One of these days I'm going to do something creative and stick with it.
It doesn't help that I've been stressed and tired for awhile now, but all the various moving parts of my life seem to be coming together in some organized sense, so there's light ahead (shut up, I will mix whatever metaphors I please). The greatest upheavals are yet to come - oh my god, so much to do in such a short span of time - but I'm as excited as I am daunted by them.
I'm going to be taking some significant risks - relocating to a different city with or without a job, taking a chance on a relationship, recrafting my life. It's scary as hell. I find myself sometimes (in metaphor) fearfully eyeing the life I've built for myself here and wondering if I'm insane or stupid to throw the match on it and set my face west.
The answer is...maybe. Maybe I'm insane or stupid, in this economy, to cast my fate to the winds and move to a city that's possibly even more economically depressed than the one I'm living in now; to gamble on a relationship that's still relatively new; to give up a relative security for the completely unknown.
The corollary is, So what?
My life here is safe, but that's all it is, and it's not even that safe. I don't have health insurance (don't even get me started on my non-options), I don't have a retirement plan, I don't have my own house, I don't have significant savings. I have a steady job that pays a good wage, but it's not what I want to do any longer; I need work that matches my vision, something I'm passionate about, something that makes me feel good about my contributions to this planet that has given me my life. I have a great apartment, but it's not quite big enough (and I want a dishwasher and a dryer and off-street parking and a backyard). I have one friend. My parents are closeby, but I rarely visit them. My life here is small and comfortable and relatively secure...and that's it.
In the end, it's not just that I've done everything that I set out to do when I came back home six and a half years ago. It's that I can't stay here anymore. I'm not only done with this phase of my life; I have to move on, or lose something that I've worked hard to gain. It's time to go, not just because it's time to move forward, but because not doing so is not a viable option.
This is me butchering Kierkegaard, but I'm reminded of the leap of faith. The actual leap of faith, as (possibly) described by Kierkegaard. The thought experiment is this: You're traveling on foot and find yourself trapped at night in a blizzard, many many impossible miles from any shelter. To turn back is certain death, so you keep moving forward, blindly feeling your way, unable to see even your hand in front of your face, while all around you the cold and the wind howl and tear at you. Suddenly you find that you've come to the edge of a cliff. You edge to the left for a long way, but the cliff extends unbroken; you edge back to the right, with the same result. There is no shelter. You cannot turn back. You cannot stay put.
So you jump.
You jump, and you trust that a ledge will be there to catch you.
Given what you can know in that situation, it's not that stupid a decision. And that's where I am now. I can't stay here; the stagnation is killing me. I'm scared to go, scared to fail, scared that everything will go spectacularly wrong; but it would be much, much worse not to try. I know what waits for me here: more of the same. And I can't do it. Even though moving to a new city with no job and only a few months' savings is risky, I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to find something. It might take awhile to achieve all the things I want to; I may not be able to teach right away. But there will be other things to do. There have to be. I'm highly employable. And when determined, once I have decided something, I am a force of nature.
So it's time to gather up my courage, and jump.
Count of three.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Thursday, March 05, 2015
tired
All I want to do right now is go to bed but I feel a sense of moral outrage at falling asleep before nine, so I thought I might as well dash off a post since, characteristically, having determined to blog regularly again, I haven't.
Which isn't to say that I haven't been writing. I have. Pages and pages and pages of anguished journal entries, until the thoughts all tangle in an amazingly annoying snarled loop. I'm so tired of my own thoughts. So...bored. After awhile, even anxiety and nervousness and fear lose their interest.
I miss New Mexico. I really need to get back there - maybe next summer. (This summer I'll be way too poor to afford a trip.) I keep remembering how it felt to be there, how the landscape, spare and vast and harsh, brought me back to life. I had felt...nothing...for over a year when I took the trip to Taos. No connection to beauty, to other people, to myself. I was the walking dead. Some trauma requires a long recovery; I had forgotten what it felt like to belong in my own skin. And there...there I remembered myself. There, for the first time in a long, long time, I reawakened to joy. Something about New Mexico will always feel like birth, and home.
I've been tired again, lately. Drained. Worried. Self-alienated. Nearly all of my life is in active upheaval or building up to active upheaval, and almost all of it is good, but...some of it is uncertain. And I want rest, and peace.
So I'll go to bed at 9:30 in the meantime. It's not desert mountains or the whisper of a green river valley or water scars in lifeless earth, but I can make the most of what I have.
Which isn't to say that I haven't been writing. I have. Pages and pages and pages of anguished journal entries, until the thoughts all tangle in an amazingly annoying snarled loop. I'm so tired of my own thoughts. So...bored. After awhile, even anxiety and nervousness and fear lose their interest.
I miss New Mexico. I really need to get back there - maybe next summer. (This summer I'll be way too poor to afford a trip.) I keep remembering how it felt to be there, how the landscape, spare and vast and harsh, brought me back to life. I had felt...nothing...for over a year when I took the trip to Taos. No connection to beauty, to other people, to myself. I was the walking dead. Some trauma requires a long recovery; I had forgotten what it felt like to belong in my own skin. And there...there I remembered myself. There, for the first time in a long, long time, I reawakened to joy. Something about New Mexico will always feel like birth, and home.
I've been tired again, lately. Drained. Worried. Self-alienated. Nearly all of my life is in active upheaval or building up to active upheaval, and almost all of it is good, but...some of it is uncertain. And I want rest, and peace.
So I'll go to bed at 9:30 in the meantime. It's not desert mountains or the whisper of a green river valley or water scars in lifeless earth, but I can make the most of what I have.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
weather adaptable
Man, it's hard to break five years of silence. The habit of idly contemplating writing something and then going nahhhhh has some roots.
My emotional state was kind of bad this week. I blame hormones, mostly, plus sleep deprivation. My body is still adjusting to the pill, perhaps, and I never do well when I'm tired. Whatever the reason, everything was all splintery in my head the last couple of days, my perspective like a slivered mirror, so that everything looked distorted and horrible, and I kept cutting myself on my thoughts. So I did what I usually do on Bad Head Days and holed up. The comfort rituals have changed a little over the years; this week it was sushi and Pride and Prejudice instead of [whatever comfort food I used to eat] and Aliens (although I still love to watch Aliens in any mood because oh my god can I be Sigourney Weaver when I grow up?). It helped; today was a little better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better still.
I guess that's the thing with mood disorders. You never get rid of them, never "cure" them; you just learn how to live with them, manage them, cope. Which isn't as defeatist as perhaps it sounds; it's actually kind of empowering. I've been saddled with these things (depression and, less severely, anxiety); they're part of my genetic heritage and my learned experience, and not "curing" them is not failure, just like not "curing" my nearsightedness is not failure. It's not curable. But it's absolutely manageable. Wonderfully so. I've had a lot of therapy to learn better tools for relating to myself and to others; I take medication to maintain a more even baseline; and when the bad days come, as come they will, I know how to handle them. And I know that they'll go away, and everything will get better. Which leaves me free to be myself, and to accept my experiences. Hell yes, that's empowering. I can't control the weather, but I have tools to mitigate the weather's effects: umbrellas, coats, scarves, gloves, boots, etc. So with my mood disorders. The nasty days come, and I can't stop them from coming, and it's not my fault that they happen; but I have a good array of implements to buffer me against the worst parts of them. And mostly those tools are things I do to relax and make myself feel a little better, a little more comfortable.
So the week has felt pretty shitty, but having not had Bad Head Days like this in awhile, getting through them as well as I have averages out to a net positive, in my book. It's been crap, but I'm still okay. And that's pretty profoundly wonderful all by itself.
My emotional state was kind of bad this week. I blame hormones, mostly, plus sleep deprivation. My body is still adjusting to the pill, perhaps, and I never do well when I'm tired. Whatever the reason, everything was all splintery in my head the last couple of days, my perspective like a slivered mirror, so that everything looked distorted and horrible, and I kept cutting myself on my thoughts. So I did what I usually do on Bad Head Days and holed up. The comfort rituals have changed a little over the years; this week it was sushi and Pride and Prejudice instead of [whatever comfort food I used to eat] and Aliens (although I still love to watch Aliens in any mood because oh my god can I be Sigourney Weaver when I grow up?). It helped; today was a little better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better still.
I guess that's the thing with mood disorders. You never get rid of them, never "cure" them; you just learn how to live with them, manage them, cope. Which isn't as defeatist as perhaps it sounds; it's actually kind of empowering. I've been saddled with these things (depression and, less severely, anxiety); they're part of my genetic heritage and my learned experience, and not "curing" them is not failure, just like not "curing" my nearsightedness is not failure. It's not curable. But it's absolutely manageable. Wonderfully so. I've had a lot of therapy to learn better tools for relating to myself and to others; I take medication to maintain a more even baseline; and when the bad days come, as come they will, I know how to handle them. And I know that they'll go away, and everything will get better. Which leaves me free to be myself, and to accept my experiences. Hell yes, that's empowering. I can't control the weather, but I have tools to mitigate the weather's effects: umbrellas, coats, scarves, gloves, boots, etc. So with my mood disorders. The nasty days come, and I can't stop them from coming, and it's not my fault that they happen; but I have a good array of implements to buffer me against the worst parts of them. And mostly those tools are things I do to relax and make myself feel a little better, a little more comfortable.
So the week has felt pretty shitty, but having not had Bad Head Days like this in awhile, getting through them as well as I have averages out to a net positive, in my book. It's been crap, but I'm still okay. And that's pretty profoundly wonderful all by itself.
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
quiet evenings
God, I love not having school for a few weeks.
