Challenging Taoism

Striving to be an Uncarved block seems like a fair enough pursuit. But is "striving" something an Uncarved block would do? I mean, an Uncarved block probably also doesn't spiral into an existential funk because of one errant feeling at bar trivia night. What is the responsibility of a block that is perched on a ledge, and a random breeze pushes the block over just enough that it's weight causes a rockslide? Whether or not it is the block's fault doesn't really matter to me. What I want to understand is what is the block's responsibility?

It's almost like analogies don't work for the human condition.

Dumb block.

Grow the Eff Up

Before I went to college, I technically had only a ninth grade education. I was kicked out of school my sophomore and junior years for absences, and I forget whether or not I bothered to try again my senior year. With chronic headaches, dizzy/fainting spells, and sometimes even hallucinations, I spent most of ages 10-20 lying down in a dark room (I got better). Anyway, for a few years now I've been having stressful dreams that I am forced to return to finish high school. When I was in college, my dreams required me to go to high school by day and college by night. Since I have been working, in my dreams I have to go part-time so I can go to school during the day.

But this week, I've had a breakthrough. The other night, I dreamt I was getting ready to go back to high school. I got dressed, packed a bag, and started walking (as I did when I went the first time). Then, as I reached the other side of the hill I live on, I stopped in my tracks and looked at that big brick prison in the distance.

"...I don't have to do any of this shit," I said out loud to myself, and turned on my heel to head back home and get ready for work.

This was the first time I had one of these going-back-to-school dreams without going into the building and having all kinds of roadblocks; incorrect schedules, emergencies keeping me from attending so I get kicked out again, all kinds of anxiety provoking things. My dream self finally called shenanigans and stopped giving a shit.

And I have to think that's a good sign for me.

Like many other "Millennials", I have been living in a state of suspended adolescents. While I like to think I have a better excuse than most, what with my years of poor health and overall lack of experience, it has lately been bothering me that I haven't done more to catch up. I have been living in a room that most parents would scold and ground a kid as old as my behavior would suggest I am, and I put about as much thought as a kid that age would in my future and my finances. During a recent stressful week, I online-shopped almost a whole effing paycheck (that's almost two weeks of work) on stress-relieving impulse buys. I was humbled when it came time to pay my rent and pay for my dog to have a small procedure done.

My life can be fun, but it isn't a game. And my money is not a toy, it's the material to build my life. And it's past time I start acting like it.

And now looking over the last couple of weeks, I can see where I'm finally trying. I'm pretty sure I just dusted and cleared out a bookshelf that hasn't been touched since I was supposed to be in high school. The other day I volunteered at church sitting in a room while little toddlers ran around eating Cheerios and generally not needing me there, but at one point a child got upset and came running to me with a snot-and-tear-stained face and open arms. With as many times as I've skipped going home from work to essentially do that same thing to men I've dated (snot and tears included, for sure), it was almost surreal for the most valuable thing in someone else's life to run to me in a time of sadness. Yeah, I passed that kid off to a nine year old with more baby-wrangling experience, but I totally picked that kid up and let him bury his face in my shirt for a handful of seconds. I might not have gotten him to stop crying, but I was a shoulder to cry on... and a shirt to use as a Kleenex.

My hope is for cleaning to become my impulse-shopping, and to maybe replace at least one of my daily three or four Simpsons episode viewings with reading. I'm never going to be one of those fully-realized uber-adults who cooks elaborate meals or keeps a picturesque garden, but I can at least be a functional adult with a home with a visible floor and knowledge of something besides Simpsons trivia. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having the Simpsons trivia, but some other things might be nice, too. A little reality to go with the whimsy.

There's clearly no risk of me losing my childlike idiocy, so there's no harm in tempering it with only the essential skills for living a point-having life.

Of Love and Digestive Health

While other people are sleeping, I'm up having romantic fantasies about colonoscopies.

Wait, let me explain....

Last night I fell asleep on the couch while I was waiting for a load of laundry to finish drying. I told myself that it should be done by the time one more episode of the Simpsons ended, so naturally I fell asleep while Homer and Ned got hitched in Vegas. Later I woke up, went up to bed, and lay awake for an hour. Bored, I got up and folded that laundry. Then I lay awake a couple of additional hours, and that's where I am as I write this (but didn't post until the next day, right now).

Being a twenty-something raised around people's broadcasted fantasy versions of themselves on Facebook and constantly aware of everyone's relationship statuses at all times, I wonder if my life is any more bombarded with people's love lives than others. It seems like I know way too much about too many marriages, and it wonder if it's warping my fragile little mind. The women who can't shut up about how much they love their husbands on Facebook confide later how badly they want to leave I know of multiple engagements of former classmates who previously split up after years of abuse and got back together, and I have a backstage pass to acquaintances racing to the altar because they want to get married before they hit a certain age.

It's a total bummer, really. It's like love and romance died and left a hollow shell of trite facades, and when you pick it up all there is inside is the whistling of depressed souls. That got dark, didn't it? But seriously, what optimism can a person have when our social interactions hinge on funhouse-mirror TMI?

So as I lay awake scraping for some kind of silver lining, I thought of a story of a younger woman married to an older man going to pick her husband up from a colonoscopy. Her powerful businessman had to sit in a lobby with a laminated sign to be surrendered to the doctor only when somebody was there to pick him up, like a preschooler waiting on mommy. The wife had to patiently get him home in his stupor after getting his colon examined.

It's a very unFacebook story, but it seems a lot more meaningful than the photos of "just because" bouquets. Colorful bundles of flowers definitely are effective mementos of affection, but they also are easy to procure and are technically already dead. If there's anything I've learned in my life, it's that the most meaningful things are usually a combination of the most painful with the least theatrical... you undergo a drastic metamorphosis over such an agonizing period of time that you don't even notice until you look back and wonder why you thought it was so hard at the time. Love already hurts pretty much invariably, so it must be pretty fucking important.

