I have nothing but these words.

Tomorrow, B and I are going to visit Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
As close as we live to a gorgeous tri-level graveyard of our very own, I am always a little excited to see new, beautiful monuments to history and the lives that trod through it.
We are bringing a couple with whom we are friends. They're a wee bit older than us and expecting their first child, and it seems bizarre to bring them somewhere so morbid, but they're weirdies like us, with serious goth roots, so I'm sure their frolic through the paths.
Staring down this road of adulthood, it's easy to feel like you're being shot down a tunnel that narrows the further along you go, and I like to be around people who don't behave that way. They inspire me to shake off my bonds and feel less trapped by my responsibilities and more confident in my securities.
Growing up, I never knew if it was worth while getting close to people, making real friends, because I always assumed I would be leaving just as we got to really like each other. As I've matured, I've tended to the opposite getting very close very fast and creating these weird ultra friendships, where I think I'm insanely dear to a person, or we are both very important to one another, but for a very short time, and then something happens, a new lover, a job change, a huge stress or even something fairly commonplace but evolutionary, and the person handles it poorly, or vanishes from my sphere to surround him/herself with people who are truly close to them.
I also find myself being more careless with my word. I make plans with no intention of following through on them. In this way, I allow myself to be lied to by acquaintances who also have no plan to actually do what we are arranging. I have, more in the past five years than ever in my life, found myself in blizzards of false promises with people who have no more gravity behind their words than i behind mine. We pepper our conversations with glass compliments and shallow facts. We are overly enthusiastic about one another's interests, and we throw out dates and options with absolutely no desire to follow through with them and a simultaneous knowledge that the other is doing the same. It is a dance of no substance, a worthless endeavor, a completely barren interaction.
Would living with more intent improve my life?
Does being truthful, socially, end up stunting my social interactions? Will I become one of those weird foils in the movies who stops herself from being enthused over anything?
Why has this kind of relationship become so commonplace in our society now?
Will we actually go to the cemetery tomorrow?

Between Me, the Clock and the Pen

The house feels stifled.
Poisonous and thick. I keep opening windows, when I probably shouldn't, and lighting incense and attempting to blow out the cobwebs, but the real cobwebs are in my brain.
The last two days, I have forced myself to write for an hour apiece.
I remember when I was the most productive, I would come home from work and write for an hour no matter what. Sometimes it was longer. Sometimes I could spend all sixty minutes staring at the page and write one word and then delete it. Sometimes the hour would be up, and I leapt out of my chair and far away from the computer. Sometimes two more would go by without me noticing.
The beginning is always the hardest.
I have written three pages in these two days. They are all starts to short stories that I can't seem to follow through. A woman wakes up in the hospital surrounded by confusion and covered in bruises: TRITE! BORING! LIFETIME ALREADY MADE IT INTO SIX DIFFERENT MOVIES.
A man stalks his wife's student through the night. She is one in a long line of rapes he commits annually. BLARGH SO DUMB! TOO SEXY! TOO SENSATIONALIST!
A girl finds her grandmother asleep on the porch covered in bees...
DUDE SERIOUSLY?
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING?
It's so frustrating.
I let my sister read the first hundred pages of my book last week, and all she did was tell me how bad it was.
The perspective is the same for all four characters, none of which are worth caring about due to the writing of the first twenty pages, which is the most important, as it is when you hook your readers. There is a reference made to a song, which apparently our Dad uses in one of his books (which I've never read).
Awesome.
Nothing like two years of work to get skewered in an afternoon.
I keep following Neil Gaiman's blogs and twitter posts, because I think he's got the right idea.
I like his writing, and I would like to marry his style with Margaret Atwood's, throw in some Bret Easton Ellis and a bit of my own, and present that to the world.
He writes about writing, which is helpful.
Except for one thing.
He has time.
I don't know how they do it.
Stephen King boggles my mind. He had two jobs, two kids and a dumpy trailer back in the late seventies, and he churned out Carrie like it was child's play. Sure, we can all remember how he began submitting short stories when he was in his teens, and he used to keep his rejection letters on a nail above his desk to remind him to keep going, but where the hell did he find the time?
Maybe I need to start doing speed.
J.K. Rowling was on the dole. Her kids were in school all day. She had six hours every day to devote to dreaming up her ode to magical England.
I want to find out how you write when you're busting your hump at a forty-fifty hour a week job and coming home to a filthy house and a depressed husband.
Do you take the time to yourself despite how selfish it makes you seem? Do you realize it really is impossible to do everything, and just shelve the whole writing dream until everything calms down? Because that one doesn't work.
I've been doing that for sixish years now.
A trail of scribbled paper followed me from san francisco. There were coffee stained poems and love letters, essays about youth and sex and feminism. They clung to my elbows and nipped at my ankles while I packed boxes and sent out resumes.
A love affair. More poems. Long journal entries all about how confusing the launch of a new relationship is. More essays on feminism, body image, whether finding your soulmate changes you. More boxes, more moving. More resumes.
A hard time. No jobs. No money. Sharing a two bedroom mousehole apartment with my sister. I built fortresses out of panicky journal entries. What was I doing? Was this how it was supposed to be? Should it ever be this hard just to exist? Let alone create?
Putting the head down. Working working working. Getting to a better place. Finally having more time to write. The book. It happens. Fast and furious and full of glory. One hour at a time. Then the wedding. Lost in planning, money, moving to a better apartment. Nobody comes knocking. Not at all.
Then the ambition returns. I send out stories to magazines and contests. I talk to friends about launching my stories online. I tell my Dad about how excited I am to be on the forefront of this new media for writers.
I win none of the contests. My Dad gets my friends to launch his writing online instead. He tells me enthusiastically that he will be on the forefront of this new media for writers, and I want to scream, curl up in a ball, and give in.
The editing of the book is the last thing I can think of. If nothing else it will give me a place to go, a destination, a light in the tunnel to work towards. I have faith that my story is good, that I will outstride my Dad's writing with my modern take on classic themes. My job is changing. I am taking on more responsibility, more hours, but it means more money, and the husband just lost his big paying job, so I take it, and the editing takes a back seat, but at least I'm still doing something, still moving forward. Still a writer.

