Addict

"She wasn't drunk, Meredith decided. She just had the nature of an addict, and the whole calming, peaceful, restorative atmosphere of the salon had permeated her skin and made her high." -Silver Girl, by Elin Hilderbrand

"This author," I informed my husband in my most decisive of tones, "does not actually know what it is to be an alcoholic." 

"Oh?" he inquired. "What makes you say that?" 

"Mmh." I considered the passage that brought about my statement. "She doesn't describe drunkenness well, and she doesn't quite get...the need of it. This character isn't an alcoholic. She just gets drunk a lot." 

This may seem a ridiculously nuanced distinction to some. Others will understand precisely what I'm talking about. 

As I sit here, the rain outside is playing a lovely percussion against the rooftops, accompanying itself with tinny droplet-clanks upon the gutters. There aren't may passing cars at a quarter to three in the morning, but whenever one goes past it gives the temporary illusion of waves hitting the shore of an ocean somewhere in the distance. Pure heaven is the smell of rain against sidewalk; it drifts in through the open window on a damp breeze that is cool and fresh against my legs. The thunderstorm has already passed, and in its wake the rain has settled into a soft, steady, drenching downfall. All is peace after the rumbling violence of a storm.

I would kill for a drink. What a strange saying, that. "I would kill for thisandsuchathing." It's clearly meant to convey a certain level of desperation, a willingness to temporarily discard one's deepest moral structures in order to fulfill a momentary whim. It is a measure of extremity, one that we don't pause to analyze too heavily since the phrase has entered our casual, day-to-day vernacular. And yet, what an eerie thing to claim, that one would kill for any reason at all. The potential is always there, and yet we say it so easily, so thoughtlessly. 

Which is kind of beautiful, if you want to perceive it that way. Death is ever-present, violence is constantly in-potentia, and so we take the concept and make it safe, take its teeth out and declaw it and make it casual, commonplace, even funny. I would kill for a drink.

Of course, it becomes much less funny if it turns out to be true, if the person saying it really would kill for a sandwich or a cigarette or a bathroom break or a cup of coffee. In this particular case, I don't think the sudden solidifying of a hypothetical situation in which I am called upon to end the life of a given individual in order to earn myself a glass of reasonably good wine would end in my bringing about the actual death of said individual. It's far more likely that I will be calling the police to be letting them know that some madman has broken into my apartment and is offering me drinks in exchange for the assassination of my husband.  

The police tend to frown on those sorts of shenanigans.

But I will be the first to admit that I would be eyeballing that glass like it was rainfall in the desert. The very moment said madman is carted away, before the paperwork that inevitably follows a random incursion of this nature is brought back by the kind Officer Biggensworth (who is very confused by the whole situation, and suspects there to be some kind of sick sex thing going on), that glass of wine will be gone. It will likely be gone the very instant it is set down. Because even while having my husband's life threatened, even while having MY life threatened, at least a portion of my attention will always be centered upon the location of the glass and its contents. Somewhere underneath the terror and the fury and the helplessness, there will be a part of me that is annoyed not because of the insanity of the situation, but because in the confusion someone spilled a few drops. A small part, yes, but a part nonetheless, will mourn the waste.

Unlike Elin Hilderbrand, you see, I can tell you a thing or two about the nature of the addict.

An addictive personality is defined by Wikipedia as,

 "a particular set of personality traits that make an individual predisposed to addictions. People who are substance dependent are characterized by a physical or psychological dependency that negatively impacts the quality of life of the person. They are frequently connected with substance abuse, but people with addictive personalities are also highly at risk of becoming addicted to gambling, food, pornography, exercise, work, and even relationships (codependency). People engaged in addictive behavior tend to plan their lives around it."


Addictive personality disorder is not listed in the DSM-IV, a surprising thing in this day and age of clinical diagnoses and subsequent druggings-unto-death of anything from an inability to pay attention to an unwillingness to follow directions to the tendency to feel sad every once in awhile for no particularly good reason. If you want my admittedly cynical opinion on the matter, this is likely because you can't give an addict expensive drugs to take away his or her tendency to get addicted to things. Because they'll get addicted to them. There is no way for pharmaceutical companies to make money off of them; they are, therefore, disregarded by the part of the psychological community in charge of what does and what does not go into the DSM-IV.


(Disclaimer for those with a tendency to write nasty emails if I do not back up with fact every single point I make that might be insulting to anyone, anywhere: I may be incorrect in this assessment. My apologies to the psychological community in general if this turns out to be the case. There's an off chance I will be researching this further; I promise if I turn out to be horribly off-base about this, I will come back and admit it.)


(Counter-disclaimer: fuck you, for making me feel the need to have to disclaimer something that might insult the psychological community. In fact, fuck the psychological community. For every psychiatrist that does good in the world, there's twenty assholes who are in it for the money and couldn't care less about this overly-medicated society in which three-year-olds  are given drugs that turn them into fucking ZOMBIES because their parents can't handle actually having to parent a fucking toddler.)


(Counter-counter-disclaimer: this is not to say that all drugs are bad and the entire psychological community sucks. I understand that there is a genuine need to medicate disorders that genuinely exist.)


(Counter-counter-counter-disclaimer: No, seriously, FUCK YOU for making me have to defend myself in this manner. I'm done disclaimering.)

<cough> 


What the DSM-IV does do is set up the criteria by which dependence and abuse can be defined. And that is the limit on the amount of research I'm willing to do at this point in time, since it appears to be having an odd effect on my disclaimer policy. 


What is addiction? It is a grasping, sucking, black hole in the precise center of your chest. It howls when you're bored, screeches when you're lonely, and keeps up a chattering thrum all the rest of the livelong day. It pulsates.  It clutches and gibbers at your heart, circles and wheels and mutters justifications in your head, and condenses the world down to two things and two things only:


what it is you want, outlined in a clear shining white,


and everything else, dim and grey and unimportant. 


