Life... or something like it.

Ed. Note: I began listening to Pandora about halfway through this post, and somehow landed on Beth Nielsen Chapman's "The Color of Roses." Seemed rather fitting.



This is not something you can rely on as gospel. It's just a bit of speculation and observation from someone who's watched, noticed, and thought entirely too much about it.

Life is not a highway. It's not a bowl of cherries. Nor is it a bitch (and then you die). It is not like a box of chocolates. It's an incredibly broad concept, a nonsensical term invented by foolish poets with a feather pen and a bottle of India ink. It's a very small word used to describe a very big thing. It's everything, and in that same strange vein, nothing at all. And because of all the things it describes, one can pretty easily attach any term to it and make it completely valid. "Life is good. Life sucks. That's life." It's a copout people use when they're too afraid to admit that they're in charge of their own destiny. It's rather easy to say "he leads a charmed life," or "life has dealt her a lousy hand," because it rests your world securely on the shoulders of some ambiguous, omnipotent force that tidily takes both the blame and the credit for anything that happens to you. I suppose it's a comforting thought to know that there's something to rely on to bring good things your way, along with something to blame when the shit hits the fan. I can see why the idea of "life" is so cherished among artists and writers, even therapists. But isn't it far more comforting and reassuring to think that perhaps the concept of "life" as it's described in sonnets and teenage angst drama doesn't truly exist, but that the nature of a person's fate lies squarely in their own hands?

Your first mistake is in thinking that "life" (aka "the world") owes you anything. People (or maybe it's just me) spend a great deal of time doing decent things, helping old ladies cross the street or volunteering for charity, partially because they genuinely want to help someone else, but I think also because we think somewhere in the romantic recesses of our minds, we hope there'll be some greater reward for it. Karma, just deserts, call it what you want. Somehow we figure what goes around will come around... whatever that means. I never really understood that expression. Even on those occasions when a person is about as good as one could aspire to be and still be considered human and still somehow gets gypped out of their happy ending (Princess Diana comes to mind), folks mop up the tragic tears with their handkerchiefs and imagine that somewhere beyond what our mortal eyes can see lies a place where the best of us find whatever it is they missed out on around here. There are no guarantees that that's ever going to be the case, but we believe it because we want so much to. We can never know if the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel truly exists, or if the life well-lived is its own reward. I've never had a conversation with Mother Theresa (and I couldn't at this point without a Ouija board), but she always seemed pretty happy marching around making the world a bit more of a brighter place. She treated the world as if she owed it a living, not the other way around. Maybe that's the secret.

What of the rest of us, who are a thousand leagues away from anything even remotely close to sainthood? Are we heathens because we're a little selfish, because we feel some faulty desire, however great or small, to earn ourselves a piece of whatever our own personal definition of happiness is? Is it simply a matter of wanting the wrong things, and is it even possible to consciously change what you want? It all goes back to what's under our power, I suppose. I guess I never really questioned why I wanted what I wanted or felt how I felt. Those were always things that just... happened. I suppose it hadn't occurred to me that maybe it's just all a matter of willpower. Maybe pining after things is just a spot of weakness in character. It only makes sense that we'd all be a little more content if we just wanted the attainable. But isn't it part of human nature to want what we don't have? Isn't that what ambition is all about? What happens when we get exactly what it is we want? Do we stop wanting it and move onto something else? Or does it become something kept on a peripheral shelf, a happy trinket within reach whenever we fall short of whatever else we set our eyes on?

For the seekers, the questioners, the worriers like myself, there may never be a satisfactory answer. I never throw anything away. My closet is stuffed to the gills that the majority of folks (including me, most of the time) think is useless, but that I refuse to throw away for the simple reason that I'm concerned that the minute I don't have something anymore is the very moment I'll start wanting it again. But life (ah! there's that word again) does not allow for unlimited closet space. I suppose all one can really do is try to hope for the little things that will fit. In the meantime, I'm keeping an empty space saved on that peripheral shelf, just in case.

