as though it was still the spirit that fills you.

2010-11-14T20:06:00.002-05:00

seeker. challenges. knowledge. independent. impulsive. stubborn. freedom. restless. idealistic. justice. determination. perfectionist. passionate. firm. outcast. withdrawn. crazy.

heart of gold.

2010-11-08T12:35:00.003-05:00

it's been a long, long time.

and i don't know where i've been.

it gets better and then gets harder, but it's something i built from scratch, so i appreciate the effort it took, and the distance i've come. i try very hard to remember that the past that i miss is making me miss the present that i'll miss in ten years. my head reminds, let go, let go, let go.

began my master's in september. it's good. i missed school, and i feel comforted, held, safer in this enclosed environment where i have confidence in my abilities and a ready-made group of acquaintances. i push to spend more and more time in here, in my bubble. i work on campus with students of color, a job that i lobbied hard for and got just in the nick of time, which saved my ass with health insurance, a tuition waver, and a pay rate of $19 an hour, far more than i'd expect anywhere else. time moves fast. on october 3, at 8 pm, unexpectedly, my nana passes away in NJ, only 7 hours after i've arrived, at the last minute, just under the wire to say goodbye and have her tell me she loves me. i'm shattered for a few weeks. i'm irritable to f., snap easily, have trouble concentrating, push to work harder, turn things in on time despite my bouts of tears. my nana was the one for whom i'm named, and the only one who allowed me the freedom to be myself and loved me anyways. she'll never see me finish my master's, have kids. she never met f. we made plans to visit this summer and canceled after she displayed a lack of interest, two months after having moved back to NJ from florida after 15 long years. by the time we arrived, she was going under, going on. i braced. my prayer flags, purchased thoughtlessly in a shop in northampton a few weeks before, rested in her hand and were made into fire along with her. she was 84 years old. would that i'll live that long.

after a month, it stops hurting so much. i return to therapy. i don't need it as much now, except to say the things i don't want to say out loud to anyone else for their intrinsic selfishness. a tattoo rests in the works for the spring. my body cries out for a record again. i vacillate on the topic of a doctoral degree. i turn 26 in a month and it's moving too fast, too fast, too fast.

i appreciate our quiet apartment, our red couches, hardwood floors after they've been swept and washed, sandalwood burning, a fridge to ourselves, a porch to ourselves, and the security of having carved out a small perch in the cold world. it's been five months since we got married. i'm not going to regret anything, but i miss NJ. in two weeks i go home for thanksgiving. in 3 weeks the semester is over. i appreciate the grit of work, the focus, and the love. i love what i do. i love my life. i couldn't ask for much more. it's been a hard few years and i don't kid myself that there will be more. i don't steel myself against the fear, the grief, the depression, the loss. there's no point. i read thich nhat hanh and try not to be afraid. i try not to be afraid. i try to just move. i'm moving. what else is there?

2010-07-10T20:12:00.003-04:00

tonight i feel like shit about a lot of things. i'm smoking a line of bowls trying to not remember, but it creeps in. looking at a photo of myself in my 9th grade yearbook was a little too much like looking into a mirror for me. 2 hospitalizations, a shaved head, a pair of chunky glasses, a husband, an out of state move and a Bachelor's degree later, there we were, being afraid of everyone else. and i'm tired and lonely. not lonely for love, but just for something outside myself. the teaching fellowship ended in june....i survived...and with it my health insurance. so now, i'm away from my pillar of sanity, my therapist for 2 years, dr. j. until the fall. and i talk, mostly to myself, in my own head. and i wake up in the morning early, because i can't sleep. no one will pay me more than the bare minimum i need to survive even after all my hard work in college and the fellowship, which is unimaginably disappointing. my debt creeps a little deeper. i lack confidence in my abilities and don't apply to jobs i feel are out of my reach, which are most of them. i wish j. and i could have remained friends, and miss him. i want to not take an Ativan every day to get through the morning, but it's hard to give up. damn.

F. and i buy t-shirts at Salvation Army. we come home and i cook mahi mahi with lemons and tarragon and tomatoes, toast cranberry-walnut bread and butter it lavishly, eat greens with cheese and white honey balsamic vinegarette. it's great. F. crawls naked into our bed in our quiet new apartment. the cats creep in and sleep on the chair, the desk, the rug, the window. i'm married, free, and i know better, don't i? every day this summer i look down at my arms and i feel ashamed, that i don't seem so far away from me as i thought once. the damage i did to my arms in the winter and spring cannot be undone. it can't be healed, concealed, or taken for anything but what it is. it was a violent act, repetitive, single-minded in its destructive power. tens of straight, even pink and brown scars can be seen from five feet away, ten, in photos. they're all i think anyone thinks of me when they see me, and they cannot be undone. every time i used to see my shallow ones as a teenager, i'd think that i wanted them, needed them, that they were me, provided a road map of my life, proof of survival. maybe that's true about these ones, but i don't feel that they're anything but a mark of my stupidity, my ignorance, cowardice, fear. that they're deserved. and i'd do a lot to give them back, if i didn't just think that i'd ruin that chance too, and do it again.

when i move on the bed, F. says, "hi, baby," and looks over at me when a sunny smile, and i know that i am loved, to the bottom of my soul, and i am blessed. F. sees me, and is not afraid. but i am. mostly of myself, that i'm simultaneously not living honestly enough and living too honestly.

dogged pink lines march every morning in the mirror, and i duck into the bathroom or the bedroom in the evening and smoke. i think about that i can't pay my car insurance, that F. lost his insurance because of our marriage and that i should have known better, should have been the one to prevent that, that he hasn't told his parents, that i don't want to go out in public anymore, that i haven't cleaned my room or sent out resumes today, that i miss new jersey, that i miss my family, that i'm scared of them getting old while i'm not there, that i can't be a buddhist and let go of anything. with the consumption of enough substances, it begins to lift as i quiver inside, curl into a ball, feel my labia pull up and in on themselves, my fingers receding, straining, the cringing sour taste of a lemon, just on the very back of your tongue, and no sweetness. i begin to fight it back.

on the 4th of july i'm in NJ. i haven't slept in a week because i've been sick and then because i was in another bed. my parents have guests all day at the house, but exhausted and sunburned from a difficult kayak trip with K., i sleep most of the day. at night i finally tell my father i got married. the two of us drive his truck into the middle of a farmer's field and smoke a bowl. we watch the fireworks together, alone, and i'm glad.

it's life as an adult, and i'm not the same. i'm not the same.

re/evolu/ation

2010-05-18T21:33:00.001-04:00

This has been the longest one. Eight months solid.

I’m holding my breath now because it feels like it might be lessening, and coming out of it is like coming out from underground, when you no longer remember what the sun looked like.

I didn’t come out without a cost. I guess people rarely do. In the mornings, I take 150 mg of Lamictal (a mood stabilizer), and usually a 1 mg Ativan (a benzodiazepine). At night I take 50 mg of Seroquel XR (an antipsychotic), my birth control pill, then a 50 mg Trazodone to get to sleep. It could be worse. I feel cynical, sad, and a little trapped that finally, my mood swings have leveled, that the brain-crushingly terrifying anxiety attacks have been mitigated, that I can usually sleep most of the night. That I no longer feel the urge to burst into tears over the simple thought that I might have to live my life. I feel a little trapped, after a 3 day hospitalization, than a 6 day one. I feel a little trapped having sat on a couch, circled off meal choices, and taken my medications from a tiny cup dispensed by an R.N. I feel a little trapped that I passed from the category of genially neurotic to the category of genuinely askew. By the thought that if I only take 5 or 6 pills a day for the rest of my life, I might be able to lead something like an average emotionally regulated life. But I can breathe, and some combination of pills, therapy, hospitalizations, change, or maybe just time, has elevated me to capable. On most days. I’m wistful about the amount of energy it took to get here, and the prognosis.

Flip and I move in together next weekend.

Graduate the Fellowship in 9 days. Made it after all.

I saw a couple coming out of the Leverett Co-Op the other Sunday toting a basket of expensive liberal fixings for an evening meal, and a bottle of red wine. They must have been in their thirties. I was there because I had smoked a bowl and subsequently gotten a craving for chocolate milk, but only that sold in the bottle. Which I knew the Co-Op happened to have through a partnership with a local farm. So I dragged F. out of the house and drove to get some (and some Kettle Honey Dijon chips). When I looked at the red winers, I felt an immediate rush of immaturity, at such a paramount display of perceived maturity. The facts that I hate red wine (or any wine) and that F. is sober seemed irrelevant. I imagined the political conversations they would have together before retiring to the Colbert Show, the country cabin they’d share with a golden retriever and a fireplace, the upper-middle class salaries. I imagined the homemade meal, the wine-drinking, weekend cultural events. An adult life.

Mine’s consumed by an intransigent admiration for pot, stealing movies off the Internet, owing ten percent interest on thousands of dollars in loans and consequently buying generic-brand groceries, an undying adoration for carnivals, bright colors, Disney movies, fuzzy animals, playground equipment, and so forth. The idea I had as a kid of 25 being an adult age feels disproven by the sheer amount of procrastination I indulge in daily when it comes to things like calling Verizon, and the total lack of self-control that overtakes me at Victoria’s Secret. Marriage and kids don’t make an adult, money doesn’t make an adult, red wine doesn’t make an adult, but I have no clue what makes an adult. Flip is the most adult person I know at 21. On an average day, I feel about eight and a half.

That Sunday, I exited the Co-Op with my bag of adult groceries, still just a little high. “Spin me!” I demanded to F., and threw my groceries in the car. He did, barefoot, on the merry-go-round, and then jumped on. We went home and ate pasta with walnuts and watched reruns of Project Runway. Reruns stolen, of course. That’s just us, I guess. It never looks like what you thought it would.

good things.

2010-04-17T19:53:00.004-04:00

Stuff I Love About You:

You always defend me in any situation involving another person.
You make me laugh at least once every day even when I don't want to.
Because you're quiet, people underestimate you.
You get excited when you learn a new word.
You can do math really fast in your head because you're really smart, and sometimes I forget.
Your hair.
Your hips.
The fact that you always begin to rub my shoulders anytime you incidentally happen to be standing or sitting behind me.
That you doggedly keep trying to be friends with all my cats, even the one that hates you.
How you look in ripped black jeans and a t-shirt.
The sounds you make during sex.
How excited you get when I cook for you.
The way you always fit perfectly against me no matter where or how we're lying.
You can always beat a hard level in a video game for me and then pass the game back over when I ask.
You buy me food I love for no reason and keep it at your house.
That whenever I say something you don't want to hear you say, "What's that?" and blink.
I've never asked you to help me with a chore and had you respond unwillingly.
Your sex drive.
Your dimples.
The way you look naked in my bed in the sunlight on a Sunday morning.

I'm sure there's more.

you and the mona lisa.

2010-03-28T21:01:00.002-04:00

I got into grad school.

Wednesday morning I went into the mental hospital. Thursday I found out about grad school. Yesterday I got out of the mental hospital.

World feels too big.

thought i might get a rocket ride...

2010-02-20T19:45:00.004-05:00

when i was a child, but it was a lie.

I got an interview for the Social Justice Education Master's program at UMass Amherst. That's me, the spin of a DJ.

Interview is March 4th and 5th, after which I find out if I'll be going back to school in the fall. I hope so. I miss it. I took my eighth graders on an overnight trip to Hamilton College for two days and they got to attend some classes, eat in a dining hall, talk to students. They had a blast and so did I. It made me miss college, miss the camaraderie, spin out with anxiety thinking that, by February 18th, it was already too late to hear back from UMass, that their absence was their complicity in my self-assessment in the past year, that I've reached the end of my line, that I'm projecting a future into dead space after all. My chest was tight with the thought that it was inevitable, the bracing for failure. The haunting, seductive lure of running away was crawling from the bottom of my mind again, and I was soothed into sleep at night by the lullaby of imagining how few things I could fit in my car, and how many things I could leave behind.

When I returned from New York that evening, a letter from their program Chair was in my inbox.

One more chance, I guess. There's always California. There's always suicide. I don't think about that one much, though. There's always the chance that I'm wrong about everything, and I have been before. There's always the chance that there will be a good day, after all. There's always a chance of falling in love. There's always a chance I'll learn from my mistakes.

F.'s new cornea was stitched into place last Friday, for his right eye. It was astoundingly swift, a phone call on Wednesday, a hospital on Friday. I'm reeling. In only seven days, he can see better again. At the hospital, my hands were ice cold as I waited, my new book sat fallow in my purse, and I hoped for change. I hoped for the moment when we, all of us, would feel like we were in control of our lives, the people I love. It's illusory, but it's important to feel strong. He was pale as paper when he emerged, with a long list of contingencies pinned to his lapel. No bending, no lifting, no sex (a ban that lasted all of three days, better than I expected), no work, no sleeping on his right side or his stomach, a complicated array of eye drops every three hours, a patch for three months. No BDSM, a discouraging and long-lasting implication that hit me with a thump in the chest a day later in a way I couldn't have anticipated. But worth it. For a gift of sight. In eight months, if all is well, his other eye. My parents came to visit that weekend, brought the dogs, bought me pasta and vacuum bags and a cast-iron skillet to make frittatas in. I made them one. I'm poor as dirt; it was about all I could do.

4 more months of the Fellowship.

I'm exhausted and wan from 14 days filled with events, but so many of them were good. My prescriptions and the imminent earthquake of change of address, career, direction knit into a thin veneer of calm together, and sometimes I can forget the criticism long enough to breathe. Only sometimes, but not never, so I continue to count. It's too late in the game to give up, and too early. I see just the first little signs of spring.

the space between.

2010-01-31T14:09:00.005-05:00

Everything is about to change.

But life usually does. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes you can only focus on the next five minutes, the next five hours, and then its been five years and five weeks and there you are. The year is accelerating, and it's hardly begun. I'm finishing my final semester of my two-year commitment to Citizen Schools, and waiting in the wings to hear back from UMass about my application to their M.Ed. in Social Justice. I miss the feeling of being on a college campus, the camaraderie, the events, the opportunities. I'll be disappointed if I don't make it back into graduate school. I need a new focus. Me, ever restless. I don't regret any of my choices in the past three years, but they've lacked a clear direction.

J. and I too, are ending in the last and most final way. This May, I'm planning to move out of my apartment in the woods, which I love. The rent and heat combined are too much to pay for a 30-year-old apartment with cabinets and rugs falling to pieces, hot water that lasts only 20 minutes at a time, no cell signal. But it breaks my heart, slowly, to think of leaving my house with the blue door and the gardens of herbs that I planted, with the pale yellow walls in my bedroom, the wide sunny windows and the wind that howls in the silences at night around the house. It's the first place that's felt like mine, even when J. and I ended. The friendship between J. and I has atrophied and eroded, and I've become apathetic. It feels illicit to admit, but once F. and I began to build something together, I didn't need J. as much, once the only desperate anchor I clung to in a vast state empty of close friends and relatives I was accustomed to relying on. I'm coming up, coming out, of two years in Massachusetts, of two years in my first real living space, of a commitment and responsibility to do a job I knew nothing about, of a relationship that once seemed foretold, prophesied, written in the stars without need of my permission or assent, and I feel just a little stronger. And there's spring. I haven't felt so much every day lately the necessity for suicide, or the inevitably, the sense of grey pressing down whispering give up, give up. Without hope, what's left?

I'll miss my apartment, but I missed my last one. I'll miss this job, but I know it's not what I'm meant to do, and not what I could do forever. I belong in a college, the only place I've ever felt like I was made for. I'll miss J., but we're a pale imitation of something I thought I could have when I was 20. I didn't realize until recently how little faith I have, post-J., in the thought that relationships, any romantic relationship between two people, can succeed indefinitely. I'm placing limitations without even realized it, believing that I'm incapable of love, or loving. But F. and I will be together five months next week, and it seems impossible. F. makes me laugh when I least expect it, and rubs my shoulders, and doggedly pursues friendship with our black cat who virulently despises him. F. has absolute trust in me, flexes his abs in the sunlight and makes me shiver. When F. and I make love, I want to be on top, and he makes me wetter than anyone ever has. F.'s dimples when he smiles make me smile with him. And of course, it's new, and like everything else, uncertain, but I harbor just a little hope, a sleeping seed in the dark waiting for spring to help it grow.

My Lamictal dose, after four weeks, is up to 3/4 strength. Supplemented with Ativan, I feel more stable, more able to take the curves in the road without sliding out. I don't like it, but I recognize the need for it, something to temper these past months of turmoil that began to catch up and eat away at me. I don't want to miss my life because I can't see it. I don't want to miss my life worrying that I can't pay my bills, can't do my job, won't get into school, won't sleep at night. I don't want to take it for granted.

Wish me luck.

alright, i'll make it all up to you.

2010-01-15T22:13:00.002-05:00

today i walked into the ten dollar salon in northampton and had them buzz all my hair off. i've been thinking about it for awhile and just never got around to it until today. this week hasn't been as bad as the past few months, but i haven't been here for a lot of it. the fleeting psychiatrist switched me onto a mood stablizer...the one that gave k. a horrible rash that landed her in the hospital. but i'm desperate for something that will help my mind regain some semblance of ordinary humanity again. some pale reflection of a life of stability and constancy. it takes eight weeks to ramp up to a therapeutic dosage, but in the meantime, he gives me two prescriptions for ativan 1 mgs. i take advantage of them this week; monday, tuesday, wednesday, friday. the padded hammer gives me 25 or 30 hours of calm, of sanity, which is enough to buoy me through the rest of it, and i don't think about suicide constantly for a few days. last year seemed impossible. i need to see that there's more, believe that this isn't all of it.

i need to center.

the feeling of the electric razor sweeping over my head, clumps of fluffy dark thread falling into my lap, was sensual, elemental. it made me feel stronger. now i run my fingers over the delicate fuzz again and again, and it feels strong. the closest to shedding the year that i'll get, i guess. i'm glad it's gone.

f. calls and we argue. f. calls and mistrusts me, and i take my suppressed manic energy and go on a bender with it. f. wants to talk it out and as usual, i do not. f. and i have plans to go to the apple store tonight and shop for a computer for him and an ipod for me, but f. predicts i'll cancel, post-call, and he's right. i can't be in a relationship, and i knew that, and told him that from the start. i'm too restless, and too bitter. i fought f. on loving him, and he won, but now i've circled round again. i want to say things to f. that will make both of us feel better, but can't think of any. i bury myself in another blissful marijuana haze for the rest of the evening. i lose myself in music. f.'s had a bad week and the fight might not be who he really is, but i'm frustrated by everything, by life, and a target for all my frustration laps over the lines like a wave. i have an incoming thought like a missile that i'm not right for this life, that i don't fit, and that i don't care.

i'm glad the holidays are over.

so, this is christmas.

2009-12-23T22:24:00.001-05:00

It doesn't feel like it at all this year.

S&M.

2009-12-09T19:02:00.002-05:00

F. got a hard-on from cleaning my bathroom with a toothbrush.

That's hot.

blips.

2009-12-05T10:03:00.003-05:00

Thursday morning at 7 AM I found myself riding an elevator up to another psychiatrist’s office. It’s been a long fight, this year. I feel melancholy, thinking that just about everyone I know has had love affairs with drugs this year, and wondering what it means. I remember K. coming out of the hospital on her Klonopin, lithium, Depakote, Valium. My brother and his Xanax, salvia, oxycodone. And F., curled up on the bedroom floor on the prickly carpet, crying so hard his thin frame shook with it. All of us, maybe, knowing better. Me, throwing his thick comforter over us, curling quiet against his back, too much experience with weathering other peoples’ breakdowns to muster a cliché comment or reassurance. This week it hurt me to smile, even though it went fast. My mouth in the car in the rain, dry, contemplating dusty tablets to be swallowed, aching for more tea, something cool, to chase the loss of freedom. Prescriptions for prescriptions. Ativan, Klonopin, things to shut you down, flip the “I care” switch to off. In forty minutes after taking one, you feel your worries about losing your job, taking criticism poorly, finding a new roommate, being unable to sleep, the creaking weighted neck tension that bores into the back of your eyes, the self-loathing, and the fear, drift away, and none of it seems that important anymore, or even worth considering. Your brain…my brain…flatlines on caring. And it’s a glorious, blessed relief, when I’m so tired of fighting with my body, forcing it up, forcing it to work, forcing it not to panic, fitting it into these sharp corners and ghosts, pummeling it around stony obstacles. It’s glorious to have 12 hours of Just. Not. Caring. Scary, like a glimpse of a totally different personality, one happy only because of its total manufactured blankness and calm.

But I’m tired, relentlessly tired, inescapably, inexpressibly tired, of begging one more day out of my mind, one more day not to panic, one more day to try harder, one more day not to give up, one more day not to cut, not to indulge, one more day to be the bigger person, one more day of perfect, balanced, impeccably well-executed sanity. I’m resentful, of anyone who is sick enough to throw it all up in the air and not care where it falls later. I care, if you can, too much.

