Quickly, because I am going back to work tomorrow after a long, long-deserved sabbatical, and need to sleep:
I need to clarify something about yesterday's post. I didn't "mute" 660 people on FB. That would mean that I wouldn't see their posts. Not my intention. Instead, I narrowed the reach of MY OWN POSTING to 145 people. I still can see and interact with the 800 people whom I'm friends with. They just can't all see my posts, unless I change the setting back to all of my friends. I can do this easily, but have the smaller group of people as my default setting.
So: I hard-blocked some family members. I muted several idiotic Trump supporters for my own sanity. And I've narrowed my posting audience to 145 as a default. That is all.
This afternoon I was at the gym for the first time in months; since I got back from Vietnam I've been a lump. Today I was listening to a song on the treadmill (incidentally, it was "Seasons Cycle" on XTC's phenomenal Skylarking album, about 1988). The tempo happened to match my pace, and my hands started tapping on the bar because I can't stop from doing that when I really get into a song. At that moment, something buzzed in my brain. Frisson on the hamster wheel!
This is normal, I know, but today I had been reading about how visualization while exercising makes the exercise "count" more, or something like that, and I had also been thinking about how my baked-in anxieties have always made sitting still and meditating really difficult for me...how much more I like to move while I am thinking...remember, I'm moving during this whole string...and then I got all catalog-ey (thanx OCD) and made a playlist called "3.4 [MPH] Walking Meditation" and skipped to the next song. It was faster, so I sped up the treadmill (beep beep), and the frisson happened again when I hit the right speed! Holy shit, let's make another playlist...called "3.5 Walking Meditation."
Gleefully I spent the whole hour putting songs in playlists, from 3.0 to 3.5. Here was the sequence:
New song comes on. Check against speed until head shivers. Bam--organized.
The frisson was the signal. It's the same way when I mix music and I know it's right. Or choose a word. It's a gift, like how a painter knows what color to lay down next to another. I have no eyeball orientation, but my ears never disappoint me. It's probably why I'm a writer. Anyway, THIS IS NOT EVEN THE COOL PART.
The cool part was that throughout all of this, I was experiencing a very rare clarity of mind. Somehow I had dialed into a fine space. It felt narrow and lucidly wide at the same time. I had an idea for a creative project, and I could see all of it. I could have written it all down right there, as I was walking, tweaking the treadmill, shivering and organizing music. I didn't.
That's ok, though. The hour passed in what felt like minutes (sorry). I went to the hot tub with Lucy and Jeff and we had a beautifully present conversation. Then Lucy and I jumped into the big cold pool because we're badasses and then ran into the locker room.
TL;DR: I'm running off to join a one-man band.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Saturday, January 4, 2020
Culling Season
I've been traveling a lot and writing in my journal, and not keeping up with this blog, which was supposed to be for the deeper, more theme-oriented aspects of my life. To be honest, my life right now is pretty a-ok, aside from the house-shaped elephant in the room that I don't want to think or talk about at the moment. And the environment. And the state of the U.S. What I want to talk about in a short post, is Facebook.
There is no freaking way I'm going to get off of social media, because I love reading my FB wall and hear about what people are doing in Perth or Hai Phong or Amsterdam, Texas, Willow Glen, etc. Facebook serves an important connecting purpose for me and these people. I actually have a sense of what's going on in Vietnam during the months I'm in the US (right now, a shitload of weddings), and I get to see my friends' kids grow, and learn when people from high school die of seizure seizure stroke heart attack. It's a lucky window into worlds I don't really live in, and it doesn't affect my bank account.
If you're reading this, you also know that I'm an overposter. Not as bad as some, for real, but I really interact on FB. I've never wanted to be a spectator in any aspect of my life, so I'm always piping up. The interactions I've had with people there have really enriched my days and nights. So much of adulthood is doing things you'd rather not do, and having my friends in my pocket--even if it's just a simulacrum of friendship--sometimes just makes it easier to Do the Things. Anyway.
The Facebook friend list started getting carried away. I've had an account since the girls were born in 2008, and over time, like you I bet, I became friends with literally every human I have ever come across in 50 years. And their moms. Great, good, bad and ugly. Ambivalent people. The voyeurs (or maybe that's just a nightmare). People I aspire to be. People who should just let it go. The dead. Everyone.
At first, it seemed like a beautiful garden of wildflowers. In a terrarium. At the edges I could Block and Lock. Within this world--I felt, anyway--the invisible hand of goodwill would gently nudge and nourish us....
That was cool for a long time. I found old friends and repaired old wounds and reshaped my history such that I could sit on it like a big ole Buddha. The first problem came when members of my immediate family and I had a major--super major--falling out, and I realized that perhaps some aspects of my--of our: Jeff was in the middle of it--life were a little too available. Suddenly, I didn't want every-everyone to know every-everything. I blocked two people whom I'd never imagined I'd block. People who were second and third on my speed-dial list.
It was a therapeutic move meant to create a boundary where there had been none, and it worked very well. You risk something when you post; even if it's tiny, it adds up. It had real consequences for me in real life: I felt safer, and in that safety, I grew towards and into something different. That was five years ago.
And then the opposite happened. Today I have plateau-ed at almost 800 friends, but only about 145 of them regularly interact with me. Until recently, I didn't think very hard about this ratio. Then I did. It feels significant but I'm not sure why. I'm going to try to write through it here:
When 82% of your FB friends never interact with you, is that a bad thing? It seems like it should be, because the default identity on the platform is "totally present," even if there are varying degrees of commitment. Whether your friend has vacated their page and doesn't see anyone anymore, checks it sporadically but never posts, stalks their friends, or just dislikes you, you don't know. How much, if any, affect you're having on them is impossible to determine. If they teeming with hatred, desperately in love with your profile, or are cheerfully or depressedly ambivalent about you, you don't know. Just when I think that x could give a rat's ass about me, she replies to a post about music. When I tag someone I love and they don't respond, even weeks later, I'm sad.
(Perhaps there should be a person-shaped icon next to each person's name, with the percentage of their total social media interaction indicated by a color? And another with the percentage of their interaction with YOU? I am so fucking OCD.)
Let's just say that it's hard to gauge what kind of impact I'm having on FB, outside of my beloved 18%. When I realized how large the non-interactive group was (four times larger!), I felt embarrassed that I hadn't caught it sooner, that my exhibitionist ego had been operating in "who cares-ville" for too long. It's weird to confront paradoxical feelings: I was embarrassed for my own blabbery, but also annoyed at the way people can ghost/coast on social media. You can learn a lot about people without talking to them at all. And I can go forever talking into a void.
I used to think that the trick to being FB friends with relatives, students and people from a different political hellscape was not to prune your words into diplomatically palatable bits, but to remain whole and alert and reach out with all of the people in your mind's eye. For better or worse, this has been pretty easy for me, but it's also allowed me to lump all 800 people into one giant Friend that I talk to. Learning that your Friend is 80% brain dead is fucking disturbing. Also, realizing that the impact of the 18% who interact with you has been diluted by the rest (death to lurkers!) is infuriating.
Anyhoo, TL;DR: I shortened my friend list through muting. So far, the world hasn't stopped spinning. We're still destroying the planet, and really bad people are getting filthy rich in full view of the rest of us. Next will be reckoning with the people I enjoy reading about, but never interact with, myself! And there's always the IRL version of FB, the most important garden to tend.
There is no freaking way I'm going to get off of social media, because I love reading my FB wall and hear about what people are doing in Perth or Hai Phong or Amsterdam, Texas, Willow Glen, etc. Facebook serves an important connecting purpose for me and these people. I actually have a sense of what's going on in Vietnam during the months I'm in the US (right now, a shitload of weddings), and I get to see my friends' kids grow, and learn when people from high school die of seizure seizure stroke heart attack. It's a lucky window into worlds I don't really live in, and it doesn't affect my bank account.
If you're reading this, you also know that I'm an overposter. Not as bad as some, for real, but I really interact on FB. I've never wanted to be a spectator in any aspect of my life, so I'm always piping up. The interactions I've had with people there have really enriched my days and nights. So much of adulthood is doing things you'd rather not do, and having my friends in my pocket--even if it's just a simulacrum of friendship--sometimes just makes it easier to Do the Things. Anyway.
The Facebook friend list started getting carried away. I've had an account since the girls were born in 2008, and over time, like you I bet, I became friends with literally every human I have ever come across in 50 years. And their moms. Great, good, bad and ugly. Ambivalent people. The voyeurs (or maybe that's just a nightmare). People I aspire to be. People who should just let it go. The dead. Everyone.
At first, it seemed like a beautiful garden of wildflowers. In a terrarium. At the edges I could Block and Lock. Within this world--I felt, anyway--the invisible hand of goodwill would gently nudge and nourish us....
That was cool for a long time. I found old friends and repaired old wounds and reshaped my history such that I could sit on it like a big ole Buddha. The first problem came when members of my immediate family and I had a major--super major--falling out, and I realized that perhaps some aspects of my--of our: Jeff was in the middle of it--life were a little too available. Suddenly, I didn't want every-everyone to know every-everything. I blocked two people whom I'd never imagined I'd block. People who were second and third on my speed-dial list.
It was a therapeutic move meant to create a boundary where there had been none, and it worked very well. You risk something when you post; even if it's tiny, it adds up. It had real consequences for me in real life: I felt safer, and in that safety, I grew towards and into something different. That was five years ago.
And then the opposite happened. Today I have plateau-ed at almost 800 friends, but only about 145 of them regularly interact with me. Until recently, I didn't think very hard about this ratio. Then I did. It feels significant but I'm not sure why. I'm going to try to write through it here:
When 82% of your FB friends never interact with you, is that a bad thing? It seems like it should be, because the default identity on the platform is "totally present," even if there are varying degrees of commitment. Whether your friend has vacated their page and doesn't see anyone anymore, checks it sporadically but never posts, stalks their friends, or just dislikes you, you don't know. How much, if any, affect you're having on them is impossible to determine. If they teeming with hatred, desperately in love with your profile, or are cheerfully or depressedly ambivalent about you, you don't know. Just when I think that x could give a rat's ass about me, she replies to a post about music. When I tag someone I love and they don't respond, even weeks later, I'm sad.
(Perhaps there should be a person-shaped icon next to each person's name, with the percentage of their total social media interaction indicated by a color? And another with the percentage of their interaction with YOU? I am so fucking OCD.)
Let's just say that it's hard to gauge what kind of impact I'm having on FB, outside of my beloved 18%. When I realized how large the non-interactive group was (four times larger!), I felt embarrassed that I hadn't caught it sooner, that my exhibitionist ego had been operating in "who cares-ville" for too long. It's weird to confront paradoxical feelings: I was embarrassed for my own blabbery, but also annoyed at the way people can ghost/coast on social media. You can learn a lot about people without talking to them at all. And I can go forever talking into a void.
I used to think that the trick to being FB friends with relatives, students and people from a different political hellscape was not to prune your words into diplomatically palatable bits, but to remain whole and alert and reach out with all of the people in your mind's eye. For better or worse, this has been pretty easy for me, but it's also allowed me to lump all 800 people into one giant Friend that I talk to. Learning that your Friend is 80% brain dead is fucking disturbing. Also, realizing that the impact of the 18% who interact with you has been diluted by the rest (death to lurkers!) is infuriating.
Anyhoo, TL;DR: I shortened my friend list through muting. So far, the world hasn't stopped spinning. We're still destroying the planet, and really bad people are getting filthy rich in full view of the rest of us. Next will be reckoning with the people I enjoy reading about, but never interact with, myself! And there's always the IRL version of FB, the most important garden to tend.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Better to Fade Away?
This is not a pity party. I promise.
It's just that lately, I seem to have this conceptual art project going: how to die without thinking about it.
Let me be straight: I've never contemplated suicide. My obsessions have always been rooted in the abstract. My dad's father, unfortunately, did kill himself for real, in American Samoa of all places, when my father was 15. 15! I look at my daughters and realize that Grandpa Don was on a whole different level of fucked-up-ness. I'm nowhere near there, and I'm rapidly approaching his death-age of 55. I know that when my father turned 55, it was a hard year for him. I didn't understand it then, but I do now.
