theology&geometry

I’m stealing a moment or two from the day to sit down and write, something I have less and less time for as the time marches onward. In a little bit I’ll head out to my eye doctor’s office for my annual prodding. It is a rare event when I go a full year without any degeneration of my sight; this year I’m feeling lucky and I think I might even get my glasses prescription updated, too, since it’s been … oh let’s say four years or so. If you people had any idea how little I can actually see when I’m wearing my glasses, you would call the cops when I got into my car.

Just now as I was making a cup of the world’s most bitter coffee, I looked into the back yard and saw yellow leaves scattered about in a little sporadic blanket of fall foreshadowing. I didn’t dare go out there in the heat to try and figure out which tree is getting a jump start already, but I appreciated the sight. It’s as if the yard is saying, “We know all your flowers are dead right now, but give it some time and maybe you’ll have something else pretty to look at soon.”

I like the growing anticipation attached to this fall. Having a fall baby suits me, I think. I like to imagine myself wrapped up in smart, neutral-colored autumn clothing, walking the neighborhood streets on a carpet of damp asphalt and mottled leaves, my hands clutching my improbably huge belly and my mouth forming a tired smile. (This, of course, in no way resembles what reality is sure to present.) I’m a little less excited to have a winter newborn, however, given how cold this house gets and how bleak winter can feel even when your hormones aren’t racing wildly to recalibrate. “Do not get postpardum,” my mother instructed me bluntly back in May, as if avoiding depression was just something I had not considered before. I look at the rap sheet of all the crazy in my family — particularly the women — and I get a little worried that these major hormonal shifts are going to break something loose in my brain.

Saturday’s yard sale went pretty well, I think. I woke up at 6 and drove around the neighborhood, taping signs to poles to try and corral a crowd. At 7:40 I got back to the house and started setting up tables and sweating profusely. People crept by in their cars, no doubt wondering what he holdup was. I had a real steady crowd for the first hour — which felt like it lasted for two. Amanda came by and set up her table, and throughout the course of the day we got to meet some pretty interesting folks, including a man going to Burning Man (he was looking for costume pieces) and a dude who talked like he was a professional picker of sorts (he had nearly bought a huge lot of collectible Barbies, but couldn’t get the price right). There were people coming by in long-sleeved shirts as I soaked through my dress. We made a little bit of cash but the big thing, for me, was just getting rid of crap. I hated to see some of it go — some man got my nice rice cooker (that I never use) for $5 — and selling things that people have given me ignites all sorts of guilt and anxiety in me, but it has to be done periodically. I am nowhere near a hoarder but I do think like a hoarder sometimes. (“Throwing this thing out that my grandmother gave me will make her die sooner.”) I am perpetually amazed by people who don’t get attached to things, even things they don’t care about but were given to them by people they do. I have a goopy sentimentalism lurking inside me that clings to the most random things. But I have a small house, and it’s becoming overrun with baby gear, and my mantra is becoming I have to do this for MY family now. And that is like a guilt salve, numbing the ache bit by bit.

Up early this Saturday morning. Coffee and a spoonful of peanut butter while I wait on some biscuits to brown. I’ve got the sprinkler running out back, trying to soak the beds and save the flowers from scorching even further. I don’t know how to fight for them in this relentless bastard heat.

I am feeling content at the moment — a delicious concoction inspired by the quiet before the total chaos of what is to come. I can still sit quietly and soothe myself with the tap of a keyboard, and the showers I take occur at a pace that stops way short of frantic. Lately I’ve been thinking about the life I had just a few short years ago and how it seems so foreign now. I miss the frenetic, drunk adventures, but I don’t miss being a total directionless wreck of a person, two drinks always down the hatch and prone to waking up filled with shame. I carry a lot of guilt with me over what kind of person I have been and should be, and it’s fueled in part by my embarrassment over my delayed adolescence. I spent all of high school and college trying to act so grown up that I acted a lot like a reckless child in my mid-twenties once I sloughed off some constraints. I should have gotten that out of my system a long time ago, but I’m a late bloomer in a lot of ways, I guess.

