Thursday, July 19, 2012

Concentric Thinking, Girl Style

I think that most of the writing I post nowadays is more storytelling and less how I feel and what I think. I used to do that a lot more. I miss that. I wonder what happened to make the pendulum swing this way. Did I have more stories than usual? Maybe. Did I stop thinking and feeling? No, that didn't happen. In fact, I think and feel so much about what happens in my life and during those epic storytelling moments that I can't even talk about it, let alone mold it into some internet share-worthy form.

Is that bad? I think and feel so intensely that I have trouble explaining these things to myself and getting responses back. I have a hard time saying what I think. I never really had trouble doing that before. Ever. I was pretty good at forming opinions and stating them clearly up until this point in my life. Ask my mother. Ask the siblings who got stuck with me. Ask the teachers I had conversations and occasional shouting matches with. Read my lit analysis papers. I've got opinions.

But lately I have trouble saying them. I can see the other side and say, I think you could be right. Maybe this isn't an issue of absolutes like I thought it was. Maybe there is good in this other side too. My feelings are twisted and complicated like they haven't been in years. There are certain things in my life I feel absolutely certain about. My feelings are unshakeable and solid. And those are the things that really matter, so I am probably doing alright. But so many other things leave me floundering. I am left unsure of my opinion, afraid of saying something that will be wrong, afraid of supporting something that isn't completely good.

Probably I just need to practice more, right? Do you all know about the beauty that is Emily Series and the resulting tradition of the Jimmy Book? My sister Erin is my very own cousin Jimmy and buys me blank books, which ends up being less a list of here's all what I did today and more a  mural of blurred emotion in word form. It's cheap therapy. The problem is that sometimes it helps me think clearly and other times makes everything two hundred times more complicated inside my brain.

My therapist of old might have something to say about all this. I probably wouldn't want to hear it.
I give up thinking clearly today. Maybe I should post some Jimmy book excerpts and call that an internet-share-worthy form of writing. Chalk it up to double tasking and wait for a more structured time of life when I don't feel hopelessly jumbled.

hmmm. Jimmy book prose, coming soon. I think.



Guys, guess what!

Remember last summer when I wrote a post about how my life was visiting the Oprah Show and getting a flash makeover? One year later, we've upgraded to Extreme Makeover. Pull out the big guns. Sorry, Oprah, but it's a bigger deal than even you.

Some things have changed since that last time when everybody was stressed and running around like a herd of chickens without heads. This year, I am worrying less about packing up the Newton Family's life and dropping it into another state and worrying more about packing my teensy little car and dropping my own life three thousand miles away. Dropping it, plopping it, like a house on Munchkin Land. The trick, I am finding, is not getting squished like the wicked witch I sometimes feel like. ( Seriously. I get shrewish and shrill and I even wear stripey socks. It's a problem.)

Ahem. So there's my update. I am moving in two and a half weeks and basically flipping out. I am figuring out school and insurance and rotating my tires and breathing deep under the burden of extreme neurosis.*

The most difficult part is that I can't visualize what my day to day life will look like when I move. I haven't found a job or made a class schedule and I haven't actually been there, so basically everything past August third is a blank in my brain. I will know four whole people, and everyone else I love and adore will have to be a skype effort. My list of long-distance relationships is already a lot longer than I would like, and it is about to get tripled! It's a daring, terrifying, adventure!

So the plan is to continue being a chicken with no head and concentrate on organizing my life, packing all my crap in boxes or my car, saying goodbye, and getting there.

This is gonna be really hard, and really good. The goodbyes hurt to think about. And the adventures sound like jumping off a cliff. And I think it will be good for me. Right? Of course right!

(This is the part where I wake up at three in the morning with a musical playing in my head. "I promise you'll be happy, and even if you're not, there's more to life than that! Don't ask me what.)



*Everybody knows I get real crazy when I am stressed and feel out of control, right? I have recently discovered that I cannot, cannot sleep if either of my contacts is upside down with an air bubble, there in the case where I can't see it. They must both be totally submerged in the same direction. I think I need help.  Can I get an amen?