Luckily, as screwed up as I am, I've not ever gone there.
However, something has manifested that both surprises and un-surprises me. Maybe you need to be middle-aged before you start looking back and then can't deny that there has been a pattern. Or maybe you need to make small improvements, as I have been doing, to see the difference. I don't know. Maybe you can help.
I quit drinking alcohol about two months ago. I've done this on and off throughout my adult life; it's really no big deal for me to do it. The problem is that it kind of tweaks my social life and makes me have to do work in different places. Ultimately, it's a good thing, though. There is the embarrassment of not being able to hold liquor the way I used to: call that the impetus to quit. And then, over a period of sobriety, I realize that certain social bonds wither away without the booze. Others stand sad and neglected. I start to fix that, and realize what I'd been missing amid the ha has: undeniable connection. This kind of connection is formed inside of box playhouses when you're a child, or on the playground in junior high, when you are a pariah and someone finds you interesting in spite of it all. It continues amid the bomb craters of drunken weekend hookups (love during wartime), when a special person hands you a perfectly ripe pear. Or extends a hand at a party that took extra guts for you to walk through the door. These people come back to life with a special shine when you are sober. Or, more truthfully, when you are making plans for sobriety. It resonates and makes you want to continue.
Hard work, eh, when some sunny days you just want to sit down with a beer and laugh?
I do miss that: Colleen, Miah, Wendy, I do. I can be an excellent partier. But as the sober comic Marc Maron says, "I got my drinking hours in. I filled my quota." I'm done for now. Probably a long now.
On the same note, I recently started what I call my evening constitutional. I walk for about 45 minutes at dusk, up and down the very steep road in front of my house. I put this idea off for a long time. If you could see the road, you would understand why. But I was frustrated with my inconsistent ability to get to the gym, which is 20 miles away. And as I've aged, and because of my thyroid cancer, I've gained weight. I've been walking almost every night since June. If my daughter Lucy comes with me, we talk and look for animals. We do the think normal families do around the dinner table. If I'm alone, I listen to music or watch an episode of Narcos. Or just marvel at the beauty surrounding me.
After about a month of watching me do this, my neighbor Melody asked if she could join me. I didn't know her well before this, but now I do. I have not only lost eight pounds, but I've gained a new friend. Moreover, I feel really good about an aspect of my life that usually feels terrible.
Yay, self-improvement! All of this good stuff makes me inventory the rest of things and I see all the stuff that I do that leads in the general direction of an earlier death: my love for junk food (Coke, especially), my occasional cigarette, my terrible sleep hygiene. Where does it stop? I guess it all stops the day your heart stops. And do I want to live that long? I honestly don't know.
I honestly don't know! Sometimes you just want to live the rocknroll fantasy: better to burn out than fade away. Sometimes you love to cheat. It's how it is, right?
I'll let you know how it's going later, but I feel pretty good right now.
It's just that lately, I seem to have this conceptual art project going: how to die without thinking about it.
Let me be straight: I've never contemplated suicide. My obsessions have always been rooted in the abstract. My dad's father, unfortunately, did kill himself for real, in American Samoa of all places, when my father was 15. 15! I look at my daughters and realize that Grandpa Don was on a whole different level of fucked-up-ness. I'm nowhere near there, and I'm rapidly approaching his death-age of 55. I know that when my father turned 55, it was a hard year for him. I didn't understand it then, but I do now.
Luckily, as screwed up as I am, I've not ever gone there.
However, something has manifested that both surprises and un-surprises me. Maybe you need to be middle-aged before you start looking back and then can't deny that there has been a pattern. Or maybe you need to make small improvements, as I have been doing, to see the difference. I don't know. Maybe you can help.
I quit drinking alcohol about two months ago. I've done this on and off throughout my adult life; it's really no big deal for me to do it. The problem is that it kind of tweaks my social life and makes me have to do work in different places. Ultimately, it's a good thing, though. There is the embarrassment of not being able to hold liquor the way I used to: call that the impetus to quit. And then, over a period of sobriety, I realize that certain social bonds wither away without the booze. Others stand sad and neglected. I start to fix that, and realize what I'd been missing amid the ha has: undeniable connection. This kind of connection is formed inside of box playhouses when you're a child, or on the playground in junior high, when you are a pariah and someone finds you interesting in spite of it all. It continues amid the bomb craters of drunken weekend hookups (love during wartime), when a special person hands you a perfectly ripe pear. Or extends a hand at a party that took extra guts for you to walk through the door. These people come back to life with a special shine when you are sober. Or, more truthfully, when you are making plans for sobriety. It resonates and makes you want to continue.
Hard work, eh, when some sunny days you just want to sit down with a beer and laugh?
I do miss that: Colleen, Miah, Wendy, I do. I can be an excellent partier. But as the sober comic Marc Maron says, "I got my drinking hours in. I filled my quota." I'm done for now. Probably a long now.
On the same note, I recently started what I call my evening constitutional. I walk for about 45 minutes at dusk, up and down the very steep road in front of my house. I put this idea off for a long time. If you could see the road, you would understand why. But I was frustrated with my inconsistent ability to get to the gym, which is 20 miles away. And as I've aged, and because of my thyroid cancer, I've gained weight. I've been walking almost every night since June. If my daughter Lucy comes with me, we talk and look for animals. We do the think normal families do around the dinner table. If I'm alone, I listen to music or watch an episode of Narcos. Or just marvel at the beauty surrounding me.
After about a month of watching me do this, my neighbor Melody asked if she could join me. I didn't know her well before this, but now I do. I have not only lost eight pounds, but I've gained a new friend. Moreover, I feel really good about an aspect of my life that usually feels terrible.
Yay, self-improvement! All of this good stuff makes me inventory the rest of things and I see all the stuff that I do that leads in the general direction of an earlier death: my love for junk food (Coke, especially), my occasional cigarette, my terrible sleep hygiene. Where does it stop? I guess it all stops the day your heart stops. And do I want to live that long? I honestly don't know.
I honestly don't know! Sometimes you just want to live the rocknroll fantasy: better to burn out than fade away. Sometimes you love to cheat. It's how it is, right?
I'll let you know how it's going later, but I feel pretty good right now.
Thursday, August 4, 2016
The Real Deal
Here I am again. Nice to see you.
I'm teaching creative writing again, after so many years, the last copy of my syllabus exists only on a diskette. I am really not legit anymore.
On the bright side, having not seriously written anything for the last twelve years, I'm so out of practice that the exercises suggested in the textbooks I'm considering actually look fun.
So I might try to do the homework along with my students, just for kicks. Zen mind, beginner's mind. I have no excuse anymore. I disentangled myself from chairing the academic senate again at the end of this year. It was a tough year. What the job required, ultimately, was more interest than I actually had. I did what I could, which wasn't much.
As my students say, I ain't trippin.
About that, anyway.
The big machine that sucks up money is in warm-up mode. We just cleared the lot, and several simultaneous projects are happening: well, temporary power, grading, paving, septic...and then there is the house, which in my OCD-ness build a to-scale model of out of Legos, then covered it in cardboard painted blue:
This is very close to what the house will look like. Cape Cod-style meets industrial, with some old-fashioned Greek proportions. Galvanized steel roof. V-channel rustic siding with six-inch trim. Big sliding doors that disappear into the wall. Not pictured: a lean-to glass greenhouse attached to the kitchen. Cat5 or 6 hardwired into every room. Solar-heated radiant floors. Reverse-osmosis water treatment. Two five-thousand gallon water tanks.
It's bigger than I thought. The garage is actually underneath, which makes it three stories tall. It will have three bedrooms, three full bathrooms, and an apartment bootlegged into the side of the garage.
It's going to be very expensive. Go big or go home. I just don't know what to say in my defense except that I've waited almost twelve years--Jeff and I have waited almost twelve years, and I will be much much closer to 50 than 40 before I'll ever see it.
This is our dream. This is where my creativity has been for the last few years.
I'm teaching creative writing again, after so many years, the last copy of my syllabus exists only on a diskette. I am really not legit anymore.
On the bright side, having not seriously written anything for the last twelve years, I'm so out of practice that the exercises suggested in the textbooks I'm considering actually look fun.
So I might try to do the homework along with my students, just for kicks. Zen mind, beginner's mind. I have no excuse anymore. I disentangled myself from chairing the academic senate again at the end of this year. It was a tough year. What the job required, ultimately, was more interest than I actually had. I did what I could, which wasn't much.
As my students say, I ain't trippin.
About that, anyway.
The big machine that sucks up money is in warm-up mode. We just cleared the lot, and several simultaneous projects are happening: well, temporary power, grading, paving, septic...and then there is the house, which in my OCD-ness build a to-scale model of out of Legos, then covered it in cardboard painted blue:
This is very close to what the house will look like. Cape Cod-style meets industrial, with some old-fashioned Greek proportions. Galvanized steel roof. V-channel rustic siding with six-inch trim. Big sliding doors that disappear into the wall. Not pictured: a lean-to glass greenhouse attached to the kitchen. Cat5 or 6 hardwired into every room. Solar-heated radiant floors. Reverse-osmosis water treatment. Two five-thousand gallon water tanks.
It's bigger than I thought. The garage is actually underneath, which makes it three stories tall. It will have three bedrooms, three full bathrooms, and an apartment bootlegged into the side of the garage.
It's going to be very expensive. Go big or go home. I just don't know what to say in my defense except that I've waited almost twelve years--Jeff and I have waited almost twelve years, and I will be much much closer to 50 than 40 before I'll ever see it.
This is our dream. This is where my creativity has been for the last few years.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
Star Wars on the Brain
I don't usually have profound thoughts on a birthday, but this one is different. I'm 46 today. No one tells you about the sixes: at 36, I had the distinct sense that no bones about it, I'm not a kid anymore. Even at 35, you can still get away with young person's thoughts, actions, antics. But 36: the expiration date has passed on youth, for sure. I turned 40 a few years later and it was no big deal. But 46: again, another feeling. Life is most undoubtedly over half over. The shadow cast backwards becomes less interesting than what is coming...and what the f is it, anyway? People in this age are invisible in the flashy-pants world of advertising, movies and gossip. We apparently move in an uninteresting and uglier way to the world at large. There is a great anonymous space for discovery here, I know, but as a person who likes to be in the limelight...it's sobering, too.
It's been a long time since I actively mourned whatever beauty I had (that funeral was way too long); it's a big relief when health overtakes vanity. My children are in that flush of loveliness now, and it's so fun to watch them grow. I'm glad to be an older parent. I'm a better parent because I'm older: I know that.
Besides a trailer jack and a pair of Red Wing boots, I don't have any birthday desires. I am 46 and I rent from my mom, but I have almost every other thing I could possibly want. For 46, I've done well, and I'm glad I'm not dead.
There is a line in the Tao Te Ching, a fundamental text for me, that says something like: "When filling the glass, stop short of the rim: do not overfill." Until middle age, this seemed like a classic cop-out. Why wouldn't you shoot for the moon in all of your endeavors? For women, overdoing it is often the only way possible to success on a par with men: you have to be 150% better. I've seen this in my own job: I worked harder than almost anyone just to be noticed, got my rewards, then watched again and again as men who were either deadbeats or nuts skated right by, and sometimes way past me. Gross. Outrageous. Whatever. At any rate, the adage didn't seem to apply to my life. Here's the thing, though. It's really coming in handy now, because for the last few months, I've been standing on the edge of a choice: staying a professor or moving into university administration. Could you imagine suddenly making not twice, but three times your salary? Going to the same job? Seeing a lot of the same people? Three of my colleagues/friends in the past year have done this..like someone put fertilizer on their careers and they just shot up. Our campus is changing quickly, growing, and eyes are looking around for people to lead. And I just happen to be a leader.
