Tag Archives: writing

The Egg Story

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My husband is a bit of a city boy, which often brings some bits of amusement into my life. This particular conversation about eggs jumps out…

Michael insisted that “you don’t need to refrigerate them, they come out of the chicken hot.”
This is technically true, if you don’t wash the protective film off and they have never been refrigerated. But I think the subtlety of that was lost on him based on his next statement.
“I know, I know… Chickens are cold blooded.”

It kept getting better. Weeks later, the following happened as we sat in the food court at the mall.

“What is feta made from?”
“Cheese.” I wouldn’t disagree if someone were to diagnose me as a smartass.
“From what animal?”
“I dunno. Cow. Goat. Chicken.”
“Chickens don’t give milk. ”
“I don’t know that you know that. You thought chickens were cold blooded. ”
“Birds are cold blooded. They are amphibians. There’s more than one kind of cold blooded.”

I’m kinda curious how many kinds of cold blooded that there are.

HOW-dee.

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A long talk on the phone with Buttercup usually means tears. Almost always, actually.

This time I beat him to the punch, and was already crying when I dialed him. I wanted to set up a formalized accountability partnership with him, to give me a bit more support in my attempts to stop drinking.

Buttercup is an unusually wise man, and prone to babbling platitudes with a twist. We spoke of my last blog, how baffled I was that four people had shared on Facebook. I laughed through the tears, but he went on. “People are connecting with it because they’ve found someone eloquent enough to put words to what’s on their heart. There’s value in knowing that they aren’t alone in a struggle. That’s what they’re seeing, that at least one other person can relate, that they aren’t alone. You’re influencing people. You’re benefitting them, changing them”

I was quick to backpedal. “Yeah, but that post was basically just me admitting that I’ve been drinking. How would that change someone’s life?”

“Just because the subject matter is dark doesn’t mean the impact is dark.”

That sentence may prove to be one of those that stick with me, like “You don’t get a soul until you’re 26” or “Learning is like boiling a lobster. Ideally they never know it’s happening.” Before this moment, I had never realized how similar that Buttercup is to Mr. Shaw, my beloved high school physics teacher. They are both whip smart, funny, and quotable. They even have that same nerdy white boy look, and I highly suspect that buttercup might also throw an electrified pickle at someone.

See, this is what blogging is good for. Putting words down can change your relationship to those words, and you can discover things that you wouldn’t have otherwise. I can’t say that the realization that Mr. Shaw and Buttercup are similar is particularly world shaking, but it’s something.

Just because the subject matter is dark, doesn’t mean the impact is dark.

I don’t know what it’s like to not be depressed. I live in darkness. I roll around in it. I wear it like a scratchy, asbestos laden blanket, and I know it’s not good for me but I don’t know how to go through the world without the bit of protection and solace it gives me. But just because I’m dark doesn’t mean my impact has to be.

That thought tasted a bit like hope. It felt like it the moment he said it, too. Which is why I scrabbled for a notebook and told him. “I’m gonna write that down.”

Buttercup preened a bit at hearing that, then went to his dejection cycle. There was proud of himself, flaunting how OF COURSE he’s worth writing down, a claim of getting written down all the time, and finally an aww, just kidding, nobody writes me down or ever takes me seriously. It was immediately back to me after that. This man has the quickest pity parties I’ve ever seen.

 

He ruminated on my support structure, I suspect because I had recently commented on how it seems like I never use it or reach out. “See, you’ve got this amazing support structure where you crack the door a little bit so people can see in, but you don’t let them in to interact. You rail on about how alone you are, but it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. As long as you’re holding everyone at bay, you’re alone. ”

I guess I’m opening the door a crack for him. I told him that and he said “I’ll wait for you to let me in, until then, I just need an eye hole. Hehe, eyehole.”

He went on. “Another thing you find as you spend more time with people and engage with your support structure is that we all wear masks. You know the masks.” It’s true, I can identify several of his very well. Other people too. I can’t say whether or not I’m any good at identifying someone’s real face, but then again, I don’t have any practice with that. I don’t think anyone does. “You have to realize, it’s not an unhealthy thing to put on the mask of a happy person. It’s like, laughter is the quickest way to… how does that go? A smile is the quickest way to become happy? Something like that. It’s only phony for a while and then you become it. Fake it til you make it.”

“Number one platitude, right there.”

