I was wearing a ladybug costume (my black-clad limbs and head stuck out of a fat disk upholestered in red with black dots) and about to go into a classroom.
The classroom was off the laundry room in my own house. I was listening to a Walkman, definitely not an iPod, which was supposed to feed me ladybug facts that I could spout at the kids. I was late getting into the room because the headphones tangled (iPod headphones in design and tangliness, though black). I wanted to zip the hood of the costume completely over my face.
My shrink was the teacher. In "Big Love," Jeanne Triplehorn is a teacher, and my shrink, at this point my ex-shrink, is African-American; their association is that both are my kind of lovely: not conventionally pretty but appealing and wholesome.
The tape in the Walkman was U2's October and--tape? who can find the right spot on a tape?--I had no ladybug factoids. Instead I just blathered. It turns out that insects have strong political proclivities. Ants and bees, of course, are communists, all working to death for the common good of the dictator. Who is herself enslaved, a consideration the second-graders were not interested in at all. Ladybugs are liberal: benevolent, tasty, nonviolent. That's about as far as I got.
The kids weren't interested in West Wing, either.
So I was flailing to save myself verbally or physically. I was also trying not to laugh at myself and the kids, and that is a really good thing for me to dream about: I realize this is a ludicrous situation and I am not going to panic about it or let a bunch of four-footers jeering crush me. I--this is from the notes I scrawled at 5:30 this morning with my light-pen--apparently threatened to kiss one, and I received a text message (on my cell phone? because I had one of those but not an iPod, and the cell phone couldn't've told me vital ladybug information?) from one of the kids, "Kis1." I told the texter that if I kiss someone I'd do it right, with two s's. Even in a dream I am a snob.
The alarm saved me this time.
Definition of a best friend: someone you can call from the station not because you are stranded (though you might be) but because you have become so distraught by the wanton abuse by the person you asked politely to get off your toe in the train that you just really need her.
The first few weeks off Lexapro I thought I was going to be okay. The several weeks since the drug has cleared my system, not so much. Last night I left work for home, remembered about 2/3 of the way there that I hadn't bought vegetables for buddy chow, and detoured toward a supermarket.
At home, I cleaned and tidied and puttered and filmed the house to show Nisou. RDC gave me a video camera for our anniversary and so far I have footage of Blake (lots, as expected), magpies, Rocky Mountain National Park in July, and seeing some sprouts in Berkeley. I examined the cables available and could figure out how to charge the camera but couldn't find a USB one to move snow-shoeing in RMNP in January and today's house from camera to computer. Fine, I decided, I'll take the snippets of the garden in June (the day after I got the camera) and of RMNP on Independence Day that I could find on RDC's machine (mine, at four years old, cannot store that much data or manipulate it in iMovie) and make a DVD that I can play in Moonshadow and that will be nice.
I sat at the computer for over an hour, iMovie book (a subsequent present) in hand, listening to The Planets--Dava Sobel's book, not Holtz's suite--trying to figure this out. I had clips in iMovie, but I didn't want to compress them into Quicktime and iDVD would only take footage straight from the camera through a USB cable I couldn't find. I did not make buddy chow. I did not pack. I told myself that if something didn't click by 8, that was that. Nothing clicked, I was frustrated and stupid, The Planets was done, and that was that.
It was 8 o'clock and I went into the kitchen to start the chow. Two hours before, filming the kitchen, I had stared straight through the viewfinder at the clear glass canister where the buddy quinoa lives and not noticed that it had a half-inch of grain in it.
Eight o'clock. Whole Foods is two miles away and is open until 10, I have a car, this is totally possible. And eight is a much better time to go than five--rush-hour neither in traffic nor in the store. But I haven't had a panic attack, if that's what it is, that bad since I broke my sister's car 2.5 years ago--preLexapro, but one of the final spurs toward therapy. When I could breathe again, and see through my tears, I drove very carefully to the store with Hamlet in my lap.
I didn't bring the elephant into the store, and I have to get sanity credit for that. In the bulk food aisle, quinoa in hand, I asked a stocker about hazelnuts, which I haven't seen for weeks. I don't know whether I was blind or WF had not had any, but there they were. I had breathed easier when I saw the nice full bin of quinoa, but now I may have smiled too.
Home again, I freed Blake and began to prepare the quinoa (lots of rinsing before boiling and steaming). I roasted hazelnuts. I added water to the honey jug and nuked it into liquidity. When the quinoa had soaked up all its water, I stirred it into the vegetables. I still needed to bag and freeze the chow, but (having and) not burning the quinoa as it steams is the hard part. I rubbed the skins of the nuts and threw them into the food processor, then added chocolate chips, honey, and condensed milk. Only the noise of the chips reminded me--even though I had consulted the recipe to find time and temperature for the nuts--that the chips should be melted, not just chopped.
But see, hazelnut spread is not vital. Buddy chow is. A hostess present is a good idea, and I had opted out of chewy chocolate ginger cookies a couple of days before. The spread is not vital, and the nuts were still piping hot from the oven and melted the chocolate some, and friction from the processor helped, and for heaven's sake it's chocolate: there's a lot of leeway before it becomes inedible.
My mother makes jam--elderberry is the favorite but they cannot be cultivated, also raspberry and blackberry--and gives jars for birthdays and Christmas, and last week when I walked to the post office one of the things I mailed was a box of empty jars, returned by her request. Charenton gives me jam too--blueberry and currant and quince--and in the box where I accumulate presents all year are empty Charenton jars. Jam jars are good things to return, but Amelia Bedelia taught me that a plate should not be returned empty. She filled home plate with cookies; I filled jam jars with faux Nütella. (I hope no one gets salmonella from eating it after the time of my travel without refrigeration, but Charenton keeps eggs on the windowsill so I don't stress too much.)
Packing was the hard part because Blake Knew. He stalked back and forth on the plank (the footboard of the bed) before pouting in a corner of the mattress. He didn't even want to play cave in the suitcase. Running shoes and zebra (for Siblet) and cardinal (another American animal for Emlet) are more important than video camera, and I shouldn't use it until I know how to store and manipulate its results, so thphbt.
So. Realizing I had not the food I needed to prepare for Blake on the eve of camp was a reasonable thing to beat myself up about, given what I was doing instead. I might not have beat my breast about it so much if I had been on Lexapro, but I recovered quickly and well. Recovery is all well and good, but not having the attack at all despite stimulus, or, even better, thinking more clearly and focusing better so as to prevent the stimulus, is what the drug does for me.