C Chasing C - Removing The Layers From A Front Desk Job

In a world where lifetimes are lived during a street lamp's light, the inhabitants have a tendancy to call strangers: friend.

I asked him once if he had ever been in love. When I asked, it was somewhat mockingly and quite assumingly arrogant. He was a hooker and hardened by the haze.   He was always high when I saw him. Why would I even believe he could feel?  Let alone reach an emotion that was even close to something I had cherrished with another. The way he replied quickly changed my tone immediately.  He was not defensive.  He did not retort with a sarcasm that I may have had.  He plainly, earnestly looked me in the eye and said, "Yes."

In that glance I saw a story and a sadness.  I also saw a person for the first time.  Someone who would come to call me "friend" as the street lamps would illuminate many more of our nights, including the Eve of a New Year.  He would bestow a tenderness upon my lips that I desperately needed to feel.  It was an awakening moment where the pure love in my soul was able to override the chaotic neurochemistry and re-boot the real person I had been hiding.

Aug.2010

Batons & Relays

I'm surrounded by kindness at the moment.  There are story lines in each of the lives in this household that are overlapping right now.  This space is an intersection of energies that are in harmony.  The chills overwhelm my body as I typed that last line.  It's such a good feeling.

Last night I had a three hour conversation on the phone with Sarah.  While we have always been able to communicate as adults with fluidity, it's rare that our conversations would last this long.  Garage to garage; California to Minnesota.  The eldest and youngest of our family and both still wading through the emotional muck that accumulates when dysfunction stunts, or in some cases, completely obliterates communication between the people that you sleep under the same roof with from birth to leaving the nest.  There is so much pain in both of us.  I see her searching out ways to understand and excise that pain into the world and be filled with the good things that are missing.  I remember my initial forays into understanding my family programming and trying to learn how to change that.  (Some of my pondering thoughts are even in these posts.)

I'm finding lately that the reasons are surfacing for where I am in life right now.  I knew that these thoughts would come to me when the time was right.  Although not completely clear yet, I feel less unsure of the future.  I jokingly made a goal for 2013 already, but it is something that I desire to have again. 

Sunday brunches with friends.  :-)

Voice Overt

Send now I have the ability to blog from my phone. I suppose I always had the ability if I wanted to type long enough. But I'm actually dictating all of these words right now. True, Not exactly convenient when traveling by bus or train. But another way to get my thoughts out when I don't really want to be tapping the wrong buttons on a touch screen.

Registration & Check-In

Time for my driver's license renewal.  It's amazing to me that in over 20 years of driving, I've never had to re-take the written test.  Even more surprising to me this time around because it's the first time to renew the license since my DUI back in December 2004.  I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.  Bottom line is that they wouldn't be able to process EVERY single driver in the state.  Wait times are already long if you can't (or don't) schedule and appointment online.  They would increase to a crippling degree if written & drive test had to be administered to all of use.  Bureaucracy.  Consequently.... bad driving/drivers remain and everyone driving has no real incentive to correct their behaviors. 

And really... in life... unless one has an internal drive or the consequences of laws, what incentive is there to change?  Some might say for the approval of others in their life.  Then it's not an internal drive.  The impetus then is the approval of "whoever."  

If The Train Must Jump The Tracks

For a long time after I graduated from high school, I believed that I wasn't living the life I was supposed to have.  I believed that the "right" life would get "back on track" soon enough...  and when it didn't, I found that I had begun the trappings of every good consumer's lifestyle.  New car, credit cards, eating out and the corporate job to pay for it all.  My soul deteriorated as the right tracks could no longer be seen and the idea just a dream from some storybook life I once knew.  Like childhood.

I've been reviewing these journal entries of mine.  Not just the online portion, but the thousands of pages written in my horrid script.  There are recurring thoughts about family dating back to childhood.  What I have never been able to really accept is that part of the idea of what my "family" was (or perhaps only what I thought it should be) died with grandma.  I've expected it to "revive" somehow over the years and it just never does.  It just doesn't. 

I have found my idea of family in so many other places along the way in life.  I understand those song lyrics she used to listen to so loudly now.  Oh legacies.  oh indeed.

