TV Turn off Week and other Basically Useless Information

Oops. The author of this blog found out about TV Turnoff Week two days ago. I could have benefited from turning that piece of crap off sometime after my second episode of Friends. A conversation later in the evening consisted of "What did you do tonight?" "I watched TV..."

http://readymademag.com/blog/2007/04/24/forget-your-regularly-scheduled-programming/

I got to ride in a car today with a stranger who told me that I could do anything. He said, "I can tell you are going to do well, because I can tell that a lot of people love you. And the measure of success isn't money, it's friends." Maybe not so eloquently, but just as kindly.

We talked about hiking and art and Colorado and happiness. He was one of those people that plops into your life for a very brief minute and you think that there must be a reason, that this must be some ones way of guiding you towards fate. If it wasn't for the check engine light in my car I never would have gotten a ride from a little retired man, intent on sharing his kindness. I never would have had reason to stop and think today, "Yes, I can be happy, and I will be, I already am."

Alternately I received an email back from some graphic designer in town I had sent a "thanks" to for some advice he posted on the web. He wrote back, interested - maybe I should be his intern? After eight emails back and forth he decided that I wasn't worth the effort because I told him I wasn't planning on going back to school. He said:

"J (as though he knew me well enough to drop the last five letters of my name)

Real world skills will keep you as an admin assistant forever. If you want to design, design. And the ONLY way to do that is with a solid foundation by way of education...Will assume you are young and still trying to figure things out.

m (as though he were simply to busy and important to remember his own name)

At first I was flustered, embarrassed that I didn't have an education. I tried to think of a response that would be apologetic but somehow show that I was still good enough. A few hours later I realized that the proper response is not apologetic. It should not be flustered or embarrassed. I have done with my tiny bit of education more than a lot of people do with a full one. I am talented. So I wrote back:

"M (because he does not deserve the respect of a title)

When I speak of real world skills, I mean real jobs and real clients. The attitude that I can only achieve my dreams by getting a mediocre education will indeed keep me as an admin assistant forever. Thinking outside of the box and creating something from nothing will get me where I want to be and I have no doubt about that. Being an admin assistant, for the time being, will keep putting food on my table."

It wasn't perfect, but it was enough of a "Fuck You" to remind me that I don't need arrogant designer types lingering around to tell me I'm good enough. I already know that I am.

Seems strange that there can be such an array of strangers that flow in and out of your life each day. From cold to inspirational, in the swing of an hour. But what makes this life worth living is those connections. Those beautiful fleeting moments that we get to share with the people we love over dinner and a warm chorus of laughter, those moments of awe "Can you believe??!" that replace the moments of sadness and grief, trouble and hard times.

Fingers laced through mine tapped out a George Michael song that I remembered from a drive into the desert with my mother. I was a child in the backseat, wondering. And then suddenly he was smoothing the wrinkles of my fingers and I knew. Can you believe?? It has already replaced the trouble and sad, hard times.

Note to Self

When you are under great scrutiny, do NOT under any circumstances, knowingly admit to forgetting something someone assigned to you. The proper answer here is "I'm just starting that now!" (Obsequious smile, pivot, and exit before rebuttal).

Get better at this. You are NOT a fuck up.

The Way of the World?

From Philly.com

"If you go down almost any street, the chances are good that you'll find a person who has a gun on them, or has easy access to one."

The triggermen are often teens and young adults who are loyal only to themselves, Dambach said. Homicides are often the results of arguments over such trifles as bicycles and girls, not hotly contested drug turfs.

"The things that normally people would have had an argument over now escalate into shootings at the drop of a hat. It's disconcerting," Dambach said.

"There's a distinct loss of a value for life. It's been trivialized, and you don't see [shooters] having any remorse for what they do. They don't have a larger picture of what they're doing to their community.

What I wonder is, what is it REALLY going to take for things to finally change?? Scary world our there...

