Vacation all I ever wanted

I've been struggling a bit with the Photo-A-Day Project. Some days I look around and realize I travel the same paths most days, and have stopped being able to find interesting things on those paths... and some days I'm too busy or tired to think about my camera until I'm laying on the couch watching Jeopardy. My brain is serious mush these days. But it's a vacation week, and the scenery has finally changed... so here are a few from the last couple of days:

First up, Mick Jagger and company...

My friend Nicole and I got free tickets at the last minute to their LA show last night -- and while I wouldn't have paid to see them, I have to admit it was a good show, fireworks and giant inflatable lips and all. Except for the parts where Keith Richards sang, though.

Next up, today was Thanksgiving and I saw my very first deep-fried turkey. I spent the day with some frisbee friends and their coworkers, eating, drinking, chopping, mixing, and searing a dead bird in 300-degree peanut oil.

Cranky McSpanky

Crap. I am cranky this week. Can't seem to shake it, even after a couple of 10-hour nights of sleep. I'm tired. Tired of having papers over my head. Tired of being in my car, tired of having my life spread out over a 30-mile radius, tired of not being able to play ultimate and having to either sit and watch, or stay home alone. Tired of my room looking like someone only comes there to fling clothes around the room. Tired of my walls being bare, and tired of not having the energy or the decorating ability to do anything about it. Tired of not knowing how to change the things I'm cranky about. Tired of, at the age of 30, still occasionally wishing my mother would fly in and make sure I ate well every day. Tired of it being week 8 (perhaps I should not be surprised... maybe it's just week 7 syndrome showing up a week late). Tired of being hard on myself. Frankly, despite the fact that it is part of my job to remind people all day long that change is a long, slow process, I am secretly upset that I have not found a button to make it go fast just for me. Luckily, I have a therapist of my own who reminds me of the same thing, and having her remind me to chill out and enjoy the ride makes her worth every penny.

Anyhow, when I am cranky, I cry a lot and, to be honest, really want the rest of the world to join my pity party. Usually I can help get out of it by doing something to remember the world doesn't revolve around me, but then this morning I remembered that I had forgotten to go visit my hospice patient yesterday, which means that not only did I miss a chance to remember that whole not-the-center-of-the-world thing, but now I also feel like a big, mean, self-absorbed jerk too, for forgetting about a sweet little 95-year-old lady in a nursing home. Not really helping.

This is about the point in the quarter where I get really hard on myself, and start thinking that everyone would be better off if they didn't have to deal with me, because clearly I make everyone's lives more difficult when they have to "handle" me. So last week, when a friend pointed out this little streak I have, of thinking that I have to fix myself before anyone should have to deal with me, what was my first reaction? Crap, I thought, I'm too much of a perfectionist - I better fix that before I let anybody get anywhere near me, so I'm not too much to handle. I suppose the irony of that reaction would be much funnier to me if it weren't so true.

So, anyhow, in the spirit of trying to go easy on myself for five minutes, I'm dredging up another Anne Lamott quote. Maybe I've posted it before, but I need it again today.

"[My therapist] reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world.... The first rule is that you must not have anything wrong with you, or different. The second rule is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth one is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed. So we decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was show up for my life and not be ashamed."

I Voted

So, I got off my butt, got over my excuses, and made it to the polls. Here's the play-by-play:

• September, 2005: Register to Vote in LA County as a "Permanent Absentee Voter," thinking I will be more likely to vote if I can do it from the comfort of my own home.
• October 2005: Receive voter registration card. Promptly file it in the "pile of things to be filed" in the corner. Receive absentee ballot for Nov election - thankfully, in English this time.
• November 2005: Forget to vote. Recycle absentee ballot. Get jealous of people wearing "I voted" stickers, as they remind me I am, occasionally, lazy and irresponsible.
  
• October 2006: Get voter's guide and absentee ballot for this year's elections, along with threatening notice that if I don't vote this time, they will stop sending me absentee ballots, as I don't seem to be using them. Put voter guide and ballot on shelf with every intention of eventually reading voter's guide and making informed decisions about Important Things That Affect Society and About Which I Have a Voice.
  
• November 5, 2006:
• 7:30pm - In attempt to procrastinate from reading for class, spend 1.5 hours reading analysis and pro/con content of voter's guide and attempting to understand which choices are the lesser of evils. Try not to be swayed by ARGUMENTS WHICH FEEL THE NEED TO MAKE THEIR POINTS IN ALL. CAPITAL. LETTERS!! Find myself overcome by irritation at the idiocy of a society which wants things (like, say, education, traffic relief, and environmental protection) but is unwilling to pay taxes to fund it, opting instead to insist on issuing bonds, which essentially amounts to taxing our children for things we want to enjoy today (Buy now! Nothing down! No payments until January 2036!). Fear that one day soon we will see Arnold Schwarzenegger on late night TV, riding a donkey in a clown suit, advertising California's Going Out of Business Sale (Closing our doors! Everything must go!).
• 9:00pm - wish I had a martini. Start working on something easy, like the Sunday crossword.
• 9:30pm - notice that my absentee ballot was supposed to be in the mail two days ago.
• 9:31pm - curse. decide to deal with it the next day.

