i've got this feeling

This blog kind of sucks, but here goes.

I am breathless. Gasping. Every time i yawn I stop dead in my tracks and make myself do it again, just to feel my lungs stretch out, Just to feel the dirt, the skin, the life, settle in my lungs.There is simply not enough air. I want to breath in the atoms of every living thing; I want bigger lungs.

I have an irrational and complex love of everything. Tonight, I am touched by the scent of salsa, and the falsetto of Regina Spektor. I am brought to my knees by a picture of myself, a sunset, and hair dampened by a downpour only willing to relent to my wish for a peaceful goodbye. I have a ravenous love for the feeling of sheets agains my legs, on the first day I've shaven my legs in well, awhile.

This blog is about my way home. My way to myself and all that implies. Some days it feels like I've been gone a very long time. Some days, the thing I feel most vividly is the distance between myself and the girl who rations her openness like butter pats in the second world war.

December for me is typically a time of listening to the Counting Crows' "Long December" on repeat and analyzing and reanalyzing the reasons I have to believe that this year will be better than the last. But this year I didn't. I distanced myself even more thoroughly than I ever have from that deeply feeling mass of human intuition and reception, and refused, completely and utterly to analyze anything. I didn't want to be like all those other pitiful little messes who felt remorse, who wanted to change. I didn't want to associate myself even remotely with anything or anyone that felt.

I played, tittered, drank, debauched, and just generally spent the greater part of the last 3 months proving that I was just as capable of worldly callousness as any testosterone chugging pork rind of a man I met. Let me just tell you, it's been a quality couple of months. Grandma would be so proud.

None of this is easy to admit, I'm even blushing now, with no one in the room but my iTunes and the rapidly dissipating particles of the unadulterated joy I experienced tonight.

And then it happened. I was busy trying to be callous, and laugh away the truth, and I looked at that picture, heard that song, and smelled that smell. I felt the sheets against my legs, and the dam broke. The truth fell open in front of me like an old book. I love. I love the feeling of tea as it slides into my stomach and nests there like a sun swallowed; I love that I can breathe out it's warmth in gusts of flaring heat and fog my own glasses. I love laughing until my chest hurts and I can hardly hold myself up. Sometimes, when I'm feeling rebellious I love the roll of the word "fuck" as it bounces off my tongue. I love you. Really. I don't even care how well I know you, I probably love some piece of you.

I still love my first real boyfriend. He's happily dating someone else. He's a republican. And still, i love him for what he taught me, for dancing to the sound of crickets and the way he shook when he told me he loved me, because it was beautiful. I love it because it ended and I cried myself to sleep for months. I love him because I was in mourning for so long and because dear God, what's the real forever and always wrinkly and fat together kind like?

I love my mother and father because of all the times they broke me into a million little pieces and I learned to put myself back together, I love them breathlessly for the times they were doing the putting back together.

I love fingerpainting and the smell of garlic. I love batman.

But I reigned it in. I understand that this post is similar to the last, but humor me. I'm back in Boise this week. I'm in love. With the parts that hurt, with my shame, with my hope. I feel a lovely self-awareness and a ferocious desire to feel nothing but exactly what I feel and to know, truly what that means.

I made so many mistakes in this town. I broke so many hearts. I broke my own more times than I care to count. It's February 2nd. It took me 33 days, and I still don't have a real resolution, but I've got this feeling. I feel like every inch of me is stark-ass jiggle-nasty native villager naked to everything. Good thing I shaved my legs, huh?

P.S. I promise something a little less....hoaky tomorrow, I just couldn't sleep, and my lungs wouldn't get big enough.

feverpitch

I try to date like a man.

I can do nothing else in my life so manly as dating. Women are vulnerable, you see, needy. You can see right through us. Even the cheaters and the liars. It's in the way our bodies curve in or out. Love is like gravity for a woman, and we make satellites of the most tender parts of us. When in love we orbit, some in more obvious ways than others.

But men maintain a certain stoicism.
They are better liars. There hopes do not find a place within them to settle and magnetize towards their love. Something casual and dangerous lurks in the love of a man. It can pick and choose. There is no irrational chemical burn in their veins, no withstanding martyrdom.

So I try my best to date like a man.

I do not make myself transparent. I ignore phone calls. I hold myself in check. I do not squeal, I do not gush. I am careful. I can flirt and multitask as well as any man. I can go out at night, and know exactly which phone numbers I give out with be ones who might be kind, might be real. But mostly, I know they will text me the next day, with texts about "chillin soon" which will chill me with the surreality of it all. It is not possible that people are not hungry for each other, except in body. I know somehow it's not true.

