Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things Page 10

  The entire next week I was a wreck. Victor refused to tell me what he’d talked about with the therapist and thought I was insane for even asking. He looked unconvinced when I told him that I’d stab him in the knee if he didn’t tell me what he’d told her but I suspected he’d write this all down for his next session.

  Finally it was time for me to go visit the therapist myself. She looked like the kind of shrink who would make you hold a speaking stick and play the “emotion bongos” but I didn’t care because I immediately launched into a very long and random speech about how Victor was not to be trusted because who gets mad at someone for attending a funeral? Crazy people who want you to question your own sanity, that’s who.

  Then the therapist interrupted me to tell me that Victor had only said nice things about me and that it was obvious that he adored me. Then I accused her of being some sort of plant because a real psychiatrist would have picked up on the fact that Victor had obviously done this entire thing on purpose to make me think that I was Gaslight crazy. The bongo lady (I refused to refer to her as a doctor after that) revealed nothing but poised her pen to write in her pad of “shit that’s wrong with people” as she asked a benign question. I’ve been to therapy enough to know the tricks and I was aware that shrinks never write something down when you’ve said something truly crazy because then you’ll know it’s crazy. Instead, they wait until they ask the next, easier question and then write down the notes. I assume it’s to put you at ease but it’s just the opposite for me because I want to call them out on it but then they’ll add “paranoid” to my list of problems. So while she settled in to write down her notes I answered her easy blow-off question (“Do you like your job?”) by saying:

  “If I was a serial killer I’d leave a note on my victims saying, ‘I only stab assholes, so just don’t be a dick and you’ll be fine. Hugs, Tiny Babies.’ I think that’s the best name for a serial killer because then the news anchor has to say, ‘People across the nation are still terrified of Tiny Babies,’ and ‘Tiny Babies suspected of stabbing assholes. Police encourage you to remain calm and take standard safety precautions against Tiny Babies. Lock your doors and stop being such a jerk.’ And the newspaper headlines would be like, ‘TINY BABIES STILL AT LARGE. PROTECT YOURSELF FROM TINY BABIES.’”

  I paused and looked over to see the therapist just staring at me in confusion and I felt bad because she’d probably already forgotten the last thing she needed to write and now would have to ask an even more benign question in order to capture all of the other stuff I’d just said. Luckily we were at the end of our session.

  She didn’t have a secretary so I paid her directly, which is always awkward because basically this is the person I’m choosing to divulge my deepest, darkest secrets to and then in the end I have to pay her $200 to make up for her having to listen to me. It’s pretty much the most unhealthy relationship ever and one that probably needs therapy. It seems at the very least counterintuitive to see a shrink for low self-esteem and after an hour of their convincing you how worthwhile you are they end the session by telling you that you owe them a lot of money for that. I wonder if shrinks are ever so good that their low-self-esteem patient says, “Nope. Not this time, doc. My problems were so fascinating that this time I’m billing you.” I’m not sure if a psychiatrist would consider this a success, but it seems like one to me.

  I immediately went home and told Victor I didn’t appreciate being punked like that and he seemed innocently baffled and then we got in a fight about how wrong it was for him to pretend that I was a nice person in therapy. That’s when Victor said I had a problem and I realized that I was perhaps too crazy for therapy. Or at least, too crazy for couples therapy.

  He was right. And that was the last time we ever saw that therapist. Instead, we just came up with some rules to get us through the rest of our marriage. Basically, I promised to stop leaving half-drunk cups of water all over the house and Victor promised to forgive me when I inevitably still left half-drunk cups all over the house. It was a weird arrangement, but we were both happy with it and sometimes you have to find what works for you.

  Occasionally I’m tempted to stop by that marriage counselor’s office and tell her that we’re still happily married, but then I think that she probably really enjoys telling people that they have a great marriage compared to that crazy couple with the surprise-funeral story who never even got out of the first month of therapy without imploding. I suspect telling her that we were okay without therapy might fuck up her stories, so I leave it alone. Because I’m a good person.

  At least, according to my new therapist.

  I Left My Heart in San Francisco. (But Replace “San Francisco” with “Near the Lemur House” and Replace “Heart” with a Sad Question Mark.)

  You know when you’re walking to the trash can at the zoo and you’re holding something important in one hand, and you have something you have to throw away in the other hand, and you’re sort of distracted because you just realized the universal truth that everything in the world either is or isn’t pandas and you’re trying to decide if that’s an important epiphany or not and it’s so distracting that it’s not until you’re halfway back to the lemur house that you realize you’re still holding the garbage in your hand and that you seem to have thrown your car keys in the trash?

  And then you run back to the trash can to find your keys, but apparently they’ve sunk to the bottom and so you’re bent over, hesitantly sifting through other people’s garbage, and people are starting to stare and you want to explain that you’re not crazy, except that would be disingenuous because you are mentally ill but it certainly wasn’t your mental illness that caused you to throw your keys in the trash and you don’t appreciate their assumption? And you consider explaining that but then you suspect you might seem even more unbalanced if you start yelling at total strangers about judging your mental illness while you’re digging through the garbage can at the zoo?

