bad news first

I thought I was going to let this blog die. It was getting too boring trying to maintain people's privacy and then a whole bunch of things happened that I desperately needed to write about. Instead I wrote many emails, addressed to people, rather than just posting things blindly to people who don't follow me anymore because I don't post consistently enough. Then I realized I'm not really writing for anyone but me. Even if I haven't posted in months, I do occasionally go back to try and remember a feeling, a time, an event, for reference. I like this blog. It's mine, and I don't want it to die until I consciously want it to, not because I just couldn't figure out how to make it work.

I have to say that this year started off on a very shitty note, and that it got better, amazingly better. I have gotten better at staying out of trouble, but sometimes bad things just happen and I'm glad that I had the know-how of how to feel better. I got a haircut. I spent time with my family. And Marido kicked me back to yoga. All of these things helped. But also, this blog helped, even though I wasn't writing in it. I looked back at a time--actually it was also New Year's, a new year that got off to a shitty start, and it gave me strength. I have been through bad things before.

Some good things have happened though, too, and they were so welcome after the bad. I guess it is better to get the bad news first. One of my short stories got an honorable mention in a fiction journal. And things with Marido, after being very hard, became better than ever. My writing has been going really well. I am slowly getting the hang of balancing the things in my life that are important to me--it's a work 32 years in the making.

This is a shitty post, but it is better than nothing. When I look back on this time, I want to remember that I was trying, not that I wasn't doing anything at all. Above all, it's not that I've been too busy to write. Writing is what I do. Sometimes I'm bad at it, but I do it anyway. That's what we all do.

And risotto. Yum.

and that was april.

April was the month that I hardly wrote anything at all. The one blog post I seriously considered was negged by Marido as an over-share (sorry!) and the fact that I am counting a blog post as writing at all just goes to prove my theory that April Is The Most Unproductive Month. Period.

More than once, I sat down to clear my head by writing and what poured out of me was hauntingly dull and familiar, bitchings about my lack of employment, the feeling that my life is getting away from me, watching everyone around me couple off, get serious, make plans that increasingly don't involve me. I didn't even have to think about what I was writing, because it's a script that has played out what seems like every other year. But I don't stop and think about these things as much anymore because they're boring, and I know they will pass. This week I received one baby shower and three wedding invitations in the mail, and last week two of my good friends got engaged. I wonder what goes through your head when actually sit down and commit yourself to something, to someone, and then I realize that it's not one moment, it's a series of moments, the way I commit myself to writing a novel, as crappy as it might turn out. It's not like one day you say, "I'm going to write a novel." It's a decision you make every day, and some days are better than others.

Today Marido and I are celebrating 11 months to the day we met. 11 months! That's not even a year, pssh. It is so unbelievable to me that I just have to think about it all the time. It's wonderful to be in such a great relationship with a man who encourages me and believes in me and who doesn't doubt that we can do anything together. Anything.

It's funny to feel like I have things in working order in a relationship, where we can talk through things and feel, in the end, that we are in it for the long haul. I suppose that is what marriage feels like, and instead of thinking every time we have a fight "This is it, he's done with me," or, conversely, "This is it, I can't take it anymore," you just say to yourself, "Let's get through this." I think we are playing more of the latter than the former lately, and it feels good. We still fight and get our feelings hurt just because we are such different people, but after all this time we are still trying, and that's how we got here. I am really amazed by it all. If we are writing a story together, it has been pretty interesting thus far. I like the character development and suspense: what will they do next? Lately we are thinking of starting a photography business together.

It's been almost three years since I've had a salary now. I am used to the dejection now, and am just seeing that yes, it really is harder to get a job the longer you've been unemployed--and the older you get. Most agencies don't really see "writer" as a job at all, and so it is becoming even more important that I succeed as one. I think novelists have to nurture a kind of tenacity that is cyclical and long-term. Last year, in April, I was having my typical Most Unproductive Month, so I went to Singapore to watch my grandmother die and then spent a week in Chicago meditating on the fact that I would not allow myself to be a failure. When I returned to Buenos Aires in May, I tumbled into the most explosive month: I finished my novel, sold my first "big" story in months, and then a few weeks later I met Marido.

Well, now it's May again, and I am so primed for amazing things to happen. I am writing again, my tomato plants are growing growing growing before my eyes, and in a few weeks Marido and I are going to bliss out on the beaches of Baja. Get ready! I'm ready.

D-FENS

I'm not having the best month. It's raining; my skin is a mess; I didn't convert either of my two interviews into job offers; I also lost two freelance gigs this week to more qualified people--one photographer, one writer. I also wrote two serious blog posts, one about being a stay-at-home girlfriend, and the other about racism, and then decided that I would rather not publish any more thoughts on these topics, no matter how eloquently stated mine might be.

I got surprisingly pissed at someone's comments on my blog recently. I think if I were in a better mood, I wouldn't have cared. But despite the fact that I am surrounded by love and opportunity and recently signed a little publishing contract, my self-esteem is suffering--maybe because I'm online too much lately. I don't like being on the defensive, and I realize that is just how I feel lately. There was all this backlash against the whole stay-at-home girlfriend thing, and then all of this hate over racism, and then people telling me I'm just not good enough for whatever it is they want. I don't like defending myself on other people's terms. I don't like trying to prove that I can do a job, that it's okay if I don't have a paycheck for a little while, that it's okay if I'm Asian, that it's okay if I just need to fucken mellow out and bake cookies for a while in my sweatpants. I got all sorts of vitriolic over both hating and defending my way of life, and then I realized I don't have to. And the reason why I feel so defensive is because I spend too much time online reading people's opinions. I mean, some asshole yelled "Chinaman!" at me this week. Yesterday, some guy commanded me to "Smile!" when I passed him in the street. I wanted to react shrilly to both of them, but I let both moments pass me by. It is one thing to give one-sided commentary, and another thing to invite discussion. And I did not want to have discussions with either of these people.

Anyhow, I want to be done feeling defensive and stuck, so I'm just going to be done. I started writing a new novel this week, and I am happy with it. I also know that the reason why I get stressed about money is that it is yet another thing that I try to force myself to care about in order to be "responsible" (like a job!) but that ultimately, I'll have it when I need it, and as long as I don't worry about it, it doesn't really bother me.

Also, I'm glad to be with a guy who I think is getting used to me, so much so that last night when I burst out "Sometimes I don't think you even WANT kids!" he hardly batted an eye. That, and he still wants to quit his plum job to spend six-plus months with me in a van, driving south.

hare-brained

It is now the Year of the Hare. According to Chinese astrologists, it will be a calm year following the Tiger's year of turmoil. Hooray...?

But I prefer to think of it as a year not of the hare, but of the jackrabbit. We saw these in the desert last week and I can't stop thinking of them. They blend in to their desert surroundings, their gigantic ears standing on alert like tall radars. At the slightest detection of trouble--or opportunity--they take swift action. I am thinking of this year as a resting time, too, but resting with the notion that at any moment, we could take swift action. We can be like the hawks, opportunely waiting our moment for the right current of air to take us away.

Marido is out of town. I miss him in all the usual ways--out of comfort, out of desire, out of excitement...but I also miss him in an unexpected way that I think has something to do with his existence being a new sign that things are different now.

Although I miss him intensely, I am glad that we have some time apart to break up the routine. It is not just the routine of the everyday activities that is nice to escape, but the mental patterns you become accustomed to regarding someone's role in your life. With Marido so far away, I am reminded of our physical language, how we support each other daily, but also his overall role for me as a man who has encouraged me to pursue what I love (like writing) and change what I don't (like smoking).

As we know, our minds both seek and create patterns, which in turn give us stability, logic, and form foundations for seeking extended truths and higher-level problem-solving. It is because we can accept the physical realm that we can build skyscrapers, that when we fall asleep at night we can trust that we will wake up in the same place.

