Americana (abridged)

So when you fly from Appleton to Denver, the first things you see are small farms with one farm house and one barn each - perfect, quarter acre squares cut out of the landscape with roads between that run exactly north and south, and exactly east and west. This continues for hours, although you might go in and out of cloud cover, but when you emerge there it is again, that midwestern grid, all the way across the middle. Then, eventually, as you head west, you start to see the circles. They are bigger than the squares were, a whole acre each, perfect green circles and you can see along a radius the straight black irrigation pipes that define them, and brown bits at the corner before the next circle in the quilt. Then as you go further west there's more brown, and fewer circles, and some gentle undulations of the land but it's more barren and scrubby. And then just when you're sick of that, the captain announces your descent into Denver and asks you to fasten your seat belt and put your seat backs and tray tables into the locked position, and then if you're by the window you look out and see what seems like a line of low clouds defining the western horizon but as you get closer it's clear that it's snow at the top of the mountains, and when the plane swings around either to the right or to the left to approach the runways you see sun glint off the tall buildings downtown. You look out over it, that distinctive Colorado vegetation and the city and the peaks beyond, and wince with all those memories of being young and new and learning to drink and dance and all the rest of it, but as the plane taxis you look out over it, that brown scrubby landscape, and you’re reclaiming it and it’s yours.

Written after a flight in September as part of an email (thanks DJ for permission to reprint), abridged as above and read out to a poetry group tonight.

Possible Answers

No, never.
I'm flattered, but no, I don't think so.
Not right now.
Not right now but maybe later.
Maybe.
Let's see how things go.
Let's try it and see how things go.
Yes.
Yes, immediately.
Yes, I always have and always will forever.

Without condition

Knowing that there's someone out there who loves you, at all times, just as you are, is one of the chief comforts people get from religion.

Work not yellow enough

I attended a team-building session at work today that included a profile of my work style. In addition to descriptions of my strengths and weaknesses and preferred communication styles, there was a page that listed the features of Ellen's ideal work environment. Here's what it said that should include:

• Bright, motivational, inspirational posters and prints abound.
• She sees the impact and results of her efforts.
• The culture promotes a democratic management style.
• Information is openly and freely available and exchanged.
• There is ample opportunity to express ideas.
• The emphasis is on informality and tapping in to inner creativity.
• Her inspirational vision is nurtured.
• She has freedom from authority and bureaucracy.
• She can question the ruiles and the traditional ways of doing things.
• A flexible approach is taken to the specification of hours and days worked.

I'd say these are all true of me.

Not one - not ONE - applies to my current work situation.

(C) Copyright 1992-2009 Andrew Lothian, Insights, Dundee, Scotland. All rights reserved. www.gatehousealliance.com

anti-viral

I hate this feeling, where you're not sure if you're getting a cold or if you're just finally staring clearly down the black gaping maw of pointlessness that is human existence.

I hope it's just a cold.

working my way around the karmic wheel

If it's true that in my past life I was Marilyn Monroe, then the thing I'm getting in this life that I would have wished for in that one is to be appreciated for my mind rather than my body.

The thing I haven't worked out which may mean I might need to go back and repeat the sequence a few more million times is that now I want to be appreciated for my body as well.

I'm still her inside, people! But now with a Ph.D.!

Sometimes I think I don't deserve you

Earlier this week I burned the roof of my mouth on some pizza, but now it is healed.

Thank you, life.

There will be a special place in hell for tailgaters.

She was driving to work on a rainy morning, another morning of another long day in a long week. Running late, again, but driving carefully to avoid slipping in the car into a ditch, because being late was not as bad as that would be.

Frowning, listening to the first track of the CD come round again, approaching the first roundabout. She glances up by rote into her rear view mirror, which is filled, absolutely filled, with the giant black menacing grille of an oversized black truck. She starts at the sensation of this evil-looking vehicle roaring down upon her. She startles herself by starting to cry. They are tears she remembers from being seven, ten, school yard tears, tears from a tired school girl who doesn't have the reserves to deal with a schoolyard bully.

She feels this and realizes she feels it all in a second, speeds up to accomodate the bully and soon he turns and is past, but the realization of it, the awareness of the vulnerability makes her even sadder. Tears roll down as she takes the on ramp and gets up to speed on the highway. She realizes that everyone her life lately is just like the driver of that black menacing truck. She thinks, how can I do this? She pulls off the highway, pulls into a spot at the side of a building, tissues, eye drops. Goes in, buys Advil, the woman behind the cash register is smiley and chatty and generously friendly. She smiles and chats back, blames her weepy eyes and red nose on allergies. "Oh, at least you're not sick! How many are out today, June? One, two, three...four, four people are out." Take care, they say to each other as exits and gets back on her way. She is gathered together. She has collected herself back into a grown up working person and driver. She can do this.

Rain

Drove home tonight in heavy rain. Coming down like stripes in the sky, great washes of water over the roads, hard to see the painted lines that divide the lanes.

It made me really happy. Somehow a heavy rain was just the right thing. Driving in the wash and release of it, it occurred to me that maybe it's been a long time since we had any rain. Somehow tonight it made me happy and was a good fit.

Would be Dandy

I'd grab a phone
Just to call you up and say,
Quit your job,
Cause I got it made.

Anytime,
Baby let's go.
Everyday should be a holiday.

Experiment 1 - musical craftsmanship

This week the thing I'll add is getting up early to play scales on the guitar.

BTW, we're considering last week as baseline, starting from after my parents left after their visit. Call that a 4/10.

New Testament Democracy

So did I mention I've been going to church? No, don't worry, I haven't given up my fundamental values and metaphysical beliefs, but it's looking like this will work, coming back to my childhood institution, as a way to connect to my community and be of some benefit to them.

Anyway, so the bit that made me think today was in the Lessons before the sermon. It's a passage from the book of Mark, and this quote is 10:42-44 (is that freaking you out, having Bible passages quoted by chapter and verse here? Well, bear with me, I'm still not sure where all this is going.) :

42Jesus called them together and said, "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. 43Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all."

I understand this to be about power relationships in a group of people. And it sounds good to me - that leaders must also serve, and members must also lead. I think that works for work teams, and for groups like churches, and also for giant things like democratic governments of powerful nations. I remember in the conversations before the last federal election in Australia a discussion about reclaiming the Left for Christian politicians - you don't have to be a family-values right wing (highly judgemental, hate-filled and divisive) Christian to be able to use your religious beliefs as a ground for your political service. New Testament Christians actually fit better with the principles of our democracy, that everyone is equally valuable and we should all do what we can to make sure every one of us is okay.

So, see, I already have the Lefty politics part of this, I already believe that stuff. I hope this helps make more sense of this recent strange turn of events in my life.

How could we be scientific about this?

Pre-experiment
Compile a list of hypotheses.
Rank them in terms of difficulty of implementation and estimate of potential benefit.
Lowest difficult + highest benefit is top priority, then descending from there.

Week 1 - Baseline
Do everything as you do.
At the end of the week assign a score out of 10.

Week 2 - Low Hanging Fruit
Implement just one change, the one that ranked highest of the priority score during the Pre-experiment phase.
At the end of this week assign a score out of 10.
- If higher than baseline, adopt change permanently.
- If lower than baseline, eliminate from list of options (optional - test NOT doing the thing as its own hypothesis on a different week, score again)
- If same as baseline, activity is optional hereon in.



So then the only question for me is, should this coming week be Baseline or Week 1?

I have wonderful friends

Another link, brought to my attention :-)

http://www.43folders.com/2009/08/04/enough

A quote:

"(M)ost people won’t notice if you don’t make something, and that a lot of people won’t particularly care if you do. But, how you choose to respond to that existential kōan will say a lot about your potential as both an artist and as an
engaged human.

Because, if you’re relieved that universal apathy provides legitimate cover for eight blissful hours of “managing email,” then you’re in luck. Every day for the rest of your life. Punch out.

But, if you’re like me, you may find you’re invigorated—even challenged—by all that bigger ambiguity. By knowing that, at any time, you might be seconds away from starting something amazing that seemed impossible a minute ago."

Little platitudelet from a self-help book I read a while ago

Bad things happen quickly, good things take a long time.

I'm thinking for example of a car accident (lives destroyed or ended altogether in a matter of seconds) vs. a really nice bottle of red wine (which can take years).

We can reverse it.

And another proactive message - this video posted by a Facebook friend.

The chair in the doorway

Another reference, from an interview in Guitar Player magazine with Vernon Reid from Living Color about the title of their new album, The Chair in the Doorway.

"It came out during the press we did for Collideoscope [their previous album]. Corey and I were in Paris waiting to do an interview and I said to him, 'You're always saying 'The chair's in the doorway.'' It's his way of saying there's a gorilla in the room...there's an obstruction there that no one's bothering to move. I love the title because it's both concrete and physical as something you envision but it's also abstract. A lot of the record talks about 'Why do we put up barriers in the way of our own progress?' and 'How do we get these things out of our way?'"

"Vernon Reid" by Anil Prasad, Guitar Player November 2009, page 31

Active

The universe has been sending me signals from all directions lately that I need to take action against my unhappiness and dissatisfaction and do something about it.

