A Retrospective

There are a lot of things I've worn that I wouldn't be caught dead in at this stage in my life, not because I'm fat now, but because, well- I mean...what the hell was I thinking?! Believe it or not, this outfit is not one of them. I would wear it minus the bridal-style veil and with slightly less dramatic make-up. I was seventeen in this picture and though I was headed for an epiphany which would save me from killing myself, I still didn't believe I would live to be thirty years old.

There weren't many things I felt confident about when I was seventeen, but my sense of style was something that caused me zero qualms. I remember the day my friend Carrie and I took these pictures in San Francisco and I remember feeling that the only powerful or commendable thing about me was the way I could wear almost anything and carry it off. Naturally there were about 180,000 San Franciscans who would have disagreed with me. But who the hell cares about them anyway? The point was how I felt about it. The point was that I could wrap this piece of Indian print cloth that my mom gave me around my hips, knot it, and call it a skirt. If I had the body for it now, I'd wear this outfit today.

Sometimes, it was getting dressed everyday that kept me going. The love of texture in clothes and makeup, the fun of making fun of fashion gave me pleasure. The colors that could be combined, the little pieces of theater my garments could inspire. I could be anything I wanted to if I dressed the part. For me, clothing always had the potential to confer power on the person wearing them. I could believe in myself when I dressed like a person who believed in herself.

I could get a PHD based on the power of clothing and how un-trivial it is to human beings on so many levels. In fact, the only thing trivial about clothing is the ridiculous industry of labels that has been built around our need for covering our bodies which has so much less to do with shame and so much more to do with protection from the elements and a celebration of ourselves.

St. Andrews graveyard, Scotland, 1995

I didn't actually sit down to write a discourse on clothing. This is the end of the year. It is not my wont to look back with longing on the past. I don't enjoy aching for what didn't come to pass or mourning what did. As a person who has suffered life long depression, it might be easy to suppose this would be my normal mode: to regret, to be sad for the past, to worry at the unsatisfying fraying corners of life. It is absolutely because I deal with depression every day that I work harder than most (I believe) not to become enmeshed in self pity, sorrow, or mourning.

The end of the year, for me, is a pleasurable opportunity to assess my life's progress. Mostly it's an opportunity to measure how far I've come away from the trenches. I like to laugh at myself a little, learn from my stumblings, and think about how I want to move forward as the new year dawns. I'm not the only one getting introspective. Alice at FutureGirl is also looking inward as well as forward. A long time ago I used to scoff at the idea that a new year meant anything. I saw time (or thought I did) as a continuous ongoing never ending collection of days into nights into weeks into years. What makes tomorrow a fresh start? Why do we draw the line every year at the 365th day and say "tomorrow is a new year, a fresh start!"?

It's just tomorrow.

I'm not sure when I started feeling the renewal at the new year's approach. I think it started catching me in 1998. (The year I predicted in a journal that I would have one boy child and no other children.) Ten years ago. I started feeling the lifting of the spirit at the prospect of a clean slate. I started making resolutions, even though I don't really believe in punishing one's self when resolutions don't work out.

I like resolutions because they are powered by hope. Hope is something none of us can live completely without. One universal factor in suicides is that they've lost all hope. I think of resolutions as a great declaration of hope. Making resolutions is about voicing intentions, seeing how we want to be and coming up with a plan for manifesting positive change. When you are at the bottom of the dark, you don't make resolutions because there's no point. If you don't think you will live another ten years what difference does it make if you keep smoking, keep eating crap, and become obese? It makes no difference. Why should you stop hurting yourself if you have no future?

January is my month. The month I was born. A month of renewal. It's a time when all of nature shows it's bones. Pestilence is killed by the cold (unless you live in the south or California, or Australia) We all have a chance to rebuild. I love January best of all months. It seems that everyone spends January in quiet meditation.

I have a lot of work to do this year. I wanted to end this post with a current picture of myself. But I can't. I can't bear to do it. I will leave it blank. The blank represents what I can achieve in the next twelve months to reclaim myself physically and mentally. For two years I have been living in fear. I am going to walk away from that now.

The First Carrot

(And all kinds of talk about faith and karma and other heavy topics.)

This morning I came in with more beets (all small in size), one carrot, one tomato, two impossibly small yellow crookneck squashes, and a few more pickling cucumbers.

I also managed to pick this modest vase of flowers. If I want more flowers I'm going to have to go out there and pull up a truckload of weeds which are choking everything out. I'm going to have to deadhead the roses and pinch off the dead flowers from the daisies and zinnias.

Where I will find time for this while caring for my child who refuses to go outside unless I fight him tooth and nail, while Philip sends in resumes and looks for work which he needs to have if we are going to avoid having to sell our house, I really don't know. If I were to manage to squeeze out even a few moments to accomplish any fraction of the above chores...I have to pray my sore back doesn't turn into a broken back. I wake up every morning unrefreshed with that nasty ache in my shoulders, neck, and back. I think it's my bed trying to kill me in my sleep, but I can't seem to catch it in the act. It would never stand up in a court of law.

