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Location: Home.
Listening: "Cause Cheap Is How I Feel" by Cowboy Junkies.

Haven't updated recently and for that I apologize. There hasn't been much to tell. There's not a lot I can say. That may be the hardest part.

So to jump into what's on my mind--nothing I do these days is enough. Or so it seems. Every minute of my day is now accounted for between having to keep logs of my calls at work, watching the clock on my lunch hour and training my new coworker (did I mention that they unceremoniously fired Lucenda? They did. Jeff showed up last Monday, unannounced, from Atlanta, to tell Hitoshi and I that Lucenda was no longer with the company and that he already had three interviews lined up that afternoon for prospective replacements. No chance for goodbye. One more obstacle to get past and pretend not to notice.). So every minute of my day is now logged, to the extent that I no longer check my email or even start WinAmp for fear that someone will think that I'm slacking. As it stands, I'm not slacking. I'm doubling my speed and logging more calls than ever, yet my boss's boss sent word this week that it's still not good enough and that he could "do that (my job) in two hours with one hand tied behind his back". If I hear that once more, I'll invite him to do so--and that's not an empty "Why I oughta...". I'm past the point of caring about being fired. If he says it again, I call him out. I have a threshold for that kind of thing. I didn't get the nickname "Pride" for nothing.

Meanwhile, I'm determined to get out of here. The apartment has become small, dark, smoke-filled and impossibly untidy. I've almost given up on trying to clean because any headway I make is destroyed in a matter of days. I scrubbed the kitchen floor, the fridge, and the cupboards today (they had turned yellow as a result of too much handling and too much smoke). They are now gleaming white, but I find myself pondering for how long. I've never lived anywhere (aside from my home in Germantown) for this long and it's past starting to wear on me. I've realized that revolving places of residence have become a marker of my progress--and right now, no progress has been made. When I moved into 1260, I had just started at a job I loved at a growing company, I was spending almost every night clubbing in LA, and I was looking forward to carving out a place for myself away from my exes and the past that had held me in check for so long. Now, that company is struggling to keep its head above water in the wake of a failing economy, my job duties have been slashed and I'm little but a glorified telemarketer working in the skeleton of an office devoid of all but one person I knew when I was hired (everyone else has been "reduced" or relocated), my country is in a recession and at war with an unidentified enemy in the wake of attacks that cost thousands of lives and were easily preventable, and I can't write a word to save my life. I feel like I'm responsible for everything from getting to work on time to keeping the house clean, smiling pretty and watching my back. Peter and I have been on radically different sleep schedules lately so that when I'm waking up, he's falling asleep. My friends in LA rarely call or drop a line--ironically enough, the person I speak to most often aside from Peter is Scott, who's in Houston. Granted, everyone is facing tough times from Williams to Marshall--and I respect that and feel for them--but lately, I've been incredibly lonely on top of everything else. Plans to go up to LA this weekend fell through. I slept for 2/3 of the only two days I have free every week. I couldn't sleep anymore--hence, Peter is in the next room, asleep, and, after a fitful walk through the neighborhood, I'm sitting in front of the computer, drinking a bottle of wine and singing along with Margo Timmins.

So I try to fill my time by reading Jeanette Winterson (finished The Powerbook, which Peter gave to me in the early days of our acquaintance--I had forgotten that he had inscribed it and cried when I read it again), studying Swahili (more lessons are forthcoming--Kenny greeted me on IM with "Hamjambo?" and I was thrilled. Knowing that you've taught someone something new is incredibly rewarding.), and trying to keep myself from sliding into a miasma of stress, which also triggers my latent hypochondriasis that can paralyze me for weeks. I've become more interested in studying religion lately--I'm reading the Qu'ran in fits and starts and plan on re-reading the Bible after a long conversation with Peter over lunch. I realized that part of me is very angry at the fact that I was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention, in a church that could seat 8,000 in the sanctuary, believing a horribly bastardized version of Christianity. I've started to have recurring dreams of becoming a nun. I miss my priests from Episcopal school. I've realized that my faith is one of the few things that has ever kept me going--and that has been based, largely, on lies told to me by men in suits on Jumbotrons since I was a little girl. Parenthetically, I discovered this last week that two female members of my mother's family's clan (the MacEwen's), were the last two women burned for witchcraft in Scotland in the late 1500's. Dissidence (or perhaps just independence) runs in the family, I suppose.

Having switched from Cowboy Junkies to Gin Blossoms' New Miserable Experience, I'm pulled back to my freshman year in college.

Maybe I could use you to reassure myself
I wouldn't wish this indecision on anybody else.
I'll drink enough of anything
To make this world look new again
But when the sin smiles
How can it be wrong?

The lost horizons I could see are now resigned to memories.
I never thought I'd still be here today.
I'll drink enough of anything
To make myself look new again.

~ "Lost Horizons" Gin Blossoms.

