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.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
One good thing about being a girl guitar player
There's a term I've learned, GAS, on the guitar forums online, which stands for "gear acquisition syndrome". It afflicts all electric guitar players - there are just so many gadgets out there to buy, and each one contributes to a slightly different tone in the end result. And apparently it hits early, because earlier this week I was positively lusting after a particular guitar on Musician's Friend.com. Thing is, it was all but identical to the guitar I have now, from a music point of view. The only difference was one humbucker pickup, where mine has a single coil, but my teacher lambasted this idea saying if you have to have a humbucker it has to be with a hard tail bridge, there's no point even having it with a tremolo because the sound is too thin. Well, I'm sure there are others out there with the opposite point of view (they probably wouldn't make this guitar if there weren't, right?), but that thought held me back from hitting "buy now" the first minute I saw this lovely object.
The most lovely thing about it was the color - "Electron Blue". It's a lovely blue, not light, but knocked back from navy. It's kind of like the blue at the top of the Internet Explorer browser in Windows NT, but of course on a guitar body shinier and rounder. And then I found out that this color is being discontinued, so this guitar will not be available in a few months. Would I forever regret not hitting "Add to cart"? Would I, 10 years from now, be paying tens of thousands of dollars on eBay to recover a model of the one that got away?
And then I was at the Mall the other night, looking at handbags, and found one from Nine West that is exactly, precisely this same Electron Blue color. So I bought it intead, and the GAS went away immediately.
See, boy guitar players don't have this option!
The most lovely thing about it was the color - "Electron Blue". It's a lovely blue, not light, but knocked back from navy. It's kind of like the blue at the top of the Internet Explorer browser in Windows NT, but of course on a guitar body shinier and rounder. And then I found out that this color is being discontinued, so this guitar will not be available in a few months. Would I forever regret not hitting "Add to cart"? Would I, 10 years from now, be paying tens of thousands of dollars on eBay to recover a model of the one that got away?
And then I was at the Mall the other night, looking at handbags, and found one from Nine West that is exactly, precisely this same Electron Blue color. So I bought it intead, and the GAS went away immediately.
See, boy guitar players don't have this option!
Go forward, don't go back
The other night I was driving home from work, sort of on auto-pilot, because I had intended to turn left into the CB and head up to the Mall, but forgot and ended up not in the turn lane but going straight ahead, toward the 41 in the way I usually drive home. I took the next left, into the road that leads into the KimCentral Credit Union parking lot, and was trying to figure out if that road connected with the CB up to the left so I could cut the corner and get headed where I wanted to go.
And looking ahead, it looked like maybe in fact it didn't connect, but swept around to the right into the houses there, and that there maybe was a culvert or draining ditch between KimCentral and where I wanted to be headed. So I did a U-turn around the median strip, went back out that little road onto Winchester, to the light, and turned on the CB the standard way.
But my instinct was really to press on and see where that road went, instead, and try to keep my bearings and figure it out up ahead.
This instinct has got me lost many times, in many different cities, and I was thinking of how it is a feature of my character. I guess I don't like going back and doing anything over, I like to press ahead. Turning back, going back over old ground and trying the same thing a different way, seems to my gut like a desperate waste of time. Even inspires a low-level panic, like, "But life is so SHORT! I can't just get stuck here! There's other things up ahead to do! I might miss them, or not get them done!"
I bet I'm like this in all sorts of ways - I don't take things back to the store, I have trouble throwing out baking failures and starting again. And the very biggest, most striking example is that I can't revise written things. Just can't do it. The revising seems like ruining. My writing pours out of me as it happens, as it occurs to me and that word-generating machine part of my brain concocts it, in the moment and in reaction to whatever circumstance.
