Tag Archives: Maslow’s Hierarchy

29 April 2017

Cows & cars OR: guardian angels are completely fucking arbitrary.

By andpantomime

My mom called last weekend. We talked about my suicide attempt.

When I was 19, I was a little over a year removed from staying @ either of my parents’ homes. It wasn’t a pleasant move. There was no big send-off, no “Congrats you’re 18! You’re free to go!” complete w/ the efforts of a loving family loading your belongings onto a truck so they can finally turn your bedroom into a home-office, home-gym, or in my mother’s case, home-pet-shelter. It was just that around the age of 17-&-a-half I started getting kicked out a lot (Mom would say, “You should go live w/ your dad!” & Dad would tolerate it for a little while before saying, “Go live w/ your mom!”) & I was only a week into my 18th year whenever I moved into a dorm room mere blocks from Dad’s apartment & started going to college. That was freshman year, & sophomore year I upped the ante by moving 2 hrs away to Denton, to study Film @ the University of North Texas.

I transferred partly because I’d decided I didn’t want to be a stage actress (& had been on a theater-degree path @ the college local to my family’s hometown), partly because my best friend M was already @ UNT, & partly because my boyfriend C wanted to go to UNT for Film as well. My real dream was (& still is) to write television sitcoms, but there were no affordable in-state programs for it, so I figured I would just enjoy my college degree, no matter what it came out in name to be. So long as I graduated w/ @ least 1 scriptwriting class under my belt, I’d be a happy bird.

C broke up w/ me pretty immediately after we arrived @ UNT. This was perfectly reasonable, as I’d been a traumatizing, inconsiderate wreck the entirety of our relationship. I was convinced I was undeserving of love, had my parents’ & sisters’ opinions to show for it, & was generally always on the verge of breaking down & trying to convince him to break up w/ me. So as soon as we landed on campus, out of town, amidst @ least 18,000 other pretty girls, he did. & I broke down.

@ 1 point, I told C to take back everything he’d ever given me. Pajama shorts, a bound book of 1 of my favorite webcomics, these neat green shoes I’m wearing.

17717

Green tennies as featured in the shadowy bits of my frontage.

Later, probably w/in the same week, I asked for it all back. I’m goddamned sentimental & I wasn’t ready to let him go.

Since I’d lost my virginity to this person, we started sleeping together again really soon after the break-up. We were still apart, & I distinctly remember encouraging him to go after every girl he had a crush on, but lonely + hormones is the perfect cocktail for having a friend-w/-benefits that you are not developmentally equipped to handle. It took me a long time to come to terms w/ the idea that we would just keep having sex but not get back together, despite my enthusiastic cheerleading of his every amorous attempt.

For Christmas that year, the dorm where M – my aforementioned best friend – & I were roommates closed up & all the tenants had to go home. I wound up back @ my Dad’s place, & then my Mom’s, but not before crashing & totaling my purple Chrysler Concorde, Daria.

1993-Chrysler-Concorde-Sedan-Image-01

This is what Daria looked like but w/ rims less cool & flat-ass Texas behind her.

This is where things get blurry.

On my way home for Christmas, or maybe Thanksgiving, I had crashed Daria, & my parents met me somewhere in Dallas to help me get my belongings outta the totaled vehicle & help me purchase a replacement car. As soon as the local gov’t offices were open & I was in town after New Year’s, I would need to go get the title officially signed into my name.

On New Year’s Eve, I was @ a house party @ my friend S’s place, where I had stayed much of the previous summer between Local College & UNT, in order to avoid living w/ my parents. Bonus, C was allowed to stay there as much as he liked, too, that past summer.

M & C were both @ S’s place. M told me she’d slept w/ C. In our dorm room. I forgave her, I walked out of the room where we were discussing it, & I sucker-punched C in the face. He didn’t see it coming, & neither did our group of a dozen friends who leapt up & demanded to know what made me so suddenly & heartily violent. S kicked me out of her home & has never spoken to me since.

I don’t know where I went that night, but I went to my Mom’s the next day or day after. My mom says when I arrived, I somehow got myself locked in the garage, & wailed on the door to the house hard enough to put several dents in the sheet metal comprising that door. I think I was just trying to make my little sister, who was often in her own world, hear me & let me in. I was a bottle rocket. I was devastated by what M & C had done, even though he & I were no longer together, because it just felt more like infidelity when your best friend & ex have sex in your room. I’ve changed my mind about this point, since, because relationships ought to be defined by what you have the courage to name them, but still. Then, I felt betrayed.

Mom got home from work to find the dents in the door & me in my bedroom, which had been almost completely dismantled in the year I hadn’t lived there, further dismantling it by viciously unpacking the suitcase I’d brought from UNT. I was probably looking for the papers I needed to go into the DMV & register Garth, my new green Chevrolet Beretta, but I was pissed, & I was tearful, & I was making a lot of angry racket. She burst into my room, screamed about the dents in the door & my clearly-loosed temper, & told me to get the hell out & go back to Dad’s.

Garth

This is not Garth, but is what Garth looked like, except this car has way more paint. Also, I hated this Beretta & berated it every single day.

 

Mind you, until that point, Mom had never more than suggested I get out of her house. She’d never spoken to me in the imperative. She’d been telling me since I was 14 that her home was my home, & she hoped I would always think of it as home, & she mostly had only pushed me out the years prior because I was staying up too late for my little sister to get a fair amount of sleep.

I think I might have intended to drive to my Dad’s place, @ 1st. But that 19-year-old-lonely-hormonal brain set in instead. I went to the supermarket & got a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. Perhaps because I thought people could read suicide on my face, I had to be careful to buy it from 1 of the cashiers who didn’t know me & C’s relationship too well, because he’d worked @ that supermarket for years &, well, would someone really phone him & say “Dude I saw your ex-girl crying & buying painkillers?” I dunno. The desperation brain does not make itself accountable to reality.

I took the entire bottle & drove Garth really far out of town. I think I just got on a highway that I rarely used, so even I didn’t know where I was going, but I texted my mother what I’d done (because, of course, if you kill yourself you not-so-secretly want everyone who loves you to feel like shit), then I turned my phone off. I drove for over an hour, until I could feel myself getting very sleepy & sick. My liver was shutting down, for all I knew. I just realized that I couldn’t keep driving, because I didn’t want to die in a crash or, god forbid, kill anyone else by running my piece-of-shit Beretta off the road.

I pulled into a field that had a house on it, set way back from the road. I didn’t know where I was, what town, or on whose property, but I think the farmland reminded me just enough of my mom’s house to be a comfort. I turned Garth off & I went to sleep.

After who-knows-how-long I woke up, though.

My car was fucking surrounded by cows.

I always think about this part of the story as the guardian-angel portion. A lot of these details don’t add up exactly, but they are nonetheless what happened.

1st of all, I didn’t open anyone’s gates in order to get onto their land & park my car. I’ve lived around enough barn animals to know that wherever they are on your property, they should be on the other side of a damned gate. So these cows had clearly stepped over some collapsed barbed wire in order to greet the new, green member of their herd. That part makes sense though. Cows are mad friendly.

2ndly, these cows were excited about my car. They were mooing, & rubbing up against it, probably just trying to scratch their faces but thankfully also waking me up from the sleep that probably would have killed me. It was like I’d taken a reverse-cow-tipping trip, where their frenetic energy rocked my car back & forth quite noticeably.

3rdly, they were ear-tagged. W/ the name of the farmer. & his phone #. If you’ve ever lived in a rural area where people keep their animals between fences that they can barely maintain, you’d be dumbfounded to see that they’d sprung for the money to ear-tag their cattle w/ that much info. I guess it makes a little sense though. Cattle are capital, & if you’re not gonna maintain your barbed wire so they can get out & save a 19-year-old girl w/ liver damage, you probably don’t want to lose money on not being able to find a head in your herd when it goes to visit the neighbors.

So I woke up. I immediately opened the door & willed myself to vomit. Fun fact: this was when my bulimia officially started. I felt so nauseous & headachey, & the cows rocking my car were definitely exacerbating the former, so I opened the door & stuck my finger down my throat & a few weeks later, still depressed about the break up & the betrayal, I remembered having the power to not keep down food so that I could instead keep down my weight.

