30 of 31: back home

My alarm, or rather my army wife friend's alarm spun up a Keith Urban CD at 5am. I woke up somewhat rested, which only furthers my belief that my mattress is dunzo, took a shower, got dressed, packed almost everything (except the black wedges I left behind) and headed for the airport. By 9:45am I was back in my driveway, ready to watch Baby Girl before class.

New Orleans was a great little get away. Friday night I was welcomed with an invitation to her sister's house for a crawfish boil. Very interesting, very tasty, very local. Saturday we got coffee and bagels, pedicures, did a little shopping, lunched in the French Quarter at Pat O'Brien's, went for a walk by Lake Pontchartrain, had dinner at Jacque-Imo's and passed out in her living room while talking. Sunday was a little less busy. We got coffee again and went walking in a park near Tulane, hung out at Borders for a while, killed ourselves with a cardio kickboxing dvd, lounged at a neighborhood bar on the patio with sunshine and strawberry Abita beers, ate leftovers, read a bit, stopped by TCBY and watched Twilight at her sister's house. The movie was terrible, but the weekend was quite relaxing.

When I walked in my house, it had assumed the temperature of the flighty Spring weather, a delicious 34 degrees. I quickly turned up the heat and checked on my seeds. Many are still little containers of dirt, but my spinach is sprouting into delicate green tendrils. It was an incredibly exciting discovery, which says a lot about my increasing level of dullness. I can't wait for The Staff Sergeant to come home. I'm probably not actually super interesting, but he makes me feel so much more substantial. At any rate, I've got spinach in the works. I'm still holding out hope for the other veggies and herbs.

I also took a walk today, found a recipe for a homemade facial toner, picked up organic potting soil from a small local hardware store and went by the grocery for a few things I needed to complete my dinner attempt at Dahl with brown rice. I still need to get some poetry homework finished before spending tomorrow with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and I have my fingers crossed that I'll get a call from a certain soldier before the day is done. Right now I'm going to finish my wine and chocolate covered soy nuts before mixing up my rosemary and apple cider vinegar toner. Hopefully today's high spirits and productivity are telling for the pace of the week.

26 of 31: getting away

I continue to be amazed at how quickly the numbers are climbing as I sit down to title my daily post. I'm also a little surprised that I've been able to stick with this post-a-day business without missing one or two, and a part of me will be glad when it's on a feel-like-it basis again. Until then, I'll press on.

I'm sitting on my little side porch, sipping on a glass of sauvignon blanc, paying bills, and trying to get Beth to move from a very awkwardly rigid position - oh, there she goes. Relaxed on her haunches looks less terrified. She and I just planted another egg carton's worth of herbs. I found the ones that Lowes didn't have in their organic repertoire while I was in Nashville today: lavender, poppy, echinacea, dill, chamomile, sweet pepper, zucchini squash, and sweet onion. As you can see, I'm a complete idealist in everything that I do. Try a couple of seeds? No, no, no, Molly Gardner here fears nothing. Start small? Small-shmall. By next week, the first batch should be showing some activity. Again, that's only if I haven't over-watered, planted too deep, planted too shallow, not watered enough, or uttered the wrong prayers of cultivation to Mother Earth.

I also stopped by Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for the grocery items that we here in Army-ville are not sophisticated enough to keep stocked. [Hello, Kroger, you're Greek yogurt has been bare-shelved for almost a week!] I scored a gorgeous-delicious pair of stuffed Salmon filets and four cups of Fage, for when Kroger tries to punish me in forms of yogurt deprivation again next week. It would have been a better trip if my purpose for going wasn't follow-up-doctors-visit related. It was an easy appointment and fine, a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am kind of thing. Back in six months and maybe a second biopsy. Gah. Unfavorable cells don't really fit into my schedule. Hopefully they're already aware.

And lastly, I escape again tomorrow! I'm headed to New Orleans to spend a weekend eating the best food on earth and relaxing with an army wife friend of mine. One thing I love about this lifestyle is how quickly you can breach the boundaries of acquaintance and adopted family. It will be undoubtedly wonderful.

