Waiting Room Anthropology

An hour, or just less than that, spent at the orthodontist’s office this morning. I carry with me Thomas Kohnstamm’s Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? which I enjoy maybe because it is so totally antithetical to McCarthy’s The Road, which I just finished. I respond to that memoir voice, which I sort of feel like I can see through a little, and still enjoy. And I picked it up because of how the first chapter is about the life he isn’t choosing, which has me musing on how difficult it is to compare lives and how I don’t even feel like the phrase opt out applies if you opted out before being on a particular career path, and I never got so far, but I like tracing out hypothetical trajectories. And then there is the interruption to my...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 30, 2008 | 6 comments

Reaction Shot

After I hit “send to weblog” on my blog composing window, I have to walk away from the computer, find something else to do, so I don’t start hitting refresh on the stats page, “get new mail” in the email program as if waiting for confirmation from the universe that I exist. How do I handle my Crazy Mind reaction to comments, getting them, or not getting them, not knowing what it means either way? On the vulnerable days, they mean so much more than I think I ought to let them mean, that I consider not having comments at all, so that I don’t interpret not getting a comment as confirmation of my worst thoughts. On the other hand, the pay-off for being vulnerable that way is that the conversation that sometimes happens in the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 25, 2008 | 3 comments

Nobody Too

I swear by My life! Nothing save that which profiteth them can befall My loved ones. To this testifieth the Pen of God, the Most Powerful, the All-Glorious, the Best-Beloved.” — Bahá’u'lláh The fragment is on my lips at six a.m. when I wake from a nightmare of trying to defend my children from these enormous, ferocious bears that have snuck into our house. I repeat it until I am calm, then run around checking doors, run out to the studio to turn off heaters I realized must have been left on after a violin lesson yesterday, just in case my subconscious was sending me a nightmare to alert me to something actually wrong in the real world. Then I lie back down, my heart racing, and the empty spot where my husband isn’t is taking up too much...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 23, 2008 | 3 comments

Apologetic Enough

You know what I hate? I hate it when you mess up in some way and you’re apologizing and the other person says out loud, “No, no, it’s fine,” or “Don’t worry, stuff happens,” but you notice their lips are still pursed a little or maybe they are just a little chillier than usual and you could be projecting, of course, but you still wonder. Is there some unspoken code you’re trespassing on? Are you expected to continue deploring your own behavior? And it’s all that unspoken stuff. The ambiguity kills me. The knowing that to press could only make it worse kills me more. Some days I should not be allowed to leave the house. Or go online. Or answer the phone. My husband calls from Spain, and it’s not just the...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 20, 2008 | 2 comments

Divided Self and the Voices in my Head

So the hearing voices? I sort of just take for granted. Not in an auditory hallucination way, but, for a certain kind of thought, words are just the unit of thought, their currency. Still I was reminded when my friend Patrick wrote about his own voices that hearing voices is one of the classic signs of the crazies. I don’t think that all thought is words — when I am adjusting a muscle to change the tone of the viola, putting words on the process is as an after-the-fact approximation, and I think sometimes I have emotional responses that come long before I have the words for them. But for the thought that talks about itself, words are it. External world, I know, words aren’t so much the unit of the thought as the unit of communication. And because...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Oct 19, 2008 | 5 comments