Random Acts of Awesome

I was talking to my little brother last night, as I was driving around Beverley Hills, deeply regretting my decision to go out and explore. I was bitching, while on the phone, about how much this is just not my scene. How I was surrounded by trendy people, and how I just wanted to find a goddamn diverse neighborhood and have a little quirkiness thrown at me. I was mostly joking, but also not. I feel privileged about where I get to stay, what I get to experience. But it's still not me, this wealth and shallow awareness of others eyes and judgement. Anyways, I'm talking to him on the phone, and he's laughing, and I get a quick flash moment of awareness of his almost palpable need to be me in that moment. It's not jealousy, or a hatred of his life right now. It was just a quiet voice reminding him of what he used to be, used to want. Quiet but potent. A reminder of a past self that constantly wanted MORE, was discontent and addicted to the search for something better. In ...

You know that old commercial where a mans deep voice slowly says "Diaareeeeaaaahhhh" as an overlay to some horrific scenario? No? Nobody ever remembers that commercial. It was my families favorite thing to say, for a very long time, because we are weird. And hilarious. Anyways, I keep saying "Discontent" in that exact voice lately. It pops up at the most inconvenient times, this terrible discontent. It makes you run for relief. It embarrasses you in public spaces. It is, I think, my genetic herald. My coat of arms would be a face with furrowed brows and bit lip, looking longingly off into the distance at some vague but undoubtedly better than place. Stupid discontent. So, I try to force myself to stop and think about things I am grateful for in the moment every time I start getting that anxious roiling in the gut that heralds Diiiiisssssscooonnnnnteeeeennntttt. I wake up every morning, mostly healthy. Sometimes sore, but only because I either kicked ass the d...

Being in Seattle has been hard for me. There's something about a giant city that, trite as it sounds, is so lonely. Surrounded by people and not one of them is yours. It's been making me think a lot about my lack of connections. I am, in some ways, doing the exact opposite of what I should be doing right now. I'm hunkering down, feeding my introvert, spending too much time alone. When I do go out, alcohol is involved and I avoid the people who approach me because I don't want to make stupid decisions based on alcohol and loneliness. Which is great! Hurray for not making stupid decisions. But choosing to be alone is also a stupid decision. For me. Right now. I crave connections. Since I associate connections with long term settling in, I'm fantasizing about settling down. I want to open a book store, in a little town on the ocean. A slightly run down little town, quiet and stormy in the winter, rambunctious in the summer. I want to have a fireplace in said books...

Just woke up from a dream where I was a young woman starting to gain a mastery of fire, who met an older, very genial man who I rather wanted to fuck. He was quite amenable to the idea, but it turns out he was a monk (though not a very good one) in a religion that was a cross between every terrible thing about every religion ever conceived. We were walking down a dirt road, looking for a warm, convenient barn when I found this out. Because we came across a large group of terrifyingly aesthetic old men, with a beautiful young man in the center of their circle. When they saw the man I was with, they called to him to join them. He went and joined the outskirts of their circle, but did not take part as they beat the beautiful young man to death with heavy staves. They, of course, noticed his lack of participation (I, on the other hand, noticed only that he went to them when called, and did nothing to stop them), and decided he needed to be punished for it. They started beating him, and it ...

It makes me sad that I know so few people who are capable of asking questions. I should say, maybe, capable of asking questions of me. It seems to be a pretty consistent trend in my life, having one or two friends who ask questions, and a ton of acquaintances who don't. Since I rarely get to sit down and natter with the good question askers, I'm left with the majority of conversationalists who really, really just want to talk about themselves. It's been highlighted for me, lately, just how difficult it is to carry on conversations with people who would really rather engage in monologues. I get it, to a certain extent. I'm a good question asker, I am genuinely interested in what your answers are, and it's got to be tempting to just keep going. But damn, people. When the conversation starts to falter after yet another story about yourself, that's a good opportunity to ask a fucking question. As opposed to letting awkward silence fall till I ask another question ...

