Been struggling this weekend with strange and foreign thoughts about what I've been doing for the past few years. The last time I thought about this was when I first moved to SF, unemployed, wandering the streets in February rains, realizing the vacation was over and I had to learn how to make $2.75 last me two weeks. Peanut Butter and Bagels can only take you so far before your roommates look at you in a very 'Poor Little Match Girl' kinda way and offer you dinner because you had that unhealthy scurvy-like glow about you.
I walked home from the Mission on Saturday morning , the sun making no bones about coming back with a vengeance after a rainy winter. A bit broken down and tired, my mind churned and churned and my mushy brain full of holes, full of marzipan, almost short circuited and I almost choked down a sob somewhere on Valencia. There was a moment that morning at the boy's house where I felt so horribly misunderstood. I was stunned. He quickly retracted the statement, but it had me caught up in such a conundrum, one I was already concerned over, that it still stuck, in the back of my head. I stored it away for further contemplation at a later time.
But it wasn't enough to cry on, and as quickly as the moment came over me to let a tear shed itself, it was gone, and I was on my way passing the numbered streets, knowing how to get home, knowing I am smarter than the average bear, but not quite smart enough to figure out what the hell I was doing with myself.
I've accepted the fact that I am, by no means, a genius. I get too easily distracted by other things that I usually end up forgetting that I wanted to read that book, or see that film or go to that show, or participate in some kind of event. My clock is a half hour fast for a reason, or I'd never be on time anywhere. I get out of bed thinking about one thing, which leads to "It reminds me of that song", and then I spend forever searching for the song, I end up stumbling upon something else I wanted to listen to, I'd fight with my tempermental stereo and play one thing, looking for the other, then the cat's trying to kamikaze dive out my open window, and during my rescue attempt, I remember I'm naked.
I'm hanging out the window, flashing Ashbury St. my tits like it was 1965 or something like that.
But it's 2003 already, and a bunch of SFSU students are out jogging and I'm sure one of them wrinkled their nose in disgust at the side show freak naked girl coaxing a cat back into the house.
And then I remember I was supposed to be showering and leaving the house to meet Sma at the Bean Bag, and I'm nowhere near ready.
My life continues on these patterns, finding myself in impossible places at impossible times, forgetting what I had intended to do, or how I had gotten there in the first place, easily distracted, one minute, finding my hands down his pants and it's all good, to waking up and feeling horribly cheap and misunderstood and most of all- dumb.
No matter how hard I try to remember little details, things I want to store for a future me to reflect on, I never do. How did we start kissing in the first place, at what point did his belt become undone- and did I do it, or did he? The feel of his mouth on my neck- all of it, I make a mental note of it before the night begins, to try and concentrate and take the time to take little Polaroids in my head. All thought processes and most motor skills get thrown out the window though, and before I know it, I'm goin' to town- goin' downtown.
I don't confuse this with love, because I know that if it was love, I wouldn't have to try to remember any of it.
When we woke up, we didn't say much at first. I wished we kept it at that. Silence can sometimes be your best friend. But as much as I had forgotten how we started it all, I had forgotten the comment that stung. The exact words fail me, but the idea stuck- the idea that I was a slut of some sort. Whatever he said, it was in a jovial manner of a joke, but my response was not so much joking, it was simply straightforward.
"I am not a whore," I announced.
I didn't feel cheap and dumb until I left his house, when my brain woke up and decided to try and process.
I don't know quite how to describe how the rest of my weekend went. I walked down 24th St. that morning and passed the Bart station because I needed to think and I wanted to walk and the weather was nothing short of gorgeous. I thought of Erika Lopez and her writings on living in the Mission. Although it was a bit too early for the gut-wrenching ranchera music to permeate the air, I did feel the way she described the houses and stores, the bright colors like shiny candy in a bowl.
I didn't mind looking so much like a disheveled deviant doing the walk of shame home in the Mission. In fact, I quite belonged and received a number of co-conspiritors winks from other senoritas, and many a second look from the senors, laughing and telling obscene jokes in Spanish once I walked by. A rabid looking pitbull attempted to hump my leg. I stood on the corner non-plussed by it all. I hate smelling like sex out in public. It's simply not as glamorous as you'd like it to be.
Once I was in the familiar bardo of streets near Market, I stopped by good ole' Cafe Flore and grabbed some coffee, sat out in the secret alley garden, and I wrote. Flashback to days unemployed at Flore, debating on finding a career or a job. Job won the battle since I was surely running out of money, but job has not won the war just yet, as I now, once again, struggle with definitions of my life.
I guess my trip home has also influenced greatly this weird feeling of needing to define what I'm doing. It had been forever since I had seen many of these family members, all of them wanting to know:
#1-What I've been doing? (Are you making enough money at your job?)
#2-Am I happy? (Don't you want to get married?)
#3-Do I have a boyfriend? (Don't you want to get married and have children?)
It all goes back to money and children and husband. I have none of these things and I think it disappoints their antiquated Roman Catholic thinking. This, coming from women who had married their first and only boyfriends when they were 18 and dreamed of quaint lives and owning closets full of impossible looking shoes.
I don't want a quaint life. I don't like owning too much of anything 'cause you never know when you'll need to flee the country. At the most, I would like someone to ask me how my day was and actually mean it. For me, these days, that's enough to base a life upon.
And then arriving back to my life, running back to my real home here, and being haunted by why I don't want what they want, and what am I really doing and why- why do I feel perpetually growing dumber as the days go by? I've been learning all my life lessons and feel like I've passed most of my classes on that subject, but the world is so much bigger than that, bigger than me and menial pursuit of love, liberty and cheap eats.
Listening to Dar Williams walking around Haight yesterday, I was struck by, "When I Was a Boy", and had one of those moments of complete clarity. I wanted to play that song for someone and say, "See? That was me. I was a boy too." and have them understand me entirely, 'cause I feel the exact opposite has been happening too often.
Explaining to my friend James one night, how I feel more like an awkward child more than anything else, he laughed and glanced at my chest and said:
"But you're most definitely a girl, and there's no hiding that."
It was only as lecherous as I made it out to be, but this weekend put me back exactly in that same place.