LaurieWrites

Aiming Low NonCon: All Good

I had a long rambly post drafted about the Aiming Low NonCon and this...this...BLOGGING PLATFORM ate it. 

Seems appropriate. Aiming low and all. 

So, herewith, and long story short:

I had been committed to go for months, since Anissa asked me to be a photowalk leader. Some of my favorite people in my no-longer-able-to-distinguish-real-from-blogging life would be there. It was going to be warmer there than here. It was not my living room. It was supposed to be laid back. All good things. 

Then my life fell apart in a few distinct unbloggable ways, on top of the ways that it has steadily careened down into the valley of not-awesome since July. (I just don't even want to talk about it. I can barely stand to sketch my feelings about it in colored pencils, which is in no way as satisfying as I thought it would be. FEELINGS. COLORED PENCIL FEELINGSSSSSS.)

Just a few days before the trip, even, I wasn't sure I could swing it. My head would explode, or I'd embarrass myself more than usual and upset all the nice people. I would drive Vikki (who was going to be my roommate) crazy. I'd drive Sarah, who was going to travel there with me, crazy. This is a concern I've never had in our years of friendship, so I'm not sure why it was so important now. I told you things were weird lately. 

This was a lot of sturm und get the hell over myself, basically. 

So I put myself into Sarah's vehicle and bought some extra Vitamin Water (because you should totally invite me to your next rocking party, dear God, what have I become?) and said okay, let's do this. 

What actually happened: 

It turned out fine.

I'm not saying I didn't drive Vikki crazy, or leave her outside our door to languish in the path of barn owls very early on Sunday morning due to being very involved with my three hours of sleep.

Absolutely ridiculous. I should also note that these bandanas were provided to us, so we could make our bank robber and Bret Michaels dreams come true, respectively. It's not like we brought them along on purpose, although next year we probably should. (I also have mine hanging over my desk, for luck, and to make me smile. I'll take what I can get these days.) (I will never claim that cowgirl hat in the background, however. There are limits.)

I'm not saying I was Sarah's dream co-pilot. I'm not saying there weren't a few times where I had to go outside and walk around the building to center myself because this social thing, sometimes it's harder for me than it looks these days. 

But what it was was the best possible place for me to be that was not my living room last weekend.

It was so much better than my living room. There was candy and wine, and sessions where I did occasionally feel like I had something to contribute. There was a sense of being among people who also create and share stories online for various purposes, and a comfort I'd kind of forgotten in that that has always been really important to me, so it was nice to have that back for a time. 

 

Even Neil had fun.

There were also -- and this is really the kicker -- some of the funniest, brightest, most twisted, wonderful, talented, creative, and KIND people I know. I've come back again to the reality that they do not live near me, and this is upsetting, but it helps some toknow that they are out there, even if I mostly have to connect with them through this computer most of the time. 

There was the opporunity to follow Robin around, and to share time with Faiqa that I've found is really good for me. I got to listen to Katherine talk, which is a happy place for me. Even if I did drive Vikki crazy, I can laugh with her for real about everything and nothing, so watching her commune with the fake woodland creatures in glass cases like a really twisted Snow White with an iPhone? That was a cheap thrill. And honestly, if she's doing that for two days with remarkable commitment? I don't know why I'm worried about her sanity. She's got her bases loaded.

See? (Oh, and Janet! I got to see Janet after way too long.) 

I got to know Alexandra better, which was SO good. Her words to me on Saturday shook something loose in my brain, and I went on to have actual fun that night and if there's a thing I haven't been so much about lately, it's fun, so she's magic. (Also, I knew she wrote funny, but I didn't know she was quite...so funny. Oh God is she funny. I love funny people the most.)

I got the time with Sarah that is important to me to have every once in a while, outside of the norms of our daily lives. Since we met each other four years ago this month at a smallish blogging conference in our city, she's tolerated me better and more willingly than anyone except for two people I'm related to by blood. And sometimes I even listen to her and try to help, too, I swear. The scales will hopefully balance out over our lifetimes. 

