Words, Words, Words

Cooling—Tori Amos

When I leave work now, the sun has already hidden behind the horizon. Summer’s death knell is softer here in California than it is back in Iowa, but it’s still palpable. The air is a little cooler as well, and my Midwestern bones are firing rapid signals to my brain telling me to start hunkering down for the winter. Even though here, in California, Mother Nature doesn’t blanket us with snow like back in Iowa, we still have a tendency to turn inwards during the cooler winter months, more frequently choosing nights in with friends and wine than nights out on the town. Or at least so has been my experience.

I tend to also notice a subtle shift in peoples’ demeanors… a slight change in their mood. Maybe it’s the fact that the gray skies evoke the winter season very strongly to those many people here who are, indeed, transplants from the Midwest and who are feeling the same emotions affecting me. Perhaps they have associations with this minute change in the environment and are also feeling the need to hunker down a bit. Perhaps they, as I, feel the need to turn inwards a bit more as one stays indoors more often, even here in California.

Living in Los Angeles presents an interesting viewpoint of winter, though, because the summer never seems to want to officially let go of its hold on the season. Even last week there was a heatwave, even after two weeks of rather chilly climes. But the Los Angeles winter exists, even in a place that has few seasons.

Unfortunately, winter also brings with it intense mood changes for me. While I don’t technically suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), I think all the years of winter equaling school and evaluating my self-worth via grades has imprinted themselves upon me, causing me to always doubt myself and what I’m doing with life. So thus, I tend to have rather violent mood swings, from hating myself and everything I stand for to being on top of the world loving where I am in life. It’s a rollercoaster I don’t wish upon anyone else. Don’t get me wrong—I know that everyone has mood swings, but I’m particularly prone to them and mine are not fun.

In a previous essay I said that winter is the Midwest is as such: “In these places winter’s teeth are more than just a figure of speech but jaggedly adorn every house’s eaves, icy spikes both beautiful and menacing, and the wind cuts through every shirt and sweater and scarf and coat in one fell stroke.” It’s not really hyperbole—but yet, there’s a certain amount of nostalgia associated with such winter.

Such bitter, bitter cold yet such warm, warm hearts of people.

There’s a woman who rides my bus. We always get on the 704 or 4 (whichever comes first–we know that the time it would take to wait for the express bus in lieu of the local would negate the speed of the bus) shortly after nine o’clock in the morning. We’d wait at the bus stop together, but never say ‘hi’ or otherwise acknowledge each other. Sometimes she’d be sipping coffee, struggling not to nod off on the bench. Sometimes she’d do her makeup. And sometimes she just simply waited. She never talked on her mobile phone at the bus stop, though, as I’ve seen countless do. We get off at the same stop in Century City, at Avenue of the Stars (announced by the recording on the bus with exuberance, but not quite as much exuberance as when it announces “Hollywood!” Boulevard.) More often than not, we’d also catch the 6:32pm 704 (or sometimes the 6:38pm 4).

It’s interesting—in a city of 3.8 million people, one can see the same people every day. Of course, the randomness and extreme size of the city is mitigated by the fact that one always has one’s daily patterns from which we (tend to) rarely stray. It’s thus that we connect with people, even in just a familiar-face manner. The old lady at Whole Foods who walks slightly tilted, the familiar cashier at said Whole Foods who doesn’t need to check your ID since he’s seen you a million times, the crazy guy on the bus every now and then, the daily commuters, the regulars at the bars… they all contribute to reducing the anonymity of one of the largest cities in the world. When I used to commute on the 405 (the most congested freeway in the country during rush hour) I used to see the same people most days as well. If I didn’t see them at any point during my drive I’d wonder about them. Did she finally get in an accident for doing her makeup in the car? Him for checking his BlackBerry (maybe the stocks?) Did he get a better job (like I wanted to) even though he was obviously doing well as he was driving a Lotus?

