ignatius the bonsai tree has some new leaf growth! i haven't killed him yet! hurrah!
i ordered a mini pagoda and a mini pair of dudes playing chess to sit under him to celebrate.
i started taking my creativity class online, through university of wisconsin madison, and i was doing the first lesson and found this, which i liked. it seemed to set everything appropriately in a firmament, the calm and settled way i feel when looking at a night sky full of stars.
"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."
-martha graham, to agnes de mille
hi.
i get into the habit of not writing and i like it so much i want it to go on and on and on. i get into the habit of not riding my bike and eating ice cream instead, and i like it so much i want it to go on and on and on ...
so you can guess by the above it was an anxious week. what was missing? the riding? the blogging? i don't know. but my sense of being overwhelmed and wanting to hide under a rock continues. i didn't feel like boring everyone with my existential malaise, so i kept it to myself, with varying consequences.
sometimes i feel like i'm in a house of mirrors.
other times, things are wonderful, because i did get myself out on the bike today, racing the rain. and i beat the rain -- only one drop landed (on my lower lip) on me the whole time i was riding. and i didn't do as long as i would have because the sky was really threatening, but i roused myself out of that torpor i get in and went.
on the way i smelled summertime coming from the woods.
it's a strange spring. i'm not any happier or sadder than any other spring, i suppose, but i'm all over the place, and it's hard to be consistent.
now i hear rain outside and i want to go back to bed.
later, as is my custom on sunday, i will fold laundry.
GOOD THINGS:
1. i didn't spend a fortune on clothes this weekend
2. i actually went and picked up the ceramics i painted with p and her little friend last saturday
3. i went to the dentist -- hygienist ripped the hell out my gums, but i don't have any cavities and i received no needles of any kind
4. it is that wonderful time of the year when it's almost summer. it's cold, but the calendar marches on.
check back saturday -- busy week. sorry!!!! :(
i woke up this morning thinking "cemetery" and rolled over in bed. it's not a hardship to go, it's just going. it's not close and i need to feel like i want to go, and like i have a pocket of leisure time to do so, if you know what i mean. i am so unbelievably scheduled at this time in my life. and when i'm not scheduled, i'm cleaning. Labels: mom
yesterday was nice. p and a little friend and i painted ceramics -- the friend a mermaid jewelry box, p a kitty, and me a gargoyle. i felt like the mother of the year but by the time i went to bed last night i was exhausted. and then today came, and all i was really in the mood for was a certain pizza i like, and perhaps a hair trim. p got a little haircut with bangs that makes her look egyptian. around that time my brother called.
he asked what i was doing today, i said nothing. he said he was going to head up to the cemetery. he didn't ask me to go but i said i would. as i was driving to his house with flowers and a plastic "MOM" sign in tow, my other brother called.
he said he was going to head up to the cemetery. i said i was already going and would see him there. he called my third brother, but he was working.
as i arrived with m and his girlfriend, my brother s was cleaning mom's plaque with a brillo and some polishing cream. it looked really nice -- better than i had seen it in a long while. both of my brothers confessed to having been there recently, alone, and both had also cleaned the grave then. i was interested in what seemed to be a turning around in their attitudes -- how many times over the years had i heard them say, "there's nothing for me there?"
i pointed out to both of them that we never plan this, we always just end up there, on the day, and i wondered why. it is almost as if she summons us there. neither had an answer, but i liked the unplanned-yet-planned nature of it, so like everyday life anyway -- you never know where it takes you, you just get up with a sketch of a draft of an outline of a plan.
i explained to m's girlfriend about the creaky tree that i thought would lose a limb someday with me sitting under it -- the irony. and how it was just a little tree when we chose the site. how i flagged down various english-as-a-second-language backhoe drivers to let them know about the creaky limb. how i had been told it was checked and determined to be fine.
"rosemarie," my brother s said, "trees creak."
perhaps so.
they mocked my plastic mom sign and flowers (i had no vase) but in the end my brother dug a hole with a hammer and we planted them there. as for the sign, i said surely mom would appreciate the high camp.
i can't describe the warmth between my brothers and me as we stood around the memorial to the woman who had given us life. i felt a little weird with the girlfriend there -- she has not been part of my family long. i like her a lot. but i worried if she felt weird, which made me feel weird, which probably made me act weird, which made her feel weird -- my hypersensitive empathy meter is a tangled skein most of the time -- but i finally decided, this is my thing, these are my brothers, i'm going to ask whatever i want.
