I guess it’s like Boxing Day squared. Or doubled. Or something math like. And, being a chick, math is of course something I don’t understand. It’s all numbery and shit.

M. is back in Cali, and back in his workaday office, eating lunch with the coworkers. The part of me that shows up for work every day, which is the same part that would make me fucking excel at occupational therapy in an asylum, I mean seriously, I could ace that shit, that part of me is jealous. I’m not good at sitting around somebody else’s house idle.

Or, more accurately, I’m less comfortable being my self and tooling around with computers and whatnot in front of people. That gets a mite ratcheted up in the bosom of my family. That crowd of folks that spent a chunk of my childhood trying to convince me I was adopted, because I was so alien. I think one can imagine that maybe a couple of folks in my bloodline might be hip to ‘puters and the interwebs, and another section might be OK with creative shit, but combined, I’m a bit out of the loop. Or out to lunch or off the beaten path or left field.

Pick a cliche that equals abnormal.

The rational part of my all grown up brain realizes that possibly ever human being feels that kind of alienation with their bosom and kin now and again. Human condition, self-reflection, nature of the beast. But, fuck that rational shit, I am an artiste, I am so super sensitive. These people cannot know how I feel, how I ache, I yearn, I long to communicate.

Goddamnit, I’m special.

Actually, I’m pretty comfortable at my bro’s house. M. is a bit too comfortable. I spent some decades leaving the suburban oasis life behind and sucking some more exotic marrow from the universe. M.’s pretty much willing to embrace the ‘burbs. Ah well. In my head, I will imagine another world, like many a 50s housewife. Only I won’t have the uppers to enjoy.

In my comfort, though, I’m painfully aware of my own fucked up internal churnings. One might say I am either blessed or cursed with a certain level of self-awareness. I try really hard to imagine what the other side is hearing when I speak. Another of the expanding clan is blissfully not so wrought. Nope, not a lot of inward/outward reflection I think.

My discomfort is I spend way too much time, then, in those conversations trying to understand the other side and simultaneously biting my tongue as bitchier versions of “I can’t fucking believe you just said that” are repressed. Some day maybe I’ll let it lose. Or not. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure the other side of the conversation, the one in which I’m frothing and churning, searching for the right words, goes internally on that other side something more like, “When will she finish speaking? I have more to say about me.”

Thankfully, Christmas comes but once a year.