Some day, somewhere, somehow, I will live in a world where I don't wake up hacking up a lung every morning, and where I don't continue to hack up a lung throughout the day. It'll happen. I have faith like that.
In the meantime, aside from growing increasingly grumpier, life progresses at a happy pace. Work has entered a slow patch, which means I fill my days with catching up on all the shit I had to throw to the side in the breakneck race of summer, to try to at least come up even when the next frenzy hits. Coming up even is an impossible dream in the legal field, but everyone needs their castle in the air to keep them going, and catching up at work is mine.
Something lovely, something incredible and fierce, is happening, these days, a phoenix from the ashes of the hopes that died when a minority of Americans elected a lunatic head of a lunatic party and started to dismantle our democracy. Women are done. We are done with being assaulted. We are done with being disbelieved. We are done with being belittled, discriminated against and talked down to. We are done with being silenced. We are done with being boxed in. We are done with being powerless. I am watching a transformation happening in which I take a sort of exhausted, enraged pride. It would have been so much better under Hillary. But we're still making it happen. Even under these increasingly inauspicious circumstances.
The personal empowerment is exhilarating. I am seizing everything I can, without compromise. For the first time in my life, I would rather be single than give up one modicum of my agency and personal power.
The personal is political.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Sunday, October 08, 2017
Sunday mornings
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
~Wallace Stevens, from "Sunday Morning"
I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.
I never particularly enjoyed church. As a kid I got some fun out of it, since the '80s evangelical Baptist church in which I spent my childhood Sundays met in the local YMCA, and the small lawless horde of us roamed freely throughout the fitness club climbing on forbidden equipment and belly-flopping onto the small square heavy equipment dollies to see how far we could roll across the basketball court, racing the stumping feet and yelling voice of Martie, self-appointed behavioral enforcer who charged around the "Y" trying to corral us. (Whenever I imagine her purposeful stocky figure and short, severely parted steel-gray hair and face twisted into a permanent "I'm going to get you kids" scowl, forever in my memory looming over me like a heavy-breasted giant, my adult self still feels a thrill of childlike daring: RUN.) But as the church relocated, and I grew out of my scampering and scraped-knee days, and we changed churches altogether to find one both closer to home and (as it turned out) less plagued by adultery, I stopped enjoying anything about the Sunday morning ritual. The frenetic rush to arrive on time. Boring, predictable sermons. Troweled-on guilt. Also -- as the grandiose, orchestrally synthesized, heavy-drummed '80s worship music petered into the two-chord, endlessly repetitious, ham-fistedly emotional love whining of the '90s and early 2000s -- murderously dull music. And forced association with people I couldn't stand.
Still, as I embarked on my learning career at the tiny, conservative Christian Grove City College, I thought that would all change. So many Christians in one place! Surely there would be some amazing church out there.
Nope.
The megachurches with their seas of identical, vapid people and identical, vapid worship services and identical, vapid sermons. The tiny small-town chapels with their intense participation pressure and strong smells of mildew and varnish, trying to keep up with the times through loud faulty sound systems and electric guitars. Everyone smiling and grasping, trying to pull you in.
I resisted. I hate volunteering. The people were weird. The songs lost all grammatical, musical and theological integrity, gradually collapsing into tacky pornographic husks of self-indulgence. The sermons pissed me off, with their rising anti-multicultural, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-liberal hysteria. I've never been a morning person, so the early services were sheer torture, and the later services ate up too much of the afternoon. I didn't fit in -- everyone at these churches effortlessly curled themselves into a bland, safe, prescripted white Christian mold, lots of long skirts and khaki pants and bake sales and saccharine smiles and pearl-clutching and unquestioning obedience to the subcultural dictates, with the absolute assumption that I wanted that mold too. Sundays began to feel like a whole day spent crammed into the itchy, tiny, short-waisted, uncomfortably hot sweater that the women's honorary society I was inducted into my sophomore year forced me to wear for volunteering events which I detested nearly as much as I detested church. A whole day wasted.
For awhile I continued to attend church solely for the opportunity to brunch afterward with my churchgoing friends, but as I remained relentlessly single while most of them paired off into careful, restrained, joyless Stepford couples, I began opting to sleep in. The guilt was worth it, to wake up at 10:00 on a Sunday morning, drink my coffee in a blissfully deserted cafeteria, and stroll the loveliness of the autumnal campus alone soaking in the vibrant hues and the wet-leaf, dry-leaf smells and the creeksong while everyone else shifted uncomfortably on hard pews and dutifully sang their colorless worship to a God I no longer found in a building, a steeple, a sepulchre -- or a people. I waved off my friends' urgent concerns for my spiritual health. This was better. This gave me a deeper communion than any wafer chips and thimblefuls of juice. This restored my soul.
With my post-graduate relocation to South Bend, however, I heaved a sigh and renewed the search for a "church home." As I launched a new chapter of my life in a new place far from home, my upbringing told me that finding a good church ensured my social belonging and shored up my faithful lifestyle.
I did try. I tried a variety of denominations, from Baptist to non-denominational to Unitarian to Methodist to Presbyterian; I tried a variety of sizes, from megachurches whose stadium domes stretched over multitudes to microchurches whose twenty aging congregants flecked the sparse pews like scattered breadcrumbs. I picked one or two churches and gamely attempted regular attendance. I went to 20-something Sunday school classes. I participated in discussions. I went to brunches and Bible studies.
I hated all of them. Everything felt as shallow and glassy as a reflecting pool. Nothing fit, nothing stuck. I had no shared sympathy with any of the people. As my theology expanded beyond the confines of evangelicalism, and then Protestantism, the old stuffed-sweater feeling intensified. It itched, it cut off my circulation, it bulged in weird places. Finally I went full Catholic, in part because for a time I sincerely believed in the catechism, but also because Catholicism held room within its vastness for the odd liberal, heterodox, academically inclined philosopher, and because in a Catholic church nobody gives a shit about trying to get you to fit in. They don't assault you every week with creepy welcomes and brightly intrusive personal questions and perky invitations to gatherings that broaden a network but never flower into real friendships. You go in, sit down, participate in the liturgy, and leave. I joined the list of cantors, which was perfect because there was never any practice and all the singing was solo. Best of all, I could go to church on Saturday afternoons and have Sunday mornings to myself.
By the time I realized that I really just hate organized gatherings and regular time commitments beyond work, I no longer had to give any further thought to practicing religion. Relinquishing an already-dead faith came as both a joy and a profound relief for a number of reasons, not least of which being that I could finally give up church without regret. While my parents grieved (I was living with them when they found out; it was not our best moment), I moved forward into faithlessness with a quiet exultation. For the first time in my life, I was totally free, and absolutely everything was unwritten, including how I passed my weekends.
I haven't been a believer in anything supernatural for over six years. And even now, every week I wake to Sunday with the gladness I never knew in faith. This day is mine. This time is mine. I can spend it as I choose, and I mostly spend it in simple, quiet rest, sleeping in as late as I please, performing mundane tasks around the house, enjoying my solitude and my Simon. Instead of washing a conscience that is now always clean, I wash my clothes and dishes. Instead of the Bible I read science books and light fiction. Science podcasts and jazz albums have layered over the places where I once listened to sermons and worship music, and the spaces previously occupied by crackers and juice have expanded to accommodate homemade bread and a wide variety of wine. My day. My body. My blood. My time, my mind, my memories: The divinity that lives within myself, the better measures destined for my soul, the bounty I bestow upon this life. This life, this self, and no other.
I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
~Wallace Stevens, from "Sunday Morning"
I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.
I never particularly enjoyed church. As a kid I got some fun out of it, since the '80s evangelical Baptist church in which I spent my childhood Sundays met in the local YMCA, and the small lawless horde of us roamed freely throughout the fitness club climbing on forbidden equipment and belly-flopping onto the small square heavy equipment dollies to see how far we could roll across the basketball court, racing the stumping feet and yelling voice of Martie, self-appointed behavioral enforcer who charged around the "Y" trying to corral us. (Whenever I imagine her purposeful stocky figure and short, severely parted steel-gray hair and face twisted into a permanent "I'm going to get you kids" scowl, forever in my memory looming over me like a heavy-breasted giant, my adult self still feels a thrill of childlike daring: RUN.) But as the church relocated, and I grew out of my scampering and scraped-knee days, and we changed churches altogether to find one both closer to home and (as it turned out) less plagued by adultery, I stopped enjoying anything about the Sunday morning ritual. The frenetic rush to arrive on time. Boring, predictable sermons. Troweled-on guilt. Also -- as the grandiose, orchestrally synthesized, heavy-drummed '80s worship music petered into the two-chord, endlessly repetitious, ham-fistedly emotional love whining of the '90s and early 2000s -- murderously dull music. And forced association with people I couldn't stand.
Still, as I embarked on my learning career at the tiny, conservative Christian Grove City College, I thought that would all change. So many Christians in one place! Surely there would be some amazing church out there.
Nope.
The megachurches with their seas of identical, vapid people and identical, vapid worship services and identical, vapid sermons. The tiny small-town chapels with their intense participation pressure and strong smells of mildew and varnish, trying to keep up with the times through loud faulty sound systems and electric guitars. Everyone smiling and grasping, trying to pull you in.
I resisted. I hate volunteering. The people were weird. The songs lost all grammatical, musical and theological integrity, gradually collapsing into tacky pornographic husks of self-indulgence. The sermons pissed me off, with their rising anti-multicultural, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-liberal hysteria. I've never been a morning person, so the early services were sheer torture, and the later services ate up too much of the afternoon. I didn't fit in -- everyone at these churches effortlessly curled themselves into a bland, safe, prescripted white Christian mold, lots of long skirts and khaki pants and bake sales and saccharine smiles and pearl-clutching and unquestioning obedience to the subcultural dictates, with the absolute assumption that I wanted that mold too. Sundays began to feel like a whole day spent crammed into the itchy, tiny, short-waisted, uncomfortably hot sweater that the women's honorary society I was inducted into my sophomore year forced me to wear for volunteering events which I detested nearly as much as I detested church. A whole day wasted.
For awhile I continued to attend church solely for the opportunity to brunch afterward with my churchgoing friends, but as I remained relentlessly single while most of them paired off into careful, restrained, joyless Stepford couples, I began opting to sleep in. The guilt was worth it, to wake up at 10:00 on a Sunday morning, drink my coffee in a blissfully deserted cafeteria, and stroll the loveliness of the autumnal campus alone soaking in the vibrant hues and the wet-leaf, dry-leaf smells and the creeksong while everyone else shifted uncomfortably on hard pews and dutifully sang their colorless worship to a God I no longer found in a building, a steeple, a sepulchre -- or a people. I waved off my friends' urgent concerns for my spiritual health. This was better. This gave me a deeper communion than any wafer chips and thimblefuls of juice. This restored my soul.
With my post-graduate relocation to South Bend, however, I heaved a sigh and renewed the search for a "church home." As I launched a new chapter of my life in a new place far from home, my upbringing told me that finding a good church ensured my social belonging and shored up my faithful lifestyle.
I did try. I tried a variety of denominations, from Baptist to non-denominational to Unitarian to Methodist to Presbyterian; I tried a variety of sizes, from megachurches whose stadium domes stretched over multitudes to microchurches whose twenty aging congregants flecked the sparse pews like scattered breadcrumbs. I picked one or two churches and gamely attempted regular attendance. I went to 20-something Sunday school classes. I participated in discussions. I went to brunches and Bible studies.
I hated all of them. Everything felt as shallow and glassy as a reflecting pool. Nothing fit, nothing stuck. I had no shared sympathy with any of the people. As my theology expanded beyond the confines of evangelicalism, and then Protestantism, the old stuffed-sweater feeling intensified. It itched, it cut off my circulation, it bulged in weird places. Finally I went full Catholic, in part because for a time I sincerely believed in the catechism, but also because Catholicism held room within its vastness for the odd liberal, heterodox, academically inclined philosopher, and because in a Catholic church nobody gives a shit about trying to get you to fit in. They don't assault you every week with creepy welcomes and brightly intrusive personal questions and perky invitations to gatherings that broaden a network but never flower into real friendships. You go in, sit down, participate in the liturgy, and leave. I joined the list of cantors, which was perfect because there was never any practice and all the singing was solo. Best of all, I could go to church on Saturday afternoons and have Sunday mornings to myself.
By the time I realized that I really just hate organized gatherings and regular time commitments beyond work, I no longer had to give any further thought to practicing religion. Relinquishing an already-dead faith came as both a joy and a profound relief for a number of reasons, not least of which being that I could finally give up church without regret. While my parents grieved (I was living with them when they found out; it was not our best moment), I moved forward into faithlessness with a quiet exultation. For the first time in my life, I was totally free, and absolutely everything was unwritten, including how I passed my weekends.
I haven't been a believer in anything supernatural for over six years. And even now, every week I wake to Sunday with the gladness I never knew in faith. This day is mine. This time is mine. I can spend it as I choose, and I mostly spend it in simple, quiet rest, sleeping in as late as I please, performing mundane tasks around the house, enjoying my solitude and my Simon. Instead of washing a conscience that is now always clean, I wash my clothes and dishes. Instead of the Bible I read science books and light fiction. Science podcasts and jazz albums have layered over the places where I once listened to sermons and worship music, and the spaces previously occupied by crackers and juice have expanded to accommodate homemade bread and a wide variety of wine. My day. My body. My blood. My time, my mind, my memories: The divinity that lives within myself, the better measures destined for my soul, the bounty I bestow upon this life. This life, this self, and no other.
