I Always Believed in Futures

Perception is a complicated and bizarre phenomena. Whether it be my vivid imagination or some deep complex thought process gone haywire, sometimes I will come across a situation that will throw off my perception of reality for a brief second or two, and cause my brain to go into panic mode until I can come up with a reasonable explanation. Maybe most people don't live in this half-fantasy world where everything could be something else, and suddenly it can feel like you've stepped into an alternate universe. It isn't something for which I strive, but it does make life interesting.

I'll start with something simple. One day I was in my parents basement talking to my mom from around the corner. She was sitting at the computer with my cat on the back of her shoulders, but as I walked around the corner, all I saw was a cat where my mom's head should be. So for maybe not even 2 seconds my brain froze trying to assess the situation as to how my mom's head suddenly turned into a cat. Was I talking to a person with a cat head this whole time? Where was I, and what on earth was going on? Now I'm not crazy. I know this sort of thing doesn't just happen. As I said, it didn't take longer than 2 seconds, but in that tiny amount of time, my brain tried to process something so unusual that it started to panic.

Another (less safe) example has occurred a couple of times on the way home from work in the middle of the night. There is a bend in the road on I35S just before it appears that you're going to run directly into an oncoming train. Of course you can't see that you're not even on the same level as the train, given that its dark and there are no street lights. You just see this train light barreling towards you, and just as you start to panic, the road bends and you continue on your way. Its terrifying, but thankfully has only happened maybe two times so far.

These are only two examples of situations that arise in daily life that make me stop and think, "WAIT. What just happened, and where am I?" Thankfully I have been able to meet several other people who's brains seem to function this way - mainly in the coffee shops and bookstores where I've been employed. These are the best people. They crave vast amounts of knowledge, always respond with sharp wit, and are game for any sort of bizarre idea. All of life is a movie, and apparently it is sometimes directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

The Grass is Greener

One of the girls I work with is in her early 30's, African American, born and raised in inner Kansas City, had her first child at the age of 14, divorced, etc. You know, apparently the typical scenario around here. Nothing I was very familiar with until I began working here 8 months ago. Now I discuss with my co-workers my life, as I would any other acquaintance, and I am suprised at how often this particular girl exclaims how fascinating my life has been. Fascinating? I don't know if I've ever thought of it that way. Well, I guess I've had my share of interesting adventures and carry a fair amount of spell-binding stories, but some of the things she finds so fascinating are so ordinary to me. Granted, some of these things she was forced to forfeit by having to raise two girls through her own youth - ie: being blackout drunk at retro night dancing with a bunch of gay men - but others have a lot to do with our different backgrounds. For instance, here is a conversation we had the other night. She was going to be taking off an entire week to watch her 2 teenage girls while her mother went out of town. They didn't have much planned except maybe to go to the movies a bunch of times. I thought that was ridiculous.
"You have an entire week off to do nothing, right? With 2 teenage girls?"
"well, yeah.." she began.
"You should go to Colorado! Its only 7 hours away, for godssakes!" I exclaimed.
"What's in Colorado? I mean, why would we go there?"
"um.. to see the mountains...because they're gorgeous.."
She laughed.
"Well, I guess I've never seen the mountains before. That might be nice. I want to see the Grand Canyon sometime too, and that place that shoots water from the ground.. what are those called?" You could tell she had actually dreamed about these places.
"Geysers. That's in Yellowstone."
"Is that near the Grand Canyon? I'm terrible at geography. You've probably been there too, haven't you?"

Well, yes. I have. (and no, its not close to the Grand Canyon, if you're terrible at geography, too.. though relative to the rest of the US, I suppose its in the same general area.) You see, while other kids were going to Disney Land or maybe just heading to the zoo and swimming pool all summer long, my parents took 2 weeks off every summer and hauled us out to every interesting place of natural or historical significance they could think of (Don't get me wrong, we did plenty of the zoo and swimming pool thing, too.. though usually it was free zoos, and the stock tank pool in our back yard.) Luckily, most of this road-tripping consisted of experiencing all the glories the great American wilderness had to offer, but it almost always included some kind of historical sidetrip. Lincoln's home, Fort so-and-so, the Oregon trail, the Amana colonies, etc. Now when you're an 8 year old kid, an old fort out west might be the worst kind of summer trip, but when you're all grown up, you'll be really appreciative of the experience. Everyone else thinks its fascinating, b/c no one else was driven 2 hours out into uni-bomber country to find one of most obscure ghost towns in this nation. And as I pointed out to my co-worker, you don't necessarily need a lot of money to pull off these vacations. My dad was a teacher, and my mom stayed at home to raise 3 little kids. Do you think we had a lot of money? We just pulled 10 hour days on the road, and no we didn't have dual dvd players. My older brother read Tolstoy, my younger brother listened to headphones, and I stared out the window and imagined what it would be like if I could live on a cloud.