I never knew this. Again, these aren't words usually spoken preemptively to women. Today, though, it's a different world, and I'm a different person. I've taken certain leadership opportunities and done mostly well with them. Actually, I've used leadership as a way to not do other things that are in the long run, scarier: write creatively, teach better, hold my head high in spite of not being paid very much.... I guess you can say that I've distracted my way into becoming a somewhat important person in my job. Hence the crossroads. I can see the signs ahead: you are about to become officially awesome in the eyes of a lot of people who never noticed you before. The pull is kind of trashy and sexy, like People magazine, like Taco Bell (yum).
I guess I'm kind of an asshole myself, because the job does suit me, just like brassy language and cliches. OCD helps, too. I could do it really well: this is not the issue (yay confidence!)
There is a sense that the more one does, the better. Overfill the glass. Cut the fucking trees. Don't look back. Do it or someone else will. Seize the day. Manifest destiny. Banzai. Kowabunga. Welcome to the Real World. Be the one percent.
Ok, I'm getting ahead of myself, here, but honestly. If you're going to go for it, then why not fucking go for it? Why not be the president?
There is a line you cross when you are standing where I'm standing that is probably more significant than any jump from dean to provost to president, etc. Cynical faculty call it going to the Dark Side. I've seen enough of the university administrative world to know that it isn't all dark, but unfortunately, the shoe does fit most of the time. Nothing is free. Vocation becomes rat race, and you find yourself worrying about things that have little to do with the Life of the Mind. And at times, you have to be a dick in an official capacity!
Back to the Tao Te Ching. If I stop short here in my career, at 46, will I regret it? You only get a few of these opportunities, lucky lucky child. Last week I was ready to get on the next imperial transport, and spend my future fortune. Then, one day I was driving home, having bitten my nails down and worrying about something someone said about my PowerPoint, and wondering if I could actually swing a 160-mile round trip commute every day, and I just went: NO. No, you fucking idiot. You didn't spend 45 years learning to appreciate your weirdness and becoming a martial artist in the classroom and doing it the hard way, sneakily, under the radar. You didn't figure out that doing good in the world was the best way to nurture your own soul, and that students and colleagues regularly feed you in ways that money never will...you are a freaking socialist anyway! You have earned the right to laugh at whatever you see as funny because it costs you nothing. You can continue to thrive on the scraps of thrown away things/people/ideas and get PAID TO READ BOOKS. Stop here! You won't become deadwood, but even if you do, who cares?
Happy birthday, dear Jedi. ;)
,
It's been a long time since I actively mourned whatever beauty I had (that funeral was way too long); it's a big relief when health overtakes vanity. My children are in that flush of loveliness now, and it's so fun to watch them grow. I'm glad to be an older parent. I'm a better parent because I'm older: I know that.
Besides a trailer jack and a pair of Red Wing boots, I don't have any birthday desires. I am 46 and I rent from my mom, but I have almost every other thing I could possibly want. For 46, I've done well, and I'm glad I'm not dead.
There is a line in the Tao Te Ching, a fundamental text for me, that says something like: "When filling the glass, stop short of the rim: do not overfill." Until middle age, this seemed like a classic cop-out. Why wouldn't you shoot for the moon in all of your endeavors? For women, overdoing it is often the only way possible to success on a par with men: you have to be 150% better. I've seen this in my own job: I worked harder than almost anyone just to be noticed, got my rewards, then watched again and again as men who were either deadbeats or nuts skated right by, and sometimes way past me. Gross. Outrageous. Whatever. At any rate, the adage didn't seem to apply to my life. Here's the thing, though. It's really coming in handy now, because for the last few months, I've been standing on the edge of a choice: staying a professor or moving into university administration. Could you imagine suddenly making not twice, but three times your salary? Going to the same job? Seeing a lot of the same people? Three of my colleagues/friends in the past year have done this..like someone put fertilizer on their careers and they just shot up. Our campus is changing quickly, growing, and eyes are looking around for people to lead. And I just happen to be a leader.
I never knew this. Again, these aren't words usually spoken preemptively to women. Today, though, it's a different world, and I'm a different person. I've taken certain leadership opportunities and done mostly well with them. Actually, I've used leadership as a way to not do other things that are in the long run, scarier: write creatively, teach better, hold my head high in spite of not being paid very much.... I guess you can say that I've distracted my way into becoming a somewhat important person in my job. Hence the crossroads. I can see the signs ahead: you are about to become officially awesome in the eyes of a lot of people who never noticed you before. The pull is kind of trashy and sexy, like People magazine, like Taco Bell (yum).
I guess I'm kind of an asshole myself, because the job does suit me, just like brassy language and cliches. OCD helps, too. I could do it really well: this is not the issue (yay confidence!)
There is a sense that the more one does, the better. Overfill the glass. Cut the fucking trees. Don't look back. Do it or someone else will. Seize the day. Manifest destiny. Banzai. Kowabunga. Welcome to the Real World. Be the one percent.
Ok, I'm getting ahead of myself, here, but honestly. If you're going to go for it, then why not fucking go for it? Why not be the president?
There is a line you cross when you are standing where I'm standing that is probably more significant than any jump from dean to provost to president, etc. Cynical faculty call it going to the Dark Side. I've seen enough of the university administrative world to know that it isn't all dark, but unfortunately, the shoe does fit most of the time. Nothing is free. Vocation becomes rat race, and you find yourself worrying about things that have little to do with the Life of the Mind. And at times, you have to be a dick in an official capacity!
Back to the Tao Te Ching. If I stop short here in my career, at 46, will I regret it? You only get a few of these opportunities, lucky lucky child. Last week I was ready to get on the next imperial transport, and spend my future fortune. Then, one day I was driving home, having bitten my nails down and worrying about something someone said about my PowerPoint, and wondering if I could actually swing a 160-mile round trip commute every day, and I just went: NO. No, you fucking idiot. You didn't spend 45 years learning to appreciate your weirdness and becoming a martial artist in the classroom and doing it the hard way, sneakily, under the radar. You didn't figure out that doing good in the world was the best way to nurture your own soul, and that students and colleagues regularly feed you in ways that money never will...you are a freaking socialist anyway! You have earned the right to laugh at whatever you see as funny because it costs you nothing. You can continue to thrive on the scraps of thrown away things/people/ideas and get PAID TO READ BOOKS. Stop here! You won't become deadwood, but even if you do, who cares?
Happy birthday, dear Jedi. ;)
,
Monday, September 21, 2015
Bone on Bone
My father is overweight. When I express my concern; he always says the same thing: "Julie, I'm going to be around to piss on your grave."
I'm down in the East Bay, visiting a colleague who is hosting this year's contingent of Japanese students from the maritime university in Kobe. It's the first time in at least five years that I've been back to Oakland, and I am not prepared...was not prepared for the waves of feeling, the memory of several formative segments of my life, all of them connected to writing and anxiety, of late adolescence vs. the cliffs of fortune. Listening to Neil Young sing "The Old Laughing Lady," past dawn on the way to an $8.00/hr. job. College was over, and the younger kids were still laughing it up on the rooftops on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel, which might as well have been in another country. God, it was sad. I got fired for the first time. I threw my dog's crap over a chain link fence, into a ravine behind my apartment, where it hit a sleeping homeless person. A middle-aged woman who owned a communal house warned me that I couldn't keep alcohol in my room, as her teenaged daughter would break in and steal it. I slept with a Beretta, under instruction from my father that I shouldn't use it unless I meant to kill. One night I got high by myself and almost immediately lost my hold on context: I felt as if I were in the city's throat, on my way to becoming indistinguishable from it. Is this what private school does to you, or does this just suck?
Coming here was the first step in getting out. Somehow I knew this, though there was no future in almost anything I was doing. This was where I made my first furtive, ragged-fingered plans.
Today I sat across the street from a house owned by a close friend from long ago. It had partially burned in a basement fire when he bought it in 2001, but he painted over the smoke stains and replaced the charred struts and joists, gave up halfway and built a new house behind the old one. Then started anew on the old house, I see today, and now it's a rental...still semi-finished, ramshackle, but probably bringing in good money. Still hanging on. I admire that.
And what has shaped me to the point where I find myself returning to this place, 25 years later, like a tourist, or a Russian doll? Fate and its almost imperceptible curve? Luck? Humor? I recognize this grit, this feral city, as part of me.
I'm still hanging on, too!
Monday, August 17, 2015
Bodywork
There is a fairly famous clip of a barber in India giving what can only be described as a ecstatic haircut. I'll see if I can post it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geLtFCxDs40
Does your hair stand on end and do you get goosebumps when you see this? I do. It's a physical sensation that seems to come from the mere suggestion that "cosmic forces" are being drawn out of and pushed into the body. I looked a little into this and found a niche of people who either create or watch videos of crinkling, tapping, whispering, etc., very close to the ears and around the head. The oddest thing about this totally physical response to certain rhythms within a close proximity was that it didn't necessarily have to be erotic...necessarily. There are groups who mess with that stuff, but it's kinda embarrassing to watch.
When Jeff and I were having trouble getting pregnant so many years ago, I went to see an acupuncturist in Oakland and when she put a superfine needle right into the top of my head, my whole body became covered in goosebumps: it was a crazy response, but it also felt great. My whole being relaxed. I learned that the top of the head is one of the seven mystic chakras in the yogic tradition, and that some yogis ask their devotees to imagine a ray of light emitting from the exact center of the crown.
The other day, I was face down in the West Lake (Tây Hồ) district, the most bourgeois part of Hanoi (wha?), looking at the back of my eyelids while a nice woman was totally phoning it in to my lower legs. I started to wonder if maybe I weren't trying enough, that maybe if I visualized some kind of mental analogue, it would feel better. Maybe I could participate, somehow. As if on cue, the woman decided to move to my head, and I imagined a Indiana Jones-style ark opening out of the top of me: wow!
This is the trouble with being spiritually flat-footed. You want everything explained away.
One time I went to a hot springs that dated back over 100 years. It wasn't fancy, and had that crumbly smell of locker rooms. Trickles of water came down from leaky pipes, and a stout woman with a mustache handed me a large towel and held my elbow as we walked into the steam. There was something about the care with which she led me, then the alternating hot and cold sensations. The shock to my system wasn't always pleasant (a cold plunge is a little like dying to me, just for a second), but the end result was me wrapped in my extra large towel like a grub, lying on a cot, I felt absolutely at peace. I mean, totally drained of tension. It felt like being reborn, I kid you not. I've spent the last 20 years trying to find that again. It's just hot and cold water, right? No. It's everything together.
You wonder if you can systematically, perhaps slowly, change the patterns of your life so that more regular syncing between body and mind can occur. I know this happens when I exercise, but it's so short, and often times I'm trying to distract myself from the entire effort (usually something broody on PBS). For me, it's release of tension, because I am a bunged up girl. I'm not always so willing to visualize white light in and snakes out of my nostrils. What do you do to relax?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geLtFCxDs40
Does your hair stand on end and do you get goosebumps when you see this? I do. It's a physical sensation that seems to come from the mere suggestion that "cosmic forces" are being drawn out of and pushed into the body. I looked a little into this and found a niche of people who either create or watch videos of crinkling, tapping, whispering, etc., very close to the ears and around the head. The oddest thing about this totally physical response to certain rhythms within a close proximity was that it didn't necessarily have to be erotic...necessarily. There are groups who mess with that stuff, but it's kinda embarrassing to watch.
When Jeff and I were having trouble getting pregnant so many years ago, I went to see an acupuncturist in Oakland and when she put a superfine needle right into the top of my head, my whole body became covered in goosebumps: it was a crazy response, but it also felt great. My whole being relaxed. I learned that the top of the head is one of the seven mystic chakras in the yogic tradition, and that some yogis ask their devotees to imagine a ray of light emitting from the exact center of the crown.
The other day, I was face down in the West Lake (Tây Hồ) district, the most bourgeois part of Hanoi (wha?), looking at the back of my eyelids while a nice woman was totally phoning it in to my lower legs. I started to wonder if maybe I weren't trying enough, that maybe if I visualized some kind of mental analogue, it would feel better. Maybe I could participate, somehow. As if on cue, the woman decided to move to my head, and I imagined a Indiana Jones-style ark opening out of the top of me: wow!
