if at first you don't succeed...

...you better get over it and have a little patience. It is a virtue, after all.

I haven't written in this blog in quite a while. As a matter of fact, I haven't written much at all in quite a while. I got a little lost. I'm going to try to find my way back here.

May marked the culmination of my college career, and the beginning of my current stage of life that shall be referred to as the Twilight Zone. Here in the TZ, my identity seems transient. Without meaning to sound overly dramatic about the fact that I have a BA degree from a University, but...what does it mean now? For my entire life my profession, my direction, my purpose was one word: student. As a toddler I embraced the role and never came out of costume, from naptimes and coloring stations to metaphysics and romantic literature, through moods and styles and hobbies, hairstyles and mailing addresses, one thing remained constant: I was a student. As a sidenote my hairstyle remained fairly constant as well. Always long enough to be pulled back in a ponytail.

Now, for the first time, school doesn't start in September. It doesn't start at all. Nothing starts, in fact. I have no plan. I'm floating in the post graduate Twilight Zone, and it scares the living daylights out of me. I wonder if this is how a mouse feels at the end of a maze; you get dropped in, you follow twists and turns, choose directions, all toward this one goal of finishing, of proving you could get through it and then, well, you're there. No more corners to peak around. Just open space.

What's in the open space? I don't know yet, and that's why I'm nervous. Fear of the unknown is nothing new, and the only form of protection I have within the unknown is a piece of paper with my name on it, signed by the Dean, attesting that I made it through the maze.

But then I realize, the open space has been there all along. Losing the bubble of that one solid identity was, and is, a shock. There's really no decompression chamber, so when it comes to changes like this, I guess I shouldn't fault myself for losing my breath. The trick is to remain positive, and to open my eyes and look around. I've got friends who will help me stay steady on new ground, family to support me, and if I stand up and steady my breathing, that open space won't be so scary. That open space will fill up with whatever I put in it.

Don't be afraid of the unknown; when we came in, we didn't even know ourselves.

Rebound: Take 2

Friends, countrymen, my writer's block has yet to recede fully. Like an illness I can't seem to kick, the cement block atop my creative energy remains...cemented. But, in what I consider a little "f*ck you" to my mental captor, I will share a story.

9 volts

I have returned to Baltimore, Maryland in the year 2011. I came back earlier than my other housemates in order to get more hours at work; meaning, my bank account is squirming and squealing and accusing me of horrid abuse.
So thus, I spend my first night here...alone. Now this may not seem like a big deal; however, one must consider the facts: I am a downright namby-pamby (thank you thesaurus.com) with an outrageously active imagination. This means shower curtains must be checked, dead-bolts are not to lull one into a false sense of security, and every outside sound means danger. Woo hoo!
After forcing a friend to skype with me for about an hour and a half during which she patiently explained to me that there is not a sociopathic stalker out to get me and that I am indeed a 22 year old capable of independent existence, I decided to go to sleep. I'm laying in bed, listening to the metronomic tick of the clock which I enjoy, browsing through youtube videos of sleep meditations and streaming nature sounds. The gentle rain from the Amazon is soothing, and the frogs are croaking me a bedtime story, and the only interruption is an intermittent chirping from the smoke detector with a low battery. It's been pretty easy to ignore and so I'm relaxing, feeling good...then the second chirping starts.
I suppose the one chirping detector drained it's friend's energy, because now there are two chirpers, and of they're not in sync. A fugue of beeps. Awful. I try to ignore it; I try focus on the fact that I've now been transported to the pacific and the waves are crashing in and the ocean wants me to breathe deeply. But like the damn tell-tale heart, these things are creeping into my psyche.
I can't reach either device because the stepstool cannot elevate my small stature high enough. So I'm pacing around my room, headed for insanity. I decide to take a shower, because at least in there, I can't hear "blllip! blllip! BLLLLLIP!!" What do I discover? I had turned off the water heater to save energy. So I walk down to the basement to turn it back on. What to my wandering eyes did appear? A ladder! I frantically take it up the steps, and I'm sure I have some wild look in my eye. I climb to the offending chirper and examine. I need a 9 V battery. That little block of energy can save what's left of my sanity.
Superfresh is open 24 hours, so I head up there at 2 in the morning, looking like a one night stand. Long mesh shorts, uggs, sweatshirt, puffy vest, disheveled hair, confused look and all, I head to the batteries. AA, AAAA... tons of those... they had C batteries, even D batteries (who uses those?) but 9V are nowhere to be found. I stood there for a few minutes, as if they would just appear or something, out of thin air, like I'm Harry Potter and in front of me would appear a room FULL of 9V batteries.
An employee walked up to me, a little hesitantly, the way one would approach a stray dog. "Sweetie, what are you looking for?" I tell her I need a 9V battery because my alarm won't stop beeping. She told me that happened in her house and her boyfriend just cut the wires. I shook this idea out of my head quickly to avoid permanent damage to myself and/or others. She disappeared into the abyss of aisles and returned to me with a most precious pearl...a 9V battery. I think she was concerned for my well being because she walked me to the self checkout and proceeded to perform the transaction for me. I wanted to hug her but my better judgement told me this was inappropriate.
I returned home and with the utmost glee replaced the battery. I quieted the tell-tale heart. Victory is mine.

