lindsayliveshere.org

My sister Lisa came to Chicago just the other day. For two weeks — before I leave for other pastures — we’re roommates. And this makes me happy. We’re not usually in the same city, just hauling the same genetic baggage around our respective haunts. Now we can both say: Hey. That looks just like mine. We both mumble when we talk. Can’t follow compass directions. Love goat cheese and pasta and beer. Stay up late, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and L’Auberge Espagnole and sipping through a $3 bottle of wine while our apartment’s ancient gas heater clangs and thrums.

Becca and I had been untangling birds for about an hour. (Eliina made me three strands of paper cranes threaded on gold string, for my birthday. And now these strings were tangled. Quite hopelessly.)

Untangling a knot is the most satisfying and least satisfying of tasks. Becca had more patience than me. I kept thinking if I just gave them all a simultaneous massage-like motion, they’d magically untangle. Nope.

It was like untangling your shoelaces — but with birds. So when we found an avenue for a string, the game became: pass this whole string of birds through this tiny loop.

At some point Becca asked: Is this going to be a blog post?

Yes, yes it is. Bird by bird, inching through impossible loops.

And Eliina: I love my paper cranes. Untangling them will become part of the memory.

I’d like to say we untangled them all, but we didn’t. They are spread out on my bed. But we’re close.

I am a tired girl. I miss the easy days. The ones I didn’t even know were easy. I just thought they were normal. Life got flip turned upside down.

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one’s own behavior – where situational factors are often taken into consideration. This discrepancy is called the actor-observer bias.

Last night I was reading at the coffee shop when Tanya appeared, carrying bags of pet-store hay for her bunny. Tanya and I took classes together, long ago, at The Neos. Our catch-up conversation made me close my book, put down my cold coffee and smile for a few minutes. She pens a delightful blog.

At the same place, same night, I ran into Kurt and Jessica, who told me of their magical trip to Al’s Deli. I need some spice cookies. Pronto.

What do you think it means if you hear the phrase “Turkish Delight” over and over in a dream?

I think it’s a C.S. Lewis reference.

Oriana, on the office chair that slowly lowers itself throughout the day:
“Instead of the Year of Magical Thinking, it’s the Chair of Magical Sinking.”

1) I will surround myself with beautiful things. I will appreciate nature and art and words.

2) I will surround myself with fun things. Like margaritas, Cadbury Eggs and music I can dance to.

3) I will surround myself with interesting people — like the friends I already have, and, when I find them, other creative dorks and odd ducks.

4) I will learn to live in peace, then show other people how.

5) I will figure out how much I’m capable of loving, and how much someone is capable of loving me.

6) I will remember that the world is big and I am small. I will see as much of it as humanly possible, whether that means inspecting every blade of grass in my backyard or visiting the capitol of every nation.

7) I will leave something behind that will outlive me. Hopefully more than one thing.

– Lindsay of April 2002

–I’ve been doing Bikram yoga, under their $30 for 30 days deal, and mostly it is sweaty and crowded and a mad dash to undress, dress, sweat, unsweat, but there are moments during class when stillness descends, it’s just me and my quivering calf muscles, and the girl of me in the mirror — the same one I looked at one morning, dead in the eyes, and said I would try harder to be nice to her.

–My 1993 Buick LeSabre needs to lay down and rest now. More things keep breaking. And they’ll just keep on breaking. The latest: She needs a new TPS system, the system that controls the balance of fuel and air, and I said “Honey, tell me about it” and we cried a little, but I understand that she is old and it’s ok. She got to be a luxury car in this lifetime.

–On the walk to work this morning I found a Polish bakery with apple fritters for 81 cents — so screw you, Starbucks and your apple fritters flown in from Seattle.

There was all this STUFF I wanted to accomplish, all this pressure, all this panic. Be something, do something, keep moving. And then the past few weeks have been so hard — and actually, I can’t do much of anything, for once.

Sometimes you just have to give in. Like when I visited D.C. before Christmas and a snowstorm whalloped the entire city. I had plans — a show, friends, meetings, museums. But the storm wiped the agenda clean. It’s something I’ve always loved about snow storms. They are a relatively benign mandate to stay inside, limit your horizons, cross everything off the to-do list and make some hot chocolate. And so, on a grander scale, that is what I am doing.

