It’s funny to read the New York Times’ stumbling to describe what’s “hip” and “indie” in their review of this year’s Coachella and coming up bewildered, though satisfactorily having “discovered” My Morning Jacket. I’m not being snotty when I say that, by the way. I really do think it’s funny in an endearing sort of way, like the older relative at Thanksgiving – “Hey, I really like the Nirvana. Have you heard the Nirvana?”

Yesterday — or no, I think it was the day before, (she said as if she actually has the ability to differentiate between the days of the week) I saw Dawn Wells on television talking about, of all places, Driggs, Idaho. She interviewed me once for a job as an administrative assistant at her strange little film school there. Her office, which occupies what used to be a used car dealership, is vast and occupied by overgrown settees and lifesize cardboard cutouts of herself as Mary Ann (or Ginger. I’ve never actually seen Gilligan’s Island, so I don’t know.) At the end of the interview she patted me on the knee and said,  ”I like you, ” in that raspy old show-biz manner which begged to be followed by, “….kid. You got real chutzpah,“  or, “you’re true blue,” or something.

But she didn’t. And I didn’t get the job, despite the fact that I am true blue and am possessing of real chutzpah.

I like Jim James, by the way, getting back in a roundabout manner to paragraph #1. I never was such a big My Morning Jacket fan (and I think that’s merely because I never owned much of their music until recently) but in that scene in I’m Not There when Jim James is in the band in the little town singing ‘Goin’ to Acapulco’, that just sort of broke my heart and enamored me of him forevermore.

“Rose Marie, she likes to go to big places…” that lyric always strikes me, because I am often overcome by the desire to go to the airport and just sit there, waiting, for nothing and no one.

 

 

That last post was perhaps a little melodramatic, yet immensely cathartic. I hope no one reads it.

I am beautiful, I am bountiful, I am blissful

Today marks the day that I have been vegan for exactly one week and I have celebrated this momentous occasion with none other than Vegan Chocolate Mousse, that square vessel of pure chocolate love for which my heart yearns. It is possible that I only became vegan in the first place so that I could eat Vegan Chocolate Mousse without feeling like a big poseur.

Veganness has brought me nothing but good fortune thus far. In the past week, I have experienced appreciably less anxiety, stress, and cravings for hunks of brick cheese and cigarettes. I also have a lot more energy, though I’ve needed to consume less caffeine. This has brought me to the conclusion that either a)veganism really does live up to all the hype or b)soy, in large doses, has an opiate effect on the brain.

It’s really difficult for me to write about my personal life. I find that I’d much rather indulge in pap discussions of gastronomica, but I didn’t start this blog to discuss pap gastronomica (well, at least not all the time.) I think there are enough of those out there (and they’re better written, or at least more thoroughly researched.)

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Tomorrow morning at 5:45 am will mark the six month anniversary of my arrival back home and the resultant upheaval, which has been the most ardent proof of grace I have yet experienced, yet the most gruelingly agonizing time period of my existence.

The song is right-on, grace is amazing stuff. And I don’t just mean that in the “I found God” way, because I never found God, God was always there in some way, shape, or form and I was always cogniscant (I know I spelled that wrong, damn it) of such , I just lived in some sort of orb of cognitive dissonance. Or maybe it wasn’t even that, maybe it was that I have always been doing the best I could, and that the ante was suddenly and drastically upped during the course of the plane ride from San Francisco to Detroit. I don’t believe that “I once was lost and now am found”. When I disembarked from that plane, when I found my father waiting in the humid and dingy baggage claim that morning, I knew that I was in the right place whether I wanted to be or not. I knew that I had a good bit to learn back here, lessons I’ve been avoiding (in lieu of other lessons) for six years, lessons I couldn’t go on without. Perhaps when I met the jerk who broke my heart I fell for him and his shtick because I knew that I needed my heart broken. I knew that I needed the smack upside the head that only heartbreak can bring, to snap me out of my selfishness and vanity.

I can say with a sigh now that I’ll never be that girl again. Maybe I’ve just gotten older and wiser real quick-like, maybe that’s all there is to it, but I’ll never go back and I can’t say I’m sad about that.

There’s a gray cat meowing outside my window and a square container with the residue of mousse next to the computer and the kitchen is a godawful mess, I was supposed to run tonight but I blew it off, it’s humid, no matter how hard I try I can’t make this place beautiful and I’m so tired but Holy Shit, I’m happy. I’ll fall in love again and it’ll be alright and it wasn’t the end, only the beginning, and the Dalai Lama and Rob Brezny and the messages on my tea bags are nearly always right and just like on an Idaho highway Bliss does come right after Tuttle.

