Being Amber Rhea

Do you think the question, “Why are we here?” is irrelevant? Why or why not?

You might’ve noticed that lately (past week or so), I haven’t been posting as much, and when I do, it’s not deep meaningful important stuff. Part of it is that I’ve been really busy, but part of it is that I’ve been in… well, it’s hard to describe the kind of state I’ve been in. I wanted to say “blogger doldrums,” but that’s accurate only to a point. Because it has also spilled over into my off-blog life, with these nagging existential questions about why we’re here and what does it all mean and how can I be happy when so many people are suffering - hovering around my mind and refusing to STFU. I don’t like the nagging of those voices, the constant not-by-choice Life Pondering.

You’re probably reading this and going, “What the hell is she talking about?” Well, I said it was hard to describe. I’m doing the best I can here, people!

Really, I should just defer to Belledame… remember that whole brevity/wit thing? It’s true. Here’s what she said:

the sheer density in the universe is getting me down

Word.

And, this is particularly weird and annoying because in many ways, I feel better now than I have in a long time. Things are going generally well in my life - I’m having fun and doing cool stuff; yes, I’m working a lot of hours, but I’m happy to be at this job rather than the previous two; Rusty is awesome; I’m not getting overly stressed out about minor things (most of the time!); and so on. And yet… in the back of my mind are these thoughts that won’t leave me alone. Thoughts about poor, working class, and middle class people who can’t afford dental care because the healthcare situation in this country sucks; rape victims getting treated like shit and put through the wringer while psychopath cops walk free; white people deciding they’re the arbiters of what is and isn’t racist; general assholish behavior taking new forms each day; and the WAR, my god, the war!!

It’s too much to handle. I can’t do anything to change any of this, not little old me, by myself. Say what you will, but honestly I can’t. Yeah, I can donate money (which I do, when I have enough to donate), raise awareness, blah blah… but I can’t wave a magic wand and make every U.S. citizen suddenly have comprehensive health coverage. And then I get angry and don’t know what to do with that anger; nowhere to put it. I start to feel selfish (in the bad way) for caring about the things I care about that suddenly seem frivolous in comparison (podcasting, for example); and then soon enough, the “OH WHY ARE WE HERE” track kicks in and I get all scared of death; and I try to tell myself, well, it doesn’t really matter why we’re here; we ARE, and we might as well do something fun with our time here. -And that leads me back to the thing about other people suffering, so how dare I have fun when they can’t…

And so on.

Yes, this post is boring as shit to read, I’m sure, and non-congruous at that. But I’m rambling. I guess, my conundrum is… I want to remove bad energy (that sounds really hippy-dippy, but deal) from my life as much as possible, but then I feel selfish for wanting that. Like, oh, isn’t it nice that I have the privilege and comfort to even be thinking about such things and making the decision not to read about THE WAR because the photos of limbless children upset me. Well what about the limbless children, they can’t make that choice!!

And so on, some more.

Eh. So that’s where I am, currently. Hopefully soon I’ll get back to my blog-positive self. In the meantime I will focus on fucking Rusty as much as possible, because that always makes me happy, and all the other cares and concerns just melt away.

I will leave you with an anecdote:

A minor disaster was averted today. When I did my taxes this weekend, I accidentally designated $500 of my tax refund to go on Starbucks gift cards. (!!!!) I called TurboTax customer service, and fortunately they were able to fix it. So, even though their interface for selecting gift cards is confusing, TurboTax gets a thumbs-up from me in the customer service division (just not the UI division). I mean, I love Starbucks, but that is insane.

From Trin, whose blog I recently discovered:

I don’t have the time or the energy any more to hang around people who are going to tell me my spirituality and my desire flow from dross. It’s not healthy for me and it’s a fucking waste of time.

Hell fucking yes.

Given that I’ve been in kind of a state of blogger doldrums for the past few days, I’ll just leave it at that.

I have a lot of stuff I want to write about, but I have very little free time currently… but, also, I keep getting struck with those “OH WHY ARE WE HERE” moments lately. As I’ve said before, I don’t like that. The whole thing makes me feel weird.

And, there are things I want to say but I’m afraid I won’t be able to express them correctly. Maybe I should do a Pondering Existential Questions (And Other Really Deep Things) edition of Mostly ITP.

Also, I wish Jenny and Niki lived closer. Fuck the snow! Come to Atlanta. (We had a little bit of snow this morning, but never you mind that.)

*sigh* Substantive post later, perhaps. In the meantime, peruse my del.icio.us links. That’s where the good stuff is.

Over at Sherry’s blog, I said:

I like blogs where you get to see pieces of who the writer actually is. How much of themselves they reveal is the choice of each blogger; but I do like when I feel like the blogger is sharing *something*. This is why blogs that are purely “industry blogs” or single-topic blogs bore me to tears. I can read anywhere about what X technology does or what Y politician said. But that doesn’t keep me coming back. What keeps me coming back and wanting to read more is passion.

At which point, my train of thought went where it always does when I think about this stuff for too long, which is down the track of deconstructing everything, and ended up at, “OH WHY ARE WE HERE” (said in your best Goth teen angst voice).

I really hate when that happens.

So, when it does, I decide to change the subject. Because really, what’s the point in entertaining that kind of existential question. It’s not productive and it just leaves me feeling creeped out. If some sort of resolution is demanded (by my psyche or by obnoxious third parties), I usually refer to Cake’s words of wisdom: “As soon as you’re born you start dying / So you might as well have a good time.” It might sound morbid to some, but I think it’s inspiring. It’s basically saying, “We’re here and there’s no getting around that; so let’s make the best of it, dammit!”

I saw this line at Random Bird’s place. It is fucking beautiful in its simplicity and to-the-pointness.

If I love you, I will love you more for everything you were before me.

YES.

And I read that, and I thought, “Whoa. That is what I’ve been struggling to convey for I don’t know how long now. And look, she’s gone and done it perfectly with one simple sentence.” I am awed.

I’ve read it a thousand times: the accepted-by-default platitudes about, “Don’t talk about previous relationships, and BY GOD whatever you do, ESPECIALLY don’t talk about previous sex!! If you do, reality as we know it may come crashing down in a ball of fire and jealousy!! And there is NOTHING WORSE than jealousy!!”

You can find it everywhere, this perception. Yes, from the goddamn mainstream pop-culture media, but also from people with good intentions. Like zuzu at Feministe. And I wrote about that post back when it first went up, but fell short of accurately getting across what I meant. Oh, and I mentioned this whole concept here, too; and that turned into a bit of a blow-up at another blog.

To reiterate my point wrt zuzu’s post, in particular: I completely agree that specific numbers are meaningless (not to mention heteronormative and male-centered) and should never be a determining factor in a relationship, used against a person as a judgment about his/her character, etc. But I’m not talking about “the numbers game” here. I’m talking about the way that any discussion of past experiences - and not just sex, even, but anything that involves a former partner; and especially any admission of love for that person - are popularly deemed “off-limits.”

And I’m left there thinking, “Wellllll… wait. No. That’s not how I feel.”

And then, of course, back when I first started to identify that the way I felt didn’t match the popular portrayal: “What’s wrong with me?”

Cue hours upon hours of introspection! ‘Cause that’s how I roll. So then I came to, “Well, that’s bullshit. It’s all socially constructed! It’s caused by people’s discomfort with sexuality and it perpetuates that discomfort! Oh and not to mention, people’s undealt-with emotional baggage about fear of abandonment and whatever else.” -You know, or something close to that, in my 17-year-old mind.

I got negative reinforcement from other people, though, when I tried to reach out and put my feelings to the test. Questions were met with, basically: “What’s wrong with you?” I internalized a lot of that, and to a certain extent some of it’s still there, and I’m still struggling to shake it. Which is why I can get a bit defensive about it, even now.

I still feel like I can’t articulate this properly. Really, Random Bird’s entire post sums it up better, by way of illustration rather than trying to write a whole philosophical thing.

So this is how I feel, period. And I won’t pretend otherwise. (Fortunately, in my awesome relationship now, I know I don’t have to.)

On a larger scale, not just related to sex: I think another part of it is, I recognize that every experience a person has had contributes to who they are today. And if I love the person they are today… fill in the blanks.

Oh, and also? I hate secrets. I always have. And even moreso since the debacle of the Ending Of My Marriage (which, if you know about that, you’ll understand). To my mind, to love someone is to share things with them that you might be hesitant to share with others.¹ It’s a function of trust.

¹ And no this doesn’t mean having no privacy, or no space of one’s own. That’s something completely different, and not cool.

I now have a timeline. In addition to appealing to my J-preference, having a timelime brings some calm to the restlessness that’s been swirling around inside me (mental pictures) lately. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. It’ll take a while for me to get there, but it feels good to know that I’m being (here comes a buzzword!) proactive. I feel better already.

This has been your deliberately cryptic post of the day.

