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alcoholism

Cupcakes and Strife

by anna on 04.20.2010

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cupcakes

Sometimes people will find out that I’m a recovering alcoholic, and they’ll praise my courage and my strength. I usually go along with it.

Because I like to be praised. You know. Who doesn’t?

But the fact that I quit drinking is not evidence of my strength or courage, one way or the other. It’s evidence only, really, of honesty and being straight with myself. Some alcoholics in recovery are strong and courageous people, but I’m not one of them. Because for me, getting off alcohol was really an exercise in acceptance more than anything else. I had to accept that I could never drink again, that there was no way to think my way out of it, no loop holes, no ifs ands or buts. And even that realization took me a while, too, by the way. I tried it my way several times before I finally accepted it. I got kicked out of a few bars on New Years Eves (the one day of the year I’d let myself drink during those years), forget my way home, forget how I got somewhere, and forget half the night the next morning before I could accept it. Let’s be clear: I can be a thick bastard on occasion.

But when people in meetings — back when I went to them — would say things like, “Today, I’m giving it over to God,” I’d be like, “Yeah. Give it over to God,” and it was all academic for me. They would talk about getting on their knees and all that religious crap, and I’d go along with it, but I really never did it. My thoughts on God and spirituality expanded as a result of sobriety, and whereas before I had been a fairly adamant atheist I’m now a much more tolerant agnostic with a penchant for talking about The Order of Things and the like. But get on my knees? Not a chance, pardon the expression, in hell.

I had never been physically addicted to alcohol. Or any drug, for that matter. My drinking was chaos, but it wasn’t every day. I never found myself, on a day-by-day basis (or minute-by-minute basis) having to give myself over to the care of God or The Group or Whatever in order to get through the day without a drink. I just did it. I committed to it and did all the work and tried (really tried) to expand my ideas about God for the sake of my sobriety. And I guess it worked, because it’s been almost nine years now.

But strong? No. I got lucky.

I joke about how I’m addicted to cupcakes and how I have a sugar problem. Bottom line: it’s funny. Mr. Right-Click says, “You’re only problem with cupcakes is that you don’t have enough cupcakes.” And yeah, that is totally a problem.

The truth is that I’m seriously addicted to food. To sugar, in particular. It is something that plagues me every day of my life. It’s funny, but it’s not, and then it is again, and then it’s not again. And so on.

I had to admit to Travis that I ate seven cupcakes on Saturday, and even while I was laughing about it, I was also kind of at my wit’s end, because I DO NOT WANT TO EAT SEVEN CUPCAKES IN A DAY. I want to commit to eating better, and not just totally waste my really super painful exercising and all the time I put in to try to look good. Because it really is about looking good for me — I wish it were about health, but it’s not. In fact, if it really were about health, it might be easier. If I could convince myself that eating even one more cupcake would be leading me down the path to death, I think I might have an easier time of it.

It would be more like alcohol — no ifs, ands, or buts.

I looked at the pictures of myself from Mini’s party and, people — and I’m not fishing for compliments here, people, really — it is physically painful for me. This is why you never see pictures of me from the waist down. I cannot look at them, and I’m driven to look at them. They hurt me. It is so absurdly vain and just SO STUPID, but it’s true. So I look at the pictures, and then I eat more cupcakes, and then I look at more pictures, and I eat more cupcakes. Before you know it, I don’t even remember how many cupcakes I’ve eaten, and I’m definitely not enjoying them anymore, and — wait a second, I’ve felt this way before . . . oh yeah, this is what it was like back when I was drinking.

Sugar and/or food are not something I can cut out of my life like I did with alcohol. And I’m fresh out of ideas, people.

I guess what I’m saying is: I’m on my knees. Typing, on my knees. Also: smirking. All of it. Because it’s serious, and it’s funny, all at once. I’m out of ideas. So I’m going to have to give it to God, as they say. I hope he/she/it doesn’t mind if I don’t believe in him/her/it.

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Tanya: Captain Hook

by anna on 11.06.2009

Pirate keyboard via CrunchGear

Pirate keyboard via CrunchGear

“I should go out tonight, because I’d really like to get laid.”
“Tanya, it’s pirate party.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“Phi Delt, Tanya.”
“Yeah . . .”
“The water polo team.”
“Isn’t pirate party a date party?”
“Technically.”

