Laurence hates Nicolas

Hey friends.

I’m pretty sure you will all agree with me that it’s more than likely that I don’t have any problems or flaws. I’m not 100% sure of this because I’m not an arrogant asshole, but I’m 83% positive that I’m always delightful, engaging and happy.

On an unrelated note, I’m also pretty sure I am bipolar and am perchance feeling a little manic. I’m actually 100% sure about the bipolar bit because I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after a light break with reality back in the beginning of 2003 that was prompted by a breakdown I had while watching a Nicolas Cage movie.

I think I was actually on a date at the time. Unsurprisingly that relationship didn’t really flourish after I said I needed to be taken to the airport because I just needed to go home and see my mommy forty minutes into the movie. I actually did get home that night but I had to start seeing a psychiatrist so I could straighten up and fly right and not blow any more dates. Initially it was pretty awful, and it wasn’t at all like the Sopranos and no one thought I was edgy or deep for having to see a shrink, everyone just thought it was about time. Anyway, the shrink was actually great but I was prescribed A LOT of pink and blue pills to make me less volatile. Which was fine and I was on them for about a decade.

And then I decided, as most bipolar kids do, that pills are for suckers and screw that because it’s a lot of responsibility to have to swallow stuff everyday.

And then it happened – well, it happened a few months after I was off the meds – my bottled-up personality started shining through like the glow from a lighthouse on a moonless night, guiding wayward fishermen safely to the shores with my new-found awesomeness.

This has been terrifying for everyone.

Well, maybe not terrifying, but it has been an adjustment. I’ll briefly take you through the stages of my personality and emotional growth to explain why it has been tough for people to get used to me not on sedatives all the time:

Stage 1: Young Lauren. 0-5. Not medicated.

Wow. I miss young Lauren. I was precocious and cute as a button and I didn’t get in as much trouble for just wanting to be naked all the time. I also had a bike and a kite that I would ride around on our incredibly small porch (while naked) and I’d pretend the bike was my trusty steed and my kite was my awesome purple shield that had a rainbow and a unicorn on it for some reason and I’d fight dragons. Which actually just meant I’d chase our poor old cat named Bert around the yard yelling weird things at him. My parents called me jungle butt because I just loved being naked, and that nickname was my biggest problem. No hurdle seemed larger than getting them to move past that nickname. I think I was probably pretty adorable, but my Dad has since said that rearing me was a traumatizing experience, so who knows.

My dad saying that reminds me that there were a few things that happened that might have been embarrassing for them, like when I saw a black person for the first time and the time I bit a kid who wouldn’t get off the jungle gym and when I had to get plastic surgery. Allow me to explain:

1) The first time I saw a black person I think I was four or five and I was being pushed around in a grocery cart at our local organic produce store. The funny thing here is that my parents are pretty progressive, but I apparently wasn’t aware that there were people who weren’t lawyers and white in the world. I dunno. Anyway, I was looking around at all the cheeses and wondering what sort of juice box I wanted when a dapper older black gentleman started moseying down the isle. He said hi to my mom (my poor mother) and she said hi back and they engaged in the usual pleasantries. And then I took a break from thinking about juice and looked up and was befuddled. I was raised to be polite and deferential to my elders, but also was encouraged to have a healthy curiosity about things so it should have come as no surprise to my mother when I interrupted their conversation and said “mom, why is that man so dirty?” It was like one of those zac morris time outs, my mom’s jaw DROPPED and the man looked like he really wanted to beat the shit out of this blond haired five-year-old child for a minute but thought better of it.

When my mother regained her composure she profusely apologized and said some other shit (I have no idea what she could have said to recover from that little gaffe – he probably thought she was raising a little klan member – awkward) and chauffeured me home at an alarming speed. I don’t remember getting in trouble per se, but I do remember with startling clarity that I didn’t get any juice that day.

2) The next thing I did that was apparently awful and embarrassing for my parents happened on the playground. As a teacher I am always reminded that children’s games are inherently cruel, so really this story isn’t that surprising. Anyway, I was chillin’ on the playground just waiting my turn to play with the jungle gym. Waiting in line like a good, patient child because I wasn’t raised in a barn and have manners. So by and by the playground monitor lets me get on the ol’ gym and I’m having a good time just hanging out and climbing shit, and then this little fucking dick runs, like a bat out of hell, onto the jungle gym without getting the official ok from the monitor. I was hella pissed. That wasn’t right and I really felt like that kind of anarchy would break down the whole social structure of the playground – it would turn into a literal jungle and I am just not ok with people having that kind of freedom. So I took action. And I bit the SHIT out of his arm. And he cried and I had to go to the principal and they called my mother (my poor mother) and explained to her that physical violence wasn’t condoned at Satori and I had to apologize and write him a card if I was going to return to school. I didn’t like the sound of that one bit and I think I really tried to emphasize to all the adults the importance of the fact that he had FUCKING CUT IN LINE and that was just really douchy. But I caved because I didn’t want to get denied any more time on the jungle gym so I apologized and wrote him some disingenuous note and he invited me to his birthday party and everything was fine.

