I turned thirty yesterday!

View the awesomeness here.

I wish there was a magic alcoholic drink you could drink, that would get you drunk, yet allow you to wake up early the following morning feeling healthy and clean and chipper, as if you'd spent last night drinking green tea instead.  I always just feel so shitty after I drink, but it's so damn fun at the time.

I had a very creepy dream last night.  I don't remember all of it, but this was the last part: I was lying in my bed in my old bedroom in the house that I grew up in, only the room was barer than it should have been, some of the furniture was missing.  I was lying on the wrong side of the bed - the whole time I was growing up I had slept on the side next to the door, but now I was lying on the side nearer the wall.  Across from the bed were the two windows and the windowseat, but there were no curtains, and one of the windows was open and wind was blowing in - it was dark outside.  I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and I noticed that there was a man's button-up shirt hanging on my partially-open door - it was white, and it was blowing in the wind, but somehow the way the sleeves were moving wasn't consistent with the wind that was blowing, and it felt like the shirt was moving by itself.  Then suddenly there was a loud ringing sound from somewhere in the house outside my room.  I tried to get up and see what it was, but I couldn't move from the bed.  I think I partially woke up at that point but I couldn't wake up all the way and instead I fell back into dreaming sleep, and the exact same thing happened again - like the dream rewound and played over - I was lying on the wrong side of my bed watching this white shirt move, and then the ringing sound happened again.  I struggled really hard to move and get off the bed but it was so hard - and then I pulled myself up out of sleep like pulling yourself out of water - all this resistance to coming out the dream - and then I found myself lying in real life in my apartment, and it was 3:30, and I had that scared feeling you get sometimes in a dark quiet apartment; I kept remembering the way the white shirt was moving back and forth, and I was afraid that there was someone in my apartment.  Eventually I turned on the light and got up and made myself walk around and of course there was nobody there, but there was just something so creepy in the way my room looked all wrong from the wrong side of the bed, and that white shirt moving in the wind but not with the wind....
 
 

Maybe there’s a world out there.
It’s raining, or empty with sunshine,
Abandoned to show its pavement and parking lots
in satellite photographs, where air conditioning ducts
on rooftops and the flattened tops of trees
are caught in a frozen summer, until the next pass.
From here, the camera looks like a star.
If we zoom close enough, we can find ourselves,
pale round blurs on a fire escape.

It could be avoiding us.
Our mythologies are so complex
it would take a month of campfires to explain,
and the gods like simple dances,
chalked arrows leading us in and out.
But we juggle bottles of wine
and balance on the bedframe, looking down;
we twist each others’ hearts like acrobats,
all of it blindfold and in the dark.

Is it a wonder the world cries in a corner
with fear for our fall, or turns an indifferent
shoulder?  We weep such small tears
and our laughter is hardly audible.
Maybe this bedroom, this kitchen, this
mouth, these hands, are everything
after all, each moment reflected
not in that distant orbiting lens, but only
in our breathing voices, here and now,
here and now, here and now.

Immediately after I dragged myself out of bed this morning with a headache, bound and determined to go to work and be responsible, I stepped in cat vomit.  (In better news, the day has been improving steadily since then.)  Joey gets hold of my hair ties, and chews through them, and then eats them.  The last time this happened the hair tie came out the back end, which was really traumatic both for me and him, because I had to pull it out.  That was possibly the most disgusting thing I've ever had to do.  This time, thank God, it came out the front end, although I really wish he had barfed it up somewhere other than in the middle of my hallway along the direct route from my bedroom to my bathroom.  At least there wasn't carpet there.  I don't know where he got hold of it though!  I thought I had hidden them all.  Oh Joey.

I got two responses from the three cover letters I sent on Friday, one "thanks, we'll keep you on file" from Johnson Banks, and one "your portfolio is great but i don't think we have any openings but i'll forward you to HR anyway" from Ogilvy. (Ogilvy is a big fucking deal. They do campaigns for fucking DOVE. And Motorola. And Cisco and Mattel and IBM just to name a few. I am seriously not worthy to lick the shoes of their head designer.) The third company, a small agency in Kent, didn't respond and I don't expect them to. They only have five designers on their staff. That one was a long shot.

So all in all, prospects for moving to London aren't looking that swell at the moment, although I'd increase the likelihood slightly from a week ago, maybe to 20% from 15%, just because of the niceness of that Ogilvy contact. I need to get on some job sites and do some cold e-mails to other London companies. And I also need to start looking in Boston. My professor, who was all about hiring me for this new entry-level position they might have at their agency, is blatantly ignoring all my bugging e-mails, so looks like the prospect of that is ALSO going downhill. Huge bummer for me, because I was really psyched about working for him.

I hate, hate, hate job searching. Anyone want to hire a graphic designer? I'm pretty good!

today was total job hell.  through no fault of my own (well, ok, maybe it was like 10% my fault, but only because i didn't check some stuff that i don't really have to check) the department is in the hole $53,200.  let me tell you, when you think your budget is balanced, it really sucks when the business office calls you and is like, "hey, where's our $53,200?"  it turns out that some grant money that was supposed to be transferred into my account was never transferred, and the person who administers the grant didn't know it was supposed to be transferred so spent it on other stuff, so now the money doesn't exist anymore and we are having to scramble around frantically at the end of the fiscal year trying to pull $53,200 out of our asses.  woohoo!  it's wicked fun.

anybody out there looking for a graphic designer?

I fixed my toilet all by myself this morning. It was making this funny sound and I was like, hmm, maybe I'll call Jeff, but then I was like, hey. I am a Master of both Arts AND Fine Arts. Surely I can outsmart a toilet. So I took the top off and looked around in there and figured out how it worked, and then saw that this hooky thing was caught on this stick thing, and I pulled it off, and bam, it worked again! I experienced a feeling of great accomplishment and self-sufficiency. Men are nice for sex, and for bringing you down a few notches when your ego gets too big, and I still need them to kill my spiders, but I no longer require one to fix my toilet. Hear me roar.

Fucking seriously. Why don't we just stick that knife in a little further and twist it around a little?

when grief becomes a poem
there can't be a beginning;
even april provides no metaphor.

i'm fumbling with wet words
that tumble and collide, and slip into the dark.

some nights my body does the weeping
and my soul is quiet, but love in all its forms
is an absence i can taste in every moment.

i'm trying to call, but my hundred mouths open
to say nothing: spring limps in on a crutch

and birds fall, with pinned wings,
from every ghost of a tree.

Oh God, my head. I am never drinking again.

OK! I am ready to stop missing Sean already! It's been over a month and I'm still in love with him and I hate it, I hate it, why can't I get this person out of my system? Oh gods of the brokenhearted, how about some freakin' mercy here? Move me on already!!

I dreamed last night that Sean and I had decided to spend one more night together.  We were in this room at a fancy hotel and it was all very candlelit and romantic and he was about to kiss me, when suddenly I felt this strange feeling in my mouth and one of my teeth fell out.  I spit it out into my hand and it was like that caused a chain reaction and suddenly all the rest of my teeth started to feel loose and some of them started to crumble into little pieces.  I ran into the bathroom to try to push my teeth back in, and then there was a knock on the door and it was a tall dark-haired woman looking for a band-aid.  I looked around but couldn't find any and I was kind of annoyed that she wasn't noticing that all my teeth were falling out.  Then later there was a part where I was at a bar with these two blond girls, and my mom was there, and then my boss's brother showed up and he looked just like my boss, only he had this thick brown curly hair.  I left the bar and went back to the hotel where I was supposed to meet Sean but then I thought about it and I decided it probably wasn't a good idea for us to spend the night together after all, so I asked the guy at the front desk for directions on how to get home, only I was actually asking for directions to Waltham and not Brookline, and the guy at the front desk drove me to Dunkin Donuts in a silver Prius.

I'm sure the beginning of this dream is telling me that my insecurity is keeping me from participating fully in relationships, which is certainly the case.  The fact that I wanted to go back to Waltham, where I lived with Garrett, instead of going to my own place in Brookline, probably indicates that I'm feeling scared about being alone.  The fact that I went to Dunkin Donuts in a silver Prius probably means that I really hate jogging.

I just practiced my pieces for the Astronomy Department Musical Soiree and I actually sound pretty good.  I sucked a lot at first, but every time I do them I think I'm improving, and today I had a really good day.  If I sing as well at the actual performance as I did today, I'll be happy with myself.  I'm learning how to sing again!  It feels good.

