The Neighbors

Good morning world!

It's getting chilly here in Greenville, and the rain has been a transitionary of sorts from the warmth hanging on to the edges of summer to, finally, a smell and nip on the air of fall.

Waking up in the morning gets tougher, too, and I wonder sometimes if humans have some natural instinct towards hibernation in the cold months. But, fortunate for my schoolwork and my mood, I woke up at 7:45AM when my alarm clock sounded and rolled out of my cave of blankets into the cold, still-dark of the apartment. I realized only after I had walked around for 30 minutes shivering in my robe that we haven't even changed the thermostat over from cool air to heat. I took care of this problem and flicked on the heat switch.

Apartment living puts one in weird propinquity with strangers, neighbors, the Indian family that lives through the wall of our bathroom. Often I hear the woman singing or humming a tune while she showers as I sit on the toilet. The bathroom door closed should give me the assurance of privacy, but listening to someone you don't know singing in the shower right behind you while you're relieving yourself is a strange sensation. This morning, I washed my face and brushed my teeth to the sound of a rough, sleep-deepened male voice, the Indian man speaking to his wife in their language about what, I tried to imagine.
"I need you to iron my shirts, they were too wrinkly last time." Or, "The guys at the office are going out for drinks after work, I'll be home a little late tonight." I imagine all the possible topics being devoid of any real emotion, because the tone in his voice is all business, no tenderness.

There are many Indian families who live in our apartment complex. They all work at the big corporate headquarters of a giant company across the busy road. The men go to work and the women can be seen walking up and down the parking lots and streets at the apartments, pushing baby strollers or carrying grocery bags. They still wear the shocking bright pink, orange and turquoise silk saris trimmed in gold from their home country. They let their beautiful, exotic children hang, run and slide at the playground until late afternoon, when they head home to prepare for the men to return from work. Most evenings, this is about the time when, if I am walking down the hallway from our small apartment, curry and saffron hang heavily in the air.

Then, when the men come home and have eaten their dutifully prepared dinner, they will all congregate in carefully pressed pastel shirts on the sand volleyball court beside the playground. A few boys are allowed to accompany their fathers to this men's club.

The women aren't slighted in this. I've seen them gathered, all watching their small children play in an alcove of a parking lot, chatting and laughing grinning their stunning grins.

This morning, I did my routine along side the family that lives in the adjacent apartment. I may have been changing my underwear while the moustached young Indian father was sipping his coffee and thinking about tonight's gathering at the volleyball court.

Sometimes I smile say "hi there" to the woman if she opens her door during the day as I walk to my car. She is only about my age but already has two children, and I feel as if I could relate to her if I tried. She only looks up as an afterthought of being polite most of the time. I realize she doesn't feel the same about us as I do.

Things That Happen to a Girl

I woke up late this morning. Late because it was 9:34AM and Daniel and I were supposed to go running at 8AM. Both of us lied there under the same thin blanket, me with no job and him putting off getting up to go in to the school and get ready for the kids coming back in a couple weeks. It's okay we woke up late, pretending we hadn't made ambitious exercise plans this morning, because we looked at each other for longer than we would have, reminding ourselves that we are lucky to love so deeply.

After he left, I pulled myself out of the bed and out in the living room to the couch at least, because I know staying in the bed will only make me sad for an empty, still-warm half of the bed. The new greyhound, Aggie, who used to be called Jeserell when she didn't belong to us, followed me close behind from room to room, her usual practice. I washed my face and put on clothes, and ate a bowl of Cheerios while I watched Curb Appeal on HGTV.

I knew I had things to do today. For one, I missed my call from the unemployment insurance office last week because we had to go to a funeral in Lexington, so I was supposed to go to the office in Greenville this morning and reschedule. Bad idea that I started out at just before lunchtime, because when I got to the place in the shit side of west Greenville it was spilling out its doors with other people who probably missed their phone appointments too. This scared me off. And the parking lot was crawling. I said to myself, I'll try again tomorrow, wake up early and beat the rush. Oh, I've tried calling. Phones are always busy.

I suppose the most important thing behind all of this, behind the motions I go through and the TV shows and the good intentions, is my sustained mood. Lately, it hasn't been sustained and it certainly hasn't been good all the time. All of what I've just told about I did while trying to hold up a fragile, self-forged feeling of okayness. I've been sad lately...no, apathetic. Nobody's fault, just a place I've fallen into and am now trying to pull myself out of. But this morning, when my eyes opened, I felt the apathy resting over me again, but I made a choice in the moment and said no to it. Of course, that isn't good enough to last all day, but it worked for the next few minutes at least, and so I knew it would be hard but I could keep making the choice to push away the bad feelings all day. I'm still trying.

