Anxiety meatballs

I tried to make a batch of meatballs on Sunday and fucked them up.  In retrospect, I think the pan was too hot and crowded; the meatballs blackened on the outside but didn’t cook.  Midway through I scraped the black parts off the balls and mushed up the remains in the hope of making some kind of meat sauce.  Wrong.  Nothing browned, and I was left with two pans of raw, mushy, unsalvageable meat (yeah, I brought in an auxiliary pan to see if I could fix things, but I couldn’t).

I cried about this–real crying.  Kinda disproportionate, that reaction, but of a piece with how I’ve been feeling lately.   Frustrated, irresponsible, insufficiently adult, and sad.   

But I think I’m going to turn a corner. My new stance will be, “Yeah, I fucked up those meatballs–who gives a shit about those meatballs?  Great job for even attempting meatballs! It’s going to be okay!”

I mean, obviously this meatballs thing is trivial, but I wanted to exorcise those underlying bad feelings and this helps a little.

By the way, it’s much easier to write about meatballs than, say, my experience last week of overdrawing my bank account by $500.  Bouncing checks to one’s significant other and a mental health professional in a pretty short span of time = anxiety, anxiety. 

Now that I think about it, those meatballs may have been an indirect effort on my part to overcome my issues with facing the music, confronting things. I don’t cook. I never cook. I can’t cook. But there I was, after a hard week, trying to execute a fairly complex recipe without any help. I think I was trying to prove to myself that I am capable and competent; that I’m not stuck playing a child-role in my life and relationships.

 I think those were anxiety meatballs.

Let’s examine this myth of the “good drunk,” shall we

Now, I’m a drinker*.  I’ve certainly been a heavier one in the past, but even in these more moderate times, I drink two or three nights a week.  I’m prefacing in this way because I want to make clear that I’m not criticizing booze or boozing.  As a matter of fact, I just enjoyed some beers this evening, and I’m sure they enhanced my darts game.   

But I want to dispel right now the myth of the “good drunk.”  I can’t tell you how many times over the course of my life I’ve heard, oh, so-and-so’s a “good drunk,” so-and-so’s a “bad drunk,” or so-and-so’s a “delightful drunk.”  I mean, I do realize that there are many incarnations of drunk–I knew a girl whose only defining characteristic when she was drunk was that she complimented people weirdly and excessively–but really, I’m here to argue, they’re all bad.  

Let me start with myself.  When I get drunk, there is a window–usually–in which I’m probably incredibly pleasant.  I smile wide.  I say things that I think are amusing that are possibly amusing to others, too.  I make audacious jokes and swear.  Sometimes I’ll grow the sack to say something I’ve felt too inhibited to express before.  But inevitably that window closes.  At best, I start to slur my words and continue to utter benign things, most likely about how hungry I am and how great falafel would be.  At worst, I say terrible things, because inside I feel terrible.   And at worst worst, I can’t say anything at all, because I’m too locked inside myself.

Which brings me to my point: alcohol is a depressant.  I mean, even if it doesn’t induce an awful dark mental state, it still depresses you, if just in the sense of slowing down your response time or lulling you into believing it’s okay to shove a bunch of deviled eggs into your mouth at a party.  

I don’t want to be too absolutist about this.  I mean, I have this great memory of returning to college after my study abroad semester and drinking with my friends on campus before classes started up again.  Not many students were around, so it felt like we had the run of the place. It was winter, and there was fresh, soft snow on the ground.  I got wasted, we roamed around, and I kept belly-flopping into the snow, screaming, inexplicably, “I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE AN ASTRONAUT!” 

That was great. 

But it was exceptional.  And most likely I fell asleep later that night with tearstains and hot wing sauce on my face, because that’s what being drunk is all about.

(*I almost wrote, “I’m no teetotaler,” but then I was like, I don’t really say that word aloud–not that it’s so obscure or anything, just kind of conspicuous–so why would I write it? It’s like the other day when I ran into someone on the street, a girl from college whom I like very much, and she asked me where I was going, and I told her the restaurant I was headed to, and she said she’d been there, and I asked her how it was, and she said, “oh you know something something something neophyte something something.”  I thought to myself, why must we do this?, then made some joke about Burger King and went on my way.)

Gherkins

I rashly and somewhat violently deleted all of my earlier posts except for the original one.  I’ve been scolded, and I apologize. I did not mean to jerk anybody’s gherkin.  I just thought my posts were self-revealing and cheesy.  Maybe that’s cowardly.  And I suppose it raises the question, what’s the point of personal expression in a public forum if you’re uncomfortable with disclosure?

Speaking of personal expression in a public forum, that reminds me of a story I heard several years ago about someone I went to high school with, who was arrested for doing a “genital dance” in the parking lot of a pizza place in our town. The phrase “genital dance” appeared in our local paper’s account of the incident.  I didn’t read the article myself, but I’m willing to bet that ”genital dance” appeared without quotation marks, like it was an established phenomenon.  I believe the guy’s defense was that he was changing out of his work uniform in his car, without any intention of exposing himself.  Hey, I’ve been there. 

My point is, while I’m wholly on the side of genital dances (see, no quotes), I’m ambivalent about self-exposure.