I’m sitting here twitching with too much coffee. The coffee we still get sent from Freed’s in San Francisco. Wearing perfume I have sent from another part of California (www. Blackphoenixalchemylab.com) and searching online for a cool dress for the Bean at a shop in New York, while working on getting corks put in the Bean’s hat for her Montessori Australia pageant on Saturday.
Why all that said? Because I keep feeling the clash of then and now and of there and here. I keep thinking I’ve left things behind and find out that I haven’t. And that’s good. I was so angry for awhile about how San Francisco had changed and gotten mean and expensive (more than it was) less forgiving and more acquisitive. But now I’m planning a trip back to hang out with friends and I find how much I miss it. How much I don’t think about the bad, but rather the good people in The City, and the amazing journey that was my 14 years there.
It’ll take a while to feel positive about Chicago. I got my heart ripped out and handed to me there. But we did meet some very good folks at the end. I still wish we’d had more time with them.
And I realize I haven’t ditched the spooky self that was me for so so long. She’s still there. Still oddl and still preferring Halloween to all other things. I was so angry and hurt that I wanted to divest myself entirely of that part of myself. But over time I’ve realized several things about that.
- I can’t deny a part of myself entirely and I shouldn’t.
- Sometimes I have to swing really far one direction to be able to swing back to the golden mean.
- What was is a part of what is.
- I’ll always be more than a bit weird and I’m good with that again.
The big thing is that so much has been added to my life that not to change would be both uncomfortable and wrong. I’m married and a mom–those are both responsibilities and joys. I have some renewed interest in my spirituality and politics and I’m enjoying exploring those again. And I have my family again–something I haven’t had most of my adult life. And I’d like to be a part of something larger. I believe, just like I started caring about Fayetteville again after I’d been gone from it for a few years, and just like my fond memories of our life in SF have supplanted the bad ones–well I think I’m feeling good about my innate spookiness. I never quit liking the aesthetic (as you will always be able to tell from our decor) but I couldn’t like the lifestyle I’d created for myself within the subculture. I’ve moved on from that. Ok, except for the music and the very occasional outting . Covergence X marked the end of that for me. I felt nostalgia for the most recent Covergence in NoLA, but I’ll leave the actual attendence at that convention until the Bean wants to go (and is too young to go by herself, at which point I’ll be about 150 years old, but the undead are in at Convergence right?).
I wonder if this makes sense at all. I’m me, still me. The me of then layered over with now. And I’m pretty pleased with that. Um..I’m a spooky liberal cat loving Unitarian Sunday School Teacher?
