There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love...”

I decided to break the seal on a box of notebooks I wrote when I was in my early 20s (that I had packed and taped up in 1996). Reading my 22-year-old self fervently swear that she’ll never fall in love again makes me feel sad, mostly because she didn’t. Almost, but not really.

At 22, I was intensely passionate about many things—not eating red meat (the hormones! The red dye!), writing, feminism, literature (I had just discovered Anais Nin and Henry Miller, if that tells you anything), and love (again, the hormones!). I believed everyone had a soul mate just waiting for them out there in the world, and it was up to me to find him. Over a five year period, I recorded the turbulence of my love life in painstaking detail on page after page. I wrote about infatuations, crushes, obsessions, attractions, and love. Every time, it was the “real thing.” And every time, passion became my poison.

If these notebooks are an accurate depiction of what my I knew then, I can say I have learned a few things in years since. I no longer believe that everyone has one soul mate; I think we have many, and that people are drawn together by fate and circumstance. I no longer believe that such thing as an easy relationship exists or that the level of difficulty has anything to do with love.

I’ve also learned how to protect myself. After putting the pieces of a broken heart haphazardly back together time after time, I decided that spending the rest of my life shielding a heart of glass wouldn’t be a wise move. And I stopped letting other people in. 

Suppose love came knocking on your door. Would you turn it away with a “sorry, all stocked up on that here?” Pretend like you weren’t home? Chase it down the street with a baseball bat? Or would you open the door, smile, and thank it for being so punctual?

What I did was design a complicated mess of a barricade, complete with traps, skill tests, checklists, pulleys, ropes and, I think at one point, even a moat. If someone wanted in, he’d have to run the gauntlet, suffer the proving ground, navigate the emotional land mines, and pass every test. Should he make it through unscathed, I’d make certain he was sorry he even tried.

What I got for my efforts was a series of superficial relationships that never developed any depth or longevity. Or intensity. Or passion. And when they ended, I felt no more than a twinge of regret…a far cry from the anguish I experienced over breakups in my twenties. My thirties were not as melodramatic, but I sacrificed passion for peace.

I am not certain what I expected to find by reading the angst-ridden messages from my 22-year-old self. I hoped to discover that I am better off now than I was then, but I don’t think that’s true. I do mean it when I say I am happy being single, but I’m beginning to understand exactly what I’m missing out on by protecting myself so carefully. Without heartbreak, love and passion are watered-down versions of the real thing. Until now, I didn’t even realize that I missed the full-strength version.

There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love.” At its core is an element of letting go, even if you know there is turbulence ahead, that you’re signing up for an emotional roller coaster ride, and that it might end in tears. The only thing gained by crawling into your shell is, well, a really comfortable shell.

I’ll have to find a happy medium between being head over heels and in over my head if I want to experience the kind of intense emotion the 22-year-old me knew all too well. As for the happy ending, just consider me “in production”—I know that this movie won’t have an ending until I find a way to take heart instead of losing it.

An imaginary conversation with Elizabeth Wurtzel...

I "get" difficult women. I know a lot of them. I've worked for some and am related to several. I am one. I appreciate the stick-to-her-guns fuck you mentality of not caring (at least, appearing not to care) about what people think about you/her/us.

I read Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir, Prozac Nation, when it came out. I was in college. It spoke to me. I even saw the movie. It didn't speak to me. In the late 90s, I (still in college) read Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. You probably heard me cheering about it at some point. I read her second memoir, this one on addiction, a few years ago. I don't remember a lot about it, but I know I identified on some level. I've never met Lizzie (but in my mind I call her Lizzie because I follow her on Twitter and that's what she calls herself and I think if we met in person she'd be cool about it), but in the past couple of years - since she's popped up again writing pieces for The Guardian and New York Magazine - I've been paying a little more attention. She seemed to drop off pop culture's radar for a bit, and I had the sense that she had gone through something similar to my own (hate to call it mid-life because I know I'll live past 80) crisis. A loss of voice. And these pieces, varied as they were, attempts to find her voice again. Kind of like I've been doing for a while now. Except a lot more public. And with comments. On the internet. It feels like an odd question to ask about someone who wrote a book in praise of difficult women, but I also wondered why all the hating on Lizzie?

She's a little bit older than I am, but I consider her a sort of contemporary. And when I read her most recent piece in The Atlantic, "I Refuse to be a Grownup," I promised myself I wouldn't read the comments. Then I read the comments, or the first 20 or so. I wished I knew her in real life so I could tell her that she's doing the right thing, this writing she's doing to get her voice back. And this is the most "back" I've seen her since the 90s.

