In absence of an appropriate New Year’s picture and with my camera being a little cracked, here’s a blue blur.
So, here we are, end of the year. I’m not really interested in doing a Year in Review, but I’m suddenly intensely interested in resolutions. I always make some sort of resolution, but it’s usually something vague or impossible to achieve in a grand sense. So, I have a few.
I’d like to be less fearful. My Mom was telling me about a friend’s daughter who is one of those beautifully nutty little girls, constantly wild and ecstatic about new situations. My Mom then mentioned I was similar as a kid, something I don’t necessarily remember. She recalled, as she often does, how I danced on stage on a riverboat in Rome. This always stands out to her, for some reason — me, red velvet dress and pigtails, red-faced and thrilled, on a stage full of strangers. Before I left for Virginia, when I went out on an epic Minneapolis adventure, I was sitting in the back of a club with a new friend and I was saying, “I’ve never been on a roller coaster. I don’t swim. I haven’t skied since I was 12. I don’t drive on highways. I don’t wear lipstick. I’ve never smoked pot. I don’t want to get married. I hate flying. I’ve never been on a motorcycle.” And, of course, when I was asked why, the only answer that came was, “Well. I’m afraid.”
So, I’d like that to change. I don’t necessarily want to blaze out of here on a motorcycle and smoke weed, but I want to do something different. I didn’t used to be so safe, but I think that’s something we always say.
I’d like to reconcile my feelings of lost youth or whatever it is I constantly write here, which I’m sure ties into the first resolution. People are engaged and buying houses and bakeware and settling into something considered adulthood, and I’m not ready. Not in the sense — “Well, I’m not ready, but I’ll do it, anyway” — but in the absolute I’m-not-going-there sense. I think there might be slight envy involved — I’d really like to want those things and feel comfortable within them. There’s something so precise and relieving about following the seemingly natural steps of life. I always hesitate to write this because it sounds like I’m elitist over this other type of life, but I don’t feel that way. I just need something different. I might want the house, the marriage, the kids, the red-wine upright dinner parties — but, for now, I’m pulled in a different direction, and that’s okay.
I want to be kinder. I want to be compassionate when it’s hard. Chris balked at this and said I sounded like a Bible-thumper, but I don’t think that’s the case. I want to be less severe with my idea of what’s beautiful. I want to graduate school. I want a full-time a job. I’d like to write publishable things. I’d like to do more for my friends — they’ve done so much for me. I want to listen to more obscure music. I want to continue not brushing my hair.
Take more pictures. Learn to swim. Drive on the highway. Run an 8-minute mile. (I can run a two-hour mile now.) Buy a bike. Ride it. Spend less time arguing with my boyfriend, though our arguments are never really arguments and more the result of two nitpickers who love debating. Write more meaningful things on this site. Paint something. Build something. Learn to quilt. Go skiing. Go sledding. Go ice-skating. Try out veganism (I’m a vegetarian now). If that fails, buy a different kind of exotic cheese every month. Go traveling, even if it’s just to Toronto. Don’t give up on something if it’s harder than I thought it would be. Call my parents more. Forgive my brother. Write hand-written letters. Read more non-fiction. Volunteer. Dance, not in the country-song sort of way. Learn to play another instrument. Find the balance between numbness and overemotion. Sleep less. Drink good wine. Take care of my mental health. Less walls, more affection.
Have a good New Year. I think our night here will be weird drink concoctions and board games, which is exactly what I want.
Also, I have some Holiday cheer to spread, but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow. Virginia might be slow, but I make up for not watching television all year in one big swoop. There’s cable! And HBO shows! Must turn brain to soup.