A feeling of being profoundly alone hit me after vomiting. The nearest cows were dismayed by this display, & they backed off, which really bummed me out because I kind of wanted to get out & pet them & hold them & cry. I was too weak, though, to stand. So I closed the door to my car & turned my phone on.

The missed calls & voicemails took a lot of time to sift through. My mother had called, screaming, angry, but also sad. Wanting to know where I was. My other best friend, Pierce, had called, & he was neither screaming nor angry but very sad, & very scared, & also wanted to know where I was. I called him. I told him everything I knew, which was that I had taken a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol & driven out of town & now there were cows who wouldn’t let me go back to sleep. I told Pierce I wanted to go back to sleep & I hung up on him. I’m sure I told him I love him, but I don’t remember anything he said. I’m sure I wasn’t too lucid either.

W/in seconds, my mother called, & I figured I would get no peace if I didn’t answer her. I genuinely did just want to go back to sleep, but I think I had decided not to die, which was why I didn’t turn my phone off as soon as I finished talking w/ Pierce.

In my memory, I told my mom exactly what I told Pierce. Yes, I did take a lot of painkillers. No, I don’t know where I am. But here is some information off a cow. & the license plate of a truck parked in this driveway. & I told her my phone only had 8% battery, & that I wanted to sleep, & then I hung up on her.

Last week, my mom told me what really happened.

As soon as I texted her, she scoffed because I must have been bluffing. & then she thought, “What if she’s not?”

She called & called Pierce, & C. She drove to S’s house. She found C. She asked him if there was anywhere I might try to go for solitude. He told her yes, that there was a back road in Oklahoma where I often drove to think. He took her there. I wasn’t there. Wherever I was, I hadn’t gone north to Oklahoma.

My mom & C sped back to Burkburnett, TX. During that drive, Pierce was in touch. He hadn’t gotten ahold of me. My mom called me over & over. Finally, she got more than 1 tone before voicemail, which meant my phone was back on. Must have been while I was talking to Pierce. She called again. I picked up. She arrived @ the police station & told someone what was happening, & they took the phone off her. They traced it for about 15 seconds. Then my phone died.

I fell back asleep in Garth that day. I woke up when an ambulance arrived. I went to the hospital, had my stomach pumped, & then was sent to a psychiatric ward for the weekend, where there were no doors & a young man walked in on me in the shower. I convinced the resident shrink that I didn’t really want to kill myself, & was just acting out for attention. He bought it. My parents bought it. Hell, I bought it.

But I came really fucking close to dying. I never really knew how close. I thought I’d saved myself, w/ my vomiting & my miracle cow phone #. My mom & I hadn’t really talked about it the past 6 years, &  I’m glad that now I know how hard she worked to find me. She & C, who were the people I was most angry @, that day.

Louis CK has a new bit about suicide. It is the answer to all of the world’s problems, for you. The people who are here right now are just people who have succeeded @ not killing themselves, again, today. If everyone who were afraid of, say, ISIS, just killed themselves, it would end the terror because it would suck all the fun out of it for them.

Maybe suicidal tendencies are a recessive gene. That wasn’t the 1st, or the last, time in my life that I considered killing myself. Sometimes this is all way too much.

But I’m sitting in my apartment in my green tennis shoes. My best friend & lover is behind me promoting the shows our band is going to play next month. I’ve had a houseguest in recent weeks who keeps secretly leaving original poems in different parts of the living room. & I am writing this stupid blog because I kind of needed to cry & laugh @ the fact that I’m still alive. Even if I DO beat the recessive gene, I will die someday. But, as my partner puts it, “If everything is dreadful, fun isn’t going to be handed to you. You have to make fun.” So I guess I’m trying to make fun of the fact that I, too, succeeded @ not killing myself again today.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Verbosity

19 March 2017

You were right when you said we’re all just bricks in the wall, & when you said manic depression’s a frustrating mess.

By andpantomime

I think I am everyone’s middle child.

There’s not necessarily enough salt to the birth-order theories to absorb a red-wine spill, but as generalizations go I’m fond of these stereotypes nonetheless because, in my life, they appear to hold water.

An only child: an individual, exceptional, precocious after all the company of adults & perhaps confused by the company of one’s peers.

The 1stborn: a leader, protector, temporarily spoiled by parents’ undivided attention then subsequently bound to all the toughest of rules.

The middle: a peacekeeper, gadabout, determined to secure compromises if not in the family, then w/in an extrinsic group.

The youngest: a charmer, comedian, less bound to the rules than to their own whims & intent upon differing from the 2 eldest.

I’m not touting these impressions as absolute truths – & in fact, you can do the research to debunk any of this before moving forward through my blog – but I am about to discuss the perspective I gained while in Arapahoe County’s Work Release Program, & how that made me think about family dynamics & social psychology.

1st & foremost I suppose, a celebration: Yay! I’m out! & 2ndly, an answer to the question I keep getting: “Are you okay?” Yes. I’m okay. Because Work Release is like having a month of detention while being simultaneously grounded. Detention being the time I had to spend @ work – well over the 25 hrs a week I prefer to average – & grounding being the “Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass home, do not collect fries @ McDonald’s” stipulations by which my ankle monitor warned me to abide.

But what was I actually doing in? & what were the other women like?  People continuously want to know.

Almost all the ladies there had gotten some edition of a DUI. & by edition I mean 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, w/ sentencing totaling everywhere from 45 days to 8 months. Even though we were all working as many hrs a day as we were permitted, everyone was required an “in-day” where once every 6 or 7 days you couldn’t leave the facility for anything: not work, not the doctor, not a haircut, not your classes, not therapy. The women irresistibly bonded w/ 1 another & segmented themselves off into mostly-benign little cliques, based largely upon common interests in similar television programs or, more often, being in the same bunk of 3 to 5 girls & being sentenced for likesame amounts of time.

It was natural. It was easy. I myself left the facility w/ a few phone #s & 1 half-baked wedding invitation, while axiomatically naming Break the Joke & telling strangers to wayfare their way into a show sometime by arming themselves w/ a Google Search. It was weird. I made friends? always w/ a question mark. If I spoke Spanish it would automatically be written “¿Hice amistades?” Because now I’ve been out almost as long as I was in, for 18 days versus the 30 I served, & I really really don’t want to call up C or S & find out what they’re up to & whether or not we can grab a cup of coffee sometime soon. I’m much more concerned w/ trying to understand why I was treated like a familiar by a dozen of the fairer sex, but certain women were ostracized w/in the pod & seemed only to get themselves & others into shit.

I spent a lot of my days reading. I finished a new book every 6 days. We had to charge our ankle monitors just as you would your cell phone, & most of us needed to charge once each AM as well as every PM. As soon as you stepped into the pod, there was a wall of outlets & girls plugged in, chatting, seated @ picnic tables & sometimes agape @ the large-screen TV mounted high in the corner. I chose instead to plug my ankle into the outlets designated for our hair-straighteners (yes, incredibly we were permitted hair weaponry) over by the toilets & showers, & hang back by an old card table whipping through whatever book I could find on the shelf which included some slight vocabulary of a foreign language.

The other girls regularly approached me, despite this standoffish stance. Some of them constantly gave me their salt & pepper packets because I loudly found the food too bland, or saved me their cookies & cake because I suppose I look like I need to put on weight & also loudly have a sweet tooth. Some of them tried to engage me in the choice of TV channel or offer me the washing machine for my laundry. When I cut my hair, everyone said something. No 1 kept their opinion to themself. I was suddenly inundated w/ advice & offers of pomade.

The age ranges in there were everything from 21 to near-withdrawal of a retirement account. I ingratiated myself into the pod w/in the 1st few days by rescuing someone’s jail-distributed rubber spoon from the trash can & fixing a shower that wouldn’t spray straight. Sometimes I reached out because girls would wear their heart on their sleeve,  & if someone was crying or looking particularly haggard I wanted to be their shoulder.