I keep trying to write stories, unsuccessfully. I've tried to write stories since I was a very young child, always unsuccessfully. I remember, with fond cringing, the first full short story I was able to finish. I was 17, I think. I called it "The White Raven", and it was about a farmer in Ireland who went insane after seeing a white raven. Because ravens can't be white, see, so this raven couldn't exist, see? But it DID. And it BLEW HIS MIND. Literally. This story came about after I had been reading a whoooooole lot of books about chaos theory, and complexity theory, and fractals, and... well, lots of mind bendy science stuff. So I wanted to write about mind bendy science stuff, but in a fictiony kind of way. It didn't work. Oh, it so didn't work. I still have the story somewhere, and it's stilted and awkward and really pretty boring. Any time I try to write fiction that's more than two paragraphs long, it's the same thing. I have a way wi...

I dreamt about dancing last night. I dreamt I was getting ready to go to a wedding, full of people I used to know well. Getting ready, in front of my sister, I chose the most shapeless dress I could find. And I was still embarrassed of my body. We walked down to meet the others, and engaged in some silly shenanigans, lots of pointless running around and meeting random folks and refusing to take a zip line. And then we got to the bottom floor, and people were starting to mingle, and there was music. And suddenly I had to dance. I just had to. Nobody was dancing in the venue, so I went outside, around the fire. And there, singular people were dancing, all of them self consciously encased in their own bubble. I didn't want to feel self conscious, didn't want to make a spectacle of myself, but I just had to dance. So I did. And I flew. You know the kinds of dreams where you are deeply rooted inside your own body, deeply aware of everything that your body is doing? Most often those ...

Shit. Now I have that stupid theme song stuck in my head. I've been thinking an awful lot lately about the process of evolving friendships. I met a woman in Bozeman almost a year ago, while visiting, who I knew I wanted to be friends with. She was a friend of my brothers, she was quietly snappy, funny, self effacing, and just all around interesting. Plus, she has the energy of a bear, and I adore bear people. Over the past couple of weeks, I've finally had the opportunity to pursue a friendship with her. And, as with most of my friendships, it started off full bore. No holds barred, heavily intimate conversations, absolute fascination with each other right off the bat. Shit, our first friendship date involved the best burger I've ever had, followed by slowly walking to the Gallatin River at sunset and talking about things I wouldn't discuss with my therapist. This woman is, at heart, a healer and a teacher. She is incredibly good at both. She is also deeply flawed, ...

I feel like I have this black, viscous poison swirling under my skin, slowly getting closer to the surface the older I get. And while I have always known it was there, I have never known where it came from. It never made any sense, this poison. Not in conjunction with the memories I have of my past. I have memories of being happy, of everything being ok. But the memories are like paintings. They are bright and full of sunshine, so bad things can't be happening in them. The mind rejects the idea that beauty can hold bad things. The older I get, the closer this black tar seeps to the surface, the more I realize that it was put in my veins by something. That it resides in every bright color, every layer of sunshine and childish laughter. The blackness sharply highlights the light, making chiaroscuro sharp enough to cut out of these technicolor memories. I think about how hard I worked to look happy, how unacceptable it was to be unhappy. I think about how manipulated my entire rea...

I am in a holding pattern, and I'm not sure why. I don't know what this tether is comprised of, the one that holds me, however loosely, down. I wake up every morning and I wonder at myself, wonder why I am here instead of there, with no real idea of where there is. It's much like being a teenager, this angsty feeling of dissatisfaction with the here and now. This blinded striving towards you know not what. This is far more important, though, than any decisions I made as a teenager. This is, truly, the rest of my life, whatever it is I am longing to move towards. I know it, I feel the importance and impatience building. Yet still I sit and welter in comfort and the known. Fear is definitely a composing string on this tether. Fear of the unknown, fear of the images in my head of what people who want what I want look like. These preconceived notions are potent, are impossible to ignore. People who quit their jobs for ideals, people who throw themselves into uncomfortable ye...

