Month: December 2013

Pathologies

A lot of people said,

“There’s probably another explanation.”
“Could anything else have happened to it?”
“Maybe it’s just misplaced.”

But it was in that box. Inside another box, in my closet, next to my socks. And my house has never been broken into. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw?

There isn’t any. Someone I know took my great grandmother’s engagement ring.

I filed a police report. Durham PD has a detective who does nothing but pawn shop investigations. He’s very good, I was told by a clerk at National Pawn as I peered into their jewelry case. The investigator asked for a photo. I didn’t have a photo. I drew a picture, added details from the 1998 appraisal I had in my files, and emailed it to him.

IMG_7645

I haven’t heard anything.

I didn’t expect to, really. I can’t imagine a friend or acquaintance taking it for the money. I don’t have destitute people as guests in my home (though I don’t like what that says about me). Years ago, a woman in my therapy group shared about her shoplifting compulsion. It wasn’t that she needed to—she had plenty of money—and she clearly knew better, but she had a pathology. I assume it’s the same in this case.

Speaking of pathology, my mind is doing weird things.

The day after I wrote the last post, I let the dogs in and found myself standing at the door unable to move. I stared at the door jamb and, in the middle of the day on a Sunday with my two pit bulls at my feet in a house where I’ve never felt unsafe, flipped the lock on the knob and threw the deadbolt.

In a fit of “Do I really trust who I trust?”, I changed the password on all my protected blog posts.

And I keep having fantasies of the ring’s return. Of a friend coming to me, crying and sheepish, to confess. Of finding an anonymous package in my mailbox. Of the detective calling and saying, “It turned up at the Picasso on Roxboro and Club.” And yes, of finding it in my laundry basket and having to eat crow. I would gladly eat crow. But it’s not in my laundry basket. It would’ve had to slither out of the box, that was inside the other box, in my closet, next to my socks.

Maybe this experience hasn’t changed me. When a friend asked if he could invite two new acquaintances to my New Year’s Eve party, I said yes without any hesitation. Is that because I still believe in people, love people, want to know people? Or is it because I literally have nothing else to lose? There’s literally nothing else anyone could take from my house that means anything to me.

I guess that’s not true. If someone took the dogs, I’d lose my fucking mind.

So there’s that. I have my dogs.

Dogs are the best. They have so few pathologies.

I Am Distraught

In my life, I’ve owned only one thing of any value. I mean, aside from my house, which is supposedly worth more than anything else, but let’s be frank, it’s a 750-square-foot glorified shed in the ghetto. People have cars worth more than my house.

And my car, which cost—I don’t even remember—$18,000? I’ll be paying my car off for a couple more years.

My computer is a 2006 Mac desktop which weighs approximately a pood. The television that sits in my spare room was a hand-me-down from my friend when she moved back to Europe in 2008.

So really, it was just the ring. My great grandmother’s engagement ring that my parents gave me for my college graduation. Platinum, a round-cut diamond in a square setting with three tiny diamonds on either side, the stones together weighing almost a carat.

I never wore it. Why would I wear it? Most days, I remember to put on a pair of silver earrings, but I don’t do sparklies, I don’t do baubles. No, I kept the ring in a little tan velvety box, which itself sat in a gold cardboard box, accompanied by a brooch and the only pair of gold earrings I own, in the small closet in my bedroom, next to my sock box. Every six months or so, I would open the box, look at the ring, slip in on my finger, and put in back in the box.

And now it’s gone.

I don’t know why—maybe because I was getting dressed in a sparkly sweater for a Christmas party, or maybe because a friend at the gym got engaged last weekend—but last night I noticed the box, next to my socks.

IMG_7640I opened it and found the brooch and earrings. The ring was gone.

No, I didn’t lose it.
No, I didn’t put it in a safe deposit box and forget.

It was in that box, next to my socks, and now it’s gone.

And the hardest part about this situation is that my house has never been broken into.

So what that means is that someone came into my house, invited, looked through my stuff, and stole my ring.

And it could be anybody. I have parties. I invite friends and acquaintances and neighbors. I don’t know them all well. I hang out by the fire pit while they mill about my house. I do that because, and this is the hardest part, it would never occur to me to walk into a person’s house—friend or stranger—and take so much as a postage stamp. So I never imagined anyone would do it to me.

When I was in 5th grade, Monica Green got a birthstone ring. It was purple. She was skinny. It fell on the floor of Mrs. Heller’s classroom. I picked it up and tried it on. It more or less fit my pinkie. Eventually, Monica realized it was gone and saw that I had it. She told Mrs. Heller, who then inquired. No, I said, this ring is my sister’s. And remarkably—I can’t, as a teacher, imagine letting something like that go—I was allowed to leave school with the ring.

