LaurieWrites

August and some other things.

So. Things have been pretty heavy around here. So look! 

It's me! Mildly inappropriately clad in a dress I mended poorly all by my damn self in my hotel room just minutes before Robin wrote profanity on me at a party! She is balls to the wall, y'all, so it's convenient that she tells you that up front. Or, as I captioned a photo of her the other day, "Honey Robin don't give a shit." 

And I'm overtired of the honey badger business, too, but it just made sense. 

Anyway, that should lighten it up a little. If it doesn't I don't know what to tell you. It's all I got. 

Return from BlogHer 2-aught-11 has been difficult. Things were already feeling teetery before I left. Summer schedules are challenging and work is heavy. Major events happened early in the season, and I'd been spending a lot of time since then either on the yoga mat refocusing or screwing around at home, wondering what the next thing was going to be. 

Then I went to California and was surrounded for four days by so many of the best people I've ever been lucky enough to know. It is just true. There were probably 50 people there who I could call (if I liked to call people) and talk to about just about anything related to my life and my work, and they would listen and provide some kind of feedback and it would likely be very useful. This is very cool and incredibly overwhelming for my brain and my heart all at once. And nothing that is overwhelming for these two components of me is entirely good. But there's nothing I can do about it. I can't not go. That doesn't work for me. And once I'm there I'm no good at filtering or managing my time with people versus time alone. I don't have any time alone, unless you count the random walking back and forth to places, and even then? Never happens. Rarely happens. So it's a lot, but it's too much good stuff, if that makes sense. 

(I also worked very, very hard on a couple of projects during the conference this year, in addition to having bad words written on me and having some of the most fun times I've had with some people who are very important to me. I also made some good connections and got some great ideas. And also posed with Sarah and a toilet, and the worst slogan I have ever seen for any product ever. (Sorry dudes.))

(I don't know what is wrong with us, either. She doesn't know how grateful she should be that I posted none of the shots of her watching the, er, Kleenex-testing station, with the peculiar Pinocchio-ish Animatronic child blowing snot on a crappy tissue that splits right in half, and then the Best. Tissue. Ever! that wouldn't break if Voldemort snorted into it through his wand. 

"I'm a real boy! Watch me fake blow my nose! I will make you throw up, right here in this expo hall!" It was not enjoyable in any way.)  

Do you like how I'm flip-flopping here between bitching and sharing ridiculous things?

It's almost too much to go there, to have this kind of experience and feel like you're home when you're not and then come home and not feel at home. All the pieces are rearranged again and this year almost as soon as I walked in the door exhausted from the Metro I proceeded to embark on a series of poor life choices in response to this tailspin. I think I'm going to spend post-BlogHer week next year in a distant tropical location, where I give my iPhone and computer to a trusted caregiver and lie on a beach with  bottomless beers and trashy books.

I hear people bitching on the internet about this or that thing related to the experience every year, and I can't even process it. I don't even care about it, because for me it is such an intensely personal thing. I am too personally immersed to criticize the nuts and bolts of any one part of it. And maybe that makes me weird, but I don't question where anyone else finds their place and their people. I don't. (I mean, I may wonder why they like that place or those people, but it's really none of my business.) 

So yeah, I came home, and freaked out. Hard. 

My car blew up. There were other things, life things, a few scary things that I wasn't sure what to do with yet. The huddled masses came streaming back from the beach with burnt noses and a million, time-consuming questions. It turns out that returning from a few days of zero humidity and the pure streaming sunlight and blue sky of heaven to a vat of sticky air and clouds gives me a five-day not-quite-migraine. I had been away from yoga for a week and I immediately twisted something in my neck that made standing a challenge, and also sitting, which made me extra pleasant in the place where I am required to go daily. (Don't turn 40. Do some Benjamin Button thing. Start the incantations now, is all I'm saying.) Worse, I felt all of the ideas I'd had and discussions I'd felt were productive slip away in 48 hours, and everything was swirling around in my brain so much that I couldn't capture it in an appropriate to-do list.

