Every day, here at the office, I see people drinking coffee coffee coffee and never any water. How do they survive? How come they don't die?

What I've Learned, Part V

It's funny how much we can't see in ourselves when we're younger. How we never think we'll change with passing time and how much we end up doing so after all.

The things that have more permanence, our choices for the future, for one, never seem to show their true faces when we take them in at first, do they? We can only learn to make the right steps, little by little, by never ignoring our innate ability to root out right from wrong, and finding guidance when we can't see what's right.

Addiction wasn't a disease that I caught like cancer, it was the result of some decisions I made and my priorities at the time. Luckily this just means I got rid of it by making different decisions and having different priorities. It was inside me to be healthy all along.

Another year has rolled by us, and I thank a lot of you for showing me:

-Accept (and then expect) life to be imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. There is happiness here if you can.

-A bad choice can age well if you really care for it to. Forgive yourself and never repeat it.

-Stop worrying about what you may lose if you want to change for the better (even if it hurts).

-Feed your good wolf more than your bad wolf.

Happy five years to me!

I've been working for a few years now on being more brave. It's been varied in success. I remember when I was young, little, my unchecked courage always made me the most daring kid I knew.

I was the one picked to knock on the haunted house's front door or retrieve the fly ball from the neighbors' yard-guarding dog.

I want to be brave and strong.

[By: Valerie Chiang, via.]

Today I am in a good mood! I got some leeway yesterday into resolving an issue at work that has been a plague on my brain, and today is Friday. Yessss.

What should we do this weekend? Clean the bathroom and the kitchen? Hm. Go for a hike? Make and eat chicken noodle soup? With a soda on the side?

Yes yes, everybody!

I am full of positivity. Your jokes are funny! That story was great! Oh, man, this song is one of the best of all time!

[By: Amy Stein, via.]

Yesterday I felt sick. The day before that too. There was nausea and a horrible overheated feeling all morning. It wasn't until I ate lunch both days that I felt better. Quite curious. Related to the sugarfast? I do not know.

Anyway, Fall is here again. I am fighting lately with the feeling that I shall not survive another winter here but I know I must, I will. Here: work, Portland, you know.

I don't even remember being a kid and not dreading this time of the year. Back then, though, the holidays would come and wipe it all away but who cares about the holidays anymore? Expensive. Stressful. Awkward. There is a coziness and I like to eat up all the food but if I could trade them for good weather, I would.

I'm not sure why but I've never really owned any proper winter clothing so I am going to remedy that this year and see what's what. I do look, smiling, towards snowy walks to get dinner and picking out a tiny Christmas tree.

Last year, the Dear Boy and I quarreled about our tree. We went looking at Fred Meyer but they didn't have the type that the Dear Boy had specifically been imagining. With my positive-outlook-on-life hanging preciously by a thread, I was extremely crestfallen at the idea of going home without a tree so I balled up my fists and became petulant.

We argued a bit but found a nice little tree that held all of our miniature ornaments and the house was happy to have its bright-lighted cheeriness. And me too. Me too.

So we'll see!

Harder Days

I remember pretty clearly the smell of kindergarten. And the feel of it too. How that time period felt inside of me and me inside of it.

I remember the newness of my life, how I felt that I was at the beginning of something long and hard. There was a lot of anxiety for me over anything unfamiliar. I remember that being with all of those other stranger-kids, lining up to go to the big cafeteria that smelled of french fries and dinner rolls, was uncomfortable.

I remember always being bored in class. My legs and arms would get itchy and prickly from being still for too long. The only parts I could lose myself in involved counting or writing.

I remember how much I hated to get up in the morning when it was still dark and cold. How it felt like stealing away in the night and how it frightened me.

And today I realized: nothing has changed.

 

[both paintings by Tom French, via] 

Two years ago today I wrote:

Had a dream I was in the wilderness, cut down the middle with an ice-river, searching for my lost tribe. Found trinkets in the water left like clues. Knelt down to pray, my heart shining like a badge.

Today, this year, I read about a Japanese artist, born in 1929. When she was small, she was abused by her mother and began hallucinating patterns on everything she saw. This grew into a huge body of artistic work, and she is now considered the greatest artist of Japan. She now lives, by choice, in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Hm.

Today is my last day of work 'til I'm off for ten days. Monday: camping for three nights. Friday: the coast for my cousin's wedding for two nights. Yeah!

Fuckin' I can't find a nice image to accompany my entries lately. WTF.

Mondays are stupid.

Sometimes my general confidence in life plummets.


[Via.]

I haven't smoked a cigarette in a long time! Longest ever, in fact! Good for me.

