The Scissors of St. Renegade

2011-06-17T13:33:00.004-05:00

They kicked me out of jail

This is overly dramatic but looking at many of the blog entries I've written and not published in the last six months, I was feeling really dramatic and tortured. One is called "I'm living the Milgrim experiment." And I felt like I was! I felt so awake and thirsty and fearless, watching the souls I love get either more bruised or less alive. It felt really massive and took over my whole brain. I would try to relax and get perspective and still end up feeling like I was in a spiritual struggle on the level of Star Wars. I may have lost and by losing, I may have won.

And now?

I walked into that place three years ago and already knew what was going to happen, and then forgot to remember because it was happening. That's no one's fault. And then I couldn't leave; I couldn't quit; I had fallen in love with the kids and staff and the Fight, so I dared them to fire me and they did. They continue to act like dicks, for that is what they are, shady and small throughout, and I act all righteous and intense, for that is what I am, and so it goes.

Now my job is managing my anxiety and having faith that everything is going to work out okay. I'm suddenly broke and without the identity I had before, so my little sister has me watch Jerry McGuire ("Even the cover looks like Catcher in the Rye.") So I took my stand, and then this happened, and then the next thing will happen.

I'm also trying to get ready to miss all that love. Little Sister and I went home real quick to meet the new baby Martin, Future CEO, and to see the Cousins, so that should tide me over; a sleeping baby on my chest and one million jokes, jokes, jokes with boys is concentrated good vibes on the level of love from locked-up kids.

I'm applying for jobs, meeting professional contacts for lunch, cancelled the cable TV, cashed in some spare change, and soon I'm going to the bank to figure out what is an IRA? I'm assuming it is not The IRA, which by the way, is another example of power corrupting. There was a heart-breaking journalism piece in the recent McSweeney's, did you read it?

Power buys you the right to stop asking questions of your own behavior, and that's the greatest dope, right? To just zone out into a soft land of self-acceptance. Which appears, sadly, to leave no room for accepting anyone else, or maybe that's just me. So. I'll be over here, not watching TV, not spending money, just trying to remember that everything is going to be okay.

2011-03-24T21:15:00.003-05:00

I graduated from Unicorn School! There was a last bit of performance art and I still have the markered word "Surrender" visible on my right forearm. These kids notice everything I wear, say, and do with my hair, but don't notice that. God love 'em, they think I'm weird enough.

I got lots of great things out of the training, and they are all rolling around my head and my body. This is where the surrender comes in--what next, what next, what next. It feels solid that whatever follows Kid Jail is going to have to be a Big Deal, at least to me. I will need three to four regular jobs to fill the emotional space of this monster. And it is a monster, the embodiment of our culture, now, just as much as records released for Japan and good art. Here's where Fear reigns and we trade in Black bodies to make more money for high concept dinners. My co-workers, the ones thrown scraps of Kid Prison Power and a bullshit 'Doctor' title they purchased from chain schools, they refused to unionize, and bad feelings are staying bad all around. I'm neither dissappointed or surprised, I'm just watching fear motivate more fear, and watching how hard it is to pretend that these kids are ours, and their mistakes aren't our fault.

I'm worried I'm going to float right out of here because I can get so heady. I don't get that heady, though, because at some point my face is flaming and I've covered a sheet of paper in direct quotes that don't mean anything to anyone but me.

They talk about the stupidity of "this system" and I imagine giants standing on the necks of children and mournfully saying "these shoes" while slowly shaking their heads.

Someone wrote something around 9/11 time, and it quoted someone else, someone like Blake or Keats. Google it. The point was that nothing should be feared more than a giant who thinks himself a tiny man. Our head guy, all white hair and false teeth and Cook County sleazebag swagger, he repeatedly utilized the Hobbes quote that "life is nasty, brutish, and short" while discussing the fact that our contract may be challenged. Get this: the Beancounters are demanding receipts! They want us to be accountable for the public monies we have been spending! My God, it's like Abu Gharib up in this piece!

He is using this Hobbes quote in a jail filled with poor Black kids to illustrate the tragic nature of how he might lose his right to golden shoes. These kids, their lives and bodies, are grist for the capitalist machine of Chicago. We no longer run the stockyards, but we are making money off bodies.

A boy showed off his torso to me tonight, refusing to put on his shirt. When I left for Canada on Saturday, the super-max super-punitive subprogram had been shut down because someone from the Law had seen it and realized it was Illegal and a Bad Idea. I felt vindicated! But it's back already, and here's this kid with his shirt off and learing at me and I'm pissed. I call him a jerk, he's not getting any attention from me tonight. And he starts kicking the metal door, crying that I called him a jerk. Suddenly I realize I'm a fucking monster. This boy is SLOW. This boy is NEEDY. This boy wants to show some lady his pretty chest and so I just calmed down and he put on his shirt and he showed me a halo move that helps him calm down. He's retarded, guys, and poor, and his brother's in here and he's sorry he was a jerk, he tries to be respectful to women cause his dad beat on his mom and his brother beats his babymama and he tries to be okay with women.

And I remembered not to be a defensive ass, the End.

2011-01-29T16:22:00.004-06:00

2011 and it is resolved:

I have to get this art book finished
Get the poetry book out
Wrench my charity money back from the grubby hands of these horrible people
Paperwork completed
Get a new job

When I get the new job, I'll have time to:

Date everybody
Play drums in a band with Cuddles
Write THE book about Kid Jail
Hang out more at the Chicago Freedom School and 826CHI
Exercise

And boom! it's winter, I just got it. That joke wasn't funny anymore last month and I just now got it. I hate all my thick clothes and my boots that keep me warm and dry. I only want to eat beans and pizza and lay on my couch complaining that I'm on my couch. Here is the most apt metaphor of where I'm at, in my life, right now, but it involves some set-up:

I decided to drive a 1998 Jeep Cherokee to Unicorn School in early January, an opportunity to see friends with babies in Pittsburgh PA and Auburn NY, places I, to be honest, would not be visiting otherwise. From one angle this was the perfect plan, and it was the heart angle, so that's what I did. Babies and friends and new cities and not work are all things my heart likes.

From the brain angle, my Evil Bosses all but told me I would be fired if I tried it; I haven't driven for more than an hour since 2001; I am terrified, terrified, petrified of winter driving; I would be driving through America's Snow Belt in early January; and as soon as I got in the ride, the stereo turned out to be held together with Elmer's glue and the rear view mirror fell off.

Still staring at the mirror in my hand, marvelling at my own strength, a possible new job called. Of late I have been receiving too many messages from the Universe, and that's the truth. 'But what does it mean?' I yell to the Universe, messages in both hands. Which is good? What is happening?

I was sad driving through Toledo because with my mom lost to mental illnesses and my Dad moving to Cali, my connection to Toledo will be reduced to the overly-orange mental pictures of a not-that-great childhood. I waved. Outside of Cleveland I hit the shit and it was 25 mph in zero visibility, cars strung together in a necklace of terror. This is moment-to-moment living, for me--I can't see, and I'm scared, and I want to stop the car and just wait for it to pass.

And surprise, there's the apt metaphor: I can't see what's next and I'm scared and I'm wondering what the fuck I was thinking--what the hell am I doing, following my heart on adventures all the time? I'm not a character in a book I'm an actual person--but whatever, it's too late, stopping would be death and I just have to keep going, assuming that I'm not going to die in the next few minutes and that something awesome is in store.

And there was awesomeness--baby boys and little girls, friends and their cozy homes. Everyone settled in and making families. I got to the Mountain and the topic was community. The questions were:

Who am I?
Where am I going?
Who am I going with?

I'm not sweating the first question. The second question, good Lord, and the third question I've been steady asking since I quit drinking. I've been asking it all my life, but when I quit drinking I was really, really, really asking.

No answer yet so I'll keep going and this snow will let up eventually.

2010-11-04T16:02:00.005-05:00

Dude, Rob Brezney really is a crazy wizard. He told me to update my blog and so I'm doing it. And speaking of wizards, I made a wizard hat for a friend last night. Yesterday I took a mental health day, the irony of which is not lost on me, a person routinely called "Mental Health" over a crackly prison overhead system. Because it's my job, not because it's who I am. If I were called what I am all the time, then you would think my name was Ms. Funny Jokes Hot Ass.

Yesterday morning I woke up with a headache and sore throat but I powered through, I got dressed, had an outfit all worked up, and then was suddenly paralyzed with dread at the idea of going to my job. I took to my bed. It was very dramatic like I was in a Russian novel. I was able to move only after I had phone-typed an absence email to one of our adminstrators. After that I could breathe and I could walk. I walked through the hip neighborhood north of me, just walked and wandered, and sometimes felt at home and sometimes thought how the fuck does this place exist? How can there be a whole John Fluevog store when I haven't seen anyone in Fluevogs since 1997, and then it was only three people? How are there so many people in coffee shops? I called off work, but did everyone? Did everyone go to a meeting yesterday in which their co-workers cried at the lack of respect and waste of talent they witness everyday?

The other thing that happened was that I saw some party pictures on Facebook and my thoughts and values regressed to age 15, when it was obvious and a real fact that everyone on the face of the Earth was happier, more attractive, and having more fun than me. Combine this mindset with my growing Unicorn Consciousness and my own terrible lady body with her waves of estrogen and moon magic and I lost my ever loving mind, I mean I went crazy, all weeping and feelings and raising my mascara smeared fist to the sky.

I sewed my way out of it, thankfully. And now for emergent themes:

Books: I have to order the books from the book benefit for the kids. I have to put the poems from Poetry Circle together as a book and have a Book Release party. I have also signed up for a project with the Paper Crane to make a book and then fill that book from January until March, at which point it will be displayed, possibly printed.

Patience: we turn to Cary Tennis, who says:
"...being patient is...breathing with all the intensity of a lover. It's being as vibrant as a leaf. The leaf is attached to the tree. It's filling with the green blood of time. It's perfoming daily the miracle of photosynthesis...in the opening we make when we stop doing the compulsive, answers are scattered like acorns. We can stoop to pick them up. That is what we mean when we say, 'Be patient.' We mean focus on the few feet fecund earth around you. We mean take the gifts strewn about your feet."

I cleared out a lot of stuff in this last year and then expected the new world to rush in. It has crept in, it is moving in, but I wanted a rush, I wanted yet another Tremendous Adventure. I think that my adventuring is ended; I think I'm supposed to be like a leaf on a tree in Ukrainian Village. There is more than enough around me, that's for certain. Cousins having babies, jobs having crisis, old friends meeting new friends, new outfits all the time. It's nice, it's real lifey.

2010-07-16T18:22:00.004-05:00

Here's me, just chillin' with my unicorn

Secret Celebrations

...are not so secret when you talk about them on the internet, but I couldn't make it to an AA meeting, so facebook is where I announced my year sobriety. It worked, man, I got the props I needed and a tall post stuck in the sands of the interweb. One year, right? I thought it would be difficult like a battle, but it was more like a breakup. A breakup with a sexy loser that's an acknowledged problem but whom all your friends still like.

Between you and me, blog, today marks yet another milestone. Today we herald a secret victory: the fruit of digging up the past and showing it to light. The triumph of will over trauma, of bravery over shame, my hand exercising dominion over my past. Temper all these words with deep breaths and laid-back calm, because I'm way into yoga. Your garden-variety vanquishment.

This is how things feel now. The brutal, stabby struggles of my first thirty are gone. Lately I'm a sturdy boat gauzed with serenity, just taking it in. It no longer makes sense to say that this job is crazy--yeah, no, I get it. The reason I loathe the martyrs walking this place, pinning their hopes on incarcerated children, isn't just because it violates my code of ethics, but because it makes you a citizen of Creepytown.

You can't rescue people you don't even see.

Maybe they have sonar, or know something I don't. Whatever. I have regular old eyes and hands and a relentlessly critical brain that is getting really good at liking me without having to see me as the center of the entire Universe. It frees up time while making insults easier to take. Oh, if insults were sugary candies, I'd been on my fifth set of dentures.

There's this little Polish dude, 13 going on 63, who is an old-school hustler always trying to cop a hug. He's good for a laugh, as is the slow girl going through coke withdrawal who giggles at the most obscure things--not my best material, but like "You said that funny, you said it with your eyes." I've stopped pretending to change lives and now draw awesome calendars-of-the-month that are also coloring sheets. These are the tiny joys I clutch in my hand as the administrators of this place reveal themselves to be not merely incompetent but actively malevolent.

This building is pulsing with the desire to create the world in our image, and it's gross. Keep this in mind. It's time to start thinking of where I'll go when I move on, and then not be that surprised when I end up altogether somewhere else.

2010-03-16T13:20:00.005-05:00

St. Patrick rid Ireland of the snakes which were eating all of the potatoes. The fat cats were going to shut down the potato mines so he got together with U2 and Seamus Heany and put on a racy burlesque show to raise cash and morale for Catholics. Divinely inspired, the boys decided to strip to their "staffs" which spooked the snakes into beating oceanic retreat.

St. Patrick wasn't even Irish. He was captured and enslaved during the chaos of the Toledo War and taken via the Great Lakes all the way to Ireland. It was his beautiful singing voice and orange hair that set him apart from the other slaves. "God loves a ginge," said the nuns at the orphanage. And they raised him to be a good potato miner and a slow, sensual kisser.

No one likes being called white, it's boring. Where's our green and ginger? Where's my right to name myself? I mean, I'm not Irish, but I'm not just another white American lady, with my NPR and my coffee. I have a story and a sense of myself that takes up more than an "I Love the 90s" Special, it threads back to carpets in Ireland, drunks dead in gutters, women dead in bathtubs, basically lots of dead people, inappropriate jokes, and rousing music that makes everyone cry. We are loud in groups, also, as a rule.

What do I do when I want to feel more special than I already feel? I think about these stories that culminate in mine, and most years previous to this one, I would have gone out and gotten drunk to help shoot off the sparks these thoughts create. It's the Irish thing to do, it's our one flaw, we just love to live too much, we live to love and laugh, and we try to fly out of our bodies and workaday lives into greater, richer lives.

But I have decided not to drink again, ever, to remain shackled to sobriety and a story that daily begins and ends with me. You realize you are not that Irish-American, even: you don't have eight kids and you went to college twice and your mom isn't the crippled nasty drunk leaching out your life but a tragic story you haven't seen in years. They had her intervention on St. Patrick's Day three years ago and then went out for beers. You didn't go because you had moved on so hard. You should stop pretending, it's unseemly, you don't want to be just another voice yelling "I'm this." First time ever, you don't know what to do on St. Patrick's Day.

Sunday you get the news that Kevin has had a stroke. Except that Kevin is 25 and in good health and coming to visit this weekend, and we are going to wear green and be Irish-American Cousins together.

This St. Patrick's Day, add another layer to the paint on the walls, peeling and damp. I want to be honest about cultural tropes and poisonous family myths and I want to punish myself for my happiness and my single-minded turning to the light. I want to cut them out because I don't deserve or want all the richness of having a family and a history. Except all of this is blah blah and bullshit because this is how I know Kevin, by being born his cousin, into this family.

Kevin is going to be fine, walking and talking again. He's a stoner and a science fiction reader, tumbles with children and loves alike. He's going to be fine not because he's a fighter--he is not--but because our family fights. They sweep us up in their blurry Cathoholic hysteria and we get to look back at it and mock it.

This St. Patrick's Day I'll be moving on from the Patty Downeys, the Shane MacGowans, and the alcoholic man-boy crushes of near past and concerning myself with Kevin. Kevin is a great guy beset by a tragedy, not a narcissist courting constant immolation. Kevin is an all around quality fellow and I'm sending mad unicorn vibes his way until I get to Ohio and cure him with the world's most powerful joke. Kevin: he's a great Irish guy.

2010-01-05T17:06:00.003-06:00

"I want to hold a mirror up to society, and then win the world record for biggest mirror." --Tracy Morgan, 30 Rock

This quote was stolen from another blog that I reached through this other one blog. Tracy Morgan, right? Hilarious. Today is the first day I'm banning myself from Facebook at work, and so that's how that's going.

Just as I start writing on this thing again, I'll probably stop. Little Sister and my favorite Aunt both said, at different times this Christmas, that I should write a book. I always figured I would, but like at age 80, and it would be an Anais Nin affair. However I am now 33 and whatever dramatic shift in figure or temperament that allows for scandalous life of artistic debauchery has not happened. In fact, I get more and more like Laura Ingalls Wilder with every passing day. I should write this book now, before it becomes 'Little House in the Big Woods,' with endless sexy passages about how the joints of the tiny dried herb drawers were fitted.

The idea is to write, plainly, the vignettes of the families, children, and coworkers I have had the pleasure of working via my job as a social worker. The challenge is to do so in a way that is not condescending or exploitative; also, in a way that is funny and enjoyable, on some level. Ultimately the goal is to humanize a dehumanized and hypothetical group of people. Little Sister suggested that the ultimate goal is to contribute to another image of social workers, beyond prairie-skirt-wearing-overworked-and-crying-mess; this has its appeal, and then also I'm disgusted by my own desire to revamp my profession so that it is, in a word: sexy.

On the other hand, I dress ridiculously at work with this same intention.

Amidst racial tension at work I actually referred to myself as "white chocolate." I am consistently amazed at the following things:

--people

--life

--what I can get away with

--music

Calling myself "white chocolate" is what I mean about getting away with things; this also covers some of my outfits. How my co-workers respond to me is more of a people issue; due to a common homicidal enemy, everyone has been getting along famously. The girl who threatened to kill me is running around threatening to kill everyone; there is a tension/release thing happening every time more than four or five of us congregate. Tension: she is trying to kill us, get someone else to kill us, or get us fired. Release: we are the only ones who know just how deeply nutso she is; also, we make jokes.

A final note: the mood swings PMS provides are the only experience of highs and lows I'm getting lately. A good friend has suggested hard drugs as the solution to my problems. Hard drugs and soft pants: Winter 2010.

2009-12-23T20:37:00.002-06:00

This is M's fifth Christmas locked up in kid jail. She was telling me about speaking Creole and how I can find a husband in south Florida and how her Mom fills up trailers with stuff from Good Will and goes to Haiti every year but this year her Dad is locked up in Jamaica and there was supposed to be a money order for $800 somewhere in the house but no one can find it. She also mentioned that despite my constant encouragement she will not become a social worker. "I was looking at you earlier, when you were talking to that girl? And I was thinking 'Why the hell does Ms. Groves work here?"

