Christmas: Part 1

Christmas gets me every time. I'm not sure if I always loved Christmas this much, or if it's a result of trying really, really hard to make it feel like it could maybe be snowing if I stepped outside at the end of a day in my office. Whatever the reason, everything about this time of year makes me smile. I love cheesy pop Christmas music with jingle bells in the background. I love legitimately good Christmas music with jingle bells in the background. ("Baby, It's Cold Outside" is my favorite. I'm not sure which category it falls into.(Ooh, that's a lie. I like "River" better.)) I love the movies and the cider and garland. I love cutting paper snowflakes and hanging them everywhere, even though it drives my roommate a little crazy. I love to listen to stories of how everyone here celebrates Christmas back home. People smile when they tell those stories, even though they can be hard to talk about when you're so far away from them.
On that note, I have to say something. I hope the people who get to be with their families and live those stories the same way year and year again understand what they have going for them. I am three thousand miles away from my perfect Christmas.
On December 24th, twenty of the people I love more than anyone else in this world will walk up my grandparents' walkway. The snow beneath their shoes will crunch and someone will probably slip and almost fall. The house will be warm and smell like a roasting turkey or a baking ham. There will be Christmas music playing and my grandfather will be whistling along in his apron as he toasts flour for the gravy. The tree will be ridiculously big and look like it leapt out of a Martha Stewart magazine page and into the living room. It will be decorated in gold. It will be beautiful. There will be a million presents underneath it. They're all supposed to be for the "kids," who are now into their late twenties, but there will also be some for the adults. Each of the adults will grin at each other and say, "Oh, we weren't doing Christmas presents for each other this year!"
The mingling will happen while everyone is cooking and snacking and snacking and cooking. We have to mingle, you see, as there will inevitably be someone there whom only one of us knows. Maybe a new girlfriend or boyfriend, unaware that all past girlfriends and boyfriends are still invited to our family Christmases. Or maybe a Christmas orphan, who doesn't have anywhere else to go, or who might not even celebrate the holiday. This orphan could be my grandmother's acupuncturist or the Vietnamese family who cleans her house. This orphan could speak zero English and have no real desire to be at her house for Christmas Eve. My grandmother does not care. My grandmother is Daddy Warbucks and will be damned if there is a soul in the whole state of Colorado who doesn't have somewhere to go that night.
The mingling will be interrupted by photo-taking time. They will pour onto the front step and try to figure out how to stand so everyone is seen. Someone will have brought santa hats or headbands with reindeer horns and bells, and that someone will insist that they all wear the hats for the picture. This includes the acupuncturist or new girlfriend. No one escapes unadorned. For this reason, we have a multitude of Christmas pictures with one or two people whose names no one can remember. My grandmother will cackle and my dad will roll his eyes.
When the pictures are done, they will eat. Gram will force kids to sit next to adults so everyone talks to everyone. She does not want people in their comfort zones, no sir. Sit beside someone you don't already talk to all the time. I suspect that this is done because she wants to be at the kids table herself. We make her laugh and we don't talk about things that bore her. We have let her believe that she is sneaky for years now, just like we pretend not to know that she puts pimentos in her jello-salad just so no one else will eat it and she can have all the leftovers.
After the food is gone and those twenty loved people pat their tummies and fill their cheeks with air to signal total stuffedness, they will move to the living room, where they will laugh together. They will laugh about my Uncle Patrick's constant quest for the perfect candid photo, which he will surely have been trying to get all day. The will ask about old girlfriends and boyfriends and unwittingly make the new ones slightly uncomfortable. Right about this time, my dad and his dad will disappear into different corners with different newspapers, where they will remain for most of the rest of the night. The kids will get up and do the dishes, complaining that they're not kids anymore and that dish duty should be shared by everyone now, forgetting that they cooked nothing.
My grandfather will start the coffee, and the scent will fill the air. A moment does not exist on December 24th that their house doesn't smell like something delicious.
And then, they will sing. My grandmother will sit down at one of her two pianos and begin to play Christmas songs. She will hand out sheet music. My cousin, who is my best friend, will look around the room searching for me until she remembers that I'm not there. That I haven't been there all that much since 2004. When she remembers, she will be sad. So will I. Some of them, including my spectacular grandmother, will sing beautifully. The ones that will not sing beautifully do not care. It's Christmas, and everyone can sing at Christmas. My Uncle Ted will say that we're flat. My mother will laugh and say something about not being able to carry a tune. My cousin will sing like a pop star and my grandmother will tell her to Stop That, that's not Real Singing. My dad and his dad will remain in their corners, with smiles sneaking into the corners of their lips. People will start to break away from the carolers a bit and dive into apple pie and chocolate torte, grateful that my grandfather made the coffee. He makes better coffee than any of the rest of us.
Rather abruptly, my grandmother will get tired of singing and demand the we all go to the tree and open presents. Present time is a little bittersweet. It's exciting and full of oohs and ahhs, but it's also the end. The last part. After the oohs and ahhs come the goodbyes, and then they will have to wait another year before this all happens again. No one wants to wait another year. No one really wants the night to end at all.
As I'm writing this, I am not sure how to close it. It seems, even when just writing the story of my family's Christmas Eve, that I do not want it to end anymore than they will.
Let's just call this part one. I'll end it with not wanting it to end. And tomorrow, when I am less sad about not being at one home for Christmas, I will write about being at a different one.

