so maybe this wasn't the best idea (but then saved by Martians)

So, I don't have any NY's eve plans. Quiet one at home, I thought. Good enough for lots of people, in fact you sound a bit superior when you tell people, "Go out? New Year's Eve? Oh, no, God no, I'm just going to have a quiet one at home."

But I hate being along on NY's eve - no date, no one to kiss, no people around to ring out the old and in the new.

I really did try to make a plan, I was going to make myself a decent dinner - but forgot to go to the grocery store on the way home, didn't I? And spend some time reflecting on the year that was, and resolving resolutions. And then maybe some entertainment. I followed my usual rule of getting a DVD to watch when alone that absolutely no one would want to be subjected to besides me, and bought this evening at Barnes & Noble a 5-CD set of musical performances from Saturday Night Live. And then cracked a Clos du Bois Pinot Grigio (poison of choice lately) and watched Disk 1.

Thing is, the performances, all from 1975-1976, I vividly remember seeing most of them back in the day, when they first aired. Belushi and Joe Cocker, Belushi doing Joe Cocker while standing right beside him. Jagger and Peter Tosh doing "Walk and Don't Look Back". Paul Simon starting "Still Crazy After All These Years" dressed in a turkey suit.

I work with people who were born quite a few years after these shows were made.

What's the point of it, anyway? One day we will get so old that we will start dying off, and the kids will turn 45 and have their own thing that they remember from when they were young. You can wallow in nostalgia like I am doing tonight, or you can make plans and move forward, but I know that any plan I make now is just something artificial constructed to make advisors and family and friends happy. You don't ever actually make it anywhere. Pain just accumulates in life. I still remember the pain of being a dissatisfied teenager, and now I'm a disgruntled 40-something so that pain is layered on.

Why am I alone on NY's eve, at this late stage in my life?

Because I'm sucky company for anybody, that's why.

I watched the Kennedy Center Honors last night and Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry were honorees, and there was a bang-up version of "Love, Reign O'er Me" by a lady whose name I didn't catch, and I swear both rock stars were tearing up, up there in the balcony seats, and I certainly was, here at home. When I was 17, overcome with a hopeless crush, I would lie in bed with big puffy headphones on and listen to Quadrophenia and get weepy when listening to this song. And when I got to college I used to watch the movie of Quadrophenia every few years to measure how far I'd advanced from that weepy teenager. But last night I was even more weepy. Here's the equation:

When you're a teenager, the angst is impatience to be older so all this pain will be gone.

When you're 40-something, you know that not only will that pain never leave you, you'll accumulate even more pain on top of it, and so 40-something angst is much deeper and worser. I can vividly remember how it felt to be 17 and impatient and having a hopeless crush, and now I'm 45 and still have hopeless crushes, PLUS the pain of the break-up of a long-term partnership on top, which you can't have unless you've invested the long-term time in the partnership in the first place, so it's an exquisite sort of pain that you can only get from investing the time, like laying down a fine bottle of wine in just the right condition so it ages properly. Layered on top of the past and current teen-aged crush pain.

It's a wonder anyone makes it through it. And also that they keep it secret from the teenagers...

Actually, you can see it, in the very best, pivotal scene in Lost in Translation, where they are lying in his hotel bed and Scarlett Johanssen asks Bill Murray, "Does it get easier?" and he says, "No." But then he changes his mind and says, "Yes." Because he knows it only gets harder, but he also knows he has to tell her that it gets easier so she can keep on.

Okay, I'm not actually thinking of doing anything to stop this journey, to get off this ride, because I don't believe in that. It's irrational for the will to will itself not to be. So, I give it up. I deliver up this crazy life and the senselessness and pointlessness of being 45-

• being a 45
• year-old woman
• in Wisconsin, in the dark and snow and cold
• alone
• on New Year's Eve
• watching sketches she first saw at age 12, while staying up too late, on the dodgy color tv in her parents' new built-on room in Omaha
• now captured for nostalgia purposes on technology we couldn't even dream about back then
• purchased on a whim by swiping a debit card, because I now have a career and a good enough job to have plenty of little discretionary income even on Dec 31 right after Xmas
• and then getting online and blogging about it, on a free blog with extremely user-friendly software and reliable hosting that is absolute FREE and doesn't even have any ads on it
• that's right, not hunched over a spiral notebook scribbling overwrought thoughts and emotions in a notebook that will gather dust and/or get thrown out upon the reconciliation of my estate, but
• writing it here, where Google will look after it and the Martians will find it in a million years when they come down and notice the written record of this life
• All these lives, all these beautiful bloggers with their own stories of New Year's Eve and nostalgia.

I can picture the Martians sitting around saying to each other, "Man, it must have sucked to be a single 45-year old woman in Wisconsin in the US in 2008."

"Yeah," says the other Martian, "but keep reading! Because do you know who she grows up to be?"

Gallipoli

We were at a brunch for my parents' Gourmet Group. The group has been meeting since 1977, so the friendships and bonds have gone far beyond just a hobby of cooking that originally brought them together - they've been through births, graduations, marriages, grandchildren, facelifts, heart surgery, remodelling, and buying a trailer and travelling America. For Christmas each year they meet at a restaurant for a fancy brunch and exchange gifts gathered in their travels all through the prior year.

This year the banker and his wife had been to Turkey. She had brought back beautifully painted trivets for everyone, and they were truly exotic and impressive.

I was sitting at the opposite end of the table to them, so I wasn't following the conversation at that end of the table, but at one point my Mom got my attention, "Ellen?" She pointed at the banker's wife and said, "Tell Ellen where you went."

The banker's wife leaned over the others between us on our side of the table and said, "Dar...nelle? The Straits of Dardanelle?"

I was racing to recall my Australian geography, but all I could remember was the Bass Strait and the Torres Strait. I shook my head, it wasn't ringing a bell.

"Where the battle was? Gallipoli?"

"Oh, my! You went to Gallipoli?" My heart moved in my chest like it does in the last scene of the movie. I tried to sort of explain to the others at the table, "That was really important, to the...every January they..." But the conversation had moved on.

It haunted me all day, the end of that sentence. "It's incredibly important to them- to me, to Australians, which is us, but really them, but also me..."

I am still an Australian, at least on paper. Is Gallipoli incredibly important to me, because I am an Australian, or are the Australians it is important to a "them", because I didn't grow up with it being important to me, although I now understand why it was, and I have left them and moved back here?

Going Postal

December 20, Saturday morning, at the Appleton post office. On the way to the airport, dropping off a package to mail to Australia, too late to get there by Christmas but probably in time to be there by New Year's.

The woman behind the counter is affixing customs forms and metered postage and I say, to make small conversation, "So, you have been really busy today?"

She looks up with a rueful gaze.

I nod.

She says, "They were here when we opened. It comes in spurts, but we had 13 when we opened this morning." She looks up, "Now there's only three, but still."

"I suppose it's better than the alternative!" I say brightly, echoing news reports of retail sales being down and a conversation with an employee at the guitar shop who said he's seen this kind of thing before, it comes and goes, it's down, but later it will be up, and what I mean is that if she's busy, it means people are shopping and buying presents and so the economy will probably do well this season, despite the recent woes and worries.

She says, "I just feel so bad! I mean, you just want to help people, you don't want them to have to stand there..."

My mind flashes back to the Surry Hills post office, in the back of the building with the Coles, and how every minute of every day, no matter when you drop by, there are 15, 20, 25 people in line, wrapping awkwardly around the stand of greeting cards so the last person doesn't keep making the automatic doors open, ignoring the people talking or yelling or singing to themselves, keeping distance from the smelly aging bachelor in front of you, waiting and waiting as people dispute power bills or present library books they want to fax or filling out customs forms for packages whose addresses are written all in Chinese.

Wisconsin postal workers must be unlike postal workers anywhere else in the world. "You just want to help people!" Imagine it.

Nourishment

So I finally broke down and got a copy of "You Can Heal Your Life". My sister has a copy, given to her by a friend, and I always had her look up things in it for me but she's in Antarctica so I've been without it as a resource and finally broke down and got my own one. This book includes an extensive list of body parts, and the spiritual meaning behind an ailment in that part, and then a mantra you should say to heal yourself of that spiritual malaise represented in the physical one.

I don't believe any of this stuff, of course. But when you have strange, sudden things happen to one specific body part, especially when they're not very serious, you can't help but attach a metaphorical meaning to it. For example, a few weeks ago on a Monday I woke up and had burst a blood vessel in one eye. Half of the eye was filled with screamingly red blood. I looked it up on WebMD and found it was nothing serious, basically just a bruise, and I'd probably got it from itching my eyes from allergies, during the night. But it sure was striking, and caused alarm and concern in everyone with whom I made eye contact for a whole week. So, for that kind of thing, it's irresistable to look up what symbolical message the universe might be trying to send you through the affliction. ("Represents the capacity to see clearly - past, present and future," btw, and the mantra is "I see with love and joy.")

Another example - last week I was away at a conference, and one afternoon right after lunch starting feeling funny, and spent the next 24 hours lying in a hotel bed with a sudden and dramatic stomach flu. I recovered in one day so it was just a 24-hour bug or something I ate, but I was still a bit delicate the next few days, so when the book arrived I looked it up.

For "stomach" it said, "Holds nourishment. Digests ideas," and the mantra is "I digest life with ease." And for "stomach problems" it said, "Dread, Fear of the new. Inability to assimilate the new," and the mantra is "Life agrees with me. I assimilate the new every moment of every day. All is well." Apropos for someone going through transitioning as part of a departmental restructure, hm?

So this week when my stomach has clenched on the way to work, I have been trying to say "Life agrees with me. I digest life." And it sort of transmogrified in my mind to, "My life nourishes me." And that helped a lot - I had been arriving at work feeling a bit more like work was eating me alive, snacking on me, gaining nourishment from me. So when I remember that it's supposed to work the other way, it put me in a mood of gratitude and appreciation for all the lovely and enjoyable things I do have.

