LaurieWrites

Organizing

I'm home tonight, by choice. I spent the day focused, for me, cleaning, clearing out, doing laundry, putting some organizational thingamajigs in place. 

The fall and winter were pretty much a wreck around here. I was home and then I was not, day to day, week to week, spinning whether I was here or away, and nothing got done. The infrastructure fell apart. And then I read an article in O magazine, of all places, last week about clutter, and how the external reflects the internal, and how there's a reason we let it pile up and don't tend to the structures of our lives, and I knew I was sick of myself and of this and that with all of what I've got going on and coming up that I had better decide to make getting my act together a priority. I also decided that just because I'd always been told I wasn't any good at organizing and cleaning didn't mean I couldn't learn and that this messy rubber had hit the road bigtime.

So I went to Target and bought these bins, many bins, in my favorite comforting shade of green, because Oprah's organizer told me to get them. I have no idea what I'm going to put in them exactly yet, except he did say that one shoe-boxed size one should be reserved for cords and chargers, all the electronic stuff that my life eats, so I have dutifully put those cords and chargers in there. I was supposed to buy four, though, and I have three left. I need to check the article and see what he said to put in the other three. because I kind of keep looking at them suspiciously and moving them around while I do all of my other stuff, and that's just not very healthy or productive.

Tonight, because it is Friday and damned if I do not know how to rock the shit out of a Friday night, I refused an offer to go to a St. Patrick's Day bar thing, and took myself instead to Bed, Bath and Beyond with coupons (twenty percent off one item AND five dollars off the whole shebang, BOOYAH.) And after I obsessed over the shoe racks and rejected them all, because yeah, I can do that for 20 minutes, I grabbed 48 green fake suede slimline hangers off the racks and decided that they were what I needed to get my closet in shape. 

I am super excited about these hangers, y'all. They are SPIF-FY. So tomorrow is hang-up clothes day. (And everyone is jealous. Whatever.) 

I'm likely seeking an organizational center because, as I've told a few people this week, I have no sense of a comfort zone right now. Sure, there is always my bathtub (I don't know how I am not a Pisces), but that's about it, and there are only so many hours I can spend in there before it just gets weird and cold and wrinkly. I think that bailing on my job was the last bastion of fragile structure I had, which is bizarre because it's not like I've felt any kind of comfort zone there for a long time. 

And it's okay. It really is. I've been having some serious anxiety waves the past couple of weeks, yes. They are really hard to deal with, a combination of physically and emotionally challenging that leaves me feeling raw and strung out with nowhere to put myself and no sense of relief in sight until they pass. And whereas I'm trying to handle them with exercise and my own brand of therapy I can do for myself pretty well (which mostly amounts to yelling "Oh just fucking QUIT IT! Just CUT IT OUT RIGHT THE HELL NOW." at myself in my head,) mostly I'm just riding them out, because, well, I don't have a choice. I have got to learn to do this. So I'm learning to sit better with discomfort, to decide what it's rooted in and what I have to do about it. 

Because I know that this decision was right, that everything that is happening now is correct and in the proper order. I do have many moments where I panic and think, quite specifically, "What am I going to do? Who was I to do this now? What will become of me?" But I know. I know every time I tell someone, because I've had to tell a lot of someones. I know that while this is a place of risk and what may appear to many from the outside as utter lunacy, that what I've been living is not life, that what I've got in front of me, as nebulous and weird and scary as it may seem, is where I will carve out what is. That whereas I've had good and wonderful times, amazing experiences, beautiful connections in my span of years, that this is the most open I've ever been to ambiguity, to change, to a sense of myself that fits, inside and out. 

I was walking up to the town center to meet Lauren the other night, and I found to my true delight that this tree was in bloom again. 

And it struck me that it had been a year, a whole year since I'd seen it this way before, and as I instagrammed it, all I kept thinking was what I wrote in the caption: "Time flies while your life happens."

And I knew I'd been through a foggy period and now, when things should rightly be more confusing, that they were actually, concurrently, more clear. Things were happening, finally, consciously.

(Knowledge of the rightness of the current situation does not mean I am not terrified. It just means that I know it's necessary, and that's at its core fairly comforting, no matter what.) 

I'm also talking, a lot, in between long stretches of alone time. I'm talking to my friends and my family. I had this week off,  and I've quite on purpose not done a whole lot beyond hang out here, make some stronger professional contacts, and make it a strong point to see my friends. I have had very much-needed dinners with people who get me and who care, spent a gorgeous sunny happy hour with my sister, spent some time on the phone in conversation that made things that needed to be better, better. 

