I Think Because I Am

My bedroom is right next to the back door. This is going to be noisy and suck. But it can’t get me down because it doesn’t matter, I’m only here for a week.

This idea can be extrapolated on a grander scale. This week or this month or this year sucks for reason X, but it can’t get me down because it’s only temporary.

Or, this life sucks, but it’s only temporary so it can’t get me down. With this realization, I’m completely free. I need never feel down again.

You and I weren’t meant for the real world
That exists in bedrooms and kitchens
No, we were meant for the Real World
That awaits between meadows and ditches

Cause surrounded by people, oh don’t you see
That’s when we’re sadly alone
But out in the forests and under the trees
Is where we find our friends and our homes

Life is awesome. I don’t feel terribly inclined to give a full accounting of why, but know that it is.

I have more friends now. I’m dogsitting in exchange for a place to stay, which means I can shower any damn time I please, and I have a stove and oven for my cooking pleasure. I do indeed have a lotta sandwiches from Chilkat Guides, and my friendygirl provides me with bread and eggs and milk and rhubarb crisp. I am up to my ankles in delicious free/cheap food.

Did I mention I have a friendygirl? I’m stealing my friend Erik’s word for his girl who is a friend. The term girlfriend has so many negative connotations to me, the same way I don’t like using the word step-dad. But yes. A girl I kiss who likes to kiss me. The one downside to Haines, Andrew had said, was the complete lack of women. And now I have a gorgeous friendygirl. Aaaahh life, you are so kinda.

Oh, also I ran a marathon last week. Shabam! The last 3 miles were hard because my feet and other parts of my legs were in pain with every step, but that said, it was far easier than I thought it would be. I really expected to have to like, summon up Zen Master levels of concentration just to pick my feet up by the end of it. The worst it got was I had to yell “fuck it, fuck it, FUCK IT!” and slap my thighs to get going one time, and another time, languishing in pain, I had to tell myself “I don’t care how much it hurts.” Then I kept going.

I recovered faster than I expected to as well. I still have some sore points here and there but I think I can start running again. Maybe I will go do that.

Goodbye, Internet!

I figured I may as well write down what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks in some form. Here will be an abridged version of my past two weeks.

I left for Seattle as my initial destination, taking the route through northern Utah and southern Idaho, a much prettier route than through Wyoming and Montana. I stayed with my Aunt and Uncle in Boise for the night on their phenomenally comfortable bed and left the next morning, getting to Seattle in the afternoon. There I reunited with my good friend Emmy and the next day picked up Andrew from the airport. We went to contra dances both Thursday and Friday nights and met an exuberant girl we spent the night hanging out with, getting ice cream and walking around Seattle. After talking with her all night at a contra dancers house, I barely slept and the next day we three went to Honk! Fest, watching bands filled with brass instruments. There we met a guy named Eddy who gave us a list of free/cheap things to do in Vancouver. After a day filled with music and laughing and ultimate frisbee, Andrew and I headed up to Anacortes where my dad bought us enormous burritos. He also got us a motel room, which is the fanciest place to stay Andrew and I have ever had. It was weird, though comfy and nice.

The next few days we spent driving through Canada to Alaska, though we first made a stop in Vancouver. We went to a “pay as you feel” yoga class which was very slow paced and had a long “relaxation” period which was like meditation laying down, where both Andrew and I fell into some kind of semisleep that lasted at least 4 days. After that we went to a contact improv jam. We walked in to find a standup bass player thumping out irregular beats and rhythms, dancers here and there moving in bizarre ways, all the while touching in some way. We observed for a bit and then Andrew and I just basically played around with this weird new form of dance. It was pretty fun. All my dances seemed like metaphors, ideas given physical substance. The way I danced with Andrew mirrored, to my mind, the way we interact as conversations and as friends. I danced with a few other people but my favorite was a girl named Nina. It was a wild thing, passionate and romantic without becoming erotic. It really was incredible. I talked with her after the dance and it came up that Andrew and I didn’t know where we were staying and Nina offered an invitation to stay at her place. A bit later, we did, and it was wonderful. Cool people to talk with, homebrewed beer, a nice futon to sleep on. The next day Nina gave us a bowl of dehydrated vegetables with something spicy on them. We still haven’t finished them, treating their delicate flavor like something of a delicacy.

Over the course of this trip from CO to AK I would cross the continental divide thrice. We saw moose, mountain goats, rams, coyotes, deer, caribou, and 16 bears. We found a place behind a gas station of sorts the owner was kind enough to let us camp at, and also camped before we got to snowy peaks somewhere in the Yukon. The distance between gas stations wasn’t nearly so harrowing as I’d envisioned, but there were certainly stretches where getting caught without fuel would be a pretty terrible feeling.

