LaurieWrites

Friday Linkage, Because Laurie Apparently Still Writes

I'm at a point in my life where I need the creative work I do to pay a lot of my bills. 

Have I mentioned that I hate money? I really hate money. 

That said, I also do not mind working. I love to have a good time and I  can slack off with the best of the slackers who ever slacked, but I'm a pretty hard worker when it comes to the actual working part, even if I do loathe mornings and everything to do with that whole harrowing enterprise. 

I've been editing for almost a year now, entirely in the background, for a site that I've written for for a long time, and it's been one of the best experiences of my professional life. Don't tell writing, but I think I may like editing better, at least as a job. I also think I'm better at it than I am at writing, so understand it's all about me feeling better about myself. 

(Not really. I also like liking things a lot.) 

Recently I've picked up some more writing assignments again, because I like to keep myself on my mental toes, and also, like I said, I like money. And when money and creativity and the internet coincide? That is my favorite thing, besides that other favorite thing. I mean, really, if that could happen every day, all day? Happiness in this small corner of the world.

I'm going to share that stuff here from time to time, so you can check it out if you're interested, and also so I can keep track, because guess what? Not doing a very good job of that lately. And also? Because it's nice to encourage you to frequent the places that give me opportunities to shoot my mouth off on the internet, I think. 

I also went to Mom 2.0 and helped with Twitter and writing and things of that nature. I will share more about that soon, like I should have done already. BEHIND! So behind!

So, on with the writing show.

I'm back at MamaPop a couple times a month. I wrote an essay about the whole "I'm not a mother" thing that seemed to resonate with people. I hadn't talked about that topic in awhile. 

I wrote about how I really, really loathe the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons, to a mostly non-hostile audience of commenters, which shocked me, frankly. 

Also my feelings about the dirty rumor that Sharon and Ozzy were splitting up, which I really can't handle if that's true. 

And this week I was taken with Chris Brown's demon art, although is neighbors? Not so much. 

 

I've also taken to Instagramming Goon Squad Sarah's cats when I go over to visit, Sid more than Klaus, because he's much more of a lap and camera hog, and likes all of my igadgets, so how you like him now?  Are you on Instagram? Instagram is my jam. I am obsessed and have been for quite some time. You should find me there if you are, too. I'm laurieanne there. The web interface is pretty sweet now, too. Check it out. 

I was also at BlogHer a few times in the past week. 

I shared Angelina Jolie's story of her double mastectomy, and her New York Times 0p-ed, which I thought was gracefully and powerfully written. 

I also wrote some reflections about one of the worst stories I've ever read ever, that of Kermit Gosnell's murder conviction for his crazy train "clinic" and what this all means for abortion rights. 

And! And! My favorite, I think, was about Allie Brosh's first real, live post on Hyperbole and a Half in a very long time, which I was very excited about and it turns out that lots of other people were, too. 

Want me to write something? Right now, apparently, I'm your girl, so hit me up. It's still fun, even if it is still really, really hard for me sometimes. The muse can be mean, but if there's one thing that turns out to be true it's that I can't quit it, even when I try. 

Thank you for tolerating my links. For much better blogging than I'm capable of today, please check out Schmutzie's Five Star Friday roundup, and drop by our #BlogNow Twitter chat, Tuesday, May 21, 9 p.m. Eastern. We're talking creative communities this month, and it should be fun. Here's our Facebook page, too. 

I'm going to shut up now. Have a great weekend. 

Lost in Laramie -- Spirit Day 2012

The big failure of my trip back across the country in August was not the part where I got stopped by the police. It was the fact that in a fearful reaction to being stopped by the police, I got lost in Laramie, Wyoming, trying to look for the place where Matthew Shepard died. 

I had started my trip off by going to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis with Faiqa, a place I really believe should be a strongly encouraged elective for all of us, especially those of us who were born after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed on that site. At the end of the tour, the curators have put together an exhibit of other groups in our culture who bear that terrible word of "oppressed" -- minorities of all colors and ethnicities, gender identifications, and sexual orientations. 

I cried and cried my way through that museum, and it has not left me yet, the way I felt. It is creepy, and unnerving, and yet so important to stand in the spot from which James Earl Ray fired the shots, to look through thick glass into the room where Dr. King last hung out, to read stories of incredible bravery from people who sat at lunch counters and walked into schools and wouldn't leave stores or vehicles or even specific seats on vehicles, because they were so damned tired of being not just second best, but not treated like human beings at all.

The audio and the film clips blew my mind. And I wondered -- because there is no way I could put myself in the shoes of the people of color who did these things, just not earthly way I could imagine -- if I'd have had the strength, as an ally, to do what some, but not enough, white people did back then. It scared me to feel like I wasn't sure. 

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When I knew that I was going to drive through Wyoming, I couldn't stop thinking about Laramie, or Matthew Shepard. I'd seen the play, The Laramie Project, many years ago, and it wrecked me. Probably a lot of us know the story by now, that Matthew was at a bar and got messed up with some guys who chatted him up and then eventually took him out to some pasture to beat the crap out of him until he was dead, because he was gay. 

I still close my eyes when I type it. It just makes no sense. 

Vote however you want, pray however you want, be physically and emotionally and/or contractually involved with whomever you want. I genuinely do not care. But to kill a person, for a sexual preference, for any preference, for any reason, defies explanation or excuse, obviously. 

Anyway, after my  little run-in with some troopers, I was nervous about the wild, wild west. I had googled around and tried to find some specifics, but what I found wasn't very specific. It also came to my attention in the commentary that the people of the town where Matthew died had gone to some efforts to camouflage the site of his murder, mostly through street name changes, and I'm telling you, Google Maps failed. A well-meaning person with a Wiki and bad directions indicated where the spot was, anyway, from I-80, with the caveat that anyone who went there should be careful and look out for any pushback from the people who lived nearby (This is one person's opinion. I have no idea if that would have happened or not. Mary Mother of God could live there, I have no idea, but please know when one is traveling alone across the country, there are some things to take a bit more seriously.)  

I just wanted to go by there and say I'd been there, really. I wanted to pay respects. It felt very, very important to me. I insanely wanted to say to the air that I was sorry, that you can change street names but you can't change facts. 

And no, it doesn't really matter, if a person goes to a place or not. I can I'm sorry sitting here. I can talk to my grandma and not go to the cemetery. But one of my leftovers from Catholicism is ritual, and marking a spot. It's saying that something shouldn't have ever happened to a person, in the place where it happened. It's shedding a tear and leaving a flask, maybe. It's some kind of recognition. 

But I was afraid, that's just true. I didn't trust my own safety at that point, or the sun to stay in the sky or a police officer or -- even worse -- some homeowner with an attitude to have anything better to do, even if I am unfailingly respectful of private property. So I stopped and dilly-dallyed at a Wendy's, and noted that damn, there are a lot of police cars in this town, and I drove by the University and the directions started to fade to black and none of the signs said what they were supposed to and just a bit out of town, I decided that this was probably not going to happen. 

Dumb, pointless, thwarted, whatever. I was just really sorry about it. 

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I do not have fond memories of Spirit Days in high school. I didn't have a terrible high school experience, but I've never been into forced merriment, put it that way. I also didn't know who I was then, at all, or what the person I was supposed to love was supposed to look like.

I knew shunning and shame and embarrassment, for the things I did and said and the things I was assumed to be. I learned what it meant to tacitly apologize for myself, to shove down my natural inclinations of personality and behavior to suit my culture, in all senses of that word. I  learned what it meant to have other people attempt to define me, to tear me down, lessons I began to learn in junior high, really. 

I also wasn't always nice. There is one person I would like to apologize to, now, if I could find her, which I can't, and anyway, it's no guarantee she'd want to hear from me anyway. Our words stick, for good or bad. 

In many ways I haven't changed a whole lot, except now I know what I wish someone had told me then: that it is up to me to define me, as terrifying as that may be. It is up to me to identify who I am and who I love. It is my job to speak out, to identify atrocities, ask why they happen, why we allow them, and what our response to them will be. It is up to me to say that each human being on the planet is made how we are made, and in our particular combination of blood and bone and chemistry, heart and soul and spirit, it is no one's right, not anyone's, to judge or harm us for the very state of our existence, as long as it is not harming anyone else. 

It is hard to know that at 12, or 16, or 24. It is still tough, some days, at 41, but it is easier. And so to sit by and not reach out, and back, and through the complicated garbage of four decades and say "Who you are is fine. Her or him or them or whatever, figure it out, you are safe," is a responsibility. And to say, "Leave him the hell alone. Who do you think you are?" is the equal and opposite. 

It is our responsibility not to allow "bullying" in the context of how LGBTQ teens are treated to become another buzzword or a societal given. It is to constantly ask how it can stop, to demand evolution, to ask for accountability, and to celebrate progress. 

I will wear purple today, in what could feel like a frail offering to anyone, particularly any young person, who suffers needlessly, but is really like lighting a candle or walking a labyrinth and saying names over and over. It's a ritual and an act of hope. It is important because there should be no more Matthew Shepards or Trevors or Taylors or babies yet to come who are mentally or physically abused because of who their minds and bodies tell them they are, who their soul (because that is where this comes from, really) tells them to love. 

I'm okay with this Spirit Day. 

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Thank you to everyone who has ever and continues to listen to my story with an open heart and absolute acceptance. 

Everything After

*I have no interest in publishing this post, but there you have the story of my blog life. 

