I know I have not finished my cancer saga. In time. Today I wrote a letter to a friend who lives very far away and I told her about the whole story from beginning to end in my letter and 1. I am winded and 2. I am kind of in awe of myself. I am a month out from that whole experience now and even in just the act of writing the letters into the words that make up my experience, I cannot wrap my tiny little mind around how I just sort of went through the whole donation process… and I just…did it. And now it is all over, and it is just another story to tell at a party.
I love how pretty much every hard or crazy thing I do in my life seems really hard or crazy on paper and in your mind and even when it is in your past and you have already done it, but when you are in it, when you are living through this hard or crazy thing, you are just there. There you are. Folks kept saying “wow, that’s crazy/hard/huge”, and I just shrugged. I did a lot of shrugging last month.
I feel like I take things as they are more than I think I do. I have these moments of “how was I so calm in what appears to have been a “code red category five whatever crisis” type scenario all the time.
I am broke like I have never been before, which is pretty terrifying, but I visited a friend of mine at her place of work today, a vegetarian diner in Seattle, and I bought a waffle anyway, giving the finger to my checking account balance. I am also teaching myself how to can and preserve foods, and I am up to my noodle in free vegetables because I am working part time at farmers markets for a local farm. Two weeks ago I climbed some plum trees and picked twenty pounds of plums and canned them. This week I preserved a box of nectarines that will make my heart ache for summer when I open them up in February or whenever I open them. I am learning an art, a skill, and I am reading books and learning from friends and experimenting in my kitchen and it feels very good to learn and expand and stretch and create these beautiful little jars with brightly colored surprises in them, and I like to think about this when I wake up freaking out about my persistent lack of funds. I could homestead. Given enough jars, I could make enough pickles to feed Rhode Island. Take that, Wells Fargo and My Landlord.
I don’t know if I am just emotionally fragile/vulnerable right now, if I am more conscious of my life and living with more intention, or if I am just teetering on the edge of a depressed stretch right now, but lately my feelings have been all over the place, intense, and subject to swift and sudden change. In the past couple of weeks I have managed to convince myself that 1. I am fine and 2. I am very not fine at all, in a pretty predictable cycle. I need: 1. full time work 2. health insurance 3. a haircut 4. an oil change. Today my parents drunk dialed me to try and convince me to move back in with them. My rebuttal was to hang up and pretend this never happened, although, like the cancer thing, this makes a good party story and as such cannot be relegated to my brain’s list of things to repress asap.
I made out with a girl for a few days of this past week. It was kind of serendipitous, or it was until she turned out to be a space cadet (a well-meaning and attractive space cadet, but I have a range of crazy that I can get it up for and this was several standard deviations beyond it).
I never knew if I was any good at making out because I had one boyfriend for two years in high school and then one girlfriend for a year and a half in college and neither of them had ever dated anyone else and we had no basis for comparison. It wasn’t until I was I think twenty that I was making out with someone different who pried herself away from making out with me an hour or so into our making out to tell me that I was making out with her exactly how she wanted to be made out with. I hate the phrase ‘make out’, but this is not the point. It was good and important for me to stand under a full moon next to someone with that warm electric presence like you’re in awe of the moon and not really looking at the moon at all, and press my hand into the small of someone else’s back to push them closer to me, to breathe them in (lavender), close my eyes, say something stupid, trip when I leave. Kind of like recertifying your CPR and First Aid. Just to make sure you can still do it.
I managed to embarrass myself in new and exciting ways, ways that I had forgotten because I have not dated/made out much in almost a year.
An example of my awe-inspiring skills (to the fling): “Hey, isn’t it funny that my much-more-attractive-than-me coworker has a big crush on you AND you’re the cutest thing on two legs and everyone who isn’t legally blind wishes they could brush your teeth with their tongue BUT you’re making out with much-less-attractive-me? Isn’t that just the funniest thing?”. Etc. Repeat.
