A couple of years ago I printed the contents of this blog out and at that time it was about 3 reams of papers worth. Why do I write all this crap? I don't look back at it ever. I remember some stuff, like trying on ugly shit at am vets just for a hoot or whatever, and I have no idea if I wrote those things down at the time, and there's no relation between what I remember and what's in all the records of various kinds. I remember the day my hamster died because I remember it, not because I wrote about it my 5th grade diary, which only my mother has ever reread (eyeroll). I don't remember ever going to the bon ton for anything nor imaginatively castrating certain persons though I kept a pointless record of having done both apparently (shrug). I guess at the time I write, I do so just to process, a kind of thinking out loud as if in conversation with someone, like talking to a friend on the phone: "Girlfriend, why do I keep old records of my inner garbage? Well I don't know, why do I keep jeans that don't fit anymore? I know right, that's stupid, we should throw all this flotsam away, divest ourselves of our former first person singulars. OK let's do that and while we're at it let's drop the first person for a while altogether because I've been thinking about it and ya know how other people don't write down what they're thinking and doing all the time? Yea. Well like so nobody knows what they're thinking but them which if you think about it is amazingly free. True, in that case if they say shit like 'I did such-n-such for some awesome enlightened generous reason', nobody can pull out an old journal and be like o no you didn't and prove you were thinking like an asshole right? Yea exactly, if you're not carving a tablet as you go you can forget about it or revise the whole story in retrospect. Right and also, think of Ears he never writes down what he's thinking and doesn't say either which is like his own private island of inaccessible selfhood. Yeah man, I've always wanted my own island. Totally! On my own island I could get a weave and buy a glitter dress then later be like o no I didn't if I felt like it, like if it turns out St Peter disapproves of whitegirl weaves then I can be like 'what weave?' Lol, right, a journal is like a dead body, better not to have one lying around at all and if you do then you should at least burn that shit. Lol, YA. And lets face it, you're not Anne Frank recording significant history, you're just horny and/or hateful on paper mostly. True that. The glitter dress is bangin, by the way. Thanks. But however many years from now it might probably look like your 80s pennyloafers would look to you now. Exactly, I'm going to rock it then FORGET IT. Good idea, don't be blogging a picture of that shit. Lol. Seriously, and try third person writing or not at all, go back to just posting music links that may or may not be referential. Right, and then nobody will play the music in either case. Right, of course. And the third person character who may or may not pretend castrate whomever and/or who thinks about pointless stupid shit all the time AIN'T THE WRITER. Right. Post fucking quotes without explaining why. Lol, right right..."

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~E.L. Doctorow



------------------------------

VIRGO: Have you been tapping into your proper share of smart love, interesting beauty, and creative mojo? Are you enjoying the succulent rewards you deserve for all the good deeds and hard work you've done in the past eight months? If not, I am very upset. In fact, I would be livid and mournful if I found out that you have not been soaking up a steady flow of useful bliss, sweet revelations, and fun surprises. Therefore, to ensure my happiness and well-being, I COMMAND you to experience these goodies in abundance. [I do love a good command.]

(8 months. That'd be June.)

…pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

We went the principal’s office.  That’s what he calls going to the shrink.  A ‘boner killer’.  I laugh at both these names for counseling.  I laugh at many things he says. He has different kinds of laughs.  I suppose we all do.  I was thinking about that part of the time, about our different amused sounds.  I have a snort when I’m surprised by something that hits me as funny, and I also have what he calls a patronizing sound, a kind of “o really?!” laugh.  I think about that when the shrink starts in about my capacity to forgive (not so much) and then he says something like my mom can be difficult and I make the sound and I hear myself make it and it sounds like “difficult?!-that is a euphemism like relocation center is to prison camp” kind of laugh.  He has a laugh that sounds like “I know you want me to laugh right now”, which sounds like ha ha ha unlike his real laugh, which crinkles his eyes shut. 