“Well, how are we going to get in?”
“Renshaw.”
“How do you know? Besides, everyone will have dates.”
“Haven’t you heard? There’s no dating at Stanford.”
“When did you see Renshaw?”
“Narrative Technique.”
“You went to class?!”
“I resent your tone.”
“Well, who is Renshaw taking?”
“Nobody. That’s what I’m saying. Technically it’s a date party. Really, it’s just a party. With a guest list. That we’re on.”
“OK . . . it has been so long since I got laid.”
“It’s been three weeks, Tanya.”

You knew everything about Tanya’s sexual escapades, whether you wanted to or not, and you questioned how much of it was performed for the benefit of . . . someone? You had never met a woman who talked — thought — this way about sex, and you did not believe it. You did not trust that a woman would authentically start to track her sexual partners in this way, lining them up literally as notches on her bedpost, whose partners already numbered beyond her age in years. It was an act, you thought, but maybe there was part of you that allowed for error, since just because you could not understand did not make it automatically false. And so you went along with it, like you did with all of Tanya’s absurdities, because with all of them there were just as many fascinating things, strange tidbits that hinted at a past and experience beyond what you would ever know.

Tanya was the kind of person that nobody back home would ever meet, much less know like you did. Nobody from where you came from would be friends with this kind of a person, or be able to teach themselves her language, as you had. And that was what made it all worth the effort.

Getting Tanya out of her dorm on party nights had become a giant pain in the ass of late. As far as you could tell, Tanya’s reluctance to leave her room was connected to her exaggerated pre-party beauty ritual. Perhaps it was because she was anosmic, but Tanya seemed to feel it was crucial to stay in the shower for upwards of an hour at a time in order to truly get clean, a fact which had annoyed and frustrated you more than another person’s personal maintenance routine ever should be able to do. You had explained, rather rationally, to Tanya that soap merely needed to be afforded a brief opportunity in which to bond with dirt on skin and hair, perhaps scrubbed a bit, and then rinsed off. That more than, say, twenty minutes — tops! — was just superfluous time wasting and skin drying tomfoolery! To no avail. Tanya was convinced her routine was essential, and if she did not start it by 7pm, the likelihood of her ever making it out was very low.

Tanya’s three-hour pre-party beauty regimen annoyed you because it often meant the difference between (over-)drinking alone or (over-)drinking with company. Because for you, the niceties of beauty routines ought rightfully be cut-cornered to the greater good of going out and drinking in a socially acceptable context. Perhaps Tanya’s alcoholism was not yet so pronounced. Or perhaps it was the fact that Tanya at that time had appetites that ranked higher in priority than drugs and alcohol ever could have, and it was to accommodate those appetites that she felt the regimen was necessary. So you went through this ritual of your own, carting over a 6 pack of Sierra Nevada in the early evening, and camping out on Tanya’s futon until she agreed to go to the shower. And checking in on her progress, periodically, in the hours that followed.

“Water polo, Tanya. Eyes on the prize.” You poked your head into the women’s bathroom at the end of the hall, and went back to drinking and hanging out with Cate and Linda, and talking about the evening to come. Time would pass, and Tanya would still not be ready, and after eseveral more attempts at gettin gher moving, you agreed to meet her at the party, and somewhere inbetween the brownish haze that descended after that pack of Sierra Nevada was gone and scrounging around for Old Smuggler in the back of Andy’s liquor cabinet at the end of the night, you remember seeing Tanya at the pirate party, talking to a guy named Brant that you had seen before but never spoken too. And thinking, what an odd choice, and going for more alcohol, and then everything went blurry again.

You would sleep on Cate’s floor, too drunk to drive, and in the morning attempt to piece together the disparate parts of the evening, to reconstruct the narrative that you had certainly been a part of but could not wholly claim subjectivity for. And as you and Cate were chatting, in came Tanya to the two-room double they shared that year, her black leather biker’s jacket and eyelash curler still intact, her hair looking only slightly worse for the wear. She headed over to her bedpost and carved in another line.

“Who?” you asked, never surprised by the circumstances of the notch, always curious to hear the notchee.
“Some pirate.”
“Right.”
“No, really, he was a pirate.”
“Dressed as a pirate, yeah. Brant, then?”

“Was that his name?”
“That’s who I saw you with.”
“Well, the only way we’ll know for sure is to examine him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was calling him Captain Hook. For a reason.”

“He was missing a hand? Strange.”

“No, it was more of a reference to the shape of a crucial piece of his anatomy.”
“Oh Tanya.”
“Captain Hook! AAAAAR!”

