goodbye momma, goodbye poppa

So. My parents move to North Dakota on Saturday morning.

Wait. Go up there, back to the beginning, and read that again, please. And again. And again. And again. And again. And over and over again until it’s the only thing you can hear inside your head or feel under your skin or understand. Read it until it’s ringing around in your bones like a tiny forgotten windchime hanging in the breezeway of a house where no one has lived for a long time. And then maybe you’ll understand, like, a tenth of what I’m feeling over here in my real life.

Isn’t that ridiculous? Isn’t that the most intense/tragic/pathetic thing you’ve EVER read regarding someone’s totally alive and healthy and communicative and loving parents? It’s SO ridiculous. But that doesn’t make it not true! ALL THIS SADNESS IS DOWN INSIDE MY BONE MARROW.

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~feelings~

Today I am going to ~get real~ and talk about my feelings. I like personal blogs, this is a personal blog, I am a person, the website is my name, and I want to talk about some SHIT, okay?!

My girlfriend and I have been home from Kansas City for about a month. And it has been an excruciatingly hard month for both of us. She is readjusting to a killer commute and a rough office environment and I am unemployed and mooching off of her and generally feeling like a massive, tragic pile of crap.

I liked Kansas City. A lot. And I really, until the last three weeks, enjoyed my internship immensely. It’s more complicated than the following sentences, but: I was good at my job. I enjoyed it. And then that was taken away from me very suddenly and very… unfairly isn’t the right word. Unexpectedly. Shockingly. Unbearably. And it made our last weeks there just unbearable. Really and truly stressful in a way that moving those 1600 miles had not even come close to being. And it sucked. And getting the hell out of Kansas City felt SO GOOD. But I left happy. I mean that. And I can remember the good parts of my job. And I’d do it again if they asked it of me. And/or something similar. I don’t know if I could stay there for more than a year or maybe I could. No, I definitely could. I could stay there forever. Maybe? I don’t know. What do I honestly know from second to second?

But I was so glad to be home. I am so fucking glad to be home. I missed my family SO MUCH. And my animals. And Disneyland. And my incredible friends. And California. I adapted to KC and I liked it, but I can’t imagine it ever feeling like home. Or maybe I could?

But having my feet swept out from me before the end of the internship has left me inconsolable in a lot of ways. The internship fell together so easily, so simply, and everyone spent so much time assuring and reassuring me that it was meant to be (because I am, like all creatives, eternally my own worst critic) and that I deserved it. And I left feeling a lot like I really hadn’t deserved it and a lot like I’d failed, even if failing isn’t why I left. Even if no one ever used the word failure. Even if my co-workers threw me a wonderful going away party and gave me cards and food and gifts and sent me away feeling warm and fuzzy and appreciated. And even if coming home is what was best for both me and my girlfriend.

I have anxiety. I AM SURE THIS IS SHOCKING AS SHIT TO EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, NO REALLY. And I experience immense, heart-heavy periods of depression when I feel like things are out of my control, when I feel I’ve failed. And the last month has just been that. A train wreck of misery and sadness and bad hygiene and being broke and frustrated and embarrassed and disappointed. I have taken it out on my girlfriend and my family and I’ve tried to hide from every single human being on Earth.

I haven’t looked for jobs because my blood pressure spikes when I think about going back to work, when I think about interviewing, when I remember how fucking awful it was the LAST TIME I was looking for work. People were constantly telling me I was overeducated and inexperienced and now I have an additional degree (a terminal Master’s!) and very little additional experience! And when they weren’t saying that, they were questioning why I would want to work so far away from where I live (I LIVE IN A SUBURB, THESE ARE MY ONLY CHOICES) or looking at my fat body and thinking that meant anything about how good I would be at a job or who I was at a person or better yet, telling me how I wasn’t the right representation of their office. THIS WHOLE PROCESS JUST SOUNDS GREAT, SO GREAT. I CANNOT WAIT.

And my girlfriend has been wonderfully patient and kind and takes incredible care of me. But I have to get a job. I want to work! I want to contribute to my household and to the world at large! I want to be upstanding! I am able to work! I am a capable, intelligent, competent person! I can work! I should do it!

