Possibly because it is right in front of you is why you didn’t see it.
Possibly it has been staring you in the face for so long that you got
used to overlooking its gaze. Possibly you didn’t want to see it but
that isn’t like you. And then also: Possibly it isn’t there at all and
you didn’t conjure it OUT of existence so much as you are conjuring it
INTO existence now.

So many things are possible.

And maybe it doesn’t come down to this one thing at all; maybe it’s a
bunch of little things adding into this tower of toppling horror. In
which case instead of standing there all bravely confronting what you
see, your time would be better spent taking apart the pieces, sorting
them into piles like you used to do with Legos. Not everybody has to be
a builder and especially you don’t have to build this up into a giant
scary thing. Sometimes it’s time to put the toys away; sometimes it’s
okay to say it’s this one little thing and that one little thing and
this thing and that thing and they don’t have to turn into something
bigger than you can solve.

There is not really a box big enough for all these things.

It is not good that this is happening but it is important to remember
that it is not happening to you just because you’re there for it. You
can realize it’s not about you. You can realize it’s not about anything
in fact. You can realize that flipping out was never your strong suit.
What are you good at? What are you good for? You can spend some time
reflecting on those strengths. What’s not up for debate is that you’ll
need them.

Christmas and I’m five, I think; this is a story I only know secondhand. My parents throw a party where they serve Scarlett O’Haras in tiny glasses because they don’t want people to underestimate the punch this punch packs, and apparently some people drink doubles in protest of my parents’ perceived cheapness, and I am doubtless wearing a cute velvet dress of some sort and carrying a tray of cocktails around to the grown-ups who give the cute little girl a sip of their presumably watered cranberry juice and southern comfort, except that my dad would never water a drink and later I am passed out on the coats with my cousin, who despite it being the 70s and the South knows he can’t drive home, so you can imagine how my brain spins in the coats, the fur scratching my cheeks.

And then it’s Christmas and I’m what, ten or eleven and my parents have made this weird modern arty kind of tree that you can buy in the store by 2002 but this is 1978 or so and such things are not in abundance; it’s homemade and a bit rickety. I am mildly sick as I always am on Christmas and am trying to hang the prettiest glass ornaments on our alt.tree, and one slips from my hand and falls and shatters. Shatter is an important word. My mother comes to scold me and realizes I’m running a fever and Christmas stress goes up three knots.

Or I’m seventeen and I’ve been out dancing and come home in something provocative and interesting, throw on a robe and run down the hall to shower off the smell of danger; it’s probably four or five in the morning and my grandfather is already awake, smoking in the living room, blowing the smoke up the chimney. "You shouldn’t smoke," I say automatically, pulling my robe closely over my dress and hoping he doesn’t see the glitter on my face, the cuts on my arms. "Why not?" he asks, and his eyebrows Spock at me, because he quit smoking years before only to be diagnosed with colon cancer. We get through Christmas without his saying anything to anyone or to me either. When he leaves he whispers in my ear to be careful if I can’t be good; this is the last time we talk before he dies.

Twenty-one and living in Japan and my mother comes bustling over the ocean with Christmas gifts and cheer, but to no avail; I am more desperately lonely than I have ever been in my life and all my edges are so blurred there is no core. We listen to the bell ring three times three times nine times and I am as empty as I can be and still be full of sadness.

And then twenty-five, or maybe only twenty-four? The Christmas when I sat in a living room full of nutcrackers apologizing to the woman who would never be my mother-in-law for breaking the heart of her boy who had never loved me, then later filling his truck with my things and moving to a new life that was, in the end, even worse than the awful one I was leaving.

There have been good Christmases, for sure. But it is altogether not my favorite holiday. Imagine me, yesterday, engaged in a shouting match with Squire over the importance of vacuuming pine needles before the cat chokes on them, and he says, "Why are we jumping on each other’s ay-ess-ess-es? I’m happy to be home with you and I know you’re happy to be home with me," and I burst into laughter colored tears because I am again reminded that it is not all about the past, but about the present, which we write as we go along.

And so now Friar is making something tasty with fish and we are listening to Cechomor’s Christmas CD and the tree is lit and you know, I’m trying as hard as I can to be the person I want to be. Now and for next year. And I wish for anyone this contentment and this hope.

Three weeks ago, the internet company decided to upgrade me without my permission; the upgrade frightened my poor little modem to death and I was suddenly without internet. As a person who works, shops, and even socializes from home, this is probably my equivalent of suddenly lacking a car in a town without public transportation.