With that, she put her hand over her eye and chased you down the hall, and the two of you were off to the sunporch where you could further deconstruct the evening, unfortunate references to the shape of people’s penises and all. And if Tanya’s insistence upon the casual insignificance of it all still seemed forced, well at least there was some intimacy forged there, in spite of it all. Because at the heart of all the destruction and hazy recollections, was laughter, and the precious bond of two lost souls clinging to each other, and clawing back to themselves, one shared cigarette at a time.

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Tanya: Creature of the Night

by anna on 07.10.2009

People, we’re on vacation this week at this quaint place that doesn’t have wireless internet. This makes it hard to do new blog posts, and also there are these things called “family time” and “relaxation” that keep getting in the way of blogging progress. So today we’re in reruns–I’m bringing back a classic Tanya story for the benefit of people who might have missed her the first time around. This post originally appeared on October 2, 2008. Enjoy. Again.

It is the late fall of 1994, and you are sitting in the outer room of the small apartment that you share with Tanya at Kingscote Gardens. You are just where you wanted to be, living with Tanya, smack dab in the middle of campus, and just a few hundred yards away from the Coffee House, where you will undoubtedly down a pitcher of beer later, just as soon as it doesn’t seem so totally early in the day as to be embarrassing.

There is a stench coming from the general vicinity of the kitchen, the sink of which holds a pile of dirty dishes, including several plates covered in cheese, because cheese is mostly what Tanya eats–cheese, and sometimes pasta or the occasional piece of cheesecake. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her–she looks like a young Catherine Zeta-Jones, though you don’t know who that is yet, because it is only 1994 and The Mask of Zorro is still several years away. But Tanya’s home is in France, and though she is not French, she has mastered the French woman’s knack for eating whatever she wants without gaining weight, and, more to the point, she is anosmic, so the stench might as well not exist to her.

But what is your excuse? They are not your dishes, no, but this is your airspace, right? Was it primarily your trash that you finally gave in and emptied, dragging it down the back stairway, carefully breathing through your mouth so as to not pass out, and shuffling carefully out of the way of some other residents making their way up the stairs–overhearing, but determinedly ignoring them saying, “Uggh, it’s like something died in here.” What was it that made you give in with the trash, that the dishes have yet to accomplish?

You are halfway through Jane Eyre for your senior seminar, but a rumbling in the next room prompts you to take out one of the neon green earplugs you crammed into your ear to drown out Tanya’s three separate alarm clocks going off. The last time you saw Tanya was two days ago, but you knew she was there, because you had been checking periodically, listening at the foot of her loft to make sure she was still breathing, marveling at the fact that she could sleep through that kind of noise, and even more wondrous, at the fact that there was still any cocaine left. But here she was again, in her pajamas, her hair still strikingly perfect after two days in bed sleeping off a three or four day coke binge.

The crazy girl was talking about vampires again. She was obsessed with vampires, back when it wasn’t cool to be. There was no Twilight series then, no True Blood on HBO, and I’m not even sure how big Anne Rice was in those days. But Tanya was obsessed, and she had found TV shows on basic cable, way past anyone discerning going to bed, that dealt with the plight of the vampire who wanted to be good, but who fought their unholy urges to drink blood. She really thought this was an interesting topic, this being a vampire, and spoke of it as something that might be an ambitious aspiration, yes, but still something that could be accomplished, not unlike others of our classmates would talk of McKinsey consulting jobs or getting into UCSF Med School.

Somewhere in the vampire monologue, you notice something blackish all over Tanya’s otherwise perfectly white teeth. What is that? Chocolate? You have never known Tanya to eat chocolate, at least not in the obsessive, hiding food beneath the mattress kind of way that it would have to have been–given the fact that she has been holed up in her loft for two days. What is that, you think? At length, you decide to ask, though you are never sure if you should do that in these kinds of situations. What is most polite? Never mind, Tanya is headed to the bathroom.

It’s blood. She has blood on her teeth. And you realize then that this cocaine thing has gotten totally out of control, she sleeps all day and stays up all night, she has blood in her postnasal drip, she is disappearing for days at a time, talking obsessively about bizarre topics, making lists of things that make no logical sense, avoiding class, avoiding friends, unless they come equipped with an 8-ball or a bottle of Night Train. Somebody is going to have to do something. It seems absurd that it would be you, given . . . well, just given. But who else will do it?

She walks out of the bathroom, wiping her mouth, tasting the blood, smiles and says, “Maybe I really am a vampire.

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