LaurieWrites

New year's day

I'm sitting at the base of a small mountain in a place I've never been.

I'm sitting at the base of small mountains all over the place.

I've been moving nonstop since August and haven't reported back. I'm going and going and going, knowing I need to make a move that for me is monumental, scared to death to do it, rolling over every possible (mostly horrible, obviously) potential outcome in my mind, worry stone synapses and rosary bead neurons.

When Mary Oliver asked what I was to do with my one wild and precious life, I doubt that this pattern of behavior would make it into the desired multiple choice options from A to ZZ. This is some nonsense right here. This is self-torture of an outstanding degree, my own personal lunatic fringe. If you were doing this, I would take you out for beers and tell you to run, run, run in the opposite direction from the insanity. I would tell you to go, consequences be damned, because wasting one more day on this was not advisable. I give excellent advice to other people.

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

My year began in water.

I stood in the cold shallows of an ocean I love for longer than seemed reasonable but I couldn't help it. I looked at the sky and couldn't stop crying, and thought in the cheesiest possible way but a way that my soul travels nonetheless that starting off this span of time here had to mean something good, right? It had to mean better? It was set up that way, anyway -- as a demarcation and an escape, a running to, not away, at all.

Seagulls are irksome birds but their cries among the waves are a peculiar kind of music, and I wanted to take that with me, too. I hear it in meditation when I finally get my mind to shut down, especially when I'm asked to visualize something that calms me, that makes me feel at home in myself.

When I'm particularly off my rocker I think that things like that -- sounds, pictures, words, signs -- can set me right. My burning bush is multimedia, I guess, and mostly invisible so far. It's a collection of minutiae that has answered no big question yet, and my signals are so crossed right now that even the ocean on a day that signifies the first of the next didn't make anything clear.

Normally when I walk down to the water to say a pitiful goodbye until the next time there is a second when I feel okay leaving that makes turning around possible, a natural end that did not occur this day. I had to force myself to go, to get in my car and go back into whatever was next. It didn't flow at all, which is typical lately.

There are oceans everywhere, the occasional mountain. I just wish sometimes the answers were clearer, that I could navigate these changes and questions and challenges with more grace and less hand-wringing, more quiet resolve than hysterical chatter and questions and reliance on the advice of my friends. It feels like, at 41, the path should be more obvious to the other side of things, especially things that aren't working, things that feel so difficult, that aren't on their surface life-threatening when I know that is the case for so many others. 

But I can't and it's not, and I guess that just means I haven't done all the work yet, inside or out, to make that possible. Or maybe I haven't learned to accept the fact that sometimes the hardest is the simplest, that I have to let it be that way for it to be that way. 

On the last plane I was on, I wrote "More joy" in my little red book, as an aspiration, I guess. I meant it. I don't know what it looks like, but I meant it when I said it. I dared to write it down. I think that is something of a start. 

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.

39

I have three minutes to post on my birthday and I'm going to do it, no matter how short it's going to be and how inadequate I might feel like it is. 

It was a great day. It was spent with people who matter the most to me, really - who get it and support me and for whom in return I'd pretty much do whatever they need. That's the way it works for me. 

I have high hopes for this year. 

38 was amazing and beautiful in some ways (I am so rich in friends and family it's ridiculous) but mostly it was really fucking hard. It was the worst phase, I hope, of the scab healing over, the caterpillar working extra hard to turn into the butterfly, pick your metaphor. I boxed with the universe for a lot of it. 

I ended it just kind of asking for guidance, from somewhere, for what I need to do next. 

I'm lucky in a lot of ways. This is the year I need to get brave. 

Wish me luck. 

SXSW Smiles and Photo Dreams - What's Yours?

Cross-posted at BlogHer, with a few additions here.

As a photographer and an adult with a cleft lip and palate who had a transformative experience shooting an Operation Smile dental mission in Vietnam a year ago this week, I was thrilled to see the SXSW Smiles project at the huge SXSW Interactive conference in the oh-so-awesome Austin.

Well, I didn't actually see it. I almost missed it entirely. I walked out of my last panel on the last day smack into a table that had piles of Operation Smile stickers and buttons on it (I was tired, and it turns out when you buy an iPhone you can spend a lot of stupid time looking at the ground.) It kind of hurt my knee, but it got my attention. And after a little bit of research into the project that brought a nonprofit organization like this one to a huge tech conference, I kicked myself harder than usual for not paying attention before. There's a lot to pay attention to at this conference, but this is one more thing that given my love for this organization's mission of providing surgical repair for facial differences - primarily cleft lips and/or palates - around the world, I feel like the universe should have put in my scattered, hurried path. (And the universe is like, "Hi, pay attention to the important stuff, thanks.") So I am now, and I hope you will too.

