· recovering jezebel ·

moving house

2011-02-09T19:58:00.005-07:00

Dear, dearest readers—

Yet another home on the Internet! I walk through its house, reliving memories as the movers take out all the furniture. This particular blog has been of inestimable value to me. I don't know what I would have done without it, and without the good women of the Junkies' Wives Club, all of whom saw me through a very ugly passage in my life. I needed your support desperately, and you gave it so generously.

But it's been a year since I started Recovering Jezebel, and six months since the Qualifier finally broke up with me, and something in me wants to move on...I did my first three steps here, and have started my Step Four in a notebook specially prepared for me by my sponsor, so my first use of the blog (as a place to do stepwork) has faded. Then too, I am finally feeling free enough from the grip of the Qualifier to blog about things other than him and/or recovery from our relationship.

I'll be leaving the blog up and operating, though, in case my experience dealing with my partner's troubling sexual behavior should prove to be helpful to someone else. It's a lonely strange place to be in, when someone's sexual behavior really bothers you but they keep telling you that you should be fine with it. It's crazymaking, and if anything I've written can help someone feel less alone or less crazy, in even the tiniest way, I'll be grateful and glad.

I've mentioned before where I'll be going, but if you can't find the link and want to tag along, just shoot me an email and I'll send you the URL. It won't be a recovery blog, but will be primarily concerned with matters literary (literary). (Sorry, quoting obscure Wendy Cope poem.) Well, literary and cultural/artistic/feminist. And comments will probably be closed for a while, just until I get into the swing of things over there...I think I'll keep the avatar, though. I've kind of grown fond of it. Or her. With her red red lipstick.

Love, love to you all!

—Jezebel

very pretty eyeshadow

2011-01-29T20:47:00.009-07:00

...by Sue Devitt, though, honestly, I don't want to wear it as much as admire it. Or paint with it.

I am on a quest for the one perfect red lipstick, to take with me to the big poetry conference this year—I'm leaving next Wednesday and am determined to get tipsy, flirt incorrigibly, kiss someone if I possibly can, and not think about my ex one bit. And also see dear old friends, buy their books, drink tea with them, hear their news, exclaim over their babies, and crash in their apartments at 2 am (you know who you are).

Right now it's a toss-up between NARS in Gipsy:

...and Shiseido in Sweet Pea:

I can't believe I am acting like such a GIRL. But I suddenly feel like breaking out of my little cat-casita-cups-of-tea bubble. We'll see. Anyway I'll have a new lipstick, and I can wear it to teach English, for that matter.

post #200

2011-01-28T15:21:00.010-07:00

The cat and I are sitting in the grass staring at one another moonily. It's about 71 degrees this afternoon and she and I spend as much of each day outside as we can. I am eating raw cacao nibs and trying to figure out why I'm so morose. Am I premenstrual? No. Is it the delicious red velvet cupcake to which I succumbed last night? No, I was sad before that, so it's not my blood sugar (though the sad might explain my vulnerability to said cupcake). Is it the fact that I just found out from my department chair that I haven't been teaching my course the way he wants it taught (literary analysis rather than rhetoric/argument), and I have to scrap my syllabus and start all over from scratch? No, I actually can't even get worked up about that. They pay me and I teach whatever, it's no big deal.

So what's the matter with me? "Maybe I need to blog," I tell the cat.

Then it hits me—yes, I feel mopey, sad, down in the mouth. But I can tell that I feel that way. Which means...I haven't been feeling that way! I've been...dear God. I've been HAPPY. For a couple of weeks now. Actually happy. Not just, not miserable. But positively contented.

The cat starts rolling coyly and looking up at me all flirtatious upside down, her head covered in grass clippings and dirt.

Nice.

•

My friend Ms. K sends me a poem:

GOD SAYS YES TO ME

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

[Kaylin Haught]

•

When I try to think of all the things that have made me feel better, what it is that has raised my baseline from "Yes I can manage to get out of bed but only after 12 hours of sleep and yes I can move my limbs but only with a great deal of effort and forcing myself through the pain" to "Indolent morning cups of tea on the back porch in the sun and peaceful yogic breathing," I come up with many different answers. Most of the answers have names. [Here I typed everyone's name in one big dogpile of internet love but then deleted it, for fear of blowing the blog's confidentiality, or hurting your feelings if I put someone's name in front of someone else's etc.]

Really there has been a rotating cast of female friends, each of you pitching in for a couple of weeks to listen to me moaning about the Q. and then, like wild geese, one falling back to regain her strength and another one surging forward to take her place. Apparently it takes a village to get me through a life crisis, and let me tell you sweetcakes, we are an astonishing village.

So I think I'm mostly better because:

1. The one-two punch combo of Effexor plus Zyprexa has helped me go to yoga.
2. So I go to yoga four days a week now, plus therapy, plus a new psychiatrist. Plus
3. Honestly, I have the best effing friends in all of human history.

•

Another thing, strange as it is to tell, that has brought me to this turning point over the winter break has been the songwriting of Judee Sill (1944-1979), whose work I compare inwardly to that of Blake and, even more, George Herbert. In particular, two songs by her, "Jesus Was a Crossmaker" and "The Archetypal Man" have helped me see the Q's behavior as being, well, archetypal: nameable, categorizable, and not entirely original. Somehow this makes it less devastating. To call it out as what it is, without his bloviating getting in the way and confusing me.

fleeter even than mercury
he flies inside the walls he calls his own
he came hiding but now I see
he looks like everyone I've ever known

he comes bearing a sacrifice
I know him by the rose that's in his hand
I've been listening to his advice
I hear the words but I can't understand

his moon mirage is shining
shifting the things that he can't endure
but all through the darkness
his pain is pure

his moon mirage is shining
through his veins flows a fool's gold flood
but through the rose in his hands
flows blood

•

Then too there are these salutary, extremely tonic moments of high hilarity, most of which I've had in the presence of my neighbor-slash-roommate Ms. B. We each moved to the downtown area around the same time, and actually kicked around getting a place together, but in the end, fearful that our cats would fight (perhaps metaphorically more so than literally), we settled for being only about six blocks away from each other. We are each other's default dates; she lets me use her clothes dryer, I drop by her place with doughnuts and a zombie movie. We complain about our stomach fat falling in our faces during upside-down yoga poses. We try on jeans together. Like that.

And we get so, so, so cracked up laughing over nothing. It happened last week with Ms. L. when the three of us were watching The Wire, of all things, not particularly known for its comedic properties, but suddenly we were all bent double and gasping with laughter. I can't even explain now what was so funny, except to say that it had to do somehow with the handsomeness of the actor who plays Stringer Bell, and the neologism "tinglegina" (which I have now propagated upon the interwebs, ha ha!). Was it really only six months ago that Ms. B and I, both stunned from our respective breakups, were driving around looking at apartments together? And now I am rolling on her sofa laughing so hard I finally have to beg the two of them to stop being funny because my stomach muscles hurt? How has this come to pass? That I am gifted with such friends? B. and I are each other's go-to confidantes, ad hoc fashion consultants, and default grocery store/CVS/IHOP companions—because we live only a few blocks from each other, we enjoy all the benefits of roommates without actually having to keep our kitchens clean. I feed her cat when she teaches late, and she lets me use her nasal spray—which, how much more intimate can a neighbor be?

•

I read an interview, which I now can't find, with Robert Downey where he talks about corralling his not-inconsiderable sexual magnetism/energy and confining it to his wife, "because she deserves it." And I feel envy, and anger, and blank curiosity, and wonder if I'll ever meet a person willing to make that kind of commitment to me.

•

At Sunday's Al-Anon meeting, the topic was gratitude, and we all wound up sharing variations on how we didn't notice how good our lives were until we entered the program, because we were each so focused on all the things that were wrong. And those things didn't stop being wrong. But more stuff started being right.

I always think of the slogan, "Don't leave before the miracle happens," and how the miracle is never that the alcoholic shapes up and does what we want him/her to do, but how the miracle is that we finally notice all the miraculous stuff happening in our lives right under our noses. Like that six months ago I drove home from an Al-Anon meeting sobbing and hyperventilating and begging God to help me find a place to live, a place for me and the cat to call home.

And how now I have that. And friends with whom to eat pizza and watch movies and laugh ourselves silly over basically nothing but our own sense of fun.

•

In addition to giving me Judee Sill, my friend Mr. M also loaned me his copy of Tarkovsky's The Mirror, which I have to say has been a gamechanger, and has reminded me why I loved film in the first place. Margarita Terekhova gives maybe the best female performance in a film next to that of Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. She's that amazing. And it surprises me not a whit to learn that Tarkovsky wanted to cast her as Margarita in his (unfilmed, you cursed Soviet film board!) adaptation of The Master and Margarita. She would've been brilliant. Just the opening scene of The Mirror—just that first few frames. A woman smoking on a split-rail fence, watching the wind ripple across the grasses (which, it turns out, Tarkovsky engineered using two helicopters). (And I'm convinced it's supposed to be Ahkmatova who appears in a little ghost scene in the middle of the movie, unnamed.)

•

Among other benefits, the cleanse seems to have silenced the continual in-my-head argument between me and the Qualifier, which is a huge relief and yields much peace. Before it died down, though, I copied a few of my recurrent ripostes, uttered in the same spirit as what the beloved Ms. M calls, l'esprit d'escalier. Maybe they will amuse you too. You will note that I always get the last word, as in real life I would not. That's okay—the Qualifier always told me it was important to have a fantasy life. I guess we just differ in the kinds of things we like to fantasize about.

Q: …because I'm not a sex addict.
J: Oh, I see, so you're just a lying sack of weasels, fundamentally dishonest and completely devoid of either character or integrity! Of course, what was I thinking—I suppose that really IS preferable.

Q: … and you're probably happier now without me anyway.
J: Well, you have a point. I mean, what part of that was I supposed to miss? The betrayal, the lying, the snow jobs, or the part where you would blow up at me in gibbering infantile tantrums? —Although come to think of it, those really were unintentionally entertaining.

Q: …which is why I'm going to be single from now on.
J: I rather doubt that. You can probably cycle through the whole thing two, maybe three more times before you're just too old and disgusting for even really messed-up and damaged young women to be interested in you. I mean, other than for CLINICAL reasons.

Q: …because my ex-wives were always such detectives.
J: Odd, that. One can't imagine there was anything out of the ordinary whatsoever to arouse their suspicions.

Q: …and I'm seeing someone.
J: And on which mutually agreed-upon lies will THIS relationship be founded, pray tell? Did you inform her how your last relationship ended? No, that would be awkward, wouldn't it…of course, a simple search on your email username will reveal your entire sordid history, in the ineradicable memory of Google's usenet groups. What's that—you didn't know those posts were all still there? What a pity.

•

About five days into the cleanse, I'm sitting on the back porch drinking my tea and doing my meditations when I'm suddenly seized by a desire like a strong wind, and as if on cue the doors of the house start banging back and forth, and I go inside and clean out my desk, I mean CLEAN IT OUT, all five drawers, and throw away reams of unnecessary papers, file other papers, discard, organize, recycle, release into the wind. I find handful after handful of little tiny papers covered in little tiny scrunched writing, all kinds of things all on the same piece of paper—teaching notes, to-do lists, lines for poems. I feel a chill as I handle them, try to decide what to do with them. They seem completely manic to me, compulsively written and in many cases incomprehensible. Are they that madness which contains genius, or just madness? I don't know. I don't know what to do with them. In the end I rubber-band them into one square packet and push it way back in the top drawer. Maybe I'll go through them later and try to pull out the poem-seeds one by one, maybe as writing prompts.

•

Then it's the weekend and I'm sitting on the back porch in the sun, having finished my morning smoothie (I've finished over a week of the 21-day cleanse, if you don't count the Red Velvet Cupcake Incident, which I don't), in perfect contentment, when it blindsides me: the exact tone of his voice when he greeted me. "Hello, love."

It's a full-blown STUG. Abruptly, acutely, I am suddenly in tears, which causes me to realize I haven't cried for days—so many days I'd finally lost count. Then, so vividly, the sound of his voice, softening for me because he was crazy about me. And he was crazy about me! We were so in love! We held hands everywhere we went, like smitten schoolgirls! How could this be happening?

Blindly, I texted the last person who had texted me, who happened to be Ms. F. And she responded immediately and perfectly:

"I am so sorry, babygirl. You really were in love and it is not fair....It was real love and it was really, really beautiful." I barely got to "babygirl" before the tears spouted forth. I suddenly grieved it all freshly. I wept and laughed at the little rainstorm on my face and let the energy move through and out and past and on its way.

Then, semi-amused, semi-relieved I can still cry even on three psych meds, I snorted back the last of the tears and finished my last PhD application (which was really just uploading forms and paying $60, but still), because I AM A ROCKSTAR.

Then I ordered a pink pad from Etsy with cupcakes on it (don't get me started on the virtues of reusable menstrual products, you have NO idea, I will never shut up).

Five PhD applications finished and done. Surely someone will take me! And if no one does, I'll just teach at a nice community or tribal college somewhere in New Mexico/southern Arizona, and buy a double-wide trailer, and set about acquiring more cats.

•

I still don't know if this will be the beginning of the end for this blog. It seems to me that a blog has a life of maybe 1-3 years and then the story moves us onward. But no worries—if I stop blogging here I'll simply start up someplace else. You can take the girl out of her blog but you can't take the blogger out of the girl. Wait, that doesn't even make sense.

•

(But as long as I keep putting bullet points between paragraphs, I can pretend that it does.)

fragments toward a blogpost

2011-01-11T10:57:00.008-07:00

Yoga, yoga, yoga. I go to yoga class at the Y every chance I get. Tonight's was ashtanga, and it kicked my puny butt. At one point I kind of flopped over into child's pose. Then got back up and heaved myself into downward dog, back with everyone else. Get back on the mat. I work to hold the poses, work to accept this new body in the mirror—not my teenaged anorexic dancer body, I'll never have an 21-inch waist again, but the hippy curvy goddess body, the woman's body that the Qualifier once loved. I want a woman, not a girl. I breathe, breathe, breathe, audibly, stertorously, fiercely, the breath of fire. If your neighbor can't hear you breathing, you're too quiet, says the instructor. I hop back into plank, look down to see my belly swaying. I am done being quiet.

•

Ms. L. and I scramble our resources to throw a birthday party for Ms. B. The night before the party we go shopping for favors and silly prizes; and afterward, during dinner, she says two things that detonate slowly in my chest, open like soft flowers there, shed drops of water that trickle all the way down into my core.

The first thing she says has to do with our mutual childhoods of abuse.

(I start: "I never know how to say it—he didn't molest me, but my grandfather was—he was inappropriate."
"Right. He molested you.")

She says, We were taught to ignore and rename that bad feeling in our stomachs. When someone touched you, and you thought, "ugh, I don't like that, that feels bad," but then all the people around you TOLD you that you liked it, you had to believe them, instead of what your body was telling you. And that kind of reset our baseline. We don't believe how we feel. We believe what other people tell us about how we should feel.

This is hardly the first time I've heard this, thought this, written this. But something about it penetrated in a way I don't think it ever has before, and I found a deep forgiveness for myself, for the way I didn't take care of myself around the Qualifier. Of course when he told me there was nothing going on, I acted as though he were right. That's how I was brought up. You could practically make a flow chart out of it:

1. Funny feeling in stomach. Do what?
2. Look around, ask other people if something is wrong.
3a. If they say there is = something is wrong.
3b. If they say everything is fine = believe them.

Again and again and again. Going back to being fifteen and my grandfather kissing me on the mouth, all my family members around us. It felt funny. But it obviously wasn't supposed to feel funny, because everyone seemed apparently fine with it. So I tried to realign my reality. "Jezebel loves Grandpa so much." Did I? Everyone said I did, and I spent a lot of time with him. So I guessed I did love him. He smelt of beer and pipe tobacco and I knew I felt strange when he hugged me for so long, the length of our bodies pressed tightly together. I knew I wanted to grow up and have a boyfriend and be kissed. It seemed strange that my grandfather was kissing me so hard on the mouth. But everyone was there, and no one said anything. So I must be the one with the problem.

"Kissie-kissie!" commands my father, when I get off the airplane and hug my parents in greeting. Sometimes it is more like a plea. I hug him but turn my face aside. I refuse to kiss him, find him physically repugnant, have for decades now. "Jezebel is such a daddy's girl—she sure does love her daddy." Did I? They told me I did.

And then there I am numb with the Qualifier's phone in my hand, sitting in our kitchen, trying to find the phone number for the gardeners. "What's Kirby's Entertainment?" I ask stupidly, shocked into only very simple utterances. "You are controlling and manipulative!" he snarls, all but snatching away the phone; and instead of saying: No, what's actually happening is that you are an addict and your secret addictive life you're trying to keep under wraps is not going to stay secret much longer,—instead of saying that, I start to cry, because I am clearly a terrible crazy person.

Again and again. Why I let myself down, leave myself undefended, apologize to the perpetrator, believe them and not me. Believe them and not me. Believe them and not me.

It is a tending that could get one killed. Instead it just gave me a stomach ulcer.

•

I both accept my curvy new body and wage a small war against it. I experiment for the last few months with primal/low-carb diets but struggle to stay on them, Zyprexa's trademark carb cravings gaining the upper hand over and over again ("you'll gain weight just filling the prescription"). (Also, there is a deadly old-fashioned doughnut available right down the street at the Asian place. My new rule is that if I want one, I have to ride my bike there to get it.)

Wasting time on Gwyneth Paltrow's ridiculous website GOOP (as Ms. R. correctly notes, "so insanely out of touch with reality that it is something of a joy to read"), I spontaneously decide to do this 21-day cleanse. The additional protein of the twice-daily shakes really helps me feel satiated and uninterested in carbohydrates. I'm not officially starting the cleanse until Sunday but am on it already, except for eating a few things from the refrigerator that I want to use up, like the Nyman Farms bacon. Pipskintinkle is licking at the sautéed kale and ginger in my robin's-egg blue ceramic bowl, the one Ms. A. got me for Christmas, that has the spiral on the bottom. I think she likes the taste of the coconut oil. Or maybe the bacon.

•

Sunday morning. I am sitting out on the back porch, where I sit every morning, peeling citrus—either a cara cara or a blood orange. The sun is warm on my back. I think, Today would have been our fifth anniversary. I eat my orange, segment by segment. Wipe my hands on my pants and go inside to pour a glass of cold water, swallowing my psych meds. The cat plays in the green stalks of weeds, pretending to stalk invisible mice. I stand in the doorway in the sun, everything at peace. I think, I'm glad he's not here. I'm glad I'm alone. I'm glad it's just me and the cat.

•

Then, in the middle of vacation, the shooter in Tucson. Why there and not up here in Maricopa County? Why peaceful hippie Tucson? In this hastily but well-researched NY Times profile, what's astonishing is how many people could have diagnosed, or DID diagnose him, and at how many different stages/places—his cabdriver, his teachers, even (especially) his tattoo artist. Then, too, people are so easily able to make the leap from "Tucson shooting" to "inflammatory political rhetoric," but why do so few make the jump to "Arizona has no mental health care anymore"? When that seems to me the graver undealt-with cause?

•

A few days ago I choked while drinking my glass of water with my meds. I don't know how it happened. I swallowed wrong, something went wrong, a mouthful of water went the wrong way and I suddenly felt myself completely unable to draw in air. I was making the strangest sounds, squeaky and harsh. Blindly I sort of staggered across the house and out the front door, clawing at my throat. I didn't exactly see my life flash before my eyes, but I did think very clearly, I'm going to die if I can't breathe in air, I need air, and I didn't know what to do. I half-thought that if I went onto the front porch maybe someone would hear me, maybe someone would help me. Though how can someone save you from choking on water? My desperate attempts to breathe were making the weirdest loudest sounds I've ever heard my body spontaneously make. It was frightening. Once outside, I finally somehow quit trying to breathe in long enough to swallow, or anyway to reverse the wrong direction in which my throat was going, and after what felt like a real eternity, I could breathe again. I was shaking all over.

Then for a long moment I stood breathing in, breathing, looking at the sky, holding my body in the doorframe shaking, looking at the bright blue and these beautiful birds flying across the clouds. And just glad.

•

The second thing Ms. L. said is harder to put into words. She said that one of the tragedies of sex addicts and co-addicts is that as soon as the argument has started, as soon as the debate is underway, the juggernaut of rhetoric, the flinging back-and-forth of "is pornography art, is it toxic, should it be more available, less available, is it an act of free speech, is it demeaning to women, should sex work be legal, should it be regulated, are sex workers empowered by their work, is it degrading," etc. etc. etc., that a very fundamental truth gets lost, between the addicts and their partners. She said it so simply: "What you did really hurt me."

She said, people start to debate and that fact just gets swept under the table, because the addict can't handle hearing it. They can't take it in, it causes them too much shame. So there's all this verbiage created instead.

I said it after her, slowly. I realized I'd never said that sentence before, not ever, not once in the last two years of ugly chaos.

What you did really hurt me.

Somehow I'm supposed to disown that, "don't be a victim," take responsibility for my feelings, etc. But again, in denying my reality, his reality took precedence.

The closest I ever came to saying it was that time when I'd found the receipt from the massage parlor, and I asked him to leave the house; and so he'd been driving around Arizona for four days in the heat in his non-air-conditioned car, he said, driving and crying, but not calling his sponsor or going to a meeting, and he finally came back to town so he could go to work the next day and we sat in a neighborhood park that night to talk. And I said, quietly, looking at the blade of grass in my hands, You know, here we are talking about this and about what we're going to do, but I have to tell you, I'm really gutted. And he laughed, so I looked up, and he pointed across me to the people spinning on the tire swings, and said brightly, They're going to be so sick! And I thought, he can't hear a thing I say.

What you did really hurt me.

•

Tomorrow I teach my first rhetoric class. I was supposed to be teaching creative non-fiction, but it was the old bait-and-switch: the creative non-fiction class only had four people sign up for it, "so we had to cancel it, but would you like to teach a composition class instead?" It's a new scene—a brand-new community college far away, a brand-new group of 25 people. The college is so new that they're literally still building it, there are bulldozers scraping at the desert and rearranging it all around the building where I teach, which is so new there's construction grit in the gleaming toilet bowls of the granite-and-brushed steel hyper-designed bathrooms (with automatic soap-foam dispensers). Empty brand-new developments and big-box retail stores with no customers stretch for miles and miles around, as far as you can see, past the bulldozers. I used my key card to let myself into my new classroom, which is so new there are still wrappers on the furniture. Everything is clean and plastic-smelling and without personality. It's kind of like teaching in a Best Buy.

The new campus is also (wisely, perhaps, but inconveniently) controlling in re: photocopying, as in, adjuncts are not allowed to use the photocopiers at all, under any circumstances. We have to put our originals in a tray with instructions, and then someone else copies them for us, and we get our copies 24 hours later. I am not used to this system, and I only found out a few days ago that I was teaching rhetoric, using a brand-new textbook, so I didn't finish my syllabus in time to get it photocopied—so now I either have to pay to get it copied myself, or sneak onto the state school campus to my old department and hope I can copy it before someone asks me what I'm doing there.

I do feel sad, that vacation is ending. Yoga and sunshine, citrus and endless episodes of The Wire, late mornings and early nights just because I can. Lots of space and silence. Lots of peace.

