I Hate Blogger

Posting from: Montana
Listening to: Melody Gardot, Worrisome Heart

It was working long enough to publish two posts that should have published days to weeks ago. But then it would not post my latest post. I just want it to stop trying to publish. What will happen when I try to publish this? Who knows?

Mental Spring Cleaning

Posting from: Hardyville, MT
Listening to: Steve Poltz, Nickel

Every once in a while I get into a kind of mental housecleaning mode, and I feel like I'm there today. I've had a lot of recent changes in my life plus in the last few days I've had some great conversations with folks, and as a result there are some things on my mind having to do with the power of destruction.

Most often I think of myself as someone trying to build, create, network, organize, and otherwise participate in putting things and people together. I mostly look on destruction as a negative thing- particularly during my year of broken things where in I had a fire at my house followed by a break-in, a destroyed air conditioner, a broken water heater, both my dog and me going to the emergency room, etc.

But in the last few weeks I've started to have more respect for the positive aspects of undoing. I basically undid the last eleven years of my professional career, took apart my office, took apart my house and many things in it, and left behind a lot of people I love. It was like I was undoing nearly all the material aspects of my life.

All that, however, was facilitated by a sort of mental undoing. The way out of where I was turned out to be the thing that I was sure I would never do. It wasn't even on the table as an option for many years, and I only started to consider it after an excruciatingly intolerable situation I went through at work last year. In retrospect it seems much less dramatic a decision, and I'm pretty much okay with it. However, at the time it seemed a very extreme and ridiculous move to make.

Looking back before that, I think of all sorts of mental walls that I seemed unable to look past, let alone break down or climb over that I have since broken down to my benefit. There's quite a list:

-You do not touch your 401k for any reason.
-If you do not have a job, there's something wrong.
-You do not set aside a career after you've invested a certain amount of time and money in it both in school and in the workplace.
-You need to take someone with you if you're going to go somewhere socially.
-Women who are in their mid-thirties do not suddenly start playing drumset.
-Leaving or ending a relationship is a failure of the worst kind.
-Do not stand out from the crowd or people will think you are weird.

Now I feel myself really stretching out more and more as these walls come down and I see new possibilities open up in my life. I don't quite understand how I got over these things or at least started to see past them.

Now from Montana

Posting from: Hardyville, MT
Listening to: The Perishers, 8 am Departure

The big move is (mostly) complete. I still have a few things left in Tucson, plus some construction and cleaning to finish up at the house before I can sell it. I will be here for at least five or six weeks before I get back there.

The house is a funky old place where nothing quite looks right or quite works right but you somehow love it anyhow.

Let's start with the floorplan which is somewhat disfunctional. You enter the living room from the front door, and there are two bedrooms off to your left. So far so good. Continue forward and you are in the kitchen which has a laundry room and a pantry connected to it on the right. Continue forward through the kitchen and your only path is through the bathroom so if someone is in there, the front of the house is cut off from the back. Just past the bedroom is the master bedroom, and connected to that is a stairway that takes you up to a gabled second-story room which was apparently once a kids' room. That's where I'm setting up my drums. It has a leftover foosball table in there, so it is going to be the rumpus room.

The carpet is a dark green, reminding me of fake grass. The refrigerator light does not work, and the shelf on top of the crisper drawers is missing. Three out of four burners on the stove work, but I am promised they're working on the last one for me. There is no fan in the bathroom, but there are two very high open spaces right up near the ceiling which go to the kitchen (yum!) and the master bedroom. The windows of the pantry are cracked and taped back together with scotch tape. Curtains are missing from many windows, and as someone discovered at an inopportune moment, the curtains in the room I have chosen for my bed (not the master bedroom) do not quite cover the window. Ahem. If anyone peeps in and goes blind, I will not be held responsible.

I am settling in pretty well as is my faithful companion, Ms. Pepper Ann Delbarco.

I have most of the furniture in place with only a guest bed and a desk plust two fold-up bookshelves for my cookbooks left to put together. My drums are also yet to be put together- I hope like hell we have all the pieces and that I can figure out where they go. Today I hope to put together the guest bed and also finish unpacking all my non-cookbooks. I don't know where the cookbooks are going to go yet. I would love to get my washing machine hooked up in the next week, and get an electric dryer, too, to go with it.

Pepper has already made a couple of friends. White Rabbit and li'l p brought over their dogs Rowdy and Nixie (a two-month-old puppy) to play in my yard with Pepper the first day. They've been over here, and we've been over there for some indoor playtime since then. Rowdy has made several feeble attempts to hump Pepper, but she has rebuked his efforts.

We have found the sunny spot on the south side of the house, and I have set up Pepper's cushion there so she can sun herself in front of the window when it's sunny like yesterday. We were up into the fifities after noon. Right now it is snowing a tiny bit. We just came in from a walk. She's doing pretty well with the walking in snow thing. The only thing she really, really dislikes is walking on ice that is collapsing under her paws so I try to steer away from that. She is not doing well staying at home alone yet, but I'm leaving her for only a few minutes at a time right now to work up to progressively longer times. But overall I think she's going to do just fine here which is a big load off my mind.

