Of Love and Digestive Health

While other people are sleeping, I'm up having romantic fantasies about colonoscopies.

Wait, let me explain....

Last night I fell asleep on the couch while I was waiting for a load of laundry to finish drying. I told myself that it should be done by the time one more episode of the Simpsons ended, so naturally I fell asleep while Homer and Ned got hitched in Vegas. Later I woke up, went up to bed, and lay awake for an hour. Bored, I got up and folded that laundry. Then I lay awake a couple of additional hours, and that's where I am as I write this (but didn't post until the next day, right now).

Being a twenty-something raised around people's broadcasted fantasy versions of themselves on Facebook and constantly aware of everyone's relationship statuses at all times, I wonder if my life is any more bombarded with people's love lives than others. It seems like I know way too much about too many marriages, and it wonder if it's warping my fragile little mind. The women who can't shut up about how much they love their husbands on Facebook confide later how badly they want to leave I know of multiple engagements of former classmates who previously split up after years of abuse and got back together, and I have a backstage pass to acquaintances racing to the altar because they want to get married before they hit a certain age.

It's a total bummer, really. It's like love and romance died and left a hollow shell of trite facades, and when you pick it up all there is inside is the whistling of depressed souls. That got dark, didn't it? But seriously, what optimism can a person have when our social interactions hinge on funhouse-mirror TMI?

So as I lay awake scraping for some kind of silver lining, I thought of a story of a younger woman married to an older man going to pick her husband up from a colonoscopy. Her powerful businessman had to sit in a lobby with a laminated sign to be surrendered to the doctor only when somebody was there to pick him up, like a preschooler waiting on mommy. The wife had to patiently get him home in his stupor after getting his colon examined.

It's a very unFacebook story, but it seems a lot more meaningful than the photos of "just because" bouquets. Colorful bundles of flowers definitely are effective mementos of affection, but they also are easy to procure and are technically already dead. If there's anything I've learned in my life, it's that the most meaningful things are usually a combination of the most painful with the least theatrical... you undergo a drastic metamorphosis over such an agonizing period of time that you don't even notice until you look back and wonder why you thought it was so hard at the time. Love already hurts pretty much invariably, so it must be pretty fucking important.

There's not much that's sexy about a colonoscopy... It pretty much means you're getting old and your butt is a health risk, and there's a lot of unpleasant preparation and recovery. Romantic comedies and fairy tales don't warn us about the colonoscopies, the obnoxious habits, the tangible and lasting hurt from those slapstick misunderstandings. But those seem like the things that, when overcome, are so much more romantic to me. Of course she wants to be with him when he's buying her pointless trinkets and paying for dinner, but to be there at a time where there are no rewards takes more than a wallet.

Anyway, there I was, a single twenty-something lying awake having romantic fantasies about colonoscopies. As weird as my aspirations are, at least they are realistic, and I'm sure they'll sneak up on me sooner than I can imagine.

I didn't come up with a title. What, am I not making enough words for you?!

So yeah, I used to have a blog. And I'm not just saying that about this particular one to try to be cute about how I never post. I mean that I once had a different blog that was consistent and fun and even had a bit of a following. My life was quieter then. I was in a comfortable routine of going to class a couple of hours a day, doing school-related work for another couple of hours, and then doing whatever. It was kind of a beautiful thing but also I could have been doing way more with my time. I mostly played video games and wrote blog posts.

Everything in my life changed in a month: school was over, summer was over, and a hazy future of hard work (that I'm lucky to have) was in front of me. Badly-drawn cartoons of things that happened to me that I thought were funny no longer fit with the frantic pace of training for a new career and recovering from heartbreak. After a while I started doing this just as some kind of broadcast therapy with no real ideas behind it.

I want to write. I feel the compulsion very strongly, and most nights I actually start writing posts. But things don't feel as significant as they once did. If I can't keep my brain-boner (brainer? ew, no) for something for long enough to crank out a five paragraph post, why should I broadcast it to the people who are inexplicably reading my stuff? Seriously, I only told like four people about this blog, who are you people reading this? The numbers are consistent and puzzlingly high.

Writing to penpals is a good outlet, though it doesn't quite satisfy that need. It's more of a social outlet than anything, and now that the lengthiest of these friendships has extended into "real life", it hardly feels like a creative task (although I think assembling a gift package for a Scottish man was one of my more creative projects of the past year).

The feeling is so desperate that the other night I had a dream that I had woken up with an amazing idea that inspired me to write about it. I dreamt a whole life cycle where I was just writing this idea forever, self-publishing with little readership or recognition, but doing it all the same and loving it.

