Latest Entries
a little ado about some things.
05 February '10 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Buffalo.
What in the world has your favorite unemployed blogger been up to? After finishing my web design portfolio, I started work on a website for a local winter festival, which is almost done. I also received a batch of gorgeous business cards, that I’ve been pinning on every available bulletin board in Western New York. And of course I’m racking up Craigslist frequent flyer miles responding to ads for web design gigs.
My parents met in Cleveland, over the weekend, to discuss something. The topic caused a lot of emotion and subsequent processing in our household.
An unspoken truce in my circle of friends was broken, the other day, hopefully temporarily. It reminded me that any group of people can become like a family, with the cousin you hate, the lecherous uncle, and the niece everyone adores. You have to put up with all this less-than-perfection in order to have the good nights, when everyone gets along, the beer is fresh, and the jokes all truly funny. And you have to choose your battles carefully.
There are a few other things going on I can’t talk about publicly, among them, the fantasies I keep returning to regarding Mr. Hotness, as we talk once again via short emails sent and received on my erratically effective cell phone.
People keep asking me what I’m going to do or where I’m going to go. I have no answer. I just know that I’m making decisions differently than I used to, and everyone, myself included, is going to have to wait to see the results. 2009 made me tougher, less inclined to question my instincts or needs, and more patient. I’m not the same person who threw everything in her brother’s U-haul and lived out of a suitcase for half a year. Very basic lifestyle requirements I’ve never paid much attention to, like my own apartment, a career with management potential, and a mirror by the goshdarn front door, now seem almost insanely important.
I’m so unaccustomed to valuing these things, I have to readjust my entire decision-making process. When I get crazy-bored hanging around our cat-filled apartment, I remind myself to be grateful I have the time to do this.
Meanwhile, we’re all still in the one bedroom living like refugees. But as they say, admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.
Anyway, not much news, but much love to you all, and I’m sure I”ll have more to say soon.
2 Comments
JoJo the trained circus bear.
24 January '10 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Self, Work, Writing.
Graduating high school was a transition I still haven’t recovered from. I wasn’t popular, a class president, or captain of my basketball team. I was just really good at the schoolwork. I missed about three assignments in my entire school career, graduated with honors, passed tests without studying. I was like a trained circus bear, delighted by the applause of the audience as I rode a unicycle around the ring.
My senior English teacher was heartbroken that I didn’t plan to go to college. Instead, after graduating, I stayed home and wrote. I felt compelled to do so, and am glad I did, but it started an inner conflict I still struggle with. My teachers’ words chastised me with the praise they used to give me for meeting results, expectations and standards. Someone who always scored in the top ninety-five percent of anything found it very difficult to work on a project no one might ever see… and would probably suck.
The circus bear had returned to her native habitat, but felt lonely without the cheering audience.
I taught myself the fundamentals of story structure and character development, as well as how to sit down and just finish a story. Many of the people I’ve known since, who studied creative writing in a college setting, have yet to learn that. At the same time, I felt boring and didn’t like myself. My quiet little achievements didn’t matter in my own eyes- it was just another screenplay.
After several years of steadily increasing depression, I moved to the East Coast and was shocked back to life. It had a lot to do with the fact that I made friends and had a lot more sex. But it also had to do with that year in Manhattan working as a recruiter. In that office, my circus bear was brushed, fed with the freshest fish and given very shiny tutus to wear. My boss rewarded me with increasing responsibilities, toys, a raise, my first business card. Our clients rewarded me by hiring people I’d suggested, and those candidates thanked me for helping them find work.
It was an ego feast. But like most feasts, it always left me hungry an hour later. The bear always needed more praise, more tasks, more special moments with her trainers. When the bear wasn’t working she felt lost and a little panicky. I left New York partially because everyone I knew, at every professional level, was a circus bear. People who excelled at riding that unicycle in front of an audience. It was a rough, rough town to pursue quiet fantasies and undefined creative concepts.
Last night I was ashamed to realize that I’d gone through that cycle all over again in late 2008 and 2009. I thought that when I left New York to work as a nanny, my ego totally deprived and my happiness level very high, I had learned my lesson. But I returned home, and started jumping through hoops at a nonprofit in Buffalo, asking for a promotion, more responsibilities, fighting with a new manager for credit, attention, challenges, that have nothing to do with what I started out doing: writing.
And this divide between my inner circus bear and my desire to write affects everything else about my life. Circus bears read the expectations in their trainer’s eyes and do everything they can to live up to them. Circus bears follow rational rules (unicycles and tutus) instead of running off into the woods to follow their own wild urges. Circus bears aren’t really good at taking care of themselves, because they’re used to being fed and groomed in exchange for holding a ball on their nose. They live for others, they live to ignore their own desires, and they live under the hot spotlight.
Take romantic relationships. A guy meets me and thinks, “ooh, she’s going to take care of me, fix me up, and clean me out the way she does her office at work.” But meeting expectations in a relationship the way I do at work is hell.
In the case of big things like values and decision-making, if you’ve been raised by a very logical mother and a father who thinks in a literal, practical way, and you’re naturally an instinctive and emotional person, you alternate between impulsive moments of rebellion and miserable restraint of the “weird” voices in your head.
And, yes, it does explain why I can’t cook, refuse to iron, and don’t notice when seven red lights start beeping on the dashboard of the car.