It hasn't felt like home [before you]

The end of another day, and a busy one, busier than most Mondays. I stayed at his place last night to do laundry, and yes, also to be around his stuff. But I overslept and had a babysitting commitment this morning. Even rushing I got my coffee made and drove his monster truck to keep the battery charged. I pulled in a mere seconds before Jen and baby, luckily. Then an hour coaxing her stand, and because we are both so fashion forward, Baby Girl and I paid our daily homage to What Not to Wear.

After Children's Hour at Chez Moi, I had to go back to his house to get my clean clothes and drop off his gas-guzzler...and take the trash to the dump before my afternoon class. I also stopped by an antique store to look for a subject for my latest project idea--a bar for my giant, beautiful dining room.  In one of the latest Domino issues, they made a bookshelf into a bar/sideboard.  Something kind of like this:

(thanks apartmenttherapy.com)

...except I want a dark wood for the outside and an orange background, something warm and pumpkin-ish, not periwinkle.  I devised a plan for said [untouched] dining room: if I can get myself excited enough about decorating it, then I will surely be compelled to fill the china cabinets with china and stemware currently forgotten in boxes, and to clear off my sprawling dining table turned catch-all and care-package-central.  To accomplish this task I raided Pier 1 this weekend, stocking up on an armful of [fake] poppies and varied greens and four curtain panels in rich browns and firey red-oranges.  It's the final room to be tackled and my favorite, not to sound like the rest of the house is finished.  My bedroom is painfully in need of painting and cleaning, and all of those clothes that hang so gracefully on the closet bar are still scattered in my floor.  Still, the dining room has been neglected and it's time to wrap up this "getting settled" bit.  

I got to give The Staff Sergeant a virtual tour when we spoke via chat/webcam.  He said that the living room at least, looked completely different in a good way, which made my efforts seem momentarily worthwhile.  Until it's all finished, I power on.  I've hung curtains continuously for weeks...ok, maybe not exactly continuously, and found places for crap that laid homeless and lost in the corners of chaotic rooms.  All of this has reminded me of how much I dislike the moving process, and yet I know within a year I'll be doing it all again.

How good is a man that lets you look past the strife of separation, of uprooting, of packing all the minuscule pieces of your existence painstakingly in boxes to leave places that feel like home for new uncharted ones and then each night, also leaves you drifting off to sleep with a smile? 

if only a sigh were loud enough

My muscles pinch and crawl like intolerable little spiders up and down my back, up the length of my neck, around my middle.  I balance in between grabbing for the swimmy-head, stomach tickling anxiety pills and screaming and swinging and unbinding any sense of composure I have ever held myself together with.  

I don't understand why there are times when each single task erupts into odyssey after odyssey.  It's god-damn over-the-phone bill paying.  It is MADE to provide a convenient service!  Charge me ONCE, not twice OR not at all!  It's tracking down the apparently out-of-print book for 19th century lit. that LITERALLY is only housed at the smallest, out-of-the-way-est library known to mankind, and it only took 10 phone calls and an absurd conversation with the 85-year old uninformed campus librarian who could NOT explain to me why the online catalog listed the fucking book as both "available" and "checked-out" before I could lay my twitching, exhausted hands on its cover.  And it's the bionic fleas that refuse to surrender the sweet, tender flesh of my poor, suffering dog, and the vet money I don't have and every cure I've tried [as best as I could].

I meant to tackle backed-up homework, though the universe clearly had other plans.  I spent the day unpuzzling an unexpected Rubiks Tuesday.  A couple of times I considered erasing my notion of maps and to-do's and driving aimlessly forever, but I settled on cooking my woes into oblivion.  I checked-out the book, had treated the dog with prescriptions and unearthed an intricate grocery list from the bowels of my purse.  I wandered until I found myself parked in a grand Kroger lot.  With eco-friendly shopping bags and wallet in hand, I entered the automatic gates of Salvation.  Ripe palettes of produce, chirping lasers kissing barcodes, panes of frozen aisles, warm yeasty shelves of bread; I love this pocket of life better than the hilarity of the world at large.  With my blue bag brimming full of dairies and veggies and tubes of dough, I caught myself before making my way to the finish-line cash register.  Hard cider and less of a white-knuckled grip on each angry minute beyond the thick walls of food would feel nice.  Finished, I went to pay.