I don't notice any difference, really, like they all said I would, except I can climb stairs without getting as winded and I think my sense of smell is better but it's too hard to tell. I smoked my first cigarette at the tender age of 11 (sorry, Mom!) and quit at 29. Gosh now! That is too long. I hope my lungs can forgive me.

I had another dream again about her dying. I wonder when I will not dream of this anymore. She probably doesn't know and she probably doesn't care or deserve to.

She died and we had to go looking through her things, clean out her house, all of us sort-of relieved because this meant the worry was over. All of us also dead, a little bit, from grief. Hearts painfully dipping low low low. Revisiting memories of blonde-headed happiness, so many many many years ago, because finally we could think of her that way again.

Sometimes in the morning, I shake the low-hearted feeling by breakfast. Sometimes it sticks around all day, a lazy pallbearer late on taking the casket away.

Flirting with 30

On Tuesday I turn 30! Seems to me that this means I'm officially a grown-up now with grown-up expectations. Eep! I think I'll take this opportunity to get more serious about the things I need to get more serious about.

Like...making great tacos and learning how to swim well and hemming my own pants instead of paying a nice lady $13 a pair to do it.

Yes sir, 30 is going to be a good year.

Kurt Vonnegut said this, about writing, and I really like it:

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad's third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench. In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand. All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue. [Via]

 Aw, gosh, ain't he right! I, myself, have a written voice stuck firmly in rurally northwestern America, brewed by the patrons of my parents' restaurant.

"Workers become autonomous, self-realized human beings, but are directed and diverted into goals and activities dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production in order to extract from workers the maximal amount of surplus value possible within the current state of competition between industrialists." (Via)

Allllllright! We're ten weeks away from vacation-week, everybody! The Dear Boy and I booked a yurt for three nights and, oh boy, I am so excited! The yurt is in the lovely Valley of the Rogue State Park (sounds adventurous, doesn't it?) in southern Oregon. It's on the Rogue River and I see many happy swimmin'-time memories being made. Other than that, I will close out vacation-week with my cousin's wedding on the coast. Yippy skippy! Getting closer and closer.

Also on the agenda, this weekend is a three-day weekend and mine and the Dear Boy's two year anniversary! My goodness. Many good things to look forward to.

Over the weekend I watched Howl, that biographical movie about Allen Ginsberg. I discovered Ginsberg in high school and liked his poems very much. They seemed easy for me to relate to, and written plainly. I never knew about the court case aimed to determine whether his book Howl was obscene. The movie was done very well, James Franco did a stand-up job and the animation sequences were very creative.

It got me thinking about the beatniks and the hipsters of the 50s. It was a time when many, many more young people wrote. Much more than now, I think. Now, everyone is in a band. I guess I should feel okay about writing becoming less popular because, you know, small pond, but it is a bit too bad. It might be nice to have a circle of friends that are all plugging away at the same restless hobby as I am. Maybe because it is my hobby, I imagine round tables at quiet coffee shops, inspiration taken away from people I admire and know quite well. Better than gazing at author photos, maybe. More productive, certainly.

What I've Learned, Part 4.5

It was said to me, at the beginning of this journey, that recovery is a long road and it never ends. That remains true, except it's not "recovery" I focus on anymore (like riding a bike, I do it now without thinking), it's more a thing like self-improvement. Financial responsibility, productivity, follow-through, you know. Being nice. Being good.

As always, for lessons successfully learned the hard way, I have very many to thank:

-Difficult situations help you learn.
-Time will help a fresh hurt.
-Nothing is permanent and everything changes.

Happy four and a half years to me!

Kindle Tinder

So I did something exciting today! I put ten of my short stories together (these ones, actually: pdxcreate.com/storiesforhumans) to make an e-book for sale on Amazon's Kindle Store for $4.99! I made a cover and everything!

Very exciting but I know I will have to tweak many things (price and description, probably, to start) before I've got the handle of this e-book self-publishing business. I tried to match the price of other short-story books but I read today that many different factors play into what people will pay for a Kindle title.

Yeah! Productivity! It'll be ready for purchase in 24 hours, y'all, get them credit cards ready.

And, yes, in other writing news, I am still working on the novella. Over halfway done now. Re-working the outline, as needed. Waiting patiently for breezes of inspiration.

Yes please. Via.

Via.

I'm sorry but your clothing line was not inspired by "stars, navigating bodies of water, and studying geometric shapes found in shadows." Stop being so shallow.

Days with lots of reminders of how different I feel from other humans are hard. Maybe it's this way for everyone. I'm not sure. Someone told me today that I learned how to be alone pretty early on because I learned that most people will eventually irritate/disappoint me. I also learned today that I have pretty good patience sometimes for people who are too stupid to listen to what I'm saying.

