I went to vote yesterday and it was easy. There was no line, I just walked right in, showed the nice ladies my ID, got my ballot, filled it out, received my sticker, and walked back out the door. It's not as good as at my last precinct which was held at an old folks home and the ladies there would give you baked treats and day-old bread from Publix, but still, pretty sweet.
It got me thinking about change, about Change, and about how a few years ago we rallied as a nation and went out and voted for Change and we did it, yes we did it, Yes We Did. Lately I've been hearing talk and grumbling about "Where is the Change?", as if people feel cheated, as if they thought they voted for a Superman and what they got was a man, just a man, and how could that be? I don't understand this. Or I do, I do in my heart, because I know that the grumbling and the rumbling start with people who never voted for the change at all, they just dress in sheep's clothes and start up the whispering of dissatisfaction and that whispering is a mighty tool in our country. People like to talk shit, they like to rail, they like to repeat things that sound cool and smart without really having to think about things, or come up with anything original. Sometimes it works for one side (Yes We Can) and sometimes it works for the other (Where's My Goddamned Change?) but for whomever and wherever it works, it does. It's a game of sides, and I am tired of the game but there it is.
We are a swiftly tilting boat on choppy water and whenever we list to one side everyone runs to the other, and then someone shouts a panic and we all move on back, and the whole time there are whispers that the Captain is to blame, but it is a boat, and will list, and will tilt, and if we were listening to the Captain we wouldn't be running back and forth to begin with.
Real Change doesn't come fast, we know that. We like to think it does. We want the Slim-Fast and then we want the Ultra Slim-Fast. We want American Idol, we want the magic bullet, the two weeks to whiter teeth, the rocket to stardom, the lottery ticket to make us instant millionaires, we want it, we want it fast, we want it now. We are told that it is not only possible, but it is The American Way. We want what we want without having to actually change anything we like at all. That is why we are not happy with our Captain right now. Change is slow, and we might have to compromise.
When I was at Heartwood Institute taking classes in acupressure and Chinese medicine, my teacher told us that it would not be easy to get our clients to change. He said that people are sick the way they are because of the lifestyles they lead, and they like these lifestyles or they wouldn't live like that. So much of what makes us sick is that which we enjoy. To be healthy one often must have a deep internal change before a physical one is possible. If you develop diabetes because you love cake, and you are given cake your whole life to make you feel better and to make you happy, you must learn to love more than cake. If you don't, you can still stop eating cake but you might grow to be irritable and discontent. Or you don't stop eating cake, and you lose a foot. It is that simple on paper but I don't mean to be insensitive. We are not simple beings, the things we love, the things that we are attached to are deep within us, and make us who we are. To change who we are is difficult indeed. Sometimes impossible. I think we can all recognize that.
So if we cannot stop eating cake to save our lives, why do we expect one man to change a nation as quickly as one may change his socks? We love our money, we love our things, we love our air conditioning and our very fast and big cars, we love to bitch and blame and whisper. We love to have our Own, and God bless the child whose got his own, but where does that leave the child without?
Chinese Medicine also taught me that you cannot separate the body to heal it. If your head hurts, rub your feet. They are connected, it is one body. We are starting to understand this in Western medicine as well. If you have a sore throat and you are given antibiotics, the doctor may tell you to take a probiotic to replenish the flora in your digestive system. A sore throat and a stuffy nose are far away from a colon or a vagina, but they are connected and they affect the whole. It is a marvelous and complicated thing, the body. So too is a nation. Far too complicated for me to figure out.
I see how poverty provides a breeding ground for desperation, which in turn creates an environment ripe for fear and violence. I see how well funded schools feed minds and health care protects bodies and these two things are essential in ensuring our people a way up and out of poverty. It is common sense and yet it does not pay out as fast as giving money to big business and funding oil companies and creating bigger and better weapons to protect our giant assets. To improve the health of our nation we would do right to invest in the health and wellness of our children. Which of course would take generations to see any return on said investment and by that time those of us sitting here now will be dead and we are really really loathe to make any sort of changes that may improve things after we die.
The very smart and the very rich know these things, but we don't listen to the very smart and it is not to the advantage of the very rich to acknowledge them. The very rich are also safe in that the big picture is far too big to grasp in a satisfactory way. The money that it would take, the man power and the changes it would take to truly and properly fix our nation's ills are so vast that the human mind simply cannot grok it. I am an average human being, not stupid, not brilliant, and my mind makes a strange shift and shimmy when I try to imagine that sort of magnitude. I don't know what to do.
So I vote. I vote for people who seem to have the people's best interests at heart. I vote for the people who have fine minds and some sort of soul, who see this nation as one body, and who want to make some healing happen.
The people who have made the greatest contributions to change for the better do not live to see the full manifestation of those changes, but they do it anyway. Because they care, because they are far thinkers, because they passionately believe in what is right. Even when great and fast changes have been made it takes a very long time for us to sink into them and feel them. President Lincoln didn't just say, "I'm going to kick it up a notch. BAM! I freed the slaves!" and then everything was equal. It took people time and time again to fight and pray and speak and march and die and new people to be born in a different world to make an even more different world and still it is not perfect. That change is still happening.
I voted for my President because he spoke of change, but also because he is smart. I voted for him because he loves his family so clearly, and therefore I know he is capable of love. I voted for him because he speaks of health before he speaks of wealth and because he stands tall and is proud in his body, as I hope he is proud of our nation. Because I am not a foot or a hand, but I am my whole body. And I am not one person, I am a family, I am a city, I am a nation.
It took us a very long time to get sick, and it may take us a very long time to get well, and I am sure as hell not going to damn the man who I believe is going to fight with all he's got to make us better. No matter how long it takes.

