Subterranean Homesick Blues

... I don't really want to go back to school.

My flight leaves at 6 am tomorrow. This means we have to leave for the airport at 4:30, which means I would have to get up at about 3:30, which would be 12:30, Oregon time, and which means that I'm not going to bed tonight, because there is actually no point.

I have so much homework to do and so much everything to do and I didn't do any of it and I BLAME KEVIN. All his fault. Boyfriends are (wonderful, but still) timesucks of the third degree. Last night we walked around my neighborhood for an hour at 3 am just talking.

I'm trying to get a job at one of the nicer ice cream places downtown. That sounds like the least ambitious thing ever, but fucking hell, that is ALL I want. I just want a job I don't hate. It doesn't have to pay a lot. I'm worried that they won't hire me because I won't be back in town until early May, but that's still a month before Ohio State students get out, so... I don't know. I'm hopeful. If my only option is what I did last year - being abused by management and the elderly for LESS THAN minimum wage, I'm just... not going to take it.

It's really lovely here. Most people envision the Midwest as full of cornfields, or simply disgusting. Today there is a breeze and it is spring; the flowers are coming out and it's 65 degrees. Why the hell would I ever want to go back to school, to finals and research papers and deadlines that keep getting closer and closer? Six more weeks...

Like Kenna said, I just want to bring my friends here. I miss spending time with my parents. I'm really looking forward to this summer; it looks like I'm going to DC with my dad for a few days, catching a train to Philly, seeing my relatives there, maybe seeing Anna and a few other people I know, then catching a train to NYC to maybe visit a few more friends and spend a week or two with my sister. This sounds like bliss, especially because she actually has air conditioning this year. Plus, it won't be expensive! I'll only have to pay for a one-way flight. Awesome.

You know, I think if I could choose any existing building to live in, I would live in the Smithsonian. That's where some of my fondest childhood memories were born. I was three when my parents took me there for the first time, and they lost me because I was so enthralled by the giant squid, all laid out in a glass case in formaldehyde, that I ran away and found my way back to it. They found me with my nose pressed up against the glass, hypnotized by the dead leviathan.

More please

I want to be home longer. It's impossible to have time for my family, Kevin, my friends, myself, and a jobhunt in just a week.

I left my camera at Kevin's apartment after a ridiculous night (the way you're probably interpreting that is, by the way, incorrect) and I feel like I lost an arm. That might also partially be because the right side of my body has yet to fully regain function.

I fell off my bike for the first time in about fifteen years. Seriously, the last time I must've been six. I realize that math is incorrect.

I'm not sure what happened, but I was going down a hill and then I felt something jerk and the bike flung itself to the side and something flung me to the other side and I remember thinking "oh shit, this is going to hurt and this really, really sucks" and the milliseconds ticking slowly and then I was on the ground. And a few seconds later it hurt. I got up and the old man behind me was asking me if I was alright, and I said yes, definitely, in a far-too-alert fashion, and he told me to look at my elbow, which was in tatters. I shrugged, grabbed my stuff off the pavement and ran away, because my flight instinct had kicked in fast and hard and all I wanted to do was run away and proverbially lick my wounds in the shadows. Upon further investigation I realized I was missing quite a lot more skin than I had initially thought. And my helmet was cracked, meaning I probably hit my head way harder than I actually realized. Great. It all kind of hurt and I was kind of shaken up, but I was four miles from home so I decided to just keep going... bleeding the whole way, because all of the bathrooms at the park were locked. It's great to bike around covered in blood.

Going home was great, because I got to pick the gravel out of my skin and because the shock had worn off and everything was starting to really hurt. It still hurts. I couldn't pick anything up with my right hand for two days, and for some reason it hurts to flex the muscles. My ribs are bruised and my shoulder is fucked. I do have a really great bruise on my right side that's a nice shade of purple and continuing to grow, however, so I have that to look forward to.

It's been a few days and I think things are fine... no permanent damage, hopefully. I'm mostly weirded out by the fact that I didn't react very strongly when it happened. I did a LOT of damage to my skin and muscles, but I felt fine for a strange amount of time and later I could barely move without involuntarily yelping in pain. Weird. I'm not too broken up about this, though I guess it seems like I might be judging by how much I wrote - I just want to document it because I can't even remember the last time I hurt myself this badly (which isn't that badly... it's not like I went to the ER).

It appears spring break is half over, and this is unfortunate.