I am sitting on the patio, watching a storm roll past. There is lightening in the clouds in front of me, and a bruised sunset off to my side. I'm watching bats and hawks swirl through the air, lightening lit clouds their backdrop, visible for a moment and then gone, only to reappear moments later feet away. Magical birds, magical sky, magical air. The wind is blowing in fitful bursts, smelling of pennies and flowers and sun warmed rocks. I am drinking a cup of chrysanthemum tea, the flower at the bottom of my mug a complex sea creature waving with every sip I take. I ate good food tonight, that I made myself with love and effort. I drank a cocktail made from quality ingredients that tasted like ingenious human engineering. I smoked a cigar that made me lightheaded for a moment, and I drank water that soothed my tongue and my head. I swam for a bit, and then rested my arms against the side of the pool and read a good book while my legs kept up a gentle but steady movement. I spent...

When I think about losing weight, I don't think about being a model. I don't think about being skinny. I don't think about hip bones jutting and collar bones you could kill someone with. I don't think about food, honestly. I think about movement. My lose of weight isn't a loss of weight, it's a loss of fat. I gain muscle quickly, and I rarely actually lose weight. When I was 24, I was sick for a month and a half. The kind of sick I should have been hospitalized for, because I was hacking up blood and unable to drink anything but chicken broth with ginger and garlic. For, literally, at least a month. I lost a LOT of weight. I remember, the first time I had left the house in forever, I went to a female friends house to hang out. I was still deathly looking. My hair was lank, my skin was grey, and my eyes were shrunk in pockets of blackness. I looked sick. But there was a man there, a man I'd known for a little bit, and he looked at me in shocked admiration. H...

I got an email from a former lover this morning, catching me up on life and love. It was a beautifully worded letter, full of things that made me so happy to hear. It's such a lovely thing when the person at the end of a connection you thought you lost plucks the cord that still exists between you and plays you a little tune. He ended the letter with: Blue smoke in moonlight, Cicadas stirring, fireflies lazily drift, ping frogs hop and… How many can say, as we may, "we met in a collision of poetry"? "We sail tonight for Singapore." ----------------------------------------- And I got this incredibly happy. This knowledge that the memories you create with people, these seemingly ephemeral connections that come in and overwhelm you for a heartbeat, till they fade away, are not shallow. The moments that stick like taffy to the sides of the mercurial pool that is human experience, they are connected on the other side to the person you shared them with. T...

My little brother just had a baby girl. And, outside the awesomeness of that fact, it's bringing up all these issues around family and connections. Actually, they've been making themselves felt for a while now. I chose to go live with my brother and sister-in-law for a couple months after their wedding, before coming down to Arizona. And it rather sharply highlighted some serious deficiencies in how my family handles connections. My mom was worried I was getting too attached to my brother and his family. She thought it might not be so healthy to spend a couple months living there, that it would make me... what, I'm not sure. There are aspects of that which are not wrong. I have a tendency to over-care, to provide too much to the detriment of the person on the other ends ability to be independent and responsible. That is absolutely true, and has been true for much of my life. With my brother and his wife, though, it was more about falling into a needed family connection. T...

Those moments when you wake up in the middle of the night, with your heart racing and your mind frantically running through disaster scenarios... those are rarely pleasant moments. For me, they tend to be fueled by alcohol. If I've had even slightly too much to drink, I inevitably wake up between 2:30 and 4am, and spend a good chunk of time obsessing about everything that is wrong in my life and with me. But sometimes it's not so bad. Sometimes your brain has a chance to work something out, to tell you something tangibly that you might not have known for a good long while. Last night was one of those moments for me. I woke up at 2:30am, light headed and unhappy, scared of myself and for myself. I hate it when I drink too much. It feels like the worst sort of weakness, like I'm giving in to the absolute worst parts of myself and I'll never be healthy again. But thinking about my own weakness led me to thinking about how I could control that weakness. And the first thin...

