Archive for January, 2009
January 29th, 2009
The internet is too much with us; now
Chatting and shopping and wasting our hours
Little we see that lays limits to powers
Our privacy given away, consumed, and how
The celebrity bares her bosom, cow
Eyes seductively promise she is ours,
Screens flickering in lonely office towers.
The connection cannot meaning endow,
It moves us not. Would it wiser be
To hold to Luddite values, take shelter
So that solitude would be less lonely,
Protected from society’s welter,
To less value being seen, but to see,
Links and stats and comments helter skelter.
January 28th, 2009
A week without posting and my blog looks all reproachfully at me. It isn’t that I am not writing, it’s just that the stuff in the paper journal seems to belong mostly in the paper journal, even though it will probably come out at some later point because it does that, but in a form that is a little more comestible. And when I go all vague and stuff like that? Saying “working stuff out” I worry that sounds like I’m trying to be more mysterious, like the girls in middle school who would explain that they had to have lunch without me because they had things to discuss that weren’t for me to hear, and you know, now I know it was probably pretty insipid stuff, about which boy passed a note or which girl said something stupid (me?) but I was dying then. And it’s not like that. It’s not interesting or uninteresting, it’s just my stuff to sort out. And the blog is never going to be the place to do that. I feel more patient with the paper journal process now: I show up and write every day and some days are full of brilliance and connections and some days, I just shrug and tell myself, well if I don’t show up every day then the brilliant days aren’t going to happen. But the blog carries a different responsibility, and I don’t know how to be regular and honest and not walk through my life as if I were mining it for blog material.
Okay, and also this: I think one of the reasons I go blog-aphasic is because of this performance issue: I think about what I am saying not in relation to its truth value so much as effect and how I imagine it being received, the more for the different people I know are reading who come from all sorts of places all over my life, people to whom I relate very differently. It’s not that I am dishonest or concealing my real self from any one of them, it’s just that truth-seeking is different with each of them, and there is the way I feel chameleoned into being different people in different contexts.
Apparently this question of self and relating others is the one I am working on right now, which, you know, marks a change from the “hey, who’s going to give me permission to write?” question, but, still, I get weary of it, fear everyone else gets weary of it, like I’m one of my children playing on one of their charming toy musical instruments that plays only one note .
One of the concepts I struggled to understand in Physics 101 was the fact that an object’s center of gravity could be outside of the object itself. And I start feeling like that when I am trying to calculate effects, like my reference point should be within me and it has moved somewhere outside my perimeter. So how do I reclaim my center? Lately it’s been by walling myself in with towering stacks of books. And feeling guilty if I’m not as present as I would like to be for my family.
Still, and maybe this is its own post, I feel like I should tell you about the co-op preschool, the one I fell in love with last summer that then turned out not have an opening after all, and then turned out not even to have a waiting list, and still visiting it convinced me I didn’t want to compromise on the preschool experience Rainer was getting. They called a week and a half ago, a family had had to drop out, were we still interested? And of course we were. Rainer jumped in as if he had been there all year, and I got to go be a helping parent Monday, and I cannot tell you how lovely it is because it is precisely about what the kids need and not what the adults need (I gloat, marvelling, when a kid is hungry they get to EAT, without some line about waiting for snack time.) And I can imagine that the kids exploring as they will — the odd object going in a mouth, paint on clothes, them pouring liquids that overflow a little — this could seem chaotic, make a germ-phobic adult very uncomfortable, and yet the teacher is tuned in to the kids’ feelings, and when a conflict comes up is there on the floor sitting, listening, asking questions, because what she sees as the point of the whole thing is teaching them to solve problems. Which, oh, if she only did that for grown-ups, you know?
January 21st, 2009
A discussion last week, on Jenny’s blog, and the unreliable narrator puts out that whatever the reasons were that she started blogging, her blog has become a place to practice ending self-hatred. Which resonates. More, even than the journals in which I am endlessly trying to sort out what exactly I think, the practice of baring and sharing and seeking truth is a defiance of self-hatred. Uncomfortably, though, I ask myself what would be left without the self-hatred? It has been a guide, a constant companion, a pyrrhic defense, that nothing anyone else can do can penetrate as deeply, wound as painfully. Would I have to let go of the mortification of waking and realizing talked too much the night before and how probably every person I love is about to become just sick of me and leave me?
