Caterwauling

Dear Clarity,

Love,
Dawn

Tread carefully. I’m fra-geee-lay today.

On iTunes: Rob Thomas, “When the Heartache Ends (acoustic)”

You know I need a drink BADLY when I spend an hour driving around Adam’s Morgan — like I did last night — just to take my happy ass out for some libations at Felix to help celebrate Metblogs’ first birthday in the upstairs Zipper Lounge. I wasn’t wild about the Cosmo, but the “e’lixir”? Mmm, mmm goooooddddddd. …

The only reason (other than temporary insanity) that I thought driving around and then just paying way too much to park in a shitty garage was all because Tiff promised CakeLove. Well, that and I totally had the perfect outfit to wear:

If you want beautiful boy bloggers to look at your boobs, girls, this is the shirt to wear! I might just have to wear this more often.

For photos of the event (instead of my tired, cranky self), visit Tom’s photostream here. And other resident bloggers, hope to see ya at the next one!

On iTunes: Iio, “Rapture”

But before I get started:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRATT!!!!!

And now, for Reader Poll day.

1. How many keys are on your keychain?
Which one? I had to break them out into two because I was having car trouble that was specifically traced back to having too many freakin’ keys weighing the steering wheel down. The main one has four keys — two keys for the apartment and two for the car (one for the locks, another for the Club).

2. What are your favorite pizza toppings?
The more cheese, the merrier. Then maybe chicken and pepperoni tie for second place. And ranch dressing for the crusts. God, damn I’m hungry. …

3. How did you first learn about the birds and the bees?
OH GOOD GOD. In middle school, the school hosted a “presentation night” on the subject for students and parents. I kind of wanted to go, ’cause my mom was young and cool and all that. But then my GRANDFATHER INSISTED on coming. I was mortified. Mor-ti-FIED. I was under my chair when they started talking about the proper way for a woman to wipe herself after using the bathroom — the horror on my grandfather’s face totally did me in.

But I did learn about a company that produced really cool pamphlets that involved a story about three friends (pen pals) coming of age around the same time, and I asked Mom to order those (which she did), and those were fantastic. I think I still have them somewhere — I might give ‘em to my niece when she’s old enough.

In any event, I do have the filthiest sense of humor of anyone I know. Not that I have, oh, ANY use for it these days, but I can make a slur out of anything.

4. Are you a Harry Potter reader?
Nah. I’ve gotten away from reading books. Not that I’ve given up BUYING them — I just have the attention span of a gnat and can only function in a magazine-tidbit/headline-feed kind of world.

5. You’ve just won a 3-week vacation, which option do you pick: a cruise and a resort stay, or an adventure trip through the Amazon?
Cruise/resort. Yes, I know I stare at walls all day and want to be outside more, but I can do that from a shuffleboard deck. Besides, I love being near water. And for that matter, near a shower, hot tub, and OH YEAH a real bed!

6. If forced to choose, would you rather eat a bowl full of live cockroaches or a bowl full of cat puke?
Depends on whether the cat puke is just freshly tossed food or whether it’s got that acrid stomach acid scent to it that stains the carpets. I just inherited a big red carpet stain from Miss Molly that will not come out, no matter what I do to treat it.

7. Have you ever been arrested?
Not under this name. LOL. Seriously, no.

8. Where do you see yourself living and what do you see yourself doing 5 years from now?
I don’t hate living in Northern Virginia. I’ve come to even like my commute for the sheer fact that I am outdoors and in the sunshine and such, although I did tell a Lexus driver to “Drive off a cliff, fucknut!” this morning. Damn Maryland drivers.

The timing of this question is kind of good because I’ve been asking myself the same thing. I am happy doing what I’m doing and where I’m doing it. But I expect to ascend in level of responsibility. At this point, most of my waking time revolves around working or schlepping to and from it. I just turned down another freelance project, so I guess I should give up the prospect of additional money (it’s my own fault — I cannot for the life of me fathom looking at a computer when I get home at night or on weekends, because I like to go out and shop and just otherwise not be at home). Which is fine — I’m happy to focus on one adventure, just so long as it continues to be worth my while to do so.