Until then, I thank David Bowie and Bing Crosby for singing a Christmas song together.

Cursed?

The other day, I was reading through various Facebook things (I so hate how that site has the ability to catch my attention) and I found an interesting post. My sister wrote some status update about how her boyfriend is in Europe, her best friend is in New Zealand, and her sister (that's me) will soon cross the Atlantic again. She wondered, with all of these traveling people around her, why she is still here. I don't know how much she meant by it. I don't know if she meant that she wanted a vacation or that she wants to travel in general or that she feels like she's gotten stuck here. I don't know. I won't ask. But the post was there and I was sort of flattered to be included in her thoughts about traveling/travelers.
Comments flowed, as they always do. Some encouraging her to see the world. Others telling her that she'll find her time to do all these things as well. Uplifting, mostly, and all on her side. And then I saw something weird. I saw my name in one of them. I read further and found a comment made largely about me. A friend of ours told her that she wasn't traveling because she had good sense to save money and be stable in an unstable job market. Because she didn't feel the need to "keep up with the Joneses" the way I, apparently, do. He then said, "No offense, Jamie, I just don't think you'll ever be happy staying in one place."
Whoa.
My first response was defense. I was stung and wrote some prickly retort about not being satisfied with watching the whole wide world exist inside a television screen. I have had to defend this to people before. Career-driven people, mostly. I find that people either envy what I do or look down on it, believing it to be a juvenile escape from the reality of those picket fences and digital bathroom scales that I so abhor. I'm used to this assumption and have calculated decent defenses for every version of it.
But this was new. "You'll never be happy anywhere?" Is that true? I wonder. I haven't found anywhere I want to stay forever, and I've lived in three of the most beautiful places the US has to offer. Three places people often migrate to, not out of. Three places people go on vacation and ooh and aah about how they wish they could live there. I've left two without so much as a tear and plan to leave this one before a year is up. I have decided to move to the Pacific Northwest, but the plan is not to stay. The plan has never been to stay.
So what's wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with it at all? When he said "No offense," he clearly thought that offense could be taken. He clearly even meant it that way. Have I doomed myself to a life of dissatisfaction? Of always wondering if there is somewhere better? I am wondering even now if there is somewhere better than where I'm sitting, and I am happy where I'm sitting. Where I'm sitting is beautiful and perfect. Yet I am sure that there is somewhere more beautiful and more perfect. Yeah, that's a better was to put it. I'm not always wondering if there is some place better; I am always sure that there is.
I'm not sure if this scares me or excites me. I suppose those two things feel very much the same and even are the same in a lot of circumstances.
Should I be looking for a cure or thanking the universe?