I'm back home, wandering the rooms, frantically pounding out work that didn't happen when it was supposed to because so many other things were, not really sure of my space yet, pressing my thumbs against my arms for some sense of solidity. There is dust everywhere, half-dead pots of herbs, anthems on the tv and a newly strange sliding-glass-sized view. 

I feel weird, ungainly in a different way than I usually do in August. I promised myself last year at this time I would have a refuge slated. I dreamed a place -- anywhere in Europe, mostly, or maybe just a beach anywhere, because I am predictable -- to ease into where I could breathe out the exhaust of intense ideas and social interactions, of the competing pressures of moving and traveling and presenting and being, of speaking and hearing millions (what had to be, right?) millions of words, alphabets of them crashing into each other and melting in the New York heat.

I didn't end up doing that for myself, of course.  It was an extra, unhappenable thing, that ended up seeming untenable for lack of dollars and sense. So I'm trying to make that happen here, which would work better if I could drum up the energy for groceries beyond coffee rations and soccer game Prosecco.

It's not so bad, as it always isn't, unless it really is. It's quiet but a little too much, the familiarity not exactly what I wanted, but it will have to do, because the urge to work to go anywhere in this moment is absent.

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I want to be better this year. I am dissatisfied with myself, my thought processes, the way I dwell on wrongs. I'm not proud of so many things I'm thinking and feeling, of my dissatisfactions and my petty irritations. I am good things amid the wreck, but it's the wreck I mostly see. Mirrors are hard things.

I don't know what will happen now. I'm scared of it, to tell the truth. There is this next expanse of time to fill that I don't understand quite yet. I feel like I'd been looking at life since May as a pre- and post-BlogHer proposition, and now that the post- is here I'm out of mulligans (That is a golf term. I'm pretending to know something about golf now. See? I'm a damn dirty liar.)

I'm afraid of not doing whatever it is that I'm capable of doing, basically. I'm afraid of not fulfilling a prophecy that I can't possibly know, but feel like I should.

I'm afraid of being alone, of lack of love, and a little bit, of myself. That I'll never get it. That I'll dwell too much in possibility and miss the exit. 

I worry that I'll always be one step behind, that what I leave won't mean anything, that the things I've broken down will be the story. I'm sick of myself, of my indecision, of any kind of unhappiness, of grieving what I've lost and, worse, what I just can't have. I'm sick of working on boundaries and letting go. I'm sick of working on anything. I'm mad at myself for the things I can't stop being sad about, for resenting the relatively small things I have to endure, for not being more graceful in disappointment and want, for my inability to recover from pain more quickly, for my tendency to dwell, for being the worst. person. IN THE WORLD, right? 

I hate that I'm embarrassed to write this down, that I know I'll be embarrassed to send it out into the world, navel-gazing, self-loathing bullshit. Emotional dreck, whatever. 

I know I can be better, is the thing. I know that all I can do is take responsibility for the things I've done that aren't so good, and move on, to dare to hope, I guess, for a little slant of sun. 

I wish it would hurry up, though -- the better-getting -- because I am tired of this particular stretch of verge-of-midlife-suburban-wanderer highway. I aso know that I can sit down on my living room rug and turn up my hands and invite it, too, that I'm probably missing it in the fray. I know that I can forgive myself for the things I smack myself around for, that I can say for sure that even my most ridiculous actions are generally rooted in some hazy good intention, that I am not really all that bad. 

Maybe I feel like if I dump this out old-style  the poison of my thought processes that are wrecking up my plans will seep out of me. I told the people who so kindly and remarkably (honestly, I could not believe it. I was terrified to see it, as much as I was pleased and gratified) filled a room the other day to listen to Neil and Schmutzie and me that I am never as happy as a writer or an online person or a person of any kind as when I come back to this empty white blog box and type stuff into it, so maybe this is just some sick way of proving that true, that there's a comfort and satisfaction in it even when I can't see the screen for dumbass tears. 

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I need something better, you guys. It's been a long time coming dancing in front of me. I don't mind working but I feel like I've been grasping, and no good comes of that after a time. I think I know that I have to do some radical, physical, movement to get to what it is, the yard and the sun and the dog and the face I can kind of see but not quite, that I want to acknowledge as my truth, somewhere I can land to do what I know I want to do. I can't sit here anymore, not in this zip code or this head space, and expect to have the generalized sense of being on the right path that all of this 2012 drama has been about. 

I know this, and I know it has to start now. I knew it when I was walking those crazy halls in New York and I knew it when I hugged my friends with a peculiar sense of desperation. I really knew it when I bought myself an extravagant lunch and then took two cabs and finally ran for a train only to come back to sit in this spot again. I know it when I look for what I'll never find on the internet and yet can't seem to see here either, when I refuse phone calls and shut people down, when I do whatever it is I do to knit together a routine. 