I think my parents like to think of most life as a possible adventure. Which I suppose is fine, and maybe overall the best way to look at life. Everything is an experience, whether good or bad. When we lived in St. Louis, we acquired all our clothes as either hand-me-downs or from the local resell-it shop. A lot of our food came from the community pantry, and we actually got some of the pastries that Panera (St. Louis Bread Co) packages up at the end of the day for soup kitchens. When I asked my mom in bewilderment a few years ago how she could've let us live like that, in an apartment that was soon condemned after we moved out, she replied, "well, I guess I was just caught up in the adventure of being poor." Oh. WELL. It was only our childhood, so I'm glad you had such a fun experience. I guess the whole thing wasn't lacking on us, though. Whenever my older brother or I read The Glass Menagerie, we both think of our childhood in St. Louis. It was another life.

It was another life when we moved to Kansas and finished growing up in small town America, and another life when I went off to college. There have been so many other lifes through those years that I don't care to see most people who thought they knew me when I was an akward teenager - only those who have been around through it all.

Life has to be lived to the moment, broken up in separate pieces so you can remember each experience like a story. Each phase in time remembered almost as a different person, though always still a wisening creature. You only have one life, and it is going by with each tick of the clock.

I am feeling anxious again. Stifled, and needing to expand into something more.

We are the Dreamers of Dreams

This past Thursday I drove across Northern Missouri towards Quincy, IL to participate in a close friend's wedding. It was a hot, Midwest summer's day, without a cloud in the sky, and the land passing by me was a blend of yellow and green. The entire expansion of Hwy 36 runs through rural farming country, and as I drove, the barefoot 6-year-old tomboy in me ached to run through the hot stubbly fields of dry grass and undergrowth.

As my paternal grandparents are no longer alive, I have very little reason to make the trip back up to my father's rural "home country" that I considered my home away from home for so long. It had been the one permanent place I'd had my whole life, and it is days like that one that make me homesick for the simpler things in life. As I drove, I envisioned exploring along the creeks with my brothers, riding my bike down the winding country roads, and tagging along as my dad helped out with whatever harvest was in season. Just as I had that last thought, I passed a combine pulling up to a stop sign with a young child standing next to the driver, and I smiled. I passed a small beaten down cemetary out in a lone plot with one of those wire gates around it, and thought about family. Not sadness, but togetherness. Days later I came across this quote and thought it pinpointed exactly what I was feeling:

"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling." ~Jack Kerouac Dharma Bums

It seems to me that time is so much more evident when you are alone in an expanse of countryside.. and you are so much more insignificant in that moment to time and all greater purposes. Suddenly you are not an important being, but a mere creature on a crust thousands of millions of years old. The land is so old and powerful, it is a being of its own. I craved to sit on one of the hillsides to soak in this spirit again. I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem Renaissance: "God, I can pull the grass apart and lay my fingers on your heart." I wanted to be one with the earth again. To hear the incessant chirp of crickets across the prairie and the wind through the grasses. To let the sun soak deep into my bones. We are not meant to be fixed to one pavement. My restless heart craves the majesty of these wide open spaces.

Take a moment to Reinvent Yourself

I have a fascination with cutting my own hair. I've been doing it since the summer after my senior year of high school, when I was trying to grow out a bad perm. Apparently if you have any red to your natural hair, it will eventually turn orange after a perm. The color paired with the frizz was enough motivation for me. I figured out that I could cut it myself if it was short enough, and began experimenting. Granted, that is also how I ended up with a nice pixie cut the first semester of my freshman year of college, but I think its liberating to be able to drastically change looks now and then. Since then my hair has gone through many styles, lengths, and colors. I don't dare cut it if it is longer than my shoulders, and tend to cherish it when it does get long, but sometimes you just need a change! I think one of my favorite colors was literally called "mahogany." I called it blood red. It perfectly fit my mood at the time when I was going through a terrible period in my life. It made me feel so alive!
I just read an article addressing a question of females "going short" and whether it meant the were swearing off sex. As the article pointed out, women tend to find a change in style freeing. More than not, long flowing hair represents sensuality, classic beauty, and physical attraction. So while women might often cut off their hair after a break-up or during a pivitol moment in their lives, it doesn't necessarily mean they have sworn off men. From personal experience, it is actually empowering. To cut off what so often represents a woman's traditional persona and mold it into something that mirrors the fire and creativity she might feel within.