I don’t actually find all this depressing, I find it liberating, like all self-knowledge. I just want JoJo to retire. I’m always going to have those inclinations, but the more quickly I can spot them, the easier I can avoid the moments I actively seek a master, unicycle, and whip. Be it a job, a lover or a friend who expects me to do anything other than be kind to others, write books, and wear stripey socks.
Just say no.
No Comments
dirty little secrets.
23 January '10 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Family.
I have a confession to make. I have always wanted to live just like my deeply Christian, politically conservative, gun-owning, Ford-truck-driving grandparents.
They live in a big house surrounded by tall evergreens that are usually dripping wet from a recent rain. My grandma has room for both a decorative and vegetable garden, plus a shed and huge mulch pile. They are part of the generation that considered DIY a necessity rather than a hobby, so if my grandma decides she wants a rock-lined stream flowing down to a fountain accompanied by fake deer statuettes, she and my grandpa build it. Until recent chemotherapy weakened and made my grandpa colder, he would meander out most afternoons to pursue various experiments in his wood shop. A new method of making chess boards, turning out a couple display boxes to sell at the local swap meet, a plate or two for my grandma to tole paint.
My grandparents don’t consider themselves particularly creative, and they don’t particularly value creativity in others. But they’ve lived, in my lifetime, an essentially creative life. They get an idea into their heads, be it a new way to germinate tomatoes, or how to improve the second bathroom, and they do it. Often, together, or with the help of friends and family.
When I moved to New Jersey to live in a million dollar home with a CEO and her two daughters, I was continually surprised by their household’s need to outsource. Cleaning, landscaping, setting up a closet organizational system, retrofitting the upstairs bath, even grooming their dog fell to someone else. My efforts to solve those problems myself or find cheaper solutions usually failed to impress. To that family, doing something oneself was a sign of poverty.
To my grandparents, and my mom and her two sisters, doing something oneself give one greater control, is rewarding, and saves money. My generation is not so self-reliant, but most of us still paint our own walls, dye our own hair, and groom our own damn pets.
In my grandparents’ case, doing things themselves did make them wealthy. Not to the standards of the CEO in New Jersey, but certainly to their own standards. Building their own construction company, raising three daughters with sometimes too-severe thrift, and more than three decades’ dedication to a major Seattle construction firm, has left them with an enormous home, a cabin, that well-outfitted shop, and a big shiny refrigerator.
Perhaps more importantly, they’ve earned the freedom to pursue the activities they love. Together. With family around them. That is my standard of wealth, a standard no one in New York or New Jersey replaced.
I don’t share many of my grandparents’ values. But deep in my roots, under the soil, and hanging over my branches, they are there with that life they built together. In their partnership. In their mastery of their respective crafts. In the importance they place on family rather than status or acclaim. In their home- with the three squares a day, clean sheets in the cupboard, guest room ready, every pipe and beam familiar to each of them.
And, despite everything that’s happened between my parents in the past couple years, I still consider their traditional marital roles equally rewarding and healthy for both of them. It’s still difficult to raise children, make a pleasant home, or nurture growing people, while competing in the outside world. Particularly if you can’t afford to pay people to help you out.
Just like I did when I left Oregon four years ago, I want children, time to write, and someone who loves me enough to make it possible for me to do both, with him. Pretty old school stuff.
At the same time, I want to explore new parts of the world and pursue whatever whim comes into my head next, unencumbered by the responsibilities of property or children. I want to nest and I want to wander, and I have always wanted both. I don’t know if that conflict will be resolved by going through phases of both, or if I’m struggling to reconcile my childhood role models with what I’ve learned about myself as an adult.
I spent most of 2009 reacting to life. To my parents’ conflict, the triad of evil, my job, this town. I haven’t had a lot of time to think about my own goals or desires. Mondo beyondo wishes fell to the wayside in the face of much more practical concerns. So I’m asking these questions, looking at what I want, now that moving and finding another job have gone from theoretical needs to genuine necessities. Settling down would require making very different choices than living the catch-as-catch-can life I’ve lived so far.
At this point, I can barely keep a pair of slippers for a month without losing them.
No Comments
irresistible forces and unmoveable objects.
20 January '10 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Buffalo, Life.
My mom and I went to Buffalo’s ritzy suburban shopping mall, today. Ordinarily I suffer from involuntary tremors at the thought of crossing a mall door’s threshold, but a week and a half after walking out of my last job, I instinctively knew today was a once-a-decade time for some shop therapy.
The gods did smileth upon us the entire trip. The clerk at Frederick’s of Hollywood helpfully advised my mom and I on garter belt sizing. The soundtrack in New York & Co. kept me bopping while trying on skinny slacks. Fergie, unbeknownst to me, designed a line of sneakers so adorable, I had to buy a pair even though I already have three pairs of sneakers and hardly ever wear any of them. Bath & Body Works was paying people to take away their excess inventory. And when we finally collapsed at Jack Astors, weak and empty of wallet, the waitress greeted us warmly with cheap booze and cheesy, garlicky meat ‘n potatoes fare to strengthen us for our journey home.
Why, you may ask, does an unemployed person spend $150 at the mall on hi-tops and stockings? In my case, an unemployed person spends money because she has a disturbingly strong sense that she won’t be unemployed for long, and she’ll need those black slacks and skirt to look all, like, professional. She also does it because she needs a distraction from sitting around the house fixating on her new design portfolio or emailing the eight hundredth apartment ad.
