Tricho - what?

She sat perched, curled around herself talking casually with friends.  To them, the conversation went on and on, no mind to her and what her hands were subconsciously doing.  It was like an itch to her, it was an itch to all of us with it, but most people never see it or notice it – until we have a gaping hole.

But I saw.  I watched her hands flitter around her hair with ease, twirling hair as normal girls would, until her fingertips rested with one strand caught between them.  She’d wrestle the strand away with such fluidity that no one ever questioned it – she was just playing with her hair, no harm there, that’s what girls do when they are trying to be cute.  Finally, her fingers had the single strand by its lonesome, soon to be viciously ripped from the follicle that nested it.  But before she detached it, she looked at it, she always had to look at it, to see it attached to her, feel the slight tug against her scalp.  And then with a small twist of skilled hands, it tore from it’s safe place and fluttered down, dead, to the dark wooden floor below.  All the while, the conversation continued, in their eyes, nothing unusual had happened.

My eyes rested on her for a moment before saying, “Trichotillomania?”  She jolted upright, the entire conversation stopped.

“What?!”  Someone else said, never having heard the term before.  She breathed heavily, nostrils flared as if I had just thrown her out in front of a bus.  If there’s one thing that people like us hate, it’s being called out on our problem.

I shook my head, “Don’t worry, I have it to.”  Her eyes softened – she wasn’t amongst some crazy psychology major or a girl that wanted to point out her flaws, she was with a sympathizer, a woman that understood exactly what she was going through – the itch.  Everyone stared at us, still feeling out of place because, really, what the hell is trichotillomania?  You don’t usually know about it unless your best friend has it, or worse, you have it.

“I’ve been trying to get better at it.”

I laughed, “I wouldn’t worry if I were you – I mean, I almost had no eyelashes when I was in college.  Test taking was the worst for me, I’d lose like five of them within a few minutes.”  She smiled too, she couldn’t help it – there wasn’t anything about this disorder that was entirely fixable.  You just have to think about it more.  But here’s the thing, when you think abut trichotillomania, you want to pull.  You feel the base of your eyelashes itching, and you say to yourself, “I won’t pull, I’m just itching.”  And the light scratching movement of your fingernails becomes a twisting motion on the eyelashes themselves, and you tell yourself that you are just itching, not pulling.  And you twist until you have at least one eyelash on your fingertip, one dark strand sitting there.

This is how I know I can call bullshit whenever anyone says to me, “You know when you lose eyelashes, they never grow back.”

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I'm going on a minor vacation this weekend.  I still plan on writing every day and backlogging the entries.  I'll be in the woods - and hopefully will get inspired for some creepy, horror tales... or maybe some more sci-fi, or zombies, or maybe just your regular old fictionalized dramatic conversation.

Today, I am a...

Let’s play a game.  The inner monologue begins at the start of the day, something to end the endless tasks ahead.  So let’s play a game.  Data entry is no longer just data, no, it’s now a secret code to a safe that contains a bomb.  If I get it wrong, the bomb explodes, if I get it right, then I move onto the next secret code.  I listen, watch the numbers, convincing myself that they could change at any time.  I actually get the slightest big nervous as my fingers stroke the wrong key.  “Shoot!  Game over!”  Oh wait, I’m not actually part of a bomb squad… okay, backspace, enter the number “4” correctly this time.

Entering names and updating lists is really just me doing my job – my job of updating the most wanted list.  And oh!  There goes the guy on the street down below my office window.  Quick, someone run and grab him, tackle him!  He’s the most wanted… erm… CEO of a major corporation who has done nothing wrong.  Right, never mind, I’m not some cop searching for the predators of our streets. 

When I enter our galley kitchenette, I’m really going into a giant pantry, with millions of possibilities of things to cook.  I’m a gourmet chef, serving something amazing from our miraculous, deep cabinetry.  I open one cabinet, open another, open another, step back and wonder – what can I make today?  What delicious meal can I serve myself?  I close all the cabinets because they are full of bitter, high fiber, low calorie food and snag some pretzels out of the giant, plastic bin.  Munch, munch, yes, this is my gourmet lunch.

When I take my plant to water it, I’m really in a lush garden with green vines growing so high up the sides of the fence that you cannot even see any connection to the outside world.  This fern is a gateway to a land of butterflies, squirrels, and endless rows of flowers and fresh vegetables.  I dig my fingers into the dirt, get the warm earth underneath my fingernails and play with the grains on my skin.