I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.
Thursday, October 05, 2017
finitus
Well I had planned to write a nice reflective post about autumnal nostalgia for the days of reading poetry under trees in my college Octobers, but everything about today pissed me off. I think I'm mostly just really really tired of being sick and it's making me cranky as hell. Every driver on the road did something stupid or rude. Work presented giant irritations that to be fair probably would irk me on even a good day, but today was not a good day so I quietly clamped down on my temper and fumed to myself (another benefit of long-term singleness and living-aloneness is getting really good at all forms of self-care, including being that person for yourself who says, reasonably, "I know it's a shit day, and you're also not feeling well, and things are bothering you more than they ordinarily would, so take a few deep breaths, keep your temper, keep your head, keep your cool, you got this"). My doctor proved he has gone full woo when he told me that diet soda causes cancer (I mean, after his "wine is more natural" and "join my wife's JuicePlus group" shit earlier this year I really didn't have that many doubts left, but this takes the fucking cake. Forty years of insanely robust research that says absolutely otherwise, and "artificial sweeteners are the most dangerous thing you can put in your body." Oh please. Next it'll be GMOs and organic and oh my god I just fucking can't. Time to find a new doctor). And then yet another seemingly intelligent white male left a series of unbelievably sexist comments on a social media post of mine which skyrocketed my general annoyance to stratospheric rage (I. am. done. with. sexism) and the only good moment of my day, though it accompanied great disappointment in yet another dude, was absolutely shutting him down. (I shut him down so hard he deleted all his comments and blocked me. Yessss. I'm sad that my comments in reply to his got deleted too though. That was an epic takedown.)
Like, I'm not even having these arguments anymore. I'm not playing along. I'm not making nice. I'm not performing the myriad acts of emotional labor expected of women even when they're being talked down to by an intellectual inferior. Fuck your privilege, dude. Fuck your feelings. Fuck your sense of self-worth that is rooted in the simultaneous invalidation of and validation by women. Not this woman. Not today.
I've been a scary feminist for a long time. I was the ONLY feminist on my college campus (which is where my feminism was born), and I've only gotten more and more aware as time has gone on. But since the election, I am fucking done with sexism. I am angry. I have no time or patience for taking it, tolerating it, or supporting it.
God it feels good to just unleash. To call out bullshit in a matter-of-fact tone that doesn't even need to go ad hominem to trigger a narcissistic injury in these fragile bros. And not to worry even a little bit if I hurt their feelings because for once their feelings aren't the point and don't matter.
But can I not be sick anymore? I just really want to not be sick anymore.
Like, I'm not even having these arguments anymore. I'm not playing along. I'm not making nice. I'm not performing the myriad acts of emotional labor expected of women even when they're being talked down to by an intellectual inferior. Fuck your privilege, dude. Fuck your feelings. Fuck your sense of self-worth that is rooted in the simultaneous invalidation of and validation by women. Not this woman. Not today.
I've been a scary feminist for a long time. I was the ONLY feminist on my college campus (which is where my feminism was born), and I've only gotten more and more aware as time has gone on. But since the election, I am fucking done with sexism. I am angry. I have no time or patience for taking it, tolerating it, or supporting it.
God it feels good to just unleash. To call out bullshit in a matter-of-fact tone that doesn't even need to go ad hominem to trigger a narcissistic injury in these fragile bros. And not to worry even a little bit if I hurt their feelings because for once their feelings aren't the point and don't matter.
But can I not be sick anymore? I just really want to not be sick anymore.
Wednesday, October 04, 2017
reservoir
I'm not gonna lie, it's a little discouraging how quickly my reserves run out these days. One malingering cold is enough to deflate all my buoyant spirits and soaring optimism into a flaccid, rubbery lump of exhaustion and mundanity.
I'm just so tired. The last few days in particular have taken all my glazed-eyed, zombified will just to get through until I can drag myself home and into bed.
On the drive home from work this afternoon (I really love not having to be a Woman In Public on the bus anymore) I realized that most of the reason I don't want friends right now is that I don't have the energy to make them. I can muster enough to hang out with people who've known me forever (namely Steph and Meg), but that's it. Making new friends? Forget it. That costs more than I have in the bank right now.
Gradually the reservoir will fill up again. My spring is coming. Everything keeps going so well that I know the overall trend inclines upward. But like any convalescent, I have to remember to take it easy. Getting exercise and writing back set me aglow; I forgot how fragile so precious a newly resurrected thing can be. It doesn't take much to tap out my enthusiasm (I would say "my strength" instead of "my enthusiasm," but I've never yet come to the end of my strength, which after this summer honestly frightens me a little. Like what the hell am I. How do I still manage to find the wherewithal not only to keep going but to thrive? Alone? Because make no mistake, I am very much alone right now. My support system contains a few people at the periphery, and my therapist, and me. Mostly me. And I have never yet reached the end of my strength. Just the end of my enthusiasm), so it's important to remember to go slowly, ease up, savor each moment of delight as it comes (such as realizing that the return of my writing skills seems to have reanimated in kind my quick, intuitive ear for harmony even with unfamiliar songs; ye gods, I have missed that) and rest, rest, rest.
So, I'll counsel myself to patience. And of course it's a little lonely. But I've felt much, much worse, and since I have little to bring to the social table right now, I might as well relax into the solitude and enjoy my own company (and that of an owl-eyed, whiskery inky black kittyboy).
And get lots and lots and lots of sleep.
Tuesday, October 03, 2017
these are a few of my
Almost every day I gloat about something in my new apartment. (I still haven't decided on its name. So far it's just The Homestead.) This cold is still kicking my ass, so rather than compose something thoughtful and deep I'll just list off the things that make me feel smug and happy AF about living here.
1. My snaketongue (the succulent, you perv. No, the PLANT. The DESERT PLANT. Arrrgh forget it). That thing has decided it loves life in its new location high up on the bathroom shelf. I was worried that the lack of direct sunlight would hurt it, but evidently shade is its thang, because it's put out like ten new blades in the last two months, and the old raggedy shriveled blades that droop over the mirror are beginning to fill out.
2. My bathroom window. Ooooo it's so pretty. The shower stall is done all in big desert-colored tiles, and the window, comprised of cubes of wavy glass, is set in the middle of the shower stall, with a broad tiled ledge at about (my) waist height where I arranged two potted succulents (hilariously, the tiny little fingerling plants I bought for two bucks a pop at Aldi are thriving far more luxuriantly than anything I bought at far higher prices at The Home Depot) on either end, with a carved stone lizard, a stained-glass piece, two huge hunks of glass (one in bottle green, one in pale beach blue), and a bright blue glass vase of bath salts (the legal kind). Once the shower curtain has aired out, I pull it off to the side so the light from the window can light up the glass pieces; the effect is glorious.
3. My dishwasher. Is. So. Quiet.
4. My mantel. The huge fireplace isn't functional, but I have an electric heater that looks like a cast-iron stove that fits perfectly in the grate. When I moved in the fireplace bricks were painted this hideous glossy maroon; the walls were a shiny industrial gray that always just looked...sweaty. Steph came to visit the day after I moved in and we spent a week painting the walls throughout the apartment varying shades of green. We turned the living room this amazing dark Victorian arsenic green; I painted the fireplace white. It looks perfect. Just before I moved out of the old shithole, someone at that complex had thrown away an enormous bedroom suite, and I salvaged the mammoth dresser mirror from the dumpster, painted it the same white as the fireplace, and installed it above the mantel. It's stunning. On either end of the mantel (seriously this fireplace is fucking gargantuan) I perched my mismatched pair of favorite lamps, one a tall tapering ridged ceramic in avocado green with a drum shade wrapped in strips of burlap; the other a squat glass in rich deep orange -- they look strangely good together. In between the lamps range my favorite cobalt blue vases, interspersed with slender green daffodil-stemmed vases, and the Depression-era ruby wine glasses that my grandmother gave me. The whole thing is finished off by a riot of pothos vines that start behind the lamps and twine throughout the glass pieces and over the lamps and mirror. I just like staring at it.
5. My I CAN'T SEE ANYTHING AT ALL darkened bedroom. Back when I lived in The Eyrie I became obsessed with the idea of sleeping in pitch darkness and embarked on a quest to kill all light entering the room (I am become Satan, destroyer of light. Shit we might experience nuclear war soon. That reference wasn't funny. Dammit). Not content with the blackout curtains one can buy at Wal-Mart, I purchased real blackout fabric and sewed it to the backs of the curtains, then hung additional blackout curtains over the door (impermeable to light; permeable to Simon). It was the best sleep I've ever had. I never cared about the Placeholder (that's what I'm calling my previous dwelling, I think -- a shitty senselessly split-level condo built in the 60s with absolutely no soundproofing between the first and second floors), so it wasn't worth my time to try to light-proof that bedroom, but once I moved into the Homestead and realized the landlord wasn't kidding when he said his security lights illuminate the building like a miniature sun, I tunneled through my piles of boxes until I found the blackout curtains.
I love it. When you turn out the lights you can't even see your hand in front of your face. Once again I sleep the beautiful deep uninterrupted sleep of the entombed, and it's amazing.
6. My galley kitchen with oodles of counterspace. So easy to cook in.
7. My microwave that doesn't require you to press a button before you set the cook time. (I HATE having to press "cook time" before punching in the cook time.)
8. My neighbors. Are so quiet.
9. I HAVE A BALCONY.
10. The size and the silence.
Still gonna take me awhile to settle in -- probably most of the winter. I'm still tired and taking it easy. But I already love living here. One day soon I'll write about the story of finding this place. It's not a bad tale. In the meantime, I wake up every morning happy and grateful for where I live.
1. My snaketongue (the succulent, you perv. No, the PLANT. The DESERT PLANT. Arrrgh forget it). That thing has decided it loves life in its new location high up on the bathroom shelf. I was worried that the lack of direct sunlight would hurt it, but evidently shade is its thang, because it's put out like ten new blades in the last two months, and the old raggedy shriveled blades that droop over the mirror are beginning to fill out.
2. My bathroom window. Ooooo it's so pretty. The shower stall is done all in big desert-colored tiles, and the window, comprised of cubes of wavy glass, is set in the middle of the shower stall, with a broad tiled ledge at about (my) waist height where I arranged two potted succulents (hilariously, the tiny little fingerling plants I bought for two bucks a pop at Aldi are thriving far more luxuriantly than anything I bought at far higher prices at The Home Depot) on either end, with a carved stone lizard, a stained-glass piece, two huge hunks of glass (one in bottle green, one in pale beach blue), and a bright blue glass vase of bath salts (the legal kind). Once the shower curtain has aired out, I pull it off to the side so the light from the window can light up the glass pieces; the effect is glorious.
3. My dishwasher. Is. So. Quiet.
4. My mantel. The huge fireplace isn't functional, but I have an electric heater that looks like a cast-iron stove that fits perfectly in the grate. When I moved in the fireplace bricks were painted this hideous glossy maroon; the walls were a shiny industrial gray that always just looked...sweaty. Steph came to visit the day after I moved in and we spent a week painting the walls throughout the apartment varying shades of green. We turned the living room this amazing dark Victorian arsenic green; I painted the fireplace white. It looks perfect. Just before I moved out of the old shithole, someone at that complex had thrown away an enormous bedroom suite, and I salvaged the mammoth dresser mirror from the dumpster, painted it the same white as the fireplace, and installed it above the mantel. It's stunning. On either end of the mantel (seriously this fireplace is fucking gargantuan) I perched my mismatched pair of favorite lamps, one a tall tapering ridged ceramic in avocado green with a drum shade wrapped in strips of burlap; the other a squat glass in rich deep orange -- they look strangely good together. In between the lamps range my favorite cobalt blue vases, interspersed with slender green daffodil-stemmed vases, and the Depression-era ruby wine glasses that my grandmother gave me. The whole thing is finished off by a riot of pothos vines that start behind the lamps and twine throughout the glass pieces and over the lamps and mirror. I just like staring at it.
5. My I CAN'T SEE ANYTHING AT ALL darkened bedroom. Back when I lived in The Eyrie I became obsessed with the idea of sleeping in pitch darkness and embarked on a quest to kill all light entering the room (I am become Satan, destroyer of light. Shit we might experience nuclear war soon. That reference wasn't funny. Dammit). Not content with the blackout curtains one can buy at Wal-Mart, I purchased real blackout fabric and sewed it to the backs of the curtains, then hung additional blackout curtains over the door (impermeable to light; permeable to Simon). It was the best sleep I've ever had. I never cared about the Placeholder (that's what I'm calling my previous dwelling, I think -- a shitty senselessly split-level condo built in the 60s with absolutely no soundproofing between the first and second floors), so it wasn't worth my time to try to light-proof that bedroom, but once I moved into the Homestead and realized the landlord wasn't kidding when he said his security lights illuminate the building like a miniature sun, I tunneled through my piles of boxes until I found the blackout curtains.
I love it. When you turn out the lights you can't even see your hand in front of your face. Once again I sleep the beautiful deep uninterrupted sleep of the entombed, and it's amazing.
6. My galley kitchen with oodles of counterspace. So easy to cook in.
7. My microwave that doesn't require you to press a button before you set the cook time. (I HATE having to press "cook time" before punching in the cook time.)
