I’ve known I was going to write this post for a long time. I just didn’t know it would be like this.
I remember thinking that since everyone reading this has lived through this last year, I shouldn’t simply write a recap. Like, you were there, you know what happened. I just didn’t know how impossibly sad and tough and scary and intense this time was going to be.
I was going to write about how only person who experienced 2020 the way I did was me, and so I wanted to keep it personal. I want to focus on the ways living through this time has affected me, changed me, made me think.
But fuck, I didn’t see this one coming.
I wanted to write an intricate, beautiful piece about the highs and lows, the personal growth, the shock of how connected I felt to the world in a time of isolation.
I wanted to paint a picture of the frightened, panicked feeling, watching schools shift online, bread sell out completely at the grocery store.
I wanted to write something that captured the depths of the loneliness and depression and the helplessness, and the difficultly of building myself a mental health safety net in the middle of a pandemic.
I wanted to talk about the witches and the watchmen, and about the gunslingers, the characters in the books that kept me alive.
I wanted to talk about finding Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and I wanted to write about quoting John Mullaney at my friends.
I wanted to write about my sister graduating from high school and about how there weren’t any concerts or musicals and there wasn’t really a ceremony but there was a tiny gathering of friends, in spite of everything, because that’s what she wanted, and I wanted to write about what it felt like to drop her off at school and how I cried all the way home. And then she was gone and the house was empty, but she a few months later she home.
I wanted to talk about how I wished I had lost my job more gracefully, and I wish I hadn’t sworn so much, because it didn’t do any good.
I wanted to write about becoming angry at the government, and at the same time becoming more patriotic than I’ve ever felt in my life, because of the millions of lives that were put in danger by corruption and prejudice and disfunction and incompetence and disregard for the value of a human life. Because I found that I cared about all of those lives and their housing and their water and their educations and their work and their business and their loved ones and their freedom to love their loved ones and their earth.
I wanted to talk about watching John Mullaney & the Sock Lunch Bunch and switching my major to philosophy on a whim.
I wanted to talk about what it felt like when some asshole spray-painted “GOD BLESS AMERICA” over the poetrait of Breonna Taylor, on the painting rock at Geneseo. And what it felt like when somebody re-painted black lives matter back over the top.
I wanted to talk about looking my race-based prejudice dead in the face and saying “I see you. I see that you are there. And there are things I can do to soften the damage that you might cause in this world, and my heart is big and strong and giving enough to help me to do those things.”
I wanted to write about the swimming pool, about building a campfire circle, about trespassing in the woods, about thinking I could be a homesteader with chickens and then deciding I didn’t want to be. I wanted to talk about listening to true crime or climate activism podcasts and slowly becoming an activist when the election drew closer and I wanted to talk about reloading that goddamned map for a week.
I wanted to write about watching Twin Peaks and the Queen’s Gambit, and making soap and cooking Ramen, and the place in the loft of the barn that is mine.
I wanted to talk about 2020.
But I’m having a hard time, writing this.
I’ve been crying all day. Driving back and forth to pick up my sister, drop off my books, listening to Different Radio and NPR and WXXI. I feel flattened. And I’m so tired. I’m crying right now and my belly hurts. I want to sleep for years.
I know there will be no “girls” night at Ari’s house and nobody will kiss when the ball drops and we won’t play games like we did when we called in this year and left the last one behind. So I wanted to send this year off somehow.
I wanted to write a piece that swooped and soured and carried you to high places and brought you down with a gentle thump but I don’t know if I can. I just have this. It’ll have to work. Like a half-baked charm.
A long time ago There was a pregnancy Out of wedlock That drove a young girl In her time and place To run away from home To have her baby in a barn Because there was no space For her In the comfortable places Where people were accepted. Because she was a refugee.
A long time ago Her partner stayed with her Throughout everything Even though She wasn’t carrying his baby.
A long time ago That child, When he grew up Became a radical Who disagreed With the politics of the time Who stood up For the least of these For the oppressed folks In a time when to do this Was a revolution in itself
The child When he grew up Was kind to people No matter who they were Or where they came from Or however they struggled That child When he grew up Has a sex worker for his partner And that child When he grew up Argued against Unkindness, violence And instead He comforted people And said that in the end The universe Was going to catch them. That things would turn out alright No matter what Because everyone was loved If not by one another Then by himself.
He was technically born In the heat of the summer And what we celebrate In the dead of winter In the cold Has older roots So old they’re almost forgotten
This time Honors the darkest days of the year With light and feasting Carries us through Keeps hope alive Worships the sun With blood and bone
In ways we remember In our own traditions Not pale reflections Only different, Changed, evolved.
The lights on the fir tree And the smell of pine The oven that warms the kitchen From early until late Preparing celebratory food And the connections between people Who’ve come home.
Perhaps in the cold We stayed together As a bigger group To stay warm, and alive During the coldest time When predators roamed
And now the predator Is too small to see Has invisible teeth And it goes for the lungs And it takes us down slowly… And it goes for the elderly and the weak.
So this time We must, for the most part Not band together Against the cold and the dark And something very old and sacred Is honored clumsily Through electric blue screens Over the tops of masks
But when we wear masks That cover out faces We are forced If we look at each other To look into one another’s eyes For maybe the first time In a very long time. And it’s harder Not to recognize the humanity In everyone It’s harder not to be kind When you have to look Into somebody’s eyes.
And kindness
Like the refugee’s baby reminded us Like the prostitute’s partner reminded us
Last final exam essays are good enough, and submitted. I don’t have to think about German or Philosophy for a month, so hooray…
I really am feeling so incredibly pleased with myself.
Right now I’m laying in bed, drinking mango jalapeño beer from my brother in law’s brewery, listening to an episode of Amanda Palmer’s podcast. Comfortable feeling.
I have this stash of chocolate in my sock drawer, plus a few packs of Ramen noodles. In the fridge downstairs I have a giant jar of pickles, a smallish bag of pretzel rolls, like three blueberry muffins, and some bologna. Between that and what my mom keeps on hand, which is basically everything, I am so fucking set.
Also have a few books to get through over the break. A couple of Discworld books I’ve been saving, that sixth Dark Tower book. Also some Baldwin and mayyyybe the Obamas. It’s a tall stack.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to drop my sister off at work, come home, pack a couple of sandwiches and a book, bundle up and go outside to the barn. Making a test batch of soap with some random oils I have kicking around, to see if that’s something that works, up there in the cold. I hope it does.
Of all of the things I could have decided to hyperfixate on, I have no idea why it chose soapmaking. But hey, I mean, I’ve learned enough things about this process at this point that when my dad says “careful working with lye” I can tell him exactly what to do if it spills without thinking twice. I know about soaponification values and the right oils for swirls and the difference between hot process and cold process curing times and how to calculate a lye discount and I don’t know why any of this is useful, to me, in my life, but the information is in my brain and the impulse to try is fluttering away at my consciousness on a nearly constant basis.
I just – I feel like this is happening to me for the same reason that so many engineers switch careers to go into culinary school. The math is fun, the applicable math is also fun, but applying math in the world frequently takes time. There’s a lot instant gratification in the process of making things that are tangible and close by and almost ready and sweetie could you put the kettle on…
It’s a bit like making art.
The days start getting longer tomorrow and I love you. 💜
Hammock chairs hanging from the rafters. They are over six feet apart in a well-ventalated space. Folding chairs folded into the corner of the space. It’s cold up there, and it’s still a bit dusty, but it’s much better than it was before. The roof makes other-worldly sounds when the wind blows across it, and you have to watch out for the uneven and weak places in the floor, but probably nobody’s about to crash through it.
Okay so the other evening I wrote about an adventure in which I ducked in and out of a grocery store for a bottle of peach juice and I don’t think I ever actually explained why.
I needed it for brewing stuff, for the batch of peach wine that I back sweetened and bottled this evening.
It’s been bulk aging since August or early September, I think. So our secondary fermentation is complete and all the little yeast babies have died.
Their spirits are still with us.
Once the yeast dies there isn’t too much of a chance that the pressure inside the bottle will cause an explosion. Probably. When you’ve racked off the wine into a clean container enough times, and no more dust is falling out of solution, it’s time.
The ironic thing about all of this is that I can’t actually drink more than a very small amount of alcohol, at the moment. It’s this medication that I’m taking. But, fuck, is that a worthwhile tradeoff.
It helps that I just really enjoy the process of brewing. That’s where most of the joy is, anyway.
So this evening I asked my parents to help me out, taste testing this batch, as I added sweet peach juice until it was palatable. Because, fuck, this one fermented all the way dry. She needed a little help.
Mom and dad made ehhhh noises as I added sugar a little at a time, mixed it in, gave them a taste in a small drinking glass, until it had turned out okay. At the point when their tongues tingled in the back, as the wine splashed down, it was good enough.
I made one bottle that was much sweeter than the rest, as a treat.
And as I was doing that, Evie was also moving around the kitchen making snickerdoodles, and we were all listening to John Denver & The Muppets Christmas album, and Mom and Dad were on the computer looking at hats to buy one another as a gift exchange. Mom is getting tipsy, Dad is tired enough to be cracking jokes.
I felt happy.
And the thing about Christmas is that I used to feel like there was a certain way that I ought to be feeling. A particular spirit, a vibe. It’s like something I almost remember but can’t put my finger on. It was magic. It had to do with short days and the smell of pine, with oranges and cookies. It was lights on a tree or snow on the ground. It was a certain collection of music. Old movies. Tradition, the festival we come back to. Gift giving. More than the sum of the parts.
I don’t find that feeling in those things. Not anymore, or at least not right now. Not more than a very little bit. Maybe it is something that gets lost over time.
So instead of missing it, or longing for it, I’m letting it go. There’s a good time to be had right here, without pining for something I don’t have, can’t hold.
It doesn’t even have to be a good time, all the time. It just is.
Sometimes it’s just – moments like this one.
Evie puts together a fucking kick ass outfit with hoop earrings and a French tuck. I sloppily apply eye liner because I keep meaning to learn how to do that thing. I find out that I got a 95 on my third of three logic exams, which puts me at a 96.7 for the class. I will take it. The kid I was virtual-tutoring got a 90 and passed with an 85. I feel proud. The cats fight in the hall upstairs, and the dog curls up at our feet under the table.
It’s December 18th, 2020, and things are going to be alright. And I love you so much. And I don’t usually say always, but I that’s what I generally mean in the words I don’t say.
We’ve got power in the workshop. Yes it’s run all the way from the house. No you can’t ask how many extension chords, I don’t want to talk about that number.
We can theoretically plug in a crock pot or a blender or some shit at this point. A friend tells me that extension chords might not be able to handle too many things asking for energy at once. (This is very fucking relatable.) Not sure if we can get a space heater to work, up here, with things set up the way that they are right now. If I had a space heater, I would absolutely try it. For kicks.
It isn’t actually too cold up there, though. It’s out of the wind. Bundle up with a couple of layers and some rain boots and folks should be okay.
At least one hammock chair tomorrow.
Iiii’m feeling fucking androgynous today.
This is the compromise, the place where I can present or think of myself as gendered without having to try so hard that it feels like a mask.
Funny story – a friend who lives in Virginia reportedly said, out loud, in middle school, that they didn’t think trans people really existed because if trans people did exist then they would probably be one.
And like. Lo and behold…
They like to light things on fire and walk in the woods at night listening to frogs.
Alternatively, going out for an emergency Mochi run at Trader Joe’s and then driving home slowly with the windows down blasing Kanye is totally fine.
Their favorite shirt from Target has rainbow pinstripes and says “be the gay dad you want to be in the world.”
Thriving.
God, I wish I was that cool. We send each other memes.
Anyway. As soon as I get through this third out of three logic exams tomorrow, I can spend more time away from the books. The weather is supposed to get a bit warmer, too.
The plan is to go out there with a crock pot and the backpack full of lye and oil and wax that I’ve been compulsively hording all semester, and make beautiful interesting smelly chemical things happen in a space where it doesn’t matter if I create too much of a mess.
And I can do this
because I have my own space to work
and because we’ve got power.
Anyway I should be studying. I hope it’s an excellent evening and I love you.
Here i am, huddled in the leeward side of a Dunkin Donuts in the snow. My glasses are fogging up from the cold and the surgical mask, and there is a random a bottle of peach juice crandled carefully in one arm. If I recall correctly I was feeling grateful because I hadn’t gotten hit by a car a few minutes before. It wasn’t close, I just felt the relief.
Wanted to write this moment down.
I was only standing there in the first place because my mother was spending an eternity in a farming supply store and I had things that needed doing. I’d walked the length of road between the outskirts of the village and the grocery store, made a beeline across the parking lot, and ducked inside.
The signage over the automatic doors read “cover your face, keep everyone safe.”
About five minutes later I was out of the store with a bottle of peach juice in one pocket of this green vest I found in the back of the closet. It’s funny, I spend so much time in there, I should’ve noticed it sooner.
My mother was still in the other store, and the snow was really starting to fall. So I kept walking, down the familiar length of sidewalk towards the center of the village. To the right was a polished instantiation of an American coffee shop chain. I stood there for a second, trying to decide if it was worth it to wait inside because of the possibility of coronavirus or if I should stay outside in the cold. In that pandemic moment, my face was turning a painful shade of pink.
I risked the virus and ordered an egg & vegetable/sausage/cheddar cheese sandwich on a toasted everything bagle for $4.50. The best choice.
Now there is a sandwich in a paper bag in one pocket, a glass jug of peach juice in the other. Plus wallet and phone and miscellaneous.
Ten minutes later, I had managed to walk most of the way back to the edge of the village. Past the Goodwill and the Brewery that closed down. Past the harware store and the pizza shop and the liquor store and the chiropractor’s office. Past the graveyard with the pine trees where Jenna’s older sister isn’t, really.
I feel like I own this road, for a second. It doesn’t belong to me, but jt’s mine.
By the time my mother was done in the store, I was about level with the graveyard. Mom put the cat litter and the dog food and the suspiciously high number of tarps in the back of the Jeep. I tumbled into the driver’s seat and nibbled on the edge of a sandwich, for a minute, and let beads of condensation form on the lenses of my glasses.
We drove home.
Whe we got here, I basically just submitted my Eastern Philosophy final and collapsed. It has been a very long string of pandemic moments, and I am so tired.
I’m putting together a work space, in the attic of the barn, in the back yard.
it’s cold up there, but it isn’t anywhere near as bad as being outside in the snow. plus once I’ve figured out a space heater it’ll be fucking toasty.
Electricity is going to involve far too many extension chords, but hey. This is fine.
The pinnacle accomplishment for this space would be hanging the hammock chairs from the rafters. Or just a regular hammock.
Possibly a plastic tote with Oreos and other nonsense? At the very least a plethora of snacks.
On top of all of these things, my family talked about it and everybody thinks that it might be okay to hang out with friends up there, in a carefully socially distanced manner. I would be so down for that.
But I also like the idea of bundling up and going up there alone. I’m way too excited to hang out up there over the break and make soap or some shit and blast Hozier and LP over my terrible phone speakers and dance around with a broomstick like an actual ten year old child.
Hey so this dandelion wine is turning out nicely. This is the second bottle of five – opened the first one when the news networks called it, and it wasn’t quite ready then. This batch is better when served room temperature, which is apparently odd for a white wine. I’m picking up on some floral notes, with a surprisingly high alcohol content for the amount of sweetness present. Tastes like what freshly cut lawn in the summer smells like, almost, if you could bottle that smell.
I’ve been walking down this road for roughly 21 years, if you count all the times in the strollers, and this is the first time I’ve taken a picture that actually captured what it feels like to be there at night in the winter. This picture reminds me of that long road at Auschwitz. That thought gives me chills. Maybe it’s the perspective.
Twenty two years of my dad and my mom and me and sometimes even my sisters have walked this road. That’s a lot of leftover footprints. That’s a lot of our soul stuff, in that dust.
Just leaving some photos here for the evening and can’t really sit here and write for too long. I just wanted to post these because I really like them.
Finally got to sleep at two in the morning, aaand now we are awake again. At 4:30 AM, practicing logic and thinking up soap recipes at the kitchen table. Trying really, really hard to avoid the dark and apparently bottomless anxiety whirlpools which are right fucking there at the edge of my brain, persistently requesting an audience.
I am running out of ingredient combinations and the free variables are getting mixed up. Soon I might have to get super worked up about British colonialism and then go write a paper about it.
I feel far too awake. More awake than I’ve felt in a long time. Also incredibly tired.
I also successfully crocheted a hat. First ever time.
So close to the end of a semester. I’m finding it genuinely strange that I don’t feel compeltely exhausted. I have to finish up an essay about The Tempest, take a test on Mosim and Confucianism and Taoism, and study for an exam about symbolic logic.
The Tempest is surprisingly not terrible. For one of my last essays this semester, I get to write about whether or not Shakespeare actually intended to write commentary on the impacts of colonialism on indigenous people when he wrote this play. I think that it’s easy to read things that way, with the benefit of hindsight. But maybe the benefit of hindsight was something that Shakespeare didn’t have? And we can’t really know, for sure.
I think that a lot of the meanings of things are actually up to the readers of things. The writers are mostly just trying to find the right words.
🍃
I really like Taoism.
My professor pointed out that there are actually a lot of things that Taoism doesn’t have the answers for. Taoism knows this, and to this, Taoism just kind of says “fuck it, there are some things in life that we can’t have the answers for all of the time.”
(Tutoring 101, bitches.)
Also, I adore the implication that all of these other philosophies are trying way fucking too hard. As a philosophy student, I think this is an excellent point. Plato really should’ve tried this whole go with the flow, don’t try to force things approch to life. It might have helped him out with that neurotic perfectionism 🙃🤭
Honestly, I just feel like philosophers are meant to take issue with everything, all the time. Consequently, they’re really bad at practicing Taoism.
🍂
Studying logic makes me miss mathematics.
It’s an upside down and backwards feeling, but I like using my brain this way. Might treat myself to applied statistics in the spring, because then Geneseo will let me have a math minor and that is something I want in this life. May live to regret those words.
In my first life, I was a farmer. My earliest memory was of my mother Her voice, her cool hands, her laugh When I was a boy, I would play in the dirt by the river Under the sky.
‘till I was a man, my mother would teach me My purpose, my path, my duty My lot in this life. Dharma. Beside her I would work with the earth, by the river Under the sky.
When I was a young man As my mother lay dying She taught me about souls About rebirth, and uncountable lives And the ultimate promise of bliss.
And I asked her, “Will you remember your last life, mama? When you wake up Will you remember me…”
In my next life, I was a merchant’s daughter. My earliest memory was about my nurse, because My family was very rich, and always very busy Attending to duty Attending to matters of soul.
When I was a young girl, My nurse taught me the story of many lives About how, if I was very bad Then in my next life I would surely be reborn As one of those people, The least of these, the suffering, The dirty, the unloved.
When I was a young person I learned that the continued suffering of these people For entire lifetimes Was justified, because of the things Their souls had done, in a previous life When I was a young person I learned that some people Deserved to be treated better than others Because of things they couldn’t remember Things that had been done By a different body, a different personality A different self.
And so, when I was a woman I did my duty. I became a wife And when I carried children into the world Into a family of a rank superior to that of the commoners and servants I knew that the souls of my children, in previous lives Must somehow have earned this place in the world
And when I grew old and passed away I came back to life in a body In a family In a caste In a place in the universe That I had earned. The universe keeps score. Karma.
And so, I lived, and died, and was reborn so many times Lives like single beads, added to necklace, one by one And in each life, I had a self A shape. A body Personhood Character Me.
