day 6: i listened to a podcast

Having spent most of my adult life stumbling in and out of rum-flooded trenches, I am fascinated by the stories of other women who drink. And I mean it in the most grotesque sense – women who get sloppy fall-down drunk, rationalize it (it was a tough day; I didn’t eat enough; if he/she/they would just do/not do X like I want/don’t want, this wouldn't happen; etc.), and then, several days, weeks or months later, do it again.

After reading Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp’s honest and sometimes startling memoir about her decades-long (and mostly secret) struggles with alcoholism, I felt I had met a kindred spirit.

I don’t feel I have a drinking problem so much as I tend to drink problematically; I won’t touch booze for two weeks, and then one afternoon I’ll go out and buy a bottle of wine, and the next thing I know I’m sobbing on the kitchen floor and the cops are pounding on my door.

Knapp drank more regularly – she had the obligatory “secret stash” of bottles hidden throughout her home – but many parts of her memoir felt like scenes out of my own life: she would wake in the morning unsure of how she got home or where she left her car; she would be stricken with nail-biting anxiety at gatherings when they ran out of booze; she would grow irritated with the well-meaning concern of her boyfriends, who had watched her drink too much and act a fool at one too many parties.

One such well-meaning boyfriend used to tease her about her near-obsessive tendency to finish entire bottles of wine on her own. She would plunk the bottle down on the table with authority, as if to say, "I am drinking this wine tonight, so don’t even try to stop me." He called those her days as a "wine terrorist."

When I found out Knapp had died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 42, I mourned the loss of this woman I had never known but with whom I shared a common bond.

It seems women are less likely than men to discuss alcoholism, so when my boyfriend gave me an Aloud podcast from the Los Angeles Public Library featuring memoirist and poet Mary Karr, I was intrigued to hear her describe drinking patterns that sounded eerily similar to my own.

A successful teacher and writer whose drinking life was mostly characterized by periodic binges, Karr quit the booze for good after she nearly crashed her car into a concrete wall. In her struggles to stay sober, she test-drove various religions before settling on Catholicism after feeling inspired by the sense of community she experienced while attending mass. She details her experiences in her 2009 memoir Lit.

While I relate to the absolute lack of control and single-minded focus on getting as wasted as possible as quickly as possible after having a few drinks, Karr and I veer in different directions when considering Catholicism as a solution to this problem.

Of course I respect anyone who has overcome addiction and recognize that sometimes our last resorts can save us (Karr was a lifelong atheist), but I cannot abide a religion that says birth control and homosexuality are sinful, expects its followers to somehow reconcile a god whose love is unconditional with the possibility of eternal torture and damnation, and gives women a secondary role to men. Also, some of the pope’s stances – such as telling AIDS-ridden African communities that condoms are actually responsible for the spread of the disease – are downright dangerous.

Perhaps having been raised in an environment opposite Karr’s – everyone in my family is a devout Catholic – I simply cannot conceive of any reason why anyone would become Catholic by choice. To me it seems the same as choosing to believe in Santa Claus. At various points in the interview, Karr says “I know you think I’m crazy” regarding her choice to become Catholic. And my response is, “Well, yeah.”

On the other hand, she has managed to stay sober, while I have continued to struggle. And honestly, if I were the kind of person who could believe, maybe I would. But the older I get, the more I begin to suspect I'm just not that kind of person.

day 5: i had a relapse of strep

All day I could feel it coming on like demons scraping the back of my throat with a nail file.

“It’s the strep again,” I told my boyfriend. “Either I have PTSD, or it’s coming back.”

“It’s probably allergies,” he said. “Just take some Zyrtec.”

Turns out my Zyrtec is expired, but the real reason it didn’t work is because it isn’t allergies. As evidenced by my swollen glands and tonsils, the strep is back for round two.

And my defenses are down, because round one was brutal – after a five-day dance with Amoxicillin, the strep looked at the pitiful antibiotics, laughed and got stronger. The second doctor I saw suggested the strep was probably penicillin-resistant and prescribed a cephalosporin, aka super pills that he believed would knock it out cold.  

And finally, after seven days of whimpering every time I so much as took a drink of water, the strep began to retreat just in time for my trip to Vegas.

But now it’s back with considerably less force than last time, though I suspect that’s because I began bombing it with super pills before it had a chance to finish regrouping.

So for now I’m grateful that clouds and rain have delayed the spring, as I don’t feel I’m missing out when I opt to spend the evening watching Law & Order and Family Guy while my body goes for the TKO. 

day 4: i attended a fashion show

A lot of people I know worked hard to put on the Blue Summer Eclectic, a fundraising event for KKFI and KC Fringe Fest combining fashion, music and performance art, including my boyfriend Jason Harper, who made the awesome promo video.

All I did was show up and get trashed.

Because my fridge broke on Friday, I have no food in the house, only a sad sack of spoiled condiments moldering on the porch. I ended up getting a salad and a bottle of wine for dinner, concluding that I would rather drink my calories that evening.

Of course the wine saturated my brain like a sponge, and while teetering around the Uptown Theater's Conspiracy Room I found myself discussing the potential hazards of masturbating with hooks for hands ala Jon Hamm in the most recent episode of 30 Rock and how I wanted to personify the music of KC soul band The Good Foot into one being and sleep with it.

The event itself is kind of a blur, but a very pleasant blur. I remember hot chicks dancing with light-up hula-hoops, hot chicks strutting down the runway in clothes by local designers that I would actually wear (unlike most “high fashion,” which in my mind only falls under the broadest possible definition of “clothing” in the same way a trash bag poncho can be considered “a raincoat”), and hot chicks dancing and twirling while suspended ten feet in the air between two colorful pieces of fabric.

