Business travel is built around the idea of the solitary. When you check into business hotels, you’re given a single room key and there’s only enough of that awful hotel room coffee for one. You’ll often get a king size bed, but that’s just the hotel’s way of saying that you might be sharing the bed with someone, but it’s not someone they expect will be sticking around for morning coffee.

Leisure travel is not designed in quite the same way. Where does one sense this more strongly than when hoping to order food from a restaurant accustomed to tourists? At an all-inclusive resort in a tropical location.

It begins on the plane. Again, a business traveler is used to certain type of fellow passenger: generally male, generally in an uncomfortable suit, generally furiously typing on a blackberry until long after the “turn off electronic devices” announcement. An amusing way to pass the time on the flight is to listen to those around you introduce themselves in pre-emptive, self-congratulatory ways. They strike up wary conversations, ostensibly to get to know each other, but in reality as first class versions of gladiator games. “I’m going to Salt Lake to close a million dollar deal. I cover the whole Utah region. Everyone needs pens.” “Oh really? Interesting. I have a meeting with the Utah governor to talk about paperless technologies.” “We should exchange business cards. I’ll email you!” The business traveler version of “I’ll call you” after a blind date.

Planes to leisure destinations are much louder, as they are full of people who already know each other, traveling in packs. A woman behind me boarding the plane to Puerto Vallarta asked the flight attendant about getting someone to switch seats so she could sit with her friend. “It’s all couples on this flight”, the flight attendant told her. “You probably won’t find anyone who will switch.”

Per usual, the taxi driver was quizzical. “You came by yourself? No husband? No boyfriend? No friends?” And here’s where I start to wonder if in addition to having no interest in coupling up, I’m fundamentally unable to even if I did want it. Because the idea of spending a few days entirely by myself doing entirely what I want whenever I want (or not) is exactly what I want to be doing.

Here’s another thing about an all-inclusive tropical resort. You’re not even allowed to book for just yourself. When they say, prices per person, double occupancy, what they mean is that you’re paying for two people, including meals and drinks, whether you invited someone along or not. When I called the hotel to arrange transportation and said it would be just me at the airport, they wanted to know when the second taxi needed to go fetch my traveling companion. When I checked in, reception wanted to know when the second person would be arriving. It’s a perfectly logical question, considering I’ve just paid for two sets of towels, two sets of meal bracelets. Who would do that?

Someone who thinks the solitude, the independence, the freedom are worth it.

Which brings me back to my pondering. I just read Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage. Back when I read the author’s first book, Eat, Pray, Love, I so identified with her agony over purposely destroying, with her own hands, what many would consider the epitome of success.

But unlike her, now that I have independence, freedom — all of those things you aren’t allowed to book at an all-inclusive hotel — I don’t know that I could ever go back. Her new book explores the idea that there’s really no such thing as balance. You can’t have the autonomy and independence and privacy and freedom to do absolutely anything you want anytime you want and have the intimacy and reliability and security of a permanent relationship. Her fear is of the institution of marriage, that marriage itself can overtake you. Perhaps, but I don’t think you need to be married for a relationship to erase large swaths of you, due to the very point that you can’t be completely independent and free and etc.

And yes. I know. Of course the other side of it is it really so important to be able to read in bed with the beside lamp if you can’t sleep at 2am, when the tradeoff is everlasting love and comfort and someone to hold your hand? And I guess my answer is that I don’t know.

When people find out I’ve decided, for real, permanently and non-reversibly, not to have kids, they sometimes ask if I might regret it later. If surely one day I’ll wish for the comfort of children and grandchildren and family and again, all the etc. that implies. I don’t know. Clearly I don’t think so.

And so it goes with relationships. Or, at least, that kind of relationship — the type where you pledge your love to one alone and you live in the same house and you tend not to go to all-inclusive resorts without.

I do sometimes feel like I’m the only person actively not looking for a white dress and a white picket fence and a dog and 2.3 children. Well, me and college guys maybe. And not even all of them are in my camp. Apparently, even the word “solitary” is not only not generally considered positive, with thoughts of unencumbered freedom, but indeed skews negative. Consider the only vaguely positive definition I could find: “following or enjoying a life of solitude”. It only allows for the possibility of enjoyment. But that’s overwhelming joyousness compared to the other definitions: having no companions; lonesome or lonely. endured alone. a recluse; a hermit. And it just improves from there: desolate; deserted; silent; still; hence, gloomy; dismal; as, the solitary desert. See also, solitary confinement.

No wonder everyone is scrambling to give up all that freedom for a relationship. Anything sounds better than a solitary life. Even the game of solitaire isn’t always, well, solitary. According to Wikipedia, “it is possible to play the same games competitively (often a head to head race) and cooperatively”.

Last night, I was in a club in Puerto Vallarta, talking to Omar. He was telling me about his ex-wife and how she took all their money and was in and out of rehab and eventually left him for another guy, with whom she’s already had two kids. But you know? I could tell that deep down, he wants her back. He said he knows some people who have been able to make relationships work and have been happy. What did I think?

How did he find me, of all people, to ask that question to?

I didn’t tell him what I think. Although I didn’t paint him a fairy tale world either. I was noncommittal. Which all said, seems about right.

I was sitting in a deserted corner of the Pittsburgh airport a few nights ago, waiting for a flight that would take me to Minneapolis, where I could in turn catch a flight that would get me back to Seattle. I ended up in the back corner, as it was the only place I could find both an outlet and a chair and both my phone and laptop had nearly dead batteries. I overhead a man in a suit talking on his cell phone. He exchanged pleasantries with the person who picked up the phone and then the conversation took a really different turn. “I have some bad news.”

He went on to say that someone had a heart attack at the office that day. While at his desk. He began the story in a rather hopeful tone, like maybe the coworker was OK. But then he said he thought the coworker might be dead. And explained that he was found at his desk, but no one knew how long he had been there before he was found. And that the person who found him tried CPR but couldn’t revive him. And that the paramedics worked on him for 30 minutes before taking him away. It didn’t sound very promising from my outlet-filled corner.

He was calling because while the coworker wasn’t married, he had been with someone for a very long time, but the caller didn’t know what other family he had and he just wasn’t sure who to notify.

Fuck.

I’m sure none of us expect that we’ll die at our desks.

Then, I got on the plane and found my seat. I had been frustrated all day because I had asked my editor for one extra day to do a final read of my book manuscript and he said there wasn’t time. But while in the cab to the airport, I’d gotten an email saying he’d gotten the extension approved, so my mood had turned significantly better. But as the plane took off, I thought about the phone call I’d overhead and I wondered if my editor would publish my book as is if the plane crashed. Talk about dying at my desk. Really? That’s what made me worry about the plane crashing? That my book would be published without my final review?

After I’d made it to Minneapolis and gotten on the second flight, I sent an email to someone saying I would make it back in time for the event I was supposed to speak at the next day. You never know when you’re on the last flight of the day with a layover through a midwest city in winter, but it had worked out OK. Only after I hit send I wondered if I had jinxed the trip because after all, I was sitting in the plane about to take off, but the plane hadn’t yet successfully landed in Seattle. But surely an email stating confidence about the flight wouldn’t cause it to crash.

I’m taking a few days off next week. I don’t want to die at my desk.

verb. To cheat in return. (OED)

My parents had an odd sense of parenting in a number of ways, but none more so than the utter randomness of their strictness.

Case in point: When I graduated from high school, I was three months from my eighteenth birthday. Although I had two full time jobs lined up for the summer and a place to stay with my best friend’s parents, who were cops, in order to make $1500 or so that I needed to augment my otherwise full scholarship to the college of my dreams, my parents decided that since I was still underage, I had to move with them. If I refused, they would report my friend’s parents for kidnapping or something. So, I went with them, didn’t make the $1500, and wasn’t able to go to my otherwise full scholarship dream school. Everything worked out OK in the end, but I already told that story.

Today’s story is about the randomness of their strictness (it’s actually about my experience in countercozing (countercozenness?), but the randomness is the prelude. After my junior year of high school, my parents moved from Oklahoma back to California and let me stay behind and live for the summer with a woman I barely knew from my job at Kentucky Fried Chicken in exchange for $150 a month in rent. I had enrolled in a concurrent high school/college program and was planning to take Chemistry at the local university (lecture and lab, 7am to noon, five days a week) for college credit. (I have no idea how, but I somehow got an A, even though my lab partner was my friend’s boyfriend, who I partied with almost every night, and could therefore barely drag myself into class). I also had a week-long trip to Washington DC scheduled for which I had been chosen to represent my state after numerous essays, speeches, and answering questions for panels of seriously looking people. Also, they ran my picture in the local newspaper.

Why did my parents make me move with them when I had graduated from high school and would only be a few hours away when they were content to let me stay behind in a different state a year earlier? It would drive a person crazy trying to find a reasonable explanation. My entire childhood was filled with contradictions such as this. They didn’t value a college education but perhaps having my picture in the paper convinced them my Washington trip was important? They didn’t really like my friend’s parents and had a misguided sense that Oklahomans were trustworthy sight unseen?

Reason really didn’t factor in much as a kid. My parents were strict mostly in the sense that once they said something, they stuck with it, no matter how idiotic it was.

But now to the story. I had a 1980 Mazda GLC hatchback (this was 1989). I had bought it at a local used car dealer, one of those places with signs that practically say “I will rip you off as much as I possibly can. Please come in!” When I bought it, the sales guy told me they had done an entire engine inspection and everything was great. As a 16 year old girl, even a smart one, I totally bought it. The line about the inspection and the car.

In August, after my Chemistry class had ended and I was back from representing my state in our nation’s capitol, my mom flew to Tulsa to drive to California with me in that old car. We didn’t even make it to Oklahoma City before the engine overheated, stranding us on the side of the road. We ended up getting towed in by a great guy who took a look and gave us the bad news: the engine block was cracked and likely had been for a long time. It didn’t cause me trouble since I mostly drove it in the winter, and I only drove it short distances in the summer. But there was no way I could drive it cross country in the summer. And fixing it would be more than I had paid for the car.

My naive and innocent heart was outraged. But the used car salesman told me the engine had completely checked out! Surely he didn’t lie to me! The mechanic smiled at my gullible youthfulness. And then we devised a plan. I called the used car salesman and used all of my girlish charm. My parents had left me all alone to fend for myself. I had to get to California and was too scared to drive all that way by myself, so I needed to sell my car so I could afford a plane ticket. Could he possibly buy the car back?

I could barely hear his reply, the condescension was so loud. Sure, he could buy the car back, but I understood that he couldn’t refund my money or anything. He could give me $800, less than half the price I’d pay less than a year before. Oh, I understood. He could barely contain his glee at his chance to sell the same car twice with little additional investment. I arranged a time to return the car with a sad voice. And then hung up as my mom, the tow truck driver, and I laughed and laughed at his agreement to buy a worthless car at any price.

Our sting went as follows: We towed the car back to Tulsa and parked two blocks from the car dealership. My mom stayed with the truck and I drove the car to the lot. The sales guy drove it around the corner to make sure I hadn’t burned through the clutch or anything during my short ownership stint. The car would drive just fine for a few blocks so all went well. He gave me the money. I walked away and met up with my cohorts and we drove on to the airport.

I still have fond memories of that tow truck driver. He completely went out of his way and beyond his job description to tow the car all that way. But he enjoyed countercozening with us.

Looking back, I see that most of my outrage came from my lack of experience with the world and not so much that I had been dealt great injustice. Sure, the sales guy lied about the engine checking out, but I was buying a cheap used car. And sure, I cheated him back by selling him a knowingly defective car, smug in the deception because had he really checked out the car like he said, he would have already known about the cracked engine block. But did I really cause him any pain or did he just resell the car to another gullible high school student at a tidy profit? I can only hope the car overheated at the next test drive, but that’s just how I like to imagine it, not how it likely went.

But even so. Every time I see one of those heist movies where the good guys make a plan to swindle the bad guys in retaliation for some bad guy thing (sometimes, the good guys are actually likeable bad guys, played by characters such as George Clooney, so it’s OK that they’re not strictly speaking “good” guys), I can say, yep, I’ve done that. And it’s every bit as satisfying as you imagine.

“I don’t know if you’ll like what I got you for Christmas. Not knowing your tastes or anything.”

(Translation: I’m your mother and yet you never tell me ANYTHING.)

My mom has an interesting sense of privacy. Which is to say she has no sense of privacy at all. She’s come over to my house, poked around, and then wandered over to me with my paper journal in her hand to say she can’t read some of my writing so can I tell her what this or that word is. When my sister first moved out, some of her mail still ended up at my mom’s, who would open every last piece and read through it, ostensibly in the name of “helping”. “No really, mom,” my sister would say. “Just put it all in an envelope, UNOPENED, and send it to me.” But that made no sense to my mother whatsoever. And she just ignores what she doesn’t agree with.

When I went to counseling during my divorce, she was perplexed. Why do you need to pay to see a counselor when you could just talk to me? she asked.

My sister recently ordered some sexy lingerie online. “Just in case!” she told me. I told her that was wise. When you encounter a moment when sexy lingerie would come in handy, it kills the mood a bit to say, hey, so sexy lingerie sounds awesome. Let me just order some and we can wait a few days for it to get here. I’ll get back to you.

My mom was in the car when my sister stopped at the post office to pick the package up. “Ooh, a package. Who’s it from? Open it!” My sister declined. My mom badgered her all the way home and left pouting. Because clearly it was her God-given right as a human on this earth to see absolutely every parcel of mail she chose.

You might try to see things from my mom’s point of view. She’s only trying to take an interest in her daughters’ lives. She’s interested in knowing more about them and how they’re doing. If you thought this, you’d be wrong.

My mom’s compelling need to know everything about everyone comes from her starring role in the movie of Life, supporting cast: everyone else. Everything, everywhere, has to be all about her. Otherwise, why would it exist? Movie storylines don’t have subplots that are irrelevant to the main character.

But as with all good movies, you don’t want to get bogged down in the details of the supporting characters. Case in point:

“I always brag about my daughters. Everyone always asks how you’re doing and what you’re doing now. I really have no idea what you’re doing, so I just tell them to Google you.”

(I am, in fact, very Googleable.)

This comment is a two-for-one special. She gets to play the part of the proud and loving mother, while at the same time the slighted and shut out one.

I ask if she has Googled me, since she has no idea about me and clearly thinks this is a good way to learn more. No, she has not. I point out that as it turns out, in a twist even better than reading the internet, I am standing right here and could fill her in on what it is I’m doing now. She laughs and changes the subject. No need to introduce a lull in the movie with details like that.

She has mastered the art of listening. And by that, of course, I mean she pays just enough attention to the conversation to find an opening to talk about herself. We were out at dinner and I mentioned that one of my cats had cancer, had just had surgery, and was about to start chemotherapy. Her response?

“Well, my cats don’t seem to be sick at all. I don’t ever bring them to the vet of course since I don’t have any money, but….”

And then she went on with story after story about her three healthy cats. While working in her surely sympathy-inducing lack of money. This, her reaction to my sick cat.

“You’ve always had thick legs.”

This is a favorite topic with her. I’m so used to it, I barely even notice. My sister was apalled.

“I can’t believe you just called her fat.”

“I didn’t say she was fat. I said she was muscular.”

My muscular or perhaps thick legs and I just drank more wine.

We all have pictures in our minds of who we want to be. And some days I’m just not that person. Some days I’m sad and useless and I have nothing creative or witty or interesting or smart to say. I don’t know how to feel so I feel helpless and lonely even though I could call a million friends and go a million places. I just feel lonely in the world. I’m that person I don’t want to be.

I wrote once that I try not to believe in hope. I write all the time about how I’ve built my life around focusing on the steps I’m taking and not where I’m going. I find refuge in that. I find freedom and joy and my moments are worth something. But there’s a flipside. You can say, I am going to take a step, any step, no matter where it takes me, no matter the destination. The steps are what counts. But then it can’t also be that the destination counts. You have to choose. And there are moments, there will always be moments when all we want is to know that we will get past them. And if we could focus on the destination, on the place we will one day be, then we can get through these moments now.

But.

You can’t have it both ways. There’s a choice, then, in that kind of life. I can’t focus on the destination; I’m focusing on the moments. And the question is valid, it’s important, it matters: where do you want to be next year, the year after, what’s your five year plan?

And I think, but I don’t have a five year plan. I don’t believe in five year plans. Every five year plan I’ve ever had has been planning and working and building the pyramids brick by brick and ending up in an entirely different life. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

I know that everything I just wrote isn’t true. I am being simplistic and difficult and obtuse for no good reason. But the unreasonableness is camouflage for something that’s real. I don’t believe in plans because I can’t believe in hope. But I can believe in moments. And except for days like today, moments are enough. Even the best of us can’t have everything.

Last night, I was sitting at a bar drinking gin, talking to a couple of strangers about death. Somehow we had gotten onto the subject of plane crashes and I said I had recently talked to someone who had been in one and had to open the emergency exit door and he had said that he wasn’t scared during the fall, only after. And this guy at the bar said that he had been on a plane that got struck by lightning that then fell 10,000 feet and that he too didn’t feel scared during the drop. In fact, he felt an eerie sense of calm, and only panicked once it was over and they had leveled off.

He said it was odd, but that no one talked about it. The pilots, the flight attendants, even the passengers. No one said a word. But that as the plane was going down, people started screaming, and just as many of them lit up cigarettes. Imagine, you think you are plummeting to your death, and your first impulse is to smoke.

And then he told us another story. He was flying back from a custody hearing. His marriage had fallen apart, the judge had just given custody of his kids to his ex-wife and he felt like his entire life that he had spent so long building had crumbled and he was left with nothing. Sitting on that plane, it hit him that he had nothing to live for, and he decided to kill himself.

Only then, then. The plane hit horrible turbulence. And in only seconds, his entire outlook changed. Faced with the sudden real possibility of death, he thought only one thing: that he didn’t want to die. Maybe he would find love again. Maybe he could build a new life. No matter what happened, he wanted to live.

Later, I performed a dramatic reading of one of my favorite poems (To His Coy Mistress) to yet another set of strangers (”but at my back I always hear, time’s winged chariot hurrying near…”).

Later still, I went with some friends to see an exhibit of preserved dead bodies. One of them (a body, not one of my friends) was holding a tennis racket, stretching up towards an invisible tennis ball. I said to one of the docents, “I bet he never even played tennis when he was alive.”
This all seems like I was facing my death fears, but really I was cheating. It all seemed theoretical. I was discussing things academically, but not really considering that I, one day, would be nothing but one of those dried pieces of muscle and tissue.

I don’t think today is the day I’ll ponder that reality either.

Yesterday, between finishing overdue work for clients, attending a university board lunch, meeting with a potential client, having coffee with someone to talk about organizing an upcoming conference, and answering questions from my editor about my book, I managed to wedge in time to meet with the surgeon about permanent sterilization. The juxtaposition of rushing and rushing and rushing to meet work obligations while at the same time stopping long enough to think about LIFE CHOICES in a thoughtful and ponderous way struck me as being a bit ridiculous and surreal.

This isn’t about woe is me, I’ll never have children and a family. In fact, if anything, I feel a sense of relief, And that, really, is the crux of the angst, all tangled up in a melodramatic questioning of the blackness of my soul.

What reflection is it on a woman who never felt the maternalistic ticking of the biological clock? What does it say about me that I’m happy with my life exactly the way it is, so devoid of the traditional surroundings of happiness? Is my soul constructed with a fundamental design flaw?

I feel like an orphan and I build my family from non-standard parts. But I don’t feel sad and lonely and wistful of a life I don’t have. I feel free and hopeful and like I belong in the world.

Life’s a blur speeding past the window
We’d love to stop but who has the time
So much to do - we’re so far behind
And we stay that way no matter how fast we go
I wonder what’s the point at which we break
When will we realize just what’s at stake
We dance at weddings and we cry at wakes
And then we rush to make the next appointment

-Life and Death, Carolyn Arends

When I was just out of college, I lived in this kind of scary part of Costa Mesa in Orange Country, California. (One night, I was driving home late from the gym and while stopped at a light, four guys got out of the car next to me and started surrounding my car. I punched the gas right through the red light.) I made $23,900 a year at my corporate job in Irvine. I had two roommates, both of whom were crazy. I had just broken up with my boyfriend, who I had been living with in yet another scary part of Costa Mesa. I had cause for a lot of early twenties angst, but one moment every morning made me so happy my heart felt like it might burst.

On my drive to work, I would crest a hill and the Pacific ocean would appear out of nowhere, startling blue and stretch to the edge of the world. It didn’t matter what I was worried about facing at work that day or how angry I was at my roommates or how anxious I was about being able to pay all of my bills. Just seeing the water gave me a moment of peace. I took the long way around just so I could see it.

When I made the (foolish) decision to leave California (foolish, but had I not gone down that path then, I wouldn’t be here now, so I can’t regret it), I knew that moment of seeing the water come in view was what I would miss the most.

I love lots of things about where I live now, but my favorite time is early morning. There’s something about the light and the water and the sky and every morning before I leave for my office, I stand in my living room and just take it all in. And as I drive, I follow the water and no matter how stressed I am about all the work I have to do or whether I’m going to make it to the airport on time or why I’m not the kind of person who thinks to send out Christmas cards with heartfelt holiday sentiments, I have a moment of peace.

How does one explain the following: when looking at the start menu of a computer, the icon for Firefox says “Internet” beside it and “Mozilla Firefox” below it and the icon for Internet Explorer says “Internet” beside it and “Internet Explorer” below it.

Are they two separate internets? Do they lead to different destinations? Clearly, the answer is yes.

Proof? When you open one and click the down arrow on the address bar, the list of sites available to you is completely different than when you do the same with the other. The list of bookmarks is also entirely different. Obviously, you can go to different places in each.

Add to this the following story:

Say someone purchases data (possibly this data is a list of so-called “leads” for a shady, commission-only mortgage broker “job”, and possibly this “someone” can’t waste her time with jobs that pay actual “salaries” because they don’t get you rich quick enough, but I digress) in spreadsheet format. And say that when opening that data in Excel, the columns are too narrow so that the information is cut off and only the first few letters of each word are visible. What can one do except purchase more data in hopes that it contains all the words and not just parts of them?

Honestly, what other choice does one have?

Now tell me, dear reader, what would you do if this person, facing such conundrums of multiple internets and partial words, if this person caught in such overwhelming adversity were your mother?

Exactly right. You would do the only thing there really is to do in such a situation. Nod sympathetically at the trouble and toil she is up against and wish her the very best of luck in her pursuit of internets and spreadsheets. And sleep like a baby all night long.

It is so incredibly easy to slip into this place of letting the flaws of others — issues that have nothing to do with us — influence how we feel about ourselves. I don’t know why it’s such a comfortable place. But we think that if only we were something enough, we could cause that person to overcome that flaw, that inclination, that tendency to be rude, shallow, emotionally unavailable, ungrateful, uncaring, unappreciative, whatever, and they would treat us differently. And if they don’t, it’s not because they’re rude or shallow or any of those things, it’s because something is the matter with us.

However. I have realized that is insane.

Recently, I had this moment that almost dealt a serious blow to my self esteem. I found myself questioning my own value and then I stopped myself and realized. That the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t whatever enough. The problem was with someone else. It had nothing to do with me. We can be there for people and we can care about doing what we can to make them happy, but ultimately, our presence doesn’t change who someone is. Being nice to a mean person doesn’t suddenly turn them into a humanitarian. Being wonderful doesn’t cause a self-absorbed person to see what we’ve done for them.

Once again, there is freedom in not being responsible for everyone else. And there’s a balance that keeps us from becoming the uncaring and ungrateful ones. And my self esteem is just fine.

I went to a bookstore yesterday. Bookstores are dangerous. Not all of us can simply open a door and walk into what our alternate life might be.

Bookstores always make me feel ambivalent, and this visit was no different. On the one hand, I felt a sense of hope. I saw a series of books by an ex-coworker’s brother. I worked with her years and years ago when he was a struggling unknown writer. She had given me his books and he and I exchanged a few emails. I liked his writing, but assumed that like most authors, he would write into obscurity and I’d never hear from him again. And yet here he was, with prime space in the young adult section.

On the other hand, as I walked around, I was stuck with a sense of the familiar. I had read all of these books. Not literally all of them, of course, but I had read books on nearly every shelf. I know I read a lot. But no matter how much I read, the world is infinitely full of more books. And yet the bookstore chains stock their shelves with the same few over again.

On the way home, my iPod, set to random, played: Wide Open Spaces, You Can Sleep While I Drive, What If We Went to Italy. I wondered if my iPod was trying to tell me something.

Why is it that I’m so driven to string together words and write them on a page? What does it matter?

I was talking to someone the other day who had struck me with his drive, his intelligence, his passion for helping others. But then he told me that he didn’t believe in reading books. He would rather experience the world in person than in print. It was like walking down the street, admiring the skyline, and being knocked over by a piano being hoisted from an apartment window by a crane. We can’t possibly experience all of the world: every view, every moment in time, every feeling. And for what we do experience, we don’t always get the story behind the story. The written word has honesty that other experiences can sometimes lack.

I stood in the bookstore like I always stand in bookstores and I breathed in the words. A panicked then, a little, about my life. I have a business, employees. And all I want to do is run away and write. Fortunately, I have those expensive sunrises to balance me.

I can write about how I feel and what I’ve done and about moments and snippets of conversations and what I see as I walk through an airport. I’m not quite as able to transfer a landscape to a page: a painting in words.

But at this particular moment, if only I could describe for you this: brilliant orange sky seeping into everything: the clouds, the blue, the reflection on the water. White snow on the mountains. The ferries, white and green, slowly gliding by. Water everywhere, surrounding all of it. A tugboat, coming back from to the port. A flock of ducks, flying in unison.

And I think, not profound thoughts of nature and life and the joys of peaceful contemplation over work. No. I think, fuck, I’d better get focused on bringing in some money so I can enjoy this view for as long as I want.

Quote seen on a wall of the Salt Lake City airport. Fucking Tolkien. Summing up in seven words what I’ve been trying to say in hundreds of journal entries.

Two nights ago, I was at a dinner for an event I’m speaking at, and somehow the conversation turned to movies. What movie do you most identify with? I said probably Breakfast at Tiffany’s because of Holly Golightly’s tendency to lose her keys and keep her phone in a suitcase under her bed and try to learn new languages but I didn’t necessarily identify with her career choice of prostitution or her fear of naming her cat. Someone mentioned a recent movie that made him break down and sob, even though he was on a plane, and someone else said he’d recently cried watching A Christmas Carol. Both guys said they cry more now that they’re older. One of them said crying was like emotional masturbation.

Last night, a bunch of us from the same event were at the bar, having tequila shots. What’s the difference between a memorable conversation and one that doesn’t matter, someone asked? I said I thought it was all about how shallow it was. Is the conversation about anything meaningful or is it just small talk. (Although I didn’t say it then, I remembered the conversation from the night before and thought that hearing what makes people cry and how it makes them feel is meaningful conversation that gives me perspective on the world.)

So, how do you go about having good conversations, he then wondered. I said that mostly there aren’t good conversationalists and bad conversationalists. It’s more about the connections between two people. One person you feel like you can be honest with, another you limit things to small talk. Someone else said she thought that it was  chemistry and everyone in the conversation looking for the same things out of it. I likened it to sex. The difference between good sex and bad sex can be more about the chemistry between two people and whether they’re interested in the same things than about those involved being inherently good or bad at it.

I’m sitting in the Albuquerque airport right now, drinking coffee. I have been here before. Which is to say, I know I was here earlier this year when I went snowboarding in Taos, but I have been here by myself, fairly recently, only I have no idea when or why. The Albuquerque airport has this great area upstairs with huge windows and lots of tables and chairs and absolutely no people. You can take stairs up to it, but there are no signs that tell you what you might find. I imagine not many people know about it. I know about it. But I don’t remember when I found it.

I’m not lost. I’m just wandering.

I live within movement. The cabs, the trains, the airplanes, the airport lounges, even the security checkpoints are my living room, my office, my route to work. The other day, someone was driving me to an event and asked if I would mind if we parked a little farther out and walked over. I almost didn’t understand the question. Asking if I mind traveling, by foot or any other way, is like asking if I mind breathing. It’s just something I do.

A few days ago, I made my train with two minutes to spare. I was sitting in a cab going nowhere and I finally asked the driver to stop so I could walk. I swept into the station, bought my ticket from a kiosk, and stepped right onto the train as it was pulling away. What if I hadn’t made it? Well, there are always other trains.

Right now, I’m tired. I’m sitting in a coffee shop downtown, in between meetings. I’ve been coming to this coffee shop for years, since long before my current career and travel schedule. I ran into the owner. How are things, I asked. He told me, “I pray good morning and I spend all day building relationships. How can things be better? These are things no one can ever take away.”

I’m reading Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, which talks about the philosopher Seneca, who said, “the wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself.” The book so far talks a lot about how our emotional well-being is influenced less by our circumstances than we generally think. In a way, the book can be a bit depressing, as it suggests that one can be less angry, frustrated, and sad if we simply expect that bad things are likely to come our way. “We cease to be so angry once we cease to be so hopeful.” “Because we are injured most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything, we must hold the possibility of disaster in mind at all times.”

But I sort of get the point and it doesn’t have to be depressing. Life has great stuff and life has depressing stuff and sometimes things are hard and sometimes they’re awesome and the trick to not getting stuck in the low spots is to keep going so you can get to another awesome spot. Why spend time being shocked and amazed that life can be hard when clearly this is something we all know?

The book also talks about Epicurus and how money spent doesn’t necessarily translate into happiness. The book concludes “happiness may be difficult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.”

Of course, understanding that money isn’t the key to happiness doesn’t mean that the opposite is true. Going without money doesn’t lead to happiness either. As Seneca, living in his luxury villa noted, “I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is offered, I will choose the better half.”

As my friend the coffee shop owner said, happiness in life is more about the connections we make with people. I’ve written a lot in this journal about my moments of panic about being alone. I don’t panic so much these days. Everything tilted and when I next looked out, I realized I was measuring myself against societal standards for not being alone that I don’t even believe in.

I’ve written a lot about life as a collection of moments: joy and despair and longing and gratefulness and frustration and hope, but I don’t think that makes me a philosopher. Although philosophy is all about reason and I am exceedingly pragmatic. But the balance between reason and emotion fascinates me.

Life operates on the unpredictable nature of chaotic motion. And in that motion, I find peace.

I admit, I laugh a little when people phrase their statements as absolutes. As though I have ANY world wisdom at all and have any reason to be cooly looking over at anyone and laughing. I know. That’s part of what makes the whole thing ridiculous. But still. I laugh. Because if there’s anything I know it’s that rarely is anything absolute and black and white. See, I wrote “rarely” so I’m not hypocritically breaking my own holier-than-thou statement from on high.

And yet, sometimes, when people make these definitive, no question about it statements, our first response is to believe them. Or, at least for me, it used to be. I don’t think I believe much of anything anymore. Which possibly is bitter and sad, but actually has made me feel pretty free and happy. I used to think that what others’ said was more credible than what I thought because their opinions were more objective than mine. I was too close to me to know me clearly. But maybe they can’t see me well enough to know me clearly either. When you’ve spent your life focusing on pleasing people, it’s amazing how much weight is lifted when you realize that maybe just because they’re not pleased doesn’t mean that you’re flawed.

I’ve also realized something else, which I think (I hope) acts as a counterbalance that keeps me from letting my cynicism take over completely until I let my selfishness become the focus to replace the overpleasing. And that is that we all need people. I like being with my friends. And introducing my friends to my other friends and seeing them happy.

I used to spend so much time worrying about living my life alone. And now I don’t worry anymore. I like my life. And I’m not alone. I’m happy exactly the way that I am.

I measure life these days in moments, not in milestones towards a destination. I’m not checking off a list or looking at my days through the lens of a Microsoft Project spreadsheet.

I’m doing a bad job of explaining this, I think. I don’t mean to be philosophical or lyrical or poetic or pontificating.

I was in a cab this morning, being driven through DC. The driver was telling me about his daughters, and how their strength and independence made it difficult for them to find good men. Unlike most cab drivers who give me life advice, he was all for keeping that independence.

I don’t know anything. I really don’t. But I know that I don’t know anything. And I’m OK with not pretending that I do. And I’m going to find joy in moments as they come. Life is hard. We can all despair. But why should we let life win like that?

I used to think I was smart. But recent weeks have been filled with epiphanies completely new to me that likely everyone else simply calls “obvious stuff we’ve always known”.

I thought I understood why someone would have a so-called midlife crisis. (Although “crisis” is not the word I would really use.) As we realize death is rushing at us like the ground after we jump from an airplane, we think, fuck. I’d better live this life while I can. I’m reading this book that quotes Marcel Proust’s response to a question about what people would do if the world were about to end. He says that:

“Life would suddenly seem wonderful… just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it — our life — hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly… We shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.”

I read that and think, yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say. Every moment has a backdrop of impending death. Live life now, is the whisper I always hear. Because you won’t have the chance forever.

Only now (I did say this was about an epiphany, and the whole death thing is clearly not the thing that’s new to me as it’s practically all I ever write about), I realize that sometimes a midlife crisis is something else. Realizing you can get better at things.

I know. I told you it’s possible I’m not that smart.

In some ways, my life has been a series of black and white. Either I was good at something or I wasn’t. So I either did that thing or I didn’t. It didn’t cross my mind that if I wasn’t good at something, I could keep at it and get better. If I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t do it. That just wasn’t the thing I had talent for, so onward to something else.

As a kid, I was always good in school. Sure, I didn’t know everything. I had to learn things. But learning came easy. It was something I could do. Athletics, not so much. My stepdad said I wasn’t athletically inclined and I took my lack of abilities to mean they didn’t exist, and no amount of practice would make me better at them. It’s not that I didn’t want to try things that were hard. I just didn’t know that trying would do any good.

When I say I want to do everything that scares me, I think part of what I mean is that I want to try things I’m not good at. A few days ago, I tried indoor skydiving in a wind tunnel. We each got three tries. The first time was absolutely terrifying. I had no idea what I was doing and I was terrible at it. My first thought was that I was just bad at it and this just wasn’t something I could do. But I made myself try again. The second time was better. I knew more what to expect. I listened to the instructor and made adjustments. It was still scary, but I realized that how good you are at something the first time you try it isn’t as good as you can get at it. The third time, I jumped into the wind and the instructor took me to the top of the tunnel. Understand I was still terrible at it, but I did considerably better than the first time.

As hokey as it may sound, it may have been pole dancing that triggered this epiphany. At my first lesson, I couldn’t do any of the spins. At all. And I thought, well, I guess this just isn’t something my body can do. But the instructor said of course I couldn’t do it the first time. Really? Of course?

I kept on and now, while I’m still fairly terrible, I am able to do the things that seemed impossible in that first class. This idea of either being able to do something or not is just another way I’ve been trapping myself. Just because I can’t do something doesn’t mean I can’t do something. Try everything. Maybe I’ll be good at it and maybe I won’t. And maybe I’ll get better at it and maybe I’ll love it and maybe it’ll terrify me but why not at least try it? After all, we are humans, and death may come this evening. (Although I’m really hoping that it doesn’t.)

Once again, the stuff around me became too much. Everything took up too much space. I couldn’t breathe or think or write or see. My stuff was a fire and the smoke was choking me, surrounding me, hemming me in.

All that for some clothes and overdue mail. I’m nothing if not melodramatic.

I don’t know why the clutter gets to me so much. And I also don’t know how it is that I spend hours getting rid of everything that I don’t absolutely need and yet find myself in the same buried place only months later. Do I just accumulate it all again, sneak it all in without myself noticing? Or do I just not go far enough the first time? Progress is in moving forward, not in leaping to the destination. Or maybe my tolerance keeps declining until one day it’ll just be me and my books and a knapsack.

This morning, as I lugged out yet more boxes of things I didn’t want, I thought this: consider complication. But then I realized that was too short-sighted. Complication isn’t a scale against which things are measured. It’s just one facet that gets added into the total weight, along with joy and delight and desire and frivolity and giving and happiness and pain.

And I realized, once again, the thing I have realized so many times but somehow forget: life is never what you expect. I started this journal to have online liner notes for a mix CD and to practice writing and somehow it turned into that small part of my brain that loses confidence. And I found I could write that lack of confidence, my fears, my insecurities, my lost hopes on the page and I wouldn’t have to carry them around with me quite so much.

When I started this journal, I had an apartment I wanted and a boyfriend I didn’t need. I had been dreaming of that apartment for years. But somehow, I lost my way. And more homes, more clutter, more relationships later, the lessons come around again, and like a snake shedding his skin I pushed through it all and remembered. We learn things little by little only by doing them over and over again and each time making not quite as many mistakes until one day we make few enough to move on to the next. I read back on years past, on my insecurities and angst and I remember how they felt, but I don’t feel them anymore (I have new neuroses now). But it’s comforting to know that eventually we stop repeating the same mistakes and start making new ones.

So, now, finally, the center holds (at least for now). I kept nonsensically taking away my fiercely fought identify from myself and I don’t think I’m going to do that anymore. I am doing more writing, although when getting rid of clutter today I came across a notebook with some handwritten notes about my still very unfinished novel. I did recently manage to finish the nonfiction book I was under contract for, so that’s a step in the right direction anyway. I still want to be perfect, but I think I’m getting better at not achieving it. Ha! Striving to be perfect at not being perfect.

I’m doing a lot better on courageousness. The more you fall, the more better you get, after all. I just keep trying stuff that scares me. I now have the house on the water and the assistant that I whined so much about needing and I no longer have that terrible car I hated and I now have a tattoo, although I’m already craving the next one, and I figure I can smoke when I want, and I’m doing better on my dream of being a stripper. I even have a closet full of dresses now after being so despondent and mopey about not having anything girly or pretty. I was at a party last night and a friend said something about me being ambitious. I’m not really ambitious. Just an overachiever.

I realize that I’ve been feeling trapped but no one has been keeping me in place but me. I’ve perhaps found that thread of hope. But fuck, I used to be funny. I’m going to go back to being funny.

We can’t peek ahead to see how anything ends.

This indulgent episode has been brought to you by the inability to see movement during the process of moving, and only on looking back to see how far away the horizon has gotten.

You look out and you know that what you see isn’t really what is there. but you have glasses on (perhaps not so rose-colored) and baggage in the way, and everything is obscured by filters you just can’t quite see through. One or two, you hear the eye doctor in your head, and you want to say none, none is better. But none isn’t a choice.

And then sometimes, you squint and your strain your eyes because you know that what you see is there isn’t what is there and you blink and you rub your eyes with your fists and it’s like one of those optical illusion pictures where you see the old woman when who you want to see is the beautiful girl.

And then, then. One day when you aren’t even meaning to look, not really, you open your eyes and everything has tilted. And it’s all still there and it’s all still the same, but everything is different.

I described it once this way. That I was at a brick wall, immovable. And I saw no way around the wall even though I knew the only way forward was past the wall. And it was impossible. Any way around, over, under, or through the wall was simply an impossibility. And then one day I was around and the wall was behind me.

