Toss Up

I need a pick-me-up.

Tomorrow is a very rare day-off-with-daycare. I am conflicted. I could go across the street and crash on Mary's couch while her daughter Adrienne watches the girls. I could spend the whole day thrift-shopping (with restraint...we're down to very little in the bank). I could go to San Francisco and jell in the hot tubs at Kabuki Hot Springs for $20. I could hide in the attic and clean it out.

I could hoe the park strip in the front and start hauling rocks from the back to fill it in.

I could curl up somewhere, unwashed and feeling fat, and eventually grow depressed.

What do you do when you need a pick-me-up? How much money is required, if any?

What is your ideal soul-regeneration day?

Turning a Giant Ship

Do you ever feel like you have emotional or spiritual ADD? That is me this week. Here I am, eating the Taco Bell, chugging the coffee, staying up way too late for no good reason: pooping in the temple, as it were.

That seems to be the tragic flaw of our species. That tree is not only good for that owl, but for that stream, and this air...with the added benefit of being nice to look at, but I'd much rather think about the credit card it will pay off if I cut it down and sell it to that salivating businessman. He will even grind the stump for me so I can pretend like it hasn't been there for the last 300 years.

Poop poop poop.

You can tell I'm in a good mood. Actually, I am. I just finished my fourth-year review, and I can say that my tenure prospects are now the devil I know, rather than the much scarier one I don't. To add yet another cliche to the pile, I can now see the dots I need to connect between year four and year six....

Which maybe giving away the plot a little: I don't think I will be successful in going up a year early. However, I have modified the goal a bit: I will instead return to--gasp!--the job market this fall.

Why would I do such an absurd thing: the academic culture is dying as we speak. It's because I've located the roots of my discontent in my current job: I've been too busy to monitor my marketability over the last few years (gee, twins, new house, cancer...), and I'm beginning to worry, like some of my more intelligent colleagues, that if I HAD to go back on the academic job market, I simply wouldn't be able to compete.

Well, hogwash. What better way to feel righteous about a tenure bid than feeling some love from outside institutions? After all, my job offer from U. of Alaska helped me negociate a much higher salary than my dean wanted to give me.

Now that I've straightened that out, I can return to the temple for a moment.

We're in the process of organizing the girls' room (the master bedroom). We just painted two large bookshelves "life preserver orange," and filled them with the children's books and videos I've been collecting for the last 20 years. The room looks like a clown suit gone bad at the moment, but sometimes you just need to throw something--anything--together and then let time help you edit. Time + maturity = slow movements toward wisdom. Every little progression is wondrous. Just the way the shelves look against the wall, with their incredible offerings in art and literature...it makes me long to be a kid again. My own kid, I guess. Isn't raising children partly an exercise in reliving your own youth, the way you would have wanted it?

We are overdoing it on the Sesame Street, though. Good lord.

Bacon & Pancakes

It's amazing how much better I feel when my house is clean.

That's all I have to say tonight.

Drum Fill, Please!

I was in line at the Kaiser pharmacy in Napa yesterday, waiting for my Paxil refil. Sandwiched between a big gray guy with an oxygen tank and a big normal-colored guy with a germ mask, and behind about twenty others, I decided to call the psychiatry department and make a new appointment with the therapist who had canceled on me last week. This was the phone conversation (which was overheard by everyone):

Operator: Psychiatry department.
Me: Hi, I'd like to reschedule an appointment with Dr. X, who had to cancel last week.
Operator: Ok, let me check. [pause] Sorry, there are no appointments. Um, what were you going to see him for?
Me [noting ironically that my Paxil-withdrawal symptoms were in full effect]: Ah, well, depression, anxiety.
Operator: Are you going to harm yourself?
Me: No.
Operator: So, um, what is the reason for the depression?
Me: Well, I was recently diagnosed with cancer.
Operator [stunned]: Oh! Oh, I'm sorry.
Me: Thank you.
Operator [back to her list]: So, what is it about the cancer diagnosis that has caused you to seek psychiatric help?
Me [pausing incredulously]: Well, let's see.... How about having to confront my mortality?
Operator: ...
Me: I mean, it was kind of a shock?
Operator: Ok, I see. Are you taking any medication?
Me: Yes. Paxil.
Operator: For what?
Me (sighing): Anxiety.
Operator: Is it helping?
Me: Yes.
Operator: So let me recap: you have been recently diagnosed with cancer, you aren't going to harm yourself, and your anti-anxiety medication is working. And you want to see a psychiatrist.
Me: Strangely enough, yes.

I couldn't help laughing afterward (after I had taken my 40mgs). Poor girl.

