Happy V-Day, kids!

Out of the mouths of me

Tonight I was reading through a very old chat session that I had with MyTodd™, and I ran across this pearl of wisdom:

me: “It is not my job to comfort people. It is my job to poke at their ego with my sharp tongue until they run screaming and collapse in a broken fetal heap on the floor.”

At least I WIN at understanding my purpose in life.

This weekend’s lessons

If every day should offer some educational experience, then I suppose I should be more on the lookout for them when they show up. I did learn a few things this weekend, I think – namely:

• I should have used my cell phone to take a picture of the sign that Guy posted on the wall at the bar to get me to stop using my cell phone. Oh meta.
• Matt’s margaritas really are made of magic. They taste like happiness. How simple a thing it is to make me feel so connected to the world.
• I will probably never tire of nasty, bitchy people who nevertheless love me – they make my life more fun. I should not eat patty melts at 1:30 a.m. though, that really is a bad plan.
• There are people like me, who think the way that I think – I just notice the ones not like me more than I notice the other ones. I think the other ones talk more.
• Awkward, stupid-acting people should fear running into me, not me them. I don’t have anything to be embarrassed about, aside from occasional poor judgment and an overabundance of empathy.
• I get a curious sense of satisfaction from loading and unloading a completely full dishwasher. One that has plates and cooking utensils in it, not just 17 over-sized cups. I should entertain more often.
• I need to invest in an inflatable mattress.
• I am pretty sure I am giving up Firefox for Chrome. Sorry FF, but seriously your memory issues are too much. Especially in Vista. Trying to go cold turkey and will probably uninstall FF from the laptop entirely.
• It’s OK to like Lady Gaga un-ironically. I can like whatever the fuck I want, as I am a grown-ass woman.

I think that’s it, but that’s probably enough for one weekend. Restful and full of contentment, I am going to put this one in the WIN column.

The People Conundrum

I am continuing to struggle with dealing with people – groups of people and individuals. I have leveled out on my disgust with all the concepts that I see, at least for this week, but the people are still kind of making me nuts. Not that it’s their fault, or mine, I think it’s just the way in which I think about them—I make it harder on myself than it might have to be if I was a stupider or more thoughtless person.

Over and over I learn that my moral and logic centers are considerably out of plumb with those of the people I know. Even the people I really like. Learning to accept people in a holistic way and appreciate their place in my life while disagreeing with their beliefs and sometimes their actions is just fucking hard, and doesn’t promise to get easier with practice. It’s the constant reanalysis that wears on me. It looks like this:

OK, you’re doing this –> I like you –> you doing/thinking this must be OK… wait, it’s actually not OK. Do I still like you? –> Yes. OK then how can I incorporate this action into my view of you, and the world? How can I separate who you are to me from what you are doing?

-or-

You’re doing this –> I like you –> This is not OK –> This action/belief system is so morally unacceptable to me that I no longer can accept you as part of my world. –> Now you need to go away (Sometimes with a footnote of –> Oh wait, you’re still here? –> Everyone else thinks your actions are acceptable? –> Reevaluate –> No, you still suck. –> Grudging tolerance.)

And you know what? That’s fucking hard, and that’s fucking tiresome, and I am sick of it. But it’s constant, whenever you’re in relationship with people and you don’t wish to be consumed or subjugated by their belief systems and completely lose who you are. I would prefer that people be good and be simple, and do good, simple things that are easy to live with and understand and not bring up all these sticky problems for me to analyze. But that’s not the way of it. People I like do bad things*. To themselves, to each other, to me. They do them on purpose to be hurtful, or they do them on purpose because they do not believe them to be wrong, or they do them accidentally because they don’t understand what they’re doing and what the consequences might be. And each of those things requires some level of thought for me, some reshuffling of the facts in my mind file for them.

