It's a shame it has taken me so long to put something up since my last post. This is due in part on intentionality and in part on poor time management and in part on sheer exhaustion. I have been fortunate enough to be employed all month, save 5 days off dispersed in there, which weren't really days off because those are the days you catch up on real life stuff. I am a tired, albeit grateful, girl. I haven't been this physically active on the job for a while. 12-14 hour days moving around, often lifting and moving items from one place to another, or cutting endless reams of paper, or bouncing around in a truck picking up set pieces fighting the desire to be lulled asleep by the rocking passenger seat, or lighting candles, so many candles, and keeping those pillows fluffed just right (the secret is a karate chop, and being half-asian, I perfected it in half-time). These long days have enabled me escape the confines of my small apartment hovel and free my mind a bit from the anxiety inducing thoughts that generally fill my head. It has also provided the emolument I needed to keep me away from the unemployment line, with a little extra so that I can take a short trip in October. One that is long overdue. All of this working has made me pay attention to my body and how it has adjusted to the sudden burst of activity. All and all, I feel pretty damn good about myself and how I have been able to manage all month. I didn't throw my back out and my legs and arms are looking a wee more toned. I was able to manage it all month long. But that's the catch, I'm at the point that if I had to trudge through another month, I'd be a complete wreck. At least I think I would. I just feel like age is creeping up on me and as much as I want to have the energy and stamina to kick it with the twenty-somethings I work with, I just don't have it in me. Or I don't have as much of it in me as I once did. And I have pretty mixed feelings about that. Particularly since September is my birth month.
I was brought into this world on September 11, thirty-something years ago. My birthday was one of the 5 days I had off and thought about posting on that day, but felt overly inundated with 9-11 coverage and crying over the personal and heartfelt stories NPR was featuring all freaking morning that I just went into birthday/9-11 denial mode and shut down. I would treat it like any other day (as much as one can in between the phone calls and family skype video chats). How can I celebrate A) getting older, especially when it coincides with B) The Day That Will Live In Infamy? But I will share my two poignant 9-11 life stories. Being a September child, I started school young, which meant I was the youngest in all my classes. Everyone else would turn 13, 16, 18, etc. before me. I was in my freshman year of college when I turned 18. I had an amazing boyfriend at the time and I was driving to his house to pick him up and we were going to my granny's house for my birthday dinner with the family. He was late arriving from work, and missed the dinner altogether. I went to granny's and had supper and went back to his house to wait for him to return (his parents were in Florida at the time). I stayed there for four days in his house, with his two miniature poodles staring at the front door waiting for him to walk in. He never did. He died the night of my birthday from internal injuries suffered from a motorcycle accident. That was one of the most devastating experiences of my life and changed the course I had chosen for myself. It is the reason I am an artist and not some other "practical" career choice. His early death gave me the courage to pursue my interests and not for purely financial reasons, but for because this is what I want to do with the rest of my life reasons. I will always be grateful for that and have immense love for Kevin Bruce Pugh.
Ten years later, I have another amazing boyfriend (whom I would eventually propose to and marry). Again, I am at his house, though this time we are in Florida (graduate students at USF working on our MFA in visual art). The alarm goes off and it is set to some radio station that is in total chaos, so we push snooze, and figure it is some sort of shock-jock radio schtick. Alarm goes off again and I remember hearing high pitched voices, almost in a panic. Third snooze alarm goes off and I decide to get out of bed and get coffee brewing. I sit on the couch and turn on the TV, and watch in real time the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. Mouth agape. Heart racing. It's not my birthday anymore. It's some other sombre day. And one that has filled me with a multitude of mixed and often contradictory emotions and has deeply skewed my beliefs in human nature. It has changed the course of how we as Americans have lived these past ten years. And looking back at the me I once was and the me I am now, much has changed. I am not the artist I wanted to be, nor am I perhaps the artist I once was. But I still long to be that person, and I believe I still have the courage and fortitude to see my way through.
Farewell September.