This is where I picked up [yesterday].  And rising today, full on sleep and drawn by sunshine I started collecting myself, directing myself, finding my Wednesday purpose.  All was well and free of anxious, crawling muscles until I dumped out my purse for re-organizing.  No wallet.  Of fucking course: no wallet.  Because how could a day be whole without the blinding frustration of something amiss!?  And again I want to drive away, uncoil my mind with a pill, fire up the oven or uncork a thick, glass bottle of freedom.  

It's still at Kroger, holding my place in the land of salvation, only I'm miles and miles away, stuck in the here and now.

highways and bye-ways

On Friday I met with my non-fiction professor to discuss an idea for an independent study next summer. I'm not sure how it came to me, but on my way to class the thought congealed: travel writing; a month long road trip. She loved it!

I'm thinking, roughly, 6000 miles on $5000.

The answer to a quarter-life crisis?

A liberation from responsibility and sense?

For what and why?

To find my true self.

To stumble upon Home in pure form.

It doesn't sound crazy in my head, though the money will be a trial. They say, "if there's a will, there's a way." And there's time to consider logistics and funding. I'm not going to mask my lust for it nor will I deny how mesmerizing the day dreams have been. Thirty days to see and taste and smell half of America, or more if I wanted. Thirty days to reinvent my purpose, my place, my routine. Thirty days of distraction from all that is "fair" [in love and war]. And to write it, for credit no less? This is why I can't give up higher education. The Man would never allow such a blatant severing of strings. Ah!, freedom and The Road...

Come and stay with me.

There's a crackle in the distance. Something is moving, brewing, ready for birth. Love does things to you that you cannot anticipate and when they are in full force, arguing with their direction becomes futile. There is a pull westward then north, southbound and to the East. Each mile is a minute lived slower than others, each day lost together is simply lost. It is a challenge to recount moments passed as they have become mere shadows and echoes. Too many prequels have been archived and the threading of continuity has been removed. We are less and more. We are estranged but kindred, restless yet content. Footing is temporary, for the earth always shakes again.

Too long, too vacant, too far apart. It isn't only good things that eventually must end. Somewhere there is a white knight awaiting his damsel.

Goodnight Moon.

It's been eight months and if not every single day, at least once a week I get a new flavor of the mil-life. A preview of what is to come, if you will*. I never catch up, mostly I am left scrambling behind the group, awkwardly towing all of the information and the cultural norms it seems I should have been issued at birth. It is often that I wish he had broken the actually-I'm-in-the-army news with a sweet little how-to handbook for unknowing girlfriends-to-be. As it would seem, Life has a darker than that sense of humor and has probably not stopped laughing yet as I fumble my way through the steps.

Keeping in tune with the past, this time apart is unlike the others. He's busier than usual, the circumstances are different, there is possibly more demand. He seems further away and somehow...vacant. Today it occurred to me that this communication tempo is most probably foreshadowing of the future. There aren't foretold days of silence, rather windows of time that open and close either with or without his voice. And when we do talk, the colorful hues are missing. The timer on my cell phone rolls through the sepia-toned seconds, logging the lengths of flatness. Of course, the mere echo of his voice across the expanse curls my lips into a smile. It's just that I miss...him.

I send unnecessary volumes of text messages to his phone, on some level thinking that the mechanical buzz will shake him loose from the grip of the guns and The Army just long enough to remind him of the soft and fragile girl at home. Then I watch my tiny screen for reciprocation, willing his number to dance across in blue light [mostly in vain]. I wish and wish and wish for that connection and upon defeat, I drag my feet to bed to dream of more luscious bursts of life we've shared. This is what I've chosen to walk next to, hand in hand with the shadows of togetherness...

