Haunting Angles;Side long glances

Angles

 

You would not believe how much my life is controlled by Angles. [And yes, I am referring to Angles, opposed to Angels, despite the confusion caused by my uppercase use of “A”.]  Angels – side long glances of the reflection in a passing window or car mirror.  The well know Angels at home that seem to take pleasure in pointing out my every flaw, each misplaced hair, each skin imperfection.

 

Really, I don’t want to look but the Angels get the better of me. A quick glance as I make my way from the living room into the bedroom and back.  Not a real in depth analysis but just an odd Angel of myself, seen reflected back to me as I pass the partly closed bathroom door.  Is that who I am right now?  I must say the most jarring part about the Angels – partial images appearing everywhere around me – is that they return a ‘me’ that is at times drastically different than the ‘me’ I am in my head.  My conception – my perception – of my outward appearance is always off.  This, in truth, I feel I could reconcile myself with if it were not for the eyes.  What do you do when the eyes staring back at you, reflected in the bizarre upward Angle of a car mirror –or what have you- don’t seem familiar?  And even if they are familiar, do not seem to possess the inward passion, desire, bravado and confidence you have come to know as YOUR eyes, your SELF.

 

It’s funny how the Angles have the power to alter my day.  They say every mirror is different, each reflective surface slightly convex or concave, and therefore portraying a more or less agreeable version of that which it reflects.  I know this.  I know they can’t be trusted, but as I exit a mirror containing room I do so with my sense of self completely confirmed – bravado, confidence and charm ablaze – or I don’t.  If not, I exit dejected, lost and somewhat confused, occasionally depressed, trying to build my sense of self up from scratch.  In the meantime feeling an imposter in my own skin – no, that’s not right – an imposter in someone else’s skin.  It’s only an Angle; it’s not to be trusted, yet its confirmation or denial of me through its ability to align some ‘inner’ me with some ‘outer’ version is unbelievably alluring.

 

Can I wash my hands without looking up?  Can I exit my car without a quick glance in the rear view just to make sure my hair is not doing some sort of Alfalfa ‘thing’? Can I look through windows and never at them? 

They say near death experiences change you.  Make you less superficial and more to the point. I must say that I have had more than my fair share. However after abandoning such a lifestyle, my life seems to slowly be filling with such banal, minor trivialities.  Sometimes we may just need bigger fish to fry.

It’s that time again

Ah, the first week of class.  Always an interesting compilation of intriguing class introductions, and the equally interesting albeit strenuous period of the teachers’ culling of the herds. 

Oh so you want to take my class with three times the approved limit of students crammed into every nook and cranny, every space against the wall occupied by another laptop carting body.  Well that shouldn’t be a problem, just read this over the weekend.

The funny part about it is that next week in class the teachers are going to have this funny look in their eyes when they pose easy questions to their audiences and receive only sleepy, befuddled stares in response.  We are asked to go into this zombie mode to have even a remote chance of completing the work they assign the first week – and then they inevitably wonder why we are not exactly on point by the time we finish such a gauntlet and walk through their doors.  For that matter, exactly how much coffee would you like me to drink trying to finish all this?  I happen to have given up all other, more effective and destructive, stimulants long ago.  You want me to read faster?  Well, I refuse.  I read how I read and it suits me.  I think about things, go off on tangents, pull out corollaries and points of interest, and fill the margins with a large percentage of what occurs to me as I read the text.  To me, this IS reading.  Anything else would be merely glazing over.  I want to digest what I read. 

I think, in part, this compulsion to break down what I read is a common delusion of mine that I can get anything done in one pass.  The same operation can be seen in so many little things I do:

Yes, I can make it out of the car (while locking the doors), across the street, and over to my apartment – with a couple hundred dollars of grocery bags cutting into my arms (and wrists and fingertips) – and still manage to get out my key and open the door.  Why?  Well two (or five or six) trips would be silly… 

Yes, I can burn off over a thousand calories at the gym (or so the ‘trustworthy’ machines tell me) – practically killing myself for hours on end so that walking back to my car I look like an individual who is quite certainly missing her cane – because going several times a week for a reasonable amount of time and pain would (once again) be silly…

So where does this leave me?  Slightly bitter about being assigned more than is reasonable, but hey, I like the challenge.  I will read everything assigned.  I will read them as thoroughly as if I had several weeks to finish them at my leisure (which ironically would most likely lead to my becoming distracted and therefore reading less of them).  I may be a little run down, but come next week I will be fully functioning as I make it into class.  And, importantly, during all this I will not drop off the face of the earth from all friends, family, and blog associations.

