feminisms

I am halved, but where the two overlap is me.

Somewhere in that thankful moment where by contrast I am made aware of what I have to lose, and I make the decision to close my eyes and rest against that shoulder, pray there quietly to whatever god resides therein.

I do wonder sometimes if that reeling gypsy dancing naked, breasts in mirror multiplied is me.

That dark eyed painted lady, pockets full of golden coins that will be stones tomorrow.

But I am gutted when the red shoes come off. When morning comes and I am still in the same clothes. When I wake up in filth and the knots begin to form, and I long for a comfort so small as to have been impossible to see without these new eyes.

Do I misbehave to make this settling a mercy? My wolves would argue that I am not misbehaving, that this is Woman in her glory and that our religion is our sex, our unrelenting middle finger to every oppression save one; the way we hurt ourselves.

I am not at home here. I wonder if there is a place where these halves of me fuse together and make sense of the whole. The excesses trimmed off, and the concentrated center accepted. I can't believe I live in a society that has driven me (and others like me) to this sort of life.

make your love your life.

I have decided to become an Art

Therapist.

This means my plans are as such:

Take a term off from school and find a job, probably doing hair. Financial aid hasn't come through and I can't register for the upcoming term. My happiness will come from band practice (which is coming along nicely by the way.)

When I return to school, I will have registered mainly in art classes, with the possible exception of a counseling class, taught by a really wonderful lady who also counsels in the Women's Resource Center. She seems to have taken a liking to me, at the very least I feel she genuinely believes in my ability to become an Art Therapist, and I am lucky that she is the teacher of one of the main prerequisite classes I would need to get my associates.

Spend the rest of the year at PCC acquiring my prerequisites. (while building a lovely portfolio of sculpture, ceramics, drawing, painting, photography, etc.) Consider sign language as well.

At the end of the year asse

ss direction of next courses. Decide whether to continue on at PCC, or study abroad at one of the Art Universities.

Transfer after acquisition of associates to Marylhurst University to pursue their program in Art Therapy. (This requires at least a BA, possibly a MA)

I have had

many dreams as a person with ADD, I tend to be a dreamer. This however is the first time I saw a lightbulb go on over my mother's head when I told her about it. She appears to believe it is my calling, and I can go a long way on a little bit of faith.

inner dialogues

I call him "the twin of my loneliness".

He talks to himself in the kitchen and I imagine from where I am sitting on his couch, that I am in our apartment, listening to him talk to himself in our kitchen. His chatter is comforting. As I sit with my coffee, it becomes hard to tell the difference between caffeine arrhythmia and a galloping heart. When he sits down I am smiling at him and he asks me why I'm smiling. I tell him it's because I like listening to him talking to himself. I want to tell him that I have begun to imagine him part of some alternate ending where we live together. In my head we already own a spider plant that needs watering on top of the microwave, dust-bunnies beneath the couch and a shoe storage problem. In my head he is running the machinations of his day, keeping pace with his self-talking, and I am as content with that soundtrack as I would be on a cliff by the sea where I'm from.

Instead, I find ways to show him he is not so strange, or that strangeness is human, or that it is not a flaw but a special asset, something that makes him valuable or unique. I like to find examples of this to validate his existence. I wonder sometimes if his existence validates my own.

it is a crisis of thought

that i find myself choosing

between my better heart and your reasoning

you are difficult to scare

and even harder to read

i have forgotten what i thought you would mean to me

one day it will be like in the movies

and it will be GLORIOUS

one day it will be like in the movies

and it will be GLORIOUS

I'm not afraid to be close to anyone. I'm just tired of people who are afraid to be close.

did you bring the wind with you girl?

...after school I got off the bus downtown to apply for food-stamps. As I was crossing the street the wind whipped up the leaves in an epic fashion, prompting a homeless man to ask "Did you bring the wind with you, Girl?" and I said yes.

I finished class, which was weighing on me as I hadn't been in a week with the melt-down that's been impending. I was relieved to have gone, against my most illogical impulses, and felt I had overcome. A trip to the Financial Aid office to square away that FAFSA audit compounding my money situation sent me teetering over the edge, as I sat at the cafe (with a water) intent on writing an essay.

