From Tuesday’s Journal, June 24th

Friday, June 24 2011

So much has changed in the last year – almost all of my circumstances, and a good bit of my own personality, if that’s the right word to use. Well, I’m still a bit strange and I still use humor too often and too ineloquently, I am still reserved and a touch too sensitive. I still cannot dance to save my own life, still somewhat more comfortable than is appropriate. But I’m also more likely to speak in a group than before, to initiate conversations. I am able to dance much more freely if not well in public, I now trust myself to handle life’s business, and I feel immeasurably more confident in my own appearance. My hair, my skin and posture I believe are much improved from the state they were in just ten months previous.

 

The major physical change to my circumstances is the big move I made – fromFloridatoNew York.

 

You’ll remember that I was looking into various AmeriCorps positions last summer – social service work, stipends, sometimes inclusive of housing as well, and with less experience than a normal job requires. I specifically was looking outside of Miami, outside of the whole of Florida because I had wanted to move away. I have hated Miami for a very long time, almost as long as I lived there, though it became even worse when we moved away from the beach and more inland. I was bored. I could walk nowhere and my driving was – remains – abysmal, though neither I nor my family had the money for an extra car in any case. I never was able to feel as though I fit in that city; not with my shyness, which was crippling, not with my jeans and cardigan instead of shorts, skirts, dresses. My eternal sneakers and tennis shoes instead of cute sandals and heels.

 

It is a little funny, that the appearance and style I was lacking inMiami– the things that left me out in the figurative cold rather by myself – I have gained them all living a thousand miles away, where it’s none of it necessary anymore. I could probably go back, really, and be comfortable – get a decent paying job, an apartment by the beach for what it costs to live in an outer borough here. I could meet people this time, walk around freely looking good and knowing it too, swimming in the beach and dancing in the clubs. It would be so much easier now, and yet the desire is not there; I think about Miami and all I can recall is how I felt all those years – waiting in the sweltering heat for a bus that would take half an hour more to arrive, dismissed by everyone around me, belittled by my family and dreaming about getting away.

 

And of course it’s not just an avoidance of Miami that makes me love New York City. It’s such a unique place; I don’t imagine I could achieve this level of contentedness anywhere else. By and large it feels like a Northeast city. I remember the first time I went to Baltimore, to DC, and how I loved the brick, the little houses with tiny front porches, the gray of the side-walks and the look of the city set on rolling hills. I know I’m not describing this very well, because honestly I don’t believe I am able to explain it fully; I simply like the aesthetic of an urban neighborhood in this region. Dense, staid, old.

 

When I get near my apartment and glance up at the building to check on my window, see the park across the street with its side-walk benches, the busy road a block down with a thousand dollar stores and cheap pizza shops – it makes me feel content. On the train I stand by the door and stare out at the landscape of theBronxfrom the windows; a setting sun, smoke, warehouses and little stores, big brick apartment buildings and wild-flowered, abandoned lots, people going about their business on the weed-cracked side-walks below. In the distance sometimes, the skyscrapers of Manhattan looking serious and gray.

 

The subway – that’s another thing I love, rather predictably given my lack of driving skills or car. It’s still strikes me sometimes, the care-free simplicity of simply wandering to the bus stop at whatever time with the assumption that transportation will arrive within the next five or ten minutes. New York public transportation; there’s almost not anything I can really say beyond what’s been said a million times already – it’s the best in the country. It will take you anywhere, or nearly. It’s fairly fast, even with all of the delays – I suppose some might complain about the cost but I’m given an unlimited monthly by my work so that’s no concern of mine. Although, I do often note that the monthly unlimited for transportation inMiamiis about the same price for an abysmal service in return. Even if I knew how to drive I would be loathe abandon the train – where there’s (much less, and less noticeable) traffic, where I can read or listen to music in commute, where there are no worries about whose been drinking or not, where even travelling at two, three, four in the morning I have never been in an empty train and never felt particularly unsafe.

 

Since I am beginning to be able to recognize when I am going on at length about something which is not especially interesting to anyone else, I’m going to cut myself off here and bring this entry to a close. A lot has certainly changed since last I updated this journal – I moved from a city I hate to one I adore, I got a new job, I met many new people. Hopefully this time I’ll be a diligent enough blogger that I get to actually write about it all.

