19 posts tagged “me”

I've given about ten minutes worth of thought to how I would like to spend these last few moments of my twenty-ninth year.  I thought it would be nice to:

1. Reflect on the last nine years, and figure out one important thing I learned each year (you know... the kind of important you can actually recall and articulate in a few minutes);
2. Get another stanza of Prufrock under my belt (I have 44 lines left to go);
3. Curl up next to my wonderful husband and sleep off a deep post-game weariness that I seem unable to shake.

Year 20:  If I had a legacy, it would not be me.  It would just be a legacy. In all probability, I would have very little control over what it was, and what it would mean, and to whom.
Year 21:  Working in fashion retail is kind of like indentured servitude. Also, a 30% discount doesn't make something "so cheap it may as well be free."
Year 22:  Sometimes, everything someone can be just isn't enough.  Sometimes, love just goes away.
Year 23:  There are some things that you just need to get out of your system.  One way or another, they will have out.
Year 24:  The death of someone you truly love can fundamentally change who you are.  It can make you understand how very long forever is, and how much love you have that you might not have known about.
Year 25:  You are given a space to fill... only so wide and so deep.  It's daunting figuring out how best to fill it, especially since you don't know its dimensions.
Year 26:  Everyone should try living in the city.
Year 27:  When you meet the right person, you really do just know.
Year 28:  Weddings are a total racket, and where your old world and new world meet can be a very scary place.
Year 29:  It's important to feel down in your bones that time isn't waiting around for you, but it's totally okay to give yourself an extra week or so to memorize 44 lines.  It's even okay not to get another stanza in before you go to sleep.

Obviously there's more... so much more... but a gal at thirty's door needs to get her beauty rest.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep... tired... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me."

Last night I attended a good friend's 30th birthday dinner at his local sushi joint up in San Francisco.  Many pounds of sushi and sake were consumed, all washed down with delicious dark chocolate cupcakes and soju dispensed from a mini gas pump.  As a gentle reminder that it was indeed a party, one of my other good friends slurred many hilarious things very loudly and then threw up on the floor.  All in all, the evening was a win.

Incidentally, last night also marked the one month countdown to my own 30th birthday.  As I lie in bed this morning somewhere between dreaming(*) and waking, the imminence of it slapped me in the face.  Whenever I mention the upcoming event to people, their response is a (not altogether funny) joke or a conciliatory lecture that thirty really isn't so bad.  The latter folks are entirely missing the point, and the former folks always get the same lame joke in response: "thirty is the new twenty." 

My notice (and perhaps mild apprehension) of thirty doesn't spring from a fear of losing my youth and vitality, or some cockamamie notion that all of my best years are spent.  In fact, I'm excited for something different, even if it's mostly on paper.  I think of it much like joining a new club, where my fellow members drink better booze, live in bigger houses, have restaurants to recommend, and make altogether different and more interesting kinds of mistakes.  The point is that my thoughts aren't the kind one might expect after watching too much Sex and the City(**).

Rather, my proximity to thirty reminds me that time continues to race down a steep slope, and that five/eight/ten/twenty years can easily pull away from anyone who thinks that there's plenty of time.  I'm certainly guilty of that charge often enough.  It blows my mind when I consider that ten years ago...
 

• I didn't know my husband
• I was still a hopeful college student on the East Coast
• My grandfather was alive
• California seemed like the last place on Earth I'd end up
• I'd never heard of the Silicon Valley,
  
• I had no idea that my current industry and career existed
• I didn't know any of my best friends
• I wasn't legally allowed to drink
• I'd never lived alone
• I hated wine
  

You'd think that in ten years I'd manage to realize my peristent goal of writing a book, even if it was a bad one.  You'd think that I'd have gotten around to having the dog I've always wanted, or scheduling that elusive follow-up visit to the dermatologist.  You'd think I would have pursued my odd dream of singing in a self-parodying cover band.  In short, you'd think there'd be more time somewhere amidst all that... time. 

Five years ago, I made a list of 30 things to do by age 30.  It contained exactly the kinds of things that a twenty-five year old would put on that sort of list: learn to play guitar, become fluent in another language, go back to school.  It also contained some pointedly "Elaina" things: ask my mother about my father, get my teeth straightened or get over the fact that I have crooked teeth, make a Thanksgiving Day dinner.  I've done just over half of them, mostly in passing, as I decided a few years later that many of them weren't really worth doing.