I would never call myself "strong" although my bests assure that I have it in me. This may be the most trying endeavor I've ever taken on, yet even when it's hard I love him. My mind is saturated in war from every channel, even my periphery has begun instinctively clothing the public in digital camo. The reminder of The Beast is everywhere beyond and within my slight frame, and the ease of giving up is the devil's temptation. Tonight, though I'd cry myself to sleep if sleep were upon me, I choose to stick it out. Princess, put on your big-girl panties, my mother would chide. And in the late hours of darkness I'd slink them on, burn the white flag of surrender, and stare down the devil's offer.






*referencing the even more unfathomable idea of the longterm [not "loose lips"]

there is no love without compassion

Every now and then the world pauses, allowing a few sacred moments for me to reflect. Welcome to the first [in a long while] post that is not rushed by the bustle of my last-semester-almost-full-time-job-distracted-by-love life.

Still, not having had previous time to disperse these thoughts in increments, I fear that this will end up being a post full of color, but lacking cohesion.

[I'm sorry]

Again, on reading:

A few times I've mentioned this book that I am attempting to read, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. I am both intrigued and disgusted by the history I have avoided until now. Not only is my personal ignorance an intolerable realization, but also the testament that this book stands as. I feel so...let down by humanity.

Are we or are we not inherently good?

The Staff Sergeant will respond with an immediate and deliberate, "No." I dodge that answer in order to preserve my idealistic purpose, but I love that he challenges me to look at ideas from another side. Still, I can't help wanting to think that people are [usually] good by nature. All expectations aside, I have come to realize that not everyone aspires to make the world a better place.

[I should be hugging trees, right?]

I've only covered a small slice of the innumerable dilemmas now categorized as "genocide." One of the more inspiring/appalling situations to which I was enlightened was the Khmer Rouge regime that terrorized the Cambodian population throughout the mid-late 1970's. I just don't understand how this happens, how this is happening, elsewhere, right now, as I type, and we as Americans do little or nothing. A good portion of the populous doesn't even know what is happening in, say, Darfur. My mind lacks the ability to process so much apathy...

Backtracking to Cambodia: I was about half way through the chapter when, in one of those few seconds of free time, I happened across a blog post addressing the exact thing I was losing myself in every time I opened the book's pages. This Khmer Rouge phenomenon was severely disturbing to say the very least, so I dove into the depths of Micheal Yon's account, "No Darker Heart" with hopes of seeing yet another perspective. I devoured it, relished the words, fell in love with the articulation and lusted after his experience. I wanted to see the place where he stood, where the rain surfaced scraps of clothing, unearthed irrefutable truths. I wanted to be a voice like his, to be a bridge for those who don't know, to rid the world of naivety and preferrable darkness.

We can't close our eyes, lest the machine is perpetuated and grows more precise, more able, more hungry. If we don't talk about Darfur, the babies still starve, the innocent are still raped and tortured. The families are still displaced, still left with nothing but the memory of life before. We can't close our eyes, turn our gaze, cover our ears...we can't because it makes us an accomplice to unfathomable brutality and devastation. The sad reality is that most of us do, most generations have, and without knowledge, most will continue to.

On future plans:

My old roommate always acted as a great voice of reason. We think alike in many ways and work through our thoughts in similar methods. Coffee with her last night was extremely helpful in calming the currents of my over-active mind. I had constructed a shaky tower of what-if's on which to position my future direction. I really have no idea what I want to do with myself once I leave these hallowed halls of college, but I feel a pulling, a summoning that urges the core of myself toward some unknown place, some unclear purpose. Alas!, over hot tea, in a noisy, but familiar house of coffee, I was able to move from the maddening buzz of my inner thoughts to a place significantly less congested. I had a pseudo-epiphanic moment.

For once, I embraced patience.

[sweet relief.]

Oh the times, they are a' changin'

It seems that life happens at a rate too fast for recording these days. I know I'm slacking here, and in personal journaling, and worst of all, I am very aware of the toll it takes for me not to be writing every day. Words become more difficult to use, and cobwebs blanket my inner vocabulary pool. I stutter a lot in my head...SOOO, I'm going to put forth more effort here, both for the therapeutic benefit and for the mental exercise it provides. I have to. I really feel that it is vital for whatever the next chapter holds.

