summer vacation

This is the reality. I can no longer mask it with behaviors or relationships.

Today this school year ended. 

I have been in an unhealthy pattern lately. Think i've put on about 5 pounds.  Thing is, I feeel nasty. LIke just full of artificial flavors and dairy and nasty bloating feeling. I haven't had so little control on what I put into my body before. Remember how cooking for yourself makes u take care of yourself, less likely for crap to get into clean food from your kitchen. Since I live here and they pay for my food.... u get the idea. 

I notice myself eating when not hungry now, saying I won't eat fried foods and then eating them and drinking beer (its the World Cup!!!) I should practice forgiveness....

But underneath there is a feeling like that my body is changing. Even tho i'm not pregnant i'm getting fat more easily, and in that weird post-30's way where I almost look like .... bumpy? Like random new crop of love handles, almost like a second floor of love handles. Like my width has just expanded.

In a way I haven't experienced before. 

I am finishing the most intense 6 months of my life. .... intense? Yeah, a total change. From my old life in MA to my 'new life' here in the Hudson Valley. 

Ma = where so many things were no longer working

HV= closer to where I grew up, a feeling of being closer to my roots. Closer to josie/ jen/ NYC.

I quickly starting making very poor decisions. The big one outshines all the others. This mistake was more about feeling lonely and alone.... seeking love and approval from the worst possible source. Yeah. I won't go there. There is a mistake that would have gotten me fired and also potentially put in jail.  That awkward moment where a gravity of a situation hits you. Like Alex at UMass, how clearly out of line that all was. Employee/student relationship, or rather jizzing in his pants-ship. But that was so 2006. It is 8 years later. Can u believe it? And what has dear Tami learned. In fact that little seed of rebellion didn't fade with age or maturity. It's right there, wedged in some old wound, maybe some daddy issues and absence of self-regulation with a splash of self-destructive tendancies. Right where I left it.

So there's that. I always thought if I made it to this point I would thank my guardian angels and I wouldn't fuck up again. I don't want to. 

What this change has given me is financial independence, stability, and a professional challenge. All things I wanted.  

This is why I feel the impulse to stay at home until something that makes me feel good makes me emerge. Not this young man with emotional problems. Not this person who is out of his touch with his emotions and wants to get high all the time.  Getting high.... I have my own vice of that, don't need another manifestation of avoiding my emotions. This ass is getting so fat!

More l8er

June

That awkward moment where you wonder if you are happy in your life. 

Like, if any of it makes sense to you. That you are living on a boarding school campus, free of students for the summer, and have to see your colleagues fat asses and disapproving glances yet still. 

More and more women on facebook seem to have babies for their profile pictures.... weddings are happening under fabulous weather. 

Going to a bar alone still an exercise in not-fucking-losing-your-shit. Just let me watch my world cup match and not feel the need to ask me if I have kids or why I am single at 32 or where I lived in France and why I am a vegetarian.

I know: I am the one responsible for setting the boundary to me and the outside world. It just feels like lately, I have very low skills in this department. Maybe a reflection of my level of self-confidence? 

There is this young person. There was a string of bad decisions. There was awareness of self-sabotaging behavior. Inexplicable, it seemed. There is a feeling that I am harboring a seriously lethal secret. Me and my dance 

Do I like the Hudson Valley? I cannot tell. I just had a slew of negative interaction with rednecky type of dudes talking down to me at AutoZone, which is clouding my positive open feeling toward to the Valley. Route 9, you feel like a foreigner.

It's just been this kind of school year. Doing my job really passionately and having just a few negative colleague interactions. This feeling that I am giving so much to my job only to have "nothing" come summer vacations.

I got a job teaching for 3 weeks on campus. I'll be making pretty good money. Enough to warrant going on a special kind of travel/ vacation experience in August. I look around however, and it's like "with whom"? I am increasingly feeling like I somehow landed myself on a solitary raft off the coast of an island. You know when you are looking away and somehow your boat gets really off course. Like, almost irrevocably.

Some random thoughts for today. I feel like it's been awhile since I really felt like I was living at the edge of my being. I look around at my surroundings. I am constantly "at work". It is the most unsexy. The most uninteresting. The most fucking uninspiring.  And it is within my power as an adult with valid skills, sass and class to evaluate these conditions and how they are serving me. And opt for a change in either   situation or perspective.  Happy summer everyone especially to fellow boarding school faculty.