Poking Around the Hokey of Small Towns

As I turned back onto the freeway after a quick stop at a gas station, I decided to turn on the radio to listen to some country music. A habit that has increasingly become worse within the past year, I am sorry to say. I don’t know what happened to me. I used to hate country music except maybe some Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood, and Taylor Swift when that used to be her thing. The radio began to play a song I’d heard before but not a lot. I later googled it and discovered it was called “The House That Built Me” by Miranda Lambert. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you can listen to it below this paragraph or click here.

It really hit home for me (pun intended). It felt like the perfect song to listen to as I drove seven hours to the little small town where I grew up.

It’s the kind of small town without any stop lights. The kind when you’ve been gone for years and years, come back, poke around every part of town while walking around for a few hours, you still run into people you knew years and years ago—because it’s like nobody ever leaves. I didn’t talk to people for the most part. I sorta hoped they wouldn’t recognize me, and sorta hoped they would. Like when I wasn’t thinking and gave the Safeway cashier my family’s old phone number while buying a pizza Lunchable since my mom still hasn’t changed the phone number to her Safeway account; and the cashier decided to start talking about how she knew my parents years ago. She used to go to my dad who was a doctor at the local hospital and my mom from church. As my dad put it later, “This place is a lot smaller and more hokey than I remember it.”

Truth.

But I kinda take some sort of weird pride in growing up in a town like that.

While snooping around, I decided to send a message on Facebook to my old neighbour. She’s my age. We grew up at a time where kids still ran next door daily and knocked rather than texted each other. We didn’t have cell phones and we played outside a lot. Anyway, she said she wasn’t home, but that it was alright if I walked down the edge of their property to the land behind my family's old property.

So I did.

I drove about a minute or so out of town to the long lonely, “cul-de-sac” in the middle of a bunch of wheat fields. (Speaking of wheat, did I mention that before hitting town, I couldn’t resist the urge to stop on the side of the road and pick a tiny bit of wheat to chew and make into gritty gum just like old times? It’s a totally gross thing to do, but something you kinda do again and again just because. Definitely not gluten-free or trendy or anything like that.) As I turned onto the road, I felt this weird, subtle surge of nervousness, or excitement or something from somewhere in the depths of my unconscious, surface like a tingle up my spine. In all honesty, things were the same almost everywhere I looked, and that’s maybe what made it weird.

I parked my car on the road in front of my old house, next to the largest pine tree at the far corner of the front of our old property. It had gotten so huge—all the trees had—but especially that one. That’s where I buried all the fish carcasses from the fish the boys and I caught with our sticks and fishing line off of the boat docks down at the river. That’s also where we buried our cat Lucky who clearly really wasn’t all that lucky, poor thing.

Sitting in my car, I took off my new walking shoes, and replaced them with my hiking boots while wondering if I was being watched. Who knows, I probably was. Boots tied, I strolled down the property line to the edge of the four acres of property my family used to own. I noticed the short to the ground, long wall of piled up porous lava rock along the back edge of the property. The wall of blood, sweat, and tears. As my dad also later put it, “The perfect home for those dang gofers.” It was child labor practically, you could say. Pretty sure our parents only paid my brothers and I a penny a wheel barrow to help my dad pick rocks so my dad could plant grass.  Four acres...But hey, at least I learned not to be afraid to get my hands dirty and work.

You don’t see as much of that kind of rock where I live now. I remember how I used to be captivated by imagining that lava used to run through our backyard while dinosaurs roamed around. I always hoped I might find a dinosaur bone or something. I never found anything but dead gofers, mice and whatever else—still fascinating.

I headed toward the really old, large apple tree that must have been planted by some farmer heaven knows how long ago, before my family ever got there. I always loved that tree. Probably because I always wished we had trees, something I’m glad to have now where I live. Any other trees we had were what my dad planted, so they were small at the time. As I neared the tree, I saw an owl swoop out of it and fly away across the green wetland grass. I remembered the natural “pond” that used to exist there and had since dried up. In the early years we lived there, it used to be so deep we could have gone swimming if it weren’t so boggy. Now, if anything, the ground was just a bit damp.

