Yes, Before You Ask, I Am Clinically Insane

November, for those who don't already know, is National Novel Writing Month.

I wasn't supposed to be doing this this year. I was supposed to be concentrating on school and finishing projects and writing papers. For the next three years, my life, outside of anything I might do to earn a living or keep my household going, is to be devoted to only one thing -- school. No unscheduled fun. No unstructured creativity. No pleasure art of any kind. Period. Everyone has let me know nine ways from Sunday what my responsibilities are where school is concerned, and that writing 50,000 words of fiction that might not lead anywhere is a foolish waste of time.

I get that. I get that it's frivolous to even consider reading a book for enjoyment or writing anything that doesn't garner a grade of some kind, or isn't at least written on a syllabus somewhere.

But when I told thriller novelist J.T. Ellison that I was busy, that I had school and a life and how on Earth could I possibly fit NaNoWriMo into my schedule, her response was a little different.

"One hour a day," she tweeted to me. "You can find one hour a day."

Here's the thing. I'm a writer. It's what I do. More to the point, it's what I am. I'm not allowed to act or sing anymore, unless I'm willing to do it inside the boundaries of what someone else thinks I am. I'm not working, and I've done all I can do to look for work. I've sent out the little messages in the bottles, and now must await their return.

So, while I wait, I will write. I will write about Hindu Traditions. I will write about Greek Mythology. I will write about Dream Interpretation. And then I will write what I want to write, because I want to write it.

I've included an excerpt below, which comes from the middle of the 3,714 words I've written in two days.  Count your lucky stars -- my cousin, Brian, made the mistake of asking to read it, so I sent him the entire beginning, in all it's unedited glory. Bless him.

********

It’s the hoping that makes it the worst. Hoping that maybe you were wrong, that you misinterpreted, that maybe he will or has changed his mind. That maybe he’ll see what he’s walked away from so cavalierly, as if all the times your body was stretched along his, skin to skin, limbs wrapped around each other, never mattered a damn.

If not for hope, you’d be sad and grief-stricken and broken, but you’d know to stop listening for the phone. You’d not to stop running to check e-mail. You’d know not to want to continue in a friendship with someone that you don’t want as a friend nearly as much as you want them as a lover, though you’ll take them as a friend because, when you’ve lost a love, you need all the friends you can get, right?

That’s what hope does for you. It makes you dream for the impossible. It makes you wait for a promise full of hot air and good intentions. Until suddenly, you wake up one morning and find yourself telling your best friend that you’re wasting the best years of your life being a stalker, when you could be off being stalked.

Hope is sick. Worse, hope makes you sick.

I blame Ancient Greece.

Epiphany

Okay, so I'm in the car today, singing to the iPod, as usual, and Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" comes on, and I'm singing at the top of my lungs, adagio con brio, again, as usual, and thinking how this song is so close to my heart and it's, like, the story of my life, and how many times have I lived this very scenario, and then...

Suddenly, it hits me...

"Grrrrrlllll... you have GOT to get you a new theme song."

WHAM! (Or, When Someone Tells You That Meditation Will Change Your Life, You Should Believe Them!)

The e-mail I sent her began, "Why didn't you warn me?"  And then proceeded with, "Oh. Yeah.  You did."

And she did.

And I listened at the time. Truly, I did.  But I didn't quite believe her.  Well, that's not accurate.  I believed her.  I just didn't understand her.  Apparently, when she wrote in big capital letters in the Twitter message directing me to her instructional e-mail on this meditation "WATCH OUT", I thought she meant something else.  Like, "Have a nice day." Or, "Hugs and kisses to the kids and the family."

She meant, "WATCH OUT!" I know this now.

This meditation - which I won't detail here, other than to say that it involves white light visualization, a fair amount of chanting and a good deal of focused concentration - has turned everything pretty much on its ear.  Study, finances, relationships, home issues, employment issues -- much like June, they're all busting out all over.  Right now, it looks like a big, honkin' mess.  But somehow, I can't help but feel it's the same as when you first start using a new exfoliant.  For the first week or two, the skin breaks out, because the cell turn-over has to catch up to the impurities below the skin's surface.  The break-outs are the skin's way of pushing out the crap (old unneeded dead cells, toxic junk, dirt and germs), so the new, fresh, good skin underneath can come to the surface.

That's what this experience is. I'm exfoliating. I'm exfoliating my whole life. And right now, my whole life has a zit on its forehead the size of Wyoming. So the only thing to do now is to just step up the regime and be more diligent, so it all sorts itself out.  I'm going to be meditating twice a day now, until the life zit eventually works itself out and goes away.

And it will.  I know that. Because out of the thousands of zits that I've had in my lifetime, not one has lasted longer than a week or ten days, no matter how deeply embedded or ugly or painful.  This one is a biggie, so it might take a while.  But sooner, rather than later, it will be gone, and a fresh new layer of cells will be glowing underneath the surface.

Namaste.

~C~

Photo is a cropped, modified version of "Sun Beam" by cgjessica, available on deviantart.com, in its original format here.

We Interrupt This Postlessness To Bring You A Post

It's been a while, I realize.  Been concentrating on school, my life and the Chron, mostly.  But the Naked Chicken needs love, I know.

Have a post ready.  Just making some final tweeks, and getting art permissions and then... we're there.

Hang tight.  I've missed you, my doves.

