paradigm shift!
April 10, 2010 by admin, under Uncategorized.
I usually make it a rule not to write about generalities. Still, today requires one. To quote Wikipedia, “paradigm shift” means “a change in basic assumptions.” I have experienced a paradigm shift, and man, do I love them puppies.
For the past twenty-eight years of my life, I have acted on one basic, gloomy principle: how can I avoid fucking up my or anyone else’s life?
Thanks to the romantic suffering my mom and I went through together last year, one of my friend’s decision to commit fully to her boyfriend, a few great self-help books, my favorite astrologers, my brother’s wise advice, and probably every other person I’ve spoken to in the past six months, that question has finally changed.
I don’t care if I mess up mine or anyone else’s path, anymore. Worrying about doing so makes life suck so much it’s hard to imagine me doing anything worse, unless I actually bought an Uzi and went on a bloody rampage. Which I won’t do, because it doesn’t fit into the new paradigm any more than it fit into the old one.
Now, I find myself asking how I can live this moment. Here, now, with this person, this tree, this cup of iced decaf coffee. Fully, and well. With a flourish and a smile and a leaning-forward big gamble on life in general. By recognizing the possibility it may make me blush later, and then, by throwing that possibility away.
Scorpio
By Rick Levine
Your two ruling planets, Mars and Pluto, are currently engaged in a winner-takes-all struggle, but it’s actually a stalemate because there won’t be a winner if anyone loses now. This will be a problem as long as you are in a competitive frame of mind. But you have the power to shift the paradigm from conflict to cooperation. By changing the rules of the game, everyone can come out ahead.
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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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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.
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how do you measure, measure a year?
November 9, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
How to measure the success of a journey? In the money you earned, acclaim you won, position you gained? In the love shared and offered? In the- wait- we know this song- it’s Rent‘s “Seasons of Love:”
How can you measure
the life of a woman or man?In truths that she learned,
or in times that he cried.
In bridges he burned, or
the way that she died?
I envy my friend in Mongolia, describing her frozen sink and sleeping bag bed. I stiffen with resentment talking to a girl at a garage sale, selling a cute purse that was her “one indulgence” while living penniless in Brazil. I look around at my belongings and see an accusation: this stuff is weighing you down.
Four months abroad last fall was not enough.
But I have not traveled again since last November because I measured the success of that journey in the lack of money and direction I had when I returned, the difficulty of loving someone in another country, the general shock of being told that I had a week to pack my bags and leave England.
I chided myself that I was experiencing the predictable result of making irrational, risky choices. I’ve tried all year to do the rational thing, to seek order as opposed to chaos. And look what that obsession with rationality has gotten me. I’ve had an apartment of my own for two of the past eleven months, and am not earning enough to decorate it, myself or my friends- this “real” job sure has improved my quality of life. We all know I could care less about my keen new title, much less the ever-building responsibilities of the position. The friends I’ve made- we’ve discussed that as well. I’m a drag to be around, self-absorbed and cranky in my unhappiness. If I put all this year’s intimacy, romance and sex into one clump, it still would not fill a month of the year’s calendar. I’m not writing, painting birthday pictures for nephews, creating new collages to hang on my wall, knitting.
I am so tired of complaining, moping, whining, sleeping, being short-tempered, distracted, stressed out, all with the goal of more responsibility, more rationality, more future-thinking, more boredom.
I talk to friends and feel bored with me.
Hard work does not bring one rewarding relationships, romantic love, familial peace, personal creative satisfaction, a sense of home. It just brings more work, and more worry that you won’t get all the work done, your boss will take away your right to do that work by firing you, or you’ll keep doing the work forever and ever without being any happier than you are today. It doesn’t matter how practical you are- life is still wacky and uncertain.
Working as a nanny in England, I had no future, no plans, no money, no apartment, and I was the happiest I’ve ever been. We can slave away avoiding risk or we can just follow our frikken bliss and take our chances. It’s a question of what scares you more: extreme discomfort, or that “quiet desperation” we all know too well.
I am not moving to East Aurora. Burying myself in the snow of a small town, committing to this job and this area for yet another year, alone, was a beauty of a “rational” way to avoid taking real risk. And that’s not my credo.
If I measure a year in happiness experienced or spread, my 2009 would not be worth singing about. But 2008 was play-worthy, and 2010 will be, too. You wait and see. It isn’t about luck, Cupid’s attentions or your bankroll, it’s about what you love the most and what you fear the most, and finding a way to seek both. I’ll get there. It’s just taking me a little longer to find my map this time.
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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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let's drink to anyone but me.
October 12, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
My mom is dating someone here in Buffalo who is not my dad, and enjoying it, which may be our family’s biggest triumph of 2009. She is also going back to Seattle the morning after next.
I’m fantasizing about Mr. Hotness a lot, which makes me feel both helpless, and inclined to fantasize about people I can’t be with.
