The Most Lovely New Beginnings
I started this blog with a discussion of motherhood, and my best friend due to give birth. My last blog was while I was in despair over the end of a friend's life. Six months ago today my best friend gave birth to her son, and the next day I attended the memorial of my friend Patrick. It seems life is a never ending cycle of ends and beginnings, all around to humble, inspire, destroy and create.
The past year has been nothing short of an example of that for me. I am humbled beyond explanation from the self-esteem-destroying experiences of the last year. At the same time I learned so many lessons and started on a whole new path. I am 22 years old, with a Bachelor's degree, and am ecstatic over gaining a part-time receptionist position six months ago. I'm ecstatic to be making money again; I'm ecstatic to have a purpose - however minor it may be; I'm ecstatic t be contributing to the financial responsibilities I hadn't been able to bear for my several months of unemployment. I'm ecstatic to have the freedom again to do anything I want, because the burden of unemployment ran so deep I felt paralyzed.
When I look at this situation objectively, I realize I should maybe be reaching for the stars and having more ambition. But that's what a humbling experience does to you, it makes it so even the smallest victories are like a dream come true. It makes it so every positive experience is a life altering new beginning. That's what it felt like when I got this part-time job that a high school graduate is just as qualified for, that's what it felt like driving to see my best friend's new baby, and that's what it's going to feel like every time anything good happens. Since I have had this job I have been promoted twice and I know things have to be looking up for me. I know things are getting better. When you've fallen so far, there's only so many directions to look, and up seems the only one worth it right now.
Looking for the Lovely
I've known him for what seems like a short amount of time compared to his other friends, and many of mine. Only none of my good, long-term friends live in the same city as me anymore, so those I have made in this new, strange place are important to me.
Since I arrived here there was a hole in me for lack of local social interaction, and after several months now I've worked to develop some friendships. I now have a handful of people I can consider friends, and he is one of them.
Things are looking up for me in this crazy place where I once felt so alone and hopeless. Everyone seems to like me and accept me as a friend, including him.
A bit more than everyone else, he comes over individually to hang out with me and my boyfriend some weekends. It seems I'm putting some roots down in this new place in the form of good friends.
I'm making memories and bonding through fun social gatherings, developing inside jokes and knowing all of my new group of friends better and better everyday - he is definitely one of the ones I am closest to.
We all miss him one night while we gather to celebrate a birthday without him because he's sick with pneumonia.
The next morning he dies.
I'm shocked. It's so unfair for him. He thought he'd be back at school in a few weeks. He thought he had more time.
So did we all. I thought I'd see him the first weekend I was back in town after the new year began. I thought I'd get the chance to be friends with him for a long time. I thought I could help him celebrate his birthday in April.
He didn't know he wouldn't see us again, neither did we. I hurt for him, for his family, for his friends, and for me.
I cannot see the lovely in any of this. There is none.
‘Tis The Most Lovely Season
It's been a while since my last post. Unfortunately, my life had been lacking in inspiration for the most lovely things. Three days ago, however, marked the beginning of my favorite time of year - inspiration ensued.
Snow. Yes, I know that many don't qualify the type of snow that Houston, Texas produces to be actual snow. It didn't stick much to the ground, and several hours later was just icey puddles and glimmering frost on cars, but one thing that did stick was that it got me in the holiday mood! I know, I know, I sound ridiculously cheesy. There is just something about bundling up in warmth and looking out on the gray winter days, watching your breath and steam from roofs billow through the crisp air, that makes me think "damn! i love winter!" I especially love precipitation that I can encounter without an umbrella and not be as miserable as a recently bathed cat after said encounter - even if northerners won't admit it's snow. There's something magical about this time of year for me that isn't tangible but I can appreciate none the less.
As a child Christmas was always something to look forward to. I am part of a huge family that was strong on traditions. "Was" being the operative word. When I was fourteen, two days before my birthday and four months before our typical huge family Christmas, my grandmother died of pancreatic cancer. I knew even before she passed that my family would never be the same, but still I hoped things wouldn't change. The years of gathering as many aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and cousins as possible into the same tiny, creaky house that belonged to my grandparents on Christmas eve were over. There would be no night-before family feast and gift opening. Hot chocolate drinking with siblings and cousins, while grandma read both a santa-oriented and jesus-oriented Christmas story was no more. Though the joy of those types of Christmases was sucked away with the death of my grandmother, humans are both creatures of habit and quite adaptable. I simply adapted to new, less-extended-family oriented holidays and kept my cheesy and sentimental holiday spirit alive.
