*8 ?The Wesleyan students who nearly died took K2 or AB-FUBINACA, a synthetic cannabinoid infinitely more dangerous than the relatively safe MDMA they thought they were getting.
*9 ?Interestingly, treatment with ibogaine, a psychedelic drug derived from the African iboga plant that works to alleviate withdrawal symptoms, shows much more promising (though preliminary) results in treating addiction than either drug-replacement or traditional abstinence-based programs. See Kenneth R. Alper, M.D. et al., “Treatment of Acute Opioid Withdrawal with Ibogaine.”
*10 ?See, e.g., Breaking Bad.
*11 ?Carl L. Hart et al., “Is Cognitive Functioning Impaired in Methamphetamine Users? A Critical Review.”
*12 ?M. G. Kirkpatrick et al., “Comparison of Intranasal Methamphetamine and D-Amphetamine Self-Administration by Humans.”
*13 ?Kofi Annan, “Why It’s Time to Legalize Drugs.”
Day 28
Microdose Day
Physical Sensations: Slightly dizzy about three hours after dose.
Mood: Activated. Edgy.
Conflict: Disagreement with my husband.
Sleep: A better night’s sleep than on other Microdose Days.
Work: Productive workday.
Pain: Minor.
It began when I lobbed a passive-aggressive salvo through the closed bathroom door. My shoulder was hurting, I said, and it had to be from writing while lying on the uncomfortable couch.
“Let’s agree that the next time we buy a couch we will consult one another,” I said.
As if we spend our days buying couches. As if we are likely to buy another couch in the next decade.
After a moment, my husband answered: “Your problem isn’t the couch, or my chair, or the eight-track players. Your problem is that you want a room of your own.” Here we go again. They should write a play about us called Who’s Afraid of Admitting Virginia Woolf Was Right?
“I do not. I just can’t work in there.”
“Exactly. You can’t work in there. You want your own space. But you don’t feel like you deserve it.”
He’s said that before, and I always respond that he’s the one who wants me out of his studio. We bicker over who it is that wants me out, and then we make up and resolve to share the space more cooperatively. But this time I remembered the day a few weeks ago, when, in a fit of pique, I packed away my things from his studio: the photographs of the children, my row of books, my little laptop stand. After I had put the bin in the storage shed, I had been perfectly comfortable on the uncomfortable couch. I had felt at ease, as I feel when I write in a café. In a café, the space doesn’t feel like it’s mine, because it’s not mine. It was when I treated the studio as my husband’s, and myself as the guest that I always felt I was, that I finally felt comfortable.
I remembered that feeling, and I was finally able to admit that he is right. What I want is not a corner of his space, or even a precisely delineated half of it. What I want is a room of my own. But I don’t feel I deserve one.
In part, it’s about money. In the words of Virginia Woolf, “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.” Though I have always been paid well enough for my writing, I earn a fraction of what my husband does. Not just the typical seventy-nine cents every woman earns to a man’s dollar. Even less than that. From the very beginning, this has bothered me. There was a while, when our kids were small, when I became obsessed with the salary of the nanny we hired after our third child was born. At the end of every year, I would do an assessment. If I earned more than I paid the nanny, I was relieved. If I earned less, I was devastated. How could I justify this frivolous career when I couldn’t even pay for the child care I needed because I was pursuing this frivolous career?
I was aware of how irrational I was being. We employed a nanny not so I could work, but so we could work. My husband was no less responsible for child care than I was. He is a feminist, born and bred, and never for a moment did he consider child care solely my expense, but both of ours. So why did I offset the nanny’s salary only against my own? Why did my mental equation not include what he was bringing in?
For the past five years, I have earned a good living. Not as much as my husband, but enough so that if I had to I could support a middle-class lifestyle for our family. Was it because I was making more money that I suddenly felt free to resent his vast collection of obsolete audio equipment and his uncomfortable couch? Could it be that simple?
Like every other young woman in a “Take Back the Night” T-shirt, I read A Room of One’s Own in my first Women’s Studies class. And my second, and my third, and I think pretty much every single Women’s Studies class I ever took. Woolf’s message is clear, compelling, and seductive: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Actually, Woolf was quite specific. If a woman is to indulge in the literary life, she must have five hundred pounds a year. According to a number of Web sites whose authority I have decided for no particular reason to trust, five hundred 1929 pounds sterling is worth $38,383.44 today. I make more than that.
So I’ve got the money. What I don’t have is a room of my own.
My husband came out of the bathroom, dried his hands, and turned to me, loins girded for the fight he anticipated.
I cut him off at the pass. “You’re right. You’ve been right all along. I want a room of my own.”
“Finally!”
“I want my own studio.”
“Exactly.”
“I have been fighting with you for months—”
“Years.” Okay, he was starting to get a little drunk on my capitulation, but I guess he had earned it.
“I have been fighting with you for years because I couldn’t accept that I deserved my own workspace.” Finally, we could put this stupid argument to bed. We knew the answer!
My husband opened his arms and I fell into them. Then my face fell.
“We have a problem,” I said. “Studio space is just too expensive. And there’s nowhere here for me to work.”
“What about Dr. Schaeffer’s consulting room?” my husband asked. “Could you work there?”
“It’s dark and gloomy,” I said. “It’s a vampire’s lair.”
“Paint it,” my husband said. “Paint it white.”
“But that’s the original woodwork!” I reminded him of what happened with the Gamble House in Pasadena, the masterpiece of Arts and Crafts architecture designed and built by Charles and Henry Greene. The son of David and Mary Gamble, the couple for whom the house was built, put the house on the market, only to change his mind after overhearing a prospective buyer flick a derisive finger at the floor-to-ceiling teak and mahogany woodwork and say something to the effect of “First thing we’ll do is paint all this dark wood white.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t the Gamble house,” my husband said. The woodwork in our house is lovely, but it’s fir, not mahogany. Moreover, we’ve preserved it throughout the rest of the house. “It’s just the one room. And we don’t ever plan on selling. Let the kids worry about the resale value.”