I have, in the course of my life, been addicted to three things: smoking, drinking and a variety of social relationships. Smoking, I appear to have given up entirely one day when I suddenly realized I hated the taste. This is significant because I had tried to give it up when my husband found out about it, and didn't. I had tried to give it up when I promised various friends I would, and didn't. Why I finally did give it up is actually something of a mystery; one day I loved it, loved the smell, loved the taste, and the next I didn't. 


Drinking is not the problem it used to be, but then, I'm happier than I used to be. I haven't been actively drunk since the episode that forced into the light the absolute depth of the problem. I do still have a drink from time to time, more than one drink from time to time. That's not the problem, I feel. The problem is that I always want a drink, and upon having one, I always want another, then another and another and another. The nature of addiction, the vacuum of the soul.


Social dependency isn't a problem anymore. It went the way of smoking; I woke up one day and had lost my taste for people. Well. That's not strictly accurate. I still like them. I just don't need them to provide what they can't provide me with anyway, and thus no longer seem to expect it. People aren't as steady a thing to depend upon. Fickle thing, the human brain, as is proven by the abrupt switch flipped in my own that had provided me with a sweet and singular measure of sudden apathy that lasts to this day. And it's not like you can buy friends at the local 7-11, so when you run out of them, that's it. You're out. 


And much like cigarettes, booze or psychological drugs, most people aren't worth the side effects.


I remain an addict, though. That's a thing bleated about by every AA and NA member in the history of the organizations, and while I certainly have issues with some of the philosophies put forth by said organizations, that one is right spot-on one-hundred-percent correct. Once an addict, always an addict. You never get to escape it. Sometimes the thing in your chest is a roaring beast in the dark, other times it is a mosquito, easily swatted aside. But it never goes away. It is something you have to keep a constant eye out for, lest it creep into the back of your skull and whisper oh, what's the harm, it's only one. And never mind that it is never, not ever, only one. 


Why do I mention this, mention any of this? It's not a comfortable thing to talk about, after all. I see you all shifting from foot to foot and looking away awkwardly, don't think for a second I don't know it. Why have I done this, admitted to this terrible crack of weakness at the very heart of me? 


Honestly?


Because fucking Elin Hilderbrand doesn't know addiction from Adam, and her portrayal of it is weak and pathetic and watered-down, addiction for the beach-reading set, and that has made me very angry. A spa?! Really? An addictive personality is something to be looked down upon because upon being introduced to a spa, the character relaxes into a joyous puddle of goo? We're going to say THAT'S the danger of an addictive personality at work? REALLY?! Fuck you, Elin Hilderbrand, who is not an alcoholic and is not an addict and knows nothing of what being an addict is really like and who shouldn't have even tried to write that mental state OR the mental state of the people exposed to it without doing a modicum of research into the premise itself first. 


(Disclaimer: this is not to say that Elin Hilderbrand didn't do any research into it. Maybe she did. I don't know, maybe she actually has a relative with an addiction problem or something. If you are Elin Hilderbrand, I'm sorry for portraying you as a bad writer. You're not terrible! You're just like every other author of womenly beach-reads everywhere.)


(Disclaimer In Addendum: this is not to insult the beach-readers of the world. You read what you read, I don't care about that!)


(Counter-Disclaimer: No, fuck you, Elin Hilderbrand, this book is stupid and cookie-cutter and exactly like every other mediocre brainless general-fiction-book-for-women ever. It has nothing in it to set it apart and your writing is mediocre at best.)


(Disclaimer Realization: Four things I've been addicted to in my life. Cigarettes, alcohol, people and disclaimers.)

Sometimes it feels as though I stand on the edge of the cliff called Epiphany, toes tangled in the weeds, watching the world spin on without me and waiting for the precise moment at which I can leap off.

It is extremely disconcerting to me how strange caring is, and how close it gets to rage if you compare the physical effects of the feelings. Tightness of chest, banging of heart, whirling of brain, and underneath it all the need to do something, do something, do something...


Only I don't know what.

You rabbling scrounges of humanity! You stupid noisy idiot wonderful gorgeous and terrible species! You make me want to, want to, I don't even know! There is so much world out there, and look what you, what we, are doing with it!

I can't even say. I don't have the words.

I do not want to raise my children-in-potentia in what you are building. I don't know how to protect them. I don't know how to teach them to protect themselves. How can you fight an entire world? How can you give them the tools to figure it out on their own? How can you tell them it will all be okay when it WON'T, how can you teach them to be honest and good and believe in themselves when that's not the best way to survive?

In other news, I don't think I'll be watching the news again anytime soon.

So the substitute history professor asks us, what do you think about people? Do you think they're essentially good and a few fall through the cracks, or essentially bad with a few good exceptions?

It had been one of those conversations where nobody raises their hands, a round-table don't-overthink-it clattering mess of voices and opinions, so I didn't think about my answer; it was immediate, instinctive.

"Rotten," I said, and realized as the girl next to me turned to stare that I meant it. And so I considered. "I think we're terrible," I continued, and now I was slower in my verbalization, "and we overcome our base nature anytime we do anything good."

"God, you're a cynic," someone said, and I thought about that. "I don't think so," I replied after a minute.

And I don't. See, I see people do good things, beautiful things, all the time. I didn't realize one of the reasons it makes me so damn happy is because it's proof that people can overcome that basic, steaming, smelling-of-shit lizard-brained thing that crouches at the heart of the human soul. We are born selfish, we live selfishly, it is at the spine of species survival that we be selfish. We are violent and we are cruel and we are most of us out to screw the other guy just as hard as we can, and we are these things because our lizard-brain tells us that we must succeed, we must overcome, we must take from the other guy what we want for ourselves or we will die.

And this would be a cynical view, were it not for the fact that I believe that we are not only capable of overcoming that basic instinct, but willing to beat it back into the dust every single day. We want to be better than that, we strive to be better than that. Is it cynical to say that Mother Theresa was that much better a person for overcoming the species-specific, genetically-programmed need to cause harm, to not give a good goddamn about other people?

