LaurieWrites

The Girl Scouts and Their Cookies Are In My Computer

Cross-posted at BlogHer. 

January started innocently enough. The eating - er, holiday - season passed and I had a vague plan to get back into last year's fairly successful effort to get myself to a more comfortable weight and back to a sanity-saving exercise routine that tanked in September. 

I don't want to talk about it. 

Anyway, just after my new year's snack of bacon with a side of black-eyed peas and greens, (that I made myself so I know just how much that ratio is true) I went back to work with my almonds and tuna, my newly re-upped membership in the water club and the spring wellness schedule bookmarked on my desktop. 

That first morning back I fired up my computer. And checked Facebook, because that is important to do before proceeding with any other important tasks. And there was my friend Karma, all up in my newsfeed. 

(These names are not real. I will not call my friends bad names. Draw your own conclusions.) 

"Hi everyone! Happy New Year! As you may know, Beautiful is a Girl Scout now and she is eager to meet your cookie needs. 

 This post included an image of a Thin Mint, and a link to a site entitled "MEET THE COOKIES" that not only included graphic depictions of each variety but also gave me a link to "FIND COOKIES NOW," which indicated that if I keyed in my zip code a nearby Girl Scout would arrive at my office door bearing Samoas and a glass of milk.

Not really, but you know, it was sort of implied. And all of a sudden the spring wellness schedule icon shriveled and died on my desktop like the Wicked Witch of the West under water. Damn. 

I mean really, this has to happen in January? Where are my gift wrap and mixed nut children? I can't eat gift wrap and I have to actually think about taking the lid off of a can of nuts. Do the chocolate bars and pre-fab pizza dough come out from their hiding places now too? 

Is anyone selling wine? 

It should be noted just for kicks that I was not a blazingly successful Girl Scout. I never went camping beyond a day trip to a nature preserve or two, and mostly stuck to badge-worthy yet reasonably sedentary activities like cooking and chess. 

 Yes they give badges for chess. Shut up. 

My final straw was the inability to evenly sew the seam on a fake suede skirt - a fuede skirt, if you will. And I honestly wasn't kicked out, it just didn't work out for me. And there may have been other reasons, other small badge infractions maybe because I've just never been much into those sorts of systems, but for me that was the deal-breaker. 

Also there may have been some crying before meetings because I wanted to stay home and watch repeats of Laverne & Shirley rather than build bird houses. That may have been the real problem, but my mother gave turning me into a responsible scouting citizen her best shot. 

Yes, my mom, the faithful team player who remembers her days in sash and uniform fondly, was still the cookie mom for one year out of the two I lasted. All I can remember is a dining room full of boxes, the neon Do-Si-Do orange and Thin Mint green, and the stress of thinking how many I had to sell to meet who knows what benchmark of cookie stardom. 

Anyway, now that that pressure is long gone, I cannot tell you in acceptable language in this forum what I can do to a box of Samoas. I mean, I can, but I have issues with sharing that kind of information publicly. I could maybe share with you how I can picture in my mind what a Trefoil looks like as it disintegrates in a glass of milk in the dim light of a kitchen at midnight, and how my hand trembles and my brain negotiates with itself while it chooses a number to write in the box next to the Do-Si-Do picture on the very colorful order form. 

"Six...NO! What is wrong with you?!? That is approximately one quatrillion peanut butter cookies that you do not need in your life! Three...Ehhh. Still no. Two. Blah, okay. Two." 

Yes. And that is not even taking into account the mental gymnastics required to calculate how many boxes of Trefoils are required for those days of simple milk-and- shortbread comfort cookie needs or the yearly limited edition with the fancy kind that you have to try although you won't like it as much as the Tagalongs so you just should have gotten another box of Tagalongs or how many Thin Mints you'll need minus that rogue box that you find in the back of the freezer on that crappy July day when you most need them because they fell behind the pile of frozen burritos. 

 What? WHAT? 

But now there is no order form needed. There is no paper trail here. There is just a link. And a wall post with a smiley face from Karma who needs, she NEEDS to sell these cookies. For Beautiful. And also, let's face it, for me, so I can guiltlessly or at the very least less guiltily avoid the table of girls and their parents who accost me at the grocery store until well past the spring thaw ("OMG, isn't cookie season over YET?" I will think to myself, as they smile at me in their sashes and threaten silently to kick me in the shins) because Beautiful, SHE has gotten my business. I know her. I have contributed to her cause - to her badge, or her trip to Juliette Lowe's birthplace or to her iPod, because they probably entice them to sell these things with digital music players now. 

Samoas. Oh, you coconut and chocolate and caramel siren cookies of my dreams. Six boxes. Six! 

Now I can tell Karma how many boxes I want at a distance, in a minute. And then they will arrive in her office, and I will write her a check or fork over at least one of my ATM twenties (only one? Cheap. Cheap cheap cheap, cookie miser) and think, that isn't a lot now, is it? That isn't so many boxes of cookies. 

