Cheer up, Buttercup

It's a funny thing depression; I grew up thinking that I'd never struggle with it because I was a happy child and content adolescent. I never anticipated that I'd feel like I've been hit by a bus or drowned and resuscitated in a tortuous never ending loop, but maybe I was too naive to know better or in denial because well adjusted educated adults don't suffer this way, right?

 It's hitting me hard lately, and I've never felt this severe.

My body hurts all over, food is an afterthought, and on the days I don't work I struggle with leaving my bed. Before yesterday I hadn't showered in a week. I don't know what to do here. Admittedly there are so many people who struggle with this very same disease and in that respect I'm just like them, just like the rest, by no means special, but I am lucky in regards to having the friends and family that I do, the ones who can see that I am in "a place" and call to check in, invite me to dinner, give me a hug, and tell me that if I need to talk they're there to listen.

What do you say to someone who has no idea where you're coming from? How do you get them to see that you want to get better, you want to be happy, but you simply don't know how?

I am trying.

I've taken up skating again, although I'm quite critical of myself because my endurance and skills have decreased since my long hiatus, but I push anyway. I've gone to the gym a few times for long durations to try and focus on other things. I am writing more, applying for jobs at publications in hopes that I land my dream job and my life becomes the fairy tale I imagined as a girl. I'm browsing the dating websites, nothing serious, just a video game where I go back to 5th grade and I'm passing an internet note that reads "do you like me circle "yes" or "no". It's too soon to open up again, but I keep the faith.

Listening to a lot of indie rock lately- trying to cheer myself up, regain momentum, clean my fucking apartment because "squalor" is not a good look for anyone.

Brad has become this intrusive entity in my dreams; I can't stop recanting the moments where in between work and play there was a closeness, an intimacy that I found came easy. I'm saddened still that it's over, but I am proud of myself for being more honest this time- I was candid with the fact that I am insecure and that I need things that perhaps present themselves as a task that is not easily tackled, to care for a person who is suffering from an illness that renders them impossibly resigned.

Unfair perhaps.

I know better, I know there is a light at the end of this tunnel, and I know that there is help out there but I'm weary on this journey and I'm loosing speed. Gotta keep the faith, have to pray harder, have to see a therapist, need to get well.

Somethings gotta give, right?

Thanks for listening, smell ya later.

It's always darkest before the dawn

I am unsure of a lot of things, and I'm pretty scared to admit most things, but what I'm most afraid of is falling in love with someone who cannot stand to love me back.
,
Maybe I'm making up stories in my head, and maybe these scenarios don't actually exist, but I'm so out of control lately I can't tell which end is up and I just got pulled under a rapid. I find myself praying more, evoking the Lord, asking for his(her?) help. This is not the place for theological discussion; I'm just a girl who feels in over her head.

I just don't want it to be over yet, okay?

Playing Fast and Loose

I want to fall in love, and I want to do it with you.

Every day I'm floating further and further away, so close to the stratosphere and closer still to the sun and I'm afraid I'm going to get burned. It's a feeling of unbridled joy and impending doom, how is it that the human condition is capable of this, these multifaceted feelings? I'm 200 dollars in at the craps table in a seedy casino and I don't know the rules.

If anything else, I just want to be in your company and share a cheese plate.

I would love nothing more than to share my cheese with you, so let me do it.

And Therein Lies The Problem

I will admit that I am a jealous person, I always have been and I always will be. I am not perfect so I feel like it's okay to have a fault that so many other posses and while I struggle with keeping it under control, I think I do a pretty good job at not letting my jealousy get the best of me in a female-male dynamic.

I have been extremely jealous as of late.

There are a lot of factors playing into this feeling, for one, I haven't established a ground with my casual partner whom for this post and future posts I will refer to as "Mr. Kite", I should do this, I should have that conversation that I really don't want to have, I should come to terms with that fact that ultimately I cannot force him to not see other people, and I should understand that if he can't keep himself from sleeping with other women, no matter how much I like him, he is not the one for me and I'll have to do what's best for me and let it go.

So many grown up decisions.

I am insecure; I haven't skated for a while and that was always what kept my spirits high and made me feel valued and strong. I remember feeling insecure when my ex husband would go to the sports bar down the street from our apartment, and he'd ask me why I hated going there and I'd feel ashamed, sad, and angry all at the same time and reply "because, I don't look like those girls and I never will".  Tim did a lot of things for me, but I never felt was secure, and I know that when it comes down to it, feeling secure in a relationship is really important.

This realization has made me sad, and I cried for like, an hour last night.

