LaurieWrites

This feels really awkward.

I mean really awkward.

Graphic courtesy of Aimee and I guess I should go over and tell Chris I read his blog too. :)

You, if you're there, and never comment (or even if you do, because good Lord a post like this with no comments would send me straight to the oven with my head) are supposed to comment.

I feel like I should give you an assignment, a prompt, if you will, but maybe that's just my teacher brain.

I'm also really resisting the urge to call out specific locations I see and am intrigued by in my Sitemeter and demanding that you tell me who you are but that would just be really, really weird.

So just tell me something, anything. Something nice. Your favorite song of the aughts, maybe. Or is that too cliche?  

Actually, since I'm a photographer, you should maybe share a link to your favorite picture if you've got it. In FACT, you can visit my lonely Flickr stream and comment there. That would be fantastic. I'm re-thinking this whole thing.

Eh, whatever. Tell me anything. I'm easy like that.

Here, I'll even go back and put in a stupid picture of myself so it's kind of like you're saying hello to a real person. Which you totally are, anyway, but whatever.

    

 Bonus points if you know where I am and why I look so freaking tired.

And for a lot of you these really should be easy bonus points. I'm just sayin.

Now I guess I should go comment on some other blogs on which I never comment. Stupid Twitter.

The Girl Scouts and Their Cookies Are In My Computer

Cross-posted at BlogHer. 

January started innocently enough. The eating - er, holiday - season passed and I had a vague plan to get back into last year's fairly successful effort to get myself to a more comfortable weight and back to a sanity-saving exercise routine that tanked in September. 

I don't want to talk about it. 

Anyway, just after my new year's snack of bacon with a side of black-eyed peas and greens, (that I made myself so I know just how much that ratio is true) I went back to work with my almonds and tuna, my newly re-upped membership in the water club and the spring wellness schedule bookmarked on my desktop. 

That first morning back I fired up my computer. And checked Facebook, because that is important to do before proceeding with any other important tasks. And there was my friend Karma, all up in my newsfeed. 

(These names are not real. I will not call my friends bad names. Draw your own conclusions.) 

"Hi everyone! Happy New Year! As you may know, Beautiful is a Girl Scout now and she is eager to meet your cookie needs. 

 This post included an image of a Thin Mint, and a link to a site entitled "MEET THE COOKIES" that not only included graphic depictions of each variety but also gave me a link to "FIND COOKIES NOW," which indicated that if I keyed in my zip code a nearby Girl Scout would arrive at my office door bearing Samoas and a glass of milk.

Not really, but you know, it was sort of implied. And all of a sudden the spring wellness schedule icon shriveled and died on my desktop like the Wicked Witch of the West under water. Damn. 

I mean really, this has to happen in January? Where are my gift wrap and mixed nut children? I can't eat gift wrap and I have to actually think about taking the lid off of a can of nuts. Do the chocolate bars and pre-fab pizza dough come out from their hiding places now too? 

Is anyone selling wine? 

It should be noted just for kicks that I was not a blazingly successful Girl Scout. I never went camping beyond a day trip to a nature preserve or two, and mostly stuck to badge-worthy yet reasonably sedentary activities like cooking and chess. 

 Yes they give badges for chess. Shut up. 

My final straw was the inability to evenly sew the seam on a fake suede skirt - a fuede skirt, if you will. And I honestly wasn't kicked out, it just didn't work out for me. And there may have been other reasons, other small badge infractions maybe because I've just never been much into those sorts of systems, but for me that was the deal-breaker. 

Also there may have been some crying before meetings because I wanted to stay home and watch repeats of Laverne & Shirley rather than build bird houses. That may have been the real problem, but my mother gave turning me into a responsible scouting citizen her best shot. 

Yes, my mom, the faithful team player who remembers her days in sash and uniform fondly, was still the cookie mom for one year out of the two I lasted. All I can remember is a dining room full of boxes, the neon Do-Si-Do orange and Thin Mint green, and the stress of thinking how many I had to sell to meet who knows what benchmark of cookie stardom. 

Anyway, now that that pressure is long gone, I cannot tell you in acceptable language in this forum what I can do to a box of Samoas. I mean, I can, but I have issues with sharing that kind of information publicly. I could maybe share with you how I can picture in my mind what a Trefoil looks like as it disintegrates in a glass of milk in the dim light of a kitchen at midnight, and how my hand trembles and my brain negotiates with itself while it chooses a number to write in the box next to the Do-Si-Do picture on the very colorful order form. 

"Six...NO! What is wrong with you?!? That is approximately one quatrillion peanut butter cookies that you do not need in your life! Three...Ehhh. Still no. Two. Blah, okay. Two." 

