The Heart On My Sleeve Is A Decoy.

When something Good happens, my gut reaction is terror, which I rationalize by doubting the goodness of the Good Thing, which leads (in the functional sense) to nothing Good ever happening, because I'm too busy trying to be Right, when I should be taking risks and and opening up and letting things be Good.

Which, ahhhhgh.

AHHHHGH.
_

Where Do They All Come From?

I've related this story in person a couple of times, but thought I ought to write it down anyway. It happened a little before Christmas.

An older lady, sixty-something, shuffled into the store where I work. She stood clutching a shopping bag and waiting for the thick plastic expanse of her glasses to defog, eventually wiping them on a small patch of sweater clear from appliquéd pine trees. Reaching into the bag, she removed a box of greeting cards, along with a neatly folded receipt. The picture on the cards was, of course, kittens in Santa hats.

"I'd like to return these, please," she said.

"Was there anything wrong with them?" I asked.

"No," she said, "I just didn't realize when I bought them what they said on the inside."

I read the greeting off the back of the box: "We wish you a Meowy Christmas."

So Santa kittens were great, but puns that depended on an implicit speech impediment were crossing into territory so disgustingly cutesy that even this sweet old lady, blinking-nosed Rudolph pin and all, was unwilling to transgress. I could respect that.

Then she continued, "It says 'We.' I live alone, so . . . "

With a resolutely casual shrug, she broke my heart.

Art versus Life versus Living

When you analyze a story or a film or play, you look for the themes and motifs and patterns and symbolism, all that good junk. When you look at life, though, do you (for example) see a child let go of a balloon and think to yourself, as it bobs away toward outer space, “that must represent my youth slipping away”? I think that way sometimes, though I’m sure it’s silly. Because the idea that things happen simply to symbolize meaning in my life is so profoundly self-centered it makes me worry about becoming some kind of sociopath. I suppose it doesn’t have to be selfish, though. Just because the balloon means one thing to me does not exclude it from being meaningful to others. To the child who let it go so she could cross the monkey bars, it was the realization that she needs to let go of the past to embrace something new. To the estranged father who tried to buy the child’s love with it, it represented what an ephemeral presence he's allowed himself to become. These overlapping, interlocking meanings might hold us together like some kind of cosmic crossword puzzle. Maybe god is Will Shortz. Born on an Arabian horse farm in Indiana.

Has it ever happened to you where you learn about a thing you’d never heard of before, or had never bothered to think about, and suddenly it’s everywhere? Is this a dramatic device, a coincidence, or is it just that now that you’re aware of this thing, you are consciously looking out for it? Is it because somehow everyone noticed at once, and it’s spreading? Is this why contemporaries in the sciences tend to arrive at similar conclusions at similar times? Is there an underlying structure we are conforming to, or an overarching one we are building for ourselves, or an imaginary one we are desperately clinging to because patterns equal meaning to the human brain, and we want to be meaningful?

These ideas always seem to creep up when I should be sleeping. Maybe it is because my brain knows I should be dreaming by now, like I missed my hotel checkout time, so it’s throwing out my suitcases full of heavy subconscious nonsense. I remember someone telling me that 3 A.M. is when man is at his weakest. I seem to recall this person meaning it in the spiritual sense, but you know, I don’t actually remember.

Memory is powerful. Say you bumped into a guy on the sidewalk. It’s not a big deal; you get on with your day. Then you see on the news that a person has gone missing, and they show his picture, and it’s that guy you bumped into, and you remember him – now that event is meaningful. So the present effects the past as much as it does the future. And interpreting the past always changes it.

We have reached a point in society where huge chunks of our reality rely on our collective imaginations to keep existing. Money, for example. If everybody stopped putting their faith in the idea of numbers, our monetary system would simply cease to exist. Facts are that way, too. If everyone behaves as though a thing is true, then functionally, it might as well be true. A lot of the –isms get by on this principle. Sexism, for instance. If the commonly held perception is that a woman can’t be an astronaut, then she won’t be allowed into astronaut school, and then she can’t be an astronaut. This is also a way in which people weasel out of accomplishing things. They decide it would never succeed, so they don’t try, so obviously it doesn’t happen for them. Whatever it is. Often a novel.

Write your novels, is what I’m telling you. And telling me. Godspeed, and goodnight.

I Can See Clearly Now

So folks, it turns out that if you go six years without visiting the eye doctor, your eyes can change, and you may need glasses. As I now do. Picked out frames on Wednesday. I almost picked a different pair, and about an hour later I saw a little old lady wearing those exact ones, so I feel that I have chosen wisely. I’m not old, and as my great-grandfather put it: “All ladies are women, but not all women are ladies.” Ahem.*

I used to need reading glasses, but apparently since I did not wear them consistently and am a giant bookworm nerdface, my eyes overcorrected and I am nearsighted now. This sounds made-up, I know. It sounds like I’m that one person you sometimes talk to:

Them: Then blah-blah happened to me, isn’t that weird?!
You: Yeah, something similar happened to my cousin –
Them: But it happened to me WAY WEIRDER. I am SO WEIRD. My life is SO WEIRD.

