And then Wednesday came

How does that go? God laughs when we make plans? Ho-ly shit this week has kicked my ass. From the last week of July to present it has been insane. Personally with booty shorts and strangers in my house and likely in my bed; professionally with a volley of fast moving short notice opportunities. This last month, it has not been unusual to end my days around or past midnight. I woke up painfully tired this morning and got home so tired I didn't want to walk another step and could not muster the energy to even eat. I passed out for an hour or so then walked the Boodog. That nap was capital A amazing. Lights out.

I would not have chosen it to unfold this way but I will say the universe seems to agree with the concept of Phase 1. I think I will buy myself something fancy with all the overtime pay.

Phase 1

Before I even get into what Phase 1 is, let me just say I know I will vacillate in this final Philly year between Phase 1-go-time-Philly-bucket list and I-don't-want-to-leave-the-house-the-world-is-scary-and-hurtful. But I am kicking off this final year with many of the same feelings I started with almost 2 years ago. Lets do this, Philly.

One of my favorite quotations is from the short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find (ain't that the truth). A character says, "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." That's me. I'm that woman. What good I find within and without has to be stomped out of me like grapes, crushed out of me like peanuts, reduced in me through fire. Through trial, I am refined.

So Phase 1 is my 'do' phase. More doing, less thinking. More importantly, less investment in the outcome because the more your try, the more you fail. So if I play my cards right and really get into this, the 2010-2011 season will be a triumphant failure. I will either eke out a respectable ratio of wins to losses or feel fully justified in tucking in for the 2011-2112 season and picking out the hypoallergenic cats I'm going to spend the next 20 years with.

I love how I bargain with life like it owes me something or has any agenda or interest in my existence. I guess when it comes down to it, I'm bargaining with myself and in that way I am still limiting myself with artificial constraints. My departure from Philly is a convenient mental rallying point because it comes with an adjustment in perspective and attachment. It helps me regard this time like what is always is, precious and finite. Yes, everywhere I go, there I am. One year in Philly or 5 minutes at the North Pole doesn't change that but for some reason the constraints, real or imagined work for me. I will work harder to say yes, I will try harder to not be afraid of rejection and court the possibility more often. Tonight I wrote a guy I've talked to 3 times over the last 2 years. He's attractive but I wrote him not to flirt with him but to challenge him. He has a great eye for photography, is dis-engaged, and from a family of short-timers. I asked him if he's considered dusting off that dream. He's probably going to think I'm weird. He's not wrong. But I did it.

So yay.

At least for now.

What I learned this summer

I learned the term sex camel; someone who goes without sex for a long time. Since it was used to describe me I will note just because camels can go for eons without water doesn't mean they wouldn't be pretty ecstatic about a regular supply.

I learned I like being around people who I'm proud to be me around. People who delight in ninjas or delight in me delighting in ninjas. Who have a passion for wanting to make a difference, who believe in someone or something bigger than themselves. I'm grateful for people who delight in the better person I want to be. Who aren't uncomfortable with my Polly Anna, who understand how it feels to have a burden placed on your heart for the people of another country, to be moved by the privilege of trying to do a very big thing. I like being around people who even if they leave service, they leave to seek different ways to make an impact. I'm excited to see where these paths will take them. Among these people, one has already run for public office and I feel confident the future leaders of this country and other countries are among some of the wonderful talented people I have met.

I am beginning to feel a sense of ownership and pending stewardship for my country. Other people are running things right now but my peers are coming of age.

I am starting (I think) to get a better feel for this would be life partner if he exists. Not for his looks or demographics but for the way I want to feel with him.

I feel I know way more lovely people who could find a better match than the one they have chosen. But the heart wants what the heart wants.

I really love Baloo. She's still the best decision I've made in the last decade. She brings me consistent joy.

I like going out alone. It's harder to get myself to do because 9 times out of 10, I'd rather be home. But I'm usually rewarded when I venture out alone with a great conversation with a stranger.

I love going out with my girlfriends. And I do mean girlFRIENDS. Not girls that I am friendly with-that's a total disaster,or as a girl I know calls it, a total shit show. That I hate and avoid it as much as possible without being 100 percent anti-social.

Maybe she'll never give me the satisfaction but I will be happy with myself for inviting my sister to stay with me, and connecting her with my friends who suggested the opportunity that led to this job. I am happy that I insisted on buying her a white shirt and black slacks because that is what she is expected to wear everyday. Because of her, I have my serious misgivings about giving parenting my own whirl.

