30

Hopefully this will work, and will post when I want it to...

If it does, at this very moment (3:30 pm Pacific Time), 30 years ago, I was born. So there.

The annual birthday missive

Hello all (sorry to anyone who doesn't want this. just don't read, delete, whatever.),

Today is one week out from my 30th birthday. I don't mind turning 30 all that much. It's not a frightening number for me. If anything, I'll be happy to be out of my 20s and all they meant in my life.

But here I am, looking at what I have and haven't done with my life. I can't help but make comparisons to the achievements of others, and I can't help but always fall short. I do know that this is the result of who I compare myself to; there are plenty of comparisons in which I come out the victor. It's just not in my brain to make those comparisons, though. I make the correlations that leave me failing,
that leave me unsuccessful, that leave me crying in a corner.

Why do I do this to myself?

I wish I could say that I do it to make myself better, to challenge myself. I don't. I do it to make myself miserable. I do it to tear myself down further than anything else in the world possibly could. I do it to hit rock bottom.

'Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.'

I'd like to say that my 30s will be different, that I'll find some inner joy that will raise me above this self-destructive comparison cycle. I know I won't, though. I know I'll carry on for another 10 years, until at the verge of 40, I'm writing some missive lamenting the same damn thing.

Why are these things always so damn depressing?

I have no problem turning 30, but I do have a problem with my life. I have a problem with how little I've accomplished (no matter my accomplishments, I feel they should have and could have been so much greater). I have a problem with how little I've prepared myself (no matter the preparation, I always fall flat). I have a problem with my direction (do I have direction?).

I don't write these things for sympathy. I write them for a personal record of where I am each year. I write them in the hopes that, in some future era, they'll be of interest to somebody. In the hopes that, in some future era, I'll be of interest to somebody.

Here's what I know. I'm about to turn 30 and I don't yet have a doctorate of any kind. This bothers me. I'm about to turn 30 and I'm back to renting. This bothers me. I'm about to turn 30 and I don't have a job. This bothers me. I'm about to turn 30 and the family I grew up with no longer exists. This bothers me. I'm about to turn 30 and I don't know what I want out of life. This bothers me. I'm about
to turn 30 and all the goals I had when I was 18 seem foolish and pointless. This bothers me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

Here's what else I know. I'm about to turn 30 and I'm not going down without a fight. In spite of all my sleeping away of days, I'm still ready to punch and kick my way out of this hole. And in short, I am not afraid.

As most of my friends laugh at my crisis, thinking how quaint to be turning 30, how innocent to still have such worries, I have been rolling into a little ball. I have been a hibernating hedgehog, quills out to the world. I have protected myself by hiding, and that's the worst thing I can do, I see.

I'm about to turn 30, and I'm ready for it. I'm about to turn 30, and I'm ready to scratch its eyes out. I'm about to turn 30, and I'm ready to rise from the ashes.

Happy fucking birthday to me. I'm ready.

jen

(circulate this shit at will.)

Dreams

Though it might be an odd choice, my favourite book by Jack Kerouac is his Book of Dreams. I love the idea of taking stream of consciousness writing to that kind of ultimate extreme. Not only is it the flowing text of thought, it's thought about the most uncontrolled thoughts we have.

I've dabbled in writing down my own dreams, for my own interest, for therapy appointments, for the hope that others might be interested in the sick shit that happens in my head all night.

In all of this, there are some recurring themes: hotels, elevators, fire. I've consulted dream dictionaries -- everything from the hippie to the Freudian -- and often it seems that my dreams have no deep meaning to them, or have meanings that conflict with themselves.

So here are the bits I remember from last night:

• Going to drop off a writing assignment at my old office, walking to corner of 7th and 23rd, seeing big ad for french fry place, craving fries and hot dogs for dinner, seeing building closed, with tape blocking second entrance, which had big staircase into building. Walking under tape, scraping face, bypassing line of people waiting to get newspapers, going into warehouse room, where JT looking very old was sat on a table supervising. Went to elevator bank and waited for JT. Realised I had dog shit on the hem of my jeans, tried scraping off with shoe. JT finally gets in and doors stay open for long, we all laugh. Elevator begins to move, we have small talk. Dream ends.
• Walking to some sort of garden centre store, then on bus. See MB on a bike, recall conversation that she had just bought one, pass bike store where new bikes are all matte black painted, and used ones are battered but colourful. Get into store to buy a xmas gift for an office party, secret santa recipient is somebody who is dying and leaving, but I also know that I'm going to quit when I'm next in the office. Feel awkward about buying anything. MB comes into store to buy a book -- trashy mass market novel, which I find weird. She asks what I'm looking for, I don't want to tell her, so say a claw thing, and make gesture with hand. She makes comment about don't cats come with those still. Fluffy grey cat starts walking around in garden display I'm looking at. Rain starts and people come running in. NR is there, looking haggard. We discuss lack of sleep and he says he's been up all night because his twins are in the hospital. I feel uncomfortable because I didn't know he had twins, thought it was just a daughter. He tells of misdiagnosis... of local doctor not thinking anything of the boy's red teeth. On first visit to Dr. H, though, they did belly scans and found that both kids had some sort of heart and stomach problem. Thought it had been cured, but last night they started bleeding and having aneurysms or some sort of attack. He spent all night in the hospital and told me how sweaty he had been there, and how he had to remember to sleep on his side of the bed when he was under the covers there, and not try to sleep on top of the covers on his wife's side. NR wanders off, and I look at tacky frog lawn ornaments. Dream ends.

