A Room of One's Own

Stream nothin', it's more like a river.

I have way too many thoughts running though my head. There is just a lot there. I have been laying here in bed writing for about an hour . Nothing of clarity in any way shape or form. Random and completely nonsensical paragraphs. I just don't think that logical thoughts are going to be occurring for me tonight. But again, I've hit the point where if they don't come out somehow, I'll be laying here aware and blinking for hours. Thus the random brain dumps occurs.

 

I am sadly disappointed with the new Alanis Morissette album. I'm also dubbing it the Ryan Reynolds Album. Some of the lyrics are beautiful and cathartic but it's not the perfection of Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. Such a bummer. I still love her though.

 

I really fucked up the Year of No. I mean, bad. The verdict it still out as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Perhaps it just is. I have very mixed feelings about it. I'm sure it will all make sense in 7 years or so.

 

I want another tattoo. I can't decide what I want or where I want to put it.

 

I'm sterile. It can't be undone at this point. I am not having another kid. I got the emotional part of that out of the way early this morning. But still, it went beyond ripping a Band-Aid off and pouring salt in a wound. My wound has healed. This cut it open just a little bit. But just a little. Not like Christmas garland half hung on a stair case and a glass of red wine thrown across a room. Not like that. By tomorrow, there won't even be a need for a Band-Aid.

 

I want to redo my whole house. Paint the cabinets, wallpaper, curtains, pillows, closets, tile backsplashes, sinks, countertops. I am frustrated by the fact that I don't have the money to do it. But, I'll find a way. There's always a way. I am willing to cut just about anything out of my budget at this point to decorate my sanctuary.

 

I will never understand male ego. It's a weird dark place that seems to make no sense at all. I am certain men would say the same thing about women. The difference is that we wear our freakishness like an albatross around our necks. They try really hard to hide theirs.

 

I almost went to visit my grandmother yesterday. There is a lot I have to say to her. I didn't go. I think I realized that it would be like talking to a brick wall. She's never listened to a damn word anyone has every said to her in her whole life. Why should this be any different? At the same time, she's my blood. She is my daughter's Grandma Gigi. How do I explain it to her that Gigi lived two miles away and we never saw her? The whole thing makes me tired.

 

I'm still feeling an overwhelming need to feed people. I need to have a party. My lime tree is sagging from the weight of the fruit and will continue to taunt me until I have a bunch of people to my house and feed them enchiladas and guacamole and get them drunk on homemade margaritas.

My weekend in the cave

On Monday, I filled my cart on Amazon.com with a half a dozen books. Then I realized that I am way too impatient to wait for Amazon to deliver them. The irony is that there is no way I would be able to read six books during the delivery time for it to really matter. But yesterday I went to Barnes and Noble at lunch and filled my arms with a half dozen books. The reality that I have hundreds of books at home hit me shortly after and I put all but one back.

This weekend I am holing myself up and plowing through Sandra Cisneros' Carmelo. My love of Sandra Cisneros runs long and deep. I taught House on Mango Street my first year teaching. They actually loved it. It's hard not to love her. She is without a doubt one of the most amazing women I've never met. More so than a fiction writer, she's a poet. I keep Loose Woman, a book of her poetry, on my bedside table and I must pick that book up and read parts on a near weekly basis. I get completely lost in it.

That's my kind of book. If I can't get completely drunk and in love with the words on the page, I am just not interested. It's a complete given with certain writers and oddly, or maybe not, most come from Central or South America. I'm not sure exactly what makes them write with so much passion but I can only assume part of it must be the culture. They just feel differently. All the books I loaded up on were Hispanic authors, except one. I now have quite the reading list to get through.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I've never read One Hundred Years of Solitude. I've never finished Love in the Time of Cholera or Chronicle of a Death Foretold. All of this seems a shame. The man is beautiful. Like a Columbian Pablo Neruda and I could go on and on about my worship of Pablo Neruda.

Isabelle Allende. I had friends that taught House of Spirits. I missed that boat because I had to spend a considerable about of time teaching dead white guys. Aphrodite. A book of senses. A book of food and sex. Ummmm, yeah.

Laura Esquivel. She wrote Like Water for Chocolate, which must be one of the sexiest books and, subsequently, movies ever made. And it's all about food. I'm seeing a pattern. How can you not love a writer who has a character burn down an outdoor shower after a meal her sister makes turns her skin so hot everything around her bursts into flames? Law of Lovewas her second book and has been on my bookshelf for ten years. In the book the characters listen to Puccini arias. She includes a CD with the arias. There are also intermissions in the book for dancing. If this woman doesn't get me, I don't know who does.

The anomaly was Toni Morrison. I must have damn near every one of her books. Go ahead, ask me how many I've actually read. Unread books are like an illness running rampant in this house. The one I have read, Beloved, I loaned to my former mother in law who never returned it, which is odd because she didn't like it. Why was I not surprised? The painful part is that copy had all of my notes in it from when I had read it for a now totally abandoned Master's program. I'm neurotic in needing to have it in my house.

I have some work cut out for me and I feel like I'll be spending a lot of time holed up. I can't help it. Sometimes I feel a little lost and the only thing that can bring me back is books. It's what compels me to spend a ridiculous amount of time going through boxes and boxes of books that nearly always ends up with me sitting on the floor of my garage at 11:300 at night reading T.S. Eliot. It reminds me I'm alive and of who I am. Right now, I feel like being drunk and in love with words.

