Jaime Goes To The Hospital: Part One

"What are you so worried about, Scully? It's just a nice little trip to the forest."

- Mulder, The X-Files

For those of you who don't know (any of of the 9 of you reading this blog), I was hospitalized for two weeks - with an ailment the doctors still don't quite understand because... it only half exists? Or doesn't really exist at all? I don't know, they don't know -it's all very reassuring. What I DO know is after almost a month and a half of tests and MRIs and bloodwork up the proverbial wazoo, I'm still being pieced together, much like an episode of House. Or maybe Humpty Dumpty - just without the shell and the wall and the king's horses. At one point, I even accompanied my neurologist to his monthly conference to help present my case, for which my biggest contribution was springing out of my seat and insisting, to a room filled with neurologists, "I promise you I don't have Herpes."

So. Basically, that's the end of the Great Story Of The Crazy Illness. That said, there's a beginning to it as well - and I've been told by my doctors that I should keep a record of everything that happened - from start to finish - you know, "just in case" (always a phrase you wanna hear from people paid thousands of dollars to keep you from dying.) So in an effort to follow medical advice, I'm gonna begin with the beginning and take you guys on a ride from there - a great blog ride. A great big illness blogocoaster, if you will. Kosher?

Okay then.

To start at the beginning would be to start with all the blame placed squarely on Coney Island. Why? Because objects and places are inanimate and thus easy targets who can't argue that the only person to blame is yourself (shut up world! I blame Coney Island!)

But to go back even further, and to spread the blame around in as convoluted a way as possible, especially seeing as I can't blame anyone but myself (see above) or God (already sick of my blaming shit on him) we can also blame this on my love/hate relationship with amusement parks in general. For instance, on the one hand, my love for them is a bit unnatural - as in, I went to college in Orlando mainly for Disney World, where I played Mickey Mouse for two years - both for the joyful absurdity AND the free passes. But on the other hand, I hate them, too - the ticket cost, the commute, the lines, the aimless wandering, the constant odor of stale candy and moldy children, and the inevitable sunburn/stomach ache/brain ache that follows... And here in New York, the freaking commute is the worst part - as in, the subway ride to Coney Island will be long enough to age you at least ten years by the end of it. So ever since moving here, I have always, proudly, been all, 'thanks but no thanks, Coney Island!'

And yet...

(Undoubtedly, "and yet..." will be the quote carved on my headstone - with a skull and crossbones directly beneath it, and another quote: "Forever made of awesome" and then maybe a famous Dana Scully quote, too - although according to my mother, the headstone has to fend for itself as we tattooed Jewish freaks are chosen in life, but not in death: we're banned from all Jewish cemetaries. Which means if I DO eventually die of Meningitis + Mystery illness, it'll just be me and the Gentiles for all eternity. Can you say Interfaith Post-Death Par-tay?? BYOB, undead friends!)

Where was I?

Anyway.

And yet there was my sister, quietly counting down her last few months in the city, still living in the crawl-space behind my sofa, still eager to do NYC shit she'd never done... And of course there was also the boardwalk I'd never seen, the endless Coney Island funnel cakes I'd never tasted, and the Whack a Moles and the brand new Luna Park I'd had yet to try...

SO MUCH STUFF, GUYS!!!

(DAMN IT.)

So finally, the week before July 4th, during one of the worst heat-waves since the great brownout of 03 - when electrical wires under the streets in Queens actually melted - the two of us made it out to the boardwalk - just two Coney Island virgins getting our cherries popped.

(Except you know how some of us lose our virginity and afterwards shamefully gather our clothes and regret losing it to THAT guy?)

(Yeah.)

The first half hour we spent outside the train on the Boardwalk, excitedly snapping photos of the giant hotdog countdown clock like those tourists who take 100 pictures of the Airtrain subway platform like it's the Statue of Liberty.

Then we rode the tallest, oldest Ferris Wheel in the US and joked that I would be the first accident in 100 years. (Oh, irony. I fucking hate your bullshit.)

Afterward, we wandered out to the crowded beach, where we set up camp not far from a couple of drunk chicks slurring over their giant, $14 Cyclone collectors margaritas: "I'msooooooooover himstooooopidbooooyzzz," which of course prompted a few mock drunken slurs of our own: "Imsoooohotwhydoesn'thewanttooohiiiittthiiiiisss...." until, bored, we got up and walked along the shore, where a lovely - if not utterly stoned - older couple took our photos against the backdrop of the beach and ocean. "You guys should check out The Grateful Dead concert," they suggested. "The ampitheater's right behind you."

"Ooh, Grateful Dead," said my sister. "I love them."

"Sure," I said, "Old people in tie dye is always fun."

"You're old, too, Jaime."

"Shut the hell up, Lindsay."