My photowalk was fun, and everyone who came along was a good sport and got to know each other a little and enjoyed the beautiful space in Callaway Gardens.

By the way? This place is enormous. When I read "Callaway Gardens" I got a very different image of what it would be, certainly not a couple of miles long and wide, with tons of different facilities that it would probably take three or four days to see appropriately. You Atlanta people are lucky to have it so close. 

Anissa was responsible for all of this, of course. We became friends after the stroke she had a few years ago, communicating with each other one time on Twitter just a few days before this jerk of a thing happened to her, so her joke has always been "YOU DID THIS TO ME," except she's probably serious, and that's fine, because I'm a good scapegoat. I'm glad she tempts fate to talk to me anyway. We got some time together in Nashville this winter, when she encouraged me as I set about the business of ripping up the roots of some fundamental things in my life in the search for a new way to be. I take her support really seriously and I appreciate it. What she made happen in NonCon was obviously so needed for the people who showed up, and I'm glad I didn't let my current [unbloggable redacted please make it stop] stop me from being a part of it. 

The best thing was that everywhere I looked at this event, people were laughing -- with and at each other, which is the best, right? Things may be heavy and fraught, but they also badly need to be lighter, too. We are the election and social issues. We are our struggles and our feelings and our deep desire for a different kind of sandwich for lunch, maybe. But mostly I find that we just want to relax into our lives with people who understand and are after the same basic satisfactions. And also we really want to be heard, and connected, somehow. It's easy to forget how badly you need that until  you get it again.  

I'll absolutely go back next year. I'm looking forward to it being a much, much better season around here, and to celebrating that. As soon as those Aiming Low people get their acts together and pick a date, I'm putting it on my calendar.  You should, too, but not too many of you. I don't want this getting too big, except for you, and maybe that other person. 

 

Some of my best friends are mom bloggers

I met Laura Mayes a few years ago. It was probably because of Laurie Smithwick, who plucked me drunken from a curb (me, not her, obviously) in front of a Chicago hotel at BlogHer and said hey, we oughta know each others' phone numbers, because she is a take-charge kind of woman who has been nominated for a Grammy award and I am a name-dropping ass who likes to tell you how cool my much-cooler friends are like twice a year. 

 And then I ended up in a limo with the Kirtsy girls talking smack about mythical cameras and that was that. 

[This is the actual night of the curb and the number, etc. Photo unapologetically ripped from Sarah Goon Squad Sarah's Flickr. That's Sarah between two Lauries. There are worse fates, honestly. I love this picture so much. It makes me happy just looking at it. That was a kickass BlogHer and these are two of my favorite people in the world.] 

So that was how I met Laura Mayes. I think. But for all of the specifics that I don't know, what I can say from the first time I met her was that when Laura entered a room, any time, I felt better about things in general. She has this smile and all-around vibe and approach to things that makes me feel like "Hey world, check this out. This is all going to be okay." 

Or, as she herself is often prone to saying, "This is rad." Or, more to the point, it could be. It could be pretty fucking rad, if we let it. WHY ARE WE NOT LETTING IT BE RAD, EXCUSE ME? Except I say the eff word and maybe she doesn't. Bygones. 

So last year I pitched a panel to Laura for Mom 2.0 that I thought was weird but would totally work and she liked it. I remember talking to her about it while I drove from Virginia into North Carolina and the conversation meandered into good places and I probably cut her off about three times because AT&T on 95 is a nightmare plus there were state troopers everywhere and I couldn't remember the phone laws in the states I was in, but she'd just keep calling back. And so I went to Mom 2.0 in Houston and had a better time than I'd had in memory and that was that.

Weiner Mobiles. Taco trucks. Social media/writing learnin'. Pictures. Galleries. And then I got to go back this year and talk about cameras. 

Look, I am not a mom. I am not a mom at all awash in a beautiful sea of women who write on the internet who are moms, and I can't rightly explain how that happened either, except that I write on the internet and I'm a woman and the group of people I've found who do the same have generally produced or acquired a child, as women (especially) just shy of or at or past 40 are prone to doing. 