Just some stuff I’ve been thinking about lately, as I’ve felt kind of disconnected/off-balance over the last few days…

Trying to find the balance between not having perspective / not taking the time to smell the roses, see the silver lining, etc.; and allowing myself to acknowledge my true feelings and work toward something better… well, that’s something that’s always been very difficult for me. I know a lot of it stems from what my mom beat into my head from the time I was a little kid: “You’re so selfish” / “You’re too sensitive” / “You think you have it so bad, there are so many people who have it a lot worse” / “Stop feeling sorry for yourself” / and so on.

Those old lessons are hard to shake.

Look, I know I have it better than somebody working at McDonald’s, or picking oranges, or what-the-fuckever. I feel for people stuck in those jobs when it’s not what they would prefer to be doing, and I think we should find solutions to the economic conditions that allow people to remain mired in poverty. But, should “at least I’m not working at McDonald’s” be the only standard to which I hold myself? Is it “selfish” or assholish for me to try to better myself, for myself, and try to do whatever I can in my power to make my time here in this life as enjoyable as possible? Isn’t that what everyone wants to do? Does the fact that there are people struggling to get by on minimum wage negate my desire for personal (and economic) growth?

I posted this in a comment on Dacia’s site, and was pleased enough with my stroke of eloquence that I thought I’d share it here:

I know what you mean about feeling like a new choice, or decision, or perspective you have will validate all the assholes who’ve been sitting around quietly (or not so quietly) judging you. It has made me almost physically ill to imagine the nay-sayers with smug grins of satisfaction, saying, “I told you so, you dumb bitch!!” But, you know what? It doesn’t matter what you do or say, or whether anyone who’s an asshole turns out to be right about something at some point - they’re still assholes. Whereas you are doing something few people dare to do - examining what is right for you, and always allowing that definition to be, um, redefined. At a certain level, the fact that it’s sex work you’re talking about doesn’t matter; what really scares people is that you are determined to follow your own path and that ultimately, nothing they say or do is going to change that. That’s scary shit for a lot of people, because they wouldn’t dare to live that way themselves - it’s too raw, honest, open, and potentially painful. Better to stay insulated in a nice little comfortable den of passing judgement on others. And if something you say/do/decide ends up dovetailing with something the assholes have said, it’s nothing but a coincidence. The all-important difference between you and them is that you’ve arrived at Conclusion X because of you, not anyone else.

The only way it could’ve been better is if I had slipped in the old cliché, “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

“It’s none of my business what other people think of me.”

Last week, my therapist said that statement and had me repeat it. I didn’t understand wtf he was talking about at first; then he explained it. I’ll paraphrase:

Regardless of what you do, approx. 1/3 of the people who know you are going to just absolutely hate your guts no matter what. Another 1/3 won’t give a shit one way or the other. And another 1/3 will like you (or love you) no matter what.

Well, I sure do hope it’s a full 1/3 that would like/love me no matter what. But damn, there I go making it my business what other people think about me again! Let me start over…

Basically, what he was saying was, there’s no point in trying to not piss people off, because you’ll never please all of the people all of the time - and you won’t please some of them any of the time. When all you do is try not to make people mad at you, you’re compromising yourself and giving up some of who you are. So instead of trying to tiptoe around everyone else’s sensibilities, be true to yourself, do what you know to be best for you, and as far as other people go? All you can do is hope that they’ll think well of you, but really that’s their business and has a whole lot more to do w/ them than you - and the “what if” factor is certainly not a reason to stop being who you really are.

So that has been my food for thought since Thursday.

In an email to a friend, I said:

It’s a scary thing, and a weird balance to try to strike, of being independent but also being able to give yourself emotionally to someone else. I don’t know how anyone ever gets that shit right. I know I sure haven’t figured it out.

Like the title says, this is the closest I come to providing actual words of wisdom. There it is.

One of my favorite Liz Phair songs, “Shitloads of Money,” contains the following line:

It’s nice to be liked, but it’s better by far to get paid.

Now, if I may alter that slightly to reflect my own (current) views… hence:

It’s nice to do cool stuff, but it’s better by far to get paid.

And now, to completely butcher it beyond recognition…

It’s nice to do cool stuff, but it’s better by far to get paid to do cool stuff.

That’s the ideal scenario, anyway.

Apologies to Liz Phair.

Patrick linked to this essay this morning. It’s kind of long, but well-written, so it’s a quick read.

After I read it, I felt… weird.

I think that, by and large, the working poor are treated like shit in this country. There’s the government shittiness, which is one thing; and then there’s the social shittiness, whereby people of even marginally higher “class” (whatever that means) look down upon janitors, etc. as if they’re not even human. Who the fuck taught them that it’s okay to treat people like that?

