In this house, my bedroom is a shoe box in shape and size, presenting a spacial challenge which makes me realize: Woah, I have a lot of stuff, without much floor area in which to store it.

After many weeks of hours of rearranging my furniture, and purchasing various space-friendly storage units which, due to my exceptional lack of floor, have been rendered inaccessible in my current room situation, I decided to prop up my bed so that it is a foot and a half taller than normal, and store things underneath.

As a result ... MY BED IS FUCKING HUGE!

When I'm next to it, it is the height of my heart. Man, that sounds like it should be a metaphor, but I'm being literal. Like, the top of the mattress comes to the top of my heart. Shit ... that still sounds metaphorical. IT'S NOT. Stop lookin'.

I love having the bed this tall. When I'm on it, everything looks little, and the view out of the big window in my room is different from what I'm used to, and I feel like King Of All I Survey. Paradoxically, when I sit on the edge and dangle my legs off the side of the bed, I feel like a tiny kid.

However, since propping the bed, I've had difficulty sleeping. It's weird: I've always loved heights, and have gravitated toward the top bunk when I've had a choice. Moreover, I've never had much trouble sleeping. I often hate going to sleep, and usually stay up far past my advisable bedtime, but once my brain makes the decision to go to bed, my body usually follows through.

But the very night of my renovations, I slept only long enough to have a really disturbing dream incorporating the song "Unchained Melody," and the visions of dribbling eyeballs and razors embedded in tunnels of hair.

END OF DREAM RECAP. I mention it only because having dreamed is the only proof that I had a wink of sleep that night. Like, I went to bed, and laid there for a long while, thinking that maybe my entire circulatory system had staged a coup against my heart which was POUNDING ON THE INSIDE OF MY RIBCAGE as if knocking in desperate attempt to escape my body, and all of a sudden it was sunrise. And my heart was still pounding when I got up.

Since then, it's been continually difficult to sleep through the night. Dude, I thank my lucky stars that I've never been an insomniac. It makes me feel crazy. Insomniacs out there? God. Go, you. I don't know how you deal. Just one night of not sleeping throws off my poop schedule for weeks.

Knowing that previously I've never had much trouble sleeping, while in my involuntarily awakened state I decided to breathe and take stock of my life and try to weed out what might be keeping me awake. I found nuthin. Well, nuthin' new. I;ve always been kind of neurotic, but my tiny brain-spinning "issues" seldom kept me awake before.

What's more, these past several months I've been very conscious of how goddamn HAPPY I am. If you, like me, picture "happy" as something warm and encompassing and golden, that's the kind of happy I've been. Not manic, not amused, not glad, just happy. Like things are correct in the big picture.

Things seem to be lining up in a big good way. I'm happy with where I live, with my friends, with my relationship, with my career. Hell, even my stupid "While I'm in grad school" part-time job is fitting in well. From where I stand my future looks scary, in that despite my optimism I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it's interesting and fun and FUCKING GOOD (where "good" is something that makes my brain and body fit together, finally finally), and I'm generally confident that whatever might happen, this-right-now is where I'm supposed to be. And the decisions I make from here will still make my life good in the long run.

God, I hate such platitudes. But it's good when they actually apply to me, and especially when it seems to happen by accident. Like I've been sneaking up behind myself with a pillow pole to pound myself over the head, yell "LUCKY BITCH!" and run away. And I sit there recovering from the padded blow and say, "Well, that was weird." And maybe that's been happening for a while, but I was too distracted by my neuroses to incorporate it into my actual life, goddamnit.

You know, it's kind of a shame that I haven't been writing more often since moving to California. I know I say that every time these entries surface, and it's usually induced by guilt due to the sparseness of my entries. I've realized that guilt has been a main driving factor in my sheltered, privileged life up 'til the past couple of years when I've decided to face the guilt issue, and every other issue, head-on. But perhaps because of the surfeit of entries, resulting from not knowing why I didn't want to write, I realize that in the past, my writing here was out of longing and loneliness for many unnamed and shamefaced things.

I venture to say that a factor of many (not all) bloggers is that we write to create ideal character versions of ourselves. Not untrue versions, just glamorous caricatures. I have never lied about anything that I've written here, though I have definitely curtailed my blablabla so that I maintain some kind of control over what I disclose. My friends and family have been how I've described them, as have been my anecdotes and my broad associations. Even though I sometimes reread my accounts of everything and cringe over how saccharine and/or melodramatic I make it out to be, I know I've always been honest, and that I'm lucky that the edited version of myself has come out to appear as lucky as my real self truly is.

Point being, in writing about myself here, I think that before, I created a version of me that I could envy, and that this helped me to distance myself from inner smidgens that I didn't want to talk about, and to see, in the written word. Most of what I did and said and thought fit into who I wanted to be. In the past couple of years, whether it's been because of attending grad school for something I know I want to do, or because I've actually allowed myself to fall fully totally untragically in love, or because I live in a location so beautiful that every morning when I walk to the bus stop I think to myself, "Holy shit ... I LIVE HERE," I feel more like myself than I ever thought I would.

I like to paint myself as someone who is completely free-spirited; but the fact is that the risks I've taken, while huge, have been very well educated and calculated. I have remained attached to my roots, largely because my family is awesome and the people I have known for my whole life will always welcome me, and I will welcome them. This has given me an anchor and a fuckload of privilege throughout my semi-gypsyish adventures from the east coast to the midwest to the west coast and to the beyond, and this makes me neither better or worse than anyone else, but it certainly makes me lucky. I have a solid foundation.

The other day, while hanging with one of my oldest friends, I said that if I kept taking the educated risks I've taken over the years, according to the way things have panned out I might become "One Of Those People Who Is Actually Happy" instead of just thinking I was happy because I was cushiohed under a blanket of goals that I had previously spread out. She laughed. I laughed, too, because I didn't realize what a huge statement that was until she laughed.

Okay, right now? I am hating how self-helpy, how new-agey, all of this sounds. But it's been said, so fuck it.

I like writing here, and so I'm hoping to find myself in a place where I'm comfortable writing the day-to-day bullshit I used to write. To write more regularly would mean that I'm bridging the gulf between who I wanted to be and who I am, and incorporating the sense that those two Kellys are not so disparate.

I'm not a "different person" now or what-the-fuck-ever, and I don't really think that's how it works, no matter who you are, unless you develop some pretty serious amnesia.

I just want to make writing fun again. So that I'm no longer writing because I think I should, or because I've compiled a backlog of decent stories that I'd like to tell you but I've waited too long to make the actual writing fun, or whatever.

Oh, my goodness, I'm tired. This bullshit was boring and heavy-handed, so ... I'm sorry. I think I'll go to bed now. I did manage to sleep through the night last night, and I'd like to tackle that goal tonight as well, even though it's already so late.

And here we go back to my bed, which I guess is the height of my heart. I thought I'd escaped a metaphor. Motherfucker. MOTHERFUCKER.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Days and Nights - 10.01.07

Eye-Boners - 07.20.07

Something About My Big Frickin' Bed - 07.11.07

Summertime Fix in Hawaii - 06.12.07

About Zigs - 04.26.07

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