"do you think," i asked the sky, not looking at either of them, "that mom and dad would still be together if not for the cancer?"
they both said yes without hesitation. m just said yes, s elaborated as to why. i was so interested in this. i don't know. it's like asking do you think there would be animals in the world if there were no garden of eden, or what you'd do with the money if you won the powerball. it's a question with little meaning, but sometimes i like to think of the alternate reality that will never be mine.
or anyone else's. because life is final. walking past the memorials to so many people, i said to s, "it brings you up short -- but it's kind of a comfort; no matter how much drama, you always end up here in the end."
true of my life eventually when it's over. but true of my life now also, a different kind of mother's day filled not with brunch but silence and memory. but something more -- spring everywhere and that distant place where oceans of grass wash up on the horizon. every overarching appreciation in my spirit comes from having been alive and awash in the vast sea of the world, the extravagant gift my mother gave me. but every realization and lesson comes from that loss. they meet on that sacred ground where my brothers and i stood today.
i wrote in my diary this week:
But this week every year it is always tough to find words and the feelings and the courage to celebrate and mourn the strength of the bonds, the pain of the loss, and the fragility of the hope that connects mothers and children. Not only those to whom we have given birth, and those who bore us, but also those who help us along the way with the kind of care that can only come from a maternal place. It is the world's most awesome and gentle thing and, by turns, contains the greatest shout and the merest whisper. And it is sustained by a cord of unfathomable love that wraps around the world and ties itself to heaven.
i should be out dancing, but no. roodly had last-minute plans that came up, but i'm better off ... the weather sucks and i was freaking out about having to drive in it. so i'm sitting here contemplating watching an episode of american experience about walt whitman that i've had for three weeks and haven't had time to touch. Labels: angst, my pathetic life, my tonsils, ocd, personal hygiene regimens
what do i do with all my time, you ask?
i don't know. obsess.
so, p's birthday today she is 8!!!! s and i took off. we planned a picnic and miniature golf but instead ended up in an urban enclave getting my sinuses checked and later at a suburban mall.
you know how i've suffered, right? well, it is partially and basically allergy related, as it's raining today and i'm having no problem at all. so i go down there, the doctor numbs the inside of my nose and inserts a probe down into my throat, tells me everything looks good, the reason i've had a sore throat for so long is because i have a minor yeast infection in my throat from all the antibiotics (god, don't get me started on the varieties of yeast i've had flourishing on my person at various junctures owing to my flagrant overuse of antibiotics) and that i should gargle with salt and vinegar water.
problem solved and explains crap on my tonsils.
but, he said, i should quit looking at my tonsils, yes they are assymetrical but no not wildly so.
i have a deviated septum. whatever that means. i learn something new every day.
but my sore throat was nothing giant as he checked it, like a huge tumor, a festering wound or a family of weasels living behind my eardrum unbeknownst to me.
as soon as he said this i miraculously healed, BUT he wants a cat scan of my head just to make sure.
excuse me while i find a container for my joy.
anyway, otherwise, p got a WII and is over the moon, and s also bought her a bike so she's the luckiest little girl in the world this birthday.
while i celebrate the eighth anniversary, as you know, of the worst pain -- and the best drugs!! -- i ever had.
...so sleepy ...
one day from celebrating my one month sick anniversary, this is the first day my right tonsil has shrunk back to a less-than-ludicrous size and doesn't look like the surface of mars.
days of antibiotics to arrive at this point:
amoxicillin - 20
levaquin - 7
my throat still hurts though.maybe it's finally on its way out? god, i hope so.
thank you for your wonderful and compassionate comments on the last post. that was a toughie, and it helps beyond imagining to be validated in that.
i talked to my brother today, he called me three times. we had some great conversations. he knew i was having a hard time (throat weirdness continues, mom's birthday), but he made me laugh, which is the best part of my family.
"you know," he said, "you need to embrace the circus for all it is. ours is not like other families! embrace it, save your therapy money and go to the spa twice a week. you're not going to get any more clarity on it than you already have."
he could be on to something!
why am i so down? apart from the sinuses. my head feels a ton better but coming to the end of this last course of antibiotics, i still have a weird little hurty sensation in my throat and ear ... i wish it would just go.
whatever.
i rode my bike today.
so i thought to myself what's the deal, why am i unsettled. and then i remembered -- tomorrow is my mom's 67th birthday!
how could i forget you wonder.
well, i don't ... ever. but the reality of her birthday and knowing it's coming are two different things. it always sucks, too, as you know, because mother's day is in the same week. in between there is p's birthday! a trifecta of emotional interest. so.
i realized a couple of things today.
