Can't Sleep, Haven't Written

So I haven't written in here in ages.

I went to Denmark with my mom and sister. It was fabulous. Viking ships and castles and cobblestone streets everywhere and a beach where two seas flowing in opposite directions meet and crash into eachother. We spent two nights on the island of Aero which was charming as hell and my mom drove everywhere which was impressive as hell and we did too much shopping on account of the other two people I was with and my mom's search for a raincoat (it was cold and rained half the time we were there, even though it was the end of August). Maybe later I'll go through my notes and write more about the trip, but right now it's 6-something AM and I just can't sleep so I'm writing.

The most amazing thing about the trip, I think, was that a year ago my mom was going through her breast cancer and now we were running around a foreign country from 8 AM until we passed out, usually long after 10, for ten days straight. I often felt like I had to keep up with her. Just one year after the cancer summer.

When we got back, she went to work two days later and, jet lagged as hell, her leg fell asleep and she fell wrong on her foot and fractured it. It was just a hairline fracture, but a fracture nonetheless. No cast, but one of those giant boots she has to wear for at least another week.

In other news of the bad health of beings I love, my dog got scary bloody-eye glaucoma. It was not fabulous. After months of eye drops and specialist visits, he ended up having his eye removed because it just kept getting worse and was clearly very painful. Turned out there was a benign tumor growing in there. The real fear was a malignant tumor, but tumor was definitely expected, so having the eye removed was clearly the right thing to do. He's still healing--the surgery was only a week ago and he gets his stitches removed on Monday. It looks like one eye is just closed all the time, but right now he's stuck in a cone and keeps bumping into things. Otherwise he's pretty much back to normal, going on regular-length walks and huffing and puffing at the world as he tromples about the house. I think he's still adorable.

Then there's Corvus. He's in Colorado with his mom. He left the same time we left for Denmark (end of August) and still hasn't come back. He had a recording project out there that, when almost finished, went awry as the guy he was recording assaulted Corvus's mom and Corvus (long story, but Corvus pissed him off...doesn't justify assault but Corvus did something that was, in my opinion, really rash and dumb). The guy being recorded ended up mouthing off to the judge (speaking of rash and dumb...) and landed himself a double felony conviction. With his father vouching to make sure to get him to all his hearings and whatnot, he's on probation and back in his home state, project unfinished. Now Corvus is trying to get paid for his time engineering and everything else on an unfinished record and seems to think he can't return to Chicago until he sees his money. So it's about to be seven weeks since I've seen him with no concrete sense of when he's actually coming back.

When I first got back from Denmark I missed Corvus painfully, but the longer it's been the more I feel ok on my own and just see how unreliable he is. I still love him, I still miss him, but I don't see spending the rest of my life with him, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm 29 and I'm happy to be with him if he gets his ass back here but I wonder about finding a Forever. I also wonder if I'm not being fair; he's only 26 and still getting his own life in order. Was I reliable three years ago? It's not much time, but for some people it can be huge. Is he just immature? Or am I making excuses for him now? I wish I knew. Either way, absence is not making the heart grow fonder, it's making the heart ask all kinds of questions and get all kinds of annoyed and impatient.

Great. It's barely after 7 AM and the workers across the street are making beeping noises with their trucks. I was hoping to get back to sleep at some point...

Holy Fucking Corvus

My dog has declared a bit of snuggle time; he's feeling neglected, having been locked away to give this crazy electricity free reign over my house and my heart.

Corvus. What the fuck? How does a reciprocal crush become oh my god without blinking? For once, I don't actually care how. That's a mini "oh my god" in itself.
But Corvus! Like a mirror--a reflection without being the same. And so much kindness, so sweet. He babbles things fit for poetry, apologizes for perfect words (and I'm supposed to be the writer?). Then,  without thinking, he holds my head up as I drink water in bed, tries to wash the dishes, makes the bed the moment I'm preoccupied...I'm not the porcelain princess, he treats me like I'm made of gold; like an unworshipped goddess; like an adored equal.
He sees beauty and light and hears it, too. He doesn't know he's brilliant or doesn't believe it. He is story after story and he is warm strong quiet and he understands the laughter in the saddest of things.

There's so much more, but to dwell and list seems petty this time. Somehow, it's all more real and fair to just babble and swear and scream the name of the nearest deity.

Holy fuck.

Lovesong for Shed-Beast

How did Dog survive before it had Man to hold it while it whined and protect it from thunder? Did Dog always need its food broken into smaller pieces, or did it at some point consistently and instinctually remember how to chew? And what did Man do in the pre-dawn sleet storm? Sleep?

No, Darwin here is a fairy tale. Fur and love and big desperate eyes must be grand design; otherwise I would  have eaten the little fuzz-monster.

In college, Post Modernists were PoMos, over-educated hipsters

Oh, oh, silly PoMo
So we don't know what's  real
So?
I, too, have days in which I lash out in outfits
We are so rebellious
Twist up in the meta meta meta
Every generation has us
So so subversive
Can instead we laugh?
Not hate ourselves but laugh?
Twirl our perception of perception around in our fingertips
Love every echo of the meta meta meta
Lose ourselves in it, instead of thinking about trying to lose ourselves in it.
PoMo, let go.

So Much Love in the World...

Aural Girl came over this evening to tell me that she and Possible Boy decided to start "Dating."
I'm feeling too many things. I'll get as many into words as I can.

I'm afraid. I found these real, true, quality friends and they are wonderful and right here and they care and understand and support and are so full of love and adoration and are just as happy to have me exist as I am happy to have them exist. I don't want anything messing that up and I'm absolutely terrified of shifting the balance in any way that might hurt this amazing thing we have right now.
I want more than anything in the world for them to be happy and find exactly what they could potentially find in eachother, and if there's even the slightest chance that they could be one another's Someone, then there's so much potential wonderful in Aural Girl seeing Possible Boy's...possibility.

I'm still attracted to Possible Boy but deep swoons and jealous flare-ups subsided some time ago. I don't think I believed I was more or less "over him" until tonight, and I may feel very differently when I see him/them, but at the moment the "Boy I Like Is Now With Another Girl" thing isn't strong enough to make it  through the rest of what I feel.

I'm afraid of everything that comes next. I already feel a bit like a third wheel, but I tend to do that to myself; half the time I play side-kick in my autobiography. Now if the two of them become a romantic unit, they suddenly both have eachother fulfilling that giant deficit in a way I can only watch and wave and smile.
That's assuming things go well.
Over-analyzing will be death of me, but I feel the fear and I'm addressing it, dammit. I've had plenty of  experience being friends with both members of a couple and when things aren't going well in couple-land I never know what to do. Going back to high school, I'd have couple friends with one member cheating on the other, telling me about it in detail while keeping the other member in the dark. Two different versions of the same incident, and I'd try to fix everybody and give advice taking both perspectives into account, meanwhile never having a relationship of my own as experience/reference. I know this isn't the same, but patterns pitter patter about my brain and scare the shit out of me.

This is not about me. This is about them. And it could be a really wonderful thing for them. It could be a disaster, too, or anything inbetween. I guess we'll see.
I can't look at this as a big sucky thing that leaves me on the sidelines. They still adore me. None of that has changed. And there's still so much world. I have a fucking menagerie of "gentlemen callers." I seriously considered calling Manbug to fuck away my woes.

Chain Boy* was over here last week when my head was really awful and it was nice, but I know better than to just fuck with him to make myself feel better. And maybe I'll actually crawl outside my most recently fortressed comfort-zone and spend time with other friends, other neighborhoods, other Boys. There are many more stories to be lived. I'm experiencing a highly saturated chunk of my life.
Finally getting together romantically with Aural Girl is such a huge thing for Possible Boy, I want to be able to be as excited and happy for him as it/he deserves. But I can't see theirs without also seeing the giant hole where mine could be, and it hurts like hell.

*Boy who like(d/s) me for quite some time now but I don't like myself around him and he's really negative but then we have a nice time together randomly until he starts saying I remind him of his schizophrenic ex-girlfriend needs a name in here and I'm going with Chain Boy for a number of reasons that are amusing in my head.

You probably think this song is about you

Love is longing? Is the unobtainable? The feeling that your emotional muscles are being stretched to their limit, that is love?
No.
That is familiar. That is the semi-silent suffering that makes for great novels and television dramas and plenty of mediocre works of truth and fiction, too.
It's what we late bloomers, wallflowers, writers, and dreamers  have been carving into trees our entire lives.
Now here we are, blossoming in a maniac's paradise, the world delivered on a plate via room service, and all we know is longing and books and promises we carved into trees.
I still blossom in wallpaper and words, but there is too much world overflowing with true love and fullness to get caught in webs of longing for its own sad sake.
I know you can see how much world is out there--love is there, too. The searing fades away when you can see the love, the intentions, and the humanity.
Now, I'm lapping up every last drop I can get, but I'm also looking for a partner. My heart does a lot of crazy things, but I trust my intuition lately, and whatever happens happens. I want to feed this to you in pill form. I want to take your sadness and flush it into the ether so it's merely another frosty breath passing through winter.
Mine, too.
And then you will see friends as love and longing as pain and love as possibility.