And I feel as if I am the only person in the universe who thinks about people in this way, or has these particular ethical quandaries. I do not see others struggling to understand people quite this hard. Maybe because the concept of being in relationship with people – any people, at all – is one that is negotiable for me. Maybe other people don’t think this way because the idea of not doing people is one they can’t conceive of, so it’s pointless to ponder whether they can do these particular people, or those particular people. There are going to be some people, and people are bound to be all variable and hard to understand, so what’s the point in thinking about it? I get that. Or maybe they don’t think about it, or care about it – maybe the social neediness of primates just overcomes all and they shut down critical analysis. I don’t know. I mean – people ARE compelling. Being in a group IS enjoyable, otherwise no one would do it. Social feedback is satisfying, and people are whimsical, charming, entertaining creatures. I adore many of them, and find them very necessary to my happiness. I just also happen to find them challenging, draining and baffling too.

The one thing I know is this—the only way I can function successfully without going insane is to let my core beliefs be what they are, and not change them based on the beliefs of the people I am around, even if I care deeply for them. Everyone I know may think that something is fine, and if I don’t think it’s fine, that’s my right. It’s my right to feel it, it’s my right to express that I feel it, it’s my right to live my life in the way that I believe to be correct. And it’s my right to eject people from my personal world when the incompatibilities are too great. When trying to stretch my brain far enough to make their actions somehow acceptable is too painful or disturbing for me.

And in the end it’s not for anyone else to understand, or appreciate or approve. It’s only for me to live inside. And that seems so simple, doesn’t it? You can’t please everyone, so just please yourself? There’s even a song. But social pressure is a powerful thing, no matter how grounded you try to remain.

So the question is exactly the same tiresome, unanswerable one it’s been for years. How can I be with you and not lose myself?

Stay tuned – one of these days I may figure it out.

*Yes, I do realize that I am most probably doing bad things to other people without knowing it. I realize people don’t necessarily approve of  my value system and life choices, or my opinions. But they can get their own fucking blog and bitch about it there.

It’s Not You, It’s Me (also, it’s kinda you)

Almost every single thing that I have encountered in the last week or so has either:

A) bored me greatly
B) offended me deeply

A few things have somehow managed to do both. I am irritated with the language of the people around me, and the concepts they’re discussing. I am disgusted by the things I read, and the images I see and what those things imply about the world in which I live. I want better, more suitable, more timeworthy things to think about and look at and be delighted by. I want things to stop offending my sensibilities, and for people to stop being obtuse and obstructionist at me. I want people to be interesting and exciting and full of fun in the exact way that I feel like being interacted with at that precise moment. I want both attention and space, I want both excitement and contentment. I want you to come here until I want you to go away again, I want to buy a bunch of shit because there seem to be a lot of things I need and  I want to throw away a bunch of shit because I have too much shit. I want to read more things and watch more things and write more things and talk about more things and I would also like to stop doing any of those things because I feel a little overwhelmed. More than anything else I would really like for you to understand about it and provide me with what I am looking for, while also realizing I don’t need you or your god-damned help.

That’s all.

In case you were wondering

Everything in my house pretty much remains broken, and it sounds like I almost blew up my oven trying to clean it, too. See, I thought that if you used the cleaner spray stuff and then it didn’t work you could use the self-clean mode and it would (at worst) create a poison gas. Turns out it might explode. Luckily I turned off the self-clean mode when brown smoke started pouring out of the oven. Cleaning the oven is apparently more of a summertime project.

In other news, the kitchen drain is still clogged – going on 4 or 5 days with no dishwasher or kitchen sink now! And when I had to rinse some things off in the bathroom sink, it started leaking again at the base – whoooooo hoo! I love home ownership. I now have my under-sink cabinets standing open, in hopes the heat will get in there and thaw some stuff out, but realistically I am looking at that drain staying clogged until next Monday when it gets at least back in the 30s. I am going to run out of dishes before then, and it’s very cold to go out for every meal. :-\ I am also now afraid to run my washing machine, in case it shares some drainage with the kitchen/dishwasher, all that stuff is along the same outside wall and I really don’t want to clean up any kind of drain overflow. Dirty clothes, dirty dishes, dirty oven, standing brown water in the sink – it’s truly awesome to be me.