And the tiniest inklings, deep in my chest, of something I am learning to call healing. It feels like small puzzle pieces with wings, dove-shaped, are flying into me and settling their feathers down into place. It feels like every molecule of air I breathe is saying, Yes, I do belong inside you. I do.

and a very new year

2011-01-05T11:54:00.001-07:00

In the spirit of clearing out the old, here are various bits of blogposts/post titles that never got finished/started/published last year, in no particular order. Lector emptor.

1. "It seems that there's not much which can't be cured by triple-cream brie on apple slices with pecans. And the company of my cat, who's v. interested in the brie. And now, having cried my head off for an hour, I am watching Josh/Donna West Wing clips on youtube. If there is a more elegant, speedier, less STUPID way to get through this breakup I would really like to know what it is. I could easily keep howling, except it would interfere with my brie-eating and youtube-watching."

2.

3. "...e pur si muove."

4.

5. "Inhabiting a strange edge."

6.

7. "Everyone should listen to this song immediately."

8. "In which I laugh, unhappily, at Emma Bovary."

9. "Attached are the results of my researches, a strange stat about altitude and suicide. Which I only found because I was actually looking for an actual statistic about survivors of suicide and their own suicide rates going up; but I can find nothing. Only that, apparently, tall places are bad. Especially west of the Rockies (presumably one is no more self-annihilating in Machu Picchu or Kathmandu). Which is funny if you consider some of my grad school/life choices....Anyway, I could explain this phenomenon to them, about the intermountain Western states; but my explanation would be multivariant. And also it would have to do with the kinds of people who own guns, not simply the mere fact of their gun ownership."

10.

"I miss my cat TERRIBLY. I feel like a mother who doesn't want to be separated from her baby for more than an hour or two at most. She has taken to lying on the left side of my chest, when I lie on my back (uncomfortably, but tolerating this because it means I have maximum catness) and it makes me think of the empirical evidence that almost all women instinctively hold babies on their left sides, no matter which is their dominant hand. E.g. for the heartbeat."

11.

1.1.11

2011-01-01T19:52:00.004-07:00

In the spirit of one beloved Ms. A., who's got me thinking about lifelists, I've created my own. Some of these yearnings have been on my heart for a couple of decades now, but they're just as far out of reach as they ever were, it sometimes seems. Whereas some things are so obvious to me (publish books of poetry and teach college literature full-time) that I don't feel like putting them on the list. Can I start making any dreams more real, this year? I've been going to yoga every day, and kicking a personal small but insidious bad habit, day by day, hour by hour, which must be a start to something! I feel a lot of potential and newness and fresh starts in this year, and am deeply grateful to be able to leave behind 2010, with all its broken hearts and bruises and ugly losses.

If you start your own lifelist, please share! Let's dream big this year.

§

1. Go back to Italy, go to Greece, stay a lot longer.
2. Teach English in Japan.
3. Go to Vietnam, Thailand, and the South Pacific (in particular, Tahiti).
4. Take an African dance/drumming class.
5. Teach at a tribal college again.
6. Have a beagle.
7. Have a pickup truck, and go camping in the back of it.
8. Take 3 months and go all around the Four Corners and see all the places I've never seen—Chaco, Chelly, Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce.
9. Adopt or have a foster daughter.
10. Write an hilarious epic bildungsroman.
11. Write a book of essays.
12. Perform one more show, half on piano and half on guitar, before my voice goes (maybe the whole album Blue by Joni Mitchell).
13. Learn qi gong and relearn tai chi.
14. Through-hike the Appalachian trail when I'm sixty or seventy.
15. Grow a garden and fruit orchard (with avocado tree!) using reclaimed water.
16. Have my own milk goat or miniature cow, and chickens.
17. Take a belly-dancing class.
18. Dance en pointe again; go rock climbing again.
19. Build my own adobe/straw-bale house with a small indoor pool (tiled in blue and white art-deco ceramic tiles, with ferns growing around the rim. And yes I have been thinking about this a long time).
20. Live somewhere long enough to be fluent in the language.
21. Take my mom on an ecotour to West/Central Africa.
22. Visit in Mexico the Sierra Tarahumara, Oaxaca, and Todos Santos.
23. Do a walking tour of Western England and Wales.
24. Spend the summer in Santa Fe and take body/voice/performance classes with Ruth Zaporah, Molly Sturges and/or Renee Gregorio.
25. Be able to do pull-ups. And the splits.

(PS there is a separate lifelist for reading, obviously!)

vast blue sky

2010-12-31T20:28:00.000-07:00

[Pema Chödrön • 3 December 2009]

I was doing an interview with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche recently, and I asked him the question: "Rinpoche, you have been living in the west for some time now, and you know western people well. What do you think is the most important advise you could give to a western dharma practitioner?"

And he said, "I think the most important thing that western dharma practitioners need to understand is guiltlessness."

I said, "Guiltlessness?"

He said, "Yes. You have to understand that even though you make a lot of mistakes and you mess up in all kinds of ways, all of that is impermanent and shifting and changing and temporary. But fundamentally, your mind and heart are not guilty. They are innocent."

So guiltlessness is very important in the subject of dissolving or burning up the seeds of aggression in our own hearts and our own minds.

Most of the striking out at other people, for us in this culture, comes from feeling bad about ourselves. It makes us so wretched and so uncomfortable that it sets off the chain reaction of trying to get away from that feeling. It's some very very habitual thing that happens.

If you got hooked, and then someone was to give you four seconds, or a minute, and then tap you on the shoulder and ask you what that feels like, it feels really bad, it feels like "bad me" and the aggression is turned against yourself.

Maybe if you waited four minutes and tapped them on the shoulder, what it feels like is—they are really wrong, and they did this to me, and its their fault that I'm in this situation.

But somehow, if at that moment, you were to pause, and start breathing and let the whole thing unwind and unravel, and hang out in the impermanent yet ineffable space—if you were to do that you might realize that all of this blaming of other people, when you went into it deeper, you would see that the seed of it was really some deep discomfort and aggression about yourself.

And if you went more deeply into that, you would probably find sadness.

And I quote this so much, this poem of Rick Fields, where he said:

Behind the hardness there is fear
And if you touch the heart of the fear
You find sadness [it sort of gets more and more tender]
And if you touch the sadness
You find the vast blue sky

This is really what I am encouraging is the next time you feel yourself hooked, if you pause and you breathe with it, and you don't act out and you don't repress, but you think of this quote, and you think the ones that will create the new culture that is needed are those that are not afraid to be insecure.

Whatever it is that you think at that moment, maybe this is what it feels like to be burning up the seeds that have caused all the pain on this earth—this is what that feels like.

I always feel that somehow you have to reframe that bad feeling—so that you see it as a doorway to liberation, as an opening to the vast blue sky.

[excerpted from a talk entitled "Practicing Peace in Times of War"]

de profundis

2010-12-30T11:19:00.003-07:00

Of course, I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him.

§

When you could not find me to be with, the companions whom you chose were not flattering.

§

And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you. One cannot always keep an adder in one's breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one's soul....I must take the burden from you and put it on my own shoulders. I must say to myself that neither you nor your father, multiplied a thousand times over, could possibly have ruined a man like me: that I ruined myself and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined by his own hand....Terrible as what you did to me was, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

§

The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right. When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else—the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver—would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

§

All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

§

What lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. This I cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it. It is only to be done by fully accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything that I have suffered. How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failure to realise those aspirations, shows you quite clearly. But do not forget in what a terrible school I am sitting at my task. And incomplete, imperfect, as I am, yet from me you may have still much to gain.

§

While for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, ‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!’ now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!’ It may really be so. It may become so.

[excerpts from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, via the generous The Red Shoes]

gratitude · the christmas edition

2010-12-27T15:38:00.007-07:00

1. http://steep.it, which helps me cope with egg-poaching as well as the endless quantity of tea which has been flowing around here, now that it's no longer boiling-hot outside and one can enjoy tea, which this one does. Enjoy it. In large volume. A cup of caramel rooibos to my elbow as I type this, and the vanilla oolong has helped me clean the house for the first time since well before Thanksgiving. Everything is shining and the sheets are clean on the bed and, after weeks of household squalor, I feel sanctified and pure.

2. The Wire, seasons one and two, loaned to me by my good neighbor Ms. B, which I've been meaning to watch for years and never could have done with the Qualifier around—never could have immersed myself in it to the degree that I have, mainlining episodes and becoming utterly lost in the Tolstoyan multiplicity of its characters, from whom I am acquiring important new slang I cannot possibly use as a teacher of standard English. (E.g., saying "hold up, hold up" instead of "wait, wait"; or "niggah PLEEZE" instead of "I find what you are saying preposterous and worthy of derision.") I found myself wanting to greet my friend Ms. A. on her doorstep on Christmas Day, holding a bottle of San Pellegrino and saying something like, "Brought y'all a damn festive holiday beverage yo!" But there were children present (albeit worldly ones who have been learning all the good bad words from Hyperbole and a Half, and the younger of whom recently asked his mother, "Why does that building have the letter t on top?" and finally she worked out he meant a church).

(And I had a riotously fun Christmas with them, playing some kind of silly twenty-questions type game that had us laughing into our pinot gris and pumpkin pie.)

3. Also there was a small Robert Downey binge, involving both Iron Man movies and Sherlock Holmes; even though Downey's politics are frankly repulsive, and his rosy pink cloud of early recovery will probably start dissipating any minute now. So relax, Jon Stewart—you're still my boyfriend.

4. It can't be a gratitude list without a food item, and today's morsel is the special holiday edition bar from Chocolove—based on the French confection mendiants, the white chocolate version of which has long been a terrible weakness of mine. I love dried fruits and nuts in chocolate almost more than the candy itself, and have been known to eat them together so I can get more chewy crunch; but this bar saves me the trouble. Tomorrow after therapy I'll buy more, before they're gone in January.

5. The Qualifier's being gone to Mexico has meant I can go to all the open AA meetings, and my home group Al-Anon meetings, with zero chance of running into him. I could hardly believe it the first night, and drove around in the parking lot suspiciously, looking for his car. And then this RELIEF opened up inside me. He's out of cellphone range, can't email, can't show up and startle me. It's been really wonderful—I've seen Al-Anon and AA friends I haven't seen in months, and have heard some amazing shares.

AA on Christmas Eve was particularly bittersweet, because that meeting was the Q's and my standing Friday night date; we used to hold hands and giggle together at the same things. But what made up for missing him was (a) imagining how miserable he probably is alone in Mexico, and (b) a wonderful eccentric 77-year-old lady with over 50 years sober—she actually KNEW Bill and Lois, and told hilarious stories about getting sober in the 1950s.

It's an eclectic collection on Christmas Eve: people just trying to put together 30 days, people with 30 years and more. And me. Sitting up front picking all the vanilla and cherry Tootsie Rolls from the basket and occasionally sighing. Finally I realized that because this was a special Christmas Eve meeting, it wasn't ever going to end—the shares were just going to go on until everyone was done—so I collected my things and slunk out. And drove home singing to carols on the car radio. The electric company's giant Xmas tree, made of lights, glimmering next to the town lake. Heilige nacht; stille nacht.

5. Going to meetings again with my sponsor, who says she's going to ask her sponsor about some trouble I'm having getting started on my fourth step; and her willingness to be flexible, which is also an immense relief to me.

6. Yoga tonight with Wayne! And with Gladys on Wednesday. I mistakenly assumed any class taught by someone named Gladys would be even more little-old-ladyish than Wayne's, but OMG Gladys KICKS MY FLABBY ASS so hard. I have to breathe stertorously throughout and still can't hold all the poses. And you can hardly hear what she says, in her whispery faint old-lady voice, but holy Vishnu can Gladys ever move it.

7. The magic bullet that has been Effexor plus Zyprexa, despite the silly Xs in their names. At my current dosages I don't cry all the time, and I don't want to die, and I don't think my life will never be happy again without the Qualifier in it. In fact I rather consider him the loser in this situation, when all is said and done, and I sleep soundly. If anything I sleep a little too soundly, averaging 10 hours or more a night; but that's okay for now. I suspect I am getting a little better every day. I hope this is true. My new new pdoc, whom I see January 3, might even be willing to dial the dosage back down a tiny bit with me; I miss being able to write, and I know that's mainly due to the success of the mood stabilizer.

8. How on Christmas Eve, the big Mexican family next door had a wonderful Nochebuena that lasted into the wee hours, with barbacoa of some kind, fragrant woodsmoke, conjunto/norteño music from their pickup truck's open doors, and lots of laughter, until nearly 2 am. I wished I could invite myself to their party, but enjoyed hearing it from one house down. And couldn't help but think of the Q., because of all the Nochebuenas we've spent together, sleeplessly listening to the music and talking; but honestly I didn't miss him. Which is real progress.

9. My dear little kittling catness, who is by the day more adoring and affectionate, probably because she gets so much more of my attention. She loves that I'm watching television/films, because I hold still for long periods of time which means she can sleep on my chest. We spend hours curled up on the sofa under the Christmas lights. She even watches TV sometimes, but after a while it bores her. She seems to like opening and closing credits the best.

10. My friends. Who will receive their own separate blogpost before January, but really, who would I be without all y'all? Picking me up, putting me back together, telling me I can and I will and I already am? Knitting me striped purple socks and sending me bath fizzies and soap and candles and chocolate and books? If someone had told me I'd grow up to be a woman with such friends, I wouldn't have quite believed it possible, at all. And knowing that I'll have you as friends from now on, that wherever I move and whatever I do you'll stay with me...is without price.

Happy, happy holidays, everyone.

soft grey rainy day, with nostalgia and realism

2010-12-16T13:51:00.004-07:00

I woke at 9 but couldn't excavate myself from the duvet until well after 11. I'm definitely feeling the lack of schedule that comes from the semester's having ended, even though I am not finished grading, not by a long shot. Finally coaxed myself out of bed via the promised cup of tea with tangerine, and The Sweater, which arrived yesterday and is everything one hoped it would be.

The cat will neither go outside in the rain nor use her litter pan, but instead wanders the house warbling disconsolately, exactly like a cat with a full bladder. This is a difficult time of year for her. She stares up at me imploringly as if I am the one who has turned on the rain, and I can turn it off again so she can go out to pee and not get her feet wet. She also tries going from back door to front door and back again, as if perhaps it won't be raining outside of one of them.

Before I got out of bed, I managed to do a few minutes of mindfulness practice, as I did yesterday; and something came to me. As I wrote in an email to my BFF:

"I discovered that when I am arguing with the Q. in my head, it keeps me from feeling alone, which is maybe about 100% of why I still do it. I immediately decided it would be better to try to experience what it is like being alone. The purity and silence and simplicity of it. Instead of making a fake Qualifier out of crumpled newspaper and old clothes and ancient twisted karma and words he said last year."

It is strangely and uniquely human, this battle to be where we are, doing what we are doing, instead of imagining some other better self elsewhere doing other more interesting things. I've spent the last few weeks trying to come up with some big fascinating activity to disguise the fact that I'm spending Christmas alone this year, but I don't have money to hire a petsitter and go to Costa Rica for a yoga retreat, or spend the month with dear friends in Portland, or even go to San Diego for a week by the beach. Maybe, it occurred to me just now, skyping with my beloved Ms. R. in Germany, maybe I should just start answering the question "What are you doing for the holidays?" with a simple, "I'm spending them at home alone." What's so awful about that? I have a cat, piles of books, Netflix, a box of satsumas, and an amazing sweater (made, the BFF assures me, from baby alpacas that were petted and kissed on their noses until their fur just spontaneously fell off from happiness).

Maybe I should just be what I am—which is alone. Rather than being nostalgic for a time when I wasn't alone but was with someone who was either lying, enraged about being caught in a lie, or just generally giving every appearance of wanting to be elsewhere.

One thing it's okay to be nostalgic about, though, and that's New Mexico. There's a new gorgeous license plate for the centennial, and just seeing it on the back of a car on the freeway makes me weak with homesickness. If I don't get in to any PhD programs, that's fine. My backup plan is to teach at a NM community college and get a Toyota pickup and a beagle. And on the back of my pickup, I will put one of these:

Have you ever seen a more beautiful license plate? I assure you, there is none.

Love to you all—love and peace and holiday citrus. Oh and PS we had a fabulous cookie-making party as I told you, and here is the picture to prove it:

midwinter graces

2010-12-13T18:35:00.007-07:00

I've been having a hard time approaching this blog lately. Partly because I'm about to run out of my self-imposed limit of 200 posts...partly due to an ill-advised impulsive flurry of post-Thanksgiving communication with the Qualifier; which, yes, I started it, so I deserve whatever I get; but that doesn't help to know. And predictably it's just led to further kindly rejection on his part. ("I'm sorry that I am not ready to be connected again yet. I sincerely wish I were.") And I'm having my period, which almost renders psych meds inoperable. I've spent yesterday and today in bed and on sofa, sometimes crying, sometimes blessedly asleep, at no point working on the grad application which is due Wednesday (I'll have to FedEx it tomorrow).

So I thought it was time to list a few midwinter gifts. A dear friend spoke to me eloquently about divine grace, when I got to see her over the holiday; and her presence itself was a visitation of that grace, per one of my favorite Ani DiFranco lyrics: "God's work isn't done by God / it's done by people." So I list a few recent graces here, to soften my bruised and thorny heart.

1. Satsumas! I know it's Christmastime when these sweet little guys appear. Better than mandarines or clementines even—easy to peel, seedless, juicy—I wind up eating three a day. They're like nature's jellybeans.

2. The Christmas Miracle: Someone returned my wallet to the post office! I had to pay $2.13 postage, but all my ID was intact! Don't have to replace a thing—including my little blue wallet with strawberries on it, that I sewed myself!

3. The Christmas Miracle Part II: So when I went to buy The Sweater, it was gone. I was crestfallen. I'd waited a day too late. I asked a clerk about it, just in case, and she remembered exactly the sweater I meant—looked it up on her little Nordstrom computer—and in a heartbeat had ordered me another one. I thought it was too much to ask for that this one would be discounted, too, so when she asked me, "Does $69.95 sound about right?"—I was so relieved I could barely assent, as she took down my information. To this moment I have no idea why she gave it to me at that price, since it's still $178 on the website. I asked timidly, "So will you call me when it arrives?" and she laughed: "No, that's why I needed your address; it's coming straight to your house." But with no shipping charges. Milagro!

4. Hilarious cookie-making party at my friend Ms. B's house last night. We listened to Christmas music and baked a zillion weirdly shaped sugar cookies and decorated them wildly, in non-Christmassy colors including plum purple and sky blue. (I made one Hanukkah cookie, and a couple doves. I also made latkes, in memory of Ms. R., whom I miss like a mofo.) We also drank eggnog and I even put a teaspoon of brandy into mine, which caused me to become completely ridiculous. I seem to recall holding up my glass at some point and starting to make a speech along the lines of, "Do you know why brandy and eggnog are so good together?" and then falling apart into giggles and being unable to finish. (I think I was trying to explain that the protein in the eggs and milk evens everything out and makes the brandy buzz more mellow.) I can't really drink, thanks to the psych meds; but this was the second time I've had alcohol since breaking up with the Qualifier, and both times (wedding champagne, Christmas eggnog) have been nice and celebratory and uneventful.

And I have been nibbling sugar cookies all day today.

5. Just giving up and eating comfort food, since I can barely move at this point. Amy's macaroni and cheese, lasagne, and enchiladas. In a day or two I'll be back on my feet and can tackle the fridge, which hasn't been cleaned out since before Thanksgiving and finals, and the towers of dishes and laundry. Determined to give the house a good cleaning before the break officially starts.

6. Seeing the new pdoc again Wednesday, at which point we can discuss whether I need more antidepressant or more of something else. Or maybe I'm boosted enough, and just need to feel these feelings and battle through them into action. I don't know. I do think it would be more helpful if I had just a bit more energy, to bathe and eat and stuff. I'm grateful for that touch more energy I do have, after just 10 days of being on the new med. And I know I can trust her to help me figure all this out, which is really Christmas Miracle Part III.

7. Maybe getting to see two friends I never get to see, because they both always come to Phx in December and the Qualifier and I are usually in Mexico. But this year I won't be, so I'll get to see them! (And the Q. did say in an email that he's not going to "our" special places, but doing a more botany-driven, car-intensive tour of the peninsula; so I don't feel as badly as I did when I imagined him camping in my beloved la Bahía, and other of our haunts.)

8. The cat becomes ever more dear and kittenish; she's been playing every night with the satsuma box in hilarious youtube fashion, and comes running when I call. She curls up on my chest and purrs for hours, even falling asleep on me. We have bonded in new ways, just in the last three weeks. I'd be so much more physically lonely without her little furface.

9. Still writing poems. I don't know how good they are, really, but that's not my problem. I just keep writing them for now.

10. My grandmother's butter-yellow wedding ring quilt. I've lived under that thing the last week or so, since I started on this new drug, and find it infinitely consoling to curl up beneath. It looks as though it's made out of flour-sack fabric, but I don't know; vintage prints, for sure. I wish I'd asked my grandmother more about it, when she was still living. I used to put it on my and the Q's bed, the last few years. Honestly, sometimes I snuggle up under it and trick myself into falling asleep by pretending he's in the next room.

And as if on cue my mac and cheese is hot and bubbly, so back to the sofa and quilt for me now. I'll write happier things soon, I promise. I'm okay, just not 100 percent. But the semester's over and I can and will recoup. Just, thank God in all Her mercy and grace for cats and poems and quilts and friends.

mood disorder NOS; doo-dah, doo-dah

2010-12-06T22:19:00.001-07:00

[sung to the tune of "Camptown Ladies"]

Dear Mood Disorder,

I just got back from yoga (which helped a lot, no thanks to you) and wanted to let you know that, tomorrow morning, starting at 10:30, I am teaching my last two critical thinking classes. I'm taking doughnut holes to my students (and satsuma mandarins for the non-sugar-eaters). I'm taking paper cups and a half-gallon of horchata. I'm taking student evals with lots of pencils, for them to fill out. They're bringing their final portfolios and I'm giving them 20 points for each one that looks halfway decent. They're handing in their final essays and we'll do a quick activity, and recap the critical thinking skills they've (hopefully) learned this semester.

And then at 2:45, the second class will leave and I will start celebrating. First I'll drag all the final essays to my car. Then I'll go to the parking office and cancel my parking pass (and get half the money refunded, since I'm not teaching on campus next semester). Then I'll go to therapy and complain about how my new med is kicking my ass with all the nausea and the shivering and the yawning and the insomnia, and how I'm already hypergraphic (but how can you tell? the Internet wonders). But I won't complain about it too much, because I'll also have to admit to her that your henchmen, the suicidals, are already turned down in volume—oh, the helpful self-hating suggestions are still there, but they're so much quieter, even just after four days of medication.

And then at 5 pm, I will leave therapy and drive to the department store where I saw this sweater on Sunday, marked down to $103. It is still outrageously expensive, OUTRAGEOUS I tell you; but I'm getting it for myself, and I'll wear it every day for the rest of winter. And do you know why, Mood Disorder? I'll tell you why. Because I have attended every single class of this semester for every single meeting, even when I had to choke back tears and rage and pain and obsessive thoughts of my ex-boyfriend fondling sex workers, I have taught when I was filled with nothing more than a black bleak desire to never leave my bed again—I got out of bed and I put on my pants and I got in the car and I went, I drove to school, I sucked back my snot and I taught. And for some people maybe that's not such a big deal. But for me it's huge.