Just my imagination

So there's The Pixies and there's The Pixies as sung by your sister with headphones while she makes your house smell like burning hair. At 8:07 pm, she's been up about 3 hours which bothers me for reasons I'm not able to articulate. Perhaps I am jealous. But she's off to hang out with a friend and that markedly improves my mood because I was actually expecting for her to be at work today and was looking forward to having the house to myself. I'm supposed to go to a party at 9 which I'm still actively deciding if I'll go to. It's just around the corner at a local bar and for a guy I've talked to exactly 3 times over the last 2 years. The second time I saw him after almost a year hiatus, we finally exchanged numbers and became Facebook friends. He is of course engaged. Story of my life. I'm the coolest girl every attached guy knows. W.T.F.

Though there will be drink specials, I've decided to be an even cheaper date and get started at home with a beer at home (thank you Magic Hat summer seasonal). I really like that first beer. I really feel that first beer. Makes my head heavy and it calms me a bit if I'm in an anxious social situation. I usually don't get beyond 2 but 2 feels like being sober again. Don't know why. I assume beer 2 for me is where the judgement goes because I don't feel drunk anymore. I wouldn't drive after one beer but feel perfectly fine after 2 which is why I don't let my feelings about sobriety steer my driving decisions.

In other current events, I've taken a much needed hiatus from internet dating and proud that I haven't been on for weeks. It has helped that work has been so all consuming that I haven't missed it much. Things are slowing down now and summer is ending and I feel like aside from the havoc the humidity and near record breaking heat wrought on all my attempts to arrive at work looking presentable, I didn't experience summer at all. But this is not a new phenom in the Ava experience, just one that I'd like to change. So why am I sitting here typing away instead of getting gussied up? Because I don't want to be disappointed. Better to imagine than to experience has been my unintentional M.O. and it's a hard one to break because on balance, it is actually true. If you have a good imagination or at least an imagination that trends towards happy endings then odds are your imagined outcomes are going to be exponentially better than the real ones.

So returning to this post hours later, I did go. I'm feeling a little guilty because my sister has become the center of my conversations, even with relative strangers and she is just eccentric enough and the drama just interesting enough to be engrossing for people looking for distractions from their own drama. It is a modern day Felix and Oscar (is that Odd Couple reference landing with anyone?) with a booty short twist. Regarding the party, it's funny sometimes how one can observe circumstances that don't normally bode well like ex-fiancee and current romantic interest having an extended conversation, and still be surprised when the clouds gather and drama starts raining on the parade. Who the hell invites both women to a place where alcohol will be consumed? Who invites both women at all? Why would you leave him with the only other single person in the group? Perhaps the leaving him with me part isn't as puzzling. He clearly has a type and I'm not a threat to either of them as far as that is concerned. I left right after the tear stained ex confronted the birthday boy accusing him of lying to her. My guess is the new relationship began before the old one ended but I didn't stick around to find out. I told the magician (not kidding) to tell the guy I had left and bounced out. Yes, this party had old girl, new girl, AND a magician. This guy can throw a party. Yes, my imagination trumped the actual events of the evening but the real version was loads more interesting. I would not have thought to include a magician.

Lovin it

I'm so tired I can barely keep my eyes open but guess what? She's been in bed for almost an hour now. She's working in the ER and working overtime and working 6 days her first week. It's Thursday and she thinks she already has more than 40 hours. She has to leave for work before I even need to be up. I joked at the beginning of the week she would see why I never want to do anything once I get home, why I don't even want the pressure of planning something for the weekend. She's exhausted, and asked me to turn down the TV when she went to bed at 9:30. How many nights did she send the 'my sister is a jerk' vibe over the wall when I asked the same question. I'm lovin it. She is working hard and sleeping well. She's not in the house during the day. I'll have the house to myself on Saturday. I think she's kicking ass at her job. I think she's enjoying being part of the work force and boy does she already have awesome stories.

Seriously, I am LOVING this.

Also, never go to the ER unless you break something or think you might not last 24 hours.

Fuck the mission

My boss called yesterday. We were talking about a project which will on balance probably turn out to have been a fruitless endeavor. He was pushing to have all the meeting minutes published sooner rather than later and knowing that I no longer have a dog in the fight rolled out something about 'the mission' as if it were supposed to elevate me above the bullshit. Well I say fuck the mission. The mission changes. Take care of your god damn people. If that is at the center of how you run your organization, you won't have to put together a team every five years to brainstorm a rallying slogan. Taking care of your people means leadership. It means not tolerating people who want to bring their version of Lord of the Flies into your work place. They can get with the program, treat people with respect, or go work somewhere else.