I keep waiting for someone to say “Snap out of it and just move somewhere!” I am trying. I don’t blog about my attempts to find a volunteer homestay in Europe, or the families I’ve discussed nannying for, or the quantity of Craigslist ads I’ve read and responded to, but that’s how I spend a lot of my time. Since mid-September, I’ve explored every method of moving that I know of or people have suggested. I’ve tried, for months, to take responsibility for my happiness, by initiating change instead of sitting around complaining.
But nothing takes. And I’m starting to wonder whether the best way to figure out why, would be to shut the heck up for a minute.
So I went to the mall, and bought the dangling beaded earrings at Old Navy. I will probably wear them tomorrow, with my hi-tops, and layer the skirt over the pants over the garter belt, and top it all of with a heavy layer of sweet pea scented Bath & Body Works bath foam.
Something’s gotta give. Until then, at least I’ll look (and smell) fantastic.
1 Comment
two old poems.
15 January '10 by admin, under Fiction | Tags: Friendship, Poetry.
The other day, my mom and I visited the storage unit where we keep everything she and my brother moved from Oregon after selling our family’s house last August. We used dustpans to shovel the snow away from the doorway, and filled up the car with boxes of my belongings.
Sorting things I still wanted to keep (a pair of black leather boots with ruffles and spike heels) from things I didn’t (a six inch thick English text book from high school) I discovered a stack of high school papers. I have no idea why I kept my AP history and English essays, handwritten and generality-laden as most such essays are. Unless it was to prove that I’ve always been fond of titling things oddly, such as, “Betty Freidan vs. Martin Luther,” and “The Fascinating Issue of Power as Viewed by Orwell, Plus a Few Frogs.”
A few months after graduating I went on a poetry-writing kick, and two of those poems have remained my favorite pieces of writing, ever. They were also lurking in this pile of old papers. So I thought I’d share.
“a friend I wish I’d had”
You appreciated so much of me, that year,
or tried to. But as April turned to May,
this was one thing you never understood.
… Please listen, children. Just one more sonnet before we are through,
one more month before you can leave…
You never believed my concern: My room is a mess.
So is mine, you’d say.
You’d smile.
Mad with thirst, I’d sneak from class and find you in the hall,
sit next to you on the bench with your books.
We’d talk, your hands punctuating the air.
I would drink and drink and
drink,
drink your conversation until the ashen hallway of that sheetrock warren
warbled away.
I saw only your chin,
jutting upward when you laughed.
Then the halls would fill with students, and we’d stand
(In my dreams, you pass by unnoticing)
… Just one more day, children, and you will be free…
Moving through the revolutions of bells, wishing she was wrong,
wishing I had the chance to talk to you…
always.
But, My bedroom floor is covered, I can’t make it to my bed.
Things I haven’t used in years are floating to the surface.
You listened sympathetically, but did not see the point.
Perhaps your mess was different.
The layers covering your floor, the clothes on your chair, books on your bed,
(I have lost so quickly what was never really there)
didn’t frighten you.
My room’s a mess, too, you said, as we stepped around the curtain.
… Just one more step until you have gone…
Sometimes I wish we were still there, laughing around her as she
read aloud a sonnet.
“Senior Year: Girlfriends”
Stalking hallways in black and curvy shrouds,
you girls taught me how to savor
insanity and pain.
Letters on your rumpled t-shirts;
your madness was a slogan.
(I was crazy before it was cool).
With dark eyes and limpid hair, they/we
ate lunch: a manic coven circle sitting
in a crowded high school hall.
Anger and joy passed through unwelcome:
genuine emotion unbalances woe.
Better sorrow, the clothing fit.
(The mall has a whole store of Misery)
Dismal bedroom, suicidal frustration.
Parents who are Mean.
Sorrow is never your fault.
Stepping briefly from our baths of tears,
we had a good time, sweeties.
Thrift store hunting, Mambo Lattes,
cigarette smoke fogged our nostrils.
Nights spent imagining what life looked like.
Remember, not the anguish, but:
sitting in the grass,
blowing glitter on each other’s faces,
cuddling around a scary movie.
Books of revelation, shared poetry,
coffee and rain and
laughing till I could no longer stand.
The lightness when we pretended we had no homework,
and it would always be spring.
That year, you needed a stranger to your sticky, spider’s web.
I needed the glimpses of genius,
your weeping pasts,
loud music in the car and a cloister to dance within.
The puzzle shifts and people who didn’t fit, now do-
pieces once perfect, now cannot be wedged into place.
Funny how so brief a space
can slay a common language.
I returned and asked:
What do I do now?
You couldn’t tell me.
No Comments
Frederick Douglass, Wamba, and Jim Halpert.
12 January '10 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Buffalo, Family, Fate, Work.
“I have heard men talk of the blessings of freedom,” he said to himself, “but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” -Wamba the Jester, Ivanhoe
It took half an hour to remember what high school reading included that line, and then, to find the line itself, all thanks to Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Project.
Fate wielded its well-polished sword last week and left me, like Wamba, riding off into the sunset without a master, wondering how best to appreciate my long-sought freedom.
