You Can Call Me Taycheedah

I’ve decided to start writing at least a paragraph a day. This is not much by anybody’s stretch of the imagination, but avalanches don’t start with much either. The last year I’ve been struggling with recovering from major surgery and clinical depression, which is ever so much fun.  I like to think of it as a sort of tag team luchador fight with clinical depression wearing hot pink in the right corner. The upshot is that my productivity, she is curb kicked. Or mule kicked. Or whatever. I haven’t been writing. I haven’t been doing anything, and that needs to stop. This is therapy—one paragraph, every day, until the emotional scar tissue is worked down to tolerable levels of distress.

Apropos of nothing, at work I learned that there is a town in Wisconsin called Taycheedah. My fellow cubicle serf, Kevin, agreed that this is the perfect luchador name, and that I should hop on that project stat. And thus I became Taycheedah. Vanquisher of bullshit ad copy, destroyer of sloppy contracts. Depression trembles before me. Now all I have to do is get some colorful spandex and a sewing machine....

Death To Rodents!

I've been avoiding this blog like the plague for the past six months. Why? A whole lot of reasons. Most of them tedious. The nutshell explanation is that I had a whole boatload of extra obligations and the idea of one more was just suffocating. Now that choir season and the Printmaking class are over, I'm finally starting to feel my creative juices flowing again. So, time for blogging.

Right at the moment, I'm sitting around watching Genius with a heating pad on my giblets, a result of walking fifty pounds of death to rodents through a veritable population explosion of squirrels, chipmunks, and bunnies.

Kill! Kill! Kill!

It went super well. Which is why I'm laid up. Again. One of these days, I will be able to go about my business without, you know, managing to feel like someone's taken a hammer to my groin. I swear.

Being frequently sidelined has been pretty frustrating for me. Patience isn't exactly my forte, but I've been trying to listen to my own advice and find projects to occupy my mind when I'm incapable of exercising. Friday I started a 30 day photography challenge. It's been fun. I could see myself falling down this particular rabbit hole pretty happily. And as a bonus, it gets me out and moving.

Well, the pain killers have officially kicked in, and my brain is checking out for the moment. Hopefully a little light yoga tomorrow will set all right. But for right now, I'm worse than useless. Until later.

The Jackpot Question

2016 sucked dog balls. If you weren't fortunate enough to have spent the last twelve months in a medically induced coma, this should come as no real shock to you. From the nearly ceaseless reaping of just about every actor/artist/musician or writer I actually liked to the election of the KKK endorsed Tangerine Abomination of Desolation to the highest office, 2016 has been a shit-show.

But 2016 wasn't just a public shit-show for me. It was also the year my health suffered a major collapse, one which landed me in Loyola hospital for three days after a routine Gyno visit revealed something that looked very suspiciously like the sort of cancer you just don't walk away from. It wasn't, but that knowledge only helps so much. And if you happen to see me in real life, I'm still not actually up to talking about it all that much. I'm starting to come to terms with what psychologists irritatingly call "the new normal," but it's a long, hard road to go, and I hate actually talking to people as much as most writers do. Which is to say, like cats hate Christmas, motherfucker. Be advised.

The ambitious goals I'd set for myself, consequent to the health bullshit, remained mostly sidelined. The mental bandwidth just wasn't there. It wasn't a total rout. I started working as a proofreader. I did submit a few pieces of writing for publication. I wrote some posts. Most significantly, I finished the strongest NaNo novel I've written so far, and I actually started revising it. This is a long stretch from failure, and considering all the obstacles this bitch kitty of a year's thrown in my way, I'm going to choose to be happy with myself.

But I do want better for myself, and I've started actually believing I just might deserve it. Better doesn't happen without some sort of game plan, and as it's New Year's eve, that game plan may as well be in the form of resloutions because fuckit.

So, without further ado, here are my 2017 New Year's resolutions in no particular order and gift wrapped with a bow for your reading pleasure.

1) Run an Ultra Marathon: I have been wanting to do this pretty much since my bleeding feet slipped out of my running kicks ten minutes after crossing the finish line of the Chicago Marathon with my good buddy Cathy. Running is my happy place. It makes me feel alive, and I can use a lot more of that in my life.

2) Write one blog post a week:

This was my goal last year, and I didn't even come close. Oh well, it's still fun, and I still find myself thinking of topics and coming up with all manner of snark and silliness. Also, the blog is a good way of challenging myself to step a little way out of my ever-so-narrow comfort zone.

3) Get Politically Active:

I'm not taking the election of fat Voldemort lying down. Reading and sharing legit news stories and voting isn't cutting it any more. Like most people, I don't know a huge amount about boots-on-the-ground political activism, so as a first step I signed myself up for Citizen Muscle Boot Camp, a four week course on political activism I found out about on Best of the Left. How the rest of the year is going to unfold, I don't know yet. This is just a down payment. I'm fucked off and ready for a fight.

4) Finish the first draft of my 201 NaNoWriMo novel:

I've already put a healthy down payment on this one in December, but my goal is to average about 400 new words a day and two to four revised chapters a month. That should get me about to where I need to be by the end of next year without making me want to tear my own hair out. As an ancillary goal, when I'm asked what I'm up to, I'm going to tell people I'm writing a novel. Because it's not an exaggeration. I am. 