Yes. And that is not even taking into account the mental gymnastics required to calculate how many boxes of Trefoils are required for those days of simple milk-and- shortbread comfort cookie needs or the yearly limited edition with the fancy kind that you have to try although you won't like it as much as the Tagalongs so you just should have gotten another box of Tagalongs or how many Thin Mints you'll need minus that rogue box that you find in the back of the freezer on that crappy July day when you most need them because they fell behind the pile of frozen burritos. 

 What? WHAT? 

But now there is no order form needed. There is no paper trail here. There is just a link. And a wall post with a smiley face from Karma who needs, she NEEDS to sell these cookies. For Beautiful. And also, let's face it, for me, so I can guiltlessly or at the very least less guiltily avoid the table of girls and their parents who accost me at the grocery store until well past the spring thaw ("OMG, isn't cookie season over YET?" I will think to myself, as they smile at me in their sashes and threaten silently to kick me in the shins) because Beautiful, SHE has gotten my business. I know her. I have contributed to her cause - to her badge, or her trip to Juliette Lowe's birthplace or to her iPod, because they probably entice them to sell these things with digital music players now. 

Samoas. Oh, you coconut and chocolate and caramel siren cookies of my dreams. Six boxes. Six! 

Now I can tell Karma how many boxes I want at a distance, in a minute. And then they will arrive in her office, and I will write her a check or fork over at least one of my ATM twenties (only one? Cheap. Cheap cheap cheap, cookie miser) and think, that isn't a lot now, is it? That isn't so many boxes of cookies. 

Until I feel compelled to buy five more from other people. Because as it turned out, Karma was not the last, oh no. I know a lot of people, in-person people and people who are not only close enough to leave cookies on my porch but those who inhabit the vast recesses of my computer and distant lands like Indiana. The blog people. The Facebook friends of friends. And among them  are many moms and dads and grandmas and aunts and godparents. And those innocent little children who stare back at me from Flickr? Some of them are joining the nefarious ranks, memorizing the Girl Scout Law as we speak. Some of them are taking their cookie pleas to video (even if it is just, allegedly, for Grandma and Grandpa.) I remember what it was like. And while it may be taking me a few days to adjust to this new digital world cookie order, I would have YouTubed this whole enterprise too, if YouTube had been invented then.

Other voices around the Web:

Michele Cozzens would have bought more boxes from the Girl Scout on her door step but they're only taking cash this year because so many people have paid for cookies with bounced checks.

Sheryl Taylor wanted to support her friend's daughter's cookie efforts but didn't want the goods in her house. She told her, and they're donating her cookies and lots more to a local nursing home. Sheryl sounds scarily like me:

This way the Girl Scouts win, the recipients of the cookies win, and you win for not eating them while you are on your resolution. Although I must say, she is only the first of many that I know I am going to have to dodge and pass up those Thin Mints! Dang those Thin Mints! (fists in the air)

Finally, the Girl Scouts do have an Internet Safety Pledge, which says nothing about a wall post from Mom but does prohibit them from collecting money online. So at least I'll have to walk over to Karma's office to drop off my payment. That's good for at least a Trefoil, I'd say.  

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.

Recollection

Memories slip down the sidewalk in a golden Ohio autumn.

I think they took you, but I’m not certain.

I can’t grasp onto it – anything, really.

There are things I can almost touch,

but they don’t seem relevant.

Boston, 1964. Summer. Your eyes. Canada.

Some things you did. You always did good

things. That’s why when she comes in the door

and talks for a minute, and I see your eyes,

older, I get twisted. My mind sketches

ideas, chases shadows into the valleys of memory.

The things I want to say to make it (what is it?)

right circle back to my brother

on third base, a man’s angry

eyes. My father? That seems obvious.

Why do you ask?

You do seem like the sort

who would want to know. You seem – quite –

helpful, in your way. You seem sad,

wishing for something,

and it passes.

I have several things to show you, but I don’t

know that they’re what you’d like to see. Still,

they are mine. Come with me.

I'm clearing off an old hard drive. I wrote poetry pretty consistently for awhile, a few years ago. I wanted to do a series in the voices of people who had Alzheimer's disease, because I'd just come to the end of my time working as a social worker with them and their families.I stopped here. 

Gate of Heaven

I forgot that it's hard to drive by the cemetery at night, the expanse of blackness in the middle of my normal suburban route south from Mom and Daddy's to the place I pretend is my home while in truth I inhabit a strange limbo land that I can only trust will have a natural end before I go completely fetal.

I stopped at the Chevron although I didn't need gas because although I was totally sober a police car was randomly close behind me and I didn't feel like dealing with him if he felt the need to stop me. Back on the road after watching two blinged out guys broker some sort of deal in the parking lot (under bright lights, really, just before ten on a suburban Maryland night, you are riding super high my friends. Who knows, maybe they were buying milk, one cannot always assume nefariousness, get a grip) I saw it loom up beside me although I couldn't really see it, it was so exceptionally dark.