Let’s play a game – where imagination can take you everywhere you want to be and no where that you are.  The sun is setting somewhere, over a lakefront, with someone lazing in a boat, a line dipping into the water with no intention on catching any fish.  This is me, it’s my boat, and my lake, and my house is a short paddle away.  I bask in the last of the sunlight for the day and breathe the fresh air deeply into my lungs.  This is my life. 

The clock ticks lazily over to 4:45pm and I gather my things out of the receptionist area, walk out the front door, jump onto my scooter and rocket myself in between cars – getting home as fast as I can.  Right now, I’m a motocross driver, and I’m winning the race.

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What are you today?  Because today, I'm really an uninspired receptionist, with a new, dashingly good haircut.  And I feel pretty good.

To sleep, perchance to dream

If you have a queasy stomach, you probably should not read this...

Perchance to mess with reality.  But what if reality starts messing with you?

After coming home from a late day at work, I started to notice something wrong about our kitchen.  Ants, again, had crawled into our pretzels, over our crackers, found the little, tiny hole in the saltines container.  They were small, a light tan brown, that almost look like little moving crumbs.  If they weren't so easily multiplied, and if they didn't desire the same things I like (salty, savory food) maybe, just maybe, I'd be more entitled to let them live.  But when all is said and done, you have to bust out the can of ant killer, forget your morals, and protect your property from this seemingly small infestation.

What I found last night baffled me - it wasn't a seemingly small infestation anymore.  They had made homes in between the boards of our cupboards, nested on the roofs of our cabinets, and made little happy and trails all along each seam in our kitchen.  One area looked like a New York subway system.  I couldn't help but be fascinated by them for just one moment - how did they move around each other with such fluidity?  They look like such awkward creatures, but they never hit each other, even if there's 10 of them in a square centimeter.  They pass each other by with different lanes of traffic, and they know, without anyone painting down lines, how to keep their distance from each other.  So, I blasted them with ant killer and called it a day.

My dreams that night almost seemed so real, and I swear they were.  I woke up at one point wearing my necklace, and another having it off.  I take off my necklace every night, so I realized that I had awoken into a dream, but much too late.  My reality came bearing down on me - ants poured out of our cupboards, eating our food like a flock of locusts before moving onto me.  They crawled on my toes, around my ankles, and I felt itchy as they pierced and pinched my body.  The dream shifted into an even worse nightmare and I woke up again, without my necklace, and realized that I wasn't dead.  My husband was still asleep next to me, I hadn't just gotten eaten by ants and thrown off a cliff (how the cliff came into play, I could never tell you).

I walked into the bathroom, tired, sleepy, feeling a little off.  There was something pinching my eye.  It felt like I had been wearing contacts that got a little sliver of dirt pressed underneath them.  I looked into the mirror, staring into my red, puffy right eye.  A few veins were prominently heading towards my cornea, the red part of my eye was huge, inflamed.  And at the center of it all, on the farthest possible right hand side, was a little crumb.  No, not a crumb.  An ant, coiled around itself, dead.  I flushed my eye with water, doused it with saline solution, I put re-wetting drops in it, and not a thing dislodged this crumb.  I have to be dreaming, I told myself, this has to be a dream.  I used a cotton swab and swiped at it, my eye stung more and the coiled little sugar ant didn't move.  Finally, I washed my fingertips in saline solution and used my fingernails on my eye.  I scratched lightly at the surface.  The ant, in his last effort to stay alive, had attached himself to my eyeball in a little, piercing bite.  Was this my punishment for killing their colony?  For massive ant genocide?  Was there really even karma for that?  Did ants have karma?  Hot, frustrated tears rolled down my face - I pleaded with the ant inside my head, please, please just come out...

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Yes, this actually happened to me last night - yes, it was horrible.  I went into a hysterical panic, started crying, woke up my poor, sleep-deprived husband, and it finally came out on its own - mostly because of all the frustrated tears.  It was the smallest, little thing I've seen before - but anyone that wears contacts knows what it feels like to have something underneath them - and yes, it hurts.

All Borders are Porous to Cats

My friend and I were chatting on the phone, excited by the prospect of her moving in soon, excited to finally see each other again.  Finally, we'd be on the same coast after two years apart.  And I decided since she was one of the people that I bonded with over music, to casually look over some of my favorite band's websites.  And there it was.  The title of their tour page read, "All borders are porous to cats."  And I scrolled down.

"Oh. My. Goodness.  World Inferno Friendship Society!!!"

