So I’m sitting in my office, contemplating a variety of tasks all up to me to plan, a close-approaching trip to the Finger Lakes and the general path of the last few years of my life.  Grooveshark has helpfully provided a soundtrack that I’ve always found encouraging: .

I used to write incessantly.  I wrote in school, I wrote for fun, I filed news stories and opinion columns and tome-length emails to friends.  I journaled without end.  First bowing to an obsession with recording every moment of my life.  Then in an effort to detail every inch (and emotional iota) of a beautiful place.  To wade through the morass of graduation and finding work in a city I thought I’d grown up in but didn’t really know.  And then in frenzy, to record the millions of tiny moments I knew would evaporate from my mind into the void of grief.  That eventually turned into a series of daily declarations.  I can be happy. I will enjoy life.

Without realizing it, my writing began to bear witness to the turnaround I had willed.  And with happiness and the business of actually living my life, I had less time to record it.  It seemed somehow indulgent to record pages of bliss rather than pages of agony. The journaling quit. The long emails (for the most part) became bullet points, or text messages or Gchat windows.

But, let’s be honest.  I miss the writing.  Why else would I have just signed onto a MJ program?  So I am committed to writing again.  I expect to have some things to chronicle, among them the aforementioned MJ program, an old friend’s wedding, and the evolution of a fundraising event to support a memorial fund.  Hold me to it.

So, in plain English, I’ve quit my job.  And will be back to the corporate communications grindstone May 5, far away from the wretched conditions here.  Which hardly warrant re-hashing more than to say they have been painful.

And in this particular slice of time, I am quite happy.

I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, employers are instituted among men and women, deriving their just powers from the consent of the employed, — That whenever any Employer becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new employment laying its foundation on such principles and organizing powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that employment circumstances long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such employer, and to provide new Guards for the future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of this Woman; and such is now the necessity which constrains her to alter her former Employment. The history of the directors of The *** is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over this Woman. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

For luring me to your institution with false promises of Web 2.0 development and redesign opportunities.
For failing to conduct a 90-day review.
For expecting me to edit dense and difficult material in an open-air cubicle adjacent to a printing room.
For watching my hours hawkishly despite my never working less than 40 hours each week.
For compelling my attendance at monthly company-wide “Town Hall Meetings.”
For loudly and obnoxiously supporting Hillary Clinton.
For gossiping so maliciously about other colleagues it made me — the queen of non-discretion — uncomfortable.
For making me doubt my abilities as an editor.
For excluding me from your office coterie.
For demoting me without cause or warning.
For holding an out-of-touch retiree as the gold standard of editing and making it clear I would never fill her shoes.
For an abject disregard for my personal or professional development.

In every stage of these Oppressions I have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: My repeated Petitions have been answered only be repeated injury. A Director, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the employer of a free people.

Nor have I been wanting in attentions to my colleagues. I have warned them from time to time of attempts by their employer to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. I have reminded them of the circumstances of our at-will employment here. I have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and I have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to teh voice of justice and consanguinity. I must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as I hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

I, therefore, Writer and Contributing Editor of The *** Journal, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of my intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of my sanity and self respect, solemnly publish and declare that this Woman is, and of Right out to be Free and Independent, that she is Absolved from all Allegiance to the ***, and that all political and employment connection between me and The *** is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a Free and Independent Woman, I have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, secure other Employment ,and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent Women may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, I pledge to myself to always uphold my Life, my Fortune, and my sacred Honor.

Because this morning I woke up singing oldies and drinking songs and missed Ireland, but would rather be here.

Calling Card

Lisa Shields

Too wedded to winter,
not expecting the warm
one breath of wind
from your quarter,
and I could hear
the first solid crack,
knew the river would flow
not today,
not tomorrow,
but ah—soon.

Just a day or two
from pussywillow down,
crocus crouched
with johnny jump up impatience,
I did not beckon for Spring,
did not reckon she would come
despite the need for her,
certain she would dally in Paris,
romp in Rome,
anything but arrive
sans fanfare and flounce,
no thought to her missing baggage.

