me, talking
So.
I cooked for memorial day.
I feel like I should have a diary instead of a blog, specifically for catchall days like this. It's all little bits.
Dale posted below about attachment and suffering. Interesting. I've been walking around in this general state of hurt since I came home, but standing out in the humid dusk, I decided to try to stop not hurting. To suffer, goddammit. And I suddenly felt transparent, immaterial. Euphoric. So. I'm suffering. If I can just stop trying to avoid it, I'll be all right.
I killed a firefly today. It flew at my arm and I brushed it off before I realized what it was; it fell straight down and lay on the curb, legs crumpled in, belly up, flashing faster and faster and faster and then not at all. I sat down on the curb and wondered what to do. Should I bury it? Keen? Apologize? Keep walking? I stayed by it for a while, then got up and walked away, this time very careful, not even swatting at mosquitos.
I've been turning back into a teenager, since Rochester. I slump around the house in perpetual slouch, I scowl, I argue. I can feel the sullenness radiating from me. I am unhappy with everything. I was an adult in most other respects when I came home, but I'd never been in love.
I give up on keeping all of this together. It just is.
love,
alex
Who knew seperation hurt this much?
I am in perpetual denial, you see, when it comes to the strength of emotion involved. Right now, in the midst of it, I find it... untidy. Looking back, I will find it embarressing to shameful. I will always, I think, be the reasonable one in the relationship. When other people are proclaiming matches with past lives or planning for the future of this one, I am saying, wait, how do you know we'll still be speaking to each other by the end of the summer? I am a permanent killjoy. And I like it.
However, this does present difficulties when some evidence of infatuation burbles up in my psyche. Why should I be sad? I wasn't sad before I met him, and he sure wasn't around back then. I feel - this is the worst part - like a part of me is missing. Like I am incomplete. And that's just terrible. What kind of stupid sap am I?
Love,
alex
My garden now has a webpage. I had to do something with my day. Tell me what you think.
love
alex
It interests me how my life lumps along from place to place, moment to moment, often with no in-between jarring. If emotions happen in transition, they happen before the change, in panic, or after the change, in long, slow exhaustions and angsts. I'm home. I should go wash my face, unpack my stuff, clean my room - my mother folded and put away all the dirty clothes on my floor while I was gone - weed the garden. Instead I'm playing with the new camera (look for pictures of my tomato plants this afternoon, and pictures of me - well, never). It's too quiet here, but it's my hometown, and my house, both of which I like. Just too quiet.
love,
alex
I won't know where I am or what this is until I can look back on it, from the light of a well-reasoned and solitary day. He looks like some painting of a Victorian youth, all pale blush and eyes and curling hair. We met at a church conference last year, a sudden electricity in a random hallway, and then a long span of mail and wierd conversations. I'm not sure how I got from there to here, listening to him sing in the shower and looking at the tornado-hit wreck of my luggage. I'm eager to be gone. When I have given him up again, I will know for certain what this was.
love,
alex
Yes, I have lost my substance-free purity. Don't worry, I don't think a slide into stonerdom is immanent.
The one I came here to visit is asleep right now, face crinkled into the pillow. Dusk in the North, earlier then I thought, and I have a belly full of halvah and veggie chili and am not packed and I can feel in my chest the beginning of an ache. I leave tomorrow.
love,
alex
Apparently I smoke weed like I've been doing it for years, except for a bit of coughing and an inability to hold a lighter. It was medicinal, goddammit. I don't think I'll be doing it again, though.
Right now someone's making me breakfast while incense smoke spirals up and the college-geek stereo blasts Beethoven. Life is good.
love
alex
Rochester is great. Really, really great.
I understand now why women ruin their whole lives for men. God, people are insane when they're in love.
love,
alex
Listening to the Senate hearings on the Iraqi prison scandel. There was some stuff being accomplished early on - they were talking about the list of acceptable techniques, the Geneva convention, et cetera. We were hearing General Sanchez et. al. give their explanations and justifications. Whether I agreed with them or not, it was important to hear. Then various Republican senators started grabbing the mike and making stump speeches. The Enemy, our brave men and women in the field, the despicable arrestees who spend every minute plotting to nuke our cities. Why shouldn't they loose some sleep? I suppose it's good for me to hear the spin. It might even be true. I wish that we could actually do something honorably for once, though.
love
alex
If you go the Unitarian Universalist Association page, you can watch Hillary and Julie Goodrich's wedding in UUA headquarters by Rev. William Sinkford. (our president!) Marraiges are happening at the Arlington Street Church (news story) and all over Massachussets. I couldn't stop cheering when Sinkford said those magic "I pronounce you" words. This is not a victory for my denomination, it's a victory for humankind in general, but I'm still so, so very proud that we could help.
love,
alex
Here is an example of the real reason this blog is supposedly mom-proof:
So I've got this job cooking dinner for my family every night. It's a pretty good deal - my mother didn't pay for my groceries before this - except that we keep fighting over whether we should buy for price or political correctness. So this morning, I toast a bagel for my brother to leave on the bus, using the stovetop as a toaster-holding surface. This evening, I turn on the stove to boil my family's lentil and wild rice pilaf. Except I turn on the wrong burner. And forget to move the toaster.
I am proud that I remembered to unplug the toaster before plunging its rapidly-melting bottom into the sink. I am not proud that I didn't notice how it was dripping molten plastic all over the floor before I sunk my big toe into a lump of it. Owwww. Ow ow ow ow ow.
