Crazy As A Junebug

I am very, very, very, very neurotic. I have always been as such, doubtless a product of growing up in an atmosphere wherein vigilance was tantamount to survival. I know the difference between six ice cubes being cracked and three; the exact second one's breathing turns from shallow to deep, the exact number of steps it takes to get from one room to another. It may be a kind of OCD but it started out being less about me and more about others. Maybe now it has turned in on itself?

I worry so much about so many things that I have become adept at a practiced nonchalance to counterbalance my especial brand of nuts. So when this pretty insouciance is thwarted, I seem to go extra cuckoo for cocoa puffs in my own head.

I am rawther an old-fashioned girl. I depend on traditions and rituals, many of my own making, created as a defense against the dark art of singlehood. Christmas Eve. Quiet time. Bistroing, porch parties. Quiet late nights in my little outdoor kingdom. Festivals.

I like to entertain, not because it forces me to clean up the digs (though added bonus), but because I love being able to provide even a small bit of succor and sustenance for travellers. Having grown up in a home where the latchkey wasn't always on the lookout for the race that knows Joseph, I prefer that my home is one that graciously welcomes guests. I also prefer that it graciously welcomes me, which I have distinctively fallen down on over the past few months, thus making the former impossible to fathom at this time.

I am sometimes a modern girl. I like to take care of myself. I have been doing it long enough, lord knows, and lord knows how often I do it poorly. But I get by, I get back, I get up again--it is all I know to do. And even when the current dissatisfactions at the forefront of my addled mind--lack of funds, lack of motivation to procure funds, lack of understanding how one finds oneself in this curious abyss of the college-educated working poor--I am usually pretty good at grifting my way around them. But sometimes spells are cast and sometimes they are deflected. And right now they are not working at all.

The happiness of my friends is of huge importance to me. I like to feed people, to water them, to give them a place to grow and thrive and be tended as I do my garden (which is to say, I do all the above when I am not in a dangerous mood that is more pesticide than domicile.) I try to be supportive of the many endeavors their personalities lead them to undertake, as they are supportive of me and mine. And I try to understand that these same people are ever-changing and growing, as am I, and that we may not always be able to bloom in the same year. Some of us don't come back at all, bright though we may have burned the seasons prior. Some are there but not budding and some grow so tall they threaten to choke out everyone else. Some are newly planted. Some bloom up unexpectedly amidst what looked to be a mass of weeds. And I seem to love them all too much.