Probably started with Mom breaking the loop of me saying I can't meet anyone because the only gathering place in a small town is church, and I don't believe so that's not an option for me. She talked me into taking her when she was visiting, and in fact it turns out I knew five people there already, and it seems like it could actually work as a vehicle for service and connecting to my community (and getting some support for my grief and dislocation and unhappiness and dissatisfaction), even for a non-believer. I still believe in people, after all, and that's who goes to churches. And in love, as practice and behavior. So I'm trying that.

Then I had a very productive discussion with my new boss about my work plan and role definition, and also career aspirations. We were talking about some problem that really belongs to another department to solve, but that department has an open position for a head that hasn't been filled, so for now perhaps we should just go ahead and solve it. He quoted a mentor of his who always talked about being "in active" rather than "in passive" (or reactive or something or other, I forget the exact jargon). But basically his mentor advocated the principle of when you're dissatisfied to do something about it, don't just give up passively.

Then today I was driving and heard the end of an interview on the radio with two people. They were talking about happiness as an attitude, and about negative self-talk and how it can stunt action, and about negative beliefs and how they can show in behavior to the world even if you don't articulate them to yourself. Like, "I don't deserve adequate help at home from my partner," if you keep accepting the situation where you don't have it. Or "I don't deserve a raise, or better working conditions." They talked about, though, the powerful force of habit and familiarity, and that when you really decide you do need to take action it might require ending the relationship or putting lots of effort into working on it, and that's a scary place. But how if you don't take action happiness will be beyond your grasp.

I know that I need to live like this. I'm not sure how I got so, so beaten down - that I don't deserve things, and that I am not allowed to do anything. A bully for a boss at work, that will do it - but so thoroughly? And the love of one's life/man of one's dreams deciding, meh. But it's so pervasive now. I can't get my dishes done. There are all sorts of broken things in my house (the book says, "You are no longer a girl who keeps broken things!"), but I don't think I even believe that it's possible for me to deal with any of them.

How did it get this bad? But I'm taking small steps.

I turned off the TV and practiced singing, and worked out most of the melody of a very challenging song. I feel like singing is really coming along.

I spent at least a half hour on guitar, partly on scales, partly on songs, and I think I may have cracked the riddle of bending, or at least started to.

I started cleaning my bathroom, a little bit at a time. Sink last night. Shelves in the tub where the shampoo bottles were sitting this morning. Possibly the back of the shower curtain, or that bit right under the faucet tomorrow. I know this seems insane, but the horribleness of leaning over the tub scrubbing and getting tired while getting my clothes all wet and skin burned by caustic chemicals - I couldn't face it. For months now. Famously. Good thing I have a guest bathroom as well and have been keeping on top of that. Might sweep the floor Saturday. Mirror Sunday. It will then be time to start over, like painting the Harbour Bridge, but at least I won't have to hide my secret bathroom shame. I could have someone look at it and not judge me.

How did it get this bad?

Tonight, nothing, actually. Leftovers for dinner and dishes left around. Watched the director's commentary for Wall-E and was inspired by his brilliance and skill and expertise and quest for excellence, and the great team he had around him and the time they take and the hard work, and I was inspired. But I didn't practice guitar more. I didn't sing. I didn't write. I didn't clean any more of the bathroom, or do dishes or laundry or anything. I've kind of checked in here. And now I'm going to bed.

There's a house I want. My parents both drove by it when they were visiting and seemed kind of excited and supportive. This is insane for them to be doing, because I don't have any money at all to put down, and don't have my finances under control enough to take it on as a responsibility. But I really want it, so I plan to set up an appointment with the loan person at my bank to see how far away I am from a mortgage (if she just cackles with laughter I might reconsider the leave town and live in flats forever vagabond option). But I am allowing myself to imagine it, and almost to want it. But then tonight I was thinking about raising children and having them take their first steps (big part of Wall-E), and thought, "When we have our kid, I can teach them this way..." and then caught myself. I am allowed to experiment with allowing myself to want a mortgage. It is not an option any more to want babies. I forget this.

So part of the work of taking an active stance and making happiness a practice and an attitude is thinking hard about which desires I'm going to allow and then work to actualize - which bits of unhappiness and dissatisfaction are on the list of things to focus on and fix, and which are just part of permanent reality. S. is gone. Australia is in the past. I have hit high middle age as a single person in a town where I have no close friends. I need reading glasses now. My teeth are going back crooked to how they were before the braces. These things are part of reality and can't be changed (well, maybe the teeth can, but only with additional painful orthodontia). But I am not cursed to be lonely and alone forever - there must be a way to connect with people (analog people, not all of you - not like the people on the space ship in Wall-E with their screens). And I am not enslaved by my work so I can't have time to keep my house up. Or get great at guitar or sing in public. And maybe I even deserve to carve out some time to really do the gym thing seriously again, get a proper trainer and really push myself and do it, so that I could be a pageant babe (was watching reality TV last night), or if not a pageant babe or swimsuit model, at least that person again who makes people stop in the hallway and say, "Wow! You look great! Have you been working out?"

Which things to want, which things to work hard on even tho they're not fun and the payoff is down the track, how early to get up, how hard to push myself.

I need to meditate on all of this stuff.

But in the meantime, the sink in my bathroom and the shelves in the tub where the shampoo bottles sit are clean, and I am starting to crack the mystery of bending.

Baby steps.

Rules for fiction work as rules for life as well

Don't use lots of vague psychobabble words. Don't stick to platitudes or industry jargon that doesn't actuallymean anything.

Illustrate what you're trying to say with concrete particulars. Describe specific objects and occasions using descrptions based in physical reality.

So not, like, "I was so depressed, sitting there."

Maybe more like, "The snail started up the side of the crushed Pepsi can, and I saw that it had two concentric dark rings, in the design on the shell on its back. "

House a Home

Lately I've been catching myself glancing around at my possessions and thinking, "I made this. I built this whole thing from scratch, all by myself. "

My couch, my bedroom furniture, my great car - who would loan me enough money to get such a nice car? - I have built it all from scratch, all by myself.

Unrealistic Cinderella fantasies

I know that if I rushed into a dalliance, it would be a few hours of bliss - that feeling of leaving your body and becoming interconnected and time stopping and all that - followed a couple of days later by a lifetime's worth of horrible. Guilt, revulsion, anger, irritation, regret, etc. Just like all the last dalliances ended up. I know that's not worth it.

And I know that if I rashly proposed marriage, said hey, I have a good job, just marry me, we could do this, join your life to mine here and everything will be great, I know it wouldn't be great. I know that it would end up just like Dustin Hoffman and what's-her-name in the back of the bus at the very end of The Graduate. Oh my god, what have we done.

I choose to ignore these incontravertible facts. My desire goes ahead and desires an unending eternity of the first bit, the in-love bit, before it all goes bad. I want that, want that, want that. I don't really believe it's possible, with the front part of my brain, but the rest of me decides to want it. Like a drug.

Probably just the recent full moon.

I should probably write some songs. All songs are about exactly this.

Time Lord

My horoscope at the moment on Free Will says I should "ask yourself what three things you could do to stop fighting time and start loving it better."

One whole set of things has to do with not having enough time to do the things I want to/should every day - not exercising, practicing singing or practicing guitar enough, also not sleeping enough in the first place, and I can't quite work out where all the time is going.

The other whole set of things has to do with patience for things that are bad now but will be good sometime in the future. I will be able to play the Freebird solo. We will be working on our second projects with all these new agencies, not our first ones. I will have a job description and objectives, and feedback. My sister will live closer by and will be realizing her dreams. And I will see him again.

I'm not sure what I can do to stop fighting any of these things, but will meditate on it and see what I come up with.

Sympathy (not Empathy)

• I've never survived a flood.
• I've never been in a serious earthquake.
• I've never been so broke that I had to sleep at work and couldn't afford to buy breakfast or cigarettes.
• I've never been a smoker, so I've never tried to quit.
• I never had to cut all ties with a parent for my own self-preservation.
• I was never a child of divorce.
• My parents never had any boyfriends or girlfriends that I had to meet.
• I am not a single parent.
• I have not raised teenagers.
• I have never sent a kid off to college.
• My people have never been nearly eradicated through wartime genocide.
• Shots never rang out in any street where I lived (a few blocks over sometimes, but not in my actual street).
• No one was ever burned or shunned or discriminated against or given shock therapy for having the same sexual orientation as me.
• I have been divorced, near enough, but there were no little kids involved (one kid, his, was pretty big and more or less unaffected by the whole thing), and I wasn't betrayed when he went off with an old girlfriend until a good amount of time afterward.
• My spouse never worked in another city for an extended period of time.
• I have never battled cancer (touch wood and thank God on that one).
• I never worried that my child might be autistic.
• I've never broken any bones.
• I've never lost any limbs.
• I've never been in weather colder than about -20F.
• I've never had my brain poisoned from a zombie fish chemical.
• I have, though, had to argue with the government about money. And lost, in the end, in fact.
• I don't have back problems.
• I've never turned 50 (I do hope to one day, though).
• People have died, sure, but never my landlord.
• My spouse did not die. My kid never had to attend grief camp.
• I can afford the guitars I want.
• I don't share custody with anybody.
• The quarterback of my team who was a beloved hero to me since childhood never retired and then ended up playing for my arch rival team, and then beating us.
• I never had to sleep in a park because I missed the last train.
• I don't ever have to listen to the Grateful Dead, if I don't want to.
• I've never had two jobs at once, much less three.
• I got to do my degrees full-time, except for the distance computer one which doesn't really count.
• I have been long-term-unemployed, but am not at the moment. I have been downsized but wasn't this last time. I have worked in a dying industry but don't at the moment.
• I haven't hit a deer or run my car into the ditch in the snow. Touch wood on that one too.
• No rheumatoid arthritis yet, vision fine except for middle-aged myopia, hearing pretty good.
• I never had to kick a smack habit. No hot shot ever killed me, I never overdosed and had to go to the hospital. And this never happened to a partner, although it did to a friend.
• I did once have quite a bit of weight to lose, but only 20 lbs (9 kilos), and touch wood I've kept it off since.
• No medical condition prevents me from travelling to high altitudes.
• I've never had a book manuscript rejected from a publisher (only academic papers and those stopped mattering the minute I left the field).
• I've never been brought up on sexual harrassment charges or discrimination or fraud or negligence.
• I've been locked out of cars, houses, work, but never in really bad weather.
• I've never been stuck in an elevator.
• I haven't eaten a bad oyster (only good ones).
• Never had complications during childbirth, or had to rush a sick baby to the emergency room (I visited one though, and sat by until we knew she was okay).
• Never had a mortgage foreclosed.
• Never had a dog vomit on me, although I've had plenty of homeless people yell senseless things at me as I passed.
• Never had a bank error or ATM error, especially not in their favor.
• Never been mugged.
• Never been pregnant and had to decide, never caught an STD.
• Never had a burn large enough that its size was described as being a percentage of my body.
• I've cried in front of every boss I ever had, but I've never punched a boss.

