home run

it's ostensibly spring, and with spring comes the beginning of baseball season. i LOVE baseball. i can't quite articulate how amazing i think baseball is. so when the man, his roommate and i lit out for our local major-league park, the air was filled with promise and hope. well, except for the fact that it was a) freezing cold, b) drizzling rain and c) the local major-league team, which is very, very bad at major-league baseball. oh, y'all, it's not even funny how bad the local team is. it's like charlie brown and his baseball team up in here. but hey, at least i got to lose feeling in my extremities while listening to drunken morons scream supposedly clever nicknames at the players.

and yet, somehow, even though the hometown boys got shut out in front of a half-full stadium on opening day, i left the ballpark with a strange sense of bounciness in my soul. interesting counterpart for the numbness in my toes. seriously, though. i was really happy. and for good reason. as the seasons change, for the first time in ages, i've got things set up pretty freaking well. i'm in basically good health, the dregs of flu-pocalypse 2011 notwithstanding. i have an amazing boyfriend, outstanding friends and an outrageously excellent family. school is ending (and there's a forthcoming post about how intensely ready i am to be shut of school). the job will start right on the heels of that. i get to go to south florida at the beginning of may and show off my professional acumen. and i have not one, but two occasions in the next two months to put on a sparkly dress and swan around town.

right now, it seems that all i do is win, no matter what. and i can actually recognize it, for once. i don't even need a reality check from the man like i have seemingly ten squillion times throughout the life of this blog (and honestly, throughout the life of our friendship/relationship). i am not meteorically happy; i am not down in the doldrums. things are humming along beautifully at a state of higher-than-average. it's a beautiful thing. and really, there's no reason to think that anything other than good will keep coming down the pike. sure, there'll be bumps in the road. i can think of two or three that just can't be avoided. six months ago - hell, six DAYS ago - that would've thrown me into a pout of biblical proportions. but now? without waves, it ain't the gulf of mexico (i know, that one is usually "without waves, it ain't the ocean," but i'm a gulf-coast kid, so i don't swim in oceans).

yeah, sounds like a home run, eh? and without getting too cocky, i think i've earned some smooth sailing these days. i've put in the work. and the start of baseball season is a great metaphor for the start of this new season of my life. it's been nothing but spring training for what seems like forever. i've been playing split-squad games, spending hours in that batting cage, swing after swing after swing. but now it's time for the regular season, and we're putting up runs, baby, all day long. i bring the pain, i hit clean-up in this life of mine. watch me swagger to that plate. tap those toes, level that killer look at the pitcher. bring it; i can take whatever you've got.

crack. boom. home run, son. and as i take my trot around those bases, i smile to myself. yeah, this will keep up all season long. all i do is win. and if i keep that in the front of my mind, this life will be cake.

epistle #1: narcissus

[i'm starting a series of letters to people with whom i have unfinished business. think of this one as the first letter of magnolia to the jerkfaces, if you're inclined to use biblical analogies. and why not lead the series off with a good old-fashioned dose of all-american vitriolic rage?]

dear narcissus:
well, well, well. i have been waiting for nearly half my life to unload on you. you've always thought you were just this great upstanding person, haven't you? i mean, you lord yourself around like you do. but no matter how many times life has come to you and said, hey, big boy, don't you realize you've fucked this up?, you just laugh it off and go right along the same path. whatever, right? someone will bail you out, just like last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.

in the words of ed helms from the hangover, you're... such a bad person! like, all the way through to your core! you are a selfish, cheap, nasty person who has no regard for anyone but himself. you were so incredibly hateful to me from the time i was seventeen until i woke up and realized that, hey, i don't ever have to talk to you again as long as i live. the last time i saw you, which my god, i tried SO hard to avoid, you were, even in the few minutes i was subjected to you, nothing but awful.

and the best part? you have no idea how horrible you are. you think that because you think something is funny, no matter at whose expense the laughs come, it is just objectively funny. no one's ever allowed to be hurt, offended or anything like that. hell, it was just a joke. the way you can blithely dispense scathing cruelties would be admirable if you weren't a real person. i kinda wish i'd invented your character in my writing. you'd be one hell of a super-villain. the smallest errors - turning away from the stove with the burner on, for example - would send you into fits of i can't BELIEVE you could EVER do something like that? what's WRONG with you? at the time, i thought you were just high-strung. looking back? you're an abuser. and the worst kind: an emotional abuser.

i still don't know how you've convinced another woman to take up with you. the only reason the last one stayed around so long is that the two of you had kids. i still remember what she said to me when she finally shook you off. i saw how you refused to put up with the way he treated you. that mortified me, especially with two of her children in the room to see how i was basically being credited with the death of their parents' marriage. but if that's what it took, then i'm glad. and i never even told the full truth to either one of you about how much i hate you.

yeah, that's right, hate. you are a venal, shallow, small-hearted skinflint of a man, one who seems to take unnatural pleasure in hurting others. if someone told me you died tomorrow, i would be relieved for the few members of your family for whom i still care, because they would be shut of you and your terrible, reprehensible behavior. you are painfully immature and totally unconcerned about your lack of adult skills. you're the living embodiment of the grasshopper from that old fable, thinking that you can live off your parents' largesse forever. 'course, you've come damn close; you outlived your father, and your mother's not longed for this world. you've managed to bleed them dry for sixty-plus years now. why not keep going?

you, sir, are a bastard. plain and simple. and with that, i officially remove you from my life.

