life, past due

The signs are adding up: tomorrow is my last day of work at the Think Tank, final papers due May 6 and May 8, graduation May 16, then two weeks until we load the cats in the car and make for the West Coast.

I can’t believe how much time has passed. I was at lunch the other day listening to my boss talk about his favorite clubs in the city, and you know - before that I really thought I was quite the DC denizen - but listening to him I realized there is so much of this city I have missed since I got here two years ago. I know I’ll miss the city, but I have to wonder: will the city miss me? Sometimes the only thing reminding me I’m a DC resident is my overwhelming rage at vapid tourists on the metro. Tomorrow night though, we’re seeing OK Go, The Hush Sound, and Panic! At the Disco @ DAR Constitution Hall… so I’ll be sure to let you know how that goes.

I also can’t believe my last day of work is here. I mean, for all the pissing and moaning I did about having to wake up at 8am, I look back and realize I actually didn’t have a bad experience there. That’s so typical of me - I’ll hate something while I’m doing it, then as I’m about to leave it, suddenly I realize I’ve actually loved it all along and never want anything to change. It’s weird though, all this expectation for The Last Day. I guess they’ll take me out to lunch (if they remember I exist… I always basically thought I was the Meg Griffin of my team) and I’ll make some comments about law school and it’ll be awkward and laden with expectations of me telling them what a great experience I had, and them telling me what a great intern I’ve been. So we’ll do all that. And then at 5pm I’ll walk out the door, and the finality of it will crash onto my head and I’ll probably do something idiotic like start crying.

Lastly, on this disjointed laundry-list of things that is the insanity of my past week or so… the weekly newsflash of my dysfunctional family is that I am apparently not important enough to warrant an international phone call from my father, who is vacationing abroad, to let me know he is extending his vacation. He told my grandmother, who I rarely talk to - but serendipitously I did to talk to her the day he told her - but if he hadn’t told her, I would be stroking out at this point! I mean seriously - if you are traveling abroad, and you extend your vacation, you call your family! Because at this point, three days after they were supposed to return home, with no contact and no idea where they were - I’d be at the embassy of the country they traveled to filing a missing persons claim, and he’d get dragged off the beach by INTERPOL… all because he couldn’t bother to call me.

I mean, I’ve already been drifting in and out of irate moods (for various reasons, notably certain controversies that I can not escape on the blogs I read no matter how hard I try to ignore them) - so for full disclosure I’ll say I’m somewhat susceptible to becoming more irate by an aloof dad who refused to inform me of his desire to remain 10,000 miles away from me; but nonetheless, it doesn’t help sweeten my mood at all.

The point of this entry: I hope that newfound freedom (for freedom here, read: time to write papers) and a rockin rock concert tomorrow night will lift the curse of crankiness that has slipped over me the past few days. Fingers crossed.

This is a very strange time for me, I have so much on my mind and yet I’m feeling totally blocked - I haven’t been able to write any of it down anywhere; I’ve barely been able to talk to Liz about it (though I have, in bits).

This blog was started as part of an ongoing journey in self-discovery (and an exercise in much-needed self-censorship), but I have to say I think I’ve let myself down in that respect.  I’ve kept part of my bargain - there are some meaningful entries here, but in the long term I think I could have done more.  And I intend to, I certainly read blogs constantly, every day, from the personal to the political to  everything inbetween.

I think my problem is, I don’t know how to start this one.

Here’s the thing - this might be one of the hardest journeys/admissions/confessions I’ve ever made in my life, it’s not something that happened overnight (see this post I wrote three years ago which I have unlocked over at my livejournal), but it’s something that cuts right into the heart of who I am - what I believe, how I view the world, how I interact with it, how I process it - and, I fear, how others will interact with me.

As I was trying to explain it to Liz a couple of nights ago, she came up with a (somewhat) apt metaphor: faith is, essentially, making a bet - having faith in something doesn’t mean you know there’s a God or that your church is correct, but you’re betting it is, and that’s the nature of faith - you’ve basically got your money on the idea that this path will lead you where you want to go.

And I guess, to make a long story short, after years and years of repeating the same questions to myself over and over and over again - I can’t honestly do anything else but withdraw my bet, and choose to bet on myself instead.