It was the kind of event that made me proud to live in Kansas City and to know such awesome people. And it made me wish I’d gone to the Jamaican restaurant instead of the salad bar.

day 3: i dove into the abyss

First I should clarify that by “abyss” I mean “the space between the stove and the counter,” and by “dove into” I mean “cleaned.” *

I have been meaning to do this for years, but every time I’ve considered it my overwhelming fear of rotting food – my ex-boyfriend once chased me around our apartment with a molding jack-o-lantern, and I locked myself in the bathroom until he promised to take it to the dumpster – has forced me to stay away from the space into which I’ve seen egg shells, tofu, carrots, zucchini, etc. disappear as though entering the Bermuda Triangle.

I pull out the stove to discover this:

Though I have lived here for three years and am embarrassed to have contributed to this mess that appears equal parts furry and crusty, it isn’t all my fault; the abyss was already the grayish non-color of decaying organic matter when I moved in.

Close up:

Seriously, what the fuck is that? It looks like a mushroom, some croutons, and sadness.

After sweeping the (I get a little gaggy just typing this) chunks of food into the trash, I attack the space with bleach. I am horrified – and no, it’s not too strong of a word – to discover an ancient bag of mouse poison next to one of the “best friend” jelly bracelets I wore when I dressed as a Person of Wal-Mart for Halloween. After collecting myself and wondering what percentage of the filth constitutes mouse droppings, I wipe the floor and end up with this:

Not perfect, but much better.

*I know this isn’t exciting at all. But if I’m going to try something new EVERY DAY, they aren’t all going to go over like gangbusters.   

day 2: i wore four-inch heels

I am a low-maintenance kind of girl - I prefer comfy to fancy and cut-offs to dresses, so wearing heels for a day, especially four-inch heels, is completely out of the ordinary. In fact, the last time I did so may have been at my friend's wedding in 2007, when I preferred to walk barefoot around Union Station rather than endure another moment in those awful excuses for footwear.

I know other women (and some men) wear even higher heels on a daily basis at jobs where they have to stand for eight-plus hours, and it quite honestly confounds me; today I almost walked barefoot to the bathroom after only a few hours in heels, and most of that time I was sitting behind a desk.

Because when I wear heels I essentially feel as though I'm re-learning how to walk, I've written some limericks, my favorite poetic form from childhood.

There once was a girl from K-City

Who found four-inch heels quite tricky

"My shoes might be killers,"

she said with a shiver

And downstairs she stumbled too quickly.

When a tomboy decides to dress up

She thinks brushing her hair is the stuff

Until one more genteel

Presents her with heels

Though before she was quite tall enough.

She wears her high heels to the bar

Three drinks in, she doesn't get far

Caught on the rug

Her shoe gives a tug

She spills as though poured from a jar.

day 1: i met a pulitzer prize-winning author

Having spent nearly a decade trying (and largely failing) to write character-driven fiction, I was struck by Marilynne Robinson’s live interview at the Kansas City Public Library when she said that after finishing Housekeeping in 1980, she mourned the loss of the characters she had spent so much time getting to know.

Similarly, the characters in Gilead, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, stuck with her long after the book’s completion, so she had to continue telling their stories in her most recent novel, Home.

“If these characters want their lives,” she said, “I should give it to them.”

My signed copy of Gilead is awesome.

While I am looking forward to reading all of Robinson’s novels, last month I read Housekeeping as part of the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read series. In this poetic, observant novel, the characters are fully realized in an organic way that seems effortless and inspires a great degree of admiration and envy in my cold, cold heart.

After losing their mother to suicide when she drives her car into the same lake that swallowed their grandfather’s derailed train years earlier, young sisters Ruth and Lucille fall under the reluctant care of their eccentric, train-hopping aunt Sylvie.

The haphazard family lives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho, which is a character in itself – located in a valley alongside a temperamental lake that is always flooding or freezing, the town’s difficult climate threatens its mix of residents and transients and rattles its already shaky foundation.

Like Fingerbone, Sylvie is unstable. She sits alone for hours in the dark, fills rooms from floor to ceiling with newspapers and tin cans, “borrows” unattended canoes, and doesn’t know the whereabouts of her husband, whose very existence seems to occasionally slip her mind.

While Lucille rebels against Sylvie’s strangeness, Ruth seems almost intrinsically a part of it. The inherent similarities between Ruth and Sylvie and their inability to conform even when faced with loneliness and isolation raise questions about how much people are capable of change and how much certain tendencies such as transience and privacy (or in Lucille’s case, conformity and propriety) are simply hardwired.

On an unrelated note, Robinson teaches fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she is a self-assured, competent product of a lifetime spent in quality educational institutions. Though she claims not to think of herself as such, she is a capital "W" Writer, part of a group very few people successfully infiltrate.

if you're bored then you're boring

It's the curse of adulthood - boredom. Complacency, sometimes to the point of numbness. The death of one's soul is a slow process, unnoticable on an incremental basis but devastating in its finality. One day you realize you've been staring at the same spot on the wall for 30 minutes, and you're like... fuck. Because your ability to think critically has been reduced to one-word, pseudo-emotional reactions that simultaneously communicate dissatisfaction and passive acceptance.

Considering my recent propensity to park in front of the tv for three-hour Law & Order marathons and my something-approaching-genuine interest in the outcomes of paternity tests on the Maury Show, I fear I'm reaching this state, so I am going to vow to try something new every day. And to force myself to blog about it. Which sadly means I'll be spending less time looking at the following:

• fucking Facebook
• People of Wal-Mart
• Passive-Aggressive Notes
• Go Fug Yourself
• Cake Wrecks
• Huffington Post
• Look at this Fucking Hipster

...and much more time slyly (or perhaps not-so-slyly) giving the finger to the gray matter that composes so much of adult life.