returned from..... wherever

For the last two years, I haven't written on this blog consistently. 'Patchy' probably describes my writing, at best. This place doesn't feel as safe and private as it once did, and so part of my candid speech is gone, which makes it feel a little inauthentic, which makes it hard to write.

So, I've gone back and forth about what to do. Not writing or continuing to not write very much is not an option. I need to be writing, it feeds my soul. The way I see it, either I can pack it in and call it a day here and start a new blog that will give me more anonymity like Landlocked & Loaded used to do, or I can just say 'fuck it' and be unapologetically me.

Sadly, this was a tougher choice than it should have been. Of course I want to just be me and say 'screw the haters' or whatever people say now to their haters. But I have a career, and strong opinions, and a family that I don't want to disappoint with some of my more wild actions.

Ultimately though, I just can't imagine deserting Landlocked & Loaded. She's been with me for so long,  doesn't deserve to be abandoned and left for dead. Besides, the title is still accurate, I am indeed landlocked. Though the mountains all around do mostly make up for it.

I guess what I'm saying, is I know there will be more backlash offline than online for the choice I've made here, but it's a risk I've got to take. I'm back, and it's time to make some changes. I hope you'll join me.

Love and the like,

S

humans at their worst.

I want to get into a physical fight with you.

Hopefully it starts at a bar around closing time. Yeah. We should both be drunk. I’ll make a snippy comment and your entire demeanor will change as you say “Whatever” to me. Maybe you’ll leave, walk out the door without waiting for me. I’ll stride after you in the dark, yelling behind you until I catch up.

Maybe we’ll stop for a moment to really get into each other’s faces on the gum-stained sidewalk. Our expressions will be hideous, but it’ll be too dark to really see each other clearly. We’ll both start piling our complaints into the kitchen sink of our problems. They’ll get bigger and bigger because we’ll both to trying to be the one to hurt the other more. A race to the bottom in a sense.

I'll stalk off and you’ll pretend you’re not going to follow me, but you have no other place to go and I know it, so you’ll be forced to tail me. I won that one.

When we get home, I’ll leave the door wide open to let you know I knew you’d need me. That you had to come home. And then I’ll start slamming things around. Probably in the kitchen. I’ll be fuming to myself under my breath at you, but I’ll make sure it’s loud enough for you to catch the obscenities. My complaints will be boiled down to a string of insults at this point because I’m feeling pretty void of reasoning right now.

You’ll say something, maybe my name repeatedly, but I’m too wound up so I’ll just go on cursing and ignore you.  I think now you’ll grab my wrist to try to get my attention. I’ll rip my arm away violently and slap your face with my other hand. Not really hard, but the look on your face will be priceless.

We’re at the point of no return, dear. 

This is when things get really ugly. You’re going to make yourself as big as possible, really puff up your size for intimidation. Scare me, stand over me. Get closer and closer, menacingly. I think you should shove me, just a quick push, when I refuse to back down from your ominous advance. I’m probably drunk enough that fear isn’t even part of my repertoire anymore.  I’ll stumble backward into the wall and slide to the ground when you shove me. It’ll surprise both of us.

My eyes might well up with tears. But I’m not really sad, I’m furious. So when your eyes soften a little and you reach down and grab my arm to help me back up, I’m going to sink my teeth into the back of your hand. I’ll barely break the skin before you wrench your injured limb upward to get away, directly into my nose. My head will hit the wall behind me and I’ll shake it back and forth a few times, out of instinct, to get my bearings back.

I’m going to launch myself at you now. My arms are going to flap desperately and as powerfully as possible, as if I’m taking flight. I’ll be pounding on your chest and arms in perfect rhythm. At first you won’t know what to do, until I bring my knee into your crotch, hard. You’ll get a handful of my hair on the way down. You’re going to yank me down to the ground and pin my limbs down under you.

Did I mention that my nose is bleeding? Because it really is.

There’s a fair amount of blood on both of us. You’re still pinning my head to the ground with your grip on my hair. The instant our eyes meet, I’m going to spit in your face.

We’re both red-hot angry.

You release me now, swipe my face hard, then wipe your face and stand up. You walk away from me, punch the wall to the left of the door. We haven’t spoken a word to each since our fight got physical. You open the front door, slam it as hard as you can, twice, then walk through the threshold.

