A Late December Ramble

So you start over. You get a new apartment in a new neighborhood. You move sadly and silently past the old boyfriend and go on dates you're not sure you really want to be on. You remember breath. You watch the calendar creep and move and you're sure you can't stop it but you're not sure how you really feel about that. This is good, right? Newness. You need to learn all the creaks of your home so that it is, just now, home. It is almost January. Almost the time of those resolution things, and you are supposed to look into your hand mirror and pick out the flaws. You are to spot them, positively identify them, and make a tangible, trackable plan to rectify them. Is that supposed to work? Does that work for anyone?
It is a tricky time of year, this. Jingle bells! Joy! Santa hats and eggnog lattes! I love this time of year. I really, really do. I tend toward the annoying side of humanness, living inside car ride dance parties, multi-colored fingernails, googly eyes faces on light switches, etc. My morning alarm is the song, "Good Morning," from Singing in the Rain. Though my writing can be rather melancholy and far too introspective, I love..I don't know...cheer. And late December.
Ooh, but that New Year gets you, doesn't it? This summer was fire, the fall was a blink and winter has just begun, but it is already time to put your thoughts into what you will do with the next June, September, Halloween. We are silly humans. Taking only a few days out of 365 to reflect. Spending the rest of them filling out new planners. I just realized that I do not have plans. It feels shaky. Like those moving bridges in a fun house where the walls move in optical illusion and you have to hold on just to stay upright. It is at once terrifying and awesome, ending in a question mark and an exclamation point. How did I get out of that? I want to go again!
This year is interesting in that a new start does not necessarily mean a new start. It feels new. Everything does. But this is what people do, right? You move out, you break up, you cut your hair, you get to step back from what the year was and decide what to keep and what to throw out, and it's like new paint. It's the same thing, really, but it shines and some of the scratches have been covered up. Historically, my new starts have entailed moving roughly 3,000 miles away from whatever it was that was. There is no fun house about it. It's a footbridge, suspended above clouds and the past and once it has been crossed, it falls.
So. This year. Progress as opposed to leaps. No sharp turns, here. The road I have come down is clearly visible from the one I am on.

Do not be upset by your past, especially if you can see it. Be it the last year or the last decade or an old lifetime, look at it. Hold it. Brush the dust off with your fingertips and look at your new face and be thankful for the wear. Wear is growth is a shrinking staircase. It can be easier to climb when you see both where you were and where you are going. And cheer on this time of year, when reflection is expected, required. Miss what was, love what is, and prep yourself for the funhouse bridge.

What. A. Scrooge.

Right now, I am being mocked by two things: A box of Christmas cards to fill with cheer and the gaping lack of cheer I am feeling. One is making me think of the other. The other is making me think of one. They are a halo of laugh track from a crappy sitcom.
I am one of the most Christmas-y people I know. Last year, the house was lit up (like a Christmas tree?) far too early, with green and red and gold and jingle bells and holiday music on Pandora. A glittering cocoon of cinnamon and pine. If I remember correctly, I even baked Christmas cupcakes for the housekeeping staff, which is an incredible commitment and even more incredible feat from a girl who prefers to make macaroni and cheese in a coffee maker and once tried to microwave an avocado. Ask any roommate I have ever had-- I LOVE Christmas.
So, what the eff, 2012?
I have written a lot about keeping my whimsical little self whimsical. It is a focus of mine, and a worthy one. It is my humble and too loud opinion that most of everyone takes themselves so seriously because that's what most of everyone else does. You can lose yourself if you're not careful. You can get vacuumed up into the world of rent and cell phone bills and tie pins. There's not much light in there. And apparently, there is no where to plug in Christmas lights.
I will be moving soon. To a little city studio by myself. How...real. I think it's freaking me out a little, even though it's just about one of the most exciting things I can imagine. To some extent, though I have been in Denver for a year now, this still feels like a made-up life. As if I will snap out of it and wake up in my tropical little tent, take a cold shower next to a tree frog, spray some deet on my flip-flopped toes and get back to life as usual.
But that's not going to happen.
And the reason Christmas felt so much more like Christmas in a place where it is 85 degrees and you string on your red and white bikini to feel festive is because that place was home. Temporary as it was, it was most definitely home. I have not allowed myself that in Denver. Despite the car purchased, the relationships developed, the mailing address changed, I have not given Denver the go-ahead to call me its own. If you are supposed to be at home for Christmas, but you're not totally sure that you actually have one of those, it makes some amount of sense to be in a holiday limbo.

So. Goal for the rest of this warmth-scented season, which I have spent my entire life completely in love with, is this, which is the essentially the same one I always have: Be here. Live here. Without my chest collapsing on my heart from the pressure of a sepia past and a blind future.

And decorate my new house like a Christmas bomb.
And write those damned cards.

