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?