the duty of the citizen

I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad that I had a day off today.  Tomorrow is my first time ever having to go in for jury duty.  I have lived in this county for almost exactly a year and have now received my first summons.  The previous place I lived, I never had jury duty, though that likely had to do with my perpetual full time student status... and the fact that I didn't bother to register to vote when I was there.  I doubt it will be a terrible experience, but I find myself drawn to my bed to just lay and do nothing.  I'm feeling sort of depressed or under the weather.  I don't know if it's just jury duty or a combination of things that have been going through my mind recently, but I know that having jury duty coming so soon certainly has put me out of sorts.  I don't like doing new things alone.  I like to be introduced to them by people either familiar with them or confident in their lack of knowledge.  I have never been to the courthouse in my county, and I have never seen it.  I just know it's in downtown and there will probably be bad traffic and it may be hard to find good parking.  I can take the bus, but that's another thing I haven't done since moving to this place and taking my car is one less new thing to feel overwhelmed with.

leaving as a meth -od of living

Hey, I don't like this thing called going away
I really don't think that it's okay
I've heard it called a kind of death
Though to some it is their meth -od of living
Drug and maybe habit
Something I have dabbled in
I must admit
Cuz leaving's something that's so easy to do
But consider the ramifications
It's not just a standard vacation

So today I want everywhere
To be right here
I don't want to go away
Or spy you far away
Through the haze
but be here, now
right here, now
next to me
in this place
dreaming and talking away

Today I want everyone
All my friends
To be right here with me
They can't sadly
But really I'm tired
of friendships failing
When we go
Far far away
Out into the haze
For far too many days

Maybe not to come back again.
I'm tired of that not coming back again.

So I declare
From now on
Everywhere is in the same place
So that when you leave
You won't be
Far away

I declare
From now on
Leaving is like staying back
Adventuring is now
In our frontyards
You won't be
Far away

displaced wanderer

I am a displaced wanderer, though I feel as though I rarely travel.  This colorful map may suggest otherwise but it only represents a handful of lengthy journeys across a vast nation.  I have lived in a total of three states and two countries and have not done a lot of vacationing outside of these.  I frequently wish that all places were in the same place because I don't like leaving or being left, though sometimes going someplace new is important and even imperative.

I was talking with a friend the other day about places and about where he would rather live, and although there were positive things about various different choices he said that it was the people in those places that would draw him to the place, not place itself.  I have often cared more for the people than the places as well, which makes it impossible to really go back to someplace I have left because though the place may itself be the same, the people have changed or gone away and it can never truly be as it was.  We cannot really recapture the past, we can only arrange our present to influence our future.

When I lived in Washington I remember liking that it snowed, even though I was living on the desert side of the state.  I used to be attached to the river that ran behind my Grandma's house and to the horses that my aunt owned.  I was attached to that place because of the people and memories there.  Now I'm not so sure that is the place of my heart.  My grandparents are both gone and the house and property they lived on is being prepared for sale.  I don't know if my aunt still owns horses.  The allure of the place that I felt when I was 8 was missing.  The magic is gone.

In California I loved the weather.  The heat somehow never felt as hot as Texas, mainly because we were closer to the ocean so the breeze would come in and cool everything down in the afternoon and evening.  I always wished it would rain more there, but it never got too hot or too cold, really, so I was happy with that.  I miss the people there, but my extended family has been slowly spreading out as cousins have grown up and moved on their own following their own adventures, and now that college is finished it seems only natural for my friends and classmates to slowly spread their wings and find their own adventures.  California was losing its allure and it seemed time to move on.

Now Texas.  Texas summers are too hot for their own good, but we get real weather here.  I'm not sure I like being somewhere that houses can collapse from weather, but I've always loved storms and rain - real weather!  Texas feels more green than Southern California.  It's less of a desert.  The city feels smaller than Los Angeles, though its big enough to still truly be city.  I don't know a lot of people here, still, though I'm making friends at church and work.  I'm optimistic about this place and the people here, but there's part of me that feels that Texas isn't it, yet.  Maybe nowhere will ever be "it."  Maybe I'll be a forever wanderer.