Battery

It's been a while since I did this brainstorm type of writing.  My ears are so hot right now... coming off just responding to a political post on Sebastian's FB page regarding the complexities of voting.  Someone was making the argument that they weren't against gay rights just because they may be voting for Romeny... but whatever the spoken or written words are, you truly are if you're endorsing someone who would not allow me to get married or see my partner in the hospital, etc.  I said that it basically comes down to a prioritization of the values in one's life.  I didn't make a judgement as to what those values are.

People always come first.  If we can't agree on that basic thing than how do we expect to live with one another?  And how to we begin to do that if we don't agree that we have an equal footing that we all start from to then have discourse, debate, grow, learn... and... *ugh*... I shake my head.. or as the kids say it these days: SMH.

Moodswings' first album is playing as I'm typing.  I'm sitting on the couch in Scott & Joseph's apartment.  I'm in San Fernando.  It's midnight now... Grandpa died a little before 6pm today (October 23rd).  Here's what I wrote on my FB:

"The man who taught me at 5yrs old what Pi was, that donkey's meant Democrat and elephants meant Republicans and to be skeptical of both, who gave me my first journal to write in at 8yrs old which encouraged me to write more...left his body today. I love you very much, Grandpa.

My grandfather gave me so much more than my last name. As an adult, I would begin to understand the complexities of my emotions by listening to his words that held a subtle wisdom. In these last several years, the Alzheimer's would take me and so much more from his memory. I'm happy that he is now able to reconnect with all that he once knew. Goodbye Grandpa."

I always cry (inside or outwardly) when I hear my mother's hurt voice over the phone.  Maybe it's something, some reaction or feeling that I learned over time; rooted in childhood with memories I no longer have.  All I know is that it's one of those empathic things that pops up in my life quite naturally when it happens. 

End.

Monkey Moments

Listening to Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" while reading old love letters is maybe not the best combination one could choose to marry at a "quarter after one."  Hahaha... In truth, enough time has passed where the sincere sentiment of the letters can be lightly relived and not asorbically absorbed.

One Quarter Moisturizer

"When you're in unfamiliar places count on me through life's changes..."
I lay in the morning light with headphones on while I caress my arms. This feeling that I give to myself is not the same as it was as a child and done by grandma: not the same as a teenager and done by a lover; not the same as when I have done it before in the pauses of time.

Pick Up a phone and stop texting

Like most people...HUN...we like our compassion & sympathy with sincerity and not squished between appointments.

Lyrical Light

I have never understood the lyric, "Like a cat in heat stuck in a moving car..." more than the past few hours.  This moment of light is brought to you by the keen choices of yours truly. 

Circumstances Circumventing Circadians

That nap 12 hours ago when I was feeling run down seemed like a good idea at the time.  It definitely recharged me for the afternoon/evening student arrivals & various random "faux emergencies." (i.e. keys locked in rooms, orders for pizza, ushering the zombie-dragging-legs-of-WiFi-addicted-teenagers from the lounge to their dorms, etc. etc. ad nauseum)   :-)

All that excitement creates energy.  Though many new student's visage has a weary traveler's transatlantic fatigue showing, they are also blissfully hopeful of the future which keeps them awake.  It's infectious, contagious even.  My own sore muscles throbbing from a day's work; counting sheep right now just doesn't seem to be an option.  :-)

The Abuela Tree

Reading my old journals and watching Joseph speak with his grandmother in Creole, I miss the same in my own life.

Initializing Memory with First Hospitals

Hospitals bother some of you because of memories tied to sickness death and/or loss. Emotions arise that hurt. Scare. I have never had that feeling while walking the endless corridors or watching the scrubs and white coats traverse the halls. I have no qualms about hospital food, save maybe the the size of the portions; surely the food on a plane, or school lunchroom, has been far worse than what I have ever experienced in a hospital cafeteria.

Perhaps the fact that my very first memory of life involves a hospital in a positive circumstance has a lot to do with my openness to visiting them to this day. I was two years and two months old when my brother, Byron, was born. I have no independent memories of life without him. Funny, I paused after writing that last sentence because when I think about him there is always an inner sense of closeness I feel--even though we are by no means "close" as I think people define the word. However, we certainly are not estranged either. In the moment it took me to write out that explanatory sentence, multiple childhood flashes of Byron zipped through my head: sniffing a raisin up his nose; sharing a bedroom with bunk beds; building ships with legos; play fighting that always got too physical and he would yell for mom; cutting each others' hair in the garage... Things I don't normally think about. :-)

Learning Circles

Sometimes it is something as simple as covering the top of your cup with a CD case while in the garage so that dust and insect friends don't descend into the liquid level inside; the things that friends teach me.  Yes, I can see the bugs flying.  Yes, I know there is dirt around.  Somehow, I just didn't naturally think to cover the cup.  These are the moments of "dumb genius" that are of note for my life.  I don't think the others around me "get that" most of the time. 

