Craigslist Poetry - Missed Connections

You were crying in front of Keybank Tower - m4w (downtown)
You were over by the bikes (rather than in front of Spicy Pickle). I was wearing a blue, buttoned short sleeve shirt and carrying a book. I doubt you'll see this, but if somehow you do, I want another chance to ask if you're OK. Include your hair color and the color of the shirt you were wearing so I'll know it was you.

Cute guy with a 2:00 haircut appointment - w4m (Roberts of Portland)
I was sitting in the front when you walked in. You looked like the type of guy with a great job, a house, a dog, a wife and a kid on the way.... but maybe there's a chance you're single? I doubt you check these but figure it might be worth a chance. Anyway.... I was the petite blonde in the yellow flowered dress.

New Seasons Market - m4m - 28 (Scholls Ferry)
at 2:30ish you were outside reading a book. We sort of made eye contact a couple times. Please be gay, please be gay, please be gay. Or at least bi. Hit me up if I looked "doable".

I farted on the max - w4m - 26 (At The back....)
It was packed.... It really stunk... You where the nice looking guy standing next to me that everyone looked at...... Our eyes met..... You knew it was me and didnt say anything......
What a guy...... Id love to meet you... It dosnt happen very often..... please email me.....

-Blondie

Coffee Shop - w4m - 28 (Portland)
To the guy who I'm sitting behind right now at my local coffee shop (NON-starbucks). Damn you are great to look at from behind. Thank you! :)

Hoops and Rewards

Speaking of money and getting personal (weren't we?), I made a big breakthrough in therapy today. I'm so happy to be in therapy again. It's been a lot of years since the last bout, and sanity is worth the investment. The absolutely glorious thing, is that therapy is not just sanity-inducing, it's personal growth. Big fat life lessons learned, with the perspective of somebody outside my head, equipped with brainaical skills, willing to push me through my fortress doors out into the bright of day, the bright of life. Yes, I write for Hallmark, dammit.

Today's breakthrough...I walked in and told my therapist it was over. I ran out of money for therapy. I have to come back when I've got a stronger foundation and extra money for such a thing.

The parenthetical to this is that all week long I've been pining over the school program I left in New York eight years ago. EIGHT YEARS AGO. Holy Jeez. I thought I was over the regret, but New York keeps coming up in the hot weather, in my city walks, in conversation, photos on Facebook. I miss the people I left. I miss the dream I stepped off of, thinking I was stepping further into it by leaving. I am jealous of the success my peers are achieving in their faraway states and camaraderie. I want to be achieving it with them. Practicality states that survival is success and the pace of both for me is just a little slower than the others I'm comparing myself to. But the fact is, I don't have any babies or marriages or award-winning plays under my belt, no fancy grants or creative foundations tripping over themselves to give me development money. Not yet anyway.

I love it when thoughts that seem just along for the ride in life and its circumstances tie right into a day's therapy session. So I tell Ken-the-therapist that it's over and he tells me based on the six or so sessions we've had and the voluminous heat of each of them, that it'd be an apropos time for me to bolt. Ah, yes. I agreed. If only I WANTED to bolt. But I wanted to stay, I just didn't have the means. Then all of a sudden those New York thoughts came breezing in, remembering I left in part because I thought I was going to lose it, and I needed to be in a familiar place if my mind was going to go...so that I could survive the fall. I didn't have the means to survive it. NYC was new, as were my friends and my circumstances. Who would take me in if I crashed? Who could I ask for help if I didn't have a fight in me left?

It's all very melodramatic isn't it? I was in a dramatic arts program, if that redeems me at all. But it's true. I felt a niggling sense of doom, and a faraway call to find a nest, find it fast, and prepare to lose my head.

The parallel of needing help, and not having the means to acquire it, came clearly into view. Even the time span that I've been here in Portland, following another dream, is the same time I was in NYC following that dream before I felt the foundation begin to shake.

Ken-the-therapist nodded as I pulled this all together. Threw in sage words. And offered me a deal I couldn't refuse. Breakthrough: I'm staying in therapy. I'm getting the help that's supporting my creative brain and my business success...and lest we forget, healthy relationships with men, boyfriend in particular. It feels, I feel, relieved. I feel really good. And I feel like I made a different choice than the sad, regretful one I made to leave New York.

As for missing places in general, I've been doing that a lot lately.

I miss the rosewater ice cream in Hollywood, and my old mob of cohorts at 415 in San Francisco, and the Fritz Blitz festival selection committee in San Diego, and my friends and the the foothills and ocean running path and the ocean itself in Santa Barbara. Melissa Lion wrote a cool book called Upstream. In it a teenage girl comes to grips with a devastating loss, and in her healing progress realizes that what she misses is who she was. I miss that sometimes, in the gap between what I am and what I'm becoming. Thing is, I've been becoming for a lot of months now, and I forget who I am in the meantime...making me remember who I've been and miss myself.