Connecting takes time. Sharing meals and life stories and huge and tiny things, hearts and plans and intentions, it all takes time. As alone as I feel these days, often, I know that that's more an existential state that really reflects my  need for connection more than anything. In reality I am surrounded by people who care, close by and at a distance, and it's really up to me to foster those connections better. And it's all too easy when I'm caught up in the day to day not to take it, to trudge along, to be satisfied with texts and Facebook and whatever ephemera I fling out into the ether. 

This week, it helped. I also slept, a lot. I spent a lot of indulgent morning time in my bed, way past when I ought to have gotten up and started working towards bettering the world or at least doing my dishes. The incessant improvements to my complex meant the guys with the sanders and drills were out there doing something new to the courtyard at ungodly hours every day, which meant falling in and out of restless sleep in the morning, but I would not get up. I let myself be. 

Because I don't know when I'll be able to do this again, and I know I'm storing up for a period of time where I am going to need my energy and my wits and my everything else. I'm okay with it. I just gave myself this week.

 I know this is boring. I know this isn't a creative piece, with a punchline or a thesis or a pithy conclusion that tells any great truth of life. But what it is and what I am is down in it, in a place of work and progress, in a place of reflection and building up, and sometimes when I write it down, that's the only time it seems real. I need that right now. 

To sing my song.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski

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

I drove the old roads yesterday, as I rarely do anymore unless someone died, as someone had. Turning instinctively on numbered streets -- that party there, that unfortunate conversation on that street corner, I knew the sounds and the smells of the neighborhoods, felt the grit of the pavement and the echoes of so many voices up through the undercarriage of a car I never could have afforded then, can barely afford now. 

Road miles, they carry us, somehow.

Monday was PG County and a dead body in a Hawaiian shirt, unbearable grief and chicken joints and that school I went to once. I forgot about D's corner lot house, the irritation of the left turn. The shortcut through the 7-11 that I made still-instinctively after 20 years away made me want to smoke more than usual, an urge staved off mostly by the almost seven dollar price for a pack that made me smile big.

It's all so much the same, it's crazy how it stays that way when it seems like it ought not to, when you've been away and looking at so much other stuff. It's just so much more expensive in all ways now.

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

you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.

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

I am afraid, I admit it. I said some horrible things a few days ago, things that came from the worst place, the most unpleasant, the most fearful and preemptively abandoned. I felt as worthless and pointless as I have in months, as incapable of...I don't know? Anything. It was bad, and it was at the same time, regardless of immediate outcome, immediately productive. Watersheds are few and far between in a life, really.

I had needed it for years and never saw it coming really. Idealism is a certain circle of hell, I'm here to tell. 

Yesterday on the highway Ramble On came up in the mix and I cried and smiled, Page and Plant's mix of hubris and brilliance (the darkest depths of Mordor. MORDOR.) what it needed to be as it always is bumped up against the simple, crucial declarative that defines the song. So much, so much, so much. I looked up at the roof upholstery at a red light, wiping my stupid weeping eyes, grateful for the familiarity, for the music, for the construct. I knew anew what I had to do, as I had when my feet hit the floor behind a heavy curtain in Tennessee two days prior. 

Now's the time. The time is now. 

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

I will never be easy. I will always be difficult, sometimes the most in the times that I'm trying the hardest not to be. This is genetic, some of this, a design that I fight with every bit of good that I know I possess from competing genes and nurture and the sheer instruction of living kindly. I don't count on the same companions for the long haul so much anymore, because it's almost too much to ask in larger than small doses. I'm conversely coming upon the truth, however, that some greater consistency in this regard may be some of what I need for the longer run, and whether I think it's really possible or not, I will keep wrecking the prospect of ever having it if I don't fix me for real. 

I have been broken for a long time, in a variety of small and large ways, despite my progress, despite longstanding white-knuckled efforts to the contrary. I have the softest, brightest comprehension now though that I don't think I'm going to be for very long anymore, and regardless, I will no longer break you, not even a little if I can help it, no matter who you are. Unacceptable harsh words finished that story. The main answer -- surrender, no knuckles -- was long overdue. The time for so many (good and gentle, fun and interesting) things, the time for the real second half, is now. 

February

I came home tonight, ended up in conversation with a friend, and told her that I felt like a loser because in spite of a fine invitation to go somewhere that would probably be spirit-lifting, I wanted to stay home and so I did. I told her that I felt more socially awkward than I had in years, that I felt like everything I said was odd. What I didn't say but what I meant was that if I'm looking for anything, which I'm pretty sure socially I'm not right now, I especially wasn't finding it when I pushed myself to do something that I felt I ought to do and wasn't, especially on Friday nights. Friday nights when I'm working traditional forty hour work weeks have always been rough, and these days they're next to impossible. 

