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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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You Can't Hide Your Prying Eyes
We're having breakfast, Max and I, with MaxMom, who is in town after seeing the married boyfriend. We're talking about Max's sister and her penchant for online dating. I mention my own experiences with meeting men and women online, and then I find myself talking about the online diary. Now, I often bring up the online diary in conversation just to pinch people a little bit, to needle them, to bait some kind of hook. I do it to amuse myself on some level. And, of course, MaxMom, being the shrink, asks if she can read it. I stall. And she knows I'm stalling. I say, Let me think about it and send you the url. And I'm thinking, Yeah, go ahead and do it, just give it to her. She doesn't have any power over you any longer. Let her read about Mitch and about Max and about all the other little tidbits that I've written about, good and bad, over the years I've been writing. There's stuff in there, buried, about her too, and I know that when people ask, they're usually interested in what I've had to say in this weird publicly private space about them. I wisely don't give her the url that moment. I say wisely because later, I think otherwise. I recall the time when she and I got into an argument about a patient she had who had told her a very interesting story--in the context of her (the patient's) therapy sessions. Now, to me, having been in therapy, had always considered the therapist's office to be, you know, like a kind of confession booth, and that the information and topics I had addressed in that space to be, well, you know, private. Well, MaxMom wanted to write about this woman, her patient, for some kind of creative writing group she was participating it. When she told me about this (and told me the woman's entire story), I was, like, You What?! Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all about a good story. And as a writer, I'm all about stealing good stories from others, but see above in re: doctor-patient confidentiality issues. Because if I had found out that my therapist had been shopping out the admittedly few interesting details that I had revealed in therapy? I would have been very seriously angry first and then very seriously angry later. And my post-You What?! response to MaxMom was more of You What?!, followed by a very seriously angry explanation of why I thought it was wrong that she was even contemplating doing such an unethical thing. I got pretty pissed. Pissed and mean both. And it was that feeling that arose in me when I contemplated giving her the url to my diary. Another thing that she did quite recently that I found odd was to ask Max for pictures of me. Now, the woman has some pictures of me--maybe two or four that she took the last year that Max and I were together. Bear in mind, of course, that Max and I were together for the bulk of eighteen years and she was rather indifferent to me at the first and rather indifferent to me at the last, indifferent enough to have eighteen years of chances to take my picture. And now? Now she wants my picture. (I got some hinky feeling that it was because I'm a better daughter-in-law prospect now that I'm A. Not her daughter-in-law (which means that it's very likely that Max will soon offer up a male version of me, given his status as the gay son) and B. I'm no longer Fat Sublingua, no, now I'm Thin Sublingua. And pictures of her increasingly more open gay son's skinny ex-wife are so much more exhibitable ("exhibitable"?) than her increasingly more open gay son's fat ex-wife, right? Right. Anyway, I told Max, No way. Let her eat it. She had her chance. And to make it worse, I don't even really like the woman enough to be but barely civil to her, so why would I welcome her intruding eyes? So, yeah, I was invited to lunch and to breakfast and I went. I have trouble being civil to her over the course of a few meals, so why would I want to give her access to my publicly private life, right? Right. But I did bait the hook. Mostly to tease. So my public-private life? Will stay publicly private. So there. I'm that kind of mean, I guess.
More lies:
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