And that is a vague way of explaining why I go to to Mom 2.0. 

I think Mom 2.0 is one of the best events in the blogging world. I don't care where it is. It could be in a church basement in {insert name of city I don't want to offend} and it would kick all manner of ass, because you know what? French Quarter (I love you New Orleans) or downtown Houston or {HELL YEAH} Miami resort? Mom 2.0 attracts women and a few dudes who do some of the coolest things that are happening on the world wide internet web who also happen to be your girls who will walk back alleys with you and crack up laughing and drink and dance but are also determined to stay with you to make sure you find your damn phone that you drop on the floor of a bar and you're sure is gone but holy hell if the dj doesn't have it when you crawl back in shame to ask. (Thanks Amie. You really are one of the best there is.) 

We need to find these people.

We needed to find them when we were little girls and (god help us) when we were in high school and college and certainly now when we are supposed to be grown-ups with ideas and plans and certainties. We need friends and colleagues and mentors and associates, especially in a media/communications/writing world that is changing at lightning speed every minute.

We need people who give us benchmarks and opinions and places for our ideas to sit at tables and take shape. We need people to help us figure out our businesses and our relationships and where we are to meet for dinner. We need people who will tell us we are good at what we do when we are, and maybe (especially) when we're missing the mark so we can fix it. 

This event is still small enough for this to happen, I promise you. It's relaxed enough for it to  seem possible, and it's cool enough to give us the  venues in which to accomplish this while still feeling happily removed from our workaday circumstances. 

It's rad.  You should go next year. 

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

This year, the following people and experiences made my Mom2.0 experience especially rad: 

Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah, who makes everything more fun, who babysits me on planes when I honestly think I'm going to die every time, but especially this time if I don't get to sit with her because that has to be some kind of sign of impending death (flying anxiety is no joke, y'all), and without whom, well, you know I really just don't know. 

The Dads, particularly BetaDad, Whit Honea and the Muskrat, plus Yvonne and Miss Britt, with whom I tagged along on Thursday night in the Quarter, one of the most fun nights I've had in a very, very long time. 

(Extra special thanks to Whit, Sarah and BetaDad for the beauty of "I'm going to pull the fire alarm... DO IT NOW" plus beer at the keynote, because that was one of the best things of all conference time.) 

Janet. I love Janet. And the rest of those miscreants named above plus Faiqa who went on the awesome PBS Kids Jazz tour, which ended at Preservation Hall where I geeked out hard, and got a little crush on the bandleader who knew pretty much everything about jazz off the top of his head and managed to impart it in a manner in no way as annoying or pedantic as my ex-boyfriend. 

Maile, who is one of the kindest, most talented people I know, and with whom it was a privilege to lead our photo workshop. 

Deb, proprietress of Deb on the Rocks, who laughs at the stupid shit I say like she's not seven million times funnier. It spoils me to have her a hotel floor away, and to get to sit with her at lunch and soak up her words and ideas. 

Shannon, who is one of the best friends I've got who I've seen in person thrice, and with whom I finally got to watch a hockey game, at least on tv. 

Our blog reader and friend Marissa, who met Sarah and me uptown on Sunday and who is just lovely and kind. I'm so glad we got a chance to connect with you because that was a real highlight. 

Three Community Coffee travel mugs to bring home for me and my parents -- best trip gift ever that I didn't have to buy, and my parents are frequent New Orleans visitors who are in their coffee club, so I was ethical and everything! Thanks, Community Coffee. I will continue to drink you all of the time. 

Meeting people whose work I admire and who I've gotten to know on Twitter but never in person -- Marinka, Wendi Aarons, Stacy Morrison, Doug from Laid Off Dad (who will be bringing you Dad2.0 next year.) Seeing Kyran for just a few minutes and hearing her read from a book I first saw in very raw form and it was wonderful then, so I know it will be amazing when I finally get my hands on it now. The conversations with these people were very helpful to me this time out -- hearing what people are working on, what they're writing, how they're hoping to shape it. That was good for me. 