Toward the end of my sentence, a woman I’ll call D started to make trouble. She was passive-aggressive & gossipy all along, but suddenly she was telling deputies her grievances w/in the pod & aimed to have some control asserted by them over her would-be enemies. This tortured me, by proxy. People were splitting up into factions & because I got along w/ them all, I was expected to section myself off into a particular unit & stand in solidarity w/ whomever for whatever reason. I just retreated even further, & stopped charging my ankle as frequently. I couldn’t control the fact that 1 woman wanted to raise insurrection against the social order of the pod, but I didn’t want to vocalize my annoyance & be part of the majority quote “ganging up on her”.

My desire to keep peace was called out on 1 of my last days by 1 of the gentler deputies.

“Pheelan,” he said, pronouncing the 1st syllable w/ a long ‘e’.
“Vigil, it’s Phay-len, like not passing a class.”
“Phelan, Phelan, okay. You’ve never been locked up before have you?”
“No, officer. That’s an interesting assumption, though, & I’d like to know how you came to that.”
“You can just tell when you work here.”
“Because I am kind & genuine & I trust you to do a good job for us?”
“That, & you’re polite.”

I smiled & thanked him & left for the day, appreciative of his putting words to what I was feeling. I am everyone’s middle child; I am polite. I treated the officers in almost exactly the same way I treated the women, I just spent more time w/ the women & so naturally had longer interactions.

I’m not sure I learned anything from going to jail, except that it costs quite a lot & I oughtn’t do anything to land myself in there ever again. & that I can bloom where I’m planted. I didn’t have any trouble navigating the rules or the social relationships, when the latter presented itself as an issue I retreated & waited for it to blow over. I learned the birth-order of most of the women when I was in. There was a lot of time to chat & discuss how our pathologies led us into that facility @ that point in our lives. While I was 1 of the youngest in, & was adopted like a sister or daughter most of the time, anytime a new woman was added to our pod she was necessarily treated like the baby for a week as she acclimated & I frequently found myself jumping in to act as a shelterer.

I read 5 books while I was in. I talked to people I never would have met. I picked up smoking cigarettes again. I watched TV w/ commercials for the 1st time in about 13 years. I think, all in all, I enjoyed myself, so long as there was peace to be kept.

HaircutsHenleys

 

 

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31 August 2016

The Creative Imperative

By andpantomime

I don’t want to reproduce.

Sometimes when I state these opinions, people who have children or would like to, feel offense. That is not my intent. So let me propose a disclaimer: I understand that having a family brings most if not all people a great sense of wonder, a newfound fulfillment, & more joy than grief despite the tough years. I understand that, much of the time, you create a lifelong friend & a whole person who can teach you until the day you pass on.

None of that is exactly why I am not doing it, though. Those are reasons, good reasons, others’ reasons. My reasons for abstaining are painless & pragmatic.

I grew up w/ parents who weren’t ready for children because they hadn’t figured out how to love themselves, & thus couldn’t love 1 another. They loved us (truly madly), but they weren’t right mentally, emotionally, or physically. I’ve heard the argument, that “no 1 ever is”, but 1 must deeply wish to create to do it anyway. Right?

I decided growing up that I wanted to create, but not life, & now that I am (arguably?) grown, I have a lot of arguments which I could not have predicted to factor back into the equation. Deciding not to make half-clones has been like algebra, for me, w/ @ least 10 variables.

It used to look like this:

Me / (pregnancy + partner) x career – money x (F G H I J K L M N O P) = The Mountain Goats, “No Children.”

Now I see more. About cesarean sections, breach births, vaginal tearing; about belonging, esteem, self-actualization; about college tuition, global warming, wage stagnation.

& in all the bodies all the other coupling bodies have given life, I’ve never met a human who isn’t climbing Maslow’s Hierarchy.

For reference: Maslow Maslow

People on the whole surpass red, skim orange, secure yellow, score questionable marks in green, & sometimes settle for skipping indigo. Everyone I meet seems stuck in the middle (presumably w/ you if Stealers Wheel is to be believed).

It’s been a while, since I elaborated on it. But when I was 21 I made a 44-yr plan for my life. I don’t think of myself as very talented (except, perhaps, vocally), but I work extremely hard. So when I picked out the careers I desire to have, 1stly there were several, & 2ndly for each there is a huge gap between my abilities & the abilities required to perform it.

From 21 to 30 yrs old: I will pay off my debts.

From 30 to 40: I will be in California, laboring tirelessly to learn, perfect, & be hired for sitcom writing. Probably maintaining my sad day-job @ Costco. But sitcoms will be how I sneakily teach the next generation something. Ethics. Or feminism. Or how healthy relationships happen. I need to figure that out myself, 1st, though.

From 40 to 44: I will obtain my Master’s & PhD, in Film Studies. I’m thinking east coast, maybe the midwest. The University of Iowa has an interdisciplinary program I like well enough. I love narrative. I think it is the most sympathetic pursuit. I think film & television have the most powerful tools to do it beautifully. I went to film school because my imagination didn’t function, & now it is full to bursting, & I will go back until it overflows.

From 44 to 55: I will be a professor of screenwriting. Preferably in Spokane, Washington. At a community college. Where I can go to the Reservation often, or scholarship some of the generation coming out of it. Maybe be present as new stories about neglected populations surface or screen.

From 55 to 57: I’d like to go to the Union Theological Seminary in New York, & find out if I believe in God any longer. Rejuvenate myself & care about others. Not their salvation, but their self-preservation.

From 57 to 65: I will be in Iraq. Helping anyone oppressed become a refugee. Hopefully, the political climate in nearby, developed countries will have changed quite a bit in 32 years, & I can be employed by a church or nonprofit that calls it mission or social work.

& @ 65, perhaps I’ll go “home” to NC. Where there are mountains, & beaches, for whatever I like as an old gray-hair. Maybe return to teaching. Maybe do prison ministry. Maybe write my memoirs. Maybe make movies.

Along my plodding way, I have picked up employment, resources, achievement, respect, & decided ages ago to dive headfirst into problem-solving & tolerance (the lukewarm opposite of prejudice). Some days, I’m the incarnate Serenity Prayer.  Others, I don’t get enough food/water/sleep.

Trauma can be passed on in your genetic code.

Sometimes, people hear that I want to write sitcoms & they ask, “Why not now?” & the answer is, because I’m not ready, & I am rooting myself as part of the process of getting ready. I just got my diagnosis 6 months ago. I’m not wise or capable enough to impart the lessons I value, & under the crushing debts I’ve acquired, I can’t create something so time-intensive as a screenplay. For now, I’m just happily alive. I want to make music.

Sometimes, I tell people I won’t have children & they say, “That will change.” & I don’t have a succinct response to their assumption. I don’t have a shortcut to spilling out my 44-yr plan, how I believe it will be my contribution to the future I won’t live through, how certain I am I’ll need to work extremely hard the rest of my life to make my brain organized enough to sharpen my skills adroitly enough to give away my heart clearly enough to impact minds on a grand enough scale. How I believe that a new human life will fog up my head, & leave me less time to climb Maslow’s Pyramid.

Because I’m so worried – too worried – about any life that depends on me discovering how to climb it themselves. How I know –

know

that I won’t feel healthy until I’ve passed my mile markers: television, graduate school, tenure, seminary, travel.

Many have children when they surmount indigo. It is how they transmogrify the creative imperative.

Me?

I need my whole life to do that.

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7 July 2016

I’ve tried to figure out how many lives I’ve wasted waiting for the perfect time to start.

By andpantomime

Not many of you, if any of you, know this, but I keep a running list of people I need to contact. It’s currently 2 spiral-notebook pages long, has fewer than 5 check-marked persons, & all the names on it are of people w/ whom I had this conversation:
They say: “We should have lunch/grab coffee/get drinks/hang out/visit each other/go out to a party together sometime!”
I say: “Yeah, definitely!” Because I love everybody.
They: “Okay, hit me up whenever you’re free!”
I: *Internally, gulping for air, ignoring the stabbing pain in my heart, quieting the part of my brain that knows the list exists* “Okay! I don’t know what ‘free’ means because I tend to keep pretty busy, you okay w/ scheduling a week/a month/a year/the rest of my life out?”
They: “Yep!”
I:

I hate it. I think it’s pathetic. But, I have to govern my mania, for I am both blessed w/ & burdened by a kind of hopeful social fortitude, which allows me to do things like work retail & high-five everybody & give compliments nonstop & tell people how to pick a good watermelon; & hapless social ineptitude which compels me to compliment, high-five, & offer to go watermelon-shopping w/ EVERYONE I MEET IN ANY ENVIRONMENT RETAIL NOTWITHSTANDING.

