July Sucks

“Dear Cat Litter Marketing Team:

“My cats do not feel represented by the cats pictured on your boxes. Please rebrand to include exotic mixed breeds.”

Such begins my week on this cool Monday morning that within a few hours will crawl into crippling hot temperatures.

I didn’t think about the weather when we decided to move here. We needed a house and my in-laws were putting a lot of pressure on my husband to buy a duplex. The area is beautiful but mostly when seen from the comfort of an air conditioned vehicle.

My parents are still moving from their apartment. Really they should be done by now. But somehow they’re still managing to stay on inflatable mattresses in their empty old apartment.

My brother’s supposed to come pick up the last of the plants today.

I wish they’d just finish moving already. This melancholy is too prolonged for me.

Going back to the weather thing… i cannot be in my house during hot evenings. I find it suffocating. We have an a/c window unit but it’s a hassle to set up. The heatwave was supposed to end today but now it’s been extended until tomorrow.

My husband likes to leave the fan on all night, but it wakes me up around 4-5 AM. I haven’t gotten a decent amount of sleep since right before the move, three weeks ago, with the exception of one night.

I need them to be done. I need to wake up and picture my parents settling and not feel the fan blowing in my face so i can go back to sleep. I need to have the peace of mind that the cat products we buy have inclusive labeling.

Maybe someday in the fall, everything will be better.

Where Have All the Penguins Gone?

Every reason i have for wanting my parents to stay where they live is entirely selfish.

Who would ever want to live in one spot for so long?

Turns out they didn’t throw out my stuff from the first 20 years of my life and now my house looks like a warehouse.

It’s mostly old notebooks and journals. A scribble here, a half-hearted sketch there. A poem with no ending… Such were the mediums before blogging.

A Mickey Mouse-shaped stethoscope and plastic bandages: my brother wanted me to be a doctor.

A giant red shiny head with blue eyes: my first rattle.

A fluffy Care Bears blanket. A miniature chair with my name stamped in leather. A giant green toy chest covered in Roosevelt School stickers, full of my favorite books.

A long white gown lined with beads and silk organza.

Everything that used to matter and proof that i was not the poster child of neglect, as i have often argued.

Proof that i played and grew and played and grew some more and i read and then i went off and did some of the things i had played and read about. I grew all the way up until i could grow no more.

Granted, i should have grown at least a little more…

Yet marks on the wall cannot measure inner growth!

I had a beautiful childhood and i became a beautiful woman.

Yes, there were lots of times when i tried to kill myself and ingested things i shouldn’t have.

Yes, it was a one bedroom apartment and not one of us had any privacy.

My dad would barge in at 2 AM every school night, taking calls for his taxi business, waking all of us up.

My mom would make me do my brother’s chores while he played with his friends and practiced music.

And then they’d argue. My parents would. And then my brother would argue too.

It was such a small apartment and there we were, all arguing for the entertainment of our beloved neighbors.

There was the married woman next door who had made an unsuccessful pass at my dad while my mom was in Mexico.

The nice pothead who always asked us for cash. (His wife was so cranky!)

My friend’s little sister who literally tried to stone me.

And my other friend’s cousin who asked me to play “hide and go sex” with him when i was 13.

(For the record, i said “No.”)

I met fear there the first time my parents left me home alone to go to a dinner party. There was a big rainstorm and the lights went out.

I met my sexuality there the first time i accidentally brushed against a door at the precise angle.

I met success when i finally learned how to ride my bike.

And i met irresponsibility when it got stolen a week later because i was too lazy to put the lock on it.

That building was the nest of my early existence. But the building doesn’t feel. And those feelings are safe inside me. I carry them everywhere i go.

If my childhood self could diagnose me now, she’d say i am weak. I am broken. She’d kick me out of embarrassment.

I left the nest but i still saw it as my safety net. And now the penguins are tearing down camp. Now it’s fish season and high tide. I mean, not literally. It’s actually winter in Antarctica. But you know what i mean.

The “nest” isn’t a place. It’s more like a lump in our chests. And for better or worse, it is impossible to leave behind.