I had no welcome,
no fancy tea laid on,
so tired inside
that simply raising my arms
seemed too huge a thing.
But Madame Equinox
simply arrived,
put on the kettle,
and blew her breath
through my house,
making herself at home
as if she knew
how much I wished
for an end to cold bitter,
dusting the last leaves
of a forgotten fall
with pollen confetti,
to leave her card,
the sort of RSVP
I can never ignore.

It’s a good forumla for emotional victory when there is a finite end date in sight.

Since the darker days in 2005, it has nagged at me that never once will there emerge a victory date in this morass.  I envision (and have been assured by the “experts”) a more likely date when I will look back and realize that some cushion of peace descended while I was sleeping, or working, or out on an abysmal Internet date.  This is no less a victory, but one less theatrical than I might like.  I want the trumpets and the shafts of sunlight and the blissful march down Market Street.

The question then becomes whether it is more satisfying to screw up your guts and declare one momentus victory without looking back, or to push on and win a hundred little battles without realizing it.  And when you don’t really have a choice, how to find the same satisfaction in your only remaining option.

So, fuck you February 6th.  In particular, the 2005 vintage, but perhaps ad infinitum.  Making it past that day is victory enough, and one I can recognize on impact.  And briefly considering the intervening battles fought and won that I’ve not noticed immediately, I’m saying the war is won (at least nearly) anyway.

It’s not a mechanism that lends itself well to the sixth of February.  There is no magical perfect-tense date on which to perch and cast a wary eye back.  In fact, there isn’t even really a dread moment, either.  Every moment is the one I fear, and the sum of all the moments I spent in fear of so long before that.

Yet I feel more compelled to mark February 6 than nearly any other day on the calendar.  I feel more duty than I do on family and friends’ birthdays (ironic, that), or any state or religious holiday.  The problem is that I feel compelled, but without any specific sense of what I’m supposed to do.  Like the last three years of my life, I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m going to do.

I wish I could tell a nice story here.  About the time he kicked the Penn State magnet under some unsuspecting fan’s tire.  About the night he ran back down the street to dip me for a Hollywood kiss in front of the Mezzanine girls.  But I don’t have the emotional capital to spend.  I’m torn between showing how I feel, tangibly marking the terrible day, and  letting it steamroll me.

I wonder if I should write.  About me?  About him?  About the kinds of philosophies you create when your entire world winds up in the “should have” column?  I think—just once a year—about meditating in some empty church.  I contemplate a long walk.  Demon voices suggest synthetic anesthetization.

I don’t know how to plan for this.  You’d think after the two before, I’d be better at the anticipation.

I suppose none of this matters in any sense existing outside my head.  We loved each other.  More than I thought I ever would love or be loved, and despite circumstances far too unfair and advanced for our youth.  He was my proof of goodness, and the one thing I come back to when I believe the world is as bad a place as my cynical hyperbole makes it out to be.  He was a monument to patience and faith, and somehow, he chose me.  When I froze behind fearful walls, he made me believe someone could care enough to get in.  When I was afraid my frustrated, crazy tears would banish him for good, he told me he was relieved to know I wasn’t all hero and bravado.  When he was scared, I was his courage.  When he was unsure, I was his boundless, secretly sourced faith.  I was his bedside nurse, even when he was taking care of me.  I held his hand, and I told him we were lucky that we didn’t need any declarations; we already knew everything there was between us.  I held his hand, and he died, and it was the moment my heart disintegrated.

Tomorrow is the only day of my life where I don’t even attempt to exercise control.  I wait for the tide to roll in and disappear with me.  The reality is that the tide is there every day, and every day I decide whether or not to give in to the undertow.  But on February 6, I wade in without resistance.  And this year, more than before, I’ve been holding my breath for months. Waiting for the moment it’s ok to release, and gasp.

End of April
Phillis Levin

Under a cherry tree
I found a robin’s egg,
broken, but not shattered.

I had been thinking of you,
and was kneeling in the grass
among fallen blossoms

when I saw it: a blue scrap,
a delicate toy, as light
as confetti

It didn’t seem real,
but nature will do such things
from time to time.

