Greenstorm's Journal

Failure is rarely an option for me nowadays. I've lived a bunch of my life gently, allowing myself weakness when I have it, sometimes perhaps over-indulging in things like calling in sick to have sex or backing out of interpersonal confrontations.

I still try to live the relationship side of my life gently now that I've learned how, spending time with people who are good for my soul.

At the same time I have a rigorous schedule that leaves no leeway for my humanity.

For instance, I've been working and going to school both near full-time and keeping the rats and two boyfriends and something of a social life on the go. That translates to between 20 and 30 classroom hours per week, 12-15 hours of commuting per week, 30-ish to 35 hours of work per week, plus one day per week rat cage cleaning and whatever the people stuff adds up to, plus of course all the cleaning stuff.

I keep myself going in a number of ways. Some are gentle: I put something shiny in the next week or so, and I work hard to get through the week to it; I support myself and encourage myself and tell myself that I'm awesome and accomplish a lot; I pay attention to beautiful things around me and let them inform me of my right and fitting place in the struggles of this world. Often this is all it takes.

Some ways I get through are less gentle: I tell myself how badly people will be let down if I don't do something; I give myself a little time to break down and then remind myself that no one's interested in interacting with me if I cry and whine all the time; mostly I just keep working, through the dark part, through irritation to mental fury, through my brain spitting bile and insults at every contact, through fantasies of great pain or bodily harm to myself or people around me, through everything my mind can send at me I just go from task to task to task. I get things done and let my mind gibber.

There's sometimes a price for being harsh on myself. I begin to lose faith in the givingness of the world. I begin to forget what happiness tastes like and why I would desire any sort of human connection. Finally, pushed too far, my mind short-circuits and leaves me suspended and hanging in an abyss of static, snarling at any intrusion of consciousness.

Things fix this. Time to myself abates it; time with people I love, touching and being touched, talking and being talked to, draws me back into the wonderful parts of the world and gives me reasons for continuing on this path. I can recover quickly, especially if I haven't pushed too far, but I do need time to recover.

This month it feels like I don't have time to recover. I think I have a total of three or maybe 4 days that don't contain work, school, or most often a combination of both. Many of these are 14-hour days. There just isn't enough space.

I'm coming to my computer as a blank screen, to livejournal as a space that doesn't talk back. My own voice will heal me, I hope, that first increment so I can reach out to people for a little more contact. It seems to be working; allowing these feelings and these words to be of value, even if only to myself, is pushing me erratically from blankness through furious anger and towards tears.

It's a funny balance there, actually, seesawing between anger and compassion at myself for this barren painful feeling. It wobbles back and forth from one second to the next. I let it happen, no sense wishing it was some other thing.

That's enough writing for now, I suppose.

Blood day three. Yesterday was stupid heavy.

Winter is for being in warm places with convivial company, snuggling and eating, and for periods of reflective solitude in the outdoors. The cold builds walls around me, indoors or outdoors, and my own self-reflectiveness creates an inward-spiralling gaze that only thaws when the mental separation cold imposes on me is thawed.

Right now I'm in a livingroom full of rowdy video-game players. The room has a fireplace and the smell of bacon. I can't access my schoolwork on the internet right now. I am perfectly content.

I have friends. I have so many friends. I'm finding that as satisfying as having the most flourishing of complicatedly fluid ecosystems in my garden. This is the first weekend I've been in town, not at work or school, for quite some time, and so I have time to enjoy people again. I am enjoying them and then some.

School is exciting too. I had my epic exam on Friday: 8:30 am to 3:30 pm, 3 1/2 hours was spent in the snow with a little bit of sleet and drifting cold mist lining compasses up with distant targets (the dials and my fingers were stiff with cold), reading clinometers that fogged up when I breathed, and doing mathematical calculations (percent slope -> horizontal distance, for instance) to a timer. Many of my classes are drawing to a close, but I don't finish school till the 17th, and there's a lot left to learn.

Work is picking up. It's poinsetta season. Poinsettas are the epitome of the junk-culture consumerism culture we have around christmas: they are poor quality plants, they spend the whole time I'm taking care of them dying, about half of them make it through in presentable condition till they need to be thrown out. It's my job to make it look like they aren't dying, because for us death is unthinkable, even in situations where it's obvious, inevitable, and self-created. So, my job is to remove dead leaves and dead plants so no one thinks about their death.

Also I found this today:

Superbly Situated

you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things

i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed

and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed

how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you

part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses

just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them

but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat

we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve

by Robert Hershon

Oh, and my body is conducting a guerrilla war on me with blood. Slow trickle until the occasional militant overflow when I'm doing something (an exam, for instance) I can't set down for a second and attend to it with. It's getting old.