Sometimes our reliance on patterns can work against us, though, creating limitations of the imagination rather than platforms for expansion. I think that this happens when people get depressed, anxious, or fearful--our minds attach to a mental conception as tightly as it attaches to the physical world. We see ourselves as inflexible beings, incapable of change.

But change happens. We can resist it, but we miss out on a lot. It's like refusing to enjoy a comedy, just because we were expecting an action flick. Adaptation is more than adopting new survival skills to a changing environment, it's recognizing when we need to change our environments ourselves and knowing when the moment is right to do so.

If this is the year of waiting, I am glad to be waiting it out with Marido. And when the time comes to take action, I hope we will be ready. I think we will be.

employability

I'm still looking for a job. The odds of finding a job in the Bay Area seem pretty good at first glance, since there are approximately 500 new job postings every day on craigslist. But, upon further inspection, of the 500 new jobs listed:

-150 are for Java/PHP/Linux developers, none of whom are actually looking for a job
-75 are paid studies for (a) crack addicts, (b) migraine sufferers, (c) mommy bloggers
-50 are ****DO YOU LOVE THE ENVIRONMENT????**** street canvassing jobs
-another 50 are not actually anywhere in San Francisco, but are telecommuting positions for shady startups that pay on "commission"
-30 are for extremely specific positions like "Cantonese-speaking Paraplegic Paralegal" or "Queer-friendly Attack on Mars Pinball Technician with 1985 Ford F150 Pickup"
-20 are for upper management positions
-100 are for service industry positions, of which half are for bartenders/servers with "fine-dining experience"

The remaining 25 positions are various office positions that I could be qualified for, depending on which areas of my resume I feel like padding.

This morning I attended an "open interview" session at a cafe downtown for which I'd received a call-back from an application I submitted one or two weeks ago. I filled out a three-page application that didn't contain any information they didn't already have on my resume (except my shitty handwriting), and waited alongside seven other women, half of whom were dressed in SUITS. After waiting for almost an hour, the owner came out, asked me my name, paperclipped my written application to my email that she'd printed out, and told me today was purely a "matching faces to names" day and that, if selected, I would be called back the following week for a second round of time-wasting!

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the score

I am back in the Middle West. The summer is ending, the driveway is covered in leaves, and every morning I awake to the sounds of lawnmowers, the lack of Marido, and the somewhat panicky thought "What now?"

But I don't want to panic. Panic and anxiety are gifts that I don't open anymore, and so instead I concentrate on how every thing that seems wrong is actually right. It is an exercise in happiness, really. I started to think about this when I was listening to various people complain about forms of ownership--making renovations, moving, all these inconveniences, and it seemed to me that the real thing that was being lost was that they have this beautiful thing that they wanted. For me, I don't have a home, but I had been stressing over how to take care of this new thing that I had acquired, and stressing over the maintenance was obscuring the fact that I am in love, which is a great thing, and not something to be taken lightly. Even the days when we are apart are good days.

Marido and I continued along our particular accelerated course, which is possible due to advanced experience and exceptional communication skills, mostly on his part. He really is a divine beast. And I was able to articulate some things to him, some things that probably surprised both of us, about what I need and what I expect and what is really unimportant to me. It was terribly unromantic, really. We talked about things like finances and sex and monogamy and timing, and although it was kind of a buzzkill, it was also really great to have everything everything EVERYTHING out in the open. And when you think about it, what is more romantic than wanting to be intimate with someone, not wanting to misconstrue anything, and entering from a place of reality rather than a place of false hope?

Then again, being in love is so weird. It does feel unreal. At times it does feel completely false because it is so shiny and unexpected that it seems too good to be true. It also feels mildly addictive, because yesterday (our first day apart in about a month) we both reported headaches. I wanted to write yesterday, but really I just milled around silently and thought about him and anticipated his arrival here tomorrow. It all makes me feel very dumb and mouth-breathy. I think my biggest challenge with him will be not to turn into a drooling pile of mush in his presence.

I haven't been in love like this for a long time. I hope it never ends.

caffeinated and weary

It was a beautiful weekend in San Francisco, filled with friends, surprise guests, and gazing into the loving eyes of Marido. I have been drinking a ton of booze and coffee in true SF form, and now all I really want is to sleep for three days. But at the same time, I just want to be constantly talking to the people who know me best, and to ask them:

What should I do?

I have been pitching back and forth between Back With a Vengeance and This Place Will Kill Me. Sometimes I look around me and think I'd have to be fucking insane to not want to settle in here for a bit, be with this Man I met, and some of the people who are most important to me in this world. And then there is this part of me this is thrashing around in my gut, kicking wildly against this proposition and whispering in my ear that the Beautiful Unknown awaits for me far away from the Bay.

When I was back in the midwest last week, I hung out with the family dog, the happiest little girl on earth. Seven years old now, she is still smiles and licks and excitement, but she doesn't like to go on walks in the neighborhood anymore, and when visitors leave she gets depressed. My mother told me that she seems bored going on walks now, and the only time she gets really excited is when the sound of jangling keys promises a car ride somewhere.

I have been thinking a lot about her this week, and how I would like to kidnap her and take her places, just to see that crazy spark in her that I always adored and envied, that joy she had that was infectious and and exhausting that I thought would never die. I never thought I'd say this, but I think life is too short to just be content. Maybe I have too much; maybe I'm addicted to suffering; maybe I thrive on extremes; maybe I am afraid of the responsibility of this new acquisition--Marido's heart. But in my clearest moments, I can't explain why I just want to be far away from everything I know and love. I am willing to suffer for six months to have two months of bliss.

I have a very bad feeling that I am going to break this man's heart.

back to the future

Physically and mentally in a billion places right now. This week found me having many serious conversations with my dog, Little Brother, parents.

Unsurprisingly, Little Brother's advice was the most useful. Maybe I listen to him more because I know exactly where his advice comes from; maybe he just knows how to talk to me better than anyone. In any case, I am being forced to admit that my attempt to simultaneously recharge, regroup, and pursue my dreams has not been as successful as I had hoped, and that it is time to re-evaluate my strategy and chart a different course. I am not giving up on myself, but it feels like it. I feel like I have failed in so many ways--to try hard enough, to come up with clear and reasonable goals, to do what I set out to do.

In some ways I blame it on Illinois. I never feel so lost and defeated as when I'm in Illinois. It's not a bad place, but something about it just says to me, "Welcome back, loser!"

Tomorrow I am going back to Argentina with a somewhat heavy heart, like I am just postponing the inevitable--because then I will be returning stateside to start Life Plan 898, but the plan doesn't yet exist, and it's anybody's guess what that will be. I keep waiting and looking out for plans and opportunities, seeking out what I think will be my next big thing, but the pattern that is emerging is just scattershot and schizophrenic, not exactly the stuff of employability.

I have started to plot a return to San Francisco, and am looking for work. It sounds dangerously like what I was doing oh, seven years ago, but with 25 pounds on my former self. Each of those pounds represents moments of celebration, intoxication, indulgence, laziness, and...storing up reserves for my future days of unemployment.

death in paradise

It has been a week. I don't even want to talk about it because it's been pretty stressful, but at the same time I HAVE TO. That is what I do.

I flew about 31 hours to get here from Buenos Aires. I watched the worst movie I've seen in a while--'Did you hear about the Morgans?' Wow, what a terrible fucking film. While I've never been a Sarah Jessica Parker hater, this movie really did it for me. The movie was so bad it made me hate Hugh Grant as well. And, oddly enough, the other couple in the movie is the cowboy from 'The Big Lebowski' and Doc’s girlfriend Clara from 'Back to the Future.'

But this really has nothing to do with anything. I suppose I just don't want to talk about the stuff that has mattered these past 10 days or so. Because that shit is just overwhelming. It is so overwhelming that I wonder if I have, in these days of wandering and isolation, forgotten how to deal with shit, so much so that everything is suddenly overwhelming. But that is not really anything to decide.

