Antici….pation

/ Ashley / 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I listened to TED talk about anticipation. A group of people were polled on their favorite and least favorite day of the weekend. Nearly everybody said Friday was their favorite day and Sunday was their least favorite. Their reasoning? What lay ahead. They were excited for the prospect of the weekend and dreading the work week. That makes sense, right? But you have to wonder why people didn’t say Saturday as the favorite. Saturday is when you’re in the thick of the weekend – you’re participating in the plans you made on Friday or earlier in the week. So why not enjoy that day the most?

I have such a hard time living in the moment. I’m constantly aware of what is to come. This makes excellent at multitasking and delegating, which is why I was a fucking awesome McDonald’s employee when I was 16. But it makes for a pretty mundane existence day to day. I feel like my life is a perpetual vacation on which I take so many photos without appreciating the things and people around me. I don’t like that. I envy people who are able to live in the moment without feeling obligated to prepare for the future.

Preparing for the future is part of being a responsible adult. You don’t spend money wildly because you have bills. You don’t drink heavily on weeknights because you have work in the morning. You try to eat less red meat because your family has a history of heart disease. I fear that people view living in the moment as a sign of irresponsibility since it conjures ideas of childhood and naiveté. But remember when you were a child and the only thing you cared about was the game of make believe you were in? You weren’t worried about the scenario not concluding in an hour when you were called in for dinner – you just played and enjoyed yourself. I’d like to pinpoint the time when that changed for me, when I began realizing that time meant something and that hours in a day had to be doled out according to priority.  I think if I were able to do that, I would be able to remember how to live in the moment.

I moved into a new apartment this weekend. I’ll be sharing the place with Carissa, a good friend since high school. I’ve been excited about the move since we saw the place. It’s not anything special – just a two bedroom place in Appleton, but we’ve made it really nice. I’m using this as an opportunity to revamp my life. A new place means a new start. I’ve started thinking about what sorts of things I intend to do here.

  1. At my new apartment, I will be a girl who runs. Or at least jogs. About twenty yards from my patio, there is a bike trail that runs through a park. Since my bike needs repairs, I decided to jog on the trail to see where it went. I only went for about a mile or two, but I felt like I was participating in my life, like I was taking advantage of my new neighborhood. And also burning some calories and toning my thighs.
  2. At my new apartment, I will be charming and beautiful and always organized. I have really good intentions of keeping my space neat, but whether that will happen remains to be seen. I’m pretty considerate when it comes to shared spaces, because I know that I hate cleaning up after somebody else, but my room is a different story. I just feel like that now that I’m an adult who is working full time, I have at least some obligation to keep my room somewhat clean.
  3. At my new apartment, I will meet my neighbors and appreciate their bird feeders. In my backyard, there is a small grove of trees surrounding a bird feeder. I’ve seen robins, cardinals, blue jays, doves, finches, and even a hummingbird. He introduced himself as John, and we had a short conversation about the apartment. He said his partner would be coming home soon, and that he was sure we would see each other around.
  4. At my new apartment, I will write outside whenever possible. Carissa bought a small patio set. It’s the perfect sized for my laptop, a cup of coffee or glass of wine, and a small snack. It faces the backyard with the birds, rabbits, and chipmunks. Even though I live in a complex, it still feels secluded because I’m not looking into the windows of the surrounding buildings.
  5. In my new apartment, I will read books. I will read actual books. Not Kindle books, but actual paper books. Most of my books were in storage before, so I wasn’t able to pull out a novel, sprawl on my bed and read for a couple hours. But now, I can. Now, my books are available and I have a queen sized upon that is basically begging to be read upon.

I love anticipation.

And then I reread Sloane Crosley…

/ Ashley / 2 Comments

If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can’t afford to be with them. It’s not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what that price is. You set it yourself, and if you’re lucky it’s reasonable. You have a sense of when you’re about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, “Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses. No one’s that busy at work. No one’s allergic to whipped cream. There are too cellphones in Sweden.” But most people don’t get that lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you’ll figure out if it’s worth it later.

So, assuming you’ve gone ahead and purposefully ignored the first adage because it doesn’t apply to you and you are in love the way no one in the history of spooning has ever been in love: now what? You’ve gotten what you want, but the state of mutual ownership has shifted. Like that piece of jewelry that you’re never quite comfortable wearing, you become concerned with its whereabouts, who borrows it and for how long. You wonder if you’ll lose it, if it might look better wrapped around someone else’s neck. Admit it: wouldn’t it be less stressful not having it touch your body at all?

