Wednesday, April 20, 2011

My True Calling

Being a member of the great unwashed (or at least the great unemployed) I’ve got time on my hands. But me, I’m smart! I knew that the fastest way to get a job to show up would be to cram so many cool things into my free time that should a job show up I’d be all bummed about having to go back to work. “Awwww, man!” I’d yell at the idea of gainful employment. “But I still need to learn Italian and tantric crochet and build that full-scale model of the Empire State Building out of pudding cups!” (also kicks toe into the dirt in disappointment…) So far the job hasn’t appeared, but I’m sure it just means I don’t have enough hobbies and classes and idle goals yet.

Right now my free time is filled with any and all of the following:

  • Photography
  • Copious amounts of exercise (which will be the subject of a future blog post!)
  • Pilates
  • Kickboxing
  • Writing (both fiction and blog posts)
  • Making vaguely erotic jewelry
  • Learning video editing
  • Reading all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer graphic novels
  • Archery

…yes, I said archery. You can just go ahead and call me Robin Frickin’ Hood, people! Or no, wait, call me Green Frickin’ Arrow! Yeah, that’s good; that’s my favorite tights-wearin’, arrow-shootin’ dude. Oliver Queen. Hippy-Dippy Millionaire w/ arrows sporting boxing gloves on the end. I’m THAT cool.

I have to give T.E. credit for this too – he’s the one that reminded me how many times I’d said, in passing, “I have always wanted to learn how to fire a bow and arrow…” He also reminded me that I currently have a surplus of time that nobody wants to pay me to fill with their business. Add these two together and you get: Voila! Instant Fish! Instant, arrow-fling-flanging Fish!

So I found a local range that would show me the ropes and I went in and learned these ropes. These ropes? They’re pretty easy. I was asking the owner about taking ‘classes’ and he corrected me: “it’s just one class. If even that. I just show you how to do it, and then you just practice until you get it right.” Honestly, this whole thing has gone so well I wonder if maybe this whole ‘losing my job’ thing wasn’t really just to allow me to discover my archery savantivity and allow me to become the next Hawkeye (of Avengers, not M*A*S*H) or William Tell. (Check me, breakin’ out the historical archer references!)

Plus also you add the kickboxing (and I’m talking ACTUAL kickboxing. Not like “kickboxerjazzercizering for Cardio and Tight Butts!!” kickboxing. Feh.) and I figure I’ll be a real life Superhero by year’s end. I’m working on my costume idea now. Oh, and a name! I need a cool superhero name, you guys. Can’t do Green Arrow (or Red Arrow, or really any names that start with a color and end with ‘arrow’ of any kind) or Robin Hood (yes, that includes Robyn Hood!) Suggestions?

I’m looking forward to patrolling Hippyville in the dark of night, seeking out injustice and crapweaselitude and crushing it under my awesome superhero boots wherever I find it. (oh crap, boots! I gotta get some awesome superhero boots!) It’s gonna be awesome. And only you guys will know it’s really me! You’re gonna be my Alfred and Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon, all knowing who I am and lending a hand when I need it, even though I’m all dark and brooding and a loner and everything. Still, you guys will bring me Jello water and try to get me to sleep once in a while because I totally need it, even though I’ll push you off gruffly and tell you that evil never sleeps.*

It’s gonna be SO SWEET!

Of course the big problem with this plan is the lack of any pay or dental or anything . Just ask Spider-Man – crime may not pay, but crime fighting TOTALLY doesn’t. So I’ll have to fight crime outside the hours of “work” and “don’t work” so as to still be able to move out of my parent’s place. Because no self-respecting superhero should have to sneak out via the garage. (Unless, that is, they’ve got some killer super-bike or super-jet or something. )

Man… now I gotta get me a super-jet too.



*actually evil does sleep. but at something like 10:45am to around 2pm or so. Slacker evil...

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

She Lives!

OK, I’ll apologize again for the uber-dramatic last post. It’s very not my style to be so emo, and I spent close to a week living the emo life: I ate the emo foods, listened to the emo songs, dreamed the terrible emo dreams. (except that’s all a lie: full disclosure I didn’t sleep or hardly at all eat for the time, and, to quote a friend of mine from HER bad, bad time, “all music was broken.” But you know what I was going for.)

The other thing I did, after the initial wave of “emo” washed through my big, dumb brain, was a lot of thinking. I would go for these epically long bike rides (often in the rain – big shout out to the weather for totally backing my state of mind all of those days. Holla!) and I kept putting two and two together and getting spatula. What I knew for sure was I hurt. I loved him. He loved me. And I really, really hurt. Nothing else was anywhere near as clear.

So I did the thing that every strong, independent, bossy, control-freak of a woman would do in that situation: I went crawling after him. (OK, I’m gonna give my womyn and grrrrl readers a minute to FREAK THE F*CK OUT. Please send your incensed email reactions to the email address that’s somewhere on this dang blog.) I told him the truth of my feelings: being apart had given me an entirely new definition of “pain” and I now knew I could live with some compromises that he’d asked for that had seemed, before, out of the question. I just couldn’t make sense of the fact that we were apart given that the single biggest message from our last conversation had been how much we loved each other.

The other thing I did during that time apart was I went back to the beginning. I read every email conversation we’d had, starting with the ones right in the very beginning. I read the transcripts for all of our online chats that I could. I read all of our skype chats in the last 3 months. And that’s where I saw it.

I watched myself dissolve, right before my eyes.

As I think I’ve said before, one of the things that T.E. has always said he appreciated about me was my strength and stability. I’m someone who prides herself on handling her life stuff and having been able to take care of matters all by myself. Then life kind of went “KABLOOEY” a couple of months ago. And right about then my slide began. Strong went to sketchy to wobbly to “I’m sad! Fix everything! Waaah!!!” I leaned on T.E. more and more because I couldn’t show the cracks in my armor to anybody else. And to his credit he tried, but realistically I did not make it easy for him, and there was a big limit to what he could even do! He tried to get me to talk to people in town, but I can even remember thinking that no, that was what he was there for and I would just lean even more on him.

HARD.

And frankly I think I just overwhelmed the entire thing. I pushed him out the door, straight into other opportunities that were new and fresh and exciting and easy – all things I definitely wasn’t for him anymore.

Well, long story short (everybody together: too late!!!) we talked, we negotiated, we snuggled (there’s a way to do it on skype, trust me) and finally we got back together. This was actually a couple of weeks ago and I would have posted sooner, but for the first many days it all felt very fragile. Several times per day I’d decide this would never work. Then I’d change my mind and be desperate for us to talk. Then I’d be sure he was regretting the decision and about to drop the hammer. It all felt totally impossible.

But we stayed with it. And we talked. And talked. And TALKED. Man oh man, did we talk. Like talking was going out of business we talked. More than that, we did the thing that I think makes us really impressive: we talked honestly. And each long, heartfelt conversation built us back better and better. I’m proud to say that right now I feel closer and stronger and more right with this man than the day he had to fly away from me. We’re making plans for his trip home to me this summer. And the music is fixed again.

I promise, good people who were actually willing to wait for this additional drop of shoe, that I won’t let the emo stuff get all over this blog again unless there’s an actual death. Or maybe I break a nail. You know – the big stuff. Pinky swears!