Brave New World

It’s been a year since I put anything here.  A very eventful year.  I don’t know why I quit writing, but that maybe I was tired.  I’ve been tired a lot in the last few years.  Mostly tired, actually.  I’m tired now.  I just don’t know what all to do about it.

I’m not going to go into detail about what has happened over the last year but to say that I got promoted, started a relationship, lost the relationship, failed an interview for a new job, had some success with the work band, and got down to a reliable size 8.  Reliable.

The relationship was a huge learning experience.  I learned that if someone talks about the way they have treated other people in a way that makes you cringe, that is a warning – they are one bad experience away from talking to you the exact same way.  I learned that I do not have commitment issues – that when I am in, I am all in.  I learned that I can fall in love.  I learned that living in good faith means accepting responsibility for my actions – past and present – and all of the consequences even when it wasn’t my fault or choice or desire or intent.  I learned that being right does not exempt me from my oath to live in good faith.  Just because I didn’t ruin something doesn’t mean I get off scott free for being careless.

I was careless.  Or I think I was.  I’ve been trying to find out for sure, but I’ve had the hardest time of it.  I think the universe doesn’t want me to know.  But that is another story for another time.

I’ve forgiven myself for my role in the dissolution of this relationship.  I’ve forgiven him too – it wasn’t just one party’s fault.  I don’t know if I can be friends though.  I struggle with that part.  There are aspects to him that I would overlook as a lover but that I find difficult to tolerate as a friend.  Funny how that works.

I will be re-engaging with the rest of the world however.  I will not stay knocked down by this one.  I will get back on the metaphorical horse.  There is a little bit of work I need to do first though.

Last week I went to a week long continuing education session at a monastery in Santa Barbara.  It was intense.  Part of the curriculum involved regular journaling.  I haven’t journaled regularly in many years.  I’d forgotten how helpful it is in working through the nonsense stories I’ve created in my head.  Tonight I want to write a little about one of those stories.

One of the exercises in one of the sessions involved sitting across from another person – an acquaintance at best – and telling them what I deserve out of life.  To most people this would probably seem like an easy enough task.  They deserve to be loved and to have a happy life and to have a good job and a secure future and a family and a partner and all that jazz.  But for me this exercise was so difficult that I almost broke down.  I almost started crying in front of this veritable acquaintance – blubbering about how I don’t deserve anything.  Which is bullshit.  I know it is bullshit, but it doesn’t change the way I feel.

So I started trying to analyze why I feel this way about myself.  Why is it so difficult for me to believe that I deserve to have a good and happy life?  Why only me?  I easily accept and frequently remind my friends of all the good things they deserve, what makes me unique?  During the session we talked about the way we react to the “lessons” or “mores” passed on by family and friends, through music and TV and movies, in school, and through books.  I’m talking about the rules we create around our realities – where we decide, based on whatever feedback we’ve received, whether or not we are pretty or smart or clever or funny.  The rules that tell us what we can and can’t accomplish, what we are good at and what we fail at, and why we shouldn’t try.  These are internal rules that may or may not (usually not) have any basis in reality.  But we abide by them as though they are gospel.  So that when somebody says something that challenges those rules (“You’re really pretty!”) our response is to reject the challenging statement outright (“no I’m not”) and then deflect the speaker in order to avoid any other challenges to our reality.  I was thinking about my rules – the ones I’d inherited from the church and my family and my peer group.  I’ve already rejected all of the church oriented rules.  I’ve also written over most of my family inspired rules.  The one where my ideas never work?  Gone.  The one where I’m only pretty if I have long blonde hair that coil in neat ringlets?  Gone.  The one where I’m fat?  Gone.  The one where I’m lazy?  Eh, mostly gone.  Still working on that one.  As for my peer group, I don’t know that they ever had all that much influence over me.  I’ve spent most of my life abstaining from whatever celebration or social event or holiday that my peer group was focusing on for that week.  I’m used to being something of an outcast – which means that now, that I’m not really an outcast at all – it is easy for me to take the solo road.  Natural even.

This left me wondering where my rules come from.  What is it that has shaped my world so that I don’t feel like I deserve anything good in my life?  Then it occurred to me – the Shit.  All of the Shit that has happened to me – from my abusive marriage to my familial abandonment to my stalker to my car accidents to my rape to the death of my mentor – even the loss of my most recent relationship – all of that Shit that has happened to me with no real reason or direct cause.  I have had all of these fairly terrible things happen to me – many of them absolutely randomly, with no input or causation from me – that have had a very noticeable impact on my self image.  I joke all the time that with my mis-fortune I must have been Hitler’s Gardner in a previous life.  Even people who have a much more self-determined concept of life tend to agree.  It is almost comical the way that I attract bad mojo – even and especially when I am trying my hardest to be positive and strong.  So much of it rolls off my back (the mouse in the house, the furnace that caught on fire, the flooding in the garage – a small fraction of February’s adventures) that it isn’t until I start keeping track that the sheer weight of the Shit becomes apparent.

Generally speaking I don’t whine about the Shit.  I don’t call my friends and complain.  I don’t go asking for other people to handle my Shit for me.  I don’t blame anyone.  I just deal with it as best I can.  But I internalize it too.  I wonder what kind of person must I be to have so many bad things happen.  Just how terrible I am as a person to deserve all of this Shit.  Because I must deserve it, right?  That is what our parents and our religions and our schools and our friends teach us – that bad things happen to us as a result of us being bad – doing things wrong – treating others poorly – just not being a good person.  Therefore the mere existence of “the Shit” means that I must be a bad person.  And bad people don’t deserve to have good things in their lives.  Bad people don’t deserve anything but bad things.  This was my struggle.  I know I am not a bad person.  I work really hard to help people and do right by the environment and live my life in good faith.  I cannot both live in Good Faith and be a bad person.  But the Shit keeps happening.  So I reject the part where I know I am a good person and I accept the part where I deserve the Shit and round and round we go.

