What Flag To Wave

(August 21, 2006)

God it's late. It's like stupid o'clock. What am I doing up.

You know, about a month ago I looked back to my 2001, 2002 entries. I was in a battle with my weight, and also pretty much unable to sleep.

I have got to get rid of these extra pounds. Seriously, it's fucking ridiculous now. And WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I SLEEP.

Well at the fucking GODDAMN moment it's because a car alarm has been going off since about 4am. Joe doesn't hear it because he's asleep. However, like many sounds and weather conditions and bedclothes textures and whatever-the-fuck else, once you're up already, it's impossible to ignore. An hour and a half later and I might as well just get up and wait for sunrise.

Today I was at the office until 9pm. This is becoming par for the course. I do see an end in sight and we fixed part of the problem, but it's beginning to wear me down. I imagine it's why we now have a term in our society called "going postal." You "go postal" when, like the "postal worker" you realize that you can work and work and work and work but you. Will. Never. Be. Done. The work just keeps piling up, and you keep doing it because the customer expectation has been set. You have to do it. No one else will do it.

I was feeling so untethered that there was an incident when I stopped off at The Reef Cafe on Harvard Ave. Joe always says I'm going to "visit my boyfriend" when I go there. I wasn't feeling hungry but I stopped off to pick up taboule and spinach pie before going home. The guy, Salam, is just so friendly and nice. He ALWAYS asks "How you boyfriend?" and makes conversation about Boston or New Jersey or food. His mom makes this amazing shawarma. And spinach pies. They're better than the ones at the Middle East -- they're about the size of a half sandwich, triangle-shaped, and doughy and flaky and her spinach mixture is tangy and garlicky and excellent. Great place, great people.

I started crying at the take-out counter.

You know how I've written here how I can't stop watching CNN and listening to NPR? More than any other former Middle East conflicts, even Desert Storm during which I was in college and therefore age-appropriately-outraged-but-mostly-academically, THIS bloodbath, between Israel and Hezbollah, is really getting to me. Not just academically, but emotionally. I'm seriously having a hard time focusing on the talking heads on the news, I just break up because of the people crying, bleeding, running, digging for lost bodies in rubble. And protesting America. If you listen to BBC on NPR it's a quite different spin than what you get on CNN, and TOTALLY different from what you get on Fox News.

I just don't know what to do with myself.

I started crying at the Reef Cafe take-out counter because Salam was packing up my spinach pie and I noticed he had the Globe open on the counter. It was open to a page with his picture, and an article about his family. I read two paragraphs and I lost it.

He had no idea what to do with me.

I paid him and left and walked up the hill towards home, took a hot shower right away and later while we were eating I told Joe what happened.

He didn't know what to do with me either.

For the first time ever, the spinach pies were totally burnt on one side. I ate it anyway because Mrs. Monzer doesn't know if her kids are alive or dead.