And she said in her typical essential way that it was okay if I needed some time to myself, and, more powerfully, by way of explaining why it was okay that I couldn't always tolerate groups of people and social scenes, "I feel like you're birthing yourself out of some very old hurts." I had to concede that she was correct, and what more do you need to deal with than that, I guess? And more importantly, what more do you need than friends with hearts and insight like that, whether they live mostly in your computer or not? Not much, I'm saying. 

It's so strange to look around at my life right now and not recognize it so much, but to be pretty comfortable with it regardless. I should want to scream more, I guess, to elucidate and make clear, but whether through an understanding that that would be pointless or wasted on the unhearing or a basic disinterest in doing so, I don't. The same feelings are the same as they have always been in my physical life -- the essential feel of water on my skin in a hot tub, the soft sheets I've washed a hundred times, the need to commentate the day and hope someone will occasionally find it funny, the irritation of looking in the refrigerator and realizing one person with an erratic appetite can't keep up with vegetables that looked too pretty not to buy. 

I know who I fundamentally am, still, even as I change outside. I have unfortunately had to major in me for more than forty years. And although I think that I will have to eventually look to my beloved, beleagured sister to best help me reflect upon the timeline, in many ways, I can say that I'm more comfortable inside this spot than I've been in ever, even with the parts I can't explain. I see more clearly, more painfully, more resolutely. I am intimately acquainted anew with the bullshit, with the past twenty years, with the excuses and the necessary lies, with the fear-based life choices and the dream procrastination. I'm not even mad, at it or at anything. I feel like I'm looking at a rock collection or some old photo albums that I'm not even sure belong to me. I feel suspended, and aware. I see quite distinctly what we do to ourselves, and each other. I see my place in the constellation.

I am admittedly deeply, deeply tired, in body and in mind. I can't seem to sleep enough, I want to talk all of the time although I stop myself about how tired I am, and conversely, many nights, I don't sleep very much at all in terror of not getting enough hours in to  meet the construct of my employer, which is really crazy. I've stopped fighting, mostly, with anyone or anything, because I quite simply don't have the energy. I'm on no drugs besides the hypertension medicine. Whatever anyone sees any day now is genuine me, with apologies for hormone rise and fall. It is, as they say, kind of, what she is, what I am. 

I'm happy with this because I'm a fan of the baseline, as well as the bass line. I am naturally drawn to rhythm, and teamwork, be it of people or notes or neurons.  I like balance, always did, and before the adolescent insanity and descent into mood management began, I was basically a happy, much-loved child. That is who I was from birth and that is who I seek to be again for this remaining span of physical years, because I think that was a better bet. I'm still a bit partially obscured from her, yes, but mostly free, where it matters a lot.

 I have no idea what's going to happen in either the short or the longterm right now and you'd think I'd be scared to death, because for a long time that's kind of been my jam. But interestingly enough, I feel like I'm slipping into the right role, like someone finally got the casting right. And there is for sure that sense of normal and right anxiety as you make friends with the lines and the other people in the leading roles, but that never lasts for very long because eventually you have to put the damned show on the road. 

I knew and I said in the fall that this would happen and it's happening. I don't believe in that The Secret nonsense entirely but I do believe, in some ways, in premonition, and I've always supported a solid foreshadowing when the talent is there to back it up. 

I am going to be okay, I finally know for sure.

I am very interested in the spring. 

You are here.

"You have struggled in the past, and perhaps you are still struggling; but is it necessary? No. Struggle is useless. Stop struggling." -- Thich Nhat Han

Sometime between midnight Saturday night and when I hoped to leave the house yesterday, I lost my glasses.

Yes, in my house. Yes, it is one level, a larger condo but an apartment-type place all the same.

It's not like this is uncommon. I lay them down a lot, when I go to sleep, when I take a bath, when my eyes hit that millisecond at night where they give up the day, when the capillaries call it quits. There's generally a not-quite-five-minute span of looking if I lay them down absentmindedly, not in their appointed place by the sink or on the nightstand or coffee table.

But I always find them, and yesterday it became clearer after half an hour of poking around the magazines and general detritus of pens and hair ties and spare earrings on my desk that these glasses were hiding worse than usual. And no I don't have a backup pair, because that pair broke and my prescription expired. And no I haven't bought replacement contacts from the cheap online place since I got the new prescription last month and NO I am not paying the optical shop prices.

