Tag: Megalomania

Bad Words: Damaged, Weird

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Damaged…Weird…

Aren’t we all?

I think those two words are the softest of the bad words because they do apply to everybody and they’re not necessarily bad. Everyone is weird in their own way. Everyone is damaged in their own way and the damage is almost never their fault. Weird implies unique. Damaged implies a victim of circumstance.

I come by my weird honestly. I was born with it. I’ve been weird for as long as I can remember. Everyone told me I was weird. It escaped no one’s attention. But it was a harmless weird. I ate cat food. It was that kind of weird.

I’m still that kind of weird. I quit eating a cat food a long time ago, of course. I matured and so did my weird. I’ve acquired strange number fixations. Odd hobbies. Random obsessions. Bizarre superstitions. Some might regard my love of pickle wraps up there with eating cat food, but pickle wraps are a family thing, so they don’t count.

My weird is harmless and I admit that part of my weird is a kind of coping skill. It’s how I deal with life. The other part of my weird is just how I interpret life. My view is skewed and has been since the beginning. Not a bad thing, just a thing.

Of course, it’s a subjective thing. In this society, it’s ideal to be unique while being the same. Whatever weird a person possesses, it should be a socially acceptible form of weird. Then it’s a quirk. And sometimes that quirk can become a trend. And a trend can be profitted from.

But if your weird is just weird, harmless or not, expect the side-eye. Expect the comments, muttered or spoken or shouted across a crowded place. My weird has earned me my share of disdain. It’s just another way people can complain about not understanding me. It’s another way to single me out, isolate me, make me feel defective.

When I let them.

I’m comfortable with most of my weird. It’s their hang-up, not mine. Weird is one of the few bad words that I’m not rushing to change.

From weird we get a little more serious.

I’m damaged. Like I said before, we all can say that we are. I like to say that every parent ruins their children in their own way and I don’t say it just to be witty; I really do think it’s true. Parents don’t mean to mess up their kids (for the most part). But raising a human being is hard. You have to do more than just keep them alive; you’ve got to teach them the rules of life and mold them into a somewhat functioning person. It’s not easy, mistakes are made. Some temporary, some last. It’s the nature of the game and the game is a rough one.

My parents did their fair share of damage to me, but the damage that I’m thinking of when I think of damage as a bad word is the damage I’ve done to myself.

To make a long story short, I went crazy when I was 21. Nothing too serious, just some major depression. Had I been honest about how serious the depression really was, I imagine things might have gone a little differently. But since I kept that bit to myself, I got the tools to fix the depression (I’m more cognitive-behavioral than Freudian) from my therapist and called the game after three sessions. I didn’t want to sit and talk about my mother. I needed to change my routine, change my mind, and vent in a healthy way. That’s all I needed to know. I declared myself, well, not cured, but on my way.

I duct taped my sanity basically. I made some happy changes to my mind. I started journaling regularly to help keep my emotions from bottling up and strangling me. I started exercising regularly to get those endorphins flowing.  I renewed my creativity.

However, I know the damage has been done and despite my attempts not all of it has been fixed. I’ve managed to fill a few of the holes. For the most part, though, what I’ve done is just a temporary patch job and sometimes the tape comes loose. Sometimes you can see the cracks in the paint if you tilt your head in the right light. And believe me when I tell you that lots of people do.

The damage they more easily forgive, though. Once they realize it’s damage.

The damage isn’t so bad and the weird isn’t too weird.

Those two words aren’t too bad for bad words.

It all starts to go downhill from here.

Don’t Cry, I’m Fat.

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’m fat. There’s no other way to say it and I’m not really big on sugar coating things, so there you go. I’m fat.

I’ve got rolls that would make a bakery jealous. I’ve got curves in all the right places and a lot of the wrong ones. Baby’s got back and some front. My arm flab is envied by flying squirrels everywhere. I. Am. Fat.

I’m not just fat in body; I’m fat in personality, too.

