Slip Into Your Skin

Time is getting faster, can you feel it? Emotions are governed more by techonology than they are by actual interactions with people. 

What used to take our ancestors a few weeks to get a reply to (like a love letter)--takes us a second. One second. People connect with each other in virtual worlds now more than ever. Does this result in virtual realities? Virtual assumptions? Virtual opinions? Virtual selves? While a minute is still only 60 seconds long, about a million more things are now able to come to pass in a minute in 2008, then there was in 1888. Time is speeding up, do you feel it? These photographs posted here show that clearly....our new ability to catch a tiny nano of space and time...and capture it forever. Does this mean our feelings are more virtual?

This morning I woke up to the feeling that my bed was shaking. I felt it. I thought it was an earthquake. And my first thoughts about this supposedly happening disaster were not normal. I actually felt a small sense of relief. I actually wanted most of my things to be destroyed so I could be free of them all. With that destruction would come a newfound freedom. I have felt tied to Utah. Tied to my furniture and belongings. I want them all to go away somehow. That's not normal, is it? Of course, as we all read each others blogs, we know that the word normal is more a myth and idea than an actual truth. But, I was still a bit baffled by my reaction.

So what is my truth? I've lost my religion this year. I've lost friends. I've lost foundations and ideas that all used to make my life make sense. Why is it that part of me feels like it's time for marriage and children, and the other part of me feels like I should shave my head of this blond mass that many use to define me and that I should go on a pilgrimage of sorts? But, it would be aimless wanderings, yes? Because, honestly, I'm not even sure what I am looking for or where I want to go. 

The one call I hear is Paris. This past week confirmed to me that it was time to go back for more than just a few days. So, I have decided one thing. I'm saving now to spend a month in Paris next summer. The month of July will find me in an apartment in Paris, writing a book. No other connections but Paris and the characters that have been yearning to be created.

So, yeah, I've been in a weird place all year. A place that isn't fully me. A place where I feel like I have to figure things out. Figure things out. Make sense of things. Decide my future. And it's left me, in this final month of December, quite melancholy and lost. And this pressure of time. The daily mirror reminders that I am getting closer to death, that in fact, each second that I am alive, I am, in fact, dying too. The shaking of my bed, the dependence on virtual friends, the lonely echos of my footsteps along a dark sidewalk in my small neighborhood. All of these are reminders of something I have forgotten, or I never knew, or maybe part of me knows but hasn't told the other part of me. Can you have secrets from yourself?

I've been addicted to Regina Spektor, listening to her over and over and over again. There is her song, On the Radio,  and the lyrics say, 

This is how it works

You're young unitl your not

You love until you don't

You try until you can't

You laugh until you cry

You cry until you laugh

And everyone must breath 

until their dying breath

No this is how it works

You peer inside yourself

You take the things you like

and try to love the things you took

And you take that love you made

And stick it into someone elses heart

pumpin' someone elses blood

And walk arm and arm

And hope you don't get harmed

And even if you do, you'll do it all again....

I don't think that the lyrics only mean people in romantic love. I think any kind of love requires putting some of our hearts into someone elses. I just like that idea at Christmas time.

I finally figured things out this morning. What I figured out is that I don't have a damn thing figured out and that that is going to have to be enough for now.  What I think I will do, however, is use these next few weeks to really connect to the real people around me. The living, breathing, growing old, humming, singing, dancing, crying, sobbing, blue, and red, and green, and yellow people around me.

So, I'm signing off for the rest of the year friends, and I'm going to try and slip into my skin fully...or figure out how to make the skin I have on right now fit a little better.

Merry Christmas.