Dear You,

Let me write you a letter.

Dear Blog People:

I need to go to bed. I'm really tired. But I stumbled upon some very old and random music that Krista and I made on Myspace of all places! It feels weird to hear your own voice in your head phones. Hard not to hear everything wrong with it. However, this was so long ago its more enjoyable for the memory of it. Its weird how sounds from the past can kind of transport you there. The other weird thing is how that world does not exist in almost any form today. Very weird. It makes me wonder if the world that is all consuming for me now will someday in several years not exist to me. I think maybe that is one of my fears? I don't like jumping from existance to existance. I don't like thinking of my relationships as expendable or replaceable. People ask me a ot why I don't live it up and go traveling and see the world and get crazy with my young(ish) single self. Its not that I don't desire new experiences. Its just that the experience are only 2 dimensional if shared alone. Its the relationships that make the experience a whole one. For me, that is. Anyhow, I wonder what songs will be the time travelling device that transports me back to this exact moment? Confession time: Lately I've been scared of the dark. I know.....lame. What do you think that is? I'm frightened by the dark, yet I love sleeping. Sometimes I don't feel like a real adult because in the last almost 2 years I still can't develop a regular sleeping habit, and be a "morning person". But that is silly because through the lense of reality I am clearly a "real" adult simply by my categorical existance: almost 30 year old female living alone and self sustaining. SO the fact that I don't feel like a real adult is irrational. Or just a feeling. Or just a judgement I'm placing on myself insisting that "real" adults have a certain kind of life. Whatever THAT might be. Or maybe its just feeling. Oh, did you know that today is Mardi Gras? I didn't earn any beads this year. Ok, like I've ever really earned them in the truest form....anyway, the importance is that tomorrow is Ash Wednesday; the kick off to the season of Lent that is the precursor to Easter. I usually get kind of into Lent, but this year I don't have anything that I feel like I really need to "fast" or get rid of to purify myself. Not that I think I've arrived or whatever, but this is the first year in a loooong time that I don't feel completely broken, and that I don't have this overpowering urge to purge (ha, unintentional rhyme) some kind of impurity from my life. I don't need to ditch a habit. Maybe this season can be a time where I focus on new "vices" that can be good. Hmmm.

I really have to go to bed. Now that I think about it, I THINK that maybe I don't like going to bed because, for me it really feels like I'm going somewhere. I know...weird. But dreamland is so realistic and random that I kind of have to gear up for it. What kind of bizarre arrangements will my subconscious conjur up for me tonight? What old memory will I relive? Will I be afraid or will I be at peace? I know, its weird. Sometimes I ask for Jesus to come and make an appearance. I haven't seen him yet (that I know of), but that's not to say he hasn't made an appearance. They say that we have the mind of Christ, so I wonder if that means if Jesus sleeps if I make appearances in his dreams. Since we share a mind an' all. Yes yes....I know how this sounds. I'm leaving the link to the old Myspace page that has those old crappy songs on it in case any of you would like to identify with me. And since there are only 2 of you subscribed to this, that would leave only one of you who hasn't heard it. Haha. ...

http://www.myspace.com/jennacugno

I guess I'm leaving now.

for a world in my mind, that we all have,

but we all don't find.

For the pictures of things that I can't describe,

that escape real words, but still I will try

to assign

a meaning

to the pictures

in my

mind.

I'm going to sleep. I'm going to die,

and then rise again in tomorrows new light.

I'm going to close my eyes and hope that

maybe I'll see him tonight.

Or at least see a form I can just recognize.

one sec

Ok, here's an attempt at speed-blogging. I think I only have like 5 minutes before I have to leave, and I'm wondering what I can eek out in that time. I don't know what to write about... Ok, how come pressure is such a huge motivation for success? I'm speaking for myself specifically. I have been wanting to blog for weeks and weeks, but I have had no success as I have had no topic. Well, I'm in a now 3 minute time crunch and I feel like I have an infinite number of words to spill. Another example is creativity. I will sit with my guitar literally for hours and not be able to come up with ANYTHING. I want to create! I want to write songs! I want to plan ahead! But nothing. However, if I have a performance or am playing for something, inspiration hits like 2 hours before. Its really inconvenient. I'm wondering if the stress of the time crunch is like pressure that forces out the new creative ideas. I'm sure its all psychological. I want to find a loophole for this psychological hindrance. Sometimes I think my multitude of ideas and grand scheming actually cancels itself out. Its like I have such huge thoughts and actual aspirations to change the world that when I see how impossible the task is, I am immediately deflated and end up not leaving the house for days. Dang times up.

well.