But I see it. Eyes glazed and so far past pretense as to not even care if I hope. Eyes with intent and the desire to hunt. The ones that will say anything.

So I limit myself. I tell myself I can see right through all of it and suddenly, when I choose wrong, I am as shocked as a child who touched her fingers to the perfect orange flame. But I am a child in so many other ways. Once found, my vulnerability is naive and bottomless. I become a well of forgiveness, and unabashed tears flow freely if violated. Once penetrated, the core of me is sunburned skin, open wounds, and a toddlers trust, all in one easily trespassed package. I am a doll undone, filled with all the world's rot, and sewn shut again, with the loss inside me.

I am a cry at feverpitch, and I am lost. It's strange and rare. My pain is the blackest and most priceless of gems. I cannot keep it safe. And worse still, every day I'm growing new nerves, new loves, new ways to hurt. In each and every moment a millimeter of skin grows succeptible, even with all my trying.

So I try to date like a man. But I am a woman. And I am the soil that will not fallow. I am made a great arch and a great fool by the gravity of my love. And gravity is ever so strong.

"--He was once found on the Well-Regarded Rabbi's lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his index finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum to heel, and used his body to remember his body, and in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story?" Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated.

And so I am bound, like the madman in the story, to everything that I believe. I have tied myself to myself in order to remember all the things that I must be. As a writer, I am naturally one of history's self-swaddled string things. I am bequeathed the duty and the desire to watch as people act, and commentate on the hasty race of minutes through the years. And as the years enter the pubescence of decades and matuure into eons, I take note, and in order that I might remember the beginning, I tie it to yesterday and string each today like plastic beads on my elastic memory. I have front row season tickets to the tournament of our humanity, while each and ever belligerent soul fights for his or her right to be the most impervious to their faults, and therefore the most fallible.

I have taken note, and kept notes since my bitten fingers found the poise of a pencil and I have built my ideas about the world from notebooks filled and overflowing. Slanting sidewalls of spiral notebooks, clothbound volumes half filled with sloppy ballpoint texts, evolving from bottom to top. A foundation of titled rhyming verse, in junk store ledgers, easing up into the free form poetry etched into floppy disk, then CD and nearing the top transparent walls electric with attempted blog prose, and the glowing Verdana font of Facebook notes.

All that I know has or will be housed in what I write, and in what I can't. In tying together the days, I've opened doors, eyes, hearts, and lives and inadvertently scared the living crap out of myself. It's always been about bearing witness; in speaking the unspeakable things all I have wanted was to connect those who thought they must be seperate. I started to get scared when I started to succeed.

And then there were more strings. To remember to be deep I ran a string in one ear and out the other and tied it round the back of my head: reigns for a mind whiche needs a strong lead to direct and maintain the trot of the romantic elite. Further and further I entrenched myself in expectation. I could not be shallow, I could not be untrue, I could not be uninspiring, and for Christ's sake...no more princess dress blogs! I needed to tell the truth and unburden myself, but with the delicacy of a face atop the shoulders which woud bear my load, suddenly the strings which made me remember myself were inummerable.

So there I was, up to my metaphorical scrotum in my fear of forgetting the days, the lessons, the rules, the hours, the minutes, the expectations. I managed to hogtie myself in it all.

Is this someone to trust with for a story? Is this someone to trust with your life? Am I, one of the madmen of the world, she who you should trust with the annals of your humanity?

Can I be trusted with all that I have seen, to do something real and bright and hopeful with it all? I am afraid of my own yes. But there it is, most ardently, yes. I can build a fortress unto the stars, stacked tale and life and leaf and instant upon verse and bat of eyelash, metaphors jointed and mortared with assonance piled and ornamented with lies more honest than a lovesick teenager's eyes. Ceilings vaulted with lofty attempted eloquence can make a place to take refuge against the harsh truths of the world.

I can do that. I can hem and haw and tie myself up, tooth to toe, and unravel myself again like a child 'round a maypole, and make right my hesitation. I can. I think.

and we'll get you fixed up in no time

Apprehensive

–adjective

1.	uneasy or fearful about something that might happen: apprehensive for the safety of the mountain climbers.

2.	quick to learn or understand.

