Everything I Tell You is Hearsay

“Wherever you go, there you are.” Buckaroo Banzai

It is tempting to believe that a radical change in circumstance will fundamentally alter the experience of reality. Turns out not to be the least bit effective. I still look at the world, surroundings notwithstanding, out of the same pair of eyes, bringing the same perspective to a new location. I am undoubtedly expanded by new stimulus, but still bring the collected wisdom and accumulated damage of my life along with me; I just demand that it cover more ground.

I like to know exactly what is going on.

This is because I am a bit of a control freak. Having spent much of my childhood in circumstances which were chaotic and unsettled has turned me into a person who prefers a rather high degree of consistency. This is not to say I cannot enjoy spontaneity, or that I crumble in the face of the unexpected, but it is rather the case that in my day-to-day endeavors, I am happier if I know what to expect. To this end, I give a lot of thought to why things are the way they are, why I have made the choices I have, what drives me, what I might want to do differently, and occasionally, how my actions affect other people.

Turns out, not everyone does this. This came as a major WTF when it was finally explained to me. Apparently, many people do what they do without giving it a tremendous amount of thought. They don’t chase themselves around in their heads, analyzing the motive and origin of every action  they have ever taken. Weird, right?

So, I like to ask a lot of questions. Questions to which I want very specific answers.

By which I do not mean I want an answer in particular. I want the truth, whatever that might happen to be. I just want it in scrupulous detail.

“Well, was it that you found it confusing, or just annoying?”

“Did it just surprise you that it turned you on, or are you expanding your notions about your sexuality?”

“Was the whole thing gross, or was it only the texture that bothered you?”

Apparently, some people experience this as The Third Degree, and do not much enjoy the treatment. It is not that I am trying to pick them apart, but to peek inside and understand them better. I think I believe if I do this,  I can remove some of that pesky unpredictability from human behavior. For me, this is just about ensuring a high degree of accuracy in communication to facilitate more accurate predictions about the future.  Like any data, the more explicit and specific the information is, the better.

First let me say Hawaii was beautiful. Unquestionably, utterly, beautiful. And I had a pretty damn good time. There were some… intense moments, but it was a truly memorable and positive experience. More travel for me, yes, that.

There were more shades of it here than e'er I knew

I am not well-rounded. I am more like one of those weird dice you use for D&D that have big flat sides to fall on that are kinda hard to roll. I don’t have a broad variety of skills, but rather a few things at which I am particularly good.

My mother tells me I could sing before I could talk. That nights when I was 7 or 8 months old, she could hear me making a sighing noise from my crib, little wordless tunes. Nothing else I can do gives me as much pleasure. It lights me up inside and dispels the darkness all around me.

When I am feeling especially in need of something beautiful I will go find a spot with the kind of accoustics you used to only find in church; echoing, ringing, enveloping. I will lift my voice until the sound rolls over and through me raising the hair on the back of my neck and sending shivers through my skin.

Heathen that I am, it’s rather ironic that my voice is best suited for the cathedral. Likewise, I am not much a fan of opera, but I have a Big Voice and a very high range. A vocal coach once marvelled that I could sing several notes higher than the higest not that anyone bothers to write. That capacity to reach those heights has diminished some with age, but a few years ago a friend of mine was making an album and asked me to sing for her. There was a particular sustained note that would overlay parts of the chorus and it was far too high for her range. She had been very generous with her time and helping me record some of my own music, so I was more than happy to oblige. Later, after she had mastered the whole record she presented me with a copy, she told me that all the while she was sequencing the vocals, hers would come through the mixer as a somewhat jagged and uneven line but that when she put my voice through it made a perfect sine wave. This made me giddy.

I sing in the car, I sing at work, I sing at the gym, while I shop, and when I’m riding the bus or walking down the street. Occasionally people look at me with a quizzical or annoyed expression, but for the most part I am happy to say, other people seem to enjoy it when I sing too. Lucky me.

when i was about 12 years old, i went to live with my dad. it was a fairly typical thing for an adolescent girl to do; tension with mother had reached a breaking point, the hateful stepfather, extra hateful. i’d had enough of the tyrrany and was looking forward to some freedom and peace.

it turns out, i was looking in the wrong place, but that is not the point in this particular narrative. what is the point, is that when i arrived on my father’s doorstep, i owned exactly one pair of shoes. they had serious holes in them. i would stand out in the rain and my feet would get wet. i was accustomed to this, but not inured. i told my dad i needed some money for a new pair of shoes. after some struggle, i got the shoes. and then, something strange happened; i got another pair of shoes.

this was unprecedented. i had always just had one pair at a time. it was heady and strange to be able to decide which shoes i was going to wear that day. i remember sitting in my room feeling giddy at the prospect. and it didn’t stop there. unlike my mother who harbors a profound disdain for the acquisition of things, my dad, he comes from stuff-likers. so. suddenly, i had stuff. items were given to me and neither rescinded nor destroyed. as such, i was able to amass a selection of things. and though i knew intellectually i was going to be able to keep these things, i became rather attached to the notion of having stuff, keeping that stuff, and getting new stuff to join it.

and in this way, i am still pretty much 12 years old.

never is this more apparent than when i cleaning. my god, i have a lot of stuff. stuff from when i was in middle school. stuff from my marriage. stuff from i have no idea where. even when i have nowhere to put it, and i am oppressed by it, i am very very reluctant to let it go. and of course, i still want more stuff too…

and what’s more, now hodie has a lot of stuff. toys, games, clothes, electronics, art supplies, books, costumes, gee-gaws, etc etc ad infinitum. as we were sorting through her room in the annual “pre-first-day-of-school-clean-and-purge” i was stunned by the quantity of crap my daughter has managed to collect. and most of this is my fault. i have definitely trained her to hold on to things; or more precisely i have encouraged her to hold on to things she would pretty much be perfectly happy to let go of. for you see, unlike her mother, she does not have deprivation consciousness, because for the most part, she has been deprived of nothing.

and so today. as we were cleaning her room, i did something i have never done before. i told her she could get rid of whatever she liked. she was not obligated to consult me about what to keep and what to be rid of. she could send off whatever struck her fancy. i didnt encourage her to to keep anything she did not want for her own purposes, and i let go the need to dictate where the things that were left ought to go. as long as everything had a place, i wasnt going to try to insist on placement or particulars; just that things were relatively tidy after all was said and done.

she was judicious for the most part. lots of books from when she was 2, stuffies she hadn’t even looked at in months, gifts from people years out of her life. she arranged her remaining things in a riot across all the flat surfaces of her room in a way that makes my fingers itch with organizational longing, but i resisted and praised her diligence.

i am happy to say that hodie does not seem to care nearly as much as i do about stuff. that she’s generally pretty happy to have it, but that it doesnt seem to be something she gives all that much thought to. and in this way, i like to think i have done a good job. the shrug of her shoulders, in the face of all those things, my best reward. even better than stuff.