Just a Few Things

I had the chance to go outside and prune everything that died back during the last hard frost today. I don't quite know how to communicate this without sounding sappy (ha), but the sight of the baby sage and oregano leaves underneath the old dead growth was better than any antidepressant. I can say this with extra credibility, since I've been off my meds for almost a week (forgot to order a refill), and have been dealing with the cold-turkey-Paxil head zings and general bottom-drop-out feelings here and there. So. I got my hands dirty. My house is a falling-apart disaster next to a slumbag apartment complex, but boy did I feel good today!

On that last note, you wouldn't believe the one-two punch of having twin infants and a fixer-upper house (oh wait, I forgot the evil crotch shot of being perpetually broke--see above). You just wouldn't believe. it. I have some new gray hairs at my temples because of the sleeplessness, early rising, relentless child-minding, fast-food pounding, everywhere you look needs help-ness, oh-yeah-surprise-bill/tax/late fee, moving five times in five years stupidity...I could add to this list ad infinitum, but I think you get the idea. HOWEVER, just when we thought we were going to start having affairs at work because of having no private time at home, the girls...are becoming little girls. (One of my colleagues who has a 20-month-old is getting ready to have another child, and all I could think of was to cry for him and make a mental note to call the infertility clinic and have them torture our remaining frozen embryos before they incinerate them. It's so over for us!)

The girls can almost play in the driveway while we rake or pull weeds. They can almost run long distances without falling over their feet. I ask, "Do you want some milk?" and they nod or shake their heads. One of them (Sophie) will sit still and color at a restaurant while we eat (Lucy, not so much). Yesterday, on the bed, I asked Lucy, "Can you take Mommy's shoes off and put them on the floor?" and she did it! Now, Jeff is working on getting them to fetch him a beer.

So I'm getting a distinct lightening up feeling. Just in time for spring.

I was talking to my mom the other day about how tenure (currently two years off) will really signal a major shift in my life. Not just because of the job security, but also because I'll get a 7.2% raise, and the girls will be four...definitely big enough to fetch the beer. I can ratchet back the relentless overcommitment my coworkers have come to expect from me. Etc. There will be a piano. A little boat. Poetry.

And my mom asked, "Why don't you go up a year early?"

Like next fall.

I had just been telling her about my stellar evals, and how maybe I'd gotten them because in the classroom, I try not to be either insane or mean (unlike some of my colleagues)...and I had probably been bitching about my idiotic decision to be secretary for both our union and academic senate this year...and gee, if I just had two more publications, I'd probably go up early...

OMG DUH!

In spite of everything I wrote above about being stretched unimaginably thin, the idea that I could be through with the prep work for tenure by this time next year--you have to submit your dossier by the end of November--gave me a real charge. Why the heck not? I would just have to get one or two more pubs by next November, and I have a good draft of one essay already done....

You see, even if they denied me, I would still be able to go up again a year later...and the dossier work (it's a huge pain) would already be done. Either way, I could coast after next fall.

I am sharing my little secret with you. I'm going to go for it.

Jeff has his own goal: he needs to pass an exam so he can be a Licensed Clinical Social Worker instead of just a plain old one. He will get a raise, too, when he passes his exam.

In June, after the surgery to take out the other half of my thyroid, I have to swallow a pill full of radioactive iodine. Thyroid cells LOVE iodine, and thyroid cancer only grows in thyroid cells. So this toxic iodine will go wherever there are thyroid cells in my body, and kill them. (This is one of the reasons why thyroid cancer has such high recovery rates.) Unfortunately, the downside is that for about eight days, I will be a carcinogen. No one can be near me for very long, especially the girls. I won't lose my hair or get sick, but I have to be in near isolation. What a perfect time to work on a paper!

I love secret plans.

Grace in Small Things #1

I'm copying this idea from a blogger I follow. She makes a point to note several positive events from her day.

*Probably the best good work news I've had in a long time came today. My teaching evaluations from last semester (when I taught five courses) came back, and they were the highest they've been since my first year here. My second-to-last tenure review is next fall, and my scholarship isn't going to be as good as it was in my third-year review, so these marks really matter, timing-wise. The best part of it, though, was that last semester, I got brave and made all 125 of my students evaluate me, not just the best sections of the five.

*I'm heartened by your good wishes, both on and off this blog. Even though most of you are far away, I've felt you close in my heart in these last few weeks. Thanks. Love matters.