8. My neighbors. Are so quiet.
9. I HAVE A BALCONY.
10. The size and the silence.
Still gonna take me awhile to settle in -- probably most of the winter. I'm still tired and taking it easy. But I already love living here. One day soon I'll write about the story of finding this place. It's not a bad tale. In the meantime, I wake up every morning happy and grateful for where I live.
Monday, October 02, 2017
in the darkness
As he bent his head toward the neck of the guitar, the audience fell appreciatively silent, vibrant with anticipation. I sat four rows back in the intimate little Ann Arbor theater, so close to him I could read his facial expressions, holding my breath. The last time I'd seen Josh Ritter in concert, Meg and I had crowded close to each other in the Royal Oak Music Theater in Detroit, watching him perform with the Royal City Band. That concert was amazing, not least because of the absolute joy that Josh radiates as he plays. This one was a solo show -- just Josh and his upright bass player.
I had seen it on Facebook several weeks prior and bought a ticket without a second's hesitation. (Josh playing solo? Fuck yes I'm there.) N. had seen that I was going and jealously bought himself a ticket, insisting on accompanying me, although I had planned to ask Meg. Fortunately the relationship fell apart before the concert (I was sad about it, but more tired than anything else), and Meg had bought his ticket; but then car troubles prevented her from going, so I went by myself. It was the second concert I'd attended alone in a month, and I found myself strangely liberated by the experience. The opening numbers were great. Josh Ritter is a joy to watch, a joy to hear, and so delighted by the audience's delight, as if he can't believe that other people like listening to him.
And then his fingers began picking out the chords to "Thunderbolt's Goodnight," the song I'd longed with all my being to hear that night, and I clapped my hands to my mouth while the tears started pouring silently down my face.
I didn't know the name of the song at that point; the album on which he finally included it wouldn't be released for another three months. All I knew was the debt I owed him for that song. The first time I'd heard it, packed into the Royal Oak Music Theater next to Meg, I was exhausted and sad. Things with Chris weren't going well -- hadn't been for the bulk of the relationship. He kept insisting he wanted the relationship to work. I was trying so hard. But I felt lonely, all the time, especially when we were together; his thoughts were always anywhere but with me. There was no intimacy. We never talked. About anything, ever. I still thought we could make it work -- I thought I had to try.
Until I heard that song. When I heard Josh Ritter sing "Thunderbolt's Goodnight" for the first time, I knew that I would break up with Chris. Because I knew that I would never have with him the things I needed. I knew that he had never felt that way about me, and never would. And I knew that in the art of losing, what seemed like disaster would turn out to be something else.
And all my life
Before I met you
When I was trying hard in love
I thought the sun
Was going down
But the sun was coming up
My relationship with Chris ended a few weeks after I heard that song. Now, having just ended my relationship with N., I listened to it for the second time, and, weeping, knew that I'd done the right thing. (I'm sure the poor people on either side of me thought I was a lunatic; I was crying so hard I couldn't keep the gulpy hitches in my breath altogether quiet.) It was the kind of weeping that heals -- an outpouring of grief that resolves into hope. In that dark, exquisitely intimate little theater, I fixed my swollen eyes on Josh and let the chords wash over me. The sun was coming up. I didn't know how or when, but I knew it would.
For all my rage over the ways in which systemic sexism impedes women in relationships, for all my disappointments over past relationship failures, for all my determination to do things differently going forward, and for all my fierce delight in my current single state, I have never given up hope. I know exactly what I'm looking for -- I always have; that hasn't changed -- and now I think I finally have a clear understanding of what it looks like, and an even clearer resolve to settle for nothing less. Every relationship that I have voluntarily shed, I have shed because the relationship could go no further -- and because of my hope for the better things to come.
I'm not trying so hard, now. I'm okay on my own. I'm still resting. But the life I have founded here in Detroit, once I've emerged from hibernation, is the life in which I'll finally be in a good place to have the relationship I've always wanted. Maybe I won't find it; I want what I had the only time I ever really deeply connected with someone, and I don't know how likely it is that I'll find that again. It's so rare, and so precious. And if I don't find it a second time, that's okay; I will always make the best life possible for myself, and I enjoy my own company. And if I do -- well. That will be amazing.
It's likely that I would still be sitting here writing about this if I hadn't attended those concerts and heard Josh sing that simple, aching song. But in his hands and from his mouth that longing, that hope, that profound gratitude crystallized into a sense of purpose for me, both times, and drove me forward, so that after the solo concert, I drove back to Detroit in the late-night darkness with the fragrance of June pouring through the windows, and I felt light, and free, and washed clean.
tired
Oh man I hate being sick.
This Monday was just malicious. Nothing awful happened in my day (I admit I'm cashing in on my privilege when I write these blog posts about my personal life that don't have anything to do with the national news, but Jesus Christ, I can only take so much of wrestling with the obvious descent of our democracy into an irredeemable dystopian hell), but it dragged. All I could do was feel horribly sad and angry about yet another mass shooting committed by a seemingly law-abiding white man while all the good patriots proclaim his god-given right to carry an assault weapon that can snuff out or directly harmfully impact 550+ human lives so that nothing will ever change, while wishing I could kick the day in the ass to get it to move a little faster.
When shit like this happens (WHY THE FUCK IS IT THE REALITY THAT I CAN SAY "WHEN" SHIT LIKE THIS HAPPENS), I keep flashing back to one of the memorable moments in my short-lived teaching career.
I taught eleventh-grade English in one of the worst high schools in Detroit for six months. A majority of my students had criminal records and parole officers. Multiple fights broke out daily all over the school, necessitating a full-time security team. The year before I joined the staff a teacher had been fired for breaking up a fight with a broom; she later won her suit against the district because it was ruled that she had no other options to keep the rest of her students safe. One of the classrooms still bore bloodstains on the walls from when the police beat the shit out of a kid. Every day I interacted with students whom the entire social infrastructure has failed since their grandparents' conception. A few of them maintained hope -- hope that they could succeed, hope that they could get out, hope that they could earn safe and prosperous lives for themselves. A number of them wanted to succeed but had no idea how and couldn't connect good grades with hard work. An equal number of them didn't see the point of playing along to a system that had already set them up to fail. A few were openly hostile. Every fucking day, they broke my goddamn heart.
And I couldn't help them. The memorable moments were mostly the things that they taught me (as if a white woman's lessons were more important than the ones I tried to plan for them). Like the unit I did on mass shootings after yet another shooting while an actual leader still ran our country.
I opened up the unit with a poll. I had them write down, individually, whether they thought that guns should be made illegal.
I don't know what I expected. Most of these kids possessed firearms aplenty; a number of them had used them in the acts that earned them their criminal records.
And out of all of my 100 students, 98 of them said that no one should be allowed to own a gun. Ever. And the two that argued in favor of guns argued that people need to protect their families.
These are kids that don't walk outside to their cars at night because of the violence in their neighborhoods. Kids you might expect to think that guns were a necessity of life.
And they hate guns. All of them. Even the ones that use them. They fucking hate guns.
And when poor black kids from the 'hood in goddamn Detroit can agree on something like this -- goddammit, America. Fucking listen. I stood there listening to their opinions and their stories and their passionate arguments against the legality of gun ownership, and it was one of those moments that took my upbringing in white supremacy and rewrote my entire understanding of reality.
We need to do better by our country. We need to do better by our kids. Maybe mass shootings are difficult to prevent, but a lot of gun violence isn't.
I used to be an emphatic supporter of "the Second Amendment." I still don't have a problem with individuals owning a handgun or a shotgun or a hunting rifle -- in theory. But I would give up my right to own a gun tomorrow if it meant that we could stop seeing these horrifying stories of toddlers shooting each other and women getting murdered by their partners and exes (I just realized yesterday that in the last few months I have astronomically reduced the odds that I'll be raped, assaulted and/or murdered. By being single. Let that sink in for a minute. Seriously, just let that sink in. Because statistically it's the simple truth) and kids killing each other in the inner cities. Or possibly angry white dudes deciding to murder a huge number of people just because they're angry.
I love marksmanship. I enjoy target and skeet shooting. I'm not half-bad at it. But I no longer think my interest in a particular skill set outweighs other people's right to life and safety.
I have the luxury of feeling tired when I read one more news story about a mass shooting. Other people will never have the luxury of feeling tired again. And the people that conflate a right to self-defense with a right to own a full military arsenal need to pull their heads out of their asses and find wherever they stashed their sense of empathy and social responsibility.
This shit needs to stop.
This Monday was just malicious. Nothing awful happened in my day (I admit I'm cashing in on my privilege when I write these blog posts about my personal life that don't have anything to do with the national news, but Jesus Christ, I can only take so much of wrestling with the obvious descent of our democracy into an irredeemable dystopian hell), but it dragged. All I could do was feel horribly sad and angry about yet another mass shooting committed by a seemingly law-abiding white man while all the good patriots proclaim his god-given right to carry an assault weapon that can snuff out or directly harmfully impact 550+ human lives so that nothing will ever change, while wishing I could kick the day in the ass to get it to move a little faster.
When shit like this happens (WHY THE FUCK IS IT THE REALITY THAT I CAN SAY "WHEN" SHIT LIKE THIS HAPPENS), I keep flashing back to one of the memorable moments in my short-lived teaching career.
I taught eleventh-grade English in one of the worst high schools in Detroit for six months. A majority of my students had criminal records and parole officers. Multiple fights broke out daily all over the school, necessitating a full-time security team. The year before I joined the staff a teacher had been fired for breaking up a fight with a broom; she later won her suit against the district because it was ruled that she had no other options to keep the rest of her students safe. One of the classrooms still bore bloodstains on the walls from when the police beat the shit out of a kid. Every day I interacted with students whom the entire social infrastructure has failed since their grandparents' conception. A few of them maintained hope -- hope that they could succeed, hope that they could get out, hope that they could earn safe and prosperous lives for themselves. A number of them wanted to succeed but had no idea how and couldn't connect good grades with hard work. An equal number of them didn't see the point of playing along to a system that had already set them up to fail. A few were openly hostile. Every fucking day, they broke my goddamn heart.
And I couldn't help them. The memorable moments were mostly the things that they taught me (as if a white woman's lessons were more important than the ones I tried to plan for them). Like the unit I did on mass shootings after yet another shooting while an actual leader still ran our country.
I opened up the unit with a poll. I had them write down, individually, whether they thought that guns should be made illegal.
I don't know what I expected. Most of these kids possessed firearms aplenty; a number of them had used them in the acts that earned them their criminal records.
And out of all of my 100 students, 98 of them said that no one should be allowed to own a gun. Ever. And the two that argued in favor of guns argued that people need to protect their families.
These are kids that don't walk outside to their cars at night because of the violence in their neighborhoods. Kids you might expect to think that guns were a necessity of life.
And they hate guns. All of them. Even the ones that use them. They fucking hate guns.
And when poor black kids from the 'hood in goddamn Detroit can agree on something like this -- goddammit, America. Fucking listen. I stood there listening to their opinions and their stories and their passionate arguments against the legality of gun ownership, and it was one of those moments that took my upbringing in white supremacy and rewrote my entire understanding of reality.
We need to do better by our country. We need to do better by our kids. Maybe mass shootings are difficult to prevent, but a lot of gun violence isn't.
I used to be an emphatic supporter of "the Second Amendment." I still don't have a problem with individuals owning a handgun or a shotgun or a hunting rifle -- in theory. But I would give up my right to own a gun tomorrow if it meant that we could stop seeing these horrifying stories of toddlers shooting each other and women getting murdered by their partners and exes (I just realized yesterday that in the last few months I have astronomically reduced the odds that I'll be raped, assaulted and/or murdered. By being single. Let that sink in for a minute. Seriously, just let that sink in. Because statistically it's the simple truth) and kids killing each other in the inner cities. Or possibly angry white dudes deciding to murder a huge number of people just because they're angry.
I love marksmanship. I enjoy target and skeet shooting. I'm not half-bad at it. But I no longer think my interest in a particular skill set outweighs other people's right to life and safety.
I have the luxury of feeling tired when I read one more news story about a mass shooting. Other people will never have the luxury of feeling tired again. And the people that conflate a right to self-defense with a right to own a full military arsenal need to pull their heads out of their asses and find wherever they stashed their sense of empathy and social responsibility.
This shit needs to stop.
Sunday, October 01, 2017
friendless
My original weekend itinerary never came to fruition on account of my lingering cold. I had planned to attend a couple of bat conservation events and get a lot of writing done; instead I sat on the couch all weekend binge-re-watching How I Met Your Mother (my enjoyment of which I cannot possibly defend, and will not try. It is a show that centers around white male cisgender heteronormative supremacy. I spend more than half of my time watching it cursing it out. I stay for the friendships), with a few breaks to use the bread machine (Italian herb bread with garlic, onion, parsley, basil, rosemary and thyme, omg), do laundry, run to the grocery store for necessities like milk and wine and vegetables, and make my nuclear garlic hummus (vampires beware).
My life right now is socially isolated. I don't hang out with people outside of work, except for the monthly happy hours I instituted, or the times when I get together with Meg or Steph, which also occurs roughly monthly, or the occasions when one of my neighbors invites me over for a brunch. I enjoy those times -- the happy hours and brunches are great because I get to turn on my powerful charisma (an acquaintance of mine, himself highly socially aware, many years ago said of me to one of my friends, "She's one of those people who draws all the energy in a room") and I derive a lot of satisfaction from those artful performances; but as a person who possesses an extrovert magma surrounding an introvert core, I can only throw those performances at significant cost, and so I don't do them often. And the times with my deepest, truest, best friends are treasures that feed my soul for months. The rest of the time? I spend pretty much alone.
