March 2006 Archives

women from new mexico on the train ride home, wear your gold band and leave the diamond behind - heaven forbid - you're going into the city and who knows what might happen... dirty side streets and chalkboard marquees, oh-so-hipster brooklyn girl reading grapes of wrath with fresh freesia in her hair. shoes and jacket just so, but not too much. a man stands above me on the f train, so desperate to find love, flashing his self-help book like a badge of honor. huge wide sidewalks, the floor and the ceiling of grand central station, naughty words scrawled in sharpie on the bathroom door. bag ladies (and gentlemen).

I had forgotten what it was like to be all high with show. sitting in the front of the living room on ludlow street, bathed in orangey yellow light, sharing a table with mary jones. shifting from table to floor to table to the other side on the floor, only between songs so as not to interrupt. tom, gorgeous voice all full and wonderful bouncing off the walls when he let it, slaying everyone in the room. empty houses are lonely and my picture in a cd, amazing, one for free and another three to share. tom, arms around me ever so briefly, so slight, a quick peck on the top of my head and he tells me to come on tour for a week. I tell him that it's exactly how the book went, but that I don't think I can come... leaning on the white tiled post waiting for the subway to go back uptown, grinning from ear to ear, looking strange to the passerby I'm sure.

round trip off-peak train ticket: $28.00
four cds with my picture inside (one free): $30.00
metrocard and subway trips: $4.00
semi-trashy book, cashews, and powerbar to get me home: $19.00
total spent, with parking: over $80.00 for one seven hour trip

completely and absolutely worth it, even in the throes of brokeness. and to top it all off, I got back into new haven on the 12:11 arrival, went upstairs, washed up in the bathroom, and came around the corner to the parking garage to see raf standing there with a long stemmed red rose. in that moment, and the whole night up until that point, I had a glimpse of remembering who I was, and why I'm here. and I haven't been able to do that much lately.

photos to follow. I promise.

:*

~vvb

as my clunky budget excuse for an ipod whirls away and charges on my desk at work, as do the batteries for the camera at home. I've decided to take the train to see tom brosseau in the city tonight. this is monumental for a few reasons, one, I love taking the train and usually can't justify the cost (but I can today, with a full tank of gas at almost $35.00) and two, I haven't been to a show for most of the wintertime... anything I had plans to go to or bought tickets for, I rescheduled or sold. I just haven't had it in me to go. and to be honest, had someone not suggested taking the train, I might not have gone tonight. the only thing making me get my ass to the station is the fact that I can technically say I'm friends with tom and mary jones now, so blowing them off when they've come from great distances is completely unacceptable. so I'll zip up my grey cardigan and put on my walking shoes, and take the f train from grand central to the lower east side.

I love walking around in the city, breathing it in, dirty sidewalks and all. the last time I was there for kexp it totally sucked me in, just like the time before, and I'd go live there in a second if I could afford it. it's breathing and alive all the time and the rain against the windowpanes and everything just make me tingle with total joy. even when my feet hurt or when it's ten thousand degrees in the subways. I love it endlessly.

so much has been going on that I haven't seen fit to print, it's seen the insides of my notebooks and scraps of paper shoved into my planner and little notes around my desk at work - but I can't go throwing people under the bus without their knowledge or consent. so you'll have to be alright with me processing all of this off-blog, and hopefully you'll get the end result of my restructured mind as all this stuff shifts and passes... assuming it shifts and passes... otherwise it's going to be a long year.

spring ahead, kids.

~vvb

it was the strangest thing walking into my building after the gym today... it felt like I hadn't been here in days. I wasn't even gone for twelve hours. but the feeling just overwhelmed me -

so my horoscope in the advocate this week said that messages would be coming to me through my dreams - like if I had a dream to join the circus, that it meant to go do something that I hadn't tried before or didn't do because I thought it wouldn't work. two nights ago I had a very vivid dream about sitting in this conference room, a few random people, I think a family member or two, me, raf, and this older guy in a yankees hat and a mets shirt. turns out he's a baseball recruiter and he wants raf to come and play for his team.

then someone whispers to me, "you know he's recruiting for the seattle mariners, right?"

and in that second in the dream, it was like, yes - this is what I've been waiting for. this is it, this is the answer, this is the thing that's going to make my head be alright - and now, explaining it and seeing all the frames of the movie in my mind, I'm simultaneously enchanted by it like I was during the dream, and completely discouraged because I don't know how to make that happen in real life.

I'm back to praying for things to be obvious.

stuff is getting better, not financially or anything, but my head is straightening out a little bit each day.