I lifted my legs high as I walked through the grass to the sage brush area. I could already smell the strong scent of the sage. I used to hate the smell. Now, I loved it. What I still didn’t love was the dead cheatgrass from hell. That day, my socks were destroyed as well as some of the fabric on the insides of my boots. How the heck did I ever willingly endure that on a daily basis as a kid?

In case you’re someone who has never experienced these types of “vegetation” (can you call sage brush vegetation?), any of the bushes you see in the photos in this post are sage bushes. That’s right, I really did take pictures of sage brush and cheatgrass. That’s how nostalgic I was. But you know what’s cooler? I found all the particular spots we used to play as kids. The first obvious landmark was the following “tractors” or “plows”. I actually sent a picture of it to a friend in the area who grew up on a farm and he said they looked to him like “old discs". As he described their use, it sounded an awful lot like a plow. I'll just call them plows.  They look like this:

I explored past the boundaries my parents let us explore as a child. Upon turning back, I kept searching in hopes of finding the old spots we used to play. That’s when I saw a pile of dead sage bushes that looked like this:

I immediately recognized this as one of our old "dumps" (cause you know, when you play house you gotta have a dump), surprised that over 10 years later, it was still there.

I began to get really excited and began looking all around for remnants of any forts that we had built from the old wood we found back there. I always wondered what the wood had made up years and years ago. I wondered who had lived there. We would find random things sometimes like an old rusty spoon and an old oil lantern piece. We didn’t find things much after my mom told us that we weren’t allowed to dig there because it wasn’t our land. I never understood why the government (I’m pretty sure it was government land) just abandoned it like that. How were they not interested in it? I found it fascinating. Eventually I found it—pieces of old wood and an old tire—remnants of what used to be one of our forts. I don’t know if the kids who move into our old house moved it and made their own or not, but that was the wood we used.

I also found the old rusty jug that I used to put flowers in:

 But I knew this wasn’t the spot. There was a special spot that our main forts were built at. I headed closer to the old “plows” again because I knew they were in that direction. And then I saw something. I knew it was something so I approached it to investigate. About five feet away, I stopped in my tracks and a wave of sentiment came over me. Tears came to my eyes. There it was—the wheelbarrow. The little plastic wheelbarrow we used to play with all the time. Clearly old and broken and destroyed. But there it was. Still there after all this time in the place we had left it.

I looked around. This was the spot we used to make forts the most, right? I walked up the little hill and saw dump number two, the main dump.

Yep. It was the spot. I didn’t ball, but I had tears. I think it made me feel like I could still claim the place. I was still a part of it. Though people might not know it, my old playmates and I could still be found in that place. Just like those unknown farmers could still be found in that old spoon, that old lamp, those old discs, that old wood...we had that old wheelbarrow. For once I didn’t care that plastic left in the environment did not decompose. I wasn’t about to pick up that wheelbarrow. I left it there. I didn’t move anything. It belonged there.

There was a ditch we had once built a fort in. I knew the general area it existed and I found it with little effort. We had built a fort in it once and the dog had accidentally walked on top of it and it hadn’t fallen over or broken. We were proud of the sturdiness of that fort. Pro builders we were. Thinking of all of this as I headed back through the wetland grass, I thanked my lucky stars for this piece of my childhood to cherish. For my parents who let us explore and the space to do so.
Heading back up the neighbors property, I looked to my left to see the woman who now lived in my family’s old home watering her bushes—our bushes. “Hello,” she called.

I stopped. “Hi...I used to live here.”

“OH! Hi there! Did you want to come inside?”

Oh man...tears...only a couple, but I was capable of hiding them. “Really? For real?” I said.

To be honest, the inside was not as interesting to me as the outside. She talked and talked about the awful purple tile my mom had had in the master bathroom and the blue carpet that used to be throughout the house. She seemed so fascinated by it that she even kept a few samples of the tile in the storage room. She gave me a piece to keep.

She kept a couple of our old curtains interestingly enough despite her distaste for the other stuff. They still had our old pool table where we used to play Cuban style with my Abuelo when he and my Abuela came to visit from California. They still had our old baseboards. In retrospect, I wish I had asked her if they had found a bunch of dead stinkbugs underneath the baseboards when they ripped up the carpet. I used to kill the stinkbugs and stuff them under the baseboards with a flat-head screwdriver. I didn’t want to have to pick them up after killing them. I don’t think my parents ever knew about that. It’s a shame it didn’t cross my mind when talking to the “new” owner.

