ANGST!

Today is one of those days where how I feel inside and how things are outside are grossly mismatched.  I feel really happy and vibrant and am in the mood to exercise and complete tasks and clean house--just content and motivated.  But instead I'm sitting at work, watching the pouring rain that is likely the thing driving patients away from our dead office.  By the time I leave all of that desire will be gone, and by the time I actually get home all I will have to energy to do is change into sweatpants and watch SVU while I eat my boring paleo dinner.  It's really a shame, because I don't often feel this productive and manic, and I feel like it is being completely wasted.  Tomorrow I will be my usual even-keeled self, and all of those things I have the energy to get to this second will be left undone again.

I think the feel of day-to-day versus the way I will perceive these days in the future is one of the most frustrating aspects of the human experience.  I have nothing but good things going for me: I have a great job at a great practice, I live in a really great city with my sister and great friends, I'm deeply in love with a wonderful guy, and I'm set to move back to charleston late this year to begin a life with him and (very likely) a practice of my own.  I should be over the moon.  And I am.  But the repetition, the predictability, the Groundhog Day-ness of daily life is so incredibly wearing, that some days I have to win an argument with myself just to get myself out of bed.  Adulthood is a trap, which I have known for several years, but turning thirty has opened a window through which I can see the yawning, cavernous space that has yet to be filled by endless days of job and money-earning sameness.  Was my 21 year old, confused self who wanted to live in a beach shack and sell shell necklaces the right one?  Or will I find a happy medium between her and the fully-adult, boxes-made-of-ticky-tacky self that I see in the mirror every morning?  If I sound like an angsty fourteen year old, that's because that is exactly how I feel...but I'm simultaneously happy?   

this might be dark im not sure yet

Dear Diary, sorry I forgot to write in you for six months again.  I don't love JTT any more, I think that he is ugly now!!

Anyway, I'm at work and no one has come in to get adjusted for like 4 hours, allegedly because it's right before the holidays?  I wish I could just zone out at a cafe or at my apartment in sweatpants rather than here in dress clothes, but at least I'm getting paid pretty well to sit on my ass and write a blog that no one reads.

Time for some end of year introspection, namely:

This year has been a sorry ass shitty fucking shit storm for almost everyone I know to at least a moderate degree.  Just a goddamn bitch ass bitch of a year.  I can't even adequately express how bad it's been for a lot of people with curse words, that's how bad it is.

Since life is essentially meaningless and every human action from writing in this blog to getting married and procreating is an attempt to distract from that fact, I'm going to say that it's all of our Saturn Returns.   Erin's dad died because of her Saturn return.  Jenny's husband died because of her Saturn return.  Liam killed himself because of his Saturn return.  My dad is going through the worst undeserved professional and legal clusterfuck of his life because of his second saturn return.  My mom broke her kneecap and has been immobile for months because of her second saturn return.  Does that make us all feel better?  No?  Ok maybe just saying that it was a shitty year really is better.

Turning thirty has been strange for me.  I was very excited for it, I have been for years.  I thought turning thirty would mean that I was finally aging into my personality.  But this year specifically, I feel like I have lost a measure of confidence and self-contentment that I have always had in the past.  I have never felt loneliness before.  When I first moved to Portland at 25, I was thrown into an environment where I made quick friendships with cool people immediately, but I didn't want anything to do with it.  I didn't want new friends, I wanted to be alone.  I couldn't get ENOUGH alone time.  I would take off on a walk with my ipod and just walk for hours, all I needed was my legs and the space inside my own head to be fulfilled.  There was one night that I actually checked myself into a hotel down the street from my house just to get away from all of my roommates for a night.  It was one of the best nights I've ever had.

