Note To Self: Get Rich Or Love My Brokeness In The Process
Money is the root of all evil you say?
Tosh-Pish! Money can buy me:
Abracadabras like so!
Sit me out in the middle of no where, and sip me some wine under a chandelier like my worries have no fears and my fears can’t hear them.
Call me a different name and if I don’t answer let it make no damn difference at all. What was I saying?
O, money… money, well money, can buy me:
A White Volkswagen Hybrid Touareg.
Wha? At least I’m saving the environment. It’s Hybrid–for shucks sake!
And money, o yesss, sweet love of the world…
Walking the streets of, … … … need I say more?
The streets of Paris are likely-like dreams. Sometimes in the middle of the day I drift off in daze-like reveries of an imaginary experience. I’m sure when I get there I’ll stump my toe or a dog will bite my arm and it’ll ruin my fantasy, but for now I can live through an unrealistic daydream, a daydream where everything I eat when I’m there won’t have any calories, and everything I experience I’ll remember beyond forever. Ahhhhh, swoonie-swoon.
My mom always tells me “Honey, if you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything in the world,” and I believe that, but at the same time, what happens when you live your life never able to fully expand or live up to your own potential? Sometimes I fear I’ll be wrinkly, crinkly, and grey (I can see them coming already!) before I reach the truly good part about this panoramic figure 8 we call life. I’m sick of the journey, where’s my destination? I’m sick of the journey. What’s with all this waiting?
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
― Oscar Wilde
Money? Money could get me these, hilariously fall out cute- pumped up kicks pumps that make me want to dance swirls and swirls and bite the moon in a strapless pastel peplum dress holding this lunch clutch… which by the way would be frikkin stellar. Although there is this new nonfiction book I’ve been needing by Tracy Kidder… I’m jus’ sayin:
“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.
She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.
Buy her another cup of coffee.
Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.
It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.
She has to give it a shot somehow.
Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.
Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.
Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.
You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.
You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.
Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico
But then there’s the stomping, give me everything I want and I want everything I want right now that says… well, let’s just say I’ve been wanting this purse half a year.
So you see I have discovered that you CAN buy happiness. But that all depends on what makes you happiest.
Maybe a select few fam and friends and a diamond ring knocking me into foggy submission forevermore might help too. Yes, the dreaming is quite nice.
Ah let’s see, a published memoir and a successful following changing the lives of many would be meritoriously peachy, but we aren’t talking about aesthetic emotional heart coddling needs–we are talking wants, straight wants! I tell you.
What do you crave? Join in this materialism.
I need links!
Mad Passionate Love, I Say, Mad Mad Mad
Trust myself in the process. Through the process. Have faith in another person’s choices. Because if it weren’t possible; if people couldn’t change for the better (or potentially even the worse) all the psychiatrists on this wide universe would be out of business. Side of the road. Luggage in hand. And let me tell you, I’ve known and conversed with quite a many, and none of them have empty pockets.
Because it is maddening. Going against your best judgments to go beyond what you know you’ve been conditioned to be thus far. Because it has to fully unteach you what every other bad experience has taught you. It has to be the feeling with your heart that says ‘go slow’—but the feeling in your mind that says ‘you still have to go.’
Because it has to be the big hugs for the small reasons.
The consistencies. Never wanting to leave.
It’s got to be wide and mad.
I don’t know how to feel it anymore, do you?
I don’t know I’ve really felt it before.
“Where Is This Love? I Can’t See It, I Can’t Touch It. I Can’t Feel It. I Can Hear It. I Can Hear Some Words, But I Can’t Do Anything With Your Easy Words.”
One of my favorite movies of all time: “Closer,” Alice says this. I’m much like her character sometimes. I jump ship. I’m whimsical.
She asks about why come she can’t see the love? Touch it, feel it. Then she repeats that she can hear it—but that hearing it is easy. Those words are easy.
Tell me some hard words, if any words.
Make me speechless. Heart swerving, then plunging. The hurdle, twitch.
I want to do the splits on it. Somersault into a soaring enormous and ask him what took him so long?
I want to see it, feel it, touch it. I don’t want to hear it or hear about it anymore.
I want it sinking in my pores, I want to breathe it, be it.
I don’t want it to be easy, I want it to be uphill so I know what sleeping in is like.
I want it to hit me like an implosion. Locking my legs around it. Like plumdrops.
I want it to be so awfully good it goes stale if not immediate. Mean and fighting like rocket ship tears.
Hurry.
I don’t want fear. I want to speak it into resistance, make it persistent and lengthy.
I want it to stay like a pose, pastel roses on my pillow. I want to be warm.
To write it into me until my joints are sore. sworn. sure.
Until the hugs take longer seconds, until stares are in sync with a later perpetuum.
Until I bloom and he shivers. When I wanderlust, he’s with me.
Until I can do nothing but call off my streetlights, blink, kiss.
