2001-05-20 - 2:00 AM or so

I'm still crying now - i want to call Larissa or someone but its 2 am and I can't call just to ask her to listen to me cry because i watched a sappy movie!

the girls wedding vows were something like "I love you very much, and I want to make you happy, and I want you to be my husband for the rest of my life" and when she got outside, her husband (also retarded) had got the local highschool band to march out front of the church for the wedding and he said "This is my present for my bride" and he was so PROUD and HAPPY. She was trying to convince her mom to let her get married earlier and she told her mom "You don't see me! I can't play tennis and I'm not an artist (etc etc) but I CAN LOVE and I love Daniel!"

I'm boo-hooing as i type this!!!

Its funny because I'm not retarded, but I always thought about myself as the one person who knew how to love. I used to pride myself on my ability to love. I used to think I could fall in love with everyone. I used to think I could teach anyone to love. I used to know I could love.

And now I'm just jaded or something i guess - Am I crazier this way or the other way? I used to be sure of at least my ablity to love and now I think I can't love anyone. Will I ever feel that way about someone? Will I ever be that sure of my feeling?

I'm going to be seeing Russell tomorrow, and I know how this is going to turn out. I can see the writing on the wall. I like him, but I'm not really attracted or in love, so we'll go out for drinks and then he'll want to get physical and I'll either stall him or tell him outright that I'm not interested in sex with him and he'll get his feelings hurt and we'll make dates to hang out together to make ourselves feel better about things but gradually we'll run out of things to talk about and then he'll go home to iceland.

I don't want it to be that way for me over and over and over again. But I don't want to get closer involved with people I'm not in love with. What if I never fall in love again? That thought makes me boo hoo --- but What if I do fall in love again? I don't want to get married! I want to be a bride! But I don't want to be a wife! I want something different out of my life, I can't get married until I've gotten my shit together, and my shit isn't together.

I've been thinking about taking classes this fall and next spring to boost my resume until i'm ready to go job hunting. English as a Second Language certification would be a good thing because then I could travel and teach english everywhere in the world . . . I've also thought about Web design because its so creative . . . But I want to get this book written before I do anything . . .

I'm so sick of my family. Don't get me wrong, I adore my family and love them to no end, but I feel all crowded and obligated and stuff and I'm not getting my me time and it makes me all cranky and then I feel shitty for being cranky, like being cranky means I'm boring or crazy or something. I put real pressure on myself to not be cranky. And I've got nothing but straight family time ahead of me every day of the week for the next month between my Aunt Pat's visit here and then going to visit my mom and my texas relatives for the month of june. If I don't get some time alone to breathe and write I'm going to go insane!!!

Ugh, when i get cranky I get in this cycle of thoughts that does me no good at all. Its time to tell my inner bitch to (in the words of my Aunt Pat) "shut yer cake-hole!"

I went to Vancouver Island today -- We went to Victoria and we walked through Butchart Gardens, the most beautiful gardens in the world and then we had high tea at the Empress Hotel (for 40 dollars a person!) and it was just magnificent. It was the highlight of my Aunt Pat's trip to BC - she hasn't been to this province since she lived here in the 50s and she said she thought she'd die before she got a chance to see Vancouver Island - so i'm glad we got to take her.

Me, I was weepy all day. On the ferry on the way over I was smoking a cigarette and facing into the wind and remembering the last time I came to Vancouver island, of course it was with Jim, and he was so exhuberant about the trip and I remembered him out there holding onto the deck of the ship with his leather trenchcoat trailing behind and him smoking in the wind - and it made me all weepy to think of him but i couldn't cry, i think the wind kept the tears at bay

And then on the ferry on the way home I wanted to weep for the beauty of it - I looked out and saw the snow-capped Canadian Rockies across the water and I felt lifted off the deck into the wind - I thought about where my home is, I thought about home as where my heart lies with my loves in California and about home as where I grew up in Abilene and home as my hometownAtlanta and Vancouver as the city of my birth and then when I looked out at the mountains they had changed for me and i felt like my home was the top of the mountains, or any mountain, or on the boat, my home was the whole world and every city and every mountaintop and every wind and every shore and every boat and every country and it was all so beautiful, so achingly minutely symbiotically beautiful and I looked down at the water and it was rippling in two directions - I could see a top layer of water going one direction and another current underneath going another way and all of it changing every second on a scale as large as every ocean on the planet all at once in motion and a scale as small as every drop of water in the world making an infinitely changeable pattern and it just blew my mind, i felt like i was tripping, and I knew - I have to see as much as the world as I can and I have to travel and I have to live like the ocean, like water of life -- and then I saw a rainbow, a little one off the side of the ship, made by the spray from the boat, a recurring rainbow and it was like I had made a promise to myself

Am I going to be making myself more alone and lonely by putting this pressure on myself to keep going, to leave behind what I'm familiar with, to leave behind the idea of marriage, to push myself to get my act together to make it happen? Is this all some psycho drama I've created inside myself to react against factors of my childhood? Maybe. And in that case I do want to keep doing therapy and becoming more whole, more real, I want to be able to live myself for me and not out of reactions to the past -- but still, i guess i have this idea that somehow people don't understand me because i live my life larger than life, that some people expect me to want to become healthy by acepting reality and working within the system, by finding someone to love and creating a healthy stable happy relationship and fall in love and get married and have babies but only after I've gone back to grad school and succeeded in getting a good job in my chosen field and eventually investing my money in real estate for my retirement and publishing my writing free-lance and on the side in minor publications throughout my life.

But what if that's not what I want? Is there something wrong with me? What if I think I'm different? What if I think that what I want is to get on the train and keep going, working my way here and there around the world my whole life just to go places and never finding a husband but always making reuninions with if not live with my home-girl (s) in some funky house we share and writing novels and books here and there throughout my life that aren't published until I take them all in a big stack to someone later and then they're the voice of a generation. Am I crazy? Probably. Is this life possible? Probably. Will I end up alone and lonely and wish I'd saved more for my old age and married Steev? Maybe. But maybe not. Just maybe I'm different. Just maybe I can see most of the world in my lifetime. Maybe I can be fulfilled and be close with people, girlfriends and boyfriends, without ever having that other life. Maybe I am different, and alive, and maybe I can be just as happy my own way.

So why do I cry when I hear people talk about brides?

Because I know I won't be one by choice?

Because I couldn't be one by rejection?

Because I wish I were one?

Because I think bride-hood is a tragicaly beautiful ignorant thing, like the way i was when I used to think about getting married on my college graduation day to pig-boy?

Because I still believe in love?

Its all a paradox, like how people ask you to answer the question " A rooster laid an egg on the top of an A-frame barn, which side did the egg roll down?" and then you try to answer it and they say, "Silly, roosters don't lay eggs" Its like, I'm a rooster. And love/partnership is the egg. Technically, I'm a chicken and chickens lay eggs. And I want to lay an egg. And eggs are beautiful perfect things that I believe in. I know eggs exist because I've seen them before and they are just lovely. And plenty of chickens out there lay eggs all the time. But the chickens who can and do are hens, and I'm a rooster, see.

Its definitely not that I'm a damaged or crazy hen or anything. (Maybe she doth protest too much!) Its that I'm a rare and beautiful rooster. Or maybe I'm a hen that had an awakening and now understands her full potential to be the rooster, and with that knowledge she has separated herself from the coop and just can't lay that egg now, which is sad on one level but on another level its really beautiful, because maybe she can shake her tailfeathers. or hang out with chicks.

Ok, now I'm laughing!! Which is a good relief from crying. Life is good. Its all good. "It's casual."