This blog thing really bothers me sometimes, because I wonder what the point of it is. Blogging is a new kind of way of communicating, and I'm wondering what people did beforehand. Did they write books that never got published? Leave long notes on tree trunks? Yell from the town square? And like anyone can blog these days. I'm back at my place of internet voyeurism. I feel I have something to say that is worth hearing, so here you go web world...But. On the other hand I'm afraid of being judged badly for what I feel like saying. Even if it has no relevance to anything. So if I'm afraid of judgement, and only want the people I know that love me to read my thoughts, then why do I post it on internationally accessible places? Because deep down I think i'm the shit.

Anyway. This whole love your neighbor/love your enemy thing is bothering me. First of all, love your enemy is like my mantra in life, whatever "mantra" means. I declare it. LOVE. That is the most important thing. Love breeds fosters and begets love. Caring for others. If we all could do this we would all be cared for. I know it doesn't work that way, but nonetheless. ANYhow. This love your enemy thing is weird for me right now, because I'm wondering what that looks like. Say hi? Smile? Pretend everything is cool? Laugh at dumb jokes? I don't know. It seems fake. I'm mad at you. I don't want to smile and laugh. I don't want to high five you in the hall way. I don't want to say "see ya" when I leave. So, if I do all those things when I'm hating them on the inside am I loving? Do I mean it?
I suppose the final question is this: If i'm preferring that person above myself to the point that I can't breathe anymore...is that love? Is there an end? Or a limit? Because in my limited mind there seems to be an endless line for love. Its so annoying. But then I know the love I need. That I require. The love that gives me life.
And there are times when I've been really really weak, but still able to acknowledge when life giving love is breathing into me.
Maybe true love is taking away the scales; the need to be right or justified or vindicated.
I want to love like that. Right now its just a dream or a path to shoot for.
But I want to be relieved of those scales.
I want to love freely, and not just because I NEED to be loved freely.
I want it to be real.

the pants

I washed my pants yesterday.
Ok, I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, and actually to some of you it probably is upsetting that it could be such a big deal...
But when you wash jeans they tend to get tighter. And I was afraid.
These pants were known as the uncomfortable pants. But then my pants supply became diminished. And they went from "the uncomfortable pants" to "the only pants". We had bonded. I was afraid at first. But then we grew to fit each other. We were comfortable. But our relationship reached the point that I suppose every relationship does; the point where it just gets to be embarrassingly dirty, and you have to put it in the washer and hope the form doesn't get lost, and that all it will take is a few lunges across the apartment to make them fit again.

Sure. Like you've never heard that analogy for a relationship before.

Yes, I know. Its hard to believe that a person, a woman no less, could have one pair of pants.
But I refuse, REFUSE I say, to buy another pair. At least for a loooong time. I have a bag full of previous fitting pants that really are fine. Cute actually. And those shall be the pants I will wear. There will be no new pants.
There are pants here, that are fine. It just takes some dadgum self discipline.
So, in the meantime while self discipline sits floating out of my reach, I will punish myself for my lack of grasp, and wear the same pants. Every day.
And we will become old friends. And we will grow to hate each other.
And in the end, it will take the disintegration of time to separate me from my pants, and awkwardly join me with the rest of the world.

Anyone want to go shopping?

you.

I dreamt about you the other night.
I wish I could tell you.
But we only talk for 30 seconds at a time.

blue lakes.

I'm about to ramble.
Consider yourself
forewarned.


