The Rub(ble)

In the office, editing a spreadsheet, I'm listening to a podcast to make the days tolerable, as I have most days since my favorite coworker left. It's an old This American Life, as I've listened to all the recent ones: this one, from 1996. An episode called "Get Over it." It's about people getting over things, break-ups and deaths so far in the episode. Ira said something in the beginning about how you can't will it to happen, you can't know when it's going to happen. He related it to a passage in the bible about how the date of Jesus' return will not be known until it happens.

Then, there's this really sad story by George Saunders, about a man trying to get over his wife's death, doing so by throwing himself into the caretaking of an old widow. I won't get too much into it-- you should listen to it if you find yourself with the time-- but it's a somewhat sci-fi/futuristic story (except evidently written in and set in 1992, so think "alternative reality" futuristic rather than actual futuristic), so the method that he eventually uses to get over his wife's death and help provide for the old woman is a little...Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind.

There's so many directions I want to go in reaction to this piece, all interelated, all could be part of the same "This American Life" episode: they all have the same theme. But, like in "This American Life", they are all different stories.

My first reaction, the one that inspiried me to write this, was to the little clip of song they played after the story. My ears perked as I realized I knew the song, but not well: something I'd heard many times, but in a relatively short period of my life. As I tried to place it, the irony dawned on me: the song was from a mix tape given to me by someone that I cared very much for at the time, who I forced myself to get over by not letting myself think of him or what we had.

The idea of forcing myself to get over someone-- of not just openly and vulnerably letting myself feel whatever I feel-- is generally so foreign to me that the whole process of doing it was not entirely unlike a real-life version of this story: I had a life to save, or a way of life: not just mine, not just mine and Zack's, but his, and his family's. I had the greater good to consider. So I, in the only time in my life I ever mustered the will to do this, forced myself just to not think about him or acknowledge any lingering feelings.

It worked to the extent that I don't even know how accurate what I'm typing is. I know that I was much more strict about the process than I'd ever been before or since, but I don't know if that's truly what I can attribute the success to. I look back now, and, I know full well that I had deep feelings for him, but it's not clear to me the exacts of how or why. It seems to foreign to me now. Would I have been able to shut him out had I not already been fairly far into the process of getting over him? Or was it the process of shutting him out that makes me feel like I was over him, I must have been, I don't even know how strong my feelings were in the first place?

The reality of this, like the memories of the man in the story, is now lost to the ether.


There was a point I wanted to make about how Dan and I used to argue over how good a movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was. I think, in the end, I made the point that there were far too many parallels to mine and Zack's relationship for me to find the movie anything but disturbing and sad. I forget my exact points...maybe I'll find and post the piece of conversation, sometime. I think it was mostly online.

I tried to write a post last night that somewhat related to all of this, but then, Dan came into the room. He was making a good-faith effort to check in with me before bed time, something I've asked him to do in order to help me to feel like we're really a couple, and not just a pair of co-parents who live together. I wasn't really in a good place to appreciate his effort though-- I'd been in a bad mood all day, and it felt, often, like he was oblivious to that.

The conversation we had, as is so often the pattern, started out benign, but quickly became a tour of all the different ways we fail each other as a couple: he often feels unappreciated, which is hard to combat, because, I often don't appreciate him. I often feel like he's disappointed in me, which is hard for him to combat because, in his words, "I think you try, I think you do the best you can. But I don't think that'll ever be enough to meet my standards."

So, there's the rub: I don't appreciate him, he's disappointed in me.

At least, it's part of the rub. I don't know how much of the rub it is. I don't even know if it's most of the rub, or the biggest piece of the rub. And I've said "rub" one too many times.

I'll end with what I managed to write last night before he came in and interrupted:

"I find neuroscience fascinating, and it's a fascinating time for it. They're doing all these image studies now-- using an FMRI to track the way a brain will actually physically change in response to events in a person's life. Actual, scientific evidence of the way a traumatized person's brain will respond to therapy, showing how parts that are overactive gradually become calmed overtime. Visual evidence to show that meditation strengthens pathways that allow one to access serenity. And whatever the third thing in my list would be if I were more well-versed on the topic. (I tried to look something up figuring, hey, a rhetorically satisfying list should have three examples. But then I got really bored, really fast. Evidently, I don't actually find neuroscience THAT fascinating.)

So, any neuroscientists out there, here's my suggestion for an experiment. Prove or disprove the following hypothesis: the brain changes after great heartbreak, making it actually, physically impossible to love the next person as much as you loved the first. Prove or disprove the idea that you'll never again feel anything like your first love."

So. A whole different piece of the rub. On with it.

Day Thirty

The last day of my thirty day writing challenge. I'm not going to miss it. Still, if I manage at least a paragraph here, and hit "publish", I'll have seen it through. A few of the entries were even not terrible.

I remember somewhere in there, I said that I'd feel some kind of satisfaction when I finished. Something about it not being super gratifying, but still, some since of satisfaction that I saw it through.

Actually, I think I just implied that satisfaction, in this case, would not really be satisfaction at all, but the avoidance of whatever negative feeling I would have if I didn't do what I said I would. Yeah, that seems about right.

It's a pretty empty feeling.

Writing isn't going to ever be what it was to me, all of my life, if I do it like this. If I try to fit it into some tiny chunk of time I have before I go to bed, knowing full well that every extra word adds to my growing sleep debt. If I have to keep myself level because I don't have the time an energy to get upset. If I have to avoid really getting into anything, really having any chance to process anything, because of that.

Dan and I got into something the other day-- I was pretty sure it was yesterday but now I'm thinking maybe the day before-- and sometime in the processing between that fight and the next (it must have been the day before, because I remember writing yesterday that we weren't actually fighting), I explained to him that I need for him to try to read my signals a little better, so that we can avoid me crossing a line of emotion after which I become useless for a while, after which all I can do is try to process that emotion.

That can be a very time-consuming thing. I suppose it feels like my posts are going to be subpar so long as I'm trying to avoid getting into this long, winding diatribe where I figure out some kernel of truth inside of my emotions. I'm not the type of person who can just open something up and then close it off again: once it's out there, it's staying out there. Until I've gotten something out of it.

Dan and I are fighting again. You may have been able to tell from my cheery tone. I suspect he thinks we're fighting because he disagreed with me. I suspect he thinks I'm mad that he disagreed, and that  he's mad that I didn't react well to that.

It's true, I didn't react well. It was one of those disagreements where the other person's position is so shocking and offensive to you, but only because they're you're partner. It's not that you couldn't respect the opinion coming out of a stranger or a friend or whatever. It's that, you can't see how you managed to find yourself in a relationship with someone who feels that way.

And yeah, I don't like that feeling. But I'm not MAD at him for it. That's not what I'm fighting about.

I'm fighting because, as I could tell that the conversation was getting me upset, I started to try to give him clues that it was, to prompt him to remember the conversation we had-- just two short days ago-- where I asked him to be aware if I'm getting agitated and pull back. I even said to him that I needed him to tread lightly.

I don't know if he tried. I suspect he would argue that he did. I don't know if I'd believe him if he said that.

Our fight the other day ruined the whole night, and then, last night was also bad, though not in a fighting way. So it was in this really desperate feeling that I couldn't possibly take it a third night in a row that I lost it and just interrupted him before the conversation could continue to upset me.

I wasn't tactful, I was just trying to get out of it before it escalated and farther. But then he snapped at me for disrespecting him or something like that. I don't know. Either way, he was demanding something out of me I couldn't give-- an apology or something like that. I can't do that when I'm not sorry, and I really, really wasn't. I don't think I am now.

There was something else I asked him to do, the night before last, something else he ignored tonight: I am sensitive. I do get upset. I am emotional where he is unemotional. I get triggered easily, very possibly a side-effect of the PTSD we both know I am suffering from, and when that happens, it can be hard to control my emotions, and his lack of ability to see that happening makes everything worse. So I asked him, the other night, to try, in the future, to cut me some slack when it happens. Let some things slide. Not take everything to heart.

The night I asked, he seemed to think it was a perfectly reasonable request. This evening, it seemed like he seemed to ignore it.

I walked away because there was nothing else to do. He wasn't going to get me to say "I'm sorry" because I genuinely wasn't, and I wasn't willing to let another night get lost in another fight.

Now we don't seem to be talking. A lot of times, I just think it's better that way.


Things were going...slightly better for a while. I don't know if it's that I was mediating for a while there, or if it had something to do with the fact that things were going really well with my job and I was happier than I had been, at least in that regard. Maybe it's something hormonal, maybe it's that I haven't been sleeping. Or maybe, just maybe, the difference him. It's not like he's going to be the one to volunteer that this could be something to do with his moods and state of mind, so I guess I'm going to have to.

He's down the hall and I can hear him typing on his computer, and it's going to make it impossible to sleep. When I fight with my partner, I can't really deal with the tension their presence brings me; I need to be as far away as physically possible. I can't live with someone I fight with this much.

We've tried fighting less. It's not clear that that's working. I don't know when the next phase happens.


