Quote book

I find myself slapping some long quotes and poems up in various places these days, mostly because I like them, and they're more than 1.5 sentences long, and I have lost the art of pulling out a pen and paper or actually adding to my quote book.

This one is from Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, she of Eat Pray Love fame. I haven't bothered to get the new one, Committed, yet, but my mother sent me an excerpt. It's all about making peace with the sometimes-unsettling idea of promising to be with one other human being until the end of your earthly days, and in this particular section she talks about loving someone enough to want to protect them, even from yourself, if necessary. So she makes a list of what she perceives to be all her horrible faults, a "prenuptial informed consent," she calls it. This one, I'm just going to have engraved on some nice business cards and pass out to prospective friends and suitors.

"I have far more enthusiasm in life than I have actual energy. In my excitement, I routinely take on more than I can physically or emotionally handle, which causes me to break down in quite predictable displays of dramatic exhaustion. You will be the one burdened with the job of mopping me up every time I've overextended myself and then fallen apart. This will be unbelievably tedious. I apologize in advance."

Rumi

Oh soul, you worry too much...

Look at yourself,

what you have become.

You are now a field of sugar canes,

why show that sour face to me?

...You say that I keep you warm inside.

Then why this cold sigh?

You have gone to the roof of heavens

of this world of dust, why do you worry?

Oh soul, you worry too much.

Since you met me, you have become a master singer,

and are now a skilled wrangler,

you can untangle any knot

of life's little leash

why do you worry?

Your arms are heavy

with treasures of all kinds.

About poverty,

why do you worry?

...Oh soul, you worry too much.

You have seen your own strength.

You have seen your own beauty.

You have seen your golden wings.

Of anything less,

why do you worry?

Spare Change

I realized recently that I've lived at this house longer than at any other address (2 years 2 months) and in LA longer than in any other city (4 years 3 months) since I graduated from high school. Until I got laid off, I'd been at that agency longer than any other job (3 years). Apparently I like change, but I appreciate that it's increasingly on smaller terms.

Cheesy, I know...

... but whatever else the next 6 months bring, I am so, so, so, so grateful this Thanksgiving for amazing, wonderful, dear friends. I spent the entire four-day weekend with various people I love, who make me feel loved. And I do not take that lightly.

Tonight I fell asleep on the couch watching Elf. I am full on sausage, cranberry relish, and the sweetness of knowing that at the end of the day, even if I am alone in my house, I am not alone in the world.

Dear Diary

I got a letter back from Washington today. They accepted my hours, and approved me to take the licensing exam. If I didn't want to, I wouldn't have to do another minute of therapy in California in order to be licensed and work in Seattle.

So, if I just got the news I thought I wanted to hear, why do I feel kind of like throwing up?

Home is where the stomach tells you that it is

Why does it always happen that just when you threaten to leave a place, you start to feel more at home than ever before? What is it about the act of turning to move on that highlights every wonderful thing you'd be leaving behind?

Yeah, that's my big secret. I've been thinking quite a bit about heading home (which is causing me to see LA a little rosy-tinted, but that is for another post). It's a secret, because I always leave space to change my mind as new information arrives, and what if I tell you all, and then I don't go home? Oh well.

I can't go yet, I have a bunch of inter-state license wrangling to do, but the idea of going back to Seattle keeps surfacing, strongly, whenever I'm in a period of massive transition. I felt this way in Berkeley four years ago, but missed SPU's application deadline by 9 days. I didn't want to wait a year to start grad school, so I decided to go to LA "just for two years, then I'll go home." Four years later, I'm still here.

I guess, on some level, I just want to be somewhere that when everything else in life changes (as it probably will always continue to do, every few years), I don't think about taking off. I can't promise myself that home would be that place, but I'm getting closer to wanting to take a chance that it could be (and hey, if not, I seem to be on four-year cycles, so I'm taking suggestions for 2014). I don't want to start over, personally or professionally. And I have no regrets that I moved here, or that I stayed here for a boy, or that I then stayed here for myself. But I keep trying to get myself to decide to just keep staying, to call it home, and my stomach's not entirely OK with that (ever since I hit 30, my stomach is the place I feel it when my heart hurts). I'm nervous about taking a full-time job. I canceled plans to move that would require me to sign a lease. I'm happy here, for now, but when I think about a few years down the line, I don't know that LA is where I want to be.