Was the wall ever even there? Maybe it was like the old woman and the path ahead was the beautiful girl.

I know you can’t make yourself see what you don’t see. The best you can do is keep going and slowly, gradually, like sand crumbling from the rising tide, you open your eyes and things tilt. According to wikipedia, the tilt-a-whirl operates on the unpredictable nature of chaotic motion.

I’ve done a lot of rubbing my eyes and blinking the last few weeks. Talking and talking and talking. To everyone who would listen. And I would hear them tell me what the world looked like and I didn’t see it. I don’t know if what I see now when I open my eyes is what they see, but I know that it’s different than it was before.

I’m taking these private lessons, um, dance classes, aerobics. For working out. OK, fine, it’s pole dancing. And it is, in fact, I really great workout. My instructor throws in a lot of yoga along with the pole work. Helps with the flexibility. She’s always asking me if I feel the joy. I tell her she has an odd definition of joy as she’s contorting my hips into positions my hips didn’t know were possible.

I don’t know the meaning of life or what we’re all really supposed to be doing or if it’s better to enjoy the moments or plan for the future and since I don’t know any of those things, I do know I won’t overlook joy. The moments are like shiny beads of glass and I string them together on delicate strands. And I think, maybe it is as simple as this.

I want to change the world. Learn everything about the world. Be loved by someone who thinks I’m awesome. But at what point do I lower my expectations? Decide I’m approaching this life thing all wrong and that I’m not on a path to where I think I want to go; I’m just on a path that ends at a really steep cliff. And maybe some scary dragons.

This impact the world, learn it all drive is rooted in being terrified of death, of the idea that we all die someday. So maybe I just need to change my strategy. Instead of focusing all my energy on maximizing the time I have here, I could just join a cult. I could find peacefulness in the idea that death is just a stepping stone to the next level in my existence. That seems a lot easier than my method. Particularly since my method doesn’t seem to be working. And while the cult method might not be strictly speaking accurate, perception is reality in these things, right?

Could I give up my drive and curiosity and skepticism and just be happy not being accomplished and successful and growing and all of those things that I want but just seem to drown me? Well, no. Probably not. But I’m tempted to try.

Things that have made me cry this week:

• That part of that sappy Romeo and Juliet Taylor Swift Song that goes “you’ll never have to be alone, I love you and that’s all I really know”.
• A story on NPR about a hedgehog with cancer (who was OK in the end).
• The part of the episode of The Office where Pam and Jim get married when he cuts off his tie to match her ripped veil.

I think as long as I can avoid TV and radio, I just might make it through OK.

You know how people make those links of 100 things to do or 100 places to see before they die? I don’t have anything like that. My list is mostly, “don’t die”. I wonder, would it be wrong to take the lists of other people and cross off what of their things I’ve done? I know. I don’t even want to do everything they list. And the whole point of the lists is to live my life the way I want, to the fullest, every minute, cherish sunsets, etc. I know. But really I only have two things on my list and I want to just spend my life doing those two things. Which isn’t practical, nor is it even attainable. So other people’s lists it is!

I’ll start with Mighty Girl. I hope she doesn’t mind. Of her 100 things, I’ve done 13. I could have done a few more more, but when presented with the opportunity to ride a camel in the desert, I chose the four-wheel drive. And I didn’t really need a bank account when I was last in Switzerland, although I get her point about putting it on the list. This is why choosing other people’s lists with things you don’t want to do is problematic. Her list as partially completed by me looks like this:

Scuba dive | Cross the Canadian border | Have a croissant at a French cafe | Try escargot | Whiskey at a pub in Ireland | Make butterscotch from scratch | Grow vegetables | Live in a house with a window seat | Ring a church bell | Rewire a lamp | Own land | | Zip line through a canopy | Buy a stock on my own |

I was on the fence about “see Cuba”. I have in fact seen it, but have not actually set foot on it. The seeing was more at a distance, as in, “oh look! That big land thing is Cuba!”

How about this list I found on a Tripod site? 25!

Swim with a dolphin | Throw a huge party and invite every one of your friends | Have your portrait painted | Learn to speak a foreign language and make sure you use it | Learn to rollerblade | Plant a tree | Own a room with a view | Visit the Senate and the House of Representatives | Ring a church bell | Be the boss | Stay out all night dancing (does it have to be dancing?) and go to work the next day without having gone home | Ask for a raise | Learn to play a musical instrument with some degree of skill | See a lunar eclipse | Sleep under the stars | Spend a whole day reading a great novel | Find a job you love | Grow a garden | Drive a convertible with the top down and music blaring | Learn to use a microphone and give a speech in public| Attend one really huge rock concert | Create your own web site | Visit the Holy Land | Ski a double-black diamond run | Fall deeply in love — helplessly and unconditionally |

The portrait thing is only if having a drawing done by one of those artists at Disneyland in the New Orleans part counts. (True story: I have been carting this portrait of me (circa: 11th grade) forever. What do you do with such a thing? It’s not like you can hang it on your wall. And throwing yourself away just feels a little creepy. But I finally did just that a couple of months ago. Maybe you can leave yourself behind after all!)

That whole “go skinny-dipping at midnight in the South of France” seems a little specific. Maybe I’ll try that one next. In conjunction with “Buy a round-the-world air ticket and a rucksack, and run away.”

I have too many things in my head. I used to be able to hold it all there and have infinite room for anything. So I don’t have any practice at not letting it all in. Writing helps. Because it’s not just work and what I have to do next and how I should approach this and why is my bank account so low and where is my next flight. But it’s also wanting to know more about that thing I saw and how I feel about what happened that one time, the people I need to take care of, and my happiness, my anger, my frustration, my hope, why I love.

You think to yourself, this is so small it takes up no room at all. But everything has weight. Everything takes up space. And that’s what I don’t remember.

So I try to focus and hold the rest back, and it’s like trying to hold back a downpour, a tsunami, with a paper program from a student play.

Some things are important. Some things only seem important. And sometimes urgency is dictated by timeliness rather than priority. I want to put everything in a jar, like marbles where you have to guess how many are there to win a prize, and I want to shake them out one by one in the right order. I want to line everything up like dominoes: over the tables and on books and through corridors and around corners until every last thing is laid out and I can see it all clearly at once, even if I have to climb to the top of a mountain to have it all in view.

But it’s all so small that some of it slips away. The wind catches it - a silk scarf, a tiny torn-off corner of a paper napkin. How can I know if something’s gone missing?

And I feel so heavy because I’m carrying it all around, all the time, so I don’t lose it, and there’s no where else to keep it safe.

I love research but resist planning. Research is learning. Planning is adding constraints.

Crazy, right? Particularly since in reality, planning often adds freedom. I would likely have lots more time for exploring if I got off a plane and went directly to my hotel rather than wandering aimlessly looking for one. And maybe I wouldn’t feel so entirely totally overwhelmed by all the work I have to do if I had a plan to finish it all other than “just plow through until it’s done”.
I am learning. I am trying to learn not to think of planning and structure as a claustrophobic prison. Where does that come from anyway?

I’m also realizing that I know absolutely nothing about the world. I knew that already. But I am learning just how much I haven’t learned.

It’s hard for me not to feel capable and knowledgeable with purposeful direction. Why it is I want have purpose without planning and direction without structure, I have no idea.

I don’t quite know what to say yet about visiting Lebanon. I’ve always had this tendency to see multiple sides of an issue (even when I’m on one of the sides) and I generally don’t believe in the notion of black and white. So, I wasn’t surprised that the reality that I saw in Lebanon was so starkly different from the one-dimensional sound bites on the news.

I’m also not so naive as to think that the reality I saw was the whole story. The soldiers who so warmly said “welcome to Lebanon!” and took my hand as we drove through checkpoints surrounded by barbed wire and tanks and sandbag walls weren’t just stationed there as welcoming committees. Everyone in the Hezbollah region was so happy we were there: the young guy who we bought fried bread and cheese from made us a another special dish from the region just to try; the tour guide who showed us the ruins offered us cigarettes. Hezbollah itself is even a tourist attraction, of sorts. You can buy Hezbollah flags and t-shirts to bring home as souvenirs (if you’re willing to risk Homeland Security on your way back to the US). But while the gunfire we kept hearing in the distance was likely just target practice, it wasn’t there to add ambiance for the tourists like the gondoliers in Venice.

Everywhere we went in Lebanon, everyone was eager to know if we liked it. “It’s not like they say on the news, right?” the guy asked who was helping me ship a package home. He told me he watches CNN. He knows how the world sees his country. “We love America,” everyone kept telling us. And they kept reminding me us how many more freedoms they enjoyed than other Arab countries. “Just like America!” they said.

If the Lebanese harbor any hostility towards westerners, we didn’t see it. Our driver brought us to the “best place for kebabs” in all of Lebanon. The waiter (and bartender and cook and possibly owner) of the little bar I had dinner in one night told me to come back later that week for poetry night. The security guard at the mall who inspected our purses proudly told us about how he had found a bomb once in a laptop (hidden in the battery compartment!) and gotten a reward.

The guy with the taxi service at the airport told me that Americans don’t come to Lebanon. “I think they’re scared,” he said. And I’m sure it’s not without reason. As I said, I’m not that naive. But it’s also not as terrifying as we’re led to believe. Yes, there are soldiers everywhere and security checkpoints on the roads. But the United States is at “terror level orange” and I often see soldiers with guns patrolling the airports there. The security checkpoints really are a lot like the TSA. Everyone is just used to them. In fact, every Lebanese soldier at the checkpoints was nicer than nearly every TSA person I’ve ever encountered. And I encounter them a lot.

London doesn’t have public trash cans because they’re too easy to hide bombs in. And we still visit there.
One soldier was doing a book of quizzes. It just struck me as being so normal.

You always hear that the Lebanese are fashion conscious and it’s true. Lebanese women could definitely compete with the Italians on their sense of style and the height of their heels.

People crowd the streets even at 2am. They’re eating dinner in outdoor cafes with their small children. And all the stores are still open. With all that we saw and did — the soldiers, the checkpoints, the barbed wire, the bombed buildings riddled with bullet holes, the Roman ruins tucked in between shiny new buildings, little kids playing with guns, the nomadic tent settlements, the most surreal experience may have been trying on clothes in upscale stores at 2am.

We went to a club one night. It was filled with groups of of six or eight couples, all be hanging out together and dancing. They were all so happy and carefree. It was amazing, really, to see so many guys dancing (and well!) with their friends. “Put your hands in the air!” the song said. They all put their hands in the air and laughed.

The whole region is complicated, of course. And the complications go back thousands of years. One of the tour guides was telling us about a Sunni and Shi’ite conflict… from 667 AD. And as I had every Bible story drilled into my head over and over as a child, it was fascinating to hear about all of the same regions from exactly the same period, but from an entirely different point of view. In the Bible stories, it’s as though everything I saw and heard about during this trip didn’t even exist. But again, I tend to see the facets. Each story is a perspective. A layer of life, not the entire onion.

I don’t pretend to understand any of it. And I know that I really saw nothing in the short time I was there. But I do know that Lebanon is full of friendly welcoming people. And it’s beautiful. With lots of delicious food and historical importance. And the news doesn’t report on any of those things so I’m glad to have gotten the additional layer, at least.

True story. A couple of weeks ago, I started an entry with this title and saved it as a draft. But then I never actually wrote the entry. I had been planning to write about how I have this tendency (maybe we all do) to question myself when others think I’m making the wrong decisions or when they have a different sense of the direction I should be going.

But lately I’ve been thinking, why is it that I automatically assume that they’re right and I’m wrong? Couldn’t it just as easily be the other way? On the one hand, they have the advantage of more objective perspective (possibly), but then I have the advantage of my own experience and knowing things about myself and the situation that perhaps they don’t.

And I’m sure, in those times when what I think is right doesn’t align with what others think is right, neither side is correct all of the time. Or maybe both sides are correct and it’s just a matter of choosing a direction and going with it. When two roads diverge in a yellow road, both roads may lead to equally joyous destinations, it’s simply that one traveler cannot travel both.

But anyway, I didn’t write that entry and instead, this draft with just the title has been sitting here. And then yesterday, I was offered lemoncello twice — in two different cities no less.

I stopped at a little cafe in Venice for lunch. It was on a little side alley, away from tourist traffic, and was fairly quiet. As tends to be the way with Italian cafes, lunch was “leisurely”. Which more literally translated means that after an hour, I had only been served soup and the main course was still nowhere in sight. As a native Californian, that kind of patience is a virtue I don’t possess, and besides, I had an upcoming train and knew that based on experience, I would get lost several times and what should be a 20 minute walk would likely take me around 2 hours.

So, I told the waiter that I needed to catch a train and would it be OK if I took the pasta to go? His response? First, he took my hand and led me back into the kitchen, where the chef was preparing my food. He yelled at the chef in Italian something about how I needed my lunch and where was it anyway? I finally convinced them both that no, really, it was fine, and takeaway would be lovely.

Next, he led me into the dining room where Spanish music was playing and twirled me around with a bout of dancing I couldn’t really keep up with, being a fairly terrible dancer. Then, he said we should have some lemoncello before I left, so I sat at the bar and he made up the drinks, and then we toasted and I have to say, it was pretty delicious lemoncello. Finally, he wrote his name and phone number on a card and told me to call him when I was next in Venice.

Later in the evening, I was in a little restaurant in Bologna for dinner. The waiter spoke very little English, and I, of course, peak even less Italian, but somehow we managed to communicate well enough for me to order. After the meal, he came back and asked if I wanted any dessert. No, I said, the dinner was plenty. Well, then at least I’ll give you some lemoncello. It’s homemade!

He brought me not only a shot glass, but left the entire bottle on my table. I felt it wise to stick with the one, however.

As with the rest of Europe, Italy seemed enamored with old American pop music. In Bologna, this seems particularly odd given that the residents speak very little English. Musicians had set up all over the main square. These aren’t the street musicians you normally see with their violins and accordions in places like Dublin. Or even the small orchestras that play around St. Mark’s Square in Venice. These were full bands with amplifiers and speakers and microphones and they were seemingly on every corner. I walked from end of the square, where a lounge musician was singing Billy Joel’s “Just the Way Your Are” with an electronic keyboard, to the other end where a full band of middle-aged men were in the midst of a rendition of “Mr. Tambourine Man” in English that seemed likely they didn’t understand.

Yet another corner had a group of guys breakdancing to American rap. It reminded me of when I was in high school and guys would gather in groups on the street and break dance. Only as we were in Italy, the dancers were much better dressed and didn’t need sheets of cardboard, what with all the sidewalks being marble.

They don’t know what to make of me. Yes? They look at me quizzically, not sure what I’m doing there. Once it took three people to figure out what I wanted. The first thought he didn’t understand me and sent me to a second, who shook his head and called over a third.

“A table? A menu? You’re serving dinner?”

One wouldn’t think it would be so difficult to communicate the desire for a table upon entering a restaurant.

“You’re waiting for someone?”

“No.”

“By yourself? You want a table for yourself?”

“Yes.”

They look at me suspiciously. But eventually I am shown a table.

At least they don’t try to give me relationship advice. That’s territory best left to taxi drivers.

A storm came through today. Heavy rain and cracks of lightning splitting the sky and booming thunder. We could have been in the midwest — Arkansas or Missouri or Oklahoma. The power flickered and then was out. When the rain let up a little, I ventured out of my apartment. Maybe the power was just out in my building. And anyway, it was lunchtime. But no, the main building of the hotel was dark too. And as I walked down the steps and onto the boardwalk, I realized the entire island had lost power. People were gathered in the cafes — inside in the dark, drinking bottled sodas.

The power’s back now and the sun is breaking through the clouds just in time for it to set. A faint breeze is keeping the humidity at bay out here on the terrace.

A few minutes ago, the air was filled with bagpipes. A wedding party was descending the stairs of the huge old stone church. The entire procession, guests and all, made it to the pier and cheers went up as the bagpipes continued. And then everyone loaded onto a ship and sailed away.

Love without complications that you can just reach out and grab and keep forever. I know it’s easy to watch the joy of a wedding day from afar and not see the details and the complications. It all looks easy and happy from here. And it isn’t, but the idea of it still makes me melancholy. Even though I know it isn’t real, like the airbrushed models in magazines don’t really exist — their legs and arms and faces have been crafted, not captured.

I might go to Italy after this. I think I need more time to try and declutter my thoughts, find my center again. Some things don’t change. I hold them close to my heart and protect them. But what do I do with the rest of me?

I walked up to the cab and hoisted my bag up into the trunk. The cab driver said he would pay me $100 if I could get his wife to carry a bag that heavy just a few steps. She would never even try it! Where had I been carrying it? Oh, London, Dublin, LA.

He asked who was waiting for me when I got home. This is a favorite question of cab drivers. They seem impressed at my self-reliance in carrying heavy bags, then wonder why it is I don’t have a man around to help carry them.

Perhaps I’m too able to carry my own bags?

Who’s waiting for me when I get home? My cats. Oh, so you’re not married, he said. No.

Then he told me that in India, they have a proverb: Marriages are settled in heaven and celebrated on earth”. Translation: it’s already decided who you’ll end up with, and when you meet that person, joy abounds.

It’s already settled in heaven, he told me. Your husband is looking for you. And you are hiding.

I told him I couldn’t possibly be hiding as I’ve been traveling around just about everywhere. When I stop hiding, he’ll find me. Soon, he said.

He also gave me throat lozenge for my scratchy throat. I gave him a good tip.

It’s hard to write when I’m happy. Maybe I have less to think through? I can just enjoy the moments as they come? All I know is that when I feel like I feel now, I can’t stop writing. I write everywhere, all the time. In my head, on paper, on a computer, anywhere, anywhere. I write while I’m dreaming and when I wake I wonder what I meant.

On days like today, I think about leaving and never coming back. And maybe one day I will.

I accidentally read a sad book today. I managed to leave my kindle at home before leaving on a trip, so I stopped at the bookstore at the airport and I was too short to reach the book I wanted. This book was billed as “deeply funny” (etc.), had a cute dog on the cover, and most important of all, was within arm’s length.

As it turns out, the story is about that cute dog. That cute, but very old dog, who we learn at very beginning of the book will likely not make it to the end. This then, is what I read just after I returned home from the vet with my very old cat. Like I said, it was an accident.

And while the book was in fact very sad and the main characters go through one bad thing after another, the story isn’t a black pit of gloom and despair and I realized that at some level, hope was a fragile thread, woven through the sadness.

I sometimes think about not writing here anymore (or at least making it private) so that those who know about it don’t have to worry about reading yet again about the same fears, the same issues, the same whiny inability to fix my fucking life already and get on with things. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t write here though. The words and feelings would be trapped inside me, tangled up together like string with no way for me to see any of them clearly.

But surely I could find some hopefulness, even if it was a frail thread, barely visible.

I was talking to someone the other day about hope. I said I tried to avoid it. That it seemed too close to desperation. And it still does. Wanting something is meaningless, really. Life is full of too many moving parts and too many reasons why not.

And my hand hovers over the delete key because I see no frail thread here, no laughter in the face of tears, no heartfelt lessons learned, no admiration for courageousness. There aren’t even any cute dogs.

My cat is losing too much weight. He’s lost more than a pound in one week and the doctors are worried and talking about biopsies and potential results and how cats do with chemotherapy. I learned how to give him injections today. I just pull his skin up from his neck and plunge the needle in.

I never knew when I got that tiny kitten, curled up in that little cardboard box, that he would be one of the only constants who would see me through my marriage crumbling apart, most of my family slipping away, the heavy journeys across states, the rebuilding of my life (and again, and again). But here he is. He climbs into my lap and he looks up at me and all he wants is love.

I know there is so much of my life to be grateful for, and I do and I have joy and I know better than to think I’m anything but truly blessed. But sometimes I’m still sad.

I was passing through another airport on way onto another plane the other day and I picked up a Cosmo in an attempt at light and funny reading. Cosmo told me that nothing is so unattractive as insecurity. But here’s the thing. I’m not insecure. I don’t suffer from a lack of confidence. I don’t think I’m undeserving of love. In truth, I’m really pretty arrogant. Because I do think I’m deserving of someone who loves me and for my cat not to die and I’m rather angry at the world that I can’t get what I so clearly am entitled to.

Haven’t I spent too many years giving to other people? Aren’t I pretty enough and smart enough and funny enough and good enough in bed and imaginative and creative and spontaneous and fucking whimsical and interesting? As Avril would say, I’m damn precious, a mother fucking princess, etc.

And yet, all I can do for my cat is learn how to give him injections and scratch his ears and give him love.

A few days ago, after speaking at an event, someone started a conversation with “as a veteran public speaker, you…”

Huh.

Sometimes you get these glimpses of yourself from a perspective that doesn’t include your baggage and failures and insecurities and hopes. You see the baggage-free version you show to outsiders and at first, you wonder who they’re talking about, as this stranger they’re describing sounds nothing like you.

I do a lot of public speaking. People tell me all the time how they don’t know how I seem to do it so effortlessly and how afraid they are to speak in public and they just get so nervous about it all. How do I do it?

What they don’t know is that it’s not public speaking that terrifies me, it’s speaking at all. When you break down in hysterics in sixth grade because your speech therapist insists you call someone on the telephone, when you’re in elementary school, and you’re already the new kid, and the smart kid, the teacher’s pet, and the kids already have a million reasons to choose you as the one they ridicule and then they discover you stutter and it’s like sharks who see blood in the water — when this is the fear you have of speaking, the idea of simply speaking in public is nothing. If you can get over that fear, well, what more is there?

In part, I think it’s this. I should thank the high school speech pathologist who told me I would end up sorting mail in the post office. At my core is a fierce independence I will fight to preserve, and if someone tells me I can’t do something, then please get the fuck out of my way while I do it.

If I were to wax Freudian about it all, I might say that we learn things like relying on others and letting others help us and saying that we can’t do things all by ourselves the same way we learn how to brush our teeth and make toast and look both ways before crossing the street. And when you can’t rely on your parents, not even a little bit, not for support or guidance or praise or validation, you never really learn how to rely on anyone or anything.

So all you know is self-reliance. All you know is to be strong and not to be too loud and to take care of things the best you can. And not to count on anything at all.
The inability to speak due to technical brain difficulties and fear makes self-reliance more difficult. How do you make phone calls when you have an anxiety attack, complete with hyperventilation and sobbing every time you contemplate the idea of it? And (at least in the days before the web), it was difficult to get very far with many things without picking up the phone.

So, I guess I went the other way. I was told that I would never amount to anything because I had trouble getting all the words out talking one on one, so I worked and worked and kept going until I could talk to a thousand people at one time.

Working so hard to overcome my fear of speaking — just speaking meant that I’d already worked through any speaking with the word “public” in front it. It was all public to me.

I started public speaking early, which seems crazy considering my fears and humiliations and inability to communicate, but I didn’t want anything to keep me from doing what I wanted. And likely it was that stubborn independence, which deep down is really a panic of its own: Fuck, I have to be able to do all of this myself. If I can’t, who will help me? When I do something that someone tells me is courageous or strong or hard, I think, but it wasn’t. I had no choice. I had to be strong. I can’t count on someone else to help me lift the heavy weights. So I lift them, strong or not.

In high school, I was on the mock trial team twice, which required quick thinking and speaking with cross-examination and debating and the rest of your team counting on you. I also won the slot of representing my state in Washington DC in a competition that was half essay and half speech followed by a panel of questions.

At my first job after college, I gave lots of training. Now one knew that it scared me so much I spent my own (very meager) salary on speech therapy lessons that I tried to secretly fit in between work and school. Being comfortable with public speaking is something that only happens with lots of practice. The more you do it, the better you are. And since for me, any conversation was practice, I got better.

Which isn’t to say I don’t still get terrified and humiliated and angry. I’m generally fairly fluent these days, although I still stutter every day, at least a little. And I still have days when I can barely say anything at all.

I read a blog post about my weekly podcast once — the guy was mocking me — what was the deal with how I talked? I guess he got me on a bad week. And just a few days ago, I was driving to a friend’s house and the road was blocked off to all but local traffic because of a yearly festival. The friend had told us all to print the email inviting us over so we could show it to the police blockading the road and they’d let us through. I wasn’t able to print it out. So, I slowed down and talked to the cop. I told him the address I was going to, and that I hadn’t printed out the invitation like I was supposed to. I guess I stumbled on the address. “Are you sure that’s where you’re going?” he said. He smiled as though he was HILARIOUS. I guess I have the wrong perspective to get the joke.

So do I get nervous when I speak in public? Not really. Every conversation I’ve ever had has been rehearsal. But do I feel a moment of complete and utter panic every time I’m in the middle of a speech and find myself stumbling over a word, sure that I’ll be unable to utter another word and I’ll stand there, mute and I’ll struggle to get the words out and they won’t come and then what will I do, how will I make it through that? Of course. Of course I do.

But when someone calls me an experienced and comfortable public speaker, they don’t see my childhood and my speech therapy and all the times people hung up on me when I was blocked on a word because they thought the line was disconnected and the teasing and the fear. And that I’ve pulled through and worked and struggled so that all they see is the free and easy speech isn’t being strong. It’s just surviving.

For a long time, I didn’t like flowers. I know, who doesn’t like flowers, right? But I guess I’d gotten so many flowers delivered to me from guys who really didn’t mean anything by it. It was just this easy, hollow gesture rather than anything thoughtful and meaningful. And then there’s the pragmatic side of me that often wins out over my emotions. Where was the utility in flowers? Their only activity is dying.

I spent years of marriage with someone who gave me flowers (even though I said I didn’t want them) and earrings (even though my ears are no longer pierced) in lieu of anything requiring real thought.

But as time went by, I began to appreciate flowers a bit more. They can be beautiful. They can brighten your room, your day. And they can be thoughtful. The thoughtlessness (or not) of flowers has little to do with the flowers and more to do with the flower giver.

But I never thought of them as something I could buy for myself. I guess I was thinking of those stories — women who send themselves roses on Valentine’s Day and sign the card with a fictitious name. I didn’t want to resort to that.

My last relationship was built on superficiality. It’s amazing how we start to think whatever environment we’re in is reasonable and normal and only once we’re removed from a situation can we see its irrationality. Looking back now, I can see clearly that at some level, I felt safer in a relationship in which I didn’t have to open up or become too vulnerable.
But, even if we choose it, a relationship devoid of real meaning can take its toll on your soul. Being with someone who never tells you he likes you or anything about you or that he enjoys having you around can make you feel unlikeable and not worth having around.

And only later do you realize how much living in a world without affection or personal validation has chipped away at you, a little at a time.

Sometimes getting compliments for your professional skills becomes resounding silence — you are bombarded with the overwhelmingly loud absence of any mention of anything complimentary about your non-work identity. “You are great with corporate strategy” translates into “there is nothing about your personality, appearance, personal hopes and dreams, or non-work interests that is appealing.”

In any case, I would occasionally get flowers and I would think, maybe this is some sign that I’m personally (as opposed to professionally ) worthy. Only later I found it was nothing of the sort. I was creating a personal statement where there was none. He might pick up flowers for me, but he’d also pick them up for anyone. In this case, it was the entire relationship that was hollow.

But the idea of flowers was still growing on me.

And yet I still couldn’t buy them for myself. I kind of wanted some around, so I just hoped someone else might bring me some. And people did, every so often - friends who were dropping by for dinner.

It may sound crazy, I know, to want flowers and have the method for getting them be to just wait around and hope. But I kept (and keep, and keep) thinking about that book passage I read last September:

“It’s not that she doesn’t need rescuing but that no one else will be able to do it. She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what’s depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.”

I know, I really do know, that you can’t wait for someone else to save you and that you, only you can do it. You can’t expect someone else to fix you and make the world all better.

But buying my own flowers seemed like yet another way I had to rescue myself and it was exhausting to think about.

A few days ago I decided fuck it. I can’t let flowers be a symbol of my failures. So I bought some flowers. Bright, yellow, happy.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about our ideal future hypothetical relationships. She thought she might want someone who was funny and caring and thoughtful. I said all I wanted was to be accepted for exactly who I am. To be told that I’m enough.

And while I know intellectually that no one else can save me, I suppose I’d just like to think I’m worth the attempt.

I find it difficult to park in straight lines. Nearly every morning, I pull into the parking lot at my office, get out of my car, realize that some part of my car is occupying part of the space next to it, get back in my car, and straighten things out. This happens even though I now specifically concentrate on parking within the lines.

Perhaps there’s a life metaphor here; I just don’t know what that is.

I lost my car keys twice in the last two days. Both times I found them in the ignition. Maybe that’s a metaphor too.

I used to be a lot more focused.

The failings obscure my view of anything else.

Clearly I am freaked the fuck out about turning 37.

Likely this is because I equate 37 with “late 30s”, which is the same as 40 and at 40, everyone is a long way down the path of families and careers and other mature adult things. While I have none of these things. Of course, my freakout has nothing to do with whether or not I actually want any of these things. In fact, my life should be just about entirely complaint free.

I don’t have a boss. I work on what I want. I get paid well for it. I get to do things like write a book and travel and meet with top companies and government agencies and sit on my balcony and watch the ferries go by and get $175 haircuts and take five weeks off to wander around Europe and drive my MGB along the beach with the top down and invite my friends over and cook them lots of delicious food. I have fabulous friends, a great apartment, a loveable niece. I have a good relationship with my sister, a smart and organized assistant, and a corner office with a spectacular view.

What. the. fuck. is. wrong. with. me? I should be estactic every single day. I should think 37 is pretty damn awesome. I shouldn’t feel like my life is a failure.

But instead of focusing on all the positives, I look at the flipside: I’m divorced. I clearly am bad at relationships to the point that I don’t even want to attempt one again. I still don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up so I just take on anything that comes my way until I’m so overwhelmed I just want to sit in a corner and cry. I don’t have now, and never will have again, any kind of relationship with my parents. I fear being old and alone. I feel like a bad friend because I get overwhelmed with work and disappear. My MGB runs on expensive repair bills rather than gasoline. I look over my life and it’s hard to see anything but my failings.

I’m reading Born To Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life right now. There’s a section on studies that find that the things that tend to influence our happiness (or lack thereof) in our lives are closely tied to the strengths our romantic bonds and families. So, there’s that I guess.

But maybe I should spend more time enjoying my life and less time being such an ungrateful whiny baby. I’ll be spending my 37th birthday on a plane to Europe where I plan to try everything that presents itself to me. Except when I don’t want to. And I’ll work on being grateful.

“There is a sharp decline in a woman’s ability to achieve pregnancy over age forty. The fertility rate per month is only about 5% and even with in Vitro Fertilization (IVF), the most successful infertility treatment available, the pregnancy rate is only about 10% per try. This is due to the greatly reduced number of normal eggs remaining in the ovaries of a woman over forty… Estimates from embryo biopsy reveal that at least 90% of a woman’s eggs are genetically abnormal when a woman is over 40. This is explains the increased pregnancy risk over 40. The miscarriage rate is 33% at age 40. Genetically abnormal pregnancies are more common as well with an incidence of 1/38 at age 40… As women get older the risks of medical conditions complicating pregnancy increase. Complications of pregnancy that increase with age include elevated blood pressure, gestational diabetes, premature labor and bleeding disorders such as placental abruption.”

–A Woman’s Age and Fertility
I never had a strong desire to have children. In fact, I mostly had a desire not to have children and I figured that parenting was so challenging that it should really only be undertaken by those who really and truly wanted kids. Which isn’t to say I didn’t see how being a parent would be awesome. People always say that kids are rewarding and bring meaning to life more than anything else in this world and with my niece, I can see glimpses of that. I can see how satisfying, comforting, and life-fulfilling a family could be when everything falls into place. And I have wanted that feeling of family — of belonging. But I never felt that sense of family had to include children for me.

When I was married, my husband didn’t want kids either, so early into our marriage, he had a vasectomy and I thought that was the end of that. Never again would I have to think about birth control. Only then we got divorced and if I ever planned to have sex again, I figured I’d better start thinking about it. I considered Essure, a permanent sterilization method, but I was only 30 when I got divorced and didn’t want to exclude the possibility of finding someone to spend the rest of my life with who did want kids. Because while I didn’t have a strong pull towards them, if I met the right person who I would love forever and he wanted a family, I would consider having that with him. So after taking birth control pills for a while, I went with the Mirena IUD. Fewer hormones than the pill and I wouldn’t have to think about it again for five years.

I started to really understand the panic of the biological clock. You always hear it mocked, but it’s such a core issue to our lives. Some women truly and completely want to be mothers. Being a mom is something that means more to their lives than where they work or how much money they make. We are so obsessed with the working part of our lives and understand completely overachievers who work extra hours for that promotion. But what about those who also have non-career aspirations for their lives? Those who want to have satisfying personal lives, to have families, to get to the end of their days and look back on a life beyond work?

And if you’re a woman in your mid-thirties, those options start fading away. Sure, you can always get a better job and if you are single, you likely will one day find someone to spend your life with. But you might not be able to build a family with someone you love. And while I didn’t feel the ticking of starting a family, I could see that it was becoming less of a viable option. In your 20s, you can always change your mind someday. By the time you’re 40, you likely can’t. And the fading option of having a family also brought a fear of being alone. Maybe I would never find someone to spend my life with because anyone I would meet would want a family and I would be too old to give that to him.

I talked to a friend who chose not to have kids and who is now too old to consider it. She said that she and her husband haven’t regretted not having children, but as they get older, they do sometimes feel a bit wistful and alone with no family of their own.
When my doctor told me that I was of “advanced maternal age”, I felt a little of the ticking clock panic, but part of me also felt relieved. If I did meet someone and he did want kids, how would I really feel about that?

After a couple of years, I started to have problems and my doctor thought the IUD might be contributing. So she took it out. And she wants me to avoid introducing any hormones into my system. So.

I’m nearly 37. I’m not in a relationship. I could probably get pregnant right now, but what about in 3 years when I’m 40? Sure, it would be possible, but it could be very difficult and risky. And even if I were to meet Prince Charming today and we lived happily ever after, it would unlikely we’d be at a stage to consider children until then.

So, I think I’m going to go ahead with Essure.

It feels a little melancholy to know for certain that I’ll never experience pregnancy and motherhood and babies a little girl in pigtails and someone I love gazing at my belly and telling me I’m beautiful and feeling that sense of a family of my own. And it’s a little scary. But mostly it’s scary because I’ve kept the option of motherhood open so I could be what someone else might want me to be.

But I can’t live my life that way, anyway.

I think about my grandpa a lot. He was my favorite person, my closest family, one of the most wonderful people I have ever known. And like me, he was afraid of death. And I wonder then, what it was like for him when he knew it was coming.

Mostly, I feel guilt that I wasn’t there for him. I hardly saw him at all during his last year. And it was a hard year for him, not just because he saw death approaching and he didn’t have the mobility to do the things he loved, but because my grandma had just died and he felt so sad and alone.

I should have been there all the time, but I was caught up in my own life and didn’t want to have to deal with my mom, and really, it’s all petty compared with the gaping hole in my life now that he’s not here. I could have had more time with him.

I know that you can’t second guess and that everything is easier in hindsight, but I should have flown down early. He told my sister that he was dying. To let everyone know. And the family ignored him.  He was just being old and sad and sick. But he was right. And I already had a flight booked for later that week and so instead of flying right down, I waited.

And when I landed, I got the call that he was in the hospital and might not wake up.

It’s not that I wanted to be able to say goodbye to him, although I did. It’s that I wanted him to know that I was there for him. But I wasn’t there for him. I wanted him to feel loved in his last days, to realize how much he had done for me and meant to me. I didn’t want him to feel alone and neglected as he faced the scariest thing he’d ever known.

But I wasn’t there.

With my grandma, she spent her last days at the hospital, but even though she was in and out of present day, she knew I was there. At least in those final, scary, lonely days, she knew those who loved her were there.

My grandpa spent a week feeling frail and helpless, knowing it was likely his last week, and I didn’t come. And then he spent several more days in the hospital, with the family standing around talking over him like he was a coffee table.

I leaned over and held his hand and whispered in his ear, but I don’t really know if he heard me. And then he was gone.

I know it sounds pretentious and unrealistic and like I wear a beret and drink alcohol no one can pronounce and read only feminist novels and argue with everyone around me about the plight of the working class and march for improved health through unpasteurized milk, but I want to spend the little life I have on meaningful things. I want to have meaningful conversation about stuff that matters. I don’t want to be too afraid to be vulnerable and honest and have so many walls that I live my life alone, surrounded by people and noise.

I’m all good on the pateurization thing though.

Life’s perspective shifts again. I don’t know why I continue to be surprised. I should know by now that this is life. To think that maybe, finally, I understand myself and where I’m headed, and then finding it unexpected that it turns out I don’t know anything at all is like being surprised by the sunset. Huh, the sun’s setting again? I thought last night would be the last of that.

What I realized today is this: I may live my life alone. Maybe lots of people consider this possibility and sure I knew that not every single person in the world ended up with someone to share their life with. But I never considered that might be me. Even after my divorce when I lost faith in the concept of marriage, I still assumed I would find someone to love and grow old with.

I always wanted to be a family. To belong. To feel safe. I never had a great desired to be a mother, but after growing up feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere, I wanted to live my life differently. To find someone who I would love. Who would love me. And we would belong to each other. I thought I could will a sense of belonging into being.

When how you view the world is fractured, it’s like you’re falling, falling, wildly reaching out to catch anything that would keep you up, but you find nothing but air. And then you land and everything’s changed. You’re suddenly somewhere you’ve never been and all of your assumptions are wrong. Nothing you’ve learned has prepared you for this. It all looks familiar, but nothing’s the same.

The world in which I have lived until today included a future in which I grew old while holding someone’s hand. Now I live in another world. A world where I may not have anyone to hold. And this world is terrifying.

Sure, if I told my friends they would say that somehow things will work out; that everything will be fine. And maybe that will be true. The difference between yesterday and today is that I suddenly have this knowing that it’s also possible that won’t be true.

Maybe it was too easy for me to get dates in high school and college. Sure, I had lots of heartbreak, but I never had trouble finding someone. On the one hand, it’s good to date a lot when you’re young, so you can make all of those mistakes we all make and learn how to be in a relationship for when it really will matter later. But maybe it’s also good to sometimes have trouble, so we can learn how to face the possibility of being alone.

Now that I’m older, of course, I realize it’s not about having trouble finding someone. It’s about so many other things and all the pieces just might not come together. Not every story ends with “happily ever after”.

So I do what I always do. Funny how I never realized before that this was what I was doing. I focus all of my energy on building a perfect life, alone. If this is my future, I should get on with it. I clean. I organize. I buy things I normally don’t care about at all, things that all the commercials say will make my house a home: drapes, rugs, a hall tree and bench. Before yesterday, I couldn’t have told you what a hall tree even was.

I know I’m not entirely alone. I have friends. I have love. I have a lot of good in my life. I have relationships that matter.