It is the combination of responsibilities, the way that I put effort into handling them and the way they tend to still be just outside of my control. It is also the emotional abscess I've been tending, which has eaten through my resolve in other ways, threatening to darken a horizon that exists solely based on my ability to remain optimistic. Some part of my life needs feeding, begins to starve, I collapse upon myself, there are no fatty thoughts to feed upon. The muscles go first. The bones can't fend for themselves.

I'm at a cafe waiting for my appointment with the food stamp people. I lied about being a student, students can't get stamps. Rent is not happening. Not when I was told it would. I resent being alone. I resent not being able to live at home while in college. Life Support = Fail. Safety net= Nil. I exist coasting on kind words of others, which are like whale-sounds in the water closing in. I'm from the sea. I can swim, but I get weary all the damn time

Visualize your happy place.

I spent a great deal of time in my head as a child, which accounts for a lot of my strange ideas. As an optimist with great faith, I tend to romanticize when I'm down and out. It helps to think not about what's missing, but rather focus on "someday". Someday could happen. I like to do this thing which I call "connect the dots". Next time you're in a fix and it seems overwhelming, try to visualize a point in the future (you don't even have to be that specific about time, just focus on the YOU at that point) where you are past the obstacle. Understand that inevitably you will arrive at that point. Before you know it, you'll be there and you will have the strange and wonderful sensation of having made a dot in two separate points of time and traveled a direct line between them. It feels a little like time travel.

Meanwhile, you don't have to play connect the dots only when you're frustrated. Visualizing yourself in a someday is incredibly helpful in helping yourself understand what is at the center of your happiness. Knowing what that is could help you chart a course toward it, making it more likely you will end up with what you want.

A good example of this is something I've been doing a lot lately; imagining "home".

As someone who grew up "on the lam" so to speak, juggled between parents and moving every couple of years or so , Home is really important to me. That eventual place where I end up will become my sanctuary. I have cobbled together an idea in my head, one room at a time, of what that place will be like. Generally it's part something I have literally dreamt about, and part inspiration taken from blogs on Interior Design.

You should try it out! Try picturing yourself at your most comfortable, doing whatever it is that you might find yourself doing if you were in YOUR perfect environment and able to just relax. Look around you, what is the room like? Are you even in a room or are you outdoors? What do you see around you? What are you wearing? Are you eating or drinking anything? How about reading a book? Really see yourself in the room. After awhile you may start experiencing feelings of relaxation and contentment just "being there" mentally. Understand that these feelings are yours and are waiting for you in a future that you can now create. Sounds New Wavey I know, but it works!

Remember when you looked at every tiny thing up close, found worlds inside yards?

A story from a letter I sent to a friend

I've decided to stay up all night. I would have to be up at 7 anyway, to get ready for school, catch the bus at 8 to be there by 9. My essay is done and I ate a terribly bland twice baked potato that I microwaved. Even with the added cheese and pepperonis and pickled jalepenos it still bored my mouth.

I have a cat on each corner of my bed. Figaro, the stray, squeaks when disturbed. He does this funny yawn sigh that is adorable. I hope I'm making the right decision finding him a home. He likely belonged to someone in the neighborhood, but he has no collar and was out all night on his own for at least two nights. If I don't see flyers on my way to school today, his owners weren't good parents and he deserves to be taken care of better. People shouldn't leave kittens out all night like that. I feel bad enough when my cat wants to go out at night, knowing there's all sorts of critters to contend with in the dark.

Speaking of which, the wolves. I've got an affinity for them though I've only ever seen them that one time. There's another story though, where visitors in my sleep made me uneasy.

