Sometimes, trying to be a soft place for someone to land is exactly the same thing as being a pillow over their face. Separating the teacher from the lesson is really hard. Wine helps sometimes. But not always. Waiting is quite possibly the hardest thing to do...but it enforces learning, and out of that comes nothing but good.
In light of the upcoming construction chaos, I am going to spend some quality time this holiday weekend out on the patio with my face in a book--I just bought two tonight. Funny how I don't think twice about dropping $35 on clothes or shoes, but buying books when there's a perfectly good library down the street makes me feel such guilty pleasure.
I'm back...I'm fine...and everything is going to turn out okay. I can feel it. I want resolution too fast, usually, but in this case, time is what is needed most. Okay, then. I can wait.
I am such a fucking drama queen. Enough already. It's all good...a healthy snivel and a really fun wedding and a day working outside in the dirt has my shit all straightened out again. Snarx is back.
posts by candlelight, part the first After a craptacular day (mitigated by feeling much more like myself, which might not be all that good a thing if you don't like feisty women, and a very nice performance review by Mr. C), I drove home in the late-evening sun after some serious thunderstorms. I got to Main Street and was greeted by a volunteer firefighter who asked where I was headed. I explained that I was planning to stop at my parents' and then go on home. He said, "Well, you can get to your parents', but you can't get home--there's a tree down on your street." My street isn't even a quarter-mile long, and has eight houses on it. I'm not liking those odds, I'm thinking. "Um, exactly where is the tree down?" "Oh, on the corner." Whew. I live up at the other end. "How about I stop at my parents' and then see if I can get there?" He agreed that that was a decent plan. I did that, and my mom made me soft-boiled eggs on toast, and I picked up my mail (and the building permit! Woo-hoo!) and kissed my parents and headed down Main Street, where I was stopped by yet another volunteer firefighter. I explained my plan to go up around the top of the hill, past the golf course (from which I could cut through if there were only a road...Floyd could do the cross-country bit with no problem, but I didn't want to go mudding in a newly planted cornfield, or dig up the driving range), around and down the hill, and cut through campus. He agreed, so I did that. At the other end, yet another firefighter stopped me and I re-explained. He grudgingly said okay, but go slow, and I assured him that I would be extremely careful. There are big limbs down all over the place, and driving through campus, a rather exciting windy twisty experience on the best of days, was a giant slalom. I mentally apologized to the VFs for the "for Pete's sake, I just want to go the fuck HOME" impatient thoughts I was having as I was being friendly (I am all friendlied out for today, thankyouveryfuckingmuch), because the advice was actually spot-on. As I steered around huge willow and silver maple boughs, I wondered which windows I had left open and worried about my birch trees. When I pulled into my driveway, there was nothing. No downed branches bigger around than my finger, no patio umbrella blown over. The "Adirondack chairs" in the back yard were still in their half-circle around the fire pit. Not a thing was wrong. Inside, everything was dry except the corner of the guest bed, which was slightly damp. However, there was no power. And this brings us to... posts by candelight, part the second Walking around the house lighting candles, I dreaded the thought of no music, no TV, and no internets--nothing to keep me out of my head, where I have been way too much for the past few days. But as I stopped pacing, realizing that my normal evening routine was going to go out the window (wash, fill, and set coffeepot, check email and Facebook, hoe out gym bag and pack tomorrow's gear), I stopped to listen, and realized that it was peaceful...the sound of chainsaws down the street, closer, the humming of the emergency generator at the college, and inside, the ticking of my mantel clock, started to wind me down a bit. I fiddled with an oil lamp--I use them just infrequently enough to forget how high the wick should be cranked once they're lit--and for some reason started to forgive myself. It's been a long month or so of being consumed with something that shouldn't have consumed me, and a week of being eaten alive by guilt over it on a number of levels. I'm so grateful for so many things, even the things that suck right now. For a while, I was really happy...I had forgotten how it felt to trust someone. I still do, and that won't change--it's just in a retreat stage at the moment after getting way too intense. As patience is not one of my virtues, waiting it out is harder than it should be and I'm only just now really arriving at believing what I've been saying to myself...that it's fine, and it will figure itself out. But it's all such a good lesson...the trusting, the going too far, and the letting go of trying to fix it. I'm thankful for volunteer firefighters who just wanted to make sure I got home okay, and for lamp oil and candles, for village water service that works even when the power is out, for soft-boiled eggs and someone who loves me to cook them, for the money I spent two years ago on drainage work that kept my basement dry today, for a quiet night, for old friends I have treated so poorly while I've been so awfully selfish and new ones who are so wonderfully sweet, for the chance to apologize, for the steady ticking and quarter-hour chimes of a clock, for a laptop with a six-hour battery, for suddenly being terrified at having let myself go so far, for my house being sheltered, for knowing in my bones that everything will be as it was meant to be, whether pleasant or painful, and for the actual acceptance of that. I still have amends to make with other people, but tonight, in this quiet, I'm making them with myself. I went too far, too fast, in spite of my better judgment, and while I regret that, it's done. I initially thought that I would close the door again, and nail it shut again, and throw a pretty hefty sulk and insist that I can never trust anyone and that's all there is to it. But that's not true. As much as it was, and is, scary, and I still don't know what's going to happen, I think I'm going to leave the door open--to the person in question as well as to others. It's been a long, lonely time, and I'm done with that now. It takes a blackout to light the lamp.