And I fucking love it.
I don't have to be by myself all the time. I know plenty of people at work who would like to get to know me better, who would readily hang out if I extended an invitation. And eventually I probably will. But right now I'm in a state of suspended social animation while I rest and recuperate from the last three years.
It is so, so, so, so nice. Just to live alone. Just to come home to my lovely, quiet apartment in my lovely city neighborhood and spend time with myself and Simon. Not to have to go anywhere or entertain anyone. To have no demands on my time.
I have never spent more time by myself. And I have never been less lonely in my life.
My life right now is socially isolated. I don't hang out with people outside of work, except for the monthly happy hours I instituted, or the times when I get together with Meg or Steph, which also occurs roughly monthly, or the occasions when one of my neighbors invites me over for a brunch. I enjoy those times -- the happy hours and brunches are great because I get to turn on my powerful charisma (an acquaintance of mine, himself highly socially aware, many years ago said of me to one of my friends, "She's one of those people who draws all the energy in a room") and I derive a lot of satisfaction from those artful performances; but as a person who possesses an extrovert magma surrounding an introvert core, I can only throw those performances at significant cost, and so I don't do them often. And the times with my deepest, truest, best friends are treasures that feed my soul for months. The rest of the time? I spend pretty much alone.
And I fucking love it.
I don't have to be by myself all the time. I know plenty of people at work who would like to get to know me better, who would readily hang out if I extended an invitation. And eventually I probably will. But right now I'm in a state of suspended social animation while I rest and recuperate from the last three years.
It is so, so, so, so nice. Just to live alone. Just to come home to my lovely, quiet apartment in my lovely city neighborhood and spend time with myself and Simon. Not to have to go anywhere or entertain anyone. To have no demands on my time.
I have never spent more time by myself. And I have never been less lonely in my life.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
a time of fullness
IT'S FINALLY COOL ENOUGH TO WEAR PANTS. (Not that I ever wear pants at work; I'm solidly a skirt person. But at home I like my schluffy exercise pants and it's been too fucking hot to wear much of anything at all. I hate you, human-caused global climate change. I weep for you, planet dying of fever. I welcome you, fall temperatures.) Glory hallelujah. Amen and amen.
Also holy shit this Sudafed is no joke. (I generally keep myself well stocked with various medicines, Gatorades, ginger ales and chicken soups, because having lived half my entire life alone, I know how to prepare to care for myself during illness. Side bar: I don't even feel sad right now that there's no one to take care of me while I'm sick, which has always been the hallmark of my I-hate-being-single mourning/whining. Now I'm like "aw fuck yeah I can sleep in a quiet house without anyone bothering me." I think I was so seriously miserable in my last burning circus of a relationship that I broke through the other side of even giving a shit.) I bought the really good stuff -- the kind you have to show like four different forms of ID to even look at. The kind you have to sign in blood for. The kind you only have to take once a day. Thanks to this marvel of modern medicine I have spent the last two days blazing through my work hours in a giddy spaciness that sort of vibrates at the edges. I looked it up today to figure out why the fuck I've been so over-the-moon happy (I mean, I'm in a pretty good mood generally, especially now that I'm in a voluntary seclusion and better rested, but this soaring glee is a bit unusual), and it looks like pseudoephedrine has an impact on norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake, which is what my antidepressant does, so I guess I'm like double the happy. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome; it's just gotta be weird for the people who have to work with a giggly, beaming goofball when they're used to professional and no-nonsense. This is all-nonsense.
Oh well. I am a many-faceted being. They might as well see the sillier side of Sarah now as later.
So having got that amphetamine-addled preamble off my chest, here's the post I have intended to write since this morning.
___________________________________
This is a time of fullness.
As with most metamorphoses, it took profound upheaval to reach it. I don't subscribe to the philosophy that growth must come from pain; but growth certainly comes from change, and change, to the human brain, however ultimately good, is nonetheless tumultuous and stressful. In the last four months, I:
1. Learned that my mother has ovarian cancer and went through a summer of travel across states to help where I could (Note: I will not be writing much about this topic for the foreseeable future. At the moment Mom's treatment is going great, and I am unspeakably grateful, and that is all I can say about it);
2. Ended another terrible relationship;
3. Moved to a new apartment; and
4. Moved office locations and accepted a promotion.
The changes encompassed every facet of my life: family, personal life, home, work. All in flux at once. It was the most exhausted I've ever been.
But again, the changes themselves, with the exception of my mother's illness, weren't painful so much as stressful. The breakup was both brilliantly done on my part, and deeply liberating (I really have broken through some ceiling that I've never been able to breach before; this level of satisfaction and happiness with my own life, on its own terms, is something I never dreamed I could achieve); the move was holy-shit-so-exhausting but I love my new habitat as dearly as I hated my old one, and the closer location to work cuts my daily commute from 2.5 hours to less than one; and the promotion has catapulted me along my chosen trajectory of enacting much-needed reforms in my office. Undertaking all these changes at once definitely tapped out my reserves (I've been a pretty dry cistern for the last three years, so I didn't have much to draw on to begin with), but even in the middle of the irruption I knew I just had to get through a few months of insanity before everything evened out and coalesced into a beautiful sea change.
Which it has. I can say without hesitation or qualification that this is the happiest I have ever been. Which happened when I finished all the change-events, and allowed myself over the last couple of months to do nothing but rest. And suddenly: joy. So much joy. My apartment is still a hectic jumble of boxes; there's still so much to do at work; but everything feels peaceful and unhurried. And I love my quiet, solitary hours at home.
It is from this joy and fulfillment and happiness that I am starting to write again. It's been a long, long time since I've considered myself a writer. You can basically track my writing by my blog posting, which has been essentially defunct since 2009. Eight years in the desert.
I thought I lost it. I would sit and try to write something, but it was all stilted, forced, shriveled. I thought that was it, for me. It hurt me, but I couldn't fix it. It just wasn't there.
Undoubtedly there are many reasons for all of it. I lost my favorite blog reader and blogging after that felt weird; my first Great Change launched around that time as well and my internal perspective was shifting so fucking rapidly that I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone process it, let alone write about it; and then I didn't know how to write about it, because I found myself in a new emotional landscape that I wasn't equipped to describe; and then I embarked on a series of shitty relationships (my taste in romantic partners, with two exceptions, has trended toward the abysmal, although, I think, for no longer) and stretches of in-between recovery time that took over my life and left no room for writing. Those were all factors. But primarily, I think, now that the words keep welling up within my metaphorical soul and spilling out and I can't stop writing (yesterday I blogged, and worked on my new piece of fiction (!), and journalled): I had only known how to write from a place of pain, and not a place of wholeness, and it's taken this long, and this much rest and repletion and joy and fulfillment, to arrive in a space where I can be creative again.
It's a really good lesson to absorb. I need to protect my peace and my wholeness, so that I can write.
This feeling -- this feeling of being myself -- this is amazing. I am almost wholly Sarah.
And from this place of fullness, I can create. I can turn my hands and my brain and my entire sense of being to my best-loved, and best-suited, craft.
It is so, so good.
Also holy shit this Sudafed is no joke. (I generally keep myself well stocked with various medicines, Gatorades, ginger ales and chicken soups, because having lived half my entire life alone, I know how to prepare to care for myself during illness. Side bar: I don't even feel sad right now that there's no one to take care of me while I'm sick, which has always been the hallmark of my I-hate-being-single mourning/whining. Now I'm like "aw fuck yeah I can sleep in a quiet house without anyone bothering me." I think I was so seriously miserable in my last burning circus of a relationship that I broke through the other side of even giving a shit.) I bought the really good stuff -- the kind you have to show like four different forms of ID to even look at. The kind you have to sign in blood for. The kind you only have to take once a day. Thanks to this marvel of modern medicine I have spent the last two days blazing through my work hours in a giddy spaciness that sort of vibrates at the edges. I looked it up today to figure out why the fuck I've been so over-the-moon happy (I mean, I'm in a pretty good mood generally, especially now that I'm in a voluntary seclusion and better rested, but this soaring glee is a bit unusual), and it looks like pseudoephedrine has an impact on norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake, which is what my antidepressant does, so I guess I'm like double the happy. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome; it's just gotta be weird for the people who have to work with a giggly, beaming goofball when they're used to professional and no-nonsense. This is all-nonsense.
Oh well. I am a many-faceted being. They might as well see the sillier side of Sarah now as later.
So having got that amphetamine-addled preamble off my chest, here's the post I have intended to write since this morning.
___________________________________
This is a time of fullness.
As with most metamorphoses, it took profound upheaval to reach it. I don't subscribe to the philosophy that growth must come from pain; but growth certainly comes from change, and change, to the human brain, however ultimately good, is nonetheless tumultuous and stressful. In the last four months, I:
1. Learned that my mother has ovarian cancer and went through a summer of travel across states to help where I could (Note: I will not be writing much about this topic for the foreseeable future. At the moment Mom's treatment is going great, and I am unspeakably grateful, and that is all I can say about it);
2. Ended another terrible relationship;
3. Moved to a new apartment; and
4. Moved office locations and accepted a promotion.
The changes encompassed every facet of my life: family, personal life, home, work. All in flux at once. It was the most exhausted I've ever been.
But again, the changes themselves, with the exception of my mother's illness, weren't painful so much as stressful. The breakup was both brilliantly done on my part, and deeply liberating (I really have broken through some ceiling that I've never been able to breach before; this level of satisfaction and happiness with my own life, on its own terms, is something I never dreamed I could achieve); the move was holy-shit-so-exhausting but I love my new habitat as dearly as I hated my old one, and the closer location to work cuts my daily commute from 2.5 hours to less than one; and the promotion has catapulted me along my chosen trajectory of enacting much-needed reforms in my office. Undertaking all these changes at once definitely tapped out my reserves (I've been a pretty dry cistern for the last three years, so I didn't have much to draw on to begin with), but even in the middle of the irruption I knew I just had to get through a few months of insanity before everything evened out and coalesced into a beautiful sea change.
Which it has. I can say without hesitation or qualification that this is the happiest I have ever been. Which happened when I finished all the change-events, and allowed myself over the last couple of months to do nothing but rest. And suddenly: joy. So much joy. My apartment is still a hectic jumble of boxes; there's still so much to do at work; but everything feels peaceful and unhurried. And I love my quiet, solitary hours at home.
It is from this joy and fulfillment and happiness that I am starting to write again. It's been a long, long time since I've considered myself a writer. You can basically track my writing by my blog posting, which has been essentially defunct since 2009. Eight years in the desert.
I thought I lost it. I would sit and try to write something, but it was all stilted, forced, shriveled. I thought that was it, for me. It hurt me, but I couldn't fix it. It just wasn't there.
Undoubtedly there are many reasons for all of it. I lost my favorite blog reader and blogging after that felt weird; my first Great Change launched around that time as well and my internal perspective was shifting so fucking rapidly that I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone process it, let alone write about it; and then I didn't know how to write about it, because I found myself in a new emotional landscape that I wasn't equipped to describe; and then I embarked on a series of shitty relationships (my taste in romantic partners, with two exceptions, has trended toward the abysmal, although, I think, for no longer) and stretches of in-between recovery time that took over my life and left no room for writing. Those were all factors. But primarily, I think, now that the words keep welling up within my metaphorical soul and spilling out and I can't stop writing (yesterday I blogged, and worked on my new piece of fiction (!), and journalled): I had only known how to write from a place of pain, and not a place of wholeness, and it's taken this long, and this much rest and repletion and joy and fulfillment, to arrive in a space where I can be creative again.
It's a really good lesson to absorb. I need to protect my peace and my wholeness, so that I can write.
This feeling -- this feeling of being myself -- this is amazing. I am almost wholly Sarah.
And from this place of fullness, I can create. I can turn my hands and my brain and my entire sense of being to my best-loved, and best-suited, craft.
It is so, so good.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
a teeny bit about my job
I can't believe how much I love my job.
It's been a combination of luck and the force of my personality, to be honest. Luck that the job opened up just when I gave up on teaching and started casting around for something new, and luck that the attorneys I was initially assigned to assist are all fantastic people to work for; then luck that I got to know people who are, or who became, people of influence in the firm. The rest is personality and will.
Part of what I love about my job is finally working in a place that's big enough for my ambitions. I've taken my initial position of "legal secretary" and added management and policy development, with an eye far up the ladder over time. I am well respected in an environment that does not yield itself to a great deal of respect. I am well respected because I do good work, I am friendly and outgoing, I am smart and competent, I am firm and decisive, I speak my mind, and I don't tolerate bullshit. It's a role I've grown into, and quickly. I've only been at the firm a year and half and I've already earned a promotion and started a policy-making focus group within my department.
It's weird, realizing that I'm good at politics. (I've come a long, long way since my rawboned fledgling days at the homeless center all those years ago.) I do politics my own way (that is to say, with sincerity and openness), but I know how to make and leverage connections, I know the right things to say, the right arguments to make. I know how to set a goal and gather support for it. I know how to get what I want. I know how not to give a shit when people don't like me. I know how to use all that for good.
It's pretty fucking great.