There’s a page in a leather-bound notebook that asks, “Did you send letters, birthday cards, or Christmas gifts to 10 people this year?” (Most years – every year, in fact, the answer is no.) It is a list of 10 people I thought, @ some point, I would always want to have in my life, but it changes annually because of that other notebook filled up w/ the names of people to whom I said, “Sure, I’ll call you/text you/join your volunteer organization/come see your performance/have you over to my place soon!”

& I have been this person, this hyper-scheduled, woebegone, friendless friendly person for 11 years now – going on a dozen.

Back in high school, from about 13 to 17 years old, I rabidly enrolled in extracurriculars. For 3 semesters, I would wake @ 5 AM so that my LDS friends could pick me up @ 5:45 & take me to seminary from 6 to 7 in the morning. For 4 semesters, from 7 AM to 9, marching band – I was a section leader some of the time, “quarter master” the rest, which meant I loaded/unloaded the truck full of instruments @ games & concerts. 9 AM to 3 PM, regular classes. For 5 semesters, I competed in the University Interscholastic League, & my competition of choice was Vocabulary: memorizing between 1,000 & 10,000 words, & definitions, & spellings, & spitting them back for sport. I was in theater for 6 straight semesters, plus summer shows, so from 3 to 6 PM, theater rehearsal. Whether I was a supporting actress, the lead, or the stage manager, I was a part. I was in the acapella choir 8 semesters, a section leader (I sang alto 1.5 years, tenor 1 year, & baritone/bass 1.5 years), elected officer, or “riser crew” (I love to pick up heavy things: I used to set up the stages) the whole time. I got home @ 7 PM & squeezed in my homework, all peopled-out for the day. All my weekends were performances, or painting the Blackbox Theater for the next show, or building the  next set (I know how to hang a door!) or technical rehearsals. By the last semester of my senior year, I got a part-time job & the only above-listed line-items I had quit by then were seminary, UIL, & theater – but I did join a garage band & start dating the guitarist, so all the time I wasn’t in class or @ work, I was practicing music for the marching band, the choir, & what was basically a Pixies cover band, or trying desperately to relax w/ Clint.

I think all the extracurriculars were because I wanted to make friends, & because I am a performer @ heart. I wrote my 1st song @ 7 years-old & my 1st solo performance of an original work was @ the assembly commemorating lives lost 9/11/01, when I was 10. I can still sing both of those. They were both horrendous country songs (but I didn’t know any better!) Yet, here it is, 2016, I got outta high school 7 damned years ago, & I don’t keep in touch w/ the Mormons, or the band geeks, or the UIL nerds, or the drama kids, or the choir dorks.

I can sing every note of a love song I put on paper 18 years ago, but I can’t put on paper a note for people I loved when I was 18.

In college, I was arguably more relaxed the 1st year, while I still had the aforementioned boyfriend to hold me still. But by sophomore year I was single & back @ it. Class all hours of the day, then work from 5 to 9 PM (Phonathon – I was the person who calls you & asks you for donations to the university!) By the latter half of sophomore year it was class, church 1 or 2 nights a week where I ran all the media (mostly slideshows, but I did learn how to use a Mac!) & set up all the equipment for the band, then Phonathon 3 or 4 nights – extended shifts because I was promoted to supervisor – then I worked @ a photography studio on the weekends. By senior year, it was class + Phonathon weeknights + working for a marketing firm in Dallas on the weekends + a wonderful folk rock band that let me sing & asked me to learn to play bass, called Death in the West, during all my spare time.

I just say yes & yes & yes again until I have no free time, & – again! – I never know who my friends are. That church, for example, was jam-packed w/ loving people & always had several events a week for me to attend & socialize thereat, & trips to take where I spent a week in west Texas building an orphanage or in Bellingham, Washington discovering that I don’t believe in Hell. I just desperately craved muscular movement & human interaction. & now, 3 years after graduating, I don’t think anyone I met @ that church, nor that marketing firm, nor that photography studio, nor Phonathon, is in contact w/ me. I’d have to check Facebook.

For 2 years after graduating college, I let my then-partner trap me in my house for his fear of spending money. I would go to work, then go home to him. He would have cooked, we would watch scads upon scads of television which makes me enormously depressed, & then we would go to sleep. Occasionally, sex. But mostly, no sex.

I finally cracked about a year & a half ago, revved my engine, & burned rubber out of his driveway by finding anything else to do w/ my time. I got a job @ Costco. I started working from home as the Marketing Coordinator @ PRiMO Specialty Foods. I joined a book club. I started sponsoring a child in the Philippines. I wrote, produced, & directed my play @ the Crossroads. I agreed to join a band (we’re so good! We’re called Break the Joke & you should hear us). I joined a nonprofit (they made me board president…dear Lord why). & now, I’m starting to see a pattern I fear.

On Saturday & Sunday, I work @ 11:30 AM. On Saturday, after work, I am ready to collapse, but everyone else is usually ready to go out & party. Sometimes I party, or perform. On Sunday, after work, band practice or book club.

On Mondays, PRiMO from 11 to 3, Costco from 3:30 to 10 (those God-forsaken 11 hour days). Working from home has its advantages though, because I can leave for an appointment, or pack my lunch for the coming week, or make a couple phone calls if I need, & listen to the current book-club-book. Every single second that I am not glued to my computer prospecting for PRiMO, though, gives me enormous monetary anxiety, & I often begrudge people who come into my room or call me on the phone during those hours (or ever) because they probably don’t know how it feels to have a marketing brain that shuts down @ sundown, switching itself from business to creative when it sees the fucking moon & wants to jump over it.

On Tuesdays, band practice @ 5, immediately preceded by my efforts to be a caring partner in my new relationship, immediately succeeded by my efforts to be a caring partner in my new relationship (Tuesdays, actually, are nice).

On Wednesdays, PRiMO from 11 to 3 (theoretically), but often something else like the doctor/the dentist/the chiropractor/the car/some beleaguered friend who wants to know I still love them, comes up. Followed by Costco, 3:30 to 10. It isn’t a wonder I take my breaks alone, & feel particularly pissy if someone wants to chat while I have those precious 15-to-30 minutes solo. I’m trying to eat, while setting up my plans for the week, while checking to see what bills are due, while responding to a half-dozen emails/texts/Facebook messages, while listening to or reading the current book-club-book, while trying to rehydrate, while hitting my vaporizer like there’s no tomorrow because everybody gives me the heebie-jeebies & I need nicotine & GO. AWAY.

On Thursdays, I have therapy @ 4 PM. I also try to make up for lost PRiMO time, anywhere from 11 to 3. OFTEN, something ELSE, like my laundry/my lawyer/my destitute finances/my depleted fridge/some other belabored needs, comes up, & I gotta come unglued from the computer.

Barring all of that, Thursday also usually marks my 7th day w/o a full night’s rest, because I suffer from horrific insomnia, so I often sleep through the morning, wake up, eat everything in my house, & then it’s time for therapy where I can tell the shrink “Yes, I binged today, or last night, & my bulimia is acting up.” Some Thursdays, I don’t sleep in, because of an appointment or a lunch date. I hate scheduling those things between 11 & 3. You see, I know myself well enough to recognize that I am never productive for PRiMO after 6 PM, so when it comes to the compulsive “Yes, let’s talk/Skype/meet!”, I usually try to get people to plan that for a Thursday night. There have been times when I have Thursday nights booked up 2 months out. This is convenient since there is always a play to go see, or dinner to go eat (even though I’ve already packed my day full of calories), or coffee to go drink & many people have Thursday nights free. Yet, sometimes I’m too damned tired or broke to hang out w/ them.

On Fridays, I try to make up for lost PRiMO time anywhere from 11 to 3, but when the nonprofit is in full-swing again I will be in a frenzy applying for grants, & I’ve tried to set aside Friday mornings for that. Followed by Costco, 3:30 to 10.

