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.

solstice

It is 6am in Japan. Soon my best friend from college will be boarding a plane in Toyko, to arrive in the United States some time around 3pm eastern standard time. I do not have a phone to greet her with. Only my land line telephone, from my mother’s house, that makes it sound as though I am speaking to people from a million miles away through a tin can, delicately tethered to a string. This got me to wondering if it is at all possible to be a million miles away from anything on this little planet, so I looked up the circumference of the earth which rounds out at a disappointing 24,900 miles, approximately. The world really is rather small.

My horoscope told me to be wary today since the lunar eclipse has me all tied up in knots until tomorrow, and I didn’t realize this, until I spent the day in a tizzy, grumbling and grumbling, driving and crying, and feeling altogether miserable and messy. My phone has been dead since friday when I dropped it in a toilet. Plunk! And I thought something was jumping out at me from the pipes. My father used to believe there were alligators in the sewers of new york city. Apples do not fall far.

I didn’t think that moving would involve emotional severing as well but it kind of is going in that direction. I have stopped caring about petty grievances from my friends from home. I do not care. I have repeated this over and over to myself in the car today, as I was gathering christmas presents and hating traffic and feeling like a grinch. In my last therapy appointment we talked about how good I am at pretending I don’t know things, letting other people go first, and apologizing for things I didn’t do. I am the girl holding the door and letting everyone walk through first even though I am in a hurry, and really have better things to do than be trampled on.

I hope this all gets righted tomorrow, that the stars get realigned, and that i finally find some goddamn christmas spirit because I know that right now I really don’t think I have any.

a human species

I am moving in 18 days. Is 18 days a long time or a short time? I’m afraid I will set my things down in my new apartment and explode. I spent today drinking too much coffee and getting too little work done. I watched Eat, Pray, Love. Ok, I admitted it. I spent most of the movie shaking my head and saying, Julia Roberts is so wrong for this part. But I ate it up. I love spiritual journeys. I like to believe that I have some kind of relation to the world outside myself, even when I’ve been mostly in solitary confinement for about four months now.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Tommy for forty minutes. We broke up in August, but it still feels unfinished. It feels like he doesn’t understand what it means to break up with someone. I don’t want to date you, he says, I just want someone to eat dinner with and go to the movies with.

Oh.

What’s the worst part about this is that I feel really bad, and he’s a nice guy, and I want him to be happy. I just cannot take a role in that happiness because he is too needy, and I love being needed, but in the end I just end up getting swallowed whole and I never even realize it’s happening. It’s hard to walk away from someone who isn’t a bad person, who hasn’t necessarily wronged you in any real way, in the end I have to make something up. I have to say, listen you’re really nice but please go away. I am not very good at this.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to forgive yourself these small tragedies. We think for some reason that we can avoid them, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve repeated over and over to myself: I should have known better. That was dumb. Never again. It’s kind of tiresome. Maybe this year hasn’t been as much about grief as I thought it was. Maybe it was more about self-forgiveness. And regret.

I had a root canal in july. It was a tiny little cavity that went straight down to a nerve and they had to pull it out before it died and rotted in my gums. A friendly old man with goggles on his face talked to me about how my tooth would outlast the end of the world and pulled the juicy nerve out through a hole and filled it back up with putty. I was unnerved. I am a slow healer. My gum still hurts where it was touched, right down to the jawbone, especially when I’m tired or when it rains. They wanted to put a crown on it but I chickened out, scared of the terms they used, the idea that they were going to shave my tooth down and cover it with porcelain.

I also spent today reading about elephants. They are a matriarchal species and are said to express emotions. They grieve for their dead and protect their wounded. They also have a memory and are altruistic.

My elephant tattoo has been two and a half years in the making, I guess now is a good a time as any to get it.

for all your lies, you’re still very lovable

I am at a local coffee shop, attempting to do work but mostly seething because of a comment my uncle made at dinner Sunday night. It’s funny because I’ve been so concerned with other things that this comment was at the bottom of the pile and then this morning, in therapy, I dealt with those things, among them boy confusion and general frustration with my mother and brother. And then everything else rose to the top. First, I can’t help that other people send confusing messages, and it’s hard to change a family unit you are so deeply a part of. Despite my best efforts to diffuse the situation that arose last night– my brother throwing everything in the kitchen into the garbage can because my mother had thrown out his thermos– I was already upset because I was fishing my book, my book weight, some forks and knives out of the trash. I was fishing out my mother’s calculator. All the mail. I was furious. I think sometimes it’s more helpful not to talk when you’re mad. Especially when it comes to family. I tried to shoo everyone out of the kitchen. My brother pled his case: I DIDNT DO ANYTHING SHE JUST THREW IT IN THE GARBAGE AND I WAS TRYING TO MAKE MY POINT– My mother stood her ground: WHEN I TELL YOU TO DO SOMETHING YOU DO IT IF YOU THINK YOU’RE TAKING THE CAR ON THURSDAY THINK AGAIN– And I stood between them, trying to ask them both to leave.