The other day I came to the conclusion that I have moved from one residence to another 29 times in my life. As I am 28 years old, this is an average of once, or so, per year. All my sisters were born in different states. And none of us spent more than the first year of our lives in the state we were born in. The longest I lived in a single house with my parents and sisters was 3 years. The longest I lived in a place that was specifically mine alone was 19 months.


It wasn't until in the last few years that all these different homes started to bother me. When I was growing up I thought it was kind of cool. Most of my friends spent their "whooooole lives" in one house, sometimes two. A lot of them never even lived outside the state. When I found out information like that, it was so foreign and "boring" to me. You've never lived in another state??? Only Oregon/Idaho/North Carolina/Maine/New Hampshire etc etc? Weird. But when I moved to Oregon to finish college, and to kind of start my own life, I realized that what I had experienced is not normal. At all.


I get a lot of questions, but the 2 most common is 1) Was your dad in the military? No.


And 2) Why?
Again, the answer to "why?" seemed normal for most of my life. Because my dad got a new job. Don't you have to move when your dad gets a job? Oh...


Whenever I would hear the news that I would be moving away and changing schools, I remember it being a really sad experience. I would cry a lot at the loss of my friends, and what my child/teenage brain new as familiarity. In another aspect, I think in some ways God blessed me with being a super awkward kid, and with being kind of socially dysfunctional. I was an extreme rule follower. I couldn't handle when "the rules" were broken. If I heard other kids swearing, or telling dirty jokes, or being mean, it would really bother me. I would have to tell my mom or a teacher. Also, I had too much body hair for a 10 year old girl to be having, which was sooooo awkward, and also I was a super dork. I know the dork thing is hard for most to wrap their minds around, but if you think I'm a dork now....oh my god. This dysfunction made leaving a couple different schools much easier, as I would get bullied, picked on, death threats (yes), other kinds of threats, etc. So naturally, when the time to leave came, I was not as attached, and sometimes happy to go. Ultimately (I assume) my parents saw that I was not really ever going to adjust. SO, private school for me.

This was where I literally reinvented myself. I became a basketball player, and I dove into it. I worked my way to being a valued, scoring team member that would start games, and finish them. This was the opposite of my 7th grade self that was thrown into a locker by the basketball team I was a part of. I built a reputation for myself that was "Don't even mess with me. I will chew you up, spit you out, and I'll like it". But that wasn't really who I was; I just needed to make sure I was never on the receiving end of torment again. Anyway, I digress.


In all the places I lived with my parents, there is one house that really sticks out. We lived (well, I lived) there the longest. We were there from my 9th, 10th, and 11th grade years of school. It was out in the country, as were all the houses we had. Most everyone of my friends and I lived out in the country. That's what you do in Idaho. In fact, there aren't street addresses the farther out you get. Our addresses were all "coordinates". The address of this house (the Blue Lakes house, which is the one pictured above) was 3624 N, 3000 E. This was my favorite house. There was field all around. Big trees to climb. An irrigation ditch (which they don't really have in Oregon) that we pretended was a creek, and that we were forbidden to enter. Which of course, we did. There was enough room for my sister and I to have our own room. My little sisters were babies, and they didn't care about sharing, so they did. It was the biggest house we lived in.


It was the perfect place. I would readily invite my friends over because my sister and I had the upstairs to ourselves. We could go up there and hang out. That way I wouldn't have to be embarrassed by the mess my little sisters would make, or how my dad would never clean up whatever he did in the kitchen. It was chaotic, at best. And my mom (when she was home, she worked at a Chinese restaurant nearly full time) was a very loud woman. Like, she was funny. But she was LOUD, and it really embarrassed me, as loudness and funny voices are not behaviours befitting a mother. Only my friends that I was completely secure with could come over. But I would run around the house cleaning up before they got there. There was only one bathroom, and my young sisters would always have toothpaste all over the sink. I hated this. Also, one of my biggest grievances is how my dad would lose the cap to the milk jug in the fridge. Where the hell did it go? How could my friends come over and see that there is no lid on the milk?? And WHY, dad? We always take it off anyway, he and mom would say, why does it matter, its in the fridge. Gaahhh....agitated now thinking about it...haha. Stupid.

