Chasm

There is a chasm in front of me. No bridge, no path. Just the thing I want more than anything, more than health or life or sanity, shining there on the other side, entirely out of reach.

There it is, and it will never be mine.

There is a chasm in front of me, and to leap would mean to die.

Because it is insane, this thing called hope, this ridiculous notion that would have me believe that halfway down I'll grow wings.

Mary

I've become that girl, haven't I? You know... Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. Everybody wants to be spirited like Elizabeth or sweet like Jane, or even boy crazy and somewhat foolish like Kitty and Lydia. But Mary is just priggish and boring and dreadfully self-important. She's a drag. The very opposite of the life-of-the-party. Of all the Bennetts, I'd say she's perhaps the worst. At least the Kitty/Lydia/Mrs. Bennet trifecta of annoyance has some spirit to them. Mary is just mawkish and horrible.

And I think I've become her.

Seriously, if people who have kids become Those Annoying Parents who talk non-stop about their children, then I'm the writing version of that... only in the case of children, they're usually cute and precocious and have these utterly amazing out-of-the-mouths-of-babes crazy/awesome stories to share. In my case, I have emo poetry and pointless projects that I'm just fulfilling because I made myself a stupid promise I'd try to create something each day.

I mean, how gimmicky is that?

I feel sad sometimes when people who should be really close to me don't really know me, when all they think I care about is writing when it's really not. But I can't get mad at them, because I suck at letting people in. It's like, I don't know... when we were little kids getting to know a person meant playing together, and play usually involved a huge amount of imagination. Let's pretend to be pirates! Let's pretend to be fairies! Let's play dress-up! Let's reenact scenes from The Lion King movie! Let's pretend the treehouse is a deserted island! Let's bury a time capsule in this Sunny D bottle and guess who will dig it up fifty years from now and what they'll say when they find what we've left inside! Okay, so those are some pretty specific examples, but you get the idea... imagination. Creativity. Play.

When you grow up, social interaction morphs into something else. I can't really put a finger on when this happens. Probably during the teenage years, but I was (and still am) awkward and not good at embracing change, so I guess I kind of skipped that whole part. But essentially, now social interaction centers around... (1) Eating: Let's do lunch! Wanna grab some coffee and talk? etc. (2) Shopping (moreso for girls than guys), (3) Alcohol... this is part "Let's have a good time!" and part "Let's escape the drudgery of day jobs and responsibilities and blow off some steam." (4) Sex/Romance. I've definitely missed out on this one, but for average people my age it's a huge part of many relationships... whether they're in pursuit of or currently in the throes of or have just emerged from such intimacy, everybody seems to be thinking about it. (5) Pop culture. People have always discussed art and related to each other through it, whether that's paintings and sculptures or movies, TV, pop music, books and video games.

I don't know. There are probably more... but I'm tired and not thinking straight. In any case, these things aren't bad.... but they're very different. And they're very surface-oriented. My brother Wes and I bond through a common love of the show Parks and Recreation. We'll get into these conversation where eventually it just ends up with us quoting our favorite lines back and forth to each other, both chuckling like madmen. This is fun, and it's nice that I can share something with my brother, but it's a surface connection. I don't really learn a lot about him as person from the encounter, other than the fact that he has an awesome sense of humor (and good taste in TV shows). Shopping, eating, drinking, romance... these are all great things, but I miss the little kid stuff.

I know, the argument that you hear a lot is that make believe is a form of escapism, but I think that's silly. If anything, I think we adults are the ones who are most guilty of trying to escape our lives. We party at the weekend, or dive headfirst into romance, fill empty evenings with TV shows and web surfing... "eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die." I think we fill our lives with all these things to try to escape the fact that we feel like something is missing. Maybe that something is a person; we feel alone and want to be loved. Maybe that something is a purpose; we hate our jobs and wish we could do something where we felt fulfilled and like we were accomplishing something worthwhile. Maybe that something is completely different... I don't know. But I think we try to escape our lives every day, while little kids, with their creativity and imagination, are the ones who are embracing the world as fully as possible, and even trying to go beyond it.