Hating Myself over Boy

There's a girl. Possible Girl for Possible Boy.
I want to be perfect. I want to be the perfect friend and perfect person who can objectively see how good it is for Possible Boy to have a romantic interest that isn't me or Aural Girl, allowing him to start separating his friendship support system from his amorous subplots. It's something I need to do, too. Logical Annabell knows this.
But Logical Annabell also has support systems stationed in random pockets around the country. And Annabell's imperfect human emotional side craves a hypothetical boy who can look at all my inside goop and understand and hold me, who has the same inside goop and wants to be heard and held back, and then kissed until all the lonely pain stops tasting so bitter because now you're tasting it on love's lips.
With Possible Boy, I ran things backwards. I was trying so hard to look shiny and perfect, I didn't let him near all the important things. Between phone sex and my disastrous long-term friends-with-benefits non-relationship, all things sex default to a setting of fun with quarantined emotions. Hell, even before I myself got near sex, these are the two versions of it that existed in my world:
1) sex for unemotional fun, power and procreation
2) sex as the extension and completion of the perfect kiss

Now the stuff that makes me feel like an asshole re: Possible Boy.
I'm trying really hard lately to do things differently and do things for myself and not treat myself like crap. To that end, it's either fish or cut bait, either see about reentering myself in the more-than-friends pool or put some space between us so I can move on.
But Possible Boy doesn't have another support system. He needs a friend, and while I'm not so fabulous that I'm the only person in the entire world capable of providing adequate and proper friendship, I do understand in a way that seems manageable by a limited percentage of the populace. Everybody has different pieces of things they do and don't see. Maybe I like feeling important, or maybe after growing up with my parents hyper-controlling every aspect of my life, it's just more familiar for me to be entirely codependent. But Possible Boy is good at the codependency thing, too. He might say every mushy thing I've said about him, only about Aural Girl. It's this wonderful chain of low self-esteem. We are human and we treat ourselves like garbage so that no one else can treat us worse.

I may have to ask him not to read this post. Will someone please tell me what to do and then blame me when it goes wrong? That's what I seem to find most familiar and comforting.

Guys and Dolls and Cupcakes

Model-gorgeous friend I've known since elementary school needs a name in here. For lack of anything better, I'm going with "Ken."
Today is Ken's birthday. Even though it's a Tuesday, he had a party. I brought Aural Girl and we drove down to Humbolt Park.
Aural Girl wants to know why the hell I haven't slept with Ken. Ken made it very, very clear he wants in my pants. He's made it very clear for awhile now. Ken's a really good person in so many ways. He knew me during the worst part of my life and was one of the few kids that didn't treat me like shit. How do I feel about him now? I don't know. Nervous? He's always been a horny boy with a filthy mind, but we used to tell jokes and turn everything we said into dirty jokes on the back of the bus. Flirting was safe when I thought I was an ugly runt that nobody wanted; now it has power. There's just so much history, so many years of nothing-more-than-friendship.

Regardless of Ken, this goes back to the ol' internal debate over sex and love and everything in between. Do I want notches on my bedpost, more experience, more stories to tell, more life to have lived? Or do I accept the part of me that doesn't feel right? Am I repressed or am I repressing my repression?

I'm thinking about this way too much. Relax, brain. Relax, everything. Can I close up the hole in my heart through deep breathing, diet, and exercise? Tonight I was ever so social, but it still craves something specific and not necessarily healthy.

Out of this World

I adore the dramatics of Love. The concept. The silliness. Acting out all the bits and pieces. So is it the concept or the person? How can I tell? Am I just giving myself more excuses to run away from any possibility of something real with a real person? Anything that happens in reality doesn't measure up to that weird ethereal dream mush. I keep it that way on purpose, not consciously, but definitely on purpose. The Greatest Loves live in stories and in my head and in their struggle to survive, struggle to maintain. I've trained myself to think that longing and yearning is love, so Boys have to be unattainable to be lovable. The struggle is where love builds. That's what made a certain past Boy so perfect for me: we went through years of not actually being together but fooling around on and off through our melodramatic friendship. That was passion. Until I stopped pining over him and fooling around turned into physical recreation without the big sparklies in my soul.

