Almost Depressed, And In Love

From that title, you might think that this would be about a girl's unrequited love, causing some heartache and dramatic sighs that descend upon us all in the shorter months of the year, sort of like the flu, when the cold wind and blah days following the cacophony of practically overlapping holidays inevitably bringing forth two reliable and depressing marks of January: the start of another year of uncertainty and naive/self-denial-ladden "goals" that last for a few months, if you're lucky, and the influx of terrible movies that Hollywood couldn't find a place for in either the summer blockbuster bloc or the Oscar-bait "serious" films that get stacked in with the already crammed months of November and December. This is not about unrequited love, at least in the sense that most young adult novels would have us believe. But there are some heartache and dramatic sighs, if you're into that kind of melancholy thing, as I am. 

There's something to be said for all the resolutions that people have in the first few weeks of the beginning of every year, and that something is that I love it. Not in the way that it signifies people's hope and wishes of a better self and better life, and how that sense of renewal and rejuvenation and redoing is uplifting for a person's drifting spirit, but in that I am a super Nosey Parker and any opportunity for me to find out more tidbits of other people's secrets and lives is an opportunity that you'll surely find me casually asking questions and then hastily tucking away new information in my mind's filing cabinets bursting full of "Other People's Lives." 

It's a sign of self-awareness and integrity, I think, that the older I get, the more aware of the fact that I am quite a selfish and self-absorbed person. As an adolescent and a teenager, I spent so many hours thinking and daydreaming about other people, concerned for their feelings and welfare, feeling helplessly overwhelmed with the sense of being a single tiny wisp in a vast universe of souls and experiences and thoughts. Now, those thoughts still linger in the recesses of my undercurrent, but mostly, I am consumed with thoughts of ME. What is my purpose, why am I here, why can't I be like everyone else, how am I supposed to live, why isn't there a god damn manual to this thing. It feels like my life has an unrequited love for me. I don't really understand it, and I like it, too, enough, most of the time, but the feelings just aren't quite mutual. 

I am blessed and lucky in many ways that I recognize easily - and also in many ways that takes me longer to understand or acknowledge - and on paper, I totally get it. My life isn't perfect or exceptional or even that interesting, in a overall sense, but it's got it's good stuff. Family, friends, dog, boyfriend: all of whom I love deeply with every single bone and sinew in my body. But these joys are a metaphor of  beautiful and thick Persian rugs nailed hopefully to fragile doorway to muffle the furious and desperate storm just outside: used confusingly and inappropriately and inadequately. Take a jar of thick black paint, slide your hands in one at a time to cover them with the tar-like consistency, and manically smear and wipe it all off on a large piece of canvas, and you'd have the beginnings of an idea of my insides. 

It's the nosiness that keeps that messiness at bay. Hearing stories of other people, reading obsessively (most recently: a lot of noir-ish books for children 9-14, The Bell Jar, and The Virgin Suicides), watching a television show from beginning to end (sometimes twice in a row), and trying to revel in other people's weirdness and normalcy - that's how I stay afloat in my loneliness. It's a way of wrapping myself up in a crowd of consciousness, without having to actually be in a crowd, which usually just depresses me more. 

Yet, I'm not actually depressed. Yet. It's come to me before and I would recognize it's crushing presence if it had come back. You know what else I have? I have Carter, my real-life bodyguard against the tide of self-pity and self-loathing and self-doubt. Dogs are true and happy and so perfect in their trust and love, how can you waste time drowning in sorrows when those pure and loving eyes gaze at you, and that overly-warm and overly-large 107lb body forces itself against you, and that pungent odor of canine gas wafts toward your nose to bring you back to the shores of the present. I have Albert, my real-life life-partner who has undergone the abnormally painful growing pains of a relationship with me for the last 8 years, and who gets me and supports me and loves me, even when he thinks I'm a little weird. I have parents and a brother, who don't really get me, but try, and that counts for something. I have friends who don't always get me, but always accept me, and that counts for a lot, too. 

So I'm not exactly as in love with my life as it is with me, but I am in love with the souls and spirits and hearts around me, and those are a good number anchors to keep any ship from drifting too far, even in the rocky and tossing waters of epically biblical storms and floods. I need to get better at metaphors. And at writing cohesively, instead of all over the place, like this was. 

Secret Desires

My ultimate wish in life is to be a writer, staying at home with my kids and dogs, you know, kind of like a working mom. I do like binders. ...

What other people find fun: going out (what does that even mean, anymore?), trying new restaurants (being "foodies"), drinking, staying out late, etc., I find slightly tedious. All that effort! Picking an outfit, getting cleaned up, making arrangements for my big puppy, driving, standing around, making small talk, ugghhhh just thinking about it is making me stressed out and tired. I just can't do it.

A fun time for me includes: eating junk food or breakfast food, reading a book, taking an afternoon nap, going to a museum alone, watching a movie I actually wanted to see (either alone or with people), doing crafts, going shopping with my mom, talking with my dad about our dogs, talking with my boyfriend all the way in Afghanistan. FUN! To me, those are exciting and entertaining things to do. And if people want me to call me boring or lame, I'm okay with that.