I had a fairly stressful day at work. Nothing catastrophic or irreparable, just snarly and fairly unpleasant. There were a couple of bright spots: Talking about life for 40 minutes on the phone with a paralegal from another office who is as stressed as I am, while doing other work so I wasn't wrecking my productivity; and receiving the first of a wave of packages from Amazon, the fruits of my annual January baby-it's-cold-outside-so-let's-spend-some-money-on-music-and-sundries spree. The contents of this first package: The first translation into English of the first edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales (available here, in case that news made any of you, my gentle readers, cream your pants the way I did when I found out about it in November); Quartets, a compilation of albums by jazz tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd (why is it called Quartets when it contains five albums?); a Diva cup (because saving money + eco-friendly + menstruation = weird + gross, and curiosity is a curse); and a USB computer mouse (because I love love love my new laptop, but the built-in mouse is as moody as a pimply teenager).
I guess another bright spot is realizing the increasing return to a sense of self-groundedness. The last year has been full of change and upheaval, much of it internal, and all of it unfinished/unresolved and leading up to significant external changes, and like change seems to do, it caught me rather by surprise and threw everything into disarray. So this, following a nice long almost two-week rest at Christmas (taking all that time off was so smart, so wholesome, so restorative), this easing up of anxiety, this settling into a sense of general security, is enormously welcome. Might only be the calm in the eye of the storm, but I'll enjoy it all the more consciously for that.
And there just aren't adequate words to express the simple joy of a quiet evening. I came home from work, reheated leftovers for dinner and ate while watching Archer; bought entirely unnecessary wrist and arm warmers on Amazon (hey, most of them were $5.00/pair, the remainder even less); worked out while watching Cosmos; washed my dishes; got ready for bed; and now I'm sitting in bed listening to Fish Out of Water from Lloyd's mystifyingly-named Quartets (god, this music is beautiful) and sipping tea while Simon reposes next to me with an expression of contentment that only a cat can wear, an expression that eases all the troubles in my mind just to look at it. (Yes, Simon is still around and going strong! I love this cat. Hard to believe he's 13 this year. He still runs around apartment like a kitten.) It's been...it's heartsease, having evenings like this.
Trying not to stay up too late, though; today went well despite its level of stress precisely because I got more sleep last night.
So, not the best of days; but a balm of an evening. These are the times when I know how much I love my life.
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
routine
Wanting to tap out a quick post before I hit the hay. January isn't quite off to the ball-busting, get-up-at-five-work-out-and-journal return to spartan discipline that I had fantasized about, but we're going to try this getting up earlier thing tomorrow. Which means going to be earlier tonight. Because I'm just not 21 anymore, and I can't function energetically on short sleep.
It is lovely to return to quieter, simpler routine though. This past weekend I washed all my dishes and put away all my laundry, and so far I'm successfully doing my dishes and keeping my clothes picked up on a daily basis. It feels...rhythmic. Grounding. I'm remembering all over again how much easier it is to manage my depression when I don't feel like I'm helplessly living in a troll hole. I think the strategy (daily tidiness to manage depression) comes from bifold roots: 1.) Messiness is depressing all by itself. 2.) A huge part of depression is not being able to do anything, is powerlessness, is the lack of energy to deal with the tasks at hand. The more your surroundings fall into decay, the worse you feel, because the task becomes monumentally harder, because there's more to do to clean it up. And you also feel worse because you should be doing better than this, you should be keeping your shit together, and so the self-loathing and self-blame creep in too. But if there's enough time to get some rest and reset the clock by cleaning everything up, it's a lot easier to maintain the tidy system by little daily tasks.
I don't know how well I'll be able to maintain this when school starts back up. And I don't have a lot of weekends to myself these days (though only for a few more months), and the system is rather weekend-dependent. I'm hopeful though. Determined, but without that get-it-together-you-useless-piece-of-shit self-hating that just makes everything worse. If I can't maintain the little daily system, then I can't. But I'm going to try, because I feel so much more relaxed and happy when my living space is clean and airy.
Tonight in an effort to combat the transubstantiation of my elbows into dragon scales I cut a knee sock into a pair of elbow sleeves to wear over slathers of petroleum jelly. We'll see if that has any effect. (I love petroleum jelly, so new uses for it delight me.)
Saturday, January 03, 2015
lazy saturday
As always, I started out this day with grand ambitions -- laundry, housecleaning, sealing the sunroom windows in plastic, paperwork for school -- and so far I have:
- become conscious
- made coffee
- journaled
- watched videos on the Internet
- found more checks so I can pay rent (but haven't written the rent check)
- made tea
So productive. No wonder my housework never gets done.
Right now my tea is steeping, wrapped in a thick yellow kitchen towel, in the big brown English teapot I found for two dollars at the Salvation Army several years ago. I absolutely love this teapot. It has several features that previous teapots of mine have lacked: a small metal tip on the spout that apparently serves to keep it from spilling when poured, a stamp on the bottom that says "made in England," and a built-in internal strainer in front of the spout that means that I can use looseleaf tea and not need a strainer over the cup. Delightful.
I may need to knit a tea cozy one of these winters. Right now the kitchen towel suffices, and I am not allowing myself to knit anything until I finish knitting the infernal blanket I've been making for my sister for the last four years. I designed it myself, and it's going to be beautiful (lots of smoky purples and blues broken up by pewter eyelash yarn: I was going for "ocean" or "sky" but Chris said, when I first pulled it out at his place a month or two ago, "That looks like a Muppet skin!" I hate that he's right), but I should have thought a little harder before using sock yarn and size 7 needles. It's taking forever and I'm so sick of the project I'm tempted to do what my petite grandmother always did and stop with a lap blanket. But no. I will soldier on. Fucking blanket.
Also I'm running out of looseleaf black tea, so the time has almost come for me to return to the seedy Russian grocery store and see if they restocked on Assam. They have great deals on imported tea, and you can get a pound or so for thirteen or fourteen dollars, whereas at Wegmans you'd have to sell your car and half your soul for the same quantity.
Hard to believe it's only Saturday. I awoke from dreams of exploring Incan ruins and geeking out over thoughts of long-dead human beings having once lived what they must have considered mundane lives in those very spaces to the sinking conviction that it was a.) Sunday and b.) noon and I had wasted the remainder of my vacation. So to check my phone and learn that it's still only Saturday was like a little gift from my subconscious. Which is good because I've done nothing worthwhile with my time today. (But it's vacation!)
It doesn't help that it's a dreary, rainy, foggy day. I hate this weather in winter. It should be blizzarding out. Something about that always motivates me to nest. This shit? This shit just makes me want to go right back to bed.
Man, it feels nice to be back on this blog. Like coming home. Funny to think that you can click back for glimpses of me ten years ago now. So much has happened. So much has changed. I'm still not quite sure how to go about documenting all of that, so for the time being I'm electing to relax into enjoying the sheer act of writing again, and rambling on about my own mundane life. The other things will come up when it's time. No point in forcing it; that's part, I think, of what has kept me from writing for so long, the sense of obligation to discuss my various transformations into the person I am now. (Some things haven't changed. I'm still mulish about obligation.)
Well, if I'm not going to do anything else today, I might as well at least get the sunroom windows sealed in plastic. My heating bill and my bank account will thank me. At least this year I don't have to go around caulking the edges of all the windows, since last year's labor has held up so well; it really shouldn't take too long. It's just the jungle of pothos tendrils that will hamper the whole procedure. (Over the last few months of busyness and generalized anxiety -- god, I'm terrified of dating -- I've let them kind of go, so now I have to prune back the vines that are full of dead leaves. Sigh. Poor plants.)
All right. Once more to the breach. Must save on gas.
- become conscious
- made coffee
- journaled
- watched videos on the Internet
- found more checks so I can pay rent (but haven't written the rent check)
- made tea
So productive. No wonder my housework never gets done.
Right now my tea is steeping, wrapped in a thick yellow kitchen towel, in the big brown English teapot I found for two dollars at the Salvation Army several years ago. I absolutely love this teapot. It has several features that previous teapots of mine have lacked: a small metal tip on the spout that apparently serves to keep it from spilling when poured, a stamp on the bottom that says "made in England," and a built-in internal strainer in front of the spout that means that I can use looseleaf tea and not need a strainer over the cup. Delightful.
I may need to knit a tea cozy one of these winters. Right now the kitchen towel suffices, and I am not allowing myself to knit anything until I finish knitting the infernal blanket I've been making for my sister for the last four years. I designed it myself, and it's going to be beautiful (lots of smoky purples and blues broken up by pewter eyelash yarn: I was going for "ocean" or "sky" but Chris said, when I first pulled it out at his place a month or two ago, "That looks like a Muppet skin!" I hate that he's right), but I should have thought a little harder before using sock yarn and size 7 needles. It's taking forever and I'm so sick of the project I'm tempted to do what my petite grandmother always did and stop with a lap blanket. But no. I will soldier on. Fucking blanket.
Also I'm running out of looseleaf black tea, so the time has almost come for me to return to the seedy Russian grocery store and see if they restocked on Assam. They have great deals on imported tea, and you can get a pound or so for thirteen or fourteen dollars, whereas at Wegmans you'd have to sell your car and half your soul for the same quantity.
Hard to believe it's only Saturday. I awoke from dreams of exploring Incan ruins and geeking out over thoughts of long-dead human beings having once lived what they must have considered mundane lives in those very spaces to the sinking conviction that it was a.) Sunday and b.) noon and I had wasted the remainder of my vacation. So to check my phone and learn that it's still only Saturday was like a little gift from my subconscious. Which is good because I've done nothing worthwhile with my time today. (But it's vacation!)
It doesn't help that it's a dreary, rainy, foggy day. I hate this weather in winter. It should be blizzarding out. Something about that always motivates me to nest. This shit? This shit just makes me want to go right back to bed.
Man, it feels nice to be back on this blog. Like coming home. Funny to think that you can click back for glimpses of me ten years ago now. So much has happened. So much has changed. I'm still not quite sure how to go about documenting all of that, so for the time being I'm electing to relax into enjoying the sheer act of writing again, and rambling on about my own mundane life. The other things will come up when it's time. No point in forcing it; that's part, I think, of what has kept me from writing for so long, the sense of obligation to discuss my various transformations into the person I am now. (Some things haven't changed. I'm still mulish about obligation.)