Only one undone item has survived, and I'm determined to get it done in the next 31 days: memorize T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  I remember thinking when I made the list that five years was an eternity to accomplish the things I'd set out to do.  "And indeed there will be time," I thought.  Turns out that five years simultaneously manages to be an eternity and a flash.

While I already fully understand and appreciate its truth, perhaps memorizing the poem will stop me from realizing its truth over and over again.

* Incidentally, I was dreaming of making a large marshmallow, zucchini, bacon, and egg frittata.
** Incidentally, I have been watching too much Sex and the City.  It's a slippery slope.

I'm a pervert!  See?

...for the articles?

Happy 2008!

Wheeeeeeeeeeee!

I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing that happens to everyone, or the kind of thing that happens only to me, or the kind of thing that happens only to me only because I'm giving my synapses a reprieve from nearly four years of gentle, numbing, drug-induced contentedness.  Regardless, I find myself at the convergence of old thoughts, unanswered questions, and fragile bits of wisdom that have always threatened to disappoint me at any moment.  I know it all sounds vague, but it feels as clear and familiar as cold, running water.

Among these thoughts and questions is an old realization I had -- namely that I can't live and write about my life at the same time.  There's only a finite amount of energy and focus in me, and the end result is bad living and good writing,  good living and bad writing, or proper living and no writing at all.  There are more complexities to it than that, of course, and I'm not suggesting it applies to everyone. 

Writing usually allows me to refine, solidify, and deepen my ideas.  It helps me fill in the holes of which my brain is otherwise very forgiving.  It's unfortunate that it fails me so utterly when it comes to my life, my self, and my tenuous little ego.  With regard to those topics writing seems to obscure more than it reveals, confuse more than it clarifies.  To put it simply, it's a large and looming distraction from the business of living.

Which neatly leads to my recent absence.  A couple weeks ago I realized something terrifying:  events didn't feel like they counted unless I blogged about them.   My life somehow ended up taking a backseat to the ongoing documentary of my life.  I was having more dialog and taking less action than Prince Hamlet.  Suffice it to say, I found that discovery altogether alarming.  As such, I've been on -- and continue to be on -- a break of indefinite length and absoluteness.  No point in documenting a life that grows thinner by the minute for the endeavor.

1. Entire evenings get lost so easily.  It baffles me.
2. What I'm enjoying most about the wedding pictures that are starting to trickle in from friends and family is having the chance to look at other people's faces during the ceremony.
3. Much like action has inertia, inaction has inertia.  Physicists and Hamlet knew this.  I don't know why I didn't.
4. Laptops are like shoes, and must be broken in before they can be properly and thoroughly enjoyed. Another one, known intimately by my left forearm at present:  Laptops are like shoes.  Some of them cause blisters and chafing.
5. Until yesterday, I believed that profound thoughts were, by their very nature, deep and/or elusive.  Now I think that they are simply a truth brought into very sharp relief, etched out or uttered in a moment of acute awareness by someone who happens to be paying very close attention.
   

I've just managed to force myself to sit down after twenty solid minutes of pacing around my apartment like an insane person.  This wasn't aimless pacing per se -- I very much wanted to do one of the eight thousand things there are to do around here -- but picking a task and sticking to it proved impossible.  My mind was like an agitated fly, settling on something for just a moment before taking off to haphazardly land on something else.  I fear that nothing will be accomplished tonight.

My apartment looks like a wedding bomb exploded in it, followed shortly thereafter by a smaller travel bomb.  The debris is substantial, to say the least: a backlog of mail, unused Hefty ziplock baggies, a heating pad, leftover wedding favors, a guest book, a mostly-empty shopping bag from Edward's Luggage, a half-unpacked suitcase, a crumpled dress shirt, a damp case of assorted booze, a stack of partially-opened gift boxes, a still-pristine (because Richard, not I, read it) copy of Shadow of the Hegemon, bits of ribbon, a souvenir DVD that our DVD player won't play, a list of owed thank-yous, a shell lei snaked around the handle of a 2007 Semantic Technology Conference bag ... and this is just what I can see from where I'm sitting at the kitchen table.

