On the brink and into Newness

Ok, so Annalise was right - I skipped a month of blogging my heart out, sorry. Been rather preoccupied with heaps of "serious" endeavors. Almost done with grad school apps and I took the psych GRE and aced it, or as much as that is possible with a standardized test - I scored higher than 95% of all the other test-takers. It's good to kick a murderous test's ass, yay.

Now I'm moving to New York. Officially starting tomorrow - well tomorrow morning I'm flying to Miami for a week to celebrate the holidays with my family and get a little sunshine. Go sunshine. And THEN I'm flying to NYC on the 30th, for a New York New Year, mhmm. I'm going to stay in Brooklyn at first with a friend of my grandma's, a little Jewish lady who remembers me as a little kid in Ukraine, she says she wants to be my New York Grandma and make me "soupiki," so yay for that. This way I'll be able to take a bit of time to find a decent place to live and a job.

I figured since I'm totally free for the next 8 months at least, (if I get into one of the grad programs I want, they won't start until September,) I might as well New Yorkify my life. As in culture, art, proximity to friends, something new as I've visited but never lived there before, and a hell of an exciting place to be - plus I love big cities - I was definitely happy living in Paris.

So here I come, my bags are (just about) packed, and I'm ready to dazzle. ;) What does Carrie Bradshaw have that I don't, anyway? A newspaper column? I've got this blog, not that I promise to turn every sexual and men-related morsel of my life into an advice column from now on, but I do promise to be just as, if not more fun.

Happy holidays and a toast: (yes I'm toasting in a blog, so pour yourself something delicious and at least 10% alcoholic,)

Be brave, throw yourself into situations in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of a new city, in the middle of the middle of anything that you don't know - it's exciting, terrifying, and unbelievably good for you.

Wikipedia's etymology of stir crazy:

Stir crazy is a phrase that dates to 1908 according to the Oxford English Dictionary^[1] and the online Etymology Dictionary. Used among inmates in prison, it referred to a prisoner who became mentally unbalanced because of prolonged incarceration. It is based upon the slang stir (1851) to mean prison.

It is now used to refer to anyone that becomes restless from being stuck in one place too long, with a similar meaning to cabin fever.

Riiight. Not that my prison is so bad. And it's voluntary. But still, 'tis true, I am going stir crazy, must escape CONfiNemEnt....

Marianna is blogging more often, a definite symptom of too little action in LIfe. Life, that funny thing where action is goooood. My excitement consists of helping my little sister with her school projects. Though yes, sister bonding = good. But still, in Colorado, me borededed.

Wish me luck cyber humans.

In The Middle-Of-No-Where With Newlyweds

There's something that reminds me of high school and college and absolute independence/solitude about having my own bedroom. Perhaps because that is exactly what it is. Independence and solitude. The independence bit has perks, after all, my creativity needs a good, painful kick in the rear sometimes. Not to mention the sudden overwhelming need to propel myself into greatness, happiness, something, if only to leave the place with too much space and time and this awkward futon where I have no one to nudge me with his elbow, no tangled arms and legs and odd awakenings, no kisses either, just me and my thoughts.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Taking out the pseudo-funny blurb on my love life. It's too unfunny and caricaturish--I know I have a tendency to caricature my life, but here I'd like something very true to form instead: imagine an exotic porn star plastered in this space instead. Fill in the blanks, this could be like a choose your own adventure blog blob.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New beginnings: find job, take psych GRE, finish research writing/analysis, apply to grad school. Show world hot, amazing Marianna self. Talk like cave woman.
Oh and yeah, my folks have newlyweds staying over tonight. The girl's fresh from Ukraine, here to start a brand new life. I think I'll take her out dancing.

Benefits of the middle-of-no-where

Maybe the beautiful thing about living/being in bum fuck Suburbia is the compulsion to grow beyond it that such a dreary locale inspires. For me at least: there is nothing to see, therefore maybe it's easier to get productive, to save yourself from hell. In urban places full of incredible museums, parks, cultural districts, and theater, there is too much wonderful stuff to do - this is really only an issue of course, if you are a traveler passing through but simultaneously have it at the back of your mind that you should be looking for a job, finishing the statistical analysis and article writing for your research study, picking up the pen again, and applying for grad school.... Ah yes, that shit. So that was me as I enjoyed visiting friends in Boston, Connecticut, and New York - it was fun, more play than work. Then I visited my grandparents in Iowa, and I would like to send a heartfelt thanks to the boring nature of West Des Moines which at last inspired me to be more productive. And then there's here - Fort Collins, Colorado, where my nuclear (explosive) family dwell. Being around them stirs up so many emotions, issues, reactions, that every time I visit I never fail to be reminded why I started to write in the first place...at age ten or so. The pen was my emotional refuge early on, so maybe in that way I could be grateful to my family for rubbing me the wrong way, as it compelled me to sublimate, to write. (And still does!)

Now here I am, still unresolved but getting there - I BELIEVE it.

Have I stopped moving yet? Not quite. I've now added another city name to be printed on a sticky white luggage tag - Minneapolis. I'm excited to go, to see Joe, to hopefully remind him that I'm not a total nagging bitch, but also this lovely girl he loves - maybe we'll get a bit of resolution as to what to do next about the "us" question - to see if we can be for the other person what we would need to be to make happiness happen. I'd like to. But let's be realistic, though of course optimistic, because who gives anything another chance without some optimism? And mostly, lets be the best versions of ourselves.

I am definitely not the best version of myself with my family, and though this selection of best self is also dependent on others, I was definitely disappointed with myself today: I hurt my little sister. She is incredibly good at rubbing me the wrong way herself, can have a maddening, rude, I-am-the-teenage-queen-of-the-world manner of speaking, but nevertheless, I should restrain myself from reacting negatively and I didn't. I think I never agreed with my parents' parenting style - I've always felt, and still feel, that they let her get away with too much. The dinner tonight was not dinner, it was The Elana Show. Welcome viewers. If you did not subscribe to this program, too damn bad. Eat your food and deal with it, The Elana Show is on, and there will be no commercial breaks or channel changing. Bon appetit.

I could go on but for now I'll simply end it with wise words: try to keep the negativity down and the flow happy, happy, joy, joy. If you're the princess that has pearls spilling out of her mouth instead of reptiles, it'll come back atcha in the end - pearl instead of frog. With that I kiss you frogs good night and will dream of a princely metamorphosis. The best hope for changing anyone and anything around you is through changing yourself. The end.

Finally, some time in my grasp

Hi. I left New Zealand, stopped traveling (no, not exactly, there will still be a bit in Mama Amerika,) I am on my own (Joe and I are visiting family and friends separately,) and I finally feel like yes, I'm here, I can write, I can step back and start to reflect. I was looking forward to this, to America, to my family and friends, to comfort, to a little less uncertainty. I spent most of today hanging out with my youngest sister, Tina, which was an absolute blast. I'm in Fort Collins, in suburbia, but the location is really of no importance whatsoever, the point is I'm back with people who love me, whom I love. I was pretty homesick during large lapses of the past year in New Zealand, and seeing Joe's family pretty often made the longing for my own worse at times.