There's not much that's sexy about a colonoscopy... It pretty much means you're getting old and your butt is a health risk, and there's a lot of unpleasant preparation and recovery. Romantic comedies and fairy tales don't warn us about the colonoscopies, the obnoxious habits, the tangible and lasting hurt from those slapstick misunderstandings. But those seem like the things that, when overcome, are so much more romantic to me. Of course she wants to be with him when he's buying her pointless trinkets and paying for dinner, but to be there at a time where there are no rewards takes more than a wallet.

Anyway, there I was, a single twenty-something lying awake having romantic fantasies about colonoscopies. As weird as my aspirations are, at least they are realistic, and I'm sure they'll sneak up on me sooner than I can imagine.

I didn't come up with a title. What, am I not making enough words for you?!

So yeah, I used to have a blog. And I'm not just saying that about this particular one to try to be cute about how I never post. I mean that I once had a different blog that was consistent and fun and even had a bit of a following. My life was quieter then. I was in a comfortable routine of going to class a couple of hours a day, doing school-related work for another couple of hours, and then doing whatever. It was kind of a beautiful thing but also I could have been doing way more with my time. I mostly played video games and wrote blog posts.

Everything in my life changed in a month: school was over, summer was over, and a hazy future of hard work (that I'm lucky to have) was in front of me. Badly-drawn cartoons of things that happened to me that I thought were funny no longer fit with the frantic pace of training for a new career and recovering from heartbreak. After a while I started doing this just as some kind of broadcast therapy with no real ideas behind it.

I want to write. I feel the compulsion very strongly, and most nights I actually start writing posts. But things don't feel as significant as they once did. If I can't keep my brain-boner (brainer? ew, no) for something for long enough to crank out a five paragraph post, why should I broadcast it to the people who are inexplicably reading my stuff? Seriously, I only told like four people about this blog, who are you people reading this? The numbers are consistent and puzzlingly high.

Writing to penpals is a good outlet, though it doesn't quite satisfy that need. It's more of a social outlet than anything, and now that the lengthiest of these friendships has extended into "real life", it hardly feels like a creative task (although I think assembling a gift package for a Scottish man was one of my more creative projects of the past year).

The feeling is so desperate that the other night I had a dream that I had woken up with an amazing idea that inspired me to write about it. I dreamt a whole life cycle where I was just writing this idea forever, self-publishing with little readership or recognition, but doing it all the same and loving it.

That is such an achievable dream, but I have done nothing toward it. Real people constantly write and get their ideas into some state of a final product. Terrible, talentless writers become best sellers and have films made of their shitty books. I know two people who consistently write (hi, James and Joey!), but they are both much smarter than me, so it's easy to try to excuse myself with not being "smart enough".

What it comes down to is I don't feel as inspired any more, and it's easy for me to lose enthusiasm for things now. Maybe I've seen so much more of life since getting my job that, while I still treasure the mundane humor in my daily life, it doesn't feel worth broadcasting any more. Maybe I just super suck at accomplishing things... Psychonauts is still loaded up in my PlayStation waiting for me to complete, I have a stack of recyclables and divided piles of clothes to wash or give away, and every time I pick up my ipad I wonder if I should look up that stupid dojo again that never returned my call when I asked about getting taught to kick ass (not the actual contents of the call). I still want to do all of those things AND be wildly inspired to write something, and also there's now a bag of "crap" to take to Goodwill already in the boot of my car... and a bag on the extra bed and a pile next to that. Holy shit I fund so many piles of crap!

Maybe every time I feel inclined to shop, I should instead scribble down an idea or contribute a paragraph to an idea. By the end of the month I will have either a complete novel series or the most prolific and eclectic blog of all time.

Dodger... But Not of SUVs

Life is full of coincidences. As much as coincidences make for cheap shots in fiction (even Dickens' coincidences hurt my eyes), some really silly stuff happens in the real world, too. Bullets frequently collided midair during the Civil War, people often interrupt each other to say the exact same thing (JINX!), and I'm pretty sure we are all just a couple of degrees of separation from somebody who was married to Billy Bob Thorton. One fall day you see a dog sprinting through a field, and the next spring it gets hit by a car right next to your house on the other side of town.

Oops, I just kinda ruined the whole story I was going to tell.

My mom drives a bus for a living and often sees dogs running about loose during her routes. It's very frustrating for somebody who loves animals to see such things and not be able to drop what you're doing and help (she and I both have histories of pulling over to catch runaway dogs; it's almost frequent enough to be considered a hobby). One of the most distressing of these situations was a little white-and-ginger dog she saw sprinting through a then-empty corn field on a cold autumn day. It was in a distant part of town with nothing but various fields. The dog was small, frail, and skinny, but there was nothing my mom could do from her post driving an enormous death machine full of unrestrained children. She told me about it when she got home and we prayed for it.

About a month later, she saw that same dog again, sprinting through that same field.

Winter came, and toward the beginning of spring, she saw the dog again.

My mom is a sensitive woman and she was very distressed that this dog was clearly living out in the fields, on its own. The third time she saw it, it's ears were ratty from frostbite. It had made it through the winter at least.

One day later in the spring, one of my mom's coworkers was driving down a road perpendicular to our street, just yards from our house really, when a little dog darted in front of her car. It bounced off the side of her tire, but was hit hard enough for the driver of the SUV to know that she had hit a tiny body. She stopped her car to find a stunned little dog with tattered ears at the side of the road. Interestingly enough, she was right in front of the house of another of my mom's coworkers, a rehabilitator of animals (she used to do yard work with an orphaned raccoon riding on her shoulders) who saw the whole thing. She brought the dog into her house and, for whatever reason, called my mom.