It's been a while...

One continent and nearly 3 months have changed since my last entry. I've been suffering from a most severe case of writer's block. Whom does this effect? Well, I really don't know who reads this so perhaps just me. And why? Oh I don't know. Lack of time, general malaise brought about from the normal-hour-workweek, filled with filing things and stuffing envelopes for my internship, wrapping up wine bottles for my job, and some philosophy and writing classes sprinkled in between. Yes, perhaps this has led to my writers block...so can I, as a writer, exist within a routine? Here's hoping.

the blues...

I once heard that to sing the blues you had to feel it, that if you weren't feeling any pain, you just couldn't possibly be playing the blues. So it makes me wonder, to listen to it do you need the same? Can you listen to the blues and not have the blues?

See, I could make a prayer out of a good blues riff of bass line I listen to. That kind of beat, tone, vocal layering, repetitive rhythm that won't allow you to sit still and those addictive guitar cries, that's what makes me close my eyes and go somewhere completely metaphysical where I can't be bothered by anything aside from the beating heart and soul of music. That's what stops time, or realistically doesn't stop it at all, but takes my focus away from it, takes away the power it has over me. No, I don't think you have to have the blues to listen to the blues, but it certainly takes you somewhere, to sometime you've been hurt or felt too much weight on your shoulders. So then maybe you have to remember what pain or intense passion feels like to really play the blues and when you listen, you just connect.

Sometimes I wish that time had a heart; I wish that time's heart could be broken, that way it would understand the way all of us. Time has no sympathy and sure as hell no apathy, but if it did, than maybe it would slow down every once in a while. So maybe I wish time could play the blues.

What kind of music does time play for you?

ain't that something worth writing about

memory's a game we've got no choice but to play, holding onto moments momentarily our own and when we blink we tend to miss them and we miss them though we never had them in the first place. we can take a picture but the lens steals a bit for itself some part of the time in time we'll come to try and recall and we'll put our heads against the wall and ask to go back but to no avail because it's all a one way forward flow we've just got rear view mirrors and all's closer than it appears or maybe it's the other way around but it doesn't really matter, really. time escapes usor we escape time or however we choose to part time doesn't care, doesn't have a heart to be broken by anything or anyone, isn't that a lonely thing? smile through the tears, we do, it's good to feel a little. forgive me if i've run off course i must be in a real right state thinking i'm so eloquent when i stutter, i'm a little crazy but hell we're all a little out of control, control, that illusion we cling to in our ocean 'til it dissolves or evaporates and we drown, or, we trust the tides. who am i to write this all down? just a girl on a train playing the memory game.

You look best dressed in happiness.

A little girl jumps up and down on her parents' big queen sized bed.  Compared to her bunk bed, she's jumping up and down on an enormous sea of pillows.  She's allowed to jump on the bed when her mother's around, 'I'll catch my little monkey before she falls,' she always hears.  She wouldn't jump on the bed without her mother around anyway; what's the point?  She likes her mother's attention perhaps even more than the sensation of her curly blond locks bouncing up and higher than her whole body does while she is free and airborne. 

There's a skylight in her parents' room, so she always makes sure to jump in the center of the bed, as if she's jumping into the sky, like she's taking off to fly.  Today the sky is like a hundred lines, all different shades of purple and blue and a few streaks of yellow.  It all blends together, gorgeous and pastel, and she imagines that if she jumped into it, she'd create ripples in the plum, lilac, powder blue and indigo, making a design like the pretty edges on the dessert plates she's seen in fancy restaurants.  She wants to dive in so badly, like nothing she's ever wanted before or could ever imagine wanting in her lifetime.