So the two of us stumbled willingly into a tailgating flea market melee - vegan food, tie-dyed dresses, homemade jewelry, giant homemade glass bongs, old stoners and alcohol galore; Party in the USA, man! Here my sister bought herself a sterling silver ring and I bought myself a burritto. Not too bad for a stoner flea market par-tay in the middle of summer.

On our way out, I was given a free, mostly untouched beer - by a girl who I swear was an extra from Dazed and Confused. A few sips later and the sky had opened up; our meteorological alarm clock - time to head back to the city.

Honestly, it was just a totally fun, lazy time, y'all; Nothing special or unexpected happened; the afternoon passed as pleasantly as most summer days pass - slowly and outside of time, like a drive down the Florida Turnpike on a cloudless, sunny morning - until you realize you've been lulled into a daydream, and actually you've just zoned out for sixteen miles and missed your fucking exit - and also, you've lost an entire half hour of your life now; how the fuck did that shit happen? How do you turn this car around? Holy shi -

CRASH!

So the day after Coney Island, I woke up with a sunburn - not unusual for post-beach; admittedly, I knew should not have used my sister's tanning oil - every time I spray that crap on myself I swear to God I end up grilled like hamburger; FYI: for us translucent people, tanning oil is the kiss of death - like that coating you put on charcoal. Fire up the grill, boys! And this is exactly what I attributed the pain to - a weirdass sunburn.

"It's just all over," I told my sister, and proceeded to pace the length of the living room with arms and legs akimbo like a walking gingerbread man. "My feet are pretty fucked up. Is it possible to cook your feet inside your own shoes? And my hands, too. Like I've scraped them across a dozen feet of concrete. Like I fell off my horse something. Is that normal? I don't think that's normal."

"What now? You fell off your horse?" My sister looked up from her computer, pulled out her headphones. "You don't look burned."

I gave my still-pasty skin a cursory glance. "You're right. I don't."

"Maybe you have an invisible sunburn."

"Yeah? Maybe." I examined myself again. "Hold up. Do those actually exist?"

She put her headphones back on, answering, "No."

Fantastic.

Post-Coney-Island, Week Two:

A new sensation blossomed in my legs; a weird ache - as if I'd been on an elliptical machine for a day - and then carried it through miles of desert. For ten straight years. Much like my Jewish ancestors in Egypt with the matzoh. (Which is where the matzoh comes from, yes? No? See - THIS is why I shouldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetary. Not because I have a tattoo, but because I am Jewish-illiterate.)

So July 4th came and went (happy Independence Day!) and I managed to find my way to Brooklyn for a rooftop party - beneath the blazing hot sun, in a second round of heat wave, of course. There I spent most of the afternoon huddled in the shadows created by the four foot ledge, legs crossed awkwardly, drinking, merry-making, and explaining to my friends about my extended sunburn affliction - also apologizing for flashes of my underwear in my teeny skirt.

"It's killing me. It's fucking killing me."

"How long now?" asked my friend Corey.

"I don't know, a week?"

"You've been sunburned for a week?"

"Yeah. I know. That's a thing, right? That's normal?"

"Sure."

"Really?"

He shook his head and threw back a beer. "No."

Fantastic squared.

At this point in Sunburn Land there was really only one thought circling round my head: Clearly I'm going crazy. As in, there is a physical process involved with a Trip To Crazytown and this is the tollbooth to get on that highway.

"Everything hurts now," I told Lindsay - on that lovely July 4th evening - as a pleasant breeze coming in through the opened window hit my skin like a wall of angry glass shards, and I winced. "It's like I have the sunburn of death. It's like I set myself on fire. Except I'm not red at all. Am I going crazy?"

What I needed was validation, just anything from anyone to reassure myself that my brain had not somehow melted into my eyeballs.

"Yes," she said. "You are."

"Helpful. Thanks a lot."

Post-Coney-Island, week three.

By now the Sunburn of All Things Weird had turned into The Sunburn of Death. So I finally did what anyone would do about two and a half weeks prior to when I actually did it (shut up, world! It's not my fault! Coney Island, I SHAKE MY ANGRY FIST AT YOU!); I finally went to the doctor.

At least I'll have some answers, at least I'll find out I'm not crazy, I thought, as I sat in the waiting room - valiantly trying not to touch my own skin - for fear of screaming out in white-hot pain like a prisoner being beaten in a shower stall with a wrench.

"The good news is there's nothing wrong with you," said the doctor.

I cocked my head to one side and perched on the edge of the exam table; my organs were cooking themselves inside my skin like marinated Shishkebob, like the cartoon chicken from the Cluckin Chicken sketch on SNL, roasting itself. There were tears in my eyes and I suddenly had a precious, fantastic vision of bashing my doctor's head into the blood pressure reader.

"How can there be nothing wrong?" I snapped. "I feel like burnt hair. I feel like when my best friend pushed me into a cactus in the 9th grade. Something's got to be wrong!"