When I was 12 my mom and my second stepfather took my brother and I camping on the Lake Simtustus Indian Res, past Kahneeta. It's the sort of off the beaten path place that guarantees seclusion on account of how treacherous the pass is that winds down the side of the canyon to the lake. Down below, against the shoreline, you can camp near trees that hang over the water, with the lake all to yourself. It gets to be over a hundred degrees out there at the beginning of summer, so you end up waking early, coasting out to the middle of the lake on rafts and tubes. It's impossible to stay out of the water. In any case, our first trip out there was kind of overwhelming. It was a bit of a culture shock to be out in the desert, the terrain was so much different than the tree-lined hills and coastal wet spots. On the way in , our truck seemed to barely cling to the side of the hill, it was so terrifying to look out my window and only see a sheer drop that I had to focus on things on the drivers side, which were pretty much high sandstone cliffs with caves, and a lot of scrub brush, (things that looked dead but were just dormant and waiting for the rains). On the way down, my stepfather is telling us why camping on the Res side is different than camping on the standard designated camp side. For one, he said, the indians don't really like it, which is why if we see any we should steer clear and let him handle it. He picked this story back up later that night, while we finished off chili by the campfire. Brandishing a small pistol that I didn't even know he had, he told us this story about how an indian might get drunk and decide to kill us all in our sleep. My mom tried to get him to stop telling stories like that, but he assured her it was a reasonable threat to worry about, and sent my brother and I off to bed in our separate tent with the visions of stealthy natives slipping in from every direction, thinking death thoughts. What made this worse was the portable radio, still out by the fire, playing the only station that came in out there, chanting indian songs, sad wolf yips across the lake.
Eventually I fell asleep. Even with murderous indians on the brain, I fall asleep early in nature, and the lake slapping quietly against the pebbly beach made music out of the wind through the tall grass.
Suddenly I was startled awake. My brother was screaming and thrashing in his sleeping bag. I scrambled to my knees and began pawing around for him in the dark, trying to adjust my eyes and frantically trying to save him from whatever it was making him scream. My stepfather began to bellow from the tent next door but all I could do was yammer that Doug (my brother) was freaking out. Doug lurched upright and I realized something was wrong. He had no head. He was this large dark sleeping bag covered lump. Where was his head? I felt around for his face and couldn't find the opening. "How did you...?" I asked, he cried, something about a stolen zipper. As it turns out, he had somehow night terrored himself completely upside down in his bag, woke up zipped completely inside it with his head where his feet should be.
Once we righted the situation, he fell back asleep, but it was a jaunty rest for me after that, trying to settle my nerves.
At some point, I must have drifted off, but something else woke me. As I lay there in the dark I could hear a few snaps from the fire but everything else was silent. Assuming maybe it was just a loud pop of sap or something that woke me, I rolled over and closed my eyes. That's when I heard the thud. Or rather, it was like I felt it. It sounded like a careful footstep, a heavy boot coming down in the dirt outside my tent. And then another, Something was trying to quietly and slowly walk through the grass just outside. Then I heard the water ripple, were they coming up from the lake or going into it? Was this the murderous indians coming for our throats?
I panicked. I tried waking my brother. I half whispered to him "something's out there!" He was disgruntled and didn't believe me. It took more prodding to get him to wake up and listen. We became riveted as we both listened to whatever it was sneaking around out there. Finally we couldn't stand it anymore and began hollering for our step father, who despite all bravado refused to check on the sound with his gun and told us to go back to sleep.
The next morning when we woke up, the grass all around our tent was flat. The lake had pretty much lapped over any footprints but there were still a few heavy holes that didn't sit well with any of us. We had a quiet breakfast full of creepy feelings despite the how warm the sun was already.
On our last day there, as we were driving up the hill, the mystery was solved...
A herd of wild horses were grazing on the hillside.

And that's only one of the reasons I told you that horses are tricky.

theory on cat organization

I would like to assert that cats are very organized. They tend to keep themselves very tidy, they have particular tastes about schedules and food preferences, my cat even reserves one end of his litter-box for pee only. Case in point; cats on shelves, cats in cupboards, and cats in drawers.

I rest my case.

My mind wanders

I have a little problem. I should probably tell you that.

There isn't really a name for it, but there should be.

I can't stop metamorphosizing. I wonder if chameleons have the same problem when their lives become overwhelming. Do they suddenly swap polka dots for a nice tartan print? In my case, the only thing I can control 99.9% of the time is my appearance. If I had millions of dollars I would probably be one of those sad cases addicted to plastic surgery, but since I've got champagne tastes on a beer budget I often settle the score by torturing my hair. Most of the time this is met with praise (which probably doesn't help, and may be at the root of the problem) but some of the time, I end up back at square one... with little to no hair.