When I think about growing older, I know that death will be at the end of that, and when I think about that, it’s all I can do to keep myself from collapsing on the floor in panic. And when I think about growing older alone, without someone who’s been there with me, loving me, accepting me for exactly who I am, that panic feeling is exactly the same.

I had already accepted that my life wouldn’t be like my grandparents. As they grew old and faced the certainly of death, they had each other: over 60 years of love and support and living life together. 60 years isn’t in the cards for me.

But as I think about turning 37, I have to accept that any duration of that life might not be how things turn out for me.

Amazon doesn’t know me at all. Or, possibly they know me inside and out and are mocking my mopey teenage angst.

Just as I am lamenting my lot in life: to grow old alone, all the while knowing that the most important thing in this world is building a life with the one who you love and who loves you back, and that work, that next email, a new car, whether the couch matches the throw pillows – none of it matters in comparison. Just then, amazon suggests:

The Ultimate Wedding Album (Audio CD) ~ Various Artists (May 14, 2009)

Really, amazon? That’s what you think I’m looking for right now?

To their credit, they also recommended David Sedaris’s “When You Are Engulfed in Flames”, which I not only own, but think about its title often (including today) as a description of my life.

I don’t know whether to call amazon and ask them for life advice or close my account and throw my kindle in the ocean.

It’s quite likely I’m carefully making plans for mass murder. I see a future of death and destruction and carnage, all at my hands. I’ve killed before. There’s no reason to think I won’t do so again. I don’t mean to do it, yet it happens every single time.

I’m talking, of course, about my recently planted herbs. Plants look beautiful when you first plant them, and I’ve outdone myself this year by adding three flowering mini-trees. This is simple container gardening. I have no lawn, no weeds, no bugs, no squirrels. What could go wrong?

Well, the most salient point is probably that I travel too much to keep things watered. OK, it really doesn’t matter about the traveling. Even when I’m home I can’t imagine I’ll remember this watering thing. How often are you supposed to water these things anyway? Every day? Once a week? When they start to cry in agony?

Another problem is that I tend to grab plants randomly and then toss away the plastic care instructions. The little flowering tree I put outside my front door in a completely shaded area that never sees sunlight ever, not even for a few minutes? Apparently needs full sun. The herbs that are sitting in the broiling sun from 6 in the morning to 9 at night? Likely are meant to grow into their herb-like ways in the shade.

There’s a reason my house is completely devoid of plants. It’s not that I’ve never had any. Houseplants are a favorite gift of guests and coworkers. But they never last. One day, I look over and see a pot filled with vaguely brown dust and vines and think, oh look — apparently I used to have a plant! I don’t even remember seeing that before.

And so it will go with the latest horticulture experiment. But maybe I can keep it all alive long enough to make a pesto.

I have a love/hate relationship with antique stores. And by that, I mostly mean that I hate them. Every so often, in some delusional fit of desparation, I find myself in one, surrounded by teetering mannequins  that are staring vacantly at warped mirrors and hat stands fashioned from antlers.

It happens like this. I walk into a normal store, one that sells things that are new and lines them up neatly in matching rows. I almost find what I’m looking for, but nothing is quite right. And that would be OK, except that it doesn’t seem to make sense to spend $80 on a bowl that’s only almost attractive.

Today, for instance, I was looking for a small container. It didn’t have to be anything special, but as it was going to be visible for all to see, I wanted to get something a little classier than tupperware. My thought process went like this:

“That’s a pretty color blue. If only it wasn’t shaped like a fish. Why does it have to be a fish?”

“That has ducks on it.”

“See, that’s all I need. Just a ceramic bowl with a lid. Oh. That’s a dutch oven. And it’s $175.”

And at moments like that, I think of the antique store. But I’m really not thinking of the actual antique store, I’m thinking about the platonic ideal of an antique store that exists only in those folksy movies from the 60s when husbands and wives slept in separate twin beds.

I like the idea of finding something unique, with history. And I like the notion of reusing what we already have in the world, rather than adding more clutter. And I like the vastly lower prices available. Say you need a vase. (I don’t know — maybe someone brings you flowers a lot? Just go with me on this.) You could go into a fancy furniture store and see a lovely vase and think, hmm. $100 seems like a lot, but I’ll keep it forever. And it will add a spot of happy color to my living room. Or, you could go to an antique store and see an equally lovely vase, and it would be $5.

No contest, right? Why not always shop in antique stores?

Well. Here’s the thing.

First, the whole antique thing is a ruse. Antique stores rarely contain antiques. Mostly they contain leftover garage sale items that have been left out in the rain and snubbed by those people who make a living by fishing things out of the trash and selling them on the sidewalk. The store might have one antique but it’s a felt hat with a feather. And who wants a hundred year old feather? Can you imagine the spider eggs that thing has accumulated? Would you really put that on your head?

I know this not only because I have been inside an antique store, but also because for a while when I was a kid, my parents owned an antique store. Or, more accurately, they owned an “antique” store. I had to work there. Don’t you ever wonder where antique stores get all that stuff? It’s not like people are calling them up every day and saying, “hey, I have all this really old awesome stuff. Do you want it?”

No. The items in antique stores generally come from auctions. Mostly from estate sales. In other words, someone dies, the family goes through everything and takes the good stuff, and the rest of it gets put in cardboard boxes which are then offered up, in bulk fashion, at auction. “What’s the bid on this box of random broken things? How about this one?” It’s a bit like buying a box of cracker jacks. You hope you get the magic decoder ring and not the sticker of a monkey. Because really, no one needs another monkey sticker, but we all have cause to decode things magically.

But of course, the heirs are likely to keep all the magic stuff, so you have to hope they just don’t know what they have. Ever seen Antiques Road Show? People swarm a convention center with their broken lamps, assumed to be invaluable by virtue of having been in great aunt Ethel’s attic for 50 years. 98% of the time, the experts weigh in with their analysis that what they have, in fact, is a broken lamp. And so it goes with what ends up in antique stores.

But when I’m looking at a $80 bowl shaped like a fish, I forget all of these things and desperately try the antique store. I would like to think of it like a treasure hunt, with unknown surprises around every corner, but mostly it’s like that one scene in Indiana Jones where he’s like walking around in this dark cave and keeps running into spider webs and then big bugs start crawling around everywhere. I don’t find the kinds of surprises I like, is what I’m saying.

I’m also not a fan of clutter, also known as “bric-a-brac” or “knickknacks” or “decorating”. I’m pretty sure this also stems from childhood. My mom LOVES to fill her house completely to the brim with, well, just about anything she can find. You can’t tell what color her walls are because paintings and wall hangings cover every space. Randomly, a row of egg cups are lined up on a ledge. Another corner may house a set of Santas. Even when it’s not Christmas. You may find it hard to sit in a chair, because a camel saddle could be propped up on it. Decorative plates? She’s got them. An actual fire hydrant (clearly no longer hooked up to water)? Check. A working model of an old-timey bicycle? Sure, although God knows why.

One thing I like about being an adult is that I don’t have to live with all of those things. So I don’t. Sometimes, I think I should add a vase or something to liven things up a little, though I’m reluctant to add anything that doesn’t provide value. Mostly these additions don’t last long.

It’s not that I have nothing beyond furniture. I recently brought back a painting from Paris. I have lots of books. Tons. The few others items I have mostly belonged to my grandparents — a Varga girl tin poster, a bell – things I keep around because they remind me of them. Which provide lots of useful value.

And, of course, I have that blue bowl shaped like a fish.

First, I need to point out that I am not great at gardening. Because I’m egotistical and vain, I’m pretty sure this isn’t because I couldn’t be good at gardening, but because I don’t have the patience and follow up it requires. I also don’t see the point of it. Or, more accurately, I find it to be similar to crafts, which I also am not good at for the same reasons.

Intellectually, I understand why others see the point of things like gardening and crafts: that they’re creating something; that it’s satisfying to build something unique; that all the effort pays off in the form of something beautiful. But on a practical level, it is, for me, just a lot of work and effort to end up with something that you could have easily purchased a better version of.

But then, those crafters and gardeners probably feel the same way about writing. Where’s the value in that, after all? What’s the point?

The extent to which I am interested in both gardening and crafts centers on usefulness. At least I know my limitations and don’t have lofty goals of creating quilts and elaborate gardens. Such plans would only end in heartbreak. And lots of dead plants.

All of that to say that I planted an herb garden over the weekend. Absent life direction, I figured I could at the very least, watch something else grow. An herb garden appeals to my practicality on several levels. It’s very small and contained, so the time and effort are minimal. The result is something useful: I can just walk over to my balcony when I’m cooking and snip off a few leaves. And for the most part, the herbs grow themselves.

If last year’s herb garden is any indication, here how things will go. I will only very occasionally water the plants. Primarily, this will happen when I am sitting on the balcony, drinking a glass of water and notice that the basil is fatally limping. So, I’ll share my glass of water with it. The basil will, therefore, be the first to go.

The hardier herbs (the rosemary, the oregano, the sage) will manage to grow despite my best efforts to kill them (in fact, those are still growing from last year, even though I have completely neglected them for at least nine months). I will, however, have no use for sage at any point, so it will exist solely so the cat has something to snack on when outside.

I added catnip this year, which has already been met with great approval. I am pretty sure I’ll have no need to keep it watered because it will be completely eaten by the end of the day.

I did make one addition this year: a small tree with purple flowers. It looks pretty against the blue of the water. It serves no practical purpose other than to remind me to find happiness in small things. So, maybe it’s the most practical plant of them all.

At the end of 2007, I wrote that the theme of that year had been bittersweet and I thought the theme of 2008 might be balance. Of course, it was not, unless you consider the utter lack of it to be a theme. As I read through the last year and a half worth of posts, I see a shape emerge. A struggle to let go of the past and move on. I know very well how important it is to keep moving, not to bring the past with you, except as lessons and friends.

But if I outline that shape I see in my writing, as though I were tracing the path of the stars I see through a foggy window, I see something else. That what I mistook for the past was really part of me. And you can’t run from yourself. You learn how to take it with you.

I was reading the other day about how environment is secondary happiness. If you’re in emotional turmoil, it’s dificult to be cheered up by a sunny day. And that’s the other shape I see, hidden behind the first. My attempt to find happiness in small things. A sleeping cat. The way the sun reflects on the water. Writing.

Maybe struggling so hard to leave myself behind is what has made me so tired. I think I’m going to take a break from that and rest now.

I keep trying things that don’t work. I guess that’s how life is, really. Either things work or they don’t. And there’s really no way to know. Except sometimes there is, of course.

How any of us can ever judge anyone else about anything is a mystery. Life is hard. We all are doing the best we can. But instead of empathizing, remembering that we have all been in these same places, we forget. And it makes us all more alone.

It’s easy to be confused by life. We’re walking around in tunnels of darkness. No way of knowing where the turns are. We know they exist, but how many? I try to anchor to the few things I know beyond question. I always thought that list would grow, but it only gets smaller. Who are these people who are so sure of everything around them and everything that will come? Or are those people just better at faking confidence?

As I grope along that dark tunnel, I feel the shape of something and I discover, it’s this, this is what life is about. But it’s fixed in place and I can’t bring it with me. We come into this world assuming life is fair. But it’s not as though anyone told us this was so, so we can’t be too outraged when we learn it’s not.

You read between the lines and fill in the white space. But between the words that are here is what I keep in my heart. Unchangeable, like gravity. Unsaid because it goes without saying. Like the sky is always watching over our lives.

So I walk around doing ordinary things. I talk to my friends. I go through airport screening. I take my plastic bag of liquids and place it in the bin. I answer my email. I go to the grocery store and stand in the aisle and decide which brand of bread to buy. I pay my bills. And I’m surrounded by the white space. Unspoken, edited out, but always there.

She said I should follow my heart, and that made me stop and think because mostly no one has told me that. And mostly I always figured that what I should do is not follow my heart, but instead to follow my head. After all, that would be the smart thing, the logical thing, and therefore the best thing. But then again, life isn’t logical or smart, so maybe that’s why following my head hasn’t seemed to work for me so far.

Not that anything is easy as all that. I’ve read enough of the old fairy tales to know that following your heart leads you down a twisty path, strewn with rocks and crumbling walls with no clear sign of where it might lead. There’s certainly no guarantee that it will lead to all your heart desires. But then again, following your head down a path away from your heart isn’t likely to lead to that either.

So what the hell, right?

My mind is full of unfinished things. We all like things wrapped up neatly, but some things just don’t have closure. Looking over this journal, for instance, I see I have 24 unfinished drafts. The oldest is from November 2004, the newest from yesterday. My life was very different in November 2004. I could not have imagined or planned how things have gone since then. Which is why I think it’s so ridiculous that I worry about my lack of solid planning, my complete inability to have any sense of goals past “don’t cry all the time”. Even if I had a 10 point plan of success with multi-columned roadmap, I’d still end up four years in a completely different place, with no way of knowing any of it right now.

I even knew that back then, as a draft entry in August 2005 says:

“I don’t know how to say it without sounding trite and Hallmark. But there are some things the songs and poems don’t tell you. Sure, we all know that when the road forks, we should take the less-traveled option, and the highway’s endless and then you die and all that. But what about when you’re driving the 5 to LA and you thought you were being all responsible by getting a tune up before the trip only the mechanic didn’t put everything back right and your spark plug pops out of wherever spark plugs are supposed to plugged in to and then you’re stranded on some offramp that is so far from anything there’s not even any signs that say how far to the next town? Or when you set out for Sacramento but you look up and you’re coming up on Reno. Or Budapest.

I don’t know where I got the idea that you planned your life and just followed the plan. Maybe I saw Dorothy following the yellow brick road too many times or heard that “life is a journey” crap. With a journey, you know where you’re going, even if you don’t know exactly what you’re encounter along the way. Life isn’t really like that at all.

Life is a series of seemingly random events, connected only in that you are the starring player in each of them.”

Reading through those unfinished 2004 entries is like reading about an entirely different person, someone I used to know and hang out with, but rarely see anymore. I remember all those things happening, but I can’t feel them anymore. Take for instance, the note from January 2004:

“My ex-husband invited me to lunch to tell me about his new girlfriend. You think of divorce as this specific thing, when really, it’s a chain reaction of events, taking months and years of your life. Last January, I was near the emotional end, but only the paperwork beginning.”

The entry from April 2004, however, reminds me of one of the reasons I was so hesitant so try Zoloft:

“I went off Effexor. It was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. I had gone on it the year before. My therapist thought it would help with anxiety during the stressfulness of the divorce. He didn’t mention the “discontinuation symptoms” you experience even with a tapered dosage. Six weeks of vertigo, emotional turmoil, brain shocks, crying, throwing up, insomnia. It hurt to move my eyes.

I talked to the doctor. He said that I should gradually decrease my dosage to avoid what the medical industry cleverly calls “discontinuation effects”. Apparently, what he actually meant was that if I went cold turkey, I would without question throw myself off a bridge. But if I stepped down gradually, I increased my chances of just considering it seriously. I got a doctor’s note and worked from home for two weeks.”

June of 2004 was when I both ended up in the ER for chest pain (that was diagnosed as chest wall sprain) and had my first (and hopefully only) night terror in which I woke up in the middle of the night screaming. But it was also the month in which I changed my last name to something meaningful. I still think of that as one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Identity is important.

I have incomplete entries about both my mom and my stepdad that ramble on and on. I mostly don’t spend any time thinking about either of them anymore, and I think mostly I’m better for it. I do sometimes have that lonely wish for family, but you can’t make one out of what you have just because you want one. I might wish I had parents, but I never miss these particular parents.
I wrote one particularly rambling entry in March 2005 about my crazy ex-boyfriends. Like the one who joined the marines when I broke up with him to “show me” and the one who showed up at the same party as me after we broke up and handcuffed himself to the host’s bed and said he wouldn’t leave until I stopped talking to some other guy at the party and then finally, the host got him uncuffed and he was so drunk, he fell down the stairs as he was walking to his car, the guy I had been talking to drove him home. And then I dated that guy, who after I broke up with him, would drive five hours to my house just to sit outside of it.

By 2007, I was asking philosophical questions:

“Why is time sometimes out of order and why do sometimes things just fit like they’ve always been two halves of the same whole, just temporarily misplaced? Does the universe engage in foreshadowing or just in hindsight?”

Sadly, the entry trails thusly, “I know this if nothing else. If we believe in fate, in signs, in…” Now I’ll never know what it is that I know.

My existentialism continued when I read Eat, Pray, Love.

“I feel a lot of camaraderie with the author of eat, pray, love. I understand her absolute panic at the thought that one day we will die, we can’t stop it, it’s inevitable and my God, why are we just working and driving and sleeping in the meantime? And I understand how she feels when she says she doesn’t want to let go of control and I even get the idea that wanting so much to stop everything, to grab time with your hands and wind it tight like a string and not let it go, is just another way of trying to control something that’s impossible, impossible to control.

She describes our lives as standing on two horses — one under each foot. And both horses are galloping along at top speed and all we can do is hold on to the reins. One horse is fate and the other is free will. But I don’t know. It seems to me like we are riding fate and free will is how we decide to hold on for dear life or let go.

She tells of this dream where someone points at the waves and tells her to figure out how to stop them from happening. She tries everything she can and fashions seawalls and canals and dams, but nothing works. And finally, this person in her dram says to her as he points out toward the colossal, powerful, endless, rocking ocean. “Tell me, if you would be so kind — how exactly were you planning on stopping that.”

It seems to me her search for balance and all of her meditation only means she’s stoically accepting life, although maybe she’s right and maybe that’s the way to peace. And God knows I could use some peace, but everything inside me rebels this idea of stoic acceptance. A weakness, a failing? One of many I have, no doubt. But I’d rather experience life than accept it. Later in the book, someone says, “Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now.” And that too I understand. That’s not stoic acceptance. That’s knowing that life is all we have and we don’t know the future, so all we can do is what we can.”

Of course, these memories are near enough that I feel them as well as remember them. Like my unfinished entry called “perspective” in which I said:

“I have these moments, that mostly only I see, where all I can see are my failings. And I forget that I’m not always that way and sometimes it takes that reflection through someone else to remember. There’s more to me than my failings. Some days are harder than others.”

That entry was followed by one in which I was going to list all the great things about myself. I only got as far as #1. I made pretty good cocktails.

It’s only fitting, I think, that I end with of more recent drafts, “and then”, which is just an unfinished quote from a song lyric:

“life’s like an hourglass, glued to the table, no one can find the rewind button now…”

I just remembered what’s worse than feeling like I’m not strong enough to make it on my own.

Crying all the time.

If I’m taking Zoloft only I know that I can’t cope. When everything makes me cry, everyone knows.

When I was in college, and had never received anything other than a glowing review at anything (other than that one time in private school when I got a spanking - a spanking! - for not taking the time to grade my math papers and just giving myself 100%), during my annual review, my manager said I needed to cry less. Sure, he said it in the sexist, this is a hardware store where men work and you are a small, small girl with crazy hormones and emotions and of course you’re going to cry all the time, but  seriously, act a little more like a guy if you’re going to work here, ok? But the point still holds.

Crying at work or during a regular adult conversation doesn’t help anyone. If you’re stressed or angry or upset or sad or lonely or overwhelmed or lost, you cry it out in private like a normal person. Or possibly in the presence of a girlfriend and wine, as long as you haven’t already cried in front of said girlfriend within the previous three months. Or you get a therapist.

After the “there’s no crying in building materials” incident, I made it my LIFE’S WORK to be tear-free. And if I had to cry at work, I did so in the bathroom like a normal person.Years went by and I managed to keep the tears to a minimum. They’ve started up in full force over the last few years though, like I’ve gone back to adolescence, like those years of anti-tear training didn’t exist.

I’m back to crying when I’m angry, or sad, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or when the phone rings or when the sky’s blue. Although milk spilling doesn’t phase me.

I don’t like wearing my emotions so visibly, to be so vulnerable as to let everyone know exactly how I’m feeling. I want to be able to reveal my innermost feelings only to those I choose. Not to the cashier at the drugstore. And I want my rational brain, that knows some things aren’t worth spending time thinking about, much less crying over, to knock some sense into my runaway tear ducts that apparently are taking a vacation from rational thought.

So, drugs it is then. Because I’d like to wear mascara again some day.

1. They put cucumbers on their burgers instead of pickles.
2. You can have one packet of ketchup or one packet of mayo for your fries. You can have one of each for an extra charge.
3. Happy meals have chocolate milk in them.
4. A cup of water is carbonated.
5. A “bottle” of water is in a soft plastic package similar to a juice pack. It’s also carbonated.
6. You can only order meals, complete with a side and a drink, not individual items. Meals are around $9.
7. You can order waffle fries. But only with one packet of ketchup or one packet of mayo.
8. As with all other restaurants in Berlin, you can sit outside under sun umbrellas and smoke for hours. The difference is these umbrellas have “McCafe” written on them.
9. Competition appears to be primarily from Pizza Hut and KFC. Also with their own versions of McCafes.

Bonus McDonald’s fact: In Slovenia, all the cafe umbrellas say “I’m loving it” on them. As though they had extra from the U.S. and couldn’t be bothered to print any in Slovene. I don’t know if they also put cucumbers on their burgers.

I want to think that I don’t need a chemical substance to maintain my sanity. I want to believe that I am enough, on my own. That’s I’m strong enough, and independent enough, and smart enough, and emotionally capable enough to handle life. And maybe I’m not.

I think: but I used to be able to handle life — to thrive even. I was successful and accomplished things and didn’t feel so overwhelmed with the world that all I could do was cry. What happened to me? What’s wrong with me?

Sure, I have too much work and not enough sleep and no sense of the future, but I’ve always had too much work and not enough sleep and my sense of the future has been way more fucked in times past than now. I suppose, looking back, I’ve gone through other periods of being unable to move, unable to do anything but cry. Maybe they don’t seem so bad because I’ve gotten past them. And I can’t seem to get past this.

My doctor said maybe my body chemistry has changed as I’ve gotten older so I respond to things differently. Maybe the supposed harmless growth on my uterus is fucking with my hormone levels. Maybe things have always been this way.

I only know that I was feeling so incredibly paralyzed from the crushing weight of the world that I just couldn’t function. And then with Zoloft, I could. That’s a good thing, right? Why does it matter how I can function as long as I can?

Well, for one thing, there’s that whole, what’s wrong with me, why can’t I be strong on my own thing? And then there’s the fear that the Zoloft would take away some part of me that makes me me. And maybe not having such a heightened sense of stress would mean that I wouldn’t do as good of a job. That I would be satisified with mediocrity, with averageness. And that no one would think anything good about me anymore.

In any case, I managed to accidentally leave behind the Zoloft on my recent trip and after 10 days without it, I figured maybe I didn’t need it anymore. Only tonight, there I was again, feeling hopeless that I would ever figure out my life, feeling pointless, taking it out on people who don’t deserve it.

My doctor said I should think of taking Zoloft the same way one might take cold medicine or heart medicine. And while I think that way about anyone else who is on anti-anxiety medication or anti-depressants, I don’t think that way about myself. I just want to be me. And for that to be enough.

I keep waiting before I write. Waiting until I can be witty. Interesting. Funny. And I keep waiting. And I’m still none of those things. I’m only tired. And the more energy I spend explaining to myself why I shouldn’t be tired at all, the more tired I get.

I keep wondering what it is that I need to get past this. And all I can think of is that I could use a little love. So in addition to being tired, non-witty, etc., I’ve also become a cliche. Or a Beatles song.

“What are the names of your goldfish?”

“That one is named Sofia. And that one is named Sofia. And that one is named Sofia.”

“And what are your dolls’ names?”

“This one is Sofia.”

“How about this one?”

“Sing Sing.”

Last November, my grandmother died. I don’t think I took it very well. Family issues, relationship issues, death issues, and all other sorts of emotional issues entertwined with missing her. This September, my grandfather died. I felt like an orphan. I regretted not spending more time with him. And I was sad. I’m still sad.

There was family drama. If I think about it too much I get angry and then I realize that it doesn’t matter. That my grandparents are gone either way and it doesn’t make sense to waste emotional energy on drama. So, I tried to stay out of it. But it really would have been nice to have something to remember them by.

But I realized that things are just things and it didn’t matter, really.

Today, my sister showed me a few things she managed to save for me. An apron, a handkerchief, a book. And then she mentioned that she had rescued a box of Christmas ornaments and had decorated her tree with them. “Here’s a box of them that are leftover. I don’t know if you want them…” She handed me the box.

Maybe I’ll get a tree after all.

In mid-2007, I quit a job I liked very much because I wanted more of my life back for, well, life. Yet here I am, at 2am, with hours of work left, overdue projects undone, packing still to do for trip that I haven’t had time think enough about to know where I’m going and who I’m meeting and why.

Which is to say that I’m clearly bad at planning and estimating and saying no and prioritizing and choosing a line of work that facilitates that elusive buzzwordy work/life balance.

I don’t regret quitting. I like what I’m doing now even more than that job I liked very much and I think that I have a better chance at figuring out that balance thing when I’m also my boss.

But it still all seems a bit ridiculous.

I don’t know whether or not to get a Christmas tree. I used to love Christmas, maybe because my mom loved it and I used to love everything my mom loved. When I got married, I took with me all the Christmas ornaments I had bought after college and all the ones from when I was a little kid. The little metal drummer boy with my name engraged and the year, maybe 1977, the clay Christmas tree that I had painted red and green with that watery paint you get in elementary school, the kind that washes out. I never understood trees with coordinating decorations. Memories aren’t color coordinated.

After I got married I still loved Christmas. I liked white lights and my husband liked colored lights. He had all the Star Trek ornaments from Hallmark and I didn’t know if those belonged on the tree, but I think I always ended up putting them on, even the ships that plugged into the Christmas lights and blinked.

Sometimes when I was a kid, we would drive to my grandparents’ house for Christmas. I remember the snow in Flagstaff, as we drove along Interstate 40. It covered the pine trees and the ground and I’d worry that we’d get stranded. It was so cold and the mountains kept coming. All the cousins and aunts and uncles were at my grandparents’ house and we’d all gather around and my grandpa would show slides of old vacation photos from when my mom was a kid. Here’s Niagara Falls. And this is Canada! Grandpa almost fell off the ferry and he can’t swim!

Most years we stayed home, so I don’t know why I think of my grandparents and their house so much when I think of Christmas.

My mom gave me all the ornaments I made when I was a kid and a bunch of other ones, like the glass balls with the Disney characters on them, when she gave me everything else from my childhood when I moved out after college. I think a lot of parents keep the mother’s day cards and report cards from their kids, but my mom figured all that stuff was mine.

I still have the report cards but I lost the clay Christmas tree and metal drummer boy and the rest when I got divorced. It’s all probably in some box with those Star Trek ornaments. I don’t imagine my ex-husband puts them up every year or anything though.

So, just like everything else, I started building up my Christmas ornament life all over again. If I can’t have a tree of memories, starting from when I was a kid, then maybe I should give the color coordinated look a try. I still liked Christmas.

Then I got a boyfriend and we got a house and we got trees for Christmas, but we never really got any ornaments. That was OK though, at the time. And then I was single again, and I still didn’t have any Christmas ornaments.

I don’t know how I feel about Christmas anymore. After my grandparents died, I started feeling like an orphan, just a little. I wish I had spent more Christmases with them. Last year, after my grandma died, I spent Christmas with my sister and my niece and we went to see my grandpa. Someone had brought over beef brisket and I think we all ate outside on the patio. Now that my grandpa’s gone too, I don’t want eat on that patio, don’t want to even see the house, really. Not when they’re not in it anymore.

The thing about some kinds of regret is that there’s nothing you can do to make up for it.

I’m too hard on my boyfriend. I feel like I have no family and I need him to become that family — all of it, in one fell swoop. My marriage didn’t work out and my parents didn’t work out and my grandparents are gone and I never had children and I imagine a life when I’m old and alone and I need him to make up for all of it. But no pressure, really.

And in my weaker moments when I’m dramatic and ridiculous and say I don’t have a family at all, he reminds me of my sister and my niece and my friends and I say it’s not the same. Because it’s not the same. Even though he’s right and what I’m wanting is something else.

And I can’t explain that I feel like a failure in love, in relationships, in life and that I’m 36 and have no Christmas ornaments to show for it. Because I didn’t have the foresight to build the right kind of a life.

Which isn’t true exactly either, of course. I don’t know that there is a right kind of life. And mostly I like my life a lot.

But I don’t know if I like Christmas anymore. I wonder if I should get a tree and I wonder if it’s too complicated and then I wonder if I’ve become the kind of person who skips Christmas because it’s too much trouble.

When I was a kid, I wanted things to mean something. I wanted to remember every holiday, every milestone, believe every myth was true. I wanted to find the ends of rainbows so I could talk to leprechauns and bring back pots of gold. I kept momentos: pebbles, ribbons, movie tickets, leaves pressed between pages. We were always moving, so I would concentrate very hard on remembering what it feels like now to be here in this place. So I could remember when I was in a different town, a different house, with different friends.

I felt as though I had to gather up the moments and bring them with me. That I had to carry life around, rather than just live it. Some people find that being transitory makes them lighter, but I found the opposite. If I were somewhere permanent, I wouldn’t need so many things. I gathered up the permanence of my things around me like a warm blanket in front of a crackling fire in winter.

But all that’s changed. I don’t know why, not really. Maybe I had to leave my things behind and start over so many times that stuff just doesn’t matter like it used to. Or maybe I started feeling stifled by the weight of it all. Maybe my apartment is just too small and there’s no room to be sentimental.

I just know that I need air and space. I’m obsessed with getting rid of as much stuff as I can. I haul away boxes and boxes of things. Ask everyone I know if they’re looking for an old laptop, a stack of books, a corkscrew. And mostly, I’ve thrown away the ribbons and the movie tickets and the pebbles.

I don’t get rid of everything.

I  still have a small box of ribbons and sentiment. And my grandma’s recipes. And I keep most of my books. And those terrible poems I wrote in junior high school.

And one day, you might come over and you’ll ask me where the corkscrew is. And I’ll say, well, I don’t have one of those, but perhaps I could read you this poem instead.

What I meant to say then is this. That life is loss, sure. But it’s not cause for despair, not entirely. If we get what we want there’s loss then too. An apartment in Paris in exchange for loneliness. So maybe we don’t get that — Paris. But we get something else instead. Something that we would have lost. And it doesn’t replace Paris.  How could it?

But that something else and the next something else fill our lives and we have those things and not the other things. A collection of stones and glass rather than paper and twine and sealing wax.

And this is life. To say we don’t want loss is to say we don’t want to live.

At point in our lives do we start quoting Jack Kerouarc?

I think that I want to move to Paris or Dublin or Berlin. Pack up my books and give away the rest and get a small apartment above a cobblestone street with a little cafe underneath and a tiny market on the corner where I could buy bread and fruit and sit with my notebooks and write. And sometimes walk along the river or through a museum and watch people and smile at babies and find a park bench and write some more. When you ask me what I want, this is what I think. Not success or fame or fortune. But then, I think that I could do that. I could do that tomorrow. I was listening to a musician on NPR yesterday saying she did exactly that by just searching for “paris”, “apartment”, and “piano”. There it was. And there she went.

But what if I did that? I would be lonely and poor and I would walk by myself and when I was ready to take a break from my writing, I would turn to talk about my day and no one would be there to talk to. And anyway, I would miss my cats. And when sitting alone in that apartment, light-filled and full of comfortable writing chairs, I would want a family with babies of my own and someone to watch them laugh with me.

Sometimes life is too much and I think, surely I’ve had enough loss for now. Surely, I’m due for a break. And then I think maybe that’s what life is. A series of losses and gains. No more or less than that. We feel joy: we think, I have never been happier than at this moment. And then we feel as though joy is a voice we heard whispered once, but we don’t remember what the words were. And we wonder, what then, is life for?

But I’m feeling fatalistic these days. And that too, will pass. I’m realizing that accepting loss doesn’t mean forgetting or replacing what we’ve lost, it just means we go on living. Sometimes we feel our phantom limbs. And sometimes we find new joy, different joy and we remember that life is for that.

Perhaps this is when we start to think more about death: when we stop looking ahead at being old enough and start looking behind at being too old.

Soon I’ll be old enough to stay up until 8pm, to watch PG movies, to wear lipstick, to go on a date, to drive, to vote, to rent a car. Milestones in the future that propel you older.

And then one day, you realize that you’re too old to have a child who’s in college before you retire, too old to stay up all night and go to work the next day, to learn to play basketball, find someone and be married for fifty years, have a child at all, spend a holiday with your grandparents.

I was walking through an art museum a couple of days ago, looking at sculptures and paintings and swords engraved with family crests. It struck me that we see the end of ourselves coming and we spend the rest of our lives on things we hope last after us. But does it matter? We’re gone either way.

Would we be better off without the technology, the modern comforts? If we spent our days working on our relationships instead of at fancy high-powered jobs? I think about all the hours we spend working and I can’t imagine that anyone on a deathbed looks back and remembers those hours the most fondly.

But then again, I’m watching my grandfather wither away. His wife has died. He’s alone. Some people say that you find meaning in life when you have children — they live on. But what if you’re near the end of your life and your kids just think of you as a burden? Having a rich family life — over sixty years of marriage and seven kids — hasn’t made his last few moments here any more joyful.

Maybe it’s not that the fear of dying alone is unfounded. Maybe it’s that it’s inevitable.

I wonder that there’s not something about me that makes me perpetually busy, all the time. I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t busy, when I was bored, when I wondered: huh, what should I do next?

Is it solely that I can’t say no to things? That I take on too much? Do I not prioritize well? Procrastinate? Work on the wrong things? Do I underestimate my time, work too slowly, set direction poorly, refuse to delegate?

Sometimes I feel like I’m falling off a cliff.  I”m falling and there’s nothing to hold onto and I panic because I know I’ll eventually hit the ground and there’s nothing I can do about it but fall.

I was reading something the other day that said we mostly have to learn the important lessons in life more than once. And that’s depressing, sure. Because learning the hard things are so, well, hard, and once you get through them you think, fuck, that was hard, but at least I’ve learned something and I’ll never have to do that again. Only then you do.

But I suppose the thought is also hopeful. At least when you find yourself in the same damn place you were before, and you beat yourself up for somehow ending up here after all you’ve learned, you can take a deep breath and relax and know that it happens to all of us. That’s it’s just how life is and maybe this time will be the time that the learning sticks.

Here’s one thing that I keep learning (over and over again). There is no “what do I want to be when I grow up”. There’s only “what do I want to do next?” You don’t have to know the end; you just have to know the next step so you know the direction to point your foot.

I’m impatient and I like control. And despite my unorganized ways, I like having a plan, and knowing the goal, and working towards a purpose. And I have to keep learning to let go.

We build and plan and dream for the future. But all that building and planning and dreaming yesterday was for today. Did we dream we’d spend it planning yet again?

Some days I wonder what I’m doing with my life. My life is likely about half over and what am I doing? What have I done? I feel so aimless and I spend so much time on whatever comes up around me. Reactionary. And I think about how much I’ve done to get off the speeding trains that take all my control, that send me hurdling in directions that all I can do is try to keep up with. I’ve thrown myself off them with abandon — torn myself away at great cost.

And yet. What am I doing now?

I go ’round and ’round in my head but I never end up any place new. And I don’t know how to move forward or what to move forward to. And sometimes I think I’m happy but other times I sit in a dark room and all I can do is cry.

And the pull comes again to just run away. To leave this hermit crab shell for another. But all of these things I’ve tried before. And I end up in the very same place.

I keep thinking that maybe all I need is a break. To catch my breath. But it never comes.

Reading the reviews for this book [which talks about women entrepreneurs], I was struck by the following:

Alas she then writes how relationships may change. Marriages may fail, kids and friends my become distant, because your work needs so much of your time.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of having it all.

It’s not that the promise of having it all is a lie, it’s that some important truths are missing. The costs, the tradeoffs. What it takes to get there.

You can have a successful career and friends and a relationship and children and pursue your dreams all at the same time. But can you really devote enough time and energy to all of them? Can you both stay late at work to meet a deadline and be home in time to make your kids dinner?

And does the stress of keeping all of those plates spinning outweigh the joy of having such a multitude of plates?

Or is there greater joy in fewer things spinning but more time to contemplate and experience them?

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them - work, family, health, friends, and spirit - and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends, and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.”

-Brian Dyson (b. 1935) Argentinian CEO of Coca-Cola Enterprises
Does anyone know, with unwavering doubt, what will bring happiness? I suppose the hope that someone does is what keeps fortune tellers in business and horoscopes as one of the six main categories on the Yahoo home page.

(I was flipping through a dictionary a few days ago, and that was the sentence used for the definition of “emerge”.)

Three conversations I’ve had recently:

One. During which I said that I had a lot of emotional baggage.

Two. A friend said she needed to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up. I told her that I’ve given up trying to figure it out. Every time I think I know, things change. And where I end up is nothing like my well-made plans.

Three. Reflecting on how my life has changed since 2001. And I said I think I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.

It seems like the dots wouldn’t connect.

None of us have a past beyond reproach. Knowing that takes the pressure off.

Today I cried for no reason. Not no reason at all, I suppose. But not reason enough to cry. I wasn’t even crying over some thing, I was just tired, stressed, overwhelmed, underwater.

As I read my blog subscriptions through RSS, I hesitate with my mouse and skip over writing journals like Neil Gaiman’s. I don’t want to be reminded that I’m not writing.

Mostly, I think, I need to remember that life is life and even when it’s better it’s work. And after making good decisions it’s still hard. And that doesn’t mean you haven’t chosen well. Or that you’re on the wrong path.

Patience. Again. I can’t do everything all at once. And yet I continue to try.

Change.

It’s such a small, innocuous word. Little. Not momentous. It doesn’t roar or charge or give you any indication at all. That it’s hard. It’s scary. And it’s not just that what you have to do is difficult, it’s that you don’t always even know what the thing is that you should be doing.

With some things, changes comes easier. Other things are harder to risk.

Risk tolerance isn’t an absolute.

Without change, without risk, you can’t move forward, can’t explore the possibilities. You have to expose that which you want to protect or else you just stay in the same place. Marking time. Marching in place — growing wearing but not getting anywhere.

And if things weren’t hard enough already, the fear, the baggage, the weight all just serve to help you sabotage yourself. And so you fight it. And you breathe. And you try.

You risk. You change.

I had this moment of panic yesterday. I realized I wasn’t on any kind of ladder or path or any kind of plan at all about a career or a way to make money. That I was simply trying out things I liked, confident that I wouldn’t fail and become destitute and living in a cardboard box under a bridge.

The panic wasn’t that maybe I would end up that way, it was that I didn’t fear the risk. Shouldn’t I fear the risk? Weigh the consequences? Think things through? Am I being foolishly confident?

A few days ago, I was standing at the top of a pyramid in Mexico. It was the third time I’d been to these particular ruins. The first time, I stood at the base of the pyramid and looked at the top. I didn’t climb it. The second time, I was determined to get to the top, but it took effort and courage and panic. I had an amazing sense of accomplishment at the top, wrapped in utter terror. Last week, I climbed to the top and stood on the edge and looked down with not even a tiny drop of fear.

What changed?

I wonder if I should make back up plans for my career. The pyramid has a rope that you can hold on to as you descend the steep steps. I didn’t use it. I guess I’m letting go of the rope and walking down on my own in life too.

Life without a net.

First, I bit of background about my boyfriend in college, who I’ll call “J” for no reason other than it’s not the first initial of his name.

I met J at a party my freshman year. I worked with a friend of his and he was home from college visiting his parents. He asked me out; I said yes, but the key thing about the whole acceptance and subsequent date is that I didn’t really like him all that much. I thought he was a little odd, though nice. I mostly said yes because of my (now mostly rehabilitated) inability to say no to nice people.

He went back to school and continued to be nice and I continued to be unable to say no. In fact — and this is how I know how much I have grown as a person since — I felt compelled to make sure I did everything I could to make sure he continued to like me. Although he had not rescued me from death in the wilderness in the outback jungle, I inexplicably took on the responsibility of making his life a happier place.

Yes, I was insane.

Eventually, he grew on me, which was fortunate since at some point I somehow became his girlfriend and although the relationship was based on him liking me and me simply not saying no, I was the one who went out of my way to make the relationship work. For instance, we were able to spend time together primarily because I would drive the four and a half hours to his college anytime I had a break from work and school, even if this meant I had to leave after work at 11pm on a Friday night. This effort from me despite the fact that he didn’t work at all and took half the course load I did.

I no longer say yes to dates with boys I don’t like, but I do still find it considerably difficult to inconvenience anyone else. I used to think that was being flexible and accommodating, but now I’m pretty sure it’s mostly annoying.

There are just some events that you always remember, that you could look back on with regret, and don’t only because you learned so damned much from them. You wish you could forget them, but part of you realizes you hope you never do. Because you’d hate to repeat mistakes like that.

This event is fairly innocuous as far as those types of mistakes go. I’ve certainly made bigger mistakes with more extreme consequences. But it still comes back to me more often than the others.

It was this.

J had been in town visiting his parents and I think maybe we hadn’t spent much time together and he suggested that I drive back with him to school. Well, not with him. He thought I might follow him four hour and a half hours in my car, spend a day, then drive back. I, of course, jumped at the chance.

He said he’d leave his parents’ house then come by around 6pm. 6pm came and went. Hours went by. I called his parents’ house and no one answered. I wondered if he’d forgotten he’d invited me to drive out with him. Maybe he decided he didn’t want me to. I worried that if I left too much later I might fall asleep on the road. I started thinking that if I left too much later, I would barely be there long enough to make it worthwhile to go.

Understand that at the time, I felt my next set of actions were a result of my independent nature, personal empowerment, and other crazy ideals that as a 19 year old, I clearly had completely backwards.

So what did I do? Obviously, I set off driving.

I know. Ridiculous.

My mind was working thusly: he invited me; I wanted to go; I would go.

There’s really no need to map out reality, right?

The story gets worse, though. In the mountains not long before Paso Robles, my timing belt broke, so I was stranded on the side of the road in the middle of the night. A trucker picked me up and brought me to a gas station about 50 miles away, and then I took a cab the remaining 50 or so miles to his house (by which time, he had made it there, having stopped by my house not long after I left, and finding out I had left without him).

I don’t know what the lesson is here entirely. Patience? Saying fuck it to something you really want to do when you’re you’re being neglected?

I do know this. Some of the best lessons are when we make mistakes and discover what not to do.

That wasn’t empowerment, it was stupidity. It was throwing myself at someone. It was desperately trying to get the relationship I wanted, rather than realizing that you can’t make a relationship into something it isn’t; you can’t make someone other than who they are.

I think of that drive a lot, even though it was years and years ago - when I’m feeling impatient, or taken for granted, or I want someone to do something different or be something different than they are. It’s not just personal relationships where these things matter. They matter with everything all the time, maybe more than they should, but I guess I’m coming around to accepting that we need people. As much as I hate to admit needing anything from anyone, I’m learning that sometimes I do.

Another good lesson in all this is simply in remembering my general stupidity. I’m not being self-deprecating or too hard on myself, I’m simply saying that sometimes I feel I’m right and that I’m generally making good decisions. But it’s good, every so often, to stop and remember that sometimes we make bad decisions (obviously ridiculous and dumb decisions) — even if we feel completely correct as we are making them.

I don’t know why this entry is so hard to write. I’ve been writing it for close to two weeks now — thinking about it, writing a little, closing the browser tab. Maybe it’s because even now, so many years later, I still have those times when I feel so lost, when I want things to be one way when they’re another, when I know what I should do, even if it’s not what I feel, and I want to have grown to a place beyond that. I suppose it’s that I want to think of myself as independent and strong and not needing anything at all. Always doing the right thing, always knowing what the right thing is. Confident. Sure.

And sometimes I’m not.

There are two ways to drive to my apartment. The fastest way — the way I take most often — cuts right through town. The other way takes a bit longer, but the road follows the water, just across from the city. Sometimes, like today, I take the long way around.

Seattle defies winter. No matter how cold it is, we’re out. Walking dogs, jogging, rollerblading, kayaking, scuba diving (yes, nearly every day, I see divers out, in the crazy cold water). I like watching people walking along the beach with their lattes and strollers and gloves. I like the layered grays of the beach: the water, the sky, the clouds, the mountains. It’s peaceful and active and chaotic and soothing all at the same time.

I don’t know if I’ll ever really learn patience. Sometimes I feel as though I should remind myself with post-it notes on my monitor, my bathroom mirror, my coffeemaker, my car’s dash: Be Patient. Wait. Breathe. Although I don’t know how much it would really help. Maybe I’m getting better. Life forces things like patience sometimes. I try to remember that the next day will come. I don’t have to do it all, be it all, understand it all right this very minute.

Resolved for 2008: Patience. Right fucking now.

I don’t think I can follow through with the things I’d like to resolve for 2008. I’d like to resolve to not be so fucking influenced by those around me and to take some damn control. Although how that can coexist with the whole, throw caution to the wind, who the hell cares if you get hurt, it’s worth it for the joy of life, I have no idea. I don’t know and I don’t know how to know and I will never get it right. Maybe it’s not something we can ever get right.

But fuck. Why can’t life be easy or make sense just a little bit for just a little while. Which is overly dramatic and ridiculous, I know. And I should just put on some heavy black eyeliner and listen to Depeche Mode or whatever the young kids are listening to these days and stop even pretending to be a rational adult.

Maybe I just let momentum get the better of me and I hope for too much. But I don’t want to have to curb my hope to be happy. Sometimes I’m strong and independent and I think, I can do this on my own. But then other days, I just feel it all crashing around me and I don’t want to do it on my own, don’t want to have to do it on my own, want something other than just my own.

Life. It’s fucking hard.

Independence is a long, hard road. And maybe we don’t ever get to the place where we don’t need people. Should we even want to get to that place? But there’s a balance (yes, balance again) between isolating yourself for self-preservation and being so vulnerable and open that you have no protection at all. A space between relying only on yourself and expecting all of your strength to come from those around you.

And I guess I’d like to think I could come to a place that I could drop every wall but it’s difficult to be disappointed, to be hurt, and I wonder, can I go through that again?

I’m reading this book on the skills of successful leaders and there’s an interesting point that while too much pessimism isn’t a helpful trait for a leader, neither is too much optimism. Sometimes the opposite of something negative can be just as negative.

But then, the thought of never throwing caution to the wind again is difficult too. Everyone needs passion in their lives. Don’t they?

The great organization event continues and tonight, I happened upon my box of scrapbooks and yearbooks. I have the usual pictures and ribbons and awards and “ice cream 90 cents” sign from the supreme court cafeteria that we all have. And I have a lot of notes. Notes, of course, are what we used back in junior high and high school for our heart-felt, emotional interaction. It takes maturity and growth to tell someone how you feel, so you practice by writing it down and leaving the paper on the person’s car, tucked under the windshield wiper.

I wonder if high school kids still write notes or if they just send MySpace messages.

I always think back to high school as being fairly innocent times, but I forget just how much I got around. I have notes from lots of boys. And cards from flowers.

My favorite note is probably from Eddie, who had recently been dumped by Missi (that bitch). We were making out one night and he called me by her name, and as you might imagine, that doesn’t sound very romantic to a 16 year old girl. I suppose it wouldn’t sound all that romantic now that I’m 35 either. Anyway, I was heartbroken, devastated, etc. and I don’t know how I am still standing now to tell the story. He wrote me a long letter, proclaiming his eternal love for me and only me. The letter was flowery and sweet and he swore that his love was deeper and truer than any love felt anywhere, since the history of the world and even included a handy table comparing all the ways in which I was better than the despised Missi. (The table was followed by a paragraph in which he promised he would never compare me to her because I was incomparable.)

You know how the story ends, of course. As soon as she gave the slightest inclination she might take him back, I never heard from him again. Well, that’s not exactly true. I was flipping through my yearbook and came across where he signed it. As Missi’s lovesick fool.

My (one of many) teenage tales of love and heartbreak. Forever immortalized in writing. Just like Romeo and Juliet. But with more Tears For Fears and fewer poison vials.

I feel as though I should write an introspective of my year. That I should look back and remember where I’ve been and where I’ve come and what I’ve learned (I won’t; I will remember without writing it down). For a long time, everything was the same and I was the same and looking back over a year, I could write this:

I did exactly what I expected and feel how I predicted I would. I am the same person now that I was a year ago.

I can’t write that anymore. Haven’t been able to write that for (happily) quite a while. There’s something to be said for the comfort of consistency but you know what they say about the foolish kind. I’ve had enough of foolishness.

Which isn’t to say I won’t continue to make dumb mistakes, but one of those mistakes will not be listening to my mom’s advice that a wife’s primary job is to make a happy and relaxing home environment for her husband. For one thing, I don’t even have a husband (anymore) and for another, I don’t really talk to my mom. So, I’m pretty sure I’m safe on that one. How things change in only five years.

The theme of this last year has been bittersweet, and maybe the theme of 2008 will be balance, although I get the feeling that next year may not have a theme at all. My goal? To discover joy at every opportunity.

Some things you never expect.

Getting divorced. Owning a Mac.

Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend about how all I wanted to do when I graduated from college was be a journalist. And I applied for every job I could find and was rejected at every turn. Hey, wait a minute. I’m sort of a journalist now. Go figure. When planning my career path, I could not have conceived of this one.

Walking back from Starbucks tonight, the freezing wind on my face, blowing up from the water, my fingers fucking cold, leeching warmth from my latte, I thought. Huh. I really like my life.

Balance is like a seesaw. Or maybe log rolling. Constant movement to stay afloat. Or even adrift. The opposite of being knocked off the seesaw/log/balance metaphor of your choice and thrown to hard, hard ground, because face it. Sure, you get knocked down and you get up again (so the song says) and you dust yourself off and get back on the horse and etc. But still. Falling down hurts like hell, so if you can avoid it all the better. And I know the more you fall, the more better you get, but I’m pretty sure that the falling will come often enough for learning, no matter the balancing act.

When to be selfish, or giving. To let go or hold on. Be confident or humble. Paper or plastic. Seize the day or wait for the right moment.

Sometimes you just have to shift your weight just so.

I used to think that we didn’t have any holiday family traditions, but today I realized that I was wrong. I sat with my sister, opening gifts from my mom.

She said mom had shown her my gifts earlier and she couldn’t wait for me to see them. They are the most hilarious items of clothing you have ever seen, she told me. Since the last time I got clothes from mom anyway, I thought.

“I didn’t even know they made clothes like that.”

I was holding up a jacket, or maybe a blazer. It had collars nearly as big as the jacket itself and several rows of huge metal buttons in what I could only call the upper left quadrant. They didn’t actual button anywhere. They brought military style to balance out the hippie factor of the bell bottom sleeves which ended in romantic-era ruffles. The whole thing was held together by a large belt and a metal buckle. Metal which in no way matched the buttons.

“What are you going to do with it? I always wonder what I”m supposed to do with these things.”

“I throw it all away”, I told her.

“You could at least give it to Goodwill.”

“I don’t want to curse anyone else with this. Can you imagine if some other mother bought it for her poor daughter?”

The next gift was nearly as good.

Black shirt. Completely covered in large bright yellow lightning bolts. With sparkly hot pink dropshadows. It looked like a web site in 1995 when people were first discovering fonts and the blink tag.

We looked at her gift.

“I think it’s a sweatshirt. An off-the-shoulder sweatshirt.”

“No, it’s a dress.”

“It can’t possibly be a dress.”

“Look at the skirt part.”

“That’s a skirt?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s that one? A coat with short sleeves? Do arms not get cold?”

Later, I talked to my mom on the phone.

“Did you like the clothes I got you? Your sister really loved them when I showed her, but I know you guys don’t always have the same taste.”

Oh we have the same taste. It’s called non-crazy. We prefer our buttons to be matched with buttonholes, our coats to have sleeves, and our sweatshirts to be skirt-free. And we rarely are in the mood to wear hot pink lightning bolts.

Well, maybe that one time.

Overhead, a woman on her cell phone. Her flight was on time. Could the person on the phone still pick her up? Yes? Who all was coming, then? Were they coming in to the airport or parking? What time was dinner going to be?

And to all of this, I thought, if I planned my life down to that detail, I would certainly go crazy. If the flight’s on time and someone’s picking me up, I figure they’ll be there, I’ll hook up with somehow, and I will likely eat at some point. Possibly at either a standard meal time or when I feel hungry. Of course, most likely of all is that I’ll rent a car or grab a cab. Airport pickup. Reflections of my life.

When walking by the airport bar: a woman drinking a beer at the bar alone. Large fabric antlers on her head.

When leaving the Alaska Boardroom, an instinctive turn right. Like that turning point when learning a foreign language when you start thinking the words rather than translating them. Alaska flies to Orange County from gate C20. And C is to the right. No looking at boarding passes or terminal signs needed. I was dropping off a friend a few nights ago. “Does it seem weird to be here and yet not getting on a plane, since you come here so often?” No, it just feels familiar. The airport is one of those places I know. Like my neighborhood or my house. I can walk around with the lights off.

Yet this turbulence I never get used to.

When cleaning out my storage closet, I happened upon this: one large box of porn and elbow braces.

Understand, when I say elbow braces plural, I mean an extensive assortment of padded braces, plastic braces, those molded specifically for a particular elbow, some with metal, some without. A variety of colors, sizes, and styles.

And when I say porn, I do not mean a Playboy or two, perhaps a soft core video. I am talking about edible paints, girl-on-girl comic books, and possibly a board game. A bondage board game. For 4-8 players.

As I am ruthlessly ridding myself of everything I don’t need, the entire box ended up in the dumpster. I considered Goodwill, but I’m not sure of their orthopedic medical supply policy.

The box ended up in my storage closet thusly. I had left behind a number of items in my previous house when I moved to this apartment. But that house sold and I wasn’t in town to dispose of everything before the new owners arrived. So I asked my personal assistant to sell, give away, or toss whatever was there and only to rescue things I might really want to hang on to. I’m finally now going through what she brought over. Boxes of tax receipts, a few pairs of shoes, and this. The box of medical braces and porn.

This, then, how I’ve represented my priorities. I feel pretty good about that.

A whole day, a whole life ahead. What better Christmas gift than that. A world of possibilities (verbs optional). Realization that every day is new. Sometimes, you have more control than you think. Even within the confines (not so much confined) of what you’ve been given and what you’ve made for yourself.

Take all of this, then, and do something with it. Something that brings joy (grab joy when you can find it, when it catches your eye, sparkling from rooftops and drifting behind clouds; reach up and catch the faintest corner and pull it down towards you) or contentment or peace. A gracious and still moment. Even though the chaos howls around you, whirling like brittle leaves in the fall.

Sometimes it’s easy. The pieces fit together like a puzzle and they snap in place effortlessly and you know. This, this is exactly how things should be. Those times are to give you strength when it’s hard and you wonder, when can I stop climbing? I can’t stop climbing or I’ll fall backwards, plummeting in the darkness.

Both ways lead you to a new day. No matter what path, what darkness, what light, the next day comes. And you gather up all the pieces around you (ye rosebuds, while ye may, before that smiling flower dies) and craft something entirely new with it.

I used to look at that as loneliness (she is the one who will have to rescue herself), but I was wrong. It’s freedom.

Long ago in a land far away, we all lived in caves or under trees or something and we collected rocks and twigs mostly so we would have something to throw at people who came to steal our tasty rat-meat skewers and on Saturdays, if it wasn’t raining, we played a game called “run from the lion; ha ha, I’m sure that growl is just for show”. I think. Something like that. I only took the one anthropology class in college and it was kind of a long time ago.

Things have changed.

When I moved to this apartment, I took absolutely nothing. It was refreshing and light and freeing and I don’t miss any of the clutter. And yet somehow I’ve already managed to accumulate more. I’ve been attempting to clean my office today — a room that has somehow become devoted to black hole of disorganization and chaos, with its boxes and storage bins and papers and electronics and clothes and who knows what else. Don’t let the fact that I am clearly writing on my computer and not organizing make you think I am not devoted to this cause. Everyone needs short breaks now and then. And naps. We all need naps.

But mostly, what I need today is to find a place for everything and to figure out why exactly it is that I have been making due with only three quarters of my living space to give room to the random and crazy things that I’ve apparently been carefully storing. I’m pretty sure I don’t need an empty Jimmy Jane box. Sure, Jimmy Jane has great packaging, but do I really need to keep an empty vibrator box forever? I did find an apparent bonus tube of massage lotion in the box, but I think the box itself can go.

And I may not need all those DS games, case, and accessories when I don’t actually own a DS anymore. And yet. There it all is, stacked nicely in my bookcase. I don’t have a tape player either, but that doesn’t mean I should get rid of my cassettes, right? Right? I probably even have a few records somewhere, now that I think of it.

All this abandoned technology makes me like my books just a little more. All you need to use those are your eyes. And all those hard drives, in various states of operation, four laptops (only one of which is entirely working) and one desktop computer makes me want to find some actual paper and write with a real pen. Of course, books and paper are the other two things that pile up, but those I don’t mind so much. I’d happily line every wall with bookcases full of books and journals. The walls aren’t too far off from that now, come to think of it.

Clutter like that makes me happy. Maybe I should clear out those cassettes after all and make a little more room.

I bought a new snowboard yesterday. It is the most beautiful snowboard in all of the land, although I feel a little guilty that I evened factored prettiness into the equation. Not so guilty I didn’t buy new bindings to best compliment it, even though I had perfectly good bindings already.

Buying a new board got me thinking about how I first into snowboarding. I didn’t do a lot of things back then that were athletic or hard or scary. I think I shunned sports entirely because my stepdad told me in the sixth grade that I wasn’t athletically inclined. And because I’m a perfectionist. Tell me I’m not good at something, make me think I’ll never be the absolute best at it, and my first thought is to go do something that I can be best at. My foray into snowboarding has really been realization that a lot of the childhood lessons my parents taught me were a bit fucked up and I am free from the struggle of carrying that weight around with me everywhere I go. And it has also been acceptance that it’s OK not to be perfect after all. Who knew snowboarding could be such a psychological exercise.

I’m better than I used to be, but somehow I don’t think that years after I’m gone, my legacy will “totally kicked ass at snowboarding”. But even so, I’ve stuck with it for five years, and I love it more every time I go out.

It’s been a crazy five years. When I look back on my life, I see it distinctly divided into two parts: when I did what I thought everyone else wanted and when I did what I wanted. The line is more like a hill than a cliff though, as the “did what everyone else wanted” part was hard to let go of and lingered on. It’s still lingering. In some ways, it’s easier to live life according to what you think will make everyone else happy and to sacrifice yourself. Those choices are clear. When you start to put yourself into the equation, you’re by default doing things less for everyone else and things aren’t so clear anymore. What’s the right balance? Life becomes a series of adjustments and trial and error.

Five years ago, I never would have guessed that I would be here now. Sometimes I feel exhausted looking back, and I know that the climbing just continues. But mostly I feel light and hopeful and free. Exactly how I feel when I’m snowboarding down the mountain.

Last night, I was taking a friend who was on his way home for the holidays and he asked me what I was going to do this weekend, since I’m not flying out until Monday and everyone else will have headed out by then. I thought ahead to the next three days and all that time alone in my apartment seemed like blissful peace. I love to travel and I love my friends, but I also love being at home alone, and that’s not something I’ve had much time for at all lately.

I remember back when I was married, and I would dream about having a small apartment of my own. I would have friends over; I’d cook for them; sometimes I’d just curl up in a chair and read a book by the fire. It was a long and convoluted path to that apartment. I got sidetracked along the way, but I think I’m finally ending up there.

It’s difficult to know when to not get distracted from your goals and when the distraction is something that you just never thought about before but might be even better than what you initially wanted. Sometimes, you have to head down a path for a while before you really can figure it out. And even though I’m still learning and making mistakes and will be forever, one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to fear choosing a path. You can always turn off onto another one later.

So, I sit in my apartment alone. And can think of nothing better than spending the next few days here, getting caught up on stuff, writing, watching the water. And I’ll go along this path until another fork happens along that’s worth exploring.

I don’t remember the last time I went home for Christmas. Not that I really feel like I have a particular “home” to go back to. I mostly think of home as the place I’m making for myself. The closest place I have to “home”, of course, is my grandparents’ house, and that’s where all the relatives tend to congregate every year. I’m not sure what’s going to happen this year. I was there last weekend and my grandpa said that he didn’t want a big party, although he certainly wants everyone to stop by. He wants to be around people. He’s just not up for a celebration.

So, I’m flying down on Christmas Eve and I’ll spend Christmas morning with my niece and then the afternoon with my grandpa and maybe see the cousins that I’ve somehow lost track of. I’ve given up feeling bad about not wanting to spend time with my mom. I just can’t carry that weight around with me anymore.

And I’m spending the rest of the holiday at home. My home. The one I’ve made for myself. Despite my therapy and growth and all of that crap that comes along with getting older, I still am conflicted about family. Part of me just runs from it. It seems like so much work and trouble and energy and strength. But then I see my niece and I think that some things about family maybe are worth it after all.

Sometimes I just want to make my own home alone, and enjoy the refreshing solitude. But then I wonder if I’m missing something else even better. And then I remember that I don’t have to figure it all out right now. I can enjoy this, and watch my niece open her presents, and spend time alone, and see what happens next.

• Walking to the bakery on a Sunday morning.
• Watching the water.
• Sleeping cats.
• Friends.
• The snow falling.
• A comfortable bed.
• Moments of happiness.

Sometimes I just don’t have a lot of words to write. Which isn’t exactly true because of course I always have infinite words to write. I could write forever and never stop and I would still have words left. But sometimes words are too concrete, with shape and weight and angles and sometimes I don’t want to have any of those things.

I think I like myself a bit better now though. And we should all like ourselves. After all, we spend a lot of damn time with ourselves. More than is good for us probably, which is maybe why we go through periods when we are so tired of ourselves we just want to stop talking.

One day, I’ll be OK with concreteness and heft and direction. But today, weightlessness and wordlessness is just fine by me. There are so many things I could feel and I could ponder and plan and feel slighted or joyous or any of a number of ways about any number of things. But I think I’ll take a break from all of that, at least for today.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have more substantial words.

I was at a skateboarding park the other day (yes, I know I’m old, but old people skateboarding is not a crime!) and first, skateboarding is much harder than it looks. Look around the next time you see skateboarders and find the one who’s really terrible, who you think looks incredibly lame and can barely stay up, much less move in a forward direction. That person is probably a hundred times better than you would be if you tried it. It’s hard!

So, I was attempting to not fall over (I was very unsuccessful, by the way) and this little kid who was bad but probably a thousand times better than I was said, “the more you fall, the more better you get”. And then he skated around me and went down a ramp and generally mocked my inability to conquer a small piece of wood with wheels. But in a nice way.

I was with a friend who said he should be fucking awesome by now then. Me too. Not at skateboarding. I mean at life.

It sort of sucks that life is a practice round for which there is no other round. It’s like taking golf lessons but never actually getting to play a game of golf.

All I can do is keep practicing. And falling. And hopefully getting more better.

When I was little, and I wanted to crawl into a grown up’s bed in the middle of the night like little kids do, the grown up I picked was my grandma. I remember that she used to tease me about kicking her in my sleep. I’d wake up in the night and climb into bed between my grandparents and fall right to sleep. My earliest memories are living at their house — the first home I ever knew.

When my grandma cooked, I would drag a chair from the kitchen table over to the stove and stand up on it so that I could see into the pots and pans and watch how she cooked. The rest, of course, is history.

I never had a home. Home has always been my grandparents’ house. The place I could always go back to. They never locked their doors. You could stop by anytime and if no one was home, you could just hang out until someone got back. More often though, someone was there — a cousin, and aunt. You always knew you had a place to stay, no matter what. So many of my friends have stayed there. My grandparents welcomed everyone in.

I was just talking on the phone with my sister and she was telling me about the latest set of crazy behaviors from my mom that I guess I knew would come, but I was hoping maybe we wouldn’t have to deal with them so soon. “I just keep wishing she would act like… a mom. But I guess I can’t change who she is.” And my sister said that since we never really had a dad either, that the people who really most like parents to us have always been our grandparents. And it’s just hard to lose them.

My grandma had seven kids and she didn’t drive. Once her kids had grown up, she got a job at k-Mart in the cafeteria and she walked the two miles to work and back every day. She met my grandpa during World War II. He was at an army base in Ohio before going overseas and they met at a dance. he used to hitchike on his days off to go see her. when he got moved to a base in Atlanta, she took the train from Sandusky down to see him, with her mom as chaperone.

She loved crossword puzzles and my grandpa and the Virgin Mary. She went to mass every week until she and my grandpa got too sick and then my uncle would come to their house on Sundays to bring mass to them.

I have lost touch with my family over the years. I’ve been busy and I’ve needed some distance from my mom. I’ve stayed close with my grandparents, but haven’t seen most of my cousins for a really long time. It’s amazing to see my cousins now. We have all had the same shared experience with our grandparents, with their house, even though we didn’t have that experience together.

I stayed up late one night after the funeral, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes with my aunt and uncle out on the back patio at my grandparent’s house. My uncle said he’s been thinking a lot about the one stable thing for all of us has always been that house. And once both of my grandparents are gone, what will happen to that house? And will there be another place that will bring us together or will we just fade away. No longer a family, just a collection of people with no common ground?

My grandma started getting sick a few months ago and it was everything I had dreaded my entire life coming true. It’s difficult to think of the one constant of your entire life going away and never coming back. I spent the night with her in the hospital two nights before she died. I can regret that I didn’t spend more time talking to her or that I didn’t do enough or think that I should have visited more or longer and I don’t know. You can’t look back on life like that, I suppose.

It’s still too difficult for me to think about it all too much. There’s so much going on that I can mostly stay distracted. Family is tricky. And when you mostly feel as though you don’t have one, you want to keep what you feel you do have. And sometimes there’s nothing you can do about that slipping away.

It’s fortunate no one can peer inside my head and take a look around. There’s too much there for me to even begin to sort out and when I try to think it’s just so crowded that I’m exhausted even trying. I know that I can get through anything, I know this. And I also feel like any time I falter, when I even let any of this get to me, I feel I’m being just like my mom — the eternal victim, the martyr — and I think that I’m weak and cowardly and why is it that I have no strength. And it’s so hard for me to ask for help, to ever even let anyone know that I need help and I can’t let myself be that vulnerable, but then I ask for help because I don’t know what else to do and when I open myself up like that and I’m rejected, well. I don’t know. I feel foolish and selfish to say that the hurt of that just compounds the hurt I’m already feeling and all I want to do, then, is to protect myself. To never allow myself to feel that much again.

It’s just that it’s so much. The crowding in my head makes it difficult to be strong enough for any of it, much less all of it, all at once, descending on me like the night, like silence, like sadness, like desolation.

And I know I will get through all of it. And maybe that’s why I feel so weak, so dumb to even let it be visible. I should keep it all in, hide it, get through it, because I will. Why bother anyone else with it all. If I don’t have strength, what do I have?

And I want to be the strong one, the competent one. I don’t want to be weak and whiny and not able to find my own way. When I go home, I only remember more. My family looks to me to solve everything. I’m glad to help. I am. But it’s such weight sometimes.

To be the responsible one. I’ve given some of it up. In some ways it’s freeing and in other ways the guilt just follows me, a shadow, forever reminding me of my selfishness. My mom doesn’t talk to me anymore. My fault for no longer helping her? Or hers for expecting it? I see things that aren’t done because I didn’t step in and I know I just have to let it go.

I’ve already come to terms with not being everyone’s savior. (And going back to read that entry and seeing that the date was a year and a half ago, I guess I feel like I keep whining about the same things over and over and I just need to shut the fuck up already. Maybe not today. But soon.)

And while being confronted with death helps me realize that there is a shared experience with family you can’t get anywhere else, it also reminds me that life is fleeting, it doesn’t last, one day it’s over and that was all you had. Time is something you can’t get back, can’t keep it, can’t save it in a bottle for a rainy day. You spend each moment as it happens and then it’s gone.

That’s all you get. And nothing changes that.

I’ll have to sort through it all, all the crowding in my head and I’ll be fine. I’ll get through this. And there’s a lot of good too. But sometimes the noise of the rest of it makes all of that hard to hear.

Sometimes, I wonder if I am the most selfish person in the world. And at those times, I’m not sure if I’m just comparing the current me to the former me — the me who lived to make everyone else around me happy, so of course I seem selfish compared to that — or if I really am as selfish as I think as backlash from that former me. Maybe it’s a little of both. Sometimes, I can almost watch myself objectively and see things I should do or things that would be better for someone else, and I then also watch myself not do any of those things.

I probably should have gone to California earlier. I could have helped out. Taken away the burden. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Sure I had things to do here and it worked out better to wait until today to go, but I also know I could have put everything on hold. I could have made a way to make it down there. But it was too much. It was hard enough to deal with my own sadness. I couldn’t add the responsibility of my entire family on top of that. Was that too selfish? Probably. I don’t know. But it was all I could take.

I look at my life as it stands now and nearly everything is the result of being selfish. Perhaps I “should” have stayed married with the vows and the til death til us part and the minister pulling us aside after the ceremony and telling us that he’d never had a couple he’d married divorce. But I just wasn’t willing to live that life and I had changed too much and wasn’t willing to go back.

I could have stuck with my job and that other job and my last boyfriend and he told me that I couldn’t commit and would end up old and alone and maybe. Maybe he’s right. But I just couldn’t sacrifice my happiness and living the life I wanted for the sake of doing the right thing and not being alone.

Will I regret it? I don’t think so. Which is part of why I wonder if I’m the most selfish person in the world. Shouldn’t I regret, a little, not doing all of these things that I should?

I’m reading this book, Stumbling on Happiness, and it’s all about the psychology of how we feel and how we think and one section is about regrets. And it says that studies have found that we rarely regret things we do. Rather, we regret things we don’t do.

And I don’t regret things I do. Of course, the book also talks about how we rationalize experiences we have, and maybe that’s all I’m doing. But I think I’d rather try and fail. Even the things that have devastated me the most, that have brought me pain that I thought I couldn’t bear, even that, I don’t regret any of it. The joy, the experience, how my life has changed, it was all worth it.

I can’t spend my life avoiding pain anyway, so may as well go full in. Why avoid things because of the risk of pain — all of life is a risk, right and you’re going to run into pain no matter how much you try to protect yourself. We can spend it not experiencing anything or going for it.

And I think that, and then I wonder again about selfishness. It feels so much like “fuck the consequences” and we should care about consequences, right? But I’m thinking of the consequences of not trying anything, not risking anything, of staying in the same place, of not knowing anything new, of dying the same as I am today and looking back and not experiencing life. And I guess that consequence seems worse than of trying everything I can.

I wonder if I’m wrong. And maybe I really am the most selfish person in the world. But we all want to be happy. I’m just doing the best I can.

I don’t know how to face death, not any of it. Not the no longer living part or the what comes after part or the being without someone part or the whole complicated question of the best way to handle my life knowing that death is coming one day. I don’t know how to do any of it so I keep that all locked up somewhere far away and I try to never visit, not ever, not even for a little bit, to wonder what it might be like.

Only now I’m sitting in a hospital room and the only sounds are the machines feeding into the tubes going into my grandmother’s body and the ones that monitor if she’s breathing and her heart is pumping.

A few minutes ago, she clutched my hand and looked directly into my eyes. “Will you help me?” she said as clear as a bright blue sky and she said my name which only made it harder because that meant she knew exactly who I was, and some part of her knew exactly where she was and why.

It would be easier to think otherwise. After all, only moments before, she asked me what time the people from Bank of America were coming and then demanded I tell her what they said. And a few minutes later asked if I had let anyone know that she was running late and when I said that it was OK and not to worry about it she said “but other passengers are on board.”

She has these great moment when she laughs and smiles. She opened her eyes and asked if she was still living. I said she was and she said, “thank you” and smiled and closed her eyes again. But then she has other moments when you ask if she’s OK and she looks at you like you’re crazy and says she’s miserable and wants to go home. And, indeed, it’s a crazy thing to ask when the answer is so obvious.

I sat outside with my grandfather for a while. We lit two more cigarettes and he talked about how what he really wanted was for her to beat this. And then he said he knew that would be a miracle, but maybe at least she could come home. I don’t know. I know this isn’t something she can beat. I don’t even know if she can come home.

Yesterday, he was asking me about where I had been traveling. Have I been to Italy? No, I haven’t been to Italy.

“I always wanted to go to Venice,” he said.

And it struck me that he never, now, would go to Venice.

It made me want to drop everything and go everywhere and do everything I ever had wanted to do. Because the day will come that it will be me in that hospital room and I don’t want to say I always wanted to go to Venice.

And then he kissed his wife and told her that he loved her more than anything in the world and I thought about that too. Having someone who loves you more than anything else in the world isn’t something you can do or somewhere you can go. You can’t save up to buy it at the store. And that’s my other fear, of course. Besides my fear of dying, there’s my fear that I’ll do that dying alone and that there will never be a time when someone loves me more than anything in the world.

When you’re around death, everything else is dwarfed in comparison, but that’s mostly for everyone else but the person who is dying. My grandmother doesn’t want to be tangled in tubes and to be stuck in a bed and she keeps asking would someone please let her up to go to the bathroom. Everyone ignores her. Surely these things aren’t important next to DEATH, but they matter to her. When my cousins came in to visit, she tried to take the tube that brings her oxygen out of her nose.

“You need to leave that in. It helps you breathe.”

“But it doesn’t look attractive.”

We forget. We are thinking of the big thing and don’t remember that the small things still matter.

Often, when she slips away from the present, from the hospital bed, from not being home (and she is often in the present, which makes the times she’s not that much harder), she slips way back to when she was young. “Is this our first house, when we moved to LA right after we got married? You remember, we just needed a small apartment, just the two of us?”

It’s hard on my grandpa. “Don’t you remember, sweetheart?” He wants her to be better.

Everyone’s been coming by to see her. My cousin said that her favorite thing to do at Christmas is to go to our grandparents’ house. Not because it’s exciting, “because let’s be honest — it’s not” but because it’s them, their house. She had lived with them for a time when her mom went crazy. I have the same feelings of their house as home. Their house was the first place I remembered living.

I was talking to a friend on the phone on the way to the hospital today. I remembered that the town the hospital is in is the same one where I had my wisdom teeth out. Which reminded me that it was my grandparents who picked me up from the dentist and took me to their house and took care of me in the days after.

All of us cousins have had such fucked up lives and childhoods and families. Our one point of stability has been our grandparents. And now they’re slipping away from us and they need help and the same people — our parents, their children — who in many ways failed us as kids are in many ways failing them now. And there’s only so much any of us can do.

As much as I try not to think about death, I also mostly try not to think too much about God. Thinking about God is like thinking about the beginning of time or the edges of the universe and I can’t wrap my head around it and make it make sense. I know God academically. I can quote any scripture you’d like. But where my grandmother goes from here? I just can’t make sense of any of it.

So, I hold my grandmother’s hand and I feed her jello and give her ice chips when she’s thirsty. In her lucid moments, we talk about her cat and how the hospital room sucks and in other moments, I tell her that I’ve taken care of making my cousin a sandwich so she doesn’t have to do it. And I talk to my grandfather about what it must be like to visit Italy. And none of it makes any sense at all.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.”

What the hell is that even supposed to mean? I mean seriously. I get the whole “I did it my way” thing, but have you really listened to the lyrics to that song? I think poor Frank may have a few too many not-quite-legal substances when he came up with that one. Or quite possibly he didn’t actually write the song, but he must have been drunk on something every time he sang it because I haven’t heard stories of how he would stop in the middle of the song and say, “the fuck? ‘But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out’? Which was it? Did I eat it or did I spit it out? I can’t sing under these conditions! Find me lyrics that make sense or I’m outta here.”

So regrets. I mostly don’t have them. I don’t regret things that I do, even if it’s been wrong and I’ve failed and I’ve had to start all over again. I think I would regret not doing things. I was looking back over this journal and I came across this entry from January when I said that for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live on the water, wanted to sit outside and write to the sound of the waves. I said “The older me doesn’t quite believe as much as the younger me did that anything is possible.” And here’s where I liken myself to crazy Frank and say, what the fuck was I thinking? I no longer believe that anything is possible?

I would like to go back in time and smack the ten-months-younger me in the head and tell her that as a matter of fact, I do now live on the water and I’m listening to the waves as I write this RIGHT THIS SECOND, so maybe ten-months-younger me shouldn’t be so smug and sighing and know it all about things. Maybe anything really is possible.

I still get depressed when I fail. But I know I’m going to fail sometimes. There’s something to be said for being safe and comfortable and knowing what’s coming next, but then there are times when you just say fuck it, I’m going for it. And sometimes it’s all you could have wanted and sometimes it’s unexpected joy and sometimes you fail, but even then, you end up somewhere you couldn’t have imagined, and you’re moving forward to a new place and maybe failure’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Or wait, that was freedom. Freedom’s another word for nothing left to lose. Failure must be that word for the beginning of something new.

One thing about getting older is that you learn what words mean. When you’re younger, you read dictionaries and hear definitions and use them in sentences — a childhood full of spelling bees. But you can’t ask to experience a word in a spelling bee. You just have to wait for it to happen to you.

And then one day, you know what a word like bittersweet really means and you wonder when it last was that you felt pure happiness without feeling anything else along with it. That childlike feeling of joy that doesn’t come with the knowledge it will end or the weight of being held in the balance — at what expense, then, this? The knowing that choosing one path is closing the door on another.

You can open yourself up for that kind of joy, but. The downside of letting down your defenses is that you’re unprotected from the pain. That moment comes at a price.