In the past almost month that I have been in Arizona, I've been trying to steer a sea change in myself. There's a cascade of events that need to happen in order for me to happy, healthy, and whole for the rest of my life. And I've been trying to gently kick start them. That sounds a lot more orderly and structured than it really is. I have a vague idea of what is wrong with me (well, of what is holding me down and stopping me from many things), and a vague idea of what is needed to make it all better. The jumping off point has been judgment. I have stopped judging myself while out here. Mostly. This is a hard one to break. But I have given myself permission to let go of the need to regulate through judgement. And by god, it is freeing. The constant fear I have lived with for most of my life mysteriously disappeared within the first week of being here. I sleep well, when I eat well. Which isn't always. But that's ok, because I am stripping away my judgment of self...

There are points in my life where I can make sex transcendent. Any sex. With anyone. I watched a man walking across the street just now, directly in front of my stopped car. He was a bald black man with wide shoulders and a beer belly. He was handsome, and tired, and... And there are these two sharp realities. In one, we are both desperate. Sex is tawdry, sweating in a trailer that smells of cigarettes and microwaved food. There are the underlying emotional realities that everyone refuses to acknowledge. Fear, of being alone Nd left behind. Fear of being ignored by life and people. There is anger, and self disgust, and need. And then there is this other reality. The one where everything is acknowledged. Fear is out in the open, even if it's still hoping to be ignored. Anger is incorporated, becomes sensual. Self disgust is gone, soothed away by touch and kisses. Sex is sacred, in its own earthy way, it has a purpose beyond simple gratification. It's just as valid a reality....

From April of last year: Had this moment of epiphany, if you will, on the bus home this evening, watching a young man stare at a cute young woman for 30 min straight. See, the worst thing about objectification, in my mind, is the fact that it corrupts the reality of what happens between a man and a woman (or between any two people who might be attracted to each other). Attraction is, at its heart, the beginning of a story. Something catches your eye. You look, and something inside you wants to keep on looking. You're drawn to this person, for whatever reason. And that attraction is the seed of a story. Who knows what road it could lead down? Maybe they'll be attracted to you, and the story becomes more complex, with two characters instead of one. Maybe they won't, but you'll still have had the experience of that story, that kernel of hope for more. The potential that healthy attraction represents can/should be a beautiful thing. Objectification isn't a story. ...

There is something about lying half naked in pure sunshine that reminds me of how much empty space I'm composed of. Running my hands over my sun warmed skin, smoothing coconut oil all over me... the slick barrier between my hands and my skin reminds me that there is everything and nothing always there. The dual sensation on my hands and my thighs, neither of those are real. I love that. I love being reminded that the reason I can soak so much in is because there is so little acting as a barrier between my atoms and those composing the rest of reality. It helps, to think of my body as a loosely gathered sack of cells, composed of pure energy. What is fat, in that reality? Just more energy. Lying in the sun, I feel it melting back into me, put back into use to feed more of who I am. Yes, my cells are dying as my skin browns. Some, anyways. The rest are thriving, bouncing, dividing and gathering back together again. They are beautiful, and they are no different than every form of en...

I need to find out why I refuse to fulfill my social needs, why I isolate myself so much lately. It's an odd thing, in all honesty. It's the one parameter of my happiness that I'm not aggressively pursuing right now. But it's a big one. I have these social needs that help craft a backbone of basic happiness, the ability to interact with others in a hospitable way, to give and receive... it is a genuinely core aspect of myself. I'm not even really doing it online these days. I'm putting stuff out there, but I'm not responding to anything. It feels like a type of depression. It feels like a small darkness, getting bigger. And it feels like low self esteem. Do I not believe anyone will want what I have to offer? I've never really believed that in my life. Am I going to start believing that now, NOW, at this point in my life where I could do anything? Maybe this is a form of self gaslighting, a way to make sure I don't reach my own full potential. Mayb...