Until I feel compelled to buy five more from other people. Because as it turned out, Karma was not the last, oh no. I know a lot of people, in-person people and people who are not only close enough to leave cookies on my porch but those who inhabit the vast recesses of my computer and distant lands like Indiana. The blog people. The Facebook friends of friends. And among them  are many moms and dads and grandmas and aunts and godparents. And those innocent little children who stare back at me from Flickr? Some of them are joining the nefarious ranks, memorizing the Girl Scout Law as we speak. Some of them are taking their cookie pleas to video (even if it is just, allegedly, for Grandma and Grandpa.) I remember what it was like. And while it may be taking me a few days to adjust to this new digital world cookie order, I would have YouTubed this whole enterprise too, if YouTube had been invented then.

Other voices around the Web:

Michele Cozzens would have bought more boxes from the Girl Scout on her door step but they're only taking cash this year because so many people have paid for cookies with bounced checks.

Sheryl Taylor wanted to support her friend's daughter's cookie efforts but didn't want the goods in her house. She told her, and they're donating her cookies and lots more to a local nursing home. Sheryl sounds scarily like me:

This way the Girl Scouts win, the recipients of the cookies win, and you win for not eating them while you are on your resolution. Although I must say, she is only the first of many that I know I am going to have to dodge and pass up those Thin Mints! Dang those Thin Mints! (fists in the air)

Finally, the Girl Scouts do have an Internet Safety Pledge, which says nothing about a wall post from Mom but does prohibit them from collecting money online. So at least I'll have to walk over to Karma's office to drop off my payment. That's good for at least a Trefoil, I'd say.  

The way that light attaches

Disclaimer to you among the Google-hit masses (you know, all tens of them) who love me and read this stuff: This is where it's working for me to put this right now. And I thank you for everything, as always, especially for making me feel less like a misfit toy than I otherwise would. Now let's just have a drink, shall we?

One night a couple of weeks ago I was standing in the kitchen of an old friend's house in a southern state, looking out the window into darkness, pretty much. She wasn't there. She and her kids were still on a trip and I had come in early to hang out for a few days by the water and it is the benefit of having old friends who trust you that they'll leave the code to their gated community in your e-mail, the key to the house in the fern on the porch and a lasagna in the refrigerator. 

And standing by her sink that night I realized that here I was in the space where someone else lived her life, a beautiful house, a place where I felt really comfortable moving through the rooms. And I soaked up knowing that someone with whom I'd sucked down many beers in parking lots had a house that could be featured in Southern Living, that had more than one hammock and neighbors who waved and a little spit of sand you could sit on by the marsh. 

But it wasn't mine. I could walk around in it, borrow it for a bit, feel as comfortable sleeping and eating there as I really did. 

It just didn't belong to me. And if I was honest, I knew so distinctly at that moment that I didn't really have that place that did. 

And let's not talk about the space I do have. It meets the baseline on Maslow's hierarchy and for that I am grateful but beyond that it's...unsatisfying. 

A few days later I was in one of the warmest homes I've ever visited - both in the way it looked from the curb and from the corners of every room and the way it felt. Again, the doors were opened to me and I found friends inside who if they weren't happy to see me are incredibly good liars. Sunday morning amazing light streamed through so many windows, and there was Elton John on the stereo, kids with serious plans and engaging conversation and an incredible homemade breakfast in the kitchen. 

On my way home to my own life later I started ugly crying about 20 miles outside of Durham after a loud rendition of Last Christmas segued into some bs like Home for the Holidays and I lost my toehold in stability.

It turns out the line about the fool who goes all the way to Pennsylvania from Tennessee for a homemade pumpkin pie can be quite the little bitch of a trigger there, friends.

Anyway, there was something in that last place in particular that I knew I needed and I lacked, something I quite believed I ought not to lack at this juncture, something I tried to believe simultaneously in the car that I would be okay without if it never came my way while knowing that I absolutely would not. I knew that I would die, or might as well, if this is all there is.

It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair. 

But it gives you something to aspire to shut up. 

It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair. 

You're not dead yet. Shut. Up. 

It gets harder to repeat these things to myself the harder I'm pushing 40.  And it turns out that it's tough for me sometimes to live on the fringes of other peoples' lives, although without other people I'm kind of screwed, and when I'm with the right people I don't feel fringey at all. This is all very difficult to describe.

I kept thinking this all the miles it took me to settle down between there and the huge I-95 discount store, that it wasn't fair, that I wasn't as good at this alone thing as I've appeared to be for a long time and I didn't understand why this had happened to me, that as much as I've traveled and as much as I've run and as much as I've tried to make things better for a very long time, that I really didn't know what to do anymore if I ever did know. That as long as this existential loneliness sticks that I would remain in this weird life I've been living for a very long time now. 

Ten years, to be exact. 

That I would always be unhappy. 

I blamed the universe. I blamed my ex-boyfriend for the ancient things that always come up from the ether when I get like this. I blamed the media. (That's a lie but I really should, I mean they get blamed for everything else anyway.) I thought judging thoughts about just about every human being I know even vaguely who didn't deserve the surely blessed life of domestic bliss that they were living if I couldn't have this too. 

I never said this was right or made good sense. I never said I had any. 

