storyteller.

for the past several weeks, i have been unable to read much of anything besides novels. i have fallen in love with kamila shamsie, or rather, the way she writes, and specifically, every single one of her main female characters. i spent friday night reading kartography, falling in love, getting my heart broken. at some point, i grew tired of just getting my heart broken without the falling in love part, so find i can't read the nonfiction books that glare at me from my bookcase, from beside my futon mattress on the floor. i try to read the news, and i am reduced to reading with extended breaks between articles, usually paragraphs, but sometimes even lines, and it is an act of incredible strength sometimes just to get through the editorial page. yesterday, i was reduced to saying "blah blah blah. asswipe." or something very similar while reading a nyt editorial, and i could get into it, but i'm still recovering from the blatant hypocrisy and ridiculousness and sheer self-importance and "just how stupid do you think i am?" rage. so i read entertainment news and find it much more satisfying to read about celebrities and near celebrities than to read about people without access to that kind of stage. or, i sit and stare at the tv. and it's not on. it is my version of laurie anderson's commentary, "i'd rather be watching this on tv". and i think to myself that the title, "a million little pieces", may be the most honest that james frey gets in his memoir as he continues to expand his admissions of perhaps more than half-lies in his memoir, and i wonder if he came up with the title and hope he didn't because it is somehow more poetic to think that the truest thing about his life as he wanted to remember it was something that someone else came up with. and isn't that the way it is sometimes?

and i think i'd probably rather be writing something else, actually, but can't. what i really wish was that i was more of a storyteller, that i could write fiction that made you wonder how true it all was, that made me wonder how true it all was. and lately, i keep repeating to myself "just think of it as good writing material", because molly told me that once and it made me laugh through my tears, and i think it helps me cope through my days sometimes, through some really hard moments, and it may be true, but i think my hope chest is already full of material that i could spend a lifetime trying to create something from. and i'm not really crafty. still can't cut in a straight line. but i'm really really good at ironing. just so you know. and i wonder sometimes if things have really changed as much as i think they have. or if that's just the way it is and has been and i never really looked past my assumptions or what i wanted to see. either way, i'd rather be writing a fictionalized account and reading a fictionalized account of it all. it's easier to love and get your heart broken that way. the devastation is much more manageable and discrete and contained. so after nearly 4 years of not really reading fiction, it's all i can read. trying to gather up the million little pieces of reality into a convincing mosaic of performance art.

pandora's bad rap.

so, sunday night, z mentions pandora, and i forgot it about it until today, but i'm trying to make up for lost time. just now, i heard diana degarmo - the very same woman who succumbed to the superior vocal stylings of fantasia on american idol a while back - and i am stunned because this diana degarmo is hardly recognizable. i mean, she's actually good, or at least this song is. no longer the 16 year old with too little experience to know about subtlety, which made everything she sang sound like someone singing without knowing what the words meant. but now. geez. now she's singing songs like "all i never wanted" and damn if there isn't some subtlety there. and before that, there was a flashback to billie myers - remember that song "kiss the rain"? i didn't grow up watching mtv, but i must've seen that video at a friend's house or something, and i swear to god, i fell in love and didn't know it. and there she is again. anyway. it's amazing. i feel like someone just made me this incredible mixed cd. and i am smitten. anyway, i'm glad that someone decided that pandora got the shaft in modern interpretations of greek mythology.

and dammit. i've turned into a country-western fan. it started out innocently enough, me falling in love with just about every singer/songwriter who came along, mostly all folky, still falling for lucinda williams. and pandora points me to dwight yoakam, "a thousand miles from nowhere". i'm serious. and. i. like. it. really. but i'm too embarrassed to click the "i like it" link, so i just let it play, assuming that my fondness for country will be obvious enough. and i've come full circle. maybe i was wrong about pandora's bad rap after all. this is dangerous. this website already knows me better than i want to know myself.

on one side or another of crazy.