“Well, you know, it’s what I’m good at.” He has a bit of a sore spot regarding platitude accusation, and I’m more than willing to take a poke at it here and there. “Anyways, play the role of happy. Surround yourself with things that make you happy. Do things that make you happy. You’ll become happier. I struggle a lot with the concept that I wouldn’t be able to describe myself as classically happy. But I really think that classically happy is an illusion.”

At this point, I see a car pulled over by the side of the house. “Oh, the dead people are here.” It must have sounded a tad strange. “I mean, they’re visiting the cross. Where the man got killed last year.”

“So the dead people are the people associated with the dead man, gotcha.”

I noticed the buoyantly affectionate Golden Retriever, Rusty, had crossed the line for the electric fence and was greeting the visitors.

“Go get your dog from the grievers.” Buttercup chastised.

“Not my dog. Gabe is coming. Besides, for all we know he’s helping them.”

“Holy crap, did you se how well you just reframed that? That was brilliant! Did you see yourself doing that? Wow. Learn from that, I bet you could get really good at-”

I was impatient enough hearing his praise that I interrupted and spat out the wisest thing I’ve said all day. “Of COURSE I thought of that. You act like I can’t see these things, I see all kinds of things, I just usually choose the bad.”

We both are actually a little stunned by how profoundly honest I was in that moment.

All he was willing to say to that was “Yeah. HOW-dee.”

We move on to talking about other random stuff.

When the call ended, I was laughing.

There were no more tears.

Long day.

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I woke up early, under the advisement to see the day as an opportunity to create. The night before, Denise had been teasing me lightly about my last blog post via text. Very shortly, I was in her car, driving to a storage place as a GRMakers field trip. At one point during our conversation, I turn on my hippie voice and declare “I’m just one of those artist types, man.”
Quick and devilishly observant as ever, Denise replied “So you need constant reassurances and validation?”
She had me. “I don’t know abou- Yes.”
As we laughed and I made faces to exaggerate my hurt, I was actually feeling a little stung. She was quick to reassure me. “It’s totally okay, I am too.”

We reached our destination, a large brick building with an entryway of swooping curved metal. We were there to meet a guy who buys up the fixtures and furniture of businesses that close down and resells it. His warehouse is massive. The downstairs is rented out, and we passed factory workers, who would look up from either their phones or their work and watch us curiously. There were rows upon rows upon rows of racks filled with racks or barrels or little metal tidbits. The place seemed endless. Then we got upstairs, where we could really dive into the miscellany that we were there to look at.

~

As I walked up to rest of the group(inspecting desks), Buttercup broke from the herd to say hi and pulls me aside. “You know, as you were walking up here- today is the first time I can like SEE that you’ve lost weight. You’re like a different person.” Sometimes I think he says these things just to perplex me. It’d be within his personality to drop weird statements to throw me off. He’s one of my truest friends, but about 12% of the time he’s an asshole. There’s the 88% of the friendship where he builds me up and we joke together and muse about people, but the 12% can rip you right down(hence the nickname Buttercup). I didn’t get his motives, he had a funny look on his face and we’ve got enough history of us pushing each other that I’m generally second, third, and fourth guessing anything he says.

I don’t usually see the lost weight(about 45 pounds), I just see how far I have to go to. And I’m certainly not a different person. In fact, that’s the wall I keep bumping into with my mental health. I know that no matter how I progress or what changes I make, I’m still me. And I’d still be living my life. But the real key of this whole experience was that it’s winter. This is the first time he’s seen me without a hoodie or jacket on in months. Of course I finally look like I’ve lost weight.

~

As a fledgling makerspace, this place was ideal to outfit the place. We eagerly plotted about desks, chairs, materials racks, transformers, carts, saws, dust collectors, fans, cables, shelves, and a welding table. The two things that interested me most were the barrels of chain(for my chain horse idea) and these great big metal spoke wheels that were pulled from an overhead conveyance system. When I saw them, I saw Giraffecycle.

Giraffecycle is a very old idea of mine, I’ve wanted to build her since I was a small child. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A pedal powered vehicle in the shape of a giraffe. Preferably life size, and with an articulating neck.

Building her would be a dream come true.

Eh, probably never gonna happen. But there’s power in dreaming, and I was basking in that joy for the rest of the day.

