Random Acts of Awesome

It fascinates me, to think about how the human consciousness is being shaped by the volume of, and type of, information we now have available to us. I started thinking about it this morning, reading a blurb on a friend's Facebook page, about a woman struggling with the question of childcare and women's rights in today's workplace. I don't have a child. And I've never had to worry about what this woman is worried about. But I found myself empathizing with her, deeply caught up in her tale of woe. And, most importantly, my visceral reaction of sympathy for her was accompanied by an equally visceral, but vague, anger at those who would harm her. It got me.thinking about how we learn. Humans have always learned through stories. Our ability to create metaphor, to empathize, helped shape us into the juggernauts we are today. Storytelling, and storylearning, is an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal of growth. So when I read these stories, when I empathize with

I had a very funny, very short conversation with a dude at a bar last night. I was at Baileys, celebrating a friends wedding. I was in full on introvert forced to be extroverted mode, and rather overwhelmed with it, so I kept making excuses to get up and get away from the group I was with. During one of those gasping for air forays, I saw an old acquaintance at the bar. He is someone who I've talked to numerous times, and always had great conversational chemistry with. He's also one of those people who you'll never know if they'd be good in bed because you'll never go to bed with them and that drives you a little crazy and makes them seem like they're going to be better in bed than they probably are. We're curious about each other, but he's got a girlfriend and he's not a dick, so... Anyways, he waved when he saw me, and I went over to say hi. We chatted a bit about how things were for both of us, and he asked me how my travels had been going. I sa

I am in Tucson, Arizona right now. Sitting in a wealthy persons beautiful kitchen, listening to John Denver sing about a reason to try. I am surrounded by desert. Big, beautiful, terrifying desert, with cactus soaring 20 ft above me, hundreds of years old. I am walking someone elses chihuahua, milking someone elses goats, feeding their chickens. Sleeping in their bed. A part of me loves it. And a part of me thinks it's a very lonely sort of existence, and isn't sure we want to do this long term. Someone elses home, no matter how beautiful, is not my home. And I want a home. But more than I want a home, I want to be healthy enough to create a home. I want a home crafted from my heart and head, my happy, healthy, and whole heart and head. So, in order to find a home, I am on the road to fixing a few things. I hate that term. Fixing things. Like I'm a machine with missing and broken parts. It feels true, though. Regardless of what else I am, first and foremost I am a

The problem with having a hard (extremely hard) time being vulnerable is that, when you finally let yourself be vulnerable, you all too often choose the wrong person to be witness to it. Because you hate being vulnerable, so you choose people who you kind of know aren't really "worthy" of your vulnerability. They're not going to process it the way you need them to. They're going to be too self centered to take it in and let it change their opinion of you. They're probably going to love the fact that you opened up to them, because it validates their view of themselves as a wonderful human being. And they're going to appreciate your weakness more than your strength. And all of that? You know it's your own damn fault. Because you choose not to deeply connect to people who are better than that. Because you don't want being vulnerable to become something healthy. You want to be validated in your fear and your shame. So you choose people who, even with

I have an interesting relationship with symbols. I attribute much power to symbols, regardless of whether they originate solely in the human mind or not. For instance, this morning I did a tarot reading for myself. In fact, I did 3 of them. And came away with a strong sense of comfort and warmth. And knowledge, coalesced into useful, tangible meaning. The symbols on the cards, the paintings and general meaning of them, are just geometric shapes and concepts. They're just words and ideas, not mystical portals to another world. But what are words and ideas, if not power incarnate? The questions I asked I asked of myself. And the meanings I pulled from each card are meanings that I pull specifics from for my own benefit. But that doesn't mean that I don't feel a pull when I lay out my cards. It doesn't mean that each card isn't set down with a purpose, pulled from a random selection for a reason. I don't know what that pull is. I don't know if it comes f

I have had the craziest, weirdest, most apocalyptic dreams for the past two nights. They've been kind of awesome dreams. The kind you still remember every moment of, because it was more like watching a movie than dreaming... The first dream, from the night before last, I was in a giant, futuristic office building. It's a regular in my dreamscapes, and has elevators that go sideways. 'Nough said on that. It was a police state, in the midst of fighting the bad guys, who were basically Brown Coats (you know who I'm talkin' about here, my nerds) in stiff black trench coats and fedoras. Yeah. My first glimpse of the bad guys was to see a group of them running into the giant lobby of the building, and my heart went pitter patter. Because they were hot. And the police? The police were robots. Who didn't come running into the building after the bad guys. No no. Nothing so simple. Instead, as the bad guys disappeared into the guts of the building, I felt a rumbling b