[ooh, DAMN, did that feel good! this will have to happen again.]

pizza rolls

the weekend of a thousand used kleenexes has come to an end. i am up and moving, though still somewhat fuzzy of head and runny of nose. and the best (?) part of all of the illness was that it hit me while i was at the man's house, so i proceeded to ensconce myself there to wait it out. the man, in his own inimitable way, is the sweetest guy on the planet. he really let that show this weekend, as i sniffled, coughed and dozed. he made me dinner two nights running. (that's right, people who know him in real life - he COOKED.) and through his tender ministrations to my health and well-being, which included macaroni and cheese and pizza rolls, he showed me a lot about my attitude and how things have really changed for me over the last year or so.

yesterday was a big day on two fronts. first, i recovered a fair amount, largely through spending 72 hours in bed. second, as some of y'all already know, i finally, finally landed a grown-up job for after school ends in two months. and really, it's kinda my dream gig, back with my old pre-law school firm. i am thrilled. THRILLED. and it's funny: i was unwilling to even consider the fact that i would get what i wanted in this situation. i was so afraid of jinxing myself that i didn't even tell very many people about the specifics of the interview. (i didn't even tell my parents until i got the offer.)

but the one person who was 100% convinced that i had it nailed was the man. you know you've got this. it's a given. i refused to believe him. so of course, when the call came and i had the offer in hand, he was right there to say, see? i told you that you had this. and it hit me then, when the weight came off my chest, exactly what was wrong with me all these months. it's obvious that i've changed a lot over that time, but what i didn't see is how much i had allowed the negativity that came along with the old situation to seep into every inch of me. i'd grown harder, colder, and far less hopeful. dealing with the reality of the heavy tragedy that was the end of my marriage sucked all the optimism out of me and made me a hyper-rationalist.

but enter the man. people who knew us when will be stunned over this one, but he's been the optimist, the cheerleader, through it all. his faith in good things for me has really kept me going through it all. and his faith in me was rewarded, big-time, with this news about the job. and he was right all along. trusting myself would've saved me so much angst. trusting that good things would happen would've saved me so much pain. so he gets a lot of credit from me. he's really teaching me a lot about the rebuilding process, moving forward from the old life and fully embracing the new one. i feel so much better about where i'm going. i have a plan again, something to look forward to, and it feels amazing. my work life is lined up, my school life is winding down, and my personal life?

well. a man who brings me pizza rolls and cold drugs, trusts endlessly in my capabilities, and kisses my forehead while i sleep? hmm. seems like i win. and even as sick as i've been, it's the best feeling in the world. thank you, love.

throwback: one shining moment

[the amazing jobo is running an occasional series over at her place where she revisits old posts to see how far things have come in her life since the original words were written. with her blessing, i am totally stealing her idea. so, for your amusement, one year ago this weekend. first, the post; then, below, the commentary...]

march 22, 2010: one shining moment
on my way to the airport yesterday, i heard the local traffic reporter recounting the end of the michigan state-maryland game. lucious drains the 3, and just like that, a maryland victory turns into a crushing defeat. that's the nature of sports like basketball; one quick shot and the whole thing can change.

every so often, that sort of thing happens in other arenas too. you go through a situation thinking things are a certain way, and then POW - the entire game is changed. sometimes this is bad, and it leads to disaster, like if you're greivis vasquez and the rest of the maryland terrapins. but other times, you're tom izzo and the spartans, and the sudden change is the best thing you've ever felt in your life. that's where i sit today. never saw it coming, either...

here's a lesson for you: if you're confused about something that involves another person, it's really best to just talk it out. i took the initiative to pour my heart and soul out this weekend, and the clouds were lifted. things i thought were complex and potentially painful turned out to be crystal clear and completely perfect. perhaps you're seeking details of this. eh, not this time. some things a girl keeps to herself.

but as for results? well, that's easy. the playing field has cleared considerably. "contestant #3," while still incredibly beautiful, is off the board. the ball and chain? that's resolved as of the end of this year. and the other boy? well, all i'll say about that is that i have some incredible people in my life. one shining moment? yeah, you could say that.

[the game-changer in my relationship with the man, formerly the other boy, encapsulated in an overwrought and ridiculous march madness metaphor. when i laid it on the line for him - again - and we became a couple, he referenced this weekend, this one shining moment, as the point in time when his heart started to turn. the events i reference here made him realize that, in his words, i think we have a future.

this journey was alternately exhilarating and terrifying. to get from our origin myth, to our one shining moment, to those first small steps, and finally to the truth straight from his heart... hell. it's rare to get something you want so much in such a clear and obvious way. this is the stuff of fairy tales. but it's not, really; it's the story of my life. of our life.

what a difference a year makes.]

temper fits

oh, man, what a week. crises, emotional freakouts, the whole nine yards. i have an exam in two hours. i should be studying, but i have approximately no attention span, because i am also ragingly ill with the worst cold i've had in years. when it rains, it freaking pours. i've been just a joy to be around, too. i've gotten into a series of really stupid arguments with the man, over tiny little things like he interrupted me! he must not respect the things i say! and hey, in this debate we're having over social issues, he keeps countering my arguments with blue-collar vs. white-collar examples. he thinks i have privilege bias! (the life of the mind, eh?)

