Hit Me When I'm Down

13:32 EST, 04 April 2003

God, my nap was really freaky. I had some trouble falling asleep and I kept feeling like I was going to pass out, as in: faint. I was laying down in bed! How can you faint when you're trying to fall asleep? I was so cold, freezing under a flannel down comforter. Dizziness swept over me in waves. I think I was overexhausted.

I finally fell into a fitful sleep full of horrible dreams. I was walking, dizzy and disoriented, fainting now and then and falling down, scraping myself up and bruising myself all over. But I had to keep walking for some reason. This group of guys came up and I thought they were going to help me, but instead they started slapping me. I kept falling down and asking for help, but the beating just got worse. I fell down again and they were kicking me now. One ripped my earring out of my ear. I fell unconscious, unable to deal with the pain and stress in my condition. They continued to beat me as I looked on in third-person, as if I were standing to the side. They raped me, too, whilst I was unconscious. When I came to, one of the guys was still there and there were some cops. I started to tell the cops, pointing to the guy, and the cops had me walk to the station. I was still falling down and dizzy and bloody and bruised. I was asking for help, trusting the cops to be on my side, but they started smacking me too. I was in a world where the values were different, where I was at the mercy of cruel men and no respected system of civil rights was upheld. When I woke up and told my Mom, she said: "Sounds like Iraq." Ha.

Red-Eye

08:29 EST, 04 April 2003

I'm so tired I'm wired. I just got home from my red-eye to New York; it was a horrible flight, relative to similar westbound flights I've taken. There seemed to be some issue with the heating being totally inadequate, which led me to request extra blankets in which to swathe myself like a Siberian on the tundra. I was all wrapped up in red synthetic fleece like a candlestick rolled up in bubble-wrap for safe transport.

The cheap-ass, Chapter 11 American Airlines uses red-eyes as a cost-cutting measure, I swear. No heat, no food. That's right, no food, crappy or otherwise. One drink trolley. The food was a warm croissant with turkey and cheese on it. Think soggy mess with some sticky white substance being passed off as cheese and some strange slices that may or may not have been smoked turkey. Also included in my "snack" was a bag of Sun Chips, a baggie of mini-carrots and a chocolate chip cookie. I ate only the turkey slices.

Thank God I had the wherewithal to pack some provisions (a handful of almonds and some tuna salad) to supplement the garbage they gave us. By the time we landed I was starving and practically frostbitten. Sweeeeet.

It's cold here. Well, colder than LA. I'm not going to gripe about obvious climate comparisons. Let's just say I'm glad I brought my cashmere-lined gloves and my big red woolly scarf.

The car brought me home and I was bowled over by my dog, Molly, who is totally huge now. She's nine months old, and last time I was home (in October), she was much smaller and hadn't filled out yet. She weighs 65 lbs now. Sixty-five pounds of battering ram barrelling down the stairs towards my kneecaps. Yikes.

There was this girl on the plane who made me think. She was pretty young, maybe 14 or 15. She didn't seem to have any self-consciousness, any fear that her babbling and engagement of strangers in conversation might be intrusive. She was very excited about her trip (to London by way of New York City) and her effusive inanities were really getting on my nerves.

But then I started wondering about why I was so negatively affected by her. Was I jealous of her obliviousness to self-doubt and anxiety over how others might perceive her? Did she cause me to remember, with the disdain of someone who has lost something they can never regain, that I, too, was once that bubbling and enthusiastic without giving a single thought to whether people liked me or not, whether I was talking too much or too loud or about silly nothings? I think part of me wishes I was a little more like her.

I'm going to take a nap now. Piyush emailed me last night so maybe I'll dream a little dream of him. Or maybe not, since I don't even know if I like him. Perhaps I just want to cruelly flirt with him, reeling him in as another victim of my catch-and-release sport fishing.