If you hear me speaking with noticeable pauses between the words, I'm editing out explitives as I go.

Seeking out the center

Teaching in the inner city is hard.

It's funny though - the things I want to think about the most don't have to do with teaching.  Time and again I find my mind wandering, not to my lesson plans or upcoming project-based unit or more efficient grading systems, but to my financial stability and plans, to spending time with my boyfriend, to working in more quality time with Simon (who is currently drowsing in the kitchen chair next to mine, overjoyed to have me back after a 5-day vacation).  I find myself wistfully thinking of the hobbies I wish I had more time for, like making my own red wine vinegar, or finally finishing that goddamn afghan for my sister, or cleaning my room, which I haven't gotten around to doing since I moved in in July.

There's just never been a break.  Moving here was a haphazard, frenetic, multi-stage affair that at one point involved two different storage units in two different states.  Once the move was completed, I've had to bounce from activity to activity like some nomad electron whizzing uncoupled around the cosmos -- apartment hunt, job hunt, summer training, job training, new career, relationship adjustment, trying to make new friends -- and with the terrible energy drain that is a) teaching and b) teaching in the inner city, I have felt...emptied.  Diminished.

And really, really tired.

I miss the things that used to make me feel like me.  Waking up on a Saturday and drinking coffee and journaling.  Cooking on a weekend afternoon.  Hanging out with Simon.  Reading dogeared old favorite books.  Spending quiet time just thinking.  Exercising.

A nice little vacation down to Disney World gave me some physical and mental space to do some thinking; a violent illness upon my return forced me to rest.  I'd like to return to work in the morning with a sense of self-groundedness.  That I am my own center, and everything else flows from that.

It feels like I've forgotten how to do that, sometimes.  Maybe it's one of the challenges of being in an intimate relationship -- the desire to be separate and whole, and the desire to be together and whole.  I've never been particularly skilled at that balance -- my experience of close relationships hasn't lent itself that way.

But I can learn.  If I'm going to be able to keep a sense of self, I need to learn.  And there's no time to start like the present.

observation of the day: haircut as the secret joy of living

What is it about getting a haircut that renews your entire view of everything? 

The other weekend I went to my favorite hairdresser in Erie - I happened to be in town and she happened to have a last minute opening. As always, she gave me the best haircut I've ever had, knowing as no hairdresser has ever known before what to do with my excessively abundant, incredibly fine (if my hair were pasta, it would be three pounds of angel hair), slightly wavy tresses. I left feeling light and sexy as the air around a supermodel, but it took over a week for the New Haircut Honeymoon to set in because a.) she blow-dried it straight since it had been manhandled too much to wave, and b.) I haven't washed my hair more than once a week since the romance went out of the last haircut, so I didn't appreciate the differences until I gave my hair the grudging bare minimum of attention (I relate to my hair in much the same way as a retired couple relates to each other) and ran it under a faucet a week after the cut.

And oh. my. god.

It's fucking beautiful. I like it so much I've been wearing it down. I like it so much I went to the store on vacation in another state to buy headbands so I can wear it down while keeping it out of my goddamn face which is why I've always hated wearing it down. I like it so much I've been, if not washing, at least wetting it every day in the shower to reapply product afterward to compensate for the end of the day when I give up on the headband and put my hair in a ponytail. I like it so much I've started letting it air dry so it can wave naturally...and with NO FUSS. 

I like it so much. 

It's a new lease on life. I went out today and savored the joy of buying new shampoo and conditioner too (the last bottles lasted over a year, and they're too expensive for my unemployed budget right now, so I selected something different off the cheapo shelves of Wal-Mart - the Wal-Mart near my apartment looks even more like a picked-over flea market than even most Wal-Marts do, why), and decided I might as well wash my hair today to see how they work. (So far: satisfactorily.) 

Yep. Haircut. Renewed view of all of everything. One of life's strange mysteries.

"So how do you observe the sacred and bring joy into your life?" (asks the imaginary, and also judgmental and rudely intrusive inquisitor.)

"Well, judgmental and rudely intrusive inquisitor, I solemnly observe that most holy of human duties by paying someone to apply scissors to the dead keratin strands produced by my scalp."

Total recipe for spiritual joy.

Thoreau wept.

the year of the increase of reading

(Incidentally, until I put up the posts I wrote on my laptop while I was on vacation, this is my 1001st post on Coffee Spoons!  It's not a great average over ten years, haha, but milestones are milestones.)

The other night I finished Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (which I had started the night before).  I almost hate writing about literature anymore because I feel obligated to have some kind of deeply insightful academic criticism, and I'm so far out of the habit of thinking like a critic that any attempts would just be silly.  But it was a lovely book.  The only other Gaiman work that I've read is American Gods, which, like The Ocean at the End of the Lane, still haunts me in really beautiful ways.  Gaiman weaves some kind of imaginative magic that draws you in and holds you.  It's beautiful.  The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a short novel, and it's just about perfect.  I just wish there were more of it.

It got me thinking.  I used to be a risk-taking, curious reader.  As a kid I would grab up any book I could get my hands on and dive right in it, happily, hungrily spending most of my time in other people's worlds.  I was a weird, lonely, unhappy, imaginative, passionate child.  Books were my friends.  They weren't just my escape; they were my teachers, my mentors; the protagonists and I conquered the conflicts together; I came away from a story both longing to go back and better equipped for the life I returned to.  I couldn't learn enough.

That adventurousness sort of evaporated in college.  Majoring in English kind of killed my love of free reading for awhile; reading three novels a week will do that.  But it was more than that; the hesitancy to embark on a new bookish journey has continued to the present, and has only seemed to have grown stronger in the last three years.  If anyone were to ask what I'm reading it's always a book I've already read a dozen times.  Something familiar and comfortable.  Something safe.

I used to be braver.  More curious.  I think I'm shy about being moved.  Since coming back to Erie almost seven years ago (seven years!), I've had to deal with some tough, all-too-real things.  One of my experiences hurt and drained me so badly that I lost the ability to feel any sense of connection with anyone, myself included, for a year.  Recovering from that left me...missing something.  I don't stare at the stars much anymore, or notice the little daily flashes of beauty all around me.  I don't waste random minutes throughout the day playing with Simon and losing myself in his adorableness.  I don't spend countless hours -- or any hours -- spinning my own fiction in my head, delighted in the power of imagining.  I don't write much, don't give myself over to the creative process.  I don't listen to new music.  I don't read new books.

No wonder I feel so stagnated.  I miss the vitality I used to live in.  I think I've become afraid of opening myself up, or used to closing myself in.  When it comes to connecting, I still feel tired.  Reaching through the pages of a book and touching a character will cost me something -- pain, sympathy, loss of self.

But I want that courage, that curiosity back.  That willingness to slip into another self, see from another person's perspective, feel another person's joy and heartache, live another person's experience.  I want to feel alive again.

So I'm going to read more.  Taking a cue from Meg, I want to always be reading something new.  Not something necessarily profound or great.  Just stories.  Fiction.  There's lots of it out there.  And lots of it on my bookshelves in my own home.  Time to stop using my books to line the cases.  Time to open them up and let them take me outside myself.

what i think your personal email domain says about you (i am a horrible person) (for meg)

Gmail:  You're savvy, probably a bit bookish/nerdy/artsy/geeky, and there's a strong chance that we can be friends.

Hotmail:  You are an aging partier who thinks Coors Lime is classy and you wear fashions three decades too young for you, thinking that the frozen faces of the people you pass in the street are complimentary.

Yahoo:  You try but you should know better.  We couldn't speak even if I wanted to because all of my emails in your inbox are drowned out by spam.  That's fine because your discussions of the news are usually focused on celebrity gossip thanks to Yahoo's homepage.