But now she’s no longer on the bus. I wonder where she is. Was she just temping at one of the banks down there? Did she get fired? What happened to her? Granted, I haven’t been keeping quite the same hours—I usually catch the 9:10am bus and the 6:05pm or 6:18pm bus back. But I’ve been erratic with my schedule the past month and I haven’t seen her once. What happened?

I think it’s the small things like this—the checkers at the store, the passengers on the bus, the familiar bus driver, our coworkers—that make the anonymity of the city bearable. If we never saw the same person twice, I think we’d go insane.

Or would we be freer? What if we were free to be a different person to everyone, without any chance of being caught in a lie? Would we make up stories about our lives, aggrandize ourselves and our situation? Would we humble ourselves and seek empathy or pity from a stranger, just for the fun of it? Or would we still be ourselves, true to our situation and being?

But it’s not that way. We have our patterns and we have our modi operandi. And thus, we have more human connection from the nameless familiar faces we see on our life path.

two bodies pressed together
two boys are falling hard
the smell of sweat and leather
a kinky greeting card

crazy about each other
we both have fucked up pasts
but when we are together
we have a fucking blast

i wanna be a housewife
what’s so wrong with that
i wanna be a housewife, yeah
and that’s just where i’m at

i’m making guacamole
he’s working on the car
when he grills turkey burgers
he knows i like them charred

i like to wash the dishes
i like to scrub the floors
don’t mind doing his laundry
what are boyfriends for

i wanna be a housewife
what’s so wrong with that
i wanna be a housewife, yeah
and that’s just where i’m at

i wanna have his baby
i wanna wear his ring
he drives me fuckin crazy
i am his everything

i wanna be a housewife
what’s so wrong with that
i wanna be a housewife, yeah
and that’s just where i’m at

i wanna be a housewife
what’s so wrong with that
can’t wait ‘til he’s in my life, yeah
cuz we haven’t met

we haven’t met yet…
we haven’t met yet…

Only Echoes—Stuart Davis

Our past lives have been on my mind lately. I don’t mean this in a reincarnation sense; rather, I refer to the many phases of our lives that we have each gone through and how one phase can be so completely different from another that it really seems like another life. We’ve all used the phrase “It feels like a lifetime ago.” Maybe there’s some more literal truth to that. In essence, isn’t it possible that, fundamentally, we are different people when we experience a different part of our lives as we grow older, circumstances change, careers progress, childhood falls away. We’ve each been taught different lessons in the different parts of our lives, molding, shaping, forming us into who we are in this current life.  Every few years we experience a rebirth, phoenix rising from the ashes of our lessons. Or maybe it’s that we cycle through butterfly stages, recreating a cocoon periodically to emerge ever more beautiful.

Childhood is a very obvious past life. Those formative years set us up to be who we are today—or rather, they formed the framework of how we will grow and change as we got older. I’ve heard it said more than once that the liberal arts are less about learning facts and figures and more about learning how to learn. I think the same is true of childhood—it’s not about growing up, but learning how to grow. By experiencing so many radical changes over the course of some fifteen, eighteen years our method of rigidity or flexibility to change is formulated and solidifies. From there on out, we have developed the base from which our personality will be hammered against the anvil of life and whether we are malleable or brittle and how we learn the lessons. Any little word from parents or teachers or friends or enemies at this formative time can, unbidden, resurface at any time in our life, throwing us back into the point of life where we were when we heard it. Sometimes this can be affirming but it’s more likely that these thoughts will be the negative as the negative sticks in memory far more tenaciously than the praise and affirmations that we received. I work through these thoughts constantly; small, inconsequential actions I took, words I spoke, insults traded flit and float through my mind, sometimes surfacing in dreams and sometimes commandeering my entire conscious until I deal with them. Twenty years later, a derogatory word can still sting.

