memorly dot com

i haven’t written in quite some time. i know. i can only publish these articles if i write them fast and don’t think. since the last post, i’ve written four posts’ worth of crap, decided to take down this site, and spent way more time weighing the merits of syndicating my every emotional breakdown than i would care to admit.

luckily, like any reasonable female, i ran this decision through the obligatory wait-three-days-and-see-if-it-still-sounds-like-such-a-great-idea filter and mission Kill Memorly.Com died a boring, indecisive death. you see, even though i feel like i don’t have anything worth saying to the world at this point in my life, there are lots of things i want to say to myself, and this is the best way i’ve found to do that.

for how much thought lead to this (in)decision, i really owe you all a better post, but.. baby steps.

i am having a hard time lately. tonight i burst into tears mid-sentence while on the phone with my mom, and we weren’t even talking about anything sad. furthermore, i’m not anywhere close to a time of the month where i might be known to become a little crazy. i feel a little angry at myself for not having better control of my emotions after all of this time, but really this is sort of a new thing. i prepared myself for the “oh my god it’s been a year” freakout, but what blindsided me was the “i feel like i’ve grown up so much in one year and my dad isn’t even here to weigh in or be proud of me” breakdown. that is more or less what i’m dealing with right now.

which brings us to our next news: i made an appointment to see a therapist tomorrow. my heart was only half in it the only other time i tried this, so i’m optimistic that i’ll get better results now that i’ve seen how much better my college career would have gone had i not walked out of that doctor’s office and never looked back. either way, i’m proud of myself for getting off my ass and making the appointment, because being more pro-active is not exactly on my list of recent accomplishments.

moving on—enrique and i are driving up to michigan for the holidays and i could not be more excited about that. i love christmas. that’s not a very popular thing to say and i know particularly in my family it sounds almost (if not actually) sacrilegious, what with all the deaths that’ve happened during the holidays over the last few decades years. i guess that’s why i feel like i should say it, because it’s not obvious. i love christmas and i can’t wait to go home and see family and old friends and show enrique all the things kids do when they have snow in their back yards instead of sand.

so yeah, what’s not to love about christmas? the only thing that stresses me out about the season is people talking to me about how stressed out they are. i think it’s dumb to stress because for most of us, the holidays are a time when we get to choose exactly where we’ll be, what we’ll eat, and who we’ll be with (maybe not on a name by name basis but you know what i mean). you have months to think about the people you really love in this world and what you might do to show them that you love them and want to spoil them and you know them well enough to know how to do that. if you are worrying about impressing someone with the cleanliness or decor of your home, or the cost of your gift, or any other totally superficial bullshit thing like that, then maybe you should get some better friends or alternately, a better sense of humor. it’s just not that serious, any of it, and when another one of us bites the dust next year (retroactive irish humor alert: this website may not be appropriate for all audiences), we won’t be sitting around talking about how we wished we’d made that 9th variety of cookies.

so anyway, for the record, i think christmas is great and i hope you’re finding a way to enjoy the holidays yourself. and in case you aren’t, this would be a good time to take a breath and enjoy the following picture of nixie wearing a santa hat:

good god, how adorable is that bird.

ok, i think i can sleep now. thank you for listening to my rants. goodnight, internet.

every time i write you an email, i think of how easy it is to tell you everything i try to write in my blog but can’t. i just can’t write to everyone lately and have trouble most days writing to anyone but you. so if you’ll pardon the exploitation, i’m responding to your last email here instead of gmail.

i don’t really know what i’m doing that except that i just can’t see “one year” every time i stumble onto my own site. and you are the only person i feel is getting the unfiltered me lately so this is as honest as i can be, even if it’s of no benefit to anyone [else].

it’s just that sometimes talking to you is like those scenes in the movies where two people see each other in an airport and everyone else gets blurry. not in the lets-make-out way, but the oh-snap-it’s-annie way, you know? i don’t get writer’s block talking to you.

first, i’m sorry. i’m so, so sorry about what’s happened. i feel like we need to jump immediately into the contingency plans. where are you going? the timing is interesting to me because i’m wondering if i have the guts to leave here in february. it would be ideal timing for me, but the uncertainties are stifling at a time when i’m having trouble breathing anyway. maybe we can hold our breath and jump together. i have a few ideas about that that we should discuss when they won’t be sullied by the general shittiness of these circumstances.

to step back, though, i feel like i need to say this: in the ever-deepening disconnect of the world as i’d like it to be vs. the world as it reveals itself to be, i just can’t help but notice that hard work has come back to bite me pretty much every time. what worked for our grandparents seems obsolete these days, replaced with a game tied to nothing of physical value. kind of like our entire society. we don’t produce anything anymore. the real fuck of it all is that you’re damned either way—you lose your faith when you play the game as you think it should be played, you lose your soul when you play the game as it is actually played. as competitive people, we are all drawn toward the game, but i am starting to believe that to legitimately chase what really makes a person happy, you simply cannot engage. it’s just like every other goddamned thing this week. you’re constantly invited to insert more coins and spin again, but you lose the game as soon as you agree to play.