My bunny is going mad, glaring at things, peeing and chewing through my room.
My brother has a cold. I wish he’d catch himself a girlfriend instead.
There is a new Chinese and sushi restaurant across the street. It’s overpriced.
I don’t know where to move or how to support myself when I get there, and everyone I have talked to, wants me to share a bedroom with their baby, or wash their windows regularly, or pretend I find farming interesting.
I want a bath tub with a functioning drain system and a hot water tank that will fill it.
I went to Letchworth State Park today and saw the “Grand Canyon of the East” with Candi and her son. The leaves were orange and red, the air smelled of pine needles, Candi revealed her powers of perception yet again, and the little one and I pushed each other around. It was tons of fun. She is also happily involved with someone. I feel like Munch’s screamer, but I will sandwich this useless little bookmark of an entry between these two couples.
There are some folks out there taking risks, taking off their clothes, taking off their fear, giving in, with abandon, with desire, with hope, to the one thing that makes all this crap bearable: love. Let’s cheer these two couples, carrying torches and running barefoot in the rain to each other. I have never run that path well, or for long, that path to another human being.
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scare me.
October 1, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
“Why is familiarity worrisome?” I asked my mom, trying to puzzle out the source of my discomfort with comfort. She couldn’t answer me. That afternoon I drove through the rain that defied my flapping windshield wipers, to Buffalo’s West Side, where drug deals are often spotted on corners, and the crime lords have fireworks contests on the Fourth of July that light up the sky.
In a largely black neighborhood, at a Boys & Girls club servicing largely black families, my organization is providing a dance program conceived, managed and taught by white women. This was on my mind as I hesitated in the car outside the green and red clubhouse, eyeing the children on the sidewalk, the waistlines of their pants cresting their knees. The carwash across the street was vacant, its three covered driveways for cars empty, its sign still brightly lettered, weeds sprouting around its base. A lot next to the clubhouse had patches of concrete fading into weeds and gravel. I couldn’t tell if that was the parking lot, or part of the play field of tall, grayish grass surrounding the building. I parked in the driveway in front of the door and walked inside, to be told by the first adult I saw that the parking lot was around the corner.
I circled the block for almost ten minutes, looping and looping, growing more and more frustrated with my inability to find this mysterious Brigadoon of a parking lot, and the arrogance of we six, four teaching dancers, myself and my boss, taking it upon ourselves to educate children who grew up in an alien lifestyle, about dance. The houses I passed had dark windows, bars over glass and doors, sagging corners, tiny front lawns. Everyone I knew had a story about this neighborhood, but my boss was the only person I knew who lived here, much less had a friend who lived here. Who were we, I muttered to myself as I leaned over the steering wheel, peering through the quarter inch of rain sheeting down my windshield, to proclaim ourselves providers of culture, when we knew so little about the culture of the people we were providing it to? We were arrogant, missionaries.
“They” would hate us, “they” would be insulted by my proselytizing presence, I thought, as I finally found the parking lot and ran the ten feet to the door of the clubhouse. Shoulders and arms wet, I opened the door and was greeted with “Hey it’s another dance teacher!” Walking in, wearing pink paisley rain boots and a purple shirt under my black jumper, I blinked into the bright yellow gymnasium, several adults moving toward me. “I can’t dance,” I responded, silently chiding myself for falling back on a white girl’s defense when several black men had effectively told me this summer that I’d make a great stripper. “But I work with her,” I said, smiling at the dance instructor who is leading this program for us. A thin woman with a penchant for the tanning booth and ruffly clothes, she led me into the room where she was going to train the staff as a prelude to the program.
I sat down in a corner, surprised by the friendly smiles from the staff. There was no resentment of the missionary here. As the dance teacher discussed metabolism, heart rate and serving size, the clubhouse director ran out of the room to answer a phone call. I interrupted the dance teacher to add that even though we wanted children to leave the program knowing more about nutrition and fitness, the important thing was for them to have fun moving. One of the staff waved a hand and said, “We’ll sneak it in, they won’t even notice, they’ll be too busy dancing.” A while later she asked if they could use the dance steps with the kids on days of the week when the dance teacher wasn’t there. They all teased the male staff member about the McDonalds Angus burger he’d eaten that day, and the one he’d eaten the day before.
The clubhouse director returned to suggest we keep the session short, because the front of the building was flooded, and the water could easily flow this way.
The dance teacher rushed through the last page of her handout and turned on her CD player, telling everyone to get up. Clomping along in my rain boots, I danced along with the staff to Christina Aguilera singing “Car Wash.”
We shook those booties. Hand on hip, one foot out tapping to the beat, I thought about whether I was keeping up as well as the clubhouse staff. I thought about whether I seemed stiff and vanilla to them. I thought about why I didn’t go dancing every single weekend. Hell, with these women.