Crashing off of Pedestals

So, it's kind of a funny thing. If I learn that anyone I know wants to be my more-than-friend, I always assume that they're wrong. There was a miscalculation somewhere and there was an undue firing of neurons. They don't really feel that. It's an obvious mistake; one that will be remedied when I remind said person of my chronic craziness and also that I can never manage to keep my room clean, nor cook anything that requires heat. Being in love with me is like believing in the Tooth Fairy, I think. It's fun, but it's never real. After some digging (not even that much digging, really), the truth of the situation becomes clear. And after a while, you barely remember what it was like to believe. Silly Tooth Fairy. You don't exist. Silly boy. The girl you were in love with doesn't exist.
That this sounds like some self deprecating attempt to fish for affirmation that my theory isn't true has not escaped me. I know it seems that way. It's not, though. Really. I don't see it as cynicism...more like realism. Idealism, even, as I don't like pedestals much and am often more than ready for the crash when it finally happens. The crash makes me happy. It's like decompression. Pressure: Off.
But then something backwards happens. Every time. I'm the one falling from a height I never signed up for, looking right at the hard ground I'm getting ready to hit, and I see that the person who built that pedestal is angry. Seething, even. As if I meant to fall off. As if I climbed up there of my own accord and decided to tell the whole thing to go to hell and leapt to my doom as a normal, flawed, ground-level girl. It's like getting mad at your toddler when she falls off a two wheeler. Why was she there in the first place? She just learned to walk, for crying out loud. She has no hope of even reaching the pedals.
This is the phenomenon I am upset with right at the moment. Without mention of names or identifying specifics, this is eating at my brain. What do I do about it? Write, obviously. What does anybody do in this situation? When love turns to hate. When self preservation turns into poison. When someone you adore and who used to adore you has decided that the two of you can't be in the same room. With no warning and no eye contact and loads of awkwardness that no one else can see. At what point is the all or nothing part decided and why didn't I get a say?
I feel like I got fired for not wanting a promotion. "You're an awesome employee. Our favorite. We would love it if you were at work all day every day. Wanna be manager?" "No, but thanks for the compliment. To be honest, I've tried management. I totally suck at it. You should hear the stories. I will last much, much longer as a regular employee. Let's stick with what works, here." "Go to hell, awesome employee. Pack. Your. Things."
I generally write these things and come to some sort of an answer by the end of it. I don't have an answer for this. I usually get somewhere with writing. It helps me sort through things. It's not helping with this one and I'm beginning to think that I just need to vent. There doesn't seem to be a good answer or a solution. The only thing I can think to do is be mad as hell and miss my friend.
Maybe I should just get a warning label tattooed on my forehead: "Use only as directed. Prolonged exposure not recommended. Side effects include but are not limited to: Frustration, potentially severe loss of reason and lasting feelings of resentment. BEWARE! MISUSE CAN LEAD TO SERIOUS HEART-SHAPED INJURY AND IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE TO OTHERWISE WONDERFUL FRIENDSHIPS."
Think that would do the trick?