I know it. I don't really want to, because for some reason it is a hard last hurdle to jump, but I do. 

This time I really do. 

*Photo by Leslie Fandrich, who is a very sweet soul, among other very good things. Text by Robin Plemmons, who is Robin Plemmons, master of train horns and human hearts. 

PS: One more thing! Tonight, Alexis Hinde posted a lovely video in answer to a dream Schmutzie had last night about Bret Michaels, who is one of my favorite last vestiges of the hair metal culture of my teenaged years, and who -- I am not kidding you -- I admire for his staying power. Say what you will, but dude is a master of reinvention, and also a mogul.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn is one of my favorite songs of all time, and for reasons only she can know, Alexis offered to sing it. She did a beautiful job, and it made me feel much better about life, the universe, and everything before I called it a day. We're not sure if it's cool to post it here, but just knowing it's out there makes me feel better.

It's the little things, the little things that are big things, that keep us going.  Thank you, Alexis, and Schmutzie for everything else, pretty much. 

Use Your Words

Last night there was confusion in a concert aisle.

The usher sent me down the wrong row, and, trusting him, I believed myself to be in the right spot, and the angry man in front of me to be in the wrong one. 

He wasn't, and I didn't understand that at first, but we didn't clear it up right away. Voices were raised out of necessity, because it was already loud. Then he stepped too close to me regardless, jabbing his ticket and his thumb in my face, calling me stupid, telling me to shut up. I was honestly afraid from his body language and my wacko gift of fear that he would hit me. The guy  next to him started yelling profanity, telling us both to shut up and move along. He wasn't exactly right, either, but he was righter. I've been there, trying to have my own good time, while two assholes near me couldn't figure out their situation and it wrecked mine. It's never good. Nobody wins in the orbit of pointless conflict.

Last week, another show, a girl used the men's room in desperation that only a beer bladder gets you. When she came out, a guy standing against the wall said, "You tuck it, tranny?" in a sick, mean voice. She was steps past him and doubled back.

"TUCK WHAT? MY VAGINA? WHAT?"

Silence, the kind you get when someone expected no response.

TUCK.

WHAT?

MY.

VAGINA?"

He wasn't expecting this, clearly. He wasn't expecting her to do anything but keep walking, and when he was wrong he lost his internal tape. Her rage lit him up, though, and he yelled back in that uncomfortable combination of indignation and ignorance, with misplaced and/or ugly words like tranny and dude and lesbian and who the fuck are you?

His tone was different than it was at first, though, and she tired of it quickly, and walked away. His friends emerged, with more verbal garbage -- haha, lesbian, haha, tranny, haha things that are not like the other and don't have anything to do with anything, really -- disproportionate in every way to the initial trigger, as is usually the case.

After last night's incident, I moved through an irritated row of people, shaking, scared indeed from the skin-level feeling that the paunchy, curly-haired man with the blinking, tiny wife would have hit me. I have never been struck in the face, but on the few occasions where I've felt it was possible I've had the same reaction. It's weird and hard for me, probably a buried reaction to endless years of mouth surgeries. Because please, whatever you do, don't fuck up my mouth. Don't hit me where it was broken. It was too expensive and it hurt too much to fix it. It would be and would again, and now, I don't have the time or resolve or money.

 I made it to the end of the row, wondering what I should do, unwilling to disrupt the correct row in front of me, full of dancing people. A very nice usher lady brought me a chair. She sensed my distress, as I screeched into her headset that I'd been in the wrong row, that there'd be a bad interaction, that a man there had threatened me. She didn't ask any questions. She just seemed to know I was legit, that something had gone really wrong. She said I could sit there the whole time, and, beyond the call, that if I couldn't see, she would see to it that I could move farther up the slope.

I started crying out of nowhere, because this didn't already suck hard enough, embarrassed, wondering how I'd gotten to the point that I couldn't handle a show, that I'd left a situation bowed that years prior I'd have laughed at, that I'd have settled in no time, and never been afraid.

I think, honestly, that I am just tired, my heart and my mind need a break, just want to have fun, don't have the correct resources to handle much beyond that. But I cried too, from the kindness, the knowledge that for every person who might hit you in the face, there is often an equal and opposite intuitive, a person who can smell upset, who will help you. Maybe this is what gets more important when you're older, I don't know.

Last week I didn't intervene when that girl got into it with the guy. She didn't need me to, and I am always working on where I should butt in and where I should stay out, my feelings percolating as they do, just beneath my skin. My visceral reactions have not dulled with time, my big mouth has not shut. There is a reason for this hypertension, beyond the salt and wine and stressful job. There is a reason why my colossal reactions to the need and want and pain around me constantly swirl the way they do.

