LaurieWrites

Giving up Lent for Lent - or How It's Not the 40-day Shred

My friend on Ash Wednesday: My friend is an atheist and she said she was giving up sugar for Lent.
Me: Does she know what Lent is?
Friend: Yeah. I told her she was actually just going on a diet.

I try so hard, so very very hard every day, not to judge, but that is just silly. It's the silliest thing I've heard among a number of comments I've heard this past week about what thing to give up for Lent, whether it's the usual chocolate or swearing or something more of-the-moment like Facebook. (Sorry, I think giving up Facebook for Lent is silly too.)

I was raised Catholic, significantly, seriously so, and I don't practice anymore beyond the fact that I still own a rosary and use repetitive Hail Marys on occasion when I'm really freaked out or need comforting. Because I don't practice, I DON'T GIVE UP anything for Lent. I'm totally aware that it's happening, but I don't engage with it on a daily sacrificial level. Because guess what? It is not a fitness challenge or an internet meme - it's a religious observance and a spiritual practice, arguably the most serious in the Christian calendar. And while I don't practice Catholicism anymore, I have much respect for the genuinely faithful people who use this time as an attempt to better themselves either by giving something up (more traditionally) or working more mindfully on improving something about themselves.

My strong feelings about this are tied up in the deepest stuff of my life and my heart, namely my grandparents and how seriously they took Lent, among all the things they took seriously about living a committed Catholic life. My remaining attachments to the church - which are many and varied in my heart in spite of my political and ethical differences of opinion with the Vatican - have to do with them, for the most part, and the way they lived their lives in the most faithfully Catholic of ways, on a daily basis and in times of religious observance. One did not eat much on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, as they were fasting days, and certainly not any meat. There was no consuming meat on any Friday in their house, because when they were young you didn't eat meat on Friday, all year long. It was the night for little glass bowls of egg and tuna salad, for toast and soup and cottage cheese. It was a time to pray more and to go to church more. It was serious Jesus business, it was, and just reading this I cry because they were just that good, and that good to me. I cry a little bit because this memory makes me wish I still believed.

It was so not the life I have now, the life where I eat steak on Ash Wednesday.

The past I lived and the present I'm struggling through combined with my weird hybrid belief system make me cranky about people grabbing onto Lent as a time to shred with Jillian Michaels (Yes it's 40 days. No, it's not the same.) or to whine to their friends about how hard it is to give up some first world convenience or the other. I'm sorry. I'm a total Facebook crackhead like many of my brothers and sisters in Internet addiction, but giving it up is no kind of real sacrifice. It's irritating, sure, because who in the hell wants to miss out on 40 days of fake pokes and little green plants and wall posts going "Hey. What's up?" But a real, true sacrifice? I think not. Ask a kid in Darfur, loser.

I'm sorry I'm so rude about this, but I rarely rant anymore and this is just...GETTING TO ME. It's driving me to caps, because people just don't seem to get it. Lent is supposed to commemorate the spiritual crisis of the Christian MESSIAH and, oh, SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, undertaken as he wandered in the desert for 40 days. Call me crazy, but if I don't believe in that and I latch onto it as an excuse to lower my cholesterol or look better in a bridesmaid dress? That's just creepy. And yeah, in my lapsed Catholic way, maybe even a bit karmically frightening.And even if I do believe in Jesus and the benefit of a spiritual test, I have to wonder if giving up a social networking service is good enough.

I guess I look at it in a context of other religions and what I wouldn't do. I wouldn't borrow elements of Ramadan that might work for me, or Passover, because I don't know shit about either one of those important holidays and quite frankly, they're none of my business. They are not my cultural practices so until invited to participate I just need to observe.

There is so much I need to work on in my life, so much I need to improve and lose and gain, weight and attitude and brain cells and what have you. If I'm going to do it I need to to tie it to what makes sense for me and my life. If that isn't Christianity on a daily basis - which right now it's not - I need to keep my hands off the traditions associated with it, mind my business and head to therapy or Weight Watchers or the gym.

And in my peculiar, particular catechism, an atheist wanting to give up sugar needs to do it without any help from God, because - well - to attach it to Him, for them, just misses the point.

First Day

I'm going to try to post more in the coming months, and probably will move the blog to somewhere or something else like I've been threatening to do for two years now, just because I think it's time to put down the sippy cup and get out of my toddler bed where this content management thing is concerned. But for now this is where I'll stay because let's face it I'm a lazy bitch and dude, it's cold outside. How hard can I be expected to work?

