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Location: Home.
Listening: The fan blowing down the hall.

Peter's journal entry for today moved me to comment on one song in particular that he cited. "Notebook" by Innocence Mission has had a remarkable and, at first, deeply disturbing impact on me from the moment I heard it. I use the word "disturbing" here in the same way I use it when describing the first time I read "Learning To Dance Bob Doubles", one of the pieces on Peter's site. Both the poem and the song managed to cut straight through the layers and expose something that hadn't seen the light of day in longer than I could recall at the time. Very much like the way the South pulls on me at certain intervals, the poem and the song pulled on me simultaneously (I encountered them within days of each other) and forced me to realize that I was dealing with a person and a situation that, whether or not I allowed them to, would change the course of my life.

Think on that for a moment and you might get an inkling of why "disturbing" might be an understatement.

It's late and I can elaborate more tomorrow, but for now, I'll say that these lines:

I write in my notebook
With feelings that take me by surprise
And thoughts that I don't know I have.
They're hidden by useless facts
That I've compiled at the office where I work
Where there is no time for feeling anything.
You see, I just work there,
To finance my real life
That begins with scribbles on pages
And thoughts of "how" and "when".

brought me to tears when Peter first played the song for me in Williams' den on a lazy Sunday afternoon. For years, I had prided myself on the fact that I never cried--no matter how desperate any situation seemed, I never allowed myself that weakness. Whether or not this was the result of some deep force of will or simply a knowledge that, if I allowed myself to break, I might not be able to put myself back together and move on as was always needed at the time, I never really knew. About the time I heard the song, I had begun to wonder if this was a necessary facet of my notorious self-defense mechanisms or if it was a serious debility. I hypothesized, at times, that I had simply lost the ability for release. Hearing those lines, I realized very suddenly that I was wrong.

For years, I had been repeating the same mantra when people asked me what I did. I would always reply by first describing my job and then adding "That's what I do for money. I'm a writer.". The response was usually good-natured laughter or polite nodding and inquiries as to what I wrote, etc. No matter how many questions they asked, I never felt that anyone really comprehended this split in my personality much less how hard it could be at times to know that what I was doing during the day (coordinating admissions to master's programs at a university, overseeing multi-million dollar accounts for professional athletes, etc.) was never what I wanted to be doing, was simply a way to pay the bills so that I could find time to sit and write my little poems and journal entries and rambling non-fiction pieces. I was always somewhat envious of people who were in careers that they had always dreamed of having, working during the day towards goals that they didn't have to shrug off to survive in the "legitimate world". As someone who was born creating and had earned the title of "artist" from her parents (who raised me to believe that professional artists were little more than drains on society), I desperately wanted to be more "legitimate" and to have a "real" life-goal, something that I could hold up to the world without whispers about "bohemians" or "do you want fries with that?". I've never really been forthright about having been a Creative Writing major. People ask what my major was and I tell them "English with a minor in Psychology" because it sounds more serious somehow. Sometimes, living that way became very lonely.

When I heard Innocence Mission, I knew that, while I had always known that there were numerous people out there living the same way, who had to be dealing with the same sense of detachment or ultimate futility that I was, I really wasn't the only one. There was proof--and the person playing the song for me, who told me "I think you should hear this" was one of those people. I had spent so many years resigning myself to being like the wild parrots in Arcadia that perch on the phone wires next to finches that I wasn't prepared for my reaction when I came face to face with another "strange bird". So I cried--only slightly, much more later on when I was alone--and I realized that what I loved most in life and what I had been born knowing how to do best wasn't that futile after all.

Hence, my reaction to the "reductions"...because, you see, I just work there.