This little Arizona band broke up not long after releasing their second album, which didn't appeal to me as much as their first. Their first was simply serendipity--it said what I needed to say precisely when I needed to say it and somehow continues to do so. Considering that the bulk of the album explores addiction (specifically, alcoholism), betrayal ("Found Out About You" was actually dedicated to me by an ex--a fact of which I am dubiously proud), and frustrated ambition, I have to wonder sometimes. If you haven't heard it, pick it up. It's twangy folk rock, very similar to Dave Matthews, but, in my opinion, much more sincere. I regret that I only play the album when I'm depressed--the band deserves better--but they do an excellent job of keeping me company in my dark moods and lifting me just the slightest bit above them.

I find myself asking what I would do, at this moment, if I had my choice...and I keep coming to the same conclusion. I would have my job vanish into thin air, so that I wouldn't have to go through resigning (which always makes me feel guilty somehow). I would be able to sleep late, wake up, spend a morning outlining a story or using my watercolors or collaging (like I used to do when I was in high school), spend my afternoon reading or smooching Peter or just listening to music, spend my evening cooking dinner or studying Swahili or watching a film. I would try to go back to feeling like I'm 25 and not 40. I'd tattoo my forearm like I've always wanted to, wear more wife-beaters and corsets (seriously, I love them), try to forget this ridiculously banal corporate-centered life. I'd try to get back to being the girl who danced on the bar at the Fang, handcuffed to Shunit, or who had a reputation for being able to drink any guy in the room under the bar. She was temperamental and unpredictable and a "complete fucking paradox" according to a friend--but she was alive, and she was smart and glib and powerful, and she loved it.

So I might have just been dreaming when I hard myself say "no"
But it looks like no one heard me, so here I go.

However, there's the rub. I can't go back to drugs--and I have no idea if she'd be there without them. I like to believe that she would be--that the drugs were simply a means to an end and not the end itself--but I have to admit that I don't know. I've lost my taste for them. I couldn't even find the desire for nitrous (which used to be as common as toothpaste) at Williams' on New Year's. I've realized that they use more people than use them--and yet, wherever she was, they were. Every once in a while, I'll remember the uneven lines on a mirror (I have a deviated septum and cut my speed to reflect this, so that it became a calling card when someone saw strangely measured powder lying around). I'll recall tripping on the beach at Scott's old place in Venice, doing eight different substances in one night just to see what they would do (I ended up on some sort of even keel with a slight tilt) at parties, literally collapsing to the pavement in front of Stigmata under the weight of my first E trip. I left it behind for a reason, I know. I chose clarity over the world that altered states will put you in. I never allowed myself to believe that what I saw was anything other than what the drug wanted me to see (I used to piss people in Colonial off by mentioning that I never knew an atheist who saw God while tripping). Yet, I miss them sometimes. Somehow, they became a symbol of the home I inhabited in college--and as much as I'd like to say that I've learned my lesson somehow, I miss my days of being so fearless that I would push my body to such limits. Oddly enough, little of this has anything to do with Peter (who has never been involved with drugs and never will be). We just happened to meet when I had left them behind. He's an excellent influence, no doubt, when I realize that these things never brought me closer to what I consider to be true love--and clarity did. I will never write that I had any sort of love affair with drugs--but I will say that I lived through a necessary part of my life with them being ever present. They made me stronger, on some level. Broadened my perceptions on others. They almost killed me twice (once when I unknowingly smoked a heroin-laced joint and once during a bad E trip on New Year's '99). They had a hand in shaping the girl writing this now. They have no place in my future. Is it a fault or somehow irresponsible to remember them fondly sometimes, like a cantankerous relative or an especially difficult professor? Is it deluded to think of myself as anything but a fortunate survivor? Society tell me that it is. I don't know. I was never addicted--I can say that because I walked away from speed when I woke one morning and realized that it was no longer useful to me and again from hallucinogens when I saw that I was having the same trip over and over again. I always knew that they would never take me anywhere that I couldn't go without them. Yet, I still want to eulogize them, somehow. Go figure.

So, to end this rambling entry even more oddly:

Goodbye pscilocybin (elusive but so worth it), LSD (and all of your silvery edges), mescaline (lovely picnics on the Tri-Delt lawn), amyl nitrate (yik--you always gave me migraines), methamphetamine (my sin, my soul, my spe-e-ed, my ultimate rapture until I met this boy I know), marijuana (I always hated you, sorry), Ecstasy (your beauty never fooled me), MDMA (you made me sleepy, child), nitrous oxide (silly dentist-games), and the rest. You and I knew strange corners of reality. I go on to even stranger ones on my own.

Perhaps I'll write about what I was doing at midnight on New Year's Day (namely, defending myself--poorly--to my far too perceptive friends) at some other time. There are, after all, two sides to every story (and so much I can respect enough to simply forget--including the opportunities I denied myself later) in the end, after all.

You never knew the teenage me
And you would not believe
The things you didn't see
Some pretty, some ugly.

~ "Mirrorball" Everything But The Girl.