1. i never did crazy things when i was younger because i guess i wanted to preserve myself in some sort of child state in case my mom decided to come back. then at least she'd recognize me! crazy huh. like a little kid.
well, i was. it makes sense to me. i've probably said it in so many ways before but it became clear, like pruning a bonsai named ignatius (thank you for voting.)
2. i live in a strange time construct, half in the past, half in the future. there is a sliver that takes present in the present. all the eckhart tolleying in the world isn't going to make me leave the past behind -- i need it, need to keep a relationship going with my mom -- i will long after her every minute until i die.
but it doesn't mean i have to have such a hard time relating to people right now.
3. if i should chance to live a while longer i may have a prayer of coming to terms with some of it by the time i'm 80. it's not martyrdom or something to lean on. it just is.
4. i will never stop exploring this topic because i myself am evolving, and always there is a three way mirror: how i was and how she was, what it is to not have her to see what i might be like, and what i have made of myself in the meantime.
5. here, just to get to brass tacks, is my childhood pain in a nutshell:
even worse than the fact that my mother was ill with cancer my entire childhood, my parents separated, my mother nearly suicided twice (once in front of me) and was hospitalized for an extended period, my parents divorced and my father forcibly kicked my mom out of the house at one point by throwing all her clothes on the front lawn ... who knows if she deserved it, i'm just telling you what i saw, i have no idea about the subtexts ... we moved in with my stepfamily, and specifically my stepmother who hated and resented me and treated me like cinderella for six years, THE DAY WE BURIED MY MOTHER.
that last event was the most resonant of any that has ever happened to me in my life.
thank god my dad divorced her. i don't even blame her really, but what the hell, it sucked anyway. she's not a bad person, she had a rough life, wanted a stab at happiness, i am not a child or a woman for that matter for the faint of heart. i am too much for anyone but myself. she still kicked me when i was down. she apologized later (blaming my dad for all of it in a roundabout way), and i accepted her apology because really by that point, who cared? damage done. i'm sorry for accidentally hacking off your arm with a chainsaw for six years. it was that kind of apology.
my dad. i love him like crazy. wish it weren't thwarted so often. he had his own little red wagon too. these things are ambiguous. i'm not saying it was easy on him either. what a cluster you-know-what.
various freudians have postulated along the way, "but isn't it really YOUR MOTHER you're angry with?!?" yes, i'm pissed at her too. she wasn't the huggiest, etc. i am a lot like her actually -- i see it constantly. HOWEVER. she was the victim in this, in the sense of, she REALLY couldn't change direction. she was sick and she died. she, at 44, with a collection of sassy dancewear and pumps to rival mine at this stage, would, like george michael, "CHOOSE LIFE." she no more wanted to be dead at 44 with 4 kids barely at adulthood than she wanted to be forgo her nightly carafe of riunite white.
this is why when people are like, "OH MY GOD! did you hear?!??!?" i could care less, i've seen it all. whatever, do what you have to do. i lived eight lifetimes of drama by the time i was 15.
yet i worry i'm dying of a sore throat. yet i want to fling myself from a parapet if a pizza delivery guy is mean to me. yet i take every unreturned call extremely personally. you see the distortions.
pretty much everything else has been gravy and okay. extravagant grace at many junctures, blessings beyond imagining, plenty of chocolate, a roof over my head, and a nice view from various windows.
and i'm not saying i live my life like mother teresa with butterflies flying behind me. i don't blame anyone. i mean, i do, but what good does it do? "it's your fault i'm like this." "okay." did they ASK to have life toss them 73,000 horrible circumstances? no. you do what it takes to get through. are half your decisions asinine? of course. can anyone say they did any better? probably not. can you hold the anger? sure you can. can other things aggravate it and trigger it? of course. have i too suffered depression, bad choices, idiotic twirlabouts that have messed me up utterly and there but for the grace of god go i? indeed.
imperfect people living imperfect lives.
but you see why i don't give a fuck who sits where at a thanksgiving table or whether i remember to rsvp.
a stain on a new shirt, different story.
i'm just saying, it was kind of a lot for a delicate flower like me to manage. they did the best they could. i guess.
"The death of a parent is probably one of the worst things that can happen to you as a young adult, even if you don't live together. Facing death can be sad or frightening to anyone, but as a young adult, you are already coping with physical and mental changes and this event can really complicate the already difficult picture. This is all a lot of stuff for anyone to process at once. Through all the pain, grief, and confusion, you can carry the knowledge that if you can survive this, you can survive anything.