The capability to do good is the single most beautiful thing about the human race, because in order to do good, we first have to realize, against our own nature, that we want to. And we succeed at it. Every damn day.

Cynical? I don't think so.

Just a terrible person trying to do the best she can to be better than herself.

Just like you.

Siren

New day. The heat is stifling, the sort of heat that makes the air go heavy and wrap around you like a blanket, makes the asphalt shimmer and empties the streets. It's early yet for cicadas, and the air is so late-summer that the absence of their familiar rattle is an active, noticeable thing. People scurry into the sun like pillbugs from under a brick, eager to escape the relentless light into the cool dim of their air-conditioned apartments or cars or jobs. For my part, I too am holed up buglike, safe and sound and ever-so-delicately stagnating away in my apartment.

Across the river, the city crouches, wrapped in its haze of car exhaust made visible by the unmoving air. I am in an adventuring mood, and it seems from time to time I look up to hear its siren call wafting on a nonexistent breeze. Willingly waste your time with me, the filthy city sings, I have people, I have places, I have stories, and it is with a regretful heart I turn back to my essay, my work, my responsibilities.

"Responsibilities" is a winding, dull, annoying whine of a word. But we do what we have to.

Soon, I mutter back to the city and its millions of moments and lives that never wait to be discovered, that go missed and missing while I tackety-type away at schoolwork most meaningless.

Soon.

Duckbrain

There are, in existence, ducks which believe themselves to be red rubber balls, because a red rubber ball happens to be the first thing they encountered. They follow the red rubber ball about, to and fro and fro and to, and never once think themselves ducks for the entirety of their lives.

I mention this because I keep on meeting humans with the minds of ducks, willing to follow about the strongest idea in the room simply because it is the loudest. I suspect I used to be an individual whose duck-brain believed itself a red rubber ball, and perhaps this is why it bothers  me as much as it does. It seems that those sorts eventually come to a situation in which the red rubber ball is taken away from them, at which point they go one of two ways; either they shut themselves up with the single idea, defend it voraciously, grow angry at the blue balls or the green balls or, heaven forfend, other ducks that come along, or they take a moment to think, and become something other, and better, than what they were.

I am unsure which of these two paths I have taken. I seem to have built a ballpit, full of many different colors of ball, and perhaps I have thrown the philosophical rubber duck in as well...

...yes, that's right, go ahead and play with that thought for a moment...

...but have I evolved beyond the duckbrained thing that parrots (urngh, mixed imagery)  ideas of others and into a creature capable of thinking for myself? It is a disconcerting thing to have to wonder about.

Waste of Time

One of the mental themes that's been dogging my footsteps this semester, partially due to the limits on my personal time and partially due to the slow-growing epiphany that has been the last five months, is the concept of the mental math that affects human relationships. Specifically, and to put not too fine a point on the matter, how much individual people are worth in terms of wasted minutes.

To explain:

Start with the fact that, like it or not, life is short and time, limited. I will never get to see all the things I want to see, do all the things I want to do, pursue every interest that captures my fleeting attention, or read all the books I want to before my eventual death will overtake me and forcibly shorten my ambitions. Neither will you. Neither will anyone.

Next, take into account that every moment spent talking to another human being is, for the most part, a moment not spent doing one of those aformentioned things. In other words, all human interactions on a social scale are, effectively, a waste of incredibly valuable time.

So why do we do it? Because humans are by their very nature social beings. We like to have other people around, some more than others, to varying degrees. Most of us can't help it. Most of us want to. For us, those wasted moments are wasted because they have some form of value.

How much value is something decided on an individual basis through a process of mental algebra that is methodically and subconsciously applied to every new person we encounter. The coefficients change depending on their actions or your preferences or circumstance or anything, really...anything can be plugged in, but the equation is always the same; is this person worth the waste of my time?

Insert Susie, circa 1981, who discovered from the time she could mentally comprehend social behavior that she a) did not understand it, b) was no good at it, and c) desperately wanted to and wanted to be. I am, I was, a champion time-waster when it comes to people. I tend, tended, to prioritize them above all else. How I came to recognize this as an unhealthy pattern is a long and overwhelmingly dull story of a lifetime, so I won't bore you (or, for that matter, myself) with the writing of it. Suffice to say that the conclusion was eventually reached that yes, people are lovely, but if one wishes to get anything at all done in life, standards are useful things to apply.  It is a process I am still trying to come fully to terms with; one of the direct results of said process is that I am more  aware than might ordinarily be expected of the algebraic equation that goes into my particular brand of people-selection.

Less patient, too. After all, I can feel the minutes ticking away, one after the other after the other; those of you familiar with my writing will note a certain pattern emerging regarding the appearance and significance of clocks. This is not an accident.

In other words, ladies and gentlemen, if you are a part of my life in any degree, if I stay awake when I don't particularly want to in order to spend time talking to you or seek out your company for a pretense of a reason or call you up out of the blue every once in awhile or hell, pop up on your screen for three and a half seconds of chatting,
I.
AM.
DOING.
IT.
BECAUSE.
I.
LIKE.
YOU.
Are we clear? Do I need to say it again? Here, let me say it again:

I THINK YOU ARE, AT LEAST TO SOME EXTENT, THE CAT'S PAJAMAS. THE BEE'S KNEES. OTHER RIDICULOUS STATEMENTS THAT SOMEHOW MEAN YOU ARE NEATO, NIFTY AND OTHERWISE AWESOME.

I willingly waste my time with you because there is something about you that has twitched the result of the social equation of your worth into the positive. And guess what?

If you are reading this right now, that factor is not a question of services provided, money leant, rides given or anything else except something inherent to your inner self that I find to be personally appealing. I am not using you or humoring you, you are not a hanger-on or a schoolgirl crush or a loser or a poser or someone I keep around for the mockery value or to convince myself of my own worth. I know my worth. I don't need you around to prove it. I'm quite arrogant on this point. I have also rendered myself cold-blooded in regards to the dispensation of my very limited time on this earth. If you are here, here in my life, it is because I want you to be.

Got that?

Good.