I don't really understand the difficult things all of you are going through, because the same things haven't happened to me, but I feel for you and send good thoughts.

Unsent letter

I'm at home, still in pyjamas, still haven't showered since Friday morning, haven't left the house at all except to go through the drive-through at Tom's Diner to get a Tominator burger and small order of onion rings (used restraint not to get the Medium, which could feed a small village, but it would have been better to get none at all).

Coma Weekend proceeded as planned but as a result I got nothing done and am feeling bad about myself. And somewhat terrified about my parents coming to visit on the weekend, although it is usually fun to see them.

I was just watching a show on the TLC channel that was about hoarders, people who keep so much junk in their house that all they have is a small path in each room. There were some psychologists working with the people, and usually the problem traced back to some horrible thing in their childhood, and also it does tend to run in families. I was lying on the couch watching this, and if I squinted I could barely tell the difference between the cluttered living room being depicted on the TV and the piles of papers to file and boxes and pictures I've never hung on the walls that were sitting around outside the TV in my own analog living room. I know the boxes drive my Mom crazy. If she tries to "help", there may be tears. It's all part of the dilemma of settling, I think - do I really even want to live in this town? Or this country? (Was pining for Sydney, my old job and the Saturday dialectics, all day today). Or do I really want to live here, but then in a more permanent place, and large enough for all the dumb guitar stuff?

What with all the change at work, there were several people who weren't really friends, not really close friends, but felt like my closest connections there, and they've moved away. My old department has been shattered and we're now reporting up through four different bosses, and I'm sort of glad because there are some things I don't want to be involved with any more like arguing with IT Services about hosting arrangements, but then I'm not part of any team any more. I went home sick on Wednesday last week and didn't even know who to email to tell about it. If I just flat stopped coming in it would probably take people weeks to notice. So that's kind of fucking depressing.

My Mom and sister and I were talking about a genetic aversion to making social plans with people, that comes down from my father's side. Problem is, while my Dad and sister and usually perfectly happy to sit inside their safe cave doing their own thing without interruption, and thrive on just the amount of social engagement that they have, I sadly got extroversion from my Mom's side, so I really miss being in the company of people, although I don't have any skills to go out and meet any of them or get them to play with me.

I miss that every second Saturday I knew there would be a group to go get at least one beer with, in the evening, somewhere walking distance from the Botanic Gardens. Things went bad with a few of the regulars so I'm not sure I would like hanging out with all of them now, but I miss being part of a gang - "Where are we all going now?" Even if the same people weren't free every time, there was always some whacky companionship. I haven't found my tribe here yet. I sat inside all weekend instead of going out to find them. Bah.

I've been a long time single, too. Do I even want a partner any more? Does it squash one's independence too much? But a sly affair, I'll tell you, one of those no strings attached but every Tuesday over lunch kinds of things, that idea has a lot of appeal. Apart from advertising on Craig's List, how does one arrange that kind of thing? Or maybe I don't want that at all because it would just make me feel lonelier. Even the perfect partner and a committed long-term romance and moving in and blending lives together and buying a dog and the whole shebang might just make me feel lonelier just at the moment, because sometimes when you get closer, you just realize how fundamentally we are all separate. I want to meld with someone else and feel whole. You can't. Tough luck. Being human sucks. Go read your Sartre again, bitch, and maybe you'll stop forgetting this and stop wanting what you can't have.

I understand, from reading various news sources, that exercise, sunshine, vegetables and volunteer work are the best cures for this malaise I'm feeling.

There was one period in my life when I went out with another Gemini. And I got to experience first-hand that there are two Geminis - the "out" Gemini, who is the life of the party, a charming raconteur, flashing eyes and quick wit and everyone wants to be near them to listen and to bask in their mercurial sparkle. And then there is "home" Gemini, grumpiest creature alive, who sits in a lump and frowns and shoots down all suggestions from helpful loved ones and although they are zero fun to be around, shout and holler for attention if anyone tries to sneak away to more pleasant environments. This Coma Weekend Ellen is definitely "home Gemini". Grump grump grump. Poor poor me. Nothing will ever be good again, and no one cares. Bah.

I amuse myself now. I need to go listen to that John Lee Hooker clip again and realize that I already have everything I need. Every day is a fucking gift. Jesus loves me, this I know. Shantih, shantih, shantih.

Chickens and Eggs

I was very tired from not getting enough sleep during the week, so I scheduled a relaxing weekend of lying around with no plans, but was I having trouble sleeping in the first place because I wasn't getting enough exercise?

Or perhaps from sleeping in on the weekends and then trying to get up really early during the week to do guitar practicing and go to the gym? Should I get up the same early time every day, even on weekends? Would that be enough hours?

Or am I tired maybe from not spending all weekend growing organic food and canning and preparing nutritious organic local-grown hippy meals?

Or would it be better to stop beating myself up about not cooking and not buying lots of fresh groceries all the time (because they just go off in the fridge because I never have time or energy after work to spend any time preparing anything), and just accept myself as I am, buy the frozen or fast food, and count myself lucky I live in such a country where women can live like this, and devote themselves to work and guitar and being online and not have to be enslaved to running a household and doing "reproductive work" such as feeding and cleaning for others?

Or do I not have any energy after work because I don't cook organic meals for myself?

And should I just hire a cleaning person again, to keep up with the dust and carpets and bathtub grime (I would be put in jail immediately if anyone were to see the bathtub grime), or am I perfectly capable of doing it myself and just need to do it? It's not that big of an apartment.

Not to even mention the boxes and the pictures I need to hang up. There's no possible way I can get over that block without some large change of circumstance - moving house, or someone else moving in here, or a million dollar prize offered if I were to get it done, or a grant of an extra month of vacation days from work, or I don't even know what. Why can't I do it?

But I don't want to spend a whole month going through files and organizing the detritus of my past. It's all in boxes, in stasis and equilibrium, not really hurting anyone apart from being an eyesore and slight fire hazard. If I have time, I want to spend it on guitar stuff. I would rather be a rock star than a competent homemaker. Or is it compulsory to do both?

Would it be better to just walk from all of this, with my iPhone and one change of clothes, and reduce my needs down to the minimum and focus on the important things? Would I have more companionship if I were living on the street and riding boxcars on transcontinental freight trains? The wrong kind of companionship? Is that better than none at all?

I'll either go and do another load of laundry or go back to bed. One or the other of those must be the right first thing to do.

It's not like they can run a background check for it

Reading the Women's Health part of About.com, on symptoms of perimenopause.

Due to reduced estrogen levels, the body faces challenges regulating temperature. Check. Have been finding myself turning the air conditioning in my car on and off every three minutes or so all summer, and this weekend I kept feeling feverish and worried I had the swine flu.

Mood swings. Absolutely. I feel like I'm 13 years old again - bloated, grumpy, sensing an imaginary audience watching me at all times and judging everything I do not good enough. Speaking of which...

Weight gain around the waist. I was doing so well for so long, without even trying, but now I'm my fat teenaged dumpy awkward out of shape self again.

Memory lapses. Big time. Trouble concentrating? That too. Especially anything with a number or someone's name in it. Or driving directions. Or what I was about to do on the computer, before I started checking my email. Or what day it is.

Reading glasses and hot flashes and memory lapses are not very rock and roll. Perhaps I will invent a drug-fucked past, and blame it all on my really heavy smack habit I had back in the 80's.

It's a girl thing

It's Friday night and I've been watching a marathon of fashion television on TLC - about fiftyleven episodes in a row of Say Yes to the Dress, a show about brides shopping for wedding dresses, and then one episode of Trinny and Suzanna, the British What Not to Wear ladies, in America helping Americans dress better.

Trinny and Suzanna were helping a girl in Savannah, a woman actually, 37 years old but looked mid-twenties, who had a frumpy and blah wardrobe with no color. On this show the people turn themselves in, so that was her description, not theirs, but she was right, no color at all - a closet absolutely stuffed with black, white, beige and brown. They counted out her pairs of identical beige chinos and there were like twelve of them.