Now I'm preferring the company of people more and more.   I know that enjoying being around people objectively sounds healthier than roaming the streets of portland alone for 4 months, but to someone like me it signals a loss of independence almost.  I'm truly ready for a real, lasting relationship for the first time in my life, and now I'm wondering--why am I only ready now.  It's not like it's too late, that's not a thing, but compared to the rest of humanity it is LATE.  So many of these things make me wonder why I'm like this.  Why am I strange.  Because I am.  It's a personable strange, I've never had trouble making friends and have been blessed with an insane amount of deep, loving, unconditional friendships throughout my life.  But in terms of my deepest quirks, the things that a life partner would need to be able to put up with...am I too weird?  This past weekend I spent an entire day on the couch watching tv and being mostly silent with a guy who I am currently seeing, who I have technically "known" for a while, who I've thought might be a potential "one" since I first met him, maybe.  And for most of the time I was deeply self-concious, because I was like this is something I love to do.  An entire day of mostly silent nothing is something that is enjoyable to me as a person.  But I felt that he was bored, that I was boring him and the day was boring him.  And I hate that.  Because I am not going to entertain the person with whom I end up.  I'll never be the manic pixie dream girl.  I need a person like me, who wants to mostly live inside of their own head, but wants to do it alongside another person.  I don't know if that's realistic.  I don't know if there's a person for me.  It makes people deeply uncomfortable when I say that, so I don't.  But it might be true.  True intimacy to me isn't sex or deep talks or exposing past pain to the other person--it's sharing silence.  And one thing I've learned over the course of my life with my personality is that there are few people with whom you can comfortably share silence.  Almost no one, in fact.

So that's my most preoccupying internal crisis currently, which considering some of the aforementioned shit that my friends have been going through doesn't really amount to much.  It's still mine though, and it's still valid, I need to try not to forget that.

I'm going home for Christmas in five days.  Going home is the best because I don't have to worry.  About anything.  Because I'm a generally anxious person I can always find SOMETHING to worry about, but it feels like a less grown up worry, because any time I'm home I am immediately 17 years old again and packing to go away to college.

Something I might end up doing at home is spreading my share of Liam's ashes.  Because that's where this year has gone, my best childhood friend is suddenly just a few ounces of charred carbon.  Just like that.  I wonder if I'll ever really get over that.  I'm not crying about it every day any more, that stopped a few weeks ago.   But I think about it every day.  Several times every day.  Any time it's quiet really.  I don't even really know where to take him.  There was a place down in the woods where we would go when he was at my house, a swimming hole, I might put some there.  We played in the barn all of the time, some will probably go there.  But you can't spread ashes on a feeling.  When I was with him I was at Peak Kid--I wasn't worried about a goddamn thing and I was so self-assured and happy and confident in everything that I said and did.  That's not a place that you can return to and spread ashes, and maybe that's for a good reason.  But I know that he was so incredibly far from there when he died, farther than I ever want to be, that part of me wishes I could lay him to rest in that feeling.

So there's that, my grand update.  These aren't constant feelings, usually feelings like this only come out at 3am, when I shoot awake for no reason, fretting about mortality.  But damn they are here today, with a vengeance.

I realized yesterday that my life in Charleston is starting to become a part of my distant past rather than recent past.  I was 25 the last time I lived there.  I was 22 when I moved there.  It's strange.  It might be because the time I spent in school is more of a giant hole in the fabric of time than a part of my life, in terms of experiences, friends, romances, etc.  Lost time.

I don't miss Portland as an entity at all at all.  There were times that I wanted to stay, but now that I'm gone, I have no nostalgia for it, no desire to visit.  One of my old classmates posted one of those Portland buzzfeed lists online the other day--stuff like craft beer, salt and straw ice cream, the japanese garden, food carts, Powell's, and vegan everything.  The list left me completely unmoved.

