Even-Keeled I Am Not.

I'm a little bi-polar. Note bene: I don't mean that I've seen a psychiatrist and have a diagnosis in my permanent medical file or ought to be on a lot of medications. I have a friend who is actually bipolar, and I'm not that. What I mean is, more so than the average person, my emotional state goes up and comes down with very little regard paid to external stimuli. Happy things will make me happy, and sad things will make me sad, but sometimes happy things make me less happy because I'm in the nadir of my natural emotive cycle and sometimes sad things make me less sad because I'm sitting pretty atop the zenith of that cycle.

When I'm "up" (which ought not to be confused with happy, because they're not really the same thing) I am fast. I talk faster by at least a factor of three, and sometimes as high as a factor of ten. I am wittier; my brain moves fast enough for me to come up with those charmingly barbed bon mots that we all love Violet Grantham for. I am constantly looking for new stimulation when I'm up. I meet new people at an alarmingly high rate. Sometimes I take reasonably alarming risks. I feel invulnerable, you see, so I can totally split that hash joint with some random man who is completely unconcerned by the fact that I cannot understand him outside the tiny dive bar in a city where I don't speak the language. Nothing will happen. I am fast, I am quick, I am capable and I'll get myself out of whatever happens. Nothing's going to happen anyway.

(In my defense, nothing ever has happened. For the record.)

When I'm down, I am slow. I speak slower than average. It takes me whole seconds to find the words I mean to say. I do not want to meet people. I want to lie in my bed. I want to watch movies that I have already seen again. I want to reread favorite novels. I become a worrier, half-way convinced that the roof over my head is going to collapse at any moment. And I become defeatist, because I am convinced that while the roof is going to cave and crush me, there is nothing I can do about it. Going outside would be too much effort, you see, and my bed isn't outside, anyway. I have no energy for getting out of the way of whatever impending disaster my worry-wort brain has settled upon.

(In the interest of fairness, none of the disasters I've predicted when low have happened, either.)

There are people that only know me when I'm up. They met me when I'm up, and I only see them when I'm up and flitting about like a manic social butterfly with my tiny butterfly feet in every pie I can spy. There are lots of these people. It's not really personal that they only know me manic, it's just that when I'm low, I tend to sit in bed. Not a lot of opportunity for social interaction when you're sitting in your bed, you know?

There are a few people, one or two, here and there, that only know me when I'm down. I can only imagine what they think my life is like. I count myself blessed beyond measure to have these people, even though most of the time I don't think about them at all.

And as I get older, there is an ever-growing number of people that know me both up and down. Anyone that knows me long enough is likely to come to the conclusion that I'm a little bi-polar. The longer someone knows me, the more likely they are to realize the full magnitude and interpersonal impact of my brain chemistry. I now know people that I've known for more of my life than I've not known them. This makes me feel old, a little, but it also is an amazingly affirming realization. People have decided to keep in their life for this long. They've done this even though I'm a little bipolar, and can't be easy to deal.

But I wonder, in these stretches of worrying and defeat and solitude, how all this up and down makes me appear. I'm horrifyingly image-conscious, when you come right down to it. I care very much how people see me and what they think; I put enormous and disturbing amounts of energy into cultivating public personas that are agreeable and likable and desireable. Or, rather, I do all that when I'm up. When I'm down, I don't have the energy, and so I withdraw from the world, and I often wonder what these absences say to people. It's impossible to determine how absence and silence affect perception, because in order to find out you'd have to appear and ask, breaking the absence and the silence.

Because I only stop to think about it when I'm low, I imagine that these retreats must make me seem unhinged, unreliable, flaky, flighty, unable to control myself. Something unflattering and damaging, to be sure.

I spent about three weeks, recently, UP. I was ON. I was HOT. It was great. It lasted forever.

Well, not forever, because I haven't left my house except to go to work or the grocery store since last Wednesday.

I fend off absolute despair by reminding myself, in mantra-like repetitions, that my emotional cycle is a cycle and I'll not be this tired, this uninterested, this uninteresting, this irritable forever. Acceptance really is the best check on anything. Accepting that I'm a little bipolar helps to moderate the lows. I have yet to figure out how to moderate my highs; I don't really want to, I guess. I suppose that feeling invulnerable will get me in trouble some day, but it hasn't yet. So why bother?

Maybe that's just the lows talking. Probably.

Traveling Light

I bought myself a plane ticket to Spain for my birthday. I leave tomorrow. I intend to spend the dawn of my 28th year on earth in misty mountain solitude, listening to medieval chants and wandering around the oldest still-functioning monastery in Europe.