"In the United States, approximately 1 in 20 children experience the loss of a parent before they reach the age of 18 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990). Although most bereaved children do not show serious emotional/behavioral disturbances, children who lose a loved one are at a greater risk for symptoms of depression, withdrawal, anxiety, conduct problems, and lower self-esteem. This is why it is so important for you to express your feelings to someone. That person can be a parent, counselor, clergy person, therapist or close relative.
"When one of your parents dies, you may find that all sorts of things start to worry you that didn't before. You may fear that your other parent will die too. If you have younger brothers or sisters, you may have new responsibilities now and more work to do at home. You may need to help out more with chores, cooking, errands, or even get a part time job. In a way, this may help your grief, helping others can be healing too. You may worry about much smaller things too. Don't let small problems overcrowd your mind. Concentrate on one at a time. Deal with the most serious ones first, and then sometimes the smaller ones just take care of themselves.
"No one should tell you that you will be taking the place of the parent who has died. If they do, tell them to stop. It is natural for the remaining members of the family to regroup and some sharing of responsibilities needs to take place in the household, but all that instant responsibility is not yours to take on.
"Grief has various patterns and may continue on and off for many years, though the intensity may get less."
every time i revisit this (i never stop visiting it, but perhaps i should say every time i write about the obvious), i get a little clearer.
i think past all the crap and i see wonderful things -- this is why i'm a poet. when i think past the crap, i am about 11, and it is summertime, and there we are in the moments of lightness and laughter that punctuated it all. she is grooving in the kitchen to some music from a radio on the sill. and grabs my hands and she says, "c'mere, don't you want to learn to dance?"
but i am too shy. i giggle all over, she tries to get me to shimmy my little hips and hugs me. i feel silly and she keeps on grooving. i see her in a different light, see the sparkling lights of her evenings drifting through the blinds of motherhood i've got in front of her, see her as a woman, think of myself as one someday too.
but not yet.
"come on, let yourself move! dance with me! you need to learn to dance!"
her voice as close as my ear down twenty five years. spurts of warm breath against my neck and hair as i try to match her steps.
now, i want to learn.
hypochondria follies ...
i just started taking levaquin for this damn sinus infection that won't go away. i feel like i've been sick FOREVER, but really only since april 7, and that's only three weeks or so. not a big deal. never mind it's been antibiotics galore, but most of it was amoxicillin, which is useless. at one point during the eighties my blood was running about 50 proof amoxicillin.
so now i'm on the big guns, and s is going to get me an appointment with an ENT he knows. i shall stop taking the extraordinarily OCD step of checking my tonsils with the magnifying mirror. and p is sick too, i hear tubercular coughing drifting down from the first floor, like snotty bells pealing across the countryside.
so, as usual, i've convinced myself partially that i'm immunodeficient but i'm not. i ordered a sinus irrigator machine with a little windfall of money i got doing some editing for a friend. i already have a neti or yeti or whatever the hell kind of pot you call it, have had it for over a decade, but i'm lazy about it so the novelty of having a little machine will probably get me through allergy season at least.
the biggest thing is it just makes me so effing tired, no matter how much i sleep, and i can't ride as well and a 20 minute stationary ride is a big deal and i always want to eat everything because it's something to do. and every time i've felt better from it i've overdone it and here i am again.
oh, well, it's like riding a bike. if i get fat because of my sinuses i'll get back to it.
so, sorry to bitch on about this, but it's what's going on.
in other quasimedical news, a concerned friend (okay it was the riverboat pilot), sensing my abject misery and typical longing for the sweet release of death itself (i know, i'm so unbelievably dramatic beyond anything, but don't try to change me, baby), sent me a bonsai tree just because i said i wanted one. which was deeply appreciated. here he is (i didn't actually flip it over like a kitten to see if it were a he, but i sensed it.)
i haven't decided what to name him though. perhaps you could assist me.
so, my misery continues in the sense that, it's been a hell of a month in terms of my body, but what happens is, i tell myself, "take it easy" and then i do, and my head takes over and i end up in OCD hell.
i know you get sick of hearing about this.
even though my ear is throbbing now and p is complaining of a sore throat also, i decided not to "pamper myself" and go to bed early tonight. i decided to "push myself" instead, and ride my bike for a while. it worked better. there are just parts of me that are stronger, and more activated, by being active.
the bike ALWAYS helps. eating half an entenmann's banana crunch cake doesn't always help.
i guess i'm just writing out loud what i already know, but it helps me to write it out loud. it is easier for me to break OCD loops when i'm distracted. sure, i may be able to check my tonsils, but without a full level whatever trauma center IN THE ROWHOUSE i can't check everything else so, even though one thing may be okay it doesn't mean everything else is, i.e. it's impossible to be healthfully vigilant in all ways.
you just have to soldier through and take lots of advil, in life.
i do think i was getting too overwrought over the past few weeks. and i don't WANT to place endless perfectionistic demands on myself -- you have to weigh 128 lbs! you have to make sure you eat a green leafy vegetable every single day! you have to get at least 37 tasks done at work every single day! you have to be the best mother on the planet! and if you get sick or yell or feel tired or skip a workout, you've failed! that sort of thing.
nor should i coast endlessly ... i.e. eat whatever you like! don't ever work out! be lackadaisical at work! or whatever. there has to be some kind of happy medium.
my therapist and i have done a number of retrospectives lately as you know. and she said over the past five years she's seen me get in touch with various jungian shadow aspects of my personality -- the things you'd rather not deal with -- and i go into them whole hog, to the exception of everything else, either deep into riding or contemplating or whatever, trying them on, the hoochie mama, the buddhist monk, all of these different things.
with the goal, of course, for anyone with extended midlife crisis, being INTEGRATION, finally. she said she thinks i'm close.
i talked about this thing i read in one of the recovery books about a hamster -- did i tell you this already? the hamster ran loose for six months in the house, and everyone dove for it whenever it reappeared? i know i told you this. anyone, the lady decided not to keep diving for it, to let the irregular circumstance just go on. and one day the hamster ran into her hand and got back into its cage, where it happily remains.
my life is an irregular circumstance. it ALWAYS has been! the characters may change, but it's all at the same theater of the absurd. some days i control the curtain. some days i don't.
but i've almost decided to stop chasing the hamster that darts on and off stage. whether that hamster is my OCD or my sanity or my spirituality or any one of my eighteen distinct personas, it's constantly popping out and disappearing again, leaving me diving for dead air.
i think i'm there, part of the way. for when i'm ready to stop diving. i feel as entrenched in the circumstances of my life as a squatter in an abandominium. and i like it that way. but it's hard when you've lived in a room for 37 years where things are constantly popping out of the walls and making you dive for them.
"what can you do for you, rose?" she asked me. "how can you take care of you?"
a good question for a person who simultaneously wants, needs, must do it all herself, but can't stop depending on the kindness of strangers, familiars, and the spells and spirits of the very air.
p came home with this from st. babka, i'll be damned if i know what it says.
meanwhile, i am engaging in some serious spiralling OCD about my tonsils, which are acting up again. do i have an immune deficiency? must i be on antibiotics for the rest of my life?
tomorrow, p will spend a shadow day at st babka and i will spend a shadow day at the rowhouse, awaiting p's return from st. babka.
i have spoken to the principal, etc. and it is the usual leap of faith so, here we go.
such a soft, sleepy, rainy, depressed, but surprisingly productive, day. i have surrendered to my insane predilections at present by just deciding to minimize my contact with the human race and to keep whatever contact i do have superficial. having a mouthful of frosted flakes at any given time is helpful with this approach. Monday AQUARIANS, be of good cheer. The rest of us salute your courage and pluckiness at a time when half the time you doubt you have the strength to keep going it turns out you've got so much more stamina than you think you have we know how vulnerable, exhausted and compromised you feel now and then so we salute you today when the Moon approaches Chiron, Neptune and the Node in your sign and for everybody else wherever you have Aquarius you've been wounded but not mortally, it seems despite leaks, cracks and a sinking foundation wherever you have Aquarius persists even until today and tomorrow. Granted, it can be crazy-making because the mood shifts so quickly and radically you can't predict from one minute to the next how you'll feel sometimes it's cool at other times you think it's the end it's a ride what a ride we're all on the rush, the depression, the attempt to stabilize the juice, the lag the worry, the relief you just have to ride with it and scream each time you go around a hairpin curve
michael lutin, dead on as usual:
so at the mall i ordered bubble tea at this funky kiosk, i never had it and somehow felt that i should, because i love and appreciate tea in all its forms. in fact i am totally synonymous with tea -- seldom do i not have a cup of it somewhere near me, i am an addict the way some people are with cigarettes or highballs.
s says i make it and put it on bookcases and dressers just to have it sit there, and then i am famous for leaving it in the microwave for days. i find it and drink it, however old it is -- not more than a day for those cups that make it out of the microwave-- this comes from having lived in england where it was the very water of life and tasted good at no matter what temperature or state of steepedness.