I am in Singapore for the second time in this blog’s two-year existence. I didn’t feel anxious about leaving until I started to pack my things, as usual, and suddenly I felt very homeless and worthless. It’s funny—I’ve always equated homelessness with two polar extremes of poor nomads and worldly globetrotters, but suddenly I understood that homelessness is actually just a feeling that you don’t belong anywhere.

Not belonging somewhere is a reason to leave a place. And wanting to go somewhere else—or being needed somewhere else—that is a reason to go to a place. The former is typically a reason for moving, and the latter a reason for traveling. It was relatively easy for me to leave the U.S. and now to leave South America for both these reasons.

It took me three long flights it took me to get here; I felt very anxious and useless for many hours. I guess that’s why I sat through all those movies. I had made a promise to my family that I would stay with grandmother as long as she needed assistance. I’d like to say that this was purely out of the goodness of my heart, but I’d chalk that up to Fundamental Attribution Error. The fact of the matter is that I don’t have a job or much of a plan much less an acceptable reason for existence, so the least I could do was to volunteer my services. When I made this offer, I meant to stick by it, but I was still nervous because I didn’t know what it would entail. A month? A year? I’m not big on committing myself to anything, but suddenly I had done it. I was terrified. There are many worse fates than taking care of your grandmother in Singapore, and I meditated on this thought in-between movie-watching.

My parents and I arrived in the middle of the night and in the morning we went to the hospital to see her. On the way there, we stopped to pick up my uncle. There is a bit of a story behind all of this that I will explain later, but let’s just say for now that I have not seen my uncle in about twenty years, and he didn’t say hello to me when he got in the car with me and my parents.

We arrived a little too early and a nurse was attempting to administer some sort of treatment to her, and asked my father and I to give her some room, leaving my uncle and mother there. Dad and I stood in the hallway and I cried. Dad was in shock, I think, because he couldn’t even put his hand on my shoulder to comfort me. We both just kind of stood there, me struggling to pull tissues out of my purse and him just staring into a corner of his brain, searching for a solution. We’d been in the room with her for less than a minute, but we both knew that it was bad, much worse than we’d thought.

We stayed in the hospital all day, each of us searching for our own solutions in our selves and in the hospital staff. Mom and Dad are used to hospitals because they are doctors, and I am sort of used to them because of that. I have visited people in hospitals—people who may be uncomfortable but are recovering. I have never, though, sat with someone in such bad shape. She was struggling to breathe and couldn’t open her eyes because she was in so much pain. I held her hands—at first I was sort of holding her hands down to prevent her from clawing out her IV and breathing tube. She cursed me and wailed to her god for compassion. But when she removed her tube for the twentieth time, I didn’t struggle with her to put it back. It is ridiculous to fight with an 87-year-old woman who doesn’t want a tube in her nose. So I just rubbed her back and tried to cry as silently as possible. It is a bad feeling to know that someone you love is going to die. It is an even worse feeling to want someone you love to die as soon as possible because they are suffering so much.

My mother stayed with her through the night and my grandmother passed away in the morning. I was sleeping on the floor of my father’s room and I answered the phone, received the news, passed the phone to my father, and then went to the bathroom to get dressed. When I came out, I expected him to be fully dressed and on his cell phone. But Dad was sitting on the bed, his bare feet on the floor. I thought he was lost once again, in that corner of his brain where he goes to solve problems. But instead of springing to life when I told him we should get moving, he sat for a few moments longer, and I understood that he was experiencing something profound—my mother’s pain and a feeling of helplessness, two things which my father does not experience very often.

The sun had still not risen as we drove to the hospital in the dark. Dad gave me a charming yet totally unnecessary speech about death, something along the lines of “Death is a part of life; we have to be happy that she didn’t suffer; it is time to accept this and move forward.” Like I said, I am at peace with the idea of death, even my own. (I just don’t want to die in an airplane.) My mother takes care of people who are terminally ill, and I have absorbed her attitude toward death, which I agree with. When dealing with the terminally ill, families oftentimes prolong suffering in an effort to prolong life, which is not a good thing. I hope I don't die in a hospital. I hope that if something happens to me where I can't make decisions for myself, someone will pump me full of morphine and let me go peacefully. We can't live forever, but we do have some control over how we die. Dad ended his flowery speech with, “Seriously, when it’s my time to go, just pump me full of morphine, close the door, and walk away. No muss, no fuss.”

But no matter how unmussy or unfussy your death is, cleaning up after someone’s life is a different story. I didn't realize just how much stuff has to be attended to when someone dies. We contacted a funeral director, who swept in and asked us a million questions about religious rites, scheduling, caskets, cremation, all while the body of my grandmother was being prepared for the mortuary by two attendants wearing surgical masks. The following day was the wake, the next day was the cremation, and the next day we were cleaning out her apartment.

My grandmother was a bit of a head case. She was a hoarder. She kept every scrap of paper that came into her possession. In addition to boxes of receipts and newspaper clippings, her room contained jars filled with rocks, makeup bags stuffed with plastic bags, pantyhose from the 50s (still in the original packaging), about one hundred miniature locks with keys, decks of playing cards, dozens of umbrellas and fans, old calendars rolled up with mothballs. And for some reason, every item made of fabric--clothing, bags, etc--had at least one safety pin fastened to it. It was a bit disturbing. It makes me want to live a nomadic life and die, possession-less, on a raft in the ocean, just so nobody has to be bothered to clean up after me.

on turning 30

I had sort of a birthday fail and spent the day traveling, largely alone, in the middle of nowhere. There was a big chunk of the day where things were getting a little desperate and I was feeling like a lost, pathetic, idiot. Fortunately, I was able to pull myself out of that zone and give myself what I needed to rescue the day: a shower, a movie, a soda, a joint, some dinner...who says I don't know how to take care of myself?

Have you ever seen the movie Lars and the Real Girl? I liked it so much that I have probably mentioned it before. While I was coddling myself into a better state of mind, I found this movie on the television of my creepy but life-saving hotel and I lay in bed to watch it. There was a particularly poignant scene that was about growing up, "what it means to be a man." They concluded that becoming a man is about making decisions that aren't just about you.

It would have been easy to just let the day pass me by completely and it kind of did. I drank a liter of beer and ingested a huge sandwich composed of a flank steak, an omelet, cheese, ham, and, I think, another egg. I smoked cigarettes under the Pepsi sign of the restaurant in this small town and watched the townsfolk greet each other. I thought about the movie, about growing up, and how to grow up if you are by yourself. If you don't have a family to take care of and are kind of a drifter, it must be that you never truly grow up--or that growing up means finding your meaningful place in society. Which I have not done. I am a single, unemployed woman now in her early thirties. So hot, right?

Last night I went to party where I engaged in a pattern I am becoming used to now. I try to be social for a while, but then I get tired and bored, and kind of drift off on my own. It's the language thing that becomes tiring, that and the not understanding men here and feeling done with casual sex for...forever maybe. I had a dream about the party, a flashback to when I was dancing with a boy I should have dated but instead the first time I went out with him I did a bunch of coke and went home with someone else. I opened my eyes this morning and this thought crossed my mind: I am only attracted to men who expect nothing of me. It was such a weird thought to wake up with. I wondered why it was there.

Turning 30 is more than just brooding over the typical thoughts of some of the things that seem to make a person whole: a partner, a job, and a home. It is also a time to say, "Well, what kind of person do I want to be in this new decade?" Because really, by now, we are pretty much fully-formed beings with personalities and sufficient life experience to know ourselves. And with all that, what kind of person can we choose to be?