Sometimes I see Mr. Kite and I feel great and I get full of a certain feeling, a certain "Je ne sais quoi" if you will; I tell myself to play it cool and pretend that I'm not totally stoked and he's there but then I'm an awkward idiot with two left hands when he's around and its tremendously e
mbarrassing. I looked at him and I knew that he was a ladies man and that if I were going to do this, I'd have to deal with that, what I didn't anticipate was actually enjoying the time we spent together which is really having a strange, adverse effect on my brain. Sometimes (always) he flirts with the cocktail waitresses which like, a month ago was no big deal, but now I have to really concentrate on not turning bright red with fury and she hulking out.

You guys, I'm really freaking out here.


Why, emotions?!

He was drunk the other night and he whispered something like "let's just keep doing what we're doing" which completely mindfucked me and I felt weird and clammy after that.

I've got to get a hold of myself here.

KEEP IT TOGETHER, ELLE.

Before you, after you

I need to remind myself more often that I can do it on my own and while it's nice to have a person there to back me up, I was here before them and I'll be here after them, God willing.

I just have to make it through to the end of this year.

My cat bit the shit out of my arm.

Goodnight.

505

It's 5:05 a.m. and the whole world is sleeping; I however, am desperately searching the inner sanctum of my brain trying to remember the things I learned in college to ensure that the rest of this blog entry is eloquently put.

My feet smell terrible; I either have to start wearing socks or purchase new shoes, also possibly stop working if that could be a thing where I do nothing but also somehow get paid for that.

It's been a while since I've updated so let me give you the rundown of how my trip to NYC went:

-I hung out with my best friend for 4 days straight
-I saw a handful of the best people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing
-I missed some people that I wanted to see, but I'll visit again soon
-We ate some badass food
-We drank from BKLN to LES, East Village to SoHo
-Got lost in Greenpoint at 5 a.m.
-Remembered what it was like to fall in love with a city
-Saw a Broadway show with James Fucking Franco
-Said Goodbye
-Sprinted through a terminal
-Stopped in Chicago
- Flew home to my cats

You guys, YOU GUYS, I really needed that. Leaving your problems behind is not how you fix things, but it helps a shit ton.

I haven't been with Tim in 3.5 months (+/- 2 weeks) and its okay. I sent my cake and I'm okay. I won't say that I don't harbor some real resentment towards him because I do, but I'm just not that big of a person and I never claimed to be.

3 really is the magic number, y'all.

The more I think about my relationship with Tim, the more I realized that our relationship was based on my ertocised vision of this person who possessed what I believed I wanted in a partner. I was looking for the qualities I'd found in men I'd dated before; Tim was my type: tall, thin, and disaffected, and it's funny that you only notice that all of these attributes were a-typical of the failures of relationships past.


 I am a young hispanic female and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. 

I've recovered and I am content.

Now comes the nitty gritty, the thing you'll judge me for, and the reason for your exaggerated sigh:

*I am seeing someone now. 

*if you count weekly casual encounters + lunches/dinners as dating; I'll need his conformation on this one. 

I am often amazed that I've made it this far because when it comes to feelings one-on-one I am bad about sharing them. I find myself currently in this kerfluffle if you will, with this gentleman person because I don't know how to approach uncomfortable topics of conversation without behaving like a love sick 4 year old.

I'VE GOT KINDERGARTEN EMOTIONS AND I'M UNABLE TO SHARE THEM WITH OTHERS IN A MANNER THAT MAKES FUCKING SENSE.

You see the problem here is that I've allowed myself to become involved with a person, a beautiful, exceptional person.

Did you see that?! FEELINGS?!

!!!!!!!!!!!????

I don't know how to have that awkward conversation where you tell your casual partner that you're "batshit crazy" and hope that he can "see passed that and entertain the idea of exclusivity" without "any pressure". I guess I just really kind of like this guy and like, if he fucks someone else I'm gonna be real pissed off.

I might be jumping the gun here, shit, if he still wants to share a bed with me after this week then we'll consider it progress because my cat attacked him and he got cellulitis and it was his birthday.

Ok, here's a picture, I don't know if any of this made sense.

Bye.

Culture Shock

It was 5 a.m. and a sleepy downtown Houston was all but rid of the trash that appears every night at 2 a.m. from the bar's that line Main Street. I walked to El Big Bad; El Big Bad is a "gastrocantina"- it's a tequila bar with a focus on house made infusions and a small but diverse Tex-Mex menu. Dressed in a polkadot sundress and black flats, eyes still red from lack of a good night's rest; we gathered inside the spot we'd only left a few lazy hours before to shoot a promotion for a local t.v. station. A group of 10 lured here in the wee hours on the promise of free food, a bottle of tequila, and a Cocktail Kingdom "starter kit" a $60.00 value, we are apparently a cheap bunch. 

