Smiles

When he asked me what my smile meant, I shrugged it off. If only he knew all that I was thinking. 

"You and I want the same things out of life." Don't say that! I wanted to scream, but all I could do was keep smiling. 

A smile can hide a lot of things. Sometimes a smile is something other than an indication of happiness, but an outward expression of a sarcastic chiding to the self. A "I should have known" or "of course this X thing would happen" or "how ironic."

I've been told all of my life that I'm a bad liar, and my eyes have always given me away. Behind the blue-green exterior, there are longings and emotions that are felt too deeply, and can be transmitted no other way than through the nuances of the eyes, for words are too clumsy to explain these things. Thank God it was dark and the shadows hid my eyes from further examination.

I am an emotional sado masochist, placing myself in situations that do nothing but throw the truth and pain in my face. I'm not wanted. I'm not coveted, I'm not seen as anything special out of the crowd. I don't mean anything to any man. And it should seem so cruel to be made to crave something so much and live many years without it. Almost as if the Creator wanted to play a sick joke: I will Create this person who yearns for this, and I'll dangle a bone in front of her nose every once and a while, but she'll go what feels like an eternity without gnawing on it. 

How can my voice sound so small and childish when I have so many things to say with an intensity? When I feel full of passion for the word? How can I feel simultaneously so young and inexperienced, and yet so old and mature? How can I be so impatient and yet be calm and hopeful? Perhaps within my multitudes, I am a series of opposites as well. 

I Live By.....

The main character of the movie Memento tattoos important messages into his skin as a recall technique in place of his inability to remember things from day to day. 

----------------------------------------

There are certain codes I live by, and certain themes that are recurrent in my life. Sometimes I draw my brand, my initials onto my skin. This ritual started a few years ago when I was presented with a situation in which I could give in to what temporarily felt good and soothe my loneliness and desperation, or I could be truthful to myself. They were mutually exclusive. I could not be true to myself, and also have his affection, which also meant I leapt into a self-made position of heart ache.  The worst injury I could commit to my soul would be to wrong myself. 

I live by these words: 

I say what I mean and mean what I say about 98% of the time. The remaining 2% happens when I say something I don't mean in order to be conciliatory or to diffuse an argument or bad situation. I'm striving to make that 2% as honest to myself as the other 98%. I strive to be a person of my word.  I want people to know that when I say something, I stand behind it. 

I'm an all or nothing sort of woman. I don't want halfway. Halfway is a No Man's Land filled with nothing but rough gems hidden under land mines. Halfway hurts; I know, because I've done it more than once. 

I believe in the idealist, romantic, optimistic potential of human life. I believe that we can strive to be better than our base instincts and sins. I believe that love and faith and compassion are the best parts of being human. 

I keep placing my faith in faith. I was in the car just yesterday thinking about my lack of a job. I feel as though I keep knocking on doors, but without one opening, I can't go far. All of the knocking has to eventually be reciprocated at one point or another in order for me to move forward. I was thinking to myself that the world needed to reciprocate and then I had a very sober thought: I asked myself what makes you think the world owes you anything? I'm still not sure how to answer that. All I can say is that I'm putting out all of this mental energy, and for what? And I want to shout and beg and plead with God, verbally shaking my fists, pounding the earth with passion, because I so badly want to know where I'm going and what I should be doing and when I pray, I hear nothing but silence. I understand how Luther and others were mad with a fervor to understand in the face of silence. 

I live these things with all that I am. I am a writer. I am a seeker, a wanderer, a dreamer a reporter. I'm willing to work as hard as a plough horse--a great big Percheron or Clydesdale, hitched to equipment, throwing my shoulders and muscled quarters into the work, but the work has to present itself. 

I ask myself, how much more can I ask the universe to grant me what I want, as The Secret people say? The only thing I can think of would be to etch my words and codes of conduct into my flesh, but they are already in my heart. My moral codes and my wishes for meaningful work are with me everywhere I go. I think I'll leave the self-inflicted harm to that dude in Memento but I wish I could do something more than all that I have been doing.

I'd Like to Give My Thanks

This post is dedicated to two characters, and really to two writers. I'd like to send my deepest gratitude to Mma Ramotswe and Detective Harry Bosch, authors Alexander McCall Smith and Michael Connelly. 

