Coming Unstuck In Time

We flew into the night, right through the sunrise, up into the clouds and over them until the floor was white and the ceiling extended forever, across the world in all directions, blue. India would be just over the Atlantic, on the exact opposite side of the world. It didn’t matter if we flew over the Pacific or the Atlantic. We could have gone in either direction, into the sunrise or into the sunset. Either side was the same distance. It all led to the same place.

On the plane, I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and thought about the past and how the future always leads to thinking about the past. Before leaving my bedroom, I grabbed the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut because its small size packed nicely. I didn’t even know what it was about, and then I read the back and thought it would be a funny contrast to read about World War 2 and Dresden while traveling to India on a business trip. But really, the book is about the past, and how the past relates to our present and future. The narrator writes, “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much of it was mine to keep.”

How much of India would be mine to keep? Now, four weeks later, so much of it is sliding away, now that my car and my bed and the beach are my culture again. I awake each morning and get clean. I drink the water from the faucet. But before, on that plane, all I could think about was what was to come, instead of what had already happened. As the clouds moved below us and the darkness swallowed our small plane, with its bright little windows all in a row, I read Vonnegut’s description of a war veteran who has sustained incredible loss and heartbreak, a man who he says has “come unstuck in time.”

When I was a little girl, I used to lie on my grandma’s living room floor and imagine what it would be like if we flipped the house upside down, and everyone had to walk on the ceiling as if it were the floor. The chandeliers were centerpieces, the arches doorways or little gates, and the exposed wood grid was a practical format for furniture arrangement. What would have happened if gravity had unstuck itself, and the house had actually turned upside down, and things had turned opposite, like the way the water spins down the drain on the other side of the world?

Now that several weeks have passed since my return, I have struggled to put into words my experiences in India because they transcend so much of what I formerly understood. It is a relief to find people who have been there, who know how drastically different the culture and the mindset and the relationships are, and yet how they are very the same. It is a place of paradoxes and opposites to us Americans, a place that is terrifying in both its ugliness and its beauty. I saw life, and I saw death. I touched it. I laid my hands on it and prayed for it. I say it, life and death as singular, because in India, life and death often seemed so intertwined that they were the same. The only way I know to describe the experience is to say that we came unstuck in time.

Vonnegut’s narrator launches into a story within his own story, about a war veteran named Billy Pilgrim who goes on a radio program to talk about his experiences. Billy Pilgrim believes that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967, from the planet Tralfamadore. He was taken there and displayed naked in a zoo, and there he mated with a former movie star from Earth named Montana Wildhack. Billy Pilgrim says that the most important thing he learned on Tralfamadore is that when a person dies, he only “appears to die.” On the radio program, he says, “[A man] is still very much alive in the past, so it is silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadores can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone, it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadore sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadores say about dead people, which is, ‘So it goes.’”

I had heard so many stories before going to India, so many instructions on what to expect, what not to expect, and to expect the unexpected. My friend and co-worker LR told me that once you get to India, you realize that all your senses have been on mute, and suddenly they switch to full-volume. This is true. She also told me that you cannot go to the places she has been and return the same. “You can’t see this and do nothing,” she said. This is also true.

We spent most of our days seeing the India that tourists do not see. Now that I have returned, and strangers hear about my job, they often say one of two things: “I’ve always wanted to go to India,” or, “You must feel so good about your job.” I believe that most people want the Vanity Fair version of India, full of dancing girls and Taj Mahals and elephant rides. I also do not feel good about my job. I love my job. I am incredibly thankful for it and terribly humbled by it. But I do not feel good about it because human trafficking and slavery are overwhelming and dark and prevalent, and it’s so damn hard to know that these things exist, to have seen the faces of women who are manipulated and incarcerated and robbed of freedom, hope, and dignity. It doesn’t matter whether or not I feel good about my job. Our organization is so tiny in comparison to the problem. In one place we stayed, there were an estimated 10,000 prostitutes in one square kilometer. We’re helping about 68 in all of India.

Still, seeing the difference in those 68 compared to the women we saw who are still working the line was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It is as if I knew their faces before I got there, before those moments that I actually saw them — those present moments that instantly became past. And now that I’m home, it feels like their faces are still out there ahead of me, somewhere in the future waiting for when time will again unhinge itself, a big open door, or another horizon waiting to swallow up a different plane.

photo by friend AA

Back In the U.S.

