Adult Things, Not of the XXX Variety

In my never ending search for a little substance in my life, I am compiling a small to medium sized collection of adult materials. Though some of the nerd population may consider these pdf files and internet links to be quite sexy, it is not what you may be thinking at all. I breached the terrifying surface of the deeply disturbing GRE preparation pool and downloaded a math review with the help of a mild winter depression and a new coffee mug with a substantially sized handle (thank you Matt). It might be the caffeine, or it might be the fear but my hands are shaking.

I am not sure why I fear this test so much. I am the weight at the bottom of the mental pendulum that swings from truly believing in my intellectual ability, and realizing just how dumb I can be. The GRE takes form, in my mind, as a giant bean stalk twisting and stretching upward through the cloud cover and at the top is a big grumpy giant group of smart people (or perhaps they are just people good at taking standardized tests?). How many hours will I need to dedicate to becoming a capable climber of vines, and how many words will I have to learn to be included in this unofficial fraternity of accomplished college graduates? I am just a kid with three beans, one for hope, one for desire, and one for ability, and a goal to get through those damn gray clouds.

I am already overwhelmed and all I did was download the review. I guess this is called “growing up”.

 

Naturally.

For a year now I have been wishing that I could just halt everything for just a day, one single day, so I can just catch my breath. It is difficult to process the compounding emotions when the world just keeps turning and the days keep coming and the feelings keep making me feel. My ability to process and dismiss events and emotions became choked somewhere along the way, and now the backlog is much too overwhelming a thing to breach. I really wish life had an emergency brake I could pull, and spend as much time needed to just recognize some things. Right now they just look like a smear as this (not so)merry-go-round whirls and twirls at exorbitant speeds. I think I might get sick.

And yet, even in the midst of all the emotional chaos floating around in my brain and in my chest, there have been a few really lovely moments of remembering the person I am. It has only been recently that I have actually felt (above all other feelings) like myself in those moments. And the best part? I love her. And other people do too.

I will get there, and I will write more. Promise.

Oh, the Storms how They Roll

I was watching the night skies for birds that fly when the sun goes down, and never saw the storm roll in. The weathermen didn’t warn me, the breeze never changed, the sirens were never activated. In one blink of an eye the sky fell in rocky pebbles right down over my head. The lightning wrapped itself into a tight ball in my chest, and the thunder rattled the bones in my hands.  And when I opened my eyes again with the expectation that the sky was the sky and this guy was this guy, there was nothing left to see.  This guy was not that guy. There was no sky, just a void where thisguy used to be.

Still, the birds fly even when there is no sky, and this guy will just be that one guy in no time. And like the sky, thisguy will become the kind of memory that you know is there in the neuron clusters, but is impossible to really recall. Like the smell of rain. Or the dream you had last night. Or what you really felt on the first date.

So now we wait. We wait for the kind of storm that happens at the end of Catcher in the Rye. The kind of storm that people take cover from, and the characters of importance stand under. The kind of storm that gives meaning to the sky.

Cap and Grown

Well, it has arrived. It is that milestone event that is supposed to signify the next step. Feels like a step off a cliff into a bed of fog and emptiness. That proverbial fork in the road, lacking signs of direction and asking for an exorbitant amount of faith. The trouble with this fork is that it has far too many tines for me to choose from. None of which have names, descriptions, or end destinations. None of which have ETA’s or HMO’s or even ATM’s.

So I guess, at least for this weekend, I will just enjoy the silly hat and the company of my parents as I walk down the hill, away from the University of Kansas and into a life I have successfully neglected for the extra few years it took me to finish. Come Monday, though, I will be searching Craigslist for  a GPS for the soul and job listings for people with the 2010′s equivalent of a GED.

Cellar Door

Some days I wish I could just take it all back.

Food Blog

I made up a recipe tonight, based on a picture I saw on tastespotting.com (which happens to be my latest time sucking internet addiction) and the memory of a perfect brunch I had in Kansas City a while ago. What came out of the oven was this:

Baked eggs with Genoa salami, fresh basil, Guyere cheese in a sourdough bread bowl with Truffle Honey and Meyer Lemon vinaigrette. Sounds complicated? It wasn’t. In fact, the only complicated thing about it was finding the damn bread bowls. Don’t go google searching for the recipe either, because I made it up. And I have to say, it was a winner…

In the bull pen we have a few stories from:

The view from the lip of an Oyster.

I read somewhere that Chinese students in the United States struggle with the concept of choosing classes. If there is not a curriculum to follow, a mapped out pathway like they strictly enforce in Chinese schools, many fall into a depression based in an overwhelming degree of decision-making. It also doesn’t help that the bureaucracy at many schools provides a break-down in guidance for those, like myself, like the Chinese students, who need the most help in the face of “freedom”.

I like that everyone keeps commenting on how much freedom I suddenly have. I don’t have a lease, I don’t have a permanent job, I don’t have school or a real schedule to follow. The world is a wide open door. The world is my oyster. The trouble is, the vast expanse of possibility looks a lot like a slimy, fishy goop and not a lot of pearl to be seen. Perhaps I am just too small to see it, from where I stand on the lip of this sea monster. Perhaps I am too pessimistic to see it too. But right now it feels like some kind of paralyzing force. This “freedom” is more like an invisible steel post driven 45 feet into the ground and chain. Those attached by chain to the ball can rejoice in the fact that the ball can budge. I am not going anywhere for a long while. Everyone keeps saying though, that I am “lucky to have so much freedom”. They let the emphasis fall on “freedom” in slow drawn out syllables. Like the word tastes like bacon, or cotton candy. To me it tastes like arsenic and the sight is as poisonous as the taste. I am beginning to resent anyone and everyone who finds it a positive thing that I am faced with the impossibility of seeing a path for my future because there are too many paths to look down.