The thing is that I don’t deserve the Shit.  It just happens.  It will probably continue to happen.  And I still won’t deserve it.  The question is whether or not I can believe that I don’t deserve it.  If I can actually believe that I deserve good things.  Not know – knowing is easy.  Believe.  Believing is something far more difficult than knowing.

I think this warrants another trip to the therapist.  I’ve come so far in the last ten years – I like myself these days.  I feel like I have a lot of positive things happening for me, and I’m in a generally stable place emotionally.  Generally.  But I still don’t believe I deserve to be happy.  And that is a problem, because it isn’t going to happen until I believe it can.

I want to enter my next relationship with the belief that I deserve to be happy, that I deserve to not be lonely, that I deserve to be loved.  I think that was the piece that was missing for me this last time.  I hid it well, but that lack of faith in my own deserving-ness is what caused me to be careless – to (even if it was in my own mind) put another person at risk.

Another day I’ll write about the sameness of belief and reality – even if the belief is not reality.  Not tonight.  Tonight I want to think about finding a counselor.  And a dance class.  Time for this girl to find her groove.

Habit Forming

My grandfather was a work addict.  I remember when he fell from the roof of our barn and shattered his foot.  He was in a wheelchair for almost a month while they did the surgeries and inserted the pins and then waited to see if it would heal right.

It mostly did.  He limped for the rest of his life though.

It was less than a week after his last surgery before he had figured how to get that wheelchair to the factory where he worked and then how to get around the factory in the wheelchair.  This was before the age of ADA, and I know that what he did was far from easy.  But he could not not work.  That would be insanity.

I never figured that I had that kind of work ethic.  Or addiction.  I like to lounge around and read and write and play music and think.  I like time off.  I like five hour trips to the gym and spending a day exploring trails on foot or on a bike.  I like those things so much that in the past I chose my jobs based on how much time I would have to do the things I enjoy.

Somewhere along the way things changed.  I still love all those things that are not work.  I crave them.  But now, work comes first.  Ok, so that sounds like a no-brainer.  Of course work comes first.  Bills to pay, things to get done, all that nonsense.  I’m not talking about that.  I’ve always been good about going to work every day that I was supposed to and doing all the tasks that I was supposed to do.  This is a different kind of first.  This is a first that is before everything else – before food or sleep or exercise or friends or dog or family.  It has been this all-absorbing totally consuming experience.

It has not been pleasant.

Apart from the physical manifestations of stress – hives being the prime example (it is always a joy to realize that you have once again gotten into a situation where you have become allergic to your life) – I slipped into some very self-destructive patterns.  Not exercising.  Drinking ridiculous amounts of booze.  And by ridiculous I mean much more than what I usually consider heavy drinking.  Sleeping pills.  Uppers.  Downers.  Everything else that is required to feign normalcy when nothing is normal.

I used to tell people that I don’t have an addictive personality.  That is a lie.  I do not have the kind of addictive personality that gets hooked on cigarettes or drugs or even alcohol.  But I do get hooked on behaviors.  Like exercise.  Like work.  Like picking at my fingers until they bleed when I am stressed.  And when I get hooked on a behavior that disrupts my positive addictions then I fall back on the superficial – on the chemicals and the additives and the supplements and whatever else will feed my physical ability to pursue my new addiction.

For the last several months – since June, really, I’ve been working some ridiculous hours.  And it isn’t the kind of work where you do some task, and then you wait or you take a break or you regroup and then do another task.  This is the kind of work where there are three or four tasks going on simultaneously, and any pause in the one is filled by effort on another.  Lunch is a cup of soup at the desk.  There are no breaks.  I get up to either pull something off the printer or run something upstairs.  It got to a point where my deadlines were so tight and the meetings scheduled on top of each other and my general workload was so heavy that I didn’t have time to go to the restroom.

It is a crazy feeling to need to pee but have to pass the bathroom because there is a huge group of VIPs waiting for you to come do your presentation, and you don’t see a break in your schedule for at least another 2 hours.  And I do not just mean crazy as in strange.  I mean crazy as in insane.

Two weeks ago I hit my limit.  I’d been sick on and off for over six weeks.  Two days in a row I was trying so hard to get all caught up and to not miss any deadlines that I sat in my office chair for almost 6 hours straight before I got up, raced to the bathroom, the breakroom and then back again to continue what I was doing.  And three days that week I fell asleep in my car – while it was parked – because I was so exhausted, but I couldn’t go home just yet – I had more work to do.  Two weeks ago I decided that drinking myself numb every night, going to bed at midnight, and then getting up at 5 and trying to be productive was no longer working for me and that something needed to change.

Last week I started my new habits by not drinking alone, going to be by 10 every night, making sure the dog got walked, and still getting some exercise for myself every day.  It wasn’t five hours at the gym.  There were no endorphin rushes, no sense of accomplishment.  And I still felt depressed and stressed and generally unhappy.  But I didn’t have a migraine.  I didn’t fall asleep in my car.  I was ridiculously productive.  And I had enough energy that when the weekend finally rolled around I was able to work on my thesis – good work, not just a couple of paragraphs that I know I will need to either edit or totally rewrite later.  That was enough reward for me to decide to try to do it again this week.  No drinking alone, no sleeping meds, a little exercise every day, and going to bed early.

I’m determined to not let myself be derailed again.  I want this new pattern to become an addiction.  I want to need to not drink during the week and to go to bed early and to get my exercise.  And I want to learn to step away from work a bit too.  I want to stop working through lunch and sitting for three and four and five hours straight.  I want some perspective and some balance.  And if I have to drop some of the smaller balls at my job to make that happen, then gravity can do its thing.  I doubt they will fire me for it.