As far as programming, this may sound crazy, but the Oprah video at the end made me cry and think and question what the hell it is I'm doing in general and online -- what it's been and could be and what I need to do to make that happen. I'm not a wholesale fan of hers, really, and I'm not saying I co-sign everything she said, even in that clip. But as a woman without kids at a conference designed for moms, her statement about being a woman without her own children who nonetheless felt called to teach and lead carried a lot of weight with me. I did not make the conscious choice that she did to remain childless. My life has moved in different ways that have made that my reality, and in a lot of ways it's my central struggle, what my legacy can be besides that. What my purpose is, if it's not to be a mom and in a family structure, and it's my job to figure out how to manage that without going insane, to determine what to say, how, and for what purpose. 

And for some reason that video of Oprah talking about similar things put me in the right space to contemplate that. 

I love New Orleans. For all its crazy I love my blogging life and the people who are in it with me. So it was lovely to be in that place with some of my best friends and favorite new people, trying to figure all of this out for the next phase. I carried that away with me, flying out over Lake Ponchartrain into a life where I don't know at all what is going to happen next, except I did know for sure that I had a hell of a good time at Mom 2.0.

(It was, indeed, rad. Thanks, Laura. You're the best queso who ever queso'd.) 

Bites

I don't really know what to write here anymore. I don't know where to start. I have all kinds of threads of ideas that unfortunately don't translate very well to this little white box. I started this the other night and it went nowhere:

 I don't  know if, born scarred, that's how you stay and forever after everything's a little bit broken or if that's some more melodramatic garbage I made up in my head because the words fit.

Probably. That's probably the case, I don't know. What I do know is that there's very little beauty now. It's a hard slog, February, even at the end of a mostly-neutral winter. I do ridiculous shit to handle seasons, like recite Ecclesiastes to myself in the car on the way to work, although I rejected the Bible long ago as anything other than a three-star "way to go" on Goodreads.

"All streams flow into the sea,
   yet the sea is never full." Ecc. 1:7

That's not the seasons part at all, but I just looked it up and I liked it.

The world is too much with me, yeah. The shards of sun in my rear view, the man wanting money on the median, Libya. Freaking Egypt and Libya. Do not get me started on Wisconsin, or the guy who walks into my classroom with a Phillie Blunt in his mouth, unlit, chewing on the end until I'm like, "Hey, what's up?" standing there in my sensible shoes, pointing at his mouth before my palms go up. He considers all of this for a second before he takes it out.

"I don't know, y'all," he says.

The cigar situation and Libya are not remotely the same. It's just it all piles up and then I sit in my chair with a finger on the Twitter and one on my coffee cup and I am crushed with the knowledge that nowhere I'm sitting and nothing I'm reading has anything remotely to do with my soul or skill or whatever the hell this is supposed to be or do or evidence.

And that is where I stopped. I couldn't go any more and I went to sleep because I was tired.

**********

The woman I was supposed to rent a condo from back in November killed herself just before Christmas. I only know this because someone in her family contacted me a couple of weeks ago, a week after I moved into my new condo the same complex -- a situation that came together out of the blue in January. This person told me that she died and asked me if I still wanted to rent the place.

No, no I didn't at all, besides that I didn't need it anymore. And by the way, I was sorry, I wrote, sitting at my desk crying for a tiny person I'd met exactly once, in addition to exchanging several e-mails and one brutal phone conversation three days before I was supposed to move in, when she told me that I couldn't because her marriage was breaking up and she had to take the place herself. She was ripping up my lease.

She sat on the other end of the line, a little more than a month away from dying who knows how, crying into the phone, apologizing. I was pissed off that that my plan was wrecked and I wasn't very nice about it. I knew her for a blip, long enough to know that she was a month younger than I was, that she practiced yoga, that her aunt owned the place before she died, that she was very pleased with the new cabinet handles in the kitchen. I was actually proud of myself for being so hardcore annoyed at this disruption in my life, for displaying an anger that I'm bad at cultivating for a 90-pound woman in Keds, for holding someone accountable. This time I would not be understanding and say everything was fine. This time I would advocate for myself, not like all of the other times.

