Sure. But I wish I was dead.

Updates from the vast, uncanny brightness of San Francisco:

*

I think sitting alone in a bar reading a book is one of the best ways to get to know a city's vibe. I did some of that yesterday and drank a glass of wine that had been bottled as an unknown grape, but the nice lady who worked there explained that since the bottling, the vintner had done a DNA test. Turns out. It's 100%. Tempranillo! Actually, while I do like that grape, it was also the only 10 dollar glass in the bar... so I had gotten it for that reason. Still, cool story, bro.

After that, I tried to get to know the city my other favorite way: spending four hours wandering aimlessly around! I wasn't lost per say, but I did have to take a moment and stop myself from panicking when I realized I was miles deep into the city and completely disoriented in terms of my landmarks. When I travel, I like to orient myself with something when I'm wandering around - a big tower, the sea, a particular street. I think of them like those anchors that free climbers use to hook into their trail. 

But it was fine! I also bought myself a green wrap/cloak thingie with a hood so I won't be so cold. If I was in my twenties, I'd larp the fuck outta that thing. Still, I think it looks okay; someone actually gave me a compliment about it! I have only had two unsolicited conversations with someone here who wasn't helping me in a service capacity: one, the nice lady who said it looked cool, and two, a street guy who yelled "looking at you makes me forget how old I am!" as I walked past - really a weird catcall, but I'll kind of take it? I feel old and ugly as shit these days. 

Cinda tells me that it's 75 degrees in Cville today - 15 degrees colder than sunny California! It feels utterly ridiculous that I'm out here in February and it's so nice back home. I think I did get a little color on my face from walking around yesterday, but it's probably wind burn. 

*

Whew, sleeping last night was a dozy. I haven't had a dream that shook me up so much in such a long time. It wasn't even a bad dream, but my whole heart feels like it was taken out and put back with finger marks all over it. I wouldn't have skipped the experience of it, but fuck, it feels so incredibly raw, like something extremely sensitive being touched too roughly. I feel the emotions in almost a physical way today. Not almost; I do feel it physically. And again, I'm not sorry I do, it's just a lot to hold in my chest. 

The dream also reminded me that I can read in my dreams, and not only read, but recognize specific people's handwriting, even years after seeing it. That was a weird part, since I'd never really thought about whether or not I could read in dreams until I saw an article about how most people can't, and now I notice it all the time. 

*

Okay, what's next? I'm going to eat lunch, work a little more, and then go up to the Fisherman's wharf and North Beach area, maybe try to see a sea lion. 

 Went for a run along the San Francisco trail this morning. Having a nice flat place to run along the water is very nice, but otherwise, this place is very strange to me. I expected to really like it because normally, I would say that I like most places, and traveling from the airport, the landscape looked a bit like Greece. But I don't know, it kind of weirds me out. 

There are all these giant pieces of ugly sculpture everywhere, and the grass is so green and fake-looking. The general layout of the waterfront feels like it's staged, like in amusement park with props and landscape creating a space that people don't really use. The stores are open very weird hours, and everything is expensive and hard to do. Maybe it's because this is the financial district, with Google and all these tech companies next door, so people come here to work or remote in, but don't really live here? I'm not sure.

I'm also very confused about what time it is. I think there are three time zones in my head - one on the East coast for work and thinking about people there in relation to what part of the day it is for them, another which is the literal time zone I'm in right now, relevant to whether or not the Ferry Building market will be open in a few minutes when I try to walk down, and last, the time it is in my head which is some dream-like, confused amalgamation of all of these. It's wild! 

I'm also learning that I dressed like an idiot for this trip. I guess I was in a rush with my mom's thing (which was actually really nice, even after all my petty bitching - I'll talk more about that in another post) but it's also about 10-15 degrees below average for San Francisco this week. I might need to literally go out and buy myself a few warmer things. It reminds me of when we went to Iceland and it was August, so I just didn't have a concept of how cold it would be even though my brain knew it was a cold climate. So the whole time I was just wearing like every shirt I owned and looked like a doofus. 