But the house...the house was great. We took out old carpet. We peeled decades of wall paper. We painted. My sisters, my mom, and my mom's one friend, who had a daughter I was (still am) friends with. We worked so hard to make it ours.


I learned to drive while I lived there. I got my first job while living there. (At the restaurant my mom worked at). I experienced the death (for the first time) of my 2 favorite pets while there. These are just a handful of experiences that took place in those 3 years.


And then we left.

We went to a 3 bedroom manufactured home a couple miles away. My sister and I were back to sharing a room because my mom's dad moved in with us. Actually, it wasn't a "room" as in bedroom. It was a space partitioned off with a divider from the kitchen area. We developed a good hatred for each other there. But this house was so embarrassing. It was small. So small. It looked like a mobile home. But what can you do. I always felt different, but I could control how different people knew I was by keeping them away.


In all, I spent 9 years living in Idaho, and that is the longest streak of consistency I have. Even though there were school changes and house changes, we still had the same church. As I look back on that 9 years and think about all the different places we lived, that isn't really my focus. I don't feel uprooted and hindered. Moving was annoying, but it lost the power of trauma it once had. The thing that gave me any semblance of consistency was the church I went to. My mom and my sisters and I were faithful attenders. I was very involved; youth leadership, music teams, camps, every gathering, etc. My friends from church also happened to go to my private school, so we were really interconnected. The church is what gave me that grounded feeling.


It was a huge part of my life.


But then, because of me and my lack of wisdom and personal indiscretions, my mom left. And she took my sisters too. They were gone. It was really sad, and it really was because of me. BUT, fortunately it was time for me to move on, and on to Oregon I went, about 2 years later.


Then I grew up. Then I changed more.


Since then my family AGAIN changed states, and is now in Washington. But I'm still a real Idahoan. Oddly enough, I've almost lived in Oregon as long as I lived in Idaho. Soon enough it will surpass.


I'm not angry or bitter or whatever about all the "moving around" my family did. Yes it hurt, and yes it was really hard to reconcile as ok. But, it left me satisfied at a young age as far as travelling goes. I like to travel, and to see. But I don't neeeeed to do it. I don't have wild oats to sow, I don't need to be all over the world.


Also, I think that part of the pain experienced by continual up-rooting has helped me learn how to REALLY commit to something. I'm not going to just leave, that would be too easy. It also helped me to really value relationships that I have. I am deeply aware of the possibility of a relationship becoming temporary, no matter how committed. I might move, and they might be gone. I have never lived around family outside of the immediates, so to me gone is gone. It is strange to not live in the same area of the country that any of my relatives. But, I embrace this now. I won't just leave. In some ways this is a weakness. Sometimes a situation calls for turning and leaving. But I am compelled to stick something out until it literally dies, or I am completely defeated. As I have said before, I'm desperate for roots, but at the same time that desperation is a gift to me.


Someday I will really be able to appreciate what I have when its given to me.

remember when...

Ok, so here's the thing. Bear with this introduction, it gets to the story I swear. But its a long one.

I'm not going to say that I can read minds, because I can't. I can't "tell the future", and I don't see spirits or hallucinate. (That I know of). That being said, I do have mental ability. And no ability is not a euphemism for "issues". Haha to whoever went there. ANYway, I have this ability. It goes like this: A random person/acquaintance/customer/friend will cross my mind, and I will genuinely care and wonder about them. Then, in minutes or days they appear in my life. Usually they end up coming into the coffee shop. I can't deliberately put someone on my mind and have it work where they appear. It has to be genuine concern/curiosity. I'm not talking regulars that always come. I'm talking "oh I haven't seen them in a while WHOA THERE YOU ARE".

I kind of believe our brain waves are all connected somehow. There must be power in our minds that we somehow transmit or whatever, and it effects us. Even in scripture the mind is mentioned regularly as part of our Godly life: renew your mind, guard your mind, we have been "given a sound mind"....etc. It seems that if our thought literally and truly only effected US (the only people aware of them), then it wouldn't matter what we did with our minds, or our thoughts. Why valliantly protect what is only yours, and what you have the power to keep from any person? I conclude that what is in your head directly effects those in your life whether it is actual mind energy (I know...), or if it effects people because of how you personally react to what is going on, and people suffer indirectly due to your own neuroses.

