Let us celebrate the simplest of things!

-After all the rain, this grass is out of control. When the Party Sisters stopped by my house yesterday, Ashley laid in the grass and dissappeared! Undulating blades of green beauty to stare at while enjoying the High Life and a mild burn. Now everyone is cutting their lawns and Chicago smells fresh and earthy like a city never should.

-These fancy toothbrush makers have been enticing me with their giant super special effects robo-brushes for too long. I got a small, cheap toothbrush yesterday and it was like a Ferrari in my mouth--fast and zippy. That's the last time you use my fear of the dental establishment to sell me the toothbrush equivalent of a Hummer, Oral-B.

-I have taped this poem from the April 9th New Yorker to my mirror, making the last two mornings awesome. Last week I replaced my Chicago Crafter's pin with a cameo of Lincoln at his desk. I'm sure you'll agree: Lincoln's ghost has something to tell me.

Lincoln’s Dream
by Dan Chaisson

It is impossible to state just how in love I am
with my own body, the white snows of me,
the sudden involutions and crevasses of me,
my muscles tensed or slack in anger or fear.

This is why, wherever I go, I am in Lincoln’s dream.
A sentry stands by, the stairway is eerily lit,
light is a little milk splash on people’s faces,
the faces of my Cabinet, grotesque and funny masks.

Who is dead in the White House? I demand. Who’s not?
answers a soldier, pointing to a shrouded head
on my own body, encased like a gangly insect
on the catafalque, and the loud sobs wake me up.

Reader, when you caress yourself in the morning,
amazed that you are made the way you are,
sure that yours is the finest body of all,
remember, you are Lincoln having Lincoln’s dream.

In many ways the affection that I received from the kids I worked with was operating like a methadone drip; a low level of love enough to take the edge off, but not the full deal. Without it I was left with this weird sensation that I eventually labelled lonely. And having thus identified my loneliness, I see loneliness everywhere, which is sad in its prevalence and yet comforting in its universality.

This is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, about an idea that I love, even though it is flawed: "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

I went to a reading series thing and the Virginia Tech shootings and the general feeling of badness was discussed. Any sort of "these terrible times we live in, this empty culture" discussion veers too closely to end-time talk, is what I don't like. It begins to sound like exceptionalism, that this time, in history, is momentously cruel and wrong and shallow. It sets up the idea that we can avoid a fall, as though rising and falling and evil and cruelty are not as mundane as breathing and pooping. Anyway, as a tonic, sort of a corrective to random acts of violence and cruelty, one author had us identify someone in the room we knew and write on a piece of paper what about that person we find precious and unique. And then she read them out loud, and it really was moving and fantastic. I had some amazing things written about me, and did feel loved and precious. I, in turn, wrote something guarded and cheeky. Earlier in the day a friend, whom I love and spend a great deal of time with, said "I miss you" and my heart seized up because I felt panicked and trapped. See? I'm still guarded and wary, and I get mad affection. Imagine. Imagine how much worse it could be, or how much better.

And this is the thing about the lonely: they are a better concept than a reality. Who wouldn't befriend Eleanor Rigby, what with that song about her and all? Except she is probably guarded and wary, and her persistent sense that she has been victimized and isolated results in a certain cruelty that makes spending time with Ms. Rigby really awkward. I myself, at my most desperately needy and alone, was nearly impossible to be around, what with the need and rage and self-loathing. The children I have worked with, damaged and unloved and hurt, the most needy and fucked up of the homeless, they are often the most vicious because they are guarding what has been depleted. It would be saintly to love them but it is also very difficult and stupid, because if you can't get that love back then you have exempted yourself from that basic need you are trying to address: that humans, to some degree, are born to love and be loved.

What I am saying is this: loving community is a good idea, maybe the best ever. I feel like it took me forever to even imagine such a thing, much less put myself in it, and I still don't feel like I'm doing it right. And that's just me! I would also caution against a strict idea of what loving community should look like, because it might not look like love at all, to you. Here I am thinking about children who age out of foster care and return to the homes they were removed from. There have been no studies but my own experience has the minimum rate of this at 80%. These families look like nightmares to me. These families are love to their children. Or, if not love, they are a measure of unloneliness.

Loneliness, like poverty (I just read "Poor People" by William Vollman, good book, lots of thoughts) seems as though it could be quantifiable but is not, really. For instance, Eleanor Rigby, or Cho Seung-Hui, living alone and friendless: clearly, they are lonely. And what if they said they were not lonely? And what about all of us? My cat is affection-starved because I am often socializing with my fantastic friends, and yet I feel lonely. Married people feel lonely. Remember when My Girl said that she could be in a crowd of people who all say they love her and she would feel all alone? We cannot cure feelings, they are not diseases. I was not loved very much as a child, and it stays with me, and the loneliness I feel now is a shadow of how I felt as a child, and it persists.

I'm thinking 'loneliness' but I'm feeling 'unloved.' How much do loneliness and unlovedness overlap? Are they the same thing? I think they might be the same thing. I think the inherent paradoxes of this thing are so amazing: the lonely are often so difficult to love, and so resistant to what they need; that the sense of being alone and uncared-for is universal but completely the opposite of communal. I would like to ask my Armenian family if they feel lonely, ever, because they are never alone. Kurt Vonnegut, I would like to cure the terrible disease of loneliness, except I don't think it's a disease, plus I have it.

