Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Tonight, E.S. and I are going to see Super Size Me, a documentary in which Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald’s for a month to see what it will do to him.

We’re having a romantic dinner at McDonald’s beforehand, figuring that, from what we’ve heard about the movie, it very well may be the last time we ever eat there.

I’ll let you know.

The first time I spent the night at my ex-boyfriend N.T.’s parents’ house, I thought I was going to die of an allergic reaction. Not a reaction, as one might guess with the benefit of hindsight, to N.T.’s toxic and dysfunctional presence in my life, but a reaction to the four cats that inhabited the house along with N.T.’s parents and his brother and a horde of dust mites. This was in the days before this woman cured me of my allergies, so I was really in bad shape from the moment I entered the house, much less got in bed. I tossed and turned and dripped and snorted and itched while N.T., Fate being as cruel as she is, slept peacefully beside me; eventually, I gave up and went to the only place I could find in the house that wasn’t covered with dust-mite-containing bedding or carpeting: the bathroom floor. I spent a restive early morning in the arms of Morpheus, and then awoke, pretending to have slept soundly and happily and vowing inwardly never to return without a dozen prescriptions or perhaps a gas mask.

Fast forward several years. The feckless N.T. is no longer a part of my life; I have a much better boyfriend, who is much better in bed and has a real job to boot. This past Tuesday morning, E.S. had a job interview in New Jersey, so Monday we went to spend the night at his parents’ house, which was both near the interview and blessedly free of cats and dust mites, not to mention controlling mothers. After a relaxing evening of working ourselves into rages over the current political state of this country and then watching the conclusion of the dreadful NBC miniseries 10.5, we all settled down to bed–E.S. and I in the guest room next to his parents’ room.

And then the snoring started.

Now, I have been known to snore occasionally in my day. E.S. has his own pair of earplugs on my bedside table, in fact, for those occasions–few and far between, if I may speak in my own defense–on which my snoring becomes particularly intrusive.

E.S.’s father, however, blows me out of the water. In all other ways he is a delightful human being, but he snores as if Krakatoa were erupting from his nose.

I tried and tried to sleep. For a short time I even succeeded, but then at some hour between 3:00 and 4:00 I sat bolt upright, terrified that I and what few worldly possessions I’d brought with me were about to be buried under a flood of molten lava.

I got out of bed, careful not to wake E.S. up (something I’ve become good at, given how badly I’ve been sleeping lately), and went in search of another place in the house to sleep.

I tried the couch in the den. This was very comfortable, but, alas, did nothing to dispel the sound of volcanic apnea going on at the other end of the house.

I tried the office, which was quieter, but I feared that, in my restless sleep, I would accidentally unplug some vital piece of equipment upon which somebody’s survival depended.

Which left, of course, only one place.

I slept on the bathroom floor.

They say that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it, but believe me, I remember that night on N.T.’s parents’ bathroom floor with vivid pain.

So what gives?

In general, on this blog, I use an algorithmically-derived set of initials to refer to people rather than full names, so as to protect the innocent (them) and the guilty (me). However, I will go so far as to reveal that my dog A. has a fairly normal name.

This was almost not the case. I got her with my ex-boyfriend N.T., and choosing a name for her was the second-most difficult trial we faced in our relationship, after picking a color to paint the bathroom, which process very nearly brought us to blows in the middle of Barnes & Noble. (He wanted, if memory serves, Majestic Violet, and I wanted Cleopatra’s Gown. In the end we compromised and used both, in wide stripes, along with gold swirls and sheer fabric so that the bathroom looked like something out of 1,001 Arabian Nights.)

The problem with naming our dog was our respective histories with pets. I had grown up with a bichon frise (a small, white, fluffy breed of dog) that my family had, perversely, named Fang. (We were going to name him Horrible until we realized that we’d end up shortening it almost immediately to “Hor,” and the thought of going around our conservative southern neighborhood telling people our Hor had run away and asking if they’d seen him didn’t appeal to any of us.)

N.T., on the other hand, had grown up with cats with names like Aurora and Beautiful Music. Why I had decided to share my life with somebody who would name a cat Beautiful Music in the first place is, in the clear, harsh light of hindsight, quite beyond me, but at the time it seemed like the thing to do.

Our discussions about a name for A. would go something like this:

N.T.: How about “Lucinda”?
Me: How about “Mud”?
N.T.: How about “Aurelia”?
Me: How about “Three Hole Punch”?
N.T.: [cries]
Me: [cries]

We finally settled on the mutually agreeable but repulsive name “Cookie”; luckily, his controlling, overbearing mother convinced us to change our minds, and we found A.

My God, could it be possible that someone does understand how I feel? (Thanks to him for the link.)

Though I have one of the best active vocabularies of anybody I know, I am nonetheless a terrible Scrabble player. I suspect this is because I am flummoxed by the limitations of the seven letters provided me. In most areas of my life I crave limitations like I crave chocolate, but this appears not to be one of them. I use the word “perforce” in casual conversation, and yet if confronted with an open e on the board and the letters prfrcoe in my tray, I guarantee you that the absolute best I’d be able to come up with would be “fore,” or, if I were feeling particularly inspired, “crepe.”

Similarly, though in general I have a superb long-term memory, this faculty fails when it comes to women’s ages. No matter how many times a woman tells me her age, I will never, ever be able to remember it. For this I blame not the terror of limitations but an incident from my childhood. Once, when I was five, my family went out to dinner; I suspect it was to a fine dining establishment like Red Lobster. At some point during the meal, I turned to my mother and asked, in my loudest five-year-old voice, “Mommy, how old are you?”

Without missing a beat, she turned to me and said, “Seventy-six.”

Now, even I, a cognitive work in progress as it were, could tell that my mother was not seventy-six years old. And yet somehow my brain accepted that as the truth, just as it had accepted her explanation the week before that the expression “colder than a witch’s brass tit” came from the olden days, before modern weather-measuring equipment, when people put brass witches out on their back porches and felt their tits in the morning to see if it would be a cold day.

At any rate, I date my inability to remember women’s ages from that moment at Red Lobster.

It is occurring to me that my problem is not that I am cognitively deficient but that my mother was a pathological liar.

Anybody need a macramé plant holder?

Today, for the first time in almost four months, I woke up after the hour of 7:30 a.m.

There may be hope for me yet.

Now watch me wake up at 3:00 a.m. tomorrow. It's such situations for which macramé was invented, really, but who can bring himself to inflict it on anybody else?

Not that I needed any further evidence of this, but the results of last night’s American Idol prove that there is not one speck of justice in the world.

A medication that makes you both so depressed that all you can do is sit on your ass and watch TV and so anxious that you can’t take in a word the characters are saying is not a good thing. I met with my psychopharmacologist yesterday and we decided on a better option, which I’m starting tomorrow: chocolate.

Today (well, technically yesterday by now) I went back on medication.

The first interesting result is that I am, for the first time in months, awake past the hour of 1:00.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into 2:00 or 3:00. Because I’ve really had quite enough of the demons that have been chasing each other around in my head for the last hour, since the third straight episode of Law & Order finished and there was no longer anything on television with which to blunt their cruel efficacy.

Oh, wait, I just yawned. Maybe there’s hope yet.