I can't tell if this feeling is that I have something still that I need to do, or that I am trying to find something to do to leave behind. Tonight is the first night in a while I have genuinely felt the darkness, felt like it was so close beyond nothing more than a veil, a comfortable mystery, a great adventure. Telling my husband how often I felt that way was maybe the last night until tonight that death felt close, either just under the floor or over my shoulder. As I say that the wall starts creaking, and a momentary fear makes me cling back into life. As much as the heaviness inside me wants to deny it sometimes, I do cling, I have some amorphous feeling of desire to be, just as vague a mist as any other feeling I have, and just as concrete. I don't think it's any desire to justify my not-being-dead, more of just trying to find any kind of point or something to show for it. In my opinion, there is no justifying my existence against what I go through to maintain it. My continued living has not felt for my own enjoyment, but if it has not benefited anyone else, then it truly was an exercise in futility, in torturing myself. If there was some art, or some thought, some image I could leave that would bring any modicum of joy or comfort that would last longer than any awkwardness, pain or resentment I will inevitably leave in my wake.

It feels really sick to feel both relieved and resentful that my husband isn't bothered to know that his wife detests living. Oftentimes I regret marrying; it's something I've often wondered if I'd ever do it at all. Because he seemed unbothered by my troubles, maybe I felt like I wasn't so inflicted on him. Like most other things, I could wash over him and leave no trace. But then I realize how alone I feel. How un-cared for. And the perversion of how nice that feels sometimes.

Somebody once asked why I keep living. Why? Why? My answer was the thoroughly depressing, "Why not?" Usually meant in an encouraging way... why not stop for ice cream? Why not get the red instead of the blue? Why not take a few days off? You have the vacation days saved up! No. Why not stay alive? Nothing actively drawing away, because I know leaving abruptly will accomplish nothing. The lasting impression would be sadness, tragedy, unrequited longing for a purpose. Perhaps that is mostly why I long to leave something behind... not to justify the pain I am going through, or to explain it or attempt to make sense of it, but to make some kind of positivity out of it. I don't think I'm so special that my attempt would be any good, but it would feel better to be hit by a bus or blown up at a time when I had something going, something I was reaching for, something that people could look at and know I really was enjoying myself here and there, and that I wanted them to know I was okay.

Alive

I was trying to decide if I recognized the echoing introduction to the song Spotify had chosen to play for me when a meek and familiar voice rippled through my car.

"I tremble
tremble
tremble
tremble....."

It had been years since I had listened to Metric, and I had never listened to it on Spotify, so it was an honest and organic choice made by my Discover Weekly playlist. I had stopped listening to Metric and many other artists I was enjoying at the time years ago because they had become associated with the period of time in which I was a 24 year old with a breast tumor.

Here was this song, and I was simultaneously recalling the lyrics as they trailed through my car's interior. The straining pain in my chest that I had been carrying for weeks made my sternum ache as I heard my symptoms sung to me.

"Help, I'm alive.
My heart keeps beating like a hammer.
Hard to be soft, tough to be tender.
Come take my pulse, the pace is on a runaway train.
Help, I'm alive.
My heart keeps beating like a hammer."


Metric, Metrik, Muse, Silversun Pickups... I never listened willingly to LaRoux, but that also fell solidly into this realm of music, this soundtrack to my early 2013. I had not listened to any of these artists since then, and here they all are, present in this week's Discover Weekly. Together. It is by no means a complete list of music of that time, but it's enough that it became increasingly surreal as they cycled through the playlist I didn't plan on that drive home from work. By the time Knights of Cydonia made it on, the windows of my car were rolled down and I was leaning heavily into my hand, my elbow propped up on the inside of my door.

On this date four years ago, I was just a couple of days away from the surgery to have my breast tumor removed. At 5'9" tall, my weight had dwindled down to 115 pounds. What felt like a rock in my breast now constituted a significant portion of it. Upon removal it was well over "golf ball" size, venturing into "egg" proportions inside my tiny boob. Before the procedure, a "friend" of mine called me to chat, and upon hearing of my health situation, he told me that at least if it was cancer "people won't be sad for very long if you die". He then described a metaphor about human lifespans being like those of flies, tiny and meaningless in the scheme of the universe. We don't talk any more.