I blamed myself. Most of all I blamed myself. I blame myself, for being broken, for not being the kind of person who can be connected to anyone but friends for the long haul, for not just hitching myself to someone decent even though I knew that wasn't what I wanted from them at all because it just wouldn't be right. I blamed myself for not being willing to pack up the next day and move to a place where I could maybe afford property more easily, because oh, wait, maybe I don't have a job there? And at least I have a job. I blamed myself for not being financially stable enough to have a house, a child that so many people seem to think I can just afford on my own in all the ways a child must be afforded (and I am not talking about money entirely here.) 

I blamed myself. I blame myself. 

And I blame myself for thinking these things, for not being content with what I've got and who I am and what I've accomplished, for not being happy for other people and accepting of what has gone down in my life at the same time. I blame myself for not knowing what to do, ever, although my job is essentially to tell other people what to do. I blame myself for faltering in hope and optimism. I blame myself for being afraid.

In truth I don't know what happened in my life to make this all happen. I don't know how I got here. I don't know what I did or didn't do, what other people did or didn't do, what way the stars aligned to make it pan out this way. I mean, I know. I know. It's just not like I knew in the moment, or even in the months and years when choices were being made, roads chosen and discarded. 

I only knew what I was doing at the time. I only knew to follow my heart and to wish and to hope and to do the daily things we all do to get by. I trusted and believed and then I didn't. And that is how I got here, the short of it anyway.

I came home from this trip more unhinged than when I started and I was really hoping for the opposite outcome. I am completely untethered right now and I'm scared shitless. I am running out of coping skills and rationalizations and ideas and solutions. I am working too hard and not getting anywhere. 

I don't know how this will change or when or what succession of steps I'll take to make it happen, although every day I still do some things that feel like they might be the right things to do. I reach out, although I probably will not answer the phone or call, and I'm sorry but that's just my own weirdness not talking. 

At the same time it's ridiculous, really, how rich I am in friends. Quite specifically, several people have offered their homes to me while I figure stuff out and that has been amazing to me and so appreciated. And as an aside, two of these people are people I met on the INTERNET, and then became friends with in real life, so suck it, Internet haters. 

It's embarrassing, almost, to think about it. It's awesome and nice but it's embarrassing, and that is another issue of mine entirely.

It's like I can't trust myself to be in anyone else's environment. I can't be around another family, another couple, another situation. I need to be in this limbo. I need to be uncomfortable. Because I think that's what motivates me. I think that's what will make the changes happen if they are to happen at all.

I told you I have no idea how I got here. I don't like it either. It is an unpalatable to describe it and it's awkward and disappointing to live it, particularly when I'm supposed to have a tinsel-like glow at the moment.

Sorry. Holiday fail.

So all of this is to say that this current whatever this is is why it's so hard for me to write right now. This is why I'm not living, either, as effectively as I ought to be. And that's maybe because I don't know what I'm doing it for. I honestly don't know. And once again, because I'm thinking there must be some reason why I'm here, I came back from that trip knowing that I have to tear everything down and rebuild it so I can figure it out in the process. 

And I'm trying to figure out how to do some good at the same time, I really am. I am sick of myself, honestly and truly sick.

So every day I have to keep finding a reason to do this, even if it's just a self that I don't have a whole lot confidence in right now. And I really do have to keep trying to write it down, even though quite frankly it's the last thing I want to do. It's still really the only thing that helps.   

Now's the Time the Time is Now

This was written as part of Genie Alisa's Living Out Loud project for October.

Music is one of the most important things in my world and I've spent most of my life chasing the kind that moves me, makes me happy, makes me think, makes me feel better, or quite simply allows me to rock out - an essential component of my mental health. It's impossible for me to name one theme song, and I can really barely stop at less than ten. There have just been that many that fit at various times and seasons, for reasons that made perfect sense at the time and usually still do. I've latched on to some - Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls, Change by Blind Melon, To Live is To Fly by Cowboy Junkies, Coming Home by Cinderella - for a long damned time, such that they've become part of my eternal playlist. But when it comes to a theme song, what could really be more powerful than the one that includes the lyrics I've had as my Facebook "About Me" since I set up my page?

Don't answer that. Just know that these two lines from Led Zeppelin's Ramble On are as close to a lifelist as I've managed to get in the past few years that have held an almost unbearable amount of change:

"Now's the time the time is now

to sing my song."

You know, I'm not going around the world and I do not have to find my girl. I had, however, been that way - whatever way that was I was - very nearly (at least) ten years to the day, and it was getting really old. It was move forward or die, sing or go mute, live, or, predictably, die. At least inside.

I grew up on Zeppelin. My parents saw them live, a bit of trivia I held up proudly at parties in college where one of my clearest memories remains of my friend Joey jumping on his bed to "D'yer Maker," singing "Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go," etc. That was when I came to own them, learned all the words, really got that the bands I knew from my own era had stolen pretty much everything they had from them but oh well - all the good stuff has to start somewhere, right?