3. perceptive; discerning

At the dawn of my life as a writer, this word was with me, it is with me now, and unless some miracle of confidence comes and blows a whole lot of pretty colored smoke up my butt, I have very few doubts that it will be with me in some measure until I die. In first grade, I asked a teacher to spell check the word in something or another, and she proceeded to tell me it was not a word. Well I'm here to tell her this: Honey, please. It's not just a word, it's a way of life Mrs. Hawkins.(P.S. you were right, 2nd grade was for punks. :)

It's a very confusing word because it implies both uneasiness and understanding, which are two words that haven't always been friends. Typically what we crave most desperately, comingin a close second to connection, is understanding, and when we cannot have understanding the uneasiness seeps in. It's like a slow flood through a neglected basement windowell. It drips in through the cracks of our knowledge and trickles down our walls and we never even see it coming. Moist misunderstanding saturates our carpets; a swamp beneath the tread of our lives. It festers, and eventually the stink of uneasiness comes once how very clueless we've been.

Apprehension does not imply this sort of slow progress. It implies the last of the stages of grief. This word infers uneasy acceptance and understanding. We know what is coming, what is in store for us, and both because of and in spite of this understanding we are afraid. It's a calmer fear because the danger has been assessed and we have been allowed the luxury of preparation.

I have lived with apprehension about my writing, my looks, my heart, my intentions, my future, my talent, capabilities, and most ardently, my relationships.

In a labrynth of loss and return and of the volatile rumblings of volcanic involuntary gypsyhood, I came to expect a certain selfishness from people. I began to expect certain selfishnesses from those around me regularly, and with time and growing apprehension to take those pertinences for my own at all the worst junctures, or after I'd already given nearly everything worth having away.

The point is not my innumerable fallabilities, it is that I am surprised. To my most delirious delight, I have stumbled on the truth. It started with a note from my cousin, Mikki, my childhood best friend and partner in crime, with whom I spent many panic driven evenings trying to clean the water spots off the giant mirrors after our baths so we didn't get in trouble for splashing. She told me that my family missed me so badly that they wanted to pay for a plane ticket for me to come there for Christmas since I hadn't been bothered to make the Idaho to Kansas sojourn any of the previous three years. At first I assumed that her extension relied mostly on polite pleasantries and the temporary nostalgia left-over from our time as Power Rangers.

Then a week or so later, I found myself with mangled feelings and a raised voice on a very long distance phone call, a very long distance from my happy place. A friend of mine, who I didn't even realize was a friend asked me why I was wasting so much breath and energy being angry, (of course he asked me in the lingo of a farm boy train engineer with a few very colorful four letter words for good measure). Assuming, basedon my previous understanding of life, people and relationships that I was backed into a corner, I began to defend myself, pretty snottily (I was in double trouble, and I'm only human). Because of the way my life was for a very long time, and because of the way my apprehensions always ran things, I found myself presuming to need a new place to stay since I had just pretty heavily insulted the roof over my head. I had definitely been uprooted for lesser transgressions.

I hung up the phone and went outside into the cold night expecting some sort of absolution from the prairie. Wishing for my conscience to be blown clean and the knowledge that I was, yet again, going to have to change everything, took hold of me.

"Get your ass in here and put on a coat, just cause your pissed doesn't mean you have to freeze to death."

And it was that simple. I was brought a coat. I was hugged, tickled, forgiven. I went inside.

A few weeks later another cousin of mine called who does a lot of work with non-traditional medicine and made me a very generous offer of help for my horrible eyes. His simple explanation, "Rachel, I love you. I don't care how long it's been. Come see me, we'll fix you up."

Have I really been this stubbornly afraid?

I have this song that I'm pretty obsessed with. It's called, "A Walk Through Hell." It's pretty amazing and it has this part goes like this "And I'll hold you in my weak arms like a first born, first born, first born." And you have to get in all three first borns, because the rise of emotion is really what does me in every time. I am suddenly aware of and uneasy with the fact that I may have been staring this sort of love in the eye all along. There are in fact tired arms ready to take me in, weary from being held out to me, when I knew I was alone. I understood that people were weak and confused, everyone around me as much so as I, and so were to be revered, treasured, but always seperate and on our own paths.

Our survival is based on our learning curve. How long does it take us to understand that the orange and black stripey cat thing likes to bite? How long does it take us to figure out that sticks rubbing together long and fast enough might make a fire? How long does it take to realize the guy who winks at us from across the bar is not dating material, no matter how good he is with his hair gel? So we learn, we think. We take the simple bits of information we can gather and we fortify ourselves with them and prepare for what we know is coming. Discovery shows us which things we are to be apprehensive of, and what is to be anticipated. What happens though, when our learning curves become malignencies, and all that we've been taught passes it's ripening point, and the rules change a bit. All the coins of our knowledge that we've managed to hoard becomes obsolete. What happens when we see a lovely orange housecat, who is dying to purr in our laps, but all we see is the tiger?

