G-L-A-M-O-R-O-U-S

I’m glad that when people read blog posts about themselves they finally find them interesting.

I’ve been listening to much too much fergie lately. I guess much is a relative term. It has a good beat, ok?? Let it go. I am happy. The taqueria downstairs smells like melted cheese and I’m curled up with ice cream and a blanket watching the Oprah network. hahah. I like the sound of cars on the street below and that sometimes the delivery boy downstairs puts his bike against our door and surprises us when we open it. I like the bars I live near and the babies and the puppies, and the book store and the coffee shop, and the subway, and joe kelly who lives down the road and mary who lives in the other direction. I like that my room is little and cozy and that I have a skylight instead of a window. I like the studio I work for, I think that is an understatement, I love them. And I’ve learned so much in such a short year that it kind of amazes me.

Last night Billye and I rode the subway back together, after we got out at 1 in the morning, at least as far as 14th street. The 4 finally came and people shuffled off, the last of which being an old man with a shopping cart, and lots and lots of bags. As we got on and found a seat, she inspected it thoroughly, I just don’t want to sit in his poo smears, she said simply and I, in my exuberance and exhaustion, could not stop laughing. For way too long. Grateful I think is the word for how I feel these days. I’m just glad that I love the people I work with, even if it’s only once a week, and live with. Lucky? I guess I am lucky in weird ways.

And everyone else can just get over it.

ain’t it strange

I had the strangest dreams last night. At first I was in the city, and it was rising around us as we walked, the buildings were like paper cut-outs from a pop-up book. We were hungry I think. And I think I was with Tommy and we weren’t talking very much, as per usual, and I remember feeling exactly how I felt when I was in that relationship: happy, because I was in love with the city around me, and like I couldn’t breathe because there were so many unsaid things floating between us. It was a strange dream because then we were in my room and I just wanted to burrow into him, not talking still, and I knew very well that this would not be enough but still I wanted it. And then he turned into Justin, and I wouldn’t even look at him, and then I woke up feeling really weird and confused.

Why is it that when it starts to get cold I really want a cigarette? Carcinogenic effects aside, I just want to constantly be holding one, and writing. Last night was probably the first night I really really wished I could go out and drink with strangers, just so I could at least smoke one cigarette outside a bar somewhere, and be sated, and walk home alone.

I got the apartment for january. Temporary, temporary, I keep telling myself, I will have to move in June, but this is a starting point, to see how it will work. If anything it will be a working vacation, I will finally be biting the bullet, I will finally have friends and neighbors and I will feel alive again and in my own skin. Ideally. As much as this last year and a half was a necessary recuperation from a serious blow to the head, I’m afraid that I’m drying up here. I’m afraid that I’m so scared about leaving that I’ll never do it: for a whole year I wandered around, terrified, looking at the scared faces of my family, and I was so worried for everyone. What will they do without me? But they don’t need me here, not really, I don’t really do much anyway. I’m disagreeable and unreliable, obsessed with my weirdo pictures and weirdo friends. My aunt is convinced I’m a lesbian because I have short hair. I have short hair and I’m always dumping somebody, I must be a lesbian! haha, of course, of course.

I often forget that regardless of where I think I am in my life it is always a middle path. I know that sounds ridiculously zen but it’s true: it could always be way way better, and it could always be infinitely worse. This keeps me sane and happy. I realized yesterday, the whole optimism spectrum that I have been struggling to see clearly for fourteen or fifteen months, desperately grasping for some answer that would help me make sense of something I could never really make sense of and in the end it wasn’t a whole book or a poem or a treatise on death and dying, it was actually something really simple: I could either spend my time being sad that he died or just be really grateful, happy, glad that he lived. Or both. I can do both, too, but I think I have grappled long enough with the former to finally arrive at the latter and for this too I am glad.