Mama never told me there'd be days like this, but I guess I should have noticed. She lived them every day.

There will be days where you don't want to get out of bed. The sun will drive its nails into your dry eyelids and tell you to shut up and do it anyway. And you do--you do these soul-crushing tasks that try your patience, stamina and comfort zone. Get yelled at by strangers, dogged on by people you hope you'll never see again.

Then that last table comes in at ten til close, and says they're not in a hurry. While they're waiting on their meal, they strike up conversation, asking if you're in school and such, oh you have a degree, well what are you doing here?

What am I doing here?

I'd love to blame them, really. Anything is easier than standing in front of a mirror and taking stock of myself, realizing that I have no courage or belief in my abilities and ambitions, and knowing that I am here just as much for me as I am for them. It's not their fault, but I blame them in haste, convincing myself that they kept me here late, because I have such important things to do after 2pm.

When I got home, all I did was lay on the couch for an hour. Then I got up and went back for round two.

Why did I go back? Why will I go back tomorrow? Why do I bounce back and forth like this? They aren't mood swings. The student loans hover over my dreams and, while college was spectacularly fun, my education is keeping me from them. Money enslaves me. Trying to make my education worth the debt is enslaving me, when the truth is that it just wasn't worth it. It's impossible to put a price on a six-year life experience like that, but the ruling authorities took a guess, and I can't afford it.

I've often said I'm far too empathetic to be an empire-maker. Empathy is my gift. I hold it to my chest like a newborn, and use it to make peoples' lives better. If I don't use it, I shrivel like a corpse. In short, I wait tables, and when I don't like my job, I might as well be dead. I need to use this gift every day of my life, and I don't have those grandiose ideas about it anymore--I don't owe it to the world; I owe it to those people I help and I owe it to myself. The world isn't just people.

I feel the need to step lightly like a ghost, plant trees and make things grow, in more than just a horticultural sense. I can't be happy in a building, even if it's a newsroom or my "dream job". I've often wondered why I don't have a dream job, for years I thought something was wrong with me. I've tried to guess, I've been on interviews for things I should like to do. But I don't like them, and nothing is good enough to settle on.

I don't have a dream job. I have a dream life. And believe you me, my dream life looks like it's on another planet to this society. So much so, that I can't reconcile it with anything I know to be real. Almost like this dream was instilled in me before I was born, something innate, unmovable. It's no longer big and glorious as it was when I was young. No, I don't want to make an impact on the population--I've seen that it gets so generalized in history, like Che Guevara t-shirts. I want to make impacts on one person at a time. One on one.

Soul to soul.

On Junkies and the Abyss

Enter: That sinking feeling you get when you see a junkie at a gas station, comprised of the knowledge that a day in your life might come when you choose that path. Being a junkie doesn't just happen to people--they choose it, and you have those same choices to make in your own life. You might be making them right now. And you think about God. God, what soul would think of free will as a great gift to mankind? Perhaps, a soul who has never been among them, faced these choices every day, and instead sent his son to die at their hands.

God begins to make no sense to you. The junkie is said to have "turned away from God", and they'll tell you that's why he's a junkie. Why? You start to dissect the logic, and discover that there is none, especially if you, like me, and like most people, do not have a clear grip on what God is. They'll tell you that you aren't supposed to understand. God is a nebulous, celestial entity who created life, and gave the glorious burden of free will to humans alone. Perhaps God is a feeling that you get when a path is set in front of you, clear-cut, and you have no choice but to keep walking on it, and a large portion of the world accepts you and praises you for it. The pure kind of love that comes with security, stability, and peace of mind, often found in infants.

Perhaps "turning away from God" is a feeling you get when you realize you can jump over the shrubs, scale the fence, get as far away from that path as you want to. Perhaps those "without god" know free will is not a gift, but a burden, because we have so many options. You could be a cabbie, rob a bank, breathe air atop Mount Fuji, or fall to your death. You realize you can do anything, and that there is no path.