Day 30. It's not pretty, but there it is.

Alright, people. I'll see you the next time I have something of interest to say. Hopefully in a few days or so.

On with it.

Day 29

Today is the penultimate day of my 30-day blogging challenge. "Penultimate" is one of those big vocabulary words that Dan likes to throw around whenever possible, which is a trait I find super annoying. It seems to be a family trait: I remember his brother once used the word "disaggregated" in some sort of casual, non-scientific, non-data-set conversation. A conversation where "separated" would have made a lot more sense, if I remember correctly.

His brother is a graduate of Yale Law. Really smart, really successful person. Clearly knows a lot of big words. But I think theres a little more to be said for knowing when not to use them.

Opening this entry with an attack on Dan's curious and pretentious vocabulary choices, however, is a misleading choice on my part, especially where yesterday's entry somehow meandered into rant territory about an argument we'd had. Dan and I are not arguing tonight. Tonight, I am suffering from a general malaise.

Or rather, I am suffering from a malaise most closely associated with some changes at work that I don't feel at liberty to write about freely in any context that might be tracked back to me, pseudonym or not. I don't think anyone's looking, but it wouldn't be particularly hard to figure out who I really am from this, or to find this if you were looking for things about who I really am. If that makes sense. Regardless, my work life has changed, very suddenly, and has become significantly less enjoyable and fulfilling for me.

I can live with this, except that enjoying my work life was a really important distraction from the fact that I don't really enjoy my home life.

I don't do well on any day where I don't get a good chunk of time sitting in front of the TV while eating: most nights it's dinner. Tonight, dinner got rushed and was sub-par and we ended up watching a particularly disappointed episode of the daily show: two of three, well, thirds of it were really disappointing, so, assuming the first, Jon-Stewart-covers-headlines-directly-to-the-audience part was fine, I probably got all of seven minutes of my rejuvenative food-TV ritual in, and it was heavily interrupted by both the baby and the dog. So maybe that's the real source of my dourness.

I suspect, as I so often do, a hybrid of things.

To salvage what's left of the very little time before I really should be asleep, I'll probably curl up with my phone and search the internet for some way to feel more interactive with Serial, the new spinoff podcast from This American Life. Are you listening to it, imaginary reader? It's so good, so addictive.

I don't want to waste my time explaining it. Just google it. Or better yet, just download the first 7 episodes, which are currently available. You have to listen to them in order, it's an ongoing story. I'm too tired to give you a hyperlink, maybe I'll edit in later.

Day 29. The penultimate day. If you were to disaggregate this body of work, you'd get 29 separate posts so far.

On with it.

Alchemy and Pretention

Having gotten a terribly piddling amount of sleep last night, I intended to go to bed nice and early tonight.

Then Dan and I got into an argument about something that wasn't really an argument, but activated all of my argument-nerves or whatever, and then spent an hour processing and discussing that, which then, inevitably, moved into another argument. And now, at midnight, here I am, with a post still to write.

Sleep. The first casualty of an unhappy relationship.

Part of me wants to go off in this direction: talking about how strange it is that Dan and I are this bad even when we're not that bad at all, and you, figuring out what the hell I mean by that. Talking about the point I was making about how he writes off a lot of my behaviors as abnormal when they're really just female, and then talking about how he gets frustrated by my use of "stereotypes" and "generalizations." Talking about how I honestly can't stand people who play the "stereotypes" and "generalizations" card: there are legitimate differences between (most) men and (most) women. These differences evolved from having very separate biological functions and everything that goes along with that.

By and large, the men in my life understand this and accept it as fact. There are many women in my life that don't. (I'm sure I'm misrepresenting them here. So, blah blah blah, sociology, socialization, insert their whole argument here. It's not an invalid argument. But it's my blog, and I'm the one who has to get to sleep, so I don't want to spend twenty minutes here playing devil's advocate in full, fair representation of a whole group of feminists who will never read this.)

My point, I guess, the point I was trying to get around to NOT making, is this: women and men are biologically different, for very important reasons. That biology is incredibly powerful. In this, and in all things, it frustrates me when people put on airs and think that we have somehow transcended our biology. We have not. We are animals. We are the sum of our animal parts, and we our driven by our chemicals and hormones and the instincts they create. Don't be pretentious: we are just mammals that wear fancy clothes and walk upright.

I am a feminist in so much as I don't think there is any moral righteousness in acting one way because you were born that way. But I do think that some things are fundamentally more feminine, and some things are fundamentally more masculine. Large emotional range? That's a pretty feminine trait, in my mind.


This is all totally separate from the only thing I actually meant to come on here to write, which was this interesting point I made about economics. Dan and I were in an argument-- or actually, in a post-argument discussion-- about money. He was making the point (roughly, and this wasn't the whole thing) that money is math, and that math has a right and wrong answer.

I made the counter point that money isn't math: money is economics. And then I made the point that I've tried to make to many people, many times, since I stumbled upon an understanding of it, somewhere during the first hundred episodes of NPR's Planet Money Podcast: Economics isn't solely  about money. Economics isn't solely about math.

Economics it about worth, it's about value. It's about what one will trade on one side to gain on the other side. I remember once that my uncle was saying that he would be willing to buy a hybrid if his company would give him an economic incentive for doing so. I told him that he already had plenty of economic incentive, beyond the financial, if he cares about the other benefits of driving a hybrid: namely cleaner air and water and earth and blah blah blah. (And yes, for the rare reader who might quibble here, I get that the environmental benefits of a hybrid are highly controversial when considering the production of the battery, etc.. Not my point here: stay on task, imaginary, haughty environmentalist reader!)

My point to my uncle was that economic benefit is not the same as financial benefit, because any and all positive effects of driving a hybrid might help to equal out the equation where he decides to spend more on buying one. Little to know, I was barking up the wrong tree-hugger: my uncle, it seems, votes Republican, and all the stunning environmental polices that go along with it.

But back to what I said earlier. I was explaining to him that money is not math, money is economics. It's not about numbers as much as it is about obtaining balance. It's about equivalent exchange.

Economics isn't math. Economics is alchemy.


I'm sure any future economists who wander into this post equally likely to nod in thoughtful agreement or vomit. But any Full Metal fans who stop by will probably be so excited they squirt their juice boxes all over their Pokemon cards, so I got that going for me. (Someone remind me to make a mash-up illustration of John Maynard Keynes with an automail arm. That level of obscurity would gain me some serious points with like, one Econ major in a suburb of Cincinatti.)

Either way, as I said it, it occurred to me it sounded a little profound. So I thought I'd write a post about it.

I, too, wear fancy clothes and walk upright. So sue me.

Day 28. On with it.

The Old Team

Tomorrow, I am meeting with my ex-coworker from my current job. I'm excited to see her, as she was the one person I managed to get very close to in my first three months of the job, and it would be good to make a go at being friends in earnest. But I fear what happens all too often: that the longer separated professionally, the less we will have to talk about. Ex-work relationships tend to happen that way.

I still hold a very dear place in my heart for everyone I worked at Borders with: it was, by far, my longest-lasting job, and I worked their from before the store opened till after the store closed. We had our fair share of scary-crazy types, and I had one too many run-ins with them. But overall, I felt that we forged a kind of family. Somehow, all of these years later, I still feel like that.

I wondered, the other day, what would happen if someone miraculously re-opened the store and everyone who worked their before worked their again-- like the way Nathan Fillion describes how quickly all of the actors from Firefly would go back if someone bought the rights to the show and rebooted it. Would I take the job back?

The short answer is that I couldn't possibly afford to, in the way I worked their before, and I suspect most of my co-workers on the same page. I like to think most of us are making at least a little more than we were then, though I know that's not necessarily the case for the salaried management. When I was a supervisor there, I believe I was making $10.45 an hour. When I quit management to go back to school and worked as a Bookseller, I think it got knocked down about a dollar-fifty. It's really sad to think of how many of my coworkers were making way less than that fairly miserable amount.

I make a living wage now-- nothing spectacular, but enough that I could support myself, modestly, if Dan and I were no longer together. (There's this whole rant about how frustrating it would be for me that Dan, who makes about the same amount that I do, would have it so much easier because he has no debts or bills thanks to parental intervention, but it's neither here nor there.) It probably won't be long before I begin to itch for more, but it's a decent living, or what passes for one nowadays.

If the fantasy Borders team got back together, I would definitely be on-board as a part-timer, though. At least one day a week, even if I did have to commute all the way back to Brunswick. It would honestly be so good for my social life just to be there again, with that group of people.


I had every intention of staying in contact with the old crew, and I guess I've maybe done better than most. I've gone out of my way to drop in on people like Holly and Jasmine, and stayed, albeit sparsely, in contact with Andrea and Bill on Facebook. Jim and I manage to get together for an hour or so every couple of months.

But, even still, we talk almost exclusively about the old days. How much we miss people. How great it would be to go back.  If we're still getting together a few times a year in ten years, will we still be talking about this one job we once had?