And then, today it took another step - in that grateful, year-end mood I did a quick musing reflection of things I have to be thankful for this year. What were the highlights, the things that would go in a Christmas letter were I to get organized enought to write one? The website redesign that was celebrated at a wrap-up meeting just today. Guitar playing, everything about it, my new love and grand passion of my life. What about emotions caused by boys? Some of the highest highs of the year were caused by one particular crush. Dizzying highs, euphorias that would last days on end. But do I celebrate that now, at year's end, now that he's gone?

It struck me quite clearly - no. Right here in this moment in time, now, I have nothing of benefit remaining from those very high feelings a few months ago.

That boy was a drug, but was not a food.

That crush provided me no lasting nourishment. And I wonder if this little observation is going to stay with me, and provide me with guidance to make some better relationship choices, in the New Year.

Hay

I have a note in my notebook that says:

blog
view out the
side window
at work
- Anselm Kiefer

I remember what this was about - it was when the view out the side window at work was all of dead hay-colored grass and black earth, and black trees without leaves but dead yellow leaves below them. And then slate grey sky behind. These colors feature in the paintings of the German artist Anself Kiefer, and I've always liked his stuff. He has a long series of works that feature lead, gold and hay (actually stuck to the canvas, making them really heavy). I think there's something about the point at which each of these items burn, because the canvasses have often been set on fire so there's black charring around where the hay is. And the view out the side window at work was looking just like this for a while.

But that was back in early November, and now it's mid-December so everything is different. It has snowed a few times, large bodies of water are frozen solid, and there are no more golden colors anywhere. It's all white, everywhere, now, for the next months, and so it was funny to find this little note on things to blog.

Formalisms and emotion

When I saw the White Stripes at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, in early 2004, I was in the midst of my MBA. Constantly in the background of a full-time MBA program is the question, "Who am I?" in the sense of, "What am I good at?" and "What am I going to do for my next job?" The class I'd related to the most in my degree so far was, of all things, Basic Accounting. I had a really good teacher, and I did really well on the final - got into one of those states where you're so absorbed in an activity that you lose all sense of time, got all my balance sheets to balance, was confident in my answers.

The White Stripes at the Enmore was one of the best concerts I've ever, ever been to. It was the tour supporting the Elephant album which is still my favorite. Just Jack and Meg. But transcendent. He played the whole history of music on his one guitar, and you could hear how all the notes and melodic lines fit together and it was like Mozart, like Bach, like Hendrix, like the ghosts of all old blues masters playing through the fingers of a young scholar. I was transported, I was moved, I wanted to dedicate my life to doing something as profound and wonderful as this.

What I settled on that night was that I should do Accounting as Art. I should learn the structures and rules and logic of it, but then transcend beyond and be able to express the art in it.

What has actually happened is that I am learning to play blues guitar, just like Jack White. I have a teacher who knows enough music theory and is enough excited about it that he can explain chord structures and origins and relationships to me, and he himself specialized in blues-based rock and roll, and I live three hours from Chicago, and so I am immersing myself in blues theory, and I'm going to learn it well enough that I can express my emotions through it and make art. Who would have thought? But the inspiration I felt that night at the Enmore is still driving me, except just in a way that is much more directly related to the thing Jack White was doing.

p.s. When we did an exercise at a Marketing conference for work in April, on personal branding, the words that came back from my peers to describe me echoed what my Existentialism teacher had written on a paper back when I was a Sophomore in college - and I'm sure I've told you there here before as well. Reasoned Passion. That's the essence of me. Rock and roll guitar, with a teacher who knows lots of music theory, is the perfect medium to express these qualities. More than Accounting, I think.

p.p.s. And yes, it didn't escape me when I was writing the above that if you start to do art with Accounting, you end up either Enron or Lehman Brothers. So rock and roll guitar is a better bet anyway.

Wisconsiny homecoming

I'm doing my travel posts out of order, paging back through my notes.

I came back from Chicago to Milwaukee on the train on Friday night. I'd been in Chicago for a week. It was fun and all, and I did get out and about to see some familiar sites and some new ones. But you know what? I was anxious to get back home. Chicago was cold, and the city streets can be a bit grey and bleak, and I had to deal with homeless people asking me for change on every single corner on every trip, again, which I used to have to do every day on my way to work but haven't had to deal with since, and you can't really see anything from within the canyons of the tall buildings. And the Governor was led away from his house in handcuffs on corruption charges, right in the middle of my stay there. So although it's a great city, there are also some not so great things about it.

On the train I got out my iPod and listened to my five-star list, and was once again overwhelmed with the wonder and majesty of music itself, which I'd been away from while away from my guitar and also my YouTube addiction. But here it all was back. I didn't have a guitar to play so I drew a diagram of the strings and labelled all the notes and tried to work out intervals and major and minor scales and that kind of thing. So that made me feel like I was back home again, with my toys, being my whole self. I believe this happened right about the time we crossed the border.

As the train got closer to my stop I noticed that the snow was deeper, and there was a lot more space between the buildings.

I got off the train and a nice girl helped me with my suitcase. She had seen me struggling to get it in the overhead rack when I boarded (I bought some things, and it had got pretty heavy), and then when I was getting it back down again she came up and helped me, and then when I was going to make my way down the narrow and icy stairs of the train to disembark she just took my bag from me altogether and set it down on the sidewalk at the bottom. "I need to go back to the gym," I said, embarassed, and she said, "I do this for a living, don't worry about it." So, the very nice lady baggage handler saved me from trouble, because my bag was heavier than it had been going down and I was in a weakened state because of my belly thing a few days before. Very neighborly and Wisconsiny.

I had to scrape the ice and snow off my car. It looked like it had been pretty warm that day and then froze up again - there was a sheet of ice a half-inch thick all over the car, and when I got some of it loose the rest just slid off in huge chunks. Like how peanut brittle breaks up. It took a while to get the ice off the front windshield, and I brushed snow off the top of the car as well. There was another guy doing the same thing a few cars over, to his SUV. Then I tried to pull out, but the car slid on the ice and wouldn't go. I got out three or four times, trying to look for the block (shovelled some snow to make a path for the back wheels), but it still just spun. I tried to put some grocery bags down behind the front wheels for traction (front-wheel drive car) but they just slid under and spit out the other side. I gave up and waved at the SUV guy just as he was readying to drive off - once he left I would be alone in the lot and Triple-A would be my only option. He didn't seem real experienced pushing stuck cars, but we worked on it together, he pushed from the front and I got loose. I thanked him profusely, and he said, "No problem, we're in Wisconsin." That's what it's like. I remain deeply grateful.

I drove around the corner to the first hotel I got to - a Super 8. Not five-star like the hotel in Chicago had been, more about one or two stars. But friendly, welcoming, and they had a room in the inn for me. The parking lot was glare ice, they must not have any salt, but I tread carefully and didn't slip or fall. The guy at the front desk was odd but very kind - a tall, lean young black man with his hair pushed up in a mohawk and a sleepy jazzy manner. When he was writing out my credit card receipt (no fancy electronic machines at the Super 8), the very loud Christmas music in the lobby changed and the opening of Let It Snow startled me. I asked him, in order to make conversation, "So, are you sick of the Christmas music yet?" And he said, thoughtfully, while still writing, "No, I like the Christmas music. Because it makes me happy."

Welcome home, Ellen. I love Wisconsin.

Multi-culture

People worry about the monoculture, and argue that what with the McDonaldses and strip malls, everywhere in the world looks just like everywhere else and distinctive local cultures are disappearing.

This is not true.

I was at a Denny's near the airport in Milwaukee having breakfast. I ordered the two eggs (scrambled), toast (wheat), hash browns and coffee. I'd been battling a stomach thing over the previous few days and wanted something pretty mild and easy to deal with, digestion-wise, and didn't want to to anything risky or experimental. I piled the eggs on the toast at first, and it was pretty good, but I had toast left over and wanted to put something on it. There were little tubs of grape jelly and orange marmelade, but that would be too sweet, that wasn't quite it. I scanned myself to work out the specific nature of my desire, and what I wanted was Vegemite.

Then I reflected on the outrageous impossibility of them serving Vegemite in a Denny's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. No one in the Denny's at that moment had ever even heard of Vegemite, I was sure, and some of them probably couldn't find Australia on a map. If you explained it to them it wouldn't make sense, and if you got them to try it they probably wouldn't even consider it a food (that's the reaction most Yanks have). So, imagine going from that state to actually finding little tubs of the stuff on the table at a Denny's, or even a Denny's-like place, right next to the grape jelly. How much the world would have to change for that to be possible. Yet you absolutely find little tubs of Vegemite right next to the jelly (called jam, though) in every Denny's-like place in Australia, everywhere you might find yourself while travelling and wanting a simple breakfast because your tummy's been a bit funny. In that culture, it's absolutely normal and expected, and in this one it's so unlikely that it boggles the mind. Hence, there are still cultures, we're not all in one mono-culture.

Online too much?

I've noticed that I've started using "frowny face" as an expression in casual conversation. Mostly in my own head, but I'm sure it will start out loud soon enough.

For example, I was driving back from Milwaukee to Appleton in the grey drizzly rain, and stopped to fill the tank up at a Shell station in Slinger, and I opened up the driver's side door to step out to the pump and there was a huge, deep puddle right beside the car, all the way as wide as the door. "Frowny face," I said to myself.

p.s. I did manage to cantilever myself out of the car by stepping on the banks of slushy ice that had not yet melted into the puddle.

Intervals are my favorite mood-altering drug

So I still haven't sorted things out vis-a-vis the trainer situation. After the last junior one, cannon-fodder staff at my gym, disappeared as they do, the manager assigned me to someone more qualified, but he turned out to be a crazy lunatic. And quit as well, like two weeks later. He had spent the whole session with me obsessing about how much he hated the manager guy and disagreed with his training methods, and once he left I'd just had enough of the psycho-drama and stopped going altogether. Also, he pushed me so extremely hard that I would reach "failure" on like the second repetition, rather than like the second-last one which is how you're supposed to do it. But then, I was getting results. All my clothes were too big, and I was certainly feeling stronger.

Then the work stuff blew up - I learned about the opportunity for my new position (see posts below) and was trying to lay groundwork for those projects, while still trying to do my current job, get financial stuff and performance review stuff done for end of year and planning stuff in place for next year, and live with everyone's angst about the uncertainty of our futures.

