Yours ever in love and snark,

Amber

You see, people are not always as nice as they appear on the surface, and I know that better than I’d like. People who have seem sweet and well-intentioned and earnest are often the most dangerous people I’ve come to meet. So I keep people at a distance until they earn my trust. I’m very big on trust being something that is earned and not something given along with a “how do you do.”

And I don’t want to be received as “scary” or “standoffish,” yet I can’t help but feel that so many people around me who perceive me as such conflate being courteous or approachable with what I see as intimacy.

I am the way I am because I am vulnerable. My feelings are easily hurt. When I allow it to love someone, my heart loves with blind abandon, and because it loves so blindly and unconditionally, it is easily broken. So I am careful who I let into it. I am the way I am around people I don’t know well, not because I am scary, but because I am fragile. I seem very strong to most people, and those who are close to me always remark on how strong I am. But they don’t get it.  My heart is not iron-clad—far from it. It is big, soft and stupid, and if I don’t work hard to protect it, it will open up for everyone and it will bleed for them. If I do not protect my heart, it’s like wearing a target on my chest. If I show it to you before I know you will be careful, all you will see is how easy it is to break me apart. And so many people can’t resist destroying that which is so easy to destroy, like the sudden urge to crush a beetle on the sidewalk.

I’ve never understood why people—myself included—are so scared of insects and spiders. They can crush them under their boot in a nanosecond, without even a second thought.

They’re usually not worth much. One half of my favorite pair of gloves, green striped, $3 on sale. Several polycarbonate water bottles. The headphones to my iPod. Countless socks. Things I don’t realize are gone until I need them, and even though I usually recall when and where I lost track of them, it’s too usually too late to retrieve them. Very often they’re small articles that, on their own, aren’t even worth thinking about, until I realize I need them to make something else work.

There are other things I’ve lost that are worth far more, and still I lose them the same way one loses most things. Your mind is elsewhere, you think you have all your effects, and then when you go looking for them again, they’re nowhere to be found. You can check the lost and found, you can retrace your steps, but time has passed and taken whatever it is with it on its way out the door.

I’ve compiled a list in my head of the things I’ve misplaced, things that slipped away from me while my mind was distracted. Small things that maybe don’t amount to much on their own, but together their absence leaves a giant hole, a huge gaping chink in my armor, leaving my chest naked and exposed. They’re all things I didn’t know were missing until one day I looked for them, retraced my steps, and couldn’t remember the last place I saw them. I lie awake for hours at night, thinking back, and still for the life of me can’t remember where I last had them. And there is no lost and found where I can file my claim.

First off, I’ve joined Weight Watchers, and that’s been pretty awesome. Since September 5th, I’ve lost 20 pounds, which is kind of incredible, but I actually have a lot of weight to lose. Apparently spending all my time in class or organizing and eating nothing but campus market food was not super great for my figure. Anyway, in this ongoing effort toward a weight that doesn’t quite make me feel like bursting into tears every time I step on the scale, I’ve been changing my diet and trying to be more active. Last night, I had this wild idea that I would go out walking even though it was raining, but I stalled and stalled waiting for it to let up until finally, at 8, I figured it was a light enough drizzle for a short walk.

It wasn’t really, but more importantly, it was pitch dark, and the neighborhood I chose to walk in—while nice and full of cute houses with progressive political signs in the yards and nice friendly people inside the houses—is very poorly lit. Oh whatever, I told myself, you are tough and totally bad ass, as I sloshed through puddles along my two-mile post-prandial constitutional. At the halfway point, however, I felt the presence of someone behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw a man in a yellow rain slicker with a hood over his face walking behind me, matching my brisk pace.

Rather than reminding myself that lots of people take walks at night, and that it is totally reasonable to wear a yellow slicker when you’re outside at night and it’s raining, my brain immediately went to I Know What You Did Last Summer. I was convinced that if I looked behind me again I’d see that he had a hook for a hand.

The fact that it’s nearly Halloween and all the houses are appropriately dressed in spooky decorations didn’t help calm me down.