There were boundaries, shaped differently each time Between what was myself and what was other But that didn’t stop me from reaching out Connecting to the things outside, because I had mothers and fathers Friends that I loved and lost Gods that I worshiped Lovers to hold
And in each finite, temporary life I worried over things that didn’t matter And my heart ached for the things That I wanted but could never have Hopes that I reached out for all my life And never touched And it hurt. So much. But sometimes it was beautiful
And I wondered If I was given the choice To have unending, perfect happiness and bliss At the cost of losing This illusion of having An individual self, At the very end of everything… I wondered if I would make that choice. I wondered if it would be worth it If that happiness Would be an empty kind.
Still, I was told Over and over again That none of these things in my lives should matter That their temporary nature Only ever causes pain And in the end, it’s better to let things go Better not to get attached, not to feel desire at all
Because the soul that is free from desire and loathing The soul that is free from earthly attachments Can ascend the cycle of reincarnation Can escape from suffering and pain And become one with God, with Brahmin With the spirit of the universe
It all starts to blur together, Once it’s been a little while.
But in one life, I was a warrior And in my clearest memory, I was standing on a battlefield Where kin were fighting against kin In ugly conflict And I – I was unable To fulfil my duty, live up to my purpose. My concern over causing bloodshed My connection to my family Was too strong.
I was wounded in the battle Crumpled, dying By the river, in the dirt Beneath the sky.
In those last moments Before that old familiar feeling My chariot driver caught my eye And gave me a long, long look In that moment, I felt like I understood But the next time I opened my eyes All of my understanding was gone.
Because in my next life, When I opened my eyes I couldn’t see When I screamed and screamed I couldn’t hear my own screaming I was filled with pain From the tips of my toes To the edges of everything And I never knew who I was because I didn’t live For more than a couple of hours And I couldn’t remember why.
And in my next life, I was starving Bent double with hunger most of the time I had to steal in order to live And nobody told me the story of many lives I never knew
In the life after that, I was a woman A servant, in a wealthy house And the men in the house Would take me outside And in the dirt, beside the river I did my duty And never said a word Until one day I snapped And defended myself And caused them harm
And in the life after that, I was punished. Because of the life I was born into, I killed many men to survive.
And the life after that, And the life after that, And the life after that And the universe keeps score And when does it stop…
Eventually, by chance, many lives down the road This soul stopped falling Something or somebody caught me I started to earn my way back Towards a chance at something better
In the space of uncountable lifetimes, Maybe that’s what justice is Maybe that’s the balance Over time.
I don’t know.
I know that in this life, I like to play with words I am not aware of my previous selves But they were the path that brought me here To this personalily, with this shape This consciousness, equipped to feel All the pleasure and pain This illusion of a self That will only exist in the universe For this one single time.
There’s something sacred about the existence of me. Of each of us, together, on this path.
Because of that sacredness I have to wonder If this incarnation deserves To be saddled with the debts That the soul has accumulated Along the way As other people In other lives
Can we really, truly decide That a person’s birth status Into one class of society Where they will be treated Better or worse than somebody else Is permeant, irredeemable In the space of an entire life
How do we know That this life, in this moment (in the dirt, beside the river, under the sky…) Isn’t all we have?
These ideas were borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita, and from a book called The Purpose of Life by Professor Carlo Filice.
Currently procrastinating a free form writing assignment for Eastern philosophy, which is due tomorrow. I have very few parameters – compare the perspectives from one of the modern philosophers we read for this class (my professor’s book, essentially) with another viewpoint from an ancient text (the Gita, the koran, the Analects.) I could write a dialogue or a poem or a short story or a play, if I want to, so long as I’m demonstrating that I know my stuff.
Free-form poetry is probably my medium of choice. The words just – tumble. Because they are allowed.
Anyway. Things I did instead of working on this project, today –
Walked three miles
Had a neat conversation about mental health things
Online thrift shopped for ingredients for homemade things to give people over the holidays. I think I almost have enough time to pull this off.
Asked the folks in the group chat about their favorite smells. Answers included vanilla, gasoline, camp fire smoke, all types of vinegar, race car exaust, grapefruit, jasmine, and bleach. I love all of them.
Listened to my 2020 spotify playlist on fucking repeat because I am a child
Washed my hair and brushed my teeth and changed my shirt and you know what those things should be non-events but I haven’t left the house in a while so I – yeah. Actually felt kind of amazing.
Also I keep forgetting that I’m blond, so
Listened to one of Amanda Palmer’s podcast episodes, in which she interviews memiorist/musician Storm Large. Storm Large is responsible for the song “8 miles wide,” which has been stuck in my head for three days and I think everyone should live through that at some point.
Rescued my sister from her friend’s transphobic republican dad who was moody because his bl*e lives matter flag mysteriously went missing
Ate satisfying quantities of popcorn and sipped cold tea which I brewed for myself and then promptly forgot about for like two hours
Bickered with my mom because she remembers watching me do things that I have no recollection of doing like five minutes later and it is disconcerting to the nth degree
Watched an old movie about Pirates ☠
I don’t know. I felt like few things happened today, but now that I write things down… that’s kind of a lot, and no wonder I feel tired. Should rest; I have some serious free form poetry bullshitting to do until 11:59 tomorrow.
Is it Thursday, already? I hope it was strange and full and satisfying, and I hope you got to the end of this day and felt like it was time for some rest 🖤
My little sister bleached my hair today! On a wooden stool, in the upstairs bathroom with the window open to let the cold in and the fumes out. Still can’t quite get warm.
She’d only ever seen this done in YouTube videos, so of course she did an excellent job. Didn’t burn my scalp. I can still use my eyes. We’re fine.
She was actually surprised that I’d trusted her to try. I just think that when the worst case scenario is ending up with Airbender vibes for a while… it’s really just okay to try things that are new.
So, yeah. I am temporarily blond. I don’t not like it. We’re halfway to color, & I’m kind of enjoying this.
I hope it’s a lovely Wednesday night. 🌙
PS – my sister has her driver’s test tomorrow afternoon and is stressing the fuck out about it. I took her driving earlier. Her parallel parking skills are better than mine but that is not a high bar.
I hope she does well. I hope she has that freedom, soon; she doesn’t like being stuck at home. I feel like – if she does her best – she’s going to do okay.
CW – medication shenanigans, pissedoffedness at the American Healthcare system, feelings.
Today we are embarking on the adventure of trying the meds. My therapist agrees that this is a path that makes sense.
A psychiatrist’s office who happens to take my insurance happened to be taking new patients during a time when I happened to have insurance during a time when I happened to be in a solid enough mental space to make a phone call and schedule and appointment. This is like one of those planetary alignments that only happens once every several thousand years.
Feeling a little scared. The last time I tried to do this, I got a prescription from the kind of GP who immediately goes into crisis mode whenever the words “suicidal ideation” enter the room.
It’s like the conversation ends at the precise moment when the emergency training takes over. The talk is no longer about trying to find a way to make my life more livable, the talk is now about keeping me alive. There’s a difference there.
And I came here today because I needed your help with the first thing, not the second thing. I came here because I can’t do this thing by myself, I have tried, I still really haven’t let go of needing to do this alone because my ego takes up so much space but I’m here, and I really need to focus to stay on the thing that I came here for. I don’t want to talk about whether or not I have a plan, or if I have people in my life who’d be sad if I wasn’t here anymore. Not with you. Not with a stranger with a clipboard in this sterile, impersonal room with florescent lights.Please.
Not in this moment when it’s impossibly hard to remember what I came here to ask for and why in the first place because my thoughts are scattered from the drive and the traffic and the co-pays and the children in the waiting room. Not in this moment when I’m not sure if I’ll be treated for the right thing becsuse the words that convey what I’m trying to tell you won’t necessarily come out of my mouth when they’re called.
Last time I tried taking meds, and didn’t feel comfortable being open with the doctor doing the prescribing, I was… I ended up being too tired to move for several months and I never realized why. Ultimately, I ended up taking myself off 30mg’s of antidepressants, not quite cold turkey but almost, without telling anyone, just when they’d actually started working, because…
sometimes, I am miraculously dumb.
We’re trying this again, now, because I’m in a place where things are livable but I don’t know when the other shoe is going to drop. I have to try to put a safety net in place while the sun’s still out, before it’s too dark to see. But I don’t know if this net is actually going to catch me.
And I – you know. My mother told me once that she worries that if I take meds that mess with how my brain works, I will literally become a different person without realizing this from the inside. Because she doesn’t trust western medicine, she finds evidence in fringe places on the internet to support that the possibility that the side effects isn’t worth the risk of trying to find something that helps. When I tell my family that I’m going to try taking meds again, her jaw clenches and the lines around her eyes get harsher.
If only I would take fish oil, and go for more walks in the sun…
It’s hard for me. I can’t tell if this feeling about not wanting to have to take pills is my pride or my intuition or my mother’s bias.
Anyway.
I went and met with psychiatric nurse practitioner – over the phone, because COVID, but her voice seemed alright. It went okay. Those meetings are strange, because of how personal they become, so quickly.
Apparently I have to try one kind of medicine first, even though it might not be perfect for me, because insurance companies will only pay for the better stuff if I can’t tolerate the older stuff which happens to be cheaper. On the plus side, it sounds like this person will listen to me if I tell her I’m not tolerating it well.
I really just kind of hate the entire American health care system.
Also, note to self – don’t fall down the internet rabbithole of reading reviews about people who experienced horrible terrible side effects from the same exact dose of a new medication that I’ve been prescribed. Don’t do that, ever again. That is the stuff of nightmares.
Breathe.
I’m glad I got around to doing this.
There were a lot of things on my list, in the world of health, at the beginning of 2020. Find a therapist, replace the glasses I lost in Germany, take care of the wisdom teeth, start the process of finding meds that actually feel okay. I’ve done those things, even in the midst of the chaos that this year has been. And it feels good, even though I am exhausted, even though there will always be other things. I feel oddly lucky.
For now, I am just – sitting on the couch. It’s grey out. There are cats. I don’t have that pervasive feeling that I’m not really, actually loved, because I’m too busy thinking about how to build a sentence out of German words. My legs hurt, but I’d like to walk soon anyway.
This afternoon I got out of the house, went for a walk, and listened to a LPOTL compilation episode called “Best of Cannibalism.” You know, like just in time for Thanksgiving. It was fucking cold outside. Easier to breathe.
I ordered a copy of the Queen’s Gambit novel and knew that I wasn’t going to get around to reading it for a while, so I gave it to my dad and he and my mom were taking turns reading it to each other out loud.
Hairdye is in transit, somewhere in the Midwest.
Second order predicate logic is kind of a trip.
We are putting off German until the very last minute, however
Anyway.
Ancient Philosophy essay is – ehhh. I am slightly frightened to announce that I have not made any progress on this word count. Instead, I went back and revisited some of the things I didn’t fully understand about the prompt, and discovered that there was actually a lot more information to sift through and process. To be fair, these 2000+ yo texts make for some really dense reading material. but I think there were some key points that I hadn’t quite built brain pathways around, yet. And internalizing them really did help.
I think maybe as I’ve been writing this – I’ve been trying to put the puzzle pieces together without knowing how all of the edges were shaped. But as I, like – break these wide swaths of information down into smaller pieces, and sit with them, and look at them from different angles, and parse out pieces of meaning – it gets easier to understand how everything fits.
Inconsistent metaphoring my way through life this evening, apparently. So sorry.
It’s just that when everything fits together by itself, I’m not sitting here spending time trying to force it. Trying to bullshit your way through explaining how something makes logical sense when it doesn’t, not yet, not without a couple of key pieces of information, is genuinely stressful. It’s also a lot of work.
There are only so many ways to rearrange the pictures on the walls. Chew your food. I don’t know. 83’s are nothing to be ashamed of.
Tomorrow I’m going to sit down and write in the way that I used to write in those in-person timed exams, where they took away your phone and locked you in a room for three hours with six pieces of loose leaf paper and a blue or black ink pen. I’m going to write without worrying about spelling the the words incorrectly. I’m going to write without copy/pasting large chunks of paragraph from one end of a paper to another and backspacing up and down a line until I’ve got it sounding right.
And I’m going to do a brave thing and leave my notes in another room. Because I studied those all day today, and I have a much better idea of what I’m talking about, now.
We’re just going to put down some words.
I hope it’s a really good night.
PS
this cat – unprompted- decided to climb up on my shoulders earlier today. She then proceeded to not move when I stood up and walked into the kitchen to refill the coffee mug. This made my entire week. She used to sit on my shoulders all the time, but she was smaller then. I’m telling you this now so that you’ll know that it really happened.
The intention for this assignment is to demonstrate that I understand a couple of different ideas which I’m not sure if I actually do understand. I get flashes of comprehension, sometimes. Sometimes I can even put them into words.
What if I didn’t understand, correctly? What if I don’t understand this well enough?
And, always, the familiar internal rabbithole that my brain loves to tumble down – why is understanding so fucking difficult? What if there’s something wrong with me?
I’m trying to practice not engaging with those. I don’t know if they’re real or not, but they don’t help. At best, spending energy fighting them is almost as draining as spending energy feeling them. Better to leave them alone.
Once I’ve sort of gotten the ideas written out, there is the difficulty of making sure that all the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense. And sometimes the pieces just – don’t want to go together. Either because of choices I’ve already made, or things I don’t quite understand, or because two of the pieces conflict and I can’t let their edges touch. It’s like working on a jigsaw puzzle, but I made the pieces, I can change their shapes.
Five pages.
Fuck.
I have a folding table set up next to a couch in the living room windows. I have coffee and a cup of water and my tablet. I have all my notes printed off. I’m going to switch gears and try to work through this thing for a bit.
Ordered hair dying things online, directly from <<<not Amazon>>> so that I wouldn’t have to financially support a trillionaire or go the store. I made a life decision and picked out a color. Also ordered a bottle for the younger sister of a friend, so that we could both afford free shipping.
Played through to the end of TWEWY, which I’d meant to do for ages. Just found out that we’re getting a sequel. The storytelling in this game is – rather traumatic, and also beautifully done. Art is fucking neat. I quite liked it.
Watched ASMR videos of people carving up blocks of soap with razer blades. Proceeded to go looking for my own knife and a bar of soap. This is ridiculously satisfying and I genuinely don’t know why.
Consumed two cookies, macaroni and cheese, and sweet potato fries.
Scrolled through m e m e s
Did the bare minimum approch to laundry where not much folding or putting away actually happens
I also did some push-ups, which is… if I’ve gotten to the point where I’m preferentially doing calisthenics instead of homework, things are getting pretty bad.
I hope it isn’t a horrible – idk what fucking day this is, I’m sorry. Lots of love.
Fucking random life update – my hair is hopefully going to change color, sometime this month!
You can tell that I’m serious about this because today I asked for thoughts and opinions in the New Year’s Eve group chat, and then totally ignored all of the supportive input and excellent suggestions from everyone and made up my own mind about things.
Not sure what color we’re going with, yet, but ideas are floating around. Something that pops. I’m wholeheartedly drawing inspiration from an anime I watched like a year ago with a friend.
Also, there’s this girl in my German class whose hair has changed color about three times this semester and one of the styles she went with was really beautiful and I miiiight steal it, or at least come up with a similar idea and run with it.
<<<watch as we end up in the same class next semester and I just wear hats the entire time because I don’t want her to think I copied her without asking/stole her intellectual property/attempted identity fraud>>>
I’m not sure what I’m doing… I haven’t really done this on my own before. The last time, like a hundred years ago, my older sister helped me, and she knew what she was doing.
Woke up this morning absolutely paralyzed with anxiety because I only have ten days to write a five page paper comparing Aristotle’s perspective on the soul in the second book of De Anima with Plato’s account of Socrates’ perspective on the soul in the Phaedo and that is honestly not a thing that I ever thought I would give this many shits about.
I really do not like this feeling.
The sensation of absolute dread in my stomach, the experience of physically not being able to move because of the possibility that I will create a trashy paper (translation – not get an A) and then my entire GPA will shrivel up and die and I will have to run away to the deep woods with a bag of rice and stay there forever because of how utterly unhirable and worthless I am to the entirety of <<< capitalism >>>
and this paralyzed feeling makes it impossible to even remember the prompt for this paper particularly clearly, let alone think about how I’m going to answer the question, let alone focus on reading and re-reading roughly 100 pages of content necessarily to feel like I understand this material for certain, to feel sure I haven’t misunderstood
let alone begin to use my brain to think, to criticize, to find things that don’t make sense, to analyze and synthesize and connect and compare and brain thoughts and words together into something that makes coherent sense
and the knowledge that I’m not making progress on my assignments makes it worse.
I am capable of staying here
[Stuck, worrying, unable to move or do anything other than this thing that I think that I ought to be doing, unable to walk or sing or be with friends or partners, unable to read or watch TV, or do anything other than scroll through a bottomless pit of memes (tiny sparks of dopamine)]
all day. And then the next day, and the next. Until the very last panicked hours, at which point I’m shoved out into the clearing by the sheer pressure of passing time.
And this really sucks. There are absolutely moments when I’m not sure if I want to do this anymore.
The worst part is that I usually do alright. Objectively. On the surface of things, those grades look okay. Not 100’s on everything but I will fucking take it.
And that makes all of the feelings I feel seem – unsound. Ridiculous. Laughable, almost.
And I do feel satisfied and happy in the moments when I realize that I create something that somebody else thought was well made.
But the cost of that satisfied feeling? It’s so much. Almost too much.
I am not sure what to do, but I hope you’re doing okay this evening. 🖤
Okay so this fucking duolingo bird has been sending me passive aggressive messages for a long ass time. I’m well aware that I’m making Duo sad, at this point. No, I can’t take ten minutes to practice, actually. Sorry.
I have fucking pavloved myself into feeling profound guilt whenever I see that particular shade of green and I don’t like it. 😅😂
I feel like I got frustrated with the German sequence when we started talking about the dative case. At that point, we were up to roughly twelve entirely context dependant variations on the word “the.” There are more of them.
Even as a native English speaker with no concept of any of the grammer things, I feel like I could totally have picked up on the idea of indirect objects, if you’d given me a lot of time in a room alone.
What really got me was the completely arbitrary gendering of nouns. Why the fuck are statues feminine while ducks are masculine while beer is neuter while there is no singular word for grandparent? I can’t.
German 101 is about to be over and done with. There’s an exam on Thursday.
We’ve been spending time with modal verbs. There are also these other verbs with separating prefixes – these fuckers sometimes just split in half and conjugate as they migrate to opposite ends of the sentence, for some reason. Other times, they don’t.
Also, there are pronouns and prepositions for the accusative and dative cases. I don’t mind those, even though I’m still thinking about them as neatly and conveniently lined up in a chart. I wish I could just – call them to mind whenever I needed them, pluck them of the air, instead of thinking of columns and rows.
It would also be nice if I didn’t have to jump back and forth between German words and English words in order to understand their meaning. Why can’t the German words contain meaning in their own right, without having to refer back to English? I can’t decide if this has more to do with where I am in the process of learning, or if I’m doing this wrong.
Anyway. It’s important that I keep working through this, until I can hold my own in a conversation, because Kathrin is going to have a baby and I need to be able to communicate with this tiny human in words. Eventually.
When this child is three and I’m approximately twenty four, I’d like for our skill in the language to be roughly comparable, for entirely ego related reasons.
The first time these two fly across the pond to visit the states, I want to be able to talk about how the journey was in a language that’s familiar. Just because. If Kathrin needed me to fly across the pond and live in Münster for a time, if she needed that help, then I’d do it.
But it would be nice if I could understand the conversations going on around me.
I have no real obligation to Kathrin’s baby whatsoever, objectively, perhaps. But if this is the motivation that I need in order to pass this final with flying colors – then there we are.
