Happy Belated Fucking New Years: Anxiety, Biking, Resolutions, and More!

Hi.

Ok, so I've been pretty off-the-ball on pretty much everything in life lately. Not only have I failed to keep up with my blog, but we're about a week into 2014 and I haven't had a second to sit down and decide what resolutions I'm going to fail at this year.

One of my resolutions is to make "better" drawings. 

If you recall my resolutions last year, I did a pretty good job quitting smoking but more or less failed at the rest of them. Especially the buying socks part. Every day for the past three months I have put on socks with holes. I look at my feet and say, "Man I really need to get new socks." But every time I was in Target and had the opportunity to do so, I just couldn't bring myself to spend then $10 for a decent sized pack of cotton foot clothes. I guess I just prefer to look like a homeless woman.

Actually, these were my real goals and I saw about half of them to enough completion to satisfy myself. I didn't write nearly as much as I wanted, but I did manage to regain a relationship with this blog and pose nude to raise money for pole dancing.

1. Pole goals 2013. This is a list of it's very own and can be found here. 

2. Find money to fund aerial acrobat dreams. Possibly pose nude...that sounds like a joke but really it's not. 

3. Publish an article with Cracked.com

4. Submit a spec to nickelodeon writers fellowship and then immediately start working on another for next year when I inevitably don't get accepted because I have no idea how to write a spec and don't stand a chance

5. Work with professional artists/writers by the years end (regular school stuff doesn't count)

6. Write a pilot. 

7. Wake up early every morning for specifically blocked out times to do all my writing and flexibility training

8. Stop neglecting blog. 

I decided to skip out on work today even though I'm so super broke and absolutely need the money because I really needed a few hours to sit alone in a room and try to put my brain together. I woke up this morning wanting to cry all over my pillow for no apparent reason, but I managed to resist doing so in front of my pillow mate until I got home. Then I let my anxiety leak all over my face for awhile. It feels more inexplicable than usual these days which only makes me further anxious because I start to wonder how broken am I really and if I need to start taking happy pills just to be able to function. It's not a pleasant string of thoughts.

Anywho, once I got done with that (and sorted out all the terrifying school things I need to think about. Oh god. I'm going back to real school and I have no idea how to deal with it and I'm sure there will be a blog of its very own about that soon) I settled down here to complain on the internet.

Ok. So.

New Years.

2013 was a fucking awful year and I was happy to see it go. I tend to trade off new years celebrations between getting really, really wasted and doing something totally lame and anticlimactic each year. I brought 2013 in by making fun of Full House with my brother at my Aunt's party in the South Carolinian backwoods, so this year I was due to make a fool of myself. And that I did! I was really excited to say goodbye to 2013 in a big way. In fact, I managed to get sick while drunk for the very first time in my life and felt very accomplished about this. I was so proud of myself that I lay in splendor on the bathroom floor, thankful for Big Bookshelf, who held my hair back the entire time, and basked in drunken dramatic relationship conversation that I am pretty sure resulted in me crying.

I know how to keep it classy and mature. For sure. 

I'm so good at relationships.

The next morning was agony. Of course. And Big Bookshelf decided this was the day to introduce me to his love of biking by taking me on a bike ride to the grocery store to make breakfastlunchdinner. (It was 4pm by this point and we still hadn't eaten a thing.) My legs already weren't working because of some reason? I had exercised hard the day before, but it was still bizarrely weird soreness. I mostly just wanted to lay down and not move.

"Don't crash it." He said as he handed over his spare bike.

"I really hope I don't!" I smiled in an attempt to be reassuring in that I knew what I was doing. However, secretly or maybe not so secretly, on the inside I was terrified. The bike seemed so foreign in my hands. I had absolutely no control over it, and both my feet were still on the ground. I was facing a 50/50 chance of killing myself on this thing, surely.

But how hard could it be, really though? I used to ride my bike all the time as a kid. I mean, granted, that bike would brake as soon as you backpedaled and I could reach the ground with my feet from the seat. This bike in my hands was a real bike. A grown up bike. An advanced bike. You had to be coordinated in getting on and off the seat and remember to use your hands to brake. Oh god.

I totally forgot to mention this, but yea, bikes don't agree with my nether regions. 

We didn't even have helmets as we took off, but I figured if I was going to fall I was probably going to die no matter what, surely. So what did it matter? Big Bookshelf took a wide turn from his apartment alley onto the street and I took an even wider turn, cruised across two lanes of traffic, swerved back the other way, and finally came to a steady balance behind him.

We pedaled along. The actual biking wasn't too bad. I can balance fairly well, thanks to pole and acrobatics. But stopping and going were a little more challenging. I didn't feel so much like a person on a bike but instead like a 300 lb sea lion on a bike. Just imagine one of those trying to hop on and off a bike and you'll be envisioning me as well. Every turn caused great anxiety as I was never sure if I would go careening into the curb or possibly an oncoming vehicle. And not to mention that it was fucking. cold. outside. It started to snow by the time we reached the store. My hands were unable to feel anything and I was no longer sure if I was gripping the handlebars or about to die because I somehow forgot to hold on.