My pace quickened until I was jogging fast and leaping over puddles. Finally I ducked down a more well-lit street I hadn’t planned to take to get back home faster and hopefully throw him off my trail. I fumbled with my iPhone, wondering who exactly you call when a fisherman with a vendetta and a hook for a hand is following you through a poorly lit neighborhood, intent on taking your life. I looked behind me again and he was gone, and I slowed down with a sigh of relief. However, apparently he had turned down another street a few blocks before I had, probably to avoid looking like a creepy serial killer, since I had obviously started running in fear when I saw I wasn’t alone. Eventually our paths crossed again, and I almost pissed myself. However, before I could let out the blood-curdling scream for help I was planning to issue should he appear behind me again, I saw him greet some people in front of their driveway, and as he pulled off his hood I saw that he was basically the cutest widdle old man ever who probably couldn’t hurt a fly, let alone lil’ ol’ me.

Once I got home, I realized having a serial killer behind me for a good half a mile turns out to be like having a really motivational pace coach. I’m fairly certain for a couple blocks I was doing a 7 minute mile. I think, rather than shilling out for a personal trainer, I should just hire dangerous criminals to walk behind me in hooded rain slickers. I’ll be winning a 5K in no time.

But that’s not all that I am. I am a straight-A student. I am a wife, happily married. I am a good friend, a writer, a karaoke diva, and an activist. I think sometimes that I love life more than a lot of people I know. I say all this to emphasize that I am not defined solely by something traumatic that happened to me when I was a little girl.

It certainly shaped who I am, forever changed my life, and continues to affect my relationships with people and my perspective. I grew up fast, but it was the sort of growing that occurs when bones are broken and not properly set. I made bad decisions. I nearly failed out of high school. My senior year, I slept through every class before lunch because I could not sleep at night. While I got a perfect 5 on my AP English exam, I had the lowest grade in the class, and to this day I believe my D- was given out of pity. I did drugs. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of and would rather not elaborate upon. I was awful and thankless toward people who helped me along the way, because I felt the world owed me everything and more. I floundered through life feeling pretty sorry for myself for a long time.

But I did not break.

Yesterday an email conversation about Mackenzie Phillips made me think a lot about this. One dear friend suggested that, due to what happened to Mackenzie, she is irreparably broken. And you know, though I completely get where my friend was coming from, it still really struck a nerve with me, because I can’t write people off as permanently damaged, no matter what happens to them. I’ve been written off that way by a lot of people in my life, and so often I think, “if only they saw me now.”

Awful things happen to people, but I have to believe they can survive them and be whole again, because I feel like, from where I sit, I am a whole person. That said, I’m certainly not the person I might have been had I not gone through the multiple betrayals and violations I endured. But from where I sit, I’m not entirely sure I’d ever undo that past, as much as I would never want anything resembling it to be visited upon a single human being on Earth. It’s either in spite of or because of that past that the woman I am now is strong, independent, compassionate and loved. So loved. And I’ll never know which it is. I’ll never who I would be if I lived in some parallel universe where, at 11 years old, my life hadn’t changed forever.

I realize I can’t compare my experience to Phillips’s—how can any two people compare their experiences, however similar? Yet, while it does no good to quantify trauma or qualify its severity because trauma is trauma, part of me feels I can say with something resembling objectivity, “Thankfully what happened to me isn’t even in the same ballpark as what happened to Mackenzie Phillips.” For one thing, my stepfather did not shoot me up with drugs; he gave me martinis. And the dissimilarities only begin there. But that doesn’t make me feel better. It’s not a salve or a consolation,  nor is it really productive in any way that I can see. It certainly doesn’t diminish the impact of the betrayal by people whose sole purpose should have been to protect me from harm, the years of depression and post-traumatic stress, the substance abuse, or the bridges I burned with people who cared about me. So while it could be easy to give in to the notion that I didn’t break because I didn’t have it as bad as this person or that person, I do know that one can survive all manner of trauma and be whole again. I may have doubted it many times, but I always knew I was not irreparably broken. When I got that close to the point of breaking and then didn’t actually break, I think I started, over the years, to doubt whether there even are limits for what we can survive emotionally. I don’t believe people must be irreparably broken because of something like this (though certainly people can and do break), and it’s probably the only thing resembling “faith” that I have. My faith is in people, and I don’t believe people are so fragile as all that.

Because I neither believe in god nor “souls” in the religious sense, it feels weird to use the phrase “human spirit,” but I’m at a loss for a better way to refer to what I see as a strong instinct within us all to survive, to be whole people, to heal and come out stronger on the other side of even the most horrific experiences. I must believe in it. For Mackenzie. For Jaycee Lee Duggard. For Elisabeth Fritzl. And for women like me, who have suffered abuse far less severe—there I go qualifying trauma again—than the years of unspeakable violence and damage done to those women I mentioned. I believe that the “human spirit,” or whatever you want to call it, is more resilient than most of us will ever have cause to discover.