Sometimes I feel like the universe is fucking with me, and sometimes I don’t believe in the universe, and sometimes I just try and hold onto the happy feeling that is kissing a person who is not crazy when all they’re doing is kissing and you’re not letting them talk. or move. or play their bongos for the spider on the porch. I like to tell myself that I am being tested, that this is the great big universe helping me understand that I am not ready to pursue big relationships again right now, and then being Jewish and snarky and mushy and me kicks in again and I bust out in a million directions not having gotten anywhere.
Lately I have heard a lot of folks tell me about how they ask the universe to send them things– how if they figure out what it is they really want and they think about it really hard, then the universe will send it their way. This is basically the hippy version of The Secret, a movement which makes me throw up in my own mouth over and over again. The universe has nothing to do with you realizing that you need dental work and a girlfriend with red hair and a steady job. Put your vision board away, stop talking, and let’s make out.
this is about writing instead and feeling sad instead (written a few weeks ago? feeling less morose now). we will return to our regularly scheduled programming of cancer cancer cancer shortly.
The minute you are confronted with the actual advice, the moment you sit down to actually try to do what you know you need to do to get what you want, is the hardest moment of your life repeated over and over again. Every day you don’t go to the gym or read ten pages in The Yiddish Policeman’s Unit, practice piano, call your mother, is another reminder that you are a failure and the only thing that’s really keeping you from brilliance and everlasting glory is your own dullness, your lack of drive, the absence of any vision.
You strip away the commitment of a job or a relationship and your time appears before you no longer in easily segmented blocks that disappear regretlessly with tasks like ‘laundry’ and ‘potluck’ and ‘wash girlfriend’s hair’ but rather as massive swathes with no end. Your time is an animal in a trap that needs to be put out of its misery every day. Sitting on your bedroom floor, scrolling through your cell phone contacts for the umpteenth time, you are only aware of how you’re squandering your time like your phone battery life.
Tomorrow will be different, tomorrow you will have some errands to run. Tomorrow you will have a job interview. Tomorrow you’ll definitely write for at least two hours and you edit at least one story. Tomorrow will not end like today, when you sat on the couch, watching the sun roll down into the clouds, reading the same sentence in your library book over and over again, wondering if it was possible that something interesting might happen to you after your dinner so you don’t wind up going to bed at 8:30 because you have nothing else to do.
You get a postcard from your favorite author that says ‘write every day’ so you start to and then you realize that you don’t write every day because you don’t have very much to say and what you do say is poorly written in run-on sentences and you are constantly frustrated by your vocabulary (not enough words) and the English language and you need both to be so much bigger but you never worked very hard on that and you complain better than you do most anything else, really.
You begin to realize that the messages you wish to convey in your stories are as muddled and half thought out as everything else in your twenty what year old life is because you don’t know what anything means for yourself, the world, whatever right now, so when you try to write a story about love or loss or friendship or life you lose what you were trying to say three pages in. When you write about yourself, you do it with a voice that suggests you have no idea what any of these humorous anecdotes with family will mean later on, as if your sixth birthday has some greater meaning that you have not yet divined. This trips you up and makes you self conscious and you stumble and stutter over yourself and you can’t make yourself write a simple little story about a girl whose mother threw her a sixth birthday party in a hair salon during her long phase of being petrified of haircuts.
All you can write about with any assurance is feeling lonely and sometimes feeling numb, because these are the only feelings you have felt with any certainty. As you are writing you realize you are jealous of one of your college girlfriends who studied writing, wrote short stories about being gay and fat, who had felt and sorrow and shame and acceptance and love so wholly that she wrote damn good short stories about those feelings with certain endings and conscious meaning. She had things to say about bodies and her stories about the two of you make you cry but you never told her because she didn’t let you read her stories, you just found them on the floor next to her bed once when she let you sleep in late in her room when she had an early class.
You try your hand at fiction, but you can’t figure out why anyone would make up stories and write them down. You only write about what happens to you and you only make up the bits you don’t remember that well or the bits that need a little making up. You realize you don’t write fiction or good endings to your stories about yourself because you are obsessed with finding universal meaning in everything you write, yet you are constantly paralyzed by the idea that there is very little meaning in anything.
It’s 9:30. You can legitimately sleep now.