So chew on that, Mood Disorder fucking NOS.

That's PROFESSOR Crazy Lady to you.

and PS it looks much better on me even than the gangly-skinny model.

letter to a late friend

2010-12-05T19:41:00.007-07:00

Dear J.,

Yesterday we had your walk—your friends and family, we became a team, and we all walked around a park with hundreds of other suicide survivors, us wearing t-shirts that had your picture and name on them. It was jarring to see your face on a t-shirt (a photo of you raising bird-watching binoculars to the sky); it is always jarring, to see pictures of you and know that you are not merely late, but in fact you will not come at all.

This walk was to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. And your suicide should have been prevented; frankly at times I think I personally should have prevented it. You told me you had a plan. You told me you thought about it constantly. What was I waiting for—for you to call me and tell me you had the rope around your neck?

I guess that's what I was waiting for. Instead you just went ahead and did it, and do you know, I'm still pretty fucking mad at you. There were things we still had to do; there were things we had only started doing. We were supposed to agonize about our breakups some more, and strategize how to get our lovers back, and take turns reading sad poems aloud, and maybe eventually notice that we liked each other. But you foreclosed on all that. I hadn't even begun to learn who you were, under that deceptively still exterior, and you had to go all Van Gogh on us, goddammit.

You probably would have rolled your eyes at the walk. It was, as my friend Mr. B. said to me sotto voce, the kind of event that David Foster Wallace would have written about, in his half-satirical half-tender way. We released blue and white balloons into the sky, and the loudspeakers played U2's "Beautiful Day" on cue; several of us were laughing under our breaths, and muttering about how scandalized you would have been: all that rubber and ribbon headed across the desert, straight for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

We did raise a lot of money—over $4,000, and we're still taking donations until December 31. I don't know how you would feel about that. Personally I've spent so much of my adult life thinking of suicide that I think it's a good thing to spread awareness. I think people should know more about it, and the stigma of talking about it should be lessened if it can't be eliminated. We wore colored beads yesterday—purple if you were a friend of the suicide victim; blue for something else, I can't remember what; and green if you'd "struggled" yourself, as the card by the beads euphemistically put it. It was a year since my most recent suicide attempt—the one I told you about, and oh God I hope I didn't give you any ideas—so I took a green strand. I returned all the beads at the end of the walk, though. I knew you wouldn't want me to waste any more plastic.

There was some kind of funny duck on the lake, black with a bright white bill; you would have known what kind it was. Afterward we went out for barbeque. It's always weird to have these, basically these parties, where you're like the reason for all of us to be there, but you're not there. The absent guest of honor.

Speaking of the one-year anniversary of that suicide attempt, I met my new psychiatrist that same day. I kind of completely love her. I wish you were alive; maybe you could be her client too. She's our age, with Liz Lemon glasses and comfortable shoes and a genuine sense of humor. She's started me on a new med and I am seriously loopy. But I love her—she's really the first doctor I've liked since my beloved crazy black-leather-jacketed lesbian from Santa Fe. She does think I'm bipolar, but is willing to try not medicating me out of my creativity, which makes me love her the more. Did I mention I love her?

She took a really detailed history—a full hour, not just one of these 15-minute drivebys like you and I have both had. At the end of the hour she pushed back her chair, put down her legal pad (covered in teeny notes), and said, "Okay, are you ready?"

I smiled resignedly, twisting the Kleenex in my hands. I'd already burst into tears when she asked me, in re: my constant suicidality, "Do you want to live?" and I managed to get out through the sobs, "Not if it's going to be like this." Then she very nicely asked me a super-clinical question, giving me a chance to pull myself back together. "Thank you for changing the subject," I croaked, and we both laughed.

Now she looked directly at me, friendly but serious. "Well, you're almost certainly bipolar. I mean, we'll never be able to prove it 100%, so I'm still going with mood disorder NOS. But I think you're bipolar." She paused. "How do you feel about that?"

I loved her for asking me.

"I think...I think I feel fine about it. I mean, I'm a poet. We're all bipolar. It's more than an occupational hazard; it's practically a certainty."

She nodded slowly. "And I do think that finding the right medications will be important for you, so you stay on them. If you feel like they hamper your creativity, you quit taking them. But you need to find a balance between creativity and..." she gestured vaguely.

"...and cleaning the house with Q-tips," I finished for her, referring to a state of mind in January that led to my discontinuing a med abruptly.

We both laughed, not bitterly but with acknowledgement.

She looked at me carefully. "Also, I think you're going to need more careful medication management than I can give you. Because I'm the medical director of this clinic, I really only work part-time." I realized her shoes and clothes were comfortable probably because she's a mom. She seemed nice and motherly. "So you'll need to find someone else to work with eventually."

"But I like you!" I blurted out. "You take a good history."

"And I can definitely see you in the short term. We'll find you someone else who can really monitor you. I can give them my notes." She looked at me again, more searchingly. "I also have to tell you: I think you should be in the hospital."

This did not surprise me, given what I'd just told her. Any clinician in her right mind would say this.

"I just think," she continued, since I didn't protest, "that you need to be somewhere safe during the med changes. It's going to be a rough ride until you're stable on something."

We talked for about ten more minutes, and I kept count: she told me five times that I needed to be in the hospital. I know she's right; I know I'm in danger. And I told her, I can't do it. I have to finish my semester. I've made it through the entire thing and I haven't missed a single class. Do you realize how amazing that is? AN ENTIRE SEMESTER and not one cancelled class. And I've mostly kept on top of the grading, too.

She argued then for intensive outpatient, seeing that I wasn't budging on the hospitalization angle. I explained how I couldn't be at school and in outpatient at the same time. We sparred very respectfully and she made her thoughts known and I acknowledged her rightness and I am still not, not at this point anyway, going to the hospital.

But you should have been in one. If someone had slapped your depressed ass in the hospital, J., we might still have you with us.

So now I've promised both therapist and doctor that I won't do an ER admit after another botched attempt—that if it gets to the point where I have a plan and means for carrying it out, I'll call and get help. In other words, if I have to go in the hospital, I will, and I will go calmly; so much more preferable to terrifying everyone and damaging my self-respect (in the process of activating the environment to care for me). But I am taking it on a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour basis, and so far (today) (right now) I'm safe. And I'll know when I'm not, and will act accordingly.

Does that make sense? Anyway that is the plan. Day by day. And today the ideating is at a low roar. Frankly I think I'm already better after three days of the new medication. I have a pretty quick response time, which is helpful. I think if you hadn't been so depressed for so long, you might have responded more quickly to medication too. But how many depressive episodes had you already suffered, and for how many decades? Each one blacker and more deep than the one before? Medication can barely touch those depressions; I know, I've been in them.

I have an appointment with her in two weeks. In the meantime I'm taking it easy, not letting myself stress out about the end of the semester, getting plenty of sleep, reading an Edith Wharton novel, making pizza, and just letting the drugs work their magic.

I never got to play the guitar and sing for you. You never got to play drums for me. We never burned each other CDs.

I still have that U2 song in my head; it feels manipulatively uplifting. And the blue and white balloons were beautiful in the blue and white sky—soaring up in a sphere together like fireworks, like a flock of birds, like snow in a snowglobe.

We all really, really miss you.

Love, Jezebel

la mia piccola metafora

2010-12-02T19:44:00.003-07:00

So for weeks and weeks now I've been craving a kind of pizza you can't really get anywhere outside of Napoli: real Italian pizza margherita. The kind described so lyrically by, God help us, Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat Pray Spend a Honking Big Book Advance:

The dough [is] soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust—thin and crispy, or thick and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza with herbal radiance….

(It goes on like that for quite a bit longer.)

This is the kind of pizza my host mother, in Firenza, would order casually as take-out, and it would arrive on the back of a Vespa and have that priceless, knee-weakening thin-gummy-chewy crust, and she would deftly take a pair of, and I am serious about this, orange-handled German sewing shears, and cut the slices of pizza for us. She would order a pizza Fiorentina, which had spinach all over and an egg cracked on top, for herself and her older son (a teenaged boy with also a Vespa and lots of gold jewelry and one of the first cellphones I'd ever seen), and a pizza margheretta for me and the little girl.

So tonight, after weeks of daydreaming about it, I thought, I not only want that pizza, but I will have that pizza. And I went to the store and bought the things I would need, and I came home and I made it. With plenty of extra virgin olive oil, and lots of fresh basil from the plant by my front door, which is flourishing in the colder weather. The cat watched me gravely as I rolled dough, tossed it in the air, dolloped generous spoonsful of the aforementioned sweet tomato sauce (with a bit of cream whisked in) and sliced the fresh mozzarella and arranged it into the daisy petals of the margheretta/marguerite (which always makes me think of Faust).

Then I baked it, and we ate it. Well, I ate it, and the cat sampled a microscopic speck of mozzarella, which she chewed gamely for a moment and then spat out.

And now the whole house smells like pizza. And it was delicious, and just what I wanted. And I made it all by myself.

I made it by myself.

one year ago today

2010-12-01T22:37:00.002-07:00

and right around this time of night, actually, the Qualifier came home from his AA meeting to find me in a heap in the backyard; and then he drove me to the emergency room; and then I was admitted to the hospital for two days, and then to a nearby psychiatric unit.

Today I met my new psychiatrist. She's amazing, and the hour we spent talking was both good and bad. I want to talk about it, about all these things, but must keep my head down and focused on school. Two more teaching days, tomorrow (Thursday) and next Tuesday, for critical thinking; one more teaching day for the poetry workshop (next Wednesday) plus the final a week later.

I am sitting here shaking with something, I don't even know what, just shuddering like something's chasing me. No—not like it's chasing me—like it was chasing me, and then stopped, and now I am having a delayed reaction to the fear. I just finished teaching the poetry workshop—it was a disaster tonight, just a complete disaster. Through the window of the classroom where I teach it, I can look across the street and see the hospital where the Q. brought me, one year ago tonight. Overdosed and raving, and saying to him, Now you'll break up with me, I know you'll break up with me now that I've been stupid and done this. Of course he said he wouldn't. That he wouldn't leave me.

I wish I could write. But I have to take meds and go to bed.

vacation pie chart (from an email to BFF)

2010-11-27T20:34:00.002-07:00

"About 85% of the time I think, I won't last another five minutes without him, I can't take another breath knowing that he left me; and maybe 10% of the time I think, I never want to see that motherfucking son of a bitch's face again in this life how dare he goddamn him I hate him to death and back; and the rest of the time, well, I'm mostly wondering how much pecan pie with whipped cream I already ate today and when am I decently allowed to have more."

STUGs

2010-11-26T11:19:00.005-07:00

It was innocent enough: A friend texted to invite me to his birthday dinner, and I remembered my 40th birthday party, which was always a subject of some amusement for the Q. and I—he'd arranged a surprise meeting of all my friends at our favorite Mexican mariscos place, unaware that another restaurant in the same chain was just a few blocks away. So all my friends arrived there and waited for us, while in the meantime we arrived at our restaurant and were the only customers there. We ordered and I sat sad-faced and moping into my tortilla chips, not sure why the Q. hadn't planned anything slightly more exciting for a birthday with a zero in it, not sure why he hadn't let me change my mind and opt for sushi instead, which I'd have preferred. Finally he threw down his napkin and pushed away from the table in frustration. I looked up, inwardly preparing myself for a tantrum. "Oh for fuck's sake!—they were supposed to be here half an hour ago, and I don't have anyone's phone number because we set it up on Facebook." I smiled at him, brightening. Within minutes all my friends were there and we had a fine dinner.

But I wondered if I hadn't been kind of pissy about it, beforehand, and suddenly—all this happened in just a few seconds—now here I was doubled in half, leaning on the dining table sobbing explosively. I groped in my satchel for my phone and called one of my oldest and dearest friends, Ms. K, a social worker now in nursing school. She listened patiently as I choked out words.

"Was I—did he—did he do what he did because—because I'm so—"

"Sweetie, sweetie, no. No."

"But I mean I can be really self-engrossed, and I was kind of mean about—about him not throwing a party for me—"

"Oh, honey. You know this, but I'll say it again: what he did had nothing to do with you. And of course you were pissed off—it was your birthday, and here he was dragging you to a restaurant you didn't even want to go to! You walk the same line we all do, in relationships, as women, between being self-engrossed and maybe giving too much of ourselves. You didn't do anything wrong."

This sentence, said to me so many times and with such tenderness by the Q., sent me briefly into fresh paroxysms of weeping. Finally the crying died down and I could talk to her a little bit about other things—swimming, and nursing school, and her daughter.

We were about to hang up when she said to me, "It's totally normal that this is happening to you. They're just STUGs."

"?"

"STUGs. I don't know whether it was my grief counseling teacher in grad school who made it up, or whether he got it from somewhere else, but they're STUGs. Sudden Temporary Upsurges of Grief."

"Oh my God, you mean it has a name?!" Suddenly relief sparkled around me. They have a name for it! It's normal!

And so I got off the phone and looked it up and sure enough, STUGs: "In her book Treament of Complicated Mourning [Therese] Rando describes a STUG reaction as 'brief periods of intense grief which occur when a catalyst reminds one of the absence of the loved one or resurrects memories of the death, the loved one, or feelings about the loss.'" Most references give this as a Subsequent upsurge, not a Sudden one—subsequent as in, following a cue. As in, thinking about a birthday party and then bam, incapacitating outburst.

(It can't be an accident that upsurge and outburst are both Saxonate kennings. Nothing elegant or Latin about it. It's like unexpectedly throwing up.)

These spasms can catch me in mid-activity, anytime, anywhere; they are no respecter of persons, and are the emotional equivalent of being slugged in the stomach. But now that they have a name, somehow I'm more okay with them. "It's just a STUG," I whisper into the cat's comfortingly soft fur, when she draws close mrrtling and prrtling in concern. The sudden noises and spouting salt water alarm her. "I know it's weird. But the Moms isn't exploding, I promise." (And yes I call myself that to my cat. And yes it's sad.)

So they just keep a-comin. In a bid to make this week just as crazy and ill-organized as possible, I lost my wallet on Saturday night, and had to take my passport to the bank to get a new debit card. I opened it only to have my Mexican travel documents fall out, and look, there are the little colored stamps for every year the Q. and I went to Mexico together: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and there won't be one for 2010. I smiled crookedly at the bank clerk. Then I came home and needed to leave a letter for the catsitter—so I went through my usual petsitter-instructions letter and changed all instances of "we" to "I," as in "I'll be back on Monday" instead of "we'll be back"—that was fun.

Or another which I wasn't expecting—an abrupt remembrance of the Q. and me having the flu in, I think, February of 2008, and watching the entire series of Twin Peaks over like an 8-day period (which I do not recommend for maximum good mental hygiene but which was insanely fun)—and then suddenly there I am retching sobbing and nearly unable to breathe, thinking blankly What? How? Really? When? Where— and other such imponderables. Then I get up off the floor and pet the cat and look some more for my wallet. Which has truly vanished as if into the thin desert air.

Now I'm finally all packed and done with the chaos and peacefully seated in our somewhat melodramatically named airport, Sky Harbor, waiting for a flight to take me to Texas where I'll stay with my parents for 6 nights. I'm going to use the time to negotiate a med change, one that will hopefully dial back the multiple-times-daily occurrences of the STUGs and the incessant boring suicidality which just does not let up no matter how many classes I teach or how many laps I swim or how much bacon I ingest. And in fact is getting worse. The internal voice advises me (today in the middle of class, no less—rudely, disruptively—and whilst my students were debating SO beautifully) that I should (or in fact will at some point, it declared), um, take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them; even as I am sitting here in the airport writing you, it comes unbidden. It whispers: you don't belong in grad school anymore and you will never get a teaching job and so you might as well just, you know, be reasonable and—

Ridiculous, right? And all for lack of a little serotonin? I don't know. But I'm doubling Zyprexa this week and we'll see if that helps.

*****

[post interrupted by Thanksgiving with parents, more to follow]

ceci n'est pas une blogpost

2010-11-18T21:13:00.004-07:00

Part I

I can't blog. I can't possibly, because I only have three states of mind. These states are: 1) teaching, grading, or mechanically typing applications/letters/forms/requests/references; 2) crying, usually while driving; and 3) taking Klonopin/Zyprexa and going to bed. These seem the only three states I have. Sometimes I call people when I'm flailing in state 2, and need to get either into state 1 or state 3; but mostly I've started to realize and admit that I'm phobic about crying, maybe even more than I'm phobic about bathing or throwing up. Which is funny because folks, I'm a cryer. I cry all the time. But every time I fight it. I fight it for hours. I fight it so hard at school all day that when I finally am someplace where it's actually okay to cry I can't seem to understand this, and I fight it even harder, beyond some point where it's helpful. I'm scared to cry. I'm afraid I'll get into trouble, that it'll disgust people, that they'll hate me. I'm afraid I'll break into pieces, I'm afraid I'll just fall on the floor and die. I'm afraid the Qualifier won't be there to comfort me. I'm afraid I won't be able to stop. I'm afraid I'll cry myself into salt and nothingness. None of these fears are rational. I hurry from 1 to 3 and try to spend as little time in 2 as possible. This is folly. It is not wise. If grief is my work I need to grieve. But I am so scared of it. I feel so uncontained, and so alone.

Part II

Maybe it's not so bad that we lost Tori. Because we have another redhead. And she's trilingual. And she has a wicked left hand. I get goosebumps whenever she switches into the Russian, which is from Pasternak (of course).

fevrale dostat chernil i plakat
pisat O fevrale navsnryd
poka grohochushaya slyakot
vesnoyu charnoyu gorit

February—get ink, shed tears,
write of it, sob your heart out, sing
while the torrential slush that roars
burns in the blackness of spring—

Part III

Kind friend Mr. M. sent me this and I can't stop watching it. I feel I could rest my eyes on Tilda Swinton as she rides her bicycle around the perimeter of 1980s Berlin forever and ever. The trees. I am a green tree moving among trees. I can't even yet say what it is about this short film but it is deeply changing my game somehow, in an almost cellular way. And so I cannot not share it with you, on my way tonight from state 2 to state 3. On verra—

Part IV

Oh there is one other thing I do. I don't bathe properly or do dishes—they are mountainous in the kitchen and I have to slenderly select out a teaspoon or paring knife, delicately from the pile, like pick-up sticks, lest the whole thing collapse—bathing is more like disinfecting, I put bath salts in the water and immerse myself briefly, shivering, hoping it has some antiseptic properties—but there is one other thing I do.

I write poems. Daily. I don't think they are any good but I write them. I write them. I keep writing them. I don't care if they're bad. They are a state in which I'm not in pain or crying. I write these poems.

"I must go on standing; you can't break that which isn't yours."

PS

2010-11-16T19:05:00.004-07:00

1. I just got my splinter out by myself.

2. If anyone can find the poem by Adrienne Rich which has these lines in it, something like: And we who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever; a turn of a wrist, a certain weather, and we are thrust again back into the storm....something like that? I would be so grateful. I know I didn't make that poem up. Unless it's Rilke.

3. This is my homepage now, in my web browser, thanks to Mr. S's suggesting it to me. And may I suggest it to you, also. Oddly enough, it does help.

splinter

2010-11-16T18:28:00.004-07:00

I drive the car, I teach the class, I swallow down the tears mechanically and compartmentalize efficiently so I can smile at and interact with the clerk or the receptionist or the student before me. Through it all, through whatever I do, are two forms of the pain: one is a dull ache and the other is a burning, but they both start at the same place, at my wrists, on the inside of each wrist, and move up the insides of my forearms and upper arms, then meet across my upper chest, down to the tips of my breasts and up in a wave up my throat. I explain to my therapist, I think it's the part of you that would come in contact with another person, if you were holding them in your arms. If you were a child for example and someone were to pick you up, and you had your arms around their neck. I can barely get this out and she nods, gravely, acknowledging both what I am saying and how I am saying it, choked and blinded by pain. The ache, I continue, gritting my teeth against tears, is just there always, a low-grade fever, always at a one or two. The searing comes when cued, starts at around a four and goes up to a seven before I start sobbing aloud. Once I'm crying, it can reach an eight or nine in seconds. She nods again. Skin-hunger, she calls it.

I maneuver every hour of every day through this pain; I do the things which I am told make a life worth living, not just a life worth enduring (my personal little DBT joke). I fold things and put them in envelopes and mail them. I joke with friends, share ideas, order the matcha latte, order the salmon quiche, put the groceries in the refrigerator, take the recycling to the curb. I take my vitamins and do the dishes and let the cat out and in and out again and back in again. I call Medicare and patiently explain it all to the claims representative for the dozenth time since I was hospitalized in December of last year, about the claims for the hospital stay that are still not being processed, because neither carrier will admit to being my primary insurance, and so the claims just bounce back and forth eternally, purgatorially, while the collection agencies come after me. I feel slight respite from the dull low-grade ache when I am swimming, when I am actually interested in a book, or when my students are being weird or funny or somehow distracting. I'm appropriately grateful for those moments. They end promptly when all the students exit the classroom and I turn out the lights; when I haul myself dripping out of the pool and think blankly, okay, now time to shower and get dressed. When the book ends.

I don't tell my therapist that I pray for him over and over, just thinking desperately that if I can't be with him I can somehow stay connected to him through praying for him. But I can't pray, all I can do is say the brahmaviharas, the easy-version ones my other boyfriend taught me. May he be well. May he be happy. May he be peaceful. May he find home. I do this when I feel like crying, I focus on the pain in my arms and chest and breathe and pray and try not to cry. Then I try to say the same blessings for myself. I don't tell anyone this. Instead I tell my therapist thickly, everyone, they are getting tired of me. They are protecting themselves from my sadness, which makes sense. They are moving on with their lives, they're over him. But I'm not over him. I don't tell her that I think constantly, every moment that I'm conscious, about calling him, writing him, texting him, talking to him, seeing him, pleading with him, arguing, reasoning, begging. What I do tell her, truthfully: I take my evening meds at 6 pm instead of 9 pm so I can go to bed and not be conscious, because I am so worn out from the effort of not doing all these things.

I probably should be going to my two home Al-Anon meetings; but I can't stand the thought of seeing him, or not seeing him and wanting to see him; I can't face my own craving for him in that parking lot every Friday and Sunday night. Which is ironic because probably this is the time in the world when I most need those meetings.

I can't stand most music but I listen to Judee Sill's "The Kiss" and "The Donor" over and over; I am convinced these songs are genius, are the lyrical equivalent of George Herbert poems. I don't tell her this. I don't tell her that I hear his name chanted in my head; only (dryly, woodenly) that I am obsessed with contacting him. I tell her that I mailed my fellowship application, mailed out a book manuscript, dealt with the car insurance and the catsitter and am still waiting for the letter from Social Security demanding my life savings, that they gave me, back again. I don't tell her that I can't have an orgasm without bursting into tears, that I think I will probably never be able to again, that I really am afraid I won't get over him. I don't tell her, I dread the thought of the rest of my life being like this. I tell her: I can't seem to accept reality. Everyone else has accepted it but me. I have to accept this. I have to move on. I'm stuck—

I ask my BFF over the weekend if she will contact the Q. I say, maybe he can explain it to you in a way where I will finally be able to understand it and accept it? My BFF understandably says no, that another explanation or more contact, however mediated, will not help me find peace and acceptance. Instead she says, please tell the therapist. She says, please consider hospitalization. So I do tell my therapist and then I sit there laughing weakly but maniacally, blotting tears from my face; tears erupt out of me in my therapist's office like sweat or rain, just spontaneously manifesting as soon as I sit down in her chair every week. What, I croak, they're going to hospitalize me because I'm sad? We're all sad.