I don't know what will happen in the next six months. But whatever comes, the staying or going, the strange thing about all this is that it gives me a totally different perspective on, well, the source of the primary topic of my blog for the last year. When my heart was freshly broken, I couldn't understand when G said that there was nothing wrong, everything was "fine," but that he just couldn't go forward. Which sucked, because there wasn't really any way I could respond to that. But how I feel now, about LA, must be what he felt like. It's great, I'm happy, there are a number of really amazing things in Los Angeles that I couldn't get anywhere else. Sure, it's far from perfect, but I've gotten used to its quirks. I would even say (who thought this day would ever come?) that I love LA. But I can't commit. I can't promise I'll be here in the future. I'm trying to tell myself to just stay and be happy, because that would be a lot easier than starting over. And if I felt it, in my stomach/heart, that would be different. But it's just not what I want. It's not personal. It's not even about LA itself; hell, a lot of people would be lucky to live here and call it home. It's just about what feels like home to me. I can date this city, introduce it to my friends, bring my parents to meet it, play house, make a life here with it. But if push came to shove, if LA needed to know where my heart really was, I don't think I could pretend that I didn't sort of always have one toe out the door.

Well, I could lie, but then it might find out that in August, I picked a Google Voice number in area code 206.

Day 3

Dear Diary,
Today was Day 3 of unemployment in LA. Today is The Day I Did Not Get Out Of My Pajamas. I figure everybody needs one of those.

But I think one is plenty.

Dear Diary

Dear Diary,
Today is my first day of unemployment in LA. I got up and went for an early morning bike ride. With Lance Armstrong. Then I came home and ate leftover birthday cake for breakfast. Now I'm going back to bed.

I think this is going to work out just fine for a little while.

julie

Updatey-ness

Gah. So, I have to admit that my plan for the late evening was to be plopped on my couch, watching what really amounts to vampire soft-core porn (True Blood) (but dang that vampire is hot). But my neighbors have decided to throw another loud party... which means I can't even hear myself think, and I'm mentally counting down the minutes until I feel justified calling the police and making a noise complaint. I mean hey, who wants to be the lame neighbor who calls the cops at 10pm? I think maybe I can hold out until 11:30 or so. They always know it's me, anyway, although I have no idea how I am the only one who cares enough to call. I live in a canyon, so pretty much the whole neighborhood gets to hear their music until 3am.

Anyhow, on another, random note, I don't know when this song came out, but it makes me happy. So give it a whirl. It will have to suffice for tonight, because the Mexican dance party across the street precludes actual pensivity.

Stealing this from Addie over at The Softer Side of Cynical - it made me happy today, too. Mostly I really liked the guy whose gun turned into an ice cream cone...

White and Nerdy

View LA Social in a larger map

Because I am a nerd, I created a Google Map to approximate the general circumference of my life in LA, hopefully to help me discern where I should look for a new place to live. I am the big house in the middle, blue is work, red are my girlfriends, green is Ultimate. (If you live in LA and are not on my map yet, sorry! Doesn't mean you're not dear to my heart. It's an early version that doesn't account for anything not on my radar on a weekly basis). As you can see, basically I am at the hub of a non-trivially-sized wheel. Central to everything and close to nothing.

Now, perhaps, I need someone nerdier than I to write a program weighting the personal value and traveling frequency of each point on the map, accounting for negative values such as locations that would add traffic, and giving me a geometric weighted average location of where I should move, to maximize my geographic happiness.

Volunteers? Anyone?

