Hello, friends.
I am up in here like:
(Anyone remember The Purge movie? Yikes, me neither. Google tells me that Lena Headey and Ethan Hawke starred in it, which basically just confirms to me that I think I know something about life, but as it turns out, I understand nothing, nothing at all).
Aaaaaaanyway
This week I did a thing and cleaned up my shit on social media. I changed my relationship status on Facebook, and I deleted a bazillion photos of my ex from Instagram. I’m not sure that I cleansed every remnant of him from my profiles (I’m sure he’s still lurking there somewhere, as bottomfeeders tend to do), but I think I deleted just about every reference to him I could find. Homie is GONE.
And shit, that feels good.
It took me almost a year to do it, and there are a lot of shitty reasons for that. Social media is terrible and mostly exists to annoy me with pictures of dumb healthy lunchboxes for obnoxious kids, but still. In a lot of ways my Instagram account was a chronicle of my existence, and the things we did, and the way we lived. The vacations we took and the birthday parties we threw, and the Halloween costumes, and the first days of school, and the new puppy, and all the fucking things. I posted those pictures because I wanted to remember. And suddenly I was faced with the realization that the moments I had once considered the happiest times of my life were now too sad to even look at. In a lot of ways, deleting those pictures felt a lot like deleting my life.
But you know what?
Now that my social media is free from his dumb face?
There are a few things, though, I’m having a bit more trouble purging. I’m not Jewish, and I didn’t have a real Jewish wedding, but we did do some Jewish-ish wedding things, such as having my friend Naomi officiate and sort of impersonate a rabbi, which seemed about right. We stood under a chuppah during the ceremony, which was actually a table cloth on four bamboo poles. We signed a ketubah – a traditional marriage contract -- that I ordered from a nice lady on Etsy. I will admit, I always loved the ketubah. It was pretty, and I loved the text. Most of all, I spent a boatload of money having it made, and later having it professionally matted and framed. It’s that ketubah that’s giving me stress now. I took it off the wall pretty much immediately when my marriage ended, but my cheap ass can’t bring myself to get rid of it. But what do I do with it? Hide it in a corner of the garage until it gets all damp and half-eaten by bugs, until one day I accidentally kick it and crack the glass while I’m taking out my bike, and what the hell, no use keeping this ratty broken thing anymore. Or, I dunno. Maybe I just burn it on a backyard pyre of all the lame, insincere Hallmark cards that dude sent me.
Or am I supposed to keep it and preserve it, because one day maybe my kids will want it? Right now it’s sitting behind my dresser, and honestly I have a feeling it’s going to stay there a lot longer.
The far more embarrassing thing I have to purge, which I’m specifically hiding here at the bottom of this newsletter in hopes that maybe nobody reads down this far, is the tattoo I got on our fifth wedding anniversary.
I am a dumb dumb idiot human who got my wedding song tattooed on my forearm. Why did I do that? Jesus, I do all sorts of stupid things all the fucking time. If I wasn’t out there doing stupid shit I wouldn’t be me? (Shame. So much shame).
So what I have is a tattoo that says “If Not For You.” It’s a Bob Dylan song because I love Bob Dylan, and I wanted to dance to a Bob Dylan song at my wedding, and he’s not a guy who writes a lot of love songs. My ex-husband hates Bob Dylan. Come to think of it, my ex-husband hates just about everything that I love.
Hmm.
So seriously. The tattoo. I cover it up? Or I fix it? Change it from “If Not For You” to…
· If Not For Your Semen, I Would Not Have These Lovely Kids
· If Not For Youth, Life As We Know It Will End, Because Climate Change.
· If Not Fork. Your Fork. What Fork?
Or possible cover up ideas:
· A praying mantis, biting the head off her mate.
· A garbage can filled with Hallmark cards
· A Burning Chuppah
· A brain, exploding
Oh smart people of the internet, tell me what to do with this very dumb tattoo?
TheDListNewsletter@gmail.com
Listen To This (Loud).
It’s moments like this when we thank the baby Jesus for the great gift of Beyonce.
To the left, to the left.
Love,
Amy Blair