AOL:  You are retired and call your children and grandchildren when your computer isn't working because you forgot to turn it on.  I'd send you an email but your server will take a month to download it.  Every time I visit and you check your email on your huge desktop I'll be looking around for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan on TV because everyone stopped using AOL twenty years ago and dated rom-coms are the only realistic source for the nostalgia besides your living room.

Outlook:  You don't know your own email address and couldn't find your password if you tried.  You have better things to do like catch up on all those new reality shows.

(The Oatmeal has his own awesome version here.)

more stuff

SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED.
 
I'm completely fucking exhausted, but since I've been doing about as well with this "daily post" thing as I've expected, I figured I'd better get an update out there before I lose all resolve and fizzle into silence like I have for the last seven years.

So I passed all the necessary exams for my teaching job, which I just found out on Friday.  I've been waiting for the results for a month; I honestly wasn't sure what to expect, since the exams were a lot harder than I'd anticipated, and I haven't done high school math in like eighteen years.  The only real studying I did was a crash review in probability and statistics and trig with Chris over Google chat a few days before the tests.  (And you guys, my boyfriend is an amazing teacher and science/math communicator.)  I left the testing site a month ago shaking, weak and demoralized, certain that I'd have to retake all the tests (at about $150 a pop, so I was looking at another $300-400 if I needed to retake them all).

Of course everyone I know is spectacularly unsurprised.  It's both touching and a bit deflating.  I've been losing sleep over this for a month (omg, what if I failed and I fail the retests, then I won't be able to participate in the summer program and I'll never get a job, etc.), and when I got the passing scores I was like OMIGOD WAHOOOOOOOO and my friends and family are all like, "Yeah, and the sun came up today too."

I guess the real moral of the story is that I need to have the confidence in myself that everyone else has in me.  There's plenty of other shit to agonize over besides things that are probably ridiculous, like the notion that I might have failed a standardized test.

Also I found a roommate!  I'm still not really thrilled about needing a roommate - I LOVE living on my own - but I just can't afford it.  So, roommate it is.  She seems nice, and cool.  She likes cats and is a more quiet-preferring homebody who wants to be more adventurous, so that's a good place to start.  Also she uses Gmail, which automatically sets a higher baseline opinion of people as far as I'm concerned.

Now we just need to find an apartment.

vacation high

Goddammit, I keep meaning to post before I'm on the verge of falling asleep but I'm so tired that I completely forget until I go to shut down my computer and see the Blogger icon in my browser tabs.  (How's that for a run-on sentence.)

Man, a good vacation is exhausting.  The cruise was fantastic, and now I'm just all punch-drunk on post-vacation bliss and having a hard time focusing on anything.  (Also the tired thing.)

And then tonight Chris posted most of our vacation photos to Facebook, and clicking through them has made me all moony and happy and daydreamy.

I feel like my writing lately is totally crappy, but whatever, at least I'm doing it.  Getting in the habit is something for a start.

Oh and I want to go back to Chichen Itza.  Desperately.  That was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

gearing up for winding down

Well, getting back from vacation isn't as soul-killing this time around because I only have two and a half weeks of work left.  (Ohmyjesusgod.)  And the closer it comes, the more excited I get.  Also I pee my pants in fear a little because I hate taking the risk of going without income.  Arrrrgh.  

But still.  I'm ecstatically excited for the change.  I can't wait to teach.  I can't wait to move.  And once I finish with my current job, I'll have the time I need to tackle the upcoming tasks.

Short post today; I'm happy-but-exhausted from the trip and have a lot on my plate.  But the vacation was like the best thing ever.  It was so good we're already planning our next one.  It was just what we needed, and I feel a bone-deep, suffusive sense of goodness and peace.

fort lauderdale

The Fort Lauderdale Airport is mean.

We arrived, tired and sweaty, after two hours in the exit line from the cruise ship, dulled by the swarm of other tired, sweaty people, misplaced luggage, customs, finding cash for the porter, climbing into a taxi.  The twelve feet from the taxicab to the airport door smelled like Florida: hot saltwater air and cigarettes.  I reflected fondly on the many vacation-associated memories dredged up by that smell as we dragged our (well, mostly my) luggage into the airport.

It started out pleasantly enough.  I honed in like a shorthair pointer on the luggage scale and made a beeline for it to fuss over the weight distribution of my suitcases (I wound up paying an extra hundred dollars on the trip down for heavy luggage, ugh).  That accomplished, we checked in, checked our bags, traded cruise-travel banter with the white Jamaican attendant (years of trying to cultivate my own awareness of racial privilege and I'm still an idiot at it), and got wearily in line for the security check.  My bags dragged my spine into a curve never intended by nature.  My back hurt. My hair wisped wildly around my shiny, bare, vacation-blurred face. I just wanted to sit down.

I hate getting bullied by airports.  The staff barked out orders suited to wayward, stupid dogs, rolling their eyes at the slow responders.  "Shoes off.  OFF.  OFF.  YOU DO NOT NEED that bin for that bag.  Sweatshirt off.  Over here.  Keep moving.  Laptop BY ITSELF.  SHOES OFF."  The line of people scurried to obey, looking harassed and cuffed and cowed.

I think the airport personnel would have pushed us if they'd been allowed.  I can imagine what a shit job that must be, but I also know from experience that shit jobs are made less shitty by exchanging kindness with people.

Now they're informing us that the full flights are very full and we will not be allowed to take our standard one carry-on and one personal item; larger carry-ons will be taken and checked.

Chris and I are finally in seats near the only strip of wall outlets in the terminal, half of which don't work.  We infiltrated the seats like Stoogish spies, hauling our carry-ons nearer and nearer to the bench until finally a seat opened up and I fell over my bare feet to throw my shoes into the seat.  Chris lurked nearby until the seat next to me opened up.

We've been here since 10:00 and our flight doesn't board until 5:45 - another two hours.

Thank all the gods and angels for technology.  I look around, now that the terminal has mostly emptied out, and see bored people engaged in the first world's primary occupation of passing the time, a pursuit made easier by laptops and e-readers and tablets and cell phones.  On the way to the bathroom you can see people contorted into awkward sitting positions on the floor, chained to the walls by the electrical umbilical cords feeding their entertainment devices.  The pizza is good but costs too much.  The day outside would be beautiful if we were anywhere but at an airport.  Angry babies grizzle hollowly over their parents' defeated attempts at pacification.  The most common sound is someone's tired sigh.

So we block out the soul-stripping nothingness of the terminal and pass the time.  Chris is playing Civilization V.  I've read the remaining 60% of Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy -- extra reading for the training program that we'll book club at some point this week -- a fascinating, devastating account of noir journalism that has left me feeling sad and small and determined to try to do something for the city I'm moving to.

And now I really have to pee.  I hope Chris can save my seat.

polarized

Went on a last-minute shopping trip this evening for little incidentals for the cruise. Primarily I wanted (and found) a smaller shoulder bag than the primordial monster I usually carry around with me; the thing works great as a spine dislocator (if you don't already have scoliosis but always wanted it I'll let you borrow my purse)  but I'd rather travel a little more lightly for prowling around beaches and resort towns. 

Secondly, and even more, I wanted a pair of sunglasses. This might sound like an easy quest. Unfortunately, my beglassesed state of being makes the quest rather more like trying to reach the portal cake. I can't wear contacts (the only time I tried, I wound up with blisters on the insides of my eyelids), so normal sunglasses are out; and I can't afford prescription sunglasses; so for years I've subsisted on clip-ons. They've served adequately, but as I've prepared for the cruise, a sullen flame of rebellion began a slow burn. Dammit, I want sunglasses. I want big silly sunglasses like everybody else wears, that make me look like a space insect. 

Yesterday Mom told me about a kiosk in the mall that she'd heard sells sunglasses that go over your regular glasses. Pessimistic but hopeful, I headed to the mall after work. And I came away with two big, beautiful pairs of slide-over sunglasses that look just like regular sunglasses except they fit completely over my prescription glasses.

I could weep for joy. I wish I could wear them to bed.

it's like the night before christmas

Getting ready for my first real destination vacation as a grownup (ha! grownup) that Chris and I are taking next week to celebrate still liking each other after almost a year.

I'm so excited.  I want to write more about it, but I need to go construct my packing list because I'm excited enough to lose my head and forget important basic shit like my passport or a hairdryer.

Squeeeee.

back to bugs

It's almost 9:30 on a Tuesday night, and as I sit here in bed trying to decide what to write about, Simon is snoozing at my feet exuding pure contentment as only a cat can while my little black spider ally chills out above the bedroom window.  Dunno what Spidey did with the stink bug husk, but it's gone -- li'l arachnid does a better job cleaning its dishes than I do.  Although I did my dishes for the third day running, so...yay me.

I wish I could tell Spidey that there are like six billion ants in the kitchen; maybe he could help me out there.  Every damn spring the fucking ants come marking nine by ninety-nine into the kitchen, driven up by the warming temperatures and wet ground.  (Not-hurrah.)  As soon as April dries into May they leave me in peace, but in the meantime, they're running all over the walls like I invited them to.  Every year they find a different way in, too.  I think of all the crevices in this old house and shudder sometimes; who knows how many horrors are crammed into them, waiting for just the right circumstances to erupt into an infestation of hell?  

Last year the ants poured into the kitchen in especially horrifying numbers (cripes, it must sound like I run an entomology park or something, like there are just bugs everywhere, like it's some primal dystopia of the damned.  It's not that bad, honest; most of the time you'd never even notice bugs here at all).  Unwilling to use Raid because of Simon, and unwilling to keep shrieking with disgust every time I entered the room, I fell back on a bit of deductive reasoning and started using hairspray on them.  The reasoning goes like this:  I use a lot of hair spray.  The hair spray makes my lungs feel like broken balloons.  This is probably because it's coating the insides of my lungs and making it impossible to breathe.  If it does that to me it will do that to ants because ants need air too.  Die, ants.

Seems to be pretty effective.  No idea what it's doing to the paint on the walls though.

My whole life I've loved old houses.  But when it comes to loose leaky windows and structural sags and gaps, I have to cede the argument to Chris: Newer homes don't have those kinds of issues.  And fewer bugs sounds like a lovely prospect.

Although I've kind of come around to Spidey.  He doesn't bother anything, just hangs out in his web hoping to get lucky.

Omg.  I'll be his wingman.  Bwah. Hahahahaha,

Oh Jesus, I need sleep.

simple things

Just about every aspect of my life is a jumble at the moment, so this evening I decided to return to a simple, basic method for grounding myself in a sense of sanity, and washed the dishes.

Keeping things clean has always come as something of a challenge to me.  Absentminded preoccupation lends itself to chaos; depression lends itself to squalor: Historically, my living spaces have looked like the corners of the cage of some enormous mutant gerbil.  It's always worse when I'm stressed or depressed, and over the last year I've been a bit of both.  Plus, while Chris has many excellent attributes, "tidy" isn't on the list, and it's been rather easy for me to sink back into a level of comfort with what I call "living like a troll."

In those times, though, it becomes even more important to maintain cleanly, orderly surroundings: It's easier to relax in a clean room because it's bright and pretty; you can take a measure of pride in having done even the mild forms of work required to make it so (and some days any effort is worth celebrating); and you get rid of the guilt for lying around in voluntary putrefaction.  Lots of win.  So this evening I checked off one more item on my "teacher-to-be" to-do list for the upcoming summer training program, and then went into the kitchen to tackle the dishes.  Which wasn't even that horrible, because I already did them last night (for the first time in a week).  

So at the end of the day I didn't get as much work done as I wanted; but goddammit, my kitchen is clean.  And that feels really, really good.

just a small-town girl

The apartment looked perfect.

I had spent several days sifting through Detroit metro area apartment listings on Craigslist.  The results were not encouraging: Some of the apartments featured windows with strips of straight-up scrap metal nailed across them, and even those were barely in my price range.

I love city living.  It was one of the many life outcomes I never expected.  Having grown up at the outskirts of a small western Pennsylvania town voraciously reading books about horses, I thought of the city as scary, dirty, crowded and generally awful.  Give me open spaces, wide skies, fresh air, dark nights, and the nearest neighbor a mile away, I thought.

Until I moved to South Bend, Indiana, after college, and into my first solo apartment on the second floor of an old, converted single-family house in the city's graciously seedy historic Chapin Park.  Some of the streets were still brick, sunken, banked and grooved by a century of traffic; the paved streets had patches were the asphalt had worn away and the original brick showed through.  The large late Victorian houses, refurbished or gently wearing down, stood close together like birds on a telephone line; back alleys interlaced the already haphazardly mapped out blocks; garage- and car-break-ins happened frequently; the neighborhood boasted a racial and socioeconomic diversity I had been brought up to fear.  And I loved it.  I loved the surprises, the funny clashes of old and new, the compost heaps in the alleys, the scary men walking friendly dogs.  I loved the sense of surrounding activity, of private lives tucked away in plain sight, of quick access to the downtown and the farmer's market and the Asian grocery where they sold spices for four dollars a pound.

And I loved my apartment.  The Ivory Tower.  Small, clean, quiet, it featured turn-of-the-century charm in its moldings and transom windows and claw-foot cast iron tub, and bright, bi-directional light in every room.  I loved the side porch outside my front door where I smoked cigarettes and drank coffee and watched the mornings filter through the old weedy trees.  I loved the gleaming little kitchen.  I loved hearing Simon tear through the rooms.  I loved looking out my windows onto the shabby houses and rutted streets.

It's a love that has stayed with me ever since, the love of a quiet old city neighborhood.  When I moved back to Erie and could afford to live on my own again, I found The Eyrie, a second-floor flat on the West Side, much like the Ivory Tower, but with hardwood floors, oak molding and a fireplace.  As long as I'm on my own, this is the kind of place I want to live in.

So naturally as I planned for the upcoming move to Detroit, that's the kind of place I sought.  And this one looked stunning, especially considering the search results leading up to it -- like digging through a trash heap and finding a flower.  Large, airy rooms.  A formal dining room.  Hardwood floors.  A gas fireplace.  Lots and lots of windows.  A dishwasher.  As I clicked through the pictures, I could visualize myself there.  I knew where I would put the bookcases.  I could hear my footsteps moving through the kitchen into the back hallway to the bedrooms.

I wanted it.  With my whole soul.

I looked up its location and it seemed to be in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Detroit.  So I emailed the landlord, learned that an apartment just like it would be opening up on my planned moving day, and arranged to call him to ask some questions.

Prior to the conversation, I wrote down a list of talking points, particularly questions about the state of the neighborhood.  My experience of landlords has taught me caution.  Most landlords want an ideal tenant so desperately that they'll promise anything, so I looked up the non-emergency number for the local police station to verify what the landlord might say.

The arranged call time arrived.  Excitedly I dialed the phone number.  John picked up.

I didn't even get to my first question.  He heard my voice and said, "Yeah, let me stop you right there.  I don't think you want to live in this apartment."  Stunned, I stammered some kind of incoherent response, and he launched into a very firm, stark description of the neighborhood.

"I mean, you're welcome to check it out if you think you'd be comfortable here," he said.  "But  most Caucasians wouldn't do well here.  The building itself is secure because I have floodlights all over it; the place looks like the sun at night.  I have security cameras and a sixteen-hundred-dollar security door on the entrance.  But you'd need to get an alarm on your car.  One of my tenants parked his car across the street, out of the floodlights, and when I watched the footage later, I saw a van pull up alongside it, and a man got out and stood guard in the street while another man slid under the car and gutted it.  They were gone in three minutes.  And this is right next to one of the best neighborhoods in Detroit, the University District.  And even there, in the University District, a federal judge who lives there was taking his trash out one night and a car full of men stopped and pulled a gun on him and demanded that he let them into his house.  He said no and they shot him in the leg and left.