"Well," said the doctor absently, as he typed information onto my online chart, "Muscle ailments are rare but not uncommon. Have you been exercising excessively?"

"No."

"Lifting anything heavy?"

"Seriously? With my entire body including the bottoms of my feet?"

"Well, it could be something like Lupus."

"Lupus!" My eyes went wide. "What the hell is Lupus?"

"A degenerative disease of the skin. Forget I said it."

"What?" Now my brain hurt, too. "Why the hell would you say it if you wanted me to immediately forget that you said it?"

"You wanted ideas."

I blinked in disbelief.

He cheerfully handed me a printed presciption and said, "Naproxen. Once every four hours. It's just like Aleve."

My teeth were grinding. "If it's just like Aleve why do I need a prescription? Can't I just buy some goddamn Aleve?"

"Sure you could," he said, as if talking to a small, stupid child, "But you wanted prescriptions."

Fantastic cubed.

Later that night, as I lay on the couch with my feet perched at a level above my head, painfully munching on a Naproxen cocktail and desperately telling myself that I was fine, perfectly fine, that I just needed some Aloe, that I should listen to the advice of the idiot doctor, I somehow lost the functioning of most everything below the waist. And I realized I needed not just one idiot doctor but a whole slew of idiot doctors, namely an idiot hospital - right as my lower half just shut down altogether, which in English language form I imagine would roughly translate to: "Fuck you, Jaime - fuck you and all your asshole vital organs. Fuck you in your stupid faces and/or nucleotides. Why the hell didn't you go to the ER two weeks ago?"

(CONEY ISLAND'S FAULT!)

Moving on.

The ER was a flurry of doctors and nurses and wide-eyed, frightened, wandering triage patients. As I had come in via ambulance and in howling, obnoxious pain, I had been given top priority, although not everyone moved through the system as fast. Occasionally, waiting patients would be given a bed or a room, although mostly they just wandered around like battered soldiers, stopping only to pester doctors and/or cough hysterically into the faces of other patients, until a nurse would finally come up and beg them: "Please sit, sir. Please cough into your hands, sir. Please, I'm begging you, stay away from the computers, sir." It was unsanitary, but in an ironic way; the Alanis Morrisette of Hospitals.

The beds were parked side by side, like the Citifield parking lot, and seperated by curtain. They faced flatscreen TVs bolted into the ceiling, and mostly, the flatscreens played snow - unless they played silent, snow-covered sports and news. Here is where I channeled all my nervous energy - into a fuzzy screen playing MLB scores over and over - and where I spent most of my Saturday afternoon's focus when I wasn't being rolled into one test or another; chained to the bed by IV, hooked up to a Foley, doped up on something magical called 'Dilaudin,' and desperately trying to read Keith Hernandez' lips through TV snow to see if the Mets had won.

"So when do I get to leave?" I asked the nurse.

"You have a lowgrade fever and an elevated white blood cell count,"she said. "We're not sure what's going on. We have to keep you here awhile. Run some tests."

"Well, it better not be AIDS," I joked. (Trying as I often do to allieviate seriousness with ill-timed and completely awful quips.)

"I'm sorry?"

"AIDS," I repeated.

"Do you want us to run an AIDS test, ma'am?"

"No. I was mostly kidding. I don't think I've slept with enough assholes yet to really get AIDS. But if you think it's AIDS, run the test. Just add it to my queue. Like a line at a theme park? Get it? Say, that'd be fun news to deliver to the last asshole I slept with, right? Hey, douchebag, guess what - I have AIDS! Except I don't. But we covered that already. Have you slept with many assholes? You know how it is with them. Shit, do you really think I could have AIDS?"

"What?"

"AIDS," I repeated louder, realizing I had only managed to sucessfully scare the shit out of myself.

"Ma'am, I just need to change your IV."

"But now I can't get AIDS out of my head. What if I have that? Why do I joke about these goddamn things?" She pushed the new IV into my arm and I sighed. "Jesus Christ, Diludad is amazing."

"It's Dilaudin, Ma'am."

"Whatever." I picked at my new IV. "It better not be AIDS."

About a thousand tests later and my sister finally returned to the hospital to check on me. She stood over me for the final test, a spinal tap, and afterwards, gave me her own diagnosis via text message: "Coney Island Fever Virus."

My (new) doctor's only slightly more informed diagnosis: "Meningitis." Except she had a look - kind of like the befuddled expression my dog gets when we sit together on the couch and I rant about Fox News. "It's Meningitis for sure, just... we don't understand the burning, and we can't tell where you got it from. And you've got something else, too. Or you must. Your symptoms are too weird otherwise. And if not, then we don't know what it is." And then: "Don't worry, you're not dying." Then a tiny laugh - as if terrifying me with vagueness was the joke. Ha ha? Suddenly I wished for Shannon, my improv teacher, to leap up and yell, "No! Where's the justification? Do it again, but this time don't be an asshole with your scene partner."

