devmonster

RED BEANS AND RICE! 

And Misfits (not pictured).

Please indulge my narcissism. →

Scroll to the Robyn artist showcase on 8.12.11.

Recognize anyone?

A List. And Some Things.

1) I am trying to reconcile my life to the fact that circumstances are often not what we would like them to be. I have done this before. And I can do it again. 

2) I would like to figure out the ways that I stand in the way of my own happiness.

3) I would like to figure out ways to deal with those ways.

4) I would like to learn to be a person who likes more people.

5) If I cannot do that, I would at least like to learn to be a person who can give more people a chance. 

6) I am trying to be better to myself, and, by extension, to other people.

7) I am trying to keep in mind the strategies I’ve worked out for not letting my depression get the better of me. 

8) I am trying to learn new strategies. 

9) I am trying to become better at setting realistic expectations for myself. And others.

10) I have done this before. I can do it again. 

~

Every so often, I am forced to be more introspective than I would like. Sometimes I forget what this is like. 

There are things about myself that I would like to change. 

Mostly, I like myself very much. But there are things about myself that I would like to change. This doesn’t distinguish me in any way from anyone who is alive, anyone who has ever lived, and anyone who has yet to be born.

I don’t really talk about it often in this venue, but I’ve been thinking about life and shit lately, so I will talk about it here…now. Recently, I’ve had to confront a lot of things that I’d thought I had put to rest, but had obviously not actually put to rest. Objectively, my life is wonderful, but subjectively, I’ve been feeling not-wonderful for quite some time. And it’s not New York. New York is great. Objectively great. Subjectively great. But I have not been feeling great lately.  

I have almost always struggled with depression. This certainly doesn’t make me special. But it does make me proud. At this point in my life, I am very good at managing myself, and my emotional states, but it’s always a battle. Most of the time I win. Sometimes I lose. Lately, I have not been winning. 

Mostly, instead of winning, I have been incredibly, crushingly dissonant in my feelings about my relationships, my feelings about being able to manage myself and my emotions (and myself in relation to my emotions), and, quite frankly, I have been terribly, irrationally afraid of…loss. Both perceived and real. 

One of the ways I’ve been able to keep myself in check, at least in recent years, has been to understand better—and to better confront and deconstruct—the disparity between the real world and the imagined worlds I create. I have not been doing that of late. And it has been much to my detriment. I am not someone who benefits from romanticized thinking. It can be dangerous for me. I try not to let it inform my emotions. This is perhaps not always the best to do, and I hope that I have and will continue to recognize when it is not the best to do. But I’ve noticed that I can abrogate my depression when I focus on what the world is and not what I want it to be. This works for me. Transcendence and Beauty are things I love. Things I want. But not things I can manufacture. And not things I can afford to take lightly. 

Transcendent joy. I would definitely like to have more of that. I would like to find more ways to be able to experience it. Because I think that would help.

Running. Running helps. I’ve been doing that a lot. And I am perhaps most proud of my progress on that front. The moments I feel transcendentally happy are few and far between, generally. Running is reliably beautiful and transcendent and happy. 

The West Drive in Central Park is the last place I felt Beauty and Happiness and Strength and Transcendent joy. There’s a hill that coincides with (just about) the six-mile mark on my long runs. That is the point where my mind clears, the glycogen kicks in, I get my second wind (or maybe my third), and I’m just there, running. And that’s all I do. And I feel free and good and happy and invincible. That is beautiful. That is transcendent.

Running is Transcendence. Running is Beauty. Running is safe. But I can’t run all the time. Literally, of course.

And figuratively.

So…things I would like to change. I would like to get to that list I made. I would like to know the things that are worth changing. I would like to know the things that I should have added, but didn’t.

I would like to have my Chicago friends here with me. I would like to learn how not to deny myself important connections here in my new city. I would like to learn how to reconstruct the relationships about which I feel dissonant.

I am a lonely person. Or…more accurately, I am a person who is often alone. I don’t often feel lonely, but have of late. And that is because I have been afraid of being alone. 

I would like to learn how to not feel lonely. 

Something else. Something else I’d like to learn is how to recognize those people who help me to feel as though I’m in less opposition with my own emotions. Item number five on my list is learning how to give more people a chance. I would like to learn how to do that. I would like to learn how to give myself more chances to give more people more chances. 