But childhood, once we’ve entered the world beyond high school, still seems so far away—truly, a past life. Everything about what we do is different. The daily routines that are “life” have completely changed. All that remains the same is some sense of life, how we grow, how we learn. Each laugh we laugh, tear we cry, joy we share, sorrow we feel, must somehow affect us and slowly by slowly change us into a different person with a different life, right?

The next phase of life, after high school, is an obvious one. It’s then that we begin to grow into our skins. College was the place where I developed my ethics and morals, discovered drinking and sex, informed my life via my study of philosophy, dove into the world of politics, separated ideals from idealism. And then it was on to my first life in Los Angeles, my life in Chicago, and now my second life in LA… so separated and different from the first. A different job in a much more healthy environment has served to permanently remove myself from the lascivious world I was living in before. Much more stable and healthy and sound, I navigate through the daily world more secure in myself and my future.

I was reminded recently of the cyclical nature of our lives, though. I was reminded by a friend of the myth of Persephone, and how the story can be interpreted as:

He put it beautifully. Life in LA began on the top half and descended into the bottom half. Chicago was my underworld where I healed from the scars both inflicted and self-inflicted upon myself during my first life in LA. And now I have emerged from that life and returned to the community, to myself, to the world at large as a stronger, healthier person.

Each life signals a rebirth. Each life brings with it its challenges. I will be healing, learning from the scars for several years to come, but it’s almost as if I’m working off the karma of a previous life, seeking to restore the balance and free my soul from the trappings of the world. I’ve been told I have an ‘old soul’ by more than one person, and perhaps that’s true. Perhaps my analogy of past lives carries with it far more truth than we can ever reveal or verify as true. We can only strive to feel it, to touch it, to seek harmony between past and present.

Lessons learned and lessons yet to come.

Rebirth.

From Want

I don’t know what it is
But you got to do it
I don’t know where to go
But you got to be there
I don’t know where to fall
But I know that its comfortable where
I don’t know where it is

Putting all of my time
In learning to care
And a bucket of rhymes
I threw up somewhere
Want a locket of who
Made me lose my perfunctory view
Of all that is around
And of all that I do

So I knock on the door
Take a step that is new
Never been here before
Is there anyone else here too
In love with beauty
Playing all of the games
Who thinks three’s company
Is there anyone else who wears slightly mysterious brusies
I don’t know what it is

Take a lookin around
At friendly faces
All declaring a war on far off places
Is there anyone else who is through with complaining about what’s
Done unto us

So I knock on the door
And I am on the train
Going god knows where to
To get me over
To get me over

Give me heaven or hell
Calais or Dover

I was hoping the train
Was my big number
Stopping in Santa Fe and the Atchison-Topeka
Though I’m chugging along, put away by the crossing hand
We’ll be heading for Portland, or Limburgh or Lower Manhattan
Find myself running around

I don’t know what it is so get me over
I don’t know what it is so get me over
I don’t know what it is so get me over
To get me over
You gotta do it.
You gotta be there.

Do What You Have to Do—Sarah McLachlan

Every day we have to do it. It’s an unavoidable, inescapable part of life, modern or otherwise. We try to minimize how much of it we have to do, but no matter what walk of life we’re in or what our occupation there’s always going to be an amount of it.

I hate waiting.

Waiting, it seems, is one of the scourges of the world. There are so many ways in which we wait: in line, in traffic, for coworkers, for the bus… and it’s this last one that factors significantly in my life. When dependent upon public transit or other people for transportation, you do a healthy amount of waiting. Whether it’s five minutes for your friend to get there or thirty minutes for a late bus there is waiting. Sometimes we’re lucky and time things just right so there is no waiting—from bus stop to bus. But then there’s still the waiting on the bus to arrive at your destination. This one’s the same the world over, public transit or no. There’s always transit time, if nothing else.