Seems sad, don't it? Sho nuff do.

Talent and Writing

THIRTEEN weeks 'til vacation week. Hoooooo...

Last night I had a dream in which I was wandering alone around a large tract of land.

Thirteen weeks will go by lickety-split, right? Thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine...



I've been thinking lately about talent. It's interesting to me that some people get into things, like ballet, when they are very small and are able to maintain the drive and focus it takes to be very good at it as an adult. Drawing portraits, writing poetry, playing the flute, ice-skating. I wonder if it takes a lot of pushing from other people. I wonder what it takes.

My own interests have waned and waxed during my life. I think that writing has been my most solid area, though. It's not that I have a noticeable drive to be successful at it, I just do it all the time like a compulsion. Phrases and words float around my mind for days until I put them into a paragraph. I look up nearly every word that I am unsure of when I come across a new one while reading. My brain systematically spells out longer words when I hear them in speech. I re-phrase what people say.



I have also been thinking about talent without audience. The link between being a writer and being a famous writer seems to be muddled in things like marketing and being in the right place at the right time. One can no longer gauge their work's success by receipt. It doesn't matter how much you write or what you write about. That's fine, I guess. I am happy to use what I know for naught. It keeps me in pleasure just to write it down.

Of course, everyone imagines what it would be like if their name held heavy weight. Luminaries, all of us! But you have to ask yourself, is admiration where value lies?



Probably not. As much of a misanthrope as I am, probably not. And aren't most writers, anyway? It's how we silently catalog the experience of being human. How we put intangible emotions into words. We can't relate so we write.

(All photos by Stephen A. Scheer, who said, "It is our deficiency if we cannot explain something that we can see." Via.)

Okay, you guys, the time has come. I knew it would but I didn't want to believe it. Skinny jeans are on their way out. Flared (!) pants are back. I know. I know! It's awful. It goes against everything my eyes perceive to be good.

Haha, just kidding, y'all. Hell on that. Small problems. But! I've been seeing really great 70s-inspired, high-waisted, flared jeans on very stylish ladies for a while now and decided to order some of my own. They'll get here Wednesday. We shall see.

I am excited. I am even more excited about this three-day-weekend coming up, though. I'm gonna eat lots of yummy home-cooked food and play board games and hike my little legs off. Love!


Via.

Today I love Jane Fonda in Cat Ballou.


Via.

Disrespect. It's a crummy feeling, isn't it? I just bashed into someone while getting up from my desk because he was standing very closely behind my chair while talking to someone else. I said, "Oh! Sorry!" He didn't say a word or move an inch so I had to squeeeeeeeeze out of my chair. It's like I do not exist at all. Hmmph. Monday.

By: Marta Antelo, via.

I went on the most beautiful hike yesterday. The most! Actually, it was so muddy out there in the yonder that it was more like a very careful walk. We saw five hundred pale snails and a couple fire-belly newts. Nature is really the only place to fully relax.

Around the middle of it, we heard what sounded like two big boulders being knocked together by a hungry giant! We froze and listened. Again! We moved along, careful to drop our voices into quietness. It's easy to feel like the only living souls sometimes.

Today I am back at work. Mulling and smuggling my thoughts.

Yesterday I wrote a big post about the concept of fate and a German cannibal and Blogger threw it away. Just threw it away! Steams me up.

I like this sculpture very much. Maybe you do too. By: Mike Peter Smith, via.

Yes Yes Everybody!

Here is what went wrong with the fashion industry that started this rash of women feeling badly of themselves. Without her, maybe models would still have big butts (holler) and burgeoning bazoombas (as does the majority of female humans). Here is her point of view on the subject, if you're interested. (Photo Via)

Moving on!

I am counting down the hours until LA. I am not ashamed. I've found that it's very important to have series of things to look forward to. It's when the up-coming seems boring and non-rewarding that makes wallowing happen, isn't it? The "what's the point"s and the "there's no use"s and the "none of it really matters"s. Well! Let's stay away from all that. Let's listen to some records and get some donuts and milk from 7-11 and have ourselves a pep talk.

Summer's coming and we'll have lots of slow walks under the branches in all that green. We'll laugh and tell stories while drinking beer in the grass. We will drag the old black BBQ out of the garage and try out new recipes from countries we've never been to (we won't know if it's authentic but we'll know it tastes good on our white-bread tongues). At night, on our bicycles, we'll zip past all those tables of girls and boys sipping vodka from cheap glasses outside the bars, holding our heads up high to just about touch that cool air up there close to the stars.

We'll be alright.

6.5 hours 'til LA.