I woke up at 4am, thinking about the nature of evil. This after a nightmare where I was riding around in a big van in a city in Ireland with a young man, listening to him describe the circumstances of the past 2 times he wasn't able to kidnap the women he wanted. I realized that he'd pulled into a deserted parking lot just as he started to attack me. I fought back, but weakly, lethargic in the way of nightmares. And I quickly came to the realization that I was about to be bound up and helpless. I woke up as he plunged a hypodermic filled with sedative into my leg. It was interesting more than terrifying, though it was scary. But I woke up with the Edmund Burke quote running through my mind "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And spent the next hour or so lying in bed, thinking about what that really means. And about how we define evil in our world. How evil is active, and goodness too often passive. How accepting that truth,

When you hear that steeple bell, you must say goodbye to me. The convoluted way my brain works awes me sometimes. I mean, getting from point A to point B really shouldn't involve 14 steps, half of them over lava and between crumbling mountains. I want to be able to burrow inside my brain, sit down, and have a coherent conversation with it someday. I'd ask it "Why, brain? Why can't we just go from point A to point B? They're only 10 miles apart. There was no need go 3000 miles out of our way, twice, just to get to where we want to be." In related news, I'll be taking the train across the country again, to Pennsylvania, in a month. I'm going to be housesitting a farm for a week. With pigs (amongst other farm animals). In the middle of the hottest time of year. In a 200 year old house with no air conditioning. But with an awesome crick nearby, with a bad ass swimming hole, apparently. AHHHHHH!!! PIGS!!! I am disproportionately excited. A couple of

There's a picture of an old woman sitting in front of my computer. It's one of those images that I saw once, at an art fair in Portland years ago, and fell in love with it. I couldn't afford it at the time, so I walked away. But I was with my mother and sister, who were visiting me, and they snuck back and bought it for me together. It's an image that I'm supposed to have, if I believed in that sort of thing. It reminds me what happiness is, what beauty is. The picture is composed of warm russets and orange, sienna and white. The old womans wrinkles for a deeply lined map of what it means to be human, written across her face and hands. Her rheumy old eyes are magnified by tears, of indeterminate joy or pain. Her brows are drawn and her hands cover her mouth. I can't tell you how much I love this picture, how comforting it is to me. It feels like it's pulling me forward into my own old age. Into a sense of peace and joy, a comfort with death and a conte

I received a letter from my father a long time ago, about 11 years now, that I wasn't able to fully read for a very, very long time. Every time I started to read it, I got anxious to the point of tears, and I'd just put it down and tell myself I'd read it later. I finally read the whole thing recently. 11 years. Jesus. Talk about daddy issues. Anyways, the letter is getting old. And I want to write it out, so I have it available to read without ruining the paper and the handwriting that says so much about my father. "Dear Sarah, I was glad to get such a long letter from you. I always enjoy our phone calls, but they tend to get slightly abstract - I do miss you very much. We all feel the same. Family connections are an important part of our lives. We're a funny family in some ways. Close - but not too close. We all value our individuality and privacy also. You asked for first reactions. I could probably fill this notebook with them. But my hand would fall

There is room for being a baby girl to a daddy in the equality I'd like to see. There's room for being a prostitute who loves the freedom of fucking. There's room for being a housewife who loves the warm, heavy blanket of responsibility. There's room for the business woman who loves to be bent over a conference table and fucked with her arms held over head, after a long day of making difficult decisions. There's room for a woman who spends her days in sundresses and her nights in leather and latex. There's room for the teacher who just doesn't like sex all that much, though she loves cuddling and kissing. There's room for the librarian who visits the swingers club every other Friday and watches couples fucking in public. There's room for the 14 year old girl who's just discovering the pure power of her cunt and hips, her lips and eyes, her hair and feet. She's not scared, but she knows you are. There's room for the 52 year old wom

I have the hardest time in the world saying goodbye. I never learned how to do it gracefully. So, more often than not, I just don't do it at all. Even when I need to, I avoid it at all cost. I'm sitting in my little wild back patio, that I just spent a good twelve hours weed whacking into submission. Its still scruffy and wild, with a pile of leaves from last year and all the mint and lemon balm I whacked sitting smack dab in the middle of it. But I love it. I love wild and scruffy and imperfect. It makes me feel at home in a way newatness never could. So, I'm sitting here with my cup of coffee, and Sitha on my lap. She was on my shoulders a minute ago, but that wasn't garnering her enough attention, so she climbed down to my lap. And is sitting here purring, trying to convince me I don't want to be wasting my hands on typing. And I've got tears streaming down my face. Lord help me if my neighbors come out. I'm crying because I have to say goodbye to this