Long story short, my toe is still mostly there, paramedics were not required, and I've almost got the burnt-plastic smell out of the house. And I really, really should not be allowed in the kitchen, ever.
merrily burning the house down,
alex
My brain is totally fried. I went out and did stuff today, after spending yesterday not leaving my room. I narrowly missed church, had lunch with an ex-boyfriend, putzed, went to youth group and decided to have an ending right there, which may have hurt some feelings. I realized sitting on the floor of my church commons that I'm leaving for Rochester in FIVE DAYS. I am terrified. Also, I had the occasion to quote Bridget Jones this morning when I looked in the mirror, realized that I am now duck-shaped, and started randomly using the phrase 'my terrifying slide into morbid obesity'. I guess calorie-counting will give me something to do besides moon around staring into space and grinning. (Five days!)
I should say many other things, but the inside of my head is empty. Which is really pretty cool. So I won't pester it to produce things to say.
love,
alex
Ahahaha. I'm a terrible human being. In my venue as peer educator, I often encourage the young & stupid to go get STD screenings. Is it my fault if, to encourage them, I leave out - well - some of the details of the procedure? One of my projects just called me - from the clinic lobby - and asked, furious, Alex, did you know about the q-tip? Yes, I replied. I just didn't mention it to you.
They'll thank me when they're older and more sensible.
I can promise you this was no one you know.
love,
alex
Ahahaha.
I just did a silly teenager thing. I swear to God I'm not serious.
"Shy, tall, bossy hairy-legged feminist, vegetarian and a great cook, thinks in punk-rock but looks like a hippie, bathes regularly, large vocabulary. Churchgoing Unitarian Universalist. Seeking young and angry activist type who listened to too much Rage Against the Machine. Points if you're pretty, double points if you're scrawny, triple points if you're a Unitarian or even know what that is. Match none of these descriptions? We can still be great friends."
It's over at TrueBeginnings. I just want to see who responds.
love,
alex
The new Blogger format looks more like a database and less like a diary. I'm sure many people will like it. I'm so bad with change.
A beautiful orange tomcat has decided he lives here. He appeared midafternoon, cowering under a chair while Maggie, our old black toothless witch of a cat, hissed at him. She's since condescended to watch him - suspiciously - as he winds his way around ankles and paces back and forth outside asking to be let in. We'll see.
I'm in the lull between sleepless nights. I may well be in love, long-distance. We'll see about that too.
love
alex
Summer in the South. I save the water from rinsing the dishes and haul it out to the garden to the corn. It's still cool, for May, but until the air conditioning goes on the positioning of fans and curtains and screens will be of utmost scientific concern. I sleep in the sunroom with the door open, and never mind the bugs or axe murderers. The roses and honeysuckles bloom together, and I love this season.
love
alex
Alright, I give up. I've been wishy-washy on the war since a year before it started, but there's no saving it now. Bring the troops home. Poor Iraqis. Thirty, forty years from now their country will still be a wreck, and we'll have totally forgotten why. Those Arabs, we'll say. They just don't want peace. They hate our freedoms.
There's no way out, is there?
love
alex
It appears I have a second love. It was only yesterday that I said my goodbyes to my aerie, to the high clear-aired mountain forest, the poplars and the frog pond. I thought I could never love the humid suburban lowland the same. It appears I'd forgotten a great bit. I didn't remember the birdsong, or the roses, or the great falls of leaf and light. It is richest summer here, and the air smells of flowers and water and mildew and the breath of trees.
happy in suburbia,
alex
I think I've been being less then fair to my family's town, in my memory. I'd forgotten cool spring mornings with the great abundance of birds and green leaves and sunlight. My garden is coming up all cantelopes, from seeds in the compost; the air makes me want to bake biscuits and eat them with a little gravy on the back porch listening to the crickets. The state news is on the public radio feed; a mayor of a little town down in the pine scrubs complaining that a new rail line will run right by the Baptist church, and someone's stolen the plaque of the Andy Griffen monument. This is a good place.
love
alex
I firmly believe that a good sandwich brings you closer to God.
All my stuff is done, as of midnight last night.
love
alex
Church this morning brought me some peace, in its usual technicolor faith-o-rama sort of way. Today featured: a ten-minute spontaneous sermon about how we need to be ready to mobilize, the homophobic backlash is probably not far off and the social-justice-minded need to be ready. A sermon on life lessons from King Kong, complete with our service leader in a gorilla mask. The only hymn in the book that features dinosaurs, which I've always wanted to sing. And goodbye to the people I'll be seeing next year. The church is one thing that will be essentially the same in its always changing.
love
alex
I feel abandoned, grieving. I don't want to talk to anyone, and they're all trying to cram in one last minute to make the goodbye real. I don't like endings.
Last night I dreamed that I was a bunch of onions growing sheltered by the roots of a tree on a cliff above the ocean. It was like being in one of my paintings. I was woken by a phone call and sat there trying to remember what I was if I wasn't really a plant.
love
alex
In the long calm silence that was the crash of our campus internet, I realized that most of the strain on me is not finals but not wanting to leave this place, go away and come back to find it changed. I'm not good with endings. But last night, the boy across the hall stopped to say some honest things. And I realized that I am known and even loved by people here, that I'm not passing through anonymous. That's enough grace that I can leave for the summer without pain.
It's raining, and I have work - great work - to do. It is good.
love
alex