The good news is that the car might actually be OK. The guys here said that the not changing gears on the hwy in this weather is actually normal and kind of a feature? Apparently the car is running in a lower gear in order to heat up faster? This is caused by condensati0n and the car being Korean (/nod) That’s what they said anyway. The fact that it changes gears after awhile, not dependent on my speed, is apparently a good thing. It just means it will get back to normal when it’s warm enough to burn off the condensation. I don’t know. I don’t care really why, just as long as it’s not going to blow up or stop running. The whiny noise when I brake can apparently be solved by “Turn[ing] the radio up.” And the car not wanting to start yesterday was b/c I let the tank get under 1/4 full when it was buttclenching cold outside. So perhaps the car is doing OK. It’s hard to tell, I am only a girl.

The bad news is that this weather is very hard on chihuahuas, and Bruiser isn’t responding well to it at all. She’s having a hard time, her heart can’t take getting out in this cold. It makes me very sad to see, so I am trying not to think about it. The other two are just assholes who don’t like to get their paws cold and prefer to pee on my bathroom rug.

That’s all the news in my fucked up little corner of the world.

Busted

So pretty much everything in my world is broken at the moment, and I am pretty much sick of it. It’s so cold that some pipes in my yard have frozen, and my kitchen sink won’t drain. Now it’s full of nasty brown drain water, which will be just sitting there until it warms up. This also means that I can’t use my dishwasher, as it will just back up into the sink when it tries to drain. It does this any time it gets into the teens for more than one day, and I know it will solve itself once it warms up, but it’s a total PITA.

My oven is all farked up because I accidentally let olive oil spill into the bottom of it, and I’ve applied two coats of oven cleaner, and it’s still on there, so I can’t turn on the oven without detonating all the smoke detectors. I will try again tomorrow to get it cleaned, but for now it’s non-functional.

My car is doing that thing again where it won’t change gears properly on the highway. I am pretty sure it’s the cold. But try driving from the Galleria to Jefferson with your car in some weird low gear and see how that feels. It sucks. And see what it does to your freaking gas mileage – that also sucks. I am now getting about 180 miles per fillup instead of 225-250, and that is a large pile of balls. I need to have the guys at work look at it, but I know they’re gonna lecture me about getting a new car and I am not in the mood to hear it.

Also, this isn’t broken, just aggravating, but it’s so cold that my furnace runs constantly to keep the first floor at 64. This makes the second floor somewhere around 70 I bet, and the 3rd floor (where I sleep) in the high 70s. It’s like sleeping in a dry sauna, so I have to turn the heat down to 62 or 60 to keep it reasonable on the other floors. This means the bottom floor is basically off-limits, which is fine because all that’s down there is the broken freaking kitchen. But it makes me feel like I am camping out, making occasional forays down into the frigid first floor for supplies. And try getting three chihuahuas outside to pee when it’s 8 degrees out. Just go ahead and try it. I’ll watch.

Basically, this cold weather is fucking up everything in my world, and I sincerely wish it would stop it.

Now would be good.

The Decade Dominated by Denim

More from the great basement cleanout of 2009! I found a whole box of these “INFashion” magazines, and though they were heavy and smell like basement, I could not resist hauling them home to have a look through them. They are all circa 1987-89, and the following images are from the September/October 1987 issue (Lisa Bonet and Matt Dillon on the cover – oh so dreamy!) There was so much to observe and ridicule that I was spoiled for choice, so I focused mostly on denim ads in this one, as they are truly horrendous.

Here are some ladies in the ubiquitous blue fabric:

Apparently in 1987, women were allowed to cover their bodies quite completely, as well as look androgynous in general.

Unless you're one of them-there super feminine women, and then you pose in the most unnaturally ass-proffering position in the history of contortion. All the better to feature how exactly matching your jacket and pants are.

