Category: Uncategorized

What I did in 2015

So, I moved to Seattle.  All the good-byes and the lasts and the crying has culminated into me being here, after an early and restless flight.  I’ll stay with a friend tonight and sign my lease tomorrow, when, winter gods willing, my Minnesota things will arrive and we will fill the unfamiliar with familiar, the empty spaces with the objects that make this permanent.  Or, at least, that would make it another pain in the ass bundle of logistics and angst to shuffle back home.

All of this sounds very dramatic.  And, I’ll admit, in my head it is.  I’m a sucker for a good wallow from a good tragedy.  That the tragedy is mine gives me more to sink into literarily.  But it’s also just plain hard.  I mourned and exaulted over this move for three months, and I will continue to do so in the months to come.  The most important thing is that I wanted this, I longed for something new, I felt my restless feet getting itchy and I leaped because I knew I could.  That’s not to sound presumptuous, or to give myself an ego stroke.  It’s just that I’ve moved before, I’ve dealt with adversity before, and I felt that it was worth the dealing and that I had the grit to deal again.

I know New Year’s resolutions are THE WORST for a lot of people.  I’m doing a little eye-rolling writing this, too, but I have to put it here for posterity.  My resolution this year is to squeeze all the joy and novelty and fear and angst and jubilance out of this opportunity that I have.  Missing home is a natural part of it, but I can’t and won’t let it be an all-consuming part, or a crutch for why, hypothetically, I haven’t embraced the new that I have.  Happy 2015, and thank you so much for reading this little slice of my life in 2014.  Thank you for coming with me. I hope you’ll stay. I can’t promise all teh happy endings, but I can promise heavy snark laid over pragmitism, with a tiny bit of the idealist thrown in for good measure.  Basically, I just wanna make you laugh.

I met a friend for tea the other day and as we looked over the overwhelming tea list, I said, “This kinda reminds me of a place I really like in Pike’s Place Market. It’s called Market Spice. They have EVERYTHING.” It took us both a few confused sentences to realize I was talking about Seattle and hadn’t said so.

I am in between. Most of the time, my feet are here. They still walk here, and know where they’re going. My head is in Seattle, or planning Seattle; where I will live, how I will get to Whidbey Island, who I will meet, where I will eat, which parks Kiva will like, how the pattern of my footsteps will change. The rest of me is between, my emotions spiraling from almost manic excitement to a loss that makes it hard for me to breathe. Knowing what I need to do, what I will do, what I ultimately want to do, and knowing to do it will mean I leave a life that is brimming with warmth. Who knew there was so much of it in Minnesota?

I started telling strangers I was going to move to Seattle even before I started telling friends. I wanted to know how the words would feel. I was always met with envy foremost, then, “How we you leave Minnesota?” I can’t complain; it’s great to live in a place where people love to live. I felt somewhat dismissive two months ago. “Oh, well,” I said, “I’ll come visit. It’ll be fine. I’ll come in the summer!” (Har de har, the jokes just keep on coming.) Now, I feel torn in two directions; my ambition in one pocket, my mouth watering for change; my self-preservation in the other pocket, begging me, like a child, not to leave.

Part of preservation lies in my need for control. I know what I get when I stay here, year after year the same. There’s a comfort to knowing what to expect. But, there’s an excitement which lies only in being afraid and doing it anyway that I almost suspect I need in order to feel alive.

Being between means I can love the place where my feet are as fiercely as I can. It means I can anticipate the place where my head is as hopefully as I can. It means I use the stuff in the middle to make the most of the time I’ve got left and think about the time when I come back. Because I will come back, probably in the summer.

I don’t mean to brag, but I’m getting the fuck out of here this winter. It’s a good thing, because the mood that I am in today (November 12), when it is 20 degrees and there is a slip-slidey skating rink outside my door and I have no iceskates, is what you might generously describe as grumpy. More accurately, I’m annoyed and disgruntled. Just call me Crankypants Bitchface. At least my earrings are nice.

