Furiously Happy (3 page)

The first-worst way to wake up is to find bears eating you because your body thought its safest defense was to sleep in front of bears. That “playing possum” bullshit almost never works. Not that I know, because I'd never pass out in front of bears, because that would be ridiculous. In fact I've actually been known to run at bears to get a good picture of them. Instead, I pass out in front of
coats
, which—according to my brain—are the things that you
really
need to be concerned around.)

One time I loudly lost consciousness at my veterinarian's office when he called my name. Apparently my subconscious freaked out when I saw blood on the vet's coat and then I abruptly passed out right on my cat. (That's not a euphemism.) I woke up shirtless in the lobby with a bunch of strangers and dogs looking down at me. Evidently when I started moaning the vet called an ambulance and when the EMTs arrived they claimed they couldn't find my heartbeat so they ripped open my shirt. Personally I think they just wanted a cheap thrill. I think the dogs looking down on me agreed, as they seemed slightly embarrassed for me after watching the whole spectacle unfold. But you really can't blame the dogs because, first of all, who can look away from a train wreck like that, and secondly, dogs have no concept of modesty.

“Waking up shirtless with a bunch of concerned dogs staring at your bra because you're afraid of coats is about the seventh-worst way to wake up,” I mutter aloud to my mother.

“Hmm,” my mom replies noncommittally, raising a single eyebrow. “Well, okay, maybe you're not
normal
normal,” she says grudgingly, “but who wants to be normal?
You're fine.
You are perfectly fine.
Better
than normal even, because you're so aware of what's wrong with you that you can recognize it and … sort of …
fix it
.”

I nod. She has a point, although the rest of the world might disagree with our definition of “fixing it.”

When I was little I “fixed it” by hiding from the world in my empty toy box whenever my undiagnosed anxiety got too unbearable. In high school I fixed it by isolating myself from other people. In college I fixed it with eating disorders, controlling what I ate to compensate for the lack of control I felt with my emotions. Now, as an adult, I control it with medication and with shrink visits and with behavioral therapy. I control it by being painfully honest about just how crazy I am. I control it by allowing myself to hide in bathrooms and under tables during important events. And sometimes I control it by letting it control me, because I have no other choice.

Sometimes I'm unable to get out of bed for a week at a time. Anxiety attacks are still an uncomfortable and terrifying part of my life. But after my furiously happy epiphany, I've learned the importance of pushing through, knowing that one day soon I'll be happy again. (If this sentence seems confusing it's probably because you skipped over the author's note at the beginning like everyone else in the world does. Go back and read it because it's important and also because you might find money in there.)

This is why I sneak into other people's bathrooms in haunted hotels and once accepted a job as a political czar who reports directly to the stray cat that sleeps at city hall. I have staged live zombie apocalypse drills in crowded ballrooms and I've landed on aircraft carriers at sea. I once crowdfunded enough money to buy a taxidermied Pegasus
. I am furiously happy.
It's not a cure for mental illness … it's a weapon, designed to counter it. It's a way to take back some of the joy that's robbed from you when you're crazy.

“
Aaaaah!
You're
not
crazy,” my mom says again, waving a wet plate at me. “Stop saying you're crazy. People will think you're a lunatic.”

And it's true. They will. I Google the word “lunatic” on my phone and read her one of the definitions.

Lunatic:
(noun) Wildly or giddily foolish.

My mom pauses, stares at me, and finally sighs in resignation, recognizing way too much of me in that definition. “Huh,” she says, shrugging thoughtfully as she turns back to the sink. “So maybe ‘crazy' isn't so bad after all.”

I agree.

Sometimes crazy is just right.

 

I've Found a Kindred Soul and He Has a Very Healthy Coat

A few weeks ago I was at the pharmacy picking up my meds and I was staring into the drive-through window and thinking about how awesome it is that we live in a world where you can pick up drugs in a drive-through, and that's when I noticed something strange next to the pharmacist's register:

Yes. Those are dog biscuits.

And I thought, “Well, that's …
odd
. But maybe someone returned them because they were stale or something?” And then I thought it was even odder that someone could realize that dog biscuits had gone stale because dogs aren't usually very good at
not
eating cookies even if they're fairly shitty. I mean, dogs eat used diapers if you let them, so I'm pretty sure none of them are saying no to cookies. But then the pharmacist came back and while he was ringing me up
he reached over and picked up a handful of broken dog biscuits …

AND.

ATE.

THEM.

And then I thought, “Wait.
Am I high right now?
Is
he
high? Am I being tested? Should I say something?” But I didn't, because I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to accuse the man giving you drugs of eating dog food. And then I signed for the drugs and drove away and I thought to myself, “Is it possible that he accidentally ate the dog biscuits? Or maybe someone is always stealing his food at work so he decided to put his tasty human cookies (made
for
humans, not
from
humans) in a Milk-Bone box to keep them safe? Or maybe he just likes to entertain himself by seeing if people will tell him that he's eating dog food. Those would be good people, probably.”

I'm not one of those people.

