An Earth Day Rant and CHALLENGE

So it's Earth Day again, that magical day when people who rarely spend more time outside than it takes to get from their car to the mall entrance pretend to care about the environment. Hooray. Everyone post a picture of the planet with a little banner about how pretty trees are so you can feel good about yourself and then continue taking thirty minute showers, using four paper towels when you needed one, leaving all the lights on and everything plugged in at all times, and consuming plastic and fossil fuels at an alarming rate.

See? Everything's fine now!

Oh, did that sound a little bitter? Look, I know that a lot of you reading this are not the people I described above. I know that a lot of you honestly care and want to fix things just as much as I do. The thing is, we're not doing it.

I am included in this. I try to do what I can: unplug things, turn lights off, take short showers less frequently, pick up litter, reduce, reuse, recycle, work for a conservation organization, etc. But there's only so much you can do. You can bring reusable bags to the store but everything you buy comes with a pound of plastic packaging. The fact that I do work for this conservation organization means that I don't have enough money to buy all organic, it's often hard to buy local, and I drive an enormous gas-guzzling car now because my tiny fuel efficient one got wrecked and my parents offered this one to me for free which was incredibly kind of them and I was in no position to pass it up. I hope to buy a fuel efficient one in the future but I'm about to drive this behemoth 1,400 miles and I feel kind of sick about it but it's what I have to do.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has changed its language. It no longer talks about what we can do to stop global warming. It talks about what we can do to limit it to two degrees (Celsius). Spoiler alert: We're not going to do it. The big businesses are actually trying to get regulations loosened, the government is wishy-washy at best, and the media is still focusing on whether or not the people believe in climate change. I wonder how many people and animals will have their homes destroyed, starve, or run out of water before people will stop caring about everyone's right to their own opinion and start taking action based on the science. Obviously, it will be too late. It's already too late.

"Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man..." Aldo Leopold wrote that in 1948. 67 YEARS AGO. And if anything it is more true now than it was then.

Everyone knows that fracking is using millions of gallons of water while much of the country is in a prolonged drought, that it poisons groundwater, that it ruins habitat, that it is detrimental to the health of anything living anywhere near the mines. But who cares, right? It's natural gas. Natural means good! We'll have a cheap solution for a few years until we use all of it up just like we're doing with oil and then we'll all be fucked again. But why would we waste money figuring out solutions now when we could make money by pushing the problem onto future generations?!

All of this makes me want to scream and punch people and throw up but it also leads to that age-old question: So what do you do about it? I've been thinking about this a lot lately in terms of my career as well as my personal habits. I might make a separate blog post about that later, but for now the short answer is: I don't know.

But I have an idea. I'm issuing a challenge:

I'd like to make Earth Day like New Year's Eve, where we all make at least one resolution. It can be small! It doesn't have to cost money! Just pick something simple that you know you can do but haven't been and try to stick to it for a whole year. A lot of them will become habit pretty quickly. Then next year, make a new one. We're going to make this a thing.

My Earth Day Resolutions:
1. I will remember to bring my reusable bags to the grocery store every time this year and be more emphatic about refusing plastic bags when I really don't need them.
2. I will master the art of the 5 minute shower.
3. I will go camping at least three times this summer.

Edit to Add:
4. I will use locally-sourced fruit, vegetables, and eggs when possible and actually research where in my community to get more local produce.

Beauty, Perfection, and Seashells

I have long been a perfectionist. I believed in straight lines, right angles, and right answers. If you can't do it perfectly, don't try. If you do try you had better give it all you have until it is perfect. To be fair, it helped me accomplish a lot. Perfectionism got me Magna cum Laude and departmental honors in a subject that didn't come especially easy to me. It got me into Phi Beta Kappa. It made me a better writer and a better dancer. It also gave me crippling anxiety and depression. I was terrified to make the wrong move in relationships, in my career, and just generally in life. I wanted to count the squares ahead of me so I would know which move would be sure to lead me to happiness with the fewest rolls of the dice.

It's something I've known I should fight for a long time. But I believed that if I stopped trying for perfection I would fail, and failure was unacceptable. I also saw fighting against it as a losing battle and if you know you are going to lose why fight, right? I'd been trying for a couple of years, making glacial progress, but since last summer something started to change: I started to win.

And you know what? It turns out that trying is FUN. It is just as fun if you end up not being good at what you're trying. Sometimes more. And I like myself a lot more. There's still the voice in the back of my head that whispers that I'm not good enough, that nothing I do is as good as what others can do so I should just stop, but it's getting easier to shut that voice up.

I'm still ambitious. I still put all of myself into what I do. I just don't beat myself up as much if it doesn't work out. I actually try harder now. I don't avoid practicing because it no longer ends with abuse. The other day I did a truly atrocious painting. This thing was UGLY. The little voice started back up and I felt bad for even trying...for a minute. Then I looked at it again and just laughed. I noticed that I did the shape part pretty well and decided I'd try to fix the colors in a couple of days. Then I practiced guitar and decided to just wing it on a recipe. 

Obviously I still have my bad days, but I don't think I really recognized how much of my perfectionism had ebbed away until I went beachcombing with a new friend today. She only picked up the most perfect shells: big and unbroken. I started to do the same, out of habit. And don't get me wrong, I kept some of those perfect shells.

And they're pretty. But...kind of boring. They're the kind of shell you see everywhere. You can buy these things in bundles at tourist trap stores. They're just not exciting. The Hallmark-y phrase that kept running through my mind all morning was "Sometimes the broken shells are more beautiful than the perfect ones."

The broken shells are the ones that let you in. The inner structure is almost always more beautiful than the outside. And the inside gleams, polished by the life in contained.

The imperfect shells tell stories. Your eyes glide over the whole, shapely shells that look like every third grader's drawing but these hold your attention. You want to spend time on these shells, to see them from every angle.

The other phrase that leapt into my head today and stuck there was "I'm interested in beauty, not perfection." I like that one better and I think I'll keep it as a life motto. My perfectionism is disappearing in everyday things like learning to draw or play guitar but when it comes to my life as a whole I still worry constantly that I'll make a wrong move, or worse, that I've already made a move that will fuck it all up. It can be a paralyzing thought. But I'm getting braver.

Things get shattered, or just turn out different than you'd planned. You leave the board and travel in any direction you choose. You make mistakes, things change, choices you thought were right might feel wrong later, but you'll never know until it's too late so the best you can do is follow your heart. Holes may be blown in the walls you've lived within for a long time, but what you go through can only ever add depth, complexity, and ultimately, beauty.

Natural Habitat

Okay, I know that this will sound like bragging and that everyone in the Midwest and on the East Coast will get angry with me but it’s my blog so I’m just going to say it: one of my biggest problems right now is that it is just too nice outside to get any work done. It is January and in the 70s with bright sun, blue sky, and a slight breeze. It is absolutely the perfect day. And there are just magnificent climbing trees everywhere around me. I actually just sat in a tree for almost two hours. It was fantastic and I didn’t want to move. It’s one of those days where I don’t really want to swim or hike or bike or do anything, I just want to be outside. Feel the breeze and the sun and the bark of the tree, listen to the birds and watch them go about their business without racing around trying to see and identify as many as possible. Just be with nature for a while.

Of course, thoughts inevitably pop up that get in the way of that kind of serenity. Today as I was lounging in my tree I kept thinking about this sign that I saw a couple of days ago:

That sign just makes me so angry. It was at a park, too. Along a “hiking and biking trail” which was actually a wide cement path through a decent oak mot but close enough to the main road that you could always hear traffic. At one point there was a break in the trees and about twenty feet away was a golf course. The smallest amount of nature possible wedged into some suburban sprawl and they still put up signs to “Beware”. Why is everyone so afraid of nature?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that plenty of things in the natural world are dangerous and should be respected. If there had been an educational sign informing visitors about the existence of snakes in the area and maybe explaining which species could be found here or simply telling people how to identify venomous snakes, that would have been fine.

In case you didn’t know, snakes that are venomous generally have a head that is distinct from and wider than their bodies, whereas harmless snakes usually do not. (http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/gaston/Pests/reptiles/venompix.htm)

Recently I had to promise my mother that I would try not to get bitten by a venomous snake (I don’t mean to pick on you, Mom!). I don’t blame her for being worried. I do have the biologist reaction when I see a snake (Ooh! Cool! Lemme see!) rather than the normal reaction (Aaah! Run away!). But even as someone who spends more time than most out in places where Scary Nature lives it’s still fairly low on the list of things that will likely kill me. It’s probably going to be heart disease, cancer, or a car accident. But I constantly eat fried food, drive my car, and, I don’t know, live in the world (pretty much everything gives you cancer these days). People seem so much more unnerved by the possibility of death by animal attack than any of those far more likely scenarios. Everyone told me I would get killed by a venomous animal in Australia. Yesterday I showed a friend this photo:

And he responded “Ah! Kill it!” I know he was mostly joking, but seriously? It’s a pretty small gator, and it was pretty skinny. It didn’t even open its eyes when I got close enough to take this picture. Pretty much every other gator I’ve seen has splashed abruptly into the water before I got nearly this close. The snakes at the refuge, too, were much more interested in getting away from me than in trying to attack. I barely got a look at the rattlesnake; I heard it rattling as it disappeared deeper into a brush pile. Obviously there are some more aggressive creatures out there, but by and large they would rather run (or slither) away than attack you.

So why is everyone so freaked out by them? I think it’s the uncontrollable aspect. People like to think that in laying down concrete over half the country and walling out the nature, clearcutting unsightly natives and planting swaths of safe, boring, completely useless turf grass that they’ve controlled their environment. There are designated “natural spaces” that people like to view from the comfort of their air conditioned cars (no one is ever too hot or too cold anymore, why would you allow yourself to be uncomfortable?) but the thought of interacting too closely with anything wild or uncontrollable is terrifying.

Also it’s gross. Nature smells funny and is dirty and it’s not sterile like everything should be. Growing up I used to go on long walks in the nearby nature center with my parents and my dad and I would pick up feathers to bring home and make quills. I love finding feathers. But once in high school I was walking with a group of friends and found a beautiful one. I picked it up and jokingly stroked a friend’s face with it and everyone I was with was horrified. “Don’t you know that feathers carry disease?!” I was embarrassed and even though I was pretty sure they were all wrong I didn’t really know how to argue the point. Even years later after being told by an ornithologist that my dad and I were right, I still hesitate for half a second before picking one up.

I am still fighting other aspects of this. Wandering through the woods today I spotted my new favorite climbing tree with a nice wide branch to recline on and I hesitated before hoisting myself up. “I’m wearing shorts, I might scrape my legs, it might be dirty (I’ve noticed raccoons like to poop on all the best sitting spots on trees. It’s really annoying), maybe I should just go sit on a nice man-made bench". But then I decided, “Fuck it! I want to sit in that tree!” And I did scrape my leg. It stung a little for about two seconds. And it wasn’t completely comfortable, like a couch up there. But it was better than comfortable. It was wonderful. I would be there now if I didn’t want to get all this off my chest.

I want to say it was perfect but I won’t because I think that’s sort of the root of this whole issue. Society is obsessed with attaining and maintaining perfection and nature is imperfect – asymmetrical (often, but not always), in flux, complicated, dangerous, messy. We fight so hard against it. But you can’t keep things from getting dirty. You can’t keep things from getting chipped or scratched. “Puppies turn into dogs, who get old and die!” And people do, too. Our culture tries hard to fight, deny, and avoid it, but you can’t. The best you can do is take a few precautions – get insurance, wear boots, don’t poke the snake – and then embrace whatever happens. The alternative is essentially making a cage for yourself to keep the unpredictable things out.

Happy Birthday to Me!

*I wrote this about a week ago but didn't get a chance to post it until now.*

I am twenty six. I don’t approve of being closer to thirty than to twenty, and there is a minor voice in my head telling me I haven’t done nearly enough to be at this point, but I’m on a brand new adventure now so that voice can shut up. This is by far my loneliest birthday ever but I didn’t care at all today because for my birthday I got an entire new world!

The drive from Wisconsin was long and mostly boring except for the snowstorm and murder motel in Kansas. But I added three states to my list (Missouri, Kansas, and Texas) and we reached my new home past dark so I didn’t see much of the town or even my surroundings. I set up my tiny new home. I have to say, so far I kind of love it. I have way too much stuff (I knew that was going to happen) but I have just enough space (for now). It’s going to be kind of an extended dry run to see if I could hack it for long periods of time on a boat. The whole thing is 18 feet. It looks like this:

Let’s play a game I like to call “Which Bed did Karis Sleep in Last Night?” If you guessed the tiny high-up one, you are correct. Hint for the future: that will always be the answer to this question.

So far I’ve been doing really well. There were a few pangs of loneliness and fear last night, and a little bit of a feeling of being lost without the distraction of other people and the internet at my fingers constantly. Just as one of those pangs was hitting me I started to hear a great horned owl pretty close to the trailer. I heard another, then another, even closer. Three of them called back and forth so close that after listening for a few minutes I got out and by the light of the full moon (and it’s reflection on the bay) I could see them, soaring and perching only fifteen or twenty feet away! I listened to them off and on around my music all night and they made me feel so much happier and at home.

I was shocked when I stepped out into the sunlight and the bitter wind this morning and saw a pasture full of cattle in my front yard! 

There were also trees! With leaves! They are live oaks and they are everywhere and they are fast becoming one of my favorite trees. They make such gorgeous shapes, are often extremely easy to climb, and I just love them.

I heard cranes calling and thought nothing of it for a few minutes. The last nine months with fifteen species within earshot has made me fairly blasé about the preposterous calls of even African species echoing across the Wisconsin prairie. But the second or third time it dawned on me: those are real wild whooping cranes! Not raised by humans in costume, but from the original flock, brought back from the brink of 16 individuals in the wild. I can hear them calling back and forth from the marsh out to the North and the ponds in the cow pasture outside my front door. It is an amazing life I lead.

I finally met my new boss, Liz! I absolutely love her. She knows everything. We ate breakfast tacos (yep. Texas), and she showed me around the Lamar Penninsula (where I live), Fulton and Rockport (the closest towns), and Mustang Island (the barrier island across the bay). It is a strange mix around here of ranchers, oyster fishing, local beach folks, and wealthy snowbirds (“Winter Texans”). We saw tiny brightly colored shacks and enormous $10 million mansions, restored wetlands, and decimated habitat. 

Coastal ecology (like a lot of ecology these days) is full of fascinating facts and beautiful sights followed by phrases like “but its population is declining”, or “but it will all be underwater in a couple of decades”. I saw mangroves which was very exciting, but they’re moving into this area now only because it no longer freezes enough to keep them out because of climate change, so they’re choking out a lot of native plants and decreasing coastal habitats for - among other things - cranes. It was fascinating and depressing. But mostly fascinating. I hope to one day know half as much as Liz.

I saw the Gulf of Mexico! And we went birding! Both at the beach and at a little watering hole (apparently all of the migrating species stop there during the migration and in the spring they will have their breeding plumage. I cannot wait). Every year I make a resolution to become a better birder and every year I fail pretty badly but there isn’t a choice here. I will get better at it because there are just crazy amounts of birds everywhere! And they are all new and exciting to me. Today we saw:

Black and Turkey vulture (my most abundant neighbors next to cows)

Grackle (everywhere. Like pigeons. I love them)

Sanderling

Willet

Royal tern

Black skimmer (a huge flock, pretty uncommon as they are declining)

Brown pelican (almost went extinct due to DDT and are now off the endangered list)

White pelican

Laughing gull

Herring gull

Ring-bill gull

Snowy plover

Couch’s Kingbird

Kiskadee

Black crowned night heron

Great blue heron

Common flicker

Forester’s tern

Great egret

Belted kingfisher

Kestrel

Osprey

Liz knew almost all of them. And most of the shells. And told excellent stories about field biology. I kind of want to be her. I think I’m off to a good start here.

As we drove up to the gate (yes, I live in a “gated community” here) we could tell there were still whooping cranes at the cow ponds because there were birders parked all along the road with huge zoom lenses trained towards the pasture. It is very strange to have people training telescope lenses towards your home. I’m glad none of my windows face that way. I also feel like King of the Birders in a weird way. Although, I don’t want to tell them where I live because I can’t let them in to take good pictures of the birds.

So today was amazing. I am so excited to explore the town and the natural areas and just everything. I can’t wait. Now that I am alone in my tiny trailer I’m getting those pangs again a little, and I know I will get homesick and friendsick and things will be scary and hard but that’s how I know it’s worthwhile! I am so very excited to be starting this brand new adventure, and while I am not exactly excited to be turning 26, I think this is going to be a very good year.

2014

Every year feels big when it's happening but I think it's safe to say that looking back on my life from any point I will think of 2014 as being a pivotal one. A lot of things changed in a very short period of time and I'm still figuring out what it all means and where I go from here.

It started almost right away. In January, a week after my birthday, my friend and sorority sister Justine died in a car crash. I haven't talked about it much because I know that there are tons of people who were affected much more profoundly by this than I was. I wasn't terribly close to her, although I had always wanted to be, and even so it was pretty hard. It came on the heels of the death of one of my best friends from childhood seven months earlier, an event which left me feeling, in addition to the grief, pretty pointless, hopeless, and alone, thoroughly unconvinced and unable to be comforted by the thought of an afterlife the way so many other people seemed to be.

But the way that the community - AST, Beloit, and Justine's incredibly strong and loving family - came together to support each other through that time was really inspirational and started me thinking about the world in a better way. People came out of the woodwork with stories about how the smallest interaction with her had improved their lives. She lives on through everyone she touched, those she shared her life with and those she spoke to no more than once but who remember and appreciate her for it. It was beautiful. That is the kind of afterlife I believe in.

This was also the year I gave up my steady job and apartment in Madison to go back to interning, making no money and living with strangers in shared housing. I didn't go too far, I still see my friends in Madison, but it was a step farther into my chosen field and away from safety and a more "adult" life of choosing your own living situation, being able to save money, and having a potential source of income for more than 9 months at a time. It was scary and hard and absolutely the right decision.

Over the summer, my parents moved out of the house I'd lived in since I was seven months old. My father left the job he'd had for 25 years in Minnesota and moved to a university in South Carolina. While this was obviously a much larger change for my mom and dad, it meant saying goodbye to the place I'd always called "home" and getting rid of a lot of things I'd owned my whole life. Donating most of my books and almost all of my stuffed animals while around me strangers ripped up the carpet I'd learned to crawl on and tore down wallpaper I'd always hated but would miss just the same was incredibly difficult.

Around the same time, Alexander and I decided to split up after three and a half years. We're still friends and still care about each other a lot, but it just didn't make sense to be together anymore. The fairly mutual and logical decision didn't make the break less difficult to go through. The fact that I know it was right doesn't mean I'm not still sad about it even now.

I got together with him pretty quickly after my previous boyfriend whom I was with for a very long time, so this is the first time I've been single in my adult life. It's been hard and scary and exciting. I still don't really know how to deal with it but I'm learning. The break-up led me to question and change a lot of things about myself (or the questioning and changing led to the break-up? Probably both. Definitely both) and I'm still feeling pretty lost and extremely excited and terrified but finding out more and more about myself every day.

I took my first solo roadtrip. I camped alone for the first time. I went out on the town in a brand new city all by myself. I'm not very good at being alone but I'm working on it and I'm starting to realize I kind of like it.

I started to explore my spiritual side this year, as well. First with services and a couple of classes at the Unitarian Universalist church in Madison, and then with a Buddhist meditation group. I really enjoy it, although I've fallen out of practice the last few months, and it's been partially responsible for a huge shift in how I think and feel. I know that this is just the beginning of this education, too, but it felt like some very important steps that I had wanted to take for a long time and finally did.

I became obsessed with Dessa (and Doomtree in general) this year. It sounds like a silly thing to be on a list of big life changes but it definitely was for me in ways I can't really explain. Music is powerful stuff and I haven't really loved a band like this since high school. Their music helped me through a lot this year and has definitely impacted the way I think about myself and the world. 

I don't even look the same as I did at the beginning of the year. I've started wearing my glasses all the time, lost about twenty pounds, cut off most of my hair, and gotten two tattoos since last December.

I have a lot of excellent new friends. I love them all but a couple in particular (new and old) have been really instrumental in some of the more drastic changes and I'm forever grateful to them for that! I keep talking about being alone but even though I've been learning to be independent sort of for the first time a lot of people held my hand, listened to me talk (a lot. So much talking), gave excellent advice, and were generally my saviors this year. I can't begin to thank all of them in this post for everything they've done but I think you all know who you are and I want to tell you I appreciate it more than you'll ever know.

I'm conquering my fears, trying new things, challenging myself, and adopting new hobbies. I'm working on guitar and singing and finally actually attempted drawing and painting for real - and I'm not that terrible at them! More importantly, I'm going to keep trying.

I'm actually succeeding in changing some of the terrible habits I've known about but let continue for years. I've been thinking more deeply, paying more attention, and challenging what I've always thought about a lot of things. It sounds weird but in a lot of ways I feel like I'm re-learning how to feel. I would say I'm in a much better place than I was last year at this time. Even though it is scarier and less stable in every way, it's also exciting and much more free and meaningful. I've got a long way to go but I'm on the path and headed in the right direction and it feels really good.

Really, this year was all about making friends with the Fear. I'm still working on it and it's still hard but I'm starting to really appreciate the hard things in life, and looking back on the year it's amazing how much progress I've actually made.

If I had to sum up this year in just one picture it would be this one:

If I had to sum it up in a song it would be "L'audace" by Sims (http://doomtree.bandcamp.com/track/laudace) or "The Crow" by Dessa (http://dessa.bandcamp.com/track/the-crow). Ooh! Or "Into the Dark Unknown" by Holcombe Waller (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpVpK6Csf1I). There was no way I was actually going to pick just one.

Here's to a challenging, exciting, spectacular 2015 filled with new discoveries and adventures. I'm starting out well - I'll be leaving on the 3rd to live mostly alone and do field work with the whooping cranes on their wintering grounds in Texas. Terrifying, exciting, and exactly what I need.

The Linguist

                I used to believe I was a very emotional person but that’s not true. I don’t feel anything. Instead of feeling, I think. Thinking can look like feeling. To the untrained eye it can be incredibly hard to discern. Everyone says that thinking is logical and emotions are messy but really thoughts go in a million directions at once and emotions go in straight lines.

                I looked inside myself for the first time tonight. Really looked. More than just a cursory glance, like someone standing guard at an impenetrable fortress. All my organs are wrapped in words, shellacked together into a hard shell. The thoughts are criss-crossed over each other so dark that they look like blood but they shine like armor. It’s thickest around my heart, but words also pump through my bloodstream, twine around nerve-endings, and flow into every chink and crevice.

The casings are perfectly formed to the organs inside, but thick, hard, and gleaming. Like an old steel car without airbags or seatbelts, the shells of thought only really protect themselves. A crash would leave no dent, not a scratch. Even if the precious cargo shatters, liquefies, or slowly disintegrates into dust, the outside will shine like an empty skyscraper.

Word might get out, eventually, that something had gone wrong inside, but anything rising from within must pass through layers and layers of words, telling it how to act and react, what is reasonable, what is right, what is wrong, tiers of analysis and proscription before it can even make it to the surface. By the time it works its way through the densely packed expectations, caveats, and explanations, the message is unrecognizable. It may still be a mayday, but the precise nature of the problem is always masked and muted. I treat it like raw emotion, once it’s been seasoned, cooked, and garnished.

                My own voice gets muffled by the din. The air in my lungs bounces among a thousand pillowy thoughts before it can escape my lips; thoughts that quiet, that temper, other peoples’ thoughts, thoughts that I attribute to others who surely never thought them, lies, truths, song lyrics. What I say is never exactly what I mean.

                “You are thinking something,” he said. “I can tell. Just open your mouth and say what is in your mind.”

                It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I physically could not. The words were clear and coherent in my mind but the passageways from my brain to my throat are so choked with words and thoughts that the ones I’m thinking come out muddled with their edges blunted.

                It’s even worse when I’m alone. The words inside me can pile on top of me and weigh me down, can surge beneath me and lift me up, but they are slippery, fickle, and hollow. Sometimes in the morning they stick to my eyelashes and glue my eyes shut. Sometimes they settle in the switchbacks of my ear canals and twist incoming thoughts as others speak them.

                Many are my own, but I collect them. From friends, from strangers, from books, songs, Facebook statuses, advertisements. Every word I’ve ever heard or read has filled a crack somewhere. Some are locked away in the order they came in. Particularly cherished compliments will often stay for years but if not treated carefully will begin to curl at the edges and sag in the middle. Criticisms and wrong words spoken will lodge themselves somewhere inconvenient. They are diamond-plated and will never erode, still slicing deftly when new thoughts, minding their own business, try to edge gingerly past them.

                I think if I could find a way to syphon the words away slowly I would be able to stop drowning in them, but when I open my mouth a few catch in the too-small holes of the drain and block the others. They form a cyclone, come out spiraled with doubt, and once they start they cannot stop, more words issuing forth, explaining and qualifying, grasping for the control that was lost when they passed my teeth. The sea of words rises, flooding back into my ears and filling the ocean once again.

                The trouble is I keep trying to explain away my words. I keep trying to think my way out of my thoughts. To escape I need to feel: really, truly, completely, without analysis. I imagine my organs swelling and bursting out like Bruce Banner shredding his clothes as he becomes The Hulk, but they are atrophied, broken, shrunken within their shells and I frankly don’t think they have it in them. I feel like a spider trapped in its own web. I tried to build a fortress but it became a prison.

...And it Was the Best Night Ever

Without going into a lot of detail because that is not the kind of blog this is, it has been a rough few months. I have never dealt well with change and back in July there was a week where several of the pillars I thought of as sturdy, stable, and constant in my life were yanked out from under me all at once. That forced me to confront a lot about myself that I had been pushing aside or explaining away, and I've been sort of swinging wildly in the wake of all this ever since, trying to get my bearings.

I've learned more about myself in the last three months than I thought possible. I've changed and grown and gotten stronger. I'm proud of what I've done and I'm feeling optimistic about the future. I'm starting to really get to know myself better than I ever have before and for the first time I'm starting to like what I've found. It's been hard and it will continue to be hard but it's also been incredibly rewarding.

One huge reason why this process of breaking down and building back up has gone as well as it has is Doomtree and in particular, Dessa. Right before all this change went down Kathleen, one of my oldest friends, told me to listen to A Badly Broken Code and right after it all fell apart I downloaded it and started listening. I haven't stopped. I already had a couple of Doomtree CDs (from my excellent friend Kelly who deserves equal credit in introducing me to this fabulous world of Minnesota rap) that had been in my regular rotation but I bought more and more and for the past three months I have listened to almost nothing else. Some days those songs were the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning. I found strength and meaning and inspiration in the lyrics. As my situation changed new songs would emerge as my favorites, verses I had heard without really listening to the day before would suddenly cut straight to my heart and show me a new side of my situation and myself.

I don't want to sound like an insane fan or religious zealot, I just want to explain my frame of mind when I went to the Doomtree show at the Minnesota State Fair two weeks ago. Screaming the lyrics and jumping up and down with hundreds of fans was everything I'd imagined it to be and I felt better and freer than I had in months.

Knowing what that felt like made me even more excited to see Dessa last night. The show was in La Crosse, an hour and a half away but a small price to pay to get that feeling back. I hadn't known when I bought the tickets that I would be scheduled for work at 4am that day and the day before, so by the time I got to the concert I had gotten about 8 hours of sleep in the past two nights but again, that was not even really a consideration in my mind. I chugged some Red Bull and settled in.