My reckoning is here. Now, that I am officially out of the jungle, maybe it's time to find out what each thing is for itself. I want to touch and feel and see and try everything.

I think what I'm trying to say here is, this just isn't working for me anymore, Apprehension. You've brought me through a lot, and I'm not sure if I'd have survived without you, but now we are holding each other back. I'll always love you in some way, but it's time we move on. It's not you, it's me. Okay that's not true, it's both of us. We've outgrown one another. I let you get bigger than me, and I'm too big to hide behind you. We have to let go, we'll always have Paris, kid. Wait....yeah, Humphrey Bogart does that one way better than me.

the deuce

I am not a big believer in happy mediums. You can ask my dad or mom, who are both reading this at some point and shaking their heads, either laughing to themselves with pride and thinking "That's my daughter," or wishing the other were within a hundred miles so they could say, "She's YOUR daughter." No matter how they feel, and no matter how little they agree on, they will both tell you the same thing; I suck at happy mediums.

A few days ago I had to google myself into a corner before I could convince myself to begin to work on my portfolio so I could BEGIN my freelance writng career. That night, I started working on my first novel. Yeahhhhhhhhh. About that.

It's just who I am. When I work out I run 5-6 miles as fast as I can stand, and I'm constantly and creepily looking at the screen of the person next to me at the gym, making sure I'm pushing myself harder, running longer, faster, and at a higher intensity. Not because I need to feel superior to them, but because I need to know if I'm just a lazy dork who THINKS she is doing a good job, or whether or not I'm actually doing a good job in the scheme of things. (Although I'm sure my ego doesn't mind seeing higher numbers.)

When I bake a cake? It's a four teir masterpiece with alternating layers of chocolate and white cake whipped up from scratch, with layers of homemade ganache in between and entirely coated in my freshly whipped cream and topped with slivered toasted almonds. I'm just weird.

When I cook? Chicken pot pie, with both the crust and cream sauce from scratch with real butter and cream and veggies sliced a la me. Served wheatfield golden and steaming.

I'm such a creeper. I waited a month to buy new boots, even though my old ones were nearly intolerably stinkerific, simply because I could not find the perfect boots at the perfect price. But I found them eventually. When I tried photography the first time? If every single photo wasn't gallery worthy it was hidden instantaneously, like the crazy uncle in the attic.

When it comes to people in my life though, I'm like a cat with a cardboard box. It's all good. The horrible Las Vegas t-shirt my boss brough back for me from Vegas? Exalted profusely and worn with pride, because ugly or not, he thought of me. If anyone else cooks, hamburger helpber is gourmet and if one of my friends writes "i like cheese," and wants to know my poetic opinion, I swear to you I will find something to like.

So what's my obsession with being the master of all things? I know I can't be the only one. There have to be other obnoxious perfectionists out there. So why can't I just make myself understand that nothing has to be perfect. And it definitely doesn't all have to be perfect the first time!

What this boils down to? I am stuck at the first paragraph of Chapter 2 andwondering if anyone knows hypnosis and can make me understand my own damn words. I just wish sometime I would give myself a chance to just do something. I want to bake an ugly confetti sheetcake and put storebough frosting on it, and know that it will be loved just as much. I want to go for a walk and say, "Oh, man, I worked out today! Pizza time!"

But instead, I don't work out. I cook and no one eats it, because really? Who can eat real cream and butter these days and not feel like they should go see the cardiologist the next day? And I write the first chapter of the first book of my writing career, and then I play on facebook all day because I can't find the perfect transition into what I need to say next. Because what if this story that is so beautiful and original and alive in my head falls flat because oh I don't know...I've never written a book before?

I need to be nice to me. Because expecting to change the world right this very instant, expecting to have a pullitzer winning novel by the end of the first chapter in the very first draft ever is getting me precisely squat.

....ugh..anyway. I gotta go see a cup of tea about Chapter 2.


(also..sorry there are no pictures lately. my internet disagrees.)

start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start.

It all started with a song about a star. A kind sleepy melody and a simple lyrics, the burbled up from a heavy, tired chest in the bunk bed next to me. My daddy wrote that song for a girl who broke his heart with her broken heart. It changed everything.

Because of what she did to him, and because of the only way he knew to tell it, the world held the soft glow of love and I could sleep at night. Words and I have had a closer relationship than I've had with any other living thing. Since the beginning of my always, they and I have been able to shape one another, and so I have chosen to use them. They will be my life's work. We will tell the stories that need to be told. This is where today's little conundrum pops up.

