theology&geometry

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.

I had a moment with a robin today. Might be the same one who always pops up when I’m outside in the yard. Saraclark says he’s waiting for me to move branches and leaves and uncover worms for him to eat. So I guess I’m being used. But it’s still pretty interesting to be minding your own business and then turn around to see a bird two feet from you, watching your every move. I stopped and stared hard when I noticed him standing there beside me.

He blinked first.

That made me think of “Why I Like the Robins” by Hum. And when I came inside and started listening to it, I couldn’t stop the flow of Hum. Because sometimes Hum is really just right. Okay, Hum is usually always really right, more right than most of their contemporaries, if they can be said to have contemporaries at all. Hum takes me back to a time in my life when what few fears I had were completely superficial. I remember sunshine on my legs and car rides to Corinth. White sunglasses and ring pops. Smiles in photo booths.

While trying to dig for a version of “Iron Clad Lou” without the voiceover at the beginning, I found out they’re reuniting for a free show in Chicago’s Millenium Park on May 31. Cue the plotting and scheming ways to get up there for that.

I had an entire week off work. It’s over now. I had an enormous list of things I wanted to get done during my time off. I accomplished a singular thing on that list: My taxes. Other than that? Nothing. No haircut, no oil change, no redesigned websites, no finished portfolio, no balanced budget, no minor home repairs, no blogging or book reviews written. Guess I’ll just look forward to being extra busy these coming weeks as I tick off things I should have gotten done when I had the time. But I don’t feel bad about it. In fact, I feel right fine. I made meals and pots of coffee and sipped wine and played video games and read. I snuggled cats. I went out and saw and was seen. I opened my home up to friends and spent time with some of the people I adore. Talked about taking over the world … a lot, actually.

So, maybe when I get another week to myself, I’ll try to get that done.

I woke up at 6 a.m. to get ready to take Tamara to the airport, and checked Twitter (a regrettable but sometimes useful ritual), only to see @mdinstuhl telling everyone to look outside. I hadn’t been keeping up with the news and usually if there is any chance of solid precipitation coming, its impendingness is a major, major deal and everyone spends the entire night prior making milk-and-bread jokes. But nothing, not a peep. So I rose and out the window it looked like a freaking Thomas Kinkade Christmas card. In the best possible way.

Tamara’s flight was on, then canceled, then back on, then delayed again. I drove her to the airport in between the flurry of delays, white-knuckled and crazed from too much orange juice and not enough sleep. I really hated to see her go; we had a lot more talking in us, but it’ll have to wait until next time. It’s kind of remarkable that I was up so early because I got to see the snow at its prettiest on the drive back. I took a road I’d never been down before to get to get home and ended up going through a part of town I didn’t even know existed that’s literally just a few blocks south of my house. Amazing how you can live in a place and have no idea what’s around you.

Snow is a great equalizer, though. Even rundown shotguns with crap in the yard have a quiet dignity when covered in snow.

If 2009 was a book, I might have shut it with a scowl on my face. Too long, I’d have thought. With really unsympathetic characters. Mostly it’s the protagonist I would have hated. She’s moody and fickle and needy yet aloof and often makes really bad decisions. She has forgotten how to love and be loved. She lets men treat her like garbage. She’s so ambitious that she’s never really grateful for anything when she has it. She’s emotionally dramatic. She’s scared of everything. She trusts no one and everyone at seemingly random intervals. She lives life in her head but she refuses to keep her inner monologue to herself. She’s got a self-destructive streak that just won’t quit. And she tries too hard to make people laugh, even at her own expense.

But, you know, sometimes I can be overly critical.

The past year hardened me, I think, which was not at all what I intended to happen. I cracked my chest open more than once only to have someone I cared for offer me steel wool to stuff back inside. I hurt and was hurt. I touched and was touched. I put myself out there and then reeled myself back in. I winced through other people’s pain and felt foolish at my own superficial worries. I was humbled. I smiled in the sunlight and soaked up colors and smells. I breathed heavily in the darkness. I had moments where I wanted to die and moments where I wanted to live forever.