Anyway, I'm trying to fight my general anxiety and sense of disconnection and actually go do stuff. I think right now I'm going to go poke around the market. I want to force myself to do things instead of just hanging out the whole week at the nearest restaurant and eating their gigantic salads the whole trip. Thursday I'll probably take the whole day off and take a ferry out to Sausalito.

 Ugh, how many things does a person need to pack for two nights out of town?? Apparently 100. I can't believe I'm doing all of this and then turning around and flying out of town for a week. Who will coddle my birds?

Speaking of those guys, I had this dream that I was feeding pieces of a snake to my crows, who (as they often do in my dreams) would land on my shoulders and take it right from my fingers. If I was a different type of person, I think this would be a very heavy-handed symbolic dream, but for me, a weirdo, it's just a very literal dream because I'm always hanging out with my crows and feeding them weird shit.

A former coworker who moved to Staunton a couple months ago messaged me that I guess she's having a hard time and wanted to take a walk with me sometime in Thornrose. It's kind of strange because we had lunch together once, we weren't really friends or even on the same team, but I'm happy to help if I can and maybe point her in good directions in terms of making friends and doing things here. 

But honestly, I only mention it because I had this moment like.... fuck, Thornrose? She's gonna think it's really weird about the crows...

Damn. Ran into that self-titled poem by Molly Brodak again. I love the feeling of coming across a poem I had loved and forgotten about. The ending is such a kicker: 

This is love.
It is a mass of ice
melting, I can’t hold
it and I have nowhere
to put it down.

It's such a strong couple lines. I went ahead and bought the book so I wouldn't forget about it again. 

*

From love to wrath. Isn't this blog a fun roller coaster? I just need to vent a little bit before I go away with the family for this weekend, simmering with familial resentment, let my bad attitude blow up out of proportion, and say something I'm going to regret. 

So my mom is turning 60. I wanted to do something big to make her feel good about it because it's a big deal, but also because I knew no one else in the family would make the least amount of effort - my dad because he is perennially useless when called upon to play roles like father and husband (he literally argued that he didn't need to get her a gift because the gift was his presence at the event I have planned and paid for) and my brother, who isn't doing anything for reasons unclear to me. Maybe he is busy buying boats and investment properties. 

Naturally, I spent more than I could afford on a hot tub cabin for the family, a riverfront rental property which my mom has done nothing but complain about despite not having even laid eyes on the place yet. I love my mom so much, but she's very picky about food and drinks, emotionally connected to specific rituals (when I go to the beach with her and her friends, there's literally a dress code associated with certain days) and has been in a terrible mood the last few months about how she never gets what she wants and never does anything fun. While in part this trip is an effort to make her feel that she does do fun things, instead it's seemingly given the whole event really high stakes/expectations and for her, the sense that it will inevitably be doomed. She's going into it already disappointed and resentful toward me that I didn't book this 200+ dollar a night place into Monday night, even though it wasn't available Monday, which she doesn't seem to believe. 

Anyway, all week, I've been scurrying around like a frantic little rat daughter, trying to get the specific ingredients for the special, time-intensive dinner she wants, pick out particularly expensive bottles of wine and cheeses for the "firepit cheese plate" portion of the event, and having a series of conversations with her where I say for the eleventh time "yes, there is a coffee maker there, no, we don't need to bring an extra one 'in case the one there is broken because the place is junky'". Or "I bet the hot tub is broken." Why would you expect that to be the case ahead of time?!

And let it be said, I am so grateful that I have the means to do something like this, absurdly lucky that I have a great mom who made it to 60 and is fun to celebrate with, and frankly, this is the kind of work that I'm really good at. I like being the person who you can probably count on having candles, a bottle of claret, and a brick of haloumi cheese in her bag. I am, as you may have noticed, bossy! And controlling! And all these things mean that organizing events like this is something I would probably butt into even if literally no one else in my family was going to do any work on it. 

I just guess I've been so annoyed with the narrative in my family, my mom always telling me to my face that I'm "the kid she doesn't worry about" while making these passive aggressive remarks comparing me to my holy brother, "oh we'll have to move to his area when we retire because you're going to be too busy to take care of us," and her general perception that I'm totally fine, I'm always just soo busy having fun with my great life, I'm a fucking cool cucumber who nothing hurts, and all the hard and sad stuff in my life just rolls off me like oil. 

