Quote of the day :)

She did not believe that she could ever stop hating Nicky and Lee, until her pastor told her that when God was going to do something wonderful, it started with something hard, and when God was going to do something exquisite, He or She started with an impossibility.

Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe

Isn't she lovely?

I have a broken heart. It's so so very broken. I think about my broken heart when I wake up in the middle of the night. I think about it when I wake up in the morning. I work hard all freakin' day long to keep from falling apart. I have a broken heart.

"People are better than no people." When I'm sad, I need to be alone a lot. I need to sit in a quiet room and not think, maybe cry, but mostly stare at the ceiling and be sad. At some point in the sadness, I begin to wonder if it will ever end, and if I'm isolating myself to the point of depression. Then I hang out with my people, and I feel a lot better, and I realize that things will not be awful forever.

Right now, I am trying to live my life as normal. I go to work. I go to yoga. I try to feed myself on a regular basis. I cry and get mad at dumb things and then say "I'm sorry". I have good moments. I have bad moments. I try not to cry at the pharmacy when they mess up my prescription for the hundredth time (even though I try to keep this from happening, and plan ahead, and check and double check, it stills happens - I have no control). I try to keep my life as stable as possible. I take a lot of walks at dusk. There have been times in my life when the walks at dusk were accompanied by swinging on swings at the park, but I don't have any swings near me now.

I don't know what is going to happen in my life, or with my heart. I'm learning to be a person who tries not to control everything. Not trying to control everything is probably why my heart is really truly broken. I'm proud of myself for letting that happen, for letting my heart be broken. That's progress.

Making good choices.

I believe that I am the master of my own destiny, that I in fact can determine the course of my life merely by making decisions that point me in the perfect direction. This is flawed logic. See, I can't predict what will end well with 100% certainty. I can guess. I can use past experience. But I can't emphatically know what will make my life as awesome as possible.

Seriously, I don't even know why I keep trying. All it takes is one bad decision to royally fuck it all up anyway, as the protesters at Planned Parenthood remind me every morning on my way to work. Life is not a series of equally significant moments. Life is a series of benign, uninteresting moments, interspersed with crazy important ones that change the entire trajectory of one's life. Yet I continue to believe that I can be more powerful than I am, that I can predict the future, and thus completely avoid pain. And it is these times, when I have set everything up in such a way that absolutely nothing can go wrong, that everything goes wrong, and I am painfully reminded of how small and helpless I am in the face of an infinite universe and unpredictable people.

So I eat more chocolate chip cookies, because I predict that they will be good, and then they are, in fact, very good. Nothing else matters. I have control over nothing else.

Hug a veteran :)

A Charles Schultz ode to veterans on Armistice Day (11/11)

There was a purple station wagon in the parking lot when I pulled up to one of my favorite thrift stores this afternoon. It was dotted with silver-toned ephemera, lots of crosses. I got to meet the owner at the cash register, and I'm really glad I did. Turns out he was a POW in Vietnam, and the purple on the car matched the purple heart license plate. He was also covered in silver-toned ephemera, with a Western-style outfit and pristine cowboy boots. He said that he never sleeps, so he makes jewelry and decorates his car. It's his thing. I assume it keeps him alive.

This article reports that one US veteran suicides approximately every hour (average of 22 a day, higher than previous calculations). 'Purple Car Man' reminded me of how important it is for people to have something that they find joy in, that keeps them busy, helps them to find meaning, etc. Of course it's never that simple, but it's a big thing. It keeps blood flowing in important areas of the brain, encourages human contact, maybe even increases the input of sunshine.

I can imagine that when people come home from war, minor hobby-ish things seem incidental, perhaps even silly and a waste of time. But unfortunately, this way of thinking keeps the trauma of war close at all times, increasing paranoia, and disconnectedness.

Thought of the day: Hug a veteran :)

Books are awesome :)

These old mugs are super fun, not for any particularly funny reason though :)

So having school be the top priority in my life over the past five years, I have whittled my life down to the bare necessities: eating, yoga, occasional sunshine, writing, and paying the bills. These things have kept me sane in a very rocky, turmoil-filled time, and I made it! Yay! But now, all of that stress and constant need-to-perform is over, and I'm left with this emptiness in my life that I have to figure out how to fill.

It's not that my life is bad, or that I'm lacking in love or nurturing in some particular way, but some other inertia that I no longer have. I no longer have an ever-present goal I'm reaching for. And that creates a displaced feeling in my soul that I can't quite rid myself of.

So I've been reading The Hunger Games trilogy like a madwoman. I stayed up 'til midnight last night reading like my younger nine-year-old self. I'm funny that way with kid books. I do the same thing with Nancy Drew. When I lived in the jungle, I stayed up so late, I had to use a flashlight in bed to keep reading. Nerdin' out. Like a mofo.

I say "oh dear lord" a lot.

Makes you wanna go outside and ride a bike, don' it?

Today was the one day a month that I wash my sheets, clean my bathroom, wash dishes, and go to estate sales. Yeah, I'm a boss like that. Anyhow, I bought nothing at the sales that I went to. High prices + houses full of grief = Ack! Get me outta here!

In one sale that I went to, they made sure I knew that they had had things appraised. They wanted me to know that as I looked through the jewelry, they knew how much it was worth, and they weren't going to let scary 'ol me cheat them out of any money they were owed. Yikes. There was a palpable feeling in the house, a feeling of anger. And I walked out the front door, I heard one woman mention her mother who had died, and whose belongings they were hawking selling.

Suddenly, it all made sense, the feeling in the house, and I was reminded of how important it is to not get yourself into situations where you're hanging on too tight to things, when what you really want to hang on to are people (or in some cases, dogs).

So yeah, life lesson of the day.

Rilke, as ever.

Books about the rain for an elementary school classroom :)

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me — the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods —

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house — , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon, —
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke

Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell

People are animals!

There are few words to describe the past several days of my life. So I don't know if I'll try. All of it makes me feel very alone, and that cannot be helped.

But then some good things are happening, like I thrifted a lot yesterday. I bought Throwing Copper because I dunno, I had a seizure several years ago and got rid of all of my "dark" music, and listened to this song over and over again in the car. Also, I found a brown tweed shift that goes all the way to my knees (!) from Ann freakin' Taylor. Then, I finally figured out how to go to one of those quick car washes with free vacuums, so now my car looks so much better. Also, my thirteen-year-old friend made chocolate cake, and the dog ate a frog, so I laughed a lot, and got a lot of crazy kisses from dog #2 whose mouth was not foaming. So now I'm gonna go to work, and I'm gonna think about all of these good things when I'm feeling down.

Thanks for being here. I'm quite fond of you.

Nothing.

The thing about trash and recycling, is that there's always something there, a tangible object, a thing to feel and see (and sometimes even smell). When you throw something away, that thing goes somewhere (usually to a landfill). You recycle something, and it gets transformed and used again. The cycle goes on and on and on. It's a beautiful thing.

But with love, sometimes there is nothingness and emptiness, and "no more". Sometimes feelings disappear, and can never be found again. Where they go, we don't know. We go to marriage counseling to find them. We take lovers, hoping to feel good again. We drink. We laugh. We try to want and long and ache the way we used to.

Nothing.

I am feeling a bit empty of love at this moment, wishing and missing for what I once carried with me every day like a warm, tear-soaked, blanket.

No more love like a life force that could leap tall buildings. No more love. No more love. No more love.