ketchup and tears

I haven’t been up to the loft in a couple of weeks and I’d forgotten what a mess my desk is.

I’ve been using my laptop downstairs because it’s too much of a hassle to travel up two flights of stairs to get to my real computer. Also, downstairs is near the TV.

I don’t watch a lot of television, but I’ve been watching movies like it’s my career. It has become my routine after Joey goes to bed to brew a big cup of sleepytime tea and settle in on the couch for a movie before bed. And either I suck at picking movies or I’ve become jaded and unable to appreciate anything that doesn’t totally blow me away because I’ve hated all the movies I’ve seen lately. I didn’t like North Country. I didn’t like A History of Violence. Proof sucked. Jarhead wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. I hated Flight Plan. Red Eye was AWFUL. Dark Water was mostly stupid. The Fog, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and Half Light were not scary at all. In Her Shoes and Must Love Dogs were disappointing chick flicks. And on it goes, sucky movie after sucky movie. Except for November. That one was interesting and I liked it.

So I’m taking a break from movies for a while and I’m going to try reading with my tea instead.

It’s the first day of spring and it’s feeling more like winter than most of the winter did. The air is so cold and dry that my eyes are constantly itching and tearing and I’m having a hell of a time trying to keep myself from looking deranged when I head out in the morning. When it’s dry out my hair gets staticky and sticks out all over my head like I took a morning roller coaster ride instead of a shower. This combined with my red, watery eyes, and I look like a disheveled spazz who licked the toaster for breakfast.

Someone suggested eye drops, the kind that are supposed to be like natural tears, and it got me to thinking that maybe there’s a connection between my recent lack of real natural tears and my eye problems. I’ve cried only once since October. And if you’re not a big crybaby this may not seem strange to you, but all of my life I’ve been an avid weeper. I usually cry out of frustration and anger, and always once a month everything would just catch up to me and I’d have a nice big hormone-fueled cry. My shrink told me this is a coping mechanism, and a healthy way to deal with stress. But since I’ve started taking medicine that controls my moods and makes me less of an unstable psycho, the tears have stopped. I was beginning to think I might never cry again. But my theory was tested the day I got the news that my mom was in the ICU and she was having a lot of trouble and it was looking like she might not make it out of the hospital. I sat on my couch and thought about the reality of the situation, and what it would mean, and how even though we have a difficult relationship that tortures both of us every day, I’m not ready for her to be gone. Before I knew it my throat closed up and my eyes were wet. But only for a minute because once I realized what was happening it scared me so much I turned on the stereo and started cleaning.

Anyway, since nothing particularly sad is going on these days, I bought some natural tears for my eyes, and while I was at it I tried a trick I read about in Glamour where you run a sheet of fabric softener over your hair to control static. But none of it really helped. What I need is some fucking moisture in the air. The kind of moisture that happens naturally when the ground starts to thaw, the grass begins to grow and the vegetation starts to breathe and make the air feel less like a cold sucking space vacuum and more like a substance that can sustain life.

I could never live in Arizona.

And when I’m not thinking about how my skin is going to just give up one of these days, crack and fall off like a hard candy shell, exposing my soft chocolate center, I’m trying to figure out how to keep my cool as my child becomes more independent and fiercely stubborn by the day. The child who used to be content to eat with his fingers now demands his own fork so that he can torture and stab at his food with the tool in one hand while continuing to eat with the other.  He has also learned the joy of dipping through sauces like honey mustard and ketchup and goes beyond just dipping his chicken pieces and fish sticks like a normal person would, and instead dips everything on his plate, and when the food is gone, he eats the rest of the dip straight.

The dipping sauce has become the glue he uses to make extravagant sculptures of foods that should never be combined and I have to sit at the dinner table trying not to gag while the person sitting next to me drags his fruit through a pile of ketchup, like a sauce made from tomatoes is the perfect accompaniment for peaches. The most unusual and disgusting dip I’ve seen so far was the triple dip last night that consisted of a slice of apple coated in ketchup with a sprinkling of scrambled eggs all over the outside. I thought Joey was doing it as an experimental food sculpture, a colorful display of textures and shapes, and I never imagined he would eat it but that’s just what he did, and then he smiled because it was so delicious in his mouth.

But I can’t really complain because ketchup gets him to eat healthy things that he would otherwise never let near his mouth. Like green beans. And eggs. And rice. It’s like having a container of magic eating sauce in the fridge, but every time I reach for the bottle I know I’m doing wrong. As I squirt a pool of ketchup or honey mustard out on a plate I remember a commercial from when I was young about how you shouldn’t drown your food. There were all these cartoon vegetables being rescued from pools of sauce and dressings, and one very disturbing image of a radish in a salad screaming for help as a stream of salad dressing poured out over his body, threatening to drown him in the bowl.

But I have to remember that was the 70s and they didn’t know shit all about the healthy antioxidant effects of tomatoes back then.

Comments

[hubs]

'History of violence' was indeed horrible. So was 'must love dogs'. Check out 'dogville' if you haven't seen it. i don't know you well, but something tells me it would be up your ally. are you a netflix customer? i'll send you my 'friend' info if you are. i really excited because today denver public library annouced they will now be offereing free downloads of movies.

[Jaeme]

Thanks for the suggestion. I think Henry Rollins reviewed Dogville on his show and gave it a thumbs up a while back. I forgot to rent it so it's probably good.
Oh yeah, I forgot about Crash. That sucked too.