That being said

...GAH. I still want it to be him. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be US in the sunlight reading the newspaper. I want to get a house somewhere and buy a puppy. I want him to move with me in a year or so, get his masters from UPenn, or Drexel or anywhere there. I want him to make music and get his songs played on XPN. I want to take the train into New York on the weekends and to have our wedding in my sisters backyard. I want to fly his nephews up and take them camping with mine. THIS is what I want. I was it to be perfect, sweet. I want nothing less that everything.

I think, maybe, if he wants this too we can make it happen.

Impatience Isn't Virtue

I just want to know that everything is going to work out. I feel like a little kid, squirming in the waiting room at the dentist, knowing full well that I didn't brush my teeth and I am in for a scolding. I am trying to do everything right, play by the book, be supportive and patient, oh so patient as a saint.

But my instict is to shake it up. All I've ever know how to do is cut and run when things get hard. It's easier that way. If I just push him away then I will know what to expect, I will be prepared for the pain. I can wrap my mind around the thought of him leaving, never speaking to me again, hating me for all that I am not for him.

Or I can hold him in my arms and know that it will be forever. I can lay his sweet head on my chest and draw my fingers over his brow and make love to him, soft and slow. I can awake to the thought of puppies and reading the newspaper together on Sunday and the sun drifting through the tiny holes in the curtains.

But I cannot grasp the limbo. The being stretched over the canyon of doom, fingers slipping. Is there a net at the bottom? Is there a pillow of soft feathers, a cocoon of cotton to envelope us? My sister would say "Put your faith in the Lord", because that is the answer for everything. But God is tricky that way, because he doesn't make it easy to put your faith in him. Its a test, constantly a test.

I didn't go to church yesterday, I told him it was because God let me down, but he knew it was because he let me down. I did not want to think about sitting in a church full of families, happy babies crawling across their father's laps, young couples sitting reverently with their hands intertwined. I didn't want to look at all the grandmothers doting on their entire extended family, and me there alone, again. I am exhausted from the aloneness.

And yet I haven't given up yet. Maybe it's some kind of masochism. How much longer can I keep up with this?

Bad Poetry

How a Catholic Loves a Southern Baptist

There are no words to describe his
Slow like Sunday
ways.
It was the beginning of a love,
At once tender and fierce,
That made me shudder with fear,
with anticipation,
Quiver
with joy.
He did not speak in a language that I understood.
He spoke in real time,
with plans and
actualizations and
logistics and
rationality.
It was as if we came from two different planets
and we may as well have –
me from the cooler mountains of the northern solar systems
and he from the languid, brown muddy river south.
There was no way I could have known how it would shift me
Re-arrange my atmosphere
in that certain way his arms can
when they wrap around you and hold you tight.
It was too tight at first,
and then later - not tight enough.
When I crawled into bed to tell him I would die for him
he rolled out of it,
leaving the sheets still warm,
the shadow of his formidable form
lingering on the wall.
Two planets,
out of orbit with each other.
And then one Sunday,
amidst my guilty ever penitent fellow sinners,
I realize the distinct difference in our
celestial patterns.
I learned from my church
St. Jesus Mary and Joseph Ask for God's Forgiveness
much about talking,
growing,
feeling,
expressing ones feelings
exuding feelings
so that my extra terrestrial feeling-ers
had a strangle hold
on that tall, silent
sweet face.
with storm blue eyes
a boy’s scruff of chin hair
a man’s kind, kind heart
and the deep south bleeding through his veins.
It had changed his genetic makeup
so that he could not understand the touchy
feelers
wrapping their slimy emotional fingers around him.
It turns out
that all along
we've just needed a Babel fish.
We’ve needed a mediator for our impractical languages -
Not impractical, except when spoken to each other -
We needed John the Baptist
Mahatma Gandhi
Judas
to tell us that all along
we've been speaking the same language.
Just in tongues.

Bring down the fire from the mountain
And drag that asteroid across the whole galaxy
in a flash of brilliant orange light
in the middle of the perfect blue
day time sky.
May we rest scattered like stars for all of the other
confused and frightened
spinning planets,
longing to exist
as one.

