On Stress Responses, Cliff-edge Views and Bed Bugs

Thursday, November 9th, 2023:

I just found out that my website is charging foreign transaction fees to my customers. Well, technically it’s their own credit cards that are doing the charging, but still…shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.

Why did I decide to immigrate, again?

Oh right. The healthcare.

Given Mommy’s hotel-like suite at the hospital last month and the big whopping $0 on her bill, it was probably a good decision.

On the other hand, Matt, who was a level down from her ICU, was in the overcrowded section where they were at 200% capacity. They didn’t have a bed for him for the first three nights and he literally had to sleep in a chair.

So…yeah.

I’m going to see Marisol tomorrow. By Zoom. She’s working with me on that project next week. I was kind of worried she was going to cancel, but she said that was never in question.

I checked my drawbridges today and found the message from her. She sounded softer. I guess it helped that I finally wrote to Andrés.

Let me tell you, it was not fricking easy. It took the entire afternoon, all of Estrella’s help, and a valium. Okay, not a valium, but I drugged myself, no joke.

First, I had to read his message, which was positively vitriolic. He didn’t try to speak in “I feel” statements! Not one bit! It was just a million accusations, many of which were contradictory.

What really got me was how he said I acted like I didn’t care because I didn’t talk about it.

He told me not to talk about it.

!!!!!!!!!!!

All this for a fucking karaoke night.

God damn it.

After I read the message, Estrella said, “Could I propose that you empathize with his feelings? Just so he has his acknowledgement? Then you can explain why you need your space, and then perhaps Marisol won’t have to feel so in the middle anymore?”

So with all the emotional energy I could muster, with Estrella on the line for moral support, I typed him a message in which I validated his goddamn fucking feelings, which is way more than he did for me.

But I did it for Marisol, because I still want to be her friend.

And now…let the chips fall where they may.

I talked to my parents just now. (I was idly checking my email while listening to my mom when I realized about the bank charging. I wonder how many other customers I’m going to hear from in the next month. Should I offer to reimburse them? Blergh.)

My dad weighed in at 193 pounds today. I guess that Noom app and the Fitbit finally did their job. Only, I’m a tiny bit concerned he’s starving himself. For a scientist, my father has an extremely poor understanding of nutrition.

“Papa…what is your goal weight, exactly?” I asked on speakerphone.

“My goal…is to reduce down to a singularity and disappear,” he said. This did not reassure me. He continued, “I can understand why some people become anorexic.” He already is anorexic.

“Papa, you need to pick a lower limit. And also read a book on nutrition,” I added bravely. He seemed to be a in a good enough mood not to say something snide about my unsolicited advice.

“I’m shooting to win Mr. Universe in the Almost Dead category!” he informed me, and we all laughed.

I took a dance class today with Gale’s work partner. I can’t go anywhere without running into somebody who knows Gale.

Even Juran knows her, and all of her friends, since Juran does circus and circus freaks and dancers get along.

The class was good. I did an edible beforehand and while I was in the class I remembered, I am not my ego. My ego is wounded, hurt and disappointed right now in a thousand different ways, but I am not my ego.

The feeling lasted for a lot of the day.

I wonder if that is how Mommy feels all the time.

Matt overwatered my African violet! I had left careful notes for Mommy about the plants, but then she delegated the task.

“Did he read the notes???”

“Ummm….maybe not.”

Erg.

It’s back in the water now.

The good news is, it did recover this summer! After I transplanted it, one of the leaves drooped, but then it froze in place, and got really happy and grew more leaves, and then in September it bloomed at least 15 flowers!

Then I left for the west coast and wasn’t here to keep an eye on it. I thought if anything Mommy might not be able to come take care of the house…I didn’t bank on her over taking care of it!

This is partly my fault for asking two sickos to be house-sitters. Also for writing in all that copious baby girl leave-too-many-notes detail. I just needed a sign taped up that said, Water Me In Tiny Droplets!

I’ll do that next time.

What a fricking finicky plant.

I do hope it survives, though.

Next challenge: Repotting the orchid.

I asked Papa if Roo was still in quarantine. “Well, for a little bit longer, but I do say hello to him every morning!”

Poor Roo.

Oh right. You still don’t know why he would have to quarantine.

Because he’s a stuffy, that’s why.

Oh, and also, because our cabin had bedbugs so he might be a carrier.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wait, did I ruin the punch line? I think I did. I probably should have started at the beginning.

On the first night in The National Park That Won’t Be Named, Isaac killed a spider.

Tried to, anyway.

It fell to the ground and he put the tissue and spider onto the dresser.

I protested.

He rolled his eyes (little brothers, I swear) and got up to throw out the tissue, and the spider.

