After being sick for over a week and missing a few classes, I am so behind. So so behind. I had a lot of time this weekend to catch up, but of course I didn't. I went to work, came home, walked the dog, and took a lot of naps. I watched a lot of TV. I spent some time with my thoughts. I still feel pretty tired from being sick and the weather, coupled with my current attitude, isn't helping much at all.
Someone I went to high school with passed away earlier this month. I just found out about it via the eerily omniscent facebook. Like the other deaths of former classmates, I didn't know her well. I spoke to her some, but not a whole lot. But again, I am sitting at the computer, holding back tears, because it scares the shit out of me how quickly life comes and goes. We have these plans, these goals... and we say things are meant to be. But those important goals and convictions for our lives are sometimes interrupted by death.
I've always been a morbid person. I consider it realism, but others have labeled it morbid. Call it what you will, I always have death on my mind. When David was trying for a year to convince me to adopt a dog, all I could think about was the heartbreak of one day putting it to sleep. Whenever David is later at work then expected, thoughts race through my mind about his body at the bottom of Lake Michigan. If I walk Jake alone at night I bring pepper spray and spend the whole walk not enjoying Jake's company or the breeze off the lake, but examining each and every passerby, the atheist, praying, even, that these people just see that Jake is a pit bull and don't look into his kind sweet eyes. A couple of my classes are in hallways where a lot of theatre students have their classes. Whenever I hear them making a lot of noise during rehearsals, I know there's a school shooting happening. I know where I'd hide in each classroom I sit in. It's hard for me to get close to people, because I know one day they'll be gone. One of the members of my intentional family (family I've chosen intentionally, not of blood relation) has HIV. There's a part of me that wants to keep him at arms length, because I know one day he'll be gone.
I know those who consider this "morbid" are right when they tell me that Jake will be around for at least 10 years, barring all disasters. I know David leaves work with an army of big kitchen guys carrying lots of knives with them. I know most of the people in my neighborhood are women walking alone like me. I know out of all the colleges and universities, a very small percent will ever be involved in a shooting. I know I have many years left with my friend. I also know that life will be much more enjoyable, that I 'll smile more, if I think more positively. What if I just loved Jake without thinking so far head? What if I just walked him, enjoying my surroundings and the quietness of the usually hectic city? What if I just loved the people in my life fully?
It means I would get hurt later. It will hurt worse when they go. I learned this at an early age and I can't seem to shake it. I don't know that I want to. In a way it makes me feel safe, like I'm cheating this birth and death cycle, like I have it figured out and I'm prepared for it.
Then, I guess we never are. And in being so negative and guarded and worried now, I'm not eliminating the hurt in the future. I'll just have both, where most normal positive people just have the one. I know that. But my experiences tell me to act otherwise.
I'm having a problem maintaining a healthy balance in a lot of areas of my life.
It makes me feel crazy.

One week of school and then Spring Break. I am going to start it in Indy for my wedding shower and seeing Rod's show at his new theatre (congrats!) and then I'm going to a panel discussion where I will hear Mike Sherry and John D'Emilio speak. Get excited!
I will then work all week, before returning to Indy on Friday for Webb's wedding shower. Haha. Wedding madness.
I'm excited to be in my hometown. There's something grounding about it. Everyone's a lot more real there.

On why weddings are nonsense

Now that I have the engagement ring, now that I have receipts from a photographer, the event space, and I'm trying to scrape together a deposit for a caterer, I realize
It's all bullshit.
I thought maybe I'd get caught up in it once it started getting closer, once the planning really started. But honestly, it's all becoming more and more ridiculous. We should be using this money to renovate the bathroom so we can resell this place someday. But instead we are spending thousands of dollars to tell each other what we already know: we love each other, we'll be together forever, etc. Sure, the buffet we're having sounds DELICIOUS, and I'm excited to see all of our friends and family in one place.... but, really, it's just a big show. I didn't want to register for gifts, I wanted to ask people to donate to a charity in our name. But people got mad, saying that we needed to register so we could have a shower, and that we "needed" things. Now that we have registered, we have found things we really do need, but I don't care about stuff. I just want to be with David, which I already am.
I got on TheKnot.com today (a wedding site) to see if they had any pictures of decorated cupcakes. There's an advice column on this site with stupid questions like, Can I do this or can I do that... sure, it's your wedding! The question today was whether or not all the bridesmaids HAD to match. What law of nature would be broken if they didn't? Would the bride and groom be less married at the end of the day?
The banner at the top of the homepage was, "Who had the best wedding of 2007?! Vote now!" The best wedding? Please.
I'm not stressed about my wedding at all, but what I am stressed about is this heteronormative culture I am contributing to, this materialistic culture, and why I need to spend thousands of dollars just to validate my relationship.

