What is a Life Worth?

As is true for most people in America, this week has been difficult and heavy for me. Unlike most, my week was emotionally tumultuous prior to the school shooting in Uvalde, TX on Tuesday. On Monday night I went to see Sigur Ros in concert here in Austin. You might be thinking that sounds fun rather than traumatic and you would be partly right; it was fun. Unfortunately, the reason I went to that particular concert is because my friend John once told me that the best concert he ever went to was a Sigur Ros concert in 2013 in Kansas and that it was the Best. Day. Of. His. Life. 

If you're here reading this and know me, you probably know that John died last October, which means that though I assume he said it hyperbolically, there actually aren't any more days to his life and if that really was the best one then it truly was the BEST day of his life and will never be topped. When I saw that Sigur Ros was coming to Austin I immediately bought tickets. How could I not? Unfortunately, it turns out that if the whole reason you buy tickets to a concert is because your late friend loved that band, you will absolutely spend the entire concert thinking about that. It was...exhausting.

The thought that kept popping up in my head unbidden was "If John knew Sigur Ros would be playing in Austin in May, maybe he wouldn't have jumped off that building in October." 

It is a useless thing to think. There were surely many things that factored into his decision to end his life (not least among them the surely insurmountable odds of escaping the US carceral system unscathed) and while none of us will ever know exactly what was going on in his head when he made that decision, it seems reasonable to assume that a concert wouldn't have been enough to change his mind. Despite that, my brain kept bouncing between "John should be here for this, he would've loved it" and "If only he'd known, maybe he would have chosen to live for this." 

In the past seven months, there have been so many things I've wished John was alive for. So many. The Sigur Ros concert was the most recent and, in some ways, the sharpest because though I like the band, if not for John I wouldn't have bothered going to see them in concert. I've spent a lot of time these seven months thinking about what is worth living for. The other side of the same thought process, of course, is what is worth dying for. Which brings me to Tuesday and the collective trauma we've all been grappling with this week. School shootings (and mass shootings in general) are senseless acts of violence. And there is no reason for them to continue. You know what isn't worth dying for? The opportunity for every American to have a gun. I'm not sorry for saying that because you know what? People are more important than guns. Children are absolutely more important than guns. 

There is not a single child in the United States that I would argue is worth sacrificing in order to keep guns around. I don't understand if other people just don't realize that this issue boils down to that or if they are really so callous about the loss of these lives. I can't imagine anyone, even the most staunch supporter of the NRA, choosing to let their own child die in order for all Americans to have gun access. They wouldn't! So what makes other people's kids acceptable victims? They aren't. Nobody, least of all a child at their school, deserves to die in order for everyone to access guns without restrictions. 

A couple posts I've seen over the past couple days have stuck with me. One was a tweet lamenting the fact that a tragedy like the Uvalde school shooting occurs and work just goes on; no time to collectively grieve and mourn, no opportunity to take time to collect ourselves, just keep showing up and putting in our hours through all the trauma. My friend posted the tweet to her instagram story and I replied that although time to grieve would be nice, the reality of the situation in our country is that mass shootings happen SO REGULARLY that if we were afforded time off to grieve them all, we would literally never work. No, really. Another post that's been stuck in my brain since I saw it is this one: 

Although mass shootings aren't acceptable, they have become a regular, everyday occurrence. And it's not okay. 

And what if we did take the time to collective mourn each of these mass shootings? What if we used the power we have as the workforce of a capitalist society to demand policy change from our elected officials? If we all just stopped working, if our country came to a grinding halt for days every time a tragedy like Uvalde occurred, how many more shootings would it take for people to decide that guns aren't worth it? My guess is less than a month. 

So why are our lives less important than our labor? Why are our children's lives worth less than our labor? Why was a single school shooting (pick one, pick any SINGLE school shooting, let alone vast number that are scattered throughout my lifetime) not enough to invoke revulsion complete enough to spurn our lawmakers into immediate action? It is incomprehensible to me.

I realize that I have nothing to add to this conversation that hasn't already been said numerous times with more research and data backing it up than I care to invest into an issue so gruesome and horrific to me. I'm just using this space to process some of the heaviness that's been weighing me down this week. If you're reading this, I hope you realize that your life is worth living, there are beautiful things still to come that are worth you staying alive for, and that there is nobody on earth who deserves to own any possession more than you deserve to be alive. Take care of yourselves, loves. 

I'm going to leave you with this drawing by Rick Frausto that I saw on instagram that sums up how I feel these days. (Find him on instagram as @rickfrausto or on his website https://rickfrausto.com/)

On Home.

 Hey, hello, hi! 

I'm trying to flex my creative muscles more this year and one of those muscles is for writing so here we are. Besides, we all know I have plenty to say about pretty much any topic! I just need to sit down and commit to typing it all out.