  And then you realize that you’re going to have to use two hands to find your keys so you look for a place to set down what’s in your other hand and then you realize that you’re still holding the trash you went to throw away originally and that it probably looks to others like you were digging through the trash and were particularly happy to retrieve the mostly eaten funnel cake you just wanted to throw away before you got pulled into this mess?

  And then you move to throw it in the garbage but you stop yourself because you realize if you put it in the trash you’re just creating more stuff to sift through to find your keys, and so you stand there with one hand in the garbage while you stare indecisively at the funnel cake, which has stumped you?

  And then your husband comes looking for you and is like, “What in the hell are you doing? Why are you digging in the trash?” and you say, “I’m looking for my keys,” and he’s like, “Most women just store them in their purses,” and you glare at him but he’s still saying, “Seriously, stop that. You look like a lunatic,” and you say, “I DROPPED MY KEYS IN HERE BECAUSE I THOUGHT THEY WERE FUNNEL CAKE SO CAN YOU JUST HELP ME?”

  And then he stares at you with speechless, baffled concern and shakes his head incredulously as he pulls out the car keys that you’d apparently just left on the table at the lemur house? And you feel relieved for a second but then you look into the garbage and think, “Then what did I throw in there?” And you can’t decide whether to keep looking because maybe it’s important, but now you can’t even say, “I’m digging through the trash looking for my keys,” and instead you have to say, “I’m digging in the trash for something of mine that I just threw in there that I don’t even know what it was”?

  And no one can even help because they’d be all, “What does it look like?” and you’d have to say, “I HAVE NO IDEA. IT WILL BE A SURPRISE TO US ALL, I GUESS,” but the crowd is getting larger and so instead you let your husband pull you away and you never find out what it was you left in that trash can, and it haunts you forever because you let some random stran
gers shame you into not rolling up your sleeves and dumping the garbage can out on the sidewalk so you could solve the mystery of what-was-I-looking-for?

  And then all the way home you root through your purse, desperately looking for something missing, but nothing is and it drives you crazy not knowing what the hell it was you left behind in that trash? And then your husband mumbles that maybe it was your dignity, and he has a point but you explain that you remember it being heavy and substantial so it was obviously not your dignity, and you explain that the only reason you were distracted enough to throw away something that wasn’t keys was that you’d just discovered a mind-blowing universal truth. But then he looks at you expectantly and your mind goes blank and you can’t remember what it was1 and now you’ve lost two important things that you don’t know what they are?

  Yeah.

  That is how my whole week has been.

  Stock Up on Snow Globes. The Zombie Apocalypse Is Coming.

  If you’d like to quickly round up a whole lot of assholes all in one spot I suggest going to the airport. In a normal environment I’d say that about 5 percent of any nearby population are assholes. FYI: another 2 percent are total bastards. Ten percent are fine but think they’re better than you. Ten percent are awesome unless you push them too hard and then they get sort of stabby. Probably .0001 percent are serial killers or people who intentionally make pants too small. About 32 percent are awesome but secretly suspect that there’s something very wrong with them (which there is, and that’s why they’re so awesome). Six percent are questioning the validity of this breakdown right now and want to see the raw data. But I’m not going to give it to them because this is not a book about statistics. Besides, 37 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot so I’m not sure what you’re expecting from me.

  As I was saying (before I was rudely interrupted by math), in a normal environment about 5 percent of the population are assholes. Go to an average airport and suddenly the asshole population leaps exponentially. You might disagree and point out that you never see any assholes in your airport, but that’s usually a pretty good indication that you might be one of them. Sorry. I don’t really blame you though as it seems to be out of your hands. And, believe me, I can relate. Whenever I have to do story problems I turn into a small, burrowing animal and I often find myself hiding in a cupboard, so I’m not judging you. Except that I sort of am because my hiding from math in cupboards hurts no one (except possibly the cupboards) whereas people being assholes on planes makes me want to poke them with large sticks.

  It’s such a strange phenomenon. People who (outside of airports) might normally hold open doors or stop cars for crossing ducklings will suddenly be fine with plowing down elderly women and kicking small children out of the way in order to get to their preassigned, horrifically cramped seats. They’ll stand in crowds, circling the boarding lane and blocking other passengers who have earlier boarding tickets than them, and will glare at anyone who tries to walk around them. A few hours later you’ll see these exact same people breathing heavily and glancing around with trapped-animal eyes, straining against their seat belt the moment the plane begins to descend, and they will immediately leap up as soon as the seat belt sign goes off in order to be first to aggressively stand in a line of people who are not going anywhere for quite some time. I always wonder about these people. I can only suspect that they must have some sort of weird standing-in-line fetish.

  It’s my personal opinion that airlines can do two things to make air travel better for everyone. The first is to have the people taking boarding tickets recognize the person who seems the most unreasonably determined to be sitting on the plane, hold up their arm, and joyfully announce over the loudspeaker: “YOU, SIR! You are our winner for most unaccountably and frantically eager to get on a plane that will not leave until every single person is seated anyway. Well done, you! Can you tell us how you feel now that you’ve won?” At best he’ll realize he’s being a bit douchey, laugh it off, and might calm the hell down from now on. At worst he’ll start yelling and then everyone else gets a good show. Then give him a small medal and a mild tranquilizer. Plus a mild tranquilizer for the person who has to sit next to him. And, if you’re handing them out, I’ll take one too. In fact, mild tranquilizers for everyone!

