Lover of Junk

The only problem about being a packrat is that you acquire too much junk.

The benefit with being a compulsive organizer is that most of the junk is in specific places with tags or (my new obsession) organized on a spreadsheet.

The only problem with being a compulsive organizer and keeper of all things minutely significant is that you eventually do run out of things to organize, and then you feel useless and depressed until you find more junk to store.

It's a vicious cycle.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I never knew who Kurt Vonnegut was. In my imaginative writing class, a boy showed up last fall with a grey shirt with huge block letters saying "VONNEGUT". Everybody was annoyed. Turns out he was a nice kid, but it was only at the end of the term that I talked to him and found that out. Good ol' me.

Last summer I found out Vonnegut is from Indiana. Today I found out he was born in Indianapolis. I decided I had to read something by this guy - he's a fellow Hoosier - although he might kill me for even saying that.

And this is what I found in Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade:
"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

I like him. As much as I like Anne Lamott.

Now I understand, Liz...

Last school year, my roommate found out about the untimely death of a girl she had known from church.

Yesterday, I found out about the death of Abby. We were close friends in elementary school. The close part didn't last through middle school, but we were friendly through high school graduation. The best memory I have with her is from 3rd grade, I think, when we were especially close. We took the mattress from the pull out couch in my living room and road it down the stairs for hours. We were laughing so hard as we bumped and bruised along.

Now we're 22. She has had 2 babies, 2 boys. She, along with her current boyfriend, was found dead in their house on Sunday. The boys were in there. Oh my gosh...for how long? What did they see?

I don't know why she had to die.

I can't reconcile in my mind this thing, Death, that takes and takes and never gives back. That glories in the stupid mistakes of humans.

I don't understand why I live, and she doesn't. Why I am safe, and she is not. Why her children might have to grow up in the care of social services.

I just want to cry, to scream though I don't necessarily know why. I haven't spoken to Abby in at least four years, so why does this even phase me?

Because I know her middle name - what the F. stood for. And I know she hated it and never told anyone what it really was.

Because I have hanging on my wall in my bedroom, something she wrote about racial discrimination when we were in high school. It was published anonymously, but I knew she wrote it.
It began..."I have a name"

My mom...the crazy one

When I stepped out of the laundry room with a wet shirt and a something to dry it on, I flicked my wrist to open up the drying rack thing.

Evan, being in the fun mood he was said, "whoa!" in his half-laugh goofball way. "What're you doing?"

Mom shrugged her shoulders and said, "yeah, she's a bit magical."

We laughed till our sides ached.

Says a friend of mine...

"I've always had a sneaking suspicion that if I shaved my legs, you'd marry me."

Mark it down in the books...

Today is the first day I've worn a skirt to work in a whole year.

Why'd I do it?

Boredom, I guess.

Liz,
don't go back to London.
just come home.

Look Up...UP. Can you see them?

It's the stars.

Did you see them tonight?

More stars than I ever thought possible.

Even the little tiny ones that are grey shadows against the pitch black sky.

More stars than I've ever seen in my life.

More intriguing than a bright sunny sky, these mysteries of the dark.

There are no clouds. There's no mistaking them. The billions of them that are out tonight.

So look up. Turn out all the lights. And Look.

Tell me what you see.

From "Into the Wild"

Came across this quote while reading Jon Krakauer's amazing Into the Wild. It says the quote is from Donald Barthelme in The Dead Father.

"He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice." (emphasis mine)

To all my friends who think I should tell him:

I can't.

I can't because I, myself, do not even believe it is real.
With time, I believe this will pass, completely dissolve into a funny story about how I was smitten throughout college, but nothing more.

I do not trust my own sense or impulses - they have not, in 23 years, proven to be even remotely reliable.

I am fickle. So are my feelings.

(ps. when I wrote this down, while "working" in the Mobilex, I realized that my cursive handwriting hasn't changed since 5th or 6th grade, in the same way that my face hasn't changed since freshman year of high school)

Not alone

I was stuck in the room called the Mobilex. It's super storage - a tiny room with rolling shelves to take up less space but shelve more books.

Except this storage area is full of newspapers and old car/tv/radio repair manuals, beginning in the 1950s. Old stuff.

I sit in there on a chair I bring in myself, with no ventilation, checking through the manuals for missing pages. Really stimulating work. Seriously.

I take a notebook with me, supposedly to record the missing pages or folders in each volume, but mostly it's so I can write something down when I think of it.

I'm always thinking.

Yesterday, I was not alone in the Mobilex. A Roly-Poly had followed me in. I watched him walk over to my chair and I was a bit spooked that he might try to climb up my chair - I don't like Roly Polies that much - but he didn't. Instead, he fell over onto his back when he tried to climb the wall.

Poor Roly-Poly, I said, if you just roll into a ball, you can get back on your feet.

But he didn't listen. He wiggled and he squirmed. He used these extra long legs or feelers on his back end to try to violently flip himself over. But it didn't work.

He'd fight. He'd rest. He'd try really hard to flip, but he never did.
And I knew he was dying. Roly-Polies can't live on their backs. And I assumed that, like turtles, they really can't breathe well on their backs, either.

He couldn't.

My question is this: Isn't the main attraction of Roly-Polies the fact that they roll into balls? As a kid, I loved watching them and tapping them with my shoes or toes to get them to roll up. But this Roly-Poly couldn't do that.

So I began to wonder. Why, he's probably not a Roly-Poly at all. He's an imposter! Like the orange Lady Bugs that aren't Lady Bugs at all, but a transformed Japanese Beetle, or something. Those orange bugs infest everything, and they bite. Lady Bugs don't bite. Maybe, since this Roly-Poly couldn't roll, he was a Japanese Beetle Roly-Poly look-a-like.

And that's why I didn't help him turn over. In case he was an imposter.