If you know me personally, you probably know that I rehearse conversations in my head (and come on, you do too, right?). On my way home from work, during that cursed/blessed worst Austin traffic drive time, I had one with Lizzie. It went something like this:

Me: Hey, so good on you for the Atlantic piece. I hope you didn't read the comments.
Lizzie: (leaves her sunglasses on, which is fine because I am kind of the sophomore to her senior in this scenario) Nope.
Me: I mean, I don't know who has time...but the one from the "TL:DR what's the point?" guy...he didn't even read...
Lizzie: I don't read the comments. I don't care what people think.
Me: Hey, that's really great...so, you of you. There was that one "psychologist" who comment-diagnosed you with narcissistic personality disorder and that isn't even a thing anymore; it's not even in the latest DSM...
Lizzie: (icy silence)
Me: I wanted to tell you that I get it. I hate that you have to see criticism all over the freaking internet when you're just being honest, I mean who isn't a narcissist? What's wrong with not wanting to grow up? For those of us who choose not to get married, not to have kids, to remain emotionally...um, I want to say... immature? Why do people care so much?
Lizzie: I don't. So I wouldn't know.
Me: I wanted to say that I'm on your side. Write all the crazy. Just write. Let the haters hate and do it anyway, even if it's just for lines like "I wish people were judging each other a great deal more, and more carefully, but they are not. Knowing this, I have no trouble being myself. It works well. I will die screaming." BECAUSE ME TOO, LIZZIE, ME TOO.
Lizzie: Calm down. (exhales vapor from her e-cig)
Me: OK, so I'll let you go, but just one more...
Lizzie: No.
Me: DidyoutotallyfreakoutthatChristinaRicciplayedyouinthemoviebecauseherforeheadOMGherforehead...
Lizzie: No.

And that was it. She probably wouldn't like me in person. Nor should she. I wanted to tell her about that one time I was on Prozac because my best friend died when I was 23 but it didn't work and how my mom is a therapist and told me the worst thing with mental health issues is to "be in the system" so I always made sure I saw private shrinks, off insurance, sometimes under assumed names, and I think talk therapy is overrated and that most people think I'm younger than I really am too because I don't really have responsibilities, but I do have one cat and one dog just like she does but the cat has hated me for 14 years now and also sometimes I am ridiculous too. When people grossly underestimate my age, I assume it's not based on my appearance, but on my behavior. I don't behave like a person who has the weight of other people's problems on top of my own, rather, I behave like a person who thinks her problems are the only important ones. And, BAM!, right back to narcissism.

Hate her or don't. Hate me or don't. I have had worry. I have had grief. I have had despair. None of these things permanently damaged me. Not even a line on my forehead (yet, but totally fine when it does happen, because it will). So to the critics, to the commenters and trolls, to anyone who cannot follow her stream of consciousness while she reaches for the voice she might think she lost by detouring to law school and relationships and doing things other than writing - pay attention. You're not. She is. And she says it better than I:

"Nothing is more bracing than not being concerned about what other people think. I have no idea why anyone cares. Trust me: No one is looking. I know: I am looking. People are self-involved."

p.s. If you don't know who Elizabeth Wurtzel is or if you were in a coma in the 90s, here are all the Tumblr posts in the world tagged with her name. Enjoy.

On diving into the wreck...and climbing out of it

I've loved the poetry of Adrienne Rich since high school. I discovered her work around the same time as Plath and Sexton and read her poems with the same morbid fascination (and wondering how she survived when the other two did not). When I heard the news of Rich's death in March of this year, it struck me again, how she lived on to write the obits of moody colleagues suffering the same dark disease, diving over and over into the depths, making it farther and longer each time, being the only one who knew how to rise again. She published her last work just a year before her death.

In my own writing, I always knew when it was good. It was good when it hurt, when it felt like hell. I wallow in nostalgia, dipping down and then rising again to find bleak humor in failure, in embarrassment, in broken hearts. Diving into the wreck for material, surfacing to turn words into paragraphs into essays. I've carried a copy of Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck" with me for years. It's what I think of every time I have to do the work of dredging up my own past, and often what I share with writers with whom I work when they are struggling over and over to plumb their own depths. The wreck is always there, I tell them. But you don't have to live there. You don't have to drown.