There are 2 things you must keep in mind when cutting your own hair:

1. You must keep an open mind to the outcome, as you obviously have no training in what you're doing.
2. Because of #1, you must not be afraid of wearing short hair.

I learned #2 the hard way several years ago when I let a friend "fix" my hair. Terrible, terrible decision. Of course she had recently shaved her head, so what did she have to feel bad about, right? I looked like a chemo patient for almost 2 months until I wised up and bleached it blonde. It was a horrifying experience. Not a cute pixie cut at all. I felt like every ounce of my femininity had been cut away with my hair, and I had become invisible to the opposite sex on the street.

That said, if you reach the point when you feel you've made a catastrophic mistake and feel like you're going to cry, you always have the option of stopping and calling a professional. However, sometimes it is at that very moment that you unlock the secret to what you have been trying to create.

Now don't get me wrong. I have worked with several top-notch professional stylists while I was doing massage therapy, and each have always done an excellent job with my hair. However, when I worked with them we could trade, meaning I could give them an expensive massage that really didn't take much out of my day (and c'mon, everyone needs a massage,) and I wouldn't have to pay for my hair. But now? Do I have 50$ to get my hair done by the girl I know would do it well? Not when I have an out of town wedding to attend in 2 weeks, and I have to foot the bill for hotel, gas, dress, food, gifts, etc. Its sad, really. I could make it work if I really had to, but thankfully I always have another option.

I obviously get this habit from my mother, as she has these same tendencies. You'd think maybe we'd have a flash of genius and cut each other's hair, but thats not really how it works. You see, even when I've had her cut my hair in the past, I've always tweeked it a little afterwards. Its not so much about having a good haircut, as creating a style exactly to your liking. When I think about it, I think the fascination started earlier. I always wanted one of those dolls where the hair would grow back when you pumped its arm. Instead I ended up giving a lot of my barbie's haircuts, so now my niece gets to play with a lot of dolls with butchered do's. So far she doesn't seem to mind.

Copy That

I want to be a private investigator. I decided that last night. Actually I've thought about it before when I've been investigating something on my own, but didn't think that was the line of work I wanted to pursue at the time. I've been watching a lot of White Collar on USA, and besides having an unbelievabley attractive main character, its always lively and interesting. Of course, most fans of shows like CSI or Law and Order want a piece of the game, at some point. But really, do they have the skills like I do? I'm good at snooping around, being stealthy and keeping my presence to a minimum, picking up on tiny details and connecting them to situations and people, and using crafty ways to get into places or extracting information from my peers. I never let an investigation go until I have checked all the possible outcomes to find the solution, I can take on different personas and blend into any crowd, and my ethics can be bent now and then. I also have a very sharp memory that applies to all senses and can be triggered at any moment; one might call it photographic. So all of these points combined adds up to my new life calling - being a spy. I would much rather be tailing a suspect or taking on another identity to extract some vital information than driving to work and sitting in an office. Granted, I get to do some research and investigation of confidential matters in my current position, but could you imagine the real thing? Well, I could never be an FBI special agent; I already checked into that. My vision is horrible without corrective lenses, and I have a condition that could at some point hinder my performance. Outside of that, I wonder where one might become a secret agent spy, besides learning by oneself. Maybe I could just be a clerk in the FBI and eventually have an agent fall in love with me. That might be more plausible, though probably not as fun.

Romantic Comedies?.. or total BS?

I've considered this many times -the most recent during my break at 11pm in an empty hospital - the total ridiculousness of most romantic comedies, and the obvious point that the plot has, and probably never will, happen to anyone. Mainly I think about these things after watching a movie and swooning over the luck of the main character, and how I wish things would work out so well for me. The reality though, is that no one hires a male escort to fly with them to another country to attend a wedding as their date, causing them to then fall madly in love (not lust, which is more believable) with them over a course of days. The first part might be believable, but no male escort is going to suddenly see the light over a weekend with one client and then drop his entire life for her. And c'mon. He was a male escort. Maybe some STD testing would be in order? Also, no one is miraculously saved from a runaway dumpster by a gorgeous pediatrician. It just doesn't happen. And even if it does, the chances that he's single and available are very slim. In the case of The Wedding Planner, he actually is engaged to be married.. and yet he goes on a date with Jennifer Lopez, and leads her to believe he has no one in his life. Real winner you've picked there, girl. And yet it somehow works out in the end. Because people really do call off a million dollar wedding at the last minute to marry someone who also didn't get married on the same day (to a rather attractive Italian, might I add.. b/c she's just that lucky to have both Matthew McConnaughey and gorgeous Italian guy in her life.)
These are just a few examples, but they are obvious flaws in the realities of love. They tend to skip over the actual construction of a relationship, and make everything work out for everyone, all the the time. While most woman realize this is total BS, I think a part of us all really wants these stories to be true.. and wants to believe that it might someday happen to us. Maybe we'll be the one lucky person to experience the fairy tale, and never have to worry about anything ever again. But sometimes those thoughts are dangerous ones, and in reality, we just have the movies to fuel our imagination to think, "wouldn't it be nice?"