The therapist is attentive and quiet. Her tissues are nicer than they have been, softer than the usual sandpapery institutional one-ply. She admits they ran out and she bought these from Target. I swipe two at a time from the box, holding my breath so the radiating pain (only at a six or seven) doesn't turn into open-mouthed drooling gagging sobs. We do a quick chain analysis—what brought this on, what cued this particular bout, although the bouts seem to me to be running together and it's getting harder to distinguish them. It's like I'm crashing off meds, but I haven't changed anything about my meds. She says, I think you need more. She says, this grief has turned into biochemical depression and your brain needs something to jump you out of it. Like more serotonin or dopamine. You need a therapeutic dose of something. We talk about this every week and we always agree, but since I don't see the new pdoc until December 1 this is all we can do, is talk about it.

But this particular week's resurgence of grief isn't too tricky to figure out, we decide: it's just the usual weekend loneliness, plus getting my period, plus—plus what? I hold my hand up, one finger is bandaged. I tell her, I got a splinter. And I immediately thought: well obviously I have to call the Qualifier. Because no one but him can get out my splinter.

At this I finally give up and break down crying. I can't see anything. She tells me, I'm going to touch you on the knee. She puts her hand on my knee and says quietly, Yes. Yes. Who is going to take out your splinter? —And he's really good at it! I half-yell, half-sob. You know, it's not easy to take out splinters. You have to be delicate, but you also have to, you know, really go for it, really gouge. And I can't get it out by myself. I cry fiercely. We say nothing.

Finally I say, Whatever. It's just a splinter. It'll work itself out. I know that. My face is streaming, my arms and chest throbbing with a bone-deep pain. I know that, I know that. I know it'll get better.

(It just seems like, it seems like it's not getting better. It seems like it's been three months or maybe even six months, depending on when you date it from, his leaving me, and I sit here week after week and I am in the exact same place. Only actually, you know what? The truth is that actually I think I am getting worse. I am getting sadder and more bereft and wild with grief. And there is no one to come over and sit with me and be with the ugliness of it, and worst of all there is no him. There is just a howling black pain that swamps over my body, that washes in a wave down my face and over my hands and radiates out from my chest like a ragged cratered wound. And he was always comfortable being next to my ugliness, and he never found me scary or weak or bad or wrong. And now there is no him. And there is just nothing there.)

breakup music wallowing continues

2010-11-14T19:58:00.001-07:00

"all the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful"

2010-11-14T16:22:00.007-07:00

...as Miss Bishop once wrote in a nice poem. In other words, teaching, grading, applying for things, getting rejected, sending out more work, swimming, crying, sucking up and going on—it's all still taking place. Only now with a cat more or less permanently grafted to to my lap, because it's chilly.

But I wanted to break in and say, you should totally watch this, at least the segment below. Because it's stunning. I got the link from Ms. F who teaches the fiction class which I ignore because I'm inundated with teaching. I live in a cave and so had never heard of La La La Human Steps before, and thus I'm not sure when I've ever seen such acute, attacked choreography. So pungent and muscular, so chopped into ragged shreds. And what a vocabulary. And what creepy Lou Reed lyrics used so gurlesquilly. You will like this, yes. And someday when I am not crying/grading/eating potato chips/reading books/detoxing from the Q./oversleeping, I will blog with real words again.

back & forth, see-saw, up & down

2010-11-08T13:59:00.007-07:00

Which, don't get me wrong—it's not entirely unpleasant; frankly I prefer up and down to down down all the time down. But it's definitely very swoopy around here. Permanent sweatpants yes, not crying yes, mugs of tea yes, yoga yes, moping and ruminating yes, eating yes, nightmares yes, reading books yes, fear of bathing yes, missing the Q. yes, getting stuff done yes, moping some more yes, sucking it up and dealing yes. Teaching three classes—and applying to four fellowships, six graduate programs, ten CVs to community colleges, assorted book contests and dozens of poems winging their way thither and fro to literary magazines...if I juggle wildly and keep all the eggs in the air long enough, will one of them hatch and fly away? It's exhausting, but what better thing do I have to do with my time right now?

Both a friend and my therapist this last week compared me to a single mother (though to be fair it's hardly an apt comparison, because I get to sleep uninterruptedly, except for the cat accidentally walking on my face in the middle of the night). But I take their point: everything is in total flux right now. I have no job after the first of December, and all I really know I'm not staying here, in this strange and horrible state where we elect and re-elect folks like Brewer, McCain, and Quayle; but other than that I don't know anything.

Well, one thing I've decided. I'm keeping this blog up only until I reach 200 posts. Then I'm officially done obsessing about the Q., and his whole ridiculous justification/storyline/crazy talk. Sometimes I just sit there numbly in my sweatpants thinking: Why couldn't he be a NORMAL sex addict? Why couldn't he just admit he has a problem and get help? Why does he have to invent this whole fancy I'm-non-monogamous thing? All this no-really-it's-an-orientation-like-straight-or-gay-and-I'm-comin-out-I-want-the-world-to-know-I've-got-to-let-it-show-even-though-I'm-FORTY-NINE-for-chrissake HORSESHIT?

(I sent this to Ms. J., who wrote back and made me laugh aloud: "I wish you had gotten a normal sex addict too, I really do. (What a completely bizarre sentence to even have to write.)"

Anyway, when I close up the Jezebel, I'll start tending to my third anonymous identity, and posting more about writing/poetry/teaching/books/whatever my new life will hold. I look forward to being just a regular, slightly crazy literary blogger again. The Q. doesn't know about that URL either, so I'll be safe there; and I can turn over some kind of fresh blank page on this horrible sordid chapter of my time in Arizona. Because, for example, the catsitter came over to meet the cat and pick up the spare key etc., and she's a first-year ("freshman") at the university where I teach—her dad brought her and there were two things about all this which left me crestfallen: 1) HER DAD WAS MY AGE OMG I AM SO OLD, and 2) also, he was all suspicious about the cat's witchy name, where does it come from, etc. And I was cool and composed and just said, it's a family cat name, it's from medieval England, whereupon he said darkly yeah, well, we looked it up on the Internet. What, I'm supposed to be impressed that you know how to use Wikipedia? And then they left and I shut the door and the kitten came out from under the bed and I told her, Mommy is taking us AWAY FROM ARIZONA I SWEARS IT.

The other thing that needs to kick into gear is regular attendance at Al-Anon meetings. I'm really, really feeling the loss of my two home groups, and I'm going to need the help of that program if I want to shovel out from under so much resentment, as soon as the grief has turned sour and stale—it's probably already there, and I should start doing a Step Four on the Q. specifically, in addition to my general Step Four. Otherwise I sit around and make various sarcastic speeches to him in my head, and I know it only hurts me—drinking poison and waiting for him to die, etc.—but right now they are just there. The sarcastic angry bitter resentful words, inside me. Probably making me ugly and giving me a double chin. Which is maybe a good look for me; it goes with the witchy cat-name, and all the freaky goddesses and buddhas and Guadalupes around the house. Sigh.

(Because, as my BFF said, she's really an adorable cat and so fun to petsit! when I'm not USING HER TO RAISE THE DEAD.)

Yeah—I have to get out of here in more ways than one.

feline butter

2010-11-06T21:24:00.007-07:00

And what a relief. What an everloving relief. Ensuite, cardinal numerals explaining precisely how I am feline butter:

1. The last three days, I didn't cry. I.DID.NOT.CRY. I was morose and preoccupied, but no crying! I am getting better! I cried (like a spigot) in therapy on Tuesday and was sniffly on Wednesday but I didn't cry Thursday OR Friday OR Saturday!

2. I'm cooking (and eating) and cleaning again, after two weeks of not. Two loads of laundry yesterday and washed a mountain of dishes; this morning made scrambled eggs with mushrooms and spinach, tonight made a delicious low-carb pizza crust with my own quick homemade marinara (from organic plum tomatoes) to go on top, with shredded fresh basil and goat cheese. Next on the list: more regular bathing.

3. Small moments of almost-joy or near-serenity: yoga and swimming; riding my bike around the neighborhood at night; riding my bike to vote; bolt-reading Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea; having tom kha with Ms. B. last night (from the same place that has the magnificent dessert "Bananas in the Sea," which just has to be the title of a poem) and watching Man on Wire; reading The Buddha & the Borderline three times over [sic] the same day I got it from the library, about which more later; reading Melville in bed every night; and force-writing poems which aren't any good but I will faithfully keep the machinery working until they are good again goddammit.

4. Amy Winehouse, "Back to Black." (She totally should have sung a James Bond theme.)

5. This morning at the coffee place I sent out ten (10) (TEN!) curriculum vitae and cover letters to local community colleges. And I finally have my shortlist of PhD programs together; if I don't get in to any of them, I'll look for teaching jobs then, but for now I think I'll at least let them make me offers, or not. And I pulled together my writing sample for a fellowship with a November 15 deadline; still have to write my statement of teaching philosophy/cover letter for that one.

6. My basil and cilantro plants are gloriously healthy. And my purple campanula. And a cute little orange pumpkin that my neighbor bought me, all on my front porch with the succulents in their pots and the Tibetan prayer flags. The cat and I sit outside in the sun and smirk.

7. I can't fit into my jeans anymore, but I'm not taking it lying down. By which I mean, on the one hand I'm telling myself there are worse things than not being able to cram myself into size fours (even though I was always a zero [pun intended] until Zyprexa circa 2006). And then on the other hand I'm working to eliminate grains entirely from my diet, which also helps my mood almost as much as meds. Other than, maybe, I don't know, a heavy object falling on the Qualifier from some great height. That might make me feel happier too.

8. Speaking of whom, I woke this morning and you know what I thought? I'll tell you what I thought; I thought, Geez but the Qualifier is a skanky ho. And I pretty much just went with that.

9. I haven't missed class once all semester; and Thursday is a HOLIDAY OMG YAY I don't have to teach and I have never been so grateful to American's veterans in my LIFE.

10. I'm alive.

because gratitude is holy

2010-11-03T14:34:00.016-07:00

(and mostly what I'm grateful for today is BOOKS!)

1. A brand-SPANKING new issue of Black Warrior Review, and a really wonderful one—delivered to my doorstep, with a pink Post-It note I will probably treasure approximately FOREVER, because it's from my favorite managing editor east of the Mississippi. RMFTMFR!

2. Having enough meds to double up, and to be able to do so through November, until my Dec. 1 pdoc appointment where I will get prescription refills at least, if not (fingers crossed) actual medication management. It has to help, doubling up. I pray to thee, Saint Zyprexa.

[Therapist, rhetorically: "I don't understand, you're doing everything right: you teach, you grade papers, you go to the YMCA, you eat, you're spending time with friends—why are you still so miserable?" Me: points silently to brain.]

3. Tsvetaeva and Dickinson, my go-to breakup poets.

4. An astounding UPS package from Ms. M, totally unexpected, with two TWO books OMG books I love them. They are, as I said to her, like the bandages which sop up my internal bleeding. Some of us have TV, some junk food, some exercise—I have books. They stanch the psychic wound, they are the soothing balm. (Also in the box were lovely Lush bath things, which, the bathtub is also the soothing balm.) (And a card with mermaid La Sirena, from the Mexican tarot/bingo, only she's an adorable skeleton.)

5. Sarah Vap's reading last night, mostly from her newest book Faulkner's Rosary, dark wild deep-image writing about her pregnancy, and I was in tears at several points (and not just because she's so much more successful than I, plus her hair always looks fabulous), scribbling my own poem down, furtively, at my side—I often know it's a good reading when I start writing myself—it's as if the words start more words from the brush, like rabbits. Starting a sheaf of anti-pregnancy, anti-marriage poems, the tonic for how crushed with sadness I feel when I see someone dedicating her book to her husband and children, all her fecund published poems—my own astringently lonely poems about barrenness and sterility and isolation. Realizing that it's time for me to start writing out and exorcising the Qualifier, finally. But before last night was too soon. Realizing that for the first time I actually understand what Eliot means by hollow men. Feeling emptied out, exsanguinated and gutted, an exoskeleton that walks around and does its jobs and talks to people, but is a papery carapace with nothing but air inside.

(People spoke to me at the reading and I would say things, but they would be the wrong things—socially acceptable phrases, just uttered at the wrong moment. One woman announced, "I'm going to give you a hug!" "I'm good, how are you?" I replied automatically, pointlessly, like a badly programmed robot. The whole evening was like this. My poetry teacher was there; he hugged me and I told him he smelled lovely, like flowers. "It's some stuff my assistant gives me," he said, looking vaguely over the top of my head. "It comes in a purple bottle." I wound up with Ms. B. huddled safely behind the bar in the kitchen, giggling tiredly and scarfing cookies made with dried cranberries and blueberries and macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips. I didn't speak to Sarah, because why would she remember me? We only met once. And she was surrounded, when I looked, by starry-eyed young undergraduates, giving them advice on applying to MFA programs. I felt roughly one hundred years old. It was okay. It's just how it is now.)

6. And look, a book about Jezebel! I mean, besides all those hatey Xian books about her (there's one in particular I grew up with, that I can't find now, which is good—it's mostly why this blog has the name it does, because I grew up with her being such a villainess, so demonized, almost more powerful than Satan in my fucked-up family's cosmology). It's already on hold for me at the library and I can't wait to get my hands on it. Reclaiming Jezebel!

7. Also, a book I interlibrary-loan-requested because my therapist recently read it and recommended it, saying that the author, Kiera van Gelder (a poet, of course) was such a good writer that she (therapist) understood for the first time what it really feels like to be in the kind of breathtaking pain that an emotionally dysregulated person experiences. I read the following excerpt and it pretty much sealed the deal for me—that and the author's outstanding presentation at NAMI, as she's in the forefront of what some are calling Borderline 2.0—a vital, patient-centered movement redefining our particular form of mental interestingness.

Talking to Taylor only increases my upset. What do I feel? Use my DBT skills to observe and describe! I feel rage, hurt, betrayal, and then I want to slam my head into a wall. "I can't talk about this anymore," I say, as the fury inside me builds. Disengage, I tell myself, turning toward Taylor's bedroom. Think of this as an opportunity to practice the skills. Just knowing that he doesn't understand how I feel amplifies my rage.

Usually I'd escalate at this point. As I go into his bedroom, the pressure in my chest becomes unbearable and I notice that my left hand aches. It's as though a dull knifepoint is pushing into the skin on my palm, but when I turn my hand over to see if I've accidentally done something, there's nothing there. I'm craving Taylor's assurance like crack, even though I still want to berate him.

Climbing into his bed, I assume he's going to come in and check on me. But he doesn't. Underneath the floor, coming from the basement, I hear the clatter of tools and the cadence of a voice on an NPR talk radio show. He's puttering around in the basement.

Wait! He's not supposed to do that. He's supposed to apologize and pull me into his arms. Now what do I do with this pain?! I want comfort and understanding, and as the pain increases, I start to cry.

The ache in my palm turns sharp, like a stigmata. I hold my hand and sob, and consider my options: Do I go into the basement and say, "I'm sorry; I overreacted," and ask for a hug? I seriously consider whether I'm overreacting. I know the emotions are huge, cataclysmic....emotion mind is in full force. I've been "triggered," as we learn to say in CBT.

I feel too vulnerable now to go to the basement, so I burrow under the covers, where it smells like Taylor-like when we wake up in the morning, his body fit perfectly behind mine, one hand cupping my breast. I pull the pillows all around me and weep. And when he finally comes to bed, I wrap myself around him like a vine, hair and legs and arms, as close as I can be without breaking the contract. I want to possess him completely.

8. Finding a catsitter for Pipskintinkle so I can be in Texas for five nights over Thanksgiving! Yes, my parents, it's true, are completely mad; but my mom's fried chicken is worth it. Plus I get to play with farm animals, and walk in the woods down by the creek, and breathe in the soft rural air.

9. Getting the car registration/title/insurance sorted out so that at least I don't have to worry about buying a car NOW, but can take care of it over Xmas break when I have more time.

10. Teaching my poetry class tonight. We've finally bonded and I love them and I think they regard me with a kind of amused pitying tolerance, which is often as close to being loved back as one gets, as a college instructor. And I have so much fun with them, teasing them, goading them, challenging them, listening to them, asking them questions. High point of my week, next to swimming. And Friday night is swim night! Can I be grateful for that in advance?

Well, I am.

día de los muertos dream

2010-11-02T07:45:00.002-07:00

It is the last day that we will ever be together, because he's leaving. We start out in our house or yard, talking while he packs, and by the end of the long conversation we are walking, going for a walk. And during this I try everything—at last, I get a chance to argue every single argument I can think of. I reason sweetly, I disagree angrily, I am clear and logical, I beg, I plead, I am bent double with sobbing, everything. The whole spectrum of rhetoric, every form of pathos. Throughout it all he never wavers, never varies his tone—helpful, wanting to give me as much information as necessary so I understand his decision—but utterly resolved to go. He is cheerful and completely implacable. I am ravaged. But he is relieved, quite happy even. His mind is made up, was made up unbeknownst to me weeks ago.

This is part of my argument—it's not fair not even to give me a chance, now that I know that breaking up is an option, is on the menu. But I didn't know you were even thinking about leaving! I cry out, over and over again, I didn't know, I didn't even know. He is polite and firm: That's too bad, but you might have guessed, because all we did was fight, and we weren't having sex at all. That's not true! I argue, I remind him of all the things we did in the last week alone that weren't fighting, and how I would have been having sex with him if I had known it was going to cause him to leave me; I plead for just one more week to rectify these things. Absolutely not, he says courteously, secure in his private knowledge. He is moving on, has new plans, new things to pursue, new women. Will not give me a single detail about this, has scrupulous boundaries, no matter how much I dig and beg and ask.

There is some beautiful brown loam that at one point I'm running through my hands while crying, admiring its loaminess. There is a barbed-wire fence, bright and new, that at one point I'm tugging on and weeping and hearing his terrible bright new explanations, his terrible new voice, so kind and saying such razored things.

At one point I explain about my parents both having affairs but nonetheless patching it up and staying together. That maybe this is why I assumed: Yes, okay, we were having fights, but we were going to be okay in the end. (Which in the dream is true, that he and I were fighting; but in fact in real life there were only three or four fights of substance. In real life it is also true that my parents have fought nearly every day of their 40+ years together.)

He is telling me something about Aphrodite and how he is from now on going to live to serve her, to do her will, to live the life she wants him to live, to pursue this wildness among many women. I know he is making an enormous mistake, a dangerous one, but I don't know how to put it into words that he will hear and understand. I can only groan inwardly, wring my hands, and weep and weep. He does tasks related to leaving and I follow him helplessly from place to place, watching him, hoarse with begging and crying. It is one of those dreams where you feel you are crying for hours and hours.

By this point we are walking, only it is more like he is done packing and decided to take a walk so I am desperately following him, through a small middle-American town. We walk over a bridge/overpass; underneath there is a baseball field that is sideways (literally, perpendicular through the ground) but people are playing on it, so we start to walk across. There's a young woman, very powerful, who is the guardian of the field. She gives her permission for us to enter the field and play ourselves, even though I explain that I can't really play, and he hasn't played in years. She says nothing but just nods, queenly. I tell him a bit resentfully, with an edge of jealousy, that he should be happy he has impressed such a beautiful young woman, but he doesn't take any notice of her, to my surprise. I'm not sure he even saw her. I am jealous of all young women around him, but perhaps she's not his type—

We walk along, tossing a ball back and forth between us, a ball which rolled away from some other people's game. I remind him we must return it and again he assents without much interest. I still have marks of dirt on my hands and am afraid I will soil the white baseball. Also I am bad at both throwing and catching, and say to him: Do you know X & Y? (Naming a long-married couple of my acquaintance.) Well, she didn't know how to play baseball either, but after many years together, she learned, just from playing with him, and now she's an excellent catcher! She can even (I boast) catch pop flies into the sun. He nods, distracted, thinking about his new life alone.

I have a sense of bringing out my last desperate argument, my last piece of arsenal: Do you know the worst thing about this? I ask him. He says no. I say, these are the last few years for me, before my beauty is cut down, before I am cut down in my beauty. As I say this I see the sunset light coming through clouds at the horizon and striking a tree trunk; the tree is maybe dead or dying, but an ivy or vine is wrapped around it with beautiful yellow leaves, and in that slant of light it is suddenly so poignant and beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. My voice chokes, I can't continue. He is taking away my last chance. He laughs deeply, richly, full of his mysterious new certainty: Ah, no, no, Jezebel, that is just not true—

I wake up an hour before the alarm goes off, face wet.

dickinson §584

2010-11-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

It ceased to hurt me, though so slow
I could not feel the Anguish go —
But only knew by looking back —
That something — had benumbed the Track —

Nor when it altered, I could say,
For I had worn it, every day,
As constant as the Childish frock —
I hung upon the Peg, at night.

But not the Grief — that nestled close
As needles — ladies softly press
To Cushions Cheeks —
To keep their place —

Nor what consoled it, I could trace —
Except, whereas 'twas Wilderness —
It's better — almost Peace —

all souls' eve

2010-10-31T20:23:00.001-07:00

little white flowers
will never awaken you
not where the black coach
of sorrow has taken you

(from the 1933 Hungarian song "Szomorú Vasárnap")

I can watch the sunset on my own

2010-10-30T19:37:00.002-07:00

don't you try to tell me
that you never loved me
I know that you did
cos you said it and you wrote it down

yeah you make me merry, make me
very very happy but you obviously
you didn't want to stick around
(so I learnt from you)

I can be alone yeah I can be alone
I can watch the sunset on my own

(big thanks to Ms. M—click for song, embedding disabled)

so maybe god

2010-10-29T22:55:00.003-07:00

is like the water at the swimming pool. Maybe she is what holds me up when it seems like there's nothing underneath to support me. Maybe when I'm thrashing around feeling panicked, all I need to do is turn over on my back and take a deep breath and let go and drift in that watery soft silence, knowing that, invisibly, a power greater than myself is capable of keeping me afloat.

pink in my cheeks for the / first time in weeks

2010-10-28T19:30:00.002-07:00

already know what you think
about calling it quits
it's what you've always wanted
well I've given you almost everything
except that one thing
so now here's all of it

(with big thx to Rae)

on repeat

2010-10-28T16:58:00.003-07:00

I live in a neighborhood with lots of children, so there's a little funky paleta van that drives around all day. And by all day, I mean starting at around 8 a.m. and going until dark. The paleta van plays three songs, in rotation: "Redwing," "The Band Played On," and "Popeye the Sailor-Man." All three are in the same key (I think it's D), and one of them is playing at any given moment. I am not joking even one tiny bit. Right now it's just shifted from "Redwing" to "Popeye." Endlessly, these three songs. All day long.

