Tired. So tired. I am attempting to be so very patient about life, about waiting on the bigger pieces of my personal puzzle to fit together. I am exhausted.
I know the jump to the rest of my life has to be plotted carefully, as most of us spend our youth contriving American dreams and death-til-we-parts. Still, I am restless on occasion. I can’t wait to commit.
A ticket. A ring. A career.
So lofty… I twiddle my fingers into knots.
Check it out. For me.
Today I am in a state of mild obsession. I cannot remove myself from the internet at the present moment, or spending money for that matter. I almost worry myself as I am somewhat concerned for my financial habits.
Yes, I have had some horrible situations not caused by my own actions thrust into my life, but I know how to dig myself a deep financial pit. Once I was able to paid my way to Europe, everything under three thousand dollars is fair game (which is a fancy way to say justified spending). I need to get a grip before I cannot eat or pay rent. My mother has been there, and unfortunately refused to share her struggle with my brother and I, which I fear will aid in our ruin. We want to be hospitable, to give, to live with full stomachs and nice things…. I need help. :
Oddly enough, after recovering from the shock of a college career, I feel myself expanding into a fuller person. That said, I haven’t been eating consistently, so all this expanding is in an creative/intellectual/spiritual direction.
Now two months out and promptly digesting college, I find the institution was an outside force inhibiting my personal growth. Granted, I had wonderful times with wonderful people while “pursuing my education,” but I felt the constant grind on my mind, on my nerves, on my heart as I shirked some work in place of sleep, little fun, and creative ventures in general. I can see where those principles most responsible for who I am now have stuck fast, as I gently reset myself back to whom I’ve longed to be.
Imagine: I now make my own occasions to read and enjoy deeply those pursuits, I broaden my palette with deep wines, lavender, and apricots as of late, and I challenge my spiritual foundations regularly, if only by living in the most homosexual community in the Midwest.
I love the life I breathed into my living room with a fresh coat of paint. I have become a compulsive flower snatcher on my regular bike rides. I rejoice in the extra shoot on my pumpkin vine and the flowers on my tomato plants. I talk regularly with my boyfriend of our newly sprouting wedding plans, photographers, and the vows we will take under fallen leaves sometime next year (not engaged yet, but soon! So soon!). I am a gourmet chef (when it comes to all things pasta/pasta sauce) for many travelers and friends that blow in on cool breezes. For the first time in a LONG time, I feel incredibly whole and give great thanks.
I wish the same for you all. Find your wholeness.
This evening is so warm and lovely, and unusual in early June. The orange evenings cease to hug a body gently at this time of year, and given the French kiss of humidity earlier this week, I much prefer the gentle summer peck. The clouds look especially broken as blue bursts through white cracks. The birds love it- you can hear them laughing to each other in tall trees.
The wedding looked like this, at least in the pictures. Yes, of course I looked, but now not for him. I have known and not known so many things about us for so long. Rather, I looked for me.
A friend told me yesterday in his own unobtrusive brilliance that he once fell in love with someone, a part of that someone, whom he has never seen again. So brief were their interactions together, so poignantly she touched him. She is in total ignorance of his feelings, and he cannot forget the her that was. I know that the man in these photos, whom I have lamented in my quietness, is not there any longer. He has traded that man (perhaps smartly… who now can say?) for another built into another woman.
I am in love. Not with you, Jon. I wish you the best. For all my uphill clawings, I cannot remove you gently as you did not afford me such luxury.
I am sitting on the porch, eating a brownie of chocolate sunshine, waiting for my love to kiss me like the gentle breeze to the laugh of birds in tall trees.
Again so hot. I could feel the air lick me when I briefly stepped out to work. I was wet all day.
I feel my afternoons and evenings passing into the “endless numbered days” Sean Beam so listlessly recounts from the iPod radio, and I miss them all the same. To work and take pride in one’s work… yes, this is a man’s business, but I feel the summer sun burning through my window leaving an orange streak where this past month has been. My patience suffers a little. I want result, a green trail of envy and cash where my success swaggered through the room. Still a little green was never achieved without careful watering… and I was wet all day.
Tonight feels so cold, and I’m sitting sticky on tawdry covers waiting for someone to reach out. This kind of gentle jarring happens upon me once in a great haze. I wade in the midst of some great confusion that, like a pond, might overwhelm me one step closer to the center. This buzz is that strange nightmare that you wake up to anxious, yet unremembered. Still sticky, still balmy, and the neighbor man yells drunken to my window in the deep of night. He startled me, and even now I cannot recall his slurs.
Can I just take a moment to exclaim how excited I am about Helvetica on Xanga? The font practically writes itself.
I’d like to address my new layout, if I may. Though potentially read as a religious message, that was not my intent. I believe art [good art at that] is often rejected by the masses as weird, worthless, or nothing more than cheap decoration for one’s bathroom. Whenever some form has a breakthrough to mainstream, the uneducated claim credit and eventually prostitute the work onto greeting cards, ad campaigns, etc. As sex sells, sexy ideas sell iPods, I suppose.
The art world is really just an elaborate set of ideas, values, whatever. One might be shocked to realize how much advertising, vision, and morality is really the responsibility of the weird guy in the office with blue hair and a stud in his lip. The world loves our work because it is genuine to us, and the honesty is sexy. [I'd like to now commentate on my use of "sexy" not once, twice, but three times in two paragraphs.] They are currently loving our mode of fashion, our frenzied sense of decor [not because we're so cool, but because most of us are struggling starting out], and our nerdy fresh attitudes. The bravery of these thoughts are so attractive, not because it’s a brave new world out there, but because we are brave within it.
Our messages hurt too much for too many, the very reason they deny us.
So often I’d like to think we human beings are responsible enough to handle our own lives. Surely we are able to swim in our own messes and somehow come out clean on the other side, surely we aren’t our own worst enemy. I would assume we are willing to withdraw the razor before we bleed our hearts dry. Of course we bandage the friction burn from rubbing shoulders with the wrong people because we can be trusted with us…?
I’d be fairly stupid to believe myself.
I wish I could convey the profound effect of the opening ceremonies in Beijing. I wish you, dear reader, could cry as I did with the mere mention of the power and unity of thousands. Is this the force that brought down Babel? I am still the very same me that gets particularly fidgety when I stray to far from earth in Google maps, the same confessed pant-peer to encounter a blue whale in open ocean. My discomfort borders on fear of things too magnanimous. Even the open sky sends a shock wave through my spine.
The dedicated thousands sent my design sense into frenzied spasms. The harmonious colors, the graceful movements contrasted by hard and vibrant light, the many exalting the one- could this be heaven?Imagine us together bending light and space, the yin to the yang of Christ, the broken to the perfect. A true preview into forever by a nation of Communists… now that is revelation.
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