ms. sensitivepants

I've been having trouble sleeping lately.

Personal crap I haven't figured out.

I've sort of given up and decided I'll let it figure itself out and in the meantime focus on music.

I told Michelle and Erica last night that I was going to marry my Song*. They said they would come to the wedding, especially if there was an open bar.

Srlsy, I am planning a CD release party (which is almost the same thing?) for January it looks like. I think I will probably have to have it on Long Island, or I could do a big one on LI and a smaller one in the city.

Last night I was troubled but exhausted and I thought to myself, I will dream of what's important. I'll figure it out that way. And I dreamed that Tegan and Sara both had books out and Tegan's was a seriousish autobiography called Everything I Am, and Sara's was a less serious one called "I Am Everything Too, Plus All This Other Stuff," and the title was written in giltter. Sara also had a bunch of short books for poetry out. I was very excited and I was debating whether I could justify spending the money to buy all of this stuff at once.

Then I was in the back of my dad's station wagon and he had been going to drop me off at a place and we were going to go our seperate ways, but it was pouring and I had forgotten my coat, and he was looking through crap in his station wagon for it, and it was pouring inside the station wagon too, there were leaky spots where the water was just pouring in like a faucet. They kept moving around and I kept being accidentally standing under one and the water would pour into my bag with my journal and wallet and everything in it. And I felt like I was totally inconveniencing my dad, but he was very nice about it.

That one, I usually wouldn't tell anyone about, because though it's layered with crap that means stuff to me, it's not entertaining like books by Tegan and Sara or my friend guest-starring on Full House. It must be early in the morning.

*Sean Nelson says in a song that he wants to marry his convictions, which I also think is a great idea, except I'm not 100% sure my convictions like me anymore.

PMS is like MSG for feelings. It doesn't change the flavor of what you're feeling, it just makes you taste it more.

I gave myself a D for yesterday. The only reason it wasn't an F is because I was feeling generous and I upped myself a letter grade for class participation.

Today: hopefully more accomplishmentful.

So this weekend I

You know what's great about the Patriot?

I'm so hard for a rich girl/My heels are high and my eyes cast low/And I don't know how

Anyway, I've been living in Bushwick for about a week but I still don't have all of my stuff moved in.

I'm putting my daybed together tonight.

Lisa's a great roommate.

Yeah, that's what I've got right now. Everything else? It's a bit soon.

Somehow over the past week, in my mind, the answer to my problems has stopped being "writing!" and started being "let's get drunk and see how i feel about stuff!"

You know? I don't even think it's such a bad idea.

Anyway, at some point I probably need to sleep or something.

Dear Chips,

Go ahead and fall where you may already, please.

I'm not afraid of being disappointed. I've already gotten myself used to it. I'm a big girl.

I'm not terribly afraid I'll do the wrong thing. I've spent a lot of time figuring out what I need and I'm through trying to pretend I don't.

I'm just tired and I want to be settled.

I want to relax.

I'm ready to relax. I'm too tired for guilt. Too tired of being riddled with stress-induced conditions to sit around inducing more on myself by wondering whether I deserve relaxation, whether I deserve to feel good.

yours,
rorie

---

Dear Rain,

Thanks for happening tonight. It meant a lot to me.

love
rorie

---

Dear Union Square,

On second thought, I guess the rat family, and the conversation about the rat family, was more or less what I needed. Insofar as I'm capable of accepting things I need anyway.

Thanks for being.

-rorie

---

Dear rats,

I think you're cute even though my city keeps trying and failing to exterminate you.
Keep warm! It's very rainy.

love,
rorie

Opacity rising.

It's like when you are trying to zoom in or out in Photoshop but you find you're still clicked into the opacity level of a layer and then your unsightly layer just faaaaaades back in.

I can't get past the attraction to just saying things openly and honestly to the people I care about most...

But then there's the fact that my words have so much capacity to hurt. Me or the other person or both.

Sooooooo.

Opacity up opacity up opacity up.

I'm trying not to in some cases. In others I'm just watching it happen and wondering rather frantically if I'm making the right choice.

But all that aside,
remember this entry?

Huh, look at that.
I was just going to say something light like, "I've been thinking about it," but hey: that was a year ago and I feel exactly the same only eighty billion times less sure of myself.

Opacity DOWWWWWNNNN. Startlement will do that to a person.

***

I'm not the kind of person who needs to be pushed in terms of Getting Things Done. If I'm not, it's because something else is horribly wrong and I can't deal with my day-to-day life. It's not because I'm actually lazy. I'm beating myself up to Get Things Done all the time and I don't need more of that.*

I do need to be pushed emotionally.
I'm too likely to push aside how I'm feeling until it explodes and goes kablooey all over everything. And even then, I usually just pay enough attention to unkablooey it. People who force me to focus on how I feel usually win with me.

I'm trying to change. I'm trying reeeeeaally hard. I'm good at trying really hard**.

But like the nice reiki lady said, I need to learn to ask for help.
I'm working on that too.


* I'm a Virgo; has anyone noticed?
** See above.

Instead of stewing in my juices tonight, I had a long talk with a good friend. Then I initiated a different conversation I should have perhaps initiated ages ago.