That dread on waking: I talked too much last night, carried away, excitement at the conversation drowning out sensitivity, I didn’t listen well enough, bulled through the china shop, when will I ever learn? You would think that the practice of three pages every morning, the faith that I will get to chase down the loose threads, the knowledge of blankness to fill, waiting for me, would make me a better listener, only I fear it makes me like the worst sort of dentist, soliloquizing all day to those hapless persons whose mouth my hands happen to be in, until I think that that is how conversation is supposed to be. I ache, forgive me, what must you think of me?
In a conversation, Jenny asks how I find it in me to write when the world seems full of aspiring writers, and I answer, I try not to be thoughtless, but I cannot afford to think of them, the other writers. Deeper though. It does seem almost an act of unbearable arrogance to hit the publish button, to assert that my thoughts somehow matter, it’s just that I’m sick of self-effacement, it feels like a false virtue, one I cannot bear for another second. I mentioned to two of my favorite Twitter folk that I’d decided to stop auto-tweeting when I publish a blog entry and they both protested, no, they depend on those tweets, don’t see it as shameless self-promotion, or maybe don’t think there’s anything wrong with self-promotion.
The oddly liberating thought of the week has been that it is none of my business what other people think of me. This is the answer that all thought roads seem to lead to. That it is beyond my control. I could remind them of someone who picked on them in childhood, of a bad experience somewhere else, they could be having a bad day. It is radically far from a sort of script for how to behave, a motherly reminder, “You must share toys or other children will not like you” or “You must take turns or nobody will want to play with you.” It seems so absurd, we are engineered as social beings to seek one another’s approval, it’s how we are socialized and learn to be productive parts of groups. Give up bothering myself about what other people think of me! I cannot make anyone like me! Which doesn’t lead as I thought, to therefore I don’t need to take turns or share but to: Therefore I must be the person I like.
Jenny and I talk about being scrupulous, not allowing criticism of others, unkind words and judgements, to become the currency of our friendship, because to do so would make our own practicings at ending self-hatred impossible. We understand too deeply, each of us, the shared fear that others are judging us, and to allow that it is none of our business what other people think of us, is to be given the courage to listen to our inner voices. And the gift I find in the conversations around this, is to have a friendship where I don’t hold back and feel safe. Where I can say totally the wrong thing and she will tell me, gently, and I will get to apologize, where we have experience forgiving each other.
_____
For weeks, it seems now, ideas and journal entries and the soap opera in my head and the fiction I pick up, all circle around the old themes,braided together, (the themes that make me wonder if inside my head I will be fifteen forever and what implications that will hold in the near future when there is an honest-to-God chronologically fifteen year old person living in the house,) but themes of how one breaches loneliness, and celebrates its abeyance without letting down one’s guard so that its inevitable return isn’t catastrophic, and about balancing honesty and sensitivity, about how far one shares oneself, and what one holds back.
Nicole Krauss’ Man Walks Into a Room, starts with a plaintive note of life-long loneliness, that the rush of falling in love promises to take away, so that the return of loneliness is only more bitter. Then May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing replies, as a book will, gently, yes, we love ferociously, studying the beloved as if they were the map to the world, and yet… Love is not an answer to loneliness, if there is an answer to loneliness, it is that loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude the richness of self. And it’s none of my business what other people think of me.
I get excited, underlining and copying passages into my journal, realizing how this calls up the best dream I ever experienced, at fifteen, where I was pursuing through this crowded train station the object of my most desperate first crush (gratitude twenty years later, that this object was gentle and respectful, and never took advantage nor made me feel stupid for this impossible crush, how does one get to be that lucky?) and upon finding him, in this dream, he with that gentleness, said, no, really, you’re searching for yourself.