After that, I'm going to Barcelona to party.

I am refusing to take a suitcase on this trip (not such a strange thing, for me) but I am also resistant to even taking a backpacking pack. It's too big. I'm packing a duffel bag for this trip, the kind of bag one takes on a long weekend. A "weekender," the fashion people would call it. It's fake red leather, and my mother spotted it on the free table at Value Village Thrift Store two months ago and brought it home for me. It has no rips and no holes and the strap is still attached and the stitches are firm and the zipper works, so I'm not sure why it was on the free table, but it has a good home, now. This is a bag I will love.

I have my little duffel loaded up with clothes: underwear, cardigans, a cocktail dress. A toiletry bag. A current converter. I'll add a pair of fancy flats later tonight.

I have a backpack, too, a carry on, the backpack that has been on every single trip I've taken since I was fourteen and went to Oceania for three weeks. This backpack has been around the world. It's been to Australia and New Zealand, it's been to Spain before, it was with me when I got stranded in Morocco, it's been to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa, and it's held water and sandwiches while I hiked in the Schwarzwald. It's met my daughter's father. It's climbed Mayan ruins on the Yucatan, seen waterfalls in the Andes, gone to street parties outside of Santo Domingo. This backpack has been to New York City more times than I can count, seen the redwoods of Big Basin State Park in California, wandered around downtown Detroit. It's been to St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Into this backpack I will put my camera bag, laden with camera and lenses and lens filters and cleaning cloths and memory cards and a battery charger and a card reader. I will put my tiny pink computer, and its charger. I'll put my phone and its charger. I'll put in two books and a wallet and a passport and three packs of American Spirit cigarettes, in the yellow box, and a lighter. The lighter will also be yellow.

I've had butterflies in my stomach for days now, anticipating this trip. My insides are quivering in anticipation of being unattached for seven entire, glorious days. My wanderlust is ferocious, voracious, and stems primarily from a desire to have no attachments at all. My daydreams are always about taking off into the sunset and leaving everything behind. My fondest, most impossible wish is to start over, completely, from scratch. I want to disappear with my duffel and my backpack and never come back, never look back, reinvent everything about myself.

I can't do that. Having babies really puts a damper on your ability to disappear without a trace. Well, unless you're my baby's father.

(Heh.)

So, I take the next best thing: Whenever I can, I go somehwere alone. Like tomorrow.

I have many vices. Cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, pretty dresses, vintage hats, ridiculous high-heeled shoes, loud music, driving too fast. Some of these are probably even full-blown addictions. But of all my vices, and all my addictions, this is most certainly the worst. This is the one that could cause me to abandon everything, hit rock bottom, sever every tie. It would be so easy since the addiction is to rootlessness, restlessness, the ability to move on whenever the urge hits, to put one's life in two small bags and go, onward, forward, sideways, backwards, it doesn't matter as long as you're moving.

The addiction, you see, is to this fluttery feeling I get before stepping off into the unknown. I am addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the limitless vistas of possibility. This feeling is better than any drug, than any drink, than any touch. This feeling is better than any love. This combination of knowing everything theoretically and nothing concretely and being able to see everything and nothing all at once is better than anything else you can name. I would chase this feeling endlessly if I could. I would step off every cliff, climb every mountain, turn down every blind alley to find it again.

If I could. If only I could.

Low Ebb

I'm at low ebb. The lowest of low tides. I have nothing, nothing going on. I've been reading a lot of blogs focused on dating and relationships and sex and the interplay of stereotypes and expectation in each and all of these things and thinking about the interplay of all those stereotypes and expectations with both sexual ideas and loving ideals and the ways we conduct relationships.

But I don't have any conclusions from any of that.

At a certain point, reading something like The A(n)nals of Online Dating crosses a line from funny to abusive, and as a friend of mine said about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "You can only watch people be assholes to each other for so long." In the end, somewhere between nine and eleven pages in, I only end up feeling sorry for these people, these people that have no idea how to get what they want. Or even, that don't know what they want. It's heartbreaking. And I want to take each of them by the shoulders and give them a gentle shake and tell them to get it together, that life is full of disappointments, and that the only real guarantor of happiness is a long perspective.

I was talking about perspective this weekend, too, trying to sort out at what point altering your perspective on an emotional reaction become rationalization instead of healthy adjustment. Or, more accurately, I was trying to make a case for pure feeling that just wasn't happening. No matter how true I feel a rush of joy or a rush of sadness, it is just a perspective, and there's nothing sacred about anything.

I'm not as smart as I think I am.