Went for a drive today. Listened to world café on WXXI. They were interviewing one of the songwriters who worked on the musical Jagged Little Pill. I thought it was a neat interview. Later, they played Jewel’s who will save your soul and Tracy Chapmin’s new beginning. It isn’t often that there are four good songs on the radio, consecutively, without changing the station. Singing along without having to worry about who could hear me was a really nice time.
Once, not too long ago, I would drive fast with the windows down and blast pop music and sip black coffee out of an open mug. Even when the air was freezing cold, like it was today. Mostly just to keep from feeling anything.
I aaam not feeling looped in with that part of myself at the moment.
It was really fucking cold out, like I said. It takes forever for the heat to start working in the Jeep. My hands just about froze to the steering wheel and typing is still difficult. Also, the tank was almost empty and I was not entirely sure that my debit card had enough funds to get me out of that situation. I made it there and back fine.
On the radio on the way home, they were interviewing an expert on the ethics of vaccine distribution. Health care workers and adults with preexisting health conditions are two groups given some of the highest priority, I think. My dad is in both of those groups.
Since I’m relatively young, not working in an essential service, and I don’t have a preexisting health condition, I’ll probably be one of the last to receive a vaccine. I’m not sure what the approach is for students, yet. The risk of transmission to family members feels like the biggest concern. Right now, I’m trying to set up my schedule for next semester so that I don’t have to go on campus, because – I don’t think the SUNY system is going to fully transition everything online. We’ll see what happens.
A couple of weeks ago, Jenna’s mother and step dad caught and recovered from the virus, but her step dad was hospitalized for dehydration. Currently, a friend from high school is in quarantine since her roommate tested positive. Way back in February, an acquaintance of my dad’s was stuck on a cruise ship off the coast of Japan for like two weeks when the virus broke out onboard.
A few people at SUNY Geneseo have tested positive and are isolating in one of the disused dorm buildings. I think maybe there are like forty cases in the county where I live overall.
In this moment, I’m finding that I’m a bit frightened. I don’t know if fear does much of anything to help.
This is one of the first times that I’ve felt happy that there isn’t really family to be with on Thanksgiving. We’ll watch reruns of the parade at home, cook some food.
CW – police brutality, violence against trans folk.
On Nov 3rd in Canandaigua, a Black trans woman named Chanel Hines was shot three times in the chest by her parole officer. She did not recieve medical atrention for an hour and a half after she was shot.
As of Nov 10th, she was in stable but worsening condition in the hospital, about to have her third emergency surgery. She hasn’t had much contact with her family during this time. Like a five minute cell phone call with her mom.
Friends are raising money for legal support. More detailed and eloquent information about this is in the gofundme link:
Nobody I’ve talked to who lives locally has heard anything about this. I’m having a weird emotional response to the implications of that lack of media coverage that is somewhere between unsurprised and horrified and really fucking sad.
There’s no such thing as “too close to home” anymore. Everywhere in the universe where this shit happens is too close to home. But this time it feels so much more personal.
A friend who lives in Canandaigua said something to the effect of “to everyone who said that something like this couldn’t happen here, put your money where your privileged mouth is and donate.”
What he said.
Aaand if you can’t donate right in this moment, which is totally a valid space to be, please consider sharing on social media or in your circles. It does help.
Like forever ago, I had this massive crush on a childhood friend. I think it must have been one of the first times I ever had a crush on a real actual three dimensional human being, and the entire experience was such a trip. I just thought he was extraordinarily pretty and ridiculously cool, and we honestly had some pretty excellent adventures. We were like ten or eleven at the time.
He was completely clueless about this mess of feelings that I had in his general direction. Which was impressive. I have always thought of myself as really good at hiding how I feel about things, but according to literally everyone else that I know, that is decidedly not true. Which is kind of funny actually.
But yeah, he was totally clueless. He had no idea. He was never going to have any idea. If he’d ever found out, he probably would have thought the whole situation was a bit odd, laughed for a bit, and gone on with his life without giving it a second thought.
That was fine. I would probably have died if I’d thought that he suspected.
Shit was soo much easier back then, man.
I haven’t spoken to this punk in roughly a decade, at this point. Things that feel like they’re going to last forever in life sometimes come unraveled. And even if it hurts for a hot second, maybe in the long run that’s okay.
But we used to hang out on this beautiful wooded property in Western New York. There were trails through the woods. His parents threw parties every summer that lasted for like days at a time. There was a pond with a rusty paddleboat and salamanders and a rope swing. There were pancakes. There were dogs. We played ghost in thr graveyard and capture the flag in the dark. After the adults had started drunk-singing karaoke, we would go inside and play truth or dare. This whole big rambling Italian family would sit around the campfire and talk, and I think we would lay on our backs and look up at the stars.
It was such a good time.
One of the younger Aunts from this big sprawling clan had this partner that she was totally head over heels in love with. His name was Love, which is actually kind of beautiful name, and he was from Africa. These two adored one another completely. He loved his partner’s daughter, and she actually just had his child.
Sad thing happened.
Love just passed away of liver cancer. He was way to young. His partner and his daughter and step daughter have soo much love and support in their lives from so many directions. From his family, from her family, from all of the friends who paddled around the pond and sat around the campfire and told stories. I have a really strong feeling that they’re all going to get one another though it.
But this family of a friend that I haven’t spoken to in roughly ten years is really fucking going through it right now.
Because sometimes the things that feel like they’re going to last forever in this life come unraveled, when you least expect it. And it hurts like hell.
Here’s a link to a gofundme, for her and her family. For their daughter, who is going to grow up not remembering the face of her dad.
They all might really appreciate a free coffee in this moment, I think. I don’t think it needs to be impossibly much in order to count for something.
I, um – Hooh, boy. I just completely lost my shit with a group of college students who were sitting in a public building on campus, not wearing masks. I think maybe they were working on math homework together or something.
This staff member – I didn’t see her, but I heard her voice, she sounded a bit older, maybe just a tad heavy, literally none of this is relevant – told them off. Not unkindly. Not even in a reprimanding tone of voice. Just a casual remark in passing.
And when she was just about probably out of earshot, one of these punks called her a bitch. And then they laughed about it.
And I totally fucking flipped my shit.
It had been a long day.
If you’re reading this you probably know that I don’t talk to people. Not people I don’t know. Not unless I’m getting paid to initiate conversations.
…but I sure as hell initiated that one.
Still shaking, a bit. More than a bit.
I know for certain that they called me a bitch, too, when I walked away. Or something along those lines. Because I heard one of them tell another to shut the hell up. But I really couldn’t give a flying fuck what they think of me.
I’m not proud of myself. But it isn’t because I’m too much like my mom. It isn’t because I’m compulsive about following rules without thinking critically about them. That isn’t the thing.
I’m a goddamn fucking recovering kleptomaniac. I have been burning forbidden candles in my room in secret for longer than my mother would like to know about. I once accidently smuggled half a joint off Marijuana across an international border. I’m exaustingly critical of the binary political system in America and I think we could actually use a little more socialism than we currently have, here. I don’t really believe in God and I think a lot of Christianity is bullshit but I go to church anyway because I like some of the things that the people there have to say. Also, I’m so far back in the closet that it’s literally fucking snowing, but I’m not exactly cishet.
Being an obsessive rule-follower is not my problem. It really just is not.
But I do wish I had communicated more clearly, in that moment. I wish I had flipped my shit more articulately. I wish my words had packed more punch. Because I don’t think what I said made any difference at all. I don’t think they’ll think twice. I don’t think they’re going to change. I have zero control over the actions of other people and i know this, so I’m not sure if it would have made any difference, anyway. I don’t know if it matters.
But fuck do I wish those words had come out making sense.
Please, for the love of everything that matters. Put on a goddamn mask. It is a small peice of fabric over half of your face. It is, at worst, a minor discomfort or inconvenience.
No, I don’t care if you feel fine. It doesn’t mean you’re not asymptomatic.
No, I don’t care that you tested negative. A negative test result is a reflection of the amount of virus in your system at a very specific moment in time. Also, a negative test result isn’t always going to be accurate. The margin of error for these things is really high. It doesn’t mean you don’t have the plague.
No, I don’t care that you all live together. Look around. You’re in a room with other people. This thing is airborne. You are inside a building with shit for ventilation where air circulates constantly. You don’t know anything about the health conditions of the people in the room around you. You don’t know anything about the health conditions of the people in their lives. It is baseline consideration for the safety of the people around you to exercise this level of caution.
If you want to sit together with your masks off, go back to your dorm. Go outside. Don’t put the people around you at risk.
Case numbers are rising. Hundreds of thousands of people have died and, and countless more have lost the people they love most in the world. And they didn’t get to fucking say goodbye.
Don’t take that risk with my father’s life, you assholes. A healthcare worker on a college campus who’s had thirteen fucking rounds of pneumonia has a lot of fucking cards stacked against him. I’m doing everything I can, I think, I hope, but I don’t know if I’m going to make it through this thing without losing somebody, too. And I’m fucking scared.
Also, don’t call somebody a bitch for telling you to give a shit about the people around you.
Gave myself permission to feel deliriously happy and relieved about the election results, for a couple of days. Now I think I need to reign it in a little and focus.
Because I can’t just go to sleep now because Biden acknowledged the value of Black women and the existence of trans folk in his victory address. You don’t stop taking your medicine just as it starts to work, and there is still so much work to be done.
Soo, yeah… I am sitting here thinking about what “this fight isn’t over” actually means, because I honestly feel like that’s kind of fuzzy at the moment. For one thing, I did not allow myself to hope that Trump would lose, and now that he has, I am not sure what to do with myself. So much of leftist energy when I first entered those spaces was focused on *owning 45* and without that focal point, I am worried about what’s going to happen to us. To this momentum. It is so important to remember that things we’re fighting for are just as important as the things we are fighting against.
Considering what it is that I’m going to do, from here. Where to direct my energy, now that this has happened. I know I’m probably reinventing the wheel a little bit, but my brain just – handed me all of this, today. Like, “here you go.” And I thought it might help to get this out there before trying to focus on other things this morning.
Here are the thoughts that are percolating…
What are the long term implications of a Biden presidency with a republican majority in the Senate and a 6-3 majority in the SCOTUS?
How is that scenario likely to shape pandemic management, climate policy, lgbtq+ rights, the way systemic racism is addressed at a political level, etc.?
How will this presidency affect polarization in politics in general, and the agendas of future republican candidates for president of the US?
What lasting impact will Trump’s legacy have on the motherf*cking GOP?
How will this presidency effect the progressive liberal/leftist voting base? How will this effect the grassroots leftist movement?
How do I help flip the Senate blue, so that Biden’s presidency has an increased chance of being productive?
How do I as a NYS resident help get people registered to vote for Georgia’s runoff election on January 5th? What complications potentially exist, there?
How do I encourage people in GA to vote for Jon Ossoff?
How could I have conversations with voters in Georgia without having to struggle with my anxiety around taking to strangers on the phone?
Aside from directly talking to voters in Georgia, what can I do to help effect this outcome? Especially as someone who isn’t worth very much in terms of how many little green pieces of paper are rightfully mine.
What can I do with my tiny social media platform that has like – the same number of followers as students in a high school classroom?
I have finite resources to work with. Beyond money. For one thing, I’m deadass in a committed relationship with my GPA. How can I make the most impact on this outcome with the least amount of effort?
What can I do to maintain a balance between my anxiety around this outcome and the rest of everything that’s going on in my life? How do I walk the line between awareness and obsession, between productivity and pouring too much of myself into this?
What can I do to make things better closer to home?
Speaking as a tutor, I think it’s fucking amazing how the act of articulating a vague query as an explicit question can help a mind to think.
A sweet thing happened this afternoon A sweet thing worth calling up your people With a voice full of shocked and happy tears Worth opening a bottle of wine Worth punching the air Crying out in surprised joy Whispering “HOLY SHIT” A sweet thing Worth a sigh of relief A hug for your father A bottle of wine A glass raised high For the work that was done For all the momentum accomplished For the people who believed In what was right And took a stand.
A sweet thing happened today. But it was a close thing.
And there is still work to be done.
To begin with Be careful out there in the dark In the places where people are furious Where too many are furious Especially those of you Who have watched your fundamental rights Go before the courts Who are still watching those rights debated Stay safe. You already know how. I’m so sorry.
This place is still imperfect And there’s still work to be done So don’t lose that momentum. Don’t lose this spirit Of anger Of compassionate action Don’t let go of what you believe Even as you feel this relief There is still so much work to be done. So keep fighting In all the tiny ways That don’t mean very much on their own Keep believing
So that over time There will be more sweet moments Moments they can never take away.
Also it’s ironic and a little terrifying that the fate of the world is partially contingent upon what happens in Vegas, Nevada. This feels too much like the flip of a coin, except
except that it isn’t. I don’t think.
I’m trying and failing not to keep reloading the map of election results and I have not dared to let hope into my heart yet but I – hmm.
Georgia is currently tied 49.4% to 49.4%.
They’re at 99% reported.
It has just occurred to me that the difference between the number votes is literally 1902 people. That is the equivalent of maybe as many church congregations as I could count on the fingers of one hand. That’s a bit higher than the number of students at my highschool. That is a fraction of the population of the upstate NY Bible belt town with the rolling hills and the queer kids who who got the fuck out at 17 and moved to Tennessee and Virginia and Pennsylvania to start a new life, somewhere safe.
1902.
It has just occurred to me that I have probably met with, talked to, exchanged words with that many people in my adult lifetime. I’m thinking about the number of people that all of those people know. And then those people, in turn. And I’m thinking about how everything is interconnected, and how sometimes the ripples that an individual sends outward aren’t muted by the background noise in the system but once in a while there is something – a joke, a turn of phrase, a five dollar bill, a belief, or (i am so sorry) a virus – that is passed from person to person throughout these interconnected communities until it has been amplified a thousand fold.
1902 voices is barely a whisper, against a backdrop of a storm that has been raging for centuries. But that whisper could be enough to tip the scales. Right now, the scales are leaning slightly, ever so slightly away from the voice of reason and, just.
I am so fucking proud of how strong that voice of reason is.
In this moment when I feel a certain degree of helplessness, I’m trying to think of things that I actually can do to help. They are small things, but they do change the shape of the world. They’re outward facing things but mostly they’re for me to think about and remember. They might not be for you, although I got casual and decided to use the generic you. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect myself to do all of these things at once, or all the time. But they’re things I’m trying to remember that I can do, and sometimes actually am doing without realizing it, when I feel that there is no hope.
Wear a mask
Wash your hands
Get vaccinated when a vaccine becomes available
Get a flu shot
Donate blood
Stay home when you can to decrease population density in public
Don’t say things in the comments section of a social media post that you wouldn’t say to someone’s face.
Recycle
Compost
Volunteer at food distribution events
Eat vegetarian, even if you only eat vegetarian some of the time. One of the most effective ways to decrease greenhouse gas emissions.
Source meat products conscientiously if you can afford it for animal rights reasons
Make microdonations to organizations who are taking action on things you believe in
Carpool (safely)
Donate used clothing, books
Thrift shop
Check on the endorsements or social perspectives of the businesses you support consistently and be mindful of where your money is going.
Shop locally. Support that one coffee shop or bookstore or diner or performance venue you would hate to see go out if business.
Consider alternatives to big businesses like Amazon
Recognize the humanity in the folks working in food service, retail, etc., especially in those moments where you feel the need to be critical of the service you have recieved.
Support the arts. Performance based industries have been hit hard this year. Consider attending virtual performances, or supporting specific artists or venues on crowdfunding platforms like Patreon.
Exchange pronouns.
Hell, especially if you’re a cisgender ally – wear your own pronouns out on your sleeve. Wear ’em on your nametag at work, throw ’em in your email signature, etc.. It’s a small way to help make this conversation more familiar, standard, and safe in mainstream circles.
Listen more than you talk, sometimes
Other times, fucking preach. Speaking your mind is an act of revolution.
Tell a stranger how much you like their hair, or their shoes, or their outfit.
Take care of yourself. Unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders away from your ears. Take a breath. Drink water. Rest. Take a break. Put taking care of yourself first.
If somebody in your life is putting themselves first, don’t take it personally. If taking it personally is constantly your first impulse, notice that. Consider the possibility that this might not be all about you.
Learn something new, from outside of your comfort zone.
Learn about the history you weren’t taught about in school.
Sign a petition regarding a specific example of something in society that bothers you. If you are righteously passed about the criminal justice system, sign a petition for the innocent man on death row.
Regardless of whether a protest for something you believe in is happening in your city or on the other side of the world, donate to local organizations who organize for safety supplies for protesters. Or a bail fund.
Add your voice to the conversation when you amplify someone’s voice on social media.
Consider consuming your news about the state of the world from a medium which you consider to be relatively reputable.
Think critically and ask questions.
If an old perspective no longer seems right, in light of new information, think about letting it go. Or revising it a bit, at least.
One alternative to participating in a long string of potentially draining arguments or lectures that escalate and don’t get you anywhere over and over again is to just – concisely – say what you believe about the topic, and leave it at that. Repeat this statement whenever you need to. Allow it to evolve as your feelings about a topic change or become more specific. At some point, you can start asking people to repeat back to you what you’ve said. You’re not letting down the principles of nuance just because you don’t have the energy to present a research paper on what you believe in every single time.
i.e., I don’t always have the energy to get into a nuanced discussion about reproductive rights, so my go-to statement is “I think people should have agency over what happens to their own bodies, and I think this kind of medical care should be covered by insurance.”
Ask questions.
Question cancel culture.
Question the “born this way” narrative about things like gender and orientation
Don’t fall in love with politicians. Think strategically.
Protest. Change happens from the ground up, and the political landscape is shaped by what the majority of people believe to be important. A real life example of this is the youth climate justice movement in the E.U. over the last couple of years.
Protest peacefully and creatively.
Don’t tone-police protesters.
Take action in response to peaceful protest.
Learn about why people are protesting.
Don’t negate the validity of the message that protesters are trying to draw attention to by emphasizing only the actions of the most violent and radical among them.
Don’t fall out of love with healthy skepticism rational argument
Remember that just because something makes you uncomfortable that doesn’t make it evil and wrong and bad.
Hear the voice in your head that says “if you don’t do this one small thing, you won’t be able to live with yourself.” Hear that voice. And then recognize that the legitimate reason you have for being unable to take a specific action in a givin moment is not some “excuse,” it’s part of a genuine set of parameters that you’re working within. It’s human. It’s normal. The idea that if you really cared or wanted to take an action then you could just choose to take that action is abelist as fuck.
No matter what happens There’s still going to be work to do. There are still going to be things to fight for People to stand up for There’s you.
No matter what happens, there is still going to be an infinite collection Of small corners of the world Where an apparently insignificant outcome comes down, in the end To a conversation A judgement call Based on the previous inculcations Of perspective, insight, nuance, fact. Brief flashes of understanding Of things I hadn’t seen before Because I didn’t know to look These are things which, in small ways Affect everything I do All the actions that don’t seem like they mean very much By themselves.
No matter what happens, No matter which rich white man wins There’s still going to be work to do.
One path might be worlds more heartbreaking to walk than the other, Especially right now. And we don’t know yet Which path we’re going to be walking
I will walk down either path, even though I guess I could turn my back on everything And I guess this is technically a choice, to keep walking Even if I have to stop and rest periodically to keep my legs from giving out I’ll be back, on the path, when I can Because this is a choice I decided to keep making A long time ago.
And it helps me to remember Even when it’s impossibly hard to remember That I am not walking alone.
I’m sorry for the everything is terrible blog post, the other day. I’m sorry for how terrible I’ve been.
I’m kind of going through it, I think. Everything *is* terrible, but it’s beautiful, too. It’s just – everything. All at once.
