Up And Running

Yeah, okay, so I guess this site was down for a little while? And I didn’t notice until people started emailing me all HEY WHY NO UPDATES I FEEL CUT OFF HAS SOMETHING GOD FORBID HAPPENED, and I had to be all Huh What? I’ve been too busy not updating to realize I couldn’t update even if I wanted to. But here I am, updating, right now, because my tech support Matt fixed whatever the hell problem it was within twenty minutes of my first hysterical email, and so…yes. Now that it’s up and running, I guess I’ll just tell you what I’ve been doing.

I’m in California at the moment. I leave for Seattle tomorrow (who wants to pick me up at the airport and go out to dinner with me? Form an orderly queue, please, no shoving). I have been spending my time here catching up with old friends at the ABL party–which, interestingly, has calmed down since the jello-wrestling days, I guess because we’re all pretty comfortably in our thirties?–and making new Facebook friends at that same party. Anna has a couple of Gold Passes to the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival so we’ve been going into the city every day and sitting in a darkened room for hours at a time watching movies and eating snacks and wandering around the pre-Pride Castro. I was able to have a fabulous dinner of mostly cabbage with my own true love Mo Pie and with my new true love Shannon, yet had to miss out on another dinner with an old college friend. I’ve been to a belly-henna-oriented baby shower where I allowed someone to take a fake pregnant picture of me with a beach ball under my shirt. I’ve spoken with D. every day on the phone. I’ve dressed up in corsets and garters and wigs and had Anna take pictures of me and have figured out the time difference from here to New Zealand (daylight savings!) and had a couple of smallish freakouts about a couple of different things.

You can imagine what those might be, right? I mean, you know I’ve been back in the States for just about a month now, but that I have not stopped traveling. Even when I was with my mom in Miami for almost three weeks of making dinner together and going to yoga class, where I actually unpacked my bag for a little while and put things in drawers, when I had a house key to somewhere, I still had to go to New York for a few days and sleep on yet another futon. I am staying in a couple of different places for some undetermined time periods when I get to Seattle, and I won’t have a car, and I wasn’t able to sort out a way to stop in Eugene on the way up to see Tracy and Peter, and it’s getting to be time for me to work at least a little because I had to start paying my student loans again the day I got off the plane from Apia. And I don’t know when or how I am going to get back to New Zealand.

And can I tell you how absolutely freaking tired I am of having to say “I don’t know,” and “I’m working on it” and “I have no idea” and “We’ll just have to see” and “It all depends” and “It could go a couple of different ways” and “I don’t know yet.” I don’t mind when people ask me about my plans, of course, but I hate not being able to give a tidy timeline. I hate not knowing what’s going to happen next. I hate not searching for a cheap ticket back to Wellington; I hate not getting started on selling my bed and my IKEA bookshelves quite yet because who knows, I may need a bed and my IKEA bookshelves for a while more; I hate not being able to plan for a visit with my hot young international boyfriend.

But. But, of course, given the circumstances: I am grateful that I have this time off from working–I mean, seriously, when was the last time you had six months off?–and to have been able to travel around New Zealand, and to be able to spend time with friends and family in the States. I am grateful that people let me sleep on their futons. I am grateful that people ask about my plans. I am grateful to want to return to the city of my heart with a person who has–how? how?–rapidly become its center. I am grateful to dare to want to do what I want and to have, most of the wherewithal, to pursue it. I am grateful to think about all the love the world has for me, to be able to go from city to city, coast to coast, and soak in it.

But I still have to catch myself–just dipping my toes in America, just floating on the surface. What will happen when I immerse and descend, I wonder. How long will it take, and how hard will it be to get out again?