I’ve been listening to people complain about the weather ever since I moved to Minnesota, and I’ve often thought condescendingly, well, if you’re going to complain, why don’t you just move? That was when I was in college, and was only required to skip smugly across a tiny campus, much of which was linked by skyways; trundle back and forth from the grocery store every few weeks, many times by car; and drink big, foamy cups of hot chocolate in the cuddly comfort of the brightly lit student center under the pretense of “studying” but actually just talking with my friends. This isn’t meant to sound like some “good old days” college post, but the romance of Midwest winter faded faster than its fleeting summer when I graduated, started taking the bus and walking everywhere, and realized that no matter how many times I walked it in July, a route feels completely alien when it isn’t shoveled.

I seem to be getting sadder earlier every winter. I don’t think it’s a sunshine thing; the snow-glinty sun shone blindingly for days last winter, but with the temperatures as cold as they were, walking anywhere was miserable, and I had to walk everywhere. The other option is staying home, which tends to work until January (though with winter coming in November this year, who knows how much earlier that will be), when I can’t take the feeling of my empty but crowded apartment any more and I venture out anyway, with little thought to the weather or my footware. It was during one of those periods last year, when I stopped on my way home from work in the throes of a snowstorm, and drank a few beers and read something really pretentious while drifts piled up outside and the bar emptied around me. I was congratulating myself on the romance of it all, until I realized the buses weren’t running and I needed my GPS to walk home. I should have called a taxi, but my stubbornness sent me face first into the sharp, flying snow and angry wind. I thought I had something to prove, but the only thing I proved was that no, my BrailleNote was not waterproof, even in its case, and using it for only a few seconds to check the GPS could indeed mandate a three-month repair and 5000 dollars.

Around April, when it was still cold, still snowing, and I still felt like crying several times a day, I started teasing myself with the idea that I didn’t have to prove anything any more. Not to anyone, and especially not to myself.

Last spring, the full weight of the importance of writing in my life started to shape itself into something large enough that I could no longer ignore it in favor of something more “practical.” The huge relief of coming spring mixed sourly with the dread of another winter. I’m just going to say, it’s really time to do something when you realize that your enjoyment of now is being compromised by your dread of something yet to come. If I couldn’t enjoy summer because of next winter, why was I still here?

So this year, I’m leaving. At any given time, I don’t know which I crave more, constancy or change, certainty or adventure. Maybe this move will tell me which, once and for all, but probably not. It will probably just tell me whether I enjoy a rainy winter more or less than a snowy one. And in the meantime, Crankypants Bitchface and her earrings will still be around until January. Better not tell me to “smile, baby” if you aren’t expecting me to throw snowballs at you. Or, if you’re outside my apartment, iceballs. Don’t say I never warned you.

Sometimes you go out when you shouldn’t
You walk streets you’re not sure you should walk
The maps are there, but shaky
Your head is there, but shaky.
And you walk without knowing the path or the cracks
but you have to make it look like you do.
All you have is your mind and your faith in it.
“I hope this is right” will move your feet for miles
You don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re doing it.

It doesn’t matter that you want to hesitate
that your insides are a squishy mass of fear and uncertainty
and that your back is tense with the effort of listening for footsteps behind you
they’ll know you’re lost the closer they come.
So you don’t let them know
you walk steadfast, straight ahead, chin fixed and determined
and you cross the tricky traffic
sometimes without waiting to find its pattern
because you spend so much time in life
waiting
for a word of conviction, for a break from the cold,
for a love without restriction.
So you take your chances with the traffic
and soon you almost feel like it won’t hurt
adrenaline high, highway high, traveling high
across Rena, Coolidge, Franklin, Harvard
names that mean nothing and everything
because words and cold and love are flighty
but street names are true until they’re not
and then you’re lost until you’re not
and you’re scared until you’re not.
You’d think someday it would get easier
but then you’d also think that someday, it would stop being so damn fun
And even though you’d think so,
neither has happened yet
for me.