There is a reason why when  a dirtbag asks a girl if she's a "tranny who had to tuck it", that I swivel my head and have something to say that I may or may not actually say. I am learning, still always learning, to use my words, when and not just how, at what volume and velocity, in what corners, at what level of disclosure. It's a wonder we can do it well at all, really. It is so tricky. There are so many maps and changes of venue and burnt out lights at busy intersections. There are so many ways to do it wrong, so many hearts in danger of hurting, so many heads maybe confused.

I don't know. It gets harder before it gets easier, sometimes, I guess.  And I know it's not enough to have good intentions if what you leave behind you isn't. But when the alternative is doing nothing at all, I feel like I have to find the balance somewhere. What I did the other night was sit in the chair that lovely lady brought me for one and a half songs, before I realized that hey, I'd paid for that ticket, I had earned my spot up close, so I got up and launched myself into the right row, apologizing to everyone  half-stepped on, a little bit afraid my previous nemesis would be right behind me.

He was. It didn't make any difference to me, except I did notice out of the corner of my eye that he left a few songs later. I don't know why. I don't really care, which is unusual. I can only thank him for further exposition of what matters, of how I have to act in stressful situations. 

For helping me learn better how to use -- and not use -- my words. 

Traveling Mercies

I sat on a beach the other day under sun so hot I could barely breathe, sweat running into my eyes, the 80-proof sunscreen I'd sprayed all over myself barely working, I'm sure, except for it was there so at least I tried.

Intelligence is sadly hard to find when it comes down to me and a beach, and it was brutal and kind of stupid to sit there in that kind of situation, but I didn't care. I needed some stuff baked out of me.

I watched groups of friends and families, united  in that peculiar tribal beach vacation way. Sandwiches. Contraband beers. Rafts and castles, burning-sand running, blown-over umbrellas, fussing and kissing and trying to drown each other, as you do. 

I sat in the middle half-reading, half-watching, piecing together in my head my versions of the stories around me. I was jealous of some of the togetherness I saw, I admit it, and some of it made me twitchy and just as happy that it wasn't mine. I travel alone often, and popping up in crowds like this is less odd than it used to be, on this weird trip I'm on of filling in so many of my own blanks. Solitary and solitude aren't necessarily the same, for reasons I can tell you maybe, someday. Suffice to say that I'm learning what I've been missing on some fundamental counts, identifying reasons I've always felt other, how I can fix it, and, the more bummer part, how I can't. 

It's not like I'm always alone, though -- quite the opposite -- but some things I have to do for myself so I can set my head straight, so I can come back better, present myself to the people closest in a way that helps them know that I'm working on it, a touch of hands in an odd, odd, relay, and then  off again. 

I am wearing a bathing suit here. I swear. Also I am holding my arm up so my hat doesn't blow off, not because I'm a toolbag. No photo should require this much explanation. 

I'm a strange combination of hopeful and crazed with change, relaxing into true things and nervewracked about others. I'm an open book to a very few people relative to all of the ones I know, major chapters ripped out for the rest, because that is just how it is right now. Have you ever told truth to people after a long time of not, not because you didn't want to, but just because you hadn't figured it out?

It's interesting, and not even anything that remarkable, when it comes down to it. The real truth of our lives is a very quiet thing, really, sacred, if you go for that word. For me it's a shifting in perception, in how I've approached life, in what I intend to do (as best as I can even imagine now) with the rest of it.

It's blowing me away how a person can get to 40 without telling most of her story to herself, even if I thought that was what was happening all along. I think I was hearing mostly Muzak, honestly, with some garden variety self-help thrown in, and in my case an overpowering super ego, the cliched hated darling that I had to partially kill to get anywhere before I cash out in this particular body.

Also? And this is important, so pay attention: everyone else's annotations aren't the main point, but they can start to seem that way if you let them.  It is really, really important not to let them. 

A group of four intense women played beach football in front of me the other day when I wasn't thinking about any of this deep stuff, knocking each other down with great joy in the water with targeted, fast, balls. At the same time I read the phrase "traveling mercies" in my book, and it brought unexpected, burning sunscreen tears to my eyes and down my nose and into my not-so-much-hot-as-damp bathing suit cleavage, because nothing is ever that graceful in the end around here. I've always loved the idea behind that term. Traveling mercies. It's just in the way it sounds, gentle and progressive at the same time, and in a secular sense that is what I want, what I know we all need to carry us through. 

Change is a bitch sometimes, and not in the ways you'd expect. While the surface can stay the same, it's more the tectonic plates of our emotions and intellectual processes that jack it up, which is where I am now, I think. There is so much happening I just think and act in the moment and feel the effects later. Not all of it is stressful, but a lot of it, yeah. But there are some things I've apparently learned that I didn't realize until now, that I'm turning over and over in my mind, that are as new as they are obvious. 

Grasping never got me anywhere. 

My feelings may hurt and freak me out and make me say embarrassing things and feel completely knocked off my rocker, but they will not kill me. I will not die of the feelings. 