Jet lag is still sinking its claws into my brain, though the fuzziness and dizziness and feverishness of the first few days of returning to the U.S. have subsided. For a few days I was convinced that I had contracted typhoid. I wasn’t sure what my workplace would do if they knew that they were responsible for my imminent death. Then I drank a few bottles of water and realized I was just a little dehydrated. Perhaps I am the only girl who has traveled to India during the hottest season who has gotten dehydrated after she returns to the U.S. I was very well-hydrated in India. So hydrated that I dreaded any car ride, knowing that I was going to have to be the girl who would flag down the driver and try to communicate “I need a toilet” across the language barrier. Twice I was led to showers instead. Twice I peed in showers.

It is good for a body to be a foreigner for a while, to be reminded how ridiculous you can feel in foreign clothes and what a challenge it can be to eat unfamiliar food. Thankfully Indians eat with their hands, so if anything stirred up in that curry sauce looks iffy, you can just squeeze it for bones, grissle, bugs, or shoelaces. If none of the above have been cooked into the meat, you can simply put the meat in your mouth and wash it down with a bite of hard-boiled egg. Actually, though, I must say, that the food was pretty much amazing while we were there. They kept us well-fed, with plates double the size of our American dinner plates, heaping with meat, rice, nan, potatoes, picked-whatever, and love. Unfortunately, my weight-loss plan didn’t work. Half of me hoped I’d bring back a parasite just to get on track again.

I am having a hard time putting into words the details of my trip. There was so much. So many emotions passed through me in such a short period of time. I felt like I was in a time warp. It felt like we had been there for years. Some days I wasn’t sure what decade it was. I am working up an essay on the trip, which I will probably publish in segments on the blog. The experience warrants so much description that it may take a while for me to formulate exactly the right words that the place deserves. India is a paradigm. I want to tell you, but I don’t think you’ll get it unless you’ve been there. No matter how much you know or how much studying you’ve done, you have no idea until you’re there.

No Pocket For This State of Mind

It is 2:41 a.m., and I leave for India in four hours. As my last post mentioned, the past two weeks have been a whirlwind, and when I went to bed this evening, I was exhausted, hoping that the exhaustion would afford me a good night’s sleep. I awoke about an hour ago in a sweat. Last night I had another dream about my teeth falling out — this time they were hanging from their roots — which always happens when I am feeling anxious or out of control. An hour ago, I awoke thinking about all the things I had forgotten to do, all the fears and anxieties. I’m staying over at my friend LR’s house because we work together, and her husband is taking us to the airport at 5 a.m. this morning: two hours and fifteen minutes from now.

My body is completely exhausted, but my mind is so awake… it doesn’t know what pocket to stuff itself in right now because I’ve never been to India before. I’ve never been on the exact opposite side of the world. When anxiety overtakes me, I generally play a game with myself where I think up the worst case scenarios of the things I’m worried about, then I write about them so I can see the ridiculouness of my thought patterns. These thought patterns generally include, but are not limited to, virgin pregnancy, escaped mental patients lurking in my closet to rape me, and various explosions involving household appliances. I’m generally okay unwrapping the humor of these fears because I have a reality under which to interpret them: Ann, you are not bearing the anti-Christ in a sci-fi novel-like world, which means that you do not need to fear that the immaculately concepted being in your womb will eat his way out your navel using only his gums and friction. Ann, no one is lurking in your closet, because you don’t have a closet, and no one is behind your metal hanging rack except a few daddy-long-legs spiders. Ann, no household appliances have ever exploded on you before, and if they did… can you say financially stimulating lawsuit??? You’d probably have the money before your eyebrows grow back.

Only this time, regarding India, my anxieties are just swimming around in my head, without any previous experience to reel them in and gut them, then crackle them over a nice warm fire. The closest thing I can think of to India is my trip to Mexico City about four years ago, but then I did not have to confront the reality of forced prostitution or the cast system or be on the exact opposite side of the globe from my dad. I know that I will fall in love with the place, and perhaps that is the greatest anxiety of all, knowing that something will change your life, knowing that loving something demands promises. It is much easier to hate than to love because love demands things that are often not easy to feel.

And OH MY GOSH there is a giant bug in this room that just fluttered down to my computer screen. Ew. EW, EW, EW.

