Gotta Get Up Every Mornin’

I am writing this entry on my back porch.

I’m also writing in a word document ( I actually tried to figure out desperately how to get wifi so I could compose this entry when I realized there’s this thing…called word processing software…) which feels totally foreign to me, considering I’ve done the majority of my creative writing on the word press site to date. But I can’t get wifi on my porch even though the router is really not all that far away from the porch. In fact I’m probably closer to the router on my porch than when I’m in my bedroom. On the porch I get no signal. In my room I get a glimmer of a signal which then craps out mid tense awesome Good Wife episode soooo.

Holy baloney I’ve been ignoring this blog.

I have no excuse other than everything has gone out of my control this summer and I just sorta gave up. I have so much to say but so much of it is repetitive crap you all probably hear when you speak to me in real life. I felt like if I were to write a blog post these days it would go like this: Ready?

I HAVEN’T FOUND A JOB YET I SEND OUT DOZENS OF APPLICATIONS A WEEK AND NOBODY BITES AND I AM GOING INSANE AND I FORGET THE JOBS I  APPLY TO IMMEDIATELY AND THEN I AM SURPRISED AND DISCOURAGED ALL OVER AGAIN WHEN THEY REMIND ME I’VE APPLIED BY SENDING ME A REJECTION EMAIL. EAT CHEESE. RINSE. REPEAT.

That is the majority of my inner monologue.

I have come to realize that job hunting is a special sort of hell. The same sort of hell reserved for long discount bus trips, packing to move apartments esp in the summer months, searching for said apartments on craigslist. All of these things sound so awesome when they’re only twinkles in our little thoughts eyeballs.

A new apartment! How dreamy!!!! A trip to New York City? Why, let me book the mega bus!

We (or I, at least) seem to have selective memory about how craptastic these adventures eventually turn out to be. Specifically the drama llama known as Craigslist apartment searching which you’ll probably remember as my angst du jour in 2012. 

Something else hurting me in the job search is that for every single job I apply to I sit down and I really think about it. I picture myself there and I can usually always see myself doing a good job and finding a way to enjoy it. No matter the work I do I always, always, always find a way to make myself do well. Except for maybe the time the lab supervisor wanted me to slice hamster brains on what amounted to a medieval deli slicer with minimal instruction, a “hamster brain atlas” from 1972 and 8.25 an hour. I will readily admit I didn’t do a good job at that one and didn’t worry that much about it.  I like being productive and I like making money and I have always asserted that while I do want to have a job I enjoy that uses my talents and skills, the abstract idea of family and building a home is more exciting to me.

Oh the drama of the everyday modern woman.

But when I started allowing myself to look into non guidance counseling jobs I felt this IMMENSE sense of panic and failure.

You just got a master’s degree! I cried, to myself. You are going to have to pay loans on a degree you might not even use?!!? Woman!!!! GET A GRIP.

Rational Sarah says, “But this field takes time to break into and you have the pay the bills. You can do something else, there’s no shame in it.”

BUT ISN’T THERE? Maybe some shame I’ve put on myself. Yes.

Is that why I haven’t been sleeping this entire past July? BY GEORGE!

Oh you guys.

Don’t go to counseling school.

Because if you go to counseling school you’ll be able to therapizeeee yourself and it will create a self loathing ravine so deep you won’t be able to dig yourself out and you’ll retreat to your bed with Saint Andrews, Triscuits and the entire 9 seasons of the Good Wife on hulu.

*note to concerned family members, this is hyperbole in an attempt at makin’ light, call off the Harvard Pilgrim approved clinicians.

Basically, I’ve put an inordinate amount of pressure on myself to find a job and it has taken a toll on basically…everything.

Working starting today to remedy it. Tried to remember other things in life that make me happy and fulfilled and then remembered, OH YEAH I HAD A BLOG!

I posted a while back about not “needing” the blog as much. Whoops. I was wrong. I need this thing. I currently feel so much better tip tapping away over here.

OH YEAH SELF CARE I LEARNED THIS IN GRADUATE SCHOOL.

Anyway, I’m back. Expect to see me here daily. If you don’t see me here daily please call, text, smoke signal berate me until I post again. Its good for me and hopefully good for you.

xoxo

S

The Spectacular Now

“I love you”

She said in the passenger seat.