3) Hokey Pokey. OMFG the hokey pokey song was my favorite thing ever at Skate Country. They only played it once an hour so you had to be ready for it and skate your way out onto the rink and skate in unison with all the other children. But the last time I was there I was NOT prepared and the song came on while I was still in the concession area and I wigged out. I skated as fast as I could out to the rink but I never made it. I tripped over something and landed on something sharp, maybe a knife, I dunno, and I looked up through the blood that was streaming down from right above my eye and saw my mom (my poor mother), horrified, thinking her relatively un-hideous daughter had just blinded herself at the fucking skate rink in her over-zealous haste to skate around to that stupid song.

So off we went to the hospital and I had to have cosmetic surgery to fix my face and I still have a scar, I’ll show you if you want. That reminds me of the time I tried to break out of Satori into the yard of the neighbor next door to retrieve a ball and play with their cat. I never made that either because I slipped on the tree I was climbing and on my descent back to the earth a tree branch cut a jagged path through my thigh that was about a foot long. Satori decided at that point that they needed to talk to my mother about my flippant attitude regarding personal property and trespassing. She was pretty pissed and I didn’t get to go to the hospital for that and I still have that scar too.

Anyway, all normal stuff and I’m sure it wasn’t traumatizing to “rear” me. I was vivacious and outgoing and pretty fucking awesome.

Stage 2: Less Young Lauren. 6-9. Not medicated.

I’ll be honest; I don’t think this was as awesome a time for me as preschool and kindergarten were. My adult teeth were coming in really crooked and I had to ride the bus to public school and we couldn’t play with our pogs at school and I genuinely thought that the house next to our playground was haunted and it made it really hard to concentrate in class or have fun at recess.

That being said, I did get really into chess at this age and I joined the chess club so my dad took me to see the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer and then I saw Little Man Tate and I decided that I must have some latent talent trying to claw its way out of me. Turns out it wasn’t chess. It also wasn’t tennis. I was pretty good at the guitar but I think my parents would have mentioned something to me if their prodigy had been offered a recording deal or something. So the search for the latent talent continues.

Some cool shit did happen at this stage though. And it has to do with the guitar. So I took guitar lessons from this dude named Gary at his house. Which actually wasn’t sketchy because his weird wife also taught piano and cello lessons there and my mom would come for the lesson and their weird little hairy dachshund named Puccini would come sit on her lap while we practiced and she fucking hated that dog and it was really funny. Anyway, Gary would take his more talented and less annoying students camping for a week at a time in Yosemite. We would live off the land and not brush our teeth and poop in holes and burn the toilet paper or something and come home to our parents a week later looking like little devil children and it was amazing. But one year we went – the last year, incidentally – Gary was going through a divorce, and holy hell was he a dick. I remember one night he was really pissed and he made us camp (no tents, by the way) by a mighty stream and it was freezing and I woke up in the morning pretty much covered by permafrost and he seemed to think that was totally fine and I remember really disagreeing with him about that. But what I really remember from that trip was the day we were climbing El Capitan. It turns out that there are wild creatures in national parks and you should try not to taunt them. That being said, I guess there was a brown bear just chilling by one of the trails and everyone was wisely giving it a wide berth.

Except me. I always liked to be the fastest hiker so Gary and the friends of my youth were way behind me and I totally ignored the fact that people were pausing to let the bear pass and do whatever it is bears do. So I’m galloping up the mountain entirely unsupervised.

And then I saw this bear.

And I panicked. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered that if you see a bear you are supposed to play dead – which seems stupid to me now, and I guess it seemed stupid to me then too because what I did rather than play dead and not startle the mighty beast was scream at the top of my lungs, raise my arms high into the air and continue to scream in its direction for a good minute. The bear didn’t seem to care that this apparently autistic child was ripe for the picking right in front of him, probably because I still looked like a little devil child that smelled like shit, and he sauntered away and I didn’t get eaten but Gary eventually caught up with me and I told him what happened and he reminded me about all the discussions we had had about safety and staying in groups and shit and I wasn’t invited on any more of Gary’s camping trips.

Stage 3: Early Middle Lauren. 10-13. Not medicated.

Holy god. Most people hate being a pre teen but let me tell you, I LOVED it. I quit taking lessons from Gary and I went to a new school and even though my fifth grade teacher made me get rid of my king tut pencil case on my first day because it was metal and was too loud or something, oh my god, what fun junior high was. I got to learn Latin and play basketball and ride horses and run and jump and frolic in a nurturing, challenging and rewarding environment. I decided that H.M.S. Pinafore was an awesome musical; I learned that the Spanish Armada was badass and I learned an awesome joke about the word paradigm from my English teacher (it’s not 20 cents…). There were a couple of drawbacks though, I had a pretty intense and long-lasting (and as of yet still unresolved) feud with my Spanish teacher and I learned what hippies were like when we got a new art teacher in 6^th grade and I was appalled. Also, I got braces. Also also, I accidentally dyed my hair orange and generally embarrassed myself and my parents with my fashion choices. Also also also, I had to iron all my uniforms perfectly on Sunday nights so I was ready for school the following week – there were even uniform inspections to ensure they were ironed satisfactorily… So it wasn’t all good, but overall, it was a solid growing experience for me.

I did, however, have to go to church a lot. St Michael’s was an Episcopalian parochial school and we had to go to mass for two hours every Thursday and chapel for a half an hour every other day. And then Sunday mass was also a shitshow. On top of all that we had to take religion classes wherein Father Smith told us all that animals don’t actually go to heaven not even my dog and I got in a lot of trouble one time for tearing a page out of a bible to write a note to my friend Annie. So that sucked. But I learned that the only way to make it through mass was to be an alter server. I got to wear white robes and carry candles and feel a little superior and closer to the Lord than everyone who had to sit in the pews. But one time I was serving with my friend Alexis and if I remember anything about Alexis it was that she really loved to use hairspray, which I had recently learned was flammable in science class. So she was walking in front of me as we were processing down the aisle in front of all our friends and teachers and God, I guess, and I was carrying this really large candle. I think Mr. Smith, our science teacher, saw what was going through my head first and even though I didn’t act on my impulse to put this scientific principle to the test, my mom told me when I got home that I wasn’t allowed to be an alter girl anymore. Apparently Mr. Smith, who was pretty suspicious of my motives in general, and kicked me out of class a lot as I recall, thought it best to end my career as an alter girl before I could light anyone on fire. Which wouldn’t have even been that big of a deal because that church had a lot of receptacles for holy water to put out the fire but whatever. Overall a pretty badass time for me.

Stage 4: Middle Lauren. 14 – 17. Unfortunately not medicated.

Yikes. I had to leave the sanctuary of my 28-person graduating class of St. Michaels and All Angels and leave my position as an honorary member of the Latin club and go to high school. A fucking Catholic high school. I guess it wasn’t too terrible except for that fact that it just really fucking sucked and I continued to have to wear uniforms. But the worst part was actually that I don’t remember ever having homework, which sounds like it should have been awesome, but I was left to my own devices which appeared to have consisted of watching a lot of Carson Daily and Daria and not learning. So I basically didn’t get any smarter between 8^th grade and my freshman year of college. This later proved to be problematic. I was also getting…volatile. I almost died in a car accident and I’m pretty sure I had PTSD along with some brain-tissue scaring so everyday felt like I was just returning from ‘Nam and I was angry and pissed and terrified all the time. So. People were pretty glad when I left the state to pursue my education.

I wish I could lighten the mood with a funny story from high school but I can’t really remember any. Except this one time I went on a camping trip with my friends and I had to borrow a sleeping bag from my friend’s younger sister. Apparently she had spilled clear nail polish on it and I never noticed. But I took it back to my parent’s house but I guess I left it in my car or something and my mom found it and was really disturbed by the stain and obviously assumed I had engaged in some felatio with a random hill-gentleman and left this gnarly stain on my friend’s little sisters sleeping bag and was going to return it to her all soiled like I was an animal who wasn’t properly ashamed of bodily fluids, a la

So she yelled at me a lot and made me get it dry cleaned and refused to believe my story. I told my friend this and she thought it was hilarious and told her mom and her mom told my mom that I wasn’t a whore and it had actually just been clear nail polish, but to this day my mom still doesn’t believe me.

Stage 5. Late Middle Lauren. 18 – 22. Medicated.

