Today started with a clog in the kitchen sink and a snow covered ground. I was somewhat excited about the latter and irritated about the former. After my horrible drive to school, the disgusting mess that came up as a result of plunging the kitchen sink didn't seem so bad. In comparison anyway.
The drive didn't start out too bad, the snow was light and dusty so I thought it would be no big deal. Even so, I left a half an hour earlier than I normally would have, just in case. My biggest mistake was getting on I-5 and subsequently, trying to take the Fremont Bridge into northwest. I had my dogs in the car because I was going to drop them off at my work while I was in class in the morning since I have to go back there this afternoon and work a reception shift. Semitrucks and other ill prepared vehicles, or maybe ill prepared drivers, were sliding all over the place. My beastly subuaru of course was fine, but I started to panic a little on the incline of the Fremont Bridge on ramp, a steep, narrow two-lane curve that freaks me out on a warm, sunny day but when the wind is raging and ice is starting to collect under my tires....
As the 18 wheeler next to me started sliding towards me, I this scene started looping over and over in my head. I imagined the semi slamming into my car with enough force to toss me over the edge and into the icy waters of the toxic Willamette River below. What freaked me out the most about this is that my dogs were in the car. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get them both out of the water and realized that if I fell in, I'd probably pass out from shock before I could make any decisions. I began hyperventilating and sweating profusely while trying to continue to inch toward the apex of the icy bridge. I could feel a full on panic attack happening and I didn't know how to stop it. My hands and head felt tingly and I couldn't feel my lips or fingers anymore. I felt like I was going to pass out and this made me panic even more. I rolled down the drivers side window to get some air and prevent being sealed in my car if we plummeted into the freezing water below. I didn't even notice the ice and snow that was getting into the car; I was still sweating bullets and trying as hard as I could to take deep, even breaths. I tried to call about 10 people but it was one of those frustrating times when no one was answering their phone. My head became lighter and more tingly and I could feel my tunnel vision taking hold of my line of sight. Finally Erin answered her phone and talked me through it and I got over the bridge and off the exit ramp safely.
I've never, ever had a panic attack like that before, it was one of the scariest things that has ever happened to me. The other horrible part is that I really, REALLY wanted a cigarette and actually found some in my pocket but I didn't smoke them even though I knew that it would only take one or two hits of nicotine to calm my panicky feelings. Wait, maybe the fact that I didn't smoke is the best part of this whole story. God, I miss smoking.
Now, I'm completely emotionally drained and want nothing more than to crawl into my bed and sleep. But that means I'd have to drive home first. ugh.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Shifting focus
I should be reading about the mechanisms of digestion and absorption in the human body. Or I should be working on my paper for my community health class. Or working on my paper for my writing class that Carrot gave me suggestions for improvement that were amazing and overwhelming. She was trying to go over some of it with me yesterday but I was hurried and anxious, having just gotten home from a 10 hour shift at work that was full of death and sadness and in a hurry to eat and shower before going to a show that I really didn't want to go to but felt some sort of weird social pressure to attend. I didn't stay at the show long, feeling anxious about being in a room with so many people and anxious about being in a space, sitting next to actually, one of my dates who was on a date with her other date. Confusing non-monogamy, right? I wasn't prepared and was jealous, an emotion that I've denied feeling in the past but an emotion I'm ready to face and deal with when it happens. Just before the intermission, the emcee told a racist "joke," sending my anxiety over the edge so I left to the safety of my station wagon and the comfort of my the country music spilling out of my stereo leaving me to dream about the two-step lessons Gene and I will be starting in 10 days! The thought of this made me happy.
I've realized that I need to focus on putting energy towards things that make me feel happy and healthy, like making time to go to the gym, writing, investing more time in friendships that are positive and loving. I want to take a break from dating for a while because its been causing me so much anxiety and sometimes it just feels like a string of negotiations and maintenance in this way that is inorganic and forced. I feel like the last couple of years of dating have been a series of heartbreaks and disappointments due to getting involved with people who are either long-distance or emotionally unavailable or both. I need a time-out before my patterns create an impenetrable scar-tissue around my heart. So, while I should be reading about the mechanisms of human digestion, I'd rather think about the mechanisms of my own heart. I need to take some time and figure out what my contribution to my own heartbreaks have been. I need to be my own date, for a while anyway.