One girl, who has lived there for a while, I shall call Questionable Taste In Music Girl. I have often caught her, at 1 in the morning, sitting at her computer, smoking pot with the blinds open and singing loudly to Whitney Houston. A few weeks ago it was “P.Y.T.” by Michael Jackson. You can shout and shout across the driveway for her to turn down the music, but she won’t hear you.

To her right, immediately facing our balcony, there is a unit with far more frequent turnover. Since living here, I believe at least 6 different people have occupied that apartment. One rode a Segway around town and listened to bad 60s folk. Another, whom I shall call White Power Bill, owned an English bulldog, listened to charming white-supremacist nu metal, had a red, black and pewter COAT OF ARMS hanging on the wall outside, and decorated the inside of his apartment with a painting of a rough-looking topless woman and a leg lamp like the one from A Christmas Story. But even White Power Bill was not so annoying as the latest woman to move in.

I have no idea what this woman’s name is, but I’m already well acquainted with her dog, Gracie. That’s because, as far as I can tell, all this woman does is sit on her porch, smoking and drinking beer (there are over 40 bottles on the porch) and yelling at her dog, who yips in protest.

“NO GRACIE! GRACIE NO! NO! STOP IT GRACIE! GRACIE? NO.”

yip yip!

“GRACIE? NO! GRACIE STOP THAT. GRACIE NO. NO GRACIE!”

yip!

Andrew has taken to doing this incredibly uncanny impression of the woman, which gives me the giggle fits and all, but I really want this woman out of my line of site and earshot. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to write or read a 1,000-page novel while this woman and her apparently poorly trained little mutt spend all day on the balcony arguing with each other.

Luckily for me, with the turnover in that place, she’ll be gone soon.

I am unbelievably grateful for Craigslist in all of this, yet kind of amazed at what people will and won’t buy. Andrew was sure the baseball card lot he put up would be the last thing to sell, yet it was the second thing to go, before a beautiful guitar and an elliptical trainer. One man’s trash, I guess.

I actually don’t want to sell either the guitar or the elliptical, but we don’t have room for the latter, and I don’t have time to learn how to play the guitar. I’m still not sure I’ll sell the guitar, to be honest. It was a gift from my parents, and I adore it. I just am not a very good musician, it turns out, except on Rock Band, where I’m kind of a big deal. On the drums. Maybe I should get drums! Wait, didn’t I just say I don’t have room for all our stuff?

Despite the progress, there is still a long way to go. Your continued prayers will not go unappreciated.

Once upon a time, a boy and girl fell in love. They spent so much time at each other’s respective apartments, that their respective roommates were like, “OMG why don’t you just move in together?” And the two love birds were like, “OMG, you’re right!”

And so they did. They found a reasonably cute, reasonably sized, two-bedroom apartment close to the downtown area and combined the contents of their two households. But there was one small problem. The boy half of this couple had boxes and boxes of things, boxes which hadn’t been opened since he haphazardly packed them when he moved out of his parents’ house. There they stood, a fortress of sealed boxes, their exact contents unknown. Now, rather than go through these mystery boxes and sort out the treasure from the rubbish, the boy put the boxes into a moving van, where they were dropped off into the spare room the boy and girl had decided, as they mapped out their life together there, would be an office and exercise room.

There they sat, the lonely boxes. They sat through a summer, a winter, a marriage proposal, a wedding, and two anniversaries of said wedding. In those three years, maybe a third of the boxes had been dealt with, if the girl was to be generous. However, the boy appeared to have placed an enchantment upon the boxes and the room, wherein he would unpack one box and sort its contents, yet the room would appear no less cluttered than before! While the imagined purposes of the room were technically achievable—there was indeed an elliptical trainer and a desk in there— the room was so cluttered with the boy’s belongings that it has really become the Enchanted Man Cave, where the boy would go to do boy things like play video games and (probably) look at porn on the internet (the girl does not pry much into the intimate affairs of the boy when he is in the Enchanted Man Cave).

All seemed lost, and the girl had become resigned to fate, her hopes of a spare room for their mutual enjoyment dashed, until one day, like a beacon, her fairy godsister came upon her and  granted her a magical opportunity. “I am looking for a place to stay for the summer,” the fairy godsister declared, and she offered a handsome sum to the boy and girl in exchange for lodging in the Enchanted Man Cave.