I am not trying to pat myself on the back here. I was pissed.  I was digging through egg shells and used napkins and very upset. I put the mail back on the table. I put the forks and knives in the sink and went upstairs to brush my teeth. My brother followed me, you weren’t there, you don’t understand what happened, he said. I was still seething and brushing, seething and brushing. His pleas did not hold water, apparently, so he tried a different tactic: I was just doing what you told me to do! He said, you told me to laugh it off when she yelled at me! I was doing that! You told me I had to meet her actions with my actions to prove my point!

And then I was really upset. I spit. No, I said, That is not what I said– YES IT WAS– No, what you did tonight WAS NOT effective, you were not communicating, RAR RAR RAR!

At that point I don’t think I was communicating either. I just wanted to go to sleep. I growled and mumbled and he shuffled off, acting arrogant and triumphant, as if he had successfully proven me wrong because I was too mad to speak. I was mad because on every level he refuses to accept responsibility for anything and never apologizes. He just can’t say he’s sorry. And if he does, he never means it. Something like my mother. And I was mad because I’m tired of standing between everyone while they’re screaming and then getting ostracized and scapegoated for being some freeloading liberal in a family of conservatives.

Which brings us back to Sunday evening. I’ve avoided dinners at my aunt’s house for this very reason: I never leave them very happy. Inevitably, I somehow end up getting picked on for voting for Obama or taking my time finding a job, refusing to find one deemed “real,” somehow I am responsible for high taxes, unemployment and general economic failures. Yes, I am exaggerating. But after years of gradual erosion, it begins to wear on you. And at some point I have been poked at for all these things. Literally poked on Sunday evening. It went like this:

We had a lovely dinner and successfully avoided any interesting or controversial conversation and regularly applauded my sister for probably having secured a teaching job in Westchester for the rest of her life. Hooray. Clap clap clap. Everybody’s happy. My uncle, my hunting uncle, cop-palling, pick-up driving, live free or die, red red uncle, rolls in from his hunting trip around 730, just in time for tea and dessert. I’m pleasant. I think I’m always pleasant. I even pretended to admire the pictures of dead deer he showed me on his phone.  I’m adorable. Unfortunately I’m also a dirty, pot-smoking, obama-loving, naive, bleeding-heart liberal who thinks we can just hand out dollar bills on the street and scoop up every good for nothing immigrant thug for rehabilitation on someone else’s hard earned tax dollars. Obviously.

What he said was very small, a silly jab about health insurance and how I don’t have to pay for it. On his dime. We’re paying for it, he said, you should thank all of us. Poke. Literally, a hard index finger into my right arm. I pretended it didn’t happen.

First of all this is wrong, right now. I pay for my health insurance. Four hundred dollars of my measly wages a month. In January, I won’t have to do this anymore. Yes, thanks to Obama. And then what really bothered me, someone else chimed in:

Well she’s just got to find a real job and then she’ll understand.

She doesn’t want to do that either! my uncle said, and everybody laughed. It was very funny.

I think I try to be a good sport, and I would be a good sport if I were a vegetarian and made fun of for that, or if I still had orange hair like I did in high school or if I played soccer as if it were a real sport. (Listen, I like soccer, I’m just saying.) But this whole story gets very old right here. I am really very tired of it. It is really not funny to me. I think things are funny when they are small and true, when they can roll off your back because they’re light. But I can’t stand sitting there and listening to everyone laugh when they’re entirely aware of the circumstances that led to a brief period of my unemployment, should we recap? Let’s see, my father was diagnosed with cancer as I began my senior year of college and then the economy collapsed, resulting in a crisis of previously unimagined proportions. And then I graduated, my father died, and I found myself amidst a great depression both personally and on an international scale. And how could you possibly sit there, laughing, full-knowing the series of events? How is it possible for them to just skate over this blip in the normal course of events of my life that has always been colored by cancer, how could you possibly continue to call me out for unemployment when I currently have two jobs, pay for my health insurance and, yet, continue to wonder every day about who it’s going to strike next and whether or not it’s coming back to get me?

But I didn’t say anything. I looked around helplessly like a kitten. Another uncle, uncle John, took pity on me: like I always say, Sand, he said, it’s all fun and games until we start picking on John. My mouth got very tight because I was trying to smile. My aunt collected our plates and we finished our tea. Well, I’ve just got to get going, my sister said, and her and my mother found their coats. I try to remind myself that it’s not their faults, I try to remind myself that it’s no one’s battle but my own, but I can’t help but feel consistently deserted by well-meaning, cowardly family members. And then I watched the Inside Job about how nobody wants to take responsibility for the financial crisis. And then I listened to the latest This American Life about a small-scale tyrant in the Schenectady school district and how nobody could stand up to him because they were all way too scared.