i’ve been thinking a lot lately about people like you and me and how we cope when things don’t fit. it occurred to me this week that virtually every problem i have with other people is somehow tied to the fact that i feel stronger alone than with anybody else. ever, period. we both retreat into ourselves, with your swimming and my everythinging and this much i know you know because it comes between us sometimes too. other people add too many nuances to a problem, too many of their own needs and priorities, and it really is easier to just do it yourself. but as much as i’ve lamented this trait in myself and how much it does not lend to fitting some model of social normalcy, i’ve been grateful for it in this last year. i’m grateful for parents who raised me to believe in myself. for as hard a time i have believing in anyone else, i’m so thankful that i’ve never really doubted my ability to take care of me, because that’s the only person guaranteed to be there as long as you are.

you’ve watched me go into warrior mode over the years. you’ve seen me do ridiculous shit that made no sense to anybody except probably you. like we were just talking about, with me moving from craven to central without a car. moving every piece of furniture, every sweater, every textbook 2 miles on my back because that was the only way it was going to be on my terms. fourteen hours later i was sweaty and sunburned and pretty content, because doing things on your own terms counts for a lot.

and i’ve seen you do it too. i’m limited in what i can say on that now that my dumb ass decided to put this on the internet (what was i thinking?) but i think of miles logged and soup consumed and letters written, and when i picture annie the warrior, a very specific and powerful profile comes to mind.

i hope some day we’ll see sixty and can drink tea on a blanket and listen to the birds and have no hatred or resentment toward anyone because we’ll have grown enough to put it all in perspective and really accept that it was never about us, and nothing is about us, and we’re spiritually perfect and egoless. but we’re not there yet, and we’ve got to do the best we can with what we have. maybe if you can’t play no game at all, it’s better to play the one you design than the one dictated to you.

it’s a testament to my own immaturity i’m sure, but the fact remains that every really great external accomplishment in my life has been the result of a mission i adopted while pissed off. and i think, for any person who thinks enough to be afraid but not enough to be fearless (which is most people, ourselves not excluded), the key is to keep your circle small enough that you can do right by those in it, keeping your bumper car model of life to minimize for collisions relative to your path. and then you just have to put the rest of your energy into righting the wrongs in your life.

my dad used the punchline “then just stop” a lot and it always made me laugh. like if he’s making you slap yourself with limp wrists and you’re laughing and screaming and he’s demanding to know why you’re hitting yourself and you’re telling him it’s annoying and he says, “then just stop”. or when you have the flu and it’s making you miserable, “then just stop having the flu.” he makes it sound so simple.

but he would tell you, both jokingly and seriously, to just stop. i think you need to find the simplest, most honest path to okay at work and put the rest of yourself into something that feeds you. you put your trust in people who’ve proven themselves unworthy, and now it’s time to give your own orders. think of Seligman’s dogs. even in situations where it feels like the world’s got you in a choke collar, the reality is that at any point, you can snarl and bite the world’s face off. and i think it’s time for that, because i’m pretty sure you were born to conquer.

i had a dream last night where i kept going into a store to retrieve something i left inside. every time it was something crucial, like a shoe or my shirt. my friends outside were (quite understandably) annoyed that we were 90 minutes to our destination and counting, and all because i couldn’t keep track of all of my belongings. i woke up thinking that maybe that’s why i might just be bad at relationships, because my first instinct is to isolate the problem, and i do that by isolating myself. you let other people in and they try to help you and you wind up in the store for the 86th time trying to find your damn pants.

i thought that because eventually the friends left and took all the static with them. i walked back into the store, smiled at the clerk, got my hat, and walked home. not the location, but the place that made sense.

after all this? good fucking riddance to maine, i say.

i was not planning to write a one-year post, but it occurred to me that that would be silly and selfish, since today is a day that will inspire many in my life to check my humble, whiny little blog. So here we go, Internet: the one year recap.

i thought it would be nice to let my dad write most of this post, but regrettably, an emotional falling out with a friend resulted in me deleting all my instant messenger logs just a few weeks before dad died, and emails are just too painful to go through since that was our forum of choice for expressing disappointment in the other. the material i have is just not great for today’s purposes. so i’m sorry, Internet, this is what you get.

it’s been quite a year. there have been far more downs than ups, but there have been some pretty substantial ups too, so i’m not here to whine any more than i usually do. i do, however, have to retract the first major success i declared for myself: that due to my now-complete financial independence, i had officially become an adult. looking back at that claim, i am reminded of the story of the abandoned baby who survived on ketchup packet until authorities came to the rescue. just because you’re in charge of your basic needs, as it turns out, does not mean that you are qualified or doing a good job. i am not doing a great job, but i’m doing what i can.

i’ve decided that i will consider myself an adult when, and not until, i can look at myself six months in the past and not think of that person as a total asshole. i don’t see that happening anytime soon—i was certainly a freakin’ idiot six months ago and i bet i’ll see the current me as pretty immature in six more. and that’s what still bothers me most, that i relied so much on my dad to get me through all the growing pains, and i’m not nearly as grown as i’d thought.

i think i was always pretty emotionally dependent on my dad because virtually every part of my being that has ever caused me trouble is something i inherited from him (sorry, Dad, but you know you’d agree). we both thought too much, we worried too much, we struggled with the same things. where my mom’s (also amazing) advice has classically been based on 25 years of observing me, my dad gave fantastically personal guidance because he’d already been there, done the obsessing, got the t-shirt. i always tried to use his experiences to shortcut my own growth, and to be honest I’d had a lot of luck with that. i think he saved me a lot of headaches and heartaches because when he said something was worth doing or would be regrettable, i took his word for it and called it a day.

and maybe that’s why i’m so angry about things, because this is a hell of a first challenge to take on without that guidance. there’s no precedent for this, no one else i can use as a springboard—of the few people i do know who had a relationship like this with a parent, none of them lost that person before becoming adults themselves. there are so many things i want to know and want to ask, and i wish the 24 year old me wasn’t two cycles of asshole ago, when i could have known what answers i’d want today. six months from now.

it’s like dropping your compass in the worst part of the journey.

the fact that so few really relate to this loss can only point to how lucky i’ve been, and when i look at a lot of other dads out there, i start to think that it’s selfish to feel sorry for only having 24 years of such a great dad when that’s 24 years longer than a lot of people get. not everybody gets a dad who insists on eating dinner as a family, who takes you go-karting at midnight, cries with you when your pet iguana dies. who made you feel like a mature person with thoughts worth listening to long, long before that could possibly have been the case. and you know, it probably is selfish to think like that. and good god, it’s been a year now and i want to be way more past this than i am.

the good news is that one year is the recommended time for not making any drastic life changes, and today marks the beginning of my freedom to really try to move forward. i’ve had ample time to contemplate the fact that i don’t have any real motivation to continue doing anything i’m doing right now. and so, i probably won’t. it’s kind of exciting, really. i wonder where I’ll move and what kind of place i’ll live in and what i’ll do, because it could happen at any moment and i have almost no expectations or hopes with regard to the particulars.

ha. it hasn’t even been six months since i started writing this post and i’m already totally over it. i wish i had some big insights, but i don’t so i’ll just leave you with the one helpful thing i did find in my email search:

good luck with the day, Internet. and thanks for the last year.

oh, Internet. how i neglect you.

i don’t like the idea of anniversaries, but i think subconsciously they get into my head a lot. last night i got into a tussle with a store manager and threw an armful of merchandise in his general direction before stomping outside and crying about where else i could possibly buy all that stuff. would that have happened if i weren’t thinking so much about where i was this time last year, plodding around oblivious to the fact that my dad was about to die? probably not. i’m embarrassed about my emotional inconsistency (but not what i said to the manager. guy was a dick.).

anyway, there were a couple things i really wanted to talk about before any more time passes.

the first one is Enrique. I don’t talk too much about the details of my personal life on this blog, but those of you who stumble onto my flickr page may be starting to wonder why he’s suddenly the subject of so many of my photographs. so here’s that story.

Enrique is visiting from Honduras, which is where we met. He’ll be here for as long as his visa, finances, and personal priorities dictate. Since neither of us know exactly how long that will be, I’m trying to scare up as many good American experiences as I can while I still have the opportunity. Entertaining someone from a third-world country with a population smaller than that of NYC is very fun because it makes everything here seem like a gross extravagance. Enrique comes from Honduras’ capital of Tegucigalpa where his family appears to enjoy the very best that the country has to offer, but many of the luxuries of our everyday lives are not available to anyone there, no matter who you are. Even if you can afford nice things, they are nearly impossible to obtain and then a liability to protect. In this country, we just do everything bigger.

So far, we’ve gone to a wedding (he caught the garter!), taken a ride in a limo, gone to american bars and restaurants, driven to Atlanta, gone to an amazing hockey game, eaten new foods (carrot cake? pumpkin pie?), seen a 4d movie, gone to a lecture at Duke, ridden a ferris wheel, seen a north carolina pig race. We took a tour of the CNN world headquarters and sampled cokes from all over the world at the Coke museum. We’ve hosted and gone to all sorts of parties. A last-minute invitation from my neighbor resulted in front-row seats to a Bobby Sanabria concert, which has led me to think that I’m so desensitized to all that awesomeness going on all the time that I miss these opportunities when I’m not thinking about someone else’s entertainment. Everywhere we’ve gone, there’s been some huge surprise fireworks display or band playing or some other amazing show, usually free of charge and just because people have the talent and can.

“Man,” Enrique said after the concert (which featured the Duke jazz and djembe ensambles, one of the section leaders being some 14 year-old prodigy), “in my country, people just watch soccer.”

But you know what’s funny? The things that have been most impressive to Enrique have been the little everyday things that we (or at least, I) take entirely for granted. dishwashers. fancy cars in the kroger parking lot. book stores. public transportation. gps. trust—that the UPS guy really will leave your package on the stoop and your neighbors really won’t steal it. that despite the average american outearning the average honduran 14.5 to 1, we still pay less for gasoline. order—the fact that Americans have rules and play by them, not just when police are around. and speaking of police, the honor—that you can’t expect to pay off public officials to get special treatment and that you won’t be harassed under false pretenses just to be shaken down for money. the respect that Americans show each other, that instead of gawking at the scene of a car wreck, we stop, call 911, and stay to make sure the people involved are taken care of. and perhaps more than anything else, the quiet. Even the worst, ugliest parts of town evoke comments from Enrique about how crazy it is that so many people can live harmoniously in the same place, without screaming and honking and barking everywhere you go.

