Caterwauling

No, I’m not going anywhere, but I’m thinking about not coming back. Happy holidays, and be well. Stay out of trouble and take care of yourselves.

On iTunes: Jewel, “Deep Water”

Although I am admittedly not much fun to be around these days, Ted and his incredible family beat me over the head and dragged me out of the cave for The. Best. Meal. Ever. He’s nice enough to give you the recipes, so I suggest you copy them and try them ASAP (and have me over to dinner so I can taste them to make sure you made them right!).

In addition to being a terrific friend, Ted can cook! My belly is a happy one. And, not to mention, I got leftovers! w00t!

That’s not to say that Life didn’t pull on the shitkickers and remind me that happiness is fleeting. (Turning the hairy eyeball toward these asshats. Merry f’ing Christmas to you, too. I’ve got a full litterbox with your names on it!)

On iTunes: The Byrds, “Turn Turn Turn”

Nights are the worst for me — that’s when I do my hard-core fretting about the future. I do my best work in the early evening, so you’d think I’d be relaxed, but no, that’s when the brain switch flips into the upright position and spirals into orbit.

This morning, I awakened on the couch and saw Bon Jovi performing on NBC. *drool* Called my mom to alert her to the broadcast, and afterward, we ended up talking about a family friend whose luck makes mine seem like a tiptoe through the tulips.

After hearing about his kids who keep wrecking his wife’s car (one teen got drunk and totaled it last night and left the scene. Idiot.) and how his wife took his van (that he uses for business) and littered the inside with McDonald’s wrappers and wouldn’t even pick him up from work because she wanted to go shopping. He had to beg someone for a ride home, only to get there at 9 p.m. to see the house in shambles, no food to eat and the wife nagging him to go get milk for the ungrateful kids. What does she do for a living? Spend his money. She doesn’t work, doesn’t look after the kids, doesn’t do shit. Oh, and what was she shopping for, you might ask? A brand-new car.

So, after hearing all of that, I felt terrible for him. To work his whole life and to end up with that crazy mess on his hands. The man has not a moment to himself and not a shred of sanity left. The wife/kids destroy everything and can’t even save him a plate from dinner at the end of the day.

I wouldn’t say this makes me feel better, but it does give me a broader perspective that everybody’s life sucks right now. Really. Sure, I see all the people in the stores with their bursting-full shopping bags and their hideous holiday decorations, and I get envious (minus the ugly decorations!). This year, Santa Claus isn’t coming, and you know what? It’s surprisingly a relief. I don’t think I’ve ever been materialistic to a point where receiving a gift would actually matter to me. And it’s forced me to think creatively about how to enjoy the holidays at little to no cost. I’ll visit the National Gallery of Art and hit the ice rink at the Sculpture Garden and maybe even finally get to Eastern Market.

What this brings me to are reasons to be happy, even if it’s ephemeral. So many of us are struggling right now — in diametrically different ways, but still trying desperately to hold ourselves together in one way or another — so if we still have our health, let’s celebrate it. Let’s try something we’ve never done before. Let’s be our own miracles. Let’s not curse out the moron who cuts us off on the interstate but hope instead that he or she doesn’t hurt anybody in a careless fit.

I’m a big believer in what goes around, comes around. If all you have to give someone this holiday season is a smile, then by all means, do so. If you have the power to do more, then that’s even better, but it really doesn’t take much to turn somebody’s world around. When people are at their lowest points, all they really want is an acknowledgement that they still belong to the human race. And I want to thank everyone who has done that and so much more for me.

On iTunes: A Girl Named Eddy, “People Who Used to Dream”

When you spend as much time alone as I do, you’re bound to meet your demons head-on — particularly if you’ve been running from them for years. And sometimes, even the Muse needs to take a vacation from me, so I’m left to do the battle alone until she returns.