Well, if I'm not going to do anything else today, I might as well at least get the sunroom windows sealed in plastic. My heating bill and my bank account will thank me. At least this year I don't have to go around caulking the edges of all the windows, since last year's labor has held up so well; it really shouldn't take too long. It's just the jungle of pothos tendrils that will hamper the whole procedure. (Over the last few months of busyness and generalized anxiety -- god, I'm terrified of dating -- I've let them kind of go, so now I have to prune back the vines that are full of dead leaves. Sigh. Poor plants.)
All right. Once more to the breach. Must save on gas.
Friday, January 02, 2015
uphill (yes, to the very end)
This article just cropped up on my Facebook feed: "A Guide to Saving Money for People Who Love Spending Money." Oo goody, I thought, clicking, I've got a decent handle on my spending, but maybe I can glean a few more tips!
Narp.
Actually what I took away from the article was, Who lives like this? For real, who needs a tip to reduce their number of manicures to a few a month? Or to stop buying bottled sparkling water and spend $80 on a machine that will do it for you? Or to buy groceries at a grocery store instead of a convenience store?
I hope this article is targeting college students. I hope it's not relevant to 35-year-olds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming any miserly brilliance. For the last fifteen years I've lived under the eye-bulging weight of credit card debt and underemployment in a terrible economy. I know the demoralizing dread of those horrible window envelopes and the panic triggered by strange area codes on the caller ID that always mean calls from creditors. I am no stranger to the phrase INSUFFICIENT FUNDS followed by a $35 bank fee, and I have known, intimately, the sleepless 3 a.m.s frantically calculating mental math tallies that add up to "you can't eat tomorrow." I've paid bills with credit cards because I only had enough money in the bank to cover the minimum payment on the credit card. I know the helpless shame that comes from living at the mercy of debt.
A good part of my troubles stemmed from the fact that no one ever taught me how to manage money. All I really knew was "saving is good," but I never had enough to save, so everything else was more or less fair game. The rest of the trouble is my personality. I'm a creature of comfort, a creature of impulse. My sister and I call me an "Epicurean hedonist." (We haven't come up with anything for her. Spartan ascetic? When we were kids, I was always the one who spent my allowance the second it came into my hands on candy and toy horses, while she hoarded hers in a coffee can under her bed. I used to borrow money from her. We always joked that when we grew up, I'd be the starving artist scratching my stories onto the floorboards of some unheated attic in charcoal while she sent me care packages. It never came to that, but she's definitely the only reason I have a 401-k). Between those two characteristics -- ignorance and lack of discipline -- I had gouged myself pretty badly by the time I turned twenty-seven.
I started getting my shit together six-ish years ago when I had to close out a credit card account to bring down my minimum payments to something I could afford. That was the moment I realized that my system was unsustainable and needed to change. Shortly thereafter, once I returned to intensive therapy to deal with my family dynamics and my crippling depression and learned that change was entirely within my power, I realized that I could do something to make my personal economics different.
Boy was that an uphill climb. And very, very slow. I was living with my parents and making $10 an hour at a part-time job; slowly was the only way I could make any changes at all. I started by making all of my bill payments on time. I went back to school, both for a career change (which I'm still working on) and to help with living expenses. I chipped away at my credit card debt. Eventually I got a better job and could afford to live on my own again, but between the credit card payments and my still-undisciplined spending, I was just barely scraping by.
About a year ago I decided I'd had enough with uncontrolled poverty, so one weekend I sat down with a notebook and a calculator and worked out how to become (credit card) debt free in a year. (There are still the student loans, ohmyfuckinggod there will always be the student loans.) I crafted a ruthlessly stingy budget, and mostly stuck to it. I carved out room in my budget to start saving, and rearranged my shopping habits -- grocery shopping once a week at Aldi, with a monthly trip to Wal-Mart for the other adds-up-to-way-too-much-money stupid necessities like tampons and hair care products and deodorant and cat litter. I generated a budget for each pay period, with groceries and gas and the monthly bills that fell due during that time. I kept that budget in a little notebook that I carried with me everywhere, and consulted it regularly to check off the bills I'd paid and track my bank balances, my spending, and how they measured against my budget. I shopped around for better car-and-renter's-insurance plans, and used my income tax return to pay for the entire year's insurance premium all at once, to free up my monthly spending. I set money aside for car inspection, registration and repairs. I saved for modest vacations. I stopped eating out.
In short, I buckled the hell down.
And it worked. A year later, I have reached my basic goals. I'm still poor, but I'm no longer strapped. I have hauled myself out of the well.
(I remember, when I first decided to make this happen a year ago, excitedly telling my then-best-friend my new financial plan. Her response was wistful, envious and a little dour. I think she would have been flat-out unsupportive, but the previous year when I decided to lose forty pounds and get in better shape and she scoffed at me for it, I bought an exercise machine, downloaded the MyFitnessPal app, revolutionized my exercise and eating habits, lost all the weight, and then kept it off, so she knew that I would be able to achieve this next goal.
Actually, in retrospect, I think that moment, as we sat across from each other at our favorite breakfast cafe and I enthusiastically showed her my new tactics for getting a handle on my money, was another crack in the foundation of our friendship. It's been seven months since we parted ways, but by the time the parting happened, I think it had been coming for awhile. I know that memory is a faulty thing, and it's a human tendency to craft narratives in hindsight to make sense of our experiences, so I don't hold my own perspective as hard-line data; but still it seems to me that she had trouble with each leap forward that I made in my personal growth. It's a loss I'm still processing, since it's not a loss I chose, and I imagine my musings on it will crop up here occasionally.)
And I can with absolute confidence say that is it amazing not to live in fear of INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, and to assume that a strange area code is just a wrong number. I put in a lot of hard work, and the rewards are deeply satisfying, empowering and confidence-building. I love that I can read articles with money-saving tips and realize that I internalized them a long time ago. I know I'm tooting my own horn here, and to those who are reading this who found insight in the above-linked article that I'm heaping with scorn, I'm sorry. I guess I grew up knowing that convenience stores are money pits and that getting Starbucks is a black hole in your bank account (huh! I guess I learned a few things about frugality from my upbringing after all; we didn't have any money growing up, so my mother shopped very very thriftily), but if you didn't know that, holy shit yes, it's true. Start shopping at Aldi and stop buying Starbucks. Also pack your lunch. (I basically don't eat during the day, so packing my lunch is as easy as keeping a bag of almonds at work.) You can totally do it. And once you've done it, you'll feel awesome about having figured your shit out for yourself. And then you can turn into an asshole braggadocio like me.
God I love being in my thirties.
Narp.
Actually what I took away from the article was, Who lives like this? For real, who needs a tip to reduce their number of manicures to a few a month? Or to stop buying bottled sparkling water and spend $80 on a machine that will do it for you? Or to buy groceries at a grocery store instead of a convenience store?
I hope this article is targeting college students. I hope it's not relevant to 35-year-olds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming any miserly brilliance. For the last fifteen years I've lived under the eye-bulging weight of credit card debt and underemployment in a terrible economy. I know the demoralizing dread of those horrible window envelopes and the panic triggered by strange area codes on the caller ID that always mean calls from creditors. I am no stranger to the phrase INSUFFICIENT FUNDS followed by a $35 bank fee, and I have known, intimately, the sleepless 3 a.m.s frantically calculating mental math tallies that add up to "you can't eat tomorrow." I've paid bills with credit cards because I only had enough money in the bank to cover the minimum payment on the credit card. I know the helpless shame that comes from living at the mercy of debt.
A good part of my troubles stemmed from the fact that no one ever taught me how to manage money. All I really knew was "saving is good," but I never had enough to save, so everything else was more or less fair game. The rest of the trouble is my personality. I'm a creature of comfort, a creature of impulse. My sister and I call me an "Epicurean hedonist." (We haven't come up with anything for her. Spartan ascetic? When we were kids, I was always the one who spent my allowance the second it came into my hands on candy and toy horses, while she hoarded hers in a coffee can under her bed. I used to borrow money from her. We always joked that when we grew up, I'd be the starving artist scratching my stories onto the floorboards of some unheated attic in charcoal while she sent me care packages. It never came to that, but she's definitely the only reason I have a 401-k). Between those two characteristics -- ignorance and lack of discipline -- I had gouged myself pretty badly by the time I turned twenty-seven.
I started getting my shit together six-ish years ago when I had to close out a credit card account to bring down my minimum payments to something I could afford. That was the moment I realized that my system was unsustainable and needed to change. Shortly thereafter, once I returned to intensive therapy to deal with my family dynamics and my crippling depression and learned that change was entirely within my power, I realized that I could do something to make my personal economics different.
Boy was that an uphill climb. And very, very slow. I was living with my parents and making $10 an hour at a part-time job; slowly was the only way I could make any changes at all. I started by making all of my bill payments on time. I went back to school, both for a career change (which I'm still working on) and to help with living expenses. I chipped away at my credit card debt. Eventually I got a better job and could afford to live on my own again, but between the credit card payments and my still-undisciplined spending, I was just barely scraping by.
About a year ago I decided I'd had enough with uncontrolled poverty, so one weekend I sat down with a notebook and a calculator and worked out how to become (credit card) debt free in a year. (There are still the student loans, ohmyfuckinggod there will always be the student loans.) I crafted a ruthlessly stingy budget, and mostly stuck to it. I carved out room in my budget to start saving, and rearranged my shopping habits -- grocery shopping once a week at Aldi, with a monthly trip to Wal-Mart for the other adds-up-to-way-too-much-money stupid necessities like tampons and hair care products and deodorant and cat litter. I generated a budget for each pay period, with groceries and gas and the monthly bills that fell due during that time. I kept that budget in a little notebook that I carried with me everywhere, and consulted it regularly to check off the bills I'd paid and track my bank balances, my spending, and how they measured against my budget. I shopped around for better car-and-renter's-insurance plans, and used my income tax return to pay for the entire year's insurance premium all at once, to free up my monthly spending. I set money aside for car inspection, registration and repairs. I saved for modest vacations. I stopped eating out.
