Killing Time
My friend Joe and I drive to and from Dedham every day, and every day, some driver, on some part of the road, cuts us off. It drives Joe nuts. He gets the best road rage I've ever seen. What he does is, he rolls down his window and shouts into the air, "Do you think you're better than me?! Huh!! Do you think you're better than me because you drive a MERCEDES?!" He gets a big kick out of Mercedes drivers because he thinks they all think his Chevy Blazer is trash. The truth is though, Joe yells at anybody who cuts him off. "Do you think you're better than me because you have a Toole?!" Or he'll just yell out, "What the hell, subaru?!" Anyhow. If I get road rage someday, I hope to have it like Joe. Because right now, I only sort of mutter to myself, like, "Oh, okay, don't worry, you can have both lanes." But Joe? Joe takes it to a whole new level. He takes it personally that someone cut him off. I love it.
It reminds me of the time I was two years old. My folks told me this story. Apparently my mom and dad were driving along and someone cut them off. And without any prompting from them (supposedly), I said from my car seat in the back, "Jerk." Yeah, I guess at two years old my personality was pretty much in place. I must've been the most fun kid EVER.
Additionally, when I was four years old, I yelled at my dad. My dad loves to tell this story. We rented a beach house in Rhode Island when I was little, and my aunt and uncle had a house about thirty minutes away (so the opposite end of the state, basically). One night, my mom went there early and my dad was supposed to come with our bathing suits so I could go in the kid pool or whatever. He had a bag of garbage in one hand and the bag of clothes in the other. Yeah, you can see where this is going. So my father throws away the suits and brings the garbage. We drive all the way to the beach house, and my dad gets me into my stroller and then he looks down and sees a bag of trash. My father, talking to me like an adult, says, "You're not going to believe this, Elana, but we have to go back. I threw away the bathing suits." And me, at four, well, I turn around to look at him and ask, "Where is your brain?" A real charmer. My dad loves that story. Every time he hears it or tells it, it just about kills him.
So every morning when I get up, I have the distinct thought, "Am I going to make it to Friday?" It's not that I don't like what I'm doing, I do - but it's just that I can't imagine getting up and making it through the day. Some days, I play this game where I try to figure out something that will get me excited enough to get out of my bed. This used to work, back when I was in high school, even. I'd think, "Oh, I'm going to get that grade back," (yeah, I know, I'm a loser) or "Oh, the new episode of the Real World is on tonight" (Again, I know). When I was in third grade, I was supposed to get this Samantha American Girl doll in the mail on a Friday. So I thought that if I got up every morning and did my work right away, the time would go by faster. I was a real smart one, you see. Yeah, well, the time didn't go by much faster. But it still got me up every day because it was one day closer to Samantha. When the doll arrived, I just about flipped out. I took care of her for a good few years, but the problem was with these dolls is that they were no good for playing house. See, you wanted to have like a two year old and a baby. You didn't want to have a nine-year-old that came up to your calf. That didn't look right. But she was too old looking to pretend she was two. So I always had to pretend she was four years old, which was really a compromise with... who? myself? the doll? Jesus. Anyway, to further complicate matters, my brother always was playing too, and as a real live three-year-old or four-year-old, it looked like I had this giant child, a messed up four year old dwarf thing with that aging disease, and an infant. Just the picture I was going for.
Anyhow, back to getting up. My point is, if I have one, that I don't get excited any more. I can't think of anything that is worth pulling myself out of bed before six a.m. Now, before everyone starts freaking out (and by the way, if your friends don't freak out if they think you're depressed, isn't that a bad thing?), it's not that I don't want to get up and go through my day. That's not it at all. This isn't some psychobabble trying to get attention for depression. (By the way, one of my friends once told me that we should stage an intervention for my friend who seemed down for a while. She said because she didn't know a lot of people, we could invite random people to this intervention to make her feel more loved. Oh yeah, genius, just what this girl wants. A room full of strangers telling her she's depressed and needs help, but she doesn't even have enough friends to come to one of these things so we had to get people she didn't know. Great help.) God, I can't stay on track at all today. So the point is, getting up sucks. That's my point. That one, stupid sentence that took me two pargraphs and two completely random stories to get out.
For godsake, shut me up.
It reminds me of the time I was two years old. My folks told me this story. Apparently my mom and dad were driving along and someone cut them off. And without any prompting from them (supposedly), I said from my car seat in the back, "Jerk." Yeah, I guess at two years old my personality was pretty much in place. I must've been the most fun kid EVER.
Additionally, when I was four years old, I yelled at my dad. My dad loves to tell this story. We rented a beach house in Rhode Island when I was little, and my aunt and uncle had a house about thirty minutes away (so the opposite end of the state, basically). One night, my mom went there early and my dad was supposed to come with our bathing suits so I could go in the kid pool or whatever. He had a bag of garbage in one hand and the bag of clothes in the other. Yeah, you can see where this is going. So my father throws away the suits and brings the garbage. We drive all the way to the beach house, and my dad gets me into my stroller and then he looks down and sees a bag of trash. My father, talking to me like an adult, says, "You're not going to believe this, Elana, but we have to go back. I threw away the bathing suits." And me, at four, well, I turn around to look at him and ask, "Where is your brain?" A real charmer. My dad loves that story. Every time he hears it or tells it, it just about kills him.
So every morning when I get up, I have the distinct thought, "Am I going to make it to Friday?" It's not that I don't like what I'm doing, I do - but it's just that I can't imagine getting up and making it through the day. Some days, I play this game where I try to figure out something that will get me excited enough to get out of my bed. This used to work, back when I was in high school, even. I'd think, "Oh, I'm going to get that grade back," (yeah, I know, I'm a loser) or "Oh, the new episode of the Real World is on tonight" (Again, I know). When I was in third grade, I was supposed to get this Samantha American Girl doll in the mail on a Friday. So I thought that if I got up every morning and did my work right away, the time would go by faster. I was a real smart one, you see. Yeah, well, the time didn't go by much faster. But it still got me up every day because it was one day closer to Samantha. When the doll arrived, I just about flipped out. I took care of her for a good few years, but the problem was with these dolls is that they were no good for playing house. See, you wanted to have like a two year old and a baby. You didn't want to have a nine-year-old that came up to your calf. That didn't look right. But she was too old looking to pretend she was two. So I always had to pretend she was four years old, which was really a compromise with... who? myself? the doll? Jesus. Anyway, to further complicate matters, my brother always was playing too, and as a real live three-year-old or four-year-old, it looked like I had this giant child, a messed up four year old dwarf thing with that aging disease, and an infant. Just the picture I was going for.
Anyhow, back to getting up. My point is, if I have one, that I don't get excited any more. I can't think of anything that is worth pulling myself out of bed before six a.m. Now, before everyone starts freaking out (and by the way, if your friends don't freak out if they think you're depressed, isn't that a bad thing?), it's not that I don't want to get up and go through my day. That's not it at all. This isn't some psychobabble trying to get attention for depression. (By the way, one of my friends once told me that we should stage an intervention for my friend who seemed down for a while. She said because she didn't know a lot of people, we could invite random people to this intervention to make her feel more loved. Oh yeah, genius, just what this girl wants. A room full of strangers telling her she's depressed and needs help, but she doesn't even have enough friends to come to one of these things so we had to get people she didn't know. Great help.) God, I can't stay on track at all today. So the point is, getting up sucks. That's my point. That one, stupid sentence that took me two pargraphs and two completely random stories to get out.
For godsake, shut me up.
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