I would like to be a non-smoker. Not because I don't like smoking anymore, but because turning 30 was my ultimate deadline for quitting and I am so unbelievably addicted that the only thing to do is quit. I would also like to be thinner. And really, I would love to return "home" but I don't know where that is anymore. I would like to have a home, but that requires commitment. I am not sure what to do about that.

the perfect past

Last night I tried to clean out my email, which says I have more than 1,000 unread messages. It took me to the strange place of 2004, when I first got my gmail account, and I was breaking up with my boyfriend, becoming an alcoholic slut, and trying to get my life back on track by leaving the comfortable womb of San Francisco and diving headfirst into grad school in New York. The emails were so schizophrenic---filled with so much grief and excitement, hyperactivity and insomnia. They made me extremely nostalgic for that time of my life. When I feel really lost and lonely and confused, I like to kick myself for ripping myself out of that situation where "everything" was so good.

Do you ever feel like maybe the best part of your life has already happened? I had that terrible feeling last night. Let me step back a second to say that I am not as miserable as I was in my last post, and that I have somewhat successfully coddled myself with the Hallmark encouragement phrases that "dreams take time" and "genius is 99 percent perspiration..." This isn't about feeling discouraged or disappointed anymore. It is more about feeling as though that combination of naivete, optimism and determination was the magical combination and that ever since then, things have definitely been awesome in different ways, but never again have I felt that excited about life and its possibilities. And this makes me a little sad.

Of course, we cannot retain innocent hope forever. Maybe I still experience joy and wonder and fear, but it is all couched in this underwhelming, familiar cynicism that seems to be telling me that all these emotions are somewhat deceptive. Before, the appearance of these emotions were signals to me that great change was underway. If I was scared shitless or raging uncomfortably on euphoria, I knew that something incredible was happening and I just had to hold on and soak it in. But now I find myself in these tenuous places constantly, and I have begun to see it as a sign of permanence rather than change. I don't feel like I will struggle through these nerve-wracking times and come out with answers anymore; I've been through this before and none of these things got resolved. Now the struggle is just a state of being.

I am embarrassed to admit that I still feel like I broke up with my Ex in the recent past, and that I will be stronger and smarter once I get over it. That was five years ago. As a writer, I naturally live somewhat in the past, trying to understand something in order to package it and present it in some kind of frame, some kind of context. But I think that has a detrimental effect on my life, because sometimes things can't be packaged and explained and the attempt to do so can prevent us from keeping pace with what the future brings us. It is one thing to want to avoid repeating the same mistakes, but another to become so fascinated by history that we forget to vote.

I don't really know what I'm saying. I know that there is no such thing as figuring things out once and for all, that tough decisions have to be made repeatedly, and that pursuing a problem-free existence is like trying to outrun your shadow. I also know that as shiny and happy as parts of my past may seem in photos and emails, the fact is that I wasn't content to stay wherever I was, which is why I am here---and it would be foolish to think I could have stayed there anyway. Things change. I guess I just like to be the one to incite the change, rather than have it forced upon me. I'm not one for regret, but I do wonder what it would have been like had I stayed with my job, my boyfriend. I wonder if I would have put on all this weight. Or maybe I would be dead by now. It's hard to say.

sweet november

Last night I went to see Prince, my first boyfriend from high school. He wasn't feeling well and it was pretty late, so I picked him up and we just went for a drive around town. I actually had trouble remembering which house was his, and had to call and be reminded. He looked exactly the same. As we tooled around in the suburban darkness, he kept saying that it felt like we were in high school again. We haven't seen each other in more than three years, since Ex and I passed through Portland, where he was living with the girl he's now been married to for two years.

Prince and I were together for a little more than a year. We were each other's firsts, and tried to make it work when we both went off to college. I still hurt when I think back to the Tuesday afternoon that he broke up with me over the phone. I wonder if people ever really get over having their heart broken, or if it's just something we learn to ignore--this thought that someone we loved with every atom decided not to love us back anymore. It's been almost ten years since that happened, and nothing has hurt more than that since then. I've never held this against him. People tell you when you're that age that you're too young to be serious, that part of going to college is dating other people, and we manage to convince ourselves that being committed to just one person is some kind of a shortcoming.

I'm pretty sure his parents had something to do with our breakup, but more so, he probably just needed to get out there and have himself some college sex, and wasn't the type to do so with a committed girlfriend out in the ether. In the end, I have to be glad that Prince broke it off with me instead of trying to have it both ways. I am also glad we have always remained in touch.

As I piloted us around, Prince unloaded his burdens on me. We've always spoken very frankly with each other about the heaviest of existential dilemmas, and nothing tips that into intense self-loathing more than some serious family time. Overall, I got the sense that he's disappointed that all the things he feared would happen to him are happening. His marriage is beginning to resemble his parents' marriage, and in the absence of a serious passion, he's turned to placating himself with pleasant yet meaningless diversions.

After the coldest October turned into the wettest October in recent Chicagoland history, November is beautiful by comparison. Prince asked if we could go down to the lakefront for a little walk, so I parked the car and we walked down a winding pathway to Lake Michigan. There was a full moon out and mild breezes coming off the lake, and we dragged our heels through the sand. When we were in high school with no place to go, we would often come to the lake and do the same thing. We both had problems with our families and didn't like hanging out at home. The day before our winter formal, Prince got into a fight with his father and punched a cabinet so hard he broke his hand. After I got off work, I sometimes went to his house with whatever takeout I had scrounged from the restaurant and eat with his mother rather than returning home. We were both runners then, and running was a good way to get out of the house and blow off steam.

On our lakeside escapes, we would talk through our dramas in family and school and such. I bitched about the irrational restrictions and expectations my parents placed on me, and he would shake his head and tell me to do my best, that I was a good person. And he would express his frustration at his father's demands, and say he felt sorry for his mother. We would hold hands and talk about our futures, how we would get away from all of this. We didn't know why things were the way they were, but we swore that when we grew up things wouldn't be like this. We knew better. And then we would sigh and kiss and drive somewhere to get ice cream or hot chocolate.

Last night, instead of talking about his folks making decisions for him, he talked about feeling like he was in a life that he hadn't really chosen for himself...that it was just there, by default. It's not a bad life, but it's not what he had dreamed of. He hadn't really dreamed of anything other than getting away. And now that he's away, he's simply constructed the same cage of discontent for himself. There was no more talk about getting away and things getting better, but about not understanding how things got to be this way. It was like our talks from ten years ago, only without the hope that things would get better.

It made me very sad, but I identified with him completely. Detox Doc and I often talked about how resigned I was to being unhappy about a lot of things. I thought I had to go and save the world, to please my family, to "do the right thing," all difficult things to do, because anything worth doing is not only hard but requires sacrificing your own happiness. I was only sure I was doing the right thing if it made me miserable. This kind of thinking, Detox Doc told me, was just fucked up. It was an "error of logic." Throughout our time together, Detox Doc pointed out to me a number of such errors in the way I think about the world, thoughts that I really wanted to blame on my parents mostly, but what was the point? He told me the best thing to do was just to recognize these thoughts as errors, and not to give into them. Otherwise, you live in a constant state of discordance and misery, tolerable only with consistent sessions of ritual conciousness-deadening, like boozing and television.

Just when I was reaching the apex of my motivational/spiritual diatribe, Prince noticed a set of headlights at the top of the hill, and a few minutes later we were accosted by a pair of Glencoe squad cars. Two of the most good-looking cops I have ever encountered informed us we were trespassing and, after running our IDs and failing to appear threatening at all, told us to leave.

Back in the car, Prince asked me to take him home. The radio was playing Boston's "More than a Feeling," and I forced myself to talk over it, rather than doing what I normally do when I hear this song: turn it up, sing along, and indulge in the warm fuzzy memories that accompany any of the songs from the many mixtapes Prince made for me when we were dating. It was a strenuous effort. I told him about how I had gone to the Atacama Desert hoping to think my way out of a tedious situation, only to realize that for vague problems like these, thinking doesn't get you anywhere, only doing. When I dropped him off, I made him promise me that he would take some sort of action this year. Life is passing him by and he's just scared to make a move, scared to take matters into his own hands.