What I mean by that is even if I lost enough weight for society to deem me worthy (and that’s really never going to happen since I have these things called hips and shoulders and damned if BMI doesn’t account for that sort of thing), I would still have a big personality. I take up space. Give me room and get out of my way. Sometimes I think I need a bigger body just to contain this personality. Try to cram all of this into a skinny girl and it’s either going to overflow or bloat the body.

But back to being fat.

There’s some negative assumptions about my fat self that I’d like to correct. First of all, I don’t eat all the time. In fact, I actually have some troubles eating. Friends tease me about the fact that I can’t eat a lot at one time. One of my buddies pointed out once that his ten year old nephew ate more than I did. And it’s true. It’s like the ultimate joke on the fat girl: I’m fat, but can’t eat a lot. Go figure.

I don’t just eat junk. To be honest, lunches are probably the place that I slack the most on healthy eating, but dinner is a different story. I cook my own meals. I try to make them as fresh as possible. I look for ways to incorporate fruits and vegetables into my meals. I make that effort. I don’t eat a lot of fast food. Being broke helps, but even now that I have money, I’m still treating it as an occasional treat and not a go to staple. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth (I go through phases) and I don’t keep much in the way of salty snacks in my house because that’s the sort of thing I’m prone to binge on. I try to keep up the quality of the food I eat.

I don’t sit around all the time. I exercise. I try for five days a week, at least twenty mintues a day. My routine is currently in the process of being adjusted as I get used to working full time again. So far I’m just doing yoga and pilates, but I plan to work my previous workouts back into the mix: cardio kickboxing, belly dance, Latin dance, Brazillian dance, hip hop, and sculpting. Yeah, I like to dance and kick ass. Nothing wrong with that.

I’m not a slob. I may be fat, but I like the way I look for the most part. I like to dress this body that I have right now. I’ve been broke for too long and haven’t had the opportunity to invest in some new clothes, but believe me, that’s on my current to do list. I like to look good. I have style and I like to express it. It’s a struggle to find good looking clothes for my size because people are under this mistaken impression that fat people need to wear muumuus and while I’m not putting down muumuus, they’re just not for me.

Also, I’m bathe on a regular basis. Maybe I get a little sweatier during my workouts or maybe during hot days, but I can assure you, I don’t smell. I use this stuff called deodorant. Skinny people don’t have a corner on that market.

I know it offends a lot of people, but I’m okay being fat. They think that by saying that I’m giving up or choosing to be unhealthy. I’m not. I’m always looking to improve my health and if I do have a problem, my weight is probably going to be low on the cause list. Not getting regular check-ups, putting off going to the doctor, smoking for 16 years, they’ll be more likely to cause me problems than my weight.

And giving up? Please. I’m not giving up anything. Not my food and not my looks. Just because I don’t fit the norm and nobody’s going to be rushing to put me on the cover of a magazine doesn’t mean I’ve given up. It means I’m rocking what I’ve got and doing it a little harder than you’re comfortable with, that’s all.

I don’t know what I weigh right now. The scale is broken (that joke just writes itself, really). I know at one point I lost forty pounds and I can say with some certainty that due to a variety of setbacks that I gained most, if not all of it back. And I think that maybe lately, I’ve lost a little of it. I’m not sure. I’ll know for sure when my pants start fitting better. That’s how I gauge my weight. How my clothes fit.

Of course, when my clothes start fitting a little big my first thought is always that they’re stretching out, not that I’m getting smaller.

I guess that’s because my body might shrink, but my personality still fills out my britches.

I’m a Guy Magnet* *Conditions May Apply

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’m single and have been for years. I’ve never been married. I’ve really only had a couple of relationships that could have been considered serious. But it’s not for lack of attraction.

I attract men. All women are capable of such a thing. It’s just the type of men that I attract that causes me trouble.

Pardon my bluntness, but I’m a fat girl. Maybe not big enough to qualify for Richard Simmons to show up to my house, but I’m still fat. As I like to say, I’ve got curves in all the right places and several of the wrong ones, too.

A certain contigent of men see my rolls and interpret my weight as a sign of desperation. They think I’ll settle for anyone, put up with anything for a little attention and the privilege of saying that I have a man. These are the men that usually have no jobs and more often than not, no teeth either. I don’t know if the two actually go together, but in my experience they have. They hit on me like I should be grateful that a man is paying any mind to me.

These men are quickly shut down and sent grumbling. I actually had one guy offer to take me to McDonald’s for our “date” and then get indignant because I shot him down.

Sorry. I’m worth more than Mickey D’s.

I also have this odd ability to attract older, married men. I don’t know what it is about me that catches their eyes, but it’s a little creepy and I’m not at all in that market.

Then there’s the “only single girl in the room” situation. Maybe some guys don’t mind that I’ve got enough rolls to qualify for a bakery. Maybe they think that I do have a pretty face. Maybe they like my sense of humor and my brains. But, they only have anything to do with me when I’m the only single girl in the room. The minute another girl comes in, someone thinner or prettier or more socially acceptable, someone the guys won’t give him too much shit for kissing, the sweet nothings they whispered in my ear are just that…nothing.

It’s quite possible that these two types of men have conditioned me to not pay any attention to men flirting with me. I’m not very good at reading people. I can’t tell when a guy is hitting on me.

That’s not entirely true. I can’t tell when a potentionally good guy is hitting on me.

It’s enough to drive my friends mad. The good guys are more subtle, I suppose, which is why I have a hard time seeing it. But my friends can see it clearly and it kills them that I don’t. Not only do I not see it, but if my friends are kind enough to point it out to me, I deny it. These aren’t the ususal guys and usual situations. They can’t possibly be hitting on me.

And sometimes the good guys aren’t so subtle. I once had a guy that I had a mad crush on point blank ask me to make out with him. I didn’t because I thought he was joking. I thought it was because I was the only girl in the room. This same guy also picked me over a prettier girl to dance with outside of a restaurant. He looked at me and told me he was going to dance with me outside and he did and I totally missed that he might have actually meant something by that. We did dance outside. It was sweet and I was awkward and it was the closest I ever got to anything with him.

I still kick myself in the ass over missing out on that opportunity. I had my chance and I missed it because I was so deep in denial, so conditioned to think that there was no way a good guy would bother with me. He wasn’t perfect, but he could have been perfect for me. I’ll never know for sure now.

To put this into a common fishing metaphor, I can reel them in even if the bait I’ve got on the hook isn’t the best and not what most fish are looking for. I can still snag a few. Unfortunately, I’m a catch and release girl. I’m not convinced that any of them are keepers and I end up thinking about the ones that got away, the ones I let go.

Someone should have taught me to be a better fisherman.

Personal Beliefs

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

It’s possible that I take the “personal” part of personal beliefs a little too seriously. As in they’re my beliefs and they’re none of your business.

Seriously. This blog post isn’t about what I believe but why I keep my beliefs to myself.

I was raised by two atheists. Please note that sentence. I was raised BY two atheists; I wasn’t raised TO BE atheist. I was raised to believe whatever I wanted to believe.

As a kid, I decided to explore the possibility of God and religion. Over the years I went to a few different churches. It might be hard to believe, but at one point I was a very good Bible quizzer. I can still quote bits of Luke.

My parents were cool with it. They never told me I couldn’t go to church, never told me I was wrong, never told me I was stupid. They respected my choice and let me find my own way. They never once pushed their beliefs on me.

My parents set a pretty good example for me in that respect. The word “God” wasn’t an assault on what they believed; it was just another word. They didn’t care that it was in the Pledge of Allegiance or written on money. It had nothing to do with what they believed at the time and as far as they were concerned, in those contexts, it wasn’t infringing on their beliefs and trying to make them change their mind.