In short, I buckled the hell down.
And it worked. A year later, I have reached my basic goals. I'm still poor, but I'm no longer strapped. I have hauled myself out of the well.
(I remember, when I first decided to make this happen a year ago, excitedly telling my then-best-friend my new financial plan. Her response was wistful, envious and a little dour. I think she would have been flat-out unsupportive, but the previous year when I decided to lose forty pounds and get in better shape and she scoffed at me for it, I bought an exercise machine, downloaded the MyFitnessPal app, revolutionized my exercise and eating habits, lost all the weight, and then kept it off, so she knew that I would be able to achieve this next goal.
Actually, in retrospect, I think that moment, as we sat across from each other at our favorite breakfast cafe and I enthusiastically showed her my new tactics for getting a handle on my money, was another crack in the foundation of our friendship. It's been seven months since we parted ways, but by the time the parting happened, I think it had been coming for awhile. I know that memory is a faulty thing, and it's a human tendency to craft narratives in hindsight to make sense of our experiences, so I don't hold my own perspective as hard-line data; but still it seems to me that she had trouble with each leap forward that I made in my personal growth. It's a loss I'm still processing, since it's not a loss I chose, and I imagine my musings on it will crop up here occasionally.)
And I can with absolute confidence say that is it amazing not to live in fear of INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, and to assume that a strange area code is just a wrong number. I put in a lot of hard work, and the rewards are deeply satisfying, empowering and confidence-building. I love that I can read articles with money-saving tips and realize that I internalized them a long time ago. I know I'm tooting my own horn here, and to those who are reading this who found insight in the above-linked article that I'm heaping with scorn, I'm sorry. I guess I grew up knowing that convenience stores are money pits and that getting Starbucks is a black hole in your bank account (huh! I guess I learned a few things about frugality from my upbringing after all; we didn't have any money growing up, so my mother shopped very very thriftily), but if you didn't know that, holy shit yes, it's true. Start shopping at Aldi and stop buying Starbucks. Also pack your lunch. (I basically don't eat during the day, so packing my lunch is as easy as keeping a bag of almonds at work.) You can totally do it. And once you've done it, you'll feel awesome about having figured your shit out for yourself. And then you can turn into an asshole braggadocio like me.
God I love being in my thirties.
hello, january
Well, I didn't put on any holiday weight until the last three days. But I sure made up for lost time.
I feel a profound sense of relief to have arrived at the asceticism of January. I don't go back to work until Monday, so the next few days still technically fall under "vacation," but they also count as post-holiday, and I eagerly anticipate the post-holiday slimdown - getting up early once again to work out in the mornings (because I didn't get my Christmas tree until the weekend before Christmas, I'm leaving it up a little longer so I can work out by its warm twinkly lights, which somehow make being awake in the dark of a winter morning a comforting experience); eating very little during the day and savoring a big homey dinner (I've been thinking longingly of broiled salmon fillets and potatoes in my delicious all-the-spices marinade); drinking alcohol only on the weekends; and generally sitting around the house wrapped in afghans and reverting to winter hermitude. It's not just a goal to take off the holiday weight; it's an eagerness to return to the life of sparser eating and regular exercise that I've cultivated over the last couple of years. I let my fitness routine lapse over the last month because I've been busy, exhausted and completely unmotivated, and also because I think that it's perfectly healthy to let things slide into revelry periodically; and I had a wonderful holiday season, and now I'm excited for life to return to normalcy.
I do love the holidays. This year's were fun. Chris came home for a whole week, and we divided the time pretty equally among his family, my family, and just the two of us. I took the entire time off work from Christmas Eve through January 4th, and got to spend a lot of time relaxing on my own, and enjoying time with Chris. Maintaining a relationship over distance constitutes a lot of work, obviously, and having him in the same city was a wonderful treat.
So now I have three whole days all to myself before heading back to work, and so far I have spent it paying bills and looking for iPhones on eBay. The bill paying is going rather well, all things told. It's nice to have put so much effort into getting my shit together over the last year. I'm still poor but not quite as desperate. There's a lovely security to that.
I also have one more semester to go before acquiring my master's degree in education, and a few things to get done before the semester starts. Apparently taking a two-year hiatus means you have to renew all your PA clearances: fun. I'll have to dig out my printer and get it connected to the wi-fi, and take a day next week to do some running around. Also time to put together my portfolio so I can start looking for teaching jobs.
But meantime it's a gorgeous cold and snowy afternoon, there is tea to be made, a kitty to cuddle, and a house to potter about cleaning. An excellent Friday all in all.
I feel a profound sense of relief to have arrived at the asceticism of January. I don't go back to work until Monday, so the next few days still technically fall under "vacation," but they also count as post-holiday, and I eagerly anticipate the post-holiday slimdown - getting up early once again to work out in the mornings (because I didn't get my Christmas tree until the weekend before Christmas, I'm leaving it up a little longer so I can work out by its warm twinkly lights, which somehow make being awake in the dark of a winter morning a comforting experience); eating very little during the day and savoring a big homey dinner (I've been thinking longingly of broiled salmon fillets and potatoes in my delicious all-the-spices marinade); drinking alcohol only on the weekends; and generally sitting around the house wrapped in afghans and reverting to winter hermitude. It's not just a goal to take off the holiday weight; it's an eagerness to return to the life of sparser eating and regular exercise that I've cultivated over the last couple of years. I let my fitness routine lapse over the last month because I've been busy, exhausted and completely unmotivated, and also because I think that it's perfectly healthy to let things slide into revelry periodically; and I had a wonderful holiday season, and now I'm excited for life to return to normalcy.
I do love the holidays. This year's were fun. Chris came home for a whole week, and we divided the time pretty equally among his family, my family, and just the two of us. I took the entire time off work from Christmas Eve through January 4th, and got to spend a lot of time relaxing on my own, and enjoying time with Chris. Maintaining a relationship over distance constitutes a lot of work, obviously, and having him in the same city was a wonderful treat.
So now I have three whole days all to myself before heading back to work, and so far I have spent it paying bills and looking for iPhones on eBay. The bill paying is going rather well, all things told. It's nice to have put so much effort into getting my shit together over the last year. I'm still poor but not quite as desperate. There's a lovely security to that.
I also have one more semester to go before acquiring my master's degree in education, and a few things to get done before the semester starts. Apparently taking a two-year hiatus means you have to renew all your PA clearances: fun. I'll have to dig out my printer and get it connected to the wi-fi, and take a day next week to do some running around. Also time to put together my portfolio so I can start looking for teaching jobs.
But meantime it's a gorgeous cold and snowy afternoon, there is tea to be made, a kitty to cuddle, and a house to potter about cleaning. An excellent Friday all in all.
Monday, December 29, 2014
inadequacies in bas (boy) relief
So it turns out that, in all my long years of solitude, a few things with which I have always been perfectly content are actually subpar, which apparently you only notice in the context of dating someone. (Crap, that sounds like backdoor bragging doesn't it?) I've always, for example, been quite fond of my couch. I didn't even have a real couch until I moved back to Erie from South Bend; for the first half-decade of my adulthood I made do with a brown-orange-and-white floral 1970s relic loveseat covered in a beige sheet, leftover from my college dorm room days. But upon returning home, I was given possession of my grandmother's couch. As a sofabed, it weighs approximately as much as a piano, and its blue and gray upholstery matches nothing but faded jeans, but swathed in a stellar green slipcover it looks perfectly respectable, and is, I always fancied, quite comfortable.
Enter a boyfriend.
I invited Chris over a few weeks ago for dinner and movies. Dinner went easily enough, sitting side by side on the couch bent over our plates on the coffee table. But then we pushed the dishes aside and went about settling in for movie-watching cuddling. After twenty uncomfortable minutes of fidgeting and shifting like unjointed tinker toys, I faced an uncomfortable truth: My couch actually sucks. Narrow, hard and unyielding as a slab of sidewalk, it makes cuddling practically impossible in any arrangement.
Also my TV is way too small. It's maybe 19", and until you spend a lot of time with someone whose TV is 42" (now 50"), you don't realize just how postage-stamp-sized that is. It never bothered me all that much, but now there's that awkwardness that creeps in when I invite Chris over: "Heyyyy, wanna come over...and...watch....um...movies?" and I imagine I can practically hear him making mental comparisons with prison cells and Super 8 motel rooms.
Fortunately he comes over anyway. I love my apartment, and while I scratched my finances into better shape this year, I still don't have enough for a new couch or TV. Which is a shame, because I try to avoid the wall of TVs every time I go to the superstore, but while Christmas shopping I discovered the utter, stunning, intelligence-draining beauty of 4K Ultra HD (thankfully there's no reason to buy one yet since there isn't a ton of Ultra HD content available).
Some day, Gussie Mouseheimer. Someday...
In the meantime, I have a spartan couch and television screen. Because at thirty-three I am still poor and roughing it and almost all of my things are secondhand. (And my couch and television were both free.)
Enter a boyfriend.
I invited Chris over a few weeks ago for dinner and movies. Dinner went easily enough, sitting side by side on the couch bent over our plates on the coffee table. But then we pushed the dishes aside and went about settling in for movie-watching cuddling. After twenty uncomfortable minutes of fidgeting and shifting like unjointed tinker toys, I faced an uncomfortable truth: My couch actually sucks. Narrow, hard and unyielding as a slab of sidewalk, it makes cuddling practically impossible in any arrangement.