More waiting. And within that period of time, there are a flurry, plethora, smorgasbord of emotions we can feel. Nervousness, anticipation, boredom, anxiety, restlessness… or maybe peace. Maybe we can find zen in waiting instead of making it out to be some great stress or punishment in our lives. With a portable music player you can rock out at the bus stop and pass the time. In the car on a road trip, I find singing along to music always helps pass the time; good conversation always does this too. There can be many revelations between driver and passenger during even a short car ride—unknown shared interests, aligned desires, shared secrets, personal growth.

But sometimes can there be simply zen in waiting, without any distractions? Maybe it can be nice, in this frenetic modern world, to simply exist in a time and place with nothing to think about, worry about, or stress about because in that simple act of “waiting” we are acknowledging that at that very moment, there is nothing we can do to change our lives or our surroundings or location. We are waiting on the rest of the world to catch up with us. We are waiting on so many things and maybe that’s the key. Instead of frantically trying to change things, wishing the bus would hurry up, that the traffic jam would clear, that the trip is over… maybe instead, we should find a moment of peace in a small moment when even this crazy world has no expectations of us.

Last Dance—Sarah McLachlan

I’m irresponsible. To a fault. I’ll freely admit this, as it’s something I’ve had plenty of time to adjust to and accept. Whether it’s laundry, cleaning, taking out the trash, bills, freelance projects… anything, really, I procrastinate until I get so overwhelmed that I just don’t know where to start. Then I procrastinate, this time so emotional and panicked, until it becomes intolerable and I slowly by slowly start taking action to do the responsible things of my life. Maybe it has something to do with being the youngest child, spoiled by overbearing parents. Maybe it’s my wild moodswings that can leave me incapacitated for weeks at a time. Maybe it’s just the plain fact that I’m lazy. Who knows. The fact remains that, at 28, I’m as irresponsible as I was as a naïve freshman in college.

Normally this wouldn’t bother me too much, as I’ve had a very long time to accept this fact. However, something’s changed in my life to highlight that I’m at an age where I should at least be in charge of my finances and not overdrawing nor bouncing checks constantly. (I don’t even want to know what my credit score is.)

I’m now an uncle.

Born May 23^rd, Rhia and Rohan Nagale (yes, fraternal twins) are my first niece and nephew. I was ecstatic to hear the news, which I’d hoped for for a long time. But then…

But then? What can trump the pride and joy of an uncle, especially considering the recent burst of exuberance resulting from Colden’s birth?

Uncle. Uncle. Can that word be applied to me sans “the gay fuckup…” prepended to it? My brother and sister, ten years older than I am, are much more established and stable in their lives, both with solid careers and spouses. Even at my age they were (probably) the same puritanical, responsible beings. I can’t know this for a fact, of course, but reason suggests such. But now that I’m an uncle? I’ve dreamt about starting a trust fund for each of my nieces and nephews to present to them on their graduation from high school—“fuckup money,” as I’d wanted to call it. Money with which to do what their parents expressly didn’t want them to do, the eminently practical folk they are. Backpack around Europe for a summer. Buy a new car. Buy books or musical instruments. Just plain not work for half a year, spending the time on writing and reflection. Going to college where their parents didn’t want them to. Who knows. It’d be up to them. Pretty much the only rule I’d have is that it couldn’t use it on practical things that their parents would pay for. I think, knowing that they’ll all have a fairly restrictive upbringing, that they’d be appreciative of this.

I was actually hoping that I’d become an uncle sooner, very shortly after my sibs got married, so that by now my first niece/nephew/both would be some seven, eight years old. A little more fun. Then when they’d be turning twenty-one I’d still be in my early forties, still young enough to be the cool uncle that took them out and got them smashed for the first time. Hopefully I’ll still be the cool uncle, though closer to fifty by the time Rhia and Rohan (not to mention whomever may follow) are adults.

But what smarts is that I’m in no financial position to start those trust funds. I’m still (and probably forever, whether I get my act together or not) the black sheep of the family. Maybe I have an inflated thought of what “uncle” entails, since mine were definitely older and established by the time I was aware of such things, since I was the big baby of the family and all. Maybe I’m putting too much importance on such a simple biological/familial fact.