It was quite liberating to be brought up in a household like that. I was never made to feel threatened or forced to get defensive about what I believed and I learned to return in kind.

I also learned to keep it to myself.

Without being expressly told, I learned that personal beliefs were just that. Personal. They’re mine, all mine. No one can give them to me, no one can take them away, and I can’t force them on anyone else. I have to admit that due to my years of spiritual exploration my beliefs are pretty customized. It wouldn’t be easy to preach my gospel.

And I wouldn’t want to. Oh, I will discuss it when asked about it provided that I feel the conversation is safe for expression. When I talk about my beliefs, it’s not an invitation for conversion. I’m not trying to convert you, don’t bother trying to convert me. Don’t worry about saving my soul or convincing me with science. I’m good where I’m at, thanks, and I wouldn’t be so disrespectful to you.

It really boggles me when people express their personal beliefs like they are the statement of utter right. What ego must go into that. What disrespect for anyone who doesn’t think the same. What blindness to think that your beliefs won’t be criticized when you put them on display like that.

There’s another thing. It’s hard to insult me about what I believe when you don’t know what I believe. Oh, I’ve had my feathers ruffled before by people saying things, but the insults weren’t direct because there was no way the offending person could know any differently. I could have, of course, pointed it out, but there’s no satisfaction in the correction when the person just says, “Oh, I wasn’t talking about YOU”.

Instead, I comfort myself in the thought that the person running their mouth is really telling more about themselves than the group they’re insulting. And, yes, I’ve been equally offended by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, and everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m human. I think some things that some people believe are absolutely ridiculous and can’t even begin to understand it. But I try to keep as much of that to myself as I can. If I don’t like people offending me, then I need to work hard to be the bigger person and not offend them. It’s hard and I fail, but I keep trying.

Why?

It’s one of my personal beliefs.

And, yeah, for the most part, I keep it to myself.

Bad Words

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Difficult. Paranoid. Frustrating. Spiteful. Ugly. Malicious. Weird. Frightening. Damaged. Aggressive. Hypocritical. Tactless. Uncaring. Insensitive. Selfish. Unaware. Unthinking. Judgmental. Defensive. Unsypmpathetic. Poisonous.

Bad words. That’s what those are. And all of them have been said to me. Not in anger. Not by enemies. They’ve been said with great sincerity by friends and family and co-workers to me.

And every single one is true.

Everybody has their bad words whether they want to admit it or not. I admit mine. It’s not out of pride; it’s out of honesty. I know I’m all of those things. They’re not pleasant things. They’re things that I struggle with and things that I’m working on, things that I’m trying to change.

I admit to my bad words. I’ll be the first to say that they’re true. I can tell you how and why. I can explain them.

And I’d like to explain them. Not excuse them, but explain them. I don’t like excuses. Excuses refuse to take any blame. Explanations are just explanations; blame isn’t part of that game. It is what it is.

I don’t want to explain my bad words to somehow rationalize them or make them acceptible. They’re not. I want to explain them because to explain the absolute worst bits of myself is to tell the ultimate truth. And that’s what this blog is about, right? The original intent of it? To tell the truth.

My friends and family and co-workers, the very people who said those bad words, will somehow still manage to say that I’m a good person. Which is kind of boggling when you look at the list of bad words. It makes me wonder. Do I have more good words than bad words? Or is the quality of my good words better than my bad?

It’s curious. I imagine people would say the quality and quantity of my good words are greater than my bad words, but that’s a natural reaction if you like someone. You want to see all of their good bits. You emphasize them. Partly because you want to think that you associate with good people, but also because you want the people you care about to be the best they can be. You might know about their bad words, might even speak them, but in the end, you minimize them.

I don’t want to minimize my words. I don’t want to magnify them, either. I want to look at them honestly and explain them honestly.

