I ache because my friends and my girlfriend are so far away, and because this house is so full of anger. I would want my puppy because he was comforting and company.
I ache because my puppy is not here. I want my puppy whenever I'm sad, really, and I'm sad because he's not here. The house feels empty.
I ache because my puppy is gone gone gone and death is not something I can even wrap my mind around.
I am in the habit of looking on the floor for my dog whenever I enter a room in this house. Every time I get up to move, I steel myself for the pain of not finding him. Then something catches my attention for a split second, and I keep walking, and I turn the corner or open the door and look for my buddy, and then...emptiness.
This house is a rough place to be this week.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Day 6- 30 facts about yourself
1. I want two tattoos: a back piece that looks like the line of ocean water as a wave comes up the shoreline, and a half-sleeve of a sunrise. Both in full color and stylistically like...pastels. (also, I can't describe tattoos especially well.) I also want my left lower helix pierced with a tiny silver hoop.
2. I skipped kindergarten. I've been a year younger than my classmates since I was five. I was also third in my high school class of almost 500. Numba three does not get any recognition.
3. Facing the challenge of coming out was the best thing that could have happened to me when I was 17 and 18. I learned to stand up for myself.
4. I love the ocean: the colors, the waves, the sun, the shapes, the plants.
5. I've tried rugby, crew, badminton, tennis and jogging, and given up on most of them. I did play soccer for 10 years, though, and I want to try hockey.
6. I tend to go for androgynous-ish people, and girls with curves.
7. I love jewelry and accessories more than anyone really should. I could look at little silver earrings all day.
8. I feel lonely almost all of the time that I'm by myself.
9. Spiders, centipedes, roaches, and most other icky bugs squick me out. Ants and moths are just fine, though.
10. Speaking of being squicked-out, the worst thing for me is mutant fruit. Colossal multi-lobed strawberries? Double grapes? fruit-inside-fruit? EWWWWWWWWWWWW. words cannot describe.
11. I love desserts involving apple or pumpkin. I'm not a huge chocolate fan, but I crave milk chocolate on occasion.
12. I have a ridiculously fast metabolism. It slowed down briefly when I was about 15 or 16, but besides those few months, I've been like a small furry animal. I eat every couple of hours. Like, as kids we used to have "morning snack" in the four-hour period between breakfast and lunch. If I miss a meal, I become a lethargic, grouchy, sad mess. I have never technically weighed enough to donate blood.
13. My lucky number is supposed to be three. I remember this in conjunction with the number 13 because when we got soccer jerseys every season, my friend was always excited for 13, but I would hope for three. Don't ask.
14. I still use the Oxford comma. My weirdest pet peeve is when college-educated people don't know the difference between affect and effect.
15. I like the most stereotypical lesbian music ever. but I honestly love it.
16. Singing in the car is my favorite form of stress relief. Belting early 2000's Tegan and Sara is a private and entirely necessary activity.
17. I'm addicted to caffeine.
18. I had a teacher in high school who went out of her way to show that she believed in me, and it still means a lot to me. She wrote me a letter when I graduated, and I still have it.
19. Heights make me dizzy, but I love roller-coasters.
20. I'm a feminist, and you should be too.
21. I get sick in cars and buses, but planes are fine.
22. I was directionally challenged until I was eighteen, and now I'm fairly competent. Gluten or maturity?
23. As a little kid, I had a yellow security blanket with red stitching on my favorite spot on the lining. I took it everywhere, and my mom eventually cut it so that it was small enough to carry around. I slept with "Blankie" until the middle of high school. Oh, and when I was like four, Blankie married Puffy, who was an orange teddy bear. They were both girls.
24. Ab exercises and a gluten-free diet have kept me safe from my old eating disorder and compulsive exercise. Staying out of malls and away from magazines helps too.
25. I love smooth, bold pens. I like nice highlighters and Sharpies for the same reason. One of my life's dreams is to find the perfect set of fine-tipped markers in a rainbow of colors.
26. I've bought and read Harry Potter #4, 5, and 6 in Spanish.
27. After watching Disney movies as a kid, I used to imagine myself as the knight-in-shining-armor human superhero type who saves the pretty girl with my wits and brawn. I never imagined myself as a guy...just as someone really tough. (So...Erica...from the little mermaid.) I feel like I'm still trying so hard to be that strong, and sometimes it works.
28. Once upon a time, I loved someone and didn't tell her. I vowed never to do that again. I've kept my word.
29. My favorite flowers are red hibiscuses. I also like daylilies, roses, and tulips--anything with overly large petals.
30. I like converse shoes.
2. I skipped kindergarten. I've been a year younger than my classmates since I was five. I was also third in my high school class of almost 500. Numba three does not get any recognition.