That is SUCH a mixed up metaphor; god, I'm sorry, I must really be upset if I'm writing such terrible sentences! It's kind of all the same shit I was talking about last month, feeling like my actual self or pain or fuck-uppedness is invisible around some of my friends, especially the ones in the know last winter, in favor of a comfortable, fake, fun persona. But that's a lot to get back into, and maybe I don't always need to go so wide with these things. 

So. I texted my brother and gave him the direction that he is in charge of the cake. That is one high pressure thing off my list and will give me time to run around tomorrow picking up the bread and pastries she wanted. Look at me, being direct. 

Okay, I actually do feel a little better for writing out all that complaining. Boo hoo, I have to go to a nice cabin with my mostly-very-fun family. What an ungrateful bitch! It'll be fine. Luray is nice. I will take a pretty picture of the Shenandoah for my instagram. I will make a nice fire. 

 Catching up with my journal a little late tonight. Tonight was a friend over for dinner to meet his new-but-not-that-new-just-lives-in-another-state girlfriend for the first time. She was friendly, pretty, and delightful. It's good to see friends settling in with people who treat them well and are fun. 

Getting past the boring details of my social life, have I ever got a recipe tweak on my french onion soup that I actually want to talk about! So - 1, I actually let the onions significantly caramelize. I'm talking upwards of 60 minutes in the pan, then wine and spices, a tiny bit of flour slurry, then broth. 2, I did the bread + cheese separately on a sheet of wax so people could add their individual correct amount of bread/cheese ratio and the whole thing didn't get soggy and weird. I feel like it was a real breakthrough on a recipe that's been hit or miss for me for years. 

Lordy, everything is about to get so busy. I want to keep up on updating this thing for as much of that time as I can, but it might be a little hairy for a bit. Friday is up to Luray for my mom's thing, then back Sunday, and getting up to fly out of Cville at like 5 am Monday morning. I need to figure out if I have anything to wear that actually might look good. I'm a firm Staunton 8.5, and a west coast 5. My vanity over my rapid aging aside, I think it will be nice to see the Pacific for the first time, even if I'm nervous. It's also really silly that I feel fully comfortable traversing literal miles of downtown Athens at 2am but am a little shy about going to a big city in California and entertaining myself during the day.

 What else? Still hoping for a nice villa dog date tomorrow if it's not pouring. I ran 5 miles today, embarrassingly sore after the 7-8 from yesterday, but good and steady and on track. I felt kind of puffy, but I also think I drank too much last night because I was stressed out from talking to my mom who found everything wrong about the extremely expensive hot tub cabin weekend I bought for her birthday. Thinking some about sex, about how quickly the snow all melted today, and about runs I'll run tomorrow. Okay, probably bedtime. 

I reaaalllly need to get some work done today, so of course I am instead perusing upcoming forest farming webinars. Goldenseal and other non-timber forest harvesting? Hell yeah. And before I know it, it will be morel season again. I'm so crazy to finally get back out to the woods. Ali talked about maybe taking the dogs to the villa Thursday, and it will be warm, but it's supposed to pour. I wouldn't mind that, but I'm sure with the melting snow it will be a soupy, muddy mess. 

Full moon tomorrow. My heart is also a very soupy and muddy mess right now too, although I guess I mean in a good way. The world feels very raw, but not necessarily in an unpleasant way. Like I posted about last night, the snow is so beautiful and I feel very tuned into how pretty the landscapes of my life are in this new season. Algonquian-speaking tribes actually had a specific name for this particular season of late winter and hard budded pre-spring, before all the flowers and green of real spring: popanow. I've always liked that because this time does seem like a fresh, separate season from the early dark, purply browns of November and December. 

I had another nice dream last night - this one was about old school Legends and playing Yan, something I used to dream about a lot, but haven't really in years. It felt good, like seeing an old friend you haven't hung out with in a long time. 

