Triggers, Training, Toby & Time

First times for ever thing in life at least once... haha.  This year is the first time in the 13 year history of my online journal that I had absolutely no entries for the month of January. 

I blame Facebook, Twitter and the way that technology has changed over the past decade.  Since writing has always been more of a channeling of my demons, a tool to exorcise, more than a vanity seeking fame and approval, I have never written with any regularity per se.  I'm more grateful than anything, that I can see a written record of the life and times that I have already forgotten.  These entries are triggers. 

I am sure to forget much more than I have ever even recorded.  At times, the purposely vague words of my past leave me with a mystery to try and figure out who or what I was talking about.  Luckily, while the names and faces are sometimes absent from memory, usually the memory of the feeling or reason for writing remains intact. 

Five days ago I climbed up on a saddled horse named Toby and rode him in circles a few times.  I can see how people who are around the animals grow to love and ride them frequently.  I could see in his eyes what I see in many animals who do not use words to communicate and he was not looking for a new rider on that day. 

I am going into the fourth month of not speaking with my mother.  The feeling is familiar.  I have set a mental reminder to check-in on this strategy for myself at the end of the semester and before starting my Summer job with EF.  Time and experience tell me that this, sadly, is a lesson that I have got to teach myself completely continue trapping myself with the wrong people moving forward.  I know that this conflict of my own values cannot be "tabled" indefinitely, but I have had the persistent feeling that I need to focuse through at least one full semester successfully before I am ever going to gain ground with one value over another.  Compromise... is not a kitten in this litter. 

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.