Yes it was exceptionally dark and the first summer after you died is finally waning and it occurred to me that what was left of you was in there disintegrating dust to dust in the ground inside a metal box and I couldn't stand it, couldn't stand it. You were so tiny already, there was so little left of you in that bed at the end, just skin and bones and a slowing heart that finally stopped. And I could see you in my mind while I lived on the edge and drove past you unsafely through messy tears, just as I saw you lying there eight months ago in that horrible room with the people who didn't belong there, tiny in your cardigan and purple dress with the rosary-wrapped hands and that picture of Katie and me in the boas that I put in your sweater and the sunglasses too. And as much as I understand about mortality and age and running out of time, as much as my very days have been steeped so frequently over the years in these concepts, I still only want to scream very loud when it's dark and no longer warm and you're just feet away from me buried in the ground while I go about whatever this latest idiotic thing that is whatever I'm doing and what I would really like is to go and talk to you as you lived and breathed. It's selfish, grief.

I haven't been through those gates since you died and I left you a flower and took several more from the arrangements dying on the ground around you that I couldn't bring myself to dry. I don't want to go, because I know when I do it's not that it'll be real (because the loss of you is real, I get it, I hold it in my hands) but realer and sadder and focused for that period of time on a metal plate in the ground engraved with your names (because he's there too, that was bad enough) and dates on either side of dashes enclosing nothing at all obvious about two essential lives. You lie on either side of that gilt vase that's turned upside down when there's nothing in it, in some act of intelligent memorial design that makes it easier for the lawn mower men, that's all.

Because it'll be cold when I go see you for the first time, I know, because I can't get through the winter well as it is and I know one day it'll just be time and I'll feel like the heft of completing this task is too important to ignore, the water will be turned off and I'll bring something as non-perishable as possible to put in the vase when I flip it right-side up. I don't think I'll do that on your birthday, though, which I hope is okay because I want to be somewhere warm on that day, the first day of the month that I too was born, a fact I've known for most of my life but only recently remembered, a fact that pleased me all over again.

And I know all the things about it's okay not to go and you're not really there and all of that's true but so much of it is just dancing around the fact that just because I don't want you to be there doesn't mean you're not. And where you are I have always, eventually, gone, as I have always, eventually, walked away, which may be the fate of the loved child as she grows.

Nobody gets out alive but when it comes to the people I lose it will always be fresh and mind-blowing information. And when it comes to you especially I will never be able to stand it, even when it seems like I can because the time has passed and life has lent a certain veneer to the loss because that is what we need to get by.

I have as many questions as you had certainties about how this life is designed, about why we must constantly let go of what is good, whether we can see it or not. In meditation Dawn reminded us every time to feel the power of the people who came before us who support us and to imagine ourselves as connected no matter where anyone has physically gone, no matter what we can see. I'm trying to make peace with that shifting sand as much as it requires suspension of my disbelief to do so. And you, you are a hole in my heart as much as you continue to fill it.

Three Places I've Lived - Roommate From Hell Edition

Becky, one of my new favorite people, tagged me in a note on a site that dares not speak its name. I occasionally do memes as a writing prompt, and because the past year or so it's been really hard for me to get anything written at all besides, well, nothing, I was doing it a lot - notes, lists, Yelp reviews, whatever. I obsessed over that 25 Random Things thing like I was gunning for a Pulitzer, and I can't remember what even one of them was now. Wait. Let me check.

They were really boring, actually. Did you know that I often count along with the syllables to words? As in tapping them out like Nell? No? Didn't care, either, did you? Should have definitely played that one funny. I kind of want to punch myself in the face now.

I had already written the Three Things thing last month that new favorite person Becky tagged me in. Typically, you list three things about yourself in each category, i.e., three tv shows I watch are Top Chef, CNN on endless loop and The Office and that's pretty much it, aren't you glad you know that now too? And also how unoriginal am I? At least I rent the Weeds dvds when I get a chance (which is never, never ever ever anymore. If my life would slow down I might be able to catch up with my stories, kids. But I'll never miss Top Chef. Write that down. No really. Write that down for me, please, so I remember I said it.)

ANYWAY, when I went back to this note to tag Becky, my answers to the three places I've lived actually made me laugh out loud, as in for real LOL. Apparently I had a lot of pent up feelings about these roommate situations. So now you get to read it too, if you want, and I get to put something on my blog from that nameless site and it all just kind of mashes up super nicely for a Monday evening that capped off a really traditionally underwhelming Monday, thanks for asking.

