drink your juice, shelby

i fear that the days when i used to have enough brain space to devote to creative writing may be no more...it used to be an outlet, now i just feel uninspired to write most of the time. my brain is just full of other things.

first and foremost, i got my birth! it was an all-nighter, and delightfully uneventful. mama labored with minimal pain meds, and mostly without an iv tying her down or a fetal monitor inhibiting her movement, so we got to work in all kinds of fun positions. i used my new rebozo and my new hot water bottle and the coconut water i put in my bag. within 5 minutes after popping a pretty sizable baby out, mama says, "i could definitely do that again." ha! ah, no love like the love in a room when parents meet the baby for the first time on the other side of the uterus. it's thick, sort of suffocating, but in a good way, heavy, like having the wind knocked out of you.

but the longer-lasting outcome for me is that i think i can finally complete my certification now, which has been two years in the making! yahoo!

and i decided that i like my rebozo more as a scarf. so i washed it, but i'll probably wear it as a scarf from now on, which was it's original purpose. but now it has magical powers.

my lady was finally hired, not once, but TWICE. she's working with youngsters and she's working with baked goods.

i tried to find an anne geddes baby-dress-as-cupcake...you'd think it would easy. it's not!

so we're now a fully-employed household...just in time for a major brake fluid leak in the truck that cost $600 to repair. that's like...a month's rent. more than a month's student loan payment. that would have paid for a plane ticket to be with my family for the holidays. 6x the business casual wardrobe i have now. pet food for more than a year. curses!!

but there's always something. this weekend i'm going in to wells fargo and closing my (modest) bank account, and taking my dollars to a local credit union. it'll be hard to give wells fargo the "fuck you" that i'd like to, since the tellers there are always so kind to me. but it's something, at least.

what else? we bought a juicer from craigslist. $10 (we could have had SIXTY juicers for what it cost us to fix our truck!). we watched forks over knives, then some movie about this guy doing a juice fast and turning his life around, and we decided to eat more whole foods. that, and make kale, celery, apple juice. among other things. having fresh squeezed orange juice in the morning sure is a treat. i was poking around on my lil' sister's facebook wall and she wrote something about how my mother would only let us drink a tiny glass of juice a day when i was growing up. we used to joke about how strict she was an how crazy that rule had been. in retrospect, i think it was because we were poor, and possibly because of the high sugar content in juice. but i realized it's just one more way i have gone against the values my parents worked so hard to instill in me.

just look at me.

look what i've become.

i'm a non-church attending, politically progressive GAY lady, living in sin with an unmarried partner, working at a babykilling factory, drinking COPIOUS, unmeasured amounts of JUICE!!!

what deadly sin will i commit next?

*sigh* the funny thing is, i never planned for it to happen that way.

just goes to show that if you start questioning why women shave their body hair, it's a slippery slope right into the depths of hell.

pious: out of the pew and into the party

this is the title that my brain came up with in a dream.

the dream was really long and mostly full of nonsense, including a part where gabrielle from xena knocked on my car window in the middle of an ohio wheat field and offered me a half eaten fudgesicle.

at the end of the dream i was in a room of people who didn't know each other very well and we were playing a horrible charades/20 questions/hangman fusion mixer game. each person had to go to the front and get the audience to guess the title of their life memoir as it would be titled at that particular moment.

gabrielle appeared because i've been watching too much xena before bed.

the title came from i don't know. talking about my sunday school feltboard halloween costume? recent conflict with my family? pressure to come up with a concise bio for the doula collective?

it happened right before i woke up. i googled it because i thought maybe i read it somewhere, but i didn't find anything.

i've heard that dreams are where you process what you haven't processed consciously. i've also heard that they're an alternate reality. and also that what we think is real is our brain tricking us. and that our whole existence might be controlled by another reality beyond us. like sims.

i don't know anything about sims, except that yesterday leslie told me that one of her sims characters was about to have a baby. which is funny, because i'm on call for someone to have a baby right now. "make her have it at home!" i shouted, moving closer to the screen. all of the other characters were freaking their shit, grabbing their hair and jumping up and down screaming. leslie took pictures. the mother-to-be started walking out of the house. "stop her! put her in the bathroom!" "i can't, haha, i don't have control anymore." we watched as the mother and father got into a car and drove to the hospital, where everyone the laboring mother passed also starting freaking their shit. we weren't allowed to see what happened in the hospital, but a few minutes later, a new simbaby was born.

"how long do they live?"

"well, it'll take a couple of days for the baby to become a toddler. they usually live about 50-60 sims days, but if there is a skilled gardener in the household they can eat something called 'lifefruit' and extend their lives an extra day every time they eat it."

meanwhile, leslie was deciding what personality trait to assign the new baby. "let's make him...a genius."