Mma Ramotswe is an amazing individual which might sound funny given that she is a character of fiction. She is always above fair in her judgement of things to be done; she was once on a case where patients at a particular ward of a hospital in Botswana were dying at precisely 2pm on Friday afternoons. When she learns that the cleaning staff at 2pm clean that particular room in that ward and unplug ventilating machines in order to plug in a vacuum, her client insists the maid should be fired for causing the deaths of three people. 

Ever in her wisdom, Mma Ramotswe judges that no good will come from the firing of a maid, who's husband has died and who has three children to support, for doing something she didn't even know was wrong. Wasn't it the duty of the hospital to train the cleaning staff on health code procedure, Mma Ramotswe asks?

After staying with a family who do nothing but yell at each other and cast snide remarks at one another, Mma Ramotswe was almost poisoned to death. She insists that her fee has gone up to the tone of 100,000 pula, but it's not until the end of the episode (or book) that we find out she doesn't ask for the money herself, but for the orphan farm outside of Gabarone. 

When a woman comes to her certain that her husband has bought a Mercedes he knows was stolen from South Africa, the woman asks Mma Ramotswe for help. She doesn't want to turn her husband in, merely, she wants the car returned to its rightful owner so that God will know the right thing was done. Mma Ramotswe figures she will "steal" the car from her client's house, drive it across the border and give it to a police friend of hers who will return it to its rightful owner. Who, may I ask, commits such a creative crime? Only the wonderful No. 1 Lady Detective. 

Harry Bosch is a damaged character, and it's for this reason that I love him. His heart is in the right place, although he makes some judgement calls that place him in charge of a person's life, instead of a court of law. He speaks for the dead because their lives were taken, and with that, their voices. He takes the matters into his heart; he doesn't just feel or handle his cases on an intellectual level, he feels them, and in this, he lives an extremely rough life. 

His depth of character and emotion are nothing that I can replicate with my words, which do nothing but vaguely describe a diamond without illuminating all of its facets. At the end of the day, Harry Bosch is a man seeking justice, a bird with a broken wing but a fearsome bite, a smoker, a lover, and most of all, one who looks to right the worst of wrongs. He kick an ass and send a zinger as instinctively as he puts long-forgotten pieces of a case together, and he does none of this because of personal glory--only because it's his mission in life. 

 

to be continued......

Gentleman

I'm such a gentleman, I thought to myself, as I leaned into him, pulling up the hem of his shirt and covertly slipping a 10 into his front jeans pocket. I couldn't really afford to give up the 10 dollar bill, but I figured I should give him a little for paying for the taxi and the drinks.

Somewhere between the second and third shot of Patron I figured that I could probably order myself a Red Lion or a grapefruit martini on his open tab, and I probably deserved too as well. I was the third wheel with two other people, one an acquaintance, the second, even less so--and the "third wheel rights" probably would have afforded me some personal indulgence on his dime. After all, I'd kind of been ditched by my friend and left behind in the third wheel configuration--one that was supposed to be more platonic, but the booze was working on the two of them, so they ended up lip locked against the wall. Luckily, I didn't have to be the killjoy, because she was the first to suggest we go back to her place. After dancing with the both of them in a bar atmosphere not quite ready for dancing --taking my arms away from his neck, we went outside where his sister drove us all and we reconvened with our mutual friend.

It's a good thing I didn't have that fourth shot of Patron--or I'd have been as wasted as them. I got to enjoy my tipsy buzz, with just enough drunkenness to be silly. Luckily for me, the only thing I regretted was taking my top off back at the house, wandering around in a bra in front of a few people I didn't know too well. They were lucky enough to see hints of a nice rack--a thing not every one of my paramours have seen. If I'd had that fourth shot of Patron the bra might have been lost when he said "let's all take off our tops."

But a lady never loses all of her clothes on a first date, gets too drunk or too loud. After all, I'm a gentleman.

Movement

I'm often in the car these days, or on my bike. Anything to keep me moving. I like being on that tennis court and wish I could come up with a system to get me on the court more often. I love anticipating that ball, matching its trajectory and placing my racquet at just the right place to hear the sweet spot sing with that onomatopoeic "phut." I love the feel of stretching out my arm and catching the ball and smashing it to the other side at that spot, down in "no man's land" that opponents can't get to. 

It's the movement I like. I feel that if I can keep my feet moving and my body tilting forward in air long enough, other parts of my life will follow suit and I'll move out of my lull. It's not good to be a ship stuck in still water, no wind in the sails. 