Add to this pile the results of my recent interactions w/ the law & the shiny $10,000 I put on credit cards for these organizations which also require hours of my time: community service, anger management classes, random urine analyses, domestic violence courses online, & 1 very very sad Mothers Against Drunk Driving victim impact panel, & yes, obviously, I am drowning. & no, for Christ’s sake, I don’t want to go to your church, or have some water-turned-to-wine.

Because if I did, my car wouldn’t start. My car wouldn’t start, my band wouldn’t play, my jobs wouldn’t pay, & my charity would lack heart.

Tuesdays are actually nice though.

Sleep

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24 August 2015

Cold fruit.

By andpantomime

Come here.

C’mere c’mere c’mere c’mere c’mere.

Tell me all of your goals – quick!

Now quiet tell me all of your fears.

All right.

Sh.

Let me tell you mine.

I’m afraid of hating my job.

Don’t – don’t giggle!

And

I’m

afraid

of

hating

my

spouse.

Or kids. It’s really a multiple choice option.

There’s no C

No “all of the above”.

I won’t hate my spouse & hate my kids.

So, there is a “C”

But it is just “Neither”.

But we’re talking about fears here. I don’t like to make predictions when I’m making myself terrified.

So obviously my fear is not “Neither.”

Not “C”.

But

I’m afraid of hating my kids.

Afraid of hating my spouse.

Afraid of hating my job.

Afraid of hating myself.

& I always have been.

For goodness’ sake, my job.

Jobs.

Jjjobsss.

sss.

Forget driving too far from home on Tuesdays to file papers.

Forget sitting in front of the computer at home schmoozing foodies.

10 months ago I thought,

“Good! I’ll work w/ lots of other people!

“That’ll make me happy.”

Um.

I pick up cardboard.

And drive heavy machinery.

Late into the night.

Often.

And my peers

Are rather lively

And frightening

And intriguing

And indulgent

And fearless

And I want to put them all in my pockets

And carry them around in a big rain coat

And pull them out when I can’t see the sun.

But

Whoa

Raincoats have just about enough room – the really big ones – for two peeps. Two peeps max.

And all those two people can do is stand still.

Or else they’ll knock one another over.

I need more small people for my raincoat.

I am accepting applications.

But I’m a terrible adjudicator.

And I do lots of work in absentia.

Which is never all that productive come to think of it.

Neither is what I want to be doing.

What I want isn’t exactly “productive”.

Except for my joy.

Own joy.

I want to be singing.

I wish I were singing.

Really what I like to do is to sing.

I’m sorry.

We spent so much time on me.

And my fears.

What is it that you were saying?

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8 July 2015

A tiny man would tell a little joke and get a tiny laugh from all the folks.

By andpantomime

I’ve always been attracted to people who seem happy. But as I age, I feel more and more that happiness is fleeting. Although people who are funny & charismatic are not intentionally flaunting their joy, I have come to my theories about those people who are boisterous like me. As I let darkness in & out in little bursts all day, they probably do too, in more ways than I can imagine.

In other words, the people I’ve always wanted to be like have seemed “happy” strictly from my point of view. Laughers, jokers, talkers. But they, too often, have had a superficiality, accompanied by a depth of anger & sadness & urgency & anxiety (I also call this a likeness to myself).

In two dozen years I have made next to no lasting friendships. But I do run into the above type of person a lot, & usually get along w/ them rather quickly. But easy come, easy go, & as soon as I move on or move away, I struggle to keep my attention on those seemingly exuberant folks.

Others, however; have had a different trait, along with a good nature: they’re good different. I have met people who have a low-humming but presiding stillness to their comportment. They don’t always laugh, always joke, always talk. They’re quiet. And they’re calm.

This is the kind of person my partner is. Good different. Rather than fronting a friendly face, he is reserved & reasonably approachable. Not outgoing, not off-putting, but quiet. He likes “to be even-keeled”, he tells me. He has happiness – in great supply – but you have to be one of his closest compatriots to see him mimicking an airplane or humming “You Are My Sunshine”. To see him be joyful, I muddy through many minutes of quiet.

I have recently released 2 people (of the 1st kind) from my friendship. This is due to the butting-heads characteristic of my friendships with people who are emotional and vocal like me. I’m not here to say those I fought w/ are bad people, but to say that I do not know how to handle their emotions any more than I know how to handle my own. I have also recently realized that 2 lovely people (of the 2nd kind) & I have drifted way, way apart. They are level-headed & loving. But the loss is due to my pursuit of my intimate relationship w/ the calmest person I know, & the lackluster 1st impression he made on those two lovely people.

It’s not too late to let go of some & grasp tightly to new. I deserve calm w/ my happy. I deserve friends I can learn from.  I have truly missed the boat in terms of making calm people into close friends before now. Now I have a resolution.

I desire for my friends to be people I want to emulate. I spent so much time trying to laugh along w/ everyone who was crunched up on the inside. People get crunched up into someone mean or impulsive (like myself), & then when we aren’t butting heads we merely seem like we’re getting along. Really either one of us is coddling the other all the time. I deserve to choose & pursue friendships w/ people I will never stop looking up to. No more time spent on those who have enough anger & sadness to spill it onto me.

For too long I have thought, “I am the still 1. I am the calm 1. I can be admired.” & whether or not that’s sometimes true, it doesn’t grow me to be surrounded by people I want to coddle guide. I am (hopefully ready) to start pursuing longer-lasting friendships w/ people whose heads are on straight.

Hopefully by doing this, I will learn to quit spilling my anger & sadness onto everyone & also quit trying to please people I’m not meant to get along w/.  I may quit being a laugher, joker, and talker. But for my sanity’s sake. (Thesis: I have spent my whole life learning by negative example – choosing my actions by sidestepping faults I see in the panicked people around me.  I can start to learn by positive example at any given time.)

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1 January 2015

MIStakes, HEARtbreak & true love.

By andpantomime

I will not ever forget the fact that I had “The Future Freaks Me Out” by Motion City Soundtrack stuck in my head from 2005 to 2010.
That was five years. One song. Others made only curt appearances, often in the form of catchy lines (“this shit IS bananas…b-a-na-na-s.”) The first line of “The Future Freaks Me Out” is very simple, “Betty can’t stop listening to modern rock, oh!” and then it enjambs “oh” to the next line, “Oh! She hates to be alone.” And for me it was those two lines that set up a whole history of needing to feel both of those things. It was five years – I truly could NOT STOP listening to modern rock – and, oh, I did hate to be alone. I say it set up a history because in more than one way, I have grown out of trying to be Betty. I listen to different music and I love to be alone. But, that song came with a whole album, and that whole album came with my impending history.

Recently, I asked my little sister Shannon what kind of music she was into in high school. She had just moments ago posted to Facebook that she was listening to M.I.A., & since I listened to M.I.A. a lot more in high school it got me really curious as to how Shannon just now fell into that trend, and also what trends she picked up on when she was teenagery. She said that she liked Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday, but mostly folksy stuff like Iron and Wine. But that she only listens to Fall Out Boy now when she’s angry, because they are so angsty.
I was trying to draw a correlation. For exposition’s sake, I should say that Shannon has had a fairly steady relationship for a number of years, even though she is two years younger than me, and that even when she and her sometimes-boyfriend are not together no other men really (seem to) enter her picture. It’s something I admire about Shannon. She got all the stick-to-it genes and all the I-know-what-I-want genes and she also has the best butt of the three of us. But the correlation I was trying to draw was between her music and her relationships. I perceive her to be level-headed, slightly romantic, and patient with people. Which is exactly what I think you must be with folksy stuff, like Iron and Wine specifically. You have to be patient, slightly romantic, and level-headed to enjoy what they’re doing. Me? I still get mad when people try to play Iron and Wine around me. That shit is just not panicky enough.

So, in high school for me it was a lot of Motion City Soundtrack. The second line is from the narrator’s perspective, “I try to compensate her lack of love with coffee cake, ice cream, and a bottle of ten dollar wine.” &, in true-to-Betty form, I looked all around in high school and college for men who would compensate my lack of love (with sweets and eventually alcohol). Failing that, in true-to-Betty form I eventually just did the third line. “She says ‘Hey! I rock the Haro sport, I rock the cowgirl blues, I rock too fast for love; I’m footloose in my velcro shoes’.” For me, that was most of high school and all of college. I wore a lot of crazy clothes and didn’t fall in love and acted like I was better-than.

