Cleveland At Heart

AHEM *dusts off blog dashboard*

I should be getting ready to go back to work, but instead I've decided to let the world know I still exist.

Hi!I still exist.

Busy holidays... had a blast with both sides o' the family, but am now faced with three days to complete the amount of work I was thinking I'd spend about 3-4 hrs/day over my entire two week "break" working on. Ug.

 

No time for a comprehensive 2011 wrapup, so I'll do it in a series of six-word memoirs (not necessarily in chronological order):

1.) Goodbye, Bean. Enjoy your tenth life.

2.)  Thirty: not bad. Just another age.

3.)     Made progress in befriending sister. Score.

4.)    Abandoned singularity. Ate cake. Pleasing results.

5.)     Little time for much of this.

6.)   NO. Thanks for your opinion though.

7.) I want to be better, honestly.

8.) Find Bean fur somewhere. Cry. Repeat.

9.)      National Board Certification SOUNDED doable, then...

10a.)       Must not resent jerk colleague.

10b.)      I will be the bigger person!

11.)  Student overdosed: I HATE THE WORLD.

12.)              Dad is worse again. FUCK MS!

13.)    With Chris, all things are possible.

14.) Don't panic. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

15.)   Stacks of books beckon me, ignored.

16.)                  London haunts my eyelid screen theater.

17.)    The rest of my life is happening.

ZOOM

Quote that sums up how I've felt lately:

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."

-- Sylvia Plath

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It's 10:40 AM and I have done nothing productive. I've been going to my classroom every Tuesday morning and staying into the early evening, but I'm just a slug this morning.

I seriously felt like the world was ending last night. I'll spare you the dozen-plus things that all converged on my brain at the same time, but let's just say it was a perfect storm that resulted in much precipitation. So now my face looks like, well, like I was up crying all night. I can't go into work looking like this... especially considering when I was last in (Thursday) I had a fat lip due to some dental work, and the week before that I had a bruise on my cheek from volleyball. People are going to start talking. Did I mention the fat lip and bruise were both on the left side of my face? Poor Husband.

I need to put on my big girl panties and get moving. I have a HUGE pile of studying to do for National Board Certification, am still trying to get thank you notes from our wedding done, my tub needs to be scrubbed, and once my face goes back to its normal size I do need to actually go to work to get some things done.

What ARE you DOing with all of your FREE TIME?

Aah yes, the question people love to ask me in the summer. Many people assume I am nothing but a lady of leisure all summer because “teachers have the summers off.”  I have yet to eat a bonbon, watch a soap opera, or sip fruity drinks by a pool, however. Here's what I've been up to for all of you inquiring minds out there:

1.)   Laundry. Every f*cking day. There are only two of us in this house, but we generate ridiculous amounts of laundry between work clothes, workout clothes, and god knows what else. No wonder during the school year I do a mountain of it every weekend.

2.)   Cooking. This I enjoy… I once heard someone refer to it as “modern day alchemy,” and she was right.  It’s magical. It’s grounding. It’s industrious. Are you hungry? I will feed you.

3.)   Reading, and in doing so displaying the amazing abilities and frustrations of ADD. I read a few books at a time… some professional, some recreational.

4.)   Work. Yeah. In case you've never heard me preach from atop my soapbox about this, teachers don’t entirely have the summers off. I have committee meetings. I am doing curriculum development. The student groups I advise still have responsibilities and activities. I'm in the building many hours per week... I'm just not teaching classes. (Stay tuned for an entire related post.)

5.)   Studying up for National Board Certification. This involves several hours a week of reading, note-taking, and networking. And scrimping and pinching money to pay the fees.

6.)   Self-loathing. Tons of it. Then I feel like an asshole for griping about being depressed despite my great life, and that leads to more self-loathing. That’s why they call it a downward spiral, kids.

7.)   Deferring. Husband is working on finishing his thesis for master's degree #2. I support him in that venture just as he supports me in my professional & academic endeavors. But he’s months beyond when he was supposed to be done, so I'm still putting off things we'd planned for when he was done. I'm worried about him and the amount of time and mental energy it's draining from him, but don't want to bring it up because I don't want to sound down on it.  *taps fingers*

8.)   Having nightmares. Not that that’s any different from the rest of the year.