boy, when i want to be, i really can be a petulant child. it's the curse of the self-aware, too, that even as i'm throwing fits, i recognize how stupid i'm being, and yet seem powerless to stop it. the other night, when i was decompressing over the missing neighbor problem, i started into another one of my world-famous worry cycles. as i unloaded, the man responded to my concerns with solutions. god, it turned into one of those stereotypical man/woman conversations: he wants to fix it! i want to vent! when i said as much, he threw his hands in the air and said, fine. talk.

when i did, he listened. he's good like that. but then he said, as he's taken to doing lately, is being upset or angry about this doing any good? what are you talking about? i'm getting it out of my system! no, you're not. you take all of this stress onto yourself, stress that really has nothing whatsoever to do with you, and let it eat you alive. then you come to me and collapse into a puddle, telling me that you're overwrought and you want it all to go away. here's the hint, darlin': YOU have to make it go away. just look these problems in the face and tell them that you can't do it right now.

good lord, he's smart. see, i've always fancied myself as managing my emotions when i go on these rants. i told him, have you ever known me in all these years to be any different? this is just what i do. i take on the problems of those i love as my own. yeah, you do. and i think it's killing you. but how do you stop? you just do. you have to, for your own self-preservation, limit your emotional exposure to other people's problems. you can't save us all, babe.

that's the big secret, i guess. i get so tied up with doing what i can to help people i love. it's like the old george steinbrenner quote: if i can help, i wanna help. my issue comes with determining where i can actually help and where my exposure is just hurting me and doing no one else any good, either. so that's the work i have to put forth in the short term: building up my little garden walls. i'll never have a fortress around my heart; it's not in my nature not to be empathetic almost to a fault. but i do need a little barrier, a little form of insulation, to keep myself - and those around me - from going insane. and hopefully, this'll keep the tantrums in check, too.

now if you'll excuse me, i need to go read about tax allocation language in operating agreements, while trying to limit the number of times i sneeze between now and the end of the test. happy saturday, eh?

it works. it really, really works.

just a quick update: she's been found. about an hour after i posted last night, emily was found, and unharmed at that. talk about a huge relief.

thank you, thank you, thank you to my DC-area blog-friends in particular. y'all came through for her so, so much, and it's a beautiful and inspiring thing. i can't say enough about it.

twitter revolution

i got so rankled during all the uprisings in the middle east over the last few months when people said, oh, all this happened because of social media! see! it IS important! i found it to be, really, the height of first-world arrogance, pretending that the things we as privileged and connected westerners were doing on the internet had anything at all to do with the complex, generations-old rebellions in these countries. there is just no way that freaking twitter had anything significant to do with it. it's not that important. hell, half the things i read on twitter in a day have to do with either charlie sheen, chad ochocinco or cats in unusual situations.

but then today happened. today, i found out that my parents' next-door neighbor emily, one of the sweetest people in the world, has disappeared. horrifying news: she's a young mother, with an 18-month-old baby, and (worse yet) a history of psychological issues. she left for work monday morning and hasn't been seen or heard from since. scary enough. so my stepmom and a few other people started a facebook group. as people started to talk to each other there, we all started spreading the word to people we knew.

enter the DC social media world. DC is a very internet-friendly town, and our social media community is peerless. i've been to a couple of twitter-centric events, especially right after i moved back here and needed some new friends. one of the people i met during all of this is the incomparable proprietress of the southified masshole, who i think might know every single person in the metro area. i reached out to her and the rest of the people i work with over at dcblogs for a little publicity help. and with that, we were off to the races. within three hours, several major DC news sources were on the story. for every question someone had, someone else had an answer. in a situation when getting emily's face all over the universe as quickly as possible was the A-1 most important thing, everyone came through in the best way possible.

now this is what twitter, and all that other social media, can really do for us. it's so incredible how well that worked out. thank you all so very, very much for getting the word out the best way you knew how. it's amazing to see that in action. as civilians, we can't really do all that much besides publicize. the DC social media world, rock stars that they all are, did an incredibly inspiring, fantastic job. it's an honor to be a part of such a great fabric of people.

and if you're local, and you've seen emily, please call 202-680-4181. thank you.

high school sweethearts

my parents met in tenth grade, in 1968. my mother was a do-gooder smart kid with a rebel streak; my daddy was an underachieving smart-aleck more interested in his music than being part of the mainstream. (he only participated in his high-school graduation because his grandfather asked him to.) though they had ups and downs, breakups and reunions, throughout their relationship, they were loyal to each other until her mental illnesses got to be too much for both of them.

i used to think that there was no way that you should ever settle down with someone you dated in high school. 'course, i settled down with the boy i met the first day of college, and well, you know how well that worked out. i basically made myself a hypocrite of the first order there, but i also kinda proved my rule. you don't know anywhere near enough about yourself when you're seventeen years old to have any idea what you're going to need when you're twenty-seven. god knows, i thought, i'm living proof of that.

but then something hit me today as i was playing around on facebook. i've had quite a few friends who've married and divorced since high school, just like me. some of them are on to second relationships, and a couple are on to second marriages. and a very significant number of these people have gone on to date and marry people they knew and cared about in high school. i'm one of them. i met the man in tenth grade, in 1996. i was a do-gooder smart girl; he was a slightly underachieving smart-aleck more interested in his computers and his politics than being part of the mainstream. hmm.