The soundtrack to this blog post has been brought to you by Pandora: "Mellow Drama"

The Art of Breathing Easy: What I Learned from Septoplasty.

"When you're not with me, How do I breathe? How do I breathe?”

- Mario

“I can't breathe
Without you, but I have to.”

- Taylor Swift

“Breathe in, breathe out
Give it up, you'll never live this down
Last call, lost cause, who's counting?”
- Hit the Lights

“I breathe in, I breathe out.
Put one foot in front of the other
Take one day at a time, 'Til you find
I'm that someone you can't live without
Until then, I breathe in and breathe out.”

- Chris Cagle

Man, pop stars love to sing about breathing. Is it any wonder people think of it as such a big huge important thing?

Hell, I thought it was pretty important. Important enough to undergo a surgical procedure in order to do it properly. It put me out of commission for about a week, which really is pretty minor in comparison to things some of my friends have had done. But it had a little bit more of an effect on me than I'd expected. What I'm about to express here is only one little tiny part of it, but I figure it's as good a place to start as any.

I'm going to say this once, and I'm going to say it in a pretty blunt manner, because honestly, no other manner is going to get the message across, and it needs to be said. Not just to the countless legion of friends I've seen who are banging their heads against a wall repeatedly because they just don't understand what's going wrong, but to me. To make sure I remember. This is for me, you, all of us. It started with one line in a TV show (that I have never seen, and never plan on seeing), then evolved into a self-help book (which I haven't read yet, so if I'm quoting it, it's indeliberate), followed by a blockbuster romantic comedy. And most of the parties involved made millions, because they took a very, very obvious thought, and put it into simple words that even the most oblivious of us can understand.

He's just not that into you.

As much as we'd like to tell ourselves otherwise, that's really what it boils down to. And for the record, I haven't read the book, either. This comes from a lot of observations from my own life, as well as seeing the efforts and the failings of others, along with some strange sort of "AHA!" moment that I'm not entirely convinced wasn't somehow produced by the fact that a little over a week ago, a surgeon was poking around with a scalpel in an area perilously close to my brain. I'm still thinking something got knocked loose.


He doesn't call. Doesn't text. Doesn't always answer your texts. Doesn't go out of his way to see you. But when you bend over backwards to see him, he... well, he hangs out with you, right? He flirts with you, right? He SMILES, for pity's sake! He's just in a weird place right now. He doesn't know what he wants. No matter what, we'll always be friends. I've heard all of these things before. Hell, I've said all of these things before, which is probably what qualifies me as just a teensy bit of an authority on the subject. And in every circumstance that I heard (and said) them, they were big fat bundles of nonsense. Maybe he's not being insincere when he says it... maybe he thinks he's in a weird place, or that he doesn't know what he wants, or that you'll always be friends. And because of how unfairly ambiguous this all is, we're willing to buy it. He'll come around. This is just temporary. After all, if we're friends, there's always the chance that it'll turn into more.

If you're into playing odds like that, you could just buy a lottery ticket.

I should know. I wasted over two years of my life kidding myself into thinking I was going to get my ex back. We broke up, and within two months, we were going places together. Cuddling. Holding hands. Spending the night together. Doing all the normal boyfriend-girlfriend things. Except for one tiny little detail.

We weren't boyfriend-girlfriend. And I stupidly tried to have "the talk" with him a number of times. My message never hit home. But to be fair, neither did his. Even when he moved to the opposite side of the country (yep), I was still duped into thinking it could work somehow. That maybe we just weren't meant to be together "right now," but eventually, one of us would move to be with the other. He wasn't emotionally mature enough to be with me. He couldn't commit to anyone, but when he got to the point that he could, I'd be there waiting. At the very least, I thought, we'd always be part of each other's lives somehow. We were just too close, had too strong a friendship for that to ever change.

