I'm not really like this, I'm probably plightless

My thing comes out tomorrow. You know, my thing, my thingie, my thing! Fame at last! Just kidding. Well, not kidding about the thing, but you know.

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My fugue has taken a weird turn today. All month I have felt disconnected from myself, unattractive, cautious with every thing. I have snapped at friends who inquire too pointedly, or with too much entitlement. Self-protectiveness has been an ugly trend in myself this year, and this particular season, I've felt truly paralyzed by it. I was never like this.

But today, of all days, when it's pouring and grey, I feel absolutely on fire, utterly consumed with warmth and wanting.

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I had one of those weird, portentous dreams last night. I was in kind of a shit raft with a friend, and we were trying to paddle it upstream these rapids for some reason. (A reason I had not really condoned--we were arguing, and I was being quite frank about a lot of things.) Still, the water shooting underneath us was strange, beautiful, and clear, and we could see all the fish moving around. Something odd and magic about it.

I dream about boats a lot these days, ever since Travis and I took the canoe up the Little Otter to get to Falling Creek at Isaac's farm this summer. We were moving a lot of stuff up a long ways--many more miles than we'd realized--and it was hard, visceral work: getting out of the canoe and dragging it over deep pits, submerged logs, and snags, walking it through flat areas, scrambling over rocks larger than my car to haul the gear over rapids and line the boat down safe. It was utterly exhausting: seven miles longer than expected, but one of those experiences that gets into you, like when you spend all day in the surf and then close your eyes to see waves.

I've been wondering what to do; I'd give anything to talk to you

A big couple days. I'm so tired and wrung out. Should be in bed, because I think I might be coming down with something, but instead I'm drinking tiny cups of sake and looking at things I wrote. When my head feels like this, I want to play with my little stories. I wish I could write something good right now. I want to have that feeling like being excited to get into a scene or a piece, but tonight, I'm just re-reading old stuff. 

I like to write seasonally. I want to write summer stories and bright, happy scenes in the summer. In the darker months, I write colder things. The thing I'm looking at tonight is a sad story, one that has come to mean a lot to me, but it ends on a scene in summer. It all was enough to make me a little soft and dreamy about a season that didn't actually pass too long ago, even if I'm relieved the unseasonable late autumn warmth has finished. It makes me all feel a little dumb and vulnerable.

Being home this weekend was odd. I felt a strange doublethinking, like I could see fields I had once loved that had become shopping centers as vividly as the shopping centers. I could sit on my living room step-down, where the wood floors meet the carpet, and remember when I was a teenager and my house was the first house framed out in an empty meadow, and I sat on the boards in that exact spot and let my legs dangle into the basement. Strangely inhabiting of my old self, with all her faults, bitterly-sad naivete, and charms. Hard to hang out in that headspace when I've been feeling a little disconnected otherwise.

Don't be afraid

I'm thankful that when I'm up at 6:50, smashingup mashed potatoes, my dog loves to dance with me in the kitchen to Ain't Nobody's Problem.

singing so much softer than I did back then

If you spend the weekend having conversations in your head, it's best to do so ranging with a pup in Vanaheim under the Hunter's moon where the old trees and pastures make your heart gentle.

well I cursed and I cried but now I know

I came closer to dying last night that I have in a long while, when our furnace burst, and I slept for a full night in a house slowly filling with smoke and carbon monoxide. It was hard to wake up, and when I did, I went down to the source to try to stop the smoke. I felt poisoned and housefire sick all day.

Tonight, my house was heatless, waiting on the repair, but clear. I lay down with my pup on the couch and he put his head on my shoulder and stretched out alongside my body on his back, paws up, like he likes to do. He's turning all of a sudden into a real big dog instead of a little snugly puppy, and I'm remembered how big his breed will get. He still thinks he's a lap dog. He still thinks he's a dog that can lay his whole big sprawling body on yours and let you wrap your arms around him and that's just perfectly fine with him.

I thought that I should feel something about a legitimately skin-of-my-teeth near death experience, but I didn't. Josh said, "that's how people die in houses." I guess asleep in a house I love is probably not such a bad death as the ones I can imagine. The moon is very full.

Some real talk

I realize I haven't written in this thing for longer than I've ever let it go. I wasn't having some personal crisis or anything. I'm sort of over having a big dramatic episodes about stuff.