He writes me prescriptions for Ativan, Celexa, an antihistamine to block the sexual side effects of Celexa, which I cannot and won’t deal with. Prescriptions I’ve fought off asking for for a long time, but I feel relief, that I have 30 more opportunities to take a break from myself in the serene haze of a benzodiazepine, one of many I’ve been mostly trading, cribbing and stealing from friends for two years and using as infrequently as possible, hoarding to make it last for the rare true culmination of a breakdown that leaves me curled up in a corner shaking and hyperventilating or covered in my own blood. Breakdowns I mete out in an orderly fashion, space out, only have on weekend nights if I can, so I have a day to recover. Drugs beget more drugs, to fix what they break. I don’t expect anything long-term to work anymore. What I have has never been and maybe cannot be fixed by medications. It can only be delayed. It can only be controlled, by my sheer will alone, and maybe only for so long.

The amount of emotional control I have makes me feel nauseous, lopsided, insubstantial, as though I tread a razor-thin line that becomes thinner with each day of success. I don’t cry anymore. I spent all of September and half of October willing myself not to after three crying jags at work, but now I don’t. Now I stare out. Now I subsume. I need to stretch, to feel my back crackle and pop. I need to lean. I need to breathe. I’m back into this life on drugs.

I listen to songs by Stars over and over and over and over, never getting tired. The Bound in Boston bondage con is today, but by last night I knew I'd be too tired to go. My sleep has been fragmentary, fleeting, and I feel constantly exhausted from waking up over and over throughout the night. I don't really have the extra money to go and I'm tired of driving, tired of waking up early. I take a double dose of Trazodone at 10 PM on the tail of my Ativan from 9:30 AM this morning once the criticism descended like a boom from a yacht as I walked into work, and my fragile resolve began to waver and drag. I smoke a bowl. I quit the marijuana for awhile, and now once in awhile I return to it, but rarely, and it doesn't seem to have the same effect. I'll settle for it making me hungry. My khakis hang on my hips. My head aches and the next morning, I'm sluggish. Snow is imminent. I form a curled cat comma in my comforter, and nothing appeals.

The week's been hard, and I feel hollow, porcelain, sluggish, surreal, reluctant to move. I can't make a decision so small as, should I get up and go get a drink from the kitchen? My lips are chapped. I feel no desire to interact with anyone who isn't a cat.

Complaining doesn't make it feel any better, so I'll retreat.

inebriated.

2009-12-04T20:18:00.002-05:00

It can't be this easy to get drugs. You just walk in and ask for them?

I've had a bad week.

and then...

2009-11-23T14:43:00.002-05:00

I really, really, really, really want to go to this. I need to find some way to make it happen:

Beltane.

whips and chains.

2009-11-06T08:55:00.004-05:00

The bug that's been causing me so much grief this week turned out to be pneumonia. The walking kind. I finally, coughing a fine mist of blood, hauled myself to a doctor's office Wednesday where the doctor listened to my lungs and pronounced them full of liquid, and me with a fever. I got thrown on some heavy duty antibiotics and forbidden to attend work for the rest of the week. Thankfully, within 6 hours or so, I felt my breathing ease again. It's amazing how much you take for granted things like being able to eat, sleep, and breathe comfortably. After a week of not being about to do any of the above, it felt like manna from heaven just to inhale to the bottom of my lungs. I lost five pounds. Go, team pneumonia.

Last night, in the midst of F. coming up behind me against the big window in his bedroom, cupping my breasts, kissing my neck and tucking his hard-on between my legs, I realized something ridiculously cheesy, which was this: F. makes me feel like a woman, not a kid. It's the way he touches me. F.'s initial roughness obscured the fact that he knows how to touch a woman, and does it with confidence. I couldn't bring myself to say it out loud to him even though it's quite a compliment. The irony of having him around, in all his post-1984 glory, is that F. is probably more of a man than the men my own age have been, if you measure by strength and self-sufficiency. I appreciate that for its practical value, but it's also freeing. F. systematically reminds me to make good decisions, do what's healthy, put in effort. I've spent years becoming exhausted from constantly being the more responsible party in any given situation...with L., J., my mother. F. allows me to relax my deathgrip and stop policing myself, or him. It's an unusual, surprising and gratifying dynamic, to find myself taken over willingly. Only time will tell how it unfolds, but I'm perplexed with what's so obviously not my precedent. I think we benefit tremendously from each other's company, but I don't exist FOR F., to fill in his missing places.

I've mentioned before my proclivity not only for being the responsible party, but for craving to submit to someone else. My interest in domination and power stretches back as far as I can remember, both in and out of the bedroom. Although I have upon request taken a role of top in my sexual encounters, a clear preference emerged early on to be submissive. J., in top form, is a natural dominant, and our early encounters were some of my most memorable sexually. In all other dynamics with J. (and with L., his predecessor), I was in charge, control they both surrendered easily and willingly. The inner workings of BDSM and its effects on personal psychology are complicated and multifaceted, but if I had to make a simplistic guess, I'd imagine my satiation with the role of responsible party left me yearning for an opportunity to surrender, to some degree. BDSM for me was always just an natural extension of whatever was going on in my life and my head from day to day...a way to cleanse, refocus, express, seek. Extended periods of sex without BDSM were common and tolerable but not my preference, and I always missed the heightened dynamic shared between people engaged in an ongoing D/s arrangement when they occurred.

F. is a masochist. He surprised me there, too, or I surprised him. It started with the love bites, which occupy my list of standard sexual fare. But he wanted more, harder. I felt him waking up, tensing and coming out beneath me, spirit pouring into him. It gave me pause. Waking up in the morning, covered with bruises, he seemed calmer, more at peace. My inner child began to laugh, those first couple of times. I saw in him what I saw in myself, at 17 or 18 when I was first held down, spread apart, controlled, and my body begin to sing like a violin, knew I needed more, had to have it, that my fibers cried out for it. I felt him begin to sing. Curiously, one night, I tied him to my bed, cut off his vision, and played with sensation...ice, wax, menthol, feathers, flogging, biting. Afterwards, he cried, and I became more sure. Scenes are a powerful thing for people, can change the course of how they see themselves, open old wounds and heal them again. Scenes can light up a label you never knew you had. Some people play their first time and don't want more. Some play and want feathered handcuffs and light spanking, but nothing else. And some awaken a beast in their chests, that stretches and shakes and then aches and lifts and yaws and begs again, again. Moreover, the stoic submissive in me began to give way, opening a need between my legs to do it again, to take him again. All big blue eyes and delicate hands, he gazed up at me and whispered, "Hurt me." And I realized that I wanted to. That when I don't have to have control in other areas, I may want it after all, in the bedroom. I'm not convinced anymore that I even want from him what I've wanted from other lovers. It's very strange, and very new for us both, I suppose.

In passing comments last night, he asked me to do a scene for him again this weekend, made it clear he wants more, and more intense. Small comments he makes in passing that would sound like jokes coming from anyone else ("Maybe you can hit me with [that belt] this weekend.") I see for serious. I'm intensely curious to see what's down this rabbit hole. It's beautiful to see something slowly unfurling in him for the first time that I saw in myself what seems like so long ago. To have had a part in awakening it, training it, laid the first careful platforms for him to step with increasing confidence.

He makes me hot.

the songs compose themselves.

2009-11-03T19:54:00.003-05:00

Writing might distract me from the agonizing lack of sleep and ache from my raw throat, so here goes.

It's been a year filled with the unexpected. If I could summon anything besides exhausted apathy at the moment, I might use the word surprising. My balance is off. Nothing ever worked out the way I thought it would. I'm not sure where to go from here. Somehow I imagined life...my life...to be more linear, to encroach on predictability at some point, as though it were a song I'd heard sung before and already knew the lyrics to. I expected a comforting routine, even if a bleak and proscribed one.

What I got was this.

And this, I'm pretty sure, could be worse. But sometimes the vertigo makes me dizzy. Sometimes I can't help but wish for the easy. I'm sure I'd manage to make it difficult in no time. Sometimes you reach for the certainty, clasp closest what stays firm in an ocean of chances, free from promise. Life is full of maybes, of if-onlys.

I made good on my promise with the pills and this weekend, in the middle of a raging flu, I made some minutes for me, and in a moment of marvel, I felt bare boy body slip into mine. It's been thousands of hours, and I rose to meet it like the tide, the tension of hands grasping a ledge to pull up and over, the sun slipping out on a winter day and melting the ice. It was clear as glass, red velvet, and I sank into the intimacy. It was marvelous. Blond, blue-eyed possibility unfolded. I wanted more. It's not even close to enough. How far away I've been from everyone else, this entire time, how separate a life I've been leading.

All day at work I thought about blond feathers, white feathers, the perfect, waiting openness stretched out on my bed, whispering baby, baby into my ear as it pressed into me, withdrew, pressed again. Burying pointed teeth in, honoring a request to hurt with a requiem of desire and falling, down.

et cetera.

2009-11-02T17:59:00.001-05:00

I am sick as a dog and relentlessly tired.

the f. word.

2009-10-18T21:06:00.005-04:00

Today the Golden Retriever (whose name is F.) were tangled in bed again, which has become a bit of a weekend routine after 4 or 5 similar Saturday nights/Sunday mornings spent. I'm still reeling over it all. But I need to go back a bit.

Monday I had off for Columbus Day, and F., camping out for the weekend, walked into the woods with me. I've been passing the Robert Frost trail for over a year now, always wanting to check it out, and never had the company to do it. Down the path, in the glow of the yellow and orange, it was silent. No one passed but us. In the middle of woods we stretched out in the leaves on the trail, F. cradled my head against the rocks, and I cried, for the perfect, unfettered loveliness that stretched before us. I cried, because for the first time in such a long time, I feel special when I'm with F., and stronger, because he is. He might be strong enough for me to be just a little weak. And just for a fleeting moment, there was nothing but gratitude and relief that I could still fall even a little, and be caught. In the silence, he held my head against his chest, and held it, and held it. And I cried, not to be let go. And when we walked back in the leaves to my car, the realization hit me with a matter-of-fact thump that falling in love, like a quiet velvet animal, had crept into my lap when I wasn't even looking. That F., with his piercing insight and magnificent eyes, with the stupid jokes and the startling maturity, whose hands are always so gentle and affectionate when he touches me, had gotten in. Somehow, the wall wasn't there anymore. And it was marvelous.

Last night, we fell asleep early...or I did, anyways, a grueling 5 days of work behind me and 5 more ahead of me, with the single Sunday in between. In the morning, F. made me come, and then lie on top of me, both of our soft nude skins slick with sweat. I was drenched all over, the tingling crevice between my legs humid and roaring for more. His cock dipped gently in between, and my body, which has faithfully allowed me to keep it in check for so long, having once orchestrated my teenage ambition to be as slutty as I could possibly be, gnashed and yawed and fired, growling into action. Disregarding the fact that I've been less than diligent about taking my birth control pills on time and daily, I purred to F., "Fuck me without a condom."
F., displaying the previously foreseen maturity of someone born well before 1988, responding incredulously and in the negative, pointing out to me that the consequences of said action in said situation were guaranteed to do nothing more than give us a massive anxiety attack post-coitus, to which I concurred. I guess if pressed I would blame it on the hormones, but just for a minute, I wanted to be that capricious, impulsive girl, so free of fear. For a minute, I wanted to feel the skin-on-skin contact of this astonishing spirit, being the closest it could be to me, and to hell with the consequences.

It was the only time I remember that happening, and I immediately made a mental note to begin being much more vigilant about my pills, to lure it into the realm of possibility. I hate using condoms, and rarely have, but post-J. my other options drifted into nonexistence and then laxity when I resumed, as I realized the increasing unlikelihood of R. ever having sexual intercourse with me. My sex life has proceeded unpredictably following J.

F. made me come a fourth time, then, condom in place, entered me again. I drifted into the inbetween and forgot to think, plan, or imagine for awhile. Sailors, we float placidly in the warm ship of my bed. Dr. J. says life is a cycle, according to the Confucians, anyways, and I accept it, but mine is mostly spent waiting for those stolen moments wrapped in the feathers of his hair and the sloping hollows of hips and collarbones and spine, waiting for my hand to be held.

It's good to know there's something else to life besides work and worrying.

i find.

2009-10-12T18:45:00.000-04:00

that i am without words.

i just was reminded again.

2009-10-07T22:36:00.001-04:00

god, you were handsome.

present, tense.

2009-10-05T19:55:00.003-04:00

"No job is worth getting that stressed over unless you're working for the damn President."

Wise words.

And, there's you. I don't know what the next step is to take with you. I juggle you from hand to hand like a hot object, gingerly. I turn you over to see how you fit in my palm. I can't tell if you are animal, vegetable, or mineral, bitter or spicy on the tongue. You sedate me.

With some success, I vigilantly attempt to control my anxiety for 24 hours.

singing ooo, baby, please.

2009-10-04T21:43:00.005-04:00

I am in turmoil.

I'm not sure what is real lately. Nothing is ever what I expected it to be.

Another TF at work on Saturday told me that he cries sometimes over thinking about how he must be the worst TF ever and how he's sure to be fired. I felt an overwhelming surge of relief that someone else was there, too. I can't tell anymore what exists only in my head and what is more or less actually happening. The sky and the ground have switched places.

Sometimes when I'm with you and you're touching me with gentle hands, sometimes when you laugh, I forget to be afraid.

in theory.

2009-09-29T20:15:00.006-04:00

My kids made me cry today. I'm hoping by tomorrow morning I don't feel quite so exhausted and discouraged as I have for the past two days. It was a letdown from Sunday. Saturday night and Sunday were good times. I met up with Golden Retriever boy again and started thinking maybe I was too quick to judge. I feel like I gave up a little bit on dating coming out of the summer with R. I mean, I was still online messaging new people so I guess that's a vote against giving up, but my heart wasn't in it. It's usually the times like that where you're surprised. I thought by now I knew what a stereotypical person I'd connect with looked like: brooding, romantic, nihilistic. I think about actor R. with his flowers and his Rilke and his acoustic guitar. My eyes are trained to flick over what I don't expect to see. G.R. boy is nothing like I expected, and it took me a little while to figure that out. It's like looking at a family portrait with a gorilla in the middle.

G.R. and myself spend a lot of time lying around not saying anything and he doesn't mind when I turn all the lights off. He has dimples and I like them. Sometimes we sit and stare at each other. He put my favorite ice cream in the freezer once before I came over, which made me remember the time I bought my own ice cream, stashed it at R.'s, ate three bites of it and then had him eat the whole thing once I left. Maybe there is something for being kind. For openly telling someone you're into them. I've given up on men in particular. I'm bitter. I freely admit it. I don't remember the last time I felt special to someone as anything other than friends. Not even sexually. It must have been back when J. and I were tight, creeping on three years ago.

My body had forgotten what it felt like to be touched, not just to be fucked. Isn't that sad? I can't get my hopes up about anything, anymore. I'm just hoping to keep my head down and survive this school year without having a nervous breakdown or doing something thoughtless which loses me my job. My boss tells me that I really need to learn to stop stressing out disproportionately to minor events. As usual, she's right.

Fall is coming on, and leaves are turning. I miss coming home to someone. I missed the feeling of lying all day in bed with someone on a rainy afternoon, spooning and making out. Are there that many things better, honestly? It sucks a little that I'd already given up on that and grow into my solitude. Even if I still will prefer the solitude, at least I'll remember how much I'm missing.

you do mysterious poorly.

2009-09-21T21:36:00.004-04:00

R. was more or less what I expected he'd be. Too bad. Big waste of a musical compatibility. That discussion went something like this: K: "So, I suspect you're using me until you find something better." R: "Aren't we both?"

Now, to pause, I may like me some undefinable unenforceable friends-with-benefits+ action, but I never looked at it that way. I think every individual sexual and emotional encounter I've had has been so unique it's really very unlikely for me to rank and classify. Some stand out more than others but I really never regretted one or deliberately looked beyond it for the next. The fact that R. does, without stopping to clarify those intentions especially, made me wonder a little. Plus, I couldn't stomach the drama of being around R. and liking him and knowing it was completely one-sided. I suspect that might be a slight self-esteem killer to even the most fortified. Better to continue trolling.

I picked up a Golden Retriever on the way. He's 21 and never shuts up. Unless he's fucking me. It only took me almost 5 months and at least 6 unsuccessful Craigslist meetups for me to accomplish that, in the zero-hour before the seasonal changeover. Which is a true testament to my insurmountable and crippling social incapacities.

I've got a Dungeon Master's Guide, I've got a 12 sided die, I've got Kitty Pryde, waiting there for me, yes I do. I do.

The first time was okay. Typical 21 year old issues. Too rough and too frantic. Second time was better. I can skool this one.

It's possible I'm slightly drunk on sexual attention. Or affectionate attention. Definitely on compliments. It's been awhile since I received a sincere compliment from someone who was into me.

I've discovered this summer that if there's any objective standard to judge such a thing, I am apparently knowledgeable and talented in the sexual arena. I guess that's something, after spending so many years reading about sex and trying to do it with anyone who drifted into my net of what constitutes interesting (everything from uncommon talent in some area to excellent grammar to a penchant for making out with members of the same sex while listening to acoustic rock).

He has great hair. #1 nonnegotiable.

It's a trade-off being good at sex when I'm terrible at meeting people, trusting people, taking constructive criticism, and obtaining any sort of interdependent mutual happiness. At least I can suck a cock.

Now I'm starting to sound cynical myself. Nah. It's been an alright day.

sweet nugget.

2009-08-24T21:04:00.004-04:00

Here's a sweet nugget from my pen and paper journal tonight.

On what I've learned from journaling through a whole notebook for the first time in years:

"...nothing whatsoever besides that shit is usually the same. You can usually expect not the extraordinary highs or lows but just the average, run of the mill, disappointing, obvious, soul-crushingly tedious and banal and bald same thing that's always happened. You don't get fired, you just get torn apart and berated while living in abject fear of fucking up the last chance you think you have. No one fucks their relatives, they just get cold feet and go back to their ex, while telling you how awesome they think you are and how they really want to be friends. No teary reconciliations with Mom, just two childish adults who don't want to be the one to speak first."

My predictions, anyways.

Stay tuned, kiddos.

i am.

2009-08-20T17:54:00.003-04:00

a fucking mess.

my little brother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital monday night.

the rest of my life is two tenths of a second from collapsing around my ears.

i'm furious and i don't know at who.

i'm tired of caring.

i want to do the most horribly self-destructive, pointless, dangerous thing i can find to do.

caught in the undertow.

2009-08-03T21:33:00.005-04:00

You spent last night getting drunk over your past lovers, and being an enigma in conversation with me.

I'm spending tonight getting drunk over my intended lovers, and listening to the same songs by Stars over and over.

In my masturbatory fantasy, you return home and show up at my door. I take you in and our heat warms each other, thaws us, and in our closeness, you give in and move inside me, while I taste your sounds in my mouth. In the morning, I'm just the same to you and you're just the same to me, only I don't have to work, and you stay.

I can't get off thinking about it because I want it too much. I get off thinking about my ex, dominating me. Simulated treating me like shit is what gets me off. I should just get off thinking about all my worries about how this will end.

paper and pens.

2009-07-21T21:08:00.005-04:00

I'm trying with some success to actually write in an old-school notebook with a pen again. It feels good. So there's a high probability that I'll cease blogging for awhile.

I've resolved not to overthink this summer.

Wish me luck on all counts.

the alphabet according to me.

2009-07-18T20:06:00.002-04:00

Adventurous. Bold. Creative. Dreamer. Educator. Feminist. Gifted. Hipster. Independent. Jaded. Kinky. Libertine. Misanthrope. Nymphomaniac. Opinionated. Political. Queer. Resilient. Sarcastic. Tattooed. Unusual. Voracious. Whimsical. e(X)amining. Youthful. Zealous.

This summer's...

2009-07-10T17:14:00.002-04:00

Drink of choice-- vodka and lemonade with fresh mint
Food of choice-- homemade pizza
Pastime of choice-- driving around with the windows down
Indie band of choice-- The Virgins
Place of choice-- Leverett Peace Pagoda
Famous death of choice-- Michael Jackson
Unexpected turn-on of choice-- the smell of tobacco
Outfit of choice-- slightly too-big jeans and a tight grey v-neck tee with aviators
Uncharacteristic act of choice-- staying up all night on work nights
Fetish of choice-- toe-sucking
Long dormant activity of choice-- writing in a notebook
Company of choice-- people I meet on Craigslist

interdependence.

2009-07-04T23:34:00.002-04:00

I miss you, the younger, thinner you, all sharp jawline angles and confident eyes. You were sexy then, untouched.