And one particular little feature of being my flavor of mentally interesting, is that my brain latches onto a phrase, whether verbal or musical, and repeats it for days, sometimes for weeks, without variation or interruption or even pause. For example, a friend mentioned "A Whiter Shade of Pale" in an interview last week and that has been carved, I mean just engraved, into my brain ever since. Every organ note, every vocal styling, every drum kick. Or someone will innocently use a particular phrase, not being aware that it's also from a poem or song, or even just reminds me of a bit of a poem or song, and then that will play in my brain incessantly, droningly, constantly, until sometimes I do feel that I am officially gone Hamlet-mad.

When my brain is behaving this way, I imagine it as being like a turntable with an ineluctable record spinning on it. And the record just goes around and around until something forcibly stops it. Dickinson already said this better, but talking about something else (§556):

The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly—and true—
But let a Splinter swerve—
'Twere easier for You—

To put a Current back—
When Floods have slit the Hills—
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And trodden out the Mills—

I think it's the same part of my brain that makes poems, frankly—the same part that knows the words to a zillion jazz standards and Broadway show tunes—but it also curses me to remember the lyrics for every stupid television jingle ever heard. The Qualifier loved to test this by making me sing things like the 80s jingle for a Keebler product called Tato Skins ("cheddar cheese and bacon / sour cream and chives / tasty baked potatoes / you won't believe your eyes!").

Anyway, my latest theory is that when the antipsychotic or mood stabilizer (in this case, Zyprexa) is effectively suppressing my mood swings, it's also suppressing my ability to write. It subdues the part of me that compulsively strings sounds together, making poems which is on the sane end of a spectrum that ends in word-salad and clanging—and then the only bit left of that part of my brain is a whiter shade of pale—what's left is just the part that obsessively dwells on banal, repeating noises.

If this makes sense. Which I doubt. Because my head is singing happily to itself, over and over "oh the moon shines tonight on pretty Redwing, the breeze is sighing, her loved one's dying...he'd waltz round the floor with the girl he adored....I live in a frying pan / I'm strong to the finish, cause I eats me spinach...."

I don't mean to imply that all this is entirely disagreeable, strangely enough. When I was a phobic, out-of-control OCD adolescent I found a lot of safety in repetition and ritual and counting, and still do when things are bad. It's just...distracting. It can be hard to think, with all that going on up there.

And right now my brain only has a handful of thoughts anyway; I cycle through them one after the other only to begin again at the beginning, just like the paleta van. (Does the van driver ever feel like he's just going to go batshit? The way I sometimes do?)

(The song just changed back to "The Band Played On": "his brain was so loaded / it nearly exploded / the poor girl would shake with alarm....")

A good friend has sent me some mantras to chant, from Deva Premal's beautifully titled Mantras for Precarious Times. Maybe saying some Sanskrit words 108 times in succession would placate the rhyming-chiming brain. I certainly wouldn't be the first emotionally dysregulated person to find benefit in chanting.

But I don't quite know how to get the brain to make poems again. Maybe I should just aim for mental peace and stability first, and being out of pain; but I worry about the not writing, or more accurately not writing anything good (since I write incessantly). Probably I'll have to stop blogging for a while, at some point. My observation is that the bottle has to be corked, the canner/cooker has to be capped, to accumulate any momentum or steam or internal pressure at all.

It starts again. "There once was an Indian maid / a shy little prairie maid...."

on compassion with wisdom

2010-10-25T23:52:00.003-07:00

[with thanks to both Kelly and Briar for reminding me of this story]
[from Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart:]

left elbow, right hipbone

2010-10-25T20:40:00.005-07:00

1. I'm grateful for yoga. Accompanied Ms. B. to a new class tonight, bravely acting-as-if despite feeling more or less beat-up; and while it wasn't as awesome as my beloved former yin classes, it was really good to be kept busy for an hour with something besides my own mind. There was a long inextricable passage in the middle of the class, during which I was completely preoccupied with where hands and feet should go and I thought: I know I'm really sad about something, but I don't know what it is right now, which was a damn fine thing.

2. Freebie affirmation cards and other pretty stuff from one of those sweet and pretty girl blogs that kind of makes me turn all abashed, kind over matter. I actually downloaded and printed affirmations, which I haven't thought about saying in like ten squillion years. Or, okay, since my last breakup, when I actually bought a deck of affirmation cards (?!) late one night, under the influence of I believe Remeron. Anyway these are awfully pretty, and the ladies are mighty thoughty to make them available for the tattered and shopworn amongst us. "May I remember that everything is perfect in this moment right now." And look at their very cool Love Letter to the World!

3. Coconut milk, which makes almost everything go down easier, and my new coconut milk ice cream which I bought tonight, along with more yogurt. (I had a dark moment with some recalcitrant arugula today, when suddenly I basically had to give up the idea of being able to swallow it, and instead, ungainly, lurched to the kitchen to spit it out. Then I resigned myself to cream of tomato soup. We're back to the semi-liquid diet, temporarily, which is fine, especially since I've learnt how to make tom kha.)

4. Having a car mechanic I trust, who was willing give me the bad news very nicely. Having enough money to pay him to run the diagnostic tests which informed us of said bad car news. Having a still quite-driveable car, so I could go straight home and straight back to bed.

5. That my parents' farm wasn't destroyed by the tornado that completely obliterated the next-door neighbor's house. They were up until one a.m. helping her, with her eight terrified and injured horses, and her suddenly totally nonexistent house and everything, but they weren't hurt in the least, nor was their farm even ruffled. My dad reported the incredible jet-engine-like roar and noise of the thing, which passed about 500 yards south of where they stood open-mouthed on the porch, watching it destroy everything in its seven-mile path. Seriously. If you're interested in such things you should totally watch the video—my hometown briefly made famous!

6. Tokyo Story came in the post today, hooray $5/month Netflix and a good talk the other night with an MFA friend who knows his Asian cinema.

7. I made two pdoc appointments today, which was miraculous—and both with female providers, so fingers crossed. One on December 1, with a Dr. Diane, and one on January 5, with a Dr. Jill. If one doesn't work out (translation: is crazier than I am), then surely the other will be good, right? And I'm grateful, so grateful that I don't have to teach on Mondays, so I could come straight home from the mechanic's and cry and then go to bed and nap, which was apparently what I needed in order to sit upright and patiently call down my list of psychiatrists (worming my persistent way through impassible phone trees, disconnects, complicated menus, "press 1 to continue in English," "no one is available to take your call at this time," "we're sorry, that is not a valid entry") until I finally found not one but two someones who accept both new patients and Medicare, thank you Ganesh.

8. That while my students are going to be cranky that I haven't graded their papers or posted their midterm grades online, they will survive—I'll make a joke, tell a white lie, change the subject skillfully, and class will go fine tomorrow. It will be fine. The grading will happen when it happens and everything will be okay. I won't lose my job, I don't have to go to the hospital, I'm not that suicidal, I have meds and a therapist, I can handle this, everything will be fine.

9. I'm grateful that my very first (temporary, long-distance, opposite-sex) Al-Anon sponsor still loves me enough to read me the riot act—or, as I call it when I sit down my students who have too many absences, the come-to-Jesus talk.

10. That as shitty as it is right now, as bad as this emotional equivalent of food-poisoning feels, I know I will feel better again. It's categorically possible to live without the Qualifier, since a) so many of you do it quite easily, and b) I myself did it successfully for the first 37 years of my life. Just need more space. And more time. And to keep sleeping, crying, pacing around wringing my hands, blogging, talking to friends, reading Moby-Dick, and then maybe just a little more coconut milk ice cream.

guess what, no, I mean it, guess what

2010-10-24T21:27:00.004-07:00

I am not, not going to let his emotional booty-call undo everything I have laboriously, meticulously, thoroughgoingly achieved over the last two months. It was like fucking Fitzcarraldo around here; I was like a sniper crawling through the mud on my stomach using my elbows and I am not giving up and letting go and sliding back down the goddamn ridge now.

So we all know what that means. Back to right elbow, left hipbone; left elbow, right hipbone. Inch by inch. It's the middle of the semester; I can't afford to be suicidal and crying all day. In the words of Governor Jesse Ventura, that is when he was still with the Partridge Family, I ain't got time to bleed. I have so much to do. And I've got a cat, I've got a therapist, I've got a sponsor and a program and years of DBT skills; and I have the best friends in the world.

It's time for some freaking GRATITUDE all up in here.

1. The cup of Samovar tea just to my right: Nocturnal Bliss, with cornflowers and lavender—a thoughtful birthday present from my BFF back in the spring, and it's only now cool enough to where I can drink tea again, which is wildly exciting. I'm even wearing a scarf. That's only impressive if you're from central AZ, I guess. But I'm thrilled.

2. The cat, who is adorable in her lion haircut, and is all friskellating and zanting in the cooler weather. She runs in the front door, scrambling through the house, and out the back door, back and forth, for hours. Her tail ends in a little poufy pom-pom, and she just looks like something out of Dr. Seuss, and she's so happy that I'm spending so much time with her. She squints up at me with her little slitty-eyed look of appreciation, and she makes that little mrrtle when I pour out her kibbles, just before she eats—that little sound that means Yes, everything is just as it should be, quite satisfactory, thank you.

3. Names I call my cat, besides her real name:

Pyeracket
Peewinkle
Pipskintinkle
Stinkpickle
Pizzlewizzle
Purrface
Fishbreath
Furball
Teenage Dirtbag
Cap'n Fatty
Betty Mabry
Puff Catty
P. Diddy
Snaggletooth (which she is)

4. The Qualifier used to call the cat, Sweet Potatoes. He dragged her feather endlessly up and down the hallway of our house while she bucketed energetically up and down after it. The first morning I slept over at his place—he was staying rent-free in the guest house of some friends, him newly sober and still broke—he silently brought me a cup of Good Earth tea, smiled and went back to his tarot and journal. I sipped it propped up in bed bundled in his sleeping bag and thought, yeah, okay, this guy is alright by me. He'd put on a record, really low: Miles Davis, "Love for Sale." The irony isn't lost on me now. [Erratum: the song was actually "If I Were a Bell," with Red Garland on piano, from the 1956 album Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet, which I used to call Relapsin' with the MDQ, which we found endlessly entertaining. "Love for Sale" wasn't recorded until 1958. But I'm pretty sure the Q. played it for me that day too, or soon thereafter. It's one of his favorite pre-electric Miles tunes.]

I realize this doesn't sound like part of my gratitude list. But I'm grateful I was ever with him at all. I'm grateful I gave love and was loved in return, completely, for exactly who I am. I was accepted and given total permission to be myself. I'd never had that before and if I don't find it again it's okay. I know it can exist. I felt it. I was there for it. Maybe I can't ever see him again, don't get to go on a walk with him or hold his hand or hear his voice. I don't need to. I can still love him.

5. Okay so the gratitude list got derailed and now I'm crying. I'm grateful for psych meds that let me sleep. I'm going to bed.

6. No I'm not. Finish the fucking list. Right elbow, left hipbone. I'm grateful for my three amazing friends who accompanied/hauled my sorry ass to the Gilbert House today for an impromptu brunch. I'm so lucky, especially to be friends and neighbors with Ms. B., who engineered the whole thing and made it happen and even DROVE the rest of us, despite having been debilitated with a migraine the day before. I had an omelette with spinach and tomatoes and mushrooms and cheese, and hashbrowns, and generous samplings of everyone's amazing pancakes, alternating between B's blueberry ones and A's apple-butter pancakes. OMG the latter = crack cocaine. Salty sweetness, just the best. And visiting Ms. A's kittens afterward, fluffy dumplings fast becoming gangly teenager cats.

7. I'm grateful that these October days are so gorgeous. Blue sky, cool air, warm sun, poignant, graceful, lovely days.

8. I'm grateful that I told the Qualifier I couldn't go for a hike with him. I can't do it, I'm not ready, I may not ever be ready, and I'm proud of myself for having enough sense to take care of myself that way.

9. I'm grateful I have the self-possession to call my DBT therapist when I start feeling über-crazy, and I have enough skills so that I don't totally freak out and drag people I love into the worst of my self-harming impulses. I'm grateful I'm on some kind of medication which is offering support, and I'm grateful I'm actually able to find it funny and start laughing when I realize that the music they play at the answering service, when they put me on hold to page my therapist? is a really clunky, literal, block-chord rendition of "Someday he'll come along / the man I love...." I'm glad my therapist is funny and wise, that she's willing to coach me out of the howling fantods, off the ceiling and back onto the floor. I'm grateful that she'll talk me out of the fetal position, coach me through holding my breath into breathing and crying, and then after a 45-minute phone session I'm upright and in the kitchen washing dishes and feeling, if not exactly sanguine, less like I'm about to die. Yes, we are melodramatic, those of us with what I'll call emotion dysregulation syndrome. Who knows what they'll call it in the DSM-V. All I know is, having it means regularly feeling, as one of my DBT trainers used to say, "like a baby seal floating away on the ice floe."

10. I'm grateful for this blog. I'm grateful I can write and I'm grateful people care enough to read much less comment and I'm grateful I don't have to censor what I say here, but can be as messy as I need to be. And I'm really grateful I'm finally on number ten and I can go to bed now and live to fight another day.

Program under construction. Pardon our dust. Give me another week, I'll be up again. I refuse to go under. I have too much tea still to drink.

why everything is going to be okay

2010-10-23T22:01:00.004-07:00

Because this came in the post today, even as I was going batshit crazy and sobbing in a pretzel on the sofa, and look at it, it's beautiful:

I actually heard the mail carrier curse as he dropped it in the box with a thud. It's heavy, and on beautiful paper. The typesetting is astonishing.

I have taken Zyprexa, Klonopin, Benadryl; I have drunk water; I have curled up in bed with the cat and Melville. I defy my brain to do anything else to me today. Go ahead, brain. I dare you. I will throw Moby-Dick at you if you try.

meltdown

2010-10-23T18:56:00.004-07:00

Finally attained it today, after days of the apparently inevitable ramp-up. Pure, uncut, Colombian-grade meltdown. From zero to 100 percent incinerated, arterially-spurting, sobbing basketcase in, let's see, just under a week! Go, me.

With the help of therapist (three coaching calls today) and friends and the cat (who's very anxious when I cry, and punches my arm nervously with her paw, and prrtles at me winsomely) and a burrito bowl from Chipotle, I'm now taking my nighttime meds early again and going to bed early again and will try it all again tomorrow, again. I may have finally conveyed clearly to the Qualifier that he's not to contact me, under any circumstances. More importantly, I believe I've thoroughly conveyed to myself that I'm not to respond, no matter how many tempting veiled allusions he floats out in front of me. He doesn't want me back and believes his walking out on our partnership was somehow gallant and in my best interests; and he only wanted to see me in order to mop up some of his residual discomfort about losing my company. He'll have to find other people to help him handle that loneliness. And I'm sure he will, and fairly soon.

Wrenching the focus back onto myself. I'm thoroughly dysregulated and pierced again with pain I'd just put to rest, and the worst part of the semester coming up fast. This is precisely why, when he broke up with me in August, I told him we couldn't talk until next year at least. Because I have to focus on teaching and my grad school applications. I'd taken one solid step forward, to reach a point where I could handle all that; now I've abruptly taken several running leaps back. Somehow I have to clamber back up to the point of fragile near-happiness where I was last week, and I have to do so more rapidly. It only took me nine weeks to get there. Maybe half as many to retrace my steps? Maybe two-thirds as much crying, before it stops? Surely I'll blow through it faster this time. There's so much to do. I can't afford to be paralyzed with sadness anymore. I can't afford to miss him.

The paradox is: I don't get to see him until I don't care whether I get to see him. This thing I keep calling "love" makes no sense and is, he and others assure me, not love at all anyway. Really there is just pain and abandonment-terror and more pain. Someday I have to get a book out of this. Someday it has to be possible to breathe without raw anguish, without thinking, I want to die, which I know is ridiculous, I know I'm not Dickinson and I know he's just a guy, that he's not even that great of a guy; but this isn't about him, this is about my having the preexisting condition of being severely mentally interesting and then having been cued out of my mind.

My eyes feel like someone took them out and sanded them with pea gravel and put them back in again.

It's so hard not to call myself an idiot right now.

"nothing is wished for: not misusing sexuality"

2010-10-23T15:03:00.009-07:00

Because the three wheels are pure,
there is nothing to wish for.
All buddhas are on the same path.

—Dogen Zenji, "Essay on Teaching and Conferring the Precepts"

The precept of not misusing sexuality means not to harm. It also means to bring forth benefit: not just a little benefit, but the greatest and highest benefit for all beings. Misusing sexuality derives from greed, which is a rapacious desire for more than one needs or deserves. Rapacious is related to the word raptor, and means "excessively grasping or covetous" or "living on prey." Sexual greed is, similarly, feeding some kind of demon with live prey: a kind of vampirism. It is seriously harmful to our precious lives. Bodhisattvas sincerely vow to protect and liberate all beings from such greed.

How does sexual greed arise? Self and other are seen as separate. We project reality upon the separation. From a belief in the reality of this perception, the peaceful mind of the oneness of self and other is obscured. This belief wounds our consciousness, and the wound is a source of anxiety and pain. A powerful impulse arises to unite the split mind. If this other were really other, then we could live without being in union with it, but because it is not really other, our yearning is very strong. Sexual greed is powerful, because at its root is this deep pain of separation. We will do almost anything, grab onto anyone, if we feel it will help close the painful gap and heal the wound. We must recognize that in our wounded state we are dangerous to ourselves and to others as well. [...]

The process by which we separate ourselves from others and then feel greed for them is also carried out in our relationship to our own bodies or to our own sexuality. We may exclude some part of the body from our sexual experience, or identify our sexuality with just part of the body. It is quite difficult to remain upright and aware of things that we, either consciously or unconsciously, have rejected. Therefore, the first step in reversing this process is to face our woundedness and greed to whatever extent they exist. Next, we must gradually become intimate with the wound and with the greed. This is bitter work, but it is necessary, for unless we are intimate with the greed, we are susceptible to it from inside and outside. The more we face up to our woundedness and greed, the closer we are to seeing how they arise together, and the more we are able to protect beings from the harm of sexual greed.

In this lifetime we are all sexual beings. In order to realize the enlightenment of the buddhas, we must be intimate with our whole sexual being. Moment by moment, standing, sitting, walking, or lying down, we vow to be intimate, to be upright, with this great ball of fire. If we turn away from our sexual passion, then we freeze and beings are harmed. If we grab it, then we are burned and beings are harmed. But if we stay close to it, walk around it, always in touch with the fact that we are sexual beings, neither identifying with nor distancing ourselves from our sexuality, then we gradually become intimate with it. From this intimacy, appropriate sexual conduct spontaneously emerges. We know this infinite warmth and love are there, but we do not reveal it until the time is right. We vow to stay upright, to stay close to our passion. Constantly working with it, dancing with it, it is always there, and we are present too. It may get stronger or weaker according to circumstances, but we are working with it all the time. […]

Intimacy with your sexuality is the ultimate fulfillment of the bodhisattva precept of no sexual greed. Intimacy with sexuality means that there is a deep understanding of no separation between self and other. This is using sexuality to purify sexuality. Realizing this intimacy is like putting the last piece into place in a jigsaw puzzle; it is like the moment when you finally learn a great poem by heart.

A friend of mine once said, "You know, I love sex, but sometimes a good tackle is even better." He was a football player. When we really meet, it is just good: it is intimacy and sexual greed is pacified. Such intimacy is more than just satisfying: it is settling into and being healed by the reality of our sexual nature, without turning away and without touching. It is finding a way of dancing in perfect harmony with the rhythms of our sexual passion.

Eventually, the time comes when a human being appears before as a brilliant and shining god or goddess, acting as a mirror reflecting your wholeness. This reflection reveals the dazzling promise of orgasmic unity and the bliss of the complete integration of your whole being. In the face of this near and almost tangible realization of your potential, you may find it intolerable to remain upright. In your state of deep longing you may feel inexorably drawn into some extreme reaction to this reflection of your divinity. Feeling the anticipation and excitement of being so close to what you have yearned for, you may greedily take what is not given. Or you may, in your agitated state, hesitate and miss your chance to finally meet and realize your whole self. In either case, you will later deeply regret having misconstrued your self as other and the action you took based on such a mistake.

But if you can stay present in the face of this radiant image of your whole self, you will come to see that the reflection is not other and that what you have yearned for is already accomplished. You can just intimately join your palms and bow to this god or goddess who is the present reflection of your wholeness, understanding that all along the apparent other was saying, Wake up: I am you. These gods and goddesses are saying, Do not grab me or run away from me. Just be upright and gentle with me, and you will realize who I am.

When the great master Nanyue first met his teacher, the Sixth Ancestor Huineng, Huineng said, "What is it that thus comes?" Nanyue said, "Even to say it is 'this' misses the mark." Huineng said, "Then there is no practice and transformation?" Nanyue said, "I don't say there is no practice or transformation. I just say it cannot be defiled." Then Ancestor Huineng said, "This nondefilement, this purity, is the way of all buddhas. I am like this, and now you are like this too." What is it that thus comes? Can we stay present for that question at moments of the most intense and bright sexuality and not even then say, "It is this"? To say, "It is this" creates a wound in our sexuality. To leave it alone is upright sitting, and that seals the wound and heals our sexuality. Then there is no sexual greed, there is no longing anymore.

A monk once said to me, "When I am in certain situations, I can't imagine anything else to do." I said, "That's good: that's like uprightness." The practice of being upright is renouncing the ability to imagine some alternative to what is happening right now. Wishing for alternatives to what is presently occurring is confusion. It leads to discontent and complaining. This kind of confused complaining is a form of greed that is very close to sexual greed. By giving up wishing for alternatives, we inevitably move straight ahead on the path of freedom. […]

When we are overwhelmed by sexual feelings—completely entranced by anxiety and barely able to breathe—to be upright is to realize that there is no alternative to whatever is happening. It is not to say, What should I do next? Where do we go? What do we do with this? It is just to face the radiance. We use the situation to purify the situation.

When we really meet the god or goddess of our dreams, at the moment when we face that person, we give up our smart ideas. We are no longer clever enough to imagine anything else. We just enjoy the meeting. That's it. We don't think, What's next? Should we go to a club? Shall we take a walk? We just face ourselves. If there is the slightest separation, the slightest wiggling, then we may do something very harmful: we may grab the divine and lose it, or we may run away from it and lose it. Once we have lost it, by grabbing or by running away, we will forever regret what we did, and we will yearn for it, saying over and over, Next time, I'll just be there. I won't grab. Just let me see her again. Just let me be near him again. That's all I ask. Fortunately, it turns out that we get another chance: it's not too late. But in that yearning, although it is not so bad, there is the beginning of greed, which can turn into rapacious desire. We must have immaculate relationships.

The precept of no sexual greed is the gate to true upright sitting. In traditional Zen practice we use various physical postures, or ritual mudras, to embody the buddha way. Many religions around the world share the mudra of joining the palms (gassho) in prayer, or as a gesture of reverence and respect. Joining our palms together is an opportunity to actualize the precept of no sexual greed. When we completely give ourselves to the joining of our palms, there is at that moment just palms joined. At such a moment we do not imagine anything else. The whole universe in ten directions is just our palms joined. Thus we realize the confidence of a buddha. This is not great sex, but it is great intimacy with our sexuality and with all the other elements of our whole being. At such a moment we are at peace, we are content, and the precept of no sexual greed is actualized.

