Two years, seven months

Dear Ma,

I had this horrible, horrible dream right before I woke up this morning (why are the worst ones always those last-ditch, right-before-the-alarm dreams?) and almost immediately wanted to talk to you about it.

It’s two years, seven months today. No, I haven’t gone back to counting the days/weeks/months. I just happened to notice. Maybe the fact that every retailer in America is currently cramming Mother’s Day down my throat made me extra specially aware.

Maurice Sendak died today. He’s the guy who wrote Where the Wild Things Are. My favorite line from that book? “And Max the King of All Wild Things was lonely and wanted to go where someone loved him best of all.” I love it, because it breaks my heart. If that makes any sense.

There’s this line from an episode of Dollhouse that has stuck with me for these many months without you: “You don't get past it. It just becomes a part of who you are.” And it is so very true about grief, at least in my experience. But the thing about grief is that it also comes out of nowhere, just when you think you have a handle on how things are now, and shakes everything up for no reason other than it can. Fucking grief.

It’s not that I’m particularly miserable right now. It’s just cold and rainy and I miss you more than usual. I wish I could talk to you about that dream from this morning. I wish I knew who in this world loved me best of all (because I know it used to be you – you may not have always loved me the way I wanted you to and you may not have always understood me, but I knew without a doubt that you loved me more than anyone else on this planet does – it’s hard losing that feeling on top of everything else).

Last year, this guy I barely knew wished me luck on Mother’s Day and I was so taken aback by that – not in the bad way, in the way that kind of stops your heart for a second because you realize that you are not invisible and that someone is reaching toward you in kindness. A couple others chimed in later, and I was surprised every time. It was, after all, the second Mother’s Day without you. (I thought the statute of limitations on people being thoughtful about my loss had run out. I don’t know that I’ve ever been that thoughtful about anyone else’s loss.)

What’s weird is that this year, Mother’s Day is on my mind more than the last two years. I’m more annoyed by all the advertisements (I had to stop myself from emailing a response to an ad that appeared in my inbox: “Sorry, my mom lives in a box on top of my refrigerator, so I really don’t think she will appreciate your chocolates after all”). Again with the grief thing being unpredictable. To head off any sadness on the actual day, I’ve decided to go to the movies. There are a couple of things I’ve been wanting to see. If Joss Whedon can’t make a day seem brighter, there is no hope left in the world.

I still have hope. And I’m still working on love, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Days like today make it hard, but I wish you could see how your death has affected me. Not the sad part – the part where I’ve tried to learn something (about myself and the world and how we’re all connected) and how I’ve tried to make sure the people I care about know that and how much braver I’ve been (not just risking my physical safety – pushing myself to step out of my comfort zone and say and do things that scare me and risk humiliation and rejection). I think you’d be proud of that.

And now I’m going to make myself cry for the first time in months and months (since I read The Fault in Our Stars) and I’ve got to go facilitate a meeting, so I should just stop.

Love you, Ma. Miss you so much.

Whatever you do, don't think of elephants*

Except, I can't stop thinking about elephants.

The book I'm writing is very sad and personal and to offset those things for myself, I've also made it a bit wacky. Like, there's a werewolf. And a gnome (yes, a real one). And a family of former circus freaks (except it's mean to call them that, so don't). Said family also just happens to have an elephant living in a large barn-like structure behind the house.

I am a big proponent of imaginative, original writing. I like the fantastical (in fact, my favorite genre to read tends to err on the side of dystopic fantasy with a dash of the supernatural). But I'm also a firm believer in authenticity. I can make up whatever I want about werewolves and gnomes, because they don't actually exist. But when it comes to this elephant, I need to do some research. I need to know what they smell like, what it feels like being in the presence of one, exactly how it feels to brush your hand against one, the way they move, etc. (And, even if I find out in the course of my research that no elephant would ACTUALLY eat ice cream sandwiches and bread and butter pickles -- spears, not chips -- well, then I'm just going to have to take some creative license with that.)

