"Pain is weakness leaving the body"

Turns out, my brother Joey is having a thing with Emma - a flying-to-London-to-meet-up-with-her-as-we-speak sort of thing. Turns out everyone in our family knew about this but me, that is until Tuesday evening. So of course I flipped - the situation, while not ideal (he's into monogamy and has only ever slept with one girl; she's a social whore who thrives on infatuation until she gets bored, with a knack for manipulating guys into doing bizarre things for her - like flying to London maybe?) isn't the end of the world, but the secrets and lies? Totally are. I found out, through various IMs and texts, while half-asleep on the couch, so that I wasn't quite sure whether I'd dreamed the whole thing until Lui called me and then admitted he'd known for a while. I hung up on him, immediately called Irish (yes, in part because I knew it would piss Lui off), woke him up, tried my best to explain what had just happened (I was still half-asleep and not-quite-sure) and asked if we could go do something. He told me to meet him outside work in ten minutes.

So he returned the favor, so to speak, of all my "babysitting". He drove us to get coffee, then to the mall where we walked a lap of all three floors and looked at puppies in the pet store. We listened to Dennis Leary and Dane Cook and Chris Rock in his car so I would laugh and forget about the whole Joey-Emma ordeal, and he played more country songs for me and raved about how great they were. He also made me sing "Whiskey Lullaby" with him and was again impressed by my voice (maybe mostly by my ability to hit high notes). When I was about to leave, I gave him a hug and thanked him.

"Oh, of course," he said. "I only owe you about a billion talks by now." So he gets it too. That's good to know. And I went home feeling so, so much better.

Last night, I went out for ice cream (in the form of a breakfast burrito at Pokez) with Squeak. To sum up our conversation in two sentences: "What's up with the affair?" "What's up with the bulimia?"

Oh, also, my body is getting its revenge. I figure since I'm only getting one period a year, it thinks it gets to be 12 times worse. Yesterday and the day before were miserable (and not just because of the drama). I stole one of Lui's Vicodin tablets and have been carrying it in my wallet in a in-case-of-emergency-break-glass sort of way. But since I'm not sure what effect it'll have on me, I haven't brought myself to take it yet. Today's been better, too.

Irish asked me to hit him last night, sitting in the car after he'd brought me back from downtown. We'd been talking about how I've never punched somebody, but "it's on my list." We'd also been talking about how it was the five-month anniversary of his fiancée's death. He hadn't realized it until then, and I was holding his hand again, and he finally admitted to himself that she was actually gone. I mean, he was really amazed when he said it out loud. "I've been in denial for five months," he said. "Denial's not supposed to last that long - I read this article, on the stages..."

"It's different for everybody," I told him. "Not everyone experiences the same stages in the same order for the same length of time..." I wish he'd have taken the Grief Recovery Handbook when I'd offered it to him, but of course he'd refused, and now, instead, he was begging me to punch him in the face, to "snap him out of it."

I told him no. Repeatedly. First of all, he didn't deserve it. Secondly, I've never done it before, and I want my first time to be special, to really mean something - I'm saving myself for Piano Man, or Emma (that brother-stealing social whore), or at least some drunk guy trying to feel me up in a bar. Third, I didn't want to hurt him. But mostly, I couldn't help but think of the time Lui had asked me to slap him (I'd offered that service to Irish, as a substitute, but he said he didn't want to be "bitch-slapped") and my immediate instinct after I'd done it was to kiss it better. And I just couldn't guarantee that the same wouldn't happen this time. Already, it was kind of all I could do not to kiss the proffered cheek. Not that I would - like I've explained to those of you who've expressed concern (some on a daily basis), I could never make a first move here, because the whole situation just doesn't lend itself well to that sort of thing. Oh, and also because I'm married. Fuck.

For the record, Squeak met Irish last night. Didn't like him. Said he seems like one of those guys who stopped growing, physically and emotionally, in fifth grade. I didn't try to defend that statement, just corrected it, because - hello?! - it was seventh grade when he started dating [fiancée]. It's kind of uncomfortable, though, knowing that you're all probably reading this wondering what I see in this guy, even in the most platonic sense, and why I keep putting up with him. You're all shaking your heads thinking, "God, Elle has such horrible taste in men." Aren't you?

Great. It's just like old times, then.