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.