Moleskinner's Blues

I went to write in my journal this morning and I just couldn't, the journal is too big. It's alright when I'm writing on the left page but when I move over to the right I have to tuck the left side into myself somehow and that pulls the book into a severe sideways position that is not conducive to comfortable writing. I need a new one, and I'm only a few pages into this one.
I started keeping a diary when I was eleven. Our friend Summer (she of the dirty mix tape, she of the sprayed up bangs, she of the boobs at age twelve) had read Anne Frank: The Diary Of a Young Girl, and was thus inspired to take up pen and notebook. She, like Anne, named her diary so that each entry was like a letter to a friend. She let me read it (she had about three pages filled) and as I burned with the desire to be cool like Summer, I too read Anne Frank, and I too started writing. My first diary was named Anne, and it was pink.
[ An aside: So many of the things I do start because someone cooler than me does it first. Journal writing, listening to Tom Waits, learning The Jaberwockey by heart, blogging.... To my credit I only continue with these things if I really love them. I've always had a hard time finding my own things, I have to try on the things of others and see how they fit. Sometimes that bothers me, and I want to tell new people that I meet that I am not really cool, I am simply cool by borrowing the coolness of others. Then I remind myself that we are not born with great books and mix tapes in our hands, we all stumble across them in our own ways. Then I tell myself that I am over-thinking this, as I do everything and I tell myself to shut up.]
I filled up Little Pink Anne and moved on to another one, then another, then another. Picking out a new diary and naming it was something that took great thought and care, and sometimes would take several trips to various stores before I found just the right one. I remember one with sunflowers, a blue one with a Degas print, one of purple velvet, plain ones, flowered ones, ones made of recycled material, ones from India with tiny mirrored circles. Anne, Kitty, Sandra, Salome, Dave, Delilah, Mary, Maria, Sophia, Claudia, Frida, Ella, Etta, Eva, Mable, Luz, Annette, and on and on. Then to find the perfect pen, the ink pen but not too inky, a bit of scritch and scratch but also one that glides across the page and does not bring attention to itself. The color of the ink depending on my mood, and all in all mostly I write myself black and blue but there has been pink, there has been red, there has been green. For an entire year, brown.
At some point I picked up a Moleskine journal and I never looked back. O Moleskine! How perfect your pages! How narrow and unobtrusive your lines! Your tiny perfect pocket in back, your nubbled flesh, the strength of your spine! A ribbon to keep my place, elastic to hold you closed and keep your pages safe from ruck and ruffle! Your reputation is well deserved, my friend, but you have let fame go to your head.
It used to be that you had two choices: lined or unlined, in black hardback. Perfection. Now they come in three sizes, several different colors, hard or softback, lined, unlined, graph paper, reporter style (with the spine at the top), graphic artist style (half the page lined and half unlined for illustrations), sketchbook (with heavy weight paper), day planner, address book, and I don't know what else. Cook book style? Ones with wide lines for girls with bubbly handwriting? Music sheet style? Moleskines are trying to be something for everyone and that's fine, really it is, but it has become nearly impossible to find the classic, plain and perfect, black hardback in the size that will take a good amount of words but will still fit in my purse.
A week ago I went to a large chain bookstore (I will not advertise for them! I am still mad!) to get a new one. After looking through the three carousels of Moleskines that they had and not finding the one I wanted, I asked at the customer service desk when they would be getting more in. They didn't know and told me that their Stationary Specialist would come out to help me. After about a minute and a half, what appeared to be a twelve year-old girl wearing a Harry Potter t-shirt and a bow in her hair came walking toward me. Please, I begged my higher power, Please don't let this be the Stationary Specialist. I wanted someone older, I wanted someone with glasses and a pipe and ink stained fingers. At least someone who had grown breasts, but no, this little girl, this Hannah Montana was indeed the Stationary Specialist. She was so cute! She talked in all exclamations!

