Give A Little...

Y'know how that Coke ad says, "give a little love and it all comes back to you?"

It's not the same truth if you give a lot of love that you can't help giving. It actually rarely comes back anywhere near equal measure to what you gave out.

The trick is not to care, and to realize that you're here to spread love across everything so that it can fill in the tiny cracks of lives that people don't realize need constant filling until you've gone.

What you have to learn (and this is usually the hard part) is how to prep yourself to live with knowing your only appreciation will be a constantly posthumous thing.

But then, the task of life is service - a charity of sorts. Charity isn't something we do to get credit. It's not something we do just to get to heaven. It's the very fabric of which heaven is wove.

All I'm saying is that maybe loving EVERYTHING too much is a soul's way of attempting to repay God for that act of greatest Love.

Mosiah said it best: "When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God."

And I guess that true mortal progression comes when you realize that you can never repay God for all you've been given, and that you keep loving and serving the people around you anyway.

Is there really such a thing as settling for laying up the proverbial treasure in heaven?

The world's such a tainted, crummy place anyway. Why settle for it's recognition?

I'm not saying this to any of you. It's just something I had to explain to myself this morning.

Always,

Chels

I Love

Reading: The Sea by John Banville, The Quitter by Harvey Pekar, Snow by Orhan Pamuk.
Playing: Nothing, at the moment.
Listening to: Indie stuff, The Engineers mostly. Ted Leo. Casiotone.
Using Cell Phone For: Sudoku. Email. Web-surfing. My calendar.

Quote: (from page 108 in "The Sea") "Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much more then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability to fully believe one's simple luck."

I can't recall being a child. I can, but most of my childhood recollections - memories, to be so torpid - aren't exactly happy, or blissfully ignorant of their fortune. My descent from childhood, emotionally, was an un-numbing. A slow awakening to the awkwardness of self from the blissful anesthesia of a extroverted penchant for both curiosity and compassion. My childhood was observation, filling in all of the spaces in my subconscious and conscious mind (the white space that blinds you - a child so fresh from God - with it's pervasive sterility.)

I spent my early life assembling the experiential control of a stumbling, perpetual, experiment of maturing which would be lobbed a godless (well, it was painfully felt) amount of unchartable, unstable, unconscionable variables. I never adequately prepared for it, you see.

I never once caught in this giant, pieceless, hemless, smothering patchwork of acute observations a vision, a premonition, a sketch of myself. I am not mother or father before me. Not grandparent, teacher, mentor, friend, crossing guard, bosomous church lady, supposited male figures, artist, artiste, poet, Dr. Seuss character, or prophet of fire and light and the holy terror of the love of God. I was a composite of each of them - including the Harley gang bikers in the bank parking lot who I was convinced were going to kidnap my three year-old brother.

And so it goes. We are each that way - we are divinity and experience (as nouns and not adjectives - we are Divinity + Experience) both constantly grappling for dominance in the meager confines of a fleshy, imperfect, beautiful, expanselessly limited wuss of a soul. I envelope you, my truth-wielding, seraphic self-counterpart; my bumbling idiot.

I am still doing these things.

I am still tripping back to the places where people love me. Quenchless. I am on hands and knees groping from the veritable desert of days and "mellow fruitlessness." I have loved you. All of you. I do. I love you because I cannot help myself. The wretched soul-fingers that reach for your reaching merely because I breathe. I see. Because I need something more red - more here - than here is.

I write, I confess, I mistake, I over-react because of all that encompasses me, of all my patchwork properties, the batting - those very fibers of my being - of any being - that make a quilt worth having - is composed of loves.

Like Brod from Everything is Illuminated, like Jesus, like Enos, like a mercenary, like a sinner, like the faces you half-see and forget, I love you. I love. It claws, it ekes itself out of me. With such force I can hardly believe it's not tangible. Can hardly believe these letters do not burrow themselves into your very corneas with the perviousness of which they're imbibed.

I clamour for this place - this slew of lifewindows, of the real shadowyous, where each breath, space, symbol, absence, cloying presence of mine only begs you:

Love me. Because I am afraid that love doesn't exist - and I am willing to try nearly everything that does to find it.