His wife didn't come out to Chicago with him this trip, and he told me things weren't bad with her, but they weren't exactly good either. And yes, ten years later, I still thought to myself that we would have been happy together. I thought of the tortuous relationships I'd endured and the blissful encounters I'd had, and honestly I think I could have traded it all for being with him the entire time. Somehow, it's nice to know that there is someone I still love and believe in after all this time, even if he is married to someone else and still afraid of cops. But in the end, love isn't enough to make a person happy if they're resigned themselves to pereptual malaise, to struggle with situations rather than coming to terms with them. It's the fucking serenity prayer: Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I really did learn a lot in that 12-step program, even if I only did some of the steps, and they were all out of order.

dear anonymous commenter

Thank you for your kind words on my blog this week. They really floored me--mostly because I was pretty sure of the fact that my readership was limited to a dozen people whom I know intimately on either coast, but also because it gave me the immensely satisfying and secure feeling of being appreciated by and connected to a complete stranger in this volatile world during a transitory time in my life.

Things are going as okay as they can be for someone who is a) freeloading at the suburban home of one's parents, b) dangerously sober most nights of the week, and c) steadily padding on some midwest poundage. On the bright side, I'm a) not working, b) getting a lot of sleep, and c) getting a much-needed root canal this week, hopefully. You know it's a weird situation when dental work is on your top three highlights list without the slightest bit of irony.

I haven't been doing nothing, though I don't feel like writing much lately. Without the glamorous backdrop of a boozy, sultry metropolis, engaging writing requires a lot more effort. Not that I haven't been having fun out here. Since my last post I danced myself sweaty at an amazing soul party, profiled a Wrigley Field beer vendor, took another lens in for repairs, went Girls Gone Wild in the photo booth at a dubstep show, took a walk through not one but TWO cemeteries, ate fried cheese at a Celtic festival, and trolled Hipsterfest (aka the Renegade Craft Fair) on an online date with a poet. And all this I've done in this massive Chicagoland Area without ever driving drunk a single time, thanks to the open-door policy I have at Little Brother's pad downtown. Yes, Moochfest 2009 is in full effect, now with Zero Shame Down!

Secret Plan 500c is slow-going, but I'm working on it. Thanks, to Mom and Pop, for putting me up and slowing me down (in the best possible way), and to Al Gore, for inventing the Internet.

regression theory pt II

The 970-mile drive from New York was surprisingly fun and fast. I was worried that I'd get bored and fall asleep and wake up dead, but with a stereo and a pack of cigarettes, I am pretty set. I think I'd be a great trucker. I drove a brand-new Ford Escape with 2 miles on it, and the second day I realized it was equipped with Sirius satellite radio. Pennsylvania seems like an absolutely beautiful state, full of rivers and green hills and little towns. Ohio and Indiana...mmm...not so much--although Ohio has some bitchin' metal stations. But I'd still love to do a photo series on the Midwest--with a larger format camera f'sho.

So: this brings me back to tha 'nois. All of my worldly possessions are, for the first time in 11 years, under one roof. The fact that the roof belongs to my parents is somewhat disturbing, but for some reason this isn't as alarming as it was, say, last year. Moving back home? Swell! I am the dog's nanny. It's hard to be upset when you are surrounded by pie and dinner in a rent-free environment where the landlords can be stressful and moody but in the end think that you're just the best, even though you don't do a damn thing.

The hardest thing for me is to restrain myself from telling my parents how to do things. Obviously, they've made it this far in life without melling them what to do, and of course I can appreciate that if they try to tell me what to do, I'd probably throw a 10th-grade-style tantrum. 10th grade was the last bastion of insanity, because you didn't have a driver's license, so there was never a good suburban escape plan; all you could do was scream. But sometimes I listen to my parents complain about things, or see the things they put up with, or the things that I feel like will destroy them, and I want to say something. It takes a lot of reserve to respect their lifestyles sometimes, or to understand the seeming contradictions in their lives. And then I kind of know how they feel when they see me doing stupid shit as well, things they don't understand, and I see why they are totally unable to restrain themselves from saying anything. They don't have to--they're my mom and dad.

And instead of changing things, you're just more likely to hide the things that other people find contentious, because you're sick of the same discussions. For me, it all comes back to smoking. This is something we will never be okay with; it is beyond discussion. And particularly as long as I'm living at home...nope. It does, however, mean that I am moving back into my early childhood bedroom, the one with a bathroom that has a window.

But seriously, what am I thinking? I'm not moving home. This is temporary. I gotta get myself on a boat right quick.

I miss New York. I always do.

I Love New York madonna
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Seeking Sebastien

I've regressed into cruising online dating sites the past few nights. I blame it on spending the weekend surrounded by intensely cute couples, and talking to Joe this week for the first time since he left New York. I miss him, and I'm just now understanding just how important he was to me this past year. I don't think I could have survived the winter without him, and I don't think there is anyone else on the planet who could have played the role that he played for me.

But I'm so primed for my next great affair, and as I peruse a thousand profiles (including coming across My Friend online, which was funny) I realize it's just not going to happen this way, because I'm just clicking through them halfheartedly, because none of them are Sebastien. None of these preconceived setups can measure up to the cliched backpacker romance I had on my Spring Break Sobriety Tour 2009. If you're up for a long, self-indulgent story, let's hop to it.

Ever since my romantic intrigue with The Hitchhiker, I have had a fondness for intense, short-term love affairs. Psychoanalyze me if you want to, but I don't care. They are perfect because they can never be flawed; they are always over before their time, and you are always left wanting more: perfect masturbatory material.

*

It's a little after sunrise and I'm attempting, in my typical, disheveled, insomniatic fashion, to board the wrong bus.

"Cor-di-llera" the bus operator reads off my ticket. He then points at the bus I am attempting to board. "Col-que."

I don't take this too seriously because I know all the buses, regardless of the operator, are going to the same place: Bolivia. Even though I've only been in Chile for a few days, and am ill-prepared to brave the cold heights of Bolivia, I am determined to get there. Last night I stayed up late at the hostel, watching a charming young Swede kill a bottle of cheap rum and break the $700 lens on his SLR after showing me some beautiful pictures from his expedition into Bolivia. I’d spent the day running around town trying to rent a motorcycle to drive to the nearest town, about an hour away, just to pay the $130 fuck-you-because-you’re-an-American-reciprocity-fee needed to cross the border with no luck, but was going to find a way into Bolivia somehow. I wanted to go to Uyuni as well, to shoot the train graveyard.

I have not slept much, and I blame my haplessness on this as I wander down the road to find the Cordillera agency, where there is no bus whatsoever, just the now-familiar sight of pairs of travelers rummaging through each others' backpacks and feeding each other. I’m past the stage where couples make me feel lonely, but have now moved onto the hunger stage where I just long for their increased variety of food. I've spent the first few days in San Pedro de Atacama scraping by on the bodega diet of pitas stuffed with greasy wrapped cheese and salami, an assortment of chocolate cookies, and Nescafe.

At the same time that I am excited to get out of this tiny town for a few days, I am kind of dreading this excursion because I will be with a tour group. I hate tour groups so much that I almost killed myself in the desert yesterday, in an attempt to do something I hate even more--bicycling--just to get away from the tour groups. I kind of hate people lately. I only want food, the desert, cigarettes, and water. But I can't do Bolivia on my own, and so I've signed myself up to be bound to a small group of strangers, most likely these charming backpackers feeding each other around me. I just might kill everyone. Particularly alarming is the fact that I have only two cigarettes on my person, and I don't know when I'll be able to purchase cigarettes in the next four days. I am also the only person here without a sleeping bag, but I am more concerned about the cigarette supply, because while cold weather will only kill me, lack of nicotine will endanger everyone in the group. This was not well planned. This entire trip was not planned at all, actually, but that’s what makes it exciting. And the group, though I hate them without even knowing them, will not let me die.