Attachment

I don't think that I have much to write right now. It's just that it's been a while and I can feel myself sort of twitching. The twitch means I need to write. Something.
I have found a new consequence to this whole non permanent living thing. It seems that my personal relationships are the newest victim. Well, I don't suppose they're the newest victim. Just the most recently discovered.
My first year here was magic. Sparkly and warm and intense in the way you want every moment in your life to be intense. I felt that entire year down to my toes. I still feel a cliched, cosmic connection with the people I met then, even though I have not seen many of them since. At that point, I didn't know what life I was about to high-dive into. I didn't know to keep at least a small canyon in between them and myself, so they had something so deep to fall into when they left that I had a hard time remembering what it was like when they were right in front of me. It hurts without the canyon. Without the canyon, you can see them get smaller as they walk away. You see them the whole time.
So after that first year, I watched all the people I fell in love with get smaller. And I started digging.
Admittedly, there is not much I remember from college. But I paid attention in my Eastern Philosophy class, where I learned that The Tao of Pooh is amazing and that attachment is a chief cause of suffering. That did not make sense to my 20 year old brain, but I think it's sinking in a little more now. If you realize that all thing are non permanent, (except for Sharpies and the smell of burned popcorn in your microwave) then you will not become attached to them and, thus, will not suffer when they are gone, as they inevitably will be. It's not about coldness. It's not about feeling less or keeping any distance in the moment. It's about living in reality and not trying to constantly convince yourself that the life in your relationships is enough to keep them going forever. You learn quickly that you really have no knowledge of the future. You don't know who will fall out of your life, or back in. You don't know which relationships were real and which were simply the result of unique, like circumstance. You're blind in a dark room, to be frank, and there really is no way to tell.
So now, with Bon Iver in my ears and another generation of migrants going on their way, I am wondering how anyone can make it work. Like I said, it's not about coldness, and an arm's length is too much distance for a true friendship. But how, when you know that you don't know, do you get close? There is not much of me dedicated to self preservation, but the tiny bit of me that is tends to scream loudly and flash bright colors when it feels threatened. And in the spirit of any self preservation, I have cooled down a bit, haven't I? The arm's length gets longer and the canyon gets deeper and this, I'm finding, is what causes suffering. The anticipation of pain. The prevention of it, even to the detriment of my own experience. I need to forget what it's like to say goodbye. I need to do that high-dive with my eyes closed and my arms out like I did that first year, when I didn't give myself enough time to think about how deep the water at the end of the dive might be.
The whole "Live in now" thing is overused and its sheen has faded some as a result. Every new-age guru and guru lover says, "Live in now!" But I suppose every overused phrase would have been abandoned early if it did not hold some truth that people, for whatever reason, can't quite come to on their own.
At the end of every long day, I would much rather be sad to see someone go then to not feel anything when they do. I worked hard on that canyon, damnit, and I want to get some use out of it. Even if it hurts. Hell, especially if it hurts.


Dear Universe: Please let me feel this year. The whole thing.
Thank you.

Gottagetout

Do you ever feel like you're staring directly into the stone eyes of a looming wrecking ball?
I get the sense lately that I am clinging tightly to something I know to be entirely temporary. If the last few years have shown me anything, it's that it is in my personality to crave impermanence of some sort. I tend to gravitate towards things I know for a fact can not last. Summer-only jobs, disposable cameras, various boys...etc. Seasonal life is just that. Seasonal. Waxing and waning and never static. Tourist worlds are built on people who always, always leave, which means a tourist world can never really feel the same one day as it might the next. It seems like a perfect fit, right? But somehow, my commitment-phobic, restless, gottagetouttahere self has managed to make seasonal life, among the most transient of lifestyles, permanent. How the hell did that happen? As magic tricks go, it's one of the best I have been witness to...the magician doesn't even know the secret.
And somewhere, something in me is holding on. This is clear, as I have officially been at Maho a year and a half longer than I planned. But holding on is not really an option anymore, and the looming wrecking ball is also the light at the end of the tunnel. I did what I swore I wouldn't do: I got attached to a place. I settled in. I have even gone online looking for furniture and curtains so I can adorn my tent the way I like it. Effing curtains! I refuse to live in a place long enough to want curtains. As soon as I leave here, I am going to settle back into not settling in.
I've got one year left. One year of the kind of stability that I don't have any desire to continue with. And then I get to live. A bit scared and totally alone and happy, just the way I like it. I get to close my eyes and point at a map and figure out what's next. Hop in my car, maybe hoping that it will break down somewhere beautiful, and then leave again when I am done there. All I need is a backpack and my iPod. And no. Effing. Curtains.

Home.