If you read that post from three years ago, you can see that already, I believed more strongly in human power than in any form of divine power - it seems to me that God is only some being onto whom we have projected the parts of ourselves of which we are most afraid, so as to withdraw our own responsibility and accountability: the powers of creation and destruction - ultimately, those most hallowed powers of heavenly beings - are deeply human acts at their core.  What we fear in ourselves, we give to an uncontrollable, unfathomable entity and in doing so absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our lives, our environment, our world, our universe.

I was raised Jewish - in varying degrees - and this has been a difficult road for me, asking myself again and again, whether or not I can honestly say I believe in God.

So finally, when the answer came back, a quiet but firm ‘no,’ - I realized that my own ‘religion’ had been taking shape for years behind me in place of what I had been calling a faith.  I don’t know if there is or is not a God - in this sense, semantically, I suppose you could call me agnostic (because, literally, I do not know) - but I do not ascribe to any religion or any faith, I do not believe in the colonization of the mind by another, without the free choice (which I did not have) of the individual.

In the overarching sense, I believe that we have sold our souls to the wrong magicians - that the man behind the curtain, so to speak, is nobody but our own tremendous power as human individuals, with free thought and free will. And despite what some in the religious community might have us believe, I do believe in moral absolutes - my morality is codified in legal norms which I do not believe came from God but like so many other things came from us, and when, confronted by the profound accomplishments we had made, we cowered and ascribed them to a higher being.

If you have to ask me what I believe in, I finally am ready to admit, that the answer is: myself.

I’m tired, half-asleep, and my eyes are closing, but I really want to get this out before I start putting it off and, like everything else I mean to put down here, eventually forget and move on.

The most surreal chain of events has begun to unfold in my life - it started with the tiniest thing: an IM - yesterday - and I have a feeling will unfold into something no one involved can predict; not me, the person sending the message, or anyone else who may have been involved in somehow orchestrating it.

I will try to explain in my dead-tired logic.

Yesterday or two days ago, while I was away from my computer, I got a series of IMs from an unknown sender of a fairly personal nature (not, like, obscene or anything, just indicating that the sender knew me on a pretty personal level). Later I found out that the sender was the husband of a woman who, ten years ago, during a very turbulent time in my life, was my best friend - we’ll call her GW for privacy, and I don’t actually know the husband’s name anyway.

By the time I got back to the computer, he was gone, and my mind pretty much boggled: 10 years of silence culminated with a few lines from her husband asking how have I been and telling me how much he wants to get to know me. So despite the fact that something doesn’t entirely sit right with me, I send back a few lines saying yes, I’m glad he made contact (and, I think, for the most part I am), and that I do miss his wife, and it’s nice to talk to him, and goodnight.

I kinda didn’t expect to hear from him again - random IMs have a way of only happening once, in my experience. Not so this one - again tonight as I was sitting at my computer checking Facebook, a little window popped up and it was him, my personal intruder, who knows intimate details about my life and whose name I don’t even know…

My friend GW, in 6th grade through 8th grade, was absolutely the center of my world. The two of us, rather, were the center of the world. All things revolved around us, and we were inseparable. I depended on her, I trusted her when I trusted no one, I showed myself to her when I was hiding from the world, I believed in her when I thought I might give up on the world and leave it. She was the first true friend I ever had. And, probably, she was the first person in the world to really hurt me.

This leads us to the beginnings of the complexities of what’s going on here. He and I had a very strange conversation tonight. One that left my mind full of questions - What did GW tell him about me? What, exactly, is he doing here? Why didn’t GW contact me herself if she misses me so much? Can I take this at face value or is this some complex revenge plot or some kind of deceit? …Among many, many other questions.

Not to mention the fact that talking to him feels like playing chess blindfolded. For three, maybe four years of my life, GW knew more about me than any other person in the world, knew me better than anyone in the world - probably, in the sense that some things never change, she knows a hell of a lot about me and I would bet only seconds Liz in her knowledge - which I’m sure she’s imparted to him. And I, in turn, know nothing about him. Among the things he said: I am a mastermind of manipulation. Is that so? Can you really begin a good-faith conversation with a statement like that?

