an open letter to anyone paying attention

to whom it may concern:

before we get started, allow me to be clear that i am very aware of the kind of person that i am. i am stubborn, opinionated and have a profound tendency to think that i am always right. i don't mean to be critical nor is it my intention to judge for the sake of judging. (you are hardly the type of person that has been okay with that rather charming side of my personality.) what i think i need to do, mostly for my own selfish reasons, is write out what's on my mind, so i know it's gone and i can stop thinking about it. i harbor no belief that you are going to listen which is why i'm not actually drafting this as an email to send to you. i'm also not sending it because i'm fairly confident that i can't find a nice way to say what i'm thinking, thus it might (read: likely will) hurt you which is not my intention. i understand that even though it is not my intention, i'm probably going to hurt you. and while an eye for an eye might leave the whole world blind, i think ghandi seriously underestimated how good it feels to throw a couple daggers when you've been hit for so long. this is probably why he was quoted and generally regarded as a good person and i have earned my reputation as a bitch.

on to the point then, for some time, i regarded you as my best friend. as the one person on this earth that i could tell whatever to and know that it would be ok, guarded, protected. i knew that you would give me advise, engage in foolish activities, travel, make new friends, etc etc etc. it was an absolute pleasure while it lasted. in seven years, most of the memories i have of the time we spent together are quite good (with really only a few exceptions.) don't get me wrong, i always expected things would change and from the days in 2003 to early 2010, things did change. a lot. and honestly, that's not the problem. i have no qualm that things were naturally going to change because that is what happens. things changed when you moved, things changed when we finished college, things change when your relationship ended. the issue i have is simple, we changed, our friendship changed, my expentations never did. this is where things got bad, i got disappointed.

perhaps i'm wrong to feel that way but i do believe that somewhere along the way you were one of many people who tried to convince me that feelings can't be wrong. i suppose maybe i'm wrong, perhaps i shouldn't have expected so much of you but to be fair, you had always lived up to my expectations. it started to feel like i was letting you down too. and we both know how i cope, or rather don't cope, with feeling like a disappointment. we did party together but it seemed that as i didn't need that to be the central focus or if i was unable to make it a central focus then i was no longer necessary. i was a play mate and as soon as i didn't want to play, i no longer had a need. that might sound dramatic but honestly, that's exactly how it felt. think about demf if you need an example. one day was more than enough for me and when i didn't want to go back, you responded as if there must be something wrong with me. there isn't and there wasn't. demf was a good time years ago and now, i'm happy to go for one day and have that be more than enough.

i'm not going to go into the issue of tfg or any of the surrounding issues that caused. i think that you should be smart enough to realize the bullshit we all got to live through while you "learned your lesson." we've actually talked about this much more thoroughly than i would ever like to discuss tfg. one thing i never said though: it kills me that he was more important to you than your friendship with me. and the choices you made with that really make me wonder if there is anyway that our friendship can be put back together. i'm inclined to say that it can't.

i feel like you are going through some kind of quarter life crisis. any semblance of stability that you have known, you are running away from, you are pushing out people close to you and creating a network of playmates and bar friends. i suppose that is fine if that's what you want but it seems like a really lonely place. more importantly, this is what i ran away from with jason all those years ago. it seems to me that what you are looking at is the bottom and quite frankly, of all the places that i have joined you, that isn't one that i'm willing to join you. i think you need to seriously examine your life and consider pulling yourself together because i'm worried about you. so worried that it only makes sense for me to pull away. please feel free to contact me if you start to take steps to put your life back together, but only then. thank you.

i'm sorry if this has hurt you but i'm pretty confident that you didn't read this. in fact, i'm pretty sure you don't know about this blog so i feel safe and more important comforted in knowing that all that junk is out of my head.

best of luck to you.

from the girl who works to maintain "bitch" status

until next time...

don't go breaking my heart.

