I wore red shoes that night. Stood, shoulders slanted back, mic in hand, hair falling, like Greta Garbo's, only deeper, blacker, in my face at an angle.
You sat, my friends and past lovers framed you, and, sauntering, I upstaged myself. I breathed words harsh like cleaning powder, coagulating in your lungs.
The future spelled out in so many words, my red shoes tilted with the lip of your glass, as the thick black of guiness contrasted with the bark brown of your lips.
Now I understand, whispers Sheryl Crow my voice is blending with knives now, words like icicles drip from my dead lips, sour cherry blue, flab flops open
drag wind into lungs already scarred in blunt lines.
As I sit here writing this I'm looking at an old picture I took many years ago. It's a picture of the moon, risen yellow and shimmering through the harshness of bare winter trees. It's a picture I took looking off the porch of the cabin I once lived in. There are certain times in our lives that come to define us, these are the times we tell about again and again, the narratives that shape the story we share about ourselves. These times are frighteningly important, and rarely, if ever, do you know a time like that when it's happening. I'm happy to count myself among the few who has been aware of quite a few of these times in the moment of them. Maybe I'm really self-aware, but I think it's more that I'm just really observant and I pay attention to things that aren't just flopping or flowing along in the normal way. In thinking on all of this I'm thinking about what emotions end up defining us to ourselves. For a long time for me it's been the emotion of sadness, depression, a sense of general lack. Not loss, but lack, the thing inside of me that's supposed to create happiness around me just isn't there. That's what I've believed, and in many ways I still do. I'm thinking back now, to a conversation I had once with my ex-fiance. He told me then that he didn't think he was capable of the emotion of fear. That he'd never been afraid of anything, and unlike someone who was posturing or believed that fear was always a negative, his voice didn't have a note of brag in it. It was totally matter-of-fact and a little mystified that he didn't feel something that most people, if not all, automatically do nearly all the time. He's come to know that he's just as able as you or me to feel fear, but it takes more to evoke it in him. It took a personal catastrophe (what it is really doesn't matter) to bring it out, and I was there to see it. To hold him, to comfort him, and most importantly to force him to give in to it and to feel it fully. To let the fear completely take him over for a little bit, and then to have me to hide inside. It took every ounce of strength I had to be there for him. To really, completely, help him through the hardest defining moment, possibly, of his entire life. Definitely one of them, if not number one. Yet, as with most things, fear has many different faces, aspects, and the terror he experienced with me is only one kind of fear. Anything done in protection is done partially out of fear, and if he really felt no fear at all ever, he would never try to protect himself or anyone else. And he does protect, quite a bit. I was watching the last episode of season six of Buffy tonight. For some of you that will mean something, but for most it probably won't. Doesn't matter. There is a moment when Buffy and her sister Dawn realize the world is not going to end (not really a spoiler, given that we all know there's a seventh season) and Buffy bursts into tears. She turns to Dawn and says "I had it all wrong, I don't want to protect you from the world, I want to show it to you" and that had a lot of meaning for me. Because I realize that I don't shield my kids from the world. From the terror that's out there. In many ways I encourage everyone I love to walk up to the cliff's edge, look down, and take a leap, having faith that you will either fly, or that hitting the bottom won't be that bad. Even if it is, you have people to pick you up. To face fear, to feel it completely, to face misery, to face pain, not to avoid it, not to shy away from it. And I realize that I'm not really afraid of anything anymore. There are things that make me feel panicky, like the possibility of getting evicted or having my power shut off, but I know I'd figure something out. I'll make it work somehow, without anyone's help if necessary. I'll take care of my daughter and I'll make a way for myself in the world, and no matter how bad it gets I'll get through it and find something worth living for. I have to, there's really no choice, I have another human being who needs me to. Sometimes I wish for that to be gone. That weight of responsibility, but if I didn't have it, I'd die. There's no doubt in my mind, I already came close once. I gave up on life, I gave up on the world, and I've come terrifyingly close recently. Knowing that Aurora needs me to be me, to be strong, to be the powerful woman I am, that gives me the strength to keep going. If that weight goes away, I have to find something to replace it with. Because, if I do my job, there will come a day when she no longer needs me. Except that she'll still want me, and if I fail in her eyes, I've failed completely. I was talking