a negative identity

everyday you hear of 17-year-olds making big, bold steps and trotting off to the big apple to become fashion designers or to los angeles to become the next heidi klum, and there’s an element of glamour in all of it because everyone in the whole world secretly wants to be a fashion designer so somehow eating saltines in empty apartments is considered beautiful. but what if the 17-year-old wants to run a bed and breakfast in a sleepy city instead of pursuing the spotlight, and what if the 17-year-old is actually 25? is there any allure in a twentysomething spoiling any and all chances of ever owning a condo in the city? and if owning a condo in the city would be, for me, the epitomy of personal failure, why am is so fucking afraid to run in the opposite direction? laurence boldt says: until we have taken the time to discover and affirm who we really are and what we really want, we are left with only negative identities and negative passion. we define ourselves by what we are against, and so have negative, not creative, passion. we are comfortable with rebelling but fearful of creating. [but] genuine creativity is never the result of a defensive reaction against something.

i guess i'm afraid that everything that i think i want is just a response to what i know i don't want. and i know allllll about what i don't want. i know i don't want to "manage" or "coordinate" anything. i know that i don't want to work hard to make someone else rich. i can rapidly fire off a list of things i find banal and uninspired, for instance:

guys who refer to themselves as "outdoorsy"
flannel in the city
skinny jeans
flannel in the city with skinny jeans (please, seattle, STOP!)
fretting about the economy
the phrase “work hard play hard”
broadway and the surrounding pike/pine area
mustaches/finger mustaches
95 percent of feminist theory (please don’t hate me, tyanne)
pine furniture (especially in kitchens with periwinkle curtains)
articles of incorporation
guys who leave ski lift stickers on their zippers
the seemingly endless obsession with pirates
jazz/blues/fusion bands in bellingham
western’s “take back the night” march
english majors who read harry potter

but i'm done running away from things i don't like. i don't want to define myself by not liking pirates. i want to pass out and see stars from running so hard towards the things that i do like and fall down slick with sweat, thinking wow, thank you, universe.

also, i really love this

southbound

for all of the plane rides i’ve taken, and books i’ve read, and rockets of desire i’ve ridden lately—it turns out that happiness was waiting for me in a little coffee shop in phinney in the form of cayenne hot chocolate and a good friend. and right now my mom did a little dance around the kitchen to please, mr. postman. and today the skagit valley rained frosty purple raindrops that rolled down the windshield like tiny waving wrists. for all of the fear news anchors pour nightly into our living rooms about economic instability, and to all of the folks lapping it up like cats, i suggest turning of the television and treating yourself to a 3 dollar hot chocolate at the neptune.

i brought more clothes home from bellingham today. i took pictures of my apartment and will put them on craigslist tomorrow morning. moving back to bellingham was something that needed to be done. and even though i hooked up with a republican and took a job as a cog in the kicking-people-out-of-their-homes machine (ahem, I mean foreclosure process), i’m so grateful that i had the chance to put the bellingham baby to bed. plus, i reconnected with matt and tim, saw some beautiful sunsets, and watched obama win the election in the same city in which i've thought all of my best thoughts. mmmmm.

i had a crazy good time with caitlin this weekend. we're going to be roomies! we’re looking at the greenwood/phinney/ballard neighborhoods and i think i’d like living in any of them. capitol Hill, i will not fall into your hipster trap again! but seattle, maybe, just maybe, you will give birth to some of my best thoughts yet.

what i remembered in mexico

for whatever we lose, (like a you or a me) it's always our self we find in the sea. ~e.e. cummings

it’s not that i have no interest in owning a house, or peasant-chic cardigans from anthropologie or to participate in a company-matched 401k, it’s just that my freedom means so much more. simple math dictates that if for every 50 weeks we sell to our employer, they “give” us two weeks to keep for ourselves, then for every 50 years we sell to our employer, we "get" a mere two years for developing who-we-really-are. because i am convinced that one’s truest self cannot be nurtured when directly plugged into the economy. sure, people can enjoy their jobs, be challenged by their jobs and even positively contribute to society through their jobs (although this is rare), but more often than not, we are unable (or unwilling) to take a cold hard look at our lives and realize that they are only our own to the extent that our desires can be purchased.

from the time we learn how to speak, our capitalistic society grooms us to choose and devote ourselves fully to a career as if it were a religion, starting with the nauseating question: what do you want to beeee when you grow up, tommy? By the time tommy can talk he knows the correct answer to such a question, is not “a good conversationalist,” “an ecofeminist” or “one who dabbles in finger paints.” no, even 4-year-olds have learned that the questioner is really asking, how do you plan on earning money in order to pay for your inevitable mortgage, car and consumer debt? so, enthusiastically, tommy answers by proudly declaring that he wants to be a doctor, a firefighter or a lawyer, or by naming some other profession deemed respectable enough to be found in children’s books.

and as tommy gets older, he is seamlessly incorporated into our cog-like society, and before you know it, he is a 25-year-old business administration graduate spouting off nonsense like “i work hard and play hard” and “timmy, let's get all our ducks in a row and huddle to debrief on the client’s deliverable.” although the hippies among us find it easy to point fingers at all of the tommys in the world that perpetuate the conveyor belt of birth-work-death, tommys are mere products of our capitalistic society. since the capitalists have lubed and inserted their agenda into virtually every arena of our lives—political, educational, linguistic, etc., it’s hard to see that the whole "meaningful career" ideal is the most complex, opaque and successful marketing scheme in history. the money-mongers do not want us to see the gap between ourselves and what we do to pay our bills. the more time and energy we (enthusiastically, no less) invest in our careers and take on their productivity goals as our own, the more we pad their pockets at the expense of becoming who we are meant to be.