Eh, I don’t know why I’m dwelling on this stuff. It’s more or less inconsequential and here we are with a new game board laid out in front of us and a deck of fresh cards in our hands.

This tiny part of me is balled up, so excited about where my little family is going to go in the coming years. I love Memphis for all its quirks but I’m longing to give it a long kiss goodbye and to take to the road for a new adventure. I came here, knew no one, hated it, and then grew to love it and the people I met once I dug in and opened myself up to it. It’s been six and a half years, which is longer than anywhere else I’ve lived other than my parents’ house growing up. But when I walk outside into the soup that passes for air around here, I have to remind myself that there are places on this Earth that do not spend several months out of the year trying to fry your flesh and obliterate your ability to breathe. There are places on this Earth where you can look up and see an honest-to-God mountain on the horizon, or a seemingly endless sea flanked by sandy beaches. There are sweet, small towns populated not with Klan members but with live-and-let-live folks who don’t spend every waking hour worrying about what the gays are doing. These places are real and we can go there and start new adventures, build new stories, take new photographs, learn new contours of life.

It’s a little ways off, but it’s there in the distance. I can feel it. I hope that’s what I’m feeling, anyway. We’ll never have an easy time of it, I know. We are far too middle class and in far too much debt to ever coast freely. But we’ve got the freedom of possibility and that gives me such hope for what’s to come.

Last night we inched closer to settling on Mister Man’s name. Never would I have imagined going even this long without having a clear idea of what I wanted to call my first son, but that shit is hard, y’all. Name being destiny and all.

We have reached an untenable situation.

Here is the thing with the social media beast we have created.

Originally, the idea was to connect. You’re a computer nerd, I’m a computer nerd, we’re stuck in cubes, staring at glowing rectangles, let’s have some fun. Vast cities shrank and became navigable networks of people who liked what you liked, laughed at what you laughed at, listened to what you listened to, ate what you ate. You learned stuff from the people on your periphery you’d grown to trust based on tiny gives and tiny takes, pixel drip by pixel drip. There was so much information. A lot of it crap. A lot of it gold.

Computers got smaller. Portable. The world caught on. Those big vast cities that had become more navigable lost even more size, and those little social clubs we’d created for ourselves were opened up and put on display for perusal by anyone who bothered to look. We looked at each other, we looked at ourselves. Businesses began to notice where our eyeballs had gone and they decided they needed to be there too. Our bosses showed up. Aunts and dads stopped in and began flipping through our digital scrapbooks that, while not exactly private, were not the sorts of things you might display on the family coffee table either. The digital transfers we made went from semi-private to tangibly public, all while we were goofing off and cracking wise, getting angry, spouting off, sniping, snarking, being irreverent and silly, drunk and disorderly, reveling in life, offering comfort and praise and companionship to our fellow internet kindred spirits. We were being our essential messy selves, out there for anyone to see. Take it or leave it. We accepted that nothing on the internet really ever goes away and we said, “Fuck it. I’m not ashamed. This is who I am.” We found that it was genuineness and sincerity that bound us together best, and we saw through people who could not offer sincerity to us in turn.

And there is the rub.

Companies, now facing down the barrel of a paradigm shift in what people are interested and how they communicate with one another, are looking within their walls for people who understand this new digital landscape enough to be able to at least make an educated guess about what it’s going to look like five, ten years down the road. They rely on these whippersnappers because they have been doing social media — even though that’s not what it’s always been called — for more than a decade now, and they have felt the plate shifts and shaped the direction of the future by the kinds of things they chose to do and what they chose to abandon. They say, “You. You there. You have made this stuff an integral part of your life. Come show us how it works. Come let us in on the secrets.” And you oblige. You say, “Okay. Here is what ‘social media’ means. It means stitching together your messy human self with what you do for a living, what you consume, what you think, what you laugh at, your politics — all of it. It means putting yourself out there. Not marketing You as a Brand, although some will try to do that and the rest of us will laugh. It means making yourself fully open to interpretation, ridicule, love. It means opening yourself up as a person — an actual potentially unlikeable person — to the world.”

