Did I Mention the Onion Breath?

I'm sitting alone in my dad's basement eating my second bag of mint M&Ms and watching British sketch comedy from the 80s while lighting matches against the dog's putrid farts and crying quietly to myself.



Do I know how to spend a Friday night, or what?

A (Poorly Explained) Rationale

While shopping for supplies for ACTF last January, Robbie and I were perusing the toiletries aisle.  I hemmed and hawed over toothpaste choices, trying to find the one with the most whitening power for the least amount of money (I have a pathological need to exhibit blindingly white teeth).

"What I really, really want is the Crest 3D Whitening.  It works much better than any other stuff," I said as I oggled the shiny blue boxes way up on the top shelf.

"Get it," Robbie said so matter-of-factly.

"But it's four dollars a tube."

"But you want it, so get it."

"I don't know, it's expensive."

"Just get it.  Why shouldn't you?  You know it works, you really want it, so buy it."

The wonderfully patient Robbie listened to me whine for another minute or two before he convinced me to invest in myself in this small way and buy the expensive toothpaste.

I spent $250 at Kohl's today.  I bought that new wardrobe I've been talking about for months.  I needed it for work (I only had one pair of pants [shorts] and not much to wear with them), none of my old clothes fit very well, and I'm not the same person I was when I bought them.  So $250 for new clothes it is.

And it means much more than having something nice to wear every day, but just now I'm suffering a shortage of words and I can't accurately pen my thoughts, hence the seemingly disunited story about Robbie and me traversing the aisles of Walmart.

But I can tell you this: I bought yellow pants, red pants, and purple pants, and that's a mark of extraordinary forward motion.

Instinct

I have this clock. (Well, I nicked this clock from a pile of my mom's stuff when I moved into my grandma's house two years ago.)  It's about a foot wide, faded green, with spindly black roman numerals lining up around its face.

Even though this clock hasn't been functional for probably five years, I glance at it instinctively, sneak a peek over my shoulder, look to it to tell me the time.  Those warped, slender black arms point resolutely to 7:33, but the clock observes more than that.  Today, gazing back at me from a heap of disparate artifacts (having recently been remove from its perch on the dresser), it cries out with a sharp swishing ticktick,ticktick,ticktick--getout,getout,getout.

I look around my little room: piles of my most prized possessions crowd the cold cement floor; the fainting couch I looted from my dad's disintegrating house is crammed between the enormous desk I never liked and the bookshelf that's too small; my clothes spill out of a plastic tub stashed away in the closet; my gorgeous golden mirror is half-obscured by cheap white curtains.

Everywhere I turn in this room, this house that I've tried to claim as my own, there is a token of someone else, the indication of an unfamiliar life.  Tucked away in every inch of this place, like scads of dirty secrets, are reasons that I cannot stay.  The longer I try to cram myself into this environment, the more reasons I uncover, and the harder it is to come home.

It absolutely is time to go.  These nine months have been abrasive, the walls of the house and the proximity to these people filing away at my composure, shearing off great scales of my carefully established serenity.  In its place, my anxiety has returned with a vengeance; I feel the melancholy creeping in through the cracked weather stripping, its dreadful tendrils grasping for my feet, longing to bind me to its emptiness.

I don't want to answer to that again.

So off I go in search of a basement apartment or a condo or any other place where I can leave my mark.

Moving won't magically make everything better, but it will give me the chance to breathe without apology and without begging for permission or acceptance.  I've established now that I can live on my own, that I can feed myself well physically, spiritually, and socially.  Now that much closer to discovering my taste in music, men, clothes, and adventure, it's time I find the space to let these things develop and take shape, to allow myself to take shape.

As soon as time allows, I intend to tuck that clock under my arm and set out on the unmarked path that blazes before me, in search of a room that will give us both new voice.

The Aftermath

I called in sick today because I don't know how to explain to someone that I'm calling in anxious.  I guess that my anxiety is a sickness of sorts, so I wasn't being untruthful.  And Blair seemed okay with it, so I don't have to feel guilty (I'm trying to make myself believe that).

On a more positive note, my birthday was amazing.  It didn't pull me out of the sadness like I hoped it would, but it made me feel so important and so loved.  I am incredibly blessed to be surrounded by so many good friends, and even though it looks like this wave of uneasiness won't ebb any time soon, I know that they will uphold me through it.

Catch My Drift?

Do you know how I know that editing is what I want to do for the rest of my life?

I can't stop smelling my skin when I come home from work at a publishing house.

It sounds weird, I know, but even after I leave the building I can smell the toner and the new paper and the ideas on me, and I can't get enough of it.  It is the sweetest smell.

If I can come home from work every day for the rest of forever smelling like that, I will be very happy indeed.

Sometimes A Girl Just Has To Eat Chocolate

Sometimes a girl just has to eat a lot of chocolate in a short space of time.  Specifically, I ate half a bag of peanut butter M&Ms on my way home from Smith's today (Smith's is 4 blocks from my house. Seriously).  I'm stressed.  It's bad.  I feel like I did las summer- like I'm careening toward a gaping, grasping, fiery chasm, trying desperately to cling to anything familiar in the hopes that it'll stop the madness.


I've been shaking lately.  The tiniest hint of a nervous situation makes me tremble like a bad case of the Parkinson's.  And today I couldn't sit still.  It took every ounce of my not inconsiderable self-control to stay in class.  All of them.  All of my classes.


The thing is, I don't even have a legitimate excuse.  I mean, I had a run-in with the UVU administrative process, but my pile of good things is definitely taller than my pile of bad things right now (did I mention I bought the paisley soup bowls? Did I mention I eat out of them every day?).


So why can't I breathe?


Rough start to the semester.  I hope I get a grip, and soon, or this is gonna be a long 14 weeks.

~~~

Recorded 9/12/11

I'll Admit It Through an Anecdote

I recently stumbled across this brilliant little blog called Reasoning With Vampires. It's a thorough deconstruction of the Twilight series, and I love it. I spent three hours today catching up on the posts I've never read (don't judge me. I'm never productive in summer). This one post made me wonder where publishing companies draw the line in terms of a piece's awfulness. How horrendous can a manuscript be and still find its way across Mr. Boss's desk and into the "PUBLISH THIS" pile? Has the threshold ever been scientifically tested?

As you may remember from my previous posts, I record books on tape for a company called Covenant Communications. The things they hand me to read are not always works of art. Last time I was in the booth I took five minutes to read one sentence because of its accidental humorous connotation (your mother is a German Shepherd!).

All of this is to say that the part about the editor set the devious half of my brain a-scheming and I decided to see whether I could write the world's worst book and manage to get it published. Then I came to my senses and felt like I needed to take a shower.