Click Click

Home again, which is nice. Connections through Midway are much better than connections through Houston, because it takes like... two or three hours less time. I think I like going to school far away because it seems a little badass and because I'm different than the 90% of the student body that's from the Bay Area and getting to explore a new area, but fucking hell I wish I lived closer when it's time to finally take the flight home.

On landing, the woman next to me grabbed my arm and the girl next to her freaked out. People are wimps about turbulence. It's Chicago... of course it's windy.

Between Chicago and Columbus I ended up sitting next to the mother of a girl I went to middle school with (and kind of high school... that's complicated though). She gave me updates on all of her daughter's friends and all of the "people in my graduating class," which was awkward, because the people she told me about were pretty much just rich, white, annoying people who I was never friends with and never liked. Still interesting, I guess, but I kind of had to feign surprise and sympathy and excitement for people I didn't care about to keep things from getting awkward. Short flight, luckily.

I'm not sure how, but I stayed up until 3 AM (EST). That's about 40 hours. I read Kevin my paper and found some pretty bad errors... hope that doesn't hurt my grade.

I crawled into bed and slept until two in the afternoon. It was blackout sleep. Like, one second I was awake and it was night, and the next second it was afternoon already. So strange. I wanted to go for a bike ride or something today, and it's beautiful, but my body seems more inclined to just want to lie around and do nothing, which I guess is okay for a day.

I want to

I would like to be as badass as my parents were in college, which I will designate as "fairly badass," based upon the negatives from 1974 I've been scanning.

I just want to go home. Not because it's home. I just want to get away for awhile. I was looking at the dark circles under my eyes this morning and realizing that they were pretty horrendous, even though I feel like I've been getting enough sleep. My self-esteem is absolute shit and I think I'm actually going nuts. Getting away for a week will be good, I hope.

I have a paper due Friday that I will probably finish at about 5 am that morning after not sleeping at all and staying up all night packing and oh my god I am totally beat and I don't want to do this at all.

Kenna and I went for a hike down to the river today and it was sublime. I want open spaces and water and anything uncultivated.

Also, things I think are bad ideas:

- ironic tattoos

Navel Gazing

Beauty and self-love are such strange concepts. I will shamefully admit that I think about both a great deal. I shouldn't, but that's another issue.

I had pretty terrible self-esteem growing up. I always knew I was smarter, but it's not like that matters when you're seven, and more than anything, it makes you a social outcast. I was a pretty adorable preschooler but I had a bowl cut, was boyish, precocious, and probably annoying as hell. When we would role-play power rangers, I had to be the yellow one (second tier, for a girl) or, worse, the monster. The girl who got to be pink had french braids and hair ribbons, neither of which my blonde bob was conducive to, and neither of which my mother could handle. Meanwhile, the older kids in the neighborhood (2-3 years ahead, and there were four or five of them) would make fun of me, harass me, hide my shoes on top of the playground equipment where I couldn't get at them, and all sorts of other things.

Once, when I was about five, we were playing on my neighbor's swingset, and the worst one, an older boy who was sitting in a tree, threw the wooden handle of an ax at my head as I swung back and forth. My father saw him from our kitchen window. He sprinted over, grabbed the boy out of the tree, and shook him violently, yelling.

That kid is the only person I really hold any kind of grudge against. He has a rat face now, so I guess karma got him in the end.

Parts of elementary school were just as bad. I was still somewhat socially awkward (I feel horrible saying it was because I was smarter than the other kids, but really, that did make it harder to relate), and worse yet, physically awkward before everyone else was. I was 5'4" by the time I was in fifth or sixth grade, and going through all of those beautiful bodily changes that everyone else had yet to experience. I was the odd one out, always.

I guess things were better in high school, aside from a really terrible bout of manic depression (everyone goes through rough spots in adolescence, but I had paranoid delusions, lost ten pounds in two months, slept about two hours a night, and actually thought I was going to die), but I guess what this all is supposed to explain is my terrible self-esteem. I grew up thinking I was absolutely hideous. My first assumption was that people probably didn't like me. I assumed they wouldn't even remember who I was. When I was eleven I practically tweezed my eyebrows off because I hated them and hated my face and wanted so badly to conform to the standard of beauty that I saw reflected everywhere, because I wanted to be a pretty girl. The end result was way worse. Sophomore year, someone told me that they thought they were in love with me and thought I was beautiful, and my honest response was: "is this a joke?" I didn't think he could entertain thoughts like that and actually be sane.

That insecurity never seems to go away, no matter how hard I try. I still feel like a fat and awkward eleven-year-old on the inside. I don't want to feel that way; it goes against everything I believe in, and yet I can't shake it. Some days are better than others. I am confident as long as I don't think too hard about it.