"Yeah?!"

"They are playing here in October!"

We hastily made plans to go, the tickets were inexpensive, it was going to be awesome, amazing.  But the planning had me reminiscing about Boston.  All of the shows that I went to, and all of the random travels and tribulations that came with being a show goer/kind of groupie to my friends' band.  Not a real groupie, mind you, but just a girl that hangs out with them, drinks with them, loves their music, and sells stuff at their merch table in exchange for free beer.

My favorite moments were traveling back from shows.  Our ears still hot and ringing, our feet tingling from the bass vibrating the room, the drums pounding in our heads, the restless bodies bouncing and swaying to the music, sometimes pushing and shoving, but always in good fun.  It was the energy that I loved, I fed off of, so thick that it was absorbed into my very essence. These rides home always proved to be interesting - everyone still tense and buzzing from the show.  You take the bus, you transfer to the subway, and you always find new friends along the way or lots of laughter.

Heading back from the Against Me! show at Club Lido, my slightly boozed up friends started a sing-a-long.  As if we didn't get enough of their music at the show, we now infected other people on the bus - they joined in, our voices ringing throughout the seats.  Onlookers gawked, but with slight smirks on their faces.  It was infections, it was raw, it was us.

From a Rise Against show, most of my friends were never interested in them - which was really a pity since they were one of my favorite bands.  I found myself wandering back to the T (subway) alone, scared at the darkened streets and the faint hiss of street lamps.  Once I got myself into the subway, I spotted someone else.  He was wearing a band shirt, and I heard him chatting up one of his friends.  I didn't know if they went to the show, but it was the energy, the feeling that they had together - yeah, they had absorbed it too.  We chatted the T-ride away, and I felt safe even though it was almost midnight and I was with perfect strangers.  We bonded for one moment in time over that same, intoxicating feeling.  The high we got when we felt the music invade our brains, where the world melted away and all that mattered was the show, the band, and the people around you.  School didn't exist for tonight.  Hell, society faded into the background.  It was us and the wonderful world of music.

And finally, one of my fondest, albeit scariest, experiences in Boston was when I went to a World Inferno Show.  All of their shows have been fantastic in my book, with their cult following.  You'd see the same people at each show and it almost felt like, after a time, that you knew them.  In a way, you grew up with these people.  There was the kid that started vibrating when "Peter Lorre" was played - there was the girl that always wore a suit coat, dress, and high black knee boots - and there was the guy that dressed up in his finest suit and danced his ass off.

One of my girl friends and I walked home after the show, bummed cigarettes off of some guys to offered to walk us in the opposite direction.  We declined and went towards Mass. Ave.  Now, if you ever have walked the bridge at night, you understand how dark it is.  The pressing blackness of 1am is no different.  So many things in Cambridge were closed, but the bar crowd was still locked up, drinking.  There were few people on the streets, and the bridge took us directly over the black Charles River.  You could barely even see the river in that light.  A few streetlamps hung what seemed like miles apart from each other, only allowing everyone in front of you to be back lit.  A man's silhouette walked towards us. 

My friend and I let our imaginations get the best of us.  What if he was holding something?  What if he ran away with one of us into the darkness?  What if he just shoved us off the bridge?  We wouldn't stand a chance, and we wouldn't even be able to see his face.  It was the unknowing, blank face scared us more than anything, I think.  I held my breathe as we passed by three different groups of strangers, each of them chatting about their evenings, none focused on us.  Safely across the bridge, the world ignited - bars were letting out, the drunks were headed home, some gentlemen and ladies were getting lucky that night.  Our conversation became cheery and lighthearted, once again focused on the music.

Music, for me, has always been an adventure.  I never can truly appreciate a band until I can feel their energy, see them perform.  I can see their emotions on stage, their eyes serving as reflectors to every word, guitar rift, drum beat, bass slap that rolls out of them.  Everything that they intend to convey in thirty to forty-five minutes of brilliant sounds.

This is why I was drawn towards my husband, a musician.  He's my lifelong adventure, and his music often makes me strive to reach my own goals - to write that novel, or finish that painting, or just be inspired and let the music take me to someplace where society melts away.  And I can imagine myself anywhere - in a crowded bar, in a field with swaying grass so high it strings your knees, in a busy subway car watching someone try to keep themselves upright after having too much to drink, or just at home in the backyard with my cat by my side and a warm hand in mind.  Music makes me feel perfect, even if it's just for one moment in time.