Thing A: nostalgia for childhood.  I don’t know what that feels like. He does. Most of the people I have loved, many friends, they do have it too.  Then there was a coming of age for them, during which their adult selves came on and their people didn’t like them or didn’t like them being adults at all or both, and that was hard because it felt like being exiled, and struggling with that exiled feeling and making peace with it was a thing.  People like that still ache sometimes, it seems, for what it felt like to be a completely happy kid eating a certain kind of food at a certain place, etc.  I have none of that whatsoever.  I don’t know what that kind of nostalgia for a preconscious self feels like or looks like in the mind. 

Thing B: nostalgia for the future, and the value that will be in the ever shortening time between now and dead. My exiles came in adulthood, from such things as tribes to which I thought I belonged because I picked them, but lo that didn’t mean they’d pick me back. Friends, in-laws, professional pockets of people. This latest rejection by my husband’s clan was nothing new, and so that’s not what hurt(s) about it.  My nostalgia is mostly forward facing. It’s for a life I wish for, in which I eat foods in places and built good memories I will be happy to have made, and sometimes I cry for those which haven’t happened yet, and I grow very angry lest my in-laws threaten that future space of nostalgia by crippling my husband’s ability to face forward with me.  My best friend. 

What I learn in counseling: What I’m actually pissed off about.  And then I’m not so much anymore, like locating a wound and putting proper pressure on it. Experience and natural arrogance shield me from most of what would hurt about Aaron’s people rejecting who I am and that I am.  And what that doesn’t cover, an overweening sense of justice does (you can’t watch a woman half kill herself mentally physically and financially to have your son’s child and then drink beers with the mistress whom he clearly laments and then retain any personal value in my eyes, even if that woman had not been me).  So, upon reflection, I’m not hurt on my own accord really.  I’m hurt on our accord, and on his accord. And thus, by proxy I think I might be feeling Thing A.  …   If so, it’s a wonder he’s not pissed off at them, I think  ….. Then I wonder, wait, maybe he is, but I’ve been feeling/doing it for him (?) 

The boys and Aaron all got Bestbuy cards from my mom for Christmas, and he’s bought out theirs so that he’s got 3 now to spend, and he likes that.  It’s the same as having $150 but better, because to him a giftcard feels like to spend on something he wants rather than needs.  Again, a kind of charming way that he retains what must have been great about being a kid. So I ask him what he’s going to get.  He blushes and says “maybe a camera”, and we both laugh our real laughs.  Adults can like toys too, he’s taught me, and to play. 

You teach me how to play, baby, and I’ll teach you some do-not-disrespect-me implacability and we’ll both be making significant and necessary contributions to one another’s adulthoods. 

"The year you were born marks only your entry into the world. Other years where you prove your worth, they are the ones worth celebrating." ~Being Mortal

"Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them." Richard Strauss, on conducting. ~ from A Wife's Guide to In-laws, Jenna Barry.  (snort)

The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self. ~ from Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande.Ya, I'm reading this one for the grant work on nursing care, but I gotta say, it goes well with the whole in-law thing too.  Indeed, we shifted away from old people centeredness a while back, a generation back.  In other words, THEY did that, the generation now that wants you to come back and kiss their asses after they spent decades squawking about getting out from under their own parents' guilt-producing life-swallowing machine of being and spent a good deal of time also ruining your life by going bonkers any number of times and projecting their own bullshit fears of having not "achieved" enough by expecting you to do it for them and not even telling you what the fuck that even meant really since it would routinely come with competing (false) statements of virtues (that they didn't believe for a minute) like "money isn't everything" and "I just want you to be happy" (so you better look like some kind of happy I can underfuckingstandgoddamnit) until you were a crippled narssissist with shit like failed relationships and student debts and kids you were raising by necessity in the "benevolent neglect" model stacking up all over your life like a motherfucker.

I'm probably thinking like a total asshole right now, I fully admit my head is a mile up my ass all of sudden (as in all of a sudden I can't help but notice, ala 2014).  But, it is also possible that baby boomers suck.

http://inhabitat.com/stunning-finnish-micro-cabin-built-for-just-10500/

1 Thessalonians 17 Pray without ceasing. 18 In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. 19 Quench not the Spirit. 20 Despise not prophesyings. 21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.