All of this, I think, has been about the best thing that could be happening to me at this time where I tend toward thinking too much about too many things in too wide a scope, because showing your country to a foreigner forces you to focus on the nuances. The things that make Americans different from the rest of the world.

So anyway, in these weeks when our country is being bombarded with advertisements telling us why both of our presidential candidates are going to ruin everything and that things are beyond repair, I sort of wanted to take a minute to talk about why I’m especially proud of our country and grateful for these reminders that we all more or less hit the jackpot when we were born here.

North Carolina has early voting, and I went with David this Tuesday to vote. I can’t lie, I got a little emotional about the whole thing. So I hope you’ll try to vote this year too. This will probably be the only time you’ll hear me say this, but no matter who we elect, it really could be a lot worse.

so anyway. happy halloween, God bless America, and get your butt to the polls. till next time, Internet.

This morning I was on my way to work when I heard Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’. This song always makes me really happy because it reminds me of a boy I was really fond of.

Not like that, though. I was 17. He was 12. I was his algebra tutor. That is a horrible way to start a story, but I promise that this was 100% appropriate and not anything like the “afternoon delight” scene in arrested development (12:10), hahaha.

Anyway. this boy was in that make-or-break period of his life where you either realize that you’re really smart and have potential, or you delay that lesson long enough to really screw up high school and possibly the rest of your life too. In our school district, this was the class where that fate was determined. I had also been one of the students placed into the class who wouldn’t be caught dead studying, and it weren’t for parents who made it clear that death was a real possibility if i didn’t start, I think i would have failed that class and wound up on a much different track than i did. This was my reason for becoming an algebra tutor.

He came over a few days a week after school. He learned fast, and in the time left over we usually talked about his life. He had adorable quirks like needing to bring a toothbrush with him everywhere he went, even though he was too cool to be seen caring about anything else, school included, which is how he had come to be in my dining room on this day in the first place. Blowing off school is all well and good, but dental hygiene was, in his book, serious ******* business.

So anyway. We were both in a good mood on this day because things were going well and we weren’t having any problems with the material. I’d made popcorn, which we were eating as we listened to music and dissected polynomials. And then You Sexy Thing came on the radio and spontaneously we just started singing. We sang possibly the most absurd duet of all time, doing silly dances encouraging each others’ descent into completely ridiculous behavior. It was like one of those moments in a movie that makes you laugh and then think that nobody really does these things. But you know, occasionally the mood strikes and you do.

I think of that day whenever I hear that song. And then my thoughts always drift to the weeks and months that I carried around a little gift for him with the hope of running into him. I had found some toothpaste-dispensing travel toothbrushes while on my recruiting trip to Duke and brought a couple back for him. I know he didn’t need more things like this, but a part of me wanted to make sure he knew that he wasn’t just a job to me. He was a real part of my life and I missed our talks and our afternoons after school, and although the age/experience gap didn’t leave us many options for a sustained friendship, I wanted him to know that he mattered enough to me that I would carry this small gift with me everywhere until I saw him again. I moved across the country and carried it still, but even on trips home I never did see him. That’s the way that it’s supposed to go with that job and it’s probably the best way, but I did think it was a bit of a waste that with all the algebra I taught him, I never got a great chance to make it clear that I thought he was a badass and destined for great things.

My mom ran into him some years later. He recognized her. He told her that he had a 4.0. No news has ever made me happier.

Sometimes I get self-conscious when I have a relationship with someone that boils down to some kind of business, like the only relationships that could really matter are those where money or services are not being exchanged. But you know, life is busy and i can’t think of anybody ever telling me that they spend as much time with their loved ones as they’d like. I’m trying lately to shed that conception that just because someone HAS to interact with you, somehow that implies that they’d rather not. The world is a lot prettier when you can think of everyone as a friend. I’m hoping to find more of that in my job and in my life, the kinds of connections you find with people when you’re doing something that really matters to you.

You know, life is pretty good. Chris and Jenn are getting married this weekend and I get to see all my family and Enrique is coming to visit and all this exciting stuff is happening, and I’m happy. Pictures and updates to come!

i have so much love for midwesterners. sales recruiters and people in television will tell you that most people are with me on this. midwestern accents have been shown in all sorts of studies to evoke impressions that a person is hardworking, family-oriented, honest, sensible, and unpretentious. i’m sure that growing up there accounts for a large portion of my bias, but i think my heart will always be in the midwest.

i rarely talk about politics on this blog, not because i don’t have strong feelings about the subject, but because i don’t want to upset anyone i care about. today i will take the chance because there’s still time to be having productive dialogues about the matter. it is as a displaced michigander that i feel i have any reason to be talking about this at all, because perhaps an outside opinion may have more impact coming from an insider.