I didn't feel like doing this, not at all: 

 That's my boyfriend Bob Harper from the Biggest Loser, or perhaps @mytrainerbob to you. I dragged myself out of bed on BlogHer Saturday at 6:50 a.m., to go downstairs and watch him lead a terrace full of women through a punishing workout. I didn't meet him because I got a little bit shy and a little bit feeling like I needed to jam from his oatmeal breakfast before it was over because I had done an hour-long flow yoga class after his workout and a shower was a priority if I was going to meet any of my other myriad obligations that day. 

So. Almost two weeks later (is it two weeks later? Lost track.) I still feel like I'm missing stuff. I missed everyone uncommonly when I came home this year -- actually reached out to talk to people on the phone when I got back, a level of missing that is strange for me. I just don't know what to do about it, this reorganization time, besides reach out more to people in my life. But I can't spend time with people every minute. I can't constantly be reattaching some virtual umbilical cord. This is the way my life is right now and I have to learn to rest in it to a point. 

I don't think I'm doing a very good job. So what I am doing is isolating more, even when I know that that is really not a good idea. I just don't like what I have to tell people, the truth of things. I hear myself rambling and it just seems better not to talk. There are things I can't even deal with myself right now, so how can I explain them to anyone else? 

I can just feel things changing, in the oddest, most unavoidable, way, some fundamental things about what I want to do and where and with whom I want to be. I'm in touch in a pretty clinical way with things I'm not happy with in myself, with the unhelpful ways I approach my daily routine, with ways I don't relate well to people and let them down (or at the very least am less to them than I could be), with goals I'm not achieving because I've not been so much lazy as I've been terrified.

Yes, I do some things right. Yes. I have skills and assets. I will still help you if I can. 

But it's a necessary time to focus on the "needs work" list. Because I think I'm coming to understand that when we or our circumstances change, our desires and deepest understanding of what moves us (which also tend to starkly and uncomfortably illuminate what doesn't, and to what we can no longer cling without great cost) do too. It's either bend with that (I'm crazily thinking "enjoy the go," and just, no no no. Also, advertising is our societal drug. This is proof.) or you don't, and eventually -- if you are anything at all like me -- you end up cracking up a little past the usual benchmark, kicking the wrong asses and taking the entirely incorrect names.

It's like my internal house is on fire and I'm constantly cataloguing what and who I'm going to grab first, and what I'm going to let incinerate. It's a disturbing, totally involuntary feeling, and I can't say it's comfortable on any level. It just is. 

(Please go and read that post when you're done with my droning here, if you're not offended by profanity like I am not. Her name is Noa. She read it at the Voices of the Year Community Keynote this year. It is perhaps the funniest goddamned thing I have ever read on the internet, second only perhaps to Hyperbole and a Half's "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS" post which has the added benefit of having added a slogan to my regular speech. Although I'm thinking "Fuck you, this is a pan," is going to go in there too.) 

I've done this before. Although it's been different, I've been uncomfortable and I've struggled. I've tried to get help with it and I've tried to listen to the discomfort for the signals of what I ought to do next, because I believe that they are always there. I'm trying to be brave when I'm really the opposite, and I'm trying to be strong although somedays that's overrated. When I have to go through the motions, I do, and when I have to be a teacher, I am. It's just putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes.

And I also can't say that all of this changing and the burning house concept is bad, entirely, because I honestly don't know yet.  There's very little I can do about it, but walk through it the best that I can. At least I feel somewhat motivated.

And I think that pretty much brings this up to date, which I feel compelled to do around here from time to time.

I'm sorry but it's true.

(Ed: This is one of those on which I hit "publish" when I meant to hit "draft. It's appropriate, because it's about all of the things I've never seemed to learn by heart. I'll probably never stop doing that accidentally, either.) 

*******************************

You walked up to me at work and said meet me in the back, that it was important, that it meant more than pizza sauce (because you always knew I needed backstory and context, that without it I would not cooperate) that it was going to be okay, don't worry. 

I probably scowled and bitched at you for mildly inconveniencing me but it was different from your usual voice and approach so I finished ringing up the pizza and hurried more than I might, usually, at a request from you. 

You. You. Complicated, counting on my red pen to fix your essays and your heart because that it what I knew to do, your green and the brown of what you called my "eyes, your eyes" to make me help you feel a little bit better about the expanseless future in the house just up the way. 