Rich meant something different, we learned in Lit 101. It's about patriarchy, gender politics, feminine bondage. Says the professor, but I choose to believe that it's a metaphor for returning to our own crime scenes, picking over the husk of memory to find the gold, taking care not to run out of oxygen and become part of the wreck. You can decide for yourself.

Diving Into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

It has been a struggle for the past few years, trying to find my voice again, wondering if it was gone forever. I spent more time than I should have diving into that wreck, deeper than I had gone before. I set up house there for a while. I sank to the bottom and let the water fill my lungs and take over. I am tearful as I write this, remembering how hard it was to find it and stay whole, the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck.

I wanted to write about the damage that has been done. The evidence of damage. I want to write about what surrender felt like. It was easy to let go. It was easy to live down there, so much harder to climb out. And besides, you breathe differently down here. 

But I did. Climb out. And I find it harder every day to go back. By cowardice or courage. I still know the way down. The ladder is always there. I try to stick close to the surface, skimming the water, not allowing myself to sink this time. We know what it is for, we who have used it.

Inspiration here, there, everywhere...

While I love my Kindle (the instant gratification got me), I'm still on the fence about buying books. When I moved to Austin, I culled my five bookshelves down to one bookshelf full of favorites and first editions. I love to run my hands along the spines, turning them over in my hands, flipping through paper pages and reading my notes in the margins (yes, I like to underline things and write in my books). Sure, I can keep thousands at my fingertips with my Kindle Fire, but I cannot bring myself to get rid of these last shelves, these paper memories, these literary giants that sit side-by-side in tidy rows. Vonnegut lives here. Hemingway lives here. O'Connor lives and lives and lives again.

I stumbled across this Etsy shop recently and fell in love with the inspired illustrations with quotes from literary greats. I want to buy them all, hang them so they can be seen from where I work most often (living room, couch, laptop).

These two are my favorites, but it was so hard to choose. F. Scott Fitzgerald makes my heart beat faster. T.S. Eliot makes me want to spill all of my secrets. Jane Austen makes me want to write letters that I'll never send.

I went to Barnes & Noble earlier this week with a friend and we ended up sitting on the floor of an aisle in fiction, leafing through paperbacks (even as we looked up e-books on our phones), pulling books from the shelves based on covers alone, putting our faces close to the open pages and inhaling the paper and ink and wondering if we're going to be the last generation who knows what book stores smell like. Will we someday try to describe it to younger people, our reading glasses perched on noses twitching as we struggle to bring the sense memories back, wishing we would have bottled it way back when, closing our eyes as we remember what it felt like to turn the paper pages? I think yes. We writers love our books. We writers are going to have to be curators of paper museums, preservationists of ink smudges, storytellers of the printed word.

A playlist for my shoes...

Boots, actually. I got my first pair of Doc Martens in high school (oxblood, laces half done) and wore the hell out of them until I was out of college. It was the 90s. We watched Singles and dreamed of moving to Seattle or New York. We loved Nirvana and Mudhoney and L7 and Soundgarden and Sleater-Kinney. We got our noses pierced. We dyed our hair Tori Amos red. We got tattoos. My Doc Marten boots took me all over campus, waded through standing room only crowds at the Music Farm (the old and new one), drank vodka cranberries at AC's (the old and new one), ground peanut shells to dust on the floor of that shitty little club off of market street where we first saw Billy Pilgrim, stood so close to the stage at a Ramones concert that we're still a little deaf in one ear, sat outside the door during hurricane season after hurricane season, fell in love, fell out of love, smoked cigars and sang the blues at that basement club in Savannah, fell in love again and again and one more time after that. And then we grew up. We lost track of our Docs. They ended up with a friend or at Goodwill or left behind in that great second floor apartment on Alexander Street with all of those windows and hardwood floors and a fireplace in the living room and one in the bedroom.

These new boots are not like my old boots, even though they're the classic 1460s. They're black, for one (oxblood is hard to come by these days). I'm not ready to wear them to work, but I wear them almost all the time when I'm not working. They feel like the old ones, but don't make me feel like the old ones. I know the 90s are long over and I'm not sure I could fall in love again, at least, not so hard again. I can feel them pulling, though. They want to go see We Are Augustines next month at Antone's. They whisper, "listen sister, you live in Austin now and there is so, so much you haven't seen and heard." So I made a 90s nostalgia playlist for both of us (links are to individual Youtube videos but you can get the whole thing here).