I started this post late last week, mired in hormone hell and starting the semester in the absurdly cold and grumpy as hell, since which has utterly all faded as brutal temps gave way to snow and the kids got over their terrible colds and I nestled this morning into Aaron's armpit at 4 a.m. and thought of the day ahead, the one I'm in now, working quietly at home on my nursing home curriculum and planning a chicken paprika pierogi stew...so, obviously, I go up and down a lot still, since today I'm perfectly content. Last week, inner panicked lamenting. "Why o lord must I be where I am not wanted some more after so much humiliating unwanted already? I do not know. But I am an unwanted relation, so that is where God wants me. That was the upshot college assembly address to open the semester. It was Sister's best address, a flat out full throated liturgical admonition. I took it to heart and am trying to apply it. Being a daughter in law prophesies old age, I figure, where eventually I will also find myself against my will, and there humbled and weakened, possibly unwanted and probably pissed off, because that is what awaits us all. Even if I had washed the feet of the poor for decades like the nuns I work for, I'd someday be 82 years old, which sucks. So lesson 1: if you find that where you are sucks, be grateful, it's good practice for the Suckage that Lies Ahead inevitably. AND 2: for all you know the equanimity that you can muster might be the very thing that someone needs from you, right there right now where you are. Write on a little piece of paper: "I am the face of God for someone else today." And then turn to face the moment you are in with as little anger and as much kindness as you can. Presumably as much as you can is relative (I'm hoping) since, well, I'm not frigging God eh? So when I have to smile through my in-laws' condemnation again, suffering their delusion that they are the center of the universe and I an unworthy supplicant for membership to that universe, if I can do so composed and quiet and suffering my humiliations with grace, or at least in silence, that's as close to being God as I'm aiming for (versus smiting them, which God also gets to do so I kind of don't see why I get gipped out of that, but say la vee). Admonition: Be the face of God for your husband because though they have wronged and spurned you and yours without mercy, his parents are people he loves. Like the fact that I will die (and because of those people probably die alone once they've successfully offed me in my husband's mind once again if I had to make a bet, is my darkest thought), I must accept where I am now: related to them. So says the Bible, and so says the shrink. You know you've come to a hard place of required personal growth when your shrink and the Bible are on the same page :/... I just hope it matters. That it makes him happy. Please o lord. And then that we can move on, FORWARD into our own life and out of the shadow of their life and bad memories both. Please o lord."

I should get the in-law thing over with, get past it, but it's hard to make myself do it because: 1 I know as soon as I get past it, lo they'll still be alive (sigh) and so I'll have to have deal with it again as it's always Easter or some shit, plus 2 because every weekend when it's the choice between sexual healing or dinner with the folks, hmmm decisions decisions, but staying in bed for hours consistently gets the win (yay!).

Once again, therefore, I drew up the balance sheet of all I knew and all I believed, and examined it again. As unemotionally as possible I compared it with all that is now happening to us. And here, to put it frankly, is what I thought I saw. *** First and foremost: no, a thousand times no—however tragic the present conflict may be, it contains nothing that should shake the foundations of our faith in the future. ~ from the first 1% of Activation of Energy, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Ears' favorite song currently:

He is famously kind, my husband. Always sending money to those afflicted with obscure diseases or shoveling the walk of the crazy neighbor or helloing the fat girl at Rite Aid... How then is he married to me? I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves “comfortable” when what they mean is decadently rich. You’re so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.

I have a chunk of vomit in my hair, I realize right before class. Chunk is maybe overstating it, but yes, something. I wash my hair in the sink. I am teaching a class called “Magic and Dread.”

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same. 

What Keats said: No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in. 

What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.

The Yoga People always travel in pairs, their mats under their arms, their hair severely shorn in that new mother way. But what if someone sucker punched them and took their mats away? How long until they’d knuckle under? 

There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X.

What Ovid said: If you are ever caught, no matter how well you’ve concealed it / Though it is as clear as the day, swear up and down it is a lie / Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly attentive / That would establish your guilt far above anything else / Wear yourself out if you must and prove in her bed, that you could / Not / Possibly be that good, coming from some other girl. 

Taller? Thinner? Quieter? Easier, he says.

The wife goes to yoga now. Just to shut everyone up. 