y’all (just kidding, joke, joke, joke) in the midwest are really breaking my heart right now, and particularly in my home state where i know things are dire and people are desperate for a better economic situation. it seems damn near impossible to get accurate political information in the midwest because so many people have a vested interest in polluting the media. a LOT of political wars are fought there— unfortunately, the same traits that make midwesterners so lovable also makes them prime political targets. they’re incredibly patriotic, they love their country, and they vote. at the same time, they generally have jobs unrelated to politics, families to feed, and more important things to do than sit at home and analyze political records. apathetic citizens don’t vote, and ridiculously political citizens vote based on a large body of facts. and then, in america’s heartland, you have the people whose votes you can buy if you feed them enough propaganda, because as intelligent as they are, they don’t have time to fact-check every claim you make on television or every quote they read in the newspaper. They already have (at least) one full-time job; they can’t dedicate 40 hours a week to sifting through bullshit.

and that is why there is a huge pipeline of bullshit that runs directly from washington arizona to ohio.

it is because i’ve been to michigan and ohio recently, and i’ve watched tv there and read the magazines, that i can’t agree with my peers here who think that all people still voting republican are ignorant hicks (or the 1% of the population that has legitimate financial incentive to do so). i live in a college town where it’s hard to see why anyone would vote republican in this decade, but the newspapers you read (or i have read) in Ohio are not delivering the same content as the rest of the country. in a paper i picked up during my cousin’s wedding, 10 out of 10 “random” people on the street were excited to talk about what a great VP pick Sarah Palin was.

I am pretty sure that even in the most conservative state, 10 out of 10 americans are not going to agree that not only should rape victims not be allowed to seek an abortion, they should also not be offered emergency contraception, and they should be charged for the rape kit administered to help prosecute the attacker. I’m pretty sure that 10 out of 10 don’t think that a politician whose party doesn’t trust her to speak in public without extensive preparation for a specific event is capable of running the country if something happened to the president, and I don’t think those 10 would unanimously agree that global warming isn’t a real problem, and that not one of them would have picked up on the fact that she was an ardent supporter of that waste of money ‘bridge to nowhere’ until the plan was ridiculed to an extent that she changed her position. But this is how campaigns are run, and if you put all your money into the states that matter, you can convince a lot of intelligent people that you believe just about anything. that you believe what they believe. You can convince people that you’re offering something different when you’ve gone on record so many times touting your loyalty to the tired old administration. there was a time, 800 or so years ago, when John McCain really was a maverick. no one can take away that he’s a hero. But something different? no, sir.

Anyway. Maybe you think 8 more years of the Bush administration would be just fine with you. Maybe you believe that our government should be a theocracy. I don’t have much to say to you if that’s the case, and because I don’t think I could do my stance justice in a few short paragraphs, I will spare you the words you may not care about. I just wanted to take one moment during this campaign to tell the world that I enthusiastically endorse Barack Obama, and I would be happy to discuss the specific how’s and why’s with anyone who does care. And with that, I’ll get off my soapbox.

everything else is ok, i guess. i’ve been so excited for fall—it’s my favorite season—but last week we had one unseasonably cold day that left me afraid for the winter. the last time it was cold outside, it was like february, when my life and i were both a complete mess. the cold came and i found myself taking a shower to get warm and just standing it in, clean but with no desire to go anywhere. i did that a lot after my dad died…i would stay in the shower because it was the only place i felt warm and the only place where i didn’t have to talk to anyone about how i was doing or the other questions you have to answer when your dad dies and everyone feels sorry for you. i didn’t at all see it coming, and it feels dramatic to say, but i don’t think it’s at all extreme to call that day traumatizing. i am now really not looking forward to winter. if you don’t understand what’s gotten into me this week, maybe it will make you feel better that i don’t either, and i’m sorry.

i tried to write about this then, but then i saw the debate and was feeling all fired up. it has since warmed up a bit, and i have things to look forward to so i’m doing better. all i can do is buy some new sweaters and a scarf or two and hope for the best. that’s the game plan for now.

i have noticed that i only get mad at traffic when i’m late.

it doesn’t really make sense to get angry at someone for failing to facilitate my getting to a place on time when I left my apartments 15 minutes later than i should have. this is what i’m working on currently: being calm, not making other people pay for my shortcomings. i don’t want to get mad at someone else when i’m the one to blame. i don’t want nixie to get less attention because i finished too late at work. i don’t want to get mad at my friends for complaining about trivial problems on my way home from a very serious doctor’s appointment. i have a long way to go on that last one, but i’m making some progress. we live in this culture obsessed with efficiency and maybe i’m the first one to say it, but fuck efficiency. i do enough stuff. i don’t want to do more stuff if it comes at the expense of something that actually matters.

this might explain why i haven’t written in this blog for a long time—it’s the first thing to go when life gets crazy. as it is, i get more emails and phone calls than i can really keep up with (more a testament to my social disorganization than my popularity), and i trust that the people in my life would rather i try to return their calls than post on this site. i’m doing what i can, as i can, but i have realized that memorly.com needs a change of direction.

i was starting to think that it was time for memorly.com to go the way of my last website—that i should just take it down overnight and move on with my life for a while. it’s hard these days for me to know what to write…my dad’s death is now far enough in the past that my feelings about it change slowly and writing about it with any sort of regularity seems super whiny. in the meantime, enough new concerns have surfaced that i want to share, but this time i want to be more honest with fewer people, and a blog is not a good forum for that sort of communication. i pondered laying this site to rest until this morning, when i had a change of heart.