Had an interesting conversation with my mother this morning. My dad is in Florida right now, visiting his dying father and helping his brother who just had a heart attack. My mom was telling me about how my father finally got a chance to "really talk" to my grandfather, get things off his chest. Which is GREAT. My dads side of the family is like the worst stereotype of English Stiff Upper Lip-ness you can imagine. They just don't communicate emotions very well. My dad, especially. He can do it, having been forced to develop communication skills by marrying my hyper-emotional mother. But it's like pulling taffy when he does, and incredibly stressful for him. He's avoided any kind of non-practical contact with his father for a long time. He's been there for him physically, helping him out, but just has NOT been willing to talk to him about anything deep. So, his dad is dying, in hospice, and barely aware. Perfect time for my dad to get things off his chest.

Living through words is a dangerous thing. Almost as dangerous as being completely honest with yourself. I sometimes (often) think that I'm the only person in my life who's ever truly honest with me. I don't know if this is because I surround myself with people who don't know how to be honest with me, or because I just don't allow them to be. Either way, it's alienating. In the truest sense of the word. I feel like I know what people are really saying, even as the words that come out of their mouths say something different. And I don't think I'm wrong about what they're thinking and feeling, because their bodies and their eyes say something completely different from their mouths. It makes me feel like a teenager, to be so confused by conflicting signals from other human beings. Anyways. Realizing that you are full of words, and empty of deeds, is infuriating. And frightening. I feel old and useless and pathetic, all because I have no tangible e

I was just reading an article written by a woman with PTSD, talking about her relationships with others. Her whole blog is kind of awesome, but this particular entry really, really resonated with me. Not because I think I have PTSD. But because I'm almost positive that Trevor has it. As positive as I can be, minus his willingness to see a mental health professional and get diagnosed. So, she's describing how hard it is for her loved ones to deal with being her loved ones, and why. And, while I've done a lot of research on PTSD and am familiar with the symptoms, I've never really brought that thought process full circle, never really related them to my life and relationship with him. And why should I, right? Trevor isn't a boyfriend, or a partner. He's a lover, and a friend, but I'm free of emotional entanglements with him that would complicate my ability to clearly see our relationship, or walk away from unhealthiness... Yeah. I call hard bullshit on tha

I feel so completely disconnected from the rest of humanity right now. It's been a while since I've felt so lonely. I think a part of it is the knowledge that today is a religious night for my family. One we used to celebrate together, with a big dinner before church, and then ice cream after. I actually contemplated going this year. I told myself I was thinking about going because I wanted to bear the reality of what my folks are hearing right now. It's supposed to be a big one this year, they're supposed to make some kind of announcement Bout this being the last memorial. In other words, and announcement about the end of the world. They do this every ten years or so. They drum up anxiety and excitement this way, making people in that religion feel like they're not actually wasting their time and resources on an end of days cult that has never made an accurate prediction. Anyways, I was contemplating going. For informational purposes only. In reality, I'

I feel like an explosion that's already happened. Caught in a net of hands of my own making, catching the pieces of me as they try to escape, pulling them in and shoving them back into place with no real regard for where they come from. And each piece that's meant to be gone is rotting away, unconnected to anything else. All that kinetic energy dispersed into the effort required to deny the affects of the original explosion. Fuck that. I'm leery of not focusing on the negative right now. Sometimes you NEED to focus on the negative, in order to be motivated to get shit done. But that has never, ever, EVER worked for me. I am not a negatively charged particle. I can't actually accomplish anything positive when the negative is in ascendance. I just can't. I can't beat myself up over my imperfections and let that pain motivate me to change. I have to be happy to create more happy. It's why I've developed all of these false mechanisms of happiness

Magic is the sense of power swimming through your own veins. The knowledge that, while you are really very tiny, your brain is really very large. And inside your brain, there are a million billion roads that are constantly being traversed by the energy that spawned stars and worlds, that created dinosaurs and elephants, that built Rome and destroyed the Mayans. That energy isn't a closed system. It's constantly being fed from the outside by little droplets of experience, crafted and shaped by knowledge gained and lost. Experience and knowledge that has been purified in the minds of a million billion others, energy that has been consumed and shed by trees and plants, oceans and mountains, ants and apes. A connection of the neurons, if not the mind. You can choose to consume as much stimulation as you possibly can. And you can acknowledge that what you can possibly do is far greater than many believe. What is possible can be defined by what is wanted, not what is given.