The dog needed a place to stay, and apparently my mom came to mind. Sure enough, it was the white-and-ginger dog with tattered ears who had survived winter on the other side of town. Only now she was also sporting little waffly tire marks on her belly.

Kiera was fine. She had no internal injuries, no broken bones. All my mom had needed to do to catch this dog was have a coworker ram it with an SUV.

But she was incredibly timid, obviously had been mistreated by somebody before her days on the run. She found a home with my mom's friend's parents, where it would take months for her to even sit with her new daddy. One stressful day she got startled by her "mommy" dropping the plastic handle of the leash, so she bolted, noisily dragging the leash which only scared her more in a horrible perpetual motion machine of terrified dog who was also a long distance sprinter. But she was found and brought back to her new home the next day.

These events were all several years ago, and just last week she came to our house to be babysat. It worked put nicely, since it was on a day where I was working from home so I could attend a doctor's appointment. My dogs were glued to my mom like usual, so she was able to have me all to herself. Despite only having met me once many years ago, she took to me quite nicely and before the end of the day she even fell asleep curled up on my belly as I watched cartoons. Something I've always found deeply satisfying is how pretty much any dog or cat, no matter how allegedly antisocial, immediately takes a shine to me and trusts me.

Anyway, that's just a weird little story of how we obsessed over a little dog for months and were eventually able to be instrumental in finding her a home through a series of accidents. Life is funny and incidental, just proving how little point there is in doing much worrying about it. I'm not saying everything is going to work out as nicely as things did for Kiera, but maybe some other things will that you never saw coming.

German Rap

When I was a junior in high school, I had to retake a lot of freshman classes. In fact, I was in remedial English at the same time that I was in Advanced Placement English. Since I had been kicked out of school in my sophomore year for missing too much class, I was in a sort of limbo of trying to catch up while I was advancing. By all means it didn't make any sense and all the administrators should have been sacked. Anyway, being the only junior in a class otherwise entirely comprised of sophomores felt way more alienating than one year of age difference seemed to warrant, and it held true when I went to college in a class of students who were a year younger than me. Everything was "random" or "awkward" or "beast". There was a whole different slang and attitude and, apparently, nobody listened to music.

On my first day of being a junior in sophomore Spanish, we were given the task of interviewing at least three other students in Spanish. The questions were basic: what's your name, do you have any pets, what is your favorite color, what did you do over summer vacation... and who is your favorite band?

Every time I got to that last question, I was answered with a look of the same kind of smug exasperation now mostly associated with hipsters.

"I only listen to rap," they would reply. Also, they never replied in Spanish. Everybody in that class was effing terrible at Spanish.

With the first one, I persevered beyond the call of the assignment.

"Then who's your favorite rapper?"

"It's not like that."

The kid I tried that on was irritated immediately. He thought I was a complete idiot for thinking a song could be attributed to AN artist. It would be a while yet before I'd realize that every popular rap ditty is Somebody and Somebody ft. Somebody as remixed by Somebody. He didn't bother explaining that to me, he just turned the question around on me combatively.

"Well how would YOU answer?"

"I dunno. Led Zeppelin, Foo Fighters, the Smashing Pumpkins."

"I don't even know what those ARE."

I remember he said it while laughing, and a girl next to him with half her hair dyed blonde and the other half dyed black laughed with him at my liking of such obscure music that clearly nobody liked. It took me right back to the time a girl smugly told me she had never heard of Green Day, citing that they couldn't be good because they weren't on any of the NOW That's What I Call Music CDs (they were about a year after she said that, though, not that it's anything to tout).

Anyway, that was one of the most confusing exchanges I had ever had up to that point in my life. These kids were speaking a language I couldn't understand, and what I perceived to be reality (that Led Zeppelin is an amazing band that everyone is raised on and respects) was laughable to them. But even as I stumbled into more of it, rap never made much more sense to me.

And maybe that's why I am addicted to German rap.

Fast forward eight or nine years. I dated a guy who listened to the same like five Social Distortion songs on Spotify every time I was at his apartment. Then I learned that Spotify has basically all the music and a radio feature that works like a Pandora that actually understands how music can relate to each other beyond sounding exactly the same. I listened to some Rammstein and it suggested more German artists. I found Alligatoah and suddenly Willst Du was my favorite song ever.

Fast forward to now and at least half of the music I listen to is in a foreign language. German rap songs are liberally sprinkled throughout all my playlists and it has become the one genre I can listen to at almost any time and the mood seems right.

And absolutely nobody seems to agree with me.

The first time someone is in my car with me and a German rap song comes on, the response is laughter when the lyrics start. Now, I laugh at pretty much everything; most of my acquaintances don't bother asking what I'm giggling at unless we are in a quiet room by ourselves and it seems likely I could be laughing at them. But I can listen to J-pop, Swedish metal and German rap with complete sincerity and be completely moved by them. I don't understand what difference it makes to love music whose lyrics you can't understand.

In fact, I think not understanding all the lyrics is fundamental to my enjoyment of German rap. I never got much into American rap for many reasons. The shameless sexism, the swearing, the shallow content, and the rhyming are all offensive to my ear. Yes, rhyming. When I hear people talk about how "clever" a rapper is or how great their "rhymes" are, you can guarantee I'm going to hate that rapper's work because for me, rhyme is cheap and obnoxious. Maybe it's because I've read and heard so much poetry, or maybe it's just how my brain is wired, but I find much more merit in the formatting of e. e. cummings or the perceptiveness of Dostoyevsky than somebody realizing two words end the same way and painstakingly coming up with disconnected phrases that end with them.