And while it might be true that some things don’t change, a lot of things do change - and I think that’s been the point of my life for the past 12 years. I am not the same person I was when GW knew me. There were a complicated and extremely painful set of external circumstances that led to the situations that happened at that time, that led to me leaving Scott County and swearing never to return, that led to me putting serious distance between myself and everyone I had known there - we were all too young and simple to understand those circumstances, and I was judged unfairly for them at the time.

I lost the friends I had then, including GW, when I left for high school, because I stood in judgment for things I couldn’t control and was unfairly convicted by people who couldn’t understand (I’m not saying I blame them - I didn’t fully understand for years either), and I can’t help but wonder - is this just a set-up in which the final act will be another judgment, another conviction?

Lastly, there are good reasons I never talk about or think about the past, my past life in Washington 12 years ago. I’ve built a new life and a new human being over the scars of old pain - and I feel like talking to this person, who has been given all this knowledge of who I was when I was so young and so wounded, is like being forced to look into a mirror and stare at a reflection I am simply not yet ready to see.

I loved GW. She broke my heart when our friendship fell apart, I suppose I am finding out now that I, in turn, in my own way broke hers. But I swore that I would never go back there, and I have to admit I am suspicious and a bit afraid of where this mystery will unfold and carry the three of us unsuspecting players - into reconciliation, or into ruin?

Administrative: Oh my goodness WordPress!! I turn my back for a week and come back and the whole thing is different!!! Yay new blogging/dashboard interface… wow. This is pretty swanky. Sweet.

In other news. As much as I feel like pouring my heart out into this little text-box, I know I’d regret it later. I’m not usually one to buckle under pressure but I guess that’s what’s going on, more than anything else, right now.

I think I posted a while ago about advice - how everyone gives it because they think they know the answer to all your problems - and how much I hate it. Especially free, unsolicited advice. You know, there’s an Alix Olson quote I always feel is relevant:
sometimes i feel like a warrior
just for making it through the day
you know sometimes you feel like a fighter
because you fight
just to keep the fighting away
And that’s so true. And I don’t think that the people who so freely and forcefully give their opinions on how badly my partner and I are living our lives appreciate just how hard we are fighting to keep everything afloat. And I don’t think they remember, when they yell at us, about what they were like when they were our age. I mean, the mistakes they made, and how they had to make them to learn.

I think that one thing I’ve learned, more than anything else, is that this is all just a big fucking work in progress. I mean every now and then we have to tear it all down and start again and it hurts and it sucks and it’s a failure but it’s also a new start, and that’s the way it goes, when you’re 22 and 24 and just starting to carve your way in this loud, terrifying, violent, difficult world.

And, you know, when you look back, I think the truth is Liz and I have done a damn fine job. We’ve fought our way through a lot, and we’re still standing, and our life is still afloat, we’re still holding it all together, and you know, I think that’s pretty fucking amazing. So no, things are not perfect, but tell me where they are - I really don’t think things are perfect for anyone, anywhere. But we have something, and we’re making it good, we’re making it work, and if that isn’t the most adult, mature thing any two human beings can do then I don’t know what is.

So tell me we don’t pass the litmus test for adulthood. Nobody told us how to do this. Nobody gave us an instruction manual, nobody read us the rules, nobody taught us what we’ve had to learn ourselves. So tell me that after 2 years of living on our own in this ridiculous city and not sinking once, after knowing when to fight and knowing when to ask for help, after making mistakes and learning from them and not making the same ones again, after working to build something, tearing it down, and building it up again, after fighting tooth and nail to build a family and a relationship and a household that works - tell me, tell us, that we’re not doing just fine on our own, or that anyone could have done it any better. I just can’t buy that.

I just wanted to write this, because, in case anyone has any doubts about our choices, or our ability to survive, I want them to know that I don’t regret any decisions we’ve made. Even if they’ve led to hardship, you know what, we’ve learned from it, and that’s fine by me. At our age, that’s okay. And the most important thing is that we’re happy. We’ve built our own life - our own life as a couple, a new family that we have built, and we like what we’ve made, no matter what. So to our critics - don’t take the bumps in the road as anything more than what they are, and don’t underestimate our incredible strength and power and our ability to overcome any obstacle, no matter what kind, as two individual adults and as a family.