Renee Alexander Hamilton, Operation Smile's Social Media Strategist who represented the project at SXSW Interactive, tells the story on her blog, SXSW Smiles Journal.

-I told her about my new role and how now I am trying to do the same thing we do in Donor Relations online and in person at events. I explained that while in the past social networking tools like chat rooms were thought to divide people and keep them at home in a dark corner having "virtual relationships'. Now with Facebook and Twitter, these interactions are actually driving in-person meet-ups and beyond that they are inspiring ACTION.

So I guess you could say I'm in Austin for a little Smile Action!

SXSW Smiles set up shop outside the very cool Beacon Lounge for nonprofits and social change organizations in the Austin Convention Center, with the goal of enough donations for 10 new "smiles" - repair surgeries for kids with cleft lips and/or palates- each estimated at $240.

Directions were simple. First, pick up or download a "Make Me Smile" sign, and write whatever makes you smile on it. Upload a photo of yourself with the sign to Flickr with the "sxswsmiles" tag. Donate by texting "smile" to 90999, or dropping it off in the Beacon Lounge.

Check out the Operation Smile SXSW Flickr set here, hosted on Alexander aka Entropy Art's photostream. The answers are fun to read - "Bhangra," "our absurdly clingy dog", "hot salsa"- and you'll also get a peek at some of the folks roaming the halls of SXSW, if that's a draw. I would include them for you here, but "all rights reserved" is what it is.

The SXSWSmiles project is part of a larger $240 Smile Challenge March (aka Smile Month.) The cause's Facebook page says that $4203 has been donated so far and $3710 is still needed to reach their goal of providing 20 repair surgeries to children. Check it out.

While this is so much on my mind, Lenovo Microsoft is asking people to "Name Your Dream Assignment," asking "Where will your lens take you?" on a photo project for which they will give a prize of $50,000, a video camera, a blog and a computer to record it all. I haven't entered, but mine? To go on a mission - a surgical one this time, and to shoot it. I don't know when or how this will happen, but I believe that it will, and just as I felt in Vietnam, I think it'll be one of the most important things I ever witness.

And why? I'm as idealistic as I am hardcore about photography, and that's a lot. Photos can change lives, I will boldly, idealistically, perhaps overdramatically say - whether they're photos of people talking about what makes them smile or, maybe more importantly, photos taken before and after cleft lip and/or palate repair. No pictures exist of me prior to my lip repair at six weeks old. Hospitals didn't take photos of babies with facial differences then. I'm not sure what the deal was in my family, honestly - I do know my mother was never ashamed of me, in fact saw beyond my flaws as mothers most often do. Who knows what pressures existed on a 20-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man, in the days before cameras were omnipresent, everywhere, where images were immediately available.

But photos are essential and I wish there were some. I would love to see what I looked like before this repair, to see the reality of this situation that has affected my life like no other. And I like seeing the impact a simple repair surgery can make on a child who may otherwise walk around in their impoverished town or village with a gaping whole where there ought not to be one. Photos can inform and change perceptions and raise awareness just like, and sometimes even more than, words can. It can be difficult to see if you're unaccustomed, but just like with many things that present challenges that can't be easily solved, or aren't so pretty, or disturb on some level, they don't go away just because we don't pay attention.

When its in a picture in front of your face, it's hard to ignore, so may there always be pictures of important things in front of our faces.

Me, exhausted, at the end of a harrowing trip, happy nonetheless to be spending time with the very important kids at Hanoi Medical University, March, 2008. Many had just received their first dental exam. Photo kindly taken by their teacher. (The whole set is here. I love these pictures.)

And I can easily say that Operation Smile is my favorite new Twitter contact from SXSW Interactive.

Other photo dreamers for this and other causes:

Joanne Bamberger/PunditMom's dream assignment is to tell the stories of moms keeping their families afloat in tough economic times.

Katie Ring's Photography and Life blog with footage of Operation Smile patients in India and her photos of a mission there.

Audra, an American expat writing at Nicaragua: The Obandos accompanied her students from the American Nicaraguan School on an Operation Smile mission

Beth Kanter was a fixture in the Beacon Lounge and wrote prolifically about the nonprofit presence at SXSW and in social media communities. Her post on the Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam is a good place to start, but scroll around for lots more. <

It's all around me.