There's a large gap in holidays causing three-day-weekends between January and May. Otherwise, all year long, there's about one a month. Well, friends, we're approaching the end of our fast again this year. I had trouble getting out of bed this morning (the poor Dear Boy has a head cold and snored all night, bless his heart), and so have found Memorial Day as my wee beacon today.

Also, at the end of five days, LOS ANGELES! Our weather is shit so I'm excited for some sunshine. It was actually quite beautiful here yesterday and I need more, more, more! Plane trips are pretty exciting too. So much so, I had a very long and involved dream about flying in a tiny two-person aircraft last night.

One week later, here I am. I stayed home yesterday and the day before. I'm alright, though, everything's good.

Not this weekend but next weekend, the Dear Boy and I fly to LA for two nights! I haven't been there since my family moved to Oregon in 1982. I am super excited. Mentally picking out my outfits for 85+ degree days as we speak! I can't wait, I just can't wait. We're going because the Museum of Contemporary Art is having an exhibition right now on the history of graffiti. Dear Boy feels that his life's work would not be complete without documenting it. Bon par moi! Gimme dat sunshine.

I have nothing much to say except that today I started sticking it to Wicked Lady. Pretty satisfying. Pretty exhausting.


Via.

Here's something funny:


A week ago or so, I found Wicked Lady had put her empty laptop box in the most curious of places. So I put the box back out in the office. Passive-aggressive? Probs. Whatevs.


And then! A week later, the box appeared again in the same area, but in a slightly different spot. It makes you wonder what her house looks like, doesn't it? Holy hell, man.

Also, I had a dream last night that was pretty gruesome and again featured myself as a homicidal nut. I was in a large group of people in an old junk warehouse. The ring-leader said it was time to play a game. To play the game you had to kill the person standing next to you before they could kill you and you could use anything in the warehouse for this end but you wouldn't be finding any real weapons. To my right, an ugly girl grabbed a lead pipe. I chose a metal box but couldn't get a good angle in on her head. Eventually, I somehow trapped her head in the metal box and then bashed it with a fire extinguisher until the box was flat and I was satisfied she wouldn't survive.

Sheesh.

I had a dream in which I tried to strangle my sister to death. In the supermarket. I didn't succeed so she asked why I did it. I told her that her drug use has been very hard on me. She laughed and asked, "Don't you think it's been harder on me?" (A response actually employed in the past.) I said no, that drilling your dopamine receptors with hardcore narcotics is a lot easier than worrying every morning if this will be the day of getting the phone call telling you your sister is dead. I should have told her she's been a hurricane of mourning and stress upon her loved ones. Should have said there's no excuse for lies and manipulation.

Crummy dreams, man. Anxious for the day they stop all together.

When I was very little (1st grade, I think) I wrote a little fable about how baby deers get their white spots. Something to do with sunlight coming through the forest canopy. My teacher raved up and down about this little story and showed it to the principal and the librarians. One of the librarians submitted it to a little children's literary journal.

The only problem was that I had plagiarized it. I stole it. It's true.

So I went back to the librarian and told her I didn't want my story in the journal. I admitted to what I had done and apologized. To everyone. Especially to my mom. Naturally.

But!

I've never plagiarized since then! Never ever (actually I did plagiarize a bit of the internet for a report on Robert Frost in high school because I was a lazy jerk and mad at society at large - again, I had to admit what I did and felt not-so-good about it). I didn't mean nothin' by it at the time but it was a lousy feeling to have to admit to what I had done.

Bust a Cap

I am scared of capitalism. I read an article and then I watched Capitalism: A Love Story and now I am freaked out, gentle reader. Well, I've always been freaked out but I didn't really know the name for what I was afraid of. Capitalism.

I know that a lot of people have a problem with Michael Moore's dubious sources so I watched with a prudent eye but the bare bones are still there, aren't they? I don't want to believe that Citigroup sent a memo to its wealthiest clients explaining to (and congratulating) them on America now being a "plutonomy" (an economic culture in which the wealthiest have control).

In the memo, however, there is one concern for the fat cats to consider. While they are part of the 1% of American people who control the wealth, there is that 99% of the population that still gets one vote per person. So! If you've ever lived paycheck to paycheck, if you didn't get a brand new luxury car for your 16th birthday, if you don't live in a house paid for with cash, if you work for a company not owned by your father or his father's father, FUCKING VOTE. We can't let our great country crumble around us while the wealthy elite (think Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey) eat their pie in the sky. Vote.

When I was in my junior year of high school, working two jobs (supervisor at a burger joint and teaching piano lessons to kids), while the rest of my classmates went to their guidance counselors to discuss college application, a terrible and brutal anger grew inside me. There was no college fund for me. There was no promise of a bright future. There was no choice. There was only the cold, hard knowledge that I would be working for the rest of my life, no exceptions. Working for pennies if I wasn't willing to pay some bank tens (or hundreds, depending) of thousands of dollars in interest on a school loan repayment. Interest! A college loan quickly becomes twice what you originally owed when you add on the interest. If you're lucky.