This need for authenticity and to do some real-life research is what led me to google "pet an elephant in New England" yesterday. (I'm sure you're astounded to find that I didn't really come up with much for results.) That's when I turned to Facebook, asking if any of my friends knew a place where a girl could go to pet an elephant.

I was astonished how many replies I got. Unsurprisingly, most of the responses were about zoos. This makes me sad (and raises a bunch of moral/ethical quandaries about patronizing such establishments). I have fond memories of being a very small child and riding an elephant at Catskill Game Farm. Although Wikipedia refers to it as a zoo (technically, I guess it was), I still think of it as an animal preserve. There weren't the traditional cages or small enclosures. The animals always seemed well cared for and roamed in large fenced-off areas of a mountain.

My MFA mentor Suzanne posted a link to this video, which elicited a response from me something along the lines of: OMGTHATISSOAMAZINGIWISHICOULDDOSOMETHINGLIKETHATWOW. (And, while the location in the video is a zoo, at least they seem to strive to enrich the lives of the elephants living there. I feel like I can get behind that.)

So, I'm still trying to figure out which of the many options my friends suggested to pursue in my quest to get near an elephant. But then something dawned on me. I haven't been in very close proximity to any exotic animals in a long time. Me + exotic animals = wackiness

The first wacky encounter was with the least exotic animal, a baby goat. I was four and we were at Catskill Game Farm, in the special pen where the baby animals ran loose and you could feed them from bottles. I had bent down to feed a baby goat and got its nubbly little horn up my nose. (Yeah, I know. You can't do it if you TRY, but I manage to do it completely by accident. Thank goodness it was just the nubbly horn.)

Wacky encounter number two was approximately 11 years later at the Orange County Fair. There were a few years during my adolescence that, in addition to the typical 4H enclosures with various livestock, the fair featured pens and cages with exotic animals. The summer I was 15, they had some tigers (in very small cages, I might add). We were standing a good several yards back when there was a stream of liquid from the cage of a white tiger. (I tried to convince myself that said tiger had only kicked his water bowl and that's what splashed my arm. My sister laughed and said I was deluding myself.)

A year after the tiger peed on me, I was back at the fair and this time they had a petting zoo -- a tent with little pens filled with potbellied pigs and goats and a water buffalo. I think there was even a giraffe. You could put quarters into a gumball machine nearby and get handfuls of food for the animals. I stood in front of the water buffalo with my cupped hand filled with something that looked a lot like the stuff I feed my guinea pig. He ate it all up and rather than licking his plate (so to speak), he bit. My hand.

And that is how I got a goat horn up my nose, was peed on by a white tiger, and got bitten by a water buffalo (all before the age of 18), and lived to tell about it.

Getting up close and personal with an elephant may not be my wisest idea yet, but it's still worth pursuing....




* My favorite part of the book The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd (which is AWESOME) is all about that phrase.

I wish

I wish that everyone had an Emily. Everyone should have a writing partner who is willing (and eager) to read and comment on your latest material from the dentist's chair. Everyone should have a friend who is willing to fly from Colorado to Maine to be your buddy at a wedding just so you don't freak out and die (willing, if not actually able).

And everyone should have someone who participates in email exchanges like this:

Email from me at 10:33 this morning:

Day 4 and it's actually the worst so far. It's like the little virusy things in my body know their time is up, so they're staging one last assault*. I don't even want to look at anything edible right now. Ugh.

I did a weensy bit of writing last night and I'd like to finish it up tonight. We'll see how things go.

Being sick is stupid.

LOVE

*I should get such amazingly huge grammar points for getting both "their" and "they're" right when I feel like crap.

Reply from Em:

CERTIFICATE OF GRAMMAR BONUS

issued to:  Ms. Tara Thomas

For the astute act of using "their" and "they're" correctly even when ill.

signed:  Ms. Emily France, Grammar Cheerleading Squad, Acting Captain

Reply from me:

And this is why, some day, we need to publish our emails. (well, not all of them. just the funny ones.) 