(As it turns out, I heard about my future on Friday of last week, and immediately everyone went on vacation for Thanksgiving week so I haven't had a chance to debrief about any of it with anyone. I did get the job I wanted, but for a whole different set of brands, in a different building, with all different brand managers. So it's like a whole new job for a different company, nearly, and I'm now thinking it will take me 12 months to get established to this degree again and keep working on the stuff I intended to do right away in the new gig.)

The first day of my vacation I sat very still and watched TV all day - slowed my metabolic system way down like a lizard in the freezer. The next day did not much more. Monday had to do a bunch of work stuff, and Tuesday finished work stuff in the morning and then took a huge nap. Was feeling somewhat unwell - achy everywhere, and stomach ache, and like I might be getting a cold. (And old. I keep trying to look in the mirror and smile or turn my head in a particular way, or think maybe I just need to rest more or eat better, but actually the lush youthful look I'm trying to recreate in the mirror is probably not gonna ever come back. The skin is losing elasticity, the eyes have creases around them, the skin is getting that grey cast that I find so revolting when I notice it on men of a certain age, I'm just getting old, and there's nothing a girl can do about it. Rats.)

Anyway, also during this whole period I have been trying to work out what to do about the exercise stuff. I had too many options:

• Go back to the work gym, in the mornings
• Go to the work gym in the evening
• Find another trainer at the work gym
• Ask for another trainer at the other gym
• Go back to the other gym without a trainer, mornings
• Go back to the other gym without a trainer, evenings
• Just use the little gym at my apartment complex, morning or evening
• Try another gym, other trainers, another sport altogether
• Just run on the road or something

Every weekend I would vow that this week I would absolutely get up early on Monday and Wednesday, at least, and just do something, just some regular routine, just to be doing something, but it never worked.

And so this week, after my reptilian weekend of sitting very still and being achy all over, I was starting to feel truly bad from not exercising properly for so long. Because the last guy was sooo intense, too, it was like bingeing - from ultra-fit, ultra-pushing-myself, rapid-results, to puffed out, weak, sore discouraged sloth. Time for action.

Finally, today, Wednesday of my week off, I got myself to my old gym. There wasn't anyone there I recognized except the sales guy - tells you something, doesn't it, he's successful, it's just that what he's selling is completely unstable and imaginary - and I did a circuit of basic weight machines, but then I did the magic thing that has made everything okay again.

Intervals!

I get on the treadmill and set it to 80 seconds of 3mph and 80 seconds of 5mph (for which I have to run), for 20 minutes. I heard from one of those trainers along the way that this is the best way to burn calories, because you keep burning them for a while after you stop. I made it through my whole 20 minutes - red in the race, breathing hard on the last one, but legs felt strong and I felt really good that I was pushing through and accomplishing something challenging.

The feeling lasted all day when I was out shopping, and is still kind of with me now, although I did fade with tiredness at about 3pm and had to rest at a Starbucks, and now I'm still achy and still have creases and circles (I don't think there's enough resting in the world to rest from the work stuff that's been going on, so I will just have to run resting, for the next few months).

Aerobic exercise is one of the most powerful mood-altering drugs that there is. I hope the optimism that today's long-overdue trip to the gym has instilled will remind me to keep doing it, and get over the block I've had.

Non-sad tears

It's been an emotional few weeks, there's no doubt about it.

• I passed my one-year mark in Appleton, and as if by magic suddenly felt more grounded and on top of the basics and ready to start building on my solid foundation. Something about experiences passing around the second time - pumpkins, the first snow, the lake freezing, the end-of-year financial forecast meeting, multi-raters being due - it makes you feel more committed to and in control of everything.
• Barack Obama was actually elected president.
• I was confronted by the prospect of a new job with a great deal more responsibility, at a more senior level.
• My guitar playing is getting better. In conjunction with:
• I went to a gig by my guitar teacher's band and suddenly had the experience of being a scholar rather than a fan, which is a transformative experience in my relationship with rock and roll generally, and feels like another kind of ascension.
• This morning I watched my DVD of The Devil Wears Prada, which I still find a completely inspirational coming-of-age story about a woman at work.
• And I've been watching too much What Not To Wear and Say Yes To The Dress (about wedding-dress shopping) on the TLC channel on cable.
  

All of these events are associated with a particular kind of crying.

For so many years all my crying was about the shock of abandonment and grief and loss. I just got used to the fact that all tears that might come up in times of relaxing defenses and emotional vulnerability were those tears. And even during Year 1 year, all guard-letting-down tears were from the grief and culture shock of leaving Sydney.

But these are different. You saw them, on the coverage of the people in Grant Park on election night, immediately bursting forth the second the polls closed in California and CNN flashed on a giant screen, "CNN Projection: Barack Obama elected president," and then flowing on and on as he gave his calm and majestic acceptance speech. He was fine, he had been visualizing this moment for years, and also he knew deep inside that it was only the beginning of the very hard work of leading the nation and turning history around to get back on the path of right. But all of us, we just cried.

They're very particular tears - tears of being moved, tears of happiness and joy but something more. Tears of - I don't believe this amazing and good thing is actually happening. Tears of relief and hope? Tears of being moved by beauty? Beauty of the soul, the experience, the grand human sweep of existence that can have such deep meaningfulishness and love and whatever. How to describe it? I've been trying to work out how to really describe the thing that leads to this kind of tears.

For me, they are coming up most from guitar stuff. I was at the gig, it was the second set, I was bopping along with the crowd, lots of good-time Wisconsin girls out at a bar on a Friday night getting in the groove with a great and competent band. It was no problem I was there by myself - I was there with my teacher but also there with the whole industry and discipline and art form of rock and roll. I was there as a scholar. (It wasn't my first gig as a scholar, I also went to Octoberfest in downtown Appleton and was similarly examining all the guitars and how everyone's hands were moving, but I was so new at it then that it wasn't quite the same.) In the peaceful place I found in the midst of all that dark and noise and movement, I was working through a bunch of things in my mind. I felt a new committment and a new, more mature relationship with rock and roll, after all these many years of having strong and exciting other relationships with it - fan, collector, college radio dj, rock journalist. My mind thought, where is this going to take me? And my mind answered back, I don't know.

And that one thought brought on Obama-election-night type of emotions in me, and I nearly stood and wept with tears running down my smiling face. I was moved by the show. "Moved" is the only word I can think of for that weird emotion of pain but relief and hope and beauty and whatever.

I'm glad I have next week off - I can just sit around at home watching movies and listening to guitar songs that I want to learn how to play and make myself cry.

p.s. on the crushee

Remember last week when I was wondering if I should send a Facebook friend request to someone I had an embarassing crush on in college?

I decided to do the grown-up thing and just sent the friend request. But he never accepted.

So. Thanks for the advice though.

post-party blues

Last night was so outstandingly fun that today couldn't help but be a letdown, but I'm still carrying the golden glow of the gig with me inside. And I didn't need to have too much fun today because tomorrow I'm going to my first Green Bay Packers game, with a group of people from work. It will have the advantage that, unlike at the rock show, I won't be watching all the performers and wishing I could be where they were, doing what they are doing. And should be fun hanging out of the work folks outside of work.

Today, all inspired, I decided to practice guitar, and all the things I used to be able to do were awkward and hard and not coming out right. It made me feel like a two-year-old probably feels - I have all these things inside me that I want to express, but I'm not fluent enough in the language to be able to get them out. Wish there was a baby-sign-language equivalent for playing a Fender. Actually, there probably is - I think it's called "Guitar Hero III".

The only cure for lack of experience is more experience. So I'm going to try some more blues patterns, and get the songs under my fingers more effectively, and have a quiet night in, in anticipation of the football game tomorrow.

Going to a show with somebody

Some of the best evenings I had during my last few years in Sydney where when my dear neighbors would score some free tickets to the Woodfire Pizza Restaurant in Double Bay. It was a strange hole-in-the-wall joint with pizza out front, but then a curtained off area with a little stage where they would hold shows that were usually really good. And we never ate pizza, the back side of the menu was a full, page-long, densely typed in small font list of outstanding Hungarian food. I always got the goulash that was a little spicier, with dumplings (nearly unmistakable from gnocchi) and a cucumber and sour cream salad on the side.

We saw some great shows. The first one was Monica Trappaga, who is better known for being a children's TV host, but on this night she was launching her new album of 1930's swing numbers and torch songs. Another really good one was Simon Tedeschi, reknowned classical pianist and the subject of an Archibald-Prize-winning portrait that made the most of his youthful face and intense blue eyes, but on this night he was sitting in with some well-known jazz players and realizing his second passion of playing jazz piano.

The meals were great, the shows were great, and I love my neighbors who used to invite me, but every time, especially at the point I got most transported by the music, I wished I had someone there with me. My heart would go out to whoever I had a crush on at the time and I'd imagine them there with me, being similarly moved by the music and the experience. I never imagined my ex there because this tradition started after he left me, so I didn't miss having him with me, only some new person. It became sort of a mental litmus test - any new boyfriend who was going to hang around with me - to get to the point where we were a social unit - would have to love these nights as much as I did.

Fast forward to Appleton. Last night I went to see my guitar teacher's band play at a big barn-like place called the Rodeo Bar, out Country Road II in the middle of nowhere. I had emailed a work colleague who I once went to another concert with to see if he wanted to come along, but never heard back from him, so this gave the convenient cover that I was waiting for a friend to join me and not that I was some pathetic groupie there by myself. But I wasn't there by myself - I am now not just a music fan, I am a guitar student. I talked to my teacher before the show, after the show, and in the break when he took me up on stage and showed me all their gear and his effects pedals (explained to me the history of all the effects pedals - he's pretty encyclopedic really). During the show I stayed up front, not right at the stage but about two or three bodies back (most of the bodies were Wisconsin girls who are not afraid to dance in public, or a guy Eric whose birthday it was, who was drunk enough that he wasn't afraid either). But I was transfixed on the guitars. I tried to watch their hands as much as I could, to catch them doing things that I know how to do. And there was hardly a favorite song of mine that wasn't in their set list.