Curious, if I didn't think so much of myself, I'd think I were a narcissist. ;-)

Thanks for hearing my breakthrough today. It's a big one and I am happy. I feel older. By two days. At least.

Cash for Crustaceans

Money makes the mood go up, the mood go up, the mood go up.
Money makes the mood go up, the mood! go! up!

Was walking and driving around, composing today's blog post in my head. Watching my mood sway with anxiety, resolve, encouragement, anxiety, resolve, thinking it'll be one of those deep days, posting about my internal life. My bench on the inside. I started a new writing schedule today, and I guess anytime I'm in between things new and old, I get soft like a crustacean growing out of its shell. Soft and vulnerable and worrisome, wondering if the end is near, if the sky is falling, and if I'll be an unfortunate soft and squishy when it lands. On me. Squashing me dead. Hm. Maybe that's the point. To be squishy, so that you're not broken, but malleable when it hits. Maybe then I'd squish into a whole new kind of creature. A giraffe, maybe.

But the sky is not falling, or at least, the confidence of money in the mail pops a parachute on that gravity and tells it to take its time sweet time. Sometimes when confidence is lacking, money makes up for it. And caffeine. I now have introduced both into my bloodstream.

Birthday Weather

My blog is doing something weird. It won't let me comment on my own posts. Sorry, friendlies, to whom I would like to comment back. I'll look into that. In the meantime, thanks for reading and commenting.

It's 40 minutes before my birthday. Late night, dark and warm, make that really warm, with a breeze that's kind of thick. Humid. The kind that opens you up and gets you all nostalgic for what once was or what is to come. Hm. Appropriate birthday weather.

The Little Line Was Blue

The month of July has potentially seen the most transformative days in a row of my whole adult life. I could be wrong. I have had some swerves and misses. Some direct hits. My friend/boss died in a plane wreck. I moved to another state. I left 15 years of day-jobbing to leap into doing bizness for myself.

But two weeks ago I peed on a stick and turned it the faintest shade of blue. It was so light blue, the little line predicting the rest of my life, that the digital readout read, "Not Pregnant." My girlfriends, however, are all sorts of savvy. Peeing on sticks is a national sport in some households. Every last symptom under their belts, they know when the jig is up. And these pros in the field suggested I pee on another one, then bust that thing open with a hammer to read it the good old fashioned way: White strip. Thin blue line. You can only have the hormone in your system that turns sticks blue if you are pregnant, they said. Even if it's a tiny bit blue, you're 100% knocked up.

So I got out the hammer. Opened a fresh test. Peed. And waited. Three minutes later, it read, "Not pregnant." I got down on the floor and bashed that digital thing open. What did I pull out? White strip. Thin blue line.

Here's the calendar of events.
Wednesday - My boyfriend and I break up.
Friday - I'm four days late. I pee on a stick. It's negative.
Saturday Night - Pregnancy jock girlfriend instills doubt about my negative.
Sunday Morning - Pee on the stick. Doubtable shade of blue. But blue. No. Can't be. Yet.
Sunday - Six days late.
Sunday Night - Undeniable symptoms. Come to Jesus. My very molecules changing everything I know. Pema Teeter, This Is Your Life! I'm telling you, everything changed. I woke up the next morning recommitted to my core values, my spirituality, my purpose in life.
Monday Morning - Can't eat breakfast. Tastes funny. Nauseated. Make appointment for doctor.
Monday Mid-morning - Period comes. Seven days late, and one transformation later.

Now that we have the calendar down, I'll go back and tell you about the boyfriend. We broke up because of my complaint. I felt like I didn't exist for him, that I was a convenience, and that he was wholly self-absorbed. I tried hard to be a good girlfriend, being open and understanding, slow to judge, slow to anger. Simply put, he was in a better relationship than I was. And based on weeks prior, each of us battling to be satisfied in our worlds, he seemed happy to head for the door once I opened it.

Then I asked him to come over to help me with something. He brought flowers. Truce, he said. I told him I was four days late. His eyes got gentle and settled into me. He watched me a while with a slight upturn in his mouth. He said quietly without ever looking away, "Okay." He went out and came back with a bottle of wine, a box of pregnancy tests, and a bag of donuts. We clinked glasses. Hugged. Then I peed on the stick. We hugged again when it read negative, and amid all the relief, I felt sad.

That was day four. As the days progressed, we talked and talked. Not about being late or pregnant, but about what had us break up. I was traumatized by the event that kicked it off for us, and so I called him each night my head was spinning, to ask him to help me through it. Every night he would. So by night-six and morning-seven of my thin blue line journey, he was right there with me, offering whatever he had, to let me know he was with me all the way. Want me to go to the doctor with you? I will. Want to marry me for my insurance? We could have a courthouse wedding. He showed up in ways I had doubted he ever could. Just days after I had doubted him so completely as to call it off.