So those are the two I remember from last night. They usually trickle back into my brain as the day goes on, so maybe I'll add more later.

Identity

I'm not going to get into why I've been pondering identity over the past few days. Those involved in any of it are probably already having a snide laugh, thinking that they've inspired me, or fooled me, or god knows what else.

Everyone has multiple identities, and that's a simple fact. The whole best foot forward, meeting the parents, interview, wearing the dry clean only clothes version of you is a pretty different identity than the version where you're sitting on the couch, wearing the same underwear for three days, watching trashy tv, in the middle of what starts to look like an odd concentration camp for alcohol.

Yeah, deep down it's the same person. Sure. Not arguing there. But there are different parts to any person. Picture it how you want... devil on one shoulder, angel on the other. Id, ego, and superego. Whatever. Point is, everyone knows that there are these component parts that make us up, but nobody likes to think that they might have to deal with anyone else's parts.

Some people who know me will only know one aspect, and that's how I want to keep it. Maybe they know my political work, or my writing, or my health problems, or my sick sense of humour, or my work pimping art, or something else. Maybe they knew me when I was 17, maybe when I was 25. All of those bits come together to form who I am now, but it's only natural to protect yourself against anyone knowing everything.

If somebody else knew everything about me, that might just mean that I'd have to accept all those parts of me. I'd have to get to know myself.

So I don't want you to know everything about me (yet here I am writing all sorts of crap that's stumbling around in my head), but I get a bit offended when you don't tell me everything about you (see previous post about wanting to know you more than you know yourself, etc.). Guess what... we all do it.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm happier with people who openly hide themselves. Don't want me to know who you are? Fine. But don't make a game out of it. You can keep your secrets, and I'll keep mine. We can interact with those secrets tucked under our arms, hoisted in hobo sacks over our shoulders. The parts that we're happy to have public can be friends for what they have in common, not for what's dangling in that tatty hankie at the end of that stick.

So I'm ok with this. Now I just need to convince everyone else to be, too. I find that if you don't prod and pick the scabs of conversations, people tell you the most unexpected things. For most of my friends, the defining moments of confession and conversation came when the pretenses were dropped and that little glimmer of humanity came through. Maybe it dropped out of a hole in the hankie.

We all have things we want to keep hidden, and we all lie to each other and ourselves. There's no point in wasting time worrying about what lies might be out there.

Almost time...

When I started this thing, this little bit of internet turf, I had this idea that I would write every day until I turned 30. Well, with months-long gaps, I guess that didn't work out.

I've got one month and 23 days now, and I'm not exactly sure how to play them. Do I fuck off the world and have self-destructive fun? Do I get my head down and plow through all the work in front of me? Do I start learning Japanese? Do I plan a party?

I honestly don't know. I'm veering away from self-destructive fun, despite flirting with it over the past month or so. And I really don't want to spend all this time, when we actually have nice weather, tied to a computer, toiling away.

So I think it's going to be a Japanese phrasebook, too. Learning a language isn't a strong point for my brain, and there's no way I'm going to speak Japanese beyond the five days I'm there.

I guess that leaves me with the party thing. Great. How do I wrangle friends who are either imaginary or don't give a fuck about me into coming to Weston for a day and then getting absolutely shitfaced with me in Bristol for a night? Always a problem.

I've never had a really good birthday. With it being in the middle of summer, it always seemed to coincide with people going on forms of family vacations. I had sleepovers where nobody slept over. I had afternoon parties where people came late and/or left early. I had fancy dinners that ended in people going out with others and/or arguments. I had one where I moped around mourning the death of my dog, who had needed to be put down the day before.

Most birthdays have been depressing as fuck for me, and amazingly it's a different reason each year. There have actually only been a few where I was upset about my age, and I'm now actually looking forward to 30. I'm kind of sick of being in my 20s. They haven't been good to me, so fuck them. I'm going to embrace being a mature lady of 30.

Maybe that's overstating it.

I'm going to be happy to be in my 30s, so I can lord my maturity over those who are not in their 30s or above.

So... How best to mark this occassion? So far the idea I've come up with is a barbecue and paint jam in Weston, then unabashed drunkenness in Bristol. Of course, it'll have to be either before or after I actually turn 30, since that day I'll be sat on Mount Fuji listening to music.

I'm open to suggestions of idea refinement and dates. And I really, really hope people show up. Otherwise, I might as well stay 29.

Burnt

The sun fills me with anxiety.