I stayed for two sets, until 1:00 in the morning. I was transported by the music in the same way I used to be at the Woodfire Pizza place - more so, because I could dance and so lose myself in the songs more, and have the experience of being part of a crowd having a good time at the front of a stage. I was there with my guitar teacher. And sort of also with my whole history of my relationship to rock and roll - fan, collector, college radio DJ, amateur rock journalist. My new realationship to rock and roll is apprentice. And my future relationship to rock and roll is I hope as a craftswoman. I didn't feel any of that incompleteness or longing that I used to at the Woodfire Pizza place. I was at a show with somebody.

Facebook secrets

You know how on the Facebook homepage it suggests people you might know and might want to become Facebook Friends with? Someone from my past just showed up there - someone I had a crush on in college and pretty much made a fool of myself over. He was in Honors English with me, and was very charming, and had cool friends, and so I starting making invitations. There was a group that year who called themselves The Steering Committee and would hold formal parties that were for all of us Independents, who weren't associated with a fraternity. The frats had semi-formals all the time, so it was great that we had a chance to as well, with all the cool Honors people who we liked to hang out with.

So I invited this boy to one of the dances, and he accepted which amazed me. I wrote home and had my sister mail me a fancy black cocktail dress, I think it was actually hers and she loaned it to me for the evening. The boy came by my room to pick me up, and we went to the VI for a drink first. Then we went to the dance and all the girls who were sort of more in his inner circle were being a bit proprietary, fixing his tie and that kind of thing. I was nervous, and I think it was champagne we were drinking, and you know, I was only like 20, 21, and so I didn't really have a fine virtuosic handle on how much I could drink. I overdid. And back then when I overdid I would usually cry, hysterically and for prolonged periods. Many a poor boy had to deal with the weeping mess of me at the ends of nights like this, and this night I really didn't want that to happen. Drunk and reeling a bit, starting to lose my visual focus, I detached myself from my charming date and his closer friends, went to the periphery and found what I thought was someone safe. Another philosophy major, in my Wittgenstein seminar, a year behind me, and I knew for a fact he intended to become a Catholic priest after graduation. Nice boy. I kind of leaned on him, and averted a messy scene in front of my date, but what happened was I ended up leaving with the safe, kindly Catholic one, and went back to my room, where lo, the kindly Catholic future priest philosophy major professed his own deep lust for me. So, you know, I think I sort of kissed him or whatever, but dear me, the next day I realized what I had done.

Took a while to get rid of the Catholic one and convince him I just wanted to be friends, but I never did get a second chance with the poor jilted charming boy who was my date. I invited him to lunch, I invited him to dinner, I asked him to movies that were showing on campus. I did embarassing, humiliating things like slip notes under his dorm room door saying, "This coupon: GOOD FOR ONE dinner with Ellen!" Oh, my god, I cringe to think of it now. He was very polite. "No thank you," was always the answer. But that incident left me with my first big Regret, and I will carry it to my grave. They say you should live your life without regrets, but I deeply regret ditching J. at the dance and going home with Catholic boy (whose name I have repressed).

But, in the way of Facebook, guess who showed up as someone I might know, just tonight? Charming J. So, do I friend him? Or should I take the hint, from way back 20-some years ago, and just leave him alone?

***

p.s. I actually wrote to another crush who's also a FB friend (and who I know is reading this) and asked his advice, and that made me wonder just how many ghosts from my past are actually on there. (friend might want to stop reading at this point). Among my 114 friends are 12 boys I had crushes on, the one girl ever had a crush on, my First Kiss, my Second Kiss, my Prom Date (who is also my First Kiss), but only one guy I ever actually slept with. Facebook is very strange the way these people come back into your life, but I can't say I mind it, exactly. And I wonder if any among them are boys that ever had a crush on me?

Pre-winter

Most of the leaves are off the trees now, so where there was orange and red and glowing yellow there are the grey stands of the bare branches that are with us for most of the year.

When I leave work in the morning, if the day going to be nice, the sky is all baby blues and pinks. The field across the road is still arranged in lovely stripes, but now they are soft and muted colors, and very early in the morning they're frosted in white. (frosted in...frost. What a poet I can be sometimes, hey?).

Except this morning it was raining, and so it stayed dark all day. Out that window that you can always see out of on my floor, the guy next to Craig who works in some different department so I don't know his name who keeps his door open so you can see out through his office, the sky was dark grey and the trees were black against it and at noon it didn't even look like daytime. Outside the rain was falling in drops but leaving a surround of mist, and the streets were black and slick as running oil, and I kept pulling out in front of people too fast when I was driving, forgetting that everything is different now it's cold, and Wisconsin people should turn overnight from aggressive, reckless hoons to sensible precise and human bearers of responsibility.

***

The other night I dreamt I had a baby girl. She was lovely, pink skin and a little round face and quite a bit of hair, although not long, and just my color. I held her on my hip. I was going around, maybe it was work or shopping? I showed her to people and bragged that she was only born yesterday, and look. She held a book in her hands, and she could talk and say fairly big words. She was very still, and she was very good. I think I even told people that, "She's a very good baby." My heart overflowed with love and pride. I named her - it occurred to me that it was strange that I'd forgotten to name her until her second day, but the name just came to me and I knew it was hers - Emma. She had a pink dress on. She sat very still and concentrated, and was very beautiful and good and just fit on my hip while I went around. Another woman was there - someone I know at work who's a single Mom and regales me with endless stories about her daughter. I felt a real connection - I had a daughter now too. I think I was hoping she would help me. Then we were about to leave, to go someplace, we were getting coats on and getting ready to get in the car. And Emma was suddenly hungry. She was moving, she was agitated. I think she might have grabbed for the breast of my friend, the way babies can do, primitive and not knowing. I thought, "Well, baby, no, you do what we do, and we're not eating now, we're going - you can eat later when we're there." I had her in my arms, but she thrashed her body over away from me, and I marvelled at her strength, and thought, oh, maybe this won't be so easy after all.

It was one of those dreams where the feeling stayed with me all day.

Ascension

Feeling emotionally exhausted and a little freaked out.

Today had meetings all day. A bunch of them I had organized myself because I want to enact my own plans, conduct business for my brands the way I think it should be done. Others were normal weekly meetings, or special planning meetings, or phone calls I had to have with people. Which didn't leave enough time to actually do anything, follow up the action items I had from all the meetings or review emails or do backlog stuff. Or end of year stuff which I'm a bit behind on. And at 5:30 after getting a Diet Coke and surfing for a bit to rest my mind, I decided I need to take care of myself first (fit your own mask before helping others kind of thing), and so just shut the computer down, left it there, and came home. I don't have anything to eat for breakfast tomorrow and nothing obvious to have for dinner tonight, but I didn't care, I just came straight home and watched an episode of Mad Men and am trying to rest.

The meetings in which I'm trying to enact my plans require incredible levels of personal influence, all the more so because I need to go so very, very slowly, to get buy-in from the people I need buy-in from. In some cases I am planning to move on from certain folks but need to respect their knowledge and contribution and want them to help with transition so I can't tell them they're about to be no longer useful to the organization. And maybe it's not my decision anyway, but that's my plan. So those need to be incredibly delicate, because I have forged positive and loyal relationships in the past so as to get what I needed from them back then, and now there really is a bond there but I might have to break it. And then there are other new people who, given the shifting of the organizational continents at work, are suddenly in a position, a much better position, to partner with to enact the things I want to do, and so I'm trying to make initial forays but I really feel like an ambassador from a very foreign culture, and I have already put a few tenderfoot feet wrong and must go very, very cautiously so as not to spook them and to make myself understood.

All day, this. After a day like that, all you want is to meet someone at a bar who doesn't work at work, and over some tall gold schooners tell them all the stories (and not worry about if you sound like a conniving hound or a lying manipulative sales-devil). Someone who is sophisticated enough to understand the work stuff and has been following the story so you don't have to go back to real basics, like what does "DAT" stand for, but who doesn't actually work at work. So they aren't players in the political dramas unfolding, and you can tell them really sensitive confidential things and they won't run into anyone they shouldn't tell about it until it's irrelevant and old news.

Mostly somebody I can just be my whole self with, without spin, without judging all my words, without checking the impression I'm making on them. Someone with whom I can say, "Yeah, when I was in Paris, we..." and you don't have to worry that you're sounding snobby. Someone with whom you can say, "And my sister's at Pole so I can't call her now to talk about it, " and not have to explain what "at Pole" means and answer the 20 standard Antarctica questions that everyone has. You can just skip ahead to the important bit. Or maybe even just drink your schooner and listen to them talk about their day, and you are up to speed on it too because it's a mutual relationship, not like a paid therapist, you care just as much about their job and trials and people in their life and how their day was.

Is a wife what I need? Someone to come home to who is there to support me while I'm trying to to these ambitious business things? Or a husband, someone who with their strong arms and strong back can give me a hug and shore up the edges of my personality? Or just a BFF?

Maybe what I really need is a mentor. Another seniorish woman who is already spending her days doing the high-level things that I'm trying to do (trying to be worthy of doing so they give me the chance to do them). So I can talk through the emotional side of rising up, being senior. Check my mistakes, learn from them, get some encouragement, make sure someone else believes I can actually do this, and that I should be doing it.

I love my job. I love the opportunities it presents. I want to work at that top level where big things happen and big relationships are forged. I want to have interesting projects like my current, rather big one. But you know, tonight driving around the roundabout in the rain home to my grocery-less house, I could see the appeal of having an easy job. Something you just go, and do, and get done, and then you come home and you still have everything left inside you that you left with that morning.

Freaking out a little bit. Needing a beer and a hug.

Prayer Poem

You are like my guitar.
Colors dark and rich, cut to fit my body.
You are a craft, a practice, a creative endeavour.
Except I am already an expert
we can play fluently, I can already express
myself through you without getting
caught up in technique.

You know time.
I dig you and you go "Yessss".
We hop in cars and just go, baby, go.

You are a wrap of warm bear fur
that I take along so I know
at least one of us will be warm.
You are something from home.

Looking at me via you,
Looking at you,
Standing beside you and looking, you and me, at;
They're all as good
You are endless vistas and beautiful art.