I've realized that I need to focus on putting energy towards things that make me feel happy and healthy, like making time to go to the gym, writing, investing more time in friendships that are positive and loving. I want to take a break from dating for a while because its been causing me so much anxiety and sometimes it just feels like a string of negotiations and maintenance in this way that is inorganic and forced. I feel like the last couple of years of dating have been a series of heartbreaks and disappointments due to getting involved with people who are either long-distance or emotionally unavailable or both. I need a time-out before my patterns create an impenetrable scar-tissue around my heart. So, while I should be reading about the mechanisms of human digestion, I'd rather think about the mechanisms of my own heart. I need to take some time and figure out what my contribution to my own heartbreaks have been. I need to be my own date, for a while anyway.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Where are my memories?
I'm supposed to be writing a paper for my writing class right now. Its a descriptive essay about the place we're from and how its made us who we are. Being a "descriptive essay" it needs to include a lot of sensory memories. Which I don't feel I have. My memories are like that word that's on the tip of your tongue, a word that you know is somewhere in your memory bank but you just can't access. My memories are like a box of out of focus, sepia toned pictures with yellow edges you'd come across in a second hand shop, they seem somewhat familiar, but still distant. They are two dimensional and I long for the texture of my childhood but the longer I am away from that place, the place where I grew up, the place I feel like a fraud if I refer to it as "home," the more faded those memories become until they no longer even seem like mine. I don't even refer to the place of my childhood as “home,” not having been back there in almost ten years. I hear my friends talk about “going home for the holidays,” a concept that seems so foreign to me. I get a little jealous about it. I want to experience the place where I grew up as an adult, to be able to feel the Kansas air fill my lungs and touch the dirt my child hands touched. I want to be able to build a new relationship with this place, one based on love and appreciation for what and who inhabits the space rather than a resentment and a longing to leave. I remember being a twelve year old kid and knowing even then that I had to leave as soon as possible. It was then that I started thinking of Topeka as a temporary place of habitation, beginning to create some distance even before I left. This mirrored the distance I already felt from my family, a distance I began to feel at the age of four when gender expectations were formally introduced to me, a distance that increased over the years, especially with my father.
My most recent memory of being in Topeka is a ten year old memory. At the end of a 52 hour bus trip, the Greyhound I was riding pulled off of I-70 and onto the run down streets of downtown Topeka. I hadn't been back in a couple of years and it looked smaller, more dilapadated, grayer, than I remembered. It was was cloudy mid-September day and fall had already settled in Portland, but here, it was still muggy and hot. Stifling. A familiar sense of strangulation began to settle in and I took some deep breaths as the bus pulled into the station to avoid passing out from a panic attack.
Even this memory is fading. Like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I feel my memories slowly being erased and it makes me feel a panic and desperation to hold on to them, even the hard ones, the hurtful ones. I want to remember them because they are mine.
If I don't remember, who will?
My most recent memory of being in Topeka is a ten year old memory. At the end of a 52 hour bus trip, the Greyhound I was riding pulled off of I-70 and onto the run down streets of downtown Topeka. I hadn't been back in a couple of years and it looked smaller, more dilapadated, grayer, than I remembered. It was was cloudy mid-September day and fall had already settled in Portland, but here, it was still muggy and hot. Stifling. A familiar sense of strangulation began to settle in and I took some deep breaths as the bus pulled into the station to avoid passing out from a panic attack.
Even this memory is fading. Like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I feel my memories slowly being erased and it makes me feel a panic and desperation to hold on to them, even the hard ones, the hurtful ones. I want to remember them because they are mine.
If I don't remember, who will?
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Writing class
My writing class is amazing! Maybe not the class itself so much, but its inspiring me to write again and reviving my confidence in myself as a writer. Its ironic because this is the class I was dreading the most and now its the one I'm most excited about. I think its this in combination with my new roommate, who is an amazing writer, all I want to do is sit in my room, my dogs at my feet, and write anything and everything that comes into my brain, then try to squeeze out more because this sponge in my head needs to get drained.