There have been several ideas swirling around in my brain for a few months that I want to write about but the idea of home is the one that's pressing on my heart the most at the moment. A couple things have made me think about this a lot over the past few days. 

First Laura Brown, a Minneapolis-based artist I follow on Instagram, had a story where she referenced the following quote by Mary Oliver: 

I spent a night last week painting this kinda abstract peacock-ish thing (because remember, I'm trying to spend more time being creative) and thought maybe I would overlay some words onto it but couldn't think of what would fit. Then I saw Laura's story and thought "Of course! What a good quote! I'll put that over my painting!" So I did. (See above.) Laura had written that she just wants to be an artist with her one wild and precious life and it got me thinking about what I want out of mine. And honestly there are so many many things that I want out of my life and they change constantly and contradict each other and it's not always so easy, right? But it kinda boils down to wanting to be happy. I want to make the world a better and more beautiful place but I just want to feel happy as myself.

Which leads me to the second thing that inspired this post. Yesterday I was texting with a friend who asked which city feels like hoooome to me and I haven't been able to stop thinking about this idea of feeling at home in a place ever since. I think it's been a really long time since one location has felt like "hoooome".

I mean, Maine will always feel like home to me, for sure. It's where I grew up and it's where my family still is, and I think being from Maine is a significant part of my identity. I think Maine is really special. But after moving "home" for three years and being pretty damn miserable for much of it, I have little desire to ever live there again. And when I think about a childhood home, it's kinda complicated because I only ever spent half of my time with each of my parents, so even when I was growing up my sense of "home" was split between physical homes.

Then there's Minneapolis, where I loved living. In many ways Minneapolis still feels like "my city". It's kinda where I learned how to adult; the first place I paid rent and had to figure everything out for myself. I am always so nostalgic for Minneapolis but only for the spring and summer and fall versions of it - I have absolutely no desire to live in Minnesota in the winter ever again in my life (as I write this the actual temperature there is -4° and it "feels like" -24°....miss me with that shit, thanks!).

And now I'm in Austin. In fact, I've been here for almost exactly a year (I began my road trip down on February 10th and arrived on the 25th) although 2020 seems like it shouldn't have counted since I didn't  spend ANY of the year settling into a real life here. And I'm not sure that Texas feels like forever to me. Although again, this doesn't seem totally fair since I haven't gotten to do any settling into this city. 

I remember thinking a few years ago that as I've lived in different places and made meaningful connections with people in those places, no ONE place really felt like it contained all of my heart anymore. I started to realize that you leave pieces of your heart with all the people you love and if they're scattered all over the world, then you're never completely home in one place. And I do think I was on to something there, but I have concluded something different in this current bout of pondering what home means to me. 

I make my own home wherever I go. I feel like home to me. 

There're a couple different layers to this (external/physical and internal) and I'm going to talk about them both because they both matter to me and I'll do what I want in this rambling blog post. 

The external factor is that I'm really good at making spaces feel mine. So even though I don't know that Texas feels like a place I've settled into, I have very much settled into my personal living space. My bedroom here feels like a sanctuary of me-ness. I've come to realize that not everybody has a space like this in their life and that creating a space that feels like oneself is not a skill everyone possesses. But I've managed to do it several times in the different places I've lived and I love that about myself. Now, I think that part of the reason I can make any space feel like mine is that I'm very good at packing my tiny car and so a lot of the same possessions have been in each iteration of my living space. But that's only part of it; a lot of the furniture that makes up my room here in Texas was purchased after I arrived here. I guess I have a distinctive decorating style that hasn't changed in the past decade (or ever??) which perhaps should be embarrassing, like maybe my tastes should be maturing? But you know what? I don't care! I like it. Also, I am pretty sure my style has evolved in some ways so it hasn't just been completely stagnant my whole life. Although I will admit that I've reached an age where it feels pretty immature and lame to slap a bunch of unframed art up everywhere and I should probably start investing in framing the pieces I love but moving framed art to different states sounds like something I have no interest in doing, so I'm still living that college student temporary art life and while it's not ideal it is FINE.

The internal factor is that I feel at home just by myself. Again, this is something I've realized not everybody has. I guess I've known it for a while now in the sense of just being okay doing things alone because I don't have a partner to do things with or even friends in a new place and so I just do thing alone. I go to dinner or a museum or for a walk by myself. I don't have time to wait for someone else to do things with - what if I waited forever and never did anything!?!? I want to do things therefore I do them even if it means going alone. 

But since my friend asked about a place feeling like home yesterday I realized it's more than that. I feel at home as myself. Home is where the heart is, right? And I've always considered my family, especially my siblings, a huge part of my heart. And I have friends who feel like part of my heart. But the biggest part of my heart is just...me. I think sometimes people can make any place feel like home as long as they are with their person/people ("Home is wherever I'm with you" and all that). But I decided I feel like home all by myself. I like who I am. I don't need another person in order to feel complete or whole or fully at home. And maybe someday that will change and there will be another person who feels like home to be with and that's okay too! But for now, it feels really good to realize that I've been everywhere with myself for almost thirty years (eeeek!) and I am a good home for myself. Not everyone has that. Some people feel lost - there have been times when I've felt lost, too! But for now, I am home and I'm really glad to be here.

