Chapter 137: Wishing Heart

It seems like I am pretty quick to label my days in this blog right off the bat as either good or bad, or just plain boring. I’ve talked a lot in this blog about the fact that I have been pretty irritated with how boring so many of my days have been recently but I am beginning to think that perhaps the days are not as much the problem as it is my perception of them and quickness to label them as “just another boring day.” Today was a perfect example of that because, depending on the way I chose to perceive it, it could easily fall into any of those categories. The day started off pretty good. I woke up at 7:45am, about 15 minutes after my alarm went off, and brushed my teeth and washed my face, then smoked a cigarette and was ready to workout. The only negative part of my initial waking up experience was the fact that my alarm didn’t actually go off because my phone somehow froze in the middle of the night and stopped charging or functioning at all. Not only did my alarm not go off, the phone also only had two bars of battery power in it. It wasn’t anything severe, though, and I just plugged it back in and let it charge until time to leave for work. I had bigger concerns at that moment, namely my first workout in over a week. I wasn’t quite sure what I should go for, music-wise, for today’s workout but through some random last minute inspiration I decided to go with Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits album. Let me just say that Britney Spears is not somebody who is an inspiration to me by any means but as a gay man and a lover of pop music, I have a healthy respect for her work. Regardless of what has gone on with her personally she has managed to consistently release some of the most fun, catchy, upbeat pop music you can find. Is it the best music you can find? It certainly is not. It lacks any real emotion or artistry but it is always good when you’re in the mood for something fun and catchy and upbeat. Those are all vital in a good workout soundtrack. It worked out well for me, too, and the workout today went really well. It was a lot more intense than anticipated, but I suppose that is to be expected considering how long it had been. I had a little trouble cooling down from the workout, but I did eventually and headed to the bathroom to get dressed and do my hair and makeup for the day. As far as makeup goes, I decided to try something new today. Last night, while going through my Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga appearances on the DVR I happened to watch Gaga’s appearance on Oprah again and was very taken with her makeup look on there, so I decided to recreate it for myself today. It was a pretty simple, kind of understated look using a very light shade of purple across the lid and a darker purple in the crease and the inner corner of the eye. I loved it and felt very pretty today. With the workout, the makeup and a fully charged phone by the time I left the house, I was feeling really good.

Then as we were leaving the house, my Mom and I kind of started discussing the fact that the management of our apartment complex had approved for us to sign another year’s lease without the rent going up at all, as it was initially supposed to. I had been so relieved when I got that news on Friday and felt like one of our potentially major problems had just been solved for us. I was telling my Mom that I feel like we need to get down there and get the new lease signed as soon as possible. Then my Mom dropped a little bit of a bombshell, or a potential bombshell, on me. She said that she wanted to wait to sign the lease because she wanted to talk to the management first and find out if we absolutely had to sign a year-long lease, or if it is possible to only sign a six-month one. My immediate reaction was, “WHAT THE FUCK,” because unless she has been hiding something from me there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t sign the lease for another year. Then she said that she has been looking for another job, which I have known, but that she is not only looking for another job in this area. I’m not going to lie I felt like this was complete bullshit. I was extremely upset particularly considering so much of the reason why I decided not to move to California was because I didn’t want to put her through having to stay here alone. Come to find out, at least from what she was implying, she is sitting here considering jumping ship and leaving me to fend for myself. It just really pissed me off because I thought it was kind of understood that neither one of us can really manage to live on our own at this point and we were both dedicated to sticking together until we are in better positions. We wound up fighting about this all the way to work. I just can’t imagine surviving on my own right now. I’m sure I could manage to sort it out somehow financially but I also feel like I would be pretty miserable, much like I was imagining my Mom being miserable if I moved to LA and she stayed here on her own. It just seemed incredibly unfair to even be considering trying to move off somewhere else. When we got to work and were riding up the elevator I said to her, “So, basically, you’re telling me I need to start thinking about how to live by myself?” and she denied that but I told her that if she is thinking about going somewhere else then obviously that IS what she was saying. We parted ways at the elevator and basically both walked away mad.