I could rave all day about how much I love my attorneys. I assist three at present; there have been some secretarial reassignments since I came on board, so of the three I initially started with, I've retained two, S. and B. (one of which I kept because I went to my supervisors and demanded to keep him--sometimes when I think about all the brassy, ballsy things I've done at this job I just sit and giggle, I can't believe they've all worked, and also, since that appears to be all it takes to make shit happen, why haven't I thought to just make demands all along); the third (D.) I knew I wanted to assist from my first week on the job, and about six months ago he went to my supervisor and told her he wanted to be assigned to me, and it was done (M.'s recounting to me later made my heart swell with pride, because the people at the top know who I am). My attorneys are all vastly different personalities, with vastly different positions in the firm hierarchy, and I get along with all of them splendidly, and have really solid working relationships with them. B. and I are work-spouses who are mostly incredibly nice to each other, occasionally grump each other out, and frequently spend long minutes on the phone together muttering absently to ourselves before realizing we don't need to be talking to each other. S. and I are old-school-style boss-and-secretary (except that he thinks me a magical computer wizard), with a lot of benevolent cordiality and occasional political commiserations. D. and I are still figuring each other out, but there's a lot of mutual liking and respect there, and working with him is teaching me to be even more assertive and personally powerful, which I appreciate the hell out of.
And that's not even bringing the management and policy-making aspects into it.
I fucking love my job. For the first time ever. I've turned it into a career, and I have a clear vision of where I want to take it. And I can get there.
The last eight years have seen a few distinctive shifts in my personal development. 2009-2010 saw me burst out of a chrysalis of trauma and depression into healing and coping and joy and freedom. 2017 has been the year of real blooming. (So I'm a butterfly and a flower. A butterflower. Don't mind me, I have a cold right now and this is the Sudafed talking.) It's been a damn hard year, in places -- completely exhausting. But this is the most, and most marked and permanent-feeling, growth that I've undergone in a long time.
I've always learned and grown in my own time. Often that's been later than I would have expected, or than others have expected. But it's better and deeper for taking so long.
I still have a long way to go, with a lot of things. But I'm getting there; and even better, I love where I am right now -- not just where I plan to be.
Also? I love writing again.
It's been a combination of luck and the force of my personality, to be honest. Luck that the job opened up just when I gave up on teaching and started casting around for something new, and luck that the attorneys I was initially assigned to assist are all fantastic people to work for; then luck that I got to know people who are, or who became, people of influence in the firm. The rest is personality and will.
Part of what I love about my job is finally working in a place that's big enough for my ambitions. I've taken my initial position of "legal secretary" and added management and policy development, with an eye far up the ladder over time. I am well respected in an environment that does not yield itself to a great deal of respect. I am well respected because I do good work, I am friendly and outgoing, I am smart and competent, I am firm and decisive, I speak my mind, and I don't tolerate bullshit. It's a role I've grown into, and quickly. I've only been at the firm a year and half and I've already earned a promotion and started a policy-making focus group within my department.
It's weird, realizing that I'm good at politics. (I've come a long, long way since my rawboned fledgling days at the homeless center all those years ago.) I do politics my own way (that is to say, with sincerity and openness), but I know how to make and leverage connections, I know the right things to say, the right arguments to make. I know how to set a goal and gather support for it. I know how to get what I want. I know how not to give a shit when people don't like me. I know how to use all that for good.
It's pretty fucking great.
I could rave all day about how much I love my attorneys. I assist three at present; there have been some secretarial reassignments since I came on board, so of the three I initially started with, I've retained two, S. and B. (one of which I kept because I went to my supervisors and demanded to keep him--sometimes when I think about all the brassy, ballsy things I've done at this job I just sit and giggle, I can't believe they've all worked, and also, since that appears to be all it takes to make shit happen, why haven't I thought to just make demands all along); the third (D.) I knew I wanted to assist from my first week on the job, and about six months ago he went to my supervisor and told her he wanted to be assigned to me, and it was done (M.'s recounting to me later made my heart swell with pride, because the people at the top know who I am). My attorneys are all vastly different personalities, with vastly different positions in the firm hierarchy, and I get along with all of them splendidly, and have really solid working relationships with them. B. and I are work-spouses who are mostly incredibly nice to each other, occasionally grump each other out, and frequently spend long minutes on the phone together muttering absently to ourselves before realizing we don't need to be talking to each other. S. and I are old-school-style boss-and-secretary (except that he thinks me a magical computer wizard), with a lot of benevolent cordiality and occasional political commiserations. D. and I are still figuring each other out, but there's a lot of mutual liking and respect there, and working with him is teaching me to be even more assertive and personally powerful, which I appreciate the hell out of.
And that's not even bringing the management and policy-making aspects into it.
I fucking love my job. For the first time ever. I've turned it into a career, and I have a clear vision of where I want to take it. And I can get there.
The last eight years have seen a few distinctive shifts in my personal development. 2009-2010 saw me burst out of a chrysalis of trauma and depression into healing and coping and joy and freedom. 2017 has been the year of real blooming. (So I'm a butterfly and a flower. A butterflower. Don't mind me, I have a cold right now and this is the Sudafed talking.) It's been a damn hard year, in places -- completely exhausting. But this is the most, and most marked and permanent-feeling, growth that I've undergone in a long time.
I've always learned and grown in my own time. Often that's been later than I would have expected, or than others have expected. But it's better and deeper for taking so long.
I still have a long way to go, with a lot of things. But I'm getting there; and even better, I love where I am right now -- not just where I plan to be.
Also? I love writing again.
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
sorry, not sorry
We have no intention of having children, and have a dog and cat who are clearly the only kids we want.
I grinned as I re-read that delightful sentence from my childhood best friend with whom I recently reconnected after at least twenty years (Facebook may have unforgivably cost us the election, but damn it's great for connecting with people). Aside from marrying young, J. and I followed similar life paths, including shedding our faith (god I love talking with fellow ex-pats from religious fundamentalism; when you run into someone who comes from the same strange subculture as you did, you can swap stories without having to translate anything, which is refreshing), and not having children.
It wasn't the outcome I expected (and as people never tire of reminding me, kids could still happen); since very early childhood I have always dreamed of love and marriage and children--ambitions which eclipsed all others. I planned to marry right out of college and devote myself full-time to my husband and our three or four children. While I reserved small dreams to myself--I always intended on writing--I never planned seriously for any career; employment, to my college-aged mind, would serve merely as a placeholder until I could meet Mr. Right and settle down to my real life of wife- and motherhood.
Thank gawd none of that came to pass.
Looking back on that cultural brainwashing infuriates me. I have clawed my way up to an amazing career, but it took me until my mid-thirties to even really get started. Everything that came before this was haphazard and accidental; if my talents and ambitions had been fostered, if I'd been taught that my goals for what I wanted with my own life as a sovereign human being should always come first, if I'd been encouraged to plan for a future that holds no guarantee of domestic partnership, if I'd been told, as men are told, that it was imperative to plan for my career because a profession is both necessary and fulfilling, it might not have taken me as long to get here.
And that enculturation runs deep. Long after I gave up my faith, I maintained the assumption that what I wanted most was love and family. It led to many years of lonely grief as my short-lived relationships all failed one after the other, and the years of singleness overwhelmed the scale. It's only been within the last few months that I've started to question whether family is something I really want. Love and marriage--yes, I still want those. Not as badly as I once did, because I'm realizing with increasing clarity what a gift this time is that I have all to myself, and what a glorious life I am capable of building on my own. But someday, once I'm established, once I've built a foundation that limerence cannot shake, once I've met someone who is truly what I want, I would like a life companion.
Kids though. I cannot decide where I land when it comes to kids. I have moments where I wish I could kiss a sweaty, tangled little forehead goodnight, plan a magical Christmas, watch a little person become a bigger person, help someone find their way in a big daunting exciting world. I have moments when it hurts me to realize that the likelihood of any of that happening is decreasing every day. I always thought I'd be a good mom, and it's weird to think that such a lifelong assumption will most likely go unproven.
But then I think about all the things I don't have to deal with. Diapers. Teething. Fevers. Tantrums. The noise and the mess. Giving up prioritizing your own schedule and wellbeing pretty much forever. The sharp drop in marital happiness and personal fulfillment that nearly all parents experience. All that sleeplessness. The horrors of pregnancy and labor and post-partum depression. Homework and sports. Endless complications. Middle school. Constant financial crisis. The weird culty mentality that most parents I've met subscribe to the instant they have kids.
Yeah, I'm really glad I haven't had to experience any of that.
So when I read J.'s "we definitely don't want kids" statement (from the tone it sounds like she's had to defend her decision to far too many people with zero actual stakes in but plenty of opinions regarding her life) my response was...interesting, to me. I wanted to give her a giddy high five.
Maybe I don't want kids. (Hahaha since the window is gradually closing I'm thinking that's maybe a happier conclusion to reach than "I wish I'd had them when I was twenty-five.") I'm cool with that, if that's the case.
Of course, when you reach your mid-thirties and are thinking about the possibility of dating again sometime in the next 15 years, you have to weigh whether you'd take a partner with pre-existing kids. I've dated guys with kids before; it was enough to make me realize real quick that I wasn't in any hurry to go popping little people out of my own vagina. Parts of it were great; I had a really strong bond with one child in particular, and I loved the little routines we built together, the songs he liked me to sing to him at bedtime, the books he liked me to read--and the milestones we reached together, like teaching him to shower and get his own breakfast--and the goals we set together, like helping him deal with his extreme emotions. But a lot of it sucked, including the stark reality that my relationship with my significant other would never come first, and the realization that I had to set myself aside for the sake of children that I hadn't signed up for. And even though the kids were the reason I stayed in that relationship so long, I emerged from it realizing a lot more than I had before about exactly what having kids entails, and it gave me serious pause.
Would I date a guy with kids again (or a woman with kids)? I guess that would depend on the guy (or woman)--and the kids. It wouldn't be my first choice. Sort of like having kids at all. But I could be persuaded, I think, with the right person (the right people).
Just not right this second. People my age now have mostly younger kids, and younger kids aren't my jam. Since I'm not really seeing myself taking up dating again in the immediately foreseeable future, there's not a whole lot of worry on that score. I have shit to do right now, and dating doesn't really fit in with my plans, so kids are a moot consideration at the moment in any case (I will consider fostering, farrrrr down the road, when I'm established; but I'll be damned if I take up single parenting that starts at the kid's infancy. Nope nope nope).
One long rambling blog post later...in short, I'm not 100% solid on the kids conclusion, but I'm definitely over 80% on not wanting kids. That last 20% is confusing; I hate that I can't really tell how much of my residual possible desire for kids is an internalized cultural expectation, and how much of it is genuine, and how much of it is simply a willingness to be open to the best life as it comes. I tend to know myself very, very well ("Know Thyself" is sort of my life's pursuit), and not knowing this drives me fucking nuts.
It doesn't help that underlying this margin of uncertainty is a suspicion that some dude could come along and try to talk me into something I don't really want and I might give in because women are also trained from birth never to trust ourselves. I'm tired of men telling me what I want, tired of female uncertainty being interpreted as an invitation (or a need) for male direction/interjection/interference. Uncertainty is not the absence of agency, thank you very much. And then there's the highly enculturated neurosis of the "ticking biological clock" (which intellectually I reject; I have genes that would benefit the human gene pool to pass on like intelligence and resilience, but also genes that I'm just as happy not to inflict on a child like crippling depression; further, there's no inherent merit in having biological children, and arguably there's quite a bit of non-merit in insisting on producing biological children on a frighteningly overpopulated planet with shrinking resources and millions of orphaned, homeless, and unwanted children in need of a good home). A number of people who advocate for having kids put forth the bullshit argument that you're never really ready anyway and parenthood is something you can't possibly plan for emotionally until you just do it, which is both absurdly egotistical and ludicrously self-righteous, not to mention founded on laughably specious logic. (Like, no one says that about getting a pet. You know you'll have to spend money and time caring for a dependent living being, which factors heavily into a responsible person's decision whether or not to adopt one. "You can't know until you commit irrevocably to it by doing it" is the same nonsense put forth by the Catholic Church regarding the Eucharist; I converted to Catholicism before jumping the religious ship altogether and confirmed that the Eucharist is exactly what you make of it, which is what I thought to begin with.) My uncertainty is plagued by nefarious cultural factors that I don't trust at all, and which make me narrow my eyes a bit at the remaining 20% of myself that whispers that I might want kids. Do I? Do I really?
I suppose where I'm really landing is my own agency. I'm not entirely certain what I want, and that's perfectly okay; there's no hurry to figure it out, and there's certainly no need to have someone else around to help me decide. In the meantime, I'm deeply happy that I have kicked off my thirty-sixth year in my present circumstances. This isn't the life I had envisioned. But in more ways than one, it's so much better than anything I even knew to wish for myself. And that includes (for the time being, at least) being single, and child-free.
Monday, September 25, 2017
singleness rocks, part 1
So, I'm not going to lie. Singleness is awesome.
It's taken a long time to get to this FUCK YEAH point. But several lousy relationships and nearly a decade after my regular blogging days, I'm pretty thrilled to be where I am.
It's funny, the things that hit you. Yesterday I was reflecting on the privacy. Or rather, the complete irrelevance of privacy. I can shit with the bathroom door open or stride around the apartment naked or belt out random snippets of songs or fart in bed without worrying about my dignity or anyone else's sensibilities. It's great.