Thing is, the woman had been a dancer, and had taught dance and theatre to at-risk school kids for ten years. She had recently burned out and left that job, though, and was now a cook in a candy story, making taffy and caramel apples and things. She'd been in some kind of relationship that had broken up, but now had no boyfriend, no kids. She mainly just worked, the midnight shift, and then went to church.

In talking to her, they found out that she had a flamboyant personality locked up inside all those drab clothes - she talked about how she felt she couldn't let herself be too loud or too expressive at church because she would alarm people, her phrase was, "I think of it as 'Tropical Bird Syndrome'". Well, the ladies latched right onto that, and transformed this woman into the same tropical bird on the outside that she felt like on the inside - bold, bright colors, mixed and matched, some bold fashion statements, high heels, sexiness, elegance - and she blossomed right out. The best staement I thought was one by Trinny: "We want you standing out. Not standing out in a difficult way but in a way that you're inspiring to others."

(As someone who has her own version of Tropical Bird Syndrome when she gets really worked up about something at work (I've been getting the word "passionate" on all my performance reviews lately), I know that desire to just turn yourself way down and wrap yourself in drab beige so as not to scare people. So I should remember that phrase, "inspiring to others".)

Then another moment was on Say Yes to the Dress. A woman came in, a tall, classically beautiful black woman, with her mother, bridesmaid, and a gay fashion consultant male friend of hers. The woman had been in beauty pageants from the age of 16, and had been in Miss Virginia three times. So she knew about gowns. As the consultant summarized, her wedding dress had to be even more special than all those gowns she had worn, and it had to make her feel even more of that feeling. But her instruction for what she was looking for was a classic, traditional wedding dress, not something pageanty, not something that looked like a beauty queen gown.

She had looked at 3000 dresses online and had tried on about 80 in shops, and the wedding was getting closer so there was a bit of pressure.

She tried on three gowns. Her family and friends all thought she looked gorgeous in each of them - well, she was gorgeous - but she would just shrug and shake her head and say, "no....not the one." This went on and on. Frustrations mounted, and the consultant was worried because she really needed a sale to make her monthly numbers (we in the audience knew this but not the prospective bride, of course). Finally the consultant went out on a limb, picked up an elaborate coffee coloured dress with white tulle insets in the pleated skirt, and lots and lots of figured applique and who knows what all up and down the bodice. It was a sale dress, originally priced $17,000. Very haute, very designer, made a real impact.

The woman tried it on. She looked stunning. She frowned. She came out and showed it to her friends and family. They were stunned. They told her it was gorgeous. She said, "Is it like a pageant dress?" The consultant said, with some conviction in her voice, "But that's what you like, that's what you were used to." The customer was troubled. Her brow furrowed, and she walked off the pedastal off to the side. She turned and looked her gay friend straight in the eye, and asked, firmly, "Do I look like a bride? Or do I look like a beauty queen?"

There was a beat when no one in the room answered, and the answer was so completely obvious. You look like both. Because you are both - you are a beauty queen, and now you are you, getting married. She had been fighting it, thinking a bride had to somehow be the opposite of that, and she had tried on 83 boring dresses and hated all of them, because she hadn't come to terms with herself and who she really was. And this dress, being so couture and exquisite, was actually more than a pageant dress. It really did take it to the next level, and she looked radiant and amazing, like a goddess. It was so moving, though, watching her stop running from her identity, stop trying to fit someone else's idea of who she should be and what she should wear, and embrace her identity and radiate it. I'm sure on her wedding day she stood out in a way that she was inspiring to others.

Back home

The thing I'm reconnecting with, now that I'm back in the States, is all the music.

All my punk stuff.

All the songs that were popular when I was in college, that all of us radio people were most into (hello, Children of Nuggets Vols 1-4).

Rockabilly, punkabilly - the edgy stuff that is country-informed, and that you don't earn the right to play unless you're from Texas.

The guitars, which were all invented and built here. Stratocaster, Telecaster, Les Paul.

The indie magazines, the mimeographed posters in the windows of indie record stores. The venues, the pick up bands, the kids doing it, the homemade tapes.

The tattoos, the leather jackets, the shirts with those colored panels down the front, the hands around necks of beer bottles, the post-Elvis punkabilly hair.

I am from this place. There's a line to it from me now. I'm back home, and reconnecting to it.

Mageirocophobia

I have never liked to cook, but I noticed this past weekend that it was somehow worse. I have always had cooking disinclination, but not so much cooking avoidance.

This past weekend I noticed that I would walk into the kitchen, sort of lurk by the fridge near the edge of a counter, and then walk back out of the kitchen again and go lie on the couch watching TV. I tried encouraging self-talk, tried daring myself, tried tricking myself into going in there and preparing something, but I would walk in the kitchen and just walk back out.

I thought it was maybe a general lassitude in the universe, because I'm not practicing guitar much or unpacking any boxes either, but now I think it was something more. I took steps on like Monday to solve the problem, picked up the stuff for spaghetti at the grocery, brought them home with good intentions, but no. Put stuff away in the fridge, walked out of the kitchen.

Tonight, same thing, and I really did need to act on the groceries in the fridge or risk having to throw them all away, unopened. Walked into the kitchen. Walked back out.

Yeah, this was more than disinclination. I decided to kind of delve into the thoughts and feelings a bit more. What bad will happen if you go in there? Over the weekend I had thought it was the time involved, that cooking a proper meal and then dealing with all the dishes would take too long, and I had other priorities that were more important uses of my time, like practicing guitar (or lying on the couch watching TV). So I tried that tonight, but my internal inquisitor was not convinced and pushed further.

And I realized I was afraid of danger. And I think this is because of my recent burn. On that occasion I was already resistant and kind of self-medicating it, because I'd had quite a bit of white wine and because of that kind of mis-aimed and touched my arm to the hot rack in the oven when putting in some frozen pizza, and then didn't react immediately to put the burned place under cold water and so ended up with a pretty severe injury that has left a eucalyptus-leaf-shaped scar, right on the top of my right arm where it's quite obvious all the time.

You know from a previous post that this scar has bugged me and is associated with all kinds of things about aging and hurt and the passage of time.

But also, tonight the emotion was, I hurt myself really badly and because I live alone I just had to go, "Oh," and get the proper ointments and bandages, and just deal with it. I was wearing huge bandages on my arm all week at work, and not one person asked me, "What happened to your arm there?" I even had the bandage at guitar lessons and he didn't ask me anything.

So I had a pretty bad and kind of scary and painful (and permanent) injury, and I never got the chance to kind of collapse and be vulnerable about it, and have someone say, "Oh you poor baby" and comfort me.

And that set up a fear, a dread of pain and fire and heat and boiling things, of sharp knives and deep alarming bleedy cuts and smoke and ruined ingredients, and all the things that can so very easily go so very badly wrong in a kitchen, and I didn't even know that it had. But I'm sure, now, after that excavation work, that's what it was. I was afraid to cook anything because I might hurt myself - the memory of the recent hurt lodged there and turned to avoidant fear maybe because it never got comforted.

This is going to sound like I'm fishing for sympathy. I'm really not, I don't mean to make any of you feel bad, I'm fine and surviving quite well on my own. And then also, I broke through my phobia tonight - put a pot of water on to boil, cooked up the spaghetti and sauce, did all the dishes, put everything away. I got through it by putting the iPod speakers in the kitchen and playing some music that I loved when I was in college, that filled the space and avoided the sense of wasted time in case that was still lingering on top of all of this. And now I'm well fed, have leftovers, and did not have to discard spoiled food. So I got past it. But it certainly was there - if there's anything else like this that comes up, more than a block but a real avoidance, just a physical walking away, I will do this same kind of exercise and see if there was a past sharp unresolved hurt that might be causing it.

TMI

Back in February or so I was having some severe dramas with my shoulder. And at that same time my monthly cycle was out of whack - just missed one altogether, an eight week gap. I started tracking the monthly cycles and they were going three weeks, three weeks, five weeks, like that, and then next time I went to the doctor I took them in, but I didn't see my normal doctor and the guy I did see what kind of a jerk to me. I showed him the changing date ranges and he said, "Yeah. Well, you're at that age," really cavalierly, and I think I must have reacted because I remember he said, "Well, some women find it a relief."

So just in the last few days the shoulder thing has kind of started up again, and it started so suddenly and with so little provocation that I'm wondering if it's a chemical/hormonal thing, actually, and not ergonomic at its base, because I'm also late, late, late. Maybe the squinching of all the muscles in my shoudular region is a chemical thing from some hormone confusion happening in my woman's body, women's bodies being so complicated generally. (Have you ever read how periods actually happen? The tiniest, tiniest thing goes from one place to another, and it sets off this huge, complicated, interrelated chain reaction, and then it resets and starts all over again. Check out Our Bodies Ourselves. It boggles the mind.)

So I was reflecting on this whole looming change of life thing, and finally got an articulation of why I'm kind of not at all okay with it. A conversation with someone in my head:

"So when my relationship broke up, I guess I always imagined I could start over again with someone new, and this time it might be possible to have it all - the whole husband and babies thing. But it turns out it's not possible."

It's not. Possible.

(That is a big deal, Replacement Doctor. That is grief and loss. Not a relief.)

Film consumption

I was thinking about how people consume movies these days - either via cable or cable-on-demand or Netflix or buying the DVD or downloading or just streaming them on the computer.