A reenactment. 

"Wanna see how fast we can go on the upcoming block?"

"No. No I don't. I don't think that will go well for me at all."

"But it's easier when you go faster!"

He fortunately relented to my denial to increase the risk of me dying.

As soon as I got off the bike at the store, the immensity of my hangover finally hit me. While Big Bookshelf shopped, I mostly sat with my head between my knees on the toilet, trying to win my body in the fight not to vomit just a wee bit more. I was really happy when Big Bookshelf lent me a pair of gloves for the ride back, which made biking a little more bearable, but at this point it was full on snowing and we were biking right into it. I blinked as quickly a hummingbird beats its wings just to be able to see. It was our fortune that it was a holiday, and a cold one at that, so there weren't many cars out to threaten my life. I was already enough of a threat to myself, after all.

We made it back alive, by some miracle. I had not felt so unnatural, bent over in the freezing cold and pedaling a half-broken complicated metal contraption that I felt was completely out of my control, in a very long time. But I did it. I proceeded to collapse on the bed and curl up into a ball, until Big Bookshelf asked if I could could cook the breakfast-lunch-dinner because he could also no longer stand. And I did. Because I was so fucking hungry and also I like Big Bookshelf and appreciate his cooking for me all the time despite his trying to get me killed.

Yet another reenactment.
All those anatomy lessons have gone a long way, don't you think? 

That was my first day of 2014.

I think it was a pretty good story-metaphor for my life. Although specifically what part of my life the metaphor applies to-- the past, the present, or the future-- I'm not sure. I guess it is like this:

I suck at things. I want to get better at things. I feel like I used to not suck at things when I was younger. Like biking. I used to bike, then I stopped, now I suck at biking. But maybe I will get better. It would probably help if my legs didn't feel immobile and I don't want to puke before I even get on the bike. So I will keep trying, maybe be a little more responsible along the way. It would be nice if I could feel the ground with my feet while I'm sitting on the seat, but life isn't like that. Not when you are grown up. You have to ride the grown up bikes, even if it's awkward at first.

I miss my life in California for one reason: there was direction. And structure. I got up, I went to school, I did homework, I did some pole on the side. There were repeating people, friends, a few events. I cooked, I shopped. I had control. I was lonely but there was order and that kept me calm. Now I'm still lonely and have no order to my life and that is the only reason I still hold on to California in my mind. I want to go to real school and have a campus and obvious, direct goals. I could say that is what I want my new years resolution to be, but that is too big and abstract to really accomplish. I could list a million pole tricks and physical feats that I want to achieve, but some are so far away and it doesn't really matter what I am doing, as long as I keep working, I will get better. I could list the competitions I want to own, but I don't feel ready to compete and win, I mostly just want to create new pieces of art and that is why I am entering. I could list so many things as new years resolutions. So many ways I can be better, that my life can be better. There is no where to go but up right now it seems. So instead of listing all the big, grand things I want to be, I am going to start small and simple.

Sexless and Cynical 2014 Resolutions: 

Start flossing a couple times a week. 

Keep a journal full of notes and doodles that no one can decipher. It doesn't have to be anything, just a way to track pole and aerial shit and the occasional thought here and there. 

Write less personal and whiny blogs and write more general and witty blogs. Maybe like... half and half? Compromise, yea?

This is how I normally blog. But no longer. I shall be a dignified lady contributing important cultural material to the world. Maybe. 

Stay in school. 

Maybe send a text to art, ask how it's doing, see what's up, and try to start a friendly but neutral conversation again. 

I'm so cool I have inside jokes with myself. 

Do one full revision of my novel manuscript. Just one. I don't have to finish the book. Just push and pull it around a little bit. All the way through. 

Finally fucking launch The Lives of the Aerialists, that thing I've been scheming about for the past year.  I'm giving myself until June and I signed up for a web authoring class specifically just so I could work on it in a structured environment. 

I don't want to get into details mostly because this is the least likely to happen of all the resolutions. Besides maybe flossing. 

Eat more vegetables. 

Vegetables a happy Meri make. 

That's it. Those are the simplest things I could think of. I wanted to write things like "stop comparing myself to others," and "Train hard, play hard, and always express myself," or "Be the best employee I can be!" but we all know those are nothing but nonsense bullshit that sounds nice but doesn't have a tangible way to be measured, and are therefore almost impossible to accomplish. Some of these are still big, but I can plan for them, and that is the important part.

Happy fucking new year everyone.

Oh and by the way. After writing this I went to pole class and worked hard and got sweaty and felt much better.

It's a step.