And if they did, well, it isn’t my dream job anyway.  I mean, it is ok now, and I could like it if things were a little different.  But for now, it is what it is.

A paycheck.

It’s time to make some new habits.

Like the one now, where I step away from the computer and go practice my guitar for a while.

Once Upon a Time…

Once upon a time I was dangerous.  Once upon a time I trained myself to fight everything and anything that came up against me.  Once upon a time I thought up ways to hurt others.  Once upon a time.

I am searching for a new motivation.  For years I lived off of anger.  I was so angry with the world around me and at the things that had happened to me.  And I was angry with myself.  Then one day I woke up and the anger was gone.  I floundered a bit and began to punish myself for the floundering.  I punished myself for not being as strong as I wished I was, for not being as self-disciplined as I thought appropriate, for not being as pretty or as smart or as charming as I thought I could be.  And I fed on that punishment.  It was my motivation.  I’m tired of punishment.  I will not do it anymore.  I have no anger.  I have nothing to punish.

I am unmotivated.

I have attached my motivation to negative emotions for so long that now that I have decided that it will no longer be that way I don’t know how to motivate myself.  I don’t know how to make myself do the things I need to do.  I’m so tempted to go back to the punishment – but I hated it so much.  It made me so unhappy.

I don’t know how to be ok with myself.  I don’t know how to be happy.  I look back on my life and there were only a few years in my childhood that were not difficult or painful.  Not that having a difficult childhood is a bad thing.  I am not complaining.  The path that has taken me to where I am has been an incredible one, and I have few regrets.  Ok maybe that one night in New Orleans.  But only that.  But I have never learned how to be happy.  Every moment of happiness came with strings – kind of like laying in the guillotine.  Sure it may be comfortable, but that blade is going to drop any moment.

I am gradually trying to work my way back into the martial arts.  Something tells me that it is the answer to the question I am trying to ask.  It is blatantly apparent how much my body has changed, and I resent aging.  I resent surgery.  I resent all the injuries that have compromised my strength.  And I wonder how I overcome it.  I don’t doubt that it can be overcome.  Martial artists do not live much past 40 if they do not figure out how to overcome the repercussions of their choices.  Not as active martial artists they don’t.

Which brings me to the question – what am I?

I used to be dangerous.  Today I was in a meeting and I surprised myself by how much I knew about the topic.  Last Sunday I tried to remember my kata and found that I could only reliably perform half of them.  It was as though I could not connect my body to my brain.  My body knew what to do, but my brain… it wasn’t sure what time zone it was it.  There is no reconciliation.

For a long time I tied my identity to my ability to defend myself – and anyone I cared about.  I would still probably be a pain in the ass in a fight – though I am not the fighter I was.  But it is not my identity.  Nor am I a scholar.  Nor a public servant.  Nor a wife or mother or lover.

I am lonely, but not in the bad way.  I find that I crave solitude.  And I am a little unnerved by the strength of that craving.  My friend tells me that this is a sign of change.  I can taste the change.  It is in everything I do, everything I try and every time I fail.  And I fail a lot.

But what I wish I knew is what comes after?  Change… and then what?  Because I want to know how much energy to invest.  How much time to allocate.

Or maybe I should just give in and rejoin a dojo.  It would be beautiful to work at a single identifiable goal again.

S O S

If you were to ask me the things that I found most distressing about my life, my first and foremost answer would be the fact that I am female.  There are a lot of strong women out there – women who know how to use their female-ness to their advantage.  I am not one of them.  I will never have children.  I will probably never have a long-term relationship.  Everything about me and my life choices is antithetical to my biology, and frankly, the biology is in the way.  If a sex change wasn’t both extremely expensive and socially challenging, I’d have done it long ago.  Because the only thing I’ve gotten from this whole female gig is a stupidly high tolerance for pain – and really, that is actually more trouble than it is worth.

I joke about my karmic unbalance – the fact that it is not unusual for me to face more problems in both quantity and severity in a month than most people face in a year.  And I have gotten used to that.  True, I have periods of stability – times where I forget how things can go – and then I get reminded.  How about surgery the week that you are finishing your master’s thesis, a week after the worst flu in two years, and three weeks after a debilitating three day episode of abdominal pain?  Oh, and let’s make sure you remember that you don’t get paid for any of those days you took off, and that your insurance is both expensive and minimal and that you will undoubtedly be spending the next two years paying this all off.  Remember that.  Also remember that there are rats in your attic, that you lit your hand on fire two weeks ago – in part because it is slowly going numb, and that you have both hives and a now-chronic migraine.  Oh, and you haven’t had a decent workout in over a week.  I’m going to be late on almost all of my bills next month – I did not plan for both a vacation – the first real “you do not have to think about work/school” vacation in 5 years – and surgery to happen at the same time.

I’m having this dual response to everything that is going on right now.  Part of me is all “you can do it – it will all be ok.”  And the other part of me is all “die.  just give up and die.”  I’m trying to ignore that second part right now, but every day that I don’t exercise – every day I don’t get my endorphins, it gets a little louder – a little more insistent.

I should be working on my thesis tonight.  I’d planned on finishing my maps.  But being female caught up with me today and instead I’m doped up on vicodin and booze, and even then I can still feel the cramps and the aches.  I can’t walk in a straight line, but I can sit here in pain.  Good times.