I get it, dude. I do. I look more exciting than your beautiful wife, sitting to your side with a brand new baby on her lap. Blocking access to her womb and her heart, a tiny little presence that has supplanted you completely. My breasts are hugged by a form fitting shirt, framed by a vest designed to make them appealing to you. Hers are covered by flannel, comfortable and soft for a baby to rest against. My hips are mine alone, not occupied by a tiny being that has sucked all the sexuality that created it right back into itself, for the moment. Ah, for the moment. All the moments. That's what you need to remember, as you look at my hips and breasts longingly. The moments you've helped create. The depth of sexuality you're missing, that's causing your eyes to stray, have nothing on those moments. I hope, for your sake, that your father taught you the breadth of moments available to you now, the depth of the beauty you've created. Because without that knowle

Every now and then I start dreaming about becoming a foster parent. It's a weird thing for me to dream about. I'm not super IRRESPONSIBLE, but I'm not the most responsible person in the world, either. And I have a hard enough time taking care of myself, making the right decisions for myself. What would I do with kids? I'm also not the most selfish person in the world, but I AM selfish. I love getting things my own way, I love peace, and I love comfort. Being a foster parent would be pretty much antithetical to those things I love. But yeah. I think about providing a home for a sibling group. It's incredibly difficult to find homes that will take larger groups of siblings together. And I can't imagine what it would feel like to have that entire structure ripped out from under a child who's already experiencing something awful. I think a big part of me dreaming about this is the idea of a ready made family. Which is fucked up. But I lost my family (for a

The sun is shining, hard and bright. The air is on the verge of chill, that special early spring cold that feels like a harbinger of green and smells like heaven. My shoes are bright red, a smear of color that startles me every time look down. I'm standing at the bus stop, watching traffic go by, and thinking about how much I've changed. The knowledge that I'm being stared at doesn't feel as heavy on my 35 year old skin. The almost tactile sensation of eyes running up and down my body is no longer an invasion. Knowledge has given me this power, these shields. I know what would happen if I accepted the invitation inherent in these looks, and I am comfortable in the knowledge that I don't have to. But I can if I want. I can make whatever choice I deem fit, and I know I can live with the reality of those choices. Youth was beautiful. But knowledge is powerful, and I prefer this power given to me by the years over the frail beauty of inexperience.

And I have no privacy... It's interesting. Applying for the Amtrak writers residency has tested my sense of privacy. There's a part of me that FAR, FAR prefers to stay small and under the radar. That part of me is OK with people reading my stuff, but prefers not to think about it too much. It's uncomfortable with praise, and suspicious of it. The other part of me is pretty convinced that my destiny (said with heavy emphasis on DES, and trailing emphasis on tiny, ending with a long yyyyy)(just because) is to be a well known, beloved writer. Not an author. I don't have many fiction stories rolling around in my head. But a writer. Someone who uses words to capture moments in time and presents them to the word in a such a way that every brain on the surface of this planet can read them and find themselves inside the structure. The two parts of me are unbalanced (SHOCKING, I know). They're both coming from a relatively unhealthy part of me. Fear of and absolute nee

Don't call me beautiful. I know you think I'm pretty, it's a part of why you're hoping to get in my pants. I can sense your attraction, and yes, it's nice. But don't call me beautiful. Call me thoughtful. Oh, that's a good start. Adorable is ok too, but thoughtful... you hit the nail on the head. Stop calling me beautiful, because it's got nothing to do with why I'm interested in you. You make my brain sing, and if I don't make yours do the same, we're not going to have much fun. I'm going to get sick of your pride in parading my tits around. Quickly.

Here's the train of thought that led me to my story about trees: Trying to fall asleep last night, contemplating the familiar sick little feeling of unease in my belly that's making my heart race. Thinking about how often I've felt it in my life. The words "The decision branches I'm taking aren't leading to my long term happiness." Spending a good amount of processing time thinking about what decision branches mean, and how the choices we make create these branching patterns. Really enjoying this thought process. Thinking about pulling back into my trunk, since the branch analogy naturally leads to picturing myself as a tree. Trying to imagine pulling my sap back in to my core, and choosing to create another set of decision branches instead of wasting resources on already created patterns. Thinking about what kind of tree I want to be. Definitely not an Aspen. I hate those trees. An Oak. Or a Maple. Or a giant, gnarly old Beech. No, a