She sat down, or rather, bounced and landed with her feet swinging off the side of the bed.  She looked at her mother, blue eyes meeting blue and asked, "Where's the top of the world?"  "The highest place you stand," her mother replied, bemused.  "Well, how can I get there?  Have you ever been there?"  Her mother had an expression on her face that the girl couldn't recognize.  After a few moments she said, "If you believe."

Later that night the girl had vivid dreams.  First she was tiny - so small that the lillies of the valley looked like huge church bells.  She climbed to the highest bell, peered over, and all of a sudden she was on top of an oak tree.  She looked up and when she looked back down she was on the wings of a nightengale and she closed her eyes only to open them and see she was on a mountain peak looking down at the moon's reflection in the water.  She stared at the moon, and in that moment, woke up. 

She walked into the kitchen to find her mother drinking coffee and reading the paper before she had to leave.  Her father had already left for work.  She sat down next to her mother and drank milk out of her favorite mug, pretending it was black coffee like her mother's.  "What if you can't make it to the top?  What if you never stand at the highest place?"  That same expression.  "You just have to believe, baby girl."

That little girl grew into a young woman; she went through the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, went to college, started smoking, quit smoking, travelled, fell in love, wrote a book, adopted a puppy, got married, bought a small house, and always made it home for holidays with her family.  She had a baby girl of her own whom she named after her great grandmother, and who had the same blue eyes as her mother and grandmother.  When she brought the baby home, her mother gave her a book.  The cover was black, and inside were pages upon pages of her childhood - photos, poems, trinkets, dried flowers - all the way up to the present.  The last page was a photo taken when she must have been just born.  Next to it was written, in her mother's perfect cursive, "This, my baby, is the top of the world."

mice, amongst other things.

One of the tasks I have been assigned to is cleaning out the basement of the Loyola Nachbar Huis.  I did not know there was a basement in the Loyola Nachbar Huis.  The basement of the Loyola Nachbar Huis is terrifying.

The stairs are creaky, and it's this ancient looking corridor with doors on the left and right that enter into more rooms that are dark, cold, and smell pretty funky.  It reminds me of a prison or something from the middle ages; I expect to see a man holding his arm out from behind bars with a bone attempting to entice the dog with the keys around its neck to come over.  

I start working at 6 am because it is so hot in Belgium and my delicate body cannot handle manual labor in extreme temperatures.  What is glorious about this job is the fact that I can roll out of bed, put on some clothes, have a cup of coffee and walk downstairs to work.  So anyway, I walk all the way downstairs to work in the basement.  I'm carrying up boxes, broken toilet seat covers, old computers and awkwardly shaped bags filled with god knows what.  But I'm also carrying up boxes and boxes of just...people's stuff.  It's all from years ago...10 or 15 years ago, all belongings people left, perhaps intending to come back and collect.

I was simply carrying up the boxes until I worked my way to what I'll call the 'damp area.'  Word to the wise, if one tries to pick up a cardboard box when the bottom has been eaten away by moisture and time, it will break.  The contents will spill everywhere.  If you're lucky like me, a huge dead mouse/rat will fall at your feet and its surviving children will scamper away from you further into the creepy corridor.  After jumping up and down yelping a few times, I disposed of the dead mouse and proceeded.  The next bag contained a fur coat (which, after the aforementioned experience, appeared to me at first glance as a mutant super rat), and a few beer glasses.  The other boxes contained various things...old papers, files, books, a few pictures, a few geodes...keepsakes.  I wonder about the people who left these things.  I picked up a colored pencil drawing from one of the boxes...its ripped edges tell me it came from a sketchbook.  A pretty landscape graces the page, a blue sky strewn with clouds...its very pretty, and I wonder, why'd this person tear it out of the book?  And why did he/she keep it?  Why didn't he/she come back for it?

Its funny to be going through other people's things.  I'll never know who this person is, but I've got a piece of his/her sketchbook hanging on my wall because I think it's pretty.  I know that life isn't about material things, you know, that 'the things you own end up owning you.'  But nevertheless, I'm fascinated by belongings.  I find it interesting, the items people choose to keep, to hold onto.  I'm touching things that a while ago, people possessed, wanted to keep.  It's like a little connection across time.  Every box could tell me a story, if I wanted it to.