This from the Quran, quoted in a Baha’i prayer for marriage “He hath let loose the two seas, that they meet each other: Between them is a barrier which they overpass not.” I have struggled with the idea of that barrier, when all that I can remember ever having wanted is to know and be known. It seems lonely to think that the barrier somehow prevents it, and it is trying to breach the barrier that I do keep looking for better words. I try applying here, “But it’s none of my business what other people think of me” and that barrier suddenly strikes me as a safety zone. In the Twilight books there’s the vampire who can read the thoughts of everyone around him except for the girl he immediately falls in love with, and in Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark books, the mind-reading girl cannot stand dating men because she reads their thoughts, and then meets the vampire whose mind remains closed to her, and it’s such a relief that she falls in love with him. Too much thinking on how people work and I suddenly find it unbearable even the small degree of transparency, the insecurities and pettinesses revealed, I can imagine no greater horror than the Psychic X-Ray Goggles. Is the barrier between selves a safety?
May Sarton makes reference to “the experiential fact that a writer not only feels but watches himself feeling” and this feels familiar, the feeling of vertiginous duplicitousness, the second-guessing my own sincerity because I observe myself, I narrate. The transparency of my own self?
I think of Raven’s observation that some people, compelling and charismatic people, you only ever get to know to a certain degree because they are so busy performing, the performance keeps you from ever seeing their real feelings, hearing their real thoughts. I get fearful sometimes, about the blog-as-performance, that it should stand as a barrier between myself and others rather than a bridge connecting two selves, a truth-seeking.
That fracturing, the crack between the self experiencing, the self performing for itself, and the self observing, seems like a place where the self-hatred slips in. And maybe that’s why the blogging can be a place for practicing the extinction of self-hatred? That I let go of performing, of being so anxiously concerned about what you think of me, of holding back and holding back, and instead try for truth-seeking doesn’t make the two selves one again, but creates a bridge between them both, a bridge I extend outward.
January 19th, 2009
These are the two two-sided charms I made this weekend with my friend Jenny. She did the soldering because I’m scared of hot liquid metal, and she has a way of making almost impossible things look easy. The solitude/loneliness one was inspired by May Sarton’s line that “Loneliness is the poverty of self and solitude is the richness of self” and is not at all a reflection on the weekend, for the whole of which, in fact, loneliness was quite in abeyance. It was a lovely weekend, full of exuberant giggling girls and long and thoughtful conversations and chocolate and art-making in this perfect balance. Only now I’m home and tired and all the things I want to say about all things we talked about and the things I was reading and all of the thoughts having conversations with each other will have to wait.
January 13th, 2009
My friend Patrick’s blog has been the site of a discussion of compassion that morphed into a discussion of whether feeling happiness with others is a form of compassion and also whether you can have compassion for yourself, much more worth checking out than anything on my blog today. But I thought that just in case anyone wants to practice sympathethic joy I should present an all but completely trivial list of things that have made me happy in the last two days.
1) The Fugees’ song “Ready or Not.” It’s the Enya sampling, I think, only I like this song better than I like Enya or most hip hop, have listened to it maybe too many times today. Maybe an antidote to crying to too many Dar Williams’ songs?
2) Realizing that the answer to not being able to find women’s jeans in a comfortable cut, that is, ones that do not allow a draft in back whenever I sit down, and do not cut cruelly right under my belly, while being at the same time a size that I can slide them off without unbuttoning them, is, in fact, right under my nose, why didn’t I think of this two years ago, men’s jeans. And hauling myself to Goodwill where in the matter of the minutes that Rainer could be patient with me shopping, I was able to find and try on three pairs of jeans in the men’s section that are comfortable and require no tugging, all for under thirty dollars.
3) Watching the five-year-old son of friends so that they could meet with the realtor, preparatory to their moving here (joy!), and his playing not alongside but actually WITH Rainer, the two boys inventing their own imaginary world. This is a new sort of friendship for Rainer, one I find exciting to watch.
4) Shamelessly materialistically, I am taking joy in my boots. And my big green coat. Which I cannot tell doesn’t make me look like a homeless person wearing a bathrobe around downtown, only women I don’t know will stop me to tell me that they love my coat. Which is good because I like wearing it. It has one capacious pocket big enough for pocketbook, keys, iPhone, chapstick and a paperback, so I am not bothering with any sort of purse, and thus not only am I not tugging on jeans, I am not messing with purse straps, pushing them back up on my shoulders, dealing with the purse swinging in the way of things I want to do. A tiny thing but it counts.