Everyone wants to be happy. That’s the goal, right? In life? To be happy? Do what makes you happy. Are you happy? Is this making you happy? And if you’re not happy, you’re failing at the big goal in life which is (did you forget?): BE HAPPY. What if that’s wrong. What if, instead of happy versus unhappy the dichotomy is awake versus asleep. And instead of trying to be happy all the time, we can just be awake for this life — whether that means bliss or pain — and instead of thinking of ways to make the chaos go away, let’s rejoice that at least we’re not numb, missing it all, as good as dead and gone.

I have yet to achieve a steady state of “merry” and am stuck instead in a cycle… moments of radical clarity and stretches of okay-ness punctuated by moments of truly un-fine. The way I’d imagine it feels to be attacked by zombies… you’re brushing your teeth like usual when suddenly four of the undead are bloodying your doorstep and busting through with a hatchet and you’re like: I WAS JUST BRUSHING MY TEETH.

But overall:

Seeing old friends has been rejuvenating in all the right ways.

My dad has taken up cooking in his retired state, and so elaborate and butter-filled dishes grace our table each night.

My mom got us all snuggies (I’m lowercasing it!) of the highest caliber; essentially sleeping bags with head, arm and feet holes.

So. Things are ok.

Snow, more snow, in drifts and swirls, a million armfuls tossed from a million rooftops. The next morning we watched from the sixth floor window as a woman and two kids, bundled to the hilt, cleared off their car in the parking lot. I didn’t realize at first that they were using kitchen implements to de-snow this car. I thought, you know, they had three snow brushes. But I couldn’t stop watching the little girl in the yellow coat and pink hat. She must’ve been three or four, and she kept flinging the snow from the hood of the car onto her head. Still she kept swinging her de-snowing implement, which I soon realized was a spatula. Swing, fling, swing, fling. Her little brother had another spatula, and so did the mom. They chipped away at it.

The little girl kept falling over, getting stuck in the snow, wandering distractedly over to the neighboring snow-capped car and taking a few jabs at that one. Finally she just gave up and flopped backwards into the snow, swooshing her arms and legs to make an angel. She’d chosen a spot that was already trafficked in footprints, and I can only imagine that she stood up looking for the perfect imprint of her angel and just saw a muddle. But pretty soon the whole family trekked out to the clean part of the snow and I stopped watching but I hope they made more.

Today I got the splints out of my nose. I will say very little about this process except that it means I don’t have plastic in my head any more. You can imagine how fun it was to experience this removal of plastic. But what did strike me is that all I said was, “I’m feeling really dizzy” and in an instant the doctor had tilted the chair back, shut off the lights and put a cold compress across my forehead. Then he told me about a bad bike accident he’d been in, in his 20s, where he got huge scabs on both his palms and had to douse them in betadine. He said he nearly passed out every time, and said that it made him frustrated — he knew he could handle it, but the blood drained from his head and he couldn’t stop the dizziness. Then the lights came on, the cold washcloth came off, and the chair straightened up.

The best advice I’ve ever received came to me in the form of a wish. When I graduated from high school, I received a card from my great-great-aunt Helen. Arriving from my mother’s father’s sister, whom I’d forgotten meeting when I was a toddler, the card made me feel connected to a family out there somewhere, as if a larger world wished me well. I’d grown up moving, having been in more than twenty schools by the time I graduated from high school, and the experience had left me with a profound sense of isolated difference.

Inside the card’s embossed exterior, my great-great-aunt had written not the usual sort of advice that attends graduation cards, but only a sentence: “May your life be shaped by what you love.” The phrase struck me, and stuck, somewhere within me, resonating. Like a small lodestone, falling from the sky, that lodges in the earth and generates a magnetic field, and is taken to float on water, turning toward true north, the phrase became not only a wish but a direction.

My life has been profoundly altered by that wish; my work, my sense of myself, and even my body have been shaped, altered, by what I love, and sometimes unpredictably. The wish itself set me in a direction that was often against the tide, for our culture values the life shaped by the mind’s architect, ambition, considerations of means and ends, rewards and long-term plans. Yet what true resemblances there are between my interior and exterior realities are the fruit of that wish. It is only the failures of love that I regret, those times when I did not give myself so generously.

–poet Rebecca Seiferle