This shouldn't be a revelation, I know, as simple as it is, but it is. It took me a really long time to understand it, and I am making very good friends with this idea now in spite of its late arrival, because it's saving me. My friend Debbie said on Twitter the other night, "Our disoriented now is our oriented later," and I liked that too. Basically I will pay cash money for some specificity here.  

Anyway, this is all blahblahblah now, right? And the end of the story is that I finally got up out of my chair because the patch of my knee that always burns bright red regardless of how much I spray it or cover it was burning bright red, and it looks really stupid, and I was hungry, and there was just a little too much sunscreen in my eyes for me to handle. I burned my feet on the way to the car, and that was that. 

Not all moving is running, and nor is it progress, necessarily. Not all staying is settling, either, although sometimes it's not smart either for a variety of reasons, particularly if your knee is burning all to hell or maybe if you're just extremely bored or irritated, or aren't learning anything, which is an underrated problem. Sometimes when you leave you think you're going to burn off the bottoms of your feet walking across sand to the car, and generally that doesn't happen either. All of a sudden you're driving again and yelling along to some Bruce Springsteen song (his new cd is really good, it's kind of my soundtrack this summer) and you know that on some cellular level and also many others it is all going to be okay. Traveling mercies, please, but anyway, it'll all come together somehow. 

Slapboxing with June

I hit a wall yesterday. 

I laid my head against a wall in a hotel shower because I suddenly got tired like the tired of a million years, and I wasn't sure that I could move. I wish I were being dramatic about this, but that is how it felt, like I was going to live in conjoined twinness with that wall until I died or someone pried me off, which I'm glad no one had to do because in retrospect it wasn't pretty at all. Somehow, though, the water was at the perfect angle and that felt good, plus crying in the shower is so much more expedient, because, well, besides the energy release, it all goes down the drain.

I said to myself, look, self, this is not working out. You feel like crap and you look like crap. This whole running to stand still business is doing nothing but wearing out shoes and neurons. The groove is not grooving. This is a spiritual crisis of some sort happening here. It is a dicey situation and you have got to stop trying to fix it.

(Yes, that reads correctly. And if you don't talk to yourself you're probably assuming this is a summary of thoughts that ran through my head. That is very sweet of you.) 

I don't know why it was so shocking to me, how bad I felt or the fact that I face-planted on tile. It's like I went to the store in May and bought all the high dollar crap that goes into the blue-ribbon-winner recipe for a breakdown, and ate it every day at the appointed time like a magical goddamned apple breakdown pie. And now I was looking around in adorable bewilderment in an uninspiring shower wondering what hit me.  

I don't know what I think will happen every new time I kick my own ass in response to a life change, why I think it'll be any better this time than it was the past 87 times I did it. But when I changed my job and therefore my daily routine, instead of sitting even the littlest bit still with that choice and transition, and sitting on my couch for a few days and sorting my markers and eating snack foods, or going on a real vacation not at all tied to an event or a mission of any kind like I promised myself I would, I set myself up on a schedule of events that I thought would be in the service of my future. Because I'm figuring out now that inherently I still felt like I'd wrecked it up, based on old, outdated notions of that, of course, but still. I'm so programmed.

Here are the real things I had planned to do once my job ended: 

I wanted another tattoo. (I did not say these were all high-level, well-thought-out plans.) I didn't get it. 

I wanted to go sit by the ocean for a few days. I didn't do that either. 

I wanted to start walking again, maybe go back to yoga. Nope. 

 I wanted to set up a fully functional organizational system in my house, so that I would work better and eat better and generally live better in my space for this next new big phase. Big no, there, unless you consider half-packed or unpacked suitcases and over-filled recycling bags essential to feng shui principles.

I was not entirely wrong about the schedule I had planned. There were things I knew that I needed to do now, based on timing of ideas and opportunities, and some great things have happened. It is not all angst and tiredness and bad road food and one more dumb plastic key that hopefully turns the door light green when my hands are full. 

But when I say I'm tired, I think I just mean that my brain is on overload. I didn't give myself any chance to know what hit me, and the truth is that a lot has, even though it was my choice. And when I'm not really writing through it, it piles up in my head like...well, a bunch of junk piled up in my head. It's not pretty and I get cranky, I overreact and I panic and worry. My ability to cope with transitions is at toddler level. Until I get to the point that finally happened yesterday, where I feel like every word out of my mouth is wrong and awkward, that I can't complete any task successfully and surely this isn't the way things are supposed to get done by a competent person. All the things seem bad. 

I do not focus on self-actualizing behavior, in other words. 

I sometimes specialize in slapboxing with truth, really hard, no mat, for pointless rounds and rounds, until in its always ultimate wisdom it suddenly quits hitting me back and sits down hard on the ground in front of me, where I have to look at it. And because I really am a lover, not a fighter, I always wonder then why I got into duking it out in the first place, and I work my brain around it again. 