I've been reading all kinds of resolution-y posts and e-mails, round-ups of memes for the first day of the first month of the year, and I really feel that I ought to participate in some way. Every time I read them, though, I just get overwhelmed. Which one do I do? Do I do the one where each resolution starts with a different letter of the alphabet? Assign them all a color? Jesus I don't know.

I didn't have a very mentally positive year last year and my hope this year is that I do. I want to be in better charge of my situation. I want to organize my life and get it in a shape I actually like and admire. I don't want to be capital-K KRAZY all the time, running around meeting odd deadlines but accomplishing nothing.

Today I went to my meditation group's new year's day gathering, a most outstanding fire ceremony where we wrote the stuff down that we want to get rid of first and put it in the fireplace and then our intentions and values for the new year and burned those up too. My group is populated with a number of intensely beautiful inside and out Persian women who constantly astound me with their way of expressing themselves, their way of walking in the world. I feel instantly better when I walk into this house, when I sit in this circle with other people who are open and true about what they contend with in this life and their utter commitment to making it better.

This was the best possible place I could have been today. My paper with the stuff I wanted to incinerate was packed with scribble. There is so much I want to let go of and break off and torch. Putting it literally into the fire and watching it crumble felt so good. My intentions for the year were a little bit harder to articulate. There are several things I want to do, priorities I want to get in order. I might write a bit more about them this weekend as they shake out in my mind.

Happy 2009, anyway. I'm glad it's here.

The day after the day that sucked.

I'm good, friends. My friends. My friends of which none of whom are plumbers or hockey players or even hockey moms, although I can assure you that if I had a friend who was a hockey mom she'd be the most bad-ass hockey mom in all the land, with the orange slices and the juice boxes and a mean slapshot.

Those are the only kind of hockey mom friends I need. And I really can't wait for November 4, to put all of this ridiculosity to rest. CNN played a montage of the amount of times both of the candidates said "Joe the plumber" or some variation thereof today, several times over, and it occurred to me then as it's occurred to me often lately that we are a nation on the verge. Or maybe a nation that's there, just there, repeatin' the hockey and the plumber and the change and the alarming Three Stooges' "heh?" tic that McCain has over and over until we're all just going to one day explode in a huge global warming hug from God.

I hope it's a good hair day. I'd like to go out on one of those - just not today, which is one, so thanks.

Yesterday was a bad day, a bad hair day and a post-BlogHer, post-trip post-mortem of a day. And I have to say that writing through it is one of those things that I use this space for, or at least I did before and I'm trying to again, regardless of how I think it may bum some people out or make them think I'm crazy. I honestly don't really care at this point. I'm interested in feeling better and part of that is writing it down. When I don't I'm worse and when I do I'm better. It's an elemental part of me being better than I get when I'm down in the hole.

It's also really aggravating me that I can't write about the routine of my days right now, because I sat on a panel on Monday and told a room full of people that it is one of those things that I consider unbloggable. But I'll tell you one thing - when you're finally-once-and-for-all grieving an old loss that's been a long and hard time going, and you're in a weird transitional time, and you're freaking out about your weight (for reasons of health and comfort as well as the desire to fit into any sort of clothing) AND photos of you from high school (AWKWARD, and not the kind where Jennifer Garner goes "Oh, I was TOTALLY the ugly duckling in my high school," which always makes me want to punch a wall) are popping up on Facebook, you need a better environment than the one you are currently in, when you is me.

Just sayin'. Because that is all I can say. I really wish I could say more. I really, really, really wish I could say more.

But I can't. Because I have to pee and I have to catch a shuttle bus to my car. That is what I need to do. And that involves putting one foot in front of the other, which is actually working out today.

And everything around me stays the same.

There's a lot to say about the weekend, the trip from Maryland to Boston to Maryland and back home to my bed again, and I know I can't really adequately explain it all. I'm really tired. My mind and heart and body are tired. There were things I needed to experience in Massachusetts, things I'd sort of expected but not really, plus three days of intense driving across strange highways and connection with people who in many cases I knew but had never met before.

Massachusetts broke my heart a long time ago, not on purpose, just as a player in a drama it knew nothing of. And this weekend in addition to going there to see amazing women whose writing inspires me, and who work on special projects with me, I ended up meeting up with someone who lives there who has meant a lot to me for a long time because apparently we had a few final loose ends to tie up or cut.

It was fine. It was low-key. I ran my mouth as I am prone to doing. I tried to make it all make sense for everyone, because that's also what I do. I felt someone's pain whose pain I am able to feel like few others, I tried to give solutions and really felt like what I was thinking was right. It actually felt strangely easy at the time.