Greetings from Quarantine!

Hello world!

It's been a minute. In fact, it's been nearly two years. A million and ten things have happened in these two years but the biggest thing is definitely that in February I packed up my life and loaded it all into my trusty Honda Civic, Guthrie, and went on a winding road trip all over the country before ending in Austin, Texas.

I'd been here for all of three weeks when the Covid 19 craziness hit...and I now find myself sheltering in place with someone I've known for a month (hey, Sam!). It's going probably a lot like you might expect. And by that I mean we are surviving and it is sometimes odd and I am almost definitely talking more than Sam wants me to. Another roommate, Lily, has been here some of the time but is primary elsewhere for the time being, and so it's just Sam and I here at the house, day after day.

Have any of you had a hard time keeping track of the days? This is not something I particularly struggle with in a normal world, and I'm mostly still keeping track of the days now (it's FRIDAY as I write this), but also knowing what day it is matters very little to me because each day is just another day in a world that isn't demarcated by working days and non-working days. Allll of my days stretch out before me as non-working days (for at least the next four weeks, anyway) and there just doesn't seem much point to me in differentiating. I wonder if that's considered unhealthy? It's sort of the way I operated as a kid during summer, too. *shrug*

Speaking of summer! Since I'm in Texas now, the best thing about the quarantine has been the fact that it's NOT WINTER here and I can go outside and walk on trails and at parks and pick flowers. It's actually not summer here, which is probably good since Texas summer is supposed to be oppressively hot, but Texas spring, it turns out, is basically exactly what Maine summer is. I am a big fan. That being said, we're currently on day two of a ten-ish day rainy forecast. It's....not great. It's significantly harder to stay positive during quarantine when the sun isn't shining. I know a lot of you feel the same and I totally sympathize with all of you who are stuck inside because it's still winter where you live. Don't worry - it's April now and SPRING IS COMING!

Anyway. Life in Texas, before the shelter-in-place orders went into effect was going fairly well. I got a job almost immediately when I got here (at a restaurant which has since shut down and will hopefully open up again eventually) which was cool, and I was just starting to try to make some friends. I know that everyone (like, EVERYONE. In the whole world) is in the same weird limbo that I am in right now, but in some ways I still feel like I am in a stranger position than a lot of other people. Most of you were living your normal lives when business as usual either came to a grinding halt or was dramatically changed. Now you're in a season of pause before hopefully picking back up where you were (or close to it) and living life again. And yes, I know that for a lot of people things aren't just going to pick right back up. Nobody is going back to exactly where they were when the world got put on pause. Things will be different for all of us. I know this. But part of me is still really jealous of the people who get to resume something a lot closer to normal when this is all over. Because the life I was leading when we hit pause was very much already a pause for me - a transitional period that had been going on for a month already and I'd been working to settle in and move out of. So now I'm in a limbo in the middle of what was already a limbo for me! So strange. When everyone is allowed to go out and socialize again, I'm not going to have anyone to meet up with. The life I'm trying to settle into is now confined to one house and one other person. And while I'll be fine, and I know that there'll be all the time in the world to make friends on the other side of this quarantine, it's hard right now for me to imagine the world I'll be entering into. It's a free/bonus side order of scary along with the already overwhelming emotions that we're all having together (but separately) right now. It just feels like one more thing when I think about it.

So mostly I'm trying not to think about it. I'm living day to day. I'm figuring out each day what I want and need to do with it, and giving myself the space to do those things. I did come up with a list of goals for myself for this quarantine and typed them up on my typewriter (which somehow still works even though I've never replaced the ink ribbon and lord only knows how old it was before I got it about 8 years ago) but one of the items on my overarching goals list is to come up with goals for each day.

Today, my quarantine looked like barely getting my ass out of the house by noon and going for a walk and then changing into clothes that I haven't worn since I left my office job almost two months ago and even wearing high heels because I needed to feel something closer to normal and I wanted to sit down and FINALLY write this blog post. So that's what I did. I didn't manage to put together a fika for Sam, which I've been able to do every other weekday since I started them last week, but that's okay. It fell off the list of things to get done for today and I think the biggest gift we can all give ourselves right now is grace. It's okay to have days where you didn't get done what you thought would be your minimum. It's okay to have days where you literally have to force yourself into things just to get them done - but no day HAS to be like that, and certainly every day shouldn't. Only you can know what you need at any given moment. I think we're all just doing our best and that is - and needs to be - okay.

Anyway. More soon, hopefully.

For now, I hope all of you are safe and healthy. We're gonna make it. Warm and sunny days and happy times are coming. You're gonna make it.