maybe there's a little something more to this whole initial instinct thing than i once thought. i mean, lord knows it's not a hard and fast rule. i'm learning quickly that there is absolutely no such thing as a hard and fast dating rule. anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, and something that will do nothing good for you. but there's an immeasurable comfort in having someone near you who knows you so thoroughly, so completely, that there aren't any surprises. you don't have to work as hard, be something or someone you're not. all i have to do is love him.

so the whole high-school sweetheart thing, maybe all it needs is a little revision. go out, see the world, learn yourself... and then, at the end of the day, you just might find what you needed in the first place you thought to look. i know i did.

landslide

i've been afraid of changing
'cause i built my life around you
but time makes you bolder
children get older
i'm getting older, too.
 - "landslide," fleetwood mac (or about six million other people)

i always thought i owed it to the past, to what's happened in my life, to try to maintain a positive relationship with my ex-husband. we grew up together. kind of, anyway. at any rate, we lived together, shared so much for so long. i felt it proper and right to make the effort to normalize relations. and honestly, the marriage didn't end because he sucked as a companion; he sucked as a partner, which is completely different. but i realized something yesterday: what i thought was good-faith progress towards detente, and possibly even enjoying one another's company again, was a lie, an elaborate ruse designed to manipulate me. i'm fond of using the line someday, you will ache like i ache when i'm angry, stung. he has apparently decided to use it to bring me to his level. he hurts. he's mad. i broke his dream. so because i did these things, i should suffer the way he did. it's only fair.

yeah, funny thing. i'm sorry for his pain, legitimately. i did not set out to injure him in saving myself from mediocrity and discomfort. but that's how this works.  you're happy, aren't you? his words stung. he informed me, in no uncertain terms, that if i won't take him back, he doesn't want to be friends. oh, and then he hands me three envelopes with goodbye notes. one for my dad. one for my stepmom.

one for the man.

yeah, that happened. so i brought the envelope to him, and he read the contents. as i poured out the hurt and the heartache, then demanded to read the parting shot my ex-husband threw at his (unbeknownst to him) replacement, the tears flowed. again. one. more. time. the man dealt with it. again. one. more. time. we talked, and as we did, it finally hit me, the knives that have been twisted into my side, the pain that's been wielded like so many bludgeons. i parroted his words to me in my talk with the man: you're happy, aren't you? the man responded, so what if you are?

it was the quintessential saul-on-the-road-to-damascus moment. just like that, the scales fell from my eyes, and i saw exactly what he'd done to me. i owe him NOTHING, not after he treated me like this. i did everything right, and my reward was twisted manipulation. so guess what? you get what you wished for. if we can't be lovers, and we MOST ASSUREDLY cannot, we can't be friends.

i was afraid of changing, of thoroughly abandoning that relationship, because my adulthood had been completely confected around that relationship. he was all i knew of grown-up life. but time has passed, and lo and behold, i got the nerve to let it go. i'm better than a cheap manipulation thrust into my most tender places. i've gotten older, aged a lifetime in the space of a night, and i've gotten bolder. so i'll take the machete to my past, because i owe it to my present. more vitally, i owe it to my future. i owe it to that gloriously loyal, reasonable man who's been left far too many times to rebuild what my wounded, rage-crazed ex husband has sought to destroy.

for you, my love, i let it all go. wash it all away. never, ever again. i promise.

just a brief list.

i need this off my chest:

1) i want my life to settle the hell down. this up and down is going to kill me.

2) i humbly ask the universe to continue this unexpected rain of job-related kindness and intrigue. it is much, much appreciated.

3) i really, really, REALLY miss having my own car. rolling metal = freedom.

4) i love my profession. i really do.

5) if that's the way you want it, he who will not be named, that's the way you're going to get it. but you know full good and well that you're being unkind, petty and ridiculous. and i might be using a platform that you don't have to call you out, but frankly, i don't care. it didn't have to be this way. it's how you made it.

6) march madness is an amazing, beautiful thing. one shining moment after another.

i'm scattered tonight. thanks for dealing. more coherence later.

straight from the heart

i love this cheesy, god-awful pop song. i just love it (though i'd love the studio version on youtube a lot more than this one, bryan. jeez). it's a fabulous shower-singing song, when you're sure you're 100% alone and no one can hear you belting out lyrics like you're on stage at carnegie hall. it's been on my mind pretty much nonstop today, too, which would seem kinda random... except that last night, the man and i had THE TALK HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD. ok, i'm being a trifle overdramatic. but y'all made me think, you fabulous readers you. why should i just stew in my own juices (or vent to y'all)? he's a grown-up. moreover, he loves me. he wants me happy and satisfied. he also doesn't want me to worry. so let's talk about some stuff.

so after dinner last night, we went back to my house and sat down. i started with the uncertain and wide-casting job search in which i find myself in the middle. from there... well, the road was long, and the topics were many. we actually (gasp!) got serious for once. and of course, my honesty and openness was well rewarded. why wouldn't it? i got a lot of concerns answered, a lot of questions settled, and many reassurances, given to me in his own inimitable way.

one of the things that's been weighing on my soul is the distinct possibility that the job i take will make me have to move. i've been trying for weeks now to figure out his position on this subject. it's an opinion that, while not make-or-break, is pretty freaking important. i've done a long-distance relationship before. i do not enjoy them. i think they're stressful. so what would we do then? ('course, because this is me, i ended up traipsing headlong into related subjects that won't be discussed in public, which further complicated the matter.) this has always been a huge concern for me.

when the time comes, he said, we'll make the decision as to what we're going to do. but until then, apply where you want, do what you want. i'm not going to tell you that you can't do something. wow, love, i thought. was that so hard? so i said to him, what if the only thing i get is far away? what then? he kissed me and said, do you really think i'd let you take off somewhere and leave me here?

answers. straight from the heart. your humble blog proprietor is one happy woman today. and all i had to do was ask. y'all are smart. thanks. :)

sleeps with butterflies

you say the word, you know i will find you
or if you need some time, i don't mind
i won't hold on to the tail of your kite
i'm not like the girls that you've known
but i believe i'm worth coming home to...
so go on and fly, boy
 - sleeps with butterflies, tori amos

one of the central themes of my life, and if you'd known me at age fourteen you'd never have seen this coming, is non-stop male companionship. i have not been single since june 7, 1998. one boy bled into another boy, who bled into the man, and that was it. now, obviously, that span is DOMINATED by my relationship with my ex-husband, which ran from september of 1998 until very, very recently. but the fact of the matter is, i've been half of a whole for thirteen years.

needless to say, this probably explains why i am not particularly fond of sleeping alone. i just haven't done it very much, and i got damn used to having the sound of breathing/snoring/dreaming next to me as i drift off. when the man took off to africa last month, one of the main things i hated about it (besides the whole exposure to malaria, being way too close to sectarian violence for comfort thing) was that i'd be on my own for all that time. but that distaste for alone-ness brought a cold, stark and really unattractive truth home.

i am clingy.

yeah, that's just not something you want to face as a grown woman. so i am faced with a serious dilemma: own the clinginess and risk pushing him away from me through the sheer burden of being more intense about us than he is, or enforce a romantic austerity program that will cause me sheer and unadulterated pain, all in the name of changing things. talk about a hobson's choice, eh? 'course, i suppose i could just bring all of this up to him, but honestly, he's not going to have a clue in hell how to deal with this. in fact, i'm sure he has no opinion on the matter whatsoever. he's very much a cloud, so to speak: he prefers to float along, doing whatever, in this regard. if he can avoid being wedded to a plan, so much the better.

did i mention i also overthink the hell out of everything?

yeah, so i think i'm just going to work on not worrying so much. on that score, the man has a very definite opinion: don't worry about it. don't worry so much. i'd ask you not to worry, but i know better. i just need to toughen up a bit, get a thicker skin, and oh yeah, learn to enjoy my alone time. just because there's not a man next to me as i lay me down to sleep doesn't mean something's wrong. (and it also doesn't mean the man doesn't miss me, either. food for my own personal thought.) i am worth coming home to, and both of us know it. so i don't have to cling so hard to the tail of his kite; he's not going anywhere. breathe in, breathe out, and relax.

besides, it's easier to sleep without the snoring. i think we can all agree on that.

a woman of letters

i am an excessively educated woman. i started school at age three, in pre-kindergarten, in the fall of 1984. i was in school without interruption until the spring of 2002 (for those keeping score at home, that's eighteen years). i took five years off to find myself, then went back in the fall of 2007. i am still here. four more years of education gives me a grand total of twenty-two years in school of a total of thirty years of life. i will have the following credentials when i am done:

1) a high school diploma, advanced with honors
2) international baccalaureate diploma, which means i took six tests at the end of twelfth grade, wrote a couple of papers and did some community service to earn an extra piece of paper that proves that i really, really learned a lot in high school
3) bachelor of arts degree, american history
4) juris doctor degree (my law degree)
5) graduate diploma in civil law (my special louisiana law diploma)
6) master of laws in taxation (my second law degree)

that'll make me magnolia, B.A., JD/DCL, LL.M., esq. that's an alphabet soup of credentials. i say all this not to brag on myself, but to pose a question. i've spent a lot of money and a TRUCKLOAD of time over my life attaining knowledge. book learnin', if you will. but why is it that this automatically makes me "smarter" than other people? i've had a couple of conversations over time with brilliant people who don't have these credentials. the basic idea that's been posed to me is, you have brains; i have wit. um, no; we both know that's not true, you have just as much "brains" as i do. but you've got the education, and that makes you smart.

does it? i mean, i'm not going to sit here and tell you all that i am not an intelligent person. i've learned a lot in my life, and i'm hungry to learn more, more, more. but what makes me smart isn't the fact that people in robes have handed me pieces of paper with categories on them. it's the fact that i think, i read, and i consider. you don't need special training to be smart. why don't we value intelligence gained in other ways? there are so many circumstances to consider as to why people don't tack the letters onto the back of their names. why is it that we've just decided that the one way to be "smart" is to do it? that's unfair, and it costs us a lot in terms of societal ignorance of people without these benchmarks.

i love my education. but there's more than one way to smart. we'd all be better off if we remembered that.

crush redux

lo and behold, once again, it's international crush day. today, we're supposed to sing to the heavens of a subject of a crush and appreciate that subject publicly. oh, i am so, so down with that. i mean, it's not like my crush is any great secret around these parts. and it's not like i have any shortage of things to appreciate about him. i could go all cutesy-details on you and share embarrassingly charming things that he does just to make me smile. i won't. some things stay mine (and i think he'd kill me if i did - people we both know read this). but i will share the following:

1) he claims to be bad at romance, but he's, without a doubt, the most conscientious man i've ever known when it comes to making me feel 100% loved. we're no one's romance novel, but we're very happy.