Gwen Bell is inspiring. I haven't read her for some reason but I went from link to link and finally settled in to find out that I love her writing.

It is the lovely Jen Lemen's birthday today. She wrote this post about turning 40 and all she plans to do to commemorate it this year. I read it this morning and my heart sang for her and for me because I'm totally stealing this idea.

I've been sitting in the bookstore today reading and writing, trying to step outside the lines that have been drawing themselves in tighter and tighter around me. It's been a good mental and physical break from a life that's moving too fast all of a sudden and still presenting me with some challenges.Two-and-a-half months to graduation and there are so many questions I have that have no answer and yet I find myself gravitating more and more towards trust where in recent months there has been such uncertainty.

Lunch with an old friend today restored something in me that I didn't know was in need of it, really. It helped me write something I needed to get out, which was good - so often lately I've felt blocked. It helped me see my way clear to forgiveness, to putting something positive and of actual value into the universe. Actually I'm rediscovering all of these people from all along the path of my life - from high school and other times where maybe we needed a break or didn't really need one but it happened anyway. Add that to some tremendous new people who have come into my life in the past year and I feel that for all the things I'm afraid I lack, I have an embarrassment of riches in friends, which is so wonderful to know. I really can't overstate it.

My dear old friend K and I sat down over beers this weekend after three years of a fractured relationship and it's so great to know that with some people you can just pick up wherever you - for whatever reason - left off.

Then today I looked at a woman I last knew as a 16 year old girl and even though it had been 20 years there was so much that we still inherently knew about each other and there was so little back story that needed to be explained. Turns out we've lived really close to each other for years and it just needed this kind of time to reconnect, I guess. Last night someone I never thought would own anything in common with me at all set up some dinner plans and that was really nice too.

I don't know what the confluence of all of this means at this point - and I don't think I'm going to think about it too deeply for awhile. I'm just going to enjoy it since there's so much of life not to enjoy and what I'm focusing on is connection with good people.

I'll just add that it might not be useful to knock the good stuff that Facebook can do for you until you've tried it - you know, if you want to.

The fall light and colors are inside of me as they are every year. It's an amazing time to be alive - somewhere on the edge of melancholy, but not quite there. I'm not dreading winter as I usually do so much. It'll just happen and I'll move through it as usual. If I didn't have to drive in bad weather I really don't think I'll care. My mother asked if I was going anywhere for graduation and the truth is probably not but maybe I ought to. 

Now I'm listening to Hem, and to a little bit of Wilco. I'm checking the totals and hoping people donate to the Life Through a Lens project. I figure if I had kids by now I'd have hit my family up for thousands of dollars in wrapping paper and school candy bars so maybe we can just cobble together this $800 for these kids and call it even. At least I hope so.

I feel good today. I feel inspired today. I feel like maybe things can sometimes be good and I feel slightly more capable of letting go of things that weight me down than usual, which is to say that I actually do feel capable. And that does feel good, I have to say.

Learning to fly

I always worry about my plane crashing. I used to be a pretty normal flyer - a few butterflies on takeoff, random worries about the things that go bump on the plane, as it were, gratitude when I was on solid ground again, annoyance that that woman with all the crap in the overhead bin just couldn't slide over just a LITTLE bit so as not to impede the progress of 100 people trying to get the hell off.

Sometime last year I became a super nervous flyer. My mind became a total jackass and turned me into that person who actually buys the little bottles of cheap red wine for MEDICINAL PURPOSES. I don't know why, but it made a (total of, with layovers) 20-hour trip to Hanoi an exercise in hell, and sets me on the edge of my seat for the bulk of every flight, unable to sleep.

My trip to San Francisco for BlogHer, I planned for this - planned ahead, that is, with a little bit of medicine for mama to take the edge off, I admit it. I wished I didn't have to, but I was not going to go through this hell again, leaving me uncoiling for the first day of an event of which I do not wish to miss a single minute. Crazy stuff: it worked. I made it everywhere in good form, arms and legs quite loose and brain not completely overwhelmed and just all warm and fuzzy and in love with the universe.

Still not a huge fan of the flying thing, but if pressed, I would say that the reason my plane didn't crash on the way here was so I could read last night in the Community Keynote.