This is the trouble with being spiritually flat-footed. You want everything explained away.
One time I went to a hot springs that dated back over 100 years. It wasn't fancy, and had that crumbly smell of locker rooms. Trickles of water came down from leaky pipes, and a stout woman with a mustache handed me a large towel and held my elbow as we walked into the steam. There was something about the care with which she led me, then the alternating hot and cold sensations. The shock to my system wasn't always pleasant (a cold plunge is a little like dying to me, just for a second), but the end result was me wrapped in my extra large towel like a grub, lying on a cot, I felt absolutely at peace. I mean, totally drained of tension. It felt like being reborn, I kid you not. I've spent the last 20 years trying to find that again. It's just hot and cold water, right? No. It's everything together.
You wonder if you can systematically, perhaps slowly, change the patterns of your life so that more regular syncing between body and mind can occur. I know this happens when I exercise, but it's so short, and often times I'm trying to distract myself from the entire effort (usually something broody on PBS). For me, it's release of tension, because I am a bunged up girl. I'm not always so willing to visualize white light in and snakes out of my nostrils. What do you do to relax?
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Meditation on Distance
There are a few times of the year when things get me down: October, February, and right after school gets out in the summer. Why the last one? As a public college teacher, I don't officially have to get dressed between May and September: this is a problem? A good problem to have, some will no doubt grumble. I suppose if I were a normal person, I would agree.
The Buddhists have a compound term, "dukkha-samsara," which roughly translates as "the shit of the world that gets you down." Example: Our forest is dying. Whatever doesn't die will be consumed by the fire caused by what does. This sucks. Nothing like being reminded of this on the way down the hill every day. In my fossil-fuel burning car. On my million-mile commute. I am, from this perspective, doing it all wrong, no matter how great Bluetooth is. I'm contributing to the problem, and will, someday, be punished for it. Ok. Boo hoo for me. What about the trees?
This is kind of the dukkha-samsara circle I travel in when I'm depressed. Which is now. Oddly enough, the trees I so love haven't seen me up close in over a month. Shouldn't I go there? Yes! It usually works as a good soul strainer. I thought that moving to the mountains would force me into more peaceful zones, but it is kind of like a dream where you are so close to something you love, but also so far. It doesn't happen unless you make it happen. I'll file this under "things you hate to do before you do them, but love that you did them afterward."
There are civilizations that seem to filter out the dukkha by design. All live close to the land. All don't expect busy-ness. All are able to sit still. I seem to be able to sit still only when in bed. I consume chaos at a rate that would probably stagger you, though you have probably noticed this if you look at my Facebook feed (the never-ending but often tasty samsara vomiting).
Actually, I was thinking about this the other day, within the context of softball. I didn't play softball for a long time, because the first time I did it I was put into left field. Even as a child I felt the distance between myself and the infield. Something seemed to be going on over there that was highly social and intense. I liked to watch them, but then the first fly ball came sailing towards me and I was disoriented on a few levels: the intensity of the team and the crowd's (small crowd) attention, suddenly focused on me (what?!), and the fact that I had no idea where the ball was. It wasn't the sun; it was me. I don't seem to have much of a sense of depth. After a few rounds of non-fly-ball-catching, neurosis started to kick in during the downtime. Hypervigilance. Cuticle-picking. Fear. Relief when a lefty came to bat. A whole new fear of the hop-up grounder (I never caught those, either). The idea of playing softball at all became terrifying, yet I persisted. (I also persisted during one soccer match in the goal, which is a more hardcore form of playing outfield. I learned here that there is an outfield/goalie personality type, of which I, even medicated, am not of. All respect.)
It wasn't until my Ph.D. program that I attempted to play softball again, for our creative writing dept. team (The Prose). It was kind of a "we need a body" request, and the great thing is that no one expects writers to be good at sports. I joined, mostly for the camaraderie, but also for the beer. Imagine my surprise when I was asked to pitch at practice. Pitch! Isn't that the most coveted, most admired position of the team? Didn't one graduate to pitching if they were a good enough fielder, the way a lackey someday becomes CEO? Wasn't the infield like the cool table in the junior high cafeteria? (Can you tell I never watched baseball on TV?) I was stunned, but since I knew I sucked at fielding, I did it.
Well, I was good at it. It took a few weeks of practice to get to the point where I could huff the ball all the way to the plate, but after that hurdle I was pretty accurate.
More than that, though, I learned this magic thing: anxiety can actually help when you are up close to the action. I was able to turn plays, even without a ton of coordination, with a consistency that shocked me. Hit the ball at me? No problem. Complicated chaos at home plate? I could handle it.
What a revelation! The more distance I had from the action, the more neurosis set in. The closer I was, the better. Bring it! We won three intramural championships, and I had something to do with it each time.
What a weird revelation!
I need to get up and do something. Mindfully.
The Buddhists have a compound term, "dukkha-samsara," which roughly translates as "the shit of the world that gets you down." Example: Our forest is dying. Whatever doesn't die will be consumed by the fire caused by what does. This sucks. Nothing like being reminded of this on the way down the hill every day. In my fossil-fuel burning car. On my million-mile commute. I am, from this perspective, doing it all wrong, no matter how great Bluetooth is. I'm contributing to the problem, and will, someday, be punished for it. Ok. Boo hoo for me. What about the trees?
This is kind of the dukkha-samsara circle I travel in when I'm depressed. Which is now. Oddly enough, the trees I so love haven't seen me up close in over a month. Shouldn't I go there? Yes! It usually works as a good soul strainer. I thought that moving to the mountains would force me into more peaceful zones, but it is kind of like a dream where you are so close to something you love, but also so far. It doesn't happen unless you make it happen. I'll file this under "things you hate to do before you do them, but love that you did them afterward."
There are civilizations that seem to filter out the dukkha by design. All live close to the land. All don't expect busy-ness. All are able to sit still. I seem to be able to sit still only when in bed. I consume chaos at a rate that would probably stagger you, though you have probably noticed this if you look at my Facebook feed (the never-ending but often tasty samsara vomiting).
Actually, I was thinking about this the other day, within the context of softball. I didn't play softball for a long time, because the first time I did it I was put into left field. Even as a child I felt the distance between myself and the infield. Something seemed to be going on over there that was highly social and intense. I liked to watch them, but then the first fly ball came sailing towards me and I was disoriented on a few levels: the intensity of the team and the crowd's (small crowd) attention, suddenly focused on me (what?!), and the fact that I had no idea where the ball was. It wasn't the sun; it was me. I don't seem to have much of a sense of depth. After a few rounds of non-fly-ball-catching, neurosis started to kick in during the downtime. Hypervigilance. Cuticle-picking. Fear. Relief when a lefty came to bat. A whole new fear of the hop-up grounder (I never caught those, either). The idea of playing softball at all became terrifying, yet I persisted. (I also persisted during one soccer match in the goal, which is a more hardcore form of playing outfield. I learned here that there is an outfield/goalie personality type, of which I, even medicated, am not of. All respect.)
It wasn't until my Ph.D. program that I attempted to play softball again, for our creative writing dept. team (The Prose). It was kind of a "we need a body" request, and the great thing is that no one expects writers to be good at sports. I joined, mostly for the camaraderie, but also for the beer. Imagine my surprise when I was asked to pitch at practice. Pitch! Isn't that the most coveted, most admired position of the team? Didn't one graduate to pitching if they were a good enough fielder, the way a lackey someday becomes CEO? Wasn't the infield like the cool table in the junior high cafeteria? (Can you tell I never watched baseball on TV?) I was stunned, but since I knew I sucked at fielding, I did it.
Well, I was good at it. It took a few weeks of practice to get to the point where I could huff the ball all the way to the plate, but after that hurdle I was pretty accurate.
More than that, though, I learned this magic thing: anxiety can actually help when you are up close to the action. I was able to turn plays, even without a ton of coordination, with a consistency that shocked me. Hit the ball at me? No problem. Complicated chaos at home plate? I could handle it.
What a revelation! The more distance I had from the action, the more neurosis set in. The closer I was, the better. Bring it! We won three intramural championships, and I had something to do with it each time.
What a weird revelation!
I need to get up and do something. Mindfully.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Meet Me in the Morning
I'm not a morning person; I'm a fucking amazing morning person. My first class this semester is at 8:00, and I live 90 minutes away from my job. Silicon Valley, the overpopulated land of my birth (ugh), lies between me and my paycheck; hence, I'm up well before I would ever want to be. Want vs. need: sometimes you have to set up your life against your urges. Hey, but then you learn new things. One is that I relish the alone time in my little red car, when the sun is coming up, and I have Complete Control (CC) over the sound system. I get to DJ my life, and the songs that come up, sometimes randomly (thank you ITunes), re-blow my mind*. This morning, it was Bob Dylan, the man I love to hate. The terrible angel, in the summer of his art, communicating to me in parallel fashion, from Blood on the Tracks. It throws me back to another early morning, around 1999, when the demon of boredom + hormones drove me and my co-pilot Miah off to Galveston with the Wrong Boys. Many boys are wrong, but these two deserved the capital letters. (Of course, you could have said the same thing about me and Miah in this case: years later, another wrong boy told another to stay away from us, because "those two are trouble." I totally agree with him.) Anyhoo, it wasn't so much the Wrongness of the Boys I mean to emphasize here (though sometimes people are so Wrong, they deserve a tip of the hate...I meant hat), but the way the music cleaved to the moment, crystallized it, gave both Boys and music a kind of glow that only finds amplification through art. Whatthefuckever.
If I get more detailed, my husband will burn my dinner. Anyway, so I'm listening (probably appropriately) to "Idiot Wind" on the way to a totally normal job, through the hills of Central California, still green, with cows a la those compellingly processed Eyvind lithographs, drinking more coffee than is probably healthy out of a mason jar, marveling at the exquisite eastern light and the tule fog lying in the bottom of the gulch running along the freeway, kind of grateful that I survived my 20s, still surprised at where I am now, and wondering excitedly what's ahead (hopefully not a semi-truck).
William Stafford, one of my touchstone poets, routinely rose before dawn to write. I have often thought of him on my way to work, wishing that I were at home to do the very same thing...though I know that if I were lucky enough to be at home, I would be asleep. Someday I will be old and insomniac, please?
But back to blood on the tracks. There is some behind all of my dearest friends and me. It puts the bitter in the sweet, and during this sweeter time in my life, I (conveniently) have the courage to acknowledge it. In fact, it's chilling when you are close with someone, and you realize that in spite of it, the relationship wouldn't survive a single fight: that you end up spending a good deal of time avoiding the conflict because you know what is bound to happen :( Boo. Not to glorify conflict, because it truly sucks (thinking of a certain summer in Amsterdam: sorry about that, Rosa), but to acknowledge that when you have recovered with someone, and truly forgiven each other (not always possible, I know), it's a unique kind of triumph.
I think this, anyway. Bob Dylan is a kind of consolation for the unforgiven, I suppose.
*Got to stop using this phrase.
If I get more detailed, my husband will burn my dinner. Anyway, so I'm listening (probably appropriately) to "Idiot Wind" on the way to a totally normal job, through the hills of Central California, still green, with cows a la those compellingly processed Eyvind lithographs, drinking more coffee than is probably healthy out of a mason jar, marveling at the exquisite eastern light and the tule fog lying in the bottom of the gulch running along the freeway, kind of grateful that I survived my 20s, still surprised at where I am now, and wondering excitedly what's ahead (hopefully not a semi-truck).
William Stafford, one of my touchstone poets, routinely rose before dawn to write. I have often thought of him on my way to work, wishing that I were at home to do the very same thing...though I know that if I were lucky enough to be at home, I would be asleep. Someday I will be old and insomniac, please?
