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.