I'm like that cranky Maxine on the Hallmark cards, or a flailing toddler, most days, depending.

After almost an hour of looking, this place was looking remarkably cleaner but I was going crazy, Gaslight crazy, half-blind since the 5th grade and not getting unblinder. I had dinner to finish making and the Grammys to watch, work to finish that is not finishing because I have some sort of psychological block on this particular project. I wasn't sure how I was going to do all of that much less drive my car to work in the morning, because, again, so hard to see.

I can see okay way up close, so I threw some food on my plate, pushed the comfy chair right up close to the television, and tried not to freak out. Visually-impaired or not, I had no more energy to give to that particular struggle at the given time. I couldn't do it anymore. I had to sit down and start thinking about something else.

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

I like to get in the trenches, especially when it comes to my brain. I like to duke it out, I think, or at least I always have. That's the habitual behavior. An old friend calls it "laying down on the train tracks," I call it things like inoculating myself, or being a decent (if unpaid) investigative reporter.

I don't trust ease, have not had much occasion to embrace it, quite honestly. I will pursue the harder path, if need be. I'm not afraid of it entirely.

But lately I think it's getting old, this slapboxing approach to life, something I've admittedly come to think with some unwanted help from my body and my brain. There were the headaches that wouldn't quit for months, the body that wouldn't motivate, the brain that felt fuzzy and tired more often than not. Then there was, finally, that day somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas when I found myself in an emergency room bed, my heart literally pumping so hard it made my head pound and my chest skip. A nurse who felt like my personal angel Clarence looked at me over a clipboard.

"Why are you here?"

"Because my blood pressure is really high."

"I know that. I see your numbers. I mean, you're...40? It's Saturday afternoon. Why are you here? And how are you not going to come back?"

She gave me a lot of morphine and some painkillers and sent me home, with a general recommendation to examine my life and, much like Mr. Bender in the Breakfast Club, encouraged me to examine whether or not I'd care to return next Saturday.

I didn't, not so much, but I am a slow learner, and so it was in the latter part of January that I found myself back at my regular doctor's office, lying on a table head pounding again, with a nurse saying "stroke numbers" and telling me to lie down and finally a note in my hand that said I had orders not to go into work for a little while.

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

I'm trying to listen. I'm taking the medicine, the kind in the bottle and the words that I read (because I'm reading inspirational shit again, as well as listening to people who do not sweet talk me entirely, who would have me know that this fall was no joke.

I listen to a cardiologist say "thickened heart muscle" and "it was elevated for a year" and "you have to make these changes or it won't get better." I have new appreciation for my limits, particularly the physical ones that beat up against my valves and walls, the confluence of my tendency to worry and obsess with a body that is saying, after many years, "Please stop." I am learning to sit quieter with anxiety and paranoia, with a disbelief in deserving good things, with being worthy of love.

It turns out that most of the time I'm interested in preserving this fragile, sometimes solitary existence for its own sweet sake and for the people who sometimes tell me they would like me to do that. It turns out that I still think there may be good things ahead, even though my current spot is a little dicey. It turns out that I still may think I have something to say.

You can't say anything if you're not here.

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

This morning I woke up and I still couldn't find my damned glasses. I called and admitted this to someone who may have been expecting me early. I sucked up my remaining, blurry pride and called my mother, and told her that I'd thought about squinting to drive up to LensCrafters (not in any way the hell sponsored. In fact, with what I pay for vision crap, I'd be sponsored if someone would let me, I admit it.) but I was concerned about killing other people or hallucinating rainbows through my confused pupils so could she please take me?

And she did. She took me and she told me it was okay that I'd lost my glasses in my house. She bought me some contacts, even, and lunch, and dropped me at work.

I went into the bathroom and put the holdover lenses in, and after a month of staring through scratched eyeglasses that were giving up I could see really, really well. I saw that when I get myself ready to leave the house at way less than 20/20 vision, the results are not typical, so I had to fix my hair.

At any rate, I was able to finish my day clearly, so that was a bonus.

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

My mother drove me home tonight after some tacos and dinner talk of an old friend who is really sick, a man who is like my father's brother, who always, in spite of anything else, has been kind and loved us, who has been one of our very closest people, who is our extended family. She gave me a coat she bought at a consignment shop. She told me to follow up on my appointments.

It feels good, sometimes, not to work so hard. It feels okay to relax into advice. It feels like a ministry to ourselves to share memories of people we're losing at various clips, of the things we do to keep the rest of us together -- never often enough, never what it could maybe be, but just what it is.

