In Which I Aspire to Stitch Pieces Together

Emotions are a funny thing. Some people are driven by them, some people avoid them as though they will be set on fire and left a pile of rubble. Some find the whole thing totally inconsequential. My birthday is dredging up a lot of these thoughts this week- I spent my birthday a year ago blind drunk in a bar, with my parents, holding the parts of my last relationship up to the light and looking for a way to put it back together. I spent this year’s birthday sober, at home, talking to my significant other about things I want to do this year. It’s not the swings between beautiful dreams and reality that were last year’s October theme, but maybe being off the rollercoaster and back on the ground is a good way to start a year.

I’m more immovable object than irresistible force, but underneath I’m overly sensitive to other people’s emotions, especially when they belong to people I trust- and there are precious few of those people. I have an especially hard time separating the feelings of my mate from my own. Now, the thousands of dollars of therapy stuffed into my head mean I know that I’m not necessarily the cause of wild turmoil in other people’s souls, but it’s still nearly impossible, after 20-odd years, to be able to really step back from it. I’ve had to accept it as part of my wiring at this point.

The death throes of that relationship were an ugly vortex of emotions on both sides, and until recently I wasn’t able to start separating the threads of all these different feelings from the hysteria in which they were hurled at me. On top of all the madness, I was accused of not caring about any of it anyway, because I didn’t generate the same angry passions to match. I was horribly ashamed of the whole fiasco at the time—I must be a really awful person to instigate such things in other people—but time and distance have let me step back from it a little now. I don’t react well to emotional firebombings; my fight-or-flight instinct definitely trends toward “flee” in those situations.
It’s hard for me to really experience emotional intensity within myself too. When I was younger I’d dissociate: mentally watching a fight from up on the ceiling, thinking of something (anything) else, or checking out entirely and having no memory of it altogether. Nothing would come up, Sybil-style, in place, but I went through a heap of psychologists before someone could teach me what to do instead (what NORMAL people do). It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to unlearn. It’s easier now, but even now I fight the twitch to do that when things get too heated. Some things never really go away.

My last post was written in a rare burst of emotion. I’m not a person who gets angry often, or morose, or frantic. I tend to intellectualize instead… I rarely yell even when I am angry. I can’t even identify with any certainty what I was feeling, just that I was. Which is, for me, a victory in itself. I didn’t go on to make irate phone calls, I didn’t have an atomic meltdown. I just put it here, because that’s what the invisiblog is for. Almost no one even knows it exists.
Some people think I live alone in an ivory tower of ego, or that I’m a paragon of zen calm and never break, but we all know that’s not true for anyone, and I’m not really that unlike anyone else. Other people feel entitled to wild outbursts whenever they want. Am I not worthy of a few of my own?

I’m not trying to prop up some facsimile of my life in Seattle here, the way I did a bit when I lived in Indiana. There it was partly because I knew living there was temporary, and when I finally did relax and start to break out of the elitist mindset I dragged there people said I was becoming “one of them.” The common folk, the people who didn’t know what they were missing, the sheeple who liked their nice, dull, child-friendly community. I could do the same thing here. I could go to PS14 with the hipsters every weekend, shoot pool and drink, and tell myself Miami is lame and plastic and full of shallow assholes and not like the places I know and hold dear. But that’s not true either. Places, like people, are more alike than they are different. The details are all that distinguish a run-down beach town like Dania from a run-down Rust Belt town like Fort Wayne or Flint. People are coffee shop philosophers and proles and geniuses and douchebags in Miami and Toronto and Austin and Chicago and Seattle and everywhere else.

All my old trappings aren’t really who I am now anyway. Coming to Florida has ripped away nearly all of what I did before, through an insane combination of geography, technology, circumstance, climate, and what could be viewed as either bad or good luck. I don’t do the same kind of work, I don’t live in the same kind of community, I don’t have the friends and family nearby who know me and all my baggage. I don’t spend my time the same way. I don’t have a joint elitist M.O. to cling to. I don’t wear the same clothes here- jeans and Docs or Chucks are no fun when it’s 95 every day. My hair is different. I’m not even pale anymore. I didn’t work at it, it just sort of happened… and nothing has come together in its place yet.
I don’t have any so-called indie cred now. I don’t have a schtick, period. Right now I’m a collection of pieces, some original, some refurbished, and some that look vaguely familiar but that I don’t think were mine before. Which is fine. What use is cred anyway, really?

I’m certainly not saying I’m a blank slate. I still bike, and spend too much time online, and teach tarot to people, and have a tendency to swing between working myself to death and total sloth. I still do a lot of other things the same way I used to and act a lot of the same ways I did before, good and bad. I’ve had a few layers sanded off myself over the past year, though, and that’s a good thing. This might sound strange coming from me but starting fresh doesn’t always mean throwing everything out- there can be room for something else in between.

Part of all this raw, new stuff this year has been to let myself just feel more feelings, and not try to protect myself or other people from them just because they might be controversial, or self-serving, or irritating, or not make total sense. I don’t plan to go down the firebombing path, but the world is full of passive navel-gazers and I’m not all that different from them either.