And I got really mad.

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.

dog days are over

On Wednesday night I met Robert Hass, I had nothing for him to sign, and no money to purchase one of his lovely books of poetry. He had a really kind face, but I thought it would be rude if I just asked him to sign my mess of chicken scratch that is my notebook/life journal, now overflowing with pieces of looseleaf because I filled it up and have not yet committed to a new one. I had already written down what I wanted to remember anyway, the writerly questions he posed: what is your first conscious image of consciousness? All the grad students in the room looked bemused and nodded their heads. As if they’d all considered this before, knew well their first conscious image of consciousness… a blue sky? a series of innocuous mobiles? their parents’ sweaty relieved faces? bug-eyed nurses and doctors? the sick florescent light of a hospital room? my brother’s tiny feet as they trailed behind me out of the womb? haha, am I supposed to pick one? Out of all these first images that I imagined on my own?

Earlier in the day I went on an epic bike ride with a boy i knew in high school but was not really friends with and it was lovely. I struggled to keep up with him, he had the kind of pedals that require special shoes to clip into, while I hadn’t been biking or running in weeks and had only done a measly hour of yoga some twelve days ago. We talked about a lot of things and nothing in particular, and he asked me how he could help me write my novel, which made me grateful. It’s nice to feel like you have a friend around, even if you don’t know them very well, when you felt like you had no one.

So after this epic bike ride and this magical meeting of Robert Hass, former poet laureate, and some bad thai food, I ended up with a stomach bug that had me sleeping for 20+ hours. I think the fact that my body was so tired from the bike ride made it more difficult to fight what was in my belly and thus, I went to sleep. I couldn’t move my head. I burrowed into bedding and I was delirious a little, sleep-dreaming for so many hours, thinking about the many new endeavors I needed to embark upon and instead chalking up this whole day, a whole 24 hours, to rest.

I have also come to the rather solid conclusion that I need to move out. If only because I value my freedom. More than I value my things. If this were my life day I would… find my own apartment. Sell my clothes, sell my guitar, sell my books. What was I holding onto anyway?

so help me with this barricade…no surrender, no defeat…

Hello world

I’ve been away for far too long, I’m afraid. I don’t know how this always happens to me, I get wrapped up in things, and I don’t know how to say no to people, and I always believe it when people tell me I’m wrong. I take many things to heart. I am slow to rebound, but I’ve realized that I am in things for the long haul, and I am resourceful and happy, so I don’t really see the reason why I shouldn’t move out come January.

I think that as long as I don’t lose sight of the things I want to do and as long as I stay on top of things and apply myself, I should be just fine. I am not moving to the city to be closer to friends although that would be really nice. It’s really just where I need to be, because I love that city more than anything, regardless of its flaws, its overpopulation, bed bugs, shiny surfaces, vapid populace… I think that great things happen there. I forget what it’s like to feel like things are possible.

I recently turned 23. Last Friday I celebrated the 10-year anniversary of being chemo-free and it’s strange to me that ten years could feel like so long and like no time at all.

something’s been rearranged

Early spring makes me think of creating things, makes me think of the end of high school when everything looked so promising and dewey and bright. And even if I don’t feel that way now, I still have this sense-memory of it, vivid and clear and it’s like it’s almost real again, like I can almost touch it.

I am most happy when I feel connected to people, and I think this is why I love the city. I feel connected to so many disparate parts of myself, in other people, connected by streets and avenues, connected by cars, trucks, buses, subway lines, and even if we are all strangers, there is the sense that we are aware of our own strangeness, this kind of inherent immigration- we are all one or two steps from somewhere else, away from home, so we can meet in this middle place, respectful, grateful for the opportunity to make a life separate from our ancestors. And the friends I have here I have had for years and years, because this is the way I build things, I try to build things that last because it seems like so many other things disappear (and disappear and disappear) at their own will.

Last night I went to Yoga to the People and it’s become ritual for me that every time I go I experience something kind of religious. There is such a communion to the poses, to a shared breath, and the energy is so positive that I can’t help but feel that this is what is meant when you are supposed to discover something spiritual. It makes sense to me and it lasts, I feel it because it’s built in my body and helps to clear my head. The room was crowded with ten bodies to a row, everybody breathing out their day and sweating and it’s something of a dance, negotiating your arms and legs between so many other moving people.

It’s easy to feel like you’re not moving forward when everything in the world is sluggish, in slow motion. Despite all my moving I still feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water, like nothing is happening because I’m not getting paid, the results are not immediate, this is not an obvious progression, my life is not quite as linear as I expected it to be.

