What a day. (you know, I used to have these great opening lines...)
I'll never be able to work a six-hour workday, for future reference. I'm still swimming in guilt over what I didn't get started on before leaving at 2pm, skipped lunch or no skipped lunch.
I've been carpooling to work with a glorious spirit. I roar out of the house and then before I know it we've talked our way to University Avenue and I'm suddenly full and slightly less rife with the guilt of not making enough time for the people in my life.
I'm good at guilt. My mother, and now uncle, are preying on that.
"What do you mean you won't have a jewish wedding?" I'm still killing their ancestors.
"What do you mean I can't invite all of my friends? At leasy my friends' children are marrying people they like enough to throw an engagement party for, and we're all invited..."
Soon it will be "jewish children..."
And then my assistant is standing by my desk as I'm trying to wind down from another "we'll get Gila to run this meeting because everyone is terrified when she says critical" and I'm remembering watching the pulse thicken at the neck of yet another external partner and I'm wondering if maybe this upgrade to senior business analyst isn't the way to go.
I studied math. I studied machines. I still think in circuit diagrams and electric pulses. I worked so hard for the title of geek, techie, specialist and now suddenly I'm being offered a throne in business, every step removing me from the greek symbols that once filled my every thought.
I am afraid to let go of the mad scientist dream. But I'm having so much fun at this. But I don't know the industry. But I'm getting to know the industry. But I don't know the terms and techniques. But I am learning them at an alarming pace.
And then C is standing at my desk asking if we can run away during lunch next week and we've set up a secret official sounding meeting to go wander Kensington market at lunchtime, and for some reason she's all a flutter about it.
And then C is back at my desk and I'm handing her a pile of reports and she's looking at me funny and asking
"Can I make something for your wedding?"
And all these weeks that I've been biting my tongue at losing her and encouraging her to follow her dream of jewelry making and she wants to try her most complicated piece yet for me to wear. I'm sitting at my desk at work in an office seventeen floors above the coldest street in the city and there is this beautiful girl telling me that she wants to contribute to our happinness because we have contributed so much to hers, in each morning's discussion about life the universe and her sons' tribulations.
I am surrounded by the sort of folk I never believed existed once upon a time, and every day my mind explodes at the shining reminders.
And then both of them, my girls, my kung-fu in the corridor girls (once upon a business environment they were too shy to look us in the eye and suddenly they're the happy scourge of the mock-carpeting) are beating me about the ears as my calendar bleeps away and my fingers pick away at the machine.
It took me a half hour to leave for the cardiologist's office.
It took a half hour of reading yuppie magazines in the waiting room.
And then the next hour was filled with diagnoses and large words "hypertension" and perscriptions and realizations and discussions and a battery of tests and scheduling for another battery of tests.
And all the while I thought of Steven's unfortunate-experience warnings, and the soft shape to Dave's eyes when he stops in mid-sentence to tell me serious things and admonish me for not preparing to live a hundred years by his side.
I'm going to be a guinea pig the next few weeks, kidney tests and ultrasounds of my heart, ecg's and eeg's and strange sterilized bottles to fill
and as of this morning I can no longer say "no" to that question on any questionnaire -- "do you take any medication."
I've fought all these years to avoid a hundred pills and beaten myself about the ears to fix it, FIX IT and with all this progress I've made, I've still been welcomed to the ranks of the medicated.
No more yoga for monstres, at least not ayengar, and at least not for now -- no muscle-related activity. All those times I was getting dizzy and finding myself on the floor after backbends and headstands? The words she used after I described them were "lesion, anneurism, permanent damage".
But I'm allowed cardio again, within strict by reasonable limits, and suddenly I'm learning that next time I walk by the aikido place I don't have to wonder about the schedule anymore. THe elliptical machine is my new best friend and hopefully a few cross-country weekends hidden in the woods this winter. I wonder if my super-strength will wane.
Heading towards my singing lesson was the fastest rollercoaster yet.
I'm medicated.
Broken.
All these efforts and restrictions and the careful way we avoid plastic wrap and read canned ingredients in the grocery store, vitamins and time spent trying to think my way out of stresses and traumas and it made no difference, I've been diagnosed. With nothing terrible-sounding, but it's official now. I'm twenty six years old and already broke. My father's heart is trying to tear it's way out of my chest. I've beaten him out of my brain and still failed.
And then I got tired of the drama and realized how many fears had been fixed with the matter-of-factness of a doctor's scrawl on paper.
I don't have to be that frail girl, ever. I'm still far from "not being excitable", people won't have to whisper behind their hands not to "get me excited". I don't have to give up the thrill and the race and the spicy taste of thriving on pressure and passion.
It will only be less dangerous now.
And we're not expecting to find anything wrong with my kidneys or brain or gooey bits.
We're just making sure.
And taking pills every day for the rest of my life.
But I can keep laughing until my heart explodes, and that will be a much longer smile, now.
I am not fragile. I am not frail. And today my actions are less dangerous than they were yesterday.
But the day wasn't over yet, and in singing class teacher clapped her hands in glee at my new soaring improvements, intertwined with talk of childhood traumas and adult realizations.
And then I was off again and the cell phone was a dispatch radio and we were at the lady Norah's house and giggling on the floor and sticking carving wax up my nose and measuring our fingers (6.5 and 9) for rings and discussing alloys and shapes and prices and the deposit's been made and this beautiful girl is too shy to charge us a third of what hand-made rings would normally be.
The rings are on their way. Smoothed and white and engraved and rounded and sized and designed and matched and alloyed with nickel and indestructible. And you should have seen her eyes laugh when she said "you could dance on them".
And just as I thought this week-long day was over I skipped my plans (with less guilt than before) of GST calculations and we were in a pub, alone together, over capon and icewater and it took five minutes until the sense of shame and urge to cry was disppeared into his kind face and we were talking that way, the way only we do, sharing triumphs of our childhood minds, miracles and brilliances and stories that combined seem to imply that we've lived several full lives by now.
ANd I remember each one. The graveyard shift at the truck stop in 60 below, Walmart, the diner and the stew, straight A's to the street and through a thousand adventures to where we are now.
Only the adventures are different, (their shape is the same) and the lessons we share with each other from every turn.