Then I got into a cab at the end of the night and laid my head against the glass and vaulted immediately into another episode of helping a frustratingly clueless and unmotivated cab driver find his way in a city in which I do not live in which ostensibly he does, when I really just wanted to be and let someone else who could PLEASE know what they're doing for once take the wheel. (Could one cab driver have a GPS system, in his brain or on his dashboard, please?) And in the spaces in between that aggravation I felt a certain feeling of not feeling which I was relieved to think would hold. I did - as I always try to do - what I thought was the right thing.

The next day I drove, hopelessly lost, out of Boston and finally onto the gorgeous roads of central Massachusetts south through Connecticut and New York, finally into Pennsylvania and onto home. I felt peaceful, and relieved.

Then, today was a mess. I've been crying all day, off and on. I had another big event yesterday with some of the the same people from the weekend and hundreds more, which was great and exhausting at the same time. I think it was too much stimulation. Even though it was good to see everyone, it was too much to deal with my unsettled heart on top of it all.

Barenaked Ladies has a lyric in what is probably my favorite song of theirs, "I wake up scared/I wake up strange/I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever gonna change" and that's how I woke up today. I shrunk into myself, into a withering feeling of loneliness, of finally having let something huge go for who knows why.

There's no reason for my heart to be unsettled, except for every reason that anyone's ever is. I went for - and got - that aggravating "c" word, closure, on this trip. I was told by smart and caring people that that was what I needed, for real. I knew deep down that it was what I was doing this for, that it would come about if I approached it in the right way. I needed to be an adult. I needed to let go. I needed to accept that there were things I had done and said that weren't helpful, and that in order to move on, to have any shot at a better emotional life, that this was what I needed to do.

I know this is true. I am well aware of my delusions and blind spots, of how I clung to the wrong thing for so many years, looked after the closed door when supposedly God was opening a window as it's often suggested. But the thing is, really, that when I'm completely honest and unfiltered, I'm tired of closure. I'm tired of trying to resolve things and make them right. I'm tired of trying to be happy on my own, of accepting that every road that has led me back to a room by myself with a pile of resolutions is the right one.There are days when, even though the basic premise of Buddhism is that everything must be let go and released because that's just the way it is, I cannot let go of one more thing.

This sounds like whining and maybe it is. Maybe at my core I am angst-ridden and needy and ridiculous. But I don't want to let things go so much as I want to grab onto them with both hands at this point, of love and joy and connection. There is so much lack in the world, uncertainty and fear and garbage of the highest order that I want something beautiful. At the very least I want to stop having to give stuff back, and maybe I am specifically daring to tal about love here.

And what is beautiful - the most beautiful - thing about healing this relationship that I dealt with in Boston is that it was angry and acrimonious and it isn't anymore. It was really easy to work that part out. We were able to communicate with each other and put some things right that hadn't been for awhile, and again, some of them my fault to a degree. I think that was good. I can't say it was joyful, on any level, but at least it was better than the alternative.

So the crying today, I don't know. The serious tears that came out of nowhere maybe meant that something was excising itself for a final time, or at least I hope so - that the last vestiges of hope for an old feeling that had planted a perennial garden of sorts in my mind and heart were leaving me in salt water as they've done so many times before but never for good.

I still hate it, I can't lie. I can't say I understand it really, that it isn't one of the great and terrible mysteries of my life. And I wish that I could be more gracious about everything on so many levels. Someday I will be, I'm sure, but maybe not when I'm this deep in the end of it, when I'm not working so hard to be better off than I still am.

Luckily, this is burned into my brain. Maybe there's some kind of hope.

"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh for awhile anyway

There's a saying in my family, a family that is full of them (on both sides I might add.):

"He's as happy as if he didn't have good sense."

I'm from Maryland and one of the great loves of my life is the true Maryland/DC old-style dialect. It's one of the reasons I love this statement, because it challenges the limits of grammar in ways that I enjoy, it doesn't really make sense, and it brings me slamming right back down to my roots in the best of ways.

Internet, I'm as happy as if I didn't have good sense.

I don't know why. I don't really have a particular reason to be happy. I'm still kind of a mess. I have so many bills due, including a storage unit man who calls me when I'm like a day late, and a degree I need to finish in ways I feel ill-equipped to handle. I'm dealing with some demanding personalities in my day-to-day and I'm feeling stressed about that. I don't have a boyfriend. My family and friends who are that close have their requisite challenges and issues. There's a lot I'd change.