But there are small things that I randomly come across in my memory all the time.  They are all things that you dont realize are special at the time--drinking coffee at Fresh Pot on Mississippi in the summer time while watching the hipsters walk by was a frequent one.  My first six months there were scary and amazing, living with Anna (now Avery) and having nothing but the clothes on my back.  We would craft and watch Twin Peaks while waiting for the rain to stop, before going off to work at our respective restaurant jobs.  That kind of the stuff, the personal things and the newness of the city, being broke with other broke people, THAT stuff was great.  It was probably the last time in my life where being super-poor was not only ok, it was expected.  I lived in two basements during those first six months, with weird people who I went out of my way to avoid sometimes.  I slept on a twin mattress for the first time since I was 7.  I tanned on a private beach on Sauvie's island with my roommate and a bunch of models who worked with Gus van Sant.  I sneaked into hot yoga classes that I couldn't afford, just to get away from the spring chill.  I walked from my physics class at Portland State all the way back home to North Portland, for no reason, just to walk.

That's the stuff I miss.

REMEMBER THAT TIME IM A GROWNUP NOW?

Over the past few weeks I've done the following:

-rolled over (right term? not sure?) my oregon private health insurance to Colorado Obamacare

-paid off my credit card.  only $184,000 in student loans left!!

-OFFICIALLY become a chiropractor, the last stretch of which included obtaining my license and malpractice insurance

-gotten my first business cards ever.  i have never needed business cards.  is that weird?

-oh also, im making money now!  like, money that i wont have to pay back to the federal government at a high interest rate.  it seems pretty basic, but after living off student/loans the government and spending every dollar knowing that a) in the end, it will actually equal like 5 dollars and b) its taking away from a very small pool of money that I have to make last for 3 months, this is a revelation.  i will never take a steady paycheck for granted again.  IT IS GLORIOUS!

*

Wow, this used to be an awesome fucking blog.  There is no excuse for what has happened since then.    In a way I was dead and now I am alive again, but didn't realize I was dead at the time.  Like a zombie maybe, or I guess more like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.  My drive out here to Colorado was like Haley Joel Osment being like "you're dead, yo," but unlike Bruce Willis I had the option to revive.  So I did.

I'm feeling good now.  Real good.  As usual, nothing about my life seems to be following a "plan" that "makes sense", but I get more and more comfortable with that idea as time goes on.  As of right now, this second, at 10:55 am on Februrary 24th 2014, I am totally content.  I want for nothing.  I guess I should want a boyfriend to complete me or something too, so maybe I'll look for that soon.  I've realized though, that people seek out significant others so that they dont have to do stuff by themselves and can bone on a regular basis, and since I like doing stuff by myself and have felt sort of sexually fallow for the past few months, I'm probably good for a while.  Also I'm getting kind of hungry and will need to eat soon.  So yeah, besides THAT i want for nothing.

I'm at the library in what appears to be the World War II section, and am captivated by the following titles:

The Last Train From Hiroshima
Stalin's Folly
D-Day by Steven Ambrose (I just know it's probably good)
Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945, The Years of Extermination

and finally

In The Garden of Beasts (a fat black book with a swastika between the title and the author's name)

Oh and I just noticed My Queer War which is sandwiched between two titles on Nagasaki, so obviously I need to check and see what that's about.

Is it weird that since I arrived in Telluride, I have spent more time in this library than in any public library over the past 20 years combined?  It's sad really--I wasn't raised that way.  When I was 4 and 5 years old my great aunt Mary took me to the downtown public library every weekend, where I would browse in the children's section for hours, as if it were my first time down there.  When the new (it will always be new to me) TR public library opened I was there at least three times a week, doing god knows what for hours on end.  Now look at me.  I don't remember at ALL how the dewey decimal system works.  I don't recognize a single title in the surrounding stacks.  I need Mrs. Armstrong, my elementary school librarian, to come here and re-teach me all of these lapsed skills.

Portland I <3 You

Damn I'm gonna miss portland.  I realized this today.  

It is the dumbest city.  Like, if you could take the concept of a peter pan complex and then express it as a city, that city would be portland.   