I guess that's so silly and a little childish. But it's been good to have a few nice dreams in a row instead of my usual like "replaying hard conversations from my life but in the dream I say everything right, unlike in real life where I obsess daily over my failures" and the old favorite, "really really unsubtle metaphors." Some kind of energy being gentle with me right now. I appreciate it; I'm a tired old husk of myself.

Hah, okay, and here's something funny. I was nominated for my company's "Tiger" award - the person who best represents the qualities of the Chinese zodiac sign. My nomination mentioned how "quietly brave" and positive I am. Quietly brave! My, my. 

It's probably time to stop chattering at my own blog and go run. I was getting dressed earlier and actually had something of a positive moment where I thought my stomach seemed a little cute and not so out of shape as I've felt recently. It's been good just setting an actual goal with my running, as small and bite-sized as it is, and sticking with it instead of freaking out when I don't have time or the ability to do what I used to be doing every day. Ha, we were talking about running/exercise at Galentines Day and everyone was being so negative about it when I mentioned how much I liked to run. I get that a lot of people hate it, yet every time people go on about it, I want to be like "Cool, the stuff you like is stupid too!" 

The snow is actually quite beautiful. As the sun was setting, all the color of it clung to the mountains and the trees. I tell you what, I could keep this winter around a little longer. 

 

I never really thought of the cat brothel as beautiful, but gosh, the way that the ceramic tiles seem to glow in the snow light. 

I deleted my other post because blah blah blah I was in a bad mood, I'm occasionally annoyed by my good and well-meaning friends, and I feel isolated and insane, what's new? As usual, I woke up and felt better - perhaps aided in part by a really nice little dream I had that made me feel soft and a little warm. 

It's cold today, I'll have to bundle up for my run. I think I'm going to take some of the afternoon off and try to catch up on a few errands. I wish I had something bright, interesting, or funny to say. I do feel like my last few months of posts on this thing have been shit shows, and I'm not really so boring as all that. (She wrote to convince herself, with a note of desperate pleading.) 

 A snow globe day; purple finches eating safflower seeds at my window feeder. Picked up my favorite Charles Wright book, Appalachia, to read my favorite poem Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat. I like the poem so much that when I went to go see him read in Charlottesville a few years ago, I had him sign that poem in particular. It felt fitting, since the poem had been written in Charlottesville, like most of his early stuff. He seemed very old at the reading; being he was hard of hearing, I was instructed to write my name on a yellow post-it note and hand it to him to sign my book. I still have the post-it marking the page in the book: worn pencil lines of my name in my own handwriting. Of course, it's a bit silly to bookmark it. It's the first poem in the book.

A love of landscape's a true affection for regret, I've found
Forever joined, forever apart,

                            outside us yet ourselves.

Each year, I find something to love a little more about that poem. I feel like I've written this exact post every year since I've had this blog. 

Storm warning until 4pm. It looks like ours is the only county that has a real warning up, but the snow seems light and conversational now. I'm going out in it shortly to take the dog over to play before Galentines Day and the rest of it. 

How will I know what I feel until I see what I write? It is cozy in my little house with the snow falling. I like to think about putting on my fatigues and going out into it. 

 Feeling a little blue today and looking up baked macaroni and cheese recipes to take to the super bowl. Galentines Day tomorrow morning too, so I'm bringing bacon and making a mimosa bar like the true bitch that I am. Apparently the snow totals have gone up - just a few inches, but it'll be pretty. I'm tired, I feel out of it. 

I see you in the yard, drinking a beer

Of course the warm weather optimism is infectious - even to gloomy old me, even when I'm the last person online on my team at work, stuck inside working on an emergency hotfix instead of getting a tree blown down on top of me during my run. Like I should be.

Well, well. I took a break to drive downtown for bread. It felt good to listen to music and have the windows down, even if the wind was cold in my hair. I bought myself an iced americano at the bakery and drove home with it held between my legs, wet and cold on my thighs through my running tights. It's melting into itself on my desk now in pretty striations of cream and espresso. 