and i like it straight up, no sugar, a bit of lemon maybe, lots of different flavors. my mother used to say it should steep so long a spoon should stand up in it. i never take the teabag out. neither did she.
so with a bit of trepidation, and i watched the dude make it up with like powder and tea and ice and i wondered where the bubbles were but after he put it through a machine that looked like one of those shimmy exercise machines from the fifties, he scooped what looked like a pile of rabbit droppings into it, jammed a giant pink straw into the cup and handed it to me.
the verdict: ugh!
firstly, it was supposed to be coconut, and it tasted all right but i couldn't deal with drinking a solid. which is weird because i will totally tip back a bowl of cereal and "drink" the remains of cap'n crunch or whatever.
and furthermore i love gummy-textured things but this was the wrong texture. kind of like how fake, american gummy bears during the nineties craze were gross and over-chewy, and the firm, teutonic ones that gave you a sore jaw but tasted oh-so-piquantly fruity were far superior (and harder to find).
i tried to put up a brave and devil-may-care front because this was, after all, bubble tea -- and therefore chic; but i ran into s as i was scowling and walking along and trying to avoid the little rabbit treasures which kept coming unbidden through the big, scooplike straw no matter how close to the top of the cup i tried to keep the bottom of the straw.
s made a face when he saw it. i tried to explain it was hip but he scowled. i offered him some; he recoiled. i decided it really did suck and it was $3.53 i would never see again, and i chucked it (i hate throwing away liquids. i always feel sorry for the janitors).
i think it was the texture problem combined with the fact that it was too sweet. i can eat a pound of candy corn at a sitting: my pancreas dies a little more with each bag, but whatever. the point is, candy corn isn't tea.
and bubble tea isn't either.
yesterday i cleaned the rowhouse from top to bottom!
this is very big news.
it's important to know.
and that's why i'm bothering telling you so.
-dr seuss
i managed to:
... there is more. more later.
today is "take your daughter to work" day.
i hope i don't live to regret this.
sorry i've been remiss. you know how it is. i went to the pulmonologist yesterday for lung function tests (apparently my lungs are functioning quite well) and the man looked up my nose and said, "ugh, yeah."
so, i have this entrenched sinus infection i've had for three weeks, he said he wasn't surprised i was on my second course of antibiotics. he said some people are on them for weeks to get rid of it and gave me some more in case it doesn't go away this time.
i do feel okay. i'm just DOG TIRED. which is why it is an effort to keep my regular life going, which is why i haven't been on here.
other than that, life is aces. hope you're all well too.
it was so hard to sleep on friday night i despaired that i would ever be able to sleep again. insomnia terrifies me, in some measure. that's because it falls into that category of something you want to cease desperately but have absolutely no power over whether it does or not. and i've read books! (i've always read books. about everything.) i know all about what to do when you can't sleep. how you should get up and do something else, etc. etc.
the problem with the reason why i couldn't sleep on friday had to do with the fact that okay, i was dog-bone-two-centuries-dead, rip-van-winkle tired, and every time i rested my weary head my throat started:
drip. drip. drip.
what could be borne while upright and consuming 345 ricola cough drops could not be borne while lying prone. i was trying to think of a way to eat a cough drop while sleeping without choking to death. in the end i sprayed about five gallons of chloraseptic in my throat, which i hate the taste of, and after five minutes of numb it started again.
drip. drip. drip.
the drip is gone today, replaced by an itch and a dry cough. i don't know whether to be thankful. i managed to sleep last night, after tiring myself out after dancing by reading a bit of the helen keller biography roodly loaned me, and today i took a successful nap without too many coughing fits.
so. here we are.
i'm still tired. and i went to ride my bike outside, with the sky threatening all day but not raining, and since riding a bike is akin to doing a rain dance, it started raining 10 minutes into my ride, so so much for that.
but at least we went dancing last night.
we only stayed until midnight and the place was packed. when we left, they asked if we were returning, we said no, and the bouncer held up two fingers and let two burly dudes in in our place.
it was strange that it was so crowded because we knew next to no one there. it was as if the various denizens we greet on a casual basis all suddenly picked up and left town for an out-of-state wedding. these are die-hard, middle-aged clubdwellers, and they do the circuit (we're tourists, they're townies). where were they all last night? whatever. they weren't bothering us.
