Creep Update

For those of you who read my post "Creep," I have wonderful news!

After a while, I decided that my old friend Brian was never going to speak to me again, and curiosity was killing me, and... well, I'm a jerk, so I downloaded and listened to Brian's CD after all. He's good. He's really good. I'm still amazed that I know such a person personally. If you like acoustic guitar, folky rock, or blues, I especially recommend him. Brian's greatest heroes include Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and David Gray, but Brian is particularly good at singin' the blues. He also has a really cool voice, though he doesn't seem to know that.

In even better news, I can, in good conscience, tell you all about Brian and recommend his music. You see, to my great surprise, Brian has started speaking to me again! (Apparently he's forgiving, as well as talented. I just hope he doesn't change his mind after reading "Creep," which, in fairness, I felt I should invite him to do.) Thus, I have his permission to recommend his music to all three of my loyal readers (and anyone else who might wander by)!

Give him a listen. His full name is Brian Blommer. His CD "Live: An Audience of One" is available on the CD Baby web site at http://cdbaby.com/cd/blommer and also from iTunes, MSN Music, and Walmart's online music store, to name the few places I've found so far. Just search for the artist "Brian Blommer" on any of these sites. You can listen to samples first, of course. CD Baby has longer free samples than iTunes, so I suggest you sample there. I'll add the CD Baby page to my links on the right side of this blog, too. Listen! Enjoy!

Brian also has recorded an electric, in-studio blues-based CD, "Too Young to Feel This Old," which he's let me hear, and which I hope he'll put on CD Baby soon. He's thinking of playing out in public more often, too. If I hear about any future performances, I'll let you know. (I know he plays acoustic improvisational stuff at a coffee house every Sunday, but I'd like to ask him if he minds before I send you all there...)

Luxury

I seem to have so much time this week! It’s just that everything falls together so simply: I wake up each morning to an alarm clock I’d used before and known how to set properly, and I immediately know where I am. I walk into the bathroom and find all of my own soaps and lotions lined up just the way I like them—-no digging in the bottom of a duffel bag, stabbing myself with tweezers as I go, to find my shampoo. Similarly, all of my clothes are hanging in a closet in easy view, not stacked on top of each other inside a laundry bag. I dress in two minutes, leave my pajamas hanging on a hook instead of packing them away, and walk into a kitchen where all of my food is out of boxes and easy to find. The day goes on like this: I pet cats who already know me, and I sit down to write for hours at a kitchen table, knowing that I won’t have to pack up and move again for another three weeks!

All of this is rare for me. Last August, I gave up my apartment and began house sitting full-time. I move from place to place every week or so, sometimes every few days. Last week, between sits, I rented a room in an apartment full of roommates. My new roomies seemed to be very nice folks, but they were strangers still, and I felt so shy that I spent most of my time driving around town, hanging out in coffeehouses, dropping in on my mother for dinner, and running errands mis-planned to make me drive all over the Denver-Boulder area-—anything to avoid being at “home.” Within a few days, it was time to pack and move yet again. This packing, moving, shyness, and rushing around are my usual state of affairs. When I do slow down enough to wonder why I’m not making more progress on my goals—-building my freelance editing business, writing more, designing more submissions for knitting magazines, and so on—-I realize that most of my time is spent spinning in circles.

I love my house sitting life, and especially all of the pets I get to know and care for. I love the freedom of not having to pay rent. Still, I’m realizing how many comforts those of us who have long-term homes take for granted. Most Americans feel we have a lot on our minds—-how to pay our bills, how to advance our careers, how to take care of children and other loved ones, how long our health will hold out-—but it’s amazing to realize how many important things we take for granted. When was the last time you wondered where you would be living next week? I’ve gotten used to wondering, and to hustling on the phone and internet to figure it out. When did you last think about where your toothbrush was, or where your kitchen staples were? I spend a great deal of time moving mine around, unpacking them, organizing them, repacking, and moving again.