I keep starting over again and I don’t know if I can’t hold on to anything that matters or if moving on is all I know how to do or if I don’t have the strength to stay when I feel battered.

I remember that time in college when I felt like such a failure because I couldn’t make lattes or decorate cakes. But failing at those things was the best thing that could have happened to me.

I look back and see a lifetime of failures, but life isn’t about not failing. I failed at my marriage and I’ve failed at jobs and sometimes I fail at making it through the day without doubting myself. But every failure is movement in another direction, maybe a better direction. Maybe just different. Every movement is a bittersweet moment. At what expense, then, this. I always wanted to be perfect. Now all I want is moments of that childlike joy.

Well a wise man once said to me
If your heart don’t break you won’t be free
I’m as free as a bird

-”The Mountain”, Kasey Chambers

I went on a run today along the beach and just looked out at the water and the city and the sand. It seemed like I passed only couples, holding hands, watching the sunset, pushing their children in strollers. I ran until the road curved and then I stopped and watched the sunset too. It lit up the sky behind the mountains and then the sun started slipping out of sight. I ran back then, staying as close to the water’s edge as I could, following the birds in the sky.

Despite the whole couples and children thing, it made me happy to run along the beach. I should do it every single day and in fact, I just might. I wonder sometimes why I don’t do more things that make me happy, or didn’t start doing them earlier. Like I’m waiting for someone else to do them with me or to suggest them or to say that it’s OK. And why should I wait for any of those things?

Every day that I drive my car I wonder why I spent all that time not driving a stick shift. Why did I wait so long to live on the water?

While I was running today, I was listening to Kasey Chambers. Not the most upbeat music for working out, I know, but it fit my mood. Someone told me recently that every experience is different and a few song lyrics can’t possibly reflect what we go though, what we feel. And I know that he’s right, but sometimes you hear something and you just know exactly how it feels.

I suppose I heard those lyrics and thought, I guess there’s a part of me that does feel free. What is there left to risk? I don’t have a fragile, crack-free heart to protect. I can’t worry about everything.

As Anya would say, there’s nothing we can’t face, except for bunnies.

Fortunately, I’m in a bunny-free zone. So I guess I can face anything.

It’s foggy today. I know that there are mountains and islands and a whole city just out my window, but all I see is fog. It’s the same color as the sky and the water and I’m surrounded by it. I was thinking about that poem about little cat feet except there’s nothing little at all about this fog. But it’s amazing how so few words can become a living thing and part of our standard consciousness. And then I feel a pang in my chest that I’m not writing words like that.

It’s all a metaphor, of course. I can’t see beyond the fog even though I know it’s obscuring an entire world.

I wonder sometimes if I’m being philosophical and wise by trying to let go of figuring out the future or if I’m simply avoiding life. Part of me is pragmatic. It’s a lot of fog. Not much I can do to see through it. It will clear eventually. Another part of me wonders if I’m letting control slip away.

Today, I’m finding the fog soothing and peaceful.  I cling to it like a blanket, like a cat with little feet, curled up in my lap.

I was talking to a friend this weekend about how everything I’m writing is depressing and I can’t seem to write anything else. I sit down and type and it’s all sadness and despair and I wonder if I should just stop writing until I can write something, anything but this.

He said that there’s a way to make everything funny. Even when you’re feeling the worst you’ve felt in your entire life, you can make it funny.

I will give him that there may be humor in everything. It’s just that I don’t have the strength to find it. But surely there is indeed something funny about people who smile in victory when their mom decides to stop chemotherapy, because that means they’ve won and the pro-chemo siblings have lost. There’s humor in their cluelnessness at the truth that no one has won and everyone is losing: their mother, their family, anything that might help them get through this together.

It is fundamentally hilarious that the person in charge of medical care — making appointments and dispensing medicine and making decisions — believes that medicine should be avoided in favor of believing that God heals all. And that you prove your faith by not taking full advantage of modern medical technology. I can almost laugh at the impossible task of getting the facts about what’s happening when the only person who gets briefings from the doctor is a person who believes that faith is in words and saying out loud that her mother has cancer and only has a few months to live is doubt. So you should only speak what you want to happen, not what actually is.

I was sitting outside of my grandparents’ house today. The only home I have known my entire life, the solid rock of my existence. I was talking to my sister and my uncle. My sister who my mom is no longer speaking to because she asked what pain medication my grandma was on. My uncle who just flew in yesterday from South America and is only now starting to realize the hilarity of an entire family focused on the petty fights of who gets to review the finances and completely ignoring the very real fact that their mother will be dead within months.

“So your mom controls what medicine she’s on and when she sees the doctor? And no one else even knows the doctor’s number?” My uncle was trying to sort through the crazy mess that my sister and I had given up on. 

“Yeah”, my sister replied. “And her ideal treatment plan is prayer and vitamins.”

We all agreed that we were all for prayer and vitamins. We just wouldn’t have gone that extra step and canceled the appointments with the oncologist.

“My mom will be mad I bought those energy bars for them.” I decided to just lay it all out and let my uncle know how things really were. “She takes it personally, like I’m saying it’s her fault they’re not eating.”

“She hasn’t talked to me in a week,” my sister added.

And then, of course, she’s one of the most disorganized people you’ll ever meet, so that she’s the only one planning the care that might prolong or shorten her mother’s life is a little, well, you could call it funny too I guess.

I mentioned this to my uncle. I was still trying to be tactful. He is her brother, after all. I just know her so well. Being organized is not a strength.

“Yeah, I know her well too. When we were kids, her nickname was scatterbrain.”

I offered to get in home care to augment my mom’s hostile, passive-aggressive, uneven attention. But my grandparents fear a stranger coming in. They don’t want someone they don’t know going through their stuff. And even more than that, they fear that if someone else is around to take care of them, the family will breathe a collective sigh of relief and disappear. And what they fear more than dying is being alone. If they have to be sick and old and nearing the end of their lives, they at least want to have their family around them.

Which might also be funny if you consider that this family they want around is spending all of their time fighting about who’s been charged with getting the mail and who’s won the anti-chemo fight that only brings death that much sooner to their mom. Their mom who they seemingly have forgotten completely about. When, after all, is there time to actually just stop and spend time with her when you’re so busy arguing about which of you gets power of attorney?

All I can do is sit at the kitchen table with them while they listen to the Angel’s baseball game on the radio. Sit at the patio table and smoke a cigarette with them and watch the sky. But I can’t be funny.

When I’m reading a book, I’ll come across a sentence or a phrase or a few words that I want to keep and I fold over the corner of the page, like dropping breadcrumbs so I can find them again. If I scribbled dates in the margins, the dog-eared pages might be sign posts for my life, speaking to me in my moments of joy and sorrow and weakness and despair.

Tonight, on the plane, there was this:

It’s not that she doesn’t need rescuing but that no one else will be able to do it. She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what’s depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.

Sometimes you can do the right thing and be fair and think about others and move on and live life the same way we all do. And other times, it’s all you can do to somehow find enough strength for self-preservation.

You have those moments when everything is perfect and you think, this can’t last and one day I will feel indescribable sadness. But not today.

And then those moments of sadness come and you think it might be more than you can take and it’s not just one thing but it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened and another worst thing that’s ever happened. Something you’ve known would happen and have always dreaded and something you never, ever expected, a position you never thought you’d be in, years ago, when you were younger and dreaming of how your life might be.

And you go on, because you have to, but in those moments, it’s difficult to remember that there was a time when you thought to yourself, this, this moment now, is the happiest I’ve ever felt. And you wonder, really, what does happiness feel like? It feels so far away like maybe it never existed at all.

“You don’t like the sound of ticking clocks.”

“No.”

We listened to the twelve chimes as we sat at the kitchen table. Midnight.

I thought about how no one else knows that about me. Only my grandpa has known me since I was born and cares enough to remember that ticking clocks bother me.

He started talking about dying. And I remembered the other reason I don’t like ticking clocks, other than the noise.

“I don’t think heaven is mansions and streets paved with gold. I just don’t think it is.”

“I don’t know.”

And I don’t know. And I can’t think about it — death, life, all of it. It’s too much.

And then he told me he wished that he and my grandma could just lay down and put their arms around each other and fade away together. And I didn’t have anything at all I could say about that.

I used to wish for lots of things.

That I would be a better singer. Or could write song lyrics. Or poetry. That I wasn’t so afraid of things. And remembered birthdays and bought thoughtful presents that made my friends smile. That I was better organized, kept things tidier, made time for trying something new.

For a while, I wanted to be a great chef, then a great journalist, then a great anything. I wanted to live by the ocean and hear the waves on the beach and write all day. I wanted to make the world a better place. Make everyone happy. Be perfect.

I hoped I might see the world and be a better friend and for a short period in the nineties, I wanted to own a Camero. I dreamed of owning a horse until I met one and realized I didn’t like horses, but I was only eight so I think I can be forgiven for misguided dreams.

I’ve had moments of wanting to be exactly like my mom and nothing like my mom and to never be a mom and in brief but very painful moments, I’ve wanted nothing more than to be one.

When I was little, I hoped very much to see a real smurf village, even though I knew, deep down, that they weren’t real.

I wanted to build forts and treehouses and to be better at sports and to never have to play sports again. I’ve longed to look prettier in dresses, to be more girly, to have more friends.

Then sometimes all I’ve wanted is to be alone.

I used to think that all I needed was to be loved. But then I realized that was just a song. Sometimes I want ice cream even though it’s cold, and a quiet place to read and blank paper and a good pen, and I want more time, if only there was more time and I could save it in a bottle, but that’s only a song too.

We all want to be happy.

I have a spider in my bathroom. It’s not a small spider, although it’s not one of those crazy scary huge hairy ones either. It has a plump silver body and long skinny legs and it’s camped out on the otherwise nondescript ceiling in the corner of my shower. Every so often he throws his legs in the air and waves them around, but otherwise he seems pretty content to just hang out.

When I shower, I can’t turn my back on him for fear he might be one of those stealthy jumping spiders and will leap out and tangle himself in my hair when I least expect it. Or possibly he’s a tarzan-style jungle spider who can throw out his web like a lasso and then ride down it towards my face like a zipline.

I don’t know what to do about him. Or her. I’m actually more worried he’s a her. I dream of a thousand baby tarzan spiders, all zipping towards me at lightning speed, yelling their tarzan spider yell. And that vision is no Charlette’s Web, no matter what you might be thinking. Also, my shower has no pig.

I try to think positive thoughts: Spiders keep away other insects, not that I’ve had a big mosquito problem lately in my shower. Spiders can’t really hurt you, at least not this particular spider although it would be exceedingly foolish to think that no spiders can hurt you, especially those in Australia or the southwestern United States. Or the rain forest. Or California. Or… OK, I take that back. Just about every spider with the possible exception of my shower-dwelling friend can hurt you.

But instead of thinking positive thoughts, I mostly think (in addition to being sure I’ll be leapt on by her or her million babies), please don’t crawl on my face in my sleep, please don’t crawl on my face in my sleep. I don’t know why that seems to be the most torturous situation one could find oneself in, but there it is.

So every morning I ponder the hopefully male spider, and every day, he stays firming in one spot, wiggling his feet. I’ve considered capturing him in a container and putting him outside (I’m much too short and he would surely escape my prison and fly at me as I crashed to the ground and ended up at the spider’s mercy as I lay there unconscious). Or I could aim the shower spray at him and wash him down the drain (spray would likely just make him mad and cause him to jump towards my face and … well, you get the picture; also I’ve seen 20/20 — he would just return from the dripping bowels of the drain and rise once again to sit in my corner, only this time, he’d be back for vengeance).

Maybe he’ll go away on his own, although if he does I’d worry about just where he took off to (and is he hiding in a nice dark spot so that as soon as I close my eyes he can strike and/or have his million babies?). My choices are few. It’s come down to this.

Anyone free to come by and take care of my spider problem for me? Yes, it’s an unusual hit, and the target is slippery. He can escape by web vine, superspider leaps, or wiggling legs. Also watch for him jumping into your hair. Might be pregnant with a million tiny spider demon babies. Consider bringing a pig to talk him down.

First of all, I’m not trying to say that I’ve conquered fear or I’m not afraid of anything or that I don’t sometimes absolutely flat out panic (about my life or the future or that I don’t have any clean clothes to pack). That’s crazy. Of course I get afraid. At all kinds of things, just like everyone.

But, I’m less afraid than I used to be, and looking back, I feel like I used to be afraid all the time.

I suppose there are some ways in which I’ve never been afraid when a lot of people are: moving, changing jobs, meeting new people. Not that I don’t always have that moment of what the fuck am I doing, but a life of change has made me mostly immune to hesitation for things like that.

But my lack of fear is different than it used to be. I mostly now think I don’t know what the hell is going to happen, but whatever it is, I will somehow survive it. Maybe that’s a result of surviving every time my life has been turned upside down or maybe it’s just getting older, realizing that I’m living out the one life I have, and so be it. Maybe it’s a survival mechansim — a way to cope when I would otherwise go completely insane from lack of control. I really like the control, and sometimes, I really just don’t have it.

I do know that fearing the unknown, being afraid of what comes next doesn’t help anything. Knowing the unhelpfulness doesn’t make the fear go away, but after being beaten down with it again and again — after panicking for absolutely no useful purpose so many times, just maybe my brain has just decided to go along for the ride.

Or maybe this is a short-lived pocket of insanity and I’ll return to my fearful ways any moment.

I was on a flight the other day, remarkably not freaking out at the turbulence and I realized it was that perhaps just this: that  I was afraid of the wrong things. I was spending all my resources: my emotions, my time, my energy, flailing against windmills. If I’m afraid of the turbulence of the flight, I’m spending my energy pretty uselessly. Turbulence isn’t what causes planes to fall from the sky. If I’m going to be afraid, it may as well be of something scary, something worth fearing. Turbulence ain’t it.

Someone asked me last night about changing jobs - but what if the company you’re at now fails? You left such stability, security, long-term career growth. it didn’t take me but a second to answer. So I’ll find something else. The path you’re on now may completely crumble and fall apart. So you find a new path. You won’t stay frozen, standing amidst the crumbling forever.

Several months ago, I was in a cab and the driver was telling me about how he escaped from his home country in Africa. His country was in the midst of a war. He’d been brainwashed to fight for a cause. He said that not being afraid saved his life. He knows now that he was brainwashed — that he’d been fed this idea that his own life was worth nothing, only the cause was worthwhile and if he died, someone would rise up to take his place so it was ok. But even so, feeling that made him not fear the possibility of death and fearlessness caused him to take risks that ultimately saved him.

It’s a different way of looking at things. We think fear saves us, keeps us from danger. But sometimes fearlessness lets us change, move from where we are, from a place that may be killing us and we don’t even know it.

A friend recently told me that we always know the right choice. That the hard part of choices is doing what it is we already know is what we want to do. I argued that it’s not always that easy. Sometimes we have no idea what the right choice is. He stood firm. I’d had a few martinis so I caved. but I don’t know. Do we always know the right choice and the hard part is in making it? How can we know when fear is protecting us or holding us back?

That I don’t know. I only know that I’m plowing ahead, making the choices I can, trying not to worry about the rest. I’m not saying I don’t worry, but I don’t want my entire life to be ruled by fear. There’s only so much of it left.

However. I’m still afraid of spiders.

Looking back over this journal, the last few months have seemed pretty rough. Living through them hasn’t been all ice cream in waffle cones either, now that I think of it. Some things have gotten a lot better and some things are hard and welcome to life my god could I whine any more? Well, probably I could. I seem to have an infinite capacity.

I suppose I’m having a midlife crisis, which is rather frightening in that it implies I have only have half of my life left. An entire half is already gone and I spent much of it trying to sneak in bad TV watching when my parents weren’t home and wondering if that boy in homeroom liked me. What was I thinking? Why didn’t I think about how I would end up here now with only 50% of my time remaining and an annoying announcer in the background of my head like on that Iron Chef America show on the Food Network. (And maybe on the original too, only that one’s in Japanese, and normally I don’t hear Japanese voices in my head. Only on odd Saturdays.) “50%. 50% remaining.”

Maybe I have longer than that. Who knows how long I might live, right? But I’d rather not dwell, with the whole panic attack hyperventilation that comes from the whole death phobia. Moving right along.

The midlife crisis really gets a bad rap, but I don’t know if it deserves it. Well, there is the whole “crisis” part of the name, but with good reason. I mean, fuck, I only have half my life left! What the hell have I been doing with it all this time? This is all we have. This is it. And then we die. And it’s over. Done. Gone. Am I happy? Am I where I want to be? Am I at least walking in that general direction? What about all that stuff I wanted to do but put off because I had so much time? What the fuck happened to all that time?

I have a friend who I’m sure gets very irritated with me. She spends her mornings at the coffee shop and then in the afternoons she walks around the lake. And she’s always inviting me along but I almost never go. The thought of spending every day doing nothing for hours makes me itchy. The voice again, in my head, counting down the time.

So, which of us is living life the right way? Or is there even a right way? Maybe she’s living the right way for her and I’m living the right way for me. Or at least I’m trying. Which is where the whole crisis a la midlife comes in. I’m halfway in, and I chucked it all and started over. (And this isn’t even the first time I’ve done it, although this time feels a little extreme for some reason, even though from some perspectives, that seems crazy.) You would think that would be the stress — that it’s so late to start over. Too late. I can never catch up now. All that time before is wasted.

But I don’t feel that way at all. I feel relief to be starting so much over, like I’ve been lost and driving down the wrong road, frustrated because I know I have no idea where I’m going, but knowing that stopping and going nowhere is foolish. And now, I’ve found another way, and I am finally going somewhere.

And nothing feels wasted. Yes, I’m back on that life is a journey, not a destination bandwagon again. You can skip this paragraph if you want. I’ll try to make it a short one. Everything now balances on everything before. That’s just how life works. When I was on this recent road trip, it was an odd feeling because instead of thinking about how long it would be until I got there, the entire trip was “there”. I could drive and enjoy whipping around winding roads except when those slow cars were in my way and why oh why did you have to drive so slowly in front of me when driving fast is so much more fun and I could stop and walk around whenever I wanted. And I did.

So yes, I’m doing all the stereotypical midlife crisis-type things. Spending too much money. Buying cars. Ending relationships and jobs and eating Haagen Dazs Mayan chocolate ice cream.

People talk about the midlife crisis with disdain but it’s really about evaluating your life. Is this where you want to be right now this moment? And is it where you’ll want to be five years from now, ten years from now? When that voice in your head is telling you that 25% if your life is remaining?

So sometimes I feel such happiness I think my heart might burst and sometimes I cry so hard I wonder when I might run out of tears. And all of that is life too. As for my crisis? It’s not entirely stereotypical. My sports car is blue.

I just drove twelve hundred miles in a 77 MGB. It even nearly made it, only running out of oil once and requiring just one push start. Driving an old rattley car that you really have to concentrate on to drive has its pros and cons. On the plus side, when you’ve been really stressed out and overthinking things, it’s a required break from all of that. Your brain mostly sticks with “really big truck; I should stay out of its way. Do I still have oil? Wow, this car is damn loud. Oh, pretty hill.” On the not-so-plus side, the car runs out of oil, randomly decides not to start, has no air conditioning, and is really damn loud.

When sitting in the car at midnight, no mechanic or rental car or tow truck for miles around, turning the key to only a clunking noise, I remembered what I thought when I bought my first actual brand-new car. And that thought was, “I will never drive an old car again.” I had been stranded on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere at midnight too many times.

My very first new car was a base model Mazda Protege. No air conditioning or power anything. It even had roll up windows. I don’t think it even had a cassette player. I walked on to the lot and said to the guy who came up to me, “I want the cheapest car you have.” He started walking away as briskly as he had walked towards me as he pointed vaguely in another direction. “Someone over there can help you.”

And I left the days of being stranded behind. Well, until now. Only this time, it’s because I wanted the car, not because it was the only thing I could afford, and I knew it might have a little engine trouble. The guy who was helping me at the gas station asked if I’d popped the clutch to start a car before. I said I had, but it had been years. “You don’t forget,” he told me. I guess he was right. As it started up, he ran behind me, “don’t stop!” I waved at him as I drove off. Fortunately, I was less than two hours from where I was heading. Twelve hundred miles would be a long way with only push starting.

My senior year of high school, I drove a blue Honda CRX. I loved that car with its stick shift and its sunroof and its non-horribleness. I’d driven a lot of horrible cars, starting with my first car: a green 76 Nova. The CRX broke down on me too, of course, but it also caused the truckers to honk at me as I drove down the 5. I haven’t had a car cause that since until the MG. The difference is that the CRX went a lot faster down the freeway.

I’ve been pondering the difference between courage and recklessness. How can you tell if your decisions are brave or stupid? Is taking a road trip in a car that requires a quart of oil every couple of hours an adventure or just dumb? I guess the reason a leap of faith isn’t called a leap of a sure thing is that maybe there is no way to tell.

You read these self-help books. Trust yourself. Listen to your inner voice. But look at Britney Spears. A few short years ago she was singing about being tired of listening to other people tell her what to do and to “be someone else but me.” So, she started listening to herself and end up shaving her head and running around proclaiming to be the anti-christ. Maybe when people talk about listening to that inner voice, they don’t mean Britney’s.

So, the courageousness vs. stupidity? I don’t know. Sure, I don’t want to end up with a shaved head, but if I’m faced with a dead battery on the 5, I can always get a push start. It beats staying home.

My entire life, the words softly repeated in the back of my mind, sometimes almost unnoticeable, but always there: nothing lasts. So, I counted milestones like you might count telephone poles as you drive down a country road. Nothing lasts. Hold onto this moment. Hold your breath and count the seconds.

If only I can get to Friday. To next month. Next year. If I don’t have to move before the school year ends, before the prom, before the next football game.

I have known you for two days, two months, two years.

I mostly couldn’t control how long things would last when I was younger. We were always moving, or my parents decided I should change schools or they couldn’t be bothered to take me to some class anymore. As I got older and could have had more control, I gave it up. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I just had never known anything else so I didn’t think it meant anything. But it did.

So, I moved away from where I wanted to be for someone else and I changed jobs and I didn’t build anything I wanted to last.

And now? Now it’s me who’s causing changes, endings, responsible for things not lasting. But lasting alone isn’t reason enough. It also has to be right.

Some things are.

I’ve had my cats for fourteen years. And that book of British poetry since the seventh grade. And thirteen months ago I started learning about all the ways you’re just like me.

There’s this dramatic and horribly emotional painful scene at the end of the second season of Buffy where she has to fight Angel, who she’s of course completely in love with and lost her virginity to only now he’s gone evil and is trying to suck the world into hell and she has to kill him and she’s all alone and it’s all heartbreak and tears. Angel is about to stab her and says to her “now that’s everything, huh. No weapons, no friends, no hope. Take that away and what’s left?” And Buffy looks at him and says, “me.” And of course she doesn’t die (this time) only she does have to kill him just as the good returns to him and there’s even more heartbreak than before. With the kissing and the stabbing and the crying.

Sometimes I feel like Buffy right as she’s grabbing the sword to keep it from plunging into her chest — alone, yet needing to somehow find strength within herself to keep fighting. and then I think, well, that’s a little overly dramatic, isn’t it? It’s not like my boyfriend is barreling at me with a sword as he tries to drag the world into a swirling vortex of hell. and then I think, I am comparing my life to a made up TV show. A TV show about vampires. No wonder my life is such a mess.

The alone thing is really getting to me though. Not just being alone, but making decisions alone, relying on myself. In my professional life, that’s easy. My personal life? Not quite so much. I think it’s because I can objectively evaluate the professional stuff. With things that involve me directly, I can’t step outside myself and take a broader view, so I feel blind. I like seeing the big picture and it’s difficult to see that in my own life. I want to hear what someone who is outside looking in has to say. But you can’t always have that. Sometimes, you have to fly blind and hope for the best. And really, even if you do have that, who’s to say you’re getting good advice, if that person has the same view that you’d have from the same vantage point. It only feels more sure when you get confirmation from someone else. That doesn’t actually make it more sure.

I guess there comes a point where you have to trust yourself, even if that feels like walking about on a wobbly bridge with loose wooden slats and fraying ropes. You hold your breath and pray you don’t fall. And you don’t fall.

I was talking to a friend of mine last night and she was telling me about how private I am and how I don’t let anyone in or tell them how I’m feeling and that I’m this strong ice princess type person who shuts everyone out. She said it in a nice way though. She would probably be surprised that I write about the full extent of my basket case emotional hysteria online for all to see. She said I don’t trust anyone and that I need to let people in and lean on them and why did I think I found it so hard to do?

I don’t know. It could just be that I moved every year when I was growing up so I never got into the habit of having good friends I could confide in. Or it could be that I always had to depend on myself and be strong and push through no matter what (with no support from, for instance, parents), and so that’s just what I know to do.

I find, actually, that when I go too long without writing here, I’m a little more angsty in general. I suppose I do need to let out my insecurities, fears, and general emotional imbalance somewhere. I mostly do just write everything I’m feeling here, and I sometimes forget that there are indeed people who know me who read this. I did write something the other day that I only published privately. It was pretty depressing and included this chipper moment:

And I am slowly dismantling my life, brick by brick, piece by piece and I can see it and I can’t stop myself. And I am drowning. [random angst cut] I have nothing to [random whiny rambling cut] build with the broken shards of my life, so I carry them in my hands, no place to put them, and they pierce my skin and weight me down, but I can’t rest because I have no where to stop.

So I was telling my friend last night, not about writing that, but about how I seem to come to this place where I tear apart everything in my life and start over and build my life back up again from nothing. And why is that? And is that self-destructive? Or is it the natural cycle of life? Am I moving on to better things in my life or just sabotaging myself?

I don’t know. I know that I am in a better place than when I wrote that entry mostly because I have at least some glimpse of stable ground. I was talking to another friend last week about uncertainty. And some uncertainty is manageable, but it’s harder everything in your life in uncertain. And I feel like I’m finally taking those broken pieces of my life and building towards something. Something entirely different than before. And who’s to say if it’s better or worse. I don’t know yet. I may never know. And I’ll never be certain about everything. I do know that.

I do mostly lean on myself. And I do find it very difficult to rely anyone else. And I don’t know that I’ll ever fundamentally change that. Although I know that’s why I sometimes feel so alone that it feels like there’s no one in the entire universe other than me. And the sound of my own breathing echoes through the endless space. Am I hell-bent on continually destroying my life? Maybe. All I know is that I’m living the only way I know how. Taking things day by day. And I can’t do anything other than that. And I have to at least trust myself. So, I’ll keep going, and building, and see where life takes me.

One thing about visiting my family is that they hold up a mirror to the very worst parts of me, my biggest weaknesses, the things I like to bury down deep and pretend don’t exist. But exist they do, and I’ve been letting them win over the good parts of me a bit too much lately. I’m generally strong, pragmatic, objective, and I think a lot of that came from growing up with an adamant desire not to be like my family. But I’ve been away from them a lot, and it’s good to be reminded of what I don’t want to be. I spent so much time these last few days thinking, look people. Either buck up and deal or make a change. These things are entirely within your control and complaining about the same things over and over will not help anything and will only serve to make me crazier than I already am. And then I realized I could be talking to myself. And I am making myself crazy.

I just need to shut the fuck up already and take control of my life. I am foolishly wasting an inordinate amount of energy complaining about my situation. And being ridiculously insecure. And all of this is completely within my control. Good God, I need to buck up or make a change.

Life be be hard, and the only thing you can do is deal with things as they come. I want easy answers, but I’m not going to get them. So, I need to stop waiting for them. I need to make my own path and stop waiting for some glowy, magical path to show itself to me. Because it won’t.

So, I make a path and I feel some relief, but am I happy? No. I’m conflicted, overwhelmed, stressed, uncertain, I doubt myself, I question the path. I’m at that place, that place I seem to keep coming back to where I’m stepping out into darkness with only faith that I’ll step out onto solid ground.

And I wonder, why do I keep coming to this place? Why am I here, in the dark, questioning myself again? I don’t have the answers. All I can do, right now in this moment, is take a step.

What choice do I have but to keep going? I may fail, I may make mistakes. I’m only human. But why dwell there, on that, on my imperfectness. Why live in frozen imperfection? I sometimes see this glimmer beyond “I must be perfect” that looks like “I can only do so much”. Sometimes I can even almost reach it, even though I-must-be-perfect cliff has lots of jagged edges and I get caught on it and it pulls me back, but if I just tug a little and let my sweater unravel, let it fall from me, let it hang from the pointed rocks on the cliff face and don’t look back for it, just keep going, even though I’m cold and the sweater was comfort and warmth, I keep going and the briskness warms me up and I don’t look back.

And I keep going.

Maybe I don’t have a fixed point right now, but I have forward momentum, and maybe not even forward, but movement of some kind, maybe sideways, maybe up, but I know how to keep going, so I do it.

It’s a little funny, I guess. I don’t have much solid ground, so to anchor me, I hold on to movement. I board planes and take cabs and watch the world go by from train windows. I buy a car. I may not have anything but my suitcase, but now I have a car. And it’s not fixed either, but then neither am I, so maybe I can just take it with me.

I don’t know how it all ends. And then I think, it’s not about the ending. It’s about the being here now. Experiencing this. Not fast forwarding through to see the end credits rolling. There’s no need for rolling credits when we can keep going, when we can take solace in the moments.

So, I’ll keep traveling. I’ll keep going. With my hobo bag, my airline tickets, my car.

I’m not traveling to the end of the road. I’m just traveling.

Right at this moment, I’m on a train, visiting states by looking out the window. We just made a stop in Delaware. Delaware! Now Maryland. I’ve never been either of these places before. They seem pretty, as far as I could tell. I’ve become a nomad, one of those puffy dandelion seeds, floating in the wind, with no real anchor, no place to go home to.

I love traveling, but it’s hard to have no home. I’m certainly used to it. I can’t think of many times in my life when I’ve felt like I’ve had a home, but these days, I’ve taken that to the extreme. I have a suitcase with me, a suitcase where I’ll eventually be flying to next, and no idea where I can put my books. Right now they’re in plastic storage bins. Earlier this week, I had no idea where I would be today.

I was talking to a friend who’s a twin traveler, and she’s declared this to be the year of living on the road. I have no choice but to join her, and for the most part, I have no complaints. In fact, I feel lucky to have the opportunity to go wherever the wind takes me, experience the unexpected joys of having no idea where that might be next.

But, right now at this moment, on this train, I also feel a little lonely. It’s nice to have a place to put your books, a place that’s yours, that’s not a little room with bad coffee and malfunctioning irons. It’s nice not to be all by yourself all the time, eating meal after meal of adequate room service. Alone.

Maybe it’s just being on the train, watching everything go by. I have this empty space inside that wishes for just a tiny bit of solid ground. Just one small handful of soil would be enough.

I know that what I need is patience, to just go with being in limbo, let the hotels do my laundry, and make due without a DVR. I can always catch up with the DVDs later. I should take pictures of the statues in Philadelphia while I can and enjoy the silence. And mostly I do. But even so, every so often, I can’t help the ache of wanting to feel the smallest touch from someone who loves me.

They say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or really irritates the hell out of you. Or totally fucks you up. Something like that. Go listen to that “Boy named Sue” song by Johnny Cash and let me know which it is, because I honestly can’t tell. Whatever the case, experience makes us who we are and we couldn’t be where we are now if we hadn’t have gone through whatever came before. I was watching my new favorite philosophical font of profound wisdom, aka Scrubs, the other day and Carla was telling Turk that she didn’t regret anything that had come before, because it all ultimately led her to him. Wherever it is we’re headed, we have to get there somehow.

So, I was listening to Johnny Cash singing about being named Sue and how it made him strong and independent (or possibly bitter, alone, and mean, depending on your point of view), and I was thinking about my own fucked-up childhood, during which I moved approximately every three minutes. Just when I would start to finally relax, it was time to uproot everything I knew again and head off somewhere unknown and start all over. People move all the time; kids survive. And I did survive just fine, but moving 16+ times by the time one graduates from high school is possibly a little excessive.

It didn’t help that I was really shy. I have finally stopped classifying myself as a shy person and now, only in the last few years, think of myself as formerly shy. It’s hard self-identification to give up when it’s so ingrained in you for so long. So, here I was, this horribly shy, awkward, insecure person, too scared to talk for fear everyone would think I was an idiot and make fun of me, and I had to face a new town, a new school, and entirely new group of kids who had known each other for years, already had their cliques and friends. And I had to do this over and over again. And when I would finally, finally, work through my fear and anxiety and fight my way to making friends and figuring things out, and was just feeling comfortable and settling in to this whole new life, it was time to move again. When I think back to my childhood, I remember a lot of of first day terror and a lot of crying in back seats of cars, driving away.

So, that sucked. But like everything else in life, all of that did in fact make me who I am. For one thing, I guess I’m over the shy thing. I can walk right into a room full of strangers and talk to anyone. There’s nothing to fear in talking to people. They’re just people. It’s just talking. What’s the worst that can happen? That they don’t like me? I don’t even know them, so who cares.

And change doesn’t bother me a bit either. Moving? Changing jobs? Sure! When I get reviews at work, I’m always told about how adaptable and flexible I am. I know that it’s meant to be a compliment, but being adaptable and flexible is the only way I know to be.

Change is like an old friend to me. But instability and lack of control are old enemies. I don’t mind moving on to something else, I just want to know what that something else is. Lack of control is especially difficult. It’s odd, isn’t it? Going through lots of change made me not mind change at all. Not having control made me crave it.

I guess I also have trouble getting too comfortable. It’s hard for me to think of anything as permanent, to count on anything, to believe that anything’s stable. I think of every job I have as temporary, not matter how passionately I throw myself into it. And it’s hard for me to lean on anyone, to rely on anything other than myself. I always fear that once I get too comfortable, believe anything or anyone will be around tomorrow, it will all be taken away in a moment. Better not to count on anything than to be horribly disappointed and let down.

I mostly don’t let anyone get too close, don’t open up to people, and maybe that’s also because of all those times when I finally would make friends, only to move across the country and never see them again. Acquaintances? Sure. Real friends? Too risky.

I pride myself on handling stress well, on being strong, on getting through anything. That also may be in part because I felt so weak when I was growing up. As a kid, you always dream about how things will be different when you’re all grown up. I dreamt about having strength and being in control of my life.

The truth, of course, is that we can’t always be strong, we can’t always be in control. Sometimes life is in limbo and what we really need most is patience. And a little faith and trust. And maybe even a little bit of letting yourself lean on someone else and allowing them to be there for you. And believing that it’s OK to relax and trust that they’ll still be there for you tomorrow. To take the risk.

So, I sit here facing life in flux. And every inch of me is fighting it. This is the space between the changes, and there’s little control here. I know I have to let it all go, to let life be in flux, to live day to day and not worry so much about this space in between. Lack of control may never be an old friend to me, but maybe it can at least be a comfortable acquaintance. I’m working on it. With a little help and a little faith.

I wanted to write a profound poem about a lone standing tree on a windy day or a safe harbor in a stormy sea. I wanted to be poetic and meaningful, to find strength in the words, to shine a light in the dark. But I have no poetry; nothing beautiful. And I don’t feel strong or capable or grown up.

When even writing fails me, I’ll just keep moving forward as best I can.

I was telling someone today that I’ve gotten very good at typing on my blackberry while driving, and better still at typing on it while walking (generally through airports). I was explaining that what it takes is just the right mix of glancing at the phone while looking where you’re going and ideally avoiding running into large objects (or small ones, for that matter).

I’ve had extensive training in the art of balancing the forward and downward glance while moving forward.

As a kid, I read a lot. No, I mean lot. More than that. Keep going. A little more. Now double it. I would leave the library with stacks of books taller than I was. We always lived in small towns, and they only had so many books. I would read through everything at my age level at the library. And at school. And then I’d be out of books, so I’d start reading what was at the next age level. And the next. I read those Judy Blume books way too early.

I devoured books. Read them every possible moment I could. When my parents said lights out, I would strain my eyes and read by moonlight. I had no idle seconds, only book-reading seconds. Which is how I learned the talents that serve me so well now with my blackberry. Walking between my room and the dining room? Why waste that time, when I could read a book? Walking to the car before school? Book! I spent my entire childhood glancing from my book just long enough to make sure I wasn’t walking off of a cliff.

I generally read a book a day. I didn’t really get the concept of reading just parts of books at any given time. You don’t watch a movie a little at a time every night, right? So why do that with a book? The only drawback to this method of book reading is that good books are over way too fast and you end the night wanting more book, and knowing that there’s no more book to be had.

I read at the dinner table, when everyone else was watching TV, in class when I was waiting for everyone else to finish our assignment. I read at lunch, recess, mornings, evenings, weekends. Just about the only time I didn’t read was when I was in the car. Not for lack of trying, but I just couldn’t get over getting car sick.

I got so used to reading with things going on around me that I won’t even notice if you come up and start talking to me. I get completely sucked into the story and don’t hear or see anything else.

There’s this picture of me that I keep in my paper journal that captures me perfectly. I look at it sometimes when I feel lost and I just don’t know who I am or what I’m doing. In it, I’m maybe nine or ten years old. I’m curled up on the couch with my snoopy stuffed animal that I carried everywhere (and still have). And a book. And I don’t even notice the camera. I look completely at peace.

What’s amazing is that I can tell where the picture was taken. It’s in the travel trailer we lived in after my stepdad decided to once again quit his job. We sold our house and bought this travel trailer with the idea that we would live wherever and not be tied down. In reality, we ended up in a trailer park only a few hours from where we started. In the picture, I’m on the couch that folded out in the bed that my sister and I slept on at night. Some kids complain about not having their own rooms. My sister and I didn’t even have a room during the rambling man years.

My life was anything but peaceful, yet there is this picture, proof that I was, at least while I was reading. I feel the same way when I write. No matter what is going on around me. No matter the complicated thoughts swirling around in my head, I can find a moment of peace in the words.

I look at that picture, and I can feel the peaceful moment. And maybe that’s what I need to remember. Maybe I can’t stop the endless onslaught, the constant barrage. But I can take a moment and find a little peace.

I now have proof, beyond all doubt, that my life doesn’t follow the normal way of things. I had my suspicions, of course, but today I came across evidence just too strong to ignore.

I was trying to get access to one of my 401k accounts and Fidelity made me go through this whole convoluted security process that included picking a picture I liked and naming it and answering three personal questions. I assume the idea is that you may have to answer these questions again at a later time, so you should pick questions that don’t require you to make up answers on the spot. Which is where the trouble started.

Some systems with these special security questions give you the option of making up your own question, and I do great with those. I can easily think up a question that I’ll later remember the answer to. What series of books will I reread every year for the rest of my life to help subdue my panic about death? (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) What car of mine do I remember fondly due to its ability to hold as many people as I wanted and its kick ass engine that let me stomp on the gas when the light turned green and dust everyone around me? (65 Ford Falcon) What do I want to do every day for the rest of my life, at least a little, no matter where I am? (Write) And so on.