Mudhoney, "Touch Me I'm Sick"
L7, "Pretend We're Dead"
Concrete Blonde, "Joey"
Nirvana, "Lithium"
Violent Femmes, "Good Feeling"
Mazzy Star, "Fade Into You"
Mother Love Bone, "Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns"
Tori Amos, "Crucify"
Nine Inch Nails, "Closer"
Hole, "Asking For It"
Porno for Pyros, "Meija"
Seven Mary Three, "Water's Edge"

There are things we can let go of and things that become ingrained. My hair isn't quite so red. I wear my nose stud when I remember to put it in. I'm still getting tattooed. My heart is healing. I know it's OK to admit it when I'm scared. I'm just as self-involved. I admit that now too. The 23-year-old me has been painted over so many times it feels like her windows will never open again. But she's there. She doesn't want to wear torn jeans and plaid flannel, but she loves the shit out of our new boots. We can hear the music.

"In one more hour I will be gone
In one more hour I'll leave this room
The dress you wore, the pretty shoes
Are things I left behind for you." (Sleater-Kinney, "One More Hour")

Sometimes you have to go looking for it....

There have been a few times in the past couple of years when I've tried to remember the last time I felt happy and couldn't do it. It makes me sad just to say that, to say that I had no memory of those moments when you stop and suddenly realize, "I am happy." I could say I was surviving, that I was getting by, that I was making it through the day, that I was productive, that I carried on, that I kept my chin up...but happy?

A few weeks ago I was talking to my BFF from back home and recalling going home for the holidays, how wonderful it felt to be with my family and friends, how great I slept in my mom's guest room, how loved I felt. And when I returned home, after a two-day drive, to my roommate packing up to stay the night at her daughter's house (it was New Year's Eve) and how I had to hold back shrieks of pure joy that I was going to have the house to myself and a quiet night and a shower and clean sheets and my cat and my dog curled up in my warm bed...and I realized it was JULY and the last time I could remember being happy was in fucking JANUARY (well, technically December 31). It made me sad, but before the pity could kick in, I took a giant step back and asked myself, "have you been looking?"

I hadn't. I'd been so consumed with surviving that I was failing to thrive. In pediatric medicine, this is something infants can die from: failure to thrive. It can also be applied to adults, mostly geriatric. I wondered when I became such a grown up that I forgot to look for the joy. One doesn't need freedom from worry to be happy - or money, or the perfect job, or any job, or confidence, or all of the other things on my crazy mental checklist that I waited for so I could finally thrive again.

Granted, in the past couple of months I have been able to cross a few things off that list. I have a roommate to take some of the pressure of the bills off and a new job that I really like, which means a regular paycheck every two weeks. But I was still holding back, still denying myself, still insisting on frugality, refusing to spend a penny on anything I deemed "unnecessary."

Last Saturday, I went to lunch with the roommate and a friend and we stopped at a big box store afterward so the roommate could return something. I found myself wandering the school supplies aisles with my friend, exclaiming over pencil cases and notebooks and gel pens. I had a wonderful sense memory smelling a box of crayons. I remembered that the best thing about the new school year when I was a kid was the new school supplies: a brand new notebook, pens, pencils, a binder (or if I was lucky, a Trapper Keeper, pink - and damn, do they make cooler ones now), paper and dividers and pencil cases. And the waxy smell of crayons.

Standing there, in the middle of rows and rows of Hello Kitty notebooks and pencil sharpeners and multi-packs of pens and wide-ruled filler paper, I realized this was me being happy. Feeling joy. Remembering the possibilities that came with a new school year. Thinking about the possibilities that lie ahead of me now. And I bought that box of crayons. Even if I never use them, I am going to keep them on my desk at home to remind me of what possibility really feels like. Possibility smells like a new box of crayons.

On friendship, falling away and the opposite of falling away...

Listening to iTunes yesterday on random mode, this song came up more than once in the shuffle. I think we all have strong sense memories associated with music, and this particular album (Beth Hart's "Singing for my Supper") reminded me of a road trip with a friend to visit another friend more than 10 years ago. The memory was so vivid...I could picture the CD I burned (it was pre-iPod), that my hair was platinum blonde, my vintage pink suitcase, the misty rain on the windshield, and singing along to the album at the top of our lungs. And I had one of those "what ever happened to?" moments.



