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?
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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dropping anchor.
October 27, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I’m not normal. Never have been. I come from a woman who painted thrift store furniture with the attention and care of Picasso finishing a canvas, and considered a discount grocery store the ideal tourist destination when visiting a new town. I come from a father who is admittedly pretty normal, but who still worked in the motorcycle industry for twenty years without owning a motorcycle for most of it. We don’t buy stuff because it will just have to be packed up in boxes and take up room in a storage unit or moving van later. We don’t buy stuff because it will take money we could spend on a nice dinner out or a pair of plane tickets- important things.
And we move. I went to three grade schools and two high schools, my brother to a different set of four and two. You move that much, growing up, you learn ways to adapt. In my case, to take each new situation equally seriously, in my brother’s, to not take anything seriously. So now he drinks and smokes and I work too hard, although those distinctions are fading. We’re both kind of equally working and drinking too much.
I sit here surrounded by chaos, having just sent a horrid confession to Mr. Hotness, awaiting my mom’s return to this crowded apartment, my coworker and I sweating over our desks, and my stomach clenches over a choice I have to make. Either I accept an offer from my dad to leave Buffalo and live with him, or I stay, here. And why would I?
I do not love Buffalo, I will probably never love Buffalo. I find it ugly, depressing, slightly pathetic, and I can’t say it’s been particularly kind to me.
I look around at this chaos, though, and wonder how moving yet again could possibly help me finally learn to live. To make a home for myself, to build lasting relationships, to act as though every chapter isn’t nine to twelve months long, as long as a school year.
My parents taught me many things I still believe today: relationships are more important than possessions, you do it yourself if you can, fights are fought fairly, fears are never given audience, and one never passes up a trip someplace new. But there is one thing I think they were hugely wrong about- that the next place is going to be any better than this one.
Another city would have more than two museums, it would have a higher employment rate, and it would probably have a sex toy store I wouldn’t be afraid to walk into. I will probably move that way soon. But after everything that’s happened this year, living in so many different cities… the things I want have nothing to do with my address. They have to do with a bedroom I can call my own, an interesting way to support myself, some friends, god forbid, getting laid now and then. I was unhappy when I didn’t have those things in Portland, when I didn’t have those things in Manhattan, when I didn’t have those things in Spain.
It isn’t about the place. I don’t honestly know what it is about, but I’d like to find out. Call it Buffalo, call it Buffgolia, call it Suckallo. For now, like it or not, I might have to call it home.
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oh, it's been broughten.
October 19, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Nothing was “right” with my life a month ago. My mom and brother were sharing the one bedroom apartment with me, I felt like a cat in heat in the dog room at the pound, like Candi had become but a memory (said with a melodramatic wrist draped over my forehead) and ducking near-constant criticism and unfair blame from my boss.
But I didn’t want to talk to any of these people about any of the things that were bothering me, I wanted to just go, go anywhere, New York, San Francisco, Milan, Beijing, Fiji. I didn’t care. Just get me out of here and away from the bullshit. I’d had a rough year. I didn’t want to talk anymore, about my parents, my lovers, the drama. Just go, before I’d say something I’d regret. But I couldn’t find a way to escape, and meanwhile…
Mr. Hotness and I started talking again. After a few polite exchanges about where the past few months had taken each of us, I lost my temper with him, and good. Instead of throwing up his hands and walking away from the e-conversation, he said he was relieved by my anger, that it sounded like the real me.
Candi ignored yet another text message, and I threw my phone at the wall, hoping she could hear it way out in the ‘burbs. After the sheetrock settled, she messaged me on Facebook, “what’s up, Toots.” We met at Cole’s. I ate chocolate madness lava extreme rich dark mousse lushness, she ate ravioli, and we talked.
One night last week, my coworker found herself unable to contain her frustration with our boss, saying a couple times, “And Palmer agrees with me.” My boss invited me, unknowing, into her office the next day, to “hear out my frustrations”… and tried to make a lot of it my fault. I’d already had the conversation two hundred times in the past month, in my head, and was firm about the amount of responsibility I’d accept for the situation.
I left winded, but fifty cent an hour richer, and working with the woman I use to work with, the boss I was friends with, the boss who is an interesting artist with lots of big ideas for the organization. Not the boss who blames me for every little thing. She and my coworker and I had lunch today after a two-hour meeting, and talked about trashy TV we love and pregnant cats in the ‘hood.
My mom’s staying in Seattle, temporarily relieving the pressure on this apartment, and dating someone whose brain is as big as this apartment.
My brother is taking professional interest in and control of his job.
My bunny’s sleeping on my bed again at least a few nights a week.
I learned that box brownies taste way better in the shape of cupcakes than they do baked in a flat pan.
I’m going to two meetings tomorrow, representing the organization to people from all over the city- yikes! New challenge, good challenge, ahhh.
I met my dad for coffee yesterday. We avoided serious topics and talked mostly of work and the weather. His presence still showed me he was willing to try. Try even though I’d told him I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, even though I’d been blunt about the problems I have with him as a father, even though difficult conversations would inevitably follow. He was there telling me what Mr. Hotness did: bring it on.
For two months I kept thinking, “If you don’t let me retreat, I’m going to lose my temper… don’t make me lose my temper…!” I don’t plan on turning into Ms. Hyde, but I also have learned from this early fall madness that I have to lose my temper, like anyone else, and people are going to deal. They’re not going to evaporate or turn into dust cubes like someone in a Star Trek episode. We’ll move on.
So bring it, bring the drama and the pain and the mess, and also the bunnies, the brownies, and the love. We’ll sort out who wins later. Just bring yourself.
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how we loop madly back to the past.
September 14, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
So I’m not blogging much right now because I’m not happy, and hate whine-blogging. But, here I am a week from my last post, and don’t want anyone to think I’ve died.
I’m just struggling.
My boss has gone from a friend to someone I want to dodge. I have too much work to do, and it all needed to be finished yesterday. One of our four staff just gave his notice, after working for us for less than two weeks.
It’s been three months since I had sex, yet not only do I not know any single men in Western New York, I don’t trust men very much right now. Internally I find myself narrowing my eyes at unsuspecting fellows, thinking, Would you act the way the DF did?
My mom and brother are still sharing this one bedroom apartment with me. They’re Goldilocks, just before finding the porridge that’s just right, except that scene has lasted for about three weeks longer than it did in the original folk tale.
My new friend Candi is dating someone who lives forty-five minutes outside Buffalo, which, added to her five year old son, and her college courses, and her job, somewhat reduces her availability to spend time with li’l ol me.
I feel like this entire year has been an exercise in proving how idiotic and cursed I am romantically, which perhaps makes my earlier complaint that I know no single men in Western New York irrelevant- maybe it’s just as well.
Unpacking our family storage units in Oregon a few months ago, my brother opened what he thought was a novel. It was instead one of my journals, which are indeed scattered through out my belongings like Tribbles. This one was from more than ten years ago, when my mom and I were visiting Phoenix. Living in a one-bedroom apartment in Everett, Washington at the time, my family had considered buying a home in Arizona (it’s a long story), so my mom and I had flown down to scout it out. Apparently the entry my brother opened the book to was written on the trip to Phoenix, and said something like, “I want to go home, but I want to go home to a home I want to go home to.”
And that, folks, is all I have to say about that.
