life, past due

we must sing
we must sing
we must sing

Deposit sent in to UW Law: check
Notice given at work: (basically) check
Moving company scheduled: check
Road trip planned/dates set/route mapped: check, check, check
New address in Seattle: ………*crickets chirping*

I’m trying not to get nervous. Ha.  If you knew me, you’d know that’s like, the sun trying not to rise.  But oh well.

I don’t know if it was this blog or my last one (this is the theme of this post, bipolar with everything, I binge and purge media just like everything else…) - I mentioned that I’ve always been connected to geography and weather in an uncanny way.

I mean yes, my mood - phases of the moon, the weather, the seasons, are all clearly connected to mood swings for me - but it seems like my whole life is, too.

The first day of Spring (the real one, not my manic OMG ITS WARM day from a while back) was on us just yesterday I believe, and with it new life, new light, new hope - not just the kind they market in car commercials and cleaning product ads - but really, when the sun comes out after a long cold winter, I can’t help but feel the winds of change are right behind it.

And if the patterns of my very pattern-oriented life are meaningful, then that’s correct: with Spring comes change - graduation, moving, goodbyes, new challenges, new adventures.

In 2 months I am moving, with my partner, to Seattle, where (I hear) a new life awaits me as a law student and future righter-of-wrongs, a secret identity to be hidden beneath a calm exterior of a happy residential lesbian with 2 cats and possibly-maybe-hopefully a dog, a yard, and, you know, all that stuff.

I think  it also has a lot to do with where I’ve lived.  Seattle, London, Western MA, and DC - all places with protracted and dreary winters.  I’ve noted repeatedly that there’s something undeniably magical about that first warm day, the first day of sunshine where it’s almost warm enough to go outside without a coat (and everyone does anyway) - and suddenly what was once a dreary town/city in one day becomes a place swarming with people smiling, chatting, taking time to eat lunch in the park, being alive.

So as go nature’s bipolar annual swings, as go my own, and now, from months of darkness punctuated by sometimes-terrifying mania comes calm (a relative term, for me, the high-strung-OCD-perfectionist poster-child), comes a moment to take time to photograph the new flowers, eat lunch in the park with my best friend, and picnic on the roof with the woman I want to spend my life with.  Now comes, for the first time in months, self-forgiveness and breaths of fresh air where before there were fear and anxiety, self-loathing and shadowy doubt; now (slowly, like the warmth creeping into the Capitol) the shadows dissipate and I am left standing, yet again, having survived another round with nature’s attempt to out-bipolar my genetic inclination to win that battle every time.

As with every year, this March I dusted off my camera and my $600 worth of digital media software (I am an artist, you know, just a skittish bipolar one who hides when it’s dark - I’ve been well-received in digital media circles since high school) and actually took a fucking photograph.  I climbed onto the mossy bark at the National Zoo in my work pants and dress shoes, headphones blaring my favorite music, people staring, to get that perfect macro cherry blossom shot you saw.

I smiled, un-self-consciously, and did what it is I love to do.

So this is the month I celebrate surviving another round with this basket case set of mood-swings they call “mania” and “depression,” I celebrate that I have found the strength, within my self (the only place I’ve ever found it), and lived to breath in Beautiful Spring Air one more time.  I celebrate that I am stronger, more passionate, more driven, more capable, and more dynamic than I thought, and that gives me hope.

So happy Spring to you, and Happy New Year to me.

Hey guys.

So, I don’t know if you all heard, but it’s been on the news lately - horrible tornadoes ripped through Georgia and South Carolina yesterday and last night…

In addition to the Georgia Dome and CNN Headquarters, my partner Liz’s home town of Jefferson County, Georgia, was completely decimated by tornadoes last night.

Several other counties in Georgia were badly hit, along with many in South Carolina. We’re going to try to head down to help with the repairs and clean-up ASAP, but tonight and in the next few days I ask for your prayers and thoughts.

Please donate, if you can spare them, clothing, school supplies, anything at all, to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Committee, or various charities working with the communities most badly hit.

I remember the devastation a tornado can cause, we used to live through them every Spring, but for those of you who haven’t been south, tonight I ask that we all remember what we have in common, and that a lot of good people lost their homes and everything they own, so please send your thoughts and prayers and, if possible, help out the Red Cross providing water and food in Jefferson County and surrounding areas.

Thank you,

Alexis

It’s true… I’ve been in a “burn down the capitol” mood the past few weeks.  My best friend has definitely helped fuel it, being the communist that he is (haha), but the fact is, I’ve somehow come full-circle in realizing where I stand on a lot of things.