repeat readers know all about the plumeria plants my dad and i were growing—they have become symbolic to me in several different ways. after blogging about my hope to find my dad’s plant flourishing and beautiful when i came home, i was more than a little distraught to hear that it had been discarded for appearing dead. there is no way for anyone to just know this, but that’s sort of how those plants are. even knowing this, i constantly worry that my own has died. it grows many beautiful leaves, drops them all, and just when you think that all is lost, the dismal looking stump suddenly grows and inch and comes back stronger and better than before. i know this, and still every time my plant does it, i lose faith and think that this is really it, it really will not come back. i had all but lost hope this time around when i woke up to find a proud little bud shooting out of the top of the stump.

i think i might be like that, and maybe everyone is like that. there will be many times when you wonder if all is lost before you grow an inch and come back as a stronger person. Although memorly.com cannot be the same as it’s been, i don’t think it needs to die. I’m just going to use it to document the new leaves.

New leaves…new friends, new opportunities, new season. It’s starting to cool down, and since fall is my favorite season, this makes me really happy. Work has really taken off, the 9-5 is stressing me out more than I’d like but other projects are going well. my (sister-)cousin Anne Marie just got married, i got to see Tim, David had a birthday, and I got to see the Ben Folds Five reunion concert. I feel like I’ve gotten to really bond with some new friends and a few old ones. I redecorated my apartment, frosted the bottom half of all my windows, and cleaned out my closet. I’ve been trying to get to bed earlier. I’ve been spending more time with Nixie. I’m cooking more. I disassembled my desktop computer because I don’t need more instruments of work or distraction in my life. And just when I feel like I could use a little direction, all sorts of older, wiser, more badass people have come out of the woodwork to give me some really great perspective. in general, i’m happy with where my life is going.

less generally, i’ve been dealing with some stuff. but you know, that’s ok with me. I told my mom earlier this week that in my life, I have never wished for happiness. Happiness is a pretty impractical thing to wish for because it simultaneously implies two opposite conditions. happiness as the absence of sadness or happiness as the inverse of sadness. the straight line or the sine wave.

i prefer to be more specific because I can be: i don’t want to be content. it seems that a day comes for most people when they cash in their chips for stability and comfort, but i hope to live all the highs and lows that i can endure before it’s my time for that. if i have the luxury of being old enough to look back on my life, i want some stories. and so instead of happiness, i have always wished for stamina. stamina to stay at the table as long as possible, to love and be hurt and die for a little while before i grow and inch and come back stronger. thinking about this makes me feel more optimistic about my life, that the bad things are just exercises in being a stronger person. i’m trying to keep my focus on that.

so i am going to try to write about the concrete things for a little while. maybe i’ll show you pictures of my windows. i will definitely pimp out a web application David wrote that is rocking my world (though I’ll let him debut it first) and maybe introduce you to one of mine. For now, i came here to get caught up on some projects so I’ll get back to that. you stay classy, Internet.

hi, Internet. remember me? I know it’s been a while, so I wrote you a book and now you have to read it! Just kidding…this post is really just to break the silence with something a little happier than the last post.

i spent about a month, off and on, writing a blog entry that I’ve decided to trash today. the effort it was taking to edit it was in complete conflict with the point of the entry, so better to start fresh and post something from the heart without overthinking it.

the article was about coming to terms with the fact that both nature and nurture have programmed me to be a chronic overdoer, and lately I’m working on accepting that it’s just not good for me. Doing a lot of stuff makes me feel productive and useful and good, and it’s easy to get addicted to the high of accomplishing things that not just anyone could pull off. At the point where you’re channeling your neuroticism and affinity for overscheduling into that kind of eudamonistic happiness, you’re getting validation on so many levels that it’s easy to think you’re really onto something. I get it, and I get why other people do it. I’ve just decided that at least in my life, it’s a really masturbatory tactic. In all that time that i’m booking tasks and hobbies and other ‘productive’ pursuits, i’m not leaving time for life to happen, and leaving time for life to happen has become very important to me in the last few years.

It’s almost a fluke that my overdoing in college didn’t land me in the hospital (if not the morgue); it should’ve. it certainly landed me in a therapist’s chair…but only long enough for her to tell me that I was doing too much, long enough for me to decide she didn’t “get” it, long enough for me to decide that I didn’t have time to talk about my feelings anydamnway. I am not a stranger to fighting against the current, but I like to think I’m a pretty grateful person, and I knew when I escaped from duke with a diploma and a job that I had gotten very lucky.

I decided to attone for my sins and pay respect to this fantastic luck by taking a mental health vacation, by actively abstaining from anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary to my survival until I’d recovered (physically, emotionally) from my college experience. I figured after six months or so, i’d feel adequately bored with the routine to start ratcheting my level of activity back up to a sustainable level of the chaos I believed I needed to be happy. And then, voila, I’d be an adult with everything all figured out!

six months, ha. i was so cute.

i’ve known for a long time that i’m happiest when i put what i think i want out of my mind and instead look to the universe for what i should be doing or learning next. i’ve let myself down trying to stick square pegs into round holes, but even when my course seemed strange or unjustifiable at the beginning, the universe has never disappointed me.