An extension of this is my belief/concern/suppressed freak-out that the socioecomonic situation of the U.S. is teetering on very wobbly legs. On the micro scale, think about it this way - most of us are not as far from the janitors of the world as we might like to think. It would take one personal crisis (serious illness, losing a job, wrecking a car, etc. ad naseum) to knock us flat on our asses. This is something I’ve had in my head for years now, starting in college, when I’d see certain students acting so high-and-mighty. It kind of made me want to punch them in the teeth.

So, part of my response to Perrin’s essay is, “Right on! Tell it like it is.” I think he is spot on when he says:

[A] fair number of them treated my cleaners and me as barely human, somehow beneath them. My theory was that if a worker in cube 6798 identifies with George Bush, he must believe that he’s someone he’s not– so it’s easier to dump on the Honduran woman who empties his garbage and dusts his computer. I’ve had insurance company receptionists and bank tellers speak to me as if I were a twelve-year-old. Clearly, they needed to feel superior to someone, and these people laid it on thick.

There’s the whole Fight Club “you are not your job” thing, with which I don’t disagree; additionally, there’s just having the common decency to be civil toward your fellow human beings. Why do so many people think they’re “better,” on some nonexistant scale of human worth, than anyone else?

But let’s not get off on a tangent. That was my first response to the Perrin essay. My second response was something a little deeper inside, something close to guilt. Not for anything I’d personally done. But guilt on a more theoretical level, guilt that I know I shouldn’t have, because it serves no constructive purpose. I’ve always had this “Why should I be happy/successful/whatever if other people aren’t?” complex; here’s just another manifestation.

There are people who have fallen on hard times. There are people who won’t be able to dig themselves out of the lower socioeconomic class no matter how hard they try, due to personal, social, and governmental circumstance. I feel badly for those people, and angry that such a huge divide can exist in a country like the U.S., where “hard work” can supposedly help you accomplish whatever you desire.

But, does this mean that I shouldn’t continue to form goals and actively pursue them? That I shouldn’t “dream big”? Of course not; but knowing the answer intellectually doesn’t get rid of the deep pang of knee-jerk guilt. I guess I should just keep reassuring myself that personally, I have nothing to feel guilty for; and that there’s nothing wrong with trying to climb to the top - just don’t shit on anybody on the way up.

All the shit that’s happening with Hurricane Katrina, and then the big gas freak-out, has really affected me more than I’d expected. I can’t think about it for too long or else I get very angry and depressed (yes, simultaneously - not a good feeling). I might write a long post about this shit later, but for now I can’t bear to. So go read what some of my friends have been saying instead; their posts are a hell of a lot better than mine would be at this point, anyway.

• Dylan: Perception Shift and … and so goes the rest of the administration
• Jen: The Post
• Joseph: Tunnel Vision
• Jmac: How you can help and A new plan, anyone?
• Nikki: Atlanta Gas Hangover
• Patrick: If you’ve got the stomach for it
• Thomas: Now Do Something (about the gas craziness, transit, and who to write to in this godforsaken mess)

I know the hurricane and the gas crap are two different things, but they are related (one caused the other) and the two on top of each other is what’s causing this all to have such an effect on me. More later, maybe.

What we want and need is always changing, evolving. And that is a good thing.

This has been your platitude of the day.

I am tired. More later, maybe. Or maybe I’ll pass out on the couch with the new Harry Potter book laying across my chest.

Dreams can be cruel things. You finally get some much-needed, hard-core, 10-hours-running sleep — and you have dreams that are so vivid that when you slowly awake and swim your way out of them, you’re confused for several minutes because you could swear they’re real. And that makes you happy. Then you realize it was all just a dream and it’s not real after all, and a heavy wave of disappointment washes over you. You try to go back to sleep to recapture the dream, but it never works.

(With nightmares, of course, the opposite is true. You wake up scared and then you’re so relieved when you realize none of it was real. But the former kind is what happened to me this morning.)

Then you lie there for a while wondering if your dreams are trying to tell you something — if they contain a message or a truth that you’ve been unable to see in your waking life. Or if they’re just a manifestation of all your wishful thinking. Do you act on them? Go out on a limb? No, you’re too much of a wuss and you always have to save face. So you don’t do anything, other than go about the day with a little pang of pain inside you.

And when I say “you,” I mean “me.”

Sorry for the overly-poetical nature of this entry. Bleh. I tried not to make it so disgusting.

