What matters most

Months ago Kiki posted a question about why we write. One of my responses had to do with the love of research, learning, and discovery. Ten-plus years ago, when I began Sanctuary, research consisted of bullshitting my way through a scene and focusing on the romance. Now, research means raiding the Internet for all the information I can lay my hands on, making phone calls to three different people for their expert opinion, and quite possibly annoying the fuck out of my husband by asking him stupid questions before he's had his second cup of coffee. I'm a morning person. He is not.

Today I have been learning about what it's like to be with and take care of someone you love who is dying. (Not personally.) Caring.com doesn't cut it here. I stumbled across a blog, which linked to another blog, which linked to another one, and on and on... I have had a glut of heartache tonight, and more information and personal experience than I know what to do with.

Today I have learned about MRIs, brain scans, chemotherapy side effects, seizures, memory loss, and blindness.

Today I have learned that I am an extremely lucky woman. I knew this already, because every time we sit down to dinner together, Brian says grace (believe it or not), I close my eyes and take a deep breath, filling myself easily with gratitude for the gifts I have been given. It feels so good I don't want to breathe out; I don't want the moment to end. But when it does, I open my eyes and see my family on either side of me, the myriad shades of green on the trees that surround our house, the soft beauty of the kitchen table my father made for us, and I feel twice-blessed, blessed that I have these gifts, and blessed that I am cognizant and coherent enough to appreciate them.

I have shitty days. I have mood swings, and some days I am so insanely self-centered that I think these things actually matter in the Grand Scheme. They don't. They're bullshit.

What matters most to me right now, at this moment, 12:53 AM, May 15th, is respect, compassion, gratitude, and love.

It's late, I'm maudlin, and I'm off to bed before I contradict myself and become a not-so-morning person in seven hours or so.

Sorry to have missed you this evening. Hope to check in with you soon.

~Andi

high anxiety

A friend told me this morning that she had been experiencing some high anxiety lately - her son is about to do end-of-grade testing for the first time, her older son just graduated from college, and she's right at her own midterm for the class in some kind of human resource management thingamajig. I thought of the Mel Brooks movie and immediately wished I hadn't - other than marrying Anne Bancroft, I really think Mel Brooks should have stayed out of the movies altogether; at least I wouldn't be stuck sharing a house with my husband's copy of Blazing Saddles.

I digress.

What she meant was that she was experiencing a high level of anxiety. I originally thought of vertigo. But as my day has progressed, I'm beginning to think that sometimes there's not much of a difference.

Tonight I feel like I'm scrabbling for any kind of grip on the edge of a crumbling cliff - desperate, shaky, weak, and at the very beginning of a freefall, that half a second when your stomach realizes it's about to drop, and drop for a very long time. I'm not an adrenaline junkie. And I hate heights. It makes me impatient, angry, mean. It's supposed to have to do with my menstrual cycles, but tonight it's triggered by something else.

I've done as much as I can with the first three chapters. I'll put a finishing touch on the first scene, maybe run a spell-check, put it off as long as I can, then I'm sending the first chapter out for critiquing to an online critical writing group - a group of writers who do not know me and have no emotional investment in this book at all.

I'm scared shitless. And at the same time, I know that once I do this, once I just post the thing and have done with it, I'll be able to move on, because I'm frankly sick as hell of the first three everfucking chapters.

Plus maybe I'll be a little less of a cunt to my family. They don't deserve this.

~Andi

Open Road

I've been thinking about the open road. Not a particular one -- just the thought in general. I wrote a post for the Daily Revolution last year, about the benefits of travelling in general, and crazy American places to visit in particular. It's been weighing on my mind recently.

How can you live one place forever? I don't know. It's not my experience. I know a lot of people, my boyfriend included, who have done just that. Okay, so in his example, that's not technically true. He moved across his state for college, then moved to a few other places for grad school and a job. But then he got his permanent job, and here we are. However, before college, he lived in maybe two or three houses max, in the same metro area.

Me? I don't even know if I can come up with an accurate count of where I lived pre-college (and during and post? Florida, Indiana, Florida again, New Mexico, Tennessee, New Mexico again, California, New Mexico yet again...). I think...Eliot and York, Maine; Somersworth and Rochester, NH; Gaithersburg and Mt. Airy, Maryland; York, Maine again; Gallup, New Mexico (two houses); York again; Enfield and Canaan, New Hampshire...the list is so long. A minimum of 13 houses in 18 years.

I know there's been a lot of research into how this kind of moving affects kids. I'm sure most of it is significant and affecting. Whatever the fuck. I liked it. A lot.

You know -- I don't know where I'm really going with this. Except I've been in my current house, and town, for coming up on nine years now. I find that incredible. Unbelievable. Impossible. It's a good place for us. But I look at the highway, any highway, and I can't comprehend that this is the end of the road. There is no end of the road, for me. I want to see those mileage signs forever.

How does it end?

It's not supposed to...