General Update

Current credit debt: $3,777.69
Original debt at my arrival in Des Moines on September 2nd: $9,124.52

Pages written since September 2nd: 86

Quilts completed: 2
Quilts in progress: 3

Cigarettes smoked in 2006: 0

On Sunday I am leaving for Denver for five days to soak up some mountain air and visit friends. I am both excited for the mountains and stressed about the money I will spend.

My friend, Kate, just miscarried her first child last Sunday. Please keep her in your thoughts as she has always felt to me like the friend who is most like me.

Iowa Winter

Been having a rough couple of days. it's probably pms, but i've just felt alternatley sad and angry. the times i feel sad, it's like i can't even lift my cheeks to squint in the sun, let alone smile. and every part of my day seems sad past the coffee drinking. i like that part. but once i've finished my second cup it's just like "okay, here goes." and the day starts. people at work make me sad, their lifestyles, the way they don't know me at all. the landscape makes me sad, the brown grass, the bare tree branches like brushstrokes against the blue sky. the birds circling the lake up the street, confused, flying south but stopping here because it doesn't seem to be winter anymore. the stores make me sad, the food i eat makes me sad. i just feel sad. so i'll start thinking about being happy, about things that make me happy. Britenbush Hot Springs, McMenamins, camping, rain, the bulk bins at New Seasons Market, snowshoeing, sewing, writing groups, hiking, taking the bus across the Hawthorne bridge. so i'm homesick i realize. this is no surprise. i miss portland. i've known that all along. but somehow this realization, instead of comforting me, makes me angry. i'll feel very trapped, not only in iowa, but in a body. and i want to kick things and scream loud and release whatever it is that is making me feel this way. i tell myself that i will only be here four more months. then i will go back and things can go back to normal again. but that seems like a long time and i don't know if i'll make it that long without packing a bag...

Yellow Rubber Gloves

my little brother, mikey, just started work with me at the urbandale cafe. he washes dishes in the back and drinks pepsi and has a bacon cheeseburger everyday. he wears yellow dishwashing gloves and a baseball hat and old T-shirts with sports teams on them. he sweats in the hot dishwasher air and curses when we get busy and complains that his feet hurt and laughs at the jokes the cooks tell. he seems just like a normal guy working a normal job. but he's not. i know he's not. i know that he's really mikey, my little brother. the guy who sleeps until four p.m. and stays up until dawn watching T.V. , playing video games, searching the internet, doing i don't know what while the rest of the working world sleeps and dreams that they're still at work. i have known him only as this guy for years. for the last three or four years since his last job i have known him as an out-of-work, unmotivated bum. still living with my parents (different than moving back for a little while, i assure you), still wearing the same haircut he's had since he was six. at home, after he's had his nap while i was out at job #2, he bitches about how tired he is, how his back hurts. he rubs lotion on his hands with a passive aggressive sigh, like it's my fault i got him a job. he could be spending his time resting, thank you very much, and then he wouldn't have "dishpan hands", a term he actually used. like he's one of the golden girls doing a commercial for dishsoap. and my mom looks at him, worried. worried that the work is too hard for him. that he'll injure his back, that he'll catch a cold with his hands in water all day. then she comments that he's too good to be washing dishes. and my dad chimes in that he has always been the smart one. smartest of the three of us, that mikey. he could do something else. and i'm the one with the college degree. the one who's been working since i was sixteen, and supporting myself and making goals and working towards them. my mom offers to make mikey some dinner, maybe make him a doctor's appointment if he really is getting a cold. from the couch, where i lie, i want to throw something at mikey. i want to call him a snob. too good to wash dishes with his two year DMACC degree that took him five years to get. too good to wash dishes with his huge working history of about one year total. but i am too tired to move. and slowly, while mikey hobbles like a hostage into the kitchen, i relax and am not upset. because it's not that he's too good. it's not that he thinks he's too good. he's just not adventerous enough. not brave enough. not tough enough to wash dishes. and that this makes me feel better. then immediately just makes me sad.