I love this conference. It's my third year, and the haters can shut it, because not only is it not ONLY about the shoes (although, for me, it's a little bit about the wine, but that makes it no different than anywhere else in my world) it is about everything else. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my writing life, and it's up there in my personal life as well. I am an unashamed, unabashed supporter. And now my love is just off any chart in existence, because no other opportunity has arisen in my life - ever - to get up and read something incredibly deeply personal in front of almost 1,000 people, and - once I got out there, after much pre-reading angst - to look out and feel completely supported and at ease.

And afterwards? AFTERWARDS? I'm still amazed that several wonderful people took the time to seek me out - in the hotel lobby - on the way to the party - at the MightyHaus shindig later - to tell me how they felt about what I wrote. They told me their very personal and meaningful stories. They cried. They made me cry. They said things about me, about bravery, about...well, just a lot of things that I have trouble owning for myself a lot of the time, and have to say I don't always believe, but this has been a pretty big step in the right direction of shutting up the aforementioned jackass brain.

I'll write more about this later - my battery is dying and I have to go speak on a panel about blogging without kids (which, gotta say, after standing up alone in front of a ballroom full of people? let's just say I hope it isn't harder than I think it's going to be.) But because I know some new people are stopping by here today, thanks to the awesome Eden Kennedy, I just wanted to say that the experience was one of the best and most meaningful of my life. I'm really glad my plane didn't crash so I could do it, and I don't really know what happens next, ever, with anything, but this was pretty fucking awesome.

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.

Bluest Sky

I wrote the e-mail of my life yesterday morning to the love of my life thus far. It was final and (alarmingly) sane. It involved disconnection a la the phone company coming to cut the wires and it means we'll never correspond or speak again unless I unwittingly end up in the same place he does and we are the only ones there who haven't been incapacitated and one of us needs the other one to call 911. DAMN. I hated having to do it but alas it is time and it was done on my terms and yes, oh, yes, I know it is good, although not so good when you're in it. And while I was writing it I cried, and while I was reading it over before I sent it, I cried, and afterwards I cried a little bit too, because there's nothing like crying to make me cry more, and also at that point I was exhausted from thinking and trying to make things right that couldn't be righted. Crying is apparently my body's way of releasing stress and anxiety, and as annoying as it is, thank God I can do it, because if not I'd probably eat ten Snickers bars a day and mainline moonshine to get by.

Not really.

After the crying and the sending and the mental replay of the past 24 hours to make sure I was cool with the choice I'd made, I felt okay. I may have been born at night but not last night, and I may be dumb but I'm not stupid. Time to love yourself more and whatnot. So I talked to my mother, hung out with my roommates' dog for a while, and then my roommate (who is ultimately one of the most comforting people I know, just because of the ease with which he navigates the world) and cleaned out the first layer of junk in my car, that has just been a terrible sinkhole lately.  Then I went out with two of my favorite girls whose careers and lives I'll follow forever, and we had some good conversation and chicken wings. Then I dropped one of them off at a friend's house, and drove home. I sat in my favorite chair and read and took a bath and talked to another friend for a long time who I love so dearly, had some wine I'd saved just for such an occasion, and I finally went to sleep. 

I've grasped onto a Martin Luther King quote lately: "unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality." It's providing me a lot of comfort now. I can safely say that in contributing to the denouement of this most long and arduous situation in my life, I've been completely honest, and awash with unconditional love. That means that I didn't want anything. There was nothing left to want. I just still felt love for this darling person, and that was fine, and I wanted desperately to leave it on those terms. I really do believe that it's hard to start something else, whether it's a meeting with a student, a romantic relationship, or a chapter in a life, without ending the previous one well. That energy carries over, and I don't want all the messed up energy associated with the worst times in this relationship. And while being open with that has KICKED MY ASS, it has also left me feeling completely okay with who I am and what I've chosen to do, and I figure that can only serve me well in the future. I said what I meant, and I meant what I said. I said I had love, I said I had pain, I said what I needed to say, with no intention or expectation of receiving anything back. And that is, I think, the first time I can say that I've done that, in the context of this most important relationship, or any one I've had that's involved a man and some romantic something or other.

This has really, really sucked, friends, but it's set me up for good stuff. I still hate being an adult though. Can't lie. 