Yesterday in my writing class two amazing things happened. Number one, my instructor assigned my friend Chelsey's blog for our reading homework! Amazing!
Then our instructor put the following words on the board:
barn dress cow fire red girl pen
and wanted us to use one or more of the words to write a descriptive paragraph revolving around the interaction between two people. The only catch was, like the words above, the paragraph could only contain one-syllable words. We had 5 minutes to do it. This is what I wrote:
The smell of the fire fills my nose and takes me back to the barn in my mind. Ash and smoke sway in the sky in that way that plays with the stars, like they are a band that plays just for me to the beat of my own heart. I turn, my back to the fire and to you. I don't want to see the light dance on your face, the light makes your face soft and you are hard. Its not your fault, I know who you are. You are like the fire, in front of me but just out of reach.
I was really satisfied with what I wrote, especially under the 5 minute time limit. It was fun and it reminded me how much I like writing exercises like this, even though they can seem silly sometimes. Occasionally, they can also be seedlings for something spectacular.
Yesterday in my writing class two amazing things happened. Number one, my instructor assigned my friend Chelsey's blog for our reading homework! Amazing!
Then our instructor put the following words on the board:
barn dress cow fire red girl pen
and wanted us to use one or more of the words to write a descriptive paragraph revolving around the interaction between two people. The only catch was, like the words above, the paragraph could only contain one-syllable words. We had 5 minutes to do it. This is what I wrote:
The smell of the fire fills my nose and takes me back to the barn in my mind. Ash and smoke sway in the sky in that way that plays with the stars, like they are a band that plays just for me to the beat of my own heart. I turn, my back to the fire and to you. I don't want to see the light dance on your face, the light makes your face soft and you are hard. Its not your fault, I know who you are. You are like the fire, in front of me but just out of reach.
I was really satisfied with what I wrote, especially under the 5 minute time limit. It was fun and it reminded me how much I like writing exercises like this, even though they can seem silly sometimes. Occasionally, they can also be seedlings for something spectacular.
Hair we go
I'm going to get my haircut today. I've needed to get a haircut for a couple of weeks now but for some reason I'm having a lot of anxiety around it. It was so much easier when I was keeping my head clean shaven. But, I'm determined to have hair on my head, for a while anyway.
I've never been into my hair. Most of my life, I've hated it. When I was 6 I started begging my mom to let me cut my hair. Short. Like a boys. Of course, my parents refused, my mom insisting it would be a mistake and I would be ugly with short hair but when I was 8, I finally convinced my mom to take me to get a hair cut. My first ever. My hair, at this point, would swish against the waistband of the skirts I was forced to wear and usually, I wore it in two thick braids that would flank my head and heavy, like anchors keeping me tied to being a girl.
One Saturday we drove into town and walked into a salon with awful floresent lighting and the nauseating smell of ammonia and cheap shampoo. There were only ladies in that salon, which irritated me. I had imagined I'd walk into a barbershop with wood panelling, maybe a mounted deer head over the door of the bathroom and the familiar sound of a twanging steel guitar on the radio. The barber would chuckle and greet me, pull me up into the worn, brown leather chair and chop all my hair off. It would be like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy walks out of a world comprised of shades of gray and into a world of Technicolor dreams, only my dreams were made of Little League and Boy Scouts.
The reality was, I was here, with my mom, in a shop that was geared towards ladies in their late 30's and older. Much older. Blue hair older. I wanted to leave but my mom insisted we stay because I had made such a big deal about it, so now I was getting my hair cut, like it or not.
I slid onto the chair, made of vinyl that was slightly cracking. I knew this woman in front of me wouldn't give me the Tom Sawyer haircut of my dreams. "I want it really short," I told her as she draped an apron over my chest, the tips of her fingernails with chipping red polish scratching my neck as she tied the strings in place. She laughed. "Oh, honey, we don't want you to look like a boy now do we?"