Hope and Memories

Our cat is having a biopsy today.

I hate the idea of leaving her in the hands of what are practically strangers to her.

I know it’s an unreasonable fear. Vets sacrifice a lot of time and money to be licensed to handle other people’s pets. They work with different animals day in and day out for years. I’m sure they don’t take their responsibility lightly.

But it’s 5AM and i haven’t slept since before 4.

I tell myself this is an opportunity to show my faith in God and not let my heart overflow with anxiety. And prayer does help.

But still, i can’t quite sleep.

I think about my friend whose adult son is having open heart surgery in a couple days. She is having family from out of town stay with her and her plumbing just broke down. They haven’t had hot water in three days.

My problems should be manageable by comparison. In comparison, i’ve got it easy.

All i want is to go back to sleep, yet it escapes me.

Our other cat came to console me.

She gave up shortly after.

This is one of the rare occasions when it is more helpful to think of tomorrow than of today.

Tomorrow i have the day off and a friend is supposed to meet me in the morning.

Tomorrow i have a couple errands to run and clothes to pack for our annual convention for our church.

Tomorrow, today’s anguish will be but a silly indicator of my overreactive tendencies.

My parents are moving cities and that is also weighing on my heart. They are ok with it because they’ll save a lot of money, but they’ll be twice as far.

They’ve lived in the same apartment for 45 years.

Our family hung out together there for the last time last Sunday. We played music and sang. My mom made her famous potato burritos.

I’m so attached to that place. Growing up, the door was bright blue. Birds of Paradise lined the entrance. And a cat always waited for me.

The Benefits of Going Mad

Cat hairball season is in full swing and i spent the better part of this daybreak cleaning up after them.

Of course, i couldn’t sleep between coughing fits because of something someone said last night, which would continue to eat away at me if i let it.

Unrelatedly, someone different alluded yesterday to me “and my paradox worlds.”

And now, caught in the snags of my depression, grasping for my happy place, and only having one recourse which isn’t a place at all but a moment in time… i wonder if it’s ok to let myself go there. A moment which only existed as a ripple and doesn’t currently have anything to do with reality.

On the pro side, if i allow my sleep-deprived self to dwell there, i can conserve inner peace. The physical world can fall apart around me. I can tune it all out and just be.

On the other hand, if i go around smiling and not replying to others’ complaints, they’ll assume i enjoy the criticism or am going mad.

It’s almost as if in order to function properly, i would have to find a midpoint between my happy place and reality. But i cannot do that. Because halfway to my happy place isn’t my happy place. It’s just more of this… cat vomit and not being good enough.

But if i stay here in reality, insomniac me will get irritated and say things others don’t want to hear and then they’ll hate me more than they do now. Insomniac me can’t concentrate on anything long enough to be productive. Insomniac me is slow and tardy.

But in my happy place i can soar above it all in a red-orange hot air balloon, sipping on champagne, singing like a bird. I can even drop heavy things from the sky without real consequence.

This reminds me of “Around the World In 80 Days.” I lost track of how many times i read that book growing up. I’ve always wanted to mirror that voyage in real life as closely as possible.

But i only get 2-weeks paid vacation. If i lived in one of those modern nations with extended paid maternity leave, i could do it then. Because in my happy place, i must be cleaning up after a baby instead of cats.

Though in this reality, i’d be cleaning up after all of them- cats, baby, and husband.

Is it selfish to dissociate and go Matrix on everyone? Wouldn’t everyone be better off in the long run if i just let my mental health go? It’s not like anyone depends on me. Well my cats do, but they say they’ll stick by me either way.

Congratulations, IRS

Ah, numbers. Reliable. Consistent. One plus one is always two, etc, etc. Change the tax code enough and you’ll have screwed over millions of hardworking people. When did it become so illogically expensive to live in the U.S.?

I never analyzed our taxes in previous years because we pay someone to do them. It seems redundant to think about something you’re already paying someone else to think about.

But when i awoke today, i couldn’t get over how much we’d paid in property taxes.

