NoraSawyer.com

Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeghhp.

Every morning, Brian makes me a latte and sends me off to work. And every other evening, I forget to take my coffee mug home with me. So every other morning, Brian sends me off with a different cup (the mathemeticians among you will have figured out by now that I have two).

Heute morgen, I was absorbed in my work and reached over to take a swig from my latte. But it was yesterday’s latte, and it was not good.

There’s a lesson in that.

Know who I wish I was?

Ok, since

At the top of the built-in bookshelves in our living room are two books: The Figure of Beatrice and The Poems of WB Yeats. I’ve had them four years now. Every time I move, they’re carefully packed away, usually in their own box, thereby minimizing jostling and tearing. When I unpack, they’re put back on the top shelf, usually with a sigh and a mental note that I really should do something about them.

It wouldn’t be too hard really – they belong to an old professor of mine, Geraldine. She still works at Marlboro, I have both her work and school addresses. Heck, I could even mail ‘em out for free from where I work (dishonest, yet frugal). But I don’t. And I haven’t, for four years now.

In my last entries, I was wondering how one lives with a past that makes them unhappy. In my case, I know: I don’t. Those books are a constant reminder that I didn’t finish at Marlboro. That I left, thinking and saying that I’d come back, and that I never did. That, most likely, I never will.

I keep those books because, other than moving day, I can pretty much ignore them. Because the dead, inactive guilt I feel, knowing that they aren’t mine and I’ve kept them, is easier to bear than the active aknowledgement of that guilt. Because leaving them up there and scolding myself for forgetfulness is easier than mailing them back and knowing that I’m not forgetful. Bluh.

So, loking over this mornings post, I feel the need to clarify: I was never a drug addict, prostitte, runaway teen or serial killer. I’ve never been to jail, and never really done anything that would take me there.

Which raises another interesting question: is sin being untrue to yourself, or do you need to do something really bad for it to count against you?

This got me thinking: what does it mean to have an unhappy past?

Let me clarify: for the majority of my adult life, I’ve felt like (pardon my French) a fuck up. In the space of one year, at age eighteen, I went from straight-shooting golden child to that drunk girl at the party who should’ve left two hours and four beers ago. For the next few years, I carried this transformation round my neck like an albatross, approaching every new situation as the girl I never meant to be: flawed, fallible, and generally no good. I can’t really say how much my diminished expectations of myself affected my behavior, but I do know that my expectation that I would spoil every good thing rarely proved false. Growing up is never easy, but its worse when you become someone that your ‘real’ self wouldn’t like, never mind want to become.

Recovering from the shock of this metamorphosis has taken me . . . well, I’m still working on it. There’s still the latent expectation in the back of my mind that my graduation – due, again, this spring, will never happen. That my papers, already more idea than actuality than they should be at this point, will never be finished. And that I will never be the woman I should have been.

But say I have finally cleared the mire of my early twenties, what then? For the longest time, when thinking of those times, I’d refer to myself (in my own private thoughts, never aloud) as ‘the dead girl.’ Dead, because she hopefully no longer existed, dead because at the time I was dead – dead to my senses, my own desires, dead to the larger scope of the life I should have wanted. The problem was, while this thought persisted, my ‘dead years’ expanded. Years I’d thought myself awake and alive became Dead Years in my memory, as my sense of who I would be further diverged from who I was and how I’d acted.

This is starting to sound horribly schizophrenic. I’m not the dead girl I was, nor am I the half-awake zombie who gave that girl her name. I am me. I was there the whole time. And growing up and moving on, I suppose, involves learning that I am the one who made those choices: the bad ones, the ill considered ones, and the ones I didn’t even realize I was making at the time. But what are you gonna do? You live, you learn.

You’re Ulysses!

Take the Book Quiz

at the Blue Pyramid.

It seems there are two kinds of people in the world (I’m going to relish this for a moment and think of all the ways I could end this sentence):

people who think I’m smarter than I actually am, and people who seem to think I’m a complete idiot.

What’s up with that?

Check out my Morality! 75% liberal, 25% conservative

Hm.