“No, you don’t”

said the guy at the wheel.

It wasn’t the answer she expected but she was undeterred, insistent even.

“I do, I love you.”

“Don’t love me” He said.

 

The above exchange is one that happened in a movie I saw tonight, and it was miserably, eerily accurate to my life as a teenage girl.

The movie was excellent, and brought so many memories flooding back. So many hours and days and weeks focusing all of my time and my energy toward another person. At the time it felt like an investment.

“I will give you all of me”

I declared, arms outstretched.

“I will listen to you and I will understand you and I will help you with your homework and I will listen to you breathe on the other end of the phone and I will never nag and I will never tell you no and I will be whatever you want me to be whenever you need it because the only version of myself worth anything is the version of myself I am when I’m with you. Someday you’ll come around and you’ll see somewhere above my collarbones and you will realize. And then you’ll do for me the things I do for you. I’ll be patient. I’ll be here.”

And this isn’t some “you have to love yourself before someone can love you” cautionary tale.

When I was a kid I remember misbehaving and having my mother be upset with me. I’d ask through tears if she still loved me. And she’d always say “I’ll always love you, but I just don’t like you very much right now.” 

I guess deep down I always love myself, but don’t always like myself.

You don’t have to love yourself to find love.

You just have to respect yourself enough to not be someone’s sun and moon and stars and atmosphere. To not abandon yourself entirely for any one person. Maybe you have to be 15 and 16 and 17 and 18 and 19 and 20 and 21 and 22. Maybe you have to wade through an endless river of crap with a half baked plan to make a boy fall in love with you chained like dead weight to your ankle, until you’re up to your eyelashes in disappointment and wrong turns, to realize just because he will never love you, doesn’t mean you’ll never be in love. 

Just because he looked your way doesn’t mean you must spend the rest of your days chasing the back of his head. Or anyone’s head at all.

When you have the realization that you can just “be.” And make your own plans and before you know it you find out you never wanted to fix anyone in the first place.

You never wanted to be the fixer.

Instead you find something better.

Someone that takes spectacular you and lifts you right up to the ceiling, which is convenient because you’re giving them a boost too.

And its all slow upward gravy except you hope it never ends. You hope you never reach the top.

 

Dirty Thought Water in the Basin

I’m writing this post from my back porch. A few weeks ago Mav helped me string up some Christmas lights on the railing and I’m sitting in a 10 dollar camp chair from Ocean State Job Lot. The chair reeks of plastic even though its been out of the packaging for days but it was impossibly cheap and all outdoor furniture options are priced as though they’re made of solid gold.

I’m purposely out here, even though the mosquitos will surely eat me, because the breeze up here is soothing.

My anxiety has been a little out of check in recent days, for no real reason I can pin point. If I could discern a reason that’d be too easy and therefore no fun, obviously.

The other night I was at Maverick’s and as we were going to bed I proceeded to have an inner brain freak out and announced that I wasn’t tired, even though I had just said I was. Mav was all, “Didn’t….you just say you’re tired?” 

Poor guy.

He was tired and I thought about something called “door knob” syndrome I learned about in my clinical skills class.

Doorknob syndrome is when you have a session with a client and the whole thing is uneventful until the last three minutes when while you’re wrapping up they’re like “oh and my uncle raped me once but I’m not sure if that has anything to do with my dissatisfaction at work…..umm yeah?” And the session is over so you have to wait a whole week to discuss it.

I had all these thoughts racing through my head and I knew it wouldn’t be any good to door-knob Mav with them as his poor eyelids were closing. This is something I have done in my past, and at the time I felt totally entitled to it but now I recognize it as selfish and unhelpful. If you’re perseverating on bad thoughts, announcing all these thoughts to someone else isn’t all that helpful (unless you’re having serious-kill yourself thoughts in which case feel free to wake your partner the fuck up, tell them I gave you permission.). Especially when that person is sleepy. Mav is totally reading this now and shaking his head and saying I would have listened to you etc, and he totally would have. That’s not the point though.

I spent a few minutes laying there trying to regulate my breathing, but focusing on my breathing made it worse. I picked my lap top up and retreated to the living room, and used my best method of brain clearing: facebook distraction. I chatted with some friends quickly and looked at pictures of what people ate for lunch today and scrolled and scrolled through the newsfeed.

Finally I could breathe normally. I walked back into the bedroom and lay down, savoring the feeling of the air conditioning.

Felt what I have referred to on this website as the “slow settling of the status quo” (don’t you steal that line okay?)

I could feel my brain wringing itself out, emptying dirty water-thoughts into the sink basin.

I closed my eyes and I counted my blessings.

a job

half of a masters degree

family

friends

a man who loves me

a back porch with a breeze and ghetto camp chairs and christmas lights

Ways of Knowing

Tags

Romance

winter 2011. 

I should have known the second I saw the bed.

I was ready to collapse onto it, the adrenaline from the flight having worn off on the long train ride home.

My suitcase was gigantic, my backpack similarly so. They had been packed for days, dutifully following me back and forth from Logan airport. The crept along with me in line, just to approach the ticket counter and be told my flight was canceled, go back home. Again and again.

They had felt heavier every time. A not so unique metaphor for my heart.

But I had finally arrived, landed my allotted miles away.

My eyes took in the bed before me. With one, lone pillow in the center.

The thoughts in mind started racing, I’m sure before I even opened my mouth to voice my confusion. My anger. My weary I just had my flight canceled a billion times and you knew I was coming for months and you have one mother fucking pillow on the bed?!?!! rage.

Looking back, of course hind sight is 20/20.

Something silly to fixate on?

Yeah.

Something that symbolized a lack of consideration?

Yeah also.

I could have also known as I crept out of the apartment before the break of dawn. My bulging suitcase holding so much more than I knew at the time.

I should have known as he slept.

When the only one to see me off was the Iranian cab driver who had taken pity on me trudging in the wrong direction toward the L.

“I think I’ll always take a cab to the airport from now on” I had told him that night on the phone, “It was so fast, totally worth it.”

I really should have known.

Winter 2013

I stood in the bedding aisle in Target, arguably one of my top ten favorite places to be.

I debated which pillow to buy.

A totally unnecessary pillow.

Totally unnecessary except for the fact that it would match the other pillow.

The vision of how good they’d look next to each other floated into my mind’s eye and that sorta sealed the deal.

On the way out of the aisle I saw the pillow cases. Remembered him saying he needed pillow cases, found my hands unable to stop themselves from grabbing two simple tan ones off of the shelf.

The door was unlocked and his roommate looked at the shopping bag suspiciously,

“woah! what is that??” 

I told him it was a pillow.

When I snuck into his bedroom his reaction was exactly what I expected it to be.

He was mildly exasperated but the small smile he tried to hide reassured me I’d gotten away with it this time.

Slipping the pillow into the case felt exactly right. A perfect fit.

When his alarm rang I felt taken by surprise, I never sleep as well as I did last night.

I watched him gather his things, felt the little zap of electricity as he kissed my half asleep temple.

“I should get going” I rasped, lifting my head off the pillow.

He told me to stay, to take my time. I smiled in spite of myself.

Reached up to steal my third kiss, unbrushed teeth be damned.

Sometimes you just know.

Freeze Frame, Erase, Restart

We were driving today and we passed by a familiar field.

“Do you remember that day at the Carnival?” He said, from the back seat.

Yeah.

I do remember that day.

I remember being nervous to pick you up and not fully understanding why. I chalked it up to thinking I wasn’t cool enough for you.

I mean. I know I’m not. That was it.

And you sat in the front which killed me even more.

Of course it wasn’t fair.

The weather was perfect.

The very tail end of summer and the beginning of fall.

And blinking lights and the smell of farm animals and candy fucking apples.

I was wearing a blue cable knit sweater and I should have been missing my boyfriend.

I guess I did.

I looked up at the ferris wheel and the realization hit me like a ton of bricks.

The fact that, I’d rather be up there with you.

But everyone else was coupled and cozy and we were at the romantic carnival and that was why.

That was all.

But it wasn’t.

It was your stupid grin.

And your stupid eyes.

And the radio advertisements for back to school sales at JC Penny offering up that usual hopeful feeling.

The way I felt about you made me scared.

And I ran from it.

I’m sorry about that, for many reasons.

None of them black or white.

Imagine if it went a different way? If the circumstances had be altered slightly.

You’re not supposed to do that.

But I do.