But for now, in this space in my life, I feel happy. I feel like I'm acquainted with my lighter side, and I can't tell you what a relief that is after so many months of not knowing how to find it. I'm communicating fairly well. I'm handling things that would have set me spinning out just a few months ago. I'm enjoying putting together cute outfits again, whereas I'd slipped into a mode of "various combinations of black and gray" that I thought were just a reflection of being strapped for time but now looking back I'm not sure. It feels good to feel good when I leave the house, and I don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to do it.

I'm expecting a good weekend up here at BlogHer Boston and a great day on Monday at BlogHer DC. I feel really lucky to have found a good community, and to keep getting involved in things that inspire me.

On the way up here today, a really terrible, traffic-ridden drive, I listened to Patty Griffin's "Children Running Through" cd a few times through, and I cried when I heard "Heavenly Day." I love this song so much, and not just because she wrote it for her dog.

It might be a lot to ask, but I'd like to add tomorrow to the chain here. Wish me luck.

still here

I think I'll be around here more frequently for awhile.

I'm on a panel for a blogher conference in October called "Reclaiming Your Blogging Mojo" and it appears that I've recently misplaced mine here, while I've been picking up assignments elsewhere and working with words so so much.

I miss my own site, at least miss being more personally engaged with it other than cross-posting BlogHer stuff (which, don't get me wrong, I feel fine about doing. I work hard on it, who knows who reads it, so I might as well put it here.)

I stayed in all weekend, wasted a beautiful day today inside because my monthly hormonal shift had me all out of whack and in some serious stomach pain. I thought a lot, which isn't something I really need to do that much more of, you wouldn't think, but it's amazing what happens when you're just still, when you let things roll over you and see what sticks.

I didn't and don't like a lot of it. There's so much I'm dissatisfied with, but I'm really trying to treat this time as the run-up to a great shift, a time where this latest thing I've done will culminate in something worthwhile. And I do believe that a lot. It's just that other times my concrete shoes are unbearable.

I miss writing here. I'm tired of worrying about who won't hire me because of it, because yeah, turns out I still have a job. And for good or for ill, this site walked me through three years of terrible pain and persistent growth, even though I'm not feeling so much like I'm growing now, or maybe it's just that I feel like I got stuck.

I'm tired, I'm frustrated, I thought I'd be farther along the road by now. I haven't really caught on to what the next step is yet, which is maddening. I can only really see as far as October at this point, and everyone knows that that kind of attempted foresight is just pretend. I'm trying really hard to take care of myself, though, trying to stay as positive as I can. It isn't easy in times like these when the overall vibe dips a lot and I can feel myself going to places I don't like.

Always though I make it through the places that scare me. And now after a weekend of less-than-pretty thinking I already feel like it's turning around for the new week. My ideas are breaking through, and I feel like it's going to be tolerable and maybe even good. This whole process with me is so very daily.

I just don't know

I graduate from journalism school three months from today. People are starting to ask me what I'm going to do and I wish they'd stop because it's freaking me out.

I don't know.

The things is this has all been done on a day-by-day, case-by-case basis. I don't really know what prompted it other than a creeping sensation that I needed to do it if I wanted to be less than functionally insane and depressed. I wanted to finish something I started 20 years ago and I wanted to do it in the place where I started it. I got some financial support from the university that made it possible, and I worked out the other stuff with my job so it really was.

A year later It's been worth it but it's been really difficult much of the time. I'm tired a lot - and a lot of the time I'm freaking exhausted. Many other times I feel like the shittiest writer in the universe. My blog is boring. I hardly ever write here anymore if it's not a BlogHer cross-post, which I don't want to sell short because I work hard on those posts and think it's okay to share them here.

I just don't know what kind of writer I am anymore. I don't know if I'm a journalist or a photographer or a blogger or a writer. It's a stupid ponderous thing to consider when I really am all of those things I guess. And I don't believe I have to give up the "journalist" part just because I'm a blogger, although the strain of not expressing my opinion in quarters where I normally would is wearing on me a little. I spend so much time communicating on blogs and with people who do the same that I'm really in this bizarre no-woman's land where I'm trying to be a journalist when I've taught myself how to do all of these other things and involved myself in communities that required absolutely no education other than the work I've done over 35 years  to practice how to express myself in writing and more recently in pictures.

I kept my job because I need an income. It's no joke. I've got a vague idea that I'll move to another state and live somewhere less expensive and I'll write and shoot and do the stuff I love to do. And I'm trying to keep that in mind - trying not to just let this end up at the same spot, because that would be a shame.

