bits of good news

1. The sun is out! It's warm!

2. Contrary to the word which may or may not have been leaking out, I WILL be making tracks for Grove City Homecoming Weekend, thanks to some timely wishing on the part of David DiQuattro.

3. My apartment is still clean.

4. After a period of muddled opinions regarding any number of topics, my thoughts are again clear.

5. I've realized that I'm sick of being anxious and depressed, and am glad to find myself in a better frame of general mind.

I feel cold

The office is freezing today and the rain feels oppressive.

I discovered yesterday that when I nearly maxed out my credit card taking care of Simon, they tripled my limit.

How exceedingly generous of them.

rainy days and Mondays

...aren't bringing me down, but they're making me sleepy.

It's an uneventful day at the office; the boss has an all-day appointment, and we're left pretty much to ourselves. I'm enjoying the brief and temporary respite from the general chaos.

George called me last night, and I got rid of him. I felt admittedly badly for doing so, but I can't see it going anywhere serious (and neither could most other people), so I thought it would be easiest to cut it loose before we knew each other all that well.

Thank God for female friends. Meg called me in the middle of an awkward conversation I wasn't sure how to begin with George, so I told him I'd call him back; then she affirmed my decision and I went running over to Marianne's to sit on her porch to go through with it. In lieu of established family, it's good to have people who surround you with moral support, even if it's, "Hey, I have to break it off with this guy and for some bizarre reason didn't want to do it at home or on my porch; can I do it here?"; and then it's nice to have someone hovering by the screen periodically to check how you're getting on, and when you're finished, to demand a full report and come running out with an offer of wine.

Her porch has thus been christened The Break-Up Porch. Beware, unsuspecting young lovers who might think to linger on its comfortable cushioned lobster crate or deck chairs; tarry for long, and your love is doooomed!

And working in a family office is funny. There are little clouds of spats and temper that gust over from time to time, as well as lots of joviality and comfort. I find myself irresistably drawn in. Their son Rob, who is shadowing his dad for the rest of the month, is something like an ornery older brother -- lots of mutual joshing, crankiness, impertinence, ordering around, and flicking off. (Haha, he started it!) So I'm enjoying myself, and they all take an active interest in my well-being. Most times I don't quite dare to believe it.

Anyway, it's cold and rainy out, and I'm put in mind of soup and of naps, and also of fall. Brief as autumn is in Indiana, I'm looking forward to crisp gusty nights smelling of dead leaves and smoke, and thin blue afternoons of wandering around in jackets with pockets full of apples.

I love fall.

the necessity of singleness

My date went extremely well. George is incredibly nice, and easy to talk to. Thoughtful, decently interesting, and much taller than I am.

But the thing is (and I can't believe it) I just want to be alone. I'm convalescing from a difficult summer. I'm slowly starting to get myself back, as it were. Yesterday for the first time in months I cleaned my apartment top to toe -- and how WONDERFUL to have a clean, neat, orderly living space again. To have a Sunday where I wake up, stretch luxuriously, and have all day to relax, without thinking, Ugh, my apartment is filthy, I really should clean it, but I just can't.

I changed the calendar hanging on my bedroom wall for the first time since April. April is when my life as a healthy-minded human being basically stopped. Now it's on September, as I'm greatly looking forward to that month. I'll be twenty-five in two and a half weeks, and it's good that another year is starting its cycle.

And with all that, I don't have the energy to expend on a new relationship. I just don't want to. At the moment, most guys, however nice and interesting, seem sort of flat when I consider dating them. I have been tremendously enjoying my time spent with groups of friends (hallelujah, the grad students are back), which makes my time spent in solitude all the more relaxing.

But there's been too much loss, too much regrouping, to get to know someone right now in the context of dating. I'm having a hard time dealing with the inevitable awkwardness, with the explicit intent from someone I've just met. I don't want to cuddle with, or kiss, someone I don't really know (touch is an indication of knowledge and trust. I don't like giving it to someone right away, and I hate how dating, as a means of getting to know someone, desacramentalizes human contact). I want to recover, and to heal, I've always needed to be more or less alone. And it all comes back to the reality that however much I love people, getting to know new ones exhausts me.

