“Life is a series of collisions with the future.” ~José Ortega y Gasset
Sometimes I think I have more in me than I really do. Like I am equipped with an infinite amount of stamina and I can do it all. I can run, jump, swim and even fly! Everything looks good on paper. Communism looked good on paper and in theory and it might have been doable. But the execution is always where plans fall through. The minutia filters between the cracks of what was once thought to be a solid foundation.
On paper it looked like San Diego, DC, Philly, Chicago, return home to move. In reality it looked like a strep throat/flu monster hybrid was eating me from the inside out meanwhile Mother Nature was all, “I’ll show you wrath!” and lo the skies opened up while filling my car full of my earthly possessions. Like my Grateful Dead teddy bear and a Michael Kors skirt with the tags still on it. So there I was panting and lifting and moving and coughing and wishing death would just come take me away.
I felt like I was living a Shakespearean drama (“Brutus was an honorable man…”) that is if in Shakespeare, Julius was worried about how to move his pissed off cat five blocks without getting bite marks as opposed to his traitor of a friend.
Alana called during the move because she knew that I was sick and that ‘drought’ is an unfamiliar word in these parts. I sat and talked with her for 20 whole minutes because I knew and I think she knew that that was the only thing that would keep me from flinging a laundry basket full of J. Crew off the fucking balcony.
It’s been one of those weeks.
During BlogHer – of course I still have stories but in due time, my friends, in due time – I was interviewed for BlogTalkRadio and PepsiCo. The request for the interview mentioned ‘leading thinkers of the blogosphere’ and I wanted to write back, ‘You didn’t mean Heather B. you are actually looking for Heather B. Armstrong‘ But no. They meant me.
Here’s the description that they held before me as I sat down for my interview:
“Heather graduated four years ago from American University in DC and began her blog shortly thereafter. She is now living in upstate New York and does not want kids or a husband, though she is perfectly happy that way.”
Apparently PepsiCo knows more about me than I do. They’re in my head. Making me drink the Pepsi One. In reality I do want children. My want for children is a complicated want and after years of realizing that even their slightest imperfections, those times where poop ends up on your freshly dry cleaned clothes and they vomit all over you and the floor and the vomit keeps coming out like Mount Vesuvius; despite all of that they are this wonderful, complex, little people. If I can still be badly in love with the number of children who have gone all Vesuvius on me – those who I did not give birth to – then I really do think that at some point in the future (emphasis on FUTURE) I would want one of my own.
But it goes far deeper than that to the complexities of a mother/daughter relationship and how I was raised and things that would be better left for a novella than in the next paragraph. Regardless, I was taken aback by that description of my site. For have I really come across as some woman who is against marriage and children? Probably so. Back in the early days of this site.
My only response is that I started this site when I was 21 going on 22. I am now 25 going on 26. The chasm between what is only four short years is huge. I’m a different person than I was four years ago. And that is why I love No Pasa Nada. I love it because those differences for so many often go by in a blur until one day you’re 35 telling the 25 year old how much your twenties sucked. But you don’t know why. I know why. You’re twenties suck for the dumbest reasons but they are your reasons. It’s all relative of course but what pains the 20 year old is what the 30 year old will look back on and scoff at but for now and for me I like having this space to go back to and show my FUTURE children. I was never perfect, I will never claim to be and here, my dears, is the proof. Then I’ll show them this site and then they’ll find all the many uses of the word ‘fuck’. I’ll be so proud.
Anyway, here is my interview with BlogTalkRadio. Enjoy.
When You Grow Up
“I thought growing up was something that happened automatically as you got older. But it turns out it’s something you have to choose to do.” ~From the television show Scrubs
La Madre and I just sat next to each other in a meeting and had what must have been the longest and in depth conversation we’ve had in months. We go through these moments of seeing each other everyday for weeks and then not seeing each other at all. But you work on the same floor! Others say. Yes, but like any working relationship you don’t see everyone everyday. It’s just different when the person you haven’t seen in a month happens to be the person who gave birth to you. Quickly and without an epidural. But at least the nurse said that I was a pretty baby so there’s that.
Between laughing and swearing and admiring the gorgeousness of this bag in Cognac and the prettiness of my new stationary; I took two phone calls. One from my hairdresser because she was having a panic attack over coloring my hair and the other with a friend to whom I posed the question What do you want to do with your life?
I’m fortunate. I forget that sometimes. I love my job and what I do and I have the job that I always wanted and yet I find myself wanting more. I want more responsibility and noteriety and to fly on Air Force I because everyone else I know has flown on Air Force I and it’s really unfair that I can’t do that. But I think about what might be next and whether or not one can get an ice cream sundae with chocolate sprinkles while 10,000 feet in the air. That’s what I want though and I implored my friend to tell me what she wanted to do when she grows up. So what that she’s already an adult? I know or at least think I know that there is more out there and that while I am an adult and I am doing what I want to do, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
I told her that her homework was to tell me what she wanted to be when she grows up. Why is it that when you’re five it’s the easiest question to answer but over 25 it’s on par with being asked the circumference of the moon divided by the radius of the sun?
What do you want to be when you grow up?