Sit down and shut up

Last night, I went to the movies with two of my dearest friends. I am, in general, not the sort of person who goes to the movies just for fun. I hate most of the banal films that are produced nowadays and, unless it's something I am really pumped about, I am not going to spend fifteen bucks to sit in a dark theater trying not to fall asleep.

But Beauty and the Beast was out in 3D and, as we all know, there's nothing I love more than Disney movies from twenty years ago to which I may or may not know all the dialogue and songs. So we went.

Now, I knew going into this that one of my friends is the worst person to watch anything with. He violates one of my cardinal rules for watching things: sit down, shut up, and WATCH. He dares to do things like insert commentary, ask questions, and ask me to pass the Milk Duds.

I am "that" person in movie theaters, the one who hushes others and asks them to put their phones away. When the previews start, as far as I am concerned, nobody should be talking. If the person next to me pours a handful of Sno-Caps in a quiet moment, it will take all my self-restraint not to punch them in the face.

Luckily, I have made it known to Dave how I feel about noise, movement, breathing, etc. during films and he did his best to reign it in and we all enjoyed the movie tremendously. The whole experience got me thinking about those seemingly trivial things that I look for in a partner and how they are actually indicative of qualities I value. Here are a few....

1. Keep silent during movies, TV shows, concerts, and plays. Though on a superficial level, this is about not annoying me, from a broader perspective, it's about giving focus and attention to life. If a person cannot sit still and remain silent for a thirty minute sitcom or make it through a symphony concert without checking texts, is that person capable of listening? Would he or she notice the small things that make life beautiful? Or is that person constantly distracted, unable to patiently wait for insight, or always waiting for something better to come along?

2. Pronounce "espresso" correctly. If you say "EXpresso," not only will I want to push you down a flight of stairs, I will also wonder how you managed to read so quickly that you mistook an S for an X. This will lead me to believe that you don't pay attention to details, or care if things are done well. Or you are just dumb.

3. Don't listen to Nickelback. The initial personality flaw here is that you have shitty taste in music. As a musician, that is something I find absolutely deplorable. But Nickelback started as a country band and couldn't make it, so they became a rock band. What does it say to me if you like them? That you are attracted to bands (and probably also people) who are ok with changing themselves into a generic, mediocre entity simply to gain acclaim. Also, you are dumb.

4. Be nice to waiters and waitresses and customer service reps. Aside from embarrassing everyone you are with when you are an asshole to people who wait on you, being mean to those in the customer service industry means you have no patience. It also likely means that your parents are assholes who passed on their assholeness to you. I like when romantic interests get along with their families and can be nice to everyone. It sends up huge red flags when they don't. And if you don't tip twenty percent? Yes, you are cheap, but you also don't place any value on hospitality. I like taking my loved ones out and showing them a good time. This is important to me. If you can't be bothered to do it right, well...peace out.

I've written some pretty soul-baring stuff on this blog (and my old one), but this might be the most vulnerable I have allowed myself to be on the intertubes. Please tread lightly and kindly.

Last night, I was driving home from a friend's house where a few of us had met for dinner. The weather had felt very...apocalyptic...all day. It was almost sixty degrees earlier in the day. Then the wind picked up, low dark clouds blew through, the sky turned a weird shade of pink, and it poured rain. By the time I drove home around ten, the rain had turned to snow. It blew hard at my windshield as I listened to the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto on the local classical station.

My brain had been feeling unsettled all day and the weather certainly wasn't helping. As I got closer to home, the intensity of the music and the snow started to get to me. Here was this storm, whirling around me, and this fantastic piece of music building to a climactic moment, and I felt nothing. Nothing.

I started thinking about the last time I felt anything, the last time I cried, the last time I laughed until I cried, the last time I had a moment of complete joy, the last time a piece of music truly moved me. I couldn't think of a damn thing.

It has been ten months since I started taking anti-depressants. I have no doubt that they saved me. My job, my schoolwork, my relationships. My life. As anyone who has been on anti-depressants can tell you, they take a little while to kick in. Although I was sleeping better and generally less lethargic after only a few weeks, it took about two months for me to feel like I was functioning normally. And feeling things normally.