It figures, of course. I spent the entirety of last year freaking out about my single status and hating every minute of it, with no relief of offers to date from decent men. Now a decent one enters my life and I'm cringing away from dating him. Partly it's just not the right time; partly it's that I don't want to get seriously involved with someone who doesn't share even a modicum of my beliefs (I don't know why it's so difficult to discourse on faith with a dating prospect who isn't a Christian, when talking about it with general acquaintances and close friends is so easy. But there's an uncomfortable friction nonetheless); partly it's that he just doesn't have it. And I hate this because I don't even know what it is. It's like Dr. Potter's standards on the "A" paper -- he would always say, "I don't have a criteria, really. I just know one when I read it." Which is very frustrating to both grader and graded, not to know why one paper is an "A" and another is a "B." I can't say why one guy draws me and another doesn't. Maybe there's a fire of spirit that I need, and placid people just don't do it for me, which tends to be the quality that formulates the basic character of the "nice guy."

I tend to wonder if my standards are too high; if I'm too picky; if I'm too willing to shunt someone away without giving him a chance; if these attitudes and behaviors will consign me to years of unecessary unhappiness. But then I tend to consider that I don't have much baggage from prior relationships, and count that in my favor. I worry about everything more than enough as it is, without adding complicated choices made in uncertainty to the pile.

And I'm anticipating dealing with a couple more losses in the next week or two. There are a few things that I have to do. I don't really need, I don't think, anxiety and guilt from a new quarter to heighten the difficulty of the necessary changes I must make in more familiar realms.

All that being said, the baseline is that I'm just tired. I need to continue to heal. And always, for me, that's best done when I'm single.

continual turns for the better

Well, in addition to further realizing some of the best friendships of my life right here in South Bend, getting my laundry done for me, arranging a new and improved living room complete with small charming writing desk and huge comfy armchair (transporting which up the narrow staircase required the intervention of MP's cousin Tom, removing a door from its hinges, scraping a track in the paint on either side of the wall, and much banging, hammering, and swearing), organizing all the crap in my apartment to make it a recognizable place of human habitation, and sporting a softly sexy new haircut that allows me to wear my hair down for the first time in eight months, my life is taking some fun new twists.

MP's landlord is the coolest, chillest child of the Baby Boomer generation, holds dinner parties/folk music jam sessions on Thursday nights, and has extended a standing invitation to attend to MP and myself -- all we need to do is bring a dish. (This will have the added benefit of encouraging me to cook again.) Furthermore, he plays open mic at the Fiddler's regularly, and has told me if I pick out three songs that will go over fifteen minutes, I can perform with them (my joy knows no bounds).

And then on Sunday, my boss, his wife, their son (all of whom work at the office) and their son's fiancee (who forwarded them my resume) had a cookout at the big house, to which I was invited, and for which I was asked to provide transportation to a guy named George whose car has broken down over the summer. George and I bonded immediately over Josh Ritter, gabbled all the way up to Edwardsburg, talked our way through the cookout, and conversed all the way home. As I dropped him off, he said, "Sarah, I'd really like to take you out." I said, "George, I'd really like to go."

Yesterday he called and scheduled our date (and yes, my friends, he used the word "date" -- not "let's hang out" or "d'you wanna grab coffee") for Friday night.

He's (I think I remember him being) a bit taller than I am, with an animated, engaging face and direct eye contact. He's from Pennsylvania (Yuengling forever!) and turns thirty a week after I turn twenty-five. We hold slightly differing political views (but only slightly, as, while I am personally conservative, I am socially more liberal), and vastly different religious views (he is an agnostic); but his conversation is interesting, his manner easygoing, and his company pleasant; and he and I are both relaxed and respectful of differing viewpoints, so it should make for a fun Friday evening.

Stacy, my bosses' future daughter-in-law, confessed to having set up the whole thing (which I had suspected from the get-go...Sunday as I was getting ready to go, I felt instinctively that I ought to do something nice with my hair; having never met George, I felt nonetheless that perhaps a date was on the way).

Anyway, I now have something to anticipate over the weekend. And, okay, I can't help it, here goes...

Am no longer date pariah!

neo-modern solutions to ancient and annoying domestic predicaments

Well, I've done it. I've gone and got my mother wondering if I'm a changeling and who actually raised me and in what century.

