I have a complicated relationship with my stuff. By "stuff" I don't mean "issues". I have a complicated relationship with my issues, too, but that's why they're my issues, so it hardly merits a mention. No, I mean material goods. My relationship with them (to them? since they're inanimate, right?) is complicated which, I guess, makes "stuff" one of my "issues".
See? Complicated.
We got knocked up young. By "young" I don't mean "pregnant teen", I mean "hardly employed, living in group house, no savings, no plans except to make music and arts and friends and, apparently, a baby." We were, to put it mildly, fiscally unprepared. It took a great deal of tears and terror and sweat to make us fiscally prepared to parent. We are now fiscally prepared to parent. She's nearly thirteen. For the first half of her life we relied heavily on others for every type of support you can imagine. It took the proverbial village to raise not only our child, but us as well.
There was a time in my life when I was kind of a hardcore consumer. I was a somewhat sedentary suburban kid, so there wasn't much more to do than purchase and consume. If I sit for a moment and quiet my mind, I can still summon that purchase! consume! rush that was all too familiar in my youth. I was ravenous for the things that would shape my life, would define me, would make me interesting. I became a discerning shopper, with a keen eye for the precise external elements I would to employ to tell the rest of the world that I was intriguing! and worthy of their attention!
I was also, incongruently, pretty into Jesus. I was raised in a big, supportive Presbyterian community. Camps and ice cream socials and canoe trips and cantatas and lock-ins and mission trips. The Jesus that appealed to me was more the one who was totally into love and peace and sharing and not judging. I felt like a total weirdo back then, as an adolescent, and this Jesus offered hope that maybe people might accept me anyway. I was way less into the Jesus who said he was the only way into heaven. I was pretty into Gandhi, too, and couldn't reconcile that Jesus thought Gandhi should go to hell. This seemed to not jibe so much with the love and peace and sharing and not-judging Jesus, but try as I might, I couldn't find the Provisional Gandhi Dispensation in any of the church's teachings.
Then came punk, specifically DC punk. The Church of Dischord, I like to call it, because it called to me in much the same way I imagine people feel called to a religious order. I will say unequivocally that I don't condone the violence and misogyny often associated with punk. Like christianity, I think punk is too often characterized by the ideas and behaviors of a rowdy minority. Though it's safe to say that by the time punk reached me I was on the road to apostasy, I felt some resonance between the teachings of Jesus and the ideas of some of my punk heroes. This was particularly true of punk's approach to materialism.
The idea that we are not defined by the things we own was earth shattering for that younger me. Liberating, too, as I felt caught in a cycle of buying the exact things my schoolmates and the television prescribed for acceptance, and still feeling pretty lame. Though I noticed clear "conformist" trends early on in my experience with punk, it was soon clear that a t-shirt-and-jeans (void of any discernible branding) combination was punk's great equalizer. This was of great comfort to me. Before punk, I hadn't noticed Jesus' eschewing of material goods all that much, because there weren't malls and cars and Swatch watches in Nazareth. What was there to eschew, really?
My late teens and twenties became a process of throwing off the materialism of my youth, a process with which I continue to struggle. Our many years of living below the poverty line were a blessing, in that regard. My adoration for thrift stores, for the gleaner lifestyle, is both a help and a hindrance at times. We buy new when we must, but most often we're a salvage, reuse, repurpose kind of family. We're often the last people to own something before it's obsolete. There are all sorts of romantic ideas mixed up in there for me, regarding wabi-sabi and minimalism and my responsibility as an inhabitant of this earth, but I don't really need to go into those here.
How does this relate to our travels? We bought a new(to us) car that is the fanciest thing I've ever owned. It is a very practical purchase. Considering that we live through Michigan winters and want to drive thousands upon thousands of miles and carry camping equipment, this is the best car for us. Great gas mileage, enough room for gear, handles decent in snow. These are the things I need to remind myself in order to gain comfort with what feels to me to be an extravagant purchase. It's not extravagant, by most definitions, unless you've been drinking Punk & Jesus kool-aid with religious fervor for twenty-five years.
It's the good kind of kool-aid, though, the kind that you buy at the Co-op, made with all-natural ingredients, so that's OK, right?
June 29, 2011
June 21, 2011
Baby, You're Much Too Fast
This venture is not without anxiety for me.
I spent most of my summers in a car or a tent or a pop-up trailer or on a train. My parents were both educators, my father was a high-school counselor in Detroit for forty years and my mother a music teacher in Livonia. Summer vacations were a melange of historical landmarks and state parks. I look back on it as dreamy. Our family, free of stuff and obligation, whiling away the warmer months in exotic Hershey, PA or Interlochen, MI. I was always a little bit dirty and covered in bites and scratches. I bought pressed pennies and pencils filled with rocks, lived on jawbreakers and jewel-toned rock candy. I killed so many books of Mad Libs.