Reply from Em:

Which, you know, would be, like, what...98%?

(LOVE.)

"If I get it all down on paper / it's no longer inside of me / threatening the life it belongs to"

- Anna Nalick, "Breathe (2 a.m.)"

Have you ever been so tired that when you wake up your eyes actually hurt? It's something I deal with all the time, having been an insomniac, literally, since I was born. This morning, I got up and my eyes were so sore that I had to keep squinting.

See, I'd gone to bed late (even though I'd planned to go to bed on time) -- I was, in fact, on my way to bed when I got sidetracked by the computer. Out of nowhere, I sat down and started writing a scene I hadn't planned or even thought about. And then this morning -- even though I NEVER write when I first get up -- I added another half scene to it.

I sent these rough drafts to my writing partner, Em. She wrote back later today: "By the way, I am reading and commenting on this scene from the dentist's chair. No shit! I couldn't wait!"

And I owe her not just because she was reading/commenting IN THE DENTIST'S CHAIR. I owe her because all this writing I've been doing is because she gave me the thing I've been lacking for months and months and months: Accountability.

See, I'm a hard worker, but I'm also entropic. I lack discipline. If I don't have someone who is depending on me to do what I need to do, I end up binging on reruns of tv shows I never watched on Netflix or making my way through the shelves of unread books in my library or napping. I think about writing; I fantasize about how my life could be different if I wrote more, if I had the time to devote to writing, if I didn't have to worry about paying my bills. But for all my good intentions, I blow through every deadline I set for myself.

Em and I talked about this recently and we agreed that I will send her stuff on the 1st and 15th of every month. My first submission was earlier this week. I wasn't feeling very inspired, but I knew I had to get some writing to Em. So I did it. And, somehow, that unblocked all this stuff that I didn't even know was waiting to be written. Waiting on me.

That story isn't going to unfuck itself.

Once again, realizing that I have to learn every major life lesson about a gazillion times before it sinks in. Accountability: It's an amazing thing. And I'm glad I have a friend who loves me (and my book) enough to do this for me.

Sometimes being a Pisces sucks

I’ve started watching Battlestar Galactica, because so many people have so often told me I should. The religious stuff makes me twitchy, but I’m sticking with it for now. In the episodes I just watched, Number Six and Gaius are talking about going to pyramid ball games: “And then let the emotion of the crowd flood over me. Waves and waves of it. Like electric current.”

They said this like it was a good thing.

I have this experience all the time, but I hate it. The waves of emotion make me feel like I’m drowning. The electric current burns and shocks, just like when I stuck that key in the outlet in the downstairs bathroom when I was 3ish or 4ish or how ever old I was.

The thing is, I don’t just need to go to a sports stadium to feel like that. Surround me with more than a handful of people, and it starts happening. There’s all this emotion I don’t know how to process and then my own emotions get lost somewhere in the mix of it all and I don’t know how to deal with it and I usually end up confused and angry and crying.

In the last eight years or so, I’ve learned that certain tricks work. If I can sit in a corner with a book, I can pretend that I’m all by myself, lost in the world of the story. (Which is why this album exists.) If I have something I have to do – any kind of job or responsibility – I can focus on the task at hand and forget the people around me who aren’t directly involved in the job I have to do. If I can’t do either of those things, I find a buddy. As long as there is SOMEONE that I know that I can talk to, it’s like suddenly the waves become ripples and the electric current is more like a static shock you get walking across the room and it’s all manageable (as long as that person is not in the middle of an intense emotional experience - then all bets are off).