So, I'm sitting at my parents' dining room table. I have got the house to myself (and the two dogs, three cats and bird). It's entirely possible that it could snow today. Ok, that's probably a slight exaggeration. I guess I have to leave room for the fact that any cloud cover here means I am going to be cold, which is what's actually happening. But still. It's spring in Colorado and you never really know, do you?
I've been here for 6 days now and it's been nuts, like it always is. Running all around Colorado trying to squish every little bit of the state into ten days is not the easiest thing ever. It is something I keep doing to myself and maybe I should consider a longer vacation next time. But my commitment phobia does not limit itself to relationships and TV series. I am just as scared of a long vacation as I am of feeling hooked into people that do or maybe don't exist for any promised amount of time. In that vein, how do people consciously and happily get involved with TV shows like that? If you started watching Lost and you just stopped watching Lost, you decided to enter into a relationship without a foreseeable end. And what happened? You were there for six freaking years! How anybody leaps with glee into addiction is beyond me. I feel the same way about personal relationships, but that's deeper than I'm going to go on a dumb blog that no one reads.
Anyway, I have finally reached a few moments where I do not have any planned meetings or events to get to. That moment inside a short vacation where you can finally breathe is a conflicted one. You're glad for it, right? You're glad to have, at some point in the recent past, allotted yourself a few hours where there is truly nothing to do. Flip the coin, though, and it's a maddening few hours. I am sitting here racking my brain for who I have not yet seen and what I have not yet done. Sure that there is something I'm missing. Half sure that what I'm missing is rest, honestly, and I should relish this opportunity. But rest was not part of the deal here.
It's been a different visit than it usually is. I've done this vacation home thing a few times now and it's always the same. I drive through the Garden for nostalgia's sake. Remembering the picnics and midnight visits and all the people whom I've taken on this drive as they've passed through my life. I bring a 12 pack of Fat Tire to a friend's house, fully aware that they'll be left with 8 of them when I leave. I go to the mall with lofty intentions. Planning my new wardrobe in my head. Excited at the thought of cheap, cute summer clothes that were not purchased at exactly the same place that the 45 people I live with shop every time they need something new. It never goes the way it should, though, and I find myself searching desperately for the exits as I can no longer handle fluorescent lighting or an abundance of concrete surrounding me. I usually go to Fort Collins and come back from Fort Collins and fall in love with driving for hours. I go out to the bars and soak up feeling out of place. I can say that downtown Colorado Springs is not somewhere that makes me want to fit in. I wear heels as long as I can stand them and then bring the flops out of my purse and proceed to get funny looks all night long. I make a mess out of the room that still looks like it did when I was 17, looking through my drawers and closet and the boxes of my things that my mom has packed up. I don't know what I am looking for, but I look every time. At the end of the trip, I am both sad and happy to say goodbye to the place again. I'm ready to get back to whatever beach I left behind for a few weeks and the friends that are there.
Here's where it's different. The leaving thing. I know it's still almost a week away, but I feel totally different about going back to the islands this time. There must have been a Big Maho party last night. I saw announcements about it all over Facebook. And for the first time in years and years, I didn't wish that I was there. I have looked at the pictures people have posted in the week that I have been gone and there was no pang of envy. No little sting that made me wish I was there. Nothing.
I could ponder why that is. Wonder if it's because I am finally getting tired of the Caribbean (I am) or if it's because I have enough of my own pictures from my own Big Maho parties (I do). But those aren't the reasons. The reason I am not chomping at the bit to get back to my life on vacation has nothing to do with my life on vacation. It has much more to do with what I've left behind while I've been there.
I came home this month because two very good friends got married. A couple I have known since I was 15 tied the knot and I couldn't fathom not being here for the big day. It turns out, I wasn't the only one. A group of people I have not seen breathe the same air for about a decade was finally in one room again. It became more than a simple happy reunion, although it certainly was that. It was like we all looked around and thought, "Why the hell did this take so long?"
I have met a lot of people in the last five years. A lot. Nomads and homebodies and people who are trying to find some title in between. I have seen people come and go and I have been one of the people who always seems to leave. I write letters in an attempt to touch my fingertips to some of the people I'm afraid I've lost. I recently noticed that most of those letters are written from an airplane seat and are rarely finished and never sent. It's not that I'm ok with letting all of these people go. I'm not, really. It just feels like something I have gotten used to and have begun to regard as a normal, necessary part of my twenties. And so I have lived for the last 5 years. With fairly deep if entirely temporary attachments to amazing, wonderful people I am doomed to wish I had known for a little longer.
Enter this crew of old friends. The way I felt around them caught me off-guard. Sure, they've known me forever. They have seen me change and stay the same. Ups and downs, boyfriends and break-ups. They met me in all my JCPenney clad, bass clarinet rocking glory and somehow liked me, anyway. Though I never grew all the way out of my nerd phase, I can at least mask it with a good tan and lip gloss now; I had no such self awareness nor pressing need for social self preservation at 15 years old. The person they met was just me. Awkward, unsure, hopelessly ridiculous and juvenile. Dancing circles in the rain with my arms stretched from my sides. In love with 'N Sync. Boy crazy and restless. All this and they still wanted to hang out with me? I didn't get it then and I don't really get it now. Every single one of these people is infinitely cooler and more interesting than I could even try to be. But at 15 years old, they took me in and thus started the kind of relationships that I would never be able to replicate.
I have missed them. I had no idea how much I have missed them. We have all gone on to live drastically different lives and to examine us all individually would leave you wondering how the friendships have survived. We have a teacher, a zookeeper, a veterinarian, a photographer and a wanna-be gypsy. Some are married, some divorced, many still single. We have lived all over and out of the country, stopping in to say hello when we can and running off again, barely adjusting the rearview mirror enough to check out who we just waved goodbye to. And then the universe was kind and two of us fell in love and it finally happened. A reason. An excuse to see each other for real again and remember why we have such sweet tasting memories of all the nights we spent huddled together. As many miles and years as are between us now, it didn't feel like anything had changed. As it turns out, the only thing different since my nerd days is the tan. Well, I probably couldn't exactly rock a bass clarinet if you handed me one right now...But for the most part, I am the same. It took seeing them to figure that out and remember that there are people I don't have to write letters to. They're still here. They still love me and I still love them and they will be my intangible, abstract definition of home for as far into the future as I can see.
So, now I know.