You will pull the door silently shut behind you without so much as a backward glance. I'll scream ‘FUCK YOU’ at the closed door and then strain to hear if you’re walking down the hallway for several seconds. I’ll run to the door and fling it open while wiping my nose. Blood is everywhere. I’ll rush out the door and be struck dumb to see you sitting against the wall next to the door with your head in your hands.

You didn't leave.

We’re both breathing hard, practically gasping for air. I’ll crouch down in front of you. And reach for your arms. When we meet eyes, I give you a small shrug. You'll know what it means. You’ll reach up and wipe some bloody snot off of my face. We'll look at each other for a long time.

Our pulses are slowing.

We'll hold hands, facing each other as we stand in unison. I will fall into your chest now, and you’ll fold your arms around me and kiss the top of my head. You'll rest your face in my hair as we stand there.

Eventually we’ll walk back into the apartment. It’s a nice apartment, really, minus the fist-sized hole in the wall and the broken dishes. We won’t say a word to each other as we take off our clothes and climb into bed, clinging to each other for dear life.

We've probably said enough anyway.

here and now.

Tomorrow would have been my beloved Nan's 80th birthday. 

While I've genuinely missed her every day since she left us in bodily form on January 24th, today was particularly rough. 

Maybe it was the release of anxiety and tension that came with completing my final comprehensive exams to finish my master's degree this morning, or maybe just the fact that I wish she was still a person I could call to talk to about it, I can't distinguish. 

The fact is that this grief, this undoing sadness, is different from the normal sadness of losing her. 

Today is a reminder that she won't be there to talk to over the phone or in person to dismantle and dissect the bigger and smaller moments of my life from now on, as she has been for my forever. I knew when she died that she'd never attend my wedding, never see me be a mother, never witness my life in a stable form. And it was a bone deep sadness for something that just isn't real to me yet. 

But these smaller markers, they hit me hard. When I realize I'm happy and I no longer get to share them with her. When i feel a connection with someone new, when they do the things she would have known felt perfect to me, and I can't just say that to her and have her just intrinsically know. 

Of course I still talk to her often, our dialogue is open and rich, even though I now take on both parts. I feel fortunate to have known her well enough that I get to feel like our conversation is still two-sided. A death does not end a relationship. I remind myself. 

It's the one sided conversation that I fear. That I dread. The one where I have to somehow make peace with her being gone. I still don't have the words for that. 

Springing!

Okay you guys. 

Spring break is over. I mean, I have no idea what happened. One minute it was starting, and the next it was just...over. So weird. I think stuff happened in the middle, but, time just kind of sped up and got away from me.

I basically didn't even leave Missoula, which is fine because I love it here and I feel like this is the kind of place people come for spring break, so whatever. My beloved jeep finally pooped out, so I'm weighing my repair options. Read: I haven't done my taxes yet, so I may or may not currently lack the fundage to bring her back to life. I'll keep you posted. A guy at work maybe has a tiny crush on me, so when he found out my vehicle was on the fritz, he miraculously remembered he has a friend who is a jeep whisperer. 20 minutes later said friend was prepared to be at my service! It pays to be friendly. And by friendly I mean snarky and pithy in general, because some people like to be messed with, and there's a rapport to giving people shit, I think. It works for me, anyway.

But what I mean is that I'm not fretting about the car. I rode my bicycle to school this morning and while it was a pretty sweaty and winded affair, mostly because my tires are really flat, I feel really good about it now. Plus I did sign up for a half marathon in July, so I should probably start moving my ass. Also, riding my bike to school means that Spring has sprung! (I really hope I didn't just jinx it.) 

Yesterday I planted starter seeds in my little indoor terrarium in preparation for our garden this summer. It's going to be amazing! Humans should grow more of what we eat! I also watched the documentary Hungry For Change yesterday while eating pizza I had delivered and it really freaked me out. I mean, I get it, I'm an adult. I know enough about nutrition to know that I shouldn't drink diet soda or eat anything with an expiration date that will outlive me. But shit, realizing the things we put in our bodies, the things I put in my body, is seriously nasty. Disgusting. And the sugar in everything! And the chemicals! I eat a lot better here in MT than I ever did living in the Midwest, but really, that's not saying much. So anyway, that's a new goal of mine, to eat more cleanly. I'm not saying I'm going to run out and buy a juicer, but I think I'm going to try to at least have an idea of where my food is coming from. As a person who is OFTEN guilty of eating my feelings, this should be interesting. 