I never noticed it before because it used to be entirely deductible from our yearly income. Not anymore.

It is as if California has a permanent high HOA fee for anyone who wants to own land here.

I love California. The ocean. The mountains. Valleys. Giant trees. Wildfires. Mudslides. Socioeconomic disparity.

It doesn’t make any financial sense for us to live here.

Granted, i have no idea what property taxes are in other states. But at least some home prices aren’t as high.

I never really think about these things because my income is to some degree supplemental. I’m in charge of purchasing cat toys, decent hotel rooms, and clothes to look cute in.

But it turns out that this year there is no cat tax credit. And our cats are very high maintenance.

Taking into account that we can’t afford health insurance, it makes me wonder how much money a person has to make to comfortably live here.

I see families with kids in SUVs, driven around by manicured stay-at-home moms, and i wonder what the hell are we doing wrong? No way could we afford to bring up a family here.

I guess i could go try to work full time for a bigger company with more benefits, but it’s hard to find bigger benefits than working close to home and having a flexible schedule.

Maybe this is the price we pay for having a high quality of life. Buying fresh groceries. Line-drying clothes.

The truth is if we are ever to pay down any debt, i have to stop my music endeavors. No more private voice lessons. No summer guitar academy. No private dance studio classes. No wanting anything.

From now on i am committed to austerity. I am a monk of sorts. A female monk. A monkess.

Who knows, i may even give up avocado toast.

The Self-Conscious Photoshop Generation

Do you ever wake up and just hate your eyebrows? They were fine the night before. What could have happened during the last eight hours that made them go off in different directions?

When we lived in Mexico ten years ago, one of the last conversations i had with a friend was her kind of making fun of the way i look.

I never really felt self-conscious before that. I mean, my mom always pointed out my physical flaws when presenting me to her friends. Sometimes older women asked me how a guy like my husband ever even noticed me. But i thought all older women were just mean like that. Embittered by their oldness.

Not so long ago, i was visiting a friend and at some point she said something about physical appearance that sounded passive aggressive to me. I don’t remember what it was exactly- my brain tends to block mean comments from my memories- but it was similar to when someone criticizes chubby people in front of an obviously chubby person…

When i was dating my husband, his mom once told me that she understood if i had depression because i have a lot of freckles.

The offensive part of that comment was that anyone would think i’m that vain. The freckles are the last of my worries.

But admittedly for the last ten years i have felt more self-conscious about how i look. A lot of women use botox or get surgeries. All of that is expensive and there are funner things i’d rather spend my money on.

Anyway, i always wonder how much better people would treat me if i met the definition of gorgeous. It would be harder to read people, i think. Right now several people i know are consistently mean or indifferent to me for no apparent reason. I notice they are friendly to most other people. I can’t help but wonder if part of that can be attributed to looks.

Or maybe i just blame my looks when it is my personality failing me. Because it’s always like a million times harder to change the way i am than the way i look, and i’d rather not have to change myself to win over anyone who doesn’t innately like me.

Which to be honest lately feels like pretty much everyone.

Anyway, within the last twelve hours, i’ve woken up twice trying to scratch off my face. So that’s new.

I think the whole filtered selfie era is bad for people psychologically, creating these unrealistic expectations about how we and others ought to look.

But the animal filters are pretty cute.

When i was doing portrait photography, i was obsessed with presenting the best image of clients. Now i want to show everything as it really is. Crude. Raw. Live. Because life is already beautiful enough. Diversity is beautiful. Scars and tear stains and gray roots.

3-dimensionality is beautiful but when we reduce someone to a flat little screen, we’re taking a whole dimension away from them. People don’t fit in one’s pockets.

I don’t think technology is very far from Star Wars style holograms. But of course, the media isn’t the problem. Even as a hologram i’d probably still worry about symmetrical eyebrows.

I’ll just take cover under a teddy bear filter and hope people think it’s natural.