My Excuse

Posting from: Tucson, AZ

I recently had a conversation with someone wherein we made up excuses explaining away the behavior of some jackasses in our lives so that we would not have to be mad at those people. Well, tonight I found what explains mine. I remember as a kid whenever we'd get cut or scraped, our parents would apply either iodine, mercurochrome or merthiolate as an antiseptic. We'd usually go for one of the last two as family lore has it that those would sting less. Anyway, I just looked them up tonight and they both apparently contain mercury. Therefore, I claim mercury poisoning as my excuse. Now you don't have to be mad at me anymore for whatever it is you're mad at me for.

I Hate Not Having the Secret Decoder Ring

Posting from: Tucson, AZ

A couple of weeks ago, I got an eye exam which resulted in a new eyeglass prescription. I ordered a pair of regular glasses and a pair of sunglass which were both supposed to be done in 10 working days. They got them in and discovered that the regular glasses had the wrong prescription. I was told they should be fixed and in today so I went to pick up both pairs.

The regular glasses are not in today. Okay, fine. I'll come back tomorrow.

Meanwhile, they sent me home with my sunglasses. I tried driving around town in them, but something just wasn't right. I kept repositioning them on my face thinking they just felt funny because they were new and a different style. However, after being driven sufficiently nuts, I started switching back and forth between the old sunglasses and the new to try and figure out what was wrong.

It turns out that the new glasses are better than the old when I look straight ahead, but when I look about 20-30 degrees left of center, the new glasses are much worse than the old glasses. The lenses are very clean so it's not a smudge. Also, I tried this with both eyes open and also with each eye closed one at a time. That region is just very blurry no matter what I do.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what is going on here? During the exam, all of the tests where you compare option 1 vs. option 2 (those of you who have gotten glasses should know what I'm talking about) were with me looking straight forward which is how it has always been. Shouldn't those tests account for all areas of the corrective lens though?

I am supposed to go back tomorrow to pick up my regular glasses, and I would like to have an idea of what I need to tell these people to get my glasses fixed. Do I need an exam recheck? Do they need to recheck the prescription for these glasses? Etc...

Unemployed

Posting from: Tucson, AZ

This was it. I finished my last day of work about an hour ago. Phew. I'm whelmed.

Lives in the Balance

Posting from: Tucson, AZ
Listening to: Jackson Browne, Lives in the Balance

What is the word for the religious equivalent of racism? That sick, fucked up stance that says it's all good to kill the other guy because he insulted your religion or that says it's fine to get rid of a million people from their homes because you hate their religion, ban the Koran along with the building of mosques, close all Muslim schools, and ban the wearing of burqas?

There is a common currency that these people are dealing in. Different sides of the coin, different denominations maybe, but the same currency.

This shit is both anti-decency and anti-freedom.

I'm Wide Awake and SO ALIVE!

Posting from: Tucson, AZ
Listening to: Matt Nathanson, Car Crash

I want to feel the car crash
I want to feel it capsize
I want to feel the bomb drop, the earth stop 'till I'm satisfied

I want to feel the car crash
'cause I'm dying on the inside
I want to let go and know that I'll be alright, alright

-Matt Nathanson, Car Crash

I am sitting here with my skinny iced caramel mocha with whipped cream to my right wondering if that is the cause of my newly developed case of restless leg syndrome. I could stop bouncing my leg if I wanted to. Yes, I could. I just do not want to.

I am so, so, so, SO CLOSE to getting the hell out of dodge, and while it hasn't been a cake walk, things have been going reasonably right on most counts. I feel like I could start running fast enough to take off. But I don't think it's the caffeine and sugar doing it.

I think it's that one of my favorite people and I just bought our tickets to the first annual San Francisco Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in Golden Gate Park this summer. Two of my lifetime must-see-live musicians will be there- Tom Petty and Matt Nathanson- and I am so excited to get to see them play in this awesome location. Plus there will be lots of other musicians I would be thrilled to see as well.

Best of all, I will get to hang out with someone who I only get to see maybe once or twice a year and who is one of those people who would be wicked fun to have as company at this shindig. And as a bonus, she knows the city (having been a resident there not too terribly long ago) so I will not be a bumbling idiot trying to figure out the difference between Muni and the bus, BART and Caltrain, or how the fuck to get on a damned cable car. I really like vacations where I don't wind up sitting down in a piss-soaked gutter on a public street until I stop crying because I'm lost and don't know how to get home and I need the bleeding to stop up where I split my knee open when I tripped on the curb before I can at least figure out which way is north.

I Hope You Know What You're Doing...

Posting from: Tucson, AZ
Listening to: The Mountain Goats, Love, Love, Love

This sort of comment comes up occasionally like it did the other day. Yes, I hope I know what I'm doing, too. Or rather, no, I don't actually know what I'm doing. This is entirely uncharted territory for me, but I hope and believe I'm smart enough to figure it out quickly enough that I won't wind up broke and filthy and wandering alone in the woods with my three-legged dog whose fourth leg I amputated and used for rations over the course of four weeks.

Some things you'll do for money
And some you'll do for fun,
But the things you'll do for love
Are gonna come back to you one by one.
-The Mountain Goats, Love, Love, Love

My favorite sister Megan and I were discussing this a little bit the other day:

Megan: I think the family is starting to question if something is wrong with you.

Kirsten: What do you mean?

M: Well, dad is convinced you have a mining claim and are going to become a miner. Otherwise, there's no reason for you to be in Montana.

K: Uh, okay. What about mom?

M: She doesn't get that specific. I want you to know my status in the family is really improving with this moving plan of yours.

K: Why? You don't even have a mining claim!

M: That you know of...