In my perfect world, Jim, Andrea and I would form a team to meet at a bar in Topsham or something for a weekly Trivia night. We'd invite everyone who worked at the old place and they'd show up whenever they could, fleshing out our team with a Tara one week and a Bill the next. A few good friends, a couple of drinks, and the weird amalgam of knowledge that one gains in working at a book store for years.

We'd be unstoppable.


Day 27. On with it.

Day 26

Apparently, November is NaBloPoMo, which stands for "National Blog Posting Month" or some such nonsense. The idea is that people who are participating are supposed to write a blog post every day in November.

Well, that's bad timing.

My final day of my thirty days of posting is slated to be over on the twelfth. Under different circumstances, I'd be tempted to keep going until the end of November in order to participate, but, honestly, this has been a truly frustrating journey. Yesterday's post is a prime example of what happens when you make yourself write when you have nothing to say and no desire to, which is fine if it's merely for the writerly practice of writing a little every day. But if I were going to buy into that "great writers write every day" garbage, I wouldn't do it publicly. I don't want people who wander onto this website to think I'm some insipid moron. Yesterday's post, and many others I've produced like it, are the blogging equivalent to instagramming pictures of your breakfast. And, I mean if your breakfast were really mundane.

And for the record, I don't think great writers (or anything else) necessarily do anything. I think different people achieve greatness different ways. And most people don't at all, I suspect.

As I write this, I am sick in bed and very much want to attempt sleep. I had just cozied myself and was shutting off the light when I realized that there was a considerable chance that my attempt at sleep would lead to actual sleep, given that I've spent the last 18 hours refraining from eating anything that might bother my stomach and running back and forth the bathroom, and then my streak would be ruined. So I forced my shaky, achy, hot-and-cold self to pick up the laptop.

The reality is, for me, forcing myself to do anything every day is doomed to eventual failure. I guess the question I need to ask myself is whether that's okay, something I can just accept about myself, or if it's a shortcoming stemming from my lack of self-discipline, that I should attempt to overcome for the good of, well, everything.

A question for another day, I suppose, when the threat of throwing up on my keyboard isn't quite so clear.

Day 26. On with it.

Uninspired Writing. I Wouldn't Bother, If I Were You.

I am not drunk. The Jolly Rancher infused vodka was not good.

There is some speculation that it would be improved by more Jolly Ranchers, since it seemed to suffer from insufficient sweetness.

Either way, I am once again suffering from insufficient sex.

Or, rather, not really tonight. This week has been such a clusterfuck that I am not really let down by the last of sex tonight. But, still, the pressure continues to build.

I've gained a couple pounds back of the weight I had lost when I was focusing more on exercise and less on everything else. I feel really badly about my body again, which I guess is good, since self-hatred seems to be the only motivation that really works for me.

Meditation has also gone, more or less, by the way side. I have been incorporating some of the mindfulness practices I've learned here or there, but I haven't really been sustained. I'm thinking more seriously now about combining the two goals and working with walking mediation. I guess the idea would be, 10 minutes of walking mediation, and then, after that, keep walking for another 45 minutes or so with an audiobook or something. The key is to let myself off the hook a little about the unsustainable exercise that I can't possibly do every single day. But I would like to start getting to the gym again, at least a few times a week.

My fear is that walking will only get me as far as maintaining my weight, and that I won't be able to lose anymore. What I want to do is lose five pounds at a time, then take lengthy maintaining breaks in between. I'd rather not deal too much with the frustration of plateauing.

This whole post feels useless. No one will want to read this, and, more importantly, future me will not find this interesting, either. I'm going to end this one short. Let it just be what it is: day 25.

On with it.

Sleep and Intimacy

There are a lot of reasons why Dan and I don't sleep together.

• We're both large people, so a queen bed really doesn't cut it for us.
• Our pre-sleep habits clash. He likes to watch videos on his cell phone while he's lying it bed. That either throws off my ability to sleep, or whatever it is I'm trying to do. Which sort of lends itself to...
• I really need to be functionally alone as I'm falling asleep. When I was with Zack, this was accomplished by the fact that he fell asleep easily and was a very heavy sleeper. Lying in bed next to him was not significantly different, most of the time, from being alone. This is very different with Dan, who will be awake next to me for a very long time doing his own (usually loud) things, and then continue on to be a relatively light sleeper.  I do a lot of "processing" in bed at the end of the day, and I being around a waking person for this is extremely unsettling for me.
• He talks in his sleep. It should be said that this has only been an actual problem fairly rarely. But where sleep is at a premium now, between the baby and the dog waking us up and both of us needing to wake up early, I imagine it would quit being cute very quickly if we still slept together.
• At current, I just don't feel intimate enough with him to sleep next to him.

The biggest problem with this last thing is that it's a very vicious-cycle kind of thing. I feel like, it's clear to me, that sleeping in the same bed would be a big part of building intimacy. Negotiating every night about who is going to sleep on the couch, and then adapting my own habits that make me feel single...those do not build intimacy.

And it genuinely does make me feel single. The not really having sex thing, the fairly common fights and misery...those, I'm pretty used to in a long-term relationship. But sleeping alone, as far as I'm concerned, is the mark of not being in a relationship.

The most frustrating thing about this is that I don't particularly want to change it. If it were just the "no intimacy" problem, I might be able to force my way through it. But those other problems on that list? They're real problems. They're real problems that I don't think have a very good solution.

Yeah, okay, we could eventually buy a king bed. I've tried, before, to enforce a "No Cell Phones In Bed" policy, which he is not okay with, but a variation could be attempted. But I don't know how to get past the fact that I can't go work through my mental pre-sleep ritual with someone awake or sleeping very lightly beside me.

So I want us, in theory, to be closer. I don't want to feel single. I don't want to spend the last part of my day alone, because it makes me lonely, and sad, and it makes me wish I was with someone that I was actually with. But I don't actually want to sleep with someone who sleeps like him.

For Dan, I don't think this is a make-or-break issue. He's much more independent than me. I think he'd like for us to sleep together, but I don't think it actually changes his perception of our relationship that much that we don't.

It's become clear-- and a point of some significant resentment for me-- that what we have now is very close to Dan's ideal relationship in many ways. I feel like we barely spend time together. I feel like I'm learning how to be a single person for the first time in my life. But for him, this much interaction is what he wants. He sees no reason to spend more time together, or to check in more with each other.  He knows I'm unhappy, he knows my needs aren't being met, but for him, that's all that's wrong.

This angers me greatly, as does the realization that, if we ever have a functional relationship, it'll be because I've given up on the kind of relationship I want to have. I will adapt to being functionally single, and that will put him right where he wants to be. He's in a relationship when I'm not.

I don't know if the level of frustration is coming through, but it is literally making my head spin to think about it. 

For me, the more independent I am, the less I care about him or our relationship. And the better I get at spending time on my own, the less he realizes that I don't want to be doing it. And the less I don't want to do it, because I'd rather be lonely and watching Gilmore Girls than fighting with him.

Which, maybe the adaptation is complete. Maybe I've figured out how to thrive as a single person. But I don't want to be single. I want to be in love. I want to be intimate. I want to sleep next to someone.

Some days-- any day where I look at it carefully enough, really-- it just all feels so fucking hopeless.

Day 24. On with it.

Fight or Flight

Today was a particularly bad day. But not in the normal way.

My normal bad days consist of stress that builds up and wears me down until there's possibly an explosion, or until I wish for an explosion. Babies crying, dogs barking, work piling up, trying to get something in that matters to you but having to give up on it because there's just no time, energy, point. Fighting with Dan because that's what stress does to you, it literally puts your body in fight or flight mode, and flight isn't an option.

Those or my normal bad days. They are more days than not, at least on some level.

Today was a...helpless, sad bad day. Today, there was nothing I could do about the results of the election, all of which were sad and disappointing. There was nothing I could do about the funeral of the woman who died who I mentioned a few post's ago, or the man who loved her walking around all day in his black suit. There was nothing I could do for the coworker that I am close to will no longer be working with me. There was nothing I could do about the news that my parents are both experiencing medical concerns. And there was nothing I could do about the fact that Zack may no be flying out here for Christmas, due to budget and schedule constraints.

So I was just sad.

No barking dogs, no crying babies. No work that I cared enough to stop from piling up. No ambition to accomplish anything that I didn't end up being able to accomplish. I had no responsibilities, no duty to fight. I was just sad.


Tomorrow, things will likely go back to the normal kind of bad. At work, I will have to help with my coworker's responsibilities. Politically, the numbness will subside and I'll feel like it's time to start fighting again. The baby will cry. The dog will bark. I might feel so overcome by my sadness at Zack not being able to come for Christmas that I start scheming up ways to pay for his ticket.

It will all be stressful. It will all get my heart pumping and my adrenaline racing. I will be fighting for my life.


I guess, at the moment, the helplessness feels like respite. Nothing to do, but just be sad.


Day 23. One week left. On with it.

Election Day

It's Election Day.

I'm tired, like always, stressed, like always. A little bit sick, and I don't feel like going to bed. All surmountable, with regards to my writing an entry and getting one step closer to completing my thirty days.