I looked at this situation and the dream I've always had, since I was a little girl, to raise a family, and knew there was an imbalance somewhere and I probably wouldn't be able to reach it. I didn't want to be rich or famous. I didn't want a fancy car or a big house on a hillside somewhere. I wanted to have children. That's all.

This realization came 13 years ago and here I am, still skating the poverty line, while my eggs creep closer and closer to being unusable. Fucking hell, you guys. Fucking hell. I'm not any closer to a stable financial life than I was when I was 16. Even more unstable, probably, with my very own sizable share of America's personal consumer debt. You can take the kid out of the trailer park but you can never take the trailer park out of the kid.

I did go to college, by the way, I listened to the people who told me not to worry about the debt. I didn't end up earning my bachelor of fine arts (at $23k a year, the complete $90k of college loans was probably best to avoid in the end, anyway). I owe $17k now. I pay it off $100 a month.

Three-quarters of that monthly payment, each month, goes to interest only. I'll be paying the bank probably $35k before it's all said and done. $100 a month for the rest of my life. If I ever get laid off or otherwise lose my income, that $35k goes up and up and up with late fees, and various other dings. Does it seem to you too that there is an effort and desire taking place here for me to never pay back this loan? As long as I am in repayment, I am providing a monthly income to a huge bank who is also receiving this monthly income from thousands of others. I am a small but necessary cog in their money machine. God bless us, everyone.

In Michael Moore's documentary, he featured a couple of businesses that are run completely democratically. This doesn't mean each employee gets a share of the stocks or any ghosty funny-business like that, it means each person within those companies (owners included) receives exactly the same percentage of the entire profit. A bread-making company called Alvarado Street Bakery (in Petaluma, a small California town that I lived in for a short while, incidentally) pays its line workers and its CEO $60k a year, respectively. Everyone votes on any changes the company will make, and everyone has the same feeling of worth within the company.

Yesterday I got my 401k statement in the mail. It showed zero contributions year-to-date. Even though I check every pay-stub when I receive it, I checked again. Yup. $25 of my money comes out of every single paycheck for this 401k fund. Zero contributions year-to-date. Zero contributions year-to-date! Zero contributions year-to-date?! My employer is keeping all those deductions?! No interest is accruing because the money is simply not there?! Bad timing for a small business to screw over this particular employee. This is not the last you'll hear of this, my dear readers, I'm aiming to raise a fucking ruckus.

Or move to Japan.

How much water do you drink? Enough? I semi-recently started keeping a little tally at work of how many glasses I drink to make sure I'm getting my four pints in every day. Amazing things happened! I'm less hungry, less tired, less irritable (k, maybe that one is pretty imperceptible). I realized that unless you're chugging water constantly with a purpose, you probably aren't thinking about being thirsty enough to rely on your body to let you know how much you need.

I've heard you should drink, in ounces, the number you get if you divide the amount of pounds you weigh by two. I've also heard that everyone should drink at least two liters, regardless of weight. So! In every case, drink at least four pints a day, you hear? It's good for you. And I like you to be healthy.

Because I love you.


Via.

The Portland Grid Project. Photo by: George Kelly.

Every once in a while I am blindsided by more shit I fucked up 4+ years ago. Saturday was that day. $1700 to a towing company from 2005. Oi.

I never could relate to that part in Fight Club in which Tyler tells Jack that self-improvement is pointless. Isn't self-improvement the meaning of life? Better yourself until you die so that you can go knowing that you did absolutely the best you could. Everyone benefits from you living up to your own high expectations. We've all been around those people that do nothing to better themselves or anything around them. Tiresome.

It's hard, though, isn't it? I fight laziness and moodiness every day, to varying degrees. Telling people "no" when I feel taken advantage of. Sticking up for myself at work. Suffering fools. Knowing when confrontation is necessary. Eating well, getting enough exercise, not smoking, et cetera ad infinitum.

Maybe I interpreted that scene incorrectly.

I'd like to be able to save some money out of each paycheck but somehow I never seem to be able to! I don't buy lots of frivolous crap, just mostly food and clothes. Eating out is so expensive but I love it. I was looking online at flights to random places for my vacation-week in September (Too soon? Too bad. 23 weeks y'all!). I could fly to Tokyo for a couple thousand or I could take a train trip to Montana for around six hundred. I have 11 more paychecks 'til then but saving even $100 out of each one seems pretty impossible. I'm paying off so many debts. A few hundred every month goes to them pesky debtors.


