...before I was rudely interrupted by own neuroses, I want to tell you how I got here. Or rather, there. As in the car with the crying and the cheez-its. To catch up all you late comers - I'm a hot mess who isn't where he was a year ago, which was an even bigger mess crying on the highway stuffing my face with sodium enriched processed cheese crackers. They may even be fried. I'm not sure, but this isn't a food blog, that would be www.cookingwithtaylor.com .
Anywho, it was November of 2012 when i visited a friend of mine in the great city of Chicago when I decided that I really could make a big city move and make it work for me. Chicago has all the trappings a person could want: great food, great architecture, great sights, a plethora of professional opportunities the like of which only matched or exceeded by those in New York City, San Francisco and the like. I visited her for just a weekend while my sister was interviewing for her medical residency. We discovered a city with all the offerings of NYC but with a much lower cost of living. I began to drool and salivate. The fire under my ass that dwindled to soft glowing embers and wilted ash, was suddenly reinvigorated. OH THE HUMANITY!!!! Maybe that was just the seat warmer in my car, BUTT either way I was back on track to forging my own path to happiness. You see, I had always dreamed of New York as my true home but was discouraged by the price tag. I felt discontent in Buffalo. It was too small. It was like a sweater that shrunk in the dryer. I had tried to make it better but it ended up shrinking and suffocating me. I began to discuss it with friends. I needed to put this idea out there if it could ever become a reality. I get much too easily defeated inside my own head. My friends supported me as they always have (such great friends). They even loved my first blog entry where I lead in claiming I'd explain the cheez-its and the crying and the driving but somehow just ended up abandoning any and all readers (all of about 6 people total). My fan base is growing! So anyways, my friends supported me but it was I (twas I!!) who needed to make something happen. So I broke my lease by giving my landlord my 60 day notice, a customary requirement and began the job hunt.
I wanted a job you couldn't find in Buffalo. Everything was going to change about my life. Or at least the big things were. I firmly believe everyone should strive to work a job that they enjoy, or at the very least, a job they don't complain about. So I wanted something creative and something that you see people in the movies or E! reality shows doing. Aside from styling Kim Kardashian's enormous ass, I'd do anything! Or so I thought.....(I just had a visual of me adorning her buttocks with a feather boa and now firmly believe I've missed my calling as an ASSistant Stylist to Armenian Good-For-Nothings.)
Long story short: I realized I was not going to get a job with a Buffalo address on my resume. So I decided I would move to Chicago without a job and no place to stay. That would put me right at the doors of my future employers ready to work the second they said "You're Hired!" I imagined they would say it like Donald Trump only it'd make me feel so much more happy than when he'd say "You're Fired!" to my favorite Apprentice contestants. So I put in my two weeks notice at my job (Assistant Coordinator of Volunteer Services at a cancer hospital) and up and left. That's what brought me to saying goodbye to my mom. Thats what brought me to tears and thats what brought me to my Cheez-its.
My relationship with my mother is probably the strongest relationship I've ever come across in my life. Its the strongest I've ever had. She cares deeply and loves unconditionally. Its taken me a while to realize this but I have. I regret leaving her and can only hope she knows that I'd take with me everywhere I go for the rest of my natural and unnatural life if I could. Maybe I can. OMG. ROAD TRIP! Kidding. Although we do have the same taste in music so the ride would be a fun sing-a-long.
I love the idea behind parents. That someone wants to extend themselves into another being. They've clearly had a fun time on this earth and wish to guide someone else through its entirety. My mom is someone who has always done right by her family and friends. She did not hold a grudge against my father during or after their divorce and continued to co-parent with him quite successfully if I do say so myself, if I do say so myself, if I do say so myself. (<--if you don't get the Beyonce reference right there and this ain't the blog for you honey, okay? *flips hair*) I think life is so interesting. I really do. I think what is placed in our paths but fate is so interesting. I think the human experience is so interesting. The word interesting is so interesting. A thesaurus and or well used education would really come in handy right now. I love how as I've grown older and experienced more I've looked at everything differently.
Growing up we see our parents as our rule makers and enforcers. But only when we get to know ourselves as human beings do we really get to understand them as human beings. If you've lived enough life (and I'm talking mileage here, not years) to have loved then you understand that enveloping feeling of obsession that come dover you with a new found love. When you feel someone truly understands you as a person and truly loves you as a person. Well, your parents felt that too at one time or many. That longing that we feel, for that instant, no one else in the world understands, was understood by our own parents. Our dorky moms who dance at weddings like they're reeling in fish in the Adirondacks or our unfiltered fathers who talk about getting crabs in the 70s right in front of our college friends. Theres a quote that I'll butcher here. I think I heard it on Oprah but it probably originated from a more profound place like Rikki Lake or Sally Jesse. I believe it goes: we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. I think that applies here. Either way it brings me to my point that the experience of being human is wrought with emotions that really test our limitations. The heart is a strong muscle both biologically evidenced by my late father as well as emotionally evidenced by everyone's own individual paths. And our parents have been through it all before we have, probably before having us.
Its sad because I think when you have kids you expect that maybe life with be emotionally easy on you from thereon out. But I made my mom cry that day I left. And thats something I think about from time to time. I made her emotional. I made her feel that loss, that longing for someone she loves. I hate that I did that but had no other choice. And isn't that beautiful? That we can want something so badly, that comes at such a high cost? Its tragic. And thats why all the great plays are tragedies. Because the human condition is to want what we can't have or to want that which is unattainable if only by some large sacrifice we wouldn't dare wish on an enemy. In the series finale of HBO's Six Feet Under, Ruth Fisher, played devastatingly beautifully by Frances Conroy says: If my experience is anything to go by, motherhood is the loneliest thing in the world. She says this to her daughter right before her daughter moves away from home. I want to be a parent so badly. I will be a parent. I will love this person from the moment they are born and when they leave me, every time they leave me, in all the ways they can leave me, I will mourn. I will feel that loss that penetrates so deeply I won't know how to stand. I can feel it now. I feel homesick for my mother. I yearn to just be by her side. And somehow I know that its that loss and that emotion that makes us truly human. So we have to go through it. We cannot turn back and we must endure. That way, at our life's end, we've done what we needed to do. We've chosen that very loss that feels at times like it could kills us. We've chosen to endure that loss so that our children can also endure that loss and keep the cycle going. It's almost sick.
This blog has tired me out. I don't know how long it will last. I don't like to think deeply about things because either I make no sense (to myself or to anyone else) or I make too much sense (or so i think). I get this feeling of infinity. Like, going on forever.
It's not fun saying goodbye to any one, in any way.
Alright, I gotta do some actual work, bye!
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