Tag: loss

Cutting your nose off to spite your face

  • Love, Actuarially: How Mathematician Chris McKinlay hacked OKCupid to find the girl of his dreams.

    How typical. As soon as I begin to believe, it’s over. I am a fool. My lover abandoned me the day before we were to go to Vegas together for a captivating weekend of circus and adventure.

    I asked for him to come anyway. If he needs to put this relationship down, I respect that need, but please respect mine, too. Let us do it together and with grace, with sympathy and care. End it with a whisper, I begged him, so that everything that came before could remain valid, so that the joy we found in our hearts in each other could stay alive, so that he would not have left a terrifying gulf of pain between us. My heart could remain connected to the world. We could stay open. We would still have undamaged space. He refused.

    Now there is nothing that does not hurt. I have been running through my entire catalogue of cognitive reprogramming devices to try and repair as rapidly as possible, but it is impossible to remove this much pain on pure “I said so” alone. And it hurts that I know that he isn’t going to help me and it hurts to know that it is possible that his life never offered the compassion tools that teach a person how.

    (I imagine he might be the only person more sorry about this than I am. And making a decision one will regret for reasons that will pass will probably only make for more sorry over time.)

    Meanwhile, I try to stay distracted, the same way it’s better to talk about anything but an injury when you have to walk on it. No downtime. No interstitial moments that aren’t filled with something. Songs on repeat with lyrics or chord progressions I want to learn, playing Tetris-like repetition games while I mentally recite lists of scientific facts, “In order for nucleotides to..”, or practice foreign languages, “Estoy desconsolada.”

    There is only so much strength to this sort of knowledge. For such tricks to work, there need to be new associations, better associations, you need to have happier threads, spark your neurons with joy like forcing a new path through a forest. And I haven’t had such a thing for a very long time, actual years, nothing could get in until I discovered our connection. Now that my only well has been poisoned, I am left without comfort. (Appalling, dire, it almost feels like life has reset back to quotidian norm.)

    So I called out to my social media networks, asking if there was anyone who could come with me. It felt unnatural, but it was all I could think to do. Everything had been paid for, I had been saving for a year and I couldn’t afford to pay for it twice, and there were only a few things I had warning enough to cancel, (some surprise reservations, something on Friday night, a flower delivery on Sunday). And it would be something different. New pathways, new experiences. But even so I knew I couldn’t do it alone. There would be nothing except in relation to that void and his absence would overwhelm the world.

    It took hours, until almost midnight, but eventually the internet shivered, shook, and delivered. People had been looking at air miles, at school schedules, at spontaneous adventure savings accounts, had been reaching, but failing. Until there was a shift. The gears caught together. Esme offered to drive me to the Bellingham airport, That 1 Mike wouldn’t be leaving for his tour until Saturday morning, Joshua was back from Africa, and a woman named Cypris had recently moved to Nevada, CJ said, and you two would get on like a house on fire. Then Cypris showed up in the thread, summoned by his tag, and promised a visit with the tigers, panthers, and the lion that live on the property she’s moved to with her love. It was the tipping point. I would not be alone in the most artificial city strip on earth while my heart was breaking. There would be company, authentic company. And that would be enough to go on, enough to carry my through.

    So thanks to you, my internet, I went to Vegas anyway. I cried a lot. (The universe had a lot of extra fuck you saved up for me, too, like being denied entry onto Friday’s flights and the only empty seat on the Saturday morning plane being right next to mine, where he would have been.) I melted down a lot. But I also social hacked a $350 plan ticket with a chocolate bar, visited my favourite bronzes and the mantis art car with Joshua and went to the sexy Cirque Du Soleil show with a circus person who was pulled on stage and gave an incredible performance and we rode the roller coaster on top of New York New York twice, once in the very front, once in the very back, and Cypris and I made faces together for the coaster camera and I got to sleep on a couch in a pretty little house in the desert instead of the soulless hotel room and I woke to savannah-style roaring and I walked on a new kind of stilts and I pet big cats and was licked by tigers and scruffled a gigantic lion and held paws with a panther and fed a different panther and climbed all over Red Rock canyon. And it was magical.

    I wished the entire time, a rolling dull thunder, that he was there to share it with. I wanted to be the person who brought him to lion scruffling. To introduce him to these beautiful people. To kiss him in the art gallery. To pick him up and spin him in the line for the roller coaster. To coax him to laugh in the two-person sized bath I sat in alone. Of course I did. I still do. (I had semi-promised him a red rose in a love letter, so I carried one with me from the circus for him anyway and left scarlet he-loves-me he-loves-me-not petals in all the important places. I shook the last of them from the stem as confetti over my new friends and I at the airport. I told you I was a fool.) He would have loved it, we would have blazed with light, we could have had a record breaking excellent goodbye. But we didn’t. But I didn’t miss out because of him. That was important. Now I have these moments. They are shaded with loss, but still beautiful. Thank you.