But I love a good mashup, a good beat, and my brain does respond to the cheap musical candy of a good hook. When I listen to German rap, I don't know enough about the language to make observations of how clumsily the words are crammed into the music. (If I weren't a native English speaker, I might not want to launch my fist through the nearest window when Kid Cudi repeats "listen up" four times in "Sky Might Fall", struggling to turn "up" into a two syllable word each time.) The rhyming of German words is exciting and unexpected since I don't even know what their words are, it just sounds like linguistic sorcery that certainly must be a spell that will open an ancient portal to an underground world inhabited by unicorns and leprechauns. And if those lyrics are actually just some douchebag going on about spreading women's ass cheeks (and still talking down to them even though he's the creep staring up anuses) like that one rap song I heard that was about that exclusively, I don't have to know that. Most English-spoken rap songs I've heard sound like the rhyming letters of a madman before he snaps and murders a gas station attendant he has been stalking obsessively. With the German-spoken ones, I don't need to know.

All I hear is the human voice as a rhythmic instrument, a complement to a bassline and a beat that inspires me just as much as any other instrumental piece. So when people ask how I can listen to rap without understanding the lyrics, that is why I suddenly feel myself wanting to judge them. Because to my brain, it is way better to regard a new instrument than to listen to anthems of hate, sexism, and boasting, or what to me is ear-itching Dr. Seussian patchwork.

And seriously, do you really know all the lyrics to all the songs you like?

Fluff

When you sink deep in the water and nothing but water is pressing on your ears,
The fluff in your head as you are recovering from a faint,
When a noise is so loud your ears short out for a second,
Before your ears pop after a change in elevation,
The ocean in a seashell,
All these things are the same sensation in my ear.
Sometimes my whole life feels like that.

My Mom Hates Converse

"Remember when you broke Soandso's heart?"

It was asked as a joke, but it's not a joke I ever find funny. Even though it's true that a fair number of our mutual male acquaintances have asked me out, being reminded of times I've disappointed people isn't one of my favorite things. Some people are happy to play the field, but I'm a type who -if she's so much as kissed someone- feels it's inappropriate to put more people's feelings on the line. Also, it's hard to want more options when it feels like a lot of those options just want to get in your pants.

Anyway, I wound up by myself at a table with two beers and a sampler platter with two sides of veggies. Behind me, some fat white guy was drunk and shouting a story about (allegedly) getting hit on by a "fag". In front of me, MLB played alongside little league baseball. At times an adult batter would walk up to bat alongside a young player and it felt weirdly significant. There was a beauty to it, minus the guy behind me. He was just irritating.

When I found myself in the position of having to either drink twice the beer I had anticipated or letting some go to waste, I drank twice the beer I anticipated and walked across the street to sober up. A poor mood and an upcoming weekend seemed like good enough justification for a pair of shoes... and an outfit to go with the shoes. Dresses felt right, and I tried on a frustrating number of short dresses there were really more like shirts. I bought two and I still fear that both might be too short for actual wearing. My mom hated everything I bought.

With the moodswings, my mood is worst in the evenings. A whole day of events and brooding come to roost in my mind and I have no consoling ears or arms to come home to. I think a big part of why I feel backed up was that I allowed myself to come to count on nightly phone calls and the like. That's not my life now, and a lot of people do more with even less and even greater problems than eating alone and sadness-shopping. Other people don't have their feelings hurt when their mom hates their new pair of shoes.

Sometimes you can be in a really dark place and wonder what the point is in being if you have to be in the dark. But sometimes your dark will be somebody else's light. Even if your mood is awful, the rest of your life can be going well enough that when an emergency arises and your friend has to rush off, you can cover the full tab (and drink all the beers) without even thinking about it. You can accidentally do a small thing that means a lot and not realize it.

And sometimes you get bonus beer in the process.

Many Mes

For a while now I have been having ridiculous mood swings, and they are really starting to toy with Me. Normal Me has always had a rather unjustified sense of self and ease. Sad Me is quite a bit more complicated than that, and not complicated in an interesting way. Complicated like Bruce Willis' needy girlfriend in Pulp Fiction. Complicated like that emo kid in art class who always had to up the ante on just how profoundly nobody understood him to the point where he made up his own religion to try to alienate himself. Not exactly like that, but like that.

Sad Me is like a very droopy Rage Face character stuck in the bottom of a muddy pit like Shadow from Homeward Bound in that scene where he falls in a muddy pit and you think the old, white-faced dog is going to be stuck and die down there covered in mud. Only Shadow has quiet, wise old doggy dignity and Sad Me is just sitting down in the mud, full butt contact with the mess, legs flopped out where they landed because I just fell backward like an angry toddler whose hips wouldn't be shattered by that kind of landing. Sad Me doesn't even look up; she's looking at her muddy hands drumming on the mire, the only amusement being the "plip plop" of her fingertips in the muck. She isn't even rhythmic about it, just kind of halfheartedly pattering at the mud she's sitting in.

After a while (or perhaps after a nap), I drive by in my car. I look at Sad Me like, "Who's that frowny bitch?" Then I pop a lolli in my mouth and drive off in my car, which is also a tiny yellow rocket that runs on love and outdated German techno music.

I wonder if I will always be like this, or if I will eventually become Happy Me forever, or if I'll be some other Me in the middle at some point. The point is, I can't deal with this forever. I want to be the best part of Me, the Me I feel like when I'm in my car or after reading a good book. Enlightened, calm, flexible. I want to be the confident chick with the badass hair that smells like the California wetlands that I feel like in between that other awful extreme. I want to be powerful and happy and, I guess, fragrant.

Since getting out of the shower I have just been lying on my bed contemplating these Mes as the ever-present Me cuddles under my favorite blanket. I think that's a good illustration... These bizarre, dramatic Mes zipping through the mind of a Me who is generally just kind of hanging out, seeking comfort and avoiding how she really should go downstairs and take that vitamin... but that would require pants.

There's Organization if You Look Hard Enough

I am known for growing hair, strangely enough. I can go from a boyish pixie haircut to a ponytail in a matter of months. Perhaps that was why it was easy to take the plunge and shave the sides of my head with a beard trimmer.

People used to have rock gardens, or maybe it's just a new age thing we pretend is old. Zen gardens exist. Now I think we are our own zen gardens. We take the time to sculpt the hair of our heads and bodies, to nitpick at tiny details in our grooming that would completely miss our notice in anything resembling "the wild". I can relax as I run the clippers across my temples, back and forth in a rhythm and watching what a mere two weeks grew from my head.

This is my favorite haircut I think I've ever had. Long, traditional looking hair when down, with hidden shaved sides when I put it up. They trace the sleek bone structure of my temples. I think they are incredibly sexy. But a lot of people don't, as I would have expected.

Very often the things I am most happy about are the things about me most criticized. Shallow things and deep things.  My hobbies are juvenile, the way I want to dress impulsively is trashy. Then go deeper. "Too nice" is what I'm told for turning the other cheek, for forgiving, for times when I'm able to put my anger aside and just let things happen. These things, to me, are the goals of evolution. Personal and for humanity. To rise above animal instinct into something better, something benevolent. To transform. These things are hard to do, even harder that they aren't understood.

Perhaps that is what my role is to be in the great human narrative. Some people are revolutionaries, thinkers, movers and shakers. I am the friend who will drive you to the airport before 6 am, or the girl who's really good at turning guys down gently. Just being nice, or at least trying to be. Striving to be an Uncarved Block in a winding river of knives.

I think I lightly injured my foot yesterday. Ran on hard concrete in thin plastic sandals to chase a loose dog. I saw him when I was driving home from work, parked my car off to the side -windows down, purse still in it- and herded him into a yard until his owners could be found. There was a sudden deep sting on one of my strides when the ball of my foot hit the ground at one point, and it hasn't been the same. Too hard of a step makes it feel like there is a shard deep inside my foot, like a muscle is pinched. I'm sitting here rubbing my own foot between thoughts.

The other foot feels left out.

Beige Rainbow

On my drive home - after dark, windows down, chilly night air bringing in the smell of honeysuckles while I blasted rap mashups out - I got caught in a weird spiral of trying to motivate myself with positive thoughts, only to find these positive thoughts all tied back to bad memories. The other day I tried to start writing a series of cute anecdotes about traveling abroad to celebrate my return to Germany, but I couldn't keep the motivation.

Looking forward to my sister's wedding is a complicated thing. I'm happy for her and want her to be happy and have the life she wants... I guess I just wish that life was planned a little closer to home. We won't have the same name any more, and before long I'm sure she will tie herself overseas more with German/Swedish/American hybrid babies with stern, falling-melody cries.

My life hasn't varied much in the details we use to delineate stages of our lives. I don't have a grad school phase, an Insert Different Town period, no changes in address and I kind of just quit bothering with Facebook relationship statuses because of opportunistic idiots who jump right in as soon as you change it back to single. My life, to somebody who went to high school with me or otherwise doesn't know me well, will read as unchanged and probably kind of sad. Even the fat, sad-looking women my former classmates have turned into at least have families, children to raise and make a mark on the world. I have dogs who prefer to sleep with my mom at night. And oh yeah, I'm sleeping in the same house I've lived in since I was born.

But when I look at myself, listen to myself think, I am blown away at all the things my brain has done. The different people I've been, the different ways of thinking that have come and gone, how I never stop being overwhelmed by new information every day, wondering at what point I will just shatter under the pressure of the depth and amazingness that just makes it to my head. I'm listening to rap now, and I never would have seen that coming. And I'm appreciating it sincerely and on levels I didn't know were available. I listen to songs I once loved, that seemed to mean something, and they are cheaper and more plastic now. And yet some old things only get better and better with time. I can understand all the sexual innuendo in Rocko's Modern Life.

So yeah, I've been having all kinds of ideas for getting into a blogging pattern more resembling something actually enjoyable like the one I has that did well, but my head is just in too many places, and I'm trying very hard to make it sound more uplifting than it actually feels. Maybe after this trip I will be a better person and magic will happen all over the place.

Oh man, I'm going to miss my car so much while I'm gone.

Toy Advertising

Being buzzed with the Slinky song from the 60s stuck in your head is a lot like being in a horror movie with awareness of the ominous child-singing.

http://youtu.be/UohRpWj9O-M

The Books We Read When We're Kids

Earlier today I suddenly remembered my favorite author from when I was a kid and I had the heartbreaking realization that in the time since then, he could have passed. Brian Jacques passed three years ago, it turns out. Even though I never saw him on tv, never heard his voice, never knew him half as well as many of his other fans, seeing a picture of him like the pictures on the inside cover gave me a warm, comfortable feeling. There was that same familiar pulling feeling in the chest like when I see a picture of my grandparents or my uncle... other emotional figures from early life who are gone now.

I have a lot of memories of the books themselves. Not the stories, but the books. When I was in sixth grade, my English teacher had us all get out the books we were reading so he could read the first paragraph of each out loud, and we'd analyze the tone and how the book drew us in... or didn't. Mine was a Redwall book, and he looked at the cover and then at me like "Aren't you a bit old for this?" But as he read the paragraph aloud, I heard the shift in his voice before pulling the book away and looking at the cover again. Sounding astonished, he said, "I REALLY like the way that author writes." That was the teacher who would later randomly take me aside and tell me how impressed he was with my fearless individuality. I suppose it's worth mentioning that was during my goth phase.