Today, the 4th of July, was the first real holiday (Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, 4th of July...) that I wasn't home in NJ. Instead, I went to the Peace Pagoda and laid by the pond and read. Then I went home, had some ice cream, burned some CDs, had some dinner, rolled a joint, and went to the town fireworks and celebration. On my blanket in the parking lot, I smoked up and watched the golden showers of sparks. Unlike Christmastime, which has all these memories of death, heartbreak and depression for me, the 4th of July was always a holiday I remember as being filled with love. I haven't even been to see fireworks, which I used to love, in years. As a teenager, I remember my father and my brother and our friends piling in to the truck and driving up to the hill behind the high school, where we'd buy glowstick rings and drink Snapple and watch the show. Later it was in my own car with my first love. It used to be one of my favorite times of year. The past few years, I've usually gone home for that weekend, and taken my dog out to the park in town, but I haven't gone to the fireworks, with or without my family.

My mind whirled in lazy, hazy, spent thoughts as I dreamed through the colors, all alone in the miles. It was perfect. No one else, no boyfriend, no family, but just me, and it was enough.

Summertime.

2009-07-03T17:54:00.004-04:00

Summer is here. I'm grateful for the sun and the shorter hours. I'm grateful for surviving a first year here alone. Well. Except for my cats. Reading back over old things that I've written, I realized the whole time I was keeping myself crazy busy and worrying, so if it hadn't been this nutty schedule, it would have been a new one doing something less rewarding. I sometimes think of this job as penance, although for what, I don't know. I've been praying, this whole year, but I don't know to whom. I've had faith. I have now. I mean, when it comes down to it, what else can you do?

These past few days I've been listening to all the old songs in my humid house and trying to learn to coexist amicably with myself, which you'd think would come naturally. I had an epiphany that maybe, I need to stop telling myself where I should be and what I should be doing, in comparison with others I know or have known or have an impression of knowing. Easier said than done. These past few weeks, I've felt like a glove, turned inside out, or a clasped fist, let go. Sometimes I feel like the detante after a particularly long and bloody war. I sleep. I work. I run errands. In my increasing prevalent free time, I cogitate. I live in the air between the few words I speak between 2:30 PM and 8:30 AM. My voice turns into a rusty pair of pliers from so little use, and I breathe deep, taking in the space around me.

I miss the feeling of being a hundred percent sincere and open with someone. Confession. I have run, and I have exiled, and I have chewed off my own limbs, and to say it is...to be free? Finding another person with whom you connect is like fishing a mental hook blindly into a jetstream of brainwaves and waiting to be pulled free of yourself and forgiven. I miss riding the current of another being seeing through me like plate glass despite my best efforts. I miss it, I'm only realizing now, because last night I found it again.

I'm still far too afraid for someone so brave.

Maybe it doesn't matter who we were or who we were not, but just who we are. I still can't see the things that are right in front of my face, sometimes. When the time comes to stand, I want to know I did, even though I didn't realize it at the time.

a treatise on perfectionism.

2009-06-20T18:40:00.003-04:00

It might have been Elizabeth Wurtzel who was trying to explain what was wrong with her, after years on mood-stabilizing drugs, in and out of hospitals. I'm paraphrasing, but the idea was that the whole time, even when she was doing them, it wasn't the drugs, it wasn't the booze, if she wasn't eating it wasn't the food, if she was cutting herself it wasn't the knives. The problem wasn't with an object or a substance, it was just her. The problem she had was herself, and she could never get away from herself, couldn't go into to rehab for a problem of self. Maybe you have to be there, but that's what I think of myself more and more. That the problem, when there is one, is just being a girl who is so tightly wound and expects so much from herself and it so afraid of loving and being loved that just being me is itself like something that you need to get out from under.

I'll back up.

I've been watching a lot of Gossip Girl lately. I know it's just a throwaway TV series about a bunch of rich kids; the new O.C., if it were, and not meant for the finding of existential truths (is any TV show, really?), but I relate so strongly to a pair of the main characters, it's frightening. They're in a constantly evolving love relationship that's up and down and hot and cold (mostly hot) and mostly that's because they're basically the same personality. They're both closed, somehow, like the smooth round white shell of an egg...no way in or out. Afraid to connect. You can see in the female lead's eyes that there's a whole mansion of rooms behind her socialite smile but that you're not invited in. Underneath is love, fire, recklessness, abandonment, but on the surface, it's all about control. Control of yourself, your emotions, your choices. Perfection. Image. And it sounds ridiculous, but I connected to the female character in particular in such a deep way, watching the show (which I also watch because it's hilarious, sexy and total brain candy). It's all about the perfection. It's all about fear and image. And I am so afraid lately, so afraid that I'm closing up more as time goes on rather than opening up more, that I'm limiting my own happiness by just walking away from love entirely. I'm afraid that I'm inside, looking out through the eyes of a body that acts in a way that wasn't intended, just the ghost in the machine, if you will, and that what I want to be seen is only the machine. As painful as it was living open, like a sore, festering through this whole on and off J. thing for months and months, it scares me more the way I am now, even though it hurts less. It scares me to bring able to bring the blade of erasure down, like a cleaver, over ten years of knowing someone. To be able to just choose to lose faith, to choose a status of not-there. It's less painful but more scary, thinking how long it takes to build a love, to build a trust, how open you have to be to be able to choose that, and how I'm less open, one catastrophe down the road, than I ever was.

Perfection. And love is messy and difficult and terrifying. It's a request that I can't uphold. And so I'm contained.

In college, I remember having freakouts over so many final exams, putting in hours of cramming, in terror that a B in a class would drop my GPA below summa cum laude 3.9. I remember panicked hours prepping and worrying and losing sleep for each test, sure that this would be the one I'd fail. I never did. I graduated with a 3.9. I scored the highest grade in the class several times, and the highest grade professors had ever given on some exams. All the panicking went nowhere.

Over the course of this new job this year, I've had many of those college moments again...a comment from my boss said in a tone that told me I was failing, was useless at my job, would be fired. Frantically, I tried harder, worked more, and laid awake at night smoking bowls and taking pills until my crushing anxiety...sometimes over something as minimal as whether I was expected to come in at 8 AM or 9 AM...receded enough for me to sleep. As time went by, I cried less frequently, and panicked more, and did more drugs to alleviate the panic. Right up through this week, through my performance evaluation for the year, this was me, crucifying myself inside my head for every misstep, for not trying harder or being better.

On my performance evaluation for the year this Friday, I scored a 46 on a scale of 1-60...just over the "exceptional" line climbing towards "outstanding," with scores of 14-17 on rubrics of 20. I was praised for my vision, creativity, flexibility, my dedication to the kids, my curriculum design, and my hard work. I went as far as to ask my boss if she was bullshitting me because I literally could not believe that I had earned those scores, even working 50 hours a week. Eventually, I came to think maybe my boss had only been so hard on me to force me to be better, to keep improving, not to settle for good when I could be great. But regardless, I know I will back next week and make the same mistake once more, because I can't escape it, because it is me. Perfection, or nothing. Destruction in the pursuit of perfection. I feel like a hamster, trapped in a wheel, exhausted from running and running and going nowhere, regressing instead of changing, and exhausting myself as I regress.

And it makes sense, when you think about it, to consider my endless search for release through sex, drugs, bad TV, cutting. Most of the time, it's beyond me to even cry, unless it's related to one of the three factors above which loosens my guard long enough to let some tears come. As I creep towards 25 I pack myself tighter inside a smaller space, holding my breath until I turn blue rather than giving in and accepting, settling for patience, settling for less than perfection, settling for crying and admitting I'm wrong and opening myself up. The only way I can escape my own mind is by sneaking out the back door when I'm not looking, benzos or vibrators in hand. Often, after I come and in that moment when all walls are down, I cry, even if I'm alone. Within the minute or two it takes to swim back to the surface of myself, the tears are packed back away again beneath the surface.

I'm watching GG looking for answers, because sometimes you do see too much of yourself reflected in a character, whether it's in a book, a movie, a play, a song, a dance, or a throwaway TV show. I can feel myself retreating, ebbing like the tide, and I'm afraid the time is almost up to make a change, and I don't know how.

2009-06-14T12:34:00.003-04:00

Today after I came in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, I was thinking about the past, and I began to cry. Not the recent past, but the past of ten or twelve years ago and the sense of family that I remember having once but then lost and never got back. And I'm so afraid that I might never get it back, that my mind, thinking backwards, has turned it into something that in reality it never was in the first place, that I'm only even seeing the rearview mirror anymore. I'm afraid that the hard years have turned me into stone, and that I won't be able to open myself up and be that free to love people anymore, that I won't be able to pull them into myself the way I could once. That there won't be anything to fill the gap. That I'm living in the past even though I know that the family I had once was as imperfect as any other family that people have, as flawed. That I don't trust most of them anymore any more than I would trust anyone else who played a fleeting role in my life.

Mostly I'm afraid that there's a hole or a wall or a fist where I used to be.

But it's been a long, long time since I cried and I know that I needed it, that all of this that I haven't been talking about needs to come out somehow, in some way, that the fist needed to waver and open, that a lock clicked and a door swung not wide, but cracked, just enough to let the light in.

So I went with it. I'm afraid of myself how I am now. I'm afraid I won't know how to be anything else. That I'm just the same and everything else is moving on. I need someone to stay with me who refuses to move on too.

"Signs" by Bloc Party

Two ravens in the old oak tree
One for you and one for me
Bluebells in the late December
I see signs now all the time
The last time we slept together
There was something that was not there
You never wanted to alarm me
But I'm the one that's drowning now

I can't sleep forever these days
In my dreams I see you again
But this time fleshed out fuller face
In your confirmation dress
It was so like you to visit me
to let me know you were okay
It was so like you to visit me
Always worried about someone else

At your funeral I was so upset
In your life you were larger than this
statuesque

I see signs now all the time
That you're not dead, you're sleeping
I'll believe in anything
That brings you back home to me
I see signs now all the time
That you're not dead, you're sleeping
I'll believe in anything that brings you back
home to me

Craigslist Update.

2009-05-31T13:27:00.003-04:00

So in addition to my former flames from the CL, we now have...

Mr. Pretentious-- 31, works in computers, well-spoken, mature, responsible, well-traveled. He bought me the best veggie burger I've ever had at a restaurant in Amherst Wednesday night. But the second I saw him I knew I wasn't attracted to him. He's very into me, but it's not going to happen. At least I got a dinner out of it!

The Socialist-- 24, superbly smart, busy, actively involved in activism, works in healthcare educating people about STI prevention and writing grants, writes great emails, kinda cute. Going out with him for the first time this afternoon, really really really hoping it goes well because he is CL gold, so far!

Mr. BDSM--34, looking for a sub, answers my ad, comes off as sane, funny, and literate, which is a shock. I'm slightly intimidated by his size (6'5") and age, but just the descriptions in his emails of what kinds of things he is into make me have to masturbate, so we'll see if there's a meetup in the cards there!

Mwahaha.

If I Just Breathe...

2009-05-24T21:53:00.002-04:00

....everything will be alright.

Move on with your life, and stop asking why, because why stopped mattering a long time ago.

You can choose to let it eat you alive or you can choose to breathe and let it go.

Things to Do Before I Die.

2009-05-23T17:12:00.000-04:00

1. Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge
2. Learn to climb a mountain and then climb one
3. Hike up the Half Dome in Yosemite National Park
4. See the sequoias in Yosemite
5. See the Grand Canyon
6. Visit Yellowstone National Park
7. Stand on a glacier and see Denali in Alaska
8. Hike the Appalachian Trail from beginning to end
9. Go parasailing
10. Go to Auschwitz
11. Take a walk in the Amazon
12. Go on safari in South Africa and see animals in the wild
13. Have a threesome with two men
14. Have a threesome with a man and a woman
15. Adopt a child
16. Live in an apartment I pay for with no one else
17. Learn to speak Spanish fluently
18. Learn to dance salsa really well
19. Snorkel the Great Barrier Reef
20. Travel around Europe
21. Date someone significantly older and wealthier than me
22. See Nine Inch Nails live
23. See Tori Amos live
24. Swim with dolphins
25. Go outside naked in a thunderstorm
26. Learn to surf
27. Go kiteboarding
28. Live in California
29. Buy a pair of really expensive, really sexy high heels
30. Get my doctorate
31. Meet Adam Duritz
32. Tell someone who treats me poorly to their face, “Go fuck yourself.” And then walk away for good.
33. Buy a house with its own library or at least a room I can turn into a library
34. Go on a Caribbean cruise
35. Fall in love with and be loved by someone kind, intelligent, responsible, interesting and funny
36. Learn to ride horses
37. Get a job that I love that pays well enough for me to travel and buy a home
38. Go to Tibet and see the Himalaya

Pride.

2009-05-02T18:20:00.003-04:00

Today is Pride in Western Mass. The Smithie and I, plus some of her buddies went to the parade and rally after heading to the club until 2 AM last night. Technically speaking, this was my very first Pride. I was very excited.

Some of the area's high schools were represented in the march, their GLBT students wearing handpainted t-shirts and waving flags. They displayed some of that typical awkward self-consciousness that teenagers have, but they marched proudly in front of hundreds of people, and I teared up. I hoped their families were proud of them. I imagine my life growing up might have been very different if I had had that space to be who I was alongside other people who were proud of the community they were a part of, proud to claim ownership of being who they were unashamedly. I feel as though so many GLBT teens are still in need of that space today, to challenge the ideas presented to them that they are somehow strange, unknown, unwanted, irreconcilably different. Things are getting better, but there are still the Lawrence Kings. These days it seems one of the greatest and most piercing insults thrown around is "fag." For those of us that know that it really is true, there's in the worst cases, a terror that one will be found out and burned at the proverbial stake. More mildly, there's just an unsettling feeling of emptiness, of a lack of ties, of community, of, more importantly, shared goals and history and challenges and triumphs. So many kids with such potential to make a difference, to shift a paradigm, to open the eyes of others as to what their world looks like and who they are. So many kids who never have a chance or a voice to do that until so much later in life. I'm still not comfortable with the thought that I want to see both men and women. It was lovely to have my first Pride be while I was dating a woman that I really like and feel comfortable with.

It's all about shaping your world: what do you want it to look like? What do you want it to be? ...I've felt so often like there were a set block of options, niches to fit into, clearly delineated preferences set by someone else, by society. What no one ever tells you is that there are an infinite array of options open to us, ones that we can't even name but create from scratch, that nothing is ever really that straight and narrow and quick and easy for everyone, that it's really just the journey. I get to decide who I want to date, sleep with, invite over, marry, divorce, befriend. How many at once, under what circumstances, in what timeframe. I can decide to wait, fuck around indiscriminately, date casually, or settle down. The hardest part is also the most wonderful: figuring out what I want and how to do it.

Met Ishmael Beah, the author of A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier this week. Ran my first 5k last week. Reading the book Columbine by Dave Cullen and it's great. Getting tired on the job front but summer is coming soon.

Moving into my second year living in this apartment. Appreciate every day the peace of living in my own place with my own things, earning my way.

Applying to grad school this summer!

i'm just choosy.

2009-04-09T21:03:00.005-04:00

I Won't Fuck:

--People who have poor spelling and grammar
--Republicans/Conservatives/Anti-Choicers
~~--Smokers~~
--People who don't like animals
--Unclean people
--Men who are disrespectful to women
--Men who won't have sex with condoms
--People who are really closed-minded and traditional when it comes to sex
--Men who expect you to give them head but don't reciprocate
~~--People with less than a college education~~
--People with incurable STDs

Apparently that makes me really picky and also eliminates 99% of the people that exist. Dr. David and I agree, however, that I'm far more likely to choose people that will stick around, when I choose them, as opposed to quick and forgettable fucks. But it still means I get laid less than I would like.

At least I'm getting out more. I discovered amazingly that there is a counselor I work with who I adore who is bisexual. Always remember: you never know who people are. You never know what there really is, because you'll be surprised every time. Now I have friends to go to Pride with. I have some tentative friends in Mass. these days at least which is more than I had before. I'm getting there. Still seeing the Smithie, who is sleeping over this weekend...wish me luck.

Tomorrow off which is afreakingmazing.

adventures in craigslist.

2009-03-28T19:42:00.002-04:00

So, Sunday night, there was The Artist. 23, skinny, dominant, hair smelled great. Met him for a booty call at his apartment in Amherst at 10 PM. Made out, got naked, got slapped around a bit, gave him head, wasn't reciprocated, then I found out he doesn't wear condoms/doesn't like them/is allergic. By the time the story changed the third time, I was already out the door. Artist=code for selfish, brooding, and self-centered. Dominant=code for "I want head but don't reciprocate." Hotness: 8, minus 3 for assholeness.

Friday night: Yoga Boy, 24, was originally looking for someone to accompany him to a group sex party in Brooklyn. Tall, blue-eyed, wild sexual past including MFM and FMF threesomes, BDSM, and a hookup with a women more than twice his age. Confident, polite, ripped as hell, practices vinyasa yoga, lives with his parents, graphic designer/massage therapist/etc. Went to dinner in South Hadley, walked around town, ended early with no hookup. Future hookup potential: 5. Hotness: 7, plus 1.5 for sexual freedom.

Today: the Smithie. 20, sophomore at Smith, short, hazel eyes, theatre major, bisexual, Jewish, sweet, loves the outdoors, is deaf but reads lips and knows American Sign Language. Went for a walk around the Smith campus. Hookup potential: ? Hotness: 7 if she didn't look so tired today.

Also, the Vegetarian, 25, BA in journalism, athletic, likes motorcycles, little shy, recently out of a breakup, looking for FWB. Hoping to hook up with him this week until he emailed me today and told me his ex-girlfriend, who supposedly coincidentally also answered my CL post, read his email and drama ensued. Still waiting to hear who SHE is. I'm fighting for this one. He's cute and he's a vegetarian, too. TBD.

I have a few more on rotation backup.

J.'s Hookups:

Cling Girl: 25, met her at the club, scheduled 3 dates in a week, failed to tell her he was fucking other people, now she wants to be exclusive and it's been exactly one week.

Sketchy Girl: 23, met her on the CL, first said she was living with her ex, then said it was her boyfriend. Looking for casual sex but never seems to set a date and time to meet up.

So far, it's been a trip, I have to say.

ever wrest.

2009-03-21T18:46:00.003-04:00

I don't write much anymore. Bad me.

My work hours kicked up again and I'm working 45-50 hours a week most weeks. Which leaves little time for blogging, as you can imagine. After a couple months, they'll kick back down again until August. I'm hoping to spend the summer exploring Western Massachusetts and lying around in the sun. And reading all the books I keep buying but not reading. I've been working on Obama's damn autobiography since before the man was President.

Bought a blender today, and ingredients for vegan chocolate cookies. Love Whole Foods' version but they charge over a dollar per cookie, so I spend the money to make my own with soymilk and margarine. Didn't roll out of bed today until 2; was up running a dungeon in Warcraft until after 2 AM. I do less of everything these days: less gym, less WoW, less blogging. I have no life.

Put myself out there on CL to find some new people to add to my life. Got 85 responses; narrowed it down to one girl I really like and one guy I kinda like. Dr. D. tells me that I need to take shit less seriously and give myself permission to play around and experiment with life. J. and I decided that we're going to see other people and maybe see each other casually once in awhile. He went to the club Tuesday night and got taken home by some girl named Heather. He went again tonight alone. I probably should have gone, gotten out. Maybe I'll meet up with GamerBoy tomorrow. I need a distraction, to stop pretending that everyone I meet I have to screen to be with forever, to ignore the small things in favor of just getting what I want in the moment. To be young. The thought of playing the field mostly just makes me tired. I lack the effort. I'm more looking forward to finding women to be with than men. I want to not think about J. so much anymore. To be distracted by the rest of life. To be swept along in the waves. It's a strange lingering taste of freedom, to think about. I'm stretching out and unraveling my limbs, fitting them together, arcing out against the pressure of a change.

I remember many more times when there was a boy there for me than when I was there for me.

This job made me realize that I do want kids one day. I don't want to have them myself, but I want them. At least one. Probably in at least 3 years. I'll be 27 then.

I wish I'd get tired enough to sleep.

it's amazing...

2009-03-07T19:32:00.002-05:00

...how much shit you can find out about my life if you Google me. I'm not sure why this is because I actually took off, blocked from searching, or made anonymous a LOT of things about me that were online in the past couple years: an entire website I maintained throughout my teen years that had more than 10.000 views, my MySpace page, my nude photos from SuicideGirls, and of course, this journal. But it sort of surprises me that people can still find out this: I went to college at MSU, was a Women's Studies major and also worked for the department, that I proceeded to grad school for Sociology at Rutgers, that I was a TA there for P. R., my salary, and ratings from the students I taught. Also, that I write poetry, was engaged to J., was once a member of the SCA, my address, home phone number, that my grandfather died last year. Also that I volunteered with animals and that I'm teaching about girls' empowerment currently at Duggan Middle School in Springfield, MA.

Basically, I'd be great material for a stalker, since you can find all that out just by typing my name into Google. Dig a little deeper, and my 4 email addresses, Facebook, MySpace, etc. would be a snap to uncover as well...not to mention this journal, although most people notice I never use my or anyone's real name here. That's part of the reason why!