Beautiful, Vulnerable Honesty

Yesterday i woke up, made a pot of coffee and settled out on the four season porch to work on my book. it's a slow start of a thing about my experiences in alaska on the surface, but has a deeper undertone about recovering from an abusive relationship. it's called sleeping in my clothes. it's one of those pieces of writing that feels really good to write, but i don't know that i'd ever actually want anyone else reading it. unfortunately, those kind of books are the most popular, they are the best to read because they are so honest. i used to never have a problem sharing this kind of writing either. in fact, it was this kind of inner honesty in writing that i figured would make me a successful writer. but then other people in my life started having a problem with it. it embarassed them maybe. they didn't want the whole world to know that about me. namely these people was my ex-boyfriend dan. every inner thought expressed on paper was a threat to our relationship, a threat to him somehow. he used to read my journal and then make me feel bad about the feelings i expressed in it. eventually i quit writing in it. or i wrote only nice things that i thought he would enjoy reading on his secret forbidden trips into my diary. so i'm still recovering. still working on being honest in my writing. still convincing myself that it's okay to be honest and that it's good to be honest and by being honest i can still be a successful writer. there is a beauty and a vulnerability in honesty that everyone can relate to and think yeah, i know what you mean. comedians can somehow get away with this much better than those who don't pose it in a comical way. people prefer to laugh about the truth of human emotion and say ha,ha, that guys's saying what we're all thinking. and becuase it's funny, it's okay, it makes us feel light. we appreciate the comic for presenting it to us in a style we can handle. i have the tendancy to write the truth in a way that is, i like to call, abstractly sad. and i guess people don't want to hear the truth and feel, well, kind of sad, can't really tell how i feel about it, but i guess just weird. we don't want to be confused. but damnit, wake up. the truth is confusing. honestly is confusing. it is beautiful and vulnerable and harder to handle than the most inticatley woven lie.

This Day in History

a journal entry from January 10, 2004

Went snowshoeing today for the first time ever. it was a beautiful day too. crisp, blue. Mt. Hood white and stark in contrast. we walked over the snow, the tips of stop signs, yeild signs, pedestrian crossing signs at our knees as we crunched at a level of the trees we never could before. i felt good. took deep breaths, enjoyed the smell of the mountain, of the snow. i didn't get irritated by the sun in my eyes; didn't get whiny when i was tired at the end, truding up the last hill. just lived in the moment, enjoyed it for what it was.
i really think all this free time latley has me feeling very balanced and that's why i was so able to purely and truly enjoy myself today, as i always should when doing these types of outdoor activities, when participating in the life i came out to oregon to lead. but i'm not always able to enjoy a good hike. sometimes my shoulders are tense and i can't get to the top of my breath or it all just seems like so much work or i'm busy thinking about what i'm gonna do later, what else needs to be done, something so that i can't enjoy myself fully. and the reason that happens is because too often 40 hours of my work week is devoted to doing something i really don't care about.

On living with my parents at 28

saturday night i got drunk. not real drunk, i didn't take shots or anything, but i didn't eat dinner and after a few beers i started to feel, well...drunk. and then i started to feel sick. i was at a wedding reception. i don't know the people who got married. i didn't go to the wedding and wasn't invited. but found myself at this wedding reception with a date. i was wearing a skirt, which i had just bought that day. i normally don't wear skirts in the winter but this day i was. a short wool skirt with knee socks. i really looked quite cute, but quickly grew tired of being asked if i went to catholic school, which i did, but never wore a wool skirt and knee socks until now. i started to feel sick so i went home with steve, my date. we curled up in his bed, which has about four heavy quilts on it, making it a wonderful place to sleep, especially since the bed is pushed right up by the window where cool air seeps through the wall. i was supposed to work the next day, at the cafe, waiting tables. but i didn't stir until noon when i woke up feeling even sicker. my face felt like someone had smashed it with a cast iron skillet. it was that kind of headache, the kind where it wasn't really my head that hurt, it was my face. my eyes, my nose, the bone of my forehead. the pain seeped through me and i threw up. the only thing i could do was lie down and not move my head. light hurt. sound hurt. motion was the worst. i stayed in steve's bed all day, wearing his sweatpants, his hawkeye grain and feed sweatshirt, my knee socks still. every now and then i tried to be better. i tried to get up and drink a soda or eat a cracker and eventually ended up right back in bed, face planted in the pillows. i managed to watch family guy but then was right back in bed, where i slept all through the night. this morning, as steve and i alternatley pressed snooze on his alarm clock, his phone rang. my head still hurt, my body still unwilling to move. the answering machine picked up. then i heard my dad's voice. hi steve, this is kevin hurley. i am looking for daughter. if you know her whereabouts, please give me a call. i gasped and shot up in bed. oh yeah, i live with my parents. i live with people who like to know where i am and who worry about me when they haven't seen me for awhile. i live with people who pray the rosary and imagine me in a ditch on the side of the road. i live with people i need to call. i drove home in my wool skirt and knee socks and felt fifteen. was i going to be grounded? they couldn't ground me, could they? i felt bad because i should have called. then i felt mad because why should i have to call? i am twenty-eight years old. i am twenty-eight years old and i live with my parents and wear knee socks and sleep in a room that was decorated by my father to look like my room. high school awards in frames and a poster of jim morrison who i used to like but who now kinda just creeps me out. i am twenty-eight years old and work with kids who are seventeen and working their part-time jobs. i am twenty-eight years old and feel lost and trapped and ready to move on, but not yet. i need to move on, but living with my parents and saving money is part of moving on. nothing is happening fast enough yet days slip by before i have a chance to read a book, to look at the stars, to enjoy something about my life right now.

Portland Storage

The weather in iowa has not felt much like iowa this winter. it's been warm and has a touch of fogginess, bleakness maybe. there's no sun. there's no snow. it sort of feels like oregon, except that the grass isn't green enough, the fog not close enough. but still it feels like oregon. and maybe this is a good thing. i like the weather in oregon. it's part of the reason i live there. okay, okay, so i don't live there. i live in iowa. technically. i mean my jobs are in iowa. i wake up everyday in iowa. my mail gets sent to iowa. i live here. but i don't really live here, i live in oregon. that's where all my stuff is. my photographs, my clothes, my printer, my barstools, my futon, the quilt my grandmother made me, even my sewing machine for christ's sake. if i ever feel like i don't know where home is, i just need to ask myself "well, where is your sewing machine?" it's all stored away in an old brick building beneath the morrison bridge. there's a black sign painted on the brick. it says Portland Storage. i used to look at this sign everyday as i walked to the bus stop last year. i lived in inner southeast portland, near the river, across from a barbecue joint called tenessee reds, known mostly for their karaoke. i walked half a mile to the bus stop in the fog or rain of morning, coffee steaming from my mug. right around belmont and morrison streets i'd get a good view of downtown portland, which really is quite beautiful for a city. the west hills in the background, the fog, the river, Portland Storage. i always liked this sign being part of my view. it was like a tagline or a caption on a postcard. greetings from portland. now i don't see it anymore, but is even more a part of my life. i send them money. they hold on to my sewing machine. they assure me i can go back. i can go back to where the fog rolls off the hills. where you can spend your weekend in a hotsprings. where people turn old fire stations and closed elementary schools into bars. i can go back to art festivals and the ocean and tiny brewpubs. i can go back to used bookstores. i can. i have to. i live there. i really do. at Portland Storage they call me a "tenant" and my monthy payment is called "rent". since my parents are so kind as to do me this favor and let me stay with them, i don't pay them anything. so Portland Storage is the closest thing i have to a landlord. sometimes i have dreams that i live in my little storage unit. my futon is set up and the radio is playing and candles burn and i have plants that grow around the doorway. in my dream i get a sense that i am not supposed to be living there, that i could get in trouble for living there, but i don't want to leave. it is actually quite a nice place. at least i wake up and walk out the door and get to see that view of the city, of the hills and the archs of the bridges over the river. though i don't get a view of the sign anymore. Portland Storage is no longer in my view because i'm inside of it, part of the view. swallowed inside the postcard, looking out.