2) he is spectacularly funny without trying very hard at all. for example, remember back last fall when tennessee's football coach tried to drop some german war history on us [start at the 10-minute mark for the good stuff]? the other night, right before we fell asleep, the man rattled off easily 10 more speeches he could've made with other war references, just off the top of his head.

3) he's a world-class lay. there's no better way to say it.

so there's a small appreciation of my crush, the man. i remember this from last year, when my attitude on the subject was nowhere near as cheerful and accepting. it's remarkable how much things have been totally flipped on their heads since that point last year. i wrote that from a place of deep anguish, with everything in my life churned up, having made a stand for him once and lost. i was trapped in an existence that didn't fit.

but in a year's time, it's all different. that old unrequited crush, the one that ran through my veins like a long, black river and rattled my cage like a thunderstorm (thank you, ryan adams, for that image), turned into the great love story of my life. the danger of the crush vanished into thin air the day he told me, i think we have a future. so all that stuff i said about crushes having the potential to ruin your life? yeah. never mind. so go enjoy international crush day. praise someone to the rafters. it's not so bad after all, it seems. just be a little patient, and all will be revealed when the time is right...

figures of speech

[first, some introductory reading. this post won't make much sense until you read this.]

i am a writer. obviously; you're reading words i've committed to the internet age's version of the pagefor public consumption. as a writer, i pride myself on being able to paint pictures with words, using every color of my linguistic rainbow to tell my stories. i tell them in a variety of venues and formats, both digital and analog. sometimes, my stories aren't so pretty. i use language, metaphors and images that aren't meant for family time. i write of violence, twisted sexuality and other horrors of the soul. i like to explore darkness in my writing, because frankly, most people are a lot darker than they'd like to let on. i find the contrast between light and dark twinned with the contrast between public and private fascinating. (so do a lot of people; otherwise, dexter would never have been on television for five-plus seasons.)

but because i have chosen to write these things, i've often had to conjure images that are as harrowing as any true-crime report. i've imagined scenarios that wouldn't make the cut for law and order: SVU. like the writer in the article above, i've occasionally struggled with the morality of this sort of writing. darkness is an intrinsic part of the human condition, but in writing it, do we elevate it, or simply expose it for the evil that it is? is the dichotomy i imagine even a dichotomy at all? can you even get a satisfactory answer to these questions?

in the end, i think the answer to all of this is to be mindful with our art, our language. as writers, we owe a special duty to the society we reflect to do it as truthfully and authentically as we can. in the end, though we agonize over it, it's not the fault of writers that horrors exist in the world. all we can do is show as much respect to the reality we interpret when we work our craft. but when i go off-duty, so to speak, and revert to my regular, casual life, i can certainly control this a lot more. i can take the edge off my dark depictions by making damn sure that i work to create a world that doesn't have as much darkness in it.

the phrase [bad thing] totally raped me should never leave anyone's mouth, unless of course the bad thing in question is an act of sexual battery. we can stop, for the love of all things sacred and holy, venerating charlie sheen as a comic genius instead of treating him like the unapologetic woman-beating drug addict that he is. we can teach our kids how to sexually respect themselves and each other. for that matter, we can stop being so god-awful afraid of sexuality in our culture. no one would be demonized for dressing too sexy if we could get a handle on sexual expression and normalize it.

but that's a rant for another time. the point in all of this is simple: writers aren't the only people who should be aware of the power, the glory and the dangerous heft of their words. words aren't mere figures of speech. the things we say form the world we inhabit. by god, we need to make damn sure we build a world worthy of ourselves. we need to report the truth, we need to lay horrors bare for what they are. choose your words - your weapons - carefully.

sensational, irresistible

[so if you don't currently own collapse into now, the brand-new R.E.M. album, go get it. now. i'll wait. got it? good. now we can go on.]

southern alt-rock girls such as myself have a special relationship with R.E.M. mine began the first time i ever heard "fall on me," one of the most beautiful songs ever written. i think i was seven, and it was LOVE. i mean, pure-out, howl-at-the-moon LOVE. i was changed, permanently. (hey, by the way, remember when "losing my religion" won all those MTV VMAs? back when the M stood for music, that is. there was a time when alt-rock kids were the culture. i miss that. but i digress.)

one of the great things about R.E.M. is the way they tell stories in their songs. michael stipe can say more in three minutes that i could ever hope to say in a thousand blog entries. he crawls into my heart and wrings out the emotion i had in there, saying it better than i ever could. "be mine," from new adventures in hi-fi (which is one of the greatest records ever made, in my humble opinion - it's not only amazing, but it's the record that originally drew me into my friendship with the man, some 15 years ago), was on an endless loop as i finally decided to pursue something more than just casual hook-ups with the man. they speak my language, i guess.