My honors thesis supervisor in college had the opposite technique - the way he wrote philosophy was by revising each sentence over and over until it was perfect, and then moving on to the next one. I wrote from 30,000 feet - had to have the outline of the whole piece structured so I could hold it in my head all at once, then start filling in intros and transitions, then filling in the stuffing so that the actual sentences were the last step. I almost didn't finish my thesis because he was advising me in his way, but after a pep talk from a good friend in the library one late night, I decided to crash on and do it my way, and in the end he was amazed that it all came together.
In the end, though, this feature of my character was probably exactly, deeply instrumental in me not making it as an academic. You have to send papers out and get them published, to keep your job. I had to papers that I submitted that were accepted pending revisions. The reviewers had read them really, really carefully and had pages and pages of comments and questions that they wanted addressed and suggestions for how to refine and refigure the argument. Could not even start. Couldn't, if I recall, even read the comments and take them in - today I have no clue whatsoever what they might have said. Just complete revision block. The papers had come out of me when I was thinking of those things, they were expressions of my thoughts that were what they were, and this was six months down the track at least, maybe longer, and revising was not something I could do, at all, even under threat of not keeping my job. So you know what? I quit my job.
And poetry - at the poetry group I read blog entries, not poems. Everyone else reads poems. I was in a class in Sydney, toward the end there, where I tried to write poems, and each week we read each others' work carefully and made comments for revisions, but I hate that kind of thing. Crafting an object and honing it and adjusting, adjusting. Sometimes classmates would bring in the revisions and often they were worse than the original, I thought. Poetry, like academic writing, is not the right medium for me.
Blogging, it turns out, is perfect!
And looking ahead, it looked like maybe in fact it didn't connect, but swept around to the right into the houses there, and that there maybe was a culvert or draining ditch between KimCentral and where I wanted to be headed. So I did a U-turn around the median strip, went back out that little road onto Winchester, to the light, and turned on the CB the standard way.
But my instinct was really to press on and see where that road went, instead, and try to keep my bearings and figure it out up ahead.
This instinct has got me lost many times, in many different cities, and I was thinking of how it is a feature of my character. I guess I don't like going back and doing anything over, I like to press ahead. Turning back, going back over old ground and trying the same thing a different way, seems to my gut like a desperate waste of time. Even inspires a low-level panic, like, "But life is so SHORT! I can't just get stuck here! There's other things up ahead to do! I might miss them, or not get them done!"
I bet I'm like this in all sorts of ways - I don't take things back to the store, I have trouble throwing out baking failures and starting again. And the very biggest, most striking example is that I can't revise written things. Just can't do it. The revising seems like ruining. My writing pours out of me as it happens, as it occurs to me and that word-generating machine part of my brain concocts it, in the moment and in reaction to whatever circumstance.
My honors thesis supervisor in college had the opposite technique - the way he wrote philosophy was by revising each sentence over and over until it was perfect, and then moving on to the next one. I wrote from 30,000 feet - had to have the outline of the whole piece structured so I could hold it in my head all at once, then start filling in intros and transitions, then filling in the stuffing so that the actual sentences were the last step. I almost didn't finish my thesis because he was advising me in his way, but after a pep talk from a good friend in the library one late night, I decided to crash on and do it my way, and in the end he was amazed that it all came together.
In the end, though, this feature of my character was probably exactly, deeply instrumental in me not making it as an academic. You have to send papers out and get them published, to keep your job. I had to papers that I submitted that were accepted pending revisions. The reviewers had read them really, really carefully and had pages and pages of comments and questions that they wanted addressed and suggestions for how to refine and refigure the argument. Could not even start. Couldn't, if I recall, even read the comments and take them in - today I have no clue whatsoever what they might have said. Just complete revision block. The papers had come out of me when I was thinking of those things, they were expressions of my thoughts that were what they were, and this was six months down the track at least, maybe longer, and revising was not something I could do, at all, even under threat of not keeping my job. So you know what? I quit my job.