So we’ve determined that women wore a lot of clothing, and most of that was denim: Continue reading »

Years Gone By and Still

Brought a huge pile of old crap home from my parents’ house yesterday. My Mom is sure that it’s my old papers that are cluttering up her basement, and I am going to let her maintain that delusion. Anyway, since I didn’t ever manage to leave the house today… (vodka = bad, apparently. At least +vodka -dinner = bad.) I thought going through some of this old stuff might be a good brainless thing to do while I munched veggie pizza and watched Chronicles of Riddick for the 179th time.

Tons of things I’d forgotten about in this first pile. Creative writing from high school and early college – typed on a typewriter even. Old pictures, cards, journals and artwork. Very interesting to read in the voice of my 20-year old self, especially. So many of the things I struggled with back then (in terms of the ways I relate to the world) are still things I struggle with today. It seems my view of them was much clearer back then, now it’s all covered in grimy layers of nuance and experience. Back then I was much more blunt, especially with myself.

Yeah, my hair pretty much looked the same back then. And yes, I still wear that exact style of shoe.

My favorite thing I’ve found so far was this little book that my first really serious boyfriend made for me. He was an amazing guy in a lot of ways, and reading his old letters lets me put a rosier glow on the relationship than it perhaps deserves. See, he was just the type that my stupid broken brain still picks out for me today—artistic, talented, emotionally needy and super-controlling. Such a delightful combo of traits! So that was not going to work out, of course. But there were good parts, like in any relationship, and looking through this makes me remember his insane sense of humor and how he always made me laugh. I actually think that he hated everything even more than I did, and that’s an impressive feat indeed. Looking back, I think part of my attraction to him was being the one thing he loved in the world. Or at least the one thing he didn’t despise. Being the center of that kind of attention was compelling, and the two of us together were an amazing asshole misanthropic duo.

When we couldn’t be together he was always making me things, sending me stuff like this. (Part of our relationship was long-distance, when we were both in college, so we did a lot of mailing.) I think I am part of the last generation to ever carry out love-affairs via postal mail. That’s sad. You can’t sketch crazy characters in the margin of an email. The feeling of getting a new mixtape in the mail from someone you weren’t going to see for two months carried an emotional intensity that you can’t really match in a world with on-demand video chat. We could only talk on the phone twice a week because long distance was so expensive. And I had to trade off phone time with my roommate, because of course we shared the same phone in our apartment and he wanted to be using it to talk to HIS girlfriend. No cell phones with text messaging and free long distance. I had to make lists of things that I wanted to remember to tell him when I talked to him. No instant messaging! No email! Having to go buy stamps at the post office! Writing so much that your letter was over the limit and having to add more stamps! It was insanity, I tell you! OK now I sound like someone’s grandmother, so I am going to stop there before I take to walloping people with my cane.

Anyway, here’s part of one of the little books he put together for me. Seeing it made me smile.

Continue reading »

Liars and the SOTD – Tracy Chapman “Tell it Like it is”

This album, along with Poe’s “Haunted” and more recently F+TM’s “Lungs” is on my list of all-time favorite albums. The ones where every song you listen to you think “OK, I am totally going to replay this song when it’s over.” and then the next song comes on and it’s so amazing that you have to listen to that one instead of re-listening to the first one.

Most of these albums come from places of brokenness and disenchantment with the world, which is why I identify with them. But to me they’re also cries for understanding and calls to do better with yourself, be a better sort of person. They’re from people who are heartbroken and disillusioned, and they point out how the world and people surrounding them have failed them—yet they also hold a sort of yearning for a world that’s not like this, where the people are good to each other, and good to them.