But the album came with several more notably unpleasant occurrences. It had a main-character/semi-omniscient narrator who got into all sorts of romantic and interpersonal and introspective scrapes. “Indoor Living” is about not being able to express yourself because you find life exhausting. The problem is that someone, whether the narrator himself or someone spending time with the narrator, desperately wants him to express himself, but he’s afraid of disappointing them so he cannot. I went ahead and did that to my first boyfriend…constantly telling him that I didn’t want to let him down, and that I wanted to run away screaming to keep him safe. This album is even titled, I Am the Movie, and guys I AM the movie.

It feels that way, at least, when I remember my life in relation to specific lines. “You said we were an accident; you’ll always be my favorite one” is for the gay guy I loved in high school. “I’ll be back tomorrow, I’ll be back in the ballroom swingin’, I’ll be back with my superman action and I’m off to save the world,” is for all the time I spent trying to manage my weird peers…like being in choir, and in marching band, and in theatre, and then eventually in a real band with the aforementioned boyfriend and a bunch of schmucks who needed a mom. And “I like the red dress,” is just ’cause I needed that boyfriend to like me in a red dress. This album deals with trying to write, trying to relate, and trying to reverse your wrongs – as did I then, as do I now.

This phenomenon in my life got much more serious as Motion City Soundtrack got less abstract. I won’t go on and on in a blog about Commit This to Memory because I CAN’T. I simply cannot put it into any more words…I’ve used up a lot and they all run dry until somebody asks me, with some sincerity, why I am so close to that album. But let’s just say I wrote my only screenplay ever from it. And let’s also say that Justin Pierre, lead singer, dealt with a lot of suicidal desires in the next three albums and I painstakingly did that with him.

Last year (technically it’s still 2014, so in May of 2013) I was graduating college and moving to Colorado. I was part of a marketing firm that was gonna send me shooting straight into the metaphorical American “one percent” and I was gonna give away all the money to all the people. When I drove from Denton to Denver, I was adamant with my father (who rode along) that I would not listen to ANYTHING except The Format. I had two full albums, a live album, B-Sides and Rarities, and 2 EPs, plus an album by fun. (also Nate Ruess of The Format) and that album again but live. And it was all I wanted to hear! Songs about traveling away from people you love, songs about trying to make your career work, and songs about missing people. I still associate “Oceans” with a friend who just got engaged. Those were the brunt of it, but what was I supposed to do with a song like “I’m Actual”?

This song starts, “So can we take the next hour and talk about me? Talk about me and we’ll talk about me. Talk about me, and we’ll ONLY talk about me.” What I didn’t expect, when I moved to Denver, was that Justin would show up and love me. So I have, again, painstakingly, put him through some of the worst parts of these albums. I have expected him to shut up and listen to me for too long (an hour? Really?) “Dog Problems” is about moving in with someone too soon, and then moving right out…which I almost did to Justin. There’s a song about a girl who sleeps around (“Dead End”) and lemme tell you, I was into that right before getting out of college. “She breaks for the summer so she can find a lover, she thinks that they are bottles of wine. They make you dinner and they sing you to sleep…but in the morning? Find the bottle is empty”. I went on countless dates with people I didn’t like after two hours, and sometimes got carried away with those people. When she, the song’s character, does find a lover, this is his take on the whole situation, “I’m looking for a dead-end song…I love it when you talk so much and act like nothing is wrong…We sit and find the flaws in everyone. I wanna keep you right by my side, holding up tidal waves.” So I think I am that girl now. At a dead-end, holding up tidal waves, talking so much to pretend nothing’s wrong, and pointing out the problems of other people in order to feel good about my relationship.

But at the same time as The Format there was a lot of Wilco. Wilco shouts right into your heart, like “Nothing’s ever gonna stand in my way!” which helped me find a job and “I’ve got reservations about so many things, but not about you,” which helped me love when I wanted to leave. I was listening to all of that over a year ago, in a panicked sort of way. I couldn’t listen to enough Wilco. Like I needed to ingest and digest and expect what they said when they said, “I am trying to break your heart” and “I’m worried; I’m always in love,” and “Every little thing is gonna tear you apart.” I am worried, I am in love, every little thing is tearing me apart sometimes and I know I am trying to break hearts. But “Jesus, etc” has this line, “Jesus, don’t cry! You can rely on me, honey. You can come by any time you want,” that I know Justin emulates. He doesn’t get why I’m sad when I’m sad, & he knows he will always be there for me so none of the trivial crap matters. Later in the album is “If I could you know I would just hold your hand and you’d understand; I’m the man who loves you,” and that’s what I feel about him. Always fighting to make it clear who I am and what I am to him.

Somewhere in me, I know there’s a part that should be saying, “C’mon, these are good artists just because they plugged into universal human experiences. Nothing special, and they haven’t brainwashed you.” And I believe that! But I also don’t believe that I’m deciding what to listen to based on who is a good artist. Really I like anyone in my vocal range. I mean, I still like every fabulous piece of shit Fall Out Boy puts out because Patrick Stump and I could hang in the back of the choir. But on the other hand, I feel like they are emphatically telling me what not to do and I just keep making the same mistakes that end in heartbreak. If the album is a playbook then you are meant to first reverse all the directions, but I never got those instructions.

So, I’m making a conscious decision to look at what I’m feeding my subconscious. I’m listening to Anais Mitchell sing about couples who grow old and in love and never quite measure up to each other’s expectations (“The Shepherd’s Song”, from Young Man in America, is about a woman who is so stubborn that she dies in childbirth, but she loves her husband and their farm and their future). “Tailor” is about deciding who you want to be based on what someone likes about you, which is only reasonable if you think somebody brings out the best in you. And apart from Anais Mitchell, not much is sticking. “Betty [still] can’t stop listening to modern rock” but what really sticks is the stuff that sounds new and different and the stuff that sounds like a future I’d like to have. At this point, I’m convinced that what I listen to is life-changing. But, like Shannon, perhaps I could slow it down and listen to some Iron and Wine and focus on patience, level-headedness, and romanticism. Because what lacks in the angsty stuff, in the Fall Out Boy and Motion City Soundtrack (and M.I.A. and Against Me! and Dr. Dog and Andrew Jackson Jihad and The Format) is a desirable, romantic, peacefulness.

I need peace like we all do. Peace be with you.

Sincerely,
-M

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28 June 2014

You can write, but you can’t edit

By andpantomime

I hope there is a necessary identity crisis that accompanies one’s graduation from college. Most graduates I know who are close friends have shared their experiences w/ me: the need for a job & the need for pleasure out of that job is, undoubtedly, the most pressing issue.

Compounded by my graduation over a year ago, I have tangled up losing 1 job which I loved, getting into a long-term relationship, moving halfway across the country, & replacing my old job w/ a bizarre one into what is, effectively, a real-life rubberband stress ball (where the rubber bands are my pursuits).

Being happy is a choice I typically have made unconsciously in the past. When I got tons of stimulation, I had fewer crises. When there was always someone else’s problem to deal w/ or somewhere else to go, I felt full to bursting w/ joy because my brain worked on problems at a very specific, steady pace. The cycle of challenge & gratification was a full 7 days, w/ mini-triumphs & obstacles stippled throughout. Think of the routine college affords you: You are presented w/ a problem each week, lectures & homework ensue, & you (hopefully!) spit back your response in the form of an assignment, essay or test after another week or two. Same w/ my college friendships, & my college job. I could go a week or two w/o seeing someone & when we meet again, the issues in their life either had not changed, & I could offer suggestions based on what I knew to be true last time, or else everything was over (I passed the test! I went on that date! I got the job! I quit that job!) & we could tackle the oncoming week w/ renewed fervor. & @ work, especially when I had 2 jobs @ the end of my junior year, something may have gone to hell @ Roadshows or Phonathon but I could come back after a few days’ break & my excitement was usually a reasonable solution.