But it did. One day he told me he'd met someone, and as mature and "big" about the whole thing as I thought I'd be, I was reduced to the whimpering, sobbing seventeen year-old I was the first time I got dumped. I didn't let him see that, of course. I didn't have to. After that day, I never heard from him again.

The thing I'm laughing at myself about now is that even after a turn like that, I still didn't get it. In the year (man, it's only been a year?) since that little heartbreak, I was interested in my share of people. Usually I'd go out with a guy once or twice, and in typical girlish fashion, I'd daydream about what it could turn into. Most of the time, I'd be the one making the phone call or sending the email first. I'd attempt to wear cute outfits when I knew I'd see him. It was as though I was trying to earn extra credit points for something. And I suppose we all do that.

I don't know when it was that I figured it out, but I decided at some point that my self-respect was just a little more important. And the trouble with throwing yourself at someone is twofold: firstly, throwing things repeatedly at a brick wall over and over does not increase the probability that they're going to stick. And aside from that, things that get thrown repeatedly typically end up pretty beat up in the end.

I wish I could tell you how I did it. To put it in the simplest terms, I suppose I decided that I had to start thinking about how I was feeling, because if I didn't, no one else was going to... certainly not my would-be suitor. And really, he's not obligated to. So I took all that time that I was thinking of someone else, and I put it toward all the things I'd forgotten about before whoever that someone happened to be came along. And something awesome happened. I started having ideas. I got motivation, opportunities, a little self-assurance, and a really strong sense of direction. And I suppose it was because I stopped waiting for something to happen and started making things happen.

But despite what the last several paragraphs might have you believe, this isn't about me. It's honestly and truly for anyone who's ever buried themselves in a lost cause and forgot to come up for air. I know you've heard this all before, and I'm sure just my preaching it at you isn't going to get you to believe me. But just in case... if ever I throw something at someone and get it to stick, I want it to be this. I had to go through two thousand miles, countless humiliating moments, and an invasive surgical procedure to figure this out. I'm hoping I can save someone else just a little bit of trouble. I'm aware that it's easier said than done, and I'm sure that every pair of eyes that comes across this is going to think they're the exception to the rule. The beauty of it is, even if you truly, in some mystical, far-fetched world, ARE the exception, you've got absolutely nothing to lose by dropping the puppy dog act and being good to yourself.

I went under the knife so I could breathe again. I had absolutely no idea just how effective it would be.

“Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care.”

- Pink Floyd

“But you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable,
And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button now
Sing it if you understand.
and breathe, just breathe.”

- Anna Nalick

“If I just breathe

Let it fill the space between

I'll know everything is all right

Breathe,

Every little piece of me

You'll see

Everything is all right

If I just breathe.”

- Michelle Branch

The Wisdom in My Wallet

“Has anyone got any quarters?”

I love pretty much everything Carol says, because each word that comes out of her is accompanied by a melodic Irish brogue that makes every syllable sound like a song. Everybody likes being sung to. Which is probably why, when she asked for change for the coffee machine, I whipped out my coin purse without really giving it much thought.

“How many do you need?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if she was looking to break a dollar, or just borrow the $.50 that the machine in the break room charges. I was willing to give it to her either way.

“Four,” she answered, but her Gaelic lilt made it sound more like “Fow-uhhhr.” She has this lovely way of stretching out even monosyllabic words so that they last longer. My name even lingers into two when she says it, sounding something like “Fye-uth.”

I dropped the coins into her palm, and she handed me a crisp one-dollar bill. As I folded it to put it back on my wallet, I spied some writing on it. At the top, in the center: “Scott Harmon.” And over the seal of the Federal Reserve, “For Lerna,” accompanied by a crudely drawn heart.