Right around the time M. was watching me and thinking that, I was sitting with Negative Attention Seeking Shanae and coloring; or rather, I'm coloring, she's making a huge deal out of ignoring me, loudly announcing that I'm on drugs, and demanding that security separate us. I'm just waiting it out--she'll come around eventually and color out of boredom and the shiny allure of markers. Couple seconds later she was clutching a plastic bottle of lotion and telling me to "duck, because I'm about to do something" and I was sort of laughing, saying I'm not going to duck because she doesn't need to throw any lotion at anyone when WHAP she smashes the bottle down on the table and it shatters and there are globs of lotion and shards of thin plastic all over her, the table, and the floor. And so I calmly picked out the shards of plastic and made a joke about wasting all this good lotion while I'm ashy. "Why you picking up all the plastic, you think I'm going to cut myself?" says the girl with jagged scars all over her arms, who tried to kill herself just weeks ago, who has a life story so devoid of warmth that when she acts crazy I just want to congratulate her for not eating humans. "Well, you know me, always worried about cutting" I said affably. Because it's true. These girls will cut themselves with anything.

The key moments for me are that I actually felt affable--that exploded lotion and unheralded aggression can just pass right through me carrying whatever messed up message they were supposed to send and move right on by. That just as I was thinking "Man, I love this job" M is asking what exactly is wrong with me; and also, that I can have tiny moments when if you stay calm and soothing then suddenly everyone is calm and soothing and we're wiping up lotion and making jokes about my scaly elbows.

2009-12-12T17:01:00.004-06:00

WINTER [is a bad time to] Fall in Love

I just realized I want to be in love. It would balance the hurt of this world, fill the space where wine once warmed me, smooth the jagged edge between receiving and deserving. Except now it's winter and everyone who has ever loved me is married or inaccessible in a way I don't understand. Somewhere in my brain space there exists a closet that generates wonderful men who have loved me and I haven't seen it in time and that closet will be empty someday, is my worry. They walk out and stand patiently and then walk on to women better suited for them. I'm not sure how much good will toward me exists in the Universe, but I tell myself it's massive. Any time theology slides into math or volume I get panicky. I'm fianlly paying attention but the closet door is closed and there are no sounds coming from inside. Chick magazine advice is just as vapid but now directed right at me. The list of words and songs and smells that make me ache with the power of all the love I'm shedding gets longer and more surprising every day until I worry I'll be permanently flushed and on the verge of tears. The only culture I've ever lived in appears to be all wrong (on this question, to me) and so I'm out in the cold, so to speak. I'll just keep riding the bus, downloading love songs, reading poetry, and drawing nonsense. The last part of my adolescence is blossoming in the cracked jar of my thirties, and what's to be done with that? On the upside my endless empathy can grow and grow as I finally get what the fuck is wrong with teenage girls, and also try to tattoo on my muscles how much it sucks to be outside in Chicago in the winter, alone.

2009-12-10T14:47:00.002-06:00

Her cheap heart hurt.

This kid has dark hair, brown eyes, peach skin, and quite a mouth on him. He pops up as Little Boy/Hyper/Bright/Guarded in my personal intuitive taxonomy. Anyway, these are words, he's a kid. Here's what stood out, honestly: he didn't like me. We did not hit it off. Mostly in this world I hit it off with people. I remember coming at him with the wrong tack and Brian having to do some mending. This kid liked Brian a lot, with the particular texture of a hyper boy who is guarded but not in the way he thinks he is. When a kid like that likes you it feels great but is exhausting.

He got out of kid jail last week and was walking to school with his mom to re-enroll. A 20-year rolled up on them, flashed some gang signs, and shot him in the head. This was on the southernmost street of our neighborhood. After years of rumored gentrification, it's been speeding up real quick and the Latin gangs that once ruled Logan Square--along with the now extinct white Gaylords--have been pushed to the south and west edges. Which is where he was shot. In the head. He's 14, he's alive and in a coma.

At Unicorn camp I had a particular experience of a little boy--all that energy radiating everywhere, knocking over breakable things and literally soul-puncturing with pure love. Some people are in so much danger, you know? We're all connected but some of us are way out from under the blanket, out there cold and vulnerable. It's heartbreaking. This is my own fault, too, all this heartbreak, I actually tattooed a prayer for heartbreak on my back. I had no idea. I suspect that if I'm surprised now I'm gonna be hella shocked later, like if I have kids, like if I fall in love, like if I stay sober for as long as I need to--forever--and keep having the truth of this broken world shoved into my big dumb heart.

The girl that got locked into the room for six hours? She was on the news, too, she's missing. My brain gets it--I've been shown enough of the map to see where we are located on the X and Y of desirable attributes, Maslow-wise, I think I've got a picture of what my own compassion consists of, but feelings-wise, right now I just ache for us.

2009-11-19T16:47:00.002-06:00

And so it begins

I've been worried about this winter since it started getting colder. You don't want to be too dramatic, if you are me--it's so easy so let a slow grayness seep in that it's usually best to not name it. Plus everyone else is in so much more pain than me, usually. I try to find ways to integrate pain into how I see everything so that it doesn't stand out, right? It's in the fabric of my days, which isn't really supported by my culture, but whatever. It works as well as anything.

The loss of whiskey and wine woke me up to even more pain, loneliness, awareness of processes between people; made me more tender in general. I don't seem to be able to hide, either; it's my day job, my house is no refuge, Cary Tennis has cancer and is scared. A shiny boy kills himself, hearts are broken. If I thought that immersing myself in pain, getting right into it, would protect me, well. I was wrong. I think it means something but I don't know what.

I'm going to Shalom Mountain soon and I hope to take some magic back down to get me through this winter; I think big painful things are coming, even though I might be wrong: I'm torn, because I don't want to be wearing the wrong glasses but I don't want to be blind-sided, either. I think I just want to write that I'm scared, and also hopeful, and that if you are hurting, I get it. I also want to put this out there, in light of all of this, including my continued heartbreakingly simple interactions with these little girls who give me the clear and brutal impression that they feel they have never been valued or listened to before:

"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured." --Kurt Vonnegut

2009-09-15T15:47:00.002-05:00

In order to assuage any guilt about not updating this blog enough, I direct anyone who finds this to read Cary Tennis' advice column on salon.com. He's consistently amazing: kind, loving, funny, compassionate, eccentric. And he writes nearly everyday. Initially he was just a source of good vibes and thoughts and writing, although of late we have converged on a path he doesn't know exists, and every column is a punch to my solid gut. "Dear Mother Disliker"? The thing with an advice columnist is that I'm not simply converging with him and what he writes, but with the presenting problems of the salon.com readers writing to him.

I am not alone in disliking my mother. And like the lady who has awoken from her OCD slumber, I'm on a path. I'm like the dozens of letter writers who struggle with drinking, who want to know how to love people more, who want directions on how to live a good, decent life. If we can agree that a major feature of our common American life is a focus on the superiority of the individual desire, which intersects with capitalism in a major way and results in a soil rich for the production of narcissism, then I believe we can also use an advice columnist to remind us that our problems are collective and our solution is complex but doesn't involve thinking less, feeling less, or buying more.

On the me tip, I'm like a perpetual "Stayin' Alive" video, I'm strutting around trusting that something fantastic is happening, with occasional breaks to stop strutting and crouch, terrified, at in the middle of the sidewalk because...you know...being alive is terrifying. And then the music starts again and I'm back to hustlin'.

2009-07-23T19:10:00.005-05:00

While my computer is broken, this is my update, typed on a computer shared by four people in an office shared by 15--

My Gramma Downey passed, and she took my alcohol consumption with her. Seeing her crazy daughter (and my mother!) for the first time in five years, all drug-addled and unable to recognize her children by face or voice, well, that helped, too. I'm straight edge again! Except for the fish and the periodic cigarette and the occasional 'bump' when the party's flagging, I'm pure as Ian MacKaye, 1988.

What could he be saying?

The debate re: whether or not I am an alcoholic rages on between friends and Sister and myself, a little bit, but in the end: my Grandmother was an alcoholic, and my mom is that and so, so much more; some of the cousins have it, the unquenchable thirst following that first beer. As it stood I had a maximum of two hours of pleasure from drinking for every six hours spent worrying about money and calories and behavior and the eventual destruction of my eventual children's lives due to my eventual descent into alcoholism and Borderline Personality Disorder.

To sum up:

"It's the right thing to do."

And I'm happy about it, which is the most important thing: my happiness. Fantastic things have been falling into place, as well, although other excruciating happenings prevent me from thinking that I fell from drinking into life's great jello pool of predetermined goodness. Constant bliss and good luck happenstance would be boring anyway, and would not provide me with enough funny stories or teeny tiny reminders that being alive, while often mind-blowingly tender and precious, is also ridiculous.

2009-04-08T13:49:00.003-05:00

Around the turn of the year there were delightful 'look back at your life' directives from the newspapers and lady magazines. I love them, I eat them up. Something asked about the most creative moments in the past year and I realized how much I love running groups. Or really, how much I love coming up with ambitious ideas for groups. 'So I'll do more of that!' I decided. And revised my poetry group with the boys to be more hippyish and concentrated.

Everything was all mapped out and coordinated and it's been two days of chaos and mismanagement. Today alone we spent 30 minutes shuffling between three units, collecting girls and dirty looks. Well laid plans all mucked up is frustrating enough, right? Especially when the plans are something you are invested in, so imagine a time that happened to you. Now imagine how much that sucked, and then imagine the whole time that girls are cussing at you and staff are giving you dirty looks. When we finally had a space and the group had dwindled to 6, and the quiet room was a public room and a movie about Jesus as a drug dealer in the ghetto was blaring across the room, and my precious Borderline was making a massive attention seeking mess, but I could finally breathe. I was able to see what a tense White wreck I was, and haven't I learned? Nothing works here. It's broken.

The other thing I've learned is that these fucking kids are no fucking joke, and once I admitted my frustration and explained my vision, and took just a touch more abuse and a touch more love, we got into the swing of things and had some really nice moments.

2009-03-21T17:17:00.003-05:00

A list of demands for my man of letters.

I'm currently reading "Of Human Bondage" and it's converging strangely with the new Harpers'* I am concurrently reading. Last article in Harper's is a review of a book about William Hazlitt, and the first line is "From Samuel Johnson to Christopher Hitchens..." so you know I'm down from jump street. Along with the Maugham book I took out from the library was a Samuel Johnson collection and a fictionalized biography of said-same Dr. J. What do these guys--and Susan Sontag--have in common? They are "men of letters": "an intriguing combination of critic, sage, scholar, journalist, and dilettante...a public intellectual...combining the erudite with the popular." I also think of bell hooks. I often think of bell hooks: she is my north star: who also has (apparently like this Hazlitt they are talking about) an abiding empathy, the "rigorous and imaginative compassion" of DFW.

Where I'm going with this is--well, first things first, forget astronaut or ballerina, I want to be a man of letters. I'm also wondering what a man of letters actually does in the media-determinationist post-capitalist world in which we find ourselves. So often the revolutionary thinkers were those that undermined prevailing ideas, but as we now operate in a near constant state of advertising-driven idea-flipping, bombarded by letters, covered in silly letters, awash in loud letters, well then. My hope is that the fluffy icing will always be fluffy icing, and that the sharp mind of a pure heart will always cut to the center of discourse. We can only assume the best of a cake or cake metaphor.

The "Of Human Bondage" thing comes in for illustration: how I reminisce for a time of simple class warfare and prim Victorian oppression, for I would be a hipster libertine. Now, however, I find myself a true Catholic in a world of easy want and insincerity. I blame Ian MacKaye and Kurt Vonnegut both.

The mid-twenties narrator, Phillip, he's running into every example of foolish libertines and delusional adherents of the Good Life and I'm at this ridiculous job where I just learned they are teaching "Criminal Thinking Errors" and Freudian constructs to the boys on the fourth floor, the ones going to big kid jail soon. What about a little love, people, what if the skills you need to steal a car and lie to the cops are the same skills needed to get a good job and run an investment firm? Where is the art in life, the right for everyone to feel the smug compassion that is my daily fuel? Are there people who still can't see that their misbehavior is your gentlemanliness, that their delinquency is your success?

My demands: I demand a man of letters who can finish the ideas I start. I want no Demitri Martin-type shorthand replacing insight, but neither will the cruelness of this world lead my man of letters to kill himself or become a pickled and fusty conservative. I want workaday imagination, vigorous compassion, and enough sarcasm to keep him or her alive for the duration.

*This issue's short story contains scenes around Toledo and is called 'the Blade.' It's Denis Johnson-reminiscent and a silent shout-out to Toledo: it's both these things!

2009-03-19T21:29:00.004-05:00

Question: anxiety about your lack of anxiety is called what?

I'm saying no to the PhD program to which I was just accepted. I only sporatically abide by sober standards of behavior but I always know where I'm supposed to do--and I'm supposed to pay off this damned debt. School will not offer funding for a part-timer, and I can't afford to go full time. Also, I don't want to go full time, because as sick and stressed and heartbroken as this job has made me, I am not done with it and it is not done with me. Who quits a job in this economy? Plus, I'm thinking I'll go for the big brass ring and apply to University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. The name alone used to sicken me! I wanted to attend the School of Dismantling The System! These days I'm not so sure. Now I want to be where the power is, the power of money, class, and prestige, where the books are leather and the buildings Gothic. It seems that I will always be an outsider, and there is no better place to be outside than the inside, right?

Outside of the outside is either inside or nowhere. I'm too angry to be an insider and too much a lady for nowhere.

In the meantime I will prompt my gifted co-workers to their greatest, and attach my name to their accomplishments. I will coast on the great expectations of my friends and family, who assume there is genius in there somewhere, under the hair and head cold. That's right, Chicago Winter. You get one last punch in.

2009-03-07T14:54:00.004-06:00

Katrina asks me why I no blog no more, and I have no good answer. In the absence of a good answer I will just go ahead and blog, and then I can say "Katrina, what the hell are you talking about?" Because, you see, I'm blogging all the time.

For instance, I'm doing it right now, at work.

Remember when I thought my non-standard work schedule would be calming and centering? It has been; I am now cooking all the time, and doing yoga. I'm also deeply infatuated with a married co-worker and it is frustrating and great. Due to the sad-pants direction in which I'm heading, I'm trying to get my date on, in person and in Internet. In person, I try to talk to nice guys with beards and spend less time with charming and shallow alcoholics. On the computer, I chose chemistry.com because it involves my favorite of the soft sciences--personality tests! They are choosing men for me based on colorful pie charts, just like the village elders would have, had my people stayed in Ireland and Ireland developed pseudo-scientific Power Point-style mating rituals.

It's nearly my year anniversary here at Kid Jail, and since I love a good retrospective, I have been comparing my year at the last job with my work here. In a sweet convergence, I will be leading a Trauma-Sensitive Care training with the line staff this month. Of course this was the training I desperately wanted to lead at the residential center, but seeing as I was the Training Coordinator, it was more important to sort resumes and discuss the finer points of dental coverage. Man, that job sucked!

Following a big conference I attended in November on "Trauma and its Aftermath" I suddenly knew what I wanted to research for my PhD and applied to Jane Addams. I was watching a panel with the great Bessel van de Kelk and His Eminence John Briere and it just hit me, and continued to pinch and shock me until I was forced to speak out on the last day at the last paper presentation. I was on holy fire!

Since the application, however, I have had the time to deeply question my choice of research and of schools. In developing the handouts for this training, however, and thinking endlessly, endlessly, constantly about these kids and cultural conceptions of these kids and communities and crime, it's pretty obvious that I am supposed to pull at this thread until it no longer keeps me up at night or causes me to cry on the bus. This equation has worked well in the past: what is it that makes you cry, St. Renegade, what is keeping you awake at night with empathy and rage? You should probably make that thing your job. In fact, you should blog about it.

The plan, then, is for increased blogging on the following topics: 1. Dating and 2. Various inchoate weepy thoughts about children in Chicago and the meaning of life. I can also write about vegetarian recipes, urban teen language, and missing my friends that have moved away. Coming soon.

2008-10-12T20:15:00.003-05:00

It took me a long time to post that last thing, even though negative is easier than positive. I can type furiously in my mouse- and MRSA-infested office about a bad day much more easily than a good day. After a good day, I float out of work, buoyed by co-workers and children, and the beautiful facets of human suffering and healing. I sit on the bus and imagine I'm glowing. If I wrote about poetry group, or the children who look at me with sad and loving eyes, well: that hurts more, and would take a better writer. I'm trying, yo. You never want to brag, right? You never want to take credit for something that should be as easy as breathing. Like, 'I showed someone respect and compassion, and it moved them'. This should happen all the time. Blogs should be chock-a-block with kindness and respect. The fabric of my life, what with the work and the empathy, should be as mundane as tollbooth operation appears to be. Alas, alas. It seems to stick out. And so I say: I can write about Ponytail, and this bitch yesterday that tried to hurt me, but really? What I am not equiped to write about are the amazing times, the group last week in which I was crying, when D. reached out to K. and offered pure and loving support, in jail. In kid jail. I can't write about how the younger boys gather round, how they can still receive loving praise and you watch it fortify their bones like milk. I still don't know how to talk about D. and what she gave me, when she sat in my lap and screamed about everyone that had left her. Why is it so much easier to trade my crazy kid stories for kind looks and free beers when what I actually want to talk about is how much it hurts when someone loves and trusts you and you don't know why; it's like they handed you an egg made of gold, and you are a trampoline artist. Take care of this, they are saying. You think: what the fuck? I'm honored, but I fucking jump on things for a living.

2008-09-20T16:49:00.004-05:00

"This poem is called 'Time of Sorrow'"

Mr. Wallace's suicide continues to resonate, or it weakened the glass enough that bigger bowling balls landing on the windshield over my heart made some big scary cracks. Today I am watching a documentary in which a girl, out from foster care and juvie, screams wounded insults at her drug-addicted mother. I am sitting next to a girl with acute Borderline Personality Disorder traits, like: she cannot take in any genuineness and so judges and deflects, loudly and with the aid of teeth-sucking. "[tsk] she so stupid [tsk] her hair ugly [tsk] she be blowing me, she don't deserve no mother [tsk]." My grief over my mother was summoned by the documentary, but my hatred of her and my hatred of my hatred of her is sitting next to me like Kryponite, if Kryponite was human pain, and Superman was a social worker. I am so raw by the end of the film that I nearly ram the glass with the A/V cart in my rush to escape. It was carnage in there, girls crying over their cancer-ridden mothers, their sad lives, their existences, buy my girl is running for her room, making sure that we all see her tear-stained face and hear her anguished cries. I am certain that she isn't feeling anything. I want to smoosh her face. I want to reach into her empty self and fill her with empathy pudding.