Soooo....things aren't going quite well for me right in this moment. Nothing is seriously wrong, either. I have just found myself having one of those days where you examine your life more closely than is comfortable and find out, without much surprise, that you might not be perfectly, blindly happy. This is not a revelation, really. I have had these days before and they mostly make me shrug my shoulders and say, "Ok, so what are you gonna do about it?" I have so little pity for myself. I am sporadically glad for that.
I'm not going to delve into what I know is making me feel this way. This is one of the few things I have been able to sort out without writing all of it down first. I get it. I know what's wrong. I also know exactly what and how I need to change. This dissatisfaction is no enigma. It's more of a pain in the ass, to tell the truth of it. And the pot of coffee I just drank is probably not helping. Maybe I'll just sit in the sun and listen to Cat Stevens until Wednesday, when I get to go home and get some space from everything that is driving me crazy. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan.
And right now, instead of letting myself sink into this bummer of a mood, I am going to focus on things I am excited for. Home things, to be exact. I will make a list of everything I am stoked to go home for. And then when I get home, maybe I'll make a list of the things I thought I missed but don't. And the things I didn't think of that I miss terribly. Happens every time. Here it goes:

-Whole Foods!!! The beautiful, unparalleled produce section is bigger than my entire store.
-Driving and actually getting somewhere
-Country radio!
-Going downtown and not seeing ANYONE I know.
-My mom
-My dad
-My whole family, actually
-Blasting my car radio and cruising on I-70
-Coffee shops
-Ice cream parlors
-Walking barefoot on grass
-Carpet
-Cool nights
-Friends I have known for more than 2 years
-New nail polish colors
-Shopping! Buying a pair of shorts for less than $60 is a big, big deal.
-Puppies
-Good beer


--Ok, I'm going to go to the beach now and work on that Cat Stevens thing. The list has certainly helped my mood. More later.