You can't appeal to my sense of mission, I don't have one. At the end of the day, I'm not even sure if most organizations aren't self-licking ice cream cones who have long lost a sense of whether they are relevant and are primarily consumed with increasing their budget and staying alive. They change like people change, primarily in style but not really in substance-they are still fundamentally the same as they ever were. So yea, fuck the mission. The mission or cause or whatever has been helping you get up in the morning can change. A wall falls and you lose your sense of purpose; a plane is crashed into a building and suddenly you wish you had studied Arabic instead of Spanish. I've met very few people actually ate up about the mission. Some once were but then the mission changed or they have creative differences with their organization over execution. I feel sorry for those people because I feel like they built their lives on a foundation of sand. They tell war stories of a time when their skill set was relevant and often speak of a day when the organization will regret not having bench strength for their eclipsed mission. They aren't wrong about that; we will always live to rue the day we stopped developing expertise in one field or another. I don't use salt often but when I need it, and realize I haven't been paying attention to my dwindling supply, I'm caught flat footed. It sucks and so does the flavorless food I prepared without it.

I just hate the way 'mission' rolls off the tongues of the people who no longer actually do the brass tacks mission. The context is often an admonition, a rallying cry, something they invoke to get you do something with a sense of urgency. Give me some credit that I come to work to actually work and give me a fucking break. This is not The Crusades. You'll never go wrong however seeking to take care of the people around you, facilitating and elevating them. It is truly the only thing I care about with regard to any job I do and it has so far served me pretty well. People who worked for me say it's the thing they miss the most. They have and will work with people with greater expertise and skill sets I don't possess but they will have stiff competition finding someone who cares more about taking care of the people taking care of the mission, whatever it is that day.

*EPILOGUE*

I'm sitting here after a long day, sipping seltzer from a wine glass (cause I'm fancy) and thinking about leaving the house at 5 am tomorrow to drive to D.C. for a meeting I'm fairly confident will be useless. It's a bit of a Herculean effort that would be better reserved for something that matters but perhaps I will never have an opportunity to rise to the occasion for something that truly matters or at least not in my current job. I wrote this post this morning a little after 5 am and left it in draft. Returning to it this evening, I would have probably chose less vibrant wording had I started this now instead of a little before 5 am when my sister's alarm went off and she was in the bathroom with her headphones on and couldn't hear it. But on balance it still represents how I feel about the concept of mission. I think it's important to know what you are supposed to do at work, what your organization does, how you do it. Call it mission, call it vision, call it a thesis, the description isn't important because those things are conceptual sound bites. A distillation of your duties with loftier words. No matter what you call it, actual people have to do it so we should take care with them and of them.

That was a tall soapbox but I made it down okay.

You know we don't give a $*#% it's not your birthday!

So I'm 35 now. Yay? No, not yay but it was a good and strange day and totally blog worthy but I've been exhausted when it's time to write and thus have denied the interwebs all the good stories I've been meaning to tell. It's appropriate that I've been keeping old people hours right before I hit the big 3-5 and funnier still that if I'm fortunate enough to read this when I'm 55, I'll want to punch this version of me in the teeth for joking about fatigue and body aches.

Before I fade out let me just make an observation. When I meet some random guy I decide I want to be obsessed about, he never asks me once when my birthday is and a month later shows up at my door with a card. With a gift card in it for a store I actually shop at. He never comes all the way over to my house on his off day to bring me anything and then leaves without trying to get "payment in kind." This guy works two jobs and he gave me money. He cleans our building during the day and does valet parking at night. That's insane. It's the nicest thing a guy (who isn't my father) has ever done for me. I don't know if I should give it back to him, if I should find out when his birthday is and buy him a helicopter or something. What would you do?

I'm still processing this but I feel like no man does something like that for a girl he's not interested in. They don't buy a lovely pink card and drive all the way to her house to give it to her on her actual birthday if they wouldn't mind seeing her naked.

Right?

I may be wrong for all I know but I may be right

It's awesome out. Low humidity, nice breeze, and I am sitting inside with a puss on my face, getting comfortable in my victim-hood. I guess it's neither here nor there whether my sister pulled a retaliatory move or it was an innocent mistake but she booked a bus trip back to Virginia after I told her I was going to New York this weekend. She booked it on Friday giving me no time to get a dog sitter lined up. It's not the end of the world but it's just pretty shitty. I have been burning it at both ends for weeks now. I'm tired and I've got no one to talk to. I just wanted to see my friends, watch something funny, and be with people who actually wanted me around and don't just see me as a means to an end.