I’ve written answers to questions I assume people have wanted to ask me in the past, or questions that people have actually asked me. Today I want to ask you questions, dear reader. No big preamble this time, I just give you ten things I’ve always wanted to ask a sighted person.

1. How can you tell from someone’s back who that person is? Are things like hair and shoulders and walking feet that distinctly personal?
2. Do you ever consciously know what street you’re on when you’re walking? Or do you just go by what looks familiar? (Third option: do I always just ask for directions from people who have to go run ahead to look at the street sign? Or look it up on their phone?)
3. You can tell me all you want about what the sun looks like when it’s setting, or how bright the moon is, but how do those things make you FEEL?
4. How do you get anything done in a day when there seemS to be just so much stuff to read?
5. How do you communicate complex, intricate messages with someone all the way across the room?
6. When you see a person with a disability, do you see other things?
7. What is the single best thing you’ve ever looked at in your life? Or the top five things? Oh, hell, what’s one really good thing you’ve looked at in the past few days? Why was it so amazing?
8. When there are so many people in the world who don’t or won’t or can’t, why did you decide to talk to me?
9. Be honest, do you REALLY know the difference between fire engine red and cadmium?
10. If I could see for just one day, or even just one hour, what should I look at first?

What would you do
if you weren’t afraid of making messes?
Would you have that shot you thought would do you in
(espresso or alcohol, your call)
Would you see how it felt
to have that hard conversation
if you knew the words would come cleanly off your tongue
and all you’d have left was the reaction?
Would you walk a little faster, tip your face a little higher
Would you go ahead and make that big mistake
on purpose?
Would you hold my hand when it mattered?
Would you tell everyone you were in love?
If I could make a mess, I would be freer
I would certainly be a believer
in words like “long-term” and “change.”
And contrast.
I would run until I couldn’t think,
and not feel forced to tell you why.
Because messes are really just arbitrary things
One person’s mess is another’s joy in being
and whoever judges one’s mess is wishing they’d made it first.
If Life makes a mess of me
If I make a mess of Life
I lived
I lived
I lived

“Let this be a warning,
said the magpie to the morning,
don’t let this fading summer pass you by.”

Summer is leaving a sticky sheen as it tries to hold on, cotton candy colors and high grass smooshed into the mud around the lakes. They smell sweet with rotted wood, weeds, and whatever else I’m too squeamish to think about clogging their once-clear water. It’s time to relinquish, summer. Summer doesn’t want to, but it’s only ever had a tenuous grasp on its own immortality. So, I walk the heat-heavy lake paths with light feet, knowing that it should all be over soon.

“Trick of the light, turn of the tide”
Winter is for staying home, summer is for playing; spring is for simply breathing promising air, and autumn is for coming together. We gather around tables, around fires, in backyards, in droves hauling the farmers’ market harvest. My walk is brisker, my lungs feel revived. I want to surround myself with everyone I love or kind of like or didn’t really like at first but just might if there’s enough rum-soaked hot cider in my belly. From my desire to gather close and from my feelings of cradling abundance, my compassion blooms riotously.

“The same things look different, it’s the end of the summer,
the end of the summer, when you move to another place”
Every year, I feel restless in September. I sense the season’s change and I sense another closing of another year. I fight the urge to just pack it all up and go, with no plan or expectation, to a warmer place where I can over-winter with grace. I relish the idea of leaving obligations, of finding new ones and new things and new people who also have restless roots. I wonder how many more years I will be in this place. I wonder if I’ve even grown at all in the past year, and what it would take to help me feel as if I’d accomplished the living of a full life.

