Enter the Confessional #5: Mental as Anything

Hello, out there! It's been a while, no?

Well, yes. It has. It's been a strange stretch. The short answer is that I had a bit of a brainsnap. I had a small health scare that fortunately (and completely as predicted all along) turned out to be nothing, but in combination with a few other things was enough to trigger the kind of protracted anxiety attack I usually associate with talking to immigration officials.

It was rough. There's no point in trying to make it pretty or funny, really: I wasn't functional, and even once I got the medical all-clear, I still couldn't calm down. And that's the bit that seems to make the least sense to other people, and I understand that; the best way I can explain it is this: you know when something happens that really, really pisses you off? And it pisses you off so badly for whatever reason that even if it's comparatively small, you just can't shake it off? And then you're in a shitty mood, and every little thing that happens to you after that seems designed to make your life hard, and in a tiny corner of your mind you know you're being irrational but you're just so mad about the world that your logical brain can't get a look in? Well it's like that, except it's being worried about stuff, all the time. It doesn't matter if the original source of the anxiety gets resolved; my brain is so frantic that it can't stop worrying and will start to seek out other things to focus on. Everything I encounter makes me feel more and more anxious, sets me off more and more and more, and I can't break through it at all. When I'm at my worst, I feel like I'm spending all of my time talking to myself in my head, with my logical brain trying so hard to calm me down and talk some sense into me, and my anxious brain spinning unstoppably right the fuck out.

While I tend to be a bit keyed-up generally [audience: shocked gasp], I don't get this bad very often; but this wasn't the first time and it's far and away the smallest thing that ever triggered me to this extent. And it's so fucking hard. I disappear into my own head; I try to maintain in public but am clearly not with it; I can't sleep or eat properly. I neglect people around me, or am so distracted that I might as well be neglecting them; and if I can actually manage to focus I'm often unpleasant because the social contract has been chewed up and spat out by the Anxiety Monster. Nothing works right.

To make matters worse, the timing this time around really sucked too. I got the phone call from my doctor moments after arriving at my new house to find that a) we had no keys; b) the house hadn't been cleaned; c) there was some horrible treatment on the floorboards that had left a sticky, waxy, black sludge in every room of the house, which immediately transferred itself to everything that touched it, including our boxes and furniture and selves; and d) I couldn't get hold of the landlord. This was on a Thursday; by Sunday most of the house stuff was mostly sorted out, but the damage was done and it was all aboard the crazy train. Fast forward two and a half weeks and Colleen's so completely freaked out by the way I've unravelled that she's seriously considering moving out. It got that bad that fast.

I'm doing better now, fortunately. That's how it goes: eventually the fog starts to lift, and all of my coping tools start to work better, and given enough time I'll get back to normal. But the problem is that it happens at all. Bad things are going to happen in life, actual bad things, and I need to be able to deal with them. I can't just fall to fucking pieces every time there's a mere possibility of something having gone wrong. That's not a viable way to live. I can't put myself through that, I can't put the people around me through that. It's too fucking hard.

...Which is why I've started on daily anti-anxiety meds. I fought this for a long time. I have no problem with the idea of head meds (though I do believe that they're over-prescribed - especially Stateside, of course - because insurance companies would rather pony up for medication than for long-term therapy), and I've seen them work wonders for other people. But when it came to signing up for it myself... yeah, no. I didn't want to do it AT ALL. I didn't want to take anything that might fuck with my head. I live in my head all the time, ALL the time, and I was really afraid that I might lose that piece of me somehow.

For a long time I was able to manage my occasional anxiety attack with propranolol, which is a heart medicine that can also be used to treat the physiological symptoms of anxiety. Once I had the physical stuff in check, I could usually intervene with my logical brain and start using those tools to fix the kinks. It was nice: I only used it when I needed it; it didn't have any weird side effects; and it didn't change anything in my head. I was still in control of that aspect myself.