it's hard to know where to start these days, so more often than not, i don't. and there are many things that i can point to for my varying moods and discontents that should explain everything, but even i am not satisfied. my friends are, for the most part, too polite to push very hard, except maybe in the dark. unfortunately, i can't say the same for myself, so i have since been exchanging bitter words and silences with myself, unable to believe my own passive aggressiveness and just plain aggressive aggressiveness and hope that someday relatively soon, i'll be able to forgive myself for crossing one line or another that would've been better left uncrossed, but think i'm justified nonetheless in being a bit peeved at the unapologetic intrusions and impolitic accusations of telling half-truths and maybe more than half-lies to explain all manner of things, even if not on purpose. sometimes, things are said just to be said so that one can move on to the next thing, that will, one hopes, be a more comfortable topic of discussion. needless to say, i argue with myself sometimes about whether or not i'm crazy, but the result is still the same, regardless of what side i end up coming out on, and mostly, i don't care about the answer much anyway. or try not to.

and i think to myself, this - this is crazy. your life is not just all of this and why the hell do you insist on writing like this when this is yet another case of just half-truths and more than half-lies? you do not look good in morose. no. or angst for that matter. the coloring is all wrong. and i respond, yeah, well, it's partly true anyway, and i'm mostly writing when i'm in this space that i can't get out of that i want desperately to get out of, so i try to write my way out of it, the end result of which is usually deeper in than nearer out. i was asked today what i write, if it was fiction or something else. i'm wondering if there is an appropriate answer to that and think, whoa, is this the one thing that i'm relativist about? how irritatingly unlike me, i think. i hope, rather. here's the rub. i am a woman who is obsessively perfectionist and strives for precision with a sense of minimalism. all of this demands a certain clarity of ambition and purpose. at the moment this is what is missing. and my blog manages to capture me most in these moments, which is why it reflects the general overall mood it seems to reflect; how my words seem to be more dark than i am, more serious than i am, more worry-inducing than i am. anyway. that's been bothering me for awhile. so i'm glad to get that out of the way. and since when the hell did i become a woman who says "and here's the rub"? some things about myself i am destined to never understand.

poetry.

last night, my phone rang with "momdad" on the caller id. when i answered the phone, my dad's voice boomed over the phone - his telephone voice conjures up the image of a man who is at least partly convinced that he has to provide some of the power to get his voice to carry through to the person on the other end. i am stunned into silence and find myself trying to think of the last time my dad called me, and i can't, which makes me a bit nervous. so, some chatter about how my parents are doing on vacation in nashville, listening to johnny cash's sister, seeing the sights. then, "well, i hate to have to tell you this, but your grandpa's not doing so well".

my grandpa is in his eighties, but i realized last night that he's stayed the same age for me for as long as i can remember. just because something doesn't really come as a huge surprise doesn't mean that hearing something like this can't knock the wind out of your lungs for a good minute. and then some more.

i must have been about 10 years old when i wrote a poem about him, before i became self-conscious about who i was and who i could be and who i wanted to be, around the same time i thought i'd be a pediatrician, this having already established my dislike of needles and my propensity for finding myself bleeding for one reckless thing after another. truth is, maybe i was just enjoying myself so much that i thought that being a pediatrician would allow me to hang out with my buddies all the time while i was at work - the possibility of growing up was beyond me.

in any case, i wrote this poem, which is cute and perhaps notable at 10 in a small town in a family where people are too busy with their lives to really be concerned about trying to create art on purpose, not really noticing that it happens anyway, but exceedingly embarrassing at 24, particularly when it has become a bit of family lore, and i am reminded of it whenever i am around relatives. my grandpa does not often fail to remark that he thinks of me often - especially when he's on the pot. the poem is hanging on the wall facing the toilet in their bathroom. so while i might wish to be associated with grander things, there it is.

i called him today to see how he was doing, but that's really a lie because i knew how he was doing. i guess i called him because it was the right thing to do, but really, i guess i called him because it's so easy to convince yourself that nothing's wrong over the phone. still the same bad jokes. still the slightly hoarse, jolly voice emanating from the other end. still my grandpa who asks me how his girlfriend is doing. still not much to say beyond i love you's and i've been thinking of you's.

and i think that maybe the conversation will end with me relatively unscathed (because let's admit it, i'm selfish enough to think this is about me), even given the brief intro by my grandma who has a certain love for the macabre, but that is dismissed easily enough with me mentally shaking my head thinking how she does love melodrama, with a certain obessession with illness. but then grandpa says something of how proud he is of me, how i've accomplished more than he ever thought i would, even when i was little sporting pigtails, how he knows i'll be successful in whatever i want. so i laugh a little and joke that i'm still trying to figure out what i want, and he says, well, that's okay.