I feel like lately I have been dealing with way too many liars. Whether they’re lying inadvertently because they don’t understand themselves or lying blatantly because they’re assholes with shit to cover up, I am not always sure. Why they do it isn’t important, the net effect is that I don’t really trust anyone lately to tell the truth about anything. And I hate that. I hate that because my natural state is to believe people when they tell me things. I rarely lie. I will either tell you the truth or change the subject, and I assume most other people are the same. And I can’t assume that as much as I do. I don’t really know how to be super selective about it either. With me it’s either “honesty filter 100% on” or “you dirty motherfuckers, stop talking to me with your lying bullshit mouths.” And these are people who not only lie about what they’re doing, they lie about who they are. And that’s the most disappointing kind to discover, the kind where someone you thought was one kind of person – someone who took the time and trouble to paint that picture of themselves for you – is really not that kind of person at all. It makes me feel stupid and naive, it disappoints me, it makes me feel all alone in the world with a bunch of people wearing carnival masks.

I know that there’s no solution to this. People are how they are, and a lot of people need to lie to themselves and each other,  just in order to survive and maintain their internal images of themselves. I get it.  I am glad in some ways I am not one of them, but I am also lonely for other people who tell the truth, even when it’s harsh and ugly. I would rather hear about and deal with what’s really happening around me than have to sift through a huge pile of someone else’s horseshit to find the kernel of reality in there.

People give me grief for my negativity, but honest negativity will always be preferable to me than rosy-cheeked bullshit optimism and self-delusion. And I refuse to apologize for that, because no matter how it pains me, mine is the more authentic reality and I will not give it up.

Tracy Chapman “Tell it Like it is”

Say it say it say it
Tell it like it is
Say it say it say it
Tell it like it is

What breaks your heart
What keeps you awake at night
What makes you want to break down and cry

But say you’ll never turn your back
Say you’ll never harden to the world
Say you’ll never try to still the rhythms in your breast
Say you’ll never look at the evil among us and try to forget
Say you’ll tell it like it is

Say it say it say it so everyone can hear
Say it say it say it tell it like it is

What breaks your heart
What keeps you awake at night
How your anger and grief
Make you want to cry out
Oh and tell it like it is

But say you’ll never close your eyes
Or pretend that it’s a rosy world
Say you’ll never try to paint
What is rotten with a sugarcoat
Say you’ll talk about the horrors you’ve seen and the torment you know
And tell it like it is

Say it say it say it
So no one can forget
Say it say it say it
Tell it like it is

What breaks your heart
What keeps you awake at night
What makes you want to break the ties that silence and bind
And tell it like it is

Say you’ll never cover your ears and close your mouth
And live in a silent world
Say you’ll only run as far or as fast as you need to be secure
Say that then you’ll tell the truth
When a lie could cross your lips
And tell it like it is

Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it
Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it
Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it
Say it say it say it – Say it say it say it

Here’s the song, but ignore the video which seems to be just a bunch of weird birds.

Anniversaries

So today is ten years to the day since I moved back home from Amsterdam.

I cannot even begin to know how to process that fact. Ten years. In a heartbeat, in an eyeblink, ten years. That makes me feel incredibly old, as if this is a story I should be telling a youngster while I rock on a front porch and churn some butter.

I’ve been back here in St. Louis more than twice as long as I was gone. They say that your four years of high school have an everlasting impact on your life, but I think my four years in Holland had a much larger one on mine. I still remember how it felt ten years ago today, to wake up in a city where everyone spoke my language, and look around and see all these strangely unfamiliar things from my childhood. I remember making my bed that first morning and wondering how I was going to put my life back together. I was listening to Nina Simone “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” on my old CD player, and I heard my Dad talking to my Mom, right through my closed bedroom door. He said “Listen to that. It’s like she was never gone.”

The thought of that panicked me to no end, like all my personhood had just been stripped away, along with my job and my home and my friends. Like everything I was and the person I had become was going to be lost somehow, was going to slip out of me and slide between the cracks of the hardwood floor in my childhood bedroom and disappear forever, leaving me blank and helpless and completely unreal.

The first thing I did that day was go buy a computer. The second was to get online and do something, anything to distract me from my newly bizarre reality. I don’t think I’ve every really stopped that part.