But this last time the propranolol didn't work. I was taking as much as I could, and I'd physically relax a bit, but I couldn't get my head together no matter what else I tried. And even though now I'm feeling better, I'm afraid of what will happen next time something triggers me. Which is as good an indication as I could ask for that it's time for me to try something else.

So... I'm trying. I started on Celexa, but after only three days I was having wild side effects from it so we left it cheerfully behind. I'm now on Wellbutrin, and it seems to be going much better. I can't say that I've felt a major breakthrough, but I'm at least not feeling worse, so that's a step in the right direction. I'm on a very low dose to start with, so it may be that I'll feel more of a positive effect when the dosage goes up; if I don't, I'll try something else.

But here's hoping that I will, because I'm looking forward to finding some fucking peace. One of the worst things about anxiety, when it gets that unmanageable, is that I never feel rested. I'm on overdrive all the time, and even my comparatively calm moments aren't nearly calm enough to let me relax properly. Right now I feel pretty good; yesterday I felt pretty good; last night I was shaky and tense for no apparent reason. I can't trust that the good times will last, and that's hard. I would like to be able to enjoy the good times without feeling like something horrible is inevitably lurking just over the horizon.

Well, I guess that's that. I hope this wasn't too much of an overshare, but I wanted to explain why I'd dropped off the face of the earth, and I decided that it wasn't worth trying to cover with fibs or vagaries. So... thanks for listening. You're a lot cheaper than my regular therapist.

*****

In other and much funnier news, Colleen and I were driving through Mattapan (a very high-crime neighbourhood) the other day, and we saw a billboard that read:

'Murder... it's not okay'

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you know that gentrification has failed.

XOXO

Enter the Confessional #4: ID Parade

(It's up to you to determine if that 'D' should be lower-case.)

Through a convoluted series of events that I won't even bother trying to explain in depth, beyond:

Equation 1
fervent homesickness + pain-in-the-ass Lawyer +
quiet Sunday evening alone in the flat =
bad televisual decisions

I have become infatuated with 'McLeod's Daughters'. It's on NetFlix - it got picked up Stateside a while back by one of those estrogen-fueled basic cable channels that usually specialises in made-for-TV movies starring the mom from 'Family Ties', and I guess it got enough of an audience to justify making it available - and last weekend it showed up at the arse-end of my recommended viewing list. On a whim I decided to have a look... and now it's five days later, I've got through 30+ episodes, and while the initial shine is starting to wear off, I'm still thoroughly enmeshed.

To make matters worse, I am also a little bit in love with Claire McLeod. Not in a TV crush way, though there is a bit of that:

Equation 2

[(butchy walk + Bonds singlets + deep voice) * covered in dirt]/

vague facial expression resemblance to The Canberran Who Shagged Me =
CATNIP

No, this is more in line with a recurring pattern of mine: wildly overidentifying with a fictional character.

I've done this for... well, most of my life, I reckon. It will usually (but not always) be a character from a book I love; this (usually-but-not-always) book will resonate with me in some objectively ridiculous fashion; and, critically, the specific character will have qualities that I desperately want for myself. I will often end up adopting some bizarre trait of that character, though it's usually something fairly minor and definitely something that isn't obviously connected to anything. This is fortunate, because it means that the manias generally pass unnoticed: I am unlikely to get whatever the current version of 'The Rachel' is, for example. It's subtler than that, assuming that the word subtle can ever be applied to me without an audible question mark at the end.

So with all that in mind, here's the chronological starter's guide to my multiple personalities:

Name: Velvet Brown

Book: National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

Trait: Crunchies

I don't remember how old I was when I read National Velvet for the first time. I got it as a gift from my aunt Franny, part of a beautiful blue leather-bound set of four totally mismatched books: National Velvet, Harriet the Spy, Catcher in the Rye, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It took me years to pick up Velvet, but when I finally did I *loved* it. I still have that copy somewhere, and it's shot to hell: pages folded down, leather cover warped, the whole thing expanded out to four times its original size from having been dropped in the bath and dried out so many times.