A low grade insistent insidious depression has been gracing me with an annoying inertia. I have no energy to do anything even when I have the time. Partly that's because having the store made my household come in last place for a year. Things are so out of order (and I have all the furniture and my whole studio from the store packed in my garage) that to do any small thing here requires a huge chain of events to precede it. Like, if you want to put away the emptied out canning jars as we use them, you must first make room for them somewhere which requires shifting everything in the kitchen just a little.

There's also this colossal anxiety. Always. Every day. Panic in my chest. Dread. Which mounts to an untenable cacophony every single day I listen to my boy complaining about pretty much everything in his life and how he may as well have not been born. Philip does a great deal to add to that cacophony with his own anxiety and the fact that he is always saying the right things to piss our boy off just a little more. How does a six year old access so much negativity? How does he come to see a spat with the neighbor kid as conclusive proof that he will never find any boys his own age who like to do the exact same things as him and he shouldn't even bother because there aren't any in our WHOLE TOWN?!

I guess the apple didn't even bother falling off the tree.

On a lighter note, if I just push everything aside for a few hours by using my superpowers to freeze the whole world in it's tracks, I could do my first batch of pickles of the season today. Maybe. If I can muster up the energy while I put Max in his closet with his game boy, just maybe I could do it. I've got enough from my own garden for a small batch. I love dill pickles.

One thing that feels really good and is a tremendous relief to me is the clean wood floors in my kitchen and dining room. AAAAAhh. No more repulsive animal and people stained oatmeal colored area rug. It's wonderful to walk on that smooth clean mopped surface. Cool to the toes, not harboring diseases or nasty little what-have-yous. The kitchen floor was just scary. I am not crazy about having wood floors in there, I mean to say that while hardwood is my all time favorite flooring, I'm hard on everything I own and use and the kitchen is a room in my house that gets tremendous wear. It just seems like that finish on the wood is going to wear out super fast.

Maybe not, though, it actually still looks pretty good when I mop it.

I don't have a lot of spiritual faith. Most of what I believe in I believe because I can see that it's true. Like karma. The concept of karma is even in the bible. It isn't called karma, but it's there. The whole concept that there are consequences for behavior, whether good or bad, that will lower on our shoulders. When we live thoughtfully with compassion for others we tend to have better relationships and people will reach out to you in times of need. If you live selfishly and meanly then you will find yourself shut off from all help in times of misfortune. This is a concept you can verify in your life. Try it and see. It's true that you will reap what you sow, though perhaps not immediately. That's not something I have faith in, it's something I believe because I've seen it born out my whole life.

I also believe that everything happens for a reason and that everything that happens is supposed to happen. I came to this sometimes uncomfortable conclusion in my early twenties when I found it couldn't be refuted by a reasonable mind. I don't think there's a person on earth who hasn't wished to refute it at some point in their life. But if something has happened, you can't reasonably say it wasn't meant to happen. Maybe YOU didn't mean it to happen, but it was meant to happen because it did. You can reasonably say that YOU didn't mean something to happen, but if you unload your own intentions and back off a little, you will see that the Universe, or God did mean it to happen, because it happened. Humans do not control the universe. Nature, facts, life cycles, maybe even God does, but we don't. So ultimately, what we mean to have happen in our lives is only a small part of our life. We have only control over the choices we make, not on the outcomes of our actions.

Somehow I think I may not have spoken as clearly as I had hoped.

It has always bothered me when people say "He/She wasn't meant to die so young!" But how can that be true if He/She is, in fact, dead? We are surprised when people die young, we are devastated, we are sorrowful, but how can we know what is meant to happen except by seeing what is happening and what has happened?

I take comfort in these beliefs. I have never been able to believe in the idea that God will take care of your needs if only you have faith in him. Oh yeah? I don't know about that. That's not something born out by proof in my opinion. I guess it depends on how you think God interprets our needs. I know that there are a lot of people out there who desperately need food and are dying because no food is available to them. Does this mean that what they really need is to starve to death? Or that they don't have enough faith?

It's entirely possible that when the bible mentions God always taking care of his children that it means only in a spiritual sense. Not in a literal corporeal sense. But if that's so, then I think it's unconscionable to tell people that God will take care of their needs as a form of comforting the poor, or the sick, or the lost and letting them think that if they pray enough and give the church money or whatever it is having enough faith means, that their sickness will be cured, their poverty lifted, or that they'll find their way back to themselves.

The idea of faith bothers me a lot. Faith as in: a belief not based on proof.

I do believe in the other definition of faith: confidence or trust in a person or thing.

They are not the same. Often, religion asks you to have a faith not based on proof.

I guess I'm thinking about all this right now because I believe that whatever the future holds for me and my family, whether we have to sell our house and rent something to get by, or whether we are fortunate and find work and get to stay here in some degree of comfort, I believe everything will unfold just as it's meant to. What we can do for ourselves is keep slogging away at trying to find work, put our best feet forward, try to tame the chaos that having and then closing a store has wreaked in our lives, and if we still end up a wreck, then that's just what we have to go through. As scary as it is to me to face joblessness in this strangling economy, I do not get to decide the ultimate outcome of my life. I steer it as best I can and then the rest is up to nature, luck, the forces that be, and possibly even karma.

