Many Mes

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

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

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 Then I pop a lolli in my mouth and drive off in my car, which is also a tiny yellow rocket that runs on love and outdated German techno music.

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

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

There's Organization if You Look Hard Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other foot feels left out.

Beige Rainbow

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toy Advertising

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

http://youtu.be/UohRpWj9O-M

The Books We Read When We're Kids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Worry, Be Neutral

This is me taking time for myself.

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

Or quantity, for that matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street of Consciousness

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

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

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

Then we drove west for a while.

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

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

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