Prez

As part of what may become a life-long endeavor, I recently decided that I’d like to read biographies of all the presidents of the United States. Since there’s only so much White Guy stuff I can take, this could take a while. (Ha, inside joke for…um…three of you.)

I started with His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis. Because if you’re going to do something, you may as well start at the beginning! Also, Leo happened to have it on his bookshelf. I had realized at some point in December that I knew almost nothing about ol’ George other than some mythology (wooden teeth and cherry trees? Wooden trees and cherry teeth?) and some super basic facts. Like: first president! Married to someone named Martha!

Embarrassing.

So I read the biography, and I learned quite a bit. Washington was apparently one of those incredibly strong-willed but passionate people who, through whatever early traumas, force themselves to be the masters of their passions and train themselves to be made of iron so they never yield to anyone else’s demands. He seemed fairly unhappy, although happiness also seemed not to enter into his calculations for life.

He was, unfortunately, maybe kind of a douche?

That, then, is the second part of this goal – to read these biographies, and then offer extremely reductive opinions about the actions and characters of the men who shaped the United States.

So, then – George Washington was kind of a douche.

And Jefferson, I am in the process of learning, was very sensitive and had a… uh… rich inner life. He was totally an INFJ. (I have felt embarrassingly sympathetic toward him while reading about some of his sillier behaviors. Like calling in sick with a migraine to the Continental Congress.)

So yes! Check back with me in 20 years, perhaps I’ll have caught up by then!

If only I could, I’d be running up that hill…

Every January, I get amused because the gym is suddenly so crowded. I had the day off work on Monday, so I went to the gym in the mid-morning – a time I never really get to work out on a weekday.

It was packed. But not ridiculous. Last night, however, was out of control. Long lines for everything. People looking confused about treadmill controls.

These days, I’m a Monday-Wednesday-Friday-plus-weekend day gym-goer. I love it, even when I hate it. I have never in my life regretted a trip to the gym – even when I’m exhausted, or feel like I might be getting sick, or just super whiny, I come away from it feeling better.

I wonder about all of the people who come to the gym for the month of January, and then slowly disappear throughout the coming months. Where do they go? Do they keep paying these INSANE rates for a membership they don’t use? Is that not, quite possibly, one of the more amazing first world problems – spending $80 a month for a resource you don’t use that is supposed to keep you from getting fat from eating too much McDonald’s, but you just can’t work yourself up enough to go?

I saw a woman attempting to wriggle herself into a brand-new looking shirt from lululemon, her sneakers pristine, and I wondered if it was possible that she might fall in love with working out. If she doesn’t, I wonder what she’ll do with all that expensive workout gear. I wonder if it will lurk in her drawers, and make her feel guilty for not following through on her early-January pledge.

I wonder if the pot is calling the kettle black with all this wondering.

The things we carry

The days, lately, are anything but dull. It is nice! I haven’t been able to claim boredom in a very long time – and there are never enough minutes in a day to do all the things I want.

My heart is torn out time and again by beauty, by cuteness, by kindness, by love. I think I feel safer about letting it be torn out these days, partly because it is easier to pull it back. Much like a child who is raised with boundaries (and therefore grows up to feel safe in the world) my heart is starting to see things a little more rationally, and feel a little safer with thinner walls.

I was on the phone with my sister a couple of days ago and before we hung up she said, “oh! I wanted to tell you before I forget! When I was putting P to bed the other night, she told me ‘I miss my other mom.’ I asked who she was talking about, and she said it was you. ‘She’s pretty and she smells nice and she’s cuddly and she’s soft!’”

Well, just rip my heart out, little niece! I miss all those things about you, too!

So there is the fantasy life, where I get to see my friends and family and loved ones. That is a nice life!

And there is the activist part of my life, where I get to build language around issues that I care about, and interact with like-minded people and actually take action and write letters and Show Up and generally be less of a lazypants about whining-without-doing. That is a nice life, too!

There is the creative part of my life, where I am able to take things from images in my head to creations in the real world, and I am extremely grateful for that, even on days when my hands feel completely torn up and arthritic. (Being old: totally awesome!) That is a nice life, too!