It isn't even almost a little bit near time to come out yet, Greenie. You have maybe four or five weeks to a brief respite and still almost two years till you're done-- more if you decide to stay a little longer. You cannot afford any bit of weakness right now. You cannot afford any bit of softness towards yourself, and little enough towards others.

It's not time.

You can't rely on being smart in this. You can't rely on the endurance you've found in yourself up to this point. Each day is a new contest and any victory in your past is just that-- it's over, it's only served to bring you to another day where you haven't yet proven yourself. A handful of failures is the end of all of this.

Emotional turmoil is no excuse. Nothing is an excuse. You do this because you've started it; you finish it and you get through it. You've broken up with your friends group; twitter is like reading a fresh ex's happy relationship updates tonight. It doesn't matter. It's past, that fact hurts, move on. You have a midterm tomorrow and a quiz the next day and a bunch of homework for the day after that.

Deal.

You cannot let down your guard in this. You can't feel safe; you can't feel like you have enough time. That's when the accumulated traumas come out and you have to cope with them. You can cope with them after you graduate, or maybe in the summer, but you cannot do it now.

And you cannot afford to get this attached to people. In the past you've had the luxury of wanting things from people who were emotionally unavailable. That luxury is gone. Take what they will give you but you do not have the excess energy to delve. If someone opens to you that person is a treasure but you can't go hunting after the other ones.

You will be on starvation rations for sex and love and physical contact for a long time. It makes it worse when you go off those and glut for a little bit; you starve all over again when everything dries up. You will learn willpower on this and soon; I don't care how precious these things are to you, or how much they feel like the core of your humanity, you can't have them now and not for awhile.

Goddammit, woman, shed your skin. You used to be so fucking good at it.

This morning is, again, rather rough. Yesterday morning was rough but I had to get moving so early, and then I was nervous about class, and then I was on a machine, and then it was evening. There was no time to worry about it until it was better.

This morning is rough and I don't need to work today.

I always sit down and try to define the problem. Today is rough because this has happened lately, that has happened, and something else is a factor too. I like to understand myself, to know what makes me tick. The problem is that while I can sometimes predict myself, I can never pin myself down. There's no set of circumstances that's always going to make me happy-- wait, no, a plant walk with my ecology prof actually always would-- and life is too complicated to make use of much of the past information. So I gather this data, pore over it, write it down, and I'm still not happy. It's a lot of work for little return: all I can do is avoid a couple things I know won't go over well.

For the longest time people made me happy. Spending time with my people was what I wanted to do; I did it and I was happy, more-or-less.

Now school makes me happy. It's a lot of offscreen work, I guess like a boy who demands flowers and a new poem written for him every time I go to see him. Maybe that's why I like it: I love a challenge. I love sinking work into school, making it like me, making it notice me. That metaphor is hardly any stretch at all. We have long conversational lectures and we learn new skills together. Yesterday school taught me to use an ATV and we went riding in the woods. As for testing, well-- everyone has difficult days where the challenge is to make sure everyone walks away happy.

So if I'm honeymooning with a new lover, what happens to the old ones? What happens to my friends? I see them, but my mind is elsewhere. I talk about school all the time. I don't make enough of the kind of time I need for myself in my life. I am restless when not involved in schoolwork. I cease to identify and acknowledge my own needs, instead focusing on what school needs or wants from me.

Everything else in life has flashes of brilliance, but as a whole ceases to satisfy.

I have a natural relationship span of very approximately three years. That's how long it takes before a relationship becomes work instead of honeymoon for me, more-or-less, circumstances depending, etc. Most things tend to crumble about then. This program I'm in is two years, with the degree option another year tacked on.

It really seems like a good fit for me. In this context, using this metaphor, I'm doing absolutely the right thing. The only question is, what about the rest of my life? What about my people? The things I do can often be put on a shelf. People? Not so much. And when I do shelve them, and I have been lately, I feel disconnected and unwanted and on-the-outside of everything. I don't like that, so I get avoidant, and away the whole thing goes.

You can tell I'm writing this from a dark spot. I'm writing this sitting in bed at 7:30 on a Sunday morning, wishing I could have one day of waking up in one place with one person and not having to leave either that place or that person all day-- wishing I didn't have to chop and ration everything into an hour there, a move of some sort, a couple of hours here, change scenes again, shift gears again, and now we're doing something completely different.

Just as I was about to write 'hey guys, ignore this, it's all babble that will burn off if the sun ever rises today,' Angus wanders through in a towel, looks at my expression, his face falls, and he does little things to try to make me happy. I don't know if it's lightened my mood any, it doesn't feel like it has, but I'm going to stop writing now. This is more than enough of this.

