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.