.....i can't help but feel like someone is messing with me that way....

anyway, no baby yet in what i think is reality. but it's a full moon, so we'll see.

i've been through the desert in a truck with no a/c...

a dry-erase fridge and a composting toilet!!

that's right, friends. but it feels good to be out of the rain.

just a little over a year ago i had my first desert experience when went camping with shana, idil, and alex in angeles national forest. but it wasn't really a forest. it was the desert. and i was terrified. we saw a scorpion within hours, i was sure we were being stalked by mountain lions, and i stomped on the ground where'er i walked, expecting a rattlesnake to strike at any moment. seriously out of my element.

as you can see, the sexy danger is "very high"

in the woods, there are hiding places. there is shade and water. there are little bugs under every rock that you can eat if you're desperate.

not in the desert. not during august.

the first part of the journey was smooth sailing. we booked it down I-5 all the way to l.a., with rowdy and a sedated t.k. (we decided to drug him for sure after the little shit ran away the day before we moved!) napping comfortably (for the most part) in the backseat.

sedated t.k. on a leash

a close-up

we left l.a. at 5am on friday morning. it started getting hot around 9am, somewhere in the arizona desert. nothing a few bags of ice and some dorky matching neck bandanas for the whole family (minus asha) can't fix!

and...it really hasn't really stopped being hot since then. at first i thought i was just being a baby, but it turns out everyone in texas is complaining about the weather, too.

so, here we are. now i live in the desert. practically. well, not technically, but there are still rattlesnakes in austin. i looked it up.

but the benefits outweigh the rattlesnakes and maybe even the heat:

tex mex food trucks EVERYWHERE.

a magazine called garden & gun??!!


an amazing food co-op. (everything is cheaper!!)



a local timebank.

two hip 'lil coffeeshops around the corner from my house.

shiner in a can. in fact, there is a place here that gives you free beer while they cut your hair.

a doula co-op.

and gays everywhere, apparently. our landlady, our neighbors, everyone we buy something from on craigslist. without even looking for them. gay!

there are plenty of great things to do, but not until we have jobs.

until then, aside from craigslist furniture round-up and ikea treasure-hunting, we've mostly stayed in for xena marathons and master chef (liz t. and amy, you should finish the season!). it's too hot to sleep in our loft right now and we don't have a bed anyway, so the entire family (minus asha) has been curling up on the living "space" futon in front of the a/c every night. i had a job interview at an abortion clinic (ask me how i re-worded that one for my mother another time...), am waiting to attend a birth for the co-op, and have sprinkled various other job applications throughout the city. leslie got tricked into signing us up to perform in a talent show to benefit planned parenthood at the end of the month. tonight we're going to see a free los lonely boys show at blues on the green.

so much to explore as soon as we're done with six seasons of xena.

friends, wherever you are in the world right now, we miss and love you!!

update in bullet points

greetings, faithful followers.

speaking of which, who's ready to be raptured this weekend? if you are, make sure your pets are all taken care of (thanks, amy). you can also prepare a rapture survival kit, so the people you left behind know where you've gone.


luckily, i plan to stick around with tk and asha, so we're good. i just hope the chaos doesn't interfere with the no pants dance party we're having on saturday...

in other news:,

• milady and i are moving to austin, tx mid-august. v. exciting.
• went to vanouver, bc this weekend. some notes on vancouver: kind of like seattle w/ less interesting architecture, delicious all-dressed ruffles potato chips, everyone has the same haircut as me, veggie poutine, and our car broke down and is still there.

• the hours of my job are really getting to me...i contacted 2 temp agencies today. we'll see how it goes.
  
• i just got foodstamps and joined the y. cashing in on the poverty. am going to start lifting weights and getting really strong. oh yes.
• just read 3 books in the beebo brinker chronicles, which is amazing lesbian pulp ficture from the 1950s. i highly recommend this series, and you should definitely read the forwards and notes by the author.

too much to do! i'll be back with creative, substantial writing someday....

hoppy holidays!

it's that time of year again: SPRING CLEANING!!!!!

SPRING CLEANING is my 3rd favorite reflective/self-improvement holiday of the year (after new year's and my birthday....hm, looks like a need something in the fall...).

new year's is for thinking about all the new things i want to learn and do.

my birthday is for reflection on how i've grown in knowledge and in love in the past year (as my dear liz t. says).