It's so much easier to feel beautiful when you're alone. I wonder about that, sometimes. Of all the beautiful sex I've had, the best has been alone. Not the best orgasms, of course. The orgasms I give myself always feel a little flat. I can't feed on my own need, my own fulfillment. I only feel content, full, after I've lost myself in a lovers fruition. But beautiful... that only seems to happen in my own eyes. When I'm alone, I see the spill of my own hair across a pillow as I turn my face to the side, and it's art. I feel my own skin, silk. I pull my breasts out of confines of my bra, and the expanse of flesh doesn't feel ample, it feels right. Their size doesn't matter to me, only what they make me feel, and every inch of surface is waiting for my fingertips and nails. My hard little nipples aren't too big or too small. They're simply perfect points of sensation. I can touch them soft or rough, it doesn't matter. I do only what I wan

Drama. And sex. But mostly drama. As I was lying in bed last night, with a single dramatic tear rolling down my cheek, and my heart not even close to breaking, I realized something. I realized it's time to have another talk with myself. So here we go. Self, It's me, the part of you that's pretty happy. Granted, it's the part of you that relies on its regular doses of sex and touch to stay sane, but fuck you. I'm happy. Sorry. I've been feeling slightly angst-y towards you lately, apparently. You're addicted to drama. You're addicted to the sensation that life has so much more depth than you've given it. You need to have something to fight against, to bang your head against, to make you FEEL something. I'm not saying you like feeling like shit. You don't, you hate it. But you know that other bitch we both hate, the one we never talk about? She kind of likes it. She's pretty sure we all deserve it. Shit. I had all these hel

I never understood women and men who said they didn't have a voice. You always have a voice. You just have to choose to use it. And I thought that choice was always easy. Why WOULDN'T one choose to be heard? What ramifications could possibly be dark enough to make you lose your voice? When I was a child, I never shut up. No matter how much trouble it got me in. I was quiet, for the most part, but when I felt the injustice of my voice being stifled, I spoke up. I got grounded countless times, slapped in the face a few times, even got the belt a time or two, based on my inability to stop my voice. And even when I was being punished for it, I felt the respect it garnered. My parents would joke about my inability to allow them the last word if I thought I was right, but underneath their joking was the knowledge that they were raising a strong daughter. A woman who would stick up for herself. I felt their pride in that knowledge, and it strengthened my voice, regardless of the

Interesting. Listening to your cruel bullshit, your rapey jokes based on your hyper alertness to the fact that women are listening to you, is making my sexuality feel gross. I'd been reading T.S. Eliot, rubbing my necklace against my lips, imagining a warm, slick dick in its place, coating my lips with salty cum. And your falsely deep voice, your pathetic juvenile mating calls disguised by the voice of a man, is making my pussy dry up. You're turning my sexuality into something to be used against me. With nothing but your voice, your stupid words. You don't even mean them. You're trying so hard to impress the woman next to you with your warped version of masculinity that you'd say anything. And she's laughing. The two of you are seriously harshing my sensual buzz, and I really want to grab you by the back of your head and smash your lips into the wood of the table in front of you. But that would make you interesting. And you don't deserve it. You are borin

I was thinking today, while sitting on the bus and feeling trapped and desperate, that I've been living my fathers life for a long time. This sense of desperation to GET AWAY, to run somewhere that isn't here... it's followed me around since I was a child. And I remember seeing it in my father. I remember recognizing his frustration and rage for exactly what it was, a futile banging at the glass of his life. I think the first time I saw it clearly I was 12, and I had just watched him and my mother get into a fight. He slammed his way out the door, grabbing his car keys off the table, and she sat down and cried. Half of me sympathized with her, and I did my best to comfort her with a pat on the back. But the other half of me realized he was running away from so much more than a fight. And I empathized with him. I started to want to run away myself, though I didn't know what from. I didn't have the pressures he did, the 5 hungry children, the emotionally immature wif

One of, if not the most, pernicious ideas keeping us from happiness in this day and age is the knowledge that we are broken. And if we are broken, you are broken too, for loving us. Also, the idea that who we are right now, in this moment, is who we will always be. I feel my brittle-ness so much more since I've started taking public transit again. It highlights how little strength I feel inside myself, when I am surrounded by strangers, forced to imagine myself inside their skin. My own skin cracks and crumbles at the thought of allowing another inside, at the knowledge that these broken, imperfect people can see me. Can analyze me to their hearts content. Because that's what I'm doing to them. The man sitting across from me, with the deep set eyes that speak of allergies and Elizabethan England, I wonder if he knows who his ancestors are. The woman playing with her thick curly hair right next to me, using it as a shield between me and her boyfriend, I wonder if she rea