9.)   Loving my cats. They are so thrilled that for the first time in their short lives (the simple one is 13 months old and the brilliant one is 21 months) they just don’t know what to do with themselves.  I am beginning to have an almost unhealthy attachment to them… sometimes I am reluctant to leave the house for errands because I don’t want to disappoint them. Last night I was awake for hours because usually one sleeps in bed with me, but neither of them were anywhere to be found. I had to go find them, and once I did, I worried incessantly about how horrible it is that I will have to eventually go through with them what I went through with Bean (rest her little kitty soul) a few months ago.

10.) Playing volleyball -- BADLY. What the heck?! I used to be good at this game. Maybe I'll play softball next summer.

11.) Writing the great American novel. Don't laugh.

12.) Playing political activist. Take THAT, Governor Kasich and your lack of understanding about education...

13.) Trying to be good to my family.

14.) Cleaning. I swear my house will never decorated or organized the way I want it, but darnit, I can scrub and dust and vacuum until I feel better. And then feel like a jerk again because I should be grateful rather than grumpy.

15.) Making To-Do lists that are more like To-Think-about-Obsessively-But-Not-Actually-Do lists.

Can you tell I'm in a crumby mood as I write this? *Sigh.* Hey, at least now I've updated my blog.

"Reader, I married him."

(With apologies to the late Miss Brontë for stealing her sentence... what can I say, from the moment I saw the manuscript of Jane Eyre open to that page at the British Library last summer, I knew I was going to use it.)

Yes, I did it. I overcame my fears and cynicism and dammit, I got married. Did you see the pigs flying by your window? 

 

It's been almost a month and so far it's been great. I have not been suddenly stripped of my identity or freedom or happiness. It's basically just us, only now we can share insurance benefits and that sort of thing. And we have MUCH nicer cookware, many more serving dishes, and towels without holes in them. :)

The end of an era looms.

I would almost go so far as to say I love this cat more than I've loved most humans I know. Don't take it personally.

The way I've loved her has grown and changed over the years... early on, it was clingy and triumphant -- I'd wanted a cat as long as I could remember, and finally, in 1995 my parents let me adopt a kitten. She was mine -- a living, breathing creature for me to love and care for... even though I often felt I wasn't given permission to love or care for myself. In that mode of thinking, she became a sort of positive role model for me. 

She has always been a somewhat difficult cat -- often sick with chronic respiratory problems, very choosy when it comes to who she'll interact with, not friendly at all to other animals, completely controlling over when and how she will give or receive affection -- but let's face it, she fit right in from the start. By the age of 14, I was already a pro at loving those who are difficult to love. 

The only time I cried while packing up the car to leave home for college was when I went back inside to say goodbye to her. I still retain crystal-clear memories of explaining to her that I just had to be gone most of the time over the next few years so that I could get a degree and a job so that she and I could go off and live alone together forever.

After college she did come to follow me around for my nascent adulthood apartments in Lakewood, Stow, & Shaker Square, and now the house. In total, over the 16 years she's been around, I've lived in 13 different places... and had many different jobs, boyfriends, family issues, personal issues, etc etc etc... she has been the only constant that has stuck with me throughout all of it.

She has come to be a symbol; an artifact of every phase of life I've experienced between eighth grade and my looming 30th birthday. She even lived with my when my parents were still married and still lived in the same house together with my (unmarried) sister and I. That seems like such ancient history it should be recorded on papyrus scrolls, or at least on 9mm film.

I used to drive home from college to visit her...

Over the years she came to be nicknamed my "comfort cat"... like a little kid's comfort object, only one with a heartbeat.

The man who will be my husband in a month was able to nab me in part because of her immediate and profound affinity for him -- and I avoided almost ending up with a complete moron by her rejection of several of them before CJ came along.

She's not been herself lately. She rarely gets up, her back legs have gone from stiff to downright uncoordinated with the rest of her body, there's a sore on her nose that won't completely heal, and she's lost about half of her body weight. Her litter box skills are now less than stellar. 

After several visits to the vet, shots, x-rays, bloodwork, antibiotics, special food, and lots of extra love and attention, the vet has declared that while she never judges anyone because it's a very hard decision, her prognosis is not good and therefore we ought to consider the best thing for her may be to stop the decline before it gets worse.