This has perhaps been a great deal of saying things without necessarily communicating anything. My writing is imprecise. I’m fine with that. I am trying to be better at doing things for myself. I am trying to remember what it is like to be introspective and not resent it. I am trying to change those things that I would like to change. 

I would like to be winning again. 

Oh shit, y’all!

Standing my ground against a cluster headache with my trusted friend, sumatriptan. 

Wish us luck.

Can’t win.

Giving up, y’all.

The only people who like me are jerks, gross monsters, people who are age-inappropriate, and people who live hundreds of miles away. 

Tried. Can’t win. Done.

I’m devoting myself to catladydom. Full time. 

Just ran 5 miles.

Should probably be stretching and not checking tumblr.

Cut my thumb while slicing vegetables last night. Been holding my eating utensils thusly. Eating without the use of one’s dominant thumb is, perhaps not so surprisingly, clumsy. 

[not visible: horrible cut on the other side of my thumb]

Homeland

I went home to Indiana to visit my family a few weekends ago. I meant to post this then. Didn’t get around to it until tonight. Shows you where my priorities have been.

Apparently, I miss my family or some shit because I was all emotional and happy this weekend. This is just me blathering on about a home and what I did there…and on my way to there. Read or ignore as you please. 

Friday 

I left work early to go pick up the car I rented to drive to Indiana. I usually rent from an O’Hare locatoin via Hotwire because the money saved is mind-boggling. Believe it or not, I tend to enjoy the trip from U of C to O’Hare. It takes about two hours on a good day, so I can do a lot (A LOT) of reading on the way. I blazed through a good portion of The White Album (Didion) on the Red and Blue. I’d been so paranoid about making it out there in time that left work at noon for a three o’clock pick up time. I got to the terminal (I usually go to terminal 3 because the walk from the Blue Line is relatively short), with a bit more than an hour to spare, so I sat around, people watched, and read for a bit before going to pick up my car.

I decided to stay in Chicago that night. I had a friend date, and moreover, I just didn’t feel like making the drive at night. I much prefer heading home in the morning, mainly so that I can see the wind farm along I-65. I always pay a little less attention to the road than I should when I pass it. I’m a danger to society.

Saturday

I was good on Friday night, and made sure not to drink too much so as to avoid a hangover. I narrowly escaped, though, and I had to eat a pretty large breakfast and grab a latte to be sure I wouldn’t be haunted by the spectre of that fourth whiskey coke. 

I lost an hour to the eggs and caffeine, but they were worth it.

The drive down was really wonderful. I love the feeling I get when I haven’t driven a considerable distance in months, and I can speed down the interstate with music blaring and coffee in hand. I swear, sometimes, the only reason I ever drive anywhere is so that I can listen to music on the way there. I also love playing the cruise control game: seeing how long I can go without having to disengage it or changing lanes when I come upon someone driving slower than myself.

At some point, just before Tippecanoe County, I think, Robyn’s “In My Eyes” came on. I turned it up, thought about my baby brother and sisters, and increased the set point on the cruise control. 

Lafayette is usually my break point. If I’m hungry, I go to the Chic-fil-A. If I need caffeine, there’s a Starbucks down the road. From there, it’s only thirty or forty minutes to my family’s house in Whitestown (an Indianapolis suburb).

I increased the set point a little bit more. 

~

My mother answered the door in her bathrobe and half-set hair extensions. She, my grandmother, and my step-sisters were going to a mother-daughter tea at my family’s church, which is somewhere on the East Side, I think. I don’t really know. I’ve only been once, and that was a long time ago (plus I wasn’t really paying attention). Fun fact: their pastor owns a record label, and is a practicing dentist. While I’m not what one would call pious, I’ve heard some of his stuff (and seen some of the mouths he’s worked on), and it’s pretty solid. 

~

The kids were happy to see me, to say the least, and after an hour or so of being climbed on and taking photobooth photos, I went to visit Dustin (my younger brother). 

He lives with three other guys his age in an apartment that’s best described as modest. As far as I can tell, he’s made a conscious decision to live in relative poverty. I say relative because the rest of us (my family) do not; he’ll never be in danger of homelessness or starvation, but he is jobless and selling off his considerable shoe collection so that he can pay his bills. I bought lunch for him.