So yeah, I started out thinking I'm Mary. And maybe I am. This past month or so, I've been majorly mawkish... But this frustration with the new dynamic to relationships is fair, I think. I wish we weren't so afraid to imagine together anymore. There is power in pretending. You learn so much about a person when you see what they can dream.

Okay, well the world is supposedly ending today, so I should probably go. But, if things don't end, I want to try to be better. I want to try to balance my life, even if it means compromising with the "adult" part of it. We'll see if that's a possibility...

Tomorrow.

EVERYTHING

Carrie Ryan came to the library today for an author event. She talked for about forty five minutes then took questions then there was a signing. It was great. She's very funny, and I can see how she'd be a good lawyer. She's very confident and good in front of people, and gave some fantastic answers to people's questions.

One thing she talked about a lot (and it obviously holds great meaning to her) is the idea of figuring out what you want to do and then going after it. Her thing was, "If I ask myself what I want to be and I say 'an author,' then ten years from now I still want to be an author but I ask myself 'What have I done to accomplish that?' I don't want the answer to be 'Nothing.'" This makes a great deal of sense to me. She talked about friends she knows who practice law still who just feel trapped in their own lives. "Why do you still do it?" she asks them. "Well," they say. "I've got to pay off these school debts." And she replies, "Well, I'm paying off my school debts too, but I'm doing it while doing something I love. Wouldn't you rather try for that?"

Of course, she knows she's lucky. Not everybody gets to be successful at what they love. But I really see her point.

My problem is this: I ask myself "What do you want to be?" and do you know my answer? My answer is not "I want to be a writer." It's not "I want to sit in a room at a computer or with a notebook churning out words eight hours a day." My answer is this: I want to be EVERYTHING.

I want to be a pizza delivery guy. I want to be a talk show host. I want to be the daughter of a country knight. I want to be a cursed man stuck in a house between worlds serving penance for eternity. I want to be two orphans who rescue the forest people from an evil queen. I want to be a delusional boy convinced he's a superhero who harasses the neighborhood homeless people thinking he's helping them. I want to be a depressed twentysomething who finds out she can travel outside of time and who reluctantly squares off against a villain who's attempting to manipulate her. I want to be the teenage girl who finds out she's a fairy godmother. I want to be the Spuzzle who can't say spuz. I want to be the adventurer on the quest. I want to be the princess AND the knight AND the dragon. I want to be impossible and I want to be real. I want to be perfect and I want to be broken. I want to be the alien from outerspace and the boy from next door. I want to be EVERYTHING. Anything you can think of and more.

But some of these things require skills I don't have. Others of them require a lifetime of training. Still others happen by pure chance. And of course there are so many of those things that can't happen, that are quite impossible. I can't be the girl who finds out she's really from another world. I can't be the knight on a quest. I mean, I could live my life with a sword in one hand and a pack on my back wandering the world looking for dragons to slay, but I'd be exhausted and hungry and probably institutionalized before very long.

So since I can't be everything, I want to at least pretend. I want to make believe for a living. And since I can't be these characters, at the very least I want to tell their stories.

Carrie also talked about deadlines, and how she set one for herself. She gave herself ten years. "If I haven't gotten a novel published in ten years, then I'll give it up and just do something else with my life." And by giving herself this deadline (and plenty of time to fail), she actually succeeded in reaching her goal in half that time. In fact, this year would likely have been the ten year mark, and she has three books out and is working on another.

This also proves difficult for me, because as the Good Madness project clearly illustrates, I have too many ideas and not enough follow-through. Which do I start with? What do I do first? And what do I do with all those spare ideas buzzing around demanding attention?

I don't know.

In the book she signed for me, she wrote "Find your own path." It's a little cutesy, I think. It's the kind of generic thing she can write in anybody's book because anyone could apply it to their lives. But in this case, I like it. Because that ten year plan, "I want to be a writer" thing was her path. I don't know how long my path will be, and I don't have any sort of plan, but at least now I can tell myself the truth: I don't want to be a writer. I want to be EVERYTHING.