I guess I have a lot to write lately but I think right now I'm going to go grab a bite at the diner instead.

quiet.

2009-02-01T12:10:00.002-05:00

It's been too quiet around here.

J. was visiting his family in Puerto Rico for a few weeks and I struggled to come to terms with everything between us. I guess what it came down to eventually is that I can't change him, he won't or can't change himself, and I can't live with the things I wish would change. Which doesn't, in the end, leave me with any options. We rushed into this in the beginning, and I know it. I felt with J. that our whole long story must have happened for a reason, the improbability must have been determined by fate, that the universe was tapping on my head and pointing me in one direction. J. is, when he's feeling more like himself than he has been lately, a great partner in crime. And I miss that the most. But it's matter-of-fact, when stripped of emotion. It is what it is, and what it is is over.

I wish that he'd be more proactive to get back to that positive place. Ever since this mess with the OCD came on, ever since last January, he became someone else. I really wish I could help him in the bottom of my heart, partly because I feel like I've failed as a friend and a partner and partly because I miss him being okay. But I can't. He has to determine that he wants to get better, he has to believe that he can get better, he has to act to make himself become better. He has to take the path of most resistance. Because these things usually are just one big teeth-gritting battle of misery, until they're not anymore. But J. takes the path of least resistance, in the face of all suggestion, and it's leading him nowhere. When I talk these days, I feel like a ghost girl, because he's already in another place. Suggesting, cajoling, bargaining, getting angry, coercing, insulting, and babying haven't work. Withdrawing is what I have left.

So I guess, the path splits and we go our separate ways. I'm telling myself that if I operate on autopilot and just pretend it doesn't matter, maybe one day it won't. Because I have the same option. Fight, or give up.

Looks like the roommate hunt is on. It's going to be a long time before I want to be in a relationship with someone else.

Alright, already, we all float on.

2009-01-22T08:54:00.002-05:00

I had a dream last night that I was in the apartment of an artist who lived in a city. He was older than me but still young, shy, with a flop of sandy hair. He was moving away for awhile, and let me choose whatever I wanted from amongst his art and his belongings. He was going to charge me a little at first, but I think eventually he just let me choose. When he left, he left me a key, just in case I wanted to come back and have a safe place. It was a dream where there was one pervasive emotion, and it was love. This person loved me unimaginably, trusted me, and wanted to protect me. I woke up and basked in the love until it started to slip away.

I'm so afraid that no one will ever love me like that. That I don't really even deserve it. J. checked out of us in August and never came back the way he was before. I don't know that he can ever love me the way he used to. I ache inside thinking that I'm going to be alone.

100th post.

2009-01-10T22:24:00.001-05:00

You left it, I sent it
I want it back
You left it, I sent it
I want it back

If I had you here, I'd clip your wings
Snap you up and leave you sprawling on my pain
This plan of mine is oh so very lame
Can't you see the grass is greener where it rains

You left, I died,
I went and you cried
You came, I think
But I never really know
I've served my time
I've watched you climb
The wrong incline
But what do I know

Now this applies equally to you and I
The only thing we share
Is the same sky
These empty metaphors
They're all in vain
Can't you see the grass is greener where it rains

You left, I died,
I went and you cried
You came, I think
But I never really know
I've served my time
I've watched you climb
The wrong incline
But what do I know

And I lie behind you
And a cradle you in the palm of me
And I pat your hair down
I think, will we sink or swim?
'Cause we could do either on a whim

In the garden the snake was charming
And Eve said let's give it a try
Now lead us not into temptation
But Eve is the apple of my eye.

forever getting back to that altered state.

2009-01-09T19:45:00.003-05:00

Playing World of Warcraft. Too much.

Oh, it's just me, trying to get back to that altered state of mind. But aren't we all?

Drama abounds.

Oh, P.S.

That cat from the woods? Yeah. He's staying. This house is too small to house Tao, Meeps and Toast too, plus Mandela and his enormous tank and J. and I. But, that's what happened. I'm officially a crazy cat lady.

a history of brokenness.

2008-12-26T17:43:00.003-05:00

I guess everyone sooner or later has to come to terms with their past. Or at least, most of the people I know do. It's possible that there are the rare individuals out there that lead a life relatively free of mental catastrophe, who are well-adjusted and sure of foot. I don't know much about them. I surround myself with the other ones, which I've mentioned before. We tend to get along better, and I guess that's probably because of my own checkered past.

The "A is for Atlanta, B is for Boston" jump-rope game that kids used to play is played by me with behavioral medications these days, because I feel like it's a limited time before I'm going to need to go see a psychiatrist who can put me on a benzodiazepine or an opiod that can actually be monitored from one month to the next, and the inevitable questions about past experiences will arise. Every time I go through this, I notice the list has become a little longer. Effexor, Wellbutrin, Cymbalta, Celexa, ReVia, Ultram, Prozac, Desyrel, BuSpar, Ativan. A parade of SSRIs, SNRIs, benzos, opiods and assorted other capsules and tablets, over a period of 9 years. They didn't ever manage to get the chemistry right, so far, and it mostly came with unbearable side effects to the tune of weight gain, loss, crippling nausea, inability to have orgasms. What these things fix they mostly break somewhere else until you need 4 or 5 of them just to balance each other out and let you cope. A symptom of a society that looks to drugs to fix its ills, that at the age of 24, this list stretches on so far. But I'm plagued with the idea that "they" never really "figured out" what my big fucking problem was in the first place.

I was a 15-year-old who began down a long, slippery slope of self-injury that climbed into the hundreds of scars by my early twenties. I followed it up with several crippling depressions and serious considerations of suicide, an absurdly brief bout with bulimia, threats of hospitalization, chronic insomnia that follows me to this day, and diagnoses of Major Depressive Disorder, Dysthymia, double depression, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Eventually, the panic attacks came. My months of depression became peppered with periods of several weeks at a time when I didn't need to sleep and juggled 6 or 8 different activities at once, sometimes with great success. At the age of 19 I discovered marijuana and at 21, where to buy it. From then on, it could never be counted on that pot wouldn't be my crutch.

Now, I'm 24. I've seen seven psychologists and psychiatrists, none of whom worked until my present one, Dr. J. I've courted the previously mentioned medications. I balance my uncontrollable mood swings with contraband Ativan, Klonopin, and Seroquel I've bummed from friends. And pot, of course. Desyrel gets me to sleep at night. My last major depressive episode ended last spring, but in the meantime, my mood has jigged unpredictably, bolstered by terrified periods of anxiety, tension, restlessness, sleeplessness and crying. In a fit of pique in the fall I made good use of our new serrated kitchen knives, and not in the way they were intended.

And "they" still don't know why. I'm accusatory, which is ludicrous, since even *I* don't know "why." I guess, being medical professionals, I expected them to be endowed with magical powers of imagination. Tonight, followed around by teeth-grinding anxiety for no apparent reason for hours, I sat down and made my list of medications. I'm figuring if I'm going to take them anyways I might as well try to wrangle a prescription for them so they can be supervised. I shot an email to Dr. J. and sat down to blog. All of this has become sadly ordinary over the years, something that is background noise and will always necessitate mediation. A character defect rather than a bad period or something that can be gotten over. A life of holding your breath waiting for the roof to fall in again. Question marks about bipolar disorder and adult ADHD prance through my head. Dr. J. encourages not regarding it all in terms of diagnosis, but too often, I feel like a diagnosis waiting to happen....that whatever the "problem," in can't be "solved" until we know what it is. And I don't. So I stick to my stolen benzos and my disillusionment with the medical industries.

reflections.

2008-12-21T22:31:00.003-05:00

The end of the year is a time when most people like to reflect on the year and decide what they want to change in the coming year. The concept of New Year's Resolutions is not only resolving, but absolving...a clean slate, so to speak. A change of numbers and a change of attitudes. I've been thinking about the change. Peoples' twenties are often a time of many or great changes. Turmoil. According to Erikson, I'm supposed to be solving the problem of how to connect with people and form relationships. I think he's mostly full of shit, but that's accurate, I suppose. The non-relationship I'm in has had a way of revealing ugly truths. lately...and deep ones. I guess I hope that if I stay, it will eventually reveal more, shoes and tires being burped up by the earth. They are truths like: J. is afraid that I don't listen because I don't find anything he says to be interesting anymore. Mostly. I don't. Listen. I don't know why. Truths like: J. can't come when we have sex anymore. Truths like: I don't go on birth control because I don't know anymore if I can let him be that close to me. Truths like: I can't let go of some of my habits that hurt me. That is frightening, sometimes. Truths. Painful ones. Truths like: sometimes, there aren't any words left to talk things out anymore. Staying to see what other truths emerge is as good a reason as any other. to stay.

I saw the movie Milk on Pleasant Street, in Northampton, in a blizzard. The streets were white and free of cars. Snow whirled down and the trees were lit for Christmas. It was wonderful.

I have 3 absolvations: I want to go to the gym again, I want to worry about things less, and I want to volunteer for Northampton Pride. Well, 4: I want to have more orgasms, too. I'll leave the hard stuff for later.

In the spirit of Christmas, I guess I could admit some things about me.

Here is the good: I'm intelligent, I am socially aware, I love animals, I have a good sense of humor, I'm responsible (with most things), I'm not afraid of hard work, I like to care for people, I'm punctual, I'm reasonably clean, I'm loyal, I'm (usually) independent, I'm silly, I love my friends, I can spell, I love to learn, I'm amazingly resilient, I'm childish, I love life, I never give up, I never shut up, I never take "no" for an answer.

And the not: I'm controlling, I'm a stress case, I have impossible standards, I'm judgmental, I'm addicted to the Internet, I'm bad with finances, I have poor impulse control, I'm prone to abusing myself and substances, I'm selfish, I'm demanding, I'm inflexible, I'm emotionally unstable, I'm prone to pushing myself too hard and crashing, I'm manipulative, I'm elusive. I never give up, I never shut up, I never back down.

Maybe it balances out. Sigh. Another new year.

a season for change.

2008-11-19T21:31:00.003-05:00

This year is the year for change.

Tonight I came home and pulled into my driveway and heard a cat screaming across the road in the woods. My heart stopped because I was positive that it was mine and she'd gotten out somehow. I let myself into the house, panicky, to grab my flashlight, but Tao greeted me there. Perplexed, I ran across the street into the woods with my flashlight only to find a miserable black cat crouching on a rock in the forest in the freezing cold, screaming. I lifted him up--he let me-- and carried him into my house. He's hiding under my bed and I'm wondering what on Earth to do with him tomorrow since we now have a cat sequestered in every room in the house (since Tao and Meeps hate each other).

But, to return...

It's been a hard few weeks and I've had my doubts. And my tears shed. And even, in darker moments, the feeling that I won't be able to see this thing to the end of two years. But this week was a week to renew. This year has been a year to renew...out with the corrupt, the ignorant, the self-serving, the miserable. In with hope. In with the new. And, my kids, I couldn't help but think that I have total, unequivocal, unending faith in my kids. I want so much to buoy them up, to help them be strong and smart and confident, to help them love. I'm an educator. I'll be an educator until forever. Now I know.

There are small moments in the days that make it all worth it. Today, my boss's boss came in to watch me teach my class and poke around the kids to see what was happening. I tried to steer her towards the articulate, poised, confident kids since I knew they'd give an effortlessly good review of my class. But it was career day, and I was preoccupied with our three volunteer presenters. Emily (the boss's boss) approached James T. James T. spent the first 6 weeks of my class looking bored and playing with toy cars when he thought I wasn't looking his way. Until we visited the Zoo and he got to hear about humane education while petting a Fennec fox, a Burmese python, an armadillo. After that, I saw him open, like a flower. Emily talked to him for a few minutes and moved on to one of those articulate, poised kids. And James T. looked up at me behind him, and, sensing the importance of whatever was discussed with him, asked, self-consciously, "Did I do good?"

"You did amazing," I told him, having no idea what he had said. He smiled. It made it all worth it.

This is the year for change. Change of address, change of attitude, change of opportunity. Change of belief. This is the year we will learn to build others up instead of tearing them down. This is the year we will dance. This is the year we will reevaluate. This is the year we will grow. This is the year we will love, as though it was neverending. This is the year I will not be afraid. This is the year I will save the world, one lonely kid at a time. This is the year.

fall.

2008-10-31T19:32:00.006-04:00

It's been a super-long time since I actually wrote a self-reflective emotional blog entry about what's happening in my life. I think the few people that actually read this blog will forgive me that since they're such a busy lot themselves. But, Dr. David and I have come to an agreement that reflectively writing about what I'm thinking is probably a good bet towards taking some of the worry out of my head and transferring it to something else. I miss writing. Writing used to be this big integral part of who I thought I was, in high school, and for a little while in college. Identity. But it fell behind, the more and more "real life" worries that I turned to contemplating. Writing was something I did for me, and the things I did for me that weren't absolutely necessary were always the first to get cut.

So here I am. Halloween, and not doing anything remotely Halloween-like, unless you count listening to Thriller. Friday nights are always the same for me...Forensic Fridays on Trutv at 9, Bill Maher at 11, and me probably falling asleep in front of the TV by 10:30. What I said about being tired all the time is not an exaggeration, sadly. J. is off to a Halloween party in Springfield tonight. I could have tagged along, but that would have required my getting out of my ratty sweatpants and favorite MSU sweatshirt. The shoulder I injured two years ago is hurting all the time lately so I'm mostly interested in rubbing on my Ben-Gay and easing it gingerly onto a hot water bottle at night. I'm starting to be afraid I have a torn RC or something that's never going to go away.

Life in New England...it's been three and a half months since I moved. I love my little apartment. I love my town. There are moments when I love that J. lives with me, although they're not most of the time. There are moments when I love my job, although the same applies there too. It's been too much stress for me adjusting to the job to love it all the time. I don't regret any of my decisions, but it's lonely here. I'm approaching my 24th birthday in December and I don't know that I am where I thought I'd be at 24. Life is like that. It's something that I'll need to accept, I suppose. My life is just not one of those neat, orderly lives, and there's a lot of time still for things to turn out right. That's what I tell myself. But getting into my mid-twenties, I'm starting to feel my mortality in a weird way that I haven't before. My biological clock has started ticking, and although I don't want to give birth to kids, it's telling me that it's around the time that I should be. Although I'm really young, comparatively, life no longer feels like it will last forever the way it did in my teens and early twenties. I'm feeling the pressure around me to settle down with one person in a stable romantic/living situation and start "living my life." What I'm really doing is just mucking around, same as I have been for years, trying things on. Some days I feel so much like I'm still the same 15 year old...stubborn, self-deprecating, with my chopped off hair dyed many colors, my Nintendo and my cats, and the same attitude problem. I am not accepting this 24. I wish I owned the movie Nightmare Before Christmas to watch tonight.

This job...

So this is what my day looks like: I get up most days at 7:30, eat my Eggos, throw on my khakis, and drive the hour to work. I get there at 9. Most days, I visit science, math, English and social studies teachers. I hang out in the classrooms, watch what the lessons are about, take note of the homework, and keep an eye on my 27 seventh-graders to see how much and what kind of work they're doing. I note any behavioral problems, and I might talk to the teachers about what's going on. Sometimes I drop by the cafeteria during lunch to say hi to my kids and informally ask how they are. I get hugs. Sometimes I solicit hugs. If any kids are in Student Support (i.e., trouble), I find out why and talk it over with them. I return to the office, check my emails, and keep in contact with headquarters about suggestions and upcoming trainings. I check in with my boss regarding our upcoming events. I make phone calls to parents letting them know how their kids are doing in terms of grades, behavior, and general observations about how they're adjusting to after-school program. I let parents know about upcoming events and take notes on all of our conversations in a binder. I write out the agendas for the week. I make phone calls to arrange field trips, run off copies as needed, and keep in contact with volunteer Laura, who teaches a Pottery apprenticeship on Monday that I supervise, to make sure she has everything she needs and is on track. I usually find 20 minutes to eat my Lean Cuisine in the office while working or scanning MSN. In my "spare" time, I plan or adjust curriculum for my own Care of Animals apprenticeship, and plan learning enrichment activities that I run on Tuesdays. I gather any needed supplies for the day (games, visuals) and make sure they're distributed to part-time staff. At 2 PM, sometimes I run a pre-meeting preparing staff for the day, and then I carry our supplies downstairs and post our agenda. At 2:30, our autistic and special-needs kids come in, and at 2:45, everyone else pours in. I greet the kids, interact with them as they eat snack, and make sure they're cleaned up on time to facilitate transition to the next activity. We play a quick silly game or team-building activity to get the energy up. I help line them up, and we go to homework time. For an hour I maintain calm and quiet for 28 kids (with one other staff member), provide homework help, and confer with the students who are failing or struggling about how to raise grades. I escort them to teachers and to the bathroom and provide Band-Aids as needed. Depending on the day, I then teach a lesson for an hour or facilitate someone else's lesson. At 5:30 we dismiss them to the buses and go outside to make sure everyone gets on their way home safely, and then meet for 30 to 45 minutes in post-meeting to discuss the day. On field trip days, I go along as a chaperone. I also prepare and attend evening events like Family Potluck night, Bowling night, and trainings on weekends in Boston or Worcester. Most nights, I leave work at 6:15 and get home by 7:15.

When I write it down, it seems like SO MUCH, and I understand why no one could really explain to me what this job is about. The reason we do all this is to give much-needed academic support and mentoring to kids that are largely from poor families, foster kids, troubled kids, special-needs or ESL. 77% of the kids at my middle school come from families whose income falls below the poverty line. We hope to encourage them to get good grades, stay out of trouble and pursue good careers and college education so they can help strength their community. My workweek averages 47 hours or so. In many ways, I'm like a teacher, but more, I'm a facilitator, I suppose. When I look at it here, I suppose I put too much pressure on myself to "get it right," and don't give myself enough credit for all of it. It's one of those things you can't learn without getting thrown into it. It's thankless in a lot of ways, but the kids make up for it some of the time without even knowing it. Sometimes, I know I matter to some of the kids, when they yell out "Bye, Miss K.!" as I leave for the day, or, "Miss K.!" and run over to hug me when I enter the cafeteria (that's Amanda, who would be my favorite if I was allowed to have one). I suppose in the end this will turn out to be a really unique experience I couldn't trade for anything.

Happy Halloween, all. Hope it's satisfactorily spooky.

words and birds.

2008-10-28T21:04:00.001-04:00

I sent a sad email to a very old friend tonight.

This is not where I thought I'd be at 24 and that bothers me all the time lately.

So many people are counting on me and believing in me that it feels obscene to even think to myself that I'm not happy here.

there was a little girl.

2008-10-23T13:25:00.004-04:00

It's been a MONTH since I posted last here.

The good thing about these crazy job hours is that my time simply flies by, because there's always something to plan or think about.

The bad thing is that I'm tired, oh, 99% of the time lately. Case in point: last night I came home at 7 and planned to stay up until midnight or so to take advantage of the fact that I didn't have to be into work until 11 AM today. I made it to about 9:30: eat, shower, few reruns of SatC, and I was finished. I'm like an elderly woman. I more or less get up, work, come home, eat, shower, sleep, and start over again. I've missed the Big E and pumpkin picking because there just was no time for me to schedule it in. As it is, I have school field trips on October 30th, November 5th, 8th, 18th and 20th, a Diversity Potluck on the 6th, Art Spiegelman speaking in Amherst this Friday, Thanksgiving, Halloween, the election, my mother's birthday, an Iron and Wine concert, and the movie Milk coming up in the next 4 weeks. Plus a physical on November 14th. My gym going, I'm ashamed to say, has dropped off the radar, one of the first casualties. By the time I look up it will be next year already.

J. and I...

Yeah. I just don't want to go there. It makes my head hurt.

Barack Obama is going to win this election. You heard it here first.

My parents visited two weeks ago and we went whale watching in Boston. Saw some humpback whales. Ate out...seafood, of course...and hung around in Fanueil Hall.

I miss my NJ crew.

I am ABSURDLY broke.

Mose of my kids know who I am now. I even get hugs and greetings on some days. It's a good feeling. Kids still aren't my thing but these kids are growing on me. If this job doesn't kill me, it will make me awesomer.

sex and the country.

2008-09-23T20:11:00.004-04:00

I remember when I was young, 14 or 15, and I used to play all kinds of Pirch-based fantasy roleplaying games online, that my characters were indomitable whores. They fucked every other character--man, woman, and child--that would allow it. And of course, we were adolescents, so it was more like creative masturbation than anything. We all got pretty good at typing with one hand during that period. And it really was good for me and my burgeoning sexuality. I loved the power behind it all--just the thought that my words were powerful enough to make other people--men in particular--reach such a new and, at 14, exotic pleasure. I got off on getting them off. Although now I know that comparatively, men actually get aroused pretty easily, I still get off on making men hard by being soft and curvy and seductive and smelling good. During actual sex itself, I love to submit, but beforehand, I love to be the one starting trouble. Everyone wants to be wanted, I suppose. If I were a man for a day the first thing I would do would be find a hot cunt and bury my dick in it, for future reference. Seems like fun.