I had no way of knowing, of course, where my life would go. That I would still be in this city ten years later. I had no idea who I would meet, or who I would love and who would love me. I didn’t know where I would work, or what I would spend my time on, or how indeed one builds a new life out of nothing but one’s own knowledge and strength of will. I had no idea where I was going. But of course none of us do. From minute to minute our lives are infinitely unpredictable, completely out of our control, careening wildly in some direction we can’t ever see until we run into it full speed. In some ways I feel like I have something to show for the last ten years, and in other ways I think I have only the same exact thing I had before – myself.

I don’t have any great philosophical insight on this anniversary, which is momentous to no one but me. I don’t even really know how I feel about it. Happy or sad or numb or indifferent, I am not really sure. But I felt that I should make a note of it – if only because life passes very quickly and you will never notice it as it goes. Everything is very uncertain and ephemeral, and you cannot predict where you are going to be one minute from now, much less years later. But you can remember where you’ve been—and for ten years, I’ve been here.

And what have I got?
Why am I alive anyway?
Yeah what have I got?
Nobody can take away..?

Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No, I Got Life

Comfort Yourself with the Savings

So on and off for the last ten years I have drunk Aveda comforting tea—because it tastes good and I like it. I always bought the apothecary-style jar of loose tea leaves, and I had a little strainer I could use to make one cup at a time. I am not sure how much I paid for it, probably too much because everything at Aveda is ridiculously overpriced, but it wasn’t expensive enough to stop me buying it. I don’t often drink coffee and I don’t really like hot drinks at all, so I don’t own a coffeepot, but this summer I got myself an iced tea maker from Target. You can use loose tea or tea in bags, and it’s pretty awesome, having a nice pitcher of tea in the fridge when I want something other than water or tequila shots to drink.

I stopped in Aveda a few weeks ago to replace my tea stocks, since I’d recently gotten back on the Comforting Tea kick and finished off all my stash of it here and at the office. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that they’d not only redesigned the packaging and introduced a tea-bag form of the tea, but they’d also raised the price to $24.00. For tea. For a jar of loose tea. Seriously. I mean, I have been known to spend stupid amounts of money on stupid things, but I know for damn sure I never spent $24 on a fucking jar of tea. I want to say it was $14 last year. Max. They had a box of 20 tea bags for $14.99 too (bargain! not.)

So I thought that they could keep that fucking tea, and comfort themselves up the ass with it, if the mood struck them. I knew from reading the label that it was basically a mix of peppermint and licorice teas, and yesterday at Dierberg’s I picked up some Stash Licorice Spice Tea for about $5 for 30 tea bags, and some Celestial Seasoning’s Peppermint Tea for about $3 for 20 bags. Last night I made a pitcher of tea using 3 bags of each type – and guess what? It tastes exactly the same as Aveda’s Comforting Tea, at what… 1/4 of the price or less? So fuck a bunch of overpriced mall tea made by a company that purports to be all earth-friendly and natural (and used to be, and was founded on those principles) but is actually owned by L’Oreal now and has drastically jacked up their prices and who knows what their business principles are now? Profit at any cost I would imagine. Anyway, if you don’t want to spend $24 for fucking loose tea, here’s an alternative for you. Comfort yourself with your spare change.

And Dear Aveda, No – I have not yet forgiven you for discontinuing Deep Penetrating Hair Revitalizer. You suck.

Where the Wild Things Are

Finally saw this movie Tuesday night and really enjoyed it. It actually tied into some themes I’ve been musing on myself lately, which made it more interesting. (Or perhaps these themes reached out and slapped themselves into the plotline just because they were tired of being in my brain – not the first time that’s happened.)

Not at all a kids movie from what I could see, I would think young children especially would find it confusing, dull or disturbing. But then again it’s been a long time since I was a young child, so maybe they’d see something different in it than an adult would. The monsters were pretty amazing, all fur and snot and a plodding kind of fierceness. That in itself must be enchanting to children.