The same principle holds for the central ritual mudra of Zen practice: the mudra of sitting upright. At the very moment of sitting upright, there is nothing but just sitting upright. You meet your body with your body and do not think of anything further. At such a time the entire sky turns into enlightenment, and the whole phenomenal world becomes this mudra. The world of sex is sitting upright, too. Whenever you do anything with such complete warmth and devotion, it is the same. Creating a work of art, cooking a meal, or cleaning house: any action of body, speech, or mind, when done in this spirit of complete devotion, without imagining anything else, and without the slightest separation between yourself and the task, is the same. This is immaculate sexuality.

[from Chapter 15 of the book Being Upright: Zen Meditation and the Bodhisattva Precepts, by Reb Tenshin Anderson, 2001]

as long as she's got noise, she's fine

2010-10-22T20:19:00.005-07:00

Apparently all I do tonight is lie in bed and watch different iterations of this Dar Williams video over and over again and cry. Well okay then.

I don't know what you saw
I want somebody who sees me

I think about how I still don't know how to speak Mindfuck. I think how sweetly reasonable the Qualifier still sounds to me. I think how I will never trust anyone else again and how I have to take Zyprexa and Klonopin to get the ideation to shut up long enough so I can sleep and I think about how I don't know how to dance when the music's ended.

tie me to a post and block my ears

2010-10-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

so make your siren's call
and sing all you want
I will not hear what you have to say

cos I need freedom now
and I need to know how
to live my life as it's meant to be

and I'll find strength in pain
and I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

(wif big thx to Ms. J)

so it turns out

2010-10-21T22:17:00.010-07:00

(since after 5 days of self-inflicted torment I did finally break down and leave a voicemail asking him WTF was up) that the Q. recently went to Mexico for a four-day weekend, during which trip he apparently missed me badly, and therefore wanted to thank me in person for "being a wonderful traveling companion." He also wanted to see me "because I selfishly felt it might alleviate some of my pain over missing you....my motives were not altogether to be of service to you or to be helpful, but mixed in with a selfish impulse to find some sort of relief during what has been a painful time." The rest of the email says more, but in the same vein. About how badly he is hurting. As a direct result of his own choice. Although he doesn't consider rethinking it.

That is all. As you were.

And yes I feel like a discarded dishrag, and no I don't plan to leave bed ever again. Well, except I'm going to the farmer's market tomorrow morning and I may have to go get more chocolate tonight.

I should've changed my cellphone number when I had the chance. Too bad they can't also change out my brain while they're at it.

When exactly does this Al-Anon stuff start working, again?

curiosity

2010-10-20T23:27:00.003-07:00

a) killed the cat;

b) is how to get to Jezebel, effortlessly;

c) is apparently one of Jezebel's character defects; because

d) NOT KNOWING WHAT IT WAS THE QUALIFIER WANTED TO TALK TO ME ABOUT IS DRIVING ME UP THE EVER-LOVING *WALL,* IN SPITE OF THE BEST EFFORTS OF UMPTEEN REASONABLE FRIENDS + SPONSOR + THERAPIST + JUST NOW ALABAMA (who said pretty much exactly what we all expected, plus "Don't play the game and you won't get hooked—I didn't say it would be easy! You won't like it! It won't feel good! But don't play it anyway," and told me to work harder on my Step Four and to find something fun to do for Christmas besides go to Mexico since I can't go by myself anyway).

e) All of the above. Plus a small stomach ulcer.

speaking the language of mindfuck

2010-10-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

"Your ex is speaking Mindfuck. He's talking like he's a rational person making logical decisions that you can't seem to accept as being logical....Because you converse with him about the same topics over and over, he thinks you are speaking Mindfuck, too, and, therefore, it really is a legitimate language and he is behaving legitimately within the cultural norms of Mindfuck. [...]

"An addict in acting-out mode will seek any justification for his behavior....he confuses intimacy with sex and he sees sex (a.k.a., intimacy) as a human right. If he is or isn't happy, is or isn't satisfied, is or isn't [insert state of being here] in his marriage/friendships/working or familial relationships with his partner/childhood friend/boss/mother etc., he will use it as an excuse to act out. He will use entitlement, stress, depression, frustration, and a sliding-scale reward system as reasons, perfectly logical reasons, to act out. He will tell anyone who questions his destructive, hurtful behavior that nothing is wrong with the way he is acting and that the person confronting him is the one with the problem.

"The active addict is speaking Mindfuck. He is a walking thinking error. He is convinced of his own superior logic even though it is killing him inside. Mindfuck is an attempt to override the pain that is at the root of the addiction. The addict isn't just speaking Mindfuck aloud to others, it is his internal dialogue language."

(from Ms. Sophie in the Moonlight's witty and perspicacious 2009 post "The French Have a Different Word for Everything")

the angel and the devil

2010-10-19T00:18:00.004-07:00

So it's after midnight. And tomorrow's a teaching day. And I'm totally wired despite taking all the nighttime meds which are supposed to make me sleepy. THANK YOU premenstrual insomnia. And thank you Qualifier for your BRILLIANTLY TIMED voicemail, guaranteed to stir up the nutty no matter what you did or didn't say. I'm pacing around the kitchen, obsessed with nonexistent cookies, drinking milk from the carton and glaring at nothing. I'm resignedly rebooting the computer and typing about my small attendant personal angel and devil.

On one shoulder sits the devil. She doesn't look like you'd expect; actually, she's wearing a dirty white straightjacket. Her hair is long and tangled, her eyes are glazed, and she talks a non-stop dreamy stream of fantastic parping nonsense. The Qualifier, she feels certain, has only gotten in touch because he wants to get married! That's right, it's an old-fashioned proposal, that's why he's so bashful and didn't want to say over the phone, of course. She's even got the ring picked out—the one she's always wanted, the delicate filigree, the antique Victorian setting, the old pale yellow gold, the small amethyst or perhaps a garnet, set off by seed pearls. She's quite sure that, even though the Qualifier has shown zero desire to be bound by holy wedlock in the entire time we've known him or even known of him, that he's finally changed his mind! He misses our middle-of-the-night twin-language conversations, he misses waking up next to me—he can't stand to live without me, he can't bear another moment apart. Love conquers all! she breathes, even surly live-in boyfriends who let the dishes pile up and ignore the dog and play Internet poker all day. "You've got to call him back," she whispers seductively, looking over at me through her eyelashes. "If you don't, he'll think you're mad at him and he won't call again, and he'll never know how you really feel; and he'll return the ring to the jeweler's and you'll spend the rest of your lives apart, all because of a tragic misunderstanding!" She's read too much Guy de Maupassant. She is, in case you hadn't noticed, CLINICALLY INSANE.

On the other shoulder sits the angel. She too has an unexpected appearance; more than anything else, she resembles a tiny Alabama Baker--high heels, costume jewelry, a poofed-out brassy wig and menthol cigarette. She even has a tiny smoker's cough. She's filing her long nails, completely disinterested with all this, and looks up only to bark: "Honey, I hate to tell you this, but you're nuts. You know that, right? You know what that man wants? He probably wants to borrow money. Either that, or he's got some new crazy-ass shit he wants to unload on you, and you know why, honey? Because he's an alcoholic, and we're so full of shit we're always looking for ways to get rid of some!" She doubles over, laughing and coughing. When she catches her breath she jabs me in the shoulder with her nail file. "I'll tell you something else. You got to listen up, now. This is not about him at all. This is about you. Can you be your own best thing? Can you quit runnin' every time he yanks your chain? Can you stop waiting for some man to come along and want to marry you? It's time to grow up now. You better be praying. You better be asking, what does God have for you to do in this life? Cause I'll tell you honey, it goes by fast." She takes a drag off her cigarette and narrows her eyes. "Are you sponsoring yet? Why the hell not? You've been in program a year, girl, you should have sponsees."

And now that I've told you about my little psychomachia, my shoulder-angel and shoulder-devil, they seem to have shut up enough for me to catch some sleep. That and a glass of milk and a half a Klonopin always does the trick. I'll be glad when this particular flurry blows over. It's cumbersome, going around everywhere with so much talky company on my shoulders—I'd almost rather have a monkey on my back. But even invisible friends have to sleep sometime.

keep coming back!

2010-10-18T21:17:00.007-07:00

Dear God,

Hey, yeah, it's me again. Don't get up.

So you know what I'm tired of? Besides, of course, the Qualifier not being sick with love of me and begging my forgiveness and understanding and getting a therapist and swearing he'll do anything and actually doing it, because he's so desperate to be back with me, that is? Where was I?

Oh yeah—well, I'm tired of, and by "tired of" I mean ready to commit murder over, people at Al-Anon meetings slapping other people on the back and croaking, "Keep coming back!"

Okay, for one thing, it's majorly shameless, ugly crosstalk to respond to someone's share with advice. And it's only those who consider themselves oldtimers in the program who ever say it, and then only to people they judge (judge, mind you) as being a) newcomers or b) in some kind of major clawing-at-the-cliff's-edge need of, like, a meeting every two hours. It rankles me not just when it's me, but more so when it's someone who's really been open and vulnerable and admitted, in their share, to everyone else in the room that they're HURTING. That they are uncomfortable and in pain and really just struggling to sit upright in a chair and not slither to the floor bawling. And God, I don't know, I guess you're used to hearing people admit they're really in the shitter, maybe you're used to seeing us beslimed with tears and snot, but among us human-being types this stuff is hard enough to confess to other people. Frankly, we don't like others to see us without our game-face on. So when someone has the ovaries to do this in a meeting full of semi-strangers, and then other people go right up to that person immediately afterward and avuncularly, patronizingly say, with a tutting little shake of the head, "Keep comin' back!"—then, God, I hereby notify you that I kind of want to stab those people. With something dull and rusty.

And when they say it to me, unfortunately, I have more than once snapped back (not very wittily), "Yeah, well, you keep coming back too." Because making the judgment that someone else's program is weak, enfeebled, or somehow failing them due to their insufficient meeting attendance? is just really so super uncool.

Don't get me wrong; of course I've been in meetings and heard someone open up and pour out a stream of resentment that makes everyone's hair practically stand on end. Just a litany of the alcoholic's crimes and misdemeanors, with zero attention to their part in the matter. And sure, on those occasions we're all sitting there thinking with horror, this is a person who has been to maybe two meetings in their life. That kind of newcomer is so raw, you can't think about anything else. But no one's going to clap them on the fucking shoulder and say KCB. (I can't even bring myself to type it out anymore.) Instead, we're more likely to approach them quietly after the meeting and offer them a phone number or a pamphlet—something they can actually use, instead of meaningless advice.

No, the people who get told to KCB are the ones who've been bold enough to keep the focus on themselves and share their real feelings. Do the back-slappers have this bizarre idea that if you go to enough Al-Anon meetings, you won't have feelings anymore? I don't know. I know only that I went to a meeting a week ago, admitted that my tricky little brain was having a hard time getting motivated to do my Al-Anon stepwork, because there'd been no alcoholic in my life for eight weeks, which, dang, that's kind of nice; and that I was making sure I don't stop going to meetings just because of it, though, so please don't come up to me after the meeting and tell me to KCB.

So guess what happened after the meeting, God. JUST GUESS.

And lo and behold, now there's been a little resurfacing of my beloved alcoholic. Oh, I still love him; I don't think I'd be fooling anybody if I pretended I didn't. And of course I've spent the last 24 hours suppressing my fluttering heart in case he wants to get back with me. Yes, of course I have; I wouldn't be me if I hadn't. I'm just not doing anything about it. I change the subject on myself; I say, "Yes, but now let's print out a poem and edit it! Let's make salmon croquettes! Let's pet the cat!" On the off chance that you do want us to be back together, you'll have to motivate him to try a little harder. My sponsor says you can handle that; that you're powerful enough to arrange our little love affairs, and that I don't need to worry about helping you out at all. I'm just wondering: did you allow his little pointy head to stick up out of the waves just so I'd be aware how threadbare my very recent serenity really is? Because I think I knew that already. But whatever. You're the deity.

I'm checking out a new meeting tomorrow night, as you already know. I'm hoping it'll be a keeper. It'd be nice to go to a new meeting and meet just a few people under fifty, instead of these cackling men in golf pants who seek excuses to hug and handle me, or who crosstalk in order to tell racist jokes. It'd be nice to go to a meeting with a few women and men my own age, who maybe have ongoing relationships that are cracked and torn and bleeding because of someone's else's addiction, and their own bewilderment about how to handle same. But that's probably asking too much, given where I live.

Just, could you maybe put a lid on the self-righteousness of some of your peeps? You couldn't? You're giving me a chance to work out a resentment against the chronically condescending? You want me to...don't you say it. Don't you dare motherfucking say it.

Yeah, well, you keep coming back too.

Love, Jezebel

PS—I guess this has also happened to me more lately because I've left my home groups temporarily and am trying out new groups. In my home group, no one would have told me KCB because they'd know that was dumb, they're going to see me every Sunday at 7:45 whether they want to or not. Maybe people in the new groups really are trying to say they like me and want me to come back? Maybe I shouldn't be so sensitive? Maybe I should be able to open up my freezer and discover that it has spontaneously generated chocolate ice cream bars? And yes, now that you mention it, I AM PMSING WHAT'S YOUR POINT.

"what fresh hell is this?"

2010-10-17T20:27:00.004-07:00

(as Dorothy Parker used to ask no one in particular, whenever her phone rang)

So now, later, after the spicy dan-dan noodles with shrimp and vegetables, thinking more clearly, I am so relieved that I don't have to call him back. Yes, okay—I am an Aries and he knows, he knows the way to draw me in is through my curiosity. But what's there to be curious about here, really? Only which fresh shiny new torture implement he will choose from among half-a-dozen possibles? Upon contemplation of which, I feel not so much curious as repelled and alarmed—like Ms. F. said on the phone earlier tonight (bless her), revolted and even a little bit amused, as by someone exposing himself on the subway: "Ugh! Put it away! Put it away!"

It does occur to me that he could be calling to tell me he has an STD. If that's the case, however, I was already tested in May and will retest in December no matter what, so—that's a null value also. The more I think about it, the more I would imagine the most likely alternatives to be 1) he's shagging someone new and wants to "warn" me so I don't run into them and be surprised; which, pfft, whatever, poor girl; or 2) he's had some other brand-new Big Non-Dualistic Experience, and thus this is the equivalent of a spiritual booty call—he wants to talk program with me. Which, too bad. I don't want to be friends. I already have friends. I have really good friends. I'm all set in the friend department.

I don't know what you've been saying
I don't know why I've been staying
I got me some better things to do
there be things that my posse can do

And all that ever happens anyway when he talks about his Special Spiritual Experiences is that they fuck me up worse. I don't need it. I need it like I need a rock in my spicy dan-dan.

If he's so desperate to talk to me, he'll have to call back and at least give the genre of the conversation he wants to have—at least mention the fucking Jeopardy category. Are we talking "Kings & Queens," "Broadway Show Tunes," "Socially Unmentionable Diseases," "I Hate Your Blog/Poems," or "Can We Talk about Our Former Relationship for Another Hour While You Weep and Shiver"?

I'm taking my fortune cookie and the laptop to bed to watch a movie. Pfft. Pfft! I say unto you. Screw it. Fuck it. Forget about it. I gots important stuffs to do. He may not, as my best friend said a few months ago, ever grow an integrity; but I am growing a self-esteem.

voicemail

2010-10-17T18:53:00.008-07:00

Of course, the Qualifier called. Of course. Nine weeks since he broke up with me. He speaks formally, says he wants to talk after the AA/Al-Anon meeting tonight (but I'm not going to that meeting anymore); says he doesn't want to say on my voicemail what it is he wants to talk about.

Semi-reasonable possibilities:

1) He's seeing someone and thought it polite (?!) to let me know?
2) He's found the blog and wants to let me know/is unhappy about its contents?
3) He's angry/concerned because I sent his sister a poem (beginning with a couple of lines about a coffee mug she gave me for Christmas, which is why I sent it to her, but which goes on to be a break-up poem) (and she is a bit of a stirrer, that one, so this is remotely possible, that she immediately e-mailed the poem to him and chewed him out for breaking my heart or something)?

Patently obvious reasons not to respond:

1) So what? I don't need to know. Don't want to know, either.
2) Too bad if he's unhappy; if he's reading it I definitely want to move it elsewhere, but why couldn't he just tell me this on the phone instead of being so damn GAMEY and manipulative, however unintentionally?
3) Similarly, it's too bad if he's unhappy about it; and if it's made him concerned about me, again he could have said simply "I'm worried about you" and asked me to call him. And since he knows she's a stirrer, he could easily ignore communiqués from her, as he has in fact been doing for years now.

More outrageous possibilities:

1) He has testicular cancer/heart disease/creeping psoriasis/two weeks to live.
2) He's changed his mind.

Likelihood that these are why he's calling:

1) Zero.
2) Negative integers.

I now want to do something really fabulous for myself, so I am going to PeiWei to order some kind of very fancy expensive Chinese food (kind of lame to go to a chain restaurant, but there's no decent Chinese food in this town). All my friends are mysteriously Sunday-night AWOL (or just tired of my dramas) and I can't think of anything else to do. I'm scared to go down south (where there are better restaurants) in case I "accidentally" run into him, so I have to stay up here in my own 'hood. I listened to his message, shook all over for an hour, called a friend, then did the next right thing and finished washing the dishes. Then took a fabulous long bath with Ms. K's moon-and-star shaped, flower-petal-laced bath fizzy.

And now I'm hungry and restless, so the next right thing = food.

He couldn't just leave me alone. Nine weeks. I'd only started feeling even a little like myself again. I've already called my sponsor, to ask her what she thinks. I'm not calling him back. What on earth could he possibly have to say that would leave me feeling any more happy, joyous, or free?

Nothing. He has nothing to say that will be of benefit to me to hear.

and as soon as you have rearranged
the mess in your head
he will show up looking sane
perfectly sane
if I know crazy

sometimes with one I love · walt whitman

2010-10-17T14:42:00.005-07:00

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse
unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain
one way or another
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs).

nightmares

2010-10-17T11:20:00.004-07:00

There is a strange gray cat and it's my cat, wrapped in an old towel and lying in the back of a truck or van, lying directly on the metal floor of it. This cat is dead, is dying—shot up, but by whom? and why? I think, my father shot it on purpose because it needed to be put down—I think, my dad and his friend were hunting or just shooting their guns and accidentally shot my cat. I don't know which is true, I don't even know which cat this is, but I know it is dying and I sit beside it sobbing. I touch its fur tentatively, knowing it is busy with the work of dying and doesn't even know I'm there. Is it my fault? Did I shoot the cat? I can't remember. Even if it's not my fault, it's my fault for not being able to do anything now. Its breaths are labored and it is clearly in unbearable pain. Then it stretches out once, opens its eyes wide, stiffens, and dies. I didn't do anything to help it. I am sobbing inconsolably.

•

It's nighttime, or early morning, it's dark. My best friend comes and stands behind me, her hand on my shoulder just to let me know she is there. I am crouched down, still crying, and now am holding what is left of the cat—a little potted plant, a spidery thing with five grass-bladed leaves. Somehow this is what the cat has become, and maybe it will grow again and be a new cat? or maybe the plant too is going to die. I clutch the pot, and clutch my friend's knees, and weep and weep and weep.

•

Now I stand outside my home with my current cat safely in my arms. We watch the cars go by in the street and then suddenly the small white Honda pulls up in our driveway and the engine shuts off. It's the Qualifier; he's come home, and everything will be alright now. I wake up with tears in my eyes, thinking immediately, without transition: at least he's alive. He's not dead. He's alive.

•

I wake up all the way, cuddle the extremely purry cat for a long time, and then keep reading the book I fell asleep reading, Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone. Admiring it on the writing-level, the small touches he puts in the novel that might pass unnoticed. For example, that the narrator hopelessly confuses AA with Al-Anon. And why shouldn't he? Because their names are confusing! And the lock-in effect being what it is, there's no way Al-Anon can ever change its name to something more suitable.

•

Now to move on with the rest of my day. To try to salvage it from the rip or stench of the dreams. The best way I know how to do this, is to write.

toward a theory of taming

2010-10-16T22:14:00.005-07:00

It was then that the fox appeared.

"Good morning," said the fox.

"Good morning," the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.

"I am right here," the voice said, "under the apple tree."

"Who are you?" asked the little prince, and added, "You are very pretty to look at."

"I am a fox," the fox said.

"Come and play with me," proposed the little prince, "I am so unhappy."

"I cannot play with you," the fox said, "I am not tamed."

"Ah! Please excuse me," said the little prince. But after some thought, he added: "What does that mean—'tame'?" […]

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"To establish ties?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . . "

"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower . . . I think she has tamed me . . . "

"It is possible," said the fox. […] He came back to his idea. "My life is very monotonous," he said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. The fox hearing the sound of a step that is different from all the other steps All chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat . . . "

The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time. "Please—tame me!" he said.

"I want to, very much," the little prince replied. "But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand."

"One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me . . . "

"What must I do, to tame you? asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. First you will sit down at a little distance from me—like that—in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . . "

The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If for example, you came at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites . . . "

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour different from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near—

"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."

"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . . "

"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.

"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"Then it has done you no good at all!"

"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields." And then he added: "Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret."

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made a friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."

And he went back to meet the fox. "Goodbye," he said. "Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

"It is the time I have wasted for my rose—" said the little prince so he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . . "

"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

[from Chapter 21 of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, 1943]

•

As I held my cat in my lap tonight (she's chilly, after her haircut, and it makes her hilariously affectionate), I thought about how I am happy with just this one cat to love. I don't want any other cat. I don't want an endless variety of cats. I don't imagine other cats as I care for this one. I enjoying meeting other cats, and addressing them politely and rarely even petting them, but I don't want to try to feed them all or love them all or bring them all home (nor would it be practical). I know that by choosing one and knowing her well and deeply, I get the rewards of her particularity: the pleasure of having secret pet names for her, of being able to differentiate between her mews, of knowing the difference between her slitty-eyed adoring look and her glare. I get the pleasure of caring for her daily and of being intimate with her preferences and habits and requests and needs—and I know these benefits are well worth losing any other cat-relationships I choose to forego for the pleasure of this one in particular. She has tamed me as I have tamed her, and we don't spend time wishing we had lives other than the one we have made together—partly thrown together by accident, yes—she could have been some other cat—but she's not another cat, she's this one. And my love for her isn't merely based on rote familiarity, any more than the monk's relationship with the dark wood of the temple floor is boring or repetitive or dull, when she mops it every morning with water until it glows. Or if it's boring, it's not only boring. Inside boredom, as our greatest sages have tried to teach us, is care, which is the real meaning of love. I won't fear love. I won't diminish giving care and being cared for, in our particularity, as being somehow less than universal love. And I won't stop believing that it is possible, and good, and useful, to tame and to be tamed.

and then there are these moments

2010-10-15T22:51:00.001-07:00

when my whole being turns on one focused, vindictive, spite-driven, yearning thought: I never want to see him again as long as I live.

As if he would care, or perhaps even notice.

mysterious outbreak of happiness continues

2010-10-15T15:15:00.004-07:00

with small but extremely helpful increases in energy/productivity/clear-headedness as well. It is all really wonderful. And more than a little baffling.

For, as I wrote a friend, it's not like I don't still think about all the same stuff. I still wake every morning and my first conscious thought is: where's-my-boyfriend-oh-that's-right-he-left-me-and-oh-yeah-hookers; but that thought doesn't hurt as much. Doesn't have as much barb to it. It's just like: yup, there's that again; now what. Then I struggle upright (back spasms continue, though the swimming definitely helped and I plan to do it every chance I can, now) and embark upon the day.