I'm irritable--my girlfriend, bless her cotton socks, is light years smarter than me but can not manage to keep her fucking cell phone charged. I hate when I call her and she tells me her battery is dying. Then get off the phone, don't take the call, and just send me a text or something. Seriously. That really bugs me for some reason. Even when I'm not inside out like I am today. She is always apologizing for it too or apologizes for not being able to hear me--I don't like unnecessary apologies either. They are annoying and frankly insincere. If it truly bothered you, you would charge your phone.

Another birthday approaches as well and while I will try to focus on being alive as better than the alternative (Is it really, though? What do we even know about the alternative? Perhaps we're all jumping to conclusions about the alternative. Just sayin), if these last two weeks are any indication, it's going to shit-tastic. I can't wait to be on the other side of it. I don't need or want to go out to obligatory dinners, I feel very strongly that I want to be alone. I will have to talk to my parents and I want to talk to them, they are after all the sponsor of my birthday but I can see myself not answering or returning calls that day. This birthday will be one of the sad ones, I think. I suppose my sister may be here that weekend if she's not in the mood to make last minute plans that fuck me over. Perhaps then I can check myself into a hotel room and pretend I don't live here for a day and wait for the dust to settle.

As bent out of shape as I am about my curtailed weekend plans, I had originally bowed out of going. I'm almost out of toilet paper, soap, paper towels and all the paper products Ashley apparently eats. It's also been such a long, long week with some really disappointing developments that left me feeling like a person bailing water on the Titanic must have felt; you're pretty confident your heroics will amount to nothing but you just have to have to try. And I'm tired because my arms are sore and the only thing I'm delaying by immeasurably small amounts is my eventual drowning. So Friday morning, thinking of the day ahead (which ended near 10 pm), I bowed out. On Friday night when my friends called, I felt differently but was now hemmed in because of Ashley's conflicting plans. And my mood has darkened from there.

She's always been selfish-before she left, she washed one skillet, the one she used. She left everything else there like it needed to be preserved like a crime scene. Amos Lee has a line in one of his songs, 'Sometimes we forget who we got, who they are, and who they are not.' I can't change her but sometimes her selfishness really gets to me and it's easy to martyr myself; how much I do for her, how dependable I am for her. But that doesn't change her and it doesn't help me. So I will dump this all on blogger's doorstep and perhaps go buy some toilet paper.

You could have been in Iowa

I don't even know how long I've known about the University of Iowa's Summer Writing Festival but for at least 4 years, I've been telling myself this would be the summer I would finally sign up for one of the workshops and go. Iowa, or anywhere in the midwest in July, is otherwise nowhere I want to be. The only upside to a midwest summer are the Jesus-is-coming thunderstorms and only then when they aren't accompanied by a tornado warning. When the wind isn't picking up to bring a rapture storm, it is still and stifling and filled with insects. Having gone to school in Nebraska very close to the Iowa border, I also have a reflexive border predjudice and can't think of Iowa without recalling the acronym Idiots Out Wandering Around, a term coined by the countless Nebraskans stuck behind Iowa drivers on I-80.

But what Iowa DOES have is a well known and prestigious MFA program for writers and a Summer Writing Festival featuring workshops of all sorts. It was to be my writing vacation and a place to refresh my eyes, ears, and soul. For the first time in all the years I've been considering actually doing it, this was the year it looked like I might actually do it. I had picked out a workshop, called to check availability, researched flights, printed out the registration, and then didn't go. I felt like that V8 commercial:



I know already the excuse I will have for not going next year as I am sure to be chest deep in the logistics of moving back to D.C. or wherever I'll go next but maybe just maybe, I'll endure the terrible drivers, insect pestilence, and the see-saw of stillness and violence in the weather so that I am not again sitting in my underwear near the end of an unremarkable summer thinking, "You could have gone to Iowa."

Feeling kind of guilty

Faithful reader(s) will recall the saga of the booty shorts, my negotiation of their surrender, and their resurrection. After my sister wore them after swearing she wouldn't, I hid them for a few days and then I threw them out. Tonight she started searching through her clean/dirty clothes basket muttering 'how do jeans just up and walk away' and I felt that feeling I imagine parents feel when reading their children's text messages or not letting them know that inappropriate guy DID call. A little guilty I'm not letting her make her own decisions, a little justified that over 200 dollars of free work and casual clothing cancels out the humane disposal of what was masquerading as clothing. I didn't even think about the booty shorts again until she asked if I had seen them. I lied. Over and over again. I am not sorry because she already demonstrated she was not going to keep the shorts as a memorial to bad taste and never wear them again as agreed. But for a minute I still felt bad. In this 900 square feet of space we share, she's going to find it increasingly hard to believe she's overlooking them but perhaps one day when we're older, and she doesn't have the keys to my house, I can confirm what I'm sure she already suspects and tell her where the booty shorts are buried.