Cut to the boys group and all their bitching and moaning. This one kid--I shall call him Ponytail, because he is mean--obviously does not want to participate in the spoken word group. "So go." "I don't want to go." Continues to cuss under his breathe, attempts to screw his face up into a shank and psychically stab me with it. "Okay, everyone who wants to be in this group, raise your hand." He does not raise his hand. "Okaaaay, everyone who didn't raise their hand, step out." He does not step out. "I want to be in group." "Well, you should have raised your hand. Step out."

And then it begins. "This is some bullshit, some fucking bullshit, etc..." He is pouring me a heaping helping of the word stew commonly called 'M.F.-ing' in corrections lingo. Usually I know where to place myself in the mental terrain of these interactions. There are boundaries. Clearly, kid was looking to M.F. someone. Plus, the stupid and selfish rage of adolescents cannot be overstated. You can bitch all you want, but I know I asked you justly, and you must justly obey. You, kid, are in jail.

There is also Spazzatar, a young man greatly underserved his share of intact genes, nutrition, family life, or social capital. I try to remember that they are puppies, you know? Cute puppies you see near a dumpster, having been bested by the other dogs, and you move closer, like, "Hey little buddy! Aw, buddy, what happened to your leg?" and snap!, Little Buddy is baring his teeth and lunging and hiding his hurt leg from you, you fucking monster. Spazzatar's bared teeth take the form of a high-pitched voice he uses to repeat and mock everything I say. I feel like the worst group leader in the world. I am a terrible person, a fat white lady pouring effete syrup on nasty little kids that would rather punch each other and mock each other to death. I wonder what I am doing with my life, I should be on Project Runway. I should be doing a job that never ever hurts. I am going to quit, and find a job that does not want to kill me.

2008-09-19T19:29:00.002-05:00

Couple things:

I'm working on a plan to update this more as a personal challenge! I love personal challenges!

Also, from Laura Miller's article on Salon.com about DFW's suicide, we get this: to counter exhausting self-consciousness he practiced a "rigorous and imaginative compassion." I scribbled it inside my pocketbook I liked it so much.

And finally, I'm entranced by this spam email I read, imagining it's like an internet rune by which I can tell my future, or maybe a cryptic map to millons of Nigerian dollars. You tell me.

"Lila Thomson" CaseyexhaustBlanco@wikipedia.org

sourberry ginmill ed,

counsel sunset colony? assurance, edit nielson.colony jessica protract assurance cyclone playtime, skipgaberones marshland congestive absolve salvage.

counsel eldest.

2008-09-14T23:20:00.002-05:00

David Foster Wallace, please. Please don't hang yourself. If it isn't proof enough that, um, things are happening, that life is going along and the thoughts and words that I love are not tied to a man that can feel that love, well, you committed suicide. Just last night I was telling a stoop full of drinking women about Infinite Jest, about Don's speech in front of the Crocodiles, perhaps my favorite story ever told.

Well. Well. I choose to believe that love means something, dead or alive, and so, having not met you while you were alive, I would like to say: your books made true things clearer, and funnier, and more poignaint, and therefore: more true, in my humble opinion. Thank you. I am sorry for your mind-shattering pain.

2008-08-31T00:10:00.003-05:00

"Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander the boulevards, up and down, restlessly while the dry leaves are blowing." --Rilke

Specifically, I remember a weekend in Columbus, OH. The Hardcore Boys had moved along, and I had new roommates in a beautiful new home. It worked out that everyone was gone for the weekend, and my mind, the endless meaning-making machine that it is, took this as A Sign...I spent two days in a hammock, awash in loneliness and poverty, sobbing. Come Monday I was sought out and loved by the amazing people that 10 years on I still consider my main people. That weekend, though...I remember. It is helpful to remember that set adrift-ness. This is not who I am, but how I was raised, and my memory of this is why I am known as the Clinician That Can Deal with These Fucking Borderlines. I know what it is like to feel no center, and try to create one--I was raised in that world, and visit infrequently. It's probably bad luck to bet on such things, but I wager that I will never feel that alone again.

The counter of that is quiet, and reflection. I am a product of my age, and quiet is not easy--I call to Catholic saints, I ask Thomas Merton to help me out, but when someone text messages, I answer. Until this last week when my leg exploded in shards of numbing pain. I ignored my back pain weeks before, and this was nerve damage revisiting. Meaning-making monkey brain has decided that this forced paralysis is to remind me of quiet. I keep saying that I want less drunkenness. When I watch the kids corner a threesome, there is a clear internal voice that tells little Midwestern me to get a cab. Friends are mad, text messages fly, but in the end: I was not cut out for this. I am wholesome to the nth degree, by no choice of mine.

The job is another factor: you cannot imagine. I may not be bright enough to synthesize a child jail. Right now I have thoughts and encounters but there is no production--I have nothing to offer in the way of insight. I think I'm in a fallow phase, and so is this adorable little blog. St. Renegade is on a manhunt and a meaninghunt, saying goodbye to the Glee Club and to the Party Crew, and finally finishing "Rising Up and Rising Down." I beg forgiveness--to blog readers, to Chicago friends, to the whole world that asks anything of me. I'm in, like, pre-hibernation. What comes after, who knows.

Until then, I write about songs here: http://yourfavoritetune.com/songs/

2008-06-26T17:02:00.003-05:00

I think I know what I'm supposed to build.

I don't have much time--it's a shared computer and my co-oworker will be back from Subway soon. He likes the computer to play smooth jazz and will not appreciate the Hold Steady or T Rex. Me, I don't appreciate having to walk around with a headful of big thoughts. There is some kid trying to escape. He's white, long hair, heroin junkie--he's a grunge kid, even if he doesn't know it--and there are official warnings that he is trying to escape custody. I also imagine him busting into this office, or falling from the ceiling. There is no privacy in prison.

I wandered into having the best sort of supervisor ever, and our last conversation has given me a headache. We have to run these groups, you see. And we agree--you would also agree--that the most effective group stems from the knowledge and passion of the leader. I have passion, you know. Where other people have common sense and good looks, I have passion. He's got his existential thing, his personal responsibility thing...there's some kind of Nietshche UberMensch something going on, too, which I have told him to keep off my units.

I'm getting glimpses of what my thing is, and I'm sharing it with him, and he's nodding, you know: these professional listening types. Thinking, and then coming out with: "You know, if no one is telling you what to do, you should develop your own curriculum. And if it sucks, it sucks. But if it's awesome, everybody loves you. Type it up, publish it, you know." Just like that.

And what is this thing, distilled, that I would like to tell these children?

1) You are not alone.

2) You are valuable.

3) There are forces at work--cultural, historical, political, personal--that operate to devalue you.

4) Knowing what these forces are is power, is clarity, can help you remember your core worth and agency.

Anyway, co-worker didn't go to Subway and has returned with a plate full of no-good kid prison food. I must retrun to Smooth Jazz. Everything is daunting, you know. Daunting and exhausting. SO WORTH IT.

2008-05-30T20:38:00.002-05:00

"We're gonna build something this summer."

Leave it to the Hold Steady to bring sing talk anthem of joy to this summer of 2008. I'm at work and the brief obsessive crush with this job is over. The paperwork, meetings, and ineffectual leadership have moved in, and while everyone is talking about social justice some things will not change. In meetings, I am an angry child. When paper must be worked, I will choose the internet. When the kids call, I answer.

But for reals, we are building something this summer. I mean, I am, and whoever wants to join me. I am not clear on what I'm building but I want it to be a place for the kind of compassion that melts your eyeballs. Leaves you shaken and shiverin'. This summer, we will build a tilt-a-whirl of love to make this whole city giddy.

2008-04-13T22:52:00.003-05:00

Long time no blog

What with my new job at child prison, forgetting my godson's birthday, and learning all about Baltimore!, I have not been blogging. I have been busy thinking about the job I have not yet started. Thinking about motivational interviewing, cognitive-behavioral therapy, race and class in the Chicago workplace, and outfits. Child Prison encourages the Nun and Social Worker uniform of modest dress and sensible shoes. How then to impress upon my environment that I am neither fully nun nor social worker? How to bring the punk rock and renegade seamstress sparkle to the grey halls of Institutionalized Child Abuse without upsetting sexually reactive children and very angry underpaid prison guards? It seems I may have to tone it down. There is also the issue of my enormous hoop earrings: too sad to contemplate.

In better news, Baltimore is still great. I feel madly in love with a toddler named Andypants. We went to the American Visionaries Museum for gaudy art made by weird people and largely concerning God: good stuff all around. Special praise for Chris Roberts-Antieau's fabric book of Gandhi's Seven Deadly Sins because 1) one could turn the fabric pages and rub all over them, 2) I like a simple moral message, and 3) it was beautiful and bright.

Andypants and Chris's mom is just the best, and spending time with her was exactly what I needed walking into this new job; she is modestly and solidly loving, which is why I had the good sense to attach myself to her way back in my social working neophyte days. There is a practicality to her that I lack. For example: I'm going on about what I'm imagining I'll need to bring to this job, what these girls will need, all theory and feeling and pure good intentions, and she listens and then says: take this book. Read this book, and change it around, and walk through it with these girls. It can be a group. She is correct. She also told me to learn origami when I was going into the Peace Corps, so that I was able to make children giggle by making them birds and such well before I could say 'bird.'

I have lots of these right and solid and practical people around. They are the best sort. They get shit done. Without these people I would be wandering Toledo pants less and tearful with all sorts of ideas and feelings in my body and nowhere to sleep.

2008-03-21T14:15:00.005-05:00

The world is a better place with you in it

My former supervisor's ex-boyfriend's dad invented the Pop-O-Matic button.

Baby Mama's grandfather, or an uncle's grandfather or something, invented the machines that line up bowling pins so we can knock them down again.

Someone I know (Dr. Cheese?) dated the guy whose mother invented Jazzercise, allowing him a life of arty ease.

To make this blog more socially relevant, more currently bloggish, I should ask what Paris Hilton has ever invented. Why is she so famous when school children don't know the name of the founder of Jazzercise? In fact, I'm not even sure which friend of mine dated the son of the lady who invented Jazzercise.

The more I type the word Jazzercise the more I think I dreamt the whole thing anyway. Plus, I think Paris Hilton invented a new kind pocket vagina which is currently available exclusively in Japan.
It's crazy snowing here in Chicago. The falling snow is consistent but it's fast, then slow, right now it's teeny flakes of sideways wet snow, when about 30 minutes ago it was lazily dropping snowflakes the size of ATM receipts.

Insufficient funds, God says.

I received the official offer letter from Kid Prison and everything is copacetic--except that I'm receiving exactly 12 cents less a year than originally promised--but that should be offset by the available profit sharing. I don't know that I want to share in the dividends of children in correctional institutions. Do I have to take a kid home, or is the profit sharing just a misdemeanor committed against my person or property? A pair of big earrings?

I saw the Slits on Wednesday and it was bananas. While I don't feel pregnant, there was such pagan lesbo lunatic crusty punk good time vibes there that I wonder about giving birth to a unicorn in a couple of weeks. Cuddles gave a brilliant drunken speech about Ari Up's Right to Be Totally Insane outside of the Continental, and if you've ever been to the Continental, you know that was the single smartest thing ever said there. Ended with: "You never see David Bowie and think, Oh, that's a fashion mistake."

After my annual St. Patrick's Day thought cycle about the English, mostly hating the arrogance and colonialism but loving their musicians, it was just plain bizarre to walk back into 1977 with all the white Brit love of Jamaican sensimilla and reggae; absolutely unironic but not without palpably creepy sense of, you know, Race and Stuff. Ari Up, as a unicorn, may be exempt from self-reflection. Perhaps this is why she wears such shiny golden pants.

2008-03-12T16:56:00.002-05:00

Kid Prison

He kept saying "This is a prison." A prison full of children. I did some advance research (mostly from the Juvenile Justice Initiative) where they have an Alex Kotlowitz quote on the home page. A social worker has 19-20 days with these children, so any kind of deep trauma work is impossible...oh, and also? Trauma work is predicated on safety. And these children are not safe. They are in prison. It took a half second for the truth of this to hit my heart region and by then I had started to cry. Strings around my heart broke, but it's not heartbreak, it's that true, deep compassion that feels like a emotional muscle ache. This sensation got me locked into social work. I haven't felt it in a year of office politics and data entry. There was that delicious feeling, plus abject terror in the face of a challenge. My head is racing with possibilities but I do have to sleep, sometimes, and sing a lot. I'll focus on what I have versus what I want: I got a tour; honest answers to difficult questions; got to feel social worky again. So worth it. But believe you me: I want the whole thing.

2008-03-03T16:47:00.004-06:00

I'm cooking with gas!

There is a lot of action in my email today regarding the political unrest in Armenia. Here is a short article that doesn't cover much from the New York Times. I have little to say on this topic, except: please don't hurt the grandmas. It's a cruel trick, offering them a way to complain en mass, in the central square! Usually they can only protest in tiny clusters at the market or on the bus. Life is hard. People are always bringing shame upon their nation, families, Grandmas. They want us to know about it! They find joy in telling each other. You can no more punish them for protesting than you can refuse their tasty soup.

The action in Armenia provoked a wave of check-in emails from far away friends that actually read this blog, and have been left with the impression that life is rough for me right now. The sweetness of that is killer, but it also begs clarification, the same clarification I've been working on the last week. Imagine.

In fact, I was recently informed that I am "cooking with gas!" There are good things happening, changes aplenty in store for scrappy St. Renegade, and it is the very nature of how good everything is, quiet and growing, that makes me see myself as a drinking, compulsively eating, complaining, and grouchy mess.

Some of the time. Mostly, I'm still a golden delight to be around. I think my brain is just having trouble transitioning from the Quest to Figure Out What is Wrong With Me and Fix It to this hippie life of love and acceptance. Last week, after a series of book, people, and wine-related crisis of illumination, I decided that meditation may help. Sitting quietly. Calming down. Being silent. Trusting myself, doing some breathing, not trying to find something wrong with me all the time. As much as I like talking and writing and talking some more, it's in me to listen, so I'm gonna do that.

Also note how the 'cooking with gas' thing works on multiple levels, as it conveys how hot I am while also prompting the brain to think warm thoughts in these sluggish last months of winter. You're welcome.

2008-02-17T15:54:00.002-06:00

Pork as Fork

I cannot find my copy of Slant 6's "Soda Pop Rip*Off" and it is breaking my heart. I can't remember if it was sold or stolen. This is because I am old, and whatever happened did so a long time ago. I am certain that Unwound's "Fake Train" and a Monorchid record were stolen from me in 1998, and it still makes me angry. I know who did it, and I forgive you, for we were young, and believed that the records we owned would make everyone like us.

Two posts in one day because I decided to read. I decided to read Cometbus, which I decided to buy at Quimby's, and I never go to Quimby's, but I did yesterday in part, I believe, because there is a debate aflame in the Choir about what is punk rock, what are we doing, who are we, do we actually like each other, etc. In this familiar and actually tender pile of semantic poo, the siren song of zines called to me. They still make MRR. I suppose I thought that world ended when I landed in Chicago, and decided I was done. Over. Hurt too much.

But now I am feeling the crushing weight and exhilarating potential of a do-over vis-a-vis St. Renegade and Punk Rock and groups of people united by the thought that they love music more than other people do.

Once upon a time, I lived in a punk rock world and punk rock house and loved it like an abusive partner, never feeling at home, always waiting for the next crushing blow. This is no surprise, as I had never been comfortable in my home, body, neighborhood, family, or country. However, I thought punk rock would be different. It was different in that there were bands and zines and thrift store clothes everywhere, but everyone was still scared and selfish, just like at home.

I am an adult, now, and not as scared, aware that I have as much right to read Cometbus as anyone else. I chose Cometbus #50, which just so happens to have interviews with Ian Mackaye, Christina Billotte, and Blake Schwarzenbach. Aw, guys. I miss you.

Aaron askes the giant bearded guy from TV on the Radio, Kyp: "Are you more concerned with staying true to your younger self, or what your older self will think?"

Tough. Kyp is more mature than I am. I am 31 and still find myself answering to a very wounded 16-year-old version of myself.

Eh. I don't have a handle on all this. Last week, J. Hopper put a Dog-Faced Hermans video on her blog, and I wrote a little email saying, hey thanks! That was, for reasons still mysterious to me, very difficult to do.

I have got to get down to Pilsen. Tomorrow, though, I have decided to take my record player into the kitchen and listen to Jonestown and Bratmobile while baking cookies for my Choir. If vegan punk rock cookies cannot bring us together, only love will tear us apart.

2008-02-03T12:45:00.000-06:00

Days like this you miss Toledo summers: a Netty's twist cone with cherry dip, the heat radiating from the power lines. We did not know we were in heaven, because it was so miserable.

2008-02-01T13:14:00.000-06:00

Happy Birthday

Yesterday was the culmination of Melancholia Week, and I'm convinced the force of my ennui caused all the snow. Chicago, if you will not crawl up into the lonely cavern of my head, I will at least trap you in your houses. I could not shake the blues, even using exercise! I did something called Boot Camp that hurt me and reinforced my abhorrance of the armed services. It works out well, though, for my abdomen feels pummelled, the physical embodiment of hurt and enjoying hurt and hurting some more. I was walking around all week, out of it, and today I realized: yesterday was my mother's birthday.

Seriously, that may not have anything to do with anything, but I cancelled my therapy session and I went to my old workplace to feel at home and then I went home and attempted maudlin drunkenness but I was getting too many phone calls. At no point did I think of my mother, and then this morning--duh. So, in the ultimate tribute, I spent her birthday in a self-protective bubble of repression and avoidance. I could have sent her yellow roses--her favorite--but what meaning would that have? Yellow roses are for friends, melancholia is for adult children of borderlines.

There's a foot of snow on the street, whiskey in the bottle, and they were out of the shade of high-end lipstick I tried to buy, so it's the right time to be sad. Two boy babies were born last week and I will be unable to maintain this crushing lonliness when smelling and holding little dudes, so I shall take advantage. It's clockwork, it's biology: February in Chicago. I have got to learn to play the harp. There is a song in here somewhere.

2008-01-18T18:45:00.001-06:00

"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."

