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Attention-Seeking Behavior(Fiction, possible title)

 ome original fiction, right from my journal. This is part one, maybe of about twenty in this form.

Kyla usually hated mornings. But she especially hated waking up dazed and ever so slightly bloated, with what she was sure must have been a weird dream clinging to her consciousness.

Indeed, the other side of the blue sheet she was lying on was smooth and flat; nobody had been in bed with her since her mother had climbed in to straighten the sheets the week before.

“It felt so real.” She mumbled under her breath, and her roommate slash attendant heard and said “You’re looking rough.”
“Are you allowed to talk to me like that? I might report you to the union.”
“You’d have to get us one first. We attendants are totally the exploited proletariat.”
“Are you really asking me to feel sorry for you?!”
“Not really.” The attendant smiled. “I took a shot. “ Her eyes turned appraising and narrowed. “Are you really okay?” Jess asked after helping Kyla into her wheelchair, where she landed with an oh-so-flattering smack. That sounded really sexy, Kyla thought as she did many mornings. I am cute right now.“Had a wild weekend?”
Kyla was overcome with a brief wave of nausea that made sweat bead out on her forehead. “Not for a few years,” He was cute…kind of a bad idea. Maybe more that she was square enough to send him a Christmas card. Like he was a client, or family, or something
Jess said “Well, you do eat like a raccoon in a garbage dumpster. Maybe you have something food-borne.”
“You make my food.” She found the frosty glass of coke that jess left her and for an instant Kyla understood about fountains of youth.
“Okay, *we* eat like raccoons, okay?" 

To Be Continued...

California Dreamin'...

 

Thinking of my beloved Golden State today and of my many friends there who I don’t see enough. And of Barbara Lee and Katie Porter who lost out to a well-funded windbag this week.(And, yes, even our windbags are usually better than their…athletic supporters, but, damn). Not exactly the best display of free and fair elections I could envision(and yet, the US has all these notes for other countries…sometimes I think we can save it, you know.  Till we can convince Texas and Florida they don’t have fiefdoms, at least.)

 On a more personal note, my friend’s husband booked the date for a spring memorial, and, just like a lot of things that my friends do that aren’t online, I won’t be there. Sometimes I’m not sure why it was so important that I cheated death(Another thing that happened in California) to be my friends’ Zoom friend.  Even if my sense of humor kind of means I am terrible at memorials that aren’t wakes. (I know that, anyone inclined to wouldn’t need to make me feel better about it…)

I’ve gotten to the point where I can say the right thing some of the time; for a person with an unfinished life, well, I miss a lot of people by now.  I’m too on the sidelines, so far, to have some major “Big Chill” moment, but I’m not sure, even if I felt like having a full-on Crisis…I’m not sure I’d get to see it through.  I quit one of my committees last month, after a great deal of agonizing, and I’m not sure my supervisor even believed me.

I suppose if my life felt…finished, it would mean that I should be thinking of wrapping it up or something. I hate to say there are occasional times like that, especially since, well, it’s kind of all the same, and I don’t mean an endless round of readings and cocktail parties, or candidates fiending for my endorsement.
It’s the same like “Gee. This adolescence is taking an unbelievably long time.”

Except this time, I don’t get to graduate.

All my friend wanted was to keep doing what she was doing, raise her kid, love her husband.

She’s not here.  I am.

I’d say “Make it make sense,” but I’m afraid I would hate the answer.

 

So What If I'm A Goddess, And Other Stories...

 

 “I could be the Walrus.  I’d still have to bum rides off of people.”

Never really thought I’d grow up to quote Ferris, the one Hughes character that I came late to watching, but that is what kind of comes to mind for me when reading Marianne Williamson’s modern classic of Goddess spirituality “A Woman’s Worth” even though in some ways I liked it and I really do believe that many of us women do have untapped capacities, including your Bohemian Crip.

However, for me(and for many of you, I suspect,) it might be more complicated than deciding “I’m going to think well of myself and activate my Goddess-given skills today!”(Although maybe someone who really felt that down to her marrow might be an unstoppable foe for social and economic barriers…I can’t say.  Your Bohemian Crip isn’t there yet. This book inspired me to resume meditation, but I’m not exactly feeling Goddess energy in my bones or my “sub-cockle area’ just yet. Social and dare I say economic(Though things are a  little better) and even the architectural challenges of wheeling in an inaccessible society, including one that is not fully deadly-virus-free all kind of keep me from finding the world at my footrested feet.  Sometimes it’s hard to know what to hope for. Sometimes I feel like a much-older woman fighting for change I won’t get to see, and sometimes my life right now feels as transitory as any Tiktoker’s with student debt.

Much more fun questions(and production numbers!) in my watch-rewatch of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but it wasn’t just my overthinking that stumped me while writing that last dating profile I never finished: Do I need a mellow Josh Chan or someone who could match my sometimes-mordant intensity?(Not that the show itself wants us to think love can fix us, of course.)