ALL THAT to say.....it happened last week, on Wednesday.
I thought I saw her at my usual hang out of the Santa Clara Fred Meyer. It wouldn't have been that unusual. I didn't know for sure because I only saw her from behind, and the only clue I had to it actually being her was the hair style. It was very distinct. Tight, curly, short and with an element of "poof", and always the same. I couldn't properly assess her identity because she was the wall looking at shoes, and I would have to blatantly look her up and down with no baricade. I didn't want to veer to far away, as the shoe department is quite near the store exit. So, I slink around, slowly lapping the shoe department. I start to feel like a creep. I have been watching too much action television about spys and hidden cameras, and all kinds of "sneaking". I decide that any minute now security is going to report a suspiciously awkward character that smells of coffee and bacon looming around the shoe department. I can't handle my own weirdness...I give up. Ugh. If its meant to be she'll see me. I finally creep myself out so much that I move on to the bank, my original destination. As I'm leaving the bank, I see the aforementioned woman whose identity I coveted knowledge of....GAH!! It isn't her!

Three days later...she emails me. This is the kind of weird mind-thought coincidence that happens to me all the time. It was quite random, and weird considering I just conducted my own creepy manhunt days prior. She asked how I was doing, and wondered how that little coffee shop was going. Maybe she would stop in and visit me while stopping at Safeway on Monday.

I reply immediately.
Please come, I'll be there.

All morning Monday I had mixed emotions. I hadn't seen her in, what, almost 3 years? Was it a family gathering? I don't recall. What would we have to say to each other? Would it be awkward? Would we have to talk about her son? I start to coach myself, "Don't ask about him...don't ask about him....don't ask about him...." I decide its too weird to ask, and I leave it at that.

Well, she came, and we had a lovely time. We talked more as friends on this day, than when her son and I were "in love". I'm a little sad now, thinking of this. As she leaves we remiscince shortly or her husband, who at one time was my work study boss. A favorite past time was to harrass him and poke fun. I know his birthday was just the day before, and ask her to pass on my "happy birthday". She is touched at my rememberance, we hug again, she leaves. The moment that broke the dam of the following flooding of memory is when the conversation went like this:

Her: "Did you ever go out to Laura and Eddy's with us?"
Me: "Yes, I believe we had Thanksgiving there a few years ago."

As the conversation dies out, and we go our separte ways, the moment became real to me when I realized I said, "...a few years ago". I do have a history. I did exist before. All of a sudden I had to ask myself what happened. There was a time when we were family. We had history. We did holidays. We did life. And as I'm suddenly remembering this on a random Monday afternoon nearly 4 years later... the sadness came. This is history that is gone.

Its gone.

This is distressing to me because all I ever want is roots. I just want to build the history that makes you have people. And when its not being stripped away from me, I'm destroying it myself.

Back to the moment, now I am just overwhelmed with a myriad of emotions. Even before her son (refered to from now on as"OJ", which does make sense, worry not) and I were anything, the family was part of my life. I worked for OJ's dad for almost 5 years. My college years were entwined with memories and experiences with all of us together. We were close, and this fulfilled a strong desire of mine to BE close to the family of whomever I ended up with. And I know that isn't always an easy or natural thing. But I meshed incredibly well with OJ and his family. Even during the times when we broke up, and had to have the awkward "we're back together" moments, his dad would hug me and say, "I hope I don't have to have you leave us again." But you can't be with a man that isn't for you, even if his family wants him to be.

When the conversation ended it was a bittersweet moment. I am so thankful for whatever "energy" put us on each other's minds, whether it was God or whatever, I don't care. I'm so thankful for her email; for her willingness to look past the awkwardness and sadness of lost love, and to be drawn to what once was. She acknowledged that our history was something; that "that time" was something. For one hour I was able to live in the real memory of something that was once lovely, and I didn't have to pretend it didn't happen.
As I watched her walk away, I felt like she was walking away with my history.
But really, she was walking away with new history.