"This is Detroit.  This is the most dangerous city in America.  If you're just moving to the area and you can't afford to live right downtown, you're better off looking in the suburbs.  Here are some areas you might want to check out.  But unless you come from a really tough place and are able to live in a really tough environment, I don't think this place is for you."

I remembered to close my mouth, thanked him for his honesty ("I wouldn't want you moving here and then finding out what it's really like and not be able to move out," he said), and ended the call.

Disappointment and shame flooded me as I stared vacantly across the room, realizing just how little I knew what I'm getting into.  It's always a bitter experience when reality forces your worldview, and your view of yourself, into a new paradigm.  I've lived in sketchy neighborhoods before -- I stood down a potential break-in in South Bend with a shotgun, in a neighborhood adjacent to a neighborhood where a badly decomposed body was found under the bushes in someone's backyard.  A week after I moved into The Eyrie, a woman across the street was murdered.  In both neighborhoods I've walked around at night by myself in perfect ease.  And none of that means shit in Detroit.  Far from being the badass I've thought myself, I'm just an ingenue with a soft lens blur on my wide eyes and sweet smile.

I wanted to deny it, because goddamn it, I'm a survivor, but I've gained enough self-awareness to realize that there's no point.  And there's no way in hell I want to live in that kind of neighborhood, no matter how much I want to crusade against poverty and crime, or how much I want to "take back the city."  I don't want to die doing it.  After the sting to my pride subsided, I was able to embrace a feeling of gratitude toward John for the kindness of his brutal honesty.  And also feel a sense of outrage that anywhere should be that bad.  It's completely senseless.  (Yes, I know.  My privilege betrays itself in my shock that there could even be places where life is that grim.)

So I'm resentfully looking into the suburbs, all newer, where the apartments come in planned communities without character or soul, and where the rent will drive you broke.

But hey, it's better than getting robbed, raped or murdered.

moar sleep pleez

Going to be a boring post.  Got another in the works but I'm too tired to do it justice.

Been a rough week; the recovery is going to take some time.  In the meantime, today I slept in, did not shower, did put on pants (because it's still too cold to walk around without them - damn you, Erie), selected dresses for the cruise, worked on Teacher Corps assignments, cuddled with Simon, watched a little Game of Thrones.  

And there is still so much to be done.  Laundry, math, writing, reading Detroit: An American Autopsy (completely fascinating), more sleep. 

Ack.  I need more hours in the day.  

their legs are hair

Woke up sort of exhaustedly grateful that it's Friday and all I have to do is drag myself through one more day at work and then I can stop showering and putting pants on till Monday.  Simon was howling in my ear like an air raid siren, so I sat up and blearily turned on the light, whereupon my peripheral vision must have screamed at me because my eyes zeroed in on a very, very wrong-looking dark splotch on the wall across the room.

It was a centipede with a body bigger than my fucking thumb.

It remained perfectly still on the wall as I stared around the room in a kind of shellshock wondering what to kill it with.  I decided the cover of Virginia Woolf's The Waves would most easily wash off after the slaughter, so I crept very slowly across the room with a twentieth-century masterpiece clutched in my hands, readying it for use as a weapon.

But the damn bug was too high up on the wall to get a certain shot.  The last thing I wanted was to miss and watch it fall behind the dresser where it would doubtless scurry all over the floor.  Recalling the flyswatter I keep on the balcony, I sneaked out of the bedroom, fetched the swatter, and returned to the battle zone thoughtfully thwacking myself in the palm and wondering if I could get enough oomph to crush a giant nightmare.

My aim with a flyswatter is just horrible.  Carefully I got myself in position, eyed the centipede, gave a couple of experimental shakes like a golfer about to tee off, and let fly.

I missed.  The horror-legged thing started to move.  Desperately I struck again --

-- and centipede exploded all over my face.

Apparently their exoskeletons are a lot softer than those of wasps and spiders.  Waves of legs rippled away from the blast site on the wall, and jelly globules of bug guts flecked my skin.  Gagging, I rushed to the bathroom to get that shit off my face, wondering if maybe I should douse my head in bleach.

At least my mouth wasn't open.

So far in this daily writing project I've reflected on arthropods and Chris.  Maybe I should call this the Bugs and Boyfriend Blog.

Under the Wire

Gah! Almost midnight and almost forgot to post. So I'm mobile blogging because I don't feel like turning the computer back on. Love the Blogger app.

Rough couple of days; relationships are complicated, and there's a lot going on generally. And I'm so fucking tired.

Went out for dinner with Chris's sister tonight - lots of fun. I like Missy. I like all of Chris's family. They're funny and warm and welcoming and I felt instantly at home with them.

I met them pretty early on. Chris came back to town for the Fourth of July, six weeks after we'd started our long-distance relationship and at least six weeks before we made the relationship official. He stayed with his parents the first night of the visit, so the next day I parked my rust-eaten 1999 Buick LeSabre on the street in front of his parents' magnificent house (thinking "oh my god, someone's going to call a tow truck") and rode with him to a picnic at his friend's place. When we returned at approximately 1 a.m., full of burgers and beer, we quietly transferred my picnic contributions from his car to mine while we worked out arrangements for him to come to my place shortly after. 

As he carried his cooler up to the house with his golden retriever, the Adorable Vinnster (generally known as Vinnie), pacing his heels, I was halted in the act of getting into the car by his parents' front door opening. Bright light tracked across the broad front lawn to my car and a voice called, "Come in!"

Chris said, "It's my mom." I heard nervousness and humor in his voice. Oh god I'm meeting his parents and it's really soon and I hope he'll still come over afterward because I want to rip his clothes off I thought as I crossed the lawn up the small slope to the door.

Debbie's eyes were bright and warm and assessing as she welcomed me. And then she invited me over for dinner the next day, after which I would have the strong and normal-surreal conviction that my family had just expanded.

well, it's a post

Wow, what a horrible, horrible day.  Just amazingly, grindingly, stupidly awful.

At least there are best friends and cute sleepy kitties.  And a really, really comfy bed waiting for just this moment when I say "fuck it" and give up on consciousness for the rest of this stupid twirl of this stupid planet around its stupid axis.

And at least there is the complex and chaotic, but also still and deep, continuous current of love.

in the beginning, there was salad

Drawing inspiration from Bestie Meg over at http://adarknessuponmethatsfloodedinlight.blogspot.com/, I'm going to try to post something once a day.  It won't always be much - in fact, it's almost guaranteed not to be for some time, with everything I have going on - but something is better than nothing, and I'm tired of not being a writer.

One of the things I've aimed for over the last fifteen years is happiness.  I've blogged about this before in various places (my blogs are as dislocated and myriad as my dating history), but I grew up with this romanticized notion that great writing requires a sort of tortured despair, and that if I wanted to do anything with my writing (I'm not calling any of it great by any stretch), I had to resign myself to the sad.  Then I decided that I'd rather be happy than sad, and if that meant giving up my writing, then fine.  But I think it's a stupid, false dichotomy, and as Meg astutely pointed out, art comes from every state of mind, because art comes from life.

I think that all my past notions of art and writing must converge somewhere, somehow: the anguish and the joy, the boredom and the interest, the profundity and the mundanity.  Maybe that's the still point of the turning world that Eliot talks about so beautifully.  And at this point I don't have to choose one kind of writing over another; the choice to write is the only choice that matters, even if what I write is crap.

So here we are.  I'm going to attempt to craft something out of each day, whether that something be sad or happy or deep or silly or fascinating or dull.