Then a couple of years later when I was well beyond what should have been that stage and, in retrospect, had already gotten addicted to porn by then (I'm sober now)... the younger son of a friend of my mom's wanted to borrow one of my Redwall books for a book report. I really, really, REALLY didn't want to lend it to him, but my mom demanded it and I relented. It was like he had punched me in the face when he returned my book with a huge rip and his own name scrawled in it. My mom thought it would give me a sense of satisfaction for what I did to see the book report he did on it, and all it did was piss me off further when I saw how poorly he wrote and how he essentially just summarized the events of the book without any thought. This prepared me for doing peer-reviews as an adult in community college.

I don't remember why he did, but my dad bought the first Redwall book for me rather spontaneously. We were both amazed by the cover art, and this was long enough ago that I can picture it resting on a blue hutch that hasn't been in my room since I hit "double digits". Every now and then he would buy me the next one in the order of their release, and before long I had a collection of about a dozen brilliantly covered fantasy books about mice with swords.

That is what is amazing about the Redwall books. Like most children's books, the stories and premises are completely absurd; but they were painted so well with words that rather than absurd, it was a completely immersive and enchanting experience to read them. As an adult, I can't even watch a fantasy movie without rolling my eyes; I feel embarrassed just hearing about details of Game of Thrones. But as a skeptical kid, I was absorbed into books about talking animals well past an age when one would expect a kid to be interested in such things. Well into the era of MTV and attraction to boys, I was still picking up books with badgers in body armor on the cover.

Looking at the covers of these books brings back vivid mental images of scenes in my head. I could never watch the cartoon show based on the series; it would never stand up against the illustrations in my head. The world of Redwall is painted in my memory as a a  colorful pencil sketch, much like the covers. Everything has a comfort, a freshness, a familiarity that would be far too painstaking to replicate in animation. Ever. And this from someone obsessed with animation.

Earlier this evening, I reread a story book of Jonah illustrated by Kurt Mitchell; it also features a mouse, in this case filling the role of Jonah. I remembered the illustrations, the feelings they gave me; there was a sad longing at the end, at the sepia illustration of Jonah the mouse walking away from me at the end of his journey. There can be a small heartbreak when a book ends.

Something in me aches when I look at these books. The stash of Little Golden Books we had at the beach house that I'd get my mom to read when I wasn't ready to fall asleep in the house that was always scary to me for reasons I still don't quite understand. The blue copy of The Phantom Toll Booth that my sister got at a reading festival and that she read aloud to me, and how it was later the first chapter book I ever read cover to cover. The first three Harry Potter books, which I grudgingly started reading years after they became popular because I couldn't believe my peers were capable of liking anything that I would.

There are Redwall books that I haven't read, ones that were released once I moved on to classic novels and memoirs. Those books don't have to be over for me, and I still own all my copies. I'm a little scared to pick any up... I don't want to risk altering the memories I have of them. Maybe one of these days I'll treat myself to one of the new ones and give it a try. Perhaps I can take one overseas on my upcoming trip, where maybe nobody has enough context to wonder if that adult woman reading about Celtic warrior squirrels is mentally deficient.

Who am I kidding, I'd take the outside cover off. Not out of shame, but to preserve it.

Don't Worry, Be Neutral

This is me taking time for myself.

Hey, I didn't say it was QUALITY time.

Or quantity, for that matter.

A few years ago I advised a friend to worry less about other people, to take more time for himself and make himself more of a priority. Little did I know how shallow that advice sounds when you are on the receiving end and thinking what you've been doing was the right thing. Now I'm in a third place of kind of understanding the merit of taking time for myself, but perhaps from a different angle than suggested.

A pet peeve of mine is being told I'm being "too nice" to somebody or about something, as if there is a kind of morally justified state of being an asshole. Or that I need more to do with my time. Seriously, fuck people who say that: just because I don't check in every few minutes to update on my goings on doesn't mean there aren't any. We tend to talk about the things we care about, and I care about my worries for other people. My hobbies, while interesting to me, aren't at the top of my discussion list all the time, and I see nothing wrong with that.

And I see nothing wrong with my attempts at a new method of spending more time with myself without sacrificing my time spent thinking about other people. There is simply less of that empty time spent not thinking at all. My mind may start to suffer from that, maybe it already has, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it or I will readjust my route.

I once knew somebody who didn't believe in self esteem or thinking or caring about one's self. He claimed to have "died to himself" and claimed anything else was vanity. From my perspective, he was obsessed with vanity; one time I just looked at him, and he said, "I know when you do that you're just trying to get me to tell you you're pretty." We watched a makeover show together, and as the stylists were telling a woman to take time for herself, he snorted about how backward their thinking was.

Time for myself has felt good for me, so perhaps I'm a bit self-absorbed. Time spent coloring my hair is very zen; I can turn off most worries while painting my scalp with mud that smells like damp marijuana. What great vanity, to be taking time not to worry while also enhancing my appearance! But the way I see it, the break allows me to readjust and hopefully be a little less likely to be cruel from exhaustion. I mean, I'm sure I treat people much better when I'm freshly showered.

Perhaps I am just too weak and selfish yet to reach this kind of nirvana of constantly being on, constantly being in the best shape I can be in to face life and people and its and their challenges. Maybe as long as I am not perfect, I need this time to be off now and then.

Surely there are worse things than sitting out from fretting for half an hour now and then.

Street of Consciousness

I was sent home from work early today after cleaning out my cube. No, I'm not fired; we are simply getting a new layout tomorrow. Going through all my stuff from the past almost-two years was very... odd. A picture of an ex with the pins still in it from when it hung on my cube wall a long time ago; really old glommed up lip gloss; duplicates of training papers I've memorized months ago; reports I forgot to file which are now months outdated anyway; the most thoughtful gift I've ever been given by a boyfriend; and so many stray paper clips that I could probably construct a 1:10 scale Eiffel Tower from them. Anything that didn't get tossed, I threw in a box and put in my supervisor's office for safe-keeping.