Bin Laden and Reality

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

There has been much celebrating. People gather in crowds in the streets of D.C. and New York city, chanting "USA! USA!" and waving flags high. Folks on twitter have been tweeting and retweeting a storm of messages, some silly, some serious, and most just caught up in the excitement of it all. On facebook it's more of the same. There are some who question the idea of celebrating a death, raising mixed feelings of relief and joy that a villain has perished and reluctance to wish death and destruction upon even the most despicable of human beings.

Mixed in among the tweets are many Harry Potter references: Comparing the downfall of Osama Bin Laden to that of Voldemort. Joking that Obama must have the Elder Wand. Stating the odd coincidence that this event has occurred the same date as the Battle of Hogwarts.

For some reason, reading these tweets really bothered me. And I couldn't figure out why, until someone else voiced it for me by tweeting: "(My issue with the HP stuff is that equating it seems to cheapen the real loss and sacrifice and accomplishment.)" And I responded: "Agreed. I <3 Harry Potter to the point of mania, but it seems almost disrespectful to compare fiction w/reality in this instance."

I have mixed feelings about this. It seems a little hypocritical that I have been such a huge fan of using parallels between fictional events and real life to promote activism and the HPA, and yet when it comes to news of this nature I want to separate the two. But I do. Why?

I understand that the people who wrote and retweeted these thoughts were speaking in a language of symbols, describing real world events through the specific lens of one story and its world and characters. I should know; I've been invested in doing the same for the past twelve years of my life. But here's the thing: stories are important, but they only hold meaning because they reflect truths that actually exist in reality. And so as much as I dedicate my life to stories and legends and myths, I must draw a line between the fictional and the real.

The Battle of Hogwarts was a moving event. I cried real tears reading about it, and "losing" characters I have loved since the beginning of the series. But REAL PEOPLE died on September 11th and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Voldemort "killed" many many people during his reign of terror in the wizarding world. But Bin Laden was a REAL Dark Lord, responsible for the REAL deaths of thousands of REAL PEOPLE. Equating real life losses and sacrifices and heroism to something a (very talented) woman made up in her head and wrote down on a piece of paper just seems cold.

I think I'm overanalyzing this, and I'm tired so my logic is a bit fuzzy. But it just seems strange. I never thought I'd be the person to say, "Come on, people... it's just a BOOK!" Because I know it's much more than that. But in this instance, I feel like it is. It's a fictional story that will never entirely capture the real losses so many of us have experienced.

Mr Paws: A Good Cat

Mr. Paws, my cat, is dead.



It happened just about three hours ago. He came in for the night and Mom was bending down to take off his collar when he flopped over on his side, seized up, gasped a little, and went limp. Gone. He stopped moving. He wasn't there anymore.

Right now as I write this they have him curled up on a towel in the computer chair. They wanted to give me a chance to come home and pet him one last time, say goodbye. Wesley too, when he gets home from work. We'll bury him in the morning.

When the other pets died, I cried a lot more. It was abrupt, violent. Hit by a car. Or it was so gradual and slow that I knew it was just their time. Buffy and Tigger, both going of old age. In a case like that it's hard to let go. But with Paws, it's different than both of those. Yes, this was abrupt, but I wasn't here when it happened. I didn't see the life leave him. And the way he's curled up right now, he looks like he's simply sleeping. Cold to the touch, yes, but sometimes he laid so still when he slept that I would check to see if he was breathing. He looks like that now. I can't really get it through my head that he's not alive.

It'll come gradually. Little things. We don't have to close the doors to keep him in the downstairs section of the house anymore. I won't have to worry about leaving him out when I'm gone for long stretches of time. Or at night, around 9:45pm when I'd leave the TV room and walk down to go outside and call him. Listening for the jingle of the bell on his collar, usually close at hand because he's used to coming in at that time too.

"Jingle kitty!" I'd call. "Mr. Paws! Where are you Mister Mister?" And "I know you're out here. I know it's a beautiful night, but come on! It's time to come in!"

I'd yell "Jingle jingle!" so often that I wondered if he thought that was his name.