New goal: associate Love with contentment and Happiness. Love should go along with those moments when everything in the world is just so completely beautiful and awesome I want to take a bite out of it and explode. Those moments have always been very solitary for me, even if I'm surrounded by people. If I can find someone who really sees it and feels it and shares it, that would trump all my whiny piny love.

Ugh. Still setting Love in the ethereal. Still running around on Mars and Venus.
Reality: Flirt with Boys. Talk to Boys. Enjoy spending time with Boys. Find favorite Boy. Smooch Boy.
That's how things are done down here on earth. Just choose a partner and go dancing. Doesn't need to be so cosmic or complicated.

But it still does for me. There's magic and serendipity when I close my eyes and listen. I've spent most of my life trying to fit into LogicLand. Things seem to work out better for me when I tell Logic and Should to go fuck themselves. Something about Rogers Park reminds me of my music camp. It's the feeling and the people and walking by the lake all the time. The feeling. A sense of freedom from my parents and who I try to be at "home." At camp, I never worried about that. I worked on the things I cared about and let things that didn't matter to me slide. I spent every minute possible with people I adored because I could. There wasn't the pressure to have to explain myself and my actions and justify my decisions. I still worried and overthought and freaked out about Boys and did all sorts of typical me things and typical teenager things, but it was a different mold than usual and I liked it.

My parents are the source of much of my anxiety. I think even more than I realized, which was already a terrifying lot. It's not their fault, the same way it's not the fault of the spider when the arachnophobe panics, but they are my spider.

Ohmigawd. Fear Factor needs to start locking people up with their parents.

I think I'm showing up at an estate sale in six hours?

10 Things I Hate About Me

It's official: I'm ready to start school or something again. The freedom was nice for a bit, but now I'm losing it. With nothing to regularly force me out of the house and keep me occupied on a regular basis, the Vast Eternal Loneliness has kicked in. I spent much of last night crying at NBF and feeling unworthy of friendship and love. Good times. I still have a very hard time believing I am a likable person, and the constant paranoia that I'm just hanging around and annoying people and they don't really want to be my friends tends to loom long after they've proven otherwise. I guess I find myself annoying, stupid, tiresome, and not pretty or smooth enough to get away with it and still be liked. I want to like myself, but I don't know how without tons of really genuine, convincing external validation. It took a pair of highly judgmental, critical parents and a good 5-6 years of little kids constantly telling me I'm a piece of shit for it to really sink in, I just hope it doesn't take the rest of my life to believe otherwise.

la-dee-da, la-dee-da

Today was a narcoleptic day. Clearly about to be "that time of the month." I had 40 pages left to read in In Cold Blood, but I kept falling asleep reading so it took all day. I have a few other things I have to read for various classes this coming week, and a bunch of stuff I have to write: SUC's personality profile, the rest of the story I started last week in Fiction I, a response to some piece of reading from Fiction I, a front of the book article suitable for Time Out Chicago, and finish up this thing on the aquarium. The fiction stuff is due tomorrow, so that should get priority, but I tend to prioritize based on muses instead of due dates. Maybe not the best idea.

Friday NBF and I went to my parents' for dinner. Beef brisket and egg noodles and shabbat made for a very jewy evening, but considering NBF lived with Jews for awhile (Birdy's family), it was familiar for him, too. And our dogs came. Both of them. They passively accept one another, though we've had to be very careful and vigilant because his normally sweet and agreeable dog gets aggressive when provoked, and my dog is very good at growling when approached by other dogs, people, etc. But it worked and my brother absolutely adored NBF's dog (as was expected) and my dad went back and forth between playing with NBF's dog and taking to, feeding, and sitting with my dog. My dad is extremely cute. Over the years he's "mellowed out" while my mom has gotten more intense, and I've grown to appreciate a number of his traits I used to find difficult and annoying.

It's funny, but for my general pessimistic outlook on life, I'm a bit of an optimistic dreamer when it comes to Love. Mind you, I've got rationalizations for all of my optimisms, but it's one of those areas where I plan to be the exception to the rule. I will be the writer who makes it and the girl who is in a mutually beneficial and love-based relationship with a boy. NBF believes that women are more trouble than they are worth and the best one can hope to find is a relationship akin to a positive merger, love being besides the point. But I will keep jumping up and down and insisting that he is wrong and just bitter due to his still-raw divorce wounds and limited personal experience. People can both love and like one another and even if it isn't eternal it's a good thing while it lasts and totally worth it. Or so I would very much like to believe.