My birthday is in 12.5 days in which I will be turning 29 for the ninth time (37), which is in spitting distance of 40 which is close to death.
What an auspicious way to being an entry, eh? But, I figured it was the right time to sit down and do half-year update. Because interestingly enough I find myself at a cross-roads, one of my own choosing, A decision doesn’t have to be made this second, but, I need to write it out at the very least to sort it out.
Academically, the school year has been amazing. Going to library school has to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I ended the first full year with a overall GPA of 3.88 (B+ in cataloging, of which I proudly wear), I won the Graduate Student Assistant job at the library, which means that my tuition is now paid for AND I have a job manning the reference desk at the graduate library. For one of my classes, I ended up helping design and implement WordPress for a local Detroit museum and will more than likely end up doing my archival practicum there as the archivist loves me. (She’s also pretty awesome as well!) One of my professors has tapped me to work for her company part-time, making really good money, as a web2.0 consultant of sorts which could possibly land me as a full-time gig when I graduate if it works out. I won a scholarship and am also being pushed to fine tune some of my student papers to publishing worth materials and submitting them to appropriate journals.
Several of my classmates and I are founding a new student organization (a student chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild) and I’ve been tapped to take over presidential responsibilities of the local student chapter of ASIS&T. I’ve also been blogging over at Tech-Ink: A Librarian Collective about digital issues. I’m also the communications chair for the Graduate Student Union in my spare time.
Academically and professionally, everything is starting to fall into place.
Personally, things have been going on a more even keel. Lily and Pugsley (of ThePugKids) were surrendered to Ohio Pug Rescue when their temporary foster home fell through and I couldn’t take them with me nor could I find them a place temporarily until I could move into a place that would take more than one pet. This was heartbreaking for me, but, it was the right decision as their happiness and stability was my utmost concern over my own selfish need to make sure I kept alll three of the pug kids together.
I still have Wednesday (who has her own Twitter account) and not once has she shown any signs of abandonment by her siblings and seems pretty happy being the only pug in the household. I’ve ditched caging her at night (like I used to do when I had all three) and she sleeps with me on pillow mountain and has also taken it upon herself to wake me up every morning between 7-8am. Justin has taken a deep liking to her because “she’s lazy and I can respect that” but other than that, she turns 9 in July and she is still as cantankerous as ever. I love her even more so.
Life in Royal Oak has turned out to be pretty good to me and I’ve met a lot of awesome people. One of my girlfriends and I have started meeting every Tuesday for knitting night (and yet I’m still no closer to finishing any of my projects) and I hang out with a few other people as well. Most of the time though I spend at home solo as this past semester was really academically stimulating and I now love nothing more than doing nothing.
Justin and I are still going at it pretty strong as he’s been out to see me several times since I’ve moved for extended periods. It helps that he telecommutes for his job so he’s been able to work from the apartment while I go about my merry little way. The apartment is a little over 600sqft which is fine for one person and a pug but when he moves in in July, it will be a bit cramped. Graduation is set forth for end of August or December of 2010 depending on how I get those final classes laid out. And after that? Who knows? Justin and I have a zillion different life styles planned out for us that take us from living in a small English village to a condo in Chicago. Trips are being planned for far off exotic locales such as Florida (well, Key West) and beyond during our vacation times. A proposal and a wedding are sure to follow at some point. I just don’t know when. So over all, life is good.
I’m finding my way around Detroit and I’m fairly comfortable with the city. There are some parts, architecturally, that are so beautiful that it is heartbreaking and simultaneously so desolated and run down, it is also equally heartbreaking. I haven’t done as much exploring as I would have liked, considering that we’ve had such a rough and long winter (snows until end of April) that the idea of exploring just wasn’t palpable. But now that the glorious spring days are here, I’m totally up for it. I do miss watching my daffodils sprout and strut at Wilcox Park the beginning of every spring.
The cross-roads is that last summer I started a writing project of which I only completed one piece of flash fiction, submitted it to several websites for consideration only to find that the databases took a dump shortly after I did the submission and thus lost my work. By the time I found out, I was gutted and also too busy to re-submit and start over. So that project was shelved for the time being. Justin has always been my biggest supporter when it came to my writing and while he’s not the first person to suggest I could make a living at it, he’s been the most vocal and the most pushy about it.
For Single Awarness Day this year the only thing he wanted from me was a short story of which I never wrote. I had ideas™ but nothing ever really came to fruition. Lately, more so then ever, I’ve become envious of people I know who are living the writerly life. It seems that I keep running into people or meeting them digitally who create these fantastic worlds around their writing and the tentacles of their work stretch far and wide. Writing was always the one thing I thought I was quite good at, something I really, really wanted to do and it seems however that the more involved I become with this new profession of mine, the more intense and time-suckage it becomes, the least likely I’ll make a living as a writer – and not just a writer, but an author.