It bothered her so much that she made your life more complicated, her person said in the e-mail from hell. She was very sorry. I'm so glad things worked out for you.

It's a temporary freelance job, thinking of the one nice thing I didn't say, of all that this did not have to do with me, that I turned 40 and she never did. The day I got the e-mail was the last day of a 40-day yoga program I'd been doing since the first of the year, a commitment I made for absolutely no reason that took me to some places I still didn't really understand. The parallels were a lot to take, the godforsaken message that even spiritual immersion cannot save you.

It's not like I didn't know that anyway.

Every once in awhile, which is to say every other night now, my subconscious insists on seeing her in the corner when I walk into my dark apartment. She lived in the building on the other side of the parking lot. I can see her place from my balcony.

Location, location, location.

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

I used to rest in a Rainer Rilke quote, the one about living your questions now, so you could live your way into the answers.

It turns out that it's kind of a pain in the ass. It's not at all that anyone told me it would be easier, I just stupidly really did think it wouldn't always be this hard.

And that really probably is all I needed to say here, right now.

Insane and Rising

When you wake up sort of agitated in a spot like this, among people and places that you love almost the most, that is when it becomes most clear that there is something wrong. 

It's not wrong in a way I even really want to blurt out to the internet, even in this space that still after all these years feels oddly personal, where comments remain a minor shock. I'm sure someone doing their Ph.D in the communal nature of online journaling can explain to me why this is so, but I don't want to talk about it on that level right now. It's not wrong in a foot-stomping, door-slamming sort of way either, because no one listens to that shit anymore anyway. 

It's just inherently not-right in a way that I seem to suddenly feel compelled to document in order to listen more closely to the call of how to fix it, maybe? I don't know. I don't know how to move forward if I don't do something different in this space or anywhere else. My writing muscles are as tight as my shoulders. I'm not currently using them to serve my own needs at all, not my real ones anyway, and I don't know that I'm using them for anyone else either. 

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

I went out in the water yesterday, the most gorgeous day of this trip by far which is usually how it is on the last one, and I looked southward praying the tar balls would never make it here and then I felt guilty. We're as connected to Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi waters here as we are to all of the rest of them. This isn't my ocean any more than it is that guy's, and in that sense it's everyone's who cares to love the water. 

Except it is my ocean, or at least that's how I feel, as I feel as myself in it as I feel anywhere, even though who that is is somehow maddeningly no more clear than it's ever been. It's fuzzy in general. There are motions to be gone through and racing thoughts to think, daily shifting priorities and never more of a sense of instability. 

I don't give a crap about SEO in this context. I think that's clear. 

Anyway, I was bobbing around and singing "Santa Monica" to myself like I tend to in the ocean, the best song ever recorded by a band named after grain alcohol. 

We can live beside the ocean

Leave the fire behind

Swim out past the breakers 

Watch the world die.

Yes, you could. 

There were some beautiful moments this week and there were some tense ones. It's tough to watch human fragility and the passage of time when it's right in your face, especially when it involves people by whom you've set your watch for decades. 

It's difficult to sit next to a young person you love and want to make the way smoother even though that's not at all what he's asking for and you have no direct responsibility for him anyway. And more to the point, you can still barely take care of yourself. So you just turn up the music and derive some satisfaction when he says that he thinks it's cool that you have the same taste and can you go watch a band sometime? 

And how to tell him that you would move heaven and earth to do that because he asked, without sounding weird? So I don't, I just nod. 

It is still really hard, the missing of people who aren't here anymore, by choice or death. 

I just want to feel some sunshine. 

I just want to find some place to be alone. 

Right? It shouldn't be that difficult. If it doesn't happen here I don't think that it can happen anywhere. 

There is something to be said for swimming past the breakers metaphorically speaking although taking it to that level on this sunny Carolina morning kind of makes me want to punch myself in the face, especially since I'm looking at the ocean from a 12th floor balcony as I type. 