Or, I could recognize that every decision involves loss... that to move towards something means moving away from other potentially valuable things (literally and figuratively)... and that eventually (though I'm not sure if I am there yet) I am going to have to just choose a side of town and get on with my life.

Upswing

Ah, finally. Getting a bit of my groove back after a long spring.

I became a part-time case manager, watched one of my clients come very, very close to dying at his own hand, went to Utah, went to Berkeley, injured my ankle, spent a weekend at a tournament with both of my exes, went out on a few dates with a guy who was 6'10" and drove a corvette, biked a century, went back to church, went back to therapy, went to an 80s party... and cried through almost all of it.

It's nice to be back on an upswing!

I think I'm realizing (again) how sensitive I am to social connection. Something as simple as my roommate being pretty much MIA for two months and counting has made a huge difference in my outlook. Coming home to an empty house, ending the day alone, doesn't do good things to my psyche. I'm managing work stress enough these days to go out and do things in the evening, which is helping immensely, but I think my long-term strategy needs to be to find some communal living.

Yes, your bad. Your very very bad.

I just had words with a hospital social worker who was supposed to get my client (who has a habit of wandering three cities away without shoes) into a locked facility, but sent him home instead.

Her response?

"Oh, sorry. My bad."

Talking to Strangers

I'm trying to be open to the world these days, to put out into the universe what I hope to get back from it... you know, little things like smiling, patience, silliness, and general friendliness. Some days this is harder for me than it should be. But I don't like who I'm becoming and I'm out of excuses. However, if I'm going to pull some sunshine out of my butt a few times a week, I've gotta figure out a way to de-stress. New work responsibilities are derailing me. Seriously, I've cried so much in the past month that if there wasn't Absolutely No Way it was possible (immaculate conception notwithstanding) I would have guessed I was pregnant.

I recognize I've developed this weird way of being friendly without really being real. Or, when I don't have to be friendly, I kind of wear this "stay away" look on my face, as if to let the world know that the account where I store my soul is overdrawn until further notice. Unfortunately, I seem to sometimes pull the chatty version of this bankrupt ATM out on dates... because she's good at talking and making conversation but really, really bad at actually giving anyone a chance. I mean really, I talk to people I don't know for a living, and make them feel comfortable. I could go on a blind date in my sleep... basically I just turn it into an intake, minus the part where I ask when they met their developmental milestones, or about their family legal and drug histories. But to really be open to people? That's asking a lot these days. I suppose some people compensate for their anxiety by talking, I compensate for mine by asking questions.

Anyhow, this is not who I want to be. I'm trying to be more mindful about being real when I meet people. Mostly it's working so far, or at least I recognize the days I'm totally maxed out and just go home instead of bothering to fake it. I think "two strangers a week" is a good starting point. That means I have to have a real conversation, that I actually show up to, with two new people every week, and work doesn't count. Mostly I just realized (after telling my clients for three years straight... and because I work with surly adolescents, I can say it exactly like this) that sitting around whining, waiting for things to change with little effort on your part, seems like a really fantastic idea, until you realize it's a really shitty one.

Why?

If you are a boy, could you explain to me why boys like to talk so much on dates?

As in, tell a 15-minute story about themselves, ask you a question, let you get two sentences into your answer, and then remember another 15-minute story about themselves they need to tell?

I actually got to the point where I wondered if "looking interested" was a bad idea, possibly encouraging this pattern to continue. I caught myself wondering what would happen if, mid-sentence, I interrupted and said "OK, now we've come to the part of the evening where you pretend to be interested in me."

Tina Fey rocks my world

How is it that I have about 50 movies that I thought I was really interested in watching in my Netflix On Demand queue, and all I ever watch is 30 Rock?

Spring Cleaning

As my roommate and I are both expecting multiple rounds of family in town during the month of April, and as I may have a sliiiight tendency to make nice neat piles of crap all over the house when I don't feel like looking at it in my room any more, we decided to have an official spring cleaning day today. We put on some good music and got very wrapped up in the whole thing. And if there was a camera around, which, thank god there wasn't, there might be photographic evidence of me riding the vacuum cleaner around like a wooden pony, feather duster in one hand, margarita in the other.