For the longest time I didn’t understand what my yoga instructors meant when they said that pigeon is a “powerful” pose. For me it was always a welcome rest from all the other active postures, but lately I’ve realized it’s just as active, it’s just as difficult to let go of a pose as it is to hold on– I realized yesterday during pigeon that even when you think you have nothing left to give away, there is always something: you breathe in and have another breath, another second. This pigeon was a vast negotiation of loss. I was so exhausted, having not done yoga for three weeks, and this pose seemed just beyond my limit, but I realized I could stay there forever, somehow, somehow realizing that I had nothing left in me which meant equal parts nothing to lose, nothing to hold on to, everything to give away.

we can be heroes

I’m sitting in Phoebe’s Cafe in Brooklyn, half-reading Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, and half-listening to a a jazz trio and half-updating this blog that I’ve forgotten about since I haven’t really set my feet on the ground in about two weeks. I am so happy. I am a sleepwalker, dreaming through the day, knowing there is no other way I’d rather be spending my time. I am often underground. I’ve explored almost every color subway line in the past two weeks. I’ve been sleeping in Crown Heights in a lofted bed, in a crowded boys’ apartment with a photo studio instead of a living room. I haven’t been thinking about my half-lived life. I feel full and present. I carry my camera with me everywhere. I am learning how to see again. I am learning to not be so scared.

My friend Andy is the chef here and he put on the Pixies for me. I feel cared for in New York. I feel like people look out for me. Sometimes I even feel like the city is watching me, willing me to be ok, to not be so lost. When I’m torn between subway stops, I have a gut feeling that usually sends me the right way. That has never happened in Boston. My sense memory here is visceral and real, the subway lines are connected veins of the body of this island and sometimes when I am on them I feel like I am swimming. Riding on the Manhattan Bridge, looking out from the back of  a motorcycle, I fall in love. I watch the receding lights and think to myself, I love this city, over and over and over again.

I think I’ve been learning lately that to find your way you have to trust yourself. After I went to college I lost my intuition, because I was always listening to everything everyone ever said. I wanted to be good. And now? Now that I’ve stopped listening and started to think I was good enough again, I am a thousand times happier.

Two days ago I was walking to the subway with the fashion designer who works down the hall from the photo editor I have been working with. We had a slightly awkward conversation and then she looked over at me, as the sun was glinting in my face, and said you have beautiful eyes! Maybe I will use you some day. And I was surprised and flattered but didn’t think anything of it. The next day in the studio, Cathie, my photo editor, greeted me and said, So Katherine tells me you’re going to be her model! And suddenly I was trying on dresses and have a photo shoot on Wednesday for her look book, a catalog of long flowing dresses and one made out of recycled umbrellas.

Weird.

I haven’t been home in days. I feel like I might have my life back. It’s exciting. I am so glad to know that, sometimes, things do come together. I’m watching Andy work and it’s funny. I like watching people I’ve known since grade school in these later versions of their selves: Andy, tattooed and wearing a black beanie, clearing plates and cutting up fruit. I don’t have any money but consider tipping the band.

I am trying to write poems again.

i’m gonna take everything, everything

Something happens to me in the middle of the day, when I am home on a weekday, no matter what I am doing. I never feel that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. I know I’m supposed to be somewhere else, but I just don’t know quite where. But even at jobs or at school, I would feel unsettled, knowing the sun was soon setting, knowing that I would likely have to pack up my things and move somewhere else even if I hadn’t gotten everything done for the day.

I left my house twice today. The first to run errands and the second because I forgot my reusable bags. I returned home twice, empty handed, because I went to the store and forgot my list and then decided I didn’t want to be there anyway. And then when I thought I was going to go buy film and investigate the inner workings of my camera, I realized I’d forgotten that I needed a battery for it, and that I should probably bring my camera anyway since I didn’t know what kind I needed. After all the back and forth I just kind of gave up and sat down at my computer and started to look things up online. There are too many things you can do without ever leaving your house. It’s ridiculous.

I got called by a photographer today about an internship I applied to on craigslist. I don’t have very high expectations for this experience, but it is worth a shot. I might have a part time job soon. I feel like I am finally ready to shift out of neutral and into something that requires more of me. And it’s funny because I don’t think I’ve ever been so attuned to exactly what I was thinking or feeling, not the way that I feel I am now.  My sister seems constantly mildly annoyed with me and this makes me sad because I don’t know what to do about it. It also makes me sad that I can’t share things with her the way I’d like to, or the way I imagine sisters to be.

I am trying to figure out what it is about the afternoon that makes me so anxious. It might be the light and the way it falls through the windows of my house, or it might be the drop in temperature or my sense of accomplishments for the day. Maybe it’s the crash after my morning-time caffeination. Maybe I just need a steady job, I don’t know.