frenetics

I have been going at a pace you might call 'vibrate' since 4:00AM this morning, when I woke with a mind full of buzzing bees and jellyfish. I'm gearing up, though, for a new set of sheets and a new comforter (they don't match) and, hey, sharing.

baked goodness

Yesterday, I was sitting on the floor in the bedroom of my new apartment and I said, 'I want cake,' and my boyfriend said, 'I have some at home--come home with me and you can have a piece.' So I did, and yes, it was exactly what I wanted. This morning I was sitting on the corner of my desk, alphabetizing things and thinking about donuts, and a few minutes later a student came to our office door with a shy thank you and half a box of donuts. She said she'd brought them in for a class and had quite a few left over, and she wanted to give the rest to us because she is so grateful for all the help we've given her this year. So, I ate two. And yes, they were exactly what I wanted.

chemo

I had chemicals today, too. I was on my knees scrubbing out the tub and then the oven and then the sink.

hope

I was just thinking, with so many stressors cycling through my head, 'HOW am I going to get through this week/season/life?' but then a maintenance guy held the elevator for me and as I pushed my cart ahead of me he said, 'Bad day? Don't worry... it's all going to get better. You'll survive.'

pantomiming a please

I couldn't figure out how to keep my hands still as I was arguing for my right of self-rule. I'm not as good at being managed as I thought I might be. But it's fine, don't worry, I know what I'm doing. How do I put 'TRUST ME!' into my fingertips?

way too much lacking

I have been feeling feisty, too. Want to sit down on the floor in the middle of all this waste and dirt and boxes bulging at the seams and let out a stream of invective. I found an old bamboo flute and I almost broke it over my knee. I mainlined a bag of goldfish crackers and didn't care that the crumbs were getting all over. I bought the expensive birthday card although god knows it's just a farce. I am close, so close, to (just out of misplaced daydreaming) grabbing my sleeping bag and using my new apartment key (the only one that works--the other two I had made this evening must have been put into the machine upside down by the elderly guy at the counter, because they're mirror images instead of copies and this is irritating) and sleeping out on the desolate new carpet in the echoey, blank slate that doesn't at all feel like home (what does? All I can think of is the way the back porch used to feel under my back at the house I lived in downtown a few years ago, and how--the only place in my life I did this--I used to lie down on the smooth planks and look up at the trees and press the phone to my ear every night). I have to leave the house early in the morning again tomorrow, I have to go to offices downtown and I have to get these damn keys sorted and I have to fill out forms and change addresses and pick up a recycling bin. I will want to come back and sleep. But I have to do SOMETHING with all this excess. The truth is, I need a day of detox--I'm flooding my system with salt and bitterness. I am feeling dirty and thick and unlovely, and I'm sorry, but I do forget, I FORGET what it's like to be held and be beheld as good. Right now I am not.

over the weekend

I might (not today but someday) like to think that the hotel we stayed in this weekend was haunted by a mischievous boy-ghost who trapped us in an elevator
and
I might like to think that in the heavy-with-history tavern half a block away, as we stood by the brick wall halfway down the bar, the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe shattered the ceiling light above my head and tossed the metal base of the fixture on the left side of me and the broken glass it had held on the right. He was nice enough to keep any of it from hitting me. I appreciate the courtesy.

I'm growing transparent

I am falling into a habit of accessing my emotions. Huh. I guess it would be clearer to say that I'm falling into a habit of allowing others to access my emotions. I have been so many things today, and the only time I kept what was inside me hidden was this evening on the couch in my parents' living room when mom told me the cancer has spread. That, that was just me not wanting to cry in front of my brothers' girlfriends. Not today, anyway.

There were so many things about today that riled me up and caused me to ball my fingers into fists--unexplained silences and the ridiculous wallowy self-doubts they cause, barking dogs, security deposits, Hatetris, dead batteries, sticky apple juice, wet socks, fucking cancer. But ah, I did manage to make it back on foot to the mechanic's to pick up my car one minute before they closed. And I did spend an evening being sly and silly and bouncing a sparkly blue ball down a hallway. And I did reap some of the (chocolate) benefits from care packages sent to my mom. And I did lie on my back on the couch that the rest of the family sees as a miracle and I see as some bang-up good luck. And I did step on the accelerator and fly down a dark country road at 75 miles an hour with Bach blaring through my speakers.

