all things considered
Yesterday I switched email addresses. I sent an email out to my contacts explaining the situation: that I’ve had my Hotmail account since the beginning of time, that they finally drove me away with their new mandatory-big-flashy-advertising format, that I’m finally joining the ranks of Gmail.
My cousin responded right away. (You’re a cousin, right D? How are we even related? Our grandmothers were sisters maybe?) Anyway he writes me back as follows:
I love the back story, told so well. Who knew you were just switching email accounts and not telling of a forlorn princess instead. Great stuff.
Now in retrospect, my change-of-address email does appear to be four paragraphs long. And upon further consideration, I guess I could have gotten the point across in, say, four words.
My point being: this made me laugh a lot. Cause maybe there’s something to the drama queen thing. Could we just not call it drama queen though? Cause that makes me think of someone who believes that the whole world lives and dies with captivating minutiae of her extraordinary life. Whereas I just happen to find the minutiae of most people’s lives, mine included, somewhat captivating – while not believing the world lives and dies for any of us. So if you’re going to have a life it might as well be a good story. About a forlorn princess, for example.
note.
when we met i was still in my twenties – the end of them, granted, but still – and i was new to portland and new to the idea of setting up space somewhere and new to the interest in sharing that space with someone else. for the first time i had an idea of a direction i wanted to head in. up to that point i’d been kind of day-by-day. i had found that day-by-day was not conducive to the setting up and sharing of space.
he says a little mantra that goes like this. free me from suffering, and from desire, which is the root of suffering. but when we met i was full of desire. more accurately, i was full of a particular kind of desire: not the nonspecific desire i’ve historically been full of for any experience and feeling, but a desire for a certain set of experiences, and for a certain set of feelings. i wanted to try doing things and feeling things with someone else.
and, true to mantra, this desire has brought me a measure of suffering. not the real kind that lots of people live with every day, but enough to make itself known. enough to require attention.
he must be something, if you’ve stuck with it for so long a friend said to me on the phone this weekend. which is true. i think he’s really something. i have met a lot of people and it has been my experience that few of them share the interest i have in trying things out all the time – going to norwegian folk dancing night or moving to rural oregon. it has been my experience that, in relationships, this is just something i have to eat. i end up hearing no all the time – because there are lots of good reasons not to go norwegian folk dancing or move to rural oregon – and eventually i just try hard not to ask.
operaman, on the other hand, strikes me as someone who wants to say yes. alas, we happened to meet just as he was saying a huge yes to something completely crazy and fabulous, something that had nothing to do with me. and now he's following through. and it seems like that commitment has exhausted his reservoir of yes. he wants to do it completely and right, and there is nothing left over for late nights or early mornings or impromptu adventure. there is nothing left for doing what feels unwise or unwieldy.
and how can i judge it? because it comes from exactly the very same piece of him that i admire so fiercely.
but i am so small by now that i hardly recognize myself, so sad sometimes that i am missing the most marvelous fall. and sad is ok, sad is what happens with loving someone. but small doesn’t suit me, and i find myself acting ugly as a substitute for large. we work with what we have.
i wish he would make this as big as i want it to be. i wish we could try things together, and celebrate them when they are successful, and support each other when they aren’t. that sounds to me like everyone getting what they want. but how can i expect him to risk such an important undertaking, in which he's already invested so much, on something as unreliable as another person? i do, of course. i’ve been holding out for it to happen, trying to prove my prescience by my presence. but my presence is increasingly pissy and unconvincing. i’ve undermined my own point.
i’m in my thirties now – my early thirties, but still – and i’ve made peace with my desire. it turns out that it’s not a desire for him but for us, and us isn’t looking like an option. maybe one day it will be. it doesn’t feel like something i can influence at this point. so it’s time to hang out with my suffering, and make peace with it, and figure out what’s next. maybe i can go back to realizing that what’s next is the rest of this afternoon, and what’s next after that is tomorrow.
consequence
I went to California for a week to attend a conference, and to soak up a little sun to savor during northwest winter, and to see my one friend from college, and to see my other friend from college and her husband and her baby. I stayed in a fancy hotel with crisp white and blue sheets, and soap that smelled like sage, and a tv with that channel that shows home improvement shows at all hours. It was a very good trip.
And I landed at PDX and rode the light rail to my truck, and drove my truck to my house, and unpacked while watching a Katherine Hepburn movie from 1938. In general I prefer Audrey.
I’ve been hesitant to write. One of the comments on my last post really got under my skin, though I’m sure it wasn’t intended to. It said (and I will annotate with additional information for those of you who never went through an Indigo Girls phase) that this blog reminds the commenter of the song The Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands. You don’t need to know the lyrics with a title like that. Let’s just say it rhymes “harder” with “martyr.”
I feel so oddly defensive about that comment. I mean, I guess I kind of overthink things. (Allow me to illustrate, with this post.) And I see how this blog maybe comes across as me agonizing about small things, and getting hung up on stuff that isn’t that important. The point of my writing here is mostly to share my life with my good friends - many of whom live much farther away than I would like – and to share not just what’s happening but my thoughts about what’s happening, so that they can laugh and/or commiserate and/or provide advice, as appropriate. It works as well as anything I can think of for that purpose.
But for the record (and I don’t know why the record matters to me but I guess it does) I’m not trying to earn some kind of points here for my drama, and I certainly don’t think my life is any more difficult or dark than anyone else’s. In fact, as I’m sure I’ve said here before, I don’t really understand all the luck I have, all the ways that my life feels blessed. I don’t write about it every time, because I think that would be really fucking annoying.
And I’m not under the impression that the daily workings of my relationship or the way I’m choosing to heat my house are of any consequence in the scheme of things. I just think they’re the same ordinary things that a handful of other people are also figuring out at the same time, and that these ordinary things shape the way we experience the world every day. I like to put them down. I like to draw them out. I like that our whole lives are a series of these tiny decisions and experiences that can mean exactly as much or as little as we choose. It is so frustrating and so marvelous and so improbable.
By writing about all my stupid things I don’t mean to complain about them, and I’m certainly not trying to “solve” them. I’m not trying to make them bigger than they are. But really, they are huge. Have you ever tried to figure out if you wanted a baby? Have you ever tried to pick a woodstove? Have you ever had soap that smelled like sage? It can be so good it’s hard to breathe.