Aw. Love. I think I typed this same quote up last year on MLK Day. That's one of those rare quotes that has not, since I saw it posted on a professor's door and taped it to my telephone twelve years ago, stopped making perfect sense.

And even while you wonder, "Where is that kind of power?" it's not unknown. I've been on the end of that kind of power, the implementing of demands of justice. I feel like I've wielded that power, too. Speaking of: Job interviews! There is light at the end of the tunnel. Back to clinical work, back to the world that makes sense to me, devoid of creepy office power plays and useless spreadsheets. A return to the grey areas and pure painful honesty of dipping your hands in the lives of the hurting. I have a great interview outfit picked out. It's a bit loud. I pull my hair back, though, so as not to overwhelm these poor people.

I've got to nap. We're singing tonight, at like midnight, some benefit for a drama collective that thought, you know, it might be funny if we "dressed up like orphans and foster kids." Right? You feel how gross that is. Anyway, I have to sleep off my self-righteousness, avoid the -8000 degree cold, and prepare to try and not drink at a show. It's a fun little thing I'm trying, a return to my sXe days. Off to fall asleep to the rageful sounds of Propaghandi! It's 1995 up in here!

2008-01-08T12:59:00.000-06:00

Upsilamba!

The leap is no longer suspended--you landed in Chicago, in the cold, walking around noticing everything--absolutely everything. Upsilamba is a crystalline and all encompassing intelligence.

Seriously, 2008 is the year for you.

2008-01-02T11:38:00.000-06:00

The first day of the New Year doesn't count. That's in the Bible, man.

New Year's Eve is always rough, it just never goes right, somehow, and so I thought I'd stay home. Then an opportunity arose that seemed seamless, foolproof, just golden. I suspect, however, that I time-travelled when getting ready and knocked over an eyeliner or something thereby disturbing the Force and putting me on a path that was just a smidge off, at first, and then was way off track by 2 am. By 4 am, everything was fine: I was back on Kimball Ave, in the Cabrio, with my sister.

Those intervening hours, however. Yesterday they took on mythic proportions, like Odyssey-level allegory and metaphor, Jodeci-type heights of melodrama and pathos. Yesterday was bleak and self-obsessed, until I heard:

"I'm cut in half real bad, Dewey."

It doesn't take much, really, just a little more sister time, an invitation to suicide by a dear friend, and a movie parody to set me back right. Fluffy-headed Social Worker said "You can just kill yourself right now, if you want, while I'm on the phone. You probably should." Precious. It's been a nice transition, from thinking I wasn't crazy while everyone else did, to having friends that think I'm perfectly fine even while I try and convince them of the singular hideousness of my life and person.

So, in summary: I fell off a horse on Christmas Eve Day, and was forced to "Git back on, git back on!" I choose to take my New Year lessons early. That is lesson #1 of 2008--git back on horses. Lessons #2 and #3 I should have learned already--never go to Wrigleyville, and never be a VIP. Finally, Lesson #4: Selective Optimistic Amnesia and Personal Forgiveness. All that happened on New Year's Eve is that I got to hear Spoon perform "Peace Like a River." Anything else, cowardice, narcissism, my bangs getting too curly--are forgiven and forgotten, right....now.

2007-12-31T11:02:00.000-06:00

"What else is there but Narcissism, I often ask myself"

I think Heather Havrilesky, of Salon.com, is a genius. She writes about TV, mostly. She is an enemy of narcissism and avarice, which to me means that she is a champion of empathy. About our celebrity culture, this year, this 2007, she writes: "This is an important part of the logic of the Year of the Lunatic: If the rich and famous are happy and carefree, then you, by dint of your relaitve insignificance and poverty, have every right to make them as unhappy as humanly possible." Oh, TMZ, Perez Hilton, how the game flips you--in an effort to undermind the publicity machine of Hollywood, you became little monsters. I mean, honestly, there is a celebration of sociopathy and damage all over the place, and the answer appears to be to go to the mountain, where you will be isolated and esoteric and a bit of a sociopath as well, like the Into the Wild dude.

I wonder about cultural criticism at all--really, barring some serious geniuses who are also totally insane, 99.999999% of humans are too in it to see it, and therefore just layering icing on the big cake of Blah Blah. It's a puzzle for future generations to work out and flatten: what were they thinking with their weird intersection of celebrity obsession, fat hatred, creepy richness while refusing to talk about money and feeling ripped off all the time? In the end, I just want to make it to the end of This American Life as a good American, only partially covered in the thick tar of what is worst about my culture. All cultures? Who the hell knows.

This is what I'm thinking about as the year ends: narcissism and damage. 2007 was bent like a sickle, 2008 is curvy like a hug. To borrow from Sir Lupe Fiasco, 2008 "got a bottle-shaped body like Mrs. Butterworth." Cover this globe with the sweet sticky syrup of love!

2007-12-21T13:39:00.000-06:00

The memos are steady flying around my workplace these days. I got one, it got revoked, I wrote a rebuttal, it stone silenced those who will have me believe that I'm letting this place "defeat" me. What? Do you believe we work for American Gladiator and not, say, a social welfare organization? And do you really think I'm defeated? I'm eating your delusions, metabolizing them bitches, and getting sleek and fast like an otter. A Righteous Otter of Goodness.

It was glittery like a migraine when I realized that this casual conference call was a discipinary meeting, and it was revelation, pure and true--1)finally, I'm caught hating my job, and 2) finally, the true machinations of this place are revealed. Regardless, I will not let dispersions be cast upon my character, and I drafted a memo to make bureuacrats weep with the lyrical structure, pure ethic, and subtle contrarian zest.

Important lessons

1) I may have been wrong about how I thought power and control were working in the tiny creepy lady world of my department, and that was a surprise. I think I am so damn smart.

2)Truly, trust no one, and certainly don't trust people who are untrustworthy. Duh, and duh again, for I will keep doing it.

3)There is an empty space in my head were respect for authority should be; it is just not there, I'm looking for it, I was saying something in this meeting that was so cold and true that my superego was looking for anything to shut me up, a psychic tube sock to shove in my mouth. The absense of respect for authority is also the absence of concern for my respect for authority, so....feel the breeze move through where my administrative career isn't.

What am I going to do, I wonder? Whatever it is, I hope I can wear dresses.

2007-12-19T16:26:00.000-06:00

This is my gift to you, internet. In the actual world, I am so domestic right now, Martha Stewart is calling me for advice. Yesterday alone I made two (2) vegan pies and one (1) apron and one half (1/2) of a scarf. Today I am going to make some other stuff!

I just made this pick up line, for some yet-unknown lucky bastard.

"If you body were a sweatshop I would organize it."

2007-12-03T16:15:00.000-06:00

That wacky Carl Jung!

As a follow up to the last post, since I started talking (and talking) about this drinking thing, I've been hearing a lot about peoples' relationships to drinking. I love when that happens. In fact, even without prompting, the subject keeps coming up. Meaningless coincidence? No, my friends, there are no such things. As proof: I went out with some friends, and one reveals that he hasn't had anything to drink in two weeks because it is blocking his progress in what he wants to change in his life; I'm taking in the pure connection of that within my own life when he says "What do you think about Jung, and the collective unconscious?" I'm like: whoa. What's that experience, with the mirror reflected in the mirror, reflected in the mirror, ad infinitum? Anyway, it was like that, but with thoughts, and friends. Awesome. Other people tell me about their blackouts and wine romances and other friends seem seriously disturbed by my behavioral changes, which are not all that elaborate: basically, take some breathes, super compulsive Saint, and don't binge drink. For my drive to Rockford, I spontaneously grab some Freakwater records I haven't listened to in years; these, my friends, are some of the starkest, fullest, bestest songs about drinking's magic and regret ever written. Interesting. It is all interesting.

2007-11-30T14:51:00.000-06:00

"There's nothing that's been done that can't be undone."

Something I emitted from my 31 is Rockin'! list is that I want to not drink so much. I mean, that's very Bridget Jones, it's very au current for the heavy drinking crowd I roll with, both electively and biologically. Less booze, less cigarettes, start working out. On the other hand, it's hard to be cavalier with the family awash in beer and weed, plus factoring in my general propensity to assume I am doing something terrible all the time: it's a mess. That is why I pay someone to help me think. That is why I am making a plan, and if I can't stick to the plan, well then: I've learned something about me and my drinking.

Of course, the other reason for blogging about this is to sort of put it out there as an antidote to the shame and secrecy that I have witnessed of addicts...the sticky black tar of hiding, and second guessing, and hating yourself so deeply that it becomes a part of how you react to everyone. I will just nip that in the bud with my frank discussion of how, in the last few months, I'm drunk more, and more drunk, and missing time to blackouts, and not sure of what I've done and said. See? So send me good thoughts, and faith, and forgive the self disclosure.

If push comes to shove, if I am, indeed, an Alcoholic, thankfully I am made for AA. Honestly. You know how "Infinite Jest" was excruciating sometimes? Mostly that whole Quebecois story line; the thing that got me through, the story I still think about, was that of Don Gately and Alcoholics Anonymous. "Jesus' Son"--that's a book. And I thought "A Million Little Pieces" was crap way before the scam was revealed--I have no patience for the Guy Who Can Go It Alone. I mean, fine, whatever. Do what you want. Me, I love a group of strangers gathering together to discuss their personal failures and spiritual thirst. Hopefully I love that more than beer. We shall see. Wish me luck!

2007-11-21T13:18:00.000-06:00

"And then we'll get real Irish"

I have to make so very much casseroles today and tomorrow. The weather is *awful* and may have been engineered by Glade Scented Candles, because I have a heretofore unexperienced urge to buy a bunch of candles that smell like pies and allspice, close all the curtains, and bath in warm, inevitably cancerous, olfactory bliss.

Imagine the cans of creamed substances that will be consumed this weekend. Tubs of Country Crock will pass hand to hand; and this year, an actual turkey! Little Sister has brought her fancy LA Ways back to the Midwest and is providing poultry whereas I prefer $6 tubs of 'turkeyish substance.' My favorite part was looking at the "light and dark meat" roll and it was like a big meaty black and white cookie. Ew, barf.

Turkeyish is not like Turkish, and Turkish is a bit like Armenian, and they called this morning! Arpeek and the girls called to wish me a happy birthday, to which I replied "Miss you I do love and thinking often!" I was 24 when I met them...isn't that insane? That is 7 years of being asked if I'm married yet! Oh, they are the greatest. I am thankful that I can blow off the people I love dearly and they still tramp from their village to a freezing phone hut in order to spend their subsistence farming money to call me, St. Renegade. This is the other reason to remember that we do not earn or deserve the love we receive; because there is an anti-theological accountant residing in my psyche that says I could never pay all this goodness back. Plus, what did Lorrie Moore write? You don't give back to the people that gave to you, usually.

And so I say to you, "Schnorhakalutzoun!" I drink a toast for your happiness, health, a green path in a long life, a tub of Country Crock, a game of mafia, a house full of synthetic candle smells and loved ones.

2007-11-11T20:08:00.000-06:00

St. Renegade, LCSW

"And my thirties shall continue to kick ass"

Things that could happen:

1. Maybe I learn this interweb dohicky thing better, for the Choir and for the Scissor Museum and for greater access to "erotica." Ew, gross.

2. Hotter and hotter until I rival the sun!

3. Another tattoo. Right now I'm on a break from Yet Another trauma training, and I was thinking about how I am burning neurological pathways that associate pain with control and beauty. Which is a different pathway and makes my brain wired better-like.

I also learned that ladies hanging out with lady friends was found to release oxytocin, which counters stress and means that you are less likely to develop physical impairments as you age while being more likely to lead a joyful life.

So getting a tattoo with your good lady friend while other friends stop by means that I am going to live...

forever.

4. Sweet job.

5. Living in love, people.

It's a struggle, right? Because there's all that Oprahspeak out there about Visualize the Prize and making Collages of Acquisition and whatnot; but I think I'm supposed to keep it on point and vague, because who I am to say what should happen? Maybe these things happen or maybe I get hit by a car or develop a love of accounting.

2007-11-05T19:29:00.000-06:00

Testing, testing, 1-2-3!

I haven't learned the internet. I've been studying for a big test tomorrow. Most of what I have to learn is not horrible, no, just a lot of words I will not actually be using in my work. At least I certainly haven't heard or used them in four years of not-super-terrible mental health treatment. Isolation of affect and dysphoria and all these damned ego functions. Snooze.

Most fun terms: hot and cold empathy. Hot empathy is emotional empathy, you know, feeling the feelings; cold empathy is a cognitive understanding of their situation. Sort of. There's more than that. Words fail, you know? A hot empathizer is also a hot chick who, you know, gets it.

"You can play those songs on your synthesizer and I can feel your pain cuz I'm a hot empathizer."

And here's the plan: get license, get licensed, turn 31. It is a big week for a little Saint. And speaking of saints! Let's ask the Wikipedia about one for test taking!

Saint Joseph of Cupertino was said to have been remarkably unclever, but prone to miraculous levitation and intense ecstasies that left him gaping. In turn, he is recognized as the patron saint of air travelers, aviators, people with a mental handicap, and bad students. He was canonized in 1767.

"O St. Joseph of Cupertino, who by your prayer obtained from God to be asked at your examination, the only preposition you knew. Grant that I may like you succeed in the Clinical Social Work Licensure examination. In return I promise to make you known and cause you to be invoked. O St. Joseph of Cupertino pray for me, O Holy Ghost enlighten me, Our Lady of Good Studies pray for me, Sacred Head of Jesus, Seat of divine wisdom, enlighten me. "

2007-10-26T13:04:00.000-05:00

Oh crap.I think I'm going to learn web design.

Up on the Mountain my good buddy Ross gave me an...assignment, I guess...it was advice, actually. Once all the ideas of damage and hurt had been blown away, I was literally and figuratively, and then literally again, naked. I asked two people whom I respect immensely, incalculably, about what my next steps should be. Ross made arrow motions with his beautiful hands and directed me to focus on something for a month, write down all I know about it and then learn more about this thing for one month. I have been wandering around and trusting the process and trying to stay in my body and not be all up in my head space since I got back and then, right now, looking at some websites that are about websites that are online museums I thought: I should learn more about this website business. I should make this thing, this space carved out for me, more of a space, deeper and richer. I can also put my dreamed-of scissor museum on the the Internet and not in giant glass cases which I cannot afford. Plus, if I have a website that is more organic to me, more germane and responsive and reflective of my ethos and aesthetic, maybe then I won't have to send multi-page emails to the Glee Club Google group everyday. And endless text messages. So who know how to design websites and who understands the Internet? Let me know, you lovely you.

2007-10-18T16:05:00.000-05:00

I direct you to deadmall.com, my new favorite waste of time. Fascinating, especially the glossary, which gives the definition of labelscar, which is that dirt and crud left from a sign or store; like when they move shelves at the grocery store? Anyway, they are 'readable'...the current archeology of dead retail spaces. But here's the best new word:

Mallmanac: A map which lists names of stores and diagrams the layout of a mall. This word is a Sniglet, which is "a word that should be in the dictionary, but isn't".

A definition within a definition! And now I have to figure out the word for the words you create from mashing together two words, like mandals, showmance, fraudience, and now...mallmanac.

My favorite part was the detailed submission regarding Toledo's Northtowne Square Mall, which I went to exactly twice, once for a discount movie and once to see my friend's boyfriend who worked at Scooter's Skate Shop. As the author charts the slow death by retail abandonment and gang infestation, he notes that among the remaining stores is "...a Deb store which, by all accounts, does terrific business." It's like Rainbow here in Chicago EXCEPT Deb's storefront is of quilted metallic plastic and neon signage. There was one at Southwyck; Southwyck is one of three dead malls in the Toledo area, and it's brown dome is pictured above.

I feel more sentimental and connected to the ebb and flow of culture when learning about dead malls then I do, say, listening to nostalgia radio--music doesn't stay fixed to a time, for me, and I didn't stay at a school or neighborhood enough to get fully immersed. But the malls of Toledo, my friends, they are my museums. Que Madonna's heartbreaking "This Used to be my Playground." Grab those bags by the plastic handles and have a fountain pop in hand. This was my childhood.

2007-10-11T19:31:00.001-05:00

Reverse Stigmata

I Y LJ

I've been trying to heal the terrible wound in my heart for a very long time and I went back to the Mountain and looked into my heart and there was no wound. I mean, I looked very hard. I did a lot of naked transcendent breathing and massage in an attempt to coax it out with my mouth as bait. It was not working so I called God to come and help me look: nothing. There were goddesses, shaman, a salty rock of a poet, there was a gender fluid Child of God--these people are mystical and divine, with diamond eyes--and it's almost embarrassing, really--it turns out there is no wound.

My search for What is Wrong with Me took me on great adventures in search of poultices and tinctures and cures; I have lots of serums and can tell the kind of stories that make hurt people smile. It was good times and time well spent and worth the while it took, but now that I know I have nothing to look for, it feels as though I have nothing to search for and there is the prospect of boredom, as I am:

1) Not living in a burning house

2) Not harboring a deep and painful wound

3) Not so different from anyone else.

This is quite an adventure. It's like I was given an extra sense. You know what I said, on the Mountain, as the divinity common to us all was shown to me and moved through me?

Thank you God thank you God thank you God thank you God thank you God thank you God thank you God thank you God

2007-10-11T19:22:00.000-05:00

I am not a house on fire

Crazy Mama set her house on fire. It burned down and killed the birds that stood in for my sister and I. I don't know if she set this fire on house on purpose on her and her pickled-puppet-boyfriend and daughter-birds, but it sure did burn. I remembered this David Wojznarowicz stencil from way back, and demanded it from the Internet. It rose to the surface of Google Images, and the flames were better than I remembered. Some art sticks with you, and you are glad for it when your mom becomes a drug-addicted arsonist.

2007-09-27T23:34:00.000-05:00

Our days are numbered.

Another night spent on my porch, drinking High Life and white wine on ice with assorted lady friends and Thad. I whipped up a nice caprese salad! I made fire in the grill but no one would leave the porch to look at it. It was gorgeous.

This was last week, when the biggest problem with my car was NOT the smoke pouring from the hood but the dead battery. Up For Anything flagged down a jazz musician for a jump but he was worried my sick battery would somehow infect his Scion. While attending to the car, an episode of Elimidate broke out on my porch and two ladies kissed a passerby. Which was fine, you know, whatever, but lately I'm craving wholesomeness, sort of how bodies crave foods with the minerals they need, like...Crunchwrap Supremes. I wanted knitting to break out, or sober conversations about God. No time for that, anyway. My car is so broken!