On Happiness, and Eyelid Movie Theaters

Happiness is not leisure. Nor is it upward mobility or delivery sushi or blushing Instagram photos of every day life made to look more beautiful and interesting and more like art glowing from an Otterbox frame. Happiness is not a sparkling ring or a sparkling kitchen. It is not bragging rights. It is not sepia. It is not the perfect man or the perfect woman sitting on a teetering white pedestal. It is not butterscotch chips or snowglobe mornings, it is not Christmas, it is not the warm smell of bread baking in your own bread pan in your own oven in your own house. Happiness is none of these things.
Happiness is reality, and the acceptance of it. Knowing what you can change, knowing what you can not and driving with the map that this information draws for you.

This quest that I have been on- the search for the perfect place or the perfect feeling- is wholly, entirely useless. Useless. Perfection, as it is now, does not exist in the long term. Virtually nothing exists unchanging. The trick to sanity, I am finding, and to the truth of happiness, is that nothing will ever be exactly what we had hoped. Dreamers' eyes are closed, playing sweet, flawless movies projected on the insides of pink eyelids. The vice is not the dream. The vice is the alarm clock wake up, when you are not ready to give up what you have spent all this time seeing because now you have to see what is actually there. The vice is the distraction of the dream. The pursuit of it to the detriment of your current experience.


I have much more to say about this, but I also have wine and that shiny glass just took all my attention away from intellect.

I can only think clearly when I do it for the sake of someone else.

I wrote an e-mail to one of my best friends today, and this came out. Which is about the closest thing to my brain that I can come up with right now...



As for me. Oy, life. It is giving me a big stress fracture in my heart right now. This is a weird feeling! Like I said, I wish I could start over. I would not have bought this car, would not live in this house, would not have this life. It's strange to wish that almost EVERYTHING were different. Not that it's awful. It's just not sustainable. I am beginning to realize that people in this real world do not value "down time" as much as they maybe should. What they think is boredom is really just, you know, time. To think or dream or just be. St. John teaches this to people. But only people who maybe stay for too long and are then faced with life afterwards. There are things I love. I will list them now so as to remember myself:

-I finally have a very good relationship with my sister. We still drive each other batty, but we each see the value in having someone who really gets it. All. Of. It.
-I love my boyfriend. He is patient with me when I don't deserve it. He is uplifting and smiling and thoughtful and seems somehow immune to my crazy. And I have a lot of that. I go to bed every night wishing we were in the same place, when I have wished for space from so many others. Thinking of being farther away from him than I am makes me consider staying in one place. What?
-SEASONS! I loved watching the leaves change. I love seeing my breath in the morning, even though I sort of hate that it feels like my ears might freeze off of my head. There are changes here from month to month. In mood, in music, in food, in shoes. I love change.
-I can drive to see any number of family members whenever I want. I don't have much time for that, but if I really needed a grandmother fix, I could have one.
-Denver has potholes that gush steam. Driving through them feels like a movie. Or like an episode of Law and Order. Whatever.

Ok, those are some things. There are more things. It is ridiculously hard not to miss my old life, so I have to remind myself sometimes that unhappy is not what I am. There is no rut here. I am not stuck. I am in a weird place that might take some awkward wiggling, but there is happiness to be found here. Plenty, actually, and I don't even have to search. St. John was just so....comfy.

Girls Who Press Flowers

I used to press flowers into books. When I was young, the natural, wilted death of a wildflower seemed so unjust. Purple petals to gray. Dying in the sun. We never came to the mountains in the fall- only in the green summer and the blue silver winter- and so I had no understanding of the cycle and I never saw the golds. Just gray. Though I was mostly right, wasn't I? Wildflowers do not get caught in the fall.
Now I come here as an adult. Alone, if it can be done, and I sift through the same books that have sat on these same shelves for nearly twenty years. They are my grandparents' books, conservative and a little stuffy with titles like, "The Libertarian's Bible," and in them, in many of them, are my tiny, flattened wildflowers.
I do not read these books, but I search them for the petals and smile when I meet my ten year old self. Knobby, with ears that my head had not yet grown into, who dreamed of becoming a singer of commercial jingles and having a roly poly farm.


Thus far, most of my adulthood has surprised me. Not much has happened that I can say I saw coming. A too thoughtful girl who ran away to the Caribbean, where she lived in the trees, got to understand creatures, almost grew into her ears, decided along the way that she really only wanted to eat plants, and dreams of living everywhere else. Where did she come from?
And then I find these pressed flowers and realize that people don't actually change at all.

ReBlogger. For lack of current original thought.

I wrote this yeeeeeears ago. Approximately five of them. They were five big years, but it seems that I have landed in roughly the same place.