It’s pretty heavy stuff and I don’t want to bring down the tone of the blog. I have trouble keeping a straight face for very long and unfortunately, there’s just too many bad words to give sufficient covereage to them in one post. So for the next several months (seven if I counted my groups right), just once a month, I’m going to talk about and explain my bad words. You’re going to see just what kind of monster I really am.

Welcome to my dark side.

Obessesions

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

I will be the first person to admit that I am given to fixations. I find something that interests me and then I make it my mission to learn as much as I can about it. I get waist deep in the subject. It takes up quite a bit of my time and my mind.

I guess you could say I get temporarily obsessed.

I wouldn’t call it a problem (as denial would be fitting for such things) because it doesn’t interfere with my functioning. In some ways, it actually improves my functioning.

My obsessions become something to look forward to, something to get excited about. They improve my mood. They give me something to focus on and give me a place to go to when I need a break from the world. I need a warm fuzzy or a smile or a bit of comfort, it’s my hut on the beach, my winter cabin in the woods.

Naturally, this sort of behavior can be disconcerting. You get too deep into an obsession and extraction takes professional help at $150 an hour and maybe a backwards fitting jacket, if the obsession consumes enough of you. Luckily enough for me, I get bored before that sort of thing happens.

Okay, it’s true. There are some obsessions that I have carried with me for years, but not at a maintained intensity. I fell in love the The Monkees when I was six and twenty-five years later, that hasn’t changed. The obsession peaked my senior year of high school, the intensity fading within a year of graduating. But I still listen to the music, watch the show, and collect the memorabilia. It’s a designated safe place for me to go when I need a boost.

 I acquire my obessions in various ways. Sometimes I stumble into them. Sometimes they come from friends. Some I’ve had so long that I feel like I’ve been born with them. Often times as the intensity of one obession fades, I’ll acquire a new one or the intensity of an old one will rev up.

I’m sure that there’s no coincidence that the intensity of my obessions goes hand and hand with dreary times in my life. When my Monkees obsession hit its peak, I was in the midst of a depression slide following my parents’ divorce. School was where I went to be a normal teenager and the Monkees were my happy place.

Last summer was a dismal one for me. My laptop crashed, my Internet failed, and it was a nightmare trying to put all of the pieces back together. Considering that at the time the bulk of my money was made via the Internet in some form (either selling stories or selling stuff on eBay), I was feeling the pressure and I was feeling pretty low.

With a sudden influx of time on my hands, I turned to watching the Cubs play to stop from chewing myself up. I’ve been a Cubs fan since I was a kid, watching the games and checking the standings. But last summer, it became my obsession. My scheduled revolved around the games. Instead of waiting and stressing about getting a new computer and getting the Internet issue resolved and how I was going to make up for lost time, I transferred that emotion and devotion to my Cubs. It became a safe emotional outlet. And despite the miserable season, it became my happy place.

It’s still my happy place, even in the off-season. There’s still news to be kept up with and there’ll be more than just warm weather to look forward to.

Now I imagine the intensity of this obsession, as with the others, will fade, but my love of baseball and the Cubs will remain. In turn, something else will take its place, a new bit of happy to warm the cockles of my cold, black heart and be my new refuge from the harshness of reality and life.

It might drive my friends and family crazy sometimes, but it sure beats drinking.

Journal Crazy

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

My mother gave me a journal as part of the now defunct “Aunt Kiki” holiday. Pretty and purple, the script on the cover says “Me, Myself, and I: An Instrospective Collection of My Innermost Thougths and Feelings” and the design features three faces in a knotwork ontop of a silver diamond, and it sat for a month before I wrote in it.

In that first journal I admitted that part of my hestance wasn’t just marring a pristine page; I was afraid to remove my innermost thoughts from the safety of my brain. Out of my head, they could be exposed to prying eyes with no respect for privacy and judged harshly. Worse, out of my head, they could be real.