Today is the 83rd birthday of my grandfather, who has survived liver cancer now for over a year past diagnosis and without treatment - an undeniable miracle (if you believe in those sorts of things). He, along with said grandmother, was always a part of the foundation that formed my love for this season. I'm not sure if this will be his last birthday, or if this Christmas will be my last with him, since his prognosis has been so poor for so long, but I am sure that I will truly cherish this winter holiday with my family. Very little could ever ruin this time of year for me once the cool weather blows in and blinking lights go up. I've had many years since I was fourteen in which Christmas, New Year, or some/all of the holiday season were tainted by disaster, yet somehow - year after year - something in my chemistry changes when I get to pull out my winter clothes from the closet and bundle up. I truly love winter, and I have a feeling I'll love this one just as much or more than all the winters of the past. Love, love, love it.
In the spirit, as I will be for at least a month or two, here's something for all the misfits out there!
The Most Lovely Influences
Sometimes when I think about who I am and my taste in things, I realize I'm just like a puzzle. I may have a whole image that's just my own, but other people have put many pieces in place at different times throughout my assembly to becoming whole - many people have helped to create me. My older sister is definitely one of those people.
Since the age of 10 she has influenced me probably the most out of anyone. I was such a typical little sister. Her style in clothes influenced my style, her taste in music influenced mine, and I idolized her personality. She seemed glamorous, amazing, and I wanted to be like her in so many ways. I feel like I followed her around like a puppy for years. Sure I still had my critical thinking skills - I always have - and I realized things about her I didn't want to repeat in myself, but even then, her mistakes were my learning opportunities.
As weird as it sounds, she taught me how to be an individual, be myself, and be confident doing so. Sure, I can look at myself now and see a lot of her in who I am, see that she put so many of those puzzle pieces into place, but that's because I decided that's who I want to be. I guess everyone kind of does the same thing when they're in that angst-y time of life trying to figure out who they are. They look at the world and decide what the think is good, bad, cool, and uncool and create themselves out of that. Rebecca was just a big part of that process for me. She was just a very big influence on me.
I thought of all of this when I saw a TV commercial that had a song playing and I immediately thought "Damn, I love this song! I haven't heard it in forever! ...who is this? who is this? Oh! Yeah! It's Sleepyhead by Passion Pit!" I could remember Rebecca playing this music video for me around a year ago, and telling me how much she liked them and that the song reminded her of me. I posted the song as my profile song on myspace after that introduction to Passion Pit and started listening to more of their music. I thought of all of that and realized that there is so much in my life that I have loved and been excited for as a result of my big sister's influence on me. So much of who I am is a result of her.
The Most Lovely Rut
I'm in a rut. I have been, on and off, for about 5 months now. I graduated from college exactly 6 months ago tomorrow. After graduation, I spent my first 2-3 free weeks just relaxing and settling in to my new life, since I had just spent 18 years straight in the education system (pre-K, K-12, 4 years college). I moved to Houston and settled all my stuff in with my boyfriend's stuff in his apartment. I went to go visit my family in San Antonio for a few days. Basically, I spent three weeks getting a handle on the transition out of college and then got burnt out on having nothing to do. Finally, my fourth week out, I started the job hunt. This marks the beginning of my first rut.
I spent weeks applying to jobs and the only word back would be a rejection. I was astonished. Previous to this my confidence was sky high. It had always been an breeze for me to get a job. I usually interviewed well, my resume and cover-letter generally got great responses when critiqued, and I finally have a legit education. I thought I would have been able to get a job easily, so it baffled me all the more as to what I could be doing wrong. I became very aware, very quickly that the current economic climate was not conducive for recent college graduates, like myself, to get a job or really start our lives in any stable way. In this particular situation, however, knowing what the problem is does not make it any less of a problem or any easier to deal with.
After this initial plummet in my confidence and confusion over the general direction my life was going, I became immensely depressed and really went through a big crisis. What am I doing? What do I want to do anymore? What should my next step be? How can I justify living with someone when I can no longer contribute financially? Was it a good idea to move to live with my boyfriend when I have no other connections here? These were all questions I just repeated to myself along with the misery of feeling like I completely lacked purpose or ability. Eventually I would try to force myself out of my funk, get re-inspired and apply for a ton more jobs and get shot down a ton more times - and the cycle would repeat itself.