On another note, I've got comps in like two and a half weeks and just a few projects and whatnot and then BOOM graduation. Also, BOOM, summer. Comps is really really scary to think about since it's a test and I'm a paper-writing person, but once it's over I'm essentially FREE, so I just need to look through it to the other side. 

And thennnn boom, real life. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. 

Have a mentioned that my family is coming for my graduation? Because they are, and I'm fucking psyched about it. My parents are bringing my youngest brother and my grandfather with them and I'm going to show them the gloriousness of my life in Montana. Both of my parents have been out to visit before, as has my brother, but my parents were here before I really knew where the hell I was and what I was doing with my life. Now that I actually have my bearings and a life and FRIENDS and a feeling of belonging, I think it will be fun to show them around. Maybe they will come closer to understanding why I have to be here instead of back east. Nah, they'll never understand that. 

Okay. So that's where I am with my life right now. Brigit and I bought a fire pit the other day and had a bonfire in our yard. We'd been mulling it over and talking about it for weeks, so it was a very exciting event to actually have it come to fruition. Although it definitely made me miss the bird-bath fire pit from my days living downtown Indianapolis with Katherine. Cheers to a Spring full of bonfires, bike-rides, and big gardens!

on being a chicken shit. under the guise of control.

I'm taking a class this semester which makes me take really honest, uncomfortable looks at my life and myself. I would argue that these are the best kind of classes, even though they are hard and trying emotionally more than academically. Getting my Master's in counseling has been an entire journey in self-discovery, and while I'm extremely grateful, I'm also exhausted. 

But I'm here to write more specifically on this wonderful, albeit at times shaming-inducing and embarrassing class. 

I've always considered myself one of those people who never cries. For me it was a measure of strength, and I think there was even a bit of pride in being the kind of person, perhaps more specifically the kind of woman, that has control over my emotions. But do I really?  When I think about that now, I feel a little silly. Because in truth, I'm a HIGHLY emotional person. I'm one of those people with big, extreme moods and messy expressions of love and pain. I just got so good at putting a hard shell around it, withdrawing, successfully avoiding emotion that I was a sort of robot-person. Really, I wasn't in control, I was just terrified of what would happen if I had feelings, that I buried them. I like to feel safe, emotionally, even though I'm rather reckless in most other aspects of my life. Emotions are messy and unpredictable and powerful. They're raw. I like to appear polished and rational, self-assured. 

There's nothing wrong with being that way, except that I now really believe it's completely contrary to my authentic nature as a human being, as a helper. As a person swollen with empathy. Writing has been the only place in my life that I've let myself go, and even in that, there's a risk. 

And now I'm off-topic again. 

I'm just trying to explain. Tonight in class, the topic was apologies. What makes a good one? What does a bad one look like? Is hearing the words as important as a change in action by the person that did you wrong? So we had this assignment, and it was to come to class with a written apology, one you wished you would have given to someone you wronged or one you wish you would have gotten from someone who wronged you in some way. 

And suspicion crept in as I was thinking about what I was going to write about. I got this sneaking sense that we would all be sharing what we wrote with the class. So I typed out a bullshit apology to a faceless person about abusing the parking system at the university and came to class feeling safe. Last week, I broke down crying when I gave some of my thoughts on suicide, which was the topic that class. It was scary, I felt out of control, not just my voice and my face coloration, but in the slippery slope release can be on such a charged topic.

I've done wrong and I've been wronged. Not more and not less than anyone else, I don't think, but I have tons of actual examples in my life I could have drawn from. I can make a mountain out of almost any mole-hill when I start writing. It's what I do. In order to feel safe in my emotions, I have to explain and dissect them, and I can only do that through writing. It makes me feel more organized, seeing it all there in print. 

The people in my class, and there aren't that many of us, maybe 15, took risks. Almost all of them. And as I heard their stories and watched them struggle and cry and bravely share, I was ashamed of myself. Here I am, one of the few grad students in the class, and I'm in a program that has me talking about feelings for a living, and I can't muster an authentic apology to share with these people who have only ever been supportive?

So it comes to the end of class and I'm the only one who hasn't shared. And my teacher looks at me. And I say to the class, "I'm so embarrassed you guys. I didn't take this assignment as seriously as I wish I would have and now that I've heard all of your stories, I'm ashamed. I'm sorry, you guys. I was scared." And I read it and people laughed and they didn't seem mad at me for not exposing myself like they did. 