But back to blood on the tracks. There is some behind all of my dearest friends and me. It puts the bitter in the sweet, and during this sweeter time in my life, I (conveniently) have the courage to acknowledge it. In fact, it's chilling when you are close with someone, and you realize that in spite of it, the relationship wouldn't survive a single fight: that you end up spending a good deal of time avoiding the conflict because you know what is bound to happen :( Boo. Not to glorify conflict, because it truly sucks (thinking of a certain summer in Amsterdam: sorry about that, Rosa), but to acknowledge that when you have recovered with someone, and truly forgiven each other (not always possible, I know), it's a unique kind of triumph.
I think this, anyway. Bob Dylan is a kind of consolation for the unforgiven, I suppose.
*Got to stop using this phrase.
Friday, March 13, 2015
Freaks & Geeks
Today a colleague from SFSU came to campus to deliver our annual endowed lecture, which was on the topic of an 18th-century African-American/Native American whaler/trader/entepreneur who was able to live a crazily successful, independent and free life, despite the odds. He was rich! He traveled all over the place! He did whatever the fuck he pleased (more or less). He was one of those people whose individual story is just now being uncovered, and it goes against the grain of "our" cultural assumptions about what life was like for people of color back in the day. It fascinates me that one person's story can effectively disrupt--though not necessarily discount--the narrative of an entire group in an interesting--though not always satisfying--way. The paradox of the outlier fascinates me: he or she who doesn't fit with anything, who sticks up like the proverbial nail, and who, if they survive into adulthood, is used to the hammer. I know this feeling a little, and know more than a few people who live/have lived/lived this class of feeling. What strikes me today: it depends how you look at it (your outlier-ism), and how much strength you have. Por ejemplo, I can say that I've known about six true outliers in my life: one of them shot himself at 40, one is currently coming out of (I hope) an addiction to meth, three seem to be fine, and one is my husband (my current case study). All six have been to the brink of sanity in self-doubt, all six were bullied/abused mercilessly (usually by members of their own family), all six are/have been/were on psychotropic medication, all six have either considered or committed suicide. WHAT?
This is all the bad stuff: aren't we just talking about the mentally ill, here? No. Each is an amazing, amazingly different person who has been blowing people away with their creativity since birth. All make things: words, pictures, concepts, sometimes money. All are unusually funny. All are perceptive. All tend to attract fans. All are polarizing.
These are the people who seem to live outside time, convention, etc., and reinterpret it, navigate it, in ways that others only get much later. It's a narrow, magnificent, almost magic path. It's the low-percentage shot that makes it: the needle threaded, with flava. The elegance, the ease is what's so hard to watch, and so impossible not to.
Which leads me to the problem: others get jealous (or something) and want to not just destroy, but annihilate these people. I've seen this over and over. How does the outlier triumph...especially over the long haul, when he or she is mostly alone (as these people tend to be, literally or figuratively), and often under siege? I don't know. There is something to be said for knowing how to lie low and blend in. One of my wacky friends figured this out early, even took it to an extreme (which annoyed me).
I've been talking a lot in my rhetoric class about Martha Stewart's weird love for her drone (don't ask). Whatever you think of her, she is an outlier (art): but her relentless drive for more, more, more seems to have eclipsed this in a really tacky way. Bob Dylan, another nut (who should have listened more to his own advice, IMHO) once wrote, "To live outside the law, you must be honest." Martha, you seem to have started to believe your own bullshit, which I suppose is one of the pitfalls of constant loneliness.
I was going to attempt a witty dismount here, which would go something like: friends, honesty, ethics, find the right Rx, try not to poop in the temple, etc., but then my stomach started growling for Taco Bell and this is already way too long for a Friday read, so....if you had any advice for the lonely weird, what would it be?
This is all the bad stuff: aren't we just talking about the mentally ill, here? No. Each is an amazing, amazingly different person who has been blowing people away with their creativity since birth. All make things: words, pictures, concepts, sometimes money. All are unusually funny. All are perceptive. All tend to attract fans. All are polarizing.
These are the people who seem to live outside time, convention, etc., and reinterpret it, navigate it, in ways that others only get much later. It's a narrow, magnificent, almost magic path. It's the low-percentage shot that makes it: the needle threaded, with flava. The elegance, the ease is what's so hard to watch, and so impossible not to.
Which leads me to the problem: others get jealous (or something) and want to not just destroy, but annihilate these people. I've seen this over and over. How does the outlier triumph...especially over the long haul, when he or she is mostly alone (as these people tend to be, literally or figuratively), and often under siege? I don't know. There is something to be said for knowing how to lie low and blend in. One of my wacky friends figured this out early, even took it to an extreme (which annoyed me).
I've been talking a lot in my rhetoric class about Martha Stewart's weird love for her drone (don't ask). Whatever you think of her, she is an outlier (art): but her relentless drive for more, more, more seems to have eclipsed this in a really tacky way. Bob Dylan, another nut (who should have listened more to his own advice, IMHO) once wrote, "To live outside the law, you must be honest." Martha, you seem to have started to believe your own bullshit, which I suppose is one of the pitfalls of constant loneliness.
I was going to attempt a witty dismount here, which would go something like: friends, honesty, ethics, find the right Rx, try not to poop in the temple, etc., but then my stomach started growling for Taco Bell and this is already way too long for a Friday read, so....if you had any advice for the lonely weird, what would it be?
Friday, February 6, 2015
Four Things Your Friend Needs to Work On!
I'm loving the clickbait today: 10 Reasons Why John Lennon was a Dick. 15 Celebrities with Strange Body Parts. As long as a student doesn't walk in as I'm waiting for the slideshow to change (big photo of Bobbi Kristina Brown taking a bong hit). Too much.
I've been sleeping a lot. Partly it's because I have two early morning classes, which doesn't fit well with Jeff and my interest in late-night Netflix binges: British psychodrama, anyone? Could there-- statistically--be that many serial killers in North England? You would think so. My daughters are getting used to Mommy crashing for a few hours after arriving home. I like to compare it to Sport's novelist dad in Harriet the Spy, who slept during the day, and whom Sport romanticized, even as he was making his own dinner.
Lots of things are going on, and I'm still feeling sucky-of-the-having-eaten-too-much-shit variety, but it's getting better, I think/hope. Today, rather than hiding my head under a pillow, I'm visualizing constructive ways of annihilation. Just kidding. But it has occurred to me that I've never been very good at expressing anger. Usually it just bottles up until it explodes: red (rage) or blue (detachment), with blue dominating: I'm really good at ignoring people to death.
But how's that working for me? The bottling part, not so much. That's goal #1. Say no earlier. I've become better at that at work, for sure. Tenure is a lovely crutch, but a crutch nonetheless. My sister and I always used to give more points to those who tackle problems sober/naked/without nets...but who actually has the guts to do that? I'm trying to have the guts. The NUTS!
And then, the delivery of anger. Once I get around to actually being mad, I lose control really fast. Goal #2: be a more effective (read: ethical, read: not-righteous) yeller.
Ok, dear reader, I challenge you to make. me. mad. Come on.
Goal #3: Stop inviting conflict.
So all of this crap has had its usual effect on me, which is a diagrammatic accounting of my social life: yay OCD! Actually, OCD is very comforting to me, which is why I have it. I started thinking about old friends and what it means to have old friends. Do you have old friends? Some people, I realize, do not. Or (and this is much closer to my situation) some think they have old friends, but have relegated many of them to the confines of Facebook, which is like a "whole nother" category...like a Diet Friendship: safe and sane and somewhat sanitized.
Facebook is great for my OCD: everyone present/accounted for, but it is nothing like real friendship. Hence Goal #4: See actual people with some regularity. Jeff and I don't get out much, but it means so much to us to have old friends, especially ones we share (e.g. Robert, Miah). And then the new/old friends.
Do you really give a shit about any of this? I'll understand if you don't. (Direct violation of Goal #1: awesome.)
The really good news of today is that it's raining in Northern California. Our parched mountaintop is getting a break, and hopefully the wind will blow down a lot of dead trees so we can clean them up and pretend they were never there. One of my favorite students will visit tomorrow and we will walk in the woods, looking for mushrooms and wildflowers, grill something, and fulfill the requirements of Goal #4. I will sleep some more, do some work, maybe finish reading a book, maybe throw a few plates, scream into the waves, etc.
I've been sleeping a lot. Partly it's because I have two early morning classes, which doesn't fit well with Jeff and my interest in late-night Netflix binges: British psychodrama, anyone? Could there-- statistically--be that many serial killers in North England? You would think so. My daughters are getting used to Mommy crashing for a few hours after arriving home. I like to compare it to Sport's novelist dad in Harriet the Spy, who slept during the day, and whom Sport romanticized, even as he was making his own dinner.
Lots of things are going on, and I'm still feeling sucky-of-the-having-eaten-too-much-shit variety, but it's getting better, I think/hope. Today, rather than hiding my head under a pillow, I'm visualizing constructive ways of annihilation. Just kidding. But it has occurred to me that I've never been very good at expressing anger. Usually it just bottles up until it explodes: red (rage) or blue (detachment), with blue dominating: I'm really good at ignoring people to death.
But how's that working for me? The bottling part, not so much. That's goal #1. Say no earlier. I've become better at that at work, for sure. Tenure is a lovely crutch, but a crutch nonetheless. My sister and I always used to give more points to those who tackle problems sober/naked/without nets...but who actually has the guts to do that? I'm trying to have the guts. The NUTS!
And then, the delivery of anger. Once I get around to actually being mad, I lose control really fast. Goal #2: be a more effective (read: ethical, read: not-righteous) yeller.
Ok, dear reader, I challenge you to make. me. mad. Come on.
Goal #3: Stop inviting conflict.
So all of this crap has had its usual effect on me, which is a diagrammatic accounting of my social life: yay OCD! Actually, OCD is very comforting to me, which is why I have it. I started thinking about old friends and what it means to have old friends. Do you have old friends? Some people, I realize, do not. Or (and this is much closer to my situation) some think they have old friends, but have relegated many of them to the confines of Facebook, which is like a "whole nother" category...like a Diet Friendship: safe and sane and somewhat sanitized.
Facebook is great for my OCD: everyone present/accounted for, but it is nothing like real friendship. Hence Goal #4: See actual people with some regularity. Jeff and I don't get out much, but it means so much to us to have old friends, especially ones we share (e.g. Robert, Miah). And then the new/old friends.
Do you really give a shit about any of this? I'll understand if you don't. (Direct violation of Goal #1: awesome.)
The really good news of today is that it's raining in Northern California. Our parched mountaintop is getting a break, and hopefully the wind will blow down a lot of dead trees so we can clean them up and pretend they were never there. One of my favorite students will visit tomorrow and we will walk in the woods, looking for mushrooms and wildflowers, grill something, and fulfill the requirements of Goal #4. I will sleep some more, do some work, maybe finish reading a book, maybe throw a few plates, scream into the waves, etc.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Giant Circles
I suppose you have to get old in order to learn how things that go tend to come back. Stories that once seemed epic and endless are now just the last chapter of a long book you've been living through. I'm marveling at middle age and its strange boomerangs.
Some are social: the wreck I made of the last year of high school seems to be patched up and fixed--at least in my mind--due to the slow and painstaking repairs made to two or three relationships via Facebook. The lovely chorus that was my third and fourth grade experience, the one that faded away and then died out completely before college, is back, and sweet, and right. I am an extremely nostalgic person, and I love those I love fiercely--almost with a death-grip--and boy did it hurt to lose those connections. In high school we all were in the throes of hormones and social Darwinism, and I was ill. I'm not so ill anymore, and things have calmed way down for everyone now that we're up in our 40s.
I guess I'm glad to be alive to witness these turn-arounds. Moving back home didn't cause the fixes to happen, for sure, though it has certainly confirmed them nicely. I still have a few other people to reconnect with, but those are on separate trajectories.
Today I had lunch with five women from work. The synergy between us is so strong. We are all so excited to talk it's almost electric. And we laugh so hard! I haven't had a group of women friends since I moved back to California (whoa, 10 years ago!), and we are all older and have a decidedly fuck-it attitude about things. Yet we're professional, and work hard. And we work TOGETHER! It's great. Who knows how long it will last, whether people will stay in their jobs, quit, get tenure, find other work, etc. I just want to grab onto it and love it to death while I can.
In Long Beach yesterday, I learned that the dollar bookstore I so love to visit is closing. No! Where else could I get contemporary hardbacks (just bought DFW's The Pale King yesterday) for a buck? It was like a free-for-all for Julie: cheap+great=brain explosion, every other month! I'd bring another suitcase and just fill it up. I would stay at the hotel closest to it instead of my conference place, so I wouldn't have to walk too far with a heavy bag. Etc. Etc. And then, two hundred books later, it's over. So there's that. What do you do when you have a good thing? YOU SEIZE THE DAY, even if you look ridiculous (people on the senate thought I was crazy with all my suitcases), but now that it's over, I'm happy I did it all. Better to have loved and lost....
Perhaps emotions are amplified now that I'm back in my geographical home. It certainly feels more settled. My rock bottom is much farther down than it used to be, with a nice mucky layer of nostalgia and paroxetine between it and normal me. Jeff is having a rough time, but he too is mostly basically good...and the girls are tremendous. Blooming.
What if there's a fire and we lose everything (very possible)?
What if something happens to Jeff? Or god forbid our kids? Will I look back and say I seized the day when I could? Some tragedies are so awful that your survival might very well depend on getting that answer right.
Nothing stays the same. This I'm learning, too. Anini Beach is slowly becoming an unpleasant place; Kauai is becoming alien to me. My father is moving to New Mexico (don't ask), and with him, I've discovered, is going my nostalgia for Hawaii. I love my Hawaiian students, and I share their pain when they come to California: there's a kind of brave grit to their effort to fit in. I certainly understand it (backwards), but also, I feel I owe them. I owe them for what their tutus did for me when I was a kid. I owe Hawaii, and as I am useless to it when I'm there (today, with the old-timers dead and the young moved away, I'm just another tourist), I can honor it best from the mainland...by being there for the keikis.
Ok, enough mushy crap. We're going to Texas next week for a deep dipping in the pools of Southern friendship: Miah, I can't wait to see you!!!
Some are social: the wreck I made of the last year of high school seems to be patched up and fixed--at least in my mind--due to the slow and painstaking repairs made to two or three relationships via Facebook. The lovely chorus that was my third and fourth grade experience, the one that faded away and then died out completely before college, is back, and sweet, and right. I am an extremely nostalgic person, and I love those I love fiercely--almost with a death-grip--and boy did it hurt to lose those connections. In high school we all were in the throes of hormones and social Darwinism, and I was ill. I'm not so ill anymore, and things have calmed way down for everyone now that we're up in our 40s.
I guess I'm glad to be alive to witness these turn-arounds. Moving back home didn't cause the fixes to happen, for sure, though it has certainly confirmed them nicely. I still have a few other people to reconnect with, but those are on separate trajectories.
Today I had lunch with five women from work. The synergy between us is so strong. We are all so excited to talk it's almost electric. And we laugh so hard! I haven't had a group of women friends since I moved back to California (whoa, 10 years ago!), and we are all older and have a decidedly fuck-it attitude about things. Yet we're professional, and work hard. And we work TOGETHER! It's great. Who knows how long it will last, whether people will stay in their jobs, quit, get tenure, find other work, etc. I just want to grab onto it and love it to death while I can.
In Long Beach yesterday, I learned that the dollar bookstore I so love to visit is closing. No! Where else could I get contemporary hardbacks (just bought DFW's The Pale King yesterday) for a buck? It was like a free-for-all for Julie: cheap+great=brain explosion, every other month! I'd bring another suitcase and just fill it up. I would stay at the hotel closest to it instead of my conference place, so I wouldn't have to walk too far with a heavy bag. Etc. Etc. And then, two hundred books later, it's over. So there's that. What do you do when you have a good thing? YOU SEIZE THE DAY, even if you look ridiculous (people on the senate thought I was crazy with all my suitcases), but now that it's over, I'm happy I did it all. Better to have loved and lost....
Perhaps emotions are amplified now that I'm back in my geographical home. It certainly feels more settled. My rock bottom is much farther down than it used to be, with a nice mucky layer of nostalgia and paroxetine between it and normal me. Jeff is having a rough time, but he too is mostly basically good...and the girls are tremendous. Blooming.
What if there's a fire and we lose everything (very possible)?
What if something happens to Jeff? Or god forbid our kids? Will I look back and say I seized the day when I could? Some tragedies are so awful that your survival might very well depend on getting that answer right.
Nothing stays the same. This I'm learning, too. Anini Beach is slowly becoming an unpleasant place; Kauai is becoming alien to me. My father is moving to New Mexico (don't ask), and with him, I've discovered, is going my nostalgia for Hawaii. I love my Hawaiian students, and I share their pain when they come to California: there's a kind of brave grit to their effort to fit in. I certainly understand it (backwards), but also, I feel I owe them. I owe them for what their tutus did for me when I was a kid. I owe Hawaii, and as I am useless to it when I'm there (today, with the old-timers dead and the young moved away, I'm just another tourist), I can honor it best from the mainland...by being there for the keikis.
Ok, enough mushy crap. We're going to Texas next week for a deep dipping in the pools of Southern friendship: Miah, I can't wait to see you!!!
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Some New News I Won't be Advertising Elsewhere
Yes, I have secrets this year, which is weird for me.
One is that I'm quitting the senate at the end of this year. Not just the executive committee, but the whole shebang. I'm just not re-upping for another three-year term. I may return to statewide service later, but for now, I need a break. The only downside to this is that I will have to win a separate election to stay on my home campus's executive committee, on which I love to serve. I'll cross that bridge later, I suppose; ultimately, it doesn't qualify as enough of a "con" to worry about now.
I'm tired of traveling to LA.
I'm tired of the politics, and as I have zero aspiration to be promoted into a statewide academic affairs job...really, any administrative job, WTF am I doing besides getting drunk a lot and buying books?
I've been missing my family, and want to minimize the number of days away...
Because the other secret is that I'm taking students to Taiwan and Japan for three weeks in April. Jeff will accompany us for part of the trip, which is extra-special, since he's had to sit on the sidelines while the girls were too young to be without both parents. I have always loved the idea of Japan, and can do it all-expenses-paid, this way.
(I really want to travel WITH the girls, but they are still too young...we'll get to that later.)
Anyway, and I will go back to teach in Vietnam later in the summer--CHA CHING--because we need the money for our house.
Anyway, AND I will apply for a sabbatical when the deadlines come around this fall. I am really, ultimately, trying to clear a little space around my head for writing some kind of book.
There are a few other secrets which may surface this year. My daughters are growing and flourishing, and part of it is because Jeff's willingness to stay at home with them while I'm off on these trips and on my gigantic--but doable--commute. Our new life is awesome, but it is new, and it has come with some odd stress. Things that didn't seem so bad last year are suddenly really bad now, and vice-versa. I guess this is what it means to change inside-out!
The whole family is traveling to Houston over Christmas, too, which is very very exciting to me. Leaving town for a week will no doubt give us some perspective on the often too-close-for-comfort stuff happening within my immediate family, as well as allow us to see dearly missed people.
On the domestic front, I am rehabilitating plants (mostly succulents stolen from LA) on my kitchen windowsill, which is a really good place to have plants, due to the sink squirter. I haven't had indoor plants since I lived in Barcelona...for real. None in Texas, none in any part of California, until now.
Word of the week: monocot.
I'm also thinking a lot about low-rent fun: things I love to do that have little to no fiscal impact: lie in bed talking to Jeff, reading used books, drinking coffee, walking, listening to music, gardening. These are things that anyone can do, if one has any free time (which is problematic, I know).
One is that I'm quitting the senate at the end of this year. Not just the executive committee, but the whole shebang. I'm just not re-upping for another three-year term. I may return to statewide service later, but for now, I need a break. The only downside to this is that I will have to win a separate election to stay on my home campus's executive committee, on which I love to serve. I'll cross that bridge later, I suppose; ultimately, it doesn't qualify as enough of a "con" to worry about now.
I'm tired of traveling to LA.
I'm tired of the politics, and as I have zero aspiration to be promoted into a statewide academic affairs job...really, any administrative job, WTF am I doing besides getting drunk a lot and buying books?
I've been missing my family, and want to minimize the number of days away...
Because the other secret is that I'm taking students to Taiwan and Japan for three weeks in April. Jeff will accompany us for part of the trip, which is extra-special, since he's had to sit on the sidelines while the girls were too young to be without both parents. I have always loved the idea of Japan, and can do it all-expenses-paid, this way.
(I really want to travel WITH the girls, but they are still too young...we'll get to that later.)
Anyway, and I will go back to teach in Vietnam later in the summer--CHA CHING--because we need the money for our house.
Anyway, AND I will apply for a sabbatical when the deadlines come around this fall. I am really, ultimately, trying to clear a little space around my head for writing some kind of book.
There are a few other secrets which may surface this year. My daughters are growing and flourishing, and part of it is because Jeff's willingness to stay at home with them while I'm off on these trips and on my gigantic--but doable--commute. Our new life is awesome, but it is new, and it has come with some odd stress. Things that didn't seem so bad last year are suddenly really bad now, and vice-versa. I guess this is what it means to change inside-out!
The whole family is traveling to Houston over Christmas, too, which is very very exciting to me. Leaving town for a week will no doubt give us some perspective on the often too-close-for-comfort stuff happening within my immediate family, as well as allow us to see dearly missed people.
On the domestic front, I am rehabilitating plants (mostly succulents stolen from LA) on my kitchen windowsill, which is a really good place to have plants, due to the sink squirter. I haven't had indoor plants since I lived in Barcelona...for real. None in Texas, none in any part of California, until now.
Word of the week: monocot.
I'm also thinking a lot about low-rent fun: things I love to do that have little to no fiscal impact: lie in bed talking to Jeff, reading used books, drinking coffee, walking, listening to music, gardening. These are things that anyone can do, if one has any free time (which is problematic, I know).
Monday, November 10, 2014
The Eleventh Month
Funny how things change: sometimes top-down, sometimes inside-out. The move was a success, though there were several anxious months as we were smashed up against my mother's world. The barn remodel took a lot longer than we'd thought, so we didn't get in there until a few weeks ago, and even that wasn't totally settled until the other day, when we finally sat back and relaxed in our own space. Rent is paid for a year, things are put away, kids transitioned well into their new school, etc. We're getting used to major supermarkets being 30 miles away. We keep a full gas can in the shed, and have needed it twice after driving up the hill on an almost empty tank. Jeff has applied for a few jobs, had a few interviews, but nothing has panned out yet. He's definitely needed the time off, but as it's occurred to us that we probably can't get a building loan on one income, he's been looking.
We are slowly meeting people, but I've been traveling a lot for work, and our schedule has been very wonky. Jeff has befriended a carpenter down the road who seems to want to build our house; the carpenter is married to an ex-CSU faculty member whom I'd met years ago and who has mutual friends in the senate. There is also a woman two doors down who has a little boy who likes to play with S. & L. The social thing is slowly improving.
I'm getting used to the 88-mile each way drive to work. It's not a big deal except when I don't leave myself a margin for traffic issues, which don't seem to pop up unless I'm already pushing it. Everyone thought it was going to be an issue, but it really isn't.
Last week, a 100-foot trench was dug in our property, and we got an informal ok on the seismic/geologic conditions...we can't build exactly where we wanted, but we can build close by. I've been reacquainting myself with a 3D building program so I can sketch out the terrain: big time-sink, but fun, and we are still thinking about the barn house. The next step will be the septic percolation test and then water and power.