Thursday night I wandered Philadelphia. I didn't think about who I had to interview or who was going to be anywhere, because I was by myself in a place that I like and I really needed to check out for a few hours. So I talked to a lady knitting in the night market about what yarn bombing was, which surprised me by fascinating me. I ate what I believe were poisonous tacos out of a food truck, walked around and took a bunch of pictures just for fun like I hardly ever do anymore, and then I went back to my room. 

I have been here for three days that have felt like three weeks. I am going to go home tomorrow, and although I have a lot of work to do, I'm going to try not to work so hard at existing at the center of it, so the work itself becomes impossible, so the feelings feel so heavy I can't breathe, so I keep myself on the wrong track. My shower self needs a break, and what I think amounts to some kindness. That's the vague and ultimately unexciting outline of the only next thing I know. 

(*I actually didn't go home, or remember to post this, so welcome to three days ago. I learned that I'd have no power for a few more days at least, because of the storms at home, so I came to the beach where a friend offered a place to stay. Of all of the lyrics I've ever internalized, John Lennon's "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" stick with me the most for the most consistent reasons.) 

Sunday is nobody's business

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been busy. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness Is a Random Picture of a Lemon and a Tree

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

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

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

My mind is not my friend sometimes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Falls

I knew this weekend might be hard. I've been struggling with some anxiety-slash-existential crisising that tends to be worse around holidays that mean a lot of social and family stuff going on. So I did what I don't want to do at all when that's happening (because I never said I was normal, what?) and I started reaching out to make some plans to be with some, you know, other human beings.

My friend Jen likes to hike and look at leaves and climb things, and in fact works to teach little children to enjoy these things as well. These are things I'm not prone to doing at all usually when left to my own devices, but that means it's good for me to get off my ass and do it, I just need a little help figuring out where to go, apparently. Maryland, in spite of an unfair reputation as DC's phantom limb plus Baltimore (which I love, too) is really quite beautiful, and there are some mountainy places within an hour of my house. 

We went here: 

I sat on a rock at the bottom of a place near there, while she did that: 

There are days when I would be willing to push myself to go up there, too. Yesterday I felt kind of like a jerk that it was not one of those days, but I also knew that I wasn't feeling so strong. I hadn't slept much. I needed peace more than adrenaline right now, enjoyment rather than mastery of my surroundings (Fancy!), and plus I'd already walked a lot on the Cliffs Trail, so whatever.

I also got it that what I was thinking of mostly as I sat there at the bottom of those falls, rather than the accomplishment of scaling the rocks and seeing the little water pools and colorful, poorly-placed tattoos of those high-schoolers up there up close, was how many more calories I'd burn doing that rather than sitting right there on my rapidly-expanding ass. I've got some body image stuff going on right now, heyyyyyyy, and I really need to show it who's alpha or I'll end up 'round the mental bend and I do not need that right now for any other reason. 

Anyway, this day altogether at the end of it was a completely soul- and mind-clearing experience, all of those things you may like to think are dirty lies that people tell you about hiking and camping (which I have still never done) but they really aren't. The weather was perfect and I got time to spend with a friend and talk through the stuff going on in our lives, when I wasn't wheezing and leaning against a rock hoping I wouldn't die as she said "YOU wanted to take the CLIFFS TRAIL, LAURIE WHITE. When they FIND US just REMEMBER THAT."  

Plus I put my dirty, unpedicured feet into this, you guys: 

Look at this at your feet and tell me you don't see Nature Jesus. Go ahead. 

I also learned the origin of the phrase "blaze a trail," so, linguistics! Idiomatic studies!

Please don't tell me if this isn't true, because it would ruin me. 

Then I saw goats on the highway on the way back, and  I got to yell "GOATS!" because honestly, I pathetically love goats and if I had an animal farm it would be a goat farm, even though I know that making that crazy expensive cheese is a fat load of work that I don't really want to do, so I'd be, like, a social media writer person with goats, and I don't know if that would be the best idea.  

I was kind of done in emotionally at that point. How much can a nature-starved suburban person take in a day before leaves start to sprout from your brain? It was like that time I had an art hangover in Florence, except everything was mostly green and not Catholic and gilt and boobs. That is until we passed a huge spray-painted sign that said "BIKER BASH" in front of a highway bar called Fat Daddy's, because this weekend is Rolling Thunder in DC (I skipped going this year, but if you're ever in DC on Memorial Day Weekend, you should go. This is where I tell you why. It's pretty great.) And we joked about going in, but I was only half-joking, one because bikers are generally nice and fun guys who are way less creepy than your average guy in a bar, true story, and they will never, ever judge you for how much beer you drink (that is how you tell a fake biker from a real one: beer judgment.) And two because I was imagining somehow being a bit player or maybe the main girl (AU REVOIR SIMONE!) in a reenactment of the Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Tequila scene, which is some fine cinema with which I hope you are acquainted.

