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a little ado about some things.
February 5, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
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.
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dirty little secrets.
January 23, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
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.
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irresistible forces and unmoveable objects.
January 20, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
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.
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two old poems.
January 15, 2010 by admin, under Fiction.
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.
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Frederick Douglass, Wamba, and Jim Halpert.
January 12, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
“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.
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home for the holidays, part two.
December 18, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
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.
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home for the holidays, part one, or, the power of acception.
December 15, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
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.
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yardstick of normalcy.
December 2, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
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.
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Thanksgiving Day reruns (a holiday-themed reblog from 2006).
November 26, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Written Wednesday, November 29, 2006, “Sour grapes and the theory of impermanence” was about a Thanksgiving celebrated in Pennsylvania, and recovered from in New Jersey. This is raw, Myspace material here, folks. Perfect accompaniment to Ma’s green bean casserole!
Sandwiched between Halloween (my dad’s favorite holiday) and Christmas (my mom’s), Thanksgiving always came in third or possibly eighteenth in my family. To me a fun Thanksgiving required a ton of people in the house to eat all this dumb Pilgrim food with. We often didn’t live in the same region as our relatives, and the last time we did spend it with them, the evening had the ominous feel of the last act of King Lear.
So last year my family unhesitatingly spent “Turkey Day” painting the living room. But, hey, we took an hour off in the afternoon to sit on the covered furniture shoved into the middle of the room and eat turkey ‘n gravy on toast.
We all agreed it was okay if, this year, I didn’t dash across the country for the holiday dedicated to thanking our white man’s god for providing gullible natives who were willing to feed us, hand over their land, and inspire Cher songs.
Anyway. My friend M has this thing about Thanksgiving so we decided several months ago that, even if we were single, unloved, far from family and totally broke on that particular Thursday in November, we’d at least do something together. So when she decided she’d spend it with her brother and sister in law in Pennsylvania, I went too.
Driving past old stone barns turned into antique stores, M warned me that the town where her brother lived was Something Else. Waiting for something else, I watched twee tea shops and bookstores fritter into lovely straight streets of family-sized pre-war houses. The lavendar-grey sky melted into the naked mauve branches of the trees. As we parked in the driveway of her brother’s house, his wife opened the back door, holding up her adorable one year old to watch us lift dishes of sweet potatoes and turnips from the back seat. It was just like the neighborhood my family lived in before we moved to Oregon… perfect.
Digression: Many people would call the neighborhood where I currently live and work “more than perfect.” The Queen Anne and Tudor mansions on sloping green lawns grace the curving streets with a gracious distance between them. Expensive cars fill the garages, happy children run to and fro, pedigreed dogs bark from maintained fences. But no one actually lives in these homes. They commute to the city every day or spend four hours in the gym so they’ll be fit enough to pick their children up from Catholic school. Hired help cares for the lawns, children, meals, cars and windows of these “homes.” Like most of this town, they’re holograms of perfection, but you can walk right through them. End digression.
We’ll call M’s brother Dan and his wife Carrie. Their adorable baby, by the way, is truly adorable, unlike all the babies in this world whom you’re required to describe with that word. She accompanied Carrie and I around the house as I oohed and ahhed at the redecorated bathrooms, the new mullioned windows, the baby’s mint-green attic room with the two-inch thick wood door.
I asked her how she felt living out here after she said she’d lived in cities all her life. She told me with what seemed genuine contentment- I recognized it from hearing it in my own voice when my family lived in the aforementioned Perfect Town- that between the baby, her work, and the pleasure of having favorite “local spots” in the town, she felt fulfilled right now visiting the city only once every couple weeks.
They’re both writers, working from home… a home with mullioned windows.
We ate too much good food, played a couple games, marveled at the baby’s genius, met the three cats. Then M took me home and returned to hers.
The next morning I discovered the house full of cake, brownies, cookies and turkey leftover from this family’s Thanksgiving celebration. I had a slice of everything. I spent a good hour talking to my boss’s father, who was visiting with her mother for the holiday. I went to Barnes & Noble to buy a gift, glaring a bit resentfully at the shelves of books everyone else in the universe had managed to get published. Then I drove to M’s.
All this, having eaten cake for breakfast.
For some reason, as I drove, my thoughts strayed to that idyllic period (in the aforementioned Perfect Town) when I was living with my family in a sweet old Craftsman and teaching myself how to write. Those couple years were marred by my own frustration, isolation, and boredom, topped with a few ugly revelations before we moved about the town itself. But I also learned, during those years, as I had learned years before writing on a used word processor in the tiny living room of our tiny two-bedroom apartment, that a little classical music, loved ones nearby, and something to write on are sometimes all I need to feel… content.
I’ll let the word rest in its purest form.
I thought about contentment as I’d experienced it in the past. I thought about the books on the bookstore shelves, and the burbling ideas I’ve had lately for novels, screenplays, comic scripts, memoirs… hundreds of things I wanted to write. But because I don’t want to let my parents support me anymore, because I’m too high-maintenence to keep this job that gives me all the free time in the world, and because you can’t ask Santa for a husband/sugar daddy, I’m not sitting in a peaceful place writing stories all day.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have cake this morning for breakfast. Today, I know, as I know nineteen days out of twenty, that I wouldn’t trade anything for the fun I’m having right now. But “for some reason” that day after Thanksgiving, I felt bereft.
You can puke any time. This particular story probably won’t get any less sentimental. I cried driving to Hoboken. Cried later that afternoon. Wasn’t until about three-thirty that I realized, gee. I just visited the Happy Suburban Family and must admit I have no means of attaining said happiness. I wonder why I feel blue?
