Jabber some Truth Rubies into my Ear-holes (a memoir...just kidding)

10/20/2012

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    This week's disclaimer: I wrote most of it, and did all of my editing, on the website, so there are probably icky spelling errors and what not. But at least the formatting isn't fucked.

    I had a baller work-out at the gym the other day, upper body and core. It's been a while and it felt good. I've gone to my old gym location the last couple times, and even though it's older, I like it better. In the winter, anyway. In the summer it's unbearable due to the brilliant idea of floor-to-ceiling, west-facing windows. I like the way it's split up into two stories instead of one giant room like the other one. Oh well.

    I've been doing work on this damn personal statement and I have my first, very rough, mostly unuseable draft. But, dude, I have a draft! Ideas are starting to pull together into one larger idea. Right now I've got all the very personal, hippie, philosophizing shit down. But I am fully aware of the need for concrete goals and reasons why I want to go to _____________, specifically. I'm just happy my brain and my fingers are working together again. I hate it when they fight.

    I also called my grandma yesterday and we have a Scrabble date after my chemical dependency assessment on Wednesday, so I feel good about that, too. I love my grandma, and I can't neglect spending time with her. She's my only living grandparent and our relationship means a lot to me, and her, too, I know.

    I don't know if you're whole shpiel about not being able to get shit done in my condition was serious, or good, ol' fashioned reverse psychology, but whenever I start to get lazy, I remember you saying, "I don't think you can do it," and I'm like, fuck that.

    I have ten days to get everything done, and then I have to send out my recommendation requests on October 31st, because that will be two months away from the first deadline, December 31st.

    Were you the one that suggested I make some kind of chart to organize each school application process? I think that's a good idea. I think I'm going to make an Excel spreadsheet, very clean and thorough, easy for anyone to understand (rather than abbreviated to the point where only I can understand it) and I can send it out with my packets of crap for my recommenders, to make things as easy and painless as possible for them.

    Anyway, one weird thing is that I've been emailing back and forth with my dad, and a few days ago, I guess he just stopped and I haven't heard from him even though I've sent him an email a day. So I'm a little worried, but don't really see what I can do from here. Hopefully he's just mad at me =P

    Anyway, here's my way too long, "she's obviously the product of hippies" rough, rough, very rough draft. It's my John Wayne draft, if you will:

    Hello there, dropping by a day later to post a third-ish (if you count the sentence directly above this one) disclaimer. I must reiterate that I am 100% that this will maybe have one usuable paragraph, if that, out of the whole thing. I do think it has potential to be worked on and turned into something else in the future. Yeah, it was kind of bugging me all day, thinking about you reading this and thinking I'm thinking this is how you write a personal statement. I'm just happy I wrote in the general direction of my ultimate goal. Okay, I think I can live with it now. I was going to just take it down. But I'm stepping away from the computer...

    Katherine isn’t my real name. Actually, that’s a lie, it is my real name, but a year ago, I started going by Phoenix. My life, for too long, had not been what I wanted. I was off-track and lacking direction. I married the wrong man and moved to the wrong place. We made the decision to move after I received my final MFA rejection letter. I sunk deep into a dismal interval of self-indulgent misery and stayed there for two years. Then, I left my husband for another man (also wrong), my dog was shot to death, and my truck repossessed. After nearly losing my life at the hands of wrong man number two, I humbly returned to my dad’s home in Bellevue, Washington, hoping to eradicate the deadweight of pointlessness that had draped over me like a carcass ever since I received my college diploma.

    I enrolled in a memoir writing certificate program at UW Extension. Deadlines motivate me like little else, so I chose the first class meeting as my workshop date. Writing came back to me. Actually, no. I came back to it. I felt like a new woman, and I needed a new name. Phoenix, the mythical bird, rising from the ashes, born again—besides the bird part—resonated with me. 