You know how I'm always running late.

Tonight it's all about Tegan and Sara and Lisa Loeb and Me From When I Was Fifteen.

O Hai, Oldschool rorie. It's good to see you again.

I think I want to do an acoustic gig somewhere this month. I wonder if I can hop on something at the perch or vox pop or something. I miss so many songs.

I'm living in so many songs. It occurs to me that it might be better to play them purposefully, with my guitar, instead of wandering around the seaport like a ghost singing Jump Little Children's entire catalog to the boats.

I do love the boats though. I suspect no one else sings to them.

But then, maybe I suspect wrong. It's a big city.

I'm moving soon. I don't want to jinx it by talking about it but... let's just say, damn soon.

I have a lot to do, which I'm sure won't get done in a timely fashion, especially because I have so many other commitments.

And one big one that I owe myself more time and energy on--music.

I have too much stuff. Stuff I don't need but have kept around for reasons of sentimentality, guilt (Am I Wronging the Person Who Gave This To Me By Getting Rid Of It?), and just plain... packrat-yness. "I'll totally fix this up and make it worth having! It's so wasteful to just throw things away."

It's time to clean house. Literally and figuratively.

I have a lot of stuffed animals, for example.
I really like stuffed animals, but I have too many. They won't fit on my daybed, at least not if I want to be able to sleep on my daybed too. I am going to make a serious effort to downsize.

But every one has a reason that I have it...
(This is the trouble with EVERYTHING.)

I'm going to try. If I can't come up with a good reason to keep something, or it no longer serves its purpose, I'm going to tryyyyy to give it away, sell it, whatever. Throw it away if it won't be useful to anyone else. (In which case WHY AM I KEEPING IT?)

Fall cleaning. Backwards. It's how I do business.

I totally wrote this entry in lieu of other, more important stuff I haven't sufficiently sorted out to write about yet.

Yeah, I've been Cranky lately.

The undercelebrated eighth dwarf.

(But that's not my fairy tale! Actually, I just looked this up. Disney was all "WOOO PRINCESS AURORA!" in the movie, but in Perrault's version L'Aurore was actually same said princess's daughter (by the same princeguy who woke her by kissing her). Then the princeguy's ogre queen mum totally wanted to eat L'Aurore as well as her brother Le Jour, with this fancy gourmet sauce, and the cook totally fooled the ogre queen mum by feeding her goats or something in the sauce instead, and then the ogre mum decided to go right to the source and eat their mother (the sleepy princess Briar Rose), who was like, "Go ahead, slit my throat and eat me! Since you ate my children and all and now I'm quite sad," because apparently she didn't know about the cook's kindhearted trickery. Pretty sad.)

(In closing, I guess I don't HAVE a fairy tale after all and I'm a little disappointed by this. But I guess being the Roman Goddess of the dawn is cool enough, even though I did always kind of prefer the greek pantheon! But who gets choices in these things. ANYWAY I DIGRESS!)

Anyway, I've been cranky, sometimes unwarrantedly so. Sorry if I've cranked at anyone, especially since I'm pretty sure I've only cranked at people I really care about.

I'm figuring some things out (yes: too late as usual) and I'm only about halfway there and haven't had time to myself to go further. Half-conclusions: really not a good place to live your life from! I really, ideally, should just sequester myself for a few days with notebooks and wine. I need to hash everything out with myself. Before discussing anything with anyone else. And therein lies the problem: I'm kind of having a minor identity crisis and it makes me lonely and want to reach out MORE, not less. But then my half-conclusions impede my conversations and I want to talk about it but I know I shouldn't yet and I become Cranky.

The real danger, though, is that I will realize I don't want to be Cranky and take pains to insteaad make myself be Comfortable. Instead of dealing with all this stuff, which is what I really need to do.


EDIT: Did I say "minor"?
Well: guess I know which one of me was writing THAT part.

(ignore me.)

In Other News...


Despite calling myself dumb fairly regularly

(which a few people who are really important to me really don't seem to like, sorry guys),

I still know I'm smart and that disagreements don't make me stupid.

Epiphanies: cooler in the morning* than in the evening.

*But only if you're in the train, not the car, and you're in the right mood, and no one's around to ruin it. Gosh, mornings are so tough.

In the evening: cuddles are still better.

In the later evening: but wine will suffice if it must.




I don't HAVE to blow off everything to go to another state this weekend (I could go to another state without blowing off anything) but I might do it anyway.

Things I Will Probably Bring to Another State This Weekend
-my guitar
-my shiny new (it really is shiny and it really is new) tuning fork
-my less shiny but equally new capo
-my iBook, and the other iBook that I am now no longer selling, but instead harvesting the logic board out of (but we'll see if I actually get around to that)
-my tarot cards, because they're not stupid but symbolic and worthwhile to me so there
-my journal
-maybe another journal in case i run out of pages
-wine

I think I can accomplish that through playing songs, because I'm crazy.

Here is a song I started working on with the band today.

( song song song )

Dude!

Can I just tell you:

Someone made one of my favorite paintings ever into one of my favorite tarot cards ever YES I KNOW IT'S AMAZING. Go look

Tonight was a night for Old Songs And Covers.

