my loneliness has no real name

my loneliness has no real name
unlike my comrades who shout out jens and rebeccas and saras

my loneliness has no real name
worthy of wrestling Kilimanjaro, let alone flying to the continent where it all began

my loneliness has no real name
that one can attach a face to as the lights go out and the air conditioner is reeling and i begin to touch myself but beg to find out "how quickly can i get this over with?"

my loneliness has no real name
only a dance, a waltz, that glides in as the 19th hour approaches
my bedroom and i measuring the height of our shadow as the sun sets in the LA sky,
weighing the heat of the afternoon and noting it's loss of density as night arrives
the ordained irony of it all

my loneliness has no real name
only an inkling of a feeling, a swoosh, swoosh, swoosh
of the amniotic fluid that once contained me soundly in my mother's belly

my loneliness is human
but has no real name.

Change is the only constant? or a writing from my younger years.

"Bullshit!" I scream as the fire alarm blares through my ears. Bullshit. All of it. In out around backwards forwards we never know. I never know. I never know I never know. Because its all these relationships. Relationships. What are they? They that feed me and breathe me and eat me. Constantly sucking my fucking soul. My soul. Which is what? What what what what what. What is it? Questions always questions. Through my mind, through my ears, through my mouth. And then its bullshit, again. And I take that drag and I suck it up because shit, I’m too fuck scared, too fucking guilty to take that risk.

So she leans against me, grabs my hand, rubs my hand, places my hand on her breast. And slowly her pelvis rises. The smell of cheap white wine mixed with marijuana ooze from her lips. And I draw closer as her back arches, anticipating what is to come. Slowly, her intentions beyond clear, she grabs my head, pulls my hair and our lips meet. That sexual tension from the day I laid my eyes on her rapidly changes to an overwhelming aura of energy. But all I keep thinking is “she wants it, she wants it so bad”. Two candles lit on the ashtray of a coffee table are blown out and her hand carefully leads mine into her bedroom. The expression she used earlier on in the night “Just remember, you can’t wear a condom over your heart” plays out over and over in my mind. I take off my shirt and our naked bodies create a warmth overpowering the cool night air. I no longer think, I just do. I do what my body, what her body, needs me to do. As she moans with pleasure, I quickly fall back to reality. This is my friend. This is my friend. This is my friend. But the words once again sink into the subliminal, just like last weekend. We find ourselves tangled in a web, where neither one of us knows who is the black widow.

The History Lesson Continues

You did end up spilling your guts to him (whether you hit "send" or another Bell did is no matter), and he didn't go running in the other direction. When we pay attention to history, we can progress.

Birthday Blog

They say, “age is just a number,” but I disagree. Numbers are not at all like age. Numbers are objective and unbiased. They do not carry the weight of emotion. Sometimes they are invisible, sometimes they are imaginary, sometimes they are represented by letters (another code of semantics, a topic for a different day), but whatever they are, age certainly is not.

Of course we all have feelings about numbers. We have favorite numbers or lucky numbers or numbers that feel right or appear repeatedly in our lives. Some of us have aversions to certain numbers. There are Godly numbers, numbers in which bad things happen or people die. Many of us catch a glimpse of the clock at precisely the same time on a regular basis. Whether these things are controlled by a greater force, or simply the great force of our own belief, is neither here nor there. The point is, I love even numbers. For some reason it seems to me that most people prefer odd numbers or prime numbers for their uniqueness. A number that cannot be split evenly is definitive. But I have always found myself drawn to numbers like 2 and 4. Small, round, perfectly symmetrical numbers that divide easily and multiply into more familiar and comfortable numbers.

Perhaps this comes from a childhood full of “Sorry!” tournaments in which drawing a “2” meant you got to draw again and, when planned correctly, drawing a “4” meant you got to back straight into your safety zone, skipping the course of the entire board. The odd numbers were not nearly as exciting. Number 11 (a prime) was an anticlimactic card you always drew when what you really wanted was a Sorry! It didn’t actually allow you to wipe out your opponent, but simply trade places with him. Drawing a 7 was only worthwhile if you had two pawns perfectly distanced from both your “home” and each other, and otherwise, was a waste of a special card. My favorite square on the board was exactly 8 squares away from “home,” right on the corner in a very aesthetically pleasing position. In my strange little right-centric, 7-year-old brain, even numbers were simply the most pleasing and palatable.

The other rather strange thing about me was that at a young age I decided it was too difficult to choose favorites and therefore I hadn’t any. When you’re five all anyone wants to know is your favorite color or your favorite food. As you get older new friends are interested in what your favorite music is or your favorite movie. Intellectuals want you to choose a favorite book and every time I tell people I’m an actor they want to know who my favorite actor or actress is. I always prescribed to the philosophy that different things are good for different situations. My favorite color to wear is not my favorite color to paint my walls. My favorite music to dance to is not my favorite music to fall asleep to and how on earth can I pick a favorite food when so much of it tastes so good?