That is such an achievable dream, but I have done nothing toward it. Real people constantly write and get their ideas into some state of a final product. Terrible, talentless writers become best sellers and have films made of their shitty books. I know two people who consistently write (hi, James and Joey!), but they are both much smarter than me, so it's easy to try to excuse myself with not being "smart enough".

What it comes down to is I don't feel as inspired any more, and it's easy for me to lose enthusiasm for things now. Maybe I've seen so much more of life since getting my job that, while I still treasure the mundane humor in my daily life, it doesn't feel worth broadcasting any more. Maybe I just super suck at accomplishing things... Psychonauts is still loaded up in my PlayStation waiting for me to complete, I have a stack of recyclables and divided piles of clothes to wash or give away, and every time I pick up my ipad I wonder if I should look up that stupid dojo again that never returned my call when I asked about getting taught to kick ass (not the actual contents of the call). I still want to do all of those things AND be wildly inspired to write something, and also there's now a bag of "crap" to take to Goodwill already in the boot of my car... and a bag on the extra bed and a pile next to that. Holy shit I fund so many piles of crap!

Maybe every time I feel inclined to shop, I should instead scribble down an idea or contribute a paragraph to an idea. By the end of the month I will have either a complete novel series or the most prolific and eclectic blog of all time.

Dodger... But Not of SUVs

Life is full of coincidences. As much as coincidences make for cheap shots in fiction (even Dickens' coincidences hurt my eyes), some really silly stuff happens in the real world, too. Bullets frequently collided midair during the Civil War, people often interrupt each other to say the exact same thing (JINX!), and I'm pretty sure we are all just a couple of degrees of separation from somebody who was married to Billy Bob Thorton. One fall day you see a dog sprinting through a field, and the next spring it gets hit by a car right next to your house on the other side of town.

Oops, I just kinda ruined the whole story I was going to tell.

My mom drives a bus for a living and often sees dogs running about loose during her routes. It's very frustrating for somebody who loves animals to see such things and not be able to drop what you're doing and help (she and I both have histories of pulling over to catch runaway dogs; it's almost frequent enough to be considered a hobby). One of the most distressing of these situations was a little white-and-ginger dog she saw sprinting through a then-empty corn field on a cold autumn day. It was in a distant part of town with nothing but various fields. The dog was small, frail, and skinny, but there was nothing my mom could do from her post driving an enormous death machine full of unrestrained children. She told me about it when she got home and we prayed for it.

About a month later, she saw that same dog again, sprinting through that same field.

Winter came, and toward the beginning of spring, she saw the dog again.

My mom is a sensitive woman and she was very distressed that this dog was clearly living out in the fields, on its own. The third time she saw it, it's ears were ratty from frostbite. It had made it through the winter at least.

One day later in the spring, one of my mom's coworkers was driving down a road perpendicular to our street, just yards from our house really, when a little dog darted in front of her car. It bounced off the side of her tire, but was hit hard enough for the driver of the SUV to know that she had hit a tiny body. She stopped her car to find a stunned little dog with tattered ears at the side of the road. Interestingly enough, she was right in front of the house of another of my mom's coworkers, a rehabilitator of animals (she used to do yard work with an orphaned raccoon riding on her shoulders) who saw the whole thing. She brought the dog into her house and, for whatever reason, called my mom.

The dog needed a place to stay, and apparently my mom came to mind. Sure enough, it was the white-and-ginger dog with tattered ears who had survived winter on the other side of town. Only now she was also sporting little waffly tire marks on her belly.

Kiera was fine. She had no internal injuries, no broken bones. All my mom had needed to do to catch this dog was have a coworker ram it with an SUV.

But she was incredibly timid, obviously had been mistreated by somebody before her days on the run. She found a home with my mom's friend's parents, where it would take months for her to even sit with her new daddy. One stressful day she got startled by her "mommy" dropping the plastic handle of the leash, so she bolted, noisily dragging the leash which only scared her more in a horrible perpetual motion machine of terrified dog who was also a long distance sprinter. But she was found and brought back to her new home the next day.

These events were all several years ago, and just last week she came to our house to be babysat. It worked put nicely, since it was on a day where I was working from home so I could attend a doctor's appointment. My dogs were glued to my mom like usual, so she was able to have me all to herself. Despite only having met me once many years ago, she took to me quite nicely and before the end of the day she even fell asleep curled up on my belly as I watched cartoons. Something I've always found deeply satisfying is how pretty much any dog or cat, no matter how allegedly antisocial, immediately takes a shine to me and trusts me.

Anyway, that's just a weird little story of how we obsessed over a little dog for months and were eventually able to be instrumental in finding her a home through a series of accidents. Life is funny and incidental, just proving how little point there is in doing much worrying about it. I'm not saying everything is going to work out as nicely as things did for Kiera, but maybe some other things will that you never saw coming.