But then I spent all day thinking, “
WHY THE DOG BISCUITS?
” and so I went back today to ask, but the dog biscuits were gone and the dog-biscuit-eating guy was also gone and I thought, “Can I ask this pharmacist if the other pharmacist who eats dog food is around, because I need to know the story?” And the answer is “No. No, I can't.” But I really want to know because I suspect that I would be great friends with this guy because anyone who would hide crackers in a dog-food box seems like someone I'd like to hang out with. Although, someone who just eats dog food for fun seems slightly more questionable. Except now I'm wondering if maybe Milk-Bones are really delicious and he's just a genius who's discovered really cheap cookies. Cookies that you don't have to call your judgmental vet about when your dog gets in the pantry and eats all of them. You still have to call the vet though when your cat has eaten a toy consisting of a tinkle bell and a feather and a poof ball all tied together with twine. That actually happened once and it was really the worst because the vet told me that I'd have to ply the cat with laxatives to make the toy pass easily through and that I'd need to inspect the poop to make sure the toy passed because otherwise they'd have to do open-cat surgery. And then it finally
did
start to pass, but just the first part with the tinkle bell, and the cat was freaked out because he was running away from the tinkle bell hanging out of his butthole and when I called the vet he said to definitely NOT pull on the twine because it could pull out his intestines, which would be the grossest piñata ever, and so I just ran after the cat with some scissors to cut off the tinkle bell (which, impressively, was still tinkling after seeing things no tinkle bell should ever see). Probably the cat was running away because of the tinkle bell
and
because I was chasing it with scissors screaming, “LET ME HELP YOU.”

If I was good friends with that dog-food-eating pharmacist I would've called him to tell him all about the tinkle bell issue because he'd probably appreciate it, but I never found him again because I was worried that if I ever asked to see the dog-food-eating pharmacist the other pharmacists would stop giving me drugs.

This feels a bit discriminatory, but I can't explain exactly why.

 

My Phone Is More Fun to Hang Out with Than Me

When I wake up in the morning I often find messages left to me on my phone. Then I read the messages and I suspect that I'm being stalked by a madwoman. And I am. That madwoman is me. The calls are coming from inside the house.

Some of these notes are written while I'm waiting for my sleeping pills to kick in, but most are written at two a.m., when I'm convinced that I've come up with something brilliant that I'll forget if I don't jot it down immediately. Then in the morning I congratulate myself because I have forgotten what it was and am a little disappointed that the messages are less world-shattering and more just plain confusing. These missives from my brain are baffling, but I never delete them because it's nice to have a pen pal I don't have to write back to, and also because I can look at the strange notes and think, “Finally someone gets me.”

These are a few of those notes:

“I'm not going to say I told you so” is pretty much the same thing as saying “I told you so.” Except worse because you're saying “I told you so” and congratulating yourself for your restraint in not saying what you totally just said.

*   *   *

Are asparaguses just artichokes that haven't grown properly? Like they started smoking and got really skinny, like supermodels?

*   *   *

I bet marmalade was invented by the laziest person in the world.

*   *   *

Eating a peach is like eating a newborn baby's head. In that it's all soft and fuzzy. Not that peaches taste like babies. I don't eat babies. Or peaches, actually. Because they remind me of eating babies. Vicious circle, really.

*   *   *

Today at lunch the waiter told me that the soup of the day was “Beef and Human.” And I was like, “What the shit?” He said he'd had some and it was “good but really heavy on the human.” Victor was like, “That sounds great. I'll have a bowl of that,” and I felt like I'd fallen into a
Twilight Zone
movie. But it turns out the waiter was saying “Beef and Cumin,” which honestly sounds almost as gross.

*   *   *

Is it illegal to use shower curtains as regular curtains and vice versa? If not, what if you went shopping for a shower curtain but bought a valance? That seems like it should be a misdemeanor at least.

*   *   *

The phrase “Rest in peace” seems incredibly self-serving. It basically means, “Stay in your grave. Don't haunt me.” The opposite would be “Fitfully toss” or “Go jogging.”

*   *   *

I don't get the anti-slut-shaming movement. They're like, “Don't shame the sluts,” and I'm like, “
You're the one calling them sluts
.” It's like having a “Lay off the fatties” campaign.

*   *   *

If the plural of “octopus” is “octopi” then why isn't the plural of “rabbit” “rabbi”? Is it just because “octopuses” is too much fun to say?

*   *   *

One of Victor's friends had a pet called “Terry the Truth Cat.” When she was little and her father thought she was lying he would pick up the cat and say, “You kids tell me the truth or Terry gets it.” I guess it was supposed to help with honesty but it seems pretty fucked up. Plus, I don't think I could threaten a cat. Maybe we could get Terry the Truth Turtle and threaten him with a fake gun. We'd be trying to get our daughter, Hailey, to tell the truth and he'd just hide his head in his shell like, “I'm not part of this. I'm not with you guys.” But I don't like guns so maybe we could hold it over a pot of boiling water. But what if we accidentally steamed it? That would suck. Fuck it. I'd rather just let Hailey learn to lie really well.

*   *   *

“We wish you a merry Christmas” is the most demanding song ever. It starts off all nice and a second later you have an angry mob at your door scream-singing, “Now bring us some figgy pudding and bring it RIGHT HERE. WE WON'T GO UNTIL WE GET SOME SO BRING IT RIGHT HERE.” Also, they're rhyming “here” with “here.” That's just sloppy. I'm not rewarding unrequested, lazy singers with their aggressive pudding demands. There should be a remix of that song that homeowners can sing that's all “I didn't even ask for your shitty song, you filthy beggars. I've called the cops.
Who is this even working on?
Has anyone you've tried this on actually given you pudding?
Fig-flavored pudding? Is that even a thing?
” It doesn't rhyme but it's not like they're trying either. And then the carolers would be like, “SO BRING US SOME GIN AND TONIC AND LET'S HAVE A BEER,” and then I'd be like, “Well, I guess that's more reasonable. Fine. You can come in for one drink.” Technically that would be a good way to get free booze. Like trick-or-treat but for singy alcoholics.
Oh my God, I finally understand caroling.