Today my mind keeps wandering over the past twelve months; a lot has happened in their course, and a lot will happen in the year to come.  Just over a year ago I met my boyfriend for the first time, and the narrative that my memory has constructed focuses on the feelings I had (or remember having) at the time, when I first saw him, that I had just encountered someone special.

I was attending an areligious Easter dinner party, Hobbit-themed, hosted by a friend of my then-close-friend Steph.  Since Steph and Kacy were the only two people I would know there, I, like a good cautious sometimes-introvert, quizzed Steph on the participants prior to the party.  She sat at the kitchen table in the shabby little house she shared with her aunt, carefully applying makeup while I compiled all the ingredients for the salad I was taking, and gave me a brief run-down on the other invited guests.  They all sounded quirky and geeky and fun, and then she said, "And then there's Chris.  I met him last night helping to set up.  He's an engineer in Detroit, and he also writes for our favorite website."

I perked up visibly.  "Is he single?"

"I think so."

PERK.  "Is he cute?"

"Not particularly."

"Huh.  Well, looks aren't everything," I said, thinking Holy shit he sounds smart.  

She frowned.  "Long distance relationships are impossible."

I shrugged.  "Not necessarily.  Detroit isn't that far away."

"I guess not."

We assembled our various party offerings, piled into her car, and drove to Kacy's apartment complex.  As we set up in the party room, I grew increasingly nervously excited - maybe I would make new friends!  Maybe Chris was cute!  Maybe I would trip and drop the salad everywhere!  Maybe everyone would hate me!

The guests began to arrive, and as I stood chatting with them, I kept my peripheral vision trained on the door.  And then a tall, dark-haired guy came walking into the room, and, arrested, I let myself stare for a moment, thinking, What the fuck was she talking about? He's super cute!

And that's where it all began.

All Quiet on the Bedroom Front (not that connotation of 'bedroom,' perv)

The Stink Bug Wars have begun, and I have gained an ally.

I have never encountered a conflict about which I could not possibly care less but find myself enmeshed in anyway, except maybe for religious conversations with my parents.  It's like if being a World War I soldier were an office job.  A new skirmish or wave of dysentery or cloud of mustard gas arises and I just sort of sigh and glance at the time.

The other night I heard another stink bug sawing the air in my bedroom as it lumbered unseen from one place to another.  (Stink Bug Stealth technology is just crap.)  It subsided shortly thereafter so I didn't trouble myself about it.  The uneasy peace could not last, however; on the following evening I walked into my bedroom (evidently this is the front) and noticed an oddly shaped shadow suspended from the ceiling above my window.  Curious and a little apprehensive, I clambered on top of the mattress and slowly straightened to where I could observe the strange shadow without putting my face too close to it.

A stink bug hung motionless in a hammock of web as a little black spider cocooned it.

I experienced confusing emotions.  Historically I fucking hate spiders.  I blame it on the time when I was seven and happened to glance up at the ceiling to see one descending onto my face.  Ten years on my own should have taught me to kill my own spiders, but instead taught me how to remain ambulatory enough leave the room while my entire body seizes into one giant charlie horse of terror except for my urge to vomit.  Finally, fed up with my own cowardice (they are the size of a pimple, STOP SCREAMING), but still too cowardly to man up and kill them (if you miss they curl up and just FALL, probably in your hair or down your shirt), I learned to suppress the gag reflex and continue with my normal activities.  You know, while keeping a wary eye glued to the spider and exuding as much nonchalance as a cartoon character with a gun held to its head from behind a curtain while the villain hisses "act natural."  But still, you know, it's a sort of peace.  Like the peace I had with the stink bugs.  And yeah, I'd rather have the stink bugs than bed bugs or cockroaches or centipedes (THEIR LEGS ARE HAIR AND THEY ARE LEGION), but I don't really want the stink bugs.

So when I saw the itsy bitsy spider gamely marching around the stink bug like a smart car driving over a tank, shrouding the shield-shaped armor tightly in magical butt filament, I felt a rapid succession of tiny emotional jolts like the shutter button of a high speed camera: disgust for the spider, disgust for the stink bug, admiration for the spider, pity for the stink bug, and a grim satisfaction that there would no longer be this particular thing going bzzzzz in the night.  All before interest dissolved back into apathy in exactly the way my powdered non-dairy creamer collapses into my morning coffee.

"Right on, spider," I said, and left them alone.

I didn't really pick sides.  I elected noninterference.  You know, like the protagonist in Camus' L'Hote.  

And now I'm worried that I'll come back and find stink bug guerrillas encamped behind my bras and stacks of teddy bears.

Escalation

I have nearly always lived in old houses and old apartments.  Now that I'm dating an engineer with a love of big overblown shiny new houses, I'm grudgingly coming to admit that there's something to be said for dishwashers and central air and windows that don't leak frigid air every winter.  Especially the windows.  I seal mine in plastic every winter and it's always a big ordeal, and then I spend the season feeling vaguely like I'm living in a sandwich bag.

But it saves about a hundred dollars a month on heating bills, and I do like being warm.  Until Williams' "sluggish dazed spring approaches," barely discernible from winter, but nonetheless with a rich flush of warmth under the thin sharpness of the air -- air that rushes through your being reinvigorating your winter zombie animation.  For me, that invigoration builds subtly, until it suddenly erupts into a crazed starvation for fresh nighttime air blowing into my bedroom, usually at midnight on a worknight when I should be sleeping but am overcome with the conviction that if I don't get the windows open RIGHT FUCKING NOW I will swelter and suffocate, and it's either rip the plastic off the windows or tear my way out of my own skin.

This moment finally happened, when I knew I could not breathe the stale close air in my bedroom one more night without losing the dubious remnants of my sanity, and I clawed the plastic off the windows and triumphantly threw up the sash...and was thwarted by the ancient storm windows having swollen shut.  Thus, midnight on a work night found me kneeling naked in the window yanking madly at the aluminum tabs with a hammer and a screwdriver, alternately pushing up and pulling down the upper and lower windows with sweat pouring down my back and every sense narrowed to the focus on my life's great work, my only purpose in being: getting the goddamn window open.

And victory, in the end, was mine.  I sat back on my heels and felt the sweet cold of early spring pour over my skin and into the stuffy room, sweeping out the cloying staleness with every surge of breeze.

But in the quest for freedom there was a collateral casualty.  As I pulled down the upper window to try to see if anything was jammed, I recoiled from a stink bug balanced along the top beam.  I was startled, annoyed, sweaty and desperate, so that when I ascertained that nothing was in fact jammed, I pushed the window right back up and ignored the crunch.

Oh dear.  Sorry, little buddy.

stink bugs

So there are stink bugs in my house.  I've noticed them off and on, over the last few years.  Generally if something isn't obviously a pest, or something horrifying like a centipede (THEIR LEGS ARE HAIR AND THEY ARE LEGION), I don't kill it, both because I'm softhearted and because I'm a coward.  These bugs never bit me or Simon, they didn't appear to be eating anything; they're just slow and a weird shape and they kind of sit there, or occasionally brrzzzzz into a lamp shade.  So I've left them alone.  Some half-conscious hunch (I must have read some kind of field guide as a kid) said "maybe they're stink bugs" so I never tried to smash them.

Out of curiosity a couple of months ago I finally looked them up ("bugs shaped like a shield"), and sure enough: stink bugs.  I've never noticed anything stinky about them, but again, I've left them alone.  The sources I located said that they're not pests, they don't eat anything, and they don't reproduce indoors, so I felt vindicated in not viewing them as a harm.

Well, just before I sat down to type this, a stink bug that likes to hang out in my bedroom because of the illumination from the bedside lamp was in my way on the night table, so I dug out a tissue and gently moved it.  I was ever so polite, but it seemed to become quite perturbed, and buzzed harshly around the lamp so that every other sentence I've had to look over my shoulder to see what it was doing.  So here I am, writing about how I've taken pains to get along with the stink bugs in my house, and I hear this brrrrzzzzt and a plop, and I look up to see it floating in my glass of water.