The reluctance is evident in that first journal. First of all, I didn’t use it much. The entries begin July of 2003 and end January 2008. Nearly five years. Secondly, there’s a sense of holding back in some of the earlier entries. I was too scared to put down everything into words, all the thoughts, all the emotions, all the crazy bouncing around in my head.

You can see me get more comfortable with opening up over the course of the entries in that first journal. I got better at it and I did it more frequently.

My second journal I believe Carrie bought me as a birthday present. It’s rainbow colored, cheerful and simple, and I’d say it has about as many pages as my first one. The entries in it cover from January of 2008 until December of 2009.

Yeah, I got a lot better at writing in it more often. I started using it more as it was intended. Instead of being afraid of putting my thoughts down on paper, it became THE place to put my thoughts to get them out of my head. It became the refuge of my frustrations, mostly. It let me get the things off of my chest that other people wouldn’t, mostly because the ensuing arguement would be pointless and solve nothing.

It also became the locked box for the mushiest part of my heart, allowing me to explore those sweet, vulnerable feelings I don’t like to admit I have. There are some romantic ideas in those pages. Ideas that would absolutely shock the people who know me as the horror loving hard-ass that make men cry for their mothers and make women try to befriend me so I won’t eat them.

My last journal was red. That’s it. Just red. The entries cover from December of 2009 to January of this year. This is the journal I got truly comfortable in. This is the journal I put my craziest thoughts in. I gave myself permission to be absolutely ambitious and hopeful and unrealistic and unrestrained. There is some serious, wild insanity on those pages and to date, if there were any journals I’d burn before my death, that would be the first one on the fire.

Since that first journal, I’ve moved from being reluctant to dependent. I did my last entry in my red journal on my birthday with no new journal waiting for me. I’m slowly moving into frantic mode. I have things to write down, thougths that need ink! I’ve gone from not even shrugging at the idea of missing a couple of months to feeling guilty if I only have two entries for a given month.

Right now, I’m thinking about all of the things, good, bad, and crazy, I want to put in my new journal as soon as I get it. I fantasize about marring those clean pages with the inner workings of my mind. It’s going to feel so good to get all of that out.

And with any luck at all, in thirty years I’ll be able to read back over those stored thoughts and marvel at how I functioned, coped, struggled, and felt during those important years, some of which may be lost to the sands of time by then.

More likely, though, I’ll just shake my head and laugh and think, “Wow. You were really kinda nuts back then, weren’t you?” before putting down my old journal and picking up a new journal to scribble once again.

What Do You Do When Thousands of People Die On Your Birthday?

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A year ago today I turned 30 years old. While I did that hundreds of thousands of people died in a devestating earthquake in Haiti.

Unlike most other people, particularly the people around my age, I actually had been looking forward to turning 30 and deep down I wished I could have been able to do something really spectacular to celebrate. I wanted my 30th to be memorable.

I should have been more specific.

No matter what I do on my birthday, it’s my special day. I’ve been sick on my birthday (more than is fair, in my opinion). I’ve worked on my birthday. I’ve had parties. I’ve spent it alone. But no matter how I spend the day, in my head it’s always special because it’s mine.

My 30th was no different. I went to the DMV to renew my license. It’s never much of a hassle in a town of 7,000, but that day it was almost enjoyable. My new picture is the first ID picture I’ve taken in my life that didn’t look like a mugshot following a night of booze and a misused pool cue. Lunch was just a trip through the McDonald’s drive-thru, but that was one delicious chicken sandwich. It was all due to the charm of my birthday and the glow of turning 30.

And then there was an earthquake.

I saw it first on Twitter. Initially, it was just another earthquake in a country I never planned to visit. Earthquake reports come across my Twitter feed all the time about other countries, one tweet maybe retweetted by two or three different people, and that’d be the end of the earth-shaking news.

But Haiti didn’t disappear.

More and more news came over my wire, mixing the birthday wishes with death toll numbers. The shine of my birthday had no affect on that kind of devestation. Turning 30 couldn’t compete iwth the destruction of pretty much an entire country.