Perhaps there is no God/Satan dialectic. Maybe it is the God/Free Will dialectic. The Set Path/Erratic Tumult.

Tonight, the sinking feeling will churn your stomach into a restless, fruitless sleep, because tomorrow your choices might land you begging in front of a gas station in five years. Of course you won't make those choices, you're better than that, but there's no way to be sure. All of a sudden, your path has sprung up sinister pot-holes, as if you could just misstep and plunge into a bad choice. You want to go to your parents' house, your childhood home, your alma mater, with an urgency that you haven't felt since infancy. You want to be coddled, to be told that you are a good person, and that you don't have it in you to end up like that.

But that thing that came alive when you saw the junkie, it whispers differently. You do have it in you, and you know it. Then you try very hard to dream, because at least dreams are outside of your control. You know you might feel better tomorrow, but at any point, maybe sitting at a desk or in the middle of a phone call, that sinking shadow in your gut could crawl up into your stomach and start convulsing again. You do have it in you, and you always will. God gave it to you like a treasure chest, because he thought you'd like to have a choice. Images of infected track marks and meth caves double-expose with cathedral paintings and crucifixes. The safety net is gone, and you think you might be at the bottom. But you aren't sure of anything anymore, except that you are human, and that this might be what freedom feels like.

forget now!

lay in bed and close your eyes

play a song in your head and

remember:

the dilated pupils

the rush of heat

the concrete

damning everything else to indifference

and the unstoppable vigor of a 16-year old will return to you with such force that it could knock you back ten years and you will breathe again, with clear lungs, before the smog and the cigarettes and the pain of living so long without feeling anything so hard, harder than a diamond, faster than speed and as fragile as an ecosystem so

for the love of god,

go slow

and try to remember what it feels like to not know

you'll ever have to live without it

The Top Ten Boring Desk Job Access Secrets! Having a Mortgage is Awesome!

I open my Gmail account this morning, and all I've got is these monster.com mailing lists I signed up for a year ago. You know, when I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I signed up for the teacher one, the lifecoach one, etc.

These newsletters are absurd, even just in their subject lines: "Cover Letter Success Secrets!" "8 Tips For Lucky Job Seekers!" Like there's some secret to getting a good job. This makes it only that much more elusive to me. They're mystifying something that people have just done, for years and years and years.

Maybe they're just trying to make mortgage wallpaper exciting for people like me who have no interest in desk job "secrets".

Faith and the Dark

Another sheet of rain pounded the little car as Faith drove it past an exit on interstate 12. She hated driving in the rain--it was a trait she shared with both her mother and her grandmother. Getting lost was another, but Faith didn't like to admit that.

She was on her way to see her mother and grandmother. They'd be having coffee right about now, she thought, until the rain pounded down harder and she had to concentrate on not veering off the road. She held the steering wheel with two hands, at ten o'clock and two o'clock, and scooted so far up in the seat that her forehead almost touched the windshield. She still had miles to go, but the thought of a hot cup of coffee in her grandmother's dry, toasty kitchen kept her resolve strong. There was a mug at her grandmother's house that was always reserved for Faith, and her mother always kept her mug full when she was there.

But right now, she had to focus. The front tires on her ten-year-old car were as bald as her father's head, and every vehicle around her was passing her, flinging gallons of dirty water in her line of sight. The moments when she couldn't see the reflective paint on the road made her fear for her life, and for some reason, she always turned the radio off when she drove in conditions like this. She knew the silence didn't help her driving ability. She'd thought about it once, when she wasn't driving in a downpour, and she came to an unsatisfying conclusion: there could be no chance she'd die to a song she didn't like. It was either something that spoke about her life--shiny, optimistic and compassionate--or nothing at all.

There was always that control thing about Faith. She knew it, and she hated it, but it comforted her. She liked to be in control of things. The second that a situation began to drift away from her reigns, the anxiety began, and she couldn't function. She didn't know if it was by-definition anxiety--all she knew was that a fog descended, and she was rendered incapable of making decisions. She would simply turn around and walk away. Give up.