(pause for sobbing)

I have always said that I don't want her to suffer. I want her to go with dignity, and therefore will let her go when the time comes. But now that I'm actually faced with this decision, I can't find a way out of it without a massive amout of GUILT. She has been picking her head up today when I walk into the room, and she used the litter box a little while ago -- surely THOSE are improvements, however small... and what if part of her problem is seasonal depression? Surely her lack of driveway and windowsil time has made her feel like she has less to live for. What if I put her down now, but she'd have been fine if I had just let her hold out for a few more weeks? What if my vet (ok, both of the vets at the clinic) is wrong, and she WILL get better?

I don't know. All I know is that I'm wasting valuable time with her by writing this post.

Encode --> Send --> Decode

"Who is your intended audience?" a colleague asked me a few years ago after he had "stumbled across" (ahem) my previous blog.

I've never entirely been able to answer that question, and it has bothered me ever since.

I don't know that I've ever intended this for any particular audience -- but then isn't blogging inherently an earnest plea for an audience? A desire for affirmation? I think THIS design from despair.com sums it up reasonably well ("Blogging: Never before have so many said so little to so few").

I've written my entire life. I have handwritten journals all the way back to first grade, I published a zine throughout my teenage years (that's right, I was in Factsheet 5 and everything), I actually write LETTERS to people I care about, and am still convinced I will someday go back to grad school to study "creative nonfiction." Writing online was originally just a part of all that, but commensurate with just about everything else in the black hole of the Internet, "purpose" and "intention" lose their identity to the fluid interpretation of the media consumer.

When I did my first blog (no longer in existence, sorry, don't bother looking for it) about six years ago, I think my intent was actually to hide out in the open -- it was a way of journaling that didn't carry the risk of some curious visitor to my home coming across and reading. I could still flush out my brain and distill its contents, but do so anonymously amid a flood of others doing the same.

Self-absorbed? Narcissictic? Many would call it that. But I still hold to my belief that, at least with my original intentions, it was no more so than keeping a diary or a journal.

Then, enter the person who would eventually become my fiance. Several members of his family maintained blogs with the apparent intent of keeping family and friends informed about their daily lives. Perhaps as a means of assimilation or garnering acceptance, I hopped on and began tailoring what I wrote to be appropriate & informative to them.  And I started actually telling people from my "real life" that I did a blog. So for the first time, I had what could be considered an "intended audience." It was fun, but guarded.

From that point on, I've been confused.

Most people who maintain any sort of online presence, be it Facebook, Twitter, blogging, whatever, put forth effort to cultivate a particular personna. We choose a particular aspect of ourselves to focus and develop while others watch passively and comment. While this is not dishonest, it is non-comprehensive. I can't show my entire self to ANY of the various subgroups I've pondered as "intended audience": family, friends, colleagues, people with similar interests and experiences? Attempting to maintain various outlets online for these distinct audiences (ex: I separate posts about my job into a different blog, so as to not mix work and life) is exhausting and debatably a waste of time.

More and more, I feel that I need to abandon my online self for my flesh-and-blood self. When I think of relationships I have with people that have transferred from my real life to half-and-half to entirely online communication, I feel as if I have lost something vital. So many people I care about that I never meet for coffee after work or go out with on weekends because somehow reading their tweets and posting on their Facebook walls "counts" as maintaining a friendly human relationship.

Has anyone else had the bizarre, dislocated experience of getting together with a friend you've only communicated with online (and when I say online, I don't mean exchanging personal emails... I just mean being mutually privy to what each individual posts online) for years, and wondering how much you're supposed to know about them?

It's all very perplexing. Years ago I was extremely outgoing and made friends easily, but the more I've supplemented my social interactions with online communication the less work I've put forth to cultivate and maintain "real world" relationships. This is clearly a problem. 

For crying out loud, last weekend I found myself dashing down the holiday clearance aisle of a drugstore to avoid being spotted by a former coworker/friend who I had momentarily chatted with on Facebook the previous evening. I could handle responding to his "hey, how've you been?" inquiry online, but when it came to a face-to-face encounter that would involve eye contact, perhaps his taking stock of how my appearance has changed over the past four years, and my not being able to edit my comments with the "delete" key... I just couldn't handle it.

Cue the men in lab coats to whisk me away in a big white van.

So when it comes to "intended audience", I've resolved to aim for a new one: THE REAL WORLD. Sure I will keep  using online communication as I've been doing for the past several years, but with less emphasis on it being a relationship-maintainer... it needs to be the extra part of a relationship, not the basis of it.

