Goodbye, Former Self.

Am I the only one who feels that font is an important first step to writing?

Maybe it’s because I’ve never particularly liked my handwriting.  I like to choose fonts that are sort of type-set for serious writing and for more personal venting I like fonts that look more handwritten. 

In school I used it as a procrastination technique; it would take me hours to choose the right font for a paper.  Even if I had to download a new one.  Sometimes it took so long I needed a snack or bathroom break. 

Oops.

Can’t start now.  Gotta pee instead.  

Darn.

This is not really relevant to what I had intended to write at all, but I think about it every time I start to write something because I like to write using Word and then copy and paste it into my blog.  The font is the main reason for that, even though I do just really like the format of Word.

I also like Excel.  Like, a lot. 

I love making spreadsheets. 

It’s a sickness.

I was thinking this morning about the ways in which I’ve changed over the last five years. 

When I started this blog I wanted it to be similar content-wise to Sex and the City.  The show, not so much the book.  I read the book and, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. 

If you’ve watched the show but not read the book, the first season is very similar style-wise.  And for those of you who haven’t watched the show, the first season is the worst. 

The book was ultimately very depressing and Carrie isn’t a character that people really want to be.  It’s much less settled and more party girl than the show ends up being.

ANYWAY.

That is not what happened. 

The thing is, the person I was when I started this blog five years ago was happy and more comfortable in her own skin than I am now (weight gain), but I realize now she was pretty far into denial about how lost she was.  And she was still really fucked up. 

I bitched about my ex A LOT.

It took until around the summer of 2012 for me to really get over him.  It’s funny now when I think about it because I was afraid to let him go all of the way because I was terrified I’d end up alone.  After my first year at college ended I realized I was going to be happier without him, whether I found someone else or not.

I remember the moment I let go very distinctly, and I’m glad I do because it brings me peace every time it comes to mind.

I was going grocery shopping.  I had just parked in the lot and he was texting me (and hiding it from his current girlfriend).  We were fighting.  The whole time I knew him we were either fighting or I was letting him walk all over me.

I remember thinking so clearly that I didn’t really want to talk to him anymore.  I was almost surprised. 

Then he said we should stop talking.  I agreed.  I went inside and did my shopping with a feeling of lightness in my chest.  I went home.

Not long after I started really talking to Yoshi.

I got the bow tattoo on my ring finger.  Just in case I needed a reminder other than the Cherokee on my rib cage.

I started dating Yoshi. 

Eventually I just didn’t reply anymore when he tried to contact me and I know now it’s better that way.

Sometimes I regret the time I wasted letting him back in time after time, year after year, but I think if I hadn’t done that I wouldn’t have become who I am now and ultimately that person is much cooler than who I was at 20. 

I’m not saying I’m thankful, rather that I just don’t regret.

I took a rather long and unintentional break from blogging.  I didn’t have a lot of time for it in school and the things that came to mind to write about seemed silly and childish.  When I moved to Santa Rosa I didn’t have much time for it, either.

Truth be told, I really didn’t write much after finishing school.  Because of that I think I really lost touch with myself for a while there.

It took me writing consistently again and having time with myself to figure that out.  I’ve never felt so lost and been in a stable relationship before.  It was so easy to lose myself in work and blame him for everything that felt wrong.  And everything felt wrong because I wasn’t happy, but it felt like I had no idea what made me happy anymore.

I missed feeling happy. 

I missed not feeling as though I needed the antidepressants I had been taking. 

I missed feeling like myself.

Now I watch the changing winds push and pull at the summer fog and every time the clouds move out the sky reflects on the water in the most pure and cerulean blue I think I’ve ever seen. 

I’m not afraid to dream anymore.

It’s like that clear and bright reflective blue has latched onto my heart and I can feel hope again.

Even though I feel the weight of 30 breathing down my neck, I'm less freaked out by my next birthday than I was before.  I like who I am now more than who and what I was at 20.

