Hey Old Elizabeth, what are you doing here?!? I have often wondered what it would be like if we could hear each others thoughts. Like a mix of What Women Want and Pop-Up Video, giant word bubbles would pop out...bloop!...and the people around us would instantly know our deepest, darkest and sometimes most delightful secrets. Today, I'm so glad mind reading is impossible. Because if people knew what I was thinking, they would a)run for a strait jacket or b)move silently and speedily to the other side of the room, so as not to provoke a sudden charge from the Elizabeast.
That's what I will call her from now on...the Elizabeast. My arch nemesis. Who just happens to inhabit the same rent-controlled co-op I do. Only, there is nothing cooperative about her. If you've ever worked out with a trainer, or watched someone work out with one...well, there is an exercise where the trainer wraps a resistance band around his or her ridiculously whittled waist and runs...full speed...in the opposite direction you are running, or allegedly running. It's hilarious to watch, actually, as one person's legs (mine) are furiously moving. And going absolutely nowhere. It's a strange feeling, moving against the resistance, but a great workout in the end. Thus goes my relationship with the Elizabeast.
Last night, the Elizabeast worked me up into a full-blown panic attack. It started small. "Elizabeth, school starts in a couple of weeks. How are you going to fit in the workouts, the meal plans...the blog you've started?" Then she reminded me of the all the school dances I've got to coordinate at the beginning of the year. And the two jobs I'm working. And the full-time care of one 16.8 pound Shih-Tzu. Just when I was starting to hyperventilate, she delivered the final blow...three houseguests coming for extended visits over the span of three months. "And," she said, "you've got Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up. You'll never be able to juggle all of this. Give up now and no one gets hurt."
No Christmas present for you, Elizabeast. Coal, maybe.
For some people, the word anticipation has a positive connotation. The anticipation of Santa on Christmas morning, the anticipation of a wedding, or a new baby, the anticipation of Jesus coming for another visit. For me, "anticipation" is the new f-word.
I didn't think I was a catastrophic thinker. I used to think I was a glass-half-full kind of girl. But going from "We're closing the air seal doors now" to "We're going down!!!" is not a far stretch for me. Put me in a real emergency situation and I'm the calmest one in the crowd. But give me a slightly overwhelming to-do list and 45 minutes to work myself into a frenzy and I'm a Mentos and Coke rocket (If you don't know what this looks like, just YouTube it. That's me). Here's a list of my most notorious freak outs:
1. For the first 12 years of my life, any situation that involved my mom leaving. When I was five, I went to a day school that was being remodeled. We would often move from room to room as the remodeling progressed. I was SO SURE my mom wouldn't know where to find me and would, after a brief but unsuccessful search, go home to interview replacement children. Maybe we'd see each other at a 7-11 years later and she'd say "Oh, yeah, I remember you," as she waited in line to pay for her Slurpee. PS...somehow, she always found me. PSS...the day school was very glad she found me, as I would have been crying all day at the thought of having to go home with daycare worker.
2. The thought of nuclear war. Of course, this is a fear shared by the entire world. But my mom explained it to me just before going to a Friday night football game (per my incessant questioning, I'm sure, after seeing something on TV). There I was, in my 6th grade pep squad uniform, paralyzed with fear, watching the sky for impending doom. "What are all these people doing at a football game?" I wondered. "Don't they know the sky is falling?"
3. The time I finished my part of a high school Key Club meeting, stressed and starving, only to find that a pack of wild and ravenous teenagers had descended upon 20 pizza boxes (and my lunch), leaving nothing behind but pizza crumbs and empty soda bottles. "Where's the Coke?!?" could be heard at the Central Market across the street. PS...there was a whole unopened litter sitting right next to me. Oh, did I mention? I was the advisor, the voice of reason.
And any situation that involves:
Air travel, car travel, car scratches, scratches of any kind, missplacing my cell phone, missplacing my wallet, holidays, to do lists, waiting in ridiculously long lines, and line cutters who cut while I'm waiting in ridiculously long lines
So where does this kind of overreaction come from? Could it be from my mother, who just yesterday burst into the room after realizing I'd saved my username on her BofA homepage, convinced it somehow blocked her from ever accessing the site again while sending her account information into the black hole of cyberspace, never to be seen or heard from again? Or maybe my grandmother, who once convinced the entire family to kill the lights and hit the deck so we could catch the nighttime prowler who was circling our house? There we were...the four of us, on the floor in the middle of the night...nothing but our eyes and the tops of our heads showing as we peered out the window. Only to realize an hour later that it was our own white Oldsmobile she's seen. Hmmm...perhaps.
But if I have any hope of breaking free from the fat, the frumpy and the family freakouts, I've got to exorcise the Elizabeast. Maybe I'll find a mentor, like my friend, Chris. AKA the calmest person I've ever met. She just lost her brand new iPhone in a tragic parrot incident. Facing the possibility of going on vacation for three weeks without a cell phone, or paying $500 for a new phone (both options that would require me to be hooked to a tank of oxygen), she calmly picked up the land line, spent an hour-and-a-half talking to a representative from...wait for it...Lubbock, Texas, and voila...a new iPhone is being FedExed as we speak.
Interesting. Perhaps there's something to be said for this mysterious thing called calm. Maybe Cesar Millan hit the nail on the head...a calm assertive state of mind is the key. The key that opens the door to every good thing (and every place I want to go). Do you think if I could fit myself into a Saint Bernard suit, Cesar would rehabilitate me?