Everybody feels safer in the dark. . .

I am never so safe and warm in the sun as I am in the dark. The light screams of wide open spaces and sky and clouds and wind moving and people who can see me. The dark speaks of small cozy places with curves and plush cushions and whispers of places where I can hide. I love nothing better than to crawl into bed at night and pull the covers up to my chin---all 5 layers of them----and then when I wake up late on a weekend morning, to just lay there in the darkness of the room. The window is always closed, the shades always pulled, and almost no light leaks in. It's so safe there, in the dark, and I feel so warm like a cat must feel when its nuzzled into another cat and half buried between your lap and the arm of the chair, underneath a fuzzy teddy bear blanket.

Winter Blahs

*sigh*

I had forgotten what it feels like to hurt for no reason, to be scared of everything without understanding why, to want to cry all the time. Maybe it's just the winter blues, maybe I'm just having a bad day. It seems like every time Josh and I get one thing to go right, three things just go terribly wrong. In June, we moved into a better house than what we had and one week later I was sick, and the illness got drawn out for a couple of months and then we found out part of my problem was TMJ disorder. Then we found out insurance wouldn't cover any of the expenses, and it is VERY expensive to take care of and treat, and everything is coming out of our pockets. Then the water heater started leaking and had to be replaced, and my grandfather replaced it out of his own pocket, but there are now leaks that have formed in the pipes leading out of it and we currently can't turn the hot water on. And it's in the bloody middle of the winter, with a high today of 15 degrees. Josh and I were up until 1AM trying to fix it ourselves, but I think we just made it worse, and I've never had to heat up water in a tea kettle to take a sponge bath so I must be spoiled, mustn't I? I'm used to turning on a hot water tap and getting hot water.

The whole point, however, is how things seem to constantly go wrong, and I'll be perfectly honest---I don't know why my marriage hasn't already fallen apart. Two months in, I had kidney failure, and I've been sick constantly and not always able to keep up my end of the deal in this marriage, and Josh is forever having to take care of me. Murphy's Law sucks. We have medical bills we can't afford to pay, and we're barely keeping up with the ones we absolutely can't afford to let slip. My mom and grandfather try to help us out some, but we're in quite a sticky wicket, and the help hardly puts a dent in the burden.

I know, I know, I've done nothing but complain in this post, but I have to have somewhere to vent, don't I? This is where I'll vent. I don't need to vent on Josh because he needs to vent, too, and he found out last night that venting with me may not be possible because I just started to cry and couldn't stop myself. BTW, crying is BAD, very bad. It just makes it very hard to breathe, and gives me a wicked headache and causes my TMJ problems to act up. I know that, and I try very hard not to cry, even a little, but lately it feels like pressure is building up on me and there's no release valve.

Empty Inside

Sometimes I have this terrible feeling that I am nothing. I have accomplished nothing that I set out in my life to do. I haven't been anywhere in 3 years. I don't have a career. I haven't gone back to college to get my master's. I'm not a writer or a teacher. I haven't set foot on a stage to be part of a production in years. I don't do anything that used to be a part of my life anymore. I don't have very many friends, not that you need many as long as the ones you have are good. And it sounds petty, but next to my friends I feel diminished, insignificant, as if I were a small part in a large machine that the machine can run without. I compare my intellect, my interests, my experiences with those of the people around me and what I have, what I am, what I've done seems narrow, gray, and dull.

It's harder to say all that than you think. It's very easy to feel sorry for yourself and very hard to put a finger on what's really wrong, what you can fix and make better if you want to. I would like to fix things, make them better, but saying and doing are different things and the events are like dominoes lined up. You have to be able to accomplish project B to to finish project C, but to finish project B, you have to have project A in place, but to have project A in place, you have to have C in your pockets. The events are like a circle, and I have to figure out where the circle begins and ends and get inside of that opening, that opportunity. No, that makes no sense. If I could give you a graph, it would make sense. If one domino is out of line, too far away from the ones in front of it, then the chain stops.

Saying that I feel insiginificant and unimportant is also hard because I am married. I am married to a wonderful man who loves me and values me more than his own life, and in having a good, loving, faithful and loyal husband I have someone I cannot attach a value to. I did not set out to get married when I did, or to whom I did. I had the general goal many people have of being married someday and having someone love me. Sometimes I think falling in love with and marrying Josh were the only things I've gotten right. I don't think after 3 years of marriage that I have the whole marriage thing down, yet, and I always think that I could be a better wife. And I want to be a mother. Josh makes me the center, the focus of his care and attention. He does everything he can to make me feel important, so why do I still feel like this? Why do I still hold onto that one small place of fear and doubt, and how did it get buried so deeply inside of me?

