I wish Blogger knew how to post music, it's a kind of fantasy of mine that I could write a post while listening to a piece and then post the piece so the entry could be read to that soundtrack. Right now it's Regina Spektor's "Samson".
I spent most of today alone. I went to Symmetry, took Sid (my lil honda) into Honda Village where I played with blocks and did downward facing dog while I waited. They replaced the thermostat and the tire that had gone flat. I was surprised to find how expensive my life is. $117 for the tire and labor, $33 to fill up my tank, $50 for groceries on the way home, $25 for medford car tax (whatever that is it arrived in the mail today), $40 to refill my prescription...I'm an expensive girl.
I can't imagine how I'm ever going to make enough money to pay to live. And I don't think I live an extravegant life, I mean, I guess buying fresh ground peanut butter is expensive, but I mean my life doesn't consist of a series of splurges, and I'm having a hard time seeing how I'll be able to make enough money to cover myself. As is, Mum and Dad pay my rent and heating and electric, and I take care of the rest. I can barely handle the rest! Okay that's not entirely true, it's not like I'm in danger of going broke or like my bank account is steadily dwindling- it's not- but it tends to stay pretty steady- how is one supposed to save anything, especially when I'll be paying rent? I guess I'm overlooking the fact that, although I work to some capacity every single day, it's in spurts, and not like a steady 9-5. Monday I'll have a day off, Tuesday I'll work dinner, Wednesday and Thursday BCC, Friday and Saturday I'll work dinner, lunch, and tea, and Sunday usually the Church, or a BCC performance if there is one. I don't know how adults do it, I don't know how adults who don't work for Behr Sterns make it, especially ones with useless degrees like mine. I'm scared I'll be forever cobbling together a meager income and won't ever be able to feel relief like I've made it to adulthood.
I suppose I haven't had much to say lately...I've done so much writing that I feel pretty scraped out.
I decided not to come home for spring break. Which makes me sad, and solid. I was really looking forward to the roller blading, the Sunday meeting, the carrot cake at the coral tree cafe, and seeing everyone, but for my own sanity it makes more sense for me to stay. I would have found it too easy to come home and stay home if I went, I would've left myself in Los Angeles whether I intended to or not, and wouldn't have been able to come back to Boston and live independently, without momentum. Static fish.
Hey, check it out, stumbled across this...amazing what this blasted internet can find us. I think this song is so lovely. I like that she's not indulged in glamor like every other goddamn music video, and I like her chosen articulation:
Regina Spektor - Samson lyrics
And here's my contribution to the art world- I found this while sorting through old poetry drafts from junior year at Marlborough. It only serves to prove to me that as I've grow up (hah!) I've only become more dramatic, unnecessarily elaborate, and irrelevant. Guess that's why they say "oh to be seventeen again". Whoever they is.
grow, legs.
let the moist skin at the backs of my knees
expand, convex with muscle
when I flex my feet.
arch, my back.
so I may set my fingers between the vertebrae
sparse-spaced
as spine sighs
into a stiff curve.
yawn, own mouth.
make me a cathedral:
rest the globe atop my tongue,
against my cheeks,
tightening the tissue,
and the rivets,
and the roof.
shut up. i like it.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
Well first of all this is just too cool for words:
this is the extent of science's relevance to my life
I'm just home from work, Dinner shift at the restaurant (I kind of feel like all my posts begin this way). It wasn't regular service, some law firm had rented out the place to hold a recruiting event and all these posh people with their pinned on name tags swarmed the room with the open bar and us among them passing out things like duck ravioli with sweet and sour dipping sauce, hot dates wrapped in bacon, scallops wrapped in bacon and a few others, many of which were also wrapped in bacon. Chef Tony has a fondness for bacon-wrapped comestibles. My knee is really hurting from all the walking though. To do a brief sum-up of the whole knee fiasco, I went into the ER on Saturday night mostly just to get an x-ray of what was going on to cause all this pain that's been on the rise since october, not to mention the growing mass right under the scar from the August incision. No, it wasn't an emergency, but the pain was intense, and my appointment with the surgeon isn't for another week so I figured better to get it checked out and at least have some x-rays taken now, and maybe be prescribed something for the pain. X-ray showed that a cyst had developed on the edge of my tibia (heh, my tibia sounds weird...so used to hearing the tibia, but this one's mine) right around the area where the screw was put in to anchor the bottom part of my ACL. They said it was also possible that the bone cyst had developed because the screw may be coming loose, or that my body was having a reaction to it...something along those lines, but all they could confirm is that I definitely had the bone cyst. Great. They gave me some motrin and some vicodin and sent me home and offered that I'd likely be recommended surgery in which they remove the cyst from my tibia, replacing the piece with a bone graft. So...that's the idea. I'll see Dr. Karlson next monday and hopefully he'll have a better idea of what the FUCK one does when their body is inspired to build a cyst on the bit of metal that's holding yer knee together. Brilliant cells, thanks much. Bad call for the morale and physical (and financial?) stability of Mollie Inc. We're gonna add this to the agenda of the next staff meeting cause this is poop. You're all being demoted to the mail room. Okay I giggled my ass off writing that so clearly the vicodin is kicking in. Anyhow that's the knee situation. Looks like surgery but I'm doing my best not to think about it.