Water flowing in gentle streams into the gymnasium outside our classroom, we finished the routine, out of breath but remarking on how “jazzed up” we felt. I asked the dance teacher and clubhouse director about one performance date we hadn’t yet finalized, and then I started to leave.
The woman who’d assured me she’d “sneak in” the nutrition knowledge complimented my rain boots. I told her I hadn’t known I’d need them inside. She laughed. I left, running back to my car, to turn on the Beyonce CD I’d been listening to for the past three days, and drive home.
On my way, I wondered why I felt so high. I felt, in fact, the exact antithesis to the uncomfortable comfort I’d felt that morning. It wasn’t comfort I’d felt, I realized, but a lack of risk. The two aren’t necessarily synonymous; in my case, I lack certain comforts, but am also not taking any risks. The combination leaves me feeling asleep and unhappy at the same time.
Driving into that alien neighborhood, representing my organization at an outside venue, alone, for the first time since I started this job, meeting these women, dancing to “Car Wash,” realizing that they don’t care if it’s a white lady teaching their kids Salsa, or a black one, so long as some nice, smart, creative adult, just gets up with these kids and gets them to move, hell, that made me feel all right.
It made me feel alive. It involved risks, even if those risks were just tripping on my rain boots during the dance, saying something stupid, or being mugged in the parking lot.
Every parent teaches their child a different way to release, escape and conquer fears. My parents taught me their favorite: to move somewhere new. That may be what I wind up doing. But it’s not the only way. Telling difficult truths, having to pretend you know what you’re doing, meeting someone new, wearing high heels, learning a new dance step, sometimes just looking someone in the eye can be scary. They all can be edges on which to tiptoe, and that’s what I need. I need to be scared. If I’m not, I’m failing at living.
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the towel ultimatum and telling the goddamn truth.
September 27, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Mr. Hotness and I have been talking about the successes and failures of our seven-month, largely long-distance relationship. It’s been good to do so. One thing that came up was anger, which I never showed him. I don’t like losing my temper with anyone, and always assume that doing so with a boyfriend would drive him away (more parental stuff I’ve never had to work out because I don’t stay with anyone long enough to lose my cool… bad sign?).
During the winter and spring, when my conversations with Mr. Hotness did not go well, I’d just get off Skype and rant to my mom, my brother, the DF, anyone who’d listen. Never to the man who was causing me this anger or frustration. I assumed that, in order to keep our long-distance love alive, I had to be the soul of patience and tolerance.
The other day, during our catch-up conversation, I lost my temper with Mr. Hotness, and sent him an email about it, instead of someone else. I didn’t edit for readability, couch in reflective “how this makes me feel’s,” or douse with compassion. It was doused instead with poor sentence structure and swear words. And hitting “send” felt great, like I’d exhaled after holding my breath for months.
Instead of throwing up his hands and ending the conversation, as I’d expected him to (as the DF, ironically enough, did several times) he thanked me for being honest about my feelings, saying it finally sounded like the real me.
Mr. Hotness is nothing if not complex and unpredictable.
But his reaction made me aware that while I pride myself on honestly expressing sadness, confusion, and stress, I do not honestly express anger. I hide it. I have historic reasons to expect it will push someone away, but that’s no excuse. It’s unrealistic. I do lose my cool with my relatives, and sometimes I’m able to with friends, although it depends on the relationship and person’s fighting style. But even though I assess the strength of a relationship based on how emotionally open it is, I forget anger is an emotion, forget the importance of surviving pissed-off-ed-ness.
When I met Mr. Hotness, I felt instinctively there wouldn’t be time to slowly reveal my emotional, “messy” side, as we sometimes do in a relationship. I let him know, before I’d even met him, that I was angsting about living so far from home. It set the tone; I didn’t have to pretend to be happy-go-lucky when I didn’t feel that way, and I knew he could bear the mess. Because of that, we were somewhat prepared to deal with my world becoming very messy indeed when my mom discovered my dad had cheated on her.
But when he took three weeks to buy real towels to replace the one towel he’d cut into several pieces for himself before my arrival in his life, I didn’t throw one, frayed and wet because we’d both used it, in his face and insist he buy some new ones if he wanted me to spend another weekend with him. I wanted to. It was stupid- how hard is it to buy a couple goddamn towels, when you keep talking about doing so?
Instead I made little “it’s nothing”comments to him when he’d express frustration with himself for having let another week go by without getting any. Instead I talked to my friends there about it, telling my mom that, yes, if he did take another week to buy them, that was it. I actually made an ultimatum in my head about towels. Who does that? My only argument was that it seemed symbolically disrespectful and procrastinate-y at the same time- but I didn’t tell Mr. Hotness that.
He did buy towels, a few weeks later than I felt it should have taken him, the way his plans to move here took a few months longer than I felt it should have taken him. The Palmer he knew, though, had infinite patience. The Palmer he knew would wait.
And I didn’t wait. I couldn’t. So maybe it would have been helpful to throw that towel in his face a lot earlier on.
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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.