In fact, while talking to her, it occurred to me she had lived in that house longer by a couple of years than my family had. Crazy. All in all, I felt the “new” owners had respected the land and the house. She was very understanding of my nostalgia. She seemed to enjoy the history in it.

I saw my brothers’ and my hand-prints and footprints in the cement stairs outside. By that point, my phone had died after all of the sagebrush pictures I had taken, so I didn’t get a picture. But we talked about the neighbor on the other side of the property (not the ones whose property I had walked down) and found that we shared the same hatred toward them. She said she was sure they had poisoned her dog. I said I was sure their dogs had killed my pregnant cat that was now buried somewhere in the back of the property. I told her about our other cat buried under the tree in the front with all of the fish carcasses. That seemed to make her a little uncomfortable. And I told her about how the evil lady neighbor had substituted in my class when I was in second grade and mentioned that the kid who lived across the street and my other friend next door, who were both in my class at school, were her neighbors. She had totally ignored me in class in front of everyone. I never forgot that. I also never forgot how our old dog Dusty had hated her and only her. It felt like justice. I think sometimes smart dogs just know.

She kept asking me if I could tell her something special about that house. I didn’t know what to say. I guess...everything? It’s what I knew when I thought I knew everything—when I thought I knew me. Whatever happened there, the good and the bad, it shaped me. I lived in that town for the first half of my life. And despite some of the changed friends there that I now have to forget (the stuff that I don’t want to talk about) I’m glad for the ones who don’t and for the places that love me the way I love them. I feel like places do that better than anyone.

And I drove away with a hot fudge milkshake from Edna’s, the really old and I’m pretty sure only fast food restaurant in town with insanely overpriced menu items. It had the same old wallpaper inside, the same old everything. Who was Edna originally anyway? I think I just like the fact that people are okay with it all. They aren’t so focused on the “next best thing”. It is what it is and people are fine with it. Maybe they just use their imagination a lot like when they label their town outdoor pool (literally just a pool) with a big sign saying “Waterpark”.

People are funny. And people are complicated no matter how simple they are. And nobody knows it best like the places they inhabit.

Also...wildflowers:

Right, Joey Jeffrey?

I don’t feel depressed. I don’t feel anxious. I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel sad. Maybe it’s heaviness that I’m feeling. Fatigue? Tired defiance? I don’t want to change anything, not because I feel comfortable, and not because I feel uncomfortable. I don’t know why. All I know is it feels heavy in my gut, but my brain doesn’t register, so I don’t feel it emotionally. As if my body is responding to an emotion that I’m not even aware of. I don’t know how I feel. It probably has something to do with the fact that I talked Joey Jeffrey, my tiny sock monkey, and myself both to sleep last night.

And I got up for work this morning and got there late again. And a nice guy started talking to me about how he does art for fun after paying for a 12 oz. Caramel Macchiato and I stood there listening to him talk and waited for him to leave the store until he reminded me that I hadn’t even made his coffee.

And all I know is I’ve been craving lettuce and scarfed down my leftover Panda Express for lunch, wishing a Panda Express existed where I live in Canada, and that I’m asking myself if I had imported those leftovers illegally. All I know is I’m glad for the new shoes I bought that I wore to work today. And that I’m trying to get used to the new keyboard I bought for my tablet. And that there was a weird, young guy earlier today who asked me to show him where the business section of the store was, and then acted super interested in me, and then mentioned his fiancé, and then shook my hand while asking for my name, and then left. All as if he were practicing for an interview or something. Or maybe that wasn’t weird, maybe that was normal. Was it? It was weird, I think.

All I know is, I don’t really want to talk about it. There’s nothing worth saying. Nothing too terribly surprising. Nothing to work out. Just things to accept and things to ignore. And that I don’t really want to make decisions for myself. I want someone else to make decisions for me, but I want to be able to debate about it and veto them. Or maybe just understand the decisions. I want someone that knows me perfectly to make decisions for me, which I guess would be God, and He doesn’t seem to want to do that. I don’t really want to have to figure myself out. I’m kinda tired. I kinda don’t seem to operate well in the set up of this world. And it’s kinda frustrating.

