Gonna Be OKAY - Just Dance!!!

What's up in my periphery? Earthquakes in Detroit (and Toronto), Kwame handed 19 federal indictments (yes, I voted for him, but only his first time running, when he PROMISED SOOOO much for our city, I voted Freeman Hendrix in round two and lost), torrential downpours in Pittsburgh, a slow and silent and solo night at the homestead with the kids, a little thunder and lighting to keep Wilson and I on our toes, cats lurking in the shadows. There's a whirlwind of great change afoot, I can feel it. The tectonic plates are shifting, justice is being served, but it continues to rain in my dining room, so as much as things change and heave and bob and weave, they also stay the same.

Such as it is, with crashing booms and equally powerful yet non-descript moments of quiet reflective bouncing around and dancing and singing with no one here to see or judge or care, I find myself oscillating like the $20 Home Depot fan in my sweet light purple cave of a bedroom, between one side of love, one side of life, one side from here to there and back again with every subject and facet of life's strange adventures and unpredictable variances with a well-oiled ease. Moving smoothly, flawlessly perhaps, from having real love and a real relationship to the exact opposite, from having a friend who is a friend and not a lover to the exact opposite, from having a lover who isn't even a friend to the exact opposite. From being unemployed to employed overwhelmingly, from being re-charged into my phd work to suddenly underwhelmed by its presence in my life at the very critical moment I think I'm finally ready to jump through another hoop and knock it all out with a 1-2 KT punch. Nope, the fan keeps moving, keeps shifting from side to side, blowing my wits and bits off guard. I may not have felt the quake in PGH, but I feel it every day in my heart and my mind. Just dance.

It's also too hot to go for a run, which I'd love to do, though I'm slow and don't jog more than a few+ miles, but I go go go, hustle, and I blast my Gaga along the way. So instead I'll work on my web presence, rebuilding the site taken down long ago when the petty little twerp I spent five years with deactivated the website I spent a year building. It's okay, the fan blows that away too. When that gets boring, what I have control over right now is the way I sway, shake my hips and shoulders, the volume of the shitty dance pop music I'm blasting, the dishes in the sink that I can't wait to wash, the dirt on my face and hands, the dirtyness of my insatiable appetites left to deal with later. The whirlwind of change is here, it's now, and I know I can also, always control the speed of the fan with which the winds blow about me. I can also turn the fan off.

that "to do" list looks mean

Oh Angry To-Do list, why do you stare at me so? Unassuming little yellow post-it, easily movable from place to place, never really sticking, but always lingering. Loitering. Burning holes in my flesh! Yes, I see you. Covered in my own handwriting, waiting for items to be crossed off, deleted, eliminated. You are waiting for the moment when I crumple you up and put you in the garbage can. This is your destiny and you are destroying me in your process of self-actualization!

*Application to Chapman
*Application to Asian University for Women
*Application to Interlochen
*Edit short video for second competency
*Work on reading list


Simple enough, right? Except the applications each involve compiling so much data including portfolio, personal statements, transcripts, vita, writing samples, etc.

Short video means going through all the footage I hate from Hungary and salvaging some kind of short little film together that represents my skills as a video editor.

Reading list? 40+ books to knock out by the end of April.

Dear lord! Grant me the strength! The courage, the wisdom! Or any of these three things!

Wilson and I are going to go for a run and then...I should have cleared some head space to make some headway. Or so I hope.

2 months in Pittsburgh

I'm sitting here at my new Ikea desk in my 101 Dalmations border adorned office, looking nothing like the young girl in this photos, puffy-faced from mucus and phlegm and blowing my nose for 3 days. Black hair, long sweater, slipper socks -- drinking delicious hot black coffee with my feet resting warmly on my dog. I am, as usual, alone in my space (which is why I have no reason to change out of my bell-bottom sweat pants).

Today is my 2 month anniversary since I moved to Pittsburgh and I am content despite the constant state of varying illnesses and varying degrees of productivity I've experienced over the few short months here. Winter has been hard and brought all kinds of unexpected vermin, both human and single-celled, into my life and no doubt, hanging out with toddlers, as much as I enjoy it, has exposed me to some of the nastiest breeds of germs via snot and projectile coughing. I've been officially sick for this 3rd bout of illness since Thursday, coming down with a runny nose and chest congestion during the 2+ hour version of Sam Shepherd's Buried Child, in a theatre with broken heat, as in blasting way too much hot air down my already constricted lungs. I was asphyxiating just at the climax of the play, when the horror's of the family's secrets of lies and incest are revealed, just as poor Dodge dies in the corner and Vince succumbs to the family madness. All I could think was, I'm going to die, right here, right now too. I'm suffocating on my own snot and the metaphor of the American family.

I've made some new friends though. Cindy. Craig. Friends from Point Park. Kat's friends are wonderful and warm and welcoming, and I look forward to my upcoming visitors from Detroit -- you know who you are! I had a ton of fun yesterday going through my photo albums and scanning old pictures into facebook, though this too was a solitary act of arbitrary nothingness. Because I do spend a lot of time shut in to my space, more than ever before, bumbling, procrastinating, shuffling around like an old lady. I don't know if it's simply because I've been so sick all the time or because I'm working through some serious emotional trauma still lingering from the past few years of never-ending bullshit in my personal and professional life. So here I am, I moved, I'm living alone and loving it. Am I productive? Not really. Am I working on many things? All at once. Am I happy. Most certainly. The point is not happiness though, which is generally fleeting and ephemeral, I need to start a project and finish it - I need permanence, security, closure on so many things. Specifically, I need to annotate these goddamned sources for my Oral Exam and Prospectus the way I used to write a lit review for every other stupid paper I wrote for college. I need to finish painting my apartment, especially the very scary and uninviting front door. I need to get my office truly unpacked and prepped as my writing and discovery lab. All this and more...

I do find that my ever-evolving relationship with CPW to be one of the most rewarding facets of my life, something so unpredictable, so unplanned, so easy and wonderful and precious. The emotional landscape between us covers much terrain, from blue skies and sunsets over water to rainy days and muddy fields to Snowmaggedan, literally! I'm convinced that I am better person with him in my life. He's my best friend, my "manpanion," as Kat likes to say. I think we'll get married one day.

But right now, I need to fuel up on fluids, eat a healthy breakfast, stay strong and focused, try to get some work done despite my clogged ears making my head feel like it's being squeezed in a vice. I lost out on some good babysitting money this weekend because of being sick, I missed two great rock shows with Craig as well. But I did have a helpful and thoughtful caretaker and indulged in the first 4 episodes of Dollhouse and watched I Love You, Man. It was fun watching Rudd with Rudd's doppelganger.

So today, I reflect and will take notes on what I want to accomplish in the next few months while I am still woefully underemployed and have the time to be successful and hammer on my PhD requirements. When I go full-time in the fall, I may not be so fortunate to have all these sick days and days of leisure. I must be productive, it's why I moved here, first and foremost -- so I need to take these old images of myself, composite them into a big ball called NOW, plant it firmly in the ground and take the fuck off! Ok, GO KT!