When my uncle -- a man diametrically opposed to me, ideologically speaking, in so many ways but who nonetheless shares the passion for life and people that is in my DNA -- walked out the door the other night to drive back to North Carolina he stubbed out his cigarette. He looked at me sitting there at the table, thinking the jumbled thoughts that he couldn't identify specifically but nonetheless knows full well that I think.

"Take it easy, Laurie," he said. "No matter what happens, take it easy. Because you can't change a goddamned thing." 

You don't choose your true south, as I take the liberty of calling it --  not your people or your places. At least I didn't. And of all the things I know that I can't change I know that I can't change those the most, not when it's beautiful or when it breaks my heart. 

Head Like a Hole

It's my third week off and I am restless. I am also keyed up and ready to do something except I'm not sure what it is. There are too many loose ends and options right now and it is imperative that I remain calm. I am compulsively looking for freelance jobs which is taking up a great deal of my mental space and not helping me make the most of any kind of relaxation/down/woohoo I don't really have to go anywhere today time.

It's not going so poorly, actually, the making contacts part. I am just out of practice at quantifying my skills and experience because I've just been dawdling along doing a whole bunch of things with no pressure for the past five years and now here we are. Well, except for that whole journalism school thing where I had to justify every fact of my existence every single day for almost two years. Hey, yeah, come to think of it that was pretty stressful. And also I've been on deadline for something real or imaginary in my brain pretty much every minute of every day since 2002. I am not so much about the mental vacations.

So, okay. Scratch the no pressure. But, really, what can I say when people ask me what I can do? I can write things, a lot of things, effectively. I can speak coherently. I can help you figure things out, tell you what looks good where on your website or where all of your typos are, really quickly. I can take pretty pictures.

That is not specific enough, I'm afraid. And so I re-learn how to package this package that is me, and that makes me nervous because I'm constantly red-penning everything, especially myself, and I'm out of practice with resumes. I have watched some really terrible television. I go for the occasional walk. I try really  hard not to spend money, which, in the summer? Ugh. So I've been staying home a lot, in a house in a city that decided to skip May and head straight for August and our air conditioner is broken.

I did go to New York for a few days, on the Bolt Bus. That was really fun. I saw a really good, old friend who let me stay with her at her conference hotel and some newer blog friends and spent time kicking around the city. It felt good. I have pictures for months backed up or I'd show you some of the better ones, but here's my  new favorite bar near Union Square from my phone.

The bartender was standard issue no-nonsense New York pub but he talked about the oil spill and made me cry.

I can't really look at many of the pictures of that, speaking of which. I feel like I'm not witnessing but I have to really limit myself. I found myself calling up some of the images in my head while I was driving yesterday and it is hard to drive when I'm crying. I am unsettled by the state of the world in general. I don't know how you can't be. I want to write something for the Love the Gulf project (via DebontheRocks) but I'm having trouble finding the words. 

I want a new blog. I need to carve out a few days to understand SquareSpace.

Speaking of walking, which I believe I did up there somewhere, the exercise is going so-so and that has been the big come-to-Jesus this week. When my routine changes things tend to fall apart in that department. I had been going to kickboxing at L.A. Boxing three times a week for over a month. The scale wasn't really moving, although in either direction so that was almost okay, because I was loving it. It wasn't boring and I felt like I was getting back in some kind of shape, then I stopped working and one excuse led to another and there I was on Thursday night, blocked and afraid to go back because I knew it would be so difficult. I cursed myself because for the thousand-millionth time in my life I'd done it, I'd fallen off of an exercise schedule that was really working, that was making at least one part of my life feel in good, stable shape, and I'd blown it.

Stupid schedules. Stupid brain. Stupid stuff that I can't break through sometimes no matter how hard I try when the inertia takes over.

So I went back to the gym, doing the thing I know I need to do in this mind over matter situation and got in the car in spite of the fact that I didn't want to and didn't feel like it. It was hotter than it is in my house in there but I got my favorite bag in the corner and kicked out a lot of the stress and frustration and anxiety of the week. And I didn't die. I felt a little less stressed, even.