“Oh, fairy godsister, this sounds too good to be true,” quoth the girl, “but I’m afraid the enchantment the boy has placed over the Man Cave has rendered it forever a Man Cave. Alas and alack!” However, after productive conversation with the boy as to the benefits the godsister’s handsome sum would bring to their household, the girl  convinced the boy to lift the enchantment.

The boy and girl are not out of the woods, yet. The spell for lifting the enchantment will require both their efforts and take several days of labor. Even so, they are (okay, she is) determined to lift the spell over the Man Cave, in order to transform it into livable quarters for the girl’s fairy godsister. After two months’ time, foregoing any other enchanted boxes, the room may be repurposed, hopefully into a habitable workspace for both the boy and girl to live happily ever after.

Please wish the girl godspeed.

While 28 is not particularly old, it can often feel pretty ancient when so many of your friends from school are between six and eight years your junior. I didn’t really think there was much of a difference between 22 and 28 until I started running with a gang of 21-22 year olds. Now, with more regularity than I care to admit, I find myself muttering, like Murtaugh, “I’m too old for this shit.”

Because I am a goody two-shoes, this has mostly been made evident this year when I have tried to pull the ol’ all-nighter (which, incidentally, is on Ted’s Murtaugh List as well). Without fail, somewhere around 4 am, I feel like crying, and the next day I’m completely useless. Long gone are the days I could at least pretend to be semi-conscious after an all-nighter. Now I’m lucky if I can make it to the other side of 2 am.

Now that it’s summer, I am learning new things to put on my Murtaugh list. This weekend I went out twice in a row dancing and boozing. It is now Monday and I still feel like a 90-year-old woman with osteoporosis. Yesterday was worse — my feet felt like they would snap off at the ankles if I stood up. What the fuck, I ask you? I’m under 30. Isn’t this what we under 30s are made for?

I am also apparently too old to be unemployed and really enjoy doing nothing all day. I mean, the downtime has been nice and all, but I’m already kind of bored. Thankfully, I’ve made it pretty certain I can keep busy. For one, I have the blogging here and at MamaPop. I’ll also be studying for the GRE starting next week, as I mentioned yesterday, and I might also attempt the LSAT because I’m a freak and I kind of love standardized tests (probably because I’m good at them). Also mentioned yesterday, I will also be participating in Infinite Summer, which is a big internet book club wherein participants read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace from June 21st to August 21st. I’ve read it three times, and I know it shouldn’t actually take me three months to read, but I may go ahead and stick to the 75 pages a week with the others and devote the rest of my reading time to other books in my queue.

So what else is on my Murtaugh List? Well, I’ll tell you:

- eating whatever I want without getting heartburn

- rock shows where the bands don’t start until 10 pm

- Jager Bombs

- MTV

So what’s on your Murtaugh List?

Look, I know what you’re gonna say. “Where have you been? You just up and left us without even a note and then you just come back here with your, ‘hey baby’? Hey, fuck your hey baby! And fuck you!” That was what you were gonna say, right? See, I knew it, because you know what? You’re right.

I don’t deserve for you to take me back, my sweet internet. But please believe me when I tell you this:

This time it will be different. I mean it. Look, I know I’ve said that before, but things have changed. I’ve changed.

See, I was going through some stuff this year. I didn’t make time for you like I said I would, but now the school year is over, and I finished my job, and I’m making the time to make you feel special. All summer it’s gonna be just you and me. Well, I mean, mostly.  I also have a bunch of books I plan to read, and I’m doing Infinite Summer and studying for the GRE and maybe the LSAT too. I know that sounds like I’m taking on too much again, baby, but I’ve learned a lot about time management this year.

I swear, internet, I’m gonna make our relationship a priority. I’ll write here every weekday. I’m gonna tell you every day that I love you, because I do, baby, I swear—more than anything.

So, baby, please take me back. I’m nothing without you.

But I don’t think anyone could blame me for complaining about working in the giant bureacracy that is a public, post-secondary institution of learning. How anything gets done is beyond me, since about 40 hands have to touch an event before it actually takes place. Often, somewhere along the way, as the ball is bounced from desk to desk, it gets dropped, misplaced, or just plain forgotten.