"Meningitis?" I said, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Don't worry, ma'am, it's viral, not bacterial."

"Meningitis?" I repeated. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Meningitis?! What the shit? Motherfucker. Shit. Shit shit. I need to call work. I won't be in on Monday. What else? Is it possible to get some dinner soon? I'm fucking starving." Then, hocked up on drugs, I promptly passed out. This was two am on July 10th. I would not see the outside world again until the 22nd.

The next day, my sister sat beside me in my isolation (sorry- PRIVATE) room wearing the blue decontamination gown my doctors had ordered her to wear - as if she had entered the underground medical bay in Independence Day ("there can be no peace between us! nooooo peeeeeeaaaaaaace!" Man I love that movie) - although I was reassured that I was not contagious. Even though my room had several specialty anti-bacterial scrub-down stations. Even though it practically had an airlock. Not contagious! Nonetheless. I was now an anomaly. A medical mystery. Someone you'd see on Gray's Anatomy, just without the deep dark secret from my past and Katherine Heigl being annoying and Dr. Bailey shooting witty insults at me. And as a result, I had a team of doctors working on me - all with no ideas.

My sister offered up more of her own theories - although hers hadn't changed much since the less fun version of Spinal Tap had offered me Meningitis instead of pithy 70s rock music:

"Who knows what was wandering around that Grateful Dead concert, Jaime. I bet you that chick with the beer was just passing shit out, just handing people beers and drugs and Meningitis. That'll teach you - never accept a beer from a stranger. Now you have Coney Island Meningitis."

(SEE?? IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT, CONEY ISLAND!)

Which brought to mind an image of - not rollercoasters or Luna Park - but the adorable monkey from Outbreak, who, with one accidental scratch, killed his nameless poacher and then 3/4ths of an entire California town. What if my desperate need to never be left out of the theme park fun had finally KILLED ME?

Fantastic to the fourth power.

One nice little trip and now I was that bikini clad idiot who'd poached a beer and as a result was the first to be afflicted with a mystery condition - and thus I wouldn't even get an awesome death scene like Kevin Spacey - I'd just get some gruesome cut-away before they incinerated my body and brought in Renee Russo. Fucking great. Thanks for the memories, Meningitis Island! See if I ever come back and ride your hundred year old roller coaster!

Le Sigh.

This we'll just call ground zero: the beginning: an innocent little trip to Coney Island that ended in HORROR. (So head on over to Coney Island, kids: where Meningitis will infect you and kill you. You hear me? IT WILL INFECT YOU AND KILL YOU.

Insert cheerful commercial for Coney Island.)

More Meningitis fun to come in Part Two...

Grandma's Mojo is the Best!

For those of you who don't know, my grandmother (who made MANY guest appearances in my comedy monologues) passed away a few weeks ago. So what you're about to read is my occasionally rambling, always inappropriate online tribute to her - to be followed immediately by the picture of an adorable puppy (what assuages grief better than baby animals? NOTHING. Except maybe baby animals in costume.)

Commence tribute:

My grandma was an old-school broad - seemingly unsinkable, like Molly Brown. Back in the day, she took care of (what seemed like) an impossible number of Morrises - whether cooking daily meals filled with love and chicken ("everyday with the goddamn Chicken!") and far too much Paprika, providing those homeless among us with lodging, or perhaps issuing unwanted social commentary - she was always the family gate-keeper (which I suppose makes my grandfather the family Key Master? Minus the coming of Gozer and turning into a Doberman thing? Or do I just relate way too many unrelated situations to Ivan Reitman films?) Or, actually, perhaps a better analogy is Grandma as ring-master - or that creepy guy who runs the sideshow at the traveling carnival - minus the handlebar moustache and tophat. You get what I'm saying.

That she's gone now is bizarre to me - as if Bev could be susceptible to something as pedestrian as cancer; that's like Chuck Norris dying in his sleep instead of in an underwater boxing match with Satan, God and eight killer sharks like the prophecy of course always promised. (Or like how Lost turned out to be a bad metaphor trapped beneath an ancient wine cork. Really, Lost? The island is just a bottle of Sutter Home? THERE'S A REASON NOBODY BUYS THAT CRAP AT WHOLE FOODS, LINDELOFF!)

(Tribute-interuptus!:)

(Dear Lost, You shredded my heart like so much emotional pornography and then you answered none of my questions, and then, tragically, you died. Yet, I still love you. So. Please bring back Sayid's naked chest and Sawyer's wind-swept floppy hair. Maybe in a spinoff? Sayid and Sawyer: Wet, Half-Naked and Awesome. Okay? Call me, Lindeloff!)

(Finis-tribute-interuptus! - sorry, dudes. A shit ton happened in the past month and I am all over the place trying to catch up.)

Anyway.