So even though I’m heading on this really great career path that I’m passionate about, there is still this niggling feeling that I need to stop absorbing other people’s work and create my own. This is not to say that I want to give up doing what I’m doing – not by a long shot, but I really need to figure out how how to make the two worlds converge. Lessening up my activity on Twitter might be a good start as well as starting to plot out what it is I want to write. Justin has always said that I could be a really great writer if I start actually writing again, doing something more than dropping non-sequitors in Twitter or writing provocative posts on my blog or other places. The talent is there but it’s waning and it needs to be fed.
I met a friend of mine for breakfast meeting the other day and as it usually is with me, we ended up spending 3.5 hours talking about everything. We both remarked that the tables around us have all turned over at least thrice since we sat down and the lunch crowd was starting to thin out. Much of what I told her about my life seemed incredulous such as the ex-highschool boyfriend who stalked me from Facebook last winter or the reigniting of the relationship with Justin again. Even I admitted wholeheartedly that if I didn’t know it was true myself (and had blog posts, friends and other methods of documentation at hand to prove it), I would have thought I was a total bullshitter. Katishna has always said that I don’t create the drama but that drama followed me where I went.
My life, in a lot of ways, is pretty extraordinary in a Lifetime movie kind of way. Cathrynne wrote of much of what I was feeling recently, about the confessional side of writing. Since 1996, I’ve been pouring out my heart and soul, laying bare everything that I was for the world to see and not giving a damn who saw it. Age, perhaps, has dampened that need for dissipation of the soul. There are some horrors in my life that I’m not sure I want to revisit quite so soon.
The relationship fall-out with TheEx, for example, still reverberates in ways I never expected. Steph, my expert on all things with crazy men, said that it’s almost impossible to think I would be completely healed in such a short amount of time considering the intensity and brevity of the relationship itself. I know she’s right, but me being me wants the fall-out to be over.
Before the winter semester ended, I spoke to one of my professors about going on for my PhD (which she does fully support) but I was worried that I would not bring anything new to the table of research. The best advice she gave was that one can always bring something new to the table, even in academia when it looks like everything has been researched to death, one can always bring a new or fresh perspective on an issue. I think writing is a lot like that – the basics of writing have been done to death, we know this. It’s the original voices and their perspectives that make all the difference. I admire a lot of writers in a variety of genres, so I know it’s possible to do this. I just now have to figure out how and that will start with the short story for Justin, because he asked.
Month: May 2009
Everything tastes better with a little X-Files thrown in
According to Comcast, their lowest cable package offers 22 channels, of which I’m actually getting 18 (and not the promised 22) and of those 18 channels, some of the selections are weird. Like I get Discovery Health and Style networks, which seems completely arbitrary, you know, why those channels? But I do get PBS and CBC, and have been raping and pillaging PBS and CBC for shows, primarily since they both offer British television shows and I was bitching and moaning on losing BBCA, AGAIN!
CBC offers British soap operas like Emmerdale and Coronation Street, however the interesting thing is, with Emmerdale at least, the offerings are FOUR YEARS behind. I started watching Emmerdale recently and did some research on the show — and now I know what’s going to happen, but you know what? It’s trashy and I like it. I apparently have conversation fodder for the MusicBoyfriend’s OAP1 father and uncle. Hah.
My brother turned me on to Corner Gas, a comedy based on small town prairie life in Saskatchewan. Now I’ve got this urge to sell everything and open a diner in the middle of nowhere. Kind of like Waitress meets Northern Exposure, with maybe a little X-Files thrown in. Everything tastes better with a little X-Files thrown in.
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1. Old Age Person
circling the topic
Having a week of downtime between semesters, I opted to do some spring cleaning which meant dumping extraneous emails off of my two primary gmail accounts as well sort through papers and other stuff to prep for TheBF’s arrival soon (extended stay) and to do basic organization. I came across emails from various members of TheEx’s family on one account as well as love notes from him stashed in various papers that were tucked around willy nilly.
I was heart broken, pained and battered emotionally for about five minutes before I moved on with whatever it was that I was doing.
Since my move to RO, I’ve come across such things but not in such strength or number before and I disqualified everything as momentary lapse of reasoning. It was okay to mourn the death of something that was important to me and I felt like there was some ridiculous conspiracy to regurgitate that pain all over again every time I found something new. A flux of emotions would of course then appear only to be waylaid by reason and common sense (typically after a few beers).