with my lover the other day about jealousy and about rules and about polyamory, and specifically about our group relationship. And I realized something that made me take a step back and catch my breath. Both my ex-fiance and my current lover have created schemas about the way to be in a relationship, even moral guidelines and rules for themselves, as well as criteria for being attractive, to avoid getting left. To avoid the pain of falling in love and having that love leave you, or not love back in the first place. Later, on another day, the same lover asked me why I carried this weight, why I refused to let anyone take the burden. It's not that I refuse, it's that it's not possible. No one can take away the burden I carry, because it's the burden of taking care of myself. If someone takes that away, I'm stripped of everything. If my lovers past and present have created rules to protect themselves from getting left, or having a relationship fail (not that they don't, but that's the eventual goal....isn't it for just about everyone?) then why have I created my morals and rules? I asked myself this question because I realize I've been left so many times in so many different ways that the pain is so familar that even though it's soul-crushing sometimes I can deal. I have a multitude of coping techniques. I'm not afraid of people leaving. In my mind it's just about an inevitability, especially since I tend to spend time with people much older than me (five or more years) and therefore I'll probably end up watching most, if not all, of the people I love die someday. Yeah, I smoke, but with the genes in my family I'm probably going to live to be at least eighty (almost all of the women in my family have lived that long) and maybe more. So, if I'm eighty, and I tend to surround myself with mainly men, and mainly men significantly older than me, it's likely that I'll die after they do. So, leaving will happen. To me, it doesn't matter if the person is dead, or if we'll never speak again (there's an ex of mine that falls into that category. He lives literally two blocks away, and I'll never speak to him again. It's been three years, I'm pretty damn sure it's sticking) if someone is gone, they're gone. I don't really hold on to a whole lot of hope that they'll come back. And given that I do believe in some sort of individual consciousness, there's a possibility that I'll see someone that's died in some way or another after I've died. So, leaving is inevitable in my mind. So, that's not what I'm worried about, that's not the fear that drives me in making decisions about relationships and love and life. Instead I think I'm worried about losing myself. I'm far more concerned with making rules that protect my freedom. My ability to maintain autonomy, my freedom to love as I do, because I don't really believe it's possible to choose who you love, only who you let yourself show love to. And then that leads to the inevitable question, what is love? When it's shown and shared, that is, because I know what it is inside of me when I feel it. But I show it to each person differently, and I know it's based on situation and timing, and type of relationship. I guess the schism between me and the people I love is that I don't believe that there are any hard and fast rules to make a realtionship work long term. I think there are guidelines that make it more likely, but relationships depend on feeling and expression of feeling, and those aren't always things that are controllable. Maybe they should be, and maybe for some people they are, but for me at this point in my life, I don't understand how it's possible to control your emotions and dictate them all the time. It's funny, because I've been so broken lately. I've felt so horrible about everything, and wanting so desperately to just stay in my house, eat cookies, drink coffee, watch tv and hide from the world. Not have to go out and face it every damn day, and I'm envious of Buffy and the people on that show because they can, so often, just hide for a little bit. There's no kid or house payment or gas bill that forces them out into a job, forces them to depend on other people, forces them to play by other people's rules to survive. Because that's the thing I currently hate the most. Having to abide by other people's rules which have been created out of fear. Because I realize that I'm not really even afraid of losing myself. I know that if I do, then I'm gone, and like death it won't matter because it's happened. There's a difference, I think, in wanting to protect yourself from something and wanting to open up possibilities. I guess it's that split between freedom and safety that I've talked about in philosophy papers. Do I want safety? No. Not at all. But I recognize that it's something that we need. I want freedom. I crave freedom, I want to walk outside and have the whole day in front of me and the energy to take it all in. But at the same time I know that for my daughter, and for the other people in my life, there has to be a sense of safety. So, how do I reconcile my need for freedom with other people's need for security? Because I don't get a warm fuzzy feeling at the thought of coming home to the same people, no matter who they are, for the rest of my life, and having every day be a