Now I really need hobbies, though, for the 1st time in my life. Working as a representative for a medical company is a lot like Colin Meloy’s “The Hazards of Love”, except that “the wanting comes in waves” applies to when people want to call me & bitch about something I didn’t know needed to be done, which they now want me to do. It doesn’t foster an environment of order. I can have a day completely organized from 8 to 5 & by noon it will go to hell if any 1 person holds me back long enough to complain about something.

So while the inconsistency is the problem @ Mountain Sleep, the consistency of my home life I find…almost depressing. Justin is here @ home, & he is always a prince. He is agreeable, interesting, helpful, caring, & independent. The worst thing we have to do on a daily basis is decide what to have for dinner & what TV shows to watch afterward. It’s easy, being w/ him, but sometimes I think I’m not really cut out for “easy”.

So what do I do? Well, given that I haven’t made a lot of (read: no) friends here who lean on me for support, & I am not needed by any particular church or organization other than my employer, I pick fights w/ him. The desire in me to actively participate in something, even if it’s an argument, is overwhelming.

The question I’m asking here & the question I hope to answer by the end of the summer is, “How do I get & give healthy attention?” But 1st, I want to set up a dichotomy. Because I like dichotomies – & I think curiosity & wonder is built into my reaction when someone tells me 2 things are opposite. I automatically retort internally, “No, they must exist on a continuum – where is the middle ground?”

The dichotomy I see is 1 of passive attention & active attention.

The 2nd word phrase applies to any time I, as the participant, must make a concerted effort. I will also call it focus. The 1st to when the environment does the work for me. For instance, when I am playing a game or going out to sing karaoke, I’m thrust into a state of passive attention. I am present, & I am attentive because of that fact. If I’m playing Smite w/ my boyfriend or sitting in a crowded bar I can’t resist all the different kinds of stimuli. No matter how quiet I keep while out @ the bar, this experience is exhilarating for me because I keep forming & reforming opinions of those around me, & my brain works @ light speed to put everybody’s actions in boxes. I put people in boxes, try to organize myself into a matching box, & wait for their next move to decide what they or I have done wrong. & it’s fun – nights out include the success of thinking I fit in.

But there are many activities that require my effort in order for me to give them attention, like reading & writing or even watching television. Active attention. I prefer these far less, probably for the same reasons I think I could easily be medicated for ADD. My brain wants to go hundreds of directions all @ once, & upon reaching all those destinations I then want to go another 100.

I have never, for instance, been good @ practicing. I do not play music. I sing because there is no reason, except during a performance, to finish a song – I can exploit 1 line & move on. But in playing bass or guitar, one must play the whole thing & repeat the difficult portions in order to learn it by rote. & most played music is for performance, so if I am not willing to practice it enough to make it performance-ready then I am not truly willing to play the instruments @ all.

The happy middle that I have, between passive attention & active attention, is not necessarily good for my mental & physical health. It’s homeostatic. It’s a weird, extreme joy I get out of getting high & then watching a film or a TV show. Before graduating, I could easily unglue myself from the TV. In fact, I hardly ever had it on & paid attention. Normally I would put on a few episodes of Boston Legal & prance around the house doing laundry & cooking. But now, when I get a tiny bit smoked up I suddenly can’t. Watching some television shows can be downright heavy. I can easily access the deep recesses of my film school vernacular, unearth assumptions & predictions based on verbal & visual cues, & I can enjoy good movies as an academic pursuit. I can threaten to write essays about scenes in The Walking Dead, but I never write them because they will require active attention (focus, I guess) @ a later date.

1 of the top 5 reasons why I want to return to school is so that I can get back into my normal wardrobe of daringly-bright pants, shorts & dresses.  Which is, to me, a lot like saying I want an environment of passive attention again. Work is mostly difficult because I know I need to focus, but some offices are hectic – half a dozen providers & another half-dozen Medical Assistants, w/ patients to boot, kicking around from room to nurses’ station & not able to look @ me like I’m completely enchanting. & if I do focus, it usually reminds them of something they need to complain about, which is disappointing. Nowadays, I’m in the habit of making myself innocuous inside the office, so as soon as I leave people forget my company. I spend a lot of time just trying to pass the time; I will spend extra time in the car reading Reddit before I go into certain offices that make me nervous. After coming home, I scroll through hours of posts on Facebook waiting to see if any attention is thrust upon me. I miss being someone.

The solution to needing to feel like I am someone is probably to pay more active attention. To write more, like this blog. To play more, like when Darian Gore was in my house last week & suggested I get out the guitar for a particularly simple Andrew Jackson Jihad song. Maybe to compose a couple of essays after a particularly riveting album or episode. To be active, to take advantage of the mountains so close to home & hike, camp, climb. To spend less time w/ Justin, miss him, & come back to get something good out of him whenever I’m finished distracting myself.

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I would most enjoy just hanging out near huge groups of people. Thinking about them but not making myself meaningful for them. I think that would make me happiest fastest. The identity crisis is 1 of finding purpose, & I think sometimes people find that purpose when they start a family. I’m too young for that BS though. I just want to be myself & like what surrounds me.

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13 April 2014

a little boy under a table with cake in his hair stared at the grown-up feet as they danced and swayed

By andpantomime

If there’s anything having a minor in Creative Writing taught me, it’s that formulas must contain values. Which, thinking about it, sounds more like a tenet that algebra or Bachelor’s of Maths & Sciences degrees would tout. But nevertheless, the formula for writing something interesting is often boiled down to 1 of 2 things or both:

1. Theme or value

& 2. Rewriting or revision.

So, given that context (me acknowledging that I am about to do some hack & slash nonfiction here) (& my ability to ask myself why I am writing today), I feel a little sheepish about saying that what I want to write today is about my family.

But quite frankly, even if I feel like writing about any family, may I just begin by saying, “Fuck the nuclear paradigm.” It didn’t work for me & I don’t know who it has worked for (off-hand, that is. Part of posting to Facebook later means that if somebody feels they are the idyllic end-result of monogamous & lifelong pairing resultant in 2 to 3 kids, they can please speak up).

I’ve got three new sisters. Kristin Ward, Katie Ward, & Meagan “Married last name” Mozingo. They’re really stinking beautiful young ladies, (Meagan is a few months my senior), w/ hearts “in the right place” & skinny little waists & lots of things that society likes in girls. I like them. Hell, I love them, & I’m damned sure that since I’ve felt that way since the beginning that maybe they’ve had the sense to like me all along, too.

But I don’t want to knock these girls’ sense of sense, nor my whole-sisters’ (Caitlin “My husband’s name is Jeramy” Cantrell & Shannon Phelan) sense of sense. There is a lot of tension between the million (read: 6) of us girls – 7 if you include Beth, my stepmother. We’ve all got to share my dad.

Growing up, there was only 1 man in a house of 5 individuals. My dad’s a military veteran & he was sometimes detached from me, Caitlin & Shannon, as well as Momma because nobody ever warned him, growing up, that balancing work & children & romantic love would be a task not for the faint-of-heart. I’m a little older now than when once I was 5 & I made Momma promise to me that she & Daddy wouldn’t get divorced. If there’s anything my mother has ever said to me that I would repeat to my children, it is, “We will try not to.”

And with that, being a little older, I now recognize for myself that the balance between work & romantic love is precarious & heavy @ the same time. Imagine yourself picking up a barbell & getting it above your head, only to realize that this feat takes not only bursts of strength but also incredible poise & endurance. Because getting it above your head is 1 thing & holding it there is another. Sometimes I feel myself leaning backwards & forwards, bending but not breaking under the weight of Justin & my job, even though I love both. In any case, it was this balance + the decision to have kids which, I believe, made my parents wonderful parents as well as a terrible husband & wife.

I didn’t start writing today to air out my grievances. I am fairly availed of them, having used all the frustration of a crumbling family to make difficult decisions such as colleges, careers, & Colorado. I’m not saying that I’m someone who knows things. I just want to be someone who sees things. I don’t want to be looked to for answers, unless you’re trying to get a script ordered for a sleep study. But if you need some perspective, objective or subjective, I hope I can provide that to everyone in my family. I have been able to step back for going-on 6 years & just see what is happening.