I looked inside:
it was glistening, hollow,
a perfect shell

except for the missing crown,
which made it possible
to look inside.

What had been there
is gone now
and lives in my heart

where, periodically,
it opens up its wings,
tearing me apart.

I mean, it can buy really good hummus and some cucumber, tomato, and pita. It can buy a shirt on sale at the Gap outlet on Chestnut. It can buy a Belgian beer with change to tip. It can buy the Juno soundtrack on iTunes. But Sunday night, I used my nine clams to cry.

Atonement has been reviewed, reviled, and revered all over the world, and I have no interest in wasting even free, nonmaterial Internet space reviewing it myself. The only pertinent information here is that it’s a very sad movie, and its sadness is couched in an array of beautiful trappings.

I wondered, while images of war mixed with chic, verdant satins, about the difference between a sad event and a tragic one. And why the tragic one always benefits from beauty. Scenes at Dunkirk were graphic, and shots of obliterated soldiers at the hospital were shocking and gory, but the sepia tones and the swelling orchestra cast them in a glow of certain beauty. Somehow, war and death, and separation and broken romance were christened in beauty. People sniffled demurely.

What interests me most is the evolution of an event from raw emotion to the state we saw in Atonement: detached, quiet tragedy. I suspect it’s more than stiff-upper-lip Anglicism. I suspect it’s a theory we swallow wholeheartedly, and with hope. No one wants to face the actualities of sadness, or tragedy. It’s much more pleasant to consider them through a prism several layers removed. Where years have elapsed and the immediate grief has somehow melted into a shallow pool of distant melancholy.

In reality, Atonement is not a beautiful story. Peel back the layers of score and costuming and symmetrical actors, and it’s a story about neglected children, rape, war, lying, and death. Does it make a more palatable story when it is couched in beauty? Isn’t there even a little danger in sugaring up that pill first?

I suppose there are documentaries more faithful to the actual horrors of war and loss. But I couldn’t help but feel a touch of resentment toward the people affiliated with Atonement for glossing over certain truths with such wide, magical brushes. I couldn’t help but feel a little angry at myself for paying $9 to cry over a retouched vision of death. There is always a certain suspension of disbelief in theaters, but this particular brand of bullshit touched me more deeply than most. In addition to knowing intimately that paroxysms of death don’t mirror the silent, lingering glances before the final blink we see in movies, I will not believe that the most beautiful love stories, the ones to be most lauded and honored, are the ones where the protagonists are separated by mortality.

This is obviously a topic I’m unable to expound on objectively. But the part of me that finds survival more beautiful than grief itself is in revolt. And I’m promising to never again waste money on a story the apotheosis of which is sadness, and sadness only. There is no catharsis in an ending that is only death. It’s half a story. And glorifying that sadness is a luxury that, frankly, I wish I could still afford. Without wanting to be overly sensitive about a topic that happens to have touched me personally, I simply cannot believe there is much redeeming value in a movie (or book, or documentary) that uses death as its endpoint. What is the lesson there? Sadness is beautiful?

Sadness is only beautiful to spectators who haven’t endured it.

Peel back the layers, and sadness is heavy sighing, and tears that crop up so easily you don’t bother with mascara anymore. Sadness is leaving a shop because an old song comes on the radio. It’s smashing old plates against the wall simply for the release. Not particularly cinematic moments, those. But real.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I can’t pinpoint why, but my inability to pinpoint exactly why I so dislike HC’s campaign has brought me a lot of angst lately.  Like so many women, I’m torn, and feeling a little like a traitor for not blithely supporting another vadge.  Maybe, as some feminists have suggested, it’s because I’m having trouble seeing myself in her campaign.  Maybe I want to be able to connect with her, and her pandering and robot veneer are in the way.

But this crying thing has given new life to my dislike of the campaign.  I’m willing to accept that politics is an elaborate huckster act, keeping all the balls in the air for all the people, all the time.  But for the love of god, at least try to make it seem like it’s authentic.  That’s the whispered contract between the electorate and the candidates, isn’t it?  You pretend like you’re a real person not entirely made of fabrication, and I’ll pretend to feel like I matter to D.C.