I eventually chased Mulligan down the street and forced him to assist me, an endeavor that paid off for days and days in the following ways:

He took my battery out and charged it for 24 solid hours; cleaned the engine block; I went to his garage sale and got myself a green dress and beige nail polish, a white dress for Cousin, a ruffly dress for Selma, and a chair for Pretty Kelly; I meet the seventh Ms. Mulligan and their dog, Mulligan ("Mully") and three more neighbors: Lisa, Ricky, and Maria. It was a fully Mulligan weekend, and wouldn't you know his workshop is spotless, he's selling ancient carpet samples, she sells Avon, and they have a framed poster of the Irish Declaration of Independence in their garage?

It was a spot of wholesome in a time of...not debauchery, or even unwholesomeness, but that floaty feeling you get sometimes, right, when looking at your life? Mulligan does not float above anything. He's deep in the streets! He is ground level!

Everytime I love something I wonder what it will be like to lose it, and lately, I want to squeeze this damned city SO TIGHT but now is not the time to think about leaving but staying put, ground level--now is for living, and sitting, and riding my bike before the ice takes over.

2007-09-14T21:59:00.001-05:00

It's been awhile since I mom-blogged, right? So I'm about to go out with my latest girl crush--brillant, funny, horrible childhood, drunk: God love her--and I'm getting ready and I think: "This is the life she wanted." Not for me, she never really knew me, or knew I was there--but there is always that residue, her traces in my bones, her thoughts in my head. I have the life she wants, I have the love she denies, I have the defenses she lacks.

Pray for her, okay? I don't know how she is, but I know in my bones it isn't good. I'm going out anyway. It's my life.

2007-09-10T22:01:00.000-05:00

Yeah, well, it was the greatest day ever, so far, I think, in a life of dizzying highs and miserable lows. Our Glee Club played the Hideout Block Party, and we did good, and we felt GOOD, and then some of the lady Glees sang back up for the Frames, and then a lady with some fashion website liked my robot dress, and my friends were there, and my cousin was there. Everything was handed to me on a damn platter, that night, having made cheeky jokes about making it with this specific rock star and he's at the house party. That party, itself, was perfect: everything was too bright, no furniture in a collapsing house, everyone was beer-smeared and awkward. Chick feel down the stairs. I pretended to smoke a crayon. And this is what happens to me at a hype party: I want to be more wholesome. And then when I'm reading and doing dishes and writing letters to friends: I want to go to a loud and messy porch party.

You know what isn't perfect? People in these parts don't enjoy fireworks like they should. So, there. Nothing is perfection, but some days come close. What if Art Brut, standing an watching in gleeful appreciation, had started shooting roman candles off? That would have been something.

2007-09-03T23:24:00.000-05:00

This bodys only rental

Baby Mama is going to make her nickname a whole other human truer. I asked her about some of my fancy pants reading on attachment: that there may be a decrease in a woman's sex drive post-delivery because touch is touch and the erotic needs of plugged-in humans are met by the constant feel and affection of your baby person. I thought of this as I watched her daughter crawl on her and cuddle her like she wasn't a separate body, and Baby Mama added another dimension: "I didn't want to have sex because I didn't feel like it was my body, it was hers." We were on the beach, I was getting a sunburn and multiple, inexplicable exotic bug bites. Different bodies, different upkeep, rosy skin with no melanoma requires lotions and protection that I haven't mastered in 30 years. Bodies in rest and motion, humans made in tummies and emerging like Borscht Belt comics from behind the curtain: "Ta Dah!"

It was a toddler week, and oh, I love toddlers. Difficult and brilliant, like everyone I really value. I finally met the daughters of a close friend from way back, and the littlest one, the love bug, fell asleep clutching my hand after laughing all night at my jokes...it was heavenly. I had some good times baby-sitting a nearly 2 year old, navigating "yes" and "no" while trying not to manipulate or lie to her just because my brain is 10x bigger. It's an ethical conundrum, interacting with a toddler.

And so. I was thinking of bodies, and babies, and walking on the beach in front of strangers in borrowed short-shorts; I was humming This Bodys Only Rental, concentrating on the line "Pick your risk and take it"; I'm using pop music to validate my life choices, as always. God Bless the swimmers and eggs and life's longing for itself; the more babies you make, the more people I meet, and even if I don't treat you well enough, we had a good time, right?

Chicago note: What kind of beach creature leaves a bruise that is swollen hard and vicious pink, eventually subsiding and leaving three little bumps? I think I got bit by a lamprey on Dempster Beach. Be warned! There was also poop in the water, and a 16year old life guarded walked on the sandbar with a shovel and had to make an announcement that "poop has been spotted in the water! The effects of which should subside in 30 minutes" at which point every got out of the Lake. The Lake, as we all know, is composed mostly of Milwaukee's human excrement, so I think that the mass exodis was a social interaction: no one wants to be the person that is okay swimming with a poop on the loose.

I'm okay with it, but now I'm going to lose my arm to a lamprey bite. The Life of the Body of a Saint is not an easy one, friends.

2007-08-29T12:29:00.000-05:00

Changing Lives For The Better...And Forever.

Today is weird because instead of thinking that I'm on time and being late, I'm feeling late and it's early. That's messed up, right? I think I'm wasting time and more of it just keeps being there, ready to be spun out and slept on. Ready to be all interneted and thought through. Here are some thoughts: you know how everything works out for me? That process could go faster. I worry I may have to fund-raise for my next Unicorn Camp; does that mean I'm not supposed to go? Remember how Benevolent Texan told me about a "life of peace not a life of ease"? Well, how am I supposed to identify the peace versus the ease, how do I know when I'm working too hard on something? I think the answer is: when it breaks.

Other thoughts: what should I do? What is going to happen? Like, earth-shattering stuff going on in this pretty head. I'm also playing a game wherein I don't ask myself the questions I sort of want to, like why so-and-so hasn't called? or, you know, have you made a horrible choice that will ruin everything? I probably haven't, and anyway, what if everything IS ruined? Will that stop me from singing in my car today, loud, and imaging hugs and kisses while wishing for riches? No, indeed, it will not. Will the stretching of time impede the flow of my rhyme? The internet answers in the negative. Alrighy then. Back to the resumes!

2007-08-19T16:02:00.000-05:00

No one gets what they deserve because nobody deserves anything.

Yeah, me! It was one of those weekends from way back when I wasn't home any night before 4am. I woke up at 2 this afternoon and enjoyed some pasta, proclaiming to myself: "I cried at work on Thursday! I deserve this!" We are the generation that bought more shoes and we get what we deserve, says some English guy (bloke?). It's a nice math but broken theology: grace is given and not earned.

Suze Orman is on PBS teaching me about how to be a Powerful Woman who has Money and is Not Crying All the Time. The irony is that I wouldn't be watching PBS if I could afford cable. Maybe that isn't irony--it's a lesson.

I called Mama Friend while I was sobbing, because I don't just need supportive listening--all my friends are social workers and bleeding hearts, they are all wicked validaters like they work in a parking garage--I wanted someone to tell me what to do. Mostly when I think about my life it is with a rousing soundtrack, a swelling sense of gratitude and wonder for scrappiness and good luck, a cinematic montage of the gal from Toledo making good. Sometimes though I get exhausted and tired of scrappy sass and struggle and I want someone else to drive so that I can take a nap or mess with the radio. It's a metaphor, sorta, except I actually woke up at 5am to the sound of thunder and the knowledge that my convertible was filling up with water. It's conventionally called "a two person job" but I made it a "resourceful lady and broom job" but not without some tears. So when I say I want someone else to drive, I mean: I want someone to put the top up in a thunderstorm. It could be worse: no car, no arms. It could be better: a car that works, someone to wake up and help me.

I haven't earned all the goodness I've got so I can't earn anymore. I should be prepared, however, for maximum awesome, just in case, which is why I should get in the shower. It's fucking five o'clock. Mmmmm Sundays.

2007-08-13T08:51:00.000-05:00

Bikes! Bikes!

Another tale from the porch: my car battery was dead, so I had Fluffy-headed Social Worker come over in order to drain the life from her car and bring precious Cabrio back to me. It seemed like a good excuse to get Cute Boy to ride his bike down and, you know, fix something that is broken. It did not work, but we were on the porch, and that's always a good time. We went for a bike ride and it was fun, fun, fun. Not surprisingly, Cute Boy was on one of them bikes made of pipe cleaners and thin rubber, so he can fly while riding no-hands and I'm cruising in my 600lb couch on wheels. Fluffy-head borrowed Roommate's ride and popped some major .2" wheelies. We stopped in a Whirlaway (ick) for a refreshing High Life and there was a birthday party! They passed cake around! The cake had banana pudding and strawberries! I always think I don't care for cake, until there's pudding in it. So, after a nice time with good friends and a tour of Logan Square (super up-and-coming, we're on the cover of the Reader!) I was in bed by 1:00am. It was like high school. It was fun.
As I'm typing this, I receive an email from the downtown office: "I brought a Mexican cake called Tres Leches with Mocha. Please help your self to a piece in the kitchen." I can eat only the tiniest sliver of Tres Leches, as it's rich creaminess is too, too, too much for a beer-cured belly. Back when I worked in Pilsen, we had Tres Leches cake for every occasion, and no one could tell me what the third milk was: everyone knows condensed milk, and then regular milk, so we decided the third was goat, or human. Turns out it's evaporated milk, according to Wikipedia. Yeah it is, if evaporated milk is made from the powdered dreams of sleeping baby angels!

Cake! Cake!

2007-08-10T13:53:00.000-05:00

FWD: Healthy Sexuality for People with Developmental Disabilities

Which is the email I received from my former therapist today. Oh, snap! Good one.

In the way that things happen all funny and overlapping, I've heard some really awesome Bad Therapist stories in the last two days. Blind Therapist Who Only Talked About Herself and Makeup? That was a good one. And The One Who Moved His Client Into His Home? She sued and now has a nice cabin in the Catskills! Melba, from back in the day, she went into Charter Hospital at 17 and left with a married psychotherapist boyfriend and an STD! Mine just sort of wanted to be my mom, and my guru, so I had to break up with her and let God lead me to the Therapist That Made Me Into a Unicorn. She thinks my sexuality is plenty healthy, and you do, too.

2007-08-01T23:43:00.000-05:00

Highlights

I took a Predictive Index test for work as part of getting trained to administer Predictive Indexes to others, at work. The first day introduced me to three major topics of interest: 1) The new Post-It pen, 2) the trainer, and 3) what will the Predictive Index reveal about ME?

1) Post It has a new highlighter with a post-it flags dispenser in the handle. It is so rad. Mine was blue. Bomb pop.

2) On day one, it was still mostly questions about his big mountain man beard. On day two, when he revealed that he lives in a log cabin in a national forest with no electricity, that he made the logs, that he chose to do this after having been a homicide detective for 15 years, which was after his career as a psychologist, well then. That was it.

3) I was bored, and then I was thinking that I am arrogant cause I'm always ignoring the trainer and doodling and frustrated that people don't get things. This lead to wondering what I would do if my Predicative Index revealed that for all my empathic talk and career choices I am, in fact, a madly driven and highly domineering personality; what if I should run companies and, like, crush the opposition? What if I am entirely wrong about myself, or missing some major axis by which I think I care about people but am actually narcissistically manipulating everyone I know to meet some tremendous drive to power?

In fact, I am a big beating heart, I am so extroverted and people-centered that I may well be a Care Bear, and on all the other indexes I am way left of center: little drive to dominate, little drive to conform, and little patience with routine. Which when I type it out seems fine, desirable, in fact: go me. It's the effect of flattening, though. What about intellectual pursuits? What about insightful mind and introspection? How come it doesn't mention my hair?

It actually dovetailed with the experience of being 30, of going to the Mountain, all these bits and mendings-- I was born like that, all heart and love to give, but luck of the draw: I was born into the family I was born into, and now they are calling me, saying sorry, saying all the things I wanted someone to say before, before when it hurt more. And the poorly constructed shell gets hacked away, revealing Damaged Bear, the bear that was and loves the damaged. Oh, if it weren't for my damn Predictive Index I would go and live with Mountain Man in his Mountain Lair with his obsessive love; except that I need people like oxygen and without electricity how do you update your blog? Carrier pigeon?

2007-07-18T20:16:00.000-05:00

I say sexy things to myself while I'm dancing

Look, I know I'm super-behind in everything, but my roommate's boy pal--he's the best--just hipped me to this YouTube video, and I can't stop loving it. 1) That looks like my cat, the Whore, Mary! Whom I love very, very much. 2) That song is a jam. You know it. I love this picture because Mary loves scissors--not staged--and because I am wearing my FAVORITE sewdown outfit and watching a trashy movie while embroidering. Welcome to Saturday night, friends. Me + cat + sewing = awesomeness.

2007-07-17T21:50:00.000-05:00

Hey friends! I want this job. Can you sort of send a beam of light, in the shape of my realized dream, out into the Universe, specifically the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, IL? Much appreciated.

Remember when I wanted to do Teach For America, or the Philadelphia Teaching Alliance, or the job in West Chicago for the International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect? Remember how the Fulbright fell through and I was prone and spastic on the steps of the Whipple apartment and coined the term "crlaughing"? Oh man, disappointment is a magical thing. I mean, I want this to happen, but if it doesn't, you know, I have perspective, I have perspective at least after the first hour of agonizing pain and crlaughing. Anyway. I won't blame you if it doesn't work out. Please just shoot some love their way, rays of love from your sweet little tummies.

2007-07-16T14:41:00.000-05:00

Look back in love not in anger.

Hey hey! New font. Little Sis edited my cover letter and changed the font, convincing me that I shouldn't use Garamond because "it's too fancy for you." She thinks Courier is more my style. I also like Century Gothic. Both have better names, as well--Garamond sounds like an hor d'oeuvre or complicated dessert. Courier has the zip and sass of a Renegade while Century Gothic evokes the weight of modern Sainthood.

The weight of Sainthood, at this precise moment, feels offset by the exhilarating weightlessness of doing crazy things. Or thinking about the doing of crazy things. I signed up for another Unicorn camp, this one so much more insane than the last, and it's shear terror mixed with the certainty that it will be worth it, whatever the cost and effect.

Things I have learned since the last post:

1) I do not enjoy enormous outdoor concerts. The music is not loud enough and there are too many people not responding to the music the way I want them to be responding to the music if they are going to be all up in my personal space. Even if the ticket was free, I should have stayed home. Wait: maybe not. Stephen Malkmus performed two songs from Slanted and Enchanted. He also wore an adorable hot pink shirt. He is edible.

2) The dude I had a crush on finally put the nail in the coffin. I mean, it lingers, but he literally seems to pop up and disappear like a whack-a-mole, and what must you do to win at whack-a-mole? Hit them with a mallet until they don't pop up anymore. Hey, Up-For-Anything Burnham, remember that rubber mallet I got you for your wedding? I need that back for a minute.

3) Don't Look Back indeed. A suggestion got me reminiscing and suddenly I was looking way back to the Neil House days. It makes me dizzy. So much love and pain and post-adolescence crammed into a year-and-a-half span. I wrote Mike Thorn! I want to run into Scottie Nieman on the street! I am remembering more than the potato cannon, finally. The whole time I was living a life in the center of some scene, I felt totally peripheral; and it took not having any connection to that world at all before I could look back in love not in anger. It's punk rock choir's fault--there is no call for proving anything when I feel like these songs are my songs. This is the upside of 30, then...you can't prove this wasn't my life. I have the zine to prove it. And a recording of Elliot Smith playing my living room!

2007-07-09T22:25:00.000-05:00

Enough of Mom Blog. I mean, we get it, right? It's sad.

I went home to Ohioland for five days and was so happy to be back in Chicago that I felt guilty about it. It's not Ohio's fault. It's me! It's not you, Ohio! It's me! The thing is: if I don't start realizing how much people like me, I'm going to end up a nutball. So I'm working on it. That was a nice life lesson. Also: I finally sustained a (minor) fireworks injury. It is about f'n time. Piece of some poorly constructed "Super Rocket" burrowed into my foot. Yes, I was drunk. No, my cousins--all, what, 14,000 of them?--did not intervene on my behalf. Sure, they yelled "Run away! Run!!!" but I was drunk. What was extra fun is that my role as primary fireworks lighter was passed to the much more physically fit Jake, and he can drive a car! He can also make bad choices and have friends who are in jail. I remember when he was a chubby baby and Little Sister and I would fight over who got to hold him. Now he's sick buff and somehow an Irish Dancer, Gangster, and Super Funny Dude! Probably because I held him more than Little Sister held him. She would have made him a giant fashionable dork. Instead, the renegade cool rubbed off.

Seriously, though: my cousins are magic.

2007-06-24T16:11:00.000-05:00

Every junkie is like the setting sun

Someone started a game of Telephone at the party yesterday, and wouldn't ya know it, by the end the message was "bagina." Kids these days. This morning I answered my phone to a solid minute of Little Sister sobbing. She had been on the phone with our mother and it was a brutal assault on love and reality. I rode my bike to Target and felt mystical connections between 9-11, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the telephone game. And me and my sister.

The thing with 9-11 is that I was in an Armenian village when the planes hit the towers. No one spoke English and I spoke the Armenian of either a stupid adult or precocious toddler. Apart from the pictures and the talking and the talking about the pictures, and awash in a country of pain and tradegy and genocides, I didn't feel attacked; I was sad because a tragic thing had happened, and I received dispatches from the pain of the people I love. This pain, like ripples in bodies of water, mirrors and touches the pain that other people are in, and it made me feel sad and tremendous and small and powerless: like a human.

And like Owen Meany's predestination, I wonder that life I've led up until now was preperation for the eventual tragic end of my mother. Little Sister's tears were for sadness and loss but also a degree of shock: how can this be our mother? Hateful and stupid, fueled by narcissism and a staggering amount of pills and booze, how can this be the message at the end of the line? I'm getting it second-hand: I know what she's become, but only through the barrier of my little sister's body and soul. Telephone, telephones: we have to call children's services; we have to call the pharmacy; we worry for the call that she's dead. And I try to hold the pain of our family, really personalize it, but I feel the same universality that I did when I heard about 9-11--I can't stop my heart from amplifying into our family, out to the children I've met, to all the people you love and your love can't stop their pain, all the lives lived and died in the span of anguish.