Today I tried to track down the status on a lodge reservation I made last year, only to find it had been misplaced and that the lodge is now closed that weekend for maintenance. Had I not gone to check on that, we may never have known we do not have a place for our end-of-year camping retreat. I wish I’d found out sooner, since it will now be impossible to find a campground that is available Memorial Day weekend. That’s kinda why I reserved it a year ago.

I then tried to reserve a facility for a concert, and the only day it was available was also Memorial Day weekend. Since the camping trip is a no-go, I put in a reservation for that, and was told I couldn’t, because the whole university shuts down for that weekend. I guess that explains why that space was available. Now I have an event I’d love to do, but have nowhere to put it.

A whole bunch of other unfortunate events happened today, but the end result was that I went in on my day off and accomplished absolutely nothing to realize my upcoming projects, except to grow even more discouraged than I was before I went in to “take care of business.”

Let this be a lesson to me. Never ever go in on your day off, self. Best to sit on the couch and do nothing than go to your windowless office to work yourself into a tizzy while accomplishing absolutely zilch.

I am trying really hard not to let this put me into a weekend-long bad mood. Tomorrow night, gay icon and sex columnist Dan Savage will be speaking at our campus, and I have to introduce him, so I suppose rather than whining about getting nothing done, I should write my introduction for said icon so that I don’t also make a fool of myself onstage tomorrow.

The problem isn’t a lack of things to write about. I have dozens of posts stored up in my head, about the drag show I put on, or the classes I took, the paper on Sex and the City and whiteness, which I wrote for one of said classes, or even an ode to coffee, my perfect drug. I wrote none of these posts, and will now try to devote the last four days before school to addressing each one. (And then probably go silent again for another twelve weeks, naturally, because, really, who am I kidding?)

So first! The drag show! Oh my lord, the drag show. It ate my life up for most of the quarter. I had to run auditions, deal with publicity snafus, make sure the organizers of my raffle did their thing and my volunteer coordinators did theirs, and then there was the fun week where I thought I had no sound engineer. That was a fun week. Lots of sleep lost.

Then, finally, rehearsals came and some of the acts were uh…not very good. Very very sloppy indeed. However, control freak that I am, we whipped those acts into shape until they were good, stage-worthy acts, and then we had the show. But first we had THE SNOW.

Now, this was not a lot of snow, mind you, but here it doesn’t take much snow to be a Major Weather Event that keeps people in their houses and away from charity shows. It didn’t help that our publicity materials were three weeks late. And apparently we’re suffering some sort of economic crisis? I dunno, it was on the news. So, sadly, attendance wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be, but we still managed to raise a couple thousand for some very deserving charities.

And those who didn’t attend missed one helluva show. If you don’t believe me, just look at the photographic evidence:

This is my boss. Casey by day, Anne Drogenous by night!

Annie Position - Xanadu

Brokeback Billy - Smoke Rings in the Dark

Lillian Cumfterbull - Dance 10, Looks 3 (Tits and Ass)

Miranda Majesty - Vogue

Sir Licksalot - Like a Boy

Truly, all of my queens and kings were a site to behold. A few of them have been invited to do their performances elsewhere after the show. I helped my boss do his makeup for one last weekend, and his act was by far one of the best in the show. Despite all the hard work, missed sleep and occasional nervous breakdown, the drag show was, thus far, the most rewarding two months of hell I’ve been endured in a long time.

The purpose of my trip was to meet some of the fine writers I have the pleasure of counting myself among at MamaPop. I thought I would get into a long, detailed chronicle of the weekend, but it honestly wouldn’t translate, so I will share some reflections.

At some point, while waiting for brunch at Black Hockey Jesus‘s lovely home, I had this bittersweet little pang. Because, you see, most of these people were just pictures and text to me until Friday night, but here they all turned out to be REAL people made of flesh and blood and bone, and here we were together in the same room. It was the realization of how wonderful and, yet, how unfair the Internet can be. The relationships I’ve made with these writers online showed me how many wonderful, bright, funny people exist — not just those precious few whom I see on a near-daily basis, but all over the place — and that I may interact with them from thousands of miles away. At the same time, that textual contact cannot begin to compare to sitting down to a meal, or laughing in unison at the same joke or staring incredulously at the same ridiculous cover band. When I giggled with Miss Banshee or chatted with Goon Squad Sarah, or talked about books with Schmutzie and Palinode, I called them by their “real” names, I heard their laughs, I saw their wry expressions. I learned little things I never thought about when they were just words on a screen, like that PetCobra orders his martinis with three olives just like I do, or that Sarah truly does have an amazing recollection for 80s one-hit-wonder bands, like Quarterflash.