Sometime in that week, he asked if I was sure about wanting to break up. The afternoon of day-seven, leaving the doctor's office with him and a negative pregnancy test, I couldn't help but ask myself, "What's important?" We broke up because he wouldn't show up, in my estimation. And then, at a time like this, he shows up like a house afire.

A few days later we had a conversation about what we want in a partner and a relationship. It turned out we want each other. We were two single people living in a relationship a couple of weeks ago. Then we saw what was possible from what seemed inevitable. And we like each other a whole lot better. I for one like myself a little better, too. My therapist (good time for one of those right about now, wouldn't you say?) suggested that I had shown up in ways I never had, asking my (ex-)boyfriend for his help, being angry at him out loud, pulling him into my process to make it our process. So for all my complaint about his not being there in the relationship, apparently, neither was I. We need each other, people do. I guess if we don't offer, we don't get.

It must have been a big week for transformation in the cosmos. Because that weekend, I went to a Fire Starter group session with Danielle LaPorte. She said, “Go farther on your blog. Keep it personal. Take it a little crazy.” She said a good many things to all of us entrepreneurs awaiting enlightenment. And can I say, my world wasn’t just rocked. It was cracked, wide open like that damned pregnancy test, splintered and exposing what matters: White strip. Thin blue line. Me. Positively on. Being what’s possible. Seeing who I am. What I am. What I bring into the world. Pregnant with possibility. So just do it already. It’s time to give birth to it all.

Click It - Addicted!

In the interest of word game addictions, have you tried this one?

freerice

I think I've posted it here before, but, my, is it evil in the best of ways.

What's your high score?
Or better put, how many people did you feed with your addictive behavior today?

more word gaming

wow, you guys are good.
you inspired me...

pupu incense = 1,620
rickshaw trollop = 1,910
niggle swarthy = 2,680

sweat salamander

mink bikini = 34,300

milk biscuit = 4,320,000

silk sangria = 2,200,000

bilk bourgeoisie = 14,000

my friend, lisa, plays a party game on google. the gist is to enter the two words that generate the least amount of hits. 

try it. 

log your best shot here. 

Chicken Sex

Leave it to my lesbian friends to raise a rooster named Mathilda, and a hen that crows.

Mathilda the boy chicken is not such an uncommon development. It's hard to tell what sex those fuzzy little chicks are when they pop out of the eggs. When you get them home and growing in their little box, and then coop, you just gotta keep your eye, and ear, open for tell tale signs that your hen is becoming a man-bird. Like noticing the red crop growing on his head and the adolescent crackling that's trying to be a crow.

They had to get rid of Mathilda--dubbed Clark soon after puberty--because roosters aren't allowed in suburban backyards.

Rooster gone, this morning they woke to Daisy, the bossy hen of the brood, gurgling out a half-cocked screechy croon. In the absence of a rooster, she's taking on job. How very butch of her.

*

Dirt Where You'd Least Expect It

When I lived in New York, I had a lot of surreal experiences. Like the time I walked past a huge advert pic of a swimming pool and actually smelled chlorinated water on hot cement. And that first week I was there in that raucous loud city, seeing a homeless, deaf teenager, and imagining what NYC would be like without sound...I think it would be like being under water.

And there was the time I saw construction in the street. They had the road ripped up and I could see the dirt underneath. Dirt. Brown, sandy earth. In Manhattan. I stopped and stared before I realized I was gripped by the surprise of nature holding us all up.

Saw the Mannahatta Project today and it reminded me of that surprising earth.

*

iParts

A: Hey I think I can select my iPhone apps with my nipple. I'm gonna try it.
B: What? It should work. It's warm. Maybe I can take a picture with my Johnson.
A: Oh, it's working!
B: I just took a picture of my leg. I'm going to send it to you.
(beat)
B: Oh my God, I'm scrolling through my pictures with my Johnson. Wait. Check your email.

"Penis Poems"
K sZ
G blog
Doug
Stle

Typed by my Tip

*

Law School vs. Baby Uncertainty Principle

My brother has three nearly grown kids and some variation of a constant question whenever I see him:
"When are you gonna have kids?"
Or, "Why don't you go get some seeds?"
Or, "Isn't your clock gonna explode soon? Get all rusty and freeze up on you?"

Eloquence runs in my family.

Kids don't. Out of 5 adult siblings, only 2 of us have procreated. I'm not one of them.

My mantras: I *think* I want kids. I don't want to ruin them. I don't want them to ruin me, which will ruin them.

Snake eats its tail.