Years later, when I read “The Telltale Heart”, I would get sweaty remembering the way the ring had felt awkward on my little finger, the way it had sparkled in my dollhouse bathtub where I dropped it, the way I hadn’t been able to shake the cloud that hung over me, the way the next day I had waited until Mrs. Heller wasn’t looking, walked casually by Monica’s desk, and dropped it on a pile of pencil shavings inside. And the relief—good god, the relief.

I should have said sorry to Monica. I should have confessed to the teacher. I still think about that. But the important thing was the lesson I learned, which was that it’s real shitty to take something that’s not yours. For them, definitely, but in addition, it will make you feel real shitty.

And so I don’t do that. I don’t take things that don’t belong to me.

And now I feel so mad and sad and stupid. The box wasn’t hidden. It was in my closet, but it wasn’t hidden.

Why didn’t I hide it?

As I sobbed to Mom this morning, she said it’s a good thing, or it means a good thing about me, it means that I’m trusting. Is that a good thing?

I know it’s an object. And objects are just objects.

But this object can’t be replaced and neither can my belief in people.

And Now for a Rant from My Facebook Page

In my life, I’ve worked very hard to become less judgmental, and I have had great success. But lately I’ve been seeing this photo show up in my feed

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and to those of you who have Liked or Shared it, I want to say this: I am judging you.

I am judging you because you’re sharing propaganda about an issue you don’t even understand. LITERALLY NO ONE, not even those who are on strike themselves, thinks fast food workers should be paid more than soldiers.

But some of us think that LITERALLY EVERYONE deserves a living wage. And if you comment that minimum wage is a living wage, I will judge you so hard, my head will probably ‘splode.

And if you truly believe that raising the minimum wage and paying soldiers more are mutually exclusive prospects, that lifting the bottom doesn’t in turn bring up the middle, I don’t. even. know. where. the hell. to begin.

30 Days

I’ve been attempting to focus on the abundance in my life, rather than participating my usual Trance of Scarcity. The meditation (see Day 25) definitely helps, but I also thought I’d tweet one of those annoying 30 Days of Thankfulness things, except try to make it not-annoying.

The most difficult part was not coming up with things for which I felt grateful—I got plenty. The most difficult part was staying within 140 characters. You know how I like to babble on. The teacher of a writing workshop I took last year said, “You’ve got 25-30% too much fat.”

I was like, “DON’T I KNOW IT. Wait, you mean my writing?” He was right. I need to trim it down…

Arg! If I wanted to go on a word diet, I would’ve been a poet!

But I did it for thirty days. (NB: The following is not poetry. It’s just skinny prose.)

That 4-year-old, man. She’s dramatic and sassy, she wants what she wants, and she’s in the 8th percentile for height. In other words, she’s me. Hahaha. No, she’s not. She’s her. She’s her own person. But kind of me. I yub her.

This girl. She does something to my heart.
This girl. She does something to my heart.

This goes for both my parents. My parents showed the fuck up.

I’m still bad at crying (i.e., I need to do more of it and less eating/checking Facebook/self-flagellation/etc.), but I have good role models (namely, Cat, EJ, and Melissa).

(Typo: That was supposed to be Day 13.)

When the doc actually felt it, she goes—I shit you not, “Yeah, you got a lot of lumps and bumps, and this one doesn’t feel any different from the other ones.” :/

Also, if they do hate me as a result, that’s their own goddamn problem.

It’s a good job. I just wish I got paid more and didn’t have to deal with so much bullshit. I guess that’s everybody, right? Except I really should get paid more.

Every so often I consider it, dry-heave, and un-consider it.

I’m hosting the StorySLAM on December 11, folks! Come on out!

So, in today’s ironic news, when I need to unplug, I use an iPhone app. It’s called Get Some Headspace, and I highly recommend it. The dude who leads the meditation is a former Buddhist monk, and he sounds a tiny bit like the Geico Gecko so everybody wins.

Terrified of jinxing it, but there’s an amazing woman who has created a passion project, and we met, and it was awesome, and she’s invited me to be part of her team, and I hope I can keep up.

I watched 5 episodes of Game of Thrones in the middle of the day yesterday, true story.

As you can see, I’m thankful for a lot of things, including those of you who’re reading. Happy rest-of-your-holidays!

Signed,

Lumpytits