If I am ever a big fancy published author, and as a big fancy published author am invited to read a segment of my big fancy work for a public radio program or for some big fancy gala in my name, I hereby make this promise to you: I will not read to you with That Voice.
Do Not Panic
For reasons that may be obvious but which I don’t really care to get into, I’ve been on a lot of Flagyl and Diflucan lately. Flagyl is an unfortunate prescription, packaged in pills roughly the size of footballs: the standard dosage is one of these things twice a day, for a week. They aren’t kind on the stomach, but then, I’ve yet to meet an antibiotic that is.
“Huh!” the fourth nurse I’d seen regarding this problem said, staring perplexedly. “So you’ve had this for nearly three months now, eh?” In a sudden, alarming motion, my insides were no longer pried open and facing the door. (Massachusetts doctors are terrible about this.) “Tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to write you another prescription for Flagyl.”
What a fantastic idea, I thought.
“Only this time, both you and your partner will take it. And not for a week. One big dose. You’ll both take it at the same time.”
Like a suicide pact?
“You’ll want to take it with food. And right before bed, so you don’t notice the nausea. Is your partner allergic to anything?”
She scribbled out a prescription with one refill good for my partner — a shady medical move if ever I’d seen one, although the folks at the pharmacy had absolutely no issue with it — and sent me on my merry way. I filled the prescription that day, and the next, Jurvis went to pick up his refill. The other night we sat down together on the couch and horked the bastards down.
Postcards From The Cape
The plan: depart Boston at eleven thirty pm, pick up Jesse from bus terminal — squeezing five (tall) people into a two-door car. Drive to the cabin in the Cape (technically owned by confused schizophrenic, absent), brunch (french toast), walk (some jetty), Provincetoooooooown (fake mustaches, pornography).
Four o’clock: board fast ferry back to Boston.
Old friends, jetty.
Cookbook in the cabin. Full of good ideas.
See more of our fourteen-hour adventure here.
In My Secret Life
I first saw Trainspotting probably a year or two after it came out. I was fourteen in 1997, and the world Trainspotting presented blew my mind with possibilities.
“Will I become a heroin addict?” I wondered. At the time, I gauged the odds to be about 50/50: either I would get into hardcore drugs at some point during a troubled youth, or I wouldn’t. It would probably largely depend on what “crowds” I fell into in high school. Could be the wrong crowd! I could go that way! Shit could get fucked up. Or, just as likely, it wouldn’t. But I’d always been suspicious of adults, myself in ten years included. I viewed future-Adrianne as a complete stranger, divorced from current-Adrianne through circumstance, vulnerability, and hormones. The potential paths seemed endless, an infinitely branching fractal.
But I figured you could probably draw a line down the center of those possibilities, and half of them would involve heroin.
I was thinking the other day, during a quiet walk to yoga class, about what I now considered the odds of me becoming a heroin addict. I decided that this was — maybe — two percent. To be honest, I’m being a little generous there. Like, I guess I could get outrageously drunk and pass out on my way home and land on top of a needle. A needle full of heroin. That’s what the young kids use these days, right? Needles? But then it occurred to me that I don’t even drink, really, which seems to close all kinds of whimsical, happenstancical doors.
Call me crazy. It made me a little sad.
The House Shook
It’s a dark and stormy night in North Saint Paul, and I am alone in a guest bedroom. Sleeping by myself during weather like this would probably bother me if I hadn’t spent the majority of my childhood rereading A Wrinkle In Time. Our copy resided at my dad’s old house, where my sister and I slept on a foldout couch in a cozy, amber-lit basement. Every time it rained, I huddled under the pink comforter and read the first chapter, Paige snoozing next to me as thunder shook the yard.
These days, the worse the weather gets, the more I am comforted. I could pad out to the kitchen right now, and I’m pretty sure Charles Wallace would be sitting at the table in faded blue Dr. Dentons, warming some cocoa on the stove. A grey fluff of a kitten yawns luxuriously in the attic. A strange woman knocks at the door. Anything could happen, and everything will be all right.