Is she sacrificing goats at Beltaine? you ask. Is she raising chickens? Going the route of polygamy? Joining a holy order? Donning full body armor and running off to fight the Huns?

Sadly, none of those. It's much worse, actually.

I've sent out my laundry.

Yes: reel, gasp, clutch at the edges of your desks, ladies and gentleman, beg me not to do it, plead all you like, it's too late. I've gone and done it and I'm glad, I tell you, glad!

The situation is this: I live a busy and exhausting life. I work a demanding, high-stress job (which I am beginning truly to love) and when the day is over, I am pretty much too tired even to cook myself a meal. In fact, I have been buying frozen chicken pot pies and making myself sandwiches for dinner for the past fourteen or so days: Lo and behold, single and three weeks from twenty-five, I have morphed into a modern woman.

The laundry dilemma is grim. I have no washer & dryer readily available in the building where I live, which means that when the clothing is screaming for cleaning, I must pack it all into baskets and bags and load it in the car and haul it to a laundromat, which is either terrifying and dangerous and reeking of cigarette smoke, or sterile and boring and very far away. I must then sit around wasting two hours of my time and trying to stay awake in a dingy atmosphere, which is particularly unappealing on a weeknight, but then weekends are insanely busy at the laundromat and you wind up feeling like one cow among many milling around and mooing dismally while waiting for a machine to open up. Or maybe like a runty shark in a feeding frenzy, racing to a washer to slam dunk your sheet set inside before the bearded bespectacled man or the mother of ten beats you to it.

The more I have to do it, the more I truly hate it. I begrudge every lost second which I could be spending buying some precious relaxation time in the evenings instead of getting cramps in my shoulder blades from folding and pains in my back from hauling it around, then staggering back into my apartment so bone-weary I can't even put it away before collapsing like a card table among the rumpled unmade ruins of my bed.

Had I a washing machine at my immediate disposal, it would be different. I could spend Saturdays puttering with the laundry and using it to break up other chores. I could spend five minutes here and ten minutes there folding and ironing in pleasant little chunks. I could put it away a little bit at a time. I could sing while doing it and not seem like a crazy person while all the world watches.

But I don't, and my cheap and indolent landlord refuses to put one in the basement for me (he says there's no hook-up, but I believe one could be made; he just doesn't want to). And as I was commiserating with MP last night, she reminded me that back in the day, people always sent out their laundry, if they had any means to do it; it wasn't until the wide accessibility of washing machines & dryers in the home that people began to do their own.

So I decided to bring shame on the head of the woman who reared me to do all my own chores and make my frantic, stressful life a little more burden-free. There's a laundromat 1.5 minutes away from my place of employment which does drop-off and pick-up. They wash, dry, fold and hang for just 80 cents a pound. My laundry will only cost me twenty dollars this week -- just slightly more than what I would pay to do it myself, and it will save me monumental amounts of time and mental stress (since I have to spend the entirety of each designated Laundry Day gearing myself up to do it). I can drop it off in the morning and pick it up when I get off work.

Lovely. (Now if I can just remember to pick up a chicken pot pie on my way home from work.)

through the fog of post-trauma

Well, folks, my new job is going splendidly. It's a strange and wonderful thing having bosses who care about me not only as an employee (they are encouraging and -- again the gasp -- they train me in nearly every task) but as a person. I can't quite get used to it yet.

That's not to say that things here are totally relaxed. Most days spin into a whirlwind flurry of legal forms and paperwork that have to be in the mail by a certain time or someone is totally effed. I'm usually running around with a hand clamped to the top of my head, trying to remember what it was I was doing.

Overall it's enjoyable, even the stress, because I feel that I've earned the right to lounge about my apartment in languid indolence in the evenings.

The downside of everything is that the whole summer is starting to catch up with me. I sat at lunch yesterday adding up the various stressors that I've undergone since January, and most especially since June, and it's left me wondering vaguely how I'm still sane. Here's a brief timeline:

***

JANUARY:
Leave much-beloved though exhausting job with adorable though frustrating toddlers. Worry that friendship with Meg might disintegrate as a result of switching to Development side of services. Plunge headfirst into entirely new job with which have had no experience whatsoever.