Just now I was mowing down some hummus (homemade; I'm starting to do things around the house again in a way I haven't had the energy for in at least three--but more realistically eight or more--years) and trying to remember who it was I knew who wouldn't eat hummus because they didn't like the texture, and I sat bolt upright on the couch elated by the realization that I don't have to tolerate anyone's weird food habits anymore. All of my exes had weird food habits. More than one of them hated tomatoes. One wouldn't eat vegetables. One wouldn't eat meat. This one didn't like foreign food; that one didn't like cucumbers; that one hated hummus and yogurt and pudding and anything else that was neither definitively solid nor liquid. This other one hated olives. Another one hated coffee. Lettuce. Wine. Fish. Bananas. I can't keep all their stupid idiosyncrasies sorted in my head anymore, and thank god for that--trying to keep that shit straight when I wanted to cook was fucking maddening. It was like dating a class of adult kindergartners. JUST EAT THE DAMN TOMATO OHMYGOD.
Not having to mentally juggle someone else's endless lists of food-hatreds while planning a menu and trying to balance it with what I like? That's gold.
I was reading recently about how women are responsible for the vast majority of the mental labor that goes into running a household, so that even when men offer to help, the men are just thinking in terms of helping with the execution of a task, while women remain solely responsible for planning not only one task, but every accompanying and related task for every part of what makes the household function. All day. Every day. And when you're planning the kids' lunches and getting them up and dressed in the morning and timing their schedules so they all get enough sleep but still get showered and out the door to school on time; then planning throughout the day all the errands you have to run that night, and what menus you should plan out and shop for based on what's on sale, and what special events are coming up, and when to start dinner and how much to prepare and how long all the prep work will take, and whether or not you have enough time to do some laundry while dinner is cooking...well, when you have the massive events-planning of two or more lives constantly running through your head, someone half-heartedly asking "What can I do to help?" is more a hindrance than a help just for asking rather than stepping in to try to take on some of that mental planning.
My own planning is fun for me. It still occupies a lot of my mental space, but it's all by me, for me, of me, and the reduction in planning that I deal with just for being single is pretty damn sweet.
Also I can eat whatever I want without someone else whining about how they don't like perfectly normal and delicious food.
Like this amazing hummus.
It's taken a long time to get to this FUCK YEAH point. But several lousy relationships and nearly a decade after my regular blogging days, I'm pretty thrilled to be where I am.
It's funny, the things that hit you. Yesterday I was reflecting on the privacy. Or rather, the complete irrelevance of privacy. I can shit with the bathroom door open or stride around the apartment naked or belt out random snippets of songs or fart in bed without worrying about my dignity or anyone else's sensibilities. It's great.
Just now I was mowing down some hummus (homemade; I'm starting to do things around the house again in a way I haven't had the energy for in at least three--but more realistically eight or more--years) and trying to remember who it was I knew who wouldn't eat hummus because they didn't like the texture, and I sat bolt upright on the couch elated by the realization that I don't have to tolerate anyone's weird food habits anymore. All of my exes had weird food habits. More than one of them hated tomatoes. One wouldn't eat vegetables. One wouldn't eat meat. This one didn't like foreign food; that one didn't like cucumbers; that one hated hummus and yogurt and pudding and anything else that was neither definitively solid nor liquid. This other one hated olives. Another one hated coffee. Lettuce. Wine. Fish. Bananas. I can't keep all their stupid idiosyncrasies sorted in my head anymore, and thank god for that--trying to keep that shit straight when I wanted to cook was fucking maddening. It was like dating a class of adult kindergartners. JUST EAT THE DAMN TOMATO OHMYGOD.
Not having to mentally juggle someone else's endless lists of food-hatreds while planning a menu and trying to balance it with what I like? That's gold.
I was reading recently about how women are responsible for the vast majority of the mental labor that goes into running a household, so that even when men offer to help, the men are just thinking in terms of helping with the execution of a task, while women remain solely responsible for planning not only one task, but every accompanying and related task for every part of what makes the household function. All day. Every day. And when you're planning the kids' lunches and getting them up and dressed in the morning and timing their schedules so they all get enough sleep but still get showered and out the door to school on time; then planning throughout the day all the errands you have to run that night, and what menus you should plan out and shop for based on what's on sale, and what special events are coming up, and when to start dinner and how much to prepare and how long all the prep work will take, and whether or not you have enough time to do some laundry while dinner is cooking...well, when you have the massive events-planning of two or more lives constantly running through your head, someone half-heartedly asking "What can I do to help?" is more a hindrance than a help just for asking rather than stepping in to try to take on some of that mental planning.
My own planning is fun for me. It still occupies a lot of my mental space, but it's all by me, for me, of me, and the reduction in planning that I deal with just for being single is pretty damn sweet.
Also I can eat whatever I want without someone else whining about how they don't like perfectly normal and delicious food.
Like this amazing hummus.
Friday, September 22, 2017
so what
Settling into a new place takes forever.
I don't know what happened in the last few months - some kind of personal metamorphosis, again. It's not as dramatic as past metamorphoses. This feels more like...glazing, like in ceramics. Or maybe firing, after the glazing. 2016 was the glazing. 2017 is the firing. Like some kind of finish is happening, so that I can move forward to do what I've always wanted to do.
Carole told me once that after I left the house she shared with her mother and stepfather after an evening of fun and laughter and ranting with them, Mike looked at her and said of me, "She's going to be a terror when she realizes what she is."
I think I'm starting to realize what I am.
That's manifesting in all kinds of interesting ways at work (I am KILLING IT with my career, holy shit) and in my personal life (I am NOT INTERESTED in bullshit anymore--that latest round of bullshit with the last loser crystallized into a giant NOPE in my brain), which I'll get into at some point, maybe (I'm cagier with spilling all of my guts on the Internet than I used to be). The salient application at the moment is how I'm approaching settling into the new apartment.
Even at the beginning of the summer, right after the move, I felt all freaked out and stressed with how much work there was to be done, and how meager the reserves I had to draw upon to do it. But as I recovered from the latest relationship (notice I didn't say that I had to recover from the latest breakup) and started to tackle adjusting to the new position at work, and realized how critically important it is to rest and have some quality of life, I stopped giving a shit about how quickly I'm getting unpacked and organized. The kitchen is totally organized, and the bathroom; my bedroom is just about there; the living room functions; and the rest is all boxes and piles of awesome junk, and I'm okay with that. For the first time ever I'm happy, really, deeply, truly happy -- I fucking LOVE my job, I love my city, I love my apartment, I love my life: having more time because of a shorter commute, having evenings to spend at home, cooking on weekends, exercising early on weekday mornings, exploring new TV shows and new books, reveling in my lovely little Simon-eyes, buckling back down to a budget, beginning to write again, feeling like I'm finally starting to make a difference in the world around me -- so what does it matter if there are boxes everywhere? There's no rush; I'll get there. It'll all come together in time.
Also I think I'm beginning to worry less about other people liking me. I'm cool with not coming across as friendly and warm. I have shit to do. People who are worth my friendliness and warmth will get it; people who aren't, won't. I don't have time to play nice, so I'm training myself out of it. It's taking the people who don't know me as well a little aback, I think; the people who know me better seem to be taking it in stride because this has been me all along.
I like not being pushed around as easily anymore. And it's all because I stopped giving a shit. Which is extending to every corner of my life.
And I love it. I feel unleashed.
I don't know what happened in the last few months - some kind of personal metamorphosis, again. It's not as dramatic as past metamorphoses. This feels more like...glazing, like in ceramics. Or maybe firing, after the glazing. 2016 was the glazing. 2017 is the firing. Like some kind of finish is happening, so that I can move forward to do what I've always wanted to do.
Carole told me once that after I left the house she shared with her mother and stepfather after an evening of fun and laughter and ranting with them, Mike looked at her and said of me, "She's going to be a terror when she realizes what she is."
I think I'm starting to realize what I am.
That's manifesting in all kinds of interesting ways at work (I am KILLING IT with my career, holy shit) and in my personal life (I am NOT INTERESTED in bullshit anymore--that latest round of bullshit with the last loser crystallized into a giant NOPE in my brain), which I'll get into at some point, maybe (I'm cagier with spilling all of my guts on the Internet than I used to be). The salient application at the moment is how I'm approaching settling into the new apartment.
Even at the beginning of the summer, right after the move, I felt all freaked out and stressed with how much work there was to be done, and how meager the reserves I had to draw upon to do it. But as I recovered from the latest relationship (notice I didn't say that I had to recover from the latest breakup) and started to tackle adjusting to the new position at work, and realized how critically important it is to rest and have some quality of life, I stopped giving a shit about how quickly I'm getting unpacked and organized. The kitchen is totally organized, and the bathroom; my bedroom is just about there; the living room functions; and the rest is all boxes and piles of awesome junk, and I'm okay with that. For the first time ever I'm happy, really, deeply, truly happy -- I fucking LOVE my job, I love my city, I love my apartment, I love my life: having more time because of a shorter commute, having evenings to spend at home, cooking on weekends, exercising early on weekday mornings, exploring new TV shows and new books, reveling in my lovely little Simon-eyes, buckling back down to a budget, beginning to write again, feeling like I'm finally starting to make a difference in the world around me -- so what does it matter if there are boxes everywhere? There's no rush; I'll get there. It'll all come together in time.
Also I think I'm beginning to worry less about other people liking me. I'm cool with not coming across as friendly and warm. I have shit to do. People who are worth my friendliness and warmth will get it; people who aren't, won't. I don't have time to play nice, so I'm training myself out of it. It's taking the people who don't know me as well a little aback, I think; the people who know me better seem to be taking it in stride because this has been me all along.
I like not being pushed around as easily anymore. And it's all because I stopped giving a shit. Which is extending to every corner of my life.
And I love it. I feel unleashed.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
god only knows
After all these years, I am delighted to still be writing about Simon. (Also, after all these years, I am delighted to finally have embraced the split infinitive. For those whose grammatical training in English stemmed from the Victorian era and cannot read "to boldly go" without cringing, I refer you to John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, in which he lays out so sound an argument in favor of the split infinitive that I converted to its acceptance on the spot.) My lovely kittyboy approaches his sixteenth birthday sometime early next year (hm, I should probably appoint one. Lol I'm a terrible kittymama - no birthday celebrations in fifteen years; I might as well be a Dursley. I'm leaning toward January 4th; for some reason that feels right), and our fourteenth anniversary of meeting at Easter, and our twelfth year of companionship this Christmas. At fifteen, he remains full of sass and sweetness, still pert and bright-eyed, and only bushy-tailed when a loud noise scares him.
He's the most adaptable cat I've ever heard of; he acclimated to being hauled out to South Bend, Indiana, twelve years ago, then being hauled back to Erie, Pennsylvania, three years later; he survived a move into my grandmother's mobile home with me, then back into my parents' house for three years, then to my apartment that I dubbed The Eyrie for three more; then the trip back to Michigan to a cramped, cheap little condo for two more years while I spent far too much time at my ex's place; and then the enormous upheaval of the move to the current homestead. With each change, he has remained his faithful, affectionate, playful self; and with this last change in particular, now that it's just the two of us again, in a large old apartment resplendent with 1920s arched doorways, hardwood flooring and stucco walls, he is relaxed and happy, and I can't look at him without hearing him break into the soft, rhythmic purr that snags a little in his nose - my favorite sound in all the world.
My Simon has seen me through a lot. I've always had my pet songs for him (har) - "You Made Me So Very Happy," "You are My Sunshine" (or, "You are My Simon"), "Sweet Caroline" ("Sweet Kitty Simon"); lately I've been singing a lot of "God Only Knows." Because without this cat, this adorable, sweet, loyal, devoted companion, who has literally stood at my shoulder staring down into my face all through my darkest nights, I don't know that I'd be here today writing this. Every day I look forward to going home to him; every morning I love waking up to his FEED ME yowls; I laugh when he trips me up in the hallways, or trips himself up because he's too busy staring backwards into my face as he walks to pay attention to where he's going; I smile when he settles down into a catloaf next to me on the couch in the evenings.
I know our time is short. At the moment he is in perfect health (I had full bloodwork done up on him a month ago, and, uncharacteristically for fifteen-year-old cats, he has no renal or liver issues; his hips are only arthritic enough to have necessitated my converting a plastic storage bin into a custom litter box that he can easily step into and easily crouch at full height in, but which certainly don't impede his countertop foraging anytime I step out of the kitchen); but fifteen is old, and though I cherish hopes of him reaching his twenties, there's no guarantee. My breath catches when I think of losing him (god, what I wouldn't give to have the ability to reverse aging; I would go into extravagant debt to have Simon with me forever); I can envision no greater personal loss or anguish, and I know I'll have to feel it at some point, much sooner than I'll ever be ready for. But that only underscores the incalculable preciousness of the present that I have with him - a present in which we have each other all to ourselves, and in which I can give him an easy old age full of mommy-love and support and creature comforts and a stress-free environment without roommates or other animals.
Even now as I type this from my lovely balcony on a perfect autumnal-summer afternoon, I know that when I walk back into the house, a fuzzy little black face with vibrant yellow owl-eyes will be running to greet me and demand his dinner (which he will have to wait another 90 minutes to receive).
This precious little nine-pound bundle of sinew and old hips and silky-soft fur and dexterous monkey-paws is my pride and joy, my perfect companion, my favorite person, and I am so glad to still be writing about him, after all these years. God only knows what I'd be without him. And here we are.
