I have a plane ticket for mid-day Wednesday, and a letter from Portland State asking me to report for work on Friday. Yes, this Wednesday. Yes, this Friday. Yes, I'm still in Berkeley. Yes, I am panicking. I am panicking over the FedEx website, I am panicking over my jumbled boxes of incompletely-packed belongings, I am panicking over the question of what precisely I am doing moving out of the state and leaving all of my friends behind but there's nothing new about that, I am panicking over whether to change my plane ticket for a later flight, I am panicking over the scared looks my cat keeps giving me every time I move something away from where she's used to seeing it, I am panicking over the fact that I left my wallet in Erica's car tonight (but Michele did it too, damnit), and I am panicking over tables of transit times and delivery hours.
The fact that my most recently-tattooed arm is peeling and I can't pick at it is actually, all by itself, causing me nearly as much anguish as the entire preceding list of panics. I'm not OCD -- not exactly -- but as my sister can also tell you, my family contains a fair number of odd obsessions and sensitivities. Katie gets unnerved by experiencing too many textures at once (she recently told me she likes the part of the chocolate chip cookie with no chips, for that reason). Our parents wash their dishes once by hand and then again in the dishwasher. My dad derives a deep satisfaction from giftwrap without a single wrinkle in it. It is my mother's opinion that each individual pair of briefs needs to be folded before being put in the drawer. Me, I can't handle having my skin feel funny. This is one of the reasons I've always had such a miserable complexion (the other being genetic) -- if I see or feel a bump or scab, I just have to keep touching it and worrying at it and wishing for it to go away. Sometimes it's a while before I even realize I'm doing it; other times the awareness that there's a funny skin thing going on somewhere just nags at the back of my brain and I can't concentrate on anything else. This is one of the latter times. The tattooed bits still sting just enough that I'm reminded they're there, and they're peeling so rapidly that when I turn my head and look at them it looks like a furry pelt of peeling skin. I can't resist just brushing my fingers over them, but then the feeling is so weird that I have to cringe and wrestle with myself and refrain from trying to make it all go away. I tell myself firmly that I need to just wait for it to finish peeling and then it'll be back to normal, but that is precisely what I have so much trouble doing.
How do you know that I am panicking? You know because I feel the need to share far too much information with the internet. If I am blogging, I can neither pack nor stress out about my peeling skin. Incidentally, this is now at least three reasons why I am the last person on earth who should get tattoos. I'm indecisive and change my mind and style all the time; I'm terrified of needles and get lightheaded even thinking about them; I can't handle my skin doing weird things. Hey, let's go get someone to use needles to permanently stick ink into our skin which will then be flaky and weird for a solid week! Wheeee!
I need to go to bed. Hell with you, boxes. You can ship on Tuesday.
Posted by dianna at July 8, 2007 11:55 PM