suddenly my chest is caving in on my lungs, squeezing the air out, my throat is aching, and i am fighting with everything i have to not cry. not now, not while i'm on the phone with him, while we are laughing at his corny humor, and my corny humor (hey grandpa - i hear that your doctors told you that you can do anything and eat anything you want, so i was wondering if you were out partying), not while i'm standing in between the two sets of doors leading out and leading in of my office building. not like this. because he is too young for this.

and the thing is, this poem i wrote at 10 kind of led people to believe that i am something of a poet, when really, every time i'm in my grandparents' bathroom, i try not to look up. it's not that the rhyming couplets are no longer true, but that as i grew up, i learned to disdain things like that. i write now with the words of academics, theorists, critics, self-involved persons seeking self-actualization, and have little time for rhyming.

it has been insinuated, more than once, that perhaps i have little time for the rural america i grew up in, and by extension, this thing we call family. i suppose that there have been varying degrees of truth to this, just like i will never again feel affinity with poems that rhyme. but if i get offended, maybe it's because i marvel at how you don't see that when i got old enough and honest enough to know that poetry was not inside me after many failed attempts of putting alleged insightfulness and metaphor and angst into stanzas, i never gave up on being a poet someday, even though i gave up writing poems.

and more i love you's and i'm thinking of you's and i'll talk to you soon's, and he is back to reclining in his lazyboy chair, ostensibly watching tv, mostly sleeping, and i walk briskly to the elevators, back to my desk, letting my ipod take me everywhere but here, ignoring my wounds for the moment. letting myself smile at the memory of being 10, writing about one of my favorite pals, and this man for whom i will always be a poet. my first published poem had a very small circulation, but a very ardent fanbase.

exposed.

and it's bloody cold.

missing.

i can't really say where i've been lately or where i am these days - just seems that i've been gone from sight, even mine. and who the hell really knows what that means, because i'm sitting here now, right in front of you and that's where i am. but i've been off searching for something and yearning for something that may or may not be missing. and i'm right in front of you and you still ask me where i've been and where i am, and i worry about the transparency of my carefully positioned smiles and nods and all of that. if i was more new age, i'd tell you that i've been off trying to realign my chakras. if i was more evangelical, i'd tell you that i've been having conversations with god. if i was more honest, i'd tell you that i managed to lose myself in that space between you and me, which is embarassing, but reminiscent of countless lost mittens, lost papers, lost thoughts, lost days. and now i'm like lucinda williams singing "i think i lost it".

and i have a lot of excuses, you know. a lot. i've been busy. with things. lots of things. and keeping myself all in one place and all in one piece is no small feat, even if i had nothing else to do. thing is, now i don't have that much to do after an extended craze of busy-ness and stress. and now it's just kind of empty and i feel myself bouncing around like the words in my head looking for an exit, and i have the jitters like i just stayed up all night with a pack of cigarettes and a pot of coffee. so i'm thrashing about a bit now, kind of like trying to put on my own straight jacket. sweet jesus, i'm absurd.

so at least that's not missing. if all else fails, i create my own diversions and distractions when it looks like my life isn't my life anymore, but it all evens out in the end, because it's still mine, whether i want to claim it or not, whether you recognize me or not. there's a part of me that thinks that it'd be great to live in solitude, just thoreau was kind of corny about the whole thing, and monks and nuns don't really count because i'm not sure it's solitude when you're married to jesus, even if it is all in your head. and i think i shower too much to really have a good shot at asceticism anyway. and eat too much meat - eat too much in general, actually.

thing is, i'm all about worldly things. just sometimes i don't really feel like talking to people. so i say that i'm searching for something. i'm not sure that's entirely accurate, but i haven't figured out how else to put it that makes any more sense. luckily for me, everyone i've told so far has known me long enough or well enough to pretend it makes some sort of sense to them. if it was me, and someone else was telling me that, i might think about telling them to stop being so damn angsty and full of privilege and just go ahead and live life already without being so freaking neurotic and scared.

so you can think that, but hey, take it easy. i'm working on it. i'm trying to find something. but i haven't quite figured out what it is.