3.30.09
It snowed on Friday. I watched last week as the clouds began to slowly swallow up the mountains. First the tops disappeared and somehow as the foggy clouds enveloped the higher peaks, the outlines of the lower ones became more crisp and defined. Then the clouds got thicker and lower until it looked like Santa Fe was nestled in the middle of flat, white sheets of paper rather than mountains. Driving to work the normally expansive vista of desert and mountains was replaced by what looked like the background of a small child’s drawing - plain, empty, negative space, only white. I had the impression that if I drove far enough, I would simply drive off of the earth or hit a paper wall. I suppose that driving 65mph (yes, I do drive the speed limit, especially since my car is a little under the weather) I would rip right through a piece of paper. I wonder what would be on the other side . . .
It was not until I arrived at work as on time as I could be seeing that it took me at least twice as long to drive through the unplowed, snow-filled roads that I even thought to think that perhaps I didn’t need to be there. I had actually been woken up that morning by a text message from my sister saying that if I was not going to work, we should hang out. At that point I had no clue about the snow and in my half-asleep confusion I thought, “well of COURSE I’m going to work! That’s what I do! I can’t just not go because I decide that I’m not going . . .” Well, as it turns out, I didn’t need to go to work until 10AM because we had a two hour delay. I discovered this by calling a coworker as I sat in my car, looking at the deserted Head Start building, unable to check my work phone because it was sitting at home in the pocket of a sweatshirt. My coworker was able to confirm that I needn’t be there for another hour or so, but there was no point in trying to make it back to Santa Fe.
I was never given a key to the front gate, but as luck would have it I had someone else’s with me. I felt triumphant at such good fortune until I discovered that the lock was frozen shut, which left me to plunge through shin-deep snow around the side through the gate that is never locked. Snow filled my dansko clogs and soaked into the legs of my corduroy pants. I got inside, kicked off my shoes, and made myself at home. It was nice to be the only one in the building and the snow outside left me feeling warm, cozy and peaceful. All in all, accidentally showing up on time worked to my advantage because I had a nice, relaxed but productive morning and got to leave early.
The weekend remained chilly and the snow stuck on the ground for a few days. While it looked pretty that first morning, I am so over snow.
Saturday night Adi and I developed a plan. We have both put on a few winter pounds and gotten into some less-than-desirable habits over the past few months. In an attempt to reverse all of that, we have decided to start joint grocery shopping on a fairly regular basis so that we will eat out less and eat healthier food. Sunday we went to a produce market and for $29 purchased a very, very large amount of vegetables. We also hit Trader Joe’s for protein and a few other things. Arriving home we put the food away carefully - Adi helping me by dividing my dried mango into six containers so that I won’t accidentally eat it all in one sitting. Then I baked banana bread and we played cards.
Since Sunday we (and really by “we,” I do mean Adi) have made two large, delicious salads that served as a few dinners and lunch. Last night Adi made chicken soup from scratch for dinner that was even more delicious today for lunch. I’ve been eating my mango as a snack at work and overall it’s going really well. Adi loves to cook/prepare food and is having a good time making stuff for us to share. It feels good to be eating things that are good for my body and to be sharing food and clean up.
The other part of the new plan, which is really just my own new plan, is that I have re-introduced swimming to my daily routine because I’ve just been so inconsistent with exercise recently. But get this, not only am I swimming daily . . . I’m waking up at 5:30AM so that I can get to the pool by 6AM so that I can swim for an hour BEFORE going to work! I’ve been going to bed by 11PM every day this week and while I am tired and it is certainly a routine to which I will need to adjust, it feels good. The hard parts are getting out of bed and then once I’m at the pool actually getting into the pool. Once I’m in, it’s rather nice. I’m usually not entirely awake, which helps and by the end I am rather energized. I hop in and do one lap to warm up, one lap with the kick board, twenty laps, three laps kicking, five laps, two laps kicking, five laps, one kicking, one last victory lap and I’m done. When the pool is set up for short course (swimming the width, which is 25m), it takes a little under an hour and I’ll do some pull-ups towards the end.
What I am starting to all in love with about this routine is getting home from work and not thinking “Ok, I need to make sure I get an hour in at the gym, so that means that right now I can do this, then I have to do that, but what if I want to do that, man oh man I’m tired . . .” I also enjoy that I leave in the dark and when I get out of the pool the sun is just rising. I like that by the time I get to work my body is awake. I like watching the sky outside of Chavez, where I swim, in the early morning and feeling the texture of morning air.