But I fight with looking every day and every night and I hate myself more every week and the anxiety gets WORSE AND WORSE and I have more nightmares where my internship manager tells me how much she regrets hiring me and where I lose a house I don’t even own in real life and where planes crash and I fight with my friends and things break and I can’t pull myself together to handle any of it.

And I know writing this out won’t solve it. I’ve been talking this stuff out with the girlfriend for weeks and it has done little to ease the aches and pains and agonies and tensions in my brain, but it’s down anyway now and it’s loose in the world.

This week I am going to try to take hold of myself and apply for jobs. I’m going to work at that proactive thing. I’m going to shake myself out of this bullshit. Because that’s something I know I can do. Because I’ve done it before.

So check in with me in a week and it’ll either be resume sendin’, application fillin’ superchamp Ash. Or I’ll be in bed passed out in the fetal position surrounded by garbage and dog hair with a pizza box from Mamma’s Brick Oven Pizza between my knees and a 22 of Wyder’s Pear Cider clutched in my fat fist as I cry into a wad of filthy paper towels while watching Drake & Josh. Only two options.

Or I’m going to knock over some sort of financial institution and head straight to Vegas. Three options.

Also, I groomed my eyebrows today (pluck pluck pluck) and didn’t overtweeze for the first time in maybe my whole life. NEW CAREER PATH?! j/k j/k I would rather touch someone else’s poop than the meaty end of their freshly plucked eyebrow hair.

30 Day Meme — What You Did Today

Day 6: What You Did Today In Great Detail

So this week I had these Really Grand Plans about how I was going to BLOG and I was going to get on a SCHEDULE and do this thing in a way that proves how much I actually love blogging and writing and stuff (because I actually DO, despite what my entry calendar says) but then I got sick and barfed up orange foam and spent three days in bed. So. Best laid plans of mice and men and fat chicks and stuff.

mice and me

But I am climbing out of the stench pit that is my bed and getting myself together by continuing on with that long-ignored 30 day meme thing. Day 6 is “Your Day in Great Detail” and I had initially planned to a day in the life photo thing, but then decided that would probably be EVEN MORE BORING than just reading about what I did today.

So today, I got up and ate breakfast when my gf left for work because I had a headache and needed food to take Advil without barfing, but then went back to sleep and slept late-ish and had SUPER WEIRD dreams about fighting with my friend and then got up and dicked around on the internet a lot (I spend lots of time on Tumblr, like any good internet-human at this moment in time, and also caught up on my greader stuff) while monitoring whether I had a fever or not and also being mopey and kind of smelly even though I took a hot, happy shower last night and made sure to scrub all the foldy places at least twice. Illness, what a bitch. And also watched some HGTV and TeenNick because basically those are my life right now, OKAY.

love

Then my sister came over and I got attacked in a loving manner by her dog which is actually a fucking MOOSE pretending to be a dog. And we hung out and made fun of my mom (who was present, obviously, we aren’t terrible children) and watched the Michael Jackson doctor trial and talked about OJ and how televising trials is icky and weird and uncomfortable. Then we had lunch and hung out some more and I showed them the trailer for the MissRepresentation thing because they talked about it on Ellen and then my sister left and I spent a large portion of the subsequent hours painting my nails.

naaaaaaaails

Then updating my iPhone and then playing with new stuff and being PIST that I can’t put Newsstand into another folder because I really and truly am so anal retentive that this is what my iPhone situation looks like:

lockhome

Home and lock screens have to be coordinated, only three things on the dock because those are the only three I absolutely use every single day, and NORMALLY only one page of apps. BUT AS YOU CAN TELL BY THAT SECOND DOT. Newsstand lurks now on page two, just out of sight, but never out of mind… haunting me…

Then I ate dinner with my gf when she got home and watched some tv and laughed at the dogs and then I helped her sync her phone and iPad and ALL THE THINGS and fought with her shitty laptop because I am a real good gf. Then I spent time fixing our tv so it would stop making us click through channels that we don’t subscribe to. And examining the many things we have on the DVR that we need to watch because it’s getting full. And then we watched nothing instead.

