April 17, 2008

I’m Not the Mystery That You Hope to Find

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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?

 

April 7, 2008

Make a Plan to Love Me

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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.

 

March 21, 2008

In the Ears of Every Anarchist Who Sleeps But Does Not Dream

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we must sing
we must sing
we must sing

Deposit sent in to UW Law: check
Notice given at work: (basically) check
Moving company scheduled: check
Road trip planned/dates set/route mapped: check, check, check
New address in Seattle: ………*crickets chirping*

I’m trying not to get nervous. Ha.  If you knew me, you’d know that’s like, the sun trying not to rise.  But oh well.

I don’t know if it was this blog or my last one (this is the theme of this post, bipolar with everything, I binge and purge media just like everything else…) - I mentioned that I’ve always been connected to geography and weather in an uncanny way.

I mean yes, my mood - phases of the moon, the weather, the seasons, are all clearly connected to mood swings for me - but it seems like my whole life is, too.

The first day of Spring (the real one, not my manic OMG ITS WARM day from a while back) was on us just yesterday I believe, and with it new life, new light, new hope - not just the kind they market in car commercials and cleaning product ads - but really, when the sun comes out after a long cold winter, I can’t help but feel the winds of change are right behind it.

And if the patterns of my very pattern-oriented life are meaningful, then that’s correct: with Spring comes change - graduation, moving, goodbyes, new challenges, new adventures.

In 2 months I am moving, with my partner, to Seattle, where (I hear) a new life awaits me as a law student and future righter-of-wrongs, a secret identity to be hidden beneath a calm exterior of a happy residential lesbian with 2 cats and possibly-maybe-hopefully a dog, a yard, and, you know, all that stuff.

I think  it also has a lot to do with where I’ve lived.  Seattle, London, Western MA, and DC - all places with protracted and dreary winters.  I’ve noted repeatedly that there’s something undeniably magical about that first warm day, the first day of sunshine where it’s almost warm enough to go outside without a coat (and everyone does anyway) - and suddenly what was once a dreary town/city in one day becomes a place swarming with people smiling, chatting, taking time to eat lunch in the park, being alive.

So as go nature’s bipolar annual swings, as go my own, and now, from months of darkness punctuated by sometimes-terrifying mania comes calm (a relative term, for me, the high-strung-OCD-perfectionist poster-child), comes a moment to take time to photograph the new flowers, eat lunch in the park with my best friend, and picnic on the roof with the woman I want to spend my life with.  Now comes, for the first time in months, self-forgiveness and breaths of fresh air where before there were fear and anxiety, self-loathing and shadowy doubt; now (slowly, like the warmth creeping into the Capitol) the shadows dissipate and I am left standing, yet again, having survived another round with nature’s attempt to out-bipolar my genetic inclination to win that battle every time.

As with every year, this March I dusted off my camera and my $600 worth of digital media software (I am an artist, you know, just a skittish bipolar one who hides when it’s dark - I’ve been well-received in digital media circles since high school) and actually took a fucking photograph.  I climbed onto the mossy bark at the National Zoo in my work pants and dress shoes, headphones blaring my favorite music, people staring, to get that perfect macro cherry blossom shot you saw.

I smiled, un-self-consciously, and did what it is I love to do.

So this is the month I celebrate surviving another round with this basket case set of mood-swings they call “mania” and “depression,” I celebrate that I have found the strength, within my self (the only place I’ve ever found it), and lived to breath in Beautiful Spring Air one more time.  I celebrate that I am stronger, more passionate, more driven, more capable, and more dynamic than I thought, and that gives me hope.

So happy Spring to you, and Happy New Year to me.

 

March 16, 2008

Georgia Disaster Relief

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Hey guys.

So, I don’t know if you all heard, but it’s been on the news lately - horrible tornadoes ripped through Georgia and South Carolina yesterday and last night…

In addition to the Georgia Dome and CNN Headquarters, my partner Liz’s home town of Jefferson County, Georgia, was completely decimated by tornadoes last night.

Several other counties in Georgia were badly hit, along with many in South Carolina. We’re going to try to head down to help with the repairs and clean-up ASAP, but tonight and in the next few days I ask for your prayers and thoughts.

Please donate, if you can spare them, clothing, school supplies, anything at all, to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Committee, or various charities working with the communities most badly hit.

I remember the devastation a tornado can cause, we used to live through them every Spring, but for those of you who haven’t been south, tonight I ask that we all remember what we have in common, and that a lot of good people lost their homes and everything they own, so please send your thoughts and prayers and, if possible, help out the Red Cross providing water and food in Jefferson County and surrounding areas.

Thank you,

Alexis

 

March 11, 2008

I’m Going to Burn it Down

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It’s true… I’ve been in a “burn down the capitol” mood the past few weeks.  My best friend has definitely helped fuel it, being the communist that he is (haha), but the fact is, I’ve somehow come full-circle in realizing where I stand on a lot of things.