So here's the catch; you have to want me to be in your life, too. If there is one thing I have learned in gods-be-damned Chemistry, it's that the equation has to be balanced or it cannot exist. There are always situations of inequality, relationships forced by circumstance, people who are using or humoring or bullshitting. I understand that, I honestly do.

But I am not doing that.

Relationships are on the outside ridiculously complicated things, but only because we can't help but snarl the works. Boil them down, and here's what you get:

You are worth it to me.
I am worth it to you.

It's as easy as saying hello. Everything else is just noise.

And I am no longer in the habit of wasting my time with sound and fury.

I was going to do a blog update about Easter, but it turned into a now-ten-page-long single-spaced thing that contains, among other things, the seeds to what may grow into a flat-out memoir. This caught me by surprise. I had not been aware I had that much to say on the subjects found therein.

"You have a lot to say," is the comment that keeps on finding me and clamping tight to my leg. I suppose I do. But how much of what I have to say matters, really? I keep circling around the question, trying to work out how much of my writing is serving a function and how much is egotistical mental masturbation.

I've never understood why the workings of my brain, fictional or non, have any impact whatsoever on the people who read and comment on them. I never quite trust the people who tell me the things I produce are good, because clearly their taste is in need of improvement and how can I trust anyone with that level of dubious judgement? Lately, I have been ignoring the tiny voice in the back of my head that prances about declaring that everything I touch will turn to shit sooner or later, because I can't seem to get rid of the sneaking suspicion that it might be wrong. Whenever I do that, though, the sneaking suspicion (because it's sneaky) changes sides, begins to mutter that I'm fooling myself and everyone else is delusional.

The way I see it, if I do nothing at all for fear of doing badly, there will never be a chance of doing well. So I continue to ignore the voice, and the sneaking suspicion continues to mutter. But it would have done that anyway.

Yesterday, the Poet told me that he could never imagine someone like me ever being neurotic, and all I could think was, well holy crow, is it really that easy? You just pretend to be confident until the people around you believe that you are, and then suddenly, because they believe it and consensual reality works like that, you get to actually BE confident?

Is that really all there is to it? Just...lie?

Is that what the rest of you have been doing this whole time?

I have a lot to say, that's very true. But does having a lot to say automatically mean that it is worth saying?

I suppose that is a question that I will have to answer with time. In the meantime, I've got this...thing to poke at, this ever-growing, shouting-louder thing that keeps digging its roots deeper and sending out new branches to test the air.

Oh, and schoolwork. Like the Shakespeare thing. CRAP, THE SHAKESPEARE THING.

Self-Absorbed

"We should be actors," said the Boy Without a Nickname, hurrying in my wake, which is something I suspect he does rather a lot of. A leaf in search of a current, is the Nicknameless, still in that phase of life some go through in which one tries to find oneself by seeking out the loudest voice in the room and limpeting onto it. I recognize this phase, of course, as I went through it many a time myself before realizing that there were some perks allowed the loudest voice in the room that the sidekicks are never permitted to see.

Self-actualization, for one.
But I digress.

I shook my head at him. "Tried it. No dice."
"But you're so good."

We had been reading a play out loud in English Composition II. I had taken part in the reading and enjoyed myself thoroughly, before realizing that other people in the class were enjoying themselves more by their own participation and cheerfully allowing my role to be swiped out from under me.

I do damn near everything cheerfully in EngCompII. I find it deeply irritates the half of the class who despise me for reasons that remain shrouded in the mists of my incomprehension. I am just immature enough to take their annoyed huffs and whispers every time I open my mouth as motivation to grin and continue doing so.

I have developed the terrible habit of growing belligerently happy in the face of personal hatred. Probably this attitude is going to get me beat up one of these days.

Nicknameless was right, incidentally. I am good at read-throughs. I generally have a pretty decent idea for how a thing is supposed to be delivered, being as I am so completely obsessed with dialogue that my thought patterns take on the form of conversations.

However. "Good at delivery. Not so much staying in character."
"What do you mean?"  The thing I can't help but admire in the Nicknameless is how utterly willing he is to give everyone around him feedlines like "What do you mean?" or "I don't understand, can you explain?" He will make someone an excellent sidekick (if he hasn't already) and someday, because he's so damn good at actually caring about what people say, he will either grow incredibly embittered...or turn into a really fantastic human being. I'm tempted to watch the metamorphosis, but I'd be far more tempted to meddle. He doesn't need my meddling to become what he's going to become.

Besides, I'm not in the market for yet another unevenly-balanced relationship.

"I'm always," I tried to verbalize the nebulous thing that makes it impossible for me to be an actress or, for that matter, remain a sidekick. "Always me-delivering-lines. I'm never, you know, Lady Macbeth. I'm Me-Delivering-Lady-Macbeth's-Lines. So if anything happens onstage that shouldn't...say the scene where she's trying to convince Macbeth to go kill the king, yeah?"

He nodded happily. I suspect he had no idea what I was talking about. "And say, Macbeth trips and falls flat on his face. What would Lady Macbeth do?" He looked at me blankly, so I helped him out. "She'd get pissed, probably, yank him to his feet, carry on telling him to nail his courage to the sticking point. But me, I'm nervous about the audience and pratfalls are funny, so I laugh."
"Oh, no."
"Right. I've made directors cry." This is true. "Just not cut out for it," I concluded, and the conversation moved on to his own aspirations of bright lights and being somebody else.

There was a guy I dated in high school who told me once that I was very uncomplicated. "What you see is what you get," he declared, and it wasn't until years later that I worked out that he hadn't meant it as a compliment. The phrase was correctly applied, even if his interpretation had been wildly off; he had meant to imply that I was stupid and lacking in depth, an assessment I now feel fairly confident in disagreeing with.

Virulently. Vehemently. Violently, even, and on a good day, viciously.

But he was right. When it comes to me, what you see is what you get. For all that I take to lies like a fish to water, there is an inherent honesty to my nature that can't seem to ever remain repressed for long. I simply do not have the capability to be anything but myself, neuroses and loud voice and obnoxious habits and all.

This has caused me no end of trouble throughout my life, never more so than when I was very young and believed there to be no advantages whatsoever to being Susie. In my defense, I think it safe to venture to say that this coincided with the part of my life when there actually were no discernable advantages to being Susie.  The belief, however, stuck around for a disgustingly lengthy period of time, long past the point when it stopped being true.

There was a time I'd have happily thrown anyone to the wolves if I thought it would allow me to be something else. I'm not proud of this. Keep in mind, before you judge, that I had to throw Susie to the metaphorical slavering beasties in the dark first.

She took one look at them, muttered "Fuck that," and retreated to the back of my mind, where she bided her time and sharpened her Spiky Yo-yo of +8 ADHD.

And always, always, always she would re-emerge, usually sooner rather than later, whooping and dancing and using big words to talk too much about things she had no business knowing, growling at the beasties and inviting them to play, snorting scornfully at my attempts to shut her the hell up.

It was really quite difficult on one's social status, having what the Meerkat calls a Skitchgirl occasionally pop out, surprise! of what could only be called a backstabbery doormat.  It certainly didn't help that when it came to being a backstabbery doormat, I was hopelessly incompetent. I couldn't be-a-bitch my way out of a paper bag, you see, except on special occasions. Too nice, as the Insomniac likes to tell me after I've befriended the most lost-puppy person on the bus, only to blink in surprise when in response they start bus-stalking me.

I can pretend to be someone else. I'm just no bloody good at it.

Eventually, I learned to accept her. Eventually, in fact, I learned to glory in her, in no small part due to the various and sundry people who raised their eyebrows at me in a manner decidedly sarcastic and informed me that actually, they found they infinitely preferred Susie to...whatever it was I had been trying to masquerade as. And they continue to do so on the sprinkled days when I wake up wanting to apologize for who and what I am.

Life without apologies is ever so very much more pleasant when you have what I do now.

...thanks for that, by the way, Assorted Criminal Element. And the Poked Bear, of course, but the only reason I'm specially mentioning him is because he'll get annoyed if I don't. With good reason. He knows full well what he's done, and who my first book is going to be dedicated to, and who, of course, my life will be spent with.

...yes, sometimes I feel badly for him, too.

I feel the need to add a disclaimer. I'm not saying I'm perfect; anyone who knows me knows I keep a full catalogue of my flaws, each checked off very neatly and thoroughly explained, and I stand no chance of forgetting them anytime soon. Assorted Criminal Elements and Bears are not deluded, and they wish for me to lack delusion, as well; they are perfectly willing to tell me each and every time I'm off being an idiot, no matter how frequently this sort of thing occurs (very). I say and do stupid things with a regularity that is positively stunning. "Life without apologies" is in fact a misleading phrase, as I apologize quite often, usually after I've done or said one of those stunningly stupid things. I'm messy and easily distracted, and to judge by the length of this post, I'm astonishingly self-absorbed.

But I am me. And that is a thing I shall likely never lose again.

Never think me lacking in gratitude for that fact.

Coincidence

One of the little quirks that seems to stay in my belief system in spite of the ever-shifting tides of my personal opinions is my refusal to believe in coincidences. Synchronicity, I will call them, or the universe trying to tell me something, or the signs of a sense of humor in the mind of God. I can't call them coincidences. I can't call them random chance or statistical oddities, which I suppose is why, in spite of my willingness to pick up and try on just about any passing religious belief, I will never make an attempt at atheism.

Atheism seems so boring, really. And it brings to mind a memory of asking someone, what do you believe? and he pointed at a book by Christopher Hitchens and said, "That book." The way I see it, never trust anyone whose belief system can be defined in the course of one book.

I hear mutterings amongst the Christians, and possibly amongst the other one-book religions! Settle, folks, I'm not bashing your religion. Because yes, the Bible is the be-all-end-all source, but your entire religion isn't encapsulated entirely within its pages. There's interpretation there, there's room for debate, there's generations of people arguing about it and writing about their arguments and reading all the other arguments and writing about those, too, and eventually someone gets up on a preacher-place and talks about it and that's the religion you learn.*. A Christopher Hitchens book, on the other hand,  is a book of interpretation, it holds a single argument. A snot-nosed one, at that. To say that your entire belief system is entirely extant and explained within one book and to have it be a book like that strikes me as being too close-minded to be trustworthy.

Also, I hate bloody Christopher Hitchens. I've got no problem with atheists who just...don't believe in a higher power. There's a bit of me that respects the nonbelief, for all that I think it's dull as hell. There's a certain amount of courage in that. And if you meet a nice atheist, they're not being nice out of fear of celestial retribution, but because in a world without gods we only have one another. It's beautiful, when you think of it like that.

But an atheist who's actively out to condemn and mock all other religions? Bite me and all my collected God-and-gods, you condescending little shit.

And yes, before you make the accusation, as a matter of fact I did read the book in question. Did you think perhaps you were dealing with the sort of person who doesn't read a thing that's been put in front of her just because she doesn't happen to agree?

But I was talking about coincidences, and how I don't believe in them. The impetus for this was an interesting one, as it happens. This morning, I woke up with the hankering to go through all my zip drives and see what was on them. I had backed up a goodly amount of my artwork from previous computers, and I was thinking about one drawing in particular that I never finished coloring and decided to look for it. The first drive I plugged in was a mystery; it had folders, but none of them were mine, because none of the folder names had exclamation points in them and a few of them were in Japanese.

Odd, I said to it, and was promptly hit with the realization that at some point in the history of this zip drive, it had been accidentally exchanged for one that looked exactly like it. I should mention that this zip drive could not have left the house in at least a few years.

BOY, WAS I UPSET. Two gigs of drawings and pictures and writing, gone into the possession of some random person two to three years in my past! The little Godzilla in my head rampaged away for about five minutes, and then I found a music folder.

I don't know about you, but I always have a few songs playing in the back of my head. My brain is a bit like an iPod on crack. Several iPods on crack, actually, since there's usually a jangle of twelve different songs playing at exactly the same time. If you wonder why sometimes I have a particularly wild look in my eyes, that's why. Usually one song tends to take precedence over the others, and that's the one I sing under my breath when I'm supposed to be doing things like keeping quiet because other people in the library are trying to study so-shut-the-fuck-up-you-crazy-bitch.

This song has been stuck in my head for four days, where it has been slowly driving all the other songs insane:

The chances of the first song in the zip drive's music folder being that song was really quite improbable indeed, but there it was. Make of that what you will. I decided that clearly, the gods have talked about it and concluded that I need more random music in my life, and so arranged for a way by which this could come about.

Unless it is Christopher Hitchen's zip drive. Then it's clearly just coincidence.

*Unless you're a straight literalist. You guys can mutter away, because apparently if your daughter got raped, you'd have no issues selling her to the rapist. I have a bone to pick with about seventy percent of Leviticus.Maybe more; I'd have to reread it to make sure, and I'm not in the mood this morning.

Dreams, Fears and Weasels

The newest series of dreams are relatively straightforward things.  I walk into the chemistry classroom. Sometimes the chemistry classroom is on a bus, sometimes on a cliff, sometimes, for reasons that are passing understanding, it is located halfway up a tree or in the men's bathroom at work. Never is class actually being held in an actual classroom in my dreams. I suspect this is just my brain entertaining itself.

In any case, in the dream, it is always exam day, which is rather terribly stereotypical of me, I'm afraid. I have not yet had the whoops-hey-I'm-naked dream, I suspect because being naked holds very little in the way of actual fear for me. In fact, given my recent bouts of vacantbrained forgetfulness, I would not be surprised if someday I forgot my clothing on the way to the bus. My clothing, but not my coffee. I'd never forget my coffee. Happily naked at the bus stop, wondering vaguely why everyone is staring and why the bench seems colder than usual but not dwelling on it too much because hey, there's coffee.

There's priorities for you.

So yes, exam day. And I sit down and suddenly realize that I have been somehow transferred to an advanced physics class instead of Basic Stupid Person Chemistry 101, or the professor suddenly develops a kind of narcissistic madness that causes her to demand that instead of chemistry, our exam will be about her favorite things to eat, or the exam is abruptly in a language that has never been heard of on this planet, not even by anthropological linguist advanced academic people. And of course, because we're being terribly stereotypical, everyone else is having no problems whatsoever. They all love advanced physics, they studied the professor's favorite foods over the weekend, and the language that nobody has spoken since before the dawn of time they promptly start chattering in fluently. And anthropological linguist advanced academic people the world over would be amazed, except on some level they are aware of being people who exist in my dream and my dream only so instead they just shake their heads and mutter, "she's at it again, must be an exam coming up."

And so I sit there, surrounded by people who understand what's going on, mind filled with dumb incomprehension and sheer panic.

My fears are fairly easy things, really. Fear of being alone, fear of failure, fear of spiders and heights, all standard fare, and to be perfectly honest I've made an awful habit of facing those fears regularly, as if to prove something to myself or the world. I've failed more times than I've succeeded, I've held tarantulas, I've jumped off of cliffs with naught but a very expensive and carefully-stitched bedsheet attached to my back, and I keep on walking away from entire social circles with never again a how-do-you-do. 

...In my defense, they weren't the best social circles a lady could ask for, and doing so has done nothing to assuage my fears of being alone. Then again, I highly doubt I'm ever truly alone. I'd have to get rid of my characters first, wouldn't I? And that's not going to happen.

 But that's neither here nor there. Probably it's a thought for another post. Untangenting....

How does one go about facing one's fear of incomprehension? When the first thing you do upon encountering a thing you don't understand is endeavor to understand it and thus fix the problem, when you're actually proving to be quite intelligent and rarely run into a thing that you're incapable of grasping eventually, how do you face that fear?

I only ask because this morning, I awoke in a cold sweat because all the class had turned into weasels and, it turns out, would you believe it? Weasels have a much more advanced understanding of basic chemistry than humans. I wouldn't have thought it. They look so surprised all the time.

You see? 

Then again, perhaps that's just their balancing-equations expression. One never can tell, with weasels. Tricsky things. In any case, I have to get going. It's time for class, and I need to get my calipers and rope all ready to go. 

Today it's being held on Mount Everest. 

p.s. Hello, readers in South Korea, Indonesia, and Denmark, how on earth are you finding this thing? Are you just googlebots. Are you. ARE you.

What Do You Want

I woke up with frustration gnawing at me, the edges of a dream fading fast into an obscurity that immediately struck me as being unfair. Somehow, this dream was the answer, even though now I can't remember even the vaguest detail. Somehow, this dream was everything, every story I've wanted to write, every word combination I've stared at this screen for hours trying to find.

I hate those dreams for their fleetness of psychological foot.

Someone asked me the other day, what do you want? I've been turning the question over and over in my mind ever since, occasionally poking my head up to inquire of other people what they want. The answers I've gotten have been unsatisfactory; not that what they want doesn't satisfy me, so much as what they want is not what I want.

What do I want? What does anyone want? It is circling thing, this question, and invariably it spirals away to land on the question of my writing.

I think it's sad I want to be a writer. I think it is the beginning of something that will only end in disappointment, anger and a further upsurgence of my long-held suspicions that when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, I'm not as good as I think I am.

Delusion is my greatest fear, psychologically. I've seen too many people caught up in its thrall, good people, even smart people. I've seen them pat each other on the back, tell one another that they are oh-so-wonderful, self-sustain a thing that is in no way, shape or form based on reality or anything even approaching reality. I've been there myself, lost in self-delusion, cheerfully assuring myself that all things were fantastic when they were in fact steadily tramping their way downwards to oblivion. I've been a doormat telling myself that I'm self-assured, an idiot calling myself intelligent, completely alone and claiming popularity.

Nobody ever talks about what happens when you rip the bandage away, and I suppose in a way that's what I want. That's what I want to do with my writing.