Today I was able to observe a couple of apartment raids with the police department of the city where I work.  There were no doors getting bashed in or any of the like.  But a couple of folks who had violated their probation got picked up, along with a few warrants.  It was an interesting situation.  Everyone in the briefing room assumed that I was the weak link, and several times I reminded to stay out of the way.  I did not explain my past.  I did not tell them that I have years of experience in physical confrontation – both armed and unarmed.  I did not say that, the mood I was in, anyone who wanted to start something with me was most likely unprepared for what they would get in return.  I just nodded and agreed to stay out of the way.  And I didn’t get nervous.  I could feel the anxiety bleeding off of the others in the group.  I could smell their adrenaline.  But when we were actually on site, I felt like I was in my own neighborhood.  I felt the kind of calm that I used to feel when I was squaring off against an opponent that I knew was far stronger, much faster, and way more skilled than I.  The kind of calm that comes when you give up the fight for status and for face and for pride and for your sense of right and succumb to the fight for survival.  It has been so long that I’d forgotten what it was like.  But it was strange – all the anxiety around my presence in the briefing room disappeared when I was on site.

I will be doing this again – more regularly and with a higher level of participation.  My role is not to catch “bad guys”.  My role is to help make these apartments safer and to encourage residents to take a more active role in improving their living conditions.  I believe this is something worth doing.

I’m not going to work on my thesis tonight, and the loss of this time will hurt me.  I absolutely must have a completed draft by this Sunday.  If I don’t, I’ll have to postpone my graduation until this summer.  My trip abroad will be tainted, my stress level will not decrease, I will not be able to relax.  I have not relaxed – really relaxed where I don’t have to think about what I am going to do the next day and how I’m going to fit it all in and damn if that deadline isn’t rushing at me faster than I can fathom and what about all that work that I am postponing that is going to catch up to me and brand me a failure – in so long that I have a hard time remembering.  It has been years.

The last two weeks have been brutal.  The next two will be even worse.  I’m already at the point where I don’t feel that this kind of life is worth living.  If it wasn’t a temporary situation, I’d give up.  When it gets worse, it is going to be difficult to remember that this is all short-term – that soon things will be different.  I’m going to try, but this here is an apology for when I fail.  Because I will fail.  Because there is that part where karma is still trying to teach me a lesson and it will wait until I am at my weakest before delivering the killing blow.

That lesson better be worth it.  I’m thinking the secret to world peace or the secret of the universe or something equivalent.  Cause otherwise I’m going to be a might bit irritated.

I spend so much time sitting behind a computer either studying or working – so removed from the reality of the world and the people around me – that I forget what it means to be human.  I feel like a search engine with a corporeal body.  I feel like a machine – and I’m sick of it.  Whatever I do next will have to compensate for that – because I don’t think I can take much more of it.  All work and no play…

Something Else

This isn’t what I started out to write.  I started to write something else and realized that I wasn’t ready to put the concept in my head into actual words.  I’ve been told that people think in language.  I’m not sure that is true.  I think in language when I am thinking about talking to other people, but I think in pictures and sounds and actions when I think about other things.  Lots of the thoughts in my head play out like mini-movies – even the ideology and theory based ones – that must then be subtitled before they can be released at theatres.

I’m about to get back into my thesis writing.  I’m close to being done – if by close you mean 2/3 of the way.  When I run distances, I think of 2/3 as the home stretch – which is funny when the home stretch is 4 or 5 miles.  Still, I’m most of the way there.  The rest is doable.

I didn’t take a huge amount of time off of my thesis – just yesterday.  I had to.  My brain was not functioning.  I got sick on Monday and ran a fever on and off from Tuesday to Friday.  I could tell when the fever got worse because I would start getting the fever chills, and they would last for a few hours and then go away and I’d feel a little better for a while and then they would come back again and so on and so forth.

I worked through this – thesis work, not work work – and Thursday I even went to the library to get some more data, even though I was light headed and dizzy and prone to confusion.  I kept having to rest on the stairs because I thought I was going to faint.  But there really wasn’t much choice – or rather, the choice to not work means extending the level of stress that had made me vulnerable to illness in the first place, so better to get it over with sooner rather than later.

Friday night though I realized that I had nothing left to think with.  I felt drained physically and mentally.  So yesterday, instead of working like I had planned, I read.  I didn’t even read anything meaningful or educational.  I read comic books – comic books I’d already read once before even – for the whole day and did nothing on my thesis.  I didn’t even go outside except to take care of the dog – not walk the dog, because I was still a little light headed – but take care of as in water and feed.

Today I feel more like myself than I have felt in a long time.  Today I walked the dog.  Today I will work on my thesis and hopefully move that 2/3 into the 3/4 zone.  I’m still hacking and coughing and my jaw still hurts from the ear-ache (you know you have a gnarly ear-ache when it feels like your jaw has been dislocated and popped back into place) and standing up too fast is a bad idea, but I no longer feel like I’m going to fall down if I have to walk more than a block, or like I’ve been gargling battery acid.

Tomorrow I go in to have my wrist x-ray done – and if possible – schedule the surgery to get it fixed.  Almost everything I do at this point hurts.  Rolling over in my sleep wakes me up.  Pulling the blanket up when I get cold is painful.  And the numbness in my palm and thumb are growing worse.  I’m almost positive at this point that whatever is growing in there is putting some pressure on a nerve – and not just the one that goes “ouch”.  There was still some numbness in my palm from the last surgery, so it is a little difficult to know the exact line of old and new – but the thumb is definitely new and it is a very strange sensation.

Whatever happens, I am not going to let this summer pass with me in pain.  I refuse.

Not long ago my boss asked if I am one of “those” people – as in one of the people to whom bad things just happen.  And it sure seems to be true.  Not that it stops me – or even slows me down that much.  And it isn’t like the things that happen are all that devastating – though they have been in the past.  They are just normal bad things that seem to happen with abnormal frequency.  I don’t even mention most of them anymore – they just the way of things.  But sometimes I wonder if there is any way I can change this.  I do get tired of the extra struggle.  For instance, my thesis is hard enough without getting sicker than I have been in almost two years, and without the damaged wrist, and without the rats in the attic, and without setting my hand on the stove, and without the hives on my sides and hips.  Just the thesis is enough.  The rest is dead weight.  Itchy dead weight.