And I have finally for the first time successfully been growing my nails out quite well instead of biting them.

All I know is, abusive people told me I was crazy, and then I became crazy, until my non-abusive self told me I wasn't crazy, and then I wasn't. Or at least not abnormally so.

And I surprisingly hear a baby crying outside my window above the noise of the freeway, and for some reason, I like the sound of that crying baby. Babies can cry, and only idiots judge them for it. Babies don’t have responsibilities. I like the sound of crying babies at a distance. I like the sound that pressing buttons on a keyboard makes. I always did. Are my geckos fighting again? This keyboard rocks, but I hate it...


Right, Joey Jeffrey?

Masculinism

Throughout my life, I’ve heard a lot of the idea that girls have no self-respect anymore and boys have no idea how to respect girls anymore. I’ve recently seen a lot of posts in different places about teaching boys good old-fashioned manners and making sure that girls learn what true respect looks like and that they deserve nothing less than a gentleman as a partner. All that is true of course, but I think we’re ignoring a key component of the problem.

I’m not a male, so I can’t speak as one, I can only speak by my observations. Actually, I think I can make some pretty good observations as a woman because I can see what the expectations on men are from an outside perspective, in part by looking at what I’m expected to be and not to be as a woman. I find that a lot of the qualities that I’m not expected to be are the expectation because they are defined in our culture as “male traits”. And I don’t know if there’s anything more insulting to a man in our culture than saying, “You throw like a girl. You scream like a girl. You cry like a girl.”

Like a girl. What an insult…to us girls, that is. To us women.

It’s kind of interesting. It occurred to me that through these statements, men are primarily defining themselves as “not women”. As if it all starts with us. As if they must find some way to be set apart from us and by doing so gain some higher respect that we, as women, could supposedly never attain. These “like a girl” statements are often uttered in an instance when some male has not lived up to the expectation of “toughness” that is imposed upon them. Too cowardly? You must be a girl. Too weak? You must be a girl. Ouch. Really?

So yes, women are often belittled and insulted even through casual comments like the ones mentioned above. It’s just ingrained into the cultural mindset. I often think that this does not get enough attention. I lived with a lot of misogyny in different environments around me while growing up. It is an important issue. I cannot stress the importance if it enough. I just wish more people would understand the oppression on women that still goes on in the world and I haven’t personally dealt with even nearly the worst of the world. But, let’s turn the conversation around for the remainder of the conversation…

What about women treating men with respect? Many want so badly to change our culture’s view of gender. But take one particular issue that we are battling right now: the sexualisation of women. I get it, not just women are made to look like just sexual objects. Men are treated like sexual objects too. But first of all, does saying that fix the problem? Does evening it out by saying it happens to both genders just make all this sexualisation okay? I think not. Secondly, really? Do you really so more sexualized images of men? How often do you see an ad on the side of your screen of a scantily clad male apparently looking to give you a “hot night” versus ads like that featuring a scantily clad female? How often do you receive junk mail telling you that a man wants to have sex with you versus a woman? I’m a straight woman and I get all that junk mail…

Honestly, I’m tired of hearing that whole, “men are made into sexual objects too” thing. That’s no excuse, and it’s not even true to the same extent.

Basically, women’s worth in our culture is highly based on how beautiful they are and sexually attractive they are. To the extent that “beautiful” and “sexually attractive” have to mean the same thing. And men’s worth is not only, but also highly based on whether or not they’ve indulged themselves on the banquet of women that are supposedly set before them to gorge on. It’s interesting that when a girl just wants to have sex, people call her a slut, but when a guy just wants to have sex, people are like, “yeah, no duh.”