 Is there anything that makes me feel more contented than getting out of the shower, putting on my old stupid Yan pants and my new dark green apron, and making chicken fried rice for dinner while I listen to one of my stupid albums? Oh, or even better, add a little martini with an olive. A little Hendricks, a splash of nice vermouth, bright green olive, shake hard enough that there are tiny little slivers of ice floating in the top of it like blissful icebergs when I take my first sip. 

I think we all have these little stories we like to tell ourselves about ourselves - a lot of them false. One of my favorite personal ones is that I'm a creature of simple pleasures. Cooking a meal, and doing it in an empty kitchen, in my quiet home, such as it is, is a kind of pure happiness to me, a way to re-order my head into a way that makes sense. But that's also a little bit dumb, isn't it? And there's not really a lot simple about a 40 dollar bottle of gin with olives that I'm so picky about that I buy them from a restaurant downtown, or all the hanging sparkling lights I want to turn on while I do it, or the fancy new apron I'm so proud of, or the extent of the food I've planned out.

I felt good when I started this post; less so now. I have this sense of waffling between being firmly okay, happy and pretty calm, and being completely insane. Or at least depressed and sort of anxious if not insane. Able to quickly grab onto something dark and start to spiral.

I had come in wanting to talk about such silly little things. I wanted to write about things I saw today, the weather, the birds. I was running up a big hill on my stupid 5 miler and I looked to my left and realized one of my crows was with me, in touching distance, just floating over my left shoulder. I've felt so bad at running so I was going slow. He just came along with me, barely flapping his wings, just coasting along parallel to me. I love it when they run with me. Of course, ultimately, inevitably, he veered into my path and landed in the way that they do when they want me to stop and give them treats. I stopped, sat down, and he moved around directly behind me into my shadow where I fed him pieces of old mozzarella until he flew off and I could finish my run.

Almost the weekend. The days are long, but the weeks fly by. 

 Gorgeous little day out. The local witchshop reached out about being out of datura pods, so I took a basket into the garden and passed a pleasant thirty minutes or so collecting them off my moon flower stems. It's sharp and prickly work, but it felt good to feel the sun in my hair and to be doing something outdoors. I'll take them down to the shop, and the owner said they'd give me trade for them. I need to make a trip there anyway. It's been a long time since I've done any spell work - beyond making moon water when there was that well-aspected full moon a few months ago, and some disastrous spells during my big craft push last spring. Even the components I brought for curse breaking have been sitting in my apothecary drawers, since I decided to keep it. (Or at least let it hang out and keep me company, maybe I'll even learn something, but probably not!) But I'm sure I can find something I'd like and use there, even if it's just a few more spell bottles or some brick dust. 

3 days, 3 5-mile runs in a row. Not anything like my usual mileage, but better than nothing! 

 Well, today I spent a little time talking to my tattoo artist and working out my next appointment. In April, I'll add my little northern banded water snake to my moth/yarrow/chicory sleeve, then maybe next year, if I don't like... die in a bar shooting when some idiot has a loaded no-safety concealed carry in his pocket and it goes off randomly (something that literally happened in a place I go last Friday night)... I'll start on a shoulder piece. If I still feel like I want to add stuff.

I really do like my artist though. She's so bright and shiny, she's just nice and happy to talk to. It's strange to me now that my previous tattoo experiences were so stressful and unpleasant despite the fact that I was paying not an insignificant amount of money to get them done. Her being in Virginia Beach also means trying out staying First Landing State Park for the first time that weekend, something I've always wanted to do.

I hope the snake will level out my sleeve a bit. I love my flowers, but they're just a little soft and pretty, and I need something hard to level the whole thing out. Besides, I love those snakes, and I've swam naked with them on more than a few occasions, feeling them brush my bare legs. I like their common names: brown water snake, black water adder, water pilot. I also like how nasty and fierce they seem, even if they're nonvenomous. I like that they look like cottonmouths or copperheads, except for their cute little eyes. And I love that they bite repeatedly. 

 Not so cold today, almost warm at 41.