I lose count of how many of these motivation-to-rut cycles I have gone through in the past six months. I got called for two interviews, neither of which developed into anything. I eventually applied to Target, Walgreens, Central Market, Whole Foods, and several other jobs that I am over-qualified for but would love to work just for the income - none of which I got much more than a rejection from. After completely settling and still being rejected, I spent most of September and half of October relatively solitary and inactive - I had basically given up. This was my longest post-graduation-depression/rut; it was significant, but would end soon.
After some personally significant life events occurred in October/November (family crisis, best friend's baby shower, other best friends' wedding, visiting with my college buddies for the first time in a while, and starting a gig tutoring my cousins), I felt like I needed to make some changes and get back on the horse. I have tried for the past month to regain my fervor, my motivation, and that confident initiative I had six months ago when I walked that stage and was so optimistic about how things would turn out for me. I feel like I am definitely still in a rut, depressed and having an identity crisis, but it's not as bad as the ruts before.
I'm not sure if I can get back all of that confidence and passion, or if I am just permanently jaded. At the very least, though, it feels like everyday I make a baby step towards being a normal person again, or I can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel. For some reason, I don't know why (definitely not because 'people' say unemployment and the economy are looking up, because I sure don't see any evidence of that), I feel like my life is going to start again soon - it's surely feels like I haven't had a life of my own in quite a while. I don't know what I'm looking forward to - maybe at the very least just volunteering - but I know this is the best, or most inspiring, rut I've been in so far.
Honesty: The Most Lovely Policy
Sometimes in life you need principles to follow, stand up for, and provide you guidance. As a very introverted and thoughtful youngster, I developed my set of principles at a pretty young age. I had many personal battles in figuring out my beliefs and their conflicts with my family's religious beliefs at the time. As a result I kind of formed my own idea of how I thought I should live my life outside of religion, which - at the time - was too much of an overwhelmingly complicated subject for me to base my lifestyle off of.
#1 Always be honest, and ask others to be honest with me... always. #2 Don't lie, steal, or cheat. #3 Help others as much as possible. #4 Don't hurt, injury, or kill others. ....and it goes on, et cetera et cetera....
My moral set has hardly changed or wavered since adolescence because it has never steered me wrong. However, there have been many times when I've forgotten my own values or compromised them for one reason or another. My most recent compromise was in dealing with a loved one's battle with an abusive relationship. Every resource out there tells people in dealing with loved ones involved in domestic violence situations that your job is to be supportive and not force your opinions on them. You are to let them know that you think it's an abusive situation and just let them deal with it how they may, at their own pace.
For years now I compromised my number one rule in dealing with others, honesty, in order to not seem non-supportive or unloving. I compromised rule three because she didn't want my help, she wanted to be left alone, and every resource out there tells you it's her life and you have to let her make her own decisions. I realize now that my values were never worth compromising. As selfish as it may be to tell her how I feel, she deserves the courtesy of knowing how everyone else sees her relationship and her decision-making skills.
"They" are right, though, I can't make decisions for her or give her ultimatums without alienating her, but I can help her as much as possible by telling her the truth, even if it hurts. She deserves to know the reality of her situation and how it's affecting every relationship in her life. I'm glad I finally found the clarity to realize compromising on my values never helps any situation for me, or anyone involved. I don't know what the backlash from this honesty will be or if she'll even care, but I can't base my values on hopes for someone else's willingness to accept them one day.
I said what I said out of love for her and the need to stay true to myself. I hope she can understand that.
The Most Lovely Zombie
Imagine living in a world where most of your loved ones are dead, the normal social/economic/government system has collapsed, you can't trust anyone, and no-where is safe. This apocalyptic idea is what I fear most, and particularly why I fear zombies. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and crazy. Yes, I know zombies aren't real. I even know the reality of a zombie attack would be more similar to Shaun of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead, but I am a huge chicken. I watch horror films in a state of extreme anxiety and regret most of the time. Even while I enjoy Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's hilarity in Shaun of the Dead, I still get scared and anxious watching it. See, told you, I'm a chicken.
The idea of zombies (or new-age-viral-"zombies") is just the most freaky-scary. With a chainsaw massacre-ist, at least it's just contained to a small town in Texas. Sure, Scream and Halloween and Friday the 13th scare me, because I'm so easily scared, but I can still sleep and not have nightmares after watching them because the likelihood of an insane/psycho-killer targeting me is wildly unlikely. With vampires I at least could live out a fulfilling vampire-life post-transition, if I wasn't quickly killed from loss of blood. With werewolves I would be tortured but human most of the time, and could potentially guard others against myself.
