peace in all its unglamorous realness

I felt terribly grown up this afternoon because I got something notarized. After Googling “notary find,” I notary found. I went to a tall office building with a panoramic view of the city and waited while a woman wearing business-y pants stamped my photocopied ID.

Look at me, I thought, doing things that, just one Google search ago, I didn’t know how to do!

Seriously, I can put off shit like this—meaning stuff I’m ever so vaguely confused about—for ages as a result of said confusion.

In general, I have not been feeling terribly grown up this week. First, I saw The Hurt Locker, which reminded me why I’m not capable of being in the military. I mean, besides being gay and flat-footed and, increasingly, old (which is not to be confused with grown up).

Remember how when Saving Private Ryan came out, everyone was all, This movie really depicts war in all its unglamorous realness. At the time I just thought, This movie has a really lame framing device. But despite knowing nothing about the actual realities of war, I came away convinced that The Hurt Locker captured them perfectly: the uncertainty, the relentlessness, the silliness. (“I’m so glad we have all these tanks lined up,” says one of the characters, part of a crew that specializes in disarming IEDs in Iraq. “If the Russians come along, we can have a big tank war.”)

“It really drove home how war is a matter of constantly being interrupted,” I said to AK over a peacetime tuna melt at Waffle. “And you know how I hate being interrupted even by, like, a phone call. In a war, the stuff that interrupts you can usually kill you.”

My general stubbornness is the cause of the rest of this week’s immaturity. Despite my tuna melt-filled life in a part of the world that regularly delivers peace and joy, I’ve been really cranky. Last night, after (ironically) laughing so hard I cried at the juvenile journals which were read aloud at Mortified, I stomped around the house in a huff at the sheer audacity of the holidays to fall during the same month as two writing-submission-ish deadlines and T-Mec’s vet appointment.

How could the world possibly want me to make a pie (with store-bought crust) and print out a many-paged document?! How dare such a demanding world threaten to collapse if I didn’t do those things?!

After picking a fight with AK, I went to sleep, woke up, stomped around some more and then went to Starbucks and wrote for an hour. It contributed to my sleep deprivation, but also to my sanity. Writing rights the world.