I guess I was thinking about why I got so upset about the house stuff last night. I think maybe I have some baggage about last winter ("I might have some baggage about last winter" she said!) and a general fear about not having a place to live. There are a thousand good, logical reasons to buy a house, but I think underneath there's some part of me that feels wildly scared about being in a position to lose my place of residence and ending up essentially homeless. I don't want to be beholden to anyone about something as basic as where I sleep, and this whole idea of the landlord having so much control about something so simply essential to my life makes me feel a couple different types of crazy. I feel this animal-like panic around it. 

It's probably fine though. I had a real conversation with Faith today - she's trying to buy a commercial space for their business so if they do sell the house, they can immediately put the money into the new space and avoid capital gains tax. It just will mean more waiting. I can wait. And it's fine if I buy stupid sunflower seeds in the meantime. I'll put them fucking somewhere. 

This is the last kind of quiet weekend on the horizon for a while. Next week, Luray for my mom's birthday, and then flying out of Charlottesville to San Francisco. I've never been to the west coast. (For a second there, I thought you disappeared. It rains a lot this time of year.) A couple of the dumb history books I'm always reading have lately been about the history of that place, so that's kind of a nice coincidence. I'm supposed to be working, but might take half days to explore. 

 Dear Diary, 

I feel bad. I'm at the point with my winter depression where it feels like a constant, throbbing ache in my chest, like one of my organs has been removed and the rest of my insides are just pulsing around the gap, creating a weird feeling of pointlessness. I can't sleep without having terrible dreams - not even my usual convoluted, earnest things, but geysers of blood, turmoil, ruin, and frightening things. It's like the smallest stress from my life - a phone call unanswered, an appointment that hasn't been rescheduled, an unresolved conversation, a memory lodges itself in my brain and mutates. Mercury retrograde snaps back into normal and I am left feeling more dislocated than ever, less centered. I had this feeling that things should be resolving and becoming more real to me, not the opposite.  

 I'm so fucking tired. 

 Couldn't sleep, right up until about 30 minutes before it was time to get up for my India-timezone grooming. At least the sun is coming up and it's beautiful and rosy.

February already. The year already running fast. Rabbit rabbit, or maybe tiger, tiger is better for the lunar new year and start of the year of the tiger. Born in 86, I'm a fire tiger sign myself - which lines up nicely with my astrological fire alignment and Sagittarian obsession with optimism, independence, and ...poor self control? Yeah, probably. I made Sichuan udon noodles with flank steak, dumplings, fish balls, bok choy, and mushrooms last night. Noodles for luck, right?

I dreamed that one of my crows had some kind of horrible wound. I dream about them a lot because I guess I'm insane - usually recurring, happy dreams though. A friend of mine in high school used to say that when we dream about another person, it means that person is dreaming about us too. Just in case they also had a nightmare about me, I gave them extra breakfast this morning. Being in the cold yard in my pjs, putting down their food with them on the ground pecking around me reminded me of when I had chickens in high school. Some nice, normal people have backyard chickens!

I have got to get a few stress items off my list; I'm sure that's part of why I've been having trouble sleeping this week. I'll feel better when this release is out the door too, of course. I think I want to kick my next tattoo session down the road a bit; I'm eager to add my snake because just the flowers and moth look a little... too... sweet? But I also haven't really had a chance to get used to it as it is, since I got it and then it was immediately too cold to ever really look at. I'm supposed to go back down in March... that's just seeming a little soon and a lot of doing. I wish my artist were closer and it didn't mean basically needing to at least stay overnight down there.

Vanaheim this weekend. Just the thing for a little bit of light insomnia. 

 Fucking so sad today. I had most of a post done full of other things - noodles, little feelings, the lunar new year and being a tiger sign -  and then 1pm hit and everything seemed so changed. I spent the whole afternoon getting tragic and terrible updates and worrying about a little town I love a lot. One of the men killed was a coworker's ex-husband and the father of her kids, so the details slammed into us at work a lot faster than the general public. I remember sitting on the bank of the Middle River a couple hundred yards from where the probably now iconic picture of the shooter on the ground was taken. In my memory, I'm there eating an apple.

Meanwhile, my mom has to go teach school tomorrow in this same fucking country.