inside the revolution, part three: doing March right.
March 29, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
I started this blog back in July of 2008 with the express intent to write about life from a positive viewpoint. A recovered depressive still too inclined to sleep too much and avoid emotional risks, I needed this unofficial platform to publicly say “hey, life is good- even if I have to force myself to admit it.”
The following winter tested my positivity. Anyone who’s continued to read my thoughts might have done so out of appreciation for my “confessional style,” but not because I was Miss Cheery. I’ve waited for everyone to give up on me as boring and lacking spunk. Or worse, that I’d cross that line from “sort of blue” into actual “never leave my bedroom” depression.
I knew the minute I got here that Buffalo was a one-way train ticket to Depressionville. I knew I’d struggle with that Lake Erie wind, the widespread poverty, the limited entertainment. I was ready to go last March. I’d only come here to help my mom out and get my own bearings. But as though they had discussed it together, my English boyfriend and my mom both asked me to stay. They each said they thought I’d be happiest if I stayed, and my boyfriend wanted me to wait for him here. I was so astonished that two people who loved me so much could ask me to stay someplace so horrid, that I thought I must be missing something obvious. I applied for a part-time job here, and got it. A few months later I was a full-time Program Director and hanging pictures on the walls.
I committed a crime against myself, the day I applied for that part-time admin job. We all do it, all the time: we let other people tell us what’s right for us. It doesn’t matter how much someone loves you, how close they hold your interests to their heart, how good their intentions. If your reason and your heart tell you something is wrong for you, and you don’t act on that knowledge… you wind up a year later, like me, with so little to show for it.
It’s taken me this long to circle back and do March right. Since September, I’ve talked to people in Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, even England and Italy, about living in one of those cities. Nothing clicked, nothing was doable. Finally, a few weeks ago, my eyes fell on the “other cities” list on Craigslist, and I remembered…
My friend Uke had suggested I’d probably like Austin, Texas, last spring. A friend of a friend recently had, as well. I always wrote it off as “too far south,” “too hot,” “too Texas,” like we all do when an idea comes out of nowhere and we’re not ready to entertain it… But really, could anything be “too Texas” after living here?
I put an ad on the Austin Craigslist for a room for rent, talked to several cool people, agreed on a room near downtown Austin. Tomorrow, I fly down there with my suitcases and my bunny.
I don’t have much of a plan. I’ll look for web design and admin work simultaneously while I get started. I’ll explore. And I’ll reach out to people at every given opportunity. Since arriving in Buffalo, I’ve been so afraid of falling in love with someone who might tempt me to stay, I’ve barely tried to socialize. I took the friendship my brother’s group offered, while it was available, and hardly fought for it when it wasn’t. I clung to Mr. Hotness and the DF, who both lived so far away.
I went out the other night to mark my last weekend in Buffalo, and five people joined me, including my brother and a friend who only showed up at the end of the night. We all had lots of fun, I’m glad we got to spend that Saturday night together, as we have so many others over the past year, but I couldn’t help but think… “what have I been doing all this time? No one even cares I’m leaving.”
I don’t say it bitterly. I can look back on every relationship and see points where I could have reached out and instead withdrew. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be here, not fully, and not well. And that’s on me. And that’s okay.
It’s a lesson, from an incredible year, that’s left me tougher, less inclined to doubt myself, and in the end, proud that it only took me a year to shake off the blues and take another chance on something… somewhere.
It’s happening at the right time, as my brother moves into his own apartment, and my mom spends time with my dad in California. We’re each finally ready to do our own thing.
Everyone I’ve talked to about Austin describes a bigger version of Portland, Oregon- liberal and hippie-arty. I think about the warm weather and get tingles of guilty excitement, like I’m going on an undeserved vacation. I’m bringing my sundresses, and leaving my sweaters. I’m going to show some skin… and more important, I’m going to show some heart. I didn’t give Buffalo enough- it’s a mistake I won’t make again.
I’m glad that Candi and Dawn and I got to spend the time together that we did. I’m glad our friend Chris shared so many nights of board games and beers with us. I’m glad I got to design websites and gossip with coworkers and go rowing on the pond with the DF. I’m glad Mr. Hotness and I got to share Niagara- that goes in the book of unforgettable. I’m glad I got to meet my brother’s girlfriend, an intelligent, funny woman who I suspect will be an important part of his future. And I’m glad my mom and brother and I got to grow, together, becoming a different kind of family, learning together about relationships and love… and just gabbing. What we accomplished together, emotionally, happened for sad reasons- but I think it was worth it.