Except it doesn't feel like it.

What do I do? Did I miss my chance? Do I need to shake things up? Quit my job? Move somewhere new?
I've worked so hard to finally get to a place where I'll have time to write, and now that I'm here I'm churning out garbage. How do you get past that, Neil? How do you tell your brain it's okay that all that stuff kept you from writing for so long, but now it can come back and bring all the ideas it's been hiding from you this whole time?

What does Margaret Atwood do when she's overwhelmed?

Bret Easton Ellis is selling out. There's talk of an American Psycho II...
Stephen King is still sequestered in his bat mansion in maine, tocking away on his computer, earning everything he deserves.

Today, I start with an hour on the clock...and what comes next?
I have no idea.

Flawed like a diamond.

So here we are, day two of the ten minute blog a day phenomenon.

Today I want to write about Queens.
Not the place in New York, or those fabulous ladies of the lipsynch and the enormous eyebrow make up, but real Queens: ladies in charge.

It takes a lot for me to hold my head up high every day. I know I am not alone in this.
It's hard for women to stand up for themselves or put their own wants and needs first. We're told repeatedly not to be selfish or indulgent, not to give in to our incredibly sensual natures. It's in magazines, on television, and splattered all over the internet.

I read an article in Bust the other day (I'll rant about that magazine another time) about Maya Rudolph, who is 39 years old, a mother of three, and was a cast member on saturday night live for about ten years. They were asking her if she gets tired of being asked by journalists about the "new funniness of women", as though this is the first time women have been able to be perceived as both funny and sexy at the same time.

It boggles my mind to realize that so many times we are fed messages like these, that it's okay for women to be funny if they're fat, but if they're pretty it's not fair because they already have the pretty thing going for them. As though women truly are only allowed to have one dimension because having more than one wouldn't leave any for the rest of us?
What about women who aren't funny, or pretty? What does that leave them?
Being smart?
Okay.
What if I'm a regular looking, not funny woman with an average IQ, what's left for me now?

I know I'm using extremes, but I think the point of this blog is just to make the reader, and myself, look around more, think about the messages we receive from our various forms of media rather than just accepting them to be truth.
There are no omniscient narrators in real life. Everyone's writing with an angle, even me, and my angle is that no woman is just one thing. She is a culmination of experiences and perceptions and perspectives, and she should be as multifaceted as a goddamn diamond.