When the bus boards, the one lone traveler sits down next to me. We are the only non-couple on the bus. I wondered if he will make my life better or worse for the next few days. Men have a way of forcing these kinds of issues. I can’t tell if he is cute. All boys kind of look the same here: bearded, sunburned, and hungry. I wait until he finishes his juice box before asking him, "Como te llamas?"

His name is Sebastien. Did you know that's quite possibly my favorite name in the whole world? No, I did not say that out loud! God, I'm not some 14-year-old girl. But seriously, I had the biggest crush on Adrien Grenier before Entourage when he was in The Adventures of Sebastian Cole. We poke at some awkward Spanish, switch to English for a few minutes, but that just feels disgusting so we move on to French while we wait in line at the Chilean border. The Swiss are smooth like that. The last time I spoke French was in Morocco, the summer I moved to New York. I feel like an idiot, but it’s okay. My Spanish is even worse, but at this point, I just don’t want to speak English, then I have an excuse for sounding like an idiot.

I honestly don't think that anything of the sort is in store for me and this guy, even though I think that about most people I meet. I am in hyper defense mode from traveling alone, and I imagine I am getting solo-vibes from him as well. Before running into the Swede last night, I was stood up by a local guy for vague dinner plans, and so I am a little wary of people at this point. Particularly when it comes to setting up for intense time together in cramped quarters under uncomfortable conditions, I think it’s best to keep things very aloof, formal even, like rooming with strangers instead of friends. We should maintain boundaries and such.

When we cross into Bolivia, I spy a burned-out bus and confess to him that I have soft spot for rusty photography, which is why I’m looking forward to Uyuni. I’m not exactly in conversation mode, but I think I say it because I know how to say it. To my surprise, he says he wants to shoot the bus as well, and he makes a plan for us to grab a quick bite at the chow line before sneaking off to shoot the bus and making our way through the pandemonium at Bolivian immigration. It's nice when someone makes it clear where you stand with them, that you're in this together. I'm so used to people being vague: you can do this, if you want to...I'm going to do this. You know. With Sebastien, from this moment on, we are in it together.

This, however, is threatened when the Cordillera agency attempts to split the bus into groups of five for the next few days. You know that panicky feeling you get when, say, you get to a movie with a group of people, or to a long dinner table at Thanksgiving, and you realize that whatever seating position happens in the next four seconds will determine the outcome for the next four hours? That's what is happening at the Bolivian border, only it is happening in Spanish, with an angry man holding my backpack hostage, and trying to stuff me into one beat-up Land Cruiser. He is telling Sebastien to go to another. I don’t look at Sebastien, because it is pointless. I look at the man holding my backpack and prepare to accept my destiny.

"Es mi amiga," Sebastian tells the man, pointing to me. The man looks furious. At the agency, we'd been two solo travelers. "Juntos," he insists. He looks at me and smiles hopefully. My little heart melts. The man hands Sebastien my backpack and directs us to the same car.

After being packed into the Cruiser with a Brazilian-Spanish couple and a Chilean-German couple, we make many pit stops at some amazing locations in Bolivia. We sit in the back together, struggling to keep up with the rapid Spanish going on in the front of the car. Each time we make a stop, Sebastien holds the door for me, waits on me, and we scout the location together, pointing things out, in perfect step with one another. I am shooting wide-angle landscapes; he is shooting mostly telephoto wildlife photography. It is a great pairing. Later in the day, after they deposit us at a remote outpost with no heat for the evening, Sebastien asks if I want to go for a walk. Most of the group, myself included, is suffering from some degree of altitude sickness, but of course I say yes.

The fondest moments of my life always involve desert photography with a cute boy. I can't help but remember the amazing trip I took with The Ex to Baja. It was a beautiful adventure that involved camping, puking tequila in the desert, and fjording a stream in a borrowed Mercedes, and we never spoke about the infidelities that had made the trip feel like such a necessity. This trip is cleaner, with no tinge of anything like that. We clamber over rocks exploring the desert, taking turns deciding which way to go in the wide open. He helps me scale walls and navigate the rocky canyon we discover, and I point out good lighting angles, offer him water. I think, “This is what a partnership feels like.”

As the sun sets, we return to the chilly camp and meet some of the other people from the other three cars, who turn out to be mostly French speakers. Sebastien pours me tea and when dinner arrives, serves me. I am exhausted. I try to hold my own with the French speakers, but am content to just try and understand.

That night the six of us sleep in an unheated, cement room, but I don't sleep at all for the second night in a row. I know I’m not going to freeze to death, but I feel like I’m going to come close. I think about three things in a continuous loop for seven hours: (1) my stubbornness about not taking drugs, not even the sleeping pills I have in my backpack, partially because then I’d have to take my hands out from under my layers of clothes, (2) Sebastien, sleeping not two meters away from me, (3) life amazing life.

I wait until dawn and wander out into the desert to shoot the sunrise. We are truly in the middle of nowhere. Off in the distance, I see a figure emerge from the hillside and I see that he has come out to check on me. Inexplicably, I hide. Sometime during the night, I have already started to feel separation anxiety. I don't like it when people leave. Yet, you say, you like short-term love affairs? How does that make any sense? Shut the fuck up.

In late afternoon, we come to another remote location, a building constructed completely out of salt in the middle of what appears to be an exploded minefield. Sebastien and I get a room to ourselves. Everyone is in good spirits that night because there is one working shower in the salt hotel, and it is a good ten degrees warmer and 1,000 meters lower. There is even wine at dinner, which makes me extremely uncomfortable, but it doesn't matter, because I was able to buy cigarettes during the day. We are fifteen people in the middle of nowhere I am the happiest I think I ever been in my entire life. I can only communicate good things, so it's like I can only think good things. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have sex in a building made completely out of salt, completely sober, with a Swiss boy named Sebastien, in the middle of fucking Bolivia.

All of this is very charming and swell, but what really gets to me is when I am sitting next to Sebastien at dinner and I overhear him telling a French woman the story of how we'd met crossing the border and how he'd insisted we stay together. She thought we were a couple. She asks him what language we speak in, and he says, without hesitation, first in Spanish, then in English, then in French, and now, in all three: "Mira, une llama! It's cool, n'est-ce pas?"

I almost die. Or, rather, I immediately set to killing myself in the typical manner, by excusing myself to go outside to smoke a cigarette.

Admittedly, it doesn't take much for me to fall in love. I fall in love at least once a week. But at the same time that I use the word, I use it haphazardly, fleetingly, convinced that love is something that can't really be had, just glimpsed. I'm like that. I suffer from an affliction where I believe that anything truly worth having can't really be had, and so I think that the best kind of love is ephemeral. But at moments like those where things seem so fucking precious, where you can't help but think to yourself, "I want to hear that story told on my fucking wedding day," my first reponse is to get up, go outside, and yep, that's right, smoke a goddamn cigarette. I don't know why that's my response. It's like I can't believe it's happening, or I don't think I should be there, or my personal being can't handle that kind of perfect moment, so I have to fucking leave. I wish I was the kind of person that could like squeeze your hand under the table and gaze at you sweetly back, but instead my response is to try and light a stick of cancerous toxins on fire and inhale the poisons as rapidly as possible in seclusion in the freezing cold. My body can handle pain all right, but it repels perfect moments with absolute disgust.