But the fact that Paul Lepage is currently in the lead in the Governor's race...well that just makes one want to give up.

A few years ago, before the do-nothing congress and the culture wars, I considered myself independent. Liberal, of course, but someone who would be willing to hear out a politician of either side. Someone who believed that good ideas can come from anywhere.

Nowadays, it's just an all out war, and you're either one of us or you're one of them. Nowadays, I fill out my ballot by looking for the (D).

I like the idea of a political spectrum, with moderates on both sides and, you know, probably a few more political parties, to boot. I like the idea of being able to have a serious conversation with a fiscal Republican without wondering if they're secretly homophobic.

There are Republican ideas I can get behind: I think it's probably time to adjust the Social Security age. (That said, I would want the Medicare age lowered, or eliminated. I wish we all had access to Medicare.) I have a coworker who considers herself Republican who, though she hates Lepage, supports a law he enacted (proposed?) that mandates a food stamp recipient work at least a part-time job. She and I discussed it and I agreed that if they would accept volunteering in lieu of an actual job (as there may not actually be enough jobs), it's not an altogether bad idea. (I do acknowledge that it's more complicated than that, but I understand the point.)

Paul Lepage, though...I don't have the energy to talk about all the ways I hate him. All the ways...a lot of Mainers hate him. (I really want to say "most." But, at the moment, it looks like at least 48% of registered voters think he's just swell.)

The bitch of it is that his democratic opponent left a House seat to run, and that seat is now also looking like it will be lost. Which is a shame. I really liked the democrat running for it.


I'm going to go to bed now and hope the tables have turned in the morning.

Day 22. On with it.

Jolly Rancher Omens

Tonight's post, I think, shall be a list of thoughts without much fanfare.

-The baby, who normally breaks records for being the most pleasant and likable child, has been a terror today. Probably not by normal baby standard, but, spoiled as I am, I have had trouble controlling the urge to scream at him. It's probably related to teething or some such. I don't know. He's been waking up at night lately, a habit I had thought for a while was blissfully gone. It's not. Blargh.

-My stomach is not great right now. I've been taking this grass-based superfood stuff in a glass of orange juice every morning. It gives me a lot of energy and I crave it despite it's questionable taste, so that leads me to assume it is very healthy. It's also giving me very healthy amounts of excrement, along with stomach cramps to match. I think the problem is that the fiber and healthiness of the superfood clashes rather poorly with the rest of my diet, which, often, consists of Arby's and greasy chinese takeout-- probably at least one or the other four days out of five. I am on the toilet right now.

-Dan and I are in the midst of a conversation about what's going to happen to replace my phone, which has recently suffered from a mildly cracked screen. This one of about 6 ways that it's somewhat broken, including it's speakers that had melted deodorant spilled into them (It's a long story) and the data chip which stops working randomly, and is malfunctioning more often than not. This is coming at a frustrating time, because I was to be getting an iPhone 6 for Christmas. The details of this are too frustrating to list, but basically, we can't really afford it now, and we won't really be able to afford it at Christmas. But part of the reason that we can't afford it is that getting a new phone means getting off of my shared plan with Zack on T-Mobile, which doesn't work super well out here. This is one of the few remaining holdovers of my marriage to Zack, and the crux of the thing is that Zack has been paying my cell phone bill largely by himself for some time now. Switching carriers is both a practical and moral necessity, but it also comes with the high cost involved with paying for one's own things. This cost, incidentally, is the reason why Dan's parents currently still finance most of the things in his life.

-I am now off of the toiler.

-That last point, or rather, the one before that, brings up this frustrating problem: Dan is not currently financially independent from his parents in almost any way. They currently pay for his cell phone, his car insurance, his health insurance, and all of his clothes via a Kohl's charge card that he carries and they pay the bill for.  They also help pay for Ezra's daycare. The idea-- at least for me-- is that as we gain the ability to afford it, we slowly take over these costs to gain independence. The frustrating thing about this is that, for the foreseeable future, as our income goes up, our standard of living will not, if all goes as planned. We'll gain some modicum of independence, but little else. Which, I like the idea of independence. Really, I do. I just hope I like it as much as all the stuff I'll be missing out on.

-Dan and I started a batch of Jolly Ranchers-infused vodka tonight. The plan is to drink it this weekend. The secondary plan is to get drunk and finally manage to have sex. This depends largely on it tasting really good. I'm counting on you, Milton Hershey!

-I had to look that up just now before I could finish the sentence. I had no idea that Jolly Ranchers were made by Hershey's. Dan and I went to Hershey, PA, once on the way to or...from somewhere. I think on the way back from visiting his dying Grandmother in Maryland. That same trip, we went to DC and somehow decided that it would be fun to visit the Holocaust Museum! Woohoo! Hershey was sort of our little way of saying "Okay, seriously, we need some, like, singing cows and chocolate after all that Jewish sadness." It was a very pleasant little side trip from the days when we were still very happy together. Perhaps this is a good omen.

-My laptop is about to die. Day 21. On with it.

History, Endings, and Pink Socks.

I'm reading a few posts on Emily's Wordpress blog. Emily's always been a good writer, but her entries lack any sense that they are about to end. It must be a really freeing way to write, actually: just talk about what you feel like talking about and then ending when you're no longer interested in saying it. But I would hate it: when I can't find a way to end my posts that feels at least slightly like closure from something earlier in the post, I find it utterly unsatisfying.

Emily is my best friend. When I started this blog, I defined my best friends as a group called "The Fab Five", which consisted of, I think, Emily, Jeremey, Jeff, Elorza and Andrew? Is that right?

Yes. That's right. I just confirmed by searching for posts that reference them, and found one where I introduced them by writing a no-holds-barred account of their flaws. This was one of the six posts I wrote on the first day of the blog (day meaning 24-hour-period, not the way I've been defining it for the purposes of my thirty-day-challenge.) The idea was that I had decided that "my new blog site MUST have Harriet-the-spy-like integrity!" and that anyone who was going to get offended should just "get out!"

What an interesting choice I made, so early on. To go after everything with this rapid integrity, despite all costs. It says a lot about me then, and it says a lot about me now. It also says a lot about why I stopped writing for so long: as an adult, it's not as easy to live your life hanging everything out in the open for anyone close to you to see. It got a little challenging when I heard that some of the staff of my high school was reading my blog, and a lot more challenging later, when my husband's mother started reading it.

I had a nightmare a few weeks ago wherein Dan had told his mother about the existence of my blog, and she started reading it the way Zelda had in the past. I remember feeling utterly betrayed, like I wasn't going to be able to talk about our relationship at all, or work through any of the things I wanted to work through.

Privacy has always been generational for me: I'm pretty open and honest with the people in my own generation, but not our parents, or people we perceive as authority figures. Of course, 13 years after the initial post, I am now an adult, and the generational lines are a lot more blurry.


If I had made the decision, that first day, to be a little more...political in my writing-- to use a pseudonym, as I do now, or not to go into the worst of the worst about my life and relationships, how different would everything have been? Certainly, my High School life would have been a great deal different, as certain run-ins with this blog created a great deal of upheaval in my life. My marriage might have been different had I not been airing mine and Zack's troubles for all the world to see. 

But different goes both ways. It's possible that being as honest and open as I was there, as I've always tried to maintain at least some semblance of, well, it's possible that, without it, I wouldn't have been able to cope with all of my feelings, or to process everything. To figure out as much about myself as I have.

Now that Dan and I have such a bad relationship-- something I say here, openly, because of the tradition of honesty in this blog-- I often wonder if he's actually in love with me now, or if he really only ever loved what it is he used to see in me, back when circumstances were very different. I often ask him exactly why he loves me, since he seems to be very insistent that he does. One thing he often lists are my metacognitive skills. Honestly, I didn't even know what that word meant before, but now I do: I understand myself, and the things I do, and the way I react, way better than most people. This is helpful, because even when I'm being freakishly awful, I can usually call myself on it.

That doesn't stop it, mind you, but I know what I'm doing. It comes in handier than you might think.

He's right to appreciate that about me, as it's something that I'm grateful for, in myself (I'm making an effort to use that word again. Making an effort, here and there, to practice the art of gratitude.) Would I have those skills if I hadn't made that choice, that first day? Would they have developed the way that they did?


As I've been writing this again, I've wondered when, along the way, I added my little closing phrase-- maybe it's the existence of that phrase that forces me to write differently than Emily, to wind things up neatly. I don't know.

Turns out, it was there from the very first post. I don't know if there were any along the way that didn't use it, but the first week of the blog, every post ends with "On with it." Initially-- and I had forgotten this-- the habit was to write something like "My name is Linda, and _______. On with it!"

Some examples from that first week:

"My name is Linda, and I am wearing pink socks. On with it."
"My name is Linda and I am a cosmo girl (when I'm not a Maxim Man!) On with it!"
"My fucking name is Linda, and I do not know, or believe in, anything. On with it."

As you can see, quite the range. I think I kept the "My name is Linda, and..." format for the first...six months to a year. But the "On with it", well...that's gone on for quite a while now.

My name is Linda, and I have no memory of those socks. Also, it's day 20. On with it.

Echo, echo, echo....

"I'm not being clear." He says, and he looks frustrated for a while before he turns to me and says that he's going to bed.

We were having one of our conversations that winds its way through a hundred topics but always lands on one of the places where we fundamentally disagree. And then we get stuck there. And there's no satisfying way to resolve it.

I'm sick of arguing with him, fighting with him, or even just talking with him, because it never ends in a way that's in any way satisfying. When we argue, we don't even learn from each other anymore-- it's the same tired steps to the same played out dance. When we fight, we can't find a middle ground that gives us respite. And if we're having a conversation that's neither one of those two things, then one of us is probably boring the shit out of the other. He's talking about football or Magic Cards or skiing, or I'm talking about work or Zack or how unhappy I am.

Neither one of us ever backs down from anything. Neither one of us ever really relents. I get angry about things he disagrees with me about, and he gets condescending and self-righteous.


Things have been tense lately because work has been tough, and, at home, our free time has been severely cut into by cleaning the house for an inspection from our landlord that happened today and lasted all of five minutes. So there's that. I've also had, I suspect, some hormonal surges related to my period, though they really haven't seemed as extreme as years past, owing, in part, to this horrible birth control implant in my arm which seems to have leveled off the back-and-forth of my hormones with flooding me with waaaay too much of just the one...but that's a rant for another day. So there's that. All of this has left me without the time/will/peace of mind to meditate (and yes, I get that that's exactly when you SHOULD be focusing on meditating), so that has thrown me out of the Zen I was slowly building for myself.

So, yes, I know that this weekend was a little atypical in the serenity department. Still, I think the basic problem is that there's not enough goodwill between us to create a buffer: I am not getting what I need from him in order to afford me any patience. He feels attacked to often to not be defensive.


I have these goals now that are supposed to be about working towards some sort of improvement...of my situation and of ours as a couple. But the list of priorities has gotten totally muddied: exercise, meditation, writing, intimacy. You can probably trace them through the process of going from clear to utterly incomprehensible. And by now, it's clear that the only thing I'm on track at all to do is to get to my thirty days of entries.

Which, you know, is a nice idea. But what does it really get me? Unless these entries start becoming heavily laden with life-altering epiphanies during the home stretch, I doubt this little exercise will have done any more than dust out a few cobwebs.

And yet, I guess I do it because I have to, because it's part of me. Otherwise, each of these entries would be the two paragraphs that I actually intend to force myself to write when I finally force myself to open the laptop before bed, and no more. And yet, see how they grow.

So, maybe the cobwebs are blocking something that needs to get unblocked? Or maybe the sound and the feel of my fingers on the keys is more meditative for me than mediation itself. Writing mindfully would, I think, be a bit hard for me-- the idea of mindfulness being that you focus on the here and the now and any thoughts that pass through your head have no judgements attached to them-- but, I don't know. Maybe what I'm doing is close enough?

I hear the words in my head as I write them. Maybe I am being mindful in focusing in on that sound.

Nope, on second thought, that is not is not it. If I try to actually listen to the voice as I write, it gets really off-putting really fast. Oh, hi me? How are you? Echo, echo, echo...


So. Writing every night is not a priority in 11 more days. But what is? Is meditating, to gain the ability to focus and quiet my mind more beneficial to my relationship, by giving me patience and calmness and, somehow, understanding? Or is it more important to exercise, so I can feel good about my body and get the endorphins flowing? There's this whole process I could start working on in order to develop intimacy-- which is probably not at all what you're thinking, but I'm not going to share. Should that take precedent, since the missed opportunity of having sex every weekend throws me off of my priorities? Or is the body confidence a better route to that? What about the quieted mind thing? Surely, intimacy would be easier if I could actually relax...

I don't know how to stop this carousel. I know that I'd probably be better off if I picked one and stayed with it for a while.

For the next 11 days, I can feel alright it I manage to get this done-- I mean, not good, not even better, but...like I did one of the things I said I would, anyway. After that, we'll see if something else manages to fight it's way out of the crowd and distinguish itself as the next priority. Maybe that's a fight I'll be able to tolerate, unlike all the other ones around here.


Day 19. On with it.

Parties, Judgment, and Death.

Today is Halloween. I've never been a big fan.

As a kid, I think it was because things related to death made me very uncomfortable. I had stronger reactions to death than most children, I think. I postulate that this is because when my grandfather died-- I was very young at the time, perhaps 6 or 8-- my father, who was with him at the time, called my mother to tell her, and I picked up on the extension and heard the conversation-- my father panicked and speaking barely incoherently into the phone.

I remember, when my father's mother died, several years later, my parents both came into my sister's room where she and I were playing and calmly sat us down and explained what had happened. I remember asking, through a few tears, if their was cribbage in heaven, because my Grandmother loved to play it. I remember them laughing and saying, "If there wasn't before, there is now."

If the first time had been more like the second, I probably wouldn't have spent several years of my life utterly terrified of death and all things related: gravestones, caskets, and all manner of halloween decorations. But it was not that way.

As an adult, the reason I never grew to like Halloween is that it seemed like it was the one night a year where all of my friends-- even the usually extremely socially anxious ones-- had parties to go to, and I (we, really, since it was always me and Zack) did not. We tried one year to go to a college party that friend invited us to, but it became clear to us very quickly that we had never developed the correct set of social skills to make it enjoyable.

There were a few teenage years where it was mildly appealing-- going trick or treating with friends who were too young to party and too well-behaved to make trouble. But my attempt to relive that when Zack and I were first together was met with a lot of judgement and scorn from the people whose doors we knocked on. It really soured me for the whole thing.

I also really dislike giving out candy. I don't mind watching it, seeing the trick or treaters, but being as low energy as I am, the constant up-and-down, the interruptions...I find it all very frustrating and tiring.

So taking Ezra out-- albeit, only to like 6 houses-- was a nice change of pace this year. There are few things that have been as good about being a parent as they are advertised, but the relief of any sense that I should find an event or party to go to on Halloween was nice, as was having a convenient excuse to be out trick or treating. Some people in my hometown really go all out, with the spooky lawn decorations. Now that I'm old enough to appreciate it without finding it-- well, not scary, but unsettling, shall I say-- it's really quite a scene to behold.


I guess nothing deep tonight, except, you know, the grandfather's death making me a nervous child thing. Oh well.

Day 18. Happy Halloween.

On with it.

Happy Wife, Happy Life

Have you ever heard the saying, "Happy Wife, Happy Life."? It's this idea that some men-- generally older-- will relate that a man's happiness, being a simple thing, largely hinges on his wife's happiness, which is much more complicated. What they will tell you is that the sooner you learn to just say "Yes, Dear", the better your marriage, and overall, your life, will be.

While I don't think Zack actively subscribed to this theory, much of the time, he essentially lived it. Zack was a very unselfish person, due to low self-esteem. He didn't seem to believe that he deserved anything, and so he spent very little time wanting for anything. Because of this, he largely let me have what I wanted, whether it was the decision as to what restaurant we were going to eat at, or how things would be arranged in the kitchen, or something I wanted to buy.

Zack and I had a lot of problems-- a lot, a lot. But I do sort of think it was this principle that was a big part of why our marriage lasted as long as it did.

Many men-- and women-- find the "Happy Wife, Happy Life" concept to be downright insulting. That a man who learns to defer will always feel resentful and controlled.

I'm not saying it works for everyone. I'm not even saying it works for anyone, all of the time. But what I'll say is this: I'm reasonably sure that it's what I want, in the long run.


Dan does not subscribe to this philosophy. He has a very strong distaste for authority and craves an egalitarianism in our relationship that, I don't know. It's not up my ally. I suspect-- more than suspect, really-- that he thinks it's morally wrong that I don't want to be on exactly equal footing.

What I would say to him-- or to anyone who found this whole concept to be offensive-- is that it's fairly well accepted that some people lend themselves more to a follower role in life, and some people lend themselves more to a leader role. As someone who generally thinks of themselves as a leader-- and I understand that most people do, even though the natural state would be that there would have to be more followers-- I find it fairly frustrating to be in a relationship with another leader.

I'm not at all sure if my relationship with Dan would have been appealing at all if we hadn't first met in this very clear leader-follower dynamic: I was literally his boss at his first job. That only accounted for the first six months of our friendship, but for a long time, things sort of adhered to that. He was younger than me, and often asking for my advice about things. He admired me writing and, often, my knowledge. When things first started to get romantic between us, he very much stayed in this follower role that, I think, was a big part of why things worked. I feel very confident in the leader role, and I felt very happy asking for what I wanted, or walking away when I wanted to.

I think it's Dan's perception that I'm the one whose done all the changing in our relationship, which is why we haven't been able to maintain the happiness we felt when we were first together. For the most part, that's probably true: I have changed more than he has. Or at least, I have shifted from one side of my personality to another more than he has.

But a lot of that has been in response to his more or less sudden demands to be treated as an equal partner. I get it-- it's one thing to have a fling where you play a subordinate. It's another thing to live like that forever.

Never the less, his "leader" side is coming out. And anyone will tell you, two leaders is a recipe for disaster.



I work now in marketing at a Retirement Community. There's this man there who has this girlfriend that lives there-- I don't know how long ago they met or how long they've been dating. Their apartments were down the hall from one another. They live in assisted living, so neither of them is a completely independent person, physically.

I've spoken, a few times, to the girlfriend, but he is a very quiet man. Basically the only words I've ever heard come out of his mouth are asking about her, saying he's waiting for her, telling me where she is. I don't honestly think he's completely all there anymore, but it's like what's left of his mind focused on her as his only concern.

He's very smiley. He's quiet and smiley and he follows her around quietly and smiles because he's with her. Tries to buy her lunch even thought the staff is supposed to make sure they keep their money very separate.

Since Dan and I started getting back, I came to this place, emotionally, where I couldn't really stand the idea of love. People in love are frustrating to me. Movies about it are a waste of time. Love songs are just lies.

This man and this woman...it's the only relationship I've seen in a long time that has made me think, "That's what I want."


She had a stroke last week. She's had several, so at first it seemed she would be coming back from the hospice facility she'd been moved to. Now, it's clear she isn't. The rumor circulating today is that she may have already died.

The only thing I really know about this man is how much he loves her. That might be the only thing left to know about him, unless you'd known him from earlier in his life. And now, she is gone.

I haven't worked at this place very long-- three and a half months now-- but there have been a half dozen deaths. This is the first one to hit me really hard. This is the first one leaving something behind, this way.

Something understated. Something special. Something I wanted to have one day.


Day 17. On with it.

Like an Albatross

Last month, for Emily's birthday, I wrote her a song. She says she liked it, that it rivaled her girlfriend's gift to her (which was a very expensive long weekend in New York). Just now, I was thinking about it, and I wondered if she'd written an entry about it in her old LiveJournal that I always forget to check.

Turns out, about a year ago, she posted in her LiveJournal about how she's now posting in a wordpress: http://loneliess.wordpress.com. I think it was about six posts ago now that I pointed out how I feel inferior to wordpress users, but I'll say this: Emily has jumped around to, like...four different blogging/journal sites since high school? I've written a few others here and there, for different purposes, but I've stayed loyal to this site. I like that.

I like to think that me and this blog have a relationship the way I have relationships with so many of my friends: maybe those relationships don't always get tended to, but they've lasted, nevertheless. Through the good, the bad, the sometimes years of neglect. They're still strong and meaningful today.

It's a sticky wicket, though, to figure out if that's really true.

In some cases, it's demonstrably not. People who my communication has fallen totally off with, to the point that I've even deleted them from my Facebook wall, or vice-versa. (It's so weird how this totally modern invention, this website that I barely even visit anymore, has become, somehow, the bottom line of whether the bonds of friendship are still at all intact.) 

But then there are people like Jeremey and Elorza, both of whom with I have 15+ years of friendship, and both of whom I feel like there's been an understanding, in the past, that that's not really going anywhere, even if we don't talk for months.

Jeremey, right now, I feel pretty confident about. He will still occasionally text me, apropos of nothing on my end, with some incredulous rant about a Buffy the Vampire scene. Or he'll stick a song lyric on my wall. I told him that I was pregnant about 6 or 7 months in and invited him to come meet the baby, and he did, a few days after Ezra was born. All in all, I think it's solid. I'm sure whichever one of us dies first, the other will manage to be at their funeral. To make some kind of snarky eulogy.

Elorza, I don't feel so clear on. The last time we exchanged any back and forth at all was the day Ezra was born, I think. I texted asking if I had the right number, and he emphatically texted back that I did-- even without my identifying myself or specifying that I was looking for him-- and that he had seen pictures of the baby on Facebook and..."congratubabylations!!!!" was the exact word.

Oh, and apparently he wished me a happy mother's day. So THAT was the last time we talked.

Two days ago was his birthday. I knew it was his birthday because, you know, we've known each other for 15 years. I didn't have to wait for Facebook to remind me-- except I wasn't completely, 100% sure. So I puttered around for a while without texting him. Then later, I noticed on Facebook that he was thanking everyone for the birthday wishes. Somehow, that took the wind out of my sails.

I find the Facebook birthday thing kind of frustrating. By and large, I know my friend's birthdays. I don't need the reminder. But since I HAVE the reminder, I have no way of really being distinct from the pack of people who respond to every single birthday that comes up on their newsfeed with some generic wishes.

This year, I took my birthday off of Facebook about a month before it hit. To, you know. Give the real friends a fighting chance. I don't really have a lot of use for birthday wishes from someone I was in a play with in 9th grade, anyway.

The moral of the story, as meandering as it is, is that I don't really know where Elorza and I are. I know I still love him. I trust that, in some capacity, he feels the same way. But I don't know anything about his life anymore, and he knows very little about mine.

I think part of it is that he became a friend of both me and Zack, in a way that no one else really was. Elorza was like Zack in so many ways...they shared self-destructive habits and thought processes. I remember, once, when I was talking to him about the upcoming divorce, I said to him, "He's so much like you. You wouldn't want me married to you for the rest of my life, would you?"

He, of course, said "no." In this instance, I took at as a complement.

I feel guilty about this, but I probably shouldn't beat myself up. If I remember correctly, in the last few years, I've written him a few e-mails that went unanswered, despite him always indicating that he'd do his best. I remember asking him what was going on in his life, and getting little to no reply in return.

I feel like, suddenly, I'm very worried for him. I think, in my mind, lately, I've made him into a healthier, happier person than he ever really was. I think he's doing fine but...he IS just like Zack. And Zack is doing fine, I guess, most of the time.

I don't know. I should try again with Andrew. I should try harder with Jeremey. I should reconnect with dozens of people with whom I had long work relationships and budding school-based friendships. I should know where Emily is blogging in any given year. I should tell some of these people I'm writing this blog again-- that's really who it's for, in a way: the Elorzas and the Jeremeys. People who I really want to have know what's going on in my life, even if we can't talk as often as we used to so I can tell them.

Back in the day, I think both of them read almost every entry. Today, I really doubt that would be the case.

Emily had a reference to her "BFF" on an entry in her blog. I honestly don't know if that's me. I can't, for the life of me, think of who else it would be, but it's honestly just too embarrassing to ask.

I suppose that Emily is my best friend now, but it's been sort of a revolving cast. Obviously, the Jeremeys and the Elorzas don't really qualify now. But what about Jeff, who I still see fairly often (if not recently, due to a back injury of his and, you know, a baby of mine.) What about Zack, who is probably the most important person in the world to me, and can't be technically classified as anything but a friend anymore?

Emily, Zack, and Jeff...they're not BFFs. They're family. Plain and simple. And I guess Jeremey and Elorza are too, just...more cousins that you see once a year, rather than brothers or sisters.

Ugh. It's midnight. I don't know what my point is, but I've been writing too long. 

If you're out there, Jeremeys and Elorzas and Emilys and Jeffs...I love you. Obviously. Wherever you are or whatever your doing, I'll be at your funeral if you're not at mine.

I mean, unless I actually die first but you're, like, out of town or not a respirator or something. I don't know. This isn't the delicate ending I was hoping it would be. I'm feeling a little bit albatross-y, here.

Day 16. On with it.

Things I Don't Have Time to Know...

I'm thinking about things I don't know. The Google Doodle today seems to be honoring the work of one Dr. Salk, and I know that this is something that somewhere in the recesses of my brain I used to know, at least vaguely.

The obvious answer is to click it and find out, spend some time learning more. But I don't have time. Not if I want to get my daily dose of writing in, in addition to everything else I did today. Namely: work, care for the baby, care for the dog, continue on a project to clean the smelly carpet, shop for a carpet-cleaning spray and some other basic grocery things while I was there, and finish fixing this problem in a video I made for work that I just couldn't do at work because of our crappy video software.

That video...I don't want to get into it, but it basically killed me. Tomorrow is the presentation it's needed for, so, whatever happens...I am done tomorrow. I lived through it. Suck on that, video-scum!

I'm not making a lot of sense. I'm a bit punch-drunk. It's been a busy day.

I'm watching through The Gilmore Girls again now that it's on Netflix (I even managed to get in part of an episode today, while I was waiting for Dan to come home with Pizza), and I continue to be hounded by the feeling that if I looked up every lightning fast reference they made, I could become quite erudite in a matter of months. Literary references, historical figures, pop culture gems-- the episodes are jam-packed. I would be nigh unstoppable.

I feel similarly about crossword puzzles. When I was getting into a little habit with crossword puzzles (back when I had an android phone and therefore access to Shortyz, an irreplaceably excellent app if you're into crosswords), I attempted to make a point out of reading the wikipedia page of at least one clue that I did not have the answer to every time. Of course, I was unemployed at the time, and not yet a mother. So I had time to entertain such noble dalliances.

It didn't make a ton of difference, though, I suppose. I doubt very much I remember anything I learned from those entries. Read once, and without context, they just didn't have an anchor in my mind.

That's the problem with looking up Salk or various Gilmore Girls references: I might have time to read a sentence or two, or a paragraph if I'm lucky. But I don't have time to learn the context that would allow me to understand the importance or give it any meaning for me. The other day, I attempted to trace on of Michel's insults to Kirk by looking up...I don't know. Friederich Something? I figured, from the context, that he was probably a somewhat notable Nazi.

Turns out...he was! Maybe something to do with scientific experiments? Brazil? I don't know. The point is, I didn't learn any more from the exercise than what I pretty much guessed from the context.


It's frustrating to me that I can't go back and look up who Friederich-something was and re-read at least a bit of his wikipedia page so he might become more to me than just an anonymous Nazi. It's frustrating that I only play dumb crosswords now so that I don't feel guilty about the world of knowledge that I don't have. It's frustrating that I don't have time to find out who Salk was, and why there is a kid in his Google Doodle holding up a sign expressing some sort of appreciation.

But the reality is that it's 11:21 PM, and I keep promising myself that I'm going to get to bed before 11. I keep promising myself that I'm going to get to work by 8:30. I keep promising myself that today is the day that I'll get enough sleep, wake up on time, have everything laid out. Go to work, be productive, come home. Be a good mother. Meditate. Exercise. Write.

And yes, I could cut out the Gilmore Girls and the dumb crosswords in favor of learning who Salk was. But THEY don't judge me.


I acknowledge that I'm totally losing it.


Remember yesterday when I said that I do most things for the "satisfaction" of relieving the guilt of not doing them? Well, then, fine.

Jonas Salk discovered the Polio vaccine, apparently. Dude, I totally did know that. Isn't he's the one who refused to patent it because he believed a discovery that important should not be used to get rich off of?

Come to think of it, I think I totally learned that from a crossword puzzle. Bonzai!

Now let me go to bed, already, you oppressive, imaginary force.


Day 15. On with it.

I Can't Get No...

I am disinterested in today's prompt, which seems more a prompt for a sci-fi/horror short story than it does a blog post. So I guess that's not my inspiration today.

I am sore. I exercised yesterday, but not today, not officially: today, I spent the bulk of my after-work energy de-stinking a room in my house where my dog has taken to peeing if we're not around. Our landlord is coming in for an inspection in a few days, so it's pretty critical that it not smell, but more than that, today, I simply could not get used to the smell. There's that whole febreeze (I think) commercial series about how people who go "nose blind", which is clever advertising. Normally it takes me a few minutes to overcome whatever smell is happening in the house-- with an old, fat dog who cannot clean himself properly after going to the bathroom, and a baby, complete with diapers, there are plenty of them. But today, I couldn't get over it.

Dan would say that the sizable amount of moving, bending and lifting I did in the room to clean both rug and the floor underneath it (necessitating that I move nearly everything out of the room first) would count as exercise, and the ache in my joints tells me he's not entirely wrong. My retort to him would be that I don't get any real satisfaction out of exercise unless I break a considerable sweat.

When I say satisfaction, I don't mean the rush of endorphins that cause you to feel great and powerful after a workout-- a "runner's high" or whatever the elliptical equivalent of that is. I rarely feel more than just the faintest effects of endorphins. Really, what I mean by satisfied is...no longer feeling this persistent guilt that I didn't work out.

This is a running theme in my life; that, lacking any meaningful satisfaction, I instead assign the word "satisfaction" to something that is probably more closely related to "relief." Just...getting rid of whatever negative thing was associated with not doing something.

When I post something here that ends up being unexpectedly well-written or enlightening or both, I feel the actual satisfaction that I get, at this point in my life, only from accomplishing something creative. When I post this in a few minutes, I'll feel the other kind of satisfaction; the, "alright, now I can go to sleep" satisfaction. In other words, very nearly nothing.

However, the point of this post, as so many before it, is to continue my streak. At the end of the thirty days, if I've managed to post every day, it's very possible I'll feel that real satisfaction, that I set a goal and stuck to it. And, you know, that some of it was passably good.

So it's exercise enough to keep my writing muscles sore. Which, actually, I'm not sure why that's a good thing? Maybe the better word, though it doesn't fit the callback, is "limber." Or maybe my mind is getting old, much the way of my poor knees.

Day 14. On with it.

True Colors

Today's writing prompt:

Local Color

Imagine we lived in a world that’s all of a sudden devoid of color, but where you’re given the option to have just one object keep its original hue. Which object (and which color) would that be?

What a strange question.

As far as I'm concerned, there are two ways to go here: either something personal from my life, that I've had for a long time and that has always been very important to me, or, alternatively, something of great public importance, like a work of art.

Sitting here, trying to think of something I've owned since childhood, I realize that there just aren't that many things. The blanket that my childhood dog died on is what I consider to be my most important material possession, but it's a fairly bland color scheme-- red, with a sort of plaid black and yellow. I could live without it being full color, and, in fairness, I don't know quite where it is.

There was a pillow when I was young that was, to me, a security blanket. It was called "Pilly", and the pillow case on it (which is what made it so special, though I'm told it went through many iterations as it got worn out) was a brilliant, satiny pink. The material, I'm told, was made from old curtains of my grandmother's, though even as I type that, I feel compelled to check my facts, as it's impossible to imagine curtains being that pink and shiny. I don't know where it-- "she", the way I thought of her then-- now, though she's gone in and out of my life a few times since childhood. Every now and then someone would find her in the attic and she would become part of my daily life again, for a while, though in a much more passive way. My mother put her under the Christmas tree, once: one of her classic re-gifts to take advantage of our nostalgia in order to a put a few extra packages under the tree in lean years.

I don't know how many more times in my life I'll think too hard about Pilly-- if I never see her again, I won't miss her particularly, I guess, though perhaps it would be a good idea to dig her up again and give her to Ezra, my son, for Christmas.

Either way, if I ever saw her again, and she were not that same, shining pink, I think it would be far too much to handle.


The option, of course, is to be magnanimous. I suppose great many people would choose a great work of art as their one object-- especially if they lived in the cities where those works of art are stored, as any photographs of them would not be in color any longer. But if I were the one person, or one of only a few, who were given this option, I would probably go with something famous and beloved. My personal favorite painting is Jack Vettriano's "The Singing Butler", but it's so modern and...I don't know, broadly appealing to the point of being almost commercial, I would't feel right.

I've never particularly liked Monet, but if I had to pick one famous painting, I guess I'd go with one of the large water lilies, with the canvasses that take up the whole wall. Again, they've never been particularly to my taste, but they mean so much to so many. And I honestly can't think of a single painting that would be less effective in grayscale.

Personally, I far prefer the Mona Lisa, all beguiling and understated on her small canvas in The Louvre. But, as is the way of a great woman, I think she'd be capable of holding her own, despite the change. Women have been getting by with less for generations, and she's been watching the whole time.


I wrote a song about Monet-- or inspired by his art, at least-- the other night. Dan and I had just gotten into a fight and I came upstairs to give him space, as I am learning to do.

The gist of the fight is that he is constantly making it clear to me, in one way or another, that, although he loves me, he'd love me better if I were happier. We first got together under such different circumstances-- I was a happier person, maybe. More productive, perhaps.

Probably neither, really. But when we were first falling for each other, none of that was his problem. He only saw the version of me that I became when I was with him, far away from my everyday life.

That angle of that person, who lived under those circumstances and felt, albeit intermittently, those things...that's who I fell in love with.

Dan and I have our problems, and I know that a lot of them start with me. But I can't help but believe that a lot of them come from this sense I have that I'm a constant disappointment to him. That I can't live up to what he thought of me back then. That he doesn't...really love me.

"To you, I'll always be a Monet:
So beautiful from far away.
But when you close in to undress,
I'm just a great big mess."

The rest of it is suitably high-minded and unrelatable to anyone with a below-average knowledge of art history, but I hope to get a piano part written within a few weeks, and get it recorded. Dan has mixed feelings about helping me with a song that's basic theme is that he doesn't love me for who I am ("But our love has a tainted core/I'm just a painted board.").

Still, he will do it. He will help me. He is my partner in song-writing, and, somehow, in everything else in life. Whatever kind of painting I am, whether I'm a messy impressionist piece or the Mona Lisa herself, he's the stalwart patron of mon petit musée. For now, he is living with my true colors, whether he wants to or not.

Maybe we can speed up this whole black-and-white thing, and give he and I a fighting chance.

Day 13. On with it.

Super Chicken

Today's Prompt:

Masks Off: We’re less than a week away from Halloween! If you had to design a costume that channeled your true, innermost self, what would that costume look like? Would you dare to wear it?


I know the clever answer here is some kind of metaphor:

"My mask would be a chicken because inside I'm so deeply afraid."
"My mask would be a mouse because I feel so small and insignificant."
"My mask would be Donald Draper because I'm such a Mad Man."

The reality is, when I imagine my true inner self, I only picture it with my face. Maybe it's because I like my face-- most of the time, and as opposed to the way I feel about the rest of the features of my body. Maybe it's because I'm unimaginative.

I think it's because I live my life as a truly open person, when it comes to the people I care about. I don't hide much, I don't hold back anything, and when I'm manipulative or deceitful, I know I'm being manipulative or deceitful, I chock up to it: sometimes while still maintaining the affect of the manipulation.

I lie pretty freely to people I don't care about, or people with whom the terms of my relationship is dictated by societal rules, in some way: family, in-laws, bosses. But I don't lie to the people I care about, whom I've chosen; not about anything significant. And in as much as I treat my imaginary audience here as if they were, collectively, an entity I care about, I don't lie here, either.

I might recite the lies that I tell myself, but you can't fault me for that, if I buy them. I don't know any better than you do.

When I'm with the people I love, I demand of myself absolute, vulnerable truth. The guiding tenet behind this policy is that I assume that any love based on a lie would falter if the truth were told: people who love me based on an act do not love me at all, and their affection becomes useless to me.

I need the love of the people in my life too dearly to risk fearing that it's based on false claims. So I tell the truth; sometimes, exhaustively. Often, to neither my benefit, nor theirs.

It's both brave-- to be completely, unfalteringly yourself despite all costs-- and cowardly-- to be so very afraid of losing love.

So I guess I'll take a superhero chicken mask? The bravest poultry of them all.


Ugh. I so didn't want to dignify that prompt with a real answer. Day 12. On with it.

Things I'd Like to Do...

I don't think I'm going to use today's prompt from the Daily Post. Firstly, I've realized that the whole website is built around Wordpress users. This makes me feel left out when I participate in the prompt but can't get a link back, and also furthers my growing insecurity that having chose blogger over Wordpress a billion years ago, I have missed out on some degree of streed cred...or, web cred, I guess? There's just something about a Wordpress site that makes you think, "Man. This blogger is the real thing."

Secondly, the prompt is called "Out of Breath," and it's all about describing "the busiest, most hectic day you've had in the past decade." Honestly, that just feels like a really stressful thought experiment. Maybe all this mediation is getting to me, but I don't feel compelled to take the time to attempt to remember which day out of the past ten years ranks as the most stressful, and then relive that stress.

Suffice it to say, I'm sure it fell somewhere in the timeframe when I was in my final quarter of my Associate's Degree, juggling a full course load which included a portfolio-building seminar that culminated, very time-consumingly, in an art show put on by my class (and a twelve-page paper), a 24-30ish hours-a-week part-time job, an internship that was supposed to be paid (and therefore replace the job) but turned out to pretty much not be, about 7 hours a week worth of commuting, and all of my responsibilities at home.

You can tell it was hectic because of how long that sentence was.

Still, I guess it really was more hectic than stressful...or at least, no matter what it was, I look back on that time fondly. I look back on all my time at SMCC fondly, as probably the best two years of my life. There were pitfalls, sure, but I was pursuing something I was passionate about, bettering my life, meeting new people, and really just feeling this sense of empowerment: I was learning how to do things that I previously would have hit a total block in attempting to do. Something like, "I better not attempt this, I have no idea how."

In a lot of the art classes at SMCC, you just did it, it wasn't any more complicated than that. I wish a little more of that had stayed with me.

That quarter in particular, though, I have a special fondness for, probably because I simply didn't have time to be overly broody. My time was divided up between all these different things, with all these different people in all these different place. I'm busy now, too, but I'm pretty much either at-work busy or at-home busy. God, I'd really love to take an art class right now. Even if it wouldn't pay off for a long time: just, start saving up nickels that might eventually buy me an airline ticket to somewhere great.

I genuinely don't think that's in the cards for me for quite a while, though. I am enrolled in school right now, though not in any classes this semester, but it's an online degree. Communications, or something broad and useful like that.

I like communications. Marketing. I like that it got me the job I have now. But I wonder where I would be if I had decided to go to the Maine College of Art or a USM art program right after SMCC. I wonder if I'd still be pursuing the dream I went to SMCC to get closer to: writing and illustrating my own children's books.

In my mind, I'm still going to do that. But I'm eminently aware of the fact that every day older I get without actively working towards it puts me one day closer to a future where I've accidentally just driven right past my chance. I tell myself, it's cool, it's something I will get to. But then I ask myself: Will I really?


I've had a thought poking around for a while that an interesting way to start breaking into illustrating wouuld be to take some of the best posts from the history of this blog and do an illustrated version. Again, something I sort of vaguely intend to do. But...you know, maybe I should just...do it.

It feels intimidating, like something I maybe don't know how to do anymore. It's been a long time since I spent any time on my art, and it's not like I was super good at it in the first place; I never claimed to be. But I do remember my instructor, Jeff, saying that I had a really refined since of narrative in my art. He thought I should go to Vermont to get my Bachelor's in this college that had just launched a Comic Arts major. Talk about Street Cred.

Jeff is the type of person who makes you want to be cool. He's this incredibly gregarious, multi-talented, funny and smart person who you just want to impress, even years after the last time you talked to them. One of the reasons I'm really interested in recording a Scrumgirl EP is so that I can, apropo of nothing, send it to him. I'd love to go down to First Friday in Portland some time in the future and have him say, "Hey! I listened to that CD you sent me! It was great."

Anyway...I'm getting meandering. There's this new RSS feed reader that seems to be distributing my posts to a small group of people. Maybe you're one of them, or maybe they're all bots. But if you are one of them, and you'd be interested in seeing some illustrated posts, shoot me an E-mail, or leave a comment maybe. Let's see where this goes.

Day 11. On with it.

Derogatory and Arbitrary - 10 Minute Free Write

As I've been struggling to come up with fresh, new material for my daily posts, I've decided to enlist the help of a writing prompt. I expect I won't do it every day, as there may be days where I actually have something I'd like to say. But for today, I am using the prompt on http://dailypost.wordpress.com, which is, today, "Ready, Set, Done: A Ten Minute Free Write."

So, you know. That's helpful. Okay, with that introduction done, I'm starting my ten minutes...now.


Oh good. The first thing that comes to mind is blankness. It's a bit ironic that the day I go looking for inspiration is the day-- apparently they do the free-write weekly-- where there IS no real prompt. But, okay, fine. The time limit will help me.

Dan and I had this whole conversation the other night...okay, it was really just an exchange-- where we we talking about how long my posts take me. I was, yet again, complaining about how overwhelmed I am by the many things I have to get done. He made the point that it's not like I can just pump out one of these long-ass posts in 10-15 minutes. I told him, yeah, actually, I'm pretty sure that's how long it takes me. Somewhere between 15-30 minutes, anyway. He seemed a bit flabbergasted by that.

(I want to take a moment here to point out that I'm pretty sure part of the idea of a free write is "free association-style" writing. As in, I am going faster and less methodically than normal, and it's probably coming out sounding somewhat...god, what's the word? There's a word. And here's where I would normally take like a twenty minute break to look up the word.

Frenetic! That's what I'm looking for! Man, maybe this free write helps my brain work better. It would normally take me a really long time to find a word I was looking for. I should escape the parenthetical now.)

There are a couple (several?) words that I have that trouble with over and over again. I've thought about carrying them around on a little list, it happens to me so often. (I know I'm referencing something that was previously in the parenthetical, which is a no-no for a parenthetical, and totally defeats the purpose of the parenthetical. Just go with it.) One of them, I know, is....derogatory. Which, okay, the way that happened right now. I was thinking that I could only ever remember one of them when I go to remember it-- not just the word itself, but, like, what the word it is I tend to forget...I'm not making since. I want to slow this down and make it make sense.

I know there are two words, at least, that I can never remember. But as a general rule, when I go list them, I can only think of THE CONTEXT and DEFINITION of ONE OF THEM. (Those should have been italicized. I don't like this free write stuff. It's stressful.) Whether or not I can actually remember the word itself is a whole separate matter, but I can only remember the surrounding information of the words I struggle to remember one at a time. So I was pretty sure that the word I was going to remember this time was...the one in Good Will Hunting. The one where he says "Drinking coffee is as _____ as eating caramels." Arbitrary. It's arbitrary.

But, just now, I was certain I was going to be able to remember that arbitrary was the word I usually forget, but as I was trying to think of the actual word, the OTHER word came to mind. It didn't even come to mind, it came to fingers. It's almost like I've typed that sentence too many times before: I always forget the word derogatory.

So, there you have it. Derogatory and Arbitrary.

Hey! There's my timer!.

--

Goddamn. That was awful. I mean, I'm sure it got some cobwebs out or whatever, but I got really hung up on trying to explain that whole "remembering what words I forgot" thing. I have no idea if I did it well...I suspect not. I'm not going to go back and re-read now, I suspect the urge to edit would be overwhelming. And I was supposed to be "ready, set, done." The done thing being the important piece.

I will spellcheck it, though, as it became clear to me during that that I'm not at all sure what the correct way to spell "derogatory" is. Oh, look at that. I got it write every time. Not so lucky with "parenthetical" though.

Day...10? I think 10. On with it.