I lived in 2009.

It was messy but it was all mine, every bit of it — tiny Pointillist pieces of a puzzle that really won’t be complete until long after I’m gone from this world.

Old-soul Phil once said to me, “As long as I have known you, you have never really been happy with your life.” And that is probably the truest thing he or anyone else has ever said to me. I think about that observation a lot. And at times it perks me up, because it means I’m not content to just let my life stagnate but that I want to grow and do and see and learn and never give up on making a better life. But at times it lays me low, because it means I might never be satisfied with anything, that I’ve got unreasonable expectations of who I can be and what I deserve.

I don’t know what this year will bring, and I can’t think of a good reason to speculate about it. I’ve got hopes, of course, but I hold no illusions that 2010 will be any less messy or complicated than any year — and day — that has ever existed before it.

I want to live again, to go another round swinging. But this time with strength and knowledge and — hopefully — grace that I didn’t have last year.

What a year this has been. Made great personal strides in many ways and suffered weird (mostly in-my-head) setbacks in others. Took on a ton of responsibility at work and in my home life and watched my face age in the process. Stopped counting but not plucking grey hairs. Was reminded time and time again that I am so fortunate to have the family and the foundation I have. Fought for things I wanted. Got some. Didn’t get others. Realized that I was better off without some things I thought I wanted. Met even more incredible people in this city and elsewhere that I’m happy to now know.

I had to work Thanksgiving this year. Well, I didn’t have to. Of the five winter holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day), we get to pick the two we want off. Most of the time, if schedule magic can be worked, you get your two. This year I went for New Year’s Eve and Day. First time ever, and I’ll be spending it in Chicago. It stings a little knowing I’ll be working on Christmas Eve AND Day (which is my birthday O WOE), but I picked my poison. Guess I should be grateful that I even had the choice.

I have so very much to be grateful for, and I couldn’t be more thankful, even for the challenges. I get sentimental and hokey and weird sometimes when I think about it, but I mean it. This little life I have carved out for myself has its pitfalls and its moments of quiet desperation, but it is the best life I could have hoped for, I think, and I have great hopes for all the other places it will take me.

[Project 365]

Today I:

Woke up to a phone call from my dad at 10 a.m.

Jumped in the shower and got out of the apartment and on the road by 10:40.

Answered the text of a co-worker calling in sick.

Met the family in Somerville, who had driven from Hardin County to hand off a chunk of change I just found out I needed desperately in order to close on the house.

Drove back to Memphis.

Went to Kinko’s (FedExOffice, I suppose it’s really called) to copy the check, front and back, enlarged.

Went to bank to deposit check and get confirmation of deposit in both receipt form (check!) and the form of a letter from the branch manager saying that said deposit had indeed been made, which the branch manager said she could not do, despite pleas from my lender.

Went back to Kinko’s to print out bank statement showing pending deposit. Made copy of deposit receipt. Faxed hurriedly to lender.

Swung by Burger King and ate hurried shame food.

Answered the text of another co-worker calling in sick.

Went to the office.

Met. In meetings.

Made reporter’s fixes to a graphic in the Nov. 1 True Crime installment.

Threw together half a post for The Memphis Blog.

Laid out the business section.

Got an e-mail from another sick co-worker saying she’d be out for a while.

Nearly lost it. Neeeeeearly lost it. Hot tears at my desk. Got that sinking feeling. Not because of any one thing. People get sick, it happens. It was just … everything. Everything concentrated into one moment when it seems like too much for one person. Too much for any amount of people to have to deal with.

Sucked it up and tried to be a big girl and get shit done anyway.

Reassigned duties to the people left standing.

Downloaded Money&Markets and tweaked and adjusted all type to fit style.

Laid out most of A section, except for Viewpoint pages.

Got a call from loan officer, telling me the loan had been cleared to close Friday. Felt weight lift. All bones in body immediately started to ache from a lack of tension. Exhaustion set in.

Drank a cup of coffee. Black.