Merry Whatever You Celebrate. I’m drinking orange juice and holding a dog treat for reasons I can’t remember now. I’ve been writing lots of things in my paper journal with intent to post here, but now my journal has gone missing, lost to the demon of my clothes pile or just lost in general. Christmas was nicer than usual and I’m feeling like a sleepwalker. I return to Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Chris, along with Minh and Robin, is vacationing in Vietnam and Thailand for a month in February. I think I’m going to pretend he’s at war, but a different kind of war, the type where I’ll bake pies and ration my nylons. Because war is romantic, except it isn’t, and I really should’ve just stuck to my original idea for a post, which was, “I’m drinking orange juice and have nothing to say.”
Happy Almost 2005. I’ll be 24 next month, and while I know I should be getting over this soon, 24 reeks of responsibility and blenders I don’t have. (On that note, why do I always associate blenders with being an adult? I like blenders. They make daquiris and milkshakes. Maybe I should choose another piece of cookware to pick on — a mixer? A roast pan? Maybe I should give up on this theme altogether.)
Nothing says a Southern Christmas like three huge tins of boiled peanuts under the tree.
We’ve been through this. I fall in love with the first impression presented to me, and I horde it like a jewel. I don’t necessarily ever need to see anyone again after the first time, especially anyone interesting — I take that small nibble of knowledge and weave it until I have my own rich, overblown facsimile.
So, maybe you’re not the romantic I think you are, but now you’re all the romance I was missing — the dawn poetry, the sweaty red club, the rings bought in Milan. Let me lie in your lap, eyes sparkled with whiskey, and teach me things, teach me everything. Don’t even notice me, don’t feel my red heathen’s hair on your knees — be somewhere else, where women clip their curls with butterfly pins — where Ginsberg clears his throat in a damp Peruvian hallway — where men gather like clots in bourbon bars. Answer my questions with grand statements like, “Come with me to North Morocco.” End them with: “I know a woman with boneless feet who sells hash behind the elephant grass.”
Take me out in a red dress, hold my fingers as if they were glass pipes, spin me in circles, keep me at a distance, blush from the brandy, the strings, the dimpled floor. We’ll dance a Russian waltz in a room full of Viennese lacklusters. We’ll bump shoulders with sad-faced waiters, hands full of wilted roses.
Afterwards, the night will be warm. Hand me something to smoke, anything — I’ll lean against the viney awning and pretend Venus is a satellite. But you’ll know my bluff because you know things — you know everything. You’ll point at something I can’t see and call it a wormhole, a nova, a dying red planet. You’ll smell of birch bark, the kind found only in foreign men’s perfumes.
I don’t know how it will end, but the point is it’s not supposed to. I’m the white slippery etching of Hemingway, of Blake, of Gogol, of the gray-faced artist crouching on a tin can in a Roman alley.
In the mornings, there should be milk coffee, but instead, I wake in Minnesota, eyes crusted with dreams’ cruelties, Leonard Cohen growling in my ear demanding I take this waltz, take this waltz, take this waltz.
This is vaguely fictional, in the Kevin Fanning definition.
The shiny Richmond airport
Well, I’m going to Virginia for 10 days. I still spend the hours leading up to my flight a nervous wreck. I don’t think I’ll ever come to peace with the whole flying thing. Oh well. That’s what Scotch is for.
Happy Sunday.
Well, this has been one fucking night I wouldn’t even know where to begin to describe. It’s the best adventure I’ve been on in years, full of tawdry dance clubs and old houses and hyper-chilled vodka and wind tunnels and orange lights and the type of connection you have with people who have no idea who you are, but don’t need to. Better left vague. It’s 6 AM and my head is buzzing.
I like those nights where I’m a little tipsy and able to slide into the observer role comfortably. This is the role I usually want, but can’t find an appropriate way to fulfull. I mean, you have to talk sometime; stone silent people are creepy. But stone silent drunk people are just drunk people, and, so, I can sit on the floor of a music store, surrounded by trombones and old guitars and unidentifiable string-looking instruments, and study people.