day filled with warm fuzzys and curlings up in front of a fire or a tv screen. I don't get happy and excited when I think about a lifetime of everyday mundane. It's mind-numbingly exhausting to me. I don't want security, and I never did. When I was a kid I dreamt about freedom. I dreamt about stealing my parents' car (this is when I was like eleven) and just hitting the road. I ran away a couple of times, but got worried that my parents would be sad, so I came home, and my parents never realized that I was running away. Except when I was five and it was kinda obvious that I wasn't in the house at ten o'clock at night. And the scary thing is, I got about a mile away before my mom found me. It took that long to realize I was gone, and I'd told everyone I was running away. I told every single member of my family that I was leaving, I had packed food, I had packed clothes, I wasn't playing. I knew where I was going, and I hoped that the family friend I was going to wouldn't send me back. But then it was cold, and my mom pulled up behind me, and got me in the car and we talked to my dad. It was one of those defining moments. When I realized that it would take a while for people to notice I was gone. That's a side effect of security. Of making the fear go away. You don't face it, you just protect against it, and when the bad stuff happens anyway you don't have any tools to deal with it as it attacks you. Anyway, I wanted freedom. Even at five. Freedom from feeling like no one is paying attention to you. Freedom from feeling like I have to stay somewhere. Freedom to do as I wish, and worrying about me first. But I know that that's not possible. Not in entirety, but I also think it's possible to get close to that, and it doesn't take a laundry list of laws and rules to make it happen. But I think it does take a willingness to walk off that damn cliff. To say, "yeah, this person is going to leave me, so what? So, I can have some beauty for a while, and then go on to a new and different beauty. I can walk through this world and experience it, and it will hurt. It will break me sometimes, and I will put myself back together and keep on fucking walking, because I have feet, I have legs, and I have me, and it's all going to be a damn good story in the end." I don't ever want to live my life ruled by fear. I don't think I do. But I do think I live a life that's reliant on me depending first and foremost on myself. Needing only myself. Because as long as I have that, I don't have to be afraid of anything. So, maybe I am living according to fear, but it's a fear of fear. Maybe hearing that quote so long ago just cemented itself into me. I will lose things. I will lose people. I will lose jobs, and respect. And I'll gain people. I'll gain jobs and respect. And in the end maybe it will even out, maybe it won't. But what I don't want to do is live my life wondering, "What if I hadn't been so afraid of getting hurt?"
I know I need a little safety. But I don't want that safety to get in the way of my freedom. I don't want it to restrain me. And right now, all the things I have to do to maintain my security are taking away my freedom. All the things that I'm trying to accomplish are wrapped up in a need to pay bills, eat food, keep a roof over my head.
More to come in a later blog. I don't have a great ending yet, but this has already gone on way too long.
Just when you thought diversity wasn’t an issue...
Current mood: Amused
Category: Amused News and Politics
Heard this on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and had to share.... 'Black Guy' booth livens up Corvallis Saturday market By KYLE ODEGARD Corvallis Gazette-Times
The booths at the Saturday Corvallis Farmers' Market have a wild mix of fresh produce, tasty food, plants and flowers.
But this week, a table just outside the bazaar offered something more bizarre — "Meet a Black Guy."
Those who participated in the free service could chat with 21-year-old Corvallis resident Jeff Oliver, and get pictures taken with him.
"It's a statement about diversity in Corvallis. It's not a very diverse place," said Oliver, a lifelong Oregonian. He hoped to promote understanding, break stereotypes and perhaps even provide a comedic moment for hundreds of people strolling along the riverfront.
The booth drew a mixed reaction, however.
"I think this is hysterical. The entire market's great," said Jeremy Stand of the Bronx, who was in Corvallis to visit family. Oregon, in general, is a pretty Caucasian place, he said.
"It's a clever way of engaging people with dialogue about the need for more diversity in the community. It kind of caught me by surprise," said Annette Mills, who moved to Corvallis more than a year ago.
Sherry Littlefield of Corvallis said the booth was unnecessary. She and friend Ron Naasko said they have black friends, and would be voting for Barack Obama for president.
"I guess I don't care what color people are. Either you're a jerk or you're not," Littlefield said.
"I think it's degrading. It's a little bit low class," Naasko said. He added that he wouldn't set up a booth saying for people to meet someone in a wheelchair, like him.
The idea for "Meet a Black Guy" came from Sean Brown, a Linn-Benton Community College student and a co-worker of Oliver's at the Darkside Cinema.
