harsh

tonight my mom was talking about how she's ready to downsize from her house to an apartment or something smaller. she said she knows my brother and i don't think she'd be happy there.

i'm a jerk because without thinking, i replied, "you've never been happy with any place you've lived. why would that change now?"

and i think that's my fear. i fall into the american habit of always wishing for one more thing or focusing so much on what i want to or fear will happen next that i miss everything right in front of me.

the best days of my life so far hopefully felt like that in the moment. i really want to appreciate what i have when i have it instead of after it's gone.

this weekend is the first weekend i've been homesick for the des moines area. there were a few events going on down there that i wanted to go to. and i miss having friends that are close. i know this funk will pass but i'm pretty miserable at the moment. hopefully a visit from my brother will help. the newness of this new life is wearing off. and people are calling or posting to facebook from the old place.

i have no desire to visit the town i moved from. there were great people there, but all of that has been eclipsed by this dark, angry & bitter cloud. leaving was good and needed, but hard.

today was the first day i wondered if i am where i want to be. i do know i am where i need to be. i suppose there's some consolation in that.

cleaning & a poem i found

Maybe I've shared this on the internet before. I'm not sure if I posted it in a previous blog. I'm cleaning hardcore today. The game plan is to try to do 20 minutes of cleaning with 10 minute breaks. I know that seems like a lot of breaks, but I work in spurts. And at the end of the day, at least it will amount to something.

I need to come up with a laundry system, a place for a table and reorganize the kitchen. When I moved in, I just put stuff in cupboards to get everything out of sight. I'm finally ready to settle.

Okay. So here's the poem I found. I wrote it over a year ago and though I dig the sentiment, I'm not in that bitter post-break up stage anymore. Turns out I just felt it was a good poem and thought I'd put it out there.


post break up

when we untangled
that girl in the mirror without him
wasn't me.
that lonely creature
mourned a relationship
as though it had been alive.
like melding to him mattered more
than her sense of self
than her means to happy.
wound around him
forgetting to breathe on her own.
as though he were life support or even life
knowing more now
means craving a kind of companion
that leaves one's heart soul mind intact
those subtle accommodations
are fine for another time
but this girl won't forfeit herself without a fight

brun frogger

When I was a kid, I spent part of the summer out visiting my dad in Colorado. For 2-6 weeks (depending on the summer), it was my brother and I hanging out with each other while Dad did whatever. The perk was that Dad taught computer classes at school so he always borrowed a computer from the school during the summer. We played a lot of computer games.

The command to get a game to run on the Apple IIE (I'm dating myself here... I know) was BRUN followed by the name of the game. BRUN FROGGER. I typed that so many times. Nathan was more of a digdug fan. And then there was Cannonball Blitz, fun to try but we had no idea what we were doing. We never got very far on that one.

One summer day, Nathan did something that annoyed me. I don't remember what it was, but I was SO MAD. I wanted to call him the meanest thing ever. When I couldn't come up with anything mean, I decided to try to just confuse him. "You're a reggorf nurb!" I yelled.

REGGORF NURB = BRUN FROGGER backwards.

There's really no point to sharing this story except it's summer and I'm reminded of summer as a kid. Also, I think it's time someone typed BRUN SLAMB to get me started. I need to be rebooted, both with the blogging discipline and the whole clean up, organize a life kind of thing. I really don't want to be a REGGORF NURB.