A Real Hurt; An Earned Pain

I do not normally do this.  Bike ride I mean.  Even a couple of months ago, after convincing Casey [he requests his name be put in full...] to take the bikes out, getting around the block was a struggle.  Okay, it was more than a struggle and I had to get off and walk uphill (by ‘hill’ I am referring to the slight rises in the pavement) more than once. So please, tell me exactly how it is that two days in a row I have taken my bike on a solitary trek through the hills (real ones this time)? As the miles fall behind me it is as if I am being projected forward.  Yes, the hills still hurt like a son of a … Well, needless to say they are not very easy, but the fact of the matter is that I was able to get past them.  I have found there is an indescribable feeling as the bike passes the high point and starts its plummet down the other side.  With legs that simultaneously burn and feel like jello, all I can do is hold on and hope, in desperation, that whatever steering I am able to do will be enough to save me from hitting a rock or bump in the trail – sending me, as my mind pictures frequently, catapulting through the air and down the hillside.

The green.  I am a slave to the green of the hills.  As I wind my way through the hillside, it steals all other thought from my mind until all I have left is an awe at the beauty in life.  The surreal.  The smell of being outside – the smell of dirt itself.   Connecting with the smells and sights that for me, recall a childhood connectedness with the outdoors.  Becoming in tune with life…with myself.

Alone.  Yes, I am aware that this is contrary to anything remotely advisable (especially in mountain lion terrain), but it cannot be helped.  Okay, the first day it could not be helped. Casey was at work and I was off early.  I needed something to do and a ride around the block simply turned into this grand adventure.  The second day?  By the second day I figured out how much it means to me to do this alone.  The entire ride was me against myself – conquering, learning, coping, surpassing.  I do have it in me to get over this incredibly tall, rocky hill.  I am brave enough to go speeding down the side of a mountain.   I can take the trails I am not familiar with and find out where their tiny, winding, barely visible paths lead.  I want to see the lake such-and-such a sign tells me is three more miles up.  And lastly, something equally significant as the rest, I can do all these things and then make my way back home.  The return trip where all the pedaling hurts so much more, the hills seem so much higher, the distance greater.  I can do this too.  I can make it back to my door.  Sore.  Utterly exhausted.  Spent. What a feeling.  Yesterday morning my muscles hurt in an uncomfortable sort of way.  Then I took my bike out and went longer, further, harder.  This morning my muscles are sore but in an almost pleasant way.  It seems that this is how I am supposed to feel. That this is how you feel when you tell your body to do things, and it responds by accomplishing what you ask of it.  This feeling is completely new to me.

Last fall I could hardly walk.  Could hardly get out of bed.  Between the smoking and the complete absence of the thyroid hormone T3, I was hardly able to function.  I still did it all [caffeinated to an incredibly high degree mind you]. Still commuted to work and school.  Still took on way more than I should have and still managed to somehow get it all done.  But it hurt. I hurt.  Walking was a challenge.  Lifting.each.leg.up. was a matter of will because at about 100 pounds (which, by the way, is counter-intuitive to hypothyroidism) all my muscles were atrophied to practically nothing and my lower legs were so swollen I could hardly pull a sock over them.  And the stairs at school? The ‘Jans steps’?  They were my personal hell.

Quit smoking.  New medicine.  Health(ier) eating.  A bit of time.  Now I almost feel REAL.  At least in a physical way.  Today, I am sore.  I can feel the muscles over my stomach contracting each time I take a breath. My body hurts, but simply put, it SHOULD.

Enforced Happiness

Yesterday, if you had asked me for my opinion on the holiday (in a non-religious sense of course), my answer would have revealed my indifference.