Man, I'm really out of practice with this whole blogging and writing thing, huh? Baby steps. There's that quote that gets tossed around on Pinterest and Reddit all the time by Ira Glass from This American Life, "...something something something, keep writing."Clearly, I need to take the man's advice to heart.

Wallflower Syndrome

Today, I re-read "Perks of Being a Wallflower," 8 years after I first picked it up on my boyfriend's bookshelf while waiting for him to mow the lawn. And while I remember loving it and being overcome with it's sadness and wanting to just lie there upside-down on his bed with the summer sun warming me with the muffled roaring and grinding of the lawn mower outside - tonight, when Charlie signed off for the last time, I curled on into a ball on the floor of my apartment and just cried.

Stories like that one, whether in a book or a movie or a blog, make me remember the pain of first love and the confusion of growing up the naive oldest child of strict immigrant parents and the floating emptiness of being lonely and bored and I relate. The melancholy is beautiful; what cynics or people who don't want to remember those strange and uncomfortably large feelings for a single moment call disdainfully, "emo." I guess I've always been a pretty sensitive (some might say over-sensitive) person. Good stories just bring me to these depths, and then it takes time for me to climb back out. And as long as I'm not also concurrently suffering from my own darkness, I like it. It feels right and it feels real.

I really wanted to write more, but it seems like this small effort has taken out more from me than I anticipated. If you've read a good book or seen a good movie or heard a good story lately, I'd like to hear about it. For now, the evening will end with some My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and some forced cuddling with my best friend, Carter.

I'm Not Pretty

Recently, I realized that I've reached an important turning point in my life. The point where, though I still love shopping for clothes (because, hi, have we met?), I'd rather spend time stalking furniture and reading architecture and interior design blogs/magazines. Then, when I actually leave my apartment and actually see people, I realize that girls in Texas are cute...and that is not me.

To elaborate: the girls here are adorable. They wear cute and colorful clothes, they're sweet and sexy, their hair is done, their nails is did, and they might even be wearing a swipe of pink lipstick or winged eyeliner. This is just out at the supermarket. And, to reiterate, that is not me.

Sometimes, when I'm surrounded by all the cute and all the pretty, it makes me really self-conscious and suddenly very aware of myself. I don't like to tie up my hair, much less curl or straighten or style it. I rarely have painted fingernails, and though I always have my toes some interesting color (currently Chanel Peridot - aka sometimes gold, sometimes green), I let them get chipped and don't really think about redoing them. I wear all my flare on my hands and wrists, arm partying and arm swagging or however it's called now - but I never wear big dangly earrings, and I try to avoid chunky necklaces. And most importantly, I wear a wide variety of colors, ranging from neutrals and jeans to black and gray. Colorful, yes?

So. Even though I generally know who I am and what I'm comfortable with, I still get really uncomfortable in my own skin when I'm around all the pretty girls, like I'm a teenager again, in the worst way. (Although, let's be real for a second, almost all parts of being a teenager are the worst.) Coming back to my apartment, I feel the need to immediately get online and buy some new clothes so that I don't have to feel that way again, later. The strangest mix of panic of NEED TO BUY NOW + dread of OMG NO MONIES + catharsis of fastidiously planning mental outfits against the glare of my laptop takes over me, and for a while, I become a shopping/fashion robot-zombie.

After an hour or two of incessant scrolling, clicking, adding to cart, and, oh yeah I forgot this other website!, repeat ad nauseum, the panic settles down, and I realize that I don't want to wear the bright and colorful and trendy and pretty clothes that I see. I want a few nice bags, a couple of pairs of nice shoes, some nice key pieces of jewelry, comfortable and nonfussy undergarments, and, above all, a really nice place to live.

When I'm able to calm down from my initial internal freak-out of self-doubt, it always makes me want to read more, write more, get back into yoga, and love on my dog. The last of which is the only truly easy thing to do.

The Worst Kind of Blog - Wordy, With Few Pictures

I've given up on trying to be consistent and making my blog look pretty with pictures. Let's face it - I'm way too lazy. THIS IS JUST WHO I AM. ACCEPT ME.

Yesterday, I woke up at 7 to make the drive back to Dallas to see my family. No real reason, except my mom's leaving for Taiwan in a little over a week on her birthday, and I can't come next weekend for that or for Father's Day. So, the intention was to bring Carter and leave him here, so that while my mom is gone, there's an extra buffer between my dad and brother, who has graduated and moved home. But now, my parents keep telling me to just take Carter with me to Houston today, since they feel better that he's there "protecting" me. Poor Carter - if he understood what we were saying, he'd think that no one wanted him, when in reality, it's exactly the opposite: EVERYONE wants him .

In other news, I'm pretty excited and pleased with myself. My mom has caught up with me in her love and admiration for Balenciaga bags, and has been eyeing the 2012 Coquelicot red for a few months now. She'd never spend that kind of money on herself, though, so for her birthday, I've convinced my brother and dad to contribute some cash monies and go in with me on getting one for her! I think the last designer bag she bought was a Burberry, a few years back, and on sale. She's going to love it - hopefully, my brother has the sense to take a video of her opening the gift so that I can see her reaction next week.

It's been so long since I've treated a blog like a journal that it's making me tired.