“When the swallows fell from the eaves,
and the gulls from the spires,
the starlings, in millions,
would feed on the ground where they lie.”
MY compassion has turned to grief. There was a moment where they both played for my attention, and now only my grief is left.
It got cold suddenly, and I was unprepared. I stood outside, shivering, I hadn’t dressed well, my head was aching in protest and the insipid winter drip started sneakily at the tip of my nose. My breath felt like steam. My fingertips like they were separate from my warm core. I worried about the birds. I went home alone and tried to cry, but couldn’t. I wanted someone with me, but the work to get them there seemed disproportionate to how much I wanted it. I thought about souls, and if we are slowly distancing ourselves from them. I wondered if the twilight of the soul seems imminent not just to me this time of year, and the connection between the living and the dead so intimate. My grief held and comforted me. Did I really need anyone else?

“But I miss you, most of all,
my darling,
when autumn leaves start to fall.”
The thing I remember the most about autumn in Granada is chestnuts. Growing up, my only familiarity with them was that they were always roasting over that open fire in the Christmas song with the jackfrost and the tiny tots with glowing eyes. Chestnuts seemed like a weird mystical fairy fruit that no one actually ever ate. I had never smelled chestnuts before, and have never smelled them since, but I’m sure if I ever do, in an evocative instant I will be right back there with the pigeons wheeling around my head, the throngs of people in a hurry to get somewhere to not be in a hurry, and the burnt-sugar roasted-meat smell of chestnuts. Much softer than a peanut or almond, not much crunch between the teeth, they were often too hot to eat but I ate them anyway and burned the roof of my mouth. One day, I bought Laura, a girl who volunteered in one of my classes, a little bag as she walked me to the bus stop in the smoky November air. I had a wistful little crush on her. She, having grown up in Spain, but also being by nature incredibly gracious, was not as impressed by the chestnut gift as I had hoped.
I’ll be perfectly honest here, I’m not sure if I liked the chestnuts that much, or just the idea of the chestnuts. The smoke filling the air, the crackle, the warm paper parcel clutched in my hand, the promise of going “home” and resting my feet on the warm brasero all through dinner. That’s what autumn was for me in Granada, with its mountains and palm trees and the medieval Alhambra watching over its modern city. Autumn is everywhere, no matter where.

…
Song Lyrics Bibliography
“”Magpie to the Morning” Neko Case
“October” Tung
“The End of the Summer” Dar Williams
“Rooks” Shearwater
“Autumn Leaves” Eva Cassidy (and many, many others, but hers is my favorite)

Please enjoy this post from my old 2011 blog. Call it Throw Back Thursday, if you will. Next week, when I am not busy with other things, I promise a shiny new blog post. Well, at any rate, new. Shiny is subjective.

If I had a dollar for the number of times someone has told me that I am “brave”,
then my ongoing unemployment would hardly matter, at least monitarily speaking. To
hear others talk, I’ve been brave my whole freaking life. I was brave for crossing
the monkey bars when I was five, for dancing high on the risers in show choir, for moving
out of my parents’ house after graduation, for getting my bearings and traveling
independently in Spain, for teaching high school students “by myself”, for trusting
people every day. Hell, at this point I should be brave just for breathing, right?
But I’m going to tell you something that many people with disabilities don’t want their able-bodied peers to know. That is, I’m
one of the scaredest people ever. I’m scared to try, scared to fail, scared of the
dark, of grasshoppers, of being alone. Sometimes I’m scared of my blindness and the
vulnerability it can create in my day-to-day life. Sometimes, the only thing that
goes through my head when I’m doing something new is, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m
afraid.”
The truth is, I think it’s the fear that is partly responsible for my ability to,
if not conquer challenges, then at least look them in the face. Part of my fear is
of having regrets, and that I will use my blindness as a crutch to explain why I
didn’t try. Blindness is something to be embraced, but not something to lean on.
Most likely, that fear turns into the encouragement that drives me to walk out of
my house every day.
In full disclosure, I have had a period of my life in which I didn’t leave the safety
of my home unless I absolutely had to. The anxiety of something happening beyond
my control, either in a social situation or one in which I was helpless and alone
and outside my comfort zone, paralyzed me with anxiety. I second-guessed and doubted
myself. It was probably one of the hardest times of my life, but now that I’m on
the other side of it, my determination to live fully and joyfully has been further
cemented.
Maybe bravery comes with the admission of fear, and maybe we are all brave in our
own way. Or, maybe I’m just trying miserably to explain something about myself that
is so contradictory and temperamental that it’s hard to put into words. In any case,
I may as well use this space and this overly serious post to say thank you to everyone
who has bravely and unabashedly supported me and all of my fearfulness. You know
who you are.