College. I got the hell out of Arizona and went to sunny southern CA, which was gonna be amazing. Unfortunately my high school moodiness and night terrors from the car accident had transformed this once awesome and apt and outgoing person into someone who was pretty sure they had sundowners and couldn’t handle twilight so I was really particular about what hours I would go to dinner. This was groovy and normal I guess but then shit really hit the fan when I had a really visceral reaction to the movie Adaptation after which I was put on a bevy of mood stabilizers. But I went to an awesome school and people were wonderful and the campus was gorgeous and holy god did I learn some shit. I learned a lot. And as it turns out, I love learning things. It was a small all-women’s college outside LA and we all had a healthy fear of authority and wanted to achieve things. I could go on and on about how awesome we were and how beneficial that school was for me and my personal and intellectual development, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that we were about 60 miles away from Palm Springs, so occasionally we would cruise on down there in someone’s Ford Focus and look for B list celebrities. One day on such an adventure a friend of mine and I stumbled across a thrift store, which was pretty exciting for a college student. And it was called…wait for it …The Foundation for the Retarded of the Desert.

I basically pissed myself because I thought it was hilarious and edgy for anything to be not 100% politically correct. And then it got even more funny when the cashier, who I thought would be a really kind person who was just really passionate about helping the mentally handicapped, yelled at the people in front of us to “stop fucking Jew-ing” him. I didn’t even know that could be a thing. The cognitive dissonance was very intense at that moment. Anyway, that brings me back to the point of this whole yarn which is that, while I’m not one of the retarded of the desert, I was definitely diagnosed with a few mood disorders and I started taking medication for them. It actually probably saved my life and I stopped feeling like a character in Deer Hunter. So that was good. But I also stopped having or expressing nearly as many feelings. Which I guess was okay because I’m learning that most of my feelings have to do my gastrointestinal issues and arcane tv series, but nonetheless I wasn’t feeling these things and telling my friends my thoughts on the importance of regularity and why Hercule Poirot would out-detect Sherlock Holmes with his little Belgian eyes shut. So we all lost a little something.

Stage 6. Grad School Lauren. 23-26. Medicated.

What have we here. During this phase I probably thought I was the luckiest kid ever because I was in Chicago at a pretty awesome school getting some really neat Master’s degrees and meeting the best friends a girl from the Old Pueblo could ever have.  I even went to the Middle East and thought about riding a camel and just generally fell in love with another culture and got swept away and had a little adventure orientalist-style. Anyway, most of the friends I have now I met in grad school, so they all met calm, lightly-neurotic but overall stable and enjoyable Lauren.

Stage 7. Present Lauren. 27 – God only knows. Med-less.

Well, well, well. I graduated. Again. Somehow. And made my way to the Nation’s capital. It’s been a time. Wonderful in a lot of ways, but also insanely stressful. So naturally it seemed like a good idea to buck the bridle of my medication and really get to know me. Learn a little about Lauren, if you will. Un-blunted by any sort of medication. And do you know what I discovered? I’m a fucking handful. Over the past few months of going off my meds I have noticed a few things:

1)   I talk a lot more. Which is good. Everyone has a voice and an opinion and we all have a right to be heard. On a related note..

2)   I’m kind of judgmental. I will judge the shit out of a book based solely and emphatically on the cover.

3)   I think I’m realllllly funny. I hesitate to say that I know I’m really funny because I made a hilarious joke about what’s brown and sticky the other day (a stick) and no one laughed, so maybe I’m in that particular boat alone.

4)   I’m kind of dramatic. My roommate pretty much hates me because we live in an apartment with 15 stairs and I’ve been bugging her to install one of those moving chairs they attach to the wall to carry the infirm to all the levels of their house because gah, I just don’t want to deal with the hassle. I’m also lazy. But really, definitely dramatic. I freaked out and refused to leave our new apartment after dark for the first week after we moved in because there are cockroaches that swarm the sidewalks and I don’t have any bug-stomping steel-toed boots at the moment.

5)   My priorities are all over the place. For example, we live in a TERRIBLE neighborhood, but I’m way more concerned about walking around at night on account of the cockroaches than the marauding band of Hispanic youths that are attacking people at gunpoint that the police keep warning us about.

6)   I change my mind. A lot. Or maybe I don’t and it’s just a normal amount. I dunno. I just like to examine things from every angle. And I really hate committing to things and ideas. It’s a lot of pressure.

Ok, that’s pretty much the nuts and bolts of what I’ve learned about my un-medicated self. But then there’s manic Lauren. And manic Lauren is pretty much the same as run-of-the-mill-judgmental Lauren, but with a Napoleonic complex. It’s like I’m out there trying to conquer Europe’s vast bounty with not but my comedic timing and sense of self-importance. And I think that’s ok because even though Napoleon didn’t conquer Europe and got overthrown, he got to spend his last years on basically his own private island in the South Atlantic, and that doesn’t sound really terrible. So, enjoy the ride friends!