Long Time in the Dark

I can't believe I let my blog set for this long untouched. Oh well, why not? I have hand written journals that skip YEARS. My husband and I have been very busy moving. We moved into my Mom's old house, which is to say, we moved into the house I spent the second half of my childhood in. It's kind of weird. It's not a stranger's house, but it doesn't feel like "going home". I can't figure out what to do with the walls or how I want to decorate because it feels like I'm redecorating someone else's house. Other than that, it's great. Of course, right now, we have a ton of stuff to put up in the cabinets and hang on the walls, and anything that doesn't have a proper place to go may go right out the door. The cats finally got settled in. It took them a couple of weeks of hissing and spatting, and they're still confused about which side of the bedroom door opens up---they keep meowing at the hinges when they want us to let them in--but they made the transition much more easily than most cats. Every once in a while, we still catch them watching our old house next door as if they are anxious to get back to where they think they belong. Ah, well, at least no one pulled all their fur out or started defecating in strange places. I hope to get everything in the kitchen put away this weekend so I can make my husband a home-cooked meal, again. Wish me luck.

Thoughts about the Goddess

Tori Amos is as close to a living embodiment of the Goddess as I have ever had the pleasure of seeing with my own two eyes. I'm not one of those obsessive fans who strives to collect every scrap, every cd, and every piece of memorabilia commemorating every tour, but I won't tell you that I don't have a considerable collection. I went through my own phase where I scoured stores and Ebay for every import I could find, every book, every shirt. However, I think my perspective started to change when I had the privilege of seeing her in concert, in St. Louis, during her Scarlet's Walk Tour. I don't know what did it, if it was the terrible tension I could feel that night in the audience between her sincere fans and the socialites who were there because she was the "it" girl that night and they could afford front row tickets, or if it was the insanely over-priced t-shirts they were pawning in the lobby, or maybe it was the woman outside the theatre selling photos whose entire life was following Tori Amos around on tour and taking pictures to sell. It is almost like a competition to see who the biggest, the best, the truest Tori fan is. Her fans love her so much that I don't think there is a measure for it, and now I'll buy the new album or the newest concert video, but they can't compare with that terrible and beautiful intensity of just hearing her sing, on stage, in front of you. In the audience, my throat constricted and my stomach knotted, and I cried through at least 3 songs, one of which was "Playboy Mommy". Suddenly, it isn't about how much of Tori you can buy, it is about soaking her up as much as you can, because even if you see her in concert a 100 times, each time is unique, special. Each time you can be in the same room with her and hear her sing is something that will never happen just that way, again. I've only gotten to see her that one time, but I think it had a profound effect on me. Suddenly, nothing is so beautiful as that red-haired sprite, the twinkling eyes that know so much, the shape of her teeth, the quirky way she smiles, the movement of her lips when she sings, the fury with which she pounds out her thoughts and feelings on the keys, and that voice which makes your heart pound in your ears and touches you so much that it hurts. I know what it is to sit in the audience and to want to touch her hand or her cheek, to have her know your name---not because she is famous but because she is what we all wish we could be---every aspect of Woman, and so strong and so courageous, so fae and so divine. You don't want to crawl into her world, you want her to walk into yours and make it better.

Rather Like My Diary

I used to write all of the time---poetry, short stories, bits and pieces of what I meant to be gothic novels. If you know where to look in my house, you'll find a box full of books, half filled with my handwriting. I've never managed to fill up an entire journal or diary in my whole life. I even still have the little blue diary I carried around as a kid which contains only a few entries here and there, scraps of my life I don't think about most of the time---when I lost my first rabbit, when my great-grandmother died, the first boy to tell me he liked me who might have actually meant it. Some of my diaries contained only a half a dozen written pages before I discarded them in the bottom of my nightstand. I don't know if I changed books because I found one that had a cover I liked or if I just couldn't bring myself to open up the old one anymore. One of my journals I no longer have---I burned all of the pages one by one in a fire in my backyard because I couldn't bear the thought of remembering what was in them. I think I still have a journal that is completely blank because I don't have anything important enough to put in it yet. There is something about that one journal that makes me want to save it until I have enough words and time and desire to fill it to the brim. I think my blog will end up like my diaries, scraps of life, scraps of thought, written out sporadically for strangers to read, for strangers to laugh at. Half my thoughts end up on the page, the other half lost in my brain and only found when I am really tired or really wired on chocolate-covered coffee beans. That is the strange, frightening part for me---strangers reading my thoughts when I spent my childhood trying to hide them, trying to hide the journals with easily broken locks and pressed flowers and little splatters of blood inside. I guess I'm doing it for an outlet, and to have something to jumpstart my brain again. I want to write. I actually need to write, and I know I have a million things to say but when I want to say them, they disappear. And I don't know if anything I have to say is important enough for someone else to read. I just hope that if someone else reads this, they won't think it is stupid, that my thoughts are stupid. I hope this doesn't end up hidden in a box in my house like my empty journals.

Introducing myself

This little blog exists because my husband discovered a way to relieve boredom at work, and unwittingly introduced me to a new way to vent my odd thoughts. I didn't think I'd type my thoughts out for everyone online to see----I used to be such a freak about my privacy. I've discovered there is no such thing anymore. I can get online and find out anything about anyone, which means anyone who wants to can find out tons of stuff about me I'd rather they not know. I might as well spill my private thoughts here and be done with it.