The movie dealt with themes of wildness, relationships, loving someone so much you push them away, loving someone but being unable to tolerate them, loving someone and having them mistreat you, conflict resolution and rage and loss. And several of those things have been on my mind quite a bit lately—especially the idea of wildness, and whether we have space in our civilized adult lives to be loud and wild anymore. I know I don’t have much. Between my home with shared walls and my office and other public spaces, the need to be respectful of other people’s right to peace is usually paramount. Only in my car do I experience some level of freedom to sing or scream or just listen to music that gets as loud as I need it to drown out my own thoughts. Which is why I look like a total nutbag, belting out angry songs at the top of my lungs as I listen to my iPod on my way to work. But I don’t care. In terms of things I owe other drivers on the road, the ability not to see me singing  like a freak is not high on my priority list.

As far as love and rage and loss, all those things have been very heavy on my mind. Love is very hard. Families are hard. People are hard. Love can be destructive as easily as it can be nurturing. Obsession walks hand and hand with love sometimes, and obsession and wildness are the themes that came out in my writing for The Grand Conspiracy this week. What do you do when you love someone and they don’t love you, and those feelings can’t be made to go away? Do you ignore them, accept them, or do you rebel? Do you demand what you want from people, take it when they won’t give it? It’s our instinct to take what we want, what we can’t stop thinking of. But of course that isn’t permitted when what we want and can’t have is another person. But the instinct remains all the same. This piece is about someone whose obsessive desire for someone else rips through every polite barrier that society has constructed—and I feel sympathy for her, no matter how much she scares me.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind lately. I do not wonder why I can’t sleep.

Things that only happen to me

So, here’s what I get for trying to be responsible and organized.

Not actually my bedroom, but the armoire looks mostly like this. It matches nothing else in my home decor, other than a table that I am keeping in the closet and want to get rid of except I feel it's too expensive of a table to pitch in the dumpster. Does anyone need a Queen-Anne style coffee table?

Lately I have been on an organization-in-the-house kick. I think it’s because I have been staying in a lot more this month, due to the rain, or the darkness, or my friends being sick and broke, or me being unpopular or something. So while I am at home and it’s pouring down rain in the inky black of the outside, I organize things on the inside. I fixed my closet and noticed that I have a ton of clothes that I hate and need to dispose of. I made a pile of things on the floor that I intend to sort through and then throw away. Then I collected all my massive piles of random jewelry from the downstairs bathroom and the kitchen, and carted them all upstairs. I have a jewelry armoire in my bedroom, but I haven’t really been using it because I usually don’t think about what jewelry I want to wear until I am leaving the house, and I leave the house via the first floor, rather than the third. Generally.

So anyway, part of the whole organization kick involved getting all those necklaces out of the bathroom, and getting all those earrings and bracelets off the tray on the kitchen counter. And so I carted them all upstairs and arranged them in the armoire and now the kitchen looks much tidier. As I was arranging things in the armoire I naturally discovered lots of stuff I hadn’t worn in ages, and forgot that I had. One of the things I found was this Cycladic head pendant that I

This is not my actual pendant, but is remarkably similar. Sadly, I have no such beautiful backdrop bark or stone or other natural or man-made material in the vicinity of my house.

bought when I was in Athens. Now, that pendant is special to me for many reasons.

1) Because I like to buy a piece of jewelry from every place I travel to, to remind me of where I’ve been

2) Because I have a long-held fascination with all things Cycladic

3) Because when I was in Athens I actually bought this at a market and bargained the woman down. If you know me, you know this is not my nature and 10 years later I am still very proud of myself, even though she most likely still overcharged me. I bargained, dammit!

4) When I wear it people tend to comment on it, and then I can say “Oh yes, I bought this when I was vacationing in Greece.” in a very breezy and off-hand manner, thus satisfying my need for being a pretentious asshole

Anyway, I love this necklace

So I saw it hanging in the armoire and decided to wear it Tuesday night. Being  a person of a rather forthright and immediate nature in regards to my own personal wishes, I put it on and wandered downstairs. I played on the computer for a while, then went to brush my teeth because I had company coming over and I think it’s polite to expose my company to minty-fresh breath rather than whatever-I-had-for-dinner breath. As I gazed into the mirror while brushing my teeth I thought “Why, what is that shadow on my neck there?” and then I craned my neck for a better view and thought “What is that substance on my neck there?” and then as I wiped at it with ineffectively with my hand I thought “What the motherfucking fuck happened to my NECK?”