MARCH:
Fumble through huge, Great-Wall-of-China-sized charity event of which pretend to be in charge but internally panic over since must figure most of it out on own. Pull off in 2 months event that realistically takes 8 to 12. Make it best one participants have ever attended...but fundraising goal is not met. (Which is not responsibility of self.) Begin hanging out more with new coworkers. Think self belongs, but suffer heart attacks of anxiety because spend much less time with real friend Meg.

APRIL/MAY:
Begin to feel overwhelming sense of disapproval from higher realms of administration. Feel strongly that self does not belong. No one talks to me. No one tells me what I'm doing wrong. Begin to make more rookie mistakes as result of nervousness and paranoia.

JUNE:
Put together and pull off amazing Golf Tournament charity event by self. Lose job in humiliating, Gestapo-style way, on same day as incompetent fool who has never done anything right in his entire year of employment but was given far many more chances than self. Lose people had thought of as friends. Force self to return to old job for one week where have nervous hyperventilating panic attacks in hallways, office, and bathrooms. Take three-week leave of absence. Realize personally for first time that being good person not always a shield against bad happenings. Fear being forced to leave self-made home, lovely apartment, and few real friends self has left. No family closeby. No connections to help self to new job. No idea what to do next. Hate all job prospects but cannot enter grad school without applying.

JULY:
Spend three weeks lying around in fog of depression. All friends except Meg and Phillip busy, out of town, no longer friends, or inconsiderate. No energy to call college friends and tell story over and over again. Rack up huge cell phone bill talking to Mom, other friends and prospective employers who don't have Verizon plan. Prostitute self in harrowing, demeaning interview process with jobs know will hate.

Run into people from old job. Pathetically wish still were friends while wanting to shred their tires resulting in stilted matter-of-fact fakey conversations where self assures people from old job that am fine and staying in South Bend and sure things are for best and hope to see them around.

Let apartment go to shit. Plants die. Hate self, hate life, hate old job, hate bad friends, hate future, hate apartment. Spend nights dreaming horrific old-job old-friend unemployment monster dreams. Disappear from old job like exorcised ghost.

Find new apartment for MP. Finish Buffy and Angel in two-night mega-marathon with Leigh Ann. Keep terrible nightwatchman-undead-style hours.

Get new job. Get wonderful new employers. Begin to learn complicated, exacting duties of legal secretary. Is challenging and refreshing but still monumental and new. Have had no time to absorb and recover from past month of terror of joblessness and moving home a failure. Sudden divine-Providence-style success inexplicably almost depressing. Press on.

AUGUST:
Close friend totally absent. Have not had hug in three weeks. Beloved, only-ever-present-friend-cat consumes vast quantity of elastic webbing which nearly kills him. Spend entire weekend crying and begging God not to let only life companion die.

Life companion lives. Self now very poor. Realize have not been to church all summer and have built self's house on sand of previous employment and feeling of solidarity with former colleagues and homeless people. Realize self has been stupid.

Grad student friends begin to swarm back. Excited but overwhelmed: Have spent entire summer curled up on self trying to nurse self alone through trauma, betrayal, terror, stress, rage, sorrow, hurt, loss, shame, disillusionment and despair; and now people will be around constantly. Is sort of psychological culture shock. Feel as if have been hit repeatedly in head with Whiffle ball bat by maniacal five-year-old and now must talk to grown-ups who have no idea what has been going on. Must gird self's loins to sketch out facts of summer story to curious questioners while still internally bleeding from after-effects but not seem overwhemingly desperate for sympathy and support. Fear becoming social pariah as have forgotten how to make jokes or laugh. Wit dead. No funny stories from work. Feel uninteresting, two-dimensional, cardboard-style person.

Begin to crack in moments of stress at new job. Face lots of walls in effort to contain tears. Panic at each error with instant throwback to terrible Job-Losing Conversation. Replay friend Melissa's advice over and over in head: "You've been through a traumatic experience. You're going to have moments at your new job where you get paranoid and think that it's just like your old job. You're going to think people are plotting against you, that you suck, and that you're going to lose your job again. That's post-traumatic stress. It's going to happen. Just take it a day at a time and breathe."