I am sick, again. Next winter I am going to live in a bubble. I get sick every year.
Saturday, the Cook County Board approved a raise in the home buyer transfer tax (it was only $7.50 per $1,000 when David and I bought). It's going up to $10.50! I'm just thinking that homeowners are really good for the economy that isn't in trouble, according to our really intelligent president (not for him and his cronies, I guess)... and it's becoming harder and harder to own.
ALSO, affecting renters and owners alike, the sales tax is going up again! The sales tax is my city is now 10.25. Are you kidding me? What is it in my hometown? 6?
This just adds to the mounting frustration I've had with Chicago as of late and I'm done. My heart is ready to drop out of school and go somewhere small, somewhere less expensive, somewhere that lets me keep the money I make and do something fun with it.
I'm ready. But I have almost a year until I can do anything about it. I know I've been at this juncture before and I ended up being really glad I stayed in the city. But this time, something is different. I know it's time.
Caroline Rhea is on TV right now. Who told her she was funny?
When are the Kathy Griffin specials coming back on Bravo?
I want the election to be over. I want feminists to understand that expecting women to vote for a candidate because she has a vagina is pretty patronizing. What if the female candidate was a really conservative republican? I bet not many feminists would be voting for her.
I'm pretty frustrated with things right now. Everything I am excited about lies far into the future and I just want it to be here now.
I'm not a patient person.

I waste time. I watch TV, I get on the internet... and things don't get done.
I did clean the kitchen and the bathroom tonight. I did the laundry.
Jay and Dwayne are possibly coming over Sunday for dinner so that gives me a reason to clean.
I am going to see The Labirynth (yes, the David Bowie flick of your youth) tomorrow night with some friends from work. Every time I plan things with them I think, Should I stay in Chicago?
I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do. I have lives planned in my mind in multiple cities. They are similar yet vastly different. In each of these lives I carry with me the fear that I should be somewhere else and I just wonder why I can't find a home, a place where my soul resides, a place I know I need to be. And then I think what if I never find that and I spend my whole life dragging my husband and dog back and forth across the country, packing up my life, renting a U-Haul, getting new checks, new address labels... what if I never find a home?
My soul is unsettled. I feel like, for the first time in a long time, I have things figured out. I know what I want to do with my life (well, mostly) and I know what I'm good at. I know who I'm going through life with. I know what's important to me. I know what I believe.
But there's this part of me that calls me somewhere else, says I'm not standing in the right place, shifts the land under my feet until I topple over, legs and arms, mind and heart, tossed in different directions. I don't know where to go.
I don't know where I belong. My independent spirit is better suited to the thirteen year old I once was, when the world was wide open and nothing tied me anywhere. I like what ties me to Chicago: my hubby, my dog, my friends, my house... but when you're that young, when you're thirteen... you think, maybe I'll live in Oregon, on the coast, in a lakehouse. I'll write all day long. That's all I want. When you aren't thirteen, when you've lived some of your life, you realize that you probably couldn't afford a lakehouse in Oregon, you wonder how you'd drive your carsick dog that far, and you wonder if your current condo has enough resale value yet. You worry. When you're thirteen it just sounds like fun. Everything is plausible.
I know I am still so so young. I know I don't have kids (not that I ever will), I know I don't lead a life that bores me... I have ambitions, I have a passion for life. But so often I miss the girl I was when life first began to present its options to me, when I had all the confidence in the world, when my choices were not attached to job prospects, real estate...adult stuff.
I know we all remember the past more fondly sometimes. I know I'm not unique. But somedays, as I ride the bus south, along the lakefront, or when I walk around the city, I just think.
I think.
I wonder what the hell I'm doing.