Tomorrow I'm invited to go somewhere where there is moonshine, to throw things into a fire, whatever I want, on a day meant for love. I have some things that would definitely work for such an occasion, not near as many as I used to, but I'm sure I could scare up a talisman or two, a relic of a card or an old printed out email. As into ritual as I can be, I'm not sure it's the right use of my time now, though. I've got my mind on a trip, on moving forward, on being right with today and where I'd like to take it maybe, not so much looking back at stuff that mattered once but doesn't except for what it continues to teach me.

I'm not into the burning up completely now as much as stoking what I've got going on inside. I'm thinking alchemy over immolation, interested in the catching fire, in transformation, but not so much the breaking down.

No one gets to miss the storm of what will be.

December. I cannot believe it. Another year just about burned and what? How did that happen? What happened?  Where did it go? 

I've been running since September, it feels like, inside and out, and with four days of rain and a winter weather advisory today I want to stay home and in bed and let it all shake out. (I have the best bed in all the land. I recommend getting a slightly shittier bed so you don't want to be in it all of the time, but I'm already screwed. I love my bed like a person, except slightly more appropriately.) It's true that things are circling back to some kind of center -- I've been having that thought lately, incessantly, actually: "sometimes the center holds." And I don't know where this comes from except it's what I keep thinking in spite of some data to the contrary from this stupid, irritating writer brain.

I could give you a list of where I've been beyond the bits and pieces I've shared here, but that's probably really boring. I could tell you about the people I've been with and that is so much less of any kind of boring, given as I am to hanging with compelling people whenever possible. But those stories will have to hang themselves on the line one by one. I don't know where to begin, so I'm going to let them pick and choose. 

I don't ever know how to catch up after so much time away. But I can say that I've been to Pittsburgh, California, Philadelphia and then back home. I've been in a place called the Mississippi Delta that I knew nothing of before some friends pointed me there, and it will take a good long while to share just what I think and feel from that experience. I've been consoled by rain on a tin roof and delighted by the sight of the Pee Wee's Big Adventure dinosaurs from the highway enough to put returning to see them on my ever-in-progress life list.

"Au revoir, Simone!" 

"Au revoir, Pee Wee!" 

Such is the state of affairs, constantly, around here. 

(The rain on the roof part is as good as you'd expect, and if you've heard it, you know.) 

I've shriveled from three hours drinking Champagne in a steaming hot tub under desert rain with some of the smartest and nicest people I've ever met. (I am not making that up. I am not.) I have chopped up and roasted a sick amount of winter squash hours before I got on a plane simply because I didn't want it to rot on my friend's counter. I have chaperoned a field trip. I have gawked at William Faulkner's story notes from where he posted them on his bedroom wall a long, long time ago, and watched a late-day southern sun slant beautifully through trees in his backyard. I have bought one single Christmas present that now I have to take back because someone else bought it too. I have won a football helmet autographed by this year's NFL rookie squad, and I have had a genuine Hog teach my best friend and me how to pour a Guinness. I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my family, twice. I have won a $500 Apple gift card. I have lost a camera. I have held Crow for .5 seconds. I have not been eating my vegetables. I have communicated, incessantly, and mostly well. 

And that is just the past 30 days. I've been lucky, mostly. I'm guided and supported in some kind of providential way by some of the smartest and most compassionate people I have ever known. I have had friendship and love of an insane level thrown at me from various quarters. I've sung my way across four or five states in vastly different parts of the country. I have come to some kind of comfortable truce with not knowing much, with throwing my best light and dark intentions in the washer of the world and sort of hoping for a change that they'll run together. 

I have not been stopped once, not on the highway or in security. I have had two plane rows entirely to myself. I have been -- remarkably, and there are a few people out there who will know just how much -- almost entirely unafraid of flying, for the first time in my life. 

And in the middle of all of the problems and confusion and absolute lack of clarity that I've suffered for months on this latest go-round, I have a core of something now that I know is relatively solid in spite of the fact that my brain is porous and short-sighted enough that surely it could all come undone at any time. 

It's been an interesting span of days. 

Something New Under the Sun

I left my office today and won't go back until August, the exact whys of which I can't and won't explain but it's not very exciting anyway so it doesn't matter. It was more difficult than I thought it would be, beyond my genetic difficulty with clearing out spaces and recycling paper and dealing with the detritus of a couple of academic years. I am so bad at this. It is one of my least favorite things, how I hold on to places and people and things anyway - often way longer than I should, when I should take a break at least. I form attachments and have these feelings. It sucks.

