brettsing

Cats fit on the window-sill, children fit in the snow…

Music: “A Big Black Lady Stops the Show” from Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me

Jefferson City is driving me Crazy.

My friend Michelle, who is a lawyer (which I only mention to indicate how impressive this makes me… to have befriended a lawyer) and I spend a lot of time at O’Donoghue’s which is a local restaurant (that’s actually pretty upscale for it being local) chatting with each other, the bartender, and the other regular customers. Last Friday night, it was sort of busy. Michelle was doing a logic puzzle and I was reading design magazines. Now, I was sort of pissy anyway because I wasn’t feeling any bit inspired or getting any ideas for this project I was working on (which could be attributed to the less than 8 hours of sleep I’d received all week to that point… but whatever) So this guy comes in, and he and his girlfriend go to sit down. She sits down at a barstool two over from where I am. He stands next to her and talks for a considerable amount of time. After about five minutes, I pull my head out of my self-doubt and design magazine worship long enough to realize that he’s waiting for me to move my foot so that he can sit down at the stool next to me. (My foot is a little bit over in that stool’s personal space… not much, but a little.) I realize this and go to move it, but my brain intercepts the signal on its way to my foot with another message: “What the hell is this guy’s problem, that he has to stand there for eight minutes instead of politely saying ‘excuse me’ and sitting down?”

So I leave my foot and continue looking through my magazine.

I decide that if he’d like to sit down, and for me not to be in the space that he can at least have the human decency to say “excuse me” or gesture, or acknowledge my existence, or SOMETHING! I’ve been told I don’t look like a very nice person and that I’m not very approchable… but come on.

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the intensity of his antsyness increase and his mouth start to curl up a little bit out of annoyance. I couldn’t see it, but even imagining his angrily furrowed brow, I lost it.

I turned to Michelle and very matter of factly stated that I had to go to Target, and it needed to be right-now-at-this-very-moment. Michelle being who she is had absolutely no questions about this at all and so we paid our bill and as I got up to leave… of course having to move my foot… the man finally sat down.

On the way from the parking lot of Target (which was oddly busy for our Target) to the door a monsoon hit, and by the time I escaped into Target I looked every bit the disheartened soggy victim of it. The typhoon, and the thinking time I had during the car trip on the way over had only served to intensify my contempt for the man who had dared treat me with such disdain, as well as the anger I was feeling toward myself for not smacking the shit out of him for being such an asshole.

Michelle took one look at me as I walked through the interior set of air-lock doors and of course read all of this in my expression and suggested we get coffee. We stood in the short line, and the very friendly Starbucks-in-Target barista makes our order. Michelle gets hers and instantly appears more relaxed. I get mine and take a sip as we leave the counter. Its cold.

Not icy cold… like perhaps she’d thought I’d ordered it that way… but worse. It was a very curious kind of a “my coffee has been sitting around all morning and I drank some when I came back from lunch” room temperature sort of cold.

I am incredibly displeased but decide not to go back and ask for her to heat it up in large part because she was the first person in the public I’d had to interact with since the evil-snubby barstool man. And though she messed my coffee up, at least she was pleasant and I felt she didn’t deserve to die. At that moment I was sure I couldn’t collect the kind, good-naturedness required to complain about something in a non-hateful way. So I went on with my cold coffee.

Michelle was checking out the dollar aisle as I was ignoring it altogether, I had a moment to lose myself in thought. I decided that by not returning my coffee, I was being the evil snubby-bar man. At that moment, a fate far worse than death or any other kind of existence. Therefore, the kind good-naturedness must be garnered for the sake of all pissed-off wanna-be designer-homos who’d been treated like shit that day everywhere. Nay, for all humankind!

I went back and waited quietly coffee in hand, with a pleasant look on my face through what now was a signifigantly lengthier queue.

While waiting I searched the counter for interesting products or foodstuffs and chortled at the cup-sleeve proudly displaying “Please be careful, the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot.”

When again greeted by the barista I smiled politely and said: “I don’t want to be bitchy or whiny or anything, but this is kind of cold… could you maybe heat it up for me?” She apologized with all the pleasantness she’d exhibited before and instantly began working on a fresh cup.

After a few minutes when I was once again presented with a white chocolate mocha, it was hot… REALLY hot. I thanked her again, she apologized again, and I returned to the store to find Michelle.

Fifteen minutes, 12 aisles, and four really great clearance-shelf finds later, as I was enjoying the last few sips of my flavored coffee confection I couldn’t help but be a little impressed at how hot they still were. I swallowed them and thought how nice it was for me that my interaction with evil-snubby barstool man had led to personal triumph over my own social-deficiencies in the capitalist environment and how this allowed me to enjoy my coffee in a way that someone who wouldn’t speak up for themselves for whatever reason, like him, never could.