And maybe in that state I'll be happy, and feel at home like I still don't really anywhere. Maybe there's a miracle in this three months from now til graduation, or maybe there's a miracle sometime after. It would be nice to believe that, because it doesn't feel like that now. Right now it feels like the treadmill's never-ending. Right now it just feels like my life is work, and that's it. It's commuting and being in rooms I don't want to be in with people whose opinion may or may not matter and I'd tell the truth about that right now except I really can't because God knows what the consequences would be, which sucks immeasurably. And there's not a whole lot of joy that I crave bookending all of this. It all might be tolerable if there were. I really miss feeling joy and connection. I'm with people a lot, but there's an intrinsic loneliness that is kicking my ass and I'm not sure what to do about it.

With all the planning and the learning and the milestones happening and the questions about what I'm going to do and where I'm going to do it, I just wish that any small bit of it, at this moment, felt worth it.

Sugarpants for a day

I guest-posted over at Karen's site yesterday. I wrote about trying to remember to have a little bit of fun amidst all of these toils and snares, for God's sake.

I'm still thinking about it, because you know I'm never sure whether I'm getting it right or not (not the fun part...the expression part. Or maybe the fun part too. And maybe this is why I have to write about trying to have fun. I'll shut up.)

Elsewhere, I'm on an immediate and a slightly less immediate deadline and I feel awkward and uncomfortable about that, although I know this is all totally doable. I'm also strangely aggravated by the elfin Chinese gymnasts and actually care whether or not Michael Phelps wins 800 medals, so I think this means I've been sniffing a little too much of the Olympic glue (really, NBC? Al Trautwig on gymnastics? Where did you find that negative jerk?)

And yes, this too shall pass, but that phrase is annoying me so I'm avoiding it. And oh hey, I got paid! I have more than free dollars, finally, and that's good. So I'm also looking forward to doing absolutely jack nothing this weekend but sitting around and oh, maybe having some wine (shocker) and uploading about 1,000 photos replete with highly descriptive tags. Seriously. Right now, that's my kind of fun, my lame, strange, mildly anti-social kind of fun. I'm clearly saving the real throwdown for 2009. Watch out.

Oh, ps, speaking of Olympics and glue: LOLBush does Beijing, courtesy of the UK Guardian (because our reputation in the international press just doesn't get much lower.)

Contextually speaking

I'm doing fine. Really, really fine.

A friend of mine who reads this site called today and basically asked if I was standing on a ledge somewhere. The last post a little dark, yes?

Well, yeah. That part of my story is dark, and sad, and it perhaps could use some context. I carried it for a long, long time. And a little more than a month ago (a month that has flown, by the way, faster than any I can remember...this life goes by us so damned quickly) I got backed into a corner by a wall of words and people with agendas that I didn't and didn't want to understand. I got really, really uncomfortable and I let myself feel that way and then I forcibly let it go. I freed myself from this whacked out psychological and emotional prison, overnight, because I had to. I couldn't take it anymore, and although I may hold on for inexorably long periods of time to impossible situations - a mix of my genetic codependent programming and my own resistance to giving up anything that I identify as MINEMINEMINE - when I can't take it anymore, I REALLY can't take it anymore. It was as difficult as saying, "I so love you, you are so dear to me, but I can't talk to you anymore, and I can't let you talk to me" which, by the way, are words I never thought I'd have the fortitude or phonic capability of uttering. 

Is there a way to feel a bigger ass than to not be over something when you feel like you should be? So what I did was to give someone a pass, not hold them accountable on any level anymore, and just look at my own actions and words and decide what to do about them. I didn't blame anymore, I didn't say, hey, what about those things YOU did, what about YOU??? There wasn't any point anymore, it was all sand through my fingers.

And somewhere on the plane back from California, after more than a week of immersion in the world of words and people who write them, of awesome people and landscapes and straight talks with people who love me, I decided that if stuff came up in my head about this lousy and increasingly ridiculous situation, no matter how random or sad or pitiful-sounding, I was going to take it wherever it went and I was going to WRITE IT DOWN. I decided to do it for all the years I didn't because I was afraid that the person I was so screwed up about would read it, and actually know how I felt (God, the truth, it just sucks so hard, doesn't it?) But what never occurred to me in these years of censoring because I was afraid of how he'd react (it was always, always about him, on so many levels, in so many ways) was that I was digging myself into a hole of shame and depression from which I would eventually erupt, snakes for hair, shrieking at the universe with 800 axes to grind and in dire need of anti-anxiety medication and multiple shots of the brown liquor.