About 50 people signed up to receive e-mail from Oliver and Brown, including their free photos, and several others stopped by the booth, some asking pointed questions of the duo.
Brown didn't know if he and Oliver would be back next week. But if they are, a sign also will say, "Meet a Jewish white guy," Brown said.
"There's a lot of churches here. Not a lot of temples."
My favorite part is the woman who said that she and her buddy had black friends and would be voting for Barack Obama. Because, y'know, if you're suspected of living in a place that isn't real diverse, vote for the black guy, just cuz he's black. That'll make the whole world a less racist place, right?
Okay, so as I was riding home today I was listening to NPR and heard my favorite name, Joss Whedon, and I went on to discover that Joss has a mini-series type thing on the net, just go to http://www.drhorrible.com/ and check it out. It's a musical about a super villain with Neil Patrick Harris (yes, Doogie himself) and Nathan Fillion. It's hilarious and very Joss like. Go. Watch. It's great.
I was just reading back through some past blogs, trying to date something in my head. It kinda worked, but I was struck by something I wrote just before christmas last year. I was hit by the realization that I'm having the exact same problem now that I was then. That I feel like no one in my life really understands my passions. I don't feel like the people who love me really know who I am. And I don't feel like I've had time to figure it out for myself. I know a lot about myself, probably more than most people. But I'm not sure what I really want, aside from art, aside from my career. That I've got figured out, but it took me years and years of thinking about it in depth. Maybe it's that the family I grew up in prized ambition and prized having a plan for the future in terms of career. That's what made you independent in my parents' eyes, that's what made you sucessful. That you have a career that's enriching to your own, private, individual soul. Privacy was really prized in my house, too, and I think I'm a much more private person than I ever really knew. I've been tested lately, by what or who I'm not really sure, but life itself is throwing test after test at me, and I'm not sure I'm passing. I'm just not failing miserably yet.
I want to be 24. I've fought to be taken seriously, to be loved, to be accepted, to be approved of for 24 years. I've tried so hard to be a grown-up, I've dreamt and dreamt of being married, with kids, with a career, and now I'm starting to see the youth I'm letting slip through my fingers. I have the rest of my life to make a family, to craft my art, to make a career. I only have right now to be young, to be carefree and silly, to go have fun. In therapy today my therapist said something really interesting, yet horrifically familar, I said that I wanted to be young. She said, then, that she was surprised when I had originally told her my age, that I seemed so much older than 24. And I do. I've worked so hard at being mature, and I've lived my entire life in the adult world. I was homeschooled until I was fourteen, and then I chose to go to high school. I designed my curriculum as much as possible and I filled out most of the paperwork. I wanted to, I like forms. I grew up listening to intellectual discussions about everything from Proust to Shakespeare to the economy to liberal politics to...well, everything. My parents are intellectuals, and they surrounded themselves with people who wanted to discuss art and politics and the big questions all the time. It's a life that's familar and beautiful to me. But I was also raised by a bartender. I spent the first seven years of my life going to a bar everyday and living that life along with the highly educated one. I saw both sides of the coin, and though in many ways I'm sheltered, I'm also more experienced in many things than most people I've met. People marvel that I've always lived within a few miles of my parents, but I only count living as having a house or apartment that you live in regularly. I also spent four months wandering around Galway when I was fourteen. I also spent a month camping in the mountains of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming with my ex-lover. I also saw first hand the National Rainbow Gathering, and lived with open eyes in a dream world. I lived only a couple of miles from my parents but I lived in a one-room cabin in the middle of the woods.
I lived with my sister, but my daughter was conceived in a loft of a cabin while potatoes were baking all night in a woodstove. I performed a wedding once, when I was seventeen, for a friend and a much older man. It, of course, was not legal, but it was in many ways a real promise, though it faded quickly. And it was a very real ceremony that I took very seriously at the time, and still, looking back, it was something I believed in, though I made sure to put the requisite escape clause in for them. In Wiccan traditional handfastings there is an initial hand-fasting that occurs when people pledge their love for a year and a day. If during that year and a day all goes well, and they want to make the bond truly permanent they have a second ceremony a year and a day after the initial one and they are bonded, through the magic of the earth, for a lifetime. It's one of the smartest things I've ever heard of, try being married for a year, and if it doesn't work, you haven't fucked up, you haven't even broken a huge promise, you've just given yourself the opportunity to get out if it's wrong. And I performed the temporary handfasting for a couple of friends of mine once. How many people have hosted a wedding in their back yard? How many of those people also performed and organized the entire ceremony?