The first time I read  Sloane Crosley’s essay “Off the Back of a Truck” I was at the university gym almost two years ago. I was on the elliptical and I had to stop several times to make notes in my Kindle. The way she talked about relationships in such a frank way was refreshing. At the time I was with Bill and didn’t think I would ever need to seek salve for the pains of a breakup. But it resonated so fully that I wanted to stop other girls on the treadmills and bikes nearby and read paragraphs to them.

When Bill and I broke up, this book was the first book I bought, only hours after the initial exchange. I couldn’t remember the passages. I couldn’t remember the name of the title. I just knew that I wanted the paper copy of the book. I needed the tangible thing to hang on to and to underline those paragraphs that had literally given me pause. I also wanted to be able to point to something and say, “This got me through it! This got me through that first day and helped me make sense of everything in one fell swoop.”

Of course, the book didn’t really get me through it. What it did was remind me a couple things. First, that I needed to figure out how much this was costing me. Was it going to hurt me more than give me satisfaction? Did I have to sacrifice my self-respect, goals, hopes, interests, or even passing amusement in order to make this relationship work? What, exactly, was the cost? It was a rhetorical question, one I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to answer in a quantifiable sense, but I knew that for then, at least, I couldn’t afford it. The second was that I would eventually be okay. Eventually. Eventually I would be able to walk past his old house and think, “That’s where Bill used to live” the same way I might make note of a post office or grocery store. Eventually I would just look back on it as a part of my life.

That was what most struck me that afternoon on the elliptical – I knew what she meant. I had passed landmarks with ex-boyfriends and just seen them as cold facts. That was where we went on our first date. That was where he first saw me cry. We rented movies from that Blockbuster. We walked together along that trail. I recognized how those same facts that had once torn me apart now read like an uninteresting pamphlet.

I had the first promise of that the other day. I was getting ready for a wedding on Saturday night, and I digging through my desk drawer when I came across a picture from our sixth month anniversary. It was of us kissing – one of those barf-worthy things that I hate seeing on Facebook. But it was a picture I had once had framed and sat on the table next to my bed. Instead of crying and wiping my tears on my dress, I set the picture aside. “Oh,” I thought. “There’s that picture. I was wondering where it had gone.” And then I continued getting ready.

Later at the wedding, I was by the bar by myself for a few moments and I thought about how remarkable of a step that was for me. It was the first time I had come across something of us – something significantly tied to fond memories with him – that didn’t physically hurt me. It gave me hope that I was moving forward and that things would be okay. So when my friend returned from the bathroom and asked if I wanted to dance, it only seemed natural for me to accept his invitation and to enjoy myself, even if I was dancing to disco.

There is one thing you know for sure, one fact that never fails to comfort you: the worst day of your life wasn’t in there, in that mess. And it will do you good to remember the best day of your life wasn’t in there, either. But another person brought you closer to those borders than you had been, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Knowing what you can afford is useful information, even if you don’t want it.

You can find the above selections and more gems in Sloane Crosley’s book How Did you Get this Number. It would be a great book to read on the beach.

Imagining Memories

/ Ashley / Leave a comment

Last night I hung out with a boy named Leo. Our parents are friends and I have vague memories of playing together as children, back in the days of Windows 98. Maybe even before that. I remember his dad having this pad hooked up to the computer where you could draw on it and it would appear on the screen. I thought it was magic. That’s about the only memory I have tied to him.

We’ve been facebook friends for a couple years now, I think, never really having met each other. We were both aware of the fact that we had things in common, though – he’s a writer who spent some time as an English major. So I figured we would have a lot to talk about. We did – a lot about books, writing, comedy, movies, and music. At one point, he asked if I liked writing or reading better.

It honestly stumped me for a minute. I want to say that I like writing better, but I read much more than I write. So, I told him about my writer’s dilemma which is basically every writer’s dilemma: lots of ideas bouncing around in my head that never actually get written down. Or they do get written down, but only in short fragments (“the scent of wine!” “relationship and nail color = personal evolution primarily in pink” “miss to ma’am” “I’ll explain everything to the geeks”) that I intend to expand upon. Inevitably, I never do. Then I’m doomed with the writer’s guilt of having ideas but never doing anything about them.

“You know that most writers are tortured, right?” he asked.

Of course I knew that. Then I recalled that notebook I carry around for when inspiration strikes. It’s been a few days since I’ve written in it. He also asked what my dream job was and for once, I gave an honest answer: “I want to sit around and write about myself all day and get paid for it.”

That inevitably led to a short discussion about how being a writer is proclaiming to the world that you’re at least a little bit of an egomaniac since the very act of writing is asserting that your words, opinion, or perspective demands attention. It was refreshing to be able to talk about this in such a frank way. I’m all about self-deprecation, and since my writing is often a very personal subject, it was fun to make fun of it.

