I don't want to talk about it. but I am going to take a crack at it.
you know. I'm just saying, or whatever.
October 2009 Archives
I know. It's not Wishville, but it's close. Were I more adept in graphic design, I'd beef this whole thing up to say "Welcome to Capitol Hill" with lots of big gay landmarks and stuff. QFC, table 219, a few tattoo shops... maybe that is season six level stuff. Where our heroine is back in the classroom, entrenched in term papers and thirsty for knowledge, has advanced her photographic prowess, and possibly has a real bedroom.
All that just made me realize that I have undoubtedly passed go, collected my $200.00 (and put it into a spreadsheet) and entered season five. Hi. I'm right here. You can eat now.
I just let out a big, contended sigh. Life's alright. (Suicide attempts a few hundred feet from my building notwithstanding.) I finally made a budget, for reals. Yesterday I was face to face with the prospect of attending three (!!!) Wrens shows in Hoboken during the first week of December, as they "retire" their early catalog and get ready to push forth into the newalbumosphere. And so I could go to the shows -- all of them -- on guest list, and stay with my cousin, and the airfare is only like $200.00 round-trip on the redeye both ways to Newark. Piece of cake, right? Right. I mean, I can find the money in my next paycheck.
Then I did my allocations off of next week's paycheck: bills due, recurring expenses, a start on the emergency fund -- and after it was all parsed out I had $421.00 left over. And I looked at it there, staring at me, and thought about it for a minute. Even if that happened every paycheck, the absolute best possible scenario, let's even round it up to $500.00 for the sake of math -- in the course of a year, that's twelve thousand dollars. That's like, a huge chunk of my debt! Like, close to all of it! And I sat there, and remembered hearing Kristin turn down going to shows, saying that she had other priorities even right now (even though said show would indeed be fully life-altering), and -- I just always wondered how she could put it down so easily. Now I know. I have seen endless, epic Wrens sets. I've been pulled on stage during a two-night stand in Chicago to play piano. I've fully lost my shit, covered in sweat, and experienced entire gear shifts in the mechanics of my existence. It would be great to see them again, but it would be even better to be out of debt and able to go see whomever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
Across the top of my budget spreadsheet it says, If you pay off your bills now, you will be able to pay for whatever you want. And it's true. And then it became easy to sacrifice, and to bite into not taking the trip (taking a trip, not taking a trip...). It also became easier suddenly to see a set of goals and an end point. With $400.00 left over on the next few paychecks, my car will be paid off. Done. Then that $300.00 a month will wipe out the next smallest credit card (especially with the extra $400.00 per check) and so on and so forth.
This all came about because (a) I got tired of being broke, (b) the cash thing is working for Kristin, so I tried it; and (c) the preliminary drive-by of a budget in my notebook one morning at the cafe had me sitting there, aghast, going, there is no fucking way I have $800.00 left over every month after bills, expenses, and even allotting for some miscellaneous stuff -- what in the fuck am I doing with my money?
And so it is. The workbook makes calculations and everything. With everything mapped out, five extra hours of overtime is like hitting the lottery.
Lottery. Sheeshus. I meant to write about being in like with my newfound dude-like emotional capabilities and how much fun it is lately to be having all the sex, but I guess I needed to write about that instead. But really -- it's so much fun to be having all the sex. I'll sit here for just a moment: yesterday, or the day before, I'm at Annie's and she goes, "How's Gary?" And I go, "How the fuck would I know, dude?" And then we both practically pissed ourselves laughing. Season five Victoria is a far cry from every other Victoria that's ever been. It's the little things like that that show me the difference between when I think I've got something figured out, and when I really actually believe something and it just figures out itself.
Oh, and the planets have shifted or whatever, PS. I suddenly got very unstuck, and actually found myself in the bathroom yesterday going, this shit isn't going to break me. Fuck that. over a particularly difficult set of tasks my boss had asked me to do. And I feel like that in a bunch of other subsections of my life too -- perpetually blissy, working hard, dealing with some hard shit but going through it all wrapped in this impermeable golden cellophane that keeps all the yuck out.
Sigh again. It's good to be back, you know, after the writer's strike and all.
xo
Viva.
So stuff is still great, for the most part. Well, life is great, it's just that my head turns inside out sometimes. So stuff is great and my head is mostly okay.
A dude just jumped off the bridge a little while ago -- I'm assuming it was a dude, anyway. The person, the jumper, I suppose -- hit the water instead of the concrete. There was much flurry and CPR and then nothing. We don't know if the person lived or not. We just know that they jumped.
People in my office were surprisingly off-the-cuff about the whole thing -- comments ranged from "I hope the rent is cheap here" to nervous laughter... the other side was a concern for media overload, and did we need to leave to escape the onslaught of attention -- and then there was one, "yeah, I've never seen it happen on a nice day like this though." A nice day like this. A nice day like this where the sun's out and I'm struggling with the intricacies of interpersonal relations at my office, and assessing the threads of my job performance as they relate to... well, whatever -- and in those moments, even the ones where I stopped doing that and went to the kitchen to heat lunch and maybe brush my hair or send a funny email -- someone else had lost hope. All of it. So much so that they jumped from the Aurora bridge, sky blue sky, more sunshine than you could shake a stick at, with the hint of fall starting to sneak underneath like the promise of a scarf as you stand in the sun in your t-shirt.
"Hopeless." "Jump." Two little, short words. Strung together to form a tragedy, or an attempted tragedy, I suppose an assumed tragedy in any case.
I'm drawn back to that book, The Undertaking -- there's lines in it, something and something about poets and funerals. I went from golden cellophane to torn tissue paper, easily poked at, soft skin underneath. The melancholy in place of a reeling, raging weekend. Blank stares winning out over the words starting to form in my head, words I've been writing for days, trying to figure out how to give these snapshots of Texas, and trying to pour the rest of myself into my notebooks. Black ink. Not hopeless. No jump.
I wrote it in pen on my message pad when one of the guys called. "jumper" in lowercase, with a box around it. Like it meant something, like writing it did something. My to-do list is just a pile of words, the impending avalanche of laundry and agenda preparation for the morning suddenly seem like so much... less. So much smaller. I'm not trying to melodramatic or anything, and I'm going to do my job and wash the mud off my skirt and all that -- I guess I just don't understand how no one else is left reeling, even if it's only just a little bit of reeling. I want to walk over to the spot where the police were and just stand there, and take it in. To see if -- I don't know what. Maybe just to give that moment some homage and respect, I mean -- here I am in my open-collaboration cube farm, we all are -- and someone hit the end of their rope today. Literally. Someone who might have a family, or even just a cat, or a girlfriend or a dinner date tonight that will wonder why they got stood up.
It feels like I'm the only person who even paid it much attention. It just doesn't make much sense to go back to pushing paper right now, but seeing as I'm rented for these hours every weekday at a respectable rate, I sort of have to.