Every year, around this time, we get a few sunny days that remind us that there's something out there other than gloom and cold. Of course, this is the weather I grew up with... SoCal, drought, blah blah all that crap I always talk about. So it's this weird sense of being a child again.

The sun is nice and all, except for my tendency to crisp up like a human slab of bacon. My problem is that it forces me to think about so many fucking things. Where I've come, what I've done. How am I different from that little kid running around North Long Beach, thrilled with her giant as fuck cassette Walkman?

I'm not.

My anxieties are different these days... dissertations, writing, money, other seemingly 'grown up' things. But the base of it is the same. How will I know if I'm actually happy?

Maybe that links back to all my brain fuzziness, the chemical imbalances, the abuse I've ladled on top of those. Or maybe, just maybe, that's fundamentally me. Maybe I'm just an unhappy person.

This isn't to say I don't enjoy myself, or like my life. I just always want... more. Better. The Best. It pushes me forward in ways others don't seem to be pushed. What I have isn't ever good enough, so I'm always fighting for more. That's behind my drive to get a fucking PhD for, really, no reason other than that I want one.

But it also causes these moments, where I can feel my skin burning, and want to run away from everything because nothing is good enough yet. Because I'm not good enough. These are the moments, sitting in the late Spring sun, that I become destructive.

Spring is the time for rebirth, according to all those legends. I'm sure we've all seen some Joseph Campbell shit about it. Late spring is my time. It's the time where I cast off coats, and reassess. It's the time where I tell the world to fuck off and make way for me.

It's a time of false bravado. It's a time of utter, crippling fear. I don't like change. It scares me more than most things. But... here it is. It's sunny and I'm thinking of ways to make it better. Ways to push things forward. Ways to be the fucking best.

Weakness

People are only interesting when they're weak.

I love finding those weaknesses. I love asking the questions you don't want me to ask. I'm still surprised, every single time, that so many people will answer. I think it's an unspoken Jungian shared secret: we all want to confess our sins.

The Catholics should be happy. Seems they've gotten something right. Of course, it's something they share with all of the Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysts. Everyone is desperate to have their story told, but nobody knows how to do it.

It seems wrong to just shout it into the world. (Maybe that's why all of us writers are absolute cunts.) So you sit there waiting for somebody to be interested in that story. I think that's what most people take to be love. We all just want somebody to listen.

I like to be on both sides of it. I like to confess, but I also like to hear confessions. I like being the one people can tell their darkest secrets, their worst moments. Tell me about the bad things, tell me what scares you, show me your scars.

I'm drawn to weakness. Partially, this is a desire to make things better, to heal, to perfect. It's also morbid curiosity, something to make my fucked up life seem just ever so slightly better. Mostly, though, I think it's just how I connect to humanity.

We all have weaknesses, and we spend so much of our life trying to hide them. That's boring. I want to know you better than you know yourself. I want to find that tiny little memory that makes you look into nothing for a split second, rolling something around mindlessly in your hand, before you give a slight cough and carry on with your sentence. That's when you're human. That's when you're interesting. That's when you're weak.

So go on... tell me a story.

And Jonny... you can steal this now. I won't tell.

Blocks

I think most of the time my writer's block is self-imposed. It's not a lack of things to write, or desire to write them, or even ability to write. It's fear of what will happen once I put that writing out into the world.

Words are so easily misinterpreted. It's a great bit of ass-covering if you're a lit student... there is no wrong answer blah blah blah. But if you're the writer, trying to field questions from people you know, or people who think they know you... it's a bitch.

Whenever I've put myself fully into writing, it's always been the same... People mutter, look at me sideways, then slowly creep up with queries and concerns. Do I really feel that way? It'll be ok. When did that happen? Is there anything they can do to help?

What people can do to help is to accept that writing is writing. Yes, there are some reflections of me in there, but it's like a funhouse mirror version of me. On one page, I might have a big head, while on another I have elephantiasis-infested cankles. It's me, but it's not.

So what do I do? How the fuck can I get over this block? It's self-imposed, but not. Maybe this is why so many authors are faceless hermits. Maybe Pynchon and Salinger got it right.

But that's the deep dark secret behind it all... I don't want to be faceless in this. Writing is all I have to get attention, and I want that attention. I don't want it in the form of pseudo-concern about my welfare and whether this that or t'other was true. I want praise. I want pats on the head and people loving me for my talent.

I want the same affirmation of my talent that I've wanted since I was a kid. The same damn drive that has given me ulcers and mental breakdowns, trying to be the best, being the best, thinking the best isn't enough. I don't know whether all that genius kid bullshit caused it, or whether it's just part of the mentality that we bring to the genius kid stuff. Either way, I'm an overachiever and a show-off. I do things well and I damn well want some recognition for it.

But... there's the sad little person behind all that. I can talk the big talk about genius and rewards. Under it all, though, is the crippling fear of not being good enough, and of having all of this crap be absolutely meaningless. It's a deep, dark fear that all the pain and suffering was just pain and suffering. It's such a fear, I can't even think of it in passing without being stopped, the wind knocked out of me, tears coming to my eyes.

I'm scared.