I guess I just mean that I felt like I was with “my people” this weekend, and now they’re back where they came from. I’m very wistful. On Friday night, I stumbled into a bar with a cheesy cover band on stage and a table of strangers in the back, each with a slightly familiar face. Yet, when I sat down, I found I knew them all along, even though their voices were unfamiliar and their names seemed foreign as I uttered them in place of their online aliases. Having all these people in one room was very much like the convergence of miniature versions of the world’s great great cities on Las Vegas Boulevard: surreal.

The "Eiffel Tower", across from "Lake Como" (photo by Miss Banshee)

Then, just two days later, a great wind blew us all to our separate places on the continent. Here they are again, in text boxes and still images, same as I found them. Only now it kinda bums me out that I can’t see Sarah’s “really?” face and kdiddy‘s hairy eyeball or hear Sweetney‘s delightful laugh. And oh GOD, the fact that I can’t watch TV in bed with Miss Banshee is torture — making fun of Top Chef over IM will never compare.

In the words of kdiddy yesterday on Twitter: “I don’t see why I can’t have all my favorite people in one place in one time. it’s 2009.”

The internet is great. It’s become a place for me to write, to create, network, and meet wonderful people. But today, I am profoundly aware that, in the case of friendship and community, the digital world will never be an adequate substitute for the analog.

Because, seriously, I have no additional brain cells to devote to actually thinking about things to write about.

So anyway, here are some things about me. I’ve said some of them before, but those that are repeats are reiterated because they bear repeating, like my hatred of the putrid Gourd of Hades most people refer to as “cucumbers”.

You should tell me things about you now, so that we can be closer to each other. But not too close, please. I like my personal space, even on the internet, so please don’t tell me (too much) about your sex life or where you stick your boogers when you pick your nose. Please read extra emphasis into that plea if you happen to be someone I hang out with in real life. There’s something to be said for leaving a little mystery in your relationships, dig?

1. I scored a 780/800 on my SAT II English Writing subject test. I’m still curious where I lost 20 points.
2.  My first job was at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. I worked at Mombasa Island Cooker, and I had to wear a safari uniform. 
3.  On my first visit to New York, I got pickpocketed on the subway on my way to the airport. They let me on the plane without my ID. This was obviously pre-2001.
4. I have extremely nimble toes. I can pick up small change with my feet.
5. In high school, I played the Baker in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I can’t remember my part at all, but can sing every part The Narrator sang, which was the part I wanted.
6. I lived in five states over the course of four years. Oregon is still my favorite.
7. I once dated a guy so obsessed with Disney movies I broke up with him because of it.
8. He also had a car he had to push-start. The Disney thing was the deal-breaker, though.
9. I still have a baby tooth where an adult tooth never grew.
10.  I hate cucumbers more than anything in the world. I would rather fill out tax forms every day than eat them.
11.  I used to want to be a cheesemonger.
12.  And a lounge singer.
13.  The only song I can play on the guitar is “Zombie” by the Cranberries. I’m not really sure why, since that song totally sucks.
14.  I am still not fluent in Spanish after five years of Spanish classes, but I do remember the capital of every Spanish-speaking country. Quiz me!
15.  I spent prom night talking over IM with my online boyfriend. I don’t regret it.
16.  I love karaoke.
17.  I have attended three community colleges and one university, and I changed my mind about my major four times.
18.  I still remember the first and last name of everyone who was cruel to me in junior high and high school. Not that I hold grudges.
19.  My Myers-Briggs type is INFP.
20.  My favorite food is cheese. Like, just about any cheese.
21.  My favorite color is green.
22.  While I don’t believe in love at first sight or soulmates, I do freely admit to thinking to myself the first day I met Andrew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.
23.  I used to go to a Christian youth group until one day the pastor brought in a beef tongue as an analogy for something. I forget what it was an analogy for, but it put me off meat for 11 years and off God forever.
24.  I once wrote a friend’s term paper in exchange for three packs of cigarettes. 
25.  The first time a man I was romantically involved with bought me flowers was two months ago.

What I will remember most of today is the look in his eyes as he walked out before a crowd of millions. Far from smiling, his eyes, as he walked out into the sun, revealed an awareness of the enormity of the occasion, the historic nature of the day, and the hard work ahead. 