When I left college (my radical, left-wing women’s college in MA), I was very tired of the constant push for activism and very much ready to hear what Georgetown had to say about change within the system, the virtues of being moderate, and, generally, the importance of de-radicalizing.  My first year of graduate school, I’ll admit, I bought in, hook line and sinker, because they were telling me exactly what I wanted them to, exactly what I wanted to hear - and from Georgetown, supposedly the most reputable source in the country.  A graduate degree in Government from Georgetown is a degree in Moderate Politics, whether you want it or not (I’m not talking about SFS, that’s a degree in Conservative Politics), and I ate it up because I was tired, tired of the Pioneer Valley with all the old hippies who never affected any real change in the world because they never left their happy little bubble, tired of people always yelling about change but never doing anything - I got this great experience where I could work towards what people I respected (my professors) called change, and not scream and yell and run myself out because of it.

And I applied for the government jobs.  And the think tank jobs.  And the internships.  I courted the Federal Government for employment multiple times before getting cold feet at the last minute.  I visited the State Department and registered for the exam, only to not show up on the morning of the test.  I got the internship, and I took it, and I show up for work dutifully every day and sit in an office where people work within the system, putting their Georgetown graduate degrees to good use getting paid by the government to tell the government what it wants to hear.  And I can tell you now, after months of having “worked within the system,” that I have never been more radical in my life.

I am thankful for my Georgetown degree, because I have also never been more well-educated in my life about the issues I want to act on.  And I’m going to law school for people like this, and all the liberation lawyers who came before me, who got educated, who learned the law, and who used it not within the system but against the system.  Who used their brains, their educations, their passion, to really change things.  I know who I am - more now than ever - and I know where I stand, and I also know that I am backed by the best education available to anyone in this country.  This should be a terrifying thing to anyone who clings to the structures of oppression.

I regret that I wasn’t alive then; I regret bitterly that I wasn’t there to fight police outside of Stonewall, to stand up for women’s rights in the 60’s and 70’s, to fight segregation, to take the first steps towards liberation.  But those were just the first steps, just the first steps, in a long journey - and I am becoming a powerful force: educated, passionate, confident, and driven - to keep taking the steps we have to take to follow in the paths of the people who were there to do those things, to pave the way so that someone like me can get a degree from Georgetown, a law degree, a career, and make real change.

In the past I’ve been afraid, afraid of myself, afraid of what other people would think, afraid of making my way in the world.  I’ve apologized for who I am, and that’s something I will never forgive myself for.  I have learned, in the past few years, that I am an incredible young woman.  I am a radical feminist, a gay, Jewish, Hungarian-American Woman; I will soon be a lawyer, I am Georgetown-educated, I am a political scientist, I am one hell of an intellectual, I am powerful and intense and not shy or demure or afraid, I am not apologetic, I am not pushed around.  And one day soon, I am going to raise holy terror to the pieces of this broken system that tried and continue to try to break and silence people like me, and people not like me, and people like you…

So yes, I’m going to law school.  But I guess what I’m saying is, don’t expect to see me in a corporate suit anytime soon.

 

March 8, 2008

The Tree Highway

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I was looking through some of my old photographs now that I finally gave in and spent money I never had on Aperture 2 (I had a chance to do some editing I never figured out how to do in Photoshop) - and I got this incredibly sad feeling.

It coincided with a comment a former friend made (isn’t that the saddest thing?  a former friend…) on a Facebook note I wrote a while ago.  I had discovered that my favorite DJ, Paul Oakenfold, who I saw in London the summer I was there with my friends Pete and Andy (the flatmates I lived with the summer I lived there) was playing at RFK Stadium here in DC and I invited everyone I know in DC to come along because I really wanted to go.  That included this guy, Josh, who I had been really close friends with in London, we’d been a part of this inseparable group while I was there, and, of course, like always happens, we completely drifted apart.

So I wrote in the note that I’d seen the DJ in London and he was great, and the only comment I got was from Josh, and all he could come up with to say was, “who can remember London?”

And I made some witty remark, because letting him see blood is fatal, but… the fact is… I remember London. I’ll never forget London.  Some of the most fun I ever had in my life was with the friends I made in London, the days and months I pretended would never end, the freedom that felt like forever. Letting myself believe I would actually stay friends with those people, who I care(d) so much about - it lasted for a while once we came back but the truth was - and we all knew it the day we said goodbye (I was the only one who stayed on over the summer) - that the setting was part of the friendship.  The contract of our group friendship revolved around our mutual disconnection from our former, “regular” lives.  Once we returned to those lives, we wouldn’t need each other anymore.  And, it’s true, now we don’t.

And I guess I’m the only one left whose heart that breaks.

I was looking at pictures of Morgan playing guitar that I underexposed and put in black and white (they came out well, for portraiture which isn’t my gig, if I may say so myself) and I almost started crying.  If it is possible to capture the perfect and incredibly stupid heartbreaking idealism of one moment when you believe in the eternity of another person, of a friendship, those photographs did.  And Josh’s comment sealed its demise.

I’ll never forget London… but, I guess, it’s time that I, like all of my (former) friends from that time, grow up, and accept it for what it was, cease expecting the impossible from other people, and become content, I suppose, to remember.

 

March 6, 2008

Visual Poetry

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My favorite thing about Spring:

img_0293.jpg

The first Cherry Blossom.

