Random Acts of Awesome

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...