Zombie Blog

You may have noticed that I've been sort of inactive in the blog world of late.  Things have been busier at work than a crackhead with a jones, and I've been sorta trying harder to live life in the real world.

But for some reason, I wanted to bring this old blog back to life, in a quiet sort of way. I don't know how public I want to go with it yet; it may be nice to keep it small and local, and down to a manageable few readers. Honestly, I started to find some of the blog people tiresome, with what seemed to me to be a kind of non-stop contentiousness masquerading as "oh, i love a good discussion," when it was all actually, "Let me tell you why I'M right, and you're wrong." My favorites were the "I'm going to tell you how you feel, and what you meant, when you wrote that," fights. Don't you love people who know everything and feel like it's okay to tell you they know everything?


I've also been kind of wrapped up in getting ready for the Dood to move here, which is now merely a couple weeks away.

Shit.

I have really got to get my act together and call goodwill to get my house ready.

Wordless Wednesday

Go Here to Find Me

A pause, a breath, and the next step.

Moving over to Wordpress. Blogger is just too piggy for Blackberry.

No posts yet, but in the coming days and weeks, you'll see my new blog evolving.

On Acceptance and Apologies (a sort of Buddhist ramble)

A few months ago, I threw several hissy-fits about a couple of things
that made me very upset. At the time, they seemed like the most
important things in the world to me. I was caught in a net of "I want
it now I want it now I want it now." Want-want-want. I-I-I. That net
was woven out of threads made from the insecurities of a new
relationship, the distance between me and my new love, and the ghosts
of things that happened to me in my past.

I behaved like a spoiled brat baby, and in doing so, in one case, I
got something I asked for, but in pretty much every other situation, I
had to learn to let go of my anger about the situations and my own
suffering about them. My suffering and anger were more detrimental to
myself and to the relationship than they were helpful.

I was clearly having some sort of karmic meltdown, and my solution was
to sit down.

Now, a lot of people think meditating is the same as "brooding about
something to convince yourself of the rightness of your position."
They will say, I need to meditate on this, when actually what they end
up doing is going over the situation or argument endlessly in their
minds, formulating their arguments for why they are right (or have
been wronged) like Jack McCoy formulating his closing arguments in a
murder trial.

I did this, too. And every single time, I got myself all worked up,
again and again, over a couple of situations, and I thought, if I
could just *explain* the logic of my position more clearly, if I use
different words, then the other person will see my point of view and
things will be different. We went in circle after circle, chasing our
tails with no solution in sight.

Well, it didn't work, and the situations and people I couldn't
control, well, they were still just the same. And I was still
suffering and angry, running around muttering to myself that it wasn't
*fair*, how come everyone else is getting what they want and I keep
getting the short, shit-covered end of the stick?

Wah, wah, wah.

This was not helpful. I was so angry and suffering so much that I was
miserable (punishing myself) throughout the entire holiday season, I
made someone else miserable (punished him) through the holiday season,
and it certainly didn't do anything to help our long-distance
relationship (punished the relationship). We became tentative about
what subjects were "safe" to discuss, and which were potential
powder-kegs.

This was also not helpful, as the "agree to disagree" subjects turned
into "agree to never again bring it up" subjects. This is how couples
stop communicating and instead build up resentments that eventually
explode into laundry lists of grievances during fights.

The thing I did was, well, I sat down. And took up studying what my
favorite teachers (Cheri Huber, Pema Chodron, Thubten Chodron, Thich
Nhat Hanh, Suzuki Roshi, etc.), had to say. And I started paying
attention. What was coming up for me? What were the physical feelings
arising in me? Who, of all the aspects of my personality, was crying
out for attention? What memories were stirred by this situation? And
contrary to how I behave in my work world, I didn't say, "What action
do I need to take to remedy this situation right now?" Because as my
behavior indicated, and as I discovered in my self-examination,
sometimes the right action is no action. Sometimes the right action is
to sit still and pay attention.

I was fortunate that in many cases, I was trapped on airplanes, where
I had no choice but to sit and practice my breathing and noticing.
After you've finished your magazines and pondered the SkyMall catalog
for the fifth time wondering where you'd put that cute stone gargoyle
in your Brooklyn walkup, trust me, simply sitting and observing your
breath is like a little vacation. I sat in those airplane seats, when
I wasn't reading or sleeping, and paid attention to my breath. When I
noticed a thought or feeling, my training had me say, "thought,
feeling," and touch it lightly and let it pass. When I meditate, I
picture thoughts and feelings like balloons that float by, I notice
them, touch them with my fingertips and they float off in another
direction, out of my sight. In other words, as the Buddhists say, they
arise, and they pass. Always. I repeat, always.

What I learned (or re-learned, as the case may be) is that acceptance,
and the willingness of acceptance, is much more freeing and
joy-inducing than suffering and clinging to my "I was RIGHT and you
were WRONG" arguments.

We are conditioned that this is how to argue -- if I am right, you
must be wrong. We hardly ever look at a situation while we're arguing
and put ourselves in the other person's shoes and then walk a mile in
them. The world would be a better place if we could all be trained to
do this -- walk in someone else's too-tight, waterlogged shoes with no
socks down their gravel road. We almost never say, hmm, maybe we're
both right. Maybe, god forbid, we're both wrong.

If I were an enlightened being, I wouldn't have to keep coming back to
this lesson. Unfortunately, I'm not, so I do. And I have to go back to
sitting down, shutting up, and paying attention, noticing, and letting
things pass.

One hundred percent of the time, I am suffering because of my own mind
(or ego, as the Buddhists name it). Cheri Huber uses a mundane example
to illustrate this: I've lost my favorite mug. A) I'm very upset, it
was my favorite mug, I drink out of it every morning, my kid made it
for me, blah, blah, blah; or B) there is a whole rack of other mugs to
choose from, so I drink from one of those. Either way, the mug is
gone. It's a pretty simple, yet hardly easy, concept that can be
applied to pretty much any situation.

Acceptance is so much easier.

Acceptance does not mean that we are weak, or victims, if we accept
everything that is. This does not mean that we don't fight for, say,
basic human rights when we see inhumane things, or that we don't try
to change the things we can. This doesn't mean that the guy who lost
his leg to an IED in Iraq lays around weeping for his lost leg, and it
doesn't mean that I get pissed and cranky about overcrowded L trains
in the morning. The one-legged soldier gets a prosthetic and learns to
walk and can still lead a productive life, and I let four trains go by
until there's one with enough room for me, and I get to work a little
late. It just means accept what is and do the next thing we need to
do.

In my case, it finally sunk in that the situation wasn't changing, and
I was clinging to the idea that I was right (i.e. Good), he was wrong
(i.e. Bad) and I was also clinging to my pain and suffering because,
in my own mind, I was the heroic, long-suffering victim of his
wrongness. What a good person I must be, to do that! What a saint I
was, to tolerate such injustice!

What an asshole I was.

Since I'm on a virtually Instant Karmic Retribution plan, my own
assholishness was made especially clear to me recently by something
that was a mirror image of what I had done back in November.

BIG mirror, very ugly reflection. Honey, it was worthy of Wilde's
Portrait of Dorian Gray.

In recognition of that, I had to do something that, like most
Americans, I hate to do: I apologized. I didn't say, as our
politicians like to do, "mistakes were made," or "I'm sorry you feel
badly," you know, the standard non-apology apology. I didn't try to
justify or explain away my actions by saying, "well I did this because
you did THAT." (Though I did explain my understanding that MY OWN past
habitual, conditioned reactions to other things had driven my
behavior)

I drank the medicine of humility and yes, I screwed up my face as it
went down, and said, "I did that, and I was wrong, and I'm very, very
sorry, and I will do better next time."

And in saying it, a measure of peace came over me. Because in doing
this, I saw a path out of self-loathing that didn't require
self-aggrandizement. I don't have to bolster my own sense of being one
of God's Special Snowflakes in order to apologize or to be kind to
myself and others.

There was the recognition that my behavior was a result of unskillful
habits of my own mind that I was inflicting on someone else, and the
promise to myself to stay alert, to pay attention when those habitual
thoughts arise, and there was real freedom in acknowledging that I can
break those habits, and choose happiness over suffering. In that, I am
going to try to be kinder to myself, and others.

Cheri says (I know, I quote her a lot) that happiness is not about
getting what we want, but about wanting what we get. This is
acceptance.

Now, the recipient of my apology may very well be saying, that's all
well and good for YOU, because back then you got what YOU wanted, and
I still don't get what I want, so either way, I'm screwed. And
honestly, I don't have an answer to that. I don't know if he feels
retribution or punishment is in order. And I can't control how he
thinks or feels.

