Only you...

Can make you happy. Only you can organize your own life. Get a vision board, he says. Take one day at a time, Mom says. Pay more attention to yourself. Wear your favorite clothes, spring for those white jeans even though its winter and don't hate your family its not their fault you came home. Drink coffee to stay awake at midday. Ride my bike to pretend that I like living in the country and anyways I need to get in shape or the mint pants I paraded myself in back in California will never fit again. Swim. God I miss swimming. This is the moment in my first part of the day that I try to forget that I sabotaged my life and moved to the Midwest. The wind is constantly blowing the harshest cold wind in my face. Walk out to the mailbox, blast of Arctic wind. Walk to my car, blast of Arctic wind. Nothing stops the wind because mountains don't exist here. As I slowly acclimate to my life here I also am coming to grips with my reality is today. I am growing older. I can be replaced in relationships, workplace, etc with a new younger model fresh out of college whose waist size is still 24 and she is that girl that bakes cakes for her sorority sisters and makes her own dresses. Those kids a few years behind us got really crafty. Etsy, I guess. I listen to self-help podcasts constantly and every one of them tells me to dream big and execute my plans for those dreams. No matter how foolish. So I dream. First dream, I have a non-profit in Brooklyn for kids. A sort of foundation for them to come to after school and learn and get help with college prep or if they are little just play duck, duck, goose. Second dream, work at a publishing company where I spend hours on the phone with my literary heroes, if they aren't already dead, and plead with them to put down the drink and produce. "Knopf loves you and we want your novel, you know that. Now put the drink down and write." I would say something like that while fidgeting with my new scarf I got at a thrift store in Harlem. In all these dreams, I have some position of power. I matter. None of these dreams include a husband figure. I've assumed thats not going to play out for me. I only really wanted it to be this man I met a couple of years ago but he's in love with a woman named Mary and I doubt he'll ever come back. That's ok. If a man should pick not to love another, he should probably go ahead and love Mary. She did give birth to Jesus. So they say. None of those dreams are happening. I did drag out my equivalent of a vision board, a white board, I write my goals on that almost every morning. Almost always the list requires I go to the library. In an effort to self educate myself during this downtime of unemployment I'm almost always at the library. I read a lot about grad school, a lot about people who didn't go to school and a little about art news. Oh and the local paper. Everyone talks about the local news here so one has to keep up. Life is quite different here but it's just as lonely and confusing as its ever been. The winter doesn't help. My family doesn't help although I love them. I feel like the little tin wings I've been flying around with were shot through with a bunch of little pellets. Probably from the weird pocket of energy that sits in the corner of the room at night and stares at me. I wait every night for him/her/it to move closer to me and grab my feet. I'm positive that it wants to hold me down and keep me here. To admit to myself I never really was anything and I probably wasn't going to be anything. Best leave that to people with better ideas. Third dream? Go back to California. Buy a farm in Salinas, educate the migrant workers and drink wine in the sun with someone I truly love. The year is 1925 and I have black hair and am five years younger. That dream is my favorite but also the least likely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hZ6BpyyQzk

24 hours

Everyday I get up and sit in my chair and drink coffee. Sometimes I get up barely before noon and sometimes I’m up at dawn. I drink coffee and tell myself for the next five minutes that today will be a good day. An even day. I will hear back about work, I will have a good bike ride and I will work on my short story. After I tell myself that everything will work out and there is no reason to be anxious, full of regret or angry I go about trying to make my dream of a good day come true. Then sometime around 9pm that day I will creatively destruct the last 12 hours and try to make sense of it. Did I do anything progressive today? Am I still a relevant human being? Am I loved? Do I love myself? Why does everyone else seem to have all the answers, all the friends, all the fun, all of California, all of New York City, all of God’s love, all of the total Milky Way? Why? I think about all these things and manage to gulp down a couple of glasses of water. Toss and turn. Get up and write some more. Toss and turn. Listen to little noises. Try to shut my brain off by pretending my feet are asleep or dividing numbers by three. At about 3am I finally fall asleep with the computer light seeping into my eyelids throwing off my circadian rhythm. 

That's it.