Stupid things that annoy me

1. Spam views on my blog.  They turn barely-useful data in to mush.

2. The flu.  I don't even have it and it screws things up.

I am mad.  I am mad and sad and I want to go home and pout.  He NEVER comes here because it always makes more sense with our schedules and housemates for me to go there, and I'm okay with that but I was so EXCITED about him coming here and now he isn't.  And I knew it would happen, like, days ago when he first got sick, I knew it.

I don't get time off for pouting.

HOURS

I was talking to Cassidy last night about sending out the story, and he asked if he could read it.  (Which is way more than BadEx ever did, it was like he liked the idea of a girlfriend who wrote, but it didn't occur to him to talk to me about what I was writing, and even when I brought it up he never talked about it.)  Anyway, I emailed it to him.

And then, today, I sent him CH3, because, I don't know because.  More gifts of vulnerability I guess.  With a strange mix of showing off.  It's a weird combination.  Anyway, it was, like, a couple hours ago, and I feel so anxious about it.  I need him to say something!  I need to know that it didn't get lost in his spam folder.  I need to think that it wasn't actually spam, that even though it wasn't asked for, it was welcome.

And it wasn't that long ago, and he's home and sick, and likely sleeping or MMORPGing, neither of which lead to essay-reading, but oh, it feels like ages!

I HATE writing cover letters.

But since I spent the time doing it, and Cassie put in the time talking me down from much snarkier versions, I thought I'd post it here. 

They said:

And I wrote:

Oh, and in the off-chance that they accept, my bio will read:

Angela's first and only published poem appeared twelve years ago in The Iowa Review. Since then, she's moved from San Diego to Oakland to Iowa City, where she received an MFA in Photography from The University of Iowa. She lives with two knitters, two cats, and an often bewildered dog.

I don't think that this piece is as good as CH3, but I think it's good enough to try.  One of the writers in my radio class used it in her writing class as an example (I think, not of anything in particular, just part of an optional reading list or something like that), and one of her students though it was amazing, so I have some data to back me up.  It does bother me, though, that I don't think it's as good.  I want to tell them, no look, see I can do better!

If I had one more poem I liked at all, I could send out the sestinas, but I only have two, and two poems is an inappropriately small number to submit.

If I ever finished Heat Transfer, I could send that.

I apparently need a new Commie Pinko.  It has to be a real Commie Pinko, though, not a fake one I make up to motivate myself.  I tried that already.

The Geoff-o-Meter

When I was in high school, I had a crush on a boy named Geoff.  Geoff was tall, and good looking, he had big, sort of spiky, sort of just-woke-up, dyed black hair, and wore black eyeliner and was an artist and listened to NIN and Tori Amos and he probably did drugs and do you see where I am going with this?  I mean, really.  It was destiny. 

I did not figure as highly in his daily thoughts as he did in mine.  In fact, I'm not sure I ever figured in his thoughts at all, ever, except for that one time on the last day of school when he said something like, "Hey, I don't remember your name, but bye," and I just about died of happiness.

It's not as if Geoff was my One and Only.  I had a lot of crushes.  But when other crushes wore off, I found myself gravitating, always, back to Geoff.  

He sometimes had a girlfriend, a girl whose name I don't remember, who was lean and cool and had crazy hair and paint-spattered jeans and probably did drugs, too.  There was a photo of the two of them together in the school paper once, I don't remember why.  I don't think there was a lot of journalistic intent behind it.  In the photo, the two of them are standing next to each other, leaning against the side of a building, too cool to touch, or maybe just the tips of their fingers together, looking gorgeous and bored.

I saved it, of course.  And I "laminated" it with packing tape.  I drew a thermometer on it, like the ones for fundraisers, we are this close to our goal, and I labeled it The Geoff-o-Meter.  I kept it in my wallet.  The Geoff-o-Meter was a tool to measure attraction.  I would look at the photo and quantify how sad it made me to see Geoff with her and not me.  The inverse of that number, as a percentage, was the level of my attraction to whoever else I was dreaming about at the time. 

(The Geoff-o-Meter breaks at zero.  Because the inverse of 0/1 is 1/0, and oops!  Crash.)

Even if I still had the Geoff-o-Meter, it wouldn't work these days.  Some of the parts are worn past repair, and the manufacturer went out of business a long time ago.  I tried to google him, but I couldn't find anything.  It's too bad, because I could have sworn that someone I knew had heard of him, that he did go to art school, and had a job in design, but I might be mixing the story up with someone else. 

And even if it worked, you just can't read too much into the results, because it broke for my abusive fiancee, so it doesn't really matter that an imaginary scale I made in high school is imaginarily broken again.  But, you know, I was browsing through OK Cupid, because I do that, and there are new people, the kinds of profiles I like, and I didn't even bookmark them for later, just in case.  I looked at all the possibilities I could have, all of them with their best side showing, without the hassle of real interactions that might possibly go wrong, a line of imaginary boyfriends, and I just didn't care.