My positive thinking experiment is still working for me – despite not being able to work out regularly for two weeks now, and despite the frustration and depression that come with being sick and stressed out at the same time.  I’m still ok with myself.  And I’m starting to wonder if maybe something like that can change the way that things work for me.  It is one thing to keep a positive attitude and not let yourself get too low when things go wrong.  But it would be so much better if things just didn’t go wrong so often.

Ok.  That is it for now.  I wrote this to try and get my mind back in writing/thinking mode after a day off.  I think this is as close as I’m going to get to functional.  Back to work.

Urban Wildlife

Last night I received a confirmation that I’d been hoping to avoid.  It is now official.  My house is infested with rats.

The responsibility for this situation is split.  On the one hand there is my neighbor who has absolutely no hesitation for storing large amounts of garbage and assorted bits of junk in his back yard.  He has even butchered animals back there – the bones of which occasionally show up on my side of the fence.  As of today it looks like he has cleaned up a bit, so that could be why the rats have suddenly gotten very interested in my house.

On the other had, the sub-c0ntractors who replaced my siding on my house did not seal the bottom of the concrete siding to the concrete stemwall beneath.  They left gaps big enough to fit my hand through – which is three times as big as a rat needs.  It was shoddy workmanship and the only reason that I haven’t had a problem with rats before now is that I’ve been so careful to keep the area around my house clean and clear – no bushed next to the siding, no trash, no construction debris.   I did this on purpose – because it protects the house and because it makes it more difficult for things to hide next to the house.  I live in a sketch neighborhood.  I do not want things unknown hiding next to my house.

So last night at 1 am I was awakended to the sound of a critter chewing through the floor.  This was not the quiet gnawing of  a hamster or pet rat in a cage.  It was the sound of serious construction happening beneath my subfloor as a number of rats – as in more than one or two – attempted to dismantle the repairs we made to the dryrot in the bathroom in order to access the inner walls – the ones not filled with insulation.

They made decent progress in the four hours that they were at it.  I know that they were at it for four hours because I was awake for the whole thing.  No only where the rats ridiculously loud, but I was sufficiently skeeved that there was no way I could sleep through the noise.  I’m a light sleeper with serious tendencies towards insomnia, so it doesn’t take much to keep me awake.  This is why I take sleeping drugs.  Not that they work.  Even the strongest drugs are no match for my insomnia on a bad day.  I know.  I’ve tried.

So I went to the gym and then to work and then to class and then to meet the exterminator today on three hours sleep.  I tried to work on my thesis afterward, but I was so tired and so brain fried – it was a total loss.

This is just another item in the list of things that have gone wrong this semester.  It is like Murphy is pulling out all the stops to see that his law is enforced.  Yet, I’m undaunted.

Over the weekend I made a private post – another entry of total self-loathing.  I’ve deleted a few, privated the rest, but after that one, I decided I was done.  I have friends with whom the only disagreement comes when they compliment me and I automatically discount it.  And I do automatically refute anything nice said about me – particularly regarding my appearance.  I do not know why.  I do know that I am tired of feeling that way about myself.

I’ve decided to change my perspective – to revamp the way I see myself.  I know it sounds glib here, and it is not easy.  But changing my perspective is one of the few things that my personality is well suited for.  If I can do it for other things, I can do it for myself.

I have to give the exterminator’s treatment (he spread the equivalent of pepper jelly around my house) to encourage the rats to stop entering the crawlspace, and then this weekend I have to go in with steel wool and foam insulation and block it all off.  The time investment is going to be the most expensive part of this repair, but if it keeps me from laying awake listening to the sounds of rodent driven demolition, it will be worth it.  I do need to refocus though.  Time is ticking, and I don’t have much extra.

I cannot wait for the day when I can sit and watch a movie without the anxiety of my thesis or some midterm or paper hanging over my head.  It feels like I am constantly carrying a sack of bricks across my shoulders.  I’m ready to set it down.  I have a really good feeling about this summer.

Stuff, it is a changing.  🙂

Pending Mental Refresh

I have just finished the text of my literature review.  I need to go back and read it through and edit it before I send it off, but first I need to think about something else for a bit – to cleanse my mental palate so to speak.  I’m pretty drained mentally right now.  Yesterday was a great step towards refilling the intellectual coffers a bit but it was only a start.  I’ll run through everything I accumulated yesterday before I am done tonight.

I got on the scale at the gym Friday.  I don’t know why I did.  I knew it was not a good time to weigh myself – I’m in the midst of another weight gain cycle.  I’m not particularly anxious – or at least I wasn’t until I got on the scale and it told me that I was 14lbs over my target.  Now I’ll grant that my target is 5lbs under my average.  I cannot seem to lose those last 5lbs.  And that’s fine.  At some point I’ll have to reassess the target.  Some future point, that is.  But 14?  Good grief!

There is the bit where muscle weighs more than fat.  Yeah, ok.  I’ve been lifting weights three days a week for a month now.  I haven’t seen much increase in my strength – which is to say that I’ve only gone up between 5 and 10 lbs in the amount of weight I’m lifting (barbell curls with 20lbs!  it’s a first for me) but I think that if I keep it up I might actually be able to do a pull-up by the end of the semester.  So maybe some of that 14lbs is muscle.  Maybe 3lbs of it.  Maybe.  The rest?  Stress fat – aka Booze and cookie fat.