My grandma was supposed to live forever (no offense to all of you out there with mere mortal grandparents) - after 88 years of perfect health, a smoker's Brooklyn accent (somewhere between Coffee Talk's Linda Richman and The Exorcist's Linda Blair), not to mention 6 packs of Marlboros a day since the mid 1930s. Seriously, you guys? Anyone who consumes that much nicotine and makes it to 88 should outlive the Earth.

Beyond this, my grandma was always the shit to hang out with - even during those painful months before she died - mainly because she never once felt sorry for herself, never once made apologies, and had an excellent memory and an endless capacity for stories about everyone else's fucked up, retarded bullshit. (Sidenote: "fucked up retarded bullshit" is, I believe, a phrase I first learned from her when I was two.) Basically, you could ask her what she ate for breakfast and instead of an answer, she'd give you every assinine offense any Morris had ever perpetrated against the act of breakfast over a span of at least forty years.

Once, right after I joined J-date (a Jewish dating disaster deserving of its own entry) I called her up and asked her what she thought about romantic relationships. What makes them work, what compells folks to stay together, that sort of thing. And instead of giving me the usual grandmotherly speech about love and all its nauseating granduer, she launched into a seemingly unrelated diatribe about how, to save a bit of money right before the war, my grandfather bought himself a car with no floor; literally, it was just seats and cardboard on a metal foundation - what she called his "quaintly stupid piece of shit."

"Sure, nobody had money during the Depression, but who buys a goddamn floorless car? I was Wilma Flintstone for a year, and I swear, we might as well have been driving a cardboard box with a windshield. And god forbid it rained. I just... can't. even. tell you. But that idiot was adorable in his Navy uniform with his short little legs and those awful jokes. And God, that assinine car. But he made me laugh. If he hadn't, I would have smacked him in the face and gone off in search of Frank Sinatra and been done with it."

we were both adorable in the 80s...

After the war, my grandparents moved to the subburbs and bought a card store - and put my Dad to work at the register as soon as he was old enough, and then my cousins and I as soon as we were old enough - and by old enough, I mean potty-trained and able to form simple sentences. Actually, my cousins and I were (I am proud to say) the best employees no paycheck could buy: by the time we were six we ran the register and the lotto machine; we also sold ugly fake jewelry to anyone stupid enough to buy it, and peddled homemade goods from my grandmother's beloved assembly line of inappropriate nonsense - a random assortment of homemade bags, screened t-shirts with sayings like "I found the keys now where the fuck is the car?!" and chocolate molded candies - Valentines hearts, birthday lollies, Christmas wreaths, naked breasts and assorted novelty penises (which also meant we frequently nibbled on chocolate pornsicles as we rode our bikes around Hewlett Harbor. Of course, years later, when I brought up the weirdness of that - admittedly a source of both pain and hilarity - my grandma, instead of directly answering the question, extended to me a traditional Jewish Guilt Branch - an offering of homemade noodle kugle, matzoh ball soup, and/or barbeque brisket. This is how Jewish grandmothers get away with everything, guys:)

"You used to ask me, 'Grandma, can I do the boobies? Please can I do the boobies?' and it was adorable, Jaimala, and a little weird, except I kept thinking maybe you were really trying to say 'Bubbulah,' like you were confusing a sentiment, but then I realized you only had a smartass mouth. Where you picked that shit up from, I'll never know. But it's not like you had anything else going on at the time anyway... But you know Grandma loves you. Now, eat this kugel I made before it gets cold - I put in extra golden raisins. I know you love those."

(That's really how they get away with it, guys - offerings of delicious golden raisins.)

Nevertheless.

My Grandma was just a bad-ass broad; she took care of the books for the store, she sold her own erotic candy, she ran the family business as if it were both business and day care - and, awesomely enough, every once in awhile, she sold cards and assorted novelties to the entire Long Island mafia (one of her many, many stories - that the mob met in the office building across the street and we were their sole chocolate supplier - for what exactly, I have no idea. But can you imagine that meeting?)

"Tony, thank you for the comprehensive power-point on cement shoes vs. red hot pokers. I admit I was unaware of our extensive Instrument Of Death expenditures. But now, before Vinny goes over our quarterly budget by cracking open the wall safe behind the trick bookcase and disabling the array of protective security lasers, please enjoy some tea and sandwiches and some milk chocolate genitals on a stick, courtesy of Bev from Carl's Cards across the street."

(Grandma's special story cocktail: 1/2 gross exaggeration mixed with 1/4th shit learned from old timey movies, spritzed with 1/4th actual truth, but always served to us with such commitment. The more I think on it the more I realize she would have made one hell of a long-form improviser.)

I hear mob bosses are suckers for chicks in bathing suits...

Fast forward about twenty-five years.