She remembers the first night she knew she loved him, the way the fear came rushing in. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heart. One day this too will stop, she thought. The no, no, no of it. Why would you ruin my best thing?

Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.

What Kant said: What causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing.

Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.

Some nights in bed the wife can feel herself floating up towards the ceiling. Help me, she thinks, help me, but he sleeps and sleeps.

The wife reads about something called “the wayward fog” on the Internet. The one who has the affair becomes enveloped in it. His old life and wife become unbearably irritating. His possible new life seems a shimmering dream. All of this has to do with chemicals in the brain, allegedly. An amphetamine-like mix, far more compelling than the soothing attachment one. Or so the evolutionary biologists say. It is during this period that people burn their houses down. At first the flames are beautiful to see. Then when the fog wears off, they come back to find only ashes. “What are you reading about?” the husband asks her from across the room. “Weather,” she tells him. 

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

If only they were French, the wife thinks. This would all feel different. But no, feel isn’t the word exactly. What is it that the grad students say? Signify.

The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)

She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. 

The thing is this: Even if the husband leaves her in this awful craven way, she will still have to count it as a miracle, all of those happy years she spent with him. “It was a fucking miracle that I found him,” she tells the philosopher.

The wife has a little room now, one that looks out over the garden. She makes a note to herself about the book she is writing. Too many crying scenes.

What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

I’m hungry. I want to eat something delicious, have a beer and a cigarette. I’ve come back to Earth full of desires. The air tastes good. This is what the Japanese reporter said when he came back from the space station. In the morning, the wife lets the dog out: Hey a squirrel! Hey a tree! Hey a piece of shit! Hey! Hey! Hey!

The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention. The visitor was displeased. “Is that all?” So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now. Attention. Attention. Sometimes the wife still watches him sleep. Sometimes she still strokes his hair in the middle of the night and half asleep he turns to her.

What the rabbi said: Three things have a flavor of the world to come: the Sabbath, the sun, and married love.

~ all from Dept. of Speculation, which I bought and kept reading after 1% obviously, having the uncanny experience not for the first time that the book I was reading was also the one I had been writing.  The wife, who is sometimes "I", stays with her husband and he stays with her despite the mistress having had better hair.  (Note, however: there is no mother-in-law in the story.)  

VIRGO "You'll be asked to make a sacrifice in the name of love. It's probably a small concession, but it will set the tone for the future, so go carefully into this."

"We wash our feet five times a day,"

my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.

"My feet are cleaner than their sink.

Worried about their sink, are they? I

should worry about my feet!"

My grandmother nudges me, "Go on, tell them."

 

Prepping classes. I love that part of the poem, and the title of it, which reminds me of taking shits and looking through the catalog painstakingly at an age just before I got ocd about matching my panties to my bra just in case (I should get hit by a car). The rest of it here. 

http://m.n know all 28iagara-gazette.com/news/local_news/group-working-to-identify-trees-of-historical-significance-in-the/article_d79122fd-e10b-5fe8-93b6-c707032a2252.html?mode=jqm

I know it sounds crazy but I know that tree. In fact, I'll bet I know all 18 of them, and that's about ohh 15 more trees than people that I know in town after living here for 6 years.  I don't really even notice stuff like that about myself, ya know?  In my defense, first of all trees are far less obnoxious than people. Plus The Witch moved out of town and Aaron made me stop talking to the music store people, so I was down to Milkandcookies as my only townfriend. But still. It's probably time to put down a root or two more here, some kinda way...

Pms: insomnia and violently wishing I never had to see my in-laws again. This is insane, admittedly, since I never DO see them except in my head where I bitch them out once a month (think rooster about the hen house type of get offa my stuff territorial nutty) then I get my period (whew). And then I want this http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000HEBAV2/ref=pd_aw_sbs_1?pi=SL500_SS115&simLd=1

:/

From The Witch, for us both.