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So, I should be asleep…. (A lot of journal entries through the years have started with that line)

Anyway.

I know I should be writing more, even though there isn’t shit going on. Michelle and I hang out pretty much every day, but we may have to cut that back a bit just so she can get some work done.

I’m still going out a lot, but gradually…. VERY gradually… its becoming less. At least I seem to be enjoying the frequent bar visits less than I used to. Its getting to be more fun like once a week. I know that seems ridiculous for a lot of you… but you have to remember I was a five times a week guy for quite some time. Yeah, I know that’s what’s really ridiculous.

Gay people in general… especially in large groups… are getting on my nerves lately.

It sucks that Ryan won’t return any of my calls or anything, I’m not sure what’s up there. I know he’s been really busy, but seriously… its not that hard to answer the phone once in a while… or to return a call on the way to the grocery store… or… whatever… I guess I’m just bitter. I don’t like being ignored.

I miss Josh, and Christy a lot.

Christy is getting married in June… (as is Debra) Josh is moving into a new place soon, so that’s exciting for him.

Work is strange, I like it, and the time seems to pass relatively quickly, its just strange with a lot of the stuff that is going on.

I’ve been working quite a bit on crap for a portfolio. Probably not enough though. I guess it’ll just come together as it comes together, but I’m trying to speed it up a little. Though sometimes forcing the creativity works, and sometimes it really crashes and burns. Currently, I’m working on a project for a business of a friend. That’s been exciting so far because having someone else’s ideas gave me a springboard for what I do and thus far has produced a pretty solid and attractive concept relatively quickly.

I think I’m becoming a better singer. I still enjoy that so much… maybe I should try to be in a play, or go to college for a while for it or something… maybe I can get a scholarship and it’d give me something to do for a while here… other than going to a bar or working that is.

I have no money, and I want to pay off this damned $3000 in credit card debt so that I can move the hell back up and out of Jefferson City.

Brett Patrick Casey :o)

Stop pinching my fucking arm.

When I was in high school, I’m thinking sophomore year, like all other students in my graduating class I was forced to take health.

Among all the warnings about drugs, lectures on what I should be eating, and discussions on sexually transmitted diseases, only three specific things really stand out in my memory.

One, that I sat in front of a guy who was a grade ahead of me and had failed health the first time and was retaking it. His name was Paul Something-or-Other and he had lived up the street from me several years prior when I was in the second grade and was the only person to ever beat me up. (He’d chased me on his bike… I was trying to run away.)

Two, being shown pictures of what was called ‘hairy tongue’, a possible side effect of chewing tobacco, and being thoroughly disgusted.

And three, the day that we did some sort of exercise where the teacher had to draw an outline of our facial profile with the help of the overhead projector. Why would that stand out? I got into an argument with my teacher about how fat I was. She’d drawn mine with the biggest double chin EVER. I quietly informed her that it wasn’t nearly as horribly large as she’d drawn it, and she argued with me, loudly, in front of the entire class. (Mrs. Foster talked really loud anyway… I think she was a P.E. coach.)

Coincidentally, I’m pretty sure the reason that Paul had chased and beat me up had something to do with me calling him fat. (In the second grade I was still VERY thin.)
Another lovely part of this particular exercise was that on my extra-fattened profile outline, I had to write my BMI or Body Mass Index. Though at the time they had the nice discreet ones where you’d put one hand on either end of the metal thing and it’d calculate it for you, my health class had the older style where they pull all of the skin on your arm down and put that pinchy claw thing on it and it shows you the number. Naturally, we did this awkward and potentially embarrassing activity in front of the entire class as well. After we were done, Mrs. Foster, called out our BMIs taking special care to point out that mine was the highest in the class… and now did I believe her about my profile picture?

Jesus Fucking Christ.

While I was well aware of being fat, I for some reason found this particularly damaging to my self-esteem.

I don’t spend a lot of time wondering about how I ever got so fat or if even if I’ll ever finish losing the rest of the weight. (I’ve already lost 130 lbs, gained 30 back, and lost 10 again… in the past week actually) I know I will because when I put my mind to it, and do it, it always comes off in large quantities and pretty easily. At this point I have between 50 and 60 total pounds left to go, depending on who you talk to.

I’ve been working out, limiting my calorie and carbohydrate intake and weightlifting every day. I’m doing wonderfully and am excited about it and so of course its much easier than when you’re trying but you’re only doing it b/c you’re depressed about being fat and not feeling good about yourself. When you do feel good about yourself, it becomes ten-thousand times easier.