Look, face all sunshiny like the hand of HEAVEN blesses exercise.

Not really. Just flare.

I felt a lot weaker during and after class than I had felt even two weeks ago. I need to go back regularly. I need to recommit. The instructor looked at me quizzically but didn't ask me where I'd been and I still felt compelled to babble an excuse at the end, anyway, like he was my platoon leader or something. I take things too damned seriously. But how many times have I said that I can't stop because then it's so hard to start again, unlike other things that I can't stop if I tried forever? How many times has this happened? I know I'm strong. I know I have endurance. I know this isn't even entirely about my body, that my mind is so much better off when I'm burning off all of the nervous energy and feeling good about meeting physical challenges.

And yes, it is a kick to see my arms have some definition.

I am mad, I am so MAD that I've gained back 23 pounds, even though I know how hard it is for me to lose, I know how much harder it is, even, for me to maintain, no matter what the motivational police say. This is a difficult, difficult process for me. I know it. I know it. I know I can't get all negative and crazy about it or I'll stay on the downward spiral. The shame diet, as some idiot broadcaster said on the news the other night, does not work for me in any way. But still? Mad mad mad.

And then my sister and my mother reminded me of a race we'd been planning to do for awhile. It's tomorrow in Annapolis, with a bunch of our friends. It is a 10k that my mother and I -- at least -- will mostly walk, but it's a 10k anyway. My nurse practitioner (who is way better than any doctor I've ever had besides the one who fixed my face, by the way) said a few weeks ago that I should walk every day for 15 minutes just to remind myself that I was moving forward, or maybe just so I could say that I was. I haven't been following that direction either and I'm not sure I can make it all up in one day, though.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ten kilometers. Tomorrow. I don't even know how many miles that is.

But you're reading some ramblings of a sucker who's about to get into her car and drive to Annapolis, yeah you are.

Drafted

It is really time to deal with the fact that eight of my last ten posts since early April are drafts. These are not your average serial blogger's meant-for-a-diary-but-can't-write-with-a-pen-anymore-hand-cramps-up posts. It's just that right now I can't complete thoughts in very rational ways, much less sentences that turn into posts that maybe have some point or purpose.

I have stuff to write for people that I haven't written. I have so many things swirling around that I don't know how to say. Walking through my on- and offline lives feels very much like slogging through the deepest wet sand part of the beach and has for months. Here are some key points that have not made it to publish, that just kind of died in the water for what appears upon review to be very good reasons.

• I've lost the narrative again and if I told the true story right now it wouldn't be a good one.There was a part where he was playing and talking about music and I realized that even broken he knew what he wanted.
• I wandered as I love to do and chatted with people and probably smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank beers if beers were available (I have no memory, I don't know what trouble of that sort we got into) and it rained and the kids all slid around in the mud and I ruined my Keds, and at the end I bought the most perfect concert shirt ever in the parking lot for ten dollars. 
• And that is where the church leaves me - the rolling away of the rock from the tomb and the body gone, maybe, but literal ascension into heaven? Nah, that's where I can't suspend my disbelief but in all manner of things I can go figurative.
• If I did what I wanted to do right now, it would be extreme. It would be something along the lines of ripping the roof off of this bitch.
• I love professional ice hockey. I've loved it for most of my life and I will love it until I die. (Ed. note: Because finally I can get to the point.)

So. Yes. Who knows? Don't look at me.

I'm actually assuming already that this will be a draft. It's bad habit-forming. And they all kind of say the same thing, I think I just tried to dress them up in different clothes. Let's say the lucky ones got the cute little sundress, the dirges got the big clunky sweaters, I don't know. It's just occurring to me that in the effort to write things true I often end up sounding exactly unlike myself.