I went back to yoga today, first time in just over one year. When I'd sweat enough to get to nothing going on in my head at all, least of all myself, it was perfect.

a wish for 2015

I'm updating my class site for contemporary writers in the coming semester. I haven't run it since Franco came out with the Child of God film, so I'm thinking I'll go with that one and freak everybody the fuck out, what the hell? So I'm looking around for interviews or something in which McCarthy doesn't come off like a total lunatic (he's brilliant, in my opinion, but ummm not a people person is putting it lightly), and I find this, which I wouldn't repeat except that Scocca parody did crack me up.  I know I know, I'm an asshole :/

bonus link: http://stronglang.wordpress.com/  TJ is going to love the fart-word story, as he is currently texting from a car somewhere in Indiana that he is 'ripping ass' to gas his brother in the backseat. The boys are on their way back from a long weekend in the midwest to see their grandmother with their father. TJ has been texting me cultural laments punctuated by raving food reviews (the way to a kid's heart is giant portions of waffles, but TJ's heart is a hard one, so before the syrup has dried on his shirt he will be back to 'is there anything here besides gas stations??).  Best text: We walk in and dad says to grandma "you've lost weight!" and she shoots back "you've lost hair!"  Wisconsin: Where passive aggressive ninjas come from. 

The kids always win dirty Pictionary (unless Jackie is playing).

"prostate"

http://www.box.net/shared/static/38oa4eqmuj.mp3

my idea of Christmas music this morning, gearing up to kiss 2014 the fuck to the curb and good riddance if ever there were a year to get past yet it was this one, will you release me from pain and worry ? lalala

probably a proper resolution would be more godly than what springs to mind, which is "to rather than pray or some shit, punch in the face immediately and with all my might anyone who causes me one nanosecond of unrequited grief" since I would have to punch myself in the face first of all, as I surely am my greatest enemy, plus it would be illegal if I bloodied Low Cunning soooo, yeah, I have to work on my resolution for the coming year, hmmm..

well, meanwhile, Merry Christmas, and for whatever it's worth I love you with all my broken heart

Gingerbread crackhouse, another tradition.

Tomorrow we'll add the Ho Ho Hoes...

Torturing the pets, a holiday classic.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/the-unbreakable-laura-hillenbrand.html?referrer=

 VIRGO Common decency perhaps isn't as common as it should be. That's why a certain person is now standing out to you — someone who continually takes the high road in even the smallest matters.

reading, horoscopes and book news, in the superquiet. even the dogs have stopped licking their paws. I can hear the snow-wind, a small whir. I am happy like this, grateful for these fragile minutes one after another when nothing [bad] is happening at all [that I know of] and I can quiet my mind of its compulsions to wince. it's such a luxury, that. If I could give everyone in the world a gift, it would be for a spell of Nothing, just a bout of quiet and the absence of material harm or fear of harm tomorrow or too-pressing memory of past harms

In a few minutes I will probably think of something, such as his walking into the OR at his new job yesterday to find his first d&c procedure waiting, without warning put into the memory of that having been me, us, not so long ago. "Really untraumatic," he said it was. For the patient, he meant. Objectively speaking. "No cutting. What's inside you isn't attached, it's not really part of you. Not really." I will think. Of something hurty. Or scary. Then I will stand up and clean something, or do something nice ..

One of the people I work with asked me about scrapbooking in the 19th century. First of all, how would I know that? And second of all, I did know. Aaron tells me all kinds of things about the difference between veins and arteries for instance. Veins don't have any muscles and arteries do. I hear: veins age and no amount of working out or not or botox is going to keep them sexy. Arteries could be sexier, but they're usually not, so then they get a face lift using veins turned inside out for the smooth faced side and then your heart doesn't look as shitty (?). He apologizes for how he tells me all kinds of useless stuff like that. I think, Dude I know the etymology of the word 'miscellany' through the 18th century until print media hit photography and Civil War news got pasted next to recipes leading toward the eventual recipe card system that predates Weight Watchers...point being: what the fuck could be less useful than my knowledge set, generally speaking? And here's the kicker, I also dabbled in Civil War era scrapbooking for a minute back when I knew that shit AND sucked at it (double useless), such that I could reach into a drawer and pull this out and wonder 'an instance of what Kerri calls what what?', having not finished that thought because the baby was crying apparently.

