Since my last post, I have been busy, yes indeed. Have:
- moved in with a friend until I would find a hypothetical house
- stopped going to the chiropractor
- had a panic attack while drinking iced tea with friends in a bar
- re-entered psychotherapy, for depression and anxiety
- forgotten how to write poems
- ignored my mother's phone calls
- found a home (out of my price range and no animals, but close to work and downtown, and I can drum literally any time)
- ridden my bicycle through a freezing rain / hailstorm
- bought a car for $200 from a friend (a fixer-upper / drive-it-into-the-ground sorta thing)
- discovered the joy of interior decorating
- bought and returned enough merchandise to Target and Ross that the employees think I'm colorblind (one mentioned this to my face. I laughed it off. only later did her tone strike me as snarky)
- switched from the monster (death metal / rock) drumset to the consummate (latin / jazz) drumkit
- candles, incense, a living room plant, blues and browns in the bathroom, forest colors in the living room, van goghs in the bedroom and bathroom
- set up an appointment to have a cyst on my face surgically removed
- filled a storage room with stuff I moved three times that I either do not want or have no use for (a la books I own but never read nor have any true desire to read, spare bed, end tables, TV stand, extra kitchen stuff, bedsheets and floor mats that no longer go with my color schemes, etc)
- adjusted the seat on my bike so that I incur the least amount of knee-stress-damage
- been diagnosed as dysthymic
- learned that you don't put ceramic teapots on the burner -- they will break.
- not had internet for about three weeks and as a consequence read more books for pleasure in that time span than I had in the last year or two and finished a book I started reading in September (Kate Bornstein's Gender Workbook, which I hear she's currently updating for a second edition, a good idea since the last edition was published in 1996 and as a result possesses a decidedly '90s...veneer)
- set up office space for the magazine I work at for this coming academic year
- got back into actively exploring atheism.
- finally read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion after having owned it for 2 years, samesies for Darrel Ray's The God Virus), and as a result now try to root out precisely how my childhood (Roman Catholic) religious indoctrination still effects my thinking and behavior and emotional state, which is surprisingly still quite present. fuckers.
- got back into Tarot cards. current affinities: the 7, 4, and 2 of swords, the Tower (oh no!), the 8 of pentacles, Death, and the Wand King. that's a lot of affinities. I've been doing a lot of readings.
- begun taking transgender more seriously: read a memoir, a transition guide, a collection of essays about everybody-not-fitting-in, started playing around with a new dress code at home
- still not conquered insomnia (maybe it's time to make peace with it)
- gone into more debt than I had planned to in order to survive summertime
- depleted my savings
- crossed many things off many lists
- made and cancelled plans to go to Austin and see an old friend who just moved there
- had a friend in Denver make and cancel plans to visit Flag for a week
- started reading in bed again
- not written a damn thing
- not lesson planned at all for the coming semester, where I'll have twice the teaching load and be teaching a new class
- questioned if the university and the writer's life is for me
- considered dropping out of graduate school and contacting musicians agencies instead
- made sun tea, for better (black) and worse (green jasmine)
- rediscovered how perfect bumpin and grindin is (it's like that ass just belongs there)
So there's that. The whole damn summertime trip has been me negotiating an external obstacle course while trying to sort out my insides too, and then doing what I can to distract myself from the shit of things. I try to be positive. After a while it just sounds bullshitty though. This time still doesn't feel like summer, which officially ends for me on the 13th. The world has moved on. Sigh. You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you feel like a fool.
Two-and-a-half months of large-scale failures and small-scale achievements. How small?
House, I am compromising. Soon I will feel like you are not trying to press me against the roof of your mouth, which is the whole of you, a cramped exercise. I will turn you into a cozy cave on a hill. You will be mine instead of I yours.
Writing? How do people write under such conditions? I attend to problems that arise continuously. I do the official business. Put the money where it needs to go, swipe the card, fork over the greenbacks. Split myself into task-accomplisher and sneer-at-the-worlder, a turn-off-the-phoner, a me-timer and one-more-cup-of-coffee-er.
I gripe. I bitch. I moan, not well. I work. I play with color. I close the drapes and walk around naked and try to resist the propensity the air has for turning to worms and Kubrick strings.
For a few weeks this summer, even after the avalanche of insomnia that was June, I could find no joy in anything, even the things that usually give me pleasure.
When I socialize, I feel like a geode. Huh?
They say adverse circumstances, discomfort, trying times, shims under the fingernails, this stuff helps the author produce good writing. Keep shuffling the deck, new stimuli, new reactions, new ideas, new juxtapositions. Complacency leads to uninteresting subject matter. The same-old makes phrasings and intentions turn to gray paste astronaut food.
...I am done writing for a while. Without generalizing too much, most of the writing I do ends up as gut-spilling these days. I do think there's a time and a place for that. But it gets tiresome. There is hope. My classes will make me write. Maybe they will also make me enjoy it again.
What a whiner! Jeez. Here's something not tiresome. I've always liked these lyrics, how to the point yet beautiful in their honesty they are. The video may interfere with appreciating the song in this one, so maybe don't watch, just listen. Enjoy.
And sleep. And wish for dreams, for victory.
J
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