I had to pay rent for this space on the internet, for a year. For this website name, for a space to write things. And my – I guess my lease is almost up. I need to decide what I’m going to do about that.
One of the things that could happen is that nothing changes. Or I could wind up with a different domain name. Or I could take a break from writing, for a while. I’m not sure what to do.
I’m going to start with a cup of coffee.
It snowed here last night. Last year when it snowed for the first time, I wasn’t home.
I can sit and drink coffee and look out the window at the snow and listen to a Hozier track from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while, unless you count the memes.
This was the result of my mother’s decision to get a puppy like a couple of months after I was born. It was a good decision, I think. We were very good friends.
Here she is, adjusting to the idea of additional house mates. She was very good about it.
Here she is in the last months of her life. We kept going for walks until the end. I still dream about her sometimes.
My mother’s mother died suddenly in a car accident when I was – three or four years old? She and my mother were angry with one another at the time. I never really knew her, but the two or three memories I have are good ones. Kathrin knew her better. Tell the people you love that you love them, because you never know when they’re going to be gone.
Based on what I know of her, second hand – I’m sometimes absolutely stone cold furious with her. But at other times I – I wish she was here, and I wish I could have a conversation with her. For all the ways that she was flawed, I think maybe she would have understood.
I have never seen a photo of my mother’s father. But I know he played the upright bass, I know that he was an engineer, and I know that he kept bees.
My dad with his parents at my parents’ wedding day.
Jay was a trip, with a lot of faults. I only remember him as a quirkey, frail old man. He was There enough to understand when my dad said “I forgive you.”
Reba (Miller) was a sweetheart, and all of the stories of my dad’s grandparents on her side suggest that she came by that honestly. I see a lot of her in my dad.
She kept diaries for her entire life. She has something like 11 grandchildren, but for some reason I inherited all of them. Someday, I will feel ready to read them.
The first time I was in the same room as death. I think I was thirteen? He was hit by a car, which is a thing that happens, here. I think I might even have heard the tires screech at the end of the road. We found him in bad shape under the porch, and did what we could for him. I remember this cat for the friendliness and cuddles and the crazy manic energy and just a faint spark of sass.
I love cats.
Death isn’t half as scary as some of the horrors within and betwixt and between human beings, and the finite-ness of life is just another reason do what we can in the time that we’ve got.
I’m reading a book about the last time Frank sat with his friends before he was put to death by hemlock poisoning. Frank & co. spent that time philosophizing and trying to prove the immortality of the soul, which they never quite managed to pull off. When Frank couldn’t successfully prove that souls were immortal, his friends were deeply troubled and uncomfortable – not just with the prospect of their friend dying, but with a sudden lack of faith in the power of logic and reason and philosophical argument in the first place.
Having to write a five page analytical essay about Frank’s response to this on All Hallow’s Eve has been unexpectedly therapeutic.
the smallest things have been tricky for me, today. sitting up in bed, thinking of answers to questions, finishing sentences, swallowing food. I’ve thrown up once, and my chest aches. I didn’t visit campus this afternoon. Case numbers are rising. I’ve been careful to socially distance and I’ve been staying outside as much as possible up till now, but I’m starting to feel this overpowering instinct to just fucking hibernate for a while. Hopefully keep some people safe.
I did accomplish one small walk in the rain. wore three layers of rain jacket and winter coat to keep the weather off, and listened to podcast in order to keep my prefrontal cortex distracted from the thoughts that I’m honestly afraid to be alone with. seriously, if you’re ever hoping to torture me, put me in a sensory deprivation tank, alone, by myself, with my brain. I wouldn’t last five minutes.
left to my own devices, I worry. for so many things. for so much.
so instead, I listened to the last podcast on the left. Three quite nerdy and older-brotherly men with the collective maturity of a nine year old boy chatting about ghosts and true crime and UFO’s and serial killers. I think I found them because of Trista’s found word operation, but I’ve been listening to them for over a year now. Their voices have become familiar and – aaaalmost comforting? Almost. As comforting as your typical gristly & enthusiastic & incredibly nsfw commentary on the intimate details of a serial killing can be.
(they’re all in their approximate thirties, i think, and in the most recent episode two of them genuinely congratulated the other one for finally teaching himself how to cook spaghetti all by himself. which was – very consistent with the vibe)
when i got inside out of the rain I managed a good enough virtual tutoring session for a classmate, today. this is very much an under the table venmo operation, socially distanced and masked out in the cold, or awkwardly screen sharing through a zoom call. I like being self employed. I’m getting paid a bit more per hour. plus my boss says I am absolutely allowed to swear profusely on the job.
and then there was food and television with my mom and dad. This is a thing that we do together, now. we ran out of the first two seasons of twin peaks, so we’ve been watching old episodes of the great british baking show. well into the semifinals, things are becoming stressful. Mary keeps having to remind Paul to be kind.
No school this weekend. Small hiatus from almost everything.
I have four fewer teeth now than I did last weekend. This happened on purpose.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve put off letting go of the wisdom teeth for this long because I had somehow subconsciously started to believe that having wisdom teeth makes a person more wise and I –
I really had to sit down and have a chat with myself about that one.
They’ve been making my head hurt off and on since I was seventeen and, for one thing, it’s a hell of a lot harder to think when my head hurts. It’s harder to remember the important things when I’m in pain.
So I found an office that would take my parents’ insurance and I called the front desk and made an appointment and scraped all the paperwork together and sent it to all of the people who needed paperwork. It took me a long time to do all of those things, and most of them were tricky and uncomfortable. The lady on the other end of the phone was an absolute sweetheart, which somehow gave me courage.
I was conscious and awake for the entire operation, which was – also very much on purpose.
Ever since I stumbled on a random article in a magazine when I was a kid, I have had a distinctly irrational anxiety about receiving the wrong dose of anesthetic in a dentist’s office, and never waking up again.
Theoretically this happens because the anesthesiologist, just another imperfect human, is distracted and very tired, tired enough to make a fatal mistake with the arithmetic, tired enough to just completely read the charts wrong. Perhaps the botched arithmaric that leads to my death is the indirect result of a bad hangover and a broken heart.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about dying. They say beggers can’t be choosers, but I don’t want my last moments to take place in a dentist’s office. I have never in my life been in a dentist’s office that didn’t feel profoundly sterile and impersonal and a bit creepy and for some reason there is always a county music station playing in the background. Every single time.
So I didn’t go under during the operation, and the experience was incredibly strange.
Once they’d gotten past the bit with the needles, I just – went somewhere else. Mentally. Away from the sticking and poking and yanking sensations. Away from the country music lyrics. I escaped. I went to the place where Westley goes, in the Princess Bride, while he’s being torchured by the man with six fingers. I went to my own equivalent of Sherlock’s mind palace. I got the fuck out.
I dissociate on a fairly regular basis, but it doesn’t usually happen on purpose. This time it did.
When I settled back into the shape of a human, in a chair, in a room, in an office, in a town, in a deeply fucked up country, in a universe that’s beautiful and terrible and strange… I asked if they would let me keep my teeth. I don’t know why. I didn’t want anyone else to have them. The words came out jumbled because I couldn’t feel my face, but they heard me and understood.
My dad drove me home and picked up meds from the pharmacy. My mother made me garlic mashed potatoes with butter and cream. Incidently, mashed potatoes made from blue potatoes are actually a neat, pretty shade of purple. This is new information for me.
My head hurts and my jaw is puffy. I have been binging BBC television and sipping mug after mug of tea, and snacking on mashed potatoes.
I needed this time.
I hope it’s an excellent weekend.
P.S.
I have a small and slightly bloody envelope with four teeth inside, and I have no idea what to do with this. Help.
Hallo! I don’t physically have to go to school today, so I slept late into the morning. When I half-awoke I knew that there had been strange dreams, but I couldn’t remember what they’d been about. My cat was worrying at my arms and face with her paws and nose, insisting that I needed to get up because she needed something. She’s nowhere near polite enough not to tell me when she needs things, even when I’m half alseep.
So I rolled out of bed and across the floor and out of the window onto the roof above the porch and conginued over the edge
And I fell, comfortably, for what felt like a long time. I could hear the radio playing NPR through the wall between me and the kitchen. They were talking about the SCOTUS nominee confirmation process, about what it felt like for an ex-convict to vote for the first time, about sending toilets into space. I was only half-listening.
I landed on my feet outside the back door, walked through it, and went looking for cat food and a cup of coffee.
I have run out of Stephen King books to read, at the moment. I think this means either a trip to a library or to an online bookstore. I have searched in two libraries and two physical bookstores for the next book in the Dark Tower series, to no avail.
When I called the village library up the hill from the college campus to ask if they had Songs of Suzannah on the shelf, the sweet old lady on the other end of the phone happily reported that they did have the book but it was down a set of rickety stairs at the back of a dusty filing cabinet in the basement. When I arrived at the library later the same day, the librarian at the counter, a severe looing younger woman, told me that they had never had that book, that the library didn’t have a basement, and that, incidently, the old woman I had spoken to on the phone hadn’t worked there for over fourty years.
The bookstore on the main drag beside the college campus has strange and unpredictable hours which are constantly changing and seem to discourage the possibility of customers, but I’ve been persistent about it and they seem to have a broader collection of Discworld installments than Dark Tower books. The man who works there, who wears a tie-died mask and is currently calling himself Larry, turned out to be surprisingly helpful and plucked a German-English dictionary for me from a shelf where I could have sworn there hadn’t been a German-English dictionary before.
I just want a spooky adventure story to read by candle light in the evenings, before I fall asleep and dream of things I can never remember afterwards.
I did not have to go to school today, not physically. I had to be there in an oddly virtual way – I took two online tests and uploaded a paper, and those turned out fine.
School exists in an invisable layer of reality – floating through the aether from one blue screen to another to another and the next. Friendships, work, school, news about unfairness on the other side the world. It all exists on a screen that is currently about six inches from my face. When I look up, my eyes are so tired that I can’t make out the details in the trees without my glasses.
I miss everything, but maybe everything has been right there the entire time. All I have to do is look up.
When I’m feeling sad and I’m crashing in the living room of my parents’ house, two other warm bodies have a tendency to gravitate towards me. The cat will curl up on my chest if I’m laying down, or in my lap if I’ve got my feet up. The dog will stretch out on the floor beside the couch. I suspect that the cat is only in it for the body heat, but I think the dog is there because of whatever it is that connects dogs to people. I don’t know if it’s love or some ancient and deeply altruistic agreement that’s gradually morphed into an instinct. Might be the same thing.
So I curl up under blankets and the bodyweight of cats, and breathe in the smell of lab mixed with a handful of other things. We think maybe some coonhound, american bulldog, possibly great dane, but we don’t know.
She sticks her nose in my face when she needs something, and sometimes even when she doesn’t. Just because. When my dad comes home, she’ll meet him at the door. They both enjoy this.
The cats come and go. They thrum and stretch, they knead and purr, they ask for attention one minute and then leave deep red scratches down my arms and back the next. In anxious moments, when I’m trying to sleep and can’t, a 20lb weighted blanket and several layers of sheets and knitted blankets are not heavy enough. A 20lb weighted blanket, a sheet, a knitted blanket and the bodyweight of a cat is heavy enough.
This random mix of nonhuman companions makes me feel less alone in a way that pretty much none of the humans have successfully achieved. I love them for that. Or at least, I experience one half of some kind of ancient and deeply altruistic agreement that has gradually morphed into an instinct.
It’s one o’clock in the morning on a school night. I should either be sleeping or writing a paper but I am currently listening to a Last Podcast on the Left episode about Gef the talking mongoose.
A couple of days ago, I woke up and looked down at my phone and checked my news feed and all of the headlines were about how 45 had tested positive for COVID-19. There is absolutely a dark part of my soul which is deeply satisfied by that outcome, and wholeheartedly appreciates the irony there.
A couple of days before that, I woke up and looked down at my phone and checked my news feed, and all of the headlines were focused on 45’s behavior at the presidential debate. About how he outright refused to condemn white supremacy. About whatever in hell’s name that was.
A couple of days before a couple of days before that, I woke up and looked down at my phone and checked my news feed, and all of the headlines were about how 45 has paid less money in income taxes than literally every other adult who has ever taken capitalism seriously. That parameter probably neatly excludes all of the rich ones.
Weirdly, this post is not about how disgusting 45 is. We already knew this. We have known this for a long time. This is not new information. Currently, I’m just incredibly done with how much attention this excruciatingly toxic human being is receiving on an almost daily basis.
Like, yes. To a point, precisely because of this enormous scope of power that he has somehow fucking managed to end up with, it is important to keep one eye on this trainwreck. A trainwreck of this scale can throw shrapnel that effects too much of the world.
And yes it would be lovely if the public attention that is being spent on 45 could help to hold him accountable for the things that he does that are wrong. It would be lovely if it managed to shift the vote just enough to sway the election. That would be a beautiful outcome.
But right now, it just feels like the entire universe is watching this trainwreck in a kind of horrified fascination and can’t bring itself to look away. If attention was some kind of currency, if fame without any particular connotation one way or the other was like an energy source for this man, he would be so fucking set. And in a sick way, I think maybe he is.
I wonder what would happen if a fraction of that universal energy and focus was transferred to something worthwhile, something constructive. I know that it would free up space in my own head and heart, on a daily basis. Imagine multiplying that free space across millions of people, across days and weeks and years.
I know we can’t ignore Donald Trump completely.
I just think there are so many other names that are worth saying more than his. I think there are at least 209,000 COVID-19 victims who were not nameless, and should have had access to the level of care that he’s currently receiving. I think there are countless victims of systemic racism and climate injustice and lack of housing and Healthcare and a livable wage that were not nameless
whose names deserve to be spoken so much more than his ever will.
Instead of focusing in on so much hate and disgust for one person, I want to be spending my energy building a world where billions of people are going to be okay. Even if I can’t do very much. Even if I have very little to give at all.
Hating him only makes me sick, and only gives him the attention that he wanted.
I want for the last time I see his name to be on the 2020 presidential ballot
I didn’t have to go to school today. It’s been lovely.
I let myself sleep well into the morning, and I would have gone on sleeping, but my cat kept on insisting that she needed something. She’s nowhere near polite enough not to tell me when she needs things, even when I am asleep.
This morning I’ve been steadily working through my logic homework. We are currently testing for the validity of arguments in system M by direct proof, which is not something I can just sit down and work on in front of the television. Still, I enjoy the way logic makes my brain feel. It’s a bit like algebra, and for the first time in a long time I’m noticing that I miss that feeling. I feel nostalgic for the almost continuous difficulty of not understanding, punctuated by short-lived moments of clarity, followed by more frustrating confusion. Those breif moments of clarity are honestly some of the sweetest, but I think it’s the other stuff that actually helps me to grow.
Because being wrong and confused almost all the time is hard for me. Not being naturally excellent at everytbing is hard for me. And it feels like a defect. It feels like an inflated ego problem, but instead of manifesting as stark overconfidence and superiority, it manifests as a toxic kind of bitterness and self-doubt.
It’s a lonely feeling, because when I’m full of self doubt and bitterness, I’m not sure I like myself very much. And I can’t shake the feeling that it’s hard for the people that I love to like me in the moments when I don’t like myself.
I’m not sure if that’s true, but it feels true, and that makes it heavy.
So I wish I could be humble, because I don’t like the bitterness and the self-doubt and the loneliness. I wish I was more graceful in a state of not knowing. I think that I miss studying mathematics because I miss the experience of having to practice humility even when that wasn’t what I was feeling on the inside. I think that was good for me.
Anyhow. I should probably stop procrastinating and get back to practicing logic things, but apparently I needed to write that one down. Thanks for sometimes reading the things that I write, even and especially when they wind up being oddly personal.
My dad used to say that if I had a question that nobody else was bringing up, I shouldn’t hesitate to speak up ask my question, because there would almost certainly be other people struggling with the same thing. That’s sort of my hope when I write about oddly personal things – I hope I’m not the only one who experiences all this awkward messy imperfect human-ness. I hope there is a connection between my experience and the experiences of a whole host of other human beings.
My parents and I didn’t watch the debates last night. This was very much on purpose. The prospect of watching 45 debate literally anyone felt like an unnecessary stress that I didn’t need to put myself through. This morning, I was grateful I didn’t do that to myself. One news anchor at CNN described that debate as a hot mess inside of a dumpster fire inside of a train wreck, and I don’t need any more of those in my life this week, thanks.
So instead of watching the debate, we watched Twin Peaks and opened a bottle of wine. It was the very first bottle of home-brewed stuff from the weirdly manic summer of Trying All The Things…
Anyway.
We opened a random half-gallon batch of cherry wine, bottled sometime around the end of July.
And I was fully expecting it to be horrible. At worst badly infected with some random strain of bacteria, gritty, turned to vinegar. At best, flat and dry and flavorless and harsh. I had myself convinced that the outcome was going to be one of those options.
But it wasn’t.
My dad did the honors. He uncorked the bottle, which made a satisfying sound, poured a glass, took the first sip. And then his face lit up in surprise, and he smiled.
I was very much not emotionally prepared for that outcome. Might have taken a couple of involuntary physical steps backwards.
A kind but smart-assed voice in my head would like to point out that constantly expecting the worst possible outcome might be a little dumb, on my part. This is the same voice that makes exasperated noises when I realize that a joke that sounded funny in my head was basically just me putting myself down, but out loud and in front of people.
I don’t know.
Hoping that things will work out beautifully is difficult. Striving for excellence is taking a risk. Believing that there is anything about me that is worth jack to anybody is so impossibly hard, because what if…
What if.
What if they do care, even when you’re decidedly messy and imperfect. What if the recipie turns out alright, or even turns out beutifully and makes your father smile from ear to ear. What if you have the capacity for excellence, at a few things, if only you can give it a little time. What if.
It’s kind of funny, but I’m actually trying to let go of both of those things. Both ends of the spectrum. I know enough about myself to know that thinking positively in a rough moment is not enough to save me from myself, but I also know that feeding a negative thought spiral isn’t going to help.
I want to get to a place where I can open a dusty bottle, try a little, and know deep in my soul that it doesnt matter if I’ve poured myself a glass of vinegar or wine.
Because I dared to try. Because that’s enough. Because that’s part of living.
Folks, I hope you have the Wednesdayist of Wednesdays.
I had to go to school today but I didn’t have to like it.
Gods, I love what that pandemic has done to the entire education system. Purely for selfish reasons. A mostly remote and asynchronous class schedule happens to work incredibly well for my brain.
“Go and read this book.” “Have you read the book?” “Yes? Can you write us a paragraph about it?” “Excellent, thank you. Goodbye.”
This semester, I don’t have to sit through two hour lectures with my feet up on the desk, knitting, doodling, crying internally, barely keeping several different anxiety spirals under control, trying miserably to concentrate… mostly drifting off into space.
I had incredibly patient differential equations professor but that is beside the point.
Now I can pause the pre-recorded lecture every seven minutes to get up and move around, scroll through Instagram’s limited collection of Johnlock memes, make a sandwich, plan a trip to Tibet, work on my elaborate but stylish plot to overthrow the government, feel the upset of the world in the pit of my stomach … et cetera, it goes on.
This morning I listened to a humanities lecture about Aristotle’s ethics at a playback speak of 1.5, though the crappy little speakers on my phone, while walking up the hill through an absolutely gorgeous cemetery.
The other night I watched a lecture about Indian cosmology under the duvet at 3AM.
You get the idea.
But Elementary German is still very much in person. Classical music plays through the speakers before class. My professor’s voice sounds like a distinctly western NY Santa Claus. In order to practice the spoken language, we have to scream across six or twelve or eighteen feet of room to other classmates. I can only see the top halves of their faces, so I can’t see their lips to catch the shapes they make when the sounds come out.