He liked string toys. The one time we tried to use the weasel ball toy we bought in the Cracker Barrell gift shop, he was at a complete loss. He wanted to chase the weasel, but was too afraid of the clattering plastic ball to ever get close.

The pupils of his eyes got so huge when he was intrigued by something, or feeling mischievous, or wanting to explore. He liked the closet under the stairs, or any door that wasn't open to him. One time we couldn't find him, and it turns out he had crept into the open cupboard door in the kitchen and gotten trapped in the cupboard under the sink.

The way he would meow... very vocal. Sometimes it even sounded like he was yowling "Hello?" Very opinionated, and very bossy. But so cute you forgave him of it pretty quickly.

At this point, I think that's what I'm mostly worried about. That I'll forget these little things about him that I loved so much. Because, as Mom kept saying over and over again, "He was a really good cat."



The way Wesley would play with him. Really almost-violent, kind of shoving him around and twirling him and pushing him over, but he LOVED it. He would purr like nobody's business. You could tell he loved the man's touch, and he would follow Wes around after he got home and even sit on his feet to beg for more attention.

He knew when he looked good somewhere. I think he'd purposefully sit in a chair or curl up on my desk and even in the little section of dirt outside the door to my room because he knew he looked so cute there.





And he loved being in boxes. Dad's newspaper box. This cute little box we got peaches in one time. I think he felt safe in them, and he looked adorable.



He was a "bakery cat." He liked animal crackers, ginger snaps, the breading on Chick-fil-a sandwiches. He also loved Boursin cheese and hamburger meat. Any kind of meat, really. Just this afternoon Mom gave him some hamburger and he scarfed it up like a dog would. She had made the house smoky from cooking the patties, so she opened the deck door and the laundry door to let some of the smoke out. He loved this. He would dart out one door, circle around the house, and mosey in the other door minutes later of his own accord. Freedom, he seemed to be saying. I like it.

And he did. He was miserable at the basement apartment, wanting all the time to go outside. He would do purposefully naughty things to try to provoke me, pawing at hanging pictures to try to make them fall, knocking figurines off of tables and nearly breaking them. He knew he was being a troublemaker. I'm bouncing off the walls, he seemed to be saying. So just let me outside a little.



I would do that a lot. Put words in his mouth. Assume I understood what he was thinking. He would purr a lot, and it was hard to tell sometimes if he was happy or annoyed. His tail would be twitching all the while. When he slept on the foot of my bed, I used to wake up to find he had taken it over. Even this morning he was curled up next to me, stretching the full length of his body, the picture of perfect relaxation.

That's why I think I'm not as sad as I could be. I can remember all of my last things with him. If I knew he was going to die, I'd want to have a good long cuddle beforehand, maybe sleep the night with him by my side, have a good long session of playing with toys and letting him chase the string back and forth, let him out with the knowledge that he loved the outdoors more than any toy and maybe even more than me (but I could totally understand this). And I did all those things. It's like I was saying goodbye to him without knowing I was saying goodbye.

There were a few signs something may have been wrong. He got this weird spot on his nose that wouldn't leave. This was the day before yesterday. And yesterday he slept nearly all day. To be fair, so did I. I slept in until 1pm then stayed in bed even longer watching NBC comedies on hulu. He lay there a good five hours next to me, when usually he probably would have been moving about long before then.

But I think it was sudden, and that there was pain but only for the shortest of times.

Part of me immediately knew there were good things about this. I had been so worried about how to handle Paws in the move to the apartment. He would hate it, I knew, not being able to go out, and yet to leave him here at the house... I wondered if he'd understand why I wasn't there anymore. If he'd be lonely at night with nobody downstairs to keep him company. It would seem like those long trips I took. Oh, and that brings back even more memories.



Of the way he peed on my suitcase once after I returned from Wrockstock, almost as if to claim it, to tell me I had no right to go away again. Or how angry he was at me after I returned from the Bolivia/Montana trip (nearly a month away!). He seriously wouldn't even come near me until I grabbed him and clutched him to my chest and forced him to lay there on my stomach. I held him in my arms like that for a half hour at least, forcing him to stay, until eventually he relented and apparently forgave me and we were cuddle buddies again.