SPRING CLEANING is for cleansing the house, body, soul, mind, in a way that is instantly gratifying and tangible.

it is a time during which i clean my room and get rid of all the fabric scraps, shattered glass, and magazines that i've been hoarding for "art projects."

it is a time during which i remember about exercising and start moving my body again, rebuilding my bike muscles, flailing about my neighborhood on very slow runs, going to yoga to sweat winter out of my pores.

it is a time during which i clean out my digestive system by drinking mudshakes twice a day and eating only wholesome, homecooked foods.



it is a time during which i commission my brilliant, taurus lady friend to make an excel spreadsheet so i can track my daily disciplines.

it is a time for cute baby animals, cherry blossoms, sleepy tulips opening their lil petals.

new life!!!



happy SPRING CLEANING, everyone!!

you are asleep.

i just rode my bike uphill at 2:30am. the world is different now. it's both scarier and calmer. i'm scared because i feel vulnerable. but then, it's nice to have the streets to myself, to fantasize that everyone else has disappeared and i no longer have to obey red lights, or stay in the right lane. that thought is also scary, from a sci fi movie or the bible.

and things look empty, but also like they're resting. i biked past the library. i was just there a few hours ago, but now it's asleep. the buses: asleep.

i thought biking would wear me out so i could fall asleep. eli said, "it tires the body, but wakes up the mind." he was right. even my eyelids are tired. i like quizzing everyone at work about their sleeping schedules, since i'm not used to working a bar shift. some of them sleep until 2pm and don't care. others, like me, wish they could wake up earlier.

i'm letting tk lick me because i'm salty from the sweat. he likes to lick me when i'm sweaty and when i'm fresh out of the shower, for some reason. when he was a kitten, he licked me all the time. i'd hop from one foot to the other while i got dressed because if i stood still, he's lick me. i'd lift me legs off the ground while i was on the toilet.

i will go to bed in a few minutes, even though my mind is awake. i'll crawl under the covers with my lady and she'll make adorable sleep noises. then in three hours it'll be opposite. she'll be waking up and getting ready to leave for work and i'll make the sleep noises. even though i'll want to be awake to say goodbye, my body will force me to stay lying down. a heavy fog of sleepiness.

but now that's hard to imagine.

i want to be writing this on my typewriter, but i can't, because i'd wake everybody up. if this were my typewriter, i'd have a lot more things to say. about my mother, mostly. and myself. and how we're connected and not connected.

on saturday idil and i went to vashon island. it was pouring down rain, but we went anyway. it was funny because we drove all the way out to this lighthouse for a scenic view and when we got there, we just sat in the car for a moment. she said, "uh...heh, do you want to get out and see it?" and i said, "ummm...suuurree...well, it's just that--" she said, "i feel like we SHOULD go see it, but i don't want to!" i said, "haha, me either! i don't want to go see it!" so we just laughed and sat there and saw the scenic view from the car.

but it was nice to talk. i told her about everything, about about how i feel about myself these days, which isn't great. she told me about her saturn returns class and about internalized sexism and what that all has to do with our mothers.

i realized that i don't really know my mother. then i realized that i don't know if anyone knows my mother. and a lot of other things that made me feel sad, humble, and human.

but , to make a long story shorter so i can go to bed now, it all came down to:

we are all trying to survive. it is easier to have compassion for others than for myself. we are all doing the best we can.

something in the deli aisle made me cry

can anyone tell me what the hell is going on in the universe right now? mercury isn't even in retrograde (although, dear lord, it's going to be next week for nearly a month!), but things are pretty broken right now.

probably needless to say, my life didn't get as instantly perfect as i thought when i quit theo. i've had a lot of things piling up for a very long time, and, as they say, something's gotta give.

it's hard to believe i never used to cry, because this past week i wept like an angry baby. or maybe a sad baby. or an overwhelmed baby.

i know that i'm being selfish and that life could be a whole lot worse than broken cars, bad colds, bank account errors, and cell phones possibly lost in dumpsters at 2am, when your clothes are soaking wet and your fingers are all wrinkly and smell like tartar sauce....

i know that.

my recent tantrums have pretty much been like they've been whenever i've had tantrums throughout my life: "it's *sobsob* not *snort* faaaiirrrrr *many sobs*"

yes, that's pretty much been my mantra at age 5, 15, and 25. over the same stupid things, more or less.

...i don't know what i'm getting at, really. maybe because it's 4am (wow, i'm turning nocturnal! i didn't think it was possible...).

here's what i need:

• a whole week to sleep (this will never happen)
• a mentor and/or therapist (if anyone has any recommendations for someone older, wiser, or professionally trained to listen to my problems and tell me what to do for a reasonable price, please let me know.)
• everyone who interacts with me regularly to be patient with me.

i think i just needed to throw a bit of a fit, let it out...put things into perspective so i can be free to move on to stuff that matters.

but i needed to be selfish for a minute.