a much more articulate tom hodgkinson says: career encourages what i consider to be a terribly unnatural self-specialization: in our urge to compete, we tend to try to become very good at one small thing to the exclusion of all others. this is called professionalism but could more accurately labeled 'being useless.' culture is produced by experts, music by bands working for record companies, education by expert teachers, medicine by expert doctors. we are disabled. it will soon be difficult to put up a shelf without a degree in shelf-putting-up.

all of this is to say, that i’m sick of being made to feel (or allowing myself to feel) irresponsible and selfish for not wanting a career. i want to do a little of this and a little of that. i want to blur the lines between my working and non-working hours. i want to become more well-rounded, a renaissance woman. i want to commune with those who incorporate anarchy into their lifestyles. those who don’t need permission to cross the street. those who have lifted off the sticky lenses of fear. those who tangle and dance with this crazy thing called optimism. i want to pay my bills by making soap while listening to mason jennings, by walking dogs in the rain and taking on short-term temp jobs in the city. i want to listen to more Motown. i want to finish embroidering my salvation army peacoat. i want to spent more time with nicole brown and whatcom county farmers. i want to lift waterlogged worms out of puddles. i want to keep keeping my eye out for a used yurt. i want to find the love of my life and milk cows side-by-side. i want to keep in better touch with the people that inspire me. because as andy frank says, wealth is the sum of everything you value.

ordinary life does not interest me. i seek only the high moments. i am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. -anais nin

some things

we agreed that last friday's dinner was multi-dimensional in the mouth. and it was really fun eating in bellevue in irony. i dare say, i fancy you. and our midnight walk through ballard confirmed its pull on my periphery. the camel-colored brick apartment buildings from the 60s, the spinning lights inside the chai house, the cobblestones; they opened themselves to me. the importance that place plays in my life continues to marvel me. aesthetics has always my favorite field of philosophy. i'll always choose lace over logic. later, as we walked through the halls of our high school in the dark, we fogged up windows, cupping hands to eyes as we pointed out forgotten lockers and scoffed at the posters for tolo. when i was sixteen, i thought we would all become nautropaths or architects, or at least x-ray technicians. but some of us became tmobile managers at the mall, and some of us moved to wenatchee. it made me really happy though when you told me you ran into our high school's quintenential jock at the airport and that he was nice and kind and attending a bible college in california.

eventually, we dismissed ourselves and got back into the car for a drive through shoreline. oh, and thanks for giving me your mittens when my hands got cold—nice touch.

here are my answers to the proust questionnaire (proust-like, i omitted the questions i found less-intruiguing):

your favorite virtue: wittiness.

your favorite charicteristics in a man: able to make/fix things with his hands, generous, honest, dreadlocked.

favorite qualities in a woman: homemaking.

your favorite occupation: happenstancing.

your idea of happiness: falling asleep to the sound of wind beating canvas inside a candlelit yurt.

your idea of misery: finding meaning in the idea of a career.

your favorite flower: the peony

if not yourself, who would you be?: a well taken care of housecat with an attitute problem.

where would you like to live?: on a farm with chickens, llamas, goats and garlic.

your favorite prose authors: leif enger, tom hodgkinson, anne lamott, rob brezny.

your favorite poets: kim addonizio, richard siken, joshua marie wilkinson, mary cornish, erica jong, linda rogers.

favorite painters and composers: henry darger and audrey flack.

your favorite heroes in real life: nicole brown, faythe levine and modern homesteaders everywhere.

your favorite food and drink: my mom's macaroni and cheese with a side of broccoli and a big tall glass of ice water.

your favorite names: edison for a girl. easton for a boy.

your pet aversion: people freaked out by "the economic crisis."

what is your present state of mind?: it's in the midst of deprogramming itself from 15+ years of public education (indoctrination).

for what fault have you most toleration?: people who refuse to be practical. in the words of oriah mountain dreamer, "i want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human."

your favorite motto: all is well.

my simple little self

i have been swept up by the dominant current of struggle that's floating inside the souls of almost everyone i know. and my vibrations are fucked from factoring in other people's thoughts about this individual life of mine. it's nobody's fault but my own. sometimes in my repressed desire to be part of something, i enthusiastically add my boxcar to the first train passing by. but i need to stop weaving randomly through this life, mistaking other people's tracks for my own. urban homesteading, anarchism, the law of attraction—these are the things that frost my cupcake. and lately i've been a little down because they do not easily fit into the marketplace. it would be so much easier if i wanted one of those jobs they crow about on sesame street, the ones that reek of a baby-capitalist's idea respectability. in an innocent, elmo-like voice, i wish i could say:

when i grow up i want to be a teacher.
when i grow up i want to be firefighter.
when i grow up i want to be an architect.

or least want to be something that easily fits into the equation of education + certification = job. and those are the thoughts that make me believe i shouldn't leave bellingham. i tried seattle, and to me it felt like a stale version of inspiration. like it's still living off of the residual fumes of 1992. so why my sights are gravitating down south is beyond me.

i know better than to think that life is an action-oriented journey. but sometimes i fool myself into thinking, if i do X, i'll no longer be lonely. which brings to mind last year's folklife festival. everywhere i looked, there was a person. the grass was trampled flat by the sheer number of feet tromping around the area. people, people everywhere. it looked like one of those japanese beaches. but i ended up in the bathroom crying because i felt so very alone.

and i would hate to feel that way again. because although bellingham is much smaller, it doesn't have the struggle, sacrifice, hard work, complex of like the larger cities and their puritanically brainwashed citizens have. it's content being its simple self. kind of like i'm in the process of learning to be content with my simple self.