I don't know where this person is or what she's doing now, because we're no longer friends, for a variety of reasons, most of which I cannot remember. It wasn't sudden; it happened over a long period of time of change in my life during which I decided I could no longer devote so much energy spending time around people who emotionally drained me. I remember several conversations and the difficulty I had confronting this person, her anger, her refusal to accept my wanting out of the friendship, and finally falling away gradually. As far as the friend we were going to visit, we had a very different falling out that lasted many years and only recently reconnected as acquaintances, which I think we're both more comfortable with, particularly since our falling out centered around boundaries.

A few years ago, I read a book called The Friend Who Got Away, a collection of stories about the end of friendships. There was one story in particular (I can't remember the author's name offhand) about "breaking up" with a friend. It made me wish I had the book a few years earlier. I knew I had toxic relationships in my life; I was just very bad at ending them. I let some go on much longer than they should have, until it was so bad I started avoiding phone calls or just blew up. It would have been a lot easier to sit down face-to-face and have the "it's not you, it's me" conversation and be honest about it. I have since learned that this conflict isn't a bad thing, but have also gotten a lot better about choosing the friends I do have. In my 20s, I picked friends who were as self-absorbed as I was. When I began to grow out of it, I couldn't maintain those friendships.

I've also been on the other side. In hindsight, I was the toxic one. In hindsight, the friendship was one sided, the effort to maintain it was all mine, and the friend was too kind or too cowardly to sever our bond. They died their slow deaths and I'm a lot more careful now to pay attention to the signs and signals. And then there are the friendships I may have overestimated, but didn't realize it until I was no longer in a position to "do" for them, turned around, and they were gone.

There are so many different variations and levels of friendship. I am so grateful for the friends I have in my life and lucky that these friendships have survived ups and downs and distances. I'm grateful for the opposite of falling away.

Case 1: The best friend. I met my current best friend during our first year of college and we were inseparable. About six years into our friendship, we had an awful falling out, an argument that escalated via email (never do this), and didn't speak for four years. And after that four years, it was she that reached out to me. I was hesitant at first, still feeling the burn of what had been said - despite the fact that four years had passed - but she persisted. And I'm eternally grateful that she did. More than 10 years later, we are still as close as ever. Closer, in fact, and we both agree that our four-year "separation" made us so. I know she'll always be in my life, that she's the first person I call when I have a good day or a bad one, and has picked me up off of the floor more times than I can count over the past decade. I was the "best woman" in her wedding and it was the only time I had ever agreed to be a member of any wedding party, including my own sister's. She wears her heart on her sleeve and it's really big. I call this one "Mary Kathryn" and I love her.

Case 2: The instant connection. I met one of my dear friends when she walked into the newspaper where I worked and asked for an internship. In a very short period of time (and after bonding over margaritas and a game of "never have I ever"), I knew we'd always be friends. She's the kind of friend who is supportive, but also doesn't put up with my bullshit. She tells me the truth. She loves to shop as much as I do. We once went to New York together and treated the entire city like a giant mall. She squealed like a little girl when we stumbled upon a two-story TJ Maxx. I drove to Asheville for her wedding. She drove three hours to spend four days with me after surgery in early 2008, knowing that I probably wasn't going to be the easiest patient (because I CAN DO IT MYSELF and DON'T LIKE TO ASK FOR HELP). On the second day, high on Demerol, when I told her she could leave and I could take it from here, she told me to shut up and go back to sleep. I call this one "Aleigh" and I know no matter how many miles separate us, we'll always pick up right where we left off.

Case 3: The drive by. I met another dear friend when she moved to Charleston to work at the magazine I was managing. We actually became friends after her interview and before she'd officially moved. I helped her find an apartment, which was right around the corner from my house. She could see my back door from her back door. And while she only lived around the corner for two years before moving to New York for another job, we've stayed in touch and I miss her every day. She could make me laugh like no-one else. We had adventures. We could turn a shopping trip into a day of hilarity. And she's the most no-bullshit, honest, forthright person I've ever met. I'm amazed that we only spent two years in the same city and she still wants to be my friend. I call this one "Erin" and I look forward to her late night phone calls after she's had a few cocktails when we spend an hour and a half on the phone giggling our asses off. And like the "Aleigh," months can go by and we'll always pick up right where we left off.

Cases 4-25: The supportive sistergirlfriend, or the "Doretha"; the writer friend who always knows the right thing to say, or the "Angie"; the straight-talking charmer who has a pep talk for just about any occasion and who picked me up from a fetal position on the floor and gave me the kick in the pants that I needed at the time, also known as the "Charlie"; the mentor and woman whose strength I aspire to, or the "Linda"; and the rest who know who they are and what they mean to me.