Today's offenses

If I were staying even with my parents, I would not want them to arrive home after a long day at work, walk into their room and find a discarded pair of pajama bottoms in their floor. Nor would I want them to find a glass of juice on their nightstand. But that's what I found when I got home bleary eyed and emotionally and physically exhausted and in a terrible mood. I'm pretty sure she took a nap in here. And I'm pretty sure the reason she denied being in the bed was she was ON the bed and perhaps not under the sheets. But when I asked her why she had been in my room at all, she said she didn't remember and that she couldn't help me. I pressed her, completely unsatisfied with that answer. Nothing of hers is in my room. She said maybe she was looking for something but she didn't remember what. I asked why she decided to take off her pants and why she needed a drink while she looked for something in my room, she said 'I don't remember doing that. Sorry can't help you.' I went off.

I told her I didn't appreciate that she got to be offended by my asking what she was doing in my bedroom and that she was being a jerk. She said she didn't know she needed to be prepared to recall every single thing she did in my house today. She can be so fucking inconsiderate. I told her the one thing I asked her to be was a considerate roommate. I also asked her to stop using my makeup (yea, she did that today too; sharpened my eyeliner pen to boot-seriously, WTF who borrows eyeliner?). I decided I wasn't going to feel bad about our fight at all and I went to the gym. I worked like crazy for 30 minutes and came home sated and relaxed. I can't do legs right now on account of my probably-need-to-go-to-the-doctor leg situation but arms are feeling sufficiently worked out. Exercise is awesome.

Telephone

Ever have something wonderful sour in your head because you couldn't find anyone to share it with? I called everyone I could today and NO ONE picked up or responded to my text message. I knew there was a point where the shine would be off the apple and the wonderful thing wouldn't be exciting anymore. Life chips away at wonderful news. It becomes eclipsed by just about everything else; fatigue, dinner, chores. And I didn't really want to share it here because it's a hard thing to write down and likely to be only significant to people who actually know me (or maybe not). But before the edges are completely worn off, here's the wonderful thing:

It's been a long two weeks but probably the two most interesting and engaging of my time here. I have been positively giddy these past weeks with the privilege my job affords me to meet extraordinary people and attempt extraordinary things. I am increasingly enamored with my boss who is brilliant and chaotic and knows how to make me feel needed even though he can easily accomplish the things he asks me to do or simply not do them. So aside from some troubling aches, pains, and mechanical failures in my body, things are busy but well. But then my dad called this evening. He and my mother had been talking about me and running down the list of all the great things about me (the empty nest is getting to them I think) a week or so ago and he had been meaning to call me right away so he could tell me what they said. He said I was a wonderful human being and that I raise the bar and elevate the humanity of everywhere I work. That he and my mother were so proud to be my parents. He told me to be me and screw everyone else (sound familiar Lodo?). I'm not doing his words justice but the 'elevate the humanity' piece is a direct quote. I feel very lucky to have a dad who would call to tell me something like that and parents who hold me in high esteem. It really felt good. I told him I didn't even know I needed to hear that but it meant the world to me. You would think a guy like that wouldn't chase after me with a vacuum when I visit with my dog but we all have our trips and switches. I wouldn't trade a dad who calls me up and tells me something like that and then declares, "enough warmth" laughs and quickly gets off the phone for the world. Before that he shared about his second ticket in as many days, his growing fear of driving as a result, and the thought that if these things came in threes, he was either going to get hit by a meteor or he should buy a lottery ticket. I offered perhaps both could happen; he could purchase a winning lottery ticket and then a meteor could hit 7-11. I think that's why he loves me so much. But since he seems to be defying the odds and we're related and all, I wished on another star tonight.

All the right places

I get this feeling sometimes that I'm floating in a constellation of people that are going to figure prominently in the world or in the next chapters of my life. Most of us will do our thing and be quietly extraordinary, attaining positions that provide opportunities to reach back and pull a friend up. Right now though, I feel like I know extraordinary people who are or will be running shit in my lifetime. And I will be this girl who was friends with them before everyone wanted a piece. It's going to awesome. Until then, this is my life.



So what, right? This empty quart of ice tea was in my BATHROOM trashcan. Asked why it was there, (next to the toilet) she replied, 'Because that's where I was when I finished it.' Who takes beverages to the bathroom? Seriously, this girl needs to get a job yesterday. She's asleep when I sleep and still asleep when I leave for work, and now she is unconscious on my couch. This is why I can't have nice things.