I've lived an extraordinary life so far. But I'm not ready to stop adventuring, really. I think that my cold feet when my own wedding seemed so close had to do with being afraid to commit to a lifetime of certainty. That doesn't really hold a whole lot of comfort for me. Safety and security have their place, and a normal life is something I have craved. Something I still crave regularly. But there's another part of me that needs that unknown. That void in front of me that's full of possibility. I need the enticing flavor of youth, and I need to keep a hold of that wonder that I have when I look out at space between a cliff and the ground. Or when I see pictures of the Ireland I left. Or when I imagine what it will be like when I move to a whole new place. There are things I still want to have be all mine. I'm a youngest child, and maybe I'm overly greedy because of that. Maybe I shouldn't be so desiring of something bigger and better and brighter.
I'm still a kid in a lot of ways. A kid who had a child at twenty-one years old and has been a mother ever since. I grew up really really fast. Faster, really, than most people I know. And I'm not sure that's a good thing, in a lot of ways it's pushed me into a much safer life than I really want. I don't know if I'm ready to settle down and start really making a family. Part of me wants this with an urgency that's palpable, I can taste it. But part of me still wants the ethereal, the magical, the world that's filled with cool green woods and hanging vines, and trees that can open up and become faery wonderlands in a breath. A part of me that wants to read the signs in the stars, and trust that taking another step on a path that I can't see the next bend in is going to be okay. I still want to hold on to being a kid for a little longer, and I wonder if I'm asking too much. If wanting to hold on to my identity as a young woman, as someone who isn't formed yet, in the beautiful words of Joss Whedon, "I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking yet. Someday I'll be a cookie, and I'll be ready to be eaten, but not yet."
Um....this is like the entire year I was fourteen, and I had to share it, this is what I used to dream of, though maybe not the pics, this is what Ireland let me see...
so, a friend of mine posted these addresses, and I think it's a pretty cool way to get to know yourself, so I participated, and I figured I'd give her and you a way to tell me what you really think. I don't care if you mention your name or not, I'm only interested in the results. http://kevan.org/johari?name=Sorcha83 This is for "postive" adjectives that you think describe me.
For quite some time I've been uninvolved in the discussion about politics and the upcoming election.
As a moderate liberatarian there really isn't a candidate who represents all the things I agree with/believe in. I have some friends who are avid Ron Paul supporters, and I'm in support of some of the things he says, but I don't know if I agree on all points, and if I'm going to give my vote to someone basically in order to make a statement, I want to agree completely.
The other night Derand was at my house, and he's significantly more liberal than I am. We were talking politics and I said as I've said before that I wanted more about education. Really, this is my main issue. I care about other things, but being a parent, a student, and someone who wants to eventually teach at the college level, I'm most concerned about what we, as a nation, are going to do about the problems with education. I agree with the voucher system to an extent, because it gives people more choices. I like that idea, I like the idea that I could choose a private school for my children if it's better than the public school in my area. But, I'd much rather have the public school be good enough that I never even consider going somewhere else. As much of a libertarian as I am, I'm also a poor mother and I care about the quality of my kids' education. I also care about the level of education my future students are receiving. The number of people who go into freshman composition in college who are barely reading at an eighth grade or below level is shocking.
More than anything, though, I despise the "No Child Left Behind" act, and it's effect has been devastating on schools ever since it was passed. No longer do parents and teachers have control over the subjects taught, and the types of things focused on in schools. Instead our big national government is telling us what to do, what to believe, what to consider important in educating our kids. This is against everything I believe in. To have our national government telling us what to teach our kids is wrong. And that's what has finally made my decision. I'm on the fence on the war and what we should do. I'm on the fence on healthcare, and I don't really understand the system well enough to take a firm position (except that I don't think fully socialized health care is a good idea, given the state of health care in countries like Canada where the wealthy come here becuase the doctors are of lower quality there). I'm on the fence on social security.