First, to include her because I’ve hardly mentioned how well my mom is doing, I need to express that she is well, healthy, & happy since the divorce. I’m like her & I like her. My mother has the intelligence I like to think most similar to mine, because of everyone in my family I am most likely to know about what she knows about (What’s that you say? You need a tutor for 7th grade social studies & English? Have I got the girls for you). I am also most likely to have her social awareness-forming habits (Mom is always the diplomat & always dresses like she wants to be respected in public by people who know her & don’t know her alike), & I am most likely to have her temper. Her ability to lose face, her propensity for outbursts & her raw emotionalism @ insults & injury. Mom has found her match in James Burden, a raunchy wrecker-company owner w/ dozens of cows & several dogs & a horse or two. James has been troubled by women before, not sure whom to trust & not sure who’s going to be a complete basketcase, & my mother’s natural gentleness really wore him down over time. Like a waterfall & a mountainside. He loves her so much. It makes my stomach turn like I could cry, to think that Mom was really just a country girl, never wanted the military life, & is most happy whenever her boyfriend lets her drive the tractor.

Dad is giving, imperious, rational, battle-worn, & quite the attention-hound. My dad wants to pour out his bank account & his heart into all 8 women in his life (his mom is added to this number, his 3 biological daughters, 3 stepdaughters, & his wife Beth), but he hates being taken advantage of. When I say imperious, I simply mean that as a girl growing up w/ Kerry Phelan for a father, I was frequently not interested in his loquacious explanations of my wrongdoing & instead simply, naively saw his punishments as heavy-handed. After all, I am the young lady who climbed out the second-story window multiple times growing up because I’d been ordered to write a sentence 100s of times. Typically the sentence was, “I will not call names” or “I will not hit my sisters”, but the neighborhood I climbed out the window into had a registered sex-offender (probable pedophile) living around the corner, & I was 12. I imagine that it’s partly me – as well as Desert Storm & Afghanistan – that have made Daddy battle-worn. But to this day he can still be charmed if you love him – & Beth loves him, gives him attention, asks his opinion & truly desires to be enlightened by his answer, & that is part of why I love their love. He in turn protects her w/ ferocity.

My biological sisters both have SOs I won’t go into, & Meagan is obviously married, but in the interest of fairness since I don’t know much about Russell Mozingo I won’t unbalance the conversation by talking about Jeramy Cantrell & Steven Durdaller. Needless to say I simply adore all the men my sisters have chosen & I hope Caitlin & Shannon are extremely kind to Jeramy & Steven. We Phelan girls can be imperious like our father & injured like our mother, & I desire that none of the 3 of us will show these faces to our husbands/boyfriends so often that we lose the light they see in us. I don’t want any of us to lose the light the others see in us.

Which brings me full-circle to why I feel like writing about family today. Mine has expanded to include the 2 Wards, 3 if you count their brother Jonathan, as well as a Mozingo or 2. I’m excited for Kristin & Katie. My dad is a great father who will love the ever-loving shit out of these girls & I wish I could stand in the garage cheerleading, telling them to love him back for everything that hurts & everything that helps them. I see so much in Beth that I admire & adore, just like w/ my own mom, & I look forward to Caitlin & Shannon really embracing her as time goes on. James does not have kids our age, so if & when he & Momma marry it will not be as much an issue who is “included”. Yet as every holiday starts to include a bigger family (Meagan Mozingo is makin’ a baby in her belly as I type) & every passing year makes my parents a better husband & wife to other people (fingers crossed), I look forward to a certain harmony taking over.

The harmony which I hope for is not only to benefit that melting pot down in Texas which I call my family. It’s a harmony that allows me to enjoy coming home. I have lots of people I could call family. I moved to Colorado just to chase around Chris & Mallory Redmon, because they have no idea how dearly I love & need them. The harmony I hope for is selfish but I’ve felt it before. Years ago dating Clinton Aase meant feeling like his dad wanted me to sing along when the guitar got played, & his mom wanted me to sit around while dinner was being served & – maybe not even talk to her – just give her my respect & appreciation.  Now, I want to bring home Justin Newman & have him feel a part of my family the way I easily feel a part of his. His mother doesn’t hate me for taking her only boy, only child away. Barbara Doerter kinda likes me, which I find amazing assuming Justin tells her how awful I can be. & Robert Newman is sweet & talks slow & just wants me to keep loving Justin to the best of my ability, which makes me adore him too.

Whatever I’m doing the rest of my life, I can’t balance a three-ponged barbell w/o a good example. I don’t look much further than the people who raised me, because I didn’t grow up w/ anyone else. We were military. I had just Caitlin & Shannon, Mom & Dad for always. & from the time that I was 10, I’ve known only a total of 3 people on an intimate basis for several years. 1 is Justin, 1 is Aaron Moore w/ whom I struggle to keep in perfect touch, & 1 is Cain Shannon w/ whom I struggle to keep in constant contact. I don’t ask Aaron & Cain to bear my burdens w/ me now like I did growing up. I do ask Mom & Dad to, & I do ask Justin to, & the only burden I want Caitlin & Shannon to bear w/ me is the 1 of making this family feel like a family.

I don’t like imagining what it would be like to bring home my SO 1 day & have everything go to pieces. But if the situation isn’t homeostatic – if we’re all in an internal state of chaos because it’s Christmas & there are so many of us who have been through so much negativity together – then turmoil will undoubtedly ensue. Turmoil that I go through in Texas I always bring back to Colorado w/ me, & I take it to work too – I take it into doctors’ offices & can barely explain why I’m not paying attention to their patients & why I didn’t bring anything to cheer the medical assistants on as they treat people day in & day out. I don’t know if I’m the only 1 who does this – but I figure if I can take strife 650+ miles home, then the rest of us can take it a few miles for a few days. & it’s unhealthy to be unhappy.

I’m nuts about my family. I also dislike everybody a little bit every once in a while, which is important to say because it’s true. But I don’t dislike anybody any amount more than I dislike fighting. So if I could issue a formal call to arms, next time we all report for military duty, let’s drop our weapons. I love you guys. I think you all have something to offer 1 another if you’re willing to do it.

Sincerely,

-M

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5 February 2013

I don’t come with instructions.

By andpantomime

“Pamphleteer” by The Weakerthans is written from the man’s perspective, explaining to the girl that he’s standing outside during rush-hour and carrying a few papers he has (presumably) written about her – as all good troubadours do for their muse. When she shows, they avoid eye contact, they go upstairs into his place, and he paces. Then, he expresses with cognitive dissonance (“the rhetoric and treason”) that “I’ll miss you,” would mean simultaneously, “I still love you,” but “I can’t love you anymore.” So, with “the feeble strength of one” he gives up his muse. There is little else to the song, but its title says a lot (and is only repeated three times.) “I am your pamphleteer,” as in, “I have been trying to make the manual for understanding you, perhaps to benefit the next suitor.”

So yeah. That’s a favorite love song. I don’t know which character I am, though. I vacillate.

But wait, Megan! You can’t write about things that interest and define you! That bores your audience!

Maybe my audience’ll identify. We are all slightly defeatist in romance.

In the end of 1984, after all their love for rebellion’s sake, Winston and Julia come physically into contact with one another and the obvious disconnect is my favorite part of the novel. “He put his arm around her waist[… Her] waist had grown thicker and, in a surprising way, had stiffened[…] He did not attempt to kiss her, nor did they speak. […] ‘I betrayed you, she said baldly.

‘I betrayed you,’ he said. She gave him another quick look of dislike.”

In a dystopian novel, it’s going to be apparent that a lack of love can’t be compensated with “coffee cake ice cream and a bottle of ten dollar wine,” but I always hold the belief that Julia and Winston were lacking only in God. I mean, don’tgetmewrong, I’d be bored to read the novel where the totalitarian government is overcome by the power of love (read: faith), but that’s still what I learned from that novel. In a future where God is stamped out (much to Nietzsche’s triumph), love is effectively stamped out before it can get up & get going. So they may have had romance, but hey, most of us experience that bi-weekly.

Neither of these are loves I want but they are ones I’ve learned from. The loves I want show up mostly in asofterworld.

It references Vonnegut,

It makes me monstrous,

And it comes outta nowhere despite my pessimism.

As to who I want to be, that shows up elsewhere:
http://www.buttercupfestival.com/59vol2.htm
This’s who I am and my love is unfocused.

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