He was brave and protective. He killed rabbits and squirrels and mice. He fought off other neighborhood cats (to the point that it sometimes almost seemed like bullying). He would travel far away. I remember once getting a call from a woman who had found a collar he had lost with our number on it. She lived a few driveways down on Rocky River Road, the other side of the street. He really loved exploring.

I will feel the absence of him, things that should be there but won't be ever again.

There's one other horrible part to this whole thing. Today as I write this, it is 1:56am on April 17th... Mandy's birthday. Mandy is the one who found Paws for me. She thinks of animals the way most other people feel about human beings. When she hears about Mr. Paws, it will be like most people react when they hear a child has died. She will be heartbroken.

I think she'll be angry at me for not telling her sooner, but I'm sorry. I want her to have a happy birthday. I don't want her day spoiled by this, and I know it would be.

I feel guilty. I'm still doing everything I said I'd do tomorrow. I'm going to the Hunger Games casting call, then on to Mandy's birthday that night. I'm not putting anything on hold, not pausing to mourn. I guess that's what this is, though. Me mourning.

I also felt relief, I think, on first hearing the news, because when you get a phone call from your mother and she's sobbing on the other end of the line, you just can't help but think it's something really bad. I pictured Dad, Wes, Zach, Laura... that something had happened to one of my family members. When I found out it was the cat, I was relieved. I wasn't sad. I'm still not sad. I feel... numb? Or just... I just don't understand it yet? I've cried. I cried some as I wrote this. I feel hollow. I feel a loss. But I just don't know what else to do but keep on living.

Maybe that's it. When people (or animals) we love die, we feel this big responsibility. It has to be a momentous occasion, because anything less feels like it's not acknowledging how important they were. But all of that, really, is for the living. Wherever they're at, I doubt they care who's in attendance at the funeral. They know the world goes on. And life.

Back when I was doing BEDA, one of my blog post ideas was to write about Ozymandias (the poem by Percy Bysse Shelley), and the conflicting ideas of whether death renders life meaningless, or whether death actually gives life more meaning... If we die, then what's the point in us ever having been alive? But I would argue that death gives life meaning. I was talking to Greg earlier (I was actually with Melissa at his apartment when I got the call from Mom), and he was talking about work, how it was the same thing day after day from open to close. From the moment they opened their doors, it was this endless line of customers, orders to be filled, pizzas to be delivered. And if it wasn't for closing time, he could almost believe that such a thing could go on forever. Obviously, that's not true. People sleep. There would be slow times with no one in the store. But the thought was that the closing at the end of the night was what gave the work day its meaning, its definition. It only lasted a short amount of time before it was done.

I think the fact that we will one day not have our lives anymore makes what we do with the time we have all the more vital. The fact that we have an expiration date gives us worth, more worth than we would have if we were to live forever. I think death gives life meaning. And I think the way we live gives meaning to our death, but that's a whole other blog post.

For now, I'm going to do other things. I'll say goodbye to Mr. Paws in the morning.

Here he is, the adorable and lovable Mr. Paws. My handsome man:









Rest in Peace, Paws. I love you. You were a good cat.

Forget BEDA

I gave up on BEDA. It was coming down to one of two scenarios: I give up on BEDA or I give up on my Good Madness 365 project. Good Madness is more important to me, so there you have it. Goodbye BEDA.

BEDA 10: Laziness

What makes a blog post a blog post? Is it a blog post simply because I post it on my blog? If so, then this will count for BEDA. If not, then what's the something more that makes it an official post as opposed to an unofficial one?

I think the idea with BEDA is that we pontificate around a certain subject, one a day for 30 days. It's an exercise in writing, to develop your thoughts on a theme and present them in a rational and flowing manner.

Well, screw that. I got three hours of sleep last night and spent most of today still slightly drunk/hungover from the night before. Even now I'm loopy, though I suspect that has more to do with fatigue than blood alcohol levels. In any case, the theme of today's BEDA is half-assing-it.

Or in lolcat: Laziness, I haz it.



That is all.