People Person

If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s this: I border on being too neurotic to function. I’m also terrified of my mother despite the fact that I’m 26. I also frequently cry myself to sleep while cradling a bottle of Absolut. I also tend to overshare with people I don’t really know very well.

Because I’m really neurotic.

One of the biggest sources of my neuroses is interacting with other people. I’m sort of bad at it. Like really bad at it. Like I think half of my office still thinks I’m either mentally retarded or foreign. I’m basically terrified of interacting with other human beings until I reach an undetermined level of comfort with them.  I kind of revert to really inappropriate conversation topics (“Feline AIDS: Modern Epidemic, or God's Will?”) or making fart noises with my mouth.

One of the few things in society that is sympathetic to the Social Retard is the fast food drive-thru. I pull up and I talk to a faceless box. The pre-recorded voice cheerfully chimes, “Hello! Would you like to try a [random thing I don’t want to try]?” and I can say “No thanks!” without worrying about disappointing anyone like my mother.

It’s worked so well for me for so many years. I talk to a screen, a box, not a real person. I’m fairly certain I could tell this box about my deep-seeded fears of rejection, failure and dying alone, I could even ask it if I could call it Grandma since I hadn’t had one since I was 9. And the box would love me unconditionally. I love computers and boxes and NOT TALKING TO HUMAN BEINGS.

Then McDonald’s ruined it.

I pulled into the drive-thru on my lunch break, because despite my neuroses, I still really, really dig a double cheeseburger. (Which I then have to scarf down in my car like a rabid raccoon, because my health-conscious employer actually FROWNS UPON, if not FORBIDS, greasy fast food in the office.) And there she was.

A McDonald’s worker stood there with an iPad, ready to take my order. A PERSON I HAVE TO LOOK AT AND TALK TO. Someone I have to LOOK IN THE EYE and say that I’m not interested in a cherry berry smoothie. A person whose annoyance and frustration is PALPABLE as I go through my order of a double cheeseburger – no pickle, no onion, extra ketchup – with a Diet Coke to drink with NO ICE because it hurts my teeth.

It might be different if the downtown McDonald’s wasn’t so…rude. Every morning, when I pull up for my morning coffee, the box asks me in its prerecorded voice “Hello! Would you like to try a [oh my God I don’t want a goddamn smoothie]?” followed by another voice of “WHATCHOO WANT?” Meanwhile, I’m sitting, vaguely confused, yelling at the box, “Can you bring back the first lady? She was really nice!”

So anyway, I was struck with fear when I saw this woman with the iPad. She was yelling at someone on her walkie talkie headset, and this made me feel even worse about myself. I pulled up to her. I looked at her. I looked at my old friend, the box. I looked at her. I looked down. I realized she had asked me something and was looking at me expectantly.

And I drove away.

Aaaaand that’s why I have to find a new McDonald’s to frequent.

The Yoga Problem

I’m a lot of things and wear a lot of hats throughout the day (even my Red Sox hat, even though thanks to them, I know how my mother must feel, to have something start out with so much potential, statistically perfect; then have it turn out to be nothing more than a gross pile of disappointment who marries a punk rocker and gets knocked up while wasted on her 22nd birthday AM I GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU YET MOM?) – but one thing I can openly admit I am not is graceful in socially political situations. I tend to approach these with the same tact and grace as a drunk rodeo clown – uncouth, reprehensible, tactless and oftentimes without pants.

So you can imagine how well I respond when put in the middle of sticky office politics.

I work for an organization that encourages health and well-being; as such, I have a free wellness center membership and they encourage us to take advantage of it whenever we can – this includes lunch breaks, “mental wellness” breaks, etc. I have to willingly try to be a lazy fat piece of shit working here, and I’m too busy being willingly insubordinate in other aspects of my job, so I work out quite a bit.

I used to enjoy yoga on my lunch breaks, until I got too swamped with work to have a lunch break. Also, it was winter and cold. Also, I’m lazy and would rather go get Taco Bell and hoard it to my office like contraband. I don’t hate yoga. It helped a lot with my slipped disks following a serious car accident last year, and the last five minutes of class are dedicated to laying prone and re-energizing our chi. So basically, naptime for me.

At any rate, our HR director and my boss are now friends, and have started going to the yoga class I abandoned. Which is fine. Til I heard five words that completely strike fear into the heart of any middle-level white collar desk jockey:

“You should come with us!”

Anyone who has fought in the trenches of office politics – or is just painfully neurotic – knows that this is so much more than a friendly invitation. This is an invitation from upper management to come see the executive squash room and try the caviar, so to speak. This is a level of comfort with your superiors that is pretty much just reserved for sleeping with your teacher. It lets me be on the same chi level as the people who ultimately decide whether or not I get to keep showing up for work every day.