The Brown girls were always getting 'sweets' 'on tick'. They ate Fry's and Cadbury's chocolates by the bucketful, talking with special rapture about the chocolate-covered honeycomb Crunchie. They liked the ones that were a bit underdone so they were chewy in the middle. Totally foreign to me... until I was 13, on a layover in Shannon Airport in Ireland. It was early morning and I was hungry, but nothing appealed to me through the haze of jet lag. And then I saw the heap of shiny gold wrappers in the middle of a Cadbury's display, and I raced up to my mother and babbled inarticulately about 'Velvet's favourite'. I bought one, and I still remember the first bite: the thin layer of chocolate was sweet and creamy, and the honeycomb(esque) centre was smoky and crumbly and just amazing. An addiction was born.

Name: Nickel Smith
Book: Bingo by Rita Mae Brown
Trait: down-home Southern bitchery
NIckel Smith appears in three of Brown's books, but Bingo is the one that counts. Nickel serves as Brown's appointed voice (all of her novels feature someone who's a thinly-veiled version of herself), which means that she gets most of the good lines, including some first-class Southern sniping. Lines that have made it into heavy rotation include, '[he]'s got resonance where his brains should be', 'you look like the dogs got at you under the porch', and '[she] couldn't help being born ugly but she could have stayed home'.

Name: Mikage Sakurai
Book: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Trait: katsu-don, motherfucker

I can't remember when I first read Kitchen: I think it was when I was in college, but I'm not sure. The copy I've had for years has gone missing sometime in the last year - I lent it out and forgot to whom, as I've done many times, but this time it didn't come back to me - and I'll have to get another copy soon because it's been too long since I last read it. It's short, more of a novella than a novel, but it's full of small details that I have loved since whenever that first reading was.

The climactic scene centres around a bowl of katsu-don, a Japanese dish consisting of crumbed pork and sauteed onions over rice, with hot broth poured over it and an egg cracked over it that cooks in the broth. But I realise that my description is unflatteringly prosaic, so I'll turn it over to Yoshimoto:

This katsu-don, encountered almost by accident, was made with unusual skill, I must say. Good quality meat, excellent broth, the eggs and onions handled beautifully, the rice with just the right degree of firmness to hold up in the broth - it was flawless.

When I first read Kitchen, I had not yet had katsu-don. But it didn't matter: when I read that paragraph, katsu-don skyrocketed to the top of my comfort food list. Don't get why? Read it again, slowly. Everything you could want from comfort food is right there. It's warm, flavourful, substantial. It is perfect. I wanted it.

I didn't get the opportunity to try it for a long time, but when I did, I got lucky: I happened into the best version anywhere in Sydney. It was at Don Don ('Don x 2') on Oxford Street. I went there with my ex Thy-Anh and a few of her friends. I didn't know much about Japanese food at that point: I hate seaweed so sushi was off-limits, and I hadn't explored any other dishes. But this night they really wanted Japanese and I was assured that there would be non-sushi things for me to have, so I went along. It never even crossed my mind that katsu-don might be on the menu, but there it was. I was beside myself.

When the bowl appeared in front of me a few minutes later, I was nervous: I had wanted it for so long and had built it up to so much in my head that if it wasn't good, it would actually hurt my heart. But no, it was everything I had hoped and more. It was like this meal was custom-built for me. It was, as Yoshimoto said, flawless.

Name: Serena van der Woodsen
Book/TV show: 'Gossip Girl'
Trait: ridiculously long strands of pearls (and also perfume, kind of)

Some things fall into your lap when you really need them. Serena van der Woodsen fell into mine, courtesy of recaps of the TV show by the sublime Jacob Clifton*. I've never seen the show, and at that point I hadn't read any of the books, but Jacob's recaps stand alone in their awesomeness and familiarity with the subject is unnecessary. (He has also recapped several seasons of 'American Idol', and ditto for that.) This means that my introduction to Serena came through the recaps, and I was hooked from the fucking first.