And these companies, these family members, these organizations — all entities who have interests to protect, institutions to uphold, traditions to respect, neighbors to shush — they get real uncomfortable when confronted by the reality of the intricate web of human social networking and all its messy implications. They say, “We want your authentic voice because that’s what people respond to!” and then they get spooked when you’re a little too authentic, a little too open, a little too fallible, a little off-putting, a little too human. They ask you to reel it back in. Be authentically you but within these boundaries we set. Safety first. Do not spook the herd. Hang your laundry behind this black sheet. Don’t speak out of turn. But be yourself. Have a personality.

Look around you. This is ongoing. Everyone is living this to some degree. Even if you’re not, that just means you’ve probably decided to opt out of the exchange for some reason, but you’re still on the continuum. At some point, someone is going to ask you to do something that seems impossible. Erase who you used to be on the web. Become someone different. Be real but not yourself. Be a different person on every site you frequent depending on the audience. Represent your company 24 hours a day. Inform and enlighten, but don’t get too heavy. Do not offend anyone, even those whose hatefulness begs mocking. Be pleasant! Be sure you understand how to use this technology so you can make new employment inroads and help keep the company afloat. Don’t use this technology on the clock. Fake who you are so you are more palatable to the masses. But don’t lose your edge!

And what of the young ones? Those who never had a chance to live a life outside this new paradigm? Those whose every move from birth has been chronicled on a website or social networking site? How will they be asked to conduct themselves, to groom their every move to make them more attractive to employers and organizations who fiercely guard their superficial reputations? Will those organizations change too? Won’t they have to, once they run out of old people who hold their noses at how the young folks conduct themselves?

I don’t know what the eventual outcome will be but can I just say that it is exhausting trying to navigate it. Absolutely exhausting. I want to shout, “You can’t have it both ways!” to the people pulling the strings.

I feel like my life is an experiment sometimes. (All our lives are indeed experiments.) I weave my personal life into my work life in ways that seem to endlessly complicate both. I have no idea if what I’m doing is inspired or idiotic or where it will take me. It has opened doors. It has probably quietly closed them too. I am leaving a trail of crumbs about myself that I will never be able to vacuum up. I stay awake sometimes with worry because of it but ultimately I press on because the people I most respect in this world have done much the same throughout history. They’ve shaken the proverbial haters off and been fine. If I didn’t get those periodic glimpses into other people’s madness, I would never be able to manage my own. This I know.

But there’s too much going on at once. Mixed messages scrambling as they fall from every tower. I can’t keep up. I can’t please everyone or probably even anyone.

You can’t either.

I’m not ashamed of that.

[Project 365]

I look at my life in slow motion sometimes, all the choices I’ve made and weird things that people have said or done to me that have fucked me up in some small way or large, a cascade of random sentences and moments and interactions and looks, an abstract timeline soaring through victory and then skidding through muddy humiliation, going nowhere in particular, nowhere predictable, nowhere comfortable, nowhere guaranteed. I just see an unwieldy, overloaded flatbed trailer of memories and hangups and hopes and dreams and fears, god, the fears, and that trailer is always rounding a sharp curve in slow motion, always just on the verge of toppling over and spilling that stuff everywhere, traffic whizzing by, horns honking, and all I can do is to hang on and keep throwing bailing wire over it, again and again, pulling it taut, throwing it over again, pulling it taut, in slow motion, wincing, my hands bleeding, hot tears of anger streaming down my face, but that shit will not be contained and it has nothing to do with my desire to contain it, to keep the road clear for everyone else. Gravity, and nature, and momentum, and an intermittently cruel Universe — all these things will conspire to bring it all down so why the tight grip, why the bleeding hands?

Who are the bleeding hands for?

I am having a super productive run lately. Got several commissioned photography projects I’m working on — including my first official Etsy sale! — that are keeping me occupied. I’m putting new and interesting things in the ground thanks to saraclark, and I can’t wait to see them shine next spring and summer. I am seeing more of my friends these past few days than I have in the past half year. I am behind on phone calls and finding the urge to write but not the time. October has almost gotten out from under me and I’ve not yet visited a single haunted place in this city, as was my intention at the end of September. I don’t know when I’d do it, or with whom. Any takers? I need to feel the goosebumps of Halloween every year or else I don’t quite start the steady coast into the festiveness of Thanksgiving and beyond. Superstitious, maybe. I just have high expectations for the last quarter of the year, that’s all, and a spooky October is my lucky gameday sock, so to speak.

