185.905 miles of lonely pete.

first 1/2.

summer!

has begun.

I yesterday only began to love, to understand. 5/24/09

Second morning in Breckenridge.

I lay in bed and stare at the ceiling. I listen to Dad concoct his tea in the kitchen. Red rose with half a teaspoon of milk. I can direct him from counter to counter. Before he sneezes I whisper "bless you."

Two sisters still sleep: Jackie sprawled like a star fish, blond hair splayed. Cassie buried beneath covers, snoring and dreaming of red eyed seagulls.

I am awake, always awake, I rise early.

Where is my mother? Ahh, the missing figure, "touche" she would mutter, disapproving. She could be running in place or painting a landscape or crouched beneath a closet shelf sipping chardonnay.

My family. My makeup, my insides.

If I were a fourth sister and describing myself I would write:

And the oldest is awake, always awake, writing in her room. I can hear her soft sighing through the wall. The occasional thump of pen against paper. She will appear in a minute and say "good morning, lovely girl, good morning - I just woke up." But I know she has been up for hours.

And then I kiss my youngest sister's cheeks and say, "you don't exist, which is just as well."

To think I almost missed it all!

Title quote from Franz Wright's Admission.

:::: colorado this weekend.

bienvenida a tijuana
bienvenida mi amor
de noche a la maana
bienvenida mi amor

bienvenida mi suerte
a mi me gusta el verte

de menos, amor.

slow burn.

corona del mar, ca.

long day.

costa mesa, ca.

A Spiritual Woman
D.H. Lawrence

Close your eyes, my love, let me make you blind;
They have taught you to see
Only a mean arithmetic on the face of things,
A cunning algebra in the faces of men,
And God like geometry
Completing his circles, and working cleverly.

I'll kiss you over the eyes till I kiss you blind;
If I can—if any one could.
Then perhaps in the dark you'll have got what you want to find.
You've discovered so many bits, with your clever eyes,
And I'm a kaleidoscope
That you shake and shake, and yet it won't come to your mind.
Now stop carping at me.—But God, how I hate you!
Do you fear I shall swindle you?
Do you think if you take me as I am, that that will abate you
Somehow?—so sad, so intrinsic, so spiritual, yet so cautious, you
Must have me all in your will and your consciousness—
I hate you.

vespers, louise gluck.

Vespers.

In your extended absence, you permit me 
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report 
failure in my assignment, principally 
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow 
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold 
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come 
so often here, while other regions get 
twelve weeks of summer. All this 
belongs to you: on the other hand, 
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots 
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart 
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly 
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of 
that term. You who do not discriminate 
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, 
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know 
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible 
for these vines.

Louise Gluck.

i must always, always! remember.

I wrote this in February 2008, while working at another office .

venice beach, ca.

from exactly a year ago:

every couple hours I take a deep breath, inform my lovely colleague Jodi that I need a bathroom break, walk into the ladies room and slump against the door. Not because I'm sad, or depressed, or moping - but because I am thoroughly exhausted. I steal a second or two to regroup. I close my eyes and visualize unzipping my spine - my tightly bound qualities tumble out - my niceness, my humor, my polite nodding and prim smiling - then I make some faces in the mirror, shake out my hands and feet - zip back up - and go on with the day.

Friday!

richard "i've been here a long time" alpert.

i wish he could give me eyeliner tips

Froda

text removed.


#1: Mrs. Roboto


Vanessa inhabits the cublet* beside me. Her car's license plate reads V-Vans. I will be referring to her as V, Vanessa , or Vanny.


We both began on the same day. 08/08/08. I remember stretching out my freshly tanned arm and shaking my boss’s hand, flashing her my crest whitened smile. I was full of hope and devoid of sense. Ten minutes later she shuffled V and I into the back storage room, ushering us to computers placed side by side.


And thus began the unnatural and somewhat terrifying twinship.


In the offices of WV, Vanny and I come as a set. We work in tandem on everything, completing one mundane task after another. We collaborate on grammar & text & changes & technicalities. When I take a swig of my tap water, she swallows. When I get up to pee, she follows.


Inevitably the old socks brand of comfort offered by this symbiotic relationship wears thin. It comes down to this: old V has more stamina than I... or any other human on this planet.