I want to set lightning amongst the fools. I want to take the unfeeling populace and make them feel. I want to rip their damn hearts out, make them see what it is they live in, force them to face it head-on. Look at yourselves, I want to shout from the top of the very highest building, and I want them to look up at me for only a moment, then look at their own reflection in the window of a passing car and catch their breaths. I want  to scare the shit out of them, make them angry, make them sad.

Then I want to pull back from all that, and I want to make them laugh. I want to point at something, some little tiny thing, sunlight glancing off of the water of a fountain, maybe, the smile on the face of a woman going out on a date, and say, but look at that, isn't that beautiful? Look what you could be.

And I want them to look, and I want them to see, and I want them to understand what it is having to live in this world with them each and every goddamn day after day after day.

How do you do that? Riddle me this, my audience of audiences, how the hell do you take all that and fit it into anything at all? How do you achieve that pinnacle of writing, self-introspection on the part of your audience?

 It is, you see, an impossible thing, the thing I want more than anything else.

I want to make your entire species fucking think. And I have no idea how to accomplish that.


Edited to add: Plus also I want a neverending supply of cookies and my very own dragon and a chandelier I can swing on, also the BIGGEST BLANKETFORT IN THE WORLD and a place with barricades and hillocks and foxholes that I can play NERF in and, and the ability to teleport, and for BEER TO STILL BE DELICIOUS BUT NOT MAKE ME BE DRUNK.

And I want for people to not complain when I don't make EVERYTHING into a joke, because then I feel the compulsion to go and add jokes at the end of things to save them from possibly being melodramatic.  Hrmph.

...and I wouldn't mind the pointer for my tablet to come back from whichever mysterious place it has secreted itself, so I can finish the redesign of this site.

Appreciation

There is a very specific and very special sort of joy in not being trapped at the bottom of a canyon with your hand trapped under a rock, with no hope of rescue and your very probable death in the very imminent future.

This is the joy of having just watched 127 Hours.

I am not likely to have to cut my own arm off at any forseeable point, and I'm intensely grateful for that fact. Tomorrow, instead of pondering tourniquets and the possibilities of having to drink my own blood, I will be trying to work out the most efficient way to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and debating which shade of red to dye my hair.

And really, how lucky is that?


The answer is, very.

And now if you don't mind, I'm going to go drink a ludicrous amount of water. Because I can.

Cynic, Part Deux

It has been pointed out to me by one Maura (thank you, Maura) that, in contradiction to what I have previously claimed, justice as a concept actually DOES exist in nature. To quote,

"Many animals understand the concept of justice.  If you have trained monkeys or dogs to perform a certain task or trick in exchange for a reward (like a grape or a biscuit) and they both perform it but only one of them receives the reward, the deprived animal gets rather upset.  They either pester the human for the appropriate reward or try to steal it from the favored animal and usually stop performing the task.  They have a sense of justice in that they have been deprived by comparison to the other.  By comparison, if the animal performs a customarily-rewarded task but is not rewarded, but neither is his companion, he will continue to perform that task because in the past task leads to reward and may do so again in the future.  While justice does require a set of rules that we have all agreed to, we are not the only species to do so."


First of all, HOW COOL IS THAT.


Secondly, this is one of the reasons I like Maura. 


Thirdly, never let it be said that I am one of those people who won't publicly admit when proven wrong and/or ignorant about a thing. I stand (I'm lying, I'm sitting right now) corrected. 


More on this later, after I've had a chance to get some research together...not because I doubt her, because I don't, but because it deserves some thought on my part, as opposed to a swiftly thrown-together copy-pasted jumble of words. 


NOW GO READ MY MOON STORY. 

Secret Millionaire

As I type this, there's an episode of Secret Millionaire playing in the background. I recorded it in a moment of curiosity, put off watching it for weeks, and finally gave in to the guilt of the queue staring at me wondering why I was using up its memory with reality television.

This is, incidentally, one of the problems with the tendency to personify everything. Specifically, the fact of the matter is that once a thing is personified, it remains personified. Which means it can give you guilt about paying attention to James Joyce and not to it.

But I digress. To return back to the track of my thoughts, blocked as it may be by trees of digression upon the rails...Secret Millionaire is a show that is, in theory, a really cool concept; they take a millionaire and make he or she live in a slum and volunteer in various nonprofit organizations for a week. At the end of the week, they come clean to the organizations in a "reveal" scene, then donate a truly ridiculous amount of money to them. 

Pretty cool, right? I'm assuming the idea came about from that story that hit the news a few Christmases ago revealing the identity of a Kansas City "Secret Santa" who, over the course of 26 years, gave away 1.3 million dollars in hundred-dollar bills...anonymously. He only revealed himself  in the hopes of inspiring others to follow in his footsteps. Shortly after doing so, he died at the age of 58.

Random acts of kindness have since been growing in popularity, so it was really only a matter of time before a reality TV show was dedicated to the concept. 

So here's my problem with reality television, why I never ever watch it. You can't trust it. It's the issue that always arises wherever there's audience-awareness. The presence of known observation automatically changes the behavior being observed. In other words, when the millionaire starts crying about her childhood on national television, one can't help but wonder why. Is she doing it to generate audience sympathy? To prove that just because she's rich doesn't mean she's happy? She knows the camera is there. She knows it's a moment worthy of filming. She knows that if she isn't interesting enough, the show won't air. That has to have an effect on her actions.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice thing that the show is trying to do. Giving away a million dollars to various deserving charitable organizations is a great thing, and if flogging millionaire ego is a way to get them to do it, then so be it. But does it have to be a circus? Does there have to be fifteen minutes in which the millionaire pretends to discover, all on their own, a charitable organization that, as luck would have it, exists in the Very Same Slum They Happen To Be Living In? It's kind of obvious that the show researchers found it and pointed them at it, so why the charades? Do we really need twenty minutes of the millionaires sobbing or making happy-faces at the camera to indicate just how huge their Huge Gigantic Emotional Epiphanies That Will Totally Change Their Millionaire Lives Forever is?