Ok, not cookies per se.  I’m not a huge cookie fan.  Instead I eat these cardboard flavored granola bars.  I figured that if I got the ones that just tasted bad then I wouldn’t be so tempted to eat the whole box in one sitting.  Instead I’ve developed a taste for them – which is good in that it’s toned down my sweet tooth a bit and bad in that I was buying them by the Costco box.  I’m still trying to keep on the higher protein/lower processed carbs diet.  But I’m struggling a bit.  Mostly because it isn’t habit yet.  And I’m finding that I run out of my protein foods and my fresh veggies much faster than I ran out of carb based foods.  AND they’re more expensive.  So not only do I have to go to the grocery store more often (hell!) but I’m paying more when I do (depressing!).

To sum up, we’re going back on the no drink during the week pattern.  Just so I can continue to fit in my jeans, please.  I cannot afford a new wardrobe right now – especially since I want to buy some travel friendly clothes for my upcoming trip.  I am going to have to find something though that I can turn to for my after meal/pre-bed fidgets.  That is usually when my sweet tooth hits hardest, and I’m most vulnerable to eating all the dark chocolate in the freezer, drinking half a bottle of Amaretto and finishing it off with a big snifter of brandy.  Not a friendly way to end the evening, if your waistline is at risk.

I keep thinking about how things will be different when I’m not longer tied to my thesis.  I’m tempted to put some high expectations on this coming summer.  Tempted, but I’m going to resist.  It will be what it will be.  And it might take me a while to find myself again.  I was chatting with a friend Friday night.  She is one of the half-dozen or so good friends that I have made since I started grad school – only two of which are actually from school.  I told her that I thought they might be surprised to see how my personality is different when I’m not constantly struggling with too much work and too little time and way too much stress.  I told her that I was way more laid back.  That was kind of a lie.  Not to say that I’m not generally easy to get along with, but I was thinking about the last time I was unencumbered.  Hindsight being what it is and all that, I realize now that I was a bit intense.  It was not unusual for me to pick people up and carry them along with me – often farther and faster than they were ready to go.  I learned the hard way not to do that anymore, but I do wonder what will happen when I have recovered my energy.  I might need to take up a new hobby – or three.  🙂

A Bit of Fiction

A friend of mine likes to share the familiar saying – what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.  I like to follow that up with “yeah, or leaves you scarred and horribly disfigured.” but that is just me.  It’s a cliche, the whatever doesn’t kill you saying.  Things become cliche for a reason.  Usually because of their proximity to a truth.

Today I went to my second ever office holiday party.  The first holiday party where I wasn’t deeply wishing there were some sort of spirits to provide some social lubrication – or to at least quiet some of the voices in my head – the voices that are in charge of reminding me that there is so much work to do and so little time to do it and what am I doing at a “party” when I should be writing papers.  Like I would confess to the other voices here.  Whenever I go to a social event like this, I’m always worried that somebody is going to ask me about myself.  A person doesn’t have to ask  very many questions before the answers start to get very awkward.  And I’m not even talking about specific questions.  General questions lead to very strange places in my life.

In the past I’ve been evasive, too truthful, played dumb, just plain lied, and changed the topic when the subject was me.  I can be subtle at this or very obvious.  But the reality is, I like the people I work with now.  They are good people.  And I don’t want to put myself in a position where I have to maintain an overly complicated story.  For instance, when somebody asks me how I know how to do this or that or the other, I don’t want to have to try to remember how much of my story I’ve told them – or worse, which of my stories I’ve told them.

So every time I prepare to go to a social event I plan out exactly how much of my story I will tell.  Just in case.  Sometimes I don’t need it, but more often than not I’m the new person, and the new person is responsible for providing new stories.  This morning, on the way to the holiday party, I prepared my story.  I didn’t need it, thank goodness.  I’m much happier right now being in the background.  I don’t think things will always be this way.  I know they won’t.  But for now I don’t put my name on anything.  I claim no credit, no responsibility, no accolades.  I do my best to be solidly in the margin.

The story I prepared this time is different than all of the other stories I’ve told.  Not in content, because the events are what they are.  But it is different in perspective.  It is not a victim story – I’ve way outgrown that phase.  Besides, still playing the prey when you’ve actually become the predator is difficult to convincingly pull off.  Nor is it still the “I’m responsible for everything” story.  I think I’ve finally accepted that there have been a lot of things in my life that I simply had no control over.  These are things that even stunted my range of reaction.  I did what I could with what I had.  It might have taken me longer, and I might have done it the hard way, but really, I didn’t have a lot else to work with.

This new story is that my life right now is the results of a combination of my choices and my luck.  And neither have been all that great.  At the same time, I’m starting to understand why people come to me when they are trying to figure something out or when they need additional information or a new perspective.  A lot of that has to do with my bad choices and my bad luck – because that is what taught me the most.  Which gives me a new perspective about my choices and luck.  I have been cursing both – I feel like I should be established by now.  But the chances are very good that I’ll never be established – at least not in the way I think I should be.  And maybe I should learn to be OK with that.

In the break room today I was asking questions about what triggered ground cover requirements for recently cleared land.  Yeah, I’m a real ball of fun.  Anyway one of the people I was talking to inquired why I was asking.  I told him about the abandoned houses that have recently been demolished in my neighborhood and how the lots are now sitting open and bare at the start of the rainy season, and how I was hoping they wouldn’t turn into huge muddy messes.  Of course they will, but I’m still stuck on a time in my life when the ground froze during winter, so don’ t hold my optimism against me.  The person who asked me why sat for a minute after I explained the bulldozed houses and then he asked me where I lived.  I gave him my neighborhood and he stared laughing.  “You take the whole living the adventure thing all the way home, eh?”  And I smiled.  “I like to be consistent.”  Which is a total lie, but it sounded witty in the moment.