5) Get a better job: 

I'm a frugal person, and I have health insurance, so a hospital stay shouldn't have been such a huge setback. It was. There's only so much saving can do for you, and at this point I just need to look out for myself and my bottom line. I mean to be payed better for my hard work.

6) Pay off all of my medical debt:

This one explains itself. I don't want to be carrying around this ball and chain any longer than I have to. I want my next 4k expenditure to be a fucking European hiking trip or some shit. Not a three day stay at a "hotel" where they wake you every two fucking hours to stick you with anticoagulents and check your vitals. All respect to the people who took care of me, you saved my life literally, but if I never see any of y'all again it will be too soon.

7) Submit my shorter writing for publication:

Why the idea of joining a live-action version of The Long Walk doesn't phase me while thinking about sending my writing to a real live human for maybe even money makes my heart race and my vision black out is a real mystery to me. But this obstacle is old, and I'm bored with it. So next year I want to send out one piece of writing a month for publication. That is it. I have enough of a short story backlog that I could do this without even writing anything new. So why not take a risk? Literally nothing bad could happen to me besides a rejection..Oh the fuck well.

Nighthawk

                I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: 5:30am is an unholy hour. The season doesn’t really help matters. Autumn in Northern Illinois means running in the dark. Running in the dark is an added layer of bullshit. Ipso facto, a 5:30am run during Autumn is premium grade nope wrapped in tender strips of fuck this noise.

There are advantages to early morning autumn runs that nearly compensate. When you run tethered to a meaty little pit bull, running before the ass crack of dawn means few small and fuzzies are out to chase and kill. Not none, mind you. But few. And if you’ve ever had your arm nearly dislocated because a squirrel tried to commit suicide-by-dog, you’ll take what you can get, and you’ll be thankful.

Then there’s the air. When everything’s right, it’s so cool and dry this time of year, you can just run as fast as you want until hell freezes over or the sun comes up, and you’ll never, never overheat. It’s bracing but not so cold that you have to start worrying about frost bite or layering or any of that happy horseshit.

The stars are out still too. This time of year, you can see Orion, bright as fireworks in the West. The moon is nowhere close to setting. The sky is vast. You are miniscule.

Fifteen minutes of that, watching your breath fog out before you, feeling the blood course through your veins and lungs like liquid fire, it’s just about possible to forget that just about all the house lights around you are still out, and it’s because well-adjusted people are still sleeping. Also, the weather in Northern Illinois is usually overcast and/or drizzling steadily, so if you could see through your glasses, it would sort of just look like the back of your eyes anyway. And then there’s your body, which feels like it should be asleep still and not dealing with your particular brand of tomfuckery.

Do I like running before dawn? Umm, like may not be the right word. There’s a satisfaction to be had in mortifying that soft, comfortable side of my personality. When I do it I feel a little more present, a little less like those small, shivering things my dog likes to kill and a little more like, well, the creature preying on them. The world comes into sharp focus. That’s probably not something you wanted to hear, but it’s the truth.

A Coffin Nail For Your Nice Girl

They tell you to be nice, the adults, and at first you think you understand what that means. It means you should be gentle. You should measure the impact of your words and your actions. It’s fair, and you see that because you know what it’s been like when people weren’t gentle with you. It doesn’t feel good.

But somehow, somewhere the meaning of niceness shifts. It means don’t contradict people, even when you know they’re wrong. It means always smile. Confusingly, it means there are certain things you just shouldn’t wear, and certain ideas you shouldn’t espouse. It means keep doing things for people even when you don’t want to. It means keep the peace at all cost. It means making yourself so small, so gray, so you can fit into your tiny little life.

At some point niceness becomes foot binding for the soul.

When I was a little girl, I used to jump out of the second story window of my brother’s bedroom. It didn’t occur to me that this was a bad idea, that I could land wrong and break an ankle. It was just another way to get out of the house. I favored it because it was slightly less boring than the stairs.

There was a pine tree in our back yard. After school, I would climb to the top with a paperback novel tucked in my pants. I would up there, looking down at the top of my house and reading Asimov and Ellison and Herbert, while the tree swayed back and forth in the breeze. Fear never entered my consciousness.

I couldn’t say exactly when all of that changed or how. But a little over a month ago, I woke up from surgery--a very nice woman with a very polite little job who had done precisely nothing she set out to do. What I had to show for all the compromises was ashes and dust in my mouth. I was sick of being so very nice, so very responsible, and I was done. Done giving my time to jackasses. Done being contented with whatever was left over. Done with all the compromises that are entailed in being a nice person.

A week ago I began the long, painful process of surgical rehab. There’s nothing quite so bracing to the ego as crapping out after 15 minutes of yoga and two mile runs when you’re used to being able to do a 15 mile run pretty much whenever. But each shitty yoga session and each sad little run is driving a coffin nail into the nice girl I was for all those years. The person who’s arising is fierce. She goes places and has adventures. She has no room in her life for fatuousness and safety. She is many things, but never, never make the mistake of thinking she’s a nice girl.