I am mulling my shrink's insistence until my last visit that my ego, wounded, is temporarily in charge of me. Not my spirit. Which is beginning to  reassert itself apparently. Finally. I do a lot of nidra, watching my mind until it looks like Kansas, all empty electric water air smelling, like Toto is about to go flying. I say to her, My power was stolen. She immediately jumps to defending Aaron. I'm not talking about that, about his motivations, I understand all that, I'm talking about something underneath all that, a siphoning that occurred. It's hard to describe. I use what language I have but it's not right. I'm casting a spell, I say. Because I don't know how else to describe how words write themselves in my mind let alone this, the wordless swells.

Meanwhile I think; God, is there any end to what you all wanted and thought I would be enough to provide? What made you think I was so HUGE in the first place? Give me a fucking break. Except Aaron. He is the one person who ever thought "you're not enough" at me, and then changed his mind. That's never quite happened before. So I am puzzling it out. Slowly, obviously. Trying not to make the same imposition.

He lies next to me sleeping, throwing off covers in the work of dreaming with his poolball boxers all bunched up,

and I watch him and half-grieve, which is not at all the same thing as grief-rage, wherein I let him go in my mind (bitterly but pretending it's nonattachment) knowing somewhere he is putting me away in a drawer in his soul where discarded things are stowed. Half grieving is closer to pulling a child back from nearly getting hit by a bus, a scolding frantic love-ill. 'Schadenfreude', he says, laughing at me for what I would imagine him engaging in. Somewhere about me over drinks with someone new, making myself mad to imagine the furious I'd feel to be imagining him doing that if he were now doing that and I were being forced to imagine that. Pissing myself off. If you throw schadenfreude shade at me I swear to Christ I will hunt you down and shove my tragic up your smug ass etcetc. 

In other news, Marilyn Robinson's new book redeems the others between Housekeeping and this one. I've slowed it way down by switching to reading it aloud. I love every word although there are losses galore and some of them of babies. (She had thought a thousand times about the ferociousness of things so that it might not surprise her entirely when it showed itself again. She wished she could warn him, even though he knew about it, too, and dreamed about it. This child must know about it, because it lived there under her scared, wild heart. It might not want the world at all.) When I read this author I remember I'm a Calvinist by at least half (TJ didn't come by that name for nothing).


He cleared his throat. “So. ‘Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.’ My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself. If there is such a thing. God is born of obedience,’ that’s Calvin, ‘and obedience has to be constantly attentive to the demands that are made of it, to a circumstance that is always new and particular to its moment.’ Yes. ‘Then the reasons that things happen are still hidden, but they are hidden in the mystery of God.’ I can’t read my own writing. No matter. ‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed.’ So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time to another. ‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.’ Because I don’t mean to suggest that experience is random or accidental, you see. ‘When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore we have no way to reconcile its elements, because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize as ourselves.’ That’s always seemed remarkable to me, that we can do that. That we can’t help but do it. ‘So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.’”

I believe all of that except the God part :(

The wife makes insomniac proclamations to herself in the dark, "People who can talk things out, they use their ability to articulate in order to win. Not widen, but win. Every conversation is won or lost. That gets very boring. At best. People who don't know how to articulate, how to think out loud, well they just come out with conclusions, fuck knows how they got there. And if you lost, or were lost, or let go of, in their minds along the way then say la vee. At worst. Which you'd do well to expect, the worst. Either way, people are weapons. And more than not their souls have no licence to carry..."

Since it's too depressing to believe all that, and since I myself can be both those kinds of people that the wife thinks ought be put out of their misery, I proceed as if I do not and am not. I try to be happy. Which I can be, actually, a lot of the time. It's pretty quiet when I'm happy. The house is clean when I'm happy. Bills paid. Nothing making me nervous. Nobody pacing the length of my life like a cage. Including me.

The wife, her inner pablum patter, "Renee Russo is looking great these days, I wonder what moisturizer she uses..."

Tgif, yo. And one week closer to the end of 2014, a steaming dog turd of a year. Every day the primary thing I want to happen is nothing much. When I say I want nothing for Christmas, I really mean it, please Lord give me no more 'opportunities to grow' for this year.  I've been summoned to the President's suite for lunch today and the budget is a million dollars underwater so I hear. My boss looks like he's had a diet mountain dew enema most days, increasingly scrawny and grim. I think selfishly, "I don't want to know what's wrong." But say la vee, they're gonna tell me anyway. (And my card of the day is Death, the card of evolution, oye.)