it would seem that whenever i find myself with time to actually sit down and type out a blog, my mind goes blank of all of the brilliant things that i find myself thinking about when i'm sitting in traffic or blow drying my hair. in fact, i've started to think that my most brilliant thoughts actually occur when i'm blow drying my hair. i'm not sure why; it's probably just because it is such a time consuming process and i can't hear anything, all i can do is think. again, keeping with my irregularity of actually posting blogs, it has been some time since i've managed to say anything. and in that time lots of things have happened. much like my last post, today i am without a boss or a co-worker and have made it to the point of the day where i am content to type up a little diddy rather than launching into a new project. i really wish i could just sneak off early but i know that as soon as i step foot outside, my boss will call my desk and when i don't answer, she will call my cell phone, wondering where i am and why i'm not sitting at my desk doing something on my task list. anyway, here i am, thinking through my fingertips and hoping to be if nothing else amusing. let's start with the election last week and just see where that goes.

the election just happened last week and i have more than a few thoughts about what went down. quite frankly, this notion of just not voting is not something that i can understand today or will understand ever. it is your right as an american, very similar to your right to be able to complain. it is my opinion if you don't participate, then you don't deserve your right to complain. just a thought. and the voters who didn't turn out this time are the voters who make up approximately 30 percent of the nation wide electorate: the 18-30 year olds. where were we, guys? it's not enough to go out and vote once every four years for the president and feel like you've done your business as a citizen.

i'm not sure if it is for some reason hard to remember basic government classes from high school but let me give you a little refresher on the three branches of governement and therefore why it is important to vote in the midterm elections (and listen 18-30 year olds, we aren't that far removed from school so this analogy should make a lot of sense. you wouldn't have blown of the midterm in college and still expected to pass the final. same thing with voting.) the president is the executive branch, and while that is sweet and pretty bad ass if you ask me, he isn't in a position to write or create laws, just approve or deny them. this is why it is important to vote for congress, those pesky folks who run every two years (in the house) and every six (in the senate). you'll notice them because they tend to have the most commercials on tv and occasionally get mocked by snl. without a congress that is willing to work, the president doesn't get anything accomplished. in case this was for some reason not clear, i am a democrat so when i say a congress willing to work, i mean a congress willing to work for what is right for the country. now we are in a position where the house is likely to be under the leadership of an oompa loompa and it was because my peers who got barack obama elected decided to sit on their thumbs on election day. thanks guys.

i did hear a lot of chatter before the election that lgbt voters shouldn't support democrats in this election because they haven't done enough for lgbt rights since taking control of the congress and the white house. yeah i understand that. and i was annoyed by this when i saw it coming up on facebook and whatever else but didn't say anything. now that i've had a proper amount of time to think, i've become even more pissed off about this notion. if you genuinely think that the republicans that were elected last week are the kind of people who are going to advance your agenda, i think you might need to take a closer look at what got elected (rand paul? come on.) also consider this whole branches of government thing. the house is now republican dominated, do you think that we are going to see any progressive pieces of legislation from that body making it to the president's desk? thanks for standing up and saying that you were tired of democrats not doing enough but in this game, no one won.

now besides my upset about the election (and it goes much further than the national stuff because i live in michigan and we got f-ed in the a and not in a positive life affirming kind of way) i have to imagine that there are other things rolling around in my mind. we are having unseasonably lovely weather in the mitten considering that it is nearly mid-november (thank you global warming) though the fall back means that it is nearly dark when i leave work at night, which is kind of a bummer.

it would appear that i've run out of things to ramble on about so i think it might be time for me to actually continue on with my work day.

from the girl who gets real pissed when people don't vote.

until next time...

to avoid looking out the window at the beautiful weather, i'm staring at my drawing of wilford brimley wearing a tutu juggling cats. thanks jeremy.