3. Facing the challenge of coming out was the best thing that could have happened to me when I was 17 and 18. I learned to stand up for myself.
4. I love the ocean: the colors, the waves, the sun, the shapes, the plants.
5. I've tried rugby, crew, badminton, tennis and jogging, and given up on most of them. I did play soccer for 10 years, though, and I want to try hockey.
6. I tend to go for androgynous-ish people, and girls with curves.
7. I love jewelry and accessories more than anyone really should. I could look at little silver earrings all day.
8. I feel lonely almost all of the time that I'm by myself.
9. Spiders, centipedes, roaches, and most other icky bugs squick me out. Ants and moths are just fine, though.
10. Speaking of being squicked-out, the worst thing for me is mutant fruit. Colossal multi-lobed strawberries? Double grapes? fruit-inside-fruit? EWWWWWWWWWWWW. words cannot describe.
11. I love desserts involving apple or pumpkin. I'm not a huge chocolate fan, but I crave milk chocolate on occasion.
12. I have a ridiculously fast metabolism. It slowed down briefly when I was about 15 or 16, but besides those few months, I've been like a small furry animal. I eat every couple of hours. Like, as kids we used to have "morning snack" in the four-hour period between breakfast and lunch. If I miss a meal, I become a lethargic, grouchy, sad mess. I have never technically weighed enough to donate blood.
13. My lucky number is supposed to be three. I remember this in conjunction with the number 13 because when we got soccer jerseys every season, my friend was always excited for 13, but I would hope for three. Don't ask.
14. I still use the Oxford comma. My weirdest pet peeve is when college-educated people don't know the difference between affect and effect.
15. I like the most stereotypical lesbian music ever. but I honestly love it.
16. Singing in the car is my favorite form of stress relief. Belting early 2000's Tegan and Sara is a private and entirely necessary activity.
17. I'm addicted to caffeine.
18. I had a teacher in high school who went out of her way to show that she believed in me, and it still means a lot to me. She wrote me a letter when I graduated, and I still have it.
19. Heights make me dizzy, but I love roller-coasters.
20. I'm a feminist, and you should be too.
21. I get sick in cars and buses, but planes are fine.
22. I was directionally challenged until I was eighteen, and now I'm fairly competent. Gluten or maturity?
23. As a little kid, I had a yellow security blanket with red stitching on my favorite spot on the lining. I took it everywhere, and my mom eventually cut it so that it was small enough to carry around. I slept with "Blankie" until the middle of high school. Oh, and when I was like four, Blankie married Puffy, who was an orange teddy bear. They were both girls.
24. Ab exercises and a gluten-free diet have kept me safe from my old eating disorder and compulsive exercise. Staying out of malls and away from magazines helps too.
25. I love smooth, bold pens. I like nice highlighters and Sharpies for the same reason. One of my life's dreams is to find the perfect set of fine-tipped markers in a rainbow of colors.
26. I've bought and read Harry Potter #4, 5, and 6 in Spanish.
27. After watching Disney movies as a kid, I used to imagine myself as the knight-in-shining-armor human superhero type who saves the pretty girl with my wits and brawn. I never imagined myself as a guy...just as someone really tough. (So...Erica...from the little mermaid.) I feel like I'm still trying so hard to be that strong, and sometimes it works.
28. Once upon a time, I loved someone and didn't tell her. I vowed never to do that again. I've kept my word.
29. My favorite flowers are red hibiscuses. I also like daylilies, roses, and tulips--anything with overly large petals.
30. I like converse shoes.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Day 5- "a time you thought about ending your own life"
Meh. With the exception of birth-control-induced PMS depression my senior year of high school (during which I couldn't do much more than sit around and cry for a day at a time), the worst things ever were was my sophomore year of college. I wasn't anywhere really close to suicidal, thankfully. Somewhere in about September, everything started to fall apart, beginning with my relationship with my good friend and roommate. We were living in this tiny, hot double with no privacy, and it was horrible. She's a pretty strong personality with a lot of "friends," and I was the listener. It started getting tense (she thought I was ignoring her, I felt like she was pulling away from me, we were arguing over who was whose lab partner, etc.) and then got worse (homophobic rumors, passive-aggressive post-its, general glaring) and worse (silent treatment).
That was about the time that all of the people from our freshman hall started to show their true colors--I'd thought that they were mutual friends of my roommate and me, but it became clear that they were (a) kind of shallow and annoying, and (b) totally not on my side. Long story short, I didn't really have any friends on campus. I'd had to break up with my very first girlfriend, thanks to leftover baggage from the previous summer, and I was feeling pretty terrible about that. I was tentatively and uncomfortably "seeing" some other girl for a while, although she was mostly a substitute for all of my other friends, and she was just totally failing at making me feel good about the relationship or at setting boundaries. Eventually, I started falling for a friend back home, who had a girlfriend but was confessing feelings for me. Of course I had no one to talk to about this situation, because I wasn't speaking to anyone I'd made friends with the past year.