one guy kept going "wow" every time i passed him. after a while it got stupid, like he was a certain kind of frog and that was his call at the edge of the pond. at one point, i turned and smiled, acknowledging his compliment, and he leaned over and said, "you're hot."
it was about 112 degrees in there, and i was running a low-grade something or other when i left last night anyway, so i said to him, "i actually am physically hot at the moment, so you're not inaccurate."
he laughed uproariously, but i felt as if he would've laughed uproariously if i had said, "let us mourn the passing of dear aunt bertha," because he was just humoring me, like men do for five minutes before you really know them and start picking up their dirty socks from the behind the bathroom door for a living.
one of my youthful stalkers was there, however. among the strangers and the women giving us dagger eyes it was nice to see a familiar face. i gave him the thrill of his life (he must have not much going for him) by dancing with him for two songs. "planet rock" came on, an oldie -- but a goodie, and i said to him, "i was at my high school dance grooving to this while you were trying to climb out of your playpen."
he said, "you're not old. you're beautiful." what a nice young boy.
next came "push it" by salt and pepa, that forgotten classic of gentle romantic persuasion ("yeah, you come here, gimme a kiss/better make it fast or else i'm gonna get pissed"). i danced away from him, he caught up with me and said, "you were fourteen when i was one."
"and this song was playing," i said. i bid him adieu for the evening.
roodly and i were sharing a soda at the back bar, dancing to something or other, and she was talking on about the weird crowd around us.
"and look," i said. "the seventies supergroup 'bread' is in the booth right behind you."
she almost spit her cranberry juice all over the bar.
sure enough -- several people enacting a massive tribute to dirty-blond hair and porkchop sideburns were lounging in the naugahyde banquette. i said they probably were about to sing "make it with you" on the small stage by the dj booth, for the slow song portion of the evening.
and so it went.
unrelated, today i stopped to buy fruit at a wawa because i went to target instead of going to the supermarket. and target doesn't have fruit, but it does have this pair of capris i bought to wear to work tomorrow that are very unsatisfying. i wish i tried stuff on.
anyway, i was with p and a girl was ringing people up, she had long honey-colored ringlets. and when i approached her, a deep voice came out of her and i realized she wasn't a girl but a boy ...or was she?
i looked quickly at her nametag.
i swear to god, it said "pat."
i still had fun. it is beautiful there. i just like to bitch.
1. postnasal drip has taken over my life. i am on antibiotics again. i couldn't sleep until 3 am -- and i went to bed at 10.
2. s and p want to go to winterthur today. do i dare go?
3. supposedly, i am also going out with roodly tonight.
4. i threw a fit and found my way to my overstuffed, not-used-clothes closet, which had crap in front of the door, and actually put some clothes in it.
second night in a row i've gone out on the bike at like 7 pm. which is just weird, i worked all day, and no way do i have time to do the kind of ride i want to do, just like the mornings when i don't have time to do the kind of ride i want to do. but i keep on doing it. however briefly, i have ridden my bike 15 of the last 19 days, two days twice in a day, even though i got really sick somewhere in there. and so i am so proud of myself and tooting my own horn.
one of the things i've been struggling with since i went back to work full-time at the beginning of september is just the qualities that time has taken on. i have all this time to drive, all this dead time in the car getting back and forth from work, and i try to listen to self-empowerment brouhaha or music i like or open the sunroof or call people (using a hands-free device for safety), but it still just sucks. and there is time at work, and i like what i do but i'll look at the clock and be like, "it's 2:38, i have three more hours" and it leaves me feeling forever unfulfilled and like i'm just on a little track, in a mining cart to nowhere, doing not much. and while i accomplish much professionally and feel rather satisfied with myself in other ways, i have no adventures, nothing to write about on here, no rhapsodical revelations.
my life used to be populated with the everyday anecdotes and now, since i don't really talk about work and if i did, it would bore you to tears anyway, because it's all officey stuff, i don't have much to share.
the thing is that clawing the bike back in the evenings even a little bit has awakened that extra something in me that goes dormant when i spend too much time doing for others. and the quality of time changes, it is measured not in minute hands but in pedal strokes. and time stretches out and gets leisurely but it stays intense at the same time and it delivers you back to yourself, over and over and over. it's not merely working out although your muscles complain about what they're being asked to do. as you ride, it gets easier and easier, and your muscles remember. i rode my stationary all winter but there is nothing like getting back on schwinn to remind me of who i am.
i did a big hill just as the sun was going down tonight, and i was wearing my mustard colored fleece, the one that s calls me bumblebee in. and i heard three little kids on scooters yell, "hey biker!" at my back. and i turned and smiled at them, and i thought, for all the other things i am, that's what i am and will always be.
my counselor is leaving, or retiring, or something, at the end of may, great, just ducky, here i am in counseling for abandonment issues (among other psychoses) and she's abandoning me.