But. Education I know about. I've worked within it, I was raised by a college professor, I choose teaching as my profession, and I'm a parent. Of all the issues on the table, if one thing was going to be the deciding factor it's that. And when I heard McCain say on a youtube video that he says to those who say we should abolish No Child Left Behind "do you want us back where we were before the law was passed?" I yelled a resounding "YES!" at my computer screen. Because before standardized testing starting stealing money from schools at least there was a chance for a school to decide that they could nurture individual abilities. It didn't always happen, but the possibility was there. Now, it isn't.
Obama, on the other hand, thinks the act is foolish. He also believes in attempting to create a universalized preschool system, and to have outreach to at risk parents to help them create a learning environment within the home to prevent kids getting behind at the kindergarten level. He wants to channel more money into grants for college, and try to abolish some of the subsidized loan systems we have going on right now. He wants to bring a focus to math and science, but that's across the board, regardless of who you listen to. As a poetry person, I do sigh, but I agree that math and science are the things that give us great technological progress and create a good image of us in the world's eyes. So, I have to concede that point. Obama also points out the problematic nature of standarized testing, something I've been saying for years.
So, while I'm not a full fledged Obama fan, I've decided that my vote is going to go to the candidate who is speaking my language on education. The candidate who actually seems to understand part of how the educational system works, and how it doesn't, and wants to change it. And, finally, Obama has started saying something beyond "We will change things!" and is now following that up with some good arguments on HOW things will be changed.
So, I have like ten blogs I want to write. I'm starting with a call-to-arms. There's a new show on Fox this fall called "Dollhouse" and it's written, directed and executive produced by my favorite Joss Whedon. This man is amazing, one of the most talented people in television by far. He wrote on "Roseanne" when it was still good, he is the mind behind "Firefly," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Angel," and "Serenity" among others.
I, of course, am petrified. Because Fox is stupid and tends to cancel shows before giving them a full season (especially really good shows). I mean, seriously, they cancelled "Family Guy" (only one of the most popular shows on television like ever!!), and so I figure Joss's show will be good, and thusly will be summarily cancelled within three episodes. So I've decided to write them NOW to beg that they give it at least a full season (Firefly didn't get a full season, and now has a huge fan following). I reccomend any Joss fans out there do the same. Write to them at AskFox@fox.com and tell them you want them to give it a full shot.
Do it. Write them. Save a show before it's even aired. Apparently trying to bring it back is nearly impossible, so let's put the pressure .. they've moved towards cancellation. Drop an e-mail, it takes a second. Again, it's Dollhouse, and it'll be on Monday nights right before 24.
The curves life throws
Current mood: bummed
Category: Life
I hate life sometimes. I mean, really, just when things start to look up, did I really need a big punch in the gut? Both literally and figuratively. First, I wasn't able to finish my work on my independent study so I had to take an incomplete in it. I mean, seriously, what kind of misnomer is that? An incomplete in an independent study. Oy. Then, on Saturday I got some kind of icky stomach flu and I felt like death all day on my first day off from school, and got nothing done. My house is getting dirtier by the second (I really need to clean, ugh), and to top it all off, only one person called just to tell me Happy Mother's Day yesterday. Everyone else who wished me a Happy Mother's Day was a mom and I'd wished them a happy mother's day first. Grrr. Then, as an extra special mother's day present, my daughter drew a very nice picture. On the freaking wall!! So, I get to wash that off along with everything else.
Just because, apparently, my life wasn't shitty enough, my daycare told me today that I was too far behind on my payments to keep bringing my daughter to school. Luckily my significant others have agreed to take her until I can get $1400 together (and I thought I was going to get to do something pleasant with my stimulus payment. *wah*) to pay them off. I'm still buying a pretty dress. Screw it. Sixty or seventy bucks for a new outfit really doesn't seem to be that much to ask for my own personal Mother's Day gift. Seriously, when do I get a break? When do I get to stop calling people in tears because I can't seem to get my life together?
Shouldn't I be a grown-up by now? Shouldn't I be able to handle my finances and take care of my kid, and do eight million other things? hmmm. No. I shouldn't have to do all this, but I guess I just have to take another big breath and get some rest. So that I can get up a half hour earlier to take my rent check to the landlord and drop my daughter off in the next town over. Seriously. When did I get voted Job?
drained
tested
blessed
awake
bummed