Over the past two days, I’ve spent a whole lot of time looking for jobs with very little progress. There are a few that I’ll apply to, but it is honestly hard to get the motivation to do much when so many things are up in the air. In the next few days, or at least by the end of the month I have to notify my landlord that I’ll be vacating. I’ve been putting this off. I’ve been hoping that some a-ha life altering event will change things up – that I’ll see a path lit up, that a job will miraculously fall in to my lap, a sugar mamma will want to take me in, or I’ll somehow get rich enough to put all of this off a little while longer. I feel like a petulant child when I fold my arms across my chest in an I-don’t-want-to stance, but to some degree, I don’t want to. I don’t want to take some job just to take a job. I don’t want to move just to lower my bills. I don’t want to sit here and vent just because I feel stuck with so few options… again.
A Pain in the Neck
I’ve avoided writing these last two days because I’ve been preoccupied with trying to figure out my situation, which just gets frustrating, and I don’t like writing when I’m pissed off. A few days ago I wrote a blog post, now hidden, in which I was feeling pretty ticked at my ex-fiancee for her tendency to distort the truth about arguments and her/our past… I also get ticked, unfairly, because I offered to support her as she looked for a new job or thought about a career switch, and now, she’s nowhere to be found. None of this is her fault, but it makes me wish I had her help – it’s that reminder that we were going to be there for each other, and only one of us was willing to honor that. I don’t like to think ill of her – I don’t like to think ill of anyone. I needed to vent, which was cathartic. I needed to get in the jab that for a woman concerned about her legacy, she seems to be burning a lot of bridges. I hid the post because I’m not at my best when I’m not thinking kind thoughts about other people or the world in general. I suppose, as a bit of karmic payback, I tweaked something in my neck the other day while exercising, and have been feeling a low-grade pain all day for the last day-and-a-half. I have a pretty high tolerance for pain, but it’s the fact that it’s been chronic (nearly every minute) that is starting to get to me.
Some Reading
I started reading Eat, Pray, Love this morning. I didn’t get very far. I doubt I will get very far. The writing is decent enough, though I wouldn’t call it poetic. There’s an air about it as though the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, is constantly yet casually trying to impress. She talks about offering up thanks “First in English. Then in Italian. And then – just to get the point across – in Sanskrit.” If the point was to let the reader know that she knows Sanskrit – well done. And because I’m only a few pages in, I don’t know what the overall effect will be, but she very clearly tries to set some type of moral boundaries on what she will and won’t discuss in he memoir. She says she won’t use the name of her guru so as to protect her privacy and honor her sacred teachings. She talks a little bit about wanting out of her marriage but says that topic is off the table. At best, I get the sense of an erudite and accomplished woman who will let the reader in a bit, but won’t risk any true vulnerability. Already, her moments of weakness seem contrived. I’ll stick with it a little while longer – mostly because I’m curious about how she approached her journey of self discovery and freedom. There could be parallels with where I am. In at least one instance it allowed me to see something that I haven’t felt but wonder if either my ex-fiancee or ex-wife felt (this duality of wanting to stay in her marriage and wanting to get out of it) of which Gilbert will only say:
…and therefore the chronicle of our marriage’s failure will remain untold here. I also will not discuss here all the reasons why I did still want to be his wife, or all his wonderfulness, or why I loved him and why I married him and why I was unable to imagine life without him. I won’t open any of that. Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences….
The complexities are stated, but it feels like such a missed opportunity for showing human authenticity. I feel like a better writer would have made me ache for them and their impossible duality – Gilbert doesn’t take us there. Instead, she slips quietly out the back door without consequences.
Shortly after those few pages, I picked up one of my volumes of poetry (Stephen Dunn, of course). His poem “On the Way to Work” made me laugh enough that I had to stop reading. It’s probably not funny to most people. He begins by talking about a woman driving and her bumper sticker that reads, “Life is a bitch. And the you die.” He says his own sticker response would be “New Hope For The Dead.” He thinks they could “have become friends / or the kind of enemies / who must talk into the night, / just one mistake away from love?” He pulls up next to her “glancing over, as one does / on an airplane at someone’s book. / Short, straight hair. No make-up. / A face that had been a few places / and only come back from some.” Those were the lines that made me lose it a bit – I’m still laughing at them. I can’t tell if they’re cruel or funny or sad – they touch on everything. He turns off on to another street… “She didn’t follow, not in this / bitch of a life. / And I had so much to tell her / before we die…” I’m not expecting Gilbert to be able to explode such small moments in to humor and sadness the way Dunn does – though I hope.