At first I raged, but they said they’d have a new powerful amazing modem delivered in two days so I decided I’d be fine. Not all editing requires internet access, so I did what I could, and it turns out that I am internet-reliant but not internet-dependent, jobwise. The hardest part was giving up the parts of internet access that are not strictly job-related: reading the news, catching up with friends, and “finding stuff out”.

So I muddled through the week with a dictionary and an encyclopedia during the day, and it was okay. In the evenings, instead of reading up on mysterious rashes, adaptations of “My Fair Lady” into foreign languages, and the number of calories you burn brushing your teeth, I worked on home projects. I re-organized the books. I put together a new CD shelf. I waxed the living room floor. I patched things. I made myself useful.

But I didn’t feel useful, because there’s a difference between what you can do and what you’re good at doing. I’m good at about two things: watching television and looking stuff up. Because watching television tends to turn me into a bit of a nutter, I restrict that, but I am in the habit of giving my research urges unrestricted access. And not being able to look stuff up nearly did me in, because I could go to my friend’s house up the street to download projects and upload completed work, but you don’t feel the same about spending time on somebody else’s computer searching for pictures of Franklin Pierce (which is something I did the day after I got access back: quite a handsome fellow).

After a week (which is Novera-speak for "two days"), I was back on line. And reflecting on this experience was… not good.

I have thought of myself as being a knowledgeable person. There’s knowledge you have and knowledge you know how to get, and I didn’t mind being poor in the first type because I believed I was richer than many others in the second type. It isn’t necessary to know how to spell well as long as you know that you can’t and you’re reconciled to the fact of looking words up often. This applies to nearly anything: if you’re able to find the answer, you don’t have to carry it around in your head. However, it’s quite a blow when your second brain is suddenly missing.

And last Monday, the telephone company started playing with the line, and I’ve been on and offline again all week. Last night I was sleeplessly cataloging the things that I am good at and not good at, and I’ve realized that all this being good at looking stuff up has made it possible for me to forget that being good at one thing does not necessarily mean that one is good at many things, and it certainly doesn’t mean that one is good. I rationalize that I can’t wax the floor because I am “busy” looking for recordings of Algonquin poets reading aloud (?don’t remember why). Without that excuse, I am forced to discover that waxing a floor does not require any particular degree of awesome, and that waxing the floor doesn’t make me personally more aesthetically pleasing. Making crappy craft knock-offs of more creative projects doesn’t make me artistic. The ability to alphabetize my CDs, no matter how efficiently and thoroughly I do so, doesn’t make me organized. And none of these things, neither the alphabetizing or the art projects or the floor waxing, or even the live poetry, actually me a better person, or even a more interesting person, and the fact that being good at looking stuff up has distracted me from this lack is merely a testament to the horror of it.
What I am left with, when left alone, is the ability to realize how thoroughly hateful it is to be alone with me. It’s been rather a rough week.

standing under the eaves in the rain, smoking
sitting inside watching the snow fall and drift into piles
walking down the middle of the street in the dark

What you want is not what you get. What you get is what you get. You
can feel as good or bad about it as you want to feel, but it will most
likely not change what you get.

You can embrace what you have,
what you got, what you will get. You can shout from rooftops or perhaps
websites about your lucky draw and your happy hands and your pretty,
pretty life.

Or you can alternately mourn what you do not have, have not
gotten, will never. Keen and wail over it or suffer semi-stoically,
baby martyr. Did dur baby have its feewings hurted. Whoa is you indeed.

The thing about martyrs is that they’re only impressive to the
people who believe what they believe. To everybody else they are
terrorists, windmill tilters, demanding nonsensical whiners. In no case
are they people who appreciated what they had. In no case are they people
who get what they want. And the longing and the whining and the
violence, the glass thrown across the room the plate smashed hair from
the roots white gasp and the seam of blood dissolving in tears or
flames temper temper takes from what you have, and what you have is
consumed in the yearning for what you did not get.

Want what you get. For starters, it’s easier.

I’m not talking about the haircuts where you think that when you get
your hair cut like Brad Pitt you’re going to come out of it looking
like Brad Pitt. I’m talking about the haircuts where your total
inability to articulate what you want and/or the hairdresser’s total
inability to understand you ends up with you crying.
And how in the first case (Brad Pitt’s hair) you are just being really
silly, but in the second case the problem rests in the disconnect between
what you want and your ability to express it so that other people will
do it, and that disconnect is what makes you cry as much as the bad hair.