I am tirelessly on a quest for symmetry, as always. So I see that I'm hitting a balance here, and I'm glad. I'll let you see that I'm glad.

What's more, I have the day off work tomorrow and I'm spending the whole wonderful weekend on an adventure in an unfamiliar city with two of the most fantastic people I know. And this weekend I won't deny that there are things in my life that are scaring the composure out of me, but I will acknowledge them and keep moving, because that's the way. The new way.

6:15 AM blues

I feel... gross. The way you do when you spend a futile evening sitting on your butt waiting for the phone to ring and then go to bed early but are too tight and all it is is not sleep not sleep NOT SLEEP and even when you do drift off you wake up for an hour at 2AM and are so restless and hungry that you grab a bag of pretzels and eat them while sitting cross-legged on the floor of your newly clean closet. It's not the best place to be at 2AM. And then the alarm goes off a half hour earlier than its normal early because today's the day with all those extra bothers in it, and they are getting started with a trip to drop your car off at the mechanic's and walking to work from there, and it's not really farther than you tend to walk, anyway, but it's from a different angle, and besides, it's chilly outside. Don't get me started on the way your eyes feel this morning, the way they recoiled away from the light and flinched when you came near them with a contact lens. You still feel the middle of the night pretzels bubbling in your stomach and you are just going to have to suck it up and take this, aren't you?

enough is enough

I am moving next week and I am going to become a minimalist. I mean, my own version of minimalist. It's still somethingsist. It's probably even too-muchist. But I am going to learn to live with less. It's been more than two years since I've last moved, and while that doesn't seem like a long time, it has been. It's felt permanent, and that's why there are things on the top shelf of my closet that I've never seen. And boxes that have been full since high school. I have been filling bag after bag of stuff to give away and throw away and forget about. I grew up as someone whose spaces, even when clean and dusted, couldn't escape being cluttered. So I'm going to try and get over that. It's my new-apartment resolution. It's my OH WHY NOT attempt at becoming better.

gapejawed

The part of my brain that is the thesaurus is failing me, because I've run out of synonyms for 'grateful' and 'freaked out' and 'anticipating the sunrise.'

finding the bliss

I will sit on the porch in the noontime sun and eat a big bowl of my mom's homemade applesauce, and I will be grateful for sandwich meat, for senses of humor, and for the way last night a touch on the shoulder was properly interpreted as meaning wrap me up in your arms.

writing about you

I really liked it when you drove by 45 minutes into my 50 minute walk and stopped to let me in the car, saying you'd just been thinking of me. And I liked the way you complimented me, though I was sweaty and grimy, and I definitely liked the way you kissed me as you dropped me off and the way you told me you love me. You said, 'I love you so much.' And baby, I heard that. I will keep that with me.

my week; a recap

I've worn the same earrings all week, and I wonder why I don't just DO that. It's been a nice sort of symbolism.

The other day I found the most lovely compost-related poem ever. Compost. Like decomposing plants and organic materials. I keep re-reading it because it's kind of inspirational.

I've been playing in the pit for a high school musical this week, because I always say yes when someone asks me to. And it's not as if I don't want to. I get paid, y'all. Also, I have this thing where I always totally fall in love with the kids. Even when they're not... they're not that good.... Neither am I, frankly. Or I haven't been lately. My upper register has been hopelessly swoopy because I'm tired and trying to play softly and don't give a damn about breath support.

Here's something new: after a few weeks of experimentation without any dire consequences, I have decided that I don't believe in deodorant. But this is me today. You may want to ask again in July.

I keep making mistakes at work. Skipping pages, ruining files, mistyping numbers. I even had to have a replacement flatbed scanner brought in to my office. Have written more emails of apology this week than I have in the first few months of this year combined. The worst are the times I get the corrective phone call before I catch myself and am caught off guard. Oh good morning to you, too, and yes, that was my fault. I sometimes tell the voice on the other end that I'm sorry, it was my mistake. I say, I'm going through a transitional phase here. Well, aren't I always?

I blame my muddledheadedness on the fact that I've gone straight from my bed to my job to rehearsals to bed all week and this means I've barely even had time to keep up with The Colbert Report. Also, haven't had like ANY time with my man.

Well, aside from yesterday... he was wearing a tux and I was wearing the smell of his skin on my arms and a coating of goosebumps and I was listening to the 1812 Overture from a pew. This is a good defense against the whirl that will be this weekend.

