April Showers

April 2002

April 1
Sometimes I think I'm just whiny. I feel so desolate some days when Matt can't talk to me or doesn't have time to call, and then of course I feel desperate and pathetic and clingy. Not a stereotype I'm fond of. Do I just have fewer inner resources than he does, I wonder? Or maybe just fewer friends within reach...he's the only one I really want to talk to, most of the time. Which doesn't sound at all healthy.

In a way, he's more of a traditional woman and I'm more of a traditional man. He has his support network, and I don't...just acquaintances, and him. My old friends are there, and are good people, but we just aren't that involved in each other's lives so much anymore.

Today was pretty normal. Work was as it has ever been, drudgery that's not really oppressive, just dull. It's hard to say if I will make friends here.They've always been rare in my life, and it's a pity. To find someone who fits you, who you are on common ground with, who can share and get jokes with you...that is a wonderful thing. And I've gone a while without it.

April 2
Urgh. Stymied again in my attempts to get online consistently...the neighborhood center is "unexpectedly" closed again this week. I could have gone to check out a cheap per-hour place in Manhattan, but I was pretty tired and just didn't feel like it. And I still don't have even a phone line of my own to try...though God knows the free dial up I had in Dallas was so slow it may not make any difference. It would be nice to be able to try though, at least.

Bitch bitch. It's just that I feel so left out of the Internet thing...I have had no way to afford quick access of my own, so no website, no chance to learn web software, no chance just to surf on my own time without looking over my shoulder. What I need is an inexpensive source of cable access, though I wonder if anything available will be cheap enough. It's been completely out of the question for the last year...I hate the thought of adding to our bills in any way. But I feel a little paranoid when I'm cut off from the online community, or at least bereft...I had come to rely on it pretty heavily for information and the chance to get to know other people of like minds. It's addictive that way. Plus it would just be nice to send my Mom an email every few days.

I dunno.Like I said, I'm just whiny this week. Matt couldn't stay on the line with me too long, though we were having a good conversation. He is handling all our business, taxes and so on, down there, so it behooves me not to whine about that...the man is really pulling his weight and some of mine to boot. Not much happened at work besides work...boring except that the kids were pretty funny. It's nice hanging out with them.

Thursday I'm going out with some of the other women in the office. I don't know whether to feel any anticipation of that. I feel so big and stupid and blundering with other women friendships sometimes. Less so with guys. But I am a bit guyish..I'm crude, outspoken, and unconcerned with makeup to a large degree. I always had that problem as a kid, not being girly enough with the girls. I'm a little taller and broader in the beam than some girls, so I feel that I intimidate them. Also that I'm their ugly, less popular friend. So I approach girl-friendliness warily, like a dog who doesn't know if you're going to kick her or pet her.

April 5
I resisted the urge to phone Matt tonight. I'm a little impatient at him actually, he's been so preoccupied. It gets on my nerves, the way he gets all wrought up and stressed over stuff....I know my general play-it-cool demeanor probably irritates him as well. That's one of the few ways we act our birth order...he's all get-it-done-now Mr. Oldest, and I'm all hey-it's-no-big-deal Ms. Youngest. But anyway, when he's like this he's no good to talk to. And I really do know the stress he's feeling of getting everything done before he leaves.

But. It's hard to not look forward to calling him each night and talking for an hour. But I probably won't get much of that, or of weekend time, until he gets here. Which I childishly resent.

I've always felt this weird intermittent paranoia at certain points in our relationship, when I would begin to feel like a nuisance, someone he Put Up With. My normal reaction to getting that from other people is just to withdraw completely, if not end the friendship.

But with a marriage, it's much more complicated...I'm not going to give up all the good things because he's sometimes inattentive. But tangled up with those feelings is the way the situation makes me feel in comparison to him...whiny, clingy, someone who has no life of her own, lives through him, and keeps him from doing his Important Work. It may be the times he most feels like the oldest child, who patiently puts up with the hyperness of the youngest child. And as all youngest kids know, there's nothing worse about being youngest than the constant suspicion that you're being humored.