Although it had been (I'm almost embarrassed to admit) several years since I'd asked my Grandma for anything - we Morris women are known for our pigheadedness, also for our creative use of both English and Yiddish curse words - I called her up a few months before she died, needing some advice - either her hard-nosed opinion or an old-school kick in the ass - whichever she was willing to offer. I was broken hearted and feeling sort of helpless - like a kid painting chocolate testicles only half-heartedly, wondering if this was all there would ever be to life (remember when y'all were six and wistfully painting pubes on chocolate penis molds? No?)

Basically, I was having what I've since lovingly (or frustratingly) nicknamed "The Old Maid Freakout" - paranoia that my window to find a non-crazy, non-gay, non-asshole had closed. And then who the hell would I have to make bad jokes with and push a floorless car with? Surely you single women out there know what I'm talking about - usually, it ends with a pint of Phish Food, six glasses of wine, an incoherent rant directed at the dog, and mispelled drunken sexts to every retarded horndog guy in my iphone address book.

"Love doesn't fucking exist," I'd said. "And who wants to be repeatedly hurt in some fruitless, crazy, Moby Dick search for something that doesn't fucking exist? That's like I might as well go looking for Jon Hamm to give me an engagement ring - or leprechauns with Lucky Charms or talking Pound Puppies or babies who can break-dance and do you see where I'm going with this? It's all make-believe, Grandma! Everyone goes on and on about how love is just like magic but you know what? Magic isn't real. So how can love be real when magic's not? It's all an illusion! Or a paradox! Maybe? I don't know, but it's something goddamn similar!"

Then, after I took a much-needed breath from Ye Old Maid Freakout, this is what my 88 year old Grandmother had to say - in a voice strained from chemo, and for once forgoing a story in favor of actual advice:

"Don't act retarded, Jaimala. Love isn't magic - it's just hard to find. And you have plenty of time. So I think I speak for both your Poppy and myself when I say that we were worried you might be a lesbian - not that you can't be whatever you want - but really, for years we thought you were a lesbian. At least it's a relief to know you'll be able to have babies someday. Not before I die, but someday. So make yourself happy now but then, definitely, have babies. Okay? Just look at it this way: if Grandma can quit smoking, surely you can marry this Jon Hamm you love so much. I can't imagine he wouldn't want to marry you, Jaimala. What's not to like? You're my granddaughter. Just don't worry so much - you'll be fine. You have plenty of time. Everything ends up the way it's supposed to."

Oh, Grandma. Wherever am I supposed to get these pearls of wisdom without you here?

So wherever she is now, and perhaps it is outside of space and time (where a shirtless Sawyer and a shirtless Sayid are undoubtedly shuttling her around the Ever After - and come on, let's be serious - even Grandma appreciates the hottness of Sawyer and Sayid in their groovy VW van - and why can't that be the pilot of the spinoff, Lindeloff??) I hope she's watching over me. And I hope there are endless, heavenly cartons of cigarettes, and secret mob meetings, and inappropriate chocolate candy pornsicles, and of course, hot cars WITH floors (Cadillacs!) and lots of laughter (as there always was). But most of all, I hope she knows I'm grateful for all the bizarre experiences she contributed, which ultimately helped make me the awesome lunatic I am today. Thank you for everything, Grandma. I miss you.

And now, as promised, here's an adorable puppy. In costume. (That's right. I went there.)

Threes Company

Two days from now, my sister will be a squatter in my apartment - specifically, she'll be occupying the eight foot space behind the couch, which is actually, by New York City standards, not a bad deal for the money. She's planning to fill this space with an air mattress, which means her room will officially be smaller and more dimly lit than a jail cell. Welcome to Manhattan. Nevertheless, she's excited to move in and I'm excited to have her. Also, it'll be nice to push the couch a little closer to the TV.

Yesterday, I asked her how our parents felt about her moving out - they've had at least one of us living with them since the day they were married (we like to reference me as the surprise and not the accident;) and since my mother is a lot like the tortured Harry Burns from When Harry Met Sally and my father is (I swear it's true, all gay jokes aside) more of an optimistic Sally Albright, the two of them alone together should either be like a continuation of the Rob Reiner movie or the climax of the War of The Roses. And I almost shudder to think which of those it'll be.

"There is no winning! Only degrees of losing!"

"I loosened the bolts on the chandelier. I was going to drop it on you."

(I do love that movie, but thank God there are no chandeliers in my parents' house. Which is not the first time I've had that thought.)

"Are they looking forward to it?" I asked my sister. "Being alone with one another?"

"I think they're both looking forward to and dreading it."

"They'll have to occupy themselves without any outside help," I said. "Or maybe they'll finally leave the country."

"Mom would never travel. Too many germs that don't speak English. She'll watch a lot of Seinfeld and make him do her shopping for her and eventually Dad'll hang himself. Hold on, I'm putting you on speaker."

"Forced suicide? Too easy. Mom would never actually kill him," I said. "I don't think. Has she ever?"

"Have I ever what?" asked my Mother, now on speaker.

"She wants to know if you've ever tried to kill me," clarified my father.