I’ve known for months that I would be attending a wedding where I wouldn’t know any other guests and that was on the same date that most of my friends were going to be busy. I asked pretty much everyone whose company I knew I could stand for more than a couple hours if they’d be willing to go with me. (Not as a “date” or an “escort” because there are way too many connotations attached to those words – I just needed a buddy, someone to hang out with me and distract me from the waves and electric current sure to be swirling around.) It’s not easy having to beg your friends to hang out with you (although I did receive replies from two friends – one in Colorado and one in New York – that were very sweet assurances that if they weren’t otherwise engaged, they would actually have traveled THAT FAR for me; it's pretty amazing having people who will do that for you in your life). In the end, I’m going to be on my own.

I’ve warned the friend who’s getting married that I might have to leave early. The people and the emotions might just be too much for me. But, maybe I need to try to see it from Number Six’s point of view. Maybe the waves and electricity can be a good thing when you get past the fear of feeling things you don’t understand. Maybe you just have to feel it and accept that. At least, I think this is the game plan I’m going to adopt. Let’s see if it works….

I think I want to be an eck

If you don't know what an eck is, you should read There is No Dog by Meg Rosoff. I'm only about 3/4 of the way through the book (which is why I only *think* I want to be an eck -- I can't say for sure until I know what happens to him), but here's why I want to be one:

"Estelle talked to him as they strolled, not always about things he understood. But her voice seemed to enclose him in a warm place full of light, and he felt safe."

I want to stroll with Estelle and let her voice enclose me in a warm place full of light, where I feel safe. 

"If it's time to go, remember what you're leaving. Remember the best. My friends have always been the best of me."

- Doctor Who*

The vast majority of January and February this year were not particularly fun for me. But then I had a triumphant birthday and the vast majority of March was pretty damn awesome. Until about the middle of this past week.

You used to be able to tell when things got really bad at my old job, because I would announce, "I hate my job. I hate my life. I'm going to go live in a cave."

It's been a long time since I've felt all of those things simultaneously, but I was feeling all of those things PLUS A LOT MORE for the last severalish days. I stayed inside all day yesterday. Today, after running some errands, I went to finally do the laundry that I've been putting off. Except, I walked into the Laundromat and there wasn't a single free washer. And I almost started crying. Seriously. (I took this as a sign that I needed to a. go home and b. finish watching the most recent episodes of Doctor Who on Netflix because I clearly needed to be way far away from people.)

And then I got a text from Emer that she had updated the red notebook blog. LIKE MAGIC (I kid you not), everything felt better. "When we're connected to others, we become better people" -- yet another of the many lessons I seem to have to learn over and over and over again. 





* I feel like I should confess that I only started watching Doctor Who last year, after I saw Neil Gaiman speak in New Hampshire, and I've only watched the episodes in the newer series that began in 2005. I feel like I should also state that I really, intensely dislike the current doctor. He just annoys the crap out of me. BUT, I think the stories in the episodes since he became doctor are probably the best in the newer series. Go figure.

"Stop sucking and live a life of abundance"

That quote used to be the tagline for a blog that is now taglined "Personal Development for Polymaths." I'm not sure what a polymath is or why they need to develop personally, but I liked the original tagline as quoted in The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.

As a good and true nerdfighter, I try to do my part to decrease world suck. I mean, that's a big part of what this blog is all about -- keep working on love isn't just a neat quote from a book with pretty pictures of birds; it's like some crucial piece of advice on making my way in the world that happened to fall into my head at the exact right moment in time.

Are there moments/days/longer stretches of time when I still completely and utterly forget to be awesome? Yes. Mountains and moons and universes of YES. But I try. I try to be awesome, to make the world suck a little less, to keep working on love.

Some days, it even works.

Like today.

Operation Flowers was not my idea. My co-worker's husband suggested they spend Valentine's Day delivering flowers at a nursing home, rather than going the more traditional dinner-out route. When she told me about it, I got really excited...despite the fact that I often say I hate old people. (Really, I kind of do. Not totally. Fine, I'm admitting it publicly: I don't totally hate old people.)