I'm happy to be in a state more central in the United States now.  It makes visiting my scattered friends a lot easier, makes the road trips less lengthy than driving from California, though visiting California friends is now more challenging not being there.  I feel like I'm at a point in life of re-evaluation of my friendships - you know, which ones are true friendships, who should I work hard to hold on to.  I don't think where they live matters because location can always change, theirs or mine, and there are so many future unknowns, but I think it is important to have friends and to consciously work at developing those friendships and building a community of people to build each other up.  That's something that I really want but that I am not the best at.  Moving away it's easiest to also move on, to say goodbye to old friends, build new ones, and let that be that.  But I'm not always okay with that.  There are some people I don't want to say goodbye to.

momentary musings

So, letting down walls is both freeing and frightening, both in the moment and after.  I keep feeling the need for reassurance that somehow this wasn't all a crazy dream or twisted nightmare.  It flashed like the blink of an eye, and now life appears to have returned to normal.  I find myself wondering if I should have kept walls up longer, been more a mystery and less a me, maybe never stuck my toe in the water to see how it might feel.  I'm tired of staying silent and letting life live me, I'm meant to live life.

tangent.

Again, what I set out to write this evening quickly took a turn down a different path, but it was a delightful path, so I let it go there.  What I was thinking about writing while driving home this evening was how I feel like our closing announcements should be made in multiple languages.  So often we have people come in to the store who do not know English super well, and though they often bring a friend who can translate for them, that is not always the case.  On my way home I was trying to string together in my head the words that would be needed to have the closing announcement in Spanish to follow one in English.  I remember once when we were closing finding a Hispanic family in the store and telling them that we were closing -- or actually closed at that point -- and they were happy to go through the checkout, they simply did not realize, despite our announcements, that we were closed.  "Cerrado" a son translated for his mother.  "Si, estamos cerrado" I replied.

The announcement: "Hola clientes esta tienda está cerrando en diez minutos"... o, "hola clientes, esta tienda está cerrada. Favor de traer sus selecciones finales para el frente de la tienda donde los cajeros estarán encantados de ayudarle. Gracias, y tener una buena noche."

I figured out the first part on my own, but I got stuck on a few of the words and some of the phrasing in the rest.  I think that "esta tienda está cerrada" is probably the most important, anyway.  I got the rest from google translate, but I made sure to use English words that gave me Spanish words that I recognized.

I think what I was most grammatically unsure about was how to address los clientes.  I was personally considering a proper "you all" (or y'all, yes I do live in Texas...), you know, "ustedes".  Maybe something like "ustedes traen..." hence this next (and I personally think better) one:

"Hola clientes, esta tienda está cerrada.  Favor, van a la delantera de la tienda con las cosas que ustedes quieren comprar. Y como siempre, gracias ustedes por hacer compras con nosotros."

Bueno, necesito ir a la cama.  Buenas noches! or as google translate would say possibly more correctly(?)
Bueno, tengo que ir a la cama.
But maybe it's just a difference in preference.  Do I have to go to bed or do I need to go to bed?

And after all that, I bid thee good night.

vanitas. a chasing after the wind.

Again I feel like sharing the world, but like I have no one to share the world with, so I'm sharing it with my dear blog-ary.  Today.  Today I had a full shift at work starting with teaching a class and ending with preparing the store for inventory.  Only one of the three students who paid for the class showed up, so we had a private lesson.  It was a lot of fun.  I wish I could be payed to color and paint all day.  I guess I wish I was my own boss and worked as a professional artist, not just painting or drawing, but continually creating.  Something.  and letting that be enough.  I guess the only problem is that I'm more interested in creating than in selling.  The clutter of creations in my living space is proof enough of this.  I have three good sized paintings on my wall and more stowed next to my dresser.  Under my bed are yarn skeins in zipped bags separated into different crochet projects.  Here there are also two large portfolios and a portfolio sized flat box filled with old drawings and paintings on thin board and printmaking experiments.  These are from high school through college.  I think I still have some work from elementary school in the closet.  Part of me wants to photograph everything I can and put together a brag book for my mom... and partially a book for myself just to visually see the ideas and progress my work as made over the years, over my life.  I have a shelf on my wall dedicated to my hand bound books.  I have a drawing in progress under my desk taped to a drawing board.  A painting in progress is on my desk propped against a wall.  A partially dismantled ceramic sculpture sits on my bookshelf next to my book project on memory.  Precious pit fired ceramic lattice pieces lay in a stack on another shelf below a quizzical ceramic bird.  The rest of my work is on the walls throughout my house, thrown ceramic forms taking over the fireplace and several shelves in the kitchen cupboards.  Yet, it's hard to sell these.  I feel like they are either too precious or too imperfect to part with.  Slowly I'm easing myself into the reality that I can't hold on to everything I make forever.  It's like my vanitas sculpture from 3D design my freshman year of college that I finally threw in a dumpster about a year ago: Vanity, it is all vanity, a chasing after the wind.  Or in specific reference to the piece, "Do not store up your treasure on earth where moth and rust destroy, but instead store up your treasure in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy" (personal paraphrase).  (Though, you know, objects destroyed through moth and rust hold a certain interesting artistic quality to them, a certain beauty.....)