5) The Archers podcast.
6) Having stumbled by some accidental combination of product, meteorological conditions, and alignments of the stars into hair that behaves as if it were curly and not merely frizzy. I still don’t think of myself as having curly hair, because in New Mexico’s dry air, it just isn’t. It may be the most superficial of joys (well except maybe the boots and the coat) but a good hair day is not to be underestimated, and I even overcome my discomfort with pictures of myself to give you the awful computer-camera picture as evidence:
7) I’m going to Texas this weekend, Raven’s kidneys willing!
With the exception of the trip to visit friends this weekend, and the joy at the friends who are moving here, I find the things on this list a little embarrassing, except that two weeks ago NOTHING was making me happy, and being made happy by any one of these, much less all of them seems like grace. Without counting on it lasting, I have to say I like this happiness thing. I feel sort of self-contained, like there’s music inside me again, and like I have a little more resilience, and the strength to keep getting up and trying.
January 11th, 2009
Watched The Women while Raven was out of town mostly for the experience of seeing a movie without a single man in it — started thinking on why we like women in quartets — from Little Women to the Sex in the City women… Haven’t read/watched it but even the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, again, four girls. Maybe five is an unwieldy number (except for the Spice Girls?), two would be suggestive, and with three, every time you saw only two of them talking you would ache for the one who was left out?
While there wasn’t for me a lot more to the movie to recommend it, I was grateful that the characters weren’t reduced to “the smart one” “the sporty one” “the funny one” that seems to happen a lot. Or maybe that’s something about our friendships, we use them as these polarizing points to define ourselves by? You may be relatively athletic, but next to your friend who runs every day and plays tennis three times a week, you’re just plain bookish? On the other hand, next to your friend who devours six books a week, you feel just illiterate? This is something I couldn’t quite work out while doing my NaNoWriMo novel: I’d feel like characterization in one context would be completely contradicted when the character was in another context.
Lots of meditating this week on friendships, lovely old ones and shiny new ones, the reconnected ones via facebook, the ones where I am understood better than I understand myself, the ones that make me ache when they get convoluted and misunderstood. I don’t always understand why my experience of friendship with women can be so much more intense than Raven’s experiences of friendship, and then I stumbled across this, in Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage and got this, about the Victorian era:
Because the sexual aspect of a person’s identity was so much more muted than it later became, intense friendships with a person of the same sex were common and raised no eyebrows. People did not pick up the sexual connotations that often make even the most innocent expression of affection seem sexual to our sensibilities today. Perfectly respectable nineteenth-century women wrote to each other in terms like these: “[T]he expectations once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.” They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another’s portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivals or small slights.
I talk about this on the phone with Jenny, how the drama of friendship surprises me; that it rivals the intensity that was present in courtship and falling in love, an intensity I once believed would be absent from my life once I was married. And I can talk about it with Jenny because that is the friendship we have worked at almost as hard as we have worked at being married, with the attendant rewards; there is a sense of commitment and being safe knowing that we’ll work through anything that does come up, there is history and a sense of being known, and being called to honesty. And there is a completely non-sexual aspect of being “faithful” to one another, a loyalty that I think we are each called to, that takes place in a dimension apart from our marriages and motherhood, but makes us stronger in those roles, that we can support each other in those roles. Proving that our hearts are not zero sum games, it’s been my experience that being faithful to a friend doesn’t compete with being faithful to a husband, and that there’s the way that friendship expands us and makes room in our lives for more friendships.
