#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.