He's breathing, can you see it? Eeeeee! Via.

All in all, I had a very nice week off work. My mama came up for a night and we played Rummy, made corned beef 'n' cabbage, and watched movies. One of them was "Emma" which I'd never seen before (boycotted due to name stealing). It was okay but I think I prefer to read stories/books that are set in the long-ago-days rather than watching movies that are set in that time period. Maybe because modern actors are miserable at the accents (Gwyneth Paltrow is no exception).


This is stitched with thread! By: Jillian Tamaki, via.

After my mama departed, the Dear Boy and I spent a night on the coast in a cute lil vintagey cottage. More Rummy, some shopping, and the best crab melt I've ever eaten in my life! The rest of vacation-week was lounging around and going out to eat and SLEEPING IN. Heavenly.

Coming back to work has been pretty turbulent. One of the first things Wicked Lady said to me was, "I had such a hard time while you were gone!" Well, that's too bad, Wicked, because I'll be taking my two weeks of vacation time every year just like everybody else. Suck it. I was pretty frustrated all day yesterday because the whole office was a mess with everything disorganized and nothing restocked (and by restocked I don't mean ordering supplies, I just mean taking some supplies down from the storage shelves and replenishing what's needed). Simple things and she's just too lazy for any of it.

Also, she doesn't recycle. I overheard this conversation today:

Guy from Alabama: "Oh yeah, I'm in Oregon and all Oregonians recycle so I should probably do it too."
Wicked Lady: "Not ALL Oregonians do. I hardly recycle anything."

:o Amazing.

Vacation Weeeeeeek

I am in the thick of my vacation-week. Learning a couple new songs on the guitar: Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen and Marry Song by Band of Horses. I'm slowing down the Springsteen and plucking it with a syrupy country rhythm. Marry Song is just a baby so far but I'll probably end up playing it pretty straight-forwardly.

Tomorrow, we're off to the coast for a night in a tiny cottage by the beach. La vie romantique!

Getting some writing on the book done. I realized the other day that I never heard back from a novella-in-process contest I submitted it to on McSweeney's back in January. Those jerks. Hey, here's a sampling for you, if you'd like one:

I remember once catching a fish with my bare hands in the river. I was down there with Robert’s nephew, Andrew. He’s a couple years younger than me and was visiting his uncles for the summer from Long Island. His skin is so pale I can see the veins underneath his eyelids and one on the tip of his nose. He silently sat on a boulder, like a gloomy pretzel, tapping a stick on the surface of the water. I tried to be friendly, asking him questions about school and sports. He shrugged limply at my fumbling and I grew silent too. I watched the river. It was a clear, sunny day. A young bull trout shimmered deeply and caught my attention. I crept down into the water, crouching, and waited. The fish swam between my ankles and with one quick dive of my hand, I snatched it from the water. Andrew held his tapping stick in mid-air, his mouth a neat, round O. A quick rush of boyish pride tripped me as I surged towards the bank, fish flopping in my hand. I fell, coming down hard on both hands. All my weight pressed onto the trout, making its skin pop like hotdog casing. My fingertips slid along its soft ribcage. Andrew blinked a few times at my bloody foul and burst into laughter.

Mister Rogers defending PBS to the US Senate

This is the greatest thing I have ever seen in my life. Thank you, Barry. To quote you, "he could make kids as well as anyone believe he was completely sincere despite having never met you."

I love you, Mister Rogers, and I always will. You took a large part in persuading me to keep making up stories and to feed my imagination with wholesome things whenever I had the choice.

Had a saga of a bad dream last night. As always, it starred my sister reaching a new low. A couple of her friends had joined her in her quest for ruin, robbing the nice people of Portland for their money and credit cards. Somehow, again, she had the wool over everyone's eyes and even convinced my other, well-meaning sister to smuggle syringes onto a plane for her (something about a new diabetes diagnosis)! Woke up at 4:30am, sobbing dryly, and knew I wouldn't be getting any more sleep for the night.

I've never had something needle at me so persistently for this long. It's been so many years now. So many years. I'm usually pretty alright at letting go of things that strain me emotionally and while I have distanced myself considerably, here it creeps, into my dreams. I can't fucking abide the mistreatment that has inevitably come every time I've put a smile back on my face, hoping for the best, saying, "I'm there for you now and I trust you."

I reason, endlessly, that there's nothing I can do anyway. With or without me, she'll make her decisions the way she wants to make them.

I am a wellspring of hurt.

To Do List

1. Be brave


2. Be nice


3. Stay organized


4. Write more


5. Wallow less

Photos by: Francois Trezin

Tralala

Via.

