untangling

I like how quickly I can reset from a state of mental twist to a state of smooth ok-ness. Sometimes all it takes is being on the receiving end of one sincere smile.

maintenance

Once, and by once I mean just now, I spent two hours working on my bike tires. The problem was a nail and the problem is that I have too much faith in patches. And I lack a back-up plan when the patches fail. Then there I am, sitting on the porch steps, covered in bike grease and dirt and sweat, out of tire tubes and luck. What is there to do but trudge back inside and douse myself in soapy water and chase that down with wine?
I will take this as an opportunity to walk. I've noticed that I like that. Shall I make a bet with myself that I can do this for a week? By then I'll have forgiven the indignity of black smudges on my forehead.

it should have been obvious

After attending my first (and, I'd guess, last) city council meeting tonight, I realize just why I will never run for mayor. Because, DEAR GOD I'D WANT TO LET THE PEOPLE HAVE CHICKENS.

I've decided to sacrifice my thumbs

I can't seem to leave my fingernails alone. Ever. Or my cuticles. I've tried to quit the chewing and the picking cold turkey, and I'll last just long enough to get a glimpse of what smooth, unmolested fingertips look like before WHAM I'm in a stressful situation or, well, I'm bored, and the nails go back into my mouth and then so long, cuticles! I want to try again. Because I have a thing for hands. I mean, I really have a thing for hands. My own included. But mostly, yours. I am not kidding when I say that, if I know you, I have memorized your hands. I'm not always the best with faces, sometimes I forget names, but damnit, I will remember your hands. Sometimes when I'm lying awake at night I'll distract myself by cycling back through old friends, through family, through coworkers. Their hands, I mean. It's a little weird. So I guess I've decided to make my own hands a bigger deal by taking care of my fingernails. Although I know there's no way I can just STOP biting all ten. So, I'm throwing my thumbs out of the deal. My thumbs = fair game. I feel a little bad for them. Just a little.

blue skies

I am thinking of other people's hearts today--not my own! I think this is equivalent to a lid fitting tightly on a jar.

The breeze keeps pulling me back outside. It's a good way to spend a Saturday. I opened all the windows and I took a long bath and I straightened my rug, and the cat and I went belly up in a sunbeam.

Maybe I'll spend all afternoon watching golf on TV. I could--I love that I could.

Missing from today is a new bike. If I'd bitten down and purchased the one I fell in love with three weeks ago, I might be on it right now. I might be miles and miles out of town somewhere over the green hills. I didn't buy the bike. I am wary of spending what savings I have because sometimes I feel like I'm going to need that for something else, later. My old blue Schwinn is still. I mean, it is, still. It takes me the three miles to work and the three miles home. That's what I need, so stifle what I want.

I am tired of landlords staying in the basement. It makes me feel like I can't walk around half-dressed. Because I would, if I knew I was the only one who could open the outside doors.

Sarah is away for the weekend, my sister isn't moved back in yet, Krista is still six weeks away from returning. It should be just me and the cat at home, but it's not. So I'm wearing a shirt.

The song I have had as a ringtone for a year shows up on TV every so often. Once, on the radio. So, ok, nice that it gets used. I haven't been answering my phone much lately, even when I do hear it ring. Not that I won't answer it, but that I haven't. Something's different.

Last night at midnight I started reading The Giver. I was halfway through when I fell asleep with the book open on my chest. I think I'll do the same tonight.

I have stopped freaking out. I was serious when I put that on my to-do list. And for now, it has abated. I'm not worried about what's wrong with me, I'm not worried about my family, I'm not worried about work. I think the calm hit me when I got home one evening this week and thought, I'm not going to be able to sleep!! but then, within minutes, I conked out. When I woke up the next morning I realized how many gaps I'd had in my consciousness--my self-consciousness--the day before (this is a good thing!) and I have been able to string it forward ever since.

two birds

I took a walk in the rain today. I was here first, I told the rain, but if I can't talk sense into myself, I can't talk sense into the heavens. The way to handle the downpour was to stop in the middle of the street and look up. Arms stretched out. Music, for once, out of my ears and coming straight from my heart.

Then there is the more prosaic. Like fig newtons. I have been into fig newtons. And into Regina Spektor (although she is not prosaic in the least). I have been noticing potential and have been proud of my steady nerves. I've been looking around, seeing the mess, and deciding with a solid sort of resolve that this weekend, I will fix it. I've been an editor and a clown and am going to try really, really hard to actually listen this time.

I still always feel like I need a third paragraph, a third number in the series. A THIRD IDEA. WITHOUT BREAKS BETWEEN. Gosh, though, maybe I need to learn to stop with two.

trust and obey

I might cry myself to sleep because I just listened to the audio of my dad beginning to say goodbye to his congregation. Oh, what now.

my aim is off

Sometimes I run away from easy. That's stupid. Because I also run away from hard.

I am up.

I walked to work today because I'd left my bike on campus. I'm assuming it's still in the rack by the dorms by the parking garage where I left it locked at 7:00 on Friday morning, pre- all-day conference and post- don't-rain-don't-rain!! sprint up the hill.
The walking was GOOD. I can get into mornings. Second best to camping.
I'm thinking of this because I was camping this weekend, and I kept thinking MORNINGS! The morning, when you're camping, is the best part. You wake up early because campgrounds are awake early, and the Chinese family reunion across the way and near the water pump is full of early risers. I don't always let them slide by, morning noises, but when I'm in a tent, and the early sun is shining through the canvas, I forgive. To be burrowed in a sleeping bag, fending off the dew and chill, long past the part when the ground is hard and into the part when your muscles have learned how to relax into the dips and grooves, and to know that soon--it really doesn't matter when--you will pull yourself up and into sweats and out of the tent, and--eventually--you'll have a fire going, and smoke-flavored eggs for breakfast along with the wild raspberries picked from the bushes that surround the campsite... this, this is the best way to have a morning.
I hold on to complete feelings like these because I know I will probably soon drift back into the state which has become my default this summer--the way my whole mind feels the way the skin on your forearm does an hour after you brush against a stinging nettle plant. That not actively stinging but phantom stinging, worried feeling. It saps me.
But what I mean to say is that walking to work this morning didn't feel like an OPTION before I left my front door, but it is, and to feel that in my legs and to notice the way those miles cleared some of my dullness is almost as good as waking up at the beginning of a day in a tent in the woods.

it helps!

I just discovered gmail's new Tasks feature. I made a to-do list, and the only item is STOP FREAKING OUT.

feeling

When I'm afraid, I immediately look for a talisman. I think, April, are the earrings you're wearing enough to protect you? Today I'm wearing the earrings I share with my best friend (although she's worn them once and I've worn them over and over because of the weight of them, because of the dark red color). I guess they will help, and I am glad I have that curved piece of wood I carry around in my purse. Three, or was it four? summers ago while camping with my family I tried to whittle with my dad's pocketknife. I told them I was making a duck. It ended up just a smooth half-circle. Light, grained, and comforting. I have kept it in my purse ever since. Once, not for me, I was in the ER all night, and I held on to that duck. My other instinct, after looking around for something to hold on to, something with enough significance to cast a shadow big enough to hide in, is to flood my ears with music. Right now I want Fernando Ortega. These days he is one of the very, very few Christian bands/singers I don't automatically skip when they appear on my mp3 player. I will always listen to his voice. And he will calm me down. I am sitting here at my desk, earbuds in, the duck sitting in front of the keyboard. I am saying, to the air, I guess, that I am going to be ok.

lists

I have a couple of themes this week, including: paranoia, late nights, rice cakes, and Life is a Highway.

I plan on blocking out all but the late nights part by hitching a ride up to the St Lawrence River this afternoon and spending three days swimming, boating, sitting around a bonfire, drinking beer, and scratching mosquito bites.

perspective

I was feeling sorry for myself until I stood behind the guy in the grocery store check-out line who was buying bologna and mayonnaise and cat food.

marching on

For someone who never really got the hang of patriotism and probably never will, July 4th sure does stick better in my memory than most holidays. Past Christmases blur together, so do birthdays and Easters, but I can feel my way back through the long chain of ghosts of past July 4ths in my memory. I was here, I was here, I was biking along the Erie Canal, I was home alone with my parents' dog who was panicking with every loud noise, I was walking along the river with a favorite uncle who was whistling the Star Spangled Banner, I was in Nashville, I was on my way home from Ohio, I was in Austria and the only reason there was celebration was that the 4th happened to coincide with the 2004 Europe soccer cup thingy, I was in the back seat of a 15-passenger van, craning my neck for signs of fireworks in the towns we passed through on the way home from Kentucky, I was anxiously circling a neighborhood on foot, looking for the stupid labradoodle I was dog-sitting for who'd somehow gotten past her electric fence. All the way back to middle school I could tell you where I was and how it felt. Maybe I've thrown my string of memories off, though, by doing the same thing two years in a row. A waterfall. A tour of the back roads. Mint tea. Lexington. A long highway back home with my head everywhere else, watching fireworks in the rear-view mirror.

pinch

I have been listening to Elbow's 'The Seldom Seen Kid' album over and over. I wasn't until lately an album person at all--I was an artist person, or more likely, a single song person. I choose to see this as a sign of growth. Getting more than just one flavor in the bites I take. But it's all ice cream.
Every so often I get discouraged about a future that doesn't have a discernible outline. I can look at an upcoming month and groan at the prospect of the same, all over again. The same mattress with the springs poking through, the same old blue bike along the same worn streets. The same office, the same patterns of movement through my day, the same catching-of-breath the minute I'm back home. The same measured bits of friendship and activity in the evenings and on the weekends. The same couch with the same lamp and the same stack of books I still haven't finished. I catch myself right about there. I'm being a fool. This is a good life, it is! There are problems, and there are strangers living in my basement, and there are things about me that I haven't figured out how to fix yet, but my life is very sweet. And after I'm thankful again, the stasis shifts anyway. New faces pop up, old faces look at me differently. I still am surprised! I make plans to spend a weekend hiking and sharing someone else's family. And I work out hitching a nine hour ride to visit someone I really love, and I talk about camping trips and museums and the new Harry Potter movie, and well hell, I'm going to be just, just fine.