There’s the short British guy with thick glasses, the man who’s worked with the Beatles and been poolside with unmentionably over-breasted women and now he’s playing in a garage band in Minnetonka. The young bald-headed guy in the green sweater, a flashy guitar player, but self-conscious, looking over the heads of the crowd and into the street. The bouncy bass player in dark sweats, head down, watching shoes. The lead singer, 30s, with graying yacht hair. And me, retro-tangly, wondering what it’s like to have sex with each of them. Not necessarily in a hormonal way, but a depletion of moral reserves way — what are each of them like at the moment? Do they cry? Do they claw at the sheets? Do they do nothing at all?
I carried a 20 dollar bottle of wine around that night, trying to find a connection. I felt like an open plug, buzzing, but benign, just waiting for recognition. Maybe I was looking for a writer. Someone with roaming eyes, itching hands, someone who was taking everything in and filing for later. I asked a man about gravity and he said gravity was like a basketball in an ocean. None of this attraction stuff. Gravity is give and take, pressure. I believed it.
At the end of the night, after a long conversation with the British guy, I was dizzy and overheated, so I ran outside with my wine and, as usual, longed for the cigarette I don’t smoke. I never know what to do with my hands. They always want to touch faces, to read them like braille. I always want to say, “Drop everything and tell me what you’re thinking. This minute. Don’t analyze, don’t filter, just spill it.” But instead, I nervously comb through my hair and chew skin off my bottom lip. So it goes.
If anything is an indication of how I’ve changed in the past four months, it’s the teacher’s pet reputation I’ve somehow managed to acquire at school. If you’ve been reading long enough, you might recall that awful year in which I sat in the back of classrooms, half-asleep, taking notes on receipts with an eyeliner pencil — that is, if I bothered to go to class at all. Granted, this was at the end of my scholastic career at UMD, when very few things were going well in my personal life and I could barely remember how to brush my teeth in the morning, much less write academic essays.
I did much better in school before that shitty year, but, really, I was never all that in to school. I mean, I’ve always considered myself an intellectual (using the definition: someone who loves learning for the sake of learning, not: someone who has SUPER GENIUS BRAIN CAPACITY), but, until very recently, I had no discipline or foresight or work ethic or any of those things you need to do well in school. I’d get As in the classes I liked and Fs in the classes I didn’t. There really was no middle ground with me. My college transcript is a schizophrenic mess. One semester consists of all As and one F, or four As and two Fs, and there’s always the grand finale of the last two semesters: straight Fs.
After that semester, I decided it was probably a good idea to get the hell out of academia and see what the fuck was going on. Truthfully, however, if my entire support system hadn’t decided to move to Minneapolis and I hadn’t decided I would be completely lost without them, I probably would’ve stayed in Duluth and continued to do poorly. My “academic break” wasn’t very academically-motivated at all, but it turned into exactly what I needed.
Unless I completely bomb or puke all over my final exams, I’ll have a 4.0 this semester. A 4.0! This is a much better average than last semester’s 0.0. I was editor of the literary magazine this year and a member of the philosophy club and I know all my professors well enough to go to their houses and grab drinks with them on the weekends, and one of them even nominated me for some Peer Mentoring program, the kind of program my UMD professors kept quietly suggesting I visit as a mentee.
I’ve suddenly become the girl who sits in the front row, who never misses a day of class, who always has her shit together and whom the professor asks to take the teacher evaluations to the office. I get teased, good-naturedly, about all of this, and each time, I say something cryptic like, “Oh, if only you knew me a year ago!” No one seems to believe that I used to be a wreck. That I spent a year of restless nights and skipping classes to drink too much coffee and sleep in the Student Lounge. That I gave up on even bringing my bookbag to school and spent many mornings, belted in my car in the parking lot, zoning out to talk radio, wondering if it was worth even opening the door. And then, eventually, there were the mornings I didn’t even set an alarm or try to get out of bed.
This means a lot to me. I won’t say that I’m a super disciplined hero or anything because I can still sleep sixteen hours in a row and there were several mornings this semester I literally cried all the way to school because I didn’t want to do it or I was in a blue funk week or whatever. But, I did it, and you could never ever have told my old, sad-faced self this would’ve happened.