K. and I got into a discussion last year about power, BDSM, and gender roles. I think the short version was that K. argued that gender roles constantly exist in some form in male/female BDSM roleplay and that perhaps it was the gender roles, not only the power, that got me off. I argued against at the time, claiming that sex with a dominant woman would get me just as wet, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that she was right after all. It is something about the gender roles that does it for me...seduction not by force, for me, but by feigning sweetness and innocence, like the stunt climbing into the shower with J., like casual hints dropped by email about my sex dreams, like bending over a piece of furniture with a guy behind me. I'm indirect, but I'm aiming for a very direct result. I do like that caveman, I-gotta-have-it throwdown. And I like more when it's a man doing it to me than a woman. I hate to admit that I'm getting straighter as the years go on, and I think that's a huge reason why. I just like the cock too much, the implications of someone being bigger than me, stronger than me, in possession of a cock I can make stiff and suck on. It's a biological/anatomical issue because I've been socialized to believe the men possess more capacity to dominate me and less capacity to withstand my feminine wiles. I think that's interesting. Especially since the stuff I was doing at 14 online I'm still doing in reality (only with many fewer people).

I wish my feminine wiles would work now, though. I keep dreaming about sex. It's been a really horny month.

the ice was getting thinner.

2008-09-21T17:57:00.002-04:00

It's been a long, strange week. I'm still making sense of it all as it recycles into a new one. My job has kicked into full force and I'm a little alarmed to be so exhausted already. Our days are long; the longest one, Wednesday, stretches from 7:30 AM to 7 PM. Monday and Wednesday average nine and a half hours, and Thursday and Friday come in a little shorter at 7.5 or 8 hours. It's a rough pace to keep up for a whole week. I'm used to working a lot, but on a more flexible schedule. Each has its perks and downsides, of course. I know I'm still struggling to find a rhythm in the Citizen Schools job, and I'm terrified of not living up to all the expectations that come along with it. We're one Teaching Fellow short at the moment which means a corresponding increase in the amount of work for me and the other full-time employee. I know that if I can just survive these two years it will be worth it. My kids are interesting. One of the ones I like best so far, Zaraya, is also going to be my toughest, I can tell. She doesn't hold back on the mouth or the attitude. Would that I had that kind of bravery at the age of 12.

It's weird how after all of this, I still feel like I owe J. something. He reminds me at every turn that he owes me nothing and that we're not together anymore, as though I've forgotten. He rejoices in it, which I keep allowing to hurt me. He digs it in deeper, uses it like a weapon. He's a fool. As Dr. David reminds me, I have to learn to take what he says at face value, whether or not he means it...I cannot "save him from himself" by imagining the million things he might really mean instead of what he has said. If it's true that he owes me nothing, it's equally true that I owe him nothing. I can't wait around for him to be ready anymore. I can't keep hoping or keep trying. The only way that I'm not going to be disappointed by this anymore is by expecting nothing, at all, from J., as a friend, lover, or potential something. When he's not in the house, I feel relieved. I miss an existence that was physically solitary, and okay.

I wonder, though, why it is that I always have to have someone waiting in the wings for me. This time, I can't tell if it's just because I'm tired of having no friends up here besides J., or because I'm trying to escape what happened between J. and I with someone else. Or both, plus some other to-be-determined combination of factors. Whenever we're home together for even one day, it turns into another fight between J. and I, so I try not to be home, unless I'm asleep. My gym began a new hip-hop class and my volunteering with the shelter finally went through. During the week I rarely arrive home before 8 PM, so that hasn't been a problem. I feel so emotionally tired from all of this change.

harder, better, faster.

2008-09-13T16:48:00.006-04:00

Hurt. A short word for such a big concept. People have so many ways to hurt themselves...without even getting into all the ways they have to hurt others. In human history, religions have advocated hurt to prove faith, governments have advocated hurt to prove loyalty, and educators and parents have advocated hurt to discipline for wrongs. The sports community advocates hurt as part of a process to becoming greater...stronger, faster, tougher, more flexible, more talented, abler. People who practice BDSM draw a distinction between hurt and harm which relegates hurt to the acceptable position, and self-injurers (and practicers of some Eastern and tribal religions) practice an act associated with hurt yet feel no pain. People with body modifications allow or tolerate hurt for the sake of vanity, spiritual awakening, empowerment, self-awareness, creativity. Some people hurt themselves to be or seem "cool." People hurt themselves for so many reasons, conscious and un...to punish, to grow, to feel, to distract from something bigger, more brutal, more nebulous, more unknown. To become conscious and to escape the conscious, to remind themselves of their own mortality and to transcend it, to destroy and to create.

I didn't eat before going to the gym again today, stupid me, and of course I was dizzy and lightheaded. I worked on the Precor machine for 15 minutes, did a full Nautilus circuit, minus the laterals since my shoulder is fucked up again, and then attended an hour long cardio dance fitness course. I have cramps and my head hurts. Exercise often hurts, makes us tired, dizzy, makes our muscles burn and ache, sucks the breath from our lungs and bathes us in sweat. Superbly trained athletes are defined not only by their skill and training but by their capacity to push through pain, to know when it is not time to quit but only to push harder. I am always pushing harder, and never know when to quit. In exercise, and just in general.

Toning up and slimming down is not why I go, it's just a pleasant side effect. Why I go, is to hurt. Because some hurts build you up, and others only tear you down. Some, paradoxically, do both. Sometimes it's worthwhile to suffer some hurt...physical, emotional, spiritual...to be stronger, faster, smarter, to evolve. I had someone tell me once that when they want to get really fucked up, they can't smoke pot because pot lets you off the proverbial hook too easy. You get your kicks and then you can slip out of its grasp, nary a headache, nary a vomit-soaked rug, nary dizziness, nausea, blackouts, fear of death. Booze hurts. If you want to hurt...or punish yourself for hurting...booze (or hard drugs) is the way to go. In my friend's mindset, smoking pot, like cutting, is absurdly self-indulgent, a hurt that doesn't hurt, that gives you no incentive to quit hurting in some other, bigger way.

I'm a coward, though.

After the gym I trolled the city in my new geographically-based pastime. I collect cards. The greeting kind. The weird thing about the area that I now live is that it's FILLED with cool cards...not the Hallmark kind, but beautiful, interesting, subversively funny cards from indie presses, the kind that amaze, inspire, and fit the moment. So I find ones that make me laugh, that remind me of something important I should live by, or that are simply beautiful to me. I hang them everywhere. My bedroom and kitchen are covered in them by now. It was a good day, because I found five.

Every time I think I know what decision to make, these days, something else happens that makes me think I chose wrong.

Are those beating drums
Celebration guns
The thunder and the laughter
The last thing they remember

Good night, sleep light, stranger. --Stars (going to see them Wednesday!)

ugh.

2008-09-11T13:39:00.001-04:00

I really hate Camille Paglia.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/index.html

the great goldschlager debacle.

2008-09-10T21:35:00.003-04:00

Monday night, I made a mess.

My parents kicked my little brother out of the house. It's a long story. The short version is that, he's not going back. Because I am me and always do these types of things, I felt personally responsible for it, and, even though my brother is an asshole and a lot of the time my parents are bigger ones, worried.

I worked 14 hour days Friday and Saturday training for my job, then had one day off and returned for a full week.

And of course, the messy J. situation. Minus the time to go to the gym or my shrink = crash. An equation that is mostly sensible.

I spent fifteen bucks on a bottle of Goldschlager cinnamon schnapps, got home, and cooked as I begin to drink. Alone in the house, I drank ten or twelve shots on an empty stomach, tried to eat, passed out, threw up EVERYWHERE, called J. and begged him to come home, crawled around on the floor, ruined every throw rug I own, did something I don't remember that caused huge bruises on my feet, chest and lower back, got really afraid I was going to die, then spent all night vomiting, all the next day curled up in bed sweating and dizzy, and most of today, the third day, coming back to human. J. nursed me through most of it with more kindness then my stupid ass probably deserved.

It was a train wreck.

J. slept in bed with me, and I clung on. At some point, he told me that every day, he wonders how he could have fucked us up. I could feel all the things that were lost in translation pushing behind my need, pushing behind my eyes, pressuring my optic nerves, grinding my teeth. All the unsaid and all the couldn't says. All the wants I can't reconcile with the shoulds. I slept.

I remembered at one of my trainings, how I almost cried because my facilitator wouldn't give me a plan to follow, something concrete as a reference. Structure, organization, planning. She told me, "You can do anything you want!" More than anything, that frustrated me endlessly. Just give me a goddamn plan, I wanted to tell her. Give me instructions. Give me anything. J. and I are like that. I want to know, in or out? Someone told me last week that sometimes it's better not to solve problems too quickly. Not to miss the journey for the destination. Sometimes you learn something about yourself in the journey, in the not knowing. I know this is true but I struggle to accept it; the idea that there is not necessarily anything to "be," anything to "follow." I struggle, even after everything, to only be what I want, not what I feel I should.

kicking names and taking ass.

2008-09-03T20:33:00.004-04:00

I slept with J. again, after a long weekend of spending every spare moment thinking about sex, dreaming about sex, and talking about sex with my ex, who slept with *his* ex (not me, the other one) while dating his current girlfriend, the Wal-Mart price checker with the three-inch roots. I went against the grain and told him not to tell her.

I told K. once that when I was younger, I always had that movie-mentality view of how things went down in real life...neatly, chrono/logically, and in Technicolor. When couples break up in the movies it's always because one of them has cancer, or dementia, it involves broken teen hearts, orgies, flashbacks, dream sequences. It's never because someone forgot to bring home the pecans when you asked them to. And friends-with-benefits sex is kind of like that. The fireworks don't usually seem to materialize the way they do in the movies. There's no long-awaited mutual orgasm or reconciliation. In my case, it was good, utilitarian, stupid, and basically satisfying. Apart from being inevitable. I'd sort of suspected for awhile now that as breakups go, this isn't going to be a clean one like my last one was.

Monday night I returned from Jersey, got stoned out of my mind, and broke into the bathroom while J. was in the shower (I made myself a deal that if the door was locked, I'd give up, and if it was unlocked, I'd continue, and it was unlocked). I played that coy, "Can you condition my hair?" game as he rubbed his hard-on into my ass, cupped my tits, and kissed down my neck. Basically, I started shit. J. doesn't usually start shit but he's well beyond resisting a warm, curvy, dripping wet chick pressing her ass against his cock. I got out, wrapped up in my shortie white robe, and curled up in bed. I pretended to resist for a little while as J. snuggled up behind me. When he was almost inside me, I rolled over and told him to use a condom, as I've been lax on the birth control thing lately. J. didn't come. I did. The possibilities excite me more than the sex itself. I suspect that's usually true past a certain point. J. is not mentally programmed to feel totally okay about fucking women he's not involved with, being as how I'm the first one ever. I harbor no such issue when it comes to random sexual encounters and weirdly, I felt compelled to prove it by coming. I guess it worked. I'm wondering why I have no problem coyly wandering into his bathing routine but won't aggressively act on sexual encounters, despite my mental images of shoving J. down onto the couch and mounting him like a pony in the middle of dinner. I'm annoyed by my own passive-aggressiveness and my need to want something but place the responsibility for acting on someone else. In the morning, things were the same, and that day, J. finally paid me back the $2,400 he owed me. I don't want anything that I don't have, now, as far as J. goes. We'll wait and see if that's a good thing or not. Somewhere along the way I got tired of doing only what I should be doing. I make a regrettable lack of stupid decisions these days which I plan on remedying.

Today my boss let me out early and I celebrated my windfall of long-awaited J. Debt Money by wandering around the mall for a few hours. I traversed Sephora until my tension eased. I've mentioned my Sephora obsession before and it still stands. Rummaging around in there comes pretty close to meditation for me for some reason I don't understand. Sephora and Borders usually do that for me. Ironic split down the middle, as it happens...books and eyeliner. I bought two shampoos and a concealer and spent some time toying around with the iPod Touches in the Apple store. That's next on my wish list.

bffs.

2008-08-31T00:33:00.001-04:00

I have the best friends.

Must not forget.

<3

the perfect life.

2008-08-23T16:44:00.002-04:00

I'm thinking about this idea of perfection a lot lately. And laughing at myself. Lately...

Today, Saturday, I get up at 9 AM, check my e-mail, head to the gym. I do 20 minutes of cardio, 45 minutes of strength training, another 20 minutes of cardio. My heart rate peaks over 215. I go to the Stop and Shop, get groceries, come home, clean the house, wake J. and make him vacuum and do dishes. I bake a pumpkin walnut bread from scratch and bring it over to our neighbors and then start a second for me. This is me lately. I am driven, active, focused, socially conscious, open. I rent books on tape to play in the car and read more books in my spare time. I feed our birds, buy biodegradable trash bags, watch the fat content of the foods I buy, eat whole wheat bread, call my parents. I am sickeningly capable and put together. I must look really great on the outside.

For me, there's only ever been two speeds. Perfect, and not functioning at all. When they diagnose this, it's called bipolar disorder. That's true, some of the time, I think, because these two speeds of mine are mostly cyclical. (Last year, for instance, was a not functioning type year.) What it really is these days though is that I don't want to think about the only (but enormous) part of my life that I can't make work. My relationship is over and even the potential friendship there is sinking fast. I don't want to be home. I want to be anywhere but home. My life has been a succession of homes I don't want to be in...my parents', Lorena's, now this one. I feel the need to prove to myself that I am smart, funny, capable, driven, interesting, attractive, talented, worthwhile. The thought of another Major Relationship ending makes me wonder if maybe it is just me. Every minute I spend with J. these days, I know that we made a mistake in this relationship, one that's not irrevocable but is huge nonetheless. We rushed. And, as these things do, it blew up in our faces. From here, no one knows what to do or how to act. A discussion between me with my high-functioning life and J., who can't even wake up before 4 PM half the time or do the dishes in less than 14 hours, approaches an absurd farce, anyways, like if I spoke ancient Chinese to a Peruvian. It's mostly wide, childish gestures.

What I want primarily from J. is to be able to use him for what I need the way I constantly feel used for what he needs. What I want, for once in my life, is to be selfish, deliberately hurtful, absurdly irresponsible with something huge and important. As L., also in the middle of a messy breakup, points out to me, this idea is both immoral and destined to end badly, aside from being so antithetical to my nature that it's mostly empty wind in the trees anyways. But it is a bald fact that I have no idea to articulate to my lovers what I need and am even less inclined to believe they can ever give me whatever these ethereal things are that I need. As Dr. David, my new therapist, reminds me, things are rarely this black and white, and nearly everyone can be trusted on for *something*, no matter how insignificant it seems to me. I'm not the only one I expect to be perfect. There's an unspoken assumption in me that if I can function at this high level, everyone else should be able to, also.

I find myself constantly reminding myself that no one knows how to get through a breakup, especially not one so economically complicated it's more like a divorce. There's no answer I'm "missing," there's just no answer at all. And I refuse to argue anymore. I feel pinned to a board like a taxidermied fly. I wish I didn't feel quite so much like J. secretly appreciates the awful, no-win position I've been put in by now. I need him to move out and at the same time I know perfectly well that once he does, this will be over. Probably forever. Then I will find an unknown roommate, and it will be me alone again with my perfect life.

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.

2008-08-14T21:07:00.003-04:00

I broke up with J.

Which doesn't change much, practically. It hasn't fully hit me yet. I'm trying not to think about the massive implications.

My new job is slow but good. Soon it will but (hopefully) fast but good.

My new gym is f-a-w-e-s-o-m-e.

I'm working, volunteering at a shelter, gymming, and doing the jewelry business on the side.

Life is busy but...interesting.

orientating.

2008-08-10T10:37:00.003-04:00

So I've returned from spending three days in Boston in orientation for my new job. While I was there, they informed me that A.) no one much cared about my tattoos/piercings (excellent), B.) I was getting paid for a full two weeks of work which included three orientation days and two days *off*, C.) I get a week off for Christmas, Thanksgiving and Spring Break, D.) my health insurance kicks in immediately, and E.) I was getting a BRAND NEW 15" Dell laptop, sleeve, and computer bag that I could keep once my tenure with CS is over. Which, I did. And, that is awesome. The entire organization is run by young idealists. Most of our orientation was devoted to playing silly games like eating whipped cream from a plate with no hands, making human pyramids, answering trivia, egg and spoon races, and so on. Which I initially thought was humiliating but eventually came to love and appreciate. The enthusiasm caught on. What they were trying to do as far as I could tell was demonstrate to us how to raise joy, interest and camaraderie, how to loosen up, and also showing us ways to interact with our own students.

I found out that I'll be getting my own group of 12-14 middle schoolers each semester who I will be teaching apprenticeships to, supervising on homework, and playing silly games and taking trips with. That will be my "family," who I'm expected to support, encourage, and occasionally nip back into place. Hopefully, our interest, support, and mentorship will encourage these kids to be more confident, self-aware, and responsible, and to put more energy into schoolwork and their futures. I'll also have some volunteer team leaders working with me to teach other apprenticeships, which range from archery and swimming to tennis, dance, woodworking, sewing, minority history, anthropology, finance management, animal care, and anything else you can imagine. I also have to recruit people in the community with the skills and desire to teach these apprenticeships, families and students to participate and support us, and work with teachers within the school to develop curriculum and lesson plans and collaborate on how to serve the students best. Lots of work! But with the potential to do something amazing. Those three days in Boston put a lot of joy and hope back into me. There were young, enthusiastic people fired up about each other and about helping make education better. This job is a stepping stone to a million places and I really want to live up to it. I'm not afraid of working hard for a good cause.

It helped me remember that I need to find the joy and purpose in my own life and work for it, and not let anyone take that away from me. If J. can't support me, that's disappointing, but ultimately okay because I can support myself, encourage myself, and be excited and hopeful about this part of my life. I have family in my friends. I need to accept that if he can't step up, then I need to turn away from that and put the effort into other areas of my life. I've devoted a little too much of my life to him, lately.

The other new teaching fellows and I made friends, so I now have friends in Mass., albeit mostly in Worcester and Boston. We went out one night to explore this area of Boston called Faneuil Hall, with shops and street performers. We saw some amazing breakdancers who perform on the street to earn money for college. I dropped ten bucks into their bucket. I bought a funky cow clock with a pendulum that's a milk bottle. Boston's filled with cool architecture, seafood, piers, and bricks. I'd never been before this week, so it was nice to travel and get out. I came back less nervous about the job. I decided that *feeling* strong might be more important than *being* strong, so I decided to join the NoHo Athletic Club, a gym with a rock wall. I couldn't really afford it, but hopefully if I play nice with J. for a little longer he'll be able to pay me back and I'll be fine. I went to a salon in town and had them cut off all my hair, so it's back to two inches long in front, clipped all the way up on the back and sides. Everyone in Northampton has the same haircut. I missed mine being short. It sounds strange to say, but being here puts me more in touch with a certain part of myself. When I was growing up, there were few opportunities to find women to form intimate friendships or relationships with, and no opportunities at all to be yourself, if yourself happened to be bisexual and feminist, in a public setting without being castigated for it. Here, no one minds. Here it's a norm. I find myself relaxing, moving back to the way I felt briefly in college in the WMST program...that there were kindred spirits afoot, that I had the freedom to be what I needed to be. I still feel that J. and I will end within the year, if not sooner. I'd like to leave myself open to all sorts of new things happening for me. It's up to this year to make up for last year.

nicole.

2008-07-30T20:50:00.003-04:00

"Nicole Rolph," I notice on my Facebook Friends' List today. "Nicole Rolph?" I think, "I don't have a friend named that." I look and it's this girl from high school who got married over the weekend and changed her name. She was one of those girls that my friend Holly, the bulimic, and I used to secretly loathe...thin, athletic, blonde, and relentlessly friendly. She had the kind of smooth, unruffled, great-on-paper existence that my cousins on my father's side have, that Holly and I didn't. Behind her back, we were sarcastic talking about her. When she called to catch up a few years into college and left her number, I never called her back. I was the girl in high school that wore pajama pants to school, edited the literary magazine, and carved the word "Dyke" into my arm as an accessory for my senior Christmas dance. Other girls had bracelets and earrings; I had flesh wounds. I was an angry kid. I was too aware of the world with no outlet. It's funny that I went to college and studied social justice for five years and came out, and I'm still angry, and sociologically pre-programmed to perform years of "female" counterproductive, self-destructive, exhausting, relentless caretaking behavior even as I know better. I flip through Nicole's wedding photos. She is 24, radiant, normative, married to her high school sweetheart who's probably decent, interesting, and funny. My friends now are a collection of depressive, bipolar, OCD, self-injuring, transgender/lesbian/bisexual BDSM practitioners who used to swing, do hard drugs, and self-administer abortions. They're funny, interesting, intelligent, caring, and I wouldn't trade them for a hundred million dollars. But there is no mistaking that none of us are Nicole, even allowing that Nicole herself probably has some skellies in the closet.

