where do we begin the rubble or our sins, lalalaa

"Art is long; life is short; opportunity is fleeting; judgement is difficult; experience is deceitful." Hippocrates (sounds like a Virgo horoscope)

bonus (better) track

In 1962, Edward Albee published his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It won numerous awards and is still performed by modern theater groups. Albee says the title came to him as he was having a beer at a bar in New York City. When he went to the restroom, he spied the words "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap on the mirror. I urge you to be alert for that kind of inspiration in the coming days, Virgo: unexpected, provocative, and out of context. You never know when and where you may be furnished with clues about the next plot twist of your life story. 

Today's running mix started with and I think, 'she'll probably be better after a bout or two of [failed] rehab,' which brought me to
eyespy chet faker in the audience of that one (sitting to the right, in his knit hat), so repost: (that dude is hot) ...cool down

channeling some Annie magick

When she conjures the harmonica mid-spell - nice.  If I could do that, I'd be tempted to conjure an alligator-filled moat while I was at it, but she doesn't even need that. That look on her face at 5:26, hell, nobody in their right mind would fuck with her. 

M. doesn't live here anymore so I rarely get to see her. My loss. I'm grateful she still works here by proxy anyway from Bloomington. When she comes to town we begin talking mid sentence. The relationships you count on. Maybe or maybe not a number of people would call me if they needed bail. Who would I call? She'd be topping my (extremely you're-probably-not-on-it short) list. I have a torrent of words for her: ... there was the dog fashion show and a man there reminded me of my grandpa because he truly loved it but the rest clapped when the clapping time came and I was wondering my god when does the requirement to affirm the world on cue end (??) while at that time I was so frightened that I'd stopped feeling frightened, that's how acute it was at that point, like an ice burn, and I could feel Aaron buzzing my phone in my pocket worried about me running late and what that might mean but I couldn't respond because I was middogshow and the pug was wearing a tootoo and I needed to concentrate on what I was doing because I do not offload the problem of dying onto low wage workers to relieve (!), even though I'm there here in this job to get more of the dying to clap, and oddly they're right that I'm the right person for that job, though I have yet to convince my mate that the existence of an untangled inner life is not a wrong nor is rubbing salve-of-pugs on it for that matter. We are all going to die, none of coping with fears backwards is a failure, I like a crock pot stew and there's no crime in that. No crime in loving the pug in drag or not, either damn way, or a non pug related Way entirely if you can find a Way to authentically Be and inevitably Not Be at all. And it has zero to do with the normative narrative of marriage in our culture for God's sake that what I want is to actually be with the man and have access to his inner life(s)... She laughs and understands what I am saying, so little appetite anymore for sorting anything to judge it rather than to just *get it*. Once or many times, small or big things happened to him, a can of spaghettios he hammered opened and ate cold (or whatever), made him (like M.) anxious in particular ways. And that's all. There is no guilt in it. If you're guilty or believe you're not either, condemnation on your lips, frankly that entire framework seems too beside the point to engage with at all. Language fails me in ways it didn't used to or I didn't notice, then I might bawl. Like a baby. Maybe that's a kind of rebirth, she wonders. Yea, maybe.

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"According to your questionnaire responses, your attachment-related anxiety score is 4.22, on a scale ranging from 1 (low anxiety) to 7 (high anxiety). Your attachment-related avoidance score is 3.44, on a scale ranging from 1 (low avoidance) to 7 (high avoidance).  We have plotted your two scores in the two-dimensional space defined by attachment-related anxiety and avoidance. Your approximate position in this space is denoted by the blue dot.

As you can see in this graph, the two dimensions of anxiety and avoidance can be combined to create interesting combinations of attachment styles. For example people who are low in both attachment-related anxiety and avoidance are generally considered secure because they don't typically worry about whether their partners are going to reject them and they are comfortable being emotionally close to others. Combining your anxiety and avoidance scores, you fall into the region of the space. Previous research on attachment styles indicates that preoccupied people tend to have highly conflictual relationships. Although they are comfortable expressing their emotions, preoccupied individuals often experience a lot of negative emotions, which can often interfere with their relationships."


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I'm teaching myself attachment theory. (You can take the test yourself here.) So I can go to the principles office today and teach it to her. Because although they teach you that stuff in shrink school, they don't stress it because mostly nothing can be done about how you feel only how you act, so says Patti, who has little defense of these facts of her profession. (I can't defend my profession either, but still, grrrrr). Those feelings can change a lot - this I know because my blue dot has moved significantly. Our marriage has rewired me. So I'm putting my foot down. Give me ANALYSIS, whether it's "in" or not in counseling these days (armscrossy). My anger used to scare me and is still one of the things in myself and others that I least like to be around. But it's nothing compared to Grief. If I was difficult back when I was a standoffish beotch with my 'dismissive avoidant' blue dot, I'm 'anxious preoccupied' hell to pay now.  I go looking for Aaron's unconscious like a woman looking for my pair of tweezers at the bottom of a drawer.  

But there are definite upsides to the work of intimacy! I now actually like Valentine's day, for instance, aka do-something-together-that-make-you-nervous day.

Find that because you're doing it together, it's not scary at all!

