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.