I've been juggling this last semester with much more agility than I have in the past few, and I'm being more prudent with my study habits as the burning desire to get into graduate school for journalism has been re-lit...and there might be some futuristic talk, albeit still quite ambiguous, of relationships/careers/higher education and location and where it all could lead. All that to say that this is my current inexcusable excuse for slacking in the blog commitment. I'm sorry. I will do better.

This is turning into a kludge of a post, but I'll at least leave you with a teaser or two of things on my mind [that will hopefully be soon revisited in the form of substance].

On current reading lust:
I have noticed [as has The Staff Sergeant] that my palette has lessened an appetite for the heroine novels to which I was once drawn. I'm not talking about damsels in distress or worse yet, to be confused with drug use. No, the average, garden variety Oprah books [circa, beginning of the book club]...White Oleander, The Lovely Bones, Feast of Love, East of Eden. You know, where the women show resounding resilience and overcome obstacles to find themselves empowered in their new sense of self. blah, blah, blah. Ok, I did just receive the newest Sebold novel, but even she likes the dark side. Wow, a tangent has ensued! The point, and there is one, is to note the drastic turn from "warm and fuzzy" to war and destruction. To give you an idea, a list of my last 10 literary purchases:

1. What is the What
2. The Sandbox
3. The Graves are Not Yet Full
4. A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
5. The Blog of War
6. War Reporting for Cowards
7. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
8. Journalista's
9. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
10. Highways to a War

What to make of this?

Well, The Staff Sergeant has painted a picture including me in [insert war-torn country] running around in an over-sized Kevlar helmet as mortars go off around me, toting a notebook and/or satellite driven laptop. I, however, just want to get into Journalism School and to continue to feed the ravenous beast [guilty pleasure] of my own curiosity and impassioned heart. We'll see where it takes me :)

an extention of thanks

Having joyfully exceeded 1,000 visitors since August 23rd, I'd like to take a moment to say hello to a few of my anonymous, but devoted readers. I'm not sure what it is exactly that keeps you coming back, but I'm SO glad to have somewhat captivated your attention. Knowing that you are reading makes the whole thing worthwhile and keeps me hopeful that a higher degree in writing might not be so crazy of a plan :)

Gratitude for The Unknowns:
Sacramento, CA
Strawberry Plains, TN
Memphis, TN...it perplexes me daily that I cannot figure out who you might be.
Loveland, CO
Knoxville, TN...attending UTK.
Los Angeles, CA

...and a few whose identities are not so mysterious [to me]:
Radford, VA
Milwaukee, WI
Clarksville, TN
Franklin, TN

I love your company and greatly appreciate the few minutes you give to Afloat in a Lonely Sound. I look forward to 1,000 more hits :)

Oh, and don't be afraid to leave comments [you can do so just as anonymously as you view the content]!

Look, I have an iPhone!

Miss Teen USA Spoof by: William Sledd

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Idiot.

I need for someone to sit down and write The Idiots Guide to Not Being a Complete U.S. Army Dumb Ass. This my friends, is another language and culture all together!

E-what?

PF-something

Where is Dhi Qar?

...for that matter, where exactly is Iraq?

See what I mean? And it digresses from there. Maybe Miss Teen South Carolina and I can go get a latte and talk about...er...stumble over...uh...attempt to converse about The Iraq or possibly Everywhere Like Such As. She'd be in good company. My knowledge spans no further than the plastic boots of G.I. Joe and his action-hero jointed limbs. Even then, who am I kidding? I was a thoroughbred Barbie girl. No camo for this Princess.

I'm lost.

::sigh::

...and completely overwhelmed.

My adopted soldier, who we'll cast now as The Private, will perhaps be a test of informational endurance. As for The Staff Sergeant, well, I'm a bit smitten and also, he has good shoes. So, please someone remember to make that justification in my eulogy when the capacity of my brain overloads and I burst...

And reason #6, an addendum: