LaurieWrites

June in Motion

I can tell already that this is going to be one of those rambly life review posts, but this has been a crazy couple of months, y'all. 

I don't even know how else to describe it except I've been in so many places -- my body and my suitcase and my as-ever hastily-assembled documents, as well as my heart and my mind -- that I'm losing track. I actually forgot how old I was the other day, although I can't remember why I wanted to remember in the first place. I just know I didn't know, that for a stretch of seconds I was ageless, which was nice, although my bones and my blood pressure disagree. 

Since the end of my job at the end of May, I've been to Seattle for a week, then home, then Charlotte for what amounted to almost a week. Now I'm home, and due to go to Philadelphia for a long weekend of work and hopefully some more exploration of the city. After that it's here again, and more work on this strange, confusing, and sometimes exhilarating trip into what's next. 

Seattle was a gift of a trip to a city that I loved from the first few minutes I got on the light rail from the airport to downtown ($2.75 and easy peasy -- nice!) and saw...well, I saw a lot of stuff, but pretty much all that stood out to me at first was trees. Trees everywhere, a sight for East Coast eyes, reaching feet and feet and feet up into the sky. I'd never been to the Pacific Northwest at all before, and every trip into a side of the country that is still so new to me after decades of going only as far west as Chicago opens my eyes and my heart to a landscape that still doesn't quite make sense to me outside of pictures. 

My pictures are gathered here. I took very few of the conference, because I wasn't working the event in that way, and a scant few of the several outstanding meals I had while I was there. Believe me when I say that I ate almost nonstop the entire time, and had not one single bad meal. It's a kickass food town, and I'd go back with that agenda in mind any day. Like, say, tomorrow. Would someone like to invite me back tomorrow? Because I will rearrange some things.

Elliott's Oyster House, for instance, had me at "frozen mignonette." 

That is not sorbet. Oh no. That is that glorious vinegar, shallot, wine oyster concoction that I love, except it is FROZEN. SUCH a good idea. I want more now. 

Anyway. Seattle was nice. I have a highlights post in my mind that I should be writing right now, except right now what I'm trying to do is make friends with  my blog again in sort of a conversational way. See how that's working for me? Yeah. 

If Seattle is my new girlfriend, North Carolina is my road girl, POLITICAL CHOICES NOTWITHSTANDING, and Charlotte has its moments. 

This weekend was unfortunately marred by an increasing struggle with hormones (hi, 41, thanks) that seems hell-bent on wrecking my body and my serenity for a week out of every month lately, but it also meant time with some friends I apparently really needed to see and feet back on streets with sights I completely understand, like wild roses in front yards and barbecue and sun that slants in a way that will always put my incorrigibly MidAtlantic soul most at ease.

This looks just like the way back of my grandmother's back yard, for instance. I saw so  many wild roses on this street, a time machine of wild roses, if you will, down to the little old lady I finally saw fanning herself on the front porch and watching me take pictures of her rose bushes. She nodded and smiled and said good morning, obviously sweetly proud when I told her what she knew, which is that they are so beautiful. 

I had luxurious time and meals and drinks with women who make me think better and want to write better, and who seem to see a better side of me (albeit filtered through the wires and tubes you're looking at) that I completely miss at almost all times when it's just me and a bathroom mirror and crushing self-assessment. (Thank you, Tanis. Thank you, Katherine. Thank you, Robin.) I had a beer in an Irish pub that doubles as a gay bar when it's not hosting Kenny Chesney concert pre-parties, served by a wrinkly dude in skinny jeans and a Guinness t-shirt and what you'd think would be an incongruent cowboy hat (however, no, it worked just fine) who seemed to delight in yelling at the myriad straight couples, "Don't say we're GAY FRIENDLY! We're totally NOT FRIENDLY!" And that is when he and I fell in conspiratorial love, so I ordered chicken fingers and stayed through all of the Hank Williams, Jr., on the jukebox to listen to him go on and on about the day.

I sat outside with Robin, who is simply put one of the best people who lives on this planet, and listened to insane boat horns on cruising hotrods. Every time they'd honk one of us would say something mildly funny, like, "Fuck you. No, really, fuck you this time again," and then we'd laugh and laugh. At one point I said "You know, I'd just maybe once like to have peace and contentment." She looked at me and immediately said "That is never. going. to. happen." and we laughed for minutes. It was, interestingly enough, one of the most useful things anyone has ever said to me, so I'm pretty sure that everything else is going to be fine from now on. 

The internet may suck sometimes in soundbites, but these friends I have. These friends. I can't imagine my life without two things the most that I've gotten from the internet. One is how it's helping me reshape my professional life, and the work I do every day and where I get to do it. But two, and the winner by a mile, is these FRIENDS. I am lucky cubed and squared, and I don't know math at all so I just made that up. 

A lot of other things have happened on and between these trips, things that have me catching my breath at things I read or see or experience, because I suddenly see myself anew in them or they touch a part of me now that hurts where it didn't use to or makes me smile bigger than it would have before. I have tears in my eyes most days, but it's good,  it's good, it's all working for good. It's also really hard, some work that I'm doing, so hard I cannot explain it yet, some growing into this better and ultimately most true self that I've come to decide was real along the way. It's amazing how even the most difficult things are way less than devastating when you know after years of gray and indecision that they are simply right. I'm learning that there's amazing relief and calm acceptance and even joy in some of what looks like suffering. 

And I know it's why I will look back at the details of this particular stretch of roaming a few cities as a necessary backdrop for the important stuff, as I've known it would be since I decided a few months back that I needed to do what I'm doing now. As much of a homebody as my heart can inherently be, my soul needs motion, to manage my anxiety. (I don't expect this to make sense to anyone.) Geographic cures may ultimately fail, but sometimes they don't, and there are those spaces in between that reassure me that I'm moving, that I will always have some access to my own particular kind of freedom. That how things had been for a very long time was simply not how they were supposed to be, something I always knew but wasn't sure how to really fix until now, in the physical shell and daily routine of this woman. And that every minute now of hyperventilating in public restroom stalls and wiping my eyes and stepping back out into the light and fixing my lipstick is in her better service. 

Because this is truer than it's ever been, from me to me, in this 41 years. I can finally say it, Robin. More than even still (all apologies to the Commodores), I think I finally know that I just do. 

Sunday is nobody's business

I have so much stuffed up in my head, and a compulsion to write, and I can't seem to get it out. 

I am all kinds of everywhere. I have been to Seattle and back. I loved it there. I have stories about it. I should probably tell those. I also have pictures. I should probably upload those. 

Since I came home on Thursday morning so, so early, my already-challenged focus has been broken. But it appears amid all that has been coming at me from outside, I've been obsessed with cleaning my apartment, a task that is every day effort, as I am basically a shitty housekeeper, and mostly I am so interested in things that don't have to do with chores that I get yanked off my course with things that are not normal in polite company, and oh look, there's a bag of cherries on the coffee table, and the mail falls down behind the tiny table by the door. If people ask me what I'm doing, I often say, "I'm trying to get this place organized," just like my grandmother would gesture towards her hopelessly cluttered dining room table every day of her life and sigh and say, "It looks just like Miz Larsen's in here, this is terrible," in a tone that insinuated it would remain like Miz Larsen's -- a neighbor up the street whose descendants may now be candidates for Hoarders -- in spite of its terribleness because now we had a scapegoat so would you like some coffee? You can set it on the address books (always more than one, I had no idea why then, but now I understand fully, I even use the same kinds of pens. IMPRINTING.) Don't even worry about the rings. 

Anyway. The laundry is entirely done now, in spite of my interloper neighbor from DOWNSTAIRS coming up to steal the washers last night, INFIDEL BASICALLY. The piles of clothing that I mostly hate are in less than crazeballs chaos, although the final sorting for giveaways and stacking into an as-yet-undetermined storage system is still unfinished, so I've just been ignoring those until I google the perfect storage system, because do I need one of those? I need one, badly.

I also have some groceries, if not particularly inspiring ones. The perishables are all stowed away. My list of things I want to make is sketched in my head for this week's return grocery visits, and I have spices and a knife set on my list of things to add to this parade of stuff that I'm trying to control in the coming days, because, you know, FOOD. Food is so important to me. (I am going to make pickles, for example. I decided that this week, after I had some of the most delicious pickles made by the person I was talking to at the time. Does anyone know where to buy a proper crock for pickles in DC?)

And yet it still totally looks like Miz Larsen's here (that "Miz" is bothering me, but that is exactly how my grandmother said it and I can't help it. It appears to be a tic right now.) I'm planning on that changing this week. 

I have been busy. 

I keeled over sideways on a cross-country flight, no longer as embarrassed by the threat of snoring as I was exhausted, listening to this talky talky man behind me saying how he hadn't been back to North Carolina since 1982 several times over until it buzzed my brain enough so I could sleep. I woke up drooling unattractively into a torn open bag of Southwest cheese crackery things, my earbud jammed halfway into my cramping ear, cranky that I wasn't home, grateful for no turbulence. 

I ate crabs today, an hours-long, long-overdue feast of a meal in a gorgeous setting that seemed to calm me in a way I knew I needed to be calmed but I wasn't sure how to make happen.

I tended a grave yesterday. I rinsed the scum of the underground off of a metal vase tucked down there for safekeeping and lawn mowing purposes, scrubbed the green film off with my fingers as best as I could, and finally, marginally dissatisfied, I filled it with water and placed it right side up with a few flowers from my newly deceased aunt's haul on my godfather's headstone. He resides in the same cemetery where a good number of my recent ancestors are, just one quadrant over. He was a bachelor, the longtime boyfriend of my aunt, who couldn't marry her, she claimed, because her divorce in the years of no divorces had never yielded an annulment, so the church was all, whatever. He died young, 53. His dust and metal plaque now reside just inches from his parents, underneath a shady tree. I don't think anyone goes to visit him anymore, and as much as I don't  believe that people are where their decaying bodies lie, it still feels like something that is nice to do. He was naturally great with kids, especially with me -- snarky but not creepy, showing a smart little person that he knew she could handle it. I think I learned to need a foil from him, and maybe the turn of a joke in the moment, too. He brought grocery bags of Italian deli perfect foods -- chipped ham, always chipped for perfect stacked sandwiches -- to my Nanny's house for lunches. He drank Schlitz and had what I know now I'd recognize as a delightfully sick sense of humor, as much as I know I could still see him leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. Anyway, it felt entirely right to clean up his spot. I think I will go back more often. 

Since I landed late late Wednesday night I have seen so many people from my extended family, called to mind so many memories, watched the world's most elderly altar boy stand guard at the funeral mass of my aunt, who was my first memory of independence and single parenting, of a woman who scrapped out her life in spite of difficulty, who raised great people who contribute to the world, all while being kind and conscious of others, all the time. I have spent time with her daughters and their families, fine women who have crafted lives out of nothing but love and hope and skill in a weird world, who relate to me in different ways for different reasons, who I'm happy to have back in my life a little closer in spite of the reason.

In my own strange little space, I have drafted and saved three abandoned blog posts, mad at my own dumb words and their inability to hang together. I have eaten mostly pretty badly. I gazed up at the blue sky (amazing weather here this week. Perfect.) wondering how to fix some things, deciding what else to leave behind. I'm carefully reading Joan Didion's elegaiac pre-death memoir about the life and death of her daughter and her own path into aging. It's made me think about my own style in an almost-pretentious way, my own work, my own mother, my own lack of a child, my own life. 

I got a little sunburned today, sucking down passable bloody Marys in a strapless dress in the sunshine. I have been incredibly hard on myself all week, so hard you have no idea. And tomorrow, in terms of the calendar of my world, I will start again. 

Several Random Facts About Me On a Flight From Seattle to Phoenix

I was reading Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project book on the plane, and she had some ideas for lists and because I actually think she has some good ideas and it's probably wise for me to stop being so skeptical about all of the things all of the time, I decided to make myself write some. If there's a thing I need right now it's some grounding. I'll let you know how it turns out, unless I just stop talking about it altogether, in which case, well, carry on.  

I have sung five songs at karaoke in my life, and besides the dreadful mistake that was Wooly Bully, they are four of my favorite memories (I am an excellent Peaches AND Herb, put it that way.) If I were to imagine my most epic karaoke of all time, it involves The Winner Takes it All, by ABBA,  an octave down. (that piano at the end is tinkly heartbreak.)  Also Frida is my musical muse. Tell me I Know There's Something Going On was not one of the best songs of the 80s. Go on. TELL ME. 

I know I will move to a new city in the next two years, but I have no idea which one. I'm undisturbed by this.

A lot of times I think I'm a fuckup with impulse control problems, unmanageable moods, and a pathological aversion to patience, but I look around at my life and the quality of the people in it, and I think maybe a bad person couldn't have attracted this many awesome people as friends. I am so lucky in this area of my life.

I do not remember large chunks of my childhood and it freaks me out sometimes, but given what little I remember from college, my neurolinguistics class did impress upon me the brain's survival gift of self-censorship, so I roll with that.

I love Maryland. It's weird and small and in the middle of lots of other things, but it's charming in its own way, so I'm not at all sorry that I'm from here or that I've lived here for so long.

I like most dogs way better than most human beings.

I was nearly fluent in French when I quit taking classes, and I still frequently hear certain words and phrases in my mind in French first. I have never been to France, outside of the airport for a layover. This is a thorn in my traveling side.

I've written through my relationship with my grandmother in a way I feel has helped me to grieve more effectively and has also honored our relationship. I'm not saying something about her won't come up in the future, but I feel full circle with it now, and it makes all of those times I felt so awkward and repetitive hitting "publish" feel worth it. Blogging made this possible, so I appreciate blogging. 

I believe that my feelings are readily visible, like a stock market ticker on my forehead,and it bothers me much of the time. Two of my best friends have told me in the past three days that I am difficult to read. I am confused by this. Also apparently I'm dumb as ice. This is reassuring.

I took this picture of a man eating fire.

I would have married exactly four people in my life so far. I dated three of them.

My life is completely different than it was before the Internet, and I still geek out about it every day. I will never not be amazed by this screwed up communication revolution. You guys. THE INTERNET.

I'm a lot funnier in real life than I am online. I think so anyway. So I've been told. Now I don't feel funny at all. If you want to make yourself feel unfunny, type that you're funny. What a drag.

I got a depressed friend through two years of our waitressing job in college by constantly repeating "We're not here for a long time, we're here for a good time," because after the first time I said it she asked me to say it again all the time. It was a strange arrangement, but it seemed to help her, so whatever. I think I'm going go start saying it more, to me.

When I need to calm down on a plane, I listen to Belle by Al Green, Lodi by CCR and all of Hem's No Word From Tom. Lodi on repeat is excellent for meditation (for a weird kid born in the 70s, I guess. Throw some Rhiannon in there and I'd be good for several hours.)

Writing drives me crazy and if I was able to function without doing it, I would. I think constantly in partially formed, editable, language and it has to come out or I'm unpleasant and not funny. It's kind of like runners who don't run (so I understand. I'm totally okay with not running, ever. I hate running. It may be a worse compulsion than writing. Maybe.)

This is what I look like when writing is driving me crazy. It isn't cute. 

My happy places are hockey games, the beach, sleeping in with a person who makes coffee, brunch, and concerts. I cannot, however, deal with standing-only, general admission shows anymore. It finally happened.

I don't think I can come up with one more not-riveting thing about myself, except that I'm the most left-handed person I know, in all ways physical and psychological. That's probably the best place to leave off at this point.

Happiness Is a Random Picture of a Lemon and a Tree

Leaving my job plus a few other recent brain breaks triggered signs of the descent into depression again, a danceathon with minor madness that accompanies major life change.

Even good change can be strange and mood-altering, in spite of reserves, support systems, whatever it takes to get through from day to day. It still sucks, it isn't good at all, and it's such a pain in the ass to write this down again. It feels so predictable, yet every time I'm shocked that it's back, that I can feel so at loose ends with myself, that the pieces scoot into old, unhelpful patterns, managed by old, invisible ouija board hands.

At least the anxiety is over now. It was so bad in May that I felt like the top of my head was going to fly off, frequently. Sleeping was a nice plan, because that offers some kind of physical break in that action, but that wasn't working so well either, and when I finally did it, it was the drugged sleep of the mood-altered damned, with dreams about people I don't even like anymore much less have any desire to see naked. 

My mind is not my friend sometimes. 

Meanwhile I waste energy I don't have burning up over the unfairness of it all, with just enough self-loathing to keep me stuck, and isolated enough from people who care about me that I grind those relationships down, too. So, you know, nameless faceless sadness and solitude. That's helpful for an extrovert. Some people who have walked this path may relate when I say that feeling a certain way, the downward pull of down, while yanking upwards mentally on the unequal yet opposite rope for several hours a day is exhausting. It makes my body tired and my mind cranky, strangles intentions and conversation and just the sheer joy of sitting still with nothing to do and nowhere to go, unless I plan it. 

But I know these steps, and I take them pretty well -- walk around the muddy puddles,  every single well-worn crack in the mental pavement, head down against the third steep city block on whatever-this-is street. 

That is a picture of a roasted lemon that is here because it's the first one in my Flickr stream that I came across that I really enjoy. I would make a lemonade joke, but, nah.  

I've been thinking a lot about happiness, too, conversely, for a few different reasons, wondering why it's so upsetting to some people that some people aren't, or why it's not easy always to maybe most of the time will ourselves to joy.  For a culture dosed in tragedy, actually, we love to talk about happiness. When you think about what we recognize as a collective -- wars, dead (a few murdered, think about that. That's insane.) presidents, the horror of 9.11, any of the things we were forced into dealing with as citizens of a place, or the other, less consistent things, like deaths of celebrities or the day they fall from grace and beat a car with an umbrella -- I don't think we have any room to talk. If we're not celebrating, we're watching, obsessively marking downfalls -- some of us for the sake and hope of rising again, yes, but not everybody.

I'm as complicit in this as anyone. I have to assume we're just programmed. 

We are also each of us comprised of thousands of tiny griefs, (except maybe for you it's 500. I hope so. Maybe. Lucky you.)Maybe five big griefs, if we're lucky? Hopefully not ten. (Maybe three, for you.) We are generally accustomed to slights and sadness. I can sit with you in that, help you cope, not with my eyes closed but almost, I have done it so many times, imprinted by ancestors who walked through times of war and famine, poor dental hygiene, fighting the land for a basic meal. Happiness, at times, even now, is unfortunately suspect, particularly for certain brains. We are not supposed to chase it. It does not come when it is called. It's so hard to trust that, especially when another human being or two or three is involved. How can we mesh our highs and lows when it's hard sometimes to decide on a restaurant? It's pure magic if it happens, even for a minute. But we know it then, or at least I do.

And I don't know about you, but I act out around it. I get nervous and giddy--happy, this is happy -- and I try not to crowd it and especially not to send it away. I work hard at understanding happiness these days, because I want to, although I don't believe what works for one person has any impact at all on another. I ust want to know what in me can make it so elusive, and what I can do to change that. I want it to stay longer. I don't want to go back to where I was before.

At the same time I reject the idea of a tendency towards sadness as a failing, because I've known it involuntarily too many times to think I'd ever have asked for it on purpose. I understand clicks on telephones and tears in parking lots, rejection letters and feelings of exclusion and unwanted inferiority. I understand death and loss and the daily grind of a job that steals serenity. It requires a certain kind of armor to survive the daily ebb and flow of trying and stumbling and getting back up and maybe just maybe getting back to good, to look around the next bend for a sliver of light, so this is not the done deal after all. Grand gestures can be great, joy when it hits is a godsend, but it's rough as a study in contrast, an addict's hit that you can't buy.

Recently, a good thing happened for me. Someone who loves me was so happy for me, I felt the feelings being felt along with me -- pride, recognition, celebration. It made me shy. I wasn't sure if I should take it in or minimize it, and it had nothing to do with her. You're not used to someone being happy for you, are you? she said. And I would have thought that wasn't true, but it was. And in a way that minute was the beginning of some small trust, a fragile agreement between myself and me, that that could actually be, for the first time since I lost it.

Lately , in the face of the big things that are changing, most of them by my own hand and with my own intentioned action, I'm trying to settle in to the every day. Walking. Sitting. Teaching myself to be without grasping because I'm afraid I've already lost what I'm not sure I even wanted in the first place. Waiting for someone else to speak without yapping over them, wanting to use their input to draw conclusions I normally trust to my own occasionally incorrect brain,

I'm not sure I'll ever get it. I may be on some other frequency that won't allow it. Maybe the government should get me one of those foil hats to see if I can channel these strange currencies for good, because when they're really working I'm pretty sure the force could power something pretty big, and I'd like for it to not be my mouth or my brain for a change.

I'm living life in strange vignettes, in fits and starts, really. The ogre comes back and he is chatty and deceptive. He says leavable, unlovable, incapable of understanding or focusing or doing anything the right way. He says that was the wrong choice, the bad idea, that the way you feel in this moment, this unmanageable sense of free-falling into despair is how it has always been since you could remember, so welcome back. 

But the point of all of this was to find me, again, or maybe ever, to be funny again because I feel that way and not because I am performing, to find the space where I want to be -- the space that allows for the unthinkable concept of happiness -- and the whoms and the whatsits.

And in spite of the recent increase in daily management of worn grooves and patterned moods that can be overwhelming at times and keep me from the things that I want so badly, I honestly don't think that I believe him anymore. The trick is to act like I don't, I think, and maybe that will come true.