Noted for recordkeeping: this is the second day of real blood, like the fourth blood day or so.

These are full days. I am incredibly tired right now. I've finished work, class, homework, a bit of a visit, and a meal and a half today. I'm starting to drink frozen juice a can or two a day, just because I have neither time nor inclination to eat and it keeps me on my feet (yes, the juice stuff, not the sugar stuff). Homework will come to rule my life pretty soon, I can feel it.

Had a couple of fantastic moments today, most of which I am too tired to write about. My bus-friend at school continues to be my bus friend. I continue to be in an enviable place with some pretty fantastic people. I have realised I get off class such that I could go to all-you-can-eat late night sushi afterwards if I wanted, which might be a decent social event. The aches in my sides are subsiding a little bit, but now my legs are cramping and knotting from sitting so much. If I had time to get to the gym at school right before class, or actually scout my bike route getting to class (and trust my bike not to get stolen), this would be resolved.

I have equipment like it's Christmas.

You know what made me happy today? I said "I love you" and he said "yeah, yeah, yeah."

Started bleeding. Such is life.

...because she's easy, and nice. She never says anything very complicated, though, and she isn't very imagist, so there's not a lot of impact in her poems for me. Still... this one makes me think of 'Mary Oliver covers ee cummings' and I am rather fond of it:

I don't want to live a small life

I don't want to live a small life. Open your eyes,
open your hands. I have just come
from the berry fields, the sun
kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
(open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds
following along thinking perhaps I might

feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes
only to you. Look how many how small
but so sweet and maybe the last gift

I will ever bring to anyone in this
world of hope and risk, so do.
Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.

Mary Oliver

I'm tired this morning. Maybe it has to do with the lack of sun; I haven't got noticably less sleep than other nights, but it was actively difficult to get out of bed this morning and that never happens to me. There's a meeting at work this morning so I need to be out the door soon, but I think I'm gonna scrap some of the extra stuff I was going to do today and just clean up the mess on Monday when I get in. That'll make Monday a long day and both today and tomorrow an exercise in not thinking about things, but otherwise there won't be much left of me for the folk fest, and I need that folk fest. Already I'm not sure where I'm going to fit in packing.

Fireworks last night. dillen_dagen is a powerful ally when it comes to making a space or a group of people act like 'my people'- things slide that much more easily towards touch and physical closeness than when I'm the only one doing it. I appreciate this like I appreciated the party on the weekend where I wasn't 'the naked one'-- it's my natural environment and very comforting.

Tired. Tired tired tired tired. The walk home after the fireworks was every bit worth it, the night was skin temperature and I could have walked forever. Still, today I pay-- along with my bosses, who were there and out late too, so that won't be so bad.

I just wish it were sunny now, to burn away the sleep.

(my cycle seems to be shortening. I'm pretty sure I'm ovulating again, and my last period was a couple of days early. Not sure what that's about but it makes dealing with people occasionally inconvenient. I wish every part of it were not quite so much of a ride)

I have something to say and I don't know what it is. Perhaps it's just that contained intensity that comes, sometimes, and batters itself against my inner walls where the dust hangs heavy and shards of glass and stone from long ago crunch emptily underfoot.

I'm not writing this for you. I'm not saying this to you. I don't know who you are. I've never seen your eyes, never heard your voice, all my life I've spent wrapped in my own flesh and all I can see is that pulpy gelatinous mass that clogs my irises; all I can hear is the whisper of the cilia inside my own ears.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Sense has been torn loose. Meaning has been torn loose. You, my dearest audience, have been torn loose. Do you know that sometimes when I am sad and I write about it people will instant message me or text me with hugs, just from this? Just sometimes, not all the time. And did you know that sometimes when I write about something that I think is funny people will do the same? They think I am upset.

I know there is an audience out there. I don't know what you get from this. Nothing, I think, from posts like this one.

I have no story for you. Today was a difficult day. I will speak as plainly as I can: I don't know where my feelings come from, I can tell you three stories for any upset. Here are six stories:

Today I was working at the Pan and it was overcast. It has been so dark so often lately, and though the morning started off well I was inexorably pulled downwards. All I wanted to do was go home and curl up somewhere safe. I was disgusted and afraid, and I shot that in every direction around me.

Today I was working at the Pan and my blood had just started. When I was younger I could tell when my period was starting to the hour because I would feel suddenly like the sun had come out from behind the clouds. Today the sun just didn't come out, or if it did the clouds were merely toying with me. I hated everything and wanted nothing to do with the world.