A lot of feminists, or at least those that call themselves that, try to combat the above thinking by creating a sexual revolution. Women should be free to have as much sex as they want as well as men. I mean, why are women treated like sluts all the time when they try to act on their animal instincts all the time the way that men do? How dare anyone expect more of them? Right? Ugh! This misogynist culture…

I look at this much differently. In some ways, though it is degrading to be viewed as a sexual object that is only meant to be consumed, at least we’re not treated as if we don’t have any control over ourselves the way that men are. I think maybe porn is changing that a bit with women performing gross acts on screen while pretending to like it (I don’t see how that cannot change your perceptions and expectations of women, but I really don’t know a whole lot about that so I won’t talk a lot about that.) But even so, women are still usually more often treated as if they should have more self-respect than to throw themselves at someone and try to get them to have sex with them like ravenous sexual animals. They’re treated as if they should know better, like they’re higher than that.

Men on the other hand are expected to crave sex like ravenous sexual animals. To not be able to say “no” to a naked woman in front of them. It is assumed that they will try and get into a girls’ pants and that it is up to the girl to say “no”. Now, yes, that is unfair to the girl. So unfair. But I see it from another angle as well. Even if many men don’t realize it, that must be so degrading to be told that you are nothing more than a weak-willed, instinctual being with no other desire greater than to “get laid”. I’ve had so many douche-bags of men say “yep, that’s how men are,” and it’s frustrating. It’s very similar to the fact that the expectations on women to be beautiful are over the top and extreme, and yet women keep trying. It seems that most women want to be called beautiful and get the most attention competitively even at the expense of their own natural, genuine beauty. And many men want to have as much sex as they can at the expense of their character. But hey, they get away with it. It’s expected of men that they treat women like shit or that they’d at least be tempted to not treat women with respect, and if they aren’t tempted, they must not be much of a man.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, women, I get that you want to be irresistibly beautiful, but would you prefer a guy that couldn’t resist you, or a guy who had enough self-respect to say “no”? You have to see the role you’re playing in all of this. Not that acknowledging our beauty is wrong, it’s not. Not that putting attention into our appearance is wrong, because it isn’t necessarily. But using men in that way to build up our egos by seeing if we’re attractive enough to snag a glance? Not okay. We have to teach girls that beauty isn’t everything and that it’s only a small fraction of who we are as women.

And men, you deserve better.

I hope you realize it, and I hope you have or soon discover the self-respect enough to refuse to be manipulated by a culture that tells you that you don’t have a brain to think for yourself. Even in a culture that says you’re stronger, more capable, deserve higher wages, have far more positions of power, etc…even still…you are pawns…you are not respected. And in a culture that does not respect you, please learn to respect yourselves. And teach your sons to do the same.

Respecting others is so often correlated to how much you respect yourself. You have to believe you are made of finer stuff than to treat others like garbage. You have to believe you have something greater to offer. 

The Mysterious Cry

I don’t think what I have to say is going to make you cry. But I won’t guarantee it because if you’re anything like me, you might occasionally burst into tears at the most random things. Doesn’t happen a lot to me, but sometimes I’m just at a loss for how to explain why I’m crying and I don’t know what to do about it. It’s not a depressed response; it’s not a “bad” crying. It’s not a painful feeling, and it’s not happy either. It’s also not something that happens very often. Usually I know why I’m crying when I do. I don’t know how to explain it, really.

I just finished watching a movie where I burst into tears for no apparent reason. I don’t even usually cry in movies. It was called Boychoir…and it’s about boys who sing in a choir. It wasn’t some “happy-go-lucky” movie, but it wasn’t all depressing either. The boy “wins” in life eventually.

I want so badly to understand why I cried, why I curled up in a ball in the corner of my couch and just let the tears flow. I wasn’t mourning, but it felt as if I had lost something. I wasn’t crying for joy, but I felt as if I had found something I had lost. It felt almost bittersweet, and like I was home, and like I knew who I was when I was watching this video.

But see, that confuses me. I don’t like that. And I don’t understand it. And I have to sit back now and analyze my feelings or else I’ll never be able to act upon them if need be because I won’t even recognize them or identify them properly. Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t feel that I know who I am and I don’t know my feelings because they’re dead, or I just have not allowed them to live. Maybe this movie brought me to my younger self when I knew what I was passionate about, and I knew what I liked, and I knew what I was good at.

I used to just know when I liked something and didn’t and wasn’t afraid to tell someone that what they liked sucked (I know, how kind of me). I think I lost most of that at some point in my teens. I remember becoming a teenager and becoming so much more withdrawn and afraid that my every move would be taken aggressively and would be revolting to someone. That’s something I definitely haven’t totally lost either.