Have constant headache.

***

And believe me, friends, this isn't the whole thing. And while I've made light of my summer, it really, really sucked, and I think it's finally washing over me since I don't need to hold everything back and be as brave anymore; I have a job, I have an assured paycheck, and therefore I have time to process everything that I went through.

Not pleasant. My current plan is to sleep a lot and try to balance social interaction with alone time, so that I'm not unloading everything on everyone I know, but at the same time not spending massive amounts of time alone and obsessing. And to charge back into churchgoing. I've gotta have something that stays constant and unchanging no matter what might happen with jobs or friendships.

But the new job really is going fantastically well. Last week my boss told me that it's been decades since he's been able to trust this level of work and document preparation to a secretary.

An evening with Meg and Phillip

As Meg and I washed dishes after a gargantuan meal, she and Phillip were trading insults. He was downloading a Star Trek episode in the living room (we are all nuts for The Next Generation). Suddenly he yelled, "You're demoted!"

And this is what I heard:

Meg runs into the living room. I continue washing dishes.

*WHAP*

*Aaaaaaaaaaa!*

*Rrrrrrrr!*



Now, let me be clear. The WHAP and the Rrrrrrrr came from Meg.

I laughed the whole way home.

Slightly Psycho Neighbors

So, neighbor Kevin and I have, over the course of the summer, struck up an unlikely friendly association.

I blame it on the patio furniture. I bought it a little over a month ago, while I was taking time off from the old job and looking for a new, seeing how I was spending vast amounts of time in idleness and tired of languishing about the apartment. No matter how much you love your abode, it starts to feel a little cramped in gorgeous weather.

So I bought a cheap plastic table and two cheap plastic chairs, that I could languish in idleness out of doors, tucked away on the porch looking over the yard. Kevin returned from a trip to visit property he owns in Costa Rica, and he spends a lot of time on the porch as well. We began chatting.

It's basically the first time we've attempted much to interact since he tried browbeating me last summer into giving him information about Colette. Of course he failed miserably (there's a post in the archives somewhere), since I respond to browbeating in a predictably me fashion. Because, I'm guessing, that's his usual mode of interaction with people, particularly women, he didn't bother talking to me for about a year, which suited me splendidly.

But over the summer our mutual presence on the porch, our loosely disguised loneliness in the largely indifferent city of South Bend, landlord gripes, and some apparent internal adjustment on his part have rendered friendly conversation possible. He hasn't attempted to browbeat. We don't discuss Colette. If he makes suggestions as to life impovements I could make, I shrug them off or laugh at them, and he leaves me alone.

We have quite different "worldviews" and a few drastic differences in lifestyles (he's what my landlord likes to call "earthy," and I get along well with earthy, though I eat meat and shop at Wal-Mart and am horrendously bad at recycling), but rather similar approaches to things like different perspectives. (Although I suspect his approach to my different perspectives on, say, the Second Amendment would be more overbearing if it would work, which it won't; I've had my mind made up on that topic since I was nine years old, and I have lengthy lists of logical support.) So we've had interesting discussions on politics, religion, society, ethics, grammar, reading, etc. and, having spent much of the summer conversing with myself, I've been enjoying them.

Kevin is also a virtuoso on the guitar. For some reason he knows I like to sing (maybe I'm louder in the shower than I realize), and before leaving for Costa Rica he gave me a mix of Gillian Welch songs which he encouraged me to learn so that we could perform at an open mic at the Fiddler's sometime.

Me, I've felt the music swelling in me almost as intense as words, the need to sing like the need to write. It's been unbearable lately, in all honesty. I used to sing in church at home, fairly frequently in the summers when I was on break from college. Though I'll have to say the need to sing now is stronger than I ever remember it. My voice is getting better, and I've finally found the genre that suits it: folk.

My summer has been filled with folk artists and folk-influenced artists -- Gillian Welch, Josh Ritter, Sufjan Stevens, even Bright Eyes. And I'm starving for more.

So last night after I came home from dinner with the intrepid MP, Kevin dug out the guitar and played while I sang "Miss Ohio." He introduced me to Edie Brickell's "I Do," which I'm learning.

So it's been fun. Lightly, surprisingly fun.