It should be noted that whereas I can be an embellisher in certain circumstances, my life and interpersonal encounters are fucked up weird enough on a daily basis to not really require it very much, and these descriptions are particularly accurate and unembellished. Sadly. Also I really loved living alone.

Three places I've lived (the roommate from hell edition:)

1. In a crazy grad student house in Dayton where my mail was stolen out of the box and I lived with an insane girl from Chicago who moved to Ohio to stalk her ex-boyfriend who went to the same university, who called everyone "jag-offs" and spent her time compulsively shopping at Wal-Mart and doing insane things. These included getting her car keyed at Wal-Mart because she yelled "FUCKING MOTOR" out the window of her car to a little Ohio lady who then apparently keyed her car while we were still inside; trying to write checks for her food at Subway and then raging because the Subway boy wouldn't take her check; telling my loveably, perpetually high boyfriend all about how she was going to get back at her perpetually high ex by writing an editorial in the school paper about marijuana use on campus, causing my said boyfriend to go, "Oh my God, you live with a narc. I can't be here."; getting into a fight with my other roommate and accusing her of drinking a beer each morning [ed. note: something she only figured out because she dug through the garbage to find each solitary can, hello KRAZY] quoting Sheryl Crow's lyric, "I like a good beer buzz/early in the morning" to her in a nasty note that pretty much ended all serenity in the house [ed. note: and escalated into a full-on, back and forth Post-It-Notes-on-doors war that stuck together added up to the length of War & Peace, because both of them, it turns out? Yeah. The K-word] until we all had to move out in second semester. Invigorating.

2. In a house in Kettering, Ohio, with a very neurotic girl who was on the phone talking to her friends or her mother loudly every morning by 7 a.m. and also stomping around at that hour in her played out Doc Martens (wtf? Who calls people just to randomly chat at 7 a.m.? I can't even talk yet at 7 a.m.) and ended up hating me because I didn't want to pay a $730 gas bill so charged because the previous tenants screwed with the meter and we didn't know it until they shut off our heat in February. In Ohio. In February. To which I replied, "Fuck you, Dayton Power & Light. There may not be any elderly people or children in this house but that stunt earns you none of my money." So then she got all crazy and passive-aggressive and started with the e-mail messages in stilted, weird language and eventually it just all fell apart and that was that.

3. In a horrible, alternately boiling hot or freezing cold house in Hyattsville with one normal guy who liked to dance the salsa dancing and played hockey on alternate nights, the totally shady Jimmy Buffett Parrothead wannabe Annapolis sailor without a boat who owned the place and a tiny British math ph.d student who drank a twelve pack warm in his room every night and wailed along poorly to pop/folk-type songs (i.e., Mad World by Gary Jules) and worse yet never (NE.VER.) flushed the toilet or put his food down the garbage disposal even though the hole is RIGHT THERE, just push your leftover salad down there and flip the switch, you pretend to be a hippie so shouldn't you be composting anyway?...Who wandered around drunk in the early morning hours doing things like breaking the bathroom window and helpfully explaining that "it broke" when asked whether or not someone had broken in or he'd punched it or what.

At least I don't name names.

 

MLMcW

Patrick saw my tattoo today and he cried. I didn't mean for that to happen, he was just telling a story about when I was little and how you know, all those times when he'd put me on his shoulders and pretend to throw me down the super steep stairs? How that was hilarious and how it wasn't as bad as something else he was describing. And I was like, yeah, I haven't needed therapy at all for my intense fear of falling off of high things, or high people, as the case may be, and thanks too for all the times you were all, Laurie Anne, why don't you go play in the traffic? Huh?

And we were all getting like we get when we're together, sitting on a balcony by the ocean, stories we all know by heart tumbling crazily one over the other, things we've heard and memorized over decades feeling new again or at least invigorated in the validation we only get from each others' faces, each others' turns of phrase, each others' encouragement to please, please talk about that some more before we lose it, so we don't ever lose it.

At the heart of these stories, most of them anyway, are these two people who are gone but still the most influential, people who make me want to believe in a heaven, because even beyond the pipe dream that I'll ever see them again (sorry, believers) I'd like to think of them hanging out watching us and laughing, except I wouldn't want them to be pissed off that they couldn't be there too (because truth be told they got kind of bored with each other. It must be stated.) So if heaven doesn't give you some kind of pass from that, maybe no, maybe I don't want that at all. My grandparents were probably the only heroes I'll ever have.

We'd been down at Harold's for a few hours, listening to the band and drinking too many beers and dodging the crazy rain, and I had the first day of vacation impulsivity to walk over to Patrick and stick my shoulder in his face like the incredibly rude, boundary-less person I can be, and say, "Look. There she is."

