Me vs. the volcano

I've been a bit of a beyotch this week. What with the early-onset menopause after running like a German train since I was 13, that spot on the path leading to Stella's school that smells like rotting apples and just yesterday finally stopped making me varmint in my mouth, trying to adjust to a new going to bed/getting ready routine, loving a certain 2-soon-to-be-3-year old who has decided she's not too old to wake up at least once per night, all while trying to sleep through 16-pints of iced tea-fueled veins. Oy. Let's just say I owe a big apology to my household and that woman at Superstore yesterday.

And then there's today. A free day with Pete to belatedly celebrate our anniversary. Dual pedicures (yes, Pete is just gay enough for me), rockin' puerco taco for lunch at a gem of dive restaurant, followed by a cupcake shot, browsing around a bookstore buying shit up, and basically doing everything I love to do, all with teal-coloured toenails, and I feel the need to question again what this cancer crap will get me to.

I fear sometimes that I'm like an asshole. People tut about marriages turned sour - "he turned out to be an asshole" - but I think assholes are always assholes and they give you pretty definitive clues they're assholes from the very beginning. It's whether we choose to see the assholeness and confirm it in our little lizard brains that makes the difference between acting/being surprised later on. So we all just become more ourselves as we get older. This is what freaks me out.

So despite the cancer, the question of early death, the unalterable, physically volcanic journey I've embarked on, will I just continue to be the impatient, sarcastic (lowest form of wit, darlings), frustrated, afraid to fail chick that I've always been? Then what's the bloody point of all this? If, in a year from now, I'm still slogging through Superstore to buy my cheap flour, sugar and laundry baskets, fuming at the nimrod ahead of me who pores over her receipt instead of packing her grocery bags tout de suite, then what's all this been for exactly?

Mamma mia. I'm trying. I really am. I don't want all this to be a mere confirmation of self. I want a revelation, people! I have tiny moments. I do. And maybe it's the tiny moments adding up to a big epiphany at the end, but it's the James Joyce proportion I'm seeking, and... well, maybe "ski teal we drop" toes are as good a way to start the day on that one as anything else.