It is only now, eight months later, that I realize this is when I started drinking more. I am left wondering if I ever really allowed myself to recover from my depression. And if I have to ask, I probably know the answer...

I started drinking when I was in high school. I would get completely hammered with my friends almost every weekend. We were honors students, varsity athletes, competitive musicians, from stable homes. Why did we drink? Several of us had alcoholic, or recovering alcoholic parents. Some had strained relationships with parents or boyfriends. It was social and it was fun, but it also helped each of us fill some void in our lives, I believe. Of course, you don't realize these things when you are seventeen.

Fast forward to Peace Corps. A once-over of my old blogs will tell you all you need to know about the sort of mental state I was in while there. By my final year, I was drinking every day. Two liters of beer, sometimes more. It numbed the frustration and the loneliness, helped me push aside the fear that I had made the wrong choice, that I was not a good enough volunteer.

And here we are, two years later, and the thread of problem drinking is again at the forefront of my life. I don't drink every day, but when I do, more often than not, I frighten myself. I do not have an off switch. One glass of wine, then two, then eight, and I am drunkenly scrounging up more alcohol. Because it's not enough. It's never enough.

If I go out for drinks with friends, I am concerned about how fast I drink. If I finish my cocktail first, they will know that I have a problem.

Recently, I began having blackouts. This is what truly alarmed me. It is a problem I have never had before. It is terrifying to me to wake up and see that I have sent emails to people, cleaned my house, made phone calls, and have no recollection.

Last night, at my friend's house, I gingerly admitted some of this to him.

"I have rules," he said. "I don't drink alone. I don't mix."

I tuned him out as he continued. Because I realized there is a fundamental difference between him and me. He is not an addict.

Don't drink alone? I've tried that. Going out for drinks with friends ends with me, home alone, desperately wanting to be drunker, pounding cheap beer from the back of my fridge.

I had two glasses of wine with dinner last night. I stopped. And I hated my sober self. The soundtrack playing in my head told me I was not enough. Not funny enough, or interesting enough, or worthy enough.

I've got some work to do. I don't really know where to go from here, but things have to change. I don't want to go through the next ten months of my life numb.

Thanks for listening.

Life Recently

[Insert obligatory apology for neglecting this blog for over a month.]

Ok, now that's out of the way...

What have I been up to?

1) I moved. Never move on Christmas Eve and Day. It sucks. Not as much as Holiday Season 2009, but still pretty shitty. My new digs, however, are pretty rad. It is so nice to live in a place that feels comfortable and like home.

2) I signed up for yoga teacher training! I start in February and by the middle of May, I will be a registered yoga teacher. I am more excited about this than about finishing my master's degree. True story. I feel passionate about this decision in a way I have never felt passionate about anything before.

3) I have been feeling the tide turn in my life. This is rather abstract, I know. But I have been feeling like good things are going to happen. I really feel like I have reached a place in life where I can be myself and pursue what truly makes me happy.

4) I will finish school. I need to put together a recital. I am not terribly thrilled about this, honestly, but I will do it. Practicing the piano makes me hate myself. I am trying to teach myself to approach it as I approach yoga: as a practice. I still get incredibly frustrated. In addition, I have been fighting injury all year, which has been really disheartening.

Those are the happenings as of late. I could promise to post some pictures, but who knows if I will follow through? It's best not to make empty promises.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, if you are reading this blog, I wish you a fantastic 2012. I hope that you have a fruitful and satisfying year.

A Belated Thanks

As usual, when I should be sleeping, I am up surfing the internet.

For whatever reason, I think that the best cure for insomnia is to refresh my Facebook every ten seconds. After one of my refreshes, I noticed an old college acquaintance had posted a video of Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices singing on Johnny Carson in 1990. "I almost forgot about this group," he captioned it. "I have the album and it's great."

Shit. All of a sudden, I am wide awake and sad as hell and wondering where time has gone. In April, it will have been four years since I left for BG. FOUR years. The first year after returning from Bulgaria was really, really hard. I was trying to get my feet back on solid ground, get my life in order, process the whole situation, my depression, my relationships with others, the meaning of life in general....Basically, overhaul my life and values system. I thought about it every day. I simultaneously grieved for it and hated it and missed it.