Today was recovery. Today was trying to talk myself into working through my stuff that's due for school this week, in spite of having absolutely no interest in attending to that task. And then! Good news! Tonight after I got in from walking to the gym and working out and walking back, in this kind of fragmented yet earnest attempt at training myself to work out, I called my cousin and I asked her to do the Avon breast cancer 3-day walk with me in October, and she said yes. We're going to do it together! We're going to walk for her mom, who is a survivor, and thanks to some excellent medical care after a move to North Carolina, is living some happy retirement years with my uncle down there. This was a blessing, the conversation and my cousin's immediate, "Yes. Sign me up. I'm there." She is six months younger than I am, my first and oldest friend. It made me so happy. It compounded the feeling of hope that I got from the walk to the gym, and then (don't laugh) reading the Obama coverage in Rolling Ston while I was on the stair machine that made me want to blow off school and join his campaign. It made me feel like the summer and fall and all the days after, although they'll be the requisite mix of ups and downs...that they're moving on to better things.

I just can't wait for all the beautiful things I'm going to see.

Links to Dar Williams's cover of the Kinks' "Better Things"

Here's wishing you the bluest sky
And hoping something better comes tomorrow
Hoping all the verses rhyme,
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the doubt and sadness
I know that better things are on their way.
Here's hoping that the days ahead
Won't be as bitter as the ones behind you
Be an optimist instead,
And somehow happiness will find you.
Forget what happened yesterday,
I know that better things are on their way.
It's really good to see you rocking out
And having fun,
Living like you've just begun.
Accept your life and what it brings,
I hope tomorrow you find better things.
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.
Here's wishing you the bluest sky
And hoping something better comes tomorrow
Hoping all the verses rhyme,
And the very best of choruses to
Follow all the drudge and sadness
I know that better things are on the way.
I know you've got a lot of good things happening up ahead.
The past is gone, it's all been said.
So here's to what the future brings,
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.
I know tomorrow you'll find better things.

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.

Dream baby

So in my dream last night I had a baby. And do you know what I did to that baby? I took her for a walk in her stroller, and she fell out of it. Headfirst. Onto the pavement. Hard. How disturbing is that? I am traumatized that I let even a pretend dream baby fall out of her stroller and crack her head on the sidewalk. I hate dreams.

The last guy I dated in Ohio - lived with, actually, which I find sort of shocking now for how incompatible we were on a cellular level - told me that he worried about us having children because I would be too "high-strung" with them, like constantly worried that they'd hurt themselves. He came to this conclusion because I was very concerned about my dogs running out the front door of the apartment building. Like, I cared that my dogs - the tiny four-legged centers of my universe - did not get hit by the cars that sped through our complex.

Get it? I'D be the problem. As I recall, much like when I shared a poem I'd written and he said, "It's just not my style of writing", he had something half-assed to say about me as a potentially "decent" mother, nothing overwhelmingly good, for sure, and whatever it was was cancelled out by the chance that I'd be hypervigilant. I'm sure he put a slam about my family of origin in there also.

First of all, there was not a chance in hell beyond a failure in birth control that I'd have had a child with him. Zero. Hence the whole "put my belongings in a big truck and drive it 500 miles due East" thing. Not a hater, just a truth-teller. If I could have found it in my heart to do it or thought on any level that it was a good or viable plan, rest assured I would have made it happen. I was pushing 30 at the time (oh, such a baby, little did I know) and certainly was ready to have a child. I just have this little caveat where I don't want to virtually guarantee the misery of another human being that I help to create. It would kind of be nice if the conditions in the home you're creating for them are as optimal as you can make them, hmm? I knew we didn't have that, and not because I'd be too busy putting knee and elbow pads on the kid to remember to feed him.

But now that I look back I'm amazed at how much I bought what he said wholesale, that I thought for a long time that he was right, that I'd be overzealous and worried and it would fuck any children I had up beyond repair, just because he seemed so sure and so dismissive of anything resembling a strength that I might bring to the parenting table. Now I'm pleased to report that in the myriad ways I could accomplish messing up a child, being constantly worried that they'd hurt themselves is the least of these. I have several more interesting ways up my sleeve that would likely give them good blog fodder themselves.

Internet, do not let people tell you how you are or how you're going to be all the time. Do not let them twist your (even quirky and questionable) strengths into weaknesses, especially if the topic is one that is very close to your heart - so close that they, in all of their intellectual certainty, could not possibly know  what it means or how it would turn out for you. Do not, especially do not, allow them to tell you that you care too much, unless what you care about is crack cocaine or felony theft.

(Especially if they quit their job to sit on the couch and play PlayStation for two months while attempting to grow a beard and hack your IM account to message other women. I'm just sayin'.)

Maybe it was this trailer for the new Tina Fey/Amy Poehler (and Maura Tierney! It's like a girl crush bonanza, seriously) movie that I found on Fussy's page that did it. I may go see this one on the first day.