A Road of Pebbles and Rocks

There are only two...no, three reasons you update a blog.

1) you're angry/sad/depressed/disillusioned

2) you're happy/elated/overjoyed/bragging/sharing good news/sharing pictures of happy things

3) you're drunk (for either reasons 1 or 2)

4) You're a professional blogger and you HAVE to update regularly.

Okay. So there's four. Math isn't my strong suite. There are third graders who could out math me. Probably even second graders. But this isn't about math! This is about blogging!

Tonight I come to you starving, half dead blog, for a little bit of both reasons 1 and 2. And if you count Nyquil as a type of alcohol, then there are three reasons!

Life is hard. Life is like a road full of little pebbles and rocks and rocky mudslides. Most of the pebbles are things like traffic when you're already running late, or turning in a paper late. Rocks are things like your significant other breaking up with you, or losing your job. And rockslides are usually reserved for deaths or becomings mega famous. you know, extreme and you're caught in the slide, hoping to god you make it out relatively intact and not too screwed up in the head.

Life for me this year has been filled with lots of little pebbles that sometimes feel like rocks for me. Maybe it's cause I'm short and have small feet or something. But either way, this year my feet are already bruised pretty good. In the grand scheme of things, not finishing my book when I had hoped to is a pebble. But it feels like a freaking rock. I know...I know in two years I'm going to be looking back on this entry and laughing at myself and saying, "see, you were worried and bemoaning for nothing!". But right now it doesn't feel like nothing.

I've had good things happen. I've had friends show up to support me who I wouldn't have expected to. I've finally realized how to fix the ending to my book and what was wrong with the last few chapters. I've gotten a good job I love. I've also had changes and shifts on the friend and family front. Things that are pebbles but they're all grouped together and so I step on all of them in rapid succession. Some good, some not so good. Some neutral. But either way, I'm still stepping on pebbles.

When will the road be free of them? Probably never. But I'm hoping the pebbles will stop being so often. I don't like it. Call it the Virgo in me, but I actually *do* appreciate stability. At least stability in a home life. I have one that's rapidly drawing to a close. A rock rather than a pebble. So, I leave for myself, a list of good and bad pebbles, and rocks I can see ahead of me. Rocks that I should approach and not be afraid of, since obviously everything is about how you look at it.

The Good Pebbles:

My writing blog is doing pretty good!

I'm writing and being close to being done!

I have good friends who surprised me by turning out to being good friends.

I found out my cat has excellent taste and likes brie cheese. Huh.

The Bad Pebbles:

My story taking too long to write

Being afraid no one will like my work

Not making as much money as I thought I would (but hey, I'm still happy with my job!)

Upcoming Rocks: 

Moving out

Moving out to a different state altogether

Having to promote my book and hoping to god it takes off. That's a big freaking rock, blog.

Turning 30 in two and a half months (holy $#$($%7)

So there you have it. All the things that have been in my road thus far. Give or take. Hopefully the next month will be filled with nice pebbles! And to those who read this blog at all--thank you. I don't know who you are (drunk OR sober), but I like you! Thanks for bothering to read this once in a while. Sorry I suck at updates.

I blame the government. Because clearly, my lack of follow through is *their* fault.

Shedding Skin

    I didn't grow up in a normal home--I think a lot of people don't. But I grew up very unconventionally because my dad was a motorcycle riding, Santa look alike, hippie. He had me grow up in a tepee in the mountains with trees for friends, a boat where our table became our bed, and a quaint small home by the ocean that he lovingly grew wild flowers around. All of these places hold very definable memories for me and my life. I look at back on them and remember them with almost perfect clarity. Perhaps not every day of my life, but many life lessons and even inconsequential things like watching him destroy a colony of ants in the wildflowers. I was devastated because I was watching them and found it fascinating to watch the queen lay eggs. Sure, they would soon grow and enter our home and eat my sugary snacks, but it was so interesting to watch how nature worked! Then it was destroyed by his shovel right before my eyes. 

