One more mishap

My life is beginning to resemble a sit-com. Following closely on the heels of those madcap adventures-the problems with RD at work, the faux heart attack and subsequent vicodin bender, then jury duty and the twenty hour deliberation, I went back to work promising not to miss a day unless I was bleeding out my eyes.

The very next morning my back seized up on me while I was in the laundry room. I went up to my bedroom, called work and told them I'd be in as soon as the drugs kicked in. Then I hollered at Ben to bring me the prescription ibuprofen they gave me at the hospital. "Not the vicodin!" I added.

I took two of the 600mg ibuprofen pills and sent Ben to Walgreens for some Doan's pills.

When Ben got back I took two of the Doans.

Eight hours later, when the workday was nearly done, I woke up.

The next day I discovered that I did not take ibuprofen, I took two prescription muscle relaxers my doctor had prescribed and that Ben had filled while I was zonked out on the vicodin bender, plus the two Doan's pills.

I shall heretofore refer to this as the incident of the 'Lude bender.

Gone Fishin

Okay, I haven't. But it sounds so much better than kids' yoga, treadmill, grocery store, garage sale, laundry. Doesn't it?

One week to opening day of the trout season, though. Ben "A River Runs Through Him" Wundrun will be missing most Saturday mornings for a while.

Six Thing Meme

Mathman has tagged me with the six thing meme.
Let's see:

1. (Inspired by Mathman's answers) My first car was a 1974 Ford Maverick. Her name was Marge. Road trips were Margical Mystery Tours. Marge's only other owner was a nun, there was a gummy patch on the dash where the dashboard Jesus once reigned. Marge was green and the seat upholstery was green and black stripes. (I wonder if kids today realize that there used to be rather stunning upholstery in cars?)

2. Ima Wundrun, the 4yo weighed 9 lbs 6 oz. at birth. She was ten days overdue and I had to be induced. I spent 1/2 hour in hard labor and the epidural was so great that the nurse told me I had to stop laughing at the doctor's jokes or the baby would come out too fast. When she heard this story, a woman that I worked with remarked "I didn't know your hootchie was so big".

3. Ben and I have been together for eight and a half years. We've moved five times. We have been in the same place for five years. I can't believe how much crap we've accumulated since our last move. With luck, we will never have to move again because I hate moving.

4. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Herman, sent me and David G. to first grade to learn how to read. When our reading class was over she would have us sit on her enormous lap and read whatever we had learned that day. Our kindergarten classroom was nearly 100 years old at the time. It had once been a one room schoolhouse, and when you laid on your cot for nap time you got to stare up at the tin ceiling and those old glass lights. Today, my old school is a bar/restaurant. I've been to weddings in the gym.

5. When I die I want my ashes scattered somewhere that I have never been. That way, whoever spreads the ashes gets to go on a trip! Currently, I'm thinking Africa.

6. I have man hands. My high school econ teacher once exclaimed 'yee gods, you have big hands'. Making lemonade out of lemons, I was a pretty good soccer goalie in high school. My patented save was to run out to the approaching opponent and grab the ball from right in front of her feet. I'd do this by putting my head where she'd kick it if she went for the ball. Most girls were afraid to kick me in the head. Save! Then there was the girl that took her team to state. She probably thought a goalie that would put her head by a striker's feet was an idiot and she kicked me in the head. I managed the save but since my vision was going in and out in black circles and I was swaying, my coach stood on the sideline and hollered 'Don't Move!'. You are only allowed four steps after a save to get rid of the ball, and if those steps are the stumbles you make right before you pass out, so what?

I'm not tagging anybody because I'm a jerk like that. But thanks for the opportunity to go gabbing about myself, mathman!

Love Song for Nine One One Part Two

After we got our picture taken together, Ben and I started to chat each other up. He knew words that had even more than two syllables and could put coherent sentences together. Ones that utilized a subject and a verb with clauses thrown in for good measure. He looked like a guy who wore his shirts with sleeves. This was an improvement from the last two people that I had dated. We had loads of things in common. He told me that he once asked my sister (who never once mentioned him to me, by the way!) if she had a sister. She said she did, but that I was married to a prick.