At the time, I thought that this chapter of my life was some dramatic brush with mortality, but looking back it looks like just another of life's hazing rituals. "Adulthood is looking both ways to cross the street and getting hit by an airplane," said an image macro my sister put on Facebook once. Growing up is just hurting in new and humiliating ways, and forgetting how to cope with ones you've already dealt with a thousand times.

Still, the pain I've been carrying for the past few weeks has been distinctive in a way that I feel like I should take a moment at some point to be eloquent and articulate it (but this is not that time). It was only last week that I was finally able to word it to somebody in such a way that they (he, my husband) repeated it back to me in a way I understood. In trying to explain it to friends, it always came back something like, "Oh yeah, I'm a total worry wart. What you need to do is not worry about anything purple monkey dishwasher." I told my husband, "There's no specific worry that's upsetting me. It's like the fog I get when I have depression, only this is just doom, and there has been a constant pain in my chest that feels like what happens when you're having a dream and you slip off a cliff, only it never resolves itself or goes away. I'm constantly missing that extra stair, going *gasping noise*."

After that drive home, that particular straining in my chest is gone. My chest still hurts, but with a dull ache I am more or less accustomed to. My heart still races, but not as quickly. The hummingbird in my chest is now a sparrow, is the dumb way I want to say it. I still wonder what will get me up tomorrow, how I will get home, who I will be to who I see and who sees me. But it hurts less, and it feels less urgent. Like the answers to all those questions are already here, and I maybe don't need to consciously know them to act them out.

I don't feel like I need to beg for help any more. It's just I'm alive.

Little Talks

We had been dating for close to a year, or at least we had met each other almost a year ago. It took a few months for any labels to develop, but the weekend we met was the first of infinite consecutive weekends together. Anyway, this particular night we wound up in a dark, moody bar not  far from his townhouse. I had never been inside this one yet despite our thorough exploration of the different drinking venues in the area almost each and every weekend. The darkness might have been accentuated by a thick haze I had been developing for the past 12 hours, starting with our "pregame" lunch before the beer festival.

Of Monsters and Men's "Little Talks" came wafting into the room, buoyed by the thick atmosphere of fairy lights and my own pleasant buzz. I complained to him that as much as I liked the song, it reminded me of a very irritating person from their country of origin.

"It is a good song, though," he said fairly, always pragmatic and just. A sudden grin took over his usually placid face. "We should sing it karaoke some time."

"You'd sing karaoke?" I said skeptically.

"Sure!" he chirped, as if it was an obvious proposal and as if he was not the most introverted person I had ever met in my life.

Two years later, we were newly weds on our third (third? third.) night of marriage. We had been wandering the bars of San Francisco between Union Square and Chinatown. The wind and rain had driven us into a swanky coffee shop that, like many other hip establishments in the city, seemed to only play "indie" hits from five years previous at the most recent. Ladytron's "International Dateline" gave way to "Little Talks" as we decided to start commuting to the next bar.

We followed a very stylish chihuahua and his man-bunned handler out onto the sidewalk and back into the solid wall of wet dog smell that seemed to permeate the entire bay area. "Little Talks" still lingered in my head.

"Do you remember saying we should karaoke that song? I think it was after our first beer fest together."

He chuckled, "Yeah, and we still can. I think I know the lyrics better than most people."

I started singing gently:

"Cuz though the truth may vary this-"
and he chimed in with me,
"ship will carry our bodies safe to shore."

We linked arms, our free hands holding our matching cold-brew coffees as we trundled down the hill to our next destination.

The View From The Couch

A few thoughts and anecdotes from my struggle for normalcy:

My therapist xeroxed a list of things to do when I was feeling irritable. Among the list of things she couldn’t come up with herself (watch a favorite show, go for a walk) was the suggestion:

“Fly a kite.”

…...

It might as well have said, “Fly a fucking kite” while shrugging and taking a drag off a cigarette.

Fuck you, xeroxed suggestion sheet.

The psychiatrist asked how I was doing on my break without medication, and I told him that I feel like killing myself at least once a day. He shrugged.