And poetry - at the poetry group I read blog entries, not poems. Everyone else reads poems. I was in a class in Sydney, toward the end there, where I tried to write poems, and each week we read each others' work carefully and made comments for revisions, but I hate that kind of thing. Crafting an object and honing it and adjusting, adjusting. Sometimes classmates would bring in the revisions and often they were worse than the original, I thought. Poetry, like academic writing, is not the right medium for me.
Blogging, it turns out, is perfect!
Word to look up
"ardencies"
As in, "ardencies and anxieties of youth," David Denby, the New Yorker of Feb 9 & 16, 2009, page 118.
As in, "ardencies and anxieties of youth," David Denby, the New Yorker of Feb 9 & 16, 2009, page 118.
Old friends
"...Jenny?"
"Oh my GOD!"
Think of the relationships and circumstances that yield this sort of exchange. It requires a dear friend, absent for a while, and seen by surprise where not expected.
Think of maybe running into someone at an airport that you knew in college but haven't seen for 15 years. Or someone you used to work with, at an industry conference where you hadn't even thought about them being there but once you see them it makes sense. Or a reunion - probably all reunions of big groups will have exchanges like this.
It's a particular kind of assured love that yields it, nothing less.
But then, you have to think, if that deep and timeless love is there, why are these people apart?
"Oh my GOD!"
Think of the relationships and circumstances that yield this sort of exchange. It requires a dear friend, absent for a while, and seen by surprise where not expected.
Think of maybe running into someone at an airport that you knew in college but haven't seen for 15 years. Or someone you used to work with, at an industry conference where you hadn't even thought about them being there but once you see them it makes sense. Or a reunion - probably all reunions of big groups will have exchanges like this.
It's a particular kind of assured love that yields it, nothing less.
But then, you have to think, if that deep and timeless love is there, why are these people apart?
Mid-winter blog topics
Catching up on a few "to blog" ideas I've jotted down recently.
Feeling with your fingers
At guitar lessons I'm learning some more difficult things, which require changing chord shapes with your left hand and travelling further up and down the neck, and require more complex picking patterns with the right hand on non-adjacent strings. And my teacher was telling me how you keep track without looking - for example if you are standing to play, with the guitar on a strap rather than resting in your lap in the easy chair where you watch TV, and looking out making eye contract with the crowd. You know, because I'll be doing this so soon, that I need to know the right technique.
And he was saying that when he plays, he pays attention to how it feels, attends to his fingers making contact with strings that he's not playing, staying aware of the parts of guitar that he's touching. And I said, "Yes, I think I've been playing with my brain, but I need to start doing it with my body."
I was trying to apply this mindset for the next week, while practicing and while going around in the world, but found it a little scary. I think sometimes it's easier to live in your mind, detached from the physical world that's right there touching you. But it sounds like a good idea to try to be more aware of it, and if it makes me a better guitar player, then it's the right way to go.
Double Vision
I have been going to a poetry group in town, not reading poems because I don't really write them, but reading blog entries, mostly, the ones that are the most poem-like, which usually turn out to be the ones about Wisconsin weather. Also, I recently had to buy my first pair of reading glasses, which happens to everyone eventually, but it's still new to me. So a few weeks ago I was there, reading some blog entries about the weather, standing at a podium, and had for the first time the experience of looking down through the glasses at the printed sheet, and then over top of the glasses out at the audience to connect with them. It was hard. When you speak you need to look up at folks (at the end of every sentence, is what I heard - if you do that smoothly enough they don't even know you're reading), and these glasses were a barrier. If I accidentally looked through them instead of over them the people were just an indistinct blur. I even wondered about keeping my hand on the glasses and then removing them when looking out at the crowd. I will have to experiment with this more.
Distracted
Also from going to the poetry group, I've been having again in my life the experience of not at all listening to the person who's speaking, because you are in your mind rehearsing the thing that you are about to say when it's your turn next.
