High School Drama

When I was a senior in high school, I had the devoted attention of a very brilliant boy. To say that I loved him is almost a tautology, because I don’t know what “I” or “love” meant to me before him. It was forged in our relationship -- he pushing me to be a truer friend, a more honest thinker, a braver adventurer.

A year ahead of me in school, he had preceded me to college and we had the idea that I would follow him there. He was an artist -- showered me with cards and sketches daily. In our little crew, he had been the guy whose house everybody crashed at, and what identity I ever had in school was based largely on being adored by that guy.

Inevitably, when it came time for me to decide on a school, I had done him so powerfully wrong that I couldn’t see being on the same campus as him. He won’t speak to me to this day.

The inevitable was a boy also brilliant, but younger and much less worldly, given to hiding under a dingy hat and scribbling furiously in his notebook. Taking up with him benefited neither of us. I gained an audience for my antics, but lost integrity. He lost the comfort of his “island” and gained only notebook fodder.

Notebooks which, I should note, we turned in weekly to our AP English teacher. That woman never looked at me the same.

One eve, when snow had cancelled the next day's classes, I trudged through the snow to the scribbler's house. His family must never have known the likes of me before. All they knew was that their son had been ripped from the bosom of his family and come back saying strange things. "Did you know, Dad, that language is a virus from outer space? Pass the peas."

I had gone with some vague notion of defending my intentions, which were not really all that defensible. "I mean to play with your son's head, if that's all right. No point, really, just idleness."

I was ejected; Scribbler, in a fury, insisted on running me to my friend M's house. The car slid on the ice and into a cement mailbox. It was just a fender-bender, really. It could have happened to anyone in the weather. But it transformed the whole affair into something much more epic. Me, ringing M's doorbell that night. "S. thinks he's James Dean. Tried to kill us both. Can I sleep here?"

I rediscovered him in our high school’s latest round of reunion frenzy. I am pleased to note that he has found happiness in family life and academia, albeit his blogs have a familiar twinge of discontent. That too is comforting. Our lives basically track along the same Bourgeois-Bohemian lines.

I had become very comfortable with the notion that these two lives I had ruined were the great unfinished business of my life. And now I feel that it’s long past time I got over myself. What little I can gleam from cyber-stalking the artist, he seems to be living a glamorous single life, which seems to suit him so well that I can’t see where our relationship would have gone. And the scribbler’s life also suits him. His angst has mellowed to a perfectly sensible melancholia; and he is accomplished, whether he will admit it or no.

And of course deep in the background of this story is the man who would become my husband, off at college, being done wrong by his own high school senior girlfriend.

As unprecedented as our little scandal must have seemed at the time, it was all already written. A cliché, really. And in the end, we all just became who we were.

$1.99 for a fax

I just paid $1.99 to send a fax. I’m irked by this. Which is remarkable because here are the events that led up to my paying $1.99 to send a fax.

Today my Jones did not go to school because he was still semi-comatose from the heavy-duty antibiotics his body is processing in its battle against the death bug he brought home last week. No doubt the fault of some parent dosing his kid up with aspirin and tossing him back in the classroom, hoping nobody would notice.

This bug has laid waste to the entire family, save Girl (knock wood). Every day I wake up with an entirely new symptom. Yesterday it was muscle pain. Today it’s sore throat. But I thought to take a Tylenol when I woke in the middle of the night (recurring hideous dream where I get caught in flagrante with various unsavory characters in my life), so it’s under control at the crack of dawn, when I must rouse to put Girl on the bus and begin my journey to Eloy, a monotonous hour and a half straight shot from my home.

I have court at the immigration detention center. I do the dead man walking march past the sequentially locking doors, the barbed wire, the surrender of my id, the marking on my hand in invisible ink, the guard escort. But that was actually really neat, being my first detention court experience. And my guy got what he needed, which was just a lower bond so that he could get back to his family and his other lawyer in San Francisco.

The immigration detention center is down a long gravel road out with the tumbleweeds with no cars in sight. And to top it, there is a dangerous felon on the loose from the nearby county facility. So naturally I blow out a tire. And when I say blow out, I mean the rim was irreparable. And there’s noone, so I go to fix the tire. And I actually manage fairly well, so butch in my sandals and skirt working those lug nuts. So that was actually really neat.

So it hurts to pay for the new tire and rim, but what are ya gonna do? But then I decide to bail on going into the office, because it’s all the way north and I’ve just come from all the way south and I’m sick and Jones is sick and I’ve had a day. But that’s just an excuse because I haven’t had a day.

My day’s been fine. I’m fine. I have a job that allows me the flexibility to bail sometimes. That in itself is pretty wonderful. I’m sick, but I’m getting over it. I’ve got health insurance. And I mean, after all, I’m not SICK sick. Court, jail, changing a tire – not really all that stressful. Paying for the tire sucked, but what are ya gonna do? Plus, there’s a Sonic Burger by the tire place and I got a strawberry limeade (My absolute fave, and good on the throat – Tylenol wearing off now). This is what being in your thirties is, I muse, trying in vain to get strawberry up my straw and wishing I’d gotten the Route 44. Nothing riles you.

And then I remember that I still need to fax the thing about the bond to the San Francisco lawyer. And since I’m not going into the office, I need to go to the Postnet…

So, correction. Things still rile me. I am totally riled right now. Over paying $1.99 for a fax.

Shout out to universal remotes

And to my beloved. This business trip marks my husband's first that I can confidently command the technology in my own home. I can watch tivo, live tv, or even a movie even though it is well past a reasonable hour in his time zone. Nachos in hand, I settle in for a night's viewing, secure in the knowledge that the remote has been programmed so expertly by my soul's mate, the captain of my ship, that even I can't foul it up. Hee-hee-hee. Blue screen of death; where is thy sting?