'Death' - (repost)

Nice of them to feed me an apple and blue cheese salad for lunch while they do, I guess :/

"Snakes, knives, strangers, darkening in the sky—you felt some things with your whole body. What they might mean. It could be they were on their way to do harm elsewhere and you just saw them pass by, but how could you know?" Marilyn Robinson, Lila

(You don't.)

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” Keroac, Dharma Bums

Some things do not make sense to me now. They might if I allow it. Or they might not. It's hard to say.

Each time there was a spell during which the children were very small before they could speak to anyone but me with their eyes and need of me. Then they grew on, started talking and became people, inside of whom is the secret of who they were before they began to take their shape and harden into their identities. I know that secret better than they do, as my mother knows mine before my memory begins. When I die or lose my memory of their secrets, those secrets will go with me, and I think we all mourn the loss of those as much as we do the sound of our mothers' laugh fading.

These are very elemental things. Like a b c. I'm not talking about relationships, their complications and all that. Our perpetual becoming in them. Transaction that happens in words. I'm talking about simpler things, underneath that.

All of what I've done and has been done to me, all the transactions, they push me out into a shape. Like a play doh fun factory. Mother being one. Friend. Daughter. Professor, even. It is damn difficult to balk the shape you're in once you're in it. Having an identity is a bitch. Even if it doesn't suck, it is certainly constraining. And let's face it, it often does suck. Friend. Daughter. Etc. But if you try to put it down, you're a shitty friend, an estranged daughter. You've accomplished nothing but acquiring an adjective. Cheating husband. What did that accomplish? Might as well pick an adjective like "sane" or "good", and try for that, logically speaking. Sane daughter. Good wife. Take that shape. Whatever it needs to be.

My daughter is once again obsessed with having (acquiring) children. Foster kids, her job like a shopping spree off and on, her imagining each as her own and trying them on as such. This happens when she takes a lover and doesn't love him. Last month she was thinking of moving to Seattle, where she would like to open a bakery, and I thought hmm maybe she could open one here as I walked by a for rent sign. But then a man, and almost immediately and counter-intuitively she seems like she needs to get laid something fierce, wound tight as hell, and the foster children mania begins again. Talking without taking breaths. Almost as to herself up and down the street in need of a cigarette madness. Talking right through you like you're not there. Because to her, you are not. The man is not there, not really. I can relate. All she can know to do is love a kid instead, so she wants to do that.

Did I teach her that? I might have thought so, but Aaron makes me doubt it. He also has a version of her madness. It wants more identity. Parent. To be called by that name. Like a solidifying agent to offset the runny (manic) nature of their beings.

I never wanted that. To be called mom, I mean. I didn't not want it. But I WANTED what they gave me before they could talk to call anybody anything. I paid that back trying to be a good mother, a consequence of having gotten something prior, something elemental. They could have called me whatever. Tbone. Luckily for me, I enjoyed mothering. A lot of it. And I really like them, too. They're all incredibly funny people. My family is a small mob to which I belong as a consequence of several times having indulged in the extreme pleasure of putting my nose behind the ear of another human being for as many hours in a row as I wanted once upon a time before they all started talking.

I now do that again. Not child. Husband. With the same ferocity of need. Plus something else. Plus sex, I guess. But sex is just a Way. All the work I did between having children and becoming a wife. The sitting still. The breathing up my spine and over my head and back down my abdomen and around and around. Open. And quiet. I pulled him through me when he came. I take his secret unworded self in, and spit it back. There is no part of his body I do not know well, calloused heel to asshole to hair follicle, with all my senses. I know what his arteries sound like inside him, the squishy humming of his sleep. Where words begin is where he, separate from me, starts. As a consequence, I have to relate to him, because here he is. I try to be a good wife. It's the way I pay it back, the more elemental thing. Lover. That's what he calls me.

My friend Patti adopted three children. She was their foster mother. She was the stepmother of girls that we called The Daughters. Ears dubbed them that because in his typical way he could not remember their individual names. Maria and Lauren. Patti's daughters. They called her Patti. When they grew into teenagers, and after Patti and her husband had given up on the fertility treatments, Patti went through classes and set out to adopt. I remember her telling me, I want to be called mom. Just like Aaron said, why he had to hurt me. Besides, what else is there that matters? Parenting matters, she said. Fair enough, it does that. Now the girl she got when she was 5 years old is 10. At the rate that girl is going, she might herself become a mother at 12. To say nothing of the two boys. Just the girl and her attachment disorder. She needs to pet Patti constantly or she cries and carries on. She's my size trying to ride her mother's hip like a toddler, exhausting Patti completely day in and out with no respite, turning her into this shape: hates to be touched. That is Patti's shape now. Mother, Wife, Professor, Recoiling. Guilty. Anxious. Committed. Admirable. I ask her, how is your marriage holding up? She says, 'It will survive, we are nothing if not loyal, but I hate going home and I couldn't have sex if my life depended on it.'

What if you're wrong about what you assume to be true and your life does actually depend on being able to do what you cannot? That's what I'm wondering.

The Girl comes for family dinner. Aaron enjoys these evenings a great deal. He is not as easily exhausted as I am, for one thing. I wish she'd shut up and make earrings with me (let's melt crayons), but say la vee. She says at one point that of course we too will have to go through foster parent certification classes to be able to babysit for her. Aaron readily assents, can't wait, little kids are so great. I say, Of course we will do whatever is needed. He seems a better stepfather than I am a mother in this. Perhaps I am a better spouse, if that is measured in suffering, it's hard to say. Here's what I do know: no part of me wants to take foster parent classes whatsoever. I do not want to take that shape at all. I do not want to sit through youcanthaveababy classes weekly. Not even ONE week, let alone months' worth. Pure Torture. I probably will suffer that (try to) because they both want it of me, and I respect that, and I understand I have an obligation to try to be good in my relationships to each of them. Mother. Wife. I will try to allow whatever that might mean for me. But I absolutely do not want to, and will be summoning all my faith in the forces of a benevolent universe that anything but more pain will come of it. For myself, I do not desire a troubled foster child. And truly, I cannot really make myself want a different baby either; I want the one I had, have, who did nothing to regret. I do not want anything between me and that baby, obliterating her like she doesn't count. I would have preferred her alive longer, but kids aren't obliged to fulfill your wishes. Say la vee. If a baby falls out of the sky like an Eli, it would be in my arms and I would surely want it, and then have to face the consequences of that fact, which at that point would be a home study classes whatever it is to be able to keep the baby behind whose ear my nose is already parked. In which case, fine. Otherwise, no.

I was up all night,
thinking: no. Other things DO
matter to us both.

I want nothing more getting stuck between myself and Aaron like a poppy seed between gum and tooth. Hurting. I want nothing between my skin and his. Not now. I want nothing forcing me to contort to fulfill something else. Lover is a new shape I've taken. A lover has desires and that is what shape she takes, the shape of herself.

Finally morning is near enough. I turn towards him and breathe. And breathe. Quiet. I think: yes. I want him. I wake him up.

The half-life of love is forever. Junot Diaz, "A Cheater's Guide to Love"


I got eyebrows waxed yesterday and the wax was too hot and took the skin of one of my eyelids off.  I'm nursing my eyelid (ouch), grading a mountain of end of term assignments the content of which I decided back in August, hence the Diaz (sigh), while listing to an Adam Sandler album and/or reading books on my kindle phone app as my students sweat out their final exams. 

Your life’s work could be scrubbing piss from a toilet bowl. Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it. Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

She had to get through her life one way or another. No reason not to take any comfort the world seemed to offer her. If none of it made sense to her now, that might change if she let it. If none of it meant anything, after all, no harm done. Marilyn Robinson, Lila

VIRGO Instead of looking to relationships to make you happy, look to them to make you conscious of what has been weighing heavily inside you at an unconscious level. 

Jackie smoked us at Cards Against Humanity. Xmas is almost here, making me nostalgic.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/03/hands-up-dont-choke-eric-garner-was-murdered-by-police-for-no-reason/ that video, heartbreaking

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2014.html?referrer=