It was May 5th, which doesn't mean a ton to a lot of people, but in the name of alcohol consumption, society will appropriate entire cultures for the sake of a "significant holiday" to "celebrate" that is devise an excuse to drink into oblivion on a weekday . (e.g.: Cinco De Mayo, St. Patricks Day)

There was a Mariachi band hired to play music in the background; they arrived, set up in the corner of the restaurant, and began to warm up, much like an orchestra before a performance.

I sat in a stool at the bar, saying nothing when the violinist began to play Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: Allegro by Mozart. My ears sprinted with delight, anticipating every note that followed, my little heart in synch with his bow; I remembered what the sheet music for the piece looked like, how the fingers should be placed on the strings, vibrating back in forth with quick, sharp movements making the sound rich and heavy. 

He stopped as suddenly as he started and I began to ponder and I became troubled by my thoughts.

Why did I decide that because he was from Mexico that he'd not have an appreciation for classical music? I was completely distraught. I sat and contemplated this well into the morning; is this discreditation of my own people my own fault? Is there something I'm not seeing?

My father attended university in Mexico and earned a degree in Anthropology; he's a music teacher at an inner city elementary school and taught me so much about the art and music I love so much as an adult, still I found myself confounded that history classes taught in the schools I attended failed to teach me anything outside of cinco de mayo when talking specifically about Mexican history or influence. 

I began to study more closely the accomplishments of Mexican or Mexican/American classical musicians; I found myself with this idea that as a Mexican American child growing up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood the socioeconomic status of my family and the families around me had created this impenetrable bubble where the primary focus wasn't art but family, religion, and hard work; lucky for me my parents were educators and instilled in me early on that there was in fact, a world outside of our homogenous unit. I researched further and expanded my argument, it wasn't just my people, it was everyone who didn't fall under the WASP classification.

I had not until that very moment realized how profound an impact my little neighborhood had on me. There is this slight feeling of resentment toward the school district that allowed this ideology to seep into the school and influence the curriculum. The children we grew up to be were initially afforded two paths; you could aspire to be an artist, to love music or the written word and accept that you'll struggle in poverty for the rest of your life, or you can decide now that you'll leave here, complete the necessary courses and get a job to help your family then start a family of your own like so many of our parents had done. It wasn't until high school that many of us knew that we could go to college, or that those paths presented to us early on weren't the only ones that existed.

I'll preface this with the fact that there is no right or wrong here; we are all instilled with the ideals we were raised with; a strong work ethic and an appreciation for a tight knit family are admirable and desirable qualities so in this there is no fault. I am saying however, that I felt that those very ideas were carried over to the schools we attended and further emphasised, curtailing the length of our educational scope focusing on passing standardize testing and letting liberal arts fall by the wayside, because in the end, you were as smart as your test score dictated and predetermined what you'd do later (Housewife? Mechanic?).

Intelligence is not measured by test scores but by curiosity; if you can add 1 +1 and come to 2 then you're half way right, the instrument of measure here is not  a correct answer but asking "why is it 2?" 

As I made my way through grade school and into high school we moved away from the area that was slowly gentrifying around us and I transferred to a new school in a neighborhood like the one we moved away from, only slightly different. It was at that school that I began to understand that liberal arts was a viable choice, one that I enjoyed and excelled in. Things at this school were different, we were an inner city school located in the heart of a middle class neighborhood whose student demographic ranged from impoverished to upper middle class. I met people who were first generation American's whom had created this unique identity; they were still the kids their parents raised with a focus on family and religion, but they were also people who'd decided that they were going to be artists, lawyers, physicists, for no other reason than being genuinely interested in the subject. Here we were a generation divided.

Here I am now, a girl and a laptop; i suppose then at this point that it isn't just the educational system, or the socioeconomic status of the people around you but rather culture as a whole. Western culture, anglo culture, the best culture in the world; for all their allotments in regards to other culture's achievements has failed to recognize the important accomplishments of those particular people rather acknowledging a select few events that American culture deem relevant. 

I once worried about the future; not so much mine, but the future of us, but I know that the kids I went to school with were the one's who broke free from their cultural restraints to become the minority children who succeeded and joined me in art school and claimed titles such as "valedictorian", "doctor", "professor" and so on. Our parents unknowingly waged a war on art but we proved to have the strength in numbers to claim victory.