I'm lying on my bed smoking pot and listening to 2pac while eating a pound of cinnamon Jelly Belly beans. A line of meticulously peeled, picked fresh scars accompany my poor attitude and excess of self-awareness. I've spent a long time trying to force my life into the cliche...married, blonde, sane and domesticated. Not because I believe there's something inherently preferable about that, just because I'm tired of the turmoil, the excess of intelligence and worry, and the craziness. I've spent a week and a half in Massachusetts being too alive. Crying, bleeding, smoking, fucking, shopping, pulling an Elizabeth Wurtzel in Prozac Nation. I'm not the marrying kind. I'm manipulative, nymphomaniacal, and obsessed with control. I'm the anti-wife. I hate kids. I wore a corset-top Japanese red silk dress with white polka dots that I bought for a hundred dollars from Victoria's Secret to my grandfather's funeral. With my new tattoo emblazoned across my chest. I walked out of the service. I inspired shocked and disgusted faces across the board. I'm unapologetic, which drives J. crazy. I have ravenous Sagittarius appetites for food, sex, drugs, books, and expensive makeup. My teeth are bared. Trying to imagine myself in Nicole's place, I can't conceive of what it would be like to lead an uncluttered life.

J. and I struggle to pull our lives back on track. I cry some more. I hang photos of my grandmother everywhere. I decide to start a jewelry making business spur of the moment. I buy a glass dildo and some gay porn. (I can't imagine Nicole with a glass dildo and gay porn; she's the missionary type, and no 69ing.) I decide there has to be an in-between in between Nicole and I as I've been this week, but damned if I can find it. I slowly pull away from J. I ask him to clean while I buy us groceries and get my new driver's license today, and when I come home to find the back bedroom in the same condition, I clean it myself in the heat for hours, pushing harder as I get nauseous from my concurrent insomnia. I forget to drink and dehydrate. I know how stupid I'm being, and I do it anyways. I'm always pushing. I'd give anything to know how to quit or even slow down. I still keep foolishly believe that I myself can create perfection out of all this disorder, meaning out of all this chaos, and sanity out of my madness. I'm simultaneously defiant and disordered. I don't want to talk to J., I just want him to fuck me.

come on and take a spin.

2008-07-22T23:00:00.001-04:00

At least Plath had her poetry. I don't even have that. I'm just nuts straight up.

I wonder if you can laugh during it all if it makes you more or less crazy.

I'm tired of living through it all.

brilliance.

2008-07-17T00:35:00.004-04:00

At the Barnes and Noble today I bought Sylvia Plath's Ariel and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. This book thing is truly a compulsion.

I forgot how stunning and visceral Plath writes. Ariel is Plath's collection of final poems; the ones she wrote before she killed herself. They're penetrating, addressing her unhappiness with motherhood and the wifely role, satirically assessing her own state of mind and her out of control mental health treatment. I was transfixed by the lines. I haven't read Plath since I was a kid. It's ironic that so many female writers living in Massachusetts ended up going bugshit crazy. Emily Dickinson, Plath, Anne Sexton. Something about the winter and the silence got in around the talent and the defiance. When you see Anne Sexton's photo, she's always defiant, sexy, beautiful. And crazily talented. That might be my way to go. The first few lines of "Elm" have always resonated inside my head:

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

I'm smoking up way too much, drinking way too much, relying on sleeping pills too much. I'm still defiant. I don't want to see a therapist in Massachusetts. Being unstable, being whatever it is I am in and out of diagnoses and medications over ten years, is not something I want to live with or something I want to live around or even something I want to live despite. It's something I want to embrace, make a lover out of. It's something I want to use as fuel. Maybe it's better to burn the brightest and burn out than never to burn at all. I don't know yet.

I'm smoking up, drinking, shopping, consumed with anger over my life at the moment. I can feel things ending. Important things. We have taken a stand to nurture them still, we have bestowed them with epithets and requirements and assurances, but in spite of it, they remain on the same path and I am powerless to work harder, powerless to do anything but wallow in fury and misery. It feels like a stab in the lung, slowly bleeding out, expiring at leisure as pink froth bubbles up, as gurgling, desperate grasping breaths are taken, painful, protracted. I'm not sleeping at all anymore. The delusions of grandiosity arise in the car, when I'm imagining this life that I'll have one day changing the world. I have no idea how to make it happen. I'm bitter. The taste of leaving is bitter, and the stab in the lung. Plath, beautiful, talented, astute, defiant, is bitter.

I get my tattoo touched up and go for a whole 22 hours without abusing a substance before I'm back again. My theory has always been that I will self-destruct before whoever "they" are can destroy me. Maybe Plath's was, too.

i remember your face.

2008-07-13T00:35:00.003-04:00

Tonight was my farewell night with L. There have been a lot of farewells lately...to K., to A. and her husband yesterday after our day shopping and watching an IMAX dinosaur movie, and now to L. In a week I leave for Massachusetts.

L. showed some of his infrequent but extraordinarily kind insight tonight. I'm still all torn up inside over J. L. took me to a nice dinner and paid for my drinks while I got tipsy and spilled my heart. L. leaned over the table and took my hands in his ("Platonic!" he jokingly reminded me...L. is my ex). L.'s hands are the size of plates. He's a big guy...over six feet and 200 pounds. It's the things like that that my personality never allows me to ask for...always tough, always strong, sarcastic, capable. But I could have wept just to feel someone know me enough to know what good it would do me to be touched. It was the kindness in the gesture, that old-fashioned love that is L., like not letting me see the dinner bill afterwards. L.'s hugs are all-encompassing, his sheer mass just enfolds me. Last Tuesday night, the thing I wanted more than anything was for L. to hug me, to lift me off the ground. Tonight, L. and I drove past many places where we had adventures growing up here together ("Hey, remember, that's where your crazy ex-girlfriend's family practiced with the SCA." "Hey, remember that time we rescued the snapping turtle from the road here?" "Or that time when your friend A. and his girlfriend were in the peace protest here and got their photo on the front page of the paper?"). We ended messily but stayed friends. L. knows me down to the very essence of me. Now that he's not with me anymore, my quirks amuse him more and annoy him less.

He reminded me that sometimes I raise the bar "up to 20, instead of starting at 1." "If someone is at 1, and you say, okay, now jump to 20, they feel hopeless. It's not possible. You should start them at 1 and 3 inches and go up from there." He was right. In talking about J. and his belief in his own intellectual superiority to the rest of the world, L. shook his head. "He's not superior. He's terrifically insecure. Of himself, his place in the world and mostly, his place in the relationship with you."

I bought L. a bottle of tequila since he turns 25 in two weeks. Leaving him, I whispered, "I'm scared." It was the first time I'd admitted it in such a raw way, to anyone. "Go easy," he said. I looked back and saw him outlined in the taillights as I drove away.

I miss L. and the rest already.

believing.

2008-07-09T20:29:00.003-04:00

Elizabeth Kubler Ross introduced her stages of dying in 1969, and most people have heard or them or are familiar with them: the cycle of emotions we purportedly go through when death, or another traumatic life event, is impending. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. My stages of breaking up don't exactly look like that. So far, it's been more like denial, anger, drugs, more anger, working too much, shopping, misery, nausea, more denial, and crying over Erin Gruwell's memoir.

And uncertainty. I know my background usually has me looking at everything in terms of sex and gender, and this won't be an exception. I feel oppressively programmed to behave a certain way as a woman even though I know better and know what I'm doing. It's like I'm compulsively unable to think only of myself. I'm wondering, "What is he feeling? What is he thinking? How is he reacting to what I'm saying? Should I not have been honest about this because it might hurt his feelings?" I'm frustrated feeling like the women in my life put an endless amount of work, time, care, and worry into their romantic attachments in a disproportionately high percentage to the men. According to research that's been done on marriage, men gain more from marriage in general and live longer if they're married, while it's single women who live longer. And that's not surprising. In most marriages, it's women who care for the kids, clean, cook, and in recent times, of course, hold down a paying job as well. Clearly, the trend of my shouldering more responsibility is much greater than just me. In Women and Madness, the book I'm in the middle of about female psychiatric evaluation and hospitalization, Phyllis Chesler discusses how Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of the Great Gatsby F. Scott, was forcibly hospitalized by her husband because he was threatened by her writing talent and her lack of attentiveness to home and children. Unfortunately, she's not the only one. In this society at this time, women are trained to care for others at the expense of themselves, and punished if they shun the convention. It's worth asking, What are we getting? What should we expect? How can we ask for what we need without being labeled as demanding, nagging witches? Obviously, I don't know the answer. I'm being told to settle...for attention, occasional sex, companionship. But my requests for responsibility, equality, and accountability are minimally met with reactions of derision, awe, and cynicism, when they're not met with anger, guilt trips and outright refusal. "They're boys," I'm told. "That's how boys are." Sex itself is a get out of jail free card only when men are socialized to get much for comparatively little work, and women to settle for less even after busting their asses to achieve more.

J. sends me song lyrics in Spanish and nothing else. I translate a little more than half, but it's not much to work with. I read and resolve to at least attempt to stop thinking about it for awhile lest my brain burst into flames.

detox, day 6.

2008-07-07T23:38:00.000-04:00

I've been the needle and the thread
Weaving figure eights and circles round your head
I try to laugh but cry instead
Patiently wait to hear the words you've never said

Fumbling through your dresser drawer forgot what I was looking for
Try to guide me in the right direction
Making use of all this time
Keeping everything inside
Close my eyes and listen to you cry

I'm lifting you up
I'm letting you down
I'm dancing til dawn
I'm fooling around
I'm not giving up
I'm making your love
This city's made us crazy and we must get out

This is not goodbye, she said
It is just time for me to rest my head
She does not walk she runs instead
Down these jagged streets and into my bed

When I was
Fumbling through your dresser drawer, forgot what I was looking for
Try to guide me in the right direction
Making use of all this time
Keeping everything inside
Close my eyes and listen to you cry

There's only so much I can do for you
After all of the things you put me through

and we must get out.

2008-07-05T22:50:00.002-04:00

Relationship Detox, Day 4.

Still shopping, still drugging, my tattoo itches like mad and I'm afraid my friends are tired of listening to me bitch.

Last night I tried to jerk off and almost threw up.

Grading papers like mad. Still don't know what the answer is to all this, so I'm still not talking to J. When I feel myself slipping towards giving in, I reread our relationship-ending conversation of Tuesday night, and turn to steel again.

Fucking itchy tattoo.

for you.

2008-07-03T22:47:00.003-04:00

This will be the summer of the lightning. Fabulous, sky-opening, Ansel-Adams-desert-photography lightning that comes along with the ominous summer downpours of late. I enjoy it. I've never been afraid of thunderstorms. In light of the holiday and the fact that at least 30 percent of my kids are missing, I cut my class off after 90 minutes and send them home. I stop for a bite to eat on the way back, myself, and enjoy the peace and quiet. I read Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler in the Macaroni Grill by myself with my ravioli and blue cheese walnut salad.

Not knowing what to do about J. and I, I am doing nothing, He sends me a gentle but confusing e-mail. I don't have anything to say, so I don't answer. I smoke up each night at midnight, finish 2 of the 15 books I am reading, and work on two more. I skip out on Massachusetts for the weekend and plan to take my dog to the celebration in the park tomorrow and buy her a cherry Sno-Kone. I am ambivalent. I have begun to build a fence around my heart, once I realized that the J./K. hybrid of us is in a tightening downward spiral. I put each post in carefully, preparing myself to be alone again, gathering my courage, breathing slowly, conscious of my thoughts and movements. I don't know if I will be alone again soon. But I need to be ready for that, I figure. Trouble is, once that fence is up, he won't be able to see me much anymore. I know how I work. Once I've pulled out the stops and established my distance, distance will remain.

On the way home, I realize that until yesterday, it's been two years since I got a tattoo. No money. Now I have 3. And 4 piercings. When I first began, I got my tongue pierced at the age of 18 and I cried beforehand because I was scared. I had begun to come out of 3 years of cutting myself. It took until I was 20 to stop, but once the piercings and tattoos began, I slowed. There's something cathartic about pain, a reminder to yourself that you're alive and strong and aware. I'm not averse to it, despite the possible cliche. I've read about tribal cultures in which whenever a major life event occurred, a birth, a death, a marriage, a famine...it was marked on the skin of the people. A life map. So you could read a body like a story, to tell you of the person that bore the scars. My body is like that. The story my scars tell is not one of defeat, but of survival. My tattoos are a living, breathing reminder of choice, of power, of control. I remember when I began to stop cutting, I transferred my desire to destroy to a desire to build, and my unsafe methods into a safe, controlled, clean and responsible professional's hands. It was fitting that yesterday was the day for this new tattoo, when filled with anger and sadness I was able to lie back for hours while needles traced words into my skin. Designing and acquiring tattoos and piercings is me, building on the body I was given, personalizing myself, establishing my core beliefs and experiences as I tentatively grasp them: Some things will last forever. There's always a chance to start over. And now, it is choices above all that make us who we are. I am becoming. And it feels good, to become. There are more tattoos in the making.

open door.

2008-07-03T00:33:00.002-04:00

"He fucks up, and *I* try harder."

Doesn't that just sum it up?

New tattoo today. Pix2fol.

broken.

2008-07-02T02:28:00.002-04:00

I'm pretty sure my relationship uttered its dying gasp tonight.

I drove out to L.'s house and he wasn't there. So I sat in my car in the parking lot, cradled the steering wheel in my arms, and cried. One of the dippers...I can never tell which is which...was out, and the fireflies winked brilliantly in the trees. The night sky was rancid with stars and it was beautiful. I cried some more and called K.

And K., my airbag and wingwoman for whom I'm eternally grateful, turned me away from J. by talking about school and teaching and plans. Until 2 AM I sat in my car, and then drove slowly home again. When I hung up, the ache that had slowly receded pulsed in and out. I check my email, and there was nothing. With so much good in my life, this one rotten place makes everything else seem sour, too. I know I'm still in love with J. But I'm not sure anymore that he is with me. I know what I should do, what I would tell K. or A. or S. or any of my girlfriends to do unhesitatingly were they in my place, but I cannot. I'd give anything to stop seeing the good and only see what J. sees, a wreck that cannot be mended. I'm unfailingly loyal to very few, and they don't always deserve it. K. sees me better than I do, at this moment. I cannot see me. I down an Ativan and on second thought, a Trazodone, giving myself merciful permission to flee this mess in sleep.

insomniac.

2008-07-01T03:05:00.001-04:00

I can never sleep lately, and when I do sleep, I can't wake up.

politics.

2008-06-25T10:49:00.006-04:00

Last night in my class I handed out a midterm evaluation where the students could write down what they liked and didn't like about the course. For the most part, it was good...I can't understand why kids complain about things that they know I can't change, like the length and time of the course (and I NEVER run it the full 3 1/2 hours), and the dryness of the subject (if I can't make social research methods interesting with sex, drugs, suicide and Michael Moore, no one can). I got one, however, that I didn't expect, and I think I know who it's from. On it, this particular student wrote that he is not enjoying the course and that it's "improfessional for [my] political opinions to come out in class." Aside from writing that I seem bored with the material...which actually may be because I'm nervous straying from my lecture notes so I tend to stick to them pretty closely.

And, I was taken aback, so I thought about it. My political opinions tend to ooze out in class more than anything; I like most of my students and feel comfortable, so sometimes during a discussion I'll say something like, "Though I don't know how many Americans still agree with Bush lately." Which, you can argue is not my opinion. But I'll digress. The point is, this kid thinks that I'm not neutral enough, and he's right about me not being neutral, not even in class. Don't get me wrong: I always am very clear that all opinions are respected and appreciated in class, even the ones that diverge from the "norm." I also tell them not to believe anything anyone tells them just because of who says it, not even me. So, at least I'm not trying to make people feel marginalized. But the fact is, I can't hold back my opinions enough to be completely neutral, and I don't think I would if I could.

I thought back to when I was in college and it seemed clear to me that most of my professors had a very strong political consciousness, and through whatever it was they said, I tapped into it somehow and knew that they were voting Democrat, banning guns, out there on the front lines to keep abortion legal. They never said this explicitly (and I have never said explicitly in class, 'I hate George W. Bush'), but I knew this was how they felt by what they taught and how. I came from Women's Studies, which, if you ask most people, is an entire discipline built on a specific type of (overwhelmingly) liberal politics. Which is maybe why my profs felt at ease letting me know how they felt. And it influenced me tremendously...opened my eyes to things I had never known or understood about the world. The thing is, all disciplines are built on someone's or some group's dominant philosophy. Sociology was built on positivism and the idea that you can use cues and tools from the natural sciences to develop some kind of objective measure of the social world. Over time, a bunch of dead white men amassed ideas as to how we could best go about this. But like psychology, sociology crept towards legitimation by creeping towards the quantitative, and it took long years before qualitative ethnography began showing up in major journals like the American Sociological Review. Today at Rutgers, in a class called "Research Methods," which is the only methods course sociology undergraduates will ever take, as much as 80% of the semester is devoted to teaching them statistical techniques and talking about quantitative methods. At the graduate level, we're required to take two Stats. course and one Methods overview course...but no courses on how to, say, perform and take notes on an ethnography. To me, this speaks. It speaks of what sociology considers of primary importance. Which is highly political, since it's promoted by a dominant group within the discipline.

What was promoted by my dominant group within my discipline was political consciousness, and so I see the political everywhere. Should a teacher be obligated to shield their students from the political, to remove all traces of political opinions from her speech and teaching? I guess that depends on which grade level you're teaching to some degree, and what subject. But my general opinion, at the college level, is no. I'm trying to create a collaborative classroom, one where I challenge my students to engage with me and each other and ask difficult questions. I'm trying to make them aware of issues outside the classroom, issues happening in the world today, by using examples like Abu Ghraib, Super Size Me, the war on terror, the Presidential election. Examples that raise difficult questions for all of us, and also often inspire a lot of emotion. To me, I know I am an engaged political being, interested in looking at the world with a critical eye to what we can change. I'd like my students to be, too. Part of being engaged is being critical and critically evaluating your world and each other. Viewing everything passively is not only a recipe for disaster for your education but also for your role as a political being and global citizen.

Anyways, that's my two cents. Frustrated by the contradictory evaluations (More movies! Less movies! More discussions! Less discussions! Spend more time clarifying your lecture points! Make class shorter!) but trying to remember that it's never possible to please everyone, I headed home for the night. J. was gone, and this house, which has been a mess of the pre-2002 variety lately (sobbing, screaming, blaming), remained, and I felt depressed for the first time in 5 weeks. I still feel, eternally feel, stuck in the middle. 3 weeks until my course ends, and I move to Massachusetts for good. 2 weeks after that I start my new job. K. and J. and I went to Six Flags last Saturday and it was a day full of joy and relaxation, the first maybe that we've had all year. I decided we should have more of them. I envy J. his whole, unbroken summer, stretching below him like fields of wheat gold for three lazy, uninterrupted months. I'm in the middle of reading approximately 8 books and even now, I can never find time to finish them.

strike a pose.

2008-06-19T16:59:00.003-04:00

I'm a poseur, sitting in a cafe with a peach iced tea blogging on my MacBook.

I've been thinking lately about what this strange tension is between J. and I. I've been trying to see myself the way he sees me, which is entirely inaccurate, if sometimes flattering. J. thinks that I can do no wrong, that things effortlessly come to me. He thinks that because I bust my ass but that part is mostly behind the scenes, so all he sees is the result. I was thinking about how I managed to land this amazing job that combines a good paycheck, a high level of responsibility, a sense of gratification from giving back to the community, and personal and professional experience that looks great on a resume. He's so green over that one he could be the Jolly Green Giant. But of course, he doesn't realize that that result was directly related to a year of failure...a year of being miserable at Rutgers, self-flagellating, self-doubt and uncertainty. But, I gained teaching experience, one of only two upper hands I got on life in a year mired in depression. And I leveraged the teaching experience in order to get two more years of teaching experience, which I'll hopefully leverage into another grad school. So I guess it really only looks effortless on the surface. Two upper hands are enough, which is what he doesn't know. You always count what you have, not what you don't.

I know that I am intelligent, sometimes funny, reasonably good-looking, open, flexible and voracious when it comes to sex, interesting, complex, responsible to a fault, and loyal. I am also stubborn, demanding, possess poor impulse control, am easily bored, hardheaded, sarcastic and callous. (Well, otherwise it would have sounded a bit braggadocious.) But point being, I know I'm good partner material, for those that can put up with my quirks. On paper and on general inspection, I'm independent, successful and confident. And you'd think...you'd think...that would be just what potential partners would look for. If you read enough Glamour magazine, anyways. But in reality, I'm more of a liability than anything. I make men self-conscious, instead of driving them to be better as I think I'm doing. I really just point a big red arrow at their faults: if they're not well-read, if they're too dependent, if they have no confidence, money or sense of humor about life. Which sucks. It feels like, to me, those of us women who are on the top of our game have the hardest time finding partners who are comfortable with that. In Freedom Writers, Erin Gruwell's husband says, after her astronomical success and hard work in teaching at-risk high school kids and months of commitment, dedication and love on her part, "I can't be your wife!" Doesn't that just sum it up? Do we have to pretend to be "less" than what we are in order to make them feel like they're somehow "more"? It's miserable that women have gone for so long without a sense of self or direction and that now we have it, in romance and careers it works against rather than for us. I don't want to give up my self just because my partner doesn't have one.

love alone.