Fill Me Up - Shawn Colvin (ever listen to a song so many times that you suddenly realize you know how to play it?)

Half Jack - The Dresden Dolls

Like I Know -- that one's me, and I haven't played it out since Kenny's Castaways.

I Know - Jude



Yes, it's not very many. In the comfort of my bedroom, I play songs like I listen to records in my car: over and over.

Exhibit A:

So there was this short story I wrote, on my old laptop. Yeah: the one that doesn't get power anymore and I'm planning to sell for parts. Anyway, this short story was published on a website and this was part of why I never backed it up: I could totally just always go to that website and get it. (Yes, I'm mad. This is not a valid backup plan. I know.)

So, of course, the website went down at some point over the summer and I was all, "OMG! My short story and some miscellaneous other essay-like crap I wrote! Gone forever!" I freaked for a minute and then realized I could just buy an enclosure for the hard drive and get everything off it.

So, I procrastinated and finally ordered an enclosure a few days ago. Today it came in the mail.

THE SAME DAY, I get an email from the woman who runs the site, saying they're back up and they'd love to use another essay of mine in their new edition. Story's totally back online, everything's there. I'm rereading it now, dividing my time between going "WHY DID I WRITE THAT WORD SO MANY TIMES I KNOW I EDITED THIS STORY WHY DIDN'T I DO IT BETTER OMG" and simply reflecting on the emotional weirdness of it.

I only ever write-and-finish stories when I'm full of emotional turmoil of some kind and need to get it out. They're not autobiographical, but they are reflective. And the same themes have been on my mind lately, from a vastly different perspective.

http://eveinhand.net/muses_kelly_01.html <-- story

Exhibit B:

In poking through my old LJ entries just now, to find whether I linked to the story before (I did, but apparently the web address has since changed from .com to .net), I found an entry from about two years ago about a bizarre dream I had where I was dating Jesse from Full House.

The reason this gets me is that I just had a bizarre dream involving Full House two nights ago. And like the two-years-ago-dream, it was both ridiculous and, you know, Full Housey, but strangely poignant and Made Me Think About Stuff.

But that's a whole nother entry that I may or may not ever get around to writing.

Anyway, I just think all that is weird. That's all.

This girl that I knew in high school just friended me on facebook...


And she's married? WTF? I know, OK, I know. Everyone's getting married. I'm 25. I need to like, not freak out about this. It's, at least, not intimidating like everyone having babies. Babies! Gah. I'm happy for you, baby people! I just ... feel pretty bamboozled about the whole thing!


Marriage people? Okaaaaaay truce. I only get bamboozled by you because I feel pessimistic for my wee little self. I'm sure it's lovely. I'm sure I would have come to your wedding and eaten cake and cried a lot. Let's be friends.

...

OH NO! She has a picture of herself and a baby but it's not her profile picture! Do you think it's her baby? Do you think she thinks my new facebook status decrying the crazy amount of baby pictures on facebook is about her? Is she offended by my lack of Baby Sensitivity? OMG.

(1) iBook G4 that will be ready in a coupla weeks (I'm replacing a few parts)
(2) early-ass original iMacs (the adorable ones with the built-in CRT screens and the colors) that I will soup up with the highest version of OS X they can run
(1) Powerbook "Pismo" G3 that in fact does NOT work (power issue) and which I am taking the drive out of. It has a pretty new screen and other parts that work great, however, so if you're looking for Pismo parts: oh boy.

Who, if anyone, is interested in any of these things and what would they be willing to pay for them?

I don't think I'd sell the G4 for less than $375ish based on current Craigslist/ebay prices. But anything else I'd take any reasonable offer on. Also, I'm not a jackass and I'll make sure whatever I sell you is working well and/or tell you about any known defects before we agree to a price.

PS, should anyone need repair on apple stuff that they own, holla at me. I'm cheap and easy and know where to get cheap parts.

I feel that if I could play piano I could express everything that is in my heart so much better than my clumsy wordy words.

But who has time to learn to do things?

Every time I try to learn I fall away from it. Not on purpose. From a combination of I'm-really-busy and I-need-to-get-other-stuff-done-like-promote-these-gigs-instead-of-learning-a-new-instrument and I-could-be-playing-this-song-well-RIGHT-NOW-on-the-guitar.

Still I wish I could play.

I have fantasies of someday having a life that allows me time to learn the piano.
I live with someone sweet, in these fantasies, who sometimes makes me practice because he knows how much I want to get good at it.

I know he would do that for me.

Thanks to everyone who made my birthday wonderful.

I was really worried that it would be horrible.

It really wasn't.

Thanks everyone who was a part of it, and everyone who couldn't be but sent me well wishings anyway.

***

In other news, I'm settling into something that is, after all, sweet and simple.

Uncharacteristically, I'm not drowning in guilt or anxiety tonight. (Not uncharacteristically, I do have an urge to apologize for that. But I'm resisting it.)

I'm relaxing. Able to sleep. Drifting off.

Goodnight, world. I'm doing my best in you. Thanks for understanding.