Easter.  Yes, a time to be with family, but once the anticipatory ‘bunny’ fades into the distance of youth  – and prior to having any kids of ones own – what else is there?  This would have been my response last night.This morning, waking up to a sky not yet inundated with overpowering sunlight, I knew what I wanted to do.  Well, if not wanted, at least what I knew I should do if I did not wish to feel the pangs of regret.  So, up I got, stumbling into the bathroom to turn on the muchtobright light, to make myself at least halfway decent in a braving-the-public-at-seven-a.m.-on-a-Sunday-morning sort of way.

The grocery store.    Avenues of display items, the whole of the store devoid of the mass of people I generally encounter on my early evening supply runs.  The ‘holiday aisle’.  Why don’t these baskets come pre-made?  Okay, a basket, some chocolates, some stringy stuff for the bottom, random toys – all, in all, way too many decisions for my sleep-fogged mind.  A couple of donuts.  Some flowers. 

The return home.  Putting everything together.  It’s at this point that something in me changed.  Now, if asked, I would have to respond that Easter doesn’t seem too bad.  Sort of an enforced jump-start on the merry spring outlook. You know, the outlook you imagine everyone having as you scroll through blogs only to find little more than picture after picture of flowers. I have subconsciously been avoiding just such an outlook, holed up in my apartment with the air conditioner telling me that winter is still outside my door.  Maybe this spring is not too bad.  Today, it actually seems quite nice.  Plus, summer is my actual nemesis and spring is only colored in my outlook by proximity..

And the sunflowers I bought for C scream happiness… Today feels like a good day. 

Music; or, A Soundtrack of Thoughts

Music.

 I am not a die hard fan.  I used to be. I used to know all [ahem, okay, a lot of anyway] the ‘up and coming’ artists.  I used to be one of those people with an IPOD forever sticking out of their pocket and a white cord attached to an ear.  If you wanted to talk to me, you had to do so loud enough to make yourself heard over the background soundtrack that I refused to turn off. 

IPODS break.  Things get busy.  Charging units hide themselves around the house and in the bottom of a car’s center console.

 I haven’t had music keeping me company for quite some time.  In the car, yes, but with a sound system that is forever on the fritz – that’s iffy.

So I go about listening to the only thing I have left.  My thoughts.  They have stepped up to the plate, magnificently, to fill the void left by music.  They question, confuse, muddle, ponder.  They SEEM to have their own agency but the ultimate goal of such a plan (scheem..) is something I am utterly in the dark about.  I listen.  People still have to talk loud enough to get through the background soundtrack – there is just a lack of melody these days.

 Today I woke up feeling a bit ‘off’.  In the head that is.  Probably due to a series of consecutive late nights studying and writing for exams/papers etc.

Sitting at my computer, working from home mind you, I had the bright idea to minimise my tasks for the day and go in search of a long lost ITUNES application.  Found it. Picked a song at random. [Put it on repeat because this is just something I DO - always have, and yes it annoys everyone but me].

Now I am sitting here with a long forgotten friend.  It’s this somewhat glazed, far away look in my eyes.  It’s not sadness – far from it – just this distancing from myself.  Not really escaping my head – but looking at it without the ‘ZOOM’ turned all the way up.

So now I wonder if I will make the effort to find that pesky little device…

Shades of Ourselves; Unformed Friendships

Shades of ourselves. Shades of others.

 We meet people and say things.  Try to get some point or another across while skipping over a thousand other equally important things.  No one will ever really know you but yourself.  We go through life trying to understand the people around us – impressions forming about those we meet – from the most limited of interactions.  It is like a figure giving off a hundred thousand shades of itself.  The figure is the mystery.  It will always be.  If I don’t ‘get’ me, who am I to ‘get’ you? 

 Sometimes I think that I don’t think/act/behave in a certain way that seems prevalent in those in life I encounter.  I don’t understand why people lie or deceive.  Oh, I understand the aggressive tendencies we have.  I understand OVER REACTING and being TACTLESS.  I understand saying something malicious as a defensive maneuver.  But why lie?  I watch so many around me fabricate these complicated entanglements for no clear-cut reason.  They seem to be stuck on dive and evade mode.  Is this a form of self preservation/protection.  Is the truth a place of vulnerability? 

