New Year post part 1

As it is the new year I feel obligated to write a new blog. I feel oddly like walking into a wreck -- a Lucky Wreck, as Ada Limon might say -- but a wreck nonetheless. My mom will say I am being negative as always, such a drab thing and maybe I should try looking up and seeing the beautiful ice-blue sky that was out today, cutting the edges of the trees and sky scrapers like glass or that knife my dad found that was uncommonly, dangerously, sharp for a flea market knife. But still, this is a year of wonders, it opens like the hand of a magician, who is either holding in her palm a scorpion or an orb or a plain juggling scarf. I will be graduating from grad school with an MFA - a terminal degree in essentially nothing anyone cares about. I have no job, at least no job that pays enough to survive. The house I live with my little utopian Pittsburgh family is apparently killing me and my jaw feels like it is bound to fall off some day soon. Its hinges are broken (literally). So where will I move, come this spring? What will I attempt? A PHD program, a teaching job? Will I stay in Pittsburgh, in the USA? No body knows and it presses against me like people in a crowded subway. My arms hurt. I've been doing Power Yoga and using a Balance Ball and have been running and eating cookies and blow/spit all this yellow mucus out of my face but I still can't help feel like I'm losing it a little. My unemployment runs out in three weeks and I don't qualify for the extension of benefits. Bummer. My ears hurt and won't stop ringing. I feel like I'm under water. I bought Seinfeld Seasons 1&2 on dvd (box set #1) a couple days ago for $10, used. Impulse buy. Soupie and I spent Christmas in Florida with my crazy family, as a trade off for my spending most other holidays with his crazy family. But we all love each other. That crazy love. Family love on some ends. Endlessly romantic swooning injured beach love on another end. Soupie can't ride his bike or walk far, otherwise I would say moonlit bikerides along the river love, or walks in the woods love or long distance 55 miles in the snow and cold on one of these icey clear days love. For now it is domestic and infatuated love, which is just fine.




For all the feasting of the past couple months of birthdays and holidays and finishing final projects, I've been trying to ride my bike more. Rode a 20-mile mountain bike ride in the mud called Punk Bike and won a stage (sorta). Have been riding most days to Mount Washington for work when I get up early enough. Would like to get out more but Soupie knows all the good road routes and I don't really like riding them alone anyway. So I have been running in the woods with the dog and trying to stay in shape somehow. Don't know if it's working. My face hurts. Evan's coming home. Time to go back to the Cookie Party.