Hey, Mushrooms Have to Grow Too.

On a bored day, I tend to rearrange things obsessively. I really enjoy getting the most out of this small space I have, and trying to make it feel cozy rather than tiny is part of that. I've come to love my dilapidated "garage apartment" (as the landlady calls it), and all its quirks. Signing the lease was agreeing to fix problems as they arise, and I understood even though it remained unsaid as I left her house.

Not big problems, like the time a tree fell on my bathroom during hurricane Gustave. Little things, like the giant crack in the tank of the toilet. The lack of a P-trap entirely on the bathroom sink. The window unit pissing water all over the hard-wood floor. Truly, this place has forced me to become acquainted with the use of power tools and caulk, hammer and nails, and weather stripping. I'm almost happy about that; it's gotten me out of the habit of letting problems get infinitely worse before I get off my ass to fix them. The difference? It's my home, and I've never thought of it as "just an apartment".

Here's a secret that could have been the worst thing I've ever done: I didn't even look inside this place before I signed the lease. At $375 a month, located in a nice Mid-City neighborhood where most people have families and pay more than $800 for one bedroom, I really should have looked at the place. But I didn't.

And when I got the key, I came here immediately, no power or water or heat. I put votives on the windowsills and set up camp in my future bedroom, and slept on the freezing wood floor. The only thought in my head was that I'd never, ever had this much space to call my own, and I thought it was fake. I thought it would be taken away from me because it was too good to be true, so I wanted to get as much time in it as I possibly could. It felt like a vacation.

Growing up, if I wanted alone time, I had to go to the bathroom or wait until everyone was asleep to take over the living room. I'm not sure if it's because I've always had to share a room, but I now require periods of time behind a closed door to retain sanity. It has to be that way, and I don't often come across people who understand that. Sure, everyone feels anti-social every once in awhile, but I want to kill people if I don't have a night to myself once a week. I'm a textbook introvert.

("But wait, doesn't she wait tables?"

Yes, and I had to force myself to do so. It was a conscious effort to be more outgoing. It didn't work.)

But even when the bills rolled in and didn't stop and got bigger, it still felt like a vacation. And on nights like these, when Tommy's at work and no one is bombarding me with stimuli or beer, that I remember what release I felt years ago upon walking through the door. I realize how vastly I have changed as a person within these walls, and how much of it is due to these walls.

I've become more assertive and insistent; decisive, both confident and stubborn. I've coached myself through issues and conflicts, and learned to compromise when my selfishness wants everything my way. I have become more myself than I ever have been, no matter how many times I've thought I was losing it because my sisters weren't around. I've fallen on my face a lot in the 3 years I've lived here (literally and figuratively), but if someone is always there to pick you up, you continue to get too drunk. Growth can be painful, but it's necessary. Also necessary: a few walls to keep your emotional insides contained while it happens; a place where you can let them splatter all over the floor if you need to, and the ability to say, "fuck it, I'll clean it up later." They might need the air anyway.

And aside from the occasional mushroom growing in the bathroom, no quirk has been too much. At least my apartment has less quirks and more structural integrity than I do.

The mushroom was close, though.

Tired

I've been running so hard this week that I have blood blisters on my feet. Just about burned my fingerprints off yesterday holding a plate for a jackass who wouldn't get his damn hand off the table so I could put it down. I've never consciously swallowed pain before--I just took a big gulp and hid the searing in my throat until I had a chance to run cold water over it.

When that shift finally ended (still can't believe it did, actually), my friends were drunk and wanted to get drunker. Tommy had to meet someone at a bar, and wanted me to come. I wanted A Beer, as in one, because I knew I had to get up at 9 to endure more abuse all over again.

We ended up at a different bar, having shots forced upon us from a drunk ex co-worker. He just kept buying them, and they were awful. Things like "espresso tequila" and Jager. So all in all, I had 1.5 pints of beer, 2 gin and tonics, a shot of Jager and that fucking espresso tequila...in that order. It wasn't like your standard "aww I can't take shots.... well, OKAY." It was more like "I can't do that shit tonight dude. No, really, I have to fucking get up in the morning and I'm already way drunker than I wanted to be" and he just stared at me like I'd offended him. Tommy was of no help. I've never been more pissed off about having to take a shot, and NO ONE else at the bar wanted it.

So, I had to stay up and chug water until 4am, sleep until 9, wake up with the worst goddamn hangover I've had since freshman year of college, and sling meatloaf and lasagna in hellfire-temperature skillets for 4 hours.

Bad days.

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