i have once again been struck with a profound sense of motivation and by that i clearly mean i have been lacking motivation for about an hour now where i can't seem to get my mind to cooperate with the idea that it is still the work day and it is ill spent by screwing around on the internet. to be fair, i did have a very productive morning and neither my co-worker or boss (for my department) are in the building today so it's really hard to summon the desire to start a new project. so instead, i have had several glasses of water, to afford myself the time to pace back and forth from my office to the kitchen, i've done the mail with our office manager and i have considered how badly i need to paint my nails. while considering what color i would paint my nails this week (this is a saturday activity for me lately, not sure why) i was perusing a former friend's* flickr account, hoping that i might find a new picture to use as my profile picture for this blog or on my twitter account. *this former friend was someone who i used to be particularly read: very close with once upon a time in our lives and she is now quite a talented photographer. i mean, she probably was when we were friends too, i just didn't know that; 13 year olds are more interested in talking about a lot of other things that burgeoning artistic abilities. it is one of her photos that serves as the profile picture for this blog.* upon examining through about a hundred photos, i found myself realizing that everything that she snapped a picture of was something that was an experience. even something simple, like an afternoon snack of wheat thins, kiwi and a clementine was aesthetically organized in a way to be pretty. i, on the other hand, would eat that kind of snack, sitting at my desk and not think for a second to stop and look at how it looked all together in a bowl. there was a photo of a recently emptied plate with a fork and knife left haphazardly upon it and one of a crosswalk in detroit on her walk to work. it makes me think a couple of things. i am slightly jealous that i am not so creative. i wish i could look at something and just visualize how to arrange it or shoot it or whatever to make a creative and interesting image. i can't do that. my brain simple doesn't accept it. second, i think that this is kind of like the modern day equivalent of stopping to smell the roses. stop and take a photo. at least that lasts longer than a rose.

i mentioned yesterday that if given the time i would discuss my thoughts on wanting to be a robot, vampire or super hero and considering that i find myself without any other engagements for the next little while, i thought i would document those thoughts while killing time. that's right, i'm a multi-tasker. i have, for a long time, had a fascination with the idea of being able to do well everything. and the problem was, i was good enough at doing everything that i wanted through delicate juggling, excellent scheduling, not sleeping and consuming obscene amounts of coffee to get everything i wanted done. work, school, friendships, boyfriends (one at a time, for the record), leadership on extra curricular activities...you get the idea. in addition to this rather extreme desire to be able to do everything, i also fancied myself to be a person who was cold, unemotional and accordingly rational enough to always make the smartest decisions. again the problem was i became so good at this too that it became very difficult to try to convince me that i was wrong or that my approach to facing the world was at best sad. i think that part of this desire came from the early lessons that i learned quickly from my mother which can most easily be summed up like this: always do the best you can, don't accept anything less than that from yourself and understand that sometimes in life you are going to get hurt. well, when you find out at age 9 that your best is all a's, you feel a kind of pressure to keep that going. when you watch those behaviors carry over into other areas of life, you make a mental note and before you know it, it is an adult behavior that can't be shaken easily. it only took me one try of getting hurt to realize i didn't want to do that again so i carefully constructed a wall around myself to keep a distance from everyone. really. there are a good number of people who met me around my sophomore year in high school who don't know a damn thing about me but if you asked, they would say we were close in high school. i was just passing time until i got to college where i assumed i would find people that didn't seem to waste my time. because the people in high school that i did trust were the ones that hurt me, it was easier to just shut everyone down. so i did.

it was lovely for a while. lonely, yes but wow. such a wonderful feeling of safety. no one could get in, no one could hurt me, i had control. but that can only last so long, especially if you expect to grow as a human, have new relationships and so on. this was a horrifying prospect. and the very few close friends that i chose to discuss these fears with all said the same thing; they made it their business to remind me that i am not a robot. they reminded me that i'm human and therefore will experience emotions, both good and bad, and if i keep myself from some then i'm going to miss everything. yes, this makes logical sense now. at the time, you could have just as well told me to go take a long walk off a short bridge. it took a lot of undoing to get me to wrap my mind around the concept that it is okay for me to just be human.