Sometimes, being in a relationship can increase your alienation and loneliness - an odd thing that I found to be true. When you're on an island in the Pacific Ocean where you know no one and are quite isolated from anyone you do know, and your partner on the other hand has family as well as almost immediate friends (enter le hockey team,) and you don't get to see him nearly as much as you thought you would, well it kinda sucks. Most of his friends were men's men who were not only uninterested in the amazing moi, (yeah, bit of an ego killer,) but as a result I found most of them completely uninteresting (most of the time,) as well. I don't speak hockey and now have some pretty bad associations with this language that dominates the world of certain folks. True, there were a few nice guys that I would have good conversations with, but a good bit of the time I was overwhelmed by the obnoxious, loud, insulting ones - made it very difficult for me to not associate an isolated, sick feeling with the whole lot of them. If I think about it honestly, I've exaggerated the amount of them that were actually dicks, but you know what they say about rotten apples. I am particularly unhappy(yes I'm gonna bitch and get this out there,) about a certain guy (Psychology BA help me now!) who got under my skin in the most horrid way by completely questioning who I was, my right to live, the point of my existence besides being his friend's girlfriend, etc. Yes, these are the sort of things the drunk bastard said to me, before I (yes!) kicked him out of the house, but unfortunately, though I was really hoping to avoid this, I did encounter the jerk again and I lost it...again. Couldn't help myself, wanted to pick on him for being so inhuman, insensitive, outrageous.... I had worked myself up, it's true, but I wasn't going to tolerate him ever again. Oh, shitty people who get under your skin and stay there like some nasty splinter you should have gotten rid of long ago. But you can't, you can't because he's not your friend, he's your partner's friend, and suddenly you have much less control over your environment.

Ok, now that I've spilled out some of the poison in my system, yeah there's some bitterness there, I admit it - it might be easier to write about the good stuff. Good stuff coming soon. Doing a poor job of battling jet lag, ah well. Hello to Harry Potter 7 and catching up with Gilmore Girls = good stuff. Leave comments, leave comments, leave comments...! :)

On Pumpkin Soup and Other Important Matters

What do you do when you come home from work? Is it a 9 or 8:30 to 5ish? Are you exhausted? Do you feel like your mind and energies have been put to good use? Are you fulfilled by your day?

My mind is put to disintegration, or at least it did feel that way the majority of the year. I think the numbness and lack of stimulation made the dwindling connections between my neglected little neurons palpable -- can you feel yourself get "stupider"? Oh yes, I definitely think so. Filing, counting (or "auditing" in office bullshit lingo,) spreadsheet concocting, mail handling, email composing, phone calling, and last but as it turned out for me, most horrible of all - proofreading. Not that after much time and rumination I didn't discover that I was learning something from my experiences, that being spit in and out of various parts of the corporate machine as a strange, versatile little cog called "temp" could be a valuable insight into what so many people "do." It's all much less of a mystery, and now I understand what it was about corporate life that I so badly wanted to avoid. It's the painful repetition, the long hours in which nothing grows and everyone sits in their farty little gray cubicles all day, you get up to get a coffee, to use the john, and that's the majority of your movement for the day. It's the sessile existence of a plant -- you are planted in front of a PC or a Mac and there your buttocks shall stay. Of course, my experience is skewed because my jobs were usually not the most exciting ones in a place - temp work is usually not exactly orgasmic. The people, lovely and nasty, also are of course the soup in which you as a temp, get to stew for a while (yes I'm eating pumpkin soup, a good source of nourishment as well as inspiration,)- I met plenty of fantastic and not-so-fantastic individuals: Pakeha (white kiwis/New Zealanders), Maori, Brits, South Africans, Pacific Islanders, Europeans, South Americans. This is one aspect that I have loved about New Zealand - the incredible diversity of this new immigrant nation.

For example, last night I went out with a group of beautiful girls spanning five continents. The eight of us covered: Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Germany, Taiwan, and then there was I with my Ukraine/US background. I think I felt at home in the way the protagonist in L'Auberge Espagnol(great flick by the way, see it if you haven't yet,) feels at home, his own cultural confusion reflected by the situation, comfortable in cultural friction.

Speaking of comfort: it takes so long to get comfortable any where. Here, I'm just beginning to really have fun and I'm about to leave. It's sad, but it's also OK, because I think I will settle down some where eventually (more so, anyway,) and my life won't be so arrhythmic. Figuring out where, how, what, not easy - what makes a home, any one have an answer for that? Maybe part of the issue for me is that usually home seems to imply ONE place whereas because I've lived and grown attached in various ways to different locations and usually more importantly, the people in those locations, "home" is a number of places which I love and miss and which give me that fuzzy I need-to-be-there feeling. "Coming home" to people you love, perhaps that's the most important point? Although there is more to the feeling of being "at home," (like culture, language, experience, etc.,) and there is more to identity, but being loved certainly doesn't hurt.