Serena van der Woodsen is beautiful, rich, mysterious, and universally adored. She's fundamentally kind and endlessly generous, but she will exact payment out of your ass if you're stupid enough to fuck with someone she loves. She is also utterly artless and has only recently learned How to Be Places. Serena van der Woodsen, in short, does not give a fuck.

In the first season, Serena wore insane strands of pearls wrapped all around herself in complicated ways. In an attempt to channel some of her glamour and total detachment from reality, I found myself a stupidly long string of something approximating pearls at Diva and started wearing them every way I knew how. And you know, it kind of worked, if only as a total placebo. I think there are assumptions that are made about a girl with pearls wrapped 18 times around her wrist, and they were assumptions I was entirely happy to have made about me at the time. (Those assumptions may also have existed entirely in my own head. I do not care.)

I was delighted to find out subsequent to declaring Serena my hero/ Oprahesque life guru that her 'signature scent' - specially created for her, of course - is a blend of patchouli and sandalwood with other warm accents. Many of you will know that the perfume I wear was specially created for me way back when I was 15. It too is a blend of patchouli and sandalwood with other warm accents. Clearly, we are soulmates. And don't you dare accuse me of stealing it from her, because she wasn't born when I first put mine on. It is just an incredible coincidence. Also, she's fictional and has never actually been born. I'm not so crazy that I don't know that.

I've since retired the pearls, though they're always close at hand and still make the occasional appearance if needed. The perfume, of course, is still with me daily.

* TWoP was one of my favourite sites for yonks. Unfortunately, Bravo bought them a few years ago and there were a lot of unfortunate changes, including the loss of many of the best recappers and a seizure-inducing new layout. Jacob stayed on but reading anything on the site is too much like hard work, so I embarked on a ridiculous but thoroughly rewarding project of copy-and-pasting all of his recaps into Word. Should any of you want seasons 1-4 of 'Gossip Girl' or seasons 4-6 and 10 of 'American Idol', let me know in the comments. You'll thank me. True.

Name: Claire McLeod
TV show: 'McLeod's Daughters'
Trait: silver star necklace

This is the one I'm most embarrassed about, with good reason. First of all, it's the one I'm wearing at the moment, so talking about it makes me feel way more exposed than any of the others do. More importantly, though, it's embarrassing because it means admitting that I watched 'McLeod's Fucking Daughters'. I say 'watched' because in the weeks since I started writing this post, I finished the first three seasons and have officially given it up. I knew that Claire got killed off at the end of the third season and I promised myself that I would chuck it once that happened; fortunately, the show had become so ridiculous by then that it wasn't hard to stop. How ridiculous? Well, in a single third-season episode, Claire gave birth to her ex-boyfriend-who-was-still-married-but-didn't-tell-her's baby (and of course she'd told her ex that the baby wasn't his because... well, why not?) alone in the North Paddock, where she was found by her half-sister Tess thanks to the guidance of a faerie-folk-ish six-year-old... though Tess shouldn't have been out walking by herself because she'd just been rescued from near-drowning in a silo of organic wheat (that shit is like quicksand, but of course Tess didn't know that because she's from the city) and had aspirated some grain, which is a fucking problem that would land you in hospital for a stretch if you had any sense or didn't exist only on a crappy Australian bush drama.

This is not even the full story.

Anyway. I am comfortably in remission from 'McLeod's' now, but the necklace remains. Some of you may have seen it at some point; I got it very shortly before leaving Australia, at the same silver shop on King St. where my going-away ring and bracelet came from. It's very plain, just a small silver star on a short black rubber cord. It sits right below my throat and is exactly the right length for playing with while lost in thought... just the way Claire's always playing with the gold horseshoe necklace that her father gave her. (BEFORE HE DIED.)

I don't want to think the only reason I put it on for the first time in months was because I wanted to emulate the way a soapie character fiddles with her accessories; that would be unspeakably pathetic. I was having a particularly rough spot of homesickness, which may have made me reach for the necklace in the first place. I bought it as a souvenir for myself, so that makes some kind of sense. But I can't deny the coincidence of the timing, or of my sudden interest in touching it all the damn time.

