It has been a rather trying week. I have been sick, and I had a huge dust-up with P., who has long been requested not to call me and not to get any of the nice ladies who work at his home to call me on his behalf. One of them did call me on Sunday, because they couldn’t find P., and that was totally fine.
I’ve been calling P. every day, just about, but didn’t happen to call him on Sunday afternoon. On Monday evening, I got a call from the same woman who called me on Sunday. When I heard her voice leaving a message, I picked up the phone, and then P. snatched the phone from her and said, “It wasn’t my fault Gloria called you on Sunday! I didn’t tell her to do it! Don’t be mad at me!” I was instantly irate—frankly, it also scared me just a little, as it gave me a teensy little taste of what it might be like to be stalked, an experience I am very grateful not to have had so far—and said it was fine that Gloria had called me on Sunday but that it was not fine that he was calling me right then, and I hung up on him. He called back immediately and left a hysterical message, and then another.
I called him back (with some misgivings, as I was remembering what Gavin de Becker wrote in his book The Gift of Fear about how if the stalker calls you 50 times and then you finally call him back, you’ve just shown him that 50 phone calls will achieve his desired result) and he said, “I’m doing the best I can! I didn’t know you weren’t mad about Gloria calling you! You didn’t call me on Sunday so I thought you were angry at me! Forgive me! Please don’t punish me!” I found out later that he certainly did know I wasn’t mad about Gloria calling me on Sunday because his sister told me that she told him so: “Linda was not mad about Gloria calling her. Should you call Linda? No! Should you have Gloria call Linda? No!”
But even without knowing he was lying to me, I was really ticked off that I can’t make this simple request and have it respected. I know he gets unbearably anxious and his head fills with ideas that he can’t shake loose, and I know he can’t help that, but it still makes me mad, and it also makes me mad to have him say, “Don’t punish me!” as if the problem is that I’m a hardened sadist with my foot on his neck and not that he has done something I very clearly asked him not to do.
OK, here’s another thing. When I went on the 21-day vipassana retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center a few years ago (and spent most of it obsessing about the long-haired guy who was sitting in front of me; I even picked up one or two of his silver hairs from the floor and took them to my room, but if I recall correctly, by the end of the retreat, I put them back), after a number of days, I became aware of a low-pitched rumbling that became more and more noticeable until it overwhelmed most other sensory inputs. It wasn’t there twenty-four hours a day, but when it was present, it was oppressive and unpleasant. It made my ears buzz.
Finally, I wrote a note to the teachers: Is there something making a low-pitched rumbling, or am I nuts? Jack Kornfield wrote back and said I wasn’t nuts; that there was a heat pump or something that was probably the culprit.
Well, that same thing has been happening at my apartment lately. For about five or six days now, there has been roughly the same phenomenon, and while it sometimes does let up in the afternoon, it has been going on all night, or at least, so I assume, given that it makes it very hard to go to sleep and wakes me up during the night; sometimes I'm then awake until the alarm goes off. I tried earplugs last night, but they actually made it worse because they wiped out any actual ambient noise, leaving just the vibration.
About midnight, I could tell that The Big T. was still awake in the apartment above me (that’s my tall, handsome, extremely nice ex-boyfriend) and called him to see if he noticed it, too. Of course he did not but offered two helpful suggestions: that it might be some piece of equipment running all night at the possibly aforementioned construction site—the project where, once it’s done, when I lie in my bed and look out the window, instead of looking at the sky, as formerly, I’ll probably be looking straight into the beady eyes of some new neighbor whose living room or bedroom has a clear line of sight into my apartment—or it might be a pump at the nearby city swimming pool.
I called the DPW inspector in charge of this project, who probably thinks I’m a complete lunatic, as I called early on to grumble about being awakened six mornings a week. Monday through Friday seems reasonable, as many people, including myself, have to get up for work, anyway, but Saturdays, too, seemed like going a bit too far. The inspector, a no-nonsense type, said I should be happy it wasn’t Sundays, as well, but she said she’d have a word with the workers, and things did improve noticeably.
A few weeks later I called to see if perhaps the blasting of the Irish national anthem, or whatever it was, at 7:30 a.m. sharp, could also be omitted from the program, and I never heard it again. So I have friendly feelings for this inspector, though they may not be mutual.
Haggard from lack of sleep and having a cold and fighting with P., I left her a message after I talked to The Big T.: “I’m hearing this terrible RUMBLING! It’s driving me CRAZY! I think there’s some sort of MACHINE under the earth? Or at your construction project? Running all night? Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the POOL! Or George BUSH! Can you look into it and call me?” So far I haven’t heard from her.
I went to see my therapist and made that horrible noise that happens when you snort snot back into your head instead of daintily blowing it into a hanky. It was so satisfying (for me) that I informed her I’d be doing it throughout our session. (When I did a really horrible multi-phase one, I said, “That was the Deluxe.”) I said I was trying to snerf snot back into my brain. She asked why it was leaving my brain. I said I didn’t know; it was drifting out of its own accord. I said this habit, anyway, is salubrious; that instead of chafing one’s nose on a hanky and putting pressure on one’s sinuses, the snot ends up in your stomach, where it’s neutralized by juices. She said doubtfully but gamely, after a repetition of the appalling sound, “It does sound like some muscles are being worked.”
I showed her a picture of my adorable second-cousins-once-removed, Ben and Lucas. They are the children of my cousin, and will henceforth be known here as my nephews. I’ve been sending them $20 on their birthdays (in the hopes that they’ll come and care for me when I’m old and incapacitated, or either) and yesterday, for the first time, I got a thank-you card, from Ben. It said, “Thank you! I love you! Aunt Linda.” That absolutely delighted me. Plus there were three extremely darling photos enclosed, of Ben with his sweet little earnest face (he just turned nine) and Lucas with his blinding smile (he’s younger). I wrote back right away, even though I guess you don’t usually send a thank-you card for a thank-you card, and said I was tickled pink and hope to see them in June. Maybe I should scan those photos and put them here. I figure that if they called me Aunt Linda, a title I am quite pleased with, it’s OK for me to call them my nephews.
Funny to think that when I was nine, I had my first alcoholic binge, and would start smoking pot the following year. My cousin’s kids look WAY too young for anything like that.
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