The idea of zombies though is that you turn into something utterly lifeless, unintelligent, and emotionless if you aren't dismembered to death, and spend your life mindlessly slaughtering humans or starving to death without the self-awareness or intelligence to commit suicide. For the oh so many reasons a zombie-apocalypse is my worst nightmare when it comes to horror-flicks, and when it comes to my wild imagination in real-life, there is at least one reason I found to overlook my usually prejudgment of anything involving the word "zombie" - Dead Man's Bones. A sweet, sweet new band that I am offically in love with.
I reluctantly (for the various reasons listed above) listened to the track "My Body's a Zombie for You" a few days ago (their album was released October 6th). I figured it would be creepy and remind me of zombies, which I don't like. Guess what: it is creepy and it does remind me of zombies, BUT I totally love it. I have been listening to it continually for days and gave it the coveted honor of my profile song on myspace. Not only is this song hauntingly beautiful and causes you to think about levels of self-sacrifice for others (my post about my mom was written while jamming to this song), all of their other songs are equally beautiful. So for the first zombie-themed thing to ever not scare the shit out of me in some respect, I give Dead Man's Bones (indie movie star, Ryan Gosling's, band) The Most Lovely Zombie nod of approval.
The Most Lovely Gift
Growing up, you go through many phases of maturity. At some point or another you reach a point when you can look back and truly appreciate what it took for you to be where you are at that very moment. Usually you can attribute your life, your progress, and your ups and downs to one or a few people. For me, when thinking generally, I can attribute who I am and my life to so many people and occurrences, but when I think specifically, it's just one. You see, I think specifically about the gift I was given by my mom and the importance of her in my life. Not, of course, to exclude the importance of my father in my life, but my mother's role was something much different than his. While they both have sacrificed for my livelihood in incomparable ways, my mother's sacrifices are the gift I'm specifically speaking of, or my mother herself is.
This past May my mom, in her fifties, enrolled for the first time in Graduate School. Twenty-seven years after first being accepted to Graduate School but never attending, she has finally gotten her chance to do something for herself. Growing up I never could understand why she couldn't. Why won't she just shut us (her 5 children) off for a few hours a day and do something for herself - go to school, do her art, work a job she loves?, I would ask myself. Now that I've reached that certain level of maturity I reached, well, whenever I did, I can realize how impossible it was and is for her to be selfish. She lives her life to serve us, her most beautiful unintended masterpieces. She and my father fell head first into parenthood and hoped for the best, living each day trying to give us the best life they could. For her, that meant she couldn't bring herself to spend money on herself for school, when she felt she should be spending it on us. She felt she couldn't spend time on her art, when she had so many obligations for us. She felt she couldn't get a job she loved over one that paid better (the same sacrifice my father has made), when she wanted us so badly to have a good life.
Now that me and my four siblings are older (the youngest turning 18 this year), she is finally getting her chance at her own life. Finally getting the chance to be repaid for the gift she gave me and my siblings. Yet, it won't be the same and I can never truly repay her, because her gift won't stop being given our whole lives. She still, everyday, makes sacrifices for us. Sacrifices she shouldn't have to make. She is late to her classes to help us when we're in need. She has sleepless nights when we're in distress. She supports us financially when the recession leaves us jobless. She drives us to work and school, even if she has things she needs to do. And while nowadays I try to make it easy on her as much as possible, when you're young and dumb you feel entitled to this selflessness from your guardian. My best friend once told me that she was questioning her atheism because she thought about her mother and all she's done for her and feels there has to be something bigger, some greater force to thank for the gift that is her mom.
It's this friend who inspired today's blog, my first blog. She found out in June that she is pregnant. At first it was distressing and devastating. She was about to turn 22, not out of college yet, and had not been dating the father very long. I look at her and I see my mom. I see her mom. I see my best friend about to give the best gift anyone can ever give to some one else, life and unconditional love. She may not see the positive side yet, but I can't help but be excited for her. I know that he'll love her like I love my mom and she loves her's. At the same time I want her to be able to succeed at this adventure, with her son, and still succeed at fulfilling her own. I can't help but want to help her in all the ways I could never help my own mom. It's a gift I can never repay my mother for, and my friend's son will never be able to repay her for, but I just wish I could make it easier for her to give.
![mom and me, by mgtrautner[.com]](http://www.themostlovely.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/menmom.jpg "mom and me, by mgtrautner[.com]")