Archetype or Mulligan?

Last night I saw a tweet and it occurred to me exactly who Demi’s dating.

The irony of it is pretty heavy—someone from GWJ, with the waves and glasses, the comics and cooking, the girl-crushes and barista snobbery. I took a look around out of morbid curiosity and was astounded: partly that Demi freaked out over E’s tweets once upon a time, and felt compelled to blog how he inferred that we’d “been intimate”, when she was posting the same things right on the boards; they probably started dating not long after we did. Partly that he phoned me right up to chew me out after realizing I was dating someone from the site, when apparently he was doing the same thing… supposedly I did it to horn in on his business, and because I’m a heartless bitch (even though he was the one who introduced me on it, and even though I convinced him to write for them even before that, and to man up and quit lurking even before that). Partly that I had already guessed, but never got around to fact-checking myself before I got distracted by something shiny (I heard he was dating someone who looked like me, and his emails/conversations from this spring make a little more sense now).

The thing is, she seems cool. I guess that’s because I think I’m pretty great myself, and she seems a lot like me. I just don’t know what that means. Everyone wants to be a unique snowflake, right? So seeing photos of stenciled squid from my old haunts that I photographed almost eighteen months ago, pictures of her wearing glasses I had in 2001, and collections of beer bottles on what was, once upon a time, my very own kitchen counter in the rental house I found two years ago from the other end of the country, is unnerving. A newish Twitter account. Video from a Devotchka show one of my friends worked on and streamed to me over his phone. Descriptions of familiar-sounding conversations. Complaints about o-dark-thirty work hours.  …I can’t help but feel like someone’s looking for a do-over.

I spend a lot of time writing about archetypes; hell, I read tarot for a living. Is there some kind of nerd-girl class that all this falls under? Of course there’s a general one, with the glasses and the unruly hair and the paleness from living in melancholy climates. The hipster/DIYer/indie thing with art and music and t-shirts and philosophically astute observations. And G-d knows there’s a barista archetype, all emo glasses and smug superiority about waking up at hours of the morning you haven’t even heard of. But how is it possible that someone else is aggregating such similar things, independently, one step behind me? I’ve known a few people who were fundamentally, psychologically, very similar to me and it was neat. But not structurally, like this. It feels very déjà vu. Or like seeing a silent film of myself.

you are not a unique snowflake

I am, dammit. It’s a cornerstone of my identity. And I’m sure that there are plenty of people I know for a fact there are tons of people in Seattle and everywhere else that do things I do, and like things I like, and go places I’ve gone. And that’s great. Community is about shared experiences.

But damned if this isn’t creepy as fuck.

May/June Bookshelf

About Wine – J. Patrick Henderson and Dellie Rex

Asian Vegan Cooking – Kim Le

The Ayurvedic Year – Christina Brown

Because I Said So – Kate Moses and Camille Peri

Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery – Gloria Steinem, Jesse Sage, and Liora Kasten

Food Around the World – Margaret McWilliams

The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon – David Elkind

Japanese Country Cookbook – Russ Rudzinski

Japanese Kanji Flashcards Vol. 1 – Max Hodges, Tomoko Okazaki

The Jew in the Lotus – Rodger Kamenetz

Nutrition: Everyday Choices - Mary Grosvenor, Lori Smolin

The Sacred Path of the Warrior – Chogyam Trungpa

Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe

Academia beckons…

Now that I’m halfway through my ridiculously expensive A.S., I have been informed that our school is being vetted for a bachelor’s program that they’ll conveniently be starting not long after I graduate here. It’s like the damn Art Institute add-on all over again. Especially since it looks like AAS added a culinary management bachelor’s recently. Figures.

I’m already here and digging myself a nice ditch of student loans, so I’m starting to think that I may as well stay on and finish it. I’ve heard (and not just from people who get paid to tell me) that there’s a serious shortage of qualified management degrees in this field, and that my math aptitude is a big bonus. Good times. And since I’m already going to be $40k in debt by the end of this, what’s another ten or fifteen grand, right? It’s just like buying a nicer BMW instead of a mid-range one, right? But even with Florida residency and the cheaper tuition that gets me, finishing my undergrad somewhere besides El LCB will be a pretty big pain in the arse, involve a lot of backtracking, or both. Which brings me to… grad school! I thought I’d left behind all this talk forever, but here it is staring me in the face again.

Apparently FIU is one of the top-ranked hospitality school in the country, after, oh, Ivies like Cornell and Penn State, and heavyweights like UNLV and of course #1 Purdue (but I’ve kissed that program goodbye already). It also happens to be incredibly cheap for residents, and has a campus in Tianjin. The externship coordinator here is also feeding me info about a couple master’s programs that sound suspiciously interesting, and of course there’s the Bastyr set I was looking at before I even came here.

On a mildly related note, I’ve discovered I can sit for the Certified Dietary Manager exam after graduation, so that’s one more thing to do.

So in a way, I’m back where I started. But it would be nice to look at something like this or this or even this later.