I can only be hopeful that he will accept my regret over what
happened, know that I'm sorry I did it, and trust that I will try to
do better. And that he will believe and know that when I talk about
how I'm feeling about something, that he's not required to do any
"fixing," just listen.

(Fixing is also something I do, and I'm trying to stop that, too.)

In apologizing to him, it was kind of like apologizing to the world.

I know that the person, "Aileen," who notices, touches, and releases
is not very interesting, or dramatic, or "passionate and fiery,".
She's quite boring, really. But she's also a hell of a lot nicer to be
around, and can look at herself in the mirror and appreciate what's
there, be more kind to herself, and thus be more kind to others. I'm
not seeing a superstar, but it ain't a monster, either. Just a human,
trying to do better, like everyone else.

I am grateful for this practice.

Gassho.

The Four Noble Truths of Relationships

I've been exploring and studying those who appear to have more advanced wisdom on certain things than I do.  Here's where my travels took me today:

The Four Noble Truths of Relationships:

From SUSAN PIVER:

1. Relationships are deeply uncomfortable.

Whether it’s your first date or tenth anniversary, there is simply an enormous amount of discomfort involved in relationships. We’re afraid of being hurt, disappointed, overtaxed, ignored. The interesting part is that all these things happen. This is just the way it is, even in happy relationships.

The thing no one tells you is that it’s impossible to stabilize a relationship. Yes, I really mean those italics. Impossible. The emotional exchange between two people shifts like grains of sand in the desert: some days you can see forever and some days you just have to take cover because something kicked up out of nowhere and now shit is flying all over the place. You can’t see two feet in front of you and it stings. On still other occasions, imperceptible winds cause little piles to slowly accumulate until, one day, a familiar path is altogether blocked. You just can’t tell what’s going to happen. And just like hiking in the desert, you have to be as absorbed in the present moment as you are attuned to atmospheric indicators. Woe to she whose attention to either lapses.

The bad news is you never get to where you thought you were going. You get somewhere else instead. The good news is that there’s basically no way to have a boring relationship.

2. Discomfort comes from trying to make the relationship comfortable.

At the root of the discomfort is the wish that it wouldn’t be uncomfortable, that we could eventually find the “right” person and relax. But the truth is that when you do find the (or a) right person, it’s anything but relaxing: your neuroses, their neuroses, and all the hopes and fears you’ve ever had about love flood your situation. Whether you bargained for it or not, you get introduced to your deepest self while someone else is trying to introduce you to their deepest self. It can get very confusing. But instead of wasting time trying to make it not confusing, better to dive right in and be really nice to each other as you consider the root of your own and his/her confusion. (Acting nice to each other in the midst of confusion is love. Shhh.) (PS Acting nice doesn’t always mean being all sweet and demure. But I digress.)

3. It’s the inability to create safety that plots the path to love.

True love seems to exist on some mysterious edge of its own. It can’t be controlled and when you try, it calcifies. To keep it alive, at some point you just have to let go and see what happens.

When you work with all this nuttiness, love becomes more than mere romance. It turns into something way better: intimacy. Romance has got to end, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. But intimacy? It has no end. You can’t be, “oh, intimacy, we’ve done that. What comes next?” Nothing comes next. That’s it.

Discuss.

4. It is possible to work with the uncertainty skillfully.

Instead of flinging yourself kamikaze-like into the flame of love, you can train in working with the heat. As with anything you consider important (or life-threatening, for that matter), you don’t want to just show up and hope for the best. You want to play the odds.

Applying the view of the three yanas could help.

Three Yanas

1. Hinayana
As mentioned, Hinayana teachings are about personal conduct: right speech, right action, and so on. You get your own life in order through discipline, honor, and effort. You know how to make your bed, pick up your clothes, and make it to work on time. Basic stuff, but without which everything simply falls apart. Very important.

When applied to relationships, Hinayana view could mean things like calling someone when you say you will. Being on time. Having good manners. Listening when they talk and other such radical propositions.

2. Mahayana
When you are a stand-up human being, you can extend yourself to another in a more profound way. In fact, you want to. It just happens. You could find love and actually enjoy it.

Once you get into a relationship however, you find out something pretty disturbing: you have to love them back.

For whatever reason, all the relationship books and TV shows in the world seem to be about how to get love, not how to give it–which is quite a complicated proposition. Here’s the problem: most of us aren’t looking for someone to love. We’re looking for someone to cast in the role of boyfriend or girlfriend. Central casting, send me someone who has a job, a car, and speaks English! (My stringent requirements for potential boyfriends, back in the day.) You can get as specific as you want when you send in your requisition (I need someone with brown hair who likes dogs but not cats, enjoys rowing, and has never eaten at Hooters), but eventually that person is going to break character. Then what? Alarmingly, you have to dispense with all your requirements and have a look at the actual person in front of you. You see that this person is as important as yourself. This is the very teensy-tiny beginning of compassion: when you agree not to be the most important person on earth. But that’s okay. Now you can start to figure out what it really means to love.

3. Vajrayana
If the Vajrayana teachings are about meeting the circumstances of everyday life as a potential moment of transformation, then applied to relationships it could mean something like this: Every single thing that happens between you and your beloved is an opportunity to love more. Everything. Even crappy stuff.
Just as no one can tell you how to make giving birth or spilling your coffee into an opportunity to attain enlightenment, no one can tell you how to do so when your beloved leaves you for someone else or fails to empty the dishwasher. (Although he promised he would.) Big or small, heart crushing or annoying, delightful or irritating, no matter what happens, in the Vajrayana view it is fodder for wakefulness, for love. And just as with Vajrayana meditation practices, you can read books about how to do them and even have a great person teach them to you, but at some point you’re on your own. You have to figure it out for yourself.

The willingness to try is love itself. Isn’t it?

Random and In No Particular Order, 2/23

1) On the recommendation of the good people of SUNY Optometric, after I got my extraordinarily expensive new progressive eyeglass lenses, I also bought a pair of drugstore cheaters, and damn if I don't think they have made my eyes worse.

2) The SUNY folks also showed me how to use these progressive lenses the "correct" way. So how come, every time I wear my eyeglasses, I still end up pushing them down to the end of my nose in order to read instead of casting my eyes demurely downward to read through the lower part of the lenses?

3) It's been my experience that people will trade the illusion of forward movement for actual forward movement. You can usually see this in rush hour traffic, with the folks who constantly change lanes while you trundle along in your slow lane -- you always seem to end up right next to them, even though they've been bobbing and weaving through traffic with gas-wasting bursts of road rage and acceleration. You can also observe this in airport screening lines as people swing wide on the in-and-out turns even though it's not going to get them through the line any faster. I like to infuriate the people behind me by standing at the barricade pole and not moving until the people in front of me have moved ten or so feet ahead. That big gap is guaranteed to make the guy in the suit standing behind me huff and puff while I stand there, placid and all but chewing cud.

4) I am annoyed, however, by the people who get to the front of the security line and seem genuinely surprised when they have to take off their shoes, remove their belts, empty their pockets, take off their coats, unpack their Ziplocs, and put their laptops into a separate bin. Now, talk about your truly ovine -- haven't they been watching what the fifty people in front of them have been doing? Did they think they were going to somehow be *exempt* from their walk-on part in DHS Security Theater?

5) And that makes me nostalgic for the days of gate check-in. Imagine, we're the last generation who will have ever arrived at the airport a half our before our flights, tossed our bags on the belt, gotten our boarding passes at the gate and strolled onto an airplane. I remember I once overslept and got to LaGuardia fifteen minutes before my flight. And I made it onto the plane. I had to run through the terminal like OJ, but I made it.  Hmm.  We're also the last generation who will have walked off a plane directly into the loving arms of...anyone. Remember coming out of the jetway and seeing Mom and Dad's smiling face or a nice family member

6) Vertigo update:  The ENT says my "balance nerve" is probably inflamed, which is why I'm listing to the right. She's prescribed a week of steroids, and gave me some exercises which are meant to desensitize my brain to the vertigo symptoms. They seem to entail throwing myself down my bed on my side, then sitting up and doing it again on the other side, and doing this a whole bunch of times until my brain gets "used" to it. I tried it for a few minutes last night, and hey, you know what? When you know the furthest you'll fall is your own bed, the spinny stuff is actually, well, kind of, um, cool.  Trippy.  However, Miss Kitty seems to think this is a very nifty game, too, which means she may have to be banished while this daily fish-flopping is going on.