It got pretty deep there for a couple of months, let's just say, but I think now that it was just the final dark phase, the final letting go. Mostly of illusions, I know, but they were mine, thanks and I didn't construct them by myself. I had help, although somehow it's always come back around to me, to my fragility (fuck that), to my issues. And by the time I tried to fix it for the millionth time a couple of months ago, there was nothing left to fix. There was no connection there but memory, and for the final time I was not afforded the compassion of honesty, of being treated like a person who can handle my shit, who will not fall apart. No matter what the reason, no matter how well-constructed the logic of handling me with insulting and patronizing kid gloves, that ended it for me. There was a person, completely ambivalent about me, and me all building elaborate altars with my hands, hauling ass like those dudes who worked on the pyramids for 87 years, to something that never really worked in the first place.

At least I know I'm committed to causes I care about. There's some positivity there. Turns out my pea brain will go to great lengths to hold on to people who made me laugh and feel deep love once and were better than adequate at the kissing thing. And actually that's a flippant understatement. I had a great thing for a minute that lasted for a few years. And that was the minute that was in my mind when I was writing and feeling all of this old, old stuff that came out in the previous post. Yesterday morning I expected to feel stupid about writing it. I expected to want to set it back to draft, because it's amazing how jarring your own words can be staring back at you in black and white from this screen.

What I didn't expect was that when I walked to the parking lot to my car to go to work, that I'd feel so much the opposite of what I wrote. That I'd feel happy, like a weight had been lifted. It was so strange. I had no idea I'd be in a good mood all day, that I'd not be dwelling, that I'd feel a clearing in my heart and mind, for real, for the first time, not like all the other times I told other people I felt it just so they wouldn't worry and I could pretend everything was cool.

I didn't know how much I missed being funny for real instead of just darkly so. 

Maybe, although I feel like a weird poser reading a few pages from the Tao te Ching here and there throughout my day, and reading books written by Buddhist nuns and monks to try to put some good stuff in my fucked up brain, maybe it's helping. Funny how admitting I felt things but following that up by doing absolutely NOTHING about them is helping. Funny how letting all of the old stuff rise to the surface and releasing it here, in the only place I feel like doing that it seems, has been transformative. And although I'm afraid there will be backslides, because there always have been so why shouldn't there be again, I think maybe this time there won't be. I think this time it's happened. I think I did it, that thing he told me I'd apparently done last year, because he is apparently not as perceptive as I always thought he was and maybe didn't know me as well as I thought he did, bless his heart. (Or maybe I was just that convincing, because I wanted to be, and I made him believe it.) Maybe I'm doing that thing he was always doing in relation to me, so much so that it was the title of the only song he ever wrote with me in mind. I think I'm moving on.   

Marine layer

I go home today, which I think I'm happy about but I'm also scared to death of all the work I have waiting for me when I get there. My mind is so full of everything right now, just everything. I am drowning in pictures and family and BlogHer words and lingering weirdness and worries about money and the hows whens and whys of everything I'm going to do between now and...well, the end of my life, per usual.

I woke up again today in the spare bedroom at my sister's place, looking out on a cloudy sky over the ocean again and it depressed me again. The ocean view, of all things, depresses me here, which is insanity itself. It's the clouds, what they call the marine layer here. Weird. We sat on the beach yesterday around 4 in the afternoon and it was freezing.

California has been really interesting, but in that way and more not at all what I expected. I've seen my sister's life, where she is for this span of time, and I'm glad for that. I'd have to be in San Diego for a long time myself to get used to it. There's just something so different about the east coast sensibility, it's imprinted on me, its DNA I guess, the loudness and rudeness and kindness, the food and music and fonts on street signs and everything else about it that makes it unfailingly, if annoyingly, my home. I could try to be somewhere else again, and indeed I think I will soon, but it'll be within spitting distance of I-95, no doubt.

We've done so much since I've been here and it's been good but I'm tired. The knowledge that you take yourself with you wherever you go has come back to me quite clearly since I sat in the lobby of the hotel in San Francisco overnight, waiting to catch a bus. My writing isn't working, and I still feel, above all of the other things that I feel, very, very lonely. I keep tying knots in the rope of that and hanging on, but I'm running out of space, so I hope it shifts very soon. And for today, may that shift include a painless transition back to the land of monuments and ridiculous traffic, because for now - fight it or not, like it or not - that's where I belong. Because it's where all of my stuff is.