~

 
After that I went to work. The slightest task can become a festival of tangents there. All I had to do was assemble two more parts to fill an order. I made the argument for setting up a machine to make new parts for an order, but my father insisted that I sand some polished display hinges to send them out, he’d rather get the order out ASAP. I didn’t want to throw away the work that someone had already put into polishing them, but I did as he asked. It involved chucking up the little lathe with a thin rod wrapped in sandpaper and center drilling one end. Then put the rod between the chuck and the live center support, and after more fiddling around, flipped on the lathe and started to sand the tricky inner curve of the part.

The sandpaper immediately shredded. We had center drilled the wrong end, so the sandpaper was wrapped wrong. More fiddling around, cleaning the rod and replacing the papers. But I got it done, went to the other buffing jack to sand the rest of the part, and reassembled the hinge. Then we realized there are no more flanges, and my father decides that if I have to make 2, I should make eight instead, that way the whole order will match instead of some having a zinc finish and some plain.

So I start welding flanges. At one point, I notice some moisture on my glove. I was baffled. I looked at the ceiling for a leak, I wonder if maybe I had wiped my nose or something without remembering. Then I look at the torch. The water cooled TIG welding torch. There was a leak.

I only had two more parts left, 125 amps of electricity and a leaking torch, bad idea, but surely it could hold out for two more parts? The next arc strike makes my hand tingle. BETTER NOT.

I watched for a moment as my dad repaired the leak. “I guess I’ll go vacuum or something.”
“Don’t you want to know how to do this next time it happens?”
“Yeah, but I also feel bad for not being productive right now.”
I stayed standing right there, productivity be damned. Learning is important too.

Repair complete, I finish the parts and my father and I had another discussion, where it was determined that we should indeed set up the CNC machine and run more new parts. Turns out that the 2 pieces I had worked so hard on had a different hole pattern than the rest. It took until after I sanded away the nice polished finish that I was so keen to preserve earlier. Sigh.

~

My evening was spent at Celebrate Recovery and ended with squeezing arms wrapped around my ribcage. Trudy came to visit me and brought with her a hand lettered card for me with a quote from Sir Francis Bacon. It represents our shared struggles and was really very sweet. It’s going on my wall.

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”

Right now I am certain of only one thing; that it’s time for bed.

Call it good.

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“I’ve been treading water.” I came into therapy with an immediate admission of guilt- I’ve not been writing. I’ve been sleeping instead of living. I lamented my laziness. That’s what it’s always been treated as.

Kathy immediately countered with “What if you’re not being lazy? What if it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism? Someone that’s abused has a hard time envisioning a life where they aren’t abused. So they seek out familiarity. You’ve said yourself that you don’t know what it means to be happy. It’s very normal for people to have a ‘default mode’ that they switch back to.” She alluded back to my first words. “You’re going back to your default to avoid having to swim.”

“If you don’t know how to move forward, you’ll seek familiarity. You’re learning how to be a new you, to be happy.” The shaft of light that’s been progressing across the room is getting closer to hitting her eyes and I wonder why she doesn’t shift to run away from it, at least for a little while.

I don’t know what a new me will look like. I don’t even really know what the old me looked like. Pretty sure I hate them both. I asked “How will I know that the me I am, the me I’m becoming, the me I will be, is a worthwhile one?”

“Good question. How indeed?”

“I guess I have to look to others because people that fall short of the standards that society sets, or the ones that aren’t contributing to the GDP or whatever, I still think they have worth.”

Her reply was a rigorous batch of finger quotes. I don’t think her fingers stopped wagging at any point. “Those that don’t ‘Measure up’ or ‘have value’ by ‘societies standards’ of ‘worth’ are still worthwhile and you know that. So on some level you must know that about yourself.”  She gives me a gentle smile. “I think you just give up on yourself too quickly.”

“Grandma saw your value, right?”
“I don’t know that.” I tend to view it as a sort of “gotcha” technique when she invokes the name of my recently deceased grandmother, but I don’t argue with the fact that it’s highly effective.
“Would grandma have wanted for you to give up on life? To kill yourself?”
This is an easy question. I actually start laughing through the tears. No, she absolutely would not have and several times she was the reason I didn’t.
“So you know that, even if you can’t quite put it into words. And if you can know that, there will be other knowings.” She finally shifts to avoid the beam of light. It was driving me crazy.