Something Else... Accents

One of the things that constantly runs through the back of my mind is the accents around me. I've always been able to pick up on the even the discreetest of accents, and can often place people in places from their past. Lately I've been pondering the proper British accent. For obvious reasons it seems to be the most accurately pronounced in the English language. So much that its not really a British accent - just proper pronunciation. We Americans are the ones with the accent, becoming quick and sloppy with phonetics and word construction. But I would have to say if proper British is the true English form, sloppy British is even worse than an American accent. Is that what it would be called? Sloppy British? Its hard to term since no one seems to distinguish the exact British dialect they are referring to, but there are obvious differences between that and proper English. Besides the obvious dropping of the H, there is the substituting of "f" for "th." I cannot even imagine where this last piece originated. Anyway, I can't say that I've picked apart the various forms of British diction, as I've only recently begun to contemplate on its form, and am positive there are subtle (or maybe catastrophically obvious) differences between accents of certain regions - Regions of which I have no experience. Perhaps it would be a fun adventure to be like Henry Higgins and explore the country of England to discern the differences in regional dialect. I've had great fun doing so in America, though I haven't had to travel much.

Minnesotans mostly pronounce their words with a very long vowel on the "o." However, very thick native speech uses a long sound on every vowel. One of my best friends in college spoke as such. I could not for the longest time understand what town she was from, even when she tried to say it slowly. She became very frustrated since it was such a simple word - Watertown. Now think of where I was coming from, and say the word with all overly long vowel sounds. It comes out all jumbled up! Minnesota seems to be the dividing line for Northern accents in America. To the East there is a mix of bigger city accents, and shorter vowels.On the West, there is a mix of Native American accent, practically all the way to Alaska. This utilizes a more flat vowel sound. Mix that with Minnesota, and you've got a North Dakota accent. Isn't this fun?

East of Minnesota you have Wisconsin, which mainly mixes Chicago with the Norsk Minnesotan-esque accent. I just recently observed the key to the Chicago accent in the last few years. Its obviously in the "a," I knew that much already. The short "a" usage extends down through St. Louis as well. But in Chicago, they pronounce it in such a way that if you are not accustomed to it, you might be better slipping an "i" in before the "a." Kind of like the car Cialis, with a very short vowel sound. Think about that "a," and you've got the Chicago accent.

Out East you've got a whole slew of varying accents, as jumbled up as the ethnicities that settled the big cities. My first encounter with a thick Boston accent left me wondering if the woman had contracted some disease as a child, or had gotten into an accident that had hindered her speech development. Fortunately, I got to know her very well, and finally picked up that it was her regional diction at fault, not her brain! You can't blame me though, just think of children that are not developing phonetics as they should. They don't pronounce letter such as "r," which is one of the big cases in the Boston accent.

For the rest of the NE, I'd probably have to conduct another study and actually spend time in each Burrow of New York, and each region of the surrounding states, as they all have a complex history of various ethnicities for me to speak in generalities. Southern states as well, though I do have to say the Southern drawl is just delightful! Basically each vowel is drawn out, and after the first syllable of each word, the speaker drops a few notes to finish the remainder. If there is only one syllable, the word just goes down in tone automatically. Of course, that might be traditional deep South specific, as today's evolved version seems to go up in tone. Again though, there are probably regional distinctions that would require me to travel and spend some time researching. Which actually sounds like quite an interesting time. Isn't diction fun? It gives me something to pick apart in my mind, instead of sitting in dead space narrating the things around me like a story, or repeatedly playing tunes in my head.

Oh yes, and if you're curious to know what accent I have.. I have no idea. I even recorded myself speaking this morning, and then listened to it in hopes to discover my roots. Unfortunately I believe my excellent ear for picking apart others accents has caused me to mesh them into my own speech patterns. I can't imagine how people can even understand my speaking. Some vowels have a very flat sound, like Northern/Native American, but I also have some overly long vowels, and a bit of the midwest "a." Now I understand why a traveler once asked me where I was from, as he couldn't pinpoint my accent. Well sir, I also have no idea where I'm from. What a good question!