Random Acts of Awesome

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...