Tomorrow I have to go to Albuquerque for a training for work. I am going to try to get to the pool to do at least half of my workout, but I have to have my car at the shop and be ready to leave from there at 8AM. We’ll see. Now I need to go because I am running late!
3.21.09
I am not pregnant! Not that I thought that I was or anything. Unless I had done something really bad, it would be rather miraculous for me to be pregnant seeing as I am currently dating someone who does not have boy parts. And I didn’t do anything bad. I’m just trying to keep things in perspective because I had another morning that felt like the universe shitting on me and since getting here it seems that I do is wipe off the universal shit that keeps falling from the sky. As of late I’ve been wondering what role I play in what seems like an unending streak of bad luck. I see myself over and over again acting as though I am the victim of cruel fate, causing me to first get angry and then to shut down. I recognized that I have allowed the negative to take up so much space in my mind that I cannot appreciate the positive but for fleeting moments. I came to that understanding and made a conscious choice to shift my focus and my perspective. And today, keeping life in perspective means thinking about how much deeper trouble I’d be in if somehow I were pregnant.
After weeks of putting it off, I took my car to Alex Safety Lane today to find out what the clunking, rattling, shimmying and shaking going on in the front end of my car is all about. Pep Boys said the sway bar is broken and then never called me back after they said they’d find the part. It was suggested to me to go elsewhere. So I dragged myself out of bed, took a shower, got all of my work stuff together, got directions and headed out. The people at Alex Safety Lane were very friendly as I explained what was going on. I gave them my keys and they offered me a ride if I needed one since it would be a few hours before I could get my car back. It’s the first day of spring and Santa Fe is sunny and warm today, so I declined and headed out for a walk.
After about forty minutes of walking and exploring a different area of Santa Fe that I’d never really explore before, I headed to Whole Foods for some coffee. I’ve been feeling under the weather this week - sore throat, head ache, tightness in my chest - and whether I’m sick or have some sort of allergies, I was totally out of it by the time I got to Whole Foods. For at least ten or fifteen minutes I wandered around trying to decide what to get for breakfast. I looked at one juice, compared it to another, wandered to a different section, went back to the first juice and wandered around some more. I finally got a juice that supposedly has like five hundred million times the vitamin C of any other anything on the planet - I wanted something cold and it seemed that vitamin C might be helpful with whatever it is that is ailing me. I bought it, sat down, finished it in less than a minute and decided to go look for some food either for breakfast or to buy for lunch later.
Around and around I went again. I settled on coffee to give me more time to decide what food I wanted. I got my cup, grabbed a copy of the latest Santa Fe Reporter and tried to slowly sip my coffee while reading the paper cover to cover. Still no word about my car, so I headed back to the isles and wandered some more. I found a can of soup that looked good and cheap. As I headed to the check out, I got distracted in the whole body section and ended up sitting on the floor next to the flower essences, reading a very large book that listed all sorts of ailments and what flower essences to take to relieve them. Adi and I just had a discussion about flower essences recently, so it seemed quite pertinent and was actually quite interesting. A woman working in the whole body section came over and offered me a little cushion thing to sit on. Then my phone rang.
The estimate they gave me on the phone was about $600. They say when it rains it pours. I live in the desert. It doesn’t matter. All I could think as I walked from Whole Foods back to pick up my car was “I just spent basically an entire pay check on a new laptop because mine got stolen. Today is pay day and there goes that pay check. When does it end? When can my pay check just pay for my living expenses and then go into my savings? What else could possibly come my way?” I wavered between angry, indignant, sad, resigned and eventually tried for some sense of calm, for some type of rationality. At the garage they printed a cost summary sheet with a balance of $507, as I paid a $100 deposit on the spot. When I sat down at my desk when I finally got to work, I realized that the parts were not listed on the sheet, so I called and discovered that in fact the total will be $715, so at this point I owe $615.
So here I am. I talked to my dad about it who said, “are you looking for help?” I thought about it for a second and said no. I don’t want help. Well, actually I don’t need help. I have a full time job and do have some money in the bank. These repairs will not break me. They are much less than it would cost to get a new car and in order for me to get to work and to live, as much as I absolutely hate it, I currently depend on my Daewoo. I think I just needed to complain about how much it sucks to be an adult. I just needed to be reminded that this is not the universe trying to make my life miserable, it’s just how things go. And it’s ok for me to feel upset and angry and frustrated about it. But it’s not just me. A little later on I talked to my brother. He talked a lot about the mechanics of it all. He mentioned how much money he used to spend on repairs for his Land Rover. A little later later on I talked to my sister-in-law. She offered empathy in a way that was comforting and called me yet again back to the idea that this type of thing happens to everyone. It just does.
And I am not pregnant. I just have me to pay for. I’d like to be able to be saving more money than I currently am, but I have a home, I have a job, I have food, and I have people who I care about and who care about me. Once I get my car fixed, it’ll feel like a new car. When I got in it at the garage to drive out to work, I took a deep breath, petted the steering wheel and told the Daewoo how I love her and understand that she’s getting old and has been good to me. It’s important to take care of the people and also the things that we love, value, and need and sometimes taking care means spending money. Et voila.
2.25.09
A Wet Desert
I moved to the desert six months ago. The high desert with dirt, scruffy looking shrub-trees, thin air, and more shades of brown than I ever knew existed. It’s not the picture of a desert that I first developed as a child. The looming mountains that surround Santa Fe prevent an unending expanse of land and sky. There is no need for mirages or oases. Sand dunes do not belong to this landscape. But it is dry. In the summer it does get hot. The sky seems endless, even with the neighboring mountains. The altitude makes breathing difficult at first and I arrived with the need to adjust in many different ways.
I arrived during the rainy season. One of the first things I came to appreciate about the area was my ability to watch storms in the distance from where I stood dry and warmed by the sun. I loved to see the clouds that looked like they were mimicking the mountains in the way they stood tall, thick, proud with vertical streams of water connecting the sky to the earth. When the storm got closer, I could feel the air thicken and the sky would darken. Underneath the storm, I felt the intensity with which the clouds shed their excess moisture and allowed the dry desert earth to soak it up. During one such storm, I learned first hand about the amount of water the sky could dump upon as I drove home through flooded streets, wondering if my car was going to float away and how so much rain had made such a sudden appearance. At home we ran around closing windows to keep our insides dry and protected. Depending on the wind and the severity of the storm, I would sit on the couch on our front porch. It was more practical to watch storms in the distance from that vantage point, as there was no danger of getting sprayed with cold water.
My own first storm came with the same fury and intensity of a Santa Fe summer rain storm. Not long after my arrival I returned home from the gym one afternoon. I got home to see Bucket’s car. Bucket was good friends with the Rosie, only housemate I did not know upon moving - I moved in with my sister, her then boyfriend and Rosie. While I try with all my might to be open to meeting new people and making friends, with only two weeks between my life in Paris and the desert, my intentions seemed to matter not and I had no desire to be around any of the new people I met, particularly not Bucket. I walked into the house and promptly realized that I needed to leave. I took my iPod and my cell phone and went for a walk.
Unable to understand the emotions welling up inside of me and unsure of what to do with them, I called a dear old friend in hopes of connecting with someone who knew and understood me. I, of course, chose to call the friend who, like me, is notorious for not answering. As I listened to the outgoing message on her voice mail, I lost it. Crying for the first time since leaving Paris, perhaps for the first time since the previous September, almost one entire year, I left a message in which all of the fears that I felt unjustified in feeling came pouring out - I had made a huge mistake in leaving Paris, I was trapped by my decision to live with my sister, I would never make friends and was bound to a circle of people who I found to be annoying and pretentious, I would never find a job and all of my savings would go to waste. Tears streaming down my face and gasping for breath, I could not go back to the house that I had agreed to call home for the next year. With nowhere really to go, I kept slowly walking through the neighborhood.
Much to my relief, barely a few minutes passed before my phone vibrated and I looked to see Tucker’s name pop up. I answered and continued my outpouring of fears, anxiety and sadness. When I reached the elementary school about three blocks from my house, I sat down by the parking lot to continue. “BUCKET!” I exclaimed, “who the HELL is named Bucket!? What a stupid fucking name! Can you imagine, god, her stupid name says it all. She is a bucket. She barely even acknowledges my presence and is so whiney and self-involved. She talks like she’s sooo deep. Her name is BUCKET for fuck’s sake!” Of course it wasn’t really about Bucket at all. Whether or not Bucket had come into my life was really quite inconsequential, but it was easy to use her as a way to vent my frustration.
Knowing me well, Tucker laughed at my tirade and also took seriously the fact that I was in tears. Since she first met me when we were both 17 years old, crying had been a once a year occasion and it took a lot for tears to come. I often felt desert-like when it came to emotional expression. I tend first towards anger and use that energy to plow through whatever might be upsetting to me. Sadness and tears were generally a sign of a level of honesty that felt uncomfortable and abandonment to the idea that I just might not be able to change whatever had caused the tears. And then there were those times when I wanted nothing more than to cry and no matter how hard I squinted, dry-sobbed and worked to produce that salty liquid, I could at best squeeze out one single tear that would dissipate before even reaching my chin. It was as though I cried out all of the tears my body could produce after my boyfriend broke up with me a month into my first year at college.
