tuckova

More than 59 probably

Briefly, as I sit in another airport on the next to the last leg of this. I am primarily thinking that it's funny how much humans in general annoy me, for example the woman seated behind me loudly on her phone, and yet how what brings me the most happiness is people. The people I've traveled with, the ones who have welcomed me into their homes, people who took time out of their busy lives to clear a space for me to come in and occupy the whole space for a meal, a day, a weekend. I read a story about someone who used a rosary not for prayer but to remind himself of all the beauty and wonder in his life. There is a lot of beauty and wonder in nature, trees and flowers and for example the moon last night overhead and concealed by clouds, then bursting forth with a host of stars in the crisp night air. But it's people and the beautiful things people do, large scale and small, art and kindness, that would fill most of my rosary. I am so blessed, I am so lucky, I am so grateful.

RE/search

One thing that I remember is that I felt so odd and like I didn't belong, and I met people who also didn't belong but then amongst them there was also belonging and not, an inner and outer circle. Eventually, I didn't care, I understood loneliness as a natural state.

When these books came to us (how?), it was everything. It was an encyclopedia guide to a world of which I inhabited a corner. And then I was not alone.

There is always the struggle to reconcile the attachment to being unique with the desire to find a tribe. These books were the tribes.

Yesterday, we were in Vesuvio and I thought I was going to tell the story of how people take me for granted, how I have granted myself for people to take. I wanted to be anywhere but the room I was in, suddenly ready to cry, and the books appeared on the sidewalk and I was 18 again, running to books, and this time the publisher was there and all I could do is say you changed my life, you saved my life, and we took pictures and my whole day turned around. Books will always save you if you let them.

copy paste

When I was in high school I used to shave my eyebrows and draw them on with liquid crayons. Blue, green, lurid. I wanted to look like a weird and intriguing alien; I probably just looked weird. Some months later, the school newspaper profiled another student who had just started painting her own eyebrows: what a fashion trailblazer. She was cute; she looked cute and intriguing. I don't want to claim that I invented the wheel but it was painful at the time to see someone else get credit for having invented very much the same wheel as I was spinning.

In the heady days of live journal, a young woman copied my blog posts and posted them to her LJ and added provocative photos to them. It was unsettling to see her posting my words, getting gushingly positive feedback. A group of my friends went and posted comments calling her out for stealing and eventually she disappeared but she didn't seem to ever get why what she did was wrong.

A few years ago a man who failed in a misguided attempt to woo me then turned and took my words to try to woo other women. Woo is a funny word. The combination of that and other factors at the same time gave me my first true case of writer's block, a feeling that having my means of expression stolen and twisted meant it was better not to express myself in writing at all.

These aren't the only times this has happened, my words lifted out of context and re-poured from someone else's mouth. I don't want to keep feeling this particular hurt. I suppose if I keep writing, anyone who might matter to me will know who said it first. Earlier this week, I found someone using my words again, uncredited, to promote their own agenda. I'm not doing anything because people who don't intrinsically know that stealing is wrong aren't worth the breath. I will take a moment to wish them crushing failure on the basis of who they actually are, which my stolen words are not enough to conceal.