No matter how awesome my life has gotten and how great the people I’ve met recently who have aspects and interests that were like his, I still mourn him and for the last year I’ve been mourning him heavily. Part of that morning means still exhibiting verbal output that I’d like to
This long, dreary, seemingly never ending winter (and semester) finally ended last week. Academically, it was one of the most challenging I’ve had in a very long time and I carry my B+ in cataloging with pride (considering I flunked the final, this is a very good thing). My cumulative GPA dipped from 4.0 to 3.88, but I’m also totally okay with that. The academic stuff will be forthcoming in another post from lib schooled. because there is a lot going on that in arena. The whole thing about world domination before I graduated? Totally happening.
I’ve been indulging in pure, unadulterated laziness this last week or so by catching up on network and series TV, pleasure reading, and basic couching. One of my girlfriend’s said recently that she felt her entire creativity get sucked away when she’s in school, hence the lack of posting on her blog and I realized that was the same for me as well — it wasn’t about time so much anymore as about energy and feeling. It feels easier to sit and internets for hours without contributing to the conversation more so than creating something to give. Contribution requires energy and brain power and a dedication that sometimes I don’t always have to give, no matter how much free time I have lallygagging about.
TheBF is coming in a few weeks for another extended stay with plans for permanent move in July sometime and marriage happening sometime after. We’re eloping, I just don’t know when or where as of yet. And we’re not technically engaged either, but I do have a few rings he’s purchased and surprised me with for “sizing” purposes. There is also apparently a “ring fund” that he’s been contributing to for this purpose of getting me my desired fat rock, but every bloody fucking cunty time someone starts talking about marrying me, shit hits the fan so I’m not holding my breath on this one until after the ring is on my finger or I’m at a JP signing my life away.
Moving right along, I’ve been going through some personal effects recently, tossing and getting rid of even more stuff before TheBF gets here. My apartment is only about 600 sqft and with two large humans (he is 6’6) and an 18lb diva pug (Ms. Wednesday herself), the apartment feels cramped. And that’s with just my stuff so to imagine his things, no matter how scant, and the apartment feels claustrophobic. We talk of nesting and of buying better things at a better time when the big girl job comes long for me after graduation next summer, but until then, we will more than likely be slumming it in RO until that time occurs.
As I was cleaning, I ran across things from TheEx that I had forgotten about – nothing spectacular, just random love notes and such that were shoved away in random and various places, I’m assuming that I shifted about for reasons that seemed logical at the time which makes no absolute sense to me at all right now.
Also what was found was a list I had started before the first break-up entitled, “How to be fabulous in 2008.” and much of what I wrote figured him prominently in the plans but what was interesting was that intermingled with that list were items that were deeply personal and independent of him (or of anyone). That to me was the most striking, that shift from coupledom to absolute autonomy. Also interestingly enough, I accomplished a lot of my goals without realizing I had done what I set out to do in those early days of 2008. I had no idea when I wrote this list we would be breaking up a few months later, but yet we did and I survived.
After seeing those notes, what I wasn’t prepared for, really, was how much my heart still pained after all of this time. Getting over people has been one of my strong suites, so much so that I’ve been called a cold-hearted bitch1 a time or two in my life. There are men, however, who’ve gotten so ingrained in my psyche that it’s almost impossible to get them out no matter how much I tried. Alan is a good example, Ex-Fiance #1 as well as TheBF (first go around) to some extent. TheEx, obviously, is another.
Wait, am I starting on my “Top Five Most Soul Sucking Break-ups Ever”? Go away, High Fidelity! I am resisting the urge to lean out my window and start shouting out that there is no room in my top for the likes of TheEx, but of course, there is. And TheEx doesn’t drive a Saab.
When I was younger, I always imagined myself to be the “once in a lifetime” kind of girl who’d fall in love for once and forever and as 37 starts sniping its claws at me, I think it’s time to dispel that myth forever – because I’m not that girl at all. I’ve been involved with a number of men over the course of my life to dispel that overly romanticized notion. I like to believe though that at the time I really and truly felt that way and that because of that, I would never regret being with them. I love big and whole heartedly and passionately and when the relationships fell apart, I was beyond gutted.
I find myself meandering in my writing here, to and fro and I keep having to reign myself in with my point (which there never seems to be anymore).
I’ve met some wonderful people in the last year who have taken his place in some degree or another, namely my Music Boyfriend who is as passionate as myself on music, who happily engages me for hours on the topic. Other F1 and West Ham fans, TheEx was not a total special snowflake and I get that. But it was everything
1. Or serial monogamist.