2008-06-18T22:09:00.002-04:00

Reading the Casual Encounters section of craigslist can really boost your self confidence in bed, I think. Lately, I've been mesmerized at the sheer variety of human sexual expression out there. The fact that even *I* can be mesmerized by such a thing says something. It's a shame we're not taught more in school about sexual expression. On CL, there are people unabashedly seeking every kind of personal gratification, from foot fetishists, to college boys who want to be spanked, from a "Fart on my Face" request I noticed today, to role-play, to fat fetishists, older men who want to be sugar daddies, to college age men who are looking to fuck older women or married women or Asian, Latina, black and white girls. It really makes you think that whatever purportedly fucked up thing you want someone to do to you in bed, there are probably a few thousand other people at least who want the exact same thing. The only thing I regret is that you never really know who is a stalker or a rapist or a crazy codependent and who is just a normal person looking to get off. There has to be some kind of undone sexual ethnography waiting on the CL boards.

My brother's baby mama miscarried, and it was sad, but probably most appropriate. My dad broke 2 ribs and cracked a few vertebrae in a work accident and is confined to the house for 8 weeks. *His* father just had a stroke and now has lost the ability to swallow, and instead of putting him on a feeding tube when he's already degenerated so much, they're doping him up on morphine and letting him die. My dad cried and I felt sad, even though I wasn't ever close to my grandfather. My dad knows his dad won't recognize him anymore pretty soon, and that's the most awful part, not the dying. I can't imagine looking at J. one day and not knowing who he was. So the family front has been pretty difficult and awful lately.

Class has been interesting and the rest of my life has been more or less okay. After I finally freaked out on J. the other night and ranted in a classic female-psycho moment, he finally got the hint and sent me an email which included the following:

I send you this as an invitation to a new start. While there is so much that I need to work on as far as myself, I would like to be able to make you proud of me, and my accomplishments. ...It is also very true that I may not have been putting the same energy into the relationship as I have been putting into everything else. I'm sorry because I don't want you to feel discarded, or ignored, or even hated. I love you to death, but it seems that I may have been lax in my responsibilities. At this point, all I can do is get into the swing of things slowly and hope you give me that chance until I can do things consistently for us. ...I don't want you to be sad. I know you've been having a tough couple of weeks with your family and such, and I don't want to make it even harder on you. I just want you to know that I appreciate everything you and your family have done for me. I would probably be in a different situation right now if not for your help. I wish that I could somehow even come close to repaying your patience and kindness. Maybe with enough foot rubs. Until then, I just want you to know that I love you to death and there's nothing I won't do for you. I don't want to lose your friendship, because I know I will be losing a great friend who I esteem and value. Whatever the outcome, I'll always love you, even if it's as a friend.

Love,
J.

...and so I could breathe again. Sometimes I can't be the one to extend the solution or even the kindness. Sometimes he has to be the one to do that. And he did. For now, I let it go. We'll just see how everything unfolds, I guess. In the meantime, there are a lot of old Annie Lennox tunes for me to play and a lot of teaching to finish up before the big move comes.

I believe that love alone might do these things for you
I believe that love alone might do these things for you
I believe in the power of creation
I believe in the good vibrations
I believe in love alone, yeah yeah

a quién vi frente a mi.

2008-06-17T01:00:00.003-04:00

Hoy no reconoci
A quién vi frente a mi
Esa en mi reflejo
Se que no soy yo.

Yeah. It's a mess. I can't for the life of me figure out why all the smart, interesting, funny, sexy women I know who are totally self-sufficient in every other area of their lives date men who are lazy, needy, helpless leeches who suck time, energy and money and give nothing back. Where are the self-sufficient, confident, funny, capable, competent, sexy, interesting, intelligent adult men? Are there any? Are they just a myth? Why can we have interesting, fulfilling careers, a nice apartment, wonderful friends, and lots of people who love us and be satisfied? Why is it I'm currently healthy, fulfilled and employed in a good job I love and yet I can spend the entire week feeling bad about my relationship?

Why do we stay in relationships that are clearly bad for us? Why do so many women feel this compulsion to fulfill their partners so completely, to be partner, lover, mother, friend? My friends remind me that I'm smart, funny and sexy (thanks, Analena), help me make life decisions and plan mutual affairs (thanks, K.), give me mature, sensible advice (thanks, Laura), and distract me when I'm down with TV, shopping (thanks, M.), or drinks (thanks, S.). My friends are my sounding board, my family, and my intellectual company. Why do I even need to be with a man? Why do I feel I need to have another person in my life who does not fulfill any kind of mutual responsibility to me? I've gotten incredibly lucky to get so many things "right." I should know when to just let this last one go.

I hate that I even have to write this stuff.

Yay friends. Boo relationships.

yaaaay.

2008-06-13T13:31:00.001-04:00

I got the job.

Heh. Go me!

more good news.

2008-06-09T13:20:00.002-04:00

My 18 year old brother got a 15 year old girl he's not dating pregnant and they're not aborting it.

This is why I need to be a sex educator.

i shed a tear or two over this, i admit it.

2008-06-06T18:52:00.000-04:00

my life is rubber and J.'s is glue.

2008-06-05T16:48:00.004-04:00

I love to drive under the planes on the Turnpike as they cross on their way to the airport. The airport is only a few hundred feet away, and so by the time they're touching down to land, the roar grows louder and louder as they descend, almost on top of you, as you race on by, and they grow enormous, falling out of the sky. Sometimes, I parked by the airport and just watched them fly in and out, wondering about the people onboard and where they were going.

This weekend, we moved into our new house in Massachusetts. It was blissfully quiet, settled into a quiet mountainside with no one above or around us, no one but us. At first it was unnerving. Later, it became peaceful. I was overjoyed to dig out all my stuff again and have access to all my books and DVDs and clothes. The house has been decorated more me than J., because I own more stuff and also because my idea of decorating involves more than a bedspread and a Wii. Our landlord is amiable and the strip mall is close...including my personal godsend, the Target. We brought home our new (antisocial) white fluffy cat, who proceeded to hide under the couch for two days. It's good to be settled again even if I'll mostly be out of state for the next month, teaching.

Speaking of employment...

Interview with Citizen Schools was nerve-racking, but ultimately, I think, triumphant. Still waiting to hear back for certain, but they admitted on the spot that they liked me and were recommending me to the Boston headquarters. I found out they've been interviewing since January...January!...to fill only two positions. I need a background check and three references on top of the two interviews, essay questions, resume and transcript submission, and application. Explaining my apprenticeship project (part of the program is planning and holding 10-week "apprenticeships" for middle school kids, where they learn about something that wouldn't be taught in regular class and complete a community service project--mine was on the adoption and care of pets and animals in the community), I got goosebumps. I love animals, and my enthusiasm showed. Even I preened over my 10-page curriculum, which I spent hours researching and developing before the move. J. and I went to Six Flags afterwards and I made a private promise to myself to get another tattoo if this job comes through. I feel like it will. J. was proud, but immediately I felt the inferiority complex begin to kick up once more. J. has no job experience other than the past year TAing...Puerto Rican culture seems to mind less if the young people don't work and live at home for awhile. The culture I'm used to is a little less forgiving, and it shows, when J. goes on interviews with his pitiful two lines of job experience on his resume, none of it applicable to most of what he applies for. Our rent is paid for a month, but by then, he'll really be putting us on the line if he can't find anything. In typical J. fashion, after two days of looking, he begins to give up (remember all those rants I have about him being used to getting things his way, right away?). J. is a true, 4 language speaking, Moliere quoting, supercomputer doctoral candidate genius, no doubt. But his common sense skills and life experience are more or less nonexistent...and looking at him, I don't know that I'd trade mine in to be what he is, although I truly admire it.

My biggest asset is definitely not that I'm a genius, devoted heart and soul to one niche field (which may be why the Ph.D. thing is not going to work out at the moment), but that I have an almost impermeable Teflon coating. I can spin just about any fallout into something positive and inspiring. I've had to. I get through life believing that if you keep moving, there's always another chance for a change, to get your world where you want it to be. I'm not so much an optimist as just particularly wide-eyed and stubborn. I drink in new experiences, even the bad ones. I know J. envies me this catlike ability to land on my feet and walk away the better for any awful thing that's happened to me. I thank my lucky stars for it, myself. I can feel it kicking in already with my new life in Massachusetts. In a final act of fuck-you, I spend my sociological methods course teaching my kids to doubt everything, to distrust positivism, and what the alternate methods of thinking about research are. I smile smugly inside.

fear and loathing.

2008-05-31T16:23:00.002-04:00

He says that you're drunk and high like that's an excuse for someone twice my age and by anyone's measure, an adult. He says you've consumed three quarters of a bottle of vodka, and I saw you smoking up on the stairs earlier today. He says. But I'm angry. My anger swells like the earth heaving, cracks the crust of rock and sends up plumes of fire and ash, it can't be contained. I am lava red with anger, and the fact that you have him so trained to make excuses for you makes me angrier, that everyone will pretend that this behavior and the resulting idiocy are somehow acceptable instead of just telling you you're wrong, immature, irresponsible, a miserably unhappy human being who can't find any ounce of courage or strength to make a change, but instead just wallows in her own ability to self-destruct. And to destroy us. I'm waiting for the day I can sit you both down and sew shut your mouths and open your ears, tie you to chairs and tell you what you have done, the craziness that has never been erased, the self-hatred, and the fear. I wait for the day you are forced to take in the hurt, to internalize it and to be miserably sorry that what you have done can never be taken back, and that a forest can never be regrown in the wake of the emotional Agent Orange that's been sprayed on a loving parent-child relationship. There is hate there, pulsing, teeth-bared, Dalai Lama-defying hate that cannot be bought or bartered away for cheap attempts at aid that never come without complaints, without rebuking, without reminders. Acts of kindness that will get thrown in my face like boiling water, for years, tales of how I have been fed, clothed, and sheltered, and a rancid scowling reminder that that is all any child could possibly ask for, that anything more than not being in the street, starving, is just too much.

i will remember.

2008-05-29T16:39:00.002-04:00

running down the lawn in bare feet with m. towards the ice cream truck's cheerful jingle, laughing. pink cherry petals raining onto the road and coalescing in graceful piles in the gutters, swirling dreamlike in eddies on the sidewalks, heralding springtime. that nervous feeling of standing in front of a new class for the very first time, butterflies in your stomach. minds coming together and making something new. half-drunk on mojitos and laughing, comparing scars over salads and appetizers. a rare time when there were friends who understood. curled up on floor pillows eating a quiet dinner and watching television. reaching the thirty-foot heights of the rock wall my very first time. reading the sung praise of 60 students who walked out knowing more than when they walked in. thanks to me. having an office to call my very own. living independently and loving it. fabulous seventy-dollar haircuts. everything within the reach of your fingertips. summer sun on the back of my neck.

a backyard swamped in purple flowers.

but mostly, friends.

the smell of summer.

2008-05-27T15:25:00.002-04:00

Today I teach. But before, I make copies and pick up a twenty dollar bookshelf that I've found off Craigslist. I walk around the sociology department, coming closer and closer to my last time doing so. There's a faculty meeting in the seminar room and I hear the raucous sound of faculty cutting loose for the summer, behind it. I move fast. I don't want to be caught when the faculty pour out, in the swirling tide of questions and good wishes. Just pretend I never came at all. Outside, it smells of incoming summer, like caramel and magnolias and new rubber, mixed together. I take a breath, and I feel edgy, a little out of control. I'm afraid. Things are changing again, and I need some kind of closure before they do. I don't think leaving was the wrong decision, but it's so much harder to walk away from something you're good at because it isn't right for you than it is to stay and hope some day it will be. The truth is, I don't know where I belong, and I'm afraid once I'm in Mass. J. and I will fall apart, and there I'll be, adrift. I breathe, in the first year student office, I finger my keys, the first set of keys I've ever gotten to open the front door of a college building, the library, my own office. Stacked next to the computer that K. always uses in our office are Intro. to Sociology textbooks and articles and index cards, and I think of how K. is just starting to teach this week for the first time. I tape an index card to her computer reminding her of me. I miss you, I write.

I'm sad. I feel nameless, placeless, without a home. This month of living with my parents in transition grates on me, having all my things in storage, and no space to call my own, no quiet place to live and grow. I feel nowhere and nothing. This morning, before he left, J. curled up listless in my arms and whimpered, afraid to return home alone where he too starts a new job today. That's not unlike J. But it would be unlike me, so I blink back the water in my eyes in the office, and leave again, and move on, and pretend that I know the answers to all these questions.

sex y otras cosas.

2008-05-26T21:08:00.003-04:00

The sex drought ended as of last night. J. and I finally had a rip-roaring, publicly humiliating fight in the middle of the mall on Saturday, that culminated in my pulling off his ring (the one I asked him to marry me with) and telling him I'd made the decision for him. In the end, things went on, and the tension broke, and the past few days have been calm. Last night, half asleep, I let him in, and I managed to fuck myself into a state of calm that spread through me like a benzo. I slept. These days my guard mostly comes down when I'm half asleep. I don't know why, but it's harder for me to let him in, the longer I go without sex.

I'm looking at the Widener program in Human Sexuality, that would let me get an M.Ed. The classes assign the types of books I would buy anyways, which seems pretty cool. If I can't stay interested while watching fisting videos, I think I probably can't go for anything else, either.

I remember growing up and realizing that everyone else around me was either A.) totally clueless about sex or B.) totally uptight about sex. I must have been 12 or 13. By then I was realizing I liked chicks, and at that point, all bets were sort of off anyways, so I went with it. I still remember masturbating to my first orgasm at the age of 12, and thinking that it was like some sort of marvelous version of chasing the heroin dragon, and I'd always be trying to get back to it. The internet was a marvelous thing for my burgeoning sexuality. My close knit group of Internet role-playing geeks and I would inevitably steer our characters into every type of erotic scenario you can name...and in a chat room, playing as elves and dragons and who knows what else, the nice thing is that there are basically no boundaries. Combined with the fact that everyone else was older than me, and I ended up knowing an awful lot, awfully fast. It made for a truly excellent masturbatory life from the ages of 14 to 17 or so, when I started getting laid for real, with L. Continuing on to college to major in Women's Studies and a litany of sexuality and gender courses instilled in me that pervasive nagging feeling that people in the U.S. today, sadly, don't really know that much about themselves or their partners sexually, and usually pigeonhole themselves into confusing, uncomfortable and cringeworthy situations. So I kept reading. And putting myself out there.

J. is not like me. And by "like me," I mean relatively open. I realized at a young age that I liked both chicks and dicks. I realized that there's always going to have to be some Ds/power components to my sex life in order for me to be totally satisfied. Those are identities, and they force open a certain number of doors, after you look back and realize you haven't gotten off in 8 years to anything not involving BDSM and power play. Not once. J. thinks being a "free spirit" is a foolish (and selfish) cliche, but I am, to some degree, in that I get bored and distracted easily, in bed and out, and inevitably find myself moving on a lot...to new places, people, things. J., who was one of those roleplayers I met (and consequently fucked) online, didn't take his Internet persona into reality. He had his first (bad) sexual experience at the age of 20, and I am his second and, as far as he's concerned, last.

I am still looking to expand. I have had many instances of vaginal, anal, and reciprocal oral sex, I swallow, I jerk men off, I have performed 69 under duress although I find it mostly to be utterly useless, I have partner-swapped and had sex while others watched, I have been with women and men and my oldest partner was 25 years my senior. I have been DPed (although not by two men at once). I have role-played, dressed up, penetrated a man with tongue, fingers, and strap-on, worn out several dildos and vibrators on myself, been tied up and gagged, held down, drawn blood, had my blood drawn, scratched, bitten, pulled hair, choked my partners, and been choked. I have participated in forced sex role play, spanked and been spanked, tried out tens of sexual positions, gotten off while fantasizing about rape, incest, and bestiality. I have been penetrated by dicks, dildos, fingers, tongue, and random household items, everywhere I possibly can be. My male partners have dressed up in female clothing, sometimes my own. I have had men cum on me, cum in me, cum while thinking about me, and cum while watching me touch myself. I have had phone sex with every partner I've ever been with, dirty talked, and written dirty letters. I have watched, read, and perused porn. I have pierced my nipples, lip, tongue, and vertical clitoral hood, and stretched the hood to a 6 gauge. I have fucked on my parents' bed, in several cars, in a state forest, in other peoples' houses, on the beach, in the ocean, in a tent. I can get myself off, in the right conditions, in ten seconds, or 6 times a day. I am 23 years old. And I know that there are still sexual things that I haven't done and want to do. It's funny. Compiling that list, I thought that it's likely most people three times my age haven't managed to get all that in. But I've enjoyed it and learned from all of it. And I want to keep learning. But I know with J. that there are a lot of things he wouldn't allow, be turned on by, or be comfortable with, and so to some degree it's likely I'll always be limited. Sometimes I think I'm still too young to be limited. It's hard to know that you love someone enough not to be able to lie. I know I would have to say to J., "This is what I need and so I am going out to obtain it," and then do so. He treats that like it is the epitome of selfish, but I know the epitome of selfish would be if I just went, and he never was the wiser for it. It sucks that I've come into this mindset that people who view sexuality with less fluidity than myself are somehow inferior, although I know deep down that maybe, that's just who he is. I don't want to accept that those parts of him will never change, and that part of being in a long term relationship is just learning that you can't change people, and either choosing to accept them how they are or choosing to walk away.

the type of people who keep going back and trying to make sense of it all.

2008-05-23T21:45:00.004-04:00

I'm acquiring stuff faster than I can pack it up, which is a bad thing. Unfortunately, this is a bad time of year, as I recently had a little extra cash roll in, and I'm needing to buy course supplies for the class I'm teaching starting on Tuesday. Additionally, I found a deal for a kitchen table and chairs that I couldn't bear to pass up on Craigslist, so now we're going to have to manage to get them to Massachusetts as well. I'm cringing at the amount of possessions I own at the age of 23. They're mostly old hand me downs and things I can't bear to get rid of, like 30 or so journals I kept from the age of 12 to the age of 19 and old Jones soda bottles filled with dried flowers. Added to this are the few new things I've managed to pick up, like a red microsuede chaise lounge I'm still paying for and (my biggest problem) an inordinate number of books that continues to increase. This month alone I've come to own Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, a book on bipolar depression, The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins, a book by Aviva Chomsky on immigration, Phyllis Chesler's Women and Madness, the Bones series guidebook, two books that were parting gifts from friends, and Eternal Treblinka, a book about animal welfare. And those are the ones I can remember. J. and I between the two of us own upwards of 500 books. It's my biggest problem with rampant consumerism.

I've driven myself into another one of those stressed-out, Ativan-popping funks lately. Mostly because I missed a furniture payment and my account was consequently jacked from a zero to a 25% APR interest rate, because course planning has turned out to take a ridiculously unanticipated amount of time, and because Citizen Schools, the Americorps-funded nonprofit with whom I submitted a last-minute application for a Teaching Fellowship position, has, after a grueling hour-long phone interview, forwarded me to the final stage of an in-person two day interview. As I've mentioned, the position is prestigious, pays comparatively well, garners health insurance, and requires a two year, 50 hour a week commitment. I wasn't as elated as you'd have thought, instead, I thought again that my characteristic inability to accomplish the ordinary merely led me again into something with a tremendous amount of competition (three open TF positions in the city I requested placement) and responsibility, precisely what I told myself I would avoid this coming year. But lacking any other offers, I figured I'd give this one a shot, and with excellent references and a GPA topping 3.85 for both my undergrad and grad education, I excelled fast in the interview. Maybe too fast. I could have worked at Borders and contented myself with the 30% employee discount. And not felt too guilty for working retail since it was selling the one thing I can always justify buying.