I'm so lucky when they do.

The Seed That Is Ugly

Over a decade ago I began to feel the social prejudice from friends when attempting to modify the direction of my own life and defining what "success" meant to me. I never thought that it would be something I would lose friends over. Was I naive? Does this thing Mr. Gage sees in me as a light of hope blind me to everyday obvious actions? Or is it that I have maintained a level of purity to the component of friendship that others lose as they continue to keep their minds closed and not open? I've been there too. (So I am tolerant more than I would have been, but the knowledge does not overt the immediate sting of ......betrayal?) 

I guess there was no need for a question mark at the end of that last word. It is the word that came to mind so quickly and the word that I feel. So when does one lose objectivity and believe what others believe as truth? And when does sticking to one's beliefs prove to be the correct course of action because---though unpopular---it is still right(at least for me & in the grander sense, right for a specific individual) in the face of so much doubt. These questions... these uncertainties... these clouds that may never clear... To me, these are the realities of an open mind and heart because there is no doctrine that asserts that "YOU MUST" or "IT MUST BE." 

I revert back to lyrics that resonate....

"How come no-one told me 

All throughout history 

The loneliest people 

Were the ones who always spoke the truth 

The ones who made a difference 

By withstanding the indifference I guess it's up to me now 

Should I take that risk or just smile?" 

-misread, Kings Of Convenience

Writer's High

It's moments like this that "I DO" live for. Dido's "White Flag" is half way into the song. I chose this song for this moment. I'm in the slipstream of my creative self and it feels so good that'm I'm welling up with tears because it feels so good to be here again. In the joy of it all there is the real understanding that fear is a begging transient who could grow if I don't stay focused---fear that this moment is transient itself. There was a time when it seemed that this balanced feeling seem to be effortless. That's a lie we tell to ourselves, I think. I'm anxious for my trip up to Oregon in June so that I can be rejoined with the box full of hand written journals that I have been separated from for two years. I know that within the words of my twenty years younger self there is wisdom that I have misfiled over time. There is confidence that I created to carry me through uncertainty in those pages. There are memories I purposefully wrote down in the hope that I would not grow into a soulless adult who was a shell of the ideals bourne in fearless youth. Having never been wreckless then, I have explored those brambles only to find that the thorns prick you regardless of when you brush them. (I don't heal as quickly as I did in my youth.)

Pledging Myself, Passing Regardless

May day, May day... calling on my will & determination to write something EVERY SINGLE DAY this month! Even if it's just a simple statement like this. But I should gladly ask myself for more. More.

Equal ILL Bring'em

Day Six.... Insomnia. This is a familiar place to be the past few nights. Honestly... six in one hand... half dozen in the other... In times of poverty, the one hand makes pragmatic sense. In times of liquid cash flow, the other hand is just as pragmatic. Let's see how I feel about this assessment in another decade.

SOMETIMES I feel like the whole world is falling apart---literally, figuratively, my immediate space as well as the lives around me. Then reminders happen. MOST OF THE TIME I'm amazed at how intricate the universe is and how moving through it connects not just me but those around me to each other.

Somber Situation

No entries for the past month... so much change and nothing that I really feel like thinking about... let alone writing about.

CAstles IN The Sky

"Oh tell me why, do we build castles in the sky?"...
-Ian Van Dahl
ACE

Some would say that these are our dreams; something for us to strive for...others would say it's easier to set our focus on these lofty ideals that are out of reach rather than the tangible realities we don't wish to deal with at our feet. I say yes to both...but when is which?

Strangers On Blue

If this was New York, these giddy glances back and forth would be tedious and a waste of time. One of us would have already either yelled "Hey" from our seats at one another or actually walked over to the other....

Alas, this is the world geography where "The Happiest Place On Earth" exists...where you look down to see the stars amid sparkling pavement...there is an Orange Curtain...and so many other Fabulous Fabricated Fascades!