I want to burn this place down right now, you know. Kill the archives and start over. I don't threaten ever to quit blogging. It would be the emptiest of threats because that will never happen unless blogs go away or I am somehow incapacitated. And who would I be threatening anyway? It's my own business, what I quit and what I don't, carry on. I just don't like it here anymore. It is on my nerves in every single way. But the simple truth is that I don't know where to go. I am overwhelmed by templates and options and things that go bump in my browser.

It doesn't really matter where you put stuff anyway, what little white box you type into. It's just really, really upsetting when the only currency you've got goes away and just like I have assignments to fix other things in my real life life (oh because I do, I have a rack of assignments at the moment to fix things up around here) I feel like I need to speak to it here, for me. It's just that it's a house falling down. It's a minor disaster.

Because when I lose the words it means that the way I work stuff out is broken and it pisses me off. I mostly don't want to talk about my problems until I absolutely have to and then it's really awkward and uncomfortable. Thankfully there are a few people left in the world who I can talk to right now to whom I feel so closely bonded that I don't care if they think I'm weak or broken and in whom I have the kind of trust it requires to let them see me that way. 

Oh my God, they are so super lucky.

But that actually is really lucky for me. I am oddly guarded for an open person and confidences are terrifying. Honesty sucks because it's difficult. I haven't held a hand in years and meant it except for my grandma's while she was dying. I choke on "I love you." I lost my will to say it for the most part when my heart broke once and for all five years ago and I still don't really want to,  because if you touch me you can maybe hurt me, true story. 

Also I don't like to look or feel like I'm stupid or incompetent or out of control, and I will go to the most stupid, incompetent, out of control lengths to prove that I am not. I am the person who goes to therapy in hopes that I will define my problem for the person in the first ten minutes and save us all a lot of time. I don't want that person to do her job. I want to do her job, better, like I'm up for a certificate of merit or a raise, for God's sake. I just don't want to do any of my jobs, this daily set of odd, mismatched things anymore. I am finally really tired.

It is a strange dichotomy, to be as isolated and off my rocker as I feel right now, and yet to have in some ways the closest relationships to other people, the most honest, the most personally chosen, that I have ever had. I'm not complaining about it, not at all, although it's been hard work except when it was really easy. It has not been without cost and disappointment. I guess when you hit a certain point you figure there isn't time for anything else but the obvious and real, the stuff that works. And the world can surprise you, I'm finding. It gives you people you feel like you've known your whole life, who understand everything the first time. It gives you rooms to cry in and people sitting there handing you tissues who have been watching and knowing something's not right and just weren't quite sure how to put it out there.

Because you thought you were handling this so well on your own? Because when it comes down to it a lot of this shit is hard, I guess. A Facebook friend posted Plato's words as her status the other day:

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

When it is so hard to start with yourself in that endeavor of kindness, it is lucky to have other people who can do a few of those things for you until you can, who will talk to you on phones that you force yourself to dial, who have eyes that give you hope just because they're there, who appear in tiny chat boxes from a highway or a continent away. It is important, I grudgingly admit, even if it's really uncomfortable to retrain yourself to hold hands. And this is especially so when your every other impulse is to dart into traffic alone because the data you have collected about the world somehow suggests that that is where you belong. It's enough to believe in the occasional tiny thing until you can dare to consider bigger ones.

And finally you, which is of course to say I, roll over those inadequate words in draft and click over to "publish," so you can finally let them go.

Shit MY dad says.

I'm going on a long car trip in two days (to two beaches! Two!) so I figured it would be a good idea to actually figure out if my car would make it after a year of relative neglect. I am currently, as in right this minute, being completely overcharged for service due to the random turnings-on of two lights on my dashboard, and tomorrow I need to get tires.

My mother: Hold on, I'll ask Daddy where the best place is to get tires.

Me: I know where I'm going to get tires.

My mother: Daddy knows the best place to get tires.

Me: Okay, all right, okay. {Sighs, puts on shoes}

My mother: Oh, haha, he said go to Weshittires.com

Me: We shit tires.

My mother: Haha, yes, weshittires.com. But he was grinning when he said it. That's not really a place. The real place is Tires Plus.