Looking back through papers I wrote while I was at Cal State LA, I realize how far my writing's come. It's one of the things I like so much about the creative process. I once had a young journalism professor of mine tell me in college that my class's work inspired her to be a better writer and that her writing was constantly evolving. I wonder if Edward Robert Hughes or Albert Bierstadt or William Hogarth felt that way about their painting. 

I read through these papers and I see little things I would change--an altered word or phrase there, a grammatical mistake here. And I realize, as I did then, after coming home from Paris, the trip I wanted so badly, the one I dreamed of for years, the one that didn't happen--that I wanted to be a writer. I'd known that for a few months. Now, in a time in my life where I am feeling creatively blocked, having no new ideas or pitches, not having my voice heard, I look back on these papers and see all that I've done since. I was merely a student then. I've been published in four periodicals since. I was a Senior writer for one of them, a paid freelancer for three, and made the front page feature of a major city paper. 

Onward!--I say to myself. It'll happen again. 

Until then I must follow suit and keep moving, as Tom Petty says "...I dig you baby but I've got to keep movin'/ on...gotta keep movin' on"

Scales

There is a theory that by thinking of something with a lot of focus, you attract that thing to you. This concept has been espoused by many people, including Oprah, and has been written about in many a book, including the bestseller The Secret. 

As a Libra I'm constantly trying to balance things, to weigh them, and to give each side its fair time with arguing its theses. The romantic, hopeful, optimist in me wants to say that I believe in this theory. Maybe it really is as simple as mind over matter. After all, Einstein's genius is attributed to the fact that he used 7% of his brain instead of the 3% we mere mortals use; this seems to suggest to me that the human mind is full of potential that is quite literally above and beyond. And if this is true, then if we think about something enough, isn't it feasible that it will happen? There are enough testimonials from wealthy, accomplished, experts who say they've used the Law of Attraction, and this indicates that the Law may really work. 

And yet, the doubter in me wants to believe that it can't be as simple as that. I dream of being a successful freelance writer. I have been known to have extraordinary powers of imagination and focus and I have literally focused on the picture of myself in an office, about town, with a Blackberry ringing off the hook from editors that want me to write for them. I come home to an apartment that I like, feeling tired, and there is my cat, happy to see me. Best of all I invite a boyfriend, just the kind-hearted, dark and handsome, humorous gentleman I imagine who makes me laugh and wraps his arms around my waist as I stir the dinner I've got going in a pan. 

I can imagine it. And yet, it isn't here. Instead, I've gone many years without the kind of love I want and imagine, and I find that at almost every turn, I run into a wall when it comes to making money through writing. Journalism is changing; it's moving from objective, fact-based, edited news, to bloggy shit written by anyone who has google. If an internship is how one is supposed to move up into a field and make money, then I'm screwed--because I'm too old for an internship. I have enough experience to know what's what, and to deserve pay and yet I haven't been hired yet. I have too little experience for the LA Times or another news service, but I don't qualify for a media internship because I'm no longer in school. I made the mistake of succeeding and graduating, instead of bumming around in college longer than was necessary. 

I have faith merely because life is easier to live when you look on the bright side of things. But that doesn't mean I don't get consumed by fear and disappointment and rage at life every once in a while. 

Hair

Her eyes are dark brown and slightly slanted, with only the most kind of crows' feet crinkling at the edges and above her high, circularly sculpted cheekbones.

I have known her eyes for more years than I can remember. Her hands have trimmed and cut and shaped my hair for more than a decade. As I sat back in the booth and looked across at her, I realized that this woman has seen me grow up--transforming from a knee-high thing with stringy golden brown hair, to a curvy woman with thick auburn hair . She says that I am like one of her babies, like one of the two daughters she's raised. I feel blessed to have this woman in my life, however peripherally she might be.

She, more than I, knows what the real American dream is: I was born with a bronze spoon in my mouth. She emigrated from China and came with no money, eventually had two children, bought a house in South Pasadena, learned an entirely different language, owned a business, and sent her girls to college. She came from not much and ended up with a home, love and a family.

There are few people I have met that give with so much whole-hearted kindness and humbleness. She is one of them. I wonder what other ways she'll see me grow up in. How many more years her hands and scissors will trim away bad men, failed relationships, hopes, dreams from my life. I'm like Sampson, in that I hold a lot in my hair; for him it was strength, for me it is experience. Cut the hair, change the life. Much shorter bangs are punctuating this part of my life. I wonder how many different hairstyles she'll see me wear.