backyard crowing
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eternal sunshine / titanic
Striving for what you want while being happy with what you have seems to me one of the greatest challenges a human can face. For about four years, I wasn't happy with what I had, but I was moderately satisfied.
It was a living, it was a life, it was making the ends meet, with little hope for the future. It was a dead end job, a boyfriend here or there, a residence in a city and state I no longer cared about. It was comfortable, and yet still a panic, because without a degree, it's difficult to go anywhere, difficult to even imagine one day paying off student loans.
Then, I became angry. The job was too much, the people on the other end of the phone drove me to extremes, and alcohol couldn't heal all my problems. Only so much frustration is numbable. I hated them, hated the job, hated myself for not applying anywhere else, for not thinking I could get anything else, for not being able to get anything else.
One day I blew up. I'd hit my own head enough times, physically, against my bedroom walls, which are also my office walls. This time I screamed at a customer, and this time he reported it, and this time I was fired.
So I regrouped. I regrouped, I had my car taken from me in an accident, and I spent the money on a last minute trip to New York, which landed me in fucking Tennessee, which was terrible, and also not so bad, because an old co-worker lived there, and took me in for the night. Seeing her life as a bartender may have changed my life. Hopefully the trip did, I guess. It certainly cost enough. Maybe I'd have a car right now if I hadn't done that. Maybe I wouldn't be in college. Maybe I would have a better job.
One thing she told me: "my friend got fired from there, and it was the best thing that ever happened to her."
After my rental car trip to the northern south, I reapplied to the same hateful job, and they accepted me. But at that point I'd also applied to my old university, had an epic showdown drop dead blowout fight with my boyfriend's cousin et al., and I was well on my way to a new page at life. White girls really know how to lose their shit, when they finally do.
I discovered improv theater, moved into an apartment I couldn't afford because of waiting till the last minute to make a housing decision, and went back to school.
So now I'm here, at school again, wondering about the flash that the past few months...years...have been. Is there anyone alive out there? I want to call it off. Can you hear me? I said, I want to call it off.
Really I'm just hoping all this amounts to something. It had better, hadn't it? But then, what could this world possibly owe me?
1:10 am - Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013
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