That person makes me crazy, always trying to prove some nebulous something to everyone. I am not being them on purpose. The same eye thing happened to my optometrist’s daughter, so it can’t be that unusual. It is just what happened. Sometimes, weird things just happen.

And all that’s really funny, because that disclaimer was just me trying to prove something to you all. It drives me just as crazy when I do it, if not more so. And I don’t know why I do it, except that I want everyone to like me all the time. Which is ridiculous at best, and toxic at worst, because there are times I’ve compromised myself to be X thing for X person, and X person, therefore, doesn’t actually have a clue who I am. Which is maybe the point – if X person doesn’t like me, who cares, they didn’t know me anyway.

You can’t lose a race you don’t enter. But you can’t win it, either, or even get a participant ribbon, or fall and skin your knee and be tended to by a sexy concerned citizen and fall in love and have his sexy concerned babies or whatever. Yet here I sit on the sideline with my fake twisted ankle, cheering on everyone else and hoping that if I’m happy enough for them maybe it’ll overpower the way I feel for myself.

Part of it is trust. Trust is a tough thing. The people I really, truly trust, I could probably count on one hand even if I were a three-toed sloth. And I would not make the cut. I second-, third-, and thirty-fifth guess every decision I make.

Let’s take a sec and contemplate those few I do trust, though. Trust doesn’t mean I think they’ll never stumble or fail or do anything to hurt me. Trust means knowing that they won’t hurt me on purpose, and that if they do hurt me they’ll try to understand so that it doesn’t happen again; that their mistakes are only that, mistakes; that when they fail, it won’t be for lack of effort. It’s knowing they’ll know the same things about me. It’s not an expectation of perfection. It’s accepting someone. And it’s accepting their acceptance of you.

So probably it’s hard to trust others BECAUSE it’s hard to trust myself. Once again, I am my own Step One. It’s so easy to write that out. Why is it difficult to act on? How does that change happen?

Now’s the part where I tie it in to the title of the post! Do you know that song? It is in the motion picture Cool Runnings, and also Grosse Pointe Blank. There is a line where I am not entirely sure of the lyrics, and that is the line that makes all the difference.

“I can see all obstacles in my ...”

A) Way, or B) Wake

If it’s B, well, good for that guy, nothing bad will ever happen again, he’s Cinder-fucking-ella. Great. But! If it’s A, that’s another story! He can see what he’s up against, and it might be really rough, but he’s going to make it anyway.

So, that’s it. That’s me, letter A. I see now what I’m up against, and it’s going to be a bright, sunshiny day.


*The following are things I partake in that would probably be unladylike according to my great-grandfather:

Chewing gum
Wearing denim slacks
Speaking out of turn
Painting my face with makeup like a brazen hussy
Leaving the house unaccompanied by a chaperone
Slingshot-ing my underwear into the laundry basket

So This Is Christmas

I used that song as my FB status too. Cut me some slack, it is one of the three and a half Christmas songs I actually like. A lot of Christmas songs suck. A lot of Christmas stuff sucks.

The thing I do like about Christmas, though, is the free pass it gives you to tell people you love them without having to explain so much.

Maybe the explaining isn’t really necessary anyway. It just seems like such a scary word to a lot of people, like you have to muzzle it with all these other words and convince them it’s not going to bite, just so they don’t run away.

So don’t run away, okay?

I love you.

-Your Laser Cowgirl

Materialmystic

So when I'm feeling insecure about life stuff, one of the urges I get is to buy things. How gross is that, right? Stuff is just stuff. The only time it means much of anything is when it comes from someone else, and then it's not the thing itself that has meaning, but that it represents someone thinking of you. But even if the object is lost, the feeling and the memory remain.*

So why does a shiny new piece of junk make me feel better every once in a while?

I don't know. But you guys, I totally want this necklace.

Not as much as I want, say, a loving home for every child and a cure for every chronic disease. But still.

Okay. Until next time. Be well, everybody!


*When I first wrote "remain," I mistyped it as "remaim." The memory re-maims. May my eyeliner be revoked and The Cure albums broken if that's not the gothiest thing I've ever accidentally typed.

For Posterity

Baby Sister:

. . . So he's having a party, and he has a fondue pot, and his roommate has a fondue pot, and they're trying to find more people who can bring fondue pots so they can have different kinds of fondue.

Me:

Do they need a fog machine?

Baby Sister:

I don't think it's that kind of party.