On the Superior Wisdom of Squirrels

I dreamt i was tossing and turning violently in bed and could not sleep. Then i awoke and couldn’t perceive my own center of gravity. This isn’t the first time in the recent past that my anxiety has come back to shake me in the middle of the night.

I am for the most part a very good sleeper. It is one of the- or perhaps the only thing- i have always been able to do very well and usually far better than my peers. Dare i even say, i am an exemplary sleeper. Often one with enviable dreams.

I soar through pink and honeydew skies while others dream they toil away at redundant office tasks. I hike through ancient Rome surrounded by wildcats while others dream they forgot to sharpen their pencil before a test. I can even read text in my dreams, which i have heard is very uncommon.

So what is throwing me off my game?

A friend of my husband’s asked us to attend his mother’s funeral about a month ago. That funeral is today. It is my husband’s friend. I am not close to him or his family. I did not know his mother. Literally i never met her. And it is supposed to be a beautiful Saturday. I don’t want to spend it commuting to a funeral and then being surrounded by sad people.

That may sound mean but realistically, i would never ask them to do the same. I may go just to offer moral support to my husband, who is committed to being a supportive friend. But at this point i remain undecided.

About a month ago, when i heard of the unfortunate event, i didn’t think twice about adding it to my calendar. But it was stormy and gray and a funeral seemed very fitting back then.

Today there is sunshine, blue skies, poppies everywhere you look. A funeral seems rather unnatural. Let alone two funerals.

You see, Dear Reader, a terribly elderly sister at our church- whom i hardly knew but thrice- has also gone to sleep in death within the last couple of weeks. And there is another funeral scheduled for next weekend.

I cannot help but wonder what has changed within myself during this last month that all of a sudden i’m too good for funerals. Why was i so readily selfless with my time before as compared to now?

“Wise” King Solomon said: “It is better to go to the house of mourning.” But you have to wonder about the wisdom of a man who compulsively married hundreds of women. I mean, maybe in his case it was better to be at a funeral than at home.

I researched that verse and a couple of articles compared the futility of our lives to that of squirrels:

“After growing for a year or so, it locates a mate. Then it must build a nest or den and care for offspring. If it finds enough berries, nuts, and seeds, the squirrel family may grow plump and have time to enlarge their home. But in just a few years, the animal becomes old and more prone to accident and disease. About age ten it dies. With slight differences between squirrel types, that is its life cycle.

“Most people would not object to that cycle for an animal, and they hardly expect a squirrel to have a thought-out purpose in life. However, the life of many humans does not differ very much from that, does it? […] Before long they are adults, find a mate, and seek a place to live and a means to provide food. If they succeed, they may grow plump and expand their home (nest) in which to raise offspring. But the decades quickly pass, and they grow older. If not before, they may die after 70 or 80 years filled with ‘trouble and hurtful things.’ You might think about these sobering facts the next time you see a squirrel (or other animal you had in mind).”

We live in a haven for oak trees and as a result i must see 1-2 dead squirrels on our roads everyday. Is that all i’m cut out to be? Road fodder for the gods? Do i even amount to that? I mean, i don’t exactly have a mate, at least not in the sense of doing any actual mating, though i have achieved the human equivalent of growing plump.

Is the average middle aged squirrel relatively more self-realized than i am?

I am beginning to think so. For all my Bible reading and trying to be there for others, i have not attained a greater sense of lasting happiness or peace than most people. (Then again, how would i know?)

I am near the end of my ability to give birth. Every TV commercial and family walking down the street is a bitter reminder of this. Even so, i do not regret my early life choices. Sometimes i regret my recent ones.

In any case, Solomon does bring up a good point in Ecclesiastes. Seeing as how we are irrelevant dust in the wind, our problems should never be overbearing.

Part of the reason i cannot sleep is because i am worried about a guitar i custom ordered and which i need to arrive within the next five weeks. I need it for a concert at the community college.

But what happens if i don’t get it? Will the world end? Sure, i’ll be out a lot of money, but not like third world debt amounts.

So you see, i have arrived at this conclusion: you should enjoy life but not to the point that you don’t enjoy it. Get it? Like a squirrel balancing on electric power lines.