It’s like I’m living in a dream.
This afternoon, towards the end of German class, I think I worked out what it means to split an infinitive. I’d spent years of my life not knowing what an infinitive was, and pretending to know so as not to look like an idiot, while also forgetting to ever actually fucking get around to googling the damned things. But today, for some reason… today was the day when it all began to, finally, make sense.
The increasingly potent sensation is one of grief for an irretrievably lost innocence. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, until today, and now that I know what I didn’t know I can never truly go back.
It’s fascinating how you learn things when you go to school.
Anyway, I – folks, I should get offline tonight. There’ll be coffee in the morning, and that’s enough of a reason to carry on.
We just lost Ruth Bader Ginsberg. My dad told me, and I broke down a little.
In the German language, there is a word for the way that I’m feeling. Weltschmerz. It means, literally, world-sadness. Depending on the context, it can denote varying degrees of deep sadness with the flaws of life, of world-weariness. Weltschmerz is the pain of the world.
The series of unfortunate events that’ve happened in 2020 have turned this year into a sort of meme. It’s almost like a joke.
Australia was burning, and the Amazon rainforest was burning, and then Voldemort was about to start WWIII with North Korea. Then there was a novel virus that spread from bats in a cave to a wet meat market in China, and then all over the world. The world was temporarily closed. Hundreds of thousands of people died and angry republicans wouldn’t listen because haircuts and the economy were more important. JK Rowling became vocally transphobic. And then, in Minneapolis, George Floyd was killed by police, and there were Black Lives Matter rallies in all 50 states, and there was police brutality at peaceful protests. Chadwick Boseman passed away. And then Voldemort tried to shut down the post office, so that people wouldn’t be able to vote. Immigrant detention centers are feeling more and more like concentration camps and Voldemort’s rhetoric is actively encouraging this. And the west coast is on fire, and we’ve just lost our RBG.
The seat she once filled is now open.
It’s only September. Hold my hand.
I picture a moment, at New Year’s eve, surrounded by my friends. We stop playing Mario cart for long enough to count down at the tops of our lungs, and watch the ball drop. We knock back glasses of sparkling grape juice and some of us kiss and it’s extraordinary gay, and that’s okay here. All of it is. And afterwards we never speak of 2020 ever again.
But the world keeps turning and burning regardless of who’s keeping track of the years. In a way, it’ll always be like this.
In the middle of all of it, there are people who devote their entire lives to taking care of the state of the world. Once in a while, you find people who’ve spent their whole lives speaking up for those whose voices aren’t being heard.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of those people. She once said that she wanted to make things a little better than they might have been if she hadn’t been there.
And she did.
Romer v. Evans, Lawrence v. Texas, Windsor v. U.S., Obergefell v. Hodges, Bostock v. Clayton.
So many others. These were moments that somehow managed to contain the opposite of Weltschmerz.
There’s a thick haze in the sky over the campus; the folks over at the radio station says it’s smoke that blew in from the fires on the west coast.
Last night there was no chance in hell that I was going to be able to lay down and fall asleep, so I made coffee cake instead. Oatmeal and spices and a thick crumbly topping again. I got all covered with flour and it was comforting.
My mom’s a night owl and it’s cold out, so she was up late in the kitchen, too.
We had things to talk about, because my folks and I are watching Twin Peaks in the evenings. I’m rewatching each episode for the mumblemumble third or fourth time, maybe, I can’t remember, it’s still good. My mom is enjoying Twin Peaks more than she thought she might; she thinks it’s good that the show deals with tough things like domestic violence and drug abuse. Maybe it’s good for those things to be out there for everyone to see, and learn to recognize.
It was good to feel able to talk to my mom.
The conversation turned towards the weight of the things that are wrong in the world right now. JK Rowling, capitalism, the shit going down at the Mexican border, the fires in the west, the tear gas at peaceful protests.
She just listens.
Since my sister went off to college, these rants are increasing in frequency and intensity. I keep catching myself in the middle of jarringly passionate social justice orations for a very small audience of two, at the dinner table. It’s like I’m trying to fill in the gaps in conversation where Evie’s voice would be if she were home.
Sometimes it’s like something else is speaking through me. Sometimes I’m not sure that I know enough about the things I’m talking about to be talking about them out loud. But somehow the energy is too much to hold back.
The cake turned out alright, anyhow.
Today I will plunge back into the world of German verbs, and the structures of sound & valid arguments, and the readings on Plato and Socrates. The world of university is easy to navigate. I am quite good at that world. I will bury myself in scholarship, up to the eyebrows, and I while I’m at it maybe I’ll teach myself how to think.
A friend thinks I should take all of my captivity to think, and learn, and express myself, and all the feelings that I have about the things that are wrong in the world, and find a place where I can do what I can to help.
I don’t have a clue where to begin.
I just hope it’s an excellent Wednesday.
“I don’t know where I’m going, I only know where to start… by just tryna keep a little peace in this heart.”
I’m not entirely sure where this day went, and it’s disconcerting.
At one point my parents got caught in the rain, while they were out walking, so I had to go and rescue them. They were grateful, and also soaked through to the skin.
Later on I went for my own walk, which had become a three mile endeavor before I looked up and realized how far my feet had carried me. It had stopped raining, then, and the sun was shining. While I was walking I cried a little. Sometimes I avoid going for walks by myself because I’m afraid to be alone with my own thoughts, out there. But once in a while I guess I have to face that.
There are people I should speak with, things that I should say and do. I’ll have to get around to them sometime if I’m ever going to be able to live with myself. But I’m honestly a little afraid. I suspect that this is human.
On the second half of my walk, I think about the grand jury in Louisville, Kentucky, who will decide if the police officers who raided Breonna Taylor’s apartment and shot her five times will be indicted. I make a mental note to study hard in German, because if this case doesn’t go the way it should, I don’t want to live in this country anymore.
I also wonder how Jacob Blake’s children are doing. I have a vivid imagination and I can put myself in the back seat of a car, watching somebody shoot my dad, and I wonder if Blake’s kids have access to free therapy. I have to believe that someone else has already thought of this, because I have to believe that there is compassion in this world, but I wonder if there is somewhere folks can donate.
I’m home now.
We’re having oatmeal chocolate cake for dinner. It’s dense, and dark, and an old family favorite. Yesterday we made a small batch and drove up to Brockport so that we could give it to my little sister for her birthday.
This evening, I accidentally cut the second cake we made for us into four pieces instead of three, and I really missed her. For about eighteen years my childhood had a face, and it was hers, and now she’s not here anymore. I feel potent sadness about this, and I am so glad she doesn’t read this blog, because she’d laugh at me, a little. I hugged her and chatted in the backseat of a car with her, last night, and I felt completed.
I’ll see her again. Sometime.
Folks, I hope you’re having an excellent Sunday evening.
“A fire in California that has burned more than 7,000 acres was caused by a ‘pyrotechnic device used at a gender reveal party’, according to the the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.”
– The Guardian, September 7th, 2020
…
All I’m saying is that if I threw myself a gender reveal party, things would absolutely wind up catching on fire. There would be explosions.
All of the explosions would be 100% accidental explosions and definitely not gleefully premeditated explosions. Would obviously do my best not to go and cause permanent ecological damage.
I think it would be lovely time, and you are all invited.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind going to school. I enjoy riding in the car with my Dad, with the sunroof open, listening to NPR and speculating about the logistics of stealing Trump 2020 signs out of all the front yards between home and the edge of the Genesee valley.
The campus itself is beautiful; it does that particular old-bricks-and-ivy aesthetic soo well, and it rambles. The buildings were built into the side of a steep hill, on the edge of the Genesee valley. The view looking west from the gazebo where an acquaintance of mine did it with a guy for the first time is breathtaking. You can see for miles. My legs are screaming from three days of walking uphill, but for that view it’s worth it.
Yesterday I found a place to sit in the shade, in the shadow of one of the older buildings. It’s one of those out-of-the-way places that everyone walks past and nobody notices, and that makes it perfect for me. I sat with my back to a brick wall, and I read about the Pythagoreans. They were an odd bunch.
But I don’t have to go to school today.
This morning I woke up from a vivid dream, and I only remember snatches of what it was about.
So I climbed out of an upstairs window and onto the roof, and then I jumped, in a calculated arc, and after about half an hour of falling comfortably I landed with an impressive splash in the middle of the swimming pool. And it was fucking cold, but afterwards I was awake.
Under the water, I poured myself a cup of coffee, at sat at the bottom of the pool, and read a book for a little while. Still working on Stephen King’s Wolves of the Calla.
At the bottom of the pool, I can’t get an internet signal, so I don’t get caught in a web of social media outlets and emails and text messages. Nobody else in the universe has worked out how to hold their breath for as long as I have. It’s a nice place to go, when I need to disconnect from everything.
When I feel hungry, I put the book back on the shelf of the library that’s at the bottom of the swimming pool, and blithely kick my way to the surface.
Everything sort of tastes like cardboard, but toast is a manageable breakfast. Fortunately, the toaster is far enough away from the swimming pool that electrocution isn’t a big concern.
That reminds me! I’ve been meaning to share a thing. I recently discovered a true gem of a pickup line, which I will never use, but will absolutely file away in the back of my mind in a dusty box labeled Just in case…
“Damn, girl, are you a toaster? Because I’d get in a bathtub with you.”
This morning I woke up from a vivid dream, and couldn’t remember what it was about… So I climbed out of the upstairs window and onto the roof, and hesitated for a second, and then I jumped, in a calculated arc, and after about half an hour of falling comfortably I landed with an impressive splash in the middle of the swimming pool. And it was fucking freezing, but in about two seconds I was extremely awake. Afterwards, I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat on the porch and read Stephen King for like an hour. The ka-tet is falling apart, because two out of three of the men don’t think it’s a good idea to tell the lady that she’s pregnant. New characters in this installment of the Dark Tower series include: a pastor from another universe who was once bitten by a vampire in Massachusetts, an infuriatingly sassy robot who refuses to tell anyone anything, and a small group of women who have perfected the deadly art of throwing dinner plates like Frisbees, in the hope of defending themselves against the wolves who sometimes show up to steal their children. Currently, I am experiencing an inexplicable craving for cold leftover vegetable pizza, and I’m honestly not sure what to do about it.
Later, there will be almost certainly pre-recorded lectures about Antigone, and more 78 page readings about the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ancient Greece. Those dead people had some mind-bogglingly incorrect ideas about the universe.
For example:
Purse your lips and blow out a steady stream of breath, as though blowing on your food to cool it down. Observe that this breath feels cool on the back of your hand. Now, open your mouth wide, and breathe out somewhat violently, like a dragon. Observe that this breath feels warm on the back of your hand.
Good work.
(Don’t do this around other people, if you happen to have the plague. Thanks.)
Anaximenes of Miletus believed, partially on the basis of what we have just observed, that everything in the universe is actually made of air. I could go into this further, but I think I’m just going to leave it at that.
Everything in the universe is actually made up of water and earth, but nobody needs to tell Anaximenes this.
So anyway so far this week, I have learned that any good philosophy must be able to stand up to some degree of criticism.
Warrior and leader, brother and son, friend and enemy, flawed character, hero, King.
You became dust, in a snap of the fingers. And then, at the end of the world, you came back.
I know that you were not the man T’Challa. I understand the difference between reality and fiction, between movies and comics and real life. I only ever saw your face in two dimensions, and in pictures. But behind that camera was a man, and behind those smiling eyes there was a spirit.
That spirit gave T’Challa life, in a way that nobody else could. Stories have power, and you knew this. You knew what you were doing. When you were T’Challa, and when you were Jessie, and when you were James, too.
Even in the middle of your own invisible battle, you knew exactly what you were doing, and you did what you did so well.
That was a gift, to every child in the universe. But especially to the children who needed to see you the most.
This is probably not going to be an easy read. That was your warning.
Something changed in me when I walked in Auschwitz. Something fucking shifted.
I’ve suspected that something was different, since then. I’ve noticed it, I’ve been more and more aware of it, but I haven’t been sure of exactly what it is.
While I was walking in that place, a seed on the ashy wind got caught, and stuck, somewhere at the edges of my being.
It maybe got stuck in the corner of my eye, got caught by the surface tension of a tiny drop of water, salty water, leaking and pooling and falling for a girl whose name was Anne.
When I was homesick among the homeless in those freezing, empty train stations, when I was barefoot in the cold, that seed was shoved down into what you and I will have to imagine as solid ground.
For a long time, the little seed lay dormant. As I traveled, as I flew home, as I slept for a handful of winter months. The seed for Auschwitz was not dead, but it was sleeping.
Just potential, that was all.
A pandemic happened, and we all stayed home.
Later on, while we were all looking at our phones, one morning, we all heard about a Black man who was killed in Minneapolis.
And the seed felt the heat of all that shock and all that outrage like the warmth of the sun, and it started to wake up.
And then a Black woman was killed in Kentucky, in what should have been the safety of her home.
And the seed took root.
The roots went down, and down, and shoved and pushed at the dirt around them. Shoved it right out of the way.
Jesus, that shit was uncomfortable. You’d better believe that it stung and poked and itched and burned. The shifting in the solid ground hurt much more than it should’ve, for such a little thing. It hurt more than it would have been possible to expect. That tiny shift in the dirt, as the roots from a tiny seed emerged, as they took up space… that shift shook me to my foundations.
It didn’t hurt like losing a life or a loved one to a police officer’s bullets, or a police officer’s knee.
It didn’t hurt like feeling the butt end of supremacy and racism at every fucking turn.
I know that it couldn’t have hurt like that, because I have never felt those things. I must be some kind of stupid fucking lucky, in a sick way, in a way that I never asked for. But my stupid-fucking-lucky isn’t some chance roll of the dice. It never was. You’d better fucking believe that my stupid-ass white fucking privilege is a thing that came to be on fucking purpose.
On Fucking Purpose.
The system was built by a few, at first, and it was perpetuated by the many, and maybe in a handful of little ways, in my own short life, I have helped to perpetuate this system, too. And, God… Learning that, feeling the weight of that, that shit is real fucking uncomfortable.
Mine is not perfect soil for the seed that was trying to grow. It never will be.
But grow it did, a little at a time. It grew slowly, and, like most living things of its kind, it grew towards the light.
Yesterday I heard the story of a Black man in Wisconsin, who was shot seven times with the bullets from guns in the hands of officers of the fucking twisted law.
Yesterday I heard the story of a father who was shot seven times, while his three children waited in the car.
He did not die. He is allegedly in stable condition in a hospital. He is paralyzed from the waist down. He has three children.
Today is August 25th, 2020. There have only been twelve days this year when the police have not murdered someone in this country. The police have killed 751 people in 235 days. Breonna Taylor’s killers are still walking free.
What in the actual, goddamned fucking hell kind of world are we living in?!
what The HELL…
That seed from Auschwitz is still only a small green shoot, with baby leaves unfurling. It’s too soon to tell what it will become, what it will grow up to be.
But the universe shook when it broke through the surface of what I used to think was solid ground.
So I think that maybe one day it will have become a tree, whose roots grow deep into packed and well-worn soil, and I like to think that maybe the branches growing towards the light will cast enough shade for weary travelers to rest a while, and breathe air that’s just a little clearer
And I’d like to think that there are other small trees in other hearts of other people, other people everywhere, because I read once that many small people who in many small places do many small things can alter the face of the world.
Maybe I sewed my seed in Auschwitz, breathing in the ashes of the dead.
But maybe my seed was sewn a little bit before then, when I picked up the diary of a young girl in a train station in Amsterdam, because I needed something to read.
Maybe that’s – not all of what it takes, but it might be a very good start.
Listen to the stories. Bear a kind of witness to the horror, the suffering, the brilliant glimmer of hope. Shed a tear, or become angry, or feel so much love for a stranger that it hurts.
I wanted to end this with some kind of cry for justice, for protest, for change. But I think the picture of the trees is all I have to give, tonight. I can’t give up on believing that there are other trees, growing in the hearts of other people.
I hope there is something that’s growing in you.
#saytheirnames – Anne Frank, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake. 🖤
My therapist asked me for a safe place. “Visualize yourself there,” she tells me. “Even if it’s difficult. It gets easier with practice. Some day, when you need to, you’ll be able to imagine yourself there at will.”
So, in my imagination:
I am sitting on a driftwood log, on the pebbly shore of a cove on the east side of Seneca.
I know that this pebbly shore is on the east side of the lake because the sun sets in the west, and I remember that the sun always used to set on the other side of the water, across from us, every evening without fail.
In my memory, waves broke on the shore in a steady rhythm. They’d come rolling in from somewhere in the middle of the great wide stretch of water. At the edge of the water, seaweed collected in a thick, wide swath of green. There would always be lake-smoothed bits of colored glass, and shells, and bones, and sticks of wood, washed up and waiting. There, at the place where the seaweed meets the fine, dark pebbles, you might find a dead fish, rotting, or pools of green water, or the perfect stones for skipping, flat and smooth and round and light.
I can hear the surf, crashing, constantly and gently. I can summon up the shoreline in as much detail as I want to: the sharp curve of the beach, the steep bank between the grass and clover beside the cottage and the shore, the ancient willow tree, the creek. I can see the old wooden dock. It isn’t there now, but it used to be, and I remember. In my imagination it’s as battered and sturdy and real as it was when I was a child – the rough, wide, splintery boards, the mist-soaked beams, the thick round pillars half-submerged in shallow water, growing thick with zebra muscles and lake-weeds.
I am sitting on a driftwood log, bare feet resting on fine, warm pebbles. The sky is overcast and grey and it might rain, and the lake is calm and dusty grey and deep and faded blue, and the surf is rushing in, the waves are breaking in their steady rhythm.
This is a good place, for me. A meeting place, for all my splintered selves. There at the edges of things, at Seneca’s edges, is about as safe a place as there’s ever going to be.
“In this life, in this life, in this life We leave a trail that’s far and wide Good or bad, bad or good Our memories decide There are some places where I’ve been Where you can still see the world Think to myself as I look at the stars Just who do you think you are Innocent, innocent no more I saw what I saw and I shut the door Innocent, innocent no more I knew it was wrong but I did it some more In ’78 I went through a rude spell I knew it was fate, but I couldn’t really tell I thought that this was the way it was always gonna be I hated everyone and everyone hated me In ’88 I went through a great spell I knew it was fate, but I couldn’t really tell I knew that this was the way I wanted it to be I loved everyone and everyone loved me Every action has a reaction Every life has a life to lead Every human needs a fancy reason Why they should live or breathe I sit here feeling sorry for myself For one thing or another I’m trying hard to blame somebody else For the miseries that I’ve discovered I make a wish over a boiling cauldron That I pass only strengths onto the children And may the spirit move me to laugh and to sing And I won’t be drowned by the little things Until the day when there are no more desires And I put out all my little fires There’s nothing left but a wishful song And there will be no right or wrong Until that day, until that day, until that day Sights and sounds they’ll get to me…”
credit for this photo is my mother’s. I like the shutter speed
Getting into cold water is not something I can do a little at a time. It has to happen all at once – over in a moment, bing bang boom, it’s done, you can open your eyes.
Beforehand, I can sit at the top of the ladder for several minutes, with my back to the sun, feeling happily apprehensive about the prospect of the cold. I can dip my toes in, for a moment, to get a feel for what I’m in for. I can hesitate. That’s fine.
But the decision to get in the water is something that’s usually happened long before I reach the ladder. This can be a strange mix of helpful and frustrating, in that moment when I’m actually about to jump, standing up, bend at the knees, and shove
you’re in for it now, hon.
