SugarSkull

SugarSkull

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I'm in a perpetual phase of transition which doesn't seem to be phasing out.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

I haven't written in a while

I know that keeping rooms dark in the summer keeps things cooler and saves on the electric bill, but I need the light to come in so that I don’t have to go out in it. The heat is something everyone is always talking about in the summer. I try to avoid experiencing it, though remaining adjacent to it most of the time makes me romanticize it in some sort of Gothic literary way that maybe only a modern Southerner could understand. Some people probably think “modern southerner” is an oxymoron. But that’s a topic for another day. I’m still not sure I understand what Southern Gothic meant or means. The stifling humidity only experienced on my way from an air conditioned building to an air conditioned vehicle makes me sticky…the residue on my skin feels like home and I never really know if I love my home. Everyone loves his or her home in some weird way. No, that certainly isn’t true…not in the nostalgic childhood sense. It took me a long time to realize that lots of people had terrible childhoods. And even longer to understand that I can’t understand. But in therapy I talk about growing up feeling like an outcast a lot. Every time I talk about all the girls who left me out as a child, and my fear of rejection, I became pretty grossed out by my own privilege…that not fitting in was the worst thing that happened to me as a kid. 

I'm getting more okay with being weird these days. 

I keep getting stains on my clothes. Paint and peanut butter oil and random nonsense. I can’t go out with dirty clothes, but I do it all the time. Fighting decorum only intentionally in my subconscious, but consciously I just feel guilty and embarrassed. Guilty that I don’t take care of my things, embarrassed that my clothes aren’t clean.

I treat my cat like any other human. Except that I feed her. It’s hard for me not to just meet people and animals where they are in my presumptions. 

Civility is the most taught thing I’ll ever know, to never know, because it’s just learned behavior. I can’t know things that I learned a long time ago, unless I try really hard and even then I can only out learn to the extent that I acknowledge how deeply engrained they are. Nature versus nurture, nuture versus negligence, who are we anyway. Everything we’ve ever been up until now. And then there’s tomorrow. 

Nope, I'm tired of believing that. I can change, I can unlearn things, I can out learn them. 

I wonder if I’ll ever be a tidy person. I wonder if my cat loves me, I know my bunnies don’t, but they tolerate my existence for the most part. Tolerance is an old fashioned word. It has an icky ring to it at this point in history. Still that’s what they seem to do. At least that’s my personal perception of our relationship.

I’ve always liked flamingos. They were the first thing that came to mind when I tried to think of a first thing. 


I never broke a center block in tae kwon do, just lots of boards. I can’t remember if I tried, but when I try to remember I imagine myself hurting my hand really badly on the cement, and then I wonder what’s a real memory. Are memories unreal if they’re recalling a falsehood? People talk about memory a lot. Nostalgia is a buzz word right now. What are we nostalgic for? A time when things seemed less complicated. The past almost always seems less complicated. Maybe because there’s some comfort in the certainty of the past, that it did actually happen, that it did shape us in this or that way because of how the events transgressed. Yes, the past certainly did happen, there’s a security in that, whether it was good or bad. Comfort may not always be the right word and many people probably feel comforted simply by the past being dead. The uncertainty of what the future holds may make people feel better, feel promised something. But the past doesn’t lie, it’s not prostrate like a corpse, it’s a flowy wave of sensical chaos that only one’s memory can lie about.