Do I even care about their epiphanies? No, not particularly. Because they're millionaires. They can afford to have epiphanies all the time. They don't need to be on television to do it. They could have gone and done the donation thing without having a show dedicated to their generosity, even! They could have done the right thing without getting any credit whatsoever, just for the sake of doing it.

What a concept.

My opinion is softened somewhat by the reveal itself, because even if the millionaire tears are fake, the reactions of the people receiving the money are anything but. "Do you know how many people we can help with this?" a woman in charge of a soup kitchen asks, her face hidden from the camera, her voice choked with tears. "Do you KNOW?!" She can hardly talk, she looks like she might have a heart attack right there and then, and it's real, it's genuine.

The problem is that I've seen this scene before....the network has been showing it every commercial break.Come see, the network trumpets, come see the soup-kitchen lady cry! Check it out, it's like she means it! I've actually lost track of the amount of times they've made me WATCH the soup-kitchen lady cry. (Enough times that this time around, when the hug comes around, I notice the millionaire benefactress ensuring that her face isn't obscured.)

I suppose I can't blame the networks for being excited, though.

It's not often you get reality on reality television.

Cynic

I was called a cynic the other day. There was a time this wouldn't have bothered me, when I would have shouted it from the rooftops and considered having t-shirts made that declared me cynic to passersby and gentry. I suppose it is a thing one could take pride in.

The thing is, I'm not a cynic, not in the original sense of the word and not in the updated.  Nor do I happen to think that believing the concept of justice to be purely an invention of the human mind, having no representation in the natural world, is a particularly cynical view. What else could justice possibly be, after all? At no point did I say it was bad or wrong or even nonexistent; I merely said it was something that, much like fiction, would not exist without the human mind to conceive of it. 

Personally, I think that's a pretty neat thing for a human mind TO conceive of. It's one of the very many things that makes the human species endlessly fascinating, that we sit around and think up things like this. Perhaps the problem arose when the person I was talking to assumed that I was saying that because it was a human invention, that somehow discounted the concept, made it less worthy because it was dreamed up by a human mind rather than being some kind of basic universal precept.

Which was rather cynical of her, I feel. Whoever said that we as thinking, reasoning beings can't come up with better universal precepts? 

At the time, I didn't bother giving the Consensual Reality Lecture a brush and a polish and bringing it out into the light of the conversation. People tend to look at me strangely after I've gone consensual realist on them. 

I've been thinking a lot about my philosophical/religious stances on things lately. It can't seem to be helped; I keep getting roped into conversations, and they're interesting conversations, about god and God and gods and the Universe and the universe and our place in it and although a goodly chunk of these conversations take place with people who are younger and more pretentious than I am, they can't help but make you think. 

"D'you think there's a plan to it all?" the Insomniac asked me the other day, when we were waiting for a bus and I was up a tree. 

"No!" I called back, then paused. Huh. I'd not expected that answer. Tentatively, I expanded on it, and we talked for a bit about sentient universal forces and the theory that we were, in fact, created, then abandoned. It was interesting, and never mind that the Insomniac has on occasion had mental breakdowns over the premise that the Thinker isn't thinking...he made me, at least, think for a bit. 

Oops, lost track of time. More on this later.

Little Things

Little things serve as reminders, even on the best of days. Perhaps that is what makes them the best of days, the bits and pieces and details, the tiny gravestones that mark the cracks. Never forget, say the little things. Those that forget are doomed to repeat.

There is a white stone on my desk on which is written, in impossibly tiny letters, the entire text of Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night. Next to that, another that simply says, "center".

There is a strange look that wafts through my husband's eyes whenever I make a thoughtlessly casual comment about killing myself over one thing or another, and a certain whipcord strength in our exchange of smiles. Occasionally, we touch when there is no need for it, just to assure one another that we are still there.

There is a joy in day-to-day living that had never been there before, springing up vinelike to stretch to the sky, look, it says, look at everything, just look. And there is a voice that murmurs in the background, ocean against shore, you are worthwhile, you have always been worthwhile. 

And another that replies in undercurrent, and fuck all the rest of it.

Muse

A thing I am writing has lead to the question of what my muse looks like. In answering, I didn't even hesitate, which was interesting because I had never before considered it. I have complained about my muse, yes, as one does about a roommate who never washes the dishes and keeps setting things on fire, but never have I taken the time to actually look at her.

Regardless, she sprung from the aether fully formed and smiling slightly and now that I think on it, is isn't quite so surprising as one might think that she emerged abruptly and with no extended thought; it is not as though I haven't known her all these years gone by.

She has short, scraggly black hair and grey eyes with flecks of gold, her features are sharp rather than pretty, she is tiny and looks younger than she is, she wears a tight black shirt and a baggy black sweatshirt and jeans that are raggedy at the ends and stained with mysterious substances. She is barefooted and has too many knotted string friendship bracelets, she used to have a hat but she lost it in the subway one day, her everpresent bag is shapeless and paintstained and full of markers and scraps of paper.

She is not as much a whirlwind as one might expect. She ambles rather than dashes, stays in one place if she has reason to, talks slow and with a hint of an accent that I have yet to identify. She spends more time quiet than I'd like her to and has a habit of flashing into momentary rages.

Probably her hair wasn't always black. Probably it will change, and change again. 

She has very little use for people, save that they serve their functions and give her things to talk about. Give me a book and you're my friend for life, give her a book and she's liable to pore over it voraciously, then look at you expectantly, wanting more.

Nothing is ever bloody good enough for her, she doesn't understand why I can't do what she wants all the time, she gives me the silent treatment all day long only to chatter at the top of her lungs when I'm trying to sleep.

She does not get along with Sebastian.

She's a goddamn fickle bitch, as is the nature of muses everywhere, and I'd not turn her in for money or fame or friendship or anything, really, because her conversations are good ones and her stories, second to none.She hears voices in the wind and stories in a stranger. I don't think I'd still be me without that.

I don't know her name.