Or maybe I’m just being pessimistic. Maybe I’ll be a great uncle.

I can only hope.

The crush of humanity pins me to one spot in the crowded bar. I can’t move, I can barely breathe. Maybe my tolerance for crowds is diminishing—maybe I’m just not up for crowded bars any more. Maybe it’s the people there—they’re not my typical type that I tend to encounter when I usually go out to crowded places. These people are more “real” as some of my friends would say. “Dudes” as one would quip.

---

The crush of humanity shoves me into one spot when we go elsewhere. Though it’s more my type of crowd, I’m still not feeling it. I’ve been off all day; maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I leave early.

---

The crush of humanity on the bus is depressing. I just want to sit down and nod off on my morning commute, but they’ve run a small local bus on the route instead of the large two-part bus. I stand with the other people and get pressed into the same position for the whole ride. My feet hurt by the time I reach the office.

---

The office is quiet, a slight buzz of activity. The TV is on, showing the finale of the show and we’re frantically making sure the website doesn’t have issues. It does, of course, and by the time we get to the VIP afterparty, which we were all really looking forward to, it’s dying down. The food being served is old and stale; we only have time for two drinks before the close the bar down. The crowd is light, though I’m told there was a crush of humanity earlier.

---

In my room, alone, I do a postmortem on the past few days. It seems as though I’ve had an emotionally turbulent few days, mostly on the low end. But I remember the crush of humanity with a different view this time. I remember that at least it reminds us that we’re not alone.

In This Air — Dave Fischoff

I’ve developed a strange habit. When I’m riding the bus I’ve tended to listen to the same song on repeat the whole ride, as if looped chords somehow stops time as I travel and the bus ride flies by in seconds instead of minutes. Of course it doesn’t really, but it does feel as though it hits ‘pause’ on my mind and for a moment my mind is free of thought. For those twenty minutes in the morning and evening the endless loop of Dave Fischoff clears my mind and gives me twenty minutes outside of time.

Sometimes, though, I board the bus with my ears open and uncovered (usually when I’ve forgotten to charge my iPod.) It’s these times that can more interesting if I’m in the mood. The bus rumbles along in its deep raspy voice. It vibrates, shudders, spurts forwards, tremelo weaving through traffic, accompanied by its own internal orchestra of voices. Alternately tacet and fortissimo (those loud women on their mobile phones), the orchestra lifts the double bass of bus, gliding along a river clogged with plenty of debris, slowing the flow to a trickle.

Reaching my part of the shore, I disembark and begin the short walk from the bus stop to my office building to begin the daily grind.

It’s been one week since I moved back to Los Angeles, and really, everything is going swimmingly. I am getting along with my new roommates, I am proving my worth at my new job, I’m reconnecting with old friends, I’m getting the transit system down, and I’m continuing my good mood and emotional stability. It is as if, as one of my therapists has said, that I live a ‘charmed life.’

Yes, I might have to agree with that. Everything in these past six months has turned out well. Even everything before that didn’t lead to anything incredibly severe, besides the panic attacks (which have completely vanished) and perhaps spending a bit too much money on alcohol. But on the whole, many things in my life just seem to be going right. I’ve always maintained that I’m just not very lucky, but I might have to change my stance on that.

The basic rundown of this week has been fairly simple. Move in, unpack a little, meet up with friends, unpack a little more, sleep, go to work, meet up with friends, repeat repeat repeat. Which is fine with me. I’m enjoying the basic qualities of my routine so far. Going to a new job in a new office (with a fantastic view) and just getting settled again into my adoptive city is really quite comforting.

Someone welcomed me back to LA with these words: “May LA again be all the things you missed and also open herself to discover surprises you never knew she held.”

I think I shall pursue that.

Charmed. Perhaps.