I Fell In Love The Way You Fall Asleep: Slowly, and Then All At Once
I was about seven when my Mom got me a hamster. I named her Chrissy. Light brown, sorta fat, cute as a little talking chipmunk. Mind you—this is coming from a person that’s terrified of rats, roaches, spiders, and everything creepy. At first, she used to snip at me. Nip my fingertips wildly. Then I got some hamster treats in psychedelic colors and all was well in the world. I know little animals aren’t smart generally, but this one likely had a high IQ level. Seriously. Chrissy was brilliant and organized. Chrissy had bucky white teeth like she brushed them with Colgate. She didn’t muck up her cage like other hamsters I’d seen, and she even twirled her tiny hands around her face to clean herself! [Later I realized all hamsters do this] When she got her hamster snacks, she separated them by kind. Sunflowers, random nuggets, etc. This thing was cute—ity bity and she’d curl up into a ball in the palm of my hand and fall asleep regularly. Like she gained trust in me. Sometimes she fell asleep on her back while I was petting her. I held her all the time. I put her in this clear little medicine ball with a small doorway, and let her run around my room while I studied. I’m sure we had many other good times, but that’s what I can remember.
It was a slow-growing affection. Then, I fell in love with the little thing.
Then one day I loved her so much I gave her a raisin as a treat. (Hey, it looked just like the trail mix she was already eating.) I saw her stomach boil sideways unnaturally, then I saw her keel over. She still moved around a bit but I ran to get Mom. All I remember next was I started crying, then I took a short nap. When I got up Chrissy was running amuck in her cage and when I went to pick her up to apologize for possibly making her sick—she bit my finger—hard! I was bleeding.
When I went to hold her she squiggled out of my hands so determined. When I put her in her exercise ball she wouldn’t move around and explore. She just sat there.
All of the things that made this hamster adorable to me were gone. She wasn’t cuddly. She wasn’t the same little cute face I could play with. I kept trying to make her behave right again, but she just wouldn’t. Then one day I looked at her teeth. They were yellow and big! Immediately I stomped in to my Mom exclaiming
“Where is Chrissy?! This is not my hamster!!!”
Mom explained to me that it was Chrissy and that all was ok, not to worry.
I didn’t like the New Chrissy, but it didn’t matter because not too soon after New Chrissy escaped and was not ever found.
A couple of years ago I was having wine with my Mother (as an adult) and I asked her what had happened to Chrissy. She looked at me big-eyed and bursty and said
“Gyyyyrl, that hamster had died and I ain’t know what to tell you!”
We laughed about it, but after, I realized how hard it is to tell the truth when you know what you will say will hurt someone you don’t want to hurt. Mom had shot out to the store and grabbed a look-alike of Chrissy and plopped her in Chrissy’s cage to avoid explaining death to me. If a person is prepared, it still hurts, it just hurts a lot less, making it worth it to communicate beforehand. What might have been better? Killing my fairytale. Getting me to accept the reality, the possibility early on of what is to come. Teaching me that the hamster wasn’t going to last forever anyway, and, perhaps teaching me that she needn’t have raisins. Communication is the key, the lock and the Dropbox.
Yes, perhaps some casual and comfortable conversation easing me into the reality that hamsters won’t live forever. I was young, but the blatant lie and confusion? It sets me up to fall down.
Slow and concentrated.
This is the way we should talk to the people we care about. This is the way we should communicate with each other. Slowly, and then all at once. This is the way we prepare someone for what is to come. Slowly, and then all at once. This is the way we teach them how to grow with us. Slowly, and then all at once. This is how we avoid confusion and disappointment, “we man up.” We become responsible for ourselves, our actions, and the presentations and perceptions we’re exposing. Slowly, and then all at once. This is the way we learn how to trust, slowly, then all at once. This is the way we discuss things like adults. Slowly, and then all at once.
This is the way I want to fall in love. Slowly, and then all at once.
The more lessons I’ve learned the hard way, the more lessons I’ve kept. How do I like my information? —Sugar-coated and straightforwardly oxymoronic. Yes. The truth doesn’t set you free, but it helps you sleep—and that’s kindove the same thing.
Photo by JoyHey
You Are Missing Your Window Of Opportunity Because I Am Climbing My Pretty Legs Out Of It
Is there such a thing as perfect timing? Ok, maybe not perfect but what about mediocre timing? If someone asks you for a favor after a hot bath, after you’ve eaten, and your mind is rather relaxed—aren’t you more inclined?
I’m starting to believe in the world of MOP.
I made that up. But everything is all about marketing, opportunity, and perspective. “The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.” Yes, Burroughs, was another of my loves.
*
Marketing—
In the way we advertise ourselves. In our confidence, in our pep. I’m usually called chipper or spunky, or as my tagline announces… ‘Mean as a cupcake.’ But, really, in my opinion our personalities make us furthermore desirable after the looks have worn and the newness fades. It’s the way we market ourselves, the value we put in ourselves. Not the power we let others give or take from us.