An upswing

My relationship with my house is a roller coaster. I paid too much for it. I bought it at I time I shouldn't have and for the wrong reasons. The backyard has been a disaster of irrigation repairs. I hate every major appliance in it with very specific disdain for my stove. But we've had our good days. In January, I filled this house with more love and laughter that I ever thought possible. That weekend it became a home and will be one of my fondest memories here and always. My child lives here and her laughter fills the halls, even when she's not here.

Today I found contentment and calm here. I got up early and cleaned the whole house and made a vat of marinara sauce. I lounged on my couch and read a backlog of Food & Wine about six months deep. The house was just quiet. I didn't even hold my usual Sunday morning church. After a long nap, I putzed around my house listening to Joni Mitchell and Jeff Buckley and not wanting to do much of anything else.

I settled into the couch, started reading a book on Toltec wisdom, which is amazing and exhausting all at the same time. Lit about 392 candles and I am on about hour three of Chopin. I've gone through all of the Nocturnes. I've prepped some food for tomorrow's dinner. I've not talked to a soul.

About an hour and a half ago it occurred to me that it just felt good.I saw, in a rare moment, how beautiful my house is. The candles are a substitute for the winter fireplace I've missed. The green wall of the kitchen is perfect, even as flawed as it is. I have pictures all over the house and books are in every single room, as many as I can logically put there. My bedroom has become like a sanctuary and a much happier place since I hung the pictures of downtown Savannah. Yes, the carpet needs replacing and the countertops stain way too easily and the master bath shower is way too small. But, it's mine and it's beautiful.

I could spend a lot more time like this. No TV, no voices, no expectations, no to-do list. I have a long way to finding peace here, but it's coming.

More absolute embarrassment for me

I am a social networking site whore. It's true. It started out small and now it has completely snowballed into a near addiction level. It's not my fault. I have been completely suckered by peer pressure. One is a very nice, very professional networking site called LinkedIn. You post your resume, can make introductions, look for jobs, recommend people. There is nothing frilly about it. You're there for work.

I had gotten a connection request for LinkedIn. While on the site I see this little thing where I can import my contacts from my email account and see who is on LinkedIn and who isn't and I can either invite them to connect or invite them to join the site.

I happily go about my skippy little way clicking the names of people that I see are on LinkedIn that I might was to add as a connection. After unclicking the undesirables (don't look at me like that. Most of them are undesirable because THEY hate ME) I go over and hit "send request." Excellent. Oh, not so much.

I get the confirmation notice at the top of the page. It says, "Thank you! We've sent your 374 invitations!" Do what?!?!? You huh?!?! 374?!?! Oh no. No. No. What did I do? What the hell did I just do? My heart immediately starts racing. I am in a complete panic mainly because I have no earthly idea what I did or how I did it. None.

I'm too afraid of hitting the back button to see what I did for fear that I might do it again. The only thing worse than sending an accidental piece of communication to someone is sending it twice. My God. So I'm sitting at my desk at work cursing under my breath, "Shit shit shit shit fucking shit." I had unclicked the undesirables who were part of LinkedIn but I missed the tab that sends invite to JOIN if they're not a member already. I send invites to everyone in my email contacts that I had ever sent an email to in the entire life of my email. Every single god damn one. 374 people.

Oh. My. God. Now I am really panicking as there are a good number of people I have no interest in connecting with at all. None. Those are the people I hate. There are the people that I emailed once for one reason and that was it. I had emailed 150 Phoenix area Realtors last year to push the Junior League cookbook. They have no idea who I am. At all. None. And vice versa. Yeah, they all got invitations.

So now I'm going through and trying to do some damage control. If some of these folks have no idea who I am, I want it to stay that way. I go into Operation Make It Look Like Damn Virus Did It. I find out that, though there is no way I can get the email out of their email boxes, I can cancel the invite so they CAN'T be connected with me. Spiffy. I also hide my profile so they can't see who  the hell the schmuck who sent them this lovely item is. Have I mentioned what a huge jackass I feel like? And that I'm still cursing under my breath?

Canceling the invite is a manual process in which I now have to go through the list of 374 people and click on each invite and cancel it. Then the humiliation really sets in. Besides the 150 Realtors I don't know from Adam's house cat, I manage to send this to my ex-husband, the guy who bought my patio table on Craigslist, an author who basically lives off the land in the Mohave Desert, at least two ex-boyfriends, one of which I would rather stick a knitting needle in my eye and twist it slowly than be connected to in any way, ladies from the Junior League that truly hate my guts, a few council members from a city I no longer live in, a girl who sold me fraudulent concert tickets, the county sheriff...

It is taking me forever. I am honestly contemplating having my assistant log in and help me. She already knows what happened because of the vast amount of obscenities emanating from my office. She is laughing at me. Bad. She has no fear of me doing her midyear review very soon and is letting it rip. She shouts at me, "How do you manage to do these things? Repeatedly?" I have no idea. I am just that stupid.

While I'm doing this, people are accepting the invitations! Great. Now I'm connected to people on a professional networking site that I had no intention of ever speaking to again. Brilliant. Now I'm trying to figure out how I could "unconnect" with them with making it seem obvious. Can I just delete them and go about my merry way? I'm not sure. I'm sure it would send an email to them that says, "We're sorry. Vanessa actually thinks you are a total asswipe and really wants nothing to do with you. Regrets!" I'm sure at this point that is the standard message. The only option I have is to hide under my desk until this whole thing blows over and it's safe to go into public. Going into public, however, just opens me up to a whole world of face to face humiliation. I'm screwed.