You are young and old,
50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's to today
Encyclopedic. We are wikis of each other.
You are a line from a favorite old movie
That nobody saw but we saw
You are the only other native speaker
of my dialect.

Far away there's a planet, black-
no, blue, with blue rings.
It's a long journey, I lead, but once I arrive,
all the inhabitants of this familiar planet
wear black coats and have orange hair.
It is the coolest planet.

Things that are a waste of time: #1 Monopoly

I was at my fave coffee copy on Saturday afternoon and kept getting distracted by a child's voice with that particular demanding tone. A boy aged probably 7 was sitting in one of the booths with his Dad playing Monopoly - the tone usually emerged when he was reading out one of the cards.

I once spent a few days in Boston with a family who were all mad and hotly competitive players of word games, like Scrabble and Jumble and everything else you can think of. Near the table where the games were played was a shelf full of Scrabble dictionaries and other reference books. A girl came over, about my age and the age of the son who I was visiting, and she'd been part of this scene for years and was just as competitive as the others. I was still feeling bad about being completely crap at Scrabble - if you're a writer, if you're good with language, well then why wouldn't you have a huge vocabulary and be good at crosswords and Scrabble and games like this?

I think I'm over it now - spelling is not writing. Crosswords do sharpen the mind but they are a craft that you have to practice and get good at like any other. And Scrabble is more a game of strategy than anything about communication, and I absolutely suck at any game like that. Not just game, anything in life. I'm a good communicator, and I'm good at improvising to make the best of my current situation and environment, but if I have to plan more than two moves in advance I absolutely suck at that.

Monopoly, too. I could see yesterday that it was useful for the boy because he was learning to add and subtract (money) and to read, and maybe a little bit of strategy and sportsmanship and that kind of thing. But I'm not seven. The only way I could see playing a board game of any sort, at this stage in my life, would be if I was at a holiday cabin and it was raining so hard you could neither go out and do outdoorsy things nor drive to the nearest town to do indoorsy things. But even then I would probably have brought a book along. Or my guitar. Or a pen and some paper to do some analog-style blogging. Or perhaps there would be other conversationalists there and we could just talk. I can't imagine hardly any circumstance where a big, rollicking game of Monopoly would be anything for me but a colossal waste of time.

(grumpy old woman)

Why I don't do drugs

I was at the Mall today. I had a very successful trip to Black and White (the store has some other, longer name, but you know the one I mean), picking up just the wardrobe basics I was looking for (in a combination of sizes: Small, 10, and Large, showing that sizing of women's clothing doesn't mean anything and definitely shouldn't be a measure of one's self-esteem).

I then wandered down to the sporting goods store, because I'm going to my first live Green Bay Packers game next weekend and wanted to get some stuff to wear. Among the rows of sweatshirts and baseball caps is where things started to turn. I wasn't finding what I wanted and the store is so huge that you can't easily get your bearings and work out where the right thing would be. I was walking up and down aisles scanning, but what started happening is every time I moved my eyes to the right, the world would keep spinning that direction.

Also people were knocking into me, or moving into my way just at the spot on the shelves where I wanted to have a closer look.

And it was pretty hot, with all those people trussed up in warm coats and scarves all moving around in a small space.

I decided this store didn't have what I was looking for, and I could always come back next Saturday anyway, or one evening during the week, and so I made my way out. The hallways had filled up with bodies while I was in there, some kind of rush of teenagers on a cold, wet day with nothing to do. There was a din coming from the Food Court. I was having trouble seeing out of my right eye.

Walking down the main corridor to the hall where Black and White is and where my car was parked (I didn't want to go out the Food Court doors and walk around, even though I was craving fresh air, because it was getting really cold and had been spitting rain and I didn't have my gloves or my umbrella with me - it's that time of change of season where you don't know quite what you need to bring with you when you leave the house), something was sending a strong perfume all through that hallway - a bath goods cart in the central aisle? A perfume shop? The high school girlies walking in packs with too much makeup and too much hairspray? I don't know. But the dizziness was increasing so that I was having increased trouble seeing, and definitely didn't have the energy to hold my stomach in or hold my face in a poised, beautiful-enough pose which I'd been trying to do. I knew my eyes and nose were red already, from looking at myself in the dressing room mirrors. I knew my hair was fuzzy from walking through the rain, and it needs to be cut as well. I was just trying to get out - wasn't sure I could drive, once I got to the car, but I needed to get out of that mall.

The feeling was exactly like being really drunk. And it had been brought on my pollen in the autumn air, an overly perfumed shop or passerby, temperature difference, and maybe a little bit of claustrophobia. Not from being drunk.

The story has a happy ending - I got to a less crowded hall, sat down for a second, worked out I wasn't going to vomit, went and got a drink from a vending machine, my brain straightened right up when I got outside, and I drove home without incident or worry, listening to Prairie Home Companion on the radio.

But this is why I don't do drugs. In my midwestern childhood I was around all these allergens all the time. My head felt this way all the time, and I couldn't hold my face in a poised pretty-enough pose back when I was a girl so I never learned how to be a pretty girl, I am just a weird girl making strange faces and being quite vague, and slightly scaring everyone. And here I am back like that again. Like all folks of my generation who don't do drugs, I have often been strongly pressured by my friends that I should do them. You have to have a really good, compelling reason for turning them down. And I have always told them, I have spent my whole life struggling every day to feel normal. I absolutely don't need to experiment with brain-altering chemicals. I have enough of those already, inside me.

I went to the shopping mall and got dizzy and got room-spins and couldn't see and thought momentarily that I might vomit. That is absolutely enough chemically-induced excitement for me, thank you very much. This is why I don't do drugs.

40-something

One of the most memorable conversations I ever had with my Dad was when I was about 20 and had a summer job as an office temp in an insurance company. Dad and I were out shopping one day and stopped at a McDonald's in Englewood, over by Cinderella City which is probably where we had been shopping, for some afternoon french fries.

I was complaining about my boring job and the boring full-timers there and burst out (with the typical sensitivity I displayed as a youth), "How could anyone possibly spend 20 years working in a cubicle like that!" And then, "Oh. You actually did, didn't you." And then, "So, how did you do it?"

He said that when you first start at a company as a young man, you think the sky's the limit, and you think you'll be Vice President one day. And you go along in your career but then you hit 40, and you stop getting promotions and you see other people getting promoted instead, and you realize this is pretty much it. And then, he said, "Either you decide to leave it all and move to Tahiti, like Gaugin did," or you decide, like he did, that you like having a house, and a family, and you don't want to leave. And you fill in your life with other things.

I have probably written this story down in a blog before. But right now my thoughts about it are different. Because right now I'm 45, and I haven't hit a glass ceiling, my career has been moving forward in leaps every few years (with a brief time out for post-retrenchment sabbatical and MBA school and protracted unemployment and relationship disaster, but still), mainly because I've been jumping companies into better positions, but there's still quite a ways up I could go, I think.

This week at work we had a big party, one of those forced-fun celebrations where they spend a great deal on very professional decorations and a big cake and party favors, and it's all speeches from senior management and no one really wants to be there but it's not so bad, and in fact those occasions can be useful for communicating a company's culture and galvanizing people into a team. Anyway, there were speeches by the North American President, and the North American Sector President, and the North American Group President. And none of them seem like old men to me. I'm 45 and very senior people sometimes retire at 55, because they can.

So, it's right that I should be moving up into those ranks. I certainly have the experience and expertise and temperament (except for my tendency to engage in snipey gossip in office corridors - but then, you have to seem to be one of the workers in order to gain their trust and extract any helpful information, so I can somewhat rationalize - but I'm still going to try to cut down on it). But maybe I don't have all that much time to reach my whole potential. Am I supposed to accomplish everything in my career in 10 short years? I feel like 30 more is not enough. I feel like I'm on the brink of something, and I'm excited about learning and developing and influencing the organization and moving things forward to excellence. Maybe that's just a factor of my industry, and the fact that it's all new and changing all the time and full of promise and potential, and youth-oriented. So, actually, how lucky am I that I get to work in this field and be excited by new emerging things all the time, and not be in an industry where I would have achieved everything and already burned out.

On the flip side, I heard a news story on the radio while driving home about a sitting US Senator who is 90, and is only just giving up chairmanship of some important committee or other, but he's still an active member of the Senate. So, who says I have to stop at 55? Who says I have to stop contributing, soon. I do have another 30 years! 75 is the new 40!

other transformations

The country changed on Tuesday night, history changed, the future changed. Hope won, people cheered, women wept for joy, our candidate kept his cool and seemed ready for the job ahead.

And also, the whole outlook at work changed. When I heard the first proposal of what they planned to do with us, I recoiled. I didn't like it at all. I started exploration and laying groundwork and barracking for other options, right away, and have kept at it. Fortunately, I had also done a few basic things that brought me to the attention of respected senior management before that - just easy things really, I took control of a conversation, explained things clearly, whacked a few graphs up, and let it show that I think my job is really cool (was), and that was so unusual and unique that I busted through and looked like a rock star.

So, this week, one of my colleagues was in despair and howling that the senior manager who will decide our fates keeps canceling her meeting with him. And I had one that she set, on my calendar, and it stayed. She wanted to talk to me. It turns out everyone listened. They realized the original new plan had some important gaps, and I was able to articulate clearly enough what those were and what I wanted to do to fill them that it looks like they created a position just for me. And I even asked out loud if I had competition for it - the end of the sentence was "then I'd be happy to speak to my qualifications" - but I didn't have to finish my sentence, the job is earmarked for me. And then also I had been jumping up and down and expressing zeal about an organizational change that ought to happen, that did happen a few weeks ago, a whole department reporting up through a whole different part of the business, and so she asked me to comment on the ideal way that all our departments should work together. Like, "Okay, enthusiasm-girl, you're in charge, people's lives and jobs are at stake, you do some research and tell me how to do this." Eep! I sent out about seven emails in about an hour trying to drum up contacts and people to talk to. While seeming low-key because the rest of my department doesn't know I have this assignment and it's not a big deal. But eep! This is how senior managers have to work. This is how you do strategy and business direction, and also, by the way, how a smart girl makes things happen.