I try not to spend a lot of time dealing with Regret. I figure, I don’t have enough time in a day to think about the things that are productive, so why get whiplash looking back? But sometimes, when the current stretch of highway is a scary one (I feel like I’m driving endlessly around the Beltway right now), I start glancing in the rearview mirror, wondering what made me decide to get into this lane and what would have happened if I had taken the exit that had just passed. What makes me stay on this crazy expanse of interstate? What makes me get that gut feeling that I will benefit if I wait three more exits?

I’ve seen what anxiety, stress and worry has done to my family (my grandmother worried herself into a stroke, and some days, I feel like I am going to follow that same path), and that scares me even more. I want to go back to how I was in college — I had the standard mountain of debt and all the angst that accompanies coming into one’s own, but I barely gave two thoughts to not making it. Survival has always been my traveling companion, and I’ve just assumed that I would reach my destinations unscathed.

Turning 30 has brought a weird nostalgia, though, for a time I never knew. I was grooving to some ’60s tunes today (“Scarborough Fair,” anyone?) and really felt like I’d missed my calling. I should have been a flower child, wearing patchouli and protesting against war and for women’s rights. I probably would have married an ambitious corporate type — someone stable — and cleaned up my act, only to do professional lobbying for the causes that ignited me.

That’s the life I want. I’ve been so career-driven that, when the work trickles away, I find how I’ve sacrificed relationships and friendships because I was always too stressed out or too busy to cultivate them. I’ve let hobbies and passions fall by the wayside. I’m looking at all of my barely started creative projects and wondering if I could get any money for the materials so I can keep the Internet going for another month. I look at my female friends who were, like me, so “I must be career-oriented” — the friends who are now content to be wives and lovers (but not mothers — this group wasn’t the kid-friendly type!). I witnessed that last night, and I found myself wistfully wondering what it would be like to work part-time so that I could keep up with my volunteer work. And by rights, that’s what I’m doing anyway, only without a steady income coming in to make sure I could keep up my humanitarian efforts.

I heard a horrible story tonight on the news — how a woman and her four children were evicted from their apartment and she locked the two younger kids in her storage unit while she worked. The newscasts are just fascinated by this snapshot of what they call “the working poor.” But, really, isn’t that most if not all of us? I know I digest myself over finances (the lack thereof), but there’s a humanitarian cause that makes me pound the table — when people are working and still unable to afford shelter. But let me add the codicil that the woman’s community is outraged, of course, because there are children who are homeless. And, yes, that’s a travesty. But what about the fact that the woman can’t afford to have a roof over their heads, especially as winter dawns and as Santa Claus won’t be coming?

That’s my problem with society. The kids can always be shoved into some type of group home or foster situation. Not great, but whatever. It’s better than being on the streets, for the most part (and yes, I’ve seen exceptions). But what about the adults who can’t get the ends to meet within the same zip code of each other? Too bad. The homeless shelters are full. When you can’t pay your rent, they padlock your place, and all the stuff for which you have worked so very hard is locked away, inaccessible to you. Don’t think I don’t think that can’t be me someday, and maybe that’s why I’m so passionate about that. Even when I had a reliable income, I was always one paycheck away from being on the street. And even right now, I know I will somehow be OK for December, but what about January? And while I don’t condone the woman’s actions of putting her kids in a storage unit for the day, well, I understand the desperation that forces such deplorable decisions. May none of us ever be faced with such choices.

In any event, I don’t regret the decisions I’ve made. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering where I would be if I hadn’t depleted so many financial and emotional resources going down dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs. But it’s not too late. I’ve got to keep my eyes on the horizon and try not to fall into the grooves and potholes that continually threaten damage. I’ve got to recapture that period in my life when I didn’t know how I was going to cross the finish line — I just knew I was going to do it with dignity and a sense of satisfaction that there would be a reward for honesty, integrity and plain old hard work. And whenever the day comes, I will have flowers in my hair, if only in my mind.

On iTunes: Simon & Garfunkel, “Scarborough Fair”

How is your self-esteem? Do you have enough? Could you use more? Yeah, me too.

