Practice makes perfect. Plug away! I wrote a big thing today and now I hate it. I got hit with the melancholia stick late last night and can't shake the headache. A can of PBR propelled by the melancholia stick was what hit me, so actually: it was the teamwork did me in.

Who can work after a holiday? A BBQ? Who can work when they are struggling with the realization that this job blows? I was hoping that the completely obvious fact of my work being largely meaningless and repetitive would lead into a glorious realization--I love HR + Training! I cannot wait for the next conference call!--instead of the predictable acknowledgment that taking a less meaningful and challenging job for more money leaves you with, ahem, more money and a meaningless and less challenging job.

I keep trying to reframe this as taking care of me time, but I don't know how well I'm taking care of me if I don't like my job. Oh, when I am feeling more positively, I will devise methods of using my powerlessness and isolation to affect major change in the horribly punitive and culturally obtuse world of our residential center. At the least: free copies, and shiny silver binder clips of all sizes. All manner of sizes!

I can construct a tower to call for help. A day of low energy and even lower expectations leads to rescue fantasizes of the highest order. How many binder clips and neon post-its will it take to get Chris Thomson here? Like: right here.

Blurg. Hope you are well. And listen: don't send a team to find me. I'll get home just fine! I'll be fine.

A convergence of carpets. A confluence of cousins.

Cousin and I went to the museum and there was a big white room with bright orange carpeting and immediately we wanted to frolic. You would have, too. We did some cartwheels and various leaps. If you really knew that room was yours, you could spend all day in there. But it's difficult to do cartwheels in dresses in public, because we are good Midwestern girls.

There is no way to express both the gravity and total frivolity of what was happening, because, you know, it's my life and we are limited with our monkey brains and throat gargles to fully communicate sentiment; still, I persist. My family is in carpet. I know a lot about carpet and have feelings and memories, w/r/t carpet, that I do not have for other woven goods or floor coverings. My grandfather, dead and damaged patriarch of the carpet side of the family, loved the color 'bright orange.' As soon as I saw the room I thought: John M. would have loved this.

I don't know how he would have felt about this: earlier that morning, the sixth John M. of my family was born. Six generations in America! As soon as I get to meet this new little one I will have met four of these men. By dint of history and biology and whatnot, I will have known them, learned much about carpeting from them, been raised by their crazy daughters, been loved by their amazing wives, and even eaten their un-sanctified Communion.

Now, however, I am far from them, in literal and figurative terms. But doing cartwheels in a room of bright carpet, with a cousin, with my eyes and hands and heart tied in with a history of carpet and Johns and myself: it was sweet like an orange lozenge in my mouth.

I am establishing a shadow government. Or am I? If I really were to establish a shadow government, I certainly wouldn't blog about it. Would I?

There is very little to write, actually. I have Ministers of Finance, Propaganda, Kindness, Psychology, Singing (multiple), Advice-giving (multiple), Medicine (multiple, holistic), The Social Construction of Identity, Education, and Fun. Vacant posts include Ministers of Defense and the Interior, as I have yet to figure out what the Interior Minister would do. If it is decorating public buildings, then I have some candidates. If it's about trees, got that too...anything else, I will have phase one group interviews. Or will I?

Oh yeah, now I know a righteous lawyer who turned his back on one of the top firms in the nation to, like, fight corporations. It would be one thing to just get to meet great people all the time, but with such a varied and tremendous lot, it is clear that I am supposed to create a shadow government operating out of Chicago. When the oil runs out we will have to use magnetic trains to get everywhere Chicago will regain its primacy and Daley will be old and needing an Irish-American to helm this great nation. Which is going to be a lot smaller, incidentally.

Just when I was contemplating a personal missed connections ban, I read this one. I challenge myself (the only person who gives a fuck whether or not I'm reading missed connections obsessively) to find a more constructive use of my time, or precious brain-space. To the universe: give this sassy lassy what she desires, please. And by her, I mean me, and therefore: us.

For J: missed you for dinner... - w4m

You are from Chicago. I am not. We are in neither place tonight. We run into each other from time to time for work. I just wanted to let you know that I like listening to your voice. It just makes me feel good. Like a bowl full of spaghetti and a hug.

Plus, I know you want to put your meat-hands all over me. You should just ask me out already. I like you...but more importantly, I like you and want man-woman real life, real time, right now.

How great is that? All the sweet talk and then--meat-hands. man-woman. J, ask this woman out, she is that good with a hyphen.

Sing! Sing! Sing!

Friday I sang in a punk rock choir at Daley Plaza. That is...hilarious. And awesome. And we all deserve it: singers, Chicagoans, readers. We deserve to sing! Last night the Child Welfare Party Crew (and Baby Burnham) took over a Bridgeport bar and karaoked ourselves into pure, rapturous joy. Seriously. Un-dreamed of bliss and hilarity. It was songs I didn't know I wanted to hear sung by some of my favorite people in the world in a completely unexpected but totally perfect way. And also the White Sox had won! I got to sing "Don't Stop Believing" in Bridgeport! Sing, people, sing!