That said, there were very real reasons I wasn't using this. I still feel those reasons, but I started thinking about them today. I was on a run by myself, and it was one of those emotional vomit runs since it's been a hard week and I've had to suppress a lot of anger. So often now I run with other people--Josh, my run club, or Thomas--I don't get a lot of time to have those long runs alone where stuff boils up to the surface and I get to just feel my feelings.

As I was running, I was thinking of this year and the stuff that has changed. The places and things I used to associate with happiness and the people that have been lost to me. I've kept a journal every year of my life since I was 13. Of everything I lost this year, am I really going to let this get taken away too?

I also started a new blog, elsewhere, that I publish much more publicly on facebook and stuff. It's not quite the same content as this; this was always my little secret space that only one or two people in my life knew about.The other blog is obviously much, much more public. Still, I miss having this space to process my feelings and unravel what I think about things.

2016 is almost over, thank God. It was such a classic Saturn return of a year. I feel like I changed so many things in my life in such a short period of time. I guess that's a good way to do it. I'm looking forward to my birthday in December and saying "Okay, I choked that all down, what's next?" It wasn't all bad, it was just so much change, so rapidly.

- I got a new job. When I left grad school, I wanted a break from academia. I joked to my writer friends that I was a corporate sell-out. Now I'm fully on a track that's totally different from anything to do with writing. I have a job in software at a Fortune 500 company, and I'm doing great at it. It feels really strong to be working in a technical field after being the arty-writer-teacher type my whole life. I still tell new people I meet that I'm a writer before I catch myself and explain what I do. That's odd, but it's helped me to be working with a bunch of engineers and techheads, too. I think differently now than I did last year.

-We got a dog. Josh and I are in a really different chapter of our lives now together. We're doing a lot of stuff together we thought we'd never do. A lot of weird, cool, exciting stuff. And we're bringing the dog.

-I have almost a whole new friend group. For the first time in my life, I have a squad of female friends I do things with. I know a ton of new people in my town. I can walk into a bar downtown and know almost everyone. That's a strange feeling for a person who leans toward introvert. I thought when Legends ended, I would have all this free time, but now I feel like my life is busier than it has ever been.

-I'm writing, and getting published like nobody's business. My audience just got a lot bigger.

-My closest friend left my life, probably for the last time, which has been a defining factor of the year. It wasn't something I didn't see coming; he's always been the kind of person to quit things if he wasn't afraid to quit them. I don't say that coldly or bitterly, it is just the truth about him, and I always knew that one day would come where his goals were more important than whatever it was I meant to him. His own fiance warned me about what type of man he was when he and I got close, and though I'm still not sure she was right about him, over the years I thought about her words. Still, he was such an incredibly important part of my life. It hurt me that after everything we'd been through, he didn't have the strength to say goodbye to my face, which is something I've had a hard time finding closure about. There's so much I never got to say.

I'm okay about it, though part of me feels like I'll be having stairway conversations with him in my head for the rest of my life. I know he isn't having stairway conversations with me--honestly, he's probably a lot happier directly because of this. And that's okay too. I'm not childish enough to pretend my unwillingness to give up on people is a strength.

-This election was a big deal to me. As a girl who grew up in a culture that eschewed female pastors, that taught that a woman's place was in service and obedience to her husband, that encouraged me not to have a career, that literally told me that my own body was sinful and should be covered up, voting for the would-be first female president meant the world to me. The failure of those ideas, and particularly the people who I thought were my friends and allies on the left, was crushing to me. It feels very personal to me.

I posted on twitter that I felt like 2016 was like the shitty stub end of a cigarette that you started to smoke on a drunk impulse and now just don't want to finish it, but your mom didn't raise you to waste anything. A friend arranged a sort of public support group on Wednesday night for people feeling sick about the election, and I went to try to support her. Hearing the people who were weeping and devastated about this whole year, I felt tired and ready to move forward. My life has a certain momentum these days. A lot is going very well. Tonight, I'm going out to see my beautiful town. I'm going to take my veterans roses. I'm going to bake bread.

So that's some real stuff. I mostly couch everything in a fine level of bullshit that I put up on this thing, but nobody reads this anyways, and it made me feel something to write it. Maybe the person I'm well on my way to becoming will read this in a month or a year and it will mean something to her. For now, I don't know that I'm keeping this blog, but I felt that I owed myself some explanation.