9. Have you ever asked for a raise? How? Did you get it?
BAHAHAHAHAHA. Of course I have — I worked for a non-profit for three years making $18K/year with NO RAISES. I bitched left right up and down about it, too. Finally, after being told to suck it up and deal with it (my supervisor, I called her Miss Piss — I trained her to do her job and she was making four times my salary). I’d asked for a promotion, but just to spite me (I kid — it was “budgetary” according to the asswads up above), they cut out the open position that had been above me.

The irony? I found a job paying a LOT more than what I was making — I was reporting to the CEO and CFO at the new place, to boot — and when Miss Piss got my resignation, she begged me to stay and suddenly coughed up a $10K raise. I LAUGHED IN HER FACE. I asked where the fuck that money was during the previous three years, because I LOVED my job and it was costing me money to work there (let’s look at my still-screwed-up finances that started unraveling while I worked there, and I didn’t even have a CAR then).

10. Ask me a question.
So, are you and Erica gonna be on “The Amazing Race”? Will we get to see your audition tapes? I am so PSYCHED about this!!!

On iTunes: 50 Cent, “Just a Little Bit”

It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say for the past week but, rather, that I had TOO MUCH on my mind. And to permanently kill my (passing) state of being a puddle of pissed off, I thought I’d do my usual bit of going through some growing pains and actually learning something. And I did.

But first, TMI
The women of the D.C. region must all have killer Kegel muscles. When you’re in twice-daily traffic like I am, damn it, you gots to do SOMETHING. Hell, I could probably cut off someone’s oxygen supply without even having to use my hands!

At least I didn’t tell you that I got away without wearing a bra for the past two days. Wait — oops.

Ahem.

Coping mechanisms
I don’t mean to imply with “faith” in the title that I’m some Jesus freak or Bible-thumper. What I mean is that no matter how hard it is to do, we have to keep reminding ourselves that there might just, in fact, be a reason for all the stuff we view as bullshit at the time. And fundamentally, it probably IS bullshit — or, at least, a bad feeling you don’t deserve — but you can rise above it. You have to.

Many people are inclined to throw bullshit back at the dishee. My personal immediate reaction to inadvertent bullshit ingestion is to want to vent. Bitching, blogging, shopping, screaming, cleaning, driving too fast, breaking shit. Notice I said it’s what I WANT to do. And, let’s call a spade a spade here — when I did all of that, who got/gets hurt the worst? Indeed — moi.

My second reaction — and it’s the reaction that typically prevails — is to collapse into a state of passivity. Note the word “cleaning” in the list of reactions above — the madder I get, the cleaner my house is. It’s a trait I’ve garnered from my mom — after she and my evil asshat stepfather used to fight, the house got scrubbed — not like she ever let a speck of dust land in the first place. I’m not so anal-retentive about cleaning (Christ, the woman PRE-cleans! The hell?!?!) — I’m a clean person but I allow the place to get messy when life’s too busy to prioritize making the ceilings sparkle.

Cleaning aside, I typically ruminate. If I don’t have balls enough to address the problem directly (or approach the person(s) who need to be approached about it), then I shut down. When I — how shall we say — re-entered the living world not so long ago, I kept to myself. I was afraid to stand out, for fear that everything I’d worked so hard to overcome would show through my already-translucent skin. Moreover, I was terrified that what I’d worked so hard FOR would be taken away.

That, and let’s not discuss martyrdom. You can’t take something away from me if I deprive myself of it first. Of course, who’s the one who has to live the life without sunlight? Exactly. There is no substitute for the things you love. But sometimes feeling pain at least, well, keeps you feeling. I will never succumb to numbness, I promise you that.

I’m not saying what I do is *right.* I don’t even mean to imply that it actually *works.* All I’m saying is that people like me hope that things will blow over without incident — people like me end up cleaning up what other, more volatile people have ravaged, and I guess we don’t want innocent people to step in the shards of glass from the hurricanes of hysteria that we were once upon a time called in to contain.