Today I was trying to balance a plate of sushi against the wall while flicking off the light switch with my nose, and I dropped the plate. Cleaning soy sauce splatters off your walls, floor, and refrigerator is not an activity I would recommend to anyone seeking inner peace.

last night, inexplicably, i woke up completely at three a.m., and didn't get back to sleep till five-thirty.  somewhere in those two and a half hours, i decided (again) that i need to take better care of my body.  i mean, the whole point of yoga and all that is the mind-body connection, right?  and right now my mind/heart/soul/etc. is not in the best of shape and could use any help it can get.  so if there really is this mind/body connection thing and it's not a bunch of hippie codswallop, then that means my body, and therefore my mind, will start feeling better if i stop making it run on pop-tarts and bacardi.  so here's my plan:

a) i should stop drinking alcohol (i've been drinking too much lately).  I should also stop drinking caffeine.  Instead, I should drink more water.
b) i should start exercising more instead of just saying i'm going to exercise more (that strategy, though really easy on the muscles, hasn't actually resulted in any weight loss, unless you count the like two calories i burn moving my lips to say, "i should really go to the gym today."). 
c) i should start doing yoga for real. 
d) i should deep-breathe and meditate, or at least try to deep-breathe and meditate without driving myself nuts. 
e) i should stop eating crap. 

what's the worst that could result from changing my lifestyle like this?  it's certainly not going to hurt me.  i'll probably, in fact, start feeling better in many ways.  so why is it so difficult to actually do?  it's that road-to-hell thing.  i really need to get off it.

This afternoon I went to Espresso Royale to have coffee with Tony, and I got a latte, and there, in the pattern of foam on the top, was clearly: a heart.  It looked like this:
And I was all like, "Tony!  There's a heart in my latte!  What do you think this means?  Am I going to find love?"  And Tony said, "It looks like a turnip to me."  I said, "WTF, Tony.  It's clearly a heart."  And Tony said, "What are those little things sprouting out of the top of it then?"  And I said with dignity, "Those are shooting stars of joy."  And Tony said, "If it's a heart, then it has blood spouting out of its aorta."

Seriously.  Men.

Why do we hang on so desperately and determinedly to parts of our lives that are over, relationships we know won't work?  Why is it so hard to let go?  My friend Nicki says I need to focus on the future, that I'll meet other people who are better suited to me, all that, etc.  But it just doesn't seem real to me.  I can't imagine myself with anyone else.

I think it's because this man who is better suited to me, this shadowy possibility/figment of my imagination, just can't compete with the memories I have of real, flesh-and-blood, solid, comforting Sean, who was there, lying in my bed, playing GameCube in my living room, reaching things down for me from my kitchen shelves, playing with my hair.  Sure, there are other people in the world for me, and I'm sure I'll meet them and we'll get along fine and live happily ever after and all that.  But I don't find that thought comforting yet.  The known quantity, even though I know I can't have it, is so much more real and attractive to me than the unknown.

Jeff pointed out to me the other day that what I'm missing isn't even really Sean, but my idealized version of Sean, which isn't truth at all.  He said, "Remember how miserable you were in February, trying to deal with him being in love with someone else?  You don't miss that, do you?"  I said, "no," and he said, "Well that's the truth, that's how it really was.  You're not remembering that stuff."

He has a point.  It's so easy to remember the good things and forget about the bad times we had, especially there at the end when everything was falling apart.  But even while everything was falling apart, I was trying desperately hard to hold it together, because I wanted it to work so badly, and I did that because I loved him so much I couldn't bear to let him go.  I still can't bear to let him go.  But I have to, I have to, or I'll go crazy.  LJ friends, I need advice.  How do I let this go?

Today I rented a black Ford Focus and drove two and a half hours northwest to visit my best friend from high school. She and her husband are working as farm apprentices on this little six-acre organic farm in Conway, Mass, which is about five miles north of the middle of nowhere. They live in a tiny little one-room cabin in the woods with only enough electricity to run a lightbulb and no plumbing and for lunch I had an omelette made from eggs that had about an hour previously been inside a chicken. It was crazy and insane and delicious. It was so good to be there and to see her smiling face. It was so good to get in a car and drive. It was so good to sing along with the Indigo Girls again. I'm think I'm finally starting to feel a little better.



This lamb had been BORN YESTERDAY. It was quite possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life.