And then I was thinking back to the olden days where you had to go see movies in the cinema. Even if you loved the first Star Wars movie more than anything in the world, which a lot of people did, the only way you could see it again is if it was showing at a cinema in a revival.

How did we even live that way? It's as hard to imagine as trying to remember how we ever checked any facts before Google.

No wonder people went to see the first Star Wars movie 70 times when it was first released. Now, everyone sees every movie 70 times. But back then you had to take advantage while it was still showing in cinemas.

Taco Turducken

My favorite lunch lately is at a taco place up the road from the office. It's a hard shell taco, with the usual meat, cheese, lettuce and tomato, very traditional fast-food taco. But then that's wrapped in a soft taco, with refried beans in between to stick them together.

It occurred to me the other day that this is the taco version of a Turducken. I love America sometimes.

Account managers on the phone

In my last job I was an account manager, and it was my job to always sound delighted when clients called, to always have tons of time for them even if they only paid us a few hundred dollars per month and we were in the midst of a crisis for a client who paid us hundreds of times more, to always act like their work was a high priority ("Yep, it's just in final testing," when in fact we hadn't been able to assign any resources to it yet), and basically to lie to them, all the time, for a living.

Now I'm the client, but I still have a bit of this in my phone manner, and when I get another account manager on the phone with me, especially one who specializes in new business development or sales, it almost gets out of hand. There's so much smarmy bullshit on both ends of the phone, so much saccharine sweetness, that if anyone was listening it it would make their teeth hurt.

I suppose at least I'm not trying to snow you all the time. Pretty much here I say what I think.

Beatitude

I was driving through Menasha, one street down from how I normally go because of construction, and passed a church that had the Beatitudes on a sign out front. One is "Blessed are the peacemakers," and of course my mind went immediately to Monty Python's Life of Brian and changed it to "Blessed are the cheesemakers", and here I am in Wisconsin and that's what we all are, and that made me smile.

a thing about being 40+ that makes me sad

So, I was heating up a frozen pizza and accidentally touched my arm to the top rack of the oven.

There's a red spot now on my right forearm, don't think it's that bad but it might be.

And I was remembering another burn, it was when I was in college, Junior year, I was ironing the hem on a grey Goodwill skirt I'd bought and then cut off to be a mini-skirt, and I planned to wear it to go see X in Cleveland (just saw them again in Chicago recently, all of us a bit older but that's a different story). I had a very small single room in a suite that year, and I was ironing the skirt on the seat of the desk chair. So the set-up was kind of awkward. While reaching across to straighten the hem my arm touched the edge of the iron because of the crowded arrangements, and I burned a mark on my arm. Then, if I recall correctly, moshing to X I tore part of the scab off, and there's a white scar there to this day.

So, reminded of that scar, with this present burn from just a few minutes ago, I found it on my arm, just in case this new burn makes a matching one (probably won't though because it's not that deep), but I recalled the emotion of the iron-mini-skirt burn, which was much different from today's one.

I remember being absolutely horrified. I remember a sense of guilt and dread and failure, I had scarred this body and it was going to carry this scar FOREVER, for a momentary lapse. Agh! How could I bear it, how could I be forgiven? That was the emotion from the first burn.

And now, looking at the white mark on my arm, and thinking back to that poor young girl's worry (a girl who hadn't even started her life at all, really), it just brings tears to my eyes. Because, honey, there will be SO many more scars. Living life, you just accumulate them, you can't help it.

This makes me sad, thinking about her and the big deal the other burn was. But also sanguine, because, you know, this new burn, scar or not, whatever.

Blogs are for things you can't put on Facebook

Ellen is


white wine blah blah blah

(1 min ago)

Big finish

So it occurred to me tonight, looking up at the almost-full moon, that I have just, like, today, come out of a bad period in my life that lasted a really, really fucking long time. And now I'm out of it, but only just.

Here are the things, in chronological order:

- Got retrenched from my dot-com job
- Worked out full-time fiction writing wasn't the life for me, did the MBA, but had to move house in between semesters 1 and 2 and never did really get rested from it (the time that should have been rest was the world's worst, horrible nightmare of a beach Christmas with the inlaws - I still have a scar on my leg from it that comes up from time to time in periods of stress).
- Took 18 months to find a new job
- Which took such a toll on my self-esteem that my long-term partner left me
- just as I ran out of money
- Did get a new job, a great job, and a new circle of friends of sorts in Sydney, but the circle included some very crazy people, and it wasn't really nurturing me
- Decided to move back to the US, just before which spending the most - what - not hardest but densely packed with work, the logistically most difficult and consuming two weeks of my life.
- Had no idea the magnitude of the logistics and culture shock of moving countries
- coincidentally just in time for the longest, coldest, snowiest winter in 100 years
- and started a very challenging job in a not very supportive or nurturing work environment
- Then just as I was starting to get the hang of the job and rack up some successes, they restructured us and gave me a really boring and unstrategic job, and then yelled at me when I couldn't describe it or the value it was adding. Gave my dream job to someone else.
- Then announced they were restructuring us again, and downsizing, but wouldn't tell us who was staying or going for months and months.
- And meanwhile a complete madman was in charge and I got yelled at by him and then yelled at about it by my acting boss. So I didn't want to stay working there anyway.
- (But didn't want to move because I had started playing guitar and it had become the chief love and obsession and joy and preoccupation of my life. And I had found the perfect, ideal, perfectly suited teacher, and even though he might be leaving town in a year to go to grad school, I needed at least that one more year from him.)
- (And then that same teacher told me about an opportunity to perform in front of people, which it turns out was to be on the Saturday after the Monday when we would find out if we still had jobs or not.)
- (And my sister had already planned to come visit, arriving on the Friday night just before the Saturday gig.)

So in the last two weeks, I found out I still have a job and don't have to move, I did my first public performance of guitar (and got some lovely and wonderful feedback for it), and I had a great, event-packed, wonderful, fun, Wisconsiny visit with my sister.

She went back on Sunday night. Yesterday and today were the first official days working in the new structure in my new role. And tonight was the first post-gig lesson, where I could review the performance but also get back to the curriculum, and start to play some other songs.

I brought the guitar back home and then went out again and bought myself things - two expensive bottles of Pinot Noir recommended by a huge afficionado who works at the wine shop nearby; a burger and onion rings for dinner; pens and post-its and a file to keep my guitar books and notes in. I was walking with the purchases back out to my car under a midnight-blue sky (although it was 9pm, not midnight), and looked up at the nearly full moon, and thought, I've just come out of a really difficult period of my life. And thought back to how long it's been difficult, and got back to the start of the list above - October 2001.

Eight years. And I've just come out of it, just tonight. Under this blue sky and this white moon, with a beautiful pack of new pens, and guitar ambitions to pursue. But the ambitions sort of took a back seat, tonight. I guess what I felt was calm. The bad period, eight solid years of bad period, is over, just over, just tonight.

Mosaic not a ladder

We just came through a restructure at work, and I and 33 of my colleagues got a new boss, who's been with our company about 18 months but hasn't bossed anyone until now. He met with us to introduce himself and talk about the new structure and our new roles, and everything was really vague and ill-defined which frustrated many folks, but one thing he said as part of his introduction really stuck with me.

It was a bit of advice he got from a boss of his once, which was "Think of your career as a mosaic, not a ladder."

This has stayed with me but not with respect to my career, which has been and continues to be a ladder, but with respect to my life. When I have those "how did I get here" thoughts, in those moments of residual grief for the future I thought I was going to have that didn't come about, the idea that my life is a mosaic has been powerfully comforting. No, that's not the right word - sort of exciting, actually, or infused with a spirit of creative improvisation.

Like tonight I was feeling a bit emotional, coming down off a huge couple of weeks (see next post for more on that) and had a strong desire to go buy myself some pens at the Office Max near my house, and while I was in the store I wandered around to see if there were any other nice office presents I could buy myself, and holding the pack of pens and wandering around an office supply store to comfort myself I thought of how many, many times in my life I have done that. And started to think the sorry-for-myself thought, "How did I get here, alone again, shopping for pens alone again?" But then I remembered about the mosaic, and the experience turned into, "I am shopping for pens again. I shopped for them back then, and now I am here shopping for them now, and they're just two tiles in the quilt. I might shop for pens alone one day when I'm 90, and I might have a steady partner for another batch of 10 years in between now and then, and I might not be in Wisconsin forever and didn't intend to be but now I am, and that's that."

All sorts of possible sappy endings about the crazy quilt patchwork of life, blah blah blah. But if I stop thinking of my life as a ladder requiring linear progress and achievement, which it isn't anyway whether I'm okay with that or not, but if I get okay with that, then I am just buying pens, here now. And it's no kind of failure or disappointment to be doing so. Which was stupid to think that it was. But it's not.

Single phrases that have made tremendous difference lately

"You can write an email to them and say, 'You hired me to do this job for you, and I'm having trouble doing it because...' whatever."
- My guitar teacher, on the road to Platteville

Why this made a difference: Because of the way I got my current job, by pitching it myself based on my own desires for how to manage our online programs, I had sort of forgotten that I was working for them. And since the company is not receptive right now to the job I wanted to do, once I changed my focus in this way, and concentrated on the job they want me to do, I achieved a Zen state of release and could just get on with all the boring and pointless tasks that had piled up on my to do list.