That has *always* been my button, and he sometimes pushes it accidentally. It doesn't help that I *haven't* had much of a life for a while...A. I'm pretty much a natural hermit, and B., All the friends I do have have moved elsewhere, and no one in Texas panned out friend-wise. Matt's been my only close friend since I've known him....before that? No one at all for a long time. Sad, isn't it? And he hasn't had to go through that, ever, which is probably also why it's hard for him to understand. He's *always* had people to hang out with, or at least since junior high, the same people in fact.

I have been so used to being alone for so long that I'm rusty at making friends....it seems pointless. I haven't had much luck holding on to old friends either...one or both of us just gets tired of making the effort. And it's just easier to whine at Matt.

Boy, this is a whiny entry. Good news possibly being, I got an interesting story idea on the subway today (which is better for thinking than a car, since there's no chance I'll distract myself into running over someone). So I'm going to pursue that. I've been pursuing all my leads so far. None of them have really shaped up yet, but could. It feels good just to try at any rate...more work than I want to do, but less than I feared, which is a good compromise. It's just enough that I can still force myself to do it when needed.

April 8
So much of journaling could really translate easily into whining. I am tempted to do just that today, because I do not understand today, or why it happened as it did. What was the point of being unable to sleep at all last night, calling in sick, then still not being able to sleep during the day? Of schlepping to Bay Ridge to fax a resume that I could just as easily have faxed from near work? Of doing laundry next to an Asian woman who wanted to talk about why the only good Muslim was a dead Muslim? Of not being able to talk to Matt because he's gone to bed early?

See? Whining. None of it makes any sense to me, and I've staggered through the day in a sleep deprived haze. I will have to work extra hours tomorrow, even though the 7.5 I normally work is usually enough to make me stick a fork in my eye. Even so, I don't think I can stand working enough to make it all up, which translates into a slightly smaller paycheck next week. See? Doom! Disaster! Fist shaking against the universe!

There's nothing much else to report. I faxed my resume, got it ready to stick in the mail as well, ate some fish (good but stinks up the joint). I emailed a response to a Random House position on hotjobs, but forgot to click "send cover letter"...and hotjobs doesn't let you send again. So it may have been entirely pointless. I guess I need to feel that something is right with the world and I'm not getting that reassurance. At least I cleaned up around here today...that makes me good for something. Not too much, but something. I did get a few interesting writer-type thoughts, but I don't have the energy to go after them, merely jot them down while I yawn. Yet still I 'm worried that I won't sleep tonight either. Help, God. Just let me sleep, OK? That's something I need no matter what else you've got going on. Please? Let's hope She's listening and in the mood for saying yes. Cause I am not a pleasant sight with those sleep bags under my eyes.

What's he sniffing? No idea.

April 14
Today Matt mentioned the not-surprising-to-me thought that he hoped we could have kids someday. He'd said something like it before, he'd never ruled it out, but always with strict caveats and a bit of a grimace, as though he doubted it could do anything but wreck our plans. I guess he needed time to see that "happiness" could also be part of our plans. It's an understandable mistake. I think I always included "happiness" because, for a long time, I wasn't sure if I could have anything but a "normal" life, therefore, I would take whatever happiness I could find, on the chance that I would never succeed in anything artistic.

I've always doubted my talent in a way he doesn't allow himself to. I couldn't begin to tell you which, if either, approach is better. And it's not that he never doubts himself...he's not that blinded by ambition. It's that he never truly questions what he's here on earth to do, at least as far as music's concerned. And I admit, I find that extremely attractive. It's a confidence I wish I had. Sometimes, I actually do have it, just not all the time. Probably because my calling, as a writer, is much less of a decided and clear thing.

What I mean is, I know that I can write well. But writing, especially fiction, doesn't really seem to come to me the way it does to people who make their living at it. Which could mean several things:

I'm supposed to be a non-fiction writer
I'm supposed to be a non-prolific fiction writer
Some combination of those two
I'll never write for anyone but myself and web journals.