Which is exactly why it’s terrifying.

Number one, I’m not ready for that level of comfort with my superiors that only comes when you’re in yoga pants and lying on the floor twisted in ways you haven’t done since you and your college boyfriend tried when you stole that Karma Sutra book from the school bookstore (why was that even there?). Number two, my organization is pretty straight-laced, and my bosses even moreso. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I sort of lack an internal censor for the things that come out of my mouth.

This includes, if it's not completely exclusive for, my yoga time. I’m not relaxing. I’m still going balls-out Type A trying to do every pose like I’m fucking Ghandi or Yogi Bear, whoever the fucking god of yoga is, while calling the poor instructor everything but decent under my breath. I’m just not ready to expose that layer of myself to my bosses – who saw more than enough of my under layers at the last open bar office Christmas party. (Never again, Chardonnay, never again.)

Not to mention, this requires changing in the same locker room as my bosses. Did you ever change in the same locker room as your teachers in high school? No? That’s because those levels of authority are blurred. We’re like, in our underwear together. You can see my poor tattoo decisions from college and you can see that for reasons I don’t even understand, I spend an inordinate amount of money on underwear that is best reserved for a neon-lit stage. (To be fair, my Editor pants show panty lines and I’m not going to parade THAT through the office.) We don’t cross that line. We don’t blur it. No.

So the question is: to yoga, or not to yoga? I bought myself some more time since, following my pinning surgery on my left pinky finger (maybe a story for another day), I can’t put weight on my hands. And I feel like they’d frown upon me using the entire yoga session as naptime chi revitalization. So I smiled and thanked Boss for the invitation, and excitedly said, “I can’t wait! Once I get the pins out and I can put weight on my finger, we’re so on!”

Which basically buys me another six weeks to either find a new excuse, break another finger, or hope that, like my raise and promotion, they get sick of thinking about it and forget about it.

Stormy weather.

Nobody ever feels fully prepared for parenthood, primarily because nobody else adequately prepares you for it. If any of us felt like we’d been sufficiently prepped and advised on being parents, the human race would die out swiftly and quickly, the current population of women would perform immediate mass hysterectomies and the whole world would be left to be repopulated solely by the Duggars.

One’s level of parental preparation, however, hits an all-time low during thunderstorm time. I don’t care who you are; I don’t care if you’re the Christ of Childcare. You’re never adequately prepped to deal with a terrified child. And since I’m never sufficiently prepared for anything, this pretty much means thunderstorm night is an inevitable shitshow in my house.

It started with a dream, you see. A dream to move my three-year-old into a twin sized bed. So one day, after raiding my parents’ house and taking my childhood bed, I set up a twin sized bed for her. And all was magical until ten minutes later when she began to jump on the bed and the quarter-century old box spring gave out, leaving it about half an inch narrower than the frame itself. Because I’m resourceful (read: broke/lazy), I managed to carefully balance the box spring on the frame, and told E that if she jumped on the bed again, I’d fucking kill her be very upset. Made a mental note to pick up some wood, or something, from Lowe’s and fix it. Somehow. Probably.

Two weeks later and I still hadn’t gone to Lowe’s, 1.) because I work, asshole, and 2.) I’m lazy, so her bed continued to be a careful testament to physics and deep rooted fear of being fucking killed disappointing me, as it stayed intact.

She was fast asleep when the thunderstorm hit; this was also a night when the magical Lovey Fairy visited our house. What, you’ve never heard of the Lovey Fairy? Well, the Lovey Fairy comes and visits at night sometimes, and takes beloved, worn out, threadbare, fucking disgusting, heavily loved loveys, like E’s Sophie Bear, and fixes them. She also leaves them smelling magically of Tide and Downy fabric softener. And, because she lives deep under the ocean, sometimes Sophie Bear is still wet after the Lovey Fairy fixes her (which has nothing to do with the fact that Mommy ran out of quarters for the apartment complex dryer and may have, in fact, stood in the living room twirling Sophie like a helicopter for five minutes and then gave up).



So the thunderstorm rolled in, waking up my soundly slumbering babe, and upon realizing that Sophie Bear had been taken by the malicious and conniving Lovey Fairy – who at that point was going all Betsy Ross on Sophie Bear while drinking a lot of wine – lost her proverbial shit. Sophie was missing an arm at this point, but desperate times call for desperate measures, so I brought the temporarily one-armed Sophie Bear in to my hysterical daughter to try to convince her that she wasn’t going to die by any hand but mine anytime soon.