Well, fine then, jerk.  I didn't really like you hanging out by my lamp anyway.

So I took the glass to the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet.  And now my house has one less stink bug.

I just hope I haven't started a war.

leap of faith

One of these days I'm going to do something creative and stick with it.

It doesn't help that I've been stressed and tired for awhile now, but all the various moving parts of my life seem to be coming together in some organized sense, so there's light ahead (shut up, I will mix whatever metaphors I please).  The greatest upheavals are yet to come - oh my god, so much to do in such a short span of time - but I'm as excited as I am daunted by them.

I'm going to be taking some significant risks - relocating to a different city with or without a job, taking a chance on a relationship, recrafting my life.  It's scary as hell.  I find myself sometimes (in metaphor) fearfully eyeing the life I've built for myself here and wondering if I'm insane or stupid to throw the match on it and set my face west.

The answer is...maybe.  Maybe I'm insane or stupid, in this economy, to cast my fate to the winds and move to a city that's possibly even more economically depressed than the one I'm living in now; to gamble on a relationship that's still relatively new; to give up a relative security for the completely unknown.

The corollary is, So what?

My life here is safe, but that's all it is, and it's not even that safe.  I don't have health insurance (don't even get me started on my non-options), I don't have a retirement plan, I don't have my own house, I don't have significant savings.  I have a steady job that pays a good wage, but it's not what I want to do any longer; I need work that matches my vision, something I'm passionate about, something that makes me feel good about my contributions to this planet that has given me my life.  I have a great apartment, but it's not quite big enough (and I want a dishwasher and a dryer and off-street parking and a backyard).  I have one friend.  My parents are closeby, but I rarely visit them.  My life here is small and comfortable and relatively secure...and that's it.

In the end, it's not just that I've done everything that I set out to do when I came back home six and a half years ago.  It's that I can't stay here anymore.  I'm not only done with this phase of my life; I have to move on, or lose something that I've worked hard to gain.  It's time to go, not just because it's time to move forward, but because not doing so is not a viable option.

This is me butchering Kierkegaard, but I'm reminded of the leap of faith.  The actual leap of faith, as (possibly) described by Kierkegaard.  The thought experiment is this:  You're traveling on foot and find yourself trapped at night in a blizzard, many many impossible miles from any shelter.  To turn back is certain death, so you keep moving forward, blindly feeling your way, unable to see even your hand in front of your face, while all around you the cold and the wind howl and tear at you.  Suddenly you find that you've come to the edge of a cliff.  You edge to the left for a long way, but the cliff extends unbroken; you edge back to the right, with the same result.  There is no shelter.  You cannot turn back.  You cannot stay put.

So you jump.

You jump, and you trust that a ledge will be there to catch you.

Given what you can know in that situation, it's not that stupid a decision.  And that's where I am now.  I can't stay here; the stagnation is killing me.  I'm scared to go, scared to fail, scared that everything will go spectacularly wrong; but it would be much, much worse not to try.  I know what waits for me here: more of the same.  And I can't do it.  Even though moving to a new city with no job and only a few months' savings is risky, I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to find something.  It might take awhile to achieve all the things I want to; I may not be able to teach right away.  But there will be other things to do.  There have to be.  I'm highly employable.  And when determined, once I have decided something, I am a force of nature.

So it's time to gather up my courage, and jump.

Count of three.

tired

All I want to do right now is go to bed but I feel a sense of moral outrage at falling asleep before nine, so I thought I might as well dash off a post since, characteristically, having determined to blog regularly again, I haven't.

Which isn't to say that I haven't been writing.  I have.  Pages and pages and pages of anguished journal entries, until the thoughts all tangle in an amazingly annoying snarled loop.  I'm so tired of my own thoughts.  So...bored.  After awhile, even anxiety and nervousness and fear lose their interest.

I miss New Mexico.  I really need to get back there - maybe next summer.  (This summer I'll be way too poor to afford a trip.)  I keep remembering how it felt to be there, how the landscape, spare and vast and harsh, brought me back to life.  I had felt...nothing...for over a year when I took the trip to Taos.  No connection to beauty, to other people, to myself.  I was the walking dead.  Some trauma requires a long recovery; I had forgotten what it felt like to belong in my own skin.  And there...there I remembered myself.  There, for the first time in a long, long time, I reawakened to joy.  Something about New Mexico will always feel like birth, and home.

I've been tired again, lately.  Drained.  Worried.  Self-alienated.  Nearly all of my life is in active upheaval or building up to active upheaval, and almost all of it is good, but...some of it is uncertain.  And I want rest, and peace.

So I'll go to bed at 9:30 in the meantime.  It's not desert mountains or the whisper of a green river valley or water scars in lifeless earth, but I can make the most of what I have.

weather adaptable

Man, it's hard to break five years of silence.  The habit of idly contemplating writing something and then going nahhhhh has some roots.

My emotional state was kind of bad this week.  I blame hormones, mostly, plus sleep deprivation.  My body is still adjusting to the pill, perhaps, and I never do well when I'm tired.  Whatever the reason, everything was all splintery in my head the last couple of days, my perspective like a slivered mirror, so that everything looked distorted and horrible, and I kept cutting myself on my thoughts.  So I did what I usually do on Bad Head Days and holed up.  The comfort rituals have changed a little over the years; this week it was sushi and Pride and Prejudice instead of [whatever comfort food I used to eat] and Aliens (although I still love to watch Aliens in any mood because oh my god can I be Sigourney Weaver when I grow up?).  It helped; today was a little better than yesterday, and hopefully tomorrow will be better still.

I guess that's the thing with mood disorders.  You never get rid of them, never "cure" them; you just learn how to live with them, manage them, cope.  Which isn't as defeatist as perhaps it sounds; it's actually kind of empowering.  I've been saddled with these things (depression and, less severely, anxiety); they're part of my genetic heritage and my learned experience, and not "curing" them is not failure, just like not "curing" my nearsightedness is not failure.  It's not curable.  But it's absolutely manageable.  Wonderfully so.  I've had a lot of therapy to learn better tools for relating to myself and to others; I take medication to maintain a more even baseline; and when the bad days come, as come they will, I know how to handle them.  And I know that they'll go away, and everything will get better.  Which leaves me free to be myself, and to accept my experiences.  Hell yes, that's empowering.  I can't control the weather, but I have tools to mitigate the weather's effects: umbrellas, coats, scarves, gloves, boots, etc.  So with my mood disorders.  The nasty days come, and I can't stop them from coming, and it's not my fault that they happen; but I have a good array of implements to buffer me against the worst parts of them.  And mostly those tools are things I do to relax and make myself feel a little better, a little more comfortable.

So the week has felt pretty shitty, but having not had Bad Head Days like this in awhile, getting through them as well as I have averages out to a net positive, in my book.  It's been crap, but I'm still okay.  And that's pretty profoundly wonderful all by itself.

quiet evenings

God, I love not having school for a few weeks.  

I had a fairly stressful day at work.  Nothing catastrophic or irreparable, just snarly and fairly unpleasant.  There were a couple of bright spots: Talking about life for 40 minutes on the phone with a paralegal from another office who is as stressed as I am, while doing other work so I wasn't wrecking my productivity; and receiving the first of a wave of packages from Amazon, the fruits of my annual January baby-it's-cold-outside-so-let's-spend-some-money-on-music-and-sundries spree.  The contents of this first package: The first translation into English of the first edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales (available here, in case that news made any of you, my gentle readers, cream your pants the way I did when I found out about it in November); Quartets, a compilation of albums by jazz tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd (why is it called Quartets when it contains five albums?); a Diva cup (because saving money + eco-friendly + menstruation = weird + gross, and curiosity is a curse); and a USB computer mouse (because I love love love my new laptop, but the built-in mouse is as moody as a pimply teenager).