I moved on deeper into rock 'n roll, as deep as it may be possible for a person in a life like mine to get. I listened to Led Zeppelin continually, repeatedly, and when the time came where all the roads I'd taken had led me to a place I did not want to be in any way, shape or form, I found in Ramble On the lyrical permission I needed to grab onto something that gave me something to grab onto. It wasn't much - shouldn't seem like much, anyway, just an old song. But when you don't know what your original work is anymore, when the words run dry, I thank God that I've immersed myself in some really good stuff that other people have written and played over the years, to help me get back on track until I can work it out on my own.

It's a mantra now, in the car, in a meeting. "Now's the time the time is now." And sometimes I don't even get to the second line, because the first is enough - all I need to ground me, a weird, British rock zen koan.

But it really should be taken further, because if it's time for anything it's  to sing my song. I get it, even when it's hard, I get it.

Failing at beautiful

I can't do beautiful, not at all. I thought I could. I thought the forced lockstep of daily posts might work this month. With a theme like beautiful, how can you lose? (Like Smuckers, it has to be good. I am indoctrinated by advertising. No wonder everyone's obsessed with Mad Men. Them there's our society's ROOTS, people. God.)

I'm not feeling the beautiful right now, not inside, not out. Life is in some kind of back-to-school work mode. There's no ambrosia here, no soft lighting, no extra cheese, it's all presidential indoctrinating and scale buying and filling in calendar boxes with different colors of Sharpies to make it less painful and somewhat more high and climbing back on the elliptical of doom.

It is Wednesday, it is raining and we are far from November. The weather knows and reflects my pain. I did something yesterday that I'm proud of as part of this season of duty I'm embarking upon. It's something unbloggable even though it is wildly boring, doesn't involve anyone else besides me and isn't at all scandalous. It just has to do with the nuts and bolts of life, a situation that's needed to be handled for some time and now is on its way, anyway, I guess, I mean, if I filled the form in correctly and I fit the bill and oh WOW did I tell you hockey training camp started? And I know this? Because I'd much rather talk about hockey. I hate life management. There may be nothing that I'm worse at doing, besides algebra or chemistry. Life management is not my thing, to the point that I joke sometimes about needing an assistant or a minder but I'm not really joking, and it's somehow horrible but just the truth to say, "Life management: fail."

Seriously. I was thinking about this the other day as my "check engine soon" light came on again, how much I don't like chores, or errands even. The depths of denial I can sink to relative to car maintenance are epic, clearly, given the presence of the check engine light and the simultaneous illumination of the frightening red temperature gauge that I can't get checked until Friday.

And have I mentioned the testament to procrastination that is my hair? It's almost easier to ignore a check engine soon light than roots like these, one would think.

I don't even like the word "errands." I dated a person once who bounced out of bed on Saturday and was all, "Do you have any ERRANDS today?" like he was Ward Freaking Cleaver (or maybe, more to the point, Tim Gunn) and I was like, "No, I'm just going to continue with the sloth and the South Park reruns and my third cup of coffee, there are a few things I could do but I'll handle that shit some other time."

He judged me. He thought I was lazy, and he was probably right. I was just not running the incessant ticker of tasks through my brain that he was through his, all the time, and also, if I have to mail something, generally speaking I'll do it on my way to wherever else I need to go. I'm a mesher, not so much a checker-offer, which may be bad but it's too late to turn back now. He was much more productive than I was, shockingly enough, I'll admit it. I'm still more fun, but fun is much funner when you're not anxious and lately my lack of attention to detail is causing nothing but anxiety.

I don't even like stopping for gas, do you know how insane that is? It's such a pain in the ass, I put it off and put it off and then get all vengeful and rageful when I have to do it. I don't know how I happened either, stepping outside of myself and observing myself objectively.

I know this is insane. I know this is not beautiful. And it makes no sense, given that if you give me an article to edit I'll tear it apart up and down and red pen it within an inch of its life and I know that afterwards it's better. There are some details I am fully capable of dominating and I think the trick is to transfer that mindset and that - I'll own it - skill to the other pieces of my world that can so easily cave in from lack of attention.

And I'm finally to a point where I'm making changes that I know are important and may someday result in me being in a better logistical mental and physical place than I am currently, a place where I can bag my extreme focus on the day-to-day stuff I'm not doing and open up to some of the larger things I want to accomplish (that will themselves require attention to detail and some planning and logistics in addition to the creative aspects that are my main priority. Oh WHY must I be so allergic to this stuff?)

Something just happened at the end of the summer, something I can't quantify and won't because this is already boring enough. The season turned (externally, anyway - why as a society do we like to race along to the next thing before the calendar catches up? It's one of my least favorite things about this world I inhabit) and I had a mini-crisis that resulted in much looking around and evaluation. There's the drumbeat of an upcoming birthday that for some reason is on my mind a lot and you know, sometimes I think too much but this time, this was necessary. This is for a good end.

So what I'm doing is purely forcing the making of appointments and the accompanying phone calls which are first-world torture for a person like me who has developed an unreasonable hatred for the telephone. I have lists of things I don't care about at all but that I know I need to do, some stuff I've delayed for practical reasons, other things that scare the shit out of me but have to be handled. And if I told you some of the things that fit this latter category? You would either feel sorry for me or want to call in a professional to reach into my head and rearrange it because some of these things are quite normal and do not seem as unmanageable as I can manage to make them. I would give you examples but that kind of discussion involves a drink I don't allow myself in the morning.

It is just me on this trip, when it comes down to it. It brings up all of my worst stuff - lonely stuff, anxious stuff, stressed-out self-pity stuff. It makes me want to isolate myself, mostly because I feel like I have nothing good to talk about at times like these. But I have it on good intuitive authority that if I spend a few months getting my shit together and setting myself up for the next chapter maybe those feelings won't feel so bad on the other side. Maybe there are long-term problems I really can solve. And if I'm wrong, well, I can't be wrong this time.

drafts of ideas and ideas of drafts

I've wanted to write about a bunch of things this week, like...

*How I missed my fourth blogiversary because I thought it was tax day and actually it was April 10 and when I sat down on tax day to write about how I've been doing this for four years I got totally exhausted by my taxes and the four years concept and didn't finish it.

*How I despise the Susan Boyle hype and whereas everyone I seem to encounter on every single Web site I frequent feels awe-inspired by her courageous turn on that crappy Simon Cowell show the whole thing just made me pissed off and - again - exhausted. With all this exhaustion I may well soon be dehydrated Lindsay Lohan-style and need to go off for a rest at an undisclosed location in somewhere like Idaho or Montana.

*How much I only find joy in teaching right now and in the things I feel like I'm doing right as far as that's concerned. It's the best and most significant professional experience I've ever had. I'd really like it if other areas of my life would catch up but I don't really know if that'll happen anytime soon so yeah, exhaustion, dehydration, etc.

*I don't know. Something. Have I mentioned I have seven chins now, at least? I'm doing a Biggest Loser-style competition at work which is actually going pretty well. My knees have hurt lately to a degree that they ought not, so I'm focusing on fixing that because I'm not ready for a scooter yet.

*How I'm doing this March of Dimes walk next Saturday and I finally got my ass in gear and sent an e-mail to many people I know this weekend to ask for donations towards it and how much I really hated doing that but you know, I've bought a bunch of stuff from people (not most of the people I asked, of course, and this is really not the point anyway but this is how it's going lately, I start writing something and get all paranoid and weird about how people will react and so I embark on some annoying, bulky parenthetical statement and get all dehydrated again and need to stop for a snack or so I tell myself and don't finish the fucking post so whatthehellEVER) over the years, like COOKIES and WRAPPING PAPER and decorative GOODS and whatnot so one walk solicitation in that time, eh, not so bad. I don't know if anyone else will donate besides a couple very generous people, actually, and that has to be ok. I just care about the cause. I know it's hit or miss. I'm just happy to be doing it.

*How after four years, or maybe nine, depending how and where I start my count, I finally feel angry and not so much sad anymore about a particular person's impact on my life, just ANGRY AS ALL HOLY HELL and how whereas this is probably good and even freeing in some ways, my God is it exhausting, if not terribly dehydrating. It's crazy how deep you can bury things and how reliable the grief stages are no matter how long they take to work themselves out, and anyone who has any feelings about how this is too much too late can go shit in his or her hat as far as I'm concerned. Also I hate Facebook. (This one is the big one, by the way. This is the unwritable story that I have to write right now or I'll freak out just short of dying and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it. It's driving me insane. Notice? Thanks.)

*How live-Tweeting the Sound of Music with one of the funniest women I know is a perfectly valid way for a no-longer-practicing Catholic to spend Easter Sunday night. It's stuff like that that's making me laugh out loud at the moment, girl can't help it.

*I started researching international adoption this weekend. Me, with the limited funds and the roommates and the whatevers and wherefores. Vietnam is still restricted which makes me sad. Hopefully in three years when I'm ready it'll all be straightened out.

I don't know, it's just the plodding along right now. I'm still very grateful for good things and actually spending a lot of time immersed in music and things that make me happy, but I'm edgy and agitated inside and outwardly just...whatever, and I honestly (really) don't want to be comforted out of it or told it'll pass, because sometimes that's how I feel when shifts occur. Anybody with a platitude at the ready pretty much gets a nice cup of STFU at this point and it's nothing personal, which is my personal dismissive platitude of choice at the moment. Whatever this phase is, it's so not pathological or in need of medication, cause I've been there in recent years and that was way different. This is actually kind of motivational. I feel like I just woke up and looked around after I was asleep for years and people had been stealing my stuff and toilet papering my house and I just was all lalala about it forever and now I'm not and have my hand on the receiver ready to call 911. It's interesting. I don't have a tremendous amount to offer to anyone right now, especially anyone needy or whiny or passive-aggressive and I don't even feel guilty about it, which is refreshing too. I don't want to make complicated plans. I don't want to be excessively in charge of anything. I don't want to have to work on any relationships right now. If it doesn't flow and isn't reasonably enjoyable, I don't want it. I'm done. Sorry, wrong number, try again. How about never? Is never good for you?

Yet. And still. I still have pretty low expectations in the face of what I've found are pretty extreme ones from most people (really, some people need to slow their roll big time, I'm just sayin) and I'm trying to work that out, but really? I'm just here. That's all.  And no matter how this sounds, I really am ok with that. It's spring cleaning on the most basic level.

I don't know what this life will look like next year but I hope it's different and I feel that it will be. Sometimes I'm excited about that but mostly I'm just nervous still. I feel like I torched things completely recently, some of it against my will, some of it with my full cooperation, and now it's rebuilding time. I fucked up my life so badly starting a decade ago and now that that gigantic error has shrunk down to a new avatar with another woman in it, I don't have many or any of those chunks of time left to play with. It has to get better, at least as much as it's within my control. The things I want, the things I feel like I need to feel more satisfied, they're not that huge (who am I kidding? They're gigantic) but at the same time they're not anything you can pick up off of a shelf or get in a comment and you certainly can't find them on the Internet.

It may be funny around here again soon. No promises. Meanwhile, here's a monkey. I love monkeys, and the Big Picture. Also, I'm seeing this lady tonight. She's amazing.

 

Giving up Lent for Lent - or How It's Not the 40-day Shred

My friend on Ash Wednesday: My friend is an atheist and she said she was giving up sugar for Lent.
Me: Does she know what Lent is?
Friend: Yeah. I told her she was actually just going on a diet.

I try so hard, so very very hard every day, not to judge, but that is just silly. It's the silliest thing I've heard among a number of comments I've heard this past week about what thing to give up for Lent, whether it's the usual chocolate or swearing or something more of-the-moment like Facebook. (Sorry, I think giving up Facebook for Lent is silly too.)

I was raised Catholic, significantly, seriously so, and I don't practice anymore beyond the fact that I still own a rosary and use repetitive Hail Marys on occasion when I'm really freaked out or need comforting. Because I don't practice, I DON'T GIVE UP anything for Lent. I'm totally aware that it's happening, but I don't engage with it on a daily sacrificial level. Because guess what? It is not a fitness challenge or an internet meme - it's a religious observance and a spiritual practice, arguably the most serious in the Christian calendar. And while I don't practice Catholicism anymore, I have much respect for the genuinely faithful people who use this time as an attempt to better themselves either by giving something up (more traditionally) or working more mindfully on improving something about themselves.

My strong feelings about this are tied up in the deepest stuff of my life and my heart, namely my grandparents and how seriously they took Lent, among all the things they took seriously about living a committed Catholic life. My remaining attachments to the church - which are many and varied in my heart in spite of my political and ethical differences of opinion with the Vatican - have to do with them, for the most part, and the way they lived their lives in the most faithfully Catholic of ways, on a daily basis and in times of religious observance. One did not eat much on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, as they were fasting days, and certainly not any meat. There was no consuming meat on any Friday in their house, because when they were young you didn't eat meat on Friday, all year long. It was the night for little glass bowls of egg and tuna salad, for toast and soup and cottage cheese. It was a time to pray more and to go to church more. It was serious Jesus business, it was, and just reading this I cry because they were just that good, and that good to me. I cry a little bit because this memory makes me wish I still believed.

It was so not the life I have now, the life where I eat steak on Ash Wednesday.

The past I lived and the present I'm struggling through combined with my weird hybrid belief system make me cranky about people grabbing onto Lent as a time to shred with Jillian Michaels (Yes it's 40 days. No, it's not the same.) or to whine to their friends about how hard it is to give up some first world convenience or the other. I'm sorry. I'm a total Facebook crackhead like many of my brothers and sisters in Internet addiction, but giving it up is no kind of real sacrifice. It's irritating, sure, because who in the hell wants to miss out on 40 days of fake pokes and little green plants and wall posts going "Hey. What's up?" But a real, true sacrifice? I think not. Ask a kid in Darfur, loser.

I'm sorry I'm so rude about this, but I rarely rant anymore and this is just...GETTING TO ME. It's driving me to caps, because people just don't seem to get it. Lent is supposed to commemorate the spiritual crisis of the Christian MESSIAH and, oh, SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, undertaken as he wandered in the desert for 40 days. Call me crazy, but if I don't believe in that and I latch onto it as an excuse to lower my cholesterol or look better in a bridesmaid dress? That's just creepy. And yeah, in my lapsed Catholic way, maybe even a bit karmically frightening.And even if I do believe in Jesus and the benefit of a spiritual test, I have to wonder if giving up a social networking service is good enough.

I guess I look at it in a context of other religions and what I wouldn't do. I wouldn't borrow elements of Ramadan that might work for me, or Passover, because I don't know shit about either one of those important holidays and quite frankly, they're none of my business. They are not my cultural practices so until invited to participate I just need to observe.

There is so much I need to work on in my life, so much I need to improve and lose and gain, weight and attitude and brain cells and what have you. If I'm going to do it I need to to tie it to what makes sense for me and my life. If that isn't Christianity on a daily basis - which right now it's not - I need to keep my hands off the traditions associated with it, mind my business and head to therapy or Weight Watchers or the gym.

And in my peculiar, particular catechism, an atheist wanting to give up sugar needs to do it without any help from God, because - well - to attach it to Him, for them, just misses the point.