I sat in the flimsy chair directly in front of you, essentially between your legs. You had made it so there was nowhere else to go. I remember how it felt right now, how it made no sense and how yet everything was clear, my hands in my apron pockets, fiddling with the spare change and pens and broken cigarettes I couldn't smoke in your presence, your teensy, endless legs around me.

You can meet the same person several times over. I know that now. I was learning that then. 

You hugged me from behind. You asked me how much I'd made in tips. You told me that I smelled good, like I always did, combining words you'd spoken before in different orders, like a foreign language. You asked me what night I had free, in spite of the codependent calendar of our group of friends that we both knew by heart. 

I barked out days although I knew it was a bad idea. Where would we go when we went all of the same places all the time? And why? I could only ascertain that you wanted to kill me, I guess, send me headlong into the Dumpster in my brain's back parking lot. So we dove straight from clocking in on the same night to incredibly awkward in the back room, to the table at the place where you'd told me through a bottle that you loved me best (I don't know why. That couldn't possibly be true.)

This after years of trading just the kind of love you find in beers out of bags and lyrics on paper, and the deepest of whatevers at whatever bar. But maybe that was what we knew? Maybe you saw a sign. Maybe you freaked. Maybe we were so far past the line of true love at that point that the machinations didn't work anymore. 

(I will always  allow myself to think the last thing was true, loss of everything else aside. It had been years. It was not just my weight that changed, and so changed everything. I was all of a sudden someone you could picture naked. I had wanted to expect more of you.)

You didn't take all of the best of me. You were just first. 

And anyway, it never happened. 

********************** 

You can put Bringing On the Heartbreak on your stereo and fix your eyes just so, shaking your head because you did end up to be a gypsy of a sort and sometimes you think the pretty isn't such a lie, no matter what the years have indicated. You can shimmy up the skirt that finally fits and scrunchy up the hair that has always (let's be honest) been an asset. You can buy your own beer, get your own ticket scanned and ask Joe silently to fix whatever this bastard did that he did, and he will do it. He is an obedient ghost in the record machine.

He is paid a lot of money to do this for you. It doesn't really matter that he doesn't really mean it in the way that it applies, because he wouldn't know your face in a crowd of thousands. But he'll do it anyway, every time you press play, and if he helps you in the process, so much the better. You will mean it in that moment, and pretend that he does, too.

You will also remember it always, like it or not, and most helpfully, now, what it didn't mean is less important, even if it's never been this clear. 

Going to California Pt. 1

It's Wednesday of the sunniest week of the year. I say let's get on a boat, and you say okay, and we wander and we do. The air is so much lighter here, it's possible to find the second wind. 

I see one of the places where I most like to see the ocean. It's how it should be, for a little while. I know from so many other times that you can't hold onto hours, no matter how much you want to. In fact, the more you want to, the more you can't. It's just the way, you just have to let it roll. 

Amazing cheese and margaritas hours later the texts come in and the excitement of all those faces a few miles away, waiting with the gift of who they are, the brains and hearts and general Christmas morning of themselves, because we are lucky and likeable and were somehow at a few points in the right places at the right times. It blows up from there into what it always is, the friends, the schedule alternately adhered to and ignored, the ideas of how we justify ourselves, how we make ourselves the business forces and party people, the last minute decision of this or that, the drinks and hugs and passed hors d'oeuvres, the weird statues and the new city, the beauty and the bitching, the place we all find ourselves in no matter where it is each year, thousands of us, from here or there. 

(All of these things that you can't pick up free off of a table, that would never fit into a suitcase. Baggage jokes aside, you can't stuff feelings in there, not even if you sit on it.)

It's our luck and our randomness and our -- somehow -- ultimately defined place. It goes too fast and overwhelms and sometimes it irritates me because I'm an overly sensitive soul, but I move easily within it every time. It's a gargantuan home, one of the most certain things in my 365, what I'll always do until it's over, that I discovered (thank God) out of thin air. 

On Sunday I say let's get in a cab, and two of you who have been with me for years say okay, and that's what we do. We walk and drink. I show you where I liked most (really most) to see the ocean. It's how it should be. 