While talking about cognitive disruption, the therapist stopped and looked at me the most sincerely she ever had.

“Don’t should yourself.”

Near-swearing in a professional environment helps me cope with therapy.

I still get mortality warnings in the mail for a drug I stopped taking months ago.

Place You Always Go But Have Never Been

There are times when you are having a dream you are at a place you know, but your mind has generated a scene that is nothing at all like that place is in waking life. But somehow, your brain still convinces you that you are in that place, even if it never had a bathroom in the garage. You just accept it as it develops in your dream.  Twice in the same week, I had a very similar feeling in my waking life about places I have gone through a thousand times.

 I took an Uber to an event, and we drove along a section of town that I drive all the time but don't have the freedom to actually look around. It's like when you're having a dream about a place, but it isn't that place, but your brain is convincing you it's that place, except in this case, it really IS that place and it's horribly confusing but also kind of neat.  Not that it was a nice area or anything... Abandoned lots half-assedly paved with weeds poking through the empty foundations and such... And lots of BBQ joints crammed into building that were probably formerly dental offices. You might know the kind of place.

Then on a recent Monday, I was able to mosey into work a little later than usual. I merged onto a bit of interstate I go on at least twice a day, usually five days a week, sometimes more and sometimes less. It’s a segment that has been undergoing some manner of reconstruction every day I have drive in it in the past 2 3/4 years, so I have always had to be on my toes for out-of-towners who wouldn’t be anticipating the sudden shifting or disappearing of certain lanes. But that morning, I was able to look around a bit, as there wasn’t another car heading my way as far as the eye could see. For the first time in my entire life, I was able to notice the housing addition whose backyards ran almost right up to the highway. Some had fences, but some homes were just relying on faith and a slight downgrade to protect their living rooms from stray semis and drunk drivers. It struck me as very sad that some people have to buy homes like that, and that never in my life had I noticed them.

But then I guess I have to cut myself some slack since my car time isn't my time to observe extraneous details and feel feelings about them. It's my time for me to get from one place to another via controlled explosions, trying not to ram or be rammed by other motorists. And it doesn't help my powers of observation that I'm always blasting some music, something chaotic like "Is It Raining In Your Mouth" and mentally (or sometimes orally) screaming "FIVE SWEATY FINGERS ON MY DASHBOARD, FIVESWEATYFINGERSONMUHDASHBOARD, FIVE SWEATY FI-

FIVE- SWEAT- FING! GAH!!"

#FMLAIMD: Fuck My Life And Its Many Dicks

A few days ago, I had a bizarre run-in with a stranger. I was at a cheap big-box store I don’t usually go to because of how crowded and sad and dirty it is, and I was leaning on an empty shopping cart I had gotten from the front of the store where they keep about five thousand empty shopping carts. I was in an aisle full of large, heavy lamps because I intended to use my empty shopping cart to move a large, heavy lamp. My right buttock rested jauntily on the edge of the cart as I stood with my hip popped out, contemplating what heavy lamp I was going to pick up and put in my cart. It was probably a good thing that I pulled an additional couple of inches away from the cart to actually pick up one of those heavy lamps, because what happened next would have startled my buttock something terrible.

A fifty-something white man in a camouflage hunting coat stomped briskly over to my cart, slammed a boxed vacuum cleaner into it with an aggressive, rattling thud, scowled at me, and whipped the cart away from the skinny-teenager-looking girl who was standing next to it with a large lamp in her hands. His leathery wife gazed hilariously up at the ceiling, desperate to look like she hadn’t noticed anything as I squatted there with my lamp in my hands and cartoon question marks popping out of my head. He was long gone by the time my brain could come to terms with the fact that two grown human beings had just swept up to a smaller, younger, lamp-buying human and taken away the resource she had gathered for herself to move a lamp. A resource they could have walked one hundred paces to get while carrying a handy vac much more light and hollow than a large lamp.

