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.

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!

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!