Also my TV is way too small. It's maybe 19", and until you spend a lot of time with someone whose TV is 42" (now 50"), you don't realize just how postage-stamp-sized that is. It never bothered me all that much, but now there's that awkwardness that creeps in when I invite Chris over: "Heyyyy, wanna come over...and...watch....um...movies?" and I imagine I can practically hear him making mental comparisons with prison cells and Super 8 motel rooms.
Fortunately he comes over anyway. I love my apartment, and while I scratched my finances into better shape this year, I still don't have enough for a new couch or TV. Which is a shame, because I try to avoid the wall of TVs every time I go to the superstore, but while Christmas shopping I discovered the utter, stunning, intelligence-draining beauty of 4K Ultra HD (thankfully there's no reason to buy one yet since there isn't a ton of Ultra HD content available).
Some day, Gussie Mouseheimer. Someday...
In the meantime, I have a spartan couch and television screen. Because at thirty-three I am still poor and roughing it and almost all of my things are secondhand. (And my couch and television were both free.)
reboot
Over Christmas I found myself hunting back through the archives of this, my (almost) first blog (Remember Xanga, anyone? Oh god. I'm old now), seeking out my original sonnet composed in honor of William Had a Headache Day. It took a little maneuvering as I'd never really used the mobile version of Blogger, which led me to perusing past quite a number of my old posts. It made me nostalgic. Once upon a time, I was a writer. Once upon a time, I recorded the flotsam and jetsam of my whimsical, funny little life and tossed it up on the internet like so much debris on a beach. Once upon a time, I loved doing it.
It's been a long, long time since I've written anything beyond private, handwritten journal entries. I stopped calling myself a writer this past year because writing is something you have to do to call yourself a writer. I've missed it terribly, but the drive, the compulsion to the craft has been just...gone. Sure, writing is mostly hard work à la the tired adage about 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, but that sliver of inspiration matters. The brainstem comprises a small part of the brain, but without it, all the functionality of the cerebrum counts for exactly jack shit.* So here I've been, for the last six years, with everything working in my creative brain but the part that keeps the whole thing going.
I don't know why it stopped working. I have hypotheses but that's all they are and I can't test them. I guess in the end it doesn't matter why, all that much; the end result is what really counts, and the end result has been no writing. I've tried jump starting it several times to no effect.
But goddammit, I want to write again. At least to keep track of the funny things that happen to me, and the interesting people I meet, and the thoughts that flit across my brain.
I took this blog off the public spaces for several reasons, but those reasons are gone now. Well, most of them. The one that remains is the vast difference between the girl who used to write here, and the girl who is now coming back to it. A lot has changed in six years, and a lot of that change occurred extremely rapidly. (One of my hypotheses as to why I stopped writing is that I just haven't been able to keep up with my own quantum leaps - how do you write about becoming what you've become when you're not entirely sure how you became it?) I don't believe most of the things I used to believe. My entire worldview has shifted. And...I'm different, too. Not in the fundamentals; personality is, from what I understand, somewhere between fixed and fluid, so my basic temperament is what it always was. I'm still me. Just, maybe, more so. And I don't know how to explain it. I don't know how to write or talk about it. Where I was and where I am are worlds, light years, dimensions apart, and I don't even know how to trace the journey.
But maybe that's exactly why I need to come back to where I left off. Maybe it's time to bring the old blog back again. It's messy (because it was started in the days before Blogger had labels, oh god, so many posts without labels; and when I did start using labels I created and maintained them with all the planning of a five-year-old messing about with Risk). Parts of it are probably embarrassing (I haven't read any of my old writing since I stopped writing it). There are old hurts and hopes and fears and dreams, realized and unrealized, woven throughout all these old posts that will probably make me acutely ashamed, and a little bit sad. But that's growing, isn't it? And I've learned to look back on the old me with compassion. Tying the old and the new together might be interesting.
Also, if any of my old readers are still floating around out there, and this old blog blips back on a few people's radar, that's a readership, and that's one of the reasons a person writes. So, to any out there who might find their way back - hello! Welcome back! Give me a shout, if you like, to encourage me to take my work back up and keep with it.
I'd like to bring blogging back into my life in 2015. I'm not much for New Year's resolutions per se, because they almost never work, but I have gotten pretty good at reaching goals, and this is a goal that I've been wanting to tackle for awhile. I used to have a lot of fun recording the weird little things from my weird little life - creating a scrapbook of words to look back on and think, yes, this is my life, this is my story. Over the past six years I've had all these grand ambitions with my writing (I'm going to blog about atheism! I'm going to blog about skepticism! I'm going to blog for a cause!) but it always just falls apart because a.) I'm interested in too many things to stick to one subject for very long and b.) I really just like talking about myself.
So I'm going to try to make personal narrative writing a regular feature in my life once again. I'm happy to be airing out my original blog, returning, as it were, to my roots. Dunno if that'll make a difference in the motivation to keep writing, but it feels good to bring it back. (Hey, Lazarus. How's it hanging? The world's all different now, you're going to love it.)
So! Happy New Year to the ether and those who might read my little scratchings on its walls. I'm going to see about doing a reboot here, and taking up my digital pen again. There's too much shit crammed into my head to let it just sit there anymore. And I miss having a voice, however little and unfocused.
It feels tentatively, cautiously good to be back.
_______________________________________________
* Evidently I forgot everything I ever learned in twelfth grade human biology, because I thought that the cerebellum was in charge of things like heartbeat and respiration, which reminded me of that one person's case of being born without a cerebellum. But she still has a brainstem. Derp. Anyway, good brushup for me.
It's been a long, long time since I've written anything beyond private, handwritten journal entries. I stopped calling myself a writer this past year because writing is something you have to do to call yourself a writer. I've missed it terribly, but the drive, the compulsion to the craft has been just...gone. Sure, writing is mostly hard work à la the tired adage about 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, but that sliver of inspiration matters. The brainstem comprises a small part of the brain, but without it, all the functionality of the cerebrum counts for exactly jack shit.* So here I've been, for the last six years, with everything working in my creative brain but the part that keeps the whole thing going.
I don't know why it stopped working. I have hypotheses but that's all they are and I can't test them. I guess in the end it doesn't matter why, all that much; the end result is what really counts, and the end result has been no writing. I've tried jump starting it several times to no effect.
But goddammit, I want to write again. At least to keep track of the funny things that happen to me, and the interesting people I meet, and the thoughts that flit across my brain.
I took this blog off the public spaces for several reasons, but those reasons are gone now. Well, most of them. The one that remains is the vast difference between the girl who used to write here, and the girl who is now coming back to it. A lot has changed in six years, and a lot of that change occurred extremely rapidly. (One of my hypotheses as to why I stopped writing is that I just haven't been able to keep up with my own quantum leaps - how do you write about becoming what you've become when you're not entirely sure how you became it?) I don't believe most of the things I used to believe. My entire worldview has shifted. And...I'm different, too. Not in the fundamentals; personality is, from what I understand, somewhere between fixed and fluid, so my basic temperament is what it always was. I'm still me. Just, maybe, more so. And I don't know how to explain it. I don't know how to write or talk about it. Where I was and where I am are worlds, light years, dimensions apart, and I don't even know how to trace the journey.
But maybe that's exactly why I need to come back to where I left off. Maybe it's time to bring the old blog back again. It's messy (because it was started in the days before Blogger had labels, oh god, so many posts without labels; and when I did start using labels I created and maintained them with all the planning of a five-year-old messing about with Risk). Parts of it are probably embarrassing (I haven't read any of my old writing since I stopped writing it). There are old hurts and hopes and fears and dreams, realized and unrealized, woven throughout all these old posts that will probably make me acutely ashamed, and a little bit sad. But that's growing, isn't it? And I've learned to look back on the old me with compassion. Tying the old and the new together might be interesting.
Also, if any of my old readers are still floating around out there, and this old blog blips back on a few people's radar, that's a readership, and that's one of the reasons a person writes. So, to any out there who might find their way back - hello! Welcome back! Give me a shout, if you like, to encourage me to take my work back up and keep with it.
I'd like to bring blogging back into my life in 2015. I'm not much for New Year's resolutions per se, because they almost never work, but I have gotten pretty good at reaching goals, and this is a goal that I've been wanting to tackle for awhile. I used to have a lot of fun recording the weird little things from my weird little life - creating a scrapbook of words to look back on and think, yes, this is my life, this is my story. Over the past six years I've had all these grand ambitions with my writing (I'm going to blog about atheism! I'm going to blog about skepticism! I'm going to blog for a cause!) but it always just falls apart because a.) I'm interested in too many things to stick to one subject for very long and b.) I really just like talking about myself.
So I'm going to try to make personal narrative writing a regular feature in my life once again. I'm happy to be airing out my original blog, returning, as it were, to my roots. Dunno if that'll make a difference in the motivation to keep writing, but it feels good to bring it back. (Hey, Lazarus. How's it hanging? The world's all different now, you're going to love it.)
So! Happy New Year to the ether and those who might read my little scratchings on its walls. I'm going to see about doing a reboot here, and taking up my digital pen again. There's too much shit crammed into my head to let it just sit there anymore. And I miss having a voice, however little and unfocused.
It feels tentatively, cautiously good to be back.
_______________________________________________
* Evidently I forgot everything I ever learned in twelfth grade human biology, because I thought that the cerebellum was in charge of things like heartbeat and respiration, which reminded me of that one person's case of being born without a cerebellum. But she still has a brainstem. Derp. Anyway, good brushup for me.
