Friday, July 31, 2009

Set It Off

It's about a reaction.

It's about taking what someone else can give you, how big or how small, how much or how mean, how sweet or how hard, how cold or how kind.

To need to give with no limit, only to brush up against another molecule that can't handle that kind of heat, is to bounce around, endlessly, as a peg, always trying to find the right hole, never quite finding the right fit.

It's a heat to give off.  It's a heat to be absorbed.

You either step closer to the heat, or you move away from it, and you can only do what you need to do.  

Can you reorient your nature?  Maybe.  

Does it require a lot of burning?  A lot of discomfort, while you move closer to the source?  Maybe.  

Will it be worth it?  Maybe: is the red something you can get used to?  Is the blue something you can live with?  

Do you find the perfect purple in between?  

I'm red with desire to warm you.  

Friday, July 24, 2009

Here I Am, Waiting to Hold You


This is just too beautiful not to celebrate.  

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

How 'Bout Now?


I want to run around my house, screaming for joy with my kids.

I want all of us to sing songs so loudly and so badly that we break down into convulsive laughter.

I want us to be goofy and jump on things and do flips over furniture.

I can't wait for all of this. 

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Father Figure

(Incidentally, I'm having deja vu now upon publishing this.  AWESOME.) 

11.34 pm, November 14, 2005

It's one of my favorite George Michael songs, if such a category of favorites could exist (hey, he had some great tunes; "Freedom"? With the video with every hot supermodel from the 90's?  "Faith"? TOTALLY ROCKS).  But "Father Figure" has special significance because my whole life, I've gravitated towards men, always older than me, who were very intelligent, very thoughtful, and very compassionate, and it didn't take me long to realize why that was. 

At one point, not too long ago, I was having a hard time reaching out to God.  I tried calling Him "Father", to bring it into more familiar terms, and for a while it worked, and then the weekend was over.  For whatever reason, it couldn't stick.

I am in a relationship now in which I am learning to do things that I disobeyed my mother about for my entire childhood, adolescence, and the years in which I was living at home and I was still too immature to just do what she asked.  My mother was an amazing mother; but I was too stubborn to be of any good.  That tenacity (to use a euphemism for "stubborn blockhead") has served me immeasurably in certain ways, but has done nothing for me in terms of shaping me - or allowing myself to be shaped - into a strong, responsible adult.  As you know from my previous entries, I will have a paper due the next day, and I could be on a diet, but I will order a pizza, watch a movie, and then surf the internet for four hours from 3 to 7 am, instead of actually writing my assignment and getting my sleep.  I feel I am beyond reproach, and I'm waiting for someone to scare me into doing things. 

I think I'll be waiting forever. 

An amazing thing happened to me today.  I've been exploring Chrisitianity lately, because, well, why not, and a minister that I have befriended expressed some concerns he had for me regarding my virtue as a responsible young woman. 

For anyone who knew me five years ago, that conversation, back then, would have never have taken place. 

For anyone who has known me in my whole non-Christian life, this would have never have taken place.

I have known this person for exactly four weeks, and seen him a total of four times.  And yet he had the love and concern for me to express things that no man in my life who should have expressed such things ever did.  That is magnificent.  

The weight of what that means has yet to truly make its way into my heart, but I do know that since I've been trying to become closer to God (emphasis on "trying", as evidenced by my last blog, the one with all the hatred and the expletives), He has shown me the things that I long for the most; the things that have been missing in my life.  I feel as though I am beginning to find something that I have been longing for as long as I can remember, and that I have searched for in vain, and found instead only heartache and disappointment and rejection. 

Lindsay Lohan recently released a song entitled "Confessions of a Broken Heart".  In it she describes her heartache over not having her dad around, and suffering through abuse that I never went through, but that, as a human, we can all empathize with.  In addition to being a very cute, rich little girl, she also one-upped me on the spiritual end: she was able to express her pain in such a concise way and with so much vulnerability and truth that I am ashamed that she has a song on MTV about something that I denied to to myself for years regarding the very same subject.  Now, I've been a very lucky girl, and never suffered the things she had, but I think I am not alone in feeling that I wish I could have connected to my parents, particularly my father, in a better way.  