In my defense, I will say that Claire is fucking awesome: tough, capable, take-no-bullshit, and with a core of pure red fury. She's stuck in a craptastic show for sure, and there are plenty of moments when the plots and dialogue go from eye-rollingly goofy to full-on ridiculous; but Lisa Chappell knows the heart and soul of her character, and even in the most maudlin situations manages to make Claire's reactions seem honest and consistent. (And her Kiwi accent only breaks through sometimes! That's acting.)

Claire's a bit of an exception: the other characters all come from books or TV shows I revisited over and over and over, while I cannot imagine ever wanting to watch 'McLeod's Daughters' again. But Claire had an impact on me and I'd be lying if I said she didn't. I'm wearing the necklace right now, for christ's sake... though I hope to have moved on by the next time I see anyone who reads this. It's embarrassing enough.


XOXO

Enter the Confessional #3: But I've got a really good personality!

Wow. So I'm doing really well with that 'keeping to a weekly schedule' thing, huh?

It would be easy to blame my extended fail on a long list of recent events, so that's exactly what I'm going to do. Some of them are easy to discuss in a public forum: Thanksgiving, moving house, busy time at work, lead-up to Christmas, etc. etc. etc. Others are more complicated and more personal, and have involved an intense mix of joy and pain (and sunshine and rain, sing it all god's children...) and fear and triggering and triggering and triggering. I'm dating a couple of girls, one of whom is awesome and good to me, and the other of whom I actually like - and you all know me well enough to know what that means. I'm settling into a life here that after only a handful of months is already uncomfortably rife with overlaps and I'm making decisions that aren't always good. I'm broke, of course. And I'm going to rot my teeth out with candy canes if I don't slow my roll.

Returning to the topic of moving, it's been... hard. The physical move itself wasn't too bad, but this was the first time in many years that I've packed up my room in my parents' house and not been taking it all to Sydney. I've been dreaming of home a lot lately and I know it's just my brain trying to sort through things and move on, but it's exhausting and it's starting to wear me down. I never thought I'd be living in an apartment in Boston. It's a great apartment, and I have a great new flattie named Karen, and it's in an area that I don't know so it feels new. All good. But I can't help but think back to this time last year, when my life finally felt like it was coming together again after far too long - job I liked, house I liked, friends I loved, new prospects on the horizon - and then how quickly it all got pulled out from under me, and how much I lost in the process. And that's happened too many times in the last few years, that thing of going, '...finally.' right before having my whole life go tits-up, for me to be able to even begin to believe that good things may be on the horizon. Which is all apart from the fact that I still struggle to see Boston itself as a good thing. It was the right thing, I know that, but it doesn't feel like a good thing. So there's that to contend with.

On a less fraught note, my bed is cursed. I'm not sure what the hell is behind this, but it's one damn thing after another: first, the queen-size mattress and boxspring arrived as scheduled, but the boxspring didn't fit up the stairs. They took it back and advised me to order a split queen, which I did... but no one told me I had to order two of them, because for some reason they sell the halves individually at Sears (Flattie Karen said she was going to go by there and ask for one leg of pants), and none of the three people I discussed my order with saw fit to clarify it with me. And so a week later - this past Saturday - the delivery men arrived with one half of a boxspring. And when I called Sears to give them a piece of my mind, they put me on hold for 20 minutes and then asked me to call back later because their systems were down. No, really.

At this point I decided to just get a cheaper set from the furniture place downstairs, and that arrived yesterday without incident. And having the boxspring meant that the bed was high enough off the ground for me to put my brand-new, custom-designed, hand-painted doona cover on without it dangling onto the floor. So I did, only to discover that the lovely cherry-blossom detail that was meant to have bright red flowers instead had anaemic red-pink ones, which is... not what I wanted. And kind of icky. And has prompted Flattie Karen to start calling me 'Salmon'. So now I'm trying to organize a return on a custom item, which is always a joy. I also still have a stray half-boxspring lying around my room because I'm trying to arrange the return of that to Sears, but they seem unwilling to get in touch with me about it. Oh, and my actual bed frame, which I thought was being delivered at the end of this week, won't be here until sometime next week, or possibly after due to the holidays.