*Rosa mentioned in a comment that Jeff and I should get a boat. She putts around the Dutch canals in hers and says it's great for her soul. Funny, we do live about ten blocks away from the Napa River, and I busied myself the other night imagining what kind of contraption you would need to portage a small dinghy or sailboat or canoe down to the little launch pad. We could put the girls inside and just roll down the street. Imagine that!

I Can't Wait Until Spring

I went to my Harvard-trained endocrinologist this morning, who, in spite of her almost autistic bedside manner, managed to make me feel more at ease. As a rhetoric teacher, I should have anticipated that an authority figure saying, "You'll be fine," over and over again might have that effect.

This isn't really about cancer. I mean, this blog. I drove my car two blocks last night without a seat belt on, and a woman almost t-boned me in the La Playita parking lot. I laughed out loud, because thoughts of death have been hanging in my mind for the last few months, but not thoughts-of-death-by-car-last-night-at-La-Playita.

I realized that the last thing I want to feel when I die is any kind of irony.

I am 40. So far, 40 has not been so hot; however, if my cancer acts like it should, I can return to feeling like the second half of my life is just beginning. In a revised sort of way. I can't get life insurance, but that may be one of just a few minor inconveniences I endure.

Is there an upside to having a very treatable form of cancer?

A student of mine told me a story last semester: he was eating a burrito outside a shop in downtown Vallejo (not a very safe place), when a guy walked up and pointed a gun at him. My student had just enough time enough to reflect, "I didn't think I'd die on the streets of V-Town," before the guy pulled the trigger...but he gun jammed. My student wet his pants in fear. Then, the guy pulled the trigger again, and the student felt something hit him hard in the chest. It took his breath away, but strangely, didn't hurt. When he looked down, he saw a blast of blue paint all over his CMA jacket.

The guy pointed at him, laughed maniacally, and ran away.

I can relate!

Muzak for Samurai

I've been staying up late like a slacker version of the poet William Stafford, who would get up well before dawn and go to his study to write, then merge into family and work life as the sun came up. It makes me wish I had insomnia. I love being up when the rest of the world is not. Unfortunately, I am a bum whom Jeff said would medal in sleeping if sleeping were an Olympic sport. Anyway, at about ten last night I went foraging on the internet for meditation music, with multiple windows open, search words: "guru," "swami," "sri," "mantra," "chakra," "shakuhachi [Japanese flute]," listening to samples on Amazon ("kundalini," "relaxation," "namaste,") and entering names I liked into Limewire ("raga," "tibetan," "monk,"), then downloading them to iTunes. And I burned incense. And I felt cheesy.

Then I stopped and pondered the paradox of not being one of those people who automatically lights candles and incense, and settles down with green tea, but feels jealous of those whom, if they were action figures, would come with a zabuton and sage bundle. I have a friend, Martine, an artist from Copenhagen, who when you walk into her home, you are seduced by a multi-sensory onslaught of spirit: smells, sounds, mood. Rosa, from Holland, has this talent, as well. (My sister, too, though she doesn't really nurture it as much.) For me, these instantly comforting places require too much work (I can't even find the matches most of the time) and involve some unease...what if I set this all up and I still feel crappy?

So I've been trying to swallow all of this and just get on with it, because when I listened to a guided meditation the other night, after staying up really late, I fell asleep within ten minutes, which is kind of a miracle. Usually, I get all revved up in whatever I'm doing, and then it takes hours for me to fall asleep. In fact, sometimes I stay up extra late because I know I'm just going to be bored in bed, not sleeping. Add having a restless toddler on either side of me....

I fell asleep after imagining myself walking down a path and discovering a boat on a river. I lay in the boat and let it drift...with my lump-like daughters next to me. Cut to ZZZZZZZZs.

Anyway, Jeff is mad because I'm using his running iPod, but cancer trumps entertainment in the New World Order. And I Must Relax. Mommy must relax. Mommy, who was compared to Little Nell the Tapdancing Maniac by her college roommate. Mommy, who is medicated for anxiety, but still needs to chillax, apparently. Can you see how hilarious this is?

But it is good to have a reason to actively pursue relaxation. So here is what I found, in case you get cancer and say, ok, stress really can kill you; now what?

If you're like me, you wince when you see the new age stuff. That is a problem, because some of the new age stuff is sincere and doesn't rely on a synthesized wall of sound that sounds like it came out of either Tron or Miami Vice, with some self-satisfied white guy thinking he can "conquer" stress for you. For me, a good rule of thumb is to go acoustic. Tibetan singing bowls are unbelievably relaxing. Tibetan singing bowls accompanied by Tibetan monks chanting takes it somewhere else, but it's still good. The Japanese flute, if you find the right artist, is sublime. The wrong artist, however, and it's muzak for samurai. The oud, which is a Middle Eastern lute, is a very contemplative, beautiful instrument. And then there's old Ravi Shankar, with or without chanting. I happily downloaded yards and yards of these instrumental pieces.