I always thought of myself as emotionally aware, and perhaps more so than most other people, but it turns out that the one thing I always needed to express, I never even let myself feel, and a 19 year old beat me to it.  It also turns out that I'm not alone, and that it's a real relief when you won't let yourself feel certain things, and then something in the universe reminds you that they are alive and kicking in your soul, and that someone else did the work of expressing it for you.  So I'm thankful to her for having the balls to express herself, and to express the pain of millions of other kids who couldn't say it or wouldn't allow themselves to even feel it, and had no choice but to feel it, when they heard the power of lyrics put to music. 

It's amazing what life won't let you get away with.  

Sometimes when it catches up with you, it cuts so deep that you feel as though your heart is the desert floor, cracked open from the drought, and when the rain pours in, it burns so hard that you couldn't have ever imagined that relief from pain hurt more than the pain itself.

Friday, July 3, 2009

So Bunny

I have an obsession with Playboy. 
 
Bunnies, to be exact.  
Potentially being one, to be more exact.  I have no shame about this.  And if I had more balls, I'd go to California and get to that Mansion and I'd be a bunny, lickety-split.  But from what I've learned from "The House Bunny", I'm like, 64 in Bunny Years.  Not so good.  (Couldn't they put vaseline on the lens for me? I've heard that's a good trick).  

"The House Bunny" is one of my favorite movies.  I understand the lesson of it, but I still can't help but fantasize about the idea of what it would be like to be a Bunny.  To live in a big house, with tons of girls who are like your sisters, to have a huge swimming pool, an unlimited spending account, all the plastic surgery and personal trainers you'd want, and the adoration and obsession of pretty much of all men (whether they admit it or not).  You wake up every morning and the sun is shining; you can go shopping with your Playmates and eat lunch wherever you want; you travel to Paris or Vegas or New York with Hef on business - or pleasure! - and you're like this little goddess with a super cute wardrobe and stripper heels.   

I've wondered frequently about the future of the Playboy Empire, and what will happen to it once Hugh Hefner passes - which will be a sad day.   He worries me, he does.  I wonder if he sees his bunnies move on to bigger and better lives and if he is melancholy over it at times.  I wonder if all the bunnies who moved away end up returning to, say, celebrate holidays.  I wonder if Hef has sweaters knitted for them, or if he gives them red bikinis and antlers to replace the ears.  I wonder if he gives them dental, and what his healthcare plan is like.  Besides the whole possibility of tons of casual sex, they seem like healthy, happy girls.  There's a price for that happiness, no doubt, but I guess the question is, if they're happy, then isn't that what matters?   
 

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Frontier


My mom and I were looking at the rows of dogs confined in their cages in the pet store tonight and none of them felt like mine, nor like it should be mine.  Maybe I had no emotional peak because I know the dog technically won't be "mine", it would be my mom's, but I would think I'd feel at least something; it'd be an addition to our family. 

And it occurred to me that maybe this is why people have their own children, and don't adopt.   Because if they adopt, there's this little person that is not technically theirs, and doesn't have their blood, and doesn't have their smell, and doesn't look like them, and doesn't really resemble them.  I think we all seek to obtain the things and the people that are reflections of ourselves, somehow, but maybe there's a point at which you stop trying to see yourself out there.  What does it feel like to go about life and seek the truly unknown?   To go where you don't see yourself?  

I don't know what that leads to, and I don't know how to begin to list the different ways in which this manifests, aside from children and the decision to adopt or not to adopt, or to have kids, at all.  

I've never been a person to step up to bat and say Okay, this is a duty, and I'll just do it.  I have always counted my feelings on the matter, sometimes so heavily that I've talked myself out of duties, or outright shunned them.  So I'm amazed at the idea of people who take something like a phrase from the Bible, and interpret it as God's suggestion that they should adopt, and then they do adopt, and they do it merely because another life needs them.  This is so foreign a concept to me that I can actually feel my neurons firing when imagining what that might feel like.