A week ago, my therapist assigned me homework. It’s the first time she has done so in the five-plus years I’ve been her analysand (a word that increasingly seems like it comes from Arrested Development the more I look at it), and thus I feel a bit more compelled to actually do it than I otherwise might. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that she also lent me a book to read that I have absolutely no intention of reading, even though I probably will leaf through it in a desultory fashion. It’s by the Jonathan Livingston Seagull author and I just can’t shake the 70’s reverberations.)
My therapist assigned said homework because I remain mired in a funk, and not in the good Parliament, Bootsy Collins kind of way. The phrase that feels most true is this one: at a loss. I am at a loss. I’m really at many losses, but I might as well assimilate them together into one collective noun like “bread” or “sheep” and call it “loss.” I feel as if I’ve been flailing around in a wide, wide sea, only intermittently feeling the fright of the deep blue below, and only occasionally feeling as if I’m getting any closer to shore. I am at a loss, unsure and amorphous, plagued by plangent sorrow. And I guess I’ve had enough of it. Otherwise I would have made some kind of sarcastic comment to my therapist and moved on, cynically.
So what were the three pieces of homework she gave me? First, and most easily, she told me I had to go to the gym at least twice a week. In an exuberant burst of financial optimism, I joined a super-expensive gym last March. I rarely go, though I pay the fee every month. It’s only sage of me to follow my therapist’s directive and alleviate my pangs of guilt, if nothing else.
She also told me that every week I must “spend some time with God.” This is a harder mandate because a) I don’t like people and there tend to be a lot of people wherever there is religion and b) I’m sort of in between religions right now. I get that crawling feeling in my gut whenever I contemplate walking into a house of worship, like everyone there is going to turn and point and collectively yell, “Blasphemer!” in my specific direction and then I’ll look down and realize I forgot pants. I’m not good with groups, authority or following along with the sitting/standing/responding in kind. And I really am kind of suck at the whole faith thing.
Beyond one being a worshipping at the temple of the flesh and the other at the temple of the spirit, the gym thing and the religion thing converge personally. I’ve done them both, though so long ago, and in the meantime I’ve changed so much and forgotten even more. In both environs I feel strange beyond the telling of it. Plus, in my state of abject loss, I’ve had a hard time with people looking at me. I’m thinking that my life would be so much better were I simply invisible, even though that invisibility would mean people would bump into me on the street and I’d have to make my own coffee. But I suppose I’ll soldier on, man up and get my ass and my soul to the gym and to the synagogue, respectively.
The third instruction my therapist gave me was to wake every morning and begin my day by listing three things for which I’m grateful. Thus far, I’ve yet to actually write the list, which is problematic because I’m supposed to bring it in so that we can talk about it, an idea to which I’m so averse it brings out the coal-hearted cynic in me. I have, therefore, only made the list in my head, and I suppose I’ll have to crib the list in a last-minute ditch and come up with two weeks’ worth of attitudes of gratitude.
In no particular order, here are a few things for which I’ve felt grateful. They’ll probably tell you as much about me as my therapist knows. Which is to say a lot.
I’m grateful for Dorothy Parker. More than a poet, creative writer, essayist, magazine editor and crucible of cultural zeitgeist, Parker was an exquisite bitch. I love that, and I am thankful to her every time I inadvertently channel her, as I did when, readying myself to depart an awful but crowded party, a woman saw me dressed in my zipped-up coat, hat and purse in hand, and asked, “Are you leaving?” and I replied, “No, I was just cold.”
I’m grateful for expletives. I like to allow myself a full range of expression, and there is little I like more than using expletives as intensifying adverbs, imperatives, direct addresses or simple exclamations. I’m particularly fond of “fuck” for its flexibility and Anglo Saxon mouth-feel, but I’ll surely seize the opportunity to utter “cocksucker” when given the proper occasion.
I’m grateful for my Hitachi Magic Wand. It took a while to make friends with my Wand, but now I find it is reliably the shortest line between ambient friskiness and an orgasm. Plus, because I use it over my covers, I don’t have to wash it. It’s win-win.
I’m grateful for alcohol. You know, I didn’t discover the pleasure of drinking until relatively recently. I worked for six years in a strip club and rarely drank more than a single drink all night. I can count the number of times since adolescence that I’ve gotten drunk. I’ve never been much of a drinker, but I have to admit that it does have a singular edge-easing charm. I still have the alcohol tolerance of a parochial school girl, as testified by my whiskey-fueled exuberance that caused me to do a drive-by hitting on this terribly hot androgynous woman at the BLE reading the other week, a hitting-upon that as yet goes completely unrequited. I put alcohol in the plus column nonetheless.
I’m grateful for The Dandy Warhols. Specifically, I’m grateful for their Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia. The slacker haze and cynical posturing and dirty guitar make me happy in a foul kind of way.
I’m grateful for Xanax. I don’t take much nor do I take it very often, but gosh, it’s lovely when I feel tachycardiac with fear. (Also, see above: alcohol.)
I’m grateful for Sarah Palin. Were it not for Sarah Palin, I would have continued in the politically ignorant state I have spent most of my life. When Sarah Palin was nominated as the Republican vice presidential candidate, I underwent a series of violent reactions. Amusement turned to morbid curiosity, which turned to obsessional interest, which in turn became horror, which begat yet more obsession, and it all somewhere led me down the thorny path of becoming a dilettante political junkie and, eventually, to Rachel Maddow. I now realize I’m a progressive, and maybe a little bit gay.
I am grateful for my self-control. A few times over the past couple of weeks I’ve gotten texts from both Donny and the man known here as the Vampire. In both circumstances I managed to restrain myself from saying things to these two individuals that would have belied my inner raging crazy. The fact that I did not give into the whirling harridan suggests that perhaps I’m not as lunatic as I like to think I am.
I’m also grateful to Joss Whedon, the makers of those microwavable curries-in-a-pouch and Balduccis for selling the curries for $3.23, the entire series of The Wire, Amazon.com, cashmere goats, not giving into my deep desire to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, half-and-half, all the magazines and companys who pay me to write, Vladimir Nabokov, recent events that suggest that though my heart has spent a lot of time broken perhaps it is slowly and faultily ticking once more, my rental company for not serving me with eviction papers because I’m a month behind in my rent, all of my friends, and you for continuing to read, even though I am here so rarely.
I guess I do have something to tell my therapist after all.
Above all, I’m grateful for the artificial complete caesura that is New Year’s. I frankly can’t fucking wait to kick 2008 in its cock-sucking ass. I bid adieu to this suck year and wish you—and me—a 2009 brightly lit with reasons to be thankful.