I've got four minutes on the cookies, and then it's off for a shower and then the meeting, but I just had to get this down before the dream slipped away like the lines I need to write down and never get around to. like the one about walking in circles downtown and counting stars in the summertime that almost slipped my mind the other day, and that other one in the car I'll probably never get back.

~vvb

we'll walk in circles downtown
and take pictures of our reflections in everything
see that old couple, how she's fixing his coat
and kissing him goodbye
we agreed
they had to fight sometimes too,
and he probably didn't like her shoes
but he loved her anyway.

and we'll drive in the warm with the top down
and park by the beach
and throw back the seats
and we'll try to count the stars
and when you hand brushes
up against mine
it'll still feel like it did on our first date.

and all I wanted this morning
was a big old bathtub in the middle of the room
for you to carry me to
a big soft sponge
to wash off the night before
so I could sit there and cry
in the sunrise light
while you sat next to me
and made me clean again.

snapshots on the side of the highway, glove on a severed hand, telling me to go back. there's lists and shiftings and awkward silences and big, two story windowpaned walls with perfect yellow industrial light inside. I love yous on the sidewalk and I need to change everything, still. mix tapes aching to be made. aggresive sex, rambling blog entries that nobody gives a shit about and you, sitting in the corner of your apartment, alone, wondering what the hell just happened. I want to make a soft nubby brown scarf before it's too warm to wear it. (distance has a way / of making love / understandable...) and the songs trail off somewhere in the back of my mind. I'm fighting off the sleep. 49 pictures are glossy and packaged and on their merry way, and it might be the beginning of everything. kristin, I need to make my website work. my boots are loosening and it's gone from having a warm day during the cold weather to having cold days during warm weather (almost, almost). I don't want to waste my life in the waiting place, in the middle of everything great that hasn't quite happened yet, because it isn't enough. I'm in love and it's terrifying and gorgeous all at once. pillows and yellow paint and an old camera calling me from somewhere I can't seem to find.

there's a lightheartedness and a seriousness about it all, and these updates are suddenly so important. shannon said, "every time I play the wrens I think of you," and that and the glove on the side of the highway made everything fall into place.

I've got to go make some lists.

no, you must have me confused with someone else. it's the tights. no, I understand. have a great day...

there's something empowering about wearing tights. for me, anyways. I mean, unless they're the little white ones you're putting onto a small girl, tights totally rock. black stretchy ones, striped ones, wooly ones (sometimes), all kinds of them. it's like somewhere along the lines, tights made a statement. like, I'm not a little girl anymore. look at these bad-ass tights I got. don't they rock? no, controllers of the free world, I will not wear your nude pantyhose. no, naysaying elderly ladies, I will not fall prey to your suntan falsities with reinforced toe. no. I rock. I have tights, dammit.

we go from girl to almost woman to woman - and there's certain ones of us that go through the same stages of tights. they're important to me, ever since the red-black-and-white striped pair I wore with my red jumper and brown knee high lace-ups that kristy lent me that fateful day in new haven. tights can be punk rock or not. tights can change an outfit from drab to the kind of outfit that - well, that a girl that wears tights would wear. tights are teenage angst and all kinds of angela chase-y. tights make me love the cold, because you can't wear them once spring comes. I don't, anyways. tights hold memories and markers in their very being.

tights. even the word is good. like lite brite, only different. tights tights tights.

so I got ready to go to therapy this morning, favorite thrift store knee length stretchy black skirt in tow. blue old navy tshirt with grey thermal underneath. and my docs. and I felt tough and empowered. and I didn't have any pantyhose - as I thought of putting these things on while I showered, I thought I might have thrown out my last pair. so somewhere around ten thirty, on the way to coffee with raf, we stopped at walgreens to get him a heating pad. and lo and behold, next to rows of appropriate hose and trouser socks, were simple, stretchy black tights. waiting, between knee high and control top. I skipped past the easter chocolate and handed my find to the cashier triumphantly.

cut to me sitting on the floor of the starbucks bathroom (it's a super clean one out near amity), boots askew, socks shoved in the pocket of my vest, feet and then knees and then thighs inside soft stretchy tights. I put my boots back on and stood up. it was like a magic cape had been thrown over my shoulders. I was tough and strong and wore tights and fuck you if you didn't like it. I pulled my bangs down across my forehead and got my misto from the bar. I pulled my skirt up past my knee to show raf. "see? tights." he nodded. I didn't expect him to get it - it's really only a girl thing, and only for a few of us at best. we slipped back into the car and went on with our day.