Which was why she had such a strong aversion to driving in downpours. With her usual reaction to everything else out of her control, Faith would simply give up and allow the inevitable, horrible accident to happen, and it would all be over. An inglorious death, by hydroplaning into one of those giant concrete walls that surround I-12. Her hands began to shake.

It's happening, she thought. It's happening, and I'll never make it out of this.

She forced herself to picture her thick ceramic mug at her Grandmother's, filled to the brim with everything warm and wonderful. And her mother, whom Faith resembled, sitting at the table with her characteristic, slightly-misshapen sugar cookies. Her mom wasn't very good at baking, but the memory wasn't about how they tasted.

Faith took a deep breath and took control of the situation. She was almost there.

The little car slowed to make the exit to Florida Boulevard. Just being on this road made Faith feel better; she'd been driving down this road since the day she passed her driver's test. And even years before that, her Grandmother would drive Faith to the little cemetery on the occasional Sunday after Mass, to visit Grandpa's grave.

She remembered one time she rode with her mother to the cemetery. Her Grandmother had been distressed about something, and had disappeared without telling anyone where she was going. Somehow, through some channel she was too young to feel, Faith's mother knew. And they found grandma there, in the cemetery, kneeling by grandpa's gravestone, weeping.

"He's still there Grandma," Faith had said, like the child she was.

"I know he is, Faith, he's the light of my life, but it gets dark sometimes kiddo, and the rain starts pouring. Sometimes I just have to come here to make sure he's still here."

At the time, Faith distinctly remembered wanting a happy meal after that exchange. She mentioned it to her mother, and they went to McDonald's. Everything felt so stable and unchanging.

She often wondered in her teenage years whether or not it was a good thing to be raised in such a grand illusion. The cons seemed far more numerous than the pros. Perhaps, if she hadn't been born to such a religious and grounded family, she could have better prepared for the horrible things that happened later--the heartbreak, the danger, the deaths. Maybe she wouldn't have been forced to fashion a way to cope, to live everyday life the same as it had been. If things hadn't been so constant or stable, she'd have come to expect them not to be.

Faith didn't know when she began to understand, but she had eventually stopped asking questions. The situations in life that she couldn't control still constantly threatened her well-being, and always would. Reality returned, as it always did when she passed the cemetery to pull into her driveway a few blocks away.

Sometimes she just had to believe that they weren't in there. When it got dark, and the rain poured, the only thing she could do was think about being in her grandmother's kitchen. And when she came home, like she always did, she put on a pot of coffee, no matter what time it was. Then, though she rarely did it, she'd think about making awful, awful cookies.

Today I woke up thinking about my parents. I don't know if they read my blog or not--I'd assume they don't, because my generation's parents don't really care to know about things like blogs. The concept of an online journal where you write feelings and things about your personal life is something that most folks from my parents' age don't understand. See, back then, a diary was a diary, and if you went around showing your diary to everyone you knew, you'd get made fun of, or looked at like you were a mutant. And if you happened to be a male doing these things, well, you might as well be homeschooled or homosexual.

My sister is getting married in October, and I've been toying around with the idea of writing a toast-type speech to make everyone cry when we're all boozed up. I think it'd be a wonderful bonding experience. But, seeing as how everyone started loudly sobbing before my dad even said a word at the engagement party, I'm worried I can't pull it off because he did it so well.

I've mulled it over since his speech. What made that lump happen in everyone's throat, even people who had just met my father that night? Since my father doesn't say those things very often, and I am his daughter, I held on to every single word like I'd never hear it again. And probably for good reason: he might never have the forum to say something like that to me, because I don't really want to get married. Man, I'm losing my cool just thinking about it.

I'd like to say I am skilled with words, and that I don't know where it came from, it was born of internal struggles, intense self-loathing, the roller coaster of life, whatever. But hearing my father pull something like that off the top of his head erased all doubt where my favorite knack came from. He had absolutely no idea he was supposed to make a toast. And the bastard NAILED IT.