Tears were not the only piece of me that dried up during that time of my life. My menstrual cycle, which had never been regular to begin with, all but disappeared. Months would pass and there would be no period. I knew I was not pregnant and at first I suspected the irregularity came from weight loss that had taken place over the two previous years plus the stress of transitioning to college. My mom insisted I see a doctor, but there was never really anything conclusive that they could tell me. I was prescribed hormones to take every time three months passed with no period, but the hormones made me feel like a crazy person and it was much more convenient to just not have a period, so more often than not I just let it go. No period was particularly useful when I went abroad for my junior year of college and when I returned to Paris the year after I earned my Masters degree.
It seems curious then that moving to a desert would bring the liquids back to my life. The reappearance of tears came first and matched the rainy season. The rainy season passed and my tears remained. I also finally got another prescription for hormones to bring my period back after a year of dryness. The hormones exacerbated the crying and life became a series of storms with no end in sight. While I had made a few friends, established a few routines, met and started a relationship with my girlfriend Adi and gotten a job, I remained dissatisfied and overwhelmed by the feeling that there was nothing to look forward to. I fought endlessly with myself about looking back too much, about romanticizing about how things could, should, would be different if. I fought with myself about feeling bad and got annoyed with my inability to see the good for what it was and my life for what it was - complicated.
The rehydration of my life is continuing to this day. I cry at least once a week. I cannot even count how many times in these past months I have sobbed with abandon, laid on my bed shaking, rocking myself, trying to catch my breath and more importantly trying to catch my life. I got my period without the assistance of hormones once and my tender, swollen breasts tell me that I should soon be having another all on my own. While I’ve tried to maintain a full time job and my daily trips to the gym, a combination of stress/hopeless/boredom eating and exhaustion have caused my body to fill out, softening what was once tight and hard, rounding out my stomach, hips, butt and bust. While I miss the controlled version of my body, smaller chest and ass, tighter stomach, I feel womanly and fertile.
There is a lot of growth in me these days. It is the painful stage though, the stage that is watered by my tears and derived from my struggles. I am learning to be more honest with myself about what is going on. I am trying to be more patient with my emotions and to allow them to happen so that they can pass quickly and with more ease. I am working on allowing myself to feel what I feel without turning myself into a victim. I am not happy, but I am figuring out how I can become happy again, how I can become the version of me that I miss. I am also figuring out how I can be happy and unhappy, how I can have tears and still smile, how I can be a softer, rounder me and still feel sexy, how I focus on what is worthwhile in the present without settling or giving up hope for the future. I am trying to love today and not to worry about how much it might hurt tomorrow if I have to decide that I cannot stay here for the love of someone else. I am aware that I need to make decisions based on my needs and my ability to be and to find happiness and I am learning that the road to that happiness, to fulfilling those needs might cause me more pain along the way.
I moved to the desert after a lush year of fun, adventure, excitement, financial stability and sheer joy in Paris. Paris brought me luck and allowed me to push myself in new ways that magically felt easy and good. I learned about my capacity to be social, to be independent, to be adventurous and to seize the day. Valid lessons they were and the process of learning them brought me continual joy and a sense of true, solid contentment. I left feeling confident that I could take all of that with me and that life would just continue to work out with the same luck, ease and magic that I had found in Paris. I also suspect that my body left Paris but my heart and spirit were unwilling to keep up with my body and are still stuck across the Atlantic. It has taken a lot of breaking down for me to even be able to recognize just how hard it has been to move to a place that seems so dry and desolate. And as I begin to wade through the tears this year has brought so far, I am finally able to start to see that the experience here has as much to offer as my experiences last year in Paris; I am finally able to start to see that the struggle is as important a piece of my life as the ease of Paris was last year. It is a different type of learning, a different type of experience. It is a different piece of my life and it adds a new layer to my story, it brings a new level of depth to my emotions and gives me access to parts of me that have been consciously or unconsciously on lock-down for quite some time now. Like the dry desert earth soaked up and was nourished by the water dropped by mountainous clouds when I first arrived, I is soaking up the tears and using what they reveal as they wash over me to nourish myself in a way that is unfamiliar and not always the most comfortable for me.