I’m getting closer to the truth about myself.  The more I’m around other people, the more I talk to them and listen to them and think about them the more I understand my choices and my luck and my role in my own life.  I’m unusual, an outlier even.  But I’m not the only one.  Which is helping me to understand that while I’m sure I am deeply scarred and grossly disfigured, I’m also much stronger than I give myself credit for.  Turns out, all those bad bits didn’t kill me after all.

I know.  I’m as surprised as you are.

Cost Benefit Analysis

The thing that they don’t tell you when you are filling out the grad school applications is that if you are accepted into a program and if you intend to complete that program in a timely manner, your relationship with time will change completely.  This happens gradually with different phases, but with the same result – all those things that you used to do for the simple pleasure of doing them – those things that did not render up a finished product or did not immediately and meaningfully contribute to a current project – those things become unsustainable.  Suddenly there is no time for them.  No time at all.  Even when there is time, it is not linear time that can be used as one would like, but time that is connected to the time necessary to complete each and every unfinished assignment.  A web of time and first and second and final drafts and incomplete research and unprepared lectures and piles of reading and more piles of writing all interconnected until it is impossible to know where one stops and the other starts and no matter what, there is not enough time for it all.

I spent years of my life just wishing for each day to come to an end so I could be done with it – never looking forward to the next, but simply satisfied that the time was passing.  Those days time couldn’t pass fast enough.  In my foolish 20 year old heart I assumed that it would never change – that I would be passing time for the rest of my life.  I was so wrong and yet right that I am sometimes amazed at my own path.

Yesterday I took a day for myself to spend some time with a friend doing something that I love – playing in the snow.  I had an unorthodox childhood – my introduction to the suburbs was late and lacked any of the sense of “safety” that originally drove families out into the hinterlands.  Instead I spent my childhood living on the edge of some of the last truly wild land left.  Winter was serious business in the little town I called home.  The town itself was nestled in a shallow but expansive valley up in the mountains.  The horizon was framed by mountain peaks on all sides, and the foothills to the next range were within walking distance of the one traffic light in town.  They would close school on snow days, and on days when the temperature dropped so low that it was dangerous for kids to walk the few blocks to school. The town was mostly poor, and many kids didn’t have good cold weather clothes.  I remember girls walking to middle school wearing light jackets on below 0 days, their hands and faces numb and pale from the cold.

And I remember the times I got so cold that I was sure I would never be warm again – the times I got ice in my boots – that never melted even though it spent hours against my skin – the times I lost all feeling in my hands from the elbows down, the times I would come home with strange patches of white on my nose and cheeks and ears.  I remember the times it ached to stand next to the wood stove.

There are also parts that I have tried to forget.  Like the mornings I put on a dress over my tights and winter boots and long coat and went and stood in the cold on a neighbor’s porch to explain the bible to them.  The mornings that the car holding the missionary group would get stuck in the snow and I would be out with the women in their nylons and the men in their pressed slacks trying to push it until the tires could get traction on the dirty brown ice.  I remember feeling almost naked in my JC Penny dress and white nylons as the cold wind blew right through me – chilling to the bone.

Yet when we left, the thing that I missed most – more than the mountains or the people or the town or the home was the weather – the seasons – the snow.  I missed that unambiguous cold.  I could not get used to days of 40 degrees that felt so much colder than the below 0 I knew.  I desperately missed the wood stove with its obvious heat source – its “stand here and be warm simplicity”.  I missed standing out under the huge pine trees – the ones so old and sturdy that the first heavy snow would create surprisingly warm caves around the trunks.  I missed the frozen ground and the clean whiteness of the cold.  I was not prepared for green grass in winter and mud mud mud everywhere.  It felt unnatural.  Wrong.

It has been over 20 years since I left the snow country.  Yet every time I get a chance to return to the snow I feel like I have reconnected to that child who used to dig snow tunnels from the front door of her house to the mailbox on the street.  This year I have decided to make an effort to allow myself some of that time.  Yet the expense…  Oye the expense.   The monetary expense is one thing.  Nothing is free.  Nothing should be free.  And I accept that.  But the time expense?  The time that is so intrinsically intertwined with my every waking moment that I can never forget what I “should” be doing?  That expense is usurious.

I’ve come to realize that a major part of my current malaise regarding my studies has nothing to do with the topic or the teachers or anything so simple and accessible.  It is because I am tired of living without creativity and intrigue and fascination and curiosity and danger.  I need change and risk and time to squander figuring out how stuff works and how to make the things I find interesting.  I hate feeling guilty for reading literature or studying 19th century costumes or sliding down the mountain as the falling snow absorbs every unnatural sound into a kind of natural white noise.

There is irony in this guilt.  My intellectual stores are empty.  Creativity and fascination and adventures are my intellectual nourishment, and the less I have given over to these pursuits, the less I have had to spend on long-winded papers and in-depth studies.  I feel like I’ve been regurgitating the same things over and over – a sort of superficial moral outrage cloaked in academic language that I pass off as analysis.  It goes nowhere.  Yet I have nothing to supplement it with – no art, no music, no emotion.

Only memories.  And those are… tainted.

One winter, when I was 12 I was riding one of our horses in the far pasture near the marsh.  She was not my favorite horse – but I was one of the few people who could exact obedience out of her when she was feeling obstinate.  That afternoon she was unusually nervous – a storm was coming, and the temperature had dropped remarkably fast in a very short time.  I was ready to turn back to the barn when she started bucking on the ice.  We both went down hard, my leg under her side, and my head hitting the solid ice with a crack that echoed in my ears.  I was lucky that I did not get tangled in the saddle, and that she did not crush me in her struggle to stand.  She was the largest horse we had at the time.  She was long gone when I came to – the second time I had been knocked unconscious (adventure and I are close companions) and I remember lying there on the ice, very aware that I needed to move, that I was so very cold, that my head hurt and my ears were ringing and that nobody would know where I was or would come looking for me for hours and that it was getting dark and that stupid horse was still wearing my saddle.  But I so wanted to sleep.  For just a little while.  Just a nap really.