Friday, October 02, 2009
he says it perfectly
Ahead of the Curve
'Nother perfect day
They keep pilin' up
I got happiness
That I can maintain, some beginner's luck
I had shoes to fill
Walkin' barefoot now
Can't tell North from South
But no split hair's gonna get me down
I'm stayin' above the flat-line
I'm ahead of the curve
Take a piece of the sunshine with me
on a red-eye flight to another world
It isn't any trouble
If you wanna come with me
I know it's out of the question, honey,
But I sure could use the company
And a place to be
Now the sky is pink
Rooftop swimming pool
I'm not carefree, no,
I'm free to care, I just never do
All the bags are checked
And the reasons why
Yesterday lingers on
That's the piece you keep when you say goodbye
You can get what you want now
Knock it out of the park
Bury it by the river, easy,
There's a search party but it's getting dark
I won't hold you to nothin'
I want to make that plain
Probably end up a stranger and crazy
But I'm still hoping there's another way
And a place to stay
What a scene that's got you sentimental
When the night comes
When the knot comes loose
All the things you put up on your mantle
What a shame
What a shame
It's old news
I'm stayin' above the flat-line
I'm ahead of the curve
Take a piece of the sunshine with me
on an all-night drive to another world
You can get what you want now
Knock it out of the park
Probably end up a drifter and lonely
But I'm still hoping for a change of heart
And a place to start
~Conor Oberst, et al., "Ahead of the Curve," from Monsters of Folk
'Nother perfect day
They keep pilin' up
I got happiness
That I can maintain, some beginner's luck
I had shoes to fill
Walkin' barefoot now
Can't tell North from South
But no split hair's gonna get me down
I'm stayin' above the flat-line
I'm ahead of the curve
Take a piece of the sunshine with me
on a red-eye flight to another world
It isn't any trouble
If you wanna come with me
I know it's out of the question, honey,
But I sure could use the company
And a place to be
Now the sky is pink
Rooftop swimming pool
I'm not carefree, no,
I'm free to care, I just never do
All the bags are checked
And the reasons why
Yesterday lingers on
That's the piece you keep when you say goodbye
You can get what you want now
Knock it out of the park
Bury it by the river, easy,
There's a search party but it's getting dark
I won't hold you to nothin'
I want to make that plain
Probably end up a stranger and crazy
But I'm still hoping there's another way
And a place to stay
What a scene that's got you sentimental
When the night comes
When the knot comes loose
All the things you put up on your mantle
What a shame
What a shame
It's old news
I'm stayin' above the flat-line
I'm ahead of the curve
Take a piece of the sunshine with me
on an all-night drive to another world
You can get what you want now
Knock it out of the park
Probably end up a drifter and lonely
But I'm still hoping for a change of heart
And a place to start
~Conor Oberst, et al., "Ahead of the Curve," from Monsters of Folk
Monday, September 21, 2009
New Deal
Just in case there’s anyone still checking this…
Here’s what’s going on.
The future of Coffee Spoons is nebulous. I’ve been spending some time sorting through a lot of aspects of my life, including writing, and it became quite clear that I needed to take a new direction with the craft.
I know that I have never met a lot of you, and I know that most of you have been readers for some time, and I deeply appreciate your long and loyal readership. I want to keep you, and I’m fine with continued anonymity. I’ve been thinking and thinking about how to do this, and this is what I came up with:
If you want to remain informed of my writing – whether I start a new blog, or try something altogether different – please leave a comment with your email address. I accept anonymous comments on my blog, so you don’t need to tell me your name or anything about you. (To protect yourselves from spam bots, it’s best to leave your email address in this format: myemailaddress at email dot com.) For security and privacy purposes, I will delete your comment as soon as I have recorded your email address (which won’t be long after you leave the comment; I check my blog frequently). I will send you an email letting you know what I’m up to and how you can keep tracking my writing.
I don’t mean to sound egotistical; I’m not claiming any spots in the Best Writers of the World Hall of Fame (yet); but if you still want to read my bits of thoughts, my scattered rantings and my oddball stories, I would love to keep you. And if you’re still checking here after a month of my silence, you should know that I’m extremely grateful.
Here’s what’s going on.
The future of Coffee Spoons is nebulous. I’ve been spending some time sorting through a lot of aspects of my life, including writing, and it became quite clear that I needed to take a new direction with the craft.
I know that I have never met a lot of you, and I know that most of you have been readers for some time, and I deeply appreciate your long and loyal readership. I want to keep you, and I’m fine with continued anonymity. I’ve been thinking and thinking about how to do this, and this is what I came up with:
If you want to remain informed of my writing – whether I start a new blog, or try something altogether different – please leave a comment with your email address. I accept anonymous comments on my blog, so you don’t need to tell me your name or anything about you. (To protect yourselves from spam bots, it’s best to leave your email address in this format: myemailaddress at email dot com.) For security and privacy purposes, I will delete your comment as soon as I have recorded your email address (which won’t be long after you leave the comment; I check my blog frequently). I will send you an email letting you know what I’m up to and how you can keep tracking my writing.
I don’t mean to sound egotistical; I’m not claiming any spots in the Best Writers of the World Hall of Fame (yet); but if you still want to read my bits of thoughts, my scattered rantings and my oddball stories, I would love to keep you. And if you’re still checking here after a month of my silence, you should know that I’m extremely grateful.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
hey nonny nonny
“So we’re floating in the pool, and my uncle said, ‘John, you can plan your whole life out, and it won’t turn out the way you planned. Look at me. I planned out everything perfectly, and it still wound up like shit. So I say, As long as you can make your monthly payments, go out and have fun.’ And all of his sons knocked up girls in high school and are living at home, and one of them just got out of prison.”
I smiled, cradling the phone to my ear and chugging another half-glass of water in the heat as John told me about his weekend in Pittsburgh. I like his uncle. I have fuzzy memories of visiting his house a few years ago, and when I learned that he’s a retired cop, I sat with him awhile swapping yarns of my dad’s with his own tales of life on patrol.
And John’s story got me thinking. I had Shakespeare’s timeless advice – “converting all your sounds of woe / into hey, nonny, nonny!” – looping through my head already, and this morning, on Over the Rhine’s The Trumpet Child album, Karin Bergquist sang gaily, “I can’t be bothered / I’m gonna roll.”
All of those thoughts converged as I toweled my hair. My mind started pulling from other sources, and finally selected a line from Blood and Chocolate (yes, I’m eclectically inspired), when Aiden, encouraging Vivian to live her life according to her own choice and not her family’s expectations, tells her, “You only get one life.”
We only get one. I only get one. And yes, there are a lot of things I want to do with it. Some kind of greatness has always called to me, from as far back as I can remember (and that’s a long way; my consciousness seems to have kicked in early), and I look forward to it with purpose and eagerness; in my strange ways I’ve been pursuing it all my life.
But over the last couple of years I’ve started to lose that single-mindedness, and listening to Josh Ritter’s “For the Dogs or Whoever” on the way home from work yesterday, having been reminded of it in a conversation with Hillori, jolted some of it back to me:
Joan never cared about the in-betweens
Combed her hair with a blade, did the Maid of Orleans.
Said, “Christ walked on water, we can wade to the war
You don’t need to tell me who the fire is for
Oh, bring me a love that can sweeten the sword
The boat that can love the rocks or the shore
The love of an iceberg reaching out for the wreck:
Can you love me like the crosses love the nape of the neck?”
That song is about driven women. Women called to something great, whose eyes are always drawn outward and upward, who go to meet their fates aggressively, single-mindedly.
Hill and I talked about how we have always known we are one of those women. The particulars might still be cloudy, but we know we're meant for more than a two-car garage and a picket fence, although we want those too, in whatever form they come. My difficulty has lain in reconciling the future then with the present now. And honestly, it’s hard not to feel stuck in the present when the future is calling so insistently. But I have always believed that everything is connected, and so, however disparate my now feels from my then, I can’t get to my then without going through my now.
It was easier when I was sort of floating on the breeze like a dandelion seed, the last five years in the Midwest. I had no clue what my future held long-term, and so I could more or less relax in the easygoingness of the present. As long as I could pay my bills, I had fun. (Once upon a time I did live Uncle J’s philosophy.) But now that my plans have been generally shot to shit and I still feel no closer to that elusive destiny that haunts my every momentary awareness, on top of the weight of depression, I’ve been pretty miserable.
But all of it has a purpose. Coming back home has a purpose. Making almost no money has a purpose (at least I have a job). Bouncing around from no-account job to no-account job has a purpose. And I chose my purpose.
It’s not going to suddenly turn everything into daffodils and sunshine. Some days I’m still going to be dragged under by depression; but I’ve returned to the point where I can fight back, and today my thoughts toward it are, So maybe some days the only thing I can enjoy is the sunset. Well then, I’m going to enjoy the hell out of that sunset. It’s like what Harry thought after one of his more amazing conversations with Dumbledore: It’s the difference between being dragged into the ring and walking into it with your head held high. And that’s a huge difference.
In the end it all boils down to two quotable phrases: “If you love something, give it away,” as Conor points out; and, infinitely better,
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. (2 Corinthians 4:9-12)
Death and life simultaneously at work. And I don't have any control over a lot of it, but I can make the call as to what I do with it. I wrote to Meg this morning, in discussing how I still don’t have many of the things I want, and still haven’t reached many of the places I want, “I don't have to be like, Oh goody, I got an onion when what I really wanted was a steak, hooray! but I can say, Okay, I've got an onion, what can I find to go with that?”
(And if all else fails, I can trick other people into helping me make Stone Soup.)
I might not always be happy, but I’m working toward content. I’m reading fiction again, writing again, getting along with my family, eating lunch with MD and her husband today, and soon I’m going to try my hand at turning this town on its head.
Somehow all of that will lead me where I need to go. And since the road curves away out of sight behind a ridge, instead of craning my neck with frustration at not being able to see over that ridge, I might as well take in the open sky and find pleasure in the road at my feet.
Yep. Tomorrow might be stormy and crappy again, but today is fine, and I'm gonna roll.
I smiled, cradling the phone to my ear and chugging another half-glass of water in the heat as John told me about his weekend in Pittsburgh. I like his uncle. I have fuzzy memories of visiting his house a few years ago, and when I learned that he’s a retired cop, I sat with him awhile swapping yarns of my dad’s with his own tales of life on patrol.