I used to love playing piano. I used to love singing. Whenever I’m asked to answer what I do as a hobby, I usually respond with things that I’ve barely done as of late. The things that I used to love when I was younger: playing piano, singing, drawing, reading…those are my “go-to”s. But I hardly ever do them. I feel as if it’s connected to that very fact that I don’t even know what I like anymore. Because I don’t do those things. I could, I just don’t, and I’m not motivated to.

Do I even like those things anymore? Or do I just feel obligated to like them just because I know they are something that I’m good at? Or because I’m a loyal person, and they were so important to me, I have to be loyal to those things forever as if they were a life-long friend? As I’m writing this, I’m realizing, I don’t have to love those things anymore. Despite what I’ve been told by some, I don’t have to love playing music anymore. I don’t have to love drawing anymore. I don’t have to love reading anymore. Maybe the fact is that I’ve changed. And maybe I haven’t in a lot of ways too. The point is, if I have, is that so terrible? Despite what I’ve been told, am I obligated to play piano, sing, draw and paint, and write just because I’m good at them? Am I obligated to get a degree just because I’m supposedly smart? I’ve been spoken to a lot as if it’s sinful to “waste” my gifts. I’m going to be honest, it seems like I have too many to bring them all to my full potential. That’s just the reality.

Maybe I don’t know what I like because I don’t see the point in just “liking” things anymore. What’s the point of just liking things? Is the point that there is no point? Is that what fun is? What play is? I guess so. Is that what I’m wishing I hadn’t lost? I often have felt treated as if there has to be a point to everything I do and that everything that I love to do should either be used to make money, or worth money, or make a good impression on someone else, etc. I can’t even go to an art studio and enjoy the art. I either just look at art and either feel envious because others have their art displayed and I know my talents are not being recognized and that I am not using them, or I think, “Why would you draw a landscape? What is the point when you could take a photo? It takes skill, but what is the point of the skill anymore?"

That sort of reasoning was pounded into my brain to the point where I adopted it as my own. It’s to the point where I almost view liking things just for the sake of liking them as shallow. Is that what I was told? How I was treated? Maybe it’s that and also the fact that others’ opinions on what they like have hurt me far too deeply in certain ways—excluded me, and made me to feel so unwanted, useless, and unpleasant to behold.

And there I know I hit on something big. People may be kind to me. People might find me adequate. People might find me amusing at times. They might even go so far as to say that the world needs me, that I’m worth a lot and whatever other cliché things they can think of. But do they want me. Are they pleased with what they see, what they hear, what they touch, what they smell…and…nobody is allowed to taste me please…especially that creep on Tinder who said “I’m going to bite you” as if  he were a vampire. Just no…

It’s interesting that I want people to want me for no good reason, but I resent it at the same time. It feels artificial. Is there worth in the artificial sometimes? Is it really that I don’t give a crap what others’ think or care too much? Or is it that I don’t want them to even have an opinion, because I have been hurt too deeply by too many people who were critical of me and didn’t like me as I am?

It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote the above. Since then, I had a conversation with my friend Taki about art. Taki is an art student. He really likes art. Like, a lot. Like, so much that it gets annoying and I become judgmental. But Taki is still a good guy and friend. A very talented good guy and friend. That being said, in Taki’s and my conversation about art, I told him how much I hated putting meaning into a work of art or music or whatever with the intention of moving people into having certain thoughts or feelings. Impassioning people I guess you might call it. I hate it because to me it feels like manipulation. Or I guess a better way to put it, indirect communication. Which to me feels like manipulation. I’m a much more straightforward kind of person.

It’s not that all of my art that I’ve created in the past has lacked meaning. There are a few pieces where I intentionally put meaning into my art. But all of those were just an expression of my feelings. I wasn’t trying to share some deep philosophical message. And the idea of creating art with a deep philosophical message seems confusing to me. I think that’s why I like writing that sort of thing down. Because you can paint a picture with words, so to speak, but it’s still straightforward. You still literally say what you mean.

