I Got Shot Today and My Secret Double Life

I got my flu shot today. I'm not even really sure why. Well, I mean, I know why: It was free as long as you had my insurance. But I don't typically let people I don't know shove a needle into my softness and inject me with an illness.

First off, I never get the flu. I have a fantastic immune system. My mother insists it was all those years I spent, chewing my fingernails and rarely washing my hands. She always called me "a carrier," because I never got sick although all those around me did. I had a 24-hour bug once (i always remember when i had a pukey illness, because i am scared to death of vomiting), and I did get the flu when I was in the hospital for a broken wrist. I also came away with chicken pox. Hospitals are breeding grounds for nastiness of all varieties, apparently. But I digress.

Secondly, the flu now comes in so many strains and the kind that morph and change and become resistant after one trip around the globe that, honestly, I fail to see how a shot can protect people from it. This was not the H1N1 vaccine which, I've been told, won't be available until November. Either way, I don't think I'm going to get it. If it's free, I'll consider it, but...I don't know. I prefer things that are tried and true, tested by time. Ooh! Alliteration!

So, I'm a huge baby when it comes to shots. There's no explaining it. I can't remember ever being injured by a nurse or orderly, so I'm not sure what my issue is. I have piercings all over my body. I have multiple tattoos. Needles and I...we're *like this,* so why am I afraid of a tiny gauge vaccination needle? For God's sake, when they pierced my tongue, they used a huge hollow needle. It cored out my tongue. It removed that material. And yet I didn't have a problem with that. By the way...never let your piercer explain a procedure before the actual process. Bad idea. Really.

My middle name should be Irrational.. Yep. "Hi! I'm Still Irrational Broken." Oh, Lord. That almost makes sense.


Today, I was watching The Boy walk around the house. I just keep thinking, "Who the fuck have I become?! Whose life am I actually living?! This isn't me!" Trying to fit The Boy into the context of my life as a whole isn't working. I mean, he's fully integrated into my life - everyone knows about him, he has a really good relationship with my dad, and so forth - but it's like it's not real or something. Like, he's playing a role in a movie or something in which I'm starring, and it's going to end at some point. Then everything will go back to normal.

Except I'm not sure what my normal is. If I don't feel like this is me - that I'm living my own life - then exactly what should I be doing?! I mean, I created this disaster. If I'm dissatisfied, I'm the only one to blame for that. But I'm not angry about it, I just feel like none of this is real. Like it's all some weird kind of dream about leading a calm, suburban, 'normal' life, and I am at some point going to wake up and be simultaneously disappointed and relieved.

Maybe this isn't a midlife crisis thing, or a turning-point-in-my-life kind of thing. Maybe it's a you-really-need-to-see-a-professional kind of thing. Really. I mean, isn't there like, a bona fide disorder for these kinds of delusions, or something?

At one point, I realized I needed an education and I had to go back to school. I toyed around with several careers before settling on being an educator. There were two main reasons for that decision: job security, and my passion for the humanities, reading literature in specific. Teacher School filled my head with all these notions of what it would be like. I knew that it was probably somewhat of an inflated truth, something sugar-coated and dressed up all pretty with very red lipstick on to cover up the slightly sour, shabby, yellow-toothed reality of it. I knew it wasn't going to be idyllic. But I didn't think it would be like this, either.

And somewhere along the way, in the pursuit of a career, housing, a husband, and the niceties that a stable career and good credit will get you, I lost myself. I completely, totally, 100% lost myself. I have a big house, a new truck, a stable job, a bastard of an ex-husband, and the wrecked credit to match...and I hate it. I hate the responsibility, the normalcy. It's National Night Out tonight and all my neighbors (old enough to be my parents, btw) are all sitting out on their driveways with peach-flavored iced tea (with real peach slices!), or tall boys of beer, lawn chairs pulled into a big horseshoe shape, open to the street. Our police force is going around, lights all strobey and blinding, attracting all the mosquito-bitten neighborhood kids who are sticky with sweat in the post-summer swelter. By 10:00 pm, everyone will go inside (remember the noise ordinance!), driveways abandoned, lawn chairs hung back up on the hooks on the garage wall. The neighborhood streets will be empty, save for the one stray cat no one has the heart to off with a silenced .22 rifle.

I'm betting I'm the only one who thinks about killing the neighborhood stray cats, aren't I? Whatever. Back to the 10 pm closedown.

It's times like those, when I'm lying in bed (at 10:05 pm because I have to be up so early), trying to fall asleep, when I hear nothing but the far-off rumble of the trains running along Highway Alternate 90 that I ask myself, "How the fuck did I get here?"

There is no answer, except the wind whispering through the Norman Rockwell trees, and it seems to be saying, "Who knows...who knows..."
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