"Oh," said my Mother. "When do you mean?"

"What do you mean, when do I mean?" I said.

There was a slight pause, and finally my sister said, "Hold on, Mom's counting."


In mostly unrelated news, this past Friday I went bar-hopping in the East Village (something I haven't done since grad school), which began with the idea of socializing but slowly devolved into a sad attempt to reclaim my lost youth. I'm not old in comparison to, say, the Earth, but I'm old in comparison to that twenty-four year old still power drinking and getting jiggy with it at twelve am. Meanwhile, I'm exhausted by twelve-thirty and by one I'm practically curled under a bar-stool. By two I've begun nursing a migraine of epic proportions, and by three am the migraine culminates in a melodramatic almost-vomit into a trash can on the corner of Broadway, two blocks from my apartment. Additionally, there are contacts in my phone I don't remember entering, entire text conversations I don't remember having, and a cab ride with some hot guy who I vaguely recall making out with, which may or may not explain the ten dollars I used to have that I can no longer account for. God, I hate being too old to be stupid. Remember when alcoholic amnesia was a badge of honor and not absolute Patheticsville?

"Seriously, I just woke up and he was lying under the coffee table with my underwear. I don't know what happened to the Snickers."

"We did it where? And people were just walking in and out the whole time? No, I don't want to see the photo on your cell phone! Well, why the hell would you let me drink that much 151?!"

"What do you mean I vomited over the railing? When the hell was I on the roof?!"

All true stories.

(Okay, so maybe that shit was always foolish. I just hate that my brain has finally aged to the point where foolishness has ceased being awesome.)

Oh, and did I mention I have a twenty-four year old moving in with me in two days? I think I'll just try and convince her that the place to be is Bed Bath & Beyond, and at least then I'll get some new towels out of it. But no more heavy drinking. At least, not in bars. Not for me. Although Halloween is coming up and my sister will be here and I'd hate to limit my options...

Damn, stupidity is tempting. Especially around family.

Jewish Holidays and Assorted Insanity

This year, like almost every year previous, I totally forgot about the September high holy holidays - not because I'm boycotting Judaism or anything, but because on my list of daily priorities, religion tends to fall somewhere between "dust top of hallway light fixture" and "sweep out chimney floo." In my mind, Rosh Hashana is merely the all-day feast that gets me out of work early on a Friday in mid-September, and Yom Kippur is its bipolar companion best known for a twelve hour marathon of willing starvation and misery. When I was a kid, that meant no basketball for my Dad and no compulsive cleaning for my Mom and no TV or Nintendo for me, which totally sucked balls. By the end of the day we were all just staring desperately out the window, waiting for sundown, that magic hour when it would all be over, eyeballing the pantry like a group of retarded, stoned people. I still think it's a wonder all Jews aren't bulimics. Thanks for the psychological mindfuck, God.

In any case, when my aunt called last week and reminded me of my dormant heritage and the prospect of free food, I was immediately Jewish again, and after cleaning a bit, I hopped on a train to Long Island.

My aunt and uncle still live in the house my father and uncle were raised in, the same one I lived in for awhile before my parents moved us down to the sweaty groin of the United States, otherwise known as The South; the same house where, at one point, ten of us and four animals lived against code in four bedrooms and a den. So heading out there literally feels like taking a trip back to the cluttered era of Barbie and the Rockers, in which all of us kids shared the same Rocker. The little blue clubhouse my Dad built for us is still in the backyard. The wooden deck where we would sun ourselves in summer is still right outside the sliding glass doors. The kitchen where my grandmother put us all to work decorating her dirty novelty chocolates (for sale at Bingo halls across the tri-state area throughout the late 1980s) is relatively untouched. And living in this house, still, is my aunt - a loud, gossipy Italian Jew, and my uncle, who at one point, while working for a Jewish day school, had lovingly nicknamed the bus he drove, "The Yom Kippur Clipper" (complete with an impression of that sound yarmulkes make when wind whips through them.)

Classy folk, my family.

My aunt had set the table for the next day's "actual" Rosh Hashana dinner, which she claimed is the best way to do these things - a week ahead of time. As she explained to me, it takes days to polish the silver and set out the pumpkin centerpieces and organize the name-cards and fold the napkins into diamond-shaped envelopes and set out the M&Ms in saran wrapped crystal goblets (there are two of these,) and arrange the platters in alphabetical order according to which foods they'll hold - all platters clearly labeled with hand-written post-its. She does this every year, by the way. And every year, my uncle comes in after she's set what we'll call the first draft of her table, and says, "watch this" to anyone who will pay him any attention, and switches all the post-its and name-cards and place settings. Hours later, when my aunt inevitably returns to the dining room to finish some food item, we'll hear her agonized cries over the destroyed piece of art that was the dining room table, followed by, "Jon, you asshole."