My brand new brother-in-law and his buddies, Ben included, had a strange tradition of dancing in their boxer shorts at each other's weddings. While this might sound kind of stupid, in my family the tradition was to dance the "Polka Slam". The rules are: polka around the dance floor as fast as you can, gaining enough centrifugal force to knock other dancers (your cousins) down. At my own wedding I ripped my dress during the Polka Slam. So who was I to judge? I knew about the boxer shorts dance in advance because under my bridesmaid's dress, I was wearing my own pair of boxer shorts over my garter belt and stockings. My sister wanted the girls to beat the guys to it by going out on the dance floor and pulling up our dresses for the big --yes, it's true-- Packer boxer shorts reveal. *sigh* Do I have to tell the rest?

Ben caught a flash of the garter belt and wanted it when it was the guys' turn to do the boxer shorts dance. He came up to me and asked me for my underwear. Being a demure, well-bred midwestern girl raised by an imaginary television mother, I said "sure!"

We found the coat room and locked ourselves in for the underwear exchange. Having given him my underwear, and he having put it on, there was nothing else to do but kiss. and kiss. and kiss.

Heaven.

The next day we were at my folks house for the gift opening. I offered to take him to the airport so he could catch his flight home to Richmond, Virginia. I waited with him for his plane in the airport coffee shop. Sitting there, I knew I was in love. But still, there had to be a hang up. Secretly gay? Not a chance. Violent streak? Psycho killer? Those are the charming ones.

After a week of long phone calls and hours of instant messaging I hadn't discovered anything seriously wrong. I told him that my plans were to move somewhere after Thanksgiving. I was seriously considering: Austin, Texas; Charlotte, North Carolina; or London, England. In fact, I had a plane ticket and hotel room all set for a trip to London set for the third week in September. The first thing that Ben said to this was that Richmond was much nicer than Charlotte (he later admitted this lie, sorry Richmond) and suggested that I come there for a visit. If I liked it, I could move in with him after Thanksgiving. Remember my demure, conservative side? So you know my answer: I immediately said "sure!" and cancelled my trip to London, choosing instead to drive to Richmond with the vacation time I had already requested.

I had known him a week.

I thought I should call my brand new brother-in-law and get the goods on him before I drove down there and got myself killed and thrown in a landfill or down a mountain. "What," I asked my b-i-l, "is this guy's problem? He seems perfect - so why isn't he married already?"

"He doesn't want to commit," said b-i-l.

Odd. He had already asked me to move in with him, in less than a week. That did not sound like commitment issues.

I made the trip to Virginia. The trip meter in my car showed that in the fourteen hour drive I had stopped for only thirty minutes total to buy gas. If your guess was that I did this feat on an incredible amount of Tab and cigarettes you would be correct. I must have stunk like an exhaust pipe by the time I got to his house. Eeewww.

During that week I made up my mind to move there. Ben took me to an Oktoberfest celebration at Fort Belvoir. We sat at long tables with guys from the German Luftwaffe. They barely spoke english and we spoke no German but we all had a great time. We hoisted those big dimpled glass beer steins and sang 'ein prosit'. I taught the Germans the polka slam. They needed to know.

Ben, laughing at me for being such a dork, said "will you marry me?" I answered (say it with me:) "sure!"

So much for commitment issues.

I moved in with Ben in November. We bought a house and got married in April at a friend's place in Jamaica. We flew to Jamaica as two and came home three. The following October Ben was transferred back to Wisconsin and we moved home, me seven months pregnant.

The End.

****

I should tell you a little about my alcohol issues, as a kind of a post-script. Obviously, I drove around under the influence. After I met Ben I did tone down my drinking. I didn't need to pass out every night just to shut up ugly thoughts in my head anymore. But in the time between meeting Ben and going to Virginia, I went to a bar where our mutual friend was bartending. I didn't have that much to drink (for me, I thought) and drove home. I got my second DUI that night. Ah, irony.

