Man, the 90s were so good

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It's almost 5am and I'm tapping away at my keyboard while my Acer netbook restores to factory settings for the second time in its life. The process is taking a suspiciously long time but I am hopeful, and somehow this comic feels appropriate to share right now.
Sometimes I don’t know how to say what I want to say
So instead all I'll post for weeks at a time are quotes or song lyrics or conversations. Not as a cop out; everything I publish here touches on some personal truth or another, even if there are seemingly conflicting ideas. In fact, if you saw some of the zillions of drafts I have for this site I'm sure you'd suspect me of suffering from a mild case of schizophrenia. It's just the process, you know?
If there's anything I've learned in life it's that there is only now. There is only now. There is only now. I mean what I say when I say it but I reserve the right to change my mind. Because if all we have is now (now! and now! and now!) then we should live fully always, and never cheapen our present for what is uncertain or may never even come.
There's something bothering me (as if you couldn't already tell). Something deep and gigantic like the first signs of an oncoming earthquake. I'm still trying to sort it all out, so please bear with me when I do shit like post weirdo entries like this one. Eventually I'll find the words.
“When you understand that what you’re telling is just a story, it isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumple it up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
-r than fiction
Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine, and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies.
And fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind a loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort.
Not to mention:
hospital gurneys,
and nose plugs,
and uneaten Danish,
soft-spoken secrets,
and Fender Stratocasters,
and maybe, and the occasional piece of fiction.
And we must remember, that all these things – the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days are in fact here for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.
I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true.
It’s that time
Christmas 2008 is a strange time to be alive. This year my brother and I are scheduled to spend it with my mom, which means we'll sit together and have a non-Christmasy breakfast before watching a slightly uninteresting movie during which two out of the three of us will struggle to disguise our discontent in faked digestive difficulty.
I once thought Christmas was my favorite holiday, but like many things in my life, HWMNBN ruined it with some soul-crushing comment or act (I can't remember which) and now the only celebration I tend to look forward to is the one where I get to ring in the New Year and make resolutions I know I won't keep.
Who knows, maybe 2009 will be different. Let's hope so, at least.
One thing I will always appreciate, however, is my father's Christmas spirit. It's calmed down over the years, but I can always count on lights twinkling around our garage the day after Thanksgiving and a tree to put my presents under. Even through the ever-present fog of cynicism, that tiny ounce of Christmas burns brightly year after year, and it continues to sustain me.
Ch-ch-changes
As I write this entry I’m sitting in a café with my computer looking dissatisfied: A girl, a laptop, an unspecified drink, and a crappy mug. I’m just like those chicks in the movies that have some climactic event coming their way, except instead of being on the verge of meeting my Knight in Shining Armor/landing the job that's going to make me zillions of dollars/being discovered by some mogul, I’m sitting here wishing I was on a trendy MacBook instead of my tiny Vaio and thinking it would probably be a good idea to stop comparing my life to television. You know, since just appearing like something grandiose and wonderful is going to happen to you at any moment doesn't actually mean that it will.
Boo hoo.
Last week I officially resigned from my internship with the art gallery. Much of me was sad to go, but a small part of me, a small but surprisingly strong and nagging part of me, was chewing on my ear and telling me it was time. The commute with no pay was getting to my pockets and the networking I had relied on to find me a job is at a stand still thanks to the recession (high five, Life!). Also, something happened in the last couple of months I was there, something strange and in the vein of somehow feeling like I’d outgrown the program. This is not to say that I’m ungrateful for the opportunity or think I’m bigger than the organization. In fact, the experience as a whole humbled me because it made me realize just how much work goes into non-profit.
Back in February, the Outreach Director gathered several interns together including myself and told us that the organization was interested in expanding the internship program into something much bigger; the ultimate goal being to get at least one granter's attention so future interns could get a small stipend for their efforts. We were asked to dream up an event to kick off the beginning of this change of pace, and after much deliberation and suggestions (a block party? a bike ride around the city? a party at the gallery?) we finally decided to host an art show featuring our own work and the work of our friends with aim to highlight the beauty that comes from networking and connectivity – two things the organization stands for.
The project started out with very little gusto as members didn’t take it seriously, dropped out, came in late, forgot meetings, flaked on deadline dates, forgot to sign up with the message board, etc. and I spent much of the last three weeks before the opening reception feeling like I wanted to pull my hair out. But after a lot of bickering and stressing and misunderstanding and last minute patch jobs, the core group of participants got it together and we had a pretty kick-ass show. Tons of folks showed up to the opening, our twenty bottles of wine were gone in the first hour, and seeing the culmination of it all, seeing everyone’s work up on the walls next to their little name plates as folks gathered around to discuss them, felt like nothing I’ll ever be able to describe.