A Hello

So the point here (obviously) is not to create a travel blog. I'm well past the expiration date for that, and having a casual, undefined, blathering blog like this suits my love of possibility far better.

On issues of self-consciousness: I find that I am hopelessly sensitive to what other people say and do, I take it all personally, seriously, I mull over it for days, I end up thinking about it and talking about it. What others say about me attacks me at inopportune moments in the shower, in bed, while I'm riding the bus, while I'm (supposed) to be feeling great. So undertaking a blog is probably a dangerous thing for me - blogaphobia? - but here I am, I love to share and discuss too much to not give it a go for now.

Do you find that old friends always look at you in the same way no matter what changes happen in your life, in theirs? (In the past couple of weeks I've been calling good friends back home, I'm leaving New Zealand in August to make an attempt at Mother America, and I've been trying to catch up with people in the good old 50.) I suppose I do much of the same, when you have a long history with someone, that history seems to hold a strong sway in how you view them, for better or worse. If you want to prove anything new you're going to have a bloody tough time doing it, if you want the reassurances of the past they're ready as ever.

The time difference between the states and New Zealand is quite the handicap when it comes to attempting calls. On weekdays, and often on weekends as well, I can't make calls until after 5pm Auckland time, which in the states is somewhere between 11pm and 1am depending on the state...great timing, right? So when people pick up there's usually a pretty exhausted you-just-woke-me-up grit in their voice, but oh well, at least it's fantastic to catch up with old buddies and family.

On status quo: It's a beautiful country - Aotearoa (New Zealand in Maori), and I've learned a hell of a lot from my experiences here. Three apartments, 6 jobs, moving in with my boyfriend in a new country, lots of constant change, ups, downs, merry-go-round inbetweens. Travelling here is fantastic, you can point the car in any direction (outgoing from Auckland) and you'll hit lovely terrain. We're going to travel for a month before returning to the states. South Island skiing, hopefully a Pacific Island, lots of other fantastic stuff....

What I'll do when I return is a big, looming question. Votes and input welcome.
Let me know if you vote for:
1. Flying into LA, staying there, stalking Hollywood celebrities for a couple weeks, visiting places like UCLA (which yeah I've been looking into a bit lately.)
2. Thoughts on cross-cultural psychology? I've been looking into grad. programs and jobs in this looks-like-it-was-sort-of-made-for-me area - it's emerging, new, interdisciplinary and I'm definitely thinking about it.
3. Going to directly to Denver from LA, hopefully getting along happily with my folks for a while, helping my little sister think about college, hanging out with the star sisters, having a good time camping out with the 'rents in general...? This could last for a bit and I do miss them.
4. Visiting friends and family for a couple weeks. Friends who want to make travel plans with me, let me know, US flights are cheap now and I'm looking into a multicity ticket so I can visit a good number of friends and family....
Also let me know if you want to plan a trip with me or would just love me to grace your doorstep.... ;)
5. Where to settle in after? Follow a job, or a professional course that I could register for anytime, or the location of my fam or friends, or a program in Europe or Israel or Asia? I'm attempting to not think about my boyfriend as difficult as that is, because that's the way he wants it, and I probably wouldn't be happy just "following him" anyway, though it's tough, we're young, we're figuring it out, knowing what we want or how we want it to work is not always easy. Basically, I'm being forced back into total independence and self-sufficiency. This is good, but also tough and complicated. I could definitely use some time on my own, to explore whatever I want to explore (and there is plenty of that,) and I probably shouldn't hold my boyfriend's uncertainty about how to live next year (in the same flat? where/how?) against him, though I find myself doing this quite a bit. Maybe in some ways it would be easier if he were totally certain, passionate, and Prince Charming about "Darling, I just want to do whatever I can to be near you but also I want you to do whatever makes you happy." (He's got the 2nd part down.) But maybe then life would be too perfect for blogging.
Advice and thoughts, warmly welcome.