  (I apologize for the gender stereotyping, but in fairness it usually is a he. And he’s usually in a business suit. And he often has triple-diamond status. And he’s occasionally my husband.)

  Frankly, if we all had tranquilizers, that would reduce the need for the second part of my plan to make air travel less awful. There’s always that one person who is making a nuisance of themselves because they’re furious their enormous bags don’t fit, they’re loudly muttering racist bullshit about people who aren’t actually terrorists, or they’ve had too many tranquilizers and now they can’t swallow correctly. (I’ve been there, but in my defense, I’d mixed up my antianxiety sedatives with my heartburn medication and so I’d like to think it was less that I was “drooly” and more that I was just slightly too generous with my saliva.) Regardless, I think it would serve everyone as a community if the flight attendants were able to whack one person (per flight) on the head with a piñata stick for being the stupidest damn person on the plane. It wouldn’t hurt them permanently but if it happened to them more than once they’d probably get the picture because HOW ELSE ARE THEY GOING TO LEARN?

  This would also be helpful because I think we’re all a bit stressed and judgmental on planes and probably at one time or another each of us would get hit with the piñata stupid-stick, and it would be a good reminder to be more compassionate to others. Personally, I’m most likely to get whacked in the head because my anxiety disorder gets really bad on planes and so I end up panicking a bit. Usually I get on Twitter and tell everyone that I love them because that’s about the time that my antianxiety pills kick in and they make me super sentimental and scared that I’m going to die. It’s like taking ecstasy, but instead of having sex and going to a rave I just want someone to stroke my hair and sing me old Irish drinking songs. Unfortunately I always end up sitting next to people who don’t know any drinking songs at all and spend their time making pie charts, which is pretty much the worst use of pie ever.

  During my last book tour I flew constantly and it really fucked with my anxiety disorder, to the point where I eventually had a mild nervous breakdown, which they now refer to as “vital exhaustion” for some reason. My shrink suggested that if I was going to continue traveling so much that I could look into getting a service animal expressly trained to provide emotional support to people with anxiety disorders. I considered getting Hunter S. Thomcat trained, but then I remembered that he gets spontaneous nervous diarrhea every time he’s in a moving car, and I’d imagine that holding a cat who seems to have explosive plane dysentery wouldn’t necessarily help my anxiety so much as it would just give me something new (and horribly unsanitary) to be anxious about.

  I called around to different service-animal specialists and spoke to a woman who told me that it’s better to get an animal who has already been trained and has the right temperament. She also told me that cats aren’t preferred emotional-support animals for anxiety disorder, but my cats hate dogs so I figured I was fucked, but then she told me that the Americans with Disabilities Act was recently interpreted as allowing “people with anxiety disorders to travel with an emotional-support pony on airlines.” So basically I could bring a goddamn pony on board with me. I’m pretty sure a pony wouldn’t fit under my seat or in my lap, but I rather liked the idea of a small medicinal horse standing in the aisle beside me while I braided his mane. Plus, Pony Danza would make a great pack animal and instead of bringing suitcases I could just put my extra clothes on him and that way I wouldn’t have to pay to check a bag. Plus, the pony wouldn’t get cold because it would be wearing my pajamas.

  I tried to convince Victor that this was a win-win situation but he got all shitty about our having an indoor pony pet, even thoug
h I pointed out that it was for my mental illness. He responded that he had no doubt my mental illness was involved in a decision that would eventually conclude with a bunch of horses in bed with us. I reiterated that I only needed one medicinal pony but he argued that I’d eventually claim that the pony was lonely and then one day he’d come home to a houseful of ponies. I didn’t respond because we both knew he was right. Besides, I’m pretty sure the girl who brings her horse on the plane is going to get hit with the piñata stupid-stick every flight and Victor’s probably just saving me from myself. And from a concussion.

  Truthfully though, ponies on planes are small change compared to some of the things I’ve seen. Like the time the lady sitting next to me listened to every single ringtone available on the highest volume possible in the thirty minutes we waited for everyone else to board. Or one time Victor was sitting in the quiet wooden-cubicle section of the President’s Club, where professional people go to work on their laptops during layovers. There was an older man in Victor’s row who had his headphones plugged into his laptop so he could watch True Blood, and out of nowhere he lunged toward the screen and screamed, “LOOK OUT, SOOKIE!” so loudly that Victor accidentally screamed a little too. Or the guy who was sitting two rows ahead of me one time who was super careful to hold his phone in such a way that no one around him would notice that he was watching hard-core porn on the plane. And probably no one would have noticed if he’d remembered to plug the earphones he was wearing into the phone jack but he didn’t and so he groaned in frustration (I hope) and kept turning the volume up louder and louder until he realized the problem. Or the woman in front of me in the security line who asked if they would put her cat, Dave, through the luggage X-ray machine because she wanted to see if he’d eaten a necklace. (What the fuck, Dave? Get it together.)