My little sister is the poor man's Catherine Zeta-Jones. I am the poor man's Drew Barrymore. Wynonna Judd is the poor man's St. Renegade. A lady at work who loves country--and who can blame her?--stopped by my desk to ask:

"You aren't going to be offended if I tell you something, are you?" Think yes, say no. "Every time I see you I think about Wynonna Judd."

And I asked why I would I be insulted? Later the panic began and I text messaged Fluffyhead Friend. She said that I should stop wearing petticoats to work. Ha ha. Fuck friends.

Sure, I see it with the hair and the bangs and the nose and the robust figure. But I don't wear foundation and I don't rock the dread Modern Country combo of cowboy hat and giant coat with back flap. My eyebrows are composed of tiny hairs! Not clay. Honestly, I'm the Ashley Judd--the crazy mom and daughter go off with their matching hair and obviously damaging codependency and I'm at Yale being smart and marrying a race car driver. Think Wynonna, go Ashley! Anyway. I should be so lucky. I don't have even one ex-husband, or Country Music Award, and she has seven of each.

In other news, I am less concerned with the concept of loneliness, and more concerned with the concepts of fear and action and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I am also busy with the World's Greatest Punk Rock Choir, damaging my feet with hot hot heels, and sewing again. BFF was in town for a Good Times and Cute Boys Tour of Chicago; BC is coming soon, and may the magic continue!

Loneliness as social control

I'm thinking primarily of the following things:
1) The US currently has more people in prison than any nation recorded ever.
2) Our current cultural obsession with/terror of the Sexual Predator and Child Molester.*
3) We should probably track and register the mentally ill, as well. And then have them live far away.

Again with Armenia! Well, you try being from the newest and biggest and boldest of all countries and living in a village in a tiny powerless and ancient nation and see if it doesn't create an interesting counterpoint to everything you've ever thought. Anyway. I was frustrated there by the concept of community and how it worked; there was a degree of homogeneity and collectivism that my deeply Americanized soul could not tolerate. I put communal and individual societies on a teeter-totter of sorts, in my head. As a neophyte anarchist and shit-kicker, I was well aware of the evils of American individualism and how that dovetails with capitalism and avarice and greed. If we could all organize into nice communities without all this money ruining everything, it would be grand. We would be in Crass.

Then, in the poor village with the community everywhere, I was like: fuck. Because, as on Project Runway, you are either in, or you are out. If you are in (a clan, a family, a government agency) you will enjoy loyalty and vodka and bread if you mother is ill. If, however, you are out (deformity, scandal, mental illness) you are pretty wickedly out. Magooch was the village idiot: homeless, with Downs Syndrome, he would show up at weddings and beg for food. The dudes would make him dance, throw lit cigarettes at him. They put firecrackers down his shirt and he cried. Who can forget my return from spending Christmas at the orphanage? When I showed Arpeek my pictures she spit, she refused to look at them or touch them, she forbade me from visiting those monsters again.

So, finally: the upside of rugged individuality, the downside of communality. More geniuses means more money means more social nets because the community has eroded and every life has value for being a life; a life's value is not based on clan membership or functional value to a given community. Everyone is in, which sort of also means that everyone is out.

This is in broad strokes. But it made some sense, then. Now, however, my brain is mush. For I carry a sad and powerful and tender connection to the oppressed, especially the ones who were wounded in their love places, which appear to be closely tied to their sex places. I pursued that connection and ended up with conclusions I'm not really seeing anywhere else. After working with the 'sexually abused' we must hate the 'sexual abusers.' Especially since, as we all know, there is no cure. But I feel like something else is going on, here. What is going on here, with these men who do this thing that we have determined is sexual abuse? You have known these men. I have known these men as boys. I have known the boys that hurt other boys; we like them now, all victimized and small, but they are going to be big soon, and also, in Chicago, they are probably going to stay Black, which is going to dry up any of the compassion they could have enjoyed. And then again: abused does not become abuser. These connections are weak. Could we have some cultural burden, in this?

Was it always so, is it better to know, now? Now we can talk about these things and protect ourselves and our children. Perhaps I am wrong, maybe we have created a utopia, there are no secrets and monsters: tell everyone what he did, he hurt someone. And then what? They are pushed to the edges, to Pullman, to the nastiest group homes in the poorest of neighborhoods, where we can stop watching them altogether. Or we could stare at them all the time. We have got to be safe. They should be out, because they hurt people sexually and because there is no cure. You don't get to be a part of society. You have lost your chance. You get to be lonely.

Do you feel better? I don't feel better.

You know what else? Men and violence and sex and porn. Read this and get back to me: this is half of what I've ever thought, tied together, and in 1,115 words.

It is times like these that I wish I had a pocket bell hooks, a little compact of sorts, available for consultation. How great would that be? I wouldn't think about loneliness ever again.