This time last year I was waiting to close on my house, and stressing out to high heaven about it. Work was insanely busy (and has been this week, oddly enough) and I was run ragged by last-minute loan finagling and the notion that everything I had been working for could crumble at any second in part because I had lost my wallet and license on a road trip. Dumb. I see that I posted a Promise Ring video this time last year, too. How weird is that? Incredibly weird. Who’s running this show, anyway, and why do I even bother trying to control it?

This October has had its moments of pure humiliating suckitude but so far it’s been markedly better than 2009′s October, which eventually put me in the ER with some crazy allergic reaction that kept me out of work for a week with an ongoing migraine and hive outbreaks. I am lucky that nothing has ever put me down like that before or since, but it still freaks me out to think that my body can break down like that under just the weight of mental pressure. I have to remember that I have limits. And I have to learn how to respect those limits because they will kick my ass if I don’t.

Anyway, back to editing photos. I can’t wait to share some from my photoshoot with Jerm and Krissi and Piper at the Botanic Gardens. It feels nice to feel like I’m learning and growing as a photographer and artist, but it also feels really nice to be able to help people capture moments in their lives that they will cherish forever. I’m pleased with how things are going lately.

There’s a jungle outside my window — one of creeping vines and reaching grass and, infuriatingly, browning hydrangeas. In my zest to kill that fucking trumpet creeper with paintbrush applications of undiluted Roundup, I think I accidentally treated some flowers I actually do like. I don’t know how; I was careful not to get the poison on anything I didn’t care to see die a miserable wilty death. And yet, for the past two weeks, I’ve watched my beautiful blue hydrangeas brown from the bloom down. I suspect some Roundup dripped onto them somehow (they were in close quarters with the treated vine), and started to do its evil magic. It also looks like it got into one of my pots with a dahlia and some creeping Jenny in it. I am become death, destroyer of flowers. And still there are trumpet vines busting up in new places in the yard. I give up. I don’t want a yard I feel like I have to fight. I will call a truce with the vines that make their way through the other flowers and just settle for pulling them up, but I will continue a chemical assault on the ones that appear away from the fold and threaten my vinyl siding.

My zinnias are starting to bloom. I’ve got a hot pink one. Yessss.

I bought some super-discounted nearly dead dianthus with really odd fringed greenery. They look dead and they may well stay that way this year. I’m rooting for them to surprise me in 2011, though.

My dahlias are a mess. They bloom and then fall over and wilt. Immediately. The greenery is starting to look yellowish near the pots and I thought for a split second I might be overwatering them. But honestly? There’s no way. Not in this heat. Mom thinks maybe they just need to be put in the ground, that their pots are too small. Even though the pots are a good size. It’s as good a guess as any. I don’t look forward to transplanting them but I really, really want pretty — and sustained — dahlia blooms.

I really need to mow. That back yard is especially wild looking. I just haven’t had time. Oh, that’s ridiculous. I have had plenty of time but I have chosen to spend it in other ways. Tomorrow Lesley’s coming to see the house for the first time and I had so hoped to dazzle her with my “See, I’m a grownup who takes care of things!” badassedness instead of my “I miss having a landlord!” sheepishness. Le sigh. Guess I’ll just have to get her extra drunk so she won’t remember how high the grass was. And I’ve got to make sure the cats know to be in extra cuddly mode.

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My sister is at home with my parents now, slowly recovering. She says she’s weak — going up and down the stairs wears her out — but she’s feeling better all the time. She had a wacky near-disaster with a $2800 prescription for antibiotics that turned out to not be necessary to her recovery. Dear doctors: Learn what drugs cost and then TELL YOUR PATIENTS IF A RIDICULOUSLY EXPENSIVE DRUG IS NOT NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL. Jesus.