I handed her Sophie and attempted to soothe her, which quieted her for about 30 seconds before she began screaming bloody murder upon discovering Sophie was missing an arm. Now completely distraught over the storm and armless Sophie Bear, she would not be quieted by any of my methods. So I did the only thing I could think of in that moment, which actually didn’t involve much thought or else I wouldn’t have done it, and that was to get in bed and snuggle her to sleep.

And so I climbed into the bed and wrapped her into my arms, shushing her and holding her and Sophie Bear and listening to the cat yowling ominously from underneath the bed. The storm was raging on outside but we had just quieted down and the worst had passed when…

CRACK-THUD.

The bed fell off the frame under my unbearable adult weight, and there I laid, in a twin-sized bed with a hysterical three-year-old who, in the course of about ten minutes, had been terrified by a storm, saw her beloved Sophie Bear missing a vital limb, and then survived a bed breaking with her gigantic mother’s fat ass in the bed with her while the cat yowled from her box spring prison (at least that was verification that we hadn’t killed the cat).

And so we laid there on the bed, half on the frame, half off, the cat yowling, my daughter sniffling, the storm raging, and all the while, I just wondered how I might be able to get up to drink another glass of wine.

The Island of Accidentally-Given Sex Toys

I accidentally gave my sex toys to my daughter’s daycare provider.

Well, to be technical, I didn’t give them to her. I mean, yes, I am the person who physically handed them to her in a bag, but I didn’t actually know. It was an accident, really.

This whole mortifying tale actually goes back to last August, when I was subject to a separate (but in time, related) mortifying incident. I was crashing on my parents’ couch for about two weeks while I was between living situations, and my mother, on a day when her meds were apparently functioning properly, decided to wash all of my clothing. (Admittedly, in hindsight, maybe the meds were off and her OCD was rampant.) She encountered my sex toys in a box of clothes, and confiscated them. Because despite the fact I am 25, I am eternally 11 in my mother’s crazed, lithium-addled mind. Also, Jesus hates dildos.

I feel like I should defend myself in stating that I am not a whore. Sure, I got knocked up at 21 after a night of copious imbibing and snorting of various substances, but I’m just your friendly heathen next door most days. Fortunately, though, I’ve had a couple orgasms in my past, enough to know that I enjoy them. So I had acquired what some might consider a rather impressive collection of sex toys.

I was pretty pissed, but time passed and I moved back out of the nest and forgot about it. Now, in the meantime, my daycare provider, “Carol,” who runs the home daycare in which my daughter is happily enrolled, let us parents know if we were cleaning out toyboxes, especially at Christmas time, she would gladly take any toys we were tossing if they were clean and in good condition.

So when my mom when on an anti-hoarding spree, she announced she had a garbage-bag full of toys that my daughter had outgrown, and asked if I could drop it off at the Goodwill, because the closest thing to “Goodwill” in my tiny little hometown is “trash day” when the Mexicans come and pick through your trash before the truck comes. The Goodwill drop-off box is near my office and so I agreed, against my better judgment of ever doing anything that helps my mother.

I remember her exact words, as if in a slow motion defining moment of my life – “It’s just some toys you girls don’t need anymore.”

Assuming it was just a collection of barely-touched “Grandma’s house” toys, I took the bag and, believing I was doing a favor to my sitter, dropped it off later that week. I am doing good! Here, Carol! Have my bounty of toys!

I'm sure you can guess where this all came full circle.

Things were well and good til I had this little ditty of texting with Carol a couple days later.

Carol: “I have some things that were in the bag that you may want back.”
Me: “They’re from my mom’s house, I don’t even know what all’s in there. If there’s anything you can’t use, you won’t hurt my feelings by trashing it.”
Carol: “Well some things are of the ‘adult’ variety.”

That’s when my heart dropped and I called my mother to simply ask: “What did you DO?"

Apparently my mother, thinking I might actually go through the bag before I disposed of its contents, had stuck my sex toy collection – in all its phallic, vibrating, jelly-textured glory – in the bag as well.

So let me repeat. I gave my sex toys to my very conservative, Christian babysitter.

We’re not just talking a little vibrator. Oh no. We’re talking anal beads. Clit stimulator. Double ended dildo. If it looks like a shiny blue plastic penis and took double A’s, I probably owned it and it was in the bag as my wonderful Methodist babysitter - the woman who I entrust my child's well-being with for 40 hours a week - opened it and picked it up in horror, watching it wobble back and forth enticingly.

So now, while mortified, my real conflict comes from whether or not I ask for them back. Because while it’s pretty embarrassing and weird, the truth is, that Rabbit wasn’t cheap. And I'm really lonely. And drunk.