And no, I wasn't posing. That's just how I clean.

I had one of those deep, dark moments again last weekend. The boo hoo, poor me, this sucks, why-doesn't-he-realize-what-he's-missing moments of sheer emotional turmoil (over the first breakup, still, which I seem to have gone through another round of mourning after my rebound ended) in which I realized, finally, that am choosing to die here, alone, at my own little pity party. While making a great show of going through the motions of moving on, but really, going mostly nowhere. Or maybe I just put in an order for new feelings, but they've been on serious backorder. I have spent the last nine months content to be defined as The Girl With The Broken Heart. I am the cliche. And I'm kind of tired of it.

I finally got enough perspective to actually listen to the things that were coming out of my mouth when I was sad, and realize how ridiculous I sounded. I wish I could have gotten here sooner, and without doing some of the embarrassing and unhelpful things I have to admit to, but I'm here now. When I was sad, I listened to all those voices that told me I missed him, and we were so great together, and I'll never meet anyone like him again, maybe nobody else will ever love me like that, and after all this time apart maybe we should talk again (which I told myself was for closure, but I was lying, I wanted him to want me back). And I'm throwing up a little bit in my mouth realizing how long I thought those voices were rational.

I'm pretty embarrassed about this, but keeping secrets to look cool hasn't been getting me anywhere. I was on his side of town recently, and was trying to drive home after dinner with a friend who lives a few blocks from his place, but somehow pointed my car his direction. I'd seen him that day, and he was all nice to me, and invited me out to happy hour afterward, and asked about my family, blah blah blah. And I resisted going out, keeping plans with my friend, but the siren call of reconnecting was soooo... strong... tractor beam... kryptonite... cannot... resist..... I was newly single, and really, why bother learning how to miss someone new when missing someone old is so much easier, more familiar? "I'll just go talk to him," I thought, "tell him how stuck I am and maybe get more closure." I parked outside his apartment. But then I thought about walking up to the door, unannounced, and what I would say. I sat in my car for a half-hour, playing out every possible scenario, every possible conversation, every way it could go. And I realized there was no good answer. No possible conversation was going to give me what I wanted. He can't give me what I wanted. So I just drove home. In the immortal words of Heather Armstrong, it sucked, and then I cried. Although, really, looking at it from this rational place I am in today, wearing my pajamas at 2pm on a lazy Sunday, enjoying my totally cushy life, she had a baby and clinical depression, and I just had one giant pity party that I was starting to realize was coming to an unceremonious close, as I was the last one standing around in a room full of dirty dishes and stale chips.

I went to the library and checked out this, and this, and even this. I checked them out from the old lady librarian, of course, because I only check out smart-sounding titles from the Hot Librarian, but I brought them home and bolstered my self-respect by gladly allowing the author of He's Just Not That Into You to tell me stories about women who've done much more psychotic things in the wake of a miserable breakup. I mean really, all I did was have a hard time dealing with losing someone I loved.

And I planted my tomatoes.

Plan B

I am now taking recommendations for books in the category of "memoirs and wisdom-in-the-form-of-humorous-anecdotes from people who have realized that life does not turn out the way you planned."

Even though I never really started with a plan, that part, too, seems not to have gone much as planned.

Hippy

I used to be... ummmm... chunky. No, really. Ask anyone who knew me from ages 10-15. My dad used to put me on diets. Long legs, big belly. I was hott. Maybe that's why I got called Big Bird in middle school. Anyway, I know I'm not fat now, but I live in the world capital of oh-god-please-make-me-look-like-Barbie and I'm still a big advocate of learning to love the body you're in. Mostly because I know mine is probably, realistically, beginning its long, slow downhill slide and I anticipate needing to remind myself to love my wrinkles and moles along the way. Anyhow, that all came to mind tonight because I saw a video of Kelly Clarkson. Who I love. The woman actually has hips.