Game face is back on...it's all good. It's another heavy sharp thing to haul around, but hey, that builds arm definition. I'll be rockin' the sleeveless all summer.
I'm still here, just wading my way through some stuff. To tide you over until I figure out what I do and don't want to share (probably not much, so don't get too excited), here's a picture of how I spent yesterday, which was a bit of wading of the more literal kind, through mud. In case you wondered how seventeen pounds of strawberries looks, now you know:
I think the answer is none of the above, actually. It's easy to sleepwalk after being hurt--you go to work and spend time with friends and do the laundry and read and all of the things that you do as part of living, but you just put down the sharp, heavy parts of your history for a while. They sit where you left them, balanced on their blades, inert and growing dusty, while you go about getting through another page on the calendar. And then you make a connection that you weren't really expecting with someone who surprises you, and as that connection grows and you share some things, you eventually want to describe the heavy parts and how deeply they cut. That means that you have to look at them, because like anything that you don't pay attention to for a while, you forget some of the details. Peering at them, you wonder if they're still heavy after all this time. You choose one of the smaller ones and gingerly pick it up. The act of describing its power to hurt you forces you to examine it, and yourself, some more, but having shared that vulnerability makes the threat easier to understand and the mass strangely easier to carry. Learning about the other person's hidden heavy parts makes you stronger still, because the growing material of the bond protects you both against the cuts and the weight. As time goes by and that bond intensifies, you realize how much more alive you feel for having woken up, how much safer you feel when the other person understands your scars, and how much more you have to learn, both about yourself and about the other person. Regardless of anything else, the essential attraction between two people, when it's built on finding someone safe to trust with the sharp edges, the healing, and the discoveries, is easy to misinterpret. It doesn't have to be anything else, or anything more, and it doesn't even have to be safe--some of the places you have to go when you look for your truths are dark. Having a hand to hold while you're in there is all that matters. That's love, elemental and necessary, clean and pure. Gender, age, and sex don't have anything to do with it, though in some combinations, they're definitely complicating factors. Ultimately, it's just about love, and it's so hard not to be greedy for it, wanting it to be just like this, forever. That's one sharp edge I'm working on these days.
The good news is that there's been a thaw. The bad news is that the heat causing the thaw is misdirected...as usual. The good news is that I don't mind all that much. The bad news is that I don't know if I don't mind all that much because I know I'll get over it, as I have a bunch of times before and will likely have to a bunch of times in the future, or if I don't mind because I'm freezing up again, having seen that I've gone and done it yet again and clearly still can't handle this. The good news is that I'm at least recognizing the patterns enough to question which I'm seeing. The bad news is that I don't know if I really want to know the answer.
I left the office today at 5:45 to make it home a bit before 7 to go to the Community Preservation Panel meeting and request approval of my plans for the summer, which include taking probably every weekend that's not already booked and dedicating it to adding a half-bath off the kitchen and laying a patio four times the size of the one I did last year (as well as smaller projects like re-shingling the front and back porch roofs with the help of MB, his brother, and SBJ, and painting the kitchen cabinets...but soapstone countertops are going to have to wait until next summer, I think). Whenever you make an exterior change, you have to go through the CPP to get a Certificate of Appropriateness, because the whole village, including even the newer homes, is designated as a historic area. Since the bathroom project requires removing a window, it has to go before the CPP.
Turns out that since the window I'm removing is on the back of the house and not visible from the road, they don't really have to rule on it, but they gave me a certificate for everything anyway. Next, I have to go to the Planning Board and do the whole shebang all over again...except the meeting is on Wednesday night, when I will be in Denver. So I'm going to call the chair of the planning board and see if we can't get together beforehand, and hopefully mommasnarx or poppasnarx can go stand up at the meeting for me.
I got home and texted SBJ (who has graciously volunteered his electrical and drywall services) about how the meeting went, and was complaining that village life can be a PITA. He replied that he was sorry it was a hassle, and that kind of stopped me in my tracks. I texted him back that hassle is the price of having achieved, and then surpassed, a personal goal. I'd always wanted to own my own house, and I have it. Now I'm improving it with renovations. I felt very small about complaining about having to observe the established process to do something that so many people now can't...make changes to their home. Not only are people losing their homes, but they're also losing their jobs, and here I am whining. Nice.
...which could be said about so many things. Today's installment was just now, while paying bills...because The Evil Cable Company bills in advance for its sucktacular service, I carry a balance. I refuse to pay in advance for a service I haven't received yet, unless it comes on a tray in the form of fries and a vanilla shake. It makes for late fees, but It's The Principle Of The Thing, Goddammit.
Tonight I'm tired but knew I needed to pay bills, so down I sat and dutifully logged on to the computer. The Evil Cable Company doesn't make it easy on you to make one-time payments...you have to re-enter your banking information every time (but they sure want it to be easy to suck a hundred bucks a month out of your checking account on the X day of every month). So I did that, thinking, "HA. So there, Evil Cable Company...I'm NOT paying in ADVANCE for THIS."
Except I wasn't paying attention to the amount that was entered by default...I was too busy making sure my bank routing number was right. So I just paid the damn balance. Including for next month's service.
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