hearts dance?

I should probably find a good friend to gab with rather than posting online, but I find that when something is joyous or distressing, two extremes, it seems necessary to share.  With someone.  Maybe the world.  Granted, I would rather meet you for tea or coffee every week and in person mutually pass stories of delight.  I have a great friend from college who I had a standing lunch or dinner date with almost every semester.  I knew that whenever that day came around I would have a friend, good conversation, lots of laughter, maybe Gilmore Girls or Mona Lisa Smile afterwards.  We tended to watch Mona Lisa Smile at the end of semesters and reminisce about our Art History classes and how the new things discussed fit in with this or that part of the art history lessons.  It was always a happy reminder of our art professors and the funny ways they would tell things, like Puls and his musings about Islam and cheeseburgers.  Of course we actually learned some art history, too, not just about cheeseburgers.  Though I feel like towards the end I just wanted school to be done with and I didn't have the concentration required to put as much focus into my classes as I should have.  I think my last year my focus fully shifted to my show and everything was thrown out of balance for me.  I know I couldn't have been a good friend that year because I had no energy to take care of myself let alone other people.  It's nice to finally be able to look back and see life from a distance, maybe with a less clouded eye.  I knew I was farsighted for a reason; even in my life things that are too close to me are blurry but get clearer as they are farther away.

But that is a seriously terrible tangent, though I was kind of enjoying the trip through my memory.

I do really wish I had someone here right now to sit in a chair across from me that would delight in my ridiculous way of seeing life and in my childlike joy at some of my life events ahead.  I think delight is an important part of life and it's no fun to keep it to yourself.  Delight is meant to be shared.

So, for the past many months there was this small nagging piece in the back of my head worrying about getting work off in order to be a bridesmaid for a wedding coming up in a few weeks.  I knew that I would have to request time off, and since other people would be involved I had to figure out way early what time to request, even though at that point I didn't have a realistic idea of the amount of time needed, so I think I probably over estimated.  However, I kind of need a vacation.  Actually, I think I badly need a vacation, so I will be happy to have the extra couple days that aren't really required.

My joy in all this is that I knew I could not find out the sentencing of time off until today, since requests are not input very much in advance.  I turned in the paperwork at the end of April, but today was the day of truth.  I looked up at the piece of paper and scanned it for victory, and I did not find my name on the list.  Sometimes a name is still listed with a couple hours or just "time off request" written all week but my name was not even there.  My heart jumped for joy and a smile spread across my face.  Later I thanked my boss for the time off, and he basically said that he decided to give it to me because I never really ask for time off and I always do my shifts.  It's good to know that work considers me to be reliable.  I mean, I've been there for almost a year and they still like me! hah.

Long story short, my heart will be dancing from now until at least several weeks from now.  First in anticipation of a summer adventure, then from going on the summer adventure, and finally from reminiscing about the adventure.

But life has been rather dance-y lately anyway.  Somehow now that I'm reaching the year mark in this new home of sorts I'm finally feeling like I am settling in and almost like I belong.  That's probably one argument against any kind of short term arrangement for me -- it takes me so long to finally feel settled... maybe I should stop feeling the need to flit from one place to the next.  But that's more of a simultaneous fear of and desire for rootedness.  Both fear and desire because I don't feel rooted and I want to be but I don't know what it means to be.  Something to consider more fully later.