"Whoever travels without a guide needs 200 years for a two-day journey." That's an old Sufi saying sometimes attributed to the poet Rumi. I don't think it's accurate in all cases. Sometimes we are drawn to wander into frontiers that few people have visited and none have mastered. There are no guides! On other occasions, we can't get the fullness of our learning experience unless we are free to stumble and bumble all by ourselves. A knowledgeable helper would only interfere with that odd magic. But right now, Virgo, I believe the Sufi saying holds true for you. Where you're headed, you would benefit from an advisor, teacher, or role model. 

Hmmmmm.

I went looking for the entry below, which I had unblogged as it turns out, I don't remember why, maybe trying to erase some of the damage done me by the final picture wherein my ovaries were kicking out 4-8 eggs per a month and exploding when I wrote it, when actually I became too sick to remake that trip. I just booked it again finally, which is why it's on my mind.

I didn't take the trip insurance this time.

_____________________
3/5/2012:
redux

That pic was taken by me, alone in a palatial hotel suite in Boston at the American Literature Association. It was half gambit, that trip. By half, I wanted and needed to attend the conference, to begin again to think academically, to write ... the other half was John, who seemed when I booked the trip months earlier to be finally willing to try to function, drive in a car together, stuff like that, and who by the time I needed the ride was long gone (again, and amazingly enough, finally). I took that pic to mark the time, my alone time, staring at ceiling and doing nothing but thinking. About all that I was missing in my life, which was not John actually. And I thought of all the people who had partnered and how I would not; I thought about Aaron, in Mexico that weekend, for instance. I thought about how the fact of not partnering was not, in itself, overly troubling to me. It was reception I was missing, an interlocutor .. I had lost the will and ability to build meaning on my own for everything, to tell the story of myself to myself alone, to decide everything and set the value for everything. I was not suffering from "o woe is me, I shall grow old alone", I was suffering from writing such a thing either as a joke or serious fear depending on TO WHOM I WAS WRITING, which had become, well, nobody. I mean, maybe someone is reading this, but nobody immediately implicated in the content or outcome. If I set my hair on fire, your pillow won't scorch. I don't need an audience so much as someone to wrestle with, to write for not just at. Otherwise, I can't keep from going to/too quiet. Now, Aaron does not read this blog, the writing I do for him I prefer to be in midair (alive). Does that count? (Am I writing?)

I am going back to Boston. Same conference. Only this time, I will have a partner with me and I will be giving a paper. I will have someone listening with interest to a paper I'm going to give about the concept of mating versus marriage, in literature ostensibly, my favorite author to whom I return for solace endlessly, whom I reread (this) again last night. I have yet to write that paper, I don't know what it will say, I don't know what it will matter that Aaron exits vis a vis what I will say, what I'll decide I think. I don't know more than I do know about many things. I don't know how it will turn out. What will my intellect do with Aaron with me there? How will that not matter, also? Everything has changed inside me since the last time I wrote and read aloud a 'treatise'. On this subject in particular, how mating and the spirit are entwined and at odds, every single cell in body has turned over since I left a husband who tried to kill me, passed through years with a lover whose indifference and chronic absence was infinitely gentle by comparison, and now to this place I am now, with much more that I cannot say (that I cannot write about at all, at least not yet) than I can in words I've found.

I have a pile of books in front of me right now. I'm looking at them, anxious not to be speechless.




redux (internal view)

"I will not wait to love as best as I can," says writer Dave Eggers. "We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love." That's your keynote for the coming weeks, Virgo. That's your wake-up call and the rose-scented note under your pillow and the message scrawled in lipstick on your bathroom mirror. If there is any part of you that believes love will be better or fuller or more perfect in the future, tell that part of you to shut up and embrace this tender command: Now is the time to love with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind.  (armscrossy)

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.

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


"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."


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


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

Vanishing into books, I felt held. ~from Family Life, Akhil Sharma

I should be grading papers about Lydia Davis. Or I should go to yoga at noon.  I could be working on my story about the couple who buys a blow-up doll to play the part of the counselor in their DIY marriage therapy sessions, or writing an entry about this week's adventures with Low Tzu. But what I am doing is reading this book.

I cried so hard that I lost my breath. When this happened, I became detached from myself. I walked and gasped and, as I did, I could feel my unhappiness walking beside me, waiting for my breath to return so that it could climb back inside me.

In the mornings I prayed, and at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping but couldn’t, I spoke with God. One rainy night, the room was gray with light from the street and my mother was lying nearby, her breath whistling. I was on my strip of foam and I asked God whether he minded being prayed to only in need. “You think of your toe only when you stub it,” he said. “Still, it’s better to pray just to pray.” “It’s human nature. I don’t mind it.” God looked like Clark Kent...

I loved my job today. I knitted word socks. It's cold, in general mostly. People need good socks. You don't think that's necessary, maybe it's even a decadence,  but you're wrong.

"Complete relax. Always remember one thing, you have nothing to lose because you never had anything at the first place, life and death is the same thing, just struggle and try to kill yourself, the more you suffer you must be happy...is like Indian marriage, no choice." ~Bikram Choudhury

LBJ buys pants from his white house phone - the burp right before the word 'bunghole' suggests that TJ could actually become president after all. Come to think of it, his shopping at his desk at work for clothes that will fit his ass right and thus running late for a funeral (in his case MacArthur's funeral, not literature's) suggests I might have been president, ha.

And after, no one will really ever remember it. Like the greatest crimes, it will be as if it never happened. The suffering, the deaths, the sorrow, the abject, pathetic pointlessness of such immense suffering by so many; maybe it all exists only within these pages and the pages of a few other books. Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not. ~ from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan.

For breakfast, I had blueberry crisp that I made last night. And nobody died or even cried. That's enough. If I were Virginia Woolf, I could write that properly.  The woman would stand in her kitchen feeling keenly that she is not suffering, feeling it so fiercely that it would double her over except that the lack of suffering's beauty is that it is not a punch to the gut, wishing for the world to stop and value toast properly, thinking that at many times and in many places a woman can make herself toast any time she wants it. She knows how to bake and crisp and butter if only for the grain and safety that are required for the task, and that wherever there is a smell of crisp there must also be flour, and safety, enough. And what a wonder that is, enough to cry over anyplace and any time a woman cannot have it, which is also common, she knows, and that at this very moment that she is rubbing crisp into the roof of her mouth with her tongue, another woman is somewhere without grain or too full of grief to swallow, and for that woman she cries as she stands in her warm kitchen looking at the frozen pond through the laced window, praying nonsensically please and thank you at god knows what, swallowing blueberries and a mouth full of teary spit.

for my father/the throbbing in my head

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

:/