Cars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evicted

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

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

I wouldn't.

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

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

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

Life's Not Fair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How It Goes

"How's your blogging going these days?"

I dare say it isn't, really. 

(Hai, it's me.)

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

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

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

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

An Open Letter To Lunch Buddies Fruit Flavored Snacks

What the hell is this?

Happy April Fools' Day!

Keep On Creeping On

I thought I'd take a nap. Made myself into a nice little burrito with my comforter, had a squishy dog lying on me, heating up the parts that hurt. And then somewhere in the neighborhood a dog dared to bark, turning my Pug from a snugly puddle of cuddle into a stabbing mass of elbows, claws and barking all over my most tender areas. So fully awake and pummeled I'm going to make emotional diarrhea out of my fingertips.

Call it what you want, that's what all blogging basically is. Some people just have more relevant diarrhea.

This is a horrible start.

Anyway, blogs aren't all very... practical. But it's the personal ones, things like this one, that I love to read and reread. The odd little details of people's lives, thoughts, coping mechanisms.... I don't write this nonsense because I think the world wants to know. I pretty much write it because I'm full of too many thoughts and write as a sort of therapy. Also, for the odd few who might be like me and have the same perverted interest in other people's banalities. I love stories that if you told them to a live audience, their eyes (or mouths, if they hate other humans) ask, "Aaaand?" Those make some of the best blog posts ever. There are times talking to people when I see that blank stare that asks for the moral of the story and I think, "Whatever, that would have made a bitchin' blog post."

Somebody recently asked me why there aren't any comments on here. Well, because very few people are actually reading this. I'm actually really surprised at the number of views I sometimes get considering I can recall every individual that I have told about this abomination. And it's weird as hell when a friend refers back to this in real life conversation. I suppose I can't act too surprised that somebody might be interested when I am so interested in others, myself. But it feels weird perhaps since I am already so familiar with myself.

If I could freeze time for real, I would pause in the evening to read everybody's stories: what everybody did today, that funny "what if" you played out in your head as you were driving to work or putting off that intellectual task you were dreading. Yes, you. I would read the shit out of your blog. You are a unique and beautiful snowflake and I want to read all your weird, snowflake thoughts. I want to creep on everybody in the world.

The dog is back and I'm letting him lie on that spot again. I am truly a glutton for punishment.

Some Clumsy Analogies and a Trampoline and Almost Dostoyevsky

During a recent conversation, a confidant expressed that he was "impressed" with how willing I am to be open and emotionally vulnerable despite what being that way has gotten me into in the past.

"What if I'm just stupid?" I asked, half teasingly and half seriously. And he said:

"Hope is never stupid."

Hope honestly didn't feel like quite the right word at the time, but the more I think of it, the more maybe it could be.

When something happens, when I'm reminded of cuts I've suffered from other people, I stop and consider how even with the best of intentions, even I have hurt people. Throw in emotional compromise, and we are all just kids playing with each other in the dark. And sometimes we are playing with matches. And sometimes we don't know it but the room we are in is rigged with explosives. And also we're on a boat or something. Sometimes even when the game is called, one kid is waiting to play Hide and Seek ("One marshmallow, two marshmallow, three marshmallow...") while another is ready to Ninja Turtle kick him in the back of the head. Because while we are all still children, some are admittedly kind of assholes.

But usually we don't even call the game. We are just poking around making asses of ourselves and each other. Some will agree to one game but play another. Sometimes people just pick up their ball and go home. Ever play a game of Hide and Seek where another player just straight up stopped playing when they were supposed to be looking for you? How long did you wait, and how bad did it feel when they said, "Oh, I stopped looking an hour ago"?

Anyway, that's enough of the playdate analogies. Basically, we all do stupid, harmful stuff all the time. Do we always mean it as badly as it is taken? Hopefully not. Sometimes the game changes without us knowing, or we lose an important piece. Perhaps it is more of a coping mechanism than a philosophy, but I am able to be "thrown away and the bin set on fire" and still somehow be the one who is happiest with the outcome of that game of Burn Can. Because I was taught how to play nice, I have other kids I can go play with.

And that is where the hope is, in a roundabout sort of way. Hope and faith in people and their intentions. I didn't mean to hurt the people I have, so maybe they didn't mean to hurt me. Do some of them even know? There are people in the world I would like to apologize to and don't know how, so I haven't. Maybe somebody feels that way about me.

We all play differently, and some play rough. But the kids who are scared and who insist on making all the rules are no fun. I want to be fun to play with because damn it, I want to play! Just not with that pyro kid any more. Set me on fire once, shame on you....

Anyway, you also won't know what cool kids are up the street who have a freakin trampoline if you don't make yourself available to them. And I suppose that is a sort of hope, too.