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?
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
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.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
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.
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.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
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!
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!
Monday, February 24, 2014
*
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.
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.
Sunday, September 8, 2013
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.
Monday, August 5, 2013
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.
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.
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