Make sense?

I've been avoiding posting anything here for the past few months. Why?

Multiple reasons.

First and foremost, I have not had time. Period. Work and wedding planning have been keeping my schedule packed.

Secondly, I've had a deep wariness of the potential harm done by personal blogging ever since I first started dabbling in it about seven years ago, and over the past six months or so that wariness has grown exponentially. I've been intensely sentimental as I approach a milestone birthday and a marriage, so the risk of my blubbering on and on about how I desperately need the support of female friends I no longer really have is HUGE. (Oops, see?) The chances of offending relatives with a drawn-out treatise on the subject of marriage as it fits into modern society and my own life is also strong. And the likelihood of gushing about how happy I am to be going for it after all is probably the most intimidating and embarrassing prospects.

There are so many important developments and "internal peace deals" being processed in my brain these days; however, as far as this bloggity business goes I must quote everyone's favorite moody Prince of Denmark: "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue."

Let's just say that I am acutely aware of what a lucky girl I am, and that I have been spending the past few months in quiet contemplation ... with occasional bouts of panic-stricken despair, but heck, this is me -- so that's to be expected. ;)

Goodbye, sweet youth.

Note today that popped up on a website that I apparently once recorded my upcoming wedding date with:  "Hello, Em! There are 186 days until your wedding." 

And I now have less than six months left in my twenties.

And I found my

first

ever

gray

hair

today. That one made me nearly cry. Good thing I had to teach a class a moment later.

I'm excited about getting married, but am suddenly overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I "have to" do for it. I'm fine with turning thirty, even excited about it. But the gray hair thing... well... that was just way more than I could handle on top of the other stuff.

Please do not mention this to me EVER. I don't even know why I'm posting about it. Blah. Migraine. Nap.

Resolution Check-in

Nine months ago, I actually made some resolutions in honor of the new year. Since it's 3/4 of the way through 2010, I'm checking in to see if I've actually met any of them.

To be honest, I didn't even remember what they were until I checked them for this new post. Here are the updates, in the same order as the resolutions in the original post. 

1.) Hmmm. I know I finished at least three of those specific books, but all in all I've read 22 books so far this year... so I suppose that counts for something. I am usually lucky if I get to 10 non-work-related books in a year, so I'm counting this as a success. 1/2 CHECK

2.) Cavs: no comment. Indians: crap. Not yet, but my excuse is that I was gone for a good portion of the summer. Burning River Rolling Girls, CHECK! Cleveland City Stars, no. Lake Erie Monsters, CHECK x2! Browns, not yet... though I did have to turn down awesome free tickets to a preseason game that were offered to me at the last minute. It's a start.

3.) I have tickets to see GWAR in a few weeks. 'Nuff said. CHECK.

4.) CHECK. Yum. 

5.) CHECK. Maybe even "hell no" in a few cases.

6.) Hmm. I did pretty well on this one, but not quite once a month. If you count the month I spent in London (during which time I went to museums/galleries two or three times per week) and average it out, I've got this one. 1/2 CHECK.

7.) Oops. Stopped doing that several months ago.

8.) Nope. Still too damn busy, and since we moved to my version of the middle of nowhere...

My goal was to hit at least five of these. I'm counting seven at the moment... not bad.

Tagged Again

Ok. So I got tagged my my delightful future-sister-in-law to list seven random things about myself. Here goes:

1.) Six months and one week from today I will turn 30. Not bad...yet. Check with me again in a few months.

2.) Six months, three weeks, and two days from today I will be getting married. Yeah. Me. Married. Woah.

3.) I was brushing my teeth a few minutes ago, and realized when I caught a glimpse of my profile in the mirror about 10 feet away that I bear a resemblance to my aunt/godmother who I adore and don't see nearly enough (my fault). I'd never noticed that before. (It's a good thing, because I've always thought she's very pretty.)

4.) I'm pretty sure I got passed by everyone's favorite/least favorite syrupy columnist Regina Brett on I-480 a couple of days ago. Weird. 

5.) I've been stalked multiple times... I don't get it... I attract creepy people. I have a few theories as to why, but am too tired to explain them all.

6.) I sometimes secretly wish I still had the willpower to be a size zero. 

7.) Willful, self-satisfied ignorance is my biggest pet peeve at the moment. 

Goodnight.