Anyway, this has been a really hard year and I know the change is necessary and good even if it is weird and I don't like it even when I think I do. It is weird when my closest colleague, my non-biological brother and a notorious introvert who is not into displays of emotion, did the equivalent of whimpering outside of my door and said "I DON'T LIKE THIS."

Twice. Unheard of. Unnerving.

But then I left because eventually I got hungry and eventually you have to leave everywhere and there was melted cheese and chocolate and friends and wine where I was going, which wasn't a shabby incentive. On the way out, I got in my car and turned on this Courtyard Hounds cd, that as it turns out I love.

Here's where I out myself as a Dixie Chicks fan, if you haven't been paying attention for the past ten years. I am pretty much unfailingly rock and roll but that little bit that has always been country dies hard.

That is me in my car just before I left campus. Do I look like I'm going to throw up from nerves? Like I'm completely overwhelmed by options and alternatives and the threat of brokeness? No? I AM A FAKER. Total faker, I assure you.

Anyway, Emily and Martie have formed this side project. I have been a fan of the band for years but gained new respect for these two since since I saw Shut Up and Sing and realized that this enterprise, this living as musicians, this Dixie Chicks business? These sisters - gifted multi-instrumentalists and singer/songwriters - had taken their whole lives to build it. And those stupid country music fans who bulldozed their cds because of what Natalie Maines said could and would pry their career from their cold, dead hands.

And I say this as someone who has channeled Natalie Maines for confidence on more than a few occasions, which is a sort of strange story for another time.

The song that was on when I got in the car is called Something New Under the Sun and it was what I needed to hear just right then. It was clearly about a relationship, but I have no problem extrapolating and relating art to my own particular circumstance so it was enough for me.

Take a chance on me cause you know and I know we're on our way to something new under the sun.

Whatever is happening now is new, which sounds supremely stupid and obvious but it is and that's not always the case when routines go on and on for months that turn into years while it's like you weren't looking. I don't know what is going to happen at all but what I do know in these old intuitive bones is that whatever it is it is going to be better. As much as I'm nervous and afraid and all over the place, I know this for sure. As scary and financially unstable and bereft of any commitment to time and place as it is?

It is okay, and it is better. I'm sure I'll waver on this a frillion times a day, but for right now, I believe it. This is what I know -- or at least hope and pray -- to be true.

And if it's not may all of it not bite me in the ass too hard.

Cooking With Gas

One of the hugest disappointments of my life online is that wordsalad.com is not available. Suckers. Parked there for who knows what and for how long. I tried other combos of .infos and versions involving my name and whatnot, but none of them resonated, so I've stuck with the pedestrian, eponymous title that I gave my site on the day I set it up.

But to me, it's word salad. I don't like the definition that I learned in speech-language pathology classes (my undergraduate major) because it's pretty negative. I've always thought about it in a more fun, Alice in Wonderland jabberwocky sort of way, and I wanted it for my blog.

I wanted it for my blog because word salad....well, that's pretty much my life. Not a word cake or a word buffet or a word whatever else, but a word salad.

It keeps on going. The words keep on coming out. It continues.

So when I submitted my post to the BlogHer Community Keynote a month or so ago, I did it as a personal exercise, and it really worked. It was super helpful. It meant disclosure on a level I've rarely been comfortable with, as many words as I put out there on a daily basis.

And then? They picked me.

And now, oh holy hell, I am going to get up and read this post in front of 1,000 people, give or take. I'm setting it back to draft here because we're not supposed to share what post it was, but I know some of you who drop by here regularly have read it. It's really special to me, was as easy to write as it was difficult, contributes to a larger truth and conversation as much as it's myopically about my life, and for those reasons I'm pleased as much as I'm terrified. I'm going to get reacquainted with it in the next week...going to print it out and read it on planes and in bed, until I'm quite sure I can read it without crying.

And in spite of all of the pain and trauma that the past three years have held for me, I'm going to keep getting comfortable with the fact that there's been a bigger picture here that reveals itself in tiny snapshots day-by-day, not by any means a paint-by-number. It's been completely abstract. Some days, even recent ones, have been shitty ones that involved choices I didn't want to make and words - thousands of them - that I wasn't sure were right but I somehow knew needed to be shared. It's involved the despicable, necessary act of letting go of someone I thought I knew, someone whose choices confounded me but who I knew I had to accept or die.

Turns out she was me. Who knew?

So I've been cleaning up the place a little bit. And it's funny what happens, when you get right(er) with the world - not with God, necessarily, although I'm pretty actively engaging with some spiritual stuff too. Just right with the things that haven't felt right, the places in my heart and mind where I've felt akilter, where I've left things bad with other people or with myself. And that along with this keynote thing, and the other things that are happening, are strengthening my belief that this life is a circle. You come back around to the stuff you haven't learned until you learn it better, you make friends with old stuff that didn't get resolved, you make yourself face pain and depression and anxiety because it's the only way to let it move through you and away. You can't always medicate it. Sometimes you have to feel it to acknowledge it and move the hell on. I haven't felt this actively engaged with life - the good stuff and the deepest, grossest basement of it - in, well, I was going to say years, but really ever.

I don't really know what's happening right now, but I know that I'm open to whatever it is, and not just because I don't have a choice. I know there'll be good and bad days ahead, just as there have always been. But I am holding on tighter to a core of something, at the same time that I'm letting go. It gets easier with some practice.

And...and...I love this site, no matter what the name is. I almost shut it down a few months ago, sick of myself and the world and the garbage in my head. But something wouldn't let me do it, something told me that if I started over somewhere else with one of the multiple domains that I now own, that it wouldn't make any difference. Just like relocation doesn't always fix stuff - sometimes you have to hunker down and bloom where you're planted (hackbarfhack.) I love this site because it's my single-most dedicated activity of a weird, strange, random, horrible, beautiful period of my life. It's the fruit of something daily, the effort to make some sense of this nonsensical world and one life lived within it. It's at the same time nothing, and in the ways that it's connected me to so much goodness and opportunity, it's everything.

Sister Love At V to the Tenth

I finally wrote the BlogHer post about V to the 10th in New Orleans. It was such a heavy experience that I had trouble getting it down, honestly, but I couldn't let it go. Herewith, the second time in my life I've worn a boa in public for an extended period of time. This was one of the best days of my life, no question.

Too long in the rain

At 12:27 this afternoon, I had the overwhelming urge to call it all off, to just stop in my exhausting tracks. Just stop. And go get a job in a frame shop or another bookstore, in some little Carolina town where it's cheap to live and eat and buy gas, and where it's maybe over 40 degrees for most of the year. Just make it stop - so much to sift through and handle, I'm not over it but I am a little antsy over the minutiae, have to say. And I also don't think I spelled that right. It looks weird.

It's just one of those days, you know, just one of them in a string of them and I'm not sure, really, how it all knits together but I guess it must.

My grandmother fell this morning and has deep lacerations on her toothpicky arm. I called my father on my way from campus where I sat in on a class I know I won't stay in (although it wouldn't be so bad) because I have another option that it turns out will suit me better, I think. I am so in charge of this whole class schedule thing right now - trying them on for size and considering how it'll help my CAREER and my SKILLS and things I never really thought so much about before in my life, in spite of my years of beating myself to death over what said career path would entail, and actually working pretty hard at a string of mostly professional jobs at the same time. It's funny when it just becomes both the big picture and your day-to-day, not just a job or even what passes for a profession in and of itself. I take it so seriously, I think because I waited so long for this, but I don't realize it until I see myself in action and then I laugh at myself (and my school people laugh at me too) because, for real, SO SERIOUS about it. It's quite mentally tiring, this.

I wanted to remind my father to leave the mail key and the key to my mother's car because they go to Mardi Gras tonight and I'm going back home (always back home, God I need a singular home, although I like my new house, for sure, no problems there.) to be with my geriatric dog for ten days, to heat up his turkey and chat with him about all manner of things and let him out a hundred times in an evening and give him his morning and evening medication.

My father was all messed up like I get when I go and help when traumas arise with her, especially when hospitals are involved, because the super value meal of the ER and falling at 5:30 in the morning confuses her and when you go and sit with her and manage the situation she's usually on another plane of experience entirely. I cannot even watch Sicko. I know what it's about. I've seen it in person and I don't want to get more depressed ALL the time. Today apparently she thought there'd been a card game and a boat ride, which all things considered is a better fever dream than lying there as an overlooked elder in an emergency room packed with chronic care and caterwauling pediatric patients.

(My friend Tim just sent me "caterwauling" as the word of the day. Didn't think I'd get a chance to pimp it out so soon.)

And also when you spend that time with her, dealing with a crazy, understaffed/funded/heated/supplied hospital on the one side and an assisted living facility on the other, you get a little mixed up too. So I didn't catch it when my father was like, "What's that song?" in the middle of the grandma update. He said again, "What's that song?" And he started half-singing it, "You know, it goes, 'love, blahblah, the freedom of my chains, looking back, dadada,' is it Emmylou Harris?"

