Tell me why, I don't like Sundays

I hate Sundays. Something about this day makes me feel so useless. I think it's because all week I file things away in my mind to be dealt with on Sunday, and then when it gets here, I rarely feel like hauling my lazy ass out of bed, let alone cleaning, doing laundry, organizing my mess of a life, grocery shopping, preparing for the coming week, doing three times the exercise I would normally do in one day to make up for whatever fuckups I've committed during the week on the diet/exercise front, etc. So somehow I just feel all the worse for resting. Guilt rest! My very favorite kind.

Today wasn't a total waste, because my friend Laura, who I met over the summer while interning at a publisher, came up to visit from the DC area. She and I and Michelle, our other partner in internship shenanigans, met up for brunch and it was lovely, as every brunch is pretty much required by law to be. I fucking love brunch. It allows Sundays to occasionally redeem themselves. We went to Cafe Brama in the East Village, and reminisced about all the people we passed our summer making fun of. And talked about how much whatever we're doing now sucks, except for Laura who's luckily enjoying the job she went to DC for. Michelle is exhausted from school (though I'm missing some aspects of school this semester, being expected to accomplish superhuman amounts of work and activity is not among them) and I'm working sporadically, giving myself an ulcer worrying over getting enough freelance modeling work. Being grown up is such a nasty double edged sword. I can't even get into this right now. Seeing them was like getting a gift I didn't realize that I very much needed.

Halloween was a bucket of yuck this year, unfortunately. I worked just over 50 hours this week, which was tiring but welcome because I only have 15 hours scheduled as of now for the coming week. That feels apocalyptic to me. But I digress...this week was a cavalcade of Bizarre Occurrences. Odd, unreal things kept happening, one after another, and each time I was thinking that had to be the end of it, this thread of weirdness couldn't possibly get any longer. But it was just unending. Among these, I was left an unintentional voicemail from my mother that was a 5 minute long screaming match between her and my stepdad, and I inexplicably listened to the ENTIRE THING although it was clear that it was a mistake and I should have hung up and deleted it right away. Instead I listened, shaking internally and probably externally too, because it was just so scary and surreal to hear that. It took me back to living at home. The language is terrifying. It's ingrained in me, it's what I've been hearing for as long as I can remember. Hearing the fight disembodied on the phone is so strange. I did not handle it well.

Another day, I was followed. I don't want to go into detail on this. Someone followed me from one location to another, waited hours for me to leave that second location, and followed me into the subway. It is frightening and I'm not sure how this is going to get dealt with at the moment. It's too unreal for me to think about too much, I keep pushing it out of my mind. It's the healthy way!

On Halloween evening I came home from work tired, watched the repeat of Wednesday's America's Next Top Model (to which I have to say O SHEENA MY SHEENA! She permanently hooched her way into my heart and TyTy's banishing her back to Harlem was a travesty of proportions that that tenhead bitch can't even begin to fathom. I eagerly anticipate her sure to be upcoming Maxim spread). Also, I had been despising McKey before this week, what with her semi-retarded facial features (that fucking mouth! Is it supposed to look like that?!), boxing obsession/obnoxious exercises (squat-hops) and because she's one of those people who whines as annoyingly as she can, "Don't huuuuurrt it" whenever someone kills a bug, then she takes the insect and lays it by the pool and dabs water all around it. And tells us that serial killers start small. Loathe. Her. But this week, she ALMOST completely redeemed herself (still can't get over that severed muscle look of her mouth and the handicapped look in her eyes) when she voiced her irritation at three of the girls having a "vajayjay shaving party". I'll be striving to incorporate that phrase into as many conversations as possible for the rest of my life.

Anyway, I started getting ready for parties, among them one thrown by one of my very favorite people that I previously had been looking forward to but for some reason got a really bad feeling about that day, one that Laura was attending, and several other goings-on that sounded worthwhile. There's always so much happening in the city for Halloween, it's amazing to see. But while I was getting dressed (no costume, dressing up for work has forever ruined the allure of costumes for me) and makeupping, I felt less and less like I wanted to do anything at all. It wasn't my normal weekend exhaustion and laziness kicking in, it was that creepy feeling I often get and also too often choose to ignore, that something Not Right is very close to happening and I could avoid if I just paid attention to the psychic intuitive beyond the grave spookiness that's telling me to duck and cover. But no, I love my friend who's throwing the party, I can't wait to see Laura, and it's Halloween and I have to go. Still, I kept delaying, and it was almost like something was physically holding me back. I would sit down while doing something and pretend I wasn't in the middle of getting ready. Then force myself back up. Then distract myself some other way. It sounds bizarre and it fucking was. Being a dumbass, I eventually got out the door...

...only to encounter my neighbor and former classmate chainsmoking on the stoop of our building. Boyfriend fight. We talked, whined, comforted, reassured each other on various things, I invited her to come, she was understandably too upset, etc. The whole time I was talking to her, I was thinking that I should just stay right there. Sit down on the stoop, take off my heels, and drink with her for the rest of the night. It felt overwhelmingly right. And I didn't do it. I went to the train station.

Where I was drunkenly groped by some idiot and laughed at by his friends AND an MTA worker when I slapped his hand off my ass and told him to get the fuck off me. Something I have never, ever understood is the mentality among men that makes it hilarious to them whenever women are harassed and become visibly scared and aggressive. It's like prodding at a dog through a fence to get it to bite, then laughing when all it can do is snap without connecting to the target. Similar situations have happened to me so many times, and every time feels like the first. It's so disgusting. I hate so much that there are men like this. That there are so many of them. How would they feel if someone chased their sister down a train platform and grabbed her like that, and scared her, and chipped away a little bit more at her faith in humanity to understand and practice respect? Does it not occur to them that I'm someone's sister too? And then to laugh about it...I have to just stop.

There was more fuckery of this sort on the train, from another round of drunk idiots, but at least this time there was no groping. Just laughter when one of them got sick of my poker facing and ignoring in response to his come-ons, and swaggered over and stood with his crotch thrust towards my face and I jerked away and told him to leave me alone. He and his friends laughed pretty hard at that. I missed the joke.

I got to my friend's party, every step feeling like it should be back in the direction of the train to take me home, and as soon as I walked through the door, I knew I had to get out. I really don't know what the hell was up with my stupid self refusing to listen to my intuition which was screaming itself hoarse at this point and pretty much had been all night, but I actually sat down and tried to mentally talk myself out of crazy and into staying. It lasted a few minutes; in a moment of clarity I jumped up and went for the door, then dealt with the long walk + 3 motherfucking trains to get back home, which was not very far away at all, because there was an N train fuckup after midnight. Aside from that, no further incident, and I went home and forgot about anything else I had planned, because seriously, you can only ignore that weird gut feeling for so long before you start to feel crazy. It was just a strange week. I'm glad it's over and I hope the weirdosity doesn't spill over into this week, because I have enough to worry about with the lack of booked jobs. I'm hoping I'll get last-minute calls, which have been coming every week, some for jobs I've been able to take and some I can't. To borrow Sarah Palin's whacked out witch doctor chant prayer: Lord, make a way. Then again, every week for the past 2 1/2 years I've been getting a call for work at a certain job, and this week for the first time in those going-on-three-years, no call came. I'm so, so deeply worried about this and trying to keep my imagination from indulging in the horror scenarios that losing this outlet of work would bring on, and why it might have come about in the first place, which I've yet to successfully puzzle out.

Enough of that. This blog is not off to a cheerful start. Eventually I'll get around to happier things. And I'm actually far happier than I've made myself sound. Sometimes I just have to work through the nasty stuff.