Before heading home, I had to go to the bridal shop to pick up my bridesmaid dress for my sister's wedding. Of course, it turned out a little darker than I hoped, but seeing myself in it was very uplifting. When I had tried on the black sample dress, I was saddened by how soft and weak my arms looked. Seeing myself in that same shape again showed how they have improved, if only detectable to my own eyes. I can't even say they are more "toned", even that is too generous. Perhaps more "taut"... or "awake"? Probably just awake. Although I did destroy my mom's sense of reality by carrying a large bag of soil from the car to the deck on the other side of the house the other week.

Once home, I took a book and one of my mom's elderflower ciders outside and polished off both. One of my dogs attacked, growled at, barked at, and ate a bee. Then I lay on the couch with the tingle from the sun and the tingle of an alcoholic beverage drunk too fast on a hot day. My mom and I went out to dinner at the first place I ate meat after being a vegetarian for two years (my health and weight had deteriorated from an unrelated health problem and I needed weight back).

Then we drove west for a while.

West has always felt like a very alien direction to me. When I travel, it is always east: the only exceptions were an overnight trip to Chicago and a weekend in California. I have driven east to Ohio a thousand times, been to New York City and West Virginia  and continental Europe. West of my town is a mystery to me, and I only had to go about twenty miles to be somewhere I had never been in my life. Twenty miles on a street I grew up three blocks away from.

But west makes me uneasy. It's like my body has GPS and realizes I am moving in an entirely new direction. And it's scary. It's the same feeling under the diaphragm, and the hollowness behind the sternum, I get when I look out on Lake Michigan. Like heartache, being disoriented, like that time I accidentally took my prescription pain medication too soon after an alcoholic beverage. Like being on the edge of the universe without a lifeline. Perhaps an overreaction, but it's a gut reaction I can't control.

Anyway, we drove west. In my new car, driving with no real purpose, sunny warm skies with stretches of fields and trees and horses, a perfect straight line of road with occasional little hills. It was beautiful.

Hipocrite, Misspelling Intended

One of my biggest pet peeves is seeing somebody driving a small car, and yet when they go to make a turn they weave out to the opposite side first like they're turning a semi. However, I find I have the opposite problem with my own coordination... just with my own person. Instead of overcompensating and giving myself plenty of room, I toss my body around without knowing my perimeters. I'm over twenty-five years old and I yet I still haven't gotten used to my post-puberty body. I say this because once again, I have a nice big bruise on my hip from a miscalculation of my own dimensions.

The hip bruises happen like this: I will get on my hands and knees under my desk at work, and in getting out from under, will have my feet and knees lined up for a clear take off trajectory to stand next to my desk. However, upon pushing myself up I will violently stub the outermost part of my hip on the desk. One time I even caught the bony part under the very edge, scraping along the desk at high speed and leaving one of the largest, darkest bruises I've ever had. It's like I haven't learned to take new curvatures into account and I'm constantly slamming my extra bits into things.

Just a couple of weeks ago at the creepy bar my friend and I sometimes patronize, I went to resume sitting in the awful lawn chair on the deck that I had claimed. It had rigid arms on it, and despite the actual seat being a good two feet wide, naturally I slammed the outermost corner of my ass into the arm, rocking the whole chair sideways and eliciting ALL the drunk jokes. Nobody asked about the condition of my ass, but then there's rarely a solitary gentleman in the joint.

But it's not just that I have an uncoordinated butt. I've also wiped my boobs across many a doorframe, offering a feel to all kinds of trims and finishes. Reaching into the back seat of my car, I've clumsily squished them against passengers. Luckily, I don't let strangers into my cars so it's easily laughed off. Not so easily laughed off, for me, was the time I went to stand up from a table on a second or third date and jostled a glass of beer with my boob, and since I had been drinking beer I had the absence of mind to pull a horrified face and grab the offending boob like I was a modern, edgy Lucille Ball. Luckily some kinds of asshattery can be endearing.

The point of this post is something about not judging people. Some people might have poor coordination with their cars, but I have poor coordination with my various protrusions. 

And poor tit-coordination is way more shameful than driving your old Honda Civic like a stretch limo.

Cars

Driving with the windows down blasting Soul Bossa Nova, the loose flap of ceiling upholstery fluttering in the breeze, I find something therapeutic in all the driving that I do. Some people need a cup of coffee (or three) in the morning; I swear I'm not myself until I've had my thirty minute commute with my music playing. I read that it's important to remember that a car is just an appliance, but they really feel like so much more than that. It's an extension of my home, the setting for many of my memories and where I spend at least an hour of my waking life almost every day. Add in that my current car was inherited from my grandmother who passed a year and a day ago, and you will have a picture of why it will be so hard to let that car go later this week.

The last time I took it into the shop, I asked my mechanic (an old trusted family friend) when I should consider getting a different car. He handed me my invoice and said, "Let me put it like this: this is your monthly car payment."

For the past couple of weeks I've been looking at and test-driving different cars, and this Saturday I am scheduled to buy a new one and trade in the old one. In the process, I've been experiencing what my mom calls "embarrassment of riches". It feels almost unfairly decadent that my life is such that I have been able to save up a sizable down payment and will be getting a brand-new car at the age of 25, especially when my mom only got her first new car last year at age 59. I was excited and eager to talk about the shopping process when I was just looking around, but now that it's actually happening I almost feel ashamed.

Those feelings aside, I feel like this is how things needed to happen. Any doubts about my choice were relieved when it turned out that a car with all my specifications (plus a couple of extra ones I didn't dare assume I could get) was sitting twenty feet away on the showroom floor. Saturday I will be exchanging my old family sedan for the car of my dreams, a new vehicle for my adventures, my commutes, for so many of my memories to come. I am excited and grateful, it is just hard to imagine letting go of the old one. I find myself squeezing the steering wheel extra hard sometimes as I sit and wait on a light.