He's the most adaptable cat I've ever heard of; he acclimated to being hauled out to South Bend, Indiana, twelve years ago, then being hauled back to Erie, Pennsylvania, three years later; he survived a move into my grandmother's mobile home with me, then back into my parents' house for three years, then to my apartment that I dubbed The Eyrie for three more; then the trip back to Michigan to a cramped, cheap little condo for two more years while I spent far too much time at my ex's place; and then the enormous upheaval of the move to the current homestead. With each change, he has remained his faithful, affectionate, playful self; and with this last change in particular, now that it's just the two of us again, in a large old apartment resplendent with 1920s arched doorways, hardwood flooring and stucco walls, he is relaxed and happy, and I can't look at him without hearing him break into the soft, rhythmic purr that snags a little in his nose - my favorite sound in all the world.
My Simon has seen me through a lot. I've always had my pet songs for him (har) - "You Made Me So Very Happy," "You are My Sunshine" (or, "You are My Simon"), "Sweet Caroline" ("Sweet Kitty Simon"); lately I've been singing a lot of "God Only Knows." Because without this cat, this adorable, sweet, loyal, devoted companion, who has literally stood at my shoulder staring down into my face all through my darkest nights, I don't know that I'd be here today writing this. Every day I look forward to going home to him; every morning I love waking up to his FEED ME yowls; I laugh when he trips me up in the hallways, or trips himself up because he's too busy staring backwards into my face as he walks to pay attention to where he's going; I smile when he settles down into a catloaf next to me on the couch in the evenings.
I know our time is short. At the moment he is in perfect health (I had full bloodwork done up on him a month ago, and, uncharacteristically for fifteen-year-old cats, he has no renal or liver issues; his hips are only arthritic enough to have necessitated my converting a plastic storage bin into a custom litter box that he can easily step into and easily crouch at full height in, but which certainly don't impede his countertop foraging anytime I step out of the kitchen); but fifteen is old, and though I cherish hopes of him reaching his twenties, there's no guarantee. My breath catches when I think of losing him (god, what I wouldn't give to have the ability to reverse aging; I would go into extravagant debt to have Simon with me forever); I can envision no greater personal loss or anguish, and I know I'll have to feel it at some point, much sooner than I'll ever be ready for. But that only underscores the incalculable preciousness of the present that I have with him - a present in which we have each other all to ourselves, and in which I can give him an easy old age full of mommy-love and support and creature comforts and a stress-free environment without roommates or other animals.
Even now as I type this from my lovely balcony on a perfect autumnal-summer afternoon, I know that when I walk back into the house, a fuzzy little black face with vibrant yellow owl-eyes will be running to greet me and demand his dinner (which he will have to wait another 90 minutes to receive).
This precious little nine-pound bundle of sinew and old hips and silky-soft fur and dexterous monkey-paws is my pride and joy, my perfect companion, my favorite person, and I am so glad to still be writing about him, after all these years. God only knows what I'd be without him. And here we are.
Monday, August 07, 2017
doctor's orders
About a month ago, at a just-in-the-nick-of-time appointment to get my prescriptions refilled, I finally remembered to ask my doc about that weird mole on my upper thigh (nothing to worry about). As he confirmed my pharmacy for the scrip refills, I remembered the other thing I needed to ask him, and cleared my throat.
"So I've been having issues with anxiety," I said. "I've been medicated for it periodically. It doesn't require daily medication like depression, but every once in awhile it gets bad, and it's been bad lately." He nodded, following me; I'd already outlined for him what my last few months have entailed. "Do you think I need to be medicated for it for awhile?"
His shrewd, brisk eyes took me in for a moment. "Do you want to be medicated for it?"
"Well, I don't want to feel like this anymore," I said.
He assessed me again with that sharp face that I never know quite how to read.
"You drink?" he asked.
I just stared at him for a moment while my entire body clamped down on the impulse to howl with laughter and yell DO I? I had finally cut back on my alcohol intake, which, though never more than a couple of glasses at a time, had been worrying me with its frequency; after all, I had reasoned, I can only moan "the election" for so long as a preamble to a glass of wine. This being the only life I get, I had reasoned further, I would like to enjoy a long length of it without cirrhosis of the liver. I watched Dr. S's face, couldn't hear any reprimand in his tone, and, keeping my face neutral, answered,
"Well, I've cut back a lot. But yeah, I like to drink."
"What do you usually do, when you drink?"
"Well--I come home and pour myself a glass of something after work."
"Glass of what?"
"Oh, just about anything; I like it all. Usually it's wine though."
"Red or white?"
"Usually red. Sometimes white in the summer, like now, when it's hot out."
"Relax you?"
"Oh yes," I said fervently.
He smiled, a quick twinkle. "Can you keep it to one?"
"Sure, that's not a problem," I said.
He shrugged. "So do that."
"Uh -- really?" I resisted the impulse to clean out my ears on an assumed mis-hearing.
"Sure."
"Like -- every day?" This was not the medical advice I had been expecting.
"If you keep it to one it's fine."
"I was--" I cast about for a minute, completely unsure of my footing in these uncharted and unprecedented medical waters. "I, uh, was cutting back because I was worried about my liver."
He shrugged again and started organizing the papers on his clipboard. "Frankly anything I could prescribe you for anxiety would be harder on your liver than alcohol. Alcohol is more natural" [I successfully refrained from rolling my eyes] "and your body is used to it. If one glass of wine a day makes you feel calmer, just stick with what works."
"Oh -- well -- okay. A glass of wine a day. I think I can do that." (I mean, I'm gonna HATE it, but if it's for my health, I guess I can drink.)
I practically skipped out to the parking lot. (Meg, upon hearing the story that weekend, wanted to watch me slap a prescription for alcohol onto a bar counter.) I had never thought of taking anti-anxieties as pleasurable. But my doctor-recommended glass of dry red medicine that night carried me off into a land where I did nothing but smile.
"So I've been having issues with anxiety," I said. "I've been medicated for it periodically. It doesn't require daily medication like depression, but every once in awhile it gets bad, and it's been bad lately." He nodded, following me; I'd already outlined for him what my last few months have entailed. "Do you think I need to be medicated for it for awhile?"
His shrewd, brisk eyes took me in for a moment. "Do you want to be medicated for it?"
"Well, I don't want to feel like this anymore," I said.
He assessed me again with that sharp face that I never know quite how to read.
"You drink?" he asked.
I just stared at him for a moment while my entire body clamped down on the impulse to howl with laughter and yell DO I? I had finally cut back on my alcohol intake, which, though never more than a couple of glasses at a time, had been worrying me with its frequency; after all, I had reasoned, I can only moan "the election" for so long as a preamble to a glass of wine. This being the only life I get, I had reasoned further, I would like to enjoy a long length of it without cirrhosis of the liver. I watched Dr. S's face, couldn't hear any reprimand in his tone, and, keeping my face neutral, answered,
"Well, I've cut back a lot. But yeah, I like to drink."
"What do you usually do, when you drink?"
"Well--I come home and pour myself a glass of something after work."
"Glass of what?"
"Oh, just about anything; I like it all. Usually it's wine though."
"Red or white?"
"Usually red. Sometimes white in the summer, like now, when it's hot out."
"Relax you?"
"Oh yes," I said fervently.
He smiled, a quick twinkle. "Can you keep it to one?"
"Sure, that's not a problem," I said.
He shrugged. "So do that."
"Uh -- really?" I resisted the impulse to clean out my ears on an assumed mis-hearing.
"Sure."
"Like -- every day?" This was not the medical advice I had been expecting.
"If you keep it to one it's fine."
"I was--" I cast about for a minute, completely unsure of my footing in these uncharted and unprecedented medical waters. "I, uh, was cutting back because I was worried about my liver."
He shrugged again and started organizing the papers on his clipboard. "Frankly anything I could prescribe you for anxiety would be harder on your liver than alcohol. Alcohol is more natural" [I successfully refrained from rolling my eyes] "and your body is used to it. If one glass of wine a day makes you feel calmer, just stick with what works."
"Oh -- well -- okay. A glass of wine a day. I think I can do that." (I mean, I'm gonna HATE it, but if it's for my health, I guess I can drink.)
I practically skipped out to the parking lot. (Meg, upon hearing the story that weekend, wanted to watch me slap a prescription for alcohol onto a bar counter.) I had never thought of taking anti-anxieties as pleasurable. But my doctor-recommended glass of dry red medicine that night carried me off into a land where I did nothing but smile.
Sunday, August 06, 2017
wonder woman
I have two recently acquired scars over my right eye.
Two days after moving into my new apartment within the Detroit city limits, I went with Steph to a movie theater to escape the godsawful murderous heat and celebrate the arrival of the first female superhero protagonist to the big screen. Having heard of the film's largely positive reception, and enjoying a nerdy superhero movie as much as the next person (though not a comic book reader, I love a good story of conflict-ridden heroism, particularly when sprinkled with Marvel's satisfying grasp of the comedic, although for Wonder Woman I'll venture back into DC land, which I haven't done in awhile), and pleased that a woman finally gets to command the limelight, I bought my ticket and my popcorn with enthusiasm.
Taking advantage of the sparse attendance of a weekday matinee, we selected our favorite kind of seat (or maybe it's just mine), two-thirds of the way up and center, and just as the previews started to roll, I nipped down to the restroom for a pre-movie pee: an innocent decision with rather disastrous consequences.
The pee part went smoothly enough. So did the handwashing. It was the architectural design of the restroom in combination with my habitual assessment of my appearance in the mirror on my way out the door that proved problematic. See, the restroom had one of those narrow cement-and-tile barrier walls immediately opposite the door, dividing the entryway from the stalls in the back, presumably to screen users from the view of the hall. The wall was perhaps six inches wide. It abruptly stopped a few feet past the entryway and opened into the center of the restroom. Along the same wall as the doorway stood the mirrors and sinks. Writing about three-dimensional spaces is not my strongest suit, so please enjoy the below crude diagram:
I have a slight attention problem when it comes to my immediate surroundings to begin with; it is not uncommon for me, lost in thought, to misgauge the location of a desk or a doorway, bounce off a solid surface, and sport the evidence of my ongoing struggle with physics and geometry in huge bruises on my legs and upper arms. And my stride is, without any shadow of a doubt, a STRIDE -- powerful, decisive, commanding, confident, with shoulders thrown back, head held high, and a long-legged, ground-eating swiftness born of a lifetime of running late.
And so, dominant left eye focused on the wall-length mirror to my left as I prepared to make my way back to the theater, I was sizing up my reflection and its disheartening revelations regarding the effect of two years without exercise on my physique as I strode powerfully, decisively, commandingly, and confidently headfirst into the barrier wall.
I want to write about this like it was hilarious, because thanks to our primate nature nothing is funnier than someone walking into something, but holy shit it hurt. The tile slammed into my right eye; a shattering crack told me my glasses had snapped in half; I fell to my knees and with my only cogent thought -- my glasses oh my god this is my only pair -- managed to pull my glasses off my face, though my hands were too stunned to hold onto them and they clattered to the floor in front of me where they lay badly bent but not broken. Confused about what had made the cracking sound (I realized later it was my skull), I became aware of a horrible pain in my brow bone and, holding back tears, pressed the heels of my hands gingerly to my forehead. A warm liquid squishing led me to pull my hands away from my face to find them awash in blood.
Forgetting my glasses, I leaped to my feet and staggered to the mirror, where I saw blood sliding down my face from two gouges above my right eye, one glaring darkly red from its deep trench in my eyebrow. As I reached for paper towels to staunch the flow, bright blotches splashed onto the marble-white counter like the opener in Dexter; holding the paper towel to the cuts with one hand, I mopped up the counter with the other. After retrieving my glasses I returned to the mirror in a glaze of pain to stare dumbly at the damage as I pulled the paper towel away. My head felt thick and muddled, but I knew to stay put to stem the bleeding, and I knew to be vaguely grateful that no one was in the bathroom to witness my absurd mishap. I wanted to laugh at myself -- cutting my head open in the women's restroom just before seeing Wonder Woman, honestly -- but it hurt too much and mostly I just felt furious.
"Where were you?" Steph whispered as I slid into my seat five minutes into the movie, holding the paper towel pressed to my eyebrow, and holding my glasses onto my face at the same time. "I thought you got lost."
"I ran into a wall and sliced open my face," I whispered back.
"You--what? You're bleeding?"
"Profusely."
"Jesus."
"Yeah. So what'd I miss?"
She caught me up on the exposition, and I managed to enjoy the film immensely, though I couldn't help wishing I had stopped a mugger or lifted a vending machine off a child or any number of heroic things I could have done to earn a lacerated, swollen and rapidly blackening eye before seeing goddamn Wonder Woman save the world onscreen, instead of knocking myself out in a highly dramatic homage to a deeply socially instilled concern for public appearance that constitutes one hallmark of the experience of womanhood.
I did feel a bit grimly badass for watching a gloriously badass woman singlehandedly end a god and a world war while wounded in my own (admittedly much smaller and stupider) battle with the patriarchy, at least.
And I also felt a bit grimly badass sporting my first shiner two days after moving into actual Detroit, and then I felt all full of subterfuge when I bought a palette of pink and purple eyeshadow and managed to match my eyes on both sides so the bruising didn't even show when I returned to work two days later (and then I felt angry thinking how many women have mastered that precise skill because of human harm rather than ridiculous run-ins with bathroom walls).
And now I have two new scars above my right eye, physical markers of the first female superhero movie on the American cinema in the 21st century. Woman's experience, carved right into my skin. So that's something too, I guess.