If I Could Change the World

This morning i woke up powerful. I was ready to hop out of bed and take on the world. I listened to a Portuguese lesson and was very proud of myself because i was finally going to get to work early.

Yup. I was finally going to do it.

Then it started to rain and next thing you know, i’m in an SUV with my husband, who’s driving the wrong way down a one-way street from the backseat. “Watch out for pedestrians,” i said, “when you hit the corner.”

It was a dream, of course. I had fallen back asleep. The version of myself that is a capable cheerful morning person only exists hypothetically. She would only exist if i got out of bed early.

Then all our east coast customers who call ten times in a row before 8 AM would receive satisfactory service and not be moody all day. They would be nice to everyone around them. It would start a chain reaction.

Come to think of it, that is probably why east coast people have a reputation for being too uptight. They get up too early. Then they get upset at all the other parts of the country where the sun hasn’t risen yet. They hurry us up while we’re still trying to blog in our pjs.

Then there’s this daylight savings thing. Who ever thought it would be a good idea for millions of people to collectively lose one hour of sleep? And why do we do it? Why don’t we rebel against the machine?

It is because we depend on the machine. We do not know how to go back to relying on natural instincts like bears and frogs. And when the machine malfunctions, we all blame the other parts.

If all those customers got better service from me as a salesperson, i could change the world. But i won’t, because it’s cold outside.

Too Charming for Myself

Last time the a/c technician came to the office, he kind of asked me for my phone number and i kind of said No.
Today he is here again and i think i made him cry.
I told him no one told me he was coming.
It is unnerving for a guy to just show up and want to come in, and i think he got sad.
I just passed him down the hall and gave him my best fake smile i have to offer.
Charmed, no doubt.

This morning i went to do ministry work which is done this way in my congregation:
Whoever is a member of that congregation or an active member of another congregation can meet at a set time at our hall.
In our hall it is only in the mornings and since i work most mornings and oversleep the other mornings, (without mentioning the mornings on which i do both), i tend to only make my own arrangements and go out in the evenings.
But i try to show up Fridays and Saturdays to the group meetings when i can.
Today only one brother was going out in the ministry.
He is a Vietnam Vet and has a lot of stories.
(We don’t go to war but that was before he studied the Bible).
He is retired and married but his wife died twice and the paramedics brought her back to life.
(“Oh Well,” he says).
Now she is overweight and can’t really walk anymore, so he is always alone or with this single younger brother who is a little socially awkward, but i’ll leave his stories for another day.
So this brother is from Central America and he’s always contrasting his childhood on a coffee farm with the time he spent in trenches in Vietnam.
Later in life he had other jobs, the last of which was a lawyer.
Today we were speaking with a genuine hippie, the kind you only find in Ojai, Seattle or Oregon.
Mr. Hippie owns a big property (big by California standards) and feeds wild animals from scraps he finds in the neighbors’ trash bins.
He bathes in the creek or ocean with his clothes on.
(Thank God).
I’m pretty sure he was stoned the whole time we were talking to him.
You see, people round here are not that nice.
But he invited us to take a seat and the brother i was with was telling him his war stories while a woman who rents a room on the property overheard and was visibly disgusted.
That is the problem with people round here.
No one wants to hear the truth.
They just want to paint butterflies on their walls and build water fountains out of rocks they find in their neighbor’s driveway.
Still, despite his probably being stoned, we had a good conversation about making conscientious use of the earth’s natural resources.
He pretty much thinks everything humans do is damaging and we are bound to destroy ourselves.
I tried to read him a couple verses from the Bible about the future but if you are a woman, perhaps you can relate to the following:
There is a point when a woman is having a conversation with a man when you know he is dismissing your opinions as not having any serious weight to them because he is seeing you as a sex object.
Confirmation of this suspicion came when he proceeded to ask me my age.
What the hell, you go talk to people about God and stuff and guy just wants to know if you’re young enough to bear his offspring.
Of course i only put two and two together because he held his gaze for too long.
I was uncomfortable but the brother i was with didn’t seem to notice and kept sharing war anecdotes.
I don’t mind that the brother strays off topic because i wonder what his mind would be like if he didn’t have anyone to share his traumas with.
He could be one of those homeless guys who heckle my friend and me at the park.
Vets have been through a lot and though i am opposed to war, they do not get the social help they need- that is more than obvious.