"However, once we realize we are always already perfect as we are, wound and all, we integrate this disavowed piece back into the wholeness of ourselves..."
- Astrobarry, from his article "Chiron Wants to Speak," June 7.

Why this has made a difference: This article was about a planet called Chiron, after a centaur in Greek mythology who sacrificed his immortality to bring fire to humanity - his sacrifice is represented as a wound in his thigh that never heals. The point Astrobarry was making is that we need to recognize that we are each perfect, including our flaw. Immediately upon reading these words, I identified the flaw in me - the fact that I don't have a husband. I almost immediately did the mental reversal, like you do with a Necker cube image that you can flip in and out with a change in perspective. There's this big gaping wound hole in me, from my broken relationship. I had been thinking about it as a problem that needed hard work and attention to solve as soon as possible - do everything I can to get a man, be in a couple, get a boyfriend again, get married. This suggestion from Astrobarry to consider myself a perfect whole even with this gap - a sort of sculpture with a concave bit out of the side of it, as part of its shape - has been powerfully transformative over the last few days. I am starting to own some of my choices and decisions in ways that I never have before. I realize, not that I didn't before but I really deeply realize, that I am drawn to men who are adventurous flibbertygibbets, who don't themselves want the steady domesticity of a "grown up" life. I need to own those choices and realize there's something in me that doesn't want to settle down either. My lack of that classic husband-house-baby package is not because I have been rejected by all who might offer that because I'm not pretty enough, thin enough, average enough, etc. - I own my choice not to have that life. That life is not right for me. Not that I'm not good enough for it. I knew this all along, I'm sure, and I'll bet I have this revelation every couple of years, but this time it feels very powerful. I think I am starting to know myself, and to own who I am. In deeper ways than before.

The result of this revelation has been more peace - the dark, rejected, small envious feeling that was dominating quite a lot of my mental life was almost right away replaced with a colorful, energetic creative life placed here and there with black accoutrements of rock and roll like jeans, amplifiers, leather jackets. I am the rock and roll person who can't commit. That staid settled life is not the right life for me. So I will stop wasting time and moral energy on bemoaning its gap, and focus on becoming the me who is me. (Am I babbling now?)

"At the beginning you can feel in love and connected and all romantic, but saying, 'I promise to take care of you' is an institution that would be useful for a society to create."
- My guitar teacher on marriage, dropping me off at my car after a gig in Fond du Lac.

Why this has made a difference: This was just last night so I haven't had that much time to think about it, but it gives definition to a powerful reason why marriage is not for me. In fact, spookily, I looked up something I wrote back in January that expresses this almost word for word. I said:

"This is what I always want from the boys I have crushes on. It isn't really sexual, is it, and I don't want them to buy me a house and throw their coat down over puddles for me to walk across - i.e. to take care of me. I don't want to take care of them. I want to collaborate. I want to work together in some creative endeavour."

Isn't that eery, that the words are so similar? I guess I hadn't idenitified it so precisely, that marriage is a promise to take care of the other person. I don't need taking care of, and don't want to take care of someone else, so marriage is not for me.

I have known since the beginning that people bring assumptions to relationships that they don't even know they have, usually until the other person acts against them (all the "shoulds" you bring to your poor hapless new partner). But this phrase, "taking care of", so precisely identifies an assumption under marriage, it just makes everything much more clear. And as above, it makes it much more clear to me who I am and what I want, and so I won't moon around pining for a thing I don't even want, and I can put my energy into pursuing the path I do - and now I can explain it to people. (And also, I think this might identify the thing in the rebound boys that I reacted to as if with a violent allergy - the very first sign that what they wanted was for me to take care of them, I was out of there, out out out, and sometimes quite mean about it. I knew I didn't not want a 40+ boyfriend who needed me to rescue him from himself, but now I know what it is about it that is the bad fit.)

"The near future holds a gift of contentment."
- fortune cookie, after lunch at Bao Ju in Neenah

Why this made a difference: This was actually before the last one, but makes a nice final phrase. I got this at lunch, and was driving home from work, just at the point where the 441 crosses over Appleton Road, where the Perkins and Gold's Gym are. I was looking at the pavement and the grasses beside the road and the buildings, and thinking, "What if all this right now was exactly the same, but I was content?" And of course, for I'm sure the millionth time, I realized with a lightning flash of insight that everything could stay exactly the same and I could be content, the only thing that had to change was something within me, over which I have complete control. Duh! I mean, there are all kinds of reasons not to be content - they're downsizing at work and I may not have a job in a month, or may have a job that I can't bear, and I don't have my boxes unpacked and am still renting and don't have a boyfriend. But what if I went ahead and was content anyway? So I think, just from that hypothetical reflection, I've actually been doing it. Right now is a spectacular time to exist. I have wonderful, heart-filling experiences every day (just looking out across the field across the road when rain clouds are gathering, at the perfectly Midwestern landscape, takes my breath away). I am the luckiest girl on earth. I am in the now, and content.

I am perfect, including my flaw.

Marriage is not for me, so I shouldn't worry about not having it.

I am me, and the right thing for me is to continue to pursue my rock and roll lifestyle.

When is a perfectly good word not perfectly good?

I was reading the Sydney Morning Herald online and saw an article on the economy of the state of New South Wales, which has been on a more downward trend than the overall economy of Australia. The article said the state had posted three consecutive quarters of "negative growth".

The prissy grammarian in me paused at this phrase, and I could hear her start to think, "'Negative growth'! Growth is positive! There's already a perfectly good word for that, which is 'shrinking'. When something negatively grows, what it's doing is getting smaller, and there's already a perfectly good word for that in English! Gah!" My internal prissy grammarian felt a sense of indignant outrage.

But then the person inside me who wrote my PhD on how linguistic conventions are shaped by use in a social context over time, the one who always argues that rules can change and if a usage gets entrenched in a social group then it counts as the rule, reflected that the economic term "negative growth" really is different from the ordinary language terms "shrinking" or "getting smaller". Growth in this context is a specific thing that's plotted out on a graph and given a number. That number is positive, in some percentage point, or it can dip below the zero axis and be a negative number, but the thing being measured on the graph is still called "growth", so leaving that term out actually sort of changes the meaning. If you changed the statement from "The NSW state economy has shown three consecutive quarters of negative growth" to "The NSW state economy has been shrinking for three consecutive quarters," you rob the statement of a degree of economic precision, and and change it into a looser statement in ordinary English.

So I am not entirely outraged by this term. I can see arguments both for and against it.

Green car

I was walking into work from my car. I'd crossed the parking lot and was walking along the sidewalk. I saw a pile of green, which was a batch of trimmings from the greenery alongside the lot, beside the building.

Whatever grounds crew who had done the trimming, they had very neatly piled up all the branches and leaves within the lines of a single parking space. It was almost the height of a car, in a sort of loaf shape, with a few inches of pavement visible around it before the white painted lines. All the other spaces around it had cars in them, various colors, makes and models.

It looked like an art installation - "Green car". Some sort of comment on environmentalism and ecologically sustainable transport.

Incremental

It occurred to me today that perhaps one reason why I don't really clean my house is that when I do I approach it like a final exam.

When my parents were going to visit just recently, I spent days getting everything just right and thoroughly done - scrubbed down the kitchen, straightened cupboards, dusted every horizontal surface in the place, deep-cleaned and polished and sanitized all the bathrooms, laundered sheets and towels, vacuumed every horizontal surface that was covered with some kind of fabric.

This past week, though, I had invited some friends over for dinner (a brave first attempt at socializing in my own house and payment for many meals over at their house), and had scheduled it for the night following both voice and guitar lessons, so I just didn't have all that much time. I got groceries in between the two lessons and the next night ducked out of work a bit early to get all the food ready, but for cleaning I couldn't do the deep clean thing, as I had for my parents. I just didn't have enough time. So I did basics - instead of filing and sorting all the mail and clutter around in the living room, I just made a stack and moved it out of sight. Instead of taking everything off the coffee table and getting out the Pledge, I just dusted around the stuff as it sat there. I wiped a moist cleansing cloth quickly over the bathroom surfaces. I did vacuum, but didn't take any cushions off anything, it was just a quick once-over.

Now I'm sitting in my spare room at the computer, which didn't get done on that occasion because they wouldn't be coming in here, and everything is a bit dusty. And it occurred to me that I could just kind of dust it, now, quickly. Without having to dust everything, and also vaccuum and straighten and file and sort and degrime sanitize. And maybe I could keep up all my cleaning this way, in just little bits and bobs whenever it occurred to me. Rather than approaching cleaning as a huge, laborious, time-intensive final exam.

But this idea is making me uneasy so I'm going to put off dusting this space until I think a bit further about the two approaches.

List of enthusiasms

Brief enthusiasms that never went anywhere

• yoga
• throwing pots on a pottery wheel
• opera appreciation (although I did make it to one performance at the Sydney Opera House while I lived there)
• Italian
• German
• Russian
• carpentry and woodworking
• aviation
• home decorating
• professional fiction writing
• that idea for a novel

Medium level enthusiasms that I got something valuable out of but didn't pursue to the degree I could have

• French
• Japanese
• knitting
• working with a personal trainer
• cooking for other people
• writing poetry
• video

Enthusiasms that took

• philosophy
• web design and internet communications generally
• 20th century modern art
• moving back to the US
• guitar (so far so good)
• blogging!