so on the new album, which i have owned for 38 hours as of this writing and listened to four times through, there's a track called "blue." it's a throwback to "e-bow the letter," the main single from new adventures, down to the patti smith vocal track. it's largely poetry, michael stipe reading his words, voice filtered through effects over sleepy, beautiful guitars. but the last stanza is what hit me harder than anything i've heard recently:

i'm not giving up easy, i will not fold
i don't have much, but what i have is gold...
i want me, i want it all
i want sensational, irresistible
this is my time, and i am thrilled to be alive
living, blessed, i understand.

damn. it's like a bolt out of the blue. (oof - pardon the pun.) i'm big on finding messages in the world around me. my ex used to make fun of me and our mutual ex-best friend, telling us, y'all, life is not a song cue. i don't know about that; i find that songs and life are inextricably intertwined. music is the river that runs through my life. maybe it's being a musician's daughter, growing up around live bands, the constant sound of daddy's guitar noodling underwriting nearly every memory i have. but i find my life, my inspiration in music. R.E.M. has always been a key part of that, and this song struck me like a giant cosmic 2x4. check your head, girl, it says. you don't have much, but it's valuable as hell. be thrilled. be blessed. understand.

i hear you, michael. i'm listening. thanks.

fat tuesday

i was half-tempted just to repost some of my love letters to south louisiana today. mardi gras always makes me miss my gulf-coast homelands. it's the biggest example of why the gulf south, in all its glory and splendor, is so special and important to the character of this nation. it's also radically and vitally different from the non-gulf south, a difference that should be kept in mind at all times. mobile is NOT selma; new orleans is NOT memphis. anywhere the gulf of mexico touches in this country is just... not quite the same.

gulf coast kids have a different way of looking at the world. chris rose got it just so, so right with his world-class introduction to louisiana, and it applies in varying degrees to the rest of the gulf, too. we appreciate our food, our culture, our surroundings. we love life, we drink it in no matter what. we raise our glasses (probably a touch too often) to good and bad. we know that jimmy buffett is smarter than he even realized when he told us, if we couldn't laugh, then we would go insane. changes in latitudes always bring a change in my attitude. in other words, you can tell when i've been home; i come back a little bit more free than i was when i left.

so on this mardi gras day, i celebrate my gulf coast heritage. i got to the home of mardi gras (founded in mobile, alabama, in 1703, a solid century before new orleans!) by accident, by chance, and it's the greatest bit of serendipity imaginable. my gulf coast home gave me so much: friends, culture, azaleas and magnolias (!), crawfish and pralines... and the great love of my life.

laissez les bons temps rouler, chers. ain't no doubt, bebe.

good guys

we're... we're supposed to be the good guys here. and being the good guys means we have to be civilized about this. - stuart redman, the stand

this is my favorite quote from my favorite book of all time. it's my philosophy of life, it's my guiding principle, professionally and personally. i ran an ethics committee for a year in law school. i took every professional ethics class i could get my grubby little mitts on when i worked. i care about what gets done, but i'm one of those annoying people who also cares - quite a bit - HOW it gets done. if it has to be shady, i don't want to deal with it. this comes up because yesterday, i got to get up at oh-dark-thirty, hop in a rental car, and drive two and a half hours one way to spend all damn day at a mandatory professionalism course for my law license. never mind that i had to pay $150 for the privilege, too; i hate that i, being someone who has specialized in legal professionalism throughout my young career, had to sit through situations i already know about. sigh.

but the worst part of all of this wasn't the repetitious nature of the conference. i could've dealt with that. it was the keynote speaker. they dragged out this retired judge guy to talk at us on the subject of professionalism. first off, the man started a generational war with us. i personally don't want to be told by a man who came of age in the era of massive resistance that it's MY generation that was raised in an era that disrespects morals and civility. thanks, but my generation understands that racism is not appropriate, be it de facto or de jure. but leaving that aside, he also spent the whole time blathering about how civility and professional conduct is something special to virginia.

look, i've been a virginia resident off and on since 1998. i've lived all over this commonwealth: the shenandoah valley, hampton roads, richmond and northern virginia (where i reside to this day). i am a virginia attorney. there's a lot of good here. but i'll be DAMNED if i buy into this virginian exceptionalism, a unique type of psychosis in which a lot of well-born virginians specialize. i have a big enough problem with the attitude that americans are more special than other nationalities by mere virtue of our birth (we have to actually LIVE UP TO our awesomely high standards to earn that title, if you ask me). but to extend that to the commonwealth of virginia? no thanks.

i don't get down with chauvinism, in any of its forms. really, it's a ridiculous enterprise to think you're better than anyone else just because of a characteristic that you possess by accident. you're not better because you're, for example, male, virginian, blonde, tall, etc., etc., etc. you're "better," if you can call it that, because you choose correctly. if you comport yourself with civility, respect the people around you, do the right things, live a good life and try to be kind, you're "better." if you don't, no amount of inborn "specialness," be it american citizenship, gender, or even being a virginian (please read in the sarcasm - i'm straining to get it through here), is going to fix your bad choices. end of story.