But no. Fidelity can’t ask me any of these questions or let me suggest them. Instead it offers me choices of questions I can’t possibly answer.

• What city was your mother born in? What city was your father born in? I have no idea what city either of them were born in. I could vague it up and answer LA for either, since I’m pretty sure they were both born in the general Southern California area, but when faced with this question later, will I remember I decided to do that? For that matter, is this question about my biological father or my stepfather? I suppose it doesn’t matter, since I haven’t talked to either of them in about 15 years and don’t plan to call either of them up to ask about their childhoods at this point. And if I call my mom, well, I’d have to talk to her, and there’s just no reason for that. Next question?
• What’s your paternal grandfather’s first name? I was told I met him once, when I was a tiny baby. He killed himself not long after. I’m sure the two events are in no way related, but in any case, I don’t want to dwell. Nor did I ever pry about what his name might have been. Moving on.
• Who was your childhood best friend? Right. This question probably makes perfect sense to those who mostly lived in the same place growing up and had this so-called long term friend. I had lots of micro friends for brief periods of time, in between moves to the next place. I wasn’t friends with anyone long enough to remember their names, all these years later. Any more questions that perhaps would make me feel less loserish?
• When were you married? Where did you honeymoon? Where did you meet your spouse? These are the questions apparently meant to remind me that I’m a divorced loser who will end up a crazy old cat lady. I could answer these questions and remember the answers later, but I’d really rather skip them.
• What city was your high school in? What was your high school mascot? This question would require me to remember which high school I was answering about. Because only those fortunate non-movers went to only one.

I assume that a bank such as Fidelity uses focus groups and research and determined that these were the questions that their user base could easily answer. Fidelity’s customers have stable childhoods, non-crazy parents, and enduring relationships. When someone asks where they went to high school, they don’t have a split second flash where they wonder if it’s best to lie or to just say it’s a long story.

Clearly, I’m with the wrong bank.

I’ve been catching up on TV lately, gobbling up shows I’ve been wanting to watch but haven’t for reasons too whiny to get into. One show I’ve been watching a lot is Scrubs. I have it set to record on the DVR and Comedy Central shows it like four times a day, so I’ve got a marathon waiting for me every time I get home. It’s a pretty good show all around, but the best part about it is the theme song. With the marathon watching sessions, I get to hear it a lot.

I can’t do this all on my own. I’m no superman.

Honestly, I hear that, and every single time I have this sense of relief that just completely floods me. It’s OK to not be able to do everything on your own and it’s OK to admit it. And it’s OK to be human and not perfect. I know it’s just a song and a TV show and that should be the last place I get my validation and I’m reading way too much into that one line, but there it is.

Yesterday I took a barrage of emotional sticks and stones, hurled at me, relentless. And they struck at my insecurities and vulnerabilities and fears, and I flinched and tried to find a way to protect myself but I didn’t even know if I deserved protecting.

I was being graded. And I failed.

• Follows through and succeeds. Needs improvement.
• Puts in the work and doesn’t quit. F.
• Cares about others than herself. 0 points.

I was accused of taking the easy way out and of got predictions of a dismal future that I’ve always felt, deep down, would indeed be me: alone, with nothing meaningful to show for all my years of living. Am I taking the easy way out? Am I just not willing to work at anything? Will I look back all those years later and realize that I’ve decimated my own life with my selfishness and lack of commitment?

I don’t know.

Just the night before, a friend of mine was telling me that I could be taking the easy way, but instead I’m being courageous, taking the hard way — doing the right thing for the long term at the expense of short term pain.

So, who’s right? Maybe neither of them is right. Maybe I’m just stumbling along, doing the best I can. Not running away or being brave or having any kind of a plan at all. And maybe I shouldn’t be vilified. But I shouldn’t be congratulated either. I don’t know what I’m doing. Haven’t calculated any pros and cons, long term vs. short term trade-offs. I’m just trying to make it through, day to day.

I was driving the other day, listening to the Dixie Chicks sing about taking the long way around. I was thinking about how so many people just want stability and once they’ve got their career and their house and their relationship and whatever, their life is settled, and then they live it. And I can see the attractiveness in that. And I’ve had that. But I’ve given it up. I’ve changed careers. I’ve left a seemingly perfectly fine relationship. Left my home with its nicely decorated living room and substantial bookcases. I guess I’m taking the long way. As the song goes, I could have made it easier on myself.

And I don’t know if I’m gaining or losing. I just know that I’m no superman. And according to a TV show about perky doctors who get in zany situations and have heartfelt talks, that’s OK.

In an effort to break free from the soul-crushing despair this journal has become, to bring some pointless frivolity to the melodramatic, whiny ranting, I figured I would share my newly found shopping tips. Clothing shopping tips. Right, I want to tell you how to shop for clothes.

I realize shopping advice from me, the self-admitted crappiest clothing shopper on earth may seem a bit odd. But if we learn from our mistakes, then I must surely be a wise shopping guru woman, dispensing shopping wisdom from my place aloft the highest shopping peak. Or at least, I can tell you what not to do is what I’m saying.

I’ve had many learning opportunities of late, as all of my clothing is either completely hideous or doesn’t fit to the point that I look like a coat rack, flailing about in the jackets with my too many arms and stubby legs. I’ve had no choice but to brave the stores and the malls and the internet with the perky salespeople and racks of ugliness, like cardboard and curtains stitched together by blind lobsters without thumbs (not that seeing lobsters tend to have thumbs, just go with me on this) and crazy cartoon carnival house mirrors and did I mention this? with their clothes that refuse to fit me because apparently I am indeed the aforementioned coat rack.

So, what have I learned?

Clearly, regardless of how lazy one might be, one should not just randomly grab clothing and bring it home, with the good intentions of trying it on there and returning if it’s not quite right. Especially when that one is me, the one currently on the road to hell paved with those shiny good intentions. I discovered this tip years ago, but I’m caught up this loop of madness wherein I repeat the same behavior and somehow expect a different result. Like maybe the clothing fairy will return all the poor choices for me and replace them with gleaming racks of gloriousness and light while I’m sleeping.

I thought this process might be a bit easier if I shopped online. After all, you can’t possibly try things on before you buy them, so no lack-of-trying-on guilt! And how hard can it be to find a box, fill out the form, drive to the post office and… Right. I guess I didn’t quite think that one all the way through.

Another bad habit of mine is that I refuse to shop in places where clothing is less than a thousand dollars an item. Not that I’m willing to spend a thousand dollars on any one item, which makes the buying process a little more difficult. Maybe those discount stores remind me of my childhood a little too much, when I spent my hours of back-to-school shopping at thrift stores, going through rack after rack after musty, crowded, hopeless rack.

I tried going into Marshall’s again earlier today and was reminded as to why I normally drive right on by. Everything is too big for me, except for the space between the racks, which is way too small, and I have to cut my way through the clothing like I’m in a dark jungle, dodging shoppers who are oblivious that anyone else might possibly be in the store and might need to get by them to get the hell out already because I am suffocating and please don’t make me shop here anymore. (Why oh why can’t there be a Target near me so I could do my inexpensive clothes shopping in peace?)

But, again, it’s not that your more expensive-type stores are any better. For one thing, everything is a thousand dollars, which yes, is a drawback. And knowing that, it’s best to consider price tags before purchasing. Or you might end up paying over two hundred for two belts. Not that I’ve ever known this to happen. I’m just saying that it’s possible. You know, hypothetically.

OK, fine, here’s what happened.

I really did need new belts and I’d been looking for them everywhere except that I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but belt makers apparently think it’s the 80s rather than 2007 already, my god people, seriously. 2007. Not 1986. Ahem. Anyway, all the belts for women are those super wide, angled, generally white, possibly with bangles, crappy crappy horribleness that I could barely wear the first time it was hip. OK, so I wore it the first time, but I was much younger and stupider then. I wore those black rubber bracelets too. And put crazy scarves in my hair! My permed hair! No, I don’t have pictures. Anyway, the point is that I have been searching for normal belts for months, the kind that will actually go through the belt loops in jeans and the only ones I found were at this shoe store in New York so I was all ready to buy them but then the guy mentioned that they don’t come with belt buckles. Seriously, you’re supposed to find your own buckles and figure out how the hell to put them on. That was never happening. I declined the belts.

So, I was at this store the other day and I tried on this dress, because you know, my whole if only I were pretty, why can’t I wear ribbons and curtsy and and oh yeah it’s because ribbons tend to clash with the weight of the fucking world on my shoulders and could I possibly whine anymore, but sometimes I still want ribbons. Right. Because of that. I tried on this dress and it was honestly, the prettiest, floatiest dress you’ve ever seen and it had ruffles, but not too many and it was the color of the sky and it twirled and sang and danced. And it was $715. The dress went right back on the rack.

So, you see, after that experience, you would think I would check the price tags on the belts. But I saw the belts and I was like, finally, belts that won’t make me look like I’m in a Cindy Lauper video. I must have these belts! And so I marched them right up to the counter. And managed to look convincingly nonchalant when the cashier asked me for $213. Oh, $213? Of course, just the price I would expect to pay for two small strips of leather with ugly metal attached to the end. Absolutely.

The other problem with these stores is that they remind me how completely frantic my life has become and how mere seconds can seem like an eternity and I could have answered three email in those twenty seconds, please let me take my blackberry and my diamond-encrusted belts and go! But no. The cashier has to first wrap the items in tissue paper. And then tape the tissue paper. And then lovingly place the tissue paper in a bag. And then tie ribbons around the bag. And curl the ribbon. And bring the bag around the side of the counter because Lord knows I couldn’t possibly be expected to lift anything as heavy as two belts over a counter. And honestly, I hope those belts are enjoying all the attention because when I get them home I’m going to tear them out of the paper (if I can get those damn ribbons untied), throw away the bag, and shove them into a dark and lonely drawer with nothing to cushion them. Well, maybe socks.

My impatience at the tissue wrapping ceremony makes me wonder if I’m becoming a little too high strung. I have a friend who talks to the various people he meets as he walks in and out of stores and it is an absolute joy to walk around with him or even be on the phone with him while he’s doing it because he just brings calm and happiness everywhere he goes. Like there’s all the time in the world. And I think, I should be more like that rather than furtively checking my watch (you know, if I had one), wondering how much longer the ribbon curling will take.

But back to my shopping tale, which does in fact have a happy ending. I did find a dress online that was not $715, I did manage to escape the Marshall’s with no dire effects, and no one has tried to hang a coat on me yet. And hey, I did get that ribbon I wanted so much. Perhaps my future as a shopper isn’t so doomed after all. I just need someone with me at all times to check the belt prices.

I don’t want to have to do what I’m good at. My entire life, I’ve been doing things because I’m good at them and just once, maybe I’d like to opt out of the obligation that being good at sometimes brings. I was reading this magazine the other day, Marie Claire or something, some fluffy thing for the plane, to keep me distracted from the plane jumping around as it hurled itself through space. A woman had written this article about her divorce and said that while she loved her husband and she had kids and there was nothing terrible going on in her marriage, it wasn’t how she wanted to spend the rest of her life and one day she was talking to someone who told her that no one grades you at the end. And that she realized she’d been living her life according to all these responsibilities and checklists, and how it would all look on her final grade. So, she changed her life.

I don’t know if I agree with the woman who made the comment that gave her the impetus to transform. We get graded all the time, by everyone. People who expect things from us, who rely on us — it’s not always a bad thing, right? This life is made of relationships and connections and you don’t build that by expecting nothing of each other. So we are graded, sure. And it matters.

But. Does it always matter? Does it matter above all else? When does what’s deep down in our souls trump the world around us? How much do we care about our grades?

Sometimes, I just want to change my life entirely. Go somewhere else. Do something else. Forget all the obligations and responsibilities and weight. I want to spend my days writing and being loved. I don’t care if I’m poor or not admired or not changing the world. I want to be happy.

People do it all the time. They pick up and just leave it all behind. I just got another email from my uncle and his wife who are sailing around the world. They are just stopping in ports as they go along, meeting people, trying local food, getting back in the boat and sailing. They don’t know what the next day will bring, but they know it will be new and different and they’ll experience it together. And they’re happy. Not too many years ago, my uncle was married to someone else, living with his wife and two daughters, doing construction and remodeling the old farm house they bought. I was talking to my grandpa a few weeks ago when he had just gotten off the phone with my uncle.

“He’s my son the sailer now. He used to be my son the construction worker and farmer. I don’t get sailing. I liked the farm house.” And right there, a father was giving his son a grade. And it wasn’t an A. And I thought, we only get this one life and it only lasts so long. I’ll take happiness.

You have to understand, I’m a person who has always lived for As. Nothing was more important than that A, than pleasing those around me, than making sure no one thought bad about me, that everyone thought I was perfect, the best, that I was doing was I was good at it and accomplishing all I could. But these days, the more I think fuck the A. What does that bring you other than other people’s happiness?

Not that it’s as black and white as all that, of course. Bringing happiness to others makes you happy. And being in relationships makes you happy, and there’s always compromise, always responsibility. And you can’t just take and take. I don’t know the answer. I don’t know when you get to make the choices that hurt people.

I’m reading this book, eat, pray, love, about a woman who wanted to change her life. Not that her life was terrible, and I get this feeling completely. She had a successful career as a magazine writer, had just bought a huge house with her husband, and was living the American Dream. But. And it’s the but I understand. She laid on her bathroom floor, sobbing and sobbing. Finally, she prayed to God: “tell me what to do, tell me what to do, tell me what to do.” And God told her to go to bed.

It was so immediately clear that this was the only thing to do. I would not have accepted any other answer. I would not have trusted a great booming voice that said either: You Must Divorce Your Husband! or You Must Not Divorce Your Husband! Because that’s not true wisdom. True wisdom gives you the only possible answer. Go back to bed, said this omniscient interior voice, because you don’t need to know the final answer right now, at three o’clock in the morning on a Thursday in November. Go back to bed, because I love you. Go back to bed, because the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer. Go back to bed so that, when the tempest comes, you’ll be strong enough to deal with it. And the tempest is coming, dear one. Very soon. But not tonight.

It’s a true story. She does eventually divorce her husband, and it’s terrible and awful and he calls her selfish over and over and over and she accepts all that guilt and responsibility and selfishness and she’s extremely depressed and then she drops everything and spends a year traveling to Italy, India, and Indonesia. Because she wants to. Because it makes her happy.

Look, I know life is about compromise and hardship and pain and sacrifice, as well as joy and love, and I know I can’t just run off and live happily ever after. But when I’m alone and I have time to think, the panic can overwhelm me. This is the only life I have. I’m spending it working, because I’m good at this and I like it and I can make a difference here. But what am I doing for me? What in this life is mine? I (dramatically, in exaggerating martyr-like fashion) feel like an Egyptian pyramid worker, carrying stone after stone and creating a beautiful, impressive structure that will awe and astonish civilizations for generations, that will house pharaohs and queens and jewels. And with no time to build a small little home of my own, just for me.

Do I just want to run to something that doesn’t exist? Is the grass always greener until you get there and find that it’s the same color as all the other grass? Or sometimes, is the grass over there really that sparkling color of green that shines and floats in the sun and you walk through it barefoot and your toes sing and you can’t imagine spending your life walking on any other grass?

I don’t want to be like my stepdad. He wasn’t happy. So we moved. Then he wasn’t happy. So we moved. He still wasn’t happy so he quit his job. Then another. Then went back to the first. And we moved again. And then he decided it was our fault, my mom’s fault, someone’s fault, so he left. And then he wasn’t happy. I don’t want to be that person.

But there’s someplace I’m supposed to be. And not someplace I’m supposed to be because I’m obligated, I’m responsible, I should be there. But someplace where I fit, where it feels right, where my toes are happy. I want to go to that place and find peace.

On a flight this morning, the flight attendant let everyone know that she would be picking up the movie players soon, and suggested fast forwarding to find out how things end.

Sometimes, when things are particularly hard and all I can do is not know what to do, it seems like it might be nice to fast forward to find out how things end. But of course, this is life, not a movie, so while we’re living anyway, there is no real “end”, there’s only what happens next. And what happens next after that.

I’m in another hotel with another goldfish. She seems distressed (yes, she’s a girl; her name is Evelyn). She’s frantically swimming at the glass, trying to find her way out. I know how she feels sometimes, trying to find your way when any way at all is impossible. But you keep swimming anyway. I don’t want to be frantic like Evelyn. It won’t help me get anywhere. I can sometimes find a peaceful place in not knowing what happens next, although sometimes the what’s happening right now is harder. You want to frantically fight against it, but all that will make you is tired.

When I was still married and things weren’t going well, my then husband said that I used to be fun. Implying that the previous fun me was much preferred to the current not-so-much fun me. And I know. It’s not so great being around someone who’s broadcasting soul-crushing sadness. And it’s not so fun to be that person either. I want to be fun. And funny. And poetic. And clever. And entertaining. And to not be those things is exhausting me. But this too shall pass.

So I hold on as tightly as I can to my solid buoy in this vast and endless ocean. And I fight with all my breath to just be still, to hold on, to make it through this moment, to get to what happens next. And to what happens next after that.

I always thought I had a pretty good sense of direction. I realize that anyone who’s ever ridden in a car with me or had me call them while I drove around aimlessly with no idea where I am (”Um, I’m driving down a freeway? And I might be going east. Or possibly west? No, I don’t see an exit sign. I might be in Santa Clara. Or… not.”) would read that and stare at me in astonishment that I would ever for even a single second of my life think I had good navigation skills, but it’s true. I used to think (and even sometimes now am absolutely convinced!) I had a fairly reliable internal compass. I think it’s because my family is so much worse than directions than I am. Of all of them, I was always the only one who had any idea which direction we were headed and which way we should veer next. Compared to them, I am a GPS navigation system, sensing when we should turn left. Or make a u-turn as the case may be. If you only knew where I came from, you would applaud how far I’ve come.

Of course, I’m actually terrible at navigation, always lost, turning around, wandering the night streets asking for directions.

I normally bring my navigation system with me when I travel and know I’ll be renting a car. But this week, I didn’t quite have room in my bag, so I headed off directionless. I did write down directions, but I have this tendency to just write streets and turns and not number of miles or expected time. So, I’ll be driving along, no idea if I’m supposed to go 2 miles or 20 until the exit and at some point I wonder. Am I even going the right way? Am I still on the right freeway? This happened on the way to the airport yesterday, and I ended up pulling up Google Maps on my Blackberry, which is no easy feat when you’re going 75 down the freeway. (I was going the opposite direction of the airport, by the way. In case you were wondering.)

I notice that I’m a completely different driver in California. I don’t know if it’s because I’m in California, where driving fast and aggressively is just what you do, or if all just feels like home so much that I get right back into my youthful driving ways (er, I may have accumulated a few tickets when I last lived here, all those years ago), or if it’s that I’m not driving my extremely crappy car that makes driving nearly impossible. Maybe it’s a little of each. It’s not that I always get the greatest car when I rent. Sometimes I get lucky, like when I got that Infiniti G35 the other day. But sometimes, like this week, I get a station wagon. A station wagon? Do they even make those anymore? Somehow I ended up speeding in it anyway.

I’m always so anxious about getting on planes, even though I know how the odds say that flying is so much safer than driving. I was reminded of that yesterday when I was almost killed driving home from the airport. It’s amazing how many things can go through you mind in such a short period of time. I was driving through a tunnel, going about 65, when I realized the SUV in the next lane over was going to swerve into my lane. I thought the following: Surely he sees me and isn’t going to swerve into my lane. Fuck. I think he’s really coming over here. Where am I going to go? I’m in a tunnel! He’s going to knock me right up into the wall. OK, all I can do is swerve out of his way into this other lane. Is there a car in that lane? Is it clear? What if I just speed up and swerve halfway out of the lane? Will that be enough to get out of his way and not hit any other potential cars? I thought all of this in the fraction of a second that it took for me to get barely get out of the way as the SUV headed straight at me. I only panicked after I was safe.

My internal compass does, as it turns out, tend to kick in when I’m making decisions. And I think I do pretty well. I’m logical, pragmatic, objective, decisive. I spend all day at work making decisions. We should go this way. That should go this other way. I can pick a direction and stick with it, then assess as we go along if we should change course.

But. Then there are other times. When it’s just like when I’m driving and I have no direction at all. And decisions seem absolutely impossible. And so I continue along, waiting to see what the next day will bring. And when you don’t have to decide what to do about a big SUV barreling at you at 70mph, sometimes go along with no sense of direction works just fine.

Sometimes, it’s quiet and it’s just me and I’m not doing something for someone else or because of anything and everything is still. And I don’t hear the world going around me at a million miles an hour and I’m not thinking about obligations and letting everyone around me down if I take a step in the wrong direction and it is only me.

At a moment such as that, I hunger for clarity. For sureness. For something inside of me to make itself known. For the silence to make everything clear. But it doesn’t. And I don’t know. And I feel lost, like a little girl in a crowd, looking for my mother’s hand.

I don’t know what the answers are. I just want something solid to hold on to.

I sometimes wish I had more brevity. I’m so full of clutter and too many words and thoughts and worries and it would be nice, wouldn’t it, to be brief. To be summed up as simplicity.

Omit needless words. The Elements of Life, courtesy of Strunk and White. That every moment tell.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us

–TS Eliot, The Waste Land

I’ve made it through March. Some of it was pretty crappy (although it certainly had glimmers of goodness), and yet here I am. I’m tired and I have to keep going when I just want to find a quiet corner and rest, and I can’t see far enough to know when I’ll have time to just breathe, but March is a lock. But then, the reward for getting to April is, well, April. And I’m not feeling so confident about that. What I want to do and what I should do and what I can do and what I have to do are all swirling around in my mind and I have a likely suspicion they’ll all come crashing down around me come April.

But when I say I don’t know if I can make it through, of course I can make it through. We can get through anything, right? And my God am I a whiny baby. I am experiencing normal, everyday life. I have no crisis I just can’t face, no unsurmountable obstacle. I’m not alone and friendless and living under a bridge. Just losing a little confidence. I’m just on one of those paths that start out paved and smooth and end up winding through woods and turning to gravel, then dirt, then overgrown with grass, until you’re surrounded by trees and you’re not sure where the path went. But that’s why life is an adventure, and you just keep exploring until you get somewhere. I know all of this. This is life. And it’s good and it’s bad and it’s joy and pain and uncertainty and you doubt yourself and you have all the faith in the world and you know exactly what you need and you don’t know anything at all and it’s all life. And we all stumble our way through. And along the way I’ve experienced unexpected joys I would never have known had the path remained straight. When you lose the path, you gain the chance to discover. And what is life without that?

Sometimes, I imagine that worst thing that could happen. Like, I’ll think, what if I was suddenly diagnosed with some terrible disease and I was going to die soon and there was nothing I could do about it and I had to live with the knowledge of my impending death as I slowly withered away? It could happen, right? Happens all the time, why not to me?

Or I’ll be driving down the freeway and think about a car could just plow right into me and knock me off the road and I could be crushed to death in a moment.

Funny how all my worst-case scenarios are about bad things happening to me. I don’t think it’s that, really. I think it’s more than I don’t want to consider the real worst cases, especially since they are things that will happen.

I saw my grandparents recently. It’s wonderful and sad to see them. They have been the one stable thing in my life, ever since I can remember when I was two years old and living with them. They’re getting older, a lot older. They still get around on their own and are as sharp as ever, but they’re clearly aging. We all age. I will age that way one day. (I know, selfishly back to me again.) Our bodies slowly fail us and we can see the inevitable. How do you cope with that? I don’t know that you really can. I know it’s what keeps me anxious, always feeling like I don’t have enough time, that all the time in the world can’t possibly be enough, is only a moment, will be gone, and I can’t keep it, can’t grasp it in my hands and hold it tight. It slips away from me like sand, like water, like air.

I keep getting email notifications of coworkers planning vacations. A week, two weeks, a month. I think, it’s so easy. They schedule the time and they go. Why can’t I do that? But I can’t. I can’t fathom it — adding to the overwhelming avalanche of work and life by pausing the juggling act while more plates fall. I was at the grocery store today and they had all the spring flowers out for sale. I don’t like jewelry and flowers. But sometimes I do. Or I wish I had time to be the kind of person that did.

But, of course, April’s cruelty has nothing to do with not being able to take vacation or enjoy spring. It’s that melting of the forgetful snow. It’s the part of my soul that reads fortune cookies facing my practical center. It’s the whiny child inside me meeting the somewhat more grown-up me and learning the lyrics to Rolling Stones songs. You can’t always get what you want. And if you don’t know what you need, you just keep exploring. You’ll find a path eventually.

It’s the weight of making decisions when you don’t know which way to go. Decisions seem so permanent, even though I’ve seen time and time again that it isn’t so. I agonized so much in high school about my classes, my extracurricular activities. This will determine college. Which will determine career. Which will determine my future. Only it didn’t. And I know, I know that I can’t know the future. And that things always change. And that sometimes you make decisions and sometimes you later change course and some decisions you don’t have to make right this minute and you can keep going day by day.

And it’s dealing with the realities of life. Of sometimes not having any control at all, but knowing that you have just play the hand you’re dealt. Of gracefully handling the consequences of your choices.

Or maybe it’s just that I should just stop reading poetry. I sure as hell am not reading all that crap Robert Frost wrote about taking the road less traveled by. What the fuck does that even mean, anyway? I mean sure, I get the whole sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler thing. I get the telling ages later with a sigh. And the saving one path until later, while doubting you’ll be back. And never mind. Enough with the poetry already. I have to go now. I need to stop by the library and get some nice non-fiction about aerodynamics or something.

I collect fortunes, the kind in cookies with stock words of hope and wisdom that always work better in bed. I don’t mean to collect them. I don’t mean to believe in signs or be superstitious or have any faith at all in horoscopes or fate or predestination about my future. And yet.

When I’m especially happy and things are going particularly well, I tend to think: there will come a day when things won’t be going quite this well. Enjoy this now while you can. Today is one of those not-quite-as-well moments, one of those days, those weeks, when I’m feeling particularly beaten down and overcome. So what does my fortune say?

The tiny slips of paper speak of resolution, success, happiness, thoughtfulness, and joy. No one wants to break open a fortune cookie to learn about despair, pain, and heartbreak, after all. But the uniformity of positive feelings makes me question the reliability. Surely everyone doesn’t have a happy future to look to all the time? I fear the fortune cookies have failed me.

Where else can I turn? Horoscope.com perhaps? “Staying positive and upbeat is the best way to go today, as a particular planetary formation suggests that a tricky situation will be caused by someone’s clumsy or even unnecessary criticism. However, as soon as you realize why this person is behaving in this way you’ll feel much, much better!”

Well, fantastic. I’ll feel much better once I realize the planets have aligned to make someone into a jerk. Not all that helpful actually. Yahoo’s advice is a bit better, if unreachable: “Ease up on workaholic tendencies. Pointless frivolity is just what the stars ordered right now. It’s a good time to seek out some fun-loving pals and cement the bonds of friendship. Rewire those connections to refresh your soul.” And my “couples” horoscope (who knew there was such a thing?) is “the situation is almost completely beyond your control now. It’s a good opportunity to practice letting go.”

Pointless frivolity. Frivolousness without a point. I’m drowning, sinking, being pulled down; I’m suffocating, gasping for air. I have nothing to hold on to. My mind is unable to get itself around the idea of frivolity.

It’s not as bad as all that, of course. I’m just in period of darkness. I know it will be followed by light. For now, I’m inching along in the dark, one hand in front of me, feeling my way rather than seeing it. And letting go? When you’re not holding on to anything, those are words that make no sense. They clang around the room and fall to the ground with a crash that has no meaning.

I’m not Buffy, 16 years old, just hearing that the prophecy calls for my death. I’m not on my way out to an underground church so an ugly vampire can suck me dry. I’m just human. And tired. And wishing for things to be other than they are.

I’m having kind of a bad day, a day when I need to be strong. And I haven’t been doing a great job of it. In fact, I’ve been failing miserably. And I’m normally so good at the strong thing. But today I feel like shattered glass that cracks and cracks until it can’t hold up anymore and ends up in a million pieces. And I feel as though I’m letting things get to me that I shouldn’t and if that only I were a better, stronger, more together person, I wouldn’t be glass. I would be stone. Unbreakable. Solid. And even more than that, I think that the things I’m letting break me are like feathers and only a very weak person would fall under their weight.

And faced with miles to go before I sleep, I am tackling my weaknesses, the miles, the promises to keep by shopping for dresses online.

I don’t really own any dresses. Not really a dresses or jewelry or frilly kind of girl. I’m mostly a jeans and t-shirt kind of girl. I’m not at all into shopping for clothes, mostly because I’m infinitely too lazy to deal with trying things on. When I do shop, I tend to just grab things and bring them home and tell myself that if I don’t like them or they don’t fit, I’ll return them later. Only then I never do and I end up with clothes hanging in my closet with the tags on until one day I clean everything out and donate everything.

During the rare times that I do shop, I’m always attracted to very ugly things or very pretty things. I look at fancy party dresses I would never wear and frilly lacy things that would swirl as I walk. And then I buy a pair of jeans. I was in New York over the weekend and walked through the designer clothes and tried things on despite my laziness and ended up with jeans, Vans, a t-shirt, and a hooded sweatshirt. All of which I love way more than frilly dresses, so I’m not in any way complaining. But today, being all jagged, splintered, blunt edges, I just want to be pretty. I don’t want to have to be strong and hard and take anything that comes at me. And so even though I know that’s what I need to do, I pretend, for just a minute, that I can be soft and frivolous and might one day be able to just breathe and have somewhere to go in a swirly dress.

I should be working right now. Lord knows I have a lot to do. Too much to do. A crushing avalanche of todoness that threatens to bury me beneath its suffocating, all-encompassing grip. But instead, I’m wondering at the sign posted on the door of my hotel room. It’s the obligatory sign you often see, warning about blazing inferno danger and how to save oneself from an untimely fiery demise. I tend to scoff at the undue attention potential fires receive at hotels, as compared to say, the danger of a meteor crashing from the sky and falling through the building or a hellmouth opening under the hotel and unleashing the master from his underworldly prison.

My hotel stays of late have been marked by fires, or least fire alarms. And the lesson I have learned from them all is to ignore the door instructions and just stay in the room. And make sure you have good earplugs. During one lovely evening when I was peacefully sleeping in my so-called heavenly bed, alarms screamed through the room at 1:30 in the morning. I considered ignoring it, but it was really fucking loud. Fire alarms aren’t designed to be loud enough to wake you; they’re designed to be so annoying that you have no choice but to get as far away from them as you possibly can.

Fortunately, I was somewhat clothed and I sleepily found some shoes and my room key and my car keys and my purse. Hey, if I had to stand outside too long, I was going to find a new hotel for the night. We brave hotel guests stood outside in the cold (OK, not so much — it was California after all) and the dark and wondered if our temporary home would go up in flames, and if so, would we have to all wear pajamas to our morning meetings.

The fire trucks came. The firemen ran through with hoses and hatchets. The hotel employees stayed inside where it was warm. Some of us in the unenlightened crowed tried it but found the cold was vastly preferred to the screeching noise of doom and scurried back outside. Eventually, we all were able to return to our rooms. No details about the fire were forthcoming, but we got a vague sense that someone had set off the smoke alarm in the kitchen by burning toast.

Much more recently, I was staying at hotel in London that had an odd tendency to sound its fire alarms at random times, but only for short moments, so easily ignored. Until the time when I was packing up, when they sounded and refused to stop. And I thought, oh great. Someone has once again burned toast, and I won’t be able to get back into my room in time to pack up and make it to the airport. So, I stayed, packing, while the fires raged away and threatened to consume me at any moment. Until I couldn’t handle another second of the screeching that drilled into my brain and I fled down the stairs. I was on the 13th floor, which in British terms means fourteen flights up. When I reached the bottom, the wailing stopped and I trudged back up again. At least I made it to the airport on time.

But the door instruction in this hotel is a little different. Oh sure, it has the exit route and tells you to use the stairs and all that, but it ends with this helpful tip:

Attack the Fire if Possible

Good advice in any situation really. The formerly useless collection of hotel fire instructional doors has been redeemed.

In another airport. I’m starting to like the airports, really. Maybe it’s like that thing that happens with kidnapping victims when they fall in love with their kidnappers and they fight against all odds, the police, and a world that just doesn’t understand to make it work in this crazy life. Or maybe that was a movie.

Anyway, the airport lounge is rather peaceful, and even though they only have tiny sandwiches, they cut off the crusts, which is thoughtful, and they have cheese, and most of the time, they even have Internet access. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think free wireless is a God-given right, although I do think that wireless of some kind is a bit like drinking fountains and bathrooms. I mean, my God, why wouldn’t it be there?

Today’s wireless was like this: First, I tried using the shiny new wireless card I got from work. When they gave it to me, one of the techs asked the other, “doesn’t this need a driver or something.” The other tech waved him away. No, it just works. Fantastic! Only it didn’t just work, but I managed to track down the software online earlier today when I was at home. So, I started it up, ready for wireless everywhere! A brave new world! Only it wanted a username and password. Which I definitely didn’t have. I tried a few things only to have it stop recognizing the wireless card altogether. But rather than spend fruitless time trying to debug that problem, I checked out what other wireless was available. The lounge has access you can pay for (which makes me miss the free wireless at the Alaska lounge, but Alaska doesn’t fly to Europe, so what can I do, really), so I hopped on that. Only I didn’t because of some DHCP problem. I asked the desk guy, who told me to try the free airport wireless. I found that, only to get a weak signal error. No problem. This lounge has free workstations. So, I hopped on one of those. It was rather nice actually — back in a corner, surrounded by books. It was hard wired in and was working great. For a while. Until it stopped working altogether. The guy in the workstation across from me looked up. Does your internet work? Not so much.

Fortunately, my blackberry rescued me. It was a good thing too, since it had mercilessly let me down yesterday by refusing to work at all mid-conversation. It deceitfully gave the appearance of working, with its signal bars and logged in green ball and web of lies. I eventually beat it into submission by removing the battery and thinking mean thoughts about it. But it redeemed itself today as the one internet option of five that actually worked.

I’ve finally managed to get the 6 pound an hour wireless working, just moments before I have to board, and it brings a brightness to my day. After all, it’s letting me write. Nothing wrong with that.

I remember life without the Internet, certainly. But I don’t make me go back.

I love poetry. I rarely read it and I absolutely can’t write it, but I love so much about it. It relies on an efficiency of language than can be breathtaking. (That is, good poetry. Bad poetry just makes me want to cry for the poor abused words.) It’s an art to using words exactly right, just so; harnessing the power of writing, of phrases and sentences and paragraphs.

The books I enjoy the most are those with compelling stories and those with indvidual phrases and sentences that speak to me. With the latter, the story may be good or not, but it’s the way the words are arranged together that pulls me in, a kind of poetry. I’ll linger on a phrase, struck hard by it. I pull the words out of the context of the story and shape them into something of my own.

In college, I was endlessly in literary debates. Oh, the debates. We were so earnest and passionate and serious, as though the world would turn on what we discovered. And I suppose our worlds did turn, are still turning on those foundations.

We argued whether literature — all art, really — meant what the author intended or if we each bring our own experience to what we read, so that the writing then is different for each of us, a living thing, reborn anew with each reader.

I, being young and foolish, argued the first view. I was selfishly thinking of myself. If I write something, it means what I meant it to mean. Someone might read it and think it means something else, but that someone would be wrong. But I was wrong.

What we write doesn’t belong to us. We capture the words and thoughts in our heads and shape them, give life to them and set them free to be captured and shaped by those who read them. And thank God for that, for all the words set free for us to claim, to call our own, to read and think, yes, this is exactly how I feel. I needed words for this feeling and you’ve given them to me. Thank you.

I was reading this book a friend gave to me. She said, you’ll really like it until the end. Then, like with most books, everything wraps up too neatly, and you’ll think, why can’t these books end a hundred pages sooner, with loose ends and messiness like life really is? And she was right.

But what I loved the most about the book wasn’t the story, but the crafting of the words — sentences that jumped at me, left the context of the story and said, here, I am how you feel.

It didn’t surprise me then to learn that the author had also written poetry. You can’t read poems the way you read books. I gobble books up as quickly as I can, down them like shots of tequila. But you have to linger over poems. To get the feelings between the words and the lines. You have to think about those spaces and your life and what you feel right now as the words move through you. And the poem takes the shape of you and you set it free.

And I can see how love, once started
can become a thing apart from us,
a being all its own, unstoppable,
just watching as we waste our human gestures
in the air, and who can say if it’s
the monster or the hero of our lives?

-Wiglaf, Marisa de los Santos

Childhood is cruel. I don’t mean all the usual ways, although those are cruel too. I mean how everyone tells you that you can do anything you want, and even worse, how you have all this potential — this newly born, unrealized promise of youth. The cruelty is that you grow up, and you don’t grow up into the all-dreams-attained superhuman you’d been given cause to believe you would become. But into someone who’s human: imperfect, unsure, and quite often a mess.

I’m organizing my home office right now, and I came across a box of my childhood. You know this box. It’s musty and stale and full of construction paper drawings and report cards and school pictures. And potential. The once shiny ideals of what you might have been.

In my box:

• A number of report cards, all with one thing in common — none of them report for an entire year. My second grade report card, for instance, has the following note from the teacher: “progressing nicely.” However, if you look at the actual grades, only the first of four quarters is filled in. I’m not quite sure how she knew how I was progressing when she knew me for an entire quarter of one school year. For that quarter, I needed improvement in the following areas: “does neat work” and “talks at the proper time”. I’m not sure if that latter meant that I didn’t talk at all or too much. However, I did get a satisfactory rating for “is usually cheerful.” Fortunately, the second grade report from the next school gave me all excellents, including for “work is neat”, as well as “sits and stands erect”. So, you can see that I greatly improved. On my sixth grade report card, they rudely wrote “NOT ENROLLED!” over the first three quarters, but seemed to like me anyway.
• A picture (on orange construction paper) with two sides. One side features a girl saying “goodby”. Flip the paper over to find a door and the girl walking away. The quality of the picture would lead one to believe I drew it at around age four, but honestly, if I drew that right now, it would likely look exactly the same. Except I’ve become a better speller.
• A letter from Stuart Hall that accompanied the year’s supply of paper products that I won for writing an essay, apparently on the topic of “the challenge of tomorrow.” And here’s one of those cruel statements I was talking about: “I can tell that you have a bright future ahead of you,” wrote the form letter composer for Charles G Hanson, chairman of Stuart Hall Company, Inc. How could he tell, really? Because had I known what the challenge of tomorrow truly was, well, my essay may have been a little different. Not that I have any idea what my essay was about, but I assume it wasn’t about saying fuck it and running off to the ocean.
• The index cards holding the speech I gave at my eighth grade graduation, which oh goody! Is about being “faced with the future” and our “search for tomorrow.” Well, at least I know about that second part. Tomorrow shows up whether you search for it or not. (In my defense, the entire graduation apparently had a soap opera theme. What were they thinking?)
• Lots and lots of certificates for things like reading a bunch of books and being a good citizen and student of the month and perfect attendance and honor roll and unimportant stuff like that, but also a very important certificate from 1978 for PROFICIENCY IN ROLLER SKATING!