I decided to resolve my writing/reading dilemma this morning by actually writing instead of just thinking about it.

I’ve had this book, Writing Life Stories, for a few months now. It’s full of great exercises that I read through. That’s important: I read through them, I didn’t do them. So, to start out, I did a few. The first chapter is all about accessing your memory; exercises included mapping out a childhood neighborhood (done very sloppily and not at all to scale), writing a story about the map (I wrote about meeting my friend Allie), and charting a year of your life.  Through all of this I discovered one thing: Memory is weird.

While drawing the map, I recalled things I had completely forgotten about:  short-lived friendships with girls who lived on the far corner of my block for a summer or two, Allie and I whistling across the yards to each other at night, the prickliness of weeds in tall grass, and how my most vivid memories of my friendship with Allie take place in the summers.

I thought I wouldn’t have a problem charting out a year from my high school days, but that was near impossible. The years all blend together and I can’t even remember what I did for my senior homecoming. I don’t even know if I went. I have flashes of  events: losing a friend, getting dumped, an audition, doing a synchronized swimming routine to a Postal Service song (yes, that actually happened), falling in love, meeting significant people…but the order of these events is unclear to me. I also found that most years prior to 2006 are completely blurred to me.

The good news is that somewhere, I have a box of journals where I can find that information. I’ve always known how difficult it can be to access memories and I think that’s part of the reason I started journaling at such a young age. I’m sure that when I go through them I’ll be reminded of things I don’t even realize happened.

Funny how things seem so important in the moment in which they happen but then fade so quickly.

 

The Latest Anthem

/ Ashley / 1 Comment

I’ve been working unreasonable hours lately. All on my own will though. My supervisors have made it perfectly clear that any overtime I work is completely optional. I suppose it’s better than mandatory overtime. I’ve been doing it to keep busy. It’s sort of pathetic that to fill up my time, I decide to take on additional mind-numbing work. But it’s what I’m doing.

You would think that working 36 hours in the last three days would make me tired. But no, I’m just about wide awake around midnight, listening to my new favorite album – Chamber Music Society by Esperanza Spalding. Buy it now. It’s wonderful. It’s one of those albums that’s like a new discovery every time you listen to it. I may be speaking prematurely since I just got it yesterday. But I have listened to it about eight times today. The strings are beautiful and make me want to collaborate with other string players to create beautiful improvisatory avant garde pop jazz songs. If only I had those skills and actually played my violin more than a half hour once a week. During which, I play exclusively Suzuki Book 1 with an eight year old who likes mustard on pancakes (true story).

I decided to stay after the lesson this week to play on my own. It was rough. My fingers have sort of forgot how to vibrato properly. I lost my bow grip about five  years ago and have since been struggling to get it back. My six month hiatus didn’t exactly help that. Regardless, it felt good to be making sound again. I’m not ready to call it music. Right now, it’s just some horse hair across some steel making sounds in some sort pattern. It will eventually become music though. And I’ve already made plans to collaborate with a cellist to play some duets together. I think it will be fun. From what I understand, he’s also returning to playing after having not played seriously for months. So if initially we suck, at least we’ll suck together.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I was this lost in an album. It’s beautiful in such a terrible way. It makes me nostalgic for moments I have yet to experience. It makes me want to drink a single glass of white wine and cook an amazing italian meal for myself and a handsome man. It makes me want to sit alone on a patio and watch a storm roll in. I also want to eat meringue for some reason.

I’m doing my best to focus on myself right now. I’m trying to remember the things I was once passionate about. The last time I remember really being on my one was my freshman year. I was excited about so much. About music and art and lovely quotes that I couldn’t quite wrap  my head around. I was eager to express myself by whatever means available. This resulted in decoupage, about six new playlists a week, a devotion to Bukowski and beat poetry that last about three months, and a fierce coffee addiction. Looking back, I was immature about a lot of things. But of course I didn’t see it that way. I saw myself as a cardigan-wearing maverick who happened to be really excited about pretty words. I was also very clever and mature for my age. [read: I made some foolish decisions, read some very bad books, and thought I was hip when I introduced friends to awful bands they hadn’t previously heard of.]

I’m getting back to that point – not the 18-year old naivete, because that would be terrible, but getting back to seeing myself as an individual who is free and morally obligated to discover herself. Right now, this consists of working 50+ hours in a cubicle every week, reading terrible best sellers , listening to jazz that makes me feel like I’m seeing it live, working through Soulpancake, trying new recipes, and accurately designing how my new bedroom will look.

Anyway, I’m starting to lose concentration, so I think it’s finally time I go to bed. But I’ll leave you with this, just because I can’t stop listening to this song.