When I was young, there were key people that were terrified for how sensitive I was. I heard their concerns when I went into child welfare, but the heart wants what it wants, and avoiding the truth is lying, too. I am so grateful, now, to have felt how that our horrible pain is universal and also precious and deserving of all the attention in the world. My mother's tragic, wasted, increasingly monstrous life is one of millions crashing around the world right now, and it also deserves a moment of silence the universe over.

2007-06-22T20:05:00.000-05:00

"Wow. The manitee has become the Mento."

I have been watching a great deal of '30 Rock' on the internet. Anywhooos, nothing to blog, so let me share with you some of the best lines Tracy Morgan has said, as Tracy Jordan:

"I'm not on crack! I'm straight up mentally ill!"

"We're a good team, like chicken and a chicken container."

[On marriage] "Be a good listener, a giver of gifts, and work that vajayjay."

"I even have a monthly column in Ebony called 'Musings.'"

"Griz is in charge of sitting on me when I get overstimulated."

and, of course, the subject line.

Don't you people say I never gave you anything.

2007-06-14T08:35:00.000-05:00

2007-06-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

"What the frick is this world coming to?"

Alls I know is that I was sitting on my porch, enjoying the High Life with a gal pal, when Old Man Mulligan came over to discuss how he could remove even more branches from the tree without smashing the windows of this gray car right here. First he calls my landlord, Sue, telling her he's "with that red-haired Irish girl" and telling her he needs a rope. While we drink, Mulligan leans on the porch steady proving that if you're wearing overalls, you're having a good time. Spybar car, the car with the personalized 'Spy Bar' license plate, pulls up. And a hearty Mulligan hello to Johnny Spybar, the Number 1 bartender in Chicago! Mulligan tells us that Johnny has Spy Bar tattooed on his neck and he can get us dates with him; gal pal is already dating a bartender, and I keep trying, but nothing is clicking, and Johnny Spybar was wearing sweatpants.

Sue arrives with the rope. Mulligan walks back across Kimball with his white goatee and mini machete on a pole, perpetrating like Moses. Rope goes on branch, I pull on rope, Mulligan gets to sawing, and timber: giant full branch narrowly misses the gray car due to my rope maneuvers and quick thinking. I have to hop on my bike to pick up the last $50 I owe Sue for rent; in my absence, Super Pretty Boy arrives and helps clear the brush. Pizza arrives and my new neighbor comes home and at this point, something is wrong with the cooler, I keep finding it full of empty bottles instead of full, full, full. Alls I know is that Super Pretty Boy took off his shirt and shoes and chased a motorcycle down Kimball; locked out at 1:00 am, we forced New Neighbor out of bed, and he answered the buzzer in neon green patterned boxer shorts.

Trees fell, hearts were broken and mended anew, I was given a precious sentence, my neighbor should probably move; imagine your most gorgeous friend running after a motorcycle at midnight. My porch is fucking awesome.

2007-06-07T12:40:00.000-05:00

Tortured by Joy*

Iced coffee gets me high. Every frickin time it's this hot I get Vicodin and ice coffee memories, la de dah. Right now the heat and wind downtown + ice coffee = perfect accompaniment to my general too-much-ness of late. Too much joy, too much beer, too much thinking and crying and writing manifestos to myself; I get a song stuck in my head, sing it quietly, and then cry a bit. Here I could insert a selfsnarking comment about looking crazy on the street, but that would be inauthentic and disingenuous. I don't think I look crazy on the street. First of all, I don't think anyone is looking. Secondly, if anyone were looking, I choose to believe they would say to themselves, maybe the two- or four-legged friend they are walking with: "Look at Weepy McJoyfulson over there. Nice dress."

A couple of things are going on with the crying, I think. The process that started this winter on the Mountain went underground for a bit, and now, with the change of seasons I'm getting all jacked up again--every time I put my foot down or inhale I'm thinking and feeling things that have an unfamiliar depth to them, and then I can't breathe deeply enough and I cry a little bit, maybe laugh.

I cried at a play a couple of weeks ago. The Soil Cradling, Temporarily** featured Brownie, soil depicted as a big Muppet looking thing with a gravelly Muppet voice, and Sprout, the spunky little seed scared of her inevitable sprouting. Initially, upon finding myself all moved and crying, I figured it was the nurturance factor: depictions of proper parenting get me like, um, a hamburger under glass might affect starving people. So I thought I was crying for little bitty me, and then my mother and I, moving out to her mother and her, my beautiful client/kids, eventually spreading to all the moms and all the kids ever.

In the weeks since, however, I'm feeling like the mourning for my mom is lessening, and that my reaction to that play--the fact I keep thinking about it, beyond my love of Muppets--is that as a person who effectively raised herself, I get to be both Brownie and Sprout, I get to send the bright and shiny version of myself that I fostered to go out into the world, the whole time worried that she'll get hurt or embarrassed; but it's inevitable; it's already happening. Sprout is talking about how she doesn't want to go, won't go, even as she walks offstage. The inevitability of my healing, the answer to question of what is going to happen to me--that I'll be fine--closes the door to a room I know really well and forces me outside, where there are more people and louder noises and more questions. There are also cicadas, Muppets, strong winds, and novelty gifts. It should be noted that everyone I truly love already thought I knew this, already knows I'm okay, but it took me a bit longer to catch on. It took me 30 years, point of fact. God willing I get 30 more and I wonder what else I'll learn. Maybe some science? Maybe this math I've been hearing the kids talk about.

*Tortured by Joy is a short film I love directed by Henry Griffin and featured on the The Believer's Dec '04/Jan '05 DVD.

**Written by Marika Mashburn. Directed by Chris Mathews. Featuring Jake Minton as Brownie, Dixie Uffelman as Sprout. As part of Bring May Flowers. What did I do with that seed they gave me? Fuck.

***Also, Kerry James Marshall is not dead, I just miss seeing new paintings.

2007-06-05T20:51:00.000-05:00

I miss you, Kerry James Marshall.

2007-06-01T13:16:00.000-05:00

My love is bigger than your love.

How Sassy changed my life:

1) 1991: my sister and I see a girl by the pop machine at our new high school and she was wearing the skirt made of neckties from Sassy's You Make It column. We were staring at her in awe when she turned and, according to Little Sister, "gave me a dirty look." Who was that Sassy lassie, with kool-aid-burgundy hair I was convinced she ratted? My Super Best Friend since 1994! Sister and I called her the Tie Skirt Girl until she and I discovered a mutual love of sewing and laughing at least partially attributable to Sassy.

2) Yesterday while waiting for the "How Sassy Changed My Life" reading they were playing the Vaselines. Pow. I was walking into BeeBop Records in Toledo, nearly dying of shame and desire, and buying college rock at the age of 13 because Christina Kelly told me to in Listen Up. The Vaselines were awesome, I really hated Eugenius, there were hundreds of tapes and records purchased from bad jobs and money stolen from my mother so that by the time "Stepford Sassy" took over, I was sad but not shaken, having found a place in the subculture that went beyond Sassy and into vinyl and zines and punk rock shows.

One of the authors brought up the irony of so much Sassy nostalgia: we liked the magazine, hated our lives. I look back at a chubby girl in clothes she made herself buying records and reading books that were ridiculously precocious and I'm thinking how awesome I was, how valuable I was, despite being troubled and obese and living in a one bedroom apartment in Toledo with my depressed and unemployed father. All the time I was aware of how even the outside had an inside and convinced, to my core, that I would never know the inside of anything.

2007: Fluffyhair and I are at the Hideout, cute as fuck and loving life, as she turns 30. I've been 30 for seven months and the wonder is unceasing. We are the women our 13-year-old selves dreamt of being, saw in Sassy, and made ourselves into while totally unaware. That's fucking tragic. And fucking awesome.

2007-05-29T15:46:00.000-05:00

Practice makes perfect. Plug away! I wrote a big thing today and now I hate it. I got hit with the melancholia stick late last night and can't shake the headache. A can of PBR propelled by the melancholia stick was what hit me, so actually: it was the teamwork did me in.

Who can work after a holiday? A BBQ? Who can work when they are struggling with the realization that this job blows? I was hoping that the completely obvious fact of my work being largely meaningless and repetitive would lead into a glorious realization--I love HR + Training! I cannot wait for the next conference call!--instead of the predictable acknowledgment that taking a less meaningful and challenging job for more money leaves you with, ahem, more money and a meaningless and less challenging job.

I keep trying to reframe this as taking care of me time, but I don't know how well I'm taking care of me if I don't like my job. Oh, when I am feeling more positively, I will devise methods of using my powerlessness and isolation to affect major change in the horribly punitive and culturally obtuse world of our residential center. At the least: free copies, and shiny silver binder clips of all sizes. All manner of sizes!

I can construct a tower to call for help. A day of low energy and even lower expectations leads to rescue fantasizes of the highest order. How many binder clips and neon post-its will it take to get Chris Thomson here? Like: right here.

Blurg. Hope you are well. And listen: don't send a team to find me. I'll get home just fine! I'll be fine.

2007-05-23T11:46:00.000-05:00

A convergence of carpets. A confluence of cousins.

Cousin and I went to the museum and there was a big white room with bright orange carpeting and immediately we wanted to frolic. You would have, too. We did some cartwheels and various leaps. If you really knew that room was yours, you could spend all day in there. But it's difficult to do cartwheels in dresses in public, because we are good Midwestern girls.

There is no way to express both the gravity and total frivolity of what was happening, because, you know, it's my life and we are limited with our monkey brains and throat gargles to fully communicate sentiment; still, I persist. My family is in carpet. I know a lot about carpet and have feelings and memories, w/r/t carpet, that I do not have for other woven goods or floor coverings. My grandfather, dead and damaged patriarch of the carpet side of the family, loved the color 'bright orange.' As soon as I saw the room I thought: John M. would have loved this.

I don't know how he would have felt about this: earlier that morning, the sixth John M. Downey of my family was born. Six generations in America! As soon as I get to meet this new little one (they call him Matthew) I will have met four of these men. By dint of history and biology and whatnot, I will have known them, learned much about carpeting from them, been raised by their crazy daughters, been loved by their amazing wives, and even eaten their un-sanctified Communion.

Now, however, I am far from them, in literal and figurative terms. But doing cartwheels in a room of bright carpet, with a cousin, with my eyes and hands and heart tied in with a history of carpet and Johns and myself: it was sweet like an orange lozenge in my mouth.

2007-05-20T17:35:00.000-05:00

I am establishing a shadow government. Or am I? If I really were to establish a shadow government, I certainly wouldn't blog about it. Would I?

There is very little to write, actually. I have Ministers of Finance, Propaganda, Kindness, Psychology, Singing (multiple), Advice-giving (multiple), Medicine (multiple, holistic), The Social Construction of Identity, Education, and Fun. Vacant posts include Ministers of Defense and the Interior, as I have yet to figure out what the Interior Minister would do. If it is decorating public buildings, then I have some candidates. If it's about trees, got that too...anything else, I will have phase one group interviews. Or will I?

Oh yeah, now I know a righteous lawyer who turned his back on one of the top firms in the nation to, like, fight corporations. It would be one thing to just get to meet great people all the time, but with such a varied and tremendous lot, it is clear that I am supposed to create a shadow government operating out of Chicago. When the oil runs out we will have to use magnetic trains to get everywhere Chicago will regain its primacy and Daley will be old and needing an Irish-American to helm this great nation. Which is going to be a lot smaller, incidentally.

2007-05-14T22:48:00.000-05:00

Just when I was contemplating a personal missed connections ban, I read this one. I challenge myself (the only person who gives a fuck whether or not I'm reading missed connections obsessively) to find a more constructive use of my time, or precious brain-space. To the universe: give this sassy lassy what she desires, please. And by her, I mean me, and therefore: us.

For J: missed you for dinner... - w4m

You are from Chicago. I am not. We are in neither place tonight. We run into each other from time to time for work. I just wanted to let you know that I like listening to your voice. It just makes me feel good. Like a bowl full of spaghetti and a hug.

Plus, I know you want to put your meat-hands all over me. You should just ask me out already. I like you...but more importantly, I like you and want man-woman real life, real time, right now.

How great is that? All the sweet talk and then--meat-hands. man-woman. J, ask this woman out, she is that good with a hyphen.

2007-05-13T15:32:00.000-05:00

Sing! Sing! Sing!

Friday I sang in a punk rock choir at Daley Plaza. That is...hilarious. And awesome. And we all deserve it: singers, Chicagoans, readers. We deserve to sing! Last night the Child Welfare Party Crew (and Baby Burnham) took over a Bridgeport bar and karaoked ourselves into pure, rapturous joy. Seriously. Un-dreamed of bliss and hilarity. It was songs I didn't know I wanted to hear sung by some of my favorite people in the world in a completely unexpected but totally perfect way. And also the White Sox had won! I got to sing "Don't Stop Believing" in Bridgeport! Sing, people, sing!

2007-05-08T19:03:00.000-05:00

My little sister is the poor man's Catherine Zeta-Jones. I am the poor man's Drew Barrymore. Wynonna Judd is the poor man's St. Renegade. A lady at work who loves country--and who can blame her?--stopped by my desk to ask:

"You aren't going to be offended if I tell you something, are you?" Think yes, say no. "Every time I see you I think about Wynonna Judd."

And I asked why I would I be insulted? Later the panic began and I text messaged Fluffyhead Friend. She said that I should stop wearing petticoats to work. Ha ha. Fuck friends.

Sure, I see it with the hair and the bangs and the nose and the robust figure. But I don't wear foundation and I don't rock the dread Modern Country combo of cowboy hat and giant coat with back flap. My eyebrows are composed of tiny hairs! Not clay. Honestly, I'm the Ashley Judd--the crazy mom and daughter go off with their matching hair and obviously damaging codependency and I'm at Yale being smart and marrying a race car driver. Think Wynonna, go Ashley! Anyway. I should be so lucky. I don't have even one ex-husband, or Country Music Award, and she has seven of each.

In other news, I am less concerned with the concept of loneliness, and more concerned with the concepts of fear and action and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I am also busy with the World's Greatest Punk Rock Choir, damaging my feet with hot hot heels, and sewing again. BFF was in town for a Good Times and Cute Boys Tour of Chicago; BC is coming soon, and may the magic continue!

2007-05-01T14:43:00.000-05:00

Loneliness as social control

I'm thinking primarily of the following things:
1) The US currently has more people in prison than any nation recorded ever.
2) Our current cultural obsession with/terror of the Sexual Predator and Child Molester.*
3) We should probably track and register the mentally ill, as well. And then have them live far away.

Again with Armenia! Well, you try being from the newest and biggest and boldest of all countries and living in a village in a tiny powerless and ancient nation and see if it doesn't create an interesting counterpoint to everything you've ever thought. Anyway. I was frustrated there by the concept of community and how it worked; there was a degree of homogeneity and collectivism that my deeply Americanized soul could not tolerate. I put communal and individual societies on a teeter-totter of sorts, in my head. As a neophyte anarchist and shit-kicker, I was well aware of the evils of American individualism and how that dovetails with capitalism and avarice and greed. If we could all organize into nice communities without all this money ruining everything, it would be grand. We would be in Crass.

Then, in the poor village with the community everywhere, I was like: fuck. Because, as on Project Runway, you are either in, or you are out. If you are in (a clan, a family, a government agency) you will enjoy loyalty and vodka and bread if you mother is ill. If, however, you are out (deformity, scandal, mental illness) you are pretty wickedly out. Magooch was the village idiot: homeless, with Downs Syndrome, he would show up at weddings and beg for food. The dudes would make him dance, throw lit cigarettes at him. They put firecrackers down his shirt and he cried. Who can forget my return from spending Christmas at the orphanage? When I showed Arpeek my pictures she spit, she refused to look at them or touch them, she forbade me from visiting those monsters again.

So, finally: the upside of rugged individuality, the downside of communality. More geniuses means more money means more social nets because the community has eroded and every life has value for being a life; a life's value is not based on clan membership or functional value to a given community. Everyone is in, which sort of also means that everyone is out.

This is in broad strokes. But it made some sense, then. Now, however, my brain is mush. For I carry a sad and powerful and tender connection to the oppressed, especially the ones who were wounded in their love places, which appear to be closely tied to their sex places. I pursued that connection and ended up with conclusions I'm not really seeing anywhere else. After working with the 'sexually abused' we must hate the 'sexual abusers.' Especially since, as we all know, there is no cure. But I feel like something else is going on, here. What is going on here, with these men who do this thing that we have determined is sexual abuse? You have known these men. I have known these men as boys. I have known the boys that hurt other boys; we like them now, all victimized and small, but they are going to be big soon, and also, in Chicago, they are probably going to stay Black, which is going to dry up any of the compassion they could have enjoyed. And then again: abused does not become abuser. These connections are weak. Could we have some cultural burden, in this?

Was it always so, is it better to know, now? Now we can talk about these things and protect ourselves and our children. Perhaps I am wrong, maybe we have created a utopia, there are no secrets and monsters: tell everyone what he did, he hurt someone. And then what? They are pushed to the edges, to Pullman, to the nastiest group homes in the poorest of neighborhoods, where we can stop watching them altogether. Or we could stare at them all the time. We have got to be safe. They should be out, because they hurt people sexually and because there is no cure. You don't get to be a part of society. You have lost your chance. You get to be lonely.

Do you feel better? I don't feel better.

You know what else? Men and violence and sex and porn. Read this and get back to me: this is half of what I've ever thought, tied together, and in 1,115 words.

It is times like these that I wish I had a pocket bell hooks, a little compact of sorts, available for consultation. How great would that be? I wouldn't think about loneliness ever again.

2007-04-30T10:17:00.000-05:00

Let us celebrate the simplest of things!

-After all the rain, this grass is out of control. When the Party Sisters stopped by my house yesterday, Ashley laid in the grass and dissappeared! Undulating blades of green beauty to stare at while enjoying the High Life and a mild burn. Now everyone is cutting their lawns and Chicago smells fresh and earthy like a city never should.

-These fancy toothbrush makers have been enticing me with their giant super special effects robo-brushes for too long. I got a small, cheap toothbrush yesterday and it was like a Ferrari in my mouth--fast and zippy. That's the last time you use my fear of the dental establishment to sell me the toothbrush equivalent of a Hummer, Oral-B.

-I have taped this poem from the April 9th New Yorker to my mirror, making the last two mornings awesome. Last week I replaced my Chicago Crafter's pin with a cameo of Lincoln at his desk. I'm sure you'll agree: Lincoln's ghost has something to tell me.