Other times when one has this:
Feeling with your fingers
At guitar lessons I'm learning some more difficult things, which require changing chord shapes with your left hand and travelling further up and down the neck, and require more complex picking patterns with the right hand on non-adjacent strings. And my teacher was telling me how you keep track without looking - for example if you are standing to play, with the guitar on a strap rather than resting in your lap in the easy chair where you watch TV, and looking out making eye contract with the crowd. You know, because I'll be doing this so soon, that I need to know the right technique.
And he was saying that when he plays, he pays attention to how it feels, attends to his fingers making contact with strings that he's not playing, staying aware of the parts of guitar that he's touching. And I said, "Yes, I think I've been playing with my brain, but I need to start doing it with my body."
I was trying to apply this mindset for the next week, while practicing and while going around in the world, but found it a little scary. I think sometimes it's easier to live in your mind, detached from the physical world that's right there touching you. But it sounds like a good idea to try to be more aware of it, and if it makes me a better guitar player, then it's the right way to go.
Double Vision
I have been going to a poetry group in town, not reading poems because I don't really write them, but reading blog entries, mostly, the ones that are the most poem-like, which usually turn out to be the ones about Wisconsin weather. Also, I recently had to buy my first pair of reading glasses, which happens to everyone eventually, but it's still new to me. So a few weeks ago I was there, reading some blog entries about the weather, standing at a podium, and had for the first time the experience of looking down through the glasses at the printed sheet, and then over top of the glasses out at the audience to connect with them. It was hard. When you speak you need to look up at folks (at the end of every sentence, is what I heard - if you do that smoothly enough they don't even know you're reading), and these glasses were a barrier. If I accidentally looked through them instead of over them the people were just an indistinct blur. I even wondered about keeping my hand on the glasses and then removing them when looking out at the crowd. I will have to experiment with this more.
Distracted
Also from going to the poetry group, I've been having again in my life the experience of not at all listening to the person who's speaking, because you are in your mind rehearsing the thing that you are about to say when it's your turn next.
Other times when one has this:
- Speech meets in High School. Going second was the best, you'd just miss the first speaker, didn't have to dive right in before the room was warmed up, but it was close enough to the front of the line-up that the nerves wouldn't accumulate and go over the top.
- Meetings at work. Especially when a boss is going around the table and asking for updates from each person in turn. You spend your time going over and over the phrasing to make sure it's got just the right businessy words, the lead message right up front, a confident tone, not too rambly.
- In a fight, or when mad at somebody. When actually fighting, you are constructing your next move in the argument all the while the mad-ee is saying their angry part. Dangerous, because this is just when you should be listening the most. And when mad but not in the presence of the mad-ee, even in an unrelated conversation, your brain is writing arguments and rejoinders to the absent person, and you don't pay attention to the one right in front of you talking about something else.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Belated Valentine's poem
I would abjure my fundamental values for you, baby.
I would change my last name to yours.
I would stand in a church - a church! - in a white dress,
Make promises concerning a future that is not actual,
Combine book collections,
Combine bank accounts,
pick up socks off the floor and do dishes by hand every day,
all for you.
For you, I would become part of your family,
go to your mother's house for Sunday dinner,
for roast and baked potatoes.
I would stand in a kitchen, I would roast, I would bake,
me, with these fingers that only ever before touched
computer keys and telephone buttons.
I would roast a roast for you.
I would visit your mother each Sunday.
I would change my name to yours.
I would abnegate all former selves and their beliefs,
for you, baby.
I would change my last name to yours.
I would stand in a church - a church! - in a white dress,
Make promises concerning a future that is not actual,
Combine book collections,
Combine bank accounts,
pick up socks off the floor and do dishes by hand every day,
all for you.
For you, I would become part of your family,
go to your mother's house for Sunday dinner,
for roast and baked potatoes.
I would stand in a kitchen, I would roast, I would bake,
me, with these fingers that only ever before touched
computer keys and telephone buttons.
I would roast a roast for you.
I would visit your mother each Sunday.
I would change my name to yours.
I would abnegate all former selves and their beliefs,
for you, baby.
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