After arriving in Haines I was instantly making friends. Reuniting with Haines folk I had met on my Cataract Canyon trip last October, meeting Andrew’s friends, or just meeting entirely new people, suddenly I’m all kinds of social. In a few days I start work at a restaurant/bakery where I will be waiting and baking, and I begin training for my CDL to drive busloads of passengers and gear trucks for Chilkat Guides. This week I’ve helped plant apple trees, talked with the community about sustainable food in the area, played ultimate frisbee, discovered the best public library ever (where I am writing this from), attended a birthday party, a meat night, a music night at the P-bar, run at least 4 miles a day on the best trail I’ve run, and found a trailer to live in for free. I’m surrounded by mile high mountains sprouting out of the sea and town is easily navigable by bike. My one and only complaint is food prices - they are insane. Coupling my rapid metabolism with daily distance runs and constantly chewing through energy to stay way in the chilly weather, I am hungry all the dang time and have yet to find a cheap way to sate it. Working at the restaurant will certainly help, where I will be able to get meals half off, and driving for Chilkat Guides will hopefully put me in line to receive excess river sandwiches.

I am so damn glad I came up here.

I believe we are each endowed with a dark gift; something which we are naturally talented at that, when used, leads only to suffering and unhappiness. Some know how to manipulate others. Some are heartbreakers. I know I myself can produce poisonous words, small utterances that eat at the heart of an individual as if I understand their secret heart and can pray upon their deepest insecurities.

I’m also of the opinion that, knowing this, we are all responsible for controlling these gifts. Whether minimizing the negative effects of them or neglecting to use them altogether, we owe it to each other as fellow humans to be aware of our potential to cause pain and to minimize it in any way we can. For myself, I never let my venom leave the confines of my mind. I avoid anger and jealousy and unhappiness in order to, besides the obvious disposition of not enjoying negative emotions, avoid moments of conscientious weakness where these words are likely to erupt from my mouth.

I bring this up because earlier today I was thinking of a time a dark gift was used on me, to ruinous effect. Half a year later and I’m still trying to reconcile that moment. As yet another brick in the wall I’ve made against that attack, I found myself thinking “shouldn’t I want nothing to do with someone who would have the audacity to actually use such a thing against me?” I don’t think I’m wrong in this, and even if I am, until I can find a reason to think so, I’ll hold to that notion, for it gives me strength. In this, I need all I can get.

(I hope this makes sense, I was terribly tired. My short-term memory feels shot and I’m not even sure my sentences are continuations of the same thought)

are the coolest! I spent two hours looking around at this and that. I quickly read some bits of a graphic novel version of The Fountain that offered some insight into a movie I thoroughly enjoy yet don’t fully understand. I was a bit sad the library didn’t have the Sandman or Y series, but eh. They also didn’t have any audiobooks for Dutch, but they did have one for Swedish…sadly it was cassettes. I may just grab Spanish since there is a plethora of options.

I walked away with an audiobook version of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which promises to enlighten while I work, a collection of Beatles music from 67-70 so I can learn my rock roots, and a DVD set of lectures by Neil “de Man” Degrasse Tyson so I can learn about the universe at home! I’m going to get so smart.

Here is the first in a series I am going to call “Thoughts of Mine.” I have many thoughts throughout the day and I’m bored with making Facebook stati, so here I have a platform where I can present and expand upon said thoughts.

As a literate person who thinks there is great value in proper spelling, I refuse to use “internetese,” such as ‘u’ instead of ‘you’ or ‘r’ instead of ‘r.’ However, there are situations, especially in text messages (or Twitter if I gave a crap about it) where space is limited and using these vulgar (to my mind) misspellings is advantageous in saving one room, allowing for more to be said per text. I therefore propose we, the literate people’s who refuse to degrade our language, invent an abbreviation to express we are fully aware of what we’re doing and we’re sorry to lower our words, but in this case it is necessary. Perhaps something like “pardon the abbreviations,” or PTA. “Sorry For Shortening,” SFS. Something along these lines. This three letter note could be included at the beginning of a text, and then the grosser versions of words would be expected but accounted for.

I finally have a name for my guitar that I’ve had and loved and played and traveled everywhere with for some 3 or 4 years. Last night after setting down my book I reached for it and called “Come here, soul of mine.” I then realized that is a good name! Solevmein is the spelling I’ve chosen, but now you know where the name comes from.

The idea that you can’t finish a sentence with a preposition is preposterous. You can’t if you’re using Latin grammar as your base, but English is a Germanic language. It makes total and complete sense to end your sentences with prepositions. And that’s the theory I’m sticking with.

My mom believes I’m malnourished. In open defiance of this idea, I eating much better than I have been (or at least trying). Yesterday and today I had stir-fry with rice, today seasoning it with a green curry I cooked up (coconut milk+curry paste=win). I’m also continuing with my tomato/avacado sandwiches, which I think should count for comparatively healthy. For dinner tonight I made spaghetti, but I didn’t just do pasta and sauce, oh no! I diced up a carrot, along with some mushrooms and spinach and spring greens to make my sauce übergood. And extra nutricious!

I bought some mushrooms for the stir fry and now have a lot left over. Perhaps a new game I can play with my life is Iron Chef: Tyler Edition, wherein I buy a perishable food and must use it up within a week in anyway I can. For instance, adding the mushrooms to my pasta sauce, or adding slices to a sandwich I made earlier today. Basically any food I’m making, I’m adding in mushrooms.

This post was short, yet now it’s long, and so I think I’m done.