I fought back tears as she began dismantling the braids my mom wove with my hair that morning. I kept my eyes closed the whole time and tried to focus on the sound of the scissors opening and closing but could hear my mom whispering instructions to the lady. When I opened my eyes, I saw a mountain of black hair that had fallen to my feet and it seemed like she was cutting off so much, I began to get hopeful. Maybe this lady would be my magical fairy godmother, with huge silver sheers for a wand, maybe she will actually listen to me and I'll get to walk out of here with hair I can finally be proud of. Maybe.
"All done, honey!" She announced proudly. "You sure had a lot of hair, it was almost a shame to cut it all off like that!"
I looked up as she swiveled the chair toward the mirror. Oh. My. God. This woman BUTCHERED my hair. She didn't give me that hair cut I wanted at all! Now, on top of my head, was what can only be described as a curly mullet. That's right, this woman gave me a curly mullet two weeks before the new school year was supposed to start. If I had a picture, I'd show you. Today, a curly mullet is ironic, almost trendy in that hipster sort of way but as an 8 year old kid in Kansas who was in their second month of wearing glasses, this was tragic.
I immediately started crying and looked up at my mom.
"See what I told you?" She said harshly. "You should learn to listen to your mother."
Looking back I wonder if she instructed the beautician to give me such a horrible haircut so I would be so horrified by it that I would never cut my hair again, i.e. never go for the boy hair cut I longed for.
After this, my parents again refused to let me cut my hair. Everytime I'd bring it up, my mom would remind me of the Disasterous Haircut Incident of 1987. So, from then on, I just let my hair keep growing and growing. When it would start to journey past my waistband, my mom would trim a few inches herself. I was not rebellious enough to take the scissors and chop it all of in the bathroom, man I wish I was that kind of kid though.
In high school, I basically looked like Slash from Guns N Roses, refusing to take care of my long, curly hair and usually wearing a bandana (headband style, not skull cap style) around my head to keep it from getting into my eyes. My mom hated this but didn't say much after I told her "You won't let me cut it but you can't make me take care of it." In her eyes, the alternative, a short hair cut, was much worse than the mess my long hair became.
When I moved out of my parents house to go to college in Minneapolis, I didn't chop all my hair off right away. It was actually the last thing my mom said to me before I got on the plane at the Kansas City airport. "Don't go cutting your hair off, ok? Promise me?" She seemed so desperate, I promised her I wouldn't, even though I knew it was a lie. But for some reason, I didn't do it immediately, like I always thought I would. I was away from home in this ginormous city and being gay all over the place, feeling more and more distant from my parents and from the life I knew as a kid and even though I had been planning my escape since I was 4 years old, a part of me was scared to "grow up." Cutting my hair all off, doing what I'd always wanted to do, would mean that I was completely independent from my parents.
It took me about 6 months before I finally made an appointment with someone to cut my hair off. I went to this amazing older butch dyke that my friend Teri recommended. I knew she would know what to do. Her shop was very cool, kind of dark with shiny oak counters and black leather barber chairs. She had a buzzcut, a ton of tattoos and was listening to Ani DiFranco when I walked in. Hella gay.
I watched as she made the first cut, removing a large section of thick, curly hair from the right side of my head. The umbilical chord had finally been cut. As she was clearcutting the black forest on top of my head, I told her how I'd always wanted to have short hair and of the Disasterous Haircut Incident of 1987. She laughed knowingly. I can't even quantify the excitement I felt when she started using the clippers. That buzzing in my ear was like when you have a song stuck in your head, but you can't remember the name of it and then one day you hear it on the radio and you're like "YES! Finally!" It was like that. When she was done, she turned me toward the mirror. "What do you think?"
I reached my left hand up and touched the back of my clean shaven neck and let my fingers run through the small waves that were on top of my head that had replaced the long locks I'd resented my whole life. "I think my mom is going to hate it.... its perfect!"
Thanks to my genetics, I did not have the disheveled boy haircut that I'd always dreamed about, but it was short and very masculine, which was what I wanted.
Now, with my new haircut, the short cut I'd always wanted, I looked soooooo gay. And my gayness was suddenly visible to the rest of the world. It was exciting to my 19 year old self, all I had to do to let everyone know that I was gay was walk out the door. A little scary, but definitely more exciting. I suddenly had this confidence I never had before, noticed how I was walking differently, swaggering even. All this from a haircut? Man, I should have done this YEARS ago, I thought to myself one morning as I massaged some pomade into my scalp.