As my friends started to turn 24 around the end of last year and into this year, I thought, “well 24 is not so different from 23.” My two closest friends are both 9 months older than I am, yet they at 24 and myself at 23 were going through similar experiences in life, dealing with the same age-appropriate issues. I kept thinking as my own 24th birthday approached that there was so little difference between the two ages, and that, at 24, I would still be very young. When my birthday arrived, as birthdays are wont to do, 24 felt like nothing at all. Yesterday and today and tomorrow are all the same, until they are far away and become the distant past. Then I got a birthday text message from a friend that read, “happy birthday, do you feel nice and even now?” And at that moment I remembered: 24 is my favorite number! Of all the many things of which I could choose a favorite, the only favorite I ever settled on was a number. Twenty four is a wonderfully round, comfortable number. It is greatly divisible, it is the number of hours in a day, double the number of months in a year, and it is the marriage of my two favorite cards in “Sorry!” My whole life, 24 is the only favorite I could ever settle on and now it also represents my age! But I had never until this point associated my age with my feelings about this number. My age was a very different thing, it did not represent roundness or balance, in fact, quite the opposite. Twenty-four is a time of career uncertainty, financial instability and romantic frustration.

It was only after my friend’s wonderfully (if unknowingly) insightful text that I gained a little perspective. If age is just a number, and a favorite number at that, then this year may not be so bad after all. And if I ever start feeling uneasy about my age, I’ll just refer to it as x.

Fare Thee Well Blues

What happens when technology gets ahead of you? When you think you are using it for your advantage but you realize that, in all senses, it is truly a double-edged sword?

I’m afraid I have an addiction. To Facebook. To being connected all the time. My only problem is that everyone else has this addiction too.

What if we were faced with a challenge that not so long ago, was simply the way we lived? What if Facebook did not exist? I don’t mean specifically this one website. I’m using Facebook as an all encompassing term for Facebook, MySpace (does anyone other than unsigned rock bands even use MySpace anymore?), Twitter, and whatever rumored replacement for all of these is in the works.

What if we were forced to pick up the phone every once in a while? What if we were forced to convey our inflection by flexing our vocal chords instead of our pinky fingers to hit “Ctrl, I” or “Caps Lock?”

Even scarier a thought, what if my phone only made phone calls? Why do we even call it a phone anymore? It’s really so much more. Well, Apple, for one, has added iPhone as a separate category when labeling the kind of line your contact is calling from (e.g. office, home, mobile). Apparently an iPhone should not just be labeled simply as a mobile phone. There is merit in this assumption because it is not just a phone, after all it can be used for so much more than just phone calls.

Most times I love it. But lately, it seems to be getting the better of me. It’s as if I have forgotten how to approach my problems directly.

We can no longer make uneducated guesses about those around us, because we have the ability to educate ourselves about them without them even knowing! Nothing is up front any more. Everything is a complex game of strategy and timing.

We have added too many parts to the equation and I only ever made it to pre-calculus in high school, so I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. It’s time to take one of those away. (At least temporarily). Help me save me from myself. And if you find you’re one of those who actually need me (or should decide to want me), give me call.
Because I’m leaving.

I'll sleep when I'm dead.

"I'll sleep when I'm dead" came to mind at 3:30 am as I tried to subside my rage at what I imagined to be a harmless immigrant collecting glass and plastic from the recyclables and hauling them noisily to the neighboring building to reduce, reuse, repeat in their blue bin. When what I imagined to be his black durable garbage bag began to fill too close to the brim, he proceeded to drag the clanging trash back to his car (in the alley of my building), start the engine, let it lull, and then drive away. I don't mean to sound devoid of emotion for a fellow human being having to collect trash before sunrise...everyone knows once the sun rises it's anyone's game...capitalism for god's sake...but for my sake, this may have been the first night I would have had two uninterrupted REM cycles in the past three weeks.

The quote "I'll sleep when I'm dead" was conceived by Warren Zevon, a rock and roll musician, whose prime came in the 70's and 80's and who, unlike me, had more of a problem with booze and FOMO (fear of missing out) than loud, flamboyant gays, construction workers, car alarms, and obnoxious neighbors. For him, there was "so much to do... on the farm"; for me, there is too much noise on the farm. I didn't discover the origins of this famously repeated phrase until this morning when I tried to make sense of the last three weeks.