    TLDR: Mourning. Loss. Suffering. Friends. But you know what else is important? Majestic one-on-one interaction with fucking gigantic cats.

    • Let’s Throw A Riot (Because They’re Romantic)

    It seems a number of us have all independently decided that This Is The Year We Bring Blogging Back, (More Specifically Livejournal). And I could not approve more.

    I’m not sure why other people are trickling back into the fold, but for me my recent trip was a stunning reminder of what we had all built here. Just about everything positive in my life is somehow built on the foundation we created. My happiness is due to you and this place and what we made. It goes way back; I wouldn’t have found this apartment, wouldn’t have known about the concert I went to when I met my flatmate David, wouldn’t have connected so deeply with so many people. I wouldn’t have been able to make it to California if it weren’t for Jedidiah, who I met through Karen, who I met here nearly a decade ago, but only met face to face last year. I wouldn’t have had the chops to write about my godmother‘s house in Santa Fe, I wouldn’t have had such fantastic company in San Francisco, trying new things and feeling loved and inspired, I wouldn’t have felt so at welcome in Seattle or know how to deal with my people there, I wouldn’t have felt so safe running away with a complete stranger to Napa Valley. This was my very first community, the place where I started to begin.

    Our network spread across the entire world, an empire upon which the sun could not set. Tel Aviv, Madison, New York, London, Santiago, these are all homes to people that have shaped me, many of whom I have never met, but carry always in my thoughts. (There’s a woman I know through Livejournal that I haven’t heard from in five years, but every year on her birthday I post to her last entry, letting her know that I still love her and probably always will.) And I want that back. I want all of you back.

    I want myself back.

    Somewhere in the mire of crappy relationships and scraping to get by in one of the most expensive cities in the world, I lost myself. I withered and I burned out. I was isolated and torn down and I let the bastards win. Radio silence took over. So this year is the year I push back, the year I clamber out of the rubble and get back into business. I’m going to write, I’m going to take pictures, and I’m going to badger you to do the same. Be my pen-pal, be my friend. I’m going to demand that you share and want you to demand it from me in return. I want a life worth fighting for again.

    -::-

    So who am I, anyways? Given that my audience has grown considerably smaller than the thousand-plus regulars who used to read my journal, but spread to more people that I’ve actually met, it’s probably time for an update. Another member of the Great Coincidental LJ Revival posted a massive introduction and I’m going to shamelessly swipe it because she used to write speeches for Jack Layton and who am I to paraphrase greatness? So here you are, a paragraph by Audra, “I was thinking that I should do a little intro, for all of the new folks. And then I realized that probably a lot of the LJ friends I’ve had for a decade could also benefit from an update about my life now. It’s easy, especially if you are connected by Facebook, to feel like everyone knows what is up with you always. I know that’s not actually how it works, though. More than once I’ll see someone post about a new baby or something, and not have even known they are pregnant. Facebook does a lousy job of helping us keep up with each other, really, since it only ever shows us content from people we have recently interacted with. Kind of defeating the whole keep-in-touch purpose of Facebook?”

    So here I am: I’m a creative 31 year old Cascadian woman who writes, takes pictures, and is commonly understood as being “from the internet”, where my name is either Foxtongue or rarely, Dreampepper. I don’t know everybody, but I seem to live two degrees away from everybody, so if I don’t know you, it’s highly likely I already know your friends. (No, it’s not creepy, it’s hilarious. Just accept it, it hurts less when you don’t struggle.) I cohabitate with a vegetarian, contrarian flatmate, David, who is studying to be a primatologist; two black cats, Tanith and Tanaquil; and two ferrets, Selenium and Pepper. (Selenium is cuter, but Pepper makes up for it by being the biggest ferret I have ever seen). We share a two bedroom apartment in the Commercial Drive neighborhood of Vancouver, BC, that I have painted fuchsia, scarlet, orange, white, and gold, and we have filled with books, art, and houseplants. David likes clutter, I do not, but somehow it still works.

    I used to have cool jobs, like “special effects pyrotechnician” and “co-founder of an after-hours nightclub”, but right now I’m on a more pedestrian path as the HR and Culture & Process person for a small IT support company based out of White Rock by the US/Canada border, so I spend my a lot of work-related time commuting as well as being paid to sift through applicants and write corporate documents like Standard Operating Procedures or Job Description Templates. Even so, I am lucky that my employers understand that culture creation is needful and doubly-so that I have nearly free rein to write whatever I believe will get the job done. This means I regularly put sentences like “Don’t take it personally, someone will probably have candy for you” in procedure manuals. (Given half an opening, I will also put goofy lines from the original Maxis SIM:Earth manual in, too, but I haven’t had the chance yet. SOON.1)

    I also volunteer as a facilitator at CanSecWest, a security conference here in Vancouver that’s held annually every March. I love it there, I basically move into a hotel with a bunch of my favourite people and help make piles of awesome. There’s very little sleep, too many black t-shirts, but there’s also catering, a lot of love, and I’m always super happy to be part of it. (Even as it sometimes makes me seem paranoid to those outside of the security sector).