*
Opportunity—
I’m talking about timing, conquering fear, adrenaline, going for what you know you want. Making way for the fail, the trip, or the fly. The way we face it is the way we come out of it. I’ll never forget what a friend of mine said when I applied to a college (obviously the next one I got in) and I didn’t get accepted in:
“I know you got in this time, but I’m more proud of how you brushed your knees off last time.”
Or maybe my all time x lover Bukowski said it best, with reverse psychology and sarcasm.
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
—Charles Bukowski, Factotum
*
Perspective—
“I think you can love a person too much.
You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what’s wrong – a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don’t even realize what you look like, how far you’ve deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.”
―Jodi Picoult, Handle With Care
*
I’ve let opportunity slip, I’ve left the glass slipper—no prince showed. I’ve thought about it before. That maybe if I’d been in a prior relationship at any other time; it might have worked out. I’ve prayed, hoped, self-helped, sought counsel, psych, pillow screamed, pop pill—plopt dat *ss down on the couch and pouted, stopped, shouted, stomped off. Ran away on sabbaticals for days and days without contact, SOS soon I’m licking my wounds right now. Planned for the worst, and hoped for the best type of psychoanalytical reverse inverse ~comatosis~. And all I can come up with is this:
Enough already. Because most of the things I’ve hesitated for I’ve lost. Most of the things I’ve gone for I’ve gotten. Most of my gut feelings were right about things that were wrong, but right about things that were right. I’ve lived by Mark Twain when he said to “Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”
I’ve french kissed frogs a few times. They turned into monkeys, actually. Bored of the inevitable. Thought about forever, then went out of touch. In an unquenchable thirst for someone to take me house shopping, I’ve found myself—utterly afraid to opportunize anything, it’s quite shiteous, really. Maybe my timing is off? Maybe if I sleep more he’ll wake me with a kiss. Have I been poisoned? It’s my party and I can cry if I want to.
They say patience is a virtue, but really, am I missing my window of opportunity because I’m climbing my pretty legs out of it?
The Things We Won’t Admit To Ourselves
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know” —Hemingway
I’m better at surprises now. The dreams are enormous. We are lying on a paisley blanket beneath a sunburst sky. I have the hiccups. You have the why’s. Why is it you? You’ve interpolated my verbiage and now all I want to do is go house shopping. Stereotype meteorology by staring stars down. Ruminate in my ruffles. Sing in the shower “I’m a movement by myself, but I’m a force when we’re togetherrrrrrrrrr!” I want to know you better. Better, I want to know. Immobilized manic and idiosyncratic, I’ll curtsey for you. I’ll fiddle enchantless, err enchantress. Had a dream I was dreaming and you and I were staring into each others’ keyholes. Real slow. Not the sinkhole, but the peephole, I meant the eyelid, but really the heartbeat. Was I locked and will I open? Or was it moving slowly enough while I baked organic chicken and roasted vegetables? A blue supernova’d you on the line of barely. A tizzied skyride this is. See. Look at me, no hands? Or fear. And we both watch as the universe reverts, as joy rips holes into—not the line drawn but the line crossed. Not the line but the warning. Not the line but the stepping over, the kiss in which we’ve woven in me is you. Not you, but your butterskin-wandering, maybe you and an endless hot bath I wonder? I’m better at surprises now. The dreams are miniscule. We are sitting back to back on a plaid blanket in the middle of a somewhere beneath an utterly alone, no underneath a broken pie. I have incessant cough attacks. You have the why’s. Why is it I? Why is it why? I Can’t think of anything but how this lemonade is going to taste?
He Is Sitting On The Edge Of My Couch And I Am Watching The Way He Talks
He is sitting on the edge of my couch and I am watching the way he talks. Someone else is spraying Windex into my eyes, and ketchup globs around spinning in circles—splush all over the kitchen and I am screaming through my bones that I love, that I love. He is sitting on a comma, I am wishing for an exclamation. Someone else is having a tantrum because I stopped believing in Valentine’s day. He is showing off in front of his friends like he’s thirteen and four months. Someone else is not paying me no mind. He is surprising me. Someone else has let me sink, three days before zero hours, deadpan and a-lonely. He is talking to me—closing into my face, I am treating his words like rhyming sunshine. Someone else is soliciting muddy tears from each place I make up. He is causing an utterly obsessed set of recollections. Look what it has done. Someone else is afraid I’ve gone missing; an unattractive disinterest. He is keeping me up at odd hours of the night, I am eeking of him. Someone else is sleeping with other women, someone else is flyfailing, falling in lust with withdrawal. He has borderline “I’m not sure disorder,” takes unreliables-anonymous classes, and subscribes to ringing phone disease. Someone else is making me put my hand over the bible and promise I haven’t made tacos or had patron shots with strangers. In plain sight of anger. He is likely rotten, I ask please peacefully for the ache if in hindsight, if then it matters. Someone else is losing grips. He is understanding. I must like understanding. Someone else is quiet like a light switch—only I don’t know which.
And now I can’t tell the difference between any of this. So now he‘ll have to whisper loud enough to infiltrate my imagination.
Burrow, actually.