It wasn’t until I got to my desk that I realized that I was missing something: My bag. If there is anything that is absolutely essential to my day at work it is my Calvin Klein messenger bag – it carries all of my materials to keep myself entertained and keep my creative juices flowing all day long while I am at work. It also included all of my stuff from my music lessons and my new sheet music notebooks, which I had mentioned last night I was really looking forward to working on this morning at work. Not having my bag with me left me feeling really kind of naked and lost. I was already overly emotional after fighting with my Mom without a resolution and not having my bag kind of put me over the edge. I basically sat there freaking out in silence. I wrote a couple of new songs, on random loose paper I had on my desk and eventually asked my sister if I could run downstairs to check and see if my bag was in the car. Since I was freaking out so much, I decided to smoke a half of a cigarette while I was outside to calm my nerves a bit. When I got to the car, I found that my bag wasn’t in there. I figured I must have left it at home. That is just so out of character for me to do, and I just felt really out of it. While in the car, I text messaged my Mom to say that I left my bag at home and to see if she could run me home on one of her breaks to get it. I also used that text message to apologize for freaking out so badly earlier. I know that she needs to do what she needs to do and I can’t always expect to be a deciding factor in those things. It’s still an extremely upsetting concept that I am having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around, but I also understand that my reaction was extremely selfish and probably more than a little melodramatic. While I was sitting in the car, with a cigarette in one hand and my phone in the other, I noticed one of my co-workers passing by, walking to the CVS across the street on her break. She gave me a smile that was hard to read and waved. I wasn’t sure if her smile was like, “Ha, I just caught you screwing around when you’re supposed to be working,” or if it was just a regular smile. I’m not overly concerned about it, but I just really don’t want to become that person that all of my co-workers decide to hate and gang up on. I don’t see any reason why I would but stranger things have happened. I know how these people talk about everybody behind their backs and I don’t really want to become the next person that they are all talking about. We’ll see, I suppose. I just try so hard to get along well with everybody but lately I have been keeping to myself more often than anything else while at work and it does concern me that people will see that as me being a bitch or thinking I’m better than others. As I discussed last night, I worry that I do come across as if I think I am better than other people or like I think I am more than I am. As much as I may joke about it sometimes, I do not think that way at all. I’ve just been so focused on my creative work lately, particularly while at work, that I just haven’t been the most social person in the world. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter that much to me what the people at work, or anywhere else, think of me but I also don’t want to create negative situations for myself. Like I said, we’ll see.

It took my Mom a long time to respond to my text message once I got back upstairs and I kind of took that as a sign that she was still pissed off. When she finally did respond, though, she said she was sorry and that she wouldn’t leave me in the lurch or suddenly go without giving me time to prepare or anything. I still absolutely HATE the idea of it, but that puts my mind at ease a slight bit… Sure, it’s the slightest amount of ease possible but it’s better than nothing. When 11:30am rolled around, I saw my Mom come up and talk to my sister, so I figured she was on break. She walked away before I could get approved for break, as well, but I managed to catch up with her and we ran home and grabbed my bag and got me to feel complete again. We also talked a little bit and I was starting to feel a little bit better about the world. When I came back from my break, I pulled out my sheet music notebook and the loose sheets that Viktor had given me at the last two lessons and spent the next portion of my day copying them into the notebook. I feel like I have picked up the G Clef really well, as evidenced by how well I seemed to know them in last week’s lesson, but I’m feeling a little less confident about the F Clef. I think I know it pretty well – they aren’t overly complicated. I think I will spend parts of tomorrow and Wednesday studying up on it a bit more, though, to make sure I really have it down in time for this week’s lesson. I also gave my sister some gas money today for driving me to my lessons the past couple of weeks. She seemed to really appreciate that and I was very glad to do it – after all, she is going extremely out of her way to drive me down there each week and it is only right that I contribute in some way. Copying those into the new notebook was a very good way to pass a little time, though, and a really good way to kind of review the work I’ve done so far in my lessons. I am really excited for this week’s lesson, as well. I just love my piano lessons, honestly. Not only do I feel like I am FINALLY really learning something about writing music for myself but I also just have a lot of fun there. It really is one of my favorite things in the world right now.