Driving downtown, I heard a song by Patty Griffin, "Long Ride Home" from the Elizabethtown soundtrack, and sang with her so loud in the car. It made me feel good, so I went to Earshot and bought a whole Patty Griffin album, called Children Running Through. I'm listening to it right now, and it's different a little, different than I expected. I expected a more bluegrassy album but she has a lot of jazz and even rock influence in this one. I don't know what I think about the whole album yet but I love her voice. It helps me have nice feelings inside, which was the whole point why I bought the thing.

Yeah, I'm not really supposed to be spending money right now since my temp job as a Tech Writer is over and I'm trying to get a Library Assistant job with the Greenville Library, which is turning out to be a slow process. I'm in between a few things right now, not just jobs. I'm waiting to start going back to school again, my classes start in a couple of weeks. I'm in between video games, I guess you could say, because I've played the hell out of the Sims 3 for the last few weeks and now I'm burnt out. I guess my apathy is a feeling of waiting, being in between.

I'm getting myself through, though. I've fallen apart a couple times, cried for no reason apparent to people outside myself, like my husband. He helps me through those times as much as he can. But the difference between this time and the past is that I've been here before, and I've learned more each time how to cope.

Lesson #1: Lying in the bed alone in the morning is pretty much the worst thing to do during these times, and should be avoided at all costs.

Lesson #2: Watch some TV. It helps.

Lesson #3: Don't blame your reason for crying on something your husband did to hurt your feelings three years in the past. It will just end up making him cry too. (Yes, I did that)

There are plenty more lessons, but we'll save them.

Also, I am pretty sure I'm some sort of psychic, or whatever word for psychic you want to use to fit your worldview. It's not something I've just realized, but recently it's gotten a little freakish. I have the occasional, unexplained moments of deja vu, but I have also been able to conceptualize or guess the details of things before I even know them. For instance, and I know this is going to sound minor, but it freaked me out: I was driving to my apartment and there was a white styrofoam cup on the curb, and before I saw where it was from, something about seeing the cup made me think randomly about this restaurant called Joy of Tokyo and all of a sudden I wanted to go there. So, I got closer to the cup, and I could see red lettering and realized that it said Joy of Tokyo on the side. How many restaurants have white styrofoam cups and it just happened to be from the restaurant I was thinking about. This instance alone wouldn't mean much if it weren't accompanied by occurances of a similar nature. And it's not like I'm trying to do these things, they just happen.

Not to mention the insane dreams I've been having lately. For the past week, I have woken up early in the morning with my heart racing and the memory of dreams so real and so exhaustingly action-filled that I will just walk around in a daze for at least 20 minutes, with sounds and elaborate scenes from them reverberating throughout me. The real world doesn't even compare, neither does any fiction or film, to the adventure and the emotions I had in these dreams.

And all of this isn't the end of it. I would go into more detail, but a couple of the dreams I've had involve people close to me. I will say, however, that a few months ago, I dreamed that someone I knew (who I hadn't seen or spoken to in over a year) was going to die. Not month later, this person actually passed away.

I've only told my mother and my husband about these things. I've said to myself I wouldn't tell anyone, but it's getting weird lately, and I don't know what the purpose of it all is, or if it has a purpose at all. I'm not even sure I believe it is all linked, or that what is happening is something para-normal. I am sure that if anyone reading this blog can give me any insight or personal experience of their own that relates, I would be happy to not feel alone in dealing with it.

To close out, here is a photo of Aggie, our new greyhound, a 3-year-old girl who wags her tail all the time and still has stitches in from her recent spay:

Insert: Dream Adventure to Ireland

I woke up this morning to drive to my grandma's house in Marietta, SC, a very familiar and well-kept doublewide surrounded by flowerbeds and cats from several different litters up a mountain road. Aunt Jayne, my father's sister, and her husband Uncle Ted (who enjoys puns and traditional celtic music) were on the last day of their visit down from Raleigh, and wanted to see pictures of Ireland and hear about my trip. After I finished apologizing for not being able to show them the first half of Daniel's and my trip to the Emerald Isle because I have seemingly lost the memory card with all the pictures from Dublin, Galway and halfway across the southern coast, I pulled up the what photos on my computer I'd been responsible enough not to lose.