[Sigh.]

I mean, all I can do at this point is laugh, but it's beyond ridiculous. The rest of the move has gone pretty smoothly, and I do have furniture (and credit card debt) thanks to the proud Scandinavian meatball merchants at Ikea, but the fact that the main feature of my room is unlikely to be sorted within the first month of my living here is starting to bug me. I will say that the mattress is amazingly comfortable, though, so I'm lucky there. And half expecting it to spontaneously combust in the night, or possibly be harboring Julian Assange without my knowledge.

In better news, the dancing's going well. It's been a busy few weeks, but now I've got two shows down and only one more to go - but the remaining one is the biggest and scariest one. I'm doing a fusion number with a dagger; it's to a song called 'Dr Sin' by Chasing Shadows (highly recommended), and my character is an assassin. It's a bit martial-artsy and a bit tribal and entirely fueled by my latent rage issues, but it seems to be going over pretty well so far, apart from how I almost took out an audience member a couple of weeks ago when my dagger slipped from my hand and went shooting out into the audience. First time I've ever dropped it, let alone flung it, and of course it happened at a show. Luckily no one was hurt, but the event has already passed into legend and my teacher is never ever going to let me live it down, not that I can blame her for that.

So that's me. For now. I won't do anything so stupid as to promise another post between now and February, but I'll see what I can do.

XOXO

Enter the Confessional 2: Angry Girl Music of Any Persuasion

Using music to hurt people. It's easy, it's a weapon. Mandy did it: when she didn't think the crowd was worth much, she'd telegraph that by playing her most commercial tracks (and bear in mind that in this context, 'commercial' would be more correctly spelled with a silent '-unt' after the first letter). I remember one night at Slide she played that fucking Sneaky Sound System song three times in one set, just to make the point... well, and because Micky particularly hated it. I remember Micky shaking her head and grinning just a little bit more each time. I remember laughing.

I once saw Armand van Helden do it too, in Boston, too many years ago to count. I was standing behind the DJ booth, watching while he played, and his disdain for the crowd was palpable. I don't know what we'd done to offend him, but whatever it was, he took it out on us for the full two hours, striking the final blow with Stardust's 'Music Sounds Better'. He knew this track would go over big, and fuck, did he resent us for it. It was all over his face and all over his hands as they moved across the decks, even going so far as to cut it for a few bars in that bit where the music drops out and it's just the chorus, to catch every single person in the capacity crowd belting out the lyrics. Except that it backfired: the moment was so perfect - strangers in harmony, lasers going mental, manic thronging bliss - that instead of showing us what commercial losers we all were, he showed himself up as a complete twat.

(Interestingly, I saw Paul Oakenfold at the same club two weeks later, and although he was by every measure a bigger deal than Armand van Helden - more skilled, more established, heaps more respected - he sang and danced along with his tracks like a teenager and generally looked to be having the time of his life, and the night was infinitely better for it. There's a lesson to be learned there.)

I do it too, but the battles I fight are mostly in my own head. 'Paper Planes' by M.I.A., that's a big one. I can't hear it without recalling the days/weeks/months when the lyrics of anger and explosions pushed a very particular button for me. 'Bulletproof' by La Roux, that's another one that carries a few connotations, some from the same time as 'Paper Planes', some from earlier. And 'Leaving Home' by Jebediah. Every angry teenager's wet dream of a rebellion song, to the point that I've integrated it into my own memories from years before I heard it. Ev, Amy and Kat used it as the themesong to a roadtrip they took years before I met them, a roadtrip to which I came no closer than seeing a single photo of the three of them at a waterfall, and yet in my head I'm there, in the back seat of Aims's little car, cheering along with a chorus I wouldn't learn for several years to come.

