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.