I guess another bright spot is realizing the increasing return to a sense of self-groundedness.  The last year has been full of change and upheaval, much of it internal, and all of it unfinished/unresolved and leading up to significant external changes, and like change seems to do, it caught me rather by surprise and threw everything into disarray.  So this, following a nice long almost two-week rest at Christmas (taking all that time off was so smart, so wholesome, so restorative), this easing up of anxiety, this settling into a sense of general security, is enormously welcome.  Might only be the calm in the eye of the storm, but I'll enjoy it all the more consciously for that.

And there just aren't adequate words to express the simple joy of a quiet evening.  I came home from work, reheated leftovers for dinner and ate while watching Archer; bought entirely unnecessary wrist and arm warmers on Amazon (hey, most of them were $5.00/pair, the remainder even less); worked out while watching Cosmos; washed my dishes; got ready for bed; and now I'm sitting in bed listening to Fish Out of Water from Lloyd's mystifyingly-named Quartets (god, this music is beautiful) and sipping tea while Simon reposes next to me with an expression of contentment that only a cat can wear, an expression that eases all the troubles in my mind just to look at it.  (Yes, Simon is still around and going strong!  I love this cat.  Hard to believe he's 13 this year.  He still runs around apartment like a kitten.)  It's been...it's heartsease, having evenings like this.

Trying not to stay up too late, though; today went well despite its level of stress precisely because I got more sleep last night.

So, not the best of days; but a balm of an evening.  These are the times when I know how much I love my life.

routine

Wanting to tap out a quick post before I hit the hay.  January isn't quite off to the ball-busting, get-up-at-five-work-out-and-journal return to spartan discipline that I had fantasized about, but we're going to try this getting up earlier thing tomorrow.  Which means going to be earlier tonight.  Because I'm just not 21 anymore, and I can't function energetically on short sleep.

It is lovely to return to quieter, simpler routine though.  This past weekend I washed all my dishes and put away all my laundry, and so far I'm successfully doing my dishes and keeping my clothes picked up on a daily basis.  It feels...rhythmic.  Grounding.  I'm remembering all over again how much easier it is to manage my depression when I don't feel like I'm helplessly living in a troll hole.  I think the strategy (daily tidiness to manage depression) comes from bifold roots:  1.)  Messiness is depressing all by itself.  2.)  A huge part of depression is not being able to do anything, is powerlessness, is the lack of energy to deal with the tasks at hand.  The more your surroundings fall into decay, the worse you feel, because the task becomes monumentally harder, because there's more to do to clean it up.  And you also feel worse because you should be doing better than this, you should be keeping your shit together, and so the self-loathing and self-blame creep in too.  But if there's enough time to get some rest and reset the clock by cleaning everything up, it's a lot easier to maintain the tidy system by little daily tasks.  

I don't know how well I'll be able to maintain this when school starts back up.  And I don't have a lot of weekends to myself these days (though only for a few more months), and the system is rather weekend-dependent.  I'm hopeful though.  Determined, but without that get-it-together-you-useless-piece-of-shit self-hating that just makes everything worse.  If I can't maintain the little daily system, then I can't.  But I'm going to try, because I feel so much more relaxed and happy when my living space is clean and airy.

Tonight in an effort to combat the transubstantiation of my elbows into dragon scales I cut a knee sock into a pair of elbow sleeves to wear over slathers of petroleum jelly.  We'll see if that has any effect.  (I love petroleum jelly, so new uses for it delight me.)

lazy saturday

As always, I started out this day with grand ambitions -- laundry, housecleaning, sealing the sunroom windows in plastic, paperwork for school -- and so far I have:

- become conscious
- made coffee
- journaled
- watched videos on the Internet
- found more checks so I can pay rent (but haven't written the rent check)
- made tea

So productive.  No wonder my housework never gets done.

Right now my tea is steeping, wrapped in a thick yellow kitchen towel, in the big brown English teapot I found for two dollars at the Salvation Army several years ago.  I absolutely love this teapot.  It has several features that previous teapots of mine have lacked: a small metal tip on the spout that apparently serves to keep it from spilling when poured, a stamp on the bottom that says "made in England," and a built-in internal strainer in front of the spout that means that I can use looseleaf tea and not need a strainer over the cup.  Delightful.

I may need to knit a tea cozy one of these winters.  Right now the kitchen towel suffices, and I am not allowing myself to knit anything until I finish knitting the infernal blanket I've been making for my sister for the last four years.  I designed it myself, and it's going to be beautiful (lots of smoky purples and blues broken up by pewter eyelash yarn: I was going for "ocean" or "sky" but Chris said, when I first pulled it out at his place a month or two ago, "That looks like a Muppet skin!"  I hate that he's right), but I should have thought a little harder before using sock yarn and size 7 needles.  It's taking forever and I'm so sick of the project I'm tempted to do what my petite grandmother always did and stop with a lap blanket.  But no.  I will soldier on.  Fucking blanket.

Also I'm running out of looseleaf black tea, so the time has almost come for me to return to the seedy Russian grocery store and see if they restocked on Assam.  They have great deals on imported tea, and you can get a pound or so for thirteen or fourteen dollars, whereas at Wegmans you'd have to sell your car and half your soul for the same quantity.

Hard to believe it's only Saturday.  I awoke from dreams of exploring Incan ruins and geeking out over thoughts of long-dead human beings having once lived what they must have considered mundane lives in those very spaces to the sinking conviction that it was a.) Sunday and b.) noon and I had wasted the remainder of my vacation.  So to check my phone and learn that it's still only Saturday was like a little gift from my subconscious.  Which is good because I've done nothing worthwhile with my time today.  (But it's vacation!)

It doesn't help that it's a dreary, rainy, foggy day.  I hate this weather in winter.  It should be blizzarding out.  Something about that always motivates me to nest.  This shit?  This shit just makes me want to go right back to bed.

Man, it feels nice to be back on this blog.  Like coming home.  Funny to think that you can click back for glimpses of me ten years ago now.  So much has happened.  So much has changed.  I'm still not quite sure how to go about documenting all of that, so for the time being I'm electing to relax into enjoying the sheer act of writing again, and rambling on about my own mundane life.  The other things will come up when it's time.  No point in forcing it; that's part, I think, of what has kept me from writing for so long, the sense of obligation to discuss my various transformations into the person I am now.  (Some things haven't changed.  I'm still mulish about obligation.)

Well, if I'm not going to do anything else today, I might as well at least get the sunroom windows sealed in plastic.  My heating bill and my bank account will thank me.  At least this year I don't have to go around caulking the edges of all the windows, since last year's labor has held up so well; it really shouldn't take too long.  It's just the jungle of pothos tendrils that will hamper the whole procedure.  (Over the last few months of busyness and generalized anxiety -- god, I'm terrified of dating -- I've let them kind of go, so now I have to prune back the vines that are full of dead leaves.  Sigh.  Poor plants.)

All right.  Once more to the breach.  Must save on gas.

uphill (yes, to the very end)

This article just cropped up on my Facebook feed: "A Guide to Saving Money for People Who Love Spending Money." Oo goody, I thought, clicking, I've got a decent handle on my spending, but maybe I can glean a few more tips!

Narp.

Actually what I took away from the article was, Who lives like this?  For real, who needs a tip to reduce their number of manicures to a few a month?  Or to stop buying bottled sparkling water and spend $80 on a machine that will do it for you?  Or to buy groceries at a grocery store instead of a convenience store?