I think it was worth it. That might be the biggest lesson I’ll take from the B-flo experience: taking the wrong fork in the road brings its own adventure.
What adventure will this next fork bring?
3 Comments
seeking fabulousness, or, making one’s own magic.
March 2, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
My “inside the revolution” series of three will be concluded as soon as I figure out how the hell the revolution is going to end. Meanwhile… I’m pursuing fabulousness.
Fabulousness is one part treating yourself, one part scaring yourself, and one part decoration. Decorating your life, yourself, or the world, with a project, love offered, or even the right handbag. It’s anything that celebrates, embellishes, and magickifies life.
To use movie analogies, 2009 was a Clint Eastwood western, full of stubbly chins, sweaty chaps and torn Wanted posters. It was real, it was hard, it was… Buffaloan.
Buffalo teaches you to make your own fun. Mix one 20-piece chicken wing with a half-case of beer and a hippety-hoppity station on Pandora, and you’ve got yourself a winter party in B-flo. Throw on your Uggs and wade off through the snow and ice. Bar hop. Drive out to the ‘burbs to go shopping at the shiny new big box stores. Life here is like the childhood our grandparents reminisce about, when kids didn’t have all those “newfangled gadgets,” and just entertained themselves with sticks and pebbles. Buffaloans can do a lot with sticks and pebbles.
Our family’s emotional life has had a similarly rough-hewn texture, with tearful conversations about my parents, my romantic stumblings, job drama. It has been a period of growth and discovery, but there’s very little about my life, for the past twelve, maybe fourteen months, you could call “fabulous.”
Even my hair, at its most awkward face-hugging phase while I grow it out, contributes to what you might call a period of “enh.”
When I go on Facebook, on the other hand, and see photos of my friend’s upcoming theatrical performance, or an old boss windblown and relaxed on a ski trip, or a couple smiling on a tropical beach, I feel awe. Because those things are fabulous. Wearing costumes onstage, traveling, finding gorgeous sunsets, loving a new person, painting a mural, raising a baby, carrying a pink patent leather handbag, and learning to tango, are all fabulous.
But especially travel, creativity, babies, and pink patent leather handbags.
One can be unfabulous in a big city, and completely sensational working as a waitress. It’s not about one’s circumstances so much as what one makes of them.
I wrote the other day about appreciating life’s imperfections, rather than expecting sudden magic. The distinction I’m making tonight is to not only accept what life gives me, but to give something back to my life. I used to think fabulousness was granted to the special, but after having a few fabulous moments myself, I know it’s something one has to create for oneself. Fate may have plunked me in Dodge City, but that doesn’t mean I have to walk around with mud on my boots, shooting strangers. And while the rough-hewn, unfabulous periods of our lives are inevitable and necessary, I’ve come too close to believing that’s all I get, or deserve… or want.
The weather is warming, snow melting. We’ll probably have one more big storm before March is over, but I didn’t even need to wear a coat today. Like so many things in my life, I’m always surprised when something horrid- like winter in Buffalo- can just end, without my needing to take out a warrant or sign a petition to ban it. It’s a pleasant thing to re-learn.
I’ve been offered a fun but low-paying job, here, that I have to either accept, or decline, in the morning. As I do so, I’ll be pondering the topic of my last blog: location, and how it affects one’s… fabulousness. I don’t think any city will ever satisfy my every desire, and I don’t think any city can be blamed for most of my personal problems. But I do think some cities are harder to flourish in than others. And if I have to go, I can’t think of any better guide than, “Where would Starina go?”
Now she was fabulous.
No Comments
inside the revolution, part two: life is just a chicken breast.
February 26, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
My mom’s fond of cooking chicken- breading it, baking it, frying it, putting it in sauces from Asian to Mexican, tacos, salads, pastry shells. When she’s stressed or bored, she goes into the kitchen with a package of skinless thighs and goes to work. She’s never made a chicken omelet but it’s only a matter of time. And that’s the nice thing about chicken- it’s a meat of many colors, adaptable and diplomatic.
I’m twenty-eight years old and have moved twenty times. I’ve lived in six states and three countries, although Spain was only for a month, probably too short to count. I leave it on the list, though, to give my brother a reason to call me pretentious.