and now here I sit at work, tights on the brain. all day I've felt awesome about these frigging tights. besides the trip to the psychiatrist this morning, it was the best money I spent all day.

maybe I'll get some fishnets next week.

kisses,

~vvb

fourteen days on, session number 3 tomorrow morning (it's supposed to be wednesdays, but it's thursday this week instead). I've been fairly steady about keeping track of how I feel, what I ate, what my head's doing, how much sleep I'm getting, etc. - but since I'm at work and stuff, it's easier to update here. I've missed a few days now and then in my notebook so I want to make sure I stay on top of all of this.

so, I don't really feel much different. I seem to have adjusted to the sleeplessness, for the first week or ten days or so it was hard to fall asleep and I'd keep waking up in the middle of the night. now I'm back to my ten hour clips, which are from 10:30 - 11 or so until 8 or 8:30, pretty much fitlessly. I do feel wide awake though during the day - it's like my head gets tired and wants naptime but something is keeping me awake. so I sit there, a little dazed, until it passes. I've lost about 8 pounds so far, I just don't want to eat as much - which is weird for me, because I can eat and eat and eat and I just don't want to lately. I'm making my bed regularly, and going through days of not cleaning up at all and then doing it all in a big fit. I've felt a little at the end of my rope emotionally, so I get all worked up about something, and instead of just rolling around in it and not being able to stop, I'm starting to realize it's happening about five or ten minutes into it. so that's an improvement, but I don't know if it's just because I'm so shot, or if something's adjusting, or what. I'm having a hard time hanging out with my mom, it's almost like watching someone self destruct. it's hard to just - sit there. I want to scream at her and tell her to go do something, anything, just to not just sit there and wither away. I'm not scared anymore about whether or not raf is getting jammed up with me, mostly because he's told me he's not, but also because I've kind of come to this place where this is just how I am right now and it's going to pass at some point. and some people in my life are going to stick it out, and some aren't, and there's not a whole lot I can do about what other people are doing. I've told the important ones what's up, and they don't seem to be running away screaming.

as far as being jammed up about work, it came to me sometime sunday (after yapping eve's ear off for a few hours) that I don't need to work here. I don't have to work here. I don't have to do anything, for that matter - but it took away the whole "what am I going to do about all of this angst" thing. it turned into "well, I could go work somewhere else" - and that took this whole looming awful thing off of my shoulders. so I'm dusting a few things off and making some lists and we'll see where it goes. but it's not making me want to blow my brains out every day as much.

so is that just my normal evolution of having a hard time into having snapshots of having less of a hard time, or am I chemically balancing back out, or both, or neither? I have no idea. I think it's helping too that I have a few things to do at work, at least I have for the last few days, so it's a little less time to be sitting around obsessing about myself.

I can't believe I'm not hungry. that's just amazing. I'm like, always hungry. this is great.

so what else... so this week (tomorrow) we need to address that, and the not being able to sit with mom stuff, and the turning thirty what have I done with my life stuff. I feel like I need to make a colossal to-do list. I've been standing myself up for dates these days. tom brosseau's show is coming up at the end of the month, that's going to be great - but other than that, there's a lot of downtime over the next couple of weeks. it's probably exactly what i need.

club sandwiches, not seals.

kisses,

~vvb

currently in the throes of myspace addiction. come say hi.

kisses,

~vvb

so this week with the therapist was much more anti-climactic than last. less crying. more basic untangling of knots - keeping an eye on where I'm at in my cycle, trying to make plans to circumvent anything I can see coming down the crazy pipe - I feel kind of stupid now, but every week is enlightening. stupid because these are such basic things. it's like a little, specifically focused mirror she holds up and shines on me. are you going to have a hard time if you don't have plans? make some. know what you're doing for the next week. plan a massage for when your pms is getting bad. tell people what you need.

then there's the part she can't help me with, the part that's got me in tears every other five minutes. the part where I feel crazy and overreact to every single little thing. the part where I take everything personally and want to run home and hide. the part where I feel like there's something going on where there's nothing at all. still, all the crazy aside, I can't help but feel like something's up that I just can't shake. something aside from all of this, if I put it all down and try really, really hard to be focused - there's a rift that has nothing to do with any of this. and it's making me crazy. and I almost want something to happen, so I can go, see? I'm not crazy at all. I saw this coming. I told you so, I told you -

so.