Finally, I have my own laptop. I've been traveling with just my work laptop and my phone, and it's a pain in the ass to type on my phone. Not conducive to long blog posts. Of course, I don't know that I'd have been writing, regardless of my implements. I keep coming up with these entries, with things I want to write down and remember. And I keep neglecting to do so. I think a part of it is the fact that opportunity is knocking, and expecting me to answer the door. I'm sitting, curled up in my bed, sucking my thumb and ignoring the knocking. My sister asked me if it was because I was afraid of rejection, and I told her I thought it was more a fear of disappointing. She pointed out that the two are rather directly related. What happens when you disappoint people? They reject you. I neglected to point out the cause of that fear to her, nicely highlighted quite recently by the kerfuffle created when some of my family were told about an angry facebook post I made, ex...

The problem with writing whatever comes into your mind, and then making it public, is that sometimes an unintended audience is subjected to things they really didn't want, or need, to see. This was sharply highlighted for me yesterday evening. My brother and I were sitting on stools up at the bar of a little dive called the Haufbrau, in Bozeman. We were chilling, I was drinking a Bushmills on ice and he was sipping a beer, and there were french fries involved. Along with excellent conversation, about many things. One of which was his experience with an extremely intuitive woman who taught him some body and energy work in the course of his massage therapy schooling. She brought up, unprompted, his father. And how his father had unintentionally stolen his voice, through sheer loudness, and how Stoph could benefit from taking his voice back and talking to his father about it. So, I asked him to read something I'd written a year ago, about my own voice, and asked him if he relat...

Blue as the middle of the ocean, the sky pulses with promise Bees scramble from flower to flower, driven to a frenzy To eat, to taste, to spread new life I lie in improbably green grass, technicolor day Arms held above my head, wrists shackled by heavy warm sunshine Grass tickling the inside of my thighs Wind whispering a chilly breath down my belly Sharp contrast to the red pepper heat of sun Beating against my closed lids. Ravens tok and mock in the pines Impervious to the sumptuous invitation of spring Black birds waiting for the seduction of winter I feel myself pushed down into the cool dirt By the sheer weight of the sun And I cry May Day, may day, mayday

I have made a bit of a breakthrough in my quest to understand this state. See, yesterday afternoon I got sick of moping around feeling lonely and bad about myself. So, I did what always worked for me in Portland. I created a dating ad on Craigslist that is, if I do say so myself, pretty badass. I wrote out how I'm feeling at the moment about who I am, and what I'm looking for. Body of the ad below. Bozeman is a pretty small city, so I figured I'd get much less responses than I would expect in Portland, especially since I figured my ad was long and convoluted enough to weed out the good ol' boys who didn't like words. I was DELUGED with responses. So many. To the point where I'm having a hard time responding to the good ones, of which there are actually many, because of the sheer number. And the quality of responses is high. I definitely attracted the kinds of people I was looking for. Smart, open minded, aggressive, interested and interesting... Good qualit...

Talking to my baby brother about quieting those voices in his head, the ones that tell him he's not a real man if his wife doesn't take his name, that tell him he's weak and lesser if he's not in charge... Makes me ALMOST glad to have grown up a woman in that religion. The messages we're all given, religion or not, are so ugly and destructive to our sense of self. My brother is a sensitive, aware, smart human being. Who is having a hard time with the concept of his incredibly strong, smart, self willed wife not wanting to change her name. He's having a hard time with it in part because it takes away from his sense of being masculine. Her need to maintain her own sense of self threatens his sense of self. While he was taught it was weak to allow a woman autonomy, he has never been forced to realize the weakness inherent in the inability to be strong and masculine within oneself, without need of subjugating others. That, right there? Is weakness. Relying on othe...

If you knew how fucking hard it was for me to have any self esteem at all? You wouldn't try so hard to cut me back down to size. I think, I HOPE, that if you knew how hard I worked for this sense of self, you wouldn't feel so goddamn threatened by it. Listening to you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, listening to you call my hysterical, or haughty, or arrogant, or masculine... That shit doesn't roll off a well oiled back. It's been internalized since I was a little, little girl. Those voices are the ones I look for when I look for men. The words are the words I need to hear when I want to think someone loves me. If you knew how fucked up that was, would you stop? Would you let me be strong without needing to make me feel weaker than you? I don't have any patience for it anymore. I don't have patience for your "protectiveness" when I find a man who treats me the way you've always treated me. I don't blame every fucke...