A week and a half ago, on Wednesday evening, Daniel and I finally made it back to the Charlotte airport where both of our mothers were waiting to pick us up so we could all ride home together. That evening when we arrived back to our apartment in Greenville, my mother gave us the news that our greyhound Nicksie had run off while she was staying with my parents while we were away. We stilled haven't found her or discovered where she is yet, and it's been really tough for both me and Daniel. She was our baby. I haven't been able to reflect on my dream adventure to Ireland without a tinge of grief nagging me about Nicksie. But this morning, while I sat at Grandma's kitchen table in front of my laptop with Jayne and Ted looking over my shoulder as I described each photograph's location and story, I was able to gather the amazing memories Daniel and I made together in the land I have dreamed of since childhood, and linger in the beauty and realness of the whole experience as I unravelled its pieces to my aunt and uncle. They went to Ireland some years ago, and could even relate to some of the impressions I got about Ireland's current culture and atmosphere.

I learned something this morning about myself, flipping through photographs nearly taken over by shaggy green landscapes and the gray stones of ruined, ancient structures. Well, actually I knew it but denied it, assuming it was a negative trait. It started with me saying what I've usually tried to say to people when they ask about the trip, something like "It was beautiful and amazing, everything you think it would be and more in the way of landscape and natural surroundings. But the culture is...well...very "westernized" and modern."

What does that even mean? Ireland is a western country, right? Basically, this is my way of saying indirectly that I expected everybody in Ireland to be into their own traditional music, know a huge list of fairytales and legends by rite Irish birth, and be entirely - somehow - quintessentially "Irish". Whatever that means.

What I learned about myself was just this: I have been imposing a personality on Ireland, for my own imagination's benefit, for my entire life. It was my Narnia, my Camelot or Atlantis for the majority of my tortured childhood as a mousey, stick-thin dark-haired girl who didn't really have many friends. I even learned songs in Irish Gaelic and sang them to myself during gym class in 6th grade. I was that weird, and not the kind of weird that hipsters claim pervaded their childhood, for which they can now be indirectly regarded as cool. Nope, I was just sort of a freak that didn't even fit in with the freaks.

You know, the kind of person who wants to go to Rome because - of course - every local has probably descended from the Greek gods in some way, because of Italian men being the most romantic ones you'll ever find, and because everybody sits in cafes drinking espresso all day, reading and thinking about the pasta and wine they'll have for dinner that night. I realized I have regarded Ireland in this way - as a fairytale land where everything is just how I imagined it would be, and that I'd fit in automatically because: I was meant to be in Ireland.

This, however winningly it got me through my imaginative yet uneventful childhood, is just not so. When Daniel and I arrived in Dublin airport and took a rather empty bus into the heavily industrial, pervasively international city, I knew I was in for a wake-up call from my dream. I was even homesick the first day and into that night, and cried over my tea in our no-lights, no-air conditioning hotel room on the second morning of our stay in Dublin. I think I knew it then, that it wasn't going to be exactly what I expected. Daniel and I discussed it, and we both decided to take things for what they are, to experience things as current Irish culture, and not what we expected Irish culture to be.

Maybe you're thinking, at this point, "Duh, Shannon! How can you not know this already?" The thing is, people who have known me all my life, like my family, expected (I believe) for my reaction upon visiting Ireland to be visually ecstatic, like my dreams have come true. Well, my dream has come true, only - it wasn't what I expected. It wasn't even better than what I expected: it was just different, but it was beautiful. For one, I never expected I would get to go there with my best friend and person I love most in the world - my husband. We did it together and, in my memory it is filed away under "Adventures with Daniel" instead of "Wishes Granted".

But, what I realized more fully this morning, was that I should not be embarrassed to admit this to anyone just because I have acted like Ireland equals heaven for my whole life. After all, if everything were exactly how we expected it to be, how could we ever discover and learn new things? This is the biggest thing I took away from my trip to Ireland.

Ireland, I discovered, is a big history casserole, where the layers are often physically visible. From the first days in Dublin, where an early Medieval castle (Dublin Castle) has been amended for many different uses over its lifespan, and is now mainly a tourist spot, to even the land itself, which tells a story in the nutrients of its soil where potatoes were (and still are) grown and the curves in the terrain shaped by millennia of human-land interaction, past ages are still alive in some way in Ireland. But, the thing is, they are valuable for what they lend to Irish history, but Irish culture as well, which is a very alive and progressive while it never forgets its roots.

I'll continue to write about my adventures in The Republic of Ireland in the future, especially so I can tell you about some of the individual experiences we had. In some way, they will inspire me for the rest of my life. But, of course (and this is the beauty of it), never in the way I expected.

A few pictures:



This is a typical western landscape. We took this picture as we drove the way from our ferry over the Shannon to the town of Dingle.



A quiet, picturesque beach on the Dingle Peninsula coast. We tried to drive off the tourist paths and find secluded, hidden places most other travelers would miss. This was one of them. Not to mention, to get to this particular part of the beach we had to climb over a wall-pile of barnacled, seaweed-covered limestone boulders. You can even see Daniel in there, walking unsuspectingly while I take his picture.

More later, I'm having trouble uploading photos right now!

Hope everyone is doing well. Don't worry, I'm back for good now so you'll be reading more of me from now on. Sorry for the huge gap (insert trip to Ireland). :)

Today

Today at work: Can’t focus, my mind is working overtime and needs some fire for all the fuel it has, but all I’ve got to do is some brainless document correcting. Sitting at a grey desk in the corner of a huge room, I glare at a computer screen under florescent lights. A tiny space heater grumbles at my feet. They keep it around 64 in this internal department of offices, beyond a warehouse and through halls, behind doors, like an inner sanctum of air conditioning. Outside it’s pushing 90 and humid as hell from all the rain we’ve had.

By the time 2PM stumbles up, I feel like I might be going a little crazy with that walls-closing-in sensation. I text scramblingly to my husband, a couple friends, with answers enough but not connecting in the way I need to this wire in my mind that seems to be shorted and sparking out its energy into cold air.

Facebook: a terrible pit of deception, artificial socialization. I don’t have a blinking curser over my head as I walk outside from my apartment, making sure everyone knows “Shannon T Greene is taking the trash to the compactor and taking the dog to pee.” If you ask me what music I like, I won’t be able to pull out a picture of the band. And precious few of us ever really look as good as we do in our profile pictures.

But, today is my last day of work for the whole month of June. Next week we make last preparations for our trip, then on Monday June 14th Daniel and I catch a plane to Dublin! I’m borrowing my mom’s camera, a very nice one, much nicer than my little Coolpix. Only the best for the Emerald Isle!

Rejecting Rejection

Today, I haven’t done much in the way of productive thinking. Productive thought denoting, in my mind, the stuff of creative process – imagining scenes, telling myself bits of story. What I have been doing is my job, which I do not think of as my work. I’ve been writing and revising training documents for a giant pharmaceuticals company, for which they pay me enough money to significantly contribute to my and my husband’s financial cares and entertainment whims. Earphones in and music in my head, I have been getting along pretty well for a day at work. The trick is not to think about any one thing for very long, especially the fact that it is 1:03PM and you can’t leave your desk until 4:30PM.

I got a rejection email from Poetry Magazine the other day. I hadn’t realized that, until I’d received the email, I’d been partially hopeful the powers that be at Poetry Mag would accept my poem and publish it among the other, much more prolific, poets within its pages. This was a foolhardy scrap to leave wandering around in my mind unchecked, because I was definitely more disappointed when I read their (very polite) rejection than I had expected.

Rejection letters/emails can’t mean anything to a writer or any kind of artist. I think, for a couple of days, I let the rejection from Poetry Magazine get me down about my work, and that can destroy you as an artist. Think about it. If you want to be a published writer you must send your writing in to be judged by whatever editors or authorities are in charge, and you will most definitely be rejected – at some point, if not most points. You can’t care. You have to be the end-all on your own work and you have to believe it’s worth something. If you don’t believe that, you have to stop creating because if your work isn’t worth something to you, it is never going to mean anything to anyone else. (Well, it will mean something to your mom.)

I was browsing the Writer’s Almanac for today, and read about the author Barbara Pym, who would have celebrated her 97th birthday today if she hadn’t have died in 1980. She started out looking to publish her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, but it was rejected by a couple publishers. After some time, in 1950, she managed to get it published, and five more novels after that. In 1963, however, she sent her publisher a novel she had just written, which her publisher rejected, claiming that her style of writing was outdated. Then, 16 years later when it seamed the only one besides her who believed in her work was the poet Phillip Larkin:

“In the January 21, 1977 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, writers and scholars were asked to nominate the "most underrated writer of the century." Pym was the only living writer who got two nominations — one from Larkin and one from biographer and scholar Lord David Cecil. And suddenly, she was famous. In the next three years, she published two novels, she was the subject of a BBC program, and Quartet in Autumn (1977), which had been rejected the year before, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Her early novels came back into print, she was published in the United States, and her work was translated into many other languages. But she had cancer, and she died just three years later in 1980.” (Writer’s Almanac)

As I read this section, I smiled to myself and chuckled under my breath at the computer screen. Barbara Pym pretty much got famous after that Times Literary Supplement edition not because her work had changed or gotten better, but because some respected and no-doubt-respectable author-personages said her writing was good. Thankfully for her and for her readers, she never let rejection stop her from creating and believing in her work.

I for one have never read any of Barbara Pym’s books, but I may pick one up in the future. She’s on “the list” (which, by the way, is dauntingly long, especially given my slow reading pace).

This post will end, for no particular reason, with a silly picture of our greyhound, Nicksie, who has a precious little ribbon tied around her head. My little girl!