1. unnecessary job-related anger. job-related anger may not sound all that inexplicable, but i was angry at nothing. well, really i was mad at the unevenness of the workload lately; for three days out of the week i’m bored to tears (once almost literally), then for the other two i’m buried under more work than i can handle. this situation isn’t really anybody’s fault, which kind of makes things harder, since it means i’m angry at nobody as well as nothing.
the anger wouldn’t normally affect anyone other than me. but recently i wrote my sister a long email while i was angry about work, and it made the advice i gave her sound less sensitive than i’d intended. i’d like to get rid of this anger if i can, since my job isn’t important enough to warrant it. “we’re not curing cancer here, people,” i’m fond of saying to my coworkers during times of stress. this always puts things in perspective for me, though i’m not sure it helps anyone else.
2. a brief pang of sadness when i found out that neil patrick harris is gay. why should i be sad? it’s not like we used to date or anything; in fact, i don’t even know the guy. but he was my first celebrity crush. in junior high i was obsessed with watching doogie howser, m.d., and i couldn’t figure out why until my friend kim made fun of me for having a crush on doogie howser. “i do not!” i protested. “and his name is neil patrick harris!”
once i discovered that it was, in fact, a crush, i went ahead and embraced it. cutting pictures of him out of magazines proved difficult, since my mother never let me buy bop or tiger beat, so i found whatever i could in the newspaper. i rented all the movies he’d been in and taped the show so i could watch each episode over again. my fear of embarrassment prevented me from writing “alison harris” or “mrs. alison patrick harris” on any of my school folders, but i definitely did it in my head. eventually i got over that crush and moved on to someone else; i can’t remember who.
and now neil patrick harris is gay. oh well. i’ll still always think of him as doogie howser.
3. a bizarre desire to go out, get incredibly drunk, and do something stupid. last night i was wasting my youth sitting on the couch making jewelry while watching veronica mars dvds. it was the one where veronica goes to the eighties dance with meg manning, and meg’s secret admirer turns out to be veronica’s ex-boyfriend duncan, but then deputy leo shows up to be veronica’s date. a good episode except for that storyline about the russian mafia and the guy in the witness protection program.
and then i saw the scene where logan arrives at the dance, drunk and dressed as tighty-whitey-wearing tom cruise from risky business. he’s running around yelling about how everyone had better wang chung tonight, “wang chung or i’ll kick your ass!” that line makes me laugh every time.
it gave me the sudden urge to go out on a one-night bender and yell at everyone to wang chung until i puke in my hair and someone has to shove me in a cab. which makes no sense because one always tends to regret those things later. so instead i made another pair of earrings and watched the episode where the vice principal hires veronica to find the kidnapped school mascot. why is their mascot a parrot and not a pirate? probably because keeping a costumed person in a cage wouldn’t go over too well with the school board. anyway.
4. regret that it’s already the fifth and so too late to participate in NaBloPoMo. this makes no sense either. the time constraint is, like most time constraints, an arbitrary convention. i could have my own personal BloPoMo from november 23 to december 23 and nobody would arrest me. PoMo makes me think of postmodern, anyway, so i could turn my 23-23 BloPoMo into a PoMoBloPoMo and write about things in increasingly strange ways until my december 23 post is nothing but dingbat symbols, and nobody would arrest me then, either.
i worry too that NaBloPoMo would be good for my routine, but bad for my writing. there would be days when i would have things to write about, but there would also be days when i wouldn’t. on those days my participation would force me to phone it in.
5. strange feelings of missing people. i miss a person i shouldn’t really miss, and i miss another person i don’t really know.
the first one is my own fault, and i’m confident i’ll deal with it, as i have before. the second one is a bit stickier. because when i say “person i don’t really know,” i mean that this person doesn’t exist, not really. you see, i’ve always had this picture in my head of a person who is perfect for me. his desirable qualities are usually picked up from friends i’ve had, books i’ve read, and people i’ve dated before. he’s changed quite a bit over the years, but he always shows up whenever i’m single and feeling a bit lonely.
it’s lame, isn’t it? it makes me sound like one of those teenage girls who has a handwritten list of qualities she wants in a husband, or worse, like i have an imaginary boyfriend. neither of those are the case, though i did have such a list as a teenage girl.
really, though, how ridiculous is it to be twenty-eight years old and miss a person who doesn’t exist, who will never exist? it’s been a long time since i abandoned the notion that there is such thing as a soulmate, that there is one perfect person out there for everyone. relationships work because people make them work, not because they were meant to be in any way. sadly enough, there are relationships that are doomed to fail from the beginning, but there are no relationships that are guaranteed success, at least not without a lot of effort.
but i still can’t help missing this fictional person. lately i’ve decided that my perfect fictional person has a lot of hobbies, like i do. we’d spend our days immersed in our own separate activities, then reconvene later and talk about what we had done. that separateness, that aloneness, would be really important to both of us. i’ve also decided that he understands my occasional lack of conversational transition. i’d be able to bring up an earlier discussion with no warning, with no preface at all, and he’d know exactly what i was talking about.
i’ve shed quite a few of my romantic notions over the years, but apparently i can’t seem to let go of this one. i can’t decide if it’s an okay thing to hang onto, or if it’s just another thing about which i should grow the fuck up.
6. vague embarrassment about having revealed number 5. because it is a bit embarrassing. but it’s the embarrassing things that make us us, isn’t it? as a writer, i don’t want to hold those things back.
one of my favorite lines ever from a cameron crowe movie (though i’m not a huge fan of his), is from almost famous. near the end, william’s on the phone with lester bangs (philip seymour hoffman), and lester says, “the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re being uncool.”