I expected to have some snarky remarks today about the outgoing president and vice president, but once I sat down to write, I realized that the last thing I want to do on this beautiful winter day is think on the last eight years. So instead, I will look optimistically ahead, vowing to support my president with both eyes open, and asking not what my country may do for me, but what I may do for my country.

the suitcase is a metaphor.

Dear God, is that a cobweb I see in the upper right-hand corner?

So I’ve been somewhat of a neglectful blogger. So much so, in fact, that I don’t even recognize the WordPress dashboard anymore. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to post!

The last few months were not easy. I had a difficult courseload and a new job that was a definite trial by fire. And my job still scares me, frankly. It’s hard and humbling and wonderful and a mix of good and bad, but mostly good. I am still not very good at it, or not as good as I’d like to be, but it’s been a valuable experience all around.

It’s difficult to sum up three months that have gone virtually unrecapped, so I’ll attempt to hit on the memorable parts in bullet form:

• I dressed like a drag queen. Twice. 
• I handed out countless condoms and dental dams and helped put on a really great safer-sex workshop that inspired at least one student to get tested for HIV.
• I coordinated a live shadow cast performance and screening for The Rocky Horror Picture Show helped assemble over 200 bags of props for audience members to throw during the movie.  
• This led to sweeping up approximately 200 pieces of toast, 15 lbs of rice and nearly 1,000 playing cards after all was said and done.
• I laughed a lot and bonded with coworkers.
• I cried, too. A lot.
• I discovered I never, ever, at any point in my life, wish to go to law school. EVER.
• I wrote a vernacular criticism of an OutKast album for school credit.
• My relationship turned three years old and continued to kick ass, even though I rarely saw my husband, who last week broke my heart when he said, “I’ve really missed you.” 
• I voted for President-elect Barack Obama. Still so amazing to say.
• I had Thanksgiving with my family and a bunch of complete strangers and had a ridiculously good time.
• I turned 28.
• I had a terrifying justify-your-existence conference to move forward with my degree and survived it.
• I drank a lot of 5-Hour Energy.
• I survived a grueling last week of school, only to come down with tonsillitis in the home stretch.

I have a lot of resolutions for the new year and the new quarter. I need to be more organized, pay more attention to detail, and delegate more to my staff and volunteers. I need to take better care of myself in many ways — sleeping more, eating better, making time for the gym and “me time”, and spending more time with my best friend in the world.

But I also discovered that I really need this blog. I have really missed having a place for reckoning and sorting shit out, yet I would constantly tell myself I had higher priorities than blogging. I was wrong to dismiss it as unimportant, though.  I have  missed the community and also the forced time spent alone, having conversations with myself and putting some order to my thoughts. I lament the missed opportunities to explore the amazing experiences I’ve had and new ideas and theories I’ve discovered.

I resolve to put more order into my life, and blogging is part of maintaining that order, among many other things I neglected to do for myself. My preparation for the last quarter was akin to how I often end up packing before a long trip. In fact, a poorly packed suitcase is pretty much the perfect metaphor for the past three months:  too much shit I didn’t need, some essential items forgotten, and what was in the case was stuffed into it frantically, crumpled into little balls and tossed in haphazardly.

And so I resolve to start packing my suitcase with more care, both literally and metaphorically. I will take out the items I don’t need and neatly fold the ones I do. I will put them into the case with some sense of order and organization. I might find, once I’ve done so, that I have room for some items I forgot to pack last time, those essential items I always seem to forget about until I’ve arrived at my destination and slap my forehead, wondering how I’ll get through my trip without, say, a toothbrush, or my cellphone charger. I will live a more organized life that is equally full, but with order, sense, and an idea of what my needs will be once I arrive at my destination.

Three years ago today, I met you in a totally bourgeois-y alehouse in Ye Olde Fairhaven. We played Trivial Pursuit, and either I let you win or you let me think I let you win, I can’t remember which. We talked until the bartenders put the chairs up on tables in a pointed attempt to get us to move toward the door. You offered me a ride home, and I accepted, and you didn’t kiss me, but I wished that you had.

When I got inside my apartment, something inside me screamed, “don’t let that be the last time you see each other.” So I told you I liked you. My heart sang when you said you felt the same. I told you to call me when you were single and you called me the next evening. 

We have been inseparable ever since, best friends and so much more. And it has been incredible, even when I’ve wanted to strangle you, which has been far less often than with any other person I’ve loved. That is amazing, because you can be so very, very annoying.