Now that it’s over and there are very few loose ends to tie up, I somehow feel like I’m out of place whenever I walk into the building. A lot of things have happened in the last couple of years that have caused me to question my intuition (See: HWMNBN et al.) but I think the feeling that I accomplished what I set out to do with the organization is on point. In addition to adding curatorial, graphic design, administrative, and essential gallery experience to my resume, I made connections with several awesome people, and even if none of them pan out in a lucrative sense, the experience of it all is invaluable.
It’s funny to think that back in December/January I was freaking out every day (and often on this website) about getting someone to hire me for free work, when all I want to do now is wash my hands of it and move on to something that will make me a living. The job search has been total shit so far, but I have to keep reminding myself that I went through this before and I can do it again.
Until then, I’ve got tons of things to occupy my time, things that include writing product reviews for a start-up website (hopefully one day soon I’ll feel it’s aesthetically ready to link here) and starting a teacher’s assistant job for a sophomore English class. The latter job is un-paid and no doubt those fifteen year old kids are going to eat me alive, but I’m hoping the experience will be worth it. Anything that keeps me grounded, anything that keeps me from imploding or running away to join the circus like I'm thisclose to doing, has to be worth it.
Neophyte
I’ve been meaning to write this post for several weeks now, but it’s just such a beast of an entry that I reverted to my four-year-old self and have been sitting in a corner playing with toys, pretending not to hear my laptop calling and ignoring life almost altogether. Then I made the realization –well, not the realization, more like I finally chose to address the fact –that the reason everyone is so freaky about getting things done in life as soon as possible is because we’re all trying to make something of ourselves before the inevitable. It’s all a race against time, isn’t it? So if I can’t move on and maintain a proper website until I get over this hurdle, I should just get it over with.
I realize how psychotic that sounded. Please don’t e-mail me about it.
A few weeks ago a good friend of mine that was going through some relationship issues told me she’d once found the answers she was looking for right here on this website, and since then she’s been coming back hoping for more. A few weeks before that another friend of mine all the way on the other side of the world sent me an e-mail and the first line was: Dear Chelsi, Queen of LOVE. -Both poor friends are actually under the impression that I actually know what I’m talking about half the time. But the truth is, dear Internet, when it comes to relationships, I know nothing. Sure, there are times when I’ll spout off some things that sound logical because often we can make sense of our lives when we look at them in retrospect, or if we’re just coming from a third person’s perspective, but there are more times, times like the ones I’m currently living, when everything is just a jumbled pile of crap.
When I’m going through relationship, or what-the-fuck-is-this-ship problems, they are more often than not ones that have lasted years, involve the same stupid person, are always either on the forefront of my brain if not floating around in the periphery, and just when I think I’m getting over it, getting stronger, something happens and I completely fall apart. You’d think that I, the one they call Queen of Love, or Girl With Answers to Life, would be able to step back and look at my heavy situations and find that one tiny pinprick of a malfunction, like a single defunct wire in a bundle of Christmas lights, and just fucking fix the shit. Or better yet, I’d just go buy a set of new lights and call it a day. But in all honesty, I’m just not as smart as I come off to be. And I suppose if things were ever that easy, I wouldn’t feel the need to send my problems out into the electronic, unrelentingly judgmental abyss that is the Internet, now would I? (Side note: for my newer readers, if you were around to read my high school entries, you probably would have pulled out a gun and shot yourself because I was the biggest sack of self-pitying shit ever.) Of course, I stay in denial by not opening up my comments because I’m sure strangers would gladly rip me another asshole, but that’s another story.
Denial doesn’t work for this relationship stuff, I do know that for sure. The longer you stay in denial the better chance you have for monumental heartbreak on top of monumental heartbreak from the same person, and I really don’t think anyone deserves that much power over another human being. It just isn’t right. But, another truth is I am masochistic, so, even though this paragraph alone sounds like it came from a fairly level-headed person, I rarely ever take my own advice. Instead, when I’m going through problems of the heart, I do the following things:
- Sex and the City on repeat. I know how girly that sounds, I’m sorry. And no, I’m not going to go into how many times that show has saved my life because it’s too ridiculous to actually put into words, but it has definitely been more than like, a hundred.
- Music. Music has saved my life even more times than SATC, if you can believe that, and I’d be more than happy to suggest some tracks that can make you feel temporarily invincible, and I promise that none of them will be I Will Survive.
- The banner on my phone says DON’T DO IT. “It” being drunk dial of course, (another problem I’ll save for another post) but it also means don’t text, don’t call, don’t sit there and think up reasons to call the person you so desperately want to talk to because if they’re making you feel like a big fat pathetic slug, they’re probably not worth it.
I feel really dumb for just typing those out, but it’s all I really have to offer at this point. So to the two gals I mentioned earlier: I hope this helped. If you can’t connect to me through my false all-knowing-ness, then maybe we can just relate through our own girly stupidity.
Cheers.
T-h-o-u-g-h-t Process
I met an eighteen-year-old girl named Ashley at my secondary job a few months ago. Her sister, Chelsea, who also worked with me at the time, stole a twenty dollar bill from my locker during my first day on the job. I’m positive that