I don't know how I got so lucky. I don't know how the sky and sea and people came together six years ago to say "You can have this, for a few days each year. It's yours." but they did. It does. It rolls along.

And no matter how hard it is to come back into the inadequacy of everything else (because it is very, very hard), I don't really ever lose that time, not even when the walls close in and the engines blow, because you know that just a touch away there is a nation of these people, there is that sun-soaked memory.

There is that smile and those eyes and the hand that reaches out and says "Here, you are known." 

 

801

-- For Beattie and Eva, my Mom and Wayne. 

A man who I wish very deeply I had known built a house with his hands. He died when I was an idea, not even that probably, just something that would happen later.

When I was a baby, so I was told, I sat in a seat on top of the dining room table there. My grandmother spoke to me, she said. Her mother, his wife, died when I was three months old. I'm told that she held me to her chest, Eva did. And days later, when she was gone, her daughter placed me on a table that I would later know full well -- whose plastic, wrinkly tablecloth I can feel under the hands in my mind even now, clutter of sugar bowl and ashtray and butter dish -- and talked to me.

"I told you all of my problems, baby dear," she said. "I just talked and talked, and you listened all of the time."  

Where you can escape when you're four months old I don't exactly know, but clearly I have always been a good sitter on tables and listener to problems and general information. 

These years later, years too after I've stepped through either door, I know every board and floor and wall and stair her father constructed. I understand their place in the world like I have an idea of what they know as mine. I know who was there and I know where they went and I know what they said. 

I will never let it go, not really, even the parts that I work so hard, so consistently, to forget. 

I hate it, and I'll miss it. I want it torched and I want it back and different. I want back, most of all, what it took -- what I know in my heart it will always take, because taking was what it did -- and I want to swap out where I landed in its orbit.

I hate what I can't change. I hate what I can't love. I hate my anger and my pettiness and my inability to walk through fire in a bubble. 

But I loved its yard and the back corner where I could hide from what I even then knew was my potentially-defining difference. I loved that porch, even with its scary parade of visitors and loud voices. I loved the way I could see down that street, how I've always liked views. I can grab on to the peeling forest-green paint of the swing set and kick my legs and know there is onion dip waiting for me on the picnic table. I can see a German shepherd and a bedraggled poodle on the couch, and feel the Sunday sun shining on the funny papers, with no one yelling and Silly Putty on the coffee table and a cousin or two sucking down cereal in the dining room. 

I can see the Christmases that weren't bad, and meaty walnuts broken in the nutcracker and Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday night and banging pans on the porch on New Year's Eve. 

I can see a mass of love that got confused, boards that rotted and dogs that died (and people), addictions unsecured and broken down cars and weeds that just kept growing. 

I see my mother, the angel keeper of this place and its people, to whom Beattie and Eva would say "Rest, this was not how it was supposed to be, especially not for you. Rest in our love. We still see you, even now, every day. They were misguided and wrong. We'd tell them if we could that we are so, so disappointed." 

I have a few houses in my heart, this one a broken down place, a double lot of hope and disappointment, of love and belief and anger and pain. I could sit on its porch and tell you all about it, really. I should have always been able to go there and do that. But instead I take mental sledgehammers to its walls. I keep trying to shut it down, because on one fine day along the line I chose that as my path of least (and yet so not least, not least at all) resistance.  

And one day just before it's passed over, when the person who lives there now is gone and before the new ones take it with a hammer to the dirt, I'll drive there and pray I'm not arrested and I will clip the rose bush and I will plant it somewhere new and pray I don't kill what I take as I so frequently do.

I will do it because of this place and its not-entirely-terrible people who I came from -- especially for my uncle and my mother -- and because the hope of some kind of redemption is the only kind of foolish path I know. 

The Beach Trees -- a BlogHer Book Club Review

Sometimes books surprise me. 

The Beach Trees, by Karen White, surprised me. 

I love the Gulf Coast -- New Orleans in particular -- so I was excited to read a story set there, clearly written by someone with a love for the area. What I was less sure about was taking my limited time to read a story I identified at first as "chick lit." 

I know, I know. I'm not proud. 

Did I get over it? Surprise me in a good way or bad? I guess you'll see.