Once the water is over my head, it’s easy. The brain and the body adjust, and it’s nowhere as bad as I thought that it might be, and this is fine, this is good, fuck it’s cold, reach out and stretch the arms and legs and touch the bottom and stand up straight and shove a mess of wet hair out of the eyes and continue to swear for a couple of minutes and breathe
breathe
and this is alright.
surrounded by the water, there’s a certain weightlessness, a strange resistance, a persistent shift and tug, a cool and gentle force that nudges and shoves and brushes against bare skin and clumsy limbs
let it pick you up and carry you away, like a hurricane wind in slow motion. you can stay here as long as you need.
“Go to the woods,” says a voice. “You’ll feel better.”
“No!” cries another voice. This one is much louder, confrontational, in my face.
“That’s a terrible idea,” she says. “This time of year they woods are full of poison ivy, so much poison ivy that you can’t avoid walking right through it. The oils from the plant will make your skin itch, and you will be impossibly uncomfortable for days, and it will be distressing. It isn’t worth it.
“You can’t go to the woods,” the voice continues, “because in the woods there are mosquitoes that swarm around the pools of water. The mosquitos will eat you alive, and the bites will be uncomfortable and distressing. It isn’t worth it.
“You can’t go to the woods because of the raspberry canes that’ll snag your skin as you try to push through them, and you’ll feel that terrible panicky feeling of being caught, like a fish on a hook, and freeze
“You can’t go to the woods in the sun and the heat of the summer, because your skin could burn, or worse you could overexert yourself in the heat, struggle and sweat and sway until you crumpled over with tiredness…
“You could get hurt.
“Think of the aftermath, when your body is dried up and burning, and your skin is full of blackberry scratches and mosquito bites, and sunburns and poison ivy rash
when your physical self is in distress and you can’t sleep and every waking moment feels horrible.“
Fear hides her face in her hands.
“I’m just trying to keep you safe,” she tells me. “I don’t want you to be in pain, or get hurt. Stay here. Stay indoors where you can’t get hurt. Don’t go to the woods. It isn’t worth it.”
More often than not, fear is only a niggling feeling in the back of my head; fear is not so much a collection of articulated reasons as a hodgepodge of half-images. I get fuzzy memories of the last time I lost sleep because the bug bites itched, fuzzy pictures of ivy leaves and bugs.
It’s that niggling feeling that so often holds me back from doing the things that I love to do.
And so often, I felt trapped.
cut off, not just from the discomfort and distress, but from all the gladness that awaits beyond the posted signs
Until I stop to listen. Until I stop to identify which basic emotion is at the root of that feeling, and wonder what it’s trying to tell me and why.
It isn’t generally nonsense, but it’s often an incomplete picture of what’s real.
This morning, I put on a pair of very tall boots, to keep the poison ivy off my skin
And I spritzed myself with Eucalyptus. It smells horrible enough to keep the mosquitos go away
And I set off towards the woods, in the narrow strip of shade on the west side of the corn field, because even on hot days walking is bearable in the shade.
Last night I packed my backpack as though I was about to go traveling again. It was soothing.
I got so used to traveling without much to carry, you know? Because I had to carry everything I had, and I know that I can only carry so much on my back. My energy is a finite thing, no matter how strong I am, no matter how much I want to hold on to.
So I mostly held on to the things that I knew would come in useful. And I got a very clear picture of what actually was useful, what I needed. What served me and what didn’t.
Open the lid, and look inside, and say “alright, what am I carrying that is superfluous? What can I let go of?”
(I never let go of the books. They’re heavy and they take up space but you have to know when to be human.)
I just
I miss traveling. So much. I miss carrying so little and waking up in the morning and wondering “where am I going today? Am I staying or going?” I miss having no clear direction, no agenda, no plan. I miss learning about the places I was in while I was in them. I felt so free.
It’s selfish, because of COVID-19, because my sister is having a graduation party this weekend and I have to be there, for her. But I almost want to run away. Tomorrow or the next day, maybe. Throw a pack over my shoulder and slip out into the evening. I could tent camp across America. I could go north and attempt to sneak across the Canadian border. It can’t be that difficult.
I was driving in the rain today on the way to see a group of people that I spend New Year’s Eve with. It’s – well. It’s sort of like having a girls’ night, or it used to be, and then it turned out that a solid percentage of us weren’t girls. Looking back, this kind of makes all the sense in the world.
It’s a safe space. It was a nice night. We shared junk food and soda and laughter and each of us took the rice purity test and made fun of each other for how high or low our scores were. We caught up.
But anyway.
I was driving out to Ari’s house and I was about thirty minutes earlier than I should’ve been so I drove around the block a couple of times so that I wasn’t showing up ridiculously early
and I was listening to music and driving in the rain
And there’s this amazing album that was cobbled together by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, a handful of years ago.
These two happen to be two of my favorite human beings in the world. They’re a bit married. They recorded this show together and he read his short stories and poetry and she played her songs and it was a silly and sweet and spooky and powerful thing.
And then Amanda played this song…
as I was driving in the rain
And it got me in the way that sometimes only a song can, when it sneaks up on me when I’m least expecting it.
And something clicked.
I might’ve cried at that feeling a week ago. But this time I didn’t. I didn’t cry.
But my intuition shifted. I could almost hear it creaking and groaning as it settled into something that made more sense that anything in the world.
It was like that moment when you solve a tricky puzzle that’s felt uncomfortably unsolvable for too long. Then there was the embarrassed moment of “why didn’t I see this before, it’s been right in front of my face” and then there were heaps of other questions
But just for a moment, my head and my heart felt clear, and lighter, and just an odd mix of hopeful and sad.
I’m not sure if I’m ready to write about the details of that moment in this space. Not right now. But sometime, when it’s a little easier to articulate. Someday.
I have listened to the whole album about twice now. Neil’s stories and Amanda’s songs. Her melodies, his words.
That’s the thing about art, about stories. That moment when you see something that reminds you of yourself, in somebody else’s work and time and vulnerability and selfhood. Or when you witness the selfhood of somebody else, woven into a song or a poem or a story, and basically just think that it’s beautiful. And it makes you want to grow.
I’m thankful for all of the circumstances that came together for that moment, driving to a friend’s house in the rain and listening to Amanda and to Neil
I’m just feeling thankful for the shift. The push. I needed that. I hope this will make sense in the morning.
The rain tumbled out of the sky like a river, and thunder cracked over the roof. Cool air from high above got caught up in the rush of things and fell to earth. Hot and cold air stumbled over each other and mixed together and shifted, ‘til the wind picked up and thrummed its way over the yard.
The storm rough-housed a little with the tree branches and the power lines, the raspberry canes, the tomato plants, with every door in the house.
I unplugged the radio and the television and wrote, up in the attic. I waited it out. My mother ran around outside, soaked to the bone, shoving buckets under the drain spouts, collecting the water for her garden from the roof. She was happy.
When the storm passed it was like a fever breaking. The heat we’ve been having for too many days softened from scorching to something that’s been easier to breathe.
I needed that, so badly. So did the raspberries and tomatoes. It hasn’t rained in just long enough that nobody noticed that anything was missing. But the grass was turning brown.
Sometimes the sky forgets to rain, but I think, maybe… nothing ever stays the same for long.
This is going to be an interesting handful of days to look back on.
Like… ah, yes. That was the time she watched John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, cooked a pot of rice, switched her major to philosophy and listened to that one Willie Nelson album twice.
There’s been so much noise, in my head, recently. You know the kind. It never really stops.
But I’ve got much better things to do with my time than to actually listen.
In the sweltering heat in the summer, keep to the shade.
Sit in a camp chair on the porch. Take a second to notice the tiger lilies, the Queen Anne’s lace, the chicory, the milkweed. Pick a handful of raspberries. Listen to the bees.
Color in the cracks in the pavement with sidewalk chalk. Blow some bubbles and try to catch them on the wand. Close your eyes and hum into an electric fan. Doodle patterns with the condensation on the outside of a glass of iced tea. Skip a rock across the water and notice what shape the moon is.
And when you’re surrounded by the booming of fireworks and the buzzing of mosquitoes, the smell of smoke, the murmur of people all around
feel the bug bites and the sun burns and the thistles in bare feet and the ache that comes from somewhere on the inside
Notice the world. Wade out past the depth of your knees, reach in above your elbows. Watch closely. Listen.
And for a moment all there is and all there ever will be is one long evening in the summer, standing there, watching the fireflies light up the world.
Take some of this with you for the car ride home. The days are getting shorter again. Take some courage.
I’ll be taking classes at SUNY Geneseo in the fall, in whatever form that takes in the midst of the pandemic. It’s less than half an hour away from my house when the roads are good, so I’m going to live at home. Also, my dad works in the health and counseling center on campus, which means that I will probably be able to catch a ride to school more often than not.
Between carpooling, living at home, and unemployment benefits, I don’t think I’m going to have to take out loans for this year. I can live with that.
The other thing that’s evolving is a shift in a major for my bachelors degree. Again.
It’s been a lot of things. I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. It’s been like this for a long time, now, and I’m starting to think that’s just how it’s going to be.
But there’s this pressure to choose, in academia. Every interesting field seems cut off from all the others. And the way the system is set up, the more time you spend walking down one path the harder it is to change your mind and start again.
I think I might have been taking all of it much too seriously.
Since choosing Geneseo I may or may not have formally changed my major three times. And bickered with the advising department about not being able to make my own schedule in my first semester. And argued in favor of them letting me take 18 credit hours. And then changed my mind.
The folks in the advising department are containing their exasperation exceptionally well.
The other evening, I was laying in bed and thinking about taking three years of biology and chemistry and organic chemistry and biochem and there was this dread in the pit of my stomach that started to feel like nausea and I was pondering just not going back to school
except that path didn’t feel right, either.
I watched John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch. I did some research and sent some emails and asked questions. The advising department listened and wrote back and did not get angry with me for changing my mind too many times, which was really nice of them.
here is a schedule that I put together with the ridiculously patient folks in the advising department:
ancient philosophy, eastern philosophy, intro to logic, western humanities, and introductory German.
I’m actually feeling excited, for this.
I am guessing that there will be a lot of reading, and writing, and due dates, and I will have to adjust. But there are lots of lengthy gaps of time for walking up the hill to the library in the village and sitting in the big comfy chairs on the second floor and doing homework
if they’re open, in September
and that prospect seems manageable.
I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I would like a bachelors degree that leaves my options open. It feels sensible to study something that will teach me how to think and communicate and ask really good questions, and possibly get comfortable with an arbitrary set of writing conventions. Those skills are going to be useful no matter what happens.
I have time, no matter what anyone says. I just know about myself that I have to keep moving forward.
Do what feels right, as hard as you can, all the time. Just keep moving forward.
Dandelion wine has been racked off, siphoned into old and very clean wine bottles, corked, and stored horizontally in a makeshift wine wrack in the basement.
She’ll probably be ready to drink by like Christmas.
It’s been sitting on the back of the counter in a gallon jar for weeks, fermentation lock bubbling away. I’m a little more than nervous about my winechild.
It might’ve gone bad. Tasted off, or turned to vinegar.
But she burns like alcohol, and she’s sweet like wine. She tastes like dandelions.
I hadn’t noticed how much I’d been holding my breath over this.
I notice that I’m feeling relieved and hopeful. I’m feeling like I have that much more to be careful with, as I get through to the end of bottling and aging and the rest of this. I’m also noticing a strange absence where there might be resentment about one more thing to watch over and worry for.
I think it’s because I happen to really like this.
And it’s just – some stuff in a jar on the back of the counter. It’s a small thing. The world isn’t going to fall apart if it goes south.
But the little taste I had made me happy, on some random Monday in June. And I think that makes it important.
Bundles of wildflowers, tied together with hemp chord, hanging from a length of twine I strung across the ceiling.
Buttercups and daisies, red and white clover, chickweed, deadnettle. Mugwort, also. This week I learned that mugwort is a very mild psychoactive and it grows all around my house. (My little sister told me that bible pages are thin enough for rolling a joint, which would be useful if I owned a bible.)
There’s homemade soap curing in my room.
The first batch came out crumbly and brittle and streaked with veins of lye and soda ash. I’ve read that some folks think rebatching is disgraceful and isn’t true soap making and I think that is silly. I took what I had and melted it down and mixed it with beeswax and oats and milk and honey. Came out fine and smells delicious.
There’s plantain salve tucked away in a drawer in my room.
Broadleaf plantain grows almost everywhere where humans live. It’s known to be astringent, bitter, and is believed to draw impurities from small cuts and bites and stings on the skin.
There’s mead fermenting in my room.
I took a taste when I racked off the solids the other day. It’s very clearly alcoholic, but there’s still a background taste of honey. I’m worried because it’s stopped bubbling – it’s stopped making carbon dioxide. I think this means it could start to go bad if it comes in contact with oxygen, unless I bottle it quickly. That’s a tomorrow thing.
There’s a half-done crocheted sweater in my room. There’s a sand candle burning on an old clay tile. There’s a guitar in the corner, and it isn’t covered in dust. There’s a bookshelf. There are strains of Aoife O’Donovan and Crooked Still and Driftwood humming in the background.
All of these things –
all around me. While I’m reading, gaming, writing, trying to sleep.
It’s all very grounding. It’s good to have something to show for my time.
I knew it was coming. I’ve known this for a while. It’s the pandemic. People are dying and laying low, and the state is broke.
Suck it up, buttercup. You don’t exist in a vacuum.
Last year a classmate told me to let go and get out of this place while everything was still lovely. That if I stayed here too long, the beautiful things about this place and the happiest memories would begin to go sour and stale. She said that if you stay too long in a place you love, you’ll end up being forced to leave, or leaving willingly because you don’t like it there anymore.
Right now, I’m –
I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out. I’ve thought that my time here was unraveling and shifting and changing and going to end so many times.
And each time that things have changed so much that I’ve thought it could never be the same, I’ve been wrong.
Friends come and go, and chemistry in a group changes. The physical space changes, moves around. Leadership is passed from person to person. Administration does its thing. The ridiculously draining things about this kind of work take their toll. Imposter syndrome comes and goes. I learn, and grow, and I am constantly II becoming.
And I keep finding myself in a new incarnation of an old familiar spirit of a place.
When I started working in the math center we were located in a big room in the corner of the third floor of the library. There were whiteboards on the walls, and there was this perpetually-stoned-looking gremlin in a purple sweatshirt, and there were plants all over the place, and there was a safe-zone T-shirt and there was a bookshelf with a go board on the top shelf and there were old math textbooks and they were a mess, and it was excellent.
I think the first time I went to visit that room for help there was a small group of people in the corner and they were laughing and I think they were talking about snakes, and I was fairly sure that I was nowhere near cool enough to go up to those people and talk to them.
And then somehow I ended up working alongside some of those people, and laughing with them, and loving pretty much all of them and I don’t think most of them will ever actually know how much.
This job has taught me how to go up to strangers and talk to them and ask them how I could help. And that turned out to be easy next to learning how to admit when I didn’t know what I was doing, how to reach out and ask for help, how to listen, how to become more accepting and nonjudgmental than anyone had ever required me to be, how to read body language and communicate with silence, how to coax people into being self directed without them noticing it was happening and how to take someone from feeling confused to feeling like they were finally starting to understand.
Those fifteen weeks of that first semester changed who I am as a person. Those fifteen weeks are untouchable.
I have absolutely had moments of feeling useless because I didn’t understand or couldn’t remember how to do the things that people came to me for help with. I have had moments of feeling useless because even after I tried everything I could think of, my students didn’t seem to understand.
But I don’t think those moments of feeling useless negate everything I’ve learned from working here, or the moments when I believe I have been able to help.
I’m glad beyond words that I was able to be working in the math center when the pandemic happened. I’m honored to have been here to help, even in the moments when I knew that there was nothing I could do. I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else, or with any other group of people.
In all the weeks of working remotely, I only helped one student. His computer didn’t have a working microphone, so we had to get creative about how to work together.
He kept coming back until the end.
I always knew my time here was finite. But I wanted this place to be a haven for the nerds who needed somewhere to go for a long time after I was gone, after all of us had gone. In this moment, I’m wondering if it will be. I’m a little frightened.
Noticing that I haven’t written a blog post in what feels like a long time.
A long time ago, my older sister told me that she used to write, but that she doesn’t really write anymore because her time spent writing seems better spent doing the things she was writing about.
And I – hmm. I guess I can only speak for me.
I think that the process of writing and stringing words together brings me a particular kind of satisfaction that nothing else does. I think that writing takes my brain to a space where it can better see the patterns and recognize what’s real. So I think time spent writing is time well spent, for me. I think it’s some of the best time.
But there’s also something to be said for spending time doing the things I write about, because most of the things that I find myself writing about are very much rooted in life. I think it’s good to spend time living.
Writing is just thinking written down, and sometimes I use thought as a way to get away from life. It feels right to me to try to temper that with occasionally living so much that I look up after a while and find that I’ve stopped thinking.
So I’ve been – out there, living. Mostly by myself, but not always.
I’ve done and and made and learned some fascinating things. And it’s given me that much more to think about, more to write about. It’s added something, changed the color and the texture and the flavor of my thoughts. I think they’re all the better for a little change.
I’m trying to get out in the world and live the things I think and read and write about. it’s been lovely. And sometimes – frequently – it really, really hurts. But if I’m not there for the things that hurt, I think I miss so many other things. And there are so many other things.
So many.
And right now, I have to stop writing for a moment and get back to them.
Added like half a teaspoon of yeast nutrient and a handful of raisins for luck.
First small batch of dandelion wine. Started primary fermentation on Thursday, May 7th. Should be ready to rack off the solids, start secondary fermentation in about 2-3 weeks. After that, bottle and age for six months to a year.
Dandelion coffee is nothing like coffee, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.
I think my roots were just a little over-roasted, a little dark. I added a couple of cardamon pods and some cinnamon to help the flavor. Boiled everything in about 2-2 1/2 cups of water for 20 minutes, then removed from the heat, strained out the solids and let it cool down enough to drink. I prefer my coffee cool or cold with a little whole milk, so that’s how I tried the dandelion not-coffee.
And I – well. I honestly hadn’t actually expected to like this. I was expecting something overpoweringly bitter and green, or burnt and charred and blackened.
I was happily surprised.
(Relatively frequent happily-surprised-ness is like the only upshot of being stubbornly pessimistic all the time.)
Between the additional spices and the whole milk, dandelion not-coffee has a smooth and creamy consistency and a flavor that’s almost sweet. I think because of the spices I selected, my not-coffee was especially reminiscent of chai tea.
NB: a little bit of cardamon goes a long way.
The dandelion roots contributed some darker, smoke-like notes, almost like coffee; I think that’s what sets this beverage apart from the tea that I’m used to drinking.
Also, there’s a residual echo that tastes like – well, dandelions. That dirt-bitter greenness. It’s faint, it’s buried somewhere in the aftertaste, but it’s definitely there.
This was a relatively labor intensive cup of not-coffee. It took a moderate investment of time and work, but didn’t cost any money. It helped to get some weeds out of the strawberry patch. It was fun to try something new. And the end result was actually quite good; I would drink this. I like how this came out.
There was enough sun and wind to hang a load of laundry out to dry on the line today. Now all my jeans and sweaters smell like the outdoors, and it’s honestly the best.
I helped my parents, a little. Took care of the dog and the cats, cleaned up the kitchen, made a batch of enchiladas. My mother thanked me for all of the help.
I also pulled up some weeds in the garden.
Specifically, I pulled dandelions up by the roots. With a shovel, as necessary, as it frequently was; dandelion roots grow deep.
Earlier I cut the roots away from the rest of the plant, and scrubbed them and peeled them and chopped them and roasted them in the oven, and hopefully tomorrow I can brew them into dandelion-root tea. Theoretically, this is going to taste toasted and earthy and a little bitter – almost like coffee, but without the acid. Not coffee. Poor man’s coffee. Broke-and-procrastinating-college-student coffee. Without the buzz from the caffeine.