Unfortunately, it is far too easy to let those things slip by and out of my hands while I dig into the things that are hard for me. While I obsess about dreams that are lost and things I’ve done wrong, time is passing that isn’t being used well! Especially when the worries that have started cropping up are so common, so mundane – (“Hosting an event: you’re doing it wrong!”) they hardly feel like things a person should think about.

When I was a little girl, my father wrote a poem. He penned it in his beautiful calligraphy on lovely paper, and it hung on the wall of my parents’ bedroom for as long as it was their bedroom together. This would have been after my mother had her last miscarriage, the “moonchild” she lost after my younger brother was born. The final line of the poem, which is about grief and loss and picking up and carrying on, is “we live and we breathe and we hug our possessions.”

And we do. And hopefully, somewhere in there, we love and serve as well.

Keeping myself accountable

This year, she is winding to a close.

What a year. Will I say that at the end of every year from here on out? Perhaps! It seems like the last couple of years have been particularly… something. Thick? That seems an odd word to use. I stopped doing theater two years ago, and the time since then has been very different from the time before then. I used to bob along on life’s surface in a very irresponsible way. Now that I’m actually swimming in the current, it’s hard to remember what it was like before. It was shallow. I was tired.

Swimming in the current has showed me how little I was actually doing in the way of living, and how much in the way of avoidance. Over-committing myself and my time made it easy, very easy, to feel like I was doing EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD. Slowing down has showed me that I was just being frantic.

I couldn’t nurture relationships, I couldn’t nurture friendships, I couldn’t create anything of my own. I couldn’t resist weakness, I couldn’t make room for structure and I had no depth of resilience to handle anything that might come my way.

It is taking longer to build than depth than I’d have imagined possible. But then, I didn’t know what it meant to have this depth, to not crumble at the lightest push or to adapt to situations in ways that might actually benefit me in the long term – so I guess I had no framework for imagining it at all!

Although I’d been fighting it since the middle of 2009 or so, this was the year (ok, one of the years) I gave in to depression. This year I crumbled, not at a slight push but at an inexorable force that is so familiarly deep-seated -  yet I was able to see it differently this time. Even a little bit of perspective, it seems, can be helpful. I was able to see it as an effect (also an affect,) not as my entire being, and I was able to see that it didn’t have to be that way. Before this year, none of my depression spirals ever came with the knowledge that I could almost certainly get out of it. This was a novel development, I think mostly due to being less exhausted than I’ve been in my adult life.

My 23-year-old self is rolling her eyes disdainfully, but seriously, getting some sleep is a really good decision. I recommend it for everyone.

As I review the goals I’d set for 2011, and think about the ones for next year, it strikes me as funny that I barely feel like a failure, despite all the goals I didn’t fulfill. I didn’t teach myself how to knit cables! Oh no! An earlier incarnation of myself would be kicking herself – hard – for that failure. This incarnation just plans to do it next year, and thinks it’s pretty cool that I learned intarsia, anyway.

So I didn’t make all my goals, but I know more about goal-meeting than I did before – a delightful side effect of actually thinking about these things for more than a few minutes at a time! It’s a little step, but I’ll take it.

If you’ve read this far, I would love to know what your goals are for the next year. You know, if you feel like sharing. Like I said, I’m working on my list, and I’m intrigued to know what others feel like working on. If you’re not inclined to share, va bene. I wish you love, luck and health in the new year.

 

Waste of time

I think one of my resolutions for 2012 should be to spend less time dicking around looking at animals and feeling my heart get torn out by them.

Until then, there’s this:

and this:

and this:

and, of course, this old chestnut:

So anyway, I should probably do less of that and more of whatever it is I’m supposed to do.

Next year.

Solstice

In honor of solstice, here is a poem by Wendell Berry:

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

As a hippie child, I was part of a family that celebrated Solstice rather than Christmas (at least, we celebrated Solstice until the conversion to Catholicism when I was in the seventh grade, but that’s rather a different post…)

As a non-religious adult with crunchy granola tendencies, I find myself more drawn to the Solstice than to any of the attendant December holidays. The days will get longer now, and that is worth celebrating.