Only, the spider wasn’t there anymore.

!!!!!!!!

So when he first told me about his bug bites, I wasn’t very sympathetic. The spider was obviously out for revenge.

It was spectacularly beautiful at the National Park That Won’t Be Named (NPTWBN for short.) Like, unbelievably, serenely, anciently, mystically, fucking out of this world beautiful.

Our parents were in rare form. I mean rare. Some things had been breaking in their trailer and they had literally been camping for months.

My father’s stress responses were out of control, and he actually bellowed at the top of his lungs at somebody backing in across the street in the perfectly silent campground when he thought they had gotten too close to Isaac’s car.

Ahhhhh neuroses at the age of 76.

My mom cooked for us on her two burners, and Isaac and I brought over his camp stove for extras. Papa had a grill, too.

We hiked, sometimes together, sometimes separately.

On the second day we took a family trip to the Mariposa Grove. It involved quite a bit of driving, because the NPTWBN is very big.

I asked if I could drive.

Papa said, “No.”

I replied that I found it very difficult to be in the car with him, on account of how he has a heart attack any time he sees another car.

He actually took me seriously. It was kind of cute. He showed up that morning all like,

“Here I am, ready for the drive! With a good attitude! I want points and recognition for my good attitude!”

“I am happy to give them, Papa!” and off we went.

“See??” he said, as a car passed us. “ He was tailgating and I didn’t even say anything! I didn’t even care! I am so zen.”

And he was, pretty much, although he didn’t allow any topic of conversation to last for longer than 10 seconds without somehow wrestling control back to his own firm grasp.

“Papa,” I said, “You know, you are actually allowed to get stressed out if that’s what happens. Driving is stressful. It’s just what you do with the stress and how you share it with the rest of the car that is a thing.”

“Ah, but I am not stressed out,” he said.

We had been driving now for 15 minutes.

To my right were spectacular views, the road meeting the cliff edge just feet away from my face, a canyon below, and mountains on all the horizons.

The sun lazily making its way through the sky, the shadows dancing in the canyons.

And then we rounded a bend, and there was a row of cars coming down the mountain in the other direction, and one idiot had obviously gotten impatient and decided to pass on the double yellow…

And he was coming…

Straight…

At us.

My father’s hand connected with the horn in such a way as I may never have experienced before.

Somehow, the row of cars rearranged itself to let the asshole back into his own lane just seconds before we would met him in a spectacular cliffs-edge head-on collision.

It could be agreed that everybody in the car experienced a severe stress response.

I validated my father’s decision to use the horn, and assured him that this was the precise moment when perhaps a zen mindset included shitting your pants.

Personally, I didn’t recover. The view was dead to me after that, every curve simply a reminder of my fragile mortality.

My parents instantly flipped off the dude in the car. I think he at least had the presence of mind to look embarrassed.

“I mean, I hate to admit it,” said Isaac, “but one time, when I had first gotten my license, I did something like that too.”

“Well, did you learn your lesson?” asked dad.

“Oh yeah. I never did it again.”

“Well, that’s what counts.”

“This happened to me a month ago, except I was on a bike instead of in a car, and the guy sexually harrassed me afterward,” I suddenly remembered.

I hope that fucker fucking learned his lesson.

By the way, remember the burdock I had declared war on while never really thinking I could win?

I kind of thought I’d gotten it down to a tie. Because I did stop it from re-flowering quite a bit, despite the fact that the shoots came up faster and sproutier each time.

When I left for two weeks, though, the flowers bloomed for real and then the bees moved in.

And I couldn’t cut it down, then.

Mostly because I’m scared of bees, but also because they’re vital to our eco-system.

Did you know that the woman-formerly-known-as-Mistress pets bees like they were puppies?

Oh yeah anyway, I don’t think it was a tie. The burdock definitely won, because every time I walk up the back stairs I find myself tracking burrs straight into my apartment.

Outrageous.

When she visited me in July I was still calling Laurel “Mistress.” More out of habit than anything else. I honestly didn’t even think it meant anything, anymore.

Only, then I got triggered.

When will it end?

So we agreed to be friends explicitly, as in, not use random titles assigned from long ago.

What a strange friendship it has been, too.

There was a scary moment when I thought she might be upset, like everyone else in the world who seems to take my boundaries personally.

But she has emotional intelligence, so she understood. She had felt it, too; the characters we had both slipped back into; the incompatibility of our dynamic. It wasn’t healthy.

God, when we met we were both in such fucked up relationships.

I hope she’s good now. I think she is, but you never quite know for sure.

On the last day at NPTWBN, I gave Roo to Papa.