But at the same time, it's exactly the city to be in if you have no CLUE what the fuck you are doing.  Every neighborhood is a new chance to be someone else.  I literally have costumes for different areas of town that I keep on hold, in case of wine tastings or house parties or food-cart openings (of which I've been to 3 IN THREE MONTHS).  Black skinny jeans as a base, then vary accessories depending on the location.  All black on Alberta, feathers and pendleton print and shit on Hawthorne, platforms and minimalist tunic in the Pearl, kool hiking  gear anywhere east of Hollywood.  I feel like a complete poseur and fraud everywhere I go, but in the most fun way possible.  I want to yell I NORMALLY JUST WEAR BOOTCUT JEANS STILL and see how many people laugh, thinking I'm being ironic.  I want to ask, are bootcut jeans old enough for me to wear ironically yet?  But then I realize that if you have to ask, they probably arent.  

The way I'm writing this makes it sound like mocking.  It's not.  It's fun and wistful, because I know that this time in my life is almost over.  Not because of some self-enforced age limit or societal declaration, but just...because.  I can feel it.  I'm starting to get over it, the way you get over Power Rangers or Tiger Beat magazine or clubs.  I noticed it most acutely over Memorial Day weekend, when I met up with my some of my dearest and most hard-drinking study abroad friends.  We still put away an abnormal amount of alcohol, but there were no kegstands, no broken furniture.  In the morning we all took vitamins.  In the afternoon we went to the gym.   I'm starting to settle, in the best possible way. 

And I know that all my life I'll have friends who DON'T grow out of this phase--friends back home, friends I leave here.  For that I am grateful, because I'll always have a way to revisit this time in my life.  But for me personally it's almost over.  It feels like the right kind of destiny. 

I wrote this like a month or so ago and forgot to publish it

Well I went over to tumblr for a while, but that sucked so I'm back over here.

Yeah so dear diary I'm in clinic and I'm graduating in 4.5 months but currently have no patients so I feel like this is the most productive thing I could be doing even though I'm sure there are actually a million other more productive things.

Also I live on a houseboat now and have an adopted duck family who I feed bread out my bedroom window?  What is happening?

I'm in a weird place (as usual) but it's not a bad place.  Transient (as usual) but not lost.  I should be moving to the Denver area at the beginning of the year, with a layover in Telluride to hang out with Emily for a couple of weeks or so and take a little break. I'm so excited and not really nervous at all--I mostly just want to be finished with school FOREVER.  I don't have a plan, I don't have a job lined up--I'm just gonna work at the best place I find, ideally in the middle of nowhere.  Can't wait to leave the city, and I'm not even IN the city, and it's barely a city by NY/LA/ATL standards.

*

I'm in the midst of my typical post-get-together blues, wherein I am depressed for 2-4 days following time spent with my best friends and/or family.  I hate that I feel like this--I have managed to develop solid friendships with a number of people here and genuinely enjoy my life, but these relationships tend to feel relatively hollow compared to the people I just left.  It feels ungrateful, or stubborn or something, as if I'm actively preventing myself from forming deeper bonds with newer people because I know I have this other, permanent safety net of communication and understanding. 

At the same time though, everyone I know right now--everyone--will be gone in a year.  We will be scattered across the country/planet exactly the way we were before we first met.  And I 'll be starting over once more, probably in a new city, possibly (but hopefully not) still far away from my safety net.  I've always prided myself on being a solitary ship in the night, but as I get older it starts to get harder.  I have a feeling like maybe I'd like to settle somewhere more permanently, but at the same time I haven't the first clue where I want to go.  I feel lonesome for the first time (but not lonely, I feel like there's a difference)--like I can't talk about what I'm feeling because I honestly don't know how.  There's no way to connect.  It feels flat, and melancholy. 