It's okay that I don't have children and I'm not going to be married by then.  It's only 30.  

Besides, maybe instead of kids I'll have an adventure instead.  

Who knows.

Moving Upward.

The ocean is laden with fog today. 

I know this despite not having even gone outside yet because I can see to the water from my kitchen window.

I won’t lie, this may play a part in the fact that I mind washing dishes so much less lately. 

We live in a real neighborhood for the first time in years, not in some shitty shoe box apartment the middle of town.  There are no words to express how much I hated the last apartment.  It was listed as a one bedroom but it was really a studio with a large walk-in closet.  Except the walk-in closet had a window and an adjoining smaller closet.  That must have been either for a single occupant’s storage or for the man’s clothes if it was a couple like us. 

Then entryway to the complex was beautiful because it was older, so the foliage had plenty of time to grow large and beautiful.  There were walnut trees, cottonwood trees, and one pine tree.  There were large flowers and bushes accenting the edges of the lawns, and there was a creek bed separating it from another complex of nicer and larger condos that were stratospherically out of our price range.

The creek bed was lined with trees and full of feral cats.

Somehow this place was located in a time/space jump, because it seemed like all the other tenants were Mexican families with children.  The children became a wolf pack on sunny days (which there were many of because California, despite the wet weather this year, has been drought-central for about the last five) and would run the complex screaming until darkness had firmly settled its cloak around the West coast.

The screaming was all day long on weekends, especially in summer when the pool was open.  It was punctuated by the calls of a bicycle snack vendor who used a bike horn to lure people out for overpriced chips with chili powder on them, and a woman with a bell for a similar purpose who cried, "TAMALES" at the top of her lungs for several minutes.  There were also sounds that occurred at any time of the day or night: car alarms and horns, sirens, our neighbors fighting violently, cats yowling, dogs barking, bass, mariachi music, or both from people with absolutely no common decency, homeless people rooting through the dumpsters for cans, and the miscellaneous people, not necessarily tenants, who would wander through the complex shouting at each other or themselves.

The first eight months or so there was also a group of college students across the interior lawn from our unit.  They would smoke pot in their back yard until all hours of the night and sometimes, often on Thursdays, they would have parties.  One of the partygoers would inevitably end up sick and for some reason would choose to vomit somewhere on the lawn or surrounding bushes anytime between three and five AM, which is awesome when you like to sleep with your bedroom window open, have a very specific phobia, and have work the next morning.

This person is actually the primary of about three reasons I took antidepressants for a while when we lived there. 

Between that, monetary issues because everything was fucking expensive (particularly rent for our closet), and some generalized anxiety resulting from my daily commute, I was a wreck for a little bit.  Nothing compared to how I was moving here, but nine months after moving there I couldn’t compartmentalize anymore and even though I didn’t feel particularly depressed my doctor decided to put me on a moderate dose of Prozac to see if it would help my overall symptoms.

It helped.  A lot.

But when we realized the time had come to move I had just stopped taking them and we couldn’t afford for me to get a refill, anyway.

It was all just really poor timing that I don’t feel up to digging into today.

The apartment complex was on the West side of Santa Rosa, which was great for us because it was less than ten minutes out of town and 30 minutes of beautiful forested countryside to the beach. 

I think the beach drive is what I miss most, aside from people.

That drive was where we got engaged a little over two months before we moved.  It hurts not to be able to visit it whenever we want to, but at the same time I’m so glad it was a special place and we at least still live close enough to it that we can go by when we visit his family in the Central Valley or friends/family in the Bay Area.

There are places here in Humboldt that remind me of Santa Rosa.  That helps, but I think I’ll always miss it.  That’s hard to admit because I always assumed we’d move away from there.  If we decided to have a family it would take a long time to establish ourselves there and I don’t think we’d ever be able to do it the way we want to. 