As readers know, I’ve been unhappy at my job for months. What you don’t know are the gory details, because I try to keep negative comments about other people to the barest minimum on my blog. Still, if you’ve made the occasional comment about “communication struggles” with your boss, and if you’ve listed her as a reason you’re so unhappy, and if your boss happens to find your blog, and if she reads all the way back to entries made in August, and if she’s already a little frustrated…
We’ll return to those not-so-hypotheticals in a second. My boss gave my coworkers and I the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, and I spent most of it alternatively dreading or mentally avoiding the fact that, come Monday, I’d have to return to work. You know how new years are- we all like to pretend we’re starting them off auspiciously. Starting mine off in what I considered an unhealthy professional relationship hardly seemed auspicious. Yet, as I bawled on my brother’s shoulder Sunday night, I was still afraid to leave.
By Monday afternoon, however, I could tell that worrying about what to do next was this close to pushing me into an OCD brainfever. It was just time to go. I also recognized that I was terrified of telling her in person, so dorky as it was, I typed up a letter of resignation to leave in her inbox after she left that night.
My coworkers went home. The sun fell outside. My boss worked in her office, me in mine, and I kept an eye on the clock- when was she going to go home so I could give her this letter?
She emerged from the office carrying a folder, pulled a chair up to my desk, and said, “I got this email linking back to your new website…”
My head-scratching began with that sentence, and didn’t end for the rest of the conversation. She was referring to the web design portfolio site I’d spent the past couple weeks building. I haven’t let anyone know about this site yet. It’s still under construction and changing daily. The odds she’d find it on a day when the links were functional are slim, but even more puzzling is where this notification email came from. I think it was a Google Analytics mishap, but the detectives are still working on the case.
My boss continued on to say that she was sorry to learn, through the blog my design site linked to, how unhappy I’d been in Buffalo. Handing me two printed entries, she said, “Here are reasons I think it’s no longer appropriate for you to work at Young Audiences.” She handed me this entry, and this one.
Even though I disagree with my boss’s argument that the blogs are a fireable offense, I had no desire to work for someone that eager for me to leave. And, I knew better than to look a gift blog in the mouth. “I’m going to Seattle,” I said, “I’m not sure how you wanted to end this, but…”
We agreed that I would work through Friday and stick to the Seattle story as the official one. But isn’t it so ironic, or coincidental, or bizarre to find your boss approach you with reasons she thinks you should leave, on the day you’re preparing to put an “I’m leaving” letter in her inbox?
Yeah, I thought so too.
Later that week, I worked at my desk while my boss and coworker met with a potential new teaching artist in the other office. He was presenting his proposed program on the Underground Railroad. An actor, his voice carried easily from the next office, and I listened as I finished up instructions to my coworkers on how to carry out my responsibilities once I left. His conversation moved from the history of slavery, to an anecdote about a friend who had had a wonderful idea for how to improve a struggling neighborhood in Buffalo. He wasn’t able to carry it out, however, because the “powers that be” had threatened him- the idea would have lessened their own power over the neighborhood. I didn’t catch whether the friend had been threatened with losing his job, or worse, but it prevented him from carrying out an idea both just and helpful to others.
“Is he free?” the actor asked my boss. He compared this friend to Frederick Douglass, adding that the moment Douglass decided to seek liberation was his moment of liberation. Not the moment Douglass actually stepped on free ground, but before that, when he decided to disagree with the entire social structure of Southern slavery. His friend, the actor said, had not made that decision- he kept his idea to himself out of respect to or fear of the powers that be. He had not freed himself to do what he thought was right.
I dug this actor’s point. You don’t need to be shackled to someone to be his slave. I was a slave for months, to fear, doubt and anger. Anger that a woman I had considered a friend now treated me and my coworkers with such disrespect. Doubt that maybe I deserved a few of her snipes and jabs, or was being overly sensitive. And fear that if I left my job in this economy, I’d never find another one.
That Sunday night, before I wrote the letter of resignation, crying on my brother’s shoulder, he said, “Mom’s got money, I’ve got money, you’ve got money. We’ve got your back.” And I knew they did. As much as I’ve complained about sharing an apartment with them, I did walk into work Monday morning knowing that our living expenses were low enough, they were generous enough, they loved me enough, that I wasn’t going to wind up living in a cardboard box if I couldn’t find another job right away.
Love and faith can be big liberators.
So, I’m free. Like Wamba, I do wonder what to do with it. Plans still evade me. But unlike Wamba, I’m not worried. I was worried. For months. Fortunately, coincidences, fateful twists, acts of God, timing like that makes worrying seem so damn irrelevant. It’s time to go, and I’m grateful that everyone- even Google Analytics- stepped in to remind me of that.
The future will probably take care of itself, and meanwhile, I gotta admit, I’m kind of proud of my blog.
1 Comment
adultery and the triad of evil.
02 January '10 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Family, Love 'n sex.
More than three years ago, my dad was approached by the wife of a business associate. This woman, according to my dad, told him her marriage was a mess and that she had developed strong feelings for my father. One thing led to another, and my dad spent the next two years hiding his guilt and trying to strengthen his relationship with my mom. At least, that’s the way he tells it.
My mom didn’t know what he’d done, or how he truly felt about the state of their marriage. So she went along thinking she was the only person making serious compromises to keep the marriage alive. She felt he was taking her for granted, but she had felt that for years. He saw every spat as a sign of oncoming disaster, and she saw it as just another dumb spat.
Last autumn when I was trying to figure out how to spread Marmite thinly enough to satisfy English toddlers, my parents were living in Toronto. My dad returned from a business meeting in Vancouver. The next day, while he was at work, she did his laundry from the trip, and found a pair of black panties that did not belong to my mother. The tenor of her voice, when she told me this, sounded something like lightning cracking the limb from a tree, wrapped in the tears of a sick baby squirrel.
She confronted him when he came home from work. He told her he was in love with the owner of the panties, and did not want to be married to my mom any longer. My dad says he ran into the woman again while in Vancouver, slept with her, and realized his attempts to revive his marriage were futile. Everything since then has been recovery, recriminations, regrets, rants, and rootlessness.
Meanwhile, between my dad’s first and second encounters with “the woman,” and totally unaware of those encounters, I fell in love with my boss, a married father of three. I loved my job, and knew my manager was uniquely suited to accommodate my idiosyncrasies and appreciate my strengths. So this sucked. I spent several months ranting to my brother, trying to talk myself out of my feelings, drinking wine by the bottle, resisting the urge to squeeze my boss’s shoulder or call him after hours.
My last attempt to rescue the situation was to suggest working offsite, still not telling my boss how I felt. He was stressed and worried about the scenario but started preparing for it, game to keep me in any way he could.
My mom had just arrived at our New Jersey apartment iafter driving across the country, headed to Toronto to move in with my dad. Instead she spent a month driving around the Northeast with my brother, going as far as Vermont in search of an interesting but affordable town for he and I to move to.
We met my dad halfway on a trip I took with them to Albany and Rochester. My dad hadn’t seen any of us in four months, but spent most of the trip talking about his job or mine.
I felt guilty about the grief the offsite plan was causing my boss. I wanted to just tell him how I felt and give my notice. There was an agency in Seattle willing to hire me. I should just tell him, I said to my dad. In an email. My boss and I took emails seriously as a literary platform, he was a tech dork, it was his most comfortable method of communication. I had gone to work several times in the past with serious intentions to tell him in person, and could never find the courage. I realized, talking to my dad about it, that I lacked the courage because it was the wrong way to do it.
But my dad saw it differently. He thought I should tell my boss in person. I was startled that my usually apathetic father was expressing an opinion about my decision, and even more startled by the nature of the opinion. The images it brought to mind made my eyes cross: my boss recoiling, treating me like a pariah, waving his arms and ranting, looking disappointed or confused, wanting to comfort me but not wanting to, or worst of all, reacting positively to the news. My boss’s devotion to his family was a major part of my attraction. If he reciprocated my feelings, I’d be disappointed in him, if he didn’t, I’d feel like a large ball of snot someone forgot to wipe up.
“If you really have feelings for him,” my dad insisted, “You’ll tell him in person. He deserves to find out from you that way, not in an email.”
That night, I gave up trying to sleep around three in the morning, and wrote my boss a long email that said “I love you and I quit.” As I’d expected, he nearly went into shock, going home the next day after receiving my email to “go for a long run.” For the next three weeks, he treated me politely, and like a stranger. It was devastating and sometimes infuriating. But I left, and he recovered from the surprise, and we talk now and then. I still miss him as one of the best friends I’ve ever had.
He randomly got in touch the other day, and we talked on the phone. He made a few jokes about how having my help during a recent struggle at work would have been worth having an affair. There were a few pauses that felt like “I’ve missed you, man.” The pauses, and the jokes, made me feel pretty sure he wouldn’t call again.
It got me thinking.
It made me think about my dad advising me to tell my boss “I love you” to his face, considering what happened when a woman said that to him. It made me think about what my boss would have done if I’d let my feelings show. It made me think about how far I’ll go to avoid a mess, and how far I still have yet to go.
I’ve taken to referring to him, the Distant Friend, and Mr. Hotness as the “triad of evil.” I mean “evil” the way Luthor is evil to Superman, evil like kryptonite, evil like “Curse you, foul villian, for breaking into my Fortress of Power!” For someone very good at breaking up and moving on, I am frozen in time whenever one of these three men gets in touch. My understanding of each of them has evolved with time, but my feelings don’t seem to change. They’ve set standards I compare any new acquaintance to. But one is married, one lives in another country, and one considers a “committed relationship” one in which he only breaks up with someone a few times a year.
These three men share another trait. I met all three of them before I answered the phone calls that taught me not to just let it ring: the call from my mom about the black panties, the call from my dad justifying his actions by cataloging my mom’s faults as a wife, and the call from the immigration officer at Gatwick, threatening to throw my defenseless mother in the chokey and send a few henchmen round to collect me, evil illegal alien worker-person.
Since then, I’ve only answered one out of every six phone calls, and have not connected with anyone new. That may be because I live in Suckallo. It may be because the vibrator function on my phone is not really that strong. It may be because my bonds with the triad of evil are strong, and I really haven’t met their equals, and am just winding my way back to one of them.
Or there’s the small possibility they’ve all retained supervillain romantic status because I haven’t let anyone in since my mom did my dad’s laundry. Maybe I’m just afraid to hear that squirrel tear-soaked lightning in my voice.
No Comments
home for the holidays, part two.
18 December '09 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Family, Seattle.
My family, like most, is a disparate group. My grandparents had three daughters, two of whom had two children, the eldest, six. Those ten grandchildren, myself included, are “all grown up now,” only one still in high school. Four of them are married, with children of their own. Throw in a single uncle, a handful of stepchildren, and the fact that at 5′ 7″ I’m the shortest of my generation, and you’ve got a big group in more ways than one.
When I was growing up, we all got together for every birthday and major holiday, usually at my grandparents’ house. I thought those gatherings were great. That changed as we all grew up.
There was the Thanksgiving my cousin told me that she was pregnant and probably going to have to marry the child’s father. The word spread around the group quietly, no one sure who else knew, making the evening oddly macabre. There was the first couple years of Dubya’s administration, when September 11th and the wars brought political talk to a divided table. There was my own awkwardness, before I moved East, growing more and more depressed as a lonely writer living with my folks, not much to say and asked even less. There was the anger over who attended whose wedding, and why or why not. There was my grandmother (pictured at right) asking me grimly if I intended to settle back East and then treating me like a stranger for the rest of the day. There were those months and years when one of us was just absent, running with the wrong people, running wild, or in my case, running East.
I think families are groups of people who choose to accept each other’s brand of insanity. Asking one family to accept another’s unspoken agreements, however, can be difficult, especially when ours are boozeless gatherings.
Going home for a Christmas party sounded like fun and hell at the same time.
My cousin and her husband put me up for the weekend. We caught up on the past year, played with the baby, went shoe shopping. The day of the party, though, my hosts and I grew restless, circling the house like caged jungle cats who know the vet is making his rounds that day. Was my grandma going to punish me again for abandoning the Northwest? Would all the new and newish spouses mingle and be welcomed? Would it be weird to see the cousin I hadn’t in probably eight years? Would I wind up playing the ugly duckling, the snooty stranger, or the missed relative?
I had no answers, just a $1 pair of Walmart Christmas earrings and a new purple dress to defend me.
My aunt’s church, in Seattle, has a lovely Ikea-modern decor and a spacious rec room. My aunts and grandmother were setting the tables with cloths, candles and glass goblets when we arrived. We were early, gathered around my uncle and grandpa, as others started to arrive. My grandma insisted we “integrate,” but my uncle proved too entertaining to leave. Despite people having to “integrate” towards us now and then, talking and laughing and eating carried on around the room.
I teased my cousin Bryan about his fondness for enforcing rules. I talked about web design with my aunt. I told my grandpa about the flights, the cab drivers, the hotel in Chicago. I laughed with another cousin’s girlfriend of a couple years, who I hadn’t met yet and immediately liked. I ate too many Swedish meatballs.
Nothing was particularly different this visit. Just better. I still have little in common with my relatives. Most of them believe in working hard, saving money, marrying young, raising families, going to church, buying houses and cars, all of which I show little sign of ever doing. But it’s just possible, at twenty-eight, I’m starting to make sense to them all as the one who isn’t going to make any sense. Like my single great-uncle, who used to live to party in Anchorage, talks little, votes Democrat, and is dating one of the many elderly women in his ‘hood who ply him with casseroles and fudge, I may slowly gain exception credits, no longer expected to do what everyone else seems to do naturally.
This visit wasn’t like a few years ago, when I came back to be in my cousin’s wedding, and my life was awesome. I was dating a sexy European, had a fun job, went out in Greenwich Village every weekend, and shared a cute apartment with a great friend. It was also not like visits that followed my graduating high school, when I would try to explain my decision to write instead of get a job, to relatives who could find no response to such insanity.
I didn’t feel awesome, and I didn’t feel like a freak, I just felt like a single twenty-eight year old woman visiting her relatives back home. I wished I had a drink in my hand, a man by my side, and a half-finished novel on the desk at home, but contented myself with the new purple dress and the deliciousness of my grandma’s ham. I don’t know if I felt accepted because I had accepted myself, or if I accepted myself because I felt accepted by them, or if we were all just high on non-alcoholic cider and I imagined it all.
Either way, last Sunday made me realize again the value of relationships that survive the awesome years and the awkward ones. It isn’t always a great time, but it always means something. And when it is fun, like it was last Sunday, you leave with this funny feeling in the pit of your stomach… of being loved.
I’m glad I went.
2 Comments
home for the holidays, part one, or, the power of acception.
15 December '09 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Buffalo, Fate, Travel.
Thursday afternoon I flew from Buffalo to Chicago, with a mere half-hour layover before boarding a flight to Seattle. I’m not sure why I booked such an optimistic schedule. We were held up in Buffalo waiting for a pilot, and then de-icing the wings, and landed in Chicago half an hour after my flight to Seattle had departed. It was the last flight of the evening, so the ticket agent rescheduled my flight to the next morning, and gave me a few flyers for local hotel brokers.
Alone in a strange city late at night, I promptly did what any sane person would do: order a Mickey Dees Angus mushroom and Swiss burger. Restored by the fragrance of fake meat, I called the number on the flyer. The broker gave me a confirmation number for a Doubletree room twenty minutes from the airport, and told me the hotel shuttle arrived every hour on the hour outside “Door number three.”
I went downstairs, wondering if my luggage was still in Chicago. Collaring an airport employee, I was sent over to the Southwest office, where a woman informed me that the suitcases were held in a high security area. The luggage dudes were understaffed, basically, so even if she requested them, it could take two to four hours. Wilting at the thought of boarding the plane the next morning in what I was wearing, I shuffled outside to wait for the shuttle.
I had left my down-filled coat in Buffalo and brought a lighter weight Seattle-worthy coat instead. It was nine degrees in Chicago. Shuttles came and went, but none were mine. Another shuttle driver and the red-coated Commander of Taxis urged me to return to the airport and use the courtesy phone to call the hotel. Doing so, I was told by the Doubletree employee, “Oh, no, we don’t send it out unless it’s requested. But I’ll let me him know. He’ll be there in forty to forty-five minutes.”
“Are you kidding?!” I squealed.
“That’s how it…”
“Never mind, I’ll get a taxi,” I said, slamming the phone back in the cradle. Muttering to myself, I went back out Door Number Three, to be shoved by the Taxi Commander into a cab.
The cab driver had a mysterious, thick accent and friendly manner that was not immediately reciprocated. Still scowling to myself at the inconvenience and cost of having to stay at a hotel of unknown quality, my luggage-less-ness, Woman A telling me false information and Woman B wanting me to wait another hour at the airport, I did not feel like chatting.
We drove past fancy strip malls, and then poorly-lit ones, my concern about the quality of the hotel we were bound for growing. The driver kept trying to start a conversation. I relented, telling him about missing the flight, that I was from Buffalo. I don’t remember what I said next, but it was a short, passing remark about how I wasn’t sure how I’d wound up living there.
Quick flashback. Two nights before, my brother told me he’d read my last blog and found it, as my entries have been for the past couple months, “Good but… depressing.” I told him I blogged less often these days because I had a hard time describing life in Buffalo positively. But that night I got out my journal and attempted to write a rough draft explanation of the benefits of living in Suckallo, the strange challenge (and therefore opportunity for growth) it presented. I wrote several versions, never quite circling in on my point. What I clarified instead was that the series of events leading my present circumstances was just… plain… odd.
I’m in England when my mom calls in tears- my dad’s cheated on her and doesn’t want to patch things up. I convince her to come to England for an adventure. She gets on a plane. She’s questioned at the airport, accidentally reveals my status as an evil illegal alien in the country, and is denied entry. I follow a week later. My brother puts her up in Buffalo, but is working full time and getting worn out coming home to a tear-soaked mother. I could interview for a job in NYC, or go with her to Seattle to stay with her parents for a while. She refuses to go without me. So instead of going back to Manhattan to look for work I follow her to Grandma and Grandpa’s. We return to Buffalo a month later anyway. I’m engaged to an Englishman who wants to move here, but won’t discuss how or when. My mom and I go to Vegas, convinced she should get a divorce right now. We return to Buffalo. Mr. Hotness asks me to wait for him there. So I get a part-time job to pass the time. I get tired of waiting for him. My mom and brother fly back to Oregon to sell my parents’ house. I’m left by myself in Buffalo, and need a full-time job to support myself, so I take on more responsibilities at work. I’m promoted. My mom and brother return from Oregon. They can’t find apartments here they like, so we continue to live together. My boss and I struggle to communicate or even get along. I start looking into ways to leave Buffalo, as an au pair or in a volunteer home stay in Europe. When those options look unworkable, I try getting an apartment in a prettier area outside Buffalo. I discover prettiness in Western New York is often walled in by wind and snow, and besides, another year at this job sounds wretched. The next thing you know, it’s December, and I’ve lived in Buffalo a year, and have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
I wanted to know whose fault it all was. Mine? Bad karma? Family? The cat?
So I’m sitting there in that cab gazing out the window at the passing Targets and burger joints, and mutter something to the cab driver about how random it is that I live in B-Flo. He says, “I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you find yourself in this strange place, and you look around and think, ‘How did I get here?’ This odd series of events just happen, all these weird things, and there’s no explanation for it all. It’s like, whatever your belief is, God or fate or whatever, something is pushing you.”
I stare at his right ear through the open window into the front seat. He’s just summed up the thought process I’ve been running for the past two days.
“Believe me, after I turned forty I realized, it is better to be easygoing. I don’t worry now. Acception,” he said, meaning “acceptance,” “Acception is the only way. It is out of your hands.”
Some part of my tired brain registered that this man was probably talking a really weird series of events- like being a Turkish neurosurgeon who finds himself fleeing some extremist group of his brother’s, and lands in Chicago because his mother’s second cousin lives there, and gets this curvaceous but talkative waitress pregnant, and the next thing he knows, is supporting fourteen Turkish-Irish kids as a cab driver. Or something.
The conversation was slowly restoring my will to live, my head lifting slightly from the back of the chair as I said, “It’s like when we were sitting at the Buffalo airport waiting for them to de-ice. I knew we were going to miss my connecting flight. And I was getting more and more stressed out until I realized, my getting stressed isn’t going to make any difference. Might as well relax. It’s all out of your hands.”
“Acception,” he agreed. “It’s the only way to look at things.”