Apropos of not-this-topic but definitely of us, one of my earliest memories is going back in his room and laying on his bed when he was at work, scanning the walls he covered with black and neon velvet mushroom and Led Zeppelin posters (you know the one with the Stairway lyrics? And the Hobbity illustration that didn't include Hobbits?) and Cap Center ticket stubs, a dresser full of change and things with feathers that I couldn't identify, before I knew what any of it meant. He had an album-sized foldout sleeve of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours tacked to the wall by his bed, and I can remember reading along to the lyrics from Second Hand News, which is probably why I sought that record out years later and might have a little to do with why it's in my top 25.

Anyway. Today. He can't see well, but then again I can't either, and we're not even that old. He's not quite 50, and I'm younger than he is by 11 years but I've been close to blind since 5th grade so we're about even. He pulled my beach cover-up back a little and I heard him spell out the letters and mentally fill in what they stood for and then his voice cracked and I died, and he said, "That's Grandma." And he kissed me, flat out hugged me and kissed me like the men in this family don't EVER do, you have no idea. And that's when I lost it. I started crying and he started crying and bless him he didn't even try to hide it. He just looked out over the balcony to the wooden bridge to the beach.

"I was thinking about her so much on the way down here. She stood right there. She'd just stand right there and watch everything."

She was watching for us, is what she was doing, and he and I knew it at the same time. She stood there smoking an endless cigarette that thank God never caught the dunes on fire and watched for little kids whose feet were burning on the sand and big kids she could yell at and bigger kids she could still yell at, and especially by the ocean she was in her glory with all of this and we knew it. And he couldn't keep going for the crying and I tried to stop but I couldn't and my mother who is always two seconds away from crying was watching and this was not helping.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that," I said. "I just wanted to show you, especially you, all of a sudden."

"No, it's good. It's fine. That's good."

"She always has my back, see? I like that."

"It's good. No. This is good."

She stood right there, for years, wherever she needed to to watch us. She's standing wherever she is so happy that all 20 of us are here together, but angry that she's not here because she loved the beach so much, which is a huge part of the reason why we all do. She's standing there happy for Patrick and me, especially, because he was her baby and then I was the first of the next, but angry, yes, that she can't feel and talk, if by some stretch of the imagination she can see and hear. She was imperfectly real. She had no interest in not being here. She wasn't that gracious.

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

When I got this tattoo I had a few things in mind. One was my dog, who I miss so much and whose funny face I wouldn't mind carrying with me forever. But when I got it last week all I could think about were my grandmother's claddagh ring and her initials, her name. (I interpret the claddagh much more as a cultural symbol, and not specifically a wedding/engagement ring, just to be clear.)

I took some shit from various quarters over the years for allegedly being her favorite. I was the oldest grandchild, the first girl she had to contend with after four sons (Patrick, my father's youngest brother, was 11 when I was born, and so became much like my brother too.) My parents were young and I needed years of medical care so things were not easy for them and their parents really did step in to help (as competent as my parents were, in every way, just to be clear, and not to equate youth with the opposite of it. It's just hard to have a kid anyway. Add in other challenges - actually no, please don't. And if help is there, so be it.) My mom worked so my grandmother, a homemaker since the late 40s, took care of me, every day. I went everywhere with her. She or my grandfather or both picked me up from school every day. We lived together after my grandfather died and I was still in college and commuting, before I moved to Ohio. We were in each others' faces all the time. I learned everything I didn't learn from my parents from her, which was a lot.

We were best friends. She was my favorite person. I truly believe she loved me unconditionally. I stole her cigarettes for months when I decided that was a strong life choice and she pretended not to notice. She also taught me to to read. If those two things don't bond me to you, nothing will. 

The iconic "Mom" tattoo exists for a reason, even though it's made to look like a caricature and a joke. It means what it means, which is, in many cases, our heart, the person who cared for us best and first. You don't have to be a mom - or a grandmother, in this case - to get that. You just have to have had a stellar one, or more, which I did, because the universe knew, I'm sure, that this kind of soul would need it. I'm not sure how this concept gets lost but it's stupid when it does.

Marie Louise McGrath White, along with my own mother, took care of me the best. No design can do her justice and our physical selves mean very little in the overall scheme of things, but I'm into symbols and apparently the drilling of them into my skin with ink, which inherently means much less about me than a lot of people think. I admit that I like having her initials on my shoulder, though. It felt like the right thing to do. I'm still pretty sure it was.

 

Dear Heart, Wherever You Are

Cross-posted from BlogHer,  as part of our Letter to My Heart project.

Dear Heart –

You really are all over the place.

You had an innocent murmur at birth, which more or less means you made an extra sound, a breather between beats. And now you’re oddly palpitating such that I can feel you in my chest, which I really wish you’d stop.