Is it possible to be a figurative agoraphobic? Is it possible to have a fear of proverbial and fictitious open spaces? Because the hypochondriac in me says “Yes, and you have it.”

Peck a little.

I remember this moment as vividly as is the peacock’s own plumage. I was terrified of his beak. I envisioned a wound in my palm much like the wound on my fingertip from the box turtle that bit me at Beth Requist’s house a decade and a half earlier. Just seconds after this picture was snapped, the majestic bird dipped its head into my little dish of seeds and flipped it into the air and pecked the parcels of food off the dusty ground as I jolted backwards with a little shriek. It was utterly thrilling and fully mystifying that I could be halfway around the world feeding a peacock in the desert and somehow fulfilling a life dream I never knew I had. It was me, my birds, and my joyful fear.

Today I trudged through the snowy muck to get back to my car, which I had left in a few inches of snow after work last night due to a wiper blade malfunction. It was 15 blocks from the apartment to the car. It was on block three that I slipped on the ice and landed directly and with full gravitational force on my hip. Also my gloves and my hat were in my car, 12 blocks away. It was par for the course, as I had woken up in a good mood today… the most rare mood for me to wake in, so it would make sense that not much else would go my way. I hit the ice with the same little shriek I let out when the peacock startled me. This time  I got up without making a sound, without cracking a smile (I was glad that “cracking” was not part of the experience at all in any form…). And then I just moved on. One foot in front of the other. One slip on the ice to another reason for getting up and keeping on with it. Some days you just have to find a reason to keep moving. Some days you just have to find a reason to believe in love.

Today it is just me, my birds, and my joyful fear. The birds are in the whites of my eyes and there is a lot less joy in my fear today, but I feel a lot more like that girl in the picture than I did even yesterday. My reason to keep getting up, my reason to keep moving, my reason to believe in Love.

Joining Them.

Dear Friend,

I am only writing to you, this way, because if you can’t beat them you have to join them, as Bill says. It is almost Christmas and I am not going home. Charlie’s mom is worried that I will be alone. I won’t be alone, but I will be in some ways. I am alone in some ways all the time. Christmas should be no different, I think. It seems to me like it is all a bunch of selfishness wrapped up in green and gold paper with reindeer stamped all over it. And people pretend it is selflessness they are imbibing when they fill up another moose-shaped mug of eggnog. I don’t even like the taste of eggnog and I definitely don’t like moose-shaped mugs.

I have been reading a lot. Charlie has been reading The Fountainhead for the first time, too. It is really great to hear his perspective. I have never been able to hear a perspective on the book that I liked as much as my own. His is different than mine, but I like to hear him talk about it. He sees things much earlier than I saw them when I was reading it. He feels the same things I felt, but in a different way. He described one of my favorite scenes in the book as “an explosion of two equals, like forcing magnets of the same charge together.” I started to cry. It is making me love books again. It is making me want to read The Fountainhead again with these new eyes.

I wish that Perks of Being a Wallflower hadn’t ended so soon. I miss my new friends. I always feel this way when I end a good book and I guess that is how I know it is a good book to me. I thought about starting it over again, but part of me just wants to digest the first go-around. A bigger part of me wants my friends back. I think I will start again tonight.

Love Always,

Sam

The Latter Days of Pinocchio

Honesty is an interesting word. It holds its origins in the word “honor” and in archaic uses had more to do with reference to its namesake than what we use it for today. I think people forget that. I think people have lost sense of what it means to “defend one’s honor”. I think people would rather honesty be just a little bit restrained, and I am no exception.

A decade ago I made the mistake of not telling the truth to anyone. I lived lies, I told lies, I wrote lies in my own journal. I behaved the way a liar behaves. I took the train I owned and set it upon false rails. Guess what happened? I ended up in a ditch where I found the true meaning of honesty: honor. I live with some of the remaining consequences and I have diligently cleaned up the aftermath because it is the price I will pay to forevermore defend the honor of myself and my actions and words.

A month or two ago my boss’ brother called me a “bitch” because I was honest with him. I told the truth, I spoke my piece, I said what I said and I meant it. A man who does the same thing is called a “real straight-shooter,” but I do it? Well, I guess I am a bitch then. I guess I will live with the added stress of avoiding his evil eye and ignoring the comments he mutters under his breath at work. It is the price I will pay to defend the honor of what I believe.

A day or two ago I made the decision to defend the honor of my heart. I told the truth, I allowed myself to live the truth, I spoke my piece, I said what I said and I meant it. It looks as though I have destroyed something that is very important to me but after a night of rumination, relentless feeling, and remembering what life felt like when I didn’t speak up about my own fears and emotions I have come to the conclusion that I did the right thing for me. I defended my own honor, I was honest. If that is the straw, then that is the straw. It is the price I will pay for not becoming bitter and distrusting of someone I love and the price I will pay for defending my role in the relationships I hold dear.

I can’t regret honesty. I can only regret that trust and honesty are two mutually exclusive facets of any relationship and that I was inexcusably naive to this concept. Still, I will absolutely hold to honesty and trust as the values that allow me to live, because not living in the cool, calm shade of honesty and trust is a dishonorable life to live.