"You were a mess," my Mom told me recently, when we were reminiscing on our summers with an eye on our upcoming trip.
"A mess?" Dirt? Bites? Scratches?
"Yeah, you never slept the night before we left. You were always anxiety-ridden about travel."
"Um, what? I LOVED to travel."
"No. No you really didn't."
And then it came back to me. That time on July 4 in Philadelphia. I was over-tired and it was four hunnerd degrees and we'd just finished scaling the Rocky stairs to the Rocky statue and watching fireworks and we were heading back out of town to our campsite and I was SOBBING, positive that I would fall out the car onto the interstate and my parents wouldn't come back for me.
"It was nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy." Mother loves me, this I know, for her dry countenance tells me so.
And then I remembered the time in some big old stately square in Boston when I saw a woman fall off her bike onto a small child. I was eating prime rib. There was a clear association in my leettle mind between the violence of the accident and the violence of the prime rib. I completely lost my shit. I could not eat. I had dreams for years of people in that square losing body parts, limbs and digits just falling off them, and street urchins creeping out of alleys and gutters to eat the flesh. Awesome.
So it's fair to say my mother's right. (Harumph.) I have some degree of anxiety associated with travel. It's gotten significantly better over time, softened into slightly hyper Planning! Saving! Graphing! Preparing! This is somewhat difficult for me to acknowledge considering my two largest goals in life:
1. Avoid stress and anxiety at all costs
2. Travel
This travel anxiety is also at odds with one of my stubbornly held beliefs about myself: It was all that travel as a kid that helped me learn to roll with it. Sleeping in sweltering tents and drawing backseat boundaries with my brother and having to make do for a month with only the possessions I could fit in one beer case. Understanding that sometimes there will be a traffic jam and sometimes it will rain for four days and other times I won't have a choice of what I get to eat for lunch and maybe lunch will come many hours later than expected. These are the experiences to which I attribute my ability to be flexible as sands shift. In so many aspects of this particular life we have chosen, I find that to be a most valuable skill.
Mostly I know how to take everything in stride. Mostly. So why the lingering anxiety surrounding that which I desperately crave? I don't know. It could be that what remains is the ghost of the twitchy control freak I would have become were it not for being forged in the fire of Julys in the backseat of a Plymouth Volare with a much larger brother.
These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will …
I spent most of my summers in a car or a tent or a pop-up trailer or on a train. My parents were both educators, my father was a high-school counselor in Detroit for forty years and my mother a music teacher in Livonia. Summer vacations were a melange of historical landmarks and state parks. I look back on it as dreamy. Our family, free of stuff and obligation, whiling away the warmer months in exotic Hershey, PA or Interlochen, MI. I was always a little bit dirty and covered in bites and scratches. I bought pressed pennies and pencils filled with rocks, lived on jawbreakers and jewel-toned rock candy. I killed so many books of Mad Libs.
"You were a mess," my Mom told me recently, when we were reminiscing on our summers with an eye on our upcoming trip.
"A mess?" Dirt? Bites? Scratches?
"Yeah, you never slept the night before we left. You were always anxiety-ridden about travel."
"Um, what? I LOVED to travel."
"No. No you really didn't."
And then it came back to me. That time on July 4 in Philadelphia. I was over-tired and it was four hunnerd degrees and we'd just finished scaling the Rocky stairs to the Rocky statue and watching fireworks and we were heading back out of town to our campsite and I was SOBBING, positive that I would fall out the car onto the interstate and my parents wouldn't come back for me.
"It was nearly a self-fulfilling prophecy." Mother loves me, this I know, for her dry countenance tells me so.
And then I remembered the time in some big old stately square in Boston when I saw a woman fall off her bike onto a small child. I was eating prime rib. There was a clear association in my leettle mind between the violence of the accident and the violence of the prime rib. I completely lost my shit. I could not eat. I had dreams for years of people in that square losing body parts, limbs and digits just falling off them, and street urchins creeping out of alleys and gutters to eat the flesh. Awesome.