Oh, look. It's Monday again. Again and again. The upside is that at the end of FIVE DAYS from now, I'll be on my vacation week. Hell yuh! Sleeping in, writing, relaxing, tralala all over the land. Mostly I just want to do whatever the fudge I want. ALL DAY LONG.


By: John Campbell.

Non-Required Reading

I hardly ever get fashiony in here, but it is an interest of mine, so forgive me.

I want every single thing in the new Rodarte for Opening Ceremony collection. Love that we're getting away from blacks and grays, in fashion, and leaning more towards browns, nudes, and pastels. Hot cha! I haven't worn black in years cuz it's probably the least interesting apparel choice. And frankly it does nothing for my coloring.


Boooo, you look like a million weeps, lady (via).

It occurred to me the other day that I need to link some of the blogs I read. A nice little sidebar thang, am I right? Okay, will work on that today, time permitting. DONE. See? Wanna be added? Lemme know.


Via.

Maybe I will straighten my hair tonight. I'm going out dancing.

Did y'all know that "penultimate" simply means second to last? Well, if you're my mom and you're reading this, you probably did.

Sorry about this post. Move along.

For a second just now, I thought I smelled a huge field of spring flowers. Mm, that was nice.

Get down, girl, go 'head, get down. Get down, girl, go 'head, get down.

Today I learned that a nice young lady that I know would never consider herself a feminist because she feels that in the areas of domestic violence, sexual harassment, and divorce, males get the short end of the stick. This surprised me very much! Sometimes I think I may be a bit like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. Aren't all my smart, forward-thinking, young lady friends feminists? Indeed not, I guess, and this makes me a little sad.



I work for a construction management company with project managers and engineers. I see myself and my female coworkers (of which there are only three out of an office of about 25) not receiving due respect every day. Everything from our ideas not being weighed on the same scales as the men, to the objects on our desks (a bag of potato chips leftover from lunch, as an example) being treated like their property instead of our own.

At the same time, there's no chivalry here either. I've carried heavy box after heavy box across our parking lot while two male employees smoked cigarettes and watched. Colorful language is used in mixed company and they don't even try to conceal their (rude) bodily functions in front of the ladies.



Now, I am a fan of chivalry and also a feminist. Feminism is the belief that women are not inferior to men. Chivalry is the culturally accepted way of behaving honorably, especially around women. I always try to act chivalrously when I am alone with other women. Opening doors, letting them lead in conversation, paying for things, etc.. In mixed company, it's the role of men, but I think it's important for females to uphold this custom when it's just us. It's not an antiquated or dated American idea; in today's Japan, for example, there are numerous social customs, like chivalry, that everyone is expected to follow.



Getting back to the oppressed male, even when I was little and I heard someone say that white people have the least amount of rights, I knew that was wrong. Just seeing how the non-whites were treated at my (elementary) school told me that much about America. So I've been thinking today about how anyone could possibly think men get the short end of the stick when it comes to domestic violence, sexual harassment, and divorce. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief [Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, February 2003], "women accounted for 85% of the victims of intimate partner violence, men for approximately 15%." Perhaps because of this, the cops take a wee bit more convincing when a man says he is being beaten on by his girlfriend, and while this is a shame, it is definitely not grounds to denounce feminism. Also, prenuptial agreements were invented to cease gold-digging and in the wise words of Kanye West, "If you ain't no punk, holla, 'We want prenup! We want prenup!' It's something you need to have 'cause when she leaves your ass, she'll leave with half." Ha!

Ha!

(Art by: Katai Stienstra, found via.)

Toolsday

I wonder about sincerity a lot. I wonder what people are like when they're around people they are fully comfortable with. I've always treasured that day in a friendship when my friend starts using silly voices and making funny faces around me. It means I've made it into their sanctum.



Some people are at their most comfortable around their family, I've noticed. I guess if you spent every day of your childhood around the same people you no longer worry about what they think of you. I have a big family. Three brothers and two sisters, all older than me. To be fair, one of those brothers was raised mostly by his mom in Ohio but he was in my life for a couple spans.

My dad, sister, and I picked him up from the airport when he was a late teenager after last seeing him when he was in grade school. He was tall and looked a good bit like us but he was a stranger. He entered the fold cautiously and although him and I talked about lots of things, we never learned much about each other. He's gone again now, last seen homeless and on drugs. The death in life.



In other news:

I've been watching a lot of documentaries lately. We hooked up our VCR to get the internet (okay, it's a BluRay Player but I really like to give the Dear Boy a hard time by calling it "the VCR") so we can watch Netflix Instant from the couch. It's great! There are oodles of documentaries in their library. Recently, I watched Jesus Camp, which is about evangelical christians, and specifically about their aim at America's children.