The point is that I remember being in school and scoring in the 99th percentile in standardized tests and thinking that it meant something. That life was a road paved with yellow bricks and had milestones and checkpoints and all you had to do was head in the right direction and you’d reach the goal of happiness and happy ever after and as it turns out, there isn’t even a grown-over walking path, much less a road.

I don’t know how far I’ve traveled from that girl in the picture I’m looking at now — curled up reading a book, holding a stuffed Snoopy. It’s interesting how even though you grow up, some things never change. In a school assignment from second grade titled “Introducing Me” with a fill in the blank essay, I wrote:

I like to eat potatoes. I don’t like to eat corn. I like to read because it is fun.

Well, at least being grown up lets me do some things I like. Which isn’t the same as fulfilling potential and living happily ever after, but I’ll take what I can get.

I was talking to a friend that other day about my paper journal and what I write there rather than here. And by journal, I really mean journals, since I have lots of them, scattered everywhere. Paper is a kind of security blanket for me, I suppose. I just feel better when I know it’s close by. Maybe I’ll have a burst of inspiration — a writing emergency! Best to have a notebook of some kind around, just in case.

I don’t have those bursts of inspiration quite like I used to. When I was younger, I scribbled on every piece of paper I came across. Blank paper just compelled me to write on it — post-it notes, napkins, didn’t matter. And since I keep every random thing I ever write, no matter how crappy, you can imagine the scraps of paper, index cards, and receipts I carry around from place to place.

For a while, I became obsessed with good pens and papers. But now, any old notebook will do, and any pen works, as long as it’s comfortable. Of course, I mostly type when I write now — here, and when I’m working on fiction. But the stuff that’s not fiction that I just can’t really write here is all still by hand in the paper journals.

What’s different about what I write here and what I write there? Mostly, what I write here is better. Or, at least, I tend to use actual grammar and sentences and nouns and verbs. That’s one reason I started this journal, after all. I figured the fear of potential readers would scare some literary discipline into me. Not that it’s worked, exactly, but I do sometimes make the effort towards complete sentences. I continue to fail at that occasionally. Clearly.

I would say that what I write in my paper journals is more honest, but that’s not true exactly. I’m honest here. I suppose it’s that if I can’t be honest and write about it here, I don’t write about it here at all. And that’s when it ends up on paper. Maybe I don’t always write about the whole story here, but then, I don’t in my paper journal either. My paper words are likely even more cryptic, since I write them with no thought at all to anyone else reading them.

I wrote a lot in my journals when I lived in my apartment. The more things are quiet and peaceful and still, the more I write. When I lived there, I would take to the nearby hiking trails by myself and bring a notebook with me. Well, I did that until the day I walked out of the apartment and found myself face to face with a bear. After that, I did more writing from the balcony, looking out at the woods.

I was thinking about that old writing and flipped through some of it. The first thing I wrote about when I moved into my apartment was my camel.

A camel is in my living room. The best thing about this camel is that I never once had to wonder if he would be welcome. I wanted him; he was wanted.

I then go on about Herbert, the pig on Buffy who was eaten by teenagers possessed by hyena spirits, so you can see why it’s best that my journal writing mostly doesn’t see the light of day. That entry then ends with:

Sometimes, you don’t know what you want until it finds you.

I assume I was talking about the camel and not the pig. Or the hyena spirits.

I came across another entry, entirely about underwear. See what you’re spared from? In this entry I wrote, “it’s amazing that my drawer is overflowing, since I rarely even wear underwear.” Funny how things don’t change. I was thinking that very thing earlier today. I also wrote about a recent trip to the ER, that in my semi-defense, was in the middle of the night.

When I got there, the nurse gave me the familiar paper gown. “You can leave your underthings on,” she said in a cheerful voice. And somewhere in my pounding brain, I thought, “underthings?” I was wearing neither bra nor panties. And it was then that I realized. My mom was right. You should always wear clean underwear (or, at least some underwear). You never know when you’ll end up in the hospital, being handed a paper gown.

(However, I apparently didn’t actually learn much from that experience.)

You would think I wouldn’t have many more stories about underwear, but you’d be wrong. My scribblings go on for many more pages, including a mention of undies a guy gave me in high school.

These panties came disguised as a rose. You bought these panty-roses at the gas station. Gas station rose panties. What could be more romantic?

It’s not all gas station roses though. Some of it’s fairly heart breaking, if only because I can remember exactly how I felt when I wrote the words. Like my phases of a relationship, which included:

5. Think being wanted is the key to happiness. 6. Never for moment consider what I might want… other than to feel wanted. 7. Fret and stress and do everything in my power to remain wanted, including, but not limited to: catering to demands; taking on any and all responsibilities; changing myself. 8. Feel drained and overwhelmed due to taking on too much and being someone other than myself. 9. Realize am getting nothing in return; don’t even really feel all that wanted anymore. 10. Spend an enormous amount of effort and time trying to figure out what went wrong and change even more into the person that he’ll really want. 11. Say fuck it and walk away.

My rambling writing then goes on to wonder if it’s possible to find someone who would love me for exactly who I am.

I haven’t dug out the old scraps of paper and post-it notes in a while. Those go back to junior high school. And also probably wonder about finding someone to love me for who I am. Well, and have little hearts scribbled in the margins with the names of the members of Duran Duran.

At least some things change. These days I scribble little hearts around much newer and cuter bands.

I’ll likely keep filling up my paper journals with whiny ramblings and rants. They let me give my inner teenage girl a place to have a voice, so the more grown up me (such as it is) can do more grown up things. Like seek out those mature, yet attractive bands.

I had a very odd feeling this morning. I stepped into a cab, and something seemed wrong. Like the cab was off-kilter or something. And then I had the following three thoughts in rapid succession:

• The driver is sitting on the wrong side.
• Oh wait — the left side is correct.
• What country am I in again?

Bay area cab drivers are different than the talky drivers in Dublin and London. Neither driver I had today offered me any unsolicited personal advice at all. And neither told me how they felt about all that fucking porn on the Internet.

Dublin taxi driver, as best recollected: “Fucking porn. It should be illegal. Who wants to look at that? I don’t fucking want to look at that. Well. I bet my fucking wife does.”

No fewer than four drivers said things to me along the lines of, “you’re not married are you?” And one put it quite succinctly. “No, if you were married, your husband would say it’s either me or the plane.” He was nicer than I’m making him sound though. They were all very nice to me. On one of several trips to Heathrow, my driver asked if I needed help hauling my stupidly large and heavy suitcase from the cab. I said it was no problem. I was used to carrying it around. “You’re not like English girls, love. They would never carry their own suitcases.”

The driver I had in Zurich didn’t speak English and had no idea where I wanted to go. While it was true that I did a terrible job of pronouncing the street, I did have the address written down. Didn’t help. He got out the Swiss version of the Thomas guide and did lots of cursing at one way streets. And stopping. And turning around. And turning off the meter. And backtracking. He felt so bad when we finally got to the right place that he gave me a sort of hug. Hugging is the shared language of apology. I didn’t really mind that he got so lost. I got a nice tour of the city.

I have traveled 28 of the last 58 days and am writing this in an airport. Tonight will be my 14th time on a plane since the beginning of the year. That is, if this flight ever leaves. Right now, a loud voice over my head is apologizing that our delay will be just a bit longer, but Starbucks coupons are available to ease our discomfort. As long as we don’t mind going back out through security to get to Starbucks.

About an hour ago, I considered paying someone lots of money to scan my eye, take my fingerprints and keep it all on file. And the only reason I didn’t was because they wouldn’t yet be sharing my personal details with enough airports to make it worth the time it would take to fill out the form.

I must even give off frequent-business-traveler vibes because people are always stopping me and asking questions as though I’m a traveling advice-dispensing service. This morning, I was on the train to the terminal, having an emotionally involved conversation over IM (No, you are wrong; that is indeed absolutely possible. And anyway, how else am I supposed to have any conversations at all when I’m forever in airport terminals?) and a woman leaned over to look at my blackberry screen. “Is that a blackberry? Does it really keep your calendar and contacts and e-mail? Do you like it?” What I like is having private conversations on it, actually. But instead, I told her about how it’s great, and how I can answer email while walking to my plane (and by that, I meant that it lets me chat while driving and when in boring meetings) and she quizzed me a bit more and then seem satisfied, possibly because she’d caught up on the details of my emotional well being and could contently look away from my screen.

Tonight, two different people asked me if the airport had wireless, and if so, how much it was. One woman said, “$6.95! Next they’ll be charging us for the bathroom!” And while I enjoy free wireless as much as the next person, I don’t know that it’s an inalienable right or anything. And really, $6.95 for 24 hours seems fairly reasonable, considering I’ve recently been paying upwards of $15 an hour for the privilege.

I could tell her the airports where she can could get wireless access for free. Vegas has lovely free access. The Alaska lounges do. US Airways and British Airways, not so much. Heathrow terminal one seems to have no wireless access at all. Be grateful you’ve got the opportunity to pay the $6.95. But I may not need to worry about lack of access much anymore. Today I learned how I can brilliantly power broadband on my laptop via my blackberry. If only I had known earlier, I could have added that to the list of the benefits for the nosy train woman. But in any case, heathrow terminal one can no longer hurt me. In fact, I welcome my next visit to heathrow terminal one. Which is coming up pretty soon, actually.

All this traveling means I’m never actually sure where and when I’m going to be. I started keeping a separate calendar with just my trips. (Not to be confused with my regular calendar that holds all of meetings. And since apparently I’m all about numbers today, I’ll explain that I have 35 meetings scheduled for just this week, so you can understand why I need an entirely different calendar for my travel in order to have a clean visual view of my life.)

I like traveling. I don’t always like individual moments like this one, when I’ve been awake since 3:30am and have no chance of getting to sleep before 1:30am, and am in an uncomfortable chair, and my eyes are too tired to stay open, and I’m lonely. But I’m taking the time to write, and after, I’ll ignore my email for a while and read my book about perfect moments and grilled cheese sandwiches and Alfred Hitchcock and Love Affair, my favorite movie after Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (All three versions, in this order: the original from 1939; the remake with Annette Bening; the version with the changed title, An Affair to Remember. Sleepless in Seattle doesn’t count and isn’t included in this list.)

And I’m driving my own car home from the airport this time, so I guess I’ll have to give myself unsolicited advice. Although I’ll likely be so tired that maybe I’ll take the bay area cab driver approach and make it a quiet trip. Hopefully I’ll remember which side of the road to drive on.

I curiously continue to lose weight. This despite a diet that has variously consisted of the following: potatoes (in many forms) and pints (Dublin), room service, more pints, and tequila (London), vodka, cheese, and a bit of chocolate (Zurich), mashed potatoes made with entire sticks of butter, topped with gravy (again London), and McDonald’s cheeseburgers (throughout the months of January and February. Possibly a bit in December.). It’s true I’ve been going to my trainer when I have not been in London, Dublin, or Zurich, which is to say, I haven’t been going to him much. Gym access has otherwise been spotty, and honestly, with the gym weights in kilograms, I have no idea how much working out I’m actually doing. I have, however, mastered measurements in stones. I’m quickly closing in on nine.

It’s possible that what you always hear about walking being good for you is true after all. I figured walking was like marijuana — the health pushers just started you out on it in an attempt to get you hooked on stronger stuff, but the walking itself was harmless. But maybe there’s something to this walking thing. I love walking — seeing new places, old places — soaking it all in. Although walking through a densely wooded park at 3am in Zurich may not have been my brightest moment.

They say that travel is educational and it’s true. Here’s what I have learned.

• As illustrated, you can have as much cheese and beer as you want as long as you occasionally walk rather than take a taxi.
• If your suitcase weighs 70 pounds, it’s likely there will be no elevator to the sixth floor. Think of hefting that bag up all those stairs as creative exercise. It just means you can have more cheese.
• Pack more socks. No, more than that. Maybe a few more.
• The number of reusable articles of clothing (jeans, sweaters, etc.) that you should pack is directly proportional to the number of very smoky places you plan to frequent. And if you plan to contribute to their smokiness. Not that I would. I’m just offering you helpful hints, is all. Not speaking from experience. Nope.
• A wicker stool is not as comfortable as one might imagine as a desk chair. A pillow works in a pinch, but is not really a substitute for an actual chair. If the wireless were reliable, you could work from bed. But the wireless won’t be reliable. So, you may as well start considering the trade offs of a comfortable position vs. the frustration of a dropped connection now.
• Your room won’t have a coffeemaker. If you’re in Europe, at least you’re likely to have some form of tea kettle. If you’re in Vegas or the crappiest hotel in Silicon Valley, you’ll get nothing. The more you pay, the less likely you are to have access to actual coffee. The diet coke in the mini bar is $5, but well worth the cost.
• Why don’t you bring shoes that are appropriate for the actual clothes you pack? Why? Because you will not, it’s best not even to try for anything other than jeans and t-shirts. You’ll just end up taking up space in the suitcase.
• Don’t let the cleaning people in. They say they’ll only be a minute. They lie.
• Sure, the mini bar isn’t cheap, but don’t knock the mini bar. There may come a time when it’s exactly what you need.
• Go to Dublin.
• Always book hotel rooms with robes.
• Did I mention how nice it is to walk around?
• Taxi drivers are like bartenders and hair dressers. They dispense life advice at no extra charge. And you’ll never see them again, so why not take advantage of the opportunity. Just be prepared for brutal honesty. After all, they’ll never see you again, so they have no need to sugar coat.

Obviously, traveling is the path to profound wisdom. And to cheese.

When I was very little, I would go to Laguna Beach with my family. My uncle (my stepdad’s brother) lived there, and all the relatives would congregate, bringing a full spread of Lebanese food: stuffed grape leaves, tabbouleh, kibbeh. We kids would play in the waves, dig for little crabs, build sand castles. One time, I was playing in the water and must have gone in just a little too far. The undertow grabbed me and pulled me under, sucked me into the wave. I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear. I was at the mercy of the wave, tumbling me around with sand and seaweed and water. Just water. No up or down or air. And I was alone. Helpless, tossed, underwater. No way to get control. I still remember that feeling.

I have this recurring dream where I’m in a dark house and I wander from room to room, flipping light switches, but none of them work. And I keep trying, but the lights won’t come on. So, I blindly grope my way to another room, and feel for another switch and no matter what I try, there’s no light. Sometimes, it’s not entirely dark. Maybe the moon is out and not all the curtains are closed and I can see my way around enough to find the light switches. But they won’t turn the lights on.

Life isn’t like the game, with the plastic car and the little people and the neat boxes that lead to milestones and a finish line. Life is unpredictable. And every time you think you have it figured out, you realize that life isn’t something that even can be figured out. And every time you reach a place, you think, now I get it. Now I know where I’m going, with this confidence that only comes from an inability to see the future. You get through the moment of darkness. You find light. You find clarity. And at least then, when that moment of darkness comes again, you know that there will be light again.

The wave pulled me under and under until it gave me up and I was in the light and the air again. And I still remember that feeling.

I got to Dublin on Friday. I had heard a rumor about the potatoes, but you generally don’t expect rumors to be so true. I love to travel and see new things and try new foods, especially if they’re potatoes and/or gravy — preferably both. If not for the whole deal where you generally have to speed through the sky with no visible means of support in order to get to most places, travel would have practically no entries in the cons column.

I do like being home too. I love having a quiet place that’s mine, where I can find peace and refuge and storm-induced shelter and all of that. Sometimes my heart just craves it. It’s more a feeling than a place. Of rightness. Of knowing this is where I belong.

Yes, my idealized world is a Billy Joel song — “home is just another word for you” and all that. And sure, Billy sort of phoned it in there towards the end with the “instant pleasure dome” stuff, but, you know, I never did have a place that I could call my very own. He’s right about that.

Oh, like you don’t hear a song and realize your exact feeling has been put into rhyme and is neatly summarized to pop music. It happens to all of us, so don’t pretend you’re above it.

Billy Joel is often the soundtrack for my life. Vienna has been the resounding chorus for years.

But back to potatoes. In Ireland, I finally know that I am not alone in this world. There are others just like me, who feel that a meal just isn’t complete without potatoes. And maybe a meal needs two or three different kinds.

I was walking down the street the other night and heard singing from a bar. John Denver. “Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong…” I am often mocked for my John Denver love, but some things you just keep from your childhood. And some of my earliest memories are from when we were living at my grandparents’ house, listening to John Denver and the Carpenters on eight track with my mom.

The point (obviously) is that I’ve decided to stay in Ireland a few more days. Maybe I won’t find the truths of life as only Billy Joel can write, but at least I can have a few more potatoes. And sing the songs of my lost childhood, mocking-free.

When I was little, Disneyland sold tickets for rides and Casey’s train still went around the park. The Indiana Jones ride didn’t exist, and the Haunted Mansion was scary. I remember getting a mug from one of my early trips to Disneyland, commemorating the bicentennial. Mickey and Goofy and Pluto are in the 1776 band, with the flute and the drum and the marching along. I still have that mug. I keep my pens in it in my home office and it makes me happy to see it. I even still have one of those hats with the mouse ears with my name stitched in the back. Although it’s a bit small, so I don’t wear it all that much anymore.

In junior high school, I was the drum major in our school’s marching band. I played the flute but somehow ended up with the mace as tall as I was and the whistle and the standing in front telling everyone to parade rest. Our band’s crowning achievement was marching in the parade at Disneyland. We got to assemble in a part of the park that regular visitors don’t get to see and then marched all through the streets. With all the Disney characters. Fantastic. Well, and also really hot, since it was summer and we were in those band uniforms. But totally worth it. And after we were done marching, we got to spend the rest of the day on the rides.

In seventh grade, I held hands with a boy for the first time on the Pirates of the Caribbean. I know it’s really hokey, but that ride is still one of the most romantic places I’ve been, with the water and the little boats and the fake fireflies and the dark and the dog with the key in his mouth. I was there on a church trip, and the boy (Bobby) was a year older than me. It was all very exciting until we went on the skyway and he and a friend rocked the car and threw things from it, despite my fear of heights and conviction we would plummet to our deaths, and when we got to the end, the park employees threatened to kick us out. I lost all faith that he cared about my feelings and fears, and well, dumped him before the first kiss. I still have fond, romantic memories of Pirates of the Caribbean though.

When I graduated from high school, we did Grad Nite at Disneyland. Grad Nite is when a all the seniors spend the night at Disneyland after they graduate. Er, kind of like the name might imply. It’s pretty cool though, to have the park to yourself all night long, even though as a high school senior you spend too much time being bummed that they search all the bags for alcohol.

Not all my Disneyland memories are warm and fuzzy. My biological father took us once, when I was fairly little and still really afraid of roller coasters. I cried during the entire wait to get on Space Mountain as he refused to let me out of line and kept telling me I would like it. I didn’t. It’s one of my scariest childhood memories, beaten out only by the time our car was totaled and I was afraid to ever get into another car. I did eventually get over the Space Mountain fear. And the car fear, now that I think of it.

I think I have taken every boyfriend I’ve ever had to Disneyland. None of them have gotten it. At all. I guess it makes sense. Why would you want to ride in a slow little boat and listen to robot dolls sing about the smallness of the world in many languages, if not for the nostalgia? Of course it’s annoying to hear me whisper the Haunted Mansion soundtrack as we pass by the hitchhiking ghosts. And fake singing birds in a bar with no drinks, alcoholic or not? Crazy.

I always go back to the old rides, even though the newer ones are ostensibly better. And I miss the ones that are gone. Bring back the Country Bear Jamboree, dammit! What did you do with Abe Lincoln? But old rides gone, new ones added, and current ones changed, I just love being there. I don’t even like Mickey Mouse and the rest all that much; it’s the park that I like.

It’s probably one of those “what have I known the longest” things. What is it that I know now that I’ve always known? My grandparents’ house. And Disneyland.

There’s this message board I’ve been going to for years, and they’ve got this obituaries thread. People post when an author or actor or some other celebrity has died. Of course, I have this whole death avoidance problem where I try to pretend that death doesn’t exist and we all just live forever, yet I can’t stay away from the thread. I’m always sneaking in there, freaking myself out. It doesn’t matter if the person who has died is 30 or 90. It hits me either way. I’m going to die! Fuck!

Really, every time I see a new post in that thread, I should click over to the Literature and Language thread instead and distract myself with books. But I don’t. I think about my own mortality and have a tiny anxiety attack and wonder about my life. Every single time.

What am I doing with my life? What should I be doing with my life? Should I be devoting my life to the betterment of the world for those who come after? Should I be saying fuck all that, this is the only life I have, and going where my heart tells me? What? I don’t know.

When I was younger, I was told, every day, that our lives were for the glory of God and every choice we make should be based on that. Makes life choices easy, really. But it didn’t give me much useful experience that I can use now. It also didn’t give me much experience getting comfortable with the idea that death was looming for me, since I was always told the rapture was any day now and we all would be whisked away. I was always looking ahead to the next milestone and hoping I would get there. I’d like to graduate from high school before the rapture comes. I’d like to start college before the rapture comes. Hey, maybe I could even graduate from college before the rapture comes! I think I started to stray a bit from the living my life for the glory of God party line when I started thinking, I really hope I have sex before the rapture comes.

I was much more selfless when I was younger. I seriously considered joining the Peace Corps. Later, I was convinced I would be a journalist, reporting on wars and turmoil around the world. And years before all that, I thought I might be a missionary, spreading the message of God’s love. In every case, I was ready for the dirt and the bugs and the sleeping in tents and eating inrecognizable food.

And now? I want to be happy, I guess. Do all the living I can. Whatever happened to just wanting to make everyone else happy? What happened to my desire to make the world better? When did I decide I didn’t want to sleep in dirt after all?

I was just invited to a gathering to remember someone who recently died. I never met him, but even so, it’s probably best I can’t attend. I don’t think I could take that much thinking about life cut short.

I no longer have this clear sense of where life is heading that I had when I was young. I’m not looking ahead to milestones that I hope I get to before life is taken away from me. I have no idea what’s next. I’ve learned that even with careful planning and clear goals, life is a journey with unexpected turns you have no way to predict. And some of them surprise you in the most joyous of ways. And some days are hard. And I wouldn’t miss any of it. And I guess since the time we have is finite, I don’t want to waste any of it. And maybe all my mini panic attacks are because I worry that sometimes I do.

I’m thinking of taking up smoking. I think I’ll make it my new year’s resolution, in fact. Since I am completely unable to ever follow through with any my resolutions (still no slippers), I’m probably safe from all the badness those irritating commercials warn me about.

Smoking is appealing to my rebellious side, I suppose. And is a sign that the stubborn teenager inside of me is having issues with independence and control and having my own way. And that the cranky adult in me is saying, fuck it, I’ll do what I want.

Maybe it’s backlash for P. criticizing my Big Mac choices and being all disappointed every time I don’t make it to the gym. Fine, then, says my inner voice. See how you like this smoke!

I’ve never been a smoker, although if I’m with the right people, I might sneak a puff or two when I’ve been drinking a little too much. I used to go out with this group of girls (who I haven’t seen now in a really long time now) and we always ended up smoking somehow. For a while, we switched to cigars. And believe me, cigars do nothing to minimize the goldschlager hangover. Not that that stopped us.

I smoked for two weeks in high school, but it was during the summer and just too hot to inhale hot smoke. I may have been a rebel, but I still wanted my comfort.

More evidence of my nefarious behavior is in the title of this post. That’s right. I’m listening to Nick Carter’s CD. Although I realize that the title alone may not have given it away, since I was likely one of about five people who actually bought said CD. Nick Carter is terrible, right? Like not just his music, or that he was in the Backstreet Boys, or that he dated Paris Hilton, and now has a reality show with his brother, or writes songs with lyrics like “To all my girls in the USA; Ya got a fine thing goin’ on” or that he clearly was trying so hard to be the new Bryan Adams with that album, but all of those things and more. And yet, I still was crushing on him a bit when his album came out, even though his age made me feel a little dirty. I’m pretty sure he was over 21 by then though.

I’m not big on regretting things. Life is life. You live for a while and then you, well, don’t, and when you’re dead, does it matter that you got a tattoo?

My mom was always telling me I was going to regret things, but then I never regretted any of them, so maybe that caused me to lose my trust in the whole regret theory. For instance:

• shaving my legs - once I started, I could never stop; I would hate it, etc. Whatever mom. What I would regret is not having smooth legs.
• cutting my hair - I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair when I was growing up. I think this was because my mom wanted long hair, but her hair just didn’t grow long. So, she always said that when we got old enough to appreciate it, we would want long hair and would regret if we had cut it. My hair was straight down my back right up until high school. I was FINALLY allowed to cut it then. And I did. No, I have never not once ever regretted it. Ever.
• having premarital sex -I don’t have to explain this one, right? But my mom has this whole spiel about how sex creates this emotional bond (that part can be true) and that once you have sex with someone you are bonded to them FOR LIFE and you will never be able to get over them or move on and your life will be completely screwed up FOREVER (that part, probably not so much true necessarily).

Things I have always wanted to do but have never done:

• Get a tattoo
• Pose for Playboy
• Be a stripper

It’s far too late for me to pose for Playboy, and I no longer really want to work as a stripper, but I did buy a book a while back on how to dance like one. Surely it’s not too late for that. I would probably get a tattoo if brilliant inspiration about what to get would strike me.

The older I get, the more I think, fuck it. So what if this scares me. So what if this doesn’t follow all the rules. Maybe I’m getting selfish. Or maybe just becoming more aware of my own mortality. But I think back to everything I didn’t try when I was younger and I wish I had more of this perspective then. Not that I’m saying I should have kept smoking. But if I had taken up stripping in my younger days, I bet I would be a kick ass dancer now.

I never grew up anywhere.

We moved just about every year to places that I’ll never have the need or the inclination to go back to. Whenever anyone asks where I’m from, I say with no hesitation and no second thoughts: southern California. It is the one place I remember from when I was very little, from the entire time I was growing up, and still go back to now. It’s the only place that feels like home to me.

I had this game growing up. I’d try to think of the thing I’d had the longest, the place I’d lived longer than any place else. I now live in this house longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. I’ve now owned this car longer than I’ve lived anywhere. And on like that. And southern California always won, hands down, as the place I’d known the longest.

This weekend, I was driving to my sister’s house from the Long Beach airport, thinking — hey, this is the town where I was born. I got off the 91 at Harbor and drove by the building where I had my first job after college, and by the bar where we used to hang out after work. And later, when we went to Fashion Island, we drove by the apartments I lived in with my boyfriend when I first moved to Newport Beach.

It all feels like home to me. No place has ever felt like home, not like this.

What feels like home more than anything else at all is the ocean. All I have to do is look at it and I feel a peace I can get no other way.

This time, I nearly didn’t get to see the ocean. But I was so close. I couldn’t not see it. I ignored the people in the car with me and drove over the bridge to Balboa Island, the closest water I could think of on short notice. I headed to one of the piers, walked over to a bench and watched the water. The sun was just setting and the colors danced as the boats floated by. The ferris wheel was lit up in the distance. P. hates Balboa Island and my mom, well, is just generally crazy to be around, but I was in my own bubble of peace, watching the water.

It was painful to move away, back in 1995. It’s not that I regret it. I try not to regret much of anything, really. I certainly wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t moved. Maybe my life would be better; maybe it would be worse. It would absolutely be different. But those last few times just before I moved that I drove down Superior over that hill and saw the ocean unfold in front of me, my heart ached, just a little.

There’s this scene in Office Space where the guy asks what his neighbor would do with a million dollars. The idea being that maybe that’s what you should really be doing with your life. For me, there’s no question. There’s never been a question for as long as I can remember. I’d have a house overlooking the ocean, and I would write. When I was younger, I’d plan it all out in my head — did I want a house on a cliff or on the beach? I defintely wanted a wraparound porch, so I could go out early in the morning, sit in a chair with a blanket and coffee, watch the water and write. What could be better than that?

I try not to think of that dream much anymore. The older me doesn’t quite believe as much as the younger me did that anything is possible.

But this weekend, I had my moment of peace and maybe it’ll last me for a while.

I didn’t get anywhere near enough time with my grandparents this weekend. I never do, and I could tell that they were sad for me to leave. Just being in their house is comforting. The house I’ve always known.

I worry I don’t see my niece enough for her to remember me. When I was a kid, we went back to southern California a couple of times a year and it just wasn’t often enough for me to really know my aunts and uncles. I’m trying to see her more often than that. She’s only two and I had last seen her in October, but so far, she does remember me. This weekend, she would call me from across the house by name, or at least using the shortened version of my name that I’m not sure how she picked up, since my sister doesn’t even call me that. She’d call and call and when I came to find her, she’d pat the spot next to her and hand me a book.

I bought her books that were too old for her this year for Christmas, thinking she would grow into them, and she seems to like them already. She sometimes likes you to read to her, but what she likes even more is to hand you a book to read while she reads another. I can’t help but think that she’s taking after me, since that’s one of my favorite things too.

I don’t know if I’ll ever live in Southern California again, the only place that feels like home. It wouldn’t be all peaceful, of course. I try very hard to avoid getting sucked into family drama and that’s much easier when I live far away. It’s even hard to be down there for a few days without feeling a sadness in my heart.

But I don’t like being away too long, especially from the ocean, and the peace of it.

1. I work too much. Why do I do it? Is it that I care more about work than anything else around me? Surely I don’t like work more than I like my friends and my relationships and doing things that I want, like writing and exploring the world. Can it be that when looking at all the ways I could spend my time, I would rather do things that mostly people don’t do unless someone pays them? Tom Peters posted this a while back:
   

   ALL THERE IS. Damn it! I keep forgetting this! Leaving it out of presentations! Namely, a PP slide that simply reads : You = Your Calendar. THIS IS MY #1 BELIEF ABOUT MANAGEMENT. Or: “You can’t bullshit your calendar.” Or: “Your calendar knows … do you?” All we have is our time. The way we distribute it is our “strategic plan,” our “vision,” our “values.” Period. So how’d you spend your precious time today? Tell me, and I’ll tell you what you actually care about—it’s simple and unerring.

   I get the idea here. It’s not a startling new concept. You can say you care about a lot of things, but what do you actually spend your time on? But sometimes, what you spend your time on doesn’t reflect what you care about most. It says that you’re disorganized or too busy to prioritize correctly or your time gets pre-empted a lot. And sometimes, it is a bit true. I do like my work and it doesn’t really seem like work to me and I also like liking my work. It’s somewhat of a circular situation: I don’t want to go back to a job I don’t like (even though that would mean I’d have a lot more time), but being in a job I do like means that I like to do it a lot, at the expense of the rest.

2. I like bad music.
3. I can be a disorganized mess. When I read through my archives here, I see a recurring theme. I can’t get organized. I keep thinking that if I buy just one more self-help book, I’ll break through. But it hasn’t happened yet.
4. I like potatoes way too much. I could eat potatoes at every meal. Often, I do.
5. I like being independent. I don’t like being told what to do and I don’t like not having control. I’m more a leader than a follower. Which is fine in leading-type situations, but not so great in team and relationship-stype situations. I actually do very well with collaboration, but deep down, if you don’t agree with me, I mostly think that you’re wrong. I try to be open-minded and take in all the facts before making decisions, but once I’ve made a decision, it’s difficult for me to be swayed another direction. I’m judgemental and stubborn and probably not as flexible as I like to think I am.
6. I make a terrible mess in the kitchen. When I’m cooking, I use every bowl and utensil I own and ingredients end up everywhere and the place becomes a disaster zone. I clean everything up after, though.
7. I’m not virtuous.
8. I get distracted easily. I’m a power multi-tasker and it’s difficult for me to concentrate on doing just one thing at a time. So, if I’m stuck doing one thing, I get bored. But if I’m doing too many things at once, I tend to wander off and forget about some of them. Possibly this contributes to my organization problem. At work, for instance, I’m constantly opening new tabs in my browser, and I need to do something with all of them, but at the end of the day, I find that I’ve managed to forget about half of them. It’s a problem.
9. I can get really bitchy sometimes. And mean. I amaze myself with my own meanness. I’m mostly a very nice person, but then I hit my limit and the bitchiness takes over. It’s not pretty.
10. I get depressed when I fail.
11. I can’t sing at all. So much so that P. won’t let me sing around him. Even when I’m in the car and shouldn’t everyone get to sing in the car?
12. I make a lot of lists.

When we bought this house, I knew we’d be doing some remodeling. It’s not a surprise to me. And I am often reminded of this fact. I signed on for this; I knew what I was getting into; I was completely on board. Except as it turns out, I had no idea what I was getting into. And if someone had told me that I would be living in a construction zone for several years, with plywood floors, and huge holes in the walls through which the freezing air merrily blows through, and plastic sheeting draped everywhere, and no furniture, and all my stuff packed away in boxes, and construction work to look forward to every day for the foreseeable future, I may not have been so eager to sign.

When we were considering buying the house, P. brought up the idea of remodeling. He didn’t like the brick floor. I actually liked the brick. My grandparents’ house has a lot of brick and it reminded me a bit of that. (I have a soft spot in my heart for their house since it’s really the only constant in my life. It’s the first home I remember living in, and the one place from my childhood I can still go back to.) But OK, I was good with the idea of replacing the floor. And he wanted to paint the walls, and I was cool with that too. I used to be a paint manager at a hardware store, after all. I know how to paint. It’s slow but doable. And perhaps we should revamp the bathrooms. That also seemed reasonable, especially since in the version in my head, we wrote a check to a plumber and like magic, the bathrooms would be snazzy, modern marvels.

But then we moved in and actually started the remodeling. And somehow, the scope got a little bigger. It wasn’t enough to just paint the walls. Now we had to sand them all smooth first. And that turned into replacing almost all the drywall because the old drywall job wasn’t good enough and some of the seams showed through. I had this crazy notion that we’d be doing one room at a time, but apparently I know nothing about the right way to remodel, because before long, nearly the entire downstairs was gutted.

And replacing that brick turned out a little more complicated than I expected too. We couldn’t just replace it. We had to replace it with heavy stone. And P. decided, after much Internet reading, that we had to reinforce the foundation with lots of concrete and beams. I suggested that we have a professional come out and give us, oh I don’t know, a professional opinion. But who needs professional opinions when you have the Internet! So, we got to concrete pouring. Which meant we had to cut big holes in the floor. Obviously. What house is complete without big holes in the floor?

One of the many troubles of not doing one room at a time is that the rooms you’re working on remain in a state of mid-construction for a really long time. P. and I have this TV problem that I naively thought would be solved with this house. He likes the TV; me, not so much. When I have free time, I like to spend it somewhere quiet, reading a book or writing. This house was perfect for that. The big bonus room upstairs could have the TV and the living room downstairs with the cozy fireplace and nice view could have the quiet. Only the living room was the first room we started working on. And this multiple room approach to remodeling means that it’s been draped in plastic and full of construction supplies for a year and a half. With no end in sight.

And the scope just keeps expanding. A while back, P. decided that since we were tearing up all the walls anyway, we should put in structured wiring. This would give us coax and ethernet connections in every room. I wasn’t won over by the idea. We have wireless Internet. We don’t need a TV in every room. I don’t want a TV in every room. But I was overruled. Clearly, structured wiring was required. What was I thinking even questioning this? So now, even the rooms we haven’t started on have several huge holes in them.

Apparently, the kitchen is next, so it’s currently draped in plastic. And it joins the living room, hall, laundry room, bathroom, pantry, and dining room we’ve already destroyed.

Yesterday, it finally hit me. Yes, a year and a half is a long time for things to sink in, but hey, I can be slow sometimes. We were in the car and P. mentioned his plans with home automation. I quite logically asked him what the hell he was talking about. He explained about how your light switches can have Internet and you can talk to them from work. Because sometimes, when I’m at work, I just really miss my light switches. And I think to myself, if only I could talk to them right now, my day would go so much better! Then, he told me about how when we’re on vacation, we can program the lights to come on as though we were home. I mentioned those timers you can buy for five dollars. He looked at me like I had told him we could replace our bathrooms with an outhouse.

But the home automation plan was the moment I finally got it. What I want is for the house to be done. What he wants is to work on the house. It’s like how some people put together model airplanes as a hobby. He thinks of new projects for the house. I fully expect that soon, we will be living in a tent in the backyard, with a camp stove and sleeping bags, as the remodeling completely overtakes us. And the tent will have a TV, with a cord running from the outlet on the deck, likely with home automation so we can turn the TV on and off while at work. And P. will explain to me how what we really need to do next is put in recessed panels in every room for the plasma screens. And perhaps, once that’s done, we can consider turning the electrity back on. Heat and light being of course secondary to things like communicating with your appliances.

1. My current car is purple. Who the hell wants a purple car? I blame a complete lack of discernment when I bought it. How long do I have to pay for a momentary lapse in judgement? Surely three years is time enough.
2. The side mirrors don’t have defrosters. Which is clearly a safety hazard. This has been bothering me since the first week I bought the car and after researching online found that previous model years did have defrosters but for some inexplicable reason, my model year did not. Although apparently, all the wiring is still there, so some people replaced their side mirrors with ones found on totaled older models at junkyards, but that seemed really complicated so I have been driving with partial visibility this entire time.
3. The button for the heated seat is hidden way down between the seat and the door so that it’s impossible to see and since it’s a toggle, I’m always peering down there when I’m driving to see what side needs to be switched and again, that has got to be dangerous both to myself and to those on the road around me.
4. It gets terrible gas mileage. And it’s bad enough that it’s bad for the environment and my wallet, but it also means that I’m forever stopping at gas stations and it’s really cold out right now, so standing outside pumping gas sucks.
5. I think I’ve only ever had one car longer than three years and why should I keep a car I hate longer than many cars I’ve liked?
6. Did I mention my car’s purple?
7. I shouldn’t have gotten an automatic.
8. Life is too short to spend so much time driving around in an annoying car.
9. I’ve driven a lot of crappy cars in my life. First there was the green Chevy Nova. Then, the a Plymouth Duster. And a Ford Falcon. And some old Honda that I was driving some friends around in when the clutch went right out on me and wasn’t that great since I was only able to go about three miles an hour and that’s just not how to impress your friends when you’re in high school. And there was that Mazda with the cracked engine block that I tricked the dealer into taking back while the tow truck driver hid around the corner. The one that I had in the shop one time and afterwards the engine made a terrible noise so I took it somewhere else and the mechanic there found that the previous one had not only left a wrench in the engine (hence the noise) but had also left screws off an exhaust manifold or something so that if I had run the air conditioner I could have been poisoned by carbon monoxide. And then the CRX that I really liked but that kept breaking down on me like the time the timing chain broke when I was in the mountains above Paso Robles and that other time I was in the middle of nowhere and a spark plug came loose. Do you know what an engine sounds like when a spark plug comes unattached? It isn’t a pleasant sound, I tell you that. And I thought surely I would be killed but then the guy who stopped not only had a little boy with him but he also offered me a drink of his coke, which somehow made me feel like he wouldn’t murder me and leave my body in a ditch and it turned out that he had a tool in his truck that was designed for attaching spark plugs to engines and so that was lucky. And then I finally got a brand new car as soon as I had any money at all, although of course it was the very cheapest new car you could buy with barely a radio and certainly without power windows. And several subsequent car choices were influenced by the person I was dating and/or married to (I know; this was entirely my fault, but I have grown since then). And so you see that I have paid my dues with cars and can I please have one I like now?