I feel softer than I have in a great long while (not using softer as a euphemism for fatter, though while we're on the topic I did eat like pig right up until the moment I couldn't keep any food in me).  After leaving it behind for only a week, my life seems daunting and unnecessarily hard.  I'm not sure how I go about doing the things I normally do, how I handle them all, or if I'm cut out for any of it.  Granted, now is not the best time for such weighty considerations. It's my first hour apart from my new husband in over a week, and my first full day back from my honeymoon in the South Pacific.  I've been away from the office for two weeks.  The events I just spent the past four months planning are over, and everything I put off during that time is waiting at my front door.  I suppose I should give myself the space to feel a bit spacey.

So I decided to sit down, eat a bowl of Simple Chicken soup from Zao Noodle Bar, and think about things.  First, I thought about how the Simple Chicken dish seems to have gotten a bit more complicated.  And by "a bit more complicated" I mean "with fatty and gristly weird chicken bits in it".  Perhaps I'm hypersensitive given my tender tummy, but the eating was replaced with idle poking nonetheless.

In the past, I've spent a lot of time marveling at how resilient people are.  We can take so much -- much more than we imagine we can take -- and we often emerge stronger and better for it.  It's an easy observation lacking in any profundity, but I've always been stricken by it nonetheless.  Today I noticed the somewhat the murkier counterpart instead:  just how vulnerable we are, and how little it takes to shake us out of our comfortable, complacent spots in the world.  All it took was a beautiful wedding, an idyllic vacation, a messy house, and a messier stomach bug to utterly incapacitate this once capable woman, and send her, cowering, to her little blog. 

This time in a week, I won't even be able to imagine why it was so... and had I not decided to write about it, eventually I would have forgotten completely.  I still might, in fact.  I'm trying really hard not to put it all under a lens, because by the time I've looked at it closely enough, whatever I see won't matter... even to me.

I have been... absent.  And with good reason.  My wedding is imminent, the office is chaotic, and the stuff of life like laundry and grocery shopping is needy and unrelenting.

You know what they say about the busy bee, though.  Or maybe you don't.  "They" is Blake, and he says that the busy bee has no time for sorrow.  Turns out the busy bee also doesn't have time for Vox.

*bzz bzz bzzz*

I miss you all.  The little sneak peeks into your lives has become an integral part of mine, so I feel quite disconnected without them.  I hope to be back on my normal schedule soon, so try not to forget about me in the meantime.

This time in two weeks, it'll all be over.  The event that took months to plan (and months to fund) will be a fast-fading memory.  Unless, of course, I end up with a wicked hangover.  *calculates white sangria and mango mojito factor... hangover=probable*  Perhaps the memory of the day will linger into Monday. ;0)

This time in two weeks, I'll be someone's wife.  Freaky.  With a bit of luck, I'll be packed for the honeymoon and sound asleep by this hour.

So... since I've been gone (and in no particular order):

• I became a Microsoft employee
• I fired a handgun
• I finished reading another book
• I researched all there is to know about Bora Bora
  
• I decided that I hate my wedding dress
  
• I bought and sold stock
• I found out that I will have a chocolate rum wedding cake with a so-hideous-it's-great plastic bride and groom on top
  
• I spent 8 hours looking for photos of made-up people
  
• I got a sunburn on the back of my knees
• I did a pull-up
  
• I knit most of a turtleneck sweater for my stuffed dog
• I watched several movies, both good and bad
• I figured out a way to un-hate my wedding dress
• I dug through the trash for glue sticks
• I made two lolcats
  
• I went to Phoenix
• I got a zit on my eyelid
• I nursed two drunks at once
• I played one of the best games of indoor of my life
• I stopped using Splenda
• I baked even more sweet cuppin' cakes

Very busy girl, no?  Up next... my last soccer game for two whole weeks, meeting my future husband's identical twin for the first time (freaky X2), and sitting through a day-long Microsoft orientation.

Ah, 29.  Another year older and better.

Aging is a funny thing, and I'm enjoy watching the subtleties of it unfold.  Every year I seem to like myself a little better, though I also seem to become less of anything.  More bland.  More innocuous.  My professor friend tells me that people tend to become distilled as they age... not less, but more truly whatever they are.  I believe him (worth my while because he's always right), but I still feel like all my spit and fire are gone.  Oh well.  I suspect that I'd rather be happy than interesting.  Perhaps by 30 the suspicion will be knowledge.  Or perhaps by 30 I'll realize that spit and fire aren't all that interesting. 

So... a new year warrants a new account profile.  And why not?  I say, "Arbitrary traditions for arbitrary traditions driven by a mostly arbitrary and antiquated system of measuring time, which might not exist anyway."  Huzzah!

i wish for... a cupcake!