 

     

i guess im crazy now

   There is something about being in school that makes you feel as though you are standing in one place doing nothing for 4 years, when in actuality you are accomplishing a lot, I guess. My friend Anna and I were semi-joking the other day about how depressing a graph of our day-to-day lives would be, and then after we were done semi-joking I launched into a full fledged not-joking investigation of what this graph would look like.  After some intense self-reflection that took about 3 minutes, I made an actual color-coded pie chart of my daily thought processes.  Oh god, is this how I entertain myself now?  It's been raining for 6 weeks (out of 36)!!  I have an actual "raincoat" board on Pinterest dedicated to raincoats!!! I HAVE A PINTEREST!!!! AHHHHHHHHH  

 

 

WOOOooooo

Just got this email from my newest patient--I was actually frustrated and kind of bummed after her visit because I couldn't get her thoracics to move the way I wanted and was feeling all fail-y. I don't think she has any idea what this email meant to me. Total BUZZ.

Also...

this was a nice, gross little moment I had on twitter today.

OMG BOYS

I was googling some of my big celeb crushes from the 90's earlier today.  JTT made the list, as well as Leo DiCaprio, Brad Renfro (WHO DIED and I totally forgot that he DIED WTF), and Devon Sawa.  Three of the four of those guys are on this sweet Tiger Beat cover that I found.  Honorable mention to Andrew Keegan, who is also on this cover and whose last name I did not have to look up in case you were wondering.

 

 

My mom would never buy me these magazines when I was that age, so I'll never know whether or not I could have gotten JTT to notice me WILL I MOM. 

 

But anyway, while I was doing this my mind started to segue into a special category of crushes that every girl has but doesn't spend much time talking about: Cartoon Crushes.  My first cartoon crush was Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid.  Even though he was pretty generic and I was 5, I knew him to be handsome in the vague way that little girls know a man is handsome.  My first of many many brunets.

 

Yowza.

 

Next came Captain Li Shang, from Mulan.  I can't be certain, but I think that this may have kicked off my thing for asian guys that I had for the next several years, and also my thing that I continue to have for non-white guys in general.  Shang was hot because he was asian, tall, buff, and knew karate really well, BUT there was also the added intrigue of him starting to crush on Mulan before he knew that she was a girl (kinky!).  Everyone I know who saw Mulan had a crush on Shang. 

 

 

"Let's get down to business!  To defeat...THE HUNS!  HYAHH!"

 

My final, and I believe most mature cartoon crush was Trent Lane.  You know, from Daria.  Trent was the perfect marriage of my two previous cartoon crushes and my newly blossoming cynicism.  He was part asian (or something), and the slacker OF MY DREAMS--the older brother that I never got to have a crush on because none of my friends really had hot older brothers.  All he did was hang out at his parents' house and sleep and practice his guitar and eat, and it was soooo hottttt.  And the best part about Trent is that I never had to watch him grow up into a balding slacker who still works at Ingles at 30 years old or whatever.  He will always be hot teenage Trent, and even though he's still teenage he will always be older than me. 

 

 

Me and Trent.  I mean Daria and Trent.

 

However, TWIST ENDING ARE YOU READY FOR THIS.  Someone, who cares who, did whatever that kind of art is where you take a cartoon and render it into a real person (is there a name for that?).  So yeah, here is what Trent would look like as a real dude. 

 

 

 

 

SWOON. SUH-WOON.  Definitely not asian, which I thought was weird since the cartoon definitely is a little bit (right? And so is Jane?), but wow.  Be still my 15-year-old heart.  









My first meme!

I made this meme today simply because it didn't already exist and that is ridiculous.  The best part of this for me is that when Emily and I were in elementary school my mom actually took us to a Ladysmith Black Mambazo concert at the Peace Center, after which she bought us a CD that we listened to non-stop for probably the next 6 months.  So when Mean Girls came out you can imagine our synchronized utterance of "holy. shit."