Two weeks ago, I became completely embroiled in Susannah Breslin's Letters From Johns, for surprisingly similar reasons. There is enough there to disgust me, to turn my stomach and make me doubt the goodness of men in general, but there's also enough vulnerability, thinly veiled, and enough genuine confusion to make me want to do something. There's enough yearning and searching there, among those johns, to make me think that someone ought to be taking them by the hand and putting them on a different path. Maybe that's what the working girls are doing. Maybe that's what the working girls are hindering. It's hard to say. Sex is so fraught with terror.

Isn't it sad we're all so terrified of something that ought to be simple and uncomplicated and full of love? Or at least, trust.

But there I go again, wanting that pure emotional experience. That doesn't exist. It's all a matter of perspective. I speak from my perspective, and it is distinct and defined and I can try and adjust and that may change my emotional reaction. Maybe I don't want to change my reaction. Maybe I like compassion. It's a form of power, after all. All that caring.

What I mean to say is, I'm at low ebb. I have a thousand thoughts and there's a thread somewhere but I can't grasp it and I can't pull it and I can't spotlight it and make it easy to follow. I have nothing to say because I have everything to say. I can't bring any clarity to anything.

So I try and be oblique. You should see the backlog of half-started and absolutely atrocious poetry I've got catalogued. "Weave me a crown of ruby-colored leaves, and I will keep you against the winter..."

I don't know how I'm going to get through the winter.

Bad Mommy

Today's inescapable and cringe-inducing conclusion:

I'm a bad parent.

No, really. If you'd seen the tantrums I've had to deal with in the last three days, you'd know. Good parents don't have to deal with those kinds of tantrums, because good parents know how to head them off at the pass, one way or another. Good parents don't end up in screaming matches with their kids because they can neither continue to speak calmly nor simply walk away.

Good parents don't have to fight to do nice things with their kids.

So there it is. The reason mommy drinks is that she has a toddler and there's really just no way to get through the day with a toddler that doesn't involve liquor. Not when you're a bad mommy, anyway.

Honestly, though: How do you deal with a kid that won't pick out bedtime stories for you to read, won't let you pick them out, and screams bloody murder when you try to sit and wait it out? Then screams louder when you leave the room, then even louder when you come back in and tell her that unless she picks out books to read, you can't read her any stories?

Every choice simply leads to more screaming.

Oo, oo! How about breakfast? Simple, right?

"Would you like Cheerios or Raisin Bran?"

"NO!"

"Ok, well, if you get hungry and want something, let me know what you want and I'll get you something then."

"I AM HUNGRY!"

Then do you want *Cheerios* or *Raisin Bran*?

"CHEERIOS. NO RAISIN BRAN."

"Which is it? You have to PICK one or I can't get it for you."

"NO! I DON'T WANT TO PICK ONE. YOU CAN'T MAKE ME."

"Should I put some of each in your bowl?"

"NO! I WANT BREAKFAST. YOU'RE NOT GIVING ME BREAKFAST."

"Well, I can't GIVE you breakfast if you don't tell me what you want, so please PICK SOMETHING so I can give it to you."

"NO! I WANT BREAKFAST NOW!"

(ad nauseum, ad infinitum)

This is my life. I can't fucking deal with it. I am going to lose my shit. Bad mommy.

RESOLVED

I find myself inexplicably sad. Well, not inexplicably. I could probably give you a really good rundown of all the reasons I'm sad today. Most of them are ridiculous. Which is why I'm not going to provide such a rundown. It's really, really silly of me to be sad about the things that are currently making me want to cry.

So, instead, a resolution. I know it's not New Year's. But I have a resolution to make. And really, we ought to start self-improvement campaigns whenever we realize what we need to do, not only at some date chosen for us by an arbitrarily imposed calendar.

Today, for now, for the next five years: I will not be a selfish mess.

I will probably continue to be a mess, because, um, well. Hi. Have you met me? I'm a mess. I am flaky, and pretty unrepentant about it. I deliberately choose to dedicate my brain space to things like that perfect turn of phrase that I constructed while ten-keying four days worth of sales and reports into a spreadsheet. I remember those words instead of the parking ticket I have to pay, or your birthday.

I am hypocritical, because when other people flake on me the way I flake all the time, I am always crushed.

I am crazy. My emotions operate on a series of mountainous hairpin turns, and I will go from sad to happy and back again faster than a ball volleys at the French Open. (Is it the French Open going on right now? Or the US Open? Whatever. I like French tennis with their old-school clay courts.)