Oh, and I was slowly realizing I hated my major, and I was reeling from a shitty...friendship I had broken off. That fall sucked.
and this was a pointless post. oops.
That was about the time that all of the people from our freshman hall started to show their true colors--I'd thought that they were mutual friends of my roommate and me, but it became clear that they were (a) kind of shallow and annoying, and (b) totally not on my side. Long story short, I didn't really have any friends on campus. I'd had to break up with my very first girlfriend, thanks to leftover baggage from the previous summer, and I was feeling pretty terrible about that. I was tentatively and uncomfortably "seeing" some other girl for a while, although she was mostly a substitute for all of my other friends, and she was just totally failing at making me feel good about the relationship or at setting boundaries. Eventually, I started falling for a friend back home, who had a girlfriend but was confessing feelings for me. Of course I had no one to talk to about this situation, because I wasn't speaking to anyone I'd made friends with the past year.
Oh, and I was slowly realizing I hated my major, and I was reeling from a shitty...friendship I had broken off. That fall sucked.
and this was a pointless post. oops.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
June 13, 2011
I’m thinking about love. It’s one of those words that’s skittering around the corners of my mind, straining toward the surface when I least expect it. I just sometimes feel like I’m on the blurry line between like and love, or between friend-love and romantic love.
I was watching TV just now, and Carmen was talking to Shane about the real deal. I’d forgotten about that phrase, somehow. And I think that this here is the real thing. This is one of those things, those irreplaceable, unforgettable, feel-it-in-your-pores series of relations.
When you said that thing about the cookbooks—the pretty ones—my heart started racing. I can’t explain it, except to say that most things about you have that effect on me.
(this is short and unimpressive, but honest)
Day 4- my views on religion
Religion creates more problems than it solves. Faith serves to unite people, to create a community with common goals, but those goals…sometimes they’re good for the world, and sometimes they aren’t. Honestly, I’m not sure about believing anything that someone reads out of a book or announces to a crowd, just because some other person said so. I just…question everything, and that makes religion…something I’ll probably not be involved in.
Periodically, I feel compelled to start going to services or Passover Seder or something. I know that what I’m looking for is mostly a sense of being with people like me. I guess I looked for that rather than for Catholic services, because I feel a little more in tune with my dad’s side of the family, and with being…a minority…and with the faith and/or community that a lot of my friends belong to. Let’s face it, I don’t have a lot of devout Catholic friends (or really any genuinely religious friends) but I do know a lot of people, including my grandparents, who are connected to Jewish communities in some way.
I don’t know. Every time I go to one of those things, I feel entirely out of place. I feel some kind of urge to look for spirituality in other places, too, but it’s one of those things I mean to research but never get around to doing. I feel like it’s one of those things I’ll never completely settle into. Mostly, it doesn’t bother me, though. I feel like I got “right from wrong” from my parents, without any of the heaven and hell stuff.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Negative agency
I’m sweating and shaking, mostly just because I hate the phone. I just pulled my name out of applying for a full-time job in the healthcare IT industry, one which I am rather underqualified for and which pays much better than the program I’m joining up here.
And I’m relieved. I’m happy. I’m not sure how everything will work out, but I’m sure I made the right decision.
I sat through a 90-minute meeting yesterday afternoon with my section of the department. It was inefficient. They’re making administrative changes and adding another layer of corporate-esque software to (presumably) improve record-keeping and connectivity between something-or-other. It was all sort of redundant and vague, like the categories were badly defined, and the person leading things didn’t seem like he was convinced that it’d improve efficiency. The rest of the attendees (of which I was the only woman, unless there was someone who didn’t speak) seemed bored and disconnected. I didn’t get the sense that people had any faith in the departmental reorganization or the software. I did get the sense that there were things they wanted to be doing—that they had plenty of work. They’re programmers and software engineers, and from what I understood of the list of tasks, a lot of them (including me) would be doing a lot more “other crap” for the near future. I could feel the dissatisfaction in the room.