Needless to say, my mom was NOT happy. I told her by sending her a picture. She called me crying, reminding me of my promise at the airport 6 months earlier. "You knew I would do this, come on," I told her, unapologetic about my new 'do.
I pretty much had that haircut for a couple of years. When I moved to Portland, I began cutting my hair into a mohawk, which I had for several years until I finally began just keeping it clean shaven. Which was easy. But after a while, had become boring.
So now I have (for lack of a better description) basically a "faux hawk" going on. That term kind of makes me want to gag, but that's probably the best way to describe it. I don't know exactly what I'm going for but I know I want the tail at the end of the "hawk" part to grow out. I was so irritated the last time I went to get a hair cut and I specifically told the stylist NOT to cut the tail off and he did anyway. Argh. Since I've been growing my hair, he's the only stylist I've gone to but the last couple of times, I wasn't too happy about the work that he did. He's a friend of mine and I didn't say anything because its not like he could put it back on. I haven't gotten my hair cut since, which leads us back to today. What if I go to someone else, get my hair cut and then see my friend? Will it be awkward? Will we have to process? What if this new hair stylist cuts off my tail? I was talking to Evan about this and he said that the last time he went in for a hair cut, he specifically told the person not to cut the end of his hair off and the only reason it didn't happen is because Jodi was there and saved his tail from being added to the pile of hair on the floor. Do I need to bring a bodyguard for my tail? Why am I freaking out about this?
Well, I've made the decision. I'm going to try Bishops on Alberta. I mean, I am on a budget here. Wish me luck.
I've never been into my hair. Most of my life, I've hated it. When I was 6 I started begging my mom to let me cut my hair. Short. Like a boys. Of course, my parents refused, my mom insisting it would be a mistake and I would be ugly with short hair but when I was 8, I finally convinced my mom to take me to get a hair cut. My first ever. My hair, at this point, would swish against the waistband of the skirts I was forced to wear and usually, I wore it in two thick braids that would flank my head and heavy, like anchors keeping me tied to being a girl.
One Saturday we drove into town and walked into a salon with awful floresent lighting and the nauseating smell of ammonia and cheap shampoo. There were only ladies in that salon, which irritated me. I had imagined I'd walk into a barbershop with wood panelling, maybe a mounted deer head over the door of the bathroom and the familiar sound of a twanging steel guitar on the radio. The barber would chuckle and greet me, pull me up into the worn, brown leather chair and chop all my hair off. It would be like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy walks out of a world comprised of shades of gray and into a world of Technicolor dreams, only my dreams were made of Little League and Boy Scouts.
The reality was, I was here, with my mom, in a shop that was geared towards ladies in their late 30's and older. Much older. Blue hair older. I wanted to leave but my mom insisted we stay because I had made such a big deal about it, so now I was getting my hair cut, like it or not.
I slid onto the chair, made of vinyl that was slightly cracking. I knew this woman in front of me wouldn't give me the Tom Sawyer haircut of my dreams. "I want it really short," I told her as she draped an apron over my chest, the tips of her fingernails with chipping red polish scratching my neck as she tied the strings in place. She laughed. "Oh, honey, we don't want you to look like a boy now do we?"
I fought back tears as she began dismantling the braids my mom wove with my hair that morning. I kept my eyes closed the whole time and tried to focus on the sound of the scissors opening and closing but could hear my mom whispering instructions to the lady. When I opened my eyes, I saw a mountain of black hair that had fallen to my feet and it seemed like she was cutting off so much, I began to get hopeful. Maybe this lady would be my magical fairy godmother, with huge silver sheers for a wand, maybe she will actually listen to me and I'll get to walk out of here with hair I can finally be proud of. Maybe.
"All done, honey!" She announced proudly. "You sure had a lot of hair, it was almost a shame to cut it all off like that!"
I looked up as she swiveled the chair toward the mirror. Oh. My. God. This woman BUTCHERED my hair. She didn't give me that hair cut I wanted at all! Now, on top of my head, was what can only be described as a curly mullet. That's right, this woman gave me a curly mullet two weeks before the new school year was supposed to start. If I had a picture, I'd show you. Today, a curly mullet is ironic, almost trendy in that hipster sort of way but as an 8 year old kid in Kansas who was in their second month of wearing glasses, this was tragic.
I immediately started crying and looked up at my mom.
"See what I told you?" She said harshly. "You should learn to listen to your mother."
Looking back I wonder if she instructed the beautician to give me such a horrible haircut so I would be so horrified by it that I would never cut my hair again, i.e. never go for the boy hair cut I longed for.
After this, my parents again refused to let me cut my hair. Everytime I'd bring it up, my mom would remind me of the Disasterous Haircut Incident of 1987. So, from then on, I just let my hair keep growing and growing. When it would start to journey past my waistband, my mom would trim a few inches herself. I was not rebellious enough to take the scissors and chop it all of in the bathroom, man I wish I was that kind of kid though.
In high school, I basically looked like Slash from Guns N Roses, refusing to take care of my long, curly hair and usually wearing a bandana (headband style, not skull cap style) around my head to keep it from getting into my eyes. My mom hated this but didn't say much after I told her "You won't let me cut it but you can't make me take care of it." In her eyes, the alternative, a short hair cut, was much worse than the mess my long hair became.
When I moved out of my parents house to go to college in Minneapolis, I didn't chop all my hair off right away. It was actually the last thing my mom said to me before I got on the plane at the Kansas City airport. "Don't go cutting your hair off, ok? Promise me?" She seemed so desperate, I promised her I wouldn't, even though I knew it was a lie. But for some reason, I didn't do it immediately, like I always thought I would. I was away from home in this ginormous city and being gay all over the place, feeling more and more distant from my parents and from the life I knew as a kid and even though I had been planning my escape since I was 4 years old, a part of me was scared to "grow up." Cutting my hair all off, doing what I'd always wanted to do, would mean that I was completely independent from my parents.
It took me about 6 months before I finally made an appointment with someone to cut my hair off. I went to this amazing older butch dyke that my friend Teri recommended. I knew she would know what to do. Her shop was very cool, kind of dark with shiny oak counters and black leather barber chairs. She had a buzzcut, a ton of tattoos and was listening to Ani DiFranco when I walked in. Hella gay.
I watched as she made the first cut, removing a large section of thick, curly hair from the right side of my head. The umbilical chord had finally been cut. As she was clearcutting the black forest on top of my head, I told her how I'd always wanted to have short hair and of the Disasterous Haircut Incident of 1987. She laughed knowingly. I can't even quantify the excitement I felt when she started using the clippers. That buzzing in my ear was like when you have a song stuck in your head, but you can't remember the name of it and then one day you hear it on the radio and you're like "YES! Finally!" It was like that. When she was done, she turned me toward the mirror. "What do you think?"
I reached my left hand up and touched the back of my clean shaven neck and let my fingers run through the small waves that were on top of my head that had replaced the long locks I'd resented my whole life. "I think my mom is going to hate it.... its perfect!"
Thanks to my genetics, I did not have the disheveled boy haircut that I'd always dreamed about, but it was short and very masculine, which was what I wanted.
Now, with my new haircut, the short cut I'd always wanted, I looked soooooo gay. And my gayness was suddenly visible to the rest of the world. It was exciting to my 19 year old self, all I had to do to let everyone know that I was gay was walk out the door. A little scary, but definitely more exciting. I suddenly had this confidence I never had before, noticed how I was walking differently, swaggering even. All this from a haircut? Man, I should have done this YEARS ago, I thought to myself one morning as I massaged some pomade into my scalp.
Needless to say, my mom was NOT happy. I told her by sending her a picture. She called me crying, reminding me of my promise at the airport 6 months earlier. "You knew I would do this, come on," I told her, unapologetic about my new 'do.
I pretty much had that haircut for a couple of years. When I moved to Portland, I began cutting my hair into a mohawk, which I had for several years until I finally began just keeping it clean shaven. Which was easy. But after a while, had become boring.