But I wanted to hear somebody telling me to relax. In English. Assertively. Get in the boat. Imagine yourself slowly being filled with a warm orange liquid. Once I get through that, then bring on the oud, the sitar, the shakuhachi. The funny thing is, like yoga teachers, the voice has to be convincing. This is a hard thing to accomplish, I know now, after downloading and deleting dozens of tracks. I'm still working on this...like some people work on needlepoint.

If anyone wants a CD of the fruits of my pursuits, email me. I plan to become an expert.

I moved our computers into the bedroom that will someday be our master bedroom (right now, we're sleeping in the girls' room, in a big giant bed), to get them out of the living room, which I've declared a No Technology Zone (except for the stereo), and which I'm imagining will be where I vegetate/meditate/try not to ruminate. Jeff is mildly pleased about the separation of church and state, so to speak. I think he likes that I'm forcing myself to turn more inward...probably because he's in there too.

Fragmentation

Things I'm grateful for today:

Ok, yes, I have cancer, but it's treatable and has a high success rate. If you want to look it up, it's called papillary carcinoma of the thyroid. I'm trying to see this as a grand leveller of priorities...a get-your-spiritual-act-together message from god. I haven't stopped eating fast food yet, but I'm working on it.

I am a little over two months off of all alcohol. This transition has not been difficult, as the only partying I was doing was at home, with Jeff. Since going off, I've lost about five pounds. I don't miss it very much; in this, I am lucky. One of my colleagues quit around the same time, and he craves it daily.

Teaching is going well, in spite of my post-surgery, scratchy, fade-in/fade-out voice. I love my job. I was so lucky to get this job. I feel liked and respected at work. The coffee is free.

I have an incredible partner in Jeff. We're not at our best right now, as we've sacrificed almost every spare moment for the girls, but I'm working on that. We've been through a lot of hard events: being poor for years, infertility, double-whammy parenthood, moving a lot, and now cancer...and we've done none of it gracefully, but I think we both realize that we couldn't have done half of it with anyone else.

Sophie and Lucy. I am sometimes terrified at the thought of the responsibility, and a lot of times I feel I have no perspective on motherhood, but there they are in their perfect Sophie and Lucy-ness. Today I am wishing they would not climb up on boxes to reach things that were previously safely out of reach. Yesterday one of them crapped in the tub, but it made me laugh because I'm sure it was Sophie. She's that kind of kid.

So today is a low day. I had a breakdown in 1999 over a semi-similar health issue, and this is the closest I've come to feeling like that again. I don't mean to sound scary, but I have been taking some solace in the thought that if I die of this cancer, in some ways it would be a relief from the plateloads of plot I've forced into my life over the last few years. Check, please! How maudlin of me. I also feel that if I weren't taking Paxil right now, I would have to be scraped off the floor, emotionally speaking. So the pill gives me the strength to feel ambivalent about death? Yay.

But I didn't start this blog to kvetch. I would like it to be more like a blues song, you know, the one that helps you transcend blue.

Hope looks to me like:

a rake in the forest
a wooden hot tub (I would rather have this than kitchen counters)
a relaxation cd on my bitty pod (please don't laugh)
a smelly candle
an Edwardian couch
a nice old parlor piano on which I can play maudlin ragtime
a regular revolving door of old friends and new friends who will become old friends

Some people have to force themselves to balance their checkbook or whatever. I have no problem sitting in my Inner Station with my imaginary mega screens broadcasting my net worth, calculating the next move like life is a Chinese puzzle, or like your soul can be metaphorized into a chess game. I have a sick knack for that, like I do for fixing people's resumes or timing the market. What I'm not so good at is enjoying the fruits of my labors. Or just sitting around dreaming. Or creating something unusual, on purpose. Fiddling with no real purpose. Slowing down to do simple things. I have an estranged relationship with food.

Don't confuse this with hedonism. I just want to be more wise.

I would like there to be less electricity in my house, but if I lose my job I will probably become an electrician.

Other good news: I am where I belong (or at least nearly there). I'm close enough to smell the conifers.

Lucy has been carrying a pine cone around for the last few days, which I think is healthy.

The girls woke up at 4 a.m. and the giant moon was setting in the west window like a public service announcement from god. Good thing we'd been working on "moon" all week. You should have seen L's face. Yeah, kid, aren't you glad to be alive?