.something fantastic.

people tell me that everything is cyclical. you go up, you come down. you have a dry spell, and then you're saturated in men/opportunities/creative energy, whatever you're looking for. right now, i'm most certainly hanging out on the dank, fertile underbelly of the circle. opportunity is ripe, but as of now i've got nothing going on. i've got a long list of wants, and a short and waning list of haves.

i'm listening often to a cover of abba's "s.o.s." by a bluegrass band, and probably not just because it's catchy. having $1800 in my savings acount and nearly that much in bills isn't an adequate safety net for indefinite unemployment. i sent out two resumes already, and have identified a third job to apply to. but the phone hasn't begun to ring and i'm already ravishing my fingernails.

my friend said to me something about quadrants in your life, and how a happy person has filled all four of them up with something satisfying. we decided the four tenets of happiness are love, work, creativity, and spiritually. i'm 1 for 4 right now: out of a job and emotionally unattached. my spiritual endeavors consist of swearing at an occasional yoga video. at least i try to write, knit, photograph, and somehow harness some creative inspiration.

i can't help feeling exhilarated by all of my empty quadrants. i'm currently weightless and can tackle any opportunity that comes my way. everything is possible for me right now, from shopping at trader joe's on a weekday morning (no crowds!) to taking a job in argentina. i could kiss a stranger and have no consequences.

granted, i haven't kissed any strangers lately. and i won't. but i have a certain manic suspicion that something lovely will bloom amid all this wreckage.

.forest from the trees.

so yesterday, my roommate and i set out to pick up some free firewood to get us through the approaching winter season. it was eleven am on a sunday morning, i had finished a pot of espresso but had not begun to think about solid food. i changed into getting-dirty pants and a sports bra, filled up my water bottle and headed towards the car. and by car, i mean borrowed enormous truck with huge trailer. we were going to get a lot of wood, i figured. it should take a few hours. i won't be back until two in the afternoon!

it was at this point, when i was putting on sneakers, that i heard my roommate say something peculiar: "i think we're going to need a lot of snacks." why would we need "a lot of snacks" to take a short drive to somebody's garage and pile wood into our truck? we may need a snack, but certainly not an abundance of snacks. i began to suspect that something was really going on when she packed a bag with pretzels, nuts, granola bars, AND four apples. where are we going where we will need to eat multiple apples!?

at this point, i had the sense to put on deodorant. because if four apples are involved, my armpits are going to stink.

when we got in the car, i realized that the reason we needed so many snacks was because we would be driving for a very long time. 64 miles east on the freeway and many more on dirt roads.

we arrived on a huge lot almost two hours later. the ride was very pleasant for eating snacks, and my armpits were smelling powder fresh. now we just had to find the pile of wood and stock up. we were greeted by a bouncy little man who took us on a short nature walk to the woodpile. we meandered through the trees and chatted and my roommate's dog, charlie, ran in circles with his tongue hanging out. the air was warm and i was glad i had brought my camera.

at the end of our walk, the generous man with the free wood told us to walk down a hill and gave us a wheelbarrow and said he would meet us there with the chainsaw. the wood must need some chopping up a bit, i thought. wee, chainsaw! but at the bottom of the hill, there was no wood.

it was at this time that i began to realize, with shock and disgust, that by wood, this man mean TREES. and in order to turn the trees into wood, we had to cut them down, saw them up, and CARRY them many, many footsteps to our truck.

not only would the afternoon consist of hours of carrying extremely heavy trees with our bare hands, but it became gradually evident that the wood-bearing man was completely fucking insane. he cut down tree after tree until our truck was full, his truck was full, and we were covered of sap, scrapes, and sighs. we begged him to stop, saying "we're tired now. we have to save some energy for putting the wood away once we get home." "oh no, you'll rest on the drive back," he said. we were obviously dealing with a madman.

we pleaded with the crazy wood man until he let us finally get back in the car to drive away. we said goodbye and thank you, and the man still would not let us leave. "you're going to come see the chipper!?" we could not say no because he was so earnest and hopefull. so we drove with him to the wood chipper, which is a contraption that makes chips out of wood, and watched the fascinating spectacle of chips being made out of wood. we compared pine chips, oak chips, and douglas fir chips. then we watched him raise the shovel of his bulldozer up and down with a giddy look on his face. "do you need to move a big rock?" he beamed. at this point, we said our stern goodbyes and drove away as he began to eat from a cold can of clam chowder.

we drove past the metal dinosaur on the edge of his property, past the shipping container that his neighbor lives in and the 400 cars parked outside of his house. we drove nearly two hours back to portland, ate every last bit of our snacks (including three out of the four apples) and carried all of the wood up our driveway and into the basement. we were not finished until 9 pm, and then we decided to make pies.

it was a really tiresome day. and it felt really good. but next winter, i think we may just buy some wood.