 

Monroe

I sat around in pjs (they were satin too) watching Marilyn Monroe movies today--I had never seen a single movie of hers before today, and the only thing I knew about her is that she killed herself and that people are all the time posting probably-fake inspirational quotes from her on facebook.  Oh, and assholes like Lindsay Lohan love to pretend they are like her, but that's not her fault.

Anyway today I learned the following today from watching The Seven Year Itch, Niagara, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:

1.  This picture?  Arguably one of the most famous MM photos of all time?  NEVER HAPPENED.  It never happened in the actual movie! What the fuck??  During the scene itself, she stands over the subway grate, and they show little snippet shots of her legs from mid-thigh down with the skirt being blown up from her calves, but this actual shot NEVER HAPPENED.  To be frank, my mind was kind of blown.

 

2.  That guy in the photo?  He's supposed to be 38.  HAHAHA.  Either that guy is late forties at the very inside, or we have taught men to take better care of themselves nowadays.  One way or another, that's one of the most rode-hard examples of 38 I have ever seen. 

 

3.  This dress??  Yowza.  Women don't look like this anymore.  Or more specifically, they aren't supplied with clothing that makes them look like this any more.   

 

 

 

4.  She was funny.  Like actually funny, and the whole acting cute/like an idiot was a big part of it.  I was very surprised.  I'd like to think that she was in on the joke, that she knew how ridiculous she acted, and that she thought it was funny that men liked it.

 

5.  Women are always like "Marilyn Monroe was a size 14!" and shit like that.  We have GOT to stop lying to ourselves about that.  Maybe, MAYBE she was like, a 50's size 12 at her biggest, back when everyone was very thin anyway, but in today's sizes?  I would say a 6, possibly even a 4.  Let's stop lying to ourselves about something that we can see with our own two eyes--pretending that MM was a size 14 won't make our fat asses any smaller. 

 

Um, well that's it so far, maybe I'll come back with some more after I watch Some Like It Hot. 

 

mo' money less problems (sorry biggie)

So I made the decision to withdraw a chunk of money from my 401K to help while in in school.  And even though I'm gonna lose a little bit of it via penalties, taxes etc blah blah boring, it feels REALLY good to be taking a large amount of money from MYSELF.  Not my parents.  Not the federal government.  Me.  I don't have to pay anyone back.  I'm looking forward to being able to do it more often in the future. 

*

I'm reading a really enlightening essay on a woman's experience with infertility, and I came across this passage wherein she explains the justification in staying with a cheating husband:

In your twenties, when you knew everything, endings were easy because there were still so many beginnings. You didn't understand how the Hillary Clintons of the world could take back hound-dog husbands. Not you, you'd say. No way. Now you know that things aren't so simple. People work past disappointment because there's still more invested than lost, like the stock market in a bad year, and you are not so different.
 

I'm still that person in my twenties (albiet towards the end now), and I still think this way although it is not quite as clear-cut as it was when I was 18.  But in reading this passage, I suddenly get it.  I GET IT.  Maybe it was the Hillary Clinton analogy mixed in with the stock market metaphor, but something about the presentation of this idea that has never made sense to me in the past is enough for me to finally understand.  And I still hate it.  It is still a line of logic that I hope I never have to employ. 

Here is the full story.

swing

The first time I saw this movie I was young enough (7ish) to not know who Madonna was, but I did know that I wanted to BE that chick in the swing dance scene. 

Also, this is one of the greatest scores to a movie I have ever heard.  And it's Hans Zimmer of course.  If you're ever watching a movie and it's exceptionally great but you can't put your finger on why, just stop and listen for a second.  It's probably the score.  And he probably composed it.

*

*

"We are stardust that has taken its destiny into its own hands."
                                                                                                       --Carl Sagan



 

 

timeless moments in history

Endeavour: "Are we there yet?"
Boeing: "No."
Endeavour: "Are we there yet?"
Boeing: "No."
Endeavour: "Are we there yet?"
Boeing: "NO, PIPE DOWN DAMMIT"