Then I realized that whatever (elasticated? wax-covered thread?) type of cord this pendant had been hanging from had been in the armoire undisturbed long enough to have experienced some sort of elemental breakdown, and was now comprised mostly of a sticky, tar-like substance that was currently coating my neck in a horrible black horse-shoe shape. I took the necklace off and set it gingerly on the counter. I noticed my hands were now coated in black sludge. I picked up a washcloth and scrubbed at my neck, to absolutely no effect whatsoever. I squirted soap on the washcloth and scrubbed at my neck quite viciously, to very little effect. At this point I began to panic, as my company was going to be there in 10 minutes and  A) I have an aversion to greeting company whilst coated in tar and B) This was not the kind of company to whom one might reasonably appeal for help in the scrubbing of one’s neck. ( i.e. it was not my mother.)

So I opened a drawer and found some eye makeup remover and poured that on the washcloth and scrubbed more at my neck with it. Finally some of the goop began to come off, promptly ruining my washcloth. I scrubbed and scrubbed, removing most of the gunk, and then I had to put my hair up and use a hand-held mirror to look at the back of my neck while I scrubbed that too. It took a really long time, and I got tar-like crap all over my hands and under my fingernails. It was gross.

The other thing you should know is that I have had a mystery neck-rash that flares up periodically ever since July. (the doctors tell me it’s Not Serious but they don’t know what’s causing it. I <3 me some doctors, for serious.) Of course this scrubbing in that area irritated my rash and then I looked like I had some kind of pox on my neck. So basically I was sitting there, eyeballing the clock and trying to get cleaned up before my company arrived and watching lovely itchy red bumps appearing all over it, all the while thinking that these are really the sorts of things that happen only to me. Really. I mean, I woke up in the morning with a significant pack of troubles already on my back, and then I ended the day inadvertently covered in tar.

I lead a very, very special life kids. I am not sure what the moral of this tale is, other than “Try not to be me, whatever you do.”

Look at my giant sad

It seems to me that unhappiness is an inefficient, cumbersome thing to have to deal with. There’s nothing you can really do about it when you have it, as long as the thing causing the unhappiness doesn’t change. It’s not like:

“Oh shit, look at this giant fucking sad on my face – better pop that sucker before it gets any bigger.”

or

“Dude, I am feeling really maudlin today, but I made myself barf it up and now I am feeling much better.”

OK there’s a little bit of:

“I was so unhappy, but I took this medicine and now I am better!”

but that’s only temporary and cannot cure you. Sometimes you just have a sad, and it won’t go away, and you can’t fix it and you can’t do anything with it sitting there staring at you. You’re just fucking stuck with it.

Perhaps it’s better to just wallow around in it until your fingers get all pruney. Perhaps you just have to let it absorb you, and then it will be satisfied and go away on its own. Or perhaps you just incorporate it into the whole of who you are and in some ways it stays with you forever. I don’t know, I don’t understand it, I don’t like it.

All I know is that it seems like a stupid waste of time, and it interferes in what I want to be doing, and how I want to be feeling. I resent its intrusion into my days and nights. I resent it poking at me when I do find five minutes of distraction. I resent it crashing down on my head every time I wake up. I don’t want to share my life with this sad, or any sad. I arrange my business to avoid feeling sad. I contort my whole world to avoid feeling sad. But sometimes sad comes barreling in anyway. It’s a huge pile of bullshit it what it is.

Also – Why hasn’t the gene for sadness and depression been Darwinned out of us by now? You’d think sad people are more likely to stay home not procreating, and also more likely to off themselves, so why does the tendency toward melancholy persist in our human gene pool?

Why, why, blah, why, all academic questions to distract myself momentarily from the big giant sad. And it worked. For ten minutes at least.