i understand that this should not be difficult but this learning came after lots of work, visits with friends, old and new, visits with therapists (even though i never let our conversation get here, i think they did something to contribute), a failed experience with anti-depressants and lots of personal discovery. i want to be clear. i'm not good at this. i'm working at it, i've been working at it for a lot of years now and i think i'm getting a little bit better at it. but this in no way stops my desire to be a robot, vampire or superhero. i feel like you can probably deduce why but here's the bottom line: they aren't human thus don't have to deal with human emotions and trivialities. that is marvelous, i think. maybe in my next life i'll be better at this emotional stuff.

from the girl who's kind of hoping to meet edward cullen to be turned into a vampire

until next time...

you're doing well, superman does good. check yourself.

there are some things in life that i am fairly certain about. first, coffee is better black. second, none of the books in the twilight saga needed to be as long as they are. third, i am crappy at writing blogs with any kind of regularity. fourth, it is pretty tricky to be a girl. there are lots of things about being a girl, eye lash curlers, high heels, the dynamic between friends, frienemies and enemies that require very delicate balance. and as it was, we don't really get a lot of formal training in these areas. in fact, we hardly know that it is happening because for the most part, it is a very natural part of our being. that last thing anyway, high heels and eye lash curlers take some getting used to. we girls are very competitive with each other. i think there is some very backwards logic that if we are better than someone else, than we succeed and they fail. and i understand that isn't nice and it shouldn't be the way that i or anyone else should think, but the simple fact of the matter is, sometimes it is. a lot of the time too. to be fair, it works to the contrary as well, where we judge ourselves against someone else's successes, even if they are things we don't want yet. i am particularly guilty in this area. i often look at friends (via facebook, aka the best device for destroy or unjustifiably boosting self-esteem ever) from high school or college who are my peers that are engaged, married, have children. i find myself immediately feeling like i'm behind the game even though i don't want to be married or have children...yet. this being the case, if you didn't already know, being a girl is a lot harder than it might look.

now i know that there are many paths in life that we all stumble down that make up our lives and that is what makes us, as humans relatively interesting. it has been my experience that most women, particularly in my generation and the one or two before me, we are obsessed with doing the best thing, being our best, always having the answers and being able to do everything. this, of course, is an impossible task. and even though i wrote that statement, i am still guilty of wanting to be able to do everything (there is an appeal i can't explain here to being a super hero, robot or vampire. maybe some day i'll explain my thoughts on that topic.) here is a giant problem with all of that. i would say that most women when confronted with a problem they don't have an answer to, they opt for what they think is the correct answer. usually this results in women making choices that don't make them happy but what they think will make other people happy, hoping that they might become happy accordingly. simply put, this plan is a fail. i could probably expand but i feel like you get it. what happens next? experience has also taught me that the people who try this method of happiness are also the kind of people who enjoy reading self-help and self-help like books that make them feel better about their lives or will serve as some kind of guide to help them better their lives. so they read books like "who moved my cheese" and "eat, pray, love" expecting some kind of gps device to make life easier rather than a crypic roadmap that still tells you the same lesson you weren't listening to in the first place.

believe it or not, the whole reason for the post is to talk about eat, pray, love. i saw the movie. *sigh*. it was a very long film and the whole time i found myself thinking, 'this is why the world hates the united states' and 'what happens when she goes back to new york at the end of this?' i find it to be a horribly childish notion that if you run away from your problems, they will go away. this just in, problems don't move on their own. it's a lot of work to get passed them. if you leave, they will be waiting for you when you get back, having grown impatient in your absence, which makes them so much worse to deal with. something to consider. i also have this suspicion that she didn't actually learn anything. my proof? it's like this. she left to go to italy, india and bali to learn how to connect with the world and like find her true self or something right? maybe i took too much away from this but to me i thought she would also be trying to live her life, as my friend shelby would say, as a strong independent woman of the 21st century. read: this does not mean go to these countries and find men who will tell you what to do, how to do it, how to feel and how to live. liz gilbert found herself a male tutor in italy who showed her around and helped her feel at home, she found that guy from texas who flat out told her she was doing the whole praying business wrong and she met that one guy from who played the creep from "no country for old men" in bali. now at least that one i can understand. you really don't fall in love by yourself but still. come on, liz gilbert. let's give these ladies whose lives you are now impacting some hope that they can be strong and stand on their own.