I don’t care if this makes people reading vomit, I really don’t. It isn’t enough to say it only to you. I tell you so often, but I feel it so intensely, I feel it in a shout at the top of my lungs, but I turn it down to an indoor voice or a whisper, because shouting it like that would hurt your ears and startle people on the street and probably cause car accidents, and I never want my love for you to cause pain and injury. 

I love you so much, I want to rent billboards and skywriters to proclaim it. If I had to dream up the perfect person to accompany me through the rest of my life, I couldn’t come up with someone half as suitable as you – my imagination is simply not good enough to create you from thin air. Instead I stumbled into you. Everything fell into place, and my whole body sighed in relief: “There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.” 

The happiness I feel with you, in our home, in your arms, in your heart, is beyond any happiness I ever could expect or even rightfully deserve. 

They told us this would be hard, but loving you and being your spouse and partner is the easiest choice I’ve ever made. Every day, I choose you, and every day that choice continues to be as easy as writing my name, as easy as breathing. Even when I want to strangle you, I know I want you there when I breathe my last, and know, even if that day is 200 years from now, it will not have been enough time.

Happy anniversary, my love.

Feeling thusly, I opted out of a training today, as well as the absolutely wonderful free grub so kindly provided by university dining services, in favor of bed rest and a little bit of working from home, though I may have to drag my roadkill ass in for a couple hours to attend to business I can’t accomplish from my bed or living room.

Please to be sending get-well vibes my way?

MamaPop – “Winter in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland”

Writing that was kind of like pulling my heart out of my chest and wringing it out onto a piece of paper. But, like, digitally, since I wrote it on my computer. I cried for hours. And I’m glad that I did it. I am so grateful for what he gave me, even if he’ll never know it, or how much it meant to me.

It is no exaggeration to say that David Foster Wallace is the reason why I call myself a writer, even though the writer I’ve become is nowhere close to the writer he was. All I can really say to explain it is that Infinite Jest flipped a switch in my brain. It made me view writing in a completely different way. It wasn’t without its flaws, of course, but it was nonetheless powerful, towering, monumental. Reading it was like… discovery.

I keep writing sentences and deleting them, because they’re all wrong.  It’s all very, very wrong.

I can’t say I’m surprised. DFW wrote too intimately about depression and with too much insight for me to delude myself into believing it wasn’t a beast he struggled with, perhaps all his life, as so many writers do. His commencement speech at Kenyon College made that clear:

“It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.” 

It is hard. Sometimes painfully, unimaginably hard, to slog through, even without a mood disorder. I have felt in a certain period in my life like I was at the bottom of a well, so far down I could barely see the way out. I understand how it could seem like death is the only way out of it—even though I know now how untrue that is. At my darkest, lowest moment, I was lucky. Somehow, I was able to live for the people who cared about me, though I didn’t understand why they cared, as despicable and unlovable as I felt I was. So I guess I understand, to some degree, the helplessness one feels when they are so low, they are certain happiness isn’t an option, only relief — at the end of a rope, the bottom of a bottle, or the butt of a rifle. I also recognize that perhaps the only reason I survived is because I hadn’t *really* been at the bottom, the true nadir. That perhaps there’s a place lower and darker than where I was, darker than I can imagine. I know, before I reached the point I once did, I couldn’t imagine that kind of hell.

Maybe killing oneself is cowardice and douchebaggery, as so many people are saying. Maybe. Or maybe the state one has to be in to take one’s own life is such unimaginable, seemingly inescapable hell that even the bravest person would fight his own human instincts—by which I mean, above all other instincts, the determination to survive—in order to escape it. I can’t pretend to fully understand it, but I also can’t be satisfied with dismissing it outright as pure cowardice. Acute, suicidal depression is a form of madness, to paraphrase William Styron. To reach a state wherein the mental pain becomes physical torment, and wherein your brain begins to warp and reshape reality, convincing you you’re better off dead and that everyone will be better for it, too, is insanity.

I wish someone, something, had been able to pull him out before it came to this. I wish someone had seen it coming. And yet I know how often the signs along the way are only visible when you get to the X that marks the spot. 

I’m just sad. And yet, I am determined to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out, remaining hopeful that it never becomes too hard, because as hard as it sometimes is, it’s often so wonderful.

Godspeed, D.

[Edited to add this passage from Infinite Jest:]

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Yeah.