strike that

good enough / smart enough

I am not unaware that my blog can be a bit too Stuart Smiley. What can I say? It’s not fiction. It’s not my game face – those of you who’ve ever played with me know that I don’t have one of those. I’m just actually this ridiculous. (Which was my favorite comment ever, by the way.) In defense of blog integrity, I also include the crappy bits.

I’ll tell you, for example, about how last night, after such a Rah Rah Life Is Good day, I lay down to go to sleep and I couldn’t. Instead of feeling tired and satisfied I felt suddenly aware of the little stone in my stomach that I thought I’d purged this weekend, and after tossing and turning the stone felt so heavy that I thought I would be sick, and I tried to figure out if it was something I’d eaten for dinner, and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything for dinner at all. And the thing is that I rarely have trouble sleeping, and I never forget to eat. And I lay there and focused on not letting my whole self become a cold little stone, and I took careful breaths, and I listened to Tom Petty singing Wildflowers.

So there are things I couldn’t sweat out, I guess. Like, I don’t know why people who do not want to be mean still sometimes choose to be mean. I am trying very hard not to learn this lesson about how not to get hurt. It happened with Frenchie and it happened with Operaman and I saw it coming with Latest Boy Disaster, and I said out loud to him I need to take care of myself. And he said, Coward! Because those that know you well know how to be most calculating in their cruelty.

So I stepped to the very edge of my comfort zone, and took a big standing long jump out. I can do this, I said. If this is going to fail it is not going to fail because I kept anything in reserve. So I jumped, and hit something very hard and sharp, right there, right away, right in the place he’d pointed me towards. And it fuckin hurt. And it still hurts even though hiking and oranges are good.

But the thing is I am not going to untangle the mystery of why people mislead each other, and I go back to what I had a month ago: We are all doing what we need to do to get by. And what I am doing is nursing a few small wounds and trying to keep their smallness in perspective and trying to remind myself why I’d do the same thing again.

And sometimes these wounds kill my appetite. But sometimes it’s Pi(e) Day, March 14, 3.14, and you just need to buck up and eat pie. Because what are small wounds in the face of Mathematical Humor? Also pie is pretty delicious. Especially the coconut banana cream pie covered in bittersweet chocolate shavings that I celebrated with this evening.

And gosh darn it, people like me.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:35 PM