Then something happened. Time, that old devil, put some distance between me the BG. I stopped thinking about it as a really fucked up time in my life, stopped berating myself for everything I could have done better, stopped wishing I could go back and do it better and not leave such a trail of destruction in my wake. I started seeing it as an important chapter in my life, one that shaped me and changed me and helped me.

And then time kept on going and something else happened. My experience started becoming nothing but a series of amusing anecdotes or one-liners:

"Oh, you think it's cold out? Try showering in an unheated bathroom for two years."

"Oh, the bum hit you up for money? I remember the time a drunk old man tried to kiss me at the train station in Pernik and then gave me a bag of apples."

"You thought you were going to be abducted? I remember one time, I went on a picnic in the woods and we drove through a field of sunflowers to get there and I didn't speak enough Bulgarian to understand what was going on and I thought I was going to get murdered and scattered throughout north-central Bulgaria."

And on it goes. When did I become that person?

Then I see this video, and I realize just how much I miss living there. And it makes me hate myself for becoming so entrenched in the banal happenings of my life here in Ohio that I don't stop to be grateful to Bulgaria. Peace Corps didn't give me shit, but Bulgaria...you gave me so much more than I could ever give you. That sounds trite, but I don't even care.

You taught me to appreciate beauty in the small things. You taught me the importance of friendship. You taught me that people can be kind for absolutely no reason at all, other than because you are another human being in need.

So Bulgaria....thank you.

I am a total Grinch this year.

Last year was my first Christmas home in two years and I was totally enchanted by the holiday season in America. The rampant consumerism seemed almost cute. Putting up the tree didn't feel like a chore. I loved hearing Christmas music on the radio and going to midnight Mass and buying presents for my loved ones.

This year, however, I couldn't feel more differently. I am stressed about school, my church job, an impending move, money....in a word, everything. I keep telling myself to snap out of it, to stop being such a Scrooge. After all, I am so blessed and have so many wonderful people in my life. I just can't help it, though. Everything seems like a chore.

The best solution for me seems to be to step back and focus on getting a little bit done at a time, and to avoid too many commitments. I have been invited to five Christmas parties in one week. Five! Hell no. I will lose my mind if I have to force myself to be full of Christmas cheer when all I really want to do is curl up in the fetal position and listen to Radiohead.

This is a dark time of year and the Christmas holiday, whatever your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), should help each of us look for the light in our lives, for the person or thing who makes our world a little brighter. I can't say that I am going to manage to do very well at looking for the positive this year, but I am sure going to try.

Make Yourself

I've been thinking a lot recently about what I want from life. When people would ask me to project five or ten or twenty years into the future, I never could do it. The fucked up truth of it was that I found life so exhausting, I was sort of hoping not to be around. It scares me to realize that that's what I thought only a year ago.

So who do I want to be? I am not entirely sure, but I know a few things. I want to be a badass yogi. I no longer want to feel overwhelmed and defeated by the strength of my thoughts and emotions. I want to drop the nasty smoking habit that cycles in and out of my life for good. I want to cultivate the sort of physical and emotional self that makes me feel powerful. I want to help other people do the same, because I know I have something to offer in that area.

Vague, but it's a start.

So where am I now? Well, to be quite honest, I often feel like a total mess. Weak and scared, like that disgusting Voldemort fetus thing in Harry Potter:



I often find myself on the verge of tears in yoga class because it brings up such powerful emotions that I am afraid to face. I drink a lot. I am overweight. I procrastinate. I make myself physically ill with worry and anxiety. I live in fear of my depression returning full force. I think that everyone in my life secretly thinks that I am crazy or unlovable or is just waiting for the right moment to expose my fatal flaw to the world.

But you know what? That's ok. I am ok. I still have a long way to go, but I guess we all do, eh? At least now I am able to get out of bed, face life, and say, "Here is my crazy. You can take it or leave it; I have to learn to love it."

The onset of winter is difficult for me. It always has been. This year, instead of allowing myself to be sucked into believing all the negativity that swirls in my head during this season of cold and darkness, I want to use the time to make my life into what I want it to be.

So who are you and who do you want to be?