What was neat about the ER trip was the perspective I got walking out. All along the hallway as I was leaving were beds and stretchers, all containing people who were in neck braces and moaning, or on their sides and moaning, or very old heavily sedated people with thin thin hair who gazed through me as I walked by. The amount of pain in that hallway was palpable, not to mention audible. These poor hurting people waiting in bed, in line to be treated or tested or moved and it struck me that they'd be staying the night if not longer, and I was walking out of there- walking- and in minimal pain, that I'd be at work tomorrow, that I'd be singing on Sunday, that I'd get to make my peanut butter and fuji wrap or oatmeal with extra roasty peanuts for breakfast. I felt lucky that my biggest physical malady was a bone cyst, with which I could still do yoga, rock climb, waitress (uncomfortably) and sing- my life isn't all that interrupted by it. There was a time when my body was so rocked by the bulimia that I couldn't sing- I physically couldn't produce the sound- and even that (thank God) could be mended. And I felt so fortunate and so grateful to be walking out of there with health. Nothing relative about it. Certifiably insane, possibly, but that's not the point; my body's okay, and I'm not working against it.
That said, I'm going to make better time for my meals, and eat them sitting down rather than on the fly. I eat better that way, I make better food choices that way, I feel fuller that way, and it means I'll actually have the meal rather than putting it off or getting distracted.
Other than the dinner shift tonight it's been a pretty blah day...I got full credit on a symmetry homework (woot!) and it was nice to look at it and not have it be totally marked up, but really I've felt pretty gray. The weather has been hinting at spring, aall coy sunshine and full warmish breezes but the temperature plummets at night and the rain has been interrupting these attempts at rebirth. I find the breaths I take these days are deeper, that my hope is higher. My belief in self tends to respond to spring- I remember this from Skidmore, I remember this from all the way back to Mirman, how my body and brain respond to the slow softening of the weather (or in LA just the cold in the morning). I haven't made great choices lately (this self-deception thing is a bitch) but I can feel these tiny clicks happening in my brain, these little shifts that aren't yet showing up outside of me but that I can feel as real as an apple in my hand. Things like lack of clarity and shame and oh god these lonely fears make for a lot of house cleaning to do. I've not liked me much lately. Like a pack rat suddenly trying to sort through her belongings and being appalled at what she's kept and deranged she must be, what a mistake she must be to have lived like this for so long. It's hard to sort through these things and keep self esteem alive, but what I'm finding is that when I'm feeling dark about me that I have the belief now that it will change, that I can- and will- feel differently, that there's hope for this self. I'm working my way out of habits and impulses like the immediate lie or my critical eye or responding with what I actually think or feel rather than what I think you'd like me better for thinking or feeling. Honesty. Again. Relentless. And I'm actually bad at it. Really bad. When I was little Mum would ask us if we'd washed our hands for dinner, and I got into a habit for awhile where even if I had, I would tell her I hadn't- that was about power, or something, I'm sure, about having something that she didn't, some bit of knowledge about me and control over a situation that she didn't. If that makes sense. That reasoning isn't relevant to me today, it's never about power, it's about being loved. Or liked. But usually loved. What if what I have to say means that you'll think less of me or want to spend less time with me or will reveal that I think differently than you thought...god even just writing this is making me anxious. And it's strange because I'm usually pretty outspoken, I usually have no problem saying what I think whether it's at work or in the classroom (heh, I meant as a student but I like that I can be considered on the teaching side of that as well) or socially, I can usually say what I think. I'm finding that when it comes to how I feel (or how choices I've made as a result of how I feel) I'm very, very hesitant to say what I think when it's to somebody that I love because I don't want to risk saying something that will make you love me less or go away from me. I read that sentence back and the thought sounds childish. That's not a judgment, it's just what it sounds like to me. Like a child feels it. The panic that I feel when presented with a question that I could potentially answer "wrong" feels equally childish. Maybe childish isn't the right word, I think I just mean that I feel powerless over it, that the panic owns me and the fear of not continuing to be loved as I have been is pretty consuming.
I went to a meeting Monday night and it very much re-geared my thinking (for the rest of the evening at least), it was wonderful. I suppose it's pretty stupid that I can acknowledge that there's something that can make me feel better, that there is a remedy, and yet the thought of it sounds exhausting and like the last thing I want to do. I exerted a tremendous amount of energy to search out food or a place to purge when I needed it; over the years I've spent exhaustive late nights in a panic on the phone and holding hearts together, and yet the thought of putting that same amount of energy into my recovery sometimes sounds beyond me. I guess that's the whole opposite action thing. At the moment I don't feel lonely, but I don't feel attached either...kind of at sea but not a stormy one. Homeless, homeless.
It's just quiet and I'm being alone.
***
e.e. cummings 58
a total stranger one black day
knocked living the hell out of me--
who found forgiveness hard because
my(as it happened)self he was
--but now that fiend and i are such
immortal friends the other's each
this is the extent of science's relevance to my life
I'm just home from work, Dinner shift at the restaurant (I kind of feel like all my posts begin this way). It wasn't regular service, some law firm had rented out the place to hold a recruiting event and all these posh people with their pinned on name tags swarmed the room with the open bar and us among them passing out things like duck ravioli with sweet and sour dipping sauce, hot dates wrapped in bacon, scallops wrapped in bacon and a few others, many of which were also wrapped in bacon. Chef Tony has a fondness for bacon-wrapped comestibles. My knee is really hurting from all the walking though. To do a brief sum-up of the whole knee fiasco, I went into the ER on Saturday night mostly just to get an x-ray of what was going on to cause all this pain that's been on the rise since october, not to mention the growing mass right under the scar from the August incision. No, it wasn't an emergency, but the pain was intense, and my appointment with the surgeon isn't for another week so I figured better to get it checked out and at least have some x-rays taken now, and maybe be prescribed something for the pain. X-ray showed that a cyst had developed on the edge of my tibia (heh, my tibia sounds weird...so used to hearing the tibia, but this one's mine) right around the area where the screw was put in to anchor the bottom part of my ACL. They said it was also possible that the bone cyst had developed because the screw may be coming loose, or that my body was having a reaction to it...something along those lines, but all they could confirm is that I definitely had the bone cyst. Great. They gave me some motrin and some vicodin and sent me home and offered that I'd likely be recommended surgery in which they remove the cyst from my tibia, replacing the piece with a bone graft. So...that's the idea. I'll see Dr. Karlson next monday and hopefully he'll have a better idea of what the FUCK one does when their body is inspired to build a cyst on the bit of metal that's holding yer knee together. Brilliant cells, thanks much. Bad call for the morale and physical (and financial?) stability of Mollie Inc. We're gonna add this to the agenda of the next staff meeting cause this is poop. You're all being demoted to the mail room. Okay I giggled my ass off writing that so clearly the vicodin is kicking in. Anyhow that's the knee situation. Looks like surgery but I'm doing my best not to think about it.
What was neat about the ER trip was the perspective I got walking out. All along the hallway as I was leaving were beds and stretchers, all containing people who were in neck braces and moaning, or on their sides and moaning, or very old heavily sedated people with thin thin hair who gazed through me as I walked by. The amount of pain in that hallway was palpable, not to mention audible. These poor hurting people waiting in bed, in line to be treated or tested or moved and it struck me that they'd be staying the night if not longer, and I was walking out of there- walking- and in minimal pain, that I'd be at work tomorrow, that I'd be singing on Sunday, that I'd get to make my peanut butter and fuji wrap or oatmeal with extra roasty peanuts for breakfast. I felt lucky that my biggest physical malady was a bone cyst, with which I could still do yoga, rock climb, waitress (uncomfortably) and sing- my life isn't all that interrupted by it. There was a time when my body was so rocked by the bulimia that I couldn't sing- I physically couldn't produce the sound- and even that (thank God) could be mended. And I felt so fortunate and so grateful to be walking out of there with health. Nothing relative about it. Certifiably insane, possibly, but that's not the point; my body's okay, and I'm not working against it.