What defines relocation, in that context? I had a boyfriend who used to startle me by asking, “are you moving in this weekend?” when he only meant, “are you staying with me this weekend?” To me, a “move” does not require a certain length of time, but intent to stay. You can travel to Thailand for a year, but if you train from village to village, staying with strangers and at hostels, you’ll probably say you “traveled around Thailand for a year.” Move into a Bangkok apartment intending to marry a local, however, and you’ll probably say you lived there, even if he calls off the engagement a month later.
I count the two or three weeks I spent in Seattle in the summer of 2008, because I fully intended to stay, but I do not include the three weeks my mom and I spent in Vegas in January of 2009, because we had no intention of leaving our hotel room. Only two of the locations on my list lasted less than a month, the longest, five or six years.
To finish up the illustrative statistics, roughly half of those moves were initiated by my parents or as a family decision, the other half were solely mine. That means I’ve caught up fast with my parents, absorbing, without realizing it, both their fearlessness and their fear. The logistical challenges of packing up one’s belongings and carting them across the country to a foreign city do not bother us- the logistical challenges of staying put, do. If we had a dispute with the neighbors, or the kids in school were horrid, my brother and I rarely had to compromise, wait, or adapt. We’d soon be on our way. It bred a certain arrogance and dissatisfaction that’s hard to root out.
Over the years, my willingness to move evolved into a sense that, if or when anything went wrong, it was my duty to move. We moved several times for promotions for my dad, causing both his professional growth and our financial comfort. We moved to flee neighbors who held loud late-night parties and parked dead cars in their front yards, again to avoid forced busing to a school forty-five minutes away, a third time because pollution was making us sick (I found my hormone test results taken after we left Spokane- wow). In those cases, staying would have been simply due to fear. Ergo, if you’re unhappy and you’re not packing boxes, it’s because you’re afraid of change.
Those concepts, of location, happiness, and fear, are almost inextricably linked in my family’s consciousness. We’re addicted to change, convinced that unhappiness is our fault, and only curable by renting a U-haul.
This has come to a head here in Buffalo, a city a recent Forbes survey dubbed the “eighth most miserable city in the country.”
Twenty moves in twenty-eight years… but I’ve lived in Buffalo for more than a year.
When I visited my relatives in Seattle before Christmas, my aunt told me, “don’t stay there just because you’re ready to settle down.” I think about going home, about the Puget Sound, the superior jazz, the pine trees, family members who I know I could have a margarita with on a Friday night. I also think about the family members who stiffen when I mention Obama, meditation, or sex, the region’s fondness for Goretex, and the obese people who wheel themselves around Wal-Mart in electric carts.
Buffalo has a similar balance sheet. Relationships I tried to build here, have not lasted, my job’s kaput, the weather’s awful. On the other hand, living is cheap, bars are the best in the world, and my mom, brother and I know a lot of people here, whether by face or by name. It’s here, oh-so ironically, where we find a sense of community we haven’t experienced since I was in high school.
Could we find that community again, if we lived in Seattle in the same spirit? Maybe. Probably. I’m not sure if it matters where the next chapter of this story takes place. I’m not sure if it ever did.
I was jabbing a knife into some raw chicken breasts last night, duplicating something I saw Rachel Ray do to pork chops on the TV at the laundromat last week (we don’t have TV at home). As I stuffed the slivers of garlic into the white flesh, I thought, this is what it always comes down to: hum along to the radio, wash the dishes that have collected through out the day, turn on the oven, and try a new recipe. No matter what I do or where I go, from Portland to Devonshire, if you give me an evening alone at home, that’s probably how I’ll spend it. I usually wind up taking so long with the cooking that I’m not very hungry by the time I sit down to eat. I usually feel angry with myself for not having a nicer dining space in which to eat it. And I usually stay up too late with a craft project or blog afterward, like I am tonight.
But instead of staying put and changing my habits, I move, thinking I’ll establish a different routine somewhere else. That I’ll find myself eating with a lovable man instead of the cat, preparing great meals instead of “could be better” experiments, sitting down in a cute little dining room instead of at the Ikea thing mounted on the kitchen wall. But here I am, ten years out of high school, after so many different apartments, cities, roommates, jobs, weather patterns, sink-to-stove arrangements, and still, if I’m by myself on a weeknight, I’ll probably just cook some damn chicken and eat it alone. And by god, if that’s what I tend to do, what’s so wrong with that? Why am I looking for instant perfection?
