tuckova

birds of a feather

The birds came back to start roosting in the trees in the courtyard behind the apartment. There are several large trees and by the middle of summer every branch will be heavy with them, I don't think they're supposed to be there but they are. They fly around the city during the day and I'm sure it causes actual problems, but for me personally it's just the noise. When they return in the evening the sky is Hitchcockian, the sound of wings beating, the blockage of light, the sense of something impending. They start calling to each other at the first light of day so in the summer it's a full cacophony by 5 a.m. A few of the neighbors have strung shiny paper across their balconies, I assume to keep the birds out, though it's also quite pretty, the flashes in the light. The weather keeps going back and forth between winter and spring, like it is also not quite ready to put away its jacket even while it is definitely longing for the sun. Everything resonates to me with the cusp of change. Two of the trees in the courtyard are in full bloom, white petals. Others are still bare from winter. The building next door is having the facade repaired and the workers all took a long-cut through the courtyard to get to the back rather than go through the building's own doors, so there's a slippery mud slope now where grass might have grown. They were pretty tidy about it, though, considering. Our facade was freshly redone right before we moved in, which means 23 years ago I think; it now looks pretty worn down, though less than most buildings did when I moved here and fell in love with the crumbling beauty of this town, which looked like a black and white photograph, filled with implied meaning where it lacked color. Someone yesterday said that our moving to this neighborhood was gentrification which while I am very gentrified is not, I think, what that word means. The neighborhood I'd been in before translates as Kingsfield, although no kings were present. The neighborhood I've lived in since was filled with students living four to a room and with lots of old people who had lived here through it all, the Velvet Divorce, revolution, before that Communists, Nazis, one woman in our building even before that. There are marks on the walls in the cellar from when they hid from Allied bombs, when they were occupied. But then one of the old people died, and his widow found the place too big for one person and she sold it and we moved in. When we fixed the broken holes in the floor we found newspaper scraps from when it was built. An article about talkies and whether they might replace regular movies. And now we have lived here for decades, longer than I've lived anywhere. I recognize that it is very funny that I will move to a different place on the same street but I do love the street and the neighbors, the convenience of the tram stops and the trolleybus, and I love the life that goes on in the courtyard. To which, by the way, I now have a key. With which to open doors to places that always belonged to me, so to speak. It's not bad.

chrysalis

When feeling bad, as I have been lately, one of the things that helps me is to think of what I want and then try to put that into the world. Yesterday I wrote a thank you note to someone who had written an article about music that I enjoyed reading. Sometimes I stop people in the street to tell them I love their outfit. I wonder sometimes how this must seem, this randomly intense appearance of a stranger gushing over the good you've put into the world. It's funny because it starts as a sort of karmic wish, I'll put it out and then maybe I'll get it back, but of course often the act itself is its own reward.

I have a bit of a cold at the moment, which wants tea and soup and to feel sorry for itself. There's a lot of mouth breathing. Last night I took a pain murderer to knock me out, which was wonderful because honestly everything hurt quite a lot and I would have been in bed exhausted and sniveling otherwise. The result was a full night's sleep, glorious, and unfortunately extremely vivid dreams which I am still untangling from reality. One involved social shunning and it really made me sad, even though it didn't happen. Thanks brain.

Every once in a while I take a run at imagining my life if I changed it in a drastic way that pleased me and not necessarily others. What if I stopped saying "yes" to anything I was asked to do. What if I just holed up on my own and read books and watched movies and worked and wrote. What if I gave up on initiating human contact. When I was young I sought very few people, figuring that if I waited until they contacted me then I'd know they wanted to see me, and thus I managed my own fears of being unwanted and when I showed up I did so wholeheartedly. Some years ago I started initiating more, not because my own confidence went up particularly but because I was suddenly able to see other people as being, perhaps, also a little self-doubting. And it takes nothing to let someone that you want to see know you would like to see them. But what would happen, I wonder now, if I stopped? If I stopped carrying my weight, would someone else lift me? Or would I be seated quietly in one place, and would that feel like meditation or abandonment? 

