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