I also washed some of the younger greens and boiled them and saved them in a mason jar in the fridge. Boiling softened the bitter/green harshness; I think they’d be delicious in an omelette or a stir-fry. Something involving frying pans and a little garlic, anyway.
And the petals are stripped from the blossoms and added to an almost-full half gallon jar in the freezer. I almost have enough for a test batch of wine and I am soo excited. I am also 100% stalling this process until the champagne yeast arrives in the mail, which is taking forever, but is also good practice for the six months to a year that I’m going to have to wait for the wine to age enough to be delicious. It’ll be the middle of winter before I find out if this turned out alright, assuming that nothing explodes.
I’m noticing that it’s getting easier to do this – the waiting thing. The acceptance. The knowing that just because something isn’t physically present and happening right here and now, it’s still out there somewhere, and I’ll get there whenever I do.
Patience.
Patience for the end of a pandemic, for society reopening, for seeing my friends again and holding them and laughing, for leaving the house to go to work or go to a library, for the possibility of travel and school and expanding horizons. And patience for dandelion wine.
My cousin on the other side of the pond has recently become interested in foraging for edible plants. She’s been harvesting and researching and designing recipes and creating dishes, and she published her first cooking video this week:
I think this is exceptionally neat.
For one thing – speaking as a soon-to-be-broke-again college student – foraging sounds like an excellent source of free food!
Only a little bit like gardening. My mother has a garden. From watching my mother in her garden I’ve learned that gardening requires a herculean investment of work and time and careful attention. I don’t know how she does it.
Foraging is different. The weeds grow up everywhere, all by themselves; you usually can’t stop them.
All you have to do is know what to look for.
And you have to go looking. Go out for walks, with a knife and sharp eyes and a paper bag or a basket.
To be honest, oftentimes you probably don’t even need all of that. If you’re willing to get a little dirt under your fingernails, if you can live with the mud and the grass stains on your clothes, your elbows, your knees – the willingness to go is usually most of what you need for the going.
And so I’ve been foraging, on my own side of the pond.
It’s become an unexpectedly sweet way to stay connected to my cousin. Because on my side of the pond, some of the same plants grow. (Some of them are invasive species, but this does not necessarily mean that that they are not delicious.)
Wild garlic mustard, for one. Grows under trees and on roadsides, tastes bitter with a savory aftertaste, and if you crush the leaves in between your fingers you can smell a hint of garlic. (Kathrin noticed it was growing in the background of the picture of the deer skull on the front page of this blog.)
Garlic mustard, and ribwort plantains, and purple dead-nettles, and dandelions leaves before the flowers…
This week I learned that in order to cook dandelion leaves and still be able to eat them, you have to mix them with strong flavors to complement the bitterness. Soy sauce, garlic, bacon fat, coconut oil. (Maybe not all of them at once?)
nb: dandelions aren’t poisonous! Anything but, actually; allegedly they’re quite nutritious and the whole plant is technically edible. You can make wine from the petals and a coffee-like beverage out of the roots, in the fall. It’s just that the leaves taste like dirt, but greener. Especially later in the season, after the blossoms. I think they’re a lot more palatable when they’re new.
I’ve spent the better part of the last handful of days researching dandelion wine recipes, and I’ve discovered that there are easily as many ways to make the stuff as there are people who’ve written about making it. But most of them have the same basic processes in common. Dandelion wine is made up of dandelion petals, yeast, sugar, citrus, a couple of handfuls of raisins, and enough time in the right conditions for the yeast to convert the sugar into alcohol.
I have access to a kitchen and some fermentation materials, because I live with my mother. I have some old wine bottles and a few corks. And the backyard is covered in yellow blossoms…
To be fair – I’ve never done any home brewing before, my research has been made up of sources that are probably varying degrees of credible, and there’s a chance that if I do this wrong I’ll wind up with a couple of interestingly loud explosions and subsequently a very sticky mess.
(I know this on a rational level, but I haven’t actually had to clean up any particularly sticky messes yet)
So this weekend I’ve been picking dandelions in the morning, when the blossoms are open, and then separating the petals from the green stuff at the base. It’s oddly meditative work, and it’s something to do.
There’ll be this brief internal argument about which is worse: the sound of the alarm clock screaming or the prospect of leaving a comfortable space
(in my half-awake state, I never remember about the nightmares)
but the screaming wins.
this is what’s going to happen.
I will sit up and get to my feet and move across the room, and I’ll fumble in the dark until I manage to get the clock to stop screaming.
I will seriously consider going back to bed. In thousands of parallel universes, that is exactly what happens.
And in most of those universes, the nightmares are sure to follow. Dreams so vivid I’ll forget that they’re not real. I’ll wake up at eleven with a bad taste in my mouth, a fuzzy feeling in my head, a “you’re-pathetic-and-nobody-likes-you” feeling in my belly.
But when I get out of bed before the sun tomorrow and I feel cold and my stomach hurts a little and I’m groggy and I only want to rest, I’m not going to go back.
I’ll take a gulp of a tall glass of water. I’ll curl up in a chair, with my arms around my knees. I’ll turn on the candles or the Christmas lights, because they’re comforting and I like them. The sun will come up, and the cat will curl up in the crook of an elbow somewhere and purr loudly.
And I’ll reach for a book, and I’ll read and get lost in a world that isn’t real. But I’ll know it isn’t real, and that’s the difference.
And though it’s raining on the roof, I’ll put on jackets and old shoes, and I’ll sneak out of the back door and I’ll walk down to the woods
and though it’s freezing cold and raining I’ll be glowing on the inside
It’s not because I don’t think I can take a photograph that does the subject of the picture justice. I’m damn near positive that I can’t. But that doesn’t usually stop me trying.
I sometimes feel hesitant to take pictures, because there are some moments, some places, that are too sacred for that.
When I stumble on things that feel unreasonably lovely, I feel like I’ve been let in on a secret. Like I’ve been trusted. And I don’t want to share that, not at first.
It’s the same reason you don’t kiss people before you get to know them. If I took a picture of a place like this, before I knew my way around – it might be an aesthetically pleasing picture, but it’d be an empty picture. I’d have an image of a collection generic trees and earth and sky, but they wouldn’t be those trees, that earth, this sky.
The first few times I went to the swamp, I didn’t take any pictures. Now…
I’d found three or four different pathways from the field edge to the water, through a tangle of dense brambles and slick mud and fallen logs. I’ve noticed twisted vines that look suspiciously like poison ivy, and I’m careful not to touch, but I’ve scored myself some raspberry-cane scratches that are still healing. And I’ve left a mess of footprints.
I know which mushrooms grow on what trees, even if I couldn’t tell you what they’re called. I’ve counted shades of moss and lichen, I’ve noticed bones that are picked clean. I’ve heard the birds singing and sung back to them. I’ve scared a group of deer and they’ve scared me.
I’d stood and leaned against a tree trunk as it started hailing, and I’ve rolled up sleeves and pant legs against the heat on Easter Day.
It hasn’t been an especially long time, but it’s been an exceptionally good time, and for right now I feel okay about taking pictures. I feel like that’d be alright with this place, if I there was some way for me to ask.
I was out of the woods at exactly 8:59 this morning, which was cutting it close. But I did manage to take this back with me:
I’ve started to lose track of which days are which.
Was it last Sunday that I went west instead of east and found a swamp and a creek and tiny bones? Which afternoon was it warm enough to tie a rain coat around my waist?
When did I march into Evie’s room and announce that we were going on an adventure? The day we got caught in the rain, and our mother picked us up in the car and brought us home, and we made cocoa…
When did I walk six miles in the rain? Wednesday, I think. I remember that I listened to Bruce Springsteen and saw little white flowers and snail shells by the creek bed.
When did I find the pickup truck in the woods on the other side of the field? Was that the same day that I lay flat on my back and looked up through the tree branches and then tried to climb a maple tree and fell and sprained my dignity when nobody was watching? I can’t remember.
I know for certain that it was Friday when I got up at sunrise and went trespassing. In the snow. And it was beautiful. I agree with Aldo Leopold about the posted signs.
Clarification: I have a problem because there is a deep, dark chasm where my confidence should be. I have a lack-of-confidence, and that is a problem because it creates unnecessary stress in my life. One of the manifestations of that stress was the accidental gap year.
I have a lack-of-confidence problem, and I am mostly not sure what to do about it.
This evening, I curled up at the foot of my sister’s bed and asked if she could be a support and she sighed and asked me what was up and I said “I have a lack-of-confidence problem” and she said “SAME” which surprised me because she is the strongest, sassiest, most passionate and comfortable-in-her-own-skin woman that I have ever met in my life. She told me to put on an exterior persona that makes me seem more confident than I actually am, and I laughed because I’m so utterly helpless at pretending to be something I’m not. I am almost sure that the most effective mask I wear is my quiet social-awkwardness.
When I told my sister that I was worried about acting too confident, coming across as too sure of myself, too secure… it was her turn to laugh at me.
“I think you’re safe,” she tells me.
Between the two of us, the best coping mechanism we could come up with in a fifteen minute conversation was essentially “shout positive-sounding things into the void where the confidence should be and listen to the echos and pretend.”
I wonder what it feels like, pretending…
If I had a confident voice, what would I say?
“I have a void where my confidence should be. You know what else I have?
I have a math degree.
I have a math degree because I really, really wanted a math degree.
I have a math degree because working through an algebra problem is one of life’s simple pleasures, for me. It has been for a long time.
I have a math degree because I wanted to push myself outside of my comfort zone in my first two years of college. I wanted to take on something challenging so that I would be pushed into learning new coping skills, discovering new limits inside of myself. I want to be learning and growing, always.
I have a math degree because I went to what seems like hundreds of hours of math lecture. I showed up and took notes and asked questions – lots of questions – and I put in the time outside of class to try to make sense of what was going on. I focused my energy on something and made progress.
I have a math degree because I was curious, and interested, and I wanted to truly understand.
I have a math degree because I wanted to have enough understanding to support students who needed help, because I have empathy and compassion for feeling full of math anxiety and stressed and I have empathy and compassion for folks who are not sure what to do.
I have a math degree because I got an A in every math class that I took in college except for discrete and that was an A- and that’s because I did not do my homework all semester because it seemed easy and I needed to focus on other things that were also important
I have a math degree because I was able to admit that I needed help. I have a math degree because I swallowed a lot of pride.
I have a math degree because I learned how to make mistakes, and not understand, and still not understand, and be some kind of comfortable with that lack of understanding until I had enough understanding to feel competent.
I have a math degree because I am exceptionally stubborn. I was stubborn enough to find endurance, and perseverance, and strength in moments when I was at my most confused and vulnerable. I have a math degree because I was committed to getting through to the end of those two years.
I have a math degree because I have integrity. I asked for help, but I also tried very hard to honor the expectation that the work that I did, and completed, and handed in, was my own work and a fair representation of my own level of understanding.
I have a math degree because I can recognize patterns, and apply abstract concepts to different situations, and ask questions and think through the best thing to try next, and because I …”
Fuck, this is hard.
“I’m smart. I’m not-not intelligent. I am intelligent. I have a good brain.
I have a math degree because I am intelligent.”
Right now –
I am having a confidence problem.
There’s something that I’m not completely understanding, about – me. About my strengths and weaknesses, about where I belong, and what to do and how to foster the skills that I do have. About what I know, and how best to share it. About the kind of person that I want to be.
Not completely understanding is making me extremely uncomfortable.
And yet somehow – I have been uncomfortable with not understanding so many times before that I – at the very least, I understand.
Someday, sometime, I hope that I have grown enough that I know how to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable – comfortable with not understanding.
It was raining, but it wasn’t cold. The ground was soaked, but not too muddy for waking in old shoes.
I can’t tell you exactly where I was, this afternoon, before dinner. I wasn’t lost – the backwoods are small, and I usually have a halfway decent sense of direction. But if I told you where I’d been, then I’d be admitting to breaking the law. Technically. There may or may not have been posted signs that clearly read “NO TRESPASSING- Violators Will Be Prosecuted,” and I may or may not have seen them. So I think it’s better if I don’t tell you.
It’s probably in my best interest to tell you that I definitely did not go exploring in the woods beyond the fields, on the hill at the end of our own little lane.
Because it isn’t our lane. It doesn’t belong to us. We just walk there, like the people who lived in our big drafty farmhouse before us. We’ve walked there almost every day for twenty years, and nobody else ever does. But it isn’t our lane, and the fields aren’t our fields, and the woods are not our woods.
So unfortunately, I can’t describe to you the lovely place that I didn’t discover today because I wasn’t there.
Or anywhere.
but just say for a moment that I *had* stumbled across something
in the woods beyond the fields
in the rain, as I was
slipping down a gentle slope
with a blanket of dead leaves and tangled undergrowth
picking my way carefully between young saplings and rotting stumps and fallen trees
What if there had been something. A greener patch of ground off in the distance; pools of still water between patches of just slightly higher ground. It wasn’t, of course, but if it had been, it would have been almost like a maze. An overgrown, tricky, unpredictable labyrinth – tread carefully. Mind your step, and don’t get lost. If you can see reflections of the sky in the path ahead, jump across them.
but if you slip, it’s only water, after all
If I’d been there, in such a place, I’m sure I would have heard the peepers singing, and the low, insistent humming of the wind, the clattering of branches blown together high above.
But I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t have heard them.
I couldn’t have.
Which won’t help you to understand why my old shoes are soaked through, or why my coat and hat needed hanging up to dry, or why there are mysterious splattering of mud around the ankles of the leggings I’d pulled on that morning
An uneventful hour of walking down the lane and back again, alone, can’t quite explain the fae behind her eyes
I suppose if it was there all the time, it wouldn’t be half as special.
“If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you need to seriously re-examine your life.” ~ Bill Watterson
The day before the day before the day before yesterday, my knees were green from kneeling on the ground in the backyard and digging for snails in the dirt. I stood and watched the Lara-dog roll in the grass, and I hula hopped in the wind.
The day before the day before yesterday, my clothes were soaked through because I went outside to scrub out the inside of my Jeep with hot water and soap. When I was tired, I sat in the yard at the base of a tree to journal in the sun.
The day before yesterday, my shoes and socks and pants below the knee were splattered with mud from the dirt road across the way because I – I needed to run, around the block, after work, because work had been infuriating and I needed to put something between work and home
And the next day my legs were so sore but the sun was shining so I pulled on a sweatshirt, and old leggings with holes the most. awkward. places, and I laced up my battered old shoes. I ran around the block, again, and it was like pushing through molasses because it’s been a while since I’ve asked my legs and heart and lungs to work like this. But they did what I asked of them, for two miles. And then I doubled over and caught myself thinking that I was feeling old
(and Stephanie burst out laughing, and Sara just looked at me over the tops of her glasses, and Trista sat up indignantly and demanded that, if I was old, what did that make her? and my father rolled his eyes and smiled. And I had to laugh, too.)
and the morning after that, I ran outside in boxer shorts and mud boots to take photographs of daffodils, first thing
And later I tried to run but the muscles in my legs were full of acid and there were tiny, sharp crystals building up at the ends of the veins. So I mostly walked around the block, in the cold and the wind and the rain.
By the time I made it back to my parents’ house, I was happy to be inside – to wash my clothes, take a shower, change into clean sweaters and fresh jeans.
Gratitude for running water, for hot water especially, for a washing machine and a drying machine at home. Thanks, Mom & Dad. I love you.
I’m stuck at home – by choice, for right now. But I don’t have to be stuck inside, if I don’t want to be.
When all of this is over… when we’re all a little older
I’m going to set up a big tent in the back yard – like the kind they have at weddings. And under the tent I’ll build a dance floor, with more than enough room for everybody and all their family and friends. And we’ll fill that space with people and with music and with food
I’m not sure how, but we’re going to do it. Not just canned music, but the living kind of music, channeled through and in and out of real people, people standing together in the same space.
When all of this is over, we’re going to dance.
Big, full, shameless dancing. Klutzy, awkward, careful dancing. Peaceful, in-the-moment dancing. Old familiar dancing beside unfamiliar dancing. Shy dancing. “We’re going to fucking figure out how to do this if it’s the last thing we ever do” dancing.
We’re all going to dance, together. All of us in the same place. Not just faces and voices in a conference call, not just words appearing on a screen. Humans connecting in person.
It’s old-fashioned, but so help me – it’s a good thing for a body to do.
“If I could choose the way I was to die — I would go falling through the hot summer sky. With ribbons and bows tied to my hands and my feet — I’d gaze across the world, and I would feel complete…”
~ Richie Sterns
Speaking for me, I think that I’d be up for dancing like we’re none of us sure that there’s going to be a tomorrow. I’d be up for dancing into the wee hours of the morning, under the stars.
And when all the dancing’s over, when the people have gone home …
I’d be up for sitting in camp chairs around a fire, curling up in an old quilt that smells a little like the inside of a barn, like grass and sunshine and dirt. I’d be up for sitting in silence, all worn out from dancing, or for listening to stories and watching the sun rise. I’d settle for a forehead kiss and a deep sleep, and no dreams until the late into the next morning.
When all of this is over… I say that like I know it’s going to end. I don’t know. I feel more shaken and uncertain than I have in a long time. Here I am, thinking about dancing in the aftermath of what is not going to be end of the world because we’re not going to let that happen
when right now I’d dearly love to be able to go spend one solitary hour in a coffee shop, or a library, a safe space in school.
I miss the rocks and the trees by shore of a lake and I miss standing around in parking lots. I miss being surrounded by the little movements and the sounds and the conversations between real live other people. I miss passing familiar faces in the hallway. I miss you.
And so, when all of this is over, when we’re all a little older…
When all this is over, I promise, we’re going to dance.
In the deli at the grocery store, there is an age-old feud between the morning-shift people and the night-shift people.
Nobody knows exactly when or why it started, but everyone understands why it’s lasted as long as it has.
I’m a rookie, and therefore expendable, so I have worked both shifts, and I can confidently say that there’s a palpable difference between them.
Morning shift people are responsible for turning on the lights and the machines, for uncovering and unwrapping the foodstuffs, for prepping ingredients and setting up processes and making up prepackaged meals. Morning shift people are very particular about things being just-so, which I suppose I can understand. They have to maintain an exhausting level of urgency and perfectionism, and create things, and push back against entropy, and I think that it’s often exhausting. And if the night-shift people have left even one small thing out of place – and we usually have – they tend to grumble about us, loudly.
Whereas the night shift people are – well. It’s like Newton’s third law.
We are responsible for turning off the machines and lights, for covering and wrapping the foodstuffs, for taking things down and putting them away and throwing them out, if they won’t keep, and scrubbing surfaces until they are gleaming. And we tend to wind up cleaning up the halfway-through-a-day-in-a-kitchen messes left by the morning-shift staff, and we tend to grumble about it, loudly.
Night people undo the work of the morning people, and morning people undo the work of the night people, and there’s a bit of unsurprising friction, to be sure. But we balance each other out, and complement each other, and that is how the kitchen continues to function over time.
And I think it’s a little funny that I seem to have gone from a relatively objective outsider to someone who has already decidedly chosen a side in a little bit over a month.
I like night shift energy.
I wouldn’t say that it’s less work, but I think that the atmosphere is a tad more peaceful, more laid-back. We are still pushing back against entropy. But I think maybe setting things up is like trying to swim upstream, whereas taking them down and apart is like – kicking along with the current. It’s still work, but it’s the kind of work that leaves room for thought and conversation around the edges.
But it doesn’t matter.