So now I'm a bit freaked out. Here are the things freaking me out. No, wait, first here are the things not freaking me out so we can put this in perspective.
- I am smart enough to do this more senior job they want to give me
- I can think clearly and sort through confusion
- I can get different sides to agree, I can formulate and then execute solutions or enthuse other people to want to execute them
- I am really good at my job
- I have more knowledge of my subject area than any other human person who works in that building, maybe any other of the 5000 employees who work in this town, including all my peers, who have up to 15 years seniority on me with the company
- I have life and world experience that also make me perfectly qualified
- I have good judgement and the strength of character to work at a senior level

So here are the things worrying me:
- I'm still trying to grow my hair out so it's a bit of a mess, plus it got humid just this week so it's all fuzzy as well as in my eyes and I don't have the right product. Q: Should I cut my hair back into a Senior VP-style Execu-Bob? (aux. q's: Should I start using a hair straightener, should I colour my hair so it looks redder and deeper and shinier, do I have enough grey yet that it would be a good idea?)
- I've been using the big-girl makeup for a while now, but is the under-eye-circle-covering-stuff right, does it cake up and show, is it a shade of yellow that doesn't match my face, do people talk about me when I'm not there as "yellow-cake-eye" and then snicker?
- My most recent trainer left me to go out on his own and he's a bit crazy so I haven't returned his calls but I don't have a trainer now and I'm not being disciplined about going to the gym. When I was with him, granted I was dizzy and trashed all day and sore for the next 2 or 3, but I felt strong, and I was starting to have a firmish body, firmisher than it is now. Two weeks and I've puffed out again, lost strength and stamina, and am sliding backwards rather than going forwards. This crazy trainer would cost lots of extra money. The work gym is free, the other gym is already paid for. With this last one I could feel the feeling of taking it more seriously and being an athlete. Never felt that ever in my life before, but I knew it was possible with hard work. Do I want to commit? Do I want to do what it takes to make that happen? Or because my job requires charm and my brain, should I keep this middling-level of fitness and make it a secondary priority and concentrate on being rested and not dizzy and not sore, at work?
- Hair question and exercise question are really this question - do I need to put lots of effort into being a traditionally attractive female, i.e. to try to be as extremely sexy as I can be? Which has two subcomponents - is this what it will take to get a new boyfriend, esp. since I'm becoming an old woman, and then, is this how senior executive women are?
- But then, I felt completely myself in the meeting with the VP when talking about the new department and the special project. I realized that when I'm enthusiastic about something it just takes over and I burble over and just am what I am, in the moment. "I can tell you have a passion for that area," she said to me but others say to me all the time. Should I just be me, with hair a mess and lumpy elderly body, and frumpy clothes? (I ordered some non-frumpy clothes online just tonight, so steps are being taken there). Will I be able to rise up and do this more senior job properly (my direct manager said today, about his endorsement of me in this new role, "This is going to have a really high level of visibility." I want to make him proud, I want the poise and image of a senior enough person to make them not doubt giving this gig to me.) "Dress for the job you want," they say. Do I need to smarten up?
- If I get one of these senior jobs - and I'm probably making too big a deal about it, it's not like I'm going to do investor calls or anything - but if I get one, they were created for men who have wives who stay at home. I got nobody at home. I don't even have a friend in town. I would love to have someone close - an intimate, either friend or partner - who I could come home and let my guard down with, but also to help me think these things through. I don't have one of them so I talk to you.

My fantasy is, on days like this trying to process news like this, to call someone on the mobile while walking to the car, saying, "Oh my god, meet me for a beer right now." And then, "So, they think I can do it!" And the intimate says "Of course you can! I know you can!" And I say, "So, seriously, do you think I need the executive hair cut?" and she/he will say, "You always look just fine when you go to work. You're beautiful." And I could ask, "Should I call the crazy trainer back, or get a new trainer at the other gym, or just try to go at work on my own," and the intimate would say, "That's really up to you. Why do you just try (whichever one I seem to be leaning towards)? Try it and see how it goes, you can tell me about it next time we have a beer." "Which is like every week! I'm going to need you as a sounding board even more now, getting used to this new position, and just trying to keep my head around it." And the intimate would just smile, she would raise her glass and have a drink. Or if a he, he would lean over and give me a reassuring kiss.

Well, I have both a devoted boyfriend and a BFF in my head, anyway. That will have to do for the short term, here. Hope somebody's home to call on the weekend, or online to IM with.

I.O.U.

- reflections on the election
- reflections on feeling Not Pretty Enough (shout out to my homie Casey Chambers)

validation, reinforcement, identity

I got a little closer to figure out what it is I'm looking for every night when I return and return to the computer instead of going to bed.

Tonight I stood at the door of the office for a minute and tried to find the feeling, what would satisfy me, what would make me feel like my search had been satisfied?

I couldn't think of a thing, a thing in particular, but I got a sense of a feeling, like I feel when practicing guitar (sometimes), or watching a TV show that wholly absorbs me (Sopranos was the best, although the effect has been lost), or reading a very well-written, smart, funny article on something about which I am passionately interested (when you scan down the table of contents in a new New Yorker and gasp and immediately turn to that page and read it all in one go, wherever you happen to be sitting down). Emails from certain people will satisfy it, or sometimes a new Astrobarry horoscope or excellent comment thread on Cute Overload or certain All Men Are Liars blogs on the Sydney Morning Herald, but usually not a single xkcd cartoon, and since I've read them all I have to enjoy them one at a time now and that won't do. A long IM chat with almost anybody would to it, but some maybe more than others and I hate it when they say goodbye first. YouTube videos usually, although lately it's taking more and more of them for the same effect (I had the first one at a party, the guy just gave it to me....).

The colours of this mysterious thing are lots of black and red, and dark wood grain, with little bits of white to highlight or to provide contrast for text.

What is it? What do they have in common, and what is it they're doing that allows me to go to bed, and the lack of which makes me unable to go to bed?

I think it's some kind of validation of my personality. A mirror, maybe? A member of my tribe, who comes from my same planet and is like me and understands me? The success includes a feeling of absorption - I lose myself, my selfconsciousness, in my experience of the thing, my consciousness is all directed outward for that minute, or 2 minutes fifty, or 48 minutes because the DVD doesn't have ads. I lose myself in the thing and I also find myself in the thing. The thing makes me feel like myself is okay. And it also entertains me - gives me enough to think about, uses language artfully and cleverly, provides insights, or portrays a rich and engaging human character, is funny. There's an emotion to it too - detached and funny, but also melancholy, or something darker than melancholy. Think of Christopher on the Sopranos. The tone of many of his domestic scenes - not the later seasons with the cardboard cutout of a wife, but with Adriana or with Tony or Carmela. Just home from something intense, but dealing with it as a man. Really clever in his use of words, flashing eyes, amped up from some adventure but also a bit doubtful about the meaning of it all. Working, struggling really hard for a goal that's a long way away, full of passion for it but not sure the work is ever going to get him there, and it takes his all.

Yeah.

Compassion for each other

It's Election Eve, and here are some gentle words from Astrobarry, which will be good to keep in mind tomorrow whatever happens.

"Along our way, each of us will meet countless other individuals facing the same fundamental life questions […] though many will approach them from positions in sharp contrast to ours. What inspires our hope may trigger their terror. What represents our liberation may constitute the radical destruction of their near-and-dear values. And what we may do to try and build these fresh freedoms into our reigning social structures, they might seek to undermine or sabotage in righteous refusal to bow down.

"Can't you see? We are both us and them… in different guises, based on the situation. No matter what side of history we find ourselves on, the other players deserve our basic human respect—regardless of whether we feel they've given us the same. Compassion's got to start somewhere."

All the daylight has been spent

On Sunday we went off of Daylight Savings Time, and so today was the first evening we all had to leave work in the real, non-daylight adjusted time. I walked out of the building at 5:37 and it was dark, dark. Streetlights on, stars out, pitch black, no rosy glow in the western sky from the sunset, nothing, dark.

Driving home on streets that I could have seen only last week was fairly creepy. And I think it was for every other commuter as well - a long line of red taillights on the freeway, everyone driving aggressively fast and following too close. I think they all looked up from their desks out the windows and had a sudden panic - "I shouldn't be at work now!" And all jumped in their cars at once and headed for home in a rush - "I shouldn't be out! I have to get home!"

Last year when this happened I comforted myself that the solstice was only a month and a bit away, and then it would get better. Ah, but this year I know, after the solstice is when it actually starts to get cold...

Do youse like the new clock?

I swiped the idea from a "next blog" I found describing the experiences of an exchange student spending a year at a University in Alabama, and got it from a site called ClockLink. It also has a very nice World Clock that's done in Flash and is easy to use.

To Do's and Decisions

Another Saturday and the molasses is starting to take hold of me.

I slept until I woke up, which turned out to be 11. I was having big, complicated leadership dreams I think, because when I did get out of bed to brush my teeth I was having a huge argument in my head with the Messaging Services team at work because two important emails I require with the assets for two different projects, despite being sent three times, did not come through, for no good reason, and even though I raised two job tickets yesterday and they promise a response in four hours, no one called me back at all. So I think in my dreams I was a manager in charge of some complicated projects.

Had a bagel and coffee for breakfast, and scrambled eggs and toast for lunch just now - it's 1:45. I've been reading articles in a new New Yorker which has been making me feel smart and learned. I was reading some reviews in the review section and the writers compared the works under review with other famous works and authors, and while for some of them I wasn't deeply acquainted with the references, I knew them and so felt tapped in and intellectual. But in doing this I have been sitting perfectly still on the main chair in my living room, which is starting to feel like the captain's chair on the bridge of a spaceship - it's the only place to sit to eat any meals, so there are some tea towels permanently on the coffee table to use as a placemat, and it's the key place to watch TV from, so the remote is at hand, and it's where I practice guitar so the guitar is on a stand just to the side, and the amp with the headphones plugged in, and the music is spread out all over the table on top of the placemats (actually for the scrambled egg lunch I just put the New Yorker down on top of the guitar music to form both a new placemat and the thing I was reading while eating - sedimentary layers of leisure activities that all take place in this one chair).