For more of my manic first-day-of-spring photography, please check out my flickr page!

 

February 23, 2008

I have to get out of this rut

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So I’m going against my own best judgment and blogging here, I rationalize it’s fine as long as I don’t say anything about work.  So, no saying anything about work.

But I wanted to write here because, to be honest, there are some things about reading my LJ friends page that just drive me nuts.  I mean, I’m not trying to be rude but it was better when it was just a thing that me and my highschool friends used to keep in touch during/after senior year.  Most of the people I joined for don’t use it anymore, and I don’t really feel connected to it.  This is so much better.  It’s like, hi, I’m out here, I’m not asking you to read it, you don’t have to, but you’re welcome to come along and leave your thoughts if the Internet leads you this way.  It’s just a better medium for my mind.

There’s some good news and some bad news really.  I mean, last night I got my financial aid offer from University of the Pacific - WOW.  Full tuition, free books, priority registration, AND $24,000/year stipend.  Yeah.  Of course I haven’t heard anything fin-aid wise from UW, and now the downside of that coin is that everyone is pushing me to go to Pacific when UW is a better school and now I have a deeply weakened argument as to why I ought to go to UW.  So that’s stress.  I really hope UW hurries up and offers me money, otherwise I’m going to be in a really bad position.

And then of course the other issue is working long hours AND going to school full time; it’s basically killing me.  I love both, don’t get me wrong, it’s just, sometimes I forget how to be a human being.  I was talking to my dad last night and he said, “You know, the world sees, well - your pace is 100 miles an hour… then they say, that’s good, because you have to go 120 mph to survive.”  And that’s totally how I feel.  Paper due (by extension) tonight that’s REALLY stressing me out and I haven’t really started, I mean, the research is done, but I haven’t written anything.  I don’t know, I have no time anymore.  I have no time to just, be alive.

And I think, you know, I’ll work hard in law school sure, but then afterwards I’ll be in a job where I’m high-ranking if not my own boss right away, I’ll be making bank, and I can set my own hours.  But the truth is that I think all of us are telling ourselves that.  At least, those of us who aren’t privileged enough to sit around all day jobless and existential, that’s what we have to tell ourselves.

I’m used to hard work so I don’t know where this existential bog is coming from.  I think it has a lot to do with cultural expectations.  Obviously - my family is European, there’s a different kind of cultural value placed on work vs. family/life etc.  Eastern European no less.  Here in America basically (and as a political scientist I’ve even read studies about this) - the world just uses you up and then spits you out when you’re 60.  Our work (be it office or school or whatever) is seen as the sole reason we’re alive, as this godlike pillar to which our families and lives and dreams are secondary.

I want to work, I want to be a productive member of society, I want to excel in school, I want to be great - but I also want to be a human being.  I have a partner, I want to have a family, my own cultural upbringing as well as my own beliefs tell me that family is the pillar to which all else is secondary.  So how can I reconcile this?

I’ve been pretty miserable.  My dreams are all terrifying and I can’t remember what it feels like to not be tired.  It wouldn’t be so hard if I didn’t care so much about doing well at everything.  But I feel like it’s numbing my soul, more and more.

The question presents itself: when have I finally proven myself?  When is this all finally good enough?  Will that moment ever come or will I be continually breaking myself just to make it through the day?

Reminding myself that I love my classes and my job and all of that will have to suffice, I suppose, until I find those answers.

 

February 21, 2008

Marching on to a Madman’s Drum

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Hear the chimes, did you know that the wind when it blows
It is older than Rome and all of this sorrow
See the new pyramids down in old Manhattan
From the roof of a friend’s I watched an empire ending
Heard it loud and long the river’s Om
Time marching on to a madman’s drum

Don’t forget what you’ve learned all you give is returned
And if life seems absurd what you need is some laughter
And a season to sleep and a place to get clean
Maybe Los Angeles, somewhere no one is expecting
On a detox loft through a Glendale Park over sidewalk chalk
Someone wrote in red, “start over”
So I muffled my scream on an Oxnard beach
Full of fever dreams that scare you sober
Into saltless dinners

Take the fruit from the tree, break the skin with your teeth
Is it bitter or sweet? All depends on your timing
Like a meeting of chance with the train station glance
Many lifetimes had past in a instant reminded
Of a millstone house in a seaside town
When your heart gave out in a mission bed
So your wife gave birth to a funeral dirge

Hear the chimes, did you know that the wind when it blows
It is older than Rome and our joy and our sorrow

{Bright Eyes - Cleanse Song}

I miss writing here SO MUCH.  I wish I was freer to do so.

 

February 8, 2008

i wish

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that I would be good even if I did nothing
that I would be good even if I got the thumbs down
that I would be good if I got and stayed sick
that I would be good even if I gained ten pounds

that I would be fine even if I went bankrupt
that I would be good if I lost my hair and my youth
that I would be great if I was no longer queen
that I would be grand if I was not all knowing

that I would be loved even when I numb myself
that I would be good even when I am overwhelmed
that I would be loved even when I was fuming
that I would be good even if I was clingy

that I would be good even if I lost sanity
that I would be good
whether with or without you

{alanis - that i would be good}

 

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