The night before Rosh Hashana, therefore, is Hands-Off-The-Table night, so instead of eating in we headed out to a nice little Italian restaurant, and afterward, attacked and destroyed my aunt's infamously gobletted M&Ms ("Fine, just eat them all and ruin the ambiance, you assholes.") This period, otherwise known as a Jewish bonding ritual, involves a lot of uneccessary snacking and snarking at one another until someone finally tells someone else to fuck off, and a new dish is taken out and we start all over. I would assume there are more traditionally accepted rituals involved with celebrating Jewish holidays, but damned if any of us can name what they are outside of insults and food.

"Look how much weight you've put on," said my Grandmother to my cousin Sue, who was eating a mouthful of M&Ms. Meanwhile, my aunt was pulling some non-ambiance food out of the pantry (which is alphabetized by taste and genre, by the way) and offering it to us in the hopes of saving her precious display goblets.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," said Sue.

"You misunderstand," said my Grandmother. "It's not an insult. At all. You were always such a beautiful girl. So tall and slender, with real curves. I'm asking you what happened."

"She's almost 30," reasoned my Uncle, who then went over to the pantry and said, "watch this," and proceeded to rearrange all the boxes and jars until the genres mixed unnaturally.

"Do you see what I put up with?" said my Aunt, "He just wants a rise out of me." And then she sat on her hands (I assume) to keep from immediately putting everything back.

"How is that not insulting?" said Sue. "You just called me a fat ass."

"Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said the word fat ass. Why would I say something like fat-ass? Such a negative perspective."

"She's a beautiful girl," pointed out my Aunt.

"Yes," agreed my grandmother. "And I love her. She's just bigger now and there's more of her to love. Like a different girl. It's almost startling."

"Fuck you," said Sue, downing the rest of her M&Ms.

"Jo, on the other hand-" And my grandmother wagged an oatmeal cookie at Sue's older sister, Jo, "Looks amazing. Stunning. How much weight have you lost? Ten pounds? Have you been eating at all?"

"Fuck you," repeated Sue. "I work all day. I have to make more time for the gym. I know that." She popped a York Peppermint Pattie into her mouth from a wholesale-sized box my Uncle had pulled from the Sweets, P-Z portion of the pantry.

At that point, we moved on to a bowl of chocolate covered cherries, and as it's impossible to feel anything but joy and good humor while eating delicious maraschino cherries covered in creamy milk chocolate (The Dove commercials are true!) we segued onto pleasanter topics, like past holidays, and how we're all becoming old and feeble and developing weird physical ailments; that, of course, prompted me to (foolishly) mention how strange I thought it was that I'd once sprinted around this very dining room in nothing but socks and a diaper, which immediately prompted the "when is Jamie going to use her ovaries" discussion - an often popular topic at family functions - which then trickled into dessert number four - tea cookies with jam and chocolate chips. Delightful.

"Have you tried J-Date?" said my grandmother.

"How do you even know what that is?" I asked. "You don't even own a computer."

"I watch Dr. Phill," she said, wagging a tea cookie at me. "And according to Dr. Phill, everyone's online now. I'm sure you must know that. You have one of those space phones. So how do you expect to meet anyone if you don't even try? You're not working, you're not dating... Are you just choosing to be alone?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm purposefully endeavoring to have as little contact as humanly possible with the opposite sex."

Fast-forward an argument about the validity of J-date versus Eharmony (neither of which my grandmother had any sort of experience with), and she concluded, "I'm not saying you need to get married right now. I'm just saying, I'm old and will probably die soon."

"At least you're not the fat one," offered Jo.

"Fuck you," said Sue.

And with that, we moved on to Challah and diet soda, and Jo changed the subject, and we proceeded to gossip meanly about all our common relatives who weren't around and were thus easy targets, and after about an hour or so of that (fun times!), I was back on the train to Penn Station - rockin' out to Beyonce and recalling a Rosh Hashana from long ago; one that ended with all of my cousins and I in the foyer of (then my grandmother's house) playing that Halloween game - Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. We were all deadly serious about it, and had each set two fingers underneath Sue, closed our eyes, and dutifully chanted "light as a feather, stiff as a board," when Jo asked for a sign from the other world and my uncle laughed like Dracula and hit the light-switch, plunging us all into darkness. We screamed, we dropped Sue, and then we proceeded to trample over everything in sight in our terrified, no-holds-barred zeal to get back into the living room. Some of us cried. Some of us told our fathers to take a hike. Dogs were barking, cats flitting all over the place; it was pandemonium; meanwhile, my father and uncle were laughing hysterically. My aunt smacked my uncle in the head and my mother called my father an asshole, and either one or both of them felt bad enough to let us all have a second round of dessert. Thus the evening ended in what I feel is true Jewish spirit- everyone gathered together around six different cakes from Walls Bakery. Again. For the eleventh time. In one night.

Oh, Judaism.

The older I get, the more I believe that religion actually has very little to do with what's important about your heritage.