When I first got up and was Facebooking and whatever, the thought did occur to me of just getting dressed and going out of the house like I do on a workday, with streamlined efficiency of actions and purpose. And the thought made me resentful and tired. So no, no pressure to Go Out and Do Things. Which leaves Staying In and Doing The In Things.

What I have been doing, per above, are things that are creative or smart or sort of stimulating of the brain in other ways. What I'm supposed to be doing is cleaning the bathrooms and doing dishes and laundry and then maybe getting on to the boxes and finances and longer-term projects. These are not creative or intellectually stimulating or brain-tickling things in any way. So I'm avoiding them, sitting in the command chair and doing everything else, but I'm feeling guilty. It's a standoff.

My home-based To Do list is like a horrible roommate who I don't get along with, but we're stuck together. I'm not going to move out because my name is on the lease, damn it, but they can't move out because they just lost their job and the car is broken down, and they thought they had a line on a place with their buddy who is coming back from Thailand, but he has ended up somehow taking a side trip through Burma, sorry Myanmar, and there's been no emails or postcards for a few weeks, so, you know, it's not clear when he's thinking of coming back, but once he is, you know, that room should be there and I can move out then, buddy, but in the meantime can I have 40 bucks to pay the late fees at the video store? I used your card, you know, and now they're saying we can't check anything else out. Sorry, man. This horrible roommate is always just here, here, here, a lump in the corner of the living room, taking up psychic space and preventing me from getting on with my life. I sit in the living room to assert my right to be there, agitated, fixated on them to the point where I can't get on with my own stuff, but unable to negotiate or take any action. I can't do anything but be aware of them and fume. Roommate standoff.

One day I'll be more macro-organized and the baseline of my place to live will be such that I can focus on the surface stuff and the infrastructure will be taken care of. But for this weekend, should I not worry about the house, and just focus on having enriching and creative mental experiences? Or should I go out and live in the world? Or what?

p.s. Family mantra, expressing I'm sure the root of this problem: "Don't let the Gemini get bored."

Guitar lessons in the age of YouTube/Got the Blues

So, because I became overjoyed and mesmerized with the 2-string shuffles that my teacher gave me last week, this week he printed out all kinds of songs that use roughly the same pattern, so I expect to sink even deeper into it this coming week. I love my guitar teacher. And he always gives me one rather ambitious piece that uses the technique we're learning but at a rather advanced level. I love this too - it gives me something to aspire to.

The good thing about learning guitar in the age of YouTube is that in an instant you can find film footage of the original artist playing the piece, watch their hands, get the rhythms down, realize that it's actually okay to flub some bits as long as you play expressively, that they were pretty much just making it up as they went along anyway, that kind of thing.

But the bad thing about learning guitar in the age of YouTube is right at the top on the right hand side of the page when you're watching your heroes play the new song you're supposed to learn, there's inevitably a video called "10 year old kid plays [whatever the song is]".

Viz.:

Eddie Van Halen playing Eruption
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_lwocmL9dQ

10 year old kid playing Eruption
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huUVXWEM7yQ

Steve Ray Vaughn playing Pride and Joy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIpIsM4KTLc

12 year old kid playing Pride and Joy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJVqBPode5k

James Hetfield from Metallica playing One
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5BoQ1qPPRs

8 year old kid playing One
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDDV4hNv3j4

This was starting to make me discouraged, but tonight I came up with a brilliant plan - as soon as I get these songs worked up to a certain standard, I'm going to post some response videos - "45 year old woman plays Eruption solo", "45 year old woman plays Pride and Joy", but also then "45 year old plays her own blues composition because she has life experience and can express the emotions she's earned from living through song".

For 45 years old, that's rill mature, Ellen.

Still, it gives me inspiration!

Happy Halloween

Beautiful clear air. Temperatures so warm you only need a sweater, no coat or scarf. Trees with glowing yellow leaves, other trees with orange leaves that match the pumpkins. Pumpkins sitting, welcoming, on porches. Little snags of kids walking together on sidewalks between friendly wooden houses. Always a few young ones and one big one. Lots of black. Lots of red wigs, white face paint. A few little ghosts in white sheets. Everyone with a bag for treats. Stopped at stop lights, waiting to cross to a new crop of houses to hit for treats, the dog on a leash with them. A sombrero and a purple face. An older girl dressed like a cheerleader, a very little boy dressed like a Green Bay Packer. It's so light, it's so early, but you find out the kids have been off school for two days, so they probably couldn't wait. You wonder how many streets they cover, how late they stay out, how much candy will be in their bags at the end.

Oneida Street Bridge, driving south home from the guitar lesson. Look to the right, over the water and Fratello's, and nearby the boats docked on the north bank that you've been eying for your hunt task. Streaky sky. Pink to deep red. Sunset over the water, and up high enough, in a car driving over a bridge, to see a view, briefly. Grey bridge, silver water, yellow sandstone buildings, orange leaves, red sky.

Compassion fatigue

I was driving home and switched over to the Wisconsin Public Radio station out of Green Bay that is all talk, all the time. A woman was delivering a news story from a foreign land, I missed the first bit so I don't know which one. She had an oddly cheerful voice for the subject matter - "...motorcycle taxis that carry passengers side-saddle to their destination, but most of the citizens travel by foot. Life is bustling, but these are all refugees in a relocation camp. A few miles away the streets are quiet. No one there but dead bodies, and the rebel soldiers who killed them..."

I turned it off. Is that wrong of me? But this was news from a country far away from here, where I don't know anyone (probably don't even know anyone who knows anyone), and the killing is not my fault, and just now, today, there's nothing I can do about it.

So, I rationalized at the time, continuing to listen would serve no purpose at all except entertainment, and it's wrong to get entertainment value out of a village full of dead bodies and the soldiers who killed them.

But then, the voice of my philosopher friends inside my head said, first of all it's important to be aware of these goings-on in the world and not turn a blind ear to them. And beyond awareness, it's your moral obligation to do what you can to stop it. You should have listened all the way to the end of the story and if they didn't say again what country it was in you should have called the station to find out, and then, right then, you should have done whatever you could to stop the killing, including running off and joining the Peace Corps, alerting the media and insisting that they make a big deal about it, forming a non-profit fund-raising group, organizing people, creating urgency in your community, working hard. As a human being, you have a serious and incontrovertible moral obligation to do whatever you can to stop this kind of thing happening, even if, no, especially if, you don't know the people and don't know anyone who knows them.

Piss off, I said to my inner philosopher. And drove off listening to something else.

night mall, morning mall

Tonight I was at the mall, briefly. I arrived about a half hour before it closed. Most of the people around were either roving bands of teenagers or dodgy.

I was in the ladies room near the food court and it had the general dishevelment of the end of a day - paper towels on the floor, toilet paper almost out in the near stalls, and various sorts of bodily grime on the seats so you had to try several stalls before you found one you could work with - a quick wipe here and there, but no need for mops or industrial solvents, kind of thing.

It made me think of the process of cleaning this bathroom, and whole mall, to get ready for the start of a new shopping day. And I thought of the workers standing there in the morning, about five minutes before opening, the toilet paper all stocked, the surfaces all gleaming, the chairs all pushed in under the food court tables and lined up in neat rows, the overhead lights gleaming off the surfaces. Ready for the shoppers on a new day.

Today's accomplishments - not bad for a Monday

So I still haven't sorted out a new exercise regime, but set the alarm early this morning nonetheless. Alarms, actually - since it's now really super dark when I wake up in the morning, the earth having turned on its axis quite far away from the sun being as I live in Wisconsin (and it will get worse before it gets better, bring on the solstice...), I needed to go back to the technique I was using when I moved here, which was to set one alarm near the bed and then set my phone alarm for five minutes later and leave it in the living room. I therefore had to get up, actually out of bed, and walk a fair distance to make the annoying noise stop, and if I just stayed upright I could get ready and be at work on time.

So I did that this morning but hadn't made a firm decision on a gym to go to, sat around watching CNN as if it was crucial that I catch up on all the stories, and then did finally get myself to go along to the little gym at my apartment complex. Only had to put a sports bra on under the pj's, and some shoes, basically, so it was pretty low commitment. Did a basic sort of routine with some cardio and some - light, low reps - hand weights. A nice old lady came in about half-way, and asked if I was done with the treadmill but then got on the bike and didn't want the treadmill until I was back on it doing intervals. She was superciliously polite about it - "I don't want to interrupt you at all, I can go and do something else for a while" - but I was definitely an intruder on her personal morning exercise. Next time I should go to one of my gyms, where there are enough treadmills for everyone so you aren't in anyone's way. But still. Got it done. Even got red in the face and felt like I had exerted some energy.

Astrobarry has told me that this week I need to stop worrying about all my crushes and social life and get some work done (with vague threats about regretting it soon if I don't). So I've been following his advice - keeping the TV turned off, not coming in to see what's new on my Facebook homepage since five minutes ago when I last checked. Instead just getting on with a task that qualifies more as "work". At my day job, I was doing this today as well, and got lots of stuff done - a horrible PowerPoint presentation that I don't want to do in the first place and is on it's about 6th revision, plus routing lots of approvals and image files and data files for various smaller projects. Plus some high-level schmoozing to see if they will create for me the job I want in the new structure (closer to it all the time, and there are so many positive opportunities that I'm willing to hang out for a while doing a non-perfect job until it all comes together).

This evening went, as I do every month, with a friend from work to this month's film in the international film series. This was a slow but very beautiful film from Singapore called Be With Me. It was very slow and deliberate and quiet, which made it hard to gracefully eat the pizza we'd ordered (it's one of those cinemas where they bring you drinks and food and there are tables in front of all the seats). He was quite affected by it, and didn't want to talk about it or do any analysis afterward. Once again I regretted that we're not allowed to touch anyone that we know from work, because the boy looked like he needed a hug.