Sushi Love

I have ten minutes to write a blog before B and I go out for sushi.
I have promised myself that I would write a blog every week for at least a year now, but I just never get around to it.
So I figure if I promise I will write a ten minute blog every week, then I HAVE TO do it, and even better, maybe I will pick april to be a month of ten minute blogs every day.
Then I will be forced to think, and be interesting...maybe I pick March instead.
March 4th until April 8th, because april 8th is Easter, and that seems like a good punctuation point.
Nothing religious.
Not really.
Change is everywhere right now.
I have moved out of the back of house bread baking and into the front of house people squishing.
No longer do I mold flour and yeast and water into magnificence, but I mold flesh and heart and soul.
Okay, that's a wee bit melodramatic.
It does make me feel better though.
In the two weeks since the change, I have:
- realized I really have my work cut out for me.
-begun waking up before eight a.m. every day (some days I am awake at four thirty in the morning, and this makes me feel insane).
-worked harder than I worked in the back for the last four months.
-noticed a lot of people being lazy.
-began working with the public again and all that it entails...

I do like people.

I missed the micro-interactions you have helping a person every three minutes. The things you can learn with three lines of conversation. The readings you get off of people in the simple exchange of money for bread.
It's different from any other coffee shop...but I'm not sure how yet.

Somehow, I think it will allow me to write more.
Perhaps I've been a vampire all along, and what was screwing me up these last three years was that I couldn't feed off the masses like I had been for so long.
All I know is that I feel very human. I feel raw and inadequate and poised to conquer, and I've been doing a lot of laughing and crying and thinking, and more than anything else, reminding myself to live in the moment. To really and truly live in this, right. now.

And right now I am going to cram sushi in my mouth with my husband, a magical feat, because we haven't been able to afford to go out for sushi in three years.

Yay the rewards of being a grown up, sort of!

For ten minutes.

The Thing About Change

I am that snotty person who likes to trump all of your high school stories about football games and homecoming week, your growing up next door to someone who sort of was your first kiss or threw up in your dad's truck bed when you first got drunk stories, and your my best friend from elementary school is having her wedding/baby/divorce shower and I totally still got an invite stories.

I smile demurely, stir my tea, and glance demeaningly at you before confiding, "ah yes, I wouldn't know anything about such niceties, what with moving from my home country of australia to the united states at the tender age of eight, then nine months later to canada, and again four years later back to the states."

I finish the statement, lower my lashes, and sip my tea awaiting the awkward silence so I can secretly capture it in a small sachet I keep in my pocket and bring it back to the nest to feed my young.

With that out of the way, I feel comfortable letting you all in on this little secret.

Me and my sisters, my family, my type in general?

We LOVE change.

We fucking thrive on that shit.

Back when B and I first got together, about six months after I moved to Virginia to prove my love and whatever, he shared with me his desire to get out of VA and live in the historic brick streets of far away New England.

My response: Give me the go ahead, and I will make it happen in less than a year.

And I did.

Because that's what we do.

Me and my ilk. We can pick up and move out at the drop of a hat. We will sell half our belongings in the time it takes you to pack a suitcase. We will have the couches booked and the car gassed up in the time it takes you to read that We'll Miss You card from work. We take inventory, squirrel away the money, make the calls, and get gone.

What we don't tell you is that the moving when you're young thing crosses your wires in a not so awesome way also.

Grand total from age 0-13, my parents moved me through three countries, six schools, and seven houses.

From age 13-29 I moved myself through two schools, three dorms, nine apartments, two countries, four states, and an eight month, couch hopping, extravaganza, australian renaissance trip.

Still with me?

I have now lived in Massachusetts for four years. Which is the longest time I have ever lived anywhere. Usually the four year mark comes, and something either beyond my control, or incurred purely through psychoses, forces me to pack up and piss off.

Only I am not doing that this year.

I am married, and about to move into a more permanent position at my job, and about to turn thirty. These are...erm...root putting down type events. Also, I have lived in my current apartment for two years in two weeks, and that's the longest I've gone without even moving (within the same telephonic area code) in about ten years.

Needless to say, I am freaking the fuck out.

Daily I go through the colors of cabin fever. I want to cut all my hair off, or dye it all purple, or both. I want a tattoo, a huge one, maybe of a bat or a boat or a map or something. I want to move, travel, go back to school, quit my job and teach english overseas, sell myself into serfdom, etc. You get the picture.