We transition somehow into the topic of creating.
I ask her if she tells all her clients to create or if I’m special.
“Yes, we are all creating. It’s what we’re supposed to do. I’m a person of faith, I don’t know where you stand with that, but I think God created us to be creators. To create with him. When you create, you are bringing yourself strongly into the world.”

“If you’ve stopped creating, if you’ve given up to just lie in bed, of course you aren’t going to feel purpose and joy. People create with words, things, ideas. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s like God says ‘I gave you this huge big world, enjoy it!’ Look at it from the perspective of ‘How can I go out in the world and create today?’ Co-create with God. Have fun. Enjoy life.”

“Some people like to live in very prescribed ways, they don’t want to be challenged. It’s safer living that way, though it limits their creativity. You are not one of those people, don’t try to live like you are.”

“Poets, prophets, artists, musicians, they are on the fringe of society because they think outside the box. Artists challenge society. But we can’t force them to think the way society does. You’ve been dealing with being different by assuming you are flawed or broken. I don’t fit in, therefore I’m bad. What you don’t see is that you’re brilliant. You have the ability to see beyond what’s there. You’re not bad, broken, lazy or flawed. Those are labels that you’ve accepted. I’m challenging that, I’m suggesting that it was never true.”

“Maybe you’re buying into those thoughts because you don’t fit into somebody’s idea of what it means to be productive(I use that word a lot). I wish I could just shake you!” She looks visibly exasperated while she gesticulates at the writing I’ve brought in to give to her.

“Van Gogh was never appreciated in his time and it caused him to be very depressed. I just wish that he could have listened to his critics and talked back to them a bit. ‘That’s not how you do it. Clearly it’s not. It is the way that I do it.’”

“So have your voice. Express what’s inside. Maybe people will judge, because that’s what society likes to do, but you have to remember that those are the insecure people who like to live in very prescribed ways. I have no intent of doing that or aspiring to be that.”

“Approach every day as an opportunity to create, and it brings with it a sense of peace and happiness.”

“There’s still our prophets, our creators, our edge live-ers. I’m okay with that, because they’ve got something to say.”

“You have a voice, you have creative abilities, please don’t stifle it. Please don’t take yourself out of the game. That’s what you are doing when you just stay in bed.”

“God made some crazy things, and he called them good. So create, and call it good.”

Complex

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We had sat in silence for awhile. Not the whole ride, just a few minutes. We had just had a discussion about the theology of a couple members of my writers group, where they fell short, why they might think that way, how they would be perceived. As we got close to home, I decided to be brave and mention something I was actually thinking about, all day, from writers group.

 

“So, another person there told me that some of the stuff I wrote about you was the most interesting of what I brought. That our relationship was complex; it’s obvious how you’ve shaped me since I’m interested in different things than most girls.”

 

He edged to the stop sign, about as aggressively as normal despite the fresh and constant snow. “Hmm. You wrote about me?”

 

“Yeah, kind of, just stuff that I pull from my daily journals. Snippets. Conversations. Interactions. But now I have to deal with the fact that the most interesting thing about me is my father.”

 

“Huh.”

 

We slipped into silence again. We often do. I don’t know if that’s because we are comfortable sitting in silence together or just because we’re alike enough that there seems no point in bantering. Or small talk or, you know, honest feelings.

 

We pile out of the truck. I head to the shop to let my dogs out. He apparently had the same thought, and he always lopes along faster that I do. I can never keep up with him, he’s at the second door while I open the first. He calls into the darkness “INTERMEDIATES!” while I yell “Doggieees.” He calls them intermediates because they own two miniature dachshunds, my sister has a Golden Retriever, and my two weenie mutts lie squarely at the awkward intersection of “too big to be lap dogs” and “too cute to keep off the furniture.”

 

I decide to pursue the matter. I ask “What do you think of that?” and he immediately turns to look at me, and then in the direction that I’m looking. He’s searching for whatever I was talking about, and I remind him. “My writing.”

 

He looks at the floor. “It’s probably more a matter of you being a complex person than our relationship being complex. I don’t think we do complex things. You’re thinking deep on it.”

 

It feels like a victory to hear him call me a complex person. That means that to him, I’m more than just my lack of discipline or the boiling self hatred that I feel defines me. Complex. Complex is good. I can deal with complex.

 

I smile and pull out my phone, tapping away to make sure I remember the quote correctly. He grins and peers over at it. “You writing more?”

 

Always.