When I left college (my radical, left-wing women’s college in MA), I was very tired of the constant push for activism and very much ready to hear what Georgetown had to say about change within the system, the virtues of being moderate, and, generally, the importance of de-radicalizing.  My first year of graduate school, I’ll admit, I bought in, hook line and sinker, because they were telling me exactly what I wanted them to, exactly what I wanted to hear - and from Georgetown, supposedly the most reputable source in the country.  A graduate degree in Government from Georgetown is a degree in Moderate Politics, whether you want it or not (I’m not talking about SFS, that’s a degree in Conservative Politics), and I ate it up because I was tired, tired of the Pioneer Valley with all the old hippies who never affected any real change in the world because they never left their happy little bubble, tired of people always yelling about change but never doing anything - I got this great experience where I could work towards what people I respected (my professors) called change, and not scream and yell and run myself out because of it.

And I applied for the government jobs.  And the think tank jobs.  And the internships.  I courted the Federal Government for employment multiple times before getting cold feet at the last minute.  I visited the State Department and registered for the exam, only to not show up on the morning of the test.  I got the internship, and I took it, and I show up for work dutifully every day and sit in an office where people work within the system, putting their Georgetown graduate degrees to good use getting paid by the government to tell the government what it wants to hear.  And I can tell you now, after months of having “worked within the system,” that I have never been more radical in my life.

I am thankful for my Georgetown degree, because I have also never been more well-educated in my life about the issues I want to act on.  And I’m going to law school for people like this, and all the liberation lawyers who came before me, who got educated, who learned the law, and who used it not within the system but against the system.  Who used their brains, their educations, their passion, to really change things.  I know who I am - more now than ever - and I know where I stand, and I also know that I am backed by the best education available to anyone in this country.  This should be a terrifying thing to anyone who clings to the structures of oppression.

I regret that I wasn’t alive then; I regret bitterly that I wasn’t there to fight police outside of Stonewall, to stand up for women’s rights in the 60’s and 70’s, to fight segregation, to take the first steps towards liberation.  But those were just the first steps, just the first steps, in a long journey - and I am becoming a powerful force: educated, passionate, confident, and driven - to keep taking the steps we have to take to follow in the paths of the people who were there to do those things, to pave the way so that someone like me can get a degree from Georgetown, a law degree, a career, and make real change.

In the past I’ve been afraid, afraid of myself, afraid of what other people would think, afraid of making my way in the world.  I’ve apologized for who I am, and that’s something I will never forgive myself for.  I have learned, in the past few years, that I am an incredible young woman.  I am a radical feminist, a gay, Jewish, Hungarian-American Woman; I will soon be a lawyer, I am Georgetown-educated, I am a political scientist, I am one hell of an intellectual, I am powerful and intense and not shy or demure or afraid, I am not apologetic, I am not pushed around.  And one day soon, I am going to raise holy terror to the pieces of this broken system that tried and continue to try to break and silence people like me, and people not like me, and people like you…

So yes, I’m going to law school.  But I guess what I’m saying is, don’t expect to see me in a corporate suit anytime soon.

I was looking through some of my old photographs now that I finally gave in and spent money I never had on Aperture 2 (I had a chance to do some editing I never figured out how to do in Photoshop) - and I got this incredibly sad feeling.

It coincided with a comment a former friend made (isn’t that the saddest thing?  a former friend…) on a Facebook note I wrote a while ago.  I had discovered that my favorite DJ, Paul Oakenfold, who I saw in London the summer I was there with my friends Pete and Andy (the flatmates I lived with the summer I lived there) was playing at RFK Stadium here in DC and I invited everyone I know in DC to come along because I really wanted to go.  That included this guy, Josh, who I had been really close friends with in London, we’d been a part of this inseparable group while I was there, and, of course, like always happens, we completely drifted apart.

So I wrote in the note that I’d seen the DJ in London and he was great, and the only comment I got was from Josh, and all he could come up with to say was, “who can remember London?”

And I made some witty remark, because letting him see blood is fatal, but… the fact is… I remember London. I’ll never forget London.  Some of the most fun I ever had in my life was with the friends I made in London, the days and months I pretended would never end, the freedom that felt like forever. Letting myself believe I would actually stay friends with those people, who I care(d) so much about - it lasted for a while once we came back but the truth was - and we all knew it the day we said goodbye (I was the only one who stayed on over the summer) - that the setting was part of the friendship.  The contract of our group friendship revolved around our mutual disconnection from our former, “regular” lives.  Once we returned to those lives, we wouldn’t need each other anymore.  And, it’s true, now we don’t.

And I guess I’m the only one left whose heart that breaks.

I was looking at pictures of Morgan playing guitar that I underexposed and put in black and white (they came out well, for portraiture which isn’t my gig, if I may say so myself) and I almost started crying.  If it is possible to capture the perfect and incredibly stupid heartbreaking idealism of one moment when you believe in the eternity of another person, of a friendship, those photographs did.  And Josh’s comment sealed its demise.

I’ll never forget London… but, I guess, it’s time that I, like all of my (former) friends from that time, grow up, and accept it for what it was, cease expecting the impossible from other people, and become content, I suppose, to remember.

My favorite thing about Spring:

The first Cherry Blossom.

For more of my manic first-day-of-spring photography, please check out my flickr page!