We continued along this vein until we pulled up in front of the Doubletree. After a heartfelt goodbye I climbed out of the cab with my two suitcases, walked up to the front desk, and told the busty woman at the counter, “I have to apologize, I don’t know who I talked to, but I called a while ago from the airport and I did something I never do, I let stress get the better of me, and I was so rude-”
“You’re the taxi lady,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, nodding, “I spoke to you? I am so sorry…”
Using the policy of “acception” herself, she asked me about my flight, gave me two extra bottles of everything: shampoo, face wash, lotion, a razor, man’s deodorant (”but deodorant is deodorant”), chocolate chip cookies, and a toothbrush. She and her fellow front desk agent worked out the next morning’s schedule for me: wake up call at 6:20, order room service breakfast, catch the 7am shuttle back to the airport.
The hotel had been remodeled the year before; I had clearly gotten a steal at eighty dollars. Elegant decor, a hot shower, some TV, and a pillowtop bed wrapped me up in a warm embrace. The next morning I turned on an episode of the Arthur cartoon, made a cup of Wolfgang Puck coffee, ate a delicious breakfast, put on the bare minimum of yesterday’s clothes, hopped on the shuttle, and returned to the airport.
If I had caught my flight the night before, I would have slept or read through it, arriving late that night, keeping my relatives up so they could fetch me at the airport, probably feeling pretty scratchy the next day. Instead, I spent the four hour flight talking nearly non-stop to a Buffalo pilot who lives up the street from me, and a girl covered in piercings, on her way to Seattle to become a live-in nanny. Seriously. The flight flew by, with political debates, arguments about whether the pilot looked good in orange, and exchanges of family sagas.
I landed bright-eyed and bushy tailed, collected my suitcases, and walked out to a balmy morning, where my aunt, cousin and her little boy waited to pick me up. I desperately craved my flat iron, but other than that, I was in high spirits. I’d been revived by a good night’s sleep, some four-star treatment, fun conversation on the plane, and this guy of mysterious provenance, reminding me that if you can’t figure out what the heck is going on… it’s probably beyond your scope of understanding.
Now I know three things: it’s no one’s fault, my life is a lot more normal than a lot of cab drivers, and acception works.
No Comments
yardstick of normalcy.
02 December '09 by admin, under Journal | Tags: Buffalo, Life, Work.
When I decided to leave New York City a year and a half ago, I attempted to do it the rational way. I found a job similar to the one I had enjoyed in Manhattan, in Seattle. I had grown up in and around Seattle and thought I knew the city well. Measured with a yardstick of normalcy, the plan was a good two and a half feet.
I began my new job, moved into a new one bedroom apartment in Pioneer Square, cleaned the cupboards, unpacked my bags, looked around me, and thought, “What the hell am I doing here?” After working to New York standards, I watched aghast as candidates showed up for interviews in rain-soaked bike gear, paperwork forgotten, to show portfolios full of sub-par work. The city itself felt eerily small, the buses empty, shops few and far between, downtown full of homeless people, one busker filling my new neighborhood with Pearl Jam’s “Indifference,” his deep voice echoing down the rain-soaked block, “How much difference does it make…”
Indeed. A week later my mom flew in from Toronto. She and my dad had closed up their house in Oregon a short time before. We went down for the weekend to check up on it. I never went back to that agency in Seattle. I told them my head had fallen off or something, I don’t remember. All I do remember is waking up in that bedroom in the house in Oregon, unable to remember why I was supposed to return to Seattle and that silly job. Driving up to Seattle to pick up my belongings, I laughed out loud at myself. I had completely flaked out. I had thrown away my yardstick of normalcy.
About five weeks later, I flew to Spain, and the next four months were some of the coolest of my life. Sans yardstick.
I attempted to do the New York-to-Seattle thing again last month. I had a job, friends, a semblance of a life here. Why not stick with it, I reasoned. Keep the job. It’s the rational thing to do. But my friend didn’t know, when she idly suggested East Aurora as a pretty place to live, that I was seriously going to consider it. So she didn’t mention how often she’d turned back because the wind and snow made the highway out to the small town unpassable. My brother visited the apartment with me in a rare black mood, which made me discount his announcement that the highways were awful. The landlord assured me he drove into Buffalo to work every day, and it took him exactly thirty-two minutes each time. I ignored my instinct, which told me I was moving out there to isolate myself even further from people in general and sink into a nice, juicy depression. My coworkers, the woman at the DMV who helped me obtain an NYS drivers license, and neighbors all assured me East Aurora was indeed calm and beautiful… if isolated.
And then the day I was supposed to move, I went to a board meeting, came home in a funk, took a nap, woke up thinking “You shouldn’t commit another year to this job,” walked into the living room to find my mom biting her nails after talking to a friend on the phone. He had “gone on and on” about how horrible that highway was in the winter, that East Aurora was in the “ski belt,” that the snow and wind was always considerably worse than in Buffalo itself.
Since then, I feel like I did when leaving Seattle. I can’t honestly remember what the normal thing would be to do in this respect. Or, that is, the normal options no longer have meaning or resonance. Normal would be to find an apartment here, talk more with my boss about how rude she is, try to meet a nice fellow. But I don’t want to. I can’t remember why I should. The yardstick is broken.
Instead, I think I’d like to go to Guam.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a new website, sucking on cough drops, losing weight because the phlegm in my lungs ruins my appetite (yum!) and spending lots of money on new passports, driving licenses, and other forms of ID I probably won’t need in Guam. I hope y’all stay tuned. The future is filled with floating pink cotton-candy-flavored question marks.