Designed A1 when Grizzlies opener photo finally came in.

Made next week’s department schedule. Realized my trying to take a few days off to move is really going to clash with my needing to design the next installment of True Crime. Winced.

Set up remote-desktop access so I can work from home if need be. Winced.

Laid out Sunday Homefinder.

Listened to co-workers discuss HR’s latest round of benefits enrollment seminars and got that panicky feeling about having to pick next year’s medical coverage, since I did such a horrible job of picking it for 2009.

Filled out edit lists through Sunday.

Watched the clock tick past midnight as I waited for the all-clear to go home.

In fact, I’m still sitting here. Yes, I am blogging from work. I am done with work. I technically was supposed to get off half an hour ago. But I’m here. I’m just waiting for the first edition to get in so I can typeset my second-edition pages. I’m waiting for papers. Always hurrying up to wait.

I want to go home and have a glass of wine. There is a bottle waiting on me in my fridge, given to me by my friend and co-worker Mike, who just got back from a trip out to Washington wine country, where his son works. I want to sit and just breathe a little bit so these tense coils can loosen their grip around my insides. I need to think. I need to mentally prepare myself for what is about to happen to me, for how my life is going to change when I take on the responsibility for a house — a property with lot lines and shingles and a fireplace and floorboards and windows and …

There’s the all-clear. I am going home.

There’s a lot that needs saying and a lot I don’t want to forget about October — which I’m going to jokingly refer to as Woetober because of all the shit I’ve been wading through lately — but it ain’t in me. The time, the energy. Nothing.

I am on the balcony, laptop pulsing heat onto my uncovered legs, nose stuffy from a summer stress cold, red wine (Malbec) in a Graceland mug on the window ledge behind me, three citronella candles and a mosquito coil flickering around me, yet I see the mosquitoes in silhouette against my screen, darting here and there and up and down and, occasionally, settling on a patch of skin still enough to penetrate and make me flinch and slap at ghosts. The fact that I have covered myself in cancer-causing agents doesn’t matter to these creatures; I have been mosquito bait my entire life and they all want in life is what’s inside of me. The Red Cross couldn’t covet my blood at the level that these fucking mosquitoes do.

I have spent a week not off the grid, but beneath the grid, opting out of the constant give and take of certain social networking sites and programs and devices and notions. I usually love it, that cascade of constant information, but sometimes it feels a little less like a waterfall and a little more like water torture and I have to say enough and take a break. It was good to not have to deal with the constant pop-ups of the latest “news” but it left me feeling a bit clueless about even the most incremental bits of the zeitgeist. I’m an info addict and I’m not proud and I don’t know how to “fix” me and frankly I don’t think I need fixing and I’ve got a lot to say about the matter, see, but there’s no need because life is too short to keep having to explain myself to everyone else.

I am full of lust lately, the kind that propels you toward ways of living that most people consider silly and decadent and hedonistic and unsustainable. Aaaand that’s because they are. But it doesn’t matter; a person who can’t get behind hedonism is a person you shouldn’t care to know.

I want things. Things that have no real-life counterpart. Things that can only ever exist in digital daydreaming. That’s okay. I want to imagine the universe indulging me, and the actual oxygen-assisted feasibility of these circumstances is no impediment to my brain’s insistence on producing them.

(I want to stop typing sentences like that last one right there, but … no promises.)

I want to be on a beach with you. At dusk, the sun retreating and throwing long shadows recklessly onto the ground around us. I want your hand in mine, your palm finding its way to my stomach, my shoulders, my face, our grins meeting goofily, we are stretching, we are pretending to resettle ourselves on these towels because we are uncomfortable, but we are really just trying to get closer without seeming needy. We are sober. Hungover, slightly, maybe, but we’ve not had a drink yet today and the sun burns our backs but we are entwined and dozing off and trying not to snore and we will not move until there is a breeze that is so cold it makes us shiver and yawn and stretch and think about where we parked.

I never want to feel the need to write something like that last paragraph ever again. Ridiculous.