First Day

I'm going to try to post more in the coming months, and probably will move the blog to somewhere or something else like I've been threatening to do for two years now, just because I think it's time to put down the sippy cup and get out of my toddler bed where this content management thing is concerned. But for now this is where I'll stay because let's face it I'm a lazy bitch and dude, it's cold outside. How hard can I be expected to work?

I've been reading all kinds of resolution-y posts and e-mails, round-ups of memes for the first day of the first month of the year, and I really feel that I ought to participate in some way. Every time I read them, though, I just get overwhelmed. Which one do I do? Do I do the one where each resolution starts with a different letter of the alphabet? Assign them all a color? Jesus I don't know.

I didn't have a very mentally positive year last year and my hope this year is that I do. I want to be in better charge of my situation. I want to organize my life and get it in a shape I actually like and admire. I don't want to be capital-K KRAZY all the time, running around meeting odd deadlines but accomplishing nothing.

Today I went to my meditation group's new year's day gathering, a most outstanding fire ceremony where we wrote the stuff down that we want to get rid of first and put it in the fireplace and then our intentions and values for the new year and burned those up too. My group is populated with a number of intensely beautiful inside and out Persian women who constantly astound me with their way of expressing themselves, their way of walking in the world. I feel instantly better when I walk into this house, when I sit in this circle with other people who are open and true about what they contend with in this life and their utter commitment to making it better.

This was the best possible place I could have been today. My paper with the stuff I wanted to incinerate was packed with scribble. There is so much I want to let go of and break off and torch. Putting it literally into the fire and watching it crumble felt so good. My intentions for the year were a little bit harder to articulate. There are several things I want to do, priorities I want to get in order. I might write a bit more about them this weekend as they shake out in my mind.

Happy 2009, anyway. I'm glad it's here.

The day after the day that sucked.

I'm good, friends. My friends. My friends of which none of whom are plumbers or hockey players or even hockey moms, although I can assure you that if I had a friend who was a hockey mom she'd be the most bad-ass hockey mom in all the land, with the orange slices and the juice boxes and a mean slapshot.

Those are the only kind of hockey mom friends I need. And I really can't wait for November 4, to put all of this ridiculosity to rest. CNN played a montage of the amount of times both of the candidates said "Joe the plumber" or some variation thereof today, several times over, and it occurred to me then as it's occurred to me often lately that we are a nation on the verge. Or maybe a nation that's there, just there, repeatin' the hockey and the plumber and the change and the alarming Three Stooges' "heh?" tic that McCain has over and over until we're all just going to one day explode in a huge global warming hug from God.

I hope it's a good hair day. I'd like to go out on one of those - just not today, which is one, so thanks.

Yesterday was a bad day, a bad hair day and a post-BlogHer, post-trip post-mortem of a day. And I have to say that writing through it is one of those things that I use this space for, or at least I did before and I'm trying to again, regardless of how I think it may bum some people out or make them think I'm crazy. I honestly don't really care at this point. I'm interested in feeling better and part of that is writing it down. When I don't I'm worse and when I do I'm better. It's an elemental part of me being better than I get when I'm down in the hole.

It's also really aggravating me that I can't write about the routine of my days right now, because I sat on a panel on Monday and told a room full of people that it is one of those things that I consider unbloggable. But I'll tell you one thing - when you're finally-once-and-for-all grieving an old loss that's been a long and hard time going, and you're in a weird transitional time, and you're freaking out about your weight (for reasons of health and comfort as well as the desire to fit into any sort of clothing) AND photos of you from high school (AWKWARD, and not the kind where Jennifer Garner goes "Oh, I was TOTALLY the ugly duckling in my high school," which always makes me want to punch a wall) are popping up on Facebook, you need a better environment than the one you are currently in, when you is me.

Just sayin'. Because that is all I can say. I really wish I could say more. I really, really, really wish I could say more.

But I can't. Because I have to pee and I have to catch a shuttle bus to my car. That is what I need to do. And that involves putting one foot in front of the other, which is actually working out today.

And everything around me stays the same.

There's a lot to say about the weekend, the trip from Maryland to Boston to Maryland and back home to my bed again, and I know I can't really adequately explain it all. I'm really tired. My mind and heart and body are tired. There were things I needed to experience in Massachusetts, things I'd sort of expected but not really, plus three days of intense driving across strange highways and connection with people who in many cases I knew but had never met before.

Massachusetts broke my heart a long time ago, not on purpose, just as a player in a drama it knew nothing of. And this weekend in addition to going there to see amazing women whose writing inspires me, and who work on special projects with me, I ended up meeting up with someone who lives there who has meant a lot to me for a long time because apparently we had a few final loose ends to tie up or cut.

It was fine. It was low-key. I ran my mouth as I am prone to doing. I tried to make it all make sense for everyone, because that's also what I do. I felt someone's pain whose pain I am able to feel like few others, I tried to give solutions and really felt like what I was thinking was right. It actually felt strangely easy at the time.

Then I got into a cab at the end of the night and laid my head against the glass and vaulted immediately into another episode of helping a frustratingly clueless and unmotivated cab driver find his way in a city in which I do not live in which ostensibly he does, when I really just wanted to be and let someone else who could PLEASE know what they're doing for once take the wheel. (Could one cab driver have a GPS system, in his brain or on his dashboard, please?) And in the spaces in between that aggravation I felt a certain feeling of not feeling which I was relieved to think would hold. I did - as I always try to do - what I thought was the right thing.