How to Fight With Your Mother: Received

I'm second-guessing myself like a champ.  But I liked it this morning.  Other people have liked it at other times.  So the way I feel about it right before hitting "submit" is perhaps a poor indicator of things.

God, my heart is racing, though.

Thanksgiving

We were never like brother and sister. He inhabits my childhood memories, but his presence serves mostly to set the scenes in which events take place. He was neither my adversary nor my friend. I don't really know what he thought of me, if he did. I didn't think about him much. He was there; I wanted to be gone.

I was living in Berkeley when my parents separated. My brother was living at home. At first, my father moved out of the house, and he stayed in the house with my mother. Then, as part of the divorce process, my mother got an apartment downtown and my father moved back into the house. My brother stayed. I used to say, offhandedly, that my brother came with the house. He didn't seem to have any agency in the matter, or in any matters at all that I could think of. I thought that my brother was the kind of person who shrugged a lot.

One year, when he and my father were visiting up in Berkeley, my brother... exploded at me. He stopped shrugging, and yelled. I mistreated our mother, he said. I hurt her. I didn't care, I didn't try. It is the only fight I can ever remember us having. I went to bed in tears. He left the next day.

He had become my mother's only ally. And a few months later, he moved in with her. My father came home to an empty bedroom and a note on the kitchen table.

I saw my brother a few more times after that, when I visited my mother, but when that stopped, so did any contact with him. Perhaps because I never credited him with much agency or even personality, I began to see him as an extension of my mother. His only two acts I knew of had been to hurt me, then my father, both times on her behalf.

Look, I understand the problem with being angry at my brother because he won't talk to my father. I don't talk to my mother. We are, all of us, stuck in place, and he is not any more stubborn than I. But I am angry. This is what you need to understand: I do not know who my brother is or has been, now or ever, but I am angry at him anyway.

That is not what I came here to say, but it's important that you know that. Because I spoke to my cousin on Thanksgiving, and she told me that my brother has a blog. She reads it so she can better talk to him, so that they will have something to talk about. She sent me the address.

My brother has a blog.

It mostly consists of links to other things on the internet, usually articles and blog posts. On rare occasions, there is commentary. On even rarer occasions, there is no link at all, just something he wanted to say.

In between the links to articles about gaming, and internet privacy, and copyright laws, my brother links to Captain Awkward, to Yes Means Yes: Visions of female sexual power & a world without rape. He links to articles about transgender issues.

On Sunday, my brother wrote,

Love is desire. Who wouldn't want to ease the suffering of those they love?
A love that does not care about the suffering of others, isn't love.
To love, one must be willing to accept suffering. It is the price of caring...

...If I sought happiness, I'd find it easily, by simply abandoning all care for the world. I would rather abandon my life, than abandon my love. What I seek, is not happiness.

I want to care. I want to care so much it hurts. So, I do.

Here Again

I've never lived in my dad's house.  My parents moved while I was away at college.  I didn't even know they'd moved until they were driving me home from the airport one winter and took a different turn off of Ted Williams Parkway.  But it stands for the houses I did live in.  It has all the same stuff in it. 

We decorated the Christmas tree three days before Christmas, and for a moment it was too much: the ornaments, the couches, the acrylic afghan, the coffee table.  I called Cassidy that night, nearly in tears, and I said that I needed to remind myself that this isn't my life, this is just vacation.  And at first, he didn't understand.  He thought I wanted to stay, that it was hard to realize that I would have to go back to Iowa.  But it's my life in Iowa that keeps me safe when I'm there.  And when he understood, he asked, What's so much better about Iowa?

I said, I'm not who I was.

...

The day after Christmas, I was standing up to my waist again in (not quite) freezing water, thinking about how I was here, exactly, one year ago.  Singing to myself.

This house is like Russia
With eyes cold and gray
You got me movin' in a circle
I dyed my hair red today

It's the song I sing when drunk dish-washing, the song I used to sing while setting up the darkroom in Berkeley, the song I used to listen to while sitting on my roof at night when I was sixteen years old.  It was on a mix tape that a girl in my social studies class made me because she knew how much I liked Tori Amos.  And then it was on a mix CD that M gave me for Christmas, right before we broke up: a spectacular gift, a perfect gift.  If it could have been enough, I would have stayed.

There are other songs I sing while drunk dish-washing.  Newer songs, from college, from after college, from a few months ago.

If I didn't know better, I'd hang my hat right there
If I didn't know better, I'd follow you up the stairs

But still, no matter how many years or songs I put between me and that girl on the roof, I find that my moments in life are still narrated by the same voice in my head.  It's funny, because one of the flaws of being a teenager is the belief that everything is always and forever.  We are supposed to be proven wrong.  And I have been.  I was wrong.  I'm not who I was.  But I wasn't entirely wrong.  Some things last longer than I ever could have known.