I'm using my course (Intro. to Social Research Methods) as a cheap excuse to show interesting documentary movies (Super Size Me, The Bridge, Kinsey) and dreading the excessive amount of reading I'm giving only because that means I have to do it myself. My syllabus clocked out at 8 pages, although most of it is interesting and fairly relevant (or at least I tried). Mostly I'm grumbling my lack of any real vacation so far this year, since mine are eternally crammed with work. J. and I are still clashing like cats and dogs, spurring further exhaustion on my part, mostly over my obsessive, detail-oriented perfectionism in contrast to his total inability to do anything by himself or take any type of initiative without being directed. Upon realizing that everything, including my interview clothes, is packed up, I begrudgingly am forced to adventure out to the mall tomorrow to update my wardrobe and buy a pair of shoes that isn't marketed by Kangaroos or Vans. One of these days when I actually have the time I have to remember to call the electric and propane companies for our new apartment and change over the tenant information, and prepare a presentation for my CS interview. In characteristic J. fashion, he puts off his final papers into the absolute last minute and then spends nearly a week of 15 hour days doing nothing but writing. J. does not possess my finest ability--writing an average of 2 to 2.5 pages per hour on research papers (which allows me to finish good papers in record time) anymore than he possesses my ability to plan everything ahead of time to the last detail. He can parallel park, cook great dishes from scratch, and speak four languages with ease--traits I used to love, but are now overshadowed by the fact that he looks for the sugar in the kitchen closet for four seconds and then yells, "Baaaaabbbyyyy....where's the sugar?" and makes me rise from writing my syllabus in order to point out the ten-pound bag spelling SUGAR which is staring directly at him.

We've had sex once in a month, and he doesn't seem bothered. I refuse to admit I am bothered, so instead I just go to bed early each night, doped up on Desyrel, and pretend it doesn't matter. I wish even summer didn't feel like so much work.

blech.

2008-05-20T15:41:00.001-04:00

"jump the shark"-Original meaning was the point when a television series shows it has run out of ideas and must resort to stunts to retain viewer interest.

Fuck you, Bones. Thanks for breaking my heart.

grapevine fires.

2008-05-18T19:44:00.000-04:00

When the wind picked up the fire spread
And the grapevines seemed left for dead
And the Northern sky looked like the end of days
The end of days

The wake-up call to a rented room
Sounded like an alarm of impending doom
To warn us it's only a matter of time
Before we all burn

Before we all burn
Before we all burn
Before we all burn

We bought some wine and some paper cups
Near your daughters school when we picked her up
And drove to a cemetery on a hill
On a hill

And we watched the plumes paint the sky gray
But she laughed and danced through the field of graves
And there I knew it would be alright
That everything would be alright

Would be alright
Would be alright
Would be alright

And the news reports on the radio
Said it was getting worse
As the ocean air fanned the flames
But I couldn't think
Of anywhere I would of rather been
To watch it all burn away

To burn away

And the firemen worked in double shifts
With prayers for rain on their lips
And they knew it was only a matter of time

p.s.

2008-05-16T09:24:00.001-04:00

We're thinking about bringing her into a new home, since we have the ability now. Her name is Meeps. She's 6 years old and in her house now she's getting beat up by the other cat because she's so shy. What do you think? Yea/nay?

rainbows.

2008-05-16T09:00:00.003-04:00

I have forgotten how much I like Amherst, MA. This week I finally consent to come up for the first time in three months, only because I really don't have a choice; there's a lease to be signed and a deposit to put down. J. grouses endlessly about the fact that I don't come to stay with him much anymore, and there are a lot of good reasons for that. But one of the simplest is that he lives in what is essentially a dorm--four boys sharing a space about a third the size of the space I shared with three other people. Dirty dishes are always everywhere, garbages are always overflowing, and sometimes I head to the bathroom to find piss all over the seat (or on the floor) and pubic hairs stuck to everything. There is no Aleve, no scissors, and very seldom anything for me to actually eat, which is how I manage to spend more than eighty dollars eating out in a week here. J.'s room degenerates within hours to a crawlspace of floorspace surrounded by heaps of clothes, cords, books and wrappers, with two people living in it. Within four days I positively ache to be back in my own quiet, dimly lit, bodily-fluids-free abode. I have doubts that moving in with J. in three weeks is going to solve anything at all of what's been going wrong with us lately. Most likely, it will merely produce a hundred other things on which we disagree, when I remind him not to leave the lid up, throw clothes on the floor, to help me mow the lawn/call the snow plow people/scrub the bathrooms. None of which will occur to him. I'm just getting ready for more moments of seething complaint, for more feelings of being sick of this relationship, which I nearly always am these days. The timing for life is arranged ironically, so that by the time you take 3 or 4 months to find a decent place to live, see it, approve it, pay a deposit, take photos, sign a lease and move in, your relationship has degenerated to the point that you wish 70% of the time you had just taken the dog and gone to California.

Someone backs into J.'s car overnight and dents the whole front left bumper in, which sucks a lot since it's brand new. J. appropriately vents for awhile, but then the whole day inevitably turns into one of those self-pitying orgies he's wonderful at. Low-grade, just a constant grating, grating, grating, for 12 or 14 hours. This is what leaves me exhausted and unable to function. The constant, "Well, now my car is ruined anyways," "These things always happen to me and never to anyone else," that just gets trapped in my ears and buzzes like a bug caught. Until I will eventually explode and tell J. to grow the fuck up, that a dent in a bumper does not equal a car being ruined, that a life of being pampered and babied and getting everything his way has left him completely incapable of dealing with a stress as great as having a hangnail on his own.

Things don't bode well, I think.

But the apartment is beautiful, in the country, spacious and filled with light from the giant ground windows. Perfect, I think. And the town too is lovely, filled with bookstores, rainbow flags, and vegetarian cuisine--Moroccan, Indian, Thai, pasta, veggie burgers, the requisite Chinese and sushi houses and steakhouses and Italian. 45 restaurants in a three-block radius. I take a few hours on my own and shop for books and silly pins and buy a rainbow beaded bracelet to tie around my wrist. I'm hoping I'll be happy here but I don't know that it will have anything to do with living with J. In the meantime, I interview with Citizen Schools on the phone, a grueling hour-long process that includes such questions as, "What is your pedagogical philosophy and why?" They tell me I'll know next week if I get moved on to the next round. I promise myself if I get this job (which pays 23,000 a year--considering my rent will only be 5,400, that's very fair, seems to me) I'll get another tattoo and maybe take a road trip to Colorado or Wyoming in July before it starts. I always wanted to go see the west.

missing pieces.

2008-05-09T19:47:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start doing art and writing again.

perseverance.

2008-05-08T20:16:00.004-04:00

"this weekend i am in massachusetts again. all the leaves there are changing colors, orange and red, the trees rising like flames. it's J.'s birthday weekend. we go to six flags, to a concert together in northhampton, and on sunday morning stay in bed late. my tiredness never leaves these days, and although all these activities were fun, i feel so often like i'm drowning and want only to lie in bed naked, clinging to J.'s softness, the reassurance of holding him as he drifts into sleep, the security blanket that ebbs like the tide. my sleep is mostly fitful, and the last night, J.'s is worse. i wake him up in the middle of the night as he cries out, and hold him. i wonder if he's afraid of me leaving again, the way i am. that night, i lie in bed under the open window thinking of the word, shift. a shift is a short period of work. it is also a movement, tectonic plates, crashing and splintering. a change of opinion. to shift is to move into a higher or lower gear. a shift is a change in direction. a change in wavelength, if you're a physicist. it is also something loose, a covering. shifty is something that is not to be trusted.

i'm waiting for one/all of these.

it is autumn, but it feels more like fall. i lie under the window, breathing the fall, deep, smell of smoke and burning, smell of leaves and ending, smell of shift. J. rests on my back and i breathe deep, and i feel the urge to tell him that i'm afraid to die. i feel the urge to tell him that i'm so afraid, of everything. he shifts, and the words die in my throat. the next day, i drive home. the drive is too long. when i pull up to my house, i feel a thousand, a million, five million, ten million miles away from everyone else in the world, a distance that cannot be borne, without insanity. i feel achably, shakably lonely, in my bones, and my work presses down on me, and i think, that there isn't a question of another year, that this year has to be my last, and then out. " --10/21/07

Reading my lyrical blog entries from my old blog inspires me to write more. Today, I proctored a test for this semester's kids for the last time. I got two hugs and a whispered, "I learned more from you than from [Professor F.] this semester." I smiled. I'm still fighting, and I suppose that's all that matters. The professor I belonged to last semester took me out to lunch to say thanks and goodbye at a fabulous Indian buffet where I stuffed myself on chili noodles and aloo gobi. I explained my laborious decision to leave the program to her and in the end, she agreed with it, which made me feel a little more sure inside. "It's really admirable that you already know yourself so well," she said to me, "to know what isn't for you. It's better than staying here just because you don't know what else to do and are afraid to leave." She's one of only three professors I met this year that I trusted. We talked for hours before she drove me back to campus. Before we left, I gave her the summarized version of my personal problems, too. It's funny, whenever I talk about them to someone who isn't J. or K. or L., I frame them in terms of others: "My life is hard right now because X and Y and Z are sick." It's impossible for me to say aloud, "My life is tough right now because *I* am sick. (Which might have happened due to worrying about X and Y and Z)." She said something that people say to me in kindness but that really just makes me feel alone: "You're amazingly resilient. If that happened to me I would be in pieces by now." Everyone says this, the way how when I used to work in animal shelters everyone who came in would say, "I wish I could take them ALL home!" That annoyed me too. But the resilient tack annoys me because mostly, lately, I think I am in pieces. Calling your fiance at 2 AM driving home in hysterical tears and threatening to run yourself off the road is pieces, more or less. But that's hard to work into a conversation and still sound sane. Or maybe, it's that I'm not in pieces. Professor P. reminded me that despite all, I finished all my classes (save the one I dropped) with good grades and no incompletes and will more than likely win two teaching awards. I am not in the hospital and I am not cutting again (yet). So maybe that is resilience. Maybe I'm just tired of the expectation that comes with resilience, and the barbs.

The professor from my favorite class I took this year wrote a song about my leaving, and emailed me to tell me, and I laughed. It felt good. Later, I got an email from Citizen Schools scheduling a phone interview, which may lead to an in-person interview and a guaranteed two-year Americorps fellowship teaching at risk kids. For $22,000 a year plus insurance, vacation, and travel stipend. I applied at the last minute but now I'm kind of hoping.

scars.

2008-05-07T21:34:00.004-04:00

When I look down, I can always see them. Even after five years, the neat white lines traipsing down my arms, so perfectly parallel. There are 3 or 400 but I can only see sixty or so, anymore, and only in the right light, if I happen to be looking. You can't see them, unless you know where to look. Sometimes I'd think I imagined that whole part of my life, but there it is, in pink and white, and I know it could happen again, except I owe something of myself to other people now, and I'm afraid to transgress that. I read an award winning essay on cancer today, and something stuck with me, when the 27-year-old author said that after a long struggle with something painful people will try to believe "at the end of all of the suffering, they will have the shining light of perspective." But in truth, she notes, "they will be lucky if they emerge with any memory of their former selves."

K. wrote this week about how she is not her label, and that is ironic, because I keep hoping they will find a label that fits me. They haven't yet. But with a label comes, reportedly, an antidote, and I'm not ready to believe there's no antidote to being me. It's true, what the cancer survivor (I said survivor, K., not warrior!) said. I don't remember who I was before the fog descended at age 12 and whisked me away. It's quite possible a "me" wasn't even there yet by that point. When I wake up and feel okay, normal, like the world isn't falling apart and I can lead a normal day, is the exception by now rather than the rule. Some of the world's truly extraordinary people were the ones who could never quite reconcile their sadness, their mania, their fear, the voices in their heads. Maybe all of them. Bipolar is known to have a proven correlation with talent and creativity. It's funny how the same cogs that make you smart and talented and interesting also make you crazy.

I wrote a paper on self injury for my sociology of gender course and finished it today. In the paper, I postulated that self injury is paradoxically a way to assert yourself and give the finger to a structure that attempts to define who and what you are and should be. I know how ridiculous that sounds, that everyone knows in order to hurt yourself over and over and over, it's really not you in control, that it's an expression of some sort of terrible unsaid truth that you don't know how to express. That's true. But it's also true that self injury is a big angry defiant fuck you, that your skin can be a discursive site on which you paint a picture, tell a story, and remember. I know that that's true because I have done it with that intent. So, like most things, which you learn when you're an adult, the truth is complicated.

It's funny, because I believe that all academic writing is a crystal clear reflection of who the person doing the writing is, and what they believe. It can be subtle (K. choosing to write a paper on cancer while waiting for her own test results back) or obvious (the majority of scholars on gender being female). But academics are not immune from discomfort, folly and wrong turns, and that weaves its way into our story like it does with anyone else. I read people by what they write and how they write it, even at the highest academic level. Which is why I write about self injury and BDSM and inequality. We're all trying to understand the world through understanding ourselves and our own existences, and sometimes justifying them. A voice is a voice. Which is why I find it so absurd that sociology tries to be an objective science. I tell my students, studying people is never objective, and it's never value-free, and it's never practically inconsequential. And it's never neutral or entirely true. I truly believe that just isn't possible when it comes to people, and the more I learn about people (and sociology), the more I believe that.

I moved out of the city yesterday and back into my parents' house for three weeks, after which I'll be in Massachusetts with J. J. has a job and a subletter for his place, and I have a subletter and enough money to last until September. My heart broke a little to leave my city friends this week, and I play the old Third Eye Blind albums over and over again and resist sleeping. My snake shed and his colors are beautiful. Summer is coming, and I am rushing out like the tide.

i remember this.

2008-05-06T20:24:00.004-04:00

...from when I was sixteen and thought I'd met the most perfect boy in the world.

His name was Brandon.

When we met light was shed
Thoughts free flow, you said you've got something
Deep inside of you
A wind chime voice sound, sway of your hips round rings true
Echos deep inside of you
These secret garden beams changed my life so it seems
Fall breeze blows outside, I don't break stride
My thoughts are warm and they go deep inside of you
Oh yeah
And I never felt alone
'Till I met you
Friends say I've changed
I don't listen cause I live to be
Deep inside of you
Slide of her dress shouts in darkness
I'm so alive, I'm
Deep inside of you
You said boy make girl feel good
But still deep inside still
I've never felt alone
'Till I met you
I'm alright on my own
Thenl I met you
And I'd know what to do if I just knew what's coming

I would change myself if I could
I'd walk with my own people if I could find them
And I would say that I'm sorry to you
I'm sorry to you but I don't want to call you
But then I want to call you cause I don't want to crush you
But I feel like crushing you and it's true
I took for granted you were with me
I breathe by your looks and you look right through me
But we were broken and didn't know it
But we were broken and didn't know it

Something's gone you withdraw and I'm not strong like before
I was deep inside of you
I can go nowhere, I burn candles and stare at a ghost
Deep inside of you
And some great need in me starts to bleed
I've lost myself, there's nothing left, it's all gone
Deep inside of you
Deep inside of you

depending.

2008-05-02T17:43:00.004-04:00

Lauren and I spend a lot of time talking about why it is I find it so impossible to care for myself, even at the level of say, realizing it's not a great idea to work a twelve hour day and not eat anything until 8 PM. That attitude is, though, as constant in me as the moon in the sky, so constant that I don't even notice it. I began to craft myself a role, a long long time ago, of caring for those around me and quietly picking up the pieces and trying to assemble them again. Of planning ahead for everyone else and always being ready with the right answer for when they stumbled into some conundrum. On the highway today, listening to Rilo Kiley (A Better Son/Daughter, of course), I remembered being 16, when we were at a Hawaiian-themed party at my friend C.'s house, one populated with acquaintances and C.'s sisters, one of the rare fetes that I managed to get to in high school. My friend D. grew up in a house that rivaled mine for craziness, and it showed. Something happened where she ended up chasing someone with a kitchen knife. I don't remember what. D. was like that, a gifted artist prone to breakdowns and acts of uncertain violence. Me and my friend S. were blatant, the marks of our cuts on our arms and thighs and bellies, but D. was more subtle, if not less lost. She locked herself in C.'s pantry and I don't remember if she had the knife still or not, but she allowed no one in. Except me. And there, somehow, I talked her down.

And so it went. The simplistic view is that years of weathering my mother's deep desire to relive her adolescence in the form of drinking, drugging, fucking and faking established a pathological need in me to be the responsible person in any situation. Which usually means talking extremely unhappy and ill-prepared people out of trees while I myself pretend not to be quite so unhappy or ill-prepared. And some of these people are truly extraordinary. Like D. and J. I can't say I mind this mantle of caretaker, although it gets a little tight and hot around the throat sometimes, usually when I myself fall into second, then third, then eighth, then tenth priority in my own life.

The other reason is just that I don't know how to do or be anything other than what all these years have made me. The real reason. I'm still afraid of not being perfect and gifted and shiny. It never did much to make anyone understand or really appreciate me, is the irony. The people who understand me don't understand me because I'm shiny. They probably understand most knowing the many times I've failed. But there's always an irresistable desire to try to fix everyone and everything.

Swamped with work, I switch from one project to the next and then to scuba, reading about regulators and SPGs and breathing control methods and ways of entering the water and buoyancy control. At night, I usually am sad until my Trazodone kicks in and punts me into sleep. J. found a job. I'm back in the city for the weekend and wanting Chinese food and peace.

burning.

2008-04-29T21:48:00.003-04:00

you say, "they will get you anyway."
'cause they've got pretty tricks to make you stay
when all turns out to be unjust
then i'll turn back and help you out

so i have come just to check on your injuries
and make believe that you're running out of time

but you can't feel it
or slightly move it
or even touch it
so better burn down
the town hall
the cornfields
the tower blocks
and secret paths
the main roads
and skater parks
the public pools
and dead-end schoolyards
the train rides to any club night
we've fought too long
just to stay along

I don't write much when things fall apart. I'm sorry. I'm still waiting for them to improve.

I finally own a Wii. Need some games.

Class ends in one week.

i'll follow you into the dark.

2008-04-25T15:52:00.002-04:00

"I'll always be proud of you," he said.

Thanks, Sean.

I'll try to remember that.

starting over.

2008-04-13T14:35:00.003-04:00

I still want to leave one day and go to California. I still do, in bed at night, I still wonder why it is I'm going north, why it is I'm not going west. It's my biggest secret that there is no one that it would be that difficult for me to leave, except my cat and dog. Sometimes I want to take a blanket, my laptop, my cat, put everything else in storage, cut my cell phone bill and cut my credit cards up, and leave no one any way to track me down again. Like the mom in The Lovely Bones, I can't breathe here anymore, and the people I love that love me are not enough for me to stay. It gets harder to think about picking up and leaving, the more things you acquire, the more responsibilities you have, the older you get. Sometimes I want to sit on a beach and watch the sun go down and know that no one in three thousand miles knows who I am or where to find me. I don't know if J. would ever forgive me. I'd like to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. I don't know if I could trust myself not to climb over the railing lately. I feel fleeting, distracted, flighty. Caitlin Summers in Summer Sisters, leaving her baby, leaving her husband, an empty sailboat in the ocean the only indication that there was ever a beautiful girl there at all. I feel like this world is slowly suffocating me, and I want to walk amongst people who I have no responsibility to.

It's my dog I couldn't leave. But maybe one day I'll take her, and go. So no one be surprised if one day, I just vanish.

growing smaller.

2008-04-12T14:22:00.003-04:00

J. is on the phone with me again, mentioning how his parents are there to pay for things, and I sort of want to strangle him. Don't date Latin boys, I want to tell my friends. Mama's apron strings are still way too there, for me. I want to scream at J., "We're planning a wedding!" The dialogue inevitably comes back to, "Well, if things get really bad, I can always move in with my dad," or "Mom offered to help pay my bills this summer." I find it ludicrous that I even have to explain to J. that he has a $300 car payment, every month, phone bill, grocery bills, living expenses, apart from all that rent entails, and thus, the option of putting all his shit in storage so he can flit to Boston and sleep on his father's couch all summer, leaving me stranded, is a nonexistent one. When he mumbles, "If I can find a job this summer," I have a silent rage blackout. If? If is when you're 16 and your paycheck funds your trips to the mall. If is not when you're almost 24 and planning a wedding. My friends are buying houses, and J. is contemplating the First National Bank of Padres. I want to say, "Um, I thought we were an adult family now who has a responsibility to each other?" J. cheerfully tells me that he can write his roommate down as a reference for our potential new house, to tell the new landlord that "I'm a good roommate!," and I silently face-palm. "J.," I say, with infinite patience that is slowly running out, "They want a landlord, not your roommate. Why do they care if you're a good roommate when WE'RE NOT GOING TO BE LIVING WITH ROOMMATES."

I'm thinking about abandoning my efforts to help men mature and just hitching a ride to California, because J. is not learning, and I'm seeing this plan that I have crafted down to the last, insignificant detail creep closer to exploding in my pretty little face. I know in the back of my head that I'm ready to start a life as an adult, and J. is just dying to move back in with his family and forget this whole thing. My frustration slowly strangles me. What the hell is wrong with men in their twenties?

rock bottom.

2008-04-09T17:33:00.002-04:00

This is when you start thinking that maybe it's just not going to get better for you...or if it is, it better start soon. I'm flat broke, confined to my bed hardly able to breathe with what's either a cold or an awful case of hay fever, depressed, and, as of a month and a half from now, without a job or a place to live. Or a grad school. On top of that, I'm out of sleeping pills and my eyes ache from the drops my stupid eye doctor put in them to dilate my pupils 3 hours ago.

You know that thing I said about hope? It's fading.