so judge? allow me to civilly, respectfully disagree with every word that left your mouth yesterday. we're not special because we're virginia attorneys. we're special, if we all even are, because we choose to live by a set of standards. we're supposed to be the good guys because of the oath we took. not all of us are, nor will we be. but those of us who choose to try? being virginian didn't make us that way. being good people and making good choices did. end. of. story.

dura lex, sed lex

the law is hard, but it's the law.

this is an old legal maxim, hence the latin. (we lawyer types just love us this dead language. there's even a special term just for this sort of thing. we lawyer types also really, really love ourselves and our little world.) this one is a favorite of my favorite (HEH) supreme court justice, one antonin scalia. he uses it to justify all manner of awful things, citing it to shirk his responsibility to defend the constitution and put off his role onto an often-unresponsive congress. it's a rigid, draconian version of the role of law in life. it's essentially the legal world's version of jeez, that sucks. hate it for ya. it comes up a lot more than you'd think, too.

now, i'm all for the rule of law. it's what makes us who we are as a country, and a leader of the world at that. i just don't see life, the law, or much of anything in that strict of terms. i think our founding fathers were smart enough to build our nation and its framework in such a way that if something new comes up, we've got the flexibility to deal with it. so i have a certain amount of trouble embracing this idea as a valid construction, whether applied to the law or to other parts of existence.

i wish other people agreed with this. the longer i live, the more i run across people who have bought into the rigidity, the calcification of dura lex, sed lex. even if someone's worldview is flexible and open in most ways, it sneaks up in rather stunning, and often disappointing, places. i've had some pretty excruciating conversations with people i love in which they betray startling levels of rock-hard disdain for anything other than my way or the highway, and there's NO room for debate here. the issues to which these people apply their rigidity - up to and including reproductive choices, for the love of god -  shocks me, and sometimes it breaks my heart. i try so hard to be open, to be accepting. as an inveterate pessimist (apparently - stay tuned for that meditation later), that's not always easy. but my job demands it. my outlook on life demands it. other people don't see things that way.

the "law" in people's lives varies wildly. emotion and reason often clash in spectacular fashion, and decisions made aren't always what you'd expect from the outside looking in. i refuse to make that kind of snap judgment on someone else's life based on things that i would do in mine. that's the basis of my worldview and my professional philosophy: it's why i'm pro-choice, a liberal, a feminist and an avowed enemy of strict constructionism. i believe that a lot of things in this world can't be strictly judged. i wish i could make other people understand the value of that.

friday night lights

a few weeks ago, i got suckered - er, invited to watch friday night lights with the man. i know that tons upon tons of people just love them some of this show. i'm totally OK with that, too... for them. to me, it's just a complete and total boy soap opera. (and boy, does the man get ornery when i call it that.) it's a melodrama with football inserted to divert from the fact that it's a melodrama. but that's not really what i wanted to get into. he and i watched the series finale together right before he left. i was more than a little emotional over the increasingly taxing events of february 2011, and without getting into details (because unless you have direcTV, you have not seen anything of the fifth season of the show), the finale of this show may as well have been called let's see how many mags-specific emotional triggers we can cram into one episode of a football-themed melodramatic boy soap opera. just one after another, with no mercy whatsoever. i bore up as best as i could, i really did...

and then it happened. i found myself sitting in a chair in the man's media room with tears silently streaming down my face, unable to stop. when he noticed, he immediately insisted that we stop what we were doing and talk about what in the name of all things holy could possibly have been bothering me. (had to have scared the hell out of him - in all the time he's known me, i had never, EVER done anything like that in his presence.) we went upstairs and shut the door to his bedroom, at which point i sobbed like i never had before.

once i got it out of my system, i looked up at my worried boyfriend and started talking. [and i mean this: if you really don't want to know what happens at the end of friday night lights, stop reading now. i can't dodge spoilers anymore.]

the one thing i've read about the show that i think is true, and highly complementary, is that it's one of the more honest depictions of marriage out there on television. and at the end, there are marriages starting and thriving, relationships ending, and people sharing and sacrificing for one another. there are poignant shots of women's wedding jewelry, meant to memorialize this emotional heavy lifting. and at the sight of the woman's wedding ring passing to the daughter's engagement ring, it drove the point home that, hey, girl, you FAILED at this. BIG TIME. i just sat there watching this, hearing the word failure over and over again in my head, and i just couldn't take it. good christ. how much of my past is going to bleed into my future? how do i know, how could i ever know, if i will let the man down the way i failed my last marriage? am i ever going to be good at this, good for him, again, or am i just locked into being a bad wife, a bad partner? this is the speech that came tumbling out of me amid the sobs, spoken into this poor man's shoulder, who really just wanted to watch how his show came out in the end.

he lifted up my head, looked me square in the eye and said, darlin', you really, really need to stop beating yourself up over this. he told me how it wasn't just me, how both sides failed at the old relationship, just like all failed relationships, and how i needed to learn how to forgive myself for the sins of the past and go forward. but i pulled the trigger, i told him. yeah, you did. but he loaded the gun. and just like that, it hit me: yeah, he's right about that. i did some things i wasn't proud of. i gave up on my ex long before i left him. i checked out years ago. but i didn't do these things in a vacuum. if things had been right, i wouldn't have gone down that road.

so the clouds lifted. i felt a little better. (and the man finished the show. he was satisfied with the ending. good for him.) and a boy soap opera gave me more clarity than i ever could have imagine.