Whatever you celebrate, I hope it is lovely. I hope there are candles and pretty lights and hot beverages and laughter and games and love. And if you are not so much into the company of others, I hope you find peace and relaxation and a gentle ending of 2011.

Happy happy!

Stand not amaz’d

If you hang out on the internet, perhaps you saw this:

Hahaha hilarious, right? Oh, that bull frog. What a kidder.

Except.

What does it say about our world, this fact that we’ve created something that fools animals into believing that they are hunting food? There’s something so fundamentally off-kilter about this that it passes from haha amusing to errrrrr… maybe we need to think about where we’re going as a society and species?

 

The years flew past

And suddenly, it’s tradition – it seems to me, anyway, that three years running can be a tradition of sorts. Peanut butter and chocolate for Leo’s birthday – not my particular favorite, although both have a place. But it puts a smile on his face that melts my heart – how can I resist that?

Anyway, if chocolate and peanut butter is your sort of thing, I used this cake recipe (divided into 12 large cupcakes) and this peanut butter-cream cheese frosting. (I reduced the sugar in the frosting from 5 cups to 3 because REALLY? FIVE CUPS OF SUGAR? It was very, very, very, very sweet even so.) Both were deemed best-of-the-best by Leo and his coworkers, and I have a feeling that the cake recipe will be my go-to chocolate cake from here on out. It’s nice to have a reliable recipe for something I don’t particularly like to eat, since that means I don’t have to adjust or futz with it too much.

It’s amazing how candles make a birthday.

Verdens beste

I got a spam comment on that last post that reads:

Okay post, but not the best Ive seen exactly. You should step it up or verdens beste gulrotkake will eat your position.

A little google research tells me that this means that “the world’s best cupcake” will eat my position. Wow. It’s true, man, I’d better step it up.

But how to step it up when, in general, I’m very much stepped down? I’ve been feeling about as non-competitive or showy as it seems possible to feel. For the first time in over two years, I find myself going for large portions of the day without thinking about terrible things, things I hate, things that make me cringe inside.

And for the first time in my entire life, I’m feeling… balanced. Is this what it feels like to feel normal? Someone should have told me about this! Of course, I blame the drugs, but that actually seems ok, too. I never imagined finding anything that would actually take the edge off, with side effects so minimal that they don’t detract from the overall effect. This isn’t a way of life I ever envisioned for myself, but it turns out that being calm and balanced is really pretty all right.

Is that what we’ll say after the machines come? Probably.

But apparently, I echo the immortal words of Arthur C. Clarke, Kent Brockman and Ken Jennings, and welcome our robot overlords. Our robot overlords, in the form of Zoloft, make it so I don’t weep on crowded subway cars, and I’m all for that.

A few years ago, when I wrapped up therapy in Los Angeles, I found myself at an odd juncture. I knew I wasn’t sad any more, and I knew I didn’t want to die any more, but I couldn’t get a handle on what there was to live for. I would ask the question every once in a while, of myself or of someone I might trust, and no one ever really had much to tell me. I lived in that zone for quite a while – until I crashed again, really.

Recently, and also for the first time in my life, I have started to understand the answer to that question. It is all the things that were there before, but with a deeper understanding. The things to live for are the friends and stories and family and hikes and camping trips and butterflies and giant centipedes and stupid jobs and silly secrets and the satisfaction of doing something well. It is the ability to be satisfied, to rest when it’s needed, to stay out of what isn’t my business, to love as much and as widely as I can, and to appreciate the moments that are happy moments as much as I’ve clung to the moments that are miserable.

Like I said – it’s always been there, and there’s no way anyone could ever have told me about it. There’s no way anyone could have answered my questions when I was trying to find those answers because, I suppose, I wasn’t ready for them.

That’s not to say that I’m not still an irritable bitch. I am, and probably always will be. But I’m an irritable bitch who thinks you’re pretty great, so I think it’s going to be just fine.

Love is not love

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.  -Robert Fulghum

I’m not sure where I saw that quote, but I think about it sometimes, and think that it applies to pretty much everyone I love.

In all the best ways.