So, uh, yeah. This is what it feels like to have worked hard and reached a goal. I think I can handle that.
Abbey and Andrew have finished notifying all the appropriate people, so now I can tell you: they got engaged over the Thanksgiving weekend. I wish I had a better picture to show you, but I was really excited and standing in the cold in my socks and a tank-top and forgot the flash, and, well, I hope you can get the idea from this blurry, bluish photo how thrilled both of them were. I’ve known Abbey for 20 years and Andrew for 5, and I knew both of them separately before they were together, and I was totally there the night Andrew, slightly drunk, stumbled into my room and whispered (which, in drunk elocution, is actually yelling), “I like Abbey, do you think I should tell her?”
So, here we are. And the growing-up thing continues, despite my best efforts to impede the process.
Six words with which to describe my night:
Open bar at Grandma’s birthday party.
Nothing like spending a Saturday afternoon in a music store, learning to play trumpet and getting hit on by a guy who looks and talks exactly like Austin Powers.
I’m suddenly feeling the urge to be ambitious again, which isn’t something I’ve felt since I was 18 years old. I’m not going to tell you what brought on this sudden surge of ambition*, but I don’t expect the surge to last very long as my minor obsessions rarely do.
When I was younger, I was convinced I would either be a) President of the U.S., b) a famous actress or c) a published novelist by the time I was 20. Apparently, I hadn’t done my research on age limits with the presidency thing, but whatever. The point was, whatever I ended up doing, it would be something involving fame, power and the ability to change the world. I worked hard in school and maintained straight As and was involved in the Student Council and the Drama Club and all those things 10-year-old overachievers are supposed to invest in.
But, then, I met my first boyfriend and all that ambition crawled in a hole somewhere and expired. Once my already rather fragile psyche was introduced to the land of extreme emotions, such as OH MY GOD LOVE LOVE LOVE and SHIT FUCK BROKEN HEART, I slowly lost my drive for, well, anything. I started doing poorly in school and began a long, everlasting fight with anxiety attacks (unrelated, really, to the OH MY GOD LOVE LOVE LOVE) and, somehow, I ended up here, almost 24 years old, still without an undergrad degree, no job, no money and no idea what the hell to do.
Along the way, I tried to rationalize this apathy towards concrete goals as my own personal life philosophy. I was a people person. I was interested in the small things, the details, the nuances of other people. I just didn’t have the right type of personality for large-scale success. I needed to learn to be happy with my mediocre life because life isn’t about success or ambition; it’s about relationships and observations and blah and blah and blah.
This is all true, to a point. I know this is true. But, really, I’d like the success and motivation for a while. I’d like to have a goal. I’d like to work towards something that changes the world for the better. I notice the details. I’ve spent five years, on my ass, noticing the details and now I’m ready to be overworked and stressed and ordering lunch at my desk every day, and wanting to order lunch at my desk everyday.
I feel like I need a small dose of chaos. I’ve been doing really well in school and with my relationships and my side projects, but I’m completely bored. I thought maintaining a 4.0 and having a stable relationship and general happiness would do it for me, but I’m restless and needing something else. I’ve been aimless for so long, but I don’t know how to pick a goal out of the air. I get intensely interested in a subject for a few months, and then the interest fades, and I’m back to the beginning. This is a sign of some sort of immaturity, I’m sure, but how to fix it? I’ve always been some sort of wanderer — never really here, never really anywhere — but I’d like for that to change.
I worry, too, that in a week or a month or even tomorrow, my drive to spend more time doing and less time just exisiting will fade, as well. I tend to do this. I get lazy. I’ll work a long day and come home and just want to crawl in bed and sleep for sixteen hours and work on finding that “life dream” in the morning. I wonder how one maintains that, as well?
*I don’t want much TV, but when someone brings me three seasons of a very popular political TV show and then I watch almost all three seasons in one week — well.