.huey lewis and impending unemployment.

so i just quit my job. i didn't intend to when i woke up this morning or when i drove to work. but i walked into my office with that same feeling of dread and panic. and sure enough, by the time my computer screen read 9:30 in the corner, i was crying. this is my daily routine. stir cream and sugar into my coffee, check my email, and something will inevitably make me cry. every day, i tell myself to suck it up. every day, i get my work done. with coffee and gossip blogs and whining to my co-workers, i make it to 5:00. and every day i come back. and for some reason, today i marched right into my boss's office and said, "i have to give my two weeks notice." i have to, i said. because i just can't take it any more.

i think that i'm less scared of being broke and of not finding a new job (although i am scared of those things, too) than i am of changing my daily routine. i can recognize, rationally, that if my daily routine is to cry before lunchtime, then i should not lament change. but change persists to trump all other fears.

i was consoling myself, between rapid heartbeats and shallow breaths, by pondering the updside of change. this will force me to do something new and different. to go to new places (job interviews!) and to meet new people. i'll have time for hiking and yoga and baking and reading and knitting and watching woody allen movies. my life will turn in a new direction. it will be excited, unexpected, and inspiring. i will no longer feel tearful and bored and dead inside.

then huey lewis walks in, talking louder than is appropriate for people who aren't celebrities. he's friends with a gentleman who rents an office in our building. he's come in a few times before, so it's not eye-poppingly bizarre that he should show up at work on a monday afternoon. but i think this bodes well. in the spirit of celebrating the unexpected, huey lewis is one of many welcome surprises that are headed my way.

.peeling tomatoes.

i thought that at age 25 i had identified all of the raw and dirty pleasures that life has to offer. when i was seven, i popped my first bubble wrap. i was probably younger when i realized the sublime pleasure of picking a scab. when i was eleven, i put my first cue tip in my ear and thought i saw a blissful glimpse of what sex would be like someday. when i was twelve, i popped my first blackhead. tequila when i was 18. cigarettes, kissing, pot, and sex all when i was 19 (a good year for me). since then, the world has withheld these visceral thrills, or at least guarded them more preciously and released them on extremely rare occasion. the sight of my gas gage on full is about the greatest pleasure i get these days.

last weekend, under overcast skies and with a particularly fragile heart, i realized a pleasure that gripped all senses with unexpected glee: i blanched tomatoes and peeled off their skins. it was like peeling a sunburn or elmer's glue off of your fingers in the first grade. it turned my hands pink and stung my mangled cuticles. the skins fell into the clogged sink and swirled around like goldfish fins, translucent and sunlit. the tomatoes themselves were warm and throbbing, and each one felt like an organ still alive in my hands and ready for transplant. i could see right through to the veins, pale and protruding.

all in all, the experience was not a success. tomatoes were overcooked, watery and wasted. a jar popped open in the water bath and spewed tomatoes everywhere. i gave up and cried. while the endeavor was not productive, it reminded me that fun lurks in the strangest places.

.jump the gun.

so i've decided, apparently, that i'm 26 years old. this isn't true: i'm 25. i won't be 26 until december. but i've heard myself say, on multiple occasions, during painstaking monologues about the timeline of my life, "i'm supposed to single, i'm 26" and "how can i have it all figured out? i'm only 26." in my head, i've made a chronological leap.

i do this every year. i think i was only 24 for six months before i proclaimed 25. it's a coping mechanism, a kind of "get it over with" strategy for aging. if i'm already 26, then i don't have to keep worrying about turning 26. this is supposed to eliminate my anxiety. but 26 is not old. 25 is not old, nor is 27. i have years of insulation from any age that connotes wrinkles and infertility and regret. and that's really what i'm worried about, bodily decay and missed opportunities. i don't want to be one of those 45 year olds who pumps their flesh full of poison and laments old times.

so if i want to cut to the chase and get aging over with, i should probably just dig a grave and jump in. it's a surefire method for nipping death in the bud. just get it over with.

.traffic court.

i have to get up early tomorrow so that i can go to court for a $240 traffic ticket. i've never had a traffic ticket in my life (this is not completely true), and then a few weeks ago i heard sirens behind me after squeezing through the end of a yellow left arrow. i do that all the time. everybody does that all the time. up until i was pulled over and reprimanded by someone i initially assumed was a gentle grandfatherly cop (he was a hard-hearted bully cop), i figured driving a little past the green on a left turn signal in portland was unofficially legal.

i also have spilled feta cheese and pizza sauce in several places on my clothes: on my shirt, right between my boobs, on the zipper of my pants. i'm a veritable two year old who is allowed to work in an office. i wish i were more presentable.

part of me (and by part of me, i mean the part of me who fears public humiliation and also the part of me who controls the alarm clock) wants to just pay the ticket and get it over with. i know that i could save a hundred bucks. i know that a hundred bucks is a quarter of my rent, is a month's worth of groceries (that is, if i stop shopping at new seasons), is a sweater from anthropologie that i will never allow myself to buy. however, a hundred dollars may also be the price i pay to avoid making public acknowledgement and apology for my having run a red light. cuz by yellow, i mean probably, more honestly, it was red.