7) Even though I haven't seen Dood in nearly three weeks, and we don't know when we will get to see each other again, I'm remarkably okay with that. And not in an "I'm suppressing my frustration oh what a good girl am I" kind of way. More of an "I'm really okay with it" kind of way.  It's as if visiting him twice at the beginning of this month solidified my confidence in the relationship in a way that his prior visits to me hadn't done.  Now I'm feeling quite okay with how things are. And when he's ready for another visit, he'll let me know. It's finally sunk in for real, somehow, that these separations are temporary, and itermittent, and how things are, and October is only seven short months away.

8) Teaching myself how to retouch photos, pixel by pixel, on the pre-loaded, prehistoric paint program on my laptop.  It's kind of fun, actually. And I don't believe it's false advertising to freshen up a photo for Facebook. I'm pretty good at it, because you'd be hard pressed to find exactly what I'm retouching. Blemishes, super-dark under-eye circles, wrinkles...the key isn't to eradicate so much as it is to soften. So I still look like me, but without the giant zit on my chin.  Call me a cheater. G'head.

9) I met Dood's brother when I was in Texas, and apparently he really likes me. Extolled my good qualities to Dood thusly, "She's well-spoken, she's not a drug-addict, and she loves you."  I have to laugh, but you know, NOT being a drug addict shouldn't be a selling point. To paraphrase Chris Rock, you're not supposed to be a drug addict! Still and all, the brother likes me, but the real gauntlet is going to be the sisters. Dun-dun-duhhhhhh....

Wordless Wednesday

Random And In No Particular Order

Miss me? Ha, yeah, you say, she finally shut up for a little while.

1) Not sure what's up with me lately, just feeling bleh. The vertigo
comes and goes, dates and times never announced. Just *whoosh* and a
big spin. Sometimes I have to sit down, sometimes I'll be walking down
the hall and take a stagger-step to the side while maintaining the
same forward momentum (I wonder if people think I'm drunk, then I
remember that most people aren't thinking about anyone else at all
most of the time), and always first thing upon awakening. I have to
sit quietly on the edge of my bed until the spins subside before I
dare lift my sleep-groggy butt off the mattress.

2) I've been feeling creatively constipated lately, too, and hesitant
to post here, as I start a post, then stop, then start again, then
stop. Abandoned postlets sitting on my Blogger dashboard, with clever
titles or half-baked ideas or lists of grievances that needed some air
but didn't necessarily need sharing, if you know what I mean.

3) I haven't exactly gained weight over this dreadful, snowy winter --
my clothes all fit just fine -- as much as I've gotten a little, um,
blurry around the edges. But then again, maybe that's just me, looking
at myself with fat eyes. I seem a little indistinct to myself when I
look in the mirror. My doctor confirmed that my weight is going in
the right direction but she'd like to see me lose a little more. You
and me both, sister. You and me both. I mean, I don't need to be able
to wear the tiny white GAP denim Barbie shorts that I've refused to
discard (reminder of my youthful hotness, I suppose, and being so
little, they don't need all that much space), and I'm not saying if
they fit, I'd actually wear them, but they are there as one of those
mile-marker items of clothing...

The Seasonal Affective Disorder was pretty bad this year, which only
magnified other challenges and made them seem worse than they actually
are. We had our first tease of spring on Friday, with temps in the
60's, and everything felt just a little bit more tolerable. I can't
wait for spring to spring. It's been a terrible winter.

Adjusting (unwillingly, I have to admit) to the frustrations and
limitations of a long-distance relationship, and all the patience and
acceptance and examination of conditioned belief systems that entails
has been tough, I admit. And not just on me -- I've made it hard on
Dood, too. A couple of times I've stayed awake for hours, staring at
the ceiling, willing myself not to say, "this is just too hard for
me." Some days it is, but I've learned to just sit quietly with that
prickly little animal until it goes away to bother someone else.

4) My Woidless Wednesday posts are thrown out there for no other
reason than to signal that I'm still here. They're my tap-tap-tap on
the hull of Poseidon to let the world know I'm alive. Some days I feel
like my ship has capsized in the middle of the big party, Gene Hackman
and his groovy turtleneck died for my sins, Shelly Winters is
face-down dead in an upside-down room full of water, and I feel like
all I'm left with is Nancy Drew in red hotpants and Jack Albertson to
help hack my way through the hull into the morning after.

5) LADY STUFF ALERT (gentlemen, feel free to skip the next couple of
paragraphs if talking about womanly innardy things makes you
uncomfortable.

6) Intellectually, I know that the bloom of dewy youth is off this
rose (I was never much of a flower anyway, I'm more the tough, thorny
stem that needs its ends pounded before it will take on water), but
the physical manifestations of it are a huge pain in the dupa. I was
never really one of those "hormonal" women who used her menses as an
excuse to act like a shrew for five days of the month, but I think I'm
starting to hokey-pokey my way into perimenopause. Man, it stinks.
Even using the word "perimenopause" is a little upsetting, so I think
I'll revert back to my tried and trusted, "a bit past my use-by date."
There's fear in saying the word for me, I hadn't realized how
attached I was to the idea of youth, well, MY youth. I mean, I know,
rationally, that I'm not getting any younger, the body changes, hello?

But here's that little voice, so tiny and deep down inside that most
days I never hear it -- it pokes me in my side fat and says, pssst,
hey, Dood has basically spent his entire dating life dating fetuses,
what's he doing with YOU? I mean, the only time he ever dated someone
Your Age he was something like fifteen years old. Like Matthew
McConaghey in "Dazed and Confused," -- "I love the high school girls,
no matter how old I get, they always stay the same age." I know this
is my own stuff, but YOU try living in a city and working in an
industry where youth and beauty have the currency value of hundred
dollar bills and past a certain age it's possible to be ignored like a
penny in a sidewalk crack. This is not reality, I know. I'm well aware
of the admiring looks I still get, the guys on the subway who try to
catch my eye, or talk to me about the book I'm reading, but I'm not
thinking about THEM. The little whisper says, Dood's finally realized
he can't get the fetuses anymore, and so he must be settling. As I
said, I know this is just my stuff, and none of it is real. Not that
the fetuses were any great shakes, I've seen the pictures.

On the other hand, maybe the fetuses were what he was settling on, and
I'M the reach. For all I know, he could be looking at me and saying,
wow, I leaped into the air and reached as high as I could and look
what I caught! I caught me a WOMAN, not an easy-pickins , trainable
little girl. So we may be having similar experiences and not even know
it.

7) I'm having my THIRD period since January 5th, hello? Whatdaheck?
And not little, self-effacing, spotting here and there periods --
full-on, oh-my-god, what is coming out of me flows. And instead of
feeling maybe a wee bit irritable for a few hours, my emotions are on
some weird hairtrigger. The other night, I had to excuse myself from a
phone call because something caught me off guard and knocked the wind
out of me. Intellectually, I was fully aware of my reaction, not that
what was said to me wasn't abrupt and thoughtless, but I knew that my
reaction to it was unreasonable, and the safest thing for all parties
involved was for me to retreat to my corner, even if it was only for
the time it took me to take a deep breath, center, then make and eat
my dinner. I can always feel when it's time to take that pause,
because I become breathless, and my voice goes thin in my effort to
keep it from shaking, and I blurt out the most inane excuse to escape.
"I'm going to cook myself some dinner, I'll talk to you later, 'mkay?"
Then dash and stand there shaking for a second, actually visualize
myself as a wobbling top gaining speed and re-centering.

I think as long as I pay attention to these little moods, I don't have
to react to the emotional hormonal crap. I can just notice that I'm
feeling a certain way, and let it pass. All feelings do ebb and flow
and pass anyway, that's a universal truth. My practice says to invite
it in, welcome it, offer it a seat, and sit quietly and
compassionately with it. Who or what needs attention right now? Well,
that night, at that moment, I was feeling tired and burned out from a
busy week, and having my period, and hungry from having gone without
lunch, my person is in tremendous pain in another city, on meds and
out of it sometimes, and I can't do a damn thing about it. So even if
I just took that 15-minute time out, I at least paid attention enough
to know I needed to take care of myself for a bit. I forget to do that
sometimes.

8) What's the difference between a goal and a deadline? The meaning we
attach to the words, I guess. "Goal" sounds so much more aspirational
and uplifting than "deadline," depending on how you look at it.

"I will be kissing you on your birthday," is much more fuzzy and
romantic than "yes, I -- and all of my worldly belongings -- will be
installed in Brooklyn by September 30th."