I'm on the cusp of some things, and it makes me feel like everything could change. It doesn't mean anything more than what it is, I'm just pondering. 

back in the day

I was in my early 20s. At the time I felt like a fully grown adult. I'd finished college, had a couple heartbreaks, lived abroad, worked in real jobs, traveled. At 24, I'd moved back to the US and started working at a sales job. My boss was creepy. During training he had us turn off our tape recorders (tape recorders!) so that he could tell us that if we ever said anything negative about him, we would be fired because he was "in" with the bosses and we weren't. I'd like to say that's why I didn't complain but actually I only connected those dots later, how it felt to know what you might say would be meaningless. Anyway he was creepy. When I'd go into his office he'd close the blinds and ask me to pull up my skirt an inch, another inch. I was young and used to a certain amount of attention from men, which I mostly ignored because it mostly felt like being ogled in a zoo (and this "just ignore it" thing was of course heightened by having lived in Japan, which was very much like living in a zoo all the time, photographed randomly as if I were an exotic animal of some sort). Anyway so he'd be creepy and I'd ignore it. I thought it was about me. We know now that it almost never ever is but that was then. At night when I'd call in my sales reports he'd ask what I was wearing, to describe it; he'd ask me to touch myself. And I would just change the subject but I didn't tell him to stop. I remember when Anita Hill testified I had absolutely no doubt that she was telling the truth, though I also thought she seemed to be awfully upset when what she was saying just wasn't that bad, comparatively. I feel bad about that now, because my boss wasn't up for the supreme court, and any creepy from your boss is too creepy. It shouldn't be that way. Going to work shouldn't feel like hell because of the people you're working with. That you don't even get to think about the work itself because everything is poisoned. Anyway back to me, 24-year-old me, so my boss was creepy and I thought it was about me and then another salesperson, a woman, asked if he was ever inappropriate and we talked about him and that's when I learned it wasn't about me. And then when I went to train with another salesperson in a different town, she told me that one of the reasons she'd transferred there was to not work with him. And then other women told me when I hinted at the subject. And still none of us said anything. I didn't say anything. After about a year I got promoted and moved to a different region and I didn't have to talk to him anymore. At some point a woman from a completely different region came to visit and I was telling her what it had been like to work with him, and that I thought sooner or later someone would complain. And she did, she took it to the head of the company. And he called and asked and I said no it wasn't so bad it didn't bother me. I think I thought that the worst thing was to confess that I was bothered, that I would be weak if I said it wasn't okay, so I said it was fine. And so did all the other women they called to ask, the women who had told me the truth were lying, we were all lying. I can't convey to you what the fear of looking like I couldn't handle something was like. When I remember this I don't also remember that I was 24, that I was different and times were different. A few days later I called the head of the company again and said that my boss had asked me to bring him clippings of my pubic hair in an envelope, to prove that I didn't dye my hair. Carpets gotta match the drapes, he had said. In what world did I think that was tolerable? In that world, apparently. It's hilarious that 30 years later I still feel dirty, still feel guilty. That it happened. That I didn't see that it was wrong. That I thought I'd ruin everything by saying how awful things were. That I thought I was weak, and that I was. 

players gonna play

I have a task manager on my phone where I type in things I want to do and every week I have a fresh notebook page where I write down the things I want to do (different parts of the page for different things) and I also have alarms to remind me to do things I want to do. Like there's work and there's performance stuff and there's just looking after my own well being, like "do a load of laundry" or whatever. Despite all this I often find I don't get as much done as I would like. And yet I do things, I wouldn't say I just sit around looking at the walls, although that is also something that I like doing very much. I am often very tired and I thought for a minute before I started traveling in December that it was because I was doing too much, specifically working too much, and I thought that when I was away from work I would finally get some sleep, and then while I was traveling I sometimes thought that I was tired because I was seeing and doing so many rare and unusual things but that when I got home again I would finally get some sleep and now I am home and I'm not really sleeping. I gave myself a week before returning to work so that I could do things like organize the paperwork that came in December for my taxes and get a haircut and check in with some friends without worrying about the inevitable hangover of such reunions and its effect on my productivity. I've been home a week and one of me says that I'm doing pretty well for just one week in (I am, for example, unpacked, which often takes me a month) but the other of me is a little disappointed that at my age I have learned so many tricks for doing things well and I don't do them. Today I read about knitting a sock for a sense of accomplishment and I really thought "Shit, do I have to take up knitting on top of everything else?" but then I mopped the bathroom floor and I guess that counts for something. I would like to be able to give myself credit for doing things, finishing things, and even doing some things well, even though I also want to hold myself to a reasonably high standard and keep striving though maybe not striving so hard that the striving itself exhausts me. Dude, I don't know. I'm going to practice ukulele for a while. It's the weekend, after all.