At some point, we started talking about my plans for a second tattoo, and we decided to swing my my friend Nick’s tattoo shop. Turns out the tattoo gods were smiling upon me, because he’d gotten there just a few minutes before Dustin and I pulled into the parking lot. 

After a lot of deliberation on my part, I picked out a (fucking awesome) raptor skull. I couldn’t get it right away, because I’d promised my older brother and sister-in-law that I’d stop by their house while I was in town, so I let Nick work on the outline sheet while I went to see them. 

Damon, my older brother, lives on the east side of town, near Arlington and 21st. If you’re familiar with Indianapolis, you’ll know that it’s not a worst part of town, but it’s certainly not the best. The house he rents there is, like Dustin’s place, modest, and at least two of my nephews (I have three…and a niece) have to share a room. But, they’re really happy, and where they are now is way better than where they’ve been before. 

But soon, this current place isn’t going to be enough.

My sister-in-law is pregnant. I didn’t know until my brother made some random remark about having to move “once this baby comes.” This came as a bit of a shock, because I remember that she cried for a while when she found out she was pregnant with her youngest, my niece. She’s loved and wanted. But I don’t think they were prepared when she came along. 

Five kids. 

~

As was the case with my first tattoo, this most recent one hurt, but never in quite the way I expected it to. It was an interesting experience, especially since the artist was a friend of mine. I think it made the experience easier to handle and intimate in a really interesting way. 

Nick did good work, and I think that this particular tattoo can be something that I can modify in a lot of really interesting ways if I choose. Work-in-progress.

Sunday

I had to get back to Chicago by 3pm, so I woke up early that morning so that I could spend time with the family while they were getting ready for church. The kids and my step-sisters are always the first up, so I spent most of my time with them. 

Once they were washed up and dressed, the girls came to sit with me. As they’ve gotten older, it’s become easier for them to tell when it’s almost time for me to head back home. They generally stick close to me on Sunday mornings, and this particular Sunday was no exception. 

While we sat together, I had the idea of playing Up on Netflix so that we could have something to do. This proved to be a bit more than I could handle, having one sister on my lap, another to the left, and another to my right, because during that first opening sequence, where Carl and Ellie meet, fall in love, and ultimately have to part, I began to tear up…quite uncontrollably. I had to go to the bathroom so I could compose myself. 

Those kids are so beautiful I can’t handle it. 

Before I left, my mother lined up my hair, and I showed her my new tattoo. 

She wasn’t pleased, but what mother ever is?

JUSTICE! 

Now, I know none of y’all care, but this is something I’ve wanted for the past four years. Of all the shitty experiences I’ve had with shitty vendors, the ones I’ve had with our dry ice vendor have been the shittiest. I absolutely hate dealing with these people. They fuck up or lose our orders almost every time we place them, and when I have to call them to ask for pricing information or change/resubmit an order, they’re incredibly nasty and impolite…because I have the audacity to expect that people actually do their jobs.   

Glory hallelujah, I’m going to enjoy tearing them apart in this survey!

Since I’m up…

It’s 5:03 AM, and since I’m up, what better to do than to make a tumblr post? So, here are a couple of things:

Thing 1

The reason I’m awake at five in the morning is that Rose has been tirelessly scratching at her ears* for the past day and a half. She usually cuddles up right next to my head or chest while I sleep, so you can imagine how this might be disruptive.

Thing 2

I listened to the new Sufjan Stevens album last night. I really enjoyed it. It strikes me as a return to the ‘A Sun Came’ sound…with a little bit of ‘Enjoy Your Rabbit’ thrown in for good measure. There was also some weird autotune stuff that I neither loved nor hated. In case you live under a rock, NPR First Listen is streaming it in its entirety until the official release on October 12th. Check it out, guys.

*I checked and it looks like she doesn’t have mites, just dirty ears. Either way, a cleaning is in order.

Jambalaya in the cafeteria

Today is a good day, you guys.

Damn…

…forgot to add GelRed to my agarose gel before I started casting it. Could just make a new one, but I’m too lazy. Looks like I’ll be post-run staining.