I was doing some thinking today at my favorite park — I was swinging on the swingset (one of my favorite stress-relievers in life), lying all the way back with my hair grazing the ground, watching the world from my upside-down position. And that kind of opened up a new perspective that I hadn’t considered on why so many of us are hitting roadblocks in our relationships, in our careers, in our ambitions. We don’t have enough belief in or respect for just what it is that we personally can accomplish.

From the time we are babies, we are confined somewhere — in a womb, in a playpen, in some kind of seatbelted apparatus. But despite that, when we are free, we learn to crawl, to walk, to run toward all of those objects that everyone tells us “no” and “stop that!” when we try to grasp them. And eventually, we learn that we get yelled at when we do certain things, so we don’t do them for that reason alone. But does it mean that the things are wrong to do in general or was our only fault in the situation simply going against an adult’s wishes?

That said, we are conditioned from Day One to mind our place. And essentially, that means we’re all just big babies. But with nicer underwear.

Most kids, if we weren’t bullied in school, then we bore witness to it. We saw what happened to the kids who were different in some way. Think about it. Were you overweight, did you wear glasses, or did you have another physical or even personal characteristic that kept you from fully blending into the masses? Were you outspoken and defiant, did you dress differently (whether on purpose or because you couldn’t afford what was trendy), were your intellect and interests on different levels than your peers?

What I remember from that time in my life was going from being an outcast to befriending some. And something weird happened — I wasn’t so weird anymore. More popular people would befriend me and tell me to ditch the “losers.” In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t, but the memory of that time is so powerful — that feeling of being included by those who previously made your life miserable. I wish I’d stood up and told the two-faced jerks to suck it, and I probably would have formed lasting friendships with the people that I stupidly left behind. I’m not in touch with anybody from those days — not surprising, eh?

But then, you escape the confines of high school and go to college or wherever you spend your next years, becoming enlightened and liberated and learning that the world is so much bigger than you’ve seen. You absorb all you can about your subjects, your comrades, even the weird Resident Adviser on your floor because she’s too eclectic to be ignored and, ultimately, too fascinating to resist midnight smoke and tea breaks with during exam week.

She is the girl you remember. She marched to the beat of her own drum. She is the girl you wanted to be. She is the girl I became. The one you really don’t think about when you meet me and yet the one you can’t forget because of something I said or the way I said it or, possibly, because of the absolute and utter passion I injected into whatever belief I held. I don’t ask you to believe the same as me, but I will tell you in no uncertain terms why you should just listen to me. Because I remember what it was like during that brief period when I didn’t stand up for what I believed.

But then you find a new venue … the real world. And it’s high school all over again without the ’80s hair.

And it’s back to the square root of self-esteem. The reason nobody has enough of it is because certain people can only feel successful if everyone around them is failing or, at least, feeling too uncertain to ask questions. And the easiest way to make that happen is to convince them of it until it eventually happens. Even the strongest among us can eventually succumb to mindfuck. I’m not saying that the bullies aren’t talented, but when the talent they decide to use is masterminding everyone else’s misery to escalate their own success, well, what a wasted resource. Really.

I was telling a friend the other day how so many hacks will always have a warm bed in which to sleep while the idealists who are truly potential change agents will die alone on the streets with only their dreams to keep them warm. He who refuses to play the game in the pre-established way is barred from playing again (e.g., “you’ll never work in this town again”).

This needs to stop. No matter what age we are at, we need to band together and save ourselves as a community. Why is the creative (or just plain different) class rejected to second-class citizenry when we are the ones who can become single-handedly responsible for the success of every individual who wishes to feel the rewards of honest, sincere contributions to our society? Be better than what they want us to be, friends, because even the best insurance plan can’t mend a broken spirit — yours or those of the people who were counting on you to be strong enough to help them, too.

On iTunes: Bon Jovi, “Bang a Drum”