I allowed myself a brief moment in the day to muse about the laws that were undoubtedly written against such a seemingly innocuous practice, and the countless number of government agencies likely employed to enforce them. “Defacing of federal currency.” “Destruction of government property.” Something of the like. I pictured a group of black-suited cube-dwellers housed in some Pentagon facility five floors below the surface of the earth, their skin bleached pale by the lack of sunlight, milling about like ants in a subterranean colony, not speaking to each other, but all nonetheless focused on one central purpose. I also thought of the young man (why do I think he’s young? No reason… defacing federal currency is just something I suppose I think of as being beneath baby boomers) who wrote the inscription, seated cross-legged in the grass with his back against a dogwood tree, or perhaps in a noisy theatre waiting for the lights to dim for a movie, a fetching curly-haired blonde at his side. Were they together when he wrote it, or thousands of miles apart? It seems as though his intent was to send the message across whatever vast distances dollar bills are like to travel. To find the mysterious Lerna herself? Or to cross the path of a stranger, to make their fingers traverse the letters carved in blue ink and long-since dried, and simply wonder? Scott and Lerna… husband and wife? Lovers? Relatives? Or merely two friends captured by a whim?

I smiled. Mostly because I simply don’t know. Because as a person who occasionally fancies herself a writer, my mind was simply flooded with the possibilities. Of course, the curse of a person with a fanciful imagination is that whenever the reality of a situation presents itself, it typically falls far short of our imaginings. The mysterious Lerna could be the married woman at the dry cleaner’s counter that our hero, Scott Harmon, harbors a lecherous crush on. An exotic dancer swinging on a pole for one of her beer-swilling regulars. A waitress at a diner that some young hot shot attempts to pick up on a dare spurred by the ribbing of his colleagues at a business luncheon. The wonder and beauty of this dollar is that I will simply never know. So Scott and Lerna, whoever they are, are left entirely to my imagination. They are what I choose to make them. And for the time being, I choose to make them two people who, by whatever association brought them together, have the sort of connection for which one would bravely risk destruction of government property.

I had thought briefly to keep the dollar in my wallet, as some sort of constant thing, an anchor in cotton, linen, and ink, even a friendly little reminder that people are occasionally mindlessly thoughtful. Then it occurred to me that to do so would basically defeat the purpose for which it was intended, to pass a message of devotion along to several strangers, perhaps eventually into the hands for the one to whom it was inscribed. I sincerely doubt that the dollar will ever fall into Lerna’s hands, and I suspect that somehow she already knows about it (young men given to flights of fancy can hardly help bragging about it, after all), but all the same, it’s not my place to stop the life cycle that each bill goes through before it reaches the end of its lifespan. According to the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the average circulation life of a dollar bill is 21 months before it is retired and destroyed. True, I could prevent this destruction indefinitely simply by holding it captive in my wallet, but letting it live out its normal life seems a little more fitting. And I can hardly deprive the next recipient of the bill from the same little smile it gave me. So I may hold it for just a little while, then release it back into the world, to a cash register drawer or vending machine or bank deposit envelope, wherever it may end up. And perhaps I’ll find the inspiration to inscribe another bill with a dedication of my own. I couldn’t really say what I’d write, or to whom, at this point. (I’m open to suggestions.) But the idea is there.

So thank you, Scott Harmon, for instilling in me a bit of inspiration to engage in a wee bit of destruction of government property.

A Lovely Night...

“Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing. Maybe even the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.”

I had a lovely night a few weeks ago. Funny, because typically it’s the sort of thing I can’t wait to share with people, but circumstances being what they are, I’ve been very quiet about it. I haven’t spoken of it, save to one very close friend, and I’ve tried not to act differently, although for the first few days, I felt a constant smile on my lips and a spring in my step that I was loath to suppress. I’m not sure what I expected… come to think of it, I don’t think I really expected anything. I wouldn’t have known what to expect, after what had happened. It was a dream come to life for me, and in my experience… well… dreams typically don’t come true.

“Why did they send you over anyone else? How should I react? These things happen to other people. They don’t happen at all, in fact…”

Typically, when something big is about to happen, for better or worse, I can’t help but think about it, and imagine it. If it’s a bad thing, I imagine the worst possible scenario. If it’s a good thing, I conjure up the best, something reality could never hope to live up to. But in this case, to my complete shock and amazement, it was exactly, to the letter, the way I’d hoped. I’d gone out and made preparations, just in case, all the while shaking my head and telling myself it’d never happen. But it did. It was something I’d been imagining, in some form or another, for a very long. And it was everything I’d ever wanted.