If you didn't know, evangelicals are the ones that speak in tongues and claim one needs to be "born again" to reach heaven. In the movie, they spoke about how children are easiest to convince of god's importance and of the place they feel Jesus should have in our lives. Children have hardly any reservations about putting their hands in the air and speaking nonsensically to the ceiling or moaning and rolling about on the floor. They are full of spirit! Ha! ha!


Photos by: Yuanling Wang

Last night we watched American Meth which is, of course, about meth. This one was pretty hard for me to sit through. They talked to a lot of addicts and even lived with one meth-addicted couple for a short time. The couple had four young children, the oldest only eight, whom they forgot to feed or care for while on meth benders. What drug addiction does to your lines of thinking is horrifying and familiar. It's hard to watch people lie to themselves and abuse their innocent loved ones. I've been on both sides of that coin and I try to reflect on it as seldom as possible. Moving on!

Remember this post, gentle readers? Well, I bought a piece by the same artist today!

This one:



Letterpressed on paper, framed, for fifty bucks. Niiiiiiice.

You Gotta Help Me Make a Stand

I'm always trying to force my thinking into a different direction than what it is naturally tending towards. Addiction, worrying, and cynicism put me in tail-spins all the time.



Addiction is probably the largest beast. It's not about drugs these days, obviously, but any little thing. I am stubbornly attached to ritual and routine and can rut myself up pretty bad if I'm not careful. Before I realize what's happening, I'm doing something every day in the same way and sometimes it isn't beneficial to me or those around me. There's a term out there for this sort of thing starting with "obsessive" and ending with "disorder" but as long as I can keep my good grip on the reigns I ain't accepting it. Addiction. Not disorder.



Even though I fully know that it doesn't do any good, I worry endlessly as well. Loops and loops of "what if"s. Combined with a tendency to be cynical, and honed story-telling, the possibilities are great and very bad indeed. I have a habit of mistaking my own speculation for fact, too, which really doesn't help at all.


All photos by: Jay B. Sauceda, via.

As I grow up, I more easily recognize when a wave of this garbage is coming on and try to duck out from under it before it gets me, so that's good. I try not to sit and stare out a window for an hour, wringing my hands and fretting up a storm any more. I find that the more I tell others "chin up" and to "throw away those thoughts" the more my ego steps in, having me take my own advice.

Minding Manners

Today I am thinking about if people ever think about what they say. Small example, of coworker, who we shall call Ponytail:

Me: "Here's a confirmation for that fax you sent earlier."
Ponytail: "Only one page?"
Me: "Yeah, it prints out only the first page of your fax with the confirmation there at the top."
Ponytail: "Okay, no problem."

Didn't ask if this was a problem for you, Ponytail.

Now, I know this sounds over-reactive but it's a phrase he uses in all his conversational exchanges even though it comes off a bit rude in most. To me. Maybe to you too. To me, it makes him sound as if he thinks everyone should be apologizing to him.


Via.

Another irritating one is those small phrases people overly use, like "and the other thing is..." which isn't so bad, I guess, until you work with the lady who uses it in statements like, "He was a really great speaker and the other thing is he really made you interested in what he was saying." Actually, lady, those two ideas are the same. A semi-colon there in place of your catch-all phrase would work super well. Super well!


Via.

I think I probably pay too much attention to how I come off socially and I probably shouldn't worry because people just aren't paying attention, that's all. Nothing personal. I mind my manners and make sure to be polite, cheerful, and funny as often as I can when I am out in the world. Makes everything nicer, I say.

Recently I've had a rash of cashiers who do not address me in any way during our transaction. No smile, no nod, no "hello," no nothing. Next time, I am going to ask, "Are you alright?" and if they wonder why I'm asking I'll tell them, "You seem like you're having a bad day." How can you get mad at a stranger concerned with your well-being?


Via.

Some evenings, I'd go up on the roof. It was only a short climb onto the backdeck railing and a mighty hoist to the gritty top of our mobile home. Our court was a short length of highway to the north of town, up among a private vineyard, a very old cemetery, and christmas tree farms.


Via.

From up there, I could only hear a whisper of civilization and all the lights were very far away. Laying down in the summer, it would warm my back as the night air cooled around me.


Via.

In high school, I'd go up there to sneak cigarettes (sorry Mom, sorry Pop). Forearms around my knees, I'd squint out at the curtain of dark trees in the distance and mull over the feelings of defiance and restlessness, and endless plans for the future.


Via.

I had a spooky imagination and was constantly scaring myself but up there I felt sealed off from my ghouls. It was where I began to get comfortable with being alone.


Via.

Sometimes mine or a neighbor's cat would join me, tail twitching, sniffing the night. I cherished their company, there is something very calming about the slowness of a cat.