I'm a lucky, lucky girl.

I gave my blog a present...

For it's 7th birthday, I gave Microfamous a gift: It's own Tumblr account. Microfamously microblogging at its best, you can see it here.

There have been times in the past few years when I thought about letting my blog go dark. I lost my voice for a little while. I didn't want to say the wrong thing. I didn't want to say what was wrong. I didn't want to be wrong.

I remember how much fun it used to be, 2004, 2005...2006 was a hoot, and how much a part of me this little site I made just for myself was. It was my insomniac friend, my "go ahead and say it anyway," my little piece of the Internet where I could share snark and silliness.

I'm keeping it. Even if and when blogs aren't cool anymore, I'm going to be like that 60 year old lady hanging on to her Curtis Mathes floor model TV for dear life because THAT'S HOW SHE LIKES TO WATCH "MURDER SHE WROTE." I like that it keeps a history of 7-plus years of my life, reminds me of where I was when, back in the days when I still had to explain to people what a "blog" was, and that it's mine. It was my gift to me and I'm going to continue to use it for rambling and longer blog posts and pictures and musings. The Tumblr site is for the days when I don't have many words left, when my words have left me. This blog is going to be my three-day weekend; Tumblr is lunch at my desk. Also? There's an app for it on my iPhone.

Waiting for a friend at a restaurant for dinner? Tumblr post.

A weekend stretching ahead with nothing on my to-do list? Blogger.

So I'll still be here but I'll be there too. I'm all over the place and there's nothing you can do about it.

Music memories...

"Good Feeling" by the Violent Femmes brought high school back in a rush of Southern Comfort, Doc Martens, thrift store sweaters, dyeing black streaks into my hair, driving to Savannah for tattoos, crushes on boys who wore ripped jeans and plaid...I haven't thought of this song in years. Usually "Blister in the Sun" or "Add It Up" take up my frontal lobe recall.



Oddly, it was a syndicated episode of "How I Met Your Mother" during which Marshall and Lily crash a prom to find their wedding band that reminded me of this song. Lily asked the band to play "their song" (and cut to flashback about their song, etc. etc.).

More downloads to add to my iTunes...

When I dream, I dream in Charleston...

Even after being in Austin for over seven months, I am often homesick. Homesickness, thankfully, isn't debilitating. But it shows up in the strangest ways.

I still love to look at photos of my house in Charleston in Wagener Terrace. Not only did I love that house and lived there for eight years, I adored the neighborhood. I have some good memories of that house. I wrote my first book in my home office in that house. I got my puppy in that house and met so many wonderful neighbors walking that little furball around the neighborhood. I trained her in the side yard. She played with her dog friends in the back yard. Someone else lives there now.



I miss azaleas. I miss Hampton Park. I miss Lulu's dog friends. I miss my family. I miss my sunroom. I miss my sweet neighbor Therese, who used to bring me the loveliest leftover dinner plates with ethnic and organic food. She once cooked me Ethiopian food simply because I mentioned I'd never tried it. I miss Carl and Donna across the street. There was something comforting on weekend mornings about watching them work in their yard or on their house. I miss my monkey, who lived a block up the street after he moved out and used to bring me fresh tomatoes from his garden. I miss Tom and Ellie and Lulu misses Nando, their Havanese - the first dog love she had at only 8 weeks old. I miss my freelancer friends I used to have lunch with at Earthfare's cafe. I miss my BFF, who used to come over and eat Chinese food from Hot Mustard with me at least once a week. I miss Doretha, Angie, Linda, Janet, Jason, Aluette, Jay (and Tater!), Sabrina, Margaret, Ida, Amy, Leigh, Lee, Misty, Archie, Colleen, and so many more.

I never really needed my GPS in Charleston, since I grew up there, but in Austin, Samantha (GPS voice) and I communicate frequently. I couldn't find my way around Austin without Samantha. But I am going to confess for the first time here: My "home" setting in my GPS is still Grove Street in Charleston. I haven't changed it.

I haven't gotten a Texas driver's license or Texas tags for my car yet. My tags don't expire until next month, and my license is good until 2011, so I figured it was OK to wait. If I get pulled over, I figured I'd just tell them I recently relocated. Something about switching tags and getting a Texas license makes it feel so permanent, and makes me feel a little like I can't go home if I wanted to RIGHT NOW. I don't, but I like having the option.

