it is, in its own way, interesting, the way in which the clinical nature of clinical depression is drawn so nakedly at times when your life is stable. usually it feeds on itself such that there are always reasons why you feel the way that you do, and you can point to them; you can say to yourself "i'm unhappy because of x, i'm scared because of y" -- and these are true things but they are also excuses, in a sense, in the way that one's brain seeks excuses for the way it functions; it allows the placing of blame, and the displacement of focus on yourself.

so then, you know, you look at your life, and things are kind of okay -- you can pay your bills, you're doing well in school, you've even Met Somebody -- and your brain goes into fucking overdrive because it was not built to handle being okay; you can, at times of painful clarity, almost literally watch the self-sabotage in action. frantic attempts to create something that you can point to and say, that! that is why i am unhappy. that is a thing and it is fixable and therefore maybe someday i will not feel like this.

in this absence of that, of things that are broken and therefore fixable, when you are alone in the white noise of your own head, there is a bleakness in knowing that this is what you're left with, when you have run out of excuses for yourself. drink more, sleep more, self; claw harder at those sad little defense mechanisms you have enacted against yourself. you will still be here in the morning, little girl; little girl, you're no better than me.

i am more proud, i think, of being able to change a tire on my bicycle than i am about anything, any test scores or awards, any poems or creations or accolades.

it is concrete, finite: before, i could not do this thing, and now, now i can.

maybe this is just an illustration, a metaphor for one of my own demons: the ocean of space between talent and skill. one you are born with, you have no responsibility for its insistent intrusions into your life, no reason to take pride in it; you are blonde, you can play the piano, you remember the nuanced meanings of words, you have freckles on your shoulders.

a skill is something towards which you work; you start with nothing, and then the first thing you do is you fail, you fuck it up, over and over you fuck it up, until you can do it: you can throw a frisbee or hit a golf ball; you can fix the computers, the plumbing, the broken étagère; play the guitar, cook a steak, make the fucking bed like a normal person.

one of these i have in self-satisfied/self-hating abundance, and the other wholly absent: a justifiable source of shame. i can talk pretty sometimes, i can punctuate like a motherfucker, and i can barely iron a shirt without setting something on fire.

but at least i can change a bicycle tire.

half-life

I dreamed that I owned a flower shop;
that I lived my life in orchids, in hydrangeas,
wallpapered in baby's breath.
The seasons flickered through the window glass:
tulips marked the springtime; vivid asters,
then chrysanthemums in the autumn air; the flash of poinsettia
bright against the snow.

Blank-faced men drifting to me,
identical, their palms turned upwards,
clutching for something:
I pressed roses and marigolds into their outstretched hands,
stroking my fingertips over petals,
over flesh and thorns.

I grew old inside my flower shop,
feeding the faceless men;
they came for the tulips, clung to the asters,
to the fading mums.
There was the murmur of water, the laughter of windchimes,
the faceless men with poinsettias, bright against the snow.

tattoo

This is what happens when my mother isn't so much around to temper my father and my sort of warped sense of hilarity.

I'm feeding the cat and thinking of Far Side, and mutter "cat fud" to myself and snicker. Twenty minutes later, I come out of my bedroom and open the door to find this stuck on it:

Which cracked me up to no end that he got the reference, when I don't think I even quite knew what was going through my head at the time.

Now half of our house is covered in things like this:



As it will probably remain for several more weeks, if not indefinitely.

Things I have found while cleaning my room:

pizza hut pay stub from 2003
cord to a bathrobe I don't own anymore
detachable inner pocket to a suitcase I don't own anymore
the tote bag equivalent of the three-wolf-moon shirt
full page sketch of snail races I probably drew in middle school
nirvana in utero cassette tape insert
a girl scout badge that I cannot interpret
homemade national antelope day tshirt
2 pairs of leather pants

And I haven't even touched the closet, or oh god the desk drawers...

Devolution

Or, Why I Need a Dark Cave in the Desert to Get Anything Done.

12:30 pm.
OK. I've opened my project, fixed up the template. I'm ready.




Look: notes on the left, vitamin water, chewing gum. I'm clearly a girl with a purpose. Note for posterity's sake the internet wire duct-taped to the closet door in the upper-left corner, as well as the keyboard firmly set into the desk drawer.

12:45 pm.
Remember that Rafael Nadal is playing in Wimbledon. Some other stupid sporting event seems to be all over the television. I take to the internet.


An understandable distraction.

1:45 pm.
I have ten whole minutes of audio done! Only... 248 minutes to go. Spent 15 minutes trying to decipher an unintelligible name. Google's failing me. This is upsetting. Inexplicable segue into looking up salsa recipes.

2:00 pm.
FISHING CONTEST IN THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT THIS IS CLEARLY AN APPROPRIATE EXPENDITURE OF MY TIME.

2:08 pm.
Didn't win.

2:11 pm.
But Nadal did!




Again: understandable, I think.

2:35 pm.
16:48 minutes done! Obviously, this is the time to upload to this blog so I can update from here. That way I can close the other MS Word document, because it was distracting me from the one I should be working on. Yes, that's way I haven't been getting much done. Definitely.

3:11 pm.


Accomplished.

3:31 pm.
Literally nothing. I think I got a glass of water. Guess that took 20 minutes.

4:30 pm.
32 minutes done! I thought that I was like 1/5 done, and then I remembered that an hour is 60 minutes, not 100. Not sure how that played out in my head.

5:30 pm.
I guess I've guilted myself into actually doing some work. 60 minutes done; under 200 to go!

8:30 pm.
I've officially ADD'd out of my own ADD recording.