I am still adjusting to the local small town artsy culture there is here.
I still haven’t decided if i have any friends yet.
One sister whom i spend a lot of time with and yeah, she’s pretty cool, kind of keeps hinting that she wants to see my twitter account but i don’t think our relationship is there yet.
At least i’m not.
(My account is public but i dunno. It’s a big step).
There is a sister who i was getting along great with but last time i saw her she kind of got on my case about not meeting in the mornings and i am the kind of person that usually doesn’t reply… but the more i think about it, the more i wish i had said, “Uhm some of us have to work.” and possibly even be more insulting because she lives off a trust her husband has and he is a little bit disabled, and she doesn’t work because she has asthma.
I have asthma too but i work.
So it is just irritating when people pressure you to do more and you already feel like you’re doing the best you can and instead of asking how they can support you, they focus on what you can’t do.
Don’t get me wrong, i love everybody, at least in theory.
But when things like that happen i don’t have anyone that i can talk to about it because i am supposed to be this model minister who gives discreet answers to stoned hippies and doesn’t tell off the homeless guys who heckle her at the park, she doesn’t tell people to mind their own business when they ask about her personal schedule and she doesn’t talk about her bouts of depression because she is supposed to be always happy and smiling and encouraging and God i hate everyone, i swear everything i do is all out of love to God and no one else.

Kalistera, Kosmos!

How do you tell someone you hardly know that you’ve selected them to teach you Greek?
You see, i have been trying to teach myself Greek since last summer but i keep forgetting everything i learn.
My brain doesn’t store it in its “probably will be useful later on” portion.
It stores it in the portion labeled “mambo jumbo and ideas that make no sense.”
That portion gets wiped clean every 3-4 days, when it gets full and needs to make space for new ideas that make no sense.
Anyway, we met this Greek woman at her door when we were handing out invitations for our congregation.
It was my husband’s turn to speak and he went on and on about how much we’d love to visit Santorini but we don’t because planes fall and we don’t like that.
She was very attentive.
She must have learned English as an adult.
She lives in a beautiful cottage complex on a huge property that looks like an abandoned wild garden with patches of organized harvest here and there, all the way in the back.
Stones painted like cats peek between the high grass and wire arches coated in ivy beckon one toward brick paths, leading to doorways with splintered chipped paint.
Man-made dry creek beds swirl in front yards while a natural creek flows audibly in the back.
Now, i had honestly given up learning Greek a couple weeks ago, so i completely forgot to say anything to her in Greek then and there.
You know, like when you’ve been waiting for a special moment for ages, then you think it’ll never come, so when it finally does come, you miss it entirely.
Like when you’re waiting for your team to score and the game’s about to end so you just get up to beat traffic, then turn on the car radio only to find out your team scored.
Or when you’re going to medical school to learn how to save people and suddenly someone needs CPR but you forget that you’re going to medical school so you just let them die.
So i completely forgot i had been learning Greek for the past 6+ months and missed my one and only opportunity to ever practice Greek.
Hopefully when i go back and try again, she won’t think i’ve just now decided to learn as a result of meeting her.
That would be creepy, right?
Like if i tell someone i teach Spanish, and then they say, “what a coincidence! I just decided to start learning it just this second” that would be weird.
Right now i’m trying to remember why i decided to learn Greek, and i really don’t know why.
I like to read the original Greek Bible verses in church when i get bored.
(Not that church is boring.)
(I just get distracted, but in a good way.)
But maybe this is why i wanted to learn Greek all along; maybe i was supposed to learn it in case i ever met someone who spoke it!
So that i could ask them to teach it to me!
But then what?
Maybe i’m just a language geek.
A Greek-geek.
Try saying that five times fast.