I’ve discovered that playing sports is a little like eating vegetables. When I was a kid, it was awful. But as an adult, I’ve learned to like it. A little. I don’t know that I’ll ever really love sports or cauliflower, but I can appreciate them a bit better than I used to.

A big part is control. As a kid, you don’t have it. You eat the vegetables the way they are prepared and put onto your plate. You play the sports you get enrolled in. Not to your liking? Life’s rough. But as an adult, you can avoid certain vegetables altogether. You can make them yourself and discover the joys of fresh spinach that doesn’t come from a can. You don’t have to play a team sport, in which many other players are penalized for your complete lack of athletic skill.

But the real breakthrough for me was realizing that I don’t have to be good at sports. I have a bit of a perfection problem. I have this need to be the absolute best at everything I do. And as a kid playing sports, that was never going to happen. And kids always have to play team sports, so I felt the added pressure of fucking up everyone’s game and not just my own. In elementary school, my stepdad was helping me pratice softball for some school team I was on. He was pitching me balls and I was attempting (and failing) to bat. He finally told me, “you’re just not athletically inclined.” A mean thing to say to a small child who couldn’t do anything with the information other than get even more depressed at the forced participation in a sport that clearly, she would not improve at? Probably, but he had a tendency to say whatever was on his mind. (Hence my complete avoidance of salt, beginning in junior high and not ending until a few years ago, after he told me that my thighs were fat, likely because the salt was causing me to retain water. Possibly that’s why I’m so into salts now - to spite him.)

Anyway, when I was growing up, organized sports were stressful. I couldn’t opt-out; I sucked; I felt all this pressure to do well, because I felt pressure to do well at everything; I knew I would never do well (the “not athletically inclined” comment rang in my ears for years after); I was letting down my entire team by sucking.

I had to player soccer, basketball, the aforementioned softball. In junior high school, I warmed up to sports a little when I started running track. Non-team sports were infinitely better. No one was relying on you; you weren’t relying on anyone else. I was never much of a team player. Of course, I preferred math competition to any sport, and I was able to move away from anything athletic.

In high school, I returned to sports, but as a spectator, due mostly to boys. I wasn’t interested in watching, but my boyfriend was a wrestler. And wrestling was big at my school. I ended up as the sports editor of the school newspaper. I loved it because although I wasn’t into the actual sports, I got to do a bunch of researching and learning new things. Sure, they were sport-related things, but I never pass up a researching and learning opportunity.

My last year in high school, I dated an actor, so I got a reprieve from sports watching, but it was soon revived for later boyfriends. Years of watching mind-numbing basketball and hockey and football followed. Again, I made the most of it by learning all about full-court presses and icing and running backs. (These were the years during which I molded myself based on the interests of the person I was with, and thank God those days are mostly gone.)

P. doesn’t watch sports, so I don’t have to worry about running into that these days. But as I was snowboarding last night, going down the mountain by myself, at my own pace, I realized that I’ve made my peace with sports participation. I still don’t go for team sports, but I enjoy more individual sports on my own terms.

Since I absolutely know that I will never be good at sports, it’s the one time that I don’t put any pressure on myself to be the best. Maybe that’s giving up and probably it means that I’ll never be as good as I could be. But you know? I don’t care. I’m a crappy snowboarder and I’ll always be a crappy snowboarder, but I’d rather go at my own speed and enjoy myself than push myself harder and have a terrible time. For some people, the enjoyment in a sport like that is pushing to the limit, but I’m not one of those people. So, I board along and P. tries to explain how I should go faster or try this other thing, and maybe I should try harder to get better, but I’d rather go slow and enjoy the scenery.

It was the same when I used to play golf. I’m truly a terrible golfer. But it’s fun to drive the cart and enjoy being outside and who cares if my balls ends up in the water every so often?

There’s no other area of my life in which I feel this way. I’m generally not at all satisfied with mediocrity. But it’s fun to relax and not put so much pressure on myself. Should I take the lesson with me to the other areas of my life? Maybe. But while I can have fun being bad at things I can never be good at, I can’t see myself enjoying being mediocre at things I could be great at. So, outside of sports, I’ll likely keep striving to be great.

I mostly fail at being great at sports, but I don’t worry about it so much, so can still enjoy them. And I probably mostly fail at being great at other things, but I know I’m trying, so I enjoy all those other things too. Contradictory? Possibly. But it seems to work OK for me.

We stopped at a BBQ place on our way to the airport today, to get one last taste of Texas flavor. One thing I really appreciate about Texas is the iced tea. Texas is south enough that you can get it anywhere, but not so far south that it’s all sweetened. Many restaurants compromise and offer both types. I remember the sadness when I moved to Wisconsin and realized that my never-ending iced tea days were over. Many places don’t serve it all, and those that do offer it “seasonally”. I guess they figure that no one needs a cold drink when it’s 25 below zero before wind chill (unless that cold drink is beer). I went through a McDonald’s drive-through once, sorely in need of some iced tea, only to be told that was only available in summer. Such trauma I had to suffer.

Anyway, As we were walking back to the car after feasting on a variety of meats (accented by the many animal heads on the walls and the cow hide decorating our table), I realized we were in the quintessential Texas shopping center — truly the heart of texas.

Once you’re done fishing, you can stock up on ammunition and shoot an animal. When the vet can’t save it, just pop over and get it stuffed, then donate it to the wildlife exhibit. Truly, the circle of life.

Every city has has something about it that makes it special, some certain place you want to visit again and again. If you look hard enough, you can always find it. Maybe it’s a bluff with a perfect view for the sunrise, or an abandoned barn, alone in a golden field. A coffee shop where baristas design a perfect heart on the top of every latte.

Houston, like every town, has this special place, a place of desire and nostalgia and pleasure. I’m talking, of course, about Sonic Drive-In. Sonic has something that no other place has. Vanilla cherry limeades. Of course, Houston doesn’t have an exclusive claim on Sonic, but Seattle is Sonic-free, so I have to find my vanilla cherry limeades when I can.

When you order them in Houston, they correct you: a cherry limeade with vanilla? Um, sure. It’s like when you go to Starbucks and for a non-fat latte and they ask if you mean skim. They can call it what they want, just give me the vanilla-y, lime-y, cherry goodness.

When I was in high school, Sonic was the turn around point on the cruise route. It had the cool side and the not-cool side, and if you wanted to stop and hang out or get something to eat, but the cool side was full, you kept crusing until a spot opened up.

Of course, we weren’t always drinking vanilla cherry limeades. Sometimes we had big gulps full of 7-Up, spiked with Seagram’s 7. Or big gulp cups full of ice, with beer cans hidden inside (with handy straw access). The big gulp often came in handy during cruising.

But back to the vanilla cherry limeades. I realize they’re just Sprite with lots of sugary syrup and artificial sweeteners. But Sonic does thoughtfully add a lime slice to the top to perpetuate the illusion of fruity goodness. And Sonic has the added attraction of offering tator tots with chili and cheese. Potatoes and illusionary fruit. It really doesn’t get much better than that.

I suppose I’m inquisitive by nature. Even as a kid, I was always reading non-fiction or researching something. I loved the library. I could sit there at the card catalog or walk the stacks and learn about absolutely anything I wanted. And there was always something I wanted to learn. I suppose that’s why I always thought I’d be a journalist. Research and writing combined? Total dream job. It’s also probably why I love the internet so much now.

Completely unrelated (mostly), I also have this problem that I want to be the absolute best at anything I do.

So, of course, as you might imagine, when I started having sex, I immediately started researching how to be better at it. Despite lots of experimentation in high school, I didn’t actually lose my virginity in the technical sense until my freshman year of college (Good Friday, right after church). It didn’t take long before I started wondering how to be the absolute best at it and where were the orgasms, anyway?

So, off to the university library I went. I spent hours with the microfilm and microfiche, reading up on the scientific details about why guys have the advantage when it comes to orgasms. I used up all my dimes, printing out the pages. (Kids these days have it so easy. They’ve never had to cross-reference and pull out drawers and load up the old dusty machines. All they have to do is type a few words.)

I also hit the bookstore. I was looking for some real how-to advice. I found this book — I probably still even have it somewhere — all about how to be great in bed.

It was about that time that I started a summer internship with a repertory theatre company. I worked in set construction and we worked just about every hour of every day until our bones hurt and we fantasized about getting into some terrible set construction accident so we could go to the hospital and rest for just a little while. The “repertory” part involved two theatres, about a half hour apart. Once we got all the sets built and the shows were in production, we spent every night tearing down a set at one theatre, loading it up on a trailer, and driving it over to the other theatre. We rotated six shows between them, and the sets involved lots and lots of heavy steel and plywood. No one had warned me about the steel and plywood.

My only downtime came during the drive between theatres. So, that’s when I read. Hey, I had to read sometime. I became known among the interns for my reading choices. And my ability to make gaffer’s tape work like a weld, but we didn’t mention that part to the actors. Of course, all you can really get from reading is theory. Theory needs practical application to really work. So, I set out to practice.

I think I read up on sex advice all throughout the next year. I was never really sure how well I was doing at it. How can you know, really? Eventually, I put aside the research and concentrated on practicing, although even now, I still hit the internet every so often to see if there’s anything new I should know. (And there’s always something new, although possibly I shouldn’t know all of it.)

You can never do too much research, really. And probably the same is true for practicing.

As is evident from the title, I’ve been listening to a lot of Billy Joel lately. Which always brings me back to high school, driving down to Northridge, singing all the way over the grapevine.

High school sucks for everyone, obviously. You live at home with your parents, who are crazy (or maybe that was just my parents), and you don’t have any money and your car breaks down all the time and you’re socially awkward and you have to work and study and worry about college and your future and your friends always have drama and you always have drama, so it’s like a never-ending drama loop. And then you like a boy and then he doesn’t like you and then you make out with someone else at a party anyway, but once you sober up, you don’t really like him, and then you try smoking and it’s just too hot outside to keep it up.

But high school is also wonderful. Your whole life is ahead of you so you can still do anything you want — life full of promise and all that. And you’re not bogged down with the baggage of a million years and you don’t really have all that much responsibility since your job is frying chicken, and you don’t even have a mortgage payment and you’re experiencing everything for the first time and you can hang out and party every night and still keep your 4.0 grade point average.

If not for all the teenage angst, life would be pretty sweet.

Life now, of course, is mostly much better than high school, although the angst never goes away entirely. But at least I know a lot more. I now know that I’ll never have all the answers and I’ll never be perfect or even mostly perfect, or, let’s face it, anywhere in the general perfection ballpark.

And when you’re young, you think you’ll live forever. But the older you get, the more the sense of your own mortality is always lingering there in the background, taunting you, mocking your wasted youth and the quickly passing days (or again, maybe that’s just me). We only get this one life.

But mortality issues not withstanding, getting older isn’t all that bad. I’m a lot more honest with myself, mostly. And I’ve mostly gotten rid of all that insecurity. I mostly know what I’m doing. Adulthood is just full of mostlys, I guess. And more grays than black and whilte.

Some days I choose reality and madness. And sometimes madness does me just fine.

I hate It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s not the bell ringing and the angel wings. I sort of expect things like that in Christmas movies. And you can’t help but like Clarence a little anyway. Who would begrudge him wings?

And it’s not even that the movie makes no sense. Although it doesn’t, since George wants to kill himself, so telling him what would happen if he hadn’t been born doesn’t really tell him anything about what might happen if he dies now (sure, he whines about wishing he’d never been born and all that, but it’s not like that’s a Christmas wish Clarence was going to magically grant or something). What George really needs is the spirit of Christmas future, but I guess he was busy in that other movie.

It’s really the whole beginning of the movie, before the missing money and the drunken uncle and the jumping off bridges that bothers me. And by bothers me, I mean it makes me irrationally angry to the point where I want to throw things at the screen. Is this really the message of the season, that we should give up all hopes and dreams and do only what everyone else wants? That we’re obligated to pick up the pieces when other people fuck up? And now that I think of it, maybe it’s not just the beginning. All that stuff about how everyone’s lives were better because of George? Way to absolve every single person in Bedford Falls of responsibility for their own lives and put all that weight on George. No wonder he wanted to kill himself. It’s one thing to make a difference in the lives of others, but is it really his fault is Mary becomes an old maid without him? Was George the only man in the entire town?

The idea of the ending is nice — you sometimes end up where you don’t expect, but don’t overlook the joy in the new destination. (Or something.) But I just can’t get over how he never really even tried doing what he wanted. Or, maybe he did do what he wanted, but it was the expense of something else he wanted and so he was a big mopey baby about it.

I realize I’m projecting onto George. I spent way too much time feeling responsible for everyone else and now I’m trying to figure out the delicate balancing act of being the right amount of selfish. It’s exhausting enough just to carry around the weight of your own life, after all. But when I think of It’s a Wonderful Life, I want to yell at young George to go see the world, already. Hire someone else to run the bank and get on the damn train. And I want to tell the rest of the town to get off their lazy asses and save themselves. Stop being such an albatross around George’s neck.

I’m tired right now just thinking about it. And apparently, I’ve somehow managed to take on the burden of the lives of fictional characters in a fictional movie that was filmed before the invention of technicolor. Maybe the first person I should yell at is myself.

(The continuing saga of publishing old drafts… I started this in March 2005.)

I love cookbooks. I love food and I love books, so I suppose it’s not surprising. Two of my earliest happy memories are of figuring out how to read and of standing on a chair near the stove, watching my grandmother cook. When I looked at one of my favorite books, Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day, I always said I wanted to be the chef, who was wearing a really tall white hat. It was probably so easy for me to choose because the book didn’t have a writer, with a big quill pen. That would have made the choice harder. One of the amazon reviews for the book talks about the overt sexist roles, and how only three jobs are available for women (homemaker, nurse, and secretary). But when I was little, I didn’t in any way get the message that I couldn’t do the jobs in the book that were being done by men. The chef was a man, but I didn’t think only men could do it.

I’m sure I have more than a hundred cookbooks: shiny new ones with healthy recipes, old tattered ones from days when all recipes called for lard. I just ordered two new cookbooks from amazon, and I like them, but I have one complaint. They’re hardcover and just so big. I realize this is a good thing in the kitchen. They’re sturdy. But the size makes them difficult to read. And I like to read my cookbooks.

If I’m judging my cookboks purely on reading enjoyment, the old ones definitely win out. Take, for instance, The American Woman’s Cook Book. How can you go wrong with a title like that? This book, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer, was originally published in 1938. My hardcover was printed in 1942. I see that amazon.com lists an out-of-print paperbacka version printed in 1974. I don’t know how much it changed between 1942 and 1974, but one would hope a lot, judging from the reader’s comments. “This book is my cooking bible.”

The first great thing about this cookbook is how it is organized. It has separate sections for: cookies/candies, cakes, ice cream, pies, and of course, the completely different, desserts. Cheese also has its own section. I am all for devotion to cheese, so you won’t get any arguments from me about that.

There is a chart of “alkaline and acid-forming foods”, although it doesn’t go on to say what the importance of knowing this might be. Beware though, that “cheese, cream” is alkaline and “cheese, all but cream” is acid-forming. The cookbook goes on to explain how to buy food. “It is desirable to include fruit twice a day.” “Women and little children will eat about two average potatoes and 1/4 lb. other vegetables daily. Adolescents and men at hard work can eat two to three times that amount.”

And then, we learn about food values. “The modern woman will learn to distinguish between vitamins and calories.” Indeed.

Alton Brown, my TV boyfriend, writes great cookbooks for reading. He probably would have a little to say about the whole vitamin vs. calorie debate.

Mostly, I just like to have the cookbooks around — just in case I want to read them. Or cook with them. 90% of the time, I use the internet when I’m searching for recipes, so you might think I don’t need all these cookbooks around. But you would be very wrong. As great as the internet is, it can never fill the need I have for books. They’re as different as vitamins and calories.

(I have made it a Christmas vow to publish all of the old bits and pieces of drafts that I have hanging around. Some of them are a couple of years old, so who the hell knows what I may have even meant by them. This one is from August, so I can even sort of remember writing it. And I still like the quote.)

I was at BlogHer last month [edit from the present: back in July now] and Arianna Huffington said something that rang true for me, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since: “we owe it to ourselves to change our minds.” She mentioned how difficult it was for her to change her political affiliation — that people who were her friends asked her why she was betraying them and everything they believed in. Change it hard, not only for us, but for those around us. Actually, when I think of Arianna Huffington, I still think of her as the wife of the rich Republican candidate. I lived in California when those ads were on TV every time you looked. That was years ago, but it’s still the first thing I think of when I hear her name, so I can imagine it was a difficult shift for her.

I think sometimes we forget that we can change our minds — entirely if we want to. That we can turn around, choose a different path, go a completely different direction. But we can. My divorce was hard for many reasons, but the idea of complely changing my life was a big one. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to change. That life itself wouldn’t let me.

When I was a kid, my stepdad valued his word above all else. He wouldn’t go back on it, no matter what. Sticking to his word was more important than reviewing the facts, doing the right thing, admitting he was wrong. If he made a rash decision in the heat of the moment, that decision stood no matter how ridiculous he later realized he was. That led to us as children being grounded for a year, moving halfway across the country, owning a girl cat named Butch.

I wanted to name the cat Cinderella. I was going through a time during which I desperately wished fairy godmothers were real and that mine would come and rescue me. The cat was a tiny calico kitten, born to a stray cat under the neighbor’s trailer. My stepdad didn’t want the cat but gave us an ultimatum. We could keep her, but her name would be Butch. What could we do? We loved that kitten. So, Butch it was.

In high school, I was scraping together every last penny for college applications and SAT tests and I needed another hundred dollars for something. My stepdad said I could sell my stamp collection to him for $100. I started collecting stamps in around the first grade and had carefully moved them from house to house to house. What did he need with it, honestly? But much like the cat naming problem, I was backed into a corner. I really needed the money, so I handed over the stamps. He kept them. I guess he did acquiesce on the stamps eventually. When he and my mom got divorced, he left the stamps with her to give back to me.

When I was growing up, my secret revenge on my stepdad was the quote about how “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. That Emerson would think my stepdad had a little mind only helped a little those nights that I was grounded for no reason, but a little was better than nothing.

I know that it’s important to be responsible and reliable and stick things out, stay the course, all of that. But there’s just no reason to name a girl cat Butch.

I’ve loved booked ever since I can remember. I love reading them, being around them, owning them. I can get completely lost in a book to the point that I entirely tune out the world around me. (Really. Try talking to me sometime when I’m reading. I won’t even know you’re there.) When I was growing up, I was never without a book. If I needed to walk from one part of the house to the other, I did it while reading. I was pretty good at navigating around things while keeping one eye on the words.

Just being around books makes me happy — even books I would never read. I could spend an entire day in a bookstore, just looking at books.

The trouble comes in when I start looking at everything, and I see all my favorites and they make me happy and I want to buy them and take them home, even if I already own them. And I have to remind myself that my copy at home is just fine. I really don’t need another one.

I went through this period a few years ago where I would haul in boxes of books to Half-Price books in a misguided attempt to reduce clutter in my life. It was difficult because I want to keep every book I ever read. And now, I feel book naked. I look at my bookshelves and think, but I’ve read way more books than this! I’ve bought so many more books than this! I know, I’m a little unbalanced when it comes to books.

I have a particular weakness for old books. I’m not really sure why. The older they are, the more they pull me in. I was at this used bookstore on Saturday and it was great with a loft and a windy staircase to the basement and cats.

I was very tempted by Shakespeare. Shakespeare always does me in, even though I rarely read him anymore. I think he brings me back to my college days, when I got to spend all of my spare time entrenched in reading things and writing things — a literary heaven.

So, there I was, standing there, looking longingly at the shelf, even though I already have several different copies of the complete works of Shakespeare. Really. Plenty of copies. But this one was from 1866 and it was so pretty. I do already have a copy from the late 1800s that I picked up in London, but it’s in pretty bad shape, so I could use another one. On the other hand, this book was $100. It seemed a little crazy to spend $100 on a book I already have several copies of. But I really wanted it.

In the end, I resisted, but did pick up a fairly old collection of Poe. Sure, I have Poe too, but not in this collected form. I don’t think.

I used to read Poe as a kid and he scared the hell out of me. I didn’t even know he was this old, classic author. I devoured any book I could get my hands on, so it would be like Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew, The Tell-Tale Heart. I was so surprised when I found out he wrote poems! And was dead!

I don’t have as much time to read anymore. Too many others things to do, and reading seems like an unattainable luxury sometimes. I sneak in my reading time at the gym. I’d like to make it a point to read more, but it seems like a frivolous goal when there are so many others things I should be doing.

I’m really tempted to go back and get that Shakespeare though.

I was avoiding calling my mom. Yes, she had called three times. Is there a special section of hell reserved for daughters who refuse to call their mothers? If there is, I suppose I have a reserved table, because I don’t even feel guilty about not returning her calls.

Her last message even mentioned Christmas and I imagine that avoiding moms who want to talk about the wonderment of the holiday is cause for having your name of the VIP list for that special hell section — they lift that velvet rope right up when they see you.

Anyway, I did call her back. Eventually.

At some point, she asked how I was, so I mentioned about how my house didn’t have power and I was freezing and how there was a hole in the roof. You know, what the hell, share my life a little.

Her response? Concern and caring for her eldest child? Heartfelt emotion and and outpouring of love and sympathy? Well, kind of.

I believe her exact words were “your sister is mad at me right now and you know I love my granddaughter and I don’t like going a day without seeing her, but your sister’s not coming by today, but it’s not my fault and…”

I drifted off at that point, so I’m not sure why exactly it wasn’t my mom’s fault, but since I had already heard the story from my sister earlier in the morning, I figured I could fill in the gaps for whatever I missed.

After hearing a bit more about her woes, I finally got to the point of the many calls - she wanted to let me know that she sent me a Christmas present. It probably sounds sweet, but with my mom, everything has a motive. Of course, she would deny it. She truly believes that her every move is selfless — a complete sacrifice of her own life for others. Even the act of sending me a present is cause for great fanfare.

So, great, sent me a present. Can’t wait. Tell her if I don’t get it by Tuesday at 3, because she’ll get her money back for the postage. Alrighty then.

Later that day, my sister called. “Mom said that a tree crashed into your house and now you don’t have any electricity.” Well, kind of. You see, it’s not that my mom wasn’t listening to me. It’s just that she was collecting the information to use in another conversation where she could be dramatic. I’m sure she’s told the story several more times by now, and at this point, my house has been washed away in a mudslide and I’m living under a bridge.

Then my sister went on about how my aunt is sending all the relatives notes, telling them not to stop by my grandparents’ house for Christmas, because they aren’t up to it, but my grandparents are sad, because they are lonely and want people to stop by for Christmas and my God it all makes my heart hurt and I feel like the worst person in the world because my first thought was that I’m glad I’m not there.

This afternoon, I got the note myself, tucked into a Christmas card. The holiday spirit leapt right from the page. I felt like flying down on Christmas day out of spite. Which isn’t very Christmasy, but then, apparently that’s not what my family is going for this year. I probably would if I wasn’t already planning to be at P.’s family’s house. As it is, I don’t know when I can get down there. I’d like to get in a trip after Christmas, but that isn’t looking likely. It would difficult anyway — how do you visit your grandparents and not your mom when everyone lives in the same house? How about sneaking in some time with your niece while avoiding your sister? I guess this is what they mean when they say you don’t pick your family. You would like to pick some of them, but the others keep hanging around.

My middle name is Jean. When I was really little, this made me very upset because I didn’t understand why my mom named me after a pair of pants. She actually named me after my grandma — my biological father’s mom. Despite having spotty contact with him over the years, I had a much closer relationship with her when I was growing up.

We’d visit and call and she’d send us birthday presents. I remember writing letters to her in crayon. My grandparents on my mom’s side have seemingly thousands of grandchildren, so for some reason, as a kid, I was always proud of being her oldest grandchild. It made me feel special. She and my biological father came to my high school graduation and I was sure, even then, that she dragged him along. She was always trying to compensate for his lack of parenting.

I remember in college, she was living in Paso Robles and my boyfriend was going to scool at Cal State San Luis Obispo, so I would drop by and see her. She was living in a retirement home then.

I don’t know when it was that I gave up on my biological father — when I decided that his relationship to me was simply that we were both people living on the same planet. But I do know when I knew for sure that he’d have no second chance with me, when my apathy turned into something else and my heart turned cold.

I was living in Dallas. My grandma had moved to be near him in Oklahoma. Unlike now, he knew where I was, and exactly like now, it was fine that he didn’t seek me out, until one day. He called my mom to tell her that my grandma had died. She had been in the hospital for a week. I had been a two hour drive away. And he never even thought to contact me so I could see her one last time. So she would know I cared. I was devastated. I really don’t think about my biological father anymore, but when I think about that day, I’m still mad at him.

With all that history, you’d think I’d like my middle name a little more, but I think I always felt a little odd, having my name associated with the side of the family that wasn’t really part of our family, that I was always a little confused about. I didn’t go by my biological father’s last name growing up, so having this middle name bond was awkward. Those awkward years are long passed now (although I still don’t use that last name). And although I don’t use my middle name much, I do sneak in the initial every so often.

Apparently my decision to leave work last night was a wise one. The six inches of water I waded through in the garage turned into four feet soon after. We lost power sometime in the night but while large branches now cover the house, deck, and yard, none of them actually made it through the house, so it’s cold inside, but not windy.

This morning, I foolishly tried to keep my appointment with my personal trainer. During winter in Seattle, 7am may as well be the middle of the night. I felt around in the dark bathroom for my toothbrush. I grabbed my gym bag. I figured I could shower at the gym.

As I drove down my street, I understood the lack of power. Huge trees had fallen over power lines, and the street was an obstacle course of wires and poles and dislodged trees still sporting full root systems. I slowly drove around them. My gym is directly across the street from my office, about 10 miles from my house. The route is a combination of streets and freeway. I didn’t see signs of electricity the entire drive.

I wasn’t hopeful about the gym. Or, for that matter, my office. I pulled up to the very dark and very closed building. And drove over to the equally dark, equally closed office. A group of people were standing around in the parking lot. I noticed that much of the water had been pumped from the parking lot. But while the water situation had improved, the power situation had not. A small group of my coworkers were huddled around a car, eating pastries. I am apparently not the only crazy person in my office, trying to work at 7:30 in the morning, despite the lack of power and connectivity. You would think we might decide to go home and go back to bed. But if you would think that, you don’t know us very well.

Our company has another office in Seattle. All we had to do was figure out a way to get over the one bridge that remained open and we could work! (Have I mentioned that we are insane? But look, no power at home — so no heat, no coffee, no Internet. We have all of those things and more at work!) A few of us carpooled over. We heard on the radio that the carpool lane that is normally open to westbound traffic in the morning was instead open to eastbound traffic, because there was no power to turn on the other side. We soldiered on.

We eventually made it to the office — land of power! and warmth! and coffee! The best part was by far the coffee. And we even had Internet access. Oh Internet, how I’ve missed you. You were only gone from me for a few short hours, but the loss was a stabbing pain to my wounded heart. And while my blackberry had forsaken my instant messaging and web browsing needs, it mostly made up for it by continuing to provide email. Oh blackberry, please never leave me.

Our main office is closed until they can get the power back on and pump out all the water and I’m not sure what’s going to happen at home. I think we’re in for several days of non-power. And the news doesn’t look hopeful: “We’re just now getting a grasp on how bad the damage is,” a spokeswoman said. “We’re cautioning customers to prepare for multiple days without electricity.”

Which means coffee could be a problem. Lack of coffee is just about as bad as lack of Internet. Can I survive the weekend? Can’t I just spend the weekend in this office?

When I woke up this morning [actually, yesterday, since I didn’t get this posted last night], I did not think to myself, “self, perhaps you’ll be wading through a flooded garage of rain, mud, and raw sewage later.” I mean, it just didn’t cross my mind at all, not even a little bit. Apparently, I should have been thinking ahead. And maybe packed galoshes.

I have this bad habit of not paying attention to anything at work if it doesn’t concern me directly. I never read the all-office mailing list and I don’t go to any of the all-employee gatherings. It generally works out OK. If I really need to know something, I figure it out eventually.

For instance, this week, an admin sent me an email, telling me that she had to move one of my meetings to a conference room in the new building across the street. What? We have a building across the street? When did that happen? (Apparently last week.) Then I ran into someone who asked me if I got my bus pass yet. I seriously have no idea what he was asking me.

This afternoon, I was in one of many meetings, and people were talking about the office closing early and about high winds and network outages. Perhaps that should have been my first clue.

Later, I was doing some work and some instant messaging and was on the phone (I’m nothing if not a multi-tasker) and out of nowhere, a hurricane appeared outside. The trees were bent completely sideways from the wind and an entire ocean was pouring down from the sky. I should explain that I sit in a corner, so both walls around me are windows. And I started to feel like they could collapse in on me at any time.

And the power went out. Everything went black. I may have yelped a little. Which probably was not very professional, considering I was talking on the phone with a coworker in an office in another state, who had no context for my crazy outburst. I tried to explain about the storm and the darkness and my office full of coworkers who were vocaling expressing their feelings about losing all of their work in a single moment of computer shut down. Did I mention I could see nothing except the headlights outside? “Do you want to talk later?” She asked this as though I were perfectly sane.

The power came back. I was grateful that I was working from a laptop chock fully of battery. I didn’t gloat though. I figured my cursing officemates would turn on me in a pack. Instead, they went to the bar. I tried to work out what I really needed to get done before I left and what could wait until tomorrow. The last of the team headed out. “I know you’re going to be here until the bitter end. Maybe you should go find a flashlight before the lights go out again.” I figured I could type a little faster and beat the next power outage.

A few minutes later, my cell phone rang. “Um, is your car parked in the garage?” My coworker again. “Maybe you should move it. The garage is sort of flooding a little.” How bad could it be, right?

I looked outside. The traffic looked really bad. Maybe I should just wait it out until things died down a little. I looked at the trees. They were even more sideways than before. Maybe I shouldn’t wait it out. I packed up and walked down the stairs. I started getting suspicous as I walked down. I could hear lively conversations about water and flooding. I walked by a few people who asked if I was parked in the garage. They asked it in a tone that seemed half amused, half pitying. And then I passed a guy who was wearing trash bags like boots.

The stairs go down to the garage, and there’s this little landing area with a door. And you open the door and go into the garage to your car. Normally. Today, we (this group of random strangers and I) peered around the corner and found the landing area completely flooded. With rain. And mud. And sewage. Yes, the sewers overflowed or broke or did the opposite of whatever sewers are supposed to do. The guy with the trash bags looked unsure. He tested the water with one trash-bag covered shoe. It was a little deeper than he expected. Then he ran back up the stairs. I followed him. Now what?

Once I go back up to my floor I ran into coworkers who I didn’t know. (This happens a lot with me. Did I mention I don’t pay attention a lot at work?)

“Is your car parked in the garage? Mine’s outside. I’ll drive you.” Thank you random coworker who I’ve never seen before! We all went back down the stairs and out the front. The rain had definitely broken something. Half of the parking lot was completely underwater. We went around a large pond and piled into random coworker’s car. He drove us down towards the garage. Which was underwater. And buckets of water were continuing to pour in.

He headed in. We saw a few people wearing those fashionable trash bag boots, wading towards their cars. We got to my car first. I looked at my car. And the water. Everyone in the car could emphathize. They were next.

I put one foot into the water. It was cold. And gross. I knew how countless disaster movie heroines must have felt. I hopped towards my car. Why get both feet wet? The water was at mid-calf. I hopped a little more. Of course, I’ve never seen movie heroines hopping through a flooded garage, but I’m sure it made for quite a dramatic scene. And then I was in. Now to drive out of the lake of sewage. I could hear the water splashing against the sides of my car. I plowed on. I finally made it out and onto the street. Water was pouring out of the storm drains. The intersections were completely flooded. And 30 minutes later, I hadn’t even made it to the next light.

I figured I may as well use the time to return some e-mail. You think I’m kidding. If only the instant messaging had been working on my blackberry, but I couldn’t even get the cell network to stay online. I got to the freeway and inched by all the downed branches and pockets of flooding. I took off my drenched sock. My foot started to burn. What was in that water anyway?

I did eventually make it home and now I’m writing by the flickering lights and the sound of the trees threatening to topple over and smash our house. Maybe when the Internet is back, I can even upload this entry.

I miss music.

Sometimes, I just need quiet (although my ability to get that ended when I started working at company with one of those nifty “open office” arrangments, aka “rooms of chaos and noise”). And I get into weird talk radio moods, although there’s only so much NPR one person can take.

I mostly can’t listen to music while I’m writing. The words get all tangled together like sheets. But when I’ve been writing a lot, I like to listen to music between the writing. Which makes me want to write more. Books are the same. If I’m reading something really good, it motivates me to go try and write something that halfway measures up.

But I don’t listen to music anymore and I really miss it. I suppose it’s my own fault and my weakness for technology. Once I got an iPod, I forgot how to carry CDs in my car or bring them to work. And then my iPod broke. And now I have to listen to morning talk radio in the car, the crappy overhead music at the gym, and my noisy coworkers at the office.

You might think the answer is to go over to my CD cabinet and get some CDs, but you would be wrong. The answer is to get a new iPod. Although then I’ll also need time to organize all my music and upload it. I don’t even think I still have the computer where I installed iTunes, so I’ll probably have to start burning my music all over again. I may have a bunch of mp3s on my old laptop, but you can see that clearly, I need my assistant to make this all work.

I did buy the latest Dixie Chicks CD over the weekend (the source of the title of this post), and I’ve been listening to it in the car on the drive to and from work. It’s reminding me of just how much I really do miss music. It’s ridiculous, right, that I don’t even make time for that? If the world can’t stop to give me time to organize my life, can it at least stop long enough for me to organize my music?

It is no secret that organization is my arch nemesis. The organizational dream and I have a love/hate relationship that has overshadowed my entire life. The trouble is that I want so much to be perfect and then I do too much and it falls apart and it’s not so bad that things turn to chaos except that it bothers me so much.

I’ve tried every trick I can find: I’ve hired an organizational consultant, bought expensive dayplanners, read possibly every book on organization that exists, made schedules and lists, set priorities — but none of those help with the real problem. I just don’t have enough time. Which sounds like a cop out, I know, and maybe I’m just not prioritizing the organization thing, but I sort of just wake up in the morning and start working on stuff and then suddenly it’s 11 at night and the organization thing didn’t happen.

Anyway, a friend of mine caught a glimpse of my e-mail inbox the other day and was shocked and apalled. As though that weren’t bad enough, he saw my desktop today, and anyone who’s ever seen that has gasped in absolute horror. Inwardly, I said, “I know, I know! I’m horrified too! It’s the bane of my existence! The albatross around my neck. The weight that drags me…” Oh, you get the idea.

So when I saw my handy life coach today and she asked what I wanted to work on, I once again brought up the organization thing. She said that a full inbox does not mean I’m disorganized, it just means I get a lot of mail. To be fair, she didn’t actually see my inbox. Or my desktop. And she’s also much too nice for her profession. She said that I must be somewhat organized, since I get a lot of stuff done, and that’s true. But then I mentioned the black hole of undoneness — all of those things that I’m not accomplishing and that I’m not organized enough to even look at so I can make an action decision to ignore them, rather than ignore them by default due to forgetfulness, as with my current plan.

She said I needed a different term than “crazy disorganization”, but I don’t know that calling it “selective memory management” is going to help me all that much. She gave me some other ideas in addition to the name change thing, mostly things I know, things that just require a little of that time I seem to keep running out of.

What I really need is one of those machines that stop time. I could make everything halt and then spend a couple of weeks making everything perfect and tidy. And then I after that, I could surely keep up no problem. Right?

They don’t get me down. In fact, I love rainy days. They are comforting in a way I can’t really explain. And I’m a secret fan of Mondays, although I suppose that means I like my work just a little too much. But that particular insanity isn’t the point. The point is that what really gets me down are movies about animals. Those feel-good ones with the sweet dogs or tigers or penguins or whatever the hell that are supposed to tug at your heart strings and make you all warm and fuzzy inside.

But no. They don’t make me feel warm and fuzzy. They make me cry my eyes out. Movies where people get maimed or killed or left alone to wander aimlessly? Fine. Whatever. A movie where a little bear has lost his way and can’t find his family? I totally lose it.

I was reminded of this when I walked upstairs last night and glanced at the TV. Eight Below was on, and while I have never seen it, I recognized it instantly. Here’s what happened in my brain. “That’s the dog movie I don’t want to see ever! Some of them die. And the rest are cold and hungry and alone and why would anyone make a movie like that?!” I somehow managed to walk in at a part of the movie I least wanted to see, where one dog is down for good in the snow and another is sad and… forget it. I’m not describing it. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, because even though I hadn’t seen the rest of the movie, had no emotional build up to the scene at all, I immediately started tearing up and had to look away.

Yes, because of a fictional dog in a fictional movie that I wasn’t even watching.

P. was watching it, so I couldn’t just change the channel. I tried not to watch any more of it as I worked on my laptop. I did, however, manage to cry twice more and curl up in a little ball with my hands over my eyes once. Why do people make movies like that?

Two Brothers was worse because I watched it in the theatre. And sobbed and sobbed like a teenage girl watching Titanic. So much death and pain and sadness and torn apartness (which isn’t a word but perhaps should be). And don’t even get me started on that March of the Penguins. What was so heartwarming about that? I don’t think I spent a minute of that movie not crying.

I’ve decided that I’m going to just avoid movies that feature animals or have animals in them or that claim to be “for the whole family” or “feel-good” or “miraculous.” It’s just not worth the pain.

Friends of mine often get confused when I mention my past. Where was I living when? What was I doing where? Was it the second time I lived there? Which state and which high school? Hell, even I get confused. Clearly, a diagram is the answer. A diagram can solve nearly any problem. OK, maybe a diagram can’t wash your car, but that’s what my assistant is for.

The drawback to presenting a diagram of my life is that it sort of screws up the whole anonymous nature of this journal, as anyone who’s heard me ramble on about my childhood, confusing or not, might find the diagram familiar. On the other hand:

• Everyone who reads this journal knows me in person.
• Nearly every email I’ve gotten from someone who’s stumbled upon it accidentally has started the email with something like, “hey, is that you,” so I’m not exactly fooling anyone anyway.

So, I figure a diagram isn’t going to make much