For example I have never been able to grow my hair past my shoulders. Not once in my life have I felt my actual hair (and not some store bought hair piece or weave) graze against my middle back. Why? Reason number one; Relationships.

If someone were to set up a time elapse camera on me during a relationship it would be like watching a street light malfunction. Red! Black! Red! Blonde!Gray?Weave! Short! Bald! It can't be helped and it's the saddest thing ever. Because what guy doesn't prefer his girlfriend to have long hair? What guy doesn't prefer his girlfriend to stay sort of the way he found her in the first place? AND YET, I am only able to keep my cool in the relationship for so long before I molt and change direction. It's as if I believe that if I can pick the right look, the right shade of hair-color, the right style of make up, and just the right outfit... if I can figure out the winning visual combination, things in my relationship will finally click into place. Though it has yet to work, I continue to do this to myself.

Some girls have anorexia. Some girls pull their eyebrows and eyelashes out one at a time.

Parrots pull their feathers out when their owners die. I have stubbornly refused to be myself until being myself became being anything but. So anyways, here I am again, having another one of those "How am I not Myself?" moments. Want to share it with me?

Overwhelmed by life and my relationship, I've hit that impasse again where it's time to start planning a reinvention of self, or I will continue to look in the mirror and see only the flaws that are not getting me anywhere. The aging face= the nose that used to not be quite so beaky when I smiled. The dull complexion. The shrinking eyes. The too fine hair that just hangs there limp on my head unless tortured into a style every single day.

So I permed it and loved it for two weeks, until the curl fell out along with handfuls of hair in the shower. I remembered the terrible stylist who permed it said that it would need to be cut in a few weeks, and rather than go to her again I bobbed a good 2 inches off of it in the hopes it would remedy the breakage and the lack of curl. To no avail. I could not prevent myself from coloring it with a very gentle all natural product known to leave hair in better condition. Unfortunately what should have been close to my natural brown ended up being inky black. My hair is dry. It is uncooperative. The blackness only serves to highlight the fact that my hair is fine and splitty. I want to cut it all off. Right now. Straight away. DO OVER.

A friend, who is also a stylist, saw me last night and said "Black?! Are you crazy?!"

My boyfriend is still sort of into me, but I fear he may leave me if I cut it all off.

Images of the girl he was really into, that impossible to compete with ghost that he sings songs to whenever he holds a guitar, flit into my head. She wasn't gussied up. She was pretty natural.

I consider shaving my head. Letting my natural grow out. I'm in college, I could get away with it. I could take a break from make up and hair all together and just focus on school. Become that girl who just rolls into a pair of jeans and a hoodie and doesn't have to fuss much or get up an hour early to get ready in the morning.

I tell myself if he leaves me, he couldn't handle "the real me". That it doesn't matter if people question my sexuality because all that matters is I know what I'm into. That it doesn't matter what anyone thinks at all, because while they're critiquing how I've "given up on pretty" I will be channeling all that energy I used to put into pulling myself apart, into building who I am on the inside. Building my knowledge, building a future.

I fantasize. I find photographs online of short hair. Hair the color of gingersnaps. I could be Mia Farrow. I could pull off Twiggy. Then I remember they were waifs, and that every time my hair is short I feel like a sexless lesbian. 60% masculine, 40% just slightly too curvy to get away with the street urchin look. I cry every time my hair is that short. The crying is inevitable, it goes with the loneliness of knowing I was right about what other people would think.

So my fantasy morphs. I imagine me with my Rosemary hair, selling off everything that ties me to this old life. I sell all my owls, my bike and my clothes, everything but a few pairs of jeans, a sturdy pair of boots and some warm enough shirts and socks. I use the money to transfer to a college abroad, maybe somewhere with weather moody enough to make for good sad songs. Somewhere like Scotland or Ireland, where imaginary boys with mischevious good looks will be happier to see me. I picture myself alone in a wet, gray, marshy boring old town and it feels like an adventure.