Around me the world I have grown accustomed to is changing dramatically. People who are dear to me are losing loved ones in droves, others are having their first (or second) babies, they're buying houses, getting divorces, starting new jobs in foreign climes or setting out on exciting frontiers as small business owners.

Often, as a woman, I feel like after marriage, the only big life changing event left for me is to have a baby, and I'm not ready for that quite yet.

Or divorce.

And I'm not interested in that. At all (and hopefully B isn't either).

And now with the big THIRTY coming for me like John Cusack in a suit, I feel more than ever I'm supposed to settle in and get comfortable with my life. Find my balance, my routine, that stability I've never had.

I look around and I think, I could do this every day for the next ten years and wake up about to turn forty still living in an apartment, still working (rather than writing), and wondering if I missed something.

But what if I'm missing it right now?

I keep preaching that the big changes in life are predicated by the little ones you make every day, but that's just because that's what I hope is true.

In my experience the big changes are always awful. They happen when you're closest to getting something you've worked really hard for and want really badly, and then they usually involve you not getting that thing and gumming up your entire life for a few years, thusly not allowing you the chance to realize you're losing time, and ground, and chances.

These are the voices that get the best of me late at night, when it seems like it would be so easy to sell the cat and buy a plane ticket. Craigslist, man. It's amazing.

But I can't help feeling like this might be my lesson. For once, I need to be the eye of the hurricane, rather than the broken rocking chair swirling around waiting for fate to plunk me somewhere. I hold friends while they weep, I cheer on family while they make leaps toward their goals, I encourage B to follow his dreams, and I try not to go mad while making time for my own.

Deep down, I know this year is meant to change everyone. For better or worse.

Perhaps my change will be to recognize that roots aren't the scariest thing that can happen to a person.

Then again, maybe I'll be a fruit picker in Fiji by 2013.

Burning Mann

I feel like constructing a late night pagan infomercial for the crazy that everybody is feeling right now.

Hey There,

I'm Betty Batshit, and this is my good friend Cabin Fever,

Do you feel like your skin is tight, and constricting? Made thin and easily torn by harsh words or deeds?

Are you sick of negativity and do people hanging onto the past make you mad with frustration?

Well then you are among friends because we're here to talk to you about blah blah blah...fat of a virgin handsoap or whatever.

The last week has me clawing at the windowpane and itchy to do something like cut all my hair off, pierce my clavicle or get cracking on a ninety hour back tattoo. And man...all of that does sound delicious, but I like to think I'm a little older and wiser now and a smidge better at realizing when I want to do all of these things at the same time, it is indicative of something a wee bit deeper.

So rather than staring crazed at the hotwire prices for hotel room in new york city and forcing kayak to load flights for every city in the northern hemisphere at four in the morning (misplaced modifier be damned!) I am trying to follow the immortal and most awesome words of Patrick Bateman.

"So keep your eyes (insert dramatic gutteral pause for assessing realization of telephonic confession of multiple murders to lawyer's consequences) open!"

Yes. Hello. We're feeling that way.

I did a lot of unreasonable crying, examining of relationships, staring at body and face in the bathroom mirror until it no longer resembled recognizable shapes, and generally confused and confusing behavior. Then I stopped, stepped outside of myself and looked around.

Winter (or whatever pathetic excuse of a winter this has been) is coming to a close. It really is. And no matter how few inches of snow, or how little the furnace has had to burn, these have been some dark days. We lost some good soldiers to the battle, and we supported our families and our friends when the light seemed to grow further away no matter how hard they ran at it.

It is time to clean out the cellar, scrape off the mold, dust off the cobwebs and get cracking.

One of the reasons I think this fall and winter have seemed so dark is because we had a lot of things coming to an end, and a lot of fresh wounds from the last year still in the early stages of healing.

But now those wounds have scabs just itching to peel off, and there is a lot of baby pink skin that needs to shine. Hm...maybe I took that analogy a little far.

No matter.

Imbolc is the celtic celebration of the first signs of the end of winter. It's modern day cousin: Groundhog's Day, is still around so Bill Murray can get royalties for further proof that he was the funniest dude with pockmarks in the eighties and nineties (now he's the funniest dude in wes anderson movies downgrade? upgrade? i have no idea), but the actual celebration of the day is a real thing, and it's good for you, so try it or something.