So, my cubemate invited me to come along and share in this Valentine adventure and I couldn't say no, even though one of the big reasons I kind of hate old people is that they kind of scare me. (All the old people in your family completely and utterly losing their minds will do that to you.)

Coincidentally, the red dress I bought myself in the spirit of The Traveling Red Dress Project arrived yesterday, and since it was appropriately colored for the so-called holiday (did I mention I hate Valentine's Day? Like, really, really hate it. Not like how I kindasortaalmostmaybe hate old people), I decided to wear it.

This morning, I got up an hour early. I straightened my hair (which is no small accomplishment). I put on my pretty new red dress. I left work an hour early (hence the getting up early), drove out to Lewiston (which I am still somewhat convinced is charged in the opposite magnetic polarity as me), and I delivered roses and handmade valentines to nursing home residents with my cubemate, her husband, and another co-worker.

It was sad in so many ways -- people who could barely speak, who didn't necessarily have any idea what was going on, people who were so pale and skinny and reminded me SO MUCH of my mom in those last weeks of her life, people with the same vacant look my grandpa had in the last weeks of HIS life. But it was beautiful in so many ways, too -- the people who had all these amazing pictures up in their rooms, from old black and whites to brand new Christmas card family pictures; the people who had so many flowers already in their rooms that our single roses could have easily gotten lost in the shuffle; people who laughed and smiled and thanked us and seemed genuinely moved by our small gesture.

I usually avoid talking to strangers. I have a hard time relating to people I don't know, knowing what to say to them, how to carry on a regular conversation. I prefer to sit in silence in a corner by myself and read most of the time.

Even tonight, I didn't say much. I didn't go out of my way to ask these people their names, tell them mine, do anything more than say, "Happy Valentine's Day!" in an especially giddy voice (my voice tends to be a bit giddy anyway, unless I'm in a mood). I said a little more to one lady, because she had all these pictures and decorations hanging around her side of her room -- had her walker decorated with random toys and fun things. She seemed like my kinda lady.

It took us less than an hour to make the world suck a little less by wandering two floors of a nursing home delivering flowers and handmade cards. I can't say it made me a different or better person, but maybe it'll make me pause before the next time I announce how much I hate old people....

"The words that matter always stay."

- David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility

I’d sent this email to my writing partner Em earlier this week:

I'm reading Bite Me: A Love Story, the final book in Christopher Moore's vamp trilogy. In his books, vampires can turn to mist and Tommy, an aspiring writer, has just learned to turn to mist after being reduced to animal instincts:

...As a human, with grammar hardwired into his brain, he put a word to everything, and as a writer, if he couldn't put a word to an experience it had no value for him. But to become mist, you simply had to BE. Words got in the way. They separated you from the condition.

And I'm wondering what you think of this. I'm wondering what I think of it. 

On the one hand, I often feel like an experience isn't real for me until I write about it IN SOME WAY. It's how I process things. But then this idea of words getting in the way, "separating you from the condition" is kind of intriguing. I've always thought of words bringing me closer to things, rather than distancing me. But, in a way, I get that, too. 

I think I tend to use words as a shield to keep people at bay a little (people really freak me out -- particularly new people [as in strangers, not as in babies...although babies kinda freak me out, too. way too jiggly and breakable AT THE SAME TIME, which seems like it should violate some law of physics or something]). And then I have this image in my head of me sitting in a corner reading (um, because that's what I do rather than interact with new people) and it's almost like I am LITERALLY using words as a shield (not my own words, but still). 

And, I dunno, reading that, it felt like I had two pieces of a three-piece puzzle and it definitely made an impression and got me thinking, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

Her response was poetic and eloquent and it resonated with me, but I still felt like a piece was missing from my puzzle, so I copied and pasted that babbly mess above and emailed it to my other writing partner and another writer I know. 

I hadn't yet received their responses when I found the puzzle piece on my own.