Who knows how long they’ll have it- as M’s boyfriend pointed out when she described her brother’s situation to him, he’d had two kids, a house and wife a while back, too. Now he’s separated, his school-age daughters are in therapy, and his wife makes Norma Desmond look calm and open-minded.
In other words, even if you experience marital, familial, and workial bliss, it may not last. But that doesn’t make it any easier to live without it. I may don a Buddhist perspective sometimes and say “life is impermanence, so enjoy whatcha got,” but I have to admit that I want those few moments of shared happiness a young family hopefully experiences. Anyone who says they don’t just hasn’t been to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving lately.
So, once I’d realized that the combination of a hypoglemic-nightmare breakfast and a heartbreakingly nice peek into suburban life had given me an understandable post-ecstasy slump, I felt more pragmatic. Sure, I didn’t have a husband, child, cat, house, or the ability to support myself writing, yet. But… someday?
Pragmatism got me off the couch and to the liquor store with the hope that beer would finish the job.
I didn’t get drunk that night, however, or hit on any boys, or wander around the city looking for a distraction. I went to M’s boyfriend’s apartment with her. The three of us had a few beers, ate sushi, and listened to music. We assured ourselves that even if none of us ever experience that “Leave It To Beaver” stuff again, (and since all three of us lack the Calm Gene that makes such things possible, we may not) we can always adopt babies from the Congo and find some sort of compromised crazy substitute for Perfect Family Life.
And one of us may. Or they may get married and I’ll wind up the spinster with a hundred cats that M worries she’ll become. We might each end up on a different continent, we might not be talking this time next year, we might be drafted to fight in Iraq, we might find ourselves still drinking decades from now, wondering how to hold on to love.
Aware of all this, we just talked about David Bowie and how M’s boyfriend needed a haircut.
It wasn’t the most relaxed of evenings, but now that my blood sugar is stable, I have just one thing to say: I’m damn grateful I was there, with them, that night. I don’t know what’ll happen to them, or me, or anyone else I care about, tomorrow or ten years from now. I’m just glad to have friends who are willing, at least right now, to do what so few people besides my family have ever been able to do: to peek with me, almost blindly, through the curtain of night into the next day.
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takin' a trip up de' Nile.
November 19, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I hate “Gee, I haven’t blogged in a while!” posts, but, “Gee, I haven’t blogged in a while!” Unfortunately I can’t really write about many of my daily preoccupations right now. But you’re not missing out. Conversations with and about my dad, Mr. Hotness, and my boss wouldn’t be that interesting even if I did feel comfortable discussing them publicly. Important, but not heavy on plot.
Meanwhile…
I had a fun birthday, ten days late. We all went out drinking and dancing and had a great time. I’m sure photos will show me red-faced and sweaty, but enjoying my new birthday shoes. I had realized that afternoon that I had no sexy winter clothes, so I went to Marshall’s with my mom and bought a complete Birthday Party Outfit just like you do when you’re twelve. You can imagine me as an adolescent describing, with lots of gesturing, “It had a purple dress, and tights with pink polka dots, and black shoes with straps on the front and a tall heel!”
I looked fabulous. Alas, the Birthday Outfit did not win me any Birthday Sex. Not that I like that song anyway…
A man has been working on the steeply peaked roof of a Gothic house I pass every morning on my way to work. He stands on a crane three stories overhead, and always has a soft rock Christmas station playing from some invisible radio. He must have it up there with him because the music wafts down like a movie soundtrack- albeit a cheesy movie. Today it was raining, so you couldn’t see him beneath a large blue tarp draped over himself and the roof. But you could still hear Natalie Cole singing about mistletoe.
My friend Candi noticed an old high school friend’s Facebook post needing a web designer, put us in touch, and I’m making her an online store- proof that social networking actually works.
I haven’t unpacked all my stuff from preparing to move to East Aurora, so if you want to borrow that copy of The Bombshell’s Manual of Style from me (and you should), forget it. It’s buried under paper-swathed dishes and comic books, in that box at the foot of my brother’s bed, or maybe the box near the dining table in the living room, or maybe the box Flippy ate the corner out of…
I really enjoyed Michael Jackson’s This is It in the theater the other day. I’m going to name my daughter Orianthi, after the guitarist who responded coolly to Jackson’s demand of, “Higher, higher- this is your time to shine!” And I now say “God bless you” in a meek, Muppety voice to everyone. Okay, that’s a lie. I couldn’t be less like Michael Jackson unless I was a cat. But I was inspired by his dedication to his craft. Not inspired enough to actually start a novel, just inspired enough to think about why I’m not thinking about starting a novel.
And what about real life, you ask?
Nothing much has changed- I’m still fed up with my current situation, still clueless as to how to change it. But I am so sick of complaining about it, even thinking about it, that I bought a ticket to DenialVille on Tuesday and haven’t been back since. It’s nice here. Chocolate cupcakes have no calories, everyone’s thighs are dimple-free, men have very good reasons for not washing the dishes, and happy adventures are just around the riverbend.
It’s sort of like being Disney’s Pocahontas, without the question of how she could look so hot in a miniskirt, when Native Americans did not have Bics. Fortunately, I do. If I had a pet raccoon, my life would be complete. Meanwhile, I’ve put a striped fur suit on my rabbit. He’s actually practicing leaping over logs and making funny faces, in this new suit, right this very minute. As I write this. It’s funny. Shame you can’t see it.
Look for us in theaters everywhere on Christmas Day.