I put her to bed and then I sat here on the internet and wrote some stuff and made some stuff and ate an ice cold cheeseburger from McDonald’s because I truly enjoy the finest things in life and am now drinking a Diet Pepsi with fresh squeezed lime juice in it and after I post THIS will go dick around on Tumblr and queue up some posts until I get tired enough to go to sleep in like an hour or so. [EXCEPT FOR WHERE DREAMHOST DECIDED TO DO SERVICE BUT I NEVER GOT AN EMAIL ABOUT THIS SO I DIDN’T GET TO POST IT UNTIL AFTER FIVE AM. I HAD TO FILL THE TIME WITH LIVEJOURNAL AND DISNEY CARTOONS FROM THE 2000S AND ANGRY TWITTERS OH GOD.]

WHO RUNS THE WORLD? I RUN THE WORLD.

Fun fact: the pictures where my palms are turned up are REALLY HARD AND PAINFUL for me to take because both of my wrists have scar tissue in them from being broken that kind of prevents them from working the way normal wrists work. The things I endure for my ART.

KCNOMO

ass

OKAY SINCE I PROMISED TO TALK ABOUT IT: The gf and I came back to California! KCNOMO. Home where we belong.

I’m not going to explain in as much detail as I had planned on, but we have been back in L.A. for almost a month and OH MAN did I miss it so much more than I even thought I did. Basically: I left on my terms. I left with good experience and good feelings. I don’t regret going. And I got to do one of my dream jobs for three months. Not so bad!!

breaded

But whatever, that part is boring since I am still not going to talk about my actual work, so moving on:

THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT KCMO:
1. bbq
2. small, accessible downtown
3. no traffic
4. fat people out in the world doing things!
5. old architecture
6. my job
7. having my own apartment
8. the income from my job
9. the weather
10. the awesome people at my job
11. steak ‘n’ shake
12. frozen custard
13. the cicada noise (only a little)
14. the amc main street and olathe studio 28 theaters (NO JOKE)
15. the fountains!
16. my landlady/kcmo momma
17. the hyvee

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT KCMO:
1. getting my car vandalized
2. assholes who steal assigned parking spaces
3. cicada noise
4. DRIVERS
5. having to drive into a different state for a decent grocery store
6. phony niceness
7. SPORTS — gawd bless l.a. where no one gives a shit
8. weather
9. did I mention the fucking spectacularly terrible driving?
10. ridiculously low speed limits EVERYWHERE

brained

There are more things I won’t miss, but I’m not going to kick the midwest while it’s down. I mean, it already lost me, it seems mean to also tear it to shit while I’m at it.

SO I AM HOME NOW. And job-hunting. Which is giving me so much anxiety and my gf is being SO AMAZING and patient and stuff. And everyone has been so excited about our return and supportive and yadda yadda, I am surrounded by really good people, gross.

pizza

Enjoy my face over the last two weeks. Such a good face. The best face.

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

So I have tried writing a post about this at least four times. Once when it first happened, then at 60 days, then 30 days, then one week, and none of those attempts has really captured exactly what I am ~feeling~ adequately. But now I am out of time and have to write SOMETHING before it’s too late.

on up

Tomorrow, my gf and I move 1600 miles to Kansas City, Missouri so that I can spend three months doing my dream job at a paid internship!

This is both exciting and terrifying! Exciting because: dream job, adventure, all that. Terrifying because: dream job, adventure, brand new place when I’ve lived in southern California for my ENTIRE LIFE.

The gf and I are trying to treat the traveling to Missouri portion as a fun and exciting road trip vacation extravaganza! We have to take both of our cars, so we wanted 9 hour driving blocks to keep from exhausting ourselves. I LOVE ROAD TRIPS. And I’ve never been through that part of the country (save Las Vegas, ’cause duh) so it is extra exciting to me. And terrifying. Because when we stop at the end of the road trip, I have to live there.

I also graduated from my MFA program on Saturday. After endless hoop-jumping to get my thesis approved by our idiotic graduate studies department and two years of feeling like I was constantly missing a step on a long, long staircase of both misery and joy, I AM DONE.

Right now I am really excited to be done with school, but I know I’ll be itching to go back in a year or so. I probably won’t, but I’ll WANT to.

I’m not going to miss my program. Or at least, I don’t think I will, not for a long time at least. But I am going to SEVERELY miss my classmates. Even when shit was bad, they continued to be awesome. I am going to miss them and my longtime friends and my family and WHY AM I MOVING 1600 MILES AWAY?!?!

Oh, right, adventure. Or whatever. Opportunity. Dream job. WHATEVER.


LET’S DO THIS!!