A second DUI means either house arrest with a Lindsey Lohan anklet or a week's jail time. Since I was already moving out of the state and had no home to be house arrested in, I chose the week in jail.

Can you imagine Ben's choosing me with all of that? Do you find it ironic that me, Ms. Flaming Flaws, would be so quick to dig for his imperfections? To this day I don't quite get how he managed that. In fact, while I was in Wisconsin doing a week in lock up, my dad was busily trying to contact me in Richmond, where he thought I was. Ben was so obtruse that my dad had figured Ben had killed me and dumped me in a landfill or threw me down a mountain and was about to go to Virginia to find out what was going on. Dad would call Ben and demand that he put me on the phone or else! My dad was saved the trip to Richmond to find me when one of the county deputies at jail, who happened to be his friend, told dad he saw me in the jail. Small world. Uggh.

Anyway, a week in jail in January followed a few months later by a pregnancy, went a long way toward fixing the cigarettes and alcohol situation. It's not a method I'd write a how-to book about, but it did work for me. Just this summer something reminded me that I used to be a person who smoked. The thought was a little like a friend telling you something about someone that you can't really believe. I did it for nearly twenty years, by the way. I can't drink and drive. If I did, I would get six months in jail. I don't think my babies would go for that. I know this sounds stupid, but I do actually like the smell of cigarette smoke (outdoors, like at a baseball game or festival) and have no problem with smoking - all smokers know how stupid it is, they don't need to be told by me. So while I am fine with smoking, I am zealous on the topic of drinking and driving. I am horrified by the fact that I did it in the past, and can't truck with people I know doing it now.

So it is eight years on. Two kids, two dogs, two fish. Most days I would say are 'happily ever after'. The other ones I'll just blog about.

Oh, and we still like to sneak into the cloakroom at weddings and make out, which is how we commemorate September 11th, 1999.

A Love Song for Nine One One

Today marks a tragic day. I carry it in my heart like a stone. So do you. So does the world. Even those who don't like us as much today as they did six years ago carry it like a weight. When others like Fran and the Monkey and Pygalgia and Dr. Zaius, who speaks to us in just a photo, tell the story of that terrible day, I don't feel I've much to add.

But I can tell you a love story about 9-11.

September 11th, occurring on our calendars every year since we humans made up this calendar, marks other events for people. Birthdays. Anniversaries. My own sister got married September, 11th, 1999. She made alot of jokes that her husband would remember the date: it is a cry for help. Hee hee.

But it is not my sister's love story that I want to talk about. It is my own.

But to tell the story properly, I need to go back to October 18th, 1998. That was the day that I came home from work to find my husband sitting in the chair in the bedroom (one of those chairs for 'retreat' in the bedroom that nobody actually ever sits in) waiting for me. To Talk. He had been gone for the weekend, a business trip to Kansas City. I wanted to go along. He said no, he wanted to drive his new Dodge Viper on the trip. Kick it up. Blow out the carbon. There wouldn't be room in the two seater, he said.

So he was back and he wanted to talk. "So talk," I said.

"I want a divorce."

We had been married for eighteen months. I was in the middle of building, as the general contractor, mind you, our dream McMansion in the exurbs. It was then a half million dollar house. What it is worth now is your guess. And he wasn't alone on his business trip because his two seater did have room in it for two. But not three. Her name was Laura. And in small town land it turned out she was my brother's neighbor. Ugh.

My response was to get rip-roaring drunk. That night. And the next three hundred and some.

Shortly after we separated, I told my boss-who happened to be my dad-that I wanted to work for him for another year. Then I was going to move somewhere and start over. In the between year I signed up for classes in graphic design at a local school and shelled out big dollars to learn virtually nothing because, for the most part, I was drunk all the time.

Because my social life got taken from me in the separation, I went back to the old fall back: bartending. Not a great choice for a girl flexing her muscles as an alcoholic, but what can I say? The rug had been pulled from beneath me. Getting out of bed sober and feeling the same pain I felt drunk seemed like a rip-off to the night before. I expanded my tolerance for alcohol in ways I didn't think possible. You know the girl in the first Indiana Jones movie? I'd have drank her ass under the table. Plus I was thin. Very very thin. But that's because, in my mood, I could puke up any dinner, or skip food altogether and live on Tab and cigarettes for three days at a time. I was in trouble.