He's been gone 16 years. I just realized that on my way downtown today. Staring out the grimy bus window at frozen Lake Michigan. I just thought. I just realized.
16 years.

why i write

At night, my balloon lamp glowing in the corner, my collection of Trolls and E.T. memorobilia casting shadows on the wallls, my parents would take turns reading to me, my little brain imagining the illustrations, the scenes, the faces. I decided that for each year of my life I should get one book. So, the night of my fifth birthday, I selected five books for my mom to read me. They were short picture books, but still a hefty load for a mother who'd worked all day and then worked all night at her second job as a wife to my dying father and as a mother to my adventurous young self.
While my mom did most of the reading in the house, my dad did most of the writing. He had been somewhat of a freelance journalist in his hometown on Bayonne, New Jersey. After we moved to Indiana, he would send the newspaper back home regular updates on his new life outside of the city. I imagine him lamenting the homogenous cul de sac we called home, dreaming of the immigrant neighbors he once knew who would bring him bread and stews in his bachelor days and came to bless me with their spells and potions when I was born. He wrote to them about his luck in finding an Irish community in his new city, but how they were all men merely decending from "the green place" and some had never even been there. With pride he recounted being chosen to ride on the Ancient Order of Hibernians float in the Indianapolis St. Patrick's Day parade. I wonder how many people read my father's words so far away in his old life, his old city. I wonder how many of them still remember a passage or a word or a quote or even his name.
My few memories of him lead me to our solid oak dining table where he always sat to write. He would set out his mug that read "DAN" in huge brown letters down the side, fill it with tea, and then begin to write. I remember hearing the typewriter that always sounds so loud and obnoxious in movies, but at home it came out like waves on the bottom of a boat, or a breeze, or rain.
Whether it was an actual joy I found in words while being read to, a way to mimic my father, or the realization that I would never be able to mimic my mother's musical abilities, I took to stapling together construction paper, making my own paperback books. I would examine books my father had by his bed or by the sofa or in the car or in the kitchen---he read everywhere. I would examine the way the books looked and remake them. On the back of my homemade books I would draw a picture of myself and write a short biography. I would make a cover, a title page, and leave a blank page before the story started like I often observed in "real" books. I would hold books, smell there musty pages, their clean and new pages, listened to the way their spined snapped, the way the library's protective plastic jacket crackled, the definitive way the pages and covers came together with a slam. I got to know their bodies in an intimate way, opening them and closing them and holding them just to see how it felt.
Too young to tackle all of the pages in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, my mom took me to see it in the theatres when Susan Sarandon and Winona Rider made it a popular story again. I felt a sudden kinship with Jo when Professor Bear pointed to her ink-stained hand. Her travel to big cities and lofty universities became my visions of my future, and the image that I tried to articulate when adults would ask, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Traveling to New Jersey and New York the year after my father died to visit his family, I thought about the movie and if I'd ever live in New York, and if my dad would be proud that while he left his urban home, I would come back to it.
One of my favorite writers these days is Thomas Lynch. He is an undertaker by trade, and it greatly influences his writing. His ideas about death and life are attractive to that part of me who encountered the death of my father at a young age. It helps explain it to me, explain my mother's actions at the time, explain the way I felt. Most importantly though, Lynch's lapsed yet loyal Catholicism and his Irish heritage bring me to my living father. The concrete memories of him are few, but the essence of the Irishman, writing in a darkened dining room in the suburbs of Indianapolis in my youth haunt me, taunt me, make up a crucial part of my identity. Perhaps his identity as a writer is why my identity is so tied to words. It is me, but it is also him. I am not the first Sweeney to claim space on pages of newpapers and journals, to struggle for hours in a dark house in the wee hours of the morning, the love of my life supporting me, but also finding it strange. I am the second, even if I'm the last, I am the second, so that my father was not the last. So that he is not entirely gone. So that he is still with me in a real way that I can touch, see, and believe. Not relegated to a ghostly or angelic make believe, hovering above me with a god I have never been able to acknowledge as present or plausible, but hovering in my mind, in my hands, in my words. He is there. So am I.