And it’s sobering, really, how fragile everything is. And how fragile you become after one really good fuckup. Some days, you find that all you can do is rely on your faith in yourself and in the power of all things good to get you through and spare you from further insanity — at least, until you have healed. Like you ever will, really.

But if you’re gonna fuck up, might as well do it all at once and get it out of your system, right?

Generating karma whenever possible
Look, I’m all goddess-y and whatnot, but I will never, ever inappropriately point fingers or place blame elsewhere. In fact, I’m way more likely to find ways to — if not outright make things my fault — get into the groove of thinking about how I could have articulated myself or behaved better. And again with coping mechanisms that might work-but-not, I’m quick to apologize to keep the peace. Damn non-confrontational Gemini trait, I swear.

Not that I don’t hold people accountable, but I am willing to get on with the rest of my life more than I am hellbent on proving myself right. Of course, getting myself to be understood is another way of being “right” that I find equally satisfying. Which is why I work very hard to figure out people’s motivations — it’s easy to NOT be able to see a person’s point of view unless you somehow get behind their eyes.

Of course, it’s just as easy to not WANT to because you aren’t sure whether they’d do it for you. But that part doesn’t matter — you’ve got to take every opportunity that ever crosses your path to generate good karma. Even when it feels like it would kill you. Because it wouldn’t kill you to get practice at being a good person. It’s not like the Easter Catholics who just go to church on major religious holidays — it doesn’t make you a good Christian because you go to church. Being a good citizen every day of your life is what makes you beyond reproach and, ultimately, even more of a sympathetic character. Caring comes pretty easily — I just wish more people would hone that particular skill.

Functioning with expectations
This is a foreign concept to me, but let me take a stab at it anyway. I find that if somebody/something gets under my skin, it means they’re deeper in my heart than I’d previously thought. I can give a million examples of people I used to know, of whom I never had high expectations. Or any expectations, for that matter — unless it involved me bracing myself the next thing they were going to do that would result in me being recruited to serve as their clean-up crew, hostage negotiator, warden, etc. I mean, it’s not that I’d ever in a million years settle for tolerating someone else’s mediocrity — see the schtick above about keeping the peace at any cost– there have been people to whom I’ve said “no” so many times, although it resulted in me being outright harassed until I budged and grudgingly performed the latest in a line of favors that were somehow never reciprocated — not that I really ever asked. But I digress — I never did favors to get favors.

And in my personal evolution, I’ve thinned out the herd to eliminate that set — budging involved budgeting my emotions and time. And now I have expectations of Everybody and Everything in my life. And I function well within expecations in my own right, although I do admit I love blowing people away who have no expectations, ’cause they just aren’t used to being so damn dazzled.

In any event, when people are deeper under your skin and in your heart than you’d anticipated, the surprise is a pleasant one, sure, but it also means they can hurt you more easily. Even if they don’t mean to. And a completely different person could say or do the same thing, and it wouldn’t faze you half as much, but because those special people practically walk on water, you get taken aback. And you wonder when you started really, truly being affected by them — how did they penetrate that barrier that you constructed so architecturally sound and breathtaking?

It reminds me of a C.S. Lewis quote — one I can recite by heart because I used to keep it framed in my dorm room: “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one — not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

This is where faith steps in — you can never guarantee that you won’t be wounded again. But you can always heal — no matter how out-of-reach it seems. And those amazing people who are surrounding you just might be the ones dazzling YOU next time around … if you give them the chance. Pleasantly, you don’t have any doubt that they will … and that they will WANT to do so. And you will know that you deserve it, although the truly humble among us will always know how lucky we are. …

On iTunes: Shakedown, “At Night (Afterlife Remix)”

A one-act play by Mo Rocca. Nice. I’m just glad he’s envisioning them sharing a jail cell and talking, not pillow-fighting.

On iTunes: Black Eyed Peas, “Don’t Phunk With My Heart”