So I'm walking to my car struck morose (ha! Another 50-center.) by the shitty, misty, chilly, cloudy weather, worried about this 80-pound lady who just keeps falling down and picking back up, taking in the realization that my parents are leaving the state to drive to Louisiana, of all places, for ten days and God could things please stay stable for one STUPID ASS TIME when I'm the only member of my immediate family in this state? Again, during the first week of my school semester when I've only had two this time around? Seriously? Please? Could that happen?

And nothing makes me more mildly crazy on top of crazy about relatively important things than not being able to place a song. So I'm trying to listen and walk to the garage and process all of this crap at the same time, and I told him I had to hang up to remember it, and although that didn't happen I remembered it anyway.

"'Looking back, my chains, dadada, freedom...dada', Dixie Chicks, it was the Dixie Chicks."

"Someone else did it first."

"Look, I don't know, but that's the one I know."

"What's it called."

Oh. God.

"I don't know. I'll check. Or I'll think about it. I have to get quiet to remember music."

"I'll figure it out."

I knew I would, probably before he did, because I need time to sing things to myself in peace and also Google and YouTube are my BFFs.

So yeah, Elvis Presley. Well shut my mouth. (And yes, also Tanya Tucker, and Brenda Lee, and Olivia Newton John, and apparently anyone who felt like it.) It is pretty nice..."'Cause I've been too long in the wind, too long in the rain,takin' any comfort that I can." Yes, very nice.

Comfort in cheap Carolina towns, maybe, I don't know, I don't know where it originates. I've stopped looking, for the most part. I just take it as it comes, if and when it does.

Little People My World

I was in the middle of writing a very emotive post about a concept called "that thing", but I think I'll stop and just tell you to read this, because Mimi Smartypants kicks ass.

Also, my life is full of babies, lately. I'm a little melancholy about it, to be honest, although mostly I'm so happy, because I love little people. I babysat for my goddaughter and her brother this weekend. She is so cute it should be illegal, and he is a ton of fun in that "I'm four and doing every possible thing within a mile radius to assert myself and you need to watch me" sort of way, It was a very happy day. Then today one of my favorite co-workers came into my office carrying her daughter, who just turned a year old, and wanted to talk about this project we're working on. And it was so much better and infinitely more satisfying to talk about this project while I was patting a little girl on the back (although she had conjunctivitis too, eesh) and stroking her hair and talking to her, while at the same time talking to her mom. We talked in very chilled out fashion about how I sure do want a child, both emotionally and intellectually (so it's not just that hormonally driven "MUST HAVE BABY NOW" thing that genuinely hits women. I can actually tell you why.) This woman is one of the sanest people I know, and seemed to understand my thoughts on the matter like few people I've spoken to about it (and I've spoken to a VERY few, for a variety of reasons). And we also talked about how I don't have any inclination to do this monumental act of parenting alone, because I just don't have the temperament for it and really do believe that I would need a partner to do my best at it. I watch my single friends who have children and admire their tenacity, but I don't think I could do it on my own. If I had to, I would, of course, but given the choice, no.

And therefore, the people who tell me not to worry about this because of medical advances and I can freeze my eggs? And the people who tell me to just do it on my own, cause I'll be sorry if I don't? Especially people who have never frozen their eggs, who do not have eggs to freeze, and who haven't done it on their own?

Yeah. It's best not to say those things.

I'll be on the other side of an age this year that will make it that much harder to produce a child, so I'm in no sort of denial about my situation. I know the odds are pretty slim. I haven't delayed it, as the media is fond of suggesting, for a "high powered career" or because I'm selfish and don't want to be responsible for another human being. My life situation has just not come together in such a way that it supports the creation or care of another human being. And as much as that does honestly bum me out when I'm completely honest about it, it's just the way it is. I can't go back and undo anything, or do it differently. I didn't have the information I had then to make better decisions, or not to waste my time, or to try to send out stronger subliminal signals to attract more manly men.

It just didn't happen. But it's so good to be with these babies, anyway - just so I don't feel totally at sea in a world of grown-ups. I'm much happier when the entire spectrum is represented. We also went to the playground and Andrew pretended it was his castle and he was the king, and Kelsey and I went down the slide a few times, with me managing not to crush her or otherwise upset her. It's good to play with stuffed horses and make-believe castles, to answer unanswerable questions and pick up a newly walking baby when she falls and brush the dirt off her butt. I wish I had photos of Kelsey trying to walk, because she's just figuring out what her legs are for and how they work and what their limits are. She gets around pretty well - doesn't need to be carried, although she likes it, oh yes she does. But I'll be honest, if someone was willing to carry me around, I might be pretty okay with it, too.

It was fun.