People
have been trying to give me long fringey bangs and cute little side
fringey things ever since I came into my face. It’s a big face, like
I’m coming at you through a peephole, and some softness around the
edges would probably make it less whoa, but the thing is I hate having
stuff touching my face and ears, and I’m the one who lives with it. So
lots of "soft little fringe" experiences in high school wound up with
me coming home making cat splutters and (because i could never cut a
straight line) eventually doing something with my mother’s pinking
shears. Sorry about that, Mom.
But if people had just done what I said, instead of what they thought would be best for me, tips would have flowed instead of tears.

Once I wanted my hair like a cross between Alannah Currie and
the Heat Miser, bald on the sides and dramatic chunks standing up on
the top; it was long and there was a perm growing out on the top,
perfect, and I cut the sides up very short myself but was perplexed by
the back. I went to a proper hairdresser who "shaped" it, oh my heavens
no. My boyfriend at the time came home to me crying hysterically
because there was nothing I could do to fix it. He took me to a barber
and the barber shaved it all off,  and vacuumed up all the stray hairs
with a wall mounted vacuum, which was a hundred kinds of awesome and cost about a tenth of the proper hairdresser.  Still, I didn’t get what I wanted and  I was so close, and I know that haircut would have been so embarrassing to look back at now, and I mourn it.

In Japan I went with my terribly well groomed and fluent
friend to get a haircut- I’d been cutting my own hair there, because
it’s superfine hair and my Japanese was atrocious and I was scared of what might happen, but I was getting
seriously tired of sweeping hair out of the tatami and ready to take a
risk. "She wants it exactly the same, but about 2 cm shorter" he told
them. They cut it 2 cm shorter than his. I even got
a nice shave for my gaijin sideburns. Yay.

All
things considered, my trip to the hairdresser today was not the worst
thing that has happened to my hair, but man. I came home today looking
like a mushroom. A mushroom that cries. I told her "cut it jagged"
which every hairdresser here has understood, and she gave me some
ass-symmetrical emo thing. We are not emo, although I was beside myself
with unhappiness for a full 20 minutes over a
haircut which is the stupidest thing ever. I tried to explain
it to her again, but she was all huffity "I don’t know what you want" and I
thought I might take her stupid straight scissors and poke her in the
eye so bah, I left and cried a bit on the way home and then did it
myself. I got out the clippers and stuck my fingers in and sort of
jabbed at all the bits that stuck up, only grazing my knuckles a few
times. I look fine. Mainly it’s not around my eyes or my ears or
touching the back of my neck anymore.

The thing that comes to me this time is that it’s not just the haircut.
It ties in to my hesitation to ask for things from others that I can do
for myself, and my utter fury when it doesn’t go well, because I feel
like partly it goes wrong because the other person screwed up, but
partly it goes wrong because I explained it badly and shouldn’t have
delegated and paid for what I’m perfectly capable of doing anyway. It’s
a whole life lesson or something. I’ll work on it once I’m done
sweeping up all the hair bits.

There were dozens of things I was going to do, crazy things and
sensible things. I was going to be a mover, driving people across the
country to start new lives, meeting people and bonding and then moving
on like a 70s television hero. Or I was going to own a small home near
the woods where I could touch the opposite walls with my fingertips and
be a mad hermit poet. Or I was going to be a ballet dancer, since what
else can you really do with perfect turnout.

Everything seemed probable. And everything still sort of
does; I could pick up at any minute and we would be sleeping in the
back of our moving van, or we more simply could move and live at the
cottage. The ballet dream is pretty much done. But I still could mostly do
what I had wanted to, except I think I don’t want it anymore.

The difference is that the life I have is also a life I
wanted, one of the possible trajectories from who I was then. I don’t
feel in any way like I betrayed my truck driving self by becoming an
editor, because I had an equal number of feature fantasies in which I
had a green visor and sleeve protectors. The costume changed, but the
dream I wanted was the same.

To
me, there is a web of lines emerging from every choice, and each choice
makes others possible. I don’t see it as having a choice, and that
choosing one thing is endlessly cutting off the other, because lines
can loop back; I don’t see Billy Pilgrim’s centipedes exactly either,
where everything past is linked to an inevitable now, but I also don’t
see a series of captured moments, unlinked. To me, you get to where you
are from where you were, and the lines can be traced no matter how
entangled, no matter if some snapped as you ran across.