Based Blatantly on the prose poem, “If My Father Were to Ask” by S. C. Hahn
If another woman were to ask, “What’s a pole dancer?”
I would take the word “dance” and fling it far enough away
that I wouldn’t be tied to its connotations of grace and beauty.
I would replace it with a word like “explorer” or “learner”
or ditch the whole adjective-noun sequence all together and just say “poler.”
Two syllables to describe
the strength of my arms as I hang on their reliance
the muscles that tighten in my legs as I climb up and up
the slight swoop in my belly when I realize
I must make a sweaty-handed, power-drill-screechy descent back to the ground
I must always pay a small price for being up so high.
I would say that
the pole gives me an anchor
a place from which to spin out
a place to always come back to and recover.
Being a poler doesn’t make me sexier than you.
Or better in bed
or more willing to undress.
It doesn’t make me cheap or brave or slutty or badass
(if I am those things, I was them before)
It does make me feel free
and really,
that’s all you need to know.

The biggest weakness in my writing is my constant need to apologize for the things I say. There are many things to blame for this: my midwestern upbringing, my sorry-slinging genetics, my constantly crashing into things and people, my somewhat awkward personality. The fact that I’m a little weird, a little quirky, a little unstable, and a lot nontraditional. Having a disability means society, as a collective mass, takes me less seriously. Plus, I don’t have a husband, babies, or a career tragectery, the things which traditionally are expected of a woman who is almost 30. That, apparently, makes it harder to take me seriously. I like to be alone, and extroverted society thinks I should be with people. I like to be quiet, and because I’m not talking, society thinks I have nothing to say. And for that I so often apologize.

When I first started this blog, I was very conscious of my readership. I desperately didn’t want to offend anyone with what I had to say, particularly the people I love the best and who may have done some of the well-meaning but demeaning things I held up as examples of disability faux pas. I got tired of writing disclaimers, but I felt there was no way around them. Reading back over old blog entries (from the blog I started three years ago which lives in a different Internet location), I find some of the writing simpering and weak. The thing is, I am slowly beginning to recognize the strength in what I WANT to say, and more quickly beginning to detest the weakness disguised as apology in my words.

Apologies are crutches I use when I feel I’m being judged. When I apologize to a stranger who has asked me an awkward question that I won’t answer, like, “How much can you see?”, what I’m really sorry about is that I have to have this conversation AGAIN; that yet another person thinks they’re entitled to personal information about me when they don’t even know my name, information that could be used to their advantage if they were so inclined. I’m apologizing because I’m sorry for that person, that they seem oblivious, that I am in this situation, that I’m not cocooned in my apartment under a fuzzy blanket reading something intriguing. I’m not at all sorry for not answering the question. I’m most sorry that I’m being asked.

(This apologizing runs so deep that upon reading over that last paragraph, I just had an overwhelming urge to clarify it, to smooth the top and shape it just so, so that no one would think I was personally attacking them. To clarify what types of questions I actually don’t mind answering. To “educate” you on the difference between an appropriate stranger enquiry and an inappropriate one. But I don’t want to always educate, and I am tired of apologizing, and so I’m not going to tell you anything. And, I’ve got faith in you. You can figure it out.)

If I can’t stop my traitorous, “I’m sorry” mouth in my every day life, I’d like to stop it in my writing. As a reader, going back and slogging through the sorrys is tedious and makes my writing feel less. It might be “less” by literary standards, but it is mine and I want to say what I need to say without shame, compulsion for clarification, or concern for upholding some veneer of politeness. I’m who I am, and I’m not sorry.