I don’t want to raise a family in an apartment.  I don’t think it’s fair to children, not to have the space to play outside.  I want to own property someday.  I’m already tired of other people telling me what I can and can’t do in my home.  Mostly I’m tired of people telling me I can’t get a dog or I shouldn’t have any pets at all because obviously I’m going to let them destroy the rental property. 

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the smell of cat piss as much as the next woman, but if I didn’t care about my pets enough to really take care of them why would I have them?  Why would I worry about letting my cats outside enough to keep them indoors if I wasn’t going to clean up after them and make sure they were taken care of? 

It is my duty as a pet owner to provide the domesticated animals I keep with the best life possible and anyone who is not willing to do that does not deserve to have a pet.  In some cases they deserve to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

And that is one of the few things I am truly passionate about.

I miss San Francisco being a little over an hour away, depending on traffic.  I miss the drive across the Golden Gate, though I don’t miss receiving the $7.00 toll in the mail three to five weeks later.  The thing is, we rarely had the money to drive to the city for anything other than family events.  I think in two years we were able to go for dinner once.  We always planned to go to the opera, but there wasn’t money for that either.

If we had made it a priority we could have, I’m sure, but especially after the first year when we were both starting to make decent money the other problems compounded and stacked on top of each other.  We both were working full time and neither of us wanted to do anything when we got home.  Often when I came home from work I still answered emails and Skypes from the factories in China, so sometimes I felt like I was never done working.  That meant we would get something from the store or fast food for dinner and rarely did regular grocery shopping. 

I hated the tiny water closet of a kitchen in that apartment and cooking in it was miserable because there was practically no counter space, the cooking area was a range on top of what I think may have been Maytag’s answer to the EZ-Bake Oven, circa approximately 1984, and much of the teeny tiny bit of navy blue counter space that existed was covered by dirty dishes because there was no dishwasher.  The deal was that I cooked and he did dishes.  Since I rarely cooked because of the aforementioned reasons, he rarely did the dishes.  And I wouldn’t do the dishes because I was trying to press the point that it was his chore.  Sometimes there were so many that it would take over three hours to hand was them all. 

That is why I am so happy that I’m able to keep my kitchen clean and beautiful right now.  I know it’s sanitary, I like the space, and it can be a safe place for me like it should be.

I know little pieces of my heart will always be in the North Bay, sprinkled around at my favorite places: a grain of sand at Kala, a larger piece at our beach spot, a little one at the Raley’s down the street (the most beautiful, clean, and spacious grocery store I have ever seen), and sprinklings here and there at places like Taps, Old Chicago, and Jamison’s Roaring Donkey in Petaluma, and El Patio in Santa Rosa.

I miss the happiness I was able to obtain there and the people who made it feel like home to me.

I can only hope I forge friendships half as wonderful here. 

For now, though, I am able to keep myself content with watching the fog move over the ocean and seeing ships move in and out of the harbor from my kitchen, cooking delicious meals every day in a space I love, weeding in a garden I didn’t think I’d have for years still, and taking peaceful drives up the Northern California coastline to see elk, giant ferns, and even larger redwood trees. 

And, of course, the open ocean.  Because, let’s face it, that’s where my heart really has been this whole time anyway.

Dichotomy of [Wo]Man.

Does every person at some point in their adult life stop and think, “This is not who I expected to be?”

My thirtieth birthday is bearing down on me.  I can feel it, a darkness in the corner of the room, quietly breathing, watching me. 

I thought I would be so different by the time I turned 30.  Things changed so slowly after college and I feel like I’m always vacillating between wanting to be who I am now and missing the person I got to be at 23.  So often people want to go back to their teen years, but I would choose 23-25, minus the crazy ex-boyfriend.

When did I become the person constantly making lists of things that we need from the grocery store in her head?  When did I become someone perfectly content to cook and clean and put things away all day long? 