Sometimes when I dream, even now, I dream in Charleston. And sometimes I wake up and I'm surprised to be in a room I don't recognize. Where are my blush pink walls, my 1940s glass windows, my high ceilings, my hardwood floors? And then I remember: I am in Texas.

So maybe I've been dragging my feet a little bit, literally and figuratively. But next month, I'm going to have to go wherever one goes to switch tags. I will also have to have my vehicle inspected, as they do that in Texas. And get a new license at the DMV.

I'm making new friends here, new memories, and there is a strong chance that someday years from now I will look back and feel so much nostalgia for Austin that I can hardly stand it. But it's new to me still and that's not a bad thing. I know it will eventually feel like home. And I needed this change of scenery. I need to be here.

"That's only 12 job, lazy woman!"

I'm probably dating myself here, but if you remember the early 90s you might have seen Keenen Ivory Wayans' sketch comedy show "In Living Color." I was in or just out of high school and watched it every week (loved the Fly Girls...Jennifer Lopez was one and Rosie Perez did the choreography). Also, Jim Carrey (back then known as "James Carrey") was hilarious.

For some reason, I was thinking this week - as I juggled some volunteer work with some freelance writing with some career transition counseling clients - about a recurring sketch on the show called "Hey Mon." The sketch was about a West Indian family called The Hedleys. I could explain it to you, but it won't be funny because I can't do an accent properly in writing. It's one of those things you have to see yourself:



Earlier in the week, I ran into a neighbor while walking Lou and she asked me what I've been working on. I tried to give her a brief rundown but stopped around the five-minute mark when I saw her eyes start to drift. I should have just said "I work from home and I have many jobs, woman" (in a West Indian accent). But I try hard not to be one of the neighborhood crazy ladies (the ones I will cross the street to avoid if I see them sitting on their porch...I promise to tell you the one about the lady who thinks my dog is a fox).

OK, so here's the summary of my current jobs:

Freelance writer. Have written a few pieces for Charleston Mag, one for Breathe Magazine, one for Lowcountry Dog (you can see the issue online and my piece is on page 5), one for an issue of Charleston Home that isn't out yet, and I'm working on a few more for various pubs that are due next month.

Media Buyer. I'm working for an amazing interactive ad agency, Broad Street Interactive. It specializes in "hyperlocal," geographic- and demographic-targeted online ad placement. I've helped build huge ad networks for various clients, many of them nonprofits and lobby organizations. Coolest one so far: We have a network of media outlets for online advertising broken down by Congressional Districts across the U.S. Check out the web site for more of what we do.

Career Transition Consultant. I've taken on several clients as a career counselor for Willows-Marsh Employee Lifecycle Consulting. The woman who is the managing partner is amazing and I love working with her.

Author/Speaker. I'm still doing discussions, signings, and readings for my book, Skirt Rules for the Workplace. Many are private for specific companies or organizations, but I list the public events on my book web site.

Volunteer. I volunteer for the Center for Women once or twice a month for its career counseling program and am currently doing volunteer marketing work for the new Planned Parenthood Health Center in Charleston (grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony June 12 at 4pm!).

OK, I know that's only five job, mon. But I didn't include Freelance Publicist, Social Media Consultant, Ad Copywriter, or any of the other freelance gigs I've been working on here and there. And that should bring me up to 12 job, mon. Which proves my theory that I'm a workaholic by nature - even at home, on my own schedule, on my own time, even with three Netflix movies, the TV, and the couch calling my name.

And let me add that VisualCV.com is the coolest online invention since Twitter. You can see ALL of my jobs here.

Sibling secret languages...

I've always been fascinated by the secret language of twins (and siblings born close together). My mother had her daughters in pairs. My older sisters are 8 and 10 years older than I am and there's a two year age difference between me and my younger sister Katie.

Katie and I had what I think could be considered a secret language, or at least a language that meant something to us but that other people couldn't understand. We still use it from time to time. Katie used to sing a song whenever she had to use the restroom (because my mother thought it was crass to say "I have to pee"...or worse), so Katie sang "skidamarinkadinkadoodle" (I have no idea how one would spell that - it started when she was 3 or 4). It came from a song my grandmother used to sing to us. Later, we shortened it to just "doodle."