 

sociologists are a bunch of whiny baby pee pants

Hey, how’s that for a theory? How do you like that, eh? Sociologists are a bunch of whiny baby pee pants. Sociologists are a bunch of disaffected, spoiled career academics who have nothing better to do with their time than to sit around, eat foie gras, and try to cultivate hip, two-tone Karl Marx beards. Sociologists are people who would get stoned and watch TV all day and complain about “the man” holding them down but that didn’t pay very well and Daddy didn’t approve, so they went out and got expensive educations so that they could do research so that they could get stoned and write papers to complain about “the man” holding them down.

Oooh, money is power and power is money, it’s a reprehensible filthy cycle of manipulative beneficence. You would know, wouldn’t you, Mr. G. William Domhoff, Ph.D. Ph. D! Golly! Isn’t that kind of expensive? Who paid for your education? Furthermore, Mr. Professor, who pays your salary?

Just curious.

 

marxists & accountants

I like to have a moment, every day, when I break down and cry. This may sound entirely unstable, but, I assure you, it’s not. Dr. Oz, according to my mom, wholeheartedly approves of the act of crying.

Tonight it was when I fled the family home (where I had dinner and am staying tonight since school is only 3 minutes away vs. 43 minutes from my own home) armed with a totebag containing twenty-six pounds of books and notes from various classes, a laptop, and my purse, stormed into the local Starbucks at 8pm to find it completely packed. Frustrated, I rolled my eyes imperiously and headed to Caribou, which was also slammed. I piled my things back into Rosa (my car) for the second time and piloted ‘er towards downtown, where I know there to be a Starbucks, lamenting the cruel aspects of my unique situation.

Dear God, this is only the beginning! I’m ten years too late for my freshman years of college, yet here I am with my stupid totebag full of books and papers needing to be written and ten years of (seemingly) useless work experience behind me and freshman fifteen around my waist. This is useless. These piddly twelve credit hours at a community college have nearly leveled me, and I fantasize about getting my MBA, about five and three-quarters more years of this, and who knows how many more dollars spent, and for what?

The sky was turning into streaky melted Superman ice cream, reminding me of San Francisco momentarily and self-piteous woe took over grandiosely as it does a six-year-old who’s just fallen off her bike and skinned her knee.

I cried and it felt so good, more soothing than the first drag off a cigarette, more releasing than a…um…you know. A sneeze.

And then I was over it and, of course, found the third Starbucks nearly empty.

Earlier, Dad and I went for a (bike) ride through Royal Oak, Birmingham and Troy with our fancy bicycles and outfits, feeling self-consciously goofy when our grand tour ended up at Somerset Mall. Yeah, we’ve both ridden up our share of mountain passes (he more than I), but neither of us, before today, could have claimed that we’d ridden to the mall. A year ago, I would have died of embarassment, being seen in lycra shorts riding through the parking lot of Nordstrom’s.

I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Dad, too.

Okay, enough of this, I have had too much caffeine too late at night and I have a final exam to write.

joy is the essence of success

I’ve decided that, from this point forward, I’m going to title my posts according to the pithy words of wisdom quoted on my tea bag tags.

Sometimes I believe that positivity is on the rise. Case in point: bathroom graffiti, which seems to be encouraged in all of the hip bathrooms in this town. Peeing at the Woodward Avenue Brewing Company can be every bit as inspirational an experience as, say, reading Chicken Soup for the Disaffected 20-Something Soul. It’s marvellous.

My favorite? “Kristen, I love you.” There are, however, many more upbeat scrawlings on the wall there, aimed at a broader audience.

I really like the WAB, in general, for a variety of reasons. 1. Food. The menu is varied and features such considerately chosen ingredients as fresh roasted green chiles. Reasonably priced, too. I got an asian salad there the other weekend that lasted me not one, not two, but three meals. 2. Atmosphere. Not too dark, not too bright, not too smoky, not too loud, not too quiet. Juuust right, like a big steaming bowl of nightlife porridge for Goldilocks. Big windows afford excellent Woodward Ave. people watching. The only element lacking is some sort of outside area in which to congregate. 3. Libations. I actually like the Strawberry Blonde Ale, and I don’t generally like microbrews, and I don’t generally like beer. The wine menu suits me to a T — high quality without attempting to gouge one’s financial situation with a fancy-ass corkscrew. They have a $6.50 house cab that is warm, dry, dark and cozy. I like it. I don’t even know what it is, but I like it.

Last night also served as a reminder for me that, no, I don’t really like smoking anymore, and I really should just let go of it. It’s an awful habit that I’ve worked too hard to give up and am in danger of adopting once again. I’ve smoked enough cigarettes lately that I feel it in my lungs when I run. Ew. More importantly, I don’t enjoy smoking like I used to. I anticipate enjoying it, and the enjoyment never comes. It’s just a pleasure that ran its course, thank God.

I’ve undergone a rigorous process in the last six months of ridding myself of the unpleasurable habits that have clung to me like barnacles for however many years. It’s painful and fun and dangerous at the same time, this process. Kind of like smoking, I suppose. Except healthier.

 

how I will be do!