Whereas I leave not a minute past five, she stays for ten, twenty minutes extra to “check her changes.” She takes shorter breaks than I do, she doesn’t leave the office for lunch. I suspect she never leaves at all, and parks in a nearby parking lot to sleep in flashy V-Vans. She chats with duller than dirt coworkers and tries her best to hang with them outside the professional environment. I avoid eye contact and dodge facebook requests. She grins and nods and spouts positive statements. I say, “really?”


I am starting to suspect that Vanessa has a plug. This is the only explanation for her Olympian endurance. She keeps her generator in V-Vans and during one of her many bathroom breaks she heads outside for a recharging sesh. Or maybe she just eats batteries the way I scarf down candy from the secretary's jar. When I leave tonight, in 32 minutes, 20 seconds, I will scope out her car for evidence.


**not a typo. On my first day I erroneously referred to the grey cubicles as “cubes.” My boss informed me of my mistake: “Oh, you been the cublets? The creative development ghetto?” Her words, not mine.

sssssnake.

Yesterday there was a snake outside the office. In a blur of kakhi and ann taylor, the employees stormed the windows hoping to spot this slithering creature. It was like Santa Claus and the incredible hulk were strolling by arm in arm.

I, of course, didn't emerge from my cublet until most of the hoopla had died. Then I walked to Omar's office (yes, yes he has an office) and peered out his window(and yes, he has a window). I saw what looked like a brown leather belt slide into a bush. My response was to ask Omar if I could have a can of coke. He said no.

After the rejection, Matt and I went for a walk. We looked for the now famous amphibian, but all we saw were some rogue beetles and a few cigarette butts (probably mine from 9 days ago).

When I returned, two unread emails flashed in my inbox. Someone had taken photos of the thing and sent them company wide. here:


and guess what the email said? Disclaimer: I PROMISE I am not lying (Matt back me up).

It said:

RED ALERT WE HAVE SNAKES!

HAPPY HUNTING, YUMMY!

K#####

and who is this K###, might you ask? He's the creepy sales guy who walks by my desk and leers at me.

it's a small office after all.

rummaging, I found this from Anna Quindlen.

The following is from Pulitzer Prize winning author Anna Quindlen's commencement address to Villanova University, Friday 23 June 2000:

...

I have no specialized field of interest or expertise, which puts me at a disadvantage, talking to you today. I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know. Don't ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.

Don't ever forget what a friend once wrote Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office." Don't ever forget the words my father sent me on a postcard last year: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat." Or what John Lennon wrote before he was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."

You walk out of here this afternoon with only one thing that no one else has. There will be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your minds, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume: I am a good mother to three children. I have tried never to let my profession stand in the way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the center of the universe. I show up. I listen, I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my husband. I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh. I am a good friend to my friends, and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But call them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I show up. I listen. I try to laugh.

I would be rotten, or at best mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true. You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So here is what I wanted to tell you today:

Get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things if you blew an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast? Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over the water gap or the way a baby scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time you look at your diploma, remember that you are still a student, still learning how to best treasure your connection to others. Pick up the phone. Send an e-mail. Write a letter. Kiss your Mom. Hug your Dad. Get a life in which you are generous.

Look around at the azaleas in the suburban neighborhood where you grew up; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black, black sky on a cold night.

And realize that life is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Once in a while take money you would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister.

All of you want to do well. But if you do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough. It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the color of the azaleas, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kid's eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. I learned to live many years ago.

Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back because I believed in it completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.

Well, you can learn all those things, out there, if you get a life, a full life, a professional life, yes, but another life, too, a life of love and laughs and a connection to other human beings. Just keep your eyes and ears open. Here you could learn in the classroom. There the classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end. No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office. I found one of my best teachers on the boardwalk at Coney Island maybe 15 years ago. It was December, and I was doing a story about how the homeless survive in the winter months.

He and I sat on the edge of the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told me about his schedule; panhandling the boulevard when the summer crowds were gone, sleeping in a church when the temperature went below freezing, hiding from the police amidst the Tilt a Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the other seasonal rides. But he told me that most of the time he stayed on the boardwalk, facing the water, just the way we were sitting now even when it got cold and he had to wear his newspapers after he read them.

And I asked him why. Why didn't he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the ocean and said, "Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view."

And every day, in some little way, I try to do what he said. I try to look at the view. And that's the last thing I have to tell you today, words of wisdom from a man with not a dime in his pocket, no place to go, nowhere to be. Look at the view. You'll never be disappointed.
________________________________________

day 7!! with out a cigarette :)