I want instant happy pills to take this away. I can't have them. I just have to sit through this, and on top of it, I have to speak on sunday, which is making me want to run away screaming. and the solution to the elusive rift? I just have to let it be. it's so hard, it's stuff I want to poke and prod at and fix - but I can't. well, I could, but that won't work. it's like letting a piece of paper unfold by itself, slowly but surely. and I want to get my hands all in it. and I wish I could tell you what I'm talking about, but I'm stuck in the not-knowing-who's-reading place so I can't.

I don't even want to post this. I might not. I think I have to.

~vvb

did you know that baby carrots aren't baby carrots at all? they're normal carrots whittled away to little versions of themselves. I had no idea. there's another thing like that ritchie valens / la bamba actor guy. I think I'm fucked with all that stuff. there's so much I don't know that I don't know...

one thing that came into clear view this week: as it turns out, I'm depressed. big shocker. my psychologist figured that out in less than fifteen minutes of sitting down with her last wednesday.

so what does that mean? right in this instant, it feels like I'm always going to be the girl that Has A Lot Going On. like my freeform brilliant writing magic finding days have ended, that I'm headed for Serious and Uptight and Painfully Self-Aware. that's a fucking drag. I know, well, I think, it won't actually be like that forever, but it's what it feels like right now. I'm super focused on a bunch of unimportant stuff, I have no perspective on my life, and the other night it felt like everything was really totally out of control. like who I know I can be and am will never resurface again, that I'm stuck with who I am right now, and I try so hard to make them match up and I can't. and not who I am in the "you're right where you're supposed to be" way, it's more like there's something standing in my way right now. sometimes I'm afraid to talk because I don't know what's going to come out. and when friends go, "how are you?" they're struck with a twenty minute dissertation about all the ways I'm not okay.

on the other side of the bed, there's a wonderful side to this too: it's not all me. what I mean by that is, that this diagnosis makes so much more make sense - I've been keeping a journal since I started the wellbutrin last week, just so I can see weeks or months from now if there's any difference, including keeping an eye on my diet and how much sleep I'm getting. and saturday, in a fit of not wanting to come out (emotionally) from under my kitchen table, a whole big chunk fell into place. I was starting to think back to when everything changed - when I noticed a departure from "I don't feel like working out" to "I'm hiding, and I'm a little crazy". now, for a while, like, a year and a half, the things I've been feeling aren't unfamiliar. it's like bad pms every now and then (well, that's pretty common) and sleeping a little too much (hey, it's cold out, or I'm always going, etc.), and not wanting to go to the gym (who does, really?) and having a hard time (hey, you've got a lot going on, your dad died, your mom's sick, etc.) - so how in the world was I supposed to know that it was anything other than normal? I mean, if I rewind my life for the last ten years, I've got my mom having cancer, getting divorced, getting married, buying and selling a house, moving every single year, my dad dying, my dog dying, getting sober, hitting bottom, ending an abusive relationship, and then all out bad shit prior to that. drunken chaos, stealing, lying, cheating, hating myself, various forms of low self-esteem, etc. - so it's not a surprise that I kind of have a tough go at things sometimes.

but for all of these to keep happening, to stretch out for so long - like I was starting to say, it all began coming together as I made these shorthand notes on saturday. I started gaining weight in the winter of '04, after I split up with george. another christmas without dad. mom got cancer. we go to cabo, and not only am I in cabo with my mom for valentine's day, but she's sick from chemo and can't really leave the hotel room. I start losing my shit, thinking, oh, I haven't been to a meeting in days, who wouldn't be having a hard time, etc. - and I proceeded to spend ten dollars a minute on roam to talk to tim grady - we determine that I've got tools I can use, and that really, things are fine - and I brush it off. but that's when I notice the snap, or the click, if you will. physical reactions to how I've been doing emotionally, among a bunch of other things. and so much was getting better - rediscovering myself, spending time out of a relationship, writing more, getting back into music - that I didn't notice. and when I did, I focused on all the good things. that's all I needed, right? a fresh perspective. maybe some fruit, and a good mixtape. things are fine.

things, as it turn out, are very much not fine. but it's good that we've figured out that they're not, because now we can Do Something About It. and those nights where my friends and my boyfriend and my family tell me they love me, and that it's all going to be alright, and I turn around and think that they all hate me - well, now it's not me not trying hard enough to get a better handle on things. all the crying and sleeping - it's not just me being lazy or sad. I've hit a wall. it's the end of the proverbial rope. six meetings a week and all the things I'm supposed to be doing later, it's still not shifiting.

so we try it another way. which is what I did last time my life fell apart.

stay tuned, kids. I have the feeling that this one is going to get interesting.

~vvb