I set the lamp down at the end of a tissue display near the store entrance and went to gather myself another empty cart. Even though all I wanted to do was go home and spoon the lamp I had endured such confusion to get, I still had to get groceries in this huge, overwhelming store I had not been in for months and which apparently had gone through so much reorganization that I found my spirit animal while looking for a can of spicy Pringles. Tired from a long day, abuse by strangers and the enlightenment of having just completed a spirit quest in a Walmart, I then got in the one line with a screwed up card-reader and the only cashier in the world lazy enough to not try any of her training and instead subject everyone to wait in line for a manager for fifteen unnecessary minutes. An older woman in line behind me was intrigued by my lamp and wanted to talk with me about it excitedly, and I did my best to be friendly and bubbly like I want to be perceived. Of course she had to ask how much my lamp was, and when I told her, she seemed to scoff and turned to whisper what I had just said to her family. I assumed by her whispering that she disapproved of me and my highfaluting lamp.

Anyway, after I got home and had time to chill out and put away my hard-won groceries, I texted about the Hunting Coat Cart Wrangler to one of my guy friends who is usually good for a chuckle after such incidents. When I told him about the Jackoff Bandit, his response was something along the lines of “These things only happen to you.” Many months back he used to jokingly call my run-ins with sexual harassers and idiot men “hot girl problems,” but apparently over time it became clear that it is a much more specific issue. An issue quite specific to me. He said something like this again, only I think he abbreviated it even further to “only you”.  To which I said:

“fuck my life and its many dicks”

He responded:

“FMLAIMD”

I decided this acronym needed writing about, and was reminded again today when I was contacted by a woman who had recently broken up with an ex of mine. She wanted to know if his harassment got violent, since I still occasionally get eerie calls and texts from him a couple of years after the fact. And again, I thought of the times he would call and how it made me feel very much like saying “FMLAIMD”.

As someone who tries to be an eternal optimist, I want to break down why I am endorsing this phrase.  If I may:

“Fuck my life.” Those are some strong fucking words, particularly since they start with “fuck,” that hardest of the hard swears. But in a world where tragedy makes me hear a mental recording of Louis CK saying, “Do I even want to be alive any more?” it feels like a comedic hyperbole, void of suicidal implications or true despair. It’s like repeatedly trying to do a simple task and failing, but punctuating the last failure with an arm-flapping gesture and an unwarranted hard swear. It’s no longer an issue, it’s now a slapstick bit.

“and its many dicks.” Okay, as a grammar stickler, it’s going to drive me crazy when this catches on and people will inevitably try to spell it as “it’s many dicks”. No. I T S with no apostrophe is possessive, and for better or for worse, my life owns those dicks in this phrase. My life is not dicks, it has dicks about it. There is much more to my life than dicks, quite luckily, but the dicks are certainly there. And while I have been trying really hard to eliminate gender-based swears from my vocabulary, “dick” is just too good a word for what it is. In this case, a jerk. A special brand of jerk that just screws everybody. It’s like the difference between “guys” and “men”; all guys are men, but not all men are guys. All dicks have penises, but not all penis-wielders are dicks. Dick is a crude slang word, not an organ on a sacred body. I have many wonderful men in my life, and they are not dicks. But if they want to call their penises dicks, such is their prerogative. 

So I’m inviting you to rally around FMLAIMD. May it remind us all not be dicks, so as not to bog each other down with endless dickery. Let us remember that dicks come in all shapes and sized, and many don’t even have dicks. Let us not discriminate and know that even we ourselves are often the dick, and that we can have much higher aspirations and be more to each other than just another of the many dicks Fing up one’s life.

Sorry, I just couldn’t handle publishing that much swearing. Here: puppy. I think that balanced some of that out.

Things I Learned Purging Photos

Today I received my new MacBook in the mail, so before I even THINK of syncing my devices together, I thought it prudent to go through purging all the photos I had collected on my iPad over the last couple of years. I knew it was going to be uncomfortable, but… man, I date a lot of guys and save a lot of stupid pictures. Apparently I can add “screen shots of unknown context” and “hot girls with really short hair” to my list of favorite hoarding items. Anyway, there are some general concepts that seemed recurring during my Embarrassing Photo Hunt, and some of them felt weirdly poignant. Here are some things I learned while cleaning out my photo albums….

Do Not Flip the Bird to the Camera. It might turn out a great photo, and then you will find yourself having to decide if sharing a great picture of yourself is worth looking like a total A-hole.