Always a risk-taker with impossible depths, you took off running a long time ago, and it takes some backwards tracing to figure out all the places you’ve landed. You’re down the hall at my parents' house, for sure, and in the two wooden boxes of dogs' ashes downstairs. You split time and space between California, Delaware, Georgia and Virginia, because that's where my people have gone, and you’re in more places in Maryland - my home - than I can track.

You've stayed behind in places where I've lost things. There are shards of you frozen in mid-air in Boston, in the southwest corner of Ohio and hanging in an apartment hallway and a cemetery, both a few miles away in either direction from where I sit. You’re in Vietnam and New Orleans, places where I've seen love and pain, and I'll cop to feeling you big time in a Denver stadium last summer. You're in the songs that make me cry. I unfailingly keep records, so you’re between the covers of many journals and all over the place in the crazy attic of the Internet. You’re in thousands of photographs, in the stories of vacations, birthday parties, sunsets, and self-portraits.

A lot of times I don't like you. You're difficult and stubborn, and you're also, in case you were wondering, not funny at all. Sometimes I (really do) think I lost you along the way. Never lucky in love, nine years - an eternity - ago, you fell in it with an utterly compelling, fairly odd, equally defensive person who seemed like the counterpart you'd been looking for since you started looking. You trusted, planned and dreamed a life when you had no business doing so, and then you sold me out. Once you met him, you were done, in spite of my need to never lose you again for no good reason. You stayed in, way over your head, for way too long. You ignored alarms, stuck your fingers in your ears and went "lalalalalala," seriously. You refused to see the obvious.

And while that’s all thoroughly and completely over now, it cost me so much for far too long. You went with him when he left, you would have crawled into his pocket if I'd let you, in spite of my best efforts to keep my center, to be okay, to stay safe and happy. I can’t forgive you yet for this. It still doesn't make any sense and it still pisses me off.

Worst of all, as a result, even if I had a reason, I can't trust your judgment and I don't know when, or if, I want to again. I can use you for the no-brainers and the necessities, for the puppies who suck you in and the family and friends who give me so much that I need whatever you can dredge up to reciprocate it. I use you for my work, for my students, for my stories, for the sheer will it takes sometimes to get through the day alongside other human beings in all the places we find ourselves together.

I use up a lot of your reserves for the news, for what I see of the world that isn't kind, and is in too many cases unbearable. I feel you. Because I still produce tears on a regular basis even though I really don't want to, I know you're there. I rely on you for awareness of what others experience, for freedom from the self-centeredness that would, if it took me over, make my life a nightmare and my value questionable.

I admit, I've wondered over the past few years how much you can take before you shut down entirely. Some big losses have piled up, the inevitable surrender of loved ones and the crushing exhaustion that I've learned goes with it. I've had to be stronger than I felt like being most of the time, because along with the loss there's been an absence of true joy, of anything solid to replace everyone and everything that checked out. I feel sorry for you, because a lot of times you're lonely, and often you feel like your chance is past. And the effort to think that's not true, that you just have to do this or that thing to get it back, to still believe in magic and the power of possibility, sometimes feels like a little too damned much.

What I've learned is that while it may look messy in the moment, given the choice between feeling and the absence of it, I'll still try to take you, as messed up as you are. A lot of times it doesn't look very graceful. I have to ride out those hours where it feels like the black hole's opening up again, where I don't feel at all like being a team player or a good sport. Even when it doesn't look like I'm trying, I am - to reach out, to be grateful maybe, to shut up the panicky thoughts that what I've got's not enough, that what I lost was the best there was, that everything poured out through your senseless holes and nothing can and will ever patch them. And I guess even though sometimes things feel dire and old and over, together we try to foster something, anything, better than that.

I still hear the faint whoosh of an innocent murmur, pushing 40 now. An idealist and a romantic in spite of myself, I wish this were a different letter, a love song or a poem or God help me a valentine even, but that's just not how it's played out. I'm keeping an eye on you, and in spite of the lack of warm fuzziness lately there must be a reason I still sign my notes "xo" like my mother has since she left notes on napkins in our school lunch bags. I feel a little bit of hope, in spite of all evidence and every reason to dismiss it. Because like it or not, from what I understand of biology and other things not at all scientific, I really do need you, wild and random as you are, to survive.

xo, Laurie White, who writes at LaurieWrites.

Noblopomo

So I failed NaBloPoMo, after acing the last two. I just couldn't do it. Things are too chaotic right now, trying to finish school and not go completely crazy in the process, along with a general disinterest in recycling any of the stuff that's cycling through my head on a daily basis. Suffice to say that this has not been a season of peace, which doesn't bode well considering my general usual lack of same during the holiday season.

My heart is not yet unbroken it seems. I am frustrated and sad. I've been crying more than I like to admit and beyond that more than I just like to do. I've been having some problems with the things that typically cause me problems, or at least that have for the past ten years. I am an up-and-down sort of girl, with a desire to be more up, and it's frustrating that I can't seem to manage it for the long haul.

I'm not ashamed of admitting the biochemical short straw I drew. It's nothing I sought out and nothing I foster because I like it or I'm proud of it. Reams of better pages have been written about depression stating the case that it's a beast, that it's unmanageable, that it can make you feel like your one relatively insignificant human existence is the nexus of suffering that no other person has ever experienced or could relate to. I'm completely unmedicated now and not in a place to afford the time or money for therapy. I've tried the drugs and they intermittently worked and didn't, and I finally found that I wasn't that much better with them so I wasn't sure what I was trying to prove. I've been to exactly one out of five helpful therapists in my life this summer who is just too expensive for me but she gave me some tools that still help. I'm making it day by day with the effort it takes to examine negative thinking and flip it around, with mostly good choices that keep me in the company of people who have a good influence on me. I know the environmental and situational things that need to and in some cases will change very soon. It's just a matter of moving through the present moment and reminding myself in general to appreciate it except when I just can't.

I got into a bad place this week because I allowed someone who has always pulled too much weight with me  to get into my head again. I suffered another short bout of imagined communion that is so, so embarrassing, always, in the aftermath - even if only I know about it. I don't really understand why this keeps happening because beyond sad it's just stupid.

I got together with a friend who has really been a godsend for listening and also talking to me about this for an obscenely long time, and I told him that in spite of my "everything happens for a reason" training I felt that this situation had had absolutely no redeeming value in my life, that I didn't feel grateful for it at all and just wished that it had never happened. I felt that I had already known and experienced the strength that It was supposed to bring me in the long run because of other things I'd experienced. Except for the fear that never entering into this relationship may have been that flapping of butterfly wings that caused an earthquake 15,000 miles away or maybe just would have meant I'd have been in the path of an oncoming car and died instead, I'm completely not grateful for it and wish beyond wishing that it had never happened. I can't imagine any purpose or any value that it has could outweigh the ridiculous amount of pain and suffering it's continued to cause for absolutely no reason at all.

My friend thought that was sad and quite frankly it is, but it's also what I know and believe to be true in this moment for me. It sucks. I don't recommend it. Here, have a beer.

See, I already knew to welcome love and be giving. I already knew to appreciate what I had, and I had already been rejected enough in my life that it just seemed cruel to have it happen on that insane level. I was ready to love someone for the long haul. I was ready to be there. And now I'm not. Now I have so little trust, so little belief in that experience for myself. It's the most significant and at the same time most glaring truth that I've gathered from the past couple of months of soul-searching. I've been told it's the wrong perspective to have. I say I can't help what I know. I say that as open as I am to life experience, which I have been for a long time and continue to be, I don't expect it to happen to me. And yes, I wish I'd turned a different corner (JUST where that's concerned. I'm glad I walked in the door of the place where I was, because it gave me other people who make my life so much better. I just wish I'd stayed away from particular departments.)

I've also been in this super-stressful daily work situation for a while now, and it's coming to a close so I'm hoping that will have a positive effect on my generally horrible state of mind. I'm also trying, really trying, not to close down socially which is what I have the urge to do lately but I know that's a guaranteed trip to the bad place. And I'm trying to be smart. To that end, I'm on the verge of booking a trip to Savannah for just after classes finally end, and I'll be spending Thanksgiving in San Diego. Other than that, I honestly have no idea where I'm going. For a long time I thought that would be freeing but for the most part it's time to reel it in a little. I don't ever want to be complacent, I don't ever want to be in a place where I'm bored with my life or thinking "this is all there is and ever will be," but I'm identifying a sense of needing to land, of needing to feel anchored with something at my center that I haven't had in a long time. It's been wearing me down progressively since I came back to Maryland in 1999, and almost ten years is long enough.

With all of the guidebooks and templates and rules of the road that exist, I wish sometimes they existed for the bigger stuff. And also that every time I wrote stuff like this I didn't feel the need to apologize for it, because if I don't have this space to store it I wouldn't have anything to look back on later when things are better and go, yeah - that time, I'm glad that time's over now.
(For instance, me a year ago - that time's over now too.)

November 4

It seems unbelievable that this day is here but it is.

Last night I went with two people from my program to cover the Obama rally in Manassas, Va. It took us three hours to get there and two hours to get home, where we finally landed at 3 a.m. It was brutal but it was another life-changing moment, much like sitting in Invesco Field watching him accept the nomination in August.