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I just spent two hours trying to update my iPhone to iOS4 to get some of that sweet app folder/multitasking action. The phone bricked and I had to do a factory restore, then imported my backed up content, except it didn’t resync any of my apps. When I tried to manually resync them, it was like, “Nahhh, don’t really feel like it,” so I’ve been manually resyncing them three or four at a time. I think everything’s OK, though. I feel such guilt when I get bogged down in and stressed out by tech wonkery. Like I should just shut up and keep my technical issues to myself since there is so much actual suffering in the world. Argh.

On my way through Lakeland a few weeks ago, I got behind the rental car I rode to Chicago in back in very late December. It really threw me to just randomly be riding in traffic behind the very same car that had been my road home for a few days. I mean, how many rental cars are on the road in Memphis at any given second? But I know that was the right car. Well, truck. It was an Explorer. I remembered the painted-on number and the Georgia Bulldogs sticker on the back window. I watched it turn off Highway 64, headed to wherever it was meant to go that day. I wondered if the CDs I had made for the trip that my trip companion didn’t really care for had gotten stuck somewhere obscure, maybe between the seats, and if anyone would ever find the discs and pop them in and actually like them, months after they had been made.

It got my captive brain thinking about how, from certain angles in the stratosphere, we must all seem like ants, following the same pheromone trails, looping here and back and here and back, stop go stop, rarely straying from the same paths every day. How often do you go somewhere you’ve never been before?

Today I started thinking my way out of going to Bonnaroo. Amber’s not going to be able to make it, so I’m looking at a solo trip. Which is fine — permit me this mopey moment where I say, in an Eeyore voice, “I’m used to doing things alone” — but it’s hard for me to imagine having a really good time alone. It’s mostly the camping bit that I dread, because I think I’ll be able to find friends during the day (if cell reception holds; it was kinda iffy last year). I can put my work face on for everything during the day. But I don’t think I am the kind of person who should be allowed to camp alone. Last year, deep in the heat of our tent-raising fiasco, I repeatedly just suggested that we give up and sleep in the car. Granted, that is because we were trying to erect a tent that was eleventy billion feet tall (which, in the end, turned out to be an AWESOME home) and we were … inebriated … and it was midnight and there was a storm brewing and everyone else around us put up their tents in ten seconds flat.

In my deep driving-to-Cordova-and-back thoughts (the deepest thoughts known to man), I reasoned that I could just spend my days off at home, working in the yard, or traveling to see friends. And then I put in an Avett Brothers CD and thought about being in the photo pit for their show and how I would kick myself if I chickened out of that opportunity. Look at this lineup. Look at this fucking lineup. There are several artists on that list that I have worshipped for a long time. And I have the opportunity to not only go and hear their music in the midst of the biggest party in the state, but to get ridiculously close to some of them and point my camera at them and steal some moments from them for eternity? It’s too bad you weren’t there to slap me out of my mopey bullshit. I know that’s what you’re thinking.

So Bonnaroo. I’m fucking going and it is going to be fucking great and if it’s not, so what? I will get a story out of it regardless. The stories are my life.

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I got hopped up on coffee today and got extra pissed at myself for having not visited Nick at his new place in Chattanooga or Cox since he moved to Oregon YEARS ago. And then I decided that this summer was going to be the summer I rectified both those problems. I requested time off, cleared my schedule, and booked plane tickets. So it’ll be a Chattanooga-y July and a Salem/Portland-y August and I could not be more excited to forge a new pheromone trail or two in my life.

Sunday morning in Memphis. Old School Freight Train is on the iTunes, water is on the stove boiling for coffee, and biscuits are waiting to be put in the oven. Yes, they’re frozen but they deserve respect because they will be delicious. The AC is earning its keep up above me. It’s a trip having your own central air. You Midtown people know what I’m talking about, I’m sure. That quiet chilly breath on your shoulder takes getting used to when summer has traditionally meant periodic trips to sit in front of the window unit, which is obviously located in the most inconvenient place in your living quarters, to let the sweat dry.

“Summer.” I said “summer.” It’s not summer yet. What’s my rush? I’ve got a few more delicious days of spring left. I want to let them sit like watermelon chunks in the bottom of my sangria, sopping up the goodness of the day. Then I’ll spear them with a straw and savor them and hopefully they will be worth remembering next summer, and the next, and the next.