     But the thing is, even when I look back on these moments in my memory I remember them because at the time that the events were happening I said to myself "you need to remember this moment and this feeling right now." I have always looked towards the future impatiently. I wanted to grow up. Hell, I FELT grown up at a young age. I felt too mature for my age. As a teen I didn't understand other teenagers who didn't question everything, who did stupid drama things and had boyfriends only to break up two weeks later. Why call them a boyfriend? Why have one at all? The friends I made in high school were unhealthy in a lot of ways...but I also learned from those bad experiences and to be fair, they DID have brains in their heads and were very serious to a degree about life--at the age of 16 we opened our own legitimate business and ran it for three years (legally owned the name, paid taxes, everything.).

     So here's my point. I've always wanted to grow up, or be in the future. I enjoy being in the present for sure, and I don't regret things in my past or choices I've made. But right now....right NOW I'm on edge. I'm losing it a little. I don't regret things I did in the past.....but I'm terrified of the present. I'm terrified of the me I am now. I feel like I'm on a high wire above a very large canyon and one small step, one gust of wind, is going to blow me away into oblivion and I will have failed without even getting started. Maybe this is all the backlash of me turning 29. Maybe its my fears creeping in saying "you should be farther a long in life. What the hell are you doing?" I do. I feel like I'm failing right now.

     But also I feel this....ripple. This change. All my fears that were at the back of my mind are now bubbling forth to the front, and from it I feel the desperate need to CHANGE. Like....completely change ME. I want to be different. I want to act different, I want to be so different my friends don't recognize me. Along with the fears--like that suddenly I'm too old to achieve my dreams like living in Japan or not making it as a writer--is a writhing, seething, screaming urge to transform.

    This isn't you!  

     That's what my inner me is saying. Who you are right now, that's not you. This present me needs to die. I need to be different. It's terrifying. I've never wanted or felt the need to change so dramatically. But I want to. I want to change so bad, and I don't think there's a way to stop it. But it's a good change, it really is. If I let it. But first....first I think I need to conquer my fears. I have a lot of them. I think the biggest one is disappointing people and not doing things I want to because they seem crazy or too far fetched. I want to stop thinking that way. I want to go for the gold. I want to hold my head high and say "So what? You got a problem with it? Too bad!" 

     This need to change....I've always had little bits of change I want to do, that I go through--everyone does. I want to change so badly that my skin feels itchy and I want to rip it all off. I've never had this experience...this drive, before I don't know what to do with it or why its happening. Just that it IS happening and I need...no HAVE to do it. I don't know what I'll look like on the other side. I don't know who I'll be. That scares me. But what scares me more is  the thought of being who I am right now, forever. This is NOT who I want to be. This is not who I'm meant to be.

I need to shed this skin.

Country Road Take Me Home

THESE ARE ALL PICTURES I TOOK

People often say that 'home is where the heart is'. But people also say that we're 'a product of our environment'. I believe both of these things equally. Some people are born or live in poverty, where a cardboard box serves as the dinning table, but love keeps the family together. Some live in apartments the size of shoe boxes, and others live in nice suburban condos and town homes. Throughout my life I've lived through many different forms of homes. But my first home, the home that shaped me, formed, and made me who I am today is Modjeska Canyon.

    It isn't a very well known place, even to people who live all of four miles away from it. It is tucked at the very foothills of a mountain range, and as a child it was considered so far out of the way that we had our own general store in case some one ran out of basic goods and couldn't get back into town (which due to only having one road, took about half an hour to get to the nearest city). But progress happens and now there is easy access to it through off shoot roads that lead directly to it--and cities have been slowly building around it as well. But Modjeska is still a magical place that gets bypassed since the neighborhood itself is so deep and well hidden by winding roads and Live Oak trees. But for those who do know it, its the most enchanting place in California.



    Modjeska has good and bad memories for me, ranging from catching tadpoles in the creek that snaked next to my house in the summer, to staying up till 3 in the morning at the local Biker joint while my dad sobered up from drinking and playing pool before sticking me on his Harley and driving me back home down the winding road perched on the side of mountain. But most of all, Modjeska holds for me the example--and even the bar--of what a good community is, and what living with and working with nature REALLY means.