It’s never stopped talking to me either, which I think is why I haven’t gotten bored and haven’t needed to add any structure to my life. I’ve just been doing so much living that I don’t have time for bullshit.

(I just realized with the title of this post, “living” might seem like a euphemism. That isn’t a Mary quote. I guess I can’t tell you who said that, but my mom [cough] could if you want to ask her.)

I know there are people with the exact opposite paradigm who could say the same thing. They don’t have time for nothing because they’re too busy driving to practices and lessons. To each his own, but I don’t see much point in being part of a team if you’re functioning independently, nor much point in learning French if you’re never going to make time to sit down and speak it with anyone.

I saw an interview with an overdoer on TV this weekend and realized that I spend more time in a day playing with Nixie than she spends playing with her daughter. I was really scared by the fact that, for how horrified I was by this woman’s priorities, I felt like I could really understand her rut.

I’m sure this will seem obvious to some people, but it was a huge concept for me and I think many people like me: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you have to. During my rowing years, i saw everything as really black and white, as I think you often have to to really excel at one particular thing. I thought of anyone who stopped rowing as a Quitter, and the only reason a person would quit was that he or she just couldn’t hang. I was so shocked when my roommate (who I respected deeply as an athlete as well as a person) told me that she was leaving the team. Who is this person? What was she going to do now? What do non-rowers even do with their extra six hours a day? Watch MTV? Eat cheetos? This is terrible!

But I hadn’t been wrong about her. She really was an incredible athlete, but that wasn’t all she was. She wanted to do other things with her life, and she started doing them. She was sleeping when I’d wake up at 5, she was eating avocado at her desk when I came home at 9, she was writing an article for the school paper when I left for the next practice at 4, she was on her way to dinner with friends when I came back at 8. I flew to Boston to race at the HOTC. She flew to Boston to go to Boston. She watched the races, visited with friends in town, did what she wanted on her own terms. Basically, her life got awesome.

A mix of unfortunate scheduling, academic, and interpersonal situations made it more and more clear that it was time for me to leave rowing behind too, but I never would have done it if it weren’t for her. I didn’t really know who I was if I wasn’t a rower. It turned out ok, though. Similarly, during my post-college planning, I didn’t know who I was outside of a producer, a doer, a planner. but I think that’s turning out ok too.

And that is why when I see reruns of I Want to Work for Diddy and I start to think hey, i could kick every one of their asses at that, I have to shake the craziness out of my head and remind myself that just because i (think i) could, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, and hunting for external validation is a waste of effort when what I really want for myself is the internal kind. I don’t need anybody to know my name and I hope not to abuse anyone because I don’t have time to devote appropriate thought to his/her situation. I just want to have a few great friends and my family and maybe someday a family of my own, and to be as good to those people as i can be.

The editing of the never-posted post was hard because in the middle of it, I took a trip home and realized that if I can’t keep my Durham calm in the Michigan storm, I will never be able to move home. When I surround myself with people who struggle with the same need to firefight and make things perfect, it’s easy for me to relapse, and I turn into someone I don’t like among people I love, and should work to actively love more. So that’s my focus now: portability. I’m glad I’ve found my Walden Pond in Durham, but one day I’d like to take some of that pond back to the land of 11,000 lakes.

man. can you believe that there was a day when i would run from east campus to my first practice of the day in Card Gym because if I ran fast enough, I could sleep for five to seven minutes longer than if I’d taken the bus? let’s say it together now: screw. that.

I am not editing this entry or I’ll never post it. I hope it doesn’t sound preachy, as that’s a large part of why I scrapped the last one.

And now, a memorly.com ^TM public service announcement! I go for my second Gardasil shot today. If you or someone you love is a good candiate for the vaccine, you really need to do that. If you don’t think you’re at risk, that means you have the most to gain from it, and if you think you’ll never be at risk, you should probably read some statistics on sexual assault. I’m not trying to be a downer, but in the last six months, i’ve heard of three friends-of-friends who are dying or dead from cervical cancer. All under 25. And if I can keep track of the appointments, there’s no excuse for you not to.

ok, Internet. thanks for listening, and get your shots.

You know what’s funny? I’ve been meaning to edit a post for days because I didn’t think it was a good idea to post it as I wrote it. But instead of doing that right now, I am going to start an entirely new post.

Whatever, it’s my blog. I do what I want. Today I am going to talk about friends.

I recently stumbled upon some pictures online of a group of girls I used to hang out with. And you know, I felt sad for a moment because the pictures were beautiful and they looked very happy together, certainly happier than I felt at the time. I spent some time contemplating whether the disintegration of these friendships was due to some flaw I should identify and work on, because there’s nothing I shoot for more than keeping my personal failures new and fresh. Failure can be funny, but stale failure is just kind of sad.

And I did think about it for a long time. But really, juxtaposed with the many flaws I know i have, i had a hard time pulling any meaningful lesson out of the situation. These girls and I, we’d never had a falling out. They didn’t get together and decide to kick me out of the club because i suck. They were just catty and horrible to each other, and I found it so alienating that I just stepped further and further out of the circle until I couldn’t see it anymore.