But I will try not to be a selfish mess, which means trying really hard not to let my unreasonable expectations get the best of me. It means realizing when my hurt is valid and when it's not, and only sharing when it's valid. And keeping it to myself when it's not. Because it's really pretty selfish to be dumping on people all the time when the problem is actually within yourself. It's really pretty selfish to be demanding other people's time and attention and energy when you don't really have any claim to them. It's really pretty selfish to monopolize someone, anyone, a whole host of someones and anyones and make sure that all that's thought about and cared about is you.

That's pretty selfish.

I am resolved not to do that. Anymore. I have resolved this in the past, and done fairly well at it, but then I got lazy, and sloppy, and here I am, crazier than I ever was. The problem with this kind of attention-seeking crazy is that it's a self-perpetuating cycle. You become absolutely addicted to the attention. You become downright dependent upon knowing someone is always looking, always reading, always caring.

It is no one's job to take care of you. More properly, it is no one's job to take care of me.

And I am resolved not to try and make it anyone's job.

Here's to emotional self-sufficiency. (I'm going to need a lot of whiskey this winter.) (Just kidding.)

Tell Me You Hated Fight Club.

I'll tell you what I'm looking for in a relationship, in one easy sentence. I'm looking for a man that didn't like Fight Club.

Really. That's it.

The rise of "man-children" is actually a horrific event for a single mama on the dating scene. Let me modify that. The rise of "man-children" is a horrific event. For everyone. Single, parent, employer, bartender, what-have-you. It's terrible for everyone. Some men claim this label proudly, others don't even bother to analyze their behavior enough to be able to claim it, but in either case, there's a stunning number of ridiculously immature, overgrown children out there.

I blame Fight Club. Palahniuk, this is ALL YOUR FAULT. And I'm totally glaring at you from my Rust Belt bastion with baleful eyes. Take note. Don't ever come to Milwaukee, or I will give you a piece of my mind.

Ok, so it's not really Palahniuk's fault, per se. He merely wrote about an already-existing cultural phenomenon. Alienation is a common theme in modern literature, and we all feel it. We all feel disconnected at some point, we all feel cheated by the world.

However, Fight Club glamorized both alienation and anger. Fight Club made it ok to be an immature, selfish, lazy "radical." Fight Club made it acceptable to blame the world at large for your unhappiness while doing nothing at all to alter the course of your life towards something better, because there is nothing better in the world of Tyler Durden. The only solution is to blow the whole thing up. Fight Club made it cool to spout off about everything and do absolutely nothing. Fight Club, and by extension Palahniuk, are the reason these man-children are so inexplicably proud of their debilitating inability to function in the world.

God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate
so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No
purpose or place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great
depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one
day we'll be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're
slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

This is the iconic quote of Fight Club. This encapsulates the sense of alienation that many, many people feel in our comfortable, Western, modern era, and gives it a distinctly masculine twist. I can appreciate all those things. Palahniuk is actually a decent writer, and I do dearly love real masculine voice in fiction, because it's becoming somewhat rare.

And if the whole thing had remained a book, read by some few and appreciated as literature, perhaps I wouldn't be crafting this rant of my own.

But then someone went and made a movie out of it. And now there are legions of men in this country that hate their jobs, hate their lives, think they're meant for something more, and fucking whine about it. Constantly.

These are the man-children. They never grew up. They still look to others to get orders. They hate this about themselves. But they don't take initiative and start sculpting their own lives.

They simply get angry.

These are the man-children. They blame the clever advertisers for fooling them all these years, telling them they need this-that-and-the-other thing to be happy and fulfilled. They blame someone else for their inability to process information rationally. And they do this while they proclaim their own superior intelligence.

And then they get angry because obviously they're smarter, but they're slaving away at jobs they hate while these lucky men get to buy all these things with the money they don't really earn because they're NOT AS SMART AS ME.

Uh, contradiction much? How about a little side of hypocrisy.

Here's the truth, you man-children, you Fight Club-aficionados: You're not smarter than the world. And if you're incapable of being happy in your life, it's no one's fault but your own.

Don't want to work a desk job? THEN QUIT. Do something else. Start a farm. Get a construction job. Go build bamboo huts in Thailand. I don't care. But don't blame the world because you don't know what else to do, because you can't actually conceive of a life that doesn't involve a steady job of some sort. It's not the world's fault that you are uncreative, and that you have no dreams. That's no one's fault but your own.

And if you have bucked the desk job, don't whine about being broke all the time. Don't whine about the things you don't have. You chose this life, and if it's really making you so miserable not to have a car or a new computer or an iPod, go get a job that will let you have those things.

Want to be a rock star? Then do it. But don't whine if you fall on your face. And especially don't come crying to me when you have never even bothered to try. I know too many people that have tried, and failed, to feel any sympathy for you.