I build my own type of walls.  I distance myself from others.  I have my intense lonely moments but always justify them with an inner desire to remain relatively solitary.  I think this ties into my sense of loyalty.  If I form an alliance, which for me constitutes anything more than a remote acquaintance, I give myself completely to it.  I will do anything for my family.  I am engaged and to be honest, (even as my sense of self rebels against my writing it…) I would do anything for him.  Maybe that’s why I don’t form true FRIENDSHIPS anymore.  In my youth I did.  And true to form, I would have done anything for them and expected the same in return.  Back then it didn’t dawn on me that we don’t all work in this all-or-nothing fashion.  I wound up hurt, used up and ditched.  They always lied too.  Time and time again until finally the point started to sink in. 

That was a long time ago.  I don’t have any steadfast reason for my lack of friendships these days.  I look to my parents (hell, anyone for that matter) and I see them surrounded by these beautiful, lasting friendships.  I understand that, at least in theory, I can form friendships without 1.becoming dependent on them and 2. investing too much in their worth.  In theory.  In the meanwhile I am sitting back from it all.  Searching for myself and what that means to me.  Learning to live honestly – especially with myself.  Trying to ‘get’ me (at least a little ;-) and perhaps at least a few of the shades I am casting.

 Listening to: several but at the moment: Goo Goo Dolls/”Black Balloon”.

My Little Office Apple-Trees

Let me start off by saying that my work schedule is somewhat sporadic.  Because of school, which I attend all day Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, I had to scale down to part time at work.  Now I work remotely on Wednesday’s and in the office on Friday’s.

 So a while back, when I was making the two hour commute to work each day, it finally began to sink in that I had been there almost a year and my work-space [it's not a cubical, it's not a cubical, it's not a ... okay it is a cubical] was quite devoid of anything personal.  Each morning I would walk to my desk (always the first or second to arrive due to the long commute and my theory that it’s better to be absurdly early than late), and look into the lives of my co-workers via the picture-collages, plaques, trinkets, decorations, and so forth that seemed to multiply in an endless desire to occupy all empty desk space.  Then I would reach my desk.  Not much but few stacks of paper cluttered with sticky-notes.  Hmm…no wonder I felt they didn’t think I belonged.  So, in a somewhat defiant manner (or so I told myself because I would not go the picture route), I bought a plant.

I found this plant in a tourist town up the coast – Solvang if you really care to know – in a little store catering to mother’s like mine.  I had let word slip of my plant-search and she (the absolutely wonderful, amazing, supportive, best-friend-of-a-mother she is) found one.  Over priced for sure, this was a delicate ivy of some sort that made its way up a four-leg wire guide that came to a point, about a foot and a half above the pot.  A beauty for sure, not that I had much hope of keeping it alive.

 Live it did, however, under the flickering, fluorescent light above my desk.  How? I have no idea, but sure enough new, tiny, brilliant green leaves started to appear and reach their way up in the air.  To me it was perfect and to the best of my knowledge, it declared that yes, this was some one’s desk, and no, there was no way to know the details of this person’s life just by passing their desk in the morning.

That was until my schedule changed, school began and this ‘part-time’ business started.  At first, during the hectic time of becoming one of the company’s first remote – or work-from-home - employee’s, I had yet to request that Friday be an in-office day.  I didn’t see the office for a three month stretch and when I returned, you guessed it, the plant was a crisp skeleton of what it one was.  This was not a case of withering and dying or simply a, leaves falling off the steam, issue.  No, my plant was a completely preserved version of its former self, down to the tiniest new foliage.  Damn.  Couldn’t someone have thrown a cup of water into the pot for you?  No, of course not, they didn’t have the trinkets and picture collages to bring you to the forefront of whatever they were thinking as they passed your desk. 

So on Friday’s when I make it into the office I look at the bones of my plant, and wonder at their stuborn defiance in holding on to each fragile leaf.  I do my best to water it – I guess this points at some belief that there is a core in those thin stalks which has not died out completely and which will reemerge in a glorious green statement of triumph. 