I chose to start my freelance writing career today. Make a portfolio, pick intense amounts of projects to send bids for, gather my reccomendations and become a writer, or something like that. So it's four thirty in the afternoon and i'm still staring at my computer. Nothing has happened, so I did what any sensible person will do, I began to complain to my friend Paul. This is how it went.

"I hate newton"
"Isaac?"
"No, fig. Yes, Isaac."
"But why?"
"Because objects at rest suck, and I'm not doing very well with finding a force in myself to make it go."
"Ah, but Newton did something nice for you too"
"Pfff."
"An object in motion will stay in motion."

Needless to say, Rachel was chastised and so much humble pie eaten that I in fact felt the need to unbutton my pants. So half dressed and needing to feel righteous in my frustration one more time, I went looking for sagelike advice from Google. I typed in "beginnings." Galileo was pretty useless, Lao Tsu kept saying the same thing over and over and over and over again, Rainer Maria Rilke, who I would typically side with over nearly anyone else had a fabulous idea;
"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning." but no procedural advice on how one actually gets around a beginning, because no matter where you think you are starting, you still have to start. The whole concept became a distracting tautological monstrosity. My brain in it's desperation to procrastinate fled to a land of inanimate "I am that I am" logic, and it was Moses and the stinkin burning bush all over again. I had to take a coffee break, it was pretty dreadful.

I was truly beginning to run out of steam. I seem to do that very easily about writing, because it may very well be the love of my life, and like any adolescent with a crush, I'm pretty sure I'm not good enough for it. The end of the quotes on beginnings was nearing, and the fickle tickleof inspiration was still far far far away. Then I found this: “I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards.” This quote more than any other touched me, but it still wasn't enough to make me commit the violent crime of beginning. What came after it was. There was that beautiful elipses and then the words Alberto Salazar, Sprinter. Inone word thinkexist.com told me exactly what he had started, and how many thousands of times he had to begin. If he hadn't, he'd have been Alberto Salazar, Stander. Alberto Salazar, Coward. Alberto Salazar, Spectator. Maybe there woudln't be any descriptor, maybe no one would ever know his words.

I've done everything I could today, except start. Which means I'm going to have to spend tomorrow and the next day and the next day coiled in my cowardly starting position. I'll waste the beautiful potential of all that kinetic energy as precious seconds tick by, and both what I want and the starting line sit exactly where they are, waiting for me to decide if I'm going to be a revolutionary or a receptionist. Starting lines don't make up their minds to get the heck out of your way very often, so I suppose I should get cracking on that descriptor, because if one sweet song from my daddy can change my whole life, imagine what could happen with a whole life of words.

-- Rachel Baxa, Writer. :)

forkforkforkforkfork

the sad truth is this: I have not written in almost two months. Whoa. I have written nothing, absolutely nothing. I haven't been able to complete a goodbye email, a scrap of poetry, or even a grocery list in many moons.

I've been listening.

Have you ever said a word over and over again until it was nonsense? Try it. Fork. Fork. Fork. Forkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkforkfork. It's hardly gibberish, it's worse because it's the same meaningless nonsense Mork and Mindy blabber, even to the insane and alien. Suddenly, a real thought is forced by relentless echo into redundant silliness. I've been listening to my thoughts become blather.

They had significance, once upon a dream. But in my silence they have circled and swum inside my head and through their dizzy dancing have been reduced to a hazy din as appealing and distracting as ceaseless buzzing of a tired fluorescent lightbulb. Not good for productivity or a glowing complexion.

I've done to my poor thoughts what constant fifth-grader repetition does to the word fork. By refusing the object it's purpose I've reduced it from a useful utensil to onomatopoeic balderdash. Suddenly, all I'm left with is a sound, an echo, a song, a game of no skill at all. Over the past couple of months I've gotten good at this game. TV, sleep, easy books, the same songs over and over again, and always that nauseating buzz of what I know melting away into what I knew.

I have been without a certain depth of conscience and consideration that makes me a person I could delight in being. Keeping confined to my own section of the Universe as I know it, I have reached out for very little, taken very few chances and never once allowed my own reason to get a word in edgewise. Being back home in the naked Northeastern Colorado landscape hasn't solved all my problems, but out that window under a sparkling layer of disappearing snow, is a cracking parched land that has finally, when I made myself look, reminded me of how untrue I've been to the girl i strove so desperately to hew from that exhausted soil.

All this time, I've been mistaking the alarm of my disloyalty for a petty migraine. A call to the truth about myself has been lurking in the drone I've learned to tune out, waiting for it's moment to remind me of the voice and depth I owe to my life. So that sucks. Wasted time makes me angry.

Fork.