So I didn’t try. I didn’t speak Haiti’s name all day and though I was aware of the news and kept up to date on the rising numbers and mounting wreckage, I kept it in my peripheral view.

Because it was my birthday, dammit! My day! And the Earth had no right to go heaving up and crushing people on my birthday. Really, it shouldn’t be doing it on any day, but this day in particular. I felt bad enough when Maurice Gibb died on my birthday. But a huge percentage of a country’s population? That’s a black cloud that lingers. Even if  I wasn’t do very much to celebrate it, my 30th birthday was now tainted, haunted, by the deaths of thousands.

I ignored that fact. I really did.

In a move that was purely and unabashedly selfish, I stuck my fingers in my ears and LALA’d in the face of a natural disaster and the dead people it brough with it. I averted my gaze from teh tragedy and focused my eyes on the glory that was the anniversary of my birth.

The rest of the day proceeded as planned. I made shrimp pasta for dinner. I wallowed in the birthday wishes from friends and family. I got a few presents. I ate cupcakes that my mother had gotten for me. My friend and roommate, Carrie, took pictures of me while I ate one, goofy, smiling pictures that belied the bizarre kind of survivor’s guilt that I felt.

Here I was celebrating a day that was seen by the rest of the world as a tragedy. And I was going to celebrate that day in teh years to come as a day of birth while everyone else would see it as an anniversary of death.

Against my will, I find myself a member of a very unique club. It’s a club of people who share their birthdays with 9/11, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Columbine shootings, the Christmas Day tsunami, Pearl Harbor, and other notorious days known better for death than life. I’m not sure how to deal with that.

It’s a silly thing, I know. It’s a selfish thing, I know. But it’s my first birthday since this huge tragedy, so I’m still working out how to share my birthday with death.

I admit that last year I hid my head in the sand and really indulged in my selfishness, but I think I redeemed myself a little bit at the end of the day.

My birthday money went to Haiti.

Plans for 31

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

On Wednesday, I’ll be turning 31 (or as I prefer to say, 30 bonus year because it sounds less dull). I don’t have big plans to celebrate my birthday. First of all, it’s on a Wednesday and Wednesdays are rarely good for rockin’ parties. Secondly, by this point after the holidays, people are tired of celebrating.

Lastly, it’s supposed to be really cold this week. Nothing kills a partying mood like the potential for sub-zero windchills and frostbite just going out for dinner.

Even though I don’t have grand plans for my birthday, I do have plans for being 31. I had plans for being 30 and I admit, most of them fell through. I had really high hopes for being 30, too. I’d been looking forward to it for years. Yet, despite all the high hopes and goals and plans and trying, being 30 wasn’t as great as it should have been. Actually, it was pretty disappointing.

But, with my birthday looming, the disappoints of being 30 fade in the light of the freshness of turning 31. I’ve got new plans, new hopes, and an unblemished optimism.

31 is going to be great like 30 wasn’t.

I plan on selling a few more stories this year. I plan on getting a novel ready to submit. I plan on fixing my finances. I plan on getting out and socializing more. I plan to continue to work on getting healthy. I plan on having a good time. I plan on improving my existence.

These plans actually don’t vary much from the ones I had for 30. They’re also not all of the plans I have for 31. As open as I’d like to be with this blog, some things are just too personal to mention. But even so, they could easily fall into the categories of either having a good time and/or improving my existence.

At the very least, I hit the high points.

Okay, so most people wouldn’t think my plans are very big. I’m not trying to run fifty marathons in fifty states or visit every baseball park in a season. Hell, I’m not even trying to skydive, rock climb, or go to Vegas. And I’m sure a few people would think there are some plans missing from my 31 To Do List. You know, like find a man or a “real” job or lose all the weight that offends other people’s delicate sensibilities.

In my defense, the plans don’t have to be big for me to be happy. So long as those plans are in line with what I really want and I make them happen, then that’s what counts. Maybe one year I’ll make an attempt to visit all of the ballparks in a single season, but this year is not the year.

This year can’t even be the year to think about it.

This year is the the year to get my house in order so next year I can think about those things.

As for the standard plans that most people make in high school and achieve in their twenties that I haven’t gotten around to yet, this year isn’t going to be the year I get around to those either. That’s not to say I’m not open to meeting someone or losing a few pounds while I work on being healthy. I plan on getting a “real” job just to help my financial situation, but I already have a real job, writing. But to be honest, I’ve just never been good at the traditional plans. If I were, then I’d already have the college degree, the career, the husband, the 2.5 kids, the house, the debt, and judging by the other people I know my age, a pending divorce, if not a finalized one.

I do better with the less-than-traditional plans and to a certain extent, I’m stellar without a plan at all.

My plans for 31 have been made and like with the plans I made for 30, I’m going to try to follow through with them.

Unlike 30, though, I’m going to put a lot more effort into 31.

No (Good With) Time

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’ve got a wall calendar hanging on my closet door. I’ve got a day planner on my dressr. I’ve got a montly schedule written out on a whiteboard. The date appears in the lower right-hand corner of my laptop’s screen.

Now go ahead…ask me what day it is?

Odds are, with all of those dately things, I have no idea. I’d like to blame that on the lack of a regular job to help keep my days in check, but even when I had one, I might know the day of the week, but not the number of the month.

Not that knowing what day it is helps me in the grand scheme of things anyway because I have no concept of time. You hear people all the time say how events sneak up on them and how they didn’t realize it was so close. It’s usually because they’re busy. They’ve got their heads down, doing their thing, and when they look up, holy cow, it’s here.

For me, it’s a fact of my existence. I have no concept of time.

I can look at a date on the calendar. I can count the days from one date to another. But those days in between have no meaning for me. I have no concept of that distance.

For example, my credit card bill is due the same time of every month. I know this. When the first of the month comes around, I look at that due date and think I have plenty of time to scrape together all of the change I can dig out of couches and pick up out of gutters to pay the bill. In reality, it’s only about two weeks. And I’m ace at neglecting the timing of things like money transfers and deposits after three being processed the next day and other banking matters. I’ve cut it more than close on many occasions because I cannot grasp the fact that two weeks really isn’t that much time.

And I do it every single month.

For whatever reason, my brain will not learn this fact. It cannot process time any other way.

I say that I don’t remember birthdays and anniversaries, but the truth is, I do. I just can’t remember them in relation to the real world.

My stepdad’s birthday is December 7th. I know that. Ask me and I’ll tell you. I bought him a card. But that date means nothing to me on December 1st. I think I still have time to send him the card. Which is why I don’t mail the card until December 5th and it’s late. It’s why I hate sending cards. I have no concept of timing it so that it arrives in a timely fashion, not too early, not late.

Or I might know the date, but if I don’t know what day it is, there’s no way I can “remember” it. More than once I’ve been caught off guard by a birthday because I didn’t know the date.

My lack of skill with time has consistently caused me trouble. I’m better off not waiting on a deadling. The sooner I get something finished, the less likely I have the opportunity to screw it up. This is ONE thing that my brain has thankfully learned through repeated near-misses during my early school days. I’m sure it seemed nerdy and suck-upish by the time I hit college and I was getting my research papers done well before the deadline, but I didn’t go to college to be hip.

The approach works for academics. I can get it to work for writing, for the most part. It doesn’t work as well for buying Christmas presents or mailing things because for whatever reason, my brain insists that I have time.

It’s a constant struggle and it’s something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to overcome or fix, and not for lack of trying either.

So until I can get the concept of time to click in this beat up brain of mine, I’m going to continue to be that guy that disappoints people with my late cards and cutting things far too close.

Sorry.

Happy birthday!

There. I’m not late.