Yesterday, after the course of some high pressure darktime hours with God, I get it. Yes. Kids. Babies. Offspring. I'd be a good mom. And maybe a nutter of one, okay. But yeah. Kids and me would go very well together.

Then I saw this post today on THE HAPPINESS PROJECT and it made me snicker while giving me perspective in all of 20 seconds. It's in the video linked here.

Hollywood Movie

Been okay. But tonight I'm a girl. A regular girl the kind I always wondered about who loved "Dirty Dancing" and swooned over boys and babies. Everywhere I look are couples aging and sophistcated on a Saturday night, young and cute in the giddy twilight. And everytime I hold back tears. Tears! Are threatening my eyes and slipping down my throat. I force myself into the street into a bar with a book and I hide behind the menu mystified that I'm crying just looking at wines. Or trying to keep from crying, lights dim, bar marble-topped, music perfectly jazz. The lights just got dimmer and my red is served. I wonder if I will be someone's story tonight, to see and consider as they go to sleep, the woman at the bar brushing at tears before her book even opens.

Lisa Makes the Sweetest Peas

Facts

My boyfriend and I broke up yesterday.

My HS reunion is in a few weeks. To go or not to go.

Kittens slept on my head last night.

I just woke up from a three-hour nap.

Window washers dangled outside my 10th floor apt today, adept as spiders.

Yesterday I was angrier than I have been in a really long time.

Like maybe ever.

Anger is cumulative over years and bursts open like a storm cloud.

I am the same girl I was in high school. More talkative maybe. And as poetically morose.

I'm looking out my window at a river right now.

My friends make me feel so special I cry.

I ate halves of five different flavored cupcakes yesterday, with two of my besties, all of us in the haven of my bed.

We drank prosecco in the afternoon. Also in my bed.

I am tired.

I wonder a lot of things. Mostly about progress and reproduction and people.

I missed yesterday's blog post, busy living its content.

I miss New York sometimes.

Life is always just beginning.

*

Office Deluge

My eyes have an office-y ache and a laptoppy strain. But success was found on my new scanner today. Even though I failed at the fax.

A General Ick

What can be attributed to this ICK? I woke up and before I even opened my eyes, I hated my apartment. I loathed where it is located, isolated at the end of my block. I regretted the home improvements I made last weekend, and couldn't believe I bought that ugly little table and chairs. It disrupts everything with its wicker cuteness and caramel-colored brightness infecting my apartment's darker tones.

Ick.

In my late 20s I used to wake up with an emotional hangover. I'd have a fun night out the night before, no alcohol (special diet), nobody in my bed (no reason but shyness), and before I even opened my eyes, I'd be regretting all that laughing and joking and general self-expression of the night before...usually it involved meeting new people and having a really great time. And it wasn't just regretting, I was doing. It was a physical sensation. My insides churned in a kitchen mixer, getting folded into a batter headed for the flame and skillet.

What the hell is that about? Does everyone feel this way when they wake up? Is this why people drink coffee? Mood enhancer of happy prancers once static dancers. Stop me.

I'm still in bed. I wrote some morning pages then made a list of all there is to do today in lieu of hating myself. When I have stuff to do there is less time for that. In between lines, I considered when I have felt like this and remembered high school. Precious days of hormonal Jekyll and Hyde. Girlhood sucks sometimes.

Today is a girl day. In all the literature of all time, all those pagan fertility rites recorded and allusions to the power of women during their "moon time," why does none of it, not one speck say one thing about PMS?

If you know of an ancient reference to lady dragons, please post. I'd love some redemption in history.

Independent

I missed yesterday's post!
I was independent of the blog while celebrating our country's independence.
Now, a lot could be debated about what our country and its individuals are independent from--or not--these days. Oil? A crazy craving to always be buying something? Debt, and the Industrial Revolution hours it makes one keep?
But systemically, ritually, we are free.
And a lotta folks work to keep us feeling that way, from red tapers to storm troopers to grocery markets that stay open till midnight.
And for that I give thanks on Independence Day.
Powerful stuff, freedom.

Note the Floral Toes

Still learning to be a girl after all them bruthas...

Rhythm is Gonna Get You

My best dancing days all added together have not seen as much dancing as there's been in my life since Michael Jackson died, all that rhythm comin outta everywhere, radios all around.

I want a jazz funeral when I die. But if you play a little MJ when I go, it'll gimme some more boogie to woogie outta here on. And I won't mind a bit. As long as you keep marchin and swingin down the streets with them trombones and sassy colors, lovin the life I led as much as I did.

Lawty Lawty Got a House Pawty

This is three-fourths of my core Welcome-to-Portland crew. Note the cute girl on the right. That's Stephanie.

And this is the farewell crew.





Saying goodbye to Stephanie. Portland's loss. New York's gain.

We'll miss you, girl.