On my lunch break today, I decided to check on something to see if I could FINALLY share my jubilation with the world.

I can.

For probably the first time since I was 17 or 18 years old, I have no credit card debt.

This doesn’t count the brief few months when I took a personal loan from my mom to get out from under my debt, and then… opened up more credit cards. To “rebuild my credit.” Except I bought things. Many things. Things I couldn’t afford, when you added them all up. 

Let me tell you. You might pay now, or you might pay later. But trust me, you will pay.

Make it easy on yourself and pay now. Don’t buy things that you can’t afford. Save up and pay cash when it makes sense.

It might be too much information, but I’m going to tell it: by the time I sought help through a credit counseling agency, my credit debt was over $13,000. I could not keep up with the monthly payments due to being laid off, moving, and subsequently being under-employed.

I have paid almost $17,000 in the past 25 months. I have sent in bonuses and windfalls. I have sent in $400 extra per month. I grew to loathe my monthly statement and viewed it as my personal enemy. Cash was the only weapon against it.

So, right now, I can say with pride – I defeated my monthly statement. It has been reduced to a giant line of zeros down the side of the page.

I am credit card debt-free.

The sad thing about all of that spending is that I have nothing to show for it that I remember buying. Except my iPod. I wanted a pink one when they first came out with the Nano, and, truth be told, that was the reason that I signed up for that first credit card (of NINE) in 2006.

The $17,000 iPod. Not quite worth it.

…that things are about to start busting loose? and it might be bad, but it might be wonderful too, even life-changing? and that now, more than ever, is the time to listen to that still small voice that nudges you toward scary things?

Yeah. Me neither.

You know there will be days when you’re so tired that you can’t take another step,
The night will have no stars and you’ll think you’ve gone as far as you will ever get

But you and me walk on
Cause you can’t go back now
And yeah, yeah, go where you want to go
Be what you want to be,
If you ever turn around, you’ll see me.

I can’t really say why everybody wishes they were somewhere else
But in the end, the only steps that matter are the ones you take all by yourself.

–the weepies, can’t go back now

I hate weeks like this.

Just… do this one thing for me.

Click on over here. Then click play.

Then come back over here and tell me if my best friend didn’t just write a super-fresh song.

I love it!

To thee, oh 124, do I give thanks and praise. Thank you for checking my idle blog. Thank you for hoping, against all odds, that one day? there would be something posted here.

Even though I’m pretty sure that at least 20 of you were spammers or spambots or whatever the kids are using to conquer the internet these days.

So. How’s life? I have missed you. I have missed blogging. I gave up facebook games for lent and decided to start journaling on paper instead, which kind of sapped my write-power. I am happy to report that I am still off the juice, a.k.a. Bejeweled Blitz. Don’t even go there.

Spring is springing all over the place here in New York (not the city), and I see electric green fluffs on the hillsides now during my morning commute, as well as rushing streams and swollen rivers and all of those other springy-type things.

I don’t know about you, but I hate winter. After Christmas, I pretty much can’t see the point in going on. Winter, that is. Winter going on. February and March are the bane of my entire year. They hurt me. They burn me with cold and scare me with ice and weather warnings. They glue me to my computer, checking forecasts, rendering me incapable of deciding whether it’s worth risking my life to drive to work that day (or will the snow miss us again??).

So, basically, I just wanted to pop by to say, giddyap, or giddeup, um, maybe giddy-up? Know what I mean? I’m trying to convey that I am back on that durn horse again.

That so didn’t work out the way I planned.

See you soon.

Wow. It’s been quite a winter for me here. I am finally starting to reach the proper edge of sanity here with the weather creeping up into the 40s on multiple days per week.

That other edge of sanity was… well, the wrong edge to be on.

Yesterday, I took a day off from work just to give myself some time to breathe. Last week I covered for a coworker all week, and this week had been One of Those Weeks, so I decided to take a day for no reason.

I ate a bagel for breakfast and took some donations to the Salvation Army. Then? I shopped. I used to love shopping when I was younger and had no business shopping. That’s how I developed credit card debt. But shopping yesterday was a different kind of experience. Every store I entered, it was like I had a laser focus to ignore what I didn’t want. I felt no pressure to purchase anything at all. And when I did want something (like a vintage-looking Coke magnet and a candle) I didn’t beat myself up over it. I took a moment to gather my thoughts, pictured the items in my home, and moved forward.

The last stop of my day was a fairly new furniture store in the town where I grew up. The location of the store was a guns-n-ammo store and a swap shop for much of my young life. Recently, it was a Curves fitness center. Now, it’s an adorable second-hand furniture store with clean and cool items.

I dipped a toe in the water and bought a magazine rack. It was low and sturdy, mission style, and just the right color. Today I went back and bought a bookshelf and a full-length mirror.

The feeling of relief I have from buying furniture is immense. I have lived for so many years without bookshelves, without dressers and full-length mirrors. I spent much of my 20s feeling unsettled and on edge. Now, I realize what my problem was. I couldn’t root. I had no place to call my own. I was living in the homes of others, trying my best not to be an imposition. My own style had no place to thrive.

I have always loved putting rooms together. I often lament that I didn’t become someone who does this for a living, someone who designs spaces for living and working and decorates them. I often think of places in terms of what should be moved where (and which walls should come down if at all possible).

So, this is an old part of myself long forgotten. I had to give up much of my furniture in 2001, and much of my decor lived in storage until last July. I feel like I am slowly getting my “eye” back, slowly remembering what looks good where and how I like my space to feel.

I’m making myself right at home.

I am finally getting around to setting up my office-slash-craft room in the third bedroom. Thank you, kind-of spring.

In the process of going through everything I have owned and deemed worthy of toting across the country and across the state, I have found some… interesting things. I found my entire CD collection, in various stages of disrepair. I found my old research project from my brief, yet miserable, foray into graduate school. I found beanie babies, the bikini I wore when i was a baby, an old Writer’s Market from 2006, old Wal-Mart receipts with poems scratched out on the back, Weight Watchers journals from 2001 (tuna fish and granola bars much?), and about eleventy bazillion notebooks with attempted and abandoned journals.

I am tempted to shake my head at the odd assemblage of crap that I have chosen to hang on to and spend energy moving over the years. But, every once in a while, my emotional packrattery pays off. Today, I found this:

What may, to some people, look like clutter I should have stopped moving 8 years ago, is, in reality, a testament to the human spirit. To ingenuity, to grace and creativity under pressure.

In the summer of 2002, my best friend had a pretty hefty schedule of bar gigs. I went with her whenever I could to help carry gear, set up, tear down, count tips, get water, you name it. Because of her busy late night schedule, she sometimes found herself without some of the things she needed for the night. Makeup, maybe, or a tip jar, once in a while. But the worst thing she could forget, the most crucial to her being able to play for three hours straight (other than a guitar, obviously), was her capo. If you don’t know what a capo is, it’s basically a little clamp that holds down all of the strings at once on the guitar’s fretboard, and this raises the pitch of the strings so you can play a wider variety of songs without having to re-tune the guitar between songs.

One night, she did forget the capo, and we had to resort to rummaging through my car for something, anything, that would work instead. I have no idea why I had spoons in my car, but, then again, see above for my indiscriminate packing habits. We foraged around in the car until we came up with a spoon and a hair tie, which I had to break apart and re-knot to get tight enough to put the spoon close enough to the fretboard to allow it to act as a true capo.

So we did. We made it, we did it, and you can actually still see where the guitar strings wore into the brown part of the spoon.

That summer was full of opportunities to make do with a little bit. To get by on what either of us could find, to eat ice cream sandwiches in the Wal-Mart parking lot, to swim in my parents’ pool, to stay up late and get up early and still have a ridiculously fun and full life. We are still those girls somewhere inside, and we still have what it takes. I was so happy today to get that reminder.

Have you ever encountered the following scenario?

Person 1: Wow, I am having a tough day today.

Person 2: Ha! You want to hear about a rough day?! Great Aunt Gwendolyn was diagnosed with black hairy tongue last Tuesday. This after she lost her little toe to gangrene last month! To make matters worse, her poodle, Sprinkles, had an anxiety attack last night! You should count your blessings!

Person 1: …

This is so common. Count your blessings even though you are miserable. Consider yourself lucky that you even have a job in this economy. At least you can walk.

Consider yourself lucky to have something to be unhappy about.

What does this mean? Haven’t we always been told not to compare ourselves to others? Don’t try to be that skinny or that rich or that successful, and certainly don’t feel bad about yourself for living an average and mediocre life. That’s the positive side of it. Judge you by you. I get that. But the underside is something more nefarious – the elevating of ourselves by being thankful that we don’t share in others’ misfortunes.

Guess what? Thinking about all of the kids and moms and dads who go to bed hungry every night and who aren’t making it in this economy doesn’t inspire me to count my blessings. Thinking about the people who send out resume after resume and are wondering if they should just end it all to make it stop? They break my heart. I think about it often. I am a poet. The suffering of the masses does not escape my notice, I assure you.

But because others suffer, am I not allowed to aspire to more?  I already count my blessings. I don’t take the wonderful parts of my life for granted. But should I really consider myself “lucky” to be unhappy because somewhere out there, someone is unhappier than me?

That has always been true, and I think I have known since I was aged somewhere in the single digits that there was oppression and hunger and abuse and neglect and killing and torture and suffering and death in this world. And never, not one time, has that ever given me any cause to feel lucky. I always knew how good I had it, but that’s because I understood the trajectory of my life and where it could have gone horrible wrong (or ceased to exist), I was indeed happy to be alive.

Comparative misery is a myth.

Each person lives in their own small universe, and it is impossible to compare across universes. I could never comprehend the struggles of, say, a crack whore. Neither could I grasp what might send a princess into the depths of despair. Because it’s not about what makes other people miserable or happy. It’s about what makes ME miserable or happy. The feelings we feel inside our respective lives are valid. We are allowed to feel disappointed in what life has to offer right now – even when the unemployment rate is eleventy billion percent.

I am struggling right now, and everywhere I turn, the universe is responding with a resounding, “You’re lucky to be getting crumbs. How dare you expect an entire piece?”

As long as people in this world are still thinking new and creative thoughts, selling their art for money, writing books and poems and films, and making new music for the world to enjoy, I will never be content (or feel lucky) to toil away at anything less. And it’s nobody’s right to tell me I should be.

Imagine a person choking on a few crumbs (let’s imagine, just for fun, that they happen to be crumbs of mediocrity). What would you do? Would you walk up to that person and say, “You’re lucky that you have those two crumbs to choke on. Do you know how many people are starving in this world? You should count your blessings.”

No, you wouldn’t.

Man, does life get in the way of the things we want to do sometimes, or what?

I absolutely love this blog – love writing it, love interacting with my friends who read it… heck, I even love re-reading it. So sue me. Obviously if I had NO ego, I wouldn’t have a blog to start with.

I’ve been busy, but honestly, not busy enough to stop writing. I have just kind of made excuses and half-promises to “write something tomorrow” or “write something when i have an idea.” The thing is, though, I very rarely sit down to blog with an idea in mind. I just sit down, open the new post box, and get to typing.

That’s kind of true about my writing life in general. I feel I don’t have a story to tell, so I never write. Anyone who knows me personally just scoffed at that last sentence. I know better. Everyone has a story to tell. I have always believed that, and I always will. I guess it’s just a matter of finding the voice, of honing the pathway so that story can make its way to the listeners.

Anyway. Here I am! I am still here. I am still thinking myself to death, still freezing my fingers off, still praying vehemently for spring, and still, still, still trying to write something, dangit.