A good way to feel awful about yourself, especially if you are a person with absolutely no educational background, is to sign up for Facebook. Then, if you are especially fond of self-torture (of the emotional variety), look up your ex. Witness the picture he’s taken of himself in the sunroom of his mother’s house (why, the very same room in which the crux of your breakup occurred!), the neatly arranged collar of his shirt, the studious expression. Oh, but you’re not done, are you? No, of course not. You have to click on Friends, don’t you? And there you encounter just what you’ve been searching for. Need I go on? No, I shan’t, because we’ve all been in the depths of this sort of depraved wound reopening ceremony.

Earlier today I had a conversation with my sociology professor on the subject of social status and my relative naivete of such, up until recent events. If one ignores, wholesale, a social force, is it possible for said force to affect that person’s life? The answer is resoundingly yes. The answer makes me relieved to have escaped, however, spending the rest of my life being treated like the hired help by all of the ex’s acquaintances. Illustrious alumae of a cornucopia of universities held in high esteem, all of them.

The disappointing aspect remains that I’ve worked hard on overcoming my reverse snobbery (another ex was fond of calling me “the working class hero” once upon a time), and I won’t let this revive it. Furthermore (and, obviously, more importantly), I won’t let this teach me a cautionary tale about love. I refuse to let this harden me into a cold-hearted misanthrope.    I found a bad apple, is all there is to it. I fell in love with a rich asshole and it didn’t work out. It doesn’t mean that all people I fall in love with are assholes or that all rich people or assholes or any of these things. In fact, I don’t think that the events of the past mean a goddamn thing. They just are what they are. Really! That’s it, my friends. The end. The bottom line.

And, you know what else? I know that my social status is nil. Fuck Facebook. Ew.  I’m a cashier at a groceryr store with a GED. I never pretended to be anything else and I never will. I’m an alumae of absolutely nothing and I simply don’t care. I go to school for myself, and not for potential employers, friends, or suitors. Hm. Speaking of which,  school is coming to a tumultuous and demanding finale. Now I know precisely why I avoided it for ten years. Having fun is so much more, oh, how do you say it, fun?  But, armed with the worldly knowledge I have gleaned from this semester, I march on.

Tomorrow, my roommate and I are hosting a party & pub-crawl, thus marking my first attempt at having any vestige of a social life since God-knows-when, since my retirement from society as a whole, which I think was about three years ago when I moved to New Mexico and took up the hermitage. I’m excited. I baked a pie.

Ferndale is such a lovely place for people who use running as a means of ogling residential architecture. Ferndale proper and Pleasant Ridge comprise some of the nicest, tree-lined, post-war neighborhoods I’ve ever encountered. Right here! In Michigan! Can you imagine? With the warmth of the spring finally settling in and coaxing the flowers (daffodils! crocuses! star of bethlehem! oh my.) out of hiding, this place feels…not bad.

It’s a not-so bad. It’s a nice-a place. Ah, shut uppa yo face.

 

big scary clouds

When he and I were together we would sit on the back porch watching clouds enact white fluffy operas over the Tetons while we ate the dinner I had prepared with fresh vegetables from the local organic farm. We would drink wine by candlelight with jazz in the background and have elaborate intellectual discourse while the sky would change from its day attire to sultry blue and pink, a combination that put me in mind of a bubblegum popsicle – the life span of which, in the clutches of a toddler on a warm, humid, midwestern July afternoon, this little vision of utopia was slated to last.

The crazy thing is, I knew that. The sound of that moment passing by grew so deafening at times that I had to strain to hear the dinner conversation.  I tried to savor it and to feel it, but all I could ever feel was its velocity. That moment was not mine. I knew I could not stay. I had been so consistently weighed down by the force of a feeling, or feelings, the load of which I was not prepared to bear, that all I could wish for was for it to be over.  I felt like a ghost in a house in which I wanted so badly to linger, yet out of which I knew I had to be driven.

When the exorcist of time finally came strolling in, when it finally was over, I felt enormous relief.

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” indeed.

No one ever tells you that’s what love feels like and life, I suppose, has been set up to prepare you, but the process is so painstakingly slow, tedious, and arduous that you wonder if you will ever really understand. And you know when you don’t. But you also know when you do, because you start to fall in love with silvery clouds looming above suburban grocery store parking lots and potbellied robins and bakery smells and the syntax of Eastern Europeans having only recently learned English and the way your kitchen welcomes you when you come home from work and like an elderly relative starts telling you tales of the old days and you may even fall in love with a city you never liked much and with your own imperfect body and fuzzy hair driven gloriously mad by the humidity. You realize that love is no person embodied, and therefore cannot be driven away by any one person, so it doesn’t matter much whether they were or weren’t “the one”, and that’s when you know that a broken heart is nothing more than a bulb stuffed deep in fertile, yet frozen, soil.

Tonight the first thunderstorm of the spring and my mom bought me new stainless pots and pans to replace the ones stuck forever in some godforsaken hangar in California and I went to the market and bought kale.

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