Because at some point we forgot to enjoy the benefits of our fearlessness and started feeling compelled by it. We forgot that it’s okay to settle.
Mr. Hotness told me a few weeks ago that instead of changing my life, perhaps I needed to change the “writer’s perspective” on that life. That I needed to go into the “room of my depression” and sit there till I got bored and left. It was a beautiful metaphor, and one I’ve had in mind ever since. Sticking chicken into the oven last night, I kept mentally poking myself, looking for signs of having walked into that “depression room-” but I hadn’t. I even had fresh rosemary, for Pete’s sake, and my, how the asparagus glistens when it’s been burnt in olive oil. So my cooking skills won’t “catch me a husband” any time soon. I’m starting to find real, plain, boring old life just a little more interesting than my quest for an imaginary, perfect one.
The equation is pretty simple. If you say, “I want this kind of apartment, this kind of companionship, this kind of entertainment, this kind of landscape outside,” you can expect to be dissatisfied. If you say, “Ah, a night to do anything I want! Let’s put on a ‘Frasier’ DVD and have a beer,” with the cat snoring in the corner and your fuzziest slipper socks on, suddenly, you’re having fun. I’m not talking about rose-colored glasses or blind complacency, just acceptance. Or “acception,” as that cab driver in Chicago told me last December.
The chicken, by the way, was delicious. When I cooked asparagus again tonight, I did not burn it. And that little forward step, my friends, could have happened in any city from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.
No Comments
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.
2 Comments
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.
1 Comment
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.
1 Comment
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.
No Comments
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.
No Comments
Goldilocks, Dorothy, and other women who have to deal with lions and tigers and bears.
November 16, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I have been offered three ways to leave Buffalo. All three are extremely kind. All three give pause. I could stay with my dad in California, but have serious issues with my dad. I could stay with my cousin in Seattle, but have already tried living in that area like eight hundred times. I could stay with Mr. Hotness’s family, but would probably be a burden, would have to find a sitter for my bunny, and would come back in a month or two to start over again.
Like Goldilocks, I keep trying the porridge, moving from plate to plate, waiting for an option that is hot enough, comfortable enough, big enough, just right.
Meanwhile here I am growing more and more depressed. If one measures depression on a scale of one to ten, ten being hospital-time and one being Strawberry Shortcake-happy, I slid from a four to a three on Saturday morning and have stayed there since. It’s not a good place to be. It’s a place where smiling seems illogical and unnecessary, free will a fantasy, choice futile, and sticky buns big enough to feed a football team an ideal serving for one.
The question is no longer, “why am I still in Buffalo,” but, “why am I still in Buffalo?” Phrased more articulately, I have options now- so why aren’t I taking any of them?
I am frustrated or hurt that I lived here for a year and no one is going to stop me from leaving, that the effort I put into my job, the friends I’ve made, the men who saw me in my new black heels the other night, for gawsh sakes, were just things that happened. My lifestyle and quality of life has not substantially changed in the past twelve months. I got here in December feeling this way, and even after the porch parties and the “tough talks,” I feel this way now.
Buffalo is my Oz, a weird place a tornado threw me into. I met this cool Tin Man, and Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion. I found some sexy red shoes. I lost my temper with a wizard. And I did learn a thing or two.
But instead of kissing the Scarecrow goodbye and climbing into one of these three hot air balloons headed back to Kansas, I’m sitting here moping because Oz didn’t work out.
Maybe it isn’t about which hot air balloon is right- maybe it’s just about getting on any one of them. Maybe it’s about letting go.
No Comments
the dollhouse and the landscape artist.
November 3, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
My friend Uke sent me Naomi Wolf’s The Treehouse a few weeks ago. This morning I woke before dawn to visit the bathroom, and returned to bed with stomach roiling and head full of tasks for the coming work day. After half an hour of that, I turned on the light and opened the book, to finish it, tears rolling down my face.
Wolf’s father, a professor and poet, based his life and his teaching on identifying, cultivating and cherishing one’s unique creative purpose. He defined that creative purpose as anything one has a passion for, be it house painting or oil painting, sales or science. As long as one loves it, and one devotes oneself to it.
I haven’t fully identified why yet, but even talking about the book makes me cry.