    Aside from work, I have a couple of small projects, but nothing like I used to. It used to be that I was elbow deep in massive works all the time, but that went away when my interiority died, so now I only have a couple of small things: gamelan practice, a coding class, a language class, and my FB Portrait series, an endeavor to take a proper portrait of every single one of the 1000+ Facebook friends I’ve been lucky enough to collect. I would like to take more on, but there’s only so much creativity on tap right now and I have to be careful not to overwhelm what fuel I’ve managed to rekindle. I’m already three years behind on my photo processing! I’ve never even SEEN any of the pictures I’ve taken at Burning Man. Ever. Right this minute, I still have to deliver three weddings, two birthdays, a maternity shoot, about 30 Facebook portraits, and my Daily Photos from two years ago. (Which is why, if you say, “I want you to come up with my portrait!”, you’re going to get something boring, just like the last ten people who told me the exact same thing. Suck it up.)

    Recently I’ve been lucky enough to travel a lot more than I have before: Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Madison, Montreal, Minneapolis, Mountain View, Napa, NYC, Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Seattle, and Vegas. Beautiful things and moments and people and discoveries at each, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. There’s so much of the world to explore, so many people to meet, so many things to do! In that, at least, I will always be greedy. I only get one chance at this and enough of it has been wasted. My goal is still to leave Vancouver for somewhere bigger, but in the meantime I plan to collect more lunatic adventures like, “that time I had that fling with the astronaut” or “that time I played pink slips for panties in a midnight drag race on the I5 and won” and use those to keep myself alive.

    Anyhow, I want you to talk to me. Introduce yourselves, inform me or remind me who’s out there listening. I want this to be a safe place. This used to be our playground and I believe that together we can bring it back to life.

    1. It’s been over 20 years, but I still use this joke. One day my network will bring me in contact with the person who wrote it and I will give them the biggest, best of hugs:

    In general, SimEarthlings are as lazy as Earthlings. They never want
    to work, and especially hate physical labour. Whenever there are heavy
    objects to move, they argue over who has to do it.

    “I don’t want to carry it–you carry it!”
    “Not me–you carry it.”

    And that’s how Eukaryotes evolved.

    Of course, the usual solution is to hire a professional to do the work.
    That’s what Prokaryotes do for a living.

    a goodbye that came far too soon.

    Tony & Jhayne w. Drew aka Schmootzi the Clod
    The day we met Drew Keriakedes (aka Schmootzi The Clod) at Circus Contraption. ♥

    Drew and Joseph Vito Albanese (aka Dexter Mantooth) and God’s Favourite Beefcake will be missed.

    For those who haven’t heard the shocking news, Drew and Joe were killed at 11 o’clock this morning by a random gunman at Cafe Racer.

    News of the crime and the murderer.

    Titanium Sporkestra have opened up their rehearsal space for an impromptu vigil at 1700 East Marginal Way South, which is where I would be if I were in Seattle tonight.

    The gunman killed another woman during his car-jacking escape and then later shot himself in the head when cornered by police, but did not successfully kill himself. (He is known to be mentally ill.) Kendall and Dustin were not present, but Len, who also works at Cafe Racer, is still in the hospital, potentially still in surgery, and the severity of his injuries are unknown. Drew and Joe’s families were not notified by police, but found out through their facebook pages, which was stunning to behold.

    They were glorious, talented, and beautiful people, lions and lords of their community who I greatly respected and deeply admired, who always made me feel welcome and loved. My heart aches to lose them and I have spent my entire day glued to the news, watching the story unfold, unable to stop crying. They’ve taken part of the soul of Seattle with them.

    “It’s been good to know ya.
    The time has come for us to say goodbye.
    Put on your mask and don your feather boa.
    We’ll sing and dance until the end of time.”

    IF FOUND, PLEASE REPORT

    My asymmetrical purple fedora has vanished, lost somehow in the earliest hours of Boxing Day, most probably to the Metrotown parking lot. It was a fine hat, resilient, much loved, and my utter favourite, the best I’ve ever had. Already I miss it, along with the lovely feather fascinator attached to it that Sugar made me for my birthday. A moment of silence, please.

    Also mysteriously gone this year: The Scarf of True Love.