That all being true... I said hello & stayed on the train past my stop to talk with him. And even if nothing comes of it... I am feeling myself again.

"Lonely" by Ian Van Dahl

I've kinda always wanted to be in bed with a boyfriend in the rain to this song.

"Lonely" by Ian Van Dahl

How about being lonely.
Gonna give my soul to you.
Like thousand lights shining on my skin.
Can you feel inside of me?
My heart beating
Lonely sound

[Chorus:]
It touches my skin
It touches my soul
Do you really understand me?
I touches my skin
It touches my soul
Do you feel the same why I do?

The atmosphere is mighty
Colours of hope are lightening me.
Seduce my mind
Lift me up real high
Something sweet I can't resist
All these questions bring me down.

[Chorus 2x]

Do you feel the same why I do?

Promise Me Maybes

Though my words often sound definitive, I've just learned to speak with authority over time. I do it much less than when I was younger, but I still catch myself now & again speaking before I know enough to be saying what comes out of my mouth. This is true of conversation topics where there are facts that could be widely known and I personally have not endeavored to study up.

But when it comes to matters of the heart... And I know someone well enough... And I've been witness to their actions... Facts or not, all observations process in some part of my brain that can read & interpret their emotional world. (Allegedly... I mean, I'm only as accurate as the honest, concurring feedback I get from what I say.)

No "expert" in the field of "SLY"chology, but an expert of time & experience just the same. I used to be young and think that wisdom came with time & experience. I now know that not to be the case with everyone. There are slow learners at every stage & in each pace of life. (Some are spinning their wheels in the same spot from birth to death and some not much further.)

I'm not sure if I have too many expectations still---after simplifying my life---or if drifting back into the world of academia & old friendships I am letting the expectations of others crowd my thoughts again.

This is something in the back of my mind for the present and near future.

Three Drives - Letting You Go (Greece 2000) (Dabruck & Klein Remix) Offi...

The Way That Truth Times

There's a very distinct vibe we put off when experiencing "The Third Wheel Syndrome." Most of the time, one can avoid the situation if the people and/or situation is assessed. However, sometimes it happens among a trio of friends when two begin to let their inner feelings show---or previously unreleased publicly.

It's by no fault of anyone.... It's just how some stories are told & unfold. At least the music is good as I'm sitting in the upstairs heat on a leather couch with my own body heat being reflected back at myself... I haven't even danced yet and my tank top is drenched.

This week has been very hard for me and while I think some people intellectually get it... I don't think anyone knows what they can do to help. I've been grateful to those who have simply known to be around me; communicate... Attempted something.

Now... I dance...

Free Chill

Winds of change inhaled...
(by choice or force)
We learn a way to adapt either way.
(step forward or drag your feet)

Riddle Me This...

I wake from sleep. Pfft, I should call it a nap seeing as I think I was only unconscious for some measurement past an hour. Strange, I do not feel groggy.

I have a sense of something being off--in the not right sense, not in the power sense. What I don't know is if it's something physical/physiological with my body, something cosmic that hasn't revealed itself yet, something obvious that I haven't opened my sight to or perhaps even---as honest as I try to be--something I know and just haven't done anything about yet. At least on this last point, I can take some time tomorrow, sit and make a list then complete the items. If I still have this feeling afterward then at least I have narrowed the possibilites.

On the Family Front, I am making steady progress. Today I have added the final sibling significant other. Including my mom's man, I am "virtually" connected where I can not be physically present. I have a letter to complete... I feel that being done by this weekend. I didn't realize I had so much to say.

The start of some old habits are coming back. The good habits. The good people will hopefully fall in line.

Song on Rand(y)om

With over 9000 songs files to select from on "random" play... Choosing to believe in connections I've made is no less odd than people believing in all-knowing beings. LoL.

December 22, 2011 after talking to Randy's mom:

"Home"
"As The Rush Comes"
"The Sound Of Missing You"
"Listen To Your Heart"
"I Would Do Anything For Love"
"Who's That Chick"
"I Know The Truth"
"Stand Up"

January 06, 2012:
"Stand Back" by Stevie Nicks
"I Hope You Dance" by Leanne Womack
"Angel" by Eurhythmics (Annie Lennox)
"Wind Beneath My Wings" by Bette Midler