Nope.  Nothing.  Months have gone by and there was not the slightest sign of life.  Until the apple, or apples I should say, that is.  I was occupying my lunch in front of the computer one day, eating a Granny-Smith (my favorite, although they’re the only apples I eat so it’s not much of a contest).  When I got to the core – I eat the core, don’t ask me why – I saw that one of the tiny seeds had started to root. 

…I didn’t think this was possible:  as children we had a nanny from Romania.  She would bring back chicken or duck eggs – can’t remember which – on the plane with her and try to hatch them at our house.  It never worked.  Something to due with the metal scanner ‘rays’ you walk through.  I just applied the same logic to why, whenever I tried to plant a seed from something grocery-store bought, it never worked…

On an impulse I put the seeds into the pot of my skeleton plant.  Yesterday at work I looked over and sure enough there were about three, one inch apple trees growing. Green again.  It was nice.

Flash Mob versus Flash Individual

Doing my best the other day to waste as much time as possible, I was browsing through the school newspaper and came across an article on Flash Mobs.  Apparently I was a bit behind the eight-ball because I had never heard of such a thing. 

Flash Mob:  ”A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse.” – courtesy of Wikipedia

[The example given by the article was a group of people, gathering outside of some retail environment or another, "holding bananas up to their ears and chatting as if they were on cell phones."]

Since reading the article I can not seem to get the idea out of my head.  Not only do I expect to see a “mob” around every corner, I WANT to see them there.  Why?  Perhaps I am just sick of the day to day conformity I feel surrounded by.  I ‘expect’ and ‘WANT’ to believe that everyone else around me is inwardly as fed up as I am.  Why does everyone go from one task to the next – from one day to the next, from weekend to weekend - without really noticing their life blurring by.  I do understand the whole ’society must abide rules, laws, and morals to avoid utter chaos’ thing.   Still, every time I drive on the freeway, jammed with cars, [and yes, maybe this is a Los Angeles thing...] I can’t stop imagining every vehicle using whatever off-roading capabilities they posses, driving up curbs, sidewalks, hillsides – making their own roads – and actually getting to where they have to go. It is the unending lines of break lights that do me in.  I can’t stand them.  I can’t stand everyone going about their day, caught up in whatever triviality they are currently obsessing over, standing there, obediently, ‘in line’ – metaphorically and literally.

I expect and want to see flash mobs wherever I go, and to be honest I don’t understand why we all seem unable to think outside the box which is our life.  The reason this bugs me – I am sure – is because in a large part it reflects the aspects of my own life I most abhor.  Some of the things I do – I DO – because society sets them in front of me and I mindlessly succumb (or at least I am unable to think of and enact an alternative).  This begs the question of why, if I so abhor the continutiy and mindless flow, do I not start my own, one-person-flash-mob?  Because that would be ‘crazy’, and because it would seem that it takes numbers to say anything sanely.

What place in line was I again?

A Scary Situation

Throughout my life I have been in various ’scary’ situations.  Situations when one thing or another has lead to some unsafe circumstance.  Why is it when someone we love is in such a situation it is SO MUCH WORSE?  The feeling of helplessness increases exponentially…but it’s more than that.  I can block out my own memories, fright/flight impulses – I can glaze over the top of them as only quasi-real moments in my life.  With someone I love it’s a different story.  There’s no forgetting.  It happened, it was scary, it was real, and it is not going away anytime soon. 

TV Challenges

Okay, I have to say I love the challenges.  I am talking about TV shows like Fit Camp, Biggest Loser, Gladiators, etc. and so forth.  It’s the challenges that I can’t get enough of.  Who thinks of these things?  What will people agree to do in the name of TV?  So you are being filmed for this show and therefore have agreed to do WHATEVER you are asked [sorry, not asked - told].  Why don’t we ever hear about the people coming up with the challenges?  They are like mini gods.  They get their kicks out of making people pull hot air balloons, run up mountains, and complete rediculous obstacle courses (which in turn remind me of dog obedience and agility competitions). I have to admit, it seems a bit silly.

Why do we need to watch TV to get our fill of these ‘challenges’?  It seems like there should be clubs, organized sports even, dedicated to the creation, participation, and observance of just such events.  Maybe we all just want to act like kids in made up games and competitions. ‘Bet I can race to the end of the street, around the light-pole and back, before you.’