How did he nail it, though? How did he pull that off with less than 5 minutes preparation? The most my dad writes is lists of things to do for the day. It kind of got me thinking about the era of no public forum, no blogosphere, no... outlets. My dad is still living in that era for all intents and purposes. All my life, he's said things like "I'd rather be fishing," and "Kids are holes in wallets". But still, all my life, I've wanted to be successful--half for myself, and half so I could buy my dad a camp on Grand Isle. I told him that once. He didn't believe me.

But he, more so than anyone I know, has things to write about. He works in a paper mill that he abhors with all of his existence. He is trapped in his life, his mortgage. Gave up a career playing music and doing drugs to have a family. My father is depressed. My father is so depressed, and has been so for so long, that everyone in that room could see it, even if they had only known him for an hour. All of that builds up in a person with no outlet.

And I guess, just to hear him say that he loved his daughter was enough to bring the room crashing. This toast had the atmosphere of 26 years of build-up. Everyone felt it.

Let me explain that better: I've wanted to buy my dad out of his life for as long as I can remember, to show him that it can be happy, and that he doesn't have to suffer every day to be alive, like he's taught me. And then he pulls that rug out from under my sisters and I. We can't do that anymore, because all this time, we've done that without money, and without knowing it.

"I hope someday, these two can be as happy as I am right now." The bastard made me weep.

Words

A forewarning: I don't know where I'm going with this post. I merely woke up at 8:30am and told myself I'd do something while I had my coffee, other than hit the stumble button 1500 times.

My project-a-day..project... has been a good thing for me, I think. I wanna recap all the things I've done, if I can remember them all:

LED lights, making my living room/kitchen look like a Miami nightclub at all hours

Quit smoking

Became a runner (still a novice with bad shoes, mind you)

Almost completely removed the resentment I had towards my job. Almost.

Made a habit of reading books with either a notebook or a highlighter

Grow garlic (still working on this one, it's in a mason jar with water and has rooted)

Spend less money, on everything

Eat better

Still working on writing more. Hello blog.

That's not all of them. Sometimes, running is my project. I still have a lot of things I want to do, and some of them take time and planning. Like visiting Macchu Pichu, for instance. Anyway, the point is that while I haven't yet gotten discouraged, things are slowing down, but in that graceful, paced kind of way. You know, the way these things are supposed to feel, without that manic breath down your neck shoving you every which way.

If anything, the lack of mania has made my resolve stronger and more focused. I am finally getting it through my thick skull that I can pull it off, what ever "it" may be, and I don't have to bend or slow down for anything. Belief was the project every day, from day one. It sounds so simple, but I guess years of sedentary sediment has done it's work. I have strata to dissolve now. Kind of like dissolving your stomach fat to reveal the ab muscles that have been there the whole time.

Oh, but once it starts, it goes down like acid down a mountain. I'm fucking up all sorts of shit.

The one, sort of bad but not really, thing is that I (sort of, not with all my heart or anything) wanted this to stop my escapist fantasies. I thought that if I systematically do the things I want to do and make every day useful, that I'd stop mind-wandering and wishing I was travelling all the time. It seemed like the source for a lot of my discontent, wanting those things. And truly, I have a pretty nice life here, about which I shouldn't complain.

I should have known better.

Instead, what it did was make the tedious more nerve-wrecking. Made mopping the worst chore in the world. Laundry does not excite me. Staying home all day is the worst torture I could possibly inflict on myself. It makes me angry when I have to do all the dishes and pick up after more than just me. In fact, when I have to do these things, I have to turn on autopilot or I'll blow my top. I told my boyfriend in a very calm voice the other day that if he couldn't pick up his living space, I didn't want him in mine. In short, I'm very aware of every minute I waste my potential.

It's turned my escapist fantasies into plans. Something has jarred loose in my brain, and reattached somewhere else. And I cannot seem to convince myself that this is a bad thing anymore. If I want to go, that's it then. I go. I sell all my shit and I go.

Words, they're just words until I do it.