Love me enough to take me seriously when I am not being serious - because even, perhaps especially - insincerity and humor have their truths, their sadnesses, their silent admissions. Who stops to count them? Who gives them priority?

I love you, so-imaginary-you're-real-maybe-even-more-real place. You People. Your nuances, your flavors, your magazines, your harrowing rapport, your steely-tottering precipice of tolerance for the shenanigan, the casual word.

Everyone builds life on a hope for tenderness. Who would shoulder the burdens of actual living if love - in its layers - wasn't worth waking up for?

If happiness in childhood consists of a heedless taking, of sorts, is it safe to conclude that at the bottom of this adulthood, this foot of clay crumbles flawlessly on the happiness, the satisfaction, of GIVING with a clear and observed understanding?

I was merely wondering, you see. I seem to have crossed a threshold. Putting away a portion of my childish things.

I find myself increduless (misspelling intentional). Schrapnelled on the panguishing moments I live. I love.

I was woken up a bit ago by a phone call.

It was one of the places I have finally been able to discern as familiar and not comfortable.

It has been springing upon me lately, in the occasionally successful attempt to catch me off guard - vulnerable to the pleabargaining of my empathy, my good nature.

I cannot escape it's septic clutching of my understanding. I cannot muster up the courage of a reboot. Of draining the same wounds.

I fear it winds around me. I fear that in this anklegrab situation, my only resource is silence and ignorance.

How dare you say now that you love me.

There is no longer the time nor place for such a thing.

We all meander through lives that consist of windows of opportunity.

When you skip a window, there's no going back, and it's closed.

I have said it was a good dream. Maybe it was only meant for that.

You cannot ever be a safety net. You cannot ever unhurt me.

What I have pledged to is both those things. He is a prop for my growing. An anchor rock for my starfish heart.

He is all that is great and good in my days ahead.

How could I forsake that?

No, the moment I agreed contained all moments.

I can trust him to pull me solidly alongside him. I am a greater person in his presence. He lifts and cradles me.

I didn't need someone on my own plane. I needed a way to grow up.

I would apologize for being myself if it was what made you love me, and what made this hurt you.

But what apology can one lay across the truth? Is it my place to apologize.

You love my possibility. The idyllic way you have painted me for yourself. You loved my attention.

But he loves me as what I am, not as the things I could be for him.

And that - THAT - is a crucial realization.

At this impossible 3 am hour, I can nearly touch the abstractions, it's all so clear.

I do not love you. You are no comfort, no step up into the darkness toward which faith in someone propels me.

You won't find or plant in me that irresolve.

I am not yours. Forever.

From my Phone...

Mellow day. Mayhaps it was even somber... I was too busy not talking and distracting myself to notice which.

And now I'm sitting on a window ledge outside at Borders, waiting for a ride home.

And I have to post this in spurts so my phone doesn't log me out.

Went and saw The Holiday today. I laughed and cried. Then I hated myself for relating to a chick flick. And because now I think Jack Black is mainly obnoxious, and not funny.

Then I walked to Borders, where I spent the day reading graphic novels by Craig Thompson. I really like his style. And his book Blankets is amazing. It moved me.

I want to go home and draw my own autobiographical comic book.

Sketchbook/journals were on sale for $4. I bought 3.

Maybe I'll do illustrated books of my poetry.

I felt outside of myself today. I keep going back to that quote from Everything Is Illuminated:

To write is to have second chances. What, then, do you mean when you say you were born to be a writer?

I have spent the last few years skirting the avoidable centers of my life. Now it's not just mine anymore, and I am plunging headlong into my personal Louisiana Purchase territory.

But it's okay now. I have found my Clark. And we shall explore it all together.

More and more I realize that my life to this point was just building. That the actual living doesn't happen until you're whole. And that you can't be whole until you find the person who completes you.

And while I rejoice in the prospect of excavating, scouting the dense jungles of my future life, I feel I have spent the week mourning my imminent departure from the world I will be leaving on the fringes.

There is much I have not the words, or presence of mind, to clearly articulate to that end.

Today I pondered the subtle, nuanced differences between familiarity and comfort.