Of course, I take the most basic comforts for granted, too. I was reminded of this while listening (on that most addictive of luxuries, an iPod) to the February 17 edition of This American Life. In the segment “The Call of the Great Indoors,” Chelsea Merz told about her friend Matthew, who has been homeless for seven years. Matthew, in turn, had told her stories of people he’d met on the street, and how they gathered together to exchange advice on finding food and surviving the elements. Everyone’s favorite topic-—everyone’s obsession-—was sleep: who got any last night, where they did it, for how long, and how they’d managed it. One man Matthew talked with hadn’t slept a wink one rainy night, for the only place he could find to hide from the downpour was an apartment building’s trash compactor. He'd sat up all night, dry, but terrified that at any moment someone might turn on the machine and unwittingly crush him to death. People who live indoors, Merz pointed out, rarely think much about sleep. We may lose an hour or two sitting up, worrying about other things, but we rarely think about how amazing it is to find a place to lay around for six to eight hours, with no fear of being frozen, robbed, arrested, beaten, or crushed. To us, a bed in a safe room is too ordinary to think about; to a homeless person, it’s a miracle.

I think my current lifestyle gives me a nice balance of safety and awareness. I needed Merz to show me how wonderful it is to always have a warm bed in a relatively quiet room each night, but my odd lifestyle makes me notice the wonder of having one closet, one medicine cabinet, one kitchen, and one living room as a home base. On the rare occasions, like now, when I have a house sit that is many weeks long, I feel like a powerhouse of efficiency, living in the lap of luxury. Life is more exciting when I take fewer things for granted. I don’t want to live like Matthew does-—I enjoy knowing where my next meal and tonight’s bed are coming from-—but I am grateful for the opportunity to see how comfortable my life really is.

Perfection

I am a perfectionist, especially when it comes to words.

My profession is making the printed word as close to perfect as I can—I’m a proofreader. My friend R.J. Zimmerman has even asked me to proofread his well-read and entertaining blog for him. He’s afraid that he’ll mistype something, and later be criticized for being less than perfect. Happy to help—and thrilled that my compulsive perfectionism has some practical use: I can help a friend feel more secure!—I adjust a comma here, fix a spelling error there, and realize that R.J. can’t tell the difference when I’m done, and most of his loyal readers can’t, either. All my picking does is give R.J. peace of mind, knowing that he will be protected from criticism if some other nitpicker, one who doesn’t adore him like I do, should wander into his blog. This is not likely to happen. What we readers notice are his great travel stories, his inspiring ideas, and the political comments that get us charged up to write endless comments. Even I wouldn’t notice those missing commas if it wasn’t for my inborn yearning to tweak every printed sentence I see.

Here’s what I’ve been noticing most of all, though: R.J. has been steadily posting a few times a week for over six months now. He posts long memories of his world travels, short blips about news stories that rile him, calls to action for his readers (Travel the world! Speak your mind!), and even a cute little blurb about eating dessert first. His spelling is imperfect, he sometimes puts in apostrophes where they don’t belong, and his sentences are not the most beautifully constructed in English literature. Meanwhile, my latest post on “Anita’s Weekly Column” went up three months ago. I did put up a New Year’s Day post just two months ago, but I later decided it was stupid, and so I took it down.

It’s not that I’m lacking ideas. I want to write about spiritual and scientific explanations, to show that we must keep both in mind in order to know what really happened, but first I want to reread two books and review a movie to make sure I have all of my quotes right and my evidence in order. I want to write about the beauty of ritualized cannibalism and how important it is to our cultural life, but my ideas are too scattered, and I never feel focused enough to get them all down. I want to write about the long conversation I had with a good friend about recurring severe depression, and explore my later realization that my favorite relative and many of my closest friends suffer from mental illness… but I don’t know what conclusion I’ll draw from that, what I’ll discover about myself when I put together everything I’ve learned from these people. I have such marvelous ideas that I don’t want to damage them by trying to write them down. I’m afraid they won’t be worth reading if I can’t express them perfectly. I’m afraid, if my arguments and my evidence and my punctuation aren’t all in order, nobody will want to read my ideas at all.

Meanwhile, R.J. blogs on and on, worried enough about his imperfections that he’s asked for my help, but still willing to put himself out there again and again. He has somehow managed to escape the paralysis of perfectionism, the disease that keeps me silent. I admire his courage. Maybe I can do it, too. I fix up his apostrophes, and recommit myself to put out one terrible, boring, short little column each week. I’ll read it six times before I post it. At least I’ll know that the commas are in the right places.