The thing that worries me is that getting therapy, chiropractic medicine, massage, and counseling for Max, plus necessary trips to the dentist all cost money we can't afford to spend. Not to mention visits to the vet. I don't feel I'm in a position to take care of these important things until we have an income again. It's a classic American problem. It doesn't matter how important all of these things are, if you don't have the money for them, you don't take care of them.

I think I need to drink more coffee. I just heard from Philip a minute ago that the new pot of coffee I brewed spilled all over the counter because I failed to put the pot in correctly. Damn.

What's weird is that we are exactly where we were a year and a half ago. Exactly. As though we have made no progress at all. It kind of freaks me out. How long can a person go without work? No, don't answer that question, I already know the answer. I'm going to go investigate the coffee situation and put my head in the grounds.

Between the trenches

I am having a lot of trouble keeping myself organized enough to make the store move. My mom is helping out by listing our furniture on Craig's list. I don't understand how come more people haven't been banging on the store doors to get in and shop, doesn't everyone love a sale? Especially a really good one. Why is it that when we have a sale, (with signs hugely posted in our windows, the door, and also all over the store) people don't get more excited? Are we putting out the wrong vibe. Are there vibes radiating from our store that go something like "these people aren't serious about their sale...move on...move on...."?*

Anyway. It just means I have more stuff to move. Don't want to move more stuff. Must sell the furniture that's not coming home with me. I can only hope that Craig's List will do it's magic for us. Because if it doesn't, I'm going to have to conclude that unlike other people, no matter how collectible or valuable my things are, something in the Universe refuses to let me make a single cent off of my discards. I'm the kind of person who could spend all day trying to sell my cool stuff cheap at a garage sale and end up making five dollars.

I consider this a curse. This is why I never try to sell my discards. I just donate it to the Good Will. But this time I am motivated by the lack of money in our accounts and the lack of jobs which underlines the slim bottom line. We can pay July's bills, and then, we're up shit creek. So if you are an editor in need of a new daring columnist willing to pay a salary, will you please stop dilly dallying and give me the damn job already?!

I got a storage unit yesterday for all the back stock for the on-line store. I opted not to get a large storage space because I decided that I 'm not moving furniture into it. It must sell. My mom immediately gets freaked in the inimitable urgent way she does and told me it won't be big enough. Too bad. Too bad. It has to be.

She's really trying to help me out in this whole transition and I need it. She picked up tile samples for my studio. I was thinking I might like Mexican tiles in there. (They didn't have any because this is Yamhill County). After she made the effort to do this and bring a couple of samples home for me, I realized that I can't afford to put tiles in there anyway. No matter how ugly the carpet is (and it's ugly-though not as ugly as orange shag would be) I can't afford new flooring. Here's what I can afford: paint, curtains, and demolition of the ugly built in 1970's desk. But only if I do it all myself. That's it. This is remodel on a budget of nothing.

I'm going to admit here that I am filling up with pictures of us all holding up cardboard signs asking for food in front of Walmart since that's where most of America is spending their money for total crap. I used to always assume that I could find a good job, or that Philip could. After two years of Philip not finding employment with anyone besides ourselves, I have less faith now. I'm finally really feeling the panic of this depressed economy. How will we ever make a living again? Philip has been getting lots of free-lance work but it's a lot of work and not coming close to paying the bills yet. I don't trust that it will, either.

It's kind of weird planning to set up my design studio at home again while not knowing if I will have to put my house up for sale in a month or two. I'm so tired of not having the tiniest bit of security.

While all this dire uncertainty is dogging me, milestones are being reached. I am getting included in a book for the first time in my life which feels like the beginning of something; the post with the announcement about my being included in the book got the most number of comments for one post that I've ever received; yesterday marks the first time the traffic at my blog has reached over two hundred visits in one day (and only 50 of those were me!); and I finally have the material for a whole book.

Can one write a book while pan handling? Do agents ever sign up homeless people?

So if you all have any prayers left for non-religious people after all the knee bending you've been doing for the truly deserving such as all the orphans and widow of the senseless war, and all the people already on the streets starving to death, and all the people losing their homes because the economy has been plunged into a deep depression from which only the very rich will come out alright, then please, if there's any prayer left in you: could you pray that my furniture sells so that we can pay a few more bills and not have to move them or give them away for free?

Thanks.

*Incidentally, this also brings up the question of why almost no one from our mailing list has come to get great merchandise for 40% off. And why all these people who come in and express how sorry they are to see us go didn't spend more money in our store and why they aren't shopping for the sale? It makes their words meaningless. The reason we are closing is because all these sad sacks didn't love our store enough to spend money in it, just to make me feel bad for taking away their browsing fun.

I feel betrayed. Except by a few very loyal and supportive customers who always came to us to buy presents and I will treasure them forever: Louise, Susan, and Carol!!!! Lots of love for you guys.