    I used to think that I was lost because I didn’t fully know myself, because I couldn’t pick a label and stick to its form. Last summer,during my month-long residence at The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute,I had the opportunity to learn from two professors of opposite minds. One saw me as a cynical, film noir heroine who used hard-living and whiskey-guzzling to hide her vulnerability.

    The other professor broke my heart—temporarily—with terms like“street,” and “subliterary,” to describe my writing. He said, “My heart sunk when I read the words, low self-esteem,” declaring it a superficial answer to a deep question. Speaking to the whole class about the importance of honesty in our writing, he told us that most structural problems can be fixed with more honesty. When I returned to Bellevue, I shared some work with my writing professor from the UW memoir class. Layers would make my writing stronger, she said. Layers, such as the narrator’s thoughts and emotions. Rising to the literary level would remain futile until I figured out how to conquer layers, which felt absolutely connected to the concept of honest writing. I tried and faied for years, and feared I'd never be deeper than the street itself. The state college-educated shame of subliterariness hung over me as if it were a double-sided sign that I was forced to wear in public until I learned my lesson.

    Searching through my memoir class documents, I found something that called for my attention. Reading it clicked open a new window inside me and I knew what everyone was talking about, and I understood what I couldn’t until that moment. Blunt truth comes from a place of being in it, while honesty, separated by the distance of time, gains perspective from being above it. .

    Absolute, factual information, is no problem for me. I will divulge anything, too much, at times. Truth is a hammock, contouring to my outline, keeping me safe and comfortable inside its hug. Honesty is a hotel bed in southern China during a winter rainstorm. Cold and hard, just like the laser stare my ex-husband gave me as I walked out of his life into the arms of another man. But everyone knows deep down that nothing changes in the warmth of a hammock. And why would it? 

    Everything, however, changes in a hotel bed in southern China during a winter rainstorm. Morning, you wake up warm against the stone block beneath you, tucked under a blanket made of wood, and you realize that you slept all through the night, and not just slept, but slept better than you have in years, and you know that a bed that hard and cold serves a purpose, and that purpose is to toughen you up and make you better.Glacier beds of loneliness have always made me stronger. Avoidance of difficult experiences never got me anywhere I wanted to go, besides a hammock.
     
    Podcasts and are a serious addiction for me, so much so that I felt it would be wrong for me to leave out this fact about myself. I absolutely cannot live without a funny person jabbering in my ear-holes. Lately I’ve been buzzing through episodes of WTF, hosted by the stand-up comic, Marc Maron. He interviews people in the arts, most frequently other comedians, many of whom had some type of relationship with him in his past, and not necessarily good ones. Some of them, in fact, existed solely within the space between Maron's ears. He begins nearly every interview with an apology, and then an admittance of his self-centered thinking during that time when, inevitably, he said or did something hurtful to his guest. The interview commences, and without hesitation, he asks his guests questions that force them to go deeper than they had ever intended, and they go willingly, sometimes without realizing it until halfway through the hour long interview.

    Maron doesn't hold back, either, speaking in a tone resonate of one who has found the balance between bluntness and earnestness. He admits his body image and food issues, his rage and intense jealousy, his fears and insecurities. The questions he poses to his guests are not only attempts to better know his them, but to better know himself. As a listener, I can say that his show has helped me look at success differently, to be more patient and accept where I am, rather than pining for an elevated status that I have yet to earn. Even the greats had to play cold, half-empty rooms once. Paying dues, I understand now, is part of the process, like sleeping on a slab of wet clay in China, or writing words that obliterate the possibility of future readers referring to me as a femme fatale.  

    Ideally, honesty inspires, strengthens the link between people, and fills in the blanks, which we nearly always misinterpret otherwise. I had to force honesty to reveal itself to me, but since then, I find more clarity every time my fingers hit the keyboard. My objective is ascension toward the ideal balance of accuracy and insight, while owning my history, including my streetness, because it is a part of me. It’s all part of me, and I will give all of it to the page, sloughing the ashes of my past with every word. 
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