Lincoln’s Dream
by Dan Chaisson

It is impossible to state just how in love I am
with my own body, the white snows of me,
the sudden involutions and crevasses of me,
my muscles tensed or slack in anger or fear.

This is why, wherever I go, I am in Lincoln’s dream.
A sentry stands by, the stairway is eerily lit,
light is a little milk splash on people’s faces,
the faces of my Cabinet, grotesque and funny masks.

Who is dead in the White House? I demand. Who’s not?
answers a soldier, pointing to a shrouded head
on my own body, encased like a gangly insect
on the catafalque, and the loud sobs wake me up.

Reader, when you caress yourself in the morning,
amazed that you are made the way you are,
sure that yours is the finest body of all,
remember, you are Lincoln having Lincoln’s dream.

2007-04-27T12:34:00.000-05:00

In many ways the affection that I received from the kids I worked with was operating like a methadone drip; a low level of love enough to take the edge off, but not the full deal. Without it I was left with this weird sensation that I eventually labelled lonely. And having thus identified my loneliness, I see loneliness everywhere, which is sad in its prevalence and yet comforting in its universality.

This is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, about an idea that I love, even though it is flawed: "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

I went to a reading series thing and the Virginia Tech shootings and the general feeling of badness was discussed. Any sort of "these terrible times we live in, this empty culture" discussion veers too closely to end-time talk, is what I don't like. It begins to sound like exceptionalism, that this time, in history, is momentously cruel and wrong and shallow. It sets up the idea that we can avoid a fall, as though rising and falling and evil and cruelty are not as mundane as breathing and pooping. Anyway, as a tonic, sort of a corrective to random acts of violence and cruelty, one author had us identify someone in the room we knew and write on a piece of paper what about that person we find precious and unique. And then she read them out loud, and it really was moving and fantastic. I had some amazing things written about me, and did feel loved and precious. I, in turn, wrote something guarded and cheeky. Earlier in the day a friend, whom I love and spend a great deal of time with, said "I miss you" and my heart seized up because I felt panicked and trapped. See? I'm still guarded and wary, and I get mad affection. Imagine. Imagine how much worse it could be, or how much better.

And this is the thing about the lonely: they are a better concept than a reality. Who wouldn't befriend Eleanor Rigby, what with that song about her and all? Except she is probably guarded and wary, and her persistent sense that she has been victimized and isolated results in a certain cruelty that makes spending time with Ms. Rigby really awkward. I myself, at my most desperately needy and alone, was nearly impossible to be around, what with the need and rage and self-loathing. The children I have worked with, damaged and unloved and hurt, the most needy and fucked up of the homeless, they are often the most vicious because they are guarding what has been depleted. It would be saintly to love them but it is also very difficult and stupid, because if you can't get that love back then you have exempted yourself from that basic need you are trying to address: that humans, to some degree, are born to love and be loved.

What I am saying is this: loving community is a good idea, maybe the best ever. I feel like it took me forever to even imagine such a thing, much less put myself in it, and I still don't feel like I'm doing it right. And that's just me! I would also caution against a strict idea of what loving community should look like, because it might not look like love at all, to you. Here I am thinking about children who age out of foster care and return to the homes they were removed from. There have been no studies but my own experience has the minimum rate of this at 80%. These families look like nightmares to me. These families are love to their children. Or, if not love, they are a measure of unloneliness.

Loneliness, like poverty (I just read "Poor People" by William Vollman, good book, lots of thoughts) seems as though it could be quantifiable but is not, really. For instance, Eleanor Rigby, or Cho Seung-Hui, living alone and friendless: clearly, they are lonely. And what if they said they were not lonely? And what about all of us? My cat is affection-starved because I am often socializing with my fantastic friends, and yet I feel lonely. Married people feel lonely. Remember when My Girl said that she could be in a crowd of people who all say they love her and she would feel all alone? We cannot cure feelings, they are not diseases. I was not loved very much as a child, and it stays with me, and the loneliness I feel now is a shadow of how I felt as a child, and it persists.

I'm thinking 'loneliness' but I'm feeling 'unloved.' How much do loneliness and unlovedness overlap? Are they the same thing? I think they might be the same thing. I think the inherent paradoxes of this thing are so amazing: the lonely are often so difficult to love, and so resistant to what they need; that the sense of being alone and uncared-for is universal but completely the opposite of communal. I would like to ask my Armenian family if they feel lonely, ever, because they are never alone. Kurt Vonnegut, I would like to cure the terrible disease of loneliness, except I don't think it's a disease, plus I have it.

Next up: loneliness as social control!

2007-04-21T01:09:00.000-05:00

The word 'hipster' was said a lot the other night, and there is no good explanation for why. It made me think of this picture, and Def Children, and how funny I think I am (most of the time) but especially when with certain other folks. I had just gotten my camera. Every picture from Portland was blurry.

2007-04-17T11:01:00.000-05:00

Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.

People I love are in California, Arizona, and Florida, and it pains me to think that they don't get the exquisite Midwestern pleasure of the coming of spring. Will it never come?! It arrives! It leaves again! Today, in an official HR + Training capacity, I got to visit Kilbourn Park. Shame on me that I have not been there before, it being so close to my home and all. There is an organic green house with one specifically magical gardenia that loved me. The field house is like every elementary school I ever attended--floors that have been lacquered for one hundred years, wide hallways, wood and linoleum in a brick castle of immense solidity. It's a pocket-sized park, hemmed in by train tracks, the perfect size for a rust belt girl that is deeply fearful of the chaos and mystery of unbridled nature.

After the sunshine and children frolicking and gardenias, the drive to work from the northwest side to the straight up north side was a killer; this always happens in spring. Buildings on the north west side are low and tan and near to the street, and I think of Douglas Avenue and Central Avenue and all my twenty-nine springs. Plus I was listening to Neon Bible and nearly weeping, which ups the sentimentality to Lifetime Movie Special levels; I could have lifted my Cabrio off the street and flown to work with all the love and pain in me, but it seemed a better idea to keep driving and get to work and review these resumes! Do the Job and get home and find someone to ride bikes to Kilbourn Park with me. Carry love and loss around in me like everyone else. Spring, I want you to stay with me, but if you go, I will understand.

2007-04-15T13:18:00.000-05:00

Everyday is like Sunday

It was shaping up to be another Sunday of laying around and reading old New Yorkers, especially since I tripped off a karaoke stage yesterday and hurt my foot. Unlike my string of foot damaging drinking exploits from two years ago, this was not a drunken fall; this was the Metal Gods punishing me for my blistering rendition of "Barracuda" for a room full of leeringly lonely Polish alcoholics.

Anyhow, my intellectual Sunday was ruined by repeated watching of and raucous laughter at this YouTube video I was hipped to by my Best Friend. What the F?! This is my gift to you. It is a lonely day, a self-pity day. I looked up "loneliness" on Google Images and duh--super downer stock photographs and this Marc Chagall painting. You have God, you have life, your lamb can play the fiddle--but all alone is all we are, no? Sometimes you feel like a terminal outsider, and your fucking cat eats her own back paws instead of learning an entertaining skill, and you'd rather read your roommate's "Entertainment Weekly: Idol Edition" than read the Bible. It's okay. It's Sunday.

2007-04-13T14:26:00.000-05:00

just a touch more

"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."

Also, it turns out I am a prescient genius. AGAIN. Dave Eggers makes a weird chart about Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s books. It could be funnier, it could be warmer, but it couldn't serve my purposes more: I know who made you want to be a writer, clever pants.

2007-04-12T10:53:00.000-05:00

You were a big deal for me, old man.

He wrote and drew his own perfect epitaph. It may be mine, as well, except that I also like 'fugit hora'--time flies--the choice of countless dead. Fugit hora reminds me of 1998, when I was elated to see Kurt Vonnegut speak at Ohio Dominican college because 1. I loved him and 2. I was certain he would be dead soon. Instead he wrote a couple more books, smoked 4 million more cigarettes, said and wrote innumerable awesome things. My high school literature textbook--probably those Norton bastards--wounded me deeply by saying that his themes "appealed to sophomoric tastes." I was very invested in my precociousness then, and plus, everyone in class but me hated "Harrison Bergeron" and they were literally sophomores.

Do people still think the themes of love and war and trying to be good when it's difficult are sophomoric? I mean, the read-y/writey people? He's omitted from the biographies of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers despite their similarities--use of humor and the absurd whilst still being, at heart, all heart--in the service of love and decency. William Gaddis is boring, is what I know, and doesn't seem to like people. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.--he loved us, all flawed and hateful.

2007-04-02T15:11:00.000-05:00

Seriously.

I purchased this stapler. The shiny redness was $2 extra but they gave me a catalog and an order form and it seemed very necessary that I have that stapler? From that movie? About my new job? I also got a Post-It brand desk carousel. Awesome!

I'm bored. I am alone on the third floor and was given a list of vague and nearly impossible tasks, which I attempted to complete. Eventually in abject defeat I called for clarification and was given another set of tasks, like "Help Melvin arrange some chairs" and "explore the benefits website." Beginning to think I've been dropped off on the third floor, no computer, no phone, for the purpose of being taped, or for a dummy paycheck that involves money laundering, or so they can catch me sleeping. That would make writing snotty things on my blog a bad idea. Except: I'm not being watched. Ever.

Which has something to do with the Ponys and why I love seeing them. First of all, there is that song "let's get together and kill ourselves" and then there is all that wah-wah pedal and weak shredding. There are only a couple of decent songs, sure, but the filler in between is like a warm aural bath in a tub of 1993. On Saturday they played an encore and it was the song I have been waiting for; it is that sexy song, the one the boy sings about the girl he sees and doesn't talk to, and I have a crush on that song. Like how you arrange to see your crush and then you do and it's a low level buzz for hours afterward? That's how I felt after hearing the Song. I can't imagine how many times this sentence has been thought, or written, or blogged, but I also can't imagine not typing it: I want to make out with that song. Even more, I want that song to want to make out with me.

I am both hard at work and hardly working.

2007-03-25T20:38:00.000-05:00

Cousins Go Braugh!

I was summoned to Ohio for the St. Patrick's Day celebration. I found my people bowed but not broken. There is some bankruptcy, some mental illness, paralyzing seizures, addictions and interventions; there is also Kevin's suit, Shannon's hat made by Grandma Clark, and the Buckeyes kicking some wack Cinci ass. Our mutual grandmother would not see us because of the Game. There was no Irishness when the Bucks were playing. It was all O-H and I-O.

This pretty lassy gets it. All this pain and drama means we are learning things we can't unlearn and can't forget. When I see my people in pain I think I should be there; I should go home. The truth is that I was alone when I had to learn these things. We are all alone for our most horrible times, and this is my Unicorn Epoch, and I am not going home. Shanner gets her own magic time soon. She is right up on it. Do you see how cute she is?
Do you see these boys becoming men? They were so adorable as little dudes, and now they are promising man humans. The one on the left was a scratchy voiced robot and the one on the right was fat and edibly cute. Now they are these awesome grown men and they can generate inside jokes at the rate of 4 million a day, and recite the entirity of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Plus, Sean makes sammiches for a living!

2007-03-13T00:33:00.000-05:00

boys that smell like salami and boys that never apologize

The parade was wicked. I nearly had to cut a bitch--she wanted to know who had invited me to the party deck, her grandma's friend's sister's party deck, because they were having a problem with underage drinkers. I'm 30, Mary Kate. I can pull out my earrings and grease up my face before you can call your cousin Bridget to get me off your ass. Representing Ohirish! Anyway, I didn't fight her, because like it or not, this is not my city. I don't know these people. But I know my girl Mandy "Up For Anything" Burnham. She was taking amazing pictures left and right and up and down. I have to get my hands on them. It's me in a tiara with countless old men in green pants, carrying shillelaghs.

Up For Anything has became an photo ethnographer. We spent Friday in Englewood taking pictures of the South Side Masonic Auditorium, the graffiti, the burnt old buildings: we were trying to avoid the ghetto cliches, but that is what Englewood has to offer. Plus I'm a social worker and former seedy neighborhood dweller and general down-with-the-streets type (not deep in the streets, though, never that raw) and yet it was amazing, the sense of otherness, the catcalls, the go-back-homes. Segregation city, my friends. Welcome.

Spring sort-of arrived. It does not have the muggy sentimentality that spurs me to listen to Cap'n Jazz and go for a walk, but it did prompt Fluffy-headed Social Worker and I to take the top down on the Cabrio and drive to the Hideout for bands, bands, bands. Guess what? One of the bands is some of Cap'n Jazz! Dude was singing and lisping and everyone is married with adorable children. Aging is amazing. Listening to the CD makes me think of the boy who stole my record and threw pennies at me and dressed a vacuum as a lumberjack for my 19th birthday. Remember summer in Columbus when you were 19? If you were me then you were in love with your friends and hating yourself. We spent a lot of time on the porch roof.

2007-03-07T15:40:00.000-06:00

"Throw us the towel!"

It's an all Irish month, y'all! It started with the Pogues on the second and continues through the Irish breakfast at my house this Sunday and then rolls on to Ohio for the big day. Everyone is invited to breakfast, everyone can come watch my cousins dance in beautiful Newark, but my mother's surprise St. Patrick's Day Intervention is invite-only. Sorry. I can only imagine how tragi-comic it will be, because my Sister did not accept the offer to be a part of the A&E show "Intervention." I would not be surprised if someone secretly tapes it; I will definitely post it on YouTube.

And speaking of drinkers: Shane MacGowan was magnificent, all you haters and nay-sayers. We sat with some Irishmen that knew every word to every song and liked to scream obscenities to the band members like they were sitting next to them at the bar. The bar cut Tommy off by 10pm and then he danced a crazy little jig before passing out on the stairs. Brian Boru offered to introduce me to some O'Gradys because I have not, as yet, 'taken a husband in Chicago.' And every song was a masterpiece, enhanced by my constant awareness that I am right now watching the Pogues perform live. Hold out, young ones, because this is proof that until a band member is declared legally dead, there may be a tour.

2007-03-01T17:32:00.000-06:00

Everything will be fine.

I don't want the unicorn thing to get played out but my heart wants what that picture has. You see that and you think that everything will be fine, you see that and you can feel them nuzzle your neck and breathing love air into your soul. It's not just me, right? You can feel this, too, right?

I'm leaving this job and my heart is breaking. When I am feeling dramatic and sad I like to poke myself in the soul with the idea that I'm a professional heart breaker: enter the hearts of the wounded and needy, get them to love me, and then leave. I've gotten so much better at my job and that means I can navigate the broken hearts and find the key and then hurt them, hurt them, hurt them.

On the other hand, Beth Pettinelli says that a good termination can save foster care. Foster care is practically defined by bad goodbyes, searing loss, and horrible loose ends. She tells me that a loving and conscientious good-bye will mend the broken hearts and burn new paths of positive loss into their sweet baby brains. Let's go with her theory, shall we?

I'm sad for saying goodbye, but I'm happy to go. Things were getting creepy on the way out, but I put my hoof down and am leaving, free and clear. Everything will be fine.

2007-02-22T19:06:00.000-06:00

Ryan Holland Syndrome

Ryan Holland Syndrome primarily infects the workplace, and is rampant in the word of human services. Competence is rewarded with more work and a dull, aching sense of obligation, whereas incompetence is met with a shrug and a lighthearted sense of understanding and fun. Ryan Holland Syndrome feels like getting strep in your career, and those with big, weepy hearts are most susceptible.

Preventive measures are most effective, and involve: 1) being tuff, 2) repping for yourself, and 3) not letting people put their trip on you. If you know my very Best Friend, you should call her, and she will make you feel better: "You know what you get when you put up with peoples' bullshit? More bullshit." Say it, sister.

Anyway, leaving this job is getting impossible. Keeping things casual with dudes is impossible. There is nothing in this world with no strings attached, if you are St. Renegade. That is a good thing. Strings are good. They just have to be clean, and strong, and made out of the braided gossamer of a unicorn's mane.

2007-02-17T12:16:00.000-06:00

The Secret is to dress like a Kung Fu Master (if you are male-identified) or in evening wear (if you are of the lady persuasion.)

The other secret "...is defined as the law of attraction, which states that like attracts like. The concept says that the energy you put into the world—both good and bad—is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day."

Way back to the Park Ave porch in Columbus, circa 98, I had a conversation with Kristen Reda, who is entirely composed of earthy goodness and love, about life. Even without the assistance of Oprah or a Kung Fu Master, Kristen had been able to distill this same Secret from the wisdom of the ancients, lots of weed, Erykah Badu, and yoga. As we all know: you get back what you put out, most of the time. Sometimes. Because when I asked Kristen about the 15 year old girl who had been raped in Goodale Park the previous week, "had she put the desire to be cut and raped out into the Universe?" she said yes and I had to stop listening.

The question of human pain and failure is the one I have attempted to answer about myself, my mother, the inhabitants of a small Armenian village, and via around 50 American children in the foster care system. Amidst these journeys I was also aging in the way that people of my kind age, and now I'm 30, and the desire to have answers is leaving me in steady trickle. I think it's true that if you act in a loving way, and believe you desire love, and give love freely, you will receive love. But I don't think it's true--and I haven't been to Darfur, so I don't really know--that if you don't believe that the Janjaweed are going to slice off your penis or rape you, then they won't, because you didn't put that out into the Universe. And then there is the sad fact that if you kick and kick and burn and deny a person love, they usually end up really, really unpleasant people, guarded and rageful and difficult to love. You put out into the Universe what you have received, and when you get really close to excruciatingly pained people, I have found that Secrets and answers become completely superfluous.

The Secret did not result in my having wings, but something else will. I have a network of geniuses with giant hearts from whom I need daily affirmation and advice, only one of whom is a nationally read advice columnist, the rest of whom are people I get to talk to and touch on a regular basis. In this next month I expect the focus of my thoughts will continue to shift from messy questions of pain and empathy to "What do you think of my bangs and do you want to date me?" The Secret is my bangs, jerks.

2007-02-16T20:36:00.000-06:00

If the idea is that I'm not crazy anymore, then clearly, that is the wrong idea. I'm not exactly there yet, but I think the idea is to recognize, sweetly and honestly, how crazy everyone else is. And then be less nervous about letting them see how hurt I am. In that way, unhurt people, or people who pretend all day that they are fine, will have very little to do with me. Good. I find such people puzzling and exhausting.