And John’s story got me thinking. I had Shakespeare’s timeless advice – “converting all your sounds of woe / into hey, nonny, nonny!” – looping through my head already, and this morning, on Over the Rhine’s The Trumpet Child album, Karin Bergquist sang gaily, “I can’t be bothered / I’m gonna roll.”
All of those thoughts converged as I toweled my hair. My mind started pulling from other sources, and finally selected a line from Blood and Chocolate (yes, I’m eclectically inspired), when Aiden, encouraging Vivian to live her life according to her own choice and not her family’s expectations, tells her, “You only get one life.”
We only get one. I only get one. And yes, there are a lot of things I want to do with it. Some kind of greatness has always called to me, from as far back as I can remember (and that’s a long way; my consciousness seems to have kicked in early), and I look forward to it with purpose and eagerness; in my strange ways I’ve been pursuing it all my life.
But over the last couple of years I’ve started to lose that single-mindedness, and listening to Josh Ritter’s “For the Dogs or Whoever” on the way home from work yesterday, having been reminded of it in a conversation with Hillori, jolted some of it back to me:
Joan never cared about the in-betweens
Combed her hair with a blade, did the Maid of Orleans.
Said, “Christ walked on water, we can wade to the war
You don’t need to tell me who the fire is for
Oh, bring me a love that can sweeten the sword
The boat that can love the rocks or the shore
The love of an iceberg reaching out for the wreck:
Can you love me like the crosses love the nape of the neck?”
That song is about driven women. Women called to something great, whose eyes are always drawn outward and upward, who go to meet their fates aggressively, single-mindedly.
Hill and I talked about how we have always known we are one of those women. The particulars might still be cloudy, but we know we're meant for more than a two-car garage and a picket fence, although we want those too, in whatever form they come. My difficulty has lain in reconciling the future then with the present now. And honestly, it’s hard not to feel stuck in the present when the future is calling so insistently. But I have always believed that everything is connected, and so, however disparate my now feels from my then, I can’t get to my then without going through my now.
It was easier when I was sort of floating on the breeze like a dandelion seed, the last five years in the Midwest. I had no clue what my future held long-term, and so I could more or less relax in the easygoingness of the present. As long as I could pay my bills, I had fun. (Once upon a time I did live Uncle J’s philosophy.) But now that my plans have been generally shot to shit and I still feel no closer to that elusive destiny that haunts my every momentary awareness, on top of the weight of depression, I’ve been pretty miserable.
But all of it has a purpose. Coming back home has a purpose. Making almost no money has a purpose (at least I have a job). Bouncing around from no-account job to no-account job has a purpose. And I chose my purpose.
It’s not going to suddenly turn everything into daffodils and sunshine. Some days I’m still going to be dragged under by depression; but I’ve returned to the point where I can fight back, and today my thoughts toward it are, So maybe some days the only thing I can enjoy is the sunset. Well then, I’m going to enjoy the hell out of that sunset. It’s like what Harry thought after one of his more amazing conversations with Dumbledore: It’s the difference between being dragged into the ring and walking into it with your head held high. And that’s a huge difference.
In the end it all boils down to two quotable phrases: “If you love something, give it away,” as Conor points out; and, infinitely better,
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. (2 Corinthians 4:9-12)
Death and life simultaneously at work. And I don't have any control over a lot of it, but I can make the call as to what I do with it. I wrote to Meg this morning, in discussing how I still don’t have many of the things I want, and still haven’t reached many of the places I want, “I don't have to be like, Oh goody, I got an onion when what I really wanted was a steak, hooray! but I can say, Okay, I've got an onion, what can I find to go with that?”
(And if all else fails, I can trick other people into helping me make Stone Soup.)
I might not always be happy, but I’m working toward content. I’m reading fiction again, writing again, getting along with my family, eating lunch with MD and her husband today, and soon I’m going to try my hand at turning this town on its head.
Somehow all of that will lead me where I need to go. And since the road curves away out of sight behind a ridge, instead of craning my neck with frustration at not being able to see over that ridge, I might as well take in the open sky and find pleasure in the road at my feet.
Yep. Tomorrow might be stormy and crappy again, but today is fine, and I'm gonna roll.
Monday, August 17, 2009
tea and books and cartoon laughs
It's as hot as the bowels of hell in the office and I'm tired to begin with, so it feels like my eyeballs are sagging backwards in their sockets and trying to sink into my chest cavity.
Yay, Monday.
Yesterday I made tereré for the first time, because it was too damn hot for mate. Verdict: Icy and refreshing, but not as good as mate. (I really need to convert someone around here to the wonderfulness of the yerba. I enjoy it very much all on my own, but it’s meant to be a social drink, and I miss my mateadas with Rica back in South Dormitory on lazy summerish afternoons at Grove City.)
Saturday I finished reading the first book I haven't read before in months (most of my reading lately has been comfort reading, immersing myself in old favorites as in the company of old friends) -- Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. I really enjoyed it, particularly the rich lyricism of her prose. It doesn’t rank up there with favorite books I’ve ever read, but it was certainly a worthwhile read. After I finished it, I surveyed my shelves to see what I should tackle next, and settled on Umberto Eco’s Island of the Day Before. (I bought this book for four reasons: 1. It cost a dollar. 2. It was by Umberto Eco. 3. It has an awesome title. 4. The cover is gorgeous. I was thoroughly seduced.) I skipped The Name of the Rose and missed Foucault’s Pendulum, so this is my first Eco novel, and it already has me grinning over the way he plays with language and constructs deconstructible characters. A wry narrative sarcasm permeates the writing and I can’t help but love it.
And then last night I indulged a whimsical mood and started watching one of my parents’ Looney Tunes collections, which I haven’t watched probably since I was an adolescent, and I really love the brilliance of Bugs Bunny’s character. I’m going to start emulating that cool nonchalance when things run amok.
That’s all, folks.
Yay, Monday.
Yesterday I made tereré for the first time, because it was too damn hot for mate. Verdict: Icy and refreshing, but not as good as mate. (I really need to convert someone around here to the wonderfulness of the yerba. I enjoy it very much all on my own, but it’s meant to be a social drink, and I miss my mateadas with Rica back in South Dormitory on lazy summerish afternoons at Grove City.)
Saturday I finished reading the first book I haven't read before in months (most of my reading lately has been comfort reading, immersing myself in old favorites as in the company of old friends) -- Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. I really enjoyed it, particularly the rich lyricism of her prose. It doesn’t rank up there with favorite books I’ve ever read, but it was certainly a worthwhile read. After I finished it, I surveyed my shelves to see what I should tackle next, and settled on Umberto Eco’s Island of the Day Before. (I bought this book for four reasons: 1. It cost a dollar. 2. It was by Umberto Eco. 3. It has an awesome title. 4. The cover is gorgeous. I was thoroughly seduced.) I skipped The Name of the Rose and missed Foucault’s Pendulum, so this is my first Eco novel, and it already has me grinning over the way he plays with language and constructs deconstructible characters. A wry narrative sarcasm permeates the writing and I can’t help but love it.
And then last night I indulged a whimsical mood and started watching one of my parents’ Looney Tunes collections, which I haven’t watched probably since I was an adolescent, and I really love the brilliance of Bugs Bunny’s character. I’m going to start emulating that cool nonchalance when things run amok.
That’s all, folks.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
squeeeeeee!
I'M GOING TO SEE SUFJAN!!!
I have wanted to see him in concert forever, but have never lived close enough to a venue where he toured to make it feasible.
Yesterday I got the newsletter email from Asthmatic Kitty with the glorious news that Sufjan is finally going on tour again, and, glory of glories, one of the venues is in Cleveland -- just an hour and a half away.
The limited tickets went on sale this morning, so I rolled out of bed, made a cup of coffee and sat at my computer gripping my mug and staring at the time, waiting, waiting...
...and waiting...
Evidently the venue hadn't activated its link.
So then it became a cat-and-mouse game. I opened up multiple windows the better to refresh with in case web traffic got too heavy for going forward/back, loaded the link onto my phone, and kept on checking while I made breakfast (Eggy in the Basket, yummm).
In the end, I win. My former bookstore coworker Steph also discovered Sufjan this past winter, and when I texted, Wanna go? she responded, I'm so there! Which is awesome, because, though I would gladly have gone alone, I prefer to share great experiences.
It was a roughish kind of week, mostly (Meg told me she's been reading my blog in the morning while she eats breakfast, and I said, "Oh, no -- that's some heavy morning reading," and she said, "I've been getting concerned," and I laughed and told her, "And my posts have all been upbeat compared to how I'm really feeling," to which she said, "Oh no..." But laughter is healing and it was good to talk with her), and getting to see the musical artist I most revere (I love Conor. I adore Conor. I identify with Conor. I adulate Sufjan) has me excited to be gaining something that almost looks like a life, and an enjoyable one at that.
And the tickets are so fricking cheap, too. One more reason to love Sufjan.
Yay yay yay!
I have wanted to see him in concert forever, but have never lived close enough to a venue where he toured to make it feasible.
Yesterday I got the newsletter email from Asthmatic Kitty with the glorious news that Sufjan is finally going on tour again, and, glory of glories, one of the venues is in Cleveland -- just an hour and a half away.
The limited tickets went on sale this morning, so I rolled out of bed, made a cup of coffee and sat at my computer gripping my mug and staring at the time, waiting, waiting...
...and waiting...
Evidently the venue hadn't activated its link.
So then it became a cat-and-mouse game. I opened up multiple windows the better to refresh with in case web traffic got too heavy for going forward/back, loaded the link onto my phone, and kept on checking while I made breakfast (Eggy in the Basket, yummm).