I realized about 45 minutes in that I’m doing this life thing right. In twelfth grade we had to write a memoir about a significant event in our lives. Mine was badly done, but it was about taking control of a social situation that I was unhappy with, and not letting some girl walk all over me. It was called something corny like “taking the wheel,” and it was one of the first times I had been decisive. This time, I feel like I’m in charge of my own life. If I don’t want to sit in a giant room filled with windowless cubicles, doing what someone else says to do, then dammit, I don’t have to. I wanted to get out of school and do something that I believed in. So I’m going to.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Day 3- my views on drugs and alcohol
I actually just talked to the person who made me my first drink. It was D-Day of my freshman year, and it was a screwdriver in the upstairs bedroom of a house in the white-coat ghetto. I could barely finish it, but this was where I discovered that (a) I hate screwdrivers, and (b) no, one drink won't make you barf.
I'm still not sure if it was meant to be a date. But that ship has long since sailed, and I'm happy with how things turned out. Also, I like drinking much more than I did then. A little is good for relaxing at a party, and a medium amount is good for losing myself in pop music and not thinking for a while.
And by "a medium amount" I mean about two strong drinks. A strategically spent ten bucks could give me alcohol poisoning.
I'm still not sure if it was meant to be a date. But that ship has long since sailed, and I'm happy with how things turned out. Also, I like drinking much more than I did then. A little is good for relaxing at a party, and a medium amount is good for losing myself in pop music and not thinking for a while.
And by "a medium amount" I mean about two strong drinks. A strategically spent ten bucks could give me alcohol poisoning.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Day 2—where I would like to be in 10 years.
Ten years is a colossal timespan, when I think about it. Ten years ago was 2001. I was finishing sixth grade in the third of the three elementary schools I attended. I hadn’t begun to conceptualize the increasing number of hints that I might be queer, although in retrospect, they were there. My body had just barely started contemplating puberty—I think I weighed sixty pounds. I did convince my mom to let me shave my legs that spring. I had about three friends, because I didn’t know how to be close with anyone, and I didn’t know how to make friends. I did know that I needed those three girls, though, because you were toast if you couldn’t sit with anyone at lunch.
Ten years from now is 2021. I hope I own a car. Something not “nice,” but one that says something. Electric, maybe, or a VW Bug. I hope I live in a small city, close enough to the ocean (Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, whatever) that I can visit often. I hope I’m with someone who cares back, but I hope I haven’t done anything like signed up for a mortgage with her, so I can move or travel freely if I really want to. I hope we have a dog, and maybe some fish. I hope I see my parents a few times a year, but I hope I talk to them a few times a week. I want to see my sister’s kids a lot, if she has any then, and I hope I talk to my cousins occasionally.
I hope I’m done with grad school by then, so I can do something with that Master’s of Public Health, and that I’m thinking about getting my doctorate soon, or an MBA from somewhere really liberal. I want to be doing something that lets me support myself and that does something good for the world. If I own a business, I want it to be sustainable and in a field that lets me build community or donate the profits. I hope I still write. I hope I can act or do drag occasionally.
I hope I vote and that I know who my representatives are, but I hope that I’m also working toward radical change if it’s still needed. I hope I’m in—or running—a feminist group of some kind and that I read a lot. I hope I have gay friends and straight friends and half-Jewish friends and friends of different backgrounds. I hope we have someplace to go dancing and to drink, but I also hope that we host dinner parties. I want to know how to make good drinks. I want to know how to surf by then. I hope I have my back piece done.
I hope I still believe in myself. I hope I take care of myself and my friends. I hope I go to my high school reunions proudly, with a girl on my arm, and I hope I go to Meliora weekends with that same girl, but also with stories of all the things I’ve seen and done since graduation. I hope I’ve taken lots of pictures of my people and my favorite places. I hope my parents are proud of me and that I’m happy.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
twitchy
I'm sitting in Boulder, and I'm a little too warm. My anxiety today is raging and distracting, and no matter how many things I get done it doesn't seem to want to go away. It's like a little misbehaving animal or something, tangling the pit of my stomach into a knot and smacking me upside the head every time I try to settle down and work.
It wants to grab onto every little thing I encounter and make it into a big deal. Ants. Dishes. Grad school. Work, quitting my job, going on vacation, planning planning planning. Money.
Dear brain, I took my citalopram. I ate. Stop it.
It wants to grab onto every little thing I encounter and make it into a big deal. Ants. Dishes. Grad school. Work, quitting my job, going on vacation, planning planning planning. Money.
Dear brain, I took my citalopram. I ate. Stop it.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Day 1--My relationship
My current relationship is the best one I've ever had. I have this problem where she catches me grinning like a fool and I try to pretend I'm just being goofy, but actually I am just that happy. (but you didn't hear that from me. shh.)
I'm with someone I can trust. she listens and like...cares back. I feel like one of those disgustingly happy coupled-people.
I'm with someone I can trust. she listens and like...cares back. I feel like one of those disgustingly happy coupled-people.
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