So, I hate smashing bugs, and I totally just handled that by opening the door, turning on the hall light, and letting the thing flutter its way toward the light, then closing the door. Genius, except now I don’t want to open the door to go use the restroom. In moments like these, I really wish I had a husband who could have killed the bug for me. Also, it may be nice to have someone turn on the light beside me and say, “Woman, you’re going to modern India, not to the year 1347 to confront the Bubonic Plague. Calm down.” Or, you know, if he didn’t know fascinating historical trivia (although who could marry a man who doesn’t?), he may roll over and say, “Woman, why are you reading Wikipedia articles at 3:15 a.m.?” Because, you know, I need that guy. Or maybe just an arm to slide around me right now. He wouldn’t have to say anything, just the phsyical contact to acknowledge that yes, dear, you’re slightly crazy, but even crazy people need their beauty sleep.

India or Bust

So, these past two weeks have been some of the craziest of my life. Last week was supposedly the craziest, but then I lived through this week, and this week definitely takes the trophy, and it still isn’t over. Did you hear me? It’s 12:46 a.m. on Sunday, and I’m still pretending like it’s last week. I will be pretending that it’s last week until 6:45 a.m. on Tuesday, April 28th, when I hop on a plane to India and will finally have a moment to relax. Did you hear me? I’m leaving for India in less than 72 hours, and I still have a billion things to do, but I am taking some time tomorrow to have fun.

Currently an acidophilus pill is dissolving in my stomach. The lights were out, and I laid in bed for about an hour before I decided that I’d better get up and do something because I can’t sleep. The last two days have been extremely hectic, and I worked a 12.5-hour day yesterday, as well as working all afternoon even though it’s Saturday. I won’t bore you with all the details of what I’ve been working on, just that it’s pertinent to my job, WHICH I LOVE, even though it very nearly killed me this past week. Thankfully when I got home this evening, I was able to lie in bed and sleep for a few hours, hence the complete alertness at this late hour.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about where I was three months ago, before I knew I got this job. It’s such an amazing feeling to be able to tell people that I love what I’m doing, even through weeks like these. I know that going to India will change my life, and that some of those changes will be draining and grueling. I will be there for two weeks and will hopefully have some time to blog. Afterward I’m extending my layover in Minneapolis, so I can see my family and recover a little before returning to Orange County. On Monday, I am mailing some of my clothes to my parents, so I have something to wear when I get to Minnesota. I’m packing light to India since we’ll be traveling to three different places — Mumbai, Tenali, and Kolkata. I have a feeling that when I get back to the States, all I’ll want is a pair of jeans and a hamburger. And my mom.

A Time of Peace and Maple Syrup

Easter came and went with K by my side. I slept in J’s bed while she was out of town, and K and I got chicken and waffles at Roscoe’s, an adventure I had not yet experienced and am now grateful to have had. We sat in the booth and talked about the stuff we talk about… art and blogs and writing and love and trying to remain sensitive in a jaded world. We talked about personality tests and discussed our strengths. It was a time of peace and maple syrup.

I miss LA. We drove familiar and unfamiliar streets. We drove past the graffiti and the street performers, past the man selling bootlegged DVDs on the curb. He wished us a happy Easter and a happy breakfast. Each part of LA wraps you up in its culture when you drive through, the sun and how all the smells are warmed up, and the concrete boxes of buildings, some empty and barred; sometimes every neighborhood holds a different story, be it through the diversity of skin color or the amount of smog on the windows. We got Italian sodas at Psychobabble and talked along the sidewalk. I took a photo of dozens of plastic, waving cats in a store window. They were terrifying. K took a photo of abstract art someone had drawn on a phonebook. It was hot out. K bought sunglasses; on the way back in the car, we decided we’re 100% friends, the kind who could tell each other 100% of stuff, the kind you keep closer than the enemies that you supposedly keep closer than your other friends.

We went back to her house. She made iced tea, like a good Southern girl, and we watched YouTube videos. Last Easter a gathering of friends came over to my house and we ate Easter dinner… ham and this cornbread apricot stuffing that is so good that it’s made me more friends than my talent and beauty.