Our divorce was scheduled for May. I clung to that day as the day of my salvation for months. That would be the day that all would fall in to place. Closure. Fini. Get on with it.

What I never could have dreamed was that was the day that I fell off the cliff. The actual divorce proceeding was a bit like a game show or a poker game. Dollar amounts were suggested. Contributions to the marriage were considered. In the end, the amount of money I made was the money we would have paid an outside general contractor to build our house. It seems that in Wisconsin, a no-fault state, that marriages under three years bearing no children are summarily disposed of. As my husband said to me "I could have fucked some broad on our kitchen counter while you were making dinner and it wouldn't matter one bit in our divorce".

Thanks for that.

Anyway, once the divorce was final and my blame totem was gone, right at the time I thought I would prevail was the time I fell through the looking glass.

By the end of the summer of 1999 I had decided that I really didn't have much will to carry on. I had dated a few people and found them so incomprehensibly stupid that I really began to wonder what happened to the normal people. I determined that they were the normal people and that I was the one with the problem.

Then I hatched a plan. Have I mentioned yet how much I could drink? I realized, sometime near the end of August, that I would be able to drink myself to death. Not everyone can do this. I think you need to build a level of alcohol tolerance in your system that allows you to put in enough poison to kill you. I wouldn't be able to do it today. I'd puke first. But back then I could put a full bottle of any liquour down my gullet and then put more down after that. My thought was that if I really tried, I'd get enough down to cause poisoning and then I'd go out like Hendrix.

Problem: My sister was getting married at the end of the summer. I was the maid of honor. I would not be so impolite as to cast a pall on her happy day, one that she came through hell and back to get to, as well.

What's a few weeks. In fact, I actually drove around to different liquor stores buying 1.75l bottles to stock up. I didn't want to buy the lethal dose at one spot. I don't know why. They'd have just thought I was having a party for forty.

On September 10th I went home from work, showered, put up my hair and dressed in a brand new pretty dress I bought for my sister's rehearsal dinner and drank two bottles of wine. Only a little drunk, I realized I was running late and hopped in my car to get to my sister's wedding rehearsal about three towns over.

I was the maid of honor and I was fucking up by being late. Damn. I roared into the parking lot, ran up the stairs, into the sanctuary and whoa- wait - what's this?

There was a striking, I kid you not, tall/dark/handsome man standing in one of the last pews of the church. His cuffs were rolled up three-quarters and he leaned on the back of the pew like he had been asked to by.....well, me.

A beautiful, beautiful man. My very first reaction, upon looking at him, was to feel like my breath had been stolen from me. Or that I had been gut-punched.

But then, my second reaction, upon finding out that he was the same age as me and had never been married, was to reject him on the basis that he had to be carrying around a psychosis or failing that had gotten him rejected for the last fifteen or so years. At the rehearsal dinner he was kindness and chivalry. I told him flat out that I didn't really find him interesting and that he should probably just leave me alone instead of trying to spend any more wasted minutes flirting. I really did.

Plus, I was making moves on one of the other groomsmen. Ben was hedging his bet with the girl who was singing in the ceremony. I let him know I thought he was - I don't know - not it.

But he was.

During the wedding reception the photographer asked me if I would like my picture taken, as the maid of honor, with my date. I had no date. So, perfectly coiffed, manicured and trussed I said "listen, cheesedick! I don't have a date. I don't have anyone to take my picture with. Take my fucking picture if you want, why do I have to have someone else in it?"

The photographer, unabashed saw Ben Wundrun across the bar and said "that guy will pretend to be your date in the picture".

Fine. Bring him on.

Ben laughed his ass off that I had called the photographer 'cheesedick'. We were friends in that instant.

Oh. But it's late. I'll tell the rest tomorrow.