How does this tie in to what I was rambling about two weeks ago? Well, a lot of what I was ranting about regarded this idea of subjectivity and whether or not it is worthy of attention and respect. Is it okay to like some things and reject others? Is that just the way of life? Taki had mentioned something about giving people what they want. I responded by saying, “I’m not necessarily into giving people what they crave. I’m into deciding what they crave.” Right after I sent that, it sounded to me like what I said could either be taken one of two ways: “Lady Gaga famous and cool kind of creepy” or “cultishly mind-controlling creepy”. And now as I’m saying this, I’m wondering, is there much of a difference between both of those kinds of creepy?...I did always say that I wanted to be the Lady Gaga of “Christian” music…

…But I digress…

 So when it comes to art, I don’t like giving people what they want. As I said, art is sometimes an expression of my feelings. Sometimes, I’m just drawing crap knows what. Sometimes it has no meaning. Either way, it is self-expression. And maybe that’s way I have a hard time sitting down to do it anymore. I started ranting to poor Taki about how I hated it when people looked at my art and tried to interpret meaning from it as if they knew me and could read my soul. Little do they know that I just threw a bunch of random lines together and colors together and it meant nothing other than that—lines and colors, plain and simple. I told him it was like English class all over again where we were required to put all sorts of meaning into things that probably weren’t meant to have any. Not that I have much to complain about when I could fudge my way into getting A’s, but I digress again.

I think truth is important to me in many ways because it’s also about being known. If I do intend meaning in a work of art and someone interprets it wrong, I feel as if that person doesn’t know me and deeply misunderstands me. If they interpret something into my work and there’s no meaning at all but they assume they know what the meaning is, they’re full of it. It’s one thing to say, “this is what it means to me” because then you’re acknowledging that you’re not coming to the discussion as a self-proclaimed all-knowing mind-reader. You’re acknowledging that your interpretation came about because of what you’ve experienced and chosen to pay attention to, and that that experience is different than others’. You’re acknowledging that one thing can have many meanings. That is truth. The failure to acknowledge subjectivity is not truth. Liking subjectivity, now that's a different story. Disliking subjectivity, now that's ironic. 

I think it irritates me in a similar way when someone dismisses me. Especially if they dismiss me because I apparently don’t play the social game well. After all, as a woman, there is that expectation that I am supposed to play the social game well, or that I at least want to and try to. I want people to know that saying the right social thing is never on my mind except sometimes at work. I just care about not hurting peoples’ feelings…but not at the expense of truth in a lot of instances…I’m not into giving people what they crave all the time…I wasn’t lying to Taki…

Okay, this is confusing, let’s try and put this together. I don’t want to sacrifice my self-expression by giving people what they want. Yet I don’t really express myself so much in art or music and hardly ever writing anymore anyway. I think when I combine those together, it makes sense to say that I don’t create art because that’s currently the only compromise that I can think of. If I can’t please everyone, then I better do nothing. I think maybe that’s partly why I have pretty much cut off my social contact as well and haven’t put any effort into making new friends. If I can’t make myself happy while also making others happy, why not just shut down? This all sounds so familiar. Trying to live in a world as an individual with other individuals, many of whom would rather sacrifice their own individuality and expect you to too.

Do I like art? I probably still do. But I don’t have to. I can like it if I want. In an anxiety group therapy class I finished recently, one of the leaders tended to correct me a lot when I said, “I should…” She’d say, “You can. It is possible. Not “should”. You may, you can go for a walk. You can choose to do so. You can choose not to. You can draw or you can choose not to. Who is to say you should. Why should? Who is to say you were wrong if you chose not to?” I still have a hard time with this way of thinking. Am I not obligated? Do I not have obligations to take care of myself? But should I like art? Should I appreciate subjectivity right now? Should I want to be social? Should I play the social game well? Or am I just in a place where I don’t. And is that okay? Maybe it’s just where I am right now, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe working alone and loving my organizational duties at my job at a local used bookstore is all I can manage right now. Or all that I will manage. Who says I should go back to school and use my brain? Who says I should be bored at my job right now? I’m not. It’s protecting something inside me right now, and right now, that’s okay. And who says I shouldn’t cry? I cried. I needed to and that’s it. That’s all.