The Church of Coffee and Cigarettes

My grandmother was just diagnosed with Lung Cancer. This is a very weird thing to me, as I've never met her, and to be honest had never heard of her until a few years ago. Now she is dying. I feel obligated to meet her, to call her, to quit smoking.

I'm down to one a day, but not without much anxiety and a very thin skin. I have taken to eating sweets and drinking more coffee. This is counterintuitive, I know. I am jacking myself up on sugar when what I really want is to a moment of spinning, head cloudiness. I am addicted, and I’m not really sure I’m ready to stop.

I smoked my first cigarette my sophomore year of high school. I wanted to be part of the crowd that got to hang out with my crush at the time. I took to spending time at the coffee house he worked at and walking in the cold down the alley from the school with the other girls who went to worship him.

This was the year I fancied myself an ‘artist’. I thought I was a poet, even sending anonymous love letters to that senior with the shaggy hair who wrote for the school newspaper. I wrote furiously, sketched dark little sad girls on all of my notebooks. It was the first year of my life that my singular personality identified myself. The year before I had my first long term relationship, losing that girl in a swirl of ‘love’.

I wasn’t a particularly adventurous teenager, but that cigarette felt so daring in my hands. I remember smelling its nicotine sweetness on my fingers the whole night, wondering if my mother could smell it too. I didn’t care, I suppose. I would stretch it as far as I could.
That year was the year of my first drink – gin and tonic, chased with a Mickey’s. I started to learn about music and playing my friend’s guitar. The girls I was hanging out with were a year younger than me but they were more rebellious. They were popular in the circle we called “The Back Alley” at school. That was where you went to smoke cigarettes and get invited to illicit parties that would have drugs and booze and no parents. It was a foray into a land I had never before been interested in.

The cigarettes lead to a party with liquor and my first smoke of pot. It lead to Denny’s sitting across from the object of my affection as he playfully explained the way to look cool while smoking a cigarette. There would be nights with that boy and his friends at Mountain Roasted Coffee, sitting on the cold metal chairs and stuffing our hands down our own pants to keep them warm between puffs. The talks were existential, though if you had asked me what that word meant I would have said something like ‘intellectual’, because I had yet to school myself in anything too far from my Catholic upbringing.

There was open mike night at that corner bar / coffee house. They had a keen smoke shop, but that wasn’t the first time I noticed him. I noticed him in the spotlight, making his guitar sing in a way I did not know a guitar could. His voice was rich, like creamed coffee. He played a version of “Gloria” that I have never heard since. We passed each other in the door way as he came in from his smoke break, just about to start his set. I was wearing the sage green dress I had made myself. It was too tight and too low cut for my still budding body, but I thought he might notice me in it. I remember that night he put his cigarette in a hole at the head of his guitar, and when he played he was engulfed in a ring of smoke.

My whole fourteen year old life was wrapped around boys, the thing that would get me noticed, the smoke rings I could form to ensnare them. I wanted so badly to be a part of a world that, to me, was something like the beat poets and the cubist movements of the 50’s and 60’s. It was right on the edge of daring, but creative and passionate - things that I would always find myself right on the edge of.

Years later I still find I associate all these things together. Coffee, cigarettes, existentialism, companionship. Longing. Music. I prefer to smoke when it’s cold (I guess as the winter days I began) but also discovered a pure joy from drinking old coffee late at night, chain smoking and typing furiously to a strain of instrumentals and words sung low and sad. It has become a sort of religion for me. A way for dirty meditation, altering my brain chemicals to move at just the right speed to push my way into the circle of the creative, passionate people I still long to be like, denying that I may just be one of them. I give worship to late nights and brief flights into my blurry, creative side. I say pay penance for the sin of polluting my body, and I thank the God of Coffee and Cigarettes for not forsaking me yet. Doors to this Church will always be open.