He suggested I learn to play the guitar so that I could be my own act. It's a thought. He also said that I should start doing stuff with singing. He was highly complimentary of my voice.

And of course I love compliments, even though they sometimes embarrass the hell out of me.

That's it

Okay, out with it: I'm pissed at you. It's something I've been dealing with for a long time now, and I'm finally going to break it open and say that I'm pissed at you. I hate that things turned out this way. It's disgusting how quickly you changed from what I knew.

It was really, really great at first. You were interesting, vivid, fresh, new. A combination of spices I had never tried before. I marveled at your being. You were lively, and you nourished me. You shared yourself. You did me good.

But then there was a flatness, then a staleness, then a foulness. You got, let's admit it, boring. Day after day of the same old thing, and every day you became a little less than what you were. You broke down. Decayed. God help me, I tried to stop it. Tried so many things. At first I tried to be creative -- I came up with alternatives for you. I relentlessly put them into action. But they weren't good enough. Initially you went passively along with it, but after awhile you wouldn't have anything to do with my attempts to recreate you. You caved in on yourself, turned sour and scummy.

Nothing I did made it better. So I started ignoring you, started leaving you alone, hoping the problem would go away. I shuffled all my new successes and disasters (far many more successes than disasters) around you so they wouldn't touch you, wouldn't disturb your sullen repose.

And it bothered me. A lot. How dare you take up so much space when you weren't good for anything anymore? When you kept getting worse? I shoved my successes a little more sharply near you, to force a contrast. You didn't pay attention.

And I missed you. I wanted to go back to you. I'd think about what things were like, at first, and I would MISS the taste of your presence. And it's not like I've been up to doing better than you lately. I wanted you back. But then I'd think about actually facing you again, and I felt -- I felt exactly this -- revulsion and contempt. Granted, it was all in anticipation, but I KNEW things wouldn't be any better than the last time I looked at you. So I didn't bother.

Yes, you can credit me with a high degree of avoidance. I hate that kind of confrontation. And it makes me unspeakably angry -- disgusted, even -- that even now, I have to be the one to haul you up and dump out all the garbage and scrape you out and make you clean. It's unbelievably unfair. I worked tirelessly to hold you together. And even now, I have to be the one to get rid of you. I have to be the one to initiate the separation.

You don't communicate at all. You don't put up any red flags. Based on my past experience, I have to guess at how you're doing, check occasionally, knowing that it's all going to pot, despite my best efforts, my greatest skills (and I have considerable skills, as your very being attests).

So here it is. I'm bringing it up. I'm saying it. I'm making it happen. Are you ready? Get out.

Get out of my life. Don't darken the door anymore. I've crowded everything into spare corners to accomodate you, and you've gone to waste. Now you're not just wasting my time and energy (remember how much I put into you? remember?); you're wasting my space. And that's the last straw.

I mean it, leftovers. Get out of the fridge. You've become utterly contemptible. And you smell horrible.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Housecleaning

I
Among the twenty sleepy houses,
The only thing moving
Was the dust from the housecleaning.

II
I was of no mind,
Like a house
In need of housecleaning.

III
The Swiffer whispered on the bookshelves.
It was a comforting part of the housecleaning.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and the housecleaning
Are not.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of process
Or the beauty of perfection,
The housecleaning
Or just after.

VI
Cat hair swirled the linoleum
With clustered cobwebs.
The eddies of the housecleaning
Pushed it, here and there.

VII
Fuck the housecleaning.

VIII
Anger speaks best
Through the stiff bristles of a brush
In the porcelain tub
And the slow pull of shoulder muscles tired
After housecleaning.

IX
When the mop draws dirt from the floor
During housecleaning,
It lifts the edge of one
Of many layers.

X
Watching the early sunlight
Blow in under the plastic blind
Is something that must be done
Like the housecleaning.

XI
I worked over my apartment
With an ancient Hoover.
Once, a joy pierced me,
In that I mistook
The old hair smell of housecleaning
For happiness.

XII
Mold mouths the rims of the dishes in the sink.
I should do the housecleaning.

XIII
It was morning all afternoon.
I was sleeping
And going to sleep.
The housecleaning drowsed
In the living room closet.