If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to quote Death Cab for Cutie: “So this is the New Year and I don’t feel any different.”
I love-love-loved that back in 2005-6 when I got the album, and that sentiment still rings true all these new years later. It’s been a new year for a few weeks now, and this has all been percolating since then. I’m not going to try to sum up the last decade, but I do have plenty to deal with in the next year.
My friend Brenna’s word for 2010, her attitude, her goal, is to be “proactive.” She’s right. I need to be more proactive too. I wouldn’t have spent Tuesday crying about my student loan mess if I’d been proactive.
But my word for the year, my goal, is “balance.”
Balance has been a constant goal for me, but it’s gotten away from me lately. I made a zine a couple summers ago, and it was called “Equal Parts.” In my introduction, I wrote, “To me, ‘Equal Parts’ is about balance. My life is a balancing act: balancing between details and big pictures, consumption and creation, words and images, looking back and looking forward. It’s not about ying and yang, but I tend to get extreme and want all or nothing.” Well, my same issues still apply.
I need balance in my music collection. It’s taking up too much space on my hard drive, but I can’t bear to delete music I may want or need. As I look through for things to delete, I’m reminded of three more albums I want to acquire (which I can, thanks to Heather’s generous iTunes gift certificate). I don’t need 40 gigs worth of music, but I can think of a justification to keep almost everything, no matter how little I’ve listened to it or how long ago I feel in and out of love with it.
I’ve always felt like I listen to music wrong. I can’t balance the new stuff I get with the old stuff that I love. I just move from one obsession to the next. For no good reason, some albums languish unplayed while others are played and played and played and then forgotten. Sometimes I can’t handle anything unfamiliar, while some days all I want is to hear something new.
I need balance in my room. I am living at home, in a small room, and it is stuffed to the gills. My shelves and drawers and stands overflow with books and paper and photos and clippings and magazines and mail and crap and junk and old junk and older crap and too many clothes and art and mementos and more books and more magazines. I know I need to get rid of stuff—donate some of it, recycle old magazines, find a way to organize all my stationery and envelopes and mail and craft stuff—but, at the same time, I don’t want to waste anything.
I don’t have much discretionary income right now, and I can’t afford to buy something when I can repurpose something or save something until I need it. Plus, I go through cycles with my clothes—I can’t bear to wear something, until I’m magically able to see it with fresh eyes and I’m glad I didn’t get rid of it.
This problem is compounded by the fact that my little room must hold everything. My younger sister cannot tolerate any evidence of my presence in the house beyond my toothbrush and shampoo in the bathroom. Anything I leave in other parts of the house always ends up unceremoniously dumped in my room where it can be hidden behind my closed door. So my room is my bookshelf, my desk, my workspace, my vanity, my wardrobe, my long-term storage, my coat rack, along with where I sleep at night. Everything I own is contained within this space, and it makes me a little claustrophobic sometimes.
So there is no room for anything that is not essential, my closet cannot hold anything else, and I must stop leaving clothes on the floor.
I need balance in my relationship. We’ve been together almost a year (!) now. Sometimes all I can think about is our future: a day when we might live in the same city, or even the same apartment. Then I get scared, or I get overwhelmed by yearning, or I dread the future grievances we will encounter. I know this is not a good use of my time or energy. I am in this relationship for the long haul, but we will not get there if I don’t worry more about taking it one day at a time. I need to be doing the day-to-day work to maintain my end of the relationship and do my part to keep us together.
Sometimes I wish we could go back and revive our roles as a painfully adorable new couple, where everything was new and exciting and we’d talk until 3:00 in the morning and make out until 4:30. I need to act more like that girl, the girl from March and April, who was wondering if she was doing everything she could to make him fall in love with her, and not the girl now who takes everything for granted and cries at the smallest provocation.
With a long-distance relationship, it is easier to avoid taking things for granted, because we don’t get to see each other as often. But it’s easy for me to convince myself that the years will stretch on forever and we’ll never live together and his cat will never like me and I’ll never be able to afford to fly to Chicago and on and on and on. That’s not going to get me anywhere. A few good hours on the phone have revived my faith in us, and I’m going to be on my best behavior for my next visit, and we’ll keep going.
I also need to balance books versus the internet (the internet’s been winning), reading versus writing, worrying versus affirming, worrying versus acting. I need to balance my paralyzing discouragement regarding my lack of employment versus my desperate need for a job and money to pay for student loans and health insurance. I need to consume less and produce more, especially in terms of my blog. I’ll read hours of other girls’ blogs instead of writing a single word for my own. I’ve gotten really good at obsessing about something without doing anything about it, but that stops now.
So I’m doing what I can every day to take small steps toward greater balance. What else can I do? Here’s to a new decade! Happy New Year!
PS: Dear Ben Gibbard,
All I want from 2010 is a new Postal Service album, please.
Love,
Maggie