And today I sent poems to two more magazines, which brings the total to FIVE magazines, Internet. Five magazines now have my poems! And several more (where I've been a previous contributor) in the hopper. And two (maybe? I can't actually remember) publishers have the whole book manuscript. And I have at least three more book contests earmarked for this month, and half-a-dozen after that. Frankly, if I can get something published this year, I don't care that the rest of my life is kind of a wash, or anyway in the doldrums (becalmed, enisled). I don't care if I'm single forever, and never have a daughter, and stay in Phoenix for the rest of my life wearing granny skirts and adjuncting for $3K a course. I don't even care when my students, playing the lifeboat game in class, throw me overboard without so much as a second glance—I actually find it screamingly funny. (I maliciously inserted myself into the group of people whose lives hung in the balance, to see what they'd do, and of course they didn't realize it was me. Student: "41-year-old divorced college instructor? Pitch her! She's too old now to ever get married again or have kids or do anything USEFUL for SOCIETY." Me [at front of classroom eavesdropping]: [shaking with suppressed glee].)

Headed to the post office now to mail things. No other news to report other than I ordered some samples of Paleo Women's "granola" and they came in the post yesterday and oh my God they are (or more accurately were) delicious. So heavenly that I've already scarfed three out of four. My favorite so far is the banana nut flavor. Or the cacao flavor. I think. Or apple? Actually I kind of barely remember because they were gone so fast. It's taking all my self-control not to wolf the last one (cappuccino).

Could not eating carbs really be responsible for my unprecedented, nearly alarming uptick in mood? Or is it just (just!) finally recovering from the last several months of Qualifier craziness? There's only one way to find out and I'm not really interested in experimenting with success just now.

I reach for mother mary

2010-10-15T12:34:00.002-07:00

tattered and worn
but I must kneel down to fight

post #150: a christmas miracle! (with lots of capital letters and italics)

2010-10-12T21:36:00.005-07:00

Dear Internet,

Something really odd is going on here.

I HAVE BEEN EXTREMELY HAPPY.

And there's no clear reason why. There've definitely been some contributing factors, but nothing that would really tip the balance from "totally miserable and trudging grimly through the days in nearly unbearable physical and psychic pain" to "bubbly and exuberant and insouciant."

HAPPY, I tell you! For more than 24 hours. Happy.

True, I did get two packages in the post today—a magical thoughtful not-even-my-birthday parcel from Ms. K. in Portland, with all kinds of locally handmade goodies therein: lavender rosemary soap, a bergamot and clary sage bath fizzy (!), a sparkly lavender candle, and two bars of exotic chocolate (both of which have of course already been tested for quality—so far I can't decide if I like the ûber-dark raw lavender bar better, or the Dagoba xocolatl with cacao nibs and Mexican chiles).

The other parcel was a box of twenty poetry books from my undergraduate advisor, who warned me over the summer that she was cleaning out her bookshelf and that I was about to be the lucky recipient of her overflow. I opened the box and immediately fell upon a copy of The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert, which I have practically memorized but never owned. AND a copy of Ariel! Can you believe in all these years I have never had my own copy of Ariel?

So that alone would make anyone happy.

But the happy started to happen before then.

Did it start yesterday, when I got up at 7 and drove way the heck across town for dental work? That couldn't have been it. Was it the fact that I came home at 9 and promptly went back to bed and slept until noon, categorically refusing to get up until I could feel all of my face again? Probably not. Was it that I then poached two eggs to perfection and ate them with a healthy quantity of pastured/grass-fed butter?

(We might be getting somewhere with this one.)

Or, could it have been that I then forcibly hauled myself to the coffee place and ordered a grande matcha latte, which in retrospect might have been a bit much, except that I then barrelled through the remaining EIGHTEEN student papers and got them all graded before 6 pm? I certainly felt an enormous relief/flush of achievement. Though that could have been the matcha latte.

I don't know. All I really know is that yesterday evening, right after I finished the papers, I suddenly felt amazingly WELL. As in, the kind of well when you've started a new med and it's actually working and you wake up one morning and look around at your friends and family and then you go: Ohhhhh. I get it. THIS is why you kept telling me to hang on. THIS is what better feels like! And they put their faces in their hands and moan gently and finally say, yes, dear. This is what we meant.

It is so NICE, this feeling! Like, it doesn't hurt to breathe. Or to think. There are thoughts and they are there, but they aren't excruciating.

Suddenly expansive and filled with energy, then, for the first time in I know not how long, not quite knowing what to do with me, I pumped up my bike tires and went for a ride in my new neighborhood. I pedalled aimlessly but happily up and down all the little residential streets and checked out all the real estate (I have a weird obsession with houses for sale) and even paused my bike at one little brick place (2 br/1 ba, cul-de-sac, desperate need of repair, $95,500) to pull out a flyer and read the details. A woman appeared in the doorway with a child clutching her. "Come inside! Please! Come take a look!"

I laughed nervously, getting back on my bike. "No, um, that's okay, I've got a flyer though, thank you, I'll take it back to my partner." I realize as soon as the words leave my mouth that I'm saying them out of habit, because the Q. and I used to play pretend real-estate shopping together. As I cycle away, I mutter, "...um, that would be my crazycakes, asshole, NONEXISTENT partner." Suddenly I am kind of pissed off. It feels good. I ride around until sunset and then come home.

I play around on Facebook, make dinner, take a bath. Let me repeat that: I take a BATH. And I do it because I WANT to, not because it's immediately necessary or else my clothing will start to spontaneously combust. I rub the fancy coconut stuff in my hair to make it sleek instead of frizzy. Then, bemused, I go to bed. I still have prep to do for class but I know I'll get up and do it before class.

Then today, oh Internet! today I was observed in the classroom, a situation which normally reduces me to gibbering, fingernail-gnawing dread. Instead I was slightly bouncier than usual and paced more. I confined myself to a small cup of pomegranate white tea (back away from the matcha). Despite my anxiety, class went great, and my boss praised my skill in the classroom and invited me to teach for her next summer (there aren't any sections of critical thinking offered in the spring). when I told her I'd be applying to PhDs, she offered me a letter of reference for teaching.

(She's nice. This was after me totally melting down in her office last week and weeping and saying with much phlegm and no small amount of drama that I wasn't sure I could go ON, I can't go ON, etc., etc. And her looking at me blankly and passing me the Kleenex box. Now here I am all bouncy curls in the classroom and hitting all my marks seemingly without effort.)

Inexplicable.

Then I went to therapy and was happy there too. My therapist commented immediately on it. "You look different. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves, but with you—it's your whole face." We updated my treatment plan and she even suggested my taking a break from therapy at some point, a three-month pause to see how it goes, "since DBT isn't supposed to be a lifetime, Woody-Allen kind of thing," and I took this surprisingly well. Then I came home and, Internet, get this—after I opened my two magic parcels and answered some student email? Are you ready? I WENT SWIMMING.

Please indulge me as I repeat this, since I probably last entered a pool for exercise purposes in, let's see, maybe 1989: I. WENT. SWIMMING. Ms. B. called me and said she was buying new swim goggles and we should go tonight and I said okay and she came and got me and we went to the YMCA and I signed in as her guest because I don't have my pass yet and we went to the pool and she swam a long ways, very professionally, with her goggles and Speedo and all, and I hesitated at the pool edges, dithering for a long time in my ridiculous black Victorian bathing costume and then finally I gulped and got my hair wet and, reader, I SWAM TOO.

I swam ten lengths!!!!!!!!!! (One exclam for each.)

I don't even know how far that is but I know when I clambered out my legs were jelly and my triceps were pleasantly sore. And then we lolled happily in the jacuzzi and then discovered they have free shampoo and conditioner, and a spinny thing that makes your bathing suit be dry, and a SAUNA. And some really gorgeous guys doing laps with us. And one enormous, impassive woman who just stolidly stayed in her lane doing leg lifts and kicking and stuff, and not swimming at all (she is my new hero). And, well, we are totally in love with the YMCA.

Finally (and through all this I'm still happy mind you), Ms. B. brought me home and I just made the most amazing tom kha with this galangal sauce that comes in a jar, and a lot of coconut milk and organic chicken broth, and curled pink shrimps, and a diced yellow crookneck squash, and some slivered snow peas, and a great pile of fresh coriander and basil and a fresh lime. And lo it was epically wonderful.

And now the cat is chasing one of the last few (one-legged, ragged) grasshoppers of summer through the house; and I am pleasantly sore all over; and I am taking my new poetry books and going to bed.

Is this how you all feel all the time? Or just some of the time? Because it is kind of amazing.

I still know the Q. is somewhere out there with all his wacky-ass ideas and opinions and crackpot gospels, but tonight it doesn't bother me. I'm blessed with magnificent friends and plenty of coconut milk and everything is going to be just goddamned fine.

And hey, it only took me 150 posts, over approximately a six-month period, to get here. Merry Christmas. I love you guys.

in honor of canadian thanksgiving

2010-10-10T19:41:00.005-07:00

Because enough already with the boo-hoo for today. I'm overwhelmindly grateful for:

1. Ms. AB, who called so thoughtfully (during the DESSERT COURSE no less) to send me her love. Back atcha, lady. (And I loved the Frank O'Hara!)

2. These cooler temperatures and being able to open the doors and windows to the house. The cat sits outside on the wicker lawn chair (on a cushion of course) and surveys her tiny yard magisterially.

3. Fragments of peace—e.g., just now, taking the recycling to the curb. Pouring in all my plastics and papers, the refuse of my great developed-world wealth, breathing in the cool night air, smoke-scented; the neighbors next door having a barbecue, their pickup truck doors open so the norteño comes blaring joyfully out. These small slices of moments of not minding living alone.

4. The big-hearted, tender and tough people who work in community settings—doing social work, offering medical care, educating, helping find housing, sharing generously of themselves day after day after underfunded day.

5. There is plenty of money in my bank account and no matter what happens to it I am going to be okay. I am educated and privileged and I will be just fine.

6. Having gotten 12 papers graded yesterday! And only 18 left! I can do it!

7. Having a great therapist—I am really lucky to have found her. And when she reminds me repeatedly that this year is not like last year—she's right. It's going to be totally different. It already is.

8. Raging Raw "For Flax Sake" crackers. Especially lavishly spread with Humboldt Fog. Very nice with a few roasted salted hazelnuts.

9. My BFF reading her blogpost aloud to me over the phone and making me laugh, just when I needed it. She writes about her occasionally out-of-control wacky job (as a crisis-team social worker in a big wild city); and then about hearing an intelligent and moving TED-caliber lecture on organ transplantation. I teased her, saying "It's like This American Life—what will be in Act III?"

10. That a heart that has been broken / will be stronger when it mends. I wish I could have shared this song with my late friend. Maybe he knew it. I wish he could have known.

these days

2010-10-10T13:38:00.006-07:00

Plummet plunge under October. Now just as dark. The walk.

Right on schedule, it suddenly seems impossible. All of it—the 18 papers still ungraded (even though I barrelled through 12 yesterday, under the influence of some bergamot-pungent vanilla Earl Grey), teaching this week (and of course I'm being observed Tuesday, and I don't have a lesson plan), finding a pdoc who will help me adjust my meds to get through this winter (if that is I even need meds), cleaning the house, submitting poems to magazines and book contests, applying for PhDs and fellowships, looking for a job for spring, fighting some kind of unhappy financial battle with the good people of the Social Security Administration, keeping up with friends (and getting back in touch with sorely neglected friends)—all of it has overnight become Officially Too Much.

I don't think my therapist believes my operant seasonal-affective-disorder theory, though we haven't discussed it overtly. I think she believes, and she's probably right, that I simply acquired the bad habit of depression over the semesters—when the academic work starts to all come due, those first long papers of October/midterms, that my anxiety pulled me into avoidance and more anxiety, and that the ideation/self-harm impulses stem directly out of this, and aren't technically/classically depressive or mood disordered. Or if I did have depressive episodes in the past, that I don't have them anymore. Just their ghostly vestiges.

(But as I say I am just gleaning all this from stray comments of hers; I haven't checked it out with her directly, though I will on Tuesday.)

I don't actually know anymore. I thought I had a pretty classic onset of depression when I was 18-19 and that it's typically worsened since then, though I've also developed coping skills (e.g. work like crazy during the periods when I feel okay...or is that hypomania? now all is in doubt).

All I know is that these days (these days) the alarm goes off at 6, 7, 8, 9...and I get up and stagger into the bathroom to pee, look out the window at the beautiful cool morning...and go back to bed, hitting snooze until 11 or 12. The cat loves this. She's always loved it when I sleep in. She's not aware that sometimes I'm lying paralyzed, in a cold sweat of fear, only feigning sleep; or that sometimes I'm immobile but thinking about the Qualifier, who broke up with me eight weeks ago today, remembering painful truths about living with him and reminding myself how much better off I am—or, still figuring out painful new truths.

(For example, realizing for the first time this morning that his taking pictures of his former students during the First Friday artwalk and posting them on Facebook? not as innocent as I tried to make it seem, rearranging reality in my head. Because they are always female students he photographs. I wonder if he realizes he is becoming that of which he used to speak with such scorn and contempt: a creeper. A dirty old man. Waiting until I broke eye contact to stare at girls, thinking I didn't notice.)

It's 2:30 pm and I have been upright for only two hours, most of that immobile on the sofa, not even with the happy American excuse of watching TV, since I don't have a working one. Still in the same sweatpants and t-shirt in which I slept. Lurch in my stomach every time I see the modest stack of 18 papers in their folders. Such fear. This is my 13th semester teaching and still such fear.

The result of my Serious Mental Illness evaluation? I am not seriously mentally ill, according to the person who interviewed me for nearly two hours. Which just makes me wonder: Okay then, do I even need this mood stabilizer? If all I have is a collection of outdated old bad mental habits, lousy self-talk and avoidance strategies that only amp up my anxieties—then what is the point of meds? Why am I even pretending to be mentally interesting, if there's nothing wrong with me?

(Maybe it was my fabulous haircut, though.)

This video, courtesy of Miss A. and her impeccable taste, is today's mental soundtrack. I grew up with the Nico version but this one is pretty fine. Oddly, Annie Clark reminds me of me, when I was 25 and covering strange old songs, playing my dad's 1957 Les Paul. Her fingerings are so like the ones I worked out (probably the inevitable consequence of being a folk guitarist trying to play an electric instrument).

I feel gutted, hollowed out, devastated, empty, completely without energy or hope—and I have a squillion things to do. And there is nothing wrong with me and no reason why I can't do them. Ah, October. Faithfully bringing on the double-bind since 1988.

please don't confront me with my failures
I have not forgotten them

belated day of gratitude #7

2010-10-08T22:00:00.005-07:00

Because I am so far down today. I'm grateful for:

1. Peach-flavored instant oatmeal, which I am having right now with cream, out of my favorite Le Petit Prince cup. A comforting dessert for sad people.

2. Much cooler—even, dare I say autumnal—temperatures, following a big rain the day after our friend's memorial gathering. E.g., the thermostat reads EIGHTY-TWO right now and the a/c hasn't come on for three days in a row.

3. Medicare inexplicably refunding the thousand-dollar deductible which the Q. and I paid out of pocket last December. I never, ever understand why they want money in the first place or why it then comes back to me. I am learning to ask no questions. I briefly contemplate giving half to the Q., but then just deposit the check in savings, assuming that at some point they'll demand its return (and considering as well that he was at least 50% of the reason I was in the hospital anyway…or is that just victim-think. Anyway I'm not sending half of it to him now).

4. Going to the YMCA gym on Tuesday and doing roughly half-an-hour of actual EXERCISE. Also getting my big stretchy exercise bands out of the closet and trying to remember to do my back/neck p/t exercises. Can't tell if they are helping yet, but will keep doing them anyway.

5. Gentle, sulfate-free olive oil shampoo, which I further dilute in a cup of water, and which does not turn my hair into one big halo of frizz.

6. Realizing—albeit with a sinking stomach during what was supposed to be a work-related appointment that inexplicably turned into a coffee date on which I really, REALLY didn't want to be—that I may never want to date again, may actually seriously be done with this thing called "falling in love," and that that's totally okay by me. Feeling the first tiny tendrils of peace in my new home alone, lying on the sofa with the cat. Experiencing the first faint smoke-wisps of real, unfeigned gratitude that the Q. isn't a) stalking around the house slamming things and yelling, b) barricading himself in his office and ignoring me, and then c) telling me I'm imagining it all.

7. The Pale King now available for pre-order. Gratitude that Wallace managed any of it, at all.

8. Dickinson! I always forget what a comfort she is. She knew, she knew. Also: rereading Hamlet. Why not! Because I can!

9. The cat curling up to sleep with me at night, because it's cooler. Getting my beloved turquoise Mexican blanket out of the closet—it's my thinnest blanket, bright woven wool and acrylic finespun—because it's cool enough to sleep under it. Remembering, but without too much pain, how the Q. bought it for me for Christmas 2008 in San Ignacio. How beautiful the plaza was on Noche Buena and how happy we were, having discovered the town by accident, as if it were our secret.

10. That I don't have to figure out everything tonight, or even this weekend, or before the end of October. That maybe I never have to figure out any of it. That's a relief. Because from here it looks pretty much completely unfigureoutable.

I'm back at my cliff

2010-10-05T23:18:00.001-07:00

still throwing things off.

in memoriam

2010-10-03T21:22:00.011-07:00

Yesterday we scattered our friend's ashes, and we tried to say goodbye.

I am, as I know others are too, simultaneously relieved and drained and deeply messed-up and deeply okay and exhausted and heartbroken and still angry and still just so fucking sad.

We met at about 5:45 a.m and drove out to the Superstition Mountains. About a dozen of us—friends, former lovers, parents. We had bagels and cream cheese and coffee that A. had thoughtfully bought for us, and jam that L.'s mother had made. The desert started heating up right after dawn. We walked a short way up the Lost Dutchman trail, built a stubby little cairn/stupa out of rocks, planted an ocotillo and scattered wildflower seeds that his closest friends had gathered in the weeks beforehand. The jobs gave us something to focus on, a small task, but then they were done and we sat in a circle waiting. And then could not but start crying, actively grieving. M. wound a string of prayer flags around the stupa and lit sticks of our friend's favorite green tea incense. A. and M. and D. read some of his poems aloud, voices cracking. I sang a song, and his parents both said a few words. We all cried our fool heads off.

We took turns scattering the ashes. Each person was intimate with the ashes in her or his own way. To my surprise I started muttering to them, to him, as if I were leaving him an affectionately scolding voicemail, talking aloud to him the way I sometimes do talk around the house. You crazy son-of-a-bitch, look what you did. Look at these good people! You've broken them completely open. Everyone here loved you. Everyone. I don't know why you did it. I'll never understand why. Now go, get out of here. Go on and be at peace. I remember at some point jabbing my index finger down into the ashes as if pointing at his chest, addressing him furiously. I wound up stumbling out away from our circle, westward, and hurling fistfuls of ashes at the desert, them flying straight back at me the way ashes do and sticking to my tear-streaked, sweat-streaked face. His ashes all over us, all over everyone, in streaks on our clothing, in our hair, him even under our fingernails. People bent double with weeping, hanging onto the ground for dear life, just being people. Praying, sobbing quietly, embracing each other. Trying to do this terrible difficult work of letting go, of accepting the unanswerableness of all the unanswered questions. Trying to find our strength in our surviving love for him.

We saw a coyote on the drive there, and a pair of golden eagles on the way home. He who loved all things wild would have loved this. He was so there, and also so not-there, it didn't make any sense and it made an uncanny kind of sense.

I came briefly home to shower and rehydrate, my t-shirt salty with sweat and tears, drinking a can of coconut water in the bathtub, then went back for the memorial gathering/potluck and stayed until around 11 pm. His professors came, even the one who never leaves the house. When we went outside to read more poetry, a huge storm blew up—not the gritty haboob kind, just the low wild clouds kind, and people had to shout poems over the wind. It was perfect. There was a massive amount of food. Finally, later in the evening, his parents started telling stories on him and we kept them going for as long as we could. There were wonderful photographs of him, scraps of his writing, stories flying through the air, parts of his life that had never met up before now intersecting, so many hugs and tears and so much laughing.

Through it all I just kept thinking—I know we all kept thinking—that it was like the best birthday in the world, only he wasn't there. The only thing that would have completed the party was his presence. And if he'd been still alive, we wouldn't have been having the party. It doesn't make any sense to think, like a record going around with the needle up, but I kept thinking it all day and all night long.

I could see him so clearly, feel him, just as others described him: his gestures, his smile, his eyes. He was so nearly there. But he wasn't anywhere.

His mother and I leaned against a hallway for a while, out of the crush of people, and talked. She told me that on some paperwork he'd had to fill out, he'd put my name as an emergency contact. That he'd told her that I was someone who understood what he was going through, someone he could trust. She's been reading William Styron. She said: I never understood depression before. But I am learning about it now. Our eyes filled with tears and we held each others' hands, to brace ourselves against the self-recrimination, against the buffeting thoughts of all that we did not ask, all that we did not do, all that we did not know.

His best friend told how they met in San Francisco in a café where he was reading (no joke) Nietzsche. His brother told a childhood story involving a fart contest gone horribly wrong. There were drawings done in marker by his two nephews, who'd drawn the best things they could think of, for their uncle—the things that reminded them of him: a cactus, a drum kit, a crab, a cardinal.

Today, I feel like I'm underwater, like I am water. My desk breeds tasks when my back is turned, and I've been turned from a solid into a liquid, I pour myself from one surface to another, I have no strength in my limbs for anything useful. For some reason I keep thinking of Christ saying to his disciples: Somebody hath touched me, for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. Virtue has left not only me but all of us in the form of a tall, thin man with a quick temper and a slow sly smile. (And as one of his exes said wryly, while we were reading: Thank God we're not mourning a mediocre poet! In fact he was an astoundingly gifted one.)

This blogpost doesn't have an end, other than I'm grateful. I'm grateful I had started to get to know him and that I'm part of a real community, a group of people with a common passion and an uncommon ability to share emotion and language and silence. Our friend loved the awkward silences of large groups of people, the moments when everyone would just run out of things to say, and everyone would feel uncomfortable but no one would know what to say to end it. We've had so many of those moments since he died. He should have been here for all of them. He should have been here. He should still be here. Somehow he is still here. Somehow he is not here. Somehow he is gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond.

My own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

week of gratitude day #6 and boy howdy do I need this one

2010-10-01T16:36:00.007-07:00

I have spent most of the day feeling miserable, for various reasons but really none which are that good. Thus I'm grateful for:

1. Soap pr0n!

Mmm, s'mores. And may I heartily recommend the pumpkin sugar scrub, a small jar of which sustained me through an entire winter last year.

2. Two artfully poached eggs for brunch, with steamed spinach and a healthy quantity of pastured butter. In case it's not already lardily evident, I'm kind of sort of lackadaisically following a modified low-carb high-fat faux-primal diet (inspired by a friend's more rigorous conversion), which I hope will help with my mood as much as my Zyprexa-inflated belly. I'm not following it terribly slavishly OH HAI HALLOWEEN CANDY but I'm aiming for few to no carbohydrates wherever I can (and definitely no bread products, grains, or anything made with flour). I may minimize dairy later but later will come later; for now I'm living it up with cream and butter. (Just wanted to put this caveat in there in case frequent readers were alarmed I was headed for a heart attack; don't worry, it's all part of the plan!)