Take Time to Enjoy Being Single. When you inevitably delete every photo with an ex in it, you might find entire events and even YEARS of your life disappearing after the breakup.

Take Lots of Pictures of Pets. Nobody will thumb-up your glamour selfies and sappy Instagrams with above-mentioned exes, but they will certainly appreciate a dog in a chair. Also, you will greatly value these pictures much longer than all those exes and selfies you’re deleting in shame.

Screenshots Are a Great Placebo. “I will totally remember this by taking a picture of how it looks on a computer screen.” *three years later* “Why do I have a photo of the bottom right quadrant of a Skype conversation?” *delete* SO much brain-memory space saved!

Delete Haircut Inspiration after the Appointment. Seriously, you look like a serial killer stalking ginger women with rockin’ sidecuts.

The Best “Sexy” Photos are Ones Where You Don’t Know if They’re You or Not. At least you won’t be incriminated in this way if you ever run for office.

There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Filter. When editing a photo, it’s not a bad practice to save progressively altered versions and give it some time before going back and picking one to send out into cyberspace. Of course, this still means more photos to clean up later. This process just reinforces lessons in restraint.

No Filter Will Replace Eyeliner. The joke about black eyeliner being “hotness in stick form” comes from a very real place. You can bump up the contrast all you want, your little squirrel eyes will be just as disappeared.

Your Pictures Can Outlive a Phase. And You. Make sure the face you are plastering all over Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is the face that you want to have looked up well after you can’t be looked up, and also is the best representation of that time you wore your hair that way for the Skrillex show.

Topless Young Christopher Walken Completes any Photo Collection.

I Believe In Jebus

“Flanders, how do you stay so happy—and don’t say Jesus!”

- Homer Simpson in "I Won't be Home for Christmas"

This last year has been a fragile one for me. All events have been objectively good, but whether inflicted by medication or buried emotional trauma, it has been a difficult one. There was a point at which some friends and I were discussing our faith, or for some of us, what was left of it.

"Is that supposed to be enough? Just that Jesus came back is really supposed to be sufficient to put up with life?" I realize how much some of us were sounding like ungrateful children. Perhaps we are.

Months later, and only a few days ago, I started crying uncontrollably during the singing of "Because He Lives". Of course, my tears dried up during that verse that comes out of nowhere gushing about babies, but came back for the chorus and the bit about the victory in dying.

But seriously, if dying is going to be so great, what is there to hold a Christian to the earth? There's a lot of doctrine about propagating the species and sharing the word of The Lord, but spending my life pregnant and then telling my offspring that the life I gave them is just awful until they die doesn't seem appealing to me.

Something I realized just today is that I have been cherishing the words of Dostoyevsky in my heart even more than the things I feel I was taught in church. Specifically:

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

There are even more powerful declarations of hope and victory given by Jesus himself, but it is hard for me to access those sometimes. It's hard for me to remember the words of hope from a being who so many use as a weapon against those they choose to hate. To too many, it seems like Jesus came not to save the world, but to condemn it. Because my pastor has yet to promise hell to anybody in any of his sermons, I bet there are many who would condemn him to it. Why WOULD a sinner want to hear from another sinner how somebody else's god will destroy their very soul (unless, of course, they unconditionally abandon all life experience to share all the beliefs of the messenger in this scenario)?

Children ask their parents if a certain person is going to hell, and the parents feel authorized to answer "yes" or "no" (for family members it's "yes"; celebrities, "no"). I knew the story of the sisters who raped their drunk father in the Old Testament before I knew male and female had different genitals, or the word "genitals", or the concept that gender was tied to anything other than hair length. [Sidebar: that version of myself would be shocked at my hair now; would I think I had gotten a sex change?] It feels like more than anything, "The Church" wanted to push me out, to keep membership only to those with the greatest sense of entitlement.

I believe in the cleansing power of Jesus. Not because of anything "The Church" ever did for me, but because of something I feel inside myself. I came back to church not because of anything anybody in "The Church" did, but because that feeling inside me knew it was time. And I think that feeling is Jesus, or God, or whatever you choose to call it. I've made it this far, and it would be an insult to the misery I survived in my youth to give up any time after. So yes, that is sufficient.

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.