 

That anxious sort of inactivity

First of all: I am studying, which I need to be, I’m just also blogging, watching ANTM, and browsing flickr outfits on wardrobe_remix and fatshionista, too. Sigh.

The sad thing is, the material isn’t uninteresting – not at all! What could be better than a class, which I practically hand-picked, about suicide, relationships, and depression? That is the stuff life is made of!! And yet, I slack. I suspect that in the end, I’m just not an academic person – that’s not where my heart is (which sounds unbelievably corny, but I only mean that some people find all the fulfilment they need in researching, in making a name for themselves in academia, and I just care much more about living comfortably, figuring out this whole relating-to-others thing, and helping others more generally….I don’t have the heart of someone who was ever going to be great, even if that’s what I was raised to desire, and I’m finally starting to realize/come to terms with that).

….Meanwhile! I applied to a job which sound absolutely dreamy today – training, pretty good fucking pay by my standards, public service (my desire to work for the state is no secret – I believe good public services are the measure of an advanced society, and the government in general is pretty good about benefits/pay, at least around here), my Very Own Cases, pretty much everything I envision when I allow myself to fantasize about professional future. I probably won’t get it, of course – not being pessimistic, just stating the reality of being a single, inexperienced salesgirl in a city with hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers going after a handful of jobs – but it’s my favorite opportunity that’s popped up so far.

I also used my last ten-dollar-off coupon of the month to buy a dress for my sister’s graduation in a few weeks – the dress is for my sister, of course, not for me. It was sixty dollars originally and I got it down to 12-something, all discounts told – not to bad, though not cheap enough to really excite me. It’s a great dress as well, black but made sunny for its pink-rosy print and it’s a-line skirt. It’s also strapless with a beautiful pleating detail across the bust, so that it looks like the material is merely sitting in front of the breasts instead of lying on them – my sister calls it a “pleated shield” and it pretty much does look like some kind of weird armour. It adds a nice bit of edge to an otherwise completely feminine dress, and once you throw on a cardigan it’s totally work appropriate. Once I get a camera in my hands I’ll probably post a picture or two.

Ok, now I really am going to double up on the studying – I absolutely must have this reaction paper submitted by tonight, no excuses! Out of my way, writer’s block! Fuck off, laziness! Tonight it’s just me and the interpersonal theories of suicidal ideation.

yours,

– Tuesday

 

What’s that? You want to hear the *most* mundane details of my everyday life?

Right now: eating Fruit Discs, the delicious supermarket-brand knock-off of Fruit Loops, half-watching Say Yes to the Dress, trying to read the articles my prof. sent me on interpersonal theories of suicide and re-checking the various jobhunting sites which have become staples of my internet history. So basically my life has become a mix of scrambling to cobble together some kind of professional future and then battling the waves of anxiety inherent in that effort with foodstuff, TV, internetwandering and shopping. Oh, shopping.

Now, I had previously thought I would abandon my department store gig at the first offer of anything in an office, where I can wear non-rubber soled shoes because I get a chair and there would be paper work and computer systems involved. After further reflection (and a minuscule, vaguely insulting raise – I now make *almost* a dollar more than minimum wage, isn’t that nice?) I’ve decided to stay put until I find a job in the actual field I want to enter, which is social/health services. After all, even if I found something in, say, a technological start-up company which was nice enough and paid more than I make right now, I would just keep job searching for the job I really want anyway, and then if I found it I would have to leave pretty soon after accepting, which I don’t like to do. Or maybe my reasoning makes no sense and I’m actually just super lazy. Whatever. This way simplifies things for me and makes me feel more focused.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been taking advantage of said crappy retail job to slowly build up the material trappings of an adult life. Probably from watching too much What Not To Wear, I’ve become much more interested in dressing less like a fourteen-year old and more like an adult. Until very recently I didn’t own any clothes at all except jeans and t-shirts, any shoes except sneakers and tennis shoes (and my beloved red Docs), I had a bookbag and a couple of rundown, old purses with missing hooks, zippers and handles.