I'd just finished Bite Me, and I was lying in bed thinking. It wasn't like one light bulb suddenly went off, it was like a whole series of them flashed on in my head. There were so many thoughts all at once, I couldn't get out of bed fast enough to write them down.

I was thinking about how a friend had asked me a few months ago what I got out of the misadventures with the Box o'Ma. It was an uncomfortable question, because he'd already asked me why I did them and I'd said, "It's just something I need to do. They help me." I didn't want to go trolling around for more words in the deep, dark, gooey places inside me. I didn't want to risk undoing the magic.

But, the thing was, the question stayed with me. FOR MONTHS. And then I put together this video, using pictures and videos from the last 2+ years of misadventures, and I wrote myself a little narrative to go along with it in the Vlogbrothers' Thoughts from Places style. It was my Thoughts on Misadventuring. And those were the words I couldn't grasp in that Indian restaurant so many months earlier.

What dawned on me last night as I was thinking about all of that -- the missing piece of my puzzle -- was that the words are always there.

Sometimes, the right words are very close.

A lot more of the time, though, they aren't. So I have to scramble and stumble through the close by ones (which is why I'm so rambly and babbly and why I over contextualize and over explain - I'm making my way through those nearby words). But I might struggle to reach the right words. I may have to seek them out in hidden places and crevices and deep pockets and locked boxes with forgotten keys.

"The words that matter always stay." I think that, for me, there are words for everything. But I can't always find them right away. And sometimes they scare me. And sometimes they overwhelm me. And sometimes they confound me. But I always keep looking.

"That story isn't going to unfuck itself."

- Chuck Wendig

If you click on that link, I suffer horribly from numbers 1, 2, 6, 8, 13, and 25. (I printed them out, FRAMED them, and hung them on the wall so I can see them right above the main screen on my laptop when I'm writing.)

Being aware of my problems, being inspired by the words of people who get it and have clearly outlined what I need to do (i.e. SIT DOWN AND WRITE) has still not helped with the actual writing lately.

Once again, I was stuck stuck stuck.

But then magic happened.

Em and I were both lamenting being in a funk and I think she was the one who suggested a write-a-thon. We planned it for tonight, even though she now lives TWO time zones away. At 6 p.m., I sat down, completely terrified because I didn't know what I was going to do. I've written three really brief scenes since November. That's it.

I opened my notebook, saw two words, and wrote a partial scene about those two words.

And then I spent almost three hours writing about an elephant and two girls who have pledged to not let each other get broken (or maybe just not MORE broken). I wrote about love and magic and empathy and psychic powers.

And it felt SO GOOD.

In the middle of it, Em sent me an email. She was talking about a Vlogbrothers video John Green made a short while ago and she said, "Well, if I made a video about what to do in life, I'd say 'Get a Tara.  Find a friend who shares your passion in life and HANG ON.  She'll be an amazing gift in your life.'"

The whole time I was reading this email, I had my left hand over my heart. It's just this thing I do when I am so totally moved by the words a person is sharing with me that all I can do is try to hold onto my heart and make sure it stays where it lives, because otherwise I think it might just float away. Or something. (I have no idea WHY I do it; I just do.)

Years ago, my mentor Suzanne said to me, "Writing is such a blessing to have in your life."

There are times when I think I completely and utterly suck -- at writing, at life, just generally and in an all-encompassing kind of way. But there are times when I write for three hours straight about things I have completely imagined and yet the words I put together made it real (at least for me -- and maybe, someday, for somebody else, too). There are times when I realize that there are these SMART, and INCREDIBLY TALENTED, and BEAUTIFUL people in my life who do AMAZING things with words (like Em, and like our friend Morgan) and without writing, I would never have met any of them. There are times when I realize how much of who I am and how I interact with the world has been shaped by the books I've read and someday I might just be able to do that for someone else.

Writing is more than a blessing. It's magic -- it is tenuous and fleeting and fickle and can only be seen in the right lighting at the right angles, but when it all comes together...there's absolutely nothing like it.