I didn’t sleep there on the ice.  In the end, it was the saddle that made me get up and walk back to the barn.  I broke a cardinal rule that day.  I did not get back on the horse that had thrown me – and I was never confident on that animal again.  But I did unsaddle her, water the rest of the horses and walk home just as the wind picked up and the temperature dropped well past freezing.  I fell asleep on the sofa in front of the wood stove.  I didn’t tell my mother until later what had happened.  I’d likely had a concussion.  Not the first or the last.  Still, not something to take lightly.

These days I feel like I am still lying on the ice.  I know that I cannot stay where I am.  The list of concerns running through my mind are long and serious and paralyzing.  I just want to rest.  Just a quick nap.  But the time to move is coming.  I just hope that this time, when the time comes to finish what I need to finish, I’ll have the motivation to get up off the ice, and walk through the frozen pastures to the barn and finish my chores.

And hopefully, when my time is mine again, it will all have been worth it.

Liquor is Quicker…

I’m not an alcoholic, I just…

Yeah, that phrase isn’t at all suspicious.

Dog is on a mission to lay down in every spot in the house to see which is best.  She just did her circle and flop routine in the closet.  It’s not even a big closet.  But there she is, wedged between the high-heeled sandals that I never got a chance to wear this summer, and the black satin evening gown that I’ve never worn in public.  If I didn’t know better I’d think she was making commentary on my jeans and t-shirt/slacks and button down lifestyle – the lifestyle that does not involve ever looking or acting like a girl.

Not that I’m all about the nail-polish and the designer handbag.  I have this theory about women, the more high-maintenance their hairstyle/nails/make-up, the more high-maintenance their personality.  And honestly, I don’t have the time or energy for it.

Men, on the other hand seem to feel differently.  I guess there is something to those high-maintenance girls that they find appealing.  I wouldn’t know.  I haven’t been on so much as a date in… well, if I’m being honest, it has been a very long time.  I’m all about making do, so I try to count the things that really don’t count.  I’m great at making friends.  And I’m good at fostering a certain level of intimacy.  But that is not dating.  That is hanging out with friends.  Everyone goes home alone.

I’m not complaining, or rather, I am complaining, but I don’t expect any sort of resolution.  This is my choice.  Or my sentence.  Not sure which.  Someone asked today if I love Dog.  I care about Dog.  I want Dog to be happy and to have a good life.  I want to do what I can to aid in that.  But Love?  Love is a strong word.  I feel the same way about my friends – I want them to be happy and to have good lives and in that way I love them.  But Love?  No.  Not Love.  I think about my life and there are a lot of things that I would really dislike giving up, but there is nothing here now that I could not walk away from – without looking back.

This is what I’d hoped that having Dog around would change.  I’m so emotionally detached from everything around me, I’d hoped she would help me reconnect.  And in some ways she’s been a godsend.  I like having her here.  I like having something that is happy to see me when I get home at night.  I like having something that is excited when I wake up in the morning.  It is soothing to my ego.  I feel a little less invisible – a little less expendible than I used to.

At the same time, I know that my status in her life is a matter of chance.  If not me, someone else.  Or no-one else.  It all ends up the same.  Worm-food.

In a conversation with my mother today I told her I have no expectation of making it to fifty.  She was telling me that fifty feels so young.  I do not doubt her.  I feel young now and it isn’t until I look in the mirror that I remember that I’m now counting my age by decades.  At the same time I want to be done.  So badly do I want to be done.

This is something that I didn’t want to write about here.  I’ve done the pathos thing.  I’ve gone through the therapy and the drugs and the whole deal.  I did not want another of my writing experiments to spiral down into the realm of constant-self pity.  Yet, it is self-pity or nothing at all.  It is where I live.  It is where I’ve lived for a long time now.  I comfort myself these days by promising myself that if it ever gets that bad again I have permission to check out.  To call it good.  To be done.  To die.  And then I keep adjusting the definition of that so it doesn’t include the now.  Because I’m not quite ready yet.   Not yet.  Though I’m close.  I’ve been close for a long time now.  I don’t know what to do with that.

I have the best friends in the world right now.  I have people that I care deeply for and that I know care about me.  I have shelter and intellectual stimulation and a constantly growing set of hobbies.  I do whatever I can to keep my mind occupied.  And when I know that I cannot keep it occupied, I deaden it with booze.  But I also know that I am lonely.  I’ve been lonely for so long that it is part and parcel of my self-identity.  When I dream at night, I dream about what it is like to be alone.  When I daydream about the future, there is no-one else around.  This is it.  Not even my subconscious believes that this will ever change.

The funny thing is that I watch my friends and neighbors as they navigate their relationship drama, and I want nothing to do with any of it.  I almost feel superior – with my emotional detachment and what-not.  Almost.  Then I remember how many years I’ve spent alone.  Years.

I’m living by a new policy these days – get as much life lived as I can as fast as I can.  I don’t expect to live to a ripe old age.  It would be foolish to pretend that I’ll have time to do the things I want to do later.  I won’t.  And as I’m not stuck with anyone else to worry about, there’s nothing to slow me down.  So when this life gets old – and I know it will – I’ll be in a place where I can end it without guilt or regret.

In the meantime, it is a matter of endurance.  And balance.  Liquor is indeed quicker, but just how much booze does it take to erase the lonely?  Maybe I should make a scientific study out of it.