Personals

I'm chipping away at my grand to-do list. Friends, I will soon be employed by two newspapers and a restaurant. I keep telling myself, this has to work, this has to work. As long as I'm doing something about this planet-sized boulder on my back, I don't mind having it there for another few months.

And then, there's my living situation. I currently share a one-bedroom apartment with my boyfriend of almost three years. A few months ago, I told him I wanted him out. Not mean like that, but more of an "I need my space" deal, as in "our relationship won't make it much further if I continue to live with you".

Well, I must not have explained it very well. He's still here, tossing his laundry about, clipping his beard in my sink.

Sunday night, I reminded him by asking if he'd been looking for a place. He said no, and that he didn't understand why this was happening; all his other friends were getting married or engaged, and moving in with each other. In his mind, he feels us stepping backwards.

Maybe we are, who am I to tell? All I know is that I need, NEED, a place where I can do what I want to do all day. And with Tommy living here, I can't do that. If I can't do that now, what happens when he pops the question? If we continue doing this to each other (i.e. me yelling at him incessantly when he doesn't pick up after himself, or his telling me to stop reading books and writing all the time), then there will be no future. It might sound like a step backwards, but it's a healthy step, whatever direction it may be.

I admit, sometimes I wonder what the hell we're doing with each other. Sometimes it seems like we don't have anything in common anymore; I'm bored with his interests and he's bored with mine.

I know living apart will aid some of this, but the only thing I have hope for is that it will be okay no matter what happens. And no matter what happens, this was the right decision, and I did it for myself--against social norms and expectations, against what people tell me about my relationship ("you two are so right for each other!"), and against my own weak desire to stay in constant comfort. Fuck constant comfort. Nothing good, valuable, or important ever came from such an environment. How will I pay the bills? If I want to live alone badly enough, I will pay the bills by any means necessary. If I want to be a freelance writer badly enough, I will find a way. I just need space to know that these things I say are true; that I can pay the bills, freelance for a living, etc. I just don't know those things for sure yet.

I know I can, but I haven't. Makes all the difference.

Heartache Gumbo

Gumbo is sacred. It is the stew-soup of the south. Outside of being a regional delicacy, southerners tend to guard the process as a ritual; something "foreigners" to the southern states shouldn't bother to try and reproduce. For a long time, I felt this way about gumbo, but couldn't explain why.

When I was young, gumbo day was something like a holiday. It usually happened in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, using the Thanksgiving fried turkey carcass as a base for the stock. If any of us kids had any plans that night, they were cancelled as soon as the news spread. On more than one occasion, my friends actually cancelled entire social events to come to my parents' house and eat gumbo.

Yes, it was delicious, but that's only half the reason it was so important. My friends loved gumbo day because so few of their families sat down to eat together. Of course, when you're a teenager, sitting down to dinner with your family is a bother, because you have so many other important things to do. So none of my friends minded not eating with their families, until they sat down at our dining table. It's something you don't realize you want until it's right there, and you've been without it for years.

When I finally (yes finally) moved out of my parents' house, I had a lot of trouble making my apartment feel like home. I know everyone has trouble with that, but my family was so... rich in informal tradition that I really noticed when it was gone. It was like an un-nameable void in my soul, and I unconsciously bought things for my kitchen when the void took over. I thought it was just a compulsion to take my mind off things, but what I was really doing was creating a home, in exactly the fashion my parents had instilled in me when I was a toddler. Stocking my kitchen was the only thing I knew how to do, to recreate the smells and warmth of my childhood.

I lived here for years before I got the nerve to make a gumbo of my own. My father fried three turkeys for Thanksgiving, specifically so we could bring them home and make our own gumbo day. I was nervous, especially about the roux part--they're so easy to mess up, and if it burns, you just have to throw it out and start over.

I always heard that gumbo takes an entire day, sometimes two, to make. And it can, but my first one didn't take all day-- but it came out all wrong. Not in flavor or texture, but in feeling. The reason gumbo takes a whole day to make is because everything in your living space has to be spotless before you begin to chop. Why? Because when you're done cooking, you try to sit down on your couch full of laundry and put your bowl on the cluttered coffee table, and you can't enjoy it. It's downright unpleasant. You sit there and wonder why the smell alone isn't enough to make this place feel like home, and it's because everything is a mess. You get angry, like I did. Add to that the amazing amount of dishes and large stock pots in the sink, and you've got an erupting volcano of rage.

So when you've got a gumbo itch, no matter how late in the day it is, throw your stock on the stove and clean the shit out of everything in your life that could use it. Think about things you regret, ball them up and throw them into the stock pot--sadness and heartache are the unnamed spices in a great gumbo. And when you start cooking, there's no time to think about the bad, messy, or regretted things in your life--the roux is like a baby, you cannot leave it alone, and you have to put every ounce of attention on it for it to happen right. If your base is not done correctly, you might as well throw out the entire pot.

There's no time to think about the reason you wanted to make a gumbo in the first place. It might be because your life needs a hard day's work. Or, like me, because you're homesick--not for the place, but for that feeling: a mixture of aromas, a few people you want to feed, and everything in its place, inside and out.

When it's done, your apartment is still spotless, and you can take a break to cry if you want to, because it's hard to build a gumbo or a life. If you do this enough, eventually you won't have to measure anything anymore; it'll be a feeling, not a tablespoon. You'll somehow have everything you need to make it right when you need to; no running to the store or running out of time.

And you'll never burn a roux again, because you'll know how to make it without knowing exactly how to make it. At some point, you realize that no one does.

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.