On Valentine's Day, I ended up at a bar at 4 am. I felt the palpable loneliness of the other people there; the nervous looks, the sadness behind great hair, full beards, and black glasses. As usual, I walked out unscathed. That's the right idea: risky sexual behavior is not for me. On the other hand: being unscathed, all the time, is not the right idea. The dichotomy isn't an STD from somebody I met at 4 am at the Continental versus a lifetime of painful and detached loneliness, but there is a lesson in there somewhere.

Something about the next phase of my life has me thinking that it's not supposed to be as difficult as all the preceding life--or that I'm not going to have to work so hard all the time. Certain burdens will slouch off on their own. On the other hand, I'm not super good at relaxing, and I have an insane craving for self-help these days. After I publish this little nugget of wisdom, I'm going to look up The Secret on Oprah's website. If I read it and grow wings, I will get back to you.

2007-02-13T23:26:00.000-06:00

This job is a nail in my ass

So anyways after picking my Girl up at a crack house, after having realized that the mountain of blankets on the filthy floor had people in it, after going to the foster home and packing up her stuff and witnessing foster mom tell her to "focus on her goals" and, subtextually, "ignore my abandonment of you," I was carrying her crap to my recently unfrozen car and fell down the front steps on to a nail, from what I can reconstruct. My favorite jeans, magic look-at-my-fine-ass pants, torn a ragged 10 inches right off me, and I spend the next two hours moving her into the group home with my backside out and wounded. Thankfully I had a long coat. Sadly, she was moving into a group home, moving away from any sense of family, drifting more and more into loneliness. Let's not say I failed her, because I didn't, but let's just say: thankfully I was offered another job. The tender convergence of my pain and their pain is becoming much too much to bear.

Of course, part of me wants forgiveness for the choices I'm making; who takes an easier job that pays more money? Who decides not to be in their mom's intervention? Who am I without all the abject self-sacrifice and attendant sense of righteousness and superiority?

Here's what I'm thinking, right now. The strength I've gained from self-laceration--and I'm not kidding, I really have--I now want to use for greater healing, straighter bangs, and debt re-payment. My magical unicorn powers will become even more magic. I will spin dreams from my single horn.

2007-02-11T17:35:00.000-06:00

I honestly had no idea how disturbing my posts regarding my work are to people. Am I not adequately expressing that at the bottom of a draining and disturbing day is, like, a feeling of boundless empathy and understanding? Not that I actually understand anything, but sometimes I feel understanding. I also get to hear some of the best sentences ever, such as:

"A spoonful of social work is worth a mountain."

2007-02-03T15:00:00.000-06:00

Pills and jazz, jazz and pills

My Mother's birthday could not pass without fireworks, for she is a powder keg of rage and pain and endless need. It turns out that her daughters were right, something is terribly wrong, and each of her siblings knows exactly what that is, and it looks to be something very similar to what each thinks is wrong with themselves and everyone else. It is time, again, for a Downey Intervention! A parade of phone calls and missed steps and the hand-wringing and name-calling that accompanies my family in any activity: weddings, trips to the store, breathing.

The terminology of addiction and salvation, as it is spoken in my family, is how I imagine twinspeak feels, if you love your twin completely and she is always poking you in the gut with a stick. The whole drama of my mother's Pill Problem and Drinking Problem is comforting and painful and fundamentally familiar, which is why I am shocked/elated at how easy it was to remove myself from the festivities entirely. My thing is: she has a Self Loathing and Self Obsession Problem like poison in the bloodstream and it's messy and desperately sad, and it lurks in all of us. All of us don't float illegal prescriptions around town and act like a Midwestern Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, so I understand the drive to fix the substance abuse first, but: I have seen what is under the pills and the rapes and the alcohol, and it is sadder than anything ever, and made me change my life. So: I am not going to the Intervention, and everyone else is, and I am alone in Chicago with my new bangs and unicorn vibe. If someone calls and asks me to go see some jazz, I'm gonna fucking do it. I'm gonna do everything, ever.

I saw some jazz and there was the horrible shrill noodling that makes me angry but there was also some funkdified get-down that made me think of my Pops and imagine him at the Empty Bottle with me, grimacing with funkiness as he does, and I felt deeply that everything would be fine. A man and a woman did what they did, and I'll do it too, and that goes on and on, forever.

2007-02-01T17:44:00.000-06:00

I'm really doing it! I'm magic!

I cut myself some magical rock star bangs the other midnight. And then I gave a sweet Urban Lumberjack to a dear friend and got an honest-to-God craigslists.org missed connection out of it!

thanks to you..... - 29
Reply to: pers-271861725@craigslist.org

Date: 2007-02-01, 1:23PM CST

I awoke bewildered as my sheets were changed into red flannel and my pillows made of lumberjack beard?? One can only assume based on the faint aroma of whisky and maple syrup. Then I saw your hoof print and a long red unicorn hair. Thank you magical friend.

Location: my bedroom
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Posting ID: 271861725

In other news: Angry Little Man gets to go home to his crazy mama after 3 years in the system! It's like I shake my fancy bangs and fairy dust of goodness settles on the world around me. Nearly good luck indeed. If I were you, I would get in real close to me right now, Chicago Bears. We are going all the way.

2007-01-30T10:43:00.000-06:00

Nearly good luck and major good looks

Fluffy-headed Co-worker called as I was leaving work and had magically found three tickets to see M. Ward and Freakwater in the office printer, under a name we did not recognize. This fit with our last couple of days of nearly good luck and so we rolled with it, making plans to scream "I can't get a third strike" if we got checked at the door. The ride up there was heavily reminiscent of the edge of 17, forever wondering if I would have to read in McDonald's while my friends saw the show. We were brainstorming about whose tickets they could be and there was no one. Absolutely no one! Jesus did this for us, for he loves us! Until we were in and saw our super cool coworker Beth Pettinelli and Friends talking to the door man. Of course, Beth Pettinelli. She taught Freakwater to sing, M. Ward to play guitar, she was in the Replacements and the Pretenders and maybe the Beatles. We copped to our duplicity just as the manager came over and had re-printed their tickets, apologizing for the mistake Ticketmaster had made. We're in! And now these people think we are skeezy shysters and ridiculous adolescents. Beth was sweet: "I bet you guys thought 'Score!'" Yes, we did. And who the fuck thinks "Score!" anymore?

The string of nearly good luck continued, in that we were there, and caught three Freakwater songs. At the same time we had inconvenienced one of the world's kindest humans, and M. Ward blew. He was shocking. I was shocked. It was slow, and I get that--I can amuse myself if one has chosen to sing lullabies. I'll make jokes about launching pillows from a t-shirt cannon and look at boys. I was fucking hilarious.

I was shocked by his throw-back pretension. Do people really sing songs like that anymore? I'm not kidding, the lyrics were about an Artist and how they don't respect what he does because they want to watch TV; they don't know real Art, and they demand he change his Precious Music before he can get their Dirty Money. He's playing the fucking Park West, with assigned seating, black lacquer, and sheeny velvet curtains. They want him to make a video, can you imagine? The audience chuckles. That is droll. They sent him to Sundance (more chuckling) and now they want a video, so he subjects my precious cones and rods to an immature and stupid one-note inside joke. Narcissists. They make me think of my uncles. I should have demanded that other girl's money back.

We left early and Catherine Irwin, Best Person Ever, was smoking and telling a funny story about the Post Office trying to give her Ronald Reagan stamps. I pray that she use her magic powers of humor, beauty, and self-effacement to transform M. Ward into a real boy. Okay, wait: I love M. Ward. I don't like that thing I saw in him that I see places and I don't like, but I love M. Ward, and I love you.

2007-01-24T00:27:00.000-06:00

I cut a brutal swath through the Chicago social scene this weekend. I was like a redheaded dancing sword wielded by a Norse god. And I wasn't the only one who thought so: everywhere I went, I heard it said again and again: "You are the redheaded dancing sword of a Norse God."

Friday night: West side spoken word in a basement club. Even when the Malcolm X poster fell on me, I was not deterred. Even when the giant dude with locks "spit his piece" about apartheid while staring at me, and then said that he thought of apartheid because "I saw black and white together," I was not deterred. East Coast kicked ass and won my heart. Someone spun disco classics and I danced. I even did my spotlight move for Zumehka, and whilst most people still refused to look at me, my friends were appreciative. Everyone needs a little light, no?

Then on Saturday I had a fancy meal at a fancy restaurant, paid in full. There is something so Big City about free bread in a restaurant that is not Olive Garden. The waiters are very, very, very serious, and despite my best Sweet and Humble Ohioan act, they think I am a tasteless monkey. This is because they are whacked out on cocaine. I asked everyone to describe their fanciest restaurant experience and then, with the conversational ball rolling, realized that all of my restaurant experiences are fantasies about Alpana Singh cobbled together from hundreds of 'Check, Please!' episodes. When my turn came I recalled the pork tenderloin from a quaint bistro on Rush Street--I liked the wine pairing, Alpana was ambivalent, but knew the owner. And then she and I made out on a bed of arugala.

After the meal: indie rock party! I was promised a dance party in honor of Keith Coogan, and he and I danced like mad all night long. In my head. Because young kids today do not dance, especially when hobbled by beer and cake. I danced. My cousin danced. Some guy in a plaid shirt was amazing--I bet he is my cousin. I hear cousins are the new handbags, and dancing is the new staring-in-distaste-and-fear.

Sunday I watched the Bears do something while I was yelling. Jill knows all about football and sporty girls are wicked hot--until they turn on you. Suddenly she was asking me what safety meant and why was I clapping? Because Chicago is clapping, girl who had a butch father. We hung out with the bartender for far too long. The Irish Bartender in Chicago is my kryptonite. What could deter St. Renegade from her service to the poor, the oppressed, and the sexually victimized? A tragic drunk with a wicked sense of humor named Timothy Patrick Joseph O'Herlihy McGrady. Probably he is also a poet, maybe a musician of some sort. They approach you like you've already broke their heart. It makes everything so easy.

There are weekends at the end of every week, forever, until we die. This was just the beginning, Chicago. Like our football team, the Bears, I refuse to hibernate in the winter. I am kicking ass. This weekend, I predict: art show, hot air balloon race, benefit show, hiding from cops, party on private yacht.

2007-01-16T23:18:00.000-06:00

St. Renegade brutalizes the very concept of brutality with crushing, brutal crushingness

About that last post: I was sad. I remain sad, or more like saddened, but I am buoyed by Best Friend telling me that everyone in Kalamazoo is cranky right now. Then Roommate, who flies around this country for a living, brought back news of national malaise. So I, for one, feel a bit better.

I was so sad and blue that I thought about calling off work, mistakenly thinking that the needs and love of emotionally disturbed children would bring me down. Except I'm me, and I had a great day, my two Js were in top form and my Girl complained that all we do is go to meetings with mean people. In filling out an agency survey she wrote that "caseworkers and clients [Hey! How do you spell 'client'?] should do more fun stuff together." Amidst the endless psychiatric, alternative school, regular school, and drug treatment assessments I drive her to, she thinks I should be showing her a good time. I reminded her of the time I took her to the Gospel McDonalds, and she called me foolish. She's right, though. We went to the cultural center once and saw the Other Nick Cave's fabric installations, and she was deep on a whole other level. Our time together is dwindling. She will be in a group home soon, and maybe I will stay her therapist, or maybe not. She will break my heart. We should go to the Holograph Museum!

There is also painful man-related neurosis and bleakness and even singing in my car could not help me. When Mariah Carepy cannot sooth the self-laceration, it's time to stop resisting. I used Google to look up my Fake Boyfriends of the Past and Maybe the Present. First and foremost is Sam McPheeters, for whom I read 10+ articles in the Orange County Weekly, and had this to say about our shared cultural future:

"This line of thinking continues: 20th century popular culture has secretly devolved into a colossal pyramid scheme in which each subsequent generation gets a little more swindled than the last. The disappointment is there for all to see. It lingers in the hordes of electro-clash enthusiasts gamely ignoring the worship of bands one generation old. It lurks on the faces of teen punkers bumbling down the sidewalk covered in patches like unemployed NASCAR drivers, their tattered costumes advertising bands 20 years dead. Every year the disappointment spreads.

For a long-term forecast, we have the Middle Ages to guide us. Picture filthy, syphilis-encrusted peasants squatting in the ruins of Roman splendor. Dread Zeppelin is but one of many mile markers on this same road to societal collapse. Enjoy."

Sometimes, that's what soothes.

2007-01-15T14:43:00.000-06:00

We have to do a little mental editing here, so that the chair looks less Catholic, more corporate--a low quality chrome frame and tan tweed-ish upholstery. And then that sweet little gal should be me, in my 'you don't pay me enough to look less trashy' pseudo-real job wear. The book would be a bulky and poorly organized DCFS manual. And the answer would be: it IS all bullshit.

I was supposed to lead a discussion of race in child welfare practice today, the day of days, MLK Day, which we do not honor at my agency. We ended up not discussing race, or the social function of child welfare, of course, but in my preparation I reached a cold hard sad part of things. The fact that child welfare is "an institution designed to monitor, regulate, and punish poor families of color." The idea that, much like prisons, we may be doing more aggregate damage than good in our effort to create safety, mythical safety. The slow shift from thinking that sometimes the system hurts people to thinking that the main product of the child welfare system is damaged people.

You know what I'm doing? I'm making it easier to go. I have got to go, not because I can't ethically stand it anymore, but because I can't pay my bills. I'm trying to make a way out for myself because I am all tied up with child welfare, and the rage and the pain of it, and I'm angry that I can't stay here and bitch because I'll end up being either bankrupt or writing bad checks. Not that the system isn't a soul crushing machine, but it's the one I love. For the man himself, for Dr. King, I'll be honest and loving in the face of wickedness, my own and others.

2007-01-06T10:34:00.000-06:00

I'm the one on the left.

Christmas dinner this year was some Guinness, peanut butter and cheese crackers, and string cheese from the White Hen on Western and 107th. I dragged Honorary Cousin down to Beverly Hills, Chicago, because she's a super cute dude magnet whom, I assumed, would pull a working class Irish-American hero to my side. It turned out to be a high school reunion scene, but whatever: there was beer, there was a fireplace, there were Life Stories to be told. Lonely Christmas 2006 wasn't all bad but it turns out that I must have kids around on the holidays. You can drain the joy from them to fill the cold, lonely, cavernous hole of your soul.

Then it was off to California to hang out with my sister, some old friends, and my newest friend: Modern Walking Doll with Fashion Outfit. She's the hot blond member of our posse, and the Silver Lake Hipsters loved her. Plus she can knock back some cole slaw, let me tell you.

For much of my trip I was filled with a low-grade, slow-burning fire of righteous judgment that left me feeling drained, bored, and angry at my sister. At some point I had to stop hiding from the Movie Star so I embraced the upper class California way and drank white wine in the hot tub. Then I watched DVDs of movies that haven't even been released yet, ate Goldfish crackers out of an enormous tub, and wrote in my journal like the sensitive Midwesterner I am.

My resolutions got set in early December, when I was at the Mountain; so for the New Year I resolved some silly things on a piece of paper, burnt that paper, and drank it in Andre Cold Duck. Even as I wrote them I saw how silly they were, because I could do them right now--isn't that the thing? What I need to resolve is to do the work to really want the thing I already want, if you know what I mean. I'm all about goals. Now I'm supposed to be breathing, and taking in, and being soft and nice to myself and others. That's my thing for 2007: hot tubs. My year for steady chillaxin.'

2006-12-30T13:11:00.000-06:00

This is how we roll

When we roll, we do so through a gate and past a guard station. But this ain't no Checkpoint Charlie--there are brass dear frolicking in a fountain, and tasteful concrete benches for poetry writing.

When we chill, we do so in a mansion. Our mansion is not big enough nor clean enough. This is the tragedy of California--you have to hire Mexicans to do what Eastern Europeans can do so much better.

When we roll, we roll in a Lexus. Please do not roll down the windows. There is a fire nearby.

2006-12-26T20:29:00.000-06:00

I intercepted this myspace.com transmission from a cousinster to an honorary cousinster.

It's brutal. I can't stop saying it in my head.

2006-12-26T17:49:00.000-06:00

I'm wactose intolerant.

Which made doing my job last week difficult, as child welfare is fundamentally wack. I had two big DCFS meetings in which people who had never met the children not only diagnosed these children but then made idiotic claims about what should be done to help them with the disorder we had just decided they had. Like therapy three times a week to address "attachment issues." Seeing as we had just removed this boy from his home before Christmas because, basically, his people are street-level West Siders, I was thinking that a good first step, beyond attachment centered play therapy, might be to give the child a fucking home. But that's just me. I'm not the head of DCFS clinical, and there is a reason for that: I am not a complete tool.

During the other meeting I admitted to my client that the whole thing was a set up to make the system--including, bless my heart, me--feel much better about steamrolling through childrens' lives. She suggested that she enter the room and yell "My caseworker thinks y'alls talking some bullshit!" and oh, I wish she had. Because they were talking some bullshit, asking this poor baby, all dressed up for yet another meeting about another foster home, to "tell us what you want out of this." She wants, if I may speak for her: to not have a crack addicted mother, to have not been placed in a foster home with a rapist, to have just one of the people who promises to be her mother actually be her mother. And these meetings, if they involve a teenager, always have this skin-crawling moment in which a caring adult makes stern eye contact and says that this is the time to make the choice to turn your life around. I hope you slept better after that completely useless speech, wackass. Does anyone really think that she has never heard that before? What if the life you are turning around is debased and shaky and badly in need of some gentle love?

My rage is righteous and justified. I will also mention, for full disclosure, that my rage is prideful; during both meetings there were allusions to the idea that the children might require more effective therapy. This is a knife in my heart. I don't think I can do any better than I am doing right at this moment, care anymore, work any harder, and the idea that my work isn't enough, or isn't right, just kills.

There is no way to know, is the problem. The measures they have developed to quantify therapeutic progress complete disintegrate when applied to multi-problem (poor, neglected, and abused) children and families. It's a creepy soft science and I cultivate this doubt, I think it keeps me sharp, a doubt in therapy and a doubt about my ability to do therapy. On the other had, I will not tolerate this doubt on the tongue of some bureaucrat who has hitched their star to the gruesome DCFS thresher.

Oh, the rheatoric. It feels good, it feels really 1998, to get back in touch with the seminal social work rage that put me on the path of poverty and righteousness I currently travel. Sometimes, with all the love and non-judgement and relativism, I forget how good it feels to find some wack bullshit and then just explode it with laser-like rage. In my head. While shaking hands. Polite smiles. Enjoy the holidays!