B and I took the out with the old mentality and cleaned our place nuclear style. It was arduous and exhausting, but at the end of the day, we surveyed our home and it felt awesome. All the trash was gone, a good chunk of unnecessary things we'd held on to for a "just in case" situation that will never come was out, all the build up from our poverty inspired hoarding went to the curb, and I feel lighter just walking through the space.

Now all that's left is to take advantage of all this great newness energy that's floating around.

If you haven't got this drilled into your head yet because I am run on sentence city today, let me break it down:

-IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU SUCK

-IF YOU FEEL LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE SUCKS AND YOU SUCK FOR BEING THE ONLY ONE WHO NOTICES

-IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU SPEND TOO MUCH TIME PRETENDING NOT TO SUCK THAT YOU FEEL SUCKY

-IF YOU FEEL SUCKED DRY

-DON'T LET IT GET YOU DOWN.

-JUST FILL A BOX WITH THINGS YOU THINK YOU NEED, BUT REALLY DON'T NEED ANYMORE (CLUTTER, NOSTALGIA, SELF DOUBT, SQUANDERED YOUTH,ETC)

-AND SET IT ON FIRE.

Seriously.

Imbolc was also known as Candlemas or St. Brigid's Day, and that bitch is all about burning the stuff that is holding you back and dragging you down. In fact, often, after the celts had smothered their fire on imbolc, they would rake it smooth and leave it for Brigid to write a message in the ash, which they would look for in the morning.

So on wednesday, it will be fire night, wee or grand, and take advantage because you will feel a lot lighter for it, and more capable to do all those things you've been convincing yourself you'll get to when you feel better.

And bonus: it's not nearly as expensive as a plane ticket to saskatchewan.

I pledge allegiance to all six hundred of me

Lovely dear friend J just tripped over Diablo Cody's short lived Showtime drama The United States of Tara, and I must admit, I was in a vulnerable place: husband out of town, post New Year's guilt blitz, general seasonal malaise...and I got sucked in when she glowingly reviewed the snarky humor, hidden evil truths and, well, I fucking love Toni Collette. Aussie pride, bitches.

As is fairly typical whenever I see anything by Diablo Cody (juno, jennifer's body, etc) I immediately start kicking myself because I'm just as talented a writer as she is, and goddammit where's my oscar and million dollars start up for my own series?

Green monsters aside, I also was intrigued by the concept of the DID (the disorder the main character on the show suffers from previously termed Multiple Personalities) Alters who come out and ruin/rule/direct Tara's story.

The next day, S asked her question of the day at work: Who would your four personalities be, if you had the disorder?

After poring over the question for a bit, i brought it up with J, who appraises the show with a more analytical eye due to her background in art therapy and psychological studies. She referenced a project she'd had to do once where she had to isolate and identify all of her "selves" and dissect them and their possible origins in a paper.

I found it very easy to come up with four personalities, hell, I even gave them names, but let's face it, creating characters isn't something I find particularly difficult. Once I started thinking about their origins though, things got interesting.

Vicky: A strong, athletic, competitive Australian. Loud, bawdy and impulsive. Funny, affectionate, somewhat of a bully.

Jessie: A very serious eight or nine year old girl who is very shy. Reads and climbs trees, doesn't like talking especially to people she doesn't know. Afraid of strangers and the dark. Hides a lot.

Lady Spectacle: A Huge outlandish Drag Queen. Incredibly beautiful, sings, hosts, dances, wears outrageous costumes, makes filthy jokes. Drinks and mixes a killer cocktail and knows her way around a Cher number.

The lizard skin fairy...

The more I thought about these facets of my personality, the more ubiquitous the masking coping mechanism became. Obviously not everyone suffers from such a serious disorder as DID, but I watch so many people put on different faces throughout the day, and they so rarely realize they're doing it, but it's just a form of social or coping chameleonism.

Uncomfortable around a group of new coworkers? put on a mask.

Meeting the SO's parents for the first time? Put on a mask.

Bump into a friend at the story you haven't seen in years whose life is very different from yours? Put on a mask.

I think it's not a bad thing to have protective gear in one's psychological arsenal. It's imperative actually. We have to be able to pull on some form of protective personality in order to keep the outside world at bay, but, like anything latent or reflexive, it's always worth a second look.

The next time you walk away from a conversation shaking your head thinking, "Why the hell did I spend twenty minutes talking about the Egyptian Pantheon? I don't think I could care less about that." Ask yourself who...deep down...needed to pull out that information to protect you, and what from?