going off the rails

Saturday, mar. 15, 2008   |   0 comments

o there's this new thing that's been happening to me. When I yawn, my jaw gets stuck open. It sounds like a small thing, perhaps even funny — even I think it's funny (unfortunately, it's quite difficult to laugh with your mouth stuck open, something I never knew before). But really I can't tell you how alarming it is, not to mention painful.

If you were raised in interchangeable condos like I was (the kind where if you drink too much Riunite on ice over at the Velvet Turtle, you'll never find your house again), then you know the curse of those sliding, mirrored closet doors. For weeks they'd roll from side to side beautifully, soothingly. Then one day you'd go to grab, say, a pair of jellies, and the door would shudder and screech and then just stop moving. Since it was easy to get riled up in those days — you're late for school, you're a teen aged girl with hormones coursing, your mom's out front, honking the horn (fucking A!) — you'd put your shoulder into it, and then you'd really be in a jam: no openies, no closies.

Well, that's what my jaw's been doing. I can go days with it being totally fine. I'll eat tall sandwiches, express shock, floss my molars, and nothing will happen. Then one day I'll open my big mouth, and it just gets derailed.

And that's not all. A few weeks ago, I got the flu. And I mean a real flu, not just one of those really bad colds that adults call the flu. No I had one of those things where you can't even watch Oprah because it requires too much focus. Where you spend 72 hours in the same pair of pyjamas. Where you actually carry a spaghetti pot around with you as you move from bed to couch to bed, just in case you "don't make it."

On day three, the hot spits woke me in the middle of the night. A personal inventory told me I had just enough time to make it to the WC, so I shuffled off. I made it to the toilet with bare seconds to spare, so I immediately dropped into hurl mode (lids up, me crouched with hands on each side of the bowl, mouth open). And...nothing. And nothing. And nothing. I hadn't eaten anything for days, so there really just wasn't much there to work with, you see. Finally it became apparent that there was nothing left to do but abort mission, so I dropped out of formation...only to discover that my mouth was locked open.

"Distressed," I slid down to the tile floor, and curled up right then and there, shivering and breathing through my gaping mouth. I just didn't have the energy to do anything else. So I started thinking, exploring the new levels I had sunk to. "Man, if I had a baby right now," I thought, "and it started crying, was hungry or needed something, perhaps a diaper or a "dummy" (which I've always thought a funny name for a nipple substitute, but that's way more there than here), I would be utterly unable to get up and deal with it."

Context: I'm getting to that age where the group of friends that got married during that first wedding wave (which hit about two years ago) are either getting divorced or having babies. While the divorce thing is pretty terrible and totally non-enviable, the baby thing is tugging at my, what, my apron strings? My fallopian tubes? And, for the first time in my life, I had started thinking that maybe a baby of my own wouldn't be such a bad idea. In fact, it sounded kind of nice.

But then, as I lay there carping out on the bathroom floor, I suddenly realized that I just didn't have that distinct inner strength ladies need to become mothers. It was real sad!

Eventually, I got my mouth closed (you actually have to force it down, which isn't pleasant), and I got over the flu. But I still haven't had babies. Nosiree! I can't even deal with my mal-adjusted kitten (a monster-cute b&w baby with extra toes on her front paws — inbred! — who was rescued from a cat lady's house where she lived with 40 other kitties — inbred!). While she shits in the litter box, she insists on peeing in the bathtub (inbred!), so we've taken to keeping the tub filled with water, which, while weird, has managed to stop her peeing down the drain. But now she's taken to peeing beside the tub. So Paul's been going to all these animal behavior sites, trying to find out how to deal with her. Today's solution, cover the "problem area" (not the cat, but where she's been pissing) with dishwashing liquid, which actually looks just like cat pee, but, of course, smells much better, and has a texture that cats apparently don't dig. We shall see. Another thing she does is wake us up at 6 am every morning, bringing her toys — her furry thing, the crunchy ball, the book shelf bracket — into the bed, one by one, and then chirping until we throw something for her (she does fetch, which is insanely cute, but not so much in the pre-dawn hours).

So yeah, no babies. But maybe I will go to the doctor about my jaw.