And absolutely, positively, I am through dating you man-children. I'm done trying to give my heart to men that are angry all the time. I'm done trying to be sympathetic to men that will never, ever be happy because they are simply too stupid to figure out how. I'm done dealing with men that are so far removed from any sense of self-awareness that they don't even know what will make them happy. They rely on the fantasy of some writer that they've never actually read, just saw the movie.

From this moment on, I'm holding out for a man that hates Fight Club. I'm holding out for a man that's actually happy in the life he's chosen for himself. Maybe he's always made such great decisions, or maybe he's figured it out through trial and error, but either way, he likes his life. He's happy. I'm holding out for a man that doesn't blame everything else when something goes wrong. I'm holding out for a man self-aware enough to know what he wants, what's going to make him happy.

I'm holding out for a man that hates Fight Club.

Paralysis.

My younger cousin (I was incredibly tempted to refer to her as my "little" cousin, but she towers over me by at least six inches these days) recently graduated from design school. She has a summer internship in London that lasts three weeks; she leaves on Thursday.

I spoke to her on Sunday, during my drive back up from Indianapolis. She offered to play sleuth for me, to try and ferret out the baby daddy's status (live vs. dead) and possibly even his whereabouts.

I find myself paralyzed with indecision.

On the one hand, there's "God yes, do whatever you can, find out what the hell happened, absolve me of this burden."

On the other hand, there's "This is not your responsibility and you should be focusing on your own shit while you're there."

On the one hand, there's "Who the fuck was he and why did he do this to me?"

On the other hand, there's "Do I really want to let someone else in on the depth of my shame and the completeness of my goddamn stupidity?"

On the one hand, there's "A child deserves to know everything she can about both of her parents, even absent ones."

On the other hand, there's "What is knowing anything going to do for her? He obviously doesn't care to be involved with her at all."

I find myself, in other words, completely paralyzed with the worst kind of indecision. This is not indecision by apathy or ambivalence; no, this is indecision by seeing too far in conflicting directions. I both want to know, and don't want to know. I both want to share this with someone, and don't want anyone else to really know any of the details. I both want to share with my daughter something about her father and don't want his narcissism touching her in any way whatsoever.

In the end, this is one of those situations where indecision is itself a decision. If I don't tell her anything, she can't play sleuth, and nothing will be discovered. I realize this.

I suspect the overriding factor in my decision to remain indecisive is a combination of ego and altruism. I don't want her to know how stupid I was, and I also don't want her to have anything less than a glowing experience on this opportunity. Her trip should be for her, not for me.

So another year will go by, and maybe on down the road I'll see my way to how to find out. Right now, I don't even know where to tell someone else to start looking.

So, I bought myself a Blackberry yesterday. This is terribly self-indulgent of me, and I feel sort of ashamed of myself and sort of disappointed in myself, but gosh-darn, I *wanted* one.

Like, reallyreally wanted one.

I can rationalize why I need one, but it's all just rationalization. I do have two jobs, although one of them doesn't pay me except in theater tickets and happiness, and I do have a baby that has a schedule and I do have a Manfriend that I have to keep track of time spent with and I do have classes to take and I do have to keep track of the childcare-providers schedules and all of that.

But really, women have been managing these things for a long time without the aid of electronic devices that keep your calendar for you and nag you when something needs to be done.

Because that's really what I got it for. To sync with my google calendar, so that wherever I am and whatever I'm doing, if I'm supposed to be somewhere else and doing something else, the thing will beep at me until I acknowledge it.

Getting my email from anywhere is just a bonus. A nice one, but still. Icing on the cake.

Plus, I get to pull it out and flash it around and subconsciously tell people, "Look how important and indispensable I am. I have a BlackBerry."

I told you I was pretentious and self-indulgent.

I feel bad for this particular one because it's not just a one-time expense. It's an additional $30 per month in bills that I didn't have before. I've got this kid, and as great as it is to have a job that pays the bills, that doesn't mean I should be creating more bills for myself. It's not the responsible thing to do.

On the other hand, it is *only* $30, and I can't be responsible all the time or I'll lose my mind. I don't stay out all night anymore. I don't get ridiculously drunk anymore. Hell, I don't even talk on the phone while I drive anymore. I get something, right? Something that proves to myself that I didn't lose my entire identity when I had a baby.

Because my identity is all tied up with being able to do what I want, when I want. I'm a hedonistic hippie at my core, at the basest of base levels. My base instincts are selfish and pleasure-centered. 

So I got a Blackberry. In the grand scheme of things, there are way worse things I could do, right?