Until yesterday, I had crows outside my window beginning my morning wake up at 6:30. For weeks I had been subjected to their "Koww, koww, koww, koww" (if you ever meet me in person, I would be more than happy to mimic the sound as I have it down pat). Morning, after endless morning, I believed the groundhog had seen its shadow and Bill Murray was lying in bed with me. "I got you babe" would play in the form of crow music and I unfortunately did not have an alarm clock to smash... or love interest to effortlessly charm with my knowledge of the previous day. I WAS ANGRY. FURIOUS even. But maddening as these ominous birds were, I knew there was a reason for their incessant nagging. Sunday morning I woke up (at 6:30 am) from a rather pleasant dream where my current crush has left her significant other and finally found her way to my arms. Of course the crows were chirping and as I lay there, enthralled by my night's reverie, I accepted those crows and all their shortcomings, because "if you can’t beat them, join them" and I knew it was time. I told my roomie about this Sunday morning catharsis and she replied with Discovery Channel-esque information that fascinated me in that moment and stunned me the next day- crows feed off energy. And sure enough, my energy toward them had been negative. They have an uncanny ability to recognize human faces and transmit information about "bad" humans by squawking.

Come Monday morning I woke up on my own accord, at 6:45, a natural habit at this point, to discover a caw-free air. I rested there, eyes open, eyes close, listening for my friends and their morning musings. However, by 7:10 I couldn't help but smile and pray that that smile wouldn't jinx the whole situation. Fingers crossed, it hasn't thus far.

My acceptance of what was, lead to the disappearance of what had been. Simple philosophy, hard to put to practice, but worth it if you do...  And if all else fails, i.e. this morning's trash-capade, get a prescription for Ambien CR and say "fuck you" Edgar Allan Poe and your "Nevermore".

 

 

Whose Vows Are These, Anyway?

For some reason, by the age of five, girls are already planning their weddings. The idea of the event at that age usually involves nothing more than a fluffy white dress and the presence of some faceless groom. By the age of twelve we are beginning to put a face on that groom and it is usually that of our newest, most exciting crush. By fifteen we’re probably discussing with friends our time frame for marriage and childbearing. For me, it was married by 24, first child by 26. Seeing as how my 24th birthday is a mere two months away and one of the farthest things from my mind is a committed relationship, much less marriage, I’m going to go ahead and admit that my predictions were a little inaccurate.

My predicted time frame is becoming less common as women continue to gain power positions in their chosen professions, but it still exists for many young women, or as I continue to refer to myself and those my age, girls. It didn’t occur to me however, how off I really was until I turned 22 and realized that the best part about my life was how single I was. I say it like that because there are certainly degrees of being single and I was most definitely the most single a girl could be. Doing what I wanted, when I wanted, with whom I wanted and there was no one at the other end of a text message wondering about any of those W’s. I knew I was happy to be single, but it was a temporary situation and when the right guy came along surely things would change.

It wasn’t until my next birthday that I began to have the thought that blew my mind. It blew my mind more than any thought I had had before because it wasn’t so much a realization of the world around me, as it was a realization of myself and the possible outcomes of my own life. It’s like reading a choose your own adventure book and thinking you chose exactly the right path to end up with all the gold at the end only to find as you turn the last page that you made a fatal mistake on page 9 that inevitably landed you in the tar pit. I realized that while it was possible that marriage would not occur until later in my life, it was also just as possible that marriage not occur at all. What if I never marry?

Perhaps this thought had never crossed my mind because society likes to lead us into monogamous lifelong partnership, but most likely it was due to the fact that I was the product of a highly successful marriage which resulted in a happy, functional family. A rare thing these days, admittedly, but so strong in my life that I had never imagined my own family would turn out any other way. Everyone talks about the times in their lives when they realized that they were adults and their parents were simply other adults coexisting in the adult world. For me, this was it. Yes, it was true that my parents had chosen the path of a wonderfully healthy nuclear family with a mom and a dad and two kids. But they were just people, like me. Not necessarily predictions of how my own life would turn out. And it was possible that I, as an adult, would choose my own path different from my parents’ choice.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t bitter. This was not a decision that I made at 23, choosing to remain single. But the mere thought that it was a possibility turned my world upside down. All of a sudden it was as if the pressure was off. I was going to be a bridesmaid in my cousin’s wedding in a few short months (a cousin who had shared my marital musings as a child), a position I had been promised some time in high school when we were planning out the next ten years of our love lives. She managed to stick to her plan. I realized my need for revisions. There was something about that realization that, for the first time, was miraculously okay.

Now here I am a year later, about to turn the age at which I’m supposed to wed (according to my sophomoric self), nowhere near where I thought I’d be. But after a year of telling myself that it’s possible I won’t wed at all, the pressure’s off. And that lack of pressure seems to have led me to have one of the most enjoyable first dates I’ve ever had.


So where’s that fluffy white dress?