Today I was working at the Pan and I haven't been taking good care of myself. I've been drinking lovely tea and eating lovely chocolate and it hit me in the afternoon like a hammer to the skull. There was nothing in the world that loved me enough to make anything better, and although looking back I know there is a lot of love aimed at me, nothing in the world could bridge the distance and get me to believe it-- or at least, not enough. I wanted to be loved hard enough to change the world and I was instead left desolate.

Today I was working at the Pan and went for lunch with CrazyChris and Freedryk. We talked soft-apocalyptic vs hard-apocalyptic scenarios and it was lovely- Freedryk knows of what he speaks. He was optimistic, when we were talking, and he argued against CrazyChris when Chris said it would all go down-- and listened politely but skeptically to me when I said that whatever down meant, the world was sure to change beyond recognition. Then suddenly, at the very end of lunch, he said: yes, it will have to change completely. I know the world is ending. It's been echoed back to me so often lately-- Paul started it --and it clatters around in my head. And I love the world. I love the infinity of topsoil in Iowa that feeds our demand for bacon hamburgers and goes down so deep and so rich it seems like we could never starve. I love the people who wouldn't dream of being able to recognise a single edible plant, let alone grow one themselves, and who sneer at the people who work the soil-- how precious a system is that, how impossibly and awkwardly high it rises? I love freezer peas and lettuce out of season and the luxury of eating only my very favourite parts of an animal. I love tall glass towers that mirror each other in an infinity of improbably fused silica and air conditioned commuters. I love the bustle of traffic and the way the city beats, as they say, like a heart, the way it pulses with life in so many diverse and complicated ways that we can't really imagine it. I love so much, so much, so very much about this world. We are a product of our environment, whatever else we may be, and so we will all slip away. As with anything we cannot hold this moment.

Today I was working at the Pan and I was texting with the Writer. He's just got a TV and has spent the better part of two days playing video games. I am reminded so strongly of the years when I slipped away into the alternate world of Otherspace and I was there for hours and hours a day-- first I'd only be on in the evenings, then all the day when I didn't have classes, then in between classes from the bank of computers at UBC, then finally I didn't bother to go to classes at all. The easy escape from reality seems to me like it should be wrong, somehow-- total transport to another world means you're turning your back on this one, and isn't that morally abhorrent? Isn't it a renunciation not only of the terrific burning glory of this world we're given but also of our own potential, when we are completely fed up with our own position, to change our lives so completely that we could never imagine going back? Isn't it a settling-for, a lowering of standards, a darkening of the whole tapestry of the world that could be so bright and brilliant? Or is it just that escapism doesn't receive me in her impossibly soft arms anymore, not reliably, and so I look in enviously from the outside? Is this because my life is good and demands everything from me so there's nothing left to squander on, not imagination, but a simalcrum of somebody else's made-up life, or is it because I can't really believe in anything outside myself anymore? And how can I trust someone who may well walk the dark paths that I walked? And how can I trust someone who hasn't, and doesn't know? And how can I sort this tangled knot that tugs me so strongly towards fear of I-know-not-what?

Today I was working at the Pan and I was in love. I wasn't going to do this anymore; years ago I promised myself. I said 'never' and so it's happened. There are no answers and no words, and the brightness of it has scoured me empty inside. I am afraid of the rest of my life.

Those are my stories. I work with complex systems. Things happen for many reasons. I don't believe in one single absolute reality. I merely act, as we must, as if one exists. Tiny things can change outcomes, the proverbial butterfly flaps its wings here but what about all those other butterflies, the leaves deflecting tiny gusts of wind, the stray glint of sunshine on a piece of jewelery bouncing back into the atmosphere? We can't think about it well. We can't talk about it well: we either speak as if a thing had one cause or, if our good sense intrudes on that too heavily, we give up. I give up. I don't know the reasons for things, whatever those things are, nor do I know what will happen. I don't know why I feel like I do; I don't know anything about tomorrow.

I'm just here, lost, in this one moment. I came home and collected some hugs and Angus left and I went out into the garden. My garden is lovely with promise right now, tomato buds in evidence and nasturtiums popping up and the zucchini seed-leaves unfurling. Some basil has even reared its head through the cold we've been having lately. There's only so much to do, though, and them I am done-- rattling around the house, pacing and typing until... something. Until whatever happens next.

I have nothing to say to you. All these words and that sledgehammer of awareness will never come down on your ribcage, splintering what's there into a million pieces and replacing it with this feeling at this moment. Of course we wouldn't want it so. Everyone is so beautiful as they are, such complex knots that the awareness I can tease out myself is nothing beside some of them. I guess that's where I am, then, staring at those compelling but so distant sparks.

I guess I'm lonely.

I guess that happens sometimes.

I guess that's gonna have to be okay.