I have to admit, 4. is the most depressing. I mean, what's the point? Not that I don't enjoy web writing, but it's basically talking to myself most of the time. Might as well take up needlework. It's not the path to greatness or immortality. If that's what I want.

No. 2 is somewhat attractive, but harder to explain to other people.We give non-fiction writers such short shrift. Probably because they are so much harder to categorize. But, I enjoy non-fiction more, and fiction less, as I get older, and I don' t know what that says about me. Most literature, like most poetry, feels somewhat impenetrable to me. Not because I can't understand, but maybe, because very few writers seem to get it right.

It may be that I'm the dull unobservant one who can't catch their trenchant insights. But I find myself not believing in most of the characters I read in modern fiction, and without that suspension of disbelief, the books just die on me. It's not just fiction either...movies have lost much of their power over me, unless I'm already emotionally vulnerable when I go to see them (ie, during PMS week, when everything makes me cry). I mean, I can analyze what the novelists are saying, their symbolism, their literary style. My english degree is good for that much.

But as for the story itself, and the characters...so much of the time, I just don't care about them. I get impatient with the dialogue, the situations, the lack of connection to anything I or the people I know experience on a regular basis. Not that every plot has to mirror my life story, but that the human beings in them should be recognizable as real people. With one great exception...some young adult literature, and some genre fiction. Maybe because these authors aren't trying as hard, or know that the story is all-important. Their audiences demand plot, and have no tolerance for fancy literary devices. In that sense, flawed and cliched as they sometimes are, at least they're honest.

Maybe this is all just an elaborate explanation of why I can't finish a Kundera novel, or shy away from Philip Roth. Maybe I just have low tastes. And none of this explains why I have yet to produce a novel, short story, or nonfiction work of any merit. But it's the kind of thing that buzzes through my head at 12 am, so it's what goes in the journal. Maybe someday I'll have an entry where I can answer all this better.

April 16
I'm doing my best to let no more than a few days go between entries. I'm trying to get in shape for the website I'm working on right now, though I don't know when I'll get to post it. When I do, I will have an archive already, and that's pretty cool. Actually, I hope to start making journal entries onto new web pages instead of this little notepad program. I'm not sure how it all works though.

To get it down, I was thinking today about how effective the arts are at actually changing the world. There are people who think art is the main power, and those who think it's just an extra, a social accessory (your average Republican, that). I guess I think it's more of a wild card in a society. Sometimes art can be extremely powerful in shaping public opinion, like say Uncle Tom's Cabin or Thomas Paine's pamphlets. Sometimes it can seem completely disconnected from the society around it, like much of what's in modern art museums now.

And its status can change...away from the debate on slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin doesn't fare well as a piece of literature, with all its melodramatic manipulations. The more enduring pieces of art seem to persist in a quieter way, affecting some and not others, mostly insulated from history unless, like the Taliban, it seeks to destroy them. But even without that, time and human error doom much art to complete obscurity and eventual destruction. The wind wears away a bit more of the pyramids every moment.

I don't think anybody really knows why art is art, what it is, why we make it, what we really feel when we see it. I've created a few things in my life that I was actually proud of, and I would call them art. But I don't really know what drove me to make them, or what purpose they serve. If any. It gives me a kind of happiness, or relief, to make them, but I can't define it much beyond that. I don't know if any artist can.

And if a piece of art happens to get caught up in an historical moment, captures the public's attention somehow, it's really an accident, I think. If art changes the world, it does so the way a rock changes the path of a stream, by chance. Of course, if you don't believe in chance, and sometimes I don't, then the mystery around what art is deepens. Maybe that mystery is what art is also trying to solve. Sort of a vast puzzle, where you get to make your own pieces but you're never told what the total picture looks like.

April 19
There's a lot going on with me right now, but not a lot to show for it yet. I spend large chunks of my time at work thinking about what on earth it is that I'm put here to do. I feel pulled in a hundred directions, distracted and confused, though not with the despair I felt while I was in Texas. But still, confused.