Annabelle Lee, the opening act, was fun. Aby Wolf was gorgeous and soulful, but I was impatient for Dessa. The venue was probably the smallest I've ever been to. The performers could see every single person in the crowd, and Dessa was not shy about calling people out on what she saw. She called out a guy for looking bored the whole show until she sang "The Man I Knew" ("Post-cocaine confusion song?! Yeah, that is my jam!"), and a couple of others for miming girly excitement for another song ("Guys don't look any cooler when they're really into a song." She said, doing an impersonation of a cool hip-hop guy rocking out). My favorite was a girl who actually raised her hand to ask a question. Dessa was really excited that someone raised their hand at a rap show like they were in school, and even more excited that she could immediately tell the difference in hand-raising, but then the girl started to ask a question about the setlist and Dessa shut her down immediately ("The setlist is mine and mine alone! Now let's do some sad shit!").

All this makes me wonder what she saw when she looked at me because I was not the only one right up at the stage singing every word with her, I was not the only one holding up my phone to get pictures and video, I wasn't even the one trying hardest to get her to notice me. I got a high-five from her with everyone else gathered around her feet at the beginning and that would have been enough, truly. Then I recorded her singing "The Crow", one of my very favorites and one that has meant a lot to me, and she leaned down and took my phone from me, recorded a few seconds of the crowd screaming, and handed it back.

That would have been enough. But then during "Seamstress" (another of my favorites. Basically they are all my favorites) she motioned to a few of us to make some space and she jumped into the crowd directly in front of me. She sang the song from a few inches away and I was in awe. She let the audience, especially those of us close to her, shout back and forth with her "It was a mercy kill" "NO" "It was a suicide" "NO" "It was an accident" "NO" "Well at least I tried". That would have been enough. But then she got to "It's a strange breed, a different kind of creature that looks for love through the eye of a needle but the creed of the seamstress is..." and put the microphone square in front of my face. I remember it happening in slow motion and I remember a second of panic and a flood of determination not to screw it up and I know for a fact that I yelled (but not too loud) "That you're pretty in pieces!" and then she moved on, finished the song, and climbed back up on stage. I know that I did sing it and someone next to me gave me the thumbs up and said "good job!" but at the time and in my memory I cannot hear my voice at all.

After the show she hung out at the merch table, meeting, greeting, picture-taking, and signing things. I bought both her books and stood in line. She hugged me when I came up to ask for her autograph. I stumbled a little over my Minnesotan anxiety about bothering her or sounding stupid but I told her that I had been having a rough time lately and thanked her for her music and told her how much it had helped. She said "Yeah, me too. It's been a hell of a year" and gave me another hug. We took a picture together and before I left she looked me straight in the eye. A small gesture but in the moment it felt huge.

I would like to point out that at this point I had been awake for 21 hours, having only gotten five hours of sleep or so the night before and even fewer the night before that, but as I stepped out into the mostly empty streets of La Crosse I found myself shaking and started to cry.

I had been looking forward to this night for weeks, idly daydreaming about getting a high five, trying to work out how I would express my gratitude for all she'd unknowingly done for me the last few months without sounding like a hundred crazy fangirls she'd met before, or, in my silliest moments, picturing getting to sing a line into the microphone with her. Never in any of my fantasies did I picture all of these things happening. I honestly have no idea how to deal with feeling this lucky, especially after this summer.

All day today I've been replaying the events over and over trying to make them feel real. My exhausted brain, now running on a total of 13 hours of sleep over the past three days, seems half convinced that I hallucinated at least part of the night. How else could I have gotten everything I'd wanted and more? The cautious humble Midwesterner in me wants to say that this is a sign of horrible things to come, that no one person could possibly deserve this much special treatment, least of all me, and the other shoe will drop any day now as payment for my ecstatic joy and recognition. But I'm trying to rise above those voices and recognize the far more likely truth: it is a charmed fucking life I lead.