And the difference between my then and now is defined by the noise of falling snow on fallen snow.

The sound of a change of heart is just as loud.

You Fi-yahd!

So, childrens. I have returned from hiatus because I have stuff to tell the peoples.

I got fired yesterday from crappy MyFamily.com job. I always hated my job there, and totally knew this was coming, but didn't really expect it to happen around Christmastime, and definitely not for the reasons that it DID happen.

Apparently my old supervisor, and someone who I thought was a friend, has been grudging me for the past few months because I've remained friends with Su and Dan, and she's been totally embittered. (She thought Dan was madly in love with her. She's frighteningly delusional about relationships...) Anyway, my real supervisor was out of town on Tuesday, because she left for Thanksgiving a day early, and Jillian (the girl in question) was subbing for her.

Turns out Jillian's been trying to get rid of me for ages, because all the part-timers liked me better than her. (I'm not saying this to boast, I'm saying it because it's true.) So she makes up some completely BULLSHIT report about me undermining authority and being willfully disrespectful, and that I was browsing the web way after my break. (I had accidentally left the window open instead of shutting it down before I went back to my auditing work.)

She tells Tony (the manager from hell who hates me because I called him on the carpet for taking advantage of the fact that he's on salary and not hourly pay anymore, and that it's ridiculous that he suddenly only comes in for 15 hours a week tops) that she told me on numerous occasions that she needed me to scan the microfilm rescans, which are always top priority. And he pulled me aside yesterday and threw all this stuff in my face. What sickened me was the fact that he looked so happy while he said it.

In reality, all Jillian had said was, "When you're done with that audit, can you come film scan?" ONE TIME. And by the time I'd finished my audit, my shift was over. I tell Tony this. Tony says, "I have to trust my supervisors, or else everyone will think that I'm bending the rules for you, and I can't do that, or no one will respect the rules or me." Apparently he doesn't know that no one respects him anyway. Sigh.

Then they had me go get my stuff, and took my badge and he made me stand out in the snow for 20 minutes without a jacket while I waited for my ride. Wouldn't even let me wait in the foyer.

Now, I've been looking for another job for months, because I knew that Tony's been prowling for an excuse to throw me out on my ear. But to have a person who I thought was a friend, to have Jillian be the one who stabs in the back, at Christmastime, no less, was what hurt the most.

Y'know, I've always been one to have faith in people. To give humanity the benefit of the doubt. Especially here in Utah, with the predominance of a religion which teaches that Christlike attributes and actions are of the highest priority, and that to love your neighbor as yourself is one of the most important commandments. Sometimes it makes me really sad, to see how so many people blatantly and repeatedly say one thing and do another.

I admit that I haven't always been the best person for sticking to my Mormon beliefs. I do swear, sometimes a lot. And sometimes I, myself, can be really mean, but I don't do either of those things and think that I'm still in the right. And I don't go around telling people to be nice and stop swearing.

I suppose it's easy to understand that in a place where Mormons are so highly concentrated, you get a good dose of those who are Mormon because they think it makes them look good. To the point where looking like they live the gospel is more important than actually living it.

And then, when you superimpose that demographic on top of a corporate environment, I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that hypocrisy and politics are even more pronounced. And that someone who calls people on the carpet for that sort of thing, someone who has always abhorred injustice, must have no place there.

Is it like that everywhere? I suppose I will never really be able to find a job where I fit in, because I don't fit in. I never have. I say what I think about things. I say how I feel. I tell people the truth, and never sit idly by while people in authority get away with crap.

But apparently those aren't important qualities. Apparently someone who's willing to take a stand is a menace, and not a help. Apparently standing for truth and justice is something that gets you fired, not something that helps.

It's hard, when your optimism, and your willingness to trust people, takes a hit like that. When you get slapped in the face for trying to be a friend, and trying to make a place better.

I think communism is a good idea, in theory. But I'll never believe in it, or advocate it, until you can prove to me than humanity is incorruptible.

Because at the end of the day, it seems, the liars and the hypocrites come out on top. And either there's something fundamentally wrong with the world, or there's something fundamentally wrong with me having faith in people.

And I'd hate to think that it's the latter.