But I just felt so, overwhelmingly selfish and shallow and pathetic. 

And so now, I think it's time to do this assignment over. With feeling. 

hanging in there

I'm  basically white-knuckling life this week because spring break is next week and I have a really bad attitude about school right now. Mostly I think I'm just burned out and worried about what the hell I'm going to do with my life after graduation on May 17th.

It's rapidly approaching.

Does everyone else constantly question, like, every single one of their life decisions on a moment to moment basis? Or is that just me? I never really thought of myself as someone that has a hard time committing to things, but I'm starting to wonder.

I'm a HUGE believer in all that "trust the universe" granola hippy-dippy bullshit, but maybe my connection with said universe has been interrupted or something because I think about paying my student loans back and I kind of feel compelled to go off the grid. But like, for real go off the grid, not the idealistic going off the grid I talked about when I was 24 and my brain hadn't started working yet.

Whatever, I need to complain less. Sometimes I get this (idiotic) idea in my head that somehow complaining about things is funny for other people, but really I think it just makes me look annoying and ungrateful.

So let's go ahead and move on.

This weekend, Courtney, Aubrey, and I went on an adventure. They are my roommates and also Courtney has been my best friend for almost ten years, since the fateful moment that we met in the Ohio State dorms. Aubrey is in my grad program and also one of those soulmate kinds of friends that you feel comfortable talking to about bowel movements and awkward sex positions.... sometimes in the same breath. We accidentally watched a lesbian porn the other day, disguised as a regular old French netflix movie, but that's a story for another time. Just let me say that I looked over at Aubrey and said "Sooooo, this is something I never thought we'd do together." And then we both started cracking up as the ladies on screen transitioned from 69 to ass-to-mouth. It was interesting.

Anyway, back to the adventure.


One of Courtney's bucket list items was to go see the great snow goose migration. It happens every year when they head back to Canada. So we drove East, across the Rocky Mountain Front (continental divide) and camped and then woke to have our worlds rocked by birds. It was amazing and fun and I really needed it.

Below is a short clip from our adventure. It was A LOT colder than anticipated, since Spring has reached Missoula, but not apparently Freeze Out Lake, MT.  We're discussing the finer points of our camping method for the night. Enjoy.

Bucket list item, check check.

On Buried Treasure

still taking awkward selfies after all these years. 

The other night I was waiting for the new Veronica Mars movie to download onto my computer.  Don't even get me started on why I was downloading it instead of going to the theater. Okay, actually I'll just tell you. It's because no fucking movie theater in the entirety of the state of Montana was playing the film. I considered for a fleeting moment driving to Washington to view the movie so that I could see it in a theater, but then realized I wouldn't have a place to stay afterward or a car bud to keep me awake on the drive home. But that's neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is that I was waiting for this movie that I've been waiting for 7 years to finish downloading and I seriously needed to chill the hell out. Tension was running high. 

So I did what any normal person would do, I exhausted Facebook, Thought Catalog, and Pinterest. And then I still had like 71 more minutes of downloading or something, so I got creative. I decided to go through my old draft folder in gmail. Just to you know, see if I had anything good. 

As of this moment, I have 653 drafts in gmail, which I realize is pretty ridiculous. But it's where I go to just jot down a couple of lines I think about or go on pissed off stream-of-consciousness rants. It's my thing. My draft folder is like, really close to my heart. It's also kind of a deep abyss of curiosities and antiquities and embarrassingly shitty writing. 

I don't delve very deep very often. 

But you know, I had some time on my hands and about three beers in my belly, so I dove right in. I found a lot of things. Essays I'd started about my Nana, years before she died. Ranty bitch fits about my best friends in those moments when I actually had the luxury of being close enough to them physically to be annoyed by anything they did, instead of just missing them desperately. And about 200 pages of a story that I started writing four years ago and just kind of ....forgot about. It was all so earnest, you know. I was discovering so much and meaning everything that I felt SO MUCH. 

It was a comfort, you know. To read and think from the voice of the girl that I was, the girl that I'll always be. Romantic and reckless and scared and self-conscious all at once, most of the time. Sometimes I forget myself, all these places that I go, all these things I get swept up in. This was a strong dose of identity. 

Finding my voice, deep and unexpected in my draft folder, it was like finding buried treasure.  

Oh, and Veronica Mars, that was a treasure too.