tuckova

hand me down my walking cane

I love editing, but it seems increasingly true to me that the things that make me really good at my job can make actual life with myself kinda hard for me sometimes. And I presume for other people, too, though I don't know. My friends seem to like me okay. Perhaps I choose friends who like hanging out with a person who can turn coal into diamonds; what do I know.

I mean: my mother sends me this adorable postcard from Turkey and tells me that turquoise comes from there, and I can't be all "That's nice!" or anything; no, I have to be totally ahem-ahem about it, because turquoise does not either come from Turkey and I see no reason to perpetuate mythology, particularly now that the internet is always open. I should point out that she's somewhat complicit in this ahem-ity, as (at least as I recall it) we were allowed to get up from the dinner table only for emergencies, and that "emergencies" extended to "consulting a reference work in the course of settling an argument". It may not have been that strict, but I remember running for the World Book more than once.

I come home from a night on the town and then send the people I just saw links to back up the facts I presented over the course of what was a perfectly lovely evening. See?! I'm yelling across the midnight internet. I was right!* I will first drink and then fact-check you under the table, is all I'm saying. On the plus side, nobody sends me "funny" email forwards anymore. Or political stuff either. If only for that reason, I don't think I'm going to change; I'm just observing that what is "giving up a cheap instant laugh for the prolonged thrill of learning and discovery" for me may come off as "a lot of furious knicker-twisting for no good reason" to people who think that it is fun to build a straw man and set it on fire.

I also send links to funny (thoroughly vetted) stuff, so you don't need to be scared to be my friend or anything. And I make good martinis, not least because I'm on a constant quest for the perfect one. Come over and help.

*ETA: If I was wrong? I will send you the links to show that I learned that you were right.

with his hands in the air

Each apartment in our building has its own little cellar space, about a 10x10 space with an infinite capacity for cobweb storage, and possibly also mouse habitation. Friday night we cleaned out the cellar. Well, sort of we did. We started cleaning it and then Squire shut the door with the keys inside, and so then we spent some time breaking down the door, and then we cleaned it some more, and then I realized I was sweeping a dirt floor, so we stopped. It was a whole-building thing, all of us down there in our grubbiest clothes, some wearing babushka headscarves (ala Russia, not ala Kate Bush) and groaning at the smell and the dust and the only-blame-yourself human habit of saving things we don't love until they are moldy and horrid. It was quite an evening. Some other cellar owners had piled their stuff right outside our door, so we couldn't actually take most of our stuff out of our room; we just stacked it neatly inside the door. The truck came today to pick it all up, and it was a moment of liberating excitement for me - soon, all this crap will be gone! - but then the truck got full before the movers got as far as our cellar. So we have neatly stacked piles of mouldering cardboard boxes and stuff now, yay.

I look very enticing with cobwebs in my hair, I have to say. And I think Friar REALLY enjoyed tearing the old wardrobe apart with basically a hammer and his bare hands (all our larger tools are at the cotthut). It turns out it wasn't the worst way to spend a Friday night, destruction and clearing away rubbish. I am comfortably sore today, the way you are when you strain your muscles doing Something Useful, like helping a friend move or waxing a floor or anything like that. It would have been better if we had actually had the stuff taken away, of course, but that part almost wasn't surprising. I haven't gotten that optimistic about life in the last week or anything. And I did the parts that I could do, which is perfectly fine.

how do you like what you have?

So, where were we? Oh, yes, my tragic sleeplessness. Well that seems to be over now YAY. It is funny how when I'm in a happy moment I am usually able to name it and enjoy it even though I am aware of its transitory soap bubble status, but when I'm unhappy it takes me a long time to figure out where it comes from, and in the meantime it's always what if it lasts forever this time? And then of course the moment it's over I'm like, oh yeah well of course. Of course I couldn't sleep; I was in a burning building.

Fortunately I have outstanding self-preservation and thus continue to go through the motions of removing myself from said burning building even when it all seems so hopeless, because some clever part of me knows that if I run, I will eventually be standing outside with all what's really important, what I have that I love, and we will have sooty faces maybe but we won't be dead or anything.

And you know, I don't mean possessions, but the people I love who really make it possible... no, that make it necessary to run. Because I am surrounded by expanding circles of awesomeness, and from the people I interact with daily to the people I only talk to a couple times a year, I am so extraordinarily lucky that I can only bear to think about it very rarely or my heart would explode. I live with an amazing pair of guys, I have friends that I see regularly, friends I see annually, and friends I've never met, and yet I know that each of these people has my back. There are couches around the world that I could distressed damsel-esquely collapse on, and those people who would hand me tissue and tell me jokes, and I know this is true not least because it is unquestionable that I would do the same for them. Gertrude Stein asked, "How do you like what you have?" and I have to say I like it really, really well. I have friends who will help me sift through my shit and laugh about it. I have people who know how to distract me from my own stabby moments by discussing stab binding. I have a sister I can call at 3 in the morning who will remind me that you cannot go wrong re-reading your favorite childhood books. And there I was, curled on the couch an hour later sniffling because Taran couldn't make pottery the way he wanted, and he had to move on... I felt nevertheless finally as right as... no, more right than rain.

I just mean to say: I know I am really lucky. I know I am so unbelievably blessed to have the life I have, to have so many people making that life rich and wonderful. I know that the moments of bliss, like the moments of despair, are just shifts in the wind, and that a good gust of laughter can blow away even the acrid smell of smoke from a building I didn't have to stay in, and the rest of the neighborhood is intact, because it's filled with good people. I'm counting you.

sleepless

And so it is like this: 4:30 in the morning and I have shoved at insomnia for an hour before admitting it won. Lying in the dark, trying not to toss and turn, playing the trick my grandmother taught me of counting all the body parts and how they were sleepy, unable to focus on a single muscle without also cataloging every injury, every insult.

Your toes are sleepy, I tell myself. Toes, you are very sleepy! And also he had no business telling me I was irresponsible for not finishing the project; we were moving across the country the next week and I think it was unreasonable to expect a seventh grader to make up sentences for 20 vocabulary words when her family is nearly off its hinges.

Insteps, you are sleepy; stay still and stop twitching. Think long relaxing thoughts! And Dennis standing at the foot of the bed and he's going to fucking kill me, rip me apart, and so again I am sleeping on the couch in the office where I work.

Heels, to heel. And the place where I passed out on the floor of the bathroom, cracking my head against the tiles, and they told me it couldn't be a gas leak because gas smells bad.

I'm not up to my knees, I'm not even at the fidgety parts yet, and why do I store so much that makes me sad, and what is it that wakes me at three in the morning and says let's think about all the bad places you've left instead of let's think of all the good places you went to.

Listen, I keep everything. I remember everything. On good days I am able to say that I got to live with a beautiful woman who made paper by hand and who had all of Leonard Cohen's recordings on reel-to-reel tapes that were copies of copies and scratchy from being loved so much; that my boss went out and got me McDonald's for breakfast and told me I was radiant even with office couch creases on my cheeks; that California turned out pretty well. But this month has been a month of sleeplessness, and remembering all the bad places I've slept is not the worst catalog I've got, but none of my catalogs are all roses either. Be patient with me. I know good things and I'll tell you them soon.