One of those things that'll make your eyes glaze over and your scrolly wheel get some exercise

[cosmolinguist]

Sometimes I get caught up in the endless dirty dishes, the same old scenery as I walk to the tram station, the pervasive mustiness in this tiny and overpriced human storage box.

I fear my short attention span. Where some others would enjoy the reassuring stability of routine, I find restlessness. "I need a change," I grumble, not at all sure if this is right. (Probably yet another thing that's true, false and meaningless ... in some sense.)

I guess restlessness shouldn't surprise me. That's how I got here in the first place, after all.

Lacking anything new to think about, I turn to something old. This morning I found myself thinking about how I got here. I can go a long time without doing that, because I get overwhelmed with the whirlwind of minutiae. But it's good to think big occasionally, especially when life gets bumpy and dreary, as it inevitably does.

The story started with a rather bumpy and dreary part of my life. I wouldn't be here without that.

It's true that I started talking with Andrew on AIM because he offers that sometimes when people are down and I was writing a lot in my journal about how I and everything else was messing up my life. But I think it's also true that we might've ended up talking anyway, for some other reason if circumstances had been happier.

However, I don't think I would've been nearly so susceptible to the offer of visiting him if I hadn't been so distraught at the time. (I just barely managed to be talked into it anyway.) I'd never done anything besides go to school, and that'd never been a choice, so I didn't have to think about it too much. I'd given college the old college try but things hadn't worked out between us. I know I'm not the first one to make a train wreck of my college years, but it was certainly new to me, and I had no idea what to do next.

Andrew just talked to me, about how much he dislikes Python and how Glastonbury's nowhere near as good as it used to be. He distracted me. Then he said I was a hell of a lot of fun to talk to and if I wasn't careful he'd have a crush on me. He flattered me.

All-too-soon, by my reckoning, he was joking about how I should come stay in his spare room ... and all-too-soon, we both knew he was no longer really joking. He bailed me out. He cared about me and wanted to help, if he could. None of this surprises me. It sounds just like him.

But I did things that sounded very not like me. I don't know how or why I got around to saying yes to his offer, to telling my parents, to letting him give me some of (or was it all of?) the money for the plane ticket when that turned out to be the only way I could do it, to filling out a passport application as if this were some normal thing I was doing.

I'd never been on a plane before, never met any People From the Internet before. I think it was that ignorance that made it easy. God protects fools and children, they say, so I guess I was well-covered.

I thought about this first trip as I was planning my second one this spring. Mostly I thought What the hell was I thinking?! and I can't believe it worked.

But I was in a much better frame of mind by then. I noticed some things the distress had hid from me before. With a clearer head, I knew enough to be scared. But by that point I knew I didn't have anything to be scared of. I never really expected to be raped and murdered or anything so dire, but there are more subtly scary things.

I certainly never expected I'd ever wanna marry the guy and stay here. That's just crazy!

You're so lucky, my parents tell me. To be able to get up and go to England like that. We'll never get to. Some of my friends have told me similar things. I wish I could do something like that. They look wistful and then think of jobs and responsibilities and obligations.

But you've got jobs and responsibilities and obligations, I want to say. I usually don't bother. Even if they sometimes envy my carefree existence, I sometimes envy their self-sufficiency and goals and well-defined (even for a little while) lives.

The dirty laundry on the floor and the other routine things are sometimes enough to make me forget that I got here almost by magic, plucked out of a bad situation like Archimedes plucked ships out of the water. I don't want to forget.

Comments

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

I didn't really do anything - I just showed you that *there is always a choice*.

[cosmolinguist]

I think that counts as doing something. :-)

see...

[zammis.livejournal.com]

I've only met you the once, but reading this... it makes me braver. There's been so much change and turmoil and well, knowing at least one person is navigating her way through all of the living-with, doing-crazy-moving maneuvers....it helps tremendously.

So I guess.... thanks for being you and posting about it. :)

Aww...

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks. I'm grinning like a fool now.

[elrestodemivida.livejournal.com]

I love the honest way in which you write in your journal, and i'm dead glad you friended me and i friended you back, so thanks loads! Sure, you can think, what the hell was i thinking, but surely that's the point of life. Do things. If they don't work out, they don't work out, but if they do - well, as you see yourself, the most wonderful things can happen if you let them.

Like you, i get that restlessness thing all the time. I get incredibly depressed and pissed off and in can't-stand-it-here and catching myself hating the same old routes to and from work. But i try and remind myself that getting pissed off doesn't change anything. The way to get around the short attention span is (i think) to take up new things. My latest project being my zine, but i have and have had lots of other things on the go. That way when you're joyfully heading out to the local library you know you have something exciting to do, and the dismally familiar surrounds don't get to you so much.

[cosmolinguist]

Wow, I don't think anyone's thanked me for being their LJ friend. :-) I like your journal too, believe it or not.

[elrestodemivida.livejournal.com]

Bloody 'ell, why? It's a load of self-indulgent whiney bollocks, innit.

[cosmolinguist]

If you think that's self-indulgent whingey bollocks, you'll be getting the same things from me!

[elrestodemivida.livejournal.com]

No way. The stuff you write may be kind of about yourself but it's how you relate to life and others, especially Andrew, and it's interesting how you dissect and examine things. It's introspective but without the self-indulgent shite that usually goes along with this sort of thing. So i find your journal very interesting and i really like reading it.