Later, as I drove home, possibilities and impossibilities whirled in my mind. I was giddy with the thought of something I’d wanted for a time actually being mine, like a kid who’s got his Christmas present picked out in February. More than that, though, I was reeling with the absence of a weight that had sat on my shoulders for about three years. I still remember the day it settled on me fairly well. I watched someone I loved more than anyone I’d ever met drive off on a cross-country move that morning. I’m thankful that I didn’t know at the time it was the last I’d ever see of him. The weight only settled more heavily on me about two years later when he said, “I’ve met someone.”

Since then, I’d figured that any happiness I’d find in the form of another person would be second-rate. After an awful lot of soul-searching, thinking, and utterly unflattering weeping, I was prepared to deal with that. Then… this. I was happy enough for the night, and the possibility, however minute, it might open up to me, but more than that, I recognized it for what it represented to me.

“Life is only halfway in our hands
Years have passed while I was making plans
And I could never find the words
I always felt absurd, and always outside
But now I know I shouldn't care
There's a song already there
Waiting inside

What a feeling… the laughter that was dead is coming…”

I’d spent a great deal of time – too long, in fact – staring backward, mourning what I’d lost and burying my nose in the past, going over and over it again, like the last paragraph of a book I’d read and just couldn’t stop poring over, thinking that if I’d studied it enough, I could will it to end differently. Now, this night, for the first time, I was tempted to pick up a new book. I felt something stir to life, and I began to hope.

It hasn’t been an easy time for me the past few years. I’ve been through mental and emotional hell, mostly of my own making. I’m far too analytical, too emotional, and I take everything far too seriously. For so long, I’ve been asking the same question over and over in my head – “Why?” It’s a question there’s never really a good answer for, because if you’re someone like me (or a three year-old child, take your pick), there is never a satisfactory answer.

In all my musings, I’ve always held a few theories about the nature of life in general. One of them is that there’s a bit of a balance to everything. As such, I’ve long suspected that the really, really good things… the intense ones, I mean, don’t last. Bright flames burn out quickly, and sparks haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of igniting a fire unless they’ve got a good foundation. For me, anyway, I always seem to carry a set of flints in my pocket. I can’t help it. I like bright, explosive things. Which is kind of odd, because I was always scared of fireworks as a kid. Still, a part of me embraces fear like a prodigal son. Like flying. I was always terrified of flying, until necessity forced me to overcome it. Now I stare the fear down when I have to.

“I’ve heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason,

Bringing something we must learn

And we are lent to those who help us most to grow, if we let them

And we help them in return

And I don’t know if I believe that’s true,

But I know I’m who I am today because I knew you…”

It’s amazing what you can learn from things if only you choose to see them in a certain way. I had someone tell me recently that he felt we’d become friends for a reason, that maybe he was meant to step in and encourage me to be more than I’d thought I could. And while I can’t deny a certain allure to him, I can’t deny that he’s right. I’m certain that we were meant to find each other, for him to inspire me to actually have a little faith in myself (no pun intended), and I can only hope that I can do a little something for him in return, whatever that might be. And it makes me think that this person, the one behind my lovely night, was meant for something, too. To make me believe that there is, in fact, life after depression. I’m guilty of being sick as a dog and never believing I’d feel well again, being sad and momentarily forgetting what it was to be happy. I’d give anything in the world if this one happy night were to stretch into something more. But if it doesn’t, I’ll see it for what it was – the knowledge, and the possibility, that someday, some other night could be.

“There's nothing left for me to say
Wanting what I need this way
And when I'm feeling low I know
I need to stop
And someday you will see
All the more you want
All the more you'll need me
All the while I'll be on to something more

I want something more

I want something more than this…”