The one I don't know what to name

Observations, on writing, endings and beginnings, and mundane moments, Oh and a substack name change!

Hi friends,

They say when your brain is empty, read, and when your brain is too full, write. But here I am anyway. Empty and full. It is hard for me to switch back and forth between writing and working my day job, but I know I need to learn how to do it to maintain both of those endeavors. I am sitting at SlowPokes right now with my friend, L. I am watching a guy in dress clothes with colorful socks type on Facebook Messenger from his laptop. It looks like he is writing a novel to someone. He taps his foot with the colorful socks along to the beat of the music playing. The baristas have switched shifts since I have been here. We got the slow barista of a few words this morning, now, over my noise-canceling headphones I hear the new barista, “That is such a cute shirt you have on!” in the most chipper voice. There is a girl who reminds me of a ballerina at the front of the coffee shop facing the windows. I think it is only her workout attire, which looks like a leotard that is making me think of her as a ballerina. None of these details particularly matter. The people sitting at the bar intrigue me, they all come here alone, one is on their laptop, one is writing in a journal, and one is reading. There are two young girls to the left of me, chatting about the movies they have recently seen, new friends it seems like. “Do you know the premise of the new Anne Hathaway movie?” “Yeah, she’s with a younger guy.” “But it’s like fan fiction about Henry Styles.” A clamor of giggles ensues, and they both throw their heads back in laughter. 

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I recently read The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, one of America’s greatest choreographers. It was okay. I wanted more out of it. There was some sound advice, and some good exercises to get your mind thinking in a more creative habit way, but I don’t know. It didn’t quite scratch that itch. I picked it up because I was interested in the process. How we all get from point A to point B interests me. Admittedly, I can get focused on the end result more than the process, which I think is what our society caters to and teaches us to focus on, but it’s so fleeting. The end is mere seconds, whereas the process can be months or years, it’s lifelong. 

Pages from The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

Every time I come to sit down and write, or read, work calls me. I’m living in limbo. Fragmentary days. Clients text me at all hours of the day, 6 AM, Midnight, 2 AM. I’m glad I have my Do Not Disturb on after a certain hour. 

Since I’ve been off Instagram it’s been hard to sort of track my days. I scroll through my photos to remember what I have been doing lately. Mostly I have been hanging out with my roses and learning about all the pests that come with it, stressing about their health, and learning to kill said pests. We had aphids. I knew the aphids weren’t gone because we had ants. Somehow the aphids get the ants to be their protectors. I noticed one of our citrus trees was leaning and we pulled out a stake that was doing nothing to support it and unleashed thousands of ants. So back to Home Depot we went to get ant killer. 

On Monday, I showed an apartment to a guy in his twenties with a 4-year-old kid. Even through text messages, I could feel his energy: he was stressed and angry. I learned early in our conversation thread that I needed to walk on eggshells with him because he bit my head off when I asked about his credit. So I took it slow. During the showing, he grew more and more visibly upset. The leasing agent onsite helping us sympathized with him because she also had a kid. “I dont know man. I dont know what to do anymore, I keep getting denied.” He finally told us what he was too hesitant to tell me over the phone, that he doesn’t make 3x the rent for a 2 bed for $1600. “Why are you looking for a 2 bed then?” The leasing agent asked him. “Because I need a room for my son.” he pled. He was stuck between his reality and his ideals. The showing went on this way with him angry, mopey, and upset, and the leasing agent trying desperately to make him see everything would be okay somehow. She kept telling him to believe in God and even prayed over him in the golf cart on our way back to the leasing office. I get it. Sometimes when you’re tired you want the world to know you’re tired. But the world never stops spinning.

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A scene from my home in the dining room

I’ve finished Cannery Row by Steinbeck which was so comforting to read. His voice always soothes me. I am currently reading The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy which is so good, but the heat is making me crave Lucia Berlin. So I picked up the last book of Lucia’s that I hadn’t read all the way through, Evening in Paradise. I flip open to page 16 and see my note, “Funny. That’s what the room I’m staying in while reading this is called.” Birds of Paradise. I stayed in that room at an Airbnb in Galveston on my 30th birthday alone. I dont really know why I did that. I told myself it was a writing retreat. Even though that was only 2 years ago, I was still so young. I was unfocused, and anxious, and scattered. I couldn’t focus on the process. I wanted the result and was anticipating the result, which clouded my freedom to explore. It is hard to remain in the process, it is hard to remain in the mud, things seem better over there, elsewhere. But the only way out is through. 

There are deep things I want to write about, important things. (Not that this is neither deep nor important) but I have unfinished essays sitting in my drafts that have been there for years. For one, I am afraid of publishing them on my substack because for some reason I have decided in my head that they should be published through a big outside publication, which could be delusional. I suppose I have built the essays up so much in my mind I think they deserve more. I have magnified them in my head as the two essays that define me, which is a dangerous thing to do, because I am more than two stories, surely. And second, I am scared to finish them, scared to reopen them and get into that headspace. Sometimes I think the only time we have trouble with writing is when it’s about something we are not yet ready to address, dont have the strength to or the will, or simply because the material we are writing about hurts, and who wants to hurt themselves on purpose? But maybe that is what writing always is, honest writing anyway. Which is why I danced around it in my mid-twenties so greatly. I just didn’t want to deal. I didn’t want to think about all the sad feelings that come with traumatic experiences, but I realized the only writing block there ever is is a mental one.  

So much of my 30s feels like the process. I dont know what I expected really, I thought the 20s was the process, but that was just chaos. This is cleaning up the mess of the 20s, sorting it all out, figuring out what stuck and what didn’t, and figuring out new habits to replace the bad ones. How maybe we will never be the greatest, whatever that means, but will land somewhere in the middle. What’s wrong with the middle? We measure ourselves too harshly. Perfection is a figment of our imagination, or worse, a product we created to sell, the thing that keeps us on the hamster wheel. Perfection teaches us to resent the process, which in turn teaches us to resent mistakes. It seems counterintuitive when the only way to improve is by identifying and building upon mistakes. But as much as I am ANTI-perfection, I am no stranger to it, we have all exhibited forms of it. 

Still from the movie Amadeus

I saw Amadeus was playing on Netflix and remembered Twyla Tharp wrote in her book about doing the choreography for it. The movie is about a fictional rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Italian composer Antonio Salieri. And really it’s such a good film, they dont make them like this anymore. A steady pace where the movie never gets boring and doesn’t rely on antics, but leans into the storytelling aspect of movie making. The director Foreman draws on prodigy and mediocrity, jealousy and comparison, and man’s relationship with God. To Salieri, Mozart has God’s love. Amadeus after all means God’s love. God has chosen him to speak through, Salieri thinks, so he curses God and turns his back on Him. In the movie, Mozart has his own demons (like the crushing pressure of pleasing his father) but mostly focuses on his work, while Salieri focuses on what Mozart is doing. He becomes obsessed with Mozart’s gift and can’t seem to focus on his own, on what talents he does have, he simply wants what Mozart has. It’s a matter of outward-looking and inward-looking. This is such a common thing amongst artists, perhaps everyone really. We forget how unique our own voice is, and get hypnotized by someone else’s talent. 

Sometimes the only thing my brain can muster is the thought, I want to write. But I need quiet days for it to develop into ideas, for me to unravel my insides to put them on paper. It feels more like a shout though, the thought, like this: I WANT TO WRITE!!! 

Lately, whenever I do the dishes, or laundry, or clean I turn on Spotify to listen to Leslie Jones's memoir on Spotify, “Leslie F*cking Jones”. It is laugh-out-loud funny, but also incredibly encouraging to read (listen) to another artist’s journey. There’s a part in chapter 4 or 5 (on audiobook she goes sort of off book) she remembers telling Jamie Foxx (before he was super famous) when she was nineteen that she just wanted to do comedy. “I JUST WANT TO DO COMEDY,” Jamie told her she didn’t have any material yet, that she was only nineteen years old and needed to go out and live life first. So she did that for six years, lived life. I understand this now. When I was in my early twenties, I just wanted to desperately write. I remember I read Mary Karr’s book about memoir writing. She said something like young people could not write memoirs. That you needed age, time, distance, and experience. I got so mad. I threw the book and then later donated it. I still haven’t read anything by her since, but maybe she was right. I needed time. I am glad I did not publish the things I was writing then. It wasn’t crafted work, it was just me dumping on a page. 

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I sit and doodle as I am taking a client call. I ask him what he is looking for in an apartment. He says anything from a studio to a 1 bed to a 2 bed. “Something nice. You know, bright and airy, nice wood floors, updated appliances. I dont want anything too big or too small. I also want bills included.” I kept asking questions to try to get as specific as possible, it is sometimes a hard task to find someone an apartment when they dont know exactly what they're looking for or when what they are looking for just doesn’t exist right now. He asked if I was a realtor or an apartment locator, and I said I was both. “Oh Good! You’re a realtor too! Because some of these apartment locators are just cockroaches. They’re everywhere. I had one person tell me they couldn’t work with me after I told them I didn’t like their options, can you believe that!?” I forced a laugh and a smile. “That’s so crazy.”

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I’ve been discarding things of myself to see who remains. I feel like I’m on the edge of something. I feel big change is around the corner, if not already here. I can feel myself shifting. Endings are near, but that must mean so are beginnings. I drive my 95-year-old grandpa and 90-year-old grandma from my mom’s house to my aunts. They are in town from Mexico. Abuelita has pretty severe dementia, and Abueltio is now folded in half, closer to the floor than not. I drive for 20 minutes while Abueltia asks me every few seconds, where we are going, why it’s cloudy, where her stuff is, is that her purse or mine, what grade I’m in and who am I. I repeat the answers over and over like a game, almost beating her to the punch. She tells, “Ay, estoy mas dormida que despierta.” It means she feels groggy like she just woke up, but I take the translation literally and wonder if that’s what having dementia feels like, to be more asleep than awake. My abuelito is quiet in the front seat. He is looking out the window and making “oooo” and “ahhh” noises like a child. He sees a train and reminds me that’s what he used to do for work. I can see the memories flood his brain. I feel like I am driving precious cargo, I am careful not to go too fast, and not to brake too hard, I want to drive as smoothly as possible. I am transporting two people who made my whole life possible. The matriarch and the patriarch. If my abueltio didn’t weld train parts for 30 years, would I be here? If he hadn’t been pulled out of school in 3rd grade to go work to care for his family, would I be here? In a way, everything leads back to them. 

I talk to my mom for an hour after, and we laugh and cry at their little quirks now. She tells me how hard it is to care for aging parents with dementia. She tells me how again, they return to being her whole world, like when she was a child, except now she is the one caring for them. She sighs. I know there is not much I can do to comfort her. But I can sympathize. I can see the sadness, on both ends. To watch someone you love die, and to be the one dying. All our worlds are changing. This feels like the process too. You can’t skip this part of life, not really. I realize how much more meaningful this is, this conversation with my mom, this relationship with her despite our rocky one growing up. This matters. 

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I am sitting outside, the heat is biting. Another rainstorm is supposed to hit soon. It’s starting already. But the sun is so strong, even the sprinkle of raindrops burns.

Lens fog from stepping outside into the humidity from the cold AC

With love,

Your friend in the swampy waters of Houston

P.S. For some reason I feel it necessary to tell you that this substack name is changing, has probably changed once you read this. I dont know when I heard the French idiom, “être fleur bleue” which directly translates to blue flower, but is meant to mean to be sentimental, or soppy, or romantic, etc. It just stuck. Feels true to me, and more true to this newsletter than what I was trying to be with “selected chronicles” (which was serious and elite) — maybe the name and newsletter will continue to evolve, or maybe I will try to incorporate both in the future, I hope you stay with me through it all.