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.

in which TV dinners are like cadavers

I had to go to work at 5:30 pm today, and since I could only haphazard that I'd probably get home somewhere between 7:30 and 11:30, my mother told me she had gotten me some dinner for whenever I got home, which was totally sweet and thoughtful. And she knows that I'm trying to avoid eating the really grody chemical soup like foodish things, so she got me some chicken teriyaki frozen dinner than appeared to be made of food ingredients and not a misplaced high school chemistry lab report like most TV dinners.

Which, as I said, really thoughtful! However, during my years as a TV dinner connoisseur (I like to pretend that I'm past that stage and not just in a temporary interlude of generally having access to one Actual Meal a day) I learned a couple things to which I have yet to find much exception. One is that Asian food, regardless of how awesome it may be in general, is almost never remotely palatable in TV-dinner form. It's all oily, but like BP-oily (too soon?) and not like delicious olive oil oily, and soggy and squeaky like Chinese takeout chicken seems to me. Basically at best it's all like that really terrible Chinese delivery food that's so fucking awful it's awesome, except without the part about it being awesome.

The other thing I learned, which should be palm/forehead common sense, is that it is absolutely not possible to marry the twin dreams of healthy and tasty when you're packaging up a pre-prepared meal to freeze and stick in the frozen-food aisle of Wal-Mart awaiting the tender ministrations of a microwave to bring out its fresh and delicious goodness. You can't do things like that to fresh ingredients and expect it to come out tasting anything like it would with all those chemicals to do whatever it is they do. It'd be like putting a fresh and formerly healthy young corpse in a coffin without embalming it and expecting it to be rosy-cheeked and non-squishy a week later. Except I think the freezer bit throws the analogy off, and I don't know anything about embalming or the decomposition process and I'm goddamn well not researching it. Point being: it's gross.

A lot of people -- or at least some people, or at least maybe one or two people -- swear by the Kashi brand, but I still have found that it tastes like ass. Like chemical-oozing ass, even, despite the nonthreatening ingredient list. Whereas, you know, Stouffer's lasagna, with its ingredient list that takes up half the box and most of it ending in -ides and -enes and -ynes and shit, is fucking delicious. Especially when you burn it a little and you get the burnt lasagna crust on the sides, which is the best part.

So I threw my decidedly non-lasagna-crust-edged chicken teriyaki away and ate bread & butter for dinner. And died a little inside.

I am well-adjusted.

Every two weeks, my mother has a pair of cleaning people come in to scour the house. I endorse this, because for a house of three people with no children or dogs and an appropriately fastidious cat, the house gets a little, well, gross. I don't know how: I exist almost entirely within the confines of my bedroom; my father is only home and awake for a small handful of hours; and I'm reasonably confident that my mother is not running around the house dumping applesauce on the loveseat and shoveling dirt from the garden on the living room floor. But it happens. Well, not the applesauce. And the cleaning people -- is there a term for cleaning people that doesn't sound sort of condescending and vaguely derogatory? Because if so I don't know it. But so the cleaning people go buck-nutty; they're here for like two hours, washing and scrubbing and scouring until at least bits of the house look like a normal house and the smells always reminds me of coming home from school on Friday afternoons after our old cleaning lady had been there all day and it's awesome.

But thanks to whatever combination of bizarre neuroses of which my brain is composed, I am seized by a paralytic, inexplicable, and absolute discomfiture while they're here. Like it's vitally important that I hide in my room and avoid all social interaction, and I have no idea why. They're a nice pair of women, friendsish with my mother -- I think it's a mother/daughter pair who opened a cleaning business to fund college education -- this complex has nothing to do with them. But when I walk out to the kitchen while the floor is being mopped, I'm instantly filled with this cocktail of feeling intrusive, lazy, guilty, and uppish because I can't think of the right word, as well as suddenly convinced that I am somehow tracking dogshit all over house even though I am barefoot, have not been barefoot outside, and also don't have a dog.

So I hide. They don't bother with my bedroom, not because of any sense of privacy but because really what's the point. But I also have to kind of quietly and unobtrusively shut my door in case it's audible and they realize I'm shutting myself in, because obviously that's what people pay attention to when they're doing their jobs and trying to get on with their day. Obviously. Like I've had to pee for like two hours, and the bathroom is right next to my room, and I still haven't because I heard the sounds of scrubbing like a fucking hour ago and what if I open the door and I have to embark on nominal social interaction with someone who is scrubbing the toilet and clearly secretly ruminating on what a disgusting and slightly creepy person must be from the state of the bathroom and the glimpses of my landfill of a bedroom and the whole hiding-in-it thing. My brain and my bladder are locked in an epic battle of physiology versus neuroticism and I'm 100% sure both lost awhile ago.

Seriously, brain. I know you've had a lot on your... self, lately. I know you're worried about your/my job, and health, and the dead cockroach that will someday need to be dealt with, and what the fuck are you doing with your life oh my god. Do you really have need to build up routine housecleaning into a biweekly mental crisis of zombie apocalypse levels? At least you don't yet have me crouched behind the door with a baseball bat listening for the telltale sounds of Windex, but come on.