The rest of my day at work, between calls and such, was spent kind of mapping out my YouTube show. I came up with a basic outline for the way I want the show to go and then used that outline to write out a sample script for the first episode. Yes, I have finally decided who the subject of my very first “Weekly Inspiration” will be. I am not going to reveal it here, because I kind of want it to be a surprise, but I will say that I figured out the perfect person to start the series off. While thinking about the whole thing, I figured out a person who not only embodies everything that I want the show to be but who has also been one of the biggest inspirations to me for pretty much my entire life and has probably influenced me more than anybody else has throughout the course of my life. I’m sure you can come up with a lot of guesses just based on that but you will have to wait and see. The sample script I wrote up came out really well, I think, and now I just have to re-write it to make it flow a little better, do a minor bit of fact-checking online and come up with ideas for the visual presentation of it all. I am really excited to get started on this. I am hoping to have the first episode all set and ready to go by next week. It is pretty exciting and I really can’t wait to get it all put together and share it with the world. I know it probably won’t wind up going very far but I think it will be a really good experience for me to put it all together and really get started on this project. It should be a lot of fun and hopefully will help some other people find the type of inspiration that I have managed to find for myself.

After work I came home and decided to make dinner to have ready for when my Mom got home. I also decided that it would be a good surprise to bake up some of these delicious cookies that I had purchased from a friend/co-worker recently from some school fundraiser. They were selling those giant tubs of Otis Spunkenmeyer cookie dough and I bought these amazing “Strawberry Shortcake” cookies, as well as “The Pink Cookie,” which is a chocolate cookie with pink M&Ms for chips with a portion of the proceeds going to breast cancer research. The cookies came out delicious, as did dinner, and I was stuffed but very pleased to have done something to make my Mom happy after her day at work. We sat down and watched “RuPaul’s Drag Race” together, which has become a bit of a Monday night ritual since the current season started, and just had a lovely time over a lovely meal, not to mention all the lovely drag queens. No matter how the morning was, I would say that the day wound up pretty great. Sure, there has been an element of uncertainty added to a very big part of my life but I also feel like it was good that my Mom was at least honest with me about the whole situation. Like I said, I think it was a pretty good day all around. The main reason that I feel that way, looking back on the day at this point, is because I have made the decision to perceive it that way. I could just as easily have chosen to perceive it as a really terrible day but what good would that really do? I am listening to “The Very Best Of Lisa Loeb” as I write this and am trying to select one of these songs for the title of this chapter of the “Story,” and based on my perception there are two options I could go with – the first would be “Bring Me Up,” a song about feeling low and all alone in the world and just wanting somebody to bring you back up, or I could go with “Wishing Heart,” a song about facing uncertainty and choosing to follow your heart. “Wishing Heart” wins out, of course, because no matter how natural it may feel to beat myself down and go with something focused on the low points of the day, it is not my personality. I have always said that I am nothing, if not hopeful. Like the Lisa Loeb song, I have a “wishing heart.” “If it doesn’t brush my should and it doesn’t beat my heart, that’s not what I want, no, that’s not where I will start, I never kissed somebody so that they would break my heart, that’s not what I want, no… if you don’t know what you’re missing because you don’t know where to start just follow your wishing heart.” That is great advice, Lisa Loeb, and I am going to follow it. For now, though, it is 12:47am and I should really be getting to bed. I have to get up in the morning and workout again, so I’d better get myself rested up. Good night.