I sometimes wonder if Mrs. Foster ever knows that she contributed so much to what was already so horrible and such a struggle for me. Thanks to her for being so careless and thoughtless and for overlooking how this stupid exercise, which clearly had no impact as I don’t remember what it was actually for, would make some of us feel. But then I suppose I have to wonder about the intelligence of most people who would devote their lives to teaching P.E. anyway.

I hope she gets fat, and someone squeezes her arm with a pinchy-BMI-tong in front of 30 judgmental peers. Unfortunately, most people at her age have lost that part of their personality. Oh well.
Brett Patrick Casey :o)

FattyBackPatch

I was in the doctors office because one of my clients had a random checkup appointment where they were checking a bunch of stuff on her. She’s short, and way to big and dislikes walking enough that I know there’s no way she’ll get on the exam table. She takes the only non-doctor reserved chair, I get on the exam table.

The doctors little nurse-person comes and goes, asking us a bunch of questions and getting kind of snotty with me. I hate most medical personnel. I understand that you’ve had lots of college and that you’re very smart and I know nothing. That’s why I come to you for advice… why the need to feel so superior about it?

As I was sitting on the exam table rubbing my sore back thinking about how I got to have health insurance soon, I noticed the squishy lump. By this point it’d been there for some months and the entire time though the lump itself hadn’t hurt, its appearance was in direct correlation with a lot of discomfort in my back that felt like muscle pain. I’d been ignoring it, but now in this doctors office it suddenly dawned on me that it might be more than just a ruptured disc or something, what if it were cancerous? Suddenly this was the most important issue ever. More than my broken computer, more than my malfunctioning Buick, and more than the small group of undesirable staff that I work with and am secretly always silently wishing would trip up and get fired. Obviously, such a life threatening existence altering issue must be addressed immediately. Without health insurance for a month though… what if the cancer spread and it became too late? I had to investigate.

Normally when taking clients to the doctor I would try to uphold the image of professionalism that I didn’t really have but thought I did, or at least pretended to have so that I’d look like I knew what was going on when really I was, for the most part, pretty clueless. Since I wasn’t really supposed to do all that many doctors appointments I’d listen quietly at our team meetings while the staff discussed client medical issues and I’d try to remember what to look out for, but I’d never copy down the details of what needed to be brought to the doctors attention.

When the doctor entered the room I gave him the list of things that the staff people wanted checked, he quickly dismissed most of them… as is his job, which was fine with me because I don’t care much for telling doctors their business. I’d much rather leave important tasks like diagnosis to the professionals. However, since most of the people I worked with felt that they knew more than anyone else in the world about anything, I was still required to ask him the silly questions.

After dismissing 90% of her issues and adjusting some medications it was my turn, which he didn’t know, so as he was trying to end the appointment I brought it up.

“This isn’t related to her but I have this other client who has this spot on his lower back that kind of soft and can move around a bit and just doesn’t seem quite right, and as far as I know its never been there before. Should he have this checked out?”

“Its on his lower back?”

“Yeah.”

“Nah, that’s nothing to worry about, those are called [insert weirdly long latin sounding medical name here] and they’re pretty common. They happen a lot. They’re just a fatty tumor, they aren’t cancerous.”

“A Fatty tumor?” Gross, I’d never heard of such a thing. An if I would have a tumor it would be a fatty one, not a glamorous cancer tumor, but a benign fatty tumor.

“Its scarred fatty tissue around some fat. Usually if you have one, you’ll get more.” Great, I had more fatty back patches to look forward to.

Fast forward to an hour later.

Now I’m in the office at work and I decide to share my newest piece of betrayal that my body has come up with my friend (and our agencies community nurse) Debra.

“My ex-husband Dan had those, the doctor just kind of cut him open and popped it out there in the exam room.” My jaw dropped. Exam-room surgeries are unacceptable and I really disliked the idea of anyone cutting me open and popping anything out. That isn’t the way its done. Plus, the wording “popped it out” gross!

“Oh my God! Eew!” I shrieked in a tone that conveyed disgust while revealing an obvious hunger for more gory details. “What the hell am I supposed to do with a scarred fatty back patch.”

“Have it removed. You can go see Doctor Suchandsuh and I can come along, she’s really hot!” I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t use my fattybackpatch to try to meet womens!”

“Do you think this could be related to why my back has been hurting so much lately? Its not that it hurts, it just hurts like behind it.” I asked, expecting an affirmative answer.”

“Its probably touching a nerve.”

I winced.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to have it checked out then and you can go be dykey at the doctors office.” Now it was her turn to roll eyes.

More on this story as it develops.

Night Kids!

Brett Patrick Casey :o)