You know, this weekend. With the talks about chemo and talks about moving boxes and talks about how breakable our spirits really are, and all this speckled in between musical performances in a tiny town forty minutes away.

overdue

Today I am
70% sure that all the studying students are

staring

at me

as I push my book cart through the library.

Which is kind of a waste of their energy,
because it was just yesterday afternoon that I
WD-40ed
the crap

out of that sucker's squeaky wheels.

TRUE OR FALSE

Real emeralds are worth more than synthetics
but the only way to tell one from the other
is to heat them to a stated temperature,
then tap. When it's done properly
the real one shatters.
I have no emeralds.
I was told this about them by a woman
who said someone had told her. True or false,
I have held my own palmful of bright breakage
from a truth too late. I sense the principle.

-John Ciardi

acting

I am full to the brim of mental tumors and high school musicals and fog machines and long drives home with the radio cranked up loud. This is one of those weeks that keeps me going every day, all day, and doesn't leave me room to stop and think. I guess I shouldn't complain--thinking, lately, has been getting me nowhere. This week I'll replace thinking with watching a fake governess and a fake captain and a fake family of seven fake fall in love with each other in a scuffed high school auditorium while I sit slouched down in my chair in the pit.

auspicious start

And when I say auspicious, I mean this new year of my life is already well played, because it began an hour ago with beer from the bottom of a pitcher and a gift bag full of peeps and a rendition of the Beatles' birthday song played to me from stage by my boyfriend's band. He looks so good in red.

on a Friday afternoon

I hate it when
pink highlighter forces me to scan in gray
but I love
the bowl of birthday guacamole
(and peeps rolled into sushi)
and the sound of the printer
latching onto a fresh sheet
of purple

malignancy

Why don't I have any ice cream in the house? This would be the perfect evening for ice cream. If I had some I'd probably overdo it, just like I've just smudged nail polish along the sides of my toenails. Because I don't have any restraint today and I don't have a steady hand. Because, oh, this is such a cliche, but it is NOT FAIR, and WHY couldn't it have been ME instead who got the diagnosis of cancer on a beautiful spring morning? It is such an affront, this disease. I am so terribly pissed off that it had to be my mother who caught its bullet in her breast. I barely knew my mom's mother because she died when I was young of this same disease, and this fact offends me even further. I am thinking about time bombs and radiation and the fact that I do not know how to hem my own pants. So this canNOT be the end. It just can't.

love story

THE reason I am smiling as I sit at work on a Monday morning, just hours before my mother undergoes a biopsy on a lump in her right breast that is like a peach pit, an insidious, dark evil peach pit: am remembering yesterday evening, curled up in green and spinning lightly from the rum still in my system, warmly wrapped in a borrowed sweatshirt three sizes too big and arms just the right size, we were kissing and thanking each other for being and I closed my eyes and he licked my eyebrow. ‘What the hell did you just do?’ He did it again. Like the fluffy calico cat had earlier that day to my parents’ dog as we all waited for the Easter ham, he held me down and cleaned my eyebrow with his tongue. He delights me sometimes, so much that I can only make croaking, crooning noises from my throat. Ah, you.

how I am ending the day

I was sitting in the new grass--sort of an inky gray green under the stars--at the top of the hill and I saw a burst of fireworks down in the distance across the valley. For a moment I wished I had someone beside me to back up my eyes with their own, but before I'd even finished that thought I heard proof--the faint echoed bang, a few seconds too late but attached all the same to the bright ball of sparks I'd just seen. And then another, and another. I don't know why someone would set off fireworks late in the evening of Good Friday, but I'm glad they did, because I felt rewarded. Here I am, being really damn selfish but trying to pretend I'm not, being over-tired and under-positive, and despite my disappointment in me there are fireworks in the distance.

I am in an empty house this weekend. I do get used to the way I rattle around when I'm the only one here, but solitude doesn't fit nearly as well with who I am these days than it might have in the past. I am trying to keep my back straight and I am trying to remember how I used to always rely on myself first and not second. It's hard. I have gotten into the habit of leaning and so when times come when there's nothing to lean on, I find myself toppling backwards.

But I will pretend this is my cabin in the woods, and I'll wake up tomorrow morning with the sun streaming in.

aloneliness

It's very easy to stop wanting an empty house the minute you've gotten one.