The goodbye girls

I should be packing, I should have been packing, doing things, like cleaning and weeding books. But I haven't. In my sincerest dorktasticness, I went to hit balls in Marin and ended up reading Harry Potter poolside, could not be wrenched from the story. Had intended to save it for the recovery after the completion of my remodel, operation new tits on Tuesday. Instead I finished it last night, then my eyeballs fell out and sought respite under the bed.

No spoilers here, but I was satisfied with the epic's conclusion.

I should have been packing and I should be packing.

Instead I spent hours with foils on my head and insufferable minutes under the dryer and spent many dollars on strands of hair. I am quite perfectly blonde with undertones of strawberry to perfume my ego. And then I wrote a sizeable check. Does anyone know of a really, really good colorist in Portland? Also someone who can manage my curls? also a good manicurist? Do they have chinese ladies in portland who speak incessantly as they competently file my rapidly growing claws - everything on me grows fast, hair, nails, ass.... How about pilates? anyone know a good pilates studio in portland? Oregon, that is.

I was thinking about driver's licenses as I was walking in the park this morning. I have several of my old boyfriend's licenses, which is probably silly in the age of identity theft, still I thought it was grandly romantic to take up that which the beloved was going to discard. Infact I have the drunk dialer's license, I looked at it this afternoon -- circa 1986, you know, back when the fax was revelutionary and we all scoffed at the nerds hunched over the apple IIe's. I have a my old passports, but I never kept any driver's licenses, there is a student ID or two floating around, from this institution or that, but as a driver, I have only ever been a californian. It occurs to me that I will have to have an Oregon driver's license. It occurs to me that I will have to register my car for new plates and as much as I have been having fun in my head playing grown up dress up with real estate online I can't imagine driving a car that belongs in Oregon, flashing my ID in a state that doesn't have sales tax nor sell liquor on Sundays. I can't imagine not being a Californian, it's the only skin I know. The years I spent in France I was an ardent and defensive Californian before I was ever an American. D'ou viens-tu? La Californie, et surtout pas LA.

I have trouble thinking that identity is as simple as a mantle to don or to shed, a sense of place is as deeply ingrained as my name, though I have long lived away from the town that I grew up in, it will always be home. I think even if my parents were no longer there, it would still be home, even if I never saw it again, it would still be home, if not in the definitive sense, then in something abstract, the notion of place. Where I could return to, and not even necessarily be welcome, but the pavement and the trees and long gone shops hold some vestage of me, like sap, like tar, like memory.

Or maybe I just haven't found it yet, the other home, in a person or a place.

I realize that most of what I have just written is the product of a relatively fortunate and happy childhood. Growing up in a small town the first thing I wanted to do was leave, but I left under an umbrella of benevolence and a rather large dollop of idyll. I was speaking to someone I had just met at a party this afternoon and we were swapping so-you-think-you-grew-up-in-a-small- town stories and his were full of a sort of abject bloodless horror and mine are full of meanderings in cars with the friends I am still close with, minus the casualties that the road and booze took, and combined they took many.

I had a point, and the point was that I should be packing, I dunno, non binding tee shirts and the like for phase II. In truth I am prevaricating because I am a little bit terrified. Now that I know what I am in for, now that I have experienced, continue to experience the trauma of alteration. Like how my sides still feel like modelling clay and as my flesh revives it fucking stings and clothes chaffe, and I should like to be suspended in jello or outer-space. So great in addition to my core having been supremely pummeled, now I get the countless sutures.....

I am not sure why I am so worked up, I want this, I am ready for it and all the rest, it's not the pain and it's not even the scarring, it's maybe the definitiveness. In terms of embracing change, this will be the herald that I carry, even if no one else can see it, it will be imprinted on my skin, it will be a talisman, more meaningfull than a tatoo. When they revive my inert system and hustle me out to my mother's car that ephemeral point of demarcation will have been penetrated. This is just me and my arbitrary set of milestones and adjustable morality, but this beyond moving to another state, this is huge. So you will pardon me if I hesitate, and if I grieve, perhaps some of you out there and far away can empathize, other will think I am just a silly, spoiled girl with body issues, all of you would be right.

For all my florid virtuousity I couldn't quite ever succinctly, efficiently verbalize that twin states of terror and hopefulness that have pitching me hither and thither, I could never effectively relay how my tits are involved, you will just have to trust me when I say that when you begin to molt all the casual markers of identity, like skins and places and breasts, it's very disconcerting to someone who is by her nature deeply loyal, and perhaps to her discredit, imagine it this way, I'd be the last mussel adhering to the dying pier that she loved for no reason other than it was the only thing that she knew.

So the letting go is in places surprisingly slippery in other it's scaling tall mountains perfectly naked and without ropes.

ps. I took pictures tonight of my goodbye girls for posteritie's sake, maybe someday when I am proficient in the internets I will post them.