Next up: loneliness as social control!

The word 'hipster' was said a lot the other night, and there is no good explanation for why. It made me think of this picture, and Def Children, and how funny I think I am (most of the time) but especially when with certain other folks. I had just gotten my camera. Every picture from Portland was blurry.

Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.

People I love are in California, Arizona, and Florida, and it pains me to think that they don't get the exquisite Midwestern pleasure of the coming of spring. Will it never come?! It arrives! It leaves again! Today, in an official HR + Training capacity, I got to visit Kilbourn Park. Shame on me that I have not been there before, it being so close to my home and all. There is an organic green house with one specifically magical gardenia that loved me. The field house is like every elementary school I ever attended--floors that have been lacquered for one hundred years, wide hallways, wood and linoleum in a brick castle of immense solidity. It's a pocket-sized park, hemmed in by train tracks, the perfect size for a rust belt girl that is deeply fearful of the chaos and mystery of unbridled nature.

After the sunshine and children frolicking and gardenias, the drive to work from the northwest side to the straight up north side was a killer; this always happens in spring. Buildings on the north west side are low and tan and near to the street, and I think of Douglas Avenue and Central Avenue and all my twenty-nine springs. Plus I was listening to Neon Bible and nearly weeping, which ups the sentimentality to Lifetime Movie Special levels; I could have lifted my Cabrio off the street and flown to work with all the love and pain in me, but it seemed a better idea to keep driving and get to work and review these resumes! Do the Job and get home and find someone to ride bikes to Kilbourn Park with me. Carry love and loss around in me like everyone else. Spring, I want you to stay with me, but if you go, I will understand.

Everyday is like Sunday

It was shaping up to be another Sunday of laying around and reading old New Yorkers, especially since I tripped off a karaoke stage yesterday and hurt my foot. Unlike my string of foot damaging drinking exploits from two years ago, this was not a drunken fall; this was the Metal Gods punishing me for my blistering rendition of "Barracuda" for a room full of leeringly lonely Polish alcoholics.

Anyhow, my intellectual Sunday was ruined by repeated watching of and raucous laughter at this YouTube video I was hipped to by my Best Friend. What the F?! This is my gift to you. It is a lonely day, a self-pity day. I looked up "loneliness" on Google Images and duh--super downer stock photographs and this Marc Chagall painting. You have God, you have life, your lamb can play the fiddle--but all alone is all we are, no? Sometimes you feel like a terminal outsider, and your fucking cat eats her own back paws instead of learning an entertaining skill, and you'd rather read your roommate's "Entertainment Weekly: Idol Edition" than read the Bible. It's okay. It's Sunday.

just a touch more

"Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."

Also, it turns out I am a prescient genius. AGAIN. Dave Eggers makes a weird chart about Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s books. It could be funnier, it could be warmer, but it couldn't serve my purposes more: I know who made you want to be a writer, clever pants.

You were a big deal for me, old man.

He wrote and drew his own perfect epitaph. It may be mine, as well, except that I also like 'fugit hora'--time flies--the choice of countless dead. Fugit hora reminds me of 1998, when I was elated to see Kurt Vonnegut speak at Ohio Dominican college because 1. I loved him and 2. I was certain he would be dead soon. Instead he wrote a couple more books, smoked 4 million more cigarettes, said and wrote innumerable awesome things. My high school literature textbook--probably those Norton bastards--wounded me deeply by saying that his themes "appealed to sophomoric tastes." I was very invested in my precociousness then, and plus, everyone in class but me hated "Harrison Bergeron" and they were literally sophomores.

Do people still think the themes of love and war and trying to be good when it's difficult are sophomoric? I mean, the read-y/writey people? He's omitted from the biographies of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers despite their similarities--use of humor and the absurd whilst still being, at heart, all heart--in the service of love and decency. William Gaddis is boring, is what I know, and doesn't seem to like people. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.--he loved us, all flawed and hateful.

Seriously.

I purchased this stapler. The shiny redness was $2 extra but they gave me a catalog and an order form and it seemed very necessary that I have that stapler? From that movie? About my new job? I also got a Post-It brand desk carousel. Awesome!

I'm bored. I am alone on the third floor and was given a list of vague and nearly impossible tasks, which I attempted to complete. Eventually in abject defeat I called for clarification and was given another set of tasks, like "Help Melvin arrange some chairs" and "explore the benefits website." Beginning to think I've been dropped off on the third floor, no computer, no phone, for the purpose of being taped, or for a dummy paycheck that involves money laundering, or so they can catch me sleeping. That would make writing snotty things on my blog a bad idea. Except: I'm not being watched. Ever.

Which has something to do with the Ponys and why I love seeing them. First of all, there is that song "let's get together and kill ourselves" and then there is all that wah-wah pedal and weak shredding. There are only a couple of decent songs, sure, but the filler in between is like a warm aural bath in a tub of 1993. On Saturday they played an encore and it was the song I have been waiting for; it is that sexy song, the one the boy sings about the girl he sees and doesn't talk to, and I have a crush on that song. Like how you arrange to see your crush and then you do and it's a low level buzz for hours afterward? That's how I felt after hearing the Song. I can't imagine how many times this sentence has been thought, or written, or blogged, but I also can't imagine not typing it: I want to make out with that song. Even more, I want that song to want to make out with me.

I am both hard at work and hardly working.