Dreams
I put the books down and went for a long walk. When I go down to the river and across the bridge, it takes me about two hours to complete the nearly 7-mile round trip (6.5). This is something I won’t be able to do when I work. I’ll have to get back in to running because it takes less time. The bitch about being middle-aged is that you begin to realize how valuable time is.
As I walked, I recalled one of my dreams from early this morning. I woke up twice from startling dreams – a mind not at ease.
In the first dream, I was arguing with my ex-fiancee – we shouted and made threats and behaved passive-aggressively. I said I was leaving (my threat), and then got even more upset because she didn’t try to stop me. The dream then jumped to a nightclub where I was on a date – maybe with my ex, I’m not quite sure. We were watching a couple dance – they were a little tipsy. The guy bumped in to a very large dude who looked like a bigger version of the character Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction. The guy that bumped him was a skinny little leisure suit of a white guy. My date tried to intervene and I had to intervene in her intervention. I’m pretty sure the little white guy got squashed…. I think I remember seeing his body on the floor twisted in ways a body shouldn’t twist. Not too long after that, the big guy is making his way back over to where we were. He see us and recognizes me. He’s pissed and huffing and puffing and growing larger as he marches towards me. I know he takes a swing and I duck it. But then he leans in and just sort of smothers me – he’s got to be twice my size. As he does this, he opens his mouth and he has the red gag ball in it that Wallace has in the movie. He’s going to bite my face off…. and that’s when I woke up. I was upset, and wrote some notes down and eventually fell back asleep.
A little before dawn I woke from a second dream. This too involved my ex-fiancee. We were together, but having some issues. We had a really nice, normal, sweet, and intimate night together. Dinner and wine and lots of talking and tender moments – though with a hint of finality, a once last night feeling. I don’t know if in the dream it was the next morning, or the morning after, but we get to a point where she was getting ready for work (and at this point, it’s not even clear if it’s her, but instead her blended with a generic she – the face seemed vaguely like hers). As she’s getting ready, looking for keys and her bag, I’m giving the “well… I guess this is it” look and talk. That clear pause where you hope against all hope that the silence is filled on the other end by some type of coming together. I hadn’t packed my things but I was going to be gone by the end of the day – I think I was moving to Arizona. Like the other dream, I wanted her to stop me, to ask me to stay. She was crying and focused on getting ready and not being late. She couldn’t bring herself to ask me not to leave, and for my part, I didn’t want to leave – I wasn’t moving on to anything else in particular. I told her that her indifference was why I HAD to leave. She and I did have a conversation like that once. I told her she always took the arguments up to the edge of the cliff and that I was always the one to patiently bring us back… that at some point, she needs to bring us back before I stop trying. I think that was the night she gave me her mother’s ring. She wanted me to know that she didn’t want to go anywhere. I woke from the dream feeling lost and tired. I immediately thought of a quote that I posted on here “Home is where somebody notices you are no longer there. – Aleksander Hemon” And while the dream may seem like it was about the relationship (and it was), the anxiety I felt when I woke was tied to moving out, not having packed, not knowing where I was going or why. I felt like I was leaving before I was ready and that I had too many things left undone, unsaid, and unseen. That’s certainly how I felt about my engagement, but it’s also how I feel about Memphis.
Walking
I jotted some notes down on my walk about that second dream. I met a woman who was a Penn State grad (I was wearing a PSU hat). We talked a bit. And then I walked and thought. The rest of my walk was spent thinking about what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. I’m probably more determined now than I’ve ever been to strike an appropriate work/life balance. I see far too many people who never take vacations who never take time off. As it is, I’m already lamenting the fact that I won’t be able to spend three hours of my day walking and thinking and being out in the world. The only way I think I can get closer to the life I’d like is to either do consulting work, or find work that isn’t all consuming. I want to have time for me and eventually a partner, and I hate the thought of robbing either of those two things for a job. Yesterday, I spent a few hours consulting (volunteer) for a large nonprofit network of farm markets in D.C. I liked being on the call and learning about them and brainstorming some solutions for them. I wouldn’t mind getting paid to do that. I walked past empty shops and wondered what I would do with the space. I thought about my desire to be a part of something, to have ownership of something, to want to build something. To get in on the ground floor. I thought about how that also applies to a relationship – two people recreating themselves and showing each other the basement…. This afternoon I looked at duplex houses -where I could live in one half and the rent from the other would cover a fair amount of my mortgage.
I spent my afternoon grasping at straws and poking at the edges to see where opportunity might take me. And then there’s the pain in the neck…. life’s a bitch and then you die. With that, I think I’ll take another walk.