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People are multitude in their variety. There is the meeting of three earnest people at the table over there, long black leather coat and houndstooth scarf, the tight gray jeans and infinitely chic sweep of hair over the forehead, big brash Guess snakeskin bag, red converse sneakers. They are leaning on the table or leaning back in their chairs, alternately, talking about what awesome things they’re going to do once they get back to the City, maybe. This is the kind of slick scruffiness you don’t often see in our town. And there goes the guy who ducks his head and smiles, wearing the awful old running shoes and the tweed blazer with elbow patches. I’ve come here to Coffee & Chocolate from the library and the post office. I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov and thinking about how easy it is to love humanity, and how hard it is to love a person. Because I’m loving all these strange and beautiful people, and worried about going to work tonight.
Knoxville now has a street paper, and I bought a copy. I want this to be a success. Everybody should buy The Amplifier.
As I’m filling out my application to UTK I’m realizing that I have lame-sounding jobs. In reality, they are so far from lame. I’m a caretaker, which means I have a friend that I spend 17 hours a week with, who loves me and makes me laugh, whose life is cracking but whose spirit is almost unnervingly whole. I get to do that. I clean houses, which means I have a friend that I see once a week and help with things she can’t do, on account of her health. She tells me about how she hates being dependent and how she loved learning to cook during her years in New Orleans, and we put our heads together about so many things. On paper, on a paper being sent to UT in a priority mail flat-rate envelope, that looks stupid. Oh well. There’s not much I can do about that. Best I can do is remember real values, which is the perennial struggle of the human being in general. Especially the follower of Christ, right? This morning I was crabbed into a corner of my teal armchair and realized that the God of the universe is larger and kinder than I understood. Leaves opened and my life is changed again. Thank God.
Another thing I wanted to hear myself say was that it’s odd how working (again) toward a concrete thing (such as graduate school) makes me feel different. Like I have opened a window and here’s an eddy of fresh air. There are other concrete things I’m working toward, of course, like a wedding and a trip to Europe in the summer of 2012, like publication of my writings, like a new car, like a series of quilts, but none of the above have deadlines. That I can see, anyway. But here’s a deadline, and if I miss it, nobody’s going to feel bad and extend it for me. Something is so enlivening about it.
When Marshall and I met K. Woodhull to talk about potential pre-marital counseling a couple weeks ago, we ended up talking a lot about how Marshall and I both need (need) to have a purpose or goal, something in the future to work toward. Or we both get so effing depressed. I think one of the biggest things in our life is going to be finding and pursuing those goals, and knowing that is empowering. Working toward grad school, even if it’s a bad idea, even if it’s impossible, is empowering. I’m searching out my own heart, here. Being taught. Thank God.
The entire world is so full of beautiful things. Today I renewed my car tags and wrote a check because there wasn’t enough to cover it in my checking account, and when I got into my car to drive home, it wouldn’t start. It means something that I called my dad and he came out immediately, roll started it and took it back home with him to look at, even though he already had stuff to do today.
Yesterday on my way home I had one of those “I’m alive!” moments and went to the Disc Exchange just to see if they had any Innocence Mission on vinyl (the only thing I have to play music on in my room is a laptop with lousy speakers and a record player), and came out with Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days and the Fleet Foxes album with the Bruegel painting on the cover. $30. It was insane, and I knew it, but I did it anyway. And now I’m listening to the vast and stony and warm layers of all of these Fleet Foxes songs, all of them, and trying to hold ideas of money and enoughness and notenoughness in one hand, and the strange beauty of the world in the other.
Sometimes even the songs that sound like canyons and huge underground lakes make a room around you, a small room. This is how these songs are, to me. The window is open just enough to let in the smell of earth, some long needles of sunlight, and the sonic disturbances of life. You get the feeling that these are all you need, all you need for the rest of your life is this album and this chair, and for that door to be closed.
Balance, the search for. Which encyclopedia? Because I needed so much to go camping this weekend, and now I don’t have money for gas, or a car. The list of things to take with me lies long in the pages of my journal, so happy and bulleted and dreamed-over (this is what I do at work). It’s gonna break my heart to tell it that I’m not going.
So, I seem to be having the worst cramps ever, in life, today, WTF.
Well, time to go to work!
Day 1
1. Buy two tickets to NYC & Chicago, $648.
2. Through browser error, accidentally buy the same tickets twice.
3. Second transaction cancels first, but both charges remain on my account, totaling $1,296.
4. Talk to Orbitz, who says it’s American Airlines.
5. Talk to American Airlines, who says it’s Orbitz.
6. Talk insistently to Orbitz, who conference-calls Regions Bank, “releases” charge from cancelled reservation, and Regions rep deletes it.
Day 2
1. Find at 5:00pm that charges returned, while other random charges that had been pending on my account posted, causing me to owe $231 in overdraft fees.
2. Talk shakily to Orbitz, in Qatar, who says it will be taken care of “within 24 hours.”
3. Go to work, go to bed.
The Longest Day
1. Talk to Orbitz, in the Philipines, who finds no record of rep in Qatar, who says she will fax notice of refund to Regions “within two hours.”
2. In two hours, talk to Orbitz, in Calcutta, who says $648 refund will take 8 – 10 business days to process.
3. Conference Orbitz with Regions, in Florida, who talks insistently to him and urges him to reconsider.
4. Orbitz says ok, five days.
5. Regions says what about the $231 in overdraft fees?
6. Orbitz says please hold.
7. Regions and I talk about kids, sons, marrying young, Disneyworld, Epcot, roller coasters, spring, snow, accents, “the run-around,” etc.
8. Orbitz says hello, says to Regions, can you take off those overdraft fees?
9. Regions says talk to my supervisor.
10. Fail to find supervisor, get lost in the air, call strange numbers, talk to automaton in call center, get off the phone.
11. Get voicemail from Philipine Orbitz who says to call Orbitz and conference in Regions.
12. American Orbitz! says please hold.
13. For first time … in life … consider yelling at rep. In repressing yell, strain muscle in neck. Wonder how many hours of wait-music I’ve heard today, total. Estimate hour and fifteen minutes.
14. Wonder if blood is pooling in legs, like they say it does during long flights, and whether a stroke is imminent.
15. American Orbitz says yes we’ll credit those fees, and yes it was American Airlines after all, and yes their refund is on its way.
16. I say thank you, Rhonda, thank you & goodbye.
17. I hang up, I see the world is still here, I see I am still alive, I wonder when I ate last, I wonder when I let the sun shine on my face last.
18. World & your million anxieties, million miles of cable and scramble and code, please hold.
I wrote what I thought was a brilliant statement of purpose for UVA, only to come back to it hours later & find that it is COMPLETELY, COMPLETELY WORTHLESS.
