It’s not often I flay myself for folks to read, though I’m not exactly known for aiming kindness my own way.  Anyway.  My lovely husband and I are attending FogCon at the moment, which is a charming little literary sf/f convention.  Highly recommended, well organized.

So, the tale.  We decided tonight to get room service for dinner.  Now, we had lunch at …11:30ish?  It’s 7 now.  And I was hungry!  So we ordered a glomp of food, a true glomp.  Or what I saw as a glomp because I’m completely disordered about food and appropriateness.  So when the nice young waiter brought our food and it was on a special table due to so many plates, I immediately slipped into a sort of humiliation fugue state.  With every perfectly reasonable dish he uncovered, I grew more and more wretched.

Finally, at the end of the recitation, I heard myself telling this bullshit story about how we hadn’t eaten all day, and wow, and it was going to feel good to finally have food, and …I just lied.  I straight up lied to a young man I’ll never see again because I was so horrified with the amount of food we ordered.  (for the record, we each had chicken tenders and fries, and an appetizer, and split a dessert.  not that it matters)  He walked out after mumbling some reassurance that really meant “I-don’t-care-lady.”  My husband looked at me and said, “Oh honey,” and I burst into tears.

There are days I wish I could cut off my stomach with a knife.  There are days when I wish I really could live on air and water, rather than ever put any food into my mouth ever again.  There are days when I want so badly to not be in the body I’m in that I can barely stand it.

I mean…I’m doing good things for myself.  I think I’ve lost a little weight lately, I’ve been working out, I’ve been eating better.  But seriously, one imagined case of side-eye from a hotel waiter, and I was nearly hysterical.  I put myself in jails, and food is just one more set of bars.

I can hear my husband at the front of the apartment.  He’s assembling a complicated Lego building, which means little plastic pieces are rattling together in the Tupperware he’s scavenged from the kitchen for sorting.  He’s playing Kacey Musgraves; he’s been going through a country-girl sort of phase (with my full support).

All three cats are lounging in sunspots in the bedroom.  When all the shades are pulled high, a nearly solid wall of sunlight shoves into the room.  I can hear the tinny growl of a tiny airplane engine, and beyond that, construction, and beyond that, the waves of the Pacific and the trolley’s occasional bell.  Pretty good day.

My husband has already posted it in several other locations (king of social media that he is), but I should declare it in my own voice too.  I’ve sold my first poem, and it was just published.  I’m humbled and thrilled.  It’s a short work about an AI who just wants to make you happy.

Watch this TED talk by writer Andrew Solomon if you have any interest in what depression feels like, viscerally, in the moment.  The “show transcript” button just below the video will bring that up for you as well.

Depression, the secret we share.

“Help! I’m in a nutshell! How did I get into this nutshell? Look at the size of this bloody great big nutshell! What sort of shell has a nut like this?”

—–

Anyway.  We moved from smack down in the middle of Silicon Everything up into San Francisco, right off the ocean, right off the park.  We’re in the exact same neighborhood, the exact same corner of it that my husband remembered from 90s nostalgia, and isn’t that cool?  The ocean is amazing, the park is restful, the neighborhood full of surfers and aimless drifters and busy busy bees.

I sold a poem this year, which is one of the proudest things I’ve done.  I sent out another one and never heard back, so it’s time to send out more rather than stuff everything back under the proverbial bushel for another twenty years.

I left my retail job at Apple, which precipitated the worst attack of depression/inertia/crap that I’ve felt in the last few years.  It isn’t money, it’s occupation.  I don’t know, contributing, doing, getting out of the house.  When I’m home, everything preys on everything else until I’m like a turtle flipped over on its shell, unable to do anything but flail.

We went to London for our honeymoon, and even though I was so sick the whole time, it was fantastic.  We went to Disneyland a couple of times and basked in excellent customer service and that odd sense of Americana belonging that comes with Disney and having the privilege to afford it and travel to it and all the rest.  We went to Austin and San Antonio too, and LoneStarCon, and BigBadCon here in Oakland.  We didn’t game nearly enough.  I was in a great Lexicon game.  I create and role-play stories with amazing friends.

I started poking at crafts – I’ve been obsessively folding paper and considering all sorts of adjacent paper-related things.  Orgami has proven to be really absorbing – it’s a match between geometry and handiwork, and somehow that’s really satisfying.

I didn’t read enough.  I loved a few movies, like Pacific Rim.   I read a ton of comics.  I am so happy I bought a Spotify subscription.  I whined about not upgrading my phone.  I became completely obsessed with nail polish.  I ate poorly, but walked more than the year before.  I have some sort of dental problem that needs attention.  I bought eyeglasses a few days ago, after not doing so since before my first husband died.  I bought them just before he passed, right?  And even though they’re scratched and nasty, I don’t know.  It’s a thing.  But new glasses are coming, and maybe I’ll see more clearly.

2014 thoughts:  write more, walk more, be kinder to myself.  love more.  be less afraid.

I can see the Pacific Ocean from where I’m sitting.  I can’t see much of it, just a glittering sliver along the top of an apartment building on the street between me and the sea.  I can’t see the waves from here, or the surfers, or the beach.  All of it’s there, though, and I smell salt every time I breathe.

The neighborhood is called Sunset (with its Inner and Outer varieties; we’re Outer).  Nearly fifty well-gridded, numbered avenues march in a straight line toward the sea.  Most are filled with houses like pastel cubes, one apartment upstairs, a garage and mother-in-law apartment below.  Or, like our place, they’re two apartments up, and a combination of garages and baby apartment below.  However it works out, there’s never enough room for all the cars.

Nothing in Sunset seems taller than four stories.  I don’t know why.  I wondered: earthquakes?  Geological instability?  Bryant says, who’d let their block be ripped down to put up the first high-rise?  I wrinkled my nose, and he said, exactly.

Between our street and the one closest to the beach is a warren of long, fenced backyards that no one uses.  The dog owned by the renters two floors below us runs around in a constant circle over a grey stone path in the shape of the infinity symbol.  Once in a while I’ll hear people shouting – five minutes ago, a guy bellowed, “Motherfucking blood type!” from the yard a few doors down – but I never see anyone just hanging out on their little patch of dirt.

What amazes me most in the middle of the day is how deserted the whole thing is.  Sunset is the largest neighborhood in the city.  The avenues are wide.  I could walk down to the corner right now and stand in the intersection and see no one, all the way up to 40th or so.  Buses pass now and again.  Surfers.  I can hear ship’s horns and the Muni’s bell where it turns at the end of Judah.  I can always hear the waves.

The apartment building right behind ours is a pastel yellow block with scaffolding covering its whole rear facade.  I can see straight through the apartment opposite our bedroom.  The woman who lives there has fluttery white curtains and a centerpiece in the middle of her dining room table.  When she eats I can see the back of her head.  It’s always perfectly centered in the window-frame.

I can tell when the afternoon heads into evening because all the cars come home.  There’s something so public about living with all the windows open.  The iron gate across our front door slams every time someone comes home.  The dog two floors down is panting.  The ‘motherfucking blood type’ guy just told a bro he’d be by later.

Birds walk and hop on our sunlights.  The cats sit below and watch in unison.  They love it here.  Sunspots, birds, open windows.  It hasn’t rained yet, but the ocean keeps everything damp.  Laundry takes forever to dry.  Bread molds quickly.  When the fog comes, I can move from one end of our very long apartment to see all the grey roll over.  The rest of the time, it’s a California dream.  The sunsets are particularly fine.