That said, I'm going to make better time for my meals, and eat them sitting down rather than on the fly. I eat better that way, I make better food choices that way, I feel fuller that way, and it means I'll actually have the meal rather than putting it off or getting distracted.
Other than the dinner shift tonight it's been a pretty blah day...I got full credit on a symmetry homework (woot!) and it was nice to look at it and not have it be totally marked up, but really I've felt pretty gray. The weather has been hinting at spring, aall coy sunshine and full warmish breezes but the temperature plummets at night and the rain has been interrupting these attempts at rebirth. I find the breaths I take these days are deeper, that my hope is higher. My belief in self tends to respond to spring- I remember this from Skidmore, I remember this from all the way back to Mirman, how my body and brain respond to the slow softening of the weather (or in LA just the cold in the morning). I haven't made great choices lately (this self-deception thing is a bitch) but I can feel these tiny clicks happening in my brain, these little shifts that aren't yet showing up outside of me but that I can feel as real as an apple in my hand. Things like lack of clarity and shame and oh god these lonely fears make for a lot of house cleaning to do. I've not liked me much lately. Like a pack rat suddenly trying to sort through her belongings and being appalled at what she's kept and deranged she must be, what a mistake she must be to have lived like this for so long. It's hard to sort through these things and keep self esteem alive, but what I'm finding is that when I'm feeling dark about me that I have the belief now that it will change, that I can- and will- feel differently, that there's hope for this self. I'm working my way out of habits and impulses like the immediate lie or my critical eye or responding with what I actually think or feel rather than what I think you'd like me better for thinking or feeling. Honesty. Again. Relentless. And I'm actually bad at it. Really bad. When I was little Mum would ask us if we'd washed our hands for dinner, and I got into a habit for awhile where even if I had, I would tell her I hadn't- that was about power, or something, I'm sure, about having something that she didn't, some bit of knowledge about me and control over a situation that she didn't. If that makes sense. That reasoning isn't relevant to me today, it's never about power, it's about being loved. Or liked. But usually loved. What if what I have to say means that you'll think less of me or want to spend less time with me or will reveal that I think differently than you thought...god even just writing this is making me anxious. And it's strange because I'm usually pretty outspoken, I usually have no problem saying what I think whether it's at work or in the classroom (heh, I meant as a student but I like that I can be considered on the teaching side of that as well) or socially, I can usually say what I think. I'm finding that when it comes to how I feel (or how choices I've made as a result of how I feel) I'm very, very hesitant to say what I think when it's to somebody that I love because I don't want to risk saying something that will make you love me less or go away from me. I read that sentence back and the thought sounds childish. That's not a judgment, it's just what it sounds like to me. Like a child feels it. The panic that I feel when presented with a question that I could potentially answer "wrong" feels equally childish. Maybe childish isn't the right word, I think I just mean that I feel powerless over it, that the panic owns me and the fear of not continuing to be loved as I have been is pretty consuming.
I went to a meeting Monday night and it very much re-geared my thinking (for the rest of the evening at least), it was wonderful. I suppose it's pretty stupid that I can acknowledge that there's something that can make me feel better, that there is a remedy, and yet the thought of it sounds exhausting and like the last thing I want to do. I exerted a tremendous amount of energy to search out food or a place to purge when I needed it; over the years I've spent exhaustive late nights in a panic on the phone and holding hearts together, and yet the thought of putting that same amount of energy into my recovery sometimes sounds beyond me. I guess that's the whole opposite action thing. At the moment I don't feel lonely, but I don't feel attached either...kind of at sea but not a stormy one. Homeless, homeless.
It's just quiet and I'm being alone.
***
e.e. cummings 58
a total stranger one black day
knocked living the hell out of me--
who found forgiveness hard because
my(as it happened)self he was
--but now that fiend and i are such
immortal friends the other's each
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