"you're breaking up with me," i said last night.
she told me that everyone goes through this, and you can revisit the time in counseling, and all. i said it felt too permanent even though you know next to nothing personally about a good counselor, they are like through a glass darkly, a piece of obsidian you see yourself in, held correctly and in a good light.
amid the trials and the tribulations of my quotidian yet eccentric existence, we ended up talking about my mother, the original abandoner.
it's funny i barely ever state the obvious. i mean i probably have, on here, the whole thing about my mom, at the end of her life, spending time with me alone because i was 14 and supposedly being her caretaker, i mean i guess they assumed i knew how to dial 911 or whatever should the situation warrant, which it did not but even so.
my mom was quite sick at that point. i accompanied her, on public medical transportation, with other hacking, dying humans, to her radiation treatments, because she wasn't allowed to drive. this struck me as normal at the time. now i look back and think: where the hell was everybody?
we all pitched in, i guess. that was the whole point of me staying there with her, of someone staying there with her, day and night for the last weeks. but even then, i was living in a strange space where the worst could not happen, i was not part of a world where her life could end, and that was that.
"i understand," my counselor said. "i totally get that!"
this is why i'm going to miss her.
because it's an important distinction. up until then, you see, i was all cocky like, "bad crap doesn't happen." and i guess in order to get up every day you have to be like that, in some measure. but it happened. she died. she died only a few weeks after i watched her comb almost all the hair out of her head in front of a mirror -- i went with her to the wig salon, and she hated it and switched to headscarves. all of that.
the smell of the flowers from her hospital room i couldn't bear to throw away. the leaves dried and rubbery, clinging to the bottom of the vases when the water got too murky and all the gerber daisy petals dropped off. sticking my face in her handbag and breathing in some essence of her -- some smell of peppermints in the bottom of a pocketbook, and someone else's crumpled tissue, someone else's compact with shattered pieces of angel face pressed powder in it, the puff compressed where it kissed the curves of someone else's face.
and so she became someone else and still confusingly inside me still part of me. i was not fully bloomed yet, am still not now. parts of me stayed in bud, parts went dormant, parts overgrew and climbed the wall of the enchanted garden. and so now, still, as it's been for some years, the bloody mary moments in the mirror -- "aagh! there she is!" glimpses of her in my own face, in a turn of my chin, in the slightest suggestion of gesture or poise of shoulders. something to long toward forever and always, a river with no end.
the other things, not even the death things. the fact that p, too, is a taurus -- like her. the fact that i was the same age when i had p, as she was when she had me. all of those things, and the things i don't want.
i put a bandanna over my explosion of hair, pull it down to my brow, remember her headscarves. put my bike helmet on, my cleats, and go and ride past all the walkers and the little babies in their prams, past the rising scent of the woods which is half autumn and half spring, a hush and deep secret of fallen leaves and their melding with the earth, and at the same time an opening of spring, the dancing scent of blossoms, all different ones, carried on the night air.
half warm and half cold, alive and dead, present and absent. she is with me still, she is with me always. she may leave me, but she always comes back to me. i have seen her face in other people i have met along the way. my counselor, so gentle always, another mother to me, not exactly but giving me a space to spread out all i am in its complexity, its reflection, its carnival and kaleidescope and comedy of errors, the peacock feathers of its perfection and its imperfection.
my own daughter is nearly 8. and i am wearing my mother's scarf on my head, it is protecting me from the world. and i am remembering myself at 8 when my mother was 37. and suddenly past the days of long nights before and long nights after she left, i am 37, i find myself almost as if i go elsewhere for many months a year.
and i am still alive. whether she is or she isn't. because she always is, although she isn't. and i am. and i am not. my mother.
i'm getting into albrecht durer again. yes i know there's an umlaut in his name, i don't have one here, so sue me! though christy, i always thought he was kind of hot here:
and i love this bunny (he calls it a "hare," we all know it's a bunny),
and this owlet.
i wonder how long the owl stood still, or if he forced it to stand still by shuffling it off this mortal coil. or if he drew it from memory, or another picture.
in addition he took on cheerful subject matter in his woodcuts, such as the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
i understand that maybe he didn't do his own woodcuts, he employed someone to follow his drawings. like bosses everywhere, he still took the credit.