I'm sitting at my desk right now. My own desk. In an office, and I'm wearing heels and slacks and my toenails are polished. I just stuffed, stamped and licked about 30 envelopes. I've got what seems like millions of file folders and paperclipped pages waiting to be set inside them covering said desk. Over and over again, I said that I never wanted to do office work. I never wanted a 9-5. In fact, the idea scared the hell out of me and I couldn't think of anything I would more passionately avoid. And now look at me.
There's that movie, "Say Anything," with John Cusack. At one point, he's having dinner with Diane's family and her dad asks Lloyd what he plans to do with his life. To which Lloyd replies with something along the lines of "I don't want to process anything bought or sold. I don't want to buy anything sold or processed. I don't want to sell anything sold, bought, or processed...." And so on. And that pretty much sums up what I've felt the last couple of years.
So, what am I doing? This is how it happens, you know? This is how free spirits and tree huggers and flower children ended up being corporate heads and other general business exec bastards. It starts as a job you don't love but don't mind and ends in a vacuum where your not-too-terrible job and your life have become the same thing.
Are people really ok with this? Does the cycle not bother them the way it does me? I understand that restlessness is for youth and maturity triggers some need to settle. Am I really the exception there or is the entire thought bogus and people are just too comfortable to realize how uncomfortable they really are?
Introspection is overrated. I've just been struck with the idea that if I'm not careful, I will be the kind of person I don't ever want to be.
I just got a spam email that asked me if I'm a real man. No, generated and randomly distributed email, I am not a real man. And it's not something I'm so interested in, so if you would take a second to think about the gender to which you are advertising and kindly take me off of your big huge list, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Jungle Hammock Head

Oooh, I found a big intense entry in my travel journal. I didn't date it, but it was definitely written while on some other land mass. Probably Dominica, since I talk about climbing waterfalls. In fact, it must have been Dominica. I think I was sitting in the hammock outside our room at the Hibiscus Valley Inn drinking a Kabouli while Erin took a mostly cold shower. We had just come back from one of our waterfall days, bruised and muddy, exhausted and exhilarated. Jack and Scottie, our puppy companions, were under the hammock, keeping watch and once in a while getting up for a pat on the head. It's the same rambling as always, but it doesn't sound like my inside voice. Must have meant this one, and I'm kind of into it...


I am tired of writing on purpose now, and want just to write. We'll see if my brain and hands want the same thing.

To want to explore, one has to have explored. Ignorance is bliss and all of that and you will probably be perfectly content with all that you are handed if you never look up. If you never look out. So, record setters are always looking to break their own records. Scholars are always looking for another degree. Travelers are always looking for the next place.

What the hell does "contentment" even mean? Is it more admirable, more attractive to want exactly what you have? As you climb, do you forget to look down? It seems that wanderers often land in soft places and find refuge alone. Many age in gardens by the sea, or on white beaches and dune grass. And alone. So often alone.

The more things a person sees, the fewer people there are to relate to. "I have been here. And also here. There as well." "That's fascinating. Did you see what is on TV tonight?"

And so it goes. Many people's minds can only travel as far as their arms have stretched. This is not a rule, certainly, as daydreamers still stare at desktop globes, but it might be fairly safe to call it the norm.

So you can tap the brakes a bit, and hope to the clouds for someone else to catch up. But you could wait forever, fidgeting, restless and wondering about what more there is to see and the time that is being wasted.

Or you see only green lights and you rip out the rearview. Slowing down for very little. Stopping for nothing. And the hairs gray, and the skin wrinkles. And old, well-worn knees can only handle landing in soft places, can't they? And no one ever caught up.

If you had never climbed to that first waterfall, you would not be obsessed with climbing another. Pushing is not a stagnant act; it comes from momentum and spine strength. Movement begets movement. If your spine goes out in the middle of a push, you fall backwards. If you overestimate a push, you lose what is solid and steady and you fall face-first with nothing to hold on to, as you have shoved it all away from yourself.

And how can you expect anyone to catch up to a fall? Maybe the best you can hope for is someone to be there at the very end. Not to catch you, but to pat you on the back for landing mostly in once piece and then to reacquaint you with firm ground; to teach you how nice walking in a straight line can be.

And you still look up, but less, maybe. I am left hoping that eventually, looking at what is in front of me will be all that I want.

I don't even have a bad case of it, to tell you the truth. I am not sure that I've got the stomach for it, nor the guts. The threat of addiction is often good motivation for moderation (I liked "tions" in this sentence, huh?). And to venture more deeply into this likely means leaving most everybody behind, and maybe not being able to stop. I love to love more than that would really allow. Closeness, affection, depth of relationships. Things I think I have chosen. I don't want to be seventy, living in the rainforest alone. Even if I am happy that way, and even if it means getting to have a mango tree.

Tapping the brakes.