Afterwards, there was beer, and these perfect little bloody Mary oyster shooters, because the best kind of naturalist friend is the one who knows her not-quite-so-naturalist-friend quite well. 

I hate this picture of me, but I am happy in it, so there, so here it is, killing me softly, living on my internet website. 

After two of these I ended up reeling off all of the ways in which Jen needed a social media strategy and dammit, she was going to have a blog, because there had to be other people on the internet who were as interested in showing children and even people like me who really don't care about leaves and plants and general woodland life.  

I am just dim enough to need days like this to remind me that things in my life that are troubling me look different, and often not as overwhelming, when I change my scenery with some purpose. They were still there, they were still things that were concerning me or that I had framed as problems that I needed to solve with my imperfect little mind, but I was in motion. I was taking pictures because I like to, which is something I forget to do an awful lot for someone who loves to do it so much. I wasn't sitting still and fretting in my living room or in my car or wherever else I like to turn over to the bad neighborhoods in my mind. 

I wasn't panicking and missing the present. I was moving my body in a healthy way. I don't know when this became such a remarkable occurrence, honestly. 

I basically need to get outside more often. 

At what cost who knows?

Adrienne Rich died last month. Friends of mine talked and  wrote about it more eloquently than I could at the time, but for some reason I kept this little lady with the enormous brain and talent and reach (who knows where her words went, who they saved, what they do?) on my mind, remembered seeing her long ago when my sister shepherded her around a reading at Georgetown and I went down to hear. I remembered out of nowhere a long-buried sense of revelation then, of feeling like I was staring into a new mirror, a person who stood matter of factly at a podium and spoke, in what were, to me, deep, yet entirely accessible truths. 

I had buried it like I'd buried so much in these years so I could be what I thought I was supposed to be instead, shape-shifting to attempt to please an ultimately unpleasable person, in the blind act of crafting what I imagined as an acceptable life, until two years ago or so when everything on the surface started cracking for real and I began through pain and depression and necessity and night after dark night of the soul to come back to a self I knew deep down I'd never fully owned. (I don't think now that I knew how. I think I needed to work a little harder at it first, needed some help I hadn't found yet.) 

So after her death I started reading Adrienne Rich's words late at night through a brand new time of not entirely easy transition for me. She has a lot of words, thankfully, so I had that much to work with.

There is so much I could have latched onto, really, and I do not reject complexity out of hand, although I call bullshit on affectation pretty quickly. I can be bought for cheap, though, with lines like "language uncommon and agile as truth" and "her wounds came from the same source as her power."

But then she said it was only a door. Either you will go through it, or you won't. I read that at first, time and time again on Twitter because Twitterlandia loves its repetition, and thought "Duh, no shit it's a door. It's only a door." And then, this is a door, I'd read and think about how what I was crawling through (because poetry has to lodge somewhere personal, right? It's so...weird.) felt like so much broken glass and beg to differ with that blanket statement. But really, if I adjusted the aperture and fixed the focus, which are always wise things to do when the light and movement shift, she was right. I wasn't on my knees. I was luckier than that. This was just another room I was looking into in this personal fun house, a space beyond where I'd been. 

This was only a door. 

And if I didn't go through it, she said, this now dead person I believed for no reason other than it seemed like a good idea? If at the last I let myself be overcome by the fear I expected to set the terms? I'd be okay, really.

 But if you don't, much will blind you/much will evade you/at what cost who knows?

Dammit. 

Her wounds came from the same source as her power. 

What could blind and evade me was my greatest fear, beyond the short-term risk, I guess. I couldn't quantify the cost to counterpoint the monetary loss so far, and that was a huge problem, remains a problem. It's scary. I don't even know the extent of the credits and debits. I slipped some paperwork into an envelope and sent it off today, gagging on the decimal points and percentages, terrified of the consequences, understanding for the first time, really, what I was giving up in real life terms, as bad as a lot of it was, as pressing as the need to leave it. 

Back at home I try to knit together an inbox that doesn't make any sense yet, to craft something that will support me from nothing, to hope that my skills and will and connections and track record will lead to something more than me and a couch and columns of credits and debits. 

It's not even a week. It's still only a door, a large and an amorphous and a scary one, but a door all the same. It makes no promises. If you go through it, there is always, a gifted poet once wrote, the risk of remembering your name.

This post is because of and in large part is a reflection of the genius words of Adrienne Rich. Please go buy one of her books, or go read Amy Turn Sharp's Poem a day for a year, or buy somebody's chapbook, or do something nice for a scared person. I'll be giving back for my whole life all that has been sent my way, so it's nice to have some company.