The funny thing that I have realized over time is that it truly does not matter what other people tell you. When you have low self-esteem you crave the affirmation of others; you want people to tell you that you are wonderful and pretty and everything else, even though you feel guilty about wanting it. Then, when someone does tell you any of those, it's hollow. Yet you still crave it. I have a boyfriend who tells me I'm beautiful all of the time, and I know he's not lying to me, but I'll never fully believe him or internalize it, no matter how much I want to, at least not any time soon.

Why is it so goddamn hard to be comfortable with yourself? I am on an intrinsic level; I just don't like the superficial part. I hate that. I think the worst aspect is that I know I shouldn't care, but I do. The contradiction makes me feel worse than poor body image ever could.

Hum

Today I feel like I need to get out of here. I spent an hour yesterday looking at airfares and planning trips that will never happen. Where did the perpetual stir-craziness come from? I wasn't always like this. Sixteen was a really bad year for me and I think something inside of me just snapped a little, even though I'm happier than ever now. My tolerance for stress is lower. My flight instinct is stronger. I seem to have a need for perpetual motion. Where'd that come from? I was the calm child, the one who could sit still, the one who could read books for hours without budging. Now I have problems sitting through a movie.

I don't understand the agitation or the constant need to move or flee or run away. I don't have anything to run away from.

I remember talking to my sister about it. "Do you feel like you get tired of places quickly? Like they go stale faster for you? Do you feel like you have moved on before everyone else has?"

"Are you always just passing through?"

I feel that way. Passing through, touching, never staying, never sticking.

Second semester of senior year, when all of my graduating class fanned out across the country/other countries, I went the farthest. I went almost exactly halfway around the world. Twelve-hour jet lag. It felt good to leave. I had been waiting for it for years; waiting to LIVE instead of just waiting and waiting to finally be loose.

I'm going to school on the other side of the country. My mother said, half-jokingly, "people are going to think you don't like us."

I didn't know what to say to that. I love my family, actually. I miss them, kind of. I am bad at missing people. Including people I love. This makes me feel broken. I thought a lot about divorcing myself from home. Going away as an end, not a stage. I miss the place and the visual associations and the memories attached to them. Familiar things that I thought were beautiful, over time. I am confused by my ability to completely romanticize everything and to simultaneously be unromantic. How does that work, exactly?

My mother took it as an insult, though I know she wouldn't have told me that. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. It just felt necessary, and distance is just ever-increasing and meaningless numbers outside of a certain radius. But I don't know why it felt necessary. Am I just running away from someone who I used to be?

Whatever it is, I want to flee to everywhere.

I've been following a moonshadow...

It's been awhile. I'm pretty terrible at this all, so far. Life has conspired against me recently and made me horrifically busy (well, not horrifically - it's been nice).

The past two days were strange, almost magical. Sleet and hail and then sun and then more hail and sun, and then the water droplets on the tree branches glittered like thousands of chandeliers. I don't know what it is, but as soon as I see that kind of afternoon light, I'm pulled towards it, outside and down the road.

Today the sun disappeared by the time I'd gotten my camera, but it was still lovely, and I went to the cemetery (I've been spending a great deal of time there... hmm). I decided to take off my shoes. Remember how I said it hailed? There was still ice on the ground. Ice and cold, cold mud. Brilliance. I'm not sure why I felt the need to, but it seemed right for what I wanted to achieve. When I take photos I feel like my body just kind of disappears and becomes a tool. I always seem to end up haphazardly clothed or in awkward positions, whether I'm the subject or the one behind the camera or both. My mother is worried that I'll be one of those tourists who takes one step too far over the edge in pursuit of a vista. Luckily, landscapes aren't my favorites.

When I came back to my room, the floor was covered in cardboard and my roommate was constructing a giant (3.5', maybe?) tape dispenser. This made me very happy.

Kenna wrote about missing Texas, and I kind of miss home, too. I don't really know what it is. It's not even the people who live there; rather it seems more like a sense of place. I miss open spaces and cornfields and summer, even. Golden days. A more disorganized setting. Things are more ordered here than they are anywhere east of the Mississippi. I miss slightly older surroundings. There is something romantic about flatlands and cornfields when you haven't seen them in months. I know they exist here, but at this point in time they might as well not, since I have no way to get there.

I miss the wooden surfaces and light at home. I am never drawn to people or specifics of place; I don't miss a specific café or my mother all that much. I miss thunderstorms and golden light and lying on a hardwood floor looking at the sky through a lattice and feeling warm and close to the earth.