I hope this article is targeting college students.  I hope it's not relevant to 35-year-olds.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming any miserly brilliance.  For the last fifteen years I've lived under the eye-bulging weight of credit card debt and underemployment in a terrible economy.  I know the demoralizing dread of those horrible window envelopes and the panic triggered by strange area codes on the caller ID that always mean calls from creditors.  I am no stranger to the phrase INSUFFICIENT FUNDS followed by a $35 bank fee, and I have known, intimately, the sleepless 3 a.m.s frantically calculating mental math tallies that add up to "you can't eat tomorrow."  I've paid bills with credit cards because I only had enough money in the bank to cover the minimum payment on the credit card.  I know the helpless shame that comes from living at the mercy of debt.

A good part of my troubles stemmed from the fact that no one ever taught me how to manage money.  All I really knew was "saving is good," but I never had enough to save, so everything else was more or less fair game.  The rest of the trouble is my personality.  I'm a creature of comfort, a creature of impulse.  My sister and I call me an "Epicurean hedonist."  (We haven't come up with anything for her.  Spartan ascetic?  When we were kids, I was always the one who spent my allowance the second it came into my hands on candy and toy horses, while she hoarded hers in a coffee can under her bed.  I used to borrow money from her.  We always joked that when we grew up, I'd be the starving artist scratching my stories onto the floorboards of some unheated attic in charcoal while she sent me care packages.  It never came to that, but she's definitely the only reason I have a 401-k).  Between those two characteristics -- ignorance and lack of discipline -- I had gouged myself pretty badly by the time I turned twenty-seven.

I started getting my shit together six-ish years ago when I had to close out a credit card account to bring down my minimum payments to something I could afford.  That was the moment I realized that my system was unsustainable and needed to change.  Shortly thereafter, once I returned to intensive therapy to deal with my family dynamics and my crippling depression and learned that change was entirely within my power, I realized that I could do something to make my personal economics different.

Boy was that an uphill climb.  And very, very slow.  I was living with my parents and making $10 an hour at a part-time job; slowly was the only way I could make any changes at all.  I started by making all of my bill payments on time.  I went back to school, both for a career change (which I'm still working on) and to help with living expenses.  I chipped away at my credit card debt.  Eventually I got a better job and could afford to live on my own again, but between the credit card payments and my still-undisciplined spending, I was just barely scraping by.

About a year ago I decided I'd had enough with uncontrolled poverty, so one weekend I sat down with a notebook and a calculator and worked out how to become (credit card) debt free in a year.  (There are still the student loans, ohmyfuckinggod there will always be the student loans.)  I crafted a ruthlessly stingy budget, and mostly stuck to it.  I carved out room in my budget to start saving, and rearranged my shopping habits -- grocery shopping once a week at Aldi, with a monthly trip to Wal-Mart for the other adds-up-to-way-too-much-money stupid necessities like tampons and hair care products and deodorant and cat litter.  I generated a budget for each pay period, with groceries and gas and the monthly bills that fell due during that time.  I kept that budget in a little notebook that I carried with me everywhere, and consulted it regularly to check off the bills I'd paid and track my bank balances, my spending, and how they measured against my budget.  I shopped around for better car-and-renter's-insurance plans, and used my income tax return to pay for the entire year's insurance premium all at once, to free up my monthly spending.  I set money aside for car inspection, registration and repairs.  I saved for modest vacations.  I stopped eating out.

In short, I buckled the hell down.

And it worked.  A year later, I have reached my basic goals.  I'm still poor, but I'm no longer strapped.  I have hauled myself out of the well.

(I remember, when I first decided to make this happen a year ago, excitedly telling my then-best-friend my new financial plan.  Her response was wistful, envious and a little dour.  I think she would have been flat-out unsupportive, but the previous year when I decided to lose forty pounds and get in better shape and she scoffed at me for it, I bought an exercise machine, downloaded the MyFitnessPal app, revolutionized my exercise and eating habits, lost all the weight, and then kept it off, so she knew that I would be able to achieve this next goal.

Actually, in retrospect, I think that moment, as we sat across from each other at our favorite breakfast cafe and I enthusiastically showed her my new tactics for getting a handle on my money, was another crack in the foundation of our friendship.  It's been seven months since we parted ways, but by the time the parting happened, I think it had been coming for awhile.  I know that memory is a faulty thing, and it's a human tendency to craft narratives in hindsight to make sense of our experiences, so I don't hold my own perspective as hard-line data; but still it seems to me that she had trouble with each leap forward that I made in my personal growth.  It's a loss I'm still processing, since it's not a loss I chose, and I imagine my musings on it will crop up here occasionally.)

And I can with absolute confidence say that is it amazing not to live in fear of INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, and to assume that a strange area code is just a wrong number.  I put in a lot of hard work, and the rewards are deeply satisfying, empowering and confidence-building.  I love that I can read articles with money-saving tips and realize that I internalized them a long time ago.  I know I'm tooting my own horn here, and to those who are reading this who found insight in the above-linked article that I'm heaping with scorn, I'm sorry.  I guess I grew up knowing that convenience stores are money pits and that getting Starbucks is a black hole in your bank account (huh! I guess I learned a few things about frugality from my upbringing after all; we didn't have any money growing up, so my mother shopped very very thriftily), but if you didn't know that, holy shit yes, it's true.  Start shopping at Aldi and stop buying Starbucks.  Also pack your lunch.  (I basically don't eat during the day, so packing my lunch is as easy as keeping a bag of almonds at work.)  You can totally do it.  And once you've done it, you'll feel awesome about having figured your shit out for yourself.  And then you can turn into an asshole braggadocio like me.

God I love being in my thirties.

hello, january

Well, I didn't put on any holiday weight until the last three days.  But I sure made up for lost time.

I feel a profound sense of relief to have arrived at the asceticism of January.  I don't go back to work until Monday, so the next few days still technically fall under "vacation," but they also count as post-holiday, and I eagerly anticipate the post-holiday slimdown - getting up early once again to work out in the mornings (because I didn't get my Christmas tree until the weekend before Christmas, I'm leaving it up a little longer so I can work out by its warm twinkly lights, which somehow make being awake in the dark of a winter morning a comforting experience); eating very little during the day and savoring a big homey dinner (I've been thinking longingly of broiled salmon fillets and potatoes in my delicious all-the-spices marinade); drinking alcohol only on the weekends; and generally sitting around the house wrapped in afghans and reverting to winter hermitude.  It's not just a goal to take off the holiday weight; it's an eagerness to return to the life of sparser eating and regular exercise that I've cultivated over the last couple of years.  I let my fitness routine lapse over the last month because I've been busy, exhausted and completely unmotivated, and also because I think that it's perfectly healthy to let things slide into revelry periodically; and I had a wonderful holiday season, and now I'm excited for life to return to normalcy.

I do love the holidays.  This year's were fun.  Chris came home for a whole week, and we divided the time pretty equally among his family, my family, and just the two of us.  I took the entire time off work from Christmas Eve through January 4th, and got to spend a lot of time relaxing on my own, and enjoying time with Chris.  Maintaining a relationship over distance constitutes a lot of work, obviously, and having him in the same city was a wonderful treat.

So now I have three whole days all to myself before heading back to work, and so far I have spent it paying bills and looking for iPhones on eBay.  The bill paying is going rather well, all things told.  It's nice to have put so much effort into getting my shit together over the last year.  I'm still poor but not quite as desperate.  There's a lovely security to that.

I also have one more semester to go before acquiring my master's degree in education, and a few things to get done before the semester starts.  Apparently taking a two-year hiatus means you have to renew all your PA clearances: fun.  I'll have to dig out my printer and get it connected to the wi-fi, and take a day next week to do some running around.  Also time to put together my portfolio so I can start looking for teaching jobs.

But meantime it's a gorgeous cold and snowy afternoon, there is tea to be made, a kitty to cuddle, and a house to potter about cleaning.  An excellent Friday all in all.