Like that old Irish blessing, it’s either one or the other with Clinton’s fraction of a muffled tear.  Either it was genuine, or it was calculated.  If it was genuine, it might say worse things about the feminine mystique than any of the other gender stereotypes the troglodytes have thrown her way.  John Edwards perverted and cut short the debate on the meaning behind Hillary’s tears when he wondered if we want a leader who cries.  The truth is, I do want a leader who cries when it’s necessary.  I wouldn’t elect a leader who didn’t cry on September 11th.  What I can’t bear to stand (vadge or not) is a leader who cries during a campaign.  Yes, they’re levying ad hominem attacks.  That’s how the election cycle rolls.  Which is why I’m more prone to believe that the quasi-tears were contrived.  Here is a woman who held herself with grace and composure while her husband made a fool of her from the White House and while her only child was being ridiculed through puberty on the late night circuit.  Here’s a woman who managed to not shed a tear during those real, emotional quagmires.  Here is a woman often chided for her emotionless exterior.  Is it very likely that one woman’s question at a coffee shop unlocked some secret, special tear duct in Hillary’s heart?

And if it was contrived, then she’s no more than the tramp who cries her way out of a ticket, making the road that much harder for any other woman who follows behind her.  My vote is Obama’s to lose.

Not feeling well, of course, is codespeak for feeling more like lying in my bed with a book than facing anything the outside world might have to offer.  Even alcohol, even boys.  Not feeling well is the same as being “tired.”  Or “out of it” or “exhausted.”  It means I might well more quickly into tears than conversation.  It’s become my neat capsule phrase that really means, I’m not OK.  I’m not fit for public consumption right now, because the scab that is my heart seems to have torn open again (or feels as though it might at any moment), and I’m trying to give myself a wide berth in case I turn fully back into that old, simpering wreck.

An ex-boyfriend called me out once, years ago, on disingenuously using the phrase, “I’m fine.”  At the time, I felt unlocked.  That someone saw through that cheery veneer was a powerful aphrodisiac.  I used to take in the chaos around me to unburden the people closest to me, believing I had some preternatural threshold for stress.  A boy who stopped to know me well enough to know that that was impossible seemed like a dream.

Eight years later, I’ve evolved into at least saying I’m fine with a voice belying my disdain.  Progress, no?

Eight years later, though, and I find myself fantasizing about decking a man who told me I’m not fine.  How am I a communications “professional” again?  (See entry below re: being more direct.  Not bloody likely.)

I’ve given myself a pass on the whole “life plan” thing for last few years.  Rolling around the calendar aimlessly seemed achievement enough.  But now, somehow, there is pressure again.  To be productive, to have a linear plan, to get with the program.  To partner off, to stop bitching about work like I’m in Reality Bites, and to function.  To stop overdrawing my bank account, work on a budget, clean up my room, get a real doctor, and grocery shop instead of eating out.  To swear less, bitch less, and drink less, and to be sweeter, more open, and  more direct.  To stop overbooking myself, go to the gym more, and finally take up yoga or some manner of meditation.

These are the things I should do in 2008.  I remember living by some theory in the Mezz that  I probably read in some horrible book.  Something about your life fitting into a triangle.  With an angle for platonic relationships,  one for romantic relationships, and another for work.  Or something.  When one angle was acute, the other two compensated.  A fine theory until your triangle collapses to a straight line (what, with no beginning or end, to boot).   When you’ve got a line, you have to build from scratch, and you’ve got to figure out where to start first.  Job searching is good, but lacks the immediate satisfaction I crave.  So I send applications into the ether and wait to be picked.  Sounds a lot like dating.

*

Had drinks with M. last night that turned into a four-hour marathon of catching up and talking about subjects more often left unmentioned. He said he doesn’t like to talk to me about G. because I should be “moving on.”  I called bullshit on that, and we proceeded to talk about it anyway.  Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between “moving on” and emptying out, hoping something new fills me up.

Felt neither like I’d moved on nor emptied out when I got home, and crawled from shower to bed. It strikes me as strange how I sometimes lose the ability to cry just when I feel like I have to the most.  A little like emotional dry heaving, I’d guess.