I won’t say anything
I won’t say anything
spring really wasn’t all that bad
dandelions and wasting time and waiting for the morning light

This morning I’ll be drinking my coffee out of a yellow cup. I chose it specially for today. It seems like a yellow cup kind of day to me. My favorite color when I was a kid was yellow. I can’t remember if that was always so, or if I just told everyone it was yellow since my room was already painted yellow, with yellow pull-down shades over the windows. I guess it doesn’t matter now. I grew up and now I live in a house with bright yellow walls and it feels like it was meant to be that way.

River’s warm so come on in and take a swim
it’s all right
I won’t say anything

I’m up early thanks to my organic alarm clock: The cats. They do not care what time I went to bed the night morning before. They will conduct a symphony of need and boredom at 8 a.m. if I am still in bed. That hour of the day, when I’ve been in bed for four or five hours, is when I am at my most petulant. I have been known to scream and holler and throw shoes like an Iraqi journalist. Today I got off a couple of rounds of “KITTY, HUSH” before I realized I might as well join the living. As soon as I get breakfast behind me, then a shower, I’m driving in to Decatur County to spend some time on the river at my aunt and uncle’s cabin. It’s my grandmother’s birthday. She fell and broke her shoulder a few weeks ago, then fell again and hurt her knee, which she broke more than a decade ago. It’s been rough on her body, rougher on her mind. Grandmaw is tough as nails and unaccustomed to having to take orders from her brittle bones. We’re going to grill out and sit around and tell stories and gossip and hopefully avoid politics. Or at least I will have the good sense, as I have learned is prudent, to clam up when the topic arises. Instead, I am going to point my camera at the people I love and steal little bits of their souls as the sun sets.

* This post is an homage to the style of one of my favorite local blogs, the Soundcheck and the Fury.

Can’t sleep. Got a lot on my mind and no real good way to say any of it. But the thoughts keep me awake anyway. They need oxygen so they can burn up and leave me alone.

Saw a good show tonight. Young crowd. So many tall people or maybe I am shrinking. So many small and measured movements to the beats, hair stringy with sweat. Harshing my mellow, naturally, was That Guy. You know, That Guy — he who was thrashing about and gesturing to the band like he was exorcising their demons. Some dude eventually had his fill of That Guy’s shenanigans and started mock dancing with him, using hugely exaggerated movements that those of us looking on and paying attention read as total parody. Things escalated over a couple of songs and shit got real when choking was involved. A teary, trembling girlfriend stepped between the two and distance was achieved, and just as soon as things had become heated, they had dissolved back into sweaty dance. I don’t know why people can’t just fucking be cool. That Guy, and all That Guys past and present, just fucking be cool, would you?

It was good to see the Hi-Tone packed at nearly midnight on a Wednesday. I had this fear fantasy while getting ready that it would be a ghost town. While the prospect of getting a table and sitting perfectly still so as to become invisible comforts my fevered, neurotic brain, I always feel just awful at shows like that. I always clap harder at shows like that. Maybe if I sound like three people, they won’t notice I’m just one. But musicians, despite how they look, are probably good at math, what with the counting beats and all.

I’ve been working lately at feeling less pathetic, which has been a goddamned monumental task. In true Me fashion, I have handled it horribly. I have slid like Pete Rose, it seems, into some sort of spectacularly mopey rut featuring moments of such acute self-loathing that I cannot leave the house. Fuck, I don’t know what it is and why I can’t just think my way out of it like a good and resourceful smartfat chick, but I can see it in my face: a literal and metaphorical weight carving an angry line in my brow and settling existential dread in my eyes. The problem with being terminally single is all that fucking time you have to yourself to think about all that fucking time you have to yourself. The brain gets going and starts asking those questions that can’t be answered correctly, questions about what it is about you that must be so horrible. So fucking horrible.

There’s no way to win that battle with your own brain, so, on good days, I do my best not to even engage.

And that, friends, is why I sit outside and play in the dirt and point my camera at flowers.

Had a pretty good weekend, despite the weather situation. Had some people over Sunday night. Ate, drank, and cooed at babies. Good times, I’d score it.

It’s time to do some spring cleaning. In every possible way.