Hi! How can I help you!

Yes, I am looking for a lined Moleskine journal in classic black. Do you know when you'll be getting more in?
Did you look at all three carousels!
I did, and you have quite a selection, but I can't find the plain, hardback, lined ones.
I know! Those go fast!
I'm sure. So, does that mean that you'll get some more in soon?
Probably! Maybe in two weeks! They just send me a bunch and I put them out!
So you don't actually order them?
Nope! They just send me a bunch and I put them out!
Okaaaaay.... Well, thanks.

I wonder how much a Stationary Specialist at a large chain bookstore makes. I'm thinking not much.
So that is how I ended up walking out with one of the large ones instead of the medium sized. An art teacher told me once that when you paint small you actually use the mathematical side of your brain and when you paint large you use the creative, and so I thought that maybe I should try the larger size, that it might open up a different part of my brain for writing. I don't think it does, my handwriting is still tiny and the larger size just makes me uncomfortable and angry. Which makes me not want to write. Which makes me crazier than I already am. Writing in my journal everyday is my therapy. I prefer vellum to Valium. I'll just have to visit other stores, manhandle other journals, maybe even find a new pen. There are areas in our lives where change is good and compromise acceptable, one's personal diary is not such a place.
Which reminds me- dish soap IS such a place. I got some lime scented dish soap recently and it's great. I feel like I'm washing my dishes with margaritas. It turns dish washing into a fiesta! Maybe I will name my new journal Margarita. Maybe I will write in lime colored ink. Maybe I will become fun and spontaneous! But only secretly, and for an hour after I wake up and before I go to work. Baby steps. One doesn't want to change everything at once.

Restless

It's cloudy this morning and cool. The outside world from my window looks like a fairy tale will happen, but only because all fairy tales seem to happen in England or some other equally gray and misty place. The mists will part, and there will be a rose garden too wild, there will be a great bear, there will be a woman on the side of the road with a nose that is three ells long. Where are my seven-league boots? I must have left them somewhere and the walk to work today seems very long. I did not walk to work yesterday.
I love Tallahassee but I am tired of it and I believe it is tired of me. I wake up excited each morning to write, to feel the fall coming, and then I realize that I have nothing to say, and that the fall is the same as it always is and after that comes winter. It will be cold. I will wear a coat. I will walk the same streets I always walk. I will see people I know everywhere I go. I feel restless.
I know that it is not Tallahassee that is the problem, and that to live a good life one must do good things. I know that, I know that, and people will say do things differently and people will say try new things and all of that I know... and I know that really, people around here do not think of me very often. It is my own anxiety that I feel so exposed, and that everything I do is watched and judged. It's hard to feel free in one's hometown.
I suppose it's that I'm really not sure. That I want to change and I want a change, but I haven't decided what that will be yet. People ask me how I am and what I've been doing, and they are just being polite, but I am tired of being polite and I am tired of what I am doing and I really don't feel like talking about it.
Do you ever feel this way? Like nothing feels right somehow and everything you do is the same?