Some observations:
The hardwood floors in my new apartment look like a slick wood-colored pool and light glows throughout the living room all day. The patio is often too windy and cold to sit on from the ocean breeze, but oh that ocean breeze. When you do sit on the patio, the smells of Indian and Persian spices are inescapable. It's lonely at night while I'm waiting for Boyan to come home, and my mind is too numb to write. I spent three weeks moving and still have things to do at the old apartment.
I am physically and emotionally exhausted.
Last Saturday in the frenzy of packing and loading up my car to drive to West L.A. I found out that I was rejected from Bennington. The craziness of the day made it impossible for me to digest the reality of it at the time, which I think helped me get through the disappointment. But I'm sure that once my life has settled down, the blows of rejection will hit me and I will break down. I haven't really been able to tell anyone about it yet, besides friends and family, because admitting my failure to others feels like I am openly admitting that I am a failure.
I'm too sensitive to open myself up to criticism from my enemies or compassion from my friends. Both would be like scratching an open wound, drawing blood and prolonging the healing process.
I have to remind myself over and over again not to listen to the voice inside my head that tells me that I'm not good enough or smart enough. If I write everyday no matter if it's good or if its crap it's strengthening my writing muscle. Every time I do it, I get stronger.
"Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness."
-- Aaron Copeland
We're living in boxes right now, too much stuff and too little storage.
I have to give some of my books away because I have no room for them.
Heidi's nails click clack against the wood floor like a woman in stilettos and she hates it; but if we let her, she'd sit on the patio all day and night.
We have directv now, and I love and hate it in equal measure. I haven't read anything new since finishing Ines of My Soul on audio book. I miss the drive only because I miss the time I spent listening to books on tape.
I take the bus now, and in the week I've been a patron of public transportation I've witnessed:
- A homeless man wearing an obama beanie
An Asian or Native American woman with dementia sitting at the bus stop wearing a red dress, string of pearls and a tiara. All the lines that pass at the bus stop had come and gone and she remained seated on the bench diligently applying and reapplying lipstick to her thin lips.
A man with bananas approached me and said,
"Hey Man, Can I have your number? I'm single."
To which I replied, "I'm married."
And he said, "Oh, your married? But I got these bananas."
While waiting at the bus stop on Santa Monica blvd and 3rd street, a man driving a black convertible Porsche blasting high trilling soprano's solo in an unfamiliar opera. He stared at me as I stared at him behind my dark sunglasses.
Today I was told that I have a nice smile and to have a nice day.
Jay Smooth, by the way, is my new hero. He speaks the true, unfiltered, and beautiful truth. I want to be him when I grow up.
He also has a twitter which you can follow here.
Speaking of which, I was thinking the other day about the promises I made to myself when I was younger. When I was about 13 or 14, one of my biggest fears was becoming old and out of touch with what was going on in the world around me, and I remembering telling myself that no matter how old I got I would continue to watch MTV. Because once I stopped watching MTV it would be over. I would become officially irrelevant as a human being.
Well, I don't watch MTV anymore (except for the hills and the city, my guilty pleasures) and in a world dominated by social media, I find myself recoiling from the hyper-connected disingenuous worlds of facebook and twitter. I HATE twitter. Hate hate hate. The idea of "following" someone sounds terrible and a little bit creepy. But the truth is everyone is doing it. People are building marketing strategies around it, and not having it on your resume makes you a less desirable candidate. But seriously, how cool can twitter be if even Sarah Palin has an account? I thought the whole point of being young and fresh was that what YOU do is above the understanding of the older generations. But thats not the case. Grandparents have facebook accounts and major CEO's, actors, and public figures are on twitter.
The craziness that is social media has turned me off so much that I've even considered removing my facebook, but A. I kind of need it for my job and B. I feel like I would totally lose touch from everyone I know if I did.
Closing my facebook account would be the equivalent of walking into the desert, finding a cave and becoming a hermit.
This past year I removed my birthday from my profile two weeks before the actual day, and I wasn't surprised that no one wished me a happy birthday when the day finally came. It was only after my husband wrote something on my wall that other people noticed. The way I look at it is, my true friends and people that love me called me or sent me a card, and I'd rather have that then have some site remind people that it would be polite to congratulate me on another year of living.
Does my distaste for this new form of media make me...old? I feel like I can't rebel against twitter and facebook without resigning from public life and damaging my career.
What's a girl to do?
All I want to do is rip out my TV, turn off my computer and surround myself with books and paper and pens and nature. I want to go to a cafe and have a coffee with a friend and ask them how they are doing, rather than read about it in their status updates. It's like we've replaced REAL face-to-face interaction with virtual interaction and people don't realize that it isn't a one-to-one trade. We are all losing out and closing ourselves off to the world around us and it's scary!
I'm going to think long and hard about this whole facebook thing.
Until then, I'll leave you with Ten Other Things Martin Luther King Said as read by Jay Smooth.
PREACH!
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