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The Sunday List: On Not Wearing Pants & Other Vulnerable States.

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Sitting at my usual spot at Jo’s, I am (only slightly unabashedly) eavesdropping on my neighboring tables to compile a list of the gems I typically hear while writing on Sundays.  However, today is oddly quiet.  While the air feels perfect, the sky warns of an impending rainy day.  Jesus sandals are popular today.  A man and his baby are proving more popular among the ladies than a man and his puppy.  Entrepreneurs, Rent-a-Baby might be an excellent idea for a new dating service.  Just FYI.  The dominating conversation permeating the airspace is about sports.  Le bore.  I have no clue which sport these two dudes are talking about.  They are speaking a foreign language.  Today is not feeling like an eavesdropping list day.

The tree just outside of my backyard was acting like a jerk last night.  She was creaking so loudly against the fence post that she was keeping me awake.  I must have done something to piss her off.

The big jerk.

I surrendered to the noise and settled for veiling the sound with a movie.  ”Tiny Furniture” was the instant Netflix pick of the night.  The two things that I was left thinking about: 1. The last lines of the movie were a perfect example of a good narrative conclusion without slapping the viewer in the face with it.  ”Do you hear that sound?”  ”A little bit.  I think it’s the alarm clock.”  ”Do you think you could move it?”  ”Yeah. Hold on a sec… I put it away.”  ”I can still hear it.”  ”Yeah, but only a little bit, right?” 2. Dunham is real.  For half of the movie, she walks around without pants (which I adore her for) and has sex with a man in the most depressing place imaginable.  A pipe in the street.  She fails at nearly everything she does, but she deserves happiness, and I rooted for her.

I want what she’s got.  Not the pipe.  But the unrelenting search for happiness, taking her failures in stride.  She made failure look not quite so bad.  Pant-less and vulnerable and she didn’t care.

The other night, I had one of those waking dreams.  Petrified it really happened, it took me a while to get a grip on the reality of my surroundings.  I dreamed I had stepped outside into my backyard without my clothes.  The fence lay flat on the ground.  The tree in my yard had finally gotten its way and took down the fence, leaving me exposed, completely vulnerable, to my neighbors.

Fearing rejection, in nearly every risk-taking venture there is to take in life, I have slowly but surely convinced myself to play it safe in my thirties.  That’s the one thing I want to take back from my twenties.  Gut-wrenching nerves or not, I pushed myself to the limit.  Fearless?…. perhaps not, but there was a clear difference between what made me anxious in a bad way and anxious in a good way, and I actively sought after the good kind.  In the same good-kind-of-anxious vein… I’m taking my failure-or-not-I’m-going-for-it-ventures back.  In a refusal to lose my romantic ideals entirely to intellect, the following is a list of the risks I am willing to take:

  1. I want to write. For a living.  I’ve grown tired of refusing to say this “aloud” for fear that people will scoff at my confession, considering the nearly impossible odds that this will happen.  Though if I never try, I would never forgive myself.
  2. So what if I just finished my masters in the field of education–a field I may soon distance myself from?  If there is anything I’ve learned from my education, it is that I know exactly what I want for my life.  Exactly.
  3. Travel.  My summers are free, and nearly every summer I swear it will be the first that I venture out.  I want to see as much as possible in this lifetime, and there is no better time to start than now.
  4. See an audience again.  The dark stage looking out into the blinding lights and faceless oblivion once sent dizzying adrenaline through me.
  5. Allow myself to get “sweet on” someone else without the fear of vulnerability.  I want to surrender myself to just feeling what comes naturally.  Someone is relentlessly taking over my brain space in a way I didn’t see coming.  But I’m welcoming it in every way, until, perhaps, that fence in my backyard crashes to the ground.

Revisiting the Leaning Tree.

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I have never been one to go out alone.  My anxiety is an uneasy beast woman.  However, if you recall, I am no longer allowing her to take charge of my life anymore.

I usually listen to her when she says, “If you go out alone, Lauren, you will be awkward.  People will look at you funny.  You will say something stupid.  You will look like a loner.  An oddball.”

I am on a mission to erase my negative thoughts.

I have always wanted to walk to Jo’s coffee on a regular basis, make Sunday mornings at Jo’s with my laptop my church.  If you have never visited Austin, Jo’s is an iconic coffee shop, located outside, next to the hotel San José.  I live only a couple of blocks away, and I can stroll down the equally iconic South Congress alongside tourists and other regulars.  Besides, I have always believed that writing is my religion, and if anything at all, my meditation.  My previous negative thoughts have always told me I would look like a wanna be, one of those coffee shop writers, who never writes alone and fakes it to get attention.  But do any of them do this to seek attention?  Maybe they are like me.  Maybe they just need a change of scenery.  To get out of the house.  To allow their mind more space, rather than the regular confines of their apartment walls.

So, it is a lovely day in Texas.  Summers are long here, but today is one of the first days the air is bearable.  The sun is out, but the breeze is stronger, without blowing my locks into my eyes and mouth.  It’s cool without being cold, which a day of cold to Texans is probably the day Northerners dust off their bathing suits and lay out on the rooftops with foil on cookie sheets nesting on their breasts.  It feels good.  So I swallowed my negative thoughts, and here I sit, alone with my laptop and an Iced Turbo, a sugary asshole of a coffee drink.  I purchased a pack of American Spirits at the counter.  The teal pack.  The woman behind the counter argued with the man who handed them to me, “You just said ‘teal’, it’s just blue.”

“Yeah, but it’s not just blue, it’s a blue-green.  It’s teal,” he said.

“What would you call the yellow pack?” she asked.

“Canary yellow.  No, school bus yellow.”

I agreed with the man; I prefer the creative underdog.  The woman jokingly said I was mean.  I smiled and tucked the cigarettes into my bag.  I’m not a regular smoker.  In fact, I had no clue what the difference was between the blue… ahem, teal pack and the school bus yellow pack was, but I’m about stepping outside of my grey… ahem, cloudy grey box these days.  Judge me, see if I care.  Ahahaha!

I care.  I’m a terrible liar.

I shoveled down a couple of their famous breakfast tacos and cracked open the lid of my ancient Mac.  We have been together forever.  He and I are constantly fighting, but we always make up.  The make up is always the best.

Sorry, I’m a sucker for long-winded analogies.  And just you wait, I’m not done.  I’m never done.

I’ve actually forgotten that I am not alone.  There are families with their dogs.  Couples with their noisy children.  And other loners with their laptops, or The New York Times, and teal or school bus yellow packs of cigarettes.  Some have on bike gear and are resting after their Sunday ride.

My next feat is coming here again.  For some reason, I have other negative thoughts that arrive when I appear somewhere as a regular.  ”Oh, look, there she is again.  The loner and her ancient laptop.  Does she not have a better place to go?  Really?”  I know.  My subconscious is a mean girl.  She is also very unreasonably judgmental.

Now it’s getting crowded and a woman nearby is acting out a big scene. Apparently, there is no place to sit.  ”Should I get up?  She’ll see that my coffee is empty.  The foil from my tacos are wadded up and resting beside the now only open container on my table… my boyfran, Mac.  He’s now turned red and is alerting me that it’s time to recharge.  He doesn’t last very long anymore, if you know what I mean.

Today is that woman’s lucky day.

*******

And now I’m back home, writing on my patio, underneath the leaning tree, the one I wrote about in my Freshly Pressed post, the one that everyone probably refers to when they say they have no clue how some of the “shit” makes its way there.  Oops, some negative thoughts are more stubborn than others.  Strange thing.  The tree is not leaning so much today.  It seems to be correcting itself and growing more upright, towards the sun.  It’s funny how that tree is still somehow a metaphor for my life.

Ah, there she is.  Still a little unsure of her direction, but she’s finding her way.

And the Third One Was Just Right.

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This tree sits just outside my backyard.  As you can see, she seeks desperately for some company.  The person who lived here before me shoved a newspaper between the tree and a single post in the fence.  Whenever the wind blows with more urgency than normal, the post makes a terrible sound like an old door opening on its own.  Some days, I think she might break in through the sliding glass door, despite the efforts of the post and the newspaper.  Some days, I feel just like that tree.

That’s it.  That was all I was going to write.  I was about to hit the Publish key and walk away, but then I thought, “Wait, that’s not my voice.  That’s my temporary voice.  The one that sneaks up on me sometimes when I’m tired and thinks I am good at self-loathing.  So, I shut the lid of my laptop with fervor.  Not ever necessary, as I mostly keep it plugged in, but it always feels good, like slamming the door after huffing a silencing insult.  And you all know, that probably never happens to me.  Then, I turned on some Louis CK, poured a second cup of coffee, and now I feel better.  I feel differently about that tree.  Here is my edit:

This tree sits just outside my backyard.  As you can see, she seeks desperately for some company.  The person who lived here before me shoved a newspaper between the tree and a single post in the fence.  Whenever the wind blows with more urgency than normal, the post makes a terrible sound like an old door opening on its own.  Some days, I think she might break in through the sliding glass door, despite the efforts of the post and the newspaper.  Some days, I feel like telling that tree to shut the hell up.

And then I thought, wait, CK may have just rubbed off on me a little too much.  I don’t think that’s my voice either.  So I tried one more time:

This tree sits just outside my backyard.  As you can see, she seeks desperately for some company.  The person who lived here before me shoved a newspaper between the tree and a single post in the fence.  Whenever the wind blows with more urgency than normal, the post makes a terrible sound like an old door opening on its own.  Some days, I think she might break in through the sliding glass door, despite the efforts of the post and the newspaper.  Some days, I feel just like that tree, but when I do, I suppress the feeling by telling my subconscious, as well as the tree, to shut the hell up.

I think I need some more coffee.