Luckily, the night wears on, and my sober ass is forced to bask in the glow of this ridiculously wonderful evening in the middle of nowhere, largely because there is nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. I forgot about my clunky French and miserable Spanish with this charming Swiss boy and this international crew of travelers, and just remembered that like them, I had wanted to be there so badly that I had forgone my comforts, almost frozen to death the night before, gnawed my way through some pitiful means, battled altitude sickness, incomprehension, and indigestion, and am still ecstatic as all hell to be there, and savoring the last hour of the power generator like it is our last night on earth. Indeed, although we feel like we are in the lap of luxury compared with where we stayed last night, it also feels like a movie set for some apocalyptic fantasy. It is, in a way. The next day we will all go our separate ways—some, like Sebastien, will venture further east into Bolivia, many are going into Argentina, and I am going back to Chile. But during these few evenings we’ve shared in the heights of the Bolivian desert, I really feel like I’ve come to understand and appreciate myself in the context of the world—or, at least, in the context of these people. “Sometimes,” one of the men says, “we have to go so far away to meet our true neighbors, those who are really like us…at home, everyone thought we were crazy to leave for so long. But out here, to meet so many people traveling…so many people who will take care of each other without question...who do the same as you...it feels right.”

Part of me wants to have a long, meaningful conversation as I snuggle up with him that night, but it is going to be sad, so I just tell him I will miss him and I kiss him. I've done this so many times now I know how to do it. After we have sex, he holds me tight and simply says, "Vas dormir." Go to sleep. And you know what, I finally do.

The next day, we part after shooting the train graveyard in Uyuni. I am so distraught about leaving him that I also leave behind my most critical piece of clothing after my favorite pair of jeans: my crucial hoodie that I've had for almost a decade. Talk about major losses.

And I'm not kidding at all when I say that as we leave town, the next song I hear is Roxette's "It must have been love," but en espanol.

*

I saw Ex when I returned to New York, and I told him that I’d met the guy I want to spend the rest of my life with. Let me clarify: maybe it’s not literally Sebastien, the same exact Sebastien I met two weeks ago on a bus in San Pedro de Atacama, but the guy I spend the rest of my life with will be Sebastien, because I will look for him in whomever I seek to date. When Ex asked me to describe him, I couldn’t do it. I missed a lot of nuances of his personality due to him being Swiss and all. All I knew about him was that I trusted him from the moment we crossed the border into Bolivia, that he took care of me, and that when I was with him, I felt like we could do anything together, like we were unstoppable.

When Ex and I were together, I also felt like we could do anything together. It’s such a high, this feeling. But he was never good at taking care of me. I never knew I wanted someone to take care of me, that this was a priority. I try to take care of myself. But it’s nice to have someone else looking out for you as well, without you asking them to. Because I look out for other people without them asking me to, so I guess I want them to do the same for me. And the trust got eroded between me and Ex as well, which is an entirely different story. He didn’t really value me after a while. I don’t think I ever heard him tell a cute story about us.

A character from college, Fentry, once said, “the key to a successful relationship is to marry a foreigner.” He went on to elaborate that cross-cultural relationships breed tolerance, which is largely lost in today’s customizable society, where we demand everything to be just so, down to matching lifestyles, compatible music tastes and so on. When you marry a foreigner, you chalk up all the differences to irreconcilable cultures, and are more forgiving from the get-go, he explained. You can then focus on what’s really important, like respect, family, taking care of one another.

But these things, I realized tonight, are hard to look for when perusing ads on OkCupid and craigslist.

I know I'm a dreamer. I know that vacation affairs are different than real-life relationships, but I want to hold onto this one. I don't know how, and that's why I've held off on writing about it and have just been thinking about it a lot, and what it means to want to hold onto something without holding onto it at all. I want my dream-life and my real-life to be one and the same. I think things will be less schizophrenic that way.

jobseeking

“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

Gustave Flaubert

One Friday every month, I have a nexus of mental wellness appointments, where I see my therapist, my psychiatrist, an hour in-between where I treat myself to a Korean lunch, followed by bikram yoga. It's like take care of Seriously day. Korean lunch is awesome, because they give you like an assortment of six different pickled delicious treats, and I sit there and pick at them with my chopsticks and think about how fucken sober I am and then when you think the meal is over, they give you this bowl of cold, cinnamon-flavored liquid that goes down like "ah."

I'm gradumucating in about six weeks and I now spend at least two hours every day thinking about what I'm going to do be doing following this massive, life-changing event. It fills me with unspeakable anxiety. For the past two years, I have been on a Mom-and-Pop-endowed vacation, with my rent and living habits generously supported, no questions asked, because they believe in higher education, and are largely unaware that this degree is preparing me to actually make less money than I was making before as a graphic designer.

Ha!

Jobseeking is the most demoralizing activity, even more so than smoking crack, cleaning up cum in peepshow booths, online dating, and going through detoxification. It asks you to trade your life and time for the illusion of security and self-preservation at one low, devalued price. While you're doing it, you always feel this strange mix of nausea and excitement, kind of like a fourteen-year-old girl giving her first blowjob. It's very dirty. You're thinking, "This feels inherently disgusting, but everyone does it...and maybe if I do it right, someone will give me a bonus." And this is just the first step into one of many of choking down something that just doesn't seem right, thinking that this is the way the world works, and you better goddamn get used to it and do it better than everyone else.

But today I am ready to say fuck it! I had a very supportive conversation with Keetens last night. I don't much like to talk about how terrified I am about The Future, mainly because I know what I have to do, I just don't like the idea of hard work and poverty. It sucks. I've been poor before, and it sucks. But I've also worked a job that I've hated before, and I think it largely contributed to the rapid escalation of my alcohol consumption. What good, really, is a decently-paying job, if you just use the extra funding to numb the gag reflex? I'm older now. And sober...so maybe I don't need all that extra money anyway. I don't want to have to numb the gag reflex. I'm sick of choking down life. I only want to add things to my life that I like. If that's too much to ask, well, then, I'm asking it anyway. I just don't want to add more meaningless shit to the world. If I can start with just me, with only adding things that mean something to me, then that's where I'm going to start.

l'chaim

On Thursday, Keetens passed along some words of wisdom by Cary Tennis to a girl lamenting the new, boring persona of her recently sober friend. I've never read him before, but I really have to give Keets a million trillion thanks for this link, which also resonated with me as someone who has spent many an hour entertaining a small, select few at Murio's Trophy Room on Haight Street, but more importantly as an aspiring journalist who is pathetically intimidated by the threat of hard work and defeat. I love it when people can say, without a hint of immodesty, that "We get sober and become boring because our brilliance deserves to live." It's something that I could never bring myself to say. Chinese people just aren't like that. I think the closest thing we could say we be something along the lines of, "Maybe the brilliance of the Emperor could shine through if we could only sober up long enough."

On the other hand, I understand the feeling of not wanting to hang out with someone who appears to be the shadow of whom she once was because of a major life decision. Sometimes you just think that you've grown apart. Life is long, and people change. Especially when you come into contact with as many people as we do in our lives, you can't hold onto everyone (although some of us try). I was empathizing with the writer of the letter until she made the remark that the newly sober friend's art was now "local-gallery good, not Artforum good." I mean, was this her agent, or her friend? I guess we all want to see our friends performing their best, and the remark stung a little because of course I fear that all these attempts at emotional well-being are just like little cyanide pills for all of my creative projects that mean anything to me.

I'm hoping this fear is wrong, though. I looked around me last night. I feel good about the photo work I've done in the past few months--partially because it's become a new outlet to keep my mind off other things, and partially because I know that I couldn't have done it on the booze train. And this was a visual sign to me last night that even when I am standing, struck silent and dumb and thinking "I know what's happening but I don't really and maybe I should go but why is this such a big fucken deal it's just booze/coke/pot/ you dealt with this last night it's the same thing these are your friends everything is okay they're not out to get you; be calm; be still; say something; wait; no; don't say anything; you don't have to say anything; were they talking to you? If they were talking to you, then you have to say something..."