XO

~C~

Party Like It's 1938!

Happy 80th birthday, Dad.
I hope that you're some place where you can celebrate it as you did when you were 9.

XO

Amanda

What's Up With The Catharine Chronicles, I Hear You Ask

Just a misunderstanding in how I wanted to renew my domain name. Hopefully, it will be taken care of by Monday or Tuesday. Don't have much to say there at the moment, so it's good to have an excuse to take a break.

~C~

How On Earth Can I Be Miserable Today?

It's National Banana Bread Day? And no one even thought to mention it? Boy, you guys could have saved yourselves a ton of mopin' and gripin'. At least for a day.

Surely, that's a good omen. ("It is. And don't call me Shirley.")

In honor of today, then, two little outdoor excursions. One, to Bodhi Tree Bookstore, the other the Panera.

Vive le pain de banane! (De préférence avec des noix de pécan, naturellement.)

~C~

Why Sometimes Facebook and My Space Suck

Could anything be more painful than reading the love poems and love words of the girlfriend of the man you love on his Facebook wall? And knowing he's responding in kind on hers? And... for the love of God... can't they send private messages for that? Does it have to be done in open comments on walls in Facebook and My Space?

This is why I cannot go to his page anymore, even just to see how he's doing.

I hate that it matters. I hate I fell in love. I wish we were friends again.

~C~

A Few Quick Thoughts On How It Ought to Feel

It occurs to me... though somewhat belatedly, I'll grant you... that love shouldn't hurt. I'm not saying it should be a walk in the park every minute of every day, especially if two people are living together or seeing each other every day. People get on each other's nerves, a bad day at the office travels home in a person's empty lunch sack, bills and in-laws and kids make patience thin and fragile.

But overall, love - real, genuine, reciprocal love between two people who respect and care for each other - really shouldn't hurt. Love isn't, by nature, painful. We make it that way. Love doesn't break your heart. We do that to ourselves, by choosing the wrong people to love or loving them at the wrong times. Love isn't mournful or melancholy or morose. It isn't spiteful or sad or full of sorrow and unfulfilled dreams.

Love abides with affection and tenderness. It thrives under the watchful eye of dignity and mutual admiration. It doesn't feel imposed upon by the lovers, or feel burdened by them.

And the minute that those other, not-so-very-nice feelings start to creep in, love needs to be reassessed, and perhaps abandoned for something or someone else. But letting go of love, even painful, inadequate, unrequited love, is much harder than I could ever imagine. I have just let it die a natural death in the past, which can take months. But I don't have months. There's a friendship at stake I'd like to salvage, and it's hanging by a thread, and this love that is so toxic and utterly agonizing will kill it sure as anything if it lingers too long.

So how to let go of the love and still keep the friendship intact? Can it be done? Maybe not. I know very few people who can stay friends when one loves and the other does not. Or worse, when the other loves another. If you remove every photograph or visual reminder in front of you, then how to you get the picture out of your brain? How do you reconcile the fact that someone that you could feel so close to, so connected to, so bonded with, so attracted to, could not possibly feel the same way about you? Why is the Universe so cruel as to give me the capacity to love so entirely, to dangle this person who appears, at least on the surface, to be everything I ever asked for, only to then say, "But, here's the bad news, he's already chosen the little blond rocker who (unlike you) is skinny and pretty and very young. But you can be his chubby gal-pal and hear all his laments about how love - even to the skinny, pretty, young rocker girl whom he professes to love most in the world, to the point of being unable to love anyone else - really only gets in the way of his happy single life. Aren't you lucky?"

No. Not so much in love. Or cards either, which is, to me, the ultimate cheat, because shouldn't there be some kind of consolation prize? I mean, if I'm not going to Vegas to run off and get married to the guy who swept me off my feet, shouldn't I at least be able to go there and beat the house at blackjack? I guess my consolation is knowing that I'm not inconvenienced by the burden of love, that my happy single life remains free and unfettered by something so demanding as the love of another human being. I am free. Free to come and go as I please, without anyone caring when or even if I'll be home. I'm free to stay or go, without anyone to share the time either way. I'm free to forgo the comforts of partnership and camaraderie, of intimacy and daily tendernesses. I'm mercifully unencumbered enough not to know how it feels to have someone tell me - and mean it - that I'm their one and only, and they love me the way I am, and they feel so fortunate to have found me.

I guess I must have pretty much hit the emotional jackpot. Lucky me.

So, I'm moving on, as best I can. If I'm free to stay or go, then I choose go. At least love-wise. Pack up my "in-love" self and go far away from someone -- yet another someone -- who is incapable of loving me in the here and now. I need someone present and accounted for, and there's a tiny part of me, amidst the dark void of "no such thing" that knows he's out there. I've taken a little break from the online places I've frequented, in order to try and make myself available for someone who must certainly be looking for me the way I'm looking for him (or will be, once I can wash this current, painful love away).

And the next time, I'll know it's love because it makes me happy. I'll know because the person that I love will love me back, and not be afraid of that. I'll know because I will be valued as an asset, rather than an inconvenience or an imposition. I'll know because he'll be there, right in the room with me, and life will be what it always is -- messy and complicated and occasionally unpleasant -- but he won't blame that on me. He'll know that's just what life is, and we'll get through it together.

And I'll know, first and foremost, because love won't hurt.

~C~