Something I've been thinking about lately is this: How does life change when one gets what one wants? I remember sitting in my in-laws' dining table in Houston in 2004, trying to explain to them why RIGHT NOW was a good time to sell my house, because it would allow us to pay off most of our lot loan, and why RIGHT NOW was a good time to move West...because we would then be closer to the lot. I'm sure we seemed crazy: that was ten years ago. Then, when we lived in the cavernous and dangerous storefront in Oakland while Jeff worked his first social work job and I was a lecturer. Then the seemingly illogical move farther north to Napa, where we hunted down the elusive short sale and had our kids. Then, selling it and moving into my mom's house last summer. We are fucking crazy! We have certainly sucked it up in pursuit of this goal. But now we are actually within range of achieving it, and it's a weird feeling. I feel stable in ways I haven't ever felt stable. And nuts in ways I hadn't predicted. I still drive up Skyland Road and feel like I'm visiting my own soul. Just visiting.
We are certainly eccentric; this I've also realized. Our lifestyle is not for everyone. We've been in a fishbowl for the last four months, and everyone's looked in: my mother, her boyfriend, our neighbors. They think we sleep too much, don't spend enough time on grooming, are not giving our children enough routine. They are probably right in some ways, but not right enough for us to recast ourselves as Better Parents. The girls are happy and strong, and I'm proud of them (and us). I can't wait to unpack it all in our own space.
Friday, June 20, 2014
Rebalancing
I'm finally able to take a breath, albeit one full of charcoal smoke in the Vietnamese city of Hai Phong, where I'm giving an ethics exam today. I left for VN the day our house closed escrow, and since then, thanks to the miracle of online banking, have managed to settle all of the debts we've accumulated over the last six months. Today, we are debt-free for the first time in years. It feels really good, so good I just want to get right back into debt!
We found a house plan we like...except it's a barn. I'm hoping that we can still make it work.
Speaking of barns, my mother's is almost framed in, and we're hoping we'll be in there by the end of July. That will be a great transition for us, as we're already stepping all over each other in my mother's house.
I don't think I've really dealt with being moved and how it's going to affect my job. The drive is so long, I'm just kind of in denial (Groucho Marx: "Denial is not a river in Egypt!") about it. If I could come up with something productive to do in the car (like write a novel!), I would feel a lot better. I will update on this.
The girls seem to be settling into life in the SC mountains just fine. Jeff is happy. I am happy. Let's hope that next year will go as smoothly as possible.
Meanwhile, I will take a bite of my latest banh mi and visit a few more temples before I bust out of here.
We found a house plan we like...except it's a barn. I'm hoping that we can still make it work.
Speaking of barns, my mother's is almost framed in, and we're hoping we'll be in there by the end of July. That will be a great transition for us, as we're already stepping all over each other in my mother's house.
I don't think I've really dealt with being moved and how it's going to affect my job. The drive is so long, I'm just kind of in denial (Groucho Marx: "Denial is not a river in Egypt!") about it. If I could come up with something productive to do in the car (like write a novel!), I would feel a lot better. I will update on this.
The girls seem to be settling into life in the SC mountains just fine. Jeff is happy. I am happy. Let's hope that next year will go as smoothly as possible.
Meanwhile, I will take a bite of my latest banh mi and visit a few more temples before I bust out of here.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Exiting
The house is sold. We will have enough money to put in our well and water tanks, our electricity, our septic tank, and get the permits we need to build. Jeff has given notice at work. Word has gotten around on my campus that we're heading south. The girls have liquidated their toy collection in exchange for a trampoline. We have radically downsized our possessions, as well. My mother has begun work on remodeling her barn, so we can move in at the end of June, when I get back from Vietnam. We have joined a swim and racquet club in Scotts Valley. A Prius is coming, which will be my commute vehicle. I have at least three potential carpool friends from work. Jeff has applied for a few jobs on both sides of the mountain. The roses are blooming. The attic eaves have been vacuumed. A party is in the works.
I have never been so terrified, but I also haven't been this excited in years. We are both really ready to leave Napa, even though it has been so good to us, and we have made some good friends. I'm really going to miss my neighbor Mary, who has supported us in so many ways: she watched our kids, cleaned our house, watered our plants when we were on vacation, made us cakes and brought us flowers from her yard, gave us cigarettes, sewed halloween costumed for the girls, fixed their boo boos; in short, was a surrogate grandmother to us (and to Sophie and Lucy). I loved sitting in her yard with her, just shooting the shit. I'm really going to miss her.
I'm also going to miss our poor house, which was in such a terrible state when we bought it; it smelled awful, had been so abused. We moved so many rocks out of the yard! We tore down the carport and a rotting, rickety, cinder-block-footed spa enclosure in the back yard. We sanded down and patched the redwood siding. We slept on a mattress on the floor when the girls were small. We had no real kitchen for 18 months. There wasn't a surface in that house that we didn't touch. Slowly, its beauty reemerged.
I had cancer in that house. Our daughters learned to walk in that house. I earned tenure in that house. Jeff studied for his license in that house. We were patient in that house: that's probably what I'll remember the most.
It's time. Farewell, Napa!
I have never been so terrified, but I also haven't been this excited in years. We are both really ready to leave Napa, even though it has been so good to us, and we have made some good friends. I'm really going to miss my neighbor Mary, who has supported us in so many ways: she watched our kids, cleaned our house, watered our plants when we were on vacation, made us cakes and brought us flowers from her yard, gave us cigarettes, sewed halloween costumed for the girls, fixed their boo boos; in short, was a surrogate grandmother to us (and to Sophie and Lucy). I loved sitting in her yard with her, just shooting the shit. I'm really going to miss her.
I'm also going to miss our poor house, which was in such a terrible state when we bought it; it smelled awful, had been so abused. We moved so many rocks out of the yard! We tore down the carport and a rotting, rickety, cinder-block-footed spa enclosure in the back yard. We sanded down and patched the redwood siding. We slept on a mattress on the floor when the girls were small. We had no real kitchen for 18 months. There wasn't a surface in that house that we didn't touch. Slowly, its beauty reemerged.
I had cancer in that house. Our daughters learned to walk in that house. I earned tenure in that house. Jeff studied for his license in that house. We were patient in that house: that's probably what I'll remember the most.
It's time. Farewell, Napa!
Friday, February 14, 2014
Doors Closing, Doors Opening
Moving 87 miles away from one's job, counting on the don't-gotta-be-there-40-hours-a-week nature of academe has a drawback: if you ever thought about transitioning into academic administration, forget about it.
Say an opportunity comes up to head a new writing center. Say you are the ideal person for this job. Say you're a little tired of the 4-4 grind, and would love a bump up in salary. Say you're getting close to retirement, even, and your pension is calculated by the highest three years of your salary....
Ain't gonna happen when you have a 90-minute commute. I'm working through this newly closing door. I may be an academic for life.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining. I just dislike having fewer options. It's a byproduct of survival mode, the setting my brain seems to be stuck on.
What I'm trying to do, now, is trying to accept that a new door is opening (or reopening): that of art. I spend a lot of time avoiding creativity, or channeling it into things like home decor. Why not write?
Because who wants to hear what a privileged white girl from NorCal has to say? Aren't we tired of hearing about white people? I'm tired of hearing echoes of hegemony in everything I read. I don't think I'm that unique, and I'm certainly lucky. I'm so lucky I'm starting to get paranoid about safety. Gross! Can I write something that anyone could relate to? Today, I don't think so. I can't imagine it. I'm going to work on this.
I need to be a little more friendly towards uncertainty, overall. Jeff and I have lived our lives in economic lockdown since we moved back to California. Our moves have been careful and boring. It's cost me. Our house is beige inside, with beige trim (speaking of home decor). It's oppressive. No more beige.
I'm reading about some privileged white writers and the chances they took. Some had no choice, due to wars, mental instability, poorly-timed childbirth, whatever. I have choices; now I have to choose chance.
Say an opportunity comes up to head a new writing center. Say you are the ideal person for this job. Say you're a little tired of the 4-4 grind, and would love a bump up in salary. Say you're getting close to retirement, even, and your pension is calculated by the highest three years of your salary....
Ain't gonna happen when you have a 90-minute commute. I'm working through this newly closing door. I may be an academic for life.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining. I just dislike having fewer options. It's a byproduct of survival mode, the setting my brain seems to be stuck on.
What I'm trying to do, now, is trying to accept that a new door is opening (or reopening): that of art. I spend a lot of time avoiding creativity, or channeling it into things like home decor. Why not write?
Because who wants to hear what a privileged white girl from NorCal has to say? Aren't we tired of hearing about white people? I'm tired of hearing echoes of hegemony in everything I read. I don't think I'm that unique, and I'm certainly lucky. I'm so lucky I'm starting to get paranoid about safety. Gross! Can I write something that anyone could relate to? Today, I don't think so. I can't imagine it. I'm going to work on this.
I need to be a little more friendly towards uncertainty, overall. Jeff and I have lived our lives in economic lockdown since we moved back to California. Our moves have been careful and boring. It's cost me. Our house is beige inside, with beige trim (speaking of home decor). It's oppressive. No more beige.
I'm reading about some privileged white writers and the chances they took. Some had no choice, due to wars, mental instability, poorly-timed childbirth, whatever. I have choices; now I have to choose chance.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Update
We're still on schedule to put our house on the market come Feb. 1. Since I last posted, we have completed the last major renovation on our house, a giant pergola to block out the view of the apartments over the back fence. Until last week--for the last five years--we could have staged Shakespearean plays for the benefit of our neighbors, who could--and sometimes would--peer down from their bedrooms onto the floodlit back steps of our house. This was not a selling point; as a matter of fact, it was kind of a deal-killer for us when we bought the house, and one big reason why we got it so cheap. Unfortunately, it was not an easy or cheap problem to solve, but we have solved it. I now can look out the back door and not be subjected to this week's NFL game on a wide-screen, coming from an upstairs window. I could seriously watch a game from my kitchen!
The only thing left to do is paint the attic stairs and dining room floor, the last vestiges of the crazy lady who owned the house before us. Her dogs started peeing in the corners of the room, and she did nothing to stop them.
This house was a mess when we bought it, and it looks 400% better now. Last night we burned the last of the carport that we tore down a few years ago.
The sweat equity will hopefully pay off.
Other news: my mother has been informed that we are moving in with her, and the most amazing thing happened! She started cleaning out her barn, so we can move into it and not be so up in her affairs. Once the inner walls were knocked down, we saw that we'll have about 600 square feet to work with, which is 600 sq. ft. of our own space, so I'm happy. All I need is a bed and a table and a bathroom.
We went ahead and had our mountain driveway rocked, which involved tearing out and replacing a damaged culvert (the road would get squishy in the winter--no bueno) and smoothing out a roller-coastery hill that would require a four-wheel-drive to navigate. The driveway had been a 100-year-old logging road originally, so the work was mostly cosmetic. At the end of the driveway was an outrageously long mobile home that had not fared well in the 1989 earthquake. That was crunched up and removed, too. What a difference! Behind it we found a wall of ferns!
As Jeff and I marveled, another thing occurred to us. Now that the MH was gone, the fact that it was surrounded on three sides by VERY TALL, HOUSE-CRUSHING REDWOOD TREES became even more evident. We had always planned to put our house in that spot, as it has a commanding view of what I call "the meadow." I imagined being able to look down on my semi-dwarf apple and pear trees as they bloomed their white fluff in the spring...but when I added to this the ever-present anxiety of being flattened...well, we decided to move our building site.
We started imagining every giant tree's deadly radius (about 100 feet), and that pretty much limited us to building at the bottom of the meadow. This is a place we had never considered, though once we did consider it, the benefits went beyond just not being killed. The only southern sun we'll hope to get is down there, which makes my dream of having a sun-room possible. It might even afford us some solar energy, though I'm not super optimistic about that. We are, for the record, at the bottom of a north-facing hill, deep in a forest.
Jeff and I took some stakes down there and tried to lay out a 2500 sq. ft. house for kicks. I don't want a house that big, but whatever. We will have to remove some smaller trees, including the only two oaks we have, but unfortunately the oaks aren't doing well (oaks in general aren't doing well in California, these days), so I'm willing to cut them down.