I know that some of the problem is that I don’t have enough stamina for natural social dynamics that are a little shitty in nature but also pretty natural. People will always talk about the one in the group who isn’t there— I know that I should work on taking that less personally. But I think the other part of the problem is that the picture is a big lie. You see these smiling happy faces, and you think, hey, these people are sharing something special…wouldn’t it be nice to connect with a whole group of people like that? But woven into these interlaced arms are all sorts of scandals. Sleeping with each others’ boyfriends, gossiping about things shared in confidence, spreading hurtful rumors. They did it all.

Sometimes I think that my only hope for normalcy would be to get a thicker skin, care more about my social networking profiles, or develop a fear of being alone.

I will continue to think about how I might possibly suck. I don’t feel like I suck.

I get so emotionally invested in my friends that it is very damaging for me to have many of them, or any bad ones. I keep a small circle and I expect that each person in it really has my back, but I have seriously had a terrible run or been exercising some terrible judgment or something. More than a year ago, I lost my cool with one of my best friends for coming to town and treating my boyfriend horribly. I mean, horribly. I was embarrassed for having put the boy through it and too upset to fix the resulting damage to the friendship myself, but I had some misplaced faith that with time she would. Annie admitted to me this weekend that when my dad died, she sent an email to this friend to let her know. The response was a curt acknowledgment and a request to not email her again. After a year of telling myself that there were plenty of excuses for this behavior that didn’t include simply not caring, it pretty much broke my heart to hear.

Less than a month ago, I lost my cool with one of my best friends over a string of actions that I found hypocritical, selfish, and cruel. I know that unless she experiences some extreme personal growth, she’ll never care enough to take initiative to fix things on her own. In between, I lost one of my best friends because someone asked him not to talk to me anymore. I mourn these friends and lament my foolishness in thinking that they were more.

I find myself in a perpetual state of feeling like I’m the only person who will chase after someone I love if I’m the one who fucked up. Or even if it’s ambiguous. And since that makes me feel pretty alone regardless, I am much less interested than usual in the lame song and dance of going to movies or going to dinner or catching up with familiar faces. It doesn’t do anything for me right now.

Well, it wouldn’t be a memorly.com post if I didn’t find a way to whine about how out of place I feel in the world. So here’s another theory, this one developed in college when I should have been doing my physics homework was this: poor people and rich people value totally different things in friends.

I have a lot of love for my home, but nobody there is rich. Being a kid is scary any way you slice it and I’m not trying to say anyone has it any worse or any better, but worrying about meeting your basic needs for survival is different than worrying about a sick relative or whether you’ll have any friends at your new school. Nobody else can help cure your grandmother or get you through your first day at your seventh elementary school, but a true friend can get you through the most of the problems my friends had. The same kids your family harbored when things were rough at home turn into the teenagers who you call drunk at 2 in the morning because a boy broke your heart and you need a ride home from a party but aren’t even sure what city you’re in. The friends who wake up their girlfriends, get out of bed, and find that random cross-street in that random city where you have randomly found yourself. I feel so uncomfortable asking people for favors, and I think it’s a response to missing having friends who would, and did, do anything for each other.

And then I grew up and went to the big rich kid school and met a lot of really clever and bubbly people. Who mostly turned out to be clever, bubbly assholes. And for a long time I blamed it on Duke, on Duke students. But if I’m going to try to be fair and attempt to intellectualize the phenomenon, the best I can do is that very few of my classmates grew up in an environment like mine, where everyone has very similar problems and those problems are only tolerable if you have a few really loyal friends. My childhood friends prized no quality higher than loyalty. My college friends, whose diverse sets of problems were generally less treatable with quality companionship, looked for and most valued companions who amused them.

My friends from home may not always (or ever) understand my life now, but they are always true. And my cousins and I might not keep up with each others’ busy lives as well as we used to, but at the end of Anne Marie’s bachelorette party, we couldn’t help but look around and pat ourselves on the backs for being the last ones standing. Not just because of our naturally incredible alcohol tolerance, but because some things matter and always will.

I just wish I felt that more often, from the people I meet in my life here. Sometimes I feel like my upbringing did not prepare me for my future. Most times it is very hard for me to embrace the idea that I won’t always be floating alone in the ether.

I am disabling commenting for this post because I didn’t write this to get opinions. i just wrote it to get it off my chest.

I’m back from Michigan and have posted pictures from the various events. You can see them here if you want. They’re all at full resolution, so if you want any of them, help yourself. I did what I could with red eyes and stuff like that.

The bachelorette party was very nice, and I’m really happy about that because it was really important to me that it go well. I got a tiny bit stressed about it because there’s so much randomness that goes into whether or not a night of drinking turns out to be fun, and I am not a person who is comfortable leaving things up to chance.

I have a lot I thought about talking about since I came back, but really I am too unhappy and disillusioned to bother. I think my dad lost a lot of time and ground waiting for things and people in his life to be the way he thought they should be, and I’m sensitive to the idea that I might be doing the same. Right now I’m just working on not making the same mistakes twice. I’ll write more when my heart’s in it.