See, I'm a production manager, and we production managers live by our
calendars and we like things like dates to be established right up
front. Then we allow for wiggle room if the situation demands or
allows it.

When handed a creative brief with a deliverables due date, we get out
our little calendars and walk our schedules backwards, through all the
estimated manufacturing and creative processes under our umbrellas,
and say, "yes, I can deliver your job by that date," or "no, I can't
deliver until a week later." Because, no matter how efficient or pushy
we are, there is one thing we cannot do, and that's to invent extra
time.

I think it was Dick Harper who said this: Love is infinite, time is not.

I have to educate and re-educate brand managers on this nearly every
day, when they say, "what if the client pays more money for overtime
and rush fees?" My standard response is that sometimes you can do
that, but at a certain point, you can throw all the money you want at
a rush job, but there are no more days left for you to buy.

I don't know where I was going with this.

Oh, yeah, goals versus deadlines.

So "kissing me on my birthday," a promise that was made to me on my
last birthday, with the understanding that he meant he would actually
be here, sharing a life with me, on the day, sounds wonderful and
romantic, but the production manager in me looks askance at it and
thinks, "does he mean that, or does he mean he may just be up here for
a visit, just passing through, on my birthday? Has he written himself
a little 'out' by not pinning down a date?" (I know of what I speak --
when a brand manager asks for an early delivery and a production
manager says, "We'll do the best we can," we're really saying, "you'll
probably get it on the date it was promised to you and you'll be happy
about it."

All of this coming from a place where I know that anything can happen,
circumstances could change, and I said this again and again.

Endless discussions of the meaning of "I will be kissing you on your birthday."

"Why don't you believe me? I made you a promise!"

"I'm just saying, anything could happen, situations could change,
things could come up,"

"Why don't you believe me? I promised you!"

"Well, I *want* to believe it, but I'm well aware that life can throw
curveballs and something else might come up at the last minute,"
"Why don't you believe me? Don't you trust me?"

"I believe that you *intend* to be here by the beginning of October.
I'm just looking for things to be a little clearer."

"Why don't you believe me? I always keep my promises."

"Okay, I believe you. Now, can we start planning this and set some
real dates because we have a lot of work to do to get ready for this."

"Fine. I'll be there by September 30th. (Long resentful pause) Now I
have a deadline."

Boom. And with that word, suddenly what was a fuzzy, romantic dream
(with all its attendant maybe-ness) has been dragged into the realm of
looming obligation, and I feel like some dream-killing rationalist
with my calendars and calculators and slide rules and financial
concerns and pocket protectors.

Look, anything can happen, at any time, and while I can't prepare for
everything, I can try to not be demolished when they don't go the way
I initially planned. It's not a matter of being in control (we only
THINK we're in control, usually when things just happen to be going
our way), it's about flexing and bending and springing back up when
things appear to be out of control. Fall down seven times, get up
eight. When you don't know what to do, just do the next thing.

But this doesn't mean you just float through life without planning
anything like dandelion fluff at the whim of the wind. We're humans,
with brains, capable of behaving intelligently, and I don't understand
how having a rough outline in any way diminishes the pure romance of
being alive. Meandering without any purpose or goals is an anathema to
me, but that's just me.

And besides, you know who floats through life at the whim of the wind
like dandelion fluff, without a care or plan for the future? Fetuses.
I don't blame them. Shit, when I was a fetus, I certainly didn't think
beyond my next night out or romantic conquest, why should they?

But now I'm a woman, all growed-up, like Topsy, and long past being
wind-tossed fluff. Here I am. Let's get our growed-up ducks all in a
row, then we can roll around and wallow in the gooshy romantic stuff.
One doesn't eliminate the other. You could say that one actually makes
the other possible.

Doesn't it?

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday: Merger Confusion

Sirius/Eye In The Sky - Alan Parsons Project

And a little further down the road from where Amos Lee wrote his song, here's a guy who's just had it with someone promising things will be different this time, really, I didn't mean it, I'll never do it again, I promise, honest, and so he's basically saying, "Fuck off and die, you, I'm done."

I love this song for the ruthless rage that's all wrapped up in a cuddly, soft-rock, lite-FM blankie.

I kept the "Sirius" intro because it segues so perfectly into the song, and besides, it just sounds really cool.



Eye in the Sky
by Alan Parsons, Eric Woolfson

Don't think sorry's easily said
Don't try turning tables instead
You've taken lots of chances before
But I ain't gonna give any more
Don't ask me
That's how it goes
Cause part of me knows what you're thinkin'

Don't say words you're gonna regret
Don't let the fire rush to your head
I've heard the accusation before
And I ain't gonna take any more
Believe me
The sun in your eyes
Made some of the lies worth believing

I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you,
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
Dealing with fools,
I can cheat you blind
And I don't need to see any more to know that
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind

Don't leave false illusions behind
Don't cry, I ain't changing my mind
So find another fool like before
Cause I ain't gonna live anymore believing
Some of the lies
while all of the signs are deceiving

I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you,
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
Dealing with fools,
I can cheat you blind
And I don't need to see any more to know that
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind (looking at you)
I can read your mind

Hello Again -- Amos Lee

So beautiful, haunting, and sad. I think this must be what it sounds like right after someone gives up for the very last time.

(Wahhh, video no longer available on youtube. Wahhh. You'll just have to buy the song.)

Hello Again
by Amos Lee

Hello again,
I know it's been a long time coming
You say you've been
Out there now a long time running

You used to be so beautiful
But you lost it somewhere along the way
You used to be so beautiful
But it's easy now to walk away

That wonderwall
You're waiting for is now collapsing
Tell me more, but wait no no
Let me find out what you're asking for

You used to be, so beautiful
But you lost it somewhere along the way
You used to be so beautiful
And it's easy now to walk away
Away, away

Now you have
Everything that you have ever wanted
Oh it's so sad to see
When the hunter becomes the hunted

You used to be so beautiful
But you lost it somewhere along the way
You used to be so beautiful
And I'm sorry now I don't have more to say

T.B.R.

I think I may have mentioned the "To Be Read" Challenge out there on the Facebook thingie, or somewhere else, or maybe just in passing conversation with someone, but since I'm writing this on the old Kberry, on which the Blogger post/edit functions are decidedly user hostile, and I can't post the link via my email upload, I'll have to come back and add it later.

Anyway, some guy out there on the interwebs has an annual reading challenge called "TBR," in which you list 12 books that you own that you haven't gotten around to reading yet. If you're registered on his site, you report back on your progress.

This sent me searching through my bookshelves, because surely I don't have a dozen unread books! Well, to my chagrin, there are 12, and then some. I guess I've got a busy year ahead of me, don't I?

Here's what I found:

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell, Susanna Clarke (started this once but grew intimidated by its sheer bulk)

Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory

The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, J.P. Donleavy

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Contact, Carl Sagan

In America, Susan Sontag

Where Men Win Glory, The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, John Krakauer (borrowed from Yishun with a stack of other books)

The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk

The March, E.L. Doctorow (another Yishun borrow)

The BFG, Roald Dahl (thanks again, Yishun)

Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith (bought off a blanket on Bedford Avenue for fifty cents)

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon (wrote one of my top three favorite books of all time, Wonder Boys)

Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos (started several times, I WILL get through it!)

The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

No Man Is An Island, Thomas Merton

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels

Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer

I imagine I'll get through a good portion of this list, since I'll be spending a lot of time on airplanes -- it looks like I may have to go to Italy at least once in the next two months, and if I'm lucky, twice. Nine hours in coach, whee. Better have a big book for each way. (I want a day on either side of those press checks, so I can finally see the Duomo, darn it. And I'll be back and forth to LA a couple times over the summer, as well, so there are those long trips, too.

I think I'll save the Dostoyevsky for those summer Fridays at Coney Island, because I've always wanted to be one of those girls who reads Dostoyevsky on the beach.

Totally unrelated aside: Once last summer, I was on the G train after a Coney Island Friday, sandy and salty and full of Nathan's, reading Jack Kerouac's "Desolation Angels," when I felt someone looking at me. I looked up from under my straw hat, and a tousle-headed hipster was looking at me and smiling. When I smiled back at him, he looked at my book, back at me, and smiled more broadly. I went back to reading. All the way to Metropolitan Avenue, we exchanged those smiling glances. I think he liked that I was reading Kerouac. I imagined that he was at just the right age that Kerouac was really important to him.