If we do build in that spot, the front of the house will be surrounded by California buckeye trees, which I love, even though they smell like sperm (really!) when they bloom. The septic tank will be downstream from the spring, and the ground is level, so engineering shouldn't be too much of an issue. There is a beautiful uphill view of two (safely distant) groves of redwood trees. Yay!
To be continued....
The only thing left to do is paint the attic stairs and dining room floor, the last vestiges of the crazy lady who owned the house before us. Her dogs started peeing in the corners of the room, and she did nothing to stop them.
This house was a mess when we bought it, and it looks 400% better now. Last night we burned the last of the carport that we tore down a few years ago.
The sweat equity will hopefully pay off.
Other news: my mother has been informed that we are moving in with her, and the most amazing thing happened! She started cleaning out her barn, so we can move into it and not be so up in her affairs. Once the inner walls were knocked down, we saw that we'll have about 600 square feet to work with, which is 600 sq. ft. of our own space, so I'm happy. All I need is a bed and a table and a bathroom.
We went ahead and had our mountain driveway rocked, which involved tearing out and replacing a damaged culvert (the road would get squishy in the winter--no bueno) and smoothing out a roller-coastery hill that would require a four-wheel-drive to navigate. The driveway had been a 100-year-old logging road originally, so the work was mostly cosmetic. At the end of the driveway was an outrageously long mobile home that had not fared well in the 1989 earthquake. That was crunched up and removed, too. What a difference! Behind it we found a wall of ferns!
As Jeff and I marveled, another thing occurred to us. Now that the MH was gone, the fact that it was surrounded on three sides by VERY TALL, HOUSE-CRUSHING REDWOOD TREES became even more evident. We had always planned to put our house in that spot, as it has a commanding view of what I call "the meadow." I imagined being able to look down on my semi-dwarf apple and pear trees as they bloomed their white fluff in the spring...but when I added to this the ever-present anxiety of being flattened...well, we decided to move our building site.
We started imagining every giant tree's deadly radius (about 100 feet), and that pretty much limited us to building at the bottom of the meadow. This is a place we had never considered, though once we did consider it, the benefits went beyond just not being killed. The only southern sun we'll hope to get is down there, which makes my dream of having a sun-room possible. It might even afford us some solar energy, though I'm not super optimistic about that. We are, for the record, at the bottom of a north-facing hill, deep in a forest.
Jeff and I took some stakes down there and tried to lay out a 2500 sq. ft. house for kicks. I don't want a house that big, but whatever. We will have to remove some smaller trees, including the only two oaks we have, but unfortunately the oaks aren't doing well (oaks in general aren't doing well in California, these days), so I'm willing to cut them down.
If we do build in that spot, the front of the house will be surrounded by California buckeye trees, which I love, even though they smell like sperm (really!) when they bloom. The septic tank will be downstream from the spring, and the ground is level, so engineering shouldn't be too much of an issue. There is a beautiful uphill view of two (safely distant) groves of redwood trees. Yay!
To be continued....
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Tilting!
As in, leaning towards...or doing something crazy a la Quixote. We have a new big secret. Which isn't really new, but it is big, and will be secret for the next six months. But I'm going to tell you.
We're going to try to move to Santa Cruz by the end of this school year.
I should have built up to it more, I know, and there is a lot you don't know because I haven't blogged much. In the last year, Jeff and I went through the motions of putting on our big-boy pants by deciding to stay in Napa for the long haul...like until the girls finished grade school. We were just so exhausted by the cancer, the twins, the job situations, that when our house started becoming a home, we thought maybe we should just quit while we were ahead. Good loan, good house (mostly), good school, (my) good job, happy kids. Everything great, right?
Except that all the work on our place in SC was going to crap. Why we moved from Texas in the first place was fading. Our dreams of waking up in the forest every morning, of welcoming friends into our sanctuary, of peace and many hot baths...was going down the drain! I guess I didn't realize how much I was mourning...and so was Jeff. Jeff's job, in the meantime, was getting more and more miserable, with no real alternative in our small town. He's looking for a good reason to eject.
It's a big job. Road, well, power, geological surveys, architects, contractors, drains, etc. Lots of time and $$$. I didn't think I had it in me. I think I was letting my fear defeat me. And driving my kids to school in the beautiful vineyards, with fucking hot air balloons like some 70's cliche in the distance, wasn't helping. Now, if we were still suffering in Oakland, it would be a different story. We are in one of the nicest small towns in Northern California, for my money...but it's not Santa Cruz.
Never mind that the mountains are long overdue for a major fire, and that everything we built could fry. Never mind that I have a somewhat contentious relationship with my dear mother, whom I love, but who often gives me heartburn. Never mind that the SC mountains seem to be the haven of the libertarian right these days.
Another factor that's been bugging me is that the public school system in Napa, after fifth grade, absolutely sucks balls. We were looking at private schools, which cost unspeakable amounts of money per year. Fries my little Scottish heart to think of that.
Meanwhile, the schools in the mountains are awesome, forever. All the way up to college. And they're free.
And our house in Napa is done, and we will make some good money on it (I think), which will get us started on the infrastructure. And interest rates are so low, we can get a decent construction loan.
And we can live at my mom's house (don't tell her--she doesn't know this yet) while we build. Yeah, that's a little, difficult detail that this 44 year old doesn't like AT ALL. However, it would be temporary, and the girls would get to hang with grandma a lot (they don't see her too much), and etc. I can suck it up.
It's going to be very hard, and my commute will be--87 miles each way. But dammit, I'm tenured, and I've paid my dues, and I teach a lot online if I want to, so there. Hence the secret.
I'm telling you because you are my dear friends, and part of the reason for this decision is so we can share this beautiful place with you and your family, for the rest of our lives.
I have no regrets about anything I've done in my life. I'm proud of that fact. I think, though, that not doing this would create a regret. This is the last big hard thing I will push for, will suffer for, will put my marriage and my kids through. I've had time to think, I've gone 180 degrees the other way, and it's come up wanting. I'm not a Napa country club type, which was where we were heading. My penchant for polarfleece and doghair was getting in the way. I want to chop wood and rake, learn how to take apart the engine on the VW, make apple cider, play the piano, save the redwoods, write some tennis commentary and maybe a memoir. I want my daughters to run through the big stumpy old growth with large dogs, and dig up artifacts. I would like to become the area historian, and push for a swim and racquet community center on Summit Road.
Anyway, I'm excited and scared. We're crazy, but we're going to try and go for it!
We're going to try to move to Santa Cruz by the end of this school year.
I should have built up to it more, I know, and there is a lot you don't know because I haven't blogged much. In the last year, Jeff and I went through the motions of putting on our big-boy pants by deciding to stay in Napa for the long haul...like until the girls finished grade school. We were just so exhausted by the cancer, the twins, the job situations, that when our house started becoming a home, we thought maybe we should just quit while we were ahead. Good loan, good house (mostly), good school, (my) good job, happy kids. Everything great, right?
Except that all the work on our place in SC was going to crap. Why we moved from Texas in the first place was fading. Our dreams of waking up in the forest every morning, of welcoming friends into our sanctuary, of peace and many hot baths...was going down the drain! I guess I didn't realize how much I was mourning...and so was Jeff. Jeff's job, in the meantime, was getting more and more miserable, with no real alternative in our small town. He's looking for a good reason to eject.
It's a big job. Road, well, power, geological surveys, architects, contractors, drains, etc. Lots of time and $$$. I didn't think I had it in me. I think I was letting my fear defeat me. And driving my kids to school in the beautiful vineyards, with fucking hot air balloons like some 70's cliche in the distance, wasn't helping. Now, if we were still suffering in Oakland, it would be a different story. We are in one of the nicest small towns in Northern California, for my money...but it's not Santa Cruz.
Never mind that the mountains are long overdue for a major fire, and that everything we built could fry. Never mind that I have a somewhat contentious relationship with my dear mother, whom I love, but who often gives me heartburn. Never mind that the SC mountains seem to be the haven of the libertarian right these days.
Another factor that's been bugging me is that the public school system in Napa, after fifth grade, absolutely sucks balls. We were looking at private schools, which cost unspeakable amounts of money per year. Fries my little Scottish heart to think of that.
Meanwhile, the schools in the mountains are awesome, forever. All the way up to college. And they're free.
And our house in Napa is done, and we will make some good money on it (I think), which will get us started on the infrastructure. And interest rates are so low, we can get a decent construction loan.
And we can live at my mom's house (don't tell her--she doesn't know this yet) while we build. Yeah, that's a little, difficult detail that this 44 year old doesn't like AT ALL. However, it would be temporary, and the girls would get to hang with grandma a lot (they don't see her too much), and etc. I can suck it up.
It's going to be very hard, and my commute will be--87 miles each way. But dammit, I'm tenured, and I've paid my dues, and I teach a lot online if I want to, so there. Hence the secret.
I'm telling you because you are my dear friends, and part of the reason for this decision is so we can share this beautiful place with you and your family, for the rest of our lives.
I have no regrets about anything I've done in my life. I'm proud of that fact. I think, though, that not doing this would create a regret. This is the last big hard thing I will push for, will suffer for, will put my marriage and my kids through. I've had time to think, I've gone 180 degrees the other way, and it's come up wanting. I'm not a Napa country club type, which was where we were heading. My penchant for polarfleece and doghair was getting in the way. I want to chop wood and rake, learn how to take apart the engine on the VW, make apple cider, play the piano, save the redwoods, write some tennis commentary and maybe a memoir. I want my daughters to run through the big stumpy old growth with large dogs, and dig up artifacts. I would like to become the area historian, and push for a swim and racquet community center on Summit Road.
Anyway, I'm excited and scared. We're crazy, but we're going to try and go for it!
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Is Anybody Out There
That's ok if not. It's been a year and a day since my last post (father, have I sinned?).
I hate October. For sure. Between Halloween and Jan. 1, I'm good. Then from then until the first burst of spring, I hate it again. Which pretty much sums up the whole month of February (sorry, sis). It only took me 43 years of going through this before realizing how bad seasonal affective whatever you call it gets for me. The shortening of days. The coldening of days. The long slog to warmth. The other day I went into a butterfly exhibit at Six Flags and it was about fifteen degrees warmer. My whole soul went YAH. That was a little shocking.
Lots has happened, but it's been of the going around in circles and ending up only slightly differently positioned since last time I checked in. Jeff has outgrown his job in the way Lucy has her size 3 jammies. We've cut the feet off, and the fabric is starting to wear thin in the knees. Yet. We'll see what happens with that. My job, fine. Still in the house, with more improvements. Girls are well ensconced in kindergarten at the shishi school across town. I drop them off normally looking more unwashed and grumpy (I imagine, anyway) than the other parents. They are learning to read (cute!).
It feels as though a gear has changed and things are easier, though time is passing faster. I will be 44 in a few weeks. I've lost 10 pounds! I gave up flour and milk. That was it.
Other than that, I'm feeling the usual restlessness/despair of fall. Blech.
I hate October. For sure. Between Halloween and Jan. 1, I'm good. Then from then until the first burst of spring, I hate it again. Which pretty much sums up the whole month of February (sorry, sis). It only took me 43 years of going through this before realizing how bad seasonal affective whatever you call it gets for me. The shortening of days. The coldening of days. The long slog to warmth. The other day I went into a butterfly exhibit at Six Flags and it was about fifteen degrees warmer. My whole soul went YAH. That was a little shocking.
Lots has happened, but it's been of the going around in circles and ending up only slightly differently positioned since last time I checked in. Jeff has outgrown his job in the way Lucy has her size 3 jammies. We've cut the feet off, and the fabric is starting to wear thin in the knees. Yet. We'll see what happens with that. My job, fine. Still in the house, with more improvements. Girls are well ensconced in kindergarten at the shishi school across town. I drop them off normally looking more unwashed and grumpy (I imagine, anyway) than the other parents. They are learning to read (cute!).
It feels as though a gear has changed and things are easier, though time is passing faster. I will be 44 in a few weeks. I've lost 10 pounds! I gave up flour and milk. That was it.
Other than that, I'm feeling the usual restlessness/despair of fall. Blech.
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