"We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars... We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time. We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed to reach the body within the body." ~"Tear It Down", Jack Gilbert

give me things that I wanted to know lalala

.... was facilitating with a couple I will call Alice and Eric. Alice had had an affair, now over, and Eric had recently found out about it. Their purpose in therapy was to restore their relationship—that is, to rebuild trust. The therapy had been making it clear to all of us that it was extremely difficult for Eric to trust his wife again, even though she had voluntarily ended the other relationship and had made a sincere commitment to fidelity and to working things out. Enough time had elapsed so that it did seem reasonable—to all three of us—that Eric could at least begin to trust Alice again. But that was not happening, even after some rather intense therapy sessions. During a particularly poignant moment, Eric was crying and I suddenly realized that his issue was not about trusting Alice. It was bigger than that. It was about his inability to trust anyone fully. Eric’s grief in that moment was for all the betrayals in his life from childhood until now. His tears were about how each one had shut him down so that now, when trust was appropriate, he just could not summon it up. The fear that is natural in all grief had, for him, become more like a phobia. [ya]

For Alice it was a history of not being trusted—what became our next focus—in Eric’s presence. When a partner is sitting silently in the room where our personal work is being addressed and processed, we feel accompanied by her, and intimacy progresses in abundant ways. Within each session, I turned to the other partner and asked how she or he was feeling and what she or he saw in the work the partner did...The work for this couple was so primal, so basic, that it was like starting the whole relationship over again, not just recovering from the recent infidelity. I wondered how many couples are at that ground-floor level and don’t realize it...We all found out that the real starting point was opening the wounded trust from long ago and working toward healing that too. ~Daring to Trust, by David Richo, author or How to be an Adult in a Relationship

(The wife's truster was cracked and his was kinda fubar entirely.~from There are No Safewords in Real Life, by Wantdogski)

Fatty snorting like a creature. ~ A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

..angrily, "Even a cow has horns."

I began praying whenever I thought of it—at my locker, during lunch, even in the middle of a quiz. I prayed more than I had ever prayed before, but I found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into the nightly conversations with God. How could chanting and burning incense undo three minutes of a sunny August afternoon? It was like trying to move a sheet of blank paper from one end of a table to the other by blinking so fast that you started a breeze. [love that analogy]

I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on television in the living room. To me, the movie meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness.

Why hadn’t people been nicer when it mattered? I wondered. [right?]

The quietness made me feel that the home was not as good as the hospital, that the nursing home was where the world put people who were not important, people who could be put away someplace and forgotten

The realization disturbed me. I saw that one day I would be nothing like who I was right then. I felt all alone

The sight of my mother in the kitchen caused my chest to hurt. Her belief that Birju could get better made me feel that she didn’t love us, that she valued believing something ridiculous over taking care of us, that she was willing to let us be hurt so she could have her hope.

I wanted us to be close, and so I began believing that we were.

At school, the guilt and sadness were like wearing clothes still damp from the wash. Whenever I moved, I felt as though I were touching something icy.

'I lie in my bed and listen to her cough and am glad she is coughing because this means she is alive. Soon she will die, and I will no longer be among the lucky people whose wives are sick. Fortunate are the men whose wives cough. Fortunate are the men who cannot sleep through the night because their wives’ coughing wakes them.' Writing the story changed me. Now I began to feel as if I were walking through my life collecting things that could be used later: the sound of a Ping-Pong ball was like a woman walking in high heels, the shower running was like television static. Seeing things as material for writing protected me. When a boy tried to start a fight by saying, “You’re vegetarian—does that mean you don’t eat pussy?” I thought this would be something I could use in a story..

As I wrote, I felt proud at my toughness for taking whatever was happening to me and turning it into something else.

Passing through the marshes covered in snow, I would have an aching sense of nostalgia. I was convinced that things would get worse and that one day I would look back on this period with longing. [right]

~all from Family Life.  I'm not sure I'd have given it the Booker, but it was pretty good.  

I didn't feel well all weekend, so I started rereading book 2 of the Harkness witch trilogy because book 3 just came out, so.  I wanted comfort reading, like raman with an egg.  Those are the books about witches written by an historian who throws in backstories to Marlowe plays etc, total schlockporn for PhD's in which I can wallow, going in and out of (simple) Latin and obscure references (I love a footnote!) to Malleus Maleficarum etc.  It strikes me reading it this time that book 2 is all about whether they're "really" married or not, the witch and the vampire, what constitutes that, whether a promise made to a witch is binding in itself or if his vampire-family has to approve. The witch moves through continents and centuries, staring down one vampire in-law after another, getting more and more pissed off, and then stronger.  Reading it, I feel like I did when I used to read those novels in which girls murdered their enemies and fed them to the rose bushes as mulch typa deal, when I was little-and-outraged.  Patti and I were just talking about this the other day, what it means, the series that tweens want in any given historical moment, which is now the Hunger Games series so it's all about resisting the state for tweens now, but when we were 12, it was all about personal disempowerment, and the longing for belonging punished cruelly and then wammo you were sorry you'd been such an asshole. We had read Carrie like it was the book of revelation.  

First it had been Ysabeau who's wished me out of her son's life.  Backwin has made no effort to hide his disdain.  Matthew's friend Hamish was wary of me and Kit openly disliked me.  Now it was Phillipe's turn. I stood and waited for Matthew's father to look at me.  When he did, I met his eyes squarely.  His flickered with surprise. .. ~Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness