The Calm After the Rage

I hate running. Endorphins don't work on me. I suck at meditating. I do love sleeping but I'm not sure we can count that...

What is my point, you ask? My point is that these are all the ways people recommend shutting up their minds, relaxing... and they just don't work for me.

Everyone has something that puts them at ease... Running, painting, yoga, cooking, cleaning, whatever. It's that one thing in the world that gives you that feeling of "ahhhhhh." It puts your mind at ease because instead of concentrating on whatever it was that was bothering you in the first place, you concentrate on what you're doing and eventually that thing that was bothering feels like less of a burden.

But see, for me those things do the opposite half the time. Instead of clearing my mind, they just provide me with extra time to think more intensely about what it was that was gnawing at my consciousness.

I Don't Know About You...

But I have had a supremely awful past 24 hours.

Looooong story short: I'm dead-ass broke, I'm disappointing my friends who were expecting me to visit them on Friday (and feel like shit about it) and I think I'm getting my period because it's only 8:00 in the morning and I've almost cried about four times already today.

In other words, getting up for work today was not just unpleasant, it was physically painful.

This baby gets it.

But something wildly unexpected happened when I got to work on this terrible Tuesday morning.

This morning, life threw me a curve ball and my job actually cheered me up.

I'm known for my blatant mistrust of children and general wariness when I'm around them. And honestly, sometimes working in a school setting can seem a lot like being back in high school--women are everywhere and where there are large groups of women crowded together, there are large amounts of drama that follow close behind.

But today two amazing things happened.

The first one seems so simple, so meaningless. Such a small but grand gesture. It meant the world to me. It is something that I cannot put a price on nor express the gratitude I feel for my co-worker for this seemingly simple and meaningless task.

She brought me a coffee.

I had just finished mine from earlier and was sorely missing its delicious caffeine-ness when Em* walked through the door, smiling with a coffee for me in her hand.

That was one of the times I almost cried... but the only time because I was overcome with happiness rather than engrossing sadness.

The second thing that happened is what really, really floored me.

I'm doing my daily rounds and walk into a classroom of little monsters. They're dancing to some music and at first I pay no attention. That is until they belt out some T-Swift.

Twenty-one four years screaming, "I don't know about you! But I'm feelin' twenty twoooooooo!" apparently is a surefire way to put a smile on your face and lift your spirits.

Who knew the little minions would be the ones to pull me out of my cloudy funk and into the sunshine.

Maybe I've been working here for too long or maybe not long enough... Either way, I'm starting to like those little buggers. And I mean, I don't know about you, but today, I'm feelin' 22.

Identity, Legacy and Social Networking

Assuming that computers and general electricity will still be around after my generation dies (and that we aren't all annihilated by the zombie apocolypse...) social networks will no doubt continue to flourish and I have recently come to the terrifying conclusion that this is what we will pass on to our children.

Twitter will be what they remember us by; Facebook will be our legacy.

I really do not know much about computers and the infinite abyss of time and space that exists within them. But I know they say once you put it up there's really no taking it down. In other words, even if you think you deleted that picture of you drunkenly doing a naked keg stand... somewhere, somehow it still exists. And it can be found with a few simple clicks.

Whatevs. I heart Instagram.

It's cool and petrifying but quickly becoming an accepted side effect of the internet.  We're not going to stop using it so we may as well accept that whatever we chose to put out there will stay out there forever.

But what scares me, for reasons I can't quite put into words yet, is that these social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter... those will be what we leave our children to remember us by. Once upon a time people left behind journals where they recorded their thoughts so that their ancestors could one day know a part of them. They would write a line just to get it down and see the words in front of them.

Nowadays we update our status.

A Song of Vice and Ire: Part 2

A Clash of Things

Whenever my mother goes a little insane with cleaning, she runs around the house like a schizophrenic chicken with it's head cut off. She gets crazy eyes, crazy hair and you can barely breathe through the tension in the air that surrounds her. She's overworked and all worked up and trying to do a million things at once. She's trying to scrub and organize and make sure that no one messes up whatever she just finished cleaning and... inevitably, she hurts herself.

It happens. Every. Time. It's unavoidable. And though seeing my mother get hurt makes me want to cry while punching someone in the face... in the end, it's the only thing that brings her back down to Earth.

Okay, so my mom's slightly less aggressive but equally as insane.

She's been on a bit of a frenzy lately, with spring cleaning and all, and since most of these deep cleaning sessions seem to go down on the weekends, I've been able to avoid the bulk of them. But unfortunately, this week, she decided to do a little weekday cleanup. I sat on the couch waiting. All my muscles were tense and I wasn't even paying any attention to Boy Meets World, which is usually captivating.

Sure enough I hear a loud SMACK and a "shit!" I cringed because I knew what had happened and I also knew that my mom had really hurt herself because she never curses. I walk over tentatively, "Mom, are you okay?"

"Yeah, I just smacked my shin on the stair." I watch her take two deep breaths and just like that the tension is gone. My mom's back and I can relax.

All recklessness leads to some sort of self-inflicted harm, eventually.

We can only floor it for so long, until our carelessness gets the better of us and we're forced to slow it down. All the pressure and stress culminate in that one moment of agonizing pain, be it physical or emotional, and after the initial shock wears off we are finally able to take three deep breaths and calm the hell down.

On Consistency...

*I wrote this in July 2012 and recently rediscovered it.*

"Fuck."

I put my martini glass back down after spilling it all over my hand. I've never understood how they never spill them in the movies.  

"Ugh, what are we doing?!"

My friend is trying to ask me what we're doing tonight but I don't realize that at the time. She catches me in the middle of one of many space-outs and I can't help but consider her question in rather different terms.

I suppose I can't speak for all recent college graduates when I say that it's the strangest time of our lives thus far... but I'm fairly confident that I can speak for most. I've tried, and failed, countless times to translate these emotions into words. (You can imagine what that does to my self-esteem as a writer).  

My mind just fails to analyze feelings that my heart simply does not recognize.

Just as I'm about to answer, I snap back to reality and remember that we are currently sitting at the bar she works at, at 9:00 at night on a Saturday.

"Do you mean tonight or in life?"

"Well, I meant tonight," she takes a long swig of Jameson, "but I guess life, too." We let the word, "life," hang, suspended, in the air.

A Song of Vice and Ire

*This is the first part in a series of ridiculous rants. Read at your own risk.*

Part 1: The Game of Hoes

Mornings that I can only drink water and cannot possibly fathom the idea of coffee... are typically bad mornings.

This was one of those mornings.

As I sat at my computer, desperately trying to ward off unforgiving nausea and a severe case of the shakes, I thought back on the conversation that had ignited a series of drunken epiphanies.

A friend and I had been arguing over the politics of love, life and sex. Mostly sex, though, with a little "love," mixed in.  She made the rather audacious proclamation that it's all merely a game. And you either win or you lose.

Taken slightly aback by her simplifying, Charlie Sheen-esque antics, I immediately disagreed with her.

"How can you possibly define love or sex or anything in such black and white terms?"

Alright, I may not have posed it quite that elegantly at the time nor do I remember exactly what her response was, but it was something along the lines of, "Think about it. It's all a game. And you can win or you can lose."


I think deep down I had always kind of assumed that when you played the game of love, or more importantly, when you played the game of hoes, everyone loses.

Speaking of hoes...

It's all a game.

Maybe it was the margarita, Sauvignon Blanc and Guiness trifecta-of-death combination coursing through my veins or perhaps it was the fact that it's been so long since I've been "in love," that I'm starting to think I don't even know what the fuck it means, but something about the way she said it the second time just made... sense.

There's winning and there's losing and there's not really any in between.

(And if you think you're "in between," you're more likely in denial of losing.)

The only real difference between the game of love and the game of sex is that the former relies upon a balance of two individuals, a back-and-forth, an even combination of openness and communication that results in equal "winning," or crashes and burns into equal "losing."

(And then begins the battle of the exes, where we all know there's a clear winner and a clear loser... I'm looking at you, guy-who-used to date J. Law)

But the latter... well, the latter, to me, is actually a bit more complex simply because it relies nearly entirely on the individual. I mean, I think we can all agree that in both cases, "winning," basically just means being happy. And in the game of hoes, as long as you're happy doing what you're doing, well who cares, right?

Well, sort of. The complications stem from questions of insecurity and vulnerability. See, when you're not in a relationship, you don't have that significant other to rely on; instead, you rely on yourself. Your happiness, therefore, depends entirely upon you, not your girlfriend, not your boyfriend, not your fuck buddy... you.

And if you're not winning, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Long Hair, Don't Care

"Oh, are you not feeling well today?"

Isn't that just the worst question in the world? Translated, it means, "Wow, you look like shit."

Which ultimately means that I probably made the conscious decision not to wear make up today. I look more tired because I am tired and didn't have the time to conceal the ever-growing dark circles under my eyes.

Furthermore, I didn't brush my hair this morning. Now, I realize that to many this is just being lazy... but that means you probably have straight hair/thin hair or more free time to tame your hair. My hair is almost down to my behind, thick as hell and answers to no one but itself. It's wildly wavy with a mind of its own. Some mornings I wake up and it looks amazing, natural and I see the envy in other womens' eyes... Other mornings I look like a lion who just touched one of those electric balls at a children's museum.

Ya just never know.

Mornin!

But what I do know is that I think making myself a delicious, healthy breakfast (egg whites, a piece of whole wheat toast and the most important part of the most important meal of the day: coffee) is more important to me than doing my hair OR my makeup.

And call me crazy, but I'm really not willing to wake up at 5:00 in the morning just so I can curl my hair and do my make up. To me, that is a solid waste of perfectly good sleep time. But the issue is I show up to work looking like this:

Coffee... I need... coffee...