I guess it's not new, then, the way time gets lost in my head. The second half of 2008 doesn't exist for me. Much of early 2009 is a blur too, but late 2008, I honestly could not swear to anything that happened. It's gone, vanished. And I realised last week that the same thing has happened over the last six months: September 8th marked six months since I left Sydney, and I have no idea how that happened. I cannot account for the time, or the things I've done, or most of the people I've met. All I know is that I must be nearing the statute of limitations on the phrase 'just moved back from Australia', yet to me it feels as fresh as a torn fingernail. I still say 'heaps' and flatten my short 'a' sounds; I still write 's' instead of 'z' and say zed instead of zee; I've recently offered a chef I've never met in person very, very dirty sex in exchange for recreating the laksa I miss to the core of my being.

I don't know how to stop being the person I've been for the last 11 years. It's more than I can get my head around.

Enter the Confessional 1: Peccadillos

I am endlessly susceptible to café staff.

I've tried to give them up, I really have. I've tried stopping in too often in an attempt to inure myself to their charms. I've tried avoiding cafés altogether, thinking that cold turkey might be the only cure. I've even tried dating a couple, and while there's nothing more likely to take the shine off one's perception of any group than an extended close relationship with one of its representatives, I remain undauntedly smitten. (See also: musicians, sporty types, and barely-legals wearing 'Dyke in Shining Armor' t-shirts.)

I try to tell myself that I will not be ruled by my obsessions. Like any addict, I make excuses, bargains with myself: I'm just passing; it's harmless; one more pot of tea won't hurt. After all, I can give it up whenever I like. But like any addict, I know the truth. I can't say no, I can't turn away. It's a sickness. My name is Elena, and I'm a baristaholic.

It's hard to quantify the attraction. I'm not a coffee drinker, so it's not the Stockholm Syndrome relationship of a caffeine dependent and her supplier. And while I have a notoriously well-defined type (looks like a 15-year-old boy, fucks like a trucker), my usual requirements can go right out the window in a good café. Which is not to say that my eyes won't be automatically drawn to the one who most fits the profile; I just seem more willing to expand that profile in a café than anywhere else. In fact, the effect is so powerful that it can extend even to other patrons: my most atypical target of recent years was someone I wouldn't have looked at twice in the street - her hair was longer than mine, you see - but we happened to be sitting opposite each other at brunch and over the course of the meal I found myself admiring her striking eyes and shoulders for miles. But what had first made me sit up and take notice was the way in which she placed her order: she barely glanced at the menu before firmly stating her requirements (eggs Benedict and a latte, if you're wondering). No havering, no hesitation. As someone who routinely hems and haws for hours, narrowing the list to two choices before inevitably ordering something entirely else, this seemed to me the picture of self-possession. It's not too much to say that I swooned a bit in my chair.

I think that's a large part of what attracts me to café staff in general and baristas in particular: they - the good ones, anyway - convey a sense of dominance over chaos that most of us could only dream of. Watch her at the coffee machine: her hands fly; she tamps like she's punishing the grounds for some imagined transgression; she harnesses scorching hot steam without batting an eye. She's covered in that dark brown dust that gets everywhere and manages to make it look as sexy as engine grease. She is calm. She is unconcerned. She is Together.

And I bite my lip and get flustered and forget how to talk. I botch the order I've been making for years (you'd be amazed how many ways there are to fuck up 'large peppermint tea, please'). I fumble for money and blatantly overtip because basic math is way too hard for me in that moment. If I'm lucky I'll get a cocky, indulgent smile in return, but most of the time I'm far too busy praying for the ground to swallow me whole to be able to properly register it, let alone return it. All I want is to get out of there without spilling something on myself or babbling incoherently. Their singlets, their tattoos, their arms that are always stronger than they look... in the face of these I am as helpless as a kitten. Take pity on me, café dykes of the world. I'm only an addict after all.