More book reviews coming, don’t worry. There are many more chapters to be analyzed!

I admit it: I sometimes get annoyed with people who write abstruse blog entries about poignant personal “anniversaries.” -Admittedly, usually only when the person in question is someone I don’t like to begin with (yes, I have a catty side — and I’m not afraid to use it!) I *like* to read such blog entries (or emails, as the case may be) if they were written by my friends, or even if they were written by someone I’m ambivalent about (about whom…) or don’t know IRL. -But even then, if it’s excessive, I *can* be pushed to the brink of annoyance by anyone other than my closest amigas y amigos. Anyway… this is just to acknowledge the fact that I spared you, my readers, the agony of reading an abstruse anniversary commeration of my own this New Year’s Eve. And it would’ve been abstruse, believe me; cryptic, even!

So consider yourselves spared.

Excerpt from my old-fashioned, pen-and-paper journal (which I don’t write in nearly enough), from Jan. 3rd, 2004:

I’m back in DFW now after visiting Chris in Georgia for 2 weeks. And I’m more confused than ever now. I’ve had a headache all day. … At first I was glad to be back in my apartment. And I still am, don’t get me wrong; my apartment is one thing that I do like about living here. It’s my little safe haven. … I have pretty much decided that barring a miracle, I’m quitting Katapultz after this year. But tonight I’m starting to feel this dread and wondering if I can even do it for 4 more months. I don’t want my life to pass me by.

So, yeah. Consider this the obligatory “Wow, look how much things can change over the course of 1 year” entry.

I’m thinking of starting a private, password-protected blog that’s accessible only to me. I could even just run it on my iBook. That way I could write down everything I want, but type instead of writing by hand… because I’m pretty sure I have carpal tunnel or something. :P My hand always cramps up.

I don’t have to prove anything to anybody, or impress anybody, or live up to some nebulous outside standard. A lot of people pay a lot of lip service to the idea of self-fulfillment and finding happiness within oneself, but they don’t actually put it into practice. Probably because it’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s always pressure and negative energy coming from other places. Yet, I am determined to continue with this as my mantra.

Basically the reason why I’m rambling like this is because somebody made a comment at work this morning that implied that writing HTML is “beneath” a “real developer,” which also implied that we here in Web Services (or perhaps just me) are not “real” developers. Hmph. As if a person is totally defined by what they do in the office between the hours of 9 to 5. Perhaps I’m too sensitive, but the comment hurt my feelings. -And if I am in fact too sensitive, then again, that’s part of who I am and anyone who doesn’t like it can kiss my ass! :-P

The person who sat in this cubicle before me was filthy. There are lots of ingrained food stains on the desk. And they won’t come out, despite my repeated vigorous scrubbing with Windex and other cleaners. Argh, it annoys my J-preference!In other news: go and read Patrick’s review of Farenheit 9/11. I have yet to see the movie myself. I’m sure I will. But I need to wait. Too much of this stuff makes me really depressed about the state of the world and humanity. I’m not trying to hide my head in the sand. I’m just trying to focus on being thankful for the good, instead of grieving over the bad. And I’m still getting over If These Walls Could Talk (review forthcoming).

I took this quiz (linked from a random blog I happened upon while aimlessly clicking during lunch) today and got a 60 out of 100. I just took it because it happened to be there and I was bored, not taking it very seriously. But upon further reflection, I wonder if, for some, it doesn’t do more harm than good. It’s supposed to serve as a “guide to help you improve your life”, but I think what it really does is make people feel bad about themselves for not meeting somebody’s ideal of perfection. Are we really supposed to be perfect? Is that a realistic goal? Should we be too hard on ourselves if we don’t meet that supposed ideal? I think not! Geez!! There are enough external forces out there influencing people to feel horrible if we’re not “perfect”… we sure don’t need another one, which masquerades as a tool for helping instead of harming.

I am discouraged and disillusioned with mankind today. Where is the line drawn between maintaining a positive outlook, and sticking your head in the sand/being naive/turning a blind eye to CRAP in the world? Is it drawn at a certain point if there’s nothing one person can personally do to remedy a situation? Where is the boundary between personal responsibility, responsibility to home and community and world, and goals too lofty to ever be achieved, thus setting oneself up for disappointment? Or, in a perhaps worse case scenario, martyrdom? Should I stop reading the crap on the internet that disheartens me thus, or should I read a balance of it and the good stuff, or just focus on the good stuff? I tend to lean somewhere between the second and third option, but that’s a precarious balancing act.