Isn't it funny how you create a persona about people based on what you see them reading? If I had been sitting there reading a book written by, say, Glenn Beck, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been so shyly appreciative. Or who knows, maybe he would have been completely dazzled (scary thought). When I got off the train, he gave me a half-wave and I smiled at him again.

Anyway, I think I'll take the Clarke with me for this trip, since it's a long one, and I'll report back with my findings as I plow through my list.

Well, that's all I have to say for now. Bed.

Is Taking Care of Oneself Selfish? (cross-posted from JCBW)

Introspective people are often accused of being self-absorbed or self-centered. But to look inward and learn to take full responsibility for oneself is the most courageous and unselfish work a human being can do. To find out how and why one is cruel, intolerant, hateful, greedy, blaming, and judging and to learn to let go of the behaviors that accompany those attitudes is 180 degrees from selfish -- it is selfless.



Cheri Huber

Sex & Money...Are Dirty, Aren't They?

(A Guided Journal)

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

So then what if we can’t stop the judgmental, critical thoughts, or that “I must fix this” sort of feeling? Well, how would we respond if we found our best friend in that state? Would we tell her she’s being bad? Or tell her to just stop it? I doubt it. I’d want to sit down with her and be supportive, find out what’s underneath all those thoughts, and why she’s feeling that way. I’d want to at least just listen and let her know I care. Can we do that for ourselves? Now THAT is a practice of kindness.



Every time we turn to ourselves with patience and forgiveness for our supposed “failures,” we’re training ourselves to be kind. I find a sense of relief in being honest and authentic with myself in this way. It’s not an admission of failure. I’m not condoning my critical thoughts, but I AM forgiving the person who is having those thoughts.



So the whole idea here is to learn how to BE kind, right now, and not to try to shape myself into some future-oriented image of what I think I should be. The more we practice the act of being kind now, the more it becomes natural to us. This is the practice.

Ask Auntie Suvanna

"Learning to Love Ourselves"

Wildmind Buddhist Meditation

Snow, and More Snow

Jesus H. Christ, I'm tired of winter.

Waking up in the dark and leaving work in the dark tires me. If I didn't force myself to stand up from my desk and walk outside for some fresh air (read: cigarette break), it's conceivable I could go an entire winter without seeing more than a few minutes of sunshine a day, like someone living in Alaska or Siberia.  If it wasn't for the 5000 Kelvin light boxes we use every day for reviewing color proofs, I swear I'd be a raving drunk or depressive or trying to find a few Palins on whom I can exercise my 2nd Amendment rights.

Navigating 3-week old piles of semi-frozen snow on every street corner by having to detour out into traffic tires me. Same with having to do the Don't Walk Too Close To The Street shuffle, because that one asshole cab driver spots you from half a block away, guns it, and swerves into the puddle of melting slush and god-knows-what-else you happen to be passing.

Inane elevator chatter about the weather makes me tired. Oh my good Christ, do you have something better to say to people on the elevator than, "Brr, it's COLD out there!"

Winter clothes tire me. Especially since I wear a lot of turtlenecks and spend the first part of my day with my hair in a staticky cloud around my head.  Before I leave the house, I already look as though I've had a serious fright.  I will say, though, in the past couple of years, I am seeing many excellent boots on the feet of New York City women.

The constant "Snowstorm a-comin'! Better start a run on the bread aisle!" panic that overtakes the local news every time a little, bitty front shows up on Doppler tires me. What does it say about us that before a snowstorm people rush off...to the grocery store? In America? As if there will be food shortages here? Really? Really?

Even if all of America was paralyzed for five days because of a giant continental blizzard, most people, and yes, I'm talking you, lardy-ass America, most people could simply stay at home marinating in their own filth and living off their own blubber. 

Look around at any public gathering place, your local mall, movie theater, or airport. Do any of those people look like they've missed a meal recently?

Plus, put a winter coat on everyone, and the subways get really crowded, really fast. 

Not to mention that the knobby yellow blind-people-stop-here strip on the platform is slippery as shit when it's wet, which is pretty much all winter long, as long as there is snow on the ground.  I've lost count of how many times I've hit that motherfucker while boarding a train and ended up doing the heel-slip, then overcompensating by lurching forward and nearly falling into the train. Sometimes I'll do jazz hands and throw in a "Ta-dahhhh!" to let the other passengers know I meant to do that.

It's a good thing I'm virtually un-embarrassable.

ummmm

Er. Um. HARRUMPH. Errr. Uhhhhh. Errr. Uhhhh.

Dunno, folks. Just, dunno.

Domestic Travel

In an effort to lighten the mood around here, I'm giving up whining for awhile.  I'm real tired of myself, real tired of blah-blah-blah-ing about being unhappy.  So I got shit going on, who doesn't? I remembered something Cheri Huber wrote in one of her books, "If you want to be happy, be happy."  Which is actually so simple, so true, it's almost laughable.  And I remember something else, it's a CHOICE.

Holy shit, remember when I used to be FUN? I take it back. I'm still fun. I just gotta stop twisting myself in knots because I'm afraid I'm not going to be perfect at being in a relationship. It makes me think of what it was like when I started riding my bike -- for the one of the first times in my life, I was confronted with the reality that I was never going to be a "great" cyclist, one of those lean and stringy people you see zipping up hills.  Me, I was always the slowest person up the hill, but I got to enjoy more of the scenery.  It was a ride, not a race.  Plus, things were much more sociable at the back of the pack.

So I'm doing what I do best, burying myself heads-down in work, which makes me contented and all that good stuff, and making plans to do stuff with friends this weekend before I leave for 2 weeks. You know, go to a wine tasting tomorrow night at a spiffy Soho jernt, and try to find just the right Steelers bar to watch the football game on Sunday without partying too hard or getting too shitfaced, since my flight on Monday is at 6:30 am.

I'd be a terrible lady who lunches.

I'm really looking forward to the next two weeks, when I will get to escape from my life in order to work in different cities. I'll get to LA twice, where according to the old weather.com, it looks to be one balmy 70-some degree day after another for the next 10 days or so.  Well, at least in Beverly Hills, it is.  Oh, come on, admit it, when you want to know the weather in LA, you plunk in "90210" for the ZIP code. I don't know about you, but it's the only one I can remember off the top of my head.

I think I will take my bathing suit and if I get any free hours, I will try to get some beach time in.  Though I'm looking decidedly, um, post-holiday right now, and a little, how do you sayyyyy, carby?

I've already extracted a promise from Judy that she will take me to In-N-Out Burger.  She merely shook her head at me, but then she perked up when I also requested a visit to Jessica in Beverly Hills, because my hobbit hooves need some lovin' care and a good dose of abuse heaped upon them by a snarling Eastern European mama. Judy will considerately schedule my press okays around the redheaded pressman, so as to minimize any embarrassment, but I'm sure we will run into each other at some point, smile politely, and we'll each pretend we don't know what the other looks like naked.


I'll do a pass through Houston, just to visit Dood, then back to LA.  The less said about Houston, the better.  My sister lived there for awhile, and her boyfriend, who was born in Queens, had the nickname "Yankee."  I visited her one Easter weekend in 1991 (I remember it because our "boys" were all over the airports coming home from the first Desert Whatever Hoo-Hah in Iraq, you know, the 4-month one where all the soldiers who took the "special" course of medicines before shipping out ended up with Gulf War Syndrome.) You know what I remember most about Houston in April?  It was steamy and it smelled bad. Oh, and titty bars. Every other building seemed to be a titty bar. (Quoth Chris Rock: "Dads, if your daughter's wearing clear heels, you fucked up!")  And some asshole in boots and a cowboy hat in some honky tonk stood next to me at the bar, looked me over for a long time, then said, "How come a pretty gal like you wants to cut your hay-er so short? You'd be so pretty if you didden have short hay-er." Those are my memories of Houston, that and dancing in the nightclub my sister managed (something called R-n-R, I believe, do they still exist?) with some Oiler (my sister pulled me aside and warned me to watch out for the ballplayers, because they were grabby and felt entitled to be that way. This was before the era of million-dollar he-sent-me-pictures-of-his-walter-payton out of court settlements) and drunkenly making out in the parking lot with some guy named Breeze.  I still have the pictures, Breeze was rockin' a serious mullet. It wasn't Jagr-quality, but still.

Anyway, what can I say about Houston? Shit, I am going to make Dood take me to the Rothko Chapel; from what he's told me, the full extent of any culture he's been exposed to since he's been there has been, "This is our mall. And this is our other mall. Here's our Wal-Mart, and this is Best Buy."  (Americans, what's up with you people and all the stuff you need to buy? Face it, as human beings, we're just gross.)

But enough about that.  Today, I leave you with someone else's take on Houston:

July 4 was not the time of year for anyone to be introduced to Houston, Texas, although just what the right time would be was hard to say. For eight months Houston was an unbelievably torrid effluvial sump with a mass of mushy asphalt, known as Downtown, set in the middle. Then for two months, starting in November, the most amazing winds came sweeping down from Canada, as if down a pipe, and the humid torpor turned into a wet chill.  The remaining two months were the moderate ones, although not exactly what you would call spring.  The clouds closed in like a lid, and the oil refineries over by Galveston Bay saturated the air, the nose, the lungs, the heart, and the soul with the gassy smell of oil funk. There were bays, canals, lakes, lagoons, bayous everywhere, all of them so greasy and toxic that if you trailed your hand in the water off the back of your rowboat you would lose a knuckle. The fishermen used to like to tell the weekenders: "Don't smoke out there or you'll set the bay on fire." All the poisonous snakes known to North America were in residence there: rattlers, copperheads, cottonmouths, and corals.

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

And now, I have to go and try to do something about this carbuncle on my chin.

The Little Girl

When I was a little girl, about eight or nine years old, I was at a family picnic. My brothers and sisters all had a cousin who was close in age to them there at the picnic, and everyone, it seemed, had someone to play with. The big kids were playing volleyball with the grown-ups in my uncle's giant backyard. My sisters were off doing girl things with my girl cousins who were close to them in age. My little brother was probably playing matchbox cars with my cousin Ronnie. I was at a loose end, and wandered about the fringe of all this activity looking for someone to play with.

I remember approaching my older sister Carol, who was playing or talking with my cousin Cheri on the front steps of the house.

"Can I play with you guys?" I asked.

"Go away," my sister said, in a really mean voice, "we don't want you here."

I remember it was a brilliant, hot summer day, and I was wearing a new short-set and probably something awful on my feet like tube socks and sneakers. I also remember recoiling from their rejection as if I had been hit. I felt foolish, embarrassed, and hurt.

I'd always been a shy and somewhat nervous little kid, afraid of my own shadow most days. I remember looking over at the grownups, who were laughing and clapping and rotating their volleyball lines. I remember retreating around the corner of the house to the garage entrance, where I sat on the concrete sill and tried really, really hard to breathe past the stone in my chest and unsuccessfully fought back tears. I let a few escape and roll down my face as I sat there with my feet in the gravel, breathing short shallow breaths through my mouth.

After awhile, I pulled my nine-year-old self together and shuffled back around to the volleyball game and the picnic tables and lawn chairs. My dad was sitting there, with a can of Iron City and his pack of Pall Malls on the table. He wasn't drunk, but probably would be, happily so, by the end of the day. At this point, he noticed me, and was very jolly.

"There's my baby girl. What're you doin', Ai?" (To this day, I miss hearing Marty's rich baritone saying, "What're you doin', Ai?") I was too big for laps at that point, but I crawled up onto Dad's anyway.

"Carol was mean to me. They wouldn't let me play with them." And I started to cry with big tears rolling down my face.

For some reason, I don't remember much else of what happened that day. Probably my sister got in trouble for being mean, and had to grudgingly let me tag along with her and Cheri, but if that happened, I don't remember.

All I remember is that little girl, standing there feeling stunned, who learned not to ask people if she could play games with them, who to this day never actively sets out to make a friend. I let them come to me, because I'll be goddamned if I let someone do that to me again, right?

So today at 3:30 I asked for a very specific thing, and I thought at 6:00 that I would get it, yay! I mean, the request seemed to be received with enthusiasm. Then another opportunity came up for the other party, and I asked again for the specific thing, in fact, explained that by turning down the other opportunity, the other party would be able to make the specific thing happen. I thought I was pretty clear in stating what I wanted.

Turns out the other party actually did want to do the other thing instead. Didn't tell me he wanted to do the other thing, just went and did it, leaving me feeling foolish, embarrassed and hurt.

Oh, well. Win some, lose some.

So I didn't get what I wanted, oh well, such is life. But I did spend a while sitting and trying to figure out what it was I felt. Was I mad? No, that wasn't it. It wasn't that I didn't get what I wanted. That would be the barest, thinnest surface layer. I asked myself, "Who's in there hurting?" And all of a sudden there was my funny-looking, chubby, nine-year-old self in my Uncle's garage, crying around the corner where no one could see her.

See, I asked if I could play, and the person I asked kinda told me, by actions if not words, nahhh, I don't want to play with you. I wanna do this other thing.

So my feelings got hurt, who the fuck cares, right? But I did do something, and that was to sit quietly and hold the little girl and tell her it's all right, that there is nothing wrong with her. I remembered that I don't have a mom and dad anymore to mop up my tears or tell me to toughen up because life ain't always fair, and most times it's not all that nice, either, and so I decided to be the mother and father to myself that I always wanted.

Because no matter how much time seems to go by, that little girl always seems to be right there with me, and I have such a responsibility to look after her, tenderly and with boundless compassion.

That's all for now.

Sunday Meandering

Nothing much to say today, just a quiet-ish Sunday morning on which I woke up curled like a boiled shrimp under my fuzzy blanket, hugging my book and half a pillow to my face, with the cat tucked deep into the curve of my legs, so soundly asleep that she didn't even move when I got up at 8:30, just emerged an hour later to yell "HI!" with all her kitty bedhead still tousled around her.

Lazy convo with the Dood about nothing while he made breakfast for his roommate and roommate's family. I advised him to put the grated potatoes into a colander and press out as much moisture as possible, lest he end up with a pan full of flaccid fried potato mush.

Washing dishes and cleaning the bathroom while I ponder what to make for Roni for dinner -- we still haven't had our Christmas, and I haven't seen her since mid-December when she went to Oregon to spend two weeks with her man. She came back engaged! I'm so happy for her because she finally has a man who seems to have his shit together and isn't a criminal or layabout and who isn't sitting around waiting for her to take care of him.

Some mixed feelings as the realization sunk in that my best friend is going to be a continent away in about 6 months. Actually, there was no "sinking in," there was Life, bonking me on the head with its interminable impermanence meme. Goddamit. This, for some reason, triggered some wholly unreasonable feelings of anger at Dood. Poor guy's all "What'd I do? Huccome you're mad at ME?" I dunno, I just WAS. Really uncomfortable weekend last weekend -- so uncomfortable that I called a time-out that lasted all of a day and a half, before I realized I'd rather be pissed about something and talking about it than pissed and hiding. I will say, however, that the day and a half did give me a chance to take one big, deep oxygenating breath and collect myself.

I get to still be Aileen and do Aileen things, and Dood gets to be Dood and do Dood-things, and as long as we are both truthful about where we are (emotionally and physically), we aren't doing harm. If I think I hear something in his tone, I recognize that it's my own projection, and vice-versa. I do kinda wish he'd stop using the label "ugly" to describe my actions or words, but as long as I know that my intention was neutral, I have to let that go. Labelling has the effect of simply shutting me and any reasonable response I might have down. I don't even bother responding anymore -- I just pause and move along, because otherwise we get into a debate about why the words I said were "bad" (therefore, making me "bad" for saying them) and he gets to be the injured party and I end up defensive about doing nothing wrong. Know what I'm saying? So in in the very act of defending something that doesn't require defensiveness, I end up resentful because I've been made to feel "wrong" when I didn't do anything. Better to just let the judgement rest where it landed, just outside his mouth. It's not for me to point out someone else's projections, but only to recognize my own. When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

So it's a nice, quiet Sunday morning, and I had the breakfast of a five-year-old, quick and easy Cream of Wheat. I love Cream of Wheat, and completely forgot I had it in my pantry. With a nice pat of butter and some maple syrup, a good and comforting Sunday breakfast.

And my Sunday morning music while I blurt this blog post? Good, mellow Sunday morning music: George Benson's "Breezin'." I remember my brother used to play it on Sunday mornings -- on vinyl, of course, on his Technics turntable, of course, which was hooked into his Yamaha receiver, of course. (I still have that receiver, the one powered by tubes and shit, at my friend Sean's house, where it resides with my Bose 201's.)

But I digress from my digressions. Did you know "Breezin'" was written by Bobby Womack? And "This Masquerade," by Leon Russell? And "Affirmation" by Jose Feliciano? The amazing things you can learm from liner notes.

In this era of digital music downloads, does anyone bother with liner notes anymore? Does anyone squint at the copyright line on a digital track and say, "Wow, I was TWELVE when this record came out," and in that instant have a series of flash-memories of being 12 and what it felt like to wake up on a Sunday when you were 12, and going to 10 o'clock mass with Dad, and coming back to Mom making breakfast and the smells of sausage and coffee and Dad's Pall Mall Reds, and the "Pittsburgh Press" scattered around the table, with George Benson (a son of Pittsburgh, along with another jazz great, Ahmad Jamal) playing in the background? Do families even eat Sunday breakfast together anymore?

One day I'll regale you with a story about a friend of mine who used to work for GRP Records and the time the esteemed Mr. Benson was in his office noodling on a new guitar he was showing off. Another time.

Anyway, it's a calm and peaceful Sunday. The Steelers won against the Ravens last night in a game that came down to nailbiting in the last five minutes of the game. Today the Jets play the Patriots, and in the event of an unlikely upset, I guess the Steelers will be going to the Super Bowl again (I mean, how many upsets can the Jets pull off phhhht?). Ho-hum, Steelers in the Super Bowl? And the sun came up in the east this morning, too.

Another Lombardi would pretty much complete the image rehabilitation of Ben "The Molester" Roethlisberger, wouldn't it? Rabid sports fans can forgive anything except losing, I guess.

I start traveling again next week -- I leave for LA on the 24th, fly to Houston on the 27th, then back to LA on the 1st, then to Cincinnati on the 3rd and back to Houston on the 4th. Finally back to NYC on the 7th. Poor Miss Kitty is going to be soooo pissed at me.

But I'll get to see Dood for two weekends running, which is a good thing, because like it or not, I need the human contact to keep him real. The words, words, words of all our talk, talk, talk, they just aren't enough for me. I need to taste and smell and touch someone to remind myself that I actually have a real relationship with him. Elizabeth Barrett I am not, and if I were, I probably couldn't come up with, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..."

I'm more Audre Lorde:

Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.
Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.
("Recreation," Audre Lorde, 1978)

Well, There Goes 2011 Intention #2 Straight Down the Crapper

I got nothin' to say.

Nada. Zilch. Zed. Zippo. Diddly. Squat. Diddly squat. Fuckall.

I'm all Karen Ann Quinlan up in here.

Tank be empty.

I'm Doing It For Me, and Us

“Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges to yourselves. Take yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone besides yourselves.” The Buddha

I did something really, really scary yesterday. Scary, because I did it to save myself, at the risk of losing my person -- the person I didn't know I was looking for, whom I found in a moment of whimsy, and whom I have come to love in ways that I didn't know were possible. My person.

I asked for breathing room, space to examine why this thing that is supposed to uplift and bring joy to my life seems to be the wellspring of so much suffering.

And I am suffering, there's no doubt about it.

But what I need the space to examine is how I am causing my own suffering. And make no mistake, I'm well aware that I am causing my own suffering.

What is at the root of it? There are so many thoughts and fears that arise for me, in both the big-picture sense of it (we are not together), and the quotidian matters (you are doing something else and not talking to me!), that it started to feel as if every phone call, our only source of communication became nothing more than a litany of my complaints and agony. And under that was the knowledge that my suffering was causing him to suffer. He wanted to "make it all better." And he couldn't.

He can't. This is a common affliction of people who are conditioned to be "fixers." They want to wave a magic wand, or say an incantation, and everyone around them will be better. But that's a subject for a different time.

I'm trying to go back to my earliest training and sit down, quiet my mind, and simply examine the processes by which I am creating my own suffering.

Who is the separate "I" that I have created who suffers?

In what ways have I abandoned myself?

Is it possible to be my own mother, and embrace the frightened child within me, and hold her close, loving the parts of me that I label "desirable" (i.e. Funny, caring, loving, generous) as well as the parts that I label "undesirable" (i.e. Angry, jealous, resentful, petty)? A loving parent recognizes these things in her child and still loves her unconditionally.

I have felt those angry, jealous, resentful, petty feelings, and instead of taking care of that little girl, I have hated her and tried to push her away, as she has spilled her anger and jealousy and resentment out into the world, and especially in her relationship. I need to take this time to hold her very closely, as a protective mother might. Not to nurture those negative emotions, or play up those fears, or tell her she's right, but to make her feel safe, and loved.

I was asked the question, "Are you going to respect this relationship?"

I heard fear in that question, fear that's justified by another person's conditioning. If one's experience has only been to be with people who don't "respect the relationship," I understand that fear. And while a puzzled part of me wants to quirk my eyebrow and say, "Ummmm, hi, have we met? I'm Aileen, and I don't cheat," I have to respect where that fear is coming from for him.

So all I can do is answer the question honestly: I am not doing this in order to seek better accommodation elsewhere, and especially not in the arms of another. I am not looking outward in order to find validation or revenge or whatever his past girlfriends may have done. (For all I know, that may have been their last-ditch effort, their hair-on-fire emergency, to get his attention, but that's just speculation on my part.) This time is about sitting down and being quiet and examining myself.

He also said, "You better come back," and the heartbreak in his voice about killed me. There was no way for me to explain to him that this is not about taking myself away from him. It's not, even though it feels that way, because I'm embarking on a period of self-exploration right now.  And this is so important to me, because it's not only to save my life, but to save the life of our relationship.  I mean, seriously? If I was hating myself every single day, literally couldn't look at myself in the mirror some days, how much fun could it have been to be in a relationship with that person?

This is one of those "leap of faith moments" you hear about. And it's terrifying, because I don't know what I'll find off the side of that cliff.  Another tiger at the bottom of the cliff and a couple of mice gnawing at my vine?  I may do whatever work I need to do in the next week or so, and go back and find that Dood has done some soul-searching of his own, and found himself feeling, "This is bullshit, and I don't need this, and you know what? I'm done. See ya."  He may very well look at the last month and say, "I am escaping by the skin of my teeth."  This is a risk that I had to take, however, because when I woke up on Sunday morning, rolled over, and started crying, the next thought that went through my head was, like a bottomed-out alcoholic, "I can't live like this anymore."  I need to eat the strawberry.

I'm grateful to have this practice, and I'm grateful that the last ten years of practice have made me aware enough to recognize all of these things.  And to realize that sometimes you have to go back to "beginner's mind," and simply sit down with what's going on.

It's hard for Dood to see that I've not taken myself away from him. 

And all I can tell him is:  I'm right here, baby.  And I'm not going anywhere.

Letting Go

Impermanence is the one thing we can count on in life.

We are confronted with this fact every day of our lives, and yet we still cling to the idea that we can hold onto something, whether it's a family tradition, a feeling, a friendship, or even a person, forever.

We are conditioned to believe that this is how things are supposed to be.

Although I understood this in a left-brainy, smart-girl kind of way, last summer was a huge lesson, or lessons, in impermanence. Sometimes you can learn something from a book, read it, understand it, even know it a little, but until you're confronted with a trifecta of it, as I was (Punch! Kick! Wham!) it's pretty easy to forget that life itself is nothing but lessons in impermanance.

The person you think you've fallen in love with tells you "Even if I told you I was falling in love with you, well, too bad! I've changed my mind!"

The old pet you thought maybe had another two or three lives in him, well, you come home and find him stroked out on the kitchen floor in a puddle of his own pee and two hours later you're watching some anonymous doctor inject a drug into a catheter in his leg that stops his heart, while his last breath sounds to you like "thank you."

The morning phone call from your sister, the one that stops you in your tracks in the middle of Park Avenue, saying, "Mom died last night," leaving you with those bright spots in front of your eyes and breath that suddenly won't squeeze past the top of your sternum to get to your lungs.

Things like this will remind you of the impermanence of life.

I used to have a friend whom I called my best friend.

Her name was Juliet. We met when we were both young and beautiful and owned New York City. We were inseparable and did everything together -- movies and brunches and drinks and dinners, long heartfelt conversations on the phone and in bars and in parks and on aimless walks through our City that we both loved as passionately as lovers. We were "Sex and the City" before that show existed.

I spent so much time with her family that the extra bedroom in their Fire Island house was called "Weenie's Room."

Our birthdays were three days apart, and her mother would host a dinner party for Juliet every year at her Riverside Drive apartment. Then I would throw a giant birthday bash for myself (any excuse to throw a party, and my circle of aquaintances was massive back then, and my parties were kind of legendary) with a hundred people jammed into my duplex, and my friend the bar owner having to call in the reinforcement keg from his bar sometime around 2am, and at least one visit from the police. Hey, it was the 90's, we were young, and we were having fun.

In 2000, I went as usual to Gwyneth's to celebrate Juliet's birthday. It was an important dinner, because Juliet was going to introduce me to her new boyfriend, Mark. This was exciting. She had mentioned him a few times on the telephone, but only in passing, so I didn't know how serious it was.

Dinner was lovely, uneventful. I liked Juliet's new boyfriend a lot, mainly because they seemed so smitten with each other. She was clearly delighted with him, and he with her. They made a nice couple.

The next day, I called her to tell her that I liked her boyfriend.

"He really liked you, too," she said. "He called you fascinating and dangerous."

Me, dangerous, ha! As dangerous as a Beanie Baby, right? As for fascinating, I'll take it, but as a girl with a happy childhood and no tragic, dark past, I'd hardly call myself fascinating. Or, maybe, as a former boyfriend once told me, my very ordinariness made me fascinating.

I laughed, yeah, just like I do now, at that description.

Saturday, the night of my birthday party, I got a call from Juliet. She wasn't feeling well, and wouldn't be able to come to the party. Oh well, shit happens, right?

After that, many more phone calls to Juliet went unanswered. At first I shrugged it off -- we New Yorkers tend to leave each other alone when one of our own wants to crawl under the porch. We understand that the very essence of New York City is a surfeit of too-muchness, and sometimes you get a little overwhelmed with the too-muchness of it. You need to escape from it, in the only way that you can. You turn off your phone, and maybe hide out in your apartment for a few days, or take long solitary walks where you don't talk to anyone. If you're looking carefully, you can spot people doing this. They have an inward-turned quality to them. The dimmer switches on their auras are dialed way back. If you look really closely, you can see their doggy eyes peering out from behind the wooden steps of their souls.

When days turned into weeks, then months, the shrug turned into puzzlement turned into hurt. I played our conversations over in my head, again and again, trying to figure out what it was that I had said or done. And I kept coming up empty -- the last conversation I had with Juliet was nothing more than normal. Regular. Ordinary.

"See you Saturday," was probably the last thing I said.

When I decided to leave my one true love, New York City, a few months later, Juliet didn't come to my going-away party, and amongst the friends who had traveled from Connecticut and Philadelphia to see me sail off into a new life, there was an empty, silent, Juliet-shaped hole.

I don't know why Juliet walked away from me, and I never will. All I can do is wonder why she decided that I wasn't important in her life anymore, or how I went from utterly indispensable to completely dispensable in the space of a day or two. I can wonder at how such a seemingly cold-blooded decision could be made. I tried to write stories in my head, then discarded each one because I just couldn't know what had happened to make her say, "she's got to go."

To this day, I wonder.

Three days after 9/11, my phone rang. It was Juliet, sobbing.

"Oh, Aileen, what did they do to our city?" she asked.

I was planning a visit to New York for my birthday. We made plans to see each other.

Circumstances, in the form of Bill the firefighter laying his head in my lap, wrapping his arms around my legs, and crying out, "It should have been me! It should have been me!" intervened, and we didn't meet.

I haven't seen my once-best friend Juliet since 2000, and I can only think "I hope things turned out okay for her." I ran into her mother in a restaurant a couple years ago, and I know she got married, had a baby, lives on the Upper West Side. But I'll never know the rest, and I have to be okay with that. Otherwise the not-knowing would make me crazy.

Unlike made-up stories and books and movies, life doesn't always hand you finite endings. You don't always get, to use a term that I find loathesome and pat, closure. This is life, and sometimes it just sucks like that.

I wish Juliet only well, and hope that she has found happiness, no matter what happened.  Just because we went around different bends in the river doesn't mean she's not there anymore -- I know she's still there, and she'll always be there.

I think that somehow, somewhere, she knows this.

Wordless Wednesday

For the Record...

For the record, 2010 wasn't all bad...

*  I wrote 363 posts in 2010. Granted, most of them were written in a two-month self-exsanguination that took place from mid-May through mid-July, but I averaged a post a day. Yay for me!

*  By the end of 2010 I had chiseled and whittled and ramen noodled my IRS debt down to less than $15,000.  No, that's not a typo.  I didn't misplace a comma or add an extra zed.  I know 15K is a lot, but if you knew how much it was when I started at the end of 2008, you'd be really impressed.  Let's just say, over the last two years, I've paid the IRS close to $30,000.   I'm putting this out there because in my travels I've learned that one in FOUR Americans has an "issue" with the IRS.  That's 25% of us. Go out to dinner with three pals, look around the table -- one of you is having an "issue" with the IRS.  So, my advice to everyone, well, at least to the others in my 25% of the taxable population, is this:  File your returns.  Even if you can't pay what you owe (and trust me, if you are middle class, you WILL owe. Quoth Leona Helmsley, only the little people pay taxes), file your returns.  I guess I'm lucky I wasn't marched off to the pokey with Wesley Snipes.  Because trust me, the IRS WILL find you. And they do have a way of  making it as uncomfortable as possible for you -- for me, they cleaned out my bank account two weeks before Christmas.  That'll sure get your attention, lemme tellya.

*  I did lose a shitload of weight, so I look decent in clothes again. It's like discovering a whole new wardrobe in my own closet!

*  Most importantly:  Dood came into my life in sort of a happy accident.  Honestly folks, I'm not attributing it to kismet, or the stars aligning, or to anything other than this:  I was in my office on Saturday, July 24th, getting ready for another one of my summer trips out west, and I ended my day by dicking around on the internet. I opened my okCupid account, changed my settings to "anyone from anywhere," and hit that button named, "Roll The Dice."  His was the first profile that came up, he was shirtless and hot, his profile was literate and clever, he was hot, he played the guitar, he was hot, he had useful skills AND he was from New Orleans. You know, now that I think about it, if I were a checklist-makin' gal, he's pretty much got all the toppings I would have ordered from the ice cream sundae guy, you know, the nuts and sprinkles and chocolate sauce and whipped cream. Maybe a little bowl on the side with pineapple.  Most of all, he seems to like me as much as I like him, at least enough to want to actually consider maybe relocating to a northerly, more Penguin-friendly climate.

I Rode My Bike Today (2011 Intention #1)

I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions. I look at them like any other expectations: they start out all overblown and build up unnecessary hopes (I'm going to lose 50 pounds this year! I'm going to save $100K this year on my $50K salary! I'm going to win the Mega Millions! I'm going to watch less television and start working on a) that book I've been meaning to write, b) the addition I've been meaning to add to the back of my house, c) the career that I gave up when I got pregnant at 22 with the first of you little bastards.

You know how it is.

I do try to have some intentions, though, and since I started off January 1st, 2011 by PICKING A FIGHT with my bf over ridiculous bullshit, I'm rewinding the day and starting again fresh, okay?

So, Intention #1 for 2011:

To keep on taking care of myself in the best ways I know how.

Today this entailed finally putting my beloved R1000 onto the Ascent trainer I bought a year ago.

This was not a simple task, as flipping the bike, changing out the quick release, flipping it back, then wrestling it into the trainer sprockets while keeping it upright would have been easier with two people. But, hey, I'm a gal who's used to workin' things out all by her lonesome, and with a well-placed knee, shoulder, and (miraculously) no broken fingernails, and with no thanks to the crappy illustrations on the instruction sheet, I worked it out.

Working shit out is what I do, after all.

A few adjustments of the resistance, and a careful music selection later, I was pedaling merrily along.

This took some adjustments and not only recall of training from over a decade ago, but some muscle memory, as well.

First, a reminder to myself that pedaling efficiently and well is about making circles, full circles, pedaling all the way around the crank. I remember doing exercises to practice this on the flat parts of 9W. Unclip one leg and let it hang, while keeping the bike moving with the other leg. You have no choice but to make complete circles with that pedaling leg.

Maintaining RPMs: ahhh, my bete noir, and why my knees sound like Rice Krispies when I go up stairs. I had a bad habit of being a showoffy gear-masher on long straight stretches of road, so now I resolve to spin at Lance Armstrong-like revolutions (ever notice how fast his legs are always going? The man was a spinner extraordinaire). Disco music is very helpful for this, as it is usually played at 100-128 beats per minute. I'll spend the rest of the winter pedaling along to some good old 70's disco and by the time I'm ready for outside riding, hopefully the spinning habit will be ingrained.

Net-net, today I did a respectable 30 minutes, leaving me a red-faced, dripping sweatball, but hey, I did a half hour of cardio work and never left the house.

It was fun.