January 6th, 2009
It was the most universally deplored and the most universally engaged in practice among the girls in elementary school, the subtle put down of yourself, knowing your friends would rush in with denials (except of course when they didn’t, the dull silence a painful one, only marginally better than being called (contemptuously or pityingly or both) on it: “You’re fishing, that is so sad.”) And this fourth grade equivalent of “This old thing?” was a toeing of a fine line between confidence (knowing your friends would rush in the denial) and self-deprecation, the insecurity wearing a mask of security, disguising itself as insecurity. There was no greater social sin than “stuck-up” and yet, it was the confident girls who had the alchemical magical ability to attract people, not the mousy fringe girls. The year of learning to put ourselves down was the year when we realized that we had been paying attention to the wrong things, that being the center of our parents adoration didn’t give us social capital on the playground, that we could be princesses at home and transformed into mousy fringe girls at school, and so it was not just confidence that magically bestowed popularity, because it was the year confidence got broken. It was years before we were differentiated on interests and abilities, when the cliques were based on which popular girl you followed. Ancient memory of trying to learn the art of self-deprecation by following the example of those who could work it, and tripping and falling, instead being called manipulative.
Somehow this lies archaeologically beneath the overwhelming urge to to rub the thoughts violent against myself, to make the little pains big enough to be worthy of attention, the “you’d be better off without me” thought, the “I am hideous” thought, the “I am so unlovable” thought, thoughts begging for denials, thoughts that aren’t really beliefs as much as words popping unsummoned into my head, challenging me, words I fight against, scrabbling for purchase, this is not a truth, this is a violence that must be resisted. Words that I am not even sure I can distinguish as either native or having been picked up by my clever brain in some self-assessment test “Put a check by all of the following thoughts that you have had in the past week…”
Worst are the moments knowing that mood could be turned around by one good compliment, one loving word, and so checking the email and examining the phone’s caller i.d., maybe I missed something? Asking, pathetically, “Do I look okay?” as we get ready to go out, husband-response, an automatic “Turn around, let me see. Yeah. Fine.” What I want has to come unasked for in order to count, to be real. And the elaborate rules in my head about putting myself in a situation where the needed comment could come spontaneously — the frustration in trying to write about it that there lies beneath the writing some manipulation for validation, further, that the validation will be invalid for my having put it out there. The half-formed resolution that this year I ask for what I need which doesn’t work with the rules about validation needing to be spontaneous to be real… And yet, maybe the resolution is as much about the courage to formulate in my own head what need is underlying behavior. Admitting a need is scary-vulnerable and it is so much easier to run around attending to other people’s needs.
Aside from the unreliable narrator’s gifts of “snorting abilify” and “edna krabapple porn,” the search term bringing the most people to my blog is “external validation.” (Oh, person searching for “people who need external validation” I ask you, who are the people who don’t? Honestly?) I remind myself that I am not the first to struggle this struggle, that I can write about this not to isolate myself as a freak who has the unspeakable thoughts, but to offer the mutual-struggler’s encouragement, the encouragement to my own self in the waves of intense self-doubt which will come again: you can do battle against these thoughts, they will intensify, maybe, but they will pass, that it’s not suppressing them that works so much as shriveling them by exposing them to air. In the startling respite this morning gives me, the courage to read old blog entries sitting in my “unpublishable” queue, I take this one and address it. Silence and suppression have failed, the attempt to be oblique and subtle have failed, so I put this one out there, a form of internal validation, I can hit the publish button without the little censor inside me screaming out that this is all a form of fishing.
January 3rd, 2009
The last two years we have taken the few days around Christmas when everything is shut down and gone up to the San Juans and rented a house for a few days enjoying the chance to spend time together and see something that isn’t Portland. This year mostly because of the snow we ended up staying home instead (and we did spend plenty of time together) but thinking it would be fun to get out of Portland at least temporarily, we bought tickets on the train to go to Seattle and back yesterday, New Year’s Day, leaving around 8 in the morning, getting there at noon, planning to do lunch and a museum then catch the 5 o’clock train home, getting back to Portland at 9.
Insomnia and the sounds of other people’s New Year’s Eve Revelry kept me from sleeping much the night before, but as we got on the train, the exhaustion was magically transformed into almost a sort of coziness, the kids were delighted with the experience, and I sat down and opened up my journal. Asking for six seats together, they put us at one one end of a passenger car where the rows faced each other, four on one side of the aisle, and the two facing aisle seats on the other, and we happily took the whole space, enjoying the ride from Portland to Vancouver, with no one else assigned the other two seats. My journal has a line about the industrial backside of cities always shown to railroads, and the grayness of the early morning light with the steady rain. And then in Vancouver, one of “our” seats is now occupied by a boy perhaps nineteen or twenty. He is dressed with the baseball hat askew and the baggy pants that have the crotch somewhere around his knees. He asks Raven “Where are you going, homie?” and my very non-hip hop Iowa-bred husband answers, “We’re not going home, we’re going to Seattle to visit.”