i'm not going to say liz gilbert is without any insight. i liked this quote: "happiness is the consequence of personal effort. you fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. you have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. and once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it." i just believe soundly that that realization could have been made anywhere in the world, not necessarily by travelling the world. the realization that you deserve happiness doesn't need to take place on a beach in bali or at an ashram in india any more than positive changes to one's life need to be vowed on new years day. if you allow the people in your life to play a role in helping you realize what you deserve, it makes it a lot easier to work towards that end.

so i guess the bottom line is this, live this life for yourself because it is the only one that you have. if you want to eat ice cream every day for a week, do it. if you need to see a therapist because you can't figure out why you don't smile, do it. do whatever you have to do to be happy because you deserve it. i'm not saying i have all the answers or that i can even do this but i do know that i can try. that is what counts. just sayin.

from the girl who probably should have never seen eat, pray, love

until next time...

all the lonely people, where do they all belong?

so i just read through the last post that i wrote. and while it isn't shocking to me that a lot has changed since i made that post since i do write so infrequently, it is now amusing. in the beginning of my last post i talk about how i'm grateful to have a job, even if i hated it because in this economy, pretty much any paycheck is a good paycheck. approximately twenty-four hours after that post, i got a new job. one that i love and am so happy to be at. it is fantastic, marvelous and a bunch of other synonyms like that. it's a 9-5 grown up kind of job too, with health care and benefits. i'm quite thrilled. so now that i accepted this new position, the burden of my old job behind me, i was told by my new boss that i needed to go to manhattan for a week for training, on their dime. this sounds pretty fantastic right? now i'm not sure why this is the case but it seems that i always end up with quite interesting travel stories whenever i leave home for any period of time. oh and just for the record, i once again work in the city of detroit. i'm sure there will be more shennanigans to post about once i've been down here for more than two days. so look foward to that. let's talk about nyc for a minute though.

it starts with a 7am flight from detroit to myrtle beach, followed by a six hour layover then finally getting to new york. i figured if i got to the airport a little before 6am, i would be totally fine. but apparently, there was some convention of annoying families happening in myrtle beach and they were all on my flight. checking in at the airport isn't really that challenging, i don't think anyway. of course it seems to be when you have three children you need to get checked in too who all have bags and gameboys and ipods and all sorts of other forms of electronic entertainment. finally made it through the sea of children, through security to the gate to find the plane was delayed. i had decided that on my flight i was going to re-read twilight then move on to the other books in the saga. a quick, distracting, silly read seemed fun to me. so at the gate i waited, for a half hour, drinking a horrible cup of coffee that an older gentleman bought for me when we were chatting about how nice it would be to have a flight with no children allowed. eventually i got tired of standing so i found a spot that was relatively quiet and i read. being an adult reading twilight in a crowded gate at an airport isn't nearly as embarrassing as i thought it might be. we finally get to myrtle beach without incident. it is now 9:45am and i am in dire need of coffee, since i also decided not to sleep the night before in fear that i would oversleep and miss my flight. i have never spent time in the south. in fact, the most time i can remember spending south of the mason-dixon line besides washington dc was this stay in the airport. i walked up to the coffee shop counter and i ordered a large black coffee. keep in mind, i'm exhausted so i was talking slower than i usually do. the woman behind the counter looked at me and said:

"oh you must be from the north. you talk real fast."

lady you could have deduced i was from the north because i walked out of that door that says a flight was coming in from detroit, the door that is right across from where you are standing. but sure, let's point out the obvious. "yes. how much is it for the coffee?"

she stared at me blankly again for another couple seconds. i started to get impatient and she finally said "$2.50."

i took my coffee and set off in search of a plug to charge my phone while i read. i needed to listen to something else. the announcer on the PA announcing all the warnings about other people packing your bags and suspicious activity needing to be reported had an exceptionally annoying southern drawl and i couldn't listen to it for five hours. i finally found a plug, after finding a bunch that were labeled "plug not operative." the one i found was near a table, in a corner. so i sat there by myself, again reading twilight and listening to my phone.

it is almost time for the plane to start boarding so i went down to the gate and sat down by a pillar to once again recharge my phone. (the old battery sucked and it lost charge so fast.) after sitting there for about ten minutes, when they announced our plane was running a half hour late, a woman came up and shouted at me.

"of course you had to sit in that spot! no offense but that is annoying. just saying."

i found her outburst to be unnecessary. it's not as if she was sitting in that seat and i sat on her lap. her things weren't on the chair, nothing. i had no way of knowing if she was sitting there before but for the ten minutes i was in the chair she wasn't so i feel like it was fine that i was sitting where i was. normally i would have just let that kind of thing go but i was tired and annoyed with the delayed flight business and all the southern accents. so i said back, "yes i did need to see here. there is a plug in this pillar and i need to charge my phone. just saying." and i went back to my book.

anyway, more tales and adventures from new york later. it is now almost five and time to shut down my computer and leave work.

from the girl who is usually not as bitchy as it sounds in this post.

until next time...

mellow pandora and a papercut to end the work day

so i am sitting at work, waiting impatiently for the next few minutes to go by so that i can leave and carry on with the rest of my evening. don't get me wrong, i am quite grateful to have a job, particularly in this economy but i've been doing nothing for the better part of an hour and it is getting tired. so after creeping around facebook, catching up on the news and recent tweets from friends, i decided to search through flickr, hoping to find a new picture for the background of my twitter. i happened upon a picture that i thought was alright so i went searching through other photos from that artist. she was quite clearly female and quite clearly head over heels in love with someone. naturally this lead me to thinking about twilight. apparently last night, eclipse, the next part of the twilight saga came out in theatres. i know this because i have a friend who coaches high school cheerleading and all of her girls were overwhelmingly excited about the premiere. i'll admit it. i've watched twilight and new moon. more than once in fact. i kind of like them though i'm not sure why. (for the record: team edward.) there is something appealing about vampires and werewolves running around in regular life. the writing isn't fantastic so the books were a struggle for me to get into. the thing about twilight that i still can mock and do, is the quick obsession that developed between edward and bella. i know in the movie they kept calling it love. she loves him, she needs him, he needs her, she needs to be a vampire but really, whoa. i get it with edward. apparently her blood smells delicious and he wants to suck it out of her. and actually now that i'm thinking about it, i get it with bella too. who wouldn't want to fall for the brooding, pale edward cullen? there is a point coming, i promise.

when looking through those pictures, some of the landscapes had quotes written over them like "every time i reach for you, you slip through my fingers" and others had proclamations of love like "i'll wait for you forever" and other such sentiments. this is connected to twilight in my mind and makes me wonder, what the hell kind of love are these people feeling that i've been left out on? i have been in love before and it was great. i miss that feeling frequently and i long for it again. but i don't think i've ever felt obsessed with anyone and this is what it looks like to me. these photos, the messages, bella and edward. it's an obsession. perhaps this is normal and what i felt was some kind of watered down version of love. honestly though, if that's the case, i prefer it my way. i like still being able to function but i am curious, how is it that someone loves that hard?

from the girl who still doesn't really get emotions.

until next time...