I ripped all my recent acquisitions over the weekend in aid of the soundtrack for the party (which went okay, by the way, nine people out of 40 invited, but everyone had a nice time, the only sort of drag thing was that unlike my two birthday parties in Sydney not one boy was hanging around at the end hoping I'd invite him home to spend the night with me - but I guess you can't have fans like that all the time - but still, I had to clean everything up and drag stuff back to my house all by myself. Even a friend or family member would stay with you until everything was cleaned up, but here I don't have one of those - yet). So I've been listening to the iPod in the car instead of the CDs, and it does have poorer sound quality, but it's nice to be able to forward and pick different things on the fly (literally - clicking up through the menus to get the setting off "shuffle songs" while going nearly 70 mph). I'm still completely obsessed with the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, have I mentioned that before? And so now I can click easily back and forth from their early, more straightforwardly psychedelic work on the album "B.R.M.C." to the similarly atmospheric but more accessible song structures of "Take Them On, On Your Own". The two songs that especially interest me in their similarities are "Whatever Happened To (Rock and Roll)" and very grand song that comes last on "TTOOYO" that makes the whole album listening experience have a crescendo and denouement like the very best constructed Aristotelean dramas (am I going on a bit now), the song "Heart + Soul". The later one, Heart + Soul, has similar rhythm in the guitars but so much more going on musically. The boys actually get better as they go along - but there are songs on every album that just thoroughly take my breath away. Not to mention how Mr Peter Hayes looks at :43 seconds in the video for Berlin. Sigh.

So B.R.M.C. is helping me as an outlet for these moony romantic feelings that have sort of been haunting me lately. When I have grand, oceany emotions to feel, they provide the music for it, and a safe target so I don't end up with irresponsible crushes on innocent bystanders and passersby. Being prone to moony romantic feelings is a bit of a liability in life. But it's the kind of thing one can learn to control, with patience and discipline.

Right, Barry. Back to work.

Today's accomplishments - Saturday errands

Dragged myself out of bed and it was only 9:30 - not bad.

One load of white laundry, one load of dark, and got all the dishes done, including the things that have to be washed by hand.

Turned off the TV - trying to have a TV free day, the exceptions were some home decorating programs while exercising and a little bit of Fast Times at Ridgemont High while eating dinner. Next step is Facebook free day, and I will have so much spare time I won't know what to do with myself.

Exercised at the little gym in my apartment complex - a bit of treadmill, a bit of hand weights. Definitely did not push myself to the limit but it's been more than a week since I last met with any professional trainer since my last one chucked a spazz and quit the gym I've been going to - he left a phone message to see if I was interested in training privately, but I don't know if his regime is what I'm looking for, and it doesn't really make sense for me to pay extra when I already get gym membership for free at work, and another gym membership that is already paid for.

I did realize that exercise, especially pretty intense exercise that you do in a serious way, is good for the ego. I've been walking around with the knowledge that I'm going in the direction of being fit and strong with lots of cardiopulmonary stamina. This makes me feel like I merit attention. I admit it, and I think I've talked about this before - if the stereotype of men is that they think about sex every three seconds, then the corresponding stereotype of women is that they worry about their attractiveness every three seconds, and I had to admit it but I think it's true. And so, when every three seconds the worry would come up, then I could rest back with satisfaction on the knowledge that I was becoming babe-like and did not need to worry. Now I do, again. I was at lunch and reading a book and felt my sides being a bit muffin-like over the top of my jeans, and wasn't able to rely on my intense training regime for comfort that it would soon be under control. So I may have to rethink this whole thing yet again. But at least today I got out there and did something. Did find my lungs burned after only 10 minutes of treadmill intervals, and I think it's still just fall allergies - maybe even just from bonfires of fallen leaves. So, for that reason I'm looking forward to the first snow, and we'll see if things are better. So much to manage. Sigh. But I'm working on it.

Went and bought fancy wine for my party tomorrow, at the fancy wine shop near me. Since I had been there a few weeks ago, I knew exactly what reds to ask for, most of them by name. For the whites I knew what grapes and what combination of flavors (dry, smooth, citrussy, etc), but had him recommend the particular bottles to me. I love, love, love knowing what I'm talking about when I'm in a fancy wine shop. Most of it you pick up just from living in Australia, like knowing about cricket and Parliamentary models of government. But then some of it was hard work from going to fancy restaurants and special event fancy meals with fancy menus, and days spent tooling around wineries and then reading that James Halliday book on varietals in the evenings before going to sleep, as if it was a novel. It goes in. I love that I can keep that knowledge with me, and immediately start talking the talk in a brand new shop in a brand new town in a brand new country. I love that I knew that it mattered that they had Reidel glasswear, the first time I went in there. It makes me feel old, and experienced, but also like I have been living my life well in some respects and have something of value I can take away from my travels.

I was aiming for the grocery store right after this to get the rest of the stuff for the party, but hadn't had lunch yet, and so was aiming for the Tom's Diner for a hamburger on the way, but you can't turn left into the road that goes past Tom's from Kensington any more, so I turned left on College Ave and was aiming to circle back and go to Tom's the right way, but found myself headed downtown. Ah well. I went down a road I'd never been down before, Talulah St. I remember last time I was in Tom's for a late afternoon hamburger, I noticed a street sign on the inside of the diner, and photos of their original location, which was somewhere on Talulah St. So I drove up it to see if I could find the spot. Did not, because it was all residential, with 60's boring ranch style houses down near me, gradually becoming more historical square wooden Wisconsiny farmhouse-houses. All the houses had mature trees, and all of them were all colors from canary yellow to orange to pink to deep red. I noticed how the leaves on the ground are the thing that is making the town look autumy. I saw a couple walking, the guy in a hooded sweatshirt, with leaves on the lawns all around them and it stabbed at my heart - this combination of aesthetic appreciation of the now and stabbing nostalgia for my childhood and the landscape that I've been away from for so long, and pining for a future time when I would be on a walk in these leaves with someone I love and missing them now. At one point I crossed a familiar road on the diagonal when I thought I had been going parallel to it. I knew enough to pick my way back to a road that crosses the river and then goes up a hill into town.

I parked where I always park, down the road a bit from the park and just out of range of the parking meters, which are still active on a Saturday. It was cold, especially walking on College Ave itself with the wind whipping straight at you from somewhere near Missoula. I regretted not bringing a scarf, was glad I had brought some gloves, and thought back to weekend afternoons when I first walked this walk when I had just moved here, and what a startling shock the temperatures were. I took a shortcut through the independent bookstore and bought something on the way through. I headed for the groovy cafe where the college kids hang out, the one with the yellow awning whose name I never remember. There were so many groovy college kids that there were no tables free, so I left again and headed to my usual haunt of the Copper Rock.

But stopped at a gifty shop that seemed to have furniture that might be antique. I asked the very extremely nice proprietresses if they knew a good refinisher, and the one who did got the phonebook out and copied out his name and phone number for me. In a similar gifty store like this in Sydney, the clerks, although they'd probably be helpful, would also be full of attitude. After getting the refinisher's number, I strolled around the shop for a bit, and wanted most of what they had. Ended up just buying a scented candle, because they had one burning near the cash register - I thought it might be "pumpkin pie spice" and thought it would be lovely and autumny in my house, but it turned out to be "banana nut bread". Before putting it in a bag for me (a paper bag with little handles), she wrapped it in decorative tissue paper, so it was like an elegant present. What a girly thing to buy, but it made me happy.

The Copper Rock was packed as well - hanging out in a cafe is just the thing to do on a wet, overcast chilly October Saturday afternoon - but my timing worked out and I scored a booth all to myself. Tried to order a short black - I said "I'll have an espresso coffee" and made a little "short black" gesture with my hand. "A 'Rocky Mountain High'?" the little boy behind the counter said. "Um, ha ha," I said in return, and looked in puzzlement over my shoulder at their coffee menu on the wall. "A shot of espresso in a coffee? Just the twelve ounces?" Wait. This was a question they ask for long blacks. "No, just the short..." and I did the hand gesture again. "Oh, an espresso." Turns out an "espresso coffee" is a long black with a short black in it, or a long black made with coffee instead of hot water. Not what I wanted, although I keep it in mind for the day when it's what I need. I explained to the little boy that I'd lived in Australia for a long time and all the coffees are called different things. This was an easier conversation that it usually is, and I was glad that I explained my space-alien-ness to him. He said that Sydney is someplace he really wants to go. I hope he gets there, but he probably won't remember what all the coffees are called.

Read a book, drank the short black/espresso when it arrived, had a fabulous sandwich called a "Mussolini" which is chicken and sundried something or other on a grilled panini with some other stuff melted in it. Tried to feel fabulous and not worry about my attractiveness. Felt quite at home, which again is a change from the first few weekends when I was hanging out downtown. Stayed until it was actually about 5pm.

Made it to the grocery store to shop for the party, and bought all the same things I used to have for my birthday parties in Surry Hills. I don't know how many people will attend this party tomorrow, might be as few as three or four although I invited 40 and included partners and children. I have enough to feed an army. I always get stuff I like in case there are leftovers. I got some crappy wine at the grocery store to supplement the fancy wine. I brought it in my car to the venue where the party will be held, and kept having flashes of being part of the family who's getting ready for a wedding the next day. "Are you all going over now? Should we take the stuff over tonight and set it up? Sure, I can just run get ice in the morning. Will it be alright overnight? Sure, we've got the only key, what would happen?" It was a delightful feeling.

I was reading a friend's blog recently (hi, Bunny), and he gave a shout out to his favorite time-management guru, and I went to the said guru's website and read the first chapter of his new book which is online there. Naturally all the really helpful secrets are in the book itself and not available for free online, but the little nuggetlette of wisdom that I took away from the intro was when he was talking about our irrational brain. The rational brain can make all sorts of plans or long-term objectives but the irrational brain classifies activities into threats or delicious treats, and then avoids them or spends too much time procrastinating doing them, in turn. I usually hate grocery shopping and sometimes avoid it for weeks even though I have nothing but dry rice noodles and a few sugar packets in my cupboard to eat. However, shopping for a party that I'm throwing is a delicious treat, and I loved it.

Now I'm home doing iPod management in anticipation of setting up some playlists for the party. I got a new set of Klipsch iPod speakers just for the occasion, and I'm excited to be able to DJ, but there will be some hard decisions to make - "What kind of music will work well with this crowd" is just as puzzling a question as "are these enough dips?", when you haven't hosted a party for this particular crowd before.

Tomorrow will tell. More later!