Last Sunday morning, I picked my mom up from the airport and drove her down to East Aurora, a town of 6,600, about half an hour south of Buffalo. My new apartment, which I plan to move into this coming Sunday, has one room big enough for a bed and loveseat, a rounded doorway into an eat-in kitchen with white cabinets, and a a claw-footed bathtub with flowers painted on it years ago in gold and teal. A little gas stove heats the main room. The windows look out on familial yards bedecked with autumn leaves and plastic slides.
While wiping out the cabinets and sanitizing the bathroom, she and I caught up on the past few weeks. I ran a sponge over the molding with the same care I used to paint small pieces of dollhouse furniture. After contemplating various ways of leaving Buffalo for the past two months, I had finally realized that the only thing I truly needed was my own space. This apartment, in a town with a Main Street that has managed to keep it theater open and showing current movies, represents that autonomy, an escape from Buffalo’s less-than-lovely landscapes, and a symbolic retreat from the pain I’ve caused and experienced romantically this year.
I gravitate to cities to find romance, that rapturous moment in the circle of light a streetlamp casts against the night sky and looming, shadowed skyscrapers. Fairly or not, I do not expect rapturous connection from a town where men in work boots eat their hash browns with ketchup at the local diner. And that’s part of the reason I’m moving there.
Finished, we locked up the dollhouse and drove back toward Buffalo. As the thruway wound into downtown, I described an episode in The Treehouse when Wolf and her father meet with a landscaper to discuss the overgrown property around the nineteenth century house she’s bought in update New York. Instead of taking the conversation for granted as many would when discussing a project with hired help, Wolf’s father catches a stray comment the man makes about the landscape’s potential. He responds as one artist to another, encouraging him to express himself. The next thing they know, the gratified gardener has tamed the scrub, uncovered the land’s beauty, installed a tiny mailbox outside their daughter’s treehouse, handing in a bill at the end that “barely covered his expenses,” according to Wolf.
I choked up relating the story, apologizing to my mom, who assured me it was all right to cry. Ordinarily I agree, but I felt disconcerted as I blinked away my tears. I needed to change lanes and get off the thruway, but instead I was sobbing about a man recognizing another man’s vision… of bushes.
I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week and a half, struggling with my brother’s snoring from the other side of the room (as he does with mine), the animals hopping on and off my bed, the multitude of projects awaiting me the next morning at work, and the random aspects of a new venture, such as moving to the country, that only occur to someone at two in the morning.
Tomorrow I’ll turn twenty-eight still a virgin to car ownership, but moving to the country means I have to buy one, and soon. I’ve never driven in the snow, much less gone to the DMV to change a title, or bought liability insurance. But just when these sharp fears prick my thoughts late at night, I ask myself, Do you still want to do this? And the answer is, Of course.
The other night Dawn and I stood in a friend’s kitchen, in our Halloween costumes, hiding from the other partygoers and drinking beer from plastic cups. Leaning on the counter, I finally articulated my philosophy about this decision to move to East Aurora. This, I told her, waving my cup and teetering on my heels, is a constructive adventure. As opposed to throwing away my job, shipping my belongings upstate with my brother, and moving across the country, like I did when frustrated last year, I’m keeping my job, and carting my belongings to an apartment only half an hour away. The car is a responsibility that seems progressive, mature, all that practical stuff I rarely think about.
But until I find myself safely ensconced in that dollhouse, with a car of my own in the driveway, and a few trips to work under my belt, I’ll probably continue to lay awake at night. In those wee sma’s, I don’t know what I’ll read now that I’ve finished soaking up Leonard Wolf’s philosophy about creative individuality.
Maybe the next sleepless night I have, I’ll contemplate the tears that came when I described Wolf’s landscape artist. It sounds like a gloomy topic, tears, but like Leonard Wolf, I believe in a universe that helps those who listen to inexplicable tears. I’ve spent much of the past year trying to carve out a new life for myself and giving my mom some emotional support to do the same. And after a year of that, I’m crying on the thruway, envying the recognition another artist has received.
This is not gloomy, this is redemptive, and just in time. I’ll take myself to the dollhouse and make myself a cup of cider, while the leaves fall outside. I’ll have that long overdue talk with my inner landscape artist. She longs for someone to hear her vision of how to turn bracken and scrub into a rolling vista. And we’ll figure something out. We usually do.