It's more than a car. It was a gift from my grandparents, a shelter, a powerful engine that got me out of some sticky situations. It's where I kept my rollerblades, where I sat and listened to the rain and the new Sigur Rós album during a summer storm last year. It's how I maintained three long-distance relationships, how I made it to Cedar Point and Kings Island, how I shared the family cottage with friends. I learned how to fishtail in it, drove through snows so treacherous it was technically illegal to drive, chased a creep who was chasing a friend, drove home a drugged up dog in a Christmas bandana after surgery. I've driven friends places as they've napped in the back seat.

I think I will miss the old car, but there will be a new one full of new possibilities to keep me excited and looking forward. I look forward to watching the mileage climb, to learning all the new switches and functions, to having music from my phone that I can control through the car instead of being tempted to fuss with my phone while driving. And gosh, I'll have a sunroof. It will be everything I've wanted in a car.

I don't want to be embarrassed. I just want to be grateful and free to enjoy what my life has given me, even if sometimes it's just stuff.

Evicted

I stood at the kitchen sink washing my hands, gazing out the kitchen window. A bunny hobbled up toward the house with a clump of twigs and grass in its mouth, disappeared under the windowsill, and hobbled away empty-mouthed. Since we have a fenced-in yard populated by at least two bunny-destroying little dogs, I went to investigate. Sure enough, a little burrow was being constructed under the kitchen window between some dense greenery my mom had growing. It was only just a divot so far, with a huge tumbleweed of rabbit fluff nestled inside.

The bunny came back into the yard and froze, nostrils hard at work and mouth full of new twigs. She stared at me, and feeling like a complete monster, I chased her toward the corner of the fence where she had been getting in. I went inside to grab a yard stick. I stuck it in the divot to be sure it went no further, and set about deconstructing the little home she had been making. It seemed a terrible waste, so I picked her fur up with the edge of the stick and carried it clump by clump, depositing it just on the other side of the fence. She waited a little beyond, still watching, her mouth still full of construction material. She seemed to be wondering if I would go away so she could resume her task.

I wouldn't.

After I was satisfied she had enough of her insulation back, I went for some bricks and one by one, stacked them against the gap in the fence she had been using to get in and out. By the time I was done, she had left. Her pile of fur lay where I left it.

The next day, I went out to see if she had reclaimed her fur to rebuild. All but one small tuft was gone, but it had also been a windy day so I can't be sure it didn't simply just blow away.

I still see a bunny exploring around outside our fence and wonder if it's the same bunny, and if she's still traumatized from the rude eviction to which I subjected her. As awful as it felt to displace her, it probably felt better than knowing she and her babies were almost certain dog food.

Life's Not Fair

"Poor us, 'needing' to 'lose' all our PTO to go on cool family vacations."

"Well, it beats using it all on having a tumor removed like last year."

Bad news comes in threes, when it rains it pours, you take the good with the bad, etc.... It seems to me that life is seldom in balance of good and bad at one point in time. Like there are good stretches and bad stretches, and if you are lucky they average out in the long run. I made the joke to my sister that all the upcoming good things in my life (a trip to Germany, a trip to Disney World, and getting a new car) are the upswing from the last two years, which was a montage of "getting a tumor carved out and being dumped a whole lot". Ok, not a whole lot, but the only times it has happened to me were remarkably close together.

Now I feel almost ashamed of myself for all the happy, fun, exciting things on the horizon. It feels like I did not earn them, which honestly is largely true. So much in life is circumstantial and beyond my control. It wasn't my idea for my sister to move to an exotic location, fall in love there, and plan a wonderful trip for the rest of the family surrounding her wedding. It wasn't my idea for the thought of her starting a family to launch my mom into a desperate ploy to be sure we go on an American vacation before babies anchor my sister in Germany even more. And my mom didn't have to let me live with her and accrue a down payment that will allow my first non-hand-me-down car to possibly be my dream car.

What it comes down to is that I am incredibly blessed. There is not a great number of people in my life, but the people in my life are great. Yes, I am kind of coasting on the coat tails of those more ambitious than me, but we all play our own little role, and who knows what one I might have to play in the future.

In the meantime, I try to ease my guilt by being more responsible around my mom's house. I sleep downstairs on the couch so her old dog, who is at risk of falling off her bed to his death, can safely sleep with me there and know he has company. I am trying harder at work, an incredibly frustrating effort since I still feel like I have no damned idea what I'm doing. And I'm trying to be a more proactive friend, reaching out first instead of childishly wondering why so-and-so hasn't been texting me.

It's all very silly... I can't retroactively earn the good things coming my way, and this is all stuff that I should have been doing anyway. But if my broken child-logic makes me be less of a drain on the people who reward me everyday, I think it's still a good thing.

How It Goes

"How's your blogging going these days?"

I dare say it isn't, really. 

(Hai, it's me.)

However, I have noticed some people are still visiting, so I want to say that it means a lot to me.

A couple of years ago, I had a blog with a decent following and cute, consistent premise. I would basically tell and illustrate personal anecdotes I thought were poignant, which I think I've only really done once on this one, and with no pictures. I dropped the old blog for personal reasons, and started a new one for even more personal reasons, and promptly, life felt weird.

I think I was able to be consistent with the old blog because it was a very consistent time in my life. I was commuting to college, which I'm good at school; I was in the same relationship the whole time, comfortably feeling like I was in love; family life was stable and nothing new ever happened. Now I'm training for an even more mentally challenging career; my social life is reliant on friends who can't always be there for me when I feel like I need them; and my last grandparent died, my brother changed his name and this very day my sister bought a wedding dress. My feelings are everywhere, and while I've written a post-like little Something almost every day, nothing feels appropriate for long.

But there's always some whimsy in my head I can belch out into words, and I think trying to get back into that will do me some good.