Most people who lived there during the 80's were artists, musicians, hippies, free spirits, and occasionally an actual job holder. I recall more often than not, that I could go to anyone's house or yard and play with their animals. People (even now) raise a lot of animals, grow their own food, and add their own artistic flair to the homes, which are all individually made and preserved. But more than the homes, gardens, and animals, were the people themselves.




    Often times every one knew who I was--even if I didn't know them. They watched me even if I didn't know it, and my next door neighbor always let me and my sister enter her house freely and insisted that we sit in her chairs and eat cookie dough saved just for us before letting us go to her backyard to pick her blackberries. The neighbors that lived a few houses down were musicians, and on hot, lazy, summer evenings the whole canyon echoed (thanks to the mountains and trees) with their banjo, spoons, and guitars--along with any other musician who would amble by to join in. BBQ's were frequent and so were people who simply stopped their cars in the middle of the tiny main road to talk to neighbors. There was never anger over this, in fact I recall a time when that happened to my dad and the people who were both trying to come AND go, got out of their cars to join in the conversation and catch up! In the fall and winter the community got together to scare the children for Halloween, and had Santa stop by to deliver presents to every boy and girl at the Christmas party held in the Fire Station.

   My dad, while not always diligent in watching me, taught me many valuable things--some of them by simply not being around. It took me a very long time to realize the reason he never played with me during the day was because he was drinking, but I was very young, and busy playing in nature. I frolicked through the streets and trees completely safe, took care of my babysitter's horse (who sadly died when the river rose during a rain storm and dragged her horse and several others into the raging waters), and played with my dogs who were always on my heels. He taught me to respect nature,  that all plants had their own voices, that animals who hurt us did it not because they hated us, but because we frightened them. To be gentle to the earth around us, and through stories, to believe that animals could talk.

    Most of my summers were spent up in the hills unsupervised with the other children, where we did daring things like walking on a narrow wall behind the fire station, climb the ancient oaks that protected us from the  glaring California sun, and roam wild in the hills and mountains that  were probably more dangerous than we gave it credit for. Kids growing up in the area learned this first: "If you hear a rattle, stop and walk backwards slowly heel to toe". The other was to always have a dog at your side. You couldn't find a kid who DIDN'T have one. I had three, but two of them in particular were my shadows. They protected me, slept with me in the dirt, and taught me how to recognize if a sound meant danger or a rabbit. And more than that, they taught me that animals had personalities and thoughts and feelings just like any one else, they just communicated it through nonverbal behavior. It was this, I think, that made it so easy for me when I was older to recognize what people were really feeling.
 
These memories and more are what shape my opinions today. That community is when neighbors contribute to each other, share, laugh, grow, and support. That we do not have to destroy nature and try and rebuild it into what we think is 'perfect', nor are cookie cutter homes and manicured lawns the 'ideal'. That letting  children explore the world and nature around them without gluing them to you is vital to their growth, and that when you are alone, sad, happy, or over come with emotions, the babbling brook, bending ancient tree, and gravel road remind you that you have a friend in both nature and the person next door.

MY VERY FIRST HOME

    I leave for a new state, a new life, and new people in four weeks. There is a lot that I am not sorry to be leaving, but Modjeska tugs at my heart very much. Being so far away from the home of my heart is more painful that saying goodbye to my friends and family, who can uproot themselves and visit me. An entire forest and mountain can't. But I take with me my memories, pictures, and myths and legends of the land I spent eight happy years in.

    I learned many life lessons in the multitude of different homes I moved to, but Modjeska taught me the most important ones. Respect nature, listen to the plants and animals, take care of your neighbors, and always ALWAYS remember that to the 400 year old trees and 40,000 year old mountains, you are still a child of the earth that should frolic through their trees and fields.

             Thank you Modjeska, for giving me a childhood that was filled with magic, music, and love.