Catch-up festival of the bullet point

I haven't written here in a while. There's been a lot going on, and somehow I seem to have been going through it wordlessly - or, not really, but expressing myself more via Facebook status updates and phone calls and 1:1 conversations than here.

My horoscope this week told me to "hush", but I'm going to try the writing thing again, just to see.

Here are some of the things, to catch you up.

• Work drama. They're downsizing, 10-15%, last Friday was the deadline for voluntary severance so we're finding about all the leaders and long-term stalwarts we'll be doing without, and then the involuntaries they're predicting will be sometime in July.
• Also, I hate my new job, the new building, the new brands, all the new people, the new drive to the new parking spot, the cafeteria, the cubicles, the smell of the building, the ladies room, the frowns on everyone's faces, especially all the light blue shirts, just everywhere.
• Hate not having a budget, ownership of the strategy or execution, ownership of the agency selection or relationships, having to consult at a pre-kindergarten level on all the stuff I know best.
• Miss last year, which had its own challenges but in retrospect had a wonderful team doing good, fun, original work, measuring its success, celebrating it and getting reward for it. I could lead if they would let me lead. I miss the success that I thought I was going to almost have now, and am so so disappointed in what it's become.
• The downsizing is coming right after a total restructure where everyone has a different job than they were doing in December, and they're trying to enact a culture change, and there's a madman in charge.
• And there's still, on the outside, an economic downturn so our options to cut and run are limited.

Okay, beyond work stuff

• Guitar is going well, I'm getting better, I'm learning lots but still not good enough to play in front of people.
• But my aim is to find some folks to jam with, and ultimate dream is to play a song at a coffee shop open mike night.
• And I started singing lessons as well, to make the open mike experience less painful for my potential future audience.
• I'm thinking a lot about having a rock and roll lifestyle at this advanced aged, what it means, how I will accommodate it. I've been thinking a lot about role models like Exene Cervenka, Joan Jett, Kim Deal. Women of rock, older than me and still living the life. If they can do it, I can maybe do it.
  
• Everyone has been so welcoming and excited about my guitar thing, too. I have no idea why there aren't more women who do this, apart from maybe it just takes a lot of time and hard work.
• I have a big new amplifier and a neighbor who's away on weekends, and so I have license to turn it up.
• And I have still been going to my teacher's gigs, including one tomorrow night, four hours drive there, four hours back.
• We spend lots of time talking about life and random things, apart from guitar. I will write a separate entry sometime about the experience of driving through Wisconsin past the barns and fields, in the middle of the night, in a car with just us, talking about life and random things. I treasure those trips because this is such a specific little window of life right now and I know it won't last, but right now this is kind of the beating heart, the quiet nighttime center of my life. Ah.

• Body stuff - still in transition, my eyes are still post-40 and bad and my grey hairs are starting to show in all kinds of light, but after a very worrying time earlier this year the rhythmic cycle seems to have kind of reset itself so that's one thing I don't quite, quite have to cope with just, exactly, quite yet.
• In addition to the rock stars, I'd love to find some more women a little bit older than me to use as spirit guides through this stage.
• I'm trying to be out about my age. Which is healthy.
• But just tonight I thought of maybe starting an online community called "No Script" for people living unusual lives that are hard to explain to people.

• Weather-wise, it is summer now, but only just. This strange northern place where I live - the snow melts in mid-March but it's just brown and squashy for all of April, the grass doesn't green up until very late April and the very first little bits of leaves were only just starting to come out around Mother's day. Now we have green grass, green trees, baby ducks and goslings in the ponds. The flowering trees flowered and are now half buds and half leaves. People are wearing shorts and t-shirts around, but today when I left work although it was sunny it was cool. I could wear that silk Country Road sweater than in Sydney you could only, only wear in winter time because it was so hot. It was fine. I had jeans on, and black boots with wool socks, and it was fine. This is a northern place and even in summer it doesn't get very hot.
• Which is probably good, because I found out that Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder is real. It's actually called "Atypical Seasonal Affective Disorder", and describes people who get depressed in the summer (another potential online community name - SummerSAD.com). It affects between 1-2% of the population, which I will point out is two standard deviations from the mean. Which makes me an official freak, that counts as a freak. They're not sure if it's actually the sunshine that causes it, or more the temperature. So having a minimum of both is actually great for me.
  
• But I wonder if this syndrome doesn't explain all sorts of other freakish things about me. I sleep in - maybe to reduce the number of daylight hours I see? I love night, I'm most productive staying up late (see time stamp below). I love snow. I have always loved rainy days, although maybe not so many in a row, and walking in a cold wet whipping wind is horrible, regardless. When we first moved to Denver I kept waiting for winter to start and it never did, because it was sunny all the way through until February. When I discovered the syndrome it was on a phone-in medical radio show, and they jokingly mentioned the cure was to move to Wisconsin. But no joke, here I am, and I think it will work for me.

• More body stuff - in addition to a bad cold I got and had to pretend I didn't have when I went down to a cousin's performance in a high school musical in February, I got a really bad shoulder problem, first started from a desk too high in my new office space, but exacerbated because I tried to solve it by sitting up straighter and straighter and being more and more stiff. Nearly eight weeks of physio required, and I cracked it, but it still comes back. And I have, apparently, a narrowing of the nerve canal or whatever in my neck on the left side, so whenever things go, I get a fizzy feeling all down my arm, or sometimes numb fingers or referred pain. This worries me as well but I'm trying to be vigilant and not worry and keep up the guitar stuff because Django Rinehart, as they point out, played with hardly any fingers at all. If the music is in you, you'll find a way to get it out.

• More amp stuff - "the sound" that I'm after, apparently you can only get by turning up a tube amplifier a bit higher than it's supposed to go. No pedal can really quite reproduce it. I love this - a friend called my taste "high end" - and I'm now hearing it everywhere, but I need to get some earplugs. And maybe a farm house far from any neighbors with a soundproofed room.

• I now have a table. I have my grandparents' dining set, refinished and ready for use, and I have my godmother's every day china. I have had two sets of relatives dine off this table, and one set of friends, just this past week. It really is a revelation, and I hope not to be without a table for any length of time ever again.

• I don't knit any more at all. I'm sure I will again, but right now any spare time is taken with practicing scales, and with singing, which takes a bit of concentration actually. I hardly read, except when going to bed. And of course I haven't been blogging.

• I do hope to keep going to the poetry group, and saw lots of those folks at the Book Festival recently so there is a scene here. So I need to write some stuff, because what I take for the open mike section of the meetings is just blog entries, mostly about the weather. So I'm hoping to start putting little musings down again.

• One thing very much on my mind, the root of the values conflict at work for me, is the nature of good design, of form and function. Functional elegance. Perspicuity, is that the word? And then also the fact that artifacts carry with them their use in social communication contexts - like tag clouds for example. And that I have a PhD in this stuff. And work for idiots who have no idea.

Anyway.

• So whenever I feel like writing something or someone asks me "So how are you doing?" or I think of something online I want to build to connect people, it's all pain, and difficulty, and melancholia. When I think of having a real, deep, friendshippy conversation, it's always about the pain I'm carrying and dealing with. I suppose the fear and the past hurt.

• But actually I think I am doing okay because Astrobarry keeps telling me not to worry or try to puzzle anything out with reason, just yet, but to just "hush, and receive". And he wrote a whole big thing about living in the now and being present. Because emotions from past hurt are past - the hurtful thing can't be changed, and doesn't affect your value as a person. And the future thing isn't now, and will probably sort itself out, or will surprise you in various ways - in fact, if you worry too much, and try to control the future, and wrest it to your plans that you're able to concoct, you'll probably limit yourself to all sorts of new possibilities that will jump up that you didn't even expect.
  

Throw those hands up for goodness. Jump off that building and know that the rope will appear. Open your eyes. Live in the now. Be open, see what new experiences life brings you that you could never expect. Experiment, adventure, go look. Fill the well. Fill the damn well. The world is full of people, full of them, and you've hardly met any of them. Open your arms. Open your eyes. Open the damn heart (rather than stop it beating with your mind - private joke there).

I will drive across Wisconsin and back tomorrow and see some more barns in the dark and maybe be able to talk about some of this stuff more. And love guitars also, as well, the same night.

More as it happens, I have to rest for that!

Bridge going up

I've been driving over the bridges between Neenah, Doty Island and Menasha for a year and a half now. It's a great drive, very scenic, through some historic townships that have their own particular look and feel, and that were the foundation of the paper industry in which I'm here to work. I remember doing that drive and imagining visitors from Australia with me, showing it to them as an example of the way this place looks.

The bridges are kind of rough, some with metal grates and all with a metal split in the pavement. They have towers at all four sides, and railings. They are designed to split and raise up to let water traffic go through.

But until this day I had never seen any of these divided bridges actually split. I was driving north on the 114, coming from a bridal shower for a work colleague that at a house near the lake in Neenah, and the traffic was stopped by traffic lights and lowering booms, much as you'd get at a rail crossing. And the road before me started to lift up. It went up until it was basically vertical. I was a few cars back and whatever water vessel was passing was pretty low, so I didn't get a look at what we were stopping to let pass at all. Then it slowly went down, and the lights stopped flashing, and the booms went up, and we all continued on our way. First time.

Second Adolescence

Nobody talks about this.

I have a memory of sitting in my dorm room in Watson Hall (no relation) in college Senior Year, one afternoon, just sitting on my bed studying and listening to records, and suddenly it struck me with a start - I was 21. Which meant I was done with the teenaged years. I would never, ever have to be a teenager ever again. And the feeling was one of huge joy and relief. Done! I made it! 21!