The next day I drove, hopelessly lost, out of Boston and finally onto the gorgeous roads of central Massachusetts south through Connecticut and New York, finally into Pennsylvania and onto home. I felt peaceful, and relieved.

Then, today was a mess. I've been crying all day, off and on. I had another big event yesterday with some of the the same people from the weekend and hundreds more, which was great and exhausting at the same time. I think it was too much stimulation. Even though it was good to see everyone, it was too much to deal with my unsettled heart on top of it all.

Barenaked Ladies has a lyric in what is probably my favorite song of theirs, "I wake up scared/I wake up strange/I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever gonna change" and that's how I woke up today. I shrunk into myself, into a withering feeling of loneliness, of finally having let something huge go for who knows why.

There's no reason for my heart to be unsettled, except for every reason that anyone's ever is. I went for - and got - that aggravating "c" word, closure, on this trip. I was told by smart and caring people that that was what I needed, for real. I knew deep down that it was what I was doing this for, that it would come about if I approached it in the right way. I needed to be an adult. I needed to let go. I needed to accept that there were things I had done and said that weren't helpful, and that in order to move on, to have any shot at a better emotional life, that this was what I needed to do.

I know this is true. I am well aware of my delusions and blind spots, of how I clung to the wrong thing for so many years, looked after the closed door when supposedly God was opening a window as it's often suggested. But the thing is, really, that when I'm completely honest and unfiltered, I'm tired of closure. I'm tired of trying to resolve things and make them right. I'm tired of trying to be happy on my own, of accepting that every road that has led me back to a room by myself with a pile of resolutions is the right one.There are days when, even though the basic premise of Buddhism is that everything must be let go and released because that's just the way it is, I cannot let go of one more thing.

This sounds like whining and maybe it is. Maybe at my core I am angst-ridden and needy and ridiculous. But I don't want to let things go so much as I want to grab onto them with both hands at this point, of love and joy and connection. There is so much lack in the world, uncertainty and fear and garbage of the highest order that I want something beautiful. At the very least I want to stop having to give stuff back, and maybe I am specifically daring to tal about love here.

And what is beautiful - the most beautiful - thing about healing this relationship that I dealt with in Boston is that it was angry and acrimonious and it isn't anymore. It was really easy to work that part out. We were able to communicate with each other and put some things right that hadn't been for awhile, and again, some of them my fault to a degree. I think that was good. I can't say it was joyful, on any level, but at least it was better than the alternative.

So the crying today, I don't know. The serious tears that came out of nowhere maybe meant that something was excising itself for a final time, or at least I hope so - that the last vestiges of hope for an old feeling that had planted a perennial garden of sorts in my mind and heart were leaving me in salt water as they've done so many times before but never for good.

I still hate it, I can't lie. I can't say I understand it really, that it isn't one of the great and terrible mysteries of my life. And I wish that I could be more gracious about everything on so many levels. Someday I will be, I'm sure, but maybe not when I'm this deep in the end of it, when I'm not working so hard to be better off than I still am.

Luckily, this is burned into my brain. Maybe there's some kind of hope.

"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh for awhile anyway

There's a saying in my family, a family that is full of them (on both sides I might add.):

"He's as happy as if he didn't have good sense."

I'm from Maryland and one of the great loves of my life is the true Maryland/DC old-style dialect. It's one of the reasons I love this statement, because it challenges the limits of grammar in ways that I enjoy, it doesn't really make sense, and it brings me slamming right back down to my roots in the best of ways.

Internet, I'm as happy as if I didn't have good sense.

I don't know why. I don't really have a particular reason to be happy. I'm still kind of a mess. I have so many bills due, including a storage unit man who calls me when I'm like a day late, and a degree I need to finish in ways I feel ill-equipped to handle. I'm dealing with some demanding personalities in my day-to-day and I'm feeling stressed about that. I don't have a boyfriend. My family and friends who are that close have their requisite challenges and issues. There's a lot I'd change.

But for now, in this space in my life, I feel happy. I feel like I'm acquainted with my lighter side, and I can't tell you what a relief that is after so many months of not knowing how to find it. I'm communicating fairly well. I'm handling things that would have set me spinning out just a few months ago. I'm enjoying putting together cute outfits again, whereas I'd slipped into a mode of "various combinations of black and gray" that I thought were just a reflection of being strapped for time but now looking back I'm not sure. It feels good to feel good when I leave the house, and I don't have to spend hundreds of dollars to do it.

I'm expecting a good weekend up here at BlogHer Boston and a great day on Monday at BlogHer DC. I feel really lucky to have found a good community, and to keep getting involved in things that inspire me.

On the way up here today, a really terrible, traffic-ridden drive, I listened to Patty Griffin's "Children Running Through" cd a few times through, and I cried when I heard "Heavenly Day." I love this song so much, and not just because she wrote it for her dog.

It might be a lot to ask, but I'd like to add tomorrow to the chain here. Wish me luck.