I cannot wait for the day when I'm secure enough in my own skin to not constantly feel the need to perform. In Tennis's piece, that's what he says The Booze is largely about, performing for free, at least in the context of others. But The Booze isn't just about the act of performing, it's also about attendance, and I think that partaking makes you part of an audience to a spectacle, and that lately I just feel left out a lot of the time. I honestly can't tell if it's because I'm not drinking or if it's just that I'm naturally on a different mental plane from lack of television and consistent Internet facetime. I have to admit, when the conversation turns uber-drunk, or uber pop-culture, I retreat to a special place in the corner of my brain...

When I went sober in November, I made the arbitrary goal of lasting through to my birthday. I had the intention of powering through the next four-odd months with my regular determination and then enjoying a typical balls-out meltdown to congratulate myself on my willpower and resolve. It wasn't until I was talking it through with Detox Doc that I realized what a stupid "plan" that was, and the idea of throwing all these months of hard work out the window in front of all the people who have supported me through it pretty much undermined the whole concept of respect and trust among friends. Color me humbled.

My friends, a juice toast to you, at the commence of my 30th year of life. (I am 29 years old, so this is the start of my 30th year, yeah?) This is to all y'all. Life is busy, and it's not easy to stay in touch with everyone. I'm not on Facebook or MySpace a lot. I don't call or write as much as I should, and I've retreated into this sober corner of my brain where the world exists in pictues of deserts and mountains and not so much people and words lately. Thank you to you all for being a part of my life, for creating a context of normalcy when things are erratic and for providing inspiration when things are drab. Thanks for keeping me in check. Thanks for your love. Thanks for keeping it real.

I love you more than you know.

not helpful

I am not a happy camper today. It has been a most stressful week, and today I was supposed to get shit done, and instead I had a rude awakening and could not get over it, and wallowed in anger all day and got NOTHING done on a day that I could not really afford to waste. I literally sat here all day and was just angry as all hell, so I ate candy and smoked cigarettes and don't think I took a real breath in seven hours.

Stress management much?

Do you ever have a moment where you look back on several distinct moments where you said to yourself, "I'll deal with this later," or "I'm going to hate myself later for this," or "Fuck it, I'm sure everything will be fine," and then you just want to go back in time and bitch-slap your former self eight times over --- because really, what did you do then instead of taking care of business? Who the hell knows? I sure as hell don't.

And yet I'm doing it again. I'm like, "Oh, it's okay. Everything will be fine. I'm just going to sit here until I can go to sleep, and when I wake up tomorrow, rested, I will be able to deal with it, because today...well, today...today is just not a good day. Today was never meant to be. And tomorrow...tomorrow will be better."

I never said I was good with stress.

Thursday I am leaving for the Atacama Desert:





















I will lay my eyes on something along those lines on Saturday probably. I don't know how, but somehow between now and Wednesday I am going to make write 20 more thesis-like pages appear out of NOTHING and then vanish into the desert for a week or so. I think it'll be good times. I want some peyote. Psychedelics are not on my list of banned substances.

Sobriety has been very, very hard this week. I miss Joe, and I miss the carefree feeling I had a few weeks ago that everything was going to be okay. Because I don't really feel that way anymore. I am really excited about my trip, but something about traveling and not drinking suddenly seems even lonelier than I ever imagined. I must be masochistic. And I can't stop thinking about the fact that I'm graduating in two months. TWO MONTHS. It's like reality suddenly decided it wants to be my new, annoying new best friend and I don't really like her very much.

Okay, me stop now, because this...this is not helpful. But I don't know what would be right now. Or...I do know...but...I don't do that anymore.

i love new york

This morning I went with Neighbor and her boyfriend at sunrise to shoot in Highbridge Park. I've been getting up really early every day to take advantage of good lighting conditions. Thursday I got up at 4 a.m. and went out to Jamaica Bay to look for interesting things to shoot. It would have been awesome but I had a slight camera malfunction. I'm tempted to go back, but it's a long fucken ride and the sun just keeps rising earlier and earlier every day. I have trekked all over the city lately and I love it. It is really nice to start the day off doing something that is exciting, while there aren't too many people awake. Sometimes it doesn't really pan out, but it's still interesting.

I'd signed on Joe to make the trip to Highbridge with me. It's the one park I won't go to by myself even though it's about eight blocks from my house. The reason for this is that it's depressed (literally), sunken into the river bank, and so there's really no foot traffic that goes through there and so it's rumored to be pretty shady. So, Joe was supposed to go with me. But then...I think I sort of told Joe I don't want to see him anymore...? I've been a moody bitch this week. So Neighbor and Neighbor's boyfriend graciously got up at 6 a.m. with me and tromped through the mud and homeless encampments with me and then we had a glorious pancake breakfast. All in all, the best Valentine's Day I've had in recent memory. Being single is going to be so effing good for me. I'm going to swear off boys for the month of March, I really am. I'm off the Booze and the Drugs and even off the Coffee now, so I might as well go off the Boys...

I met some interesting people yesterday, none of whom I will ever date. Have you ever read Andrew Sean Greer? I love him. He wrote The Secret Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Story of a Marriage. I went to a reading of his last night at NYU. I was shocked that there was hardly anyone there. I don't know any celebrities, so I'm always shocked when the people I think are famous turn out to be less than that. I mean, he was on Oprah's Book Club. He's like a god to me. After the reading he told this story about how this past fall he RSVP'd to his 20-year high school reunion and when they emailed him back with the details, one of the events was "an evening with author Andrew Sean Greer." He didn't want to do a reading and no one had asked him, but he went there anyway, and then nobody showed up ("I wasn't one of the popular kids," he explained).

What the fuck? I didn't go to high school with ASG, but I still went to his reading. What are they, illiterate? Anyhow, I love him, love him, love him. You should read him. Maybe you would love him, too. It was great talking to him about writing, and talking to other people about writing, too.

I am feeling better about life.

In my last post, I wrote that I had been missing Ex, and then two days later he called to tell me he is coming to visit. He'll be here when I get back from Chile. I haven't seen him since the summer. The summer. Holy jesus. That seems like a lifetime ago.

newest crush: life

After a twacky morning with Detox Doc numero uno, I spent the day with Joe, the human tranquilizer, and for the first time in ages, felt...relaxed. Joe and I are in this weird place of dating-land that I have never been in before. It is nice. It is totally no pressure since we have been doing this for so long. We hung out all day at his house while I worked on secret plan 437b, and I took portraits of his roommate's dog. I'd almost forgotten how soothing animals are. I think my anxiety levels dropped 90 percent. Then I came home and slept seven glorious hours.

Today, awaiting the arrival of WonderWoman, I decided to throw an impromptu dinner party so I can spend the day indoors, cooking my favorite foods. In a bummer turn of events, some of my favoritest people cannot make it, so I invited a slew of random inviduals, including New Crush. Let's talk about this for a moment. Yes, New Crush broke my heart several weeks ago when he dropped the g-bomb, but I won't let that stop me from admiring him, because he is so fucken cute! Every time I see him I can't help but...stop breathing. I kind of love it. Anyhow, last week he made a pointed issue of asking when I'd be in the Chi, and getting my number so we could hang out there next week. I'm so excited for our dedicated day of hangout in the Chi! I'm convinced that I misconstrued the g-bomb situation. I haven't heard back from him, but that's okay. Gap model and Curly are coming, which will be nice. I haven't seen them since Red's going away party. I was thinking that I probably wouldn't see them anymore because Red was a crucial organizer in that crew, but this makes me happy.

Speaking of romantic intrigue that has nothing to do with Joe, I almost had a heart attack Tuesday after leaving the Guggenheim (the Catherine Opie exhibit is great) because Love Affair called me and we are meeting up tomorrow for coffee. I haven't seen him since my golden birthday. It's very exciting. It will be nice to see him.

Sobriety has been good to me this week, despite the sleeping problems. Yesterday when I was working on secret plan 437b, I had a not-so-minor flash of understanding about what life was all about, and it had to do with the tiny slivers of reality that can be brutal and painful, but the more we deal with them, the more we can appreciate this struggle between love and freedom and the desire for a Viking funeral.