In the end, I win. My former bookstore coworker Steph also discovered Sufjan this past winter, and when I texted, Wanna go? she responded, I'm so there! Which is awesome, because, though I would gladly have gone alone, I prefer to share great experiences.
It was a roughish kind of week, mostly (Meg told me she's been reading my blog in the morning while she eats breakfast, and I said, "Oh, no -- that's some heavy morning reading," and she said, "I've been getting concerned," and I laughed and told her, "And my posts have all been upbeat compared to how I'm really feeling," to which she said, "Oh no..." But laughter is healing and it was good to talk with her), and getting to see the musical artist I most revere (I love Conor. I adore Conor. I identify with Conor. I adulate Sufjan) has me excited to be gaining something that almost looks like a life, and an enjoyable one at that.
And the tickets are so fricking cheap, too. One more reason to love Sufjan.
Yay yay yay!
Friday, August 14, 2009
I am Jill's glassy eyes.
Last night I didn't get more than two and a half hours of sleep at a time; fricking Simon hates that the window unit air conditioner has taken over his favorite window in my room, and woke me up several times banging the door in its latch to get out. (The flipside curse of the blessing of feline independence is its total disregard for human commands. I wanted to kill him.) It wouldn't have mattered so much if I weren't already dog tired, but I was, and still am, and the nightmares when I did manage to grab a few naps throughout the night were hardly conducive to rest. My mind won't shut off, and the only time I feel free of it is in my writing.
(If I didn't have to work, I would be locked in my room writing all day. It's the only thing I can think about with any kind of focus; when I get into that world, that writing space, everything else goes away and I write like something's driving me. It's been so long since I felt the Muse's sting that I'm almost feverish with it -- so often writing is about blood and sweat and tears and strenuous effort, and it's not effortless now, but there's a sort of metaphysical purpose to the effort that keeps me from noticing the strain until I stop writing -- somewhat like the exhilaration from running that overrides the body's expenditure of energy. It's difficult to come back.)
So today I'll be downing huge quantities of nature's sleep substitute, coffee, and propping my eyelids open with toothpicks.
I can't wait to go to Pittsburgh next weekend. There's a Rifftrax movie being simulcast into select theaters all over the place, and I'm taking an extended weekend to go see it, visit with old friends, bebop around my favorite city (I think it's long past time I visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History -- oo, dinosaur bones! -- and the Carnegie Science Center, too), enjoy being in a place where I have absolutely no responsibilities and take a break from everything that's wearing me out and eating into my rest here.
(If I didn't have to work, I would be locked in my room writing all day. It's the only thing I can think about with any kind of focus; when I get into that world, that writing space, everything else goes away and I write like something's driving me. It's been so long since I felt the Muse's sting that I'm almost feverish with it -- so often writing is about blood and sweat and tears and strenuous effort, and it's not effortless now, but there's a sort of metaphysical purpose to the effort that keeps me from noticing the strain until I stop writing -- somewhat like the exhilaration from running that overrides the body's expenditure of energy. It's difficult to come back.)
So today I'll be downing huge quantities of nature's sleep substitute, coffee, and propping my eyelids open with toothpicks.
I can't wait to go to Pittsburgh next weekend. There's a Rifftrax movie being simulcast into select theaters all over the place, and I'm taking an extended weekend to go see it, visit with old friends, bebop around my favorite city (I think it's long past time I visited the Carnegie Museum of Natural History -- oo, dinosaur bones! -- and the Carnegie Science Center, too), enjoy being in a place where I have absolutely no responsibilities and take a break from everything that's wearing me out and eating into my rest here.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Right. Monsters, Inc. Totally asexual and clever and cute and distracting, right? Okay. Maybe that will help.
Later: Cold shower. And maybe...um...maybe some more John Adams tonight. That's sufficiently boring, right?
And I will hurl myself into my story-writing. (No world exists beyond that world. No world exists beyond that world.)
I can do this.
(Breathe, Sarah. Breathe.)
Later: Cold shower. And maybe...um...maybe some more John Adams tonight. That's sufficiently boring, right?
And I will hurl myself into my story-writing. (No world exists beyond that world. No world exists beyond that world.)
I can do this.
(Breathe, Sarah. Breathe.)
TMI? (TFB.)
(Okay, just a heads-up: This post contains some frank thoughts regarding my own fertility. Generally I restrict discussions of this nature to a private sphere of female friends and family, but I am, as ever, something of an exhibitionist; and this blog is a steam valve for siphoning off excess internal pressure; so...yup.)
So my iPhone has this really nifty little app for tracking menstrual and fertility cycles. (MD, formerly MP, has told me about this great book she and her husband are reading that she said will work for any woman to understand her body better, but while I'm being lazy this will do nicely.) I put in all the data from the last six months, and it not only predicts when the next cycle will hit, but also when I'm at my most, um, fertile.
So, wondering why I felt so restless, edgy, caged and, well, prowly, yesterday, I pulled up the app and checked...and oh, yes. That explains everything. Fertility peak.
Intellectually I'm completely fine with not presently having any cuddly babies or grass-stained children running barefoot across my floors. I have chosen and maintained some moral boundaries that have led to my not having children yet, and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that my choices will one day vindicate me when the timing is right for a family, much as I might occasionally really, really want cuddly babies and grass-stained children running barefoot across my floors right now.
But, despite the zen attitude of my mind, my body has its own ideas. And every year that it doesn’t get to be an incubator for a little human being, it gets angrier. I think it thinks I’m a little slow on the uptake, so every year it intensifies its efforts to send me the message.
And so the result is that for a few days every month I’m basically climbing the walls and locking myself in the house for some kind of prayerful meditation (either that or I stand there yelling at my abdomen, It’s not my fault!) and fleeing the company of men to reinforce the famous self-discipline that has served as an absolutely brilliant touchstone separating the wheat from the chaff of my dating life, and, I maintain stubbornly, preserved me from much harm, however temporarily frustrating (make that, today, excruciating) the denial of certain biological drives.
Not that my body really gives a damn about my reasons. Right now I’m looking and breathing through a fiery hormone-glazed fog and fidgeting like it’s five minutes till Doomsday. But mind over matter. And fortunately my mind is quite strong, and my singleness renders the overwhelming temptation more general than specific. (Hooray for small favors.)
So my iPhone has this really nifty little app for tracking menstrual and fertility cycles. (MD, formerly MP, has told me about this great book she and her husband are reading that she said will work for any woman to understand her body better, but while I'm being lazy this will do nicely.) I put in all the data from the last six months, and it not only predicts when the next cycle will hit, but also when I'm at my most, um, fertile.
So, wondering why I felt so restless, edgy, caged and, well, prowly, yesterday, I pulled up the app and checked...and oh, yes. That explains everything. Fertility peak.
Intellectually I'm completely fine with not presently having any cuddly babies or grass-stained children running barefoot across my floors. I have chosen and maintained some moral boundaries that have led to my not having children yet, and I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that my choices will one day vindicate me when the timing is right for a family, much as I might occasionally really, really want cuddly babies and grass-stained children running barefoot across my floors right now.
But, despite the zen attitude of my mind, my body has its own ideas. And every year that it doesn’t get to be an incubator for a little human being, it gets angrier. I think it thinks I’m a little slow on the uptake, so every year it intensifies its efforts to send me the message.
And so the result is that for a few days every month I’m basically climbing the walls and locking myself in the house for some kind of prayerful meditation (either that or I stand there yelling at my abdomen, It’s not my fault!) and fleeing the company of men to reinforce the famous self-discipline that has served as an absolutely brilliant touchstone separating the wheat from the chaff of my dating life, and, I maintain stubbornly, preserved me from much harm, however temporarily frustrating (make that, today, excruciating) the denial of certain biological drives.
Not that my body really gives a damn about my reasons. Right now I’m looking and breathing through a fiery hormone-glazed fog and fidgeting like it’s five minutes till Doomsday. But mind over matter. And fortunately my mind is quite strong, and my singleness renders the overwhelming temptation more general than specific. (Hooray for small favors.)
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
i'm wide awake, it's morning
Bad Head Day.
I'm not going to go on about it. They happen, they suck, they pass.
The relevant thing is that, desiring to channel the tired, boring grief to something more impassioned, I popped in I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning on the drive to work and skipped to “Poison Oak.” I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times, and as I tiredly absorbed the beauty of the Pennsylvania landscape I can’t quite appreciate I focused on a space of bare acoustic strumming toward the end of the song, anticipating the upcoming line delivered into the emptiness that precedes a particularly intense lyrical-musical climax: “You’re the yellow bird that I’ve been waiting for.”
I thought in impulse fragments about the yellow bird symbol that crops up a couple of times in that album, and its multilayered and not entirely differentiable meanings, and in the instant when the music cut to silence before Conor sang that line, a goldfinch flashed across the road in front of me, the morning sun behind me glancing off its breast.
And I felt better and worse all at the same time, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and something important, because nothing is an accident, and I felt the suddenness of an undifferentiable presence, and I started to cry.
I'm not going to go on about it. They happen, they suck, they pass.
The relevant thing is that, desiring to channel the tired, boring grief to something more impassioned, I popped in I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning on the drive to work and skipped to “Poison Oak.” I’ve listened to that song hundreds of times, and as I tiredly absorbed the beauty of the Pennsylvania landscape I can’t quite appreciate I focused on a space of bare acoustic strumming toward the end of the song, anticipating the upcoming line delivered into the emptiness that precedes a particularly intense lyrical-musical climax: “You’re the yellow bird that I’ve been waiting for.”
I thought in impulse fragments about the yellow bird symbol that crops up a couple of times in that album, and its multilayered and not entirely differentiable meanings, and in the instant when the music cut to silence before Conor sang that line, a goldfinch flashed across the road in front of me, the morning sun behind me glancing off its breast.
And I felt better and worse all at the same time, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and something important, because nothing is an accident, and I felt the suddenness of an undifferentiable presence, and I started to cry.
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