Slowly it sinks in that, with his language peppered with words my kids are not allowed to use, the fact that I can smell him from across the train, the swigs he keeps taking from a two liter bottle with a generic soda label on it, this may not be a completely comfortable trip. Raven and the kids all head off to the dining car to find breakfast foods, and I put in headphones and continue writing trying to signal my unavailability for conversation. One conductor, a woman comes by, to collect tickets, and he is all about “Do you remember me?” and she, reluctantly it seems to me, says “Oh, right, you’re the rapper.” Shortly after this the male conductor comes and tells him that if he gets any complaints the guy is off the train. The guy mutters defiantly and laughs to himself bitterly and makes posturing remarks about what will happen if they kick him off the train, but there is no one really for him to talk to — nobody on the train is willing to be his audience.
Raven returns with coffee for me, we get the four boys settled in the four seats together across the aisle, Raven gets to sit next to this kid, I am across from them. He “sirs” and “ma’ams” us, and seems eager we not complain about him, and I say something about how if he can just watch his language a little (I feel like such a hypocrite) we’ll be fine.
He doesn’t really seem to pick up on our sort of stiff unwillingness to engage, or maybe he does and is enjoying pushing our boundaries, but I keep the headphones in, Raven puts all of his attention into the boys, and this kid falls asleep.
But of course my morning pages are full of him:
“I think about how he makes me feel stiff and square within my sudden awareness of boundaries, and not wanting my children next to him. I think of the population of strange, troubled and troubling people who would wander into the video store I worked in on Central, right across from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, me all 19 and naive and fearful, and watching co-workers who were skillful at smoothing situations that were potentially fraught, at handling people. And I can appreciate the diversity such people bring to the world, even, with a little effort summon compassion.
“If this weren’t a special trip with the kids, if I didn’t worry about Raven’s day being spoiled, I can imagine myself in a movie role, a stranger giving an older sister’s advice: look how you’re making you own life harder, kiddo. The posturing, it’s not impressing anyone. I’ve watched too many movies, I imagine being able, by small acts of kindness, to change this boy’s life, if only. I wonder if one day, one of my sons, puffed up, dressed all in black will make strangers move uncomfortably away from him, those subtle social cues. And I have always been prone to imagining myself responsible for strangers, and clearly right now responsible to children, to husband is enough. Stealing a glance, the boys is either asleep or doing a good job of feigning it.
“Am I projecting to imagine that the swagger, the taking up of more space than one would guess he could from his sleeping figure, the desire to be remembered, the performance he was putting on, are just another variation on the struggle for self, for meaning, for connection, the longing to find one’s place, to feel heard and respected? He might not see himself that way, and I wonder if my seeing these things is patronizing? It amazes me that the simple core elements of human need find expression in the range of human activity from philately to arms races, from gardening to mining, from scaling Mt. Everest to writing poems, but when you think of how all DNA is made up only of four bases in endless permutations, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. This boy and I are made of the same stuff, and he sleeps and it reminds me of my tenderness for my own sleeping children.
“I could, I think, write a letter to him slip it into his backpack so he doesn’t find it until we have separated, never to encounter each other again. I could tell him, secretly, I like you better than I would have if you were smug-seemiong or complacent, if I felt like you felt entitled, had your whole life all worked out at nineteen, like you better than that less boisterous fraternity-looking guy halfway back on the train with the blonde girlfriend looking all adoringly at him. I don’t show it of course. I don’t want to encourage you. You remind me of the sort of wounded I once dated, your misunderstood sensitivity, but not marriage material. Not that anybody is wholly un-wounded, at least, not anybody I’ve met so far, but we mostly manage to live pragmatically with the wounds boxed neatly in the back of some closet, where we don’t have to encounter it every day.