We went to a party the night before in West Hollywood with some mutual friends, the film industry types who are not stars but who have met stars from working the industry for over ten years… the people who really make the movies. They talked about how Wes Anderson was at a party with them, and one of their gay friends kept exclaiming over the shape of his hands as he played the piano. They drank too much wine and argued heatedly about whether or not parents ought to vaccinate their children. From what I could tell, none of them had children. I wanted to state an opinion in the matter because I had an observation no one had considered, but decided not to when the girl started yelling. “I will never feed my children anything but organic! I will never let them drink soda or watch TV or eat meat! I will never let them become autistic by vaccinating them!” And then the man, a tall, skinny bearded man who plays the cello and tells witty stories with hilarious punch lines, started calling out, “50% versus 5%! Your child has a 50% chance of dying. Dying. 50% versus 5%!” Apparently these two used to date.

At one point in the evening, the lady asked the group, “Have you ever read ‘The Death of Ivan Illyich’?” I answered, “I have.”I’m not even sure why she asked, and those were the only two words I said to her, but later that night she introduced me to three people as “The beautiful and talented Ann.” It made me laugh every time. There was a woman who looked just like Barbie and a man who looked just like Ken (even his hair! EVEN HIS HAIR!), and they magically found each other and only talked to each other the whole night. People of equal beauty tend to attract one another in LA.

K and the host moved the coffee table aside and swing danced, and I thought about how cool my friend is, that she can swing dance that well, and with a man who is so tall and gangly, all legs like a newborn colt. Then this other man sat down by me. His eyes looked like Al Pacino, and he had grey scruff on his face. Apparently he had been eyeing me all night, according to K, and soon she came back by my side. We girls have to take care of each other. He was a 40-year-old drinking a White Russian. We talked about our jobs and then our other friend, NN, gave the signal, and we said our goodbyes.

It being Easter weekend, I thought about redemption a lot. I thought about Flannery O’Connor a lot. She’s my favorite writer, and some of my most poignant moments of thinking about God and the interactions between Him and people have come through her words. I don’t have any amazing revelations to share, just that I thought about it, and the thinking was good.

The Emotional Purging Desists.

It is time to write a post about work.  Blogging about work is an internet taboo, and several ill-fated bloggers have been fired because of it. This is not that kind of a blog post. This post is the pendulum upturn from the last post. Work is one thing, among a few others, that God has given me to help me get through this ditch of a time. Because, baby, let me tell you, if I did not have this job, I’d probably be living in my brother’s basement in South Dakota right now instead of drowning in a pool of organic juice in Santa Monica (I worked at an organic juice company before I started my new job). Not that living in my brother’s basement would be bad, only if it flooded, really, because it would be nice to just walk up stairs and be all, “Hey, family, how’s it goin’? Say hello to your muthuh for me,” and to be able to love on my niece and nephew up close instead of through commenting on pictures of them through Facebook. And it’s not that my last job was that bad either. In fact, it was pretty phenomenal in that it was very clearly a stepping stone to get to this job. Had I not worked that job, there’s no way I would be able to do this one.

SO. Today I hopped on a plane at 7:30 this morning and began a journey on my first business trip to Portland, Oregon. After getting off said plane, I decided to forgo the taxi cab fee and see if I could figure out the Max lightrail system. Some of you are laughing right now because how hard can it be to figure out a lightrail system, right? You are forgetting that you are reading the writing of a girl with intense anxiety issues. A girl who is all, “But what if I get on the wrong train car, and I end up in West Harlem?” However, living in L.A. for a year also taught this girl to combat her worst case scenarios with practical solutions: “If you end up in New York, just pay another $2 to hop on another car and come all the way back. Think how many states you’ll see in between!” So, I pulled up all these great memories of friend AA and I travelling all over London on the Underground (Mind the Gap!), and this sistah put some street savvy to work. BAM.

This sistah also didn’t get a lot of sleep last night because of anxiety issues dealing with the former boyfriend. She arrived in Portland excited and longing for adventure, and drop-dead tired. After a few hours working in the hotel lobby (I mean with a laptop and a pair of glasses, NOT fishnets and a cigarette), this girl checked into her hotel room and slept a few hours of blissful sleep the most comfortable bed this body has ever known. In between the last moment of panicking about something illogical and finally going to sleep, it occurred to her that she was getting paid to go to Portland to study all about stuff made by  indigenous peoples of third-world nations. Because that is her job. And not only that, but her job is to help a specific group of women formerly enslaved in prostitution, whom she will meet in a month. A month! Because not only is it her job to go to Portland, but it’s also her job to go to INDIA! And three different, very diverse places in India, to boot.

Oh my freaking goodness, I love my life!

So, I’m not going to frost my job with a clean, white coat like the Sierra Nevadas that I flew over this afternoon. It’s a job. I am working my way up to being 50% of the staff of an organization. Like most nonprofits, we are understaffed. The problem will always be large, and the resources stretched to their limits. It’s easy for me to get anxious. My mind is like a morse code machine, constantly tapping out words, spinning out thought-bubble upon thought-bubble of information. It is easy for the thought-bubbles to turn on me and smother me. I am making a decision today, however, to put a stop to my anxiety by laughing at it. My life is too awesome to let it drown me.

Last night was a low, low point in my week, not because of my company, but because I was just stretched thin. I called best friend L to tell her about something very embarrassing I did. It was so embarrassing that I cried right afterward, alone in a bathroom, while hastily trying to pull myself together. It was the capstone of the frazzledness of this week. She didn’t pick up, so I left her a horrible voicemail, which I pray she promptly deleted. Basically, I got all choked up when her recording started, and after the beep, I vomited something like the following: “I’m having a really hard time [voice wavers and gets all high-pitched] because I just did something that was really stupid [sniffles] and it’s really kind of funny but it’s also sort of tragic and I feel really bad [laughs and sobs at the same time]. So, call me back if you get this tonight. I’ll be up late.” Later that night, when I didn’t pick up on her first call, she called again. I couldn’t pick up the second one either because I was saying goodbye to some friends, but then I called her on my way home. When I told her what I did, there were no words of sympathy, no moans of, “Oh, sweety I’m so sorry.” L busted out in the most genuine laugh. “I feel like I’m in an episode of Sex and the City,” I told her. “It was that embarrassing.” And I laughed too.

Well, How About That.

It seems that it actually does exist.

Why I Am a Perpetrator of Blog Neglect OR On Dead Things

While standing in line at Trader Joe’s today, it occurred to me that every Orange County woman I see in public, not counting the women that I know personally, has an element of Fake. I will try not to be too judgmental and hope that readers will merely take this as an observation. So, maybe I ought to rephrase to be kinder: “It seems that every Orange County woman I see in public, not counting the women that I know personally, has an element of physical enhancement with which she was not born.”

Since the 1970’s, the world has not seen so many fake eyelashes. At Panera, one of the girl cashiers always brings me back to the Mary Tyler Moore Show re-runs. Just about everyone has plastic fingernails, which reminds me of that episode of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where Will Smith keeps trying to compliment his girlfriend, only to find out that everything he likes about her is attached cosmetically. She gets angry, and with every retort rips something off her body and says, “HERE!” and when she’s snapping off all her fingernails, she says, “Here, Here, Here, Here, and HERE!” Ah, the things we remember from our youth… I have never seen so many boob jobs nor lip plump-ings gone awry in my life. Baby, we’re not in Minnesota anymore. I would be concerned that breast implants in Minnesota would freeze during particularly cold winters. Also, epic lip chappings.

The differences between L.A. and Orange County definitely abound. When I was telling an L.A. friend that we have a canal in our backyard, I expected her to be impressed at the dock and ducks and water flowing just beyond our fence. She said, “You have a backyard?!?!” There are spotlights on the palm trees right outside my house. Swans swim in the canal. The ocean is just three blocks away. Neighbors walk their little dogs, carrying baggies to clean up excrement. People talk to one another and call out, “Good morning!” from across the road. Children play in the streets. Sometimes it is as if I live at a resort, and though it is nice, I am not altogether comfortable with the idea.

This blog originally began as a chronicle of my life moving to Los Angeles. Though I love my life in Orange County and believe strongly that this is where I am supposed to be right now, part of me feels a sense of loss. I worked so hard to live in L.A. I conquered a lot of discouragement and learned and changed so much. I just miss the city. I miss the bustle and the crazy and the helicopters hovering over my neighborhood while I rush to lock all the doors. I miss that feeling of exiting off the freeway after all the chaos and traffic and honking, only to turn onto my quiet, peaceful street. A return to the familiar, to a place I was fighting to call home. I miss my friends. Oh, man. I miss them. A few have come down to visit, however, and that has been so kind. Friend K calls L.A. her abusive lover. I pine for my abusive lover, even as I smell the ocean through my bedroom window and slow down to appreciate the amazing panorama of the ocean on my 5-minute commute home from work.

Once, on a walk to the grocery store from my home in L.A., I walked underneath an underpass for the 10 Freeway and encountered the decaying carcass of a kitten, bulging in a yellow plastic bag, with fluid dripping out from it and into the gutter, Baudelaire-like. If any of you know me well, you know that I have a very hard time being around dead things, that I just want everything to breathe and have a life and blink and meow and be warm and all that. The departure of life from a body startles me… here are the remains of something that once was and will never be again. Though I will never be as obsessive about death as Tolstoy was, it intrigues me because of the dramatic and unconscious recoil I have when faced with it. I do not think about the logic behind running away from a stuffed moose head on the wall. I do not think about how crazy that former boyfriend must have thought I was when I asked him to remove the deer heads in his house before I got there because I preferred not to have them watching me. As a child, sporting goods stores would make me cry. Mom would walk me through, guiding me with her hands over my eyes. It is one of my favorite memories of childhood, probably because I felt the fear so intensely, and I still know the warmth and the dish-soap smell and the rough dryness of Mom’s hands on my closed eyelids. The hardest part about Los Angeles was that I felt like I was walking blindly much of the time, without hands to guide me, and with all these logical and illogical fears protruding from the walls and hovering over me, staring. I felt that D’s hands should have been there, perhaps not covering my eyes because I’m a little old for that now, but maybe just at his sides, walking beside me. There is this deep loneliness, this neglected void in me right now. I keep praying that God will show me how to fill it up. And perhaps that I can find someone who will again walk with me through all the dead things. I have plenty of friends who would do this, but let’s be honest, I’d like to be able to walk through the dead things with someone with whom I could procreate. After marriage, of course.

It is hard for me to blog right now. Part of me wants to join the trend of starting a secret blog, just so I can be motivated to write, but so I don’t have a name attached to all the stuff that’s happening right now. It’s just too much. It’s so hard to write about anything when I can’t write about the Thing that is constantly there, the nagging guilt, the incredible sorrow, the second-guessing, the fleeting relief… the void that is a breakup.

I hate it that so much of my self-confidence was wrapped up in him. Epic fail. Now I am bordering on Contents For a Secret Blog and will kindly back down. Oh, the anger. Oh, the hurt. Oh, the frustration and confusion and sorrow. It feels as though, this week, I should go to the ocean and do something dramatic, hoping that someone, somewhere, is filming it for the Academy Awards. For all the movies I’ve watched, I haven’t really learned much more than that on how to handle grief. Perhaps there is a “For Dummies” book on the subject. It would make a lovely funeral gift, all wrapped in black paper.

Too Tired To Sleep

Hello, World. It has been a while. 

I left work early today because I wasn’t feeling well. Allergies. I took a nap and ended up sleeping for three hours. My body is still angry about the time change. That’s probably another factor on why I’m finding it hard to sleep right now, at 12:51 a.m., Pacific time. Lately a myriad of reminders that I am getting older have been hitting me, the first being that I actually have a sleep schedule now. A sleep schedule! And my body struggles to accept adjustments in it. The second is that it’s getting a lot harder to lose weight and eat what I want to anymore. Goodbye, great metabolism. Hello, green salads. 

My job continues to be amazing, though I’m entirely overwhelmed. I go to India at the end of April for 2 1/2 weeks. 

My house continues to be amazing too.

My break-up is not so amazing. 

And neither is my writing.

Epic Sad Meets Epic Glad

It seems that the most difficult times of my life have been the times where I sit in front of the computer screen, watching the blinking cursor, trying to put all the crazy thoughts into words. It is during the easy times that I think of the best blog fodder. Right now, there is just too much that I can’t say, too much for internet revelation. Still, I feel the pressure to keep this blog going because I love it, and I love all the people who follow it. Suffice it to say this:

I am hurting.

The breakup has been much more dramatic and gut-wrenching than I had hoped.

Ironically, everything else in my life is better than it’s ever been. I LOVE my new job. I am going to India probably sometime in April. My new house is amazing. I found out last night from roommate K that we have swans in the canal that runs through our backyard. Swans! What is this place, and how did I get here? I promise that I am thinking up good and appropriate topics on which to blog. Regular posting will resume. I’m just letting the smoke clear.