So I’ve been slowly building a wardrobe which is respectable as well as true to my style – which I’m only just discovering anyway, so the timing is actually pretty good: had I done this earlier I would probably want to throw it all out now anyway. I’ve gotten a couple of nice shirts, a pair of nice, comfortable flats. My most recent acquisitions, which I am proud of to an inappropriate degree:

– A big giant purse, which is nice/adult enough to take to job interviews, work, etc., but also exactly what I wanted personally – big enough to fit my netbook, journal, agenda, wallet, etc., but casual (cotton, mostly) with sea-side colors (white, beige and mostly sunny-day ocean blue – I look at it and want to go swimming) – with a zipper and five different pockets. Came to $5.17 thanks to a sale, a coupon and my employee discount.

– A pencil skirt! Now, I always thought that I hated pencil skirts, because I am rather slim and thus always looking for things which will give the illusion of curves – big fan of a-lines, here – and I always thought that pencil skirts made you look narrow and flat. No thanks, right? Wrong! I loved each skirt I pulled on – I still don’t quite understand it myself, but I think it has something to do with the high waist and the way your hips look when you walk. I went with a dark gray with a black belt which I found in the clearance rack – not too tight or trendy, hits just below the knee, overall guaranteed to be appropriate for almost any job and yet still, I think, quite flattering. Cost after various discounts: $8.39.

I can’t believe I ever hated shopping.

ps: I would have pictures up, but my sister’s camera is dead (well, was killed after a bad fall….accidental cameracide) and my father took his camera with him when he fucked off to wherever, so I am camera-less. If I do get a hold of one I might come back and add pics later, because I really do think blog posts look quite bare without them.

yours,

– Tuesday

 

In a passable impression of a normal human being

I actually managed to (a) dress myself (b) leave the house!! Go me! Actually, the evening was a steady degradation of plans to celebrate graduation – which I have not actually completed, though I did attend the ceremony a few days ago – which was first moved a day, and then moved another day. We were going to go to a nice opera, and then in the face of sold-out cheap student tickets and heavy traffic, quickly adapted the plan to a night of drinking and watching Date Night and shopping by the beach, where all the cool clubs are. Then it got kind of late and my poor, batshit crazy mom’s head exploded at the thought of my staying out past midnight even in the face of my long history of staying out until two or three in the morning, so we decided to watch Date Night and maybe just sip a beer at the nearby mall, which is a great hangout spot if you are a middle school teenager and not much else. And then my friend’s car broke down for the hundredth time and I naively thought it would be fine to go with M. and R., who are a couple, just the three of us, yay! So of course I sat in a dark theatre by myself for half the movie while they “talked” outside, and then sat in a dark theatre basically by myself while they cuddled nearby.

The movie, though, was pretty funny and I am not much of a socializer anyway, so I enjoyed myself pretty well anyway. Afterwards M. and R. once more wandered off by themselves and in a valiant attempt not to resent their couply happiness I listened to music and really, really wished anyplace was still open so I could have a drink, any drink, and then flirted with a security guard in a last-ditch attempt to entertain myself/FEEL LOVED confirm my ability to hold a conversation, and then I went home and watched Life and House Hunters International.

So, overall, can I say I have a life? Well, no. But I think I made at least a good-faith effort, right?

 

Back and busy

OK, so – been a while! I logged on today for the first time in not-quite a year, and saw that I had actually written a Hiatus Announcement post, and then obviously never actually got around to publishing it….blogging fail. But in any case, I decided to back away from the internet for a while and journal privately (in an actual notebook, with a pen!). And I did that, and now I’m here again.

So to quickly bring you up to speed; I’m still at the department store, depressingly, I’m basically done with university minus a summer class I’m taking, after which I will graduate immediately,and  my plans for the future are a giant mess though I feel very good at the moment about all the different ways it could go. I’m considering wrapping up my self-imposed dating hold, what with school being over. I’m thinking of maybe staying here in the city rather than, as I had assumed until very very recently, transplanting myself almost halfway across the country to New Jersey and making it somehow work there. I may take some extra classes – maybe go for a graduate certificate – because my GPA certainly suffered this last year what with the working and the class overload and the personal stress. But all of that will be detailed later.

Today I’m running errands. Because I have free time for the first time in, no joke, a year at least. It’s amazing how much you can actually get done when you don’t have four or five different projects hanging ominously over your head. So I am: returning library books, using a coupon I have to buy a graduation present for my sister, sending my transcript out to an internship in Baltimore, returning a fairly hideous bag, stepping into a pretty store I discovered the other day to just window shop a little, picking up some food for the budgies – in other words, being normal and enjoying myself.

More later!

yours anonymously,

– Tuesday