And so I have trouble sometimes reconciling the person you’ve
become with the person I thought you were. I can’t see how you got to where you are from where you were back then. Perhaps my choice to stop
willfully charming people makes me as different from who I once was as
you seem now different to me. Or perhaps I’ve made smaller choices
slowly along the way, not even noticeable individually but cumulatively
changing me and it’s me who’s different and you’re moving on a consistent path.
I don’t know. I do know that it’s strange to look across a table and
see the eyes I once knew looking at things I don’t really understand;
the mouth I once knew forming words I never thought I’d hear, not while
sitting with you.

I recently was led to the statistic that 15% of Americans
self-declare as atheist or "no god" or "agnostic". FIFTEEN. That’s
huge. And while I realize that religion is a choice, whereas other
groupings (race, sex, sexual preference) are not, still, 15% is a sizable minority. And I found myself picturing a future in which…

Atheist Eye for the Christian Guy…Five
fabulous atheists, experts in the fields of logic, debate, reasoning
and skepticism, are unleashed upon a
Christian whose friends or loved ones believe he needs to be a bit
less… righteous. The guy is trained to think for himself, gets a good
set of
books to read, and acquires a sense of humor! Note: He’s still going to
be a Christian, he’s just not going to be annoying!

The Compounds is an animated situation comedy focusing on the
lives of the Freethink family. Elementary-school aged atheist brothers
Sartre and Atticus Freethink have been moved by their Granddad Robert
from their university town in the northest to the quiet, almost
completely Christian suburb of Woodcrest, Alabama. Less controversial than the comic strip that inspired it, the Compounds nevertheless raises some hackles… and some laughter!!

The A Word
is a television drama series on Showtime that portrays the apathy,
ambivalence, and anger of a group of atheist and agnostic people and
their acquaintances in Austin.

Like any other minority group, atheists will also be given token
roles on
major television shows, providing comic relief for the most part, but
also providing touching insights into the subtle (and not-so-subtle!)
challenges faced by atheists. In one particularly memorable episode,
the atheist doctor on whatever the hit medical drama is will reveal to
the other doctors that in fact it is offensive to atheists when doctors
talk about heaven, and maybe he’ll even add that this is why he became
a doctor, because seeing the poor little atheist kids grow up without
the false promise of an afterlife has something something something.
Still hammering out the details. In real life, the actor who portrays
the atheist will have "candid" pictures of himself taken going in and
out of some place of worship or another. Alternately, the atheist
character will be played by an atheist, who will then be assumed to
speak for all atheists everywhere whenever she opens her mouth. There
will be a big fuss about how she was hired entirely for her acting
ability and not to fill some "quota", which will be entirely true since
there is no quota to ensure that what you see on your screen bears any
relationship to the world you actually live in.

stately plump anne tuckova
i’ve
been not terribly happy with myself lately and the rainy weather early
this month was a factor but not a cause. it’s better now, getting
better, but i was ripped with conflict between a need for drastic
change
and an equally dramatic unwillingness to act. i gave bartleby a run for
his title in my absolute disinclinations; if you
could win a race by taking steps away, i would have won.

came from the stairhead
winning
by distraction, by making games for myself in which getting
one
thing done counts as success. on advice i went hunting for wellingtons
but failed and so decided to buy more socks, since my knee-high striped
socks last winter were the highlight of my personal sartorial
season. also you can gain and lose a lot of weight before your socks
don’t fit. i went to a sock store, by which i mean a store entirely
devoted to socks, in which they had no knee-high striped socks, no
knee-high solid-colored socks in my size, also no striped
ankle socks in my size, and then i gave up asking what else wasn’t
behind the counter and came home and threw out all the socks that were
holey, or vaguely frayed or even vaguely ugly, anyway, so that if i
ever find
socks i won’t hesitate to buy them. then i gave away or recycled all
the clothes until i had it down to two boxes. the balloon has to get
off the ground first, and then you can see where you’re going.

bearing a bowl of lather
i am working on being the person i want to be, a person who splashes in
puddles instead of weeps into them, a person who looks for the rainbow,
a person who smiles randomly. friday i was snapping my fingers in
rhythm with my footsteps and i thought: as with everything, it’s just a matter of continuing to pick up one foot and move it
forward.

a mirror and a razor lay crossed
i
got offered a job teaching the graduating class at a high school (two
hours a week). i used to be a good teacher but some years ago i tanked
hard and decided my mojo was gone forever. it may be, but the school
needs a teacher. i don’t ever want to return to teaching full-time,
even part-time is too much, but i need, i think, to start scouting
schools in person (on behalf of squire) and this is one way. also i
always liked 12th graders. also i think being forced to put on shoes
(with socks! must go hunting before next week!) once a week for two
hours will probably be good for me.