Two days after moving into my new apartment within the Detroit city limits, I went with Steph to a movie theater to escape the godsawful murderous heat and celebrate the arrival of the first female superhero protagonist to the big screen. Having heard of the film's largely positive reception, and enjoying a nerdy superhero movie as much as the next person (though not a comic book reader, I love a good story of conflict-ridden heroism, particularly when sprinkled with Marvel's satisfying grasp of the comedic, although for Wonder Woman I'll venture back into DC land, which I haven't done in awhile), and pleased that a woman finally gets to command the limelight, I bought my ticket and my popcorn with enthusiasm.
Taking advantage of the sparse attendance of a weekday matinee, we selected our favorite kind of seat (or maybe it's just mine), two-thirds of the way up and center, and just as the previews started to roll, I nipped down to the restroom for a pre-movie pee: an innocent decision with rather disastrous consequences.
The pee part went smoothly enough. So did the handwashing. It was the architectural design of the restroom in combination with my habitual assessment of my appearance in the mirror on my way out the door that proved problematic. See, the restroom had one of those narrow cement-and-tile barrier walls immediately opposite the door, dividing the entryway from the stalls in the back, presumably to screen users from the view of the hall. The wall was perhaps six inches wide. It abruptly stopped a few feet past the entryway and opened into the center of the restroom. Along the same wall as the doorway stood the mirrors and sinks. Writing about three-dimensional spaces is not my strongest suit, so please enjoy the below crude diagram:
 |
| An unexpectedly murderous layout. |
I have a slight attention problem when it comes to my immediate surroundings to begin with; it is not uncommon for me, lost in thought, to misgauge the location of a desk or a doorway, bounce off a solid surface, and sport the evidence of my ongoing struggle with physics and geometry in huge bruises on my legs and upper arms. And my stride is, without any shadow of a doubt, a STRIDE -- powerful, decisive, commanding, confident, with shoulders thrown back, head held high, and a long-legged, ground-eating swiftness born of a lifetime of running late.
And so, dominant left eye focused on the wall-length mirror to my left as I prepared to make my way back to the theater, I was sizing up my reflection and its disheartening revelations regarding the effect of two years without exercise on my physique as I strode powerfully, decisively, commandingly, and confidently headfirst into the barrier wall.
I want to write about this like it was hilarious, because thanks to our primate nature nothing is funnier than someone walking into something, but holy shit it hurt. The tile slammed into my right eye; a shattering crack told me my glasses had snapped in half; I fell to my knees and with my only cogent thought -- my glasses oh my god this is my only pair -- managed to pull my glasses off my face, though my hands were too stunned to hold onto them and they clattered to the floor in front of me where they lay badly bent but not broken. Confused about what had made the cracking sound (I realized later it was my skull), I became aware of a horrible pain in my brow bone and, holding back tears, pressed the heels of my hands gingerly to my forehead. A warm liquid squishing led me to pull my hands away from my face to find them awash in blood.
Forgetting my glasses, I leaped to my feet and staggered to the mirror, where I saw blood sliding down my face from two gouges above my right eye, one glaring darkly red from its deep trench in my eyebrow. As I reached for paper towels to staunch the flow, bright blotches splashed onto the marble-white counter like the opener in Dexter; holding the paper towel to the cuts with one hand, I mopped up the counter with the other. After retrieving my glasses I returned to the mirror in a glaze of pain to stare dumbly at the damage as I pulled the paper towel away. My head felt thick and muddled, but I knew to stay put to stem the bleeding, and I knew to be vaguely grateful that no one was in the bathroom to witness my absurd mishap. I wanted to laugh at myself -- cutting my head open in the women's restroom just before seeing Wonder Woman, honestly -- but it hurt too much and mostly I just felt furious.
"Where were you?" Steph whispered as I slid into my seat five minutes into the movie, holding the paper towel pressed to my eyebrow, and holding my glasses onto my face at the same time. "I thought you got lost."
"I ran into a wall and sliced open my face," I whispered back.
"You--what? You're bleeding?"
"Profusely."
"Jesus."
"Yeah. So what'd I miss?"
She caught me up on the exposition, and I managed to enjoy the film immensely, though I couldn't help wishing I had stopped a mugger or lifted a vending machine off a child or any number of heroic things I could have done to earn a lacerated, swollen and rapidly blackening eye before seeing goddamn Wonder Woman save the world onscreen, instead of knocking myself out in a highly dramatic homage to a deeply socially instilled concern for public appearance that constitutes one hallmark of the experience of womanhood.
I did feel a bit grimly badass for watching a gloriously badass woman singlehandedly end a god and a world war while wounded in my own (admittedly much smaller and stupider) battle with the patriarchy, at least.
And I also felt a bit grimly badass sporting my first shiner two days after moving into actual Detroit, and then I felt all full of subterfuge when I bought a palette of pink and purple eyeshadow and managed to match my eyes on both sides so the bruising didn't even show when I returned to work two days later (and then I felt angry thinking how many women have mastered that precise skill because of human harm rather than ridiculous run-ins with bathroom walls).
And now I have two new scars above my right eye, physical markers of the first female superhero movie on the American cinema in the 21st century. Woman's experience, carved right into my skin. So that's something too, I guess.
Climb Ev'ry Mountain (now it's stuck in your head, sorrynotsorry)
Holy shit it is so good to be home.
Of course, "home" right now, to the stranger's eye, would translate roughly to "a senseless conglomeration of oddly assorted piles of way too much crap" but after a week and a half of hospital and hotel rooms and guest beds it is close enough to heaven to sit in peace in a living space that I can call solely mine that it almost makes me remember faith with fondness. (Lol but not really.) Currently Simon is curled up on the new, beautiful alpaca blanket that my work friend Maggie brought me back from her trip to see her daughter in Ecuador: a lightweight, beautifully striped creation which shielded him from viewing the scary world outside the car window yesterday and now lies heaped on the couch; I'm sitting out on the balcony for the fourth straight hour marveling at how much quieter my city neighborhood is than my parents' small-town block off Main Street.
Settling into my new home will take, almost certainly, the remainder of the year. With three years' exhaustion sagging from my bones and dragging at the corners of my consciousness, a whirlwind of purposeful activity will elude my capability for some time. But I don't mind, much; I keep reminding myself that I have no deadline, and as busy as my job keeps me during the week, I need to focus primarily on catching up on the rest that I have missed while surfing the constant upheaval.
Not that I'm complaining; the last three years have held their share of challenges, but I look at it as a growth spurt. When I recall my physical growth spurt back in fourth grade, at a literal bomb shelter of a school long since demolished and replaced with a park, I mostly remember intensive discomfort -- particularly in my knees, which ached so badly that they felt hot to the touch and kept me awake at nights. The last three years have had their share of discomfort and aches and sleeplessness, but as I survey my current position in life, I feel just as I did when my knees finally stopped hurting: taller, stronger, and proud. Hell yes, this was worth it. In three years I have nearly doubled my income, found a career and begun to climb ladders with alarming rapidity, and adopted a city that I absolutely love. I have shed dissatisfying boyfriends (and hopefully, at this point, the inclination toward them, because I am tired of wasting my time and emotional capital on fruitless, doomed, and frankly stupid endeavors). I have made a place for myself into which I can now settle, and begin to build my own little empire.
Man, it's good to be here. Poised on the brink of something spectacular, and excited for the experience. For the whole of my time on this planet, I have been waiting for life to start; and nine years ago I realized that I would have to be the progenitor, and it's taken me this long to make the journey to the mountain I am finally equipped to climb. I'm not sure what's at the top, but I'm going to work hard and have a whole lot of fun finding out, and the path, for the time being, is challenging, but clear.
It's good to be here, and it's good to be now.
Friday, August 04, 2017
oh my god fuck this year
Maybe this is a bad time to start blogging again hahaha. I'd love to have something optimistic and cheery to present to the world, but oh my fuck I am done with life right now.
Let's see. So far in 2017, the country has gone to abrupt and sickening hell and every day the news headlines read like the writers for The Onion are running out of ideas and diving headlong into the absurd; I entered and exited another disappointing relationship characterized by extreme stress and emotional chaos; my mother was diagnosed with, treated, and is currently recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer; I moved out of one apartment and into another, with attendant unnecessary drama; and I received a promotion at work which while totally YAY THIS IS AWESOME also means more upheaval and adjustments and additional responsibilities without leaving any of my old responsibilities behind and the old responsibilities were highly hectic to begin with.
And each one of those things comes with its own pageant of additional stress factors.
I am tired.
Everything is moving in a definite good direction; by the end of this year I will have lined up nearly all my life circumstances to exactly where I want them. I just have to survive long enough to get there.
No part of my life has remained untouched and free from change this year. Settling into the new things will take awhile. Change is always stressful. And I didn't have a lot of emotional capital to spare going into any of this, because of how the last three years have gone.
Fortunately, as far as I can see ahead, there is no further urgent thing coming down the pipeline; it's all just a matter of adapting to the latest changes, and there's no huge rush on any of that. So I can settle in, get a shit ton of rest, and try to recover and reestablish myself in a way I haven't been able to do since 2013. And that part is exciting - or would be, if I had any capacity to feel excited right now.
It'll probably take the better part of the remainder of the year to rest up. But that's okay. It is nice at least to finally have some time on my side.
Let's see. So far in 2017, the country has gone to abrupt and sickening hell and every day the news headlines read like the writers for The Onion are running out of ideas and diving headlong into the absurd; I entered and exited another disappointing relationship characterized by extreme stress and emotional chaos; my mother was diagnosed with, treated, and is currently recovering from surgery for ovarian cancer; I moved out of one apartment and into another, with attendant unnecessary drama; and I received a promotion at work which while totally YAY THIS IS AWESOME also means more upheaval and adjustments and additional responsibilities without leaving any of my old responsibilities behind and the old responsibilities were highly hectic to begin with.
And each one of those things comes with its own pageant of additional stress factors.
I am tired.
Everything is moving in a definite good direction; by the end of this year I will have lined up nearly all my life circumstances to exactly where I want them. I just have to survive long enough to get there.
No part of my life has remained untouched and free from change this year. Settling into the new things will take awhile. Change is always stressful. And I didn't have a lot of emotional capital to spare going into any of this, because of how the last three years have gone.
Fortunately, as far as I can see ahead, there is no further urgent thing coming down the pipeline; it's all just a matter of adapting to the latest changes, and there's no huge rush on any of that. So I can settle in, get a shit ton of rest, and try to recover and reestablish myself in a way I haven't been able to do since 2013. And that part is exciting - or would be, if I had any capacity to feel excited right now.
It'll probably take the better part of the remainder of the year to rest up. But that's okay. It is nice at least to finally have some time on my side.
Wednesday, March 01, 2017
eyes to see
At the corner of Griswold and State in downtown Detroit, the streets lie empty. The low ambient tide of surrounding noise absorbs the occasional passing car, leaving no interruption to the impression of silence. Here in the rainwashed graylight just before dawn, all is still.
Glancing from side to side, I cross Griswold against the advice of the traffic light, breathing the fresh smell of water in the air. It’s not a good week. My head feels congested, both by viral symptoms and unhappy thoughts; anxiety twists my stomach. Sunk into a gloom that matches the downtrodden exhaustion exuded by the lightless skyscrapers in a city long faded from glory, I step toward the puddle at the edge of the curb and start to fall into the habitual obliviousness of the daily walk from my stop to the office.
I don’t know what catches my attention and draws my gaze up. Maybe it’s an edging in my vision. Maybe it’s the sound of wings. But just before I reach the puddle, I pause and turn, and find myself staring over the little square at a flock of pigeons wheeling into flight.
Hundreds of birds, black against the overcast sky, dip and scatter and soar in a synchronicity arresting in its thoughtless grace. The breeze, thrown into vortex by the ash-gray, soot-darkened skyscrapers, surges in waves of air under the multitude of wings; the flock sweeps up against the wind and billows in slow ripples like sheets. The gyre widens, narrows; the flock dissolves, spins apart, swirls back together. Ribbons of pigeons, streaming in spirals of flight, around, and around, and around the open valley of air over the square.
I have never seen anything this beautiful.
Mouth open, forgetting everything, I stand with my face to the sky, watching, wondering what moves them to flight, wondering, as they swell to the top of the corner building and begin, in scattered waves, to alight on rooftop and windowsills, what moves them to stop; watching the thinning banner of birds who circle the square just a few more times, losing a few to the rooftop each time they come back around, until they have nearly all landed, returning the square to its empty morning stillness. In all of this, there is no sound but the susurration of distant traffic, or possibly wings.
small hopes
Well, at least now that it’s March the rainy non-wintry mornings won’t strike me as acutely with the awareness that the planet is dying. It’s still dying, but I can more safely ignore it, and so human laziness wins again.
Not feeling particularly well today - this virus appears to be dragging its way through my body still like some kind of congestion-inducing zombie, and my stomach hasn’t felt great the last couple of days. Probably nerves - actually investing in my job has its disadvantages.
(Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.)
But the thought of better living accommodations has a perking effect that bolsters me through the loudness of the upstairs neighbors and the length of the bus commute. I keep thinking, Four more months. Just four more months.
I will have a life again. I won’t know what to do first. It’ll be the homebody nerd equivalent of rolling in a pile of cash and giggling. Do I play piano all evening? Do I read? Do I run around naked in honor of not having a roommate? Do I cook everything in my fridge? Do I work on my magnum opus? Maybe I can do them ALL AT ONCE.
So exciting.
So, that infuses the daily grind with a sense of upcoming relief, and takes some of the edge off the growing national disasters.
Also it’s daylight now - soon I will ride down Woodward Avenue in a bus that does not have to tunnel its way through darkness. Makes the heart lift.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)