We used to make up meanings for words we heard and liked but didn't know what the definition was. At around 3 and 5 years old, we still took baths together and made shampoo horns from our hair and called each other "three-horned butler" and giggled hysterically. "Butler" was a funny word. Probably because it has the word "but" (or "butt") in it. I remember a moving day when we left Guam and we were playing between the boxes in the driveway. One was marked "sewing" (my mother sewed back then) and my sister spelled it out loud and asked me what it meant. I told her it was our "sea wings" - the rafts we used to use in the ocean water pool in our neighborhood. I just made it up, because even at 5 years old, I didn't like to admit I didn't know something. I could spell "together" when I was 5, but apparently not "sewing." Others: "Button jam" was a signal to flee. I can't explain that if I tried. "Peapie" meant "cute," later shortened to "peep."

My older sister Kristin and I still call each other "seester" instead of "sister." I don't know where that came from. She must have started that one. She also calls Katie "hoop" because her middle name is "hope." I can't think of any good examples of Kristin and Karen languages because the only thing I really remember about them is a lot of knock-down, drag out fights before Karen went to live with my grandmother when I was 6 or 7.

I love my sisters and that we're all still so close as adults. Unlike some of my friends, I actually look forward to holidays and family gatherings and the time we can spend together. They make me laugh like no-one else can. They were there for the whole show of our childhood and an outsider will never be able to understand us like we understand each other. They're the part of my "weird little world" that I didn't get to choose, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

And today is my nephew's third birthday (my sister Katie's son and the only boy in our family). He's our peep. And if Katie doesn't get his first haircut soon, he will also be our three-horned butler.

Some backtalk from the mute sky...*

I'd like to call this "View From my Office Window on a Rainy Day," but instead I'll share stream of consciousness because I forgot my socks (how one does that...) but my feet are always cold anyway, it might be my shoes or that we were listening to "Stairway to Heaven" that makes me feel like I'm in the 7th grade, my outfit matches the sky but not my mood, my hair is still damp and smells like someone else's shampoo, I'm nostalgic for the days when it didn't matter on what pillow I laid my head because I always wanted things to be different, different, different and now I just want them same, same, same.

*From "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," Sylvia Plath.

Incongruities...

Sometimes entire weeks feel like a battle between Me and Me. I constantly fight not to turn inward, inward, inward. It's self-obsession to the nth degree, as if that level of scrutiny could possibly make me better, smarter, or happier. I must get something out of it, or I wouldn't do it, right?

I often wonder if I have some kind of mental illness that makes me incapable of communicating with others on a deep and lasting level (because it occurs to me every now and then that even my family and closest friends don't know the "real" me). But I communicate for a living.

I surprise myself by occasionally dreaming about people I've only met once or twice or people who are under my invisi-square radar. That must mean I pay more attention to others than I think I do.

I hate cherry-flavored things (they taste like cough syrup to me), but I love fresh cherries and will eat them by the bagful in the summertime.

I wish I could just write books and not have to worry about the other part, like actually marketing and selling them.

I'd like to be in a committed relationship, but I'm not willing to work at it.

I judge people most harshly for things I am guilty of myself.

I wear shoes that I love even though they hurt me.

Dreaming is free...

Those of you who know me know that I hate it when people tell me about their dreams (unless I'm in them) so I usually don't share mine with others, but since I've been having a string of strange nocturnal visions this week I thought I'd share one in hopes of clearing the clutter.

I got a giant tattoo on my forearm (!), but it was done with special glitter ink that only showed up under a black light. It was a bunch of swirls and stars in light blue. I was just about to get another one on my neck when one of my exes showed up to tell me how stupid I was. And then he wanted to get back together. I told him he wasn't the boss of me and asked the tattoo artist to use black ink on the neck tattoo instead of the invisible ink.

Even in my dreams, I'm a bad girlfriend. Bad ex-girlfriend. Whatever.

Serious inquires only...

Wanted: One heterosexual male friend for friendship and activities that may or may not include: video games, movies, attending weddings, salsa dancing, kickboxing, short-to-medium phone conversations, discussions about why men behave the way they do, boyfriend recommendations and/or referrals, a couch to sleep on when I am unable to drive home, and road trips to Lands o' Kitsch (aka Giant Balls of Twine, Enchanted Forests, Dollywood, and any museum featuring Jackie O memorabilia). Must be able to read at a college level. Must always think I'm pretty in a totally non-sexual way, even when I am not wearing makeup. Must always find me fascinating and reciprocate by being fascinating. The unattached (or attached to non-jealous female) are preferred. Ownership of tuxedo a plus. Serious inquiries only.

Think I'm kidding? I'm not.