I loved my old job.  I didn’t always love some of the people I worked for at my old job, but I loved it.  I loved the place I worked for my early twenties even more.  I love feeling important.  I love how much I can accomplish and how competent I feel when I’m taking control of something and I really know what I’m doing in an office.

BUT

I feel happier and more content than I have at least in the last two years just cleaning, writing, and cooking. 

I thought I would hate being at home.  I thought I would feel trapped and resentful.  Funny, when I actually felt trapped and resentful was when I was the only one supporting us at all. 

I think what really makes the difference for me is the kitchen.

Honestly.

This is the cleanest my kitchen has been in two years.  He has always been in charge of the dishes.  That was the deal: I cook, you clean up, we do equal work.  He always seemed to have trouble following through on the dishes.  I wash them almost right away and the kitchen always looks clean.  And I feel like a domestic goddess because my kitchen is clean.

Sometimes there’s cat shit on the rug in front of the bathroom, but I can clean that up and still be a domestic goddess because my kitchen in fucking beautiful.

I just don’t understand how it came to this.

For all my independence and all my workplace competence, I enjoy being at home.  That terrifies me.  I keep thinking I should feel lost or guilty for this and so I have moments in which I am either or both.

But when I really get down to it, when I’m really and honorably truthful with myself, I am happy.  I am happy to wake up every morning with my cats, walk into my kitchen and check the weather by how much fog has gathered on top of the bay like whipped cream on a sundae, and work on cutting through the vines in the yard for a few hours.  I’m happy to do the dishes and laundry.  I’m happy to make breakfasts and lunches the night before.  I’m happy to make a weekly meal plan every Friday and look forward to making those dishes the next week. 

The only problem is that I am lonely.  Severely lonely.  Lonely enough to make small problems seem huge and make me feel bored or useless every minute I don’t find a way to stuff full of some kind of project, and sometimes that loneliness makes me feel completely lost all over again.   

Slow Recovery.

In the past few months my life has been turned completely upside down.

I forgot how cathartic writing is for me and I didn't take the time to actually write.

I've started working on a new project this week, something I will hopefully be ready to share soon.

For now, I'm just floating away from what I used to be and what I've become, hoping to find myself again someday.

Traffic Report.

This morning on my commute to work I got to see karma at work.  And between that and the fact that Colors of the Wind came on Pandora with enough time for me to hear the whole thing before getting to the office, my mood was set for the day.

During the first chunk of my drive to work I have to merge onto the 101 from a strange on-ramp; the on-ramp I use merges with another on-ramp from the street before mine and both merge onto 101 from the same lane.  It's very annoying, but there are lights that control the flow of traffic so it really could be much worse.

The karma action happened to the guy in the Jeep that was on the ramp behind me.  He was tailgating and revving his engine trying to intimidate the people in front of him so they would speed up.  Once he got behind me on the ramp I refused to speed up because I don't respond to intimidation techniques.  I'll pull over if I get tired of the bullshit, but otherwise I don't speed up for people that are trying to push me.  People just don't seem to understand that one car won't make a difference when you're already late for something, especially here.

Jeep merged onto the 101 in the middle of a line of cars before the line even dots.  Then he kept revving trying to get the black Lexus in front of him to speed up.  So the Lexus slowed down and let me over.

Then my favorite part happened.

There was a line of cars on the left preventing Jeep from moving over and zipping around.  He was stuck in another line of cars, trying to intimidate the dude in the Lexus to get him to move up the extra car length he left between his car and mine.  And Lexus slowed down a little more.  Just for good measure, just to be sure Jeep was stuck back there, wasting his gas like an idiot, until he got off the freeway two exits later.

Traffic sucks.  Everyone knows it.  But don't try to push your way through it like a dick.  You're not going to get there much faster, anyway.  I'd rather build up the good driving karma, just in case, because I have to merge A LOT and I don't like driving on the shoulder.

The moral of this story?

Don't be an asshole behind the wheel or some stodgy dude in a Lexus is going to box you in.  And I will love him for it.