OK, I am going to admit an embarrassing habit of mine that may relate to this. When I had a car, like most people, I would drive and sing along to the radio. But sometimes, I would turn the radio off and make speeches to an imaginary audience. Sometimes, I was telling them why I wanted to be President. Sometimes, I was defending my views on some topic or other. Sometimes I was leading a protest rally. But always, I saw myself persuading, defending, or promoting the things that I want most for the world. Easy access to medical care, to food, to shelter for everyone. Limits on the power of corporations and the government itself to run our lives and interfere in them. Absolute transparency of the government's actions to the people it serves. Power to make changes given to the everyday people, not kept from them. Preservation of the beauty and wholeness of the non-human world.

We all have ludicrous fantasies of fame and leadership, I think. And mine are most probably just that. I would love the chance to run the world some days, to make those badly-needed changes that just seem like common sense, yet somehow never seem to happen. I'm frustrated, badly, by the way the country is mis-handled. And I don't want to fool around with making changes at the city council level; I want to make big changes, soon, and stop things getting worse. And what, I ask God, am I supposed to do with these feelings? Run for office? Do I really have the aptitude for that? Who do I think I am, anyway? It just seems entirely impossible.

I never even ran for class treasurer. You need money, you need powerful friends, you need to be photogenic and charming and have a clean past. The last is about the only one I have, though I know somebody would have fun with the fact that, pro-choice as I am now, I founded a pro-life group with a friend in college (that's a long story for later).

Where does Walter Mitty-land end and reality begin? So, I say to myself, I can't run for President. What about being a speechwriter? Or part of an activist group? But I see no path towards those things in my life, and I'm not going to uproot us both to DC on such a vague notion. Plus, I still think I need to be in NY right now. I think I could be a columnist, but I'd have to be a reporter first, and I've always felt a profound ambivalence about reporting; I'm a better ponderer than an interviewer, and I'm usually more interested by what's in my own head than what's in anyone else's.

This journal is my column, in fact, as well as my confessional, but I don't really feel as if I'm making an impact, though I guess that could change. Sometimes I end up giggling a little hysterically when I start to think that the closest thing I have to a calling is philosopher, a profession only a little less despised and useless than poet. And I hated philosophy class most of the time--people arguing about the meaning of Reality, something that could never be answered. If you can't find the answer, why argue? Ponder, yes, propose, yes, but argue? How can you fight over intangibles when you and your opponent may both be equally far from the truth?

Maybe it was never philosophy itself, but the people who wanted it to be competitive that bothered me. "I'm a Hegelian." "Well, I'm a Nietzchean. You suck." And so on. Please people, enough. Shut up already.

A quick note to say, today is my and Matt's fourth anniversary. We're apart at the moment, but I get to see him in a little over a week, for good, so it's not really sad at all. We've had four really good and wonderful years, and God willing, we'll have many many more. I love you, sweetie.

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table
David Hume could outconsume both Schopenhauer and Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as shloshed as Schlagel
There's nothing Nietchze couldn't teach 'ya 'bout the bending of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill of his own free will drank a half a bottle of shandy
while particularly ill
Plato they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whisky every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
Hobbs was fond of his dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart
I drink therefore I am
Yes Socrates himself is particularly missed
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.

April 21
Today I seem inclined to navel-gaze. It's a gray, cold, dreamy, stay-indoors sort of day, and those kinds of days make me think over memories and old hurts and confusions. I'm a passionate person, in ways that I had to learn to control early, because it can make people uncomfortable. Being loved or cared for by me, when I let it show too much, seems to have been something of a trial to others. It has taken me a long time to understand that.

I didn't use to understand at all, why it was so easy when I was a kid for others to make me cry. Why my high ideals of friendship and self-sacrifice, gotten from books mostly, made me sometimes look ridiculous to the people I wanted to be friends with. Or just made others uncomfortable. I was a rampant idealist in a world full of survivalists, and I was hurt so many times when my effort to do what was right (like standing up to bully) was met with fear and even derision by the very people the bully was terrorizing. I was fierce enough to defend myself, but I could not force or inspire my friends to do the same,and it confused me completely.

There's a risk in saying all this, that I look saintly and others coarse and unfeeling, and I don't want that to seem so. The feelings that I have aren't something I will myself to have, in any case, so I can hardly take credit for them. And my ideals did need balancing, most of the time, against reality. Not every friend needed my undying devotion...sometimes they just wanted to hang out.

As I got into adolescence, when every strange behavior is a fatal wound, I learned to ruthlessly supress my feelings and control my reactions. I avoided people and retreated into books, because I was afraid of myself and them. Absolutely terrified to let myself show at all. It's not surprising that no one could break that shell, even if they wanted to. And yet, with the self-inflicting cruel stupidness we all have at that age, I believed that I had no friends, and especially no boyfriends, because I was so ugly and weird. People thought I was stuck-up, when I was really just afraid.

But of course, I was right to be afraid, too. In the face of the real cruelty of high school, being invisible was a very effective strategy. Except, of course, for having no friends and being desperately lonely. I wasn't the butt of anyone's jokes (that I knew of) but no one called me up much to go hang out either.

Looking back, I'm amazed at how isolated I was, without really knowing it. I was too close to the problem then to see it. I only really started to deal with all of that in college. I met some friends who weren't frightened by me, and it gave me confidence. My schoolwork was absorbing and interesting. I even got up courage (and the frustration) to ask a few guys out, and they said yes, and we had a pretty good time. There was even the requisitely messy relationship/breakup.

At the same time, some old problems lingered. Two of my girl friendships that I cared a great deal about imploded when the gap between my friends' perception of me ran up against my more idealistic self. By that, I mean that when I stood on principles that conflicted with theirs, they refused to accept me any more. I was deeply hurt, and angry, because I always took pains to be open-minded when their principles didn't jibe with mine. I never prosyletized or condemned, but it didn't matter. And the deep love I felt for them, as people, the fact that I took friendship seriously and would have done a lot to help them if they needed it, didn't matter to them at all. They didn't want my love, my compassion. It didn't matter if I didn't toe their line, or (as in one case) if I was simply someone too geeky for their other friends to approve of.

And yet, I could never help that I take friendship so seriously, nearly as much as a romantic relationship. I thought, or had read, that real friends felt that way about one another. "Greater love has no man than that he lay down his life for his friend." was one of the few Bible verses I could ever remember. And being the romantic idealist I was, I thought if it ever came to that, yes, I hoped I would have the courage to sacrifice myself for someone else.

April 23
Today wasn't that great. My boss didn't come in to work, which was nice, but I was really sleep-deprived, so I felt gray and snarly all the same. After work I staggered to the free-internet place (hereby christened the 56k Cafe for its slow connect time). Even though I got there early, it was full of teenagers, one of whom decided to stand directly behind me, hands on my chair back, as I was trying to read my email. Um, none of your business, buttweed. Move your ass.

There wasn't anything to see job or email-wise anyway, but I would have liked to surf some journals...it's kind of hard with a pimply kid reading over your shoulder though. But it's not a big place, and there wasn't much I could do to move him. I'm getting really tired of having to pay or put up with that kind of stuff just to get online. Up to now, my jobs have provided all the surfing I needed, usually on a T3 line for free. I'm spoiled, I admit it. I hate not reading Lileks every morning. I'd much rather get the NY Times online, because I waste so much unread paper buying it, and it gets smutch on my hands. I miss my internet.

The fact that this journal entry is up for you to read means I found a way back to it, of course, but in a weird postmodernist time-twisty kind of way, the day that I'm writing it, I don't know when I'll get to go online on a regular basis again. I'm pretty much ready to pay for it now, but that requires an apartment, which requires money, which requires a real job. Which requires that my prayers get answered at last in that department. And I don't know when that will be.

There's a lot of angst over jobs in New York right now, of course. And I'm not starving, which is a lot to be thankful for. But dammit, I want a job I can enjoy, and I want to make enough not to have money worries keep me from enjoying it. And I don't know when or if that will happen, and I don't know what I'll do if it doesn't. What else am I going to start going without? Regular meals? It ain't like I'm living on steak now. New clothes? Buying a $20 pair of Old Navy pants is a splurge. Haircuts? I only do them every 6 months as it is. I mean, sheesh. I'm just so frustrated, because I can't ever seem to get out of the fucking financial sinkhole.

I know it's whiny and ungrateful to feel this way, but I do. I want some comfort, I want some relief, I want to be able to take a vacation and pay for it. I want healthcare. I want to go out once a week, buy a new computer, get DSL or cable connections, pay off my student loan, take some classes, have a kid, or at least be able to contemplate it. I want to get contacts for me and Matt. I want a paid off credit card. And that's all. Not too much, is it? It's basically a list of what I'm giving up right now because it seems necessary to do what me and Matt want as professions. But it's also the things that make me doubt my path, at least...because right now, I seem to be farther from those things than I have ever been in my life.

The amount of cash I make for someone my age and experience level, living where I do, is appalling. I won't discuss it with other people because I'm ashamed of it. I feel like a failure, sometimes, when I see the people who took the regular path with kids and a house, which would be really nice. And I'm afraid that I won't ever get to have those things, especially kids...that by the time I see any success, it'll be too late for me to have any. Your standard early-thirties female angst, that, with a little twist of doubting my own hippie wisdom. But I love my life, don't get me wrong. I'm not sorry I'm here, not sorry I married this wonderful person, not sorry I am trying to dream. I just don't always feel strong enough to deal with the sacrifice that involves.

April 26
The other night, I dreamed of my dad again. In my dream, I was seeing him again after a long separation, and was trying to list all the jobs I'd had since I last saw him. As always, I did not remember in my dream that he was dead. Every dream that I've had since his death, I can not remember that essential fact. He's just there, involved in the dream plot in some way.

It's comforting, really, though it confused me at first. How could I forget something so important? But I like to think, it means that he's still with me, that he misses me too. I think maybe he drops into my dreams from time to time just to say, Hello, I love you.

To those who didn't know me before I lost him, I can't explain the way his death has affected my life. I had lost grandparents before he died, but it was expected. The extent of my dad's illness was kept from me and my siblings as much as possible by both my mom and dad. The upshot was, he had a bad heart, and after a heart attack at 44, never really got completely well again. When I was in high school, he began suffering memory-loss seizures where he would forget what had happened for the last few years. Those were terrifying, and terrified him. He passed out at the wheel and wrecked a few times, and finally stopped driving altogether. He lost a lot of weight the year before he died, and he had always been a heavy man.

My dad was always strong, worked with his hands. His arms were deeply tanned from working outside, and scarred from electrical shocks and other accidents he suffered while working as an electrician for more than 20 years. He could never quit smoking; it had a grip he couldn't break. Even when the doctor told him his seizures were partly caused by the smoking, he couldn't quit. I'm still convinced he would have had more years if he hadn't smoked, one of the reasons I'll never take it up.

My junior year of college, he had what he thought was the flu, but was really a series of small, steadily worsening heart attacks. My sister called me one Saturday to come home, and the next morning, he died on the operating table as they tried to install a pacemaker in his dying heart.

Our relationship had become rocky; he didn't approve of my boyfriend, and I didn't dare discuss my increasingly liberal views---he had been a staunch conservative all of my life. There were a lot of uncomfortable silences between us then, or arguments. The last I saw of him was a Sunday several weeks before he died, when I was driving back to college. He leaned into my driver's side window to remind me to be safe and tell me he loved me. And I find now, that I can barely remember our arguments, but I am astonished by how much I can still feel his love. I know that I get my passionate, emotional nature from him, that he usually felt a lot more than he showed. That he understood why I cried so easily and was so easily hurt. I saw him cry more than once, saw his voice tremble with emotion, saw him brood and worry over the people he loved or the moral conflicts that troubled him. I am more like him in those things than any other way.

I miss you, Dad.