25 Random Facts About Me.

So on the Facebooks, Sweetney tagged me in one of those things where you have to say a bunch of random things about yourself and then tell a bunch of people to do it back. Since I am in a very fragile condition right now, wherein I will do anything if it means putting off homework, I of course immediately drummed out a reciprocating list. Then she posted hers in her blog and I realized: Hey, this counts as a blog post?! OMG, SCORE!

 

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?

 

Morning in America.

Today was a beautiful day in every sense of the word. With a bright and cloudless sky, a slight chilly bite in the air, and a cup of coffee in hand, I watched a man, with an expression that could only be described as humble, stand in our nation’s capitol and become our 44th president.

 

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.

 

 

She Had a Suitcase Full of Noble Intentions.

 

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.

Dear Andrew.

Dear Andrew,

 

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.

Ugh

I woke up this morning feeling like something that might be left on your pillow as a well-meaning but grotesque “gift” by a friend of the feline persuasion.

 

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?

More DFW

I wrote at greater length about David Foster Wallace today at MamaPop:

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.

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

What do you say when your hero dies? When it’s at his own hand? I feel like he took all the important words with him, because I can’t find them. I’m devastated. 

 

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.

HI INTERBUTTS MY NAME IS AMBER AND I AM CRAZY NOW

So, this week has been a little on the insane side, juggling training and program planning and meetings and three posts a week at MamaPop. Thus, any writing time I had was spent over there and not here, which is probably for the best, since over there more than 20 people read what I write. Still, if you are interested, this week I wrote about:

• My crush on hip-hop vlogger Jay Smooth.
• A fuck-you to the self-help industry and talk shows for always putting the onus of relationship maintenance and fidelity on women.
• A plea for movies where women talk about something other than men and babies.

 

Two of the above were selected as the featured post of the day, which means they ran at the top of the page all day instead of disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle we call “Page 2″. So, that was pretty dope.

 

On the work side of things, I am SLAMMED. I have at least three projects on my plate that are all high priority and I’m certain I’m missing important details to make sure they’re executed well. I am partially to blame for this, because my delegation abilities are somewhat lacking. And with the additional needs to organize our office, make sure our resource library is properly cataloged and organized, and submitting requisite expenditure requests so we can supply our office with trivial things like pens and paper, it’s kind of maddening how much there is to do in the next two weeks. This is while also preparing myself for doing this job WHILE TAKING 15 CREDITS, which seems impossible from where I stand, because I feel like I can barely keep my head above water without the mountains of schoolwork and attending class. However, a lot of the current insanity has to do with the extensive training I’m in every day (8-4:30 all next week, just about), taking up much of the time I’d otherwise devote to preparing for the upcoming school year. 

 

Thankfully, three credits of my courseload are kind of a cake walk (assembling my writing portfolio; no actual class time) and two credits are digital video production, which should also be fairly laid-back, but the other ten will be pretty meaty — “Rhetorical Theory and Criticism” and “The American Legal System.” Naturally, those two courses also the ones that I am most excited about. 

 

So, anyway, if the pickins seem slim here for the next few weeks, please don’t worry. I’m just crumpled in a ball in my windowless office, sucking my thumb and murmuring, “it’s…so cold here. Where’s my mommy?”

Apologies in Advance to My Mother.

The week since I got back from PA has been hectic with training for my new job, including a retreat with the rest of the program staff for this year. I am excited to work with ambitious and passionate young organizers and overwhelmed at the work ahead of me.

 

But what I actually wanted to blog about is an odd occurrence that took place earlier this week. As previously mentioned, I was gone for a few days and, well, Andrew missed me, and I him. So we were doing a little, er, reuniting, when I heard the familiar sound of bedsprings above us. And two voices moaning. Hmm, I thought. Interesting coincidence. Also, *immature snickering*.

 

Later on that night, when Andrew and I were, ahem, going for a double play, I heard it again while we were still at bat: the knocking of a headboard against a wall and ecstatic noises above us, louder this time. I have a much harder time believing this time that the timing is merely coincidental. What is this? An homage? A competition?  Our upstairs neighbors are either high-fiving or trying to one-up us. 

 

The feeling was strange. I was simultaneously weirded out, aroused, and embarrassed. Because our neighbors can clearly hear us below them, and this doesn’t seem to bother them. Rather, it seems to excite them, either on a voyeuristic or competitive level. But the thing is, we have to coexist in the same building in less erotic situations, and, really, how do you act around your neighbors after this sort of thing when you run into each other at the mailbox? I don’t know whether to avert my eyes or wink.

 

The good news is, after the boring-sounding sex the previous tenants — who insisted when we invited them down once that they never heard a sound from downstairs, though we certainly heard their rapid bed squeaks and an eerie lack of human vocalization on a semi-regular basis — our new neighbors have a much more exciting-sounding repertoire. And if I have to listen in on the show, I’d much rather it was a tour de force. Frankly, our old neighbors just kind of depressed me. 

 

Still, it’s an awkward situation. I now find I’m editing myself, employing pillows or avoiding certain positionsthat lend themselves to headboard knocking in order to baffle our own noise somewhat, because it really is embarrassing to know that our congress is a) audible to our neighbors and b) likely to inspire them to holla back. What would you do in this situation?

 

(Before writing this entry, I wasn’t sure I could be more embarrassed than I was earlier this week. However, having put this all down for everyone, including my mom to see, I really just pray to every deity in known mythology that she NEVER. EVER. mentions this entry in casual conversation.)

Some Random Things

Hey folks. Some random items:

 

• This post should effectively communicate that I made it to Pittsburgh in one human-shaped piece. I am in somewhat less excellent shape than I was when I got here due to some horrific blisters on the bottoms of my feet. BOTTOMS. Of. My. Feet. I can barely walk.

• This is not to say that my plane trip was without its tribulations. Las Vegas to Pittsburgh provided me with fine examples of mild, medium, and heavy turbulence. My knuckles are still white.  There were also approximately 9,000 babies on the plane, one of whom screamed the entire 4 1/2 hour flight. I felt bad for the mother while also wanting to throw her out the emergency exit with her devil child.

• I will be hosting a guest poster here in the Abyss as a participator in BetchFest. BetchFest is an opportunity for bloggers with something to get off their chest to post their rants in a place unknown to their family and immediate friends, or anyone else whom they might not want to read it. I hope that you will welcome my guest when she arrives.

• I am officially a wuss when it comes to weather. Thanks, Washington, for making me a priss. SO HOT! agh! As I dried my hair this morning, I felt beads of sweat drip down my legs. Ew. I already need another shower.