Because right now we are all essential personnel. Because even in the midst of a pandemic, people have got to eat. And I’ve gone from applying for a job on a whim a couple of months ago to risking my personal health, my family’s health, to leave the house and interact with the general public, for hours, several times a week.
When I tell people that I work in a grocery store, I sometimes feel embarrassed
I’ve been steeped in this academic-oriented culture and the message is that I need to go on in school and better myself and get a “good job”
but in the middle of a crisis, we are the ones that are still out here – on the front lines, if you will. Because we’re essential to the fragile way in which this society works, essential to supporting so many of the little things that I know that I have sometimes taken for granted.
Last week, when all of this started to really hit home, I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed about working in a grocery store. I was too busy serving the rush of stressed-out customers who had come to us for one of the most basic human needs – food. And all I could do was smile at each customer, and care a little for each one of them, for just a second. No matter how shaken they seemed, or I felt.
Together my coworkers and I take turns shopping for each other on our breaks, and get caught in untrue rumors about martial law. We watch the bread supply in the aisle across from the deli dwindle from half-full shelves to empty in one afternoon.
And today, I do have time to feel all this, and reflect on it, because the store is getting so little traffic that they didn’t need me to come in today, because people are practicing social distancing and holing themselves up in their homes.
I feel lucky to be witnessing this pandemic through the eyes of a blue-collar job. It’s been eye-opening.
This has also been the second or third week of watching the schools shift from in-person to online, from open on-campus housing to students being sent home. It feels like the Harry Potter stories I grew up with, and I can’t help thinking of Harry saying “Hogwarts is my home.”
I am thinking of FLCC.
The shift on the academic front feels unprecedented, and sudden, and neigh on impossible.
Behind-the-scenes work is being done by so many people as we try to adapt to this, as we try to work out how to support each other through this. I am so proud of everyone.
I think about such tiny particles – so small, impossible to see – that seem to have the power to close down nations. The libraries, the restaurants, the schools, the coffee shops. I think of the people in Italy, singing with each other from their balconies. I think of the cruise ship off the coast of Japan, or close to the shores of California. I think of my little sister’s senior year, of all the events that will not happen. I think of the markets, the music industry, the basketball season, the nursing students, the old folks’ homes. I think of the domestic abuse situation that has just gotten jarringly worse. I think of mental health and social isolation. I think of the college students with no access to internet. I think about the people with no homes. I think of another epidemic, and of all of the people who didn’t care.
And I think of the blue skies in China, and I feel a tiny flicker of hope
I have too much time to think, when I’m sweeping the floors, washing dishes.
I think of the twitch of a butterfly’s wing, far, far away.
I hear that garlic is good for preventing colds and flu, and for easing the symptoms of the sick.
Rinsing the back of one’s throat with hot saltwater helps a body fight a sickness. In my experience, this practice also functions as a preventative measure against sickness – especially if someone living under the same roof is symptomatic.
Honey and lemon in hot water will ease the discomfort of a sore throat.
Acetaminophen helps with fever.
When I twisted my ankle badly in the last week before the musical, in my senior year – I drank mug after mug of home-made bone broth, for something like three or four days. I think it helped.
For sprains, remember the acronym RICE – rest, ice, compress, elevate. Don’t walk on it.
Higher stress levels increase the risk of getting sick because stress saps the resources that a body should be using for baseline maintenance things, like digestion and healing and immunity.
Some of the best things for stress reduction, for me –
Reading. Laughter. Fresh air and time outside. Walking, or sometimes running. Movement. Showers. Comfy pants. Tea and cats and candle wax. Wholesome intimacy – most often hugs and conversations, for me. Intentional solitude. Familiar songs, or things, or places. Singing harmony.
It also helps me to take action on the things I know I need to do in order to keep going. Fill up a gas tank, pay a phone bill, fill out a time entry, send in an application, write an email. Afterwards, I feel lighter.
Some of the more dangerous self-soothing things:
Driving at 80mph down the back roads, at night. Drinking coffee after sunset. Getting lost on purpose. Arguing for my side of things, for what I want, instead of compromising enough to keep the peace. Scrolling through social media. Turning the music up too loud. Hidden whiskey. Impulse-buying, especially food. Putting things off.
I know that sometimes I try too hard to help everyone, to know what to do, to know everything. On the other hand, I often catch myself curling up into a useless little ball, and falling silent, and feeling powerless compared to all the things that are wrong in the world.
I think that for me the most effective kind of distraction from the hard things in life is time spent worrying about them.
I hear that the topical application if lavender is good for burns and for sleeping, and tea tree helps to disinfect the air. Eucalyptus keeps the mosquitoes away. I also know that some people’s lungs and noses are sensitive to these smells, and that it’s baseline decency to ask.
I hear that burning sage helps to keep the bad spirits away, and that smudging can help cleanse a space of negative energy.
I believe that all of this is somewhat silly and arbitrary, but this morning I needed something to write about, and focus on, and think through.
Stay healthy and take care of yourselves and each other.
On the other side of the attic windows, there is blackness.
I crack them open to let the smoke out, and cold air slaps me in the face as it tumbles into the room. I don’t mind it. Cold air is easier to breathe.
On my side of the windows, there are candles burning, their flickering light reflected in the glass. I am bundled up in a snug, worn jacket and the yellow scarf from Amsterdam, jeans, and an extra pair of socks.
I’m tired and I’m hurting on several different levels.
I’m cradling a mug of hot tea in my hands, and it’s too hot to drink just yet, but breathing in the steam – the contrast between hot air and cold – feels wholesome. I feel like I’m healing something on the inside.
I feel apprehensive about trying to sleep. Lately I’ve been having nightmares – I don’t remember the stories, but I remember the feeling that goes with them
– the shock in the moment when a knife slips, or when there isn’t one last step at the top of a familiar staircase in the dark –
I don’t want to feel that feeling, but I’m so tired.
Candlelight is comforting. Flame and smoke, and warmth and yellow light. Familiar smells, and memories of sitting around a campfire, sharing stories. I feel closer to all of the things that are earthly and tangible and real, and untouchable, and for always.
There is also a cat who lives in my room – or I’m allowed to sleep in her room, depending on your perspective. She hates everyone but me. When I’m in her room, she makes it quite clear that she requires attention – chin scritches, behind-the-ear scratches, a lap or the curve of an elbow to curl up inside. If I don’t give her attention, she will climb up my limbs like branches of a tree, and bat gently at my face. If I close my door, she needs to be on the other side of it. We share warmth, and she smiles and purrs soundly when she’s happy. And when she’s had enough, she tells me.
The tea, the cats, the candle wax – they nudge me towards a safer state of mind. I can rest here. I’m tired and it’s okay to let everything be. It’ll be here for me in the morning.
I’m a tiny speck on the surface of a tiny world, and everything is hurtling through space, and why of all of the arbitrary ways to experience this universe am I looking out at the world through Loren’s eyes…
Sometimes in the morning, I get up before the sunrise.
When I stumble out of bed, I notice that the uneven attic floor is freezing. I must have forgotten to close the window the previous night.
I reach out in the darkness for my glasses, shove them haphazardly onto the bridge of my nose. There.
The cat is napping peacefully on a tangle of blankets that have fallen to the floor – evidence of restless sleeping and bad dreams. There are droplets of hardened candlewax on the wooden headboard, dregs of herbal tea in the bottom of an old chipped mug, a small heap of half-charred sage leaves in an old ceramic bowl. Teetering stacks of books and paper are scattered all over the table, the floor, the bookshelves. My great-grandmother’s ancient and very ugly vanity is almost completely covered with notes and old pictures, strung with dried flowers and Christmas lights.
From the odd bits of mirror that aren’t covered up with old photographs, a worried looking girl peers out at me. Roundish glasses frame dark circles under grey-green eyes. A mess of brown hair that wants cutting surrounds a plainish face, with early-morning blotchy skin, blue lips, boyish eyebrows and my mother’s nose.
I scoop as much of my hair as possible into a ponytail, and pin the rest of it back with cheap plastic hair combs to keep it out of my face. After a few moments of bleary rummaging and split-second decisions, the rest of me is presumably somewhere in among the oversized sweaters and old jeans.
I need coffee.
I pad barefoot down the stairs and make my way into the kitchen. The radio is quiet. The dishes are put away, the counters are halfway between mom’s cluttered and dad’s sparkling. Dad has already left for work, and left me a mug half full of black coffee by the coffee maker. My mother is still sleeping, my sister is in holed up in her bedroom. There is black market milk in a glass jar in the second fridge.
A few moments later there is a little less milk in the open jar and my coffee is the perfect color, and I’m sitting with my legs crossed on the kitchen chair, and I’m drinking with my eyes closed.
It’s knowin’ that your door is always open And your path is free to walk That makes me tend to leave my sleepin’ bag rolled up And stashed behind your couch
And it’s knowin’ I’m not shackled by forgotten words and bonds And the ink stains that have dried upon some lines That keeps you in the back roads by the rivers of my memory And keeps you ever gentle on my mind
It’s not clingin’ to the rocks and ivy Planted on their columns now that bind me Or somethin’ that somebody said Because they thought we fit together walkin’
It’s just knowin’ that the world will not be cursin’ or forgivin’ When I walk along some railroad track and find That you’re movin’ on the back roads by the rivers of my memory And for hours you’re just gentle on my mind
Though the wheat fields and the coastlines And the junkyards and the highways come between us And some other woman’s cryin’ to her mother ‘Cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence, tears of joy might stain my face And the summer sun might burn me till I’m blind But not to where I cannot see you walkin’ on the back roads By the rivers flowin’ gentle on my mind
I dip my cup of soup Back from a gurglin’, cracklin’ cauldron in some train yard My beard a roughenin’ coal pile And a dirty hat pulled low across my face
Through cupped hands ’round a tin can I pretend to hold you to my breast and find That you’re wavin’ from the back roads by the rivers of my memories Ever smilin’, ever gentle on my mind
When I’m with you, my chest feels full to bursting.
I would like to take this feeling
Put it safely in a bottle
Set the bottle on a shelf, or maybe
keep it in my pocket
So when I want to feel this feeling
I can reach out, absentminded
Fingers brush against the surface
Cool and heavy in my hands
And I’ll take a sip, and worry
That I have less in my bottle
than before.
And I’m terrified that one day
I will need to feel this feeling
And a sip won’t be enough
I’ll swallow till the bottle’s empty
Drink until the feeling’s gone
I have dreams about the bottle
Slipping, falling to the floor
Slow motion, shattering in pieces
I’d be reeling, I’d be numb
But then you’re standing right beside me Telling stories, and I’m laughing And my chest feels full to bursting As I’m reaching for your hand
I can’t bottle up this feeling
I can’t put it on a shelf, and I can’t
Keep it in my pocket
I can’t take a sip whenever
I am searching for this feeling
When I’m feeling less than whole
If I can live without this bottle Maybe I will catch the feelings Made of everything around me Harsh or gentle, bittersweet
So when I’m standing right beside you
Telling stories, and you’re laughing
I’ll be proud to have found something
in the intervening time
I can share to make you happy
Even one smile is an honor. Two is precious.
And it’s silly, but true.
When we’re apart, my chest feels full to bursting…
I work at a community college that was built into the side of a hill, by the water.
On the third floor of the college, there is a hallway, and at the end of the hallway there is a door. The door leads outside into a small alcove – thick cylindrical pillars supporting an overhanging roof over the doorway, two trash bins, a quaint flat space surrounded by knee-high cement walls and wooden benches, a picnic table. A flight of cement-block stairs follows the curve of the hill up and past the O-building and into a parking lot. Daffodils and myrtle cover the side of the hill, and the branches of a big cherry tree settled over it all. There is always a hint of cheap cigarette smoke in the air. Hoffman.
I have a vivid, almost year-old memory of this place in my head. It was almost the end of my last semester as a student here. The weather had turned gentle and warm, and there were several of us sitting outside at the picnic table; we were working on our Linear Algebra homework before class. The breeze was playing with Emma’s hair and the pages of our notebooks. Both Alexes were struggling, but with different things.
I was struggling to block out the voices that were anxiously trying to gauge where I was compared to everyone else in that moment. I was noticing the warmth of the sun on my back, and it was a welcome kind of soothing.
In another memory, I am sitting alone. The sun was hidden behind a veil of clouds, but the air was warm. I think it must have been raining earlier that day. Think of the smell of dirt in the spring after rain.
The cherry tree’s white blossoms are a little past their prime, and every time the wind blows – even a little – a flurry of white flowers tumbles down. There are cherry blossoms everywhere: caught in the droplets of water on the picnic table, in the myrtle on the hillside, in my hair, on the lined-paper algebra notes open in front of me.
It was the very last day.
I shouldn’t even have been studying. I shouldn’t even really have been on campus, that day. Every other classmate had presumably taken their last test, handed in their last paper, locked away the schoolbooks in a drawer for the summer and thrown away the key.
But Hoffman had let me take all the time that I needed, and so I was still there. At the picnic table, under the cherry tree, worrying at thin pencil lines on white paper.
That feelings that’s something like uncomfortable and peaceful at the same time.
Yesterday I was curled up on that same picnic table in the sun. I’d skipped Alice, because I needed a moment to breathe.
Hoffman jumped down off the wall, smelling of cigarette smoke, landed on his feet. I was startled.
He told me that discouragement is valid, but also that taking a moment to disconnect from the dysfunction in the world and step away from technology and just – be – is so important. And it helps him.
But if I had children, I would read to them, from the beginning. Rowling, and Tolkien, and Madeline L’Engle. Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman. Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum and Arthur Conan Doyle. Bill Watterson. So many others. We would hang out in libraries, and I wouldn’t feel ashamed and hush them if their voices were too loud.
I don’t want children, but if I had children, I would take them to the woods and build fairy houses, and teach them to climb trees, and hold their hands as they clambered across fallen logs like balance beams.
I don’t want children but if I had children I would dress them in bright colors until they learned how to dress themselves. Yellows and greens and blues and reds. I’d teach them how to knit. I’d teach them how to teach themselves how to knit. We’d visit thrift shops and try on jackets. I’d try to teach them about the versatility of button-downs and they would roll their eyes at the void where my fashion sense should be.
I don’t want children but if I had children I’d sing to them at night until they were old enough to remember it after they’d grown up.
I don’t want children, but if I had children I would sit on the floor with them and teach them how to draw pictures on rainy days. I’d teach them about numbers and fractions and algebra and calculus. We’d watch science documentaries, and make the Socratic method into a game for long car rides. I’d try to teach them how to think.
I don’t want children but if I had children I would want to shove them out into the world. I would give them space and time to wander and get lost. I would coax them out of their comfort zones. I would let them make mistakes and figure things out for themselves. And I would let them exist separately from me.
But you can be damn sure I would give them a safe place to come home to.
There would be chickens, and a muddy back yard with a creek and lots of trees, and there would be dogs and cats and possibly alpacas or maybe goats. There would be a radio long after radios were obsolete. There would be the smell of a wood stove burning and coffee brewing and bread baking and something simmering on the stove.
I don’t want children I don’t want children I don’t want children
I’m not sure why I painted my nails this weekend. I think it must have been a subliminal response to my very own personal formaldehyde deficit.
Nail polish application isn’t usually a thing that I do, because I’m not very good at it.
This time, I only managed to paint the fingernails on my left hand. I really wish this was symbolic of something – my distracted perfectionism, or the self-doubt I carry around, or some kind of internal duality, or gender questions. But I’m actually just excruciatingly right-handed and I barely had the dexterity for the left one.
And I – yeah. I am always learning. Learning happens when I try things that are new.
For instance! I found out exactly how long isn’t enough time for the polish to dry, when I forgot what I was doing and tried to turn the pages of a book I’d borrowed from someone I don’t know very well and left a streak of red.
And, you know. The universe will keep presenting me with the same lesson until it is learned, so there is also nail polish in my hair, from when I tried to push it back out of my face. And on my forehead. And on my knee, for some reason. And all over my fingers. My little sister told me she uses the green side of a sponge to get the nail polish off her skin.
I found out what happens when you spill a drop of red nail polish in a bathtub of hot water when the bathtub in question is made of fiberglass that – well, it used to be white.
And I found out what happens to nail polish on the thumbnail that catches a groove and spins a wheel on a lighter, creating a spark, igniting the lighter fluid that’s escaping where a thumb is pressing down
creating just enough space for the flame to turn a dried-out sage leaf black
I found out what happens to painted nails when you spend six hours up to your elbows in a kitchen sink, scrubbing greasy metal pans with steel wool and mystery chemicals. Even inside the plastic gloves, the paint is chipped.
I haven’t done the fingernail painting thing since – I must have been five or six years old. I remember that my mother was good at it, but didn’t usually like to. She spent too much time playing in the dirt, and wasn’t inclined to sit still for long enough for the paint to dry. Later, I remember her objecting very strongly to the smell of the fumes. To be fair, I’m almost sure that the first ingredient in nail polish is the same chemical they use to preserve the fetal pigs we dissected in biology in like tenth grade. So I hear her concern for us. I just haven’t decided what I think.
Still, I remember how daintily perfect my fingers used to look, for the first few days, when I was little. And I remember watching the paint crack and chip and fall apart, and crumble to nothing. They’d spend more time being imperfect than beautiful. And I didn’t mind.
I remember Evie helping me turn them gold, for my 2016 Prom. They stayed that way all summer. I am just remembering this, just now.
I’m not sure why it came up again, this weekend. Maybe it had to do with an overheard conversation between coworkers at the grocery store about what this kind of work does to their hands, and I was curious. Maybe it was a conversation with Evie about an old homeschooling friend who used to paint his toenails different colors. Either way, I stole a bottle from my sister with permission and cautiously attempted about two coats. And it was messy, but I learned things. It could take me years, because I won’t always have the time or the inclination to work on this. And I will probably keep creating messes and having to clean them up, and sometimes the stains will be permanent. But someday I will add this to the list of things that I know how to do with some degree of grace.
(Hi. I am in a super comfortable space rn and I am wanting to practice a small change in writing style. More adjectives. Outside of comfort zone! Could be really really bad, but probably interesting, and I have to try to do this for an audience or I – won’t care. Also practicing noticing things, if that makes sense.)
Deliberately showered for like twice as much time as usual, this morning! May or may not have accidentally kicked out the pump.
Got lost inside a frumpy-looking combination of the old black corduroy pants that used to be my mother’s, my dad’s baggy green wool sweater, the loose-knit winter hat that Donahue made me one Christmas, and a pair of somebody’s old grey socks with holes in the toes.
Stretched out under a heavy, off-white afghan that is at least as old as the sum of the ages of both of my sisters and I, all together.
(36 & a half, 21 almost, 17 & a half…)
Evie asked me if I was cold.
There’s a cat curled up on the blanket over my knees, and we are sharing bodyheat between us. She’s a grown up incarnation of the kitten we rescued from the top of a tree, in July, two years ago.
Beneath us is a new-to-this-house brown pleather couch that was probably worth a fortune, a long time ago, which my parents somehow scored for free
Halfway through this morning’s allotment of coffee. Dad used to drink dark roast brewed so strong that it tasted like ashtray, but it’s been getting lighter over time. Add black market whole milk from cows we know – if I said any more than that I’d have to kill you – until it’s the right color. Dad can spare about half or two thirds of a mug out of each pot he brews. It’s nice of him to share.
There’s a book. Of course there’s a book. Always.
This time, it’s a remarkably angsty fantasy romance story about witches. Something between JKR and Dan Brown.
Maybe later there will be Star Trek.
Yesterday, I drove to Mansfield PA to watch Tigh performing in the musical Chicago.
Hour and a half of the repetitive, French Louisiana thrum from Keith Frank’s accordion, in the fast lane on 390, there and back again.
So worth it!
Taking an afternoon to feel physically comfortable and read. I feel like I earned this.