There is a certain kind of man who can use my sexuality against me, leverage like a crowbar to crack me open and leave me empty of anything but a ghost of himself, for a period of time. It's an addictive sort of interaction, for both of us. My sexuality is composed of many facets (like anyones), but the two strongest facets are need and power. The need of others, fulfilled. And the power of energy coursing under my skin brought to the surface to shine. Few of my own needs are fulfilled by this kind of man. I cum, and often. I crave the pleasure. But that's not what's addictive. Desire, be it physical or not, and need fulfilled... that's the addictive part. His needs, my ability to fill the cracks. This man can be faceless, but his needs are always the same. There is a powerful something or someone in his past, that took away his own sense of power and autonomy. There is a latent, burning desire to dominate. A physical craving, unfulfilled, to hold down and take, to...

There's a Margaret Atwood quote I love, "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.". I love it because it neatly highlights the disparity in power dynamics between men and women in the world we live in. This weekend, I can't stop thinking "Parents are afraid their children will shame them. Children are afraid their parents will leave them." Maybe I need to preface that with "Witness parents" and "Witness children". My folks. Man. I love them. There's no but after that statement. I just love them, as I'm sure they love me. The disparity in the power dynamic between myself and Christopher and them, though, has been sharply highlighted. They grieve the fact that we don't believe what they believe. And we live in childish terror of being abandoned, left for dead, deemed untouchable. They mourn our worldliness, even as they revel a little in the freedom we have. We tiptoe around them,...

SO many changes in such a short period of time. My body and mind are more than a little overwhelmed. I'm grieving and celebrating and trying to be practical and in the moment, all at the same time. I'm not good at ANY of those things, never mind all of them together. I'm glad I got to grieve. I'm glad I made myself say goodbye, instead of just walking away. I'm glad I lay in bed and cried in front of another human being, naked in more ways than one. I hated it, hated the loss of control. But I'm glad I did it. I think I broke the cycle of leaving being too hard, of loss and grief being unacceptable. At least for now. So, I am homeless, almost. I am staying with my brother and soon to be sister in law for now, till May. Then Arizona again. Then who knows. Not me. And that contributes to the celebration. Driving out of Portland yesterday, through the Gorge and into the hills of Eastern Oregon, felt AMAZING. Warm and right and good. Sitting here now, in a str...

I was reading an article about a young Chinese American man who's memoirs got bought by a major network and turned into a show. He was very matter of fact about the racism and fear that changed his story into something palatable to the US audience. But you could hear the desperation and anger behind his words. He'd become famous, at the expense of everything he held to be true. People loved the story they were fed, not his story. It was, honestly, extremely sad, though he wrote it in a biting, wonderfully sarcastic tone. It made me wonder anybody would want to be famous in this society. Anybody with an actual story to tell, at least. You can't be famous in this world unless you're thoroughly processed through the filter of media. And media has a vested interest in maintaining the level of stupid. Because stupid is cheap, and fast, and sells. Stupid is the fast food of the entertainment world, and the media that makes you famous also must make you stupid. They'...

I have been travelling almost constantly since June of last year. I get a little shiver of happiness down my spine whenever I say that to myself... I think I can (relatively) confidently say that I am running towards something, not away from something. It's an idea that's been bothering me, the thought that I might be blindly running away from responsibility and fear. Running blindly pretty much always leads to stumbling and hurting yourself. So, I wanted to be sure I was running while looking ahead. It feels like I am. Every new experience is eagerly grasped, processed, and then gently set aside to make room for the next one. I'm not looking behind me, I'm constantly scanning my horizon for whatever it is I'm looking for. Still haven't exactly figured that part out yet, but I will. In Montana, I was hard pressed to do any thinking. I was so constantly busy and stressed and physically active. And it was perfect. I was dragged, kicking and screaming, outsid...