real ladies don't squat like that

yesterday morning i woke up laughing. i mean it, i woke up laughing. wisps of my dream coalesced themselves into a sort of story. but really, get a load of this:

there's a sort of changling secretarygirl type. she's tall, lanky, mousey one minute, brassy and buxom the next. she was wearing grown-up underoos--the real thick and lumpy-looking 4-year-old-boy kind. no other clothes. i'm not joking. then i turn around or my attention drifts or something and she's got a blond bob and she's changing her clothes at the foot of the stairs of an old, smelly-looking but not smelly-smelling, otherwise harmless empty old buiding telling us she's got a shrink appointment she doesn't want to be late for. the carpet is ground into the floor. the walls are paneled. the lights don't work. i'm climbing the old staircase b/c i have to go to the bathroom sooooooo bad (actually i think this is when i started to actually wake up b/c i really did have to go to the bathroom.)

anyway, in my dream i walked into the ladies room, but it was no place for a lady. it was a dump--like a million rave parties and worse had happened in it. stalls torn down, just a row of outhouse-like openings. i couldn't wait, so i squatted, hoping it would be quick and i wouldn't slip.

i turned to my right: used pads stuck to surfaces--in corners, wadded up, tossed aside here, there, sticky side down, color side up. remember the scene in airplane where the passengers were reenacting a crash and people were scattered updside down and every which way, across seats, in the aisles, etc. like that, but the impression of filth. no smell, no dirt, just what was once inside now old and shed. showing. outside.

so i'm thinking to myself in my dream: these once-here women are my kind? these are not my kind. i am not this kind. and i'm carefully wrapping my own pad (a second ago i didn't have one, didn't need one, but this is dream logic) in white tissue, round and round, nice, sanitary. but looking around there's not toilet paper left to do what one does with it nor a garbage pail to put remnants in--AND IN BARGES MY BOYFRIEND LIKE SOMEBODY'S CHASING HIM--and so as not to be found contaminated with womanhood, our secret womanhood, and scared ridiculous to be charged in on and off my rocker that some stranger is following him and will see me like this, in this place, looking like i...b-e-l-o-n-g to it, or maybe worse, added to it, i throw the carefully wadded up clean and tidy package toward the corner of the room, not unlike a 7-year-old busted with the tweezers in the wall socket. nowhere proper to hide from black wall and melted metal. (funny, after that real life 7-year-old incident i hid out in the basement bathroom, thinking of my story, waiting for the smoke to clear upstairs between mom and dad before i came clean).

and as my white-wrapped package is sailing towards the corner, across the carcasses of other things discarded out-of-their-sight-out-of-their-mind, toward the open window but not out the open window, vince (the dream version) comes loping into the bathroom and i'm still hovering over the toilet with a "what the--" look on and my ass in the air, and he says, "hey babe," and then his shirt gets caught on a nail sticking up from one of the portajohn bench thing along the wall closest to the door, eventually pulling him back to where his shirt got all hung up...and all the while i'm thinking,

o h my god i am this kind. i am somehow exactly this kind.

and i woke up laughing.

cuz, well, vince really is that clumsy. and i, well, i guess i am that kind.

gross. but true. and then my real self got outta my real bed, walked into my real bathroom and took a real pee. sitting down and totally lady-like. back to being one of a kind.