So, I have an OKCupid account. I'm always slightly embarrassed about this, though not hugely, since, let's face it: if you're reading this, meeting people off the internet probably is or has been a part of your life also, to some capacity. I think in the past five or six years I've met maybe fiveish people from there, all of whom were relatively normal and none of whom I was particularly interested in, if I recall.

Anyway, today I get this email:

---

intercat:

We are very pleased to report that you are in the top half of OkCupid's most attractive users. The scales recently tipped in your favor, and we thought you'd like to know.

How can we say this with confidence? We've tracked click-thrus on your photo and analyzed other people's reactions to you in QuickMatch and Quiver.

. . .

Your new elite status comes with one important privilege:

You will now see more attractive people in your match results.

This new status won't affect your actual match percentages, which are still based purely on your answers and desired match's answers. But the people we recommend will be more attractive. Also! You'll be shown to more attractive people in their match results.

. . .

Suddenly, the world is your oyster. Login now and reap the rewards. And, no, we didn't just send this email to everyone on OkCupid. Go ask an ugly friend and see.

--

Like... I find this disturbing on so many levels, I don't even know where to begin. Suddenly -- suddenly! -- the world is my oyster! Yesterday, when apparently I was in the uglier half of users, man, I was boned. Except not so much, I guess.

What the fuck is wrong with you, Internet?

I am waffling terribly on where I want to move come fall.

Toronto is where I'll go if I can, if it works out -- also if I ever, um, finish applying -- and, of course, if I can afford it.

But so that's off the list, as a given will-if-I-can.

Minnesota is somewhere near the top, which may seem odd. It's nowhere I'd plan to spend more than a few years -- well, there is nowhere I'd plan to spend more than a few years -- but it's appealing for maybe two or three years. And Minneapolis seems to be both internally and externally considered a pretty solid place to live -- particularly if you're someone for whom Boston wasn't northerly enough.

And sometimes there's the unsurprising and oh-so-pervasive allure of NYC. There is the cliché that everyone should live in New York City at some point in their life, and I think there's some truth to it for many of us. But I also know I'd never live there indefinitely either, and I'm reluctant to return to soul-sucking, skull-fucking jobs just to maybe pay my bills and once in awhile splurge on, like, some toothpaste, just feed my own inescapable transience and flee into the huge vast lullaby of anonymity.

So then there's the identical motivation and opposite context of moving to, say, Laramie, Wyoming, which if any one of you doesn't admit that the first image in your head is Oregon Trail, you're lying. Or like Fargo, which is something almost resembling a real place, but not quite. Not quite.

Or the Pacific Northwest, Seattle or Portland, which friend after friend after friend tells me I'd love. And I know some people there, which is both a plus and a minus, perpetually. I'd love the weather there in the summer, and be sad because it's not quite cold enough in the winter.

Or Montreal, or Paris, or Bretagne or Sapporo or Edinburgh or, or, or.

Yes, I'm well aware that the entirety of the above may be summed up as Anywhere But Here.

I think that smartphones herald the death of the Great American Road Trip.

This is something I've been trying to put into words since returning home from my last one, which was my first in many a year -- it's nobody's fault, but I think the "point," as it were, of a road trip is to get away from your life for a little bit. And if you have instant access to all of your social circle at home, to your email, your Facebook, it's just like dragging your same situation onto the highway; you barely notice the changes in scenery when you're waiting for a text back, for a response to your Facebook post, for an email from your job.

The road trip-era in my life spanned about a year from 2002-2003: even discounting all the DC <-> Florida trips, and the myriad little wanderings around the Mid-Atlantic, I think I ended up driving through something like 45 states in that year. And we had cell phones, but when you have to step out and make a call, you still can step back into your world away from the world. There isn't the intrinsic violation of "see you guys in a week!" as when your social communication is continued unbroken.

But it is imfuckingpossible to resist. The entirety of the internet is there in the doorhandle: it's like, what's it going to matter if I check this text; if I scan this email; if I browse my social networking sites (tm). And it does matter; you're locked into a little bubble with whomever you're off gallivanting, and it drives a wedge into the bubble when you're off in your Real World of which I am not a part, or I'm off in my Real World, of which you are not a part. But the ability to maintain our social lives without anything but cell phone internets -- it's just no longer realistic to expect anything.

And this makes me sad.

I know that the relationship I was in over the course of those trips was something that, in all honesty, most people probably haven't experienced -- and the better for them, considering how brutally unhealthy it was pretty much from the get-go. But the immediate, speechless intensity of connection was a prime setting for a pair of screwed up transients to take to the highway; it's not fair to compare other things to that.

On the other hand, most road trips that are taken for the sake of taking a road trip are ostensibly taken with someone, even if it's not somebody with whom you're maybe falling in love as above. I don't think there's a possible balance anymore, when we have the world literally at our fingertips no matter where we are, where we can be nowhere and can be everywhere we need to be at the same time.

Or maybe I just have home issues: maybe where other people want to be in their homes, and don't crave escape from that life, I am perpetually aching, aching to be anywhere but here.

So I'm thinking of starting a blog of something slightly more coherent than my mostly drunk, bitter and generally emo livejournal -- which, thankfully, not many people have access to and fewer read.

Staring at a single sentence isn't going well thus far, but it's hard to even pretend like I'm trying to write when the only things I write are brainless facebook blurbs and mostly drunk, bitter and generally emo livejournal entries.

So we'll see.