So it's fair to say my mother's right. (Harumph.) I have some degree of anxiety associated with travel. It's gotten significantly better over time, softened into slightly hyper Planning! Saving! Graphing! Preparing! This is somewhat difficult for me to acknowledge considering my two largest goals in life:
1. Avoid stress and anxiety at all costs
2. Travel
This travel anxiety is also at odds with one of my stubbornly held beliefs about myself: It was all that travel as a kid that helped me learn to roll with it. Sleeping in sweltering tents and drawing backseat boundaries with my brother and having to make do for a month with only the possessions I could fit in one beer case. Understanding that sometimes there will be a traffic jam and sometimes it will rain for four days and other times I won't have a choice of what I get to eat for lunch and maybe lunch will come many hours later than expected. These are the experiences to which I attribute my ability to be flexible as sands shift. In so many aspects of this particular life we have chosen, I find that to be a most valuable skill.
Mostly I know how to take everything in stride. Mostly. So why the lingering anxiety surrounding that which I desperately crave? I don't know. It could be that what remains is the ghost of the twitchy control freak I would have become were it not for being forged in the fire of Julys in the backseat of a Plymouth Volare with a much larger brother.
These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will not be made safer, smarter or more affordable by worrying about them. These trips will …
June 17, 2011
Shouldhead
I'm a compulsive Should-er.
Sometimes my Shoulds are pedestrian:
"I should try not to spend any more money this week."
"We should get Watty's tags renewed."
"We should totally drag all that crap from the basement out to the curb this Sunday."
Occasionally, they're insouciant:
"We should go to the beach."
"We should eat Malaysian food tonight."
"I should so totally buy a hula-hoop."
Most often, though, are the pie-in-the-sky Shoulds:
"I should go to culinary school."
"We should buy that house in Paw Paw and I should raise goats and make goat cheese which I should then use as my primary source of nourishment and you should have a go-kart track on some of the land and we should have a recording studio there, too, and also an art studio and a place for retreating which we should make available to our friends who should come out and stay for weeks at a time."
"We should retire in Ireland."
Shouldn't I say "Could" instead? Could is nicer. Friendlier. More hopeful. Could lets in a little more sunshine, I think, rather that dooming us to the dank Michigan basement of a certain future. So these ideas for dreamy scenarios flit through my brain and are out of my mouth in the form of Shoulds before I really even realize they contradict twenty other life plans we've laid out over the last decade-and-a-half.
One such Should is the current focus of our life.
"We should try to get our kid to all of the lower 48 states before she graduates from high school."
This Should danced between us in the car one night, or hovered over the dinner table, or waved and flirted from the bed post in those drowsily batty moments just before sleep. I honestly don't know how or when it started, but here we are, boldly leaving the seventh grade behind us to embark on our second cross-country family trip.
I'm aiming to document the process here, to ruminate on my own frugality, to have a clearinghouse for travel plans and options and ideas and Coulds. OK, and Shoulds. Mostly I want to record the experience of trying to focus our remaining years as a full-time three-piece by grounding us in this quest. The days fly quicker the older she gets, so for a little while, we're going to chart our time in miles.
Sometimes my Shoulds are pedestrian:
"I should try not to spend any more money this week."
"We should get Watty's tags renewed."
"We should totally drag all that crap from the basement out to the curb this Sunday."
Occasionally, they're insouciant:
"We should go to the beach."
"We should eat Malaysian food tonight."
"I should so totally buy a hula-hoop."
Most often, though, are the pie-in-the-sky Shoulds:
"I should go to culinary school."
"We should buy that house in Paw Paw and I should raise goats and make goat cheese which I should then use as my primary source of nourishment and you should have a go-kart track on some of the land and we should have a recording studio there, too, and also an art studio and a place for retreating which we should make available to our friends who should come out and stay for weeks at a time."
"We should retire in Ireland."
Shouldn't I say "Could" instead? Could is nicer. Friendlier. More hopeful. Could lets in a little more sunshine, I think, rather that dooming us to the dank Michigan basement of a certain future. So these ideas for dreamy scenarios flit through my brain and are out of my mouth in the form of Shoulds before I really even realize they contradict twenty other life plans we've laid out over the last decade-and-a-half.
One such Should is the current focus of our life.
"We should try to get our kid to all of the lower 48 states before she graduates from high school."
This Should danced between us in the car one night, or hovered over the dinner table, or waved and flirted from the bed post in those drowsily batty moments just before sleep. I honestly don't know how or when it started, but here we are, boldly leaving the seventh grade behind us to embark on our second cross-country family trip.
I'm aiming to document the process here, to ruminate on my own frugality, to have a clearinghouse for travel plans and options and ideas and Coulds. OK, and Shoulds. Mostly I want to record the experience of trying to focus our remaining years as a full-time three-piece by grounding us in this quest. The days fly quicker the older she gets, so for a little while, we're going to chart our time in miles.
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