On the last night in NPTWBN, Isaac woke me up at 3am because he was muttering to himself and shining a flashlight all over the place.

I threw a pillow at him.

He finally went back to sleep, and so did I.

In the morning though, he was at it again.

And then, while I was in the shower trying to ignore him, he started cursing far too loudly for me to pretend it wasn’t happening.

“I FOUND THEM! THERE ARE FUCKING BEDBUGS IN THE BED FRAME!”

It’s funny, the autopilot that snaps on in a crisis.

I never packed so fast in my life.

Reception provided us with a bunch of plastic bags and very little else. The guy was sympathetic, though, having once dealt with an infestation himself. They promised to call us once they had more information for us.

But this is the United States where everyone is scared of lawsuits, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when they did absolutely no such thing.

When I called later that day, I was told, “So sorry, but we cannot confirm or deny that there were bed bugs. We have fumigated just in case.”

Just in case, my ass.

“So…you’re telling me to treat it like bed bugs, but that you can’t say it is bedbugs?”

“Um, yes, that’s right, so sorry.”

Meanwhile, Isaac sent the very clear photo he had taken to an exterminator.

“That is absolutely a bedbug,” came the response.

It was the sceeviest thing, driving along in the bugmobile, closing the space between the national park and Isaac’s house, knowing they could be right that second burrowing into our things.

Obviously we weren’t going to be able to take any of our things into the house. Could we even take ourselves into the house?

We had a lot of questions for the entomologists.

Thank god he had checked the bedframe or we would have discounted the welts on his arm as spider bites and brought the infestation back into possibly both of our homes.

As I drove us in and out of service, he called exterminators.

The first guy told us we didn’t need him, we just needed to vacuum, steam, and wait them out.

The second guy told us that for $2300 he would fumigate the car.

“I’ll take the nuclear option,” said Isaac.

The nuclear option woudn’t be ready until Thursday, though. They needed a permit from the county.

Because of the poison, I guess.

Between that and all the plastic bags we suddenly needed, our beautiful national park trip was certainly wreaking havoc upon the very environment we were trying so hard to appreciate.

Oh, the irony.

We both had nightmares about the bugs. Even Estrella did, vicariously, after I called her from the car.

We needed a particular bare minimum of items from the car, like our laptops, and my passport. So we carefully grabbed the winning items, sparing anything that a bug might find cozy enough to use for a nest. We then inspected it all carefully according to our now expert level knowledge of bedbug prevention techniques.

Once inside, I vacuumed everything just to be sure.

Before arriving, we bought new towels and new changes of clothes. Changed in the backyard. Tiptoed into his pristine house, one at a time, straight into the shower.

And of course, the fumigation took three days, and my plane left that Friday.

We spent a stressful couple days at his apartment. Not exactly the sibling bonding experience we had originally envisioned, although quite bonding all the same.

At least our brains work similarly, and we each pulled our weight.

Like, I actually drove a car on the California highway to get it to the fumigators. Just like a grownup, so that Isaac could finally catch up on the work he was supposed to have done during what was supposed to have been a fun lazy road trip.

Last week Isaac mailed all my travel stuff to me. $200 with UPS.

It still hasn’t arrived. It is stuck in a no-man’s land at customs, where I declined the $130 “brokerage fee” UPS sneakily tried to charge me, opting for the “self-release paperwork” that should have been emailed to me yesterday.

My inbox is empty.

I tracked the package today and it said in scary red ink, “Two failed delivery attempts. Final attempt tomorrow.”

So I called UPS and for the 10th time this week, rummaged for and tried to communicate the 25-digit letter/number combo tracking number.

“Ah yes,” she said, “Ummm you should be emailed the paperwork within 24 hours.”

“It’s been 24 hours.”

“Ah yes. Um, yes, I see that. November 7th, yes. I will request the email be sent again.”

“But was the email address correct the first time?”

“Um, let me check, um, yes it was.”

“So why hasn’t the email been sent?”

“Umm I don’t know, I’m so sorry.”

“And why does it say delivery attempted when I track the package? They haven’t actually tried to deliver it, have they?”

“Oh it says that, but it’s because you actually are waiting for paperwork.”

“Well why can’t it say that when I track it?!”

“Ah yes, sorry, nothing we can do.”

“So I’m supposed to go on what you’re telling me, even though the written proof on the website intended for the purpose of knowing what’s going on says something completely different.”

“Ummm yes I am so sorry.”

AGGGHHHH I’M SO SICK OF GROWNUPPING!

And now these goddamn transaction fees. :(

I want to hole up in a mountain cabin and be a recluse writer.

Starting NOW.

Love,

Lorelai