• November 6, 2006:
  
• 8:16am - hear on NPR that absentee ballots can be dropped off at polling locations.
• 8:17am - hear on NPR that thousands of people do this, causing close races to be undecided for days on end while ballots are counted.
• 8:18am - decide not to be One of Those People. Decide to find my voting location and vote properly
• November 7, 2006:
• 9:52am - leave for class
• 9:53am - use One Return Rule to go back for absentee ballot
• 9:54am - use first amendment of the One Return Rule to go back (yes, again) for voter registration card, which no longer appears to be in To Be Filed pile in corner.
• 9:56am - decide doing my civic duty is more important that being in class on time (which, really I don't seem to do often anyway, today's excuse is just better than usual) and continue searching room until I start over and find voter registration card in the To Be Filed pile, right between the title to my car and my CPR certification card.
• 3:00pm - pull card out after class. Discover it does not actually tell me where to go vote.
• 3:05pm - spend 15 minutes online attempting to ascertain the location of my polling place
  
• 3:30pm - bike to my polling place. Say hello to the ladies knitting outside the retirement home
• 3:33pm - spell my name, several times, to the lady behind the table. Offer to show someone, anyone, some ID to prove I am who I say I am. Wonder why no one seems to care that I am who I claim to be. Realize I didn't need my voter registration card. Explain that I want to vote today, even though I'm holding my absentee ballot, all filled out, in my hand. Get quizzical looks. Get directed across the room to another lady. Stand there holding my ballot while they yell back and forth about what to do with my absentee ballot, because apparently ripping it up, throwing it out, or writing VOID are not options. Realize I am not being helpful, and stop giving them suggestions about what to do with absentee ballot.
  
• 3:40pm - enter booth with shiny new ballot. Marvel at the wonder of technology that is the InkaVote machine. Try not to mess up. At least not on any of the important ones.
  
• 3:45pm - exit booth. Ballot in hand. Feed into SuperSecretVoteGuardingMachine, monitored by Frank. Feel powerful. Feel like I have a voice. Feel, strangely, like watching election results on television all night.
• 3:46pm - Proudly display my first ever "I Voted" sticker. Wish a good afternoon to the knitting ladies. Resume worrying about society.
  

Decisions...

I recently remembered another reason I love author Ann Lamott - I found a quote of hers I had written somewhere, presumably at one of the many points in time at which I found myself making a life-changing decision:

"When you need to make a decision, and you don't know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake."

In other exciting News of My Rapidly Approaching Demise, I got a TB test this week. Well, I got half of a TB test. The half where they stick you with a needle and inject something under your skin. Then, even though I was 50 feet away from it for 8 hours, I forgot to go back across the street two days later and get the test read.... which unfortunately means the whole first part, the painful part, was all for nothing. I must be really special.

Nostalgia

Last night I watched my life pass before my eyes. Well, at least seven years of it. And actually, some of those bits were really not my life, as they took place before I was around, in the strange netherworld that is Your Parents Lives Before You Were Born.

As a very belated joint birthday gift for my parents (really now, an early Christmas present, as the birthdays were last summer... aren't I a great daughter?), I had 36 reels of Super-8 home movies transferred to DVD. 1972-79. Silent movies of my parents before they had kids, going on camping vacations with their new puppy. My dad working on his Volkswagen squareback in the driveway of our old house. My grandpa on the farm in Illinois, my mom's dad, sitting around at Christmastime, while my aunt floated in and out of the scene, pregnant with the first grandchild. The life of people and things who are hazy in my own mind. My only memory of that dog is that she bit me when I was four, right before she died. My only memory of the VW is sitting on the hood, drawing in the ash that settled on it when Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980. My aunt had two more kids, my three cousins, and they've produced 9 of their own offspring in the last 4 years -- the 10th is due next May. I never met my grandfather, he died the summer before I was born.

So maybe it's just the romantic nature of Super-8 - even watching the DVD brings up memories of the rhythmic clacking of the projecter, and smell of the warm film as it passes in front of the lens - but watching the early years of our family filled me with the overwhelming understanding that I had a really wonderful childhood. Yeah, sure, so of course the only scenes in the movies are when my family was actually all together, playing in our backyard or clamming on the Oregon coast, and everybody's smiling and waving at the camera and since there's no sound, you can't hear my brother and I screaming at each other (though, circa 1978, he was caught on tape trying to run me over with a Big Wheel). But man, there's something about watching us run around in our backyard, swinging and rollerskating and learning to ride bikes, completely oblivious of the havoc that the Teen Years would wreak upon our rosy memories...

I could hardly believe that the family I was watching was my own. Not because I didn't have a good childhood (I did) and not because my family doesn't get along now (we do), but because that family is sealed off in Super-8 happy-ending land, and my family has been through so much since then. We are not without our happy endings, of sorts, but we're tempered by reality, by years of bickering with each other and accomodating each other and sticking by each other through life-threatening illness and adolescence and all that jazz. But I love revisiting that family, and finally beginning to understand how much my parents sacrificed to give my brother and I a good life, and watching everyone wave at the camera as the picture begins to flicker and the screen goes white. I can almost hear the end of the reel going thwap, thwap, thwap.