So now I have (for lack of a better description) basically a "faux hawk" going on. That term kind of makes me want to gag, but that's probably the best way to describe it. I don't know exactly what I'm going for but I know I want the tail at the end of the "hawk" part to grow out. I was so irritated the last time I went to get a hair cut and I specifically told the stylist NOT to cut the tail off and he did anyway. Argh. Since I've been growing my hair, he's the only stylist I've gone to but the last couple of times, I wasn't too happy about the work that he did. He's a friend of mine and I didn't say anything because its not like he could put it back on. I haven't gotten my hair cut since, which leads us back to today. What if I go to someone else, get my hair cut and then see my friend? Will it be awkward? Will we have to process? What if this new hair stylist cuts off my tail? I was talking to Evan about this and he said that the last time he went in for a hair cut, he specifically told the person not to cut the end of his hair off and the only reason it didn't happen is because Jodi was there and saved his tail from being added to the pile of hair on the floor. Do I need to bring a bodyguard for my tail? Why am I freaking out about this?
Well, I've made the decision. I'm going to try Bishops on Alberta. I mean, I am on a budget here. Wish me luck.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
A new year
There's something that I really enjoy about my birthday being so close to New Year's and in the dead of winter. Usually its kind of a drag having a birthday so close to Christmas and being upstaged by Jesus. My friends are gone or distracted by family, a reminder that I don't have a relationship with my biological family, which I can deal with most other times of the year, but there's this visceral reaction that I think many of us have about "the holidays" whether we want to or not.
This birthday was upstaged by Arctic Blast 2008. Things didn't go as planned (do they ever??) and I spent more time at the Florida Room my birthday weekend than I care to admit, but what was wonderful was that my friends totally rallied and braved being covered in sheets of ice to come out for birthday celebrations.
Now that "the holidays" have passed and I'm settling back into a schedule filled with schoolwork and study dates, I am enjoying the newness of so much in my life. A new year, just turned 30, a couple of new friendships that I'm really excited about, the sharp air fills my lungs in the morning and wakes me in a way that is both assaulting and inspiring. My lungs, my lungs, my lungs began to hurt last week and I decided to stop smoking. It will be a week tomorrow and my lungs still hurt as the tissue starts to repair itself. I won't say that I quit smoking, I prefer to say "I'm not smoking right now" because it doesn't sound as scary and final as "quit." The truth is, I really like smoking, I miss it. I also know that I would be in pain if I smoked a cigarette right now and I actually cried the other day about not being able to smoke. Not being able to smoke in the bars has helped though, and my clothes don't smell disgusting when I come home from the bar, this is a good thing.
I've been excited about writing again and have been thinking about writing a lot more lately. I haven't dedicated a lot of time to writing in the last few years so its nice to feel on the edge of inspiration, like I'm holding a lit match in one hand and one of those metal sparklers in the other and slowly bringing them together, anticipating the reaction that's about to take place.
This birthday was upstaged by Arctic Blast 2008. Things didn't go as planned (do they ever??) and I spent more time at the Florida Room my birthday weekend than I care to admit, but what was wonderful was that my friends totally rallied and braved being covered in sheets of ice to come out for birthday celebrations.
Now that "the holidays" have passed and I'm settling back into a schedule filled with schoolwork and study dates, I am enjoying the newness of so much in my life. A new year, just turned 30, a couple of new friendships that I'm really excited about, the sharp air fills my lungs in the morning and wakes me in a way that is both assaulting and inspiring. My lungs, my lungs, my lungs began to hurt last week and I decided to stop smoking. It will be a week tomorrow and my lungs still hurt as the tissue starts to repair itself. I won't say that I quit smoking, I prefer to say "I'm not smoking right now" because it doesn't sound as scary and final as "quit." The truth is, I really like smoking, I miss it. I also know that I would be in pain if I smoked a cigarette right now and I actually cried the other day about not being able to smoke. Not being able to smoke in the bars has helped though, and my clothes don't smell disgusting when I come home from the bar, this is a good thing.
I've been excited about writing again and have been thinking about writing a lot more lately. I haven't dedicated a lot of time to writing in the last few years so its nice to feel on the edge of inspiration, like I'm holding a lit match in one hand and one of those metal sparklers in the other and slowly bringing them together, anticipating the reaction that's about to take place.
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