Fast forward 24 years to now. And turns out I was wrong.

What they don't tell you is that all the hormonal storms a girl goes through as a teenager when she's about to get her first period, there are the same hormonal storms at the end of the process when she's about to stop having periods.

Two boomerangs

Yesterday boomerangs appeared in my life two times.

First was on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on NPR, where the special phone-in guest was William H. Macy. One trivia fact about him is that he's an avid woodworker, and has appeared on the cover of woodworking magazines (he mentioned that that's the only kind of cover he seems to appear on, but I don't think that's exactly true). But another triva fact about him is not that he collects boomerangs. The hosts mentioned this fact, and he said no, it wasn't true, but the story keeps coming up. "It goes away but then it keeps coming back again," he said, meaning that literally but then also playing up the boomerang theme. He said he doesn't know where it came from, the story is that he has a huge collection and is very interested in boomerangs, but no.

Second reference was something I saw on my walk around the little lake. I was on the other side headed back, and admiring the way the western sun glinted on the water and the geese glided so majestically. Then I heard a sound that instantly took me back to twilight at my grandparents' cottage - the sound of voices coming across water. I walked on and when I got closer I saw there was a group of men, some old and some young, playing in the lawn between the apartments and the main office building. Then my mind instantly went to backyard cricket, but I realized a second later that of course a group of Wisconsin men playing on a lawn on Easter Saturday would not be playing pick-up cricket, they've probably never even heard of it and wouldn't know what equipment you'd need or anything. I thought probably football, or maybe baseball since the season's just starting. But it turned out they were playing with a boomerang. The smallest kid, a little blonde guy maybe 10 or 11, was throwing it and the older guys were giving him tips. "Up and into the wind, right?" he said. So, they were playing with an Aussie thing, just not a set of cricket stumps.

The way you make guitar playing musical

is to get the rhythm going in your right hand and keep it there, so you don't have to think about it.

And don't stop if you get something wrong, to adjust. Just keep going.

No Sides

I was at the Mall the other evening replacing some lost sunglasses, and was hungry as it was that cheese-and-crackers time right after work, and I stopped by the Sbarro stand in the food court to get a pizza slice.

The guy behind the counter came up ready for my order. "A slice of pepperoni, please," I said.

And he replied, with a slight smile, "And I know enough not to ask you if you want any sides..."

This goes back more than a year, from when I first moved here and was on a personal crusade to improve American customer service practices. This guy, a tall guy with a friendly face and older than your usual fast food worker so perhaps the manager, took my order one night, in very similar circumstances - Mall trip after work, grabbing pizza for an evening snack - and after I said I wanted a slice of pepperoni, he recited a list of available side dishes as if from a script that Corporpate had instructed every employee that they had to say for each order: "Salad or breadsticks?"

But he said it not in the tone that he was suggesting some optional extras that I might consider but didn't have to have, you know, with a rising tone at the end of the question, like "Any salad, or maybe breadsticks?", the tone familiar to us all from the "Do you want fries with that?" question.

No, he pronounced the question with the falling tone of the waitress rattling off the list of available salad dressings, like, you get one of these anyway with your order so which one would you like, "Salad, or breadsticks."

So I scolded him about it. I told him that he shouldn't make it sound like they were included if they were extra, and that it was the tone of his voice that caused the confusion. It was a very short exchange, like a teacher correcting a student, and it certainly didn't put me off going there semi-regularly ever since.

So when he immediately recognized me again after so much time and knew not to even ask the question, it made me burst out laughing. "Wow, that goes back a long way!" I said.

"Well, some things make an impression," he said.

I kept smiling as he got my drink, warmed the pizza and rang the whole thing up (for a fair price, only what I wanted and nothing more, etc.). "One day," I said, "I will come back and order one of everything."

Chalk one up for my crusade to improve American customer service, and then another one for having lived here long enough to have some history with these people.

G20 kiddies

I had CNN on the other morning and they were showing footage of the protesters gathering at the G20 meetings in London. This was before the bank windows got smashed and anything got out of hand.

The cameras were really close to the police line, so you could see the faces of the aggro and het up young men in the front lines, "confronting" the police. I know so many people who are in lefty groups like this, I could just imagine all the planning meetings, the travel arrangements, having been made for like four years, all the temporary sleeping arrangements and really cool parties late at night after all the demonstrations had finished, all the organic food and girls with scarves wrapped in their hair and guitar playing and sharing. They must have been looking forward to this for like four years. I could also imagine all the earnest meetings where they debated and sorted out their group point of view, with all these young men's faces taut like thick wires, vibrating with their opinions but broadcasting them only to that tiny room.

On the news footage, you could see those same taut faces, yelling and yelling into the absolutely passive faces of the cops in yellow riot coats. The cops had linked arms to hold a line, and were probably going to have to stand like that the whole day, and this big row of impassioned young men were inches away from their faces, yelling and yelling, and you could tell they were alternating currents of anger and sarcasm. Trying and trying to provoke an emotional reaction in the cops, but the cops are trained not to rise to it or react.

It made me think about information and communication, and the fact that you have to have both signal and receiver to make it work.

Poem about how much I hate this season

It's April. It's April.

But everything is brown.

I walk across the spongey ground in a cold wind.

In April.

(wrote this a few days ago when going to get the mail)

Morbid themes on the radio

So two different evenings this past week I was listening to Terri Gross on NPR and she was covering really morbid topics. These are sad enough on their own, but even harder for me right exactly now in my life, where I'm noticing lots of wrinkles, counting grey hairs in the bathroom mirror every morning, coping with a persistent nerve-related pain in my left shoulder and arm, and realizing that my body is moving into "the change" and I'm going to have to make sense of being a dried-up husk of a woman.

The second show was by a guy who wrote a book about dealing with his father's terminal illness and slow decline, and the bit I listened to was a bit with way too much detail about what it's like to turn off the oxygen - by then I'd had enough and just turned the radio off. But the one before I listened to all the way through, because it was about guitars as well - an interview with John Mellencamp (fka Cougar) about his new album.

Terri read out the chorus of the first song on the album, which was based on a little homily John's grandmother told him in her very old age. I reproduce them here without permission:

"Nothing lasts forever
And your best efforts don't always pay
Sometimes you get sick and you don't get better
That's when life is short even in its longest days."

Chilling. So, thinking about life being short in this way, I was wondering if I should immediately email the poem in the post just previous to its inspiration. But didn't, because you know, sometimes life is also long and you have to be tactical and patient about your longer-term goals.

So, favor to ask, blog readers, if I do sudden cark it unexpectedly, can you please make sure he gets it?

Off to dwell upon happier subjects, I've got Pandora on the Hives channel and the sun is shining outside.

Poem which is an expression of admiration

When we sit around listening to records,
it is like viewing light through a prism;
it goes in a straight beam of white
and comes out analyzed into a rainbow.

Love this country

Actual warning that came along with a new prescription, including the capital letters:

"EATING GRAPEFRUIT OR DRINKING GRAPEFRUIT JUICE WHILE YOU ARE TAKING THIS MEDICINE may increase the amount of this medicine in your blood, which may increase your risk for serious side effects. Talk with you doctor before including grapefruit or grapefruit juice in your diet."

Recognizing a real threat

Today I listened to two different songs that were about boring, regular suburban guys with boring jobs and lives:

Super Straight by Regurgitator

and

Charmless Man by Blur

Well, the Blur song is about a boring aristocratic man with no job but a boring life, but you get the idea.

These songs are part of a huge genre of songs about men with boring jobs and lives, stuck in commutes and suburban homes and dull marriages with no future and etc. But today it struck me, for the first time ever, that since these songs are all written by men, they are writing about a man that is a real threat to them, a might they run a danger of becoming if they're not careful.

Since I'm a girl, I never heard the lyrics that way, I can see clearly that the rock stars who sing these songs are completely different from the guys in the suits and trains and bars after work, and that the rock stars would never become them, and also that the guys they're singing about probably actually did want that life, so they are probably perfectly happy and don't have the same lost attitude as the rock stars would if they were doing what the men in the grey flannel suits are doing.

For the rock stars, these guys are the same for them as the women at bridal and baby showers are for me. Those women are living the life that every woman is supposed to want to live, and the momentum of expectation and convention that swirls around in concentration in those events like a blandness tornado does, indeed, feel threatening. Even though I am as likely as ending up a married ball of averageness excited about what pram to buy for my second baby as the rock stars are to become the guys on the trains, those women threaten my identity. I was never sensitive to this emotion in the songs before, but today it occurred to me.

You Can Heal Your Life mantras

Every strange little ailment I've had recently seems to be associated, in the strange little book You Can Heal Your Life, with a mantra associated with not worrying about the future. So here's a little collection of them, for going off to bed on a Sunday evening:

Wrist - I handle all my experiences with wisdom, with love, and with ease.

Thumb - My mind is at peace.

Stiffness - I am safe enough to be flexible in my mind.

Itchiness - I am at peace just where I am. I accept my good, knowing all my needs and desires will be fulfilled.

Thank you, thank you, universe for such a nice weekend, for such lovely company and experiences the images of which I will keep in my mind forever. I am in the now, tonight, in a spirit of gratitude, not lack, not neediness, not desire and frustration, but peace, and love, and flexibility, and ease. Thanks.