I cannot believe I've been there for the things I've been there for, speaking inarticulately.

I sat on the media stand on a really, actually beautiful night in Virginia, praying I wouldn't fall off the riser and break my neck, smooshed on one side by a tiny camerawoman from a Japanese news media outlet and a man to the right of me from who knows where who wasn't pleased that I found a spot on the "floor" between their two tripods. For a not-small woman I can compartmentalize into these spaces pretty well when I want to. There were almost 100,000 people in those fairgrounds - a magnificent mix of color, age, gender and fashion sense. There were many, many people in wheelchairs and using canes to pick through the uneven ground to get out there and wait for a man who lost his grandma today, which I could tell by the look on his face and the almost-imperceptible slump in his demeanor.

The admittedly kind of shady but well-meaning video that I captured is on my YouTube channel.

I wrote this while I sat there:

I really never want to forget how I felt, sitting in these chilly fairgrounds in southern Northern Virginia. This has been a long, ridiculous eight years and whether or not this man can even begin to piece some things back together, I'm not willing to bet any more of my country's future on a short-sighted party that sold it out to the atrocities of war and domestic oppression.

80,000 people in Manassas, in November, at 10 p.m. on a Monday night. My friends, this is change.

I slept for two hours so it's a good thing the adrenaline is kicking in. I'll be in a few places today. I'm going to stop into my local precinct and vote, then go to campus to pick up some last-minute footage and news for the YouthVote Blog. TerpsVote and College Dems and Republicans are holding events all day.

I'm on Twitter at @lauriewrites, which I expect will heat up when I'm with the awesome list of bloggers expected to be at NPR tonight with me as part of their election coverage. My friends Jill Miller Zimon and Shireen Mitchell (aka digitalsista) will be there, along with several others - mostly women, amazingly. As much as after two years of this I want to be on my couch with a beer and a pizza, this is such a cool opportunity and I can't wait.

I'm going to vote now. For the rest of the day, if you're interested, you can find me on what I randomly called LeftRightLeft, the small corner of this site where I allow myself to get political. I can't promise wisdom, not at all, but what I can leave you with is the reason why all of this happened in the first place, in two small parts.

In 2000, I knew very little about politics but I knew in my heart that something was wrong. I had been back in Maryland for a year and my life was sort of messy (nothing like the airtight awesomeness it is now! Haha. ;)) The Gore loss - the election day actual real-time debacle and the eventual legal loss - changed my life and my mind forever. It altered my concept of what is fair and just, and what a country can really do. I learned then that things are not always as they seem, that sometimes in fact they are quite horrible no matter what kind of a pretty dress you put on them, and nor are they as they ought to be, at least not from my spot anyway.

I got seriously fired up for the first time but clearly not the last and I dragged everyone I knew and loved with me through my growing sense of frustration and disenchantment with the political process and the rightness of leadership in this country that has not abated since. Nice, right?

In 2004, my life was a little more together and things seemed like they might be looking up. I sat up all night hoping against dying hope that even though I knew that John Kerry the windsurfer didn't have what it took to get us out of the hole we were in, that some kind of universal force (call it God, call it what you will, I'm open) that opposed an unjust war killing many thousands of people would cause a miracle to happen and let him take over for awhile.

When I am told I need to be unbiased as a journalist I respect this - on paper. But as a fully living, beyond-opinionated woman living in this crazy world, I can't be. It stresses me. It challenges my communication skills, because I have too many ideas and have drawn too many conclusions to pretend I haven't. Because, see, I want equality for people of color and for women. I want - as I said - an end to an unjust war, and a slimmer chance that we'll end up in a series of other ones, with nothing but axes to grind forevermore.  This is my central issue, I admit it, beyond the economy even, even though I know how very serious this is. This is my heartbreak, and anyone who says this means I don't support troops or my country - well, okay, I'm all about freedom of speech, but they're wrong.

So that's why I'm here. I may never work in a traditional newsroom because of this (and let's face it, at my age I'm cool with that - they can't afford my starting salary.) I'm a teacher and a writer at heart so I'm okay if I just do those things. I'm not going to be silent today, except when it makes sense because I don't want to get punched. Today I'm going to say on my little corner of the Internet what I believe in my heart, my most impassioned heart that was very battered along with millions of others eight and four years ago. Today I'm going to say like I have not before in this cycle that if things go the way I hope they do for a man who has managed to stir millions of people the world over with an undeniable sense of promise, the right thing will have happened. I'm saying this because I've finally decided that I should, and because even when I didn't I caught hell anyway. I'm saying this because yes, I can.

Seriously, drop by the other page later if you feel like it. We're going to tear it up at NPR, I promise. There may even be a webcam involved at some point.