“Of course this is my journal, and consequently all about me. How anxious I am to be any sort of a healing force on the planet, a not-so-subtle messianic complex. I have, under only the thinnest of protective coatings, this tenderness for anyone who is angry and afraid, who feels he has no place, who has felt betrayed by those in authority. I feel tenderness for the hopeless, the seekers after oblivion, I feel compassion for those who feel misunderstood, even if they are deceiving themselves a little bit, for those who write self-revealing blog entries, for the awkward, for the embarrassed, for the misstepping and the wishing one could take it back. Is this a selfish compassion, felt because I have been, frequently am, all of those things, and can, by compassion, reassure myself to me that there is, indeed, more to me than that? Out of control now, like something from a 1950’s sci-fi movie, I realize my compassion crawls back over the train even towards the jock-ish fraternity type and his pretty girlfriend, that it fuels itself and grows, could encircle the whole world in verses of kumbaya and waves of pure agape. Somehow this is the most well-being I’ve felt in weeks, and I had worried this guy was going to ruin our train ride!
“I want my own compassion not to drown me, want to know it isn’t pure egotism: that the spasmodic annoyance at loud celebrants of the new year last night, the hour of fireworks when I was hoping to drift off, the bitterness of feeling excluded from boy jokes and from the human race generally, the children choosing video games over a movie and the total absence of festivity within our house are as real as the compassion, more real, maybe, even than the desire to put in a letter to this boy an explanation of my woman’s perspective on how one becomes a man. But this is a tender start to a new year, a feeling of fresh and unexpected growth. Better, I think than the resolution to drop ten pounds or bicycle more or cook at home more, is this glimpse of Rilkean commission to find myself more deeply, more meaningfully connected; that this is not suggesting I am going to walk around beatific, purified in practice and thought from fear, annoyance, and self-loathing, from the desperate need for something I cannot name, but that instead of allowing the deep discomfort to become an obstacle to connection, to draw on it in recognizing the discomfort others are feeling.”
I don’t, of course, write the letter. It wasn’t a movie, though I think I should be played by Kate Winslet. I listened to podcasts and fell asleep briefly, and we made it to Seattle, which was an adventure in itself (were we wearing our “crazy magnet” tshirts, I ask Raven?), and ride the train back to Portland with people I don’t need to write about at all.
And now it’s weekend, more than vacation, and we will resume our regularly structured lives, and I admit to a fair degree of relief at that.
January 2nd, 2009
Obligatory disclaimer, the last time I did a meme thing it died when nobody I tagged played, so I hesitate to tag anyone again, but I was tagged by the fabulous @seeger, Christina Williams, on her blog Hard to be Both and since I don’t want to let her down, and lord knows the blog needs a little kickstart, I’m going to go ahead and put seven things, but not actually tag anyone so as to not go through that embarrassment again.
The rules are as follows –
1. Link to your original tagger and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.
Okay so seven facts about me:
1) I can read four different musical clefs, treble, alto, tenor and bass, which is allowing me to accompany my various children on all of the Suzuki ensemble books.
2) Having studied at least a year each of Latin, ancient Greek French and Spanish, and lived in Prague where I made lame attempts at learning Czech, I cannot speak anything except English and whenever I try for anything else, I get hopeless mixings and combinations of other languages.
3) I cannot remember the last time I was not in the middle of at least four books. I am always hungry for good recommendations and discussions.
4) I have to look up my own phone number to give to people, I am so terrible at remembering numbers. I do, however, have my library card number memorized. If I give you a fact with numbers in it, you shouldn’t trust it.
5) I’ve had two moles removed on suspicion of skin cancer. Not that I spend a lot of time outside or in the sun. This is the basis of some degree of hypochondriac anxiety.
6) I hate fake meat products and carob but very few other foods, though I am not all that adventurous about trying new foods.
7) I knit very slowly, but like knitting socks and usually have one going. I love knitting during my various kids’ music lessons because it helps me keep from speaking when I shouldn’t, and I knit when watching movies at home because then I won’t have the laptop open and get so distracted I forget to watch the movie.
Facty enough?
