tuckova

she sells seashells by the seashore

Without wishing to oversimplify, it does seem pretty simple to me-- to be the person you want to be, start being that person. If you want to be different, change. If you can't change, then stop sitting around wishing you could. I don't mean unrealistic things, because it is true that I have not stopped wishing I could have wings and or a tail, but the things that are well within your range -- if it bothers you that you aren't a certain way, why aren't you working towards being that way? Or working towards not being bothered?

I want to be a person who clears deadlines, and so... I clear deadlines. I thought that I would like to be a person who can strike up a conversation with a stranger and enjoy it, but after having given it a valiant effort for a few years I concede that I am not that kind of person and it doesn't bother me anymore because anyway they invented podcasts so I do that instead and it's lovely. I sometimes think that I would like to earn more money at my job but then I remember that I had a job that paid me ridiculous piles of money and I loved that job, but when I stopped loving it I had to quit so I know that money is not as important as I thought it was.

I decided a couple years ago that I want to be the kind of person who says YES unless there's a really good reason to say NO. Curiosity killed the cat, but only after she got a good look. Last week, I was asked to go on a trip and I'm going because there was no reason to say no. I cracked my tooth and it got infected and I won't have time to fix it properly before I go so I expect this little adventure will be like an intensive spa -- all sunshine and no solid food. See you in 10 days, assuming I can't figure out how to post pictures while I'm gone.

a luscious mix of words and tricks

“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.” ― Douglas Coupland

This quote has popped up on my feed a few times in the past week and it baffles me. I can only assume Mr. Coupland, or more accurately the character that Mr. Coupland has express this sentiment, has had an awfully easy life. I think there are lots of things more cruel that you can do. Leaving aside actual physical cruelty I can still think of things that are much worse than pretending to care. You could care and pretend you don't, for example, and isn't that also fairly awful? You can genuinely not care about someone who wants you to care about them even a little, and you could let them know you don't care. You can care and then abruptly stop caring, and not explain. You can explain. You can set the phone down gently on the counter and walk away for a little while instead of just hanging up, you can practice hanging up, you can practice lots of things that are more cruel than pretending you care. 

To be clear, I think genuine caring is a lot nicer, but sometimes you want to care but you have a deadline or you know you should care but there's a stone in front of your heart and it's hard to feel much of anything. Sometimes you are swirling in a vat of molasses and tears and the only way to keep yourself afloat is by pretending not only to yourself but to other people that you give a shit about anything at all, and the people who let you pretend to care about them are full life rafts, and sometimes in the middle of pretending to care you realize you can see the shoreline and you have a moment of real caring that you couldn't have gotten to otherwise and I don't think that's cruel to anybody. 

And anyway, there are very few places where the emotion behind an act is really all that important. What does caring look like? Cook a meal, change diapers, make tea, show up, listen. Caring is easy; it involves only slightly more effort than watching a television program or reading a book and wondering what happens next. I spent enough of my younger life agonizing because I feared that people didn't really care about me and trying to keep being cared about by the few people who I thought genuinely might, and I'll tell you what I know: caring about other people is a kerjillion times easier than worrying if they care about you. And it feels better; it just does. 

I hereby solemnly swear that I shall not ever care about anyone who posts this quote on facebook, just to be on the safe side, though. Because I care too much to be cruel. 

Poem on a Line by Anne Sexton, 'We are All Writing God's Poem' by Barbara Crooker

Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed
a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step. On the interstate listening
to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist
say, "The universe is not only stranger than we
think, it's stranger than we can think." I think
I've driven into spring, as the woods revive
with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy
scarves flung over bark's bare limbs. Barely doing
sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound,
and aren't we just? Just yesterday,
I read Li Po: "There is no end of things
in the heart," but it seems like things
are always ending—vacation or childhood,
relationships, stores going out of business,
like the one that sold jeans that really fit—
And where do we fit in? How can we get up
in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do,
put one foot after the other, open the window,
make coffee, watch the steam curl up
and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls
in the open window, while the sky turns red violet,
lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.
The moon spills its milk on the black tabletop
for the thousandth time.

country feedback

This was maybe the summer of 95, living in the apartment near where Napoleon plotted that famous battle that gets replayed every year, the actors falling to the ground again. This film is on a maddening loop. I don't remember much; or I remember so much but this memory comes to me like a series of snapshots, disconnected. I remember pressing my face into the carpet and crying so hard, the nubbins of carpet dug into my forehead. I'd left with just a suitcase, and when I'd been here a month you sent me the shirt I always used to borrow. These clothes, these clothes don't fit us right. I never told you but I wore it for years, long after we'd stopped talking, until it was more holes than shirt and I finally let it go. 

Man, I could cry then, I could WAIL, cracked open and the pain just poured from me, then, and there was so much. I'm to blame, it's all the same. What's funny is that at the time I felt pretty dried up, emotionally. I woke in a pool of blood and moved and woke in a pool of tears and moved and woke and knew that while I would never get over the past I would never have to repeat it, and so all my tears were crystal memories.

You come to me with a bone in your hand. The letters we wrote and wrote, fingers already cramped over the fifth page and nevertheless tearing the sixth from a notebook, poetry, trying to be the more honest one, the more generous. You come to me with positions. Playing emotional chess by post, each move took three weeks and each move counted. You told me how when you were in bed with her, your breath on the back of her neck kept her awake, your guilt for that, the clench in my stomach, the hairs on the back of my own neck at attention to imagination and memory, but all I wrote was that you had misspelled bed, and was calling it "bad" Freudian or what; you wear me out, you wear me out. 

Maybe things were too far gone by then. Years. Self-hurt, plastics, collections. I came home and sold half my things and gave away the rest, walked down the middle of the street with you, didn't want to trade you but couldn't hold you either. Came to your door late at night, broken, and your exasperation with me was palpable. But you didn't want me to leave, either. I was central, I had control. Every time I pulled at the tether you tugged me back until I don't even remember which one of us let go. It's crazy what you could have had. Oh, I can't finish, it goes on forever. But I need this; I need this. Needed.

Flapper

When I was in my early twenties and falling desperately in love for the second time, we were invited to a 1920s themed party. I went antique shopping and found this amazing flapper-style dress, from the 1960s-era obsession with the 20s. It was short, white, with a white sequined collar and layers of fringe that flew out impressively when I spun around. Oh, I loved that dress.I wore it to that party, I wore it at multiple Halloween parties, it was a lucky charm. I felt so incredibly stylish in it, like I became a more fun person when I put it on. 

Over time and kilos, I was unable to get into it any more. But I couldn't let it go. The thing was, even if I wasn't wearing it, just having it still made me feel happy, the memories I associated with times when I had worn it rushing to the surface every time my hand passed over that fringe. There was a twinge of nostalgia, pain from an old wound, the love had after all ended badly and I felt sometimes like the fun person who wore that dress was not still somewhere inside me, but as gone as dead. But mostly I remembered dancing at a Halloween party, brushing against other dancers when I twirled. Laughing.

Last weekend there was a costume ball and a friend of mine was looking for a dress, a flapper dress if she could find one. Heeeeyyyy I said. I could... you could... 

She looked great. It made me so happy to see her wearing it, being admired in it; it was almost better than wearing it myself, because when I danced beside her I could delight in the cool swish of fringe against my arm. I feel like I can let the dress go now, because it's found a place to be loved; I can keep the memories now without needing the dress. And this is always so, for me, that I don't have a problem with letting go when I'm sure that what I release will land somewhere better. Pulling that dress out of the cedar was one of the best things I've done so far this year.