And, B. and I passed an Italian restaurant the other night which, she said, had appeared on the Food Network; and they make their own pasta, and we want to go to there. So, you know. Moderation in all things! as those immoderate Greeks loved to remind themselves.

3. Having the morning off and being able to sleep in as best I could (wrapped around/propped up on three pillows).

4. Submitting poems to two more magazines.

5. Washing all the dishes and taking out the trash.

6. Getting myself to my physical therapy appointment on time, even though it then turned out they wouldn't see me. The receptionist and I had the following amusing but ultimately rather circular conversation:

Receptionist: You need a referral from your doctor.
Me: No, I don't, because you don't need a referral with Medicare.
R: Yes you do.
Me: No you don't.
R: Yes you do.
Me: No you don't.
R: Yes you really do; we called and they said so.
Me: Oh. Well okay then.

Thus no physical therapy for me today. I am so ~~inappropriately~~ fragile I cried all the way home. It is a very cool p/t place, they take care of all the Arizona Cardinals and the Diamondbacks and their ilk, and display various gushingly autographed balls and jerseys all over the gym. I am always the whitest smallest most female least athletic person there. I will get a referral and I will go back.

7. That I'm not bad or wrong just because I disagree with someone.

8. Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which is just fabulous.

9. Knowing that the Q. is going on his art walk tonight because it's the first Friday of the month, so I can go to my Al-Anon meeting tonight, which is fortunate because the only other meetings going on tonight are a totally scarily dead meeting that I've been to one time before and to which I swore I'd never return, and a LBGT one at which I've not been terribly welcome in the past. And I kind of desperately need to go to a meeting.

10. That when Rickie Lee sings it's her last chance / her timing's all wrong / her last chance / she can't idle this long, you really have no choice but to believe her. I've been trying to cover this song since 1995 but no version makes my armhairs stand on end like this one. Sometimes the writer has to age into her own song. I don't think it was that convincing when she first recorded it in 1979. Now it's blood-curdling. I love her unabashedly aging, singularly simian face. And her hair. And the car sound at the end. And she plays the whole thing in BARRE CHORDS.

week of gratitude DAY FIVE people

2010-09-30T20:26:00.006-07:00

For as I wrote to a friend, about making these lists: "They are the dickens to write. Which I guess is why I need to make them. Because of course I could much more easily write about how MY BACK HURTS AND THEY ARE TAKING AWAY MY CRAZY MONEY AND I MISS HAVING SEX WITH THE QUALIFIER AND TALKING TO HIM AND HOLDING HANDS AND LAUGHING AT THE CAT TOGETHER. But that has to become mere background noise, and I have to learn to foreground and pay attention to: the moment when a student understands and says something smart; the seafoamy matcha latte; the emails from precious friends."

1. Organic chicken sausages for dinner, with cauliflower and butternut squash, because I AM PRETENDING IT IS AUTUMN DAMMIT. Even if it was 108º again today.

2. The bath I took when I came home. Cool and soother than the creamy curd, with not so much lucent syrups but definitely with wonderful fragrant soap and vanilla shaving cream.

3. Receiving some positive comments from my students (because I passed out midterm eval cards today, and I am NOT going to focus on the "needs improvement" comments for now, just the praise). And a couple of them already showing real improvement.

4. The vast relief which has been mine following the decision to avoid my Friday night and Sunday night home group Al-Anon meetings for the next couple of months, because the Q. goes to AA meetings at the same time and in the same place. It feels so good no longer to have to deal with the stomach-churning hope/fear of running into him. Seriously. We are talking like palpable WAVES of peace. I can find some new meetings for the next few months or anyway few weeks, and my sponsor is not only okay with that but it was actually her suggestion.

5. I don't have to teach until NEXT TUESDAY.

6. I have a pile of wonderful library books, and yes I also have 30 papers to grade and an ungodly amount of prep to do; but I can grade 10 papers tomorrow, 10 on Sunday, and 10 on Monday. And read novels in the interstices if I so choose.

7. Having gathered my courage to send feelers out to see if there's any teaching I can pick up for the spring semester. So far the answers have all been no, but the various department chairs have all been very nice about it and I am undaunted.

8. I didn't cry today (getting verklempt TOTALLY does not count).

9. Making a list of all the PhD programs and fellowships to which I'm planning to apply, and being cheered not only by my own first stab at organization, but also by the fact that there are no deadlines before November 15, and most are December 1-February 1.

10. Heteronormativity can kiss my unwedded ass.

week of gratitude day #4

2010-09-29T23:49:00.003-07:00

(Super-quick and unfancy, because it's nearly midnight and I'm wiped out and still haven't prepped to teach tomorrow and dear LORD I need to shower.)

1. My haircut today was fabulous, and an added bonus was that a charming man (namely, the stylist) made me feel like a princess for two hours. I'd found this free-haircut coupon for a Paul Mitchell salon under the windshield wiper of my car a few weeks ago, so I got an amazing, Amazing, AMAZING haircut plus a keratin make-your-hair-shiny treatment and arm/hand/neck massage and he brought me peach iced tea and made me laugh and oh so much more, all for $30 (the cost of the keratin treatment) plus gratuity. I even made another appointment for finals week in December, I was so dazzled by the experience (says she who for many years cut her own hair with paper scissors). My (slightly below chin-length, he was able to save more of it than I thought) layered bob looks TEH FABULOUS. And he spritzed it with "Texturizing Sea Spray" stuff scented with wild ginger and it curled up beautifully.

2. Then I went for my two-hour Severe Mental Illness evaluation, and comported myself pretty well (despite all the usual painful questions about how many hospitalizations have you had and how many suicide attempts and how did you try to do it and how many medications have you been on) until the end of the interview, when I was asked "So why did your long-term relationship end?" and then even worse, "What's the problem, then—you seem able to cook, shop, pay your bills, teach your classes—how are you underfunctioning?" and given this little one-two punch I, as if on cue, burst into hysterical tears, and then the evaluator hastily concluded the interview; and now who knows whether they will deem me Severely Mentally Ill or not; but I did the damn thing and it's done.

The biggest problem was probably that I walked in with a fabulous expensive-looking haircut. I looked much more mentally interesting with too-long witchy frizzy hair, before. Oh well.

3. Talking voice-to-voice finally with dear distant R.; and maybe she will come visit me in the next few weeks.

4. Teaching poetry tonight and realizing how good I am at it—even if my students don't particularly know how amazing I am.

5. Laughing with B. in Walgreens at the ridiculous Halloween decorations (a nine-and-a-half foot tall inflatable black cat, with glowing eyes/teeth? Really?) and buying candy for my students tomorrow, because I am about to break their hearts with the third paper assignment.

6. Eating one of these pralines while I read student paper drafts. They're such a Texas comfort food for me, so familiar from my childhood, almost like pecan pie—so many pecans, which is good, because otherwise they'd probably pull out all my fillings.

7. An unexpectedly productive day, including picking up the house (covered in depression detritus—books everywhere, articles of clothing, empty yogurt cartons with spoons, etc.)—even did a little vacuuming, much tidying and sorting of piles of papers, making some seriously overdue business calls/emails, and finally setting a date for the mobile cat-groomer to come shave the feline (which is like this huge ridiculously looming task, but really it is an unavoidable hassle if I don't want her to turn into a giant furball, and she will NOT let me brush her).

8. Finding out that my old physical therapist will take Medicare! which is just a godsend—it means I can go back to doing P/T for the (now blinding, waking me between 4-5 a.m. like clockwork) upper back/neck pain, and thus not have to shell out bucks to sketchy strip-mall chiropractors.

9. Waking up from an extremely sexy wonderful dream with the Qualifier in it, and somehow not having it bother me or color my whole day that it was a dream and not true—thinking with some unwholesome triumph that I feel certain he is having the same dreams, and hoping he has them more vividly, and that the emptiness is even greater when he wakes up and I'm not there.

I know, vengeance is in poor taste. But still.

10. Not absolutely dreading tomorrow.

week of gratitude day #3

2010-09-28T20:45:00.005-07:00

1. I taught today, and it went totally fine, as usual, though as usual it was this big dramatic struggle to get myself out the door. This morning I sat for a long time on the sofa, fully dressed, papers packed in satchel, lunch and an apple and water bottle in bag, looking at the cat. "I don't want to go to school," I told her pragmatically, "I want to go back to bed." She slithered under the sofa on her belly for her morning nap. Then I thought, randomly: The Qualifier is a douchebag. Then with no clear causal connection I stood up from the sofa, washed my face, put on sunscreen, and drove to school. And taught two classes.

2. Blueberries and (finally) the last of the organic cream. Note to self: Procure more cream. Also: caprese Caprese CAPRESE! Mine is just the best. I could eat it every day all summer long. Leaves of basilico from the plant by the door and virgin green olio di oliva and freshly ground sea salt and OMG just TDF.

3. The (magically seafoamy) matcha latté with which I also bribed myself to go to school. If it costs $3 every Tuesday and Thursday to talk me into teaching, then I guess that's what it's gonna take.

4. I found a coupon for a free haircut and I'm getting my hair cut tomorrow at 10 am! I can get all the bleachy sun-damaged part cut off and be back to my sleek brunette self, via the ever-reliable chin-length bob.

5. I managed to chase down an errant student today and park her ass in my office and finally, finally deliver the badly needed pep talk. She's one of my few Native American students and I feel very stroppy and mutinous about allowing them in particular to drop off the face of the earth/drop out, and I hope that today's plea + stern warning + assistance with her paper + plea will actually help her stay enrolled and complete the course and not fall off the map again.

6. Having an engrossing conversation about all this with my boss, as we laughed and shook our heads wryly and sighed and I somehow wound up eating my whole lunch while standing in her doorway.

7. In perverse defiance of all bad financial news, buying a chocolate-brown bikini for myself, because hey, what's an impoverished poet to do but SPEND MONEY OF COURSE. And I'm 41 and I've never had a bikini before. Well okay not since I was about seven years old anyway. And I look kind of terrible in it, anyway by heteronormative standards, but you know what? Fuck that noise! I look okay enough. And it was on sale.

8. A good, honest, hilarious therapy session, immediately following a ridiculously heartening voicemail from a good friend (cough*K*cough) who said it best and most simply: "Of course you're devastated. What's happened to you is devastating." And I can't tell you how much better and paradoxically non-devastated this made me feel.

9. Another friend who makes me laugh aloud by writing pithily to me on Facebook:

Okay, yeah, some relationships are based on lies. Those are:
1. Fucked-up relationships, and/or
2. Relationships that need to end, and/or
3. Relationships in which one or more parties in the relationship is a LIAR.

10. The sunset tonight on the way home from school, and having this song stuck in my head:

(Okay, so hey, I know, it's relentlessly radio-friendly Xian pop; and, let's face it, the lyrics are hardly George Herbert. But Polina Semionova's FEET. And her port de bras. And her FEET. I kind of want to be her boyfriend. Plus, I haven't thought about that in years. That dancing thing at which I spent so many hours of my misspent youth. Maybe I should remember that more often. I wonder, what would it feel like to be en pointe again? I bend but don't break.)

BONUS: The best friends in the whole world. Just the best. Dearest R., who'll be coming back for our late friend's memorial gathering this weekend (which is a whole nother post, which I can't bring myself to write right now) and I can't wait to cuddle her; and beautiful A., who so thoughtfully sent me poetry-teaching stuff today, and who holds her head up and reads her amazing new poems, despite suffering inconceivable losses; and dear B. who made me tuna surprise last night; and gentle, hilarious M. who burns me music CDs and with whom I go to thrift stores and bookstores and who bought me Thai food a couple of weeks ago; and hilarious black-humored F. with whom I maniacally chatted this morning as I simultaneously prepped for class and answered emails...and so many more...and when I think about my friends, when I think about you, I just, I just can't—I get like that girl at the party who's had too many beers and I just want to enfold everyone in my weepy beery embrace and say I love you guys, I love you all.

from "travels with the snow queen"

2010-09-28T20:08:00.005-07:00

Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren't easy on the feet?

So this is the story so far. You grew up, you fell in love with the boy next door, Kay, the one with blue eyes who brought you bird feathers and roses, the one who was so good at puzzles. You thought he loved you—maybe he thought he did too. His mouth tasted so sweet, it tasted like love, and his fingers were so kind, they pricked like love on your skin, but three years and exactly two days after you moved in with him, you were having drinks out on the patio. You weren't exactly fighting, and you can't remember what he had done that had made you so angry, but you threw your glass at him. There was a noise like the sky shattering.

The cuff of his trousers got splashed. There were little fragments of glass everywhere. "Don't move," you said. You weren't wearing shoes.

He raised his hand up to his face. "I think there's something in my eye," he said.

His eye was fine, of course, there wasn't a thing in it, but later that night when he was undressing for bed, there were little bits of glass like grains of sugar, dusting his clothes. When you brushed your hand against his chest, something pricked your finger and left a smear of blood against his heart.

The next day it was snowing and he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. You sat on the patio drinking something warm and alcoholic, with nutmeg in it, and the snow fell on your shoulders. You were wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt; you were pretending that you weren't cold, and that your lover would be back soon. You put your finger on the ground and then stuck it in your mouth. The snow looked like sugar, but it tasted like nothing at all.

The man at the corner store said that he saw your lover get into a long white sleigh. There was a beautiful woman in it, and it was pulled by thirty white geese. "Oh, her," you said, as if you weren't surprised. You went home and looked in the wardrobe for that cloak that belonged to your great-grandmother. You were thinking about going after him. You remembered that the cloak was woolen and warm, and a beautiful red—a traveler's cloak. But when you pulled it out, it smelled like wet dog and the lining was ragged, as if something had chewed on it. It smelled like bad luck: it made you sneeze, and so you put it back. You waited for a while longer.

Two months went by, and Kay didn't come back, and finally you left and locked the door of your house behind you. You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give him up yet. You told yourself that the woman in the sleigh must have put a spell on him, and he was probably already missing you. Besides, there are some questions you want to ask him, some true things you want to tell him. This is what you told yourself.

The snow was soft and cool on your feet, and then you found the trail of glass, the map.

After three weeks of hard traveling, you came to the city.

No, really, think about it. Think about the little mermaid, who traded in her tail for love, got two legs and two feet, and every step was like walking on knives. And where did it get her? That's a rhetorical question, of course. Then there's the girl who put on the beautiful red dancing shoes. The woodsman had to chop her feet off with an axe.

There's Cinderella's two stepsisters, who cut off their own toes, and Snow White's stepmother, who danced to death in red-hot iron slippers. The Goose Girl's maid got rolled down a hill in a barrel studded with nails. Travel is hard on the single woman. There was this one woman who walked east of the sun and then west of the moon, looking for her lover, who had left her because she spilled tallow on his nightshirt. She wore out at least one pair of perfectly good iron shoes before she found him. Take our word for it, he wasn't worth it. What do you think happened when she forgot to put the fabric softener in the dryer? Laundry is hard, travel is harder. You deserve a vacation, but of course you're a little wary. You've read the fairy tales. We've been there, we know.

(by the brilliant Kelly Link, from her 2001 collection Stranger Things Happen)

week of gratitude day #2

2010-09-27T21:48:00.004-07:00

Today is going to be tougher. I mean, today was tough; and I'm grateful for:

1. My two legs, my two feet, my two breasts, my two eyes, my two ovaries, my two ears, my two hands. Hanging out for three hours at the Social Security office = serious perspective injection. I have all my body parts and whatever my issues are with my back and my uterus and my brain, everything else works beautifully.

2. The nice caseworker who helped me fill out the work review forms and counselled me wisely, warning me about the inevitable financial blowback which will shortly ensue. He was so nice he actually said he was sorry for not shaking my hand or letting me use his pen; because, he said apologetically, he had a bit of a head cold. I told him I thought better of him for not spreading his virus—and for the heads-up.

3. My therapist, who called as soon as she could and listened and was kind and warm and had a few financial/legal suggestions as well.

4. My BFF who also called as soon as she could and also offered helpful legal counsel. Basically I'm to wait for a letter from the SSA and not do anything panicky in reaction to it, but just wait to get the letter, wait a few days after I read it, and start looking now for a disability lawyer. "It's especially hard for me," I complained in what I hoped was a humorous manner, to both therapist and BFF, "because I don't come from a social class where we hire attorneys. We may have public defenders, but not lawyers!" Ha ha! And, it's true.

5. My cat, who sat with me on the bed all afternoon while I cried, trilling anxiously and lovingly and patting at me worriedly with her paw.

6. My neighbor B. who thoughtfully pretended she needed help putting an IKEA chair together, which even with sandpaper eyes and achy post-sob sinuses I helped her do in a jiffy; and then we went to the downtown YMCA where she became a member, and I found out what I'd need to do to become a member; and then we went back to her place and she made "tuna surprise," which I always called tuna casserole, macaroni with tuna and frozen green peas and cream of mushroom soup, and there was nothing low-carb about it but it was totally nourishing and warm and comforting, and we ate it with crushed potato chips on top.

7. That I don't have to know how I'm going to teach tomorrow in order to know that I'm going to teach tomorrow and it will somehow be just fine.

8. Practicing distress tolerance skills automatically, almost without even remembering what they're called, because they're finally so integrated into my thinking, even when I am in extremis—and knowing instinctively that being suicidal is no longer an answer to anything, even the most hair-standing-on-end psychic pain.

9. The last of the organic cream on strawberries, with nibbles of Dagoba's new moon bar, and Catty staring hypnotically at my spoon moving back and forth, until I finally placed the empty bowl on the floor for her to lick. In the same vein: my basil plant, and the magnificent caprese I will have for dinner tomorrow night, with heirloom tomato and fresh mozzarella (shaped in little round ciliegini, or "cherries").

10. Not being in a relationship built on lies, whether mutually agreed-upon or completely unknown to me and therefore unexpectedly horrific when they finally surface. And emerging from such a "relationship" before having a child or buying a house together.

BONUS: I'm alive.

week of gratitude day #1

2010-09-26T22:22:00.003-07:00

My sponsor says, do a gratitude list every day for a week. No repeats.

So you know what you're about to be subjected to.

1. I'm so grateful for my sponsor. As I sat trembling and drizzling tears on the bench outside the Al-Anon meeting, her sitting next to me rubbing my back as I cried, and being incredibly kind and warm and supportive, I told her I don't think I can keep going to meetings where I know I'll see his car and/or him. Not for a while at least. And she agreed. We're meeting in one week to do my third step and between now and then I'll try to figure out a temporary meeting schedule that, at least for the next month or couple of months, doesn't include my home group. I'll miss everyone, but I will not miss sitting in my car with a churning stomach preparing either to run into him or not run into him, and frankly I don't know at this point which is worse.

2. I'm grateful for my little fluffy cat, who is healthy and dear.

3. Grateful for these wild blueberries I am about to douse in thick organic cream and devour.

4. The Tribes of Palos Verdes by Joy Nicholson, which I read this afternoon in one gulp, and which kept me good company during a dark couple of hours.

5. That I managed to submit poems to THREE magazines today! If I do this every weekend, I should have some acceptances by the end of the year.

6. Going to IKEA with B. last night, and grocery shopping with her afterward—I'm so lucky to have the friends I have.

7. Coming home from the meeting all cried out and feeling hungry, to have cold leftover salmon with lime and Japanese eggplant and spinach and cherry tomato stir-fry. I adore leftovers.

8. That weak, limp, meek, curiously restored and washed-clean feeling one has after a proper cry, especially if you've been holding it back all day. Washing my hands, I meet my eyes in the mirror and they are soft and clear, light brown. The Qualifier used to say I had beautiful eyes. It occurs to me that I keep saying I want to be a certain kind of older woman—open, available, deeply quiet, deeply compassionate. Maybe this is the only path to becoming her. Maybe I shouldn't have said that's what I wanted, if I weren't prepared to pay the price. Maybe every tear I shed, every sob, every second of feeling a knife to my heart will make me less brittle, less defended, less certain of my judgments—more soft, more settled, more useful to others. I vowed I'd rather be human than a Buddha. Can I stand by that now? Can I be willing to go through the process of becoming completely nakedly warmly messily human and mature?

9. The pale green dragonfly which is for no particular reason, perhaps simple weariness, ornamenting my front door.

10. Honestly I'm grateful I no longer live with and am trying to have a relationship with someone who doesn't actually want to be in a relationship with me. It's hard to sit in meetings and hear all this wisdom about how to live with an alcoholic, and to think "But I don't have an alcoholic with whom to live anymore," and, thusly reminded, to start crying during the meeting...but seriously? not living with someone who apparently really didn't want to be with me in the first place? not having to maneuver around all the lying and deception and anger and baffling animosity? A good thing.

Berries and cream, and then bed.

a new obsession

2010-09-26T01:22:00.009-07:00

So at least I'm not only obsessed with teh drama of my little life-blender's having been set to PURÉE sometime in late May; but I'm also kind of obsessed with this IKEA rug. And I think you will immediately be able to see why.

I suspect it's meant to be for a child's room, with its silly stripey bright colors. It's not particularly classy, but it just makes me smile to see it. Soon as I accumulate $199, or as soon as it's January 2013 and we've survived the apocalypse, whichever comes first, it shall be mine, muahaha. Ha.

nightmare

2010-09-26T00:31:00.010-07:00

I dream that I go to a brothel and sleep with all the hookers who work there, one at a time. They're fun and sweet, and it's sexy and I really enjoy it and it's only after the third or fourth encounter that I suddenly realize with growing horror—wait, am I reclaiming my beautiful earthy female sexuality here, or am I no better than the Qualifier, and a terrible hypocrite? And I wake all hot and bothered, with the sun slanting in the south windows of my bedroom.

Even in my sleep I can't get away from it. I told a friend in an email yesterday—it's four full months after the truth came out (it came out of him, extruded, pressed from him against his will) and there are still days when I walk around numbly and smile and do my jobs, and yet all I can think is "prostitutes Prostitutes PROSTITUTES!" and I'm scared to open my mouth in case I blurt it out in front of my boss or students or friends, and I wonder, will I ever have another thought again. because I am really bored with this one.

(I write this in the faint hopes that it could help someone else out there going through the same thing. Someone who's maybe heartbroken and confused and obsessed and she thinks she shouldn't be feeling the way she feels; or maybe she thinks that she's the only one who feels this way. But she's not. You're not.)

Part of it is this "college town" in which I still live and work. Where all the undergrads are unbelievably pulchritudinous, and physically obsessed, and ask for plastic surgery for their 21st birthdays, and all the girls dress like sex workers and OMG I am not even exaggerating even one tiny bit, and it drives me nuts because I went to a Seven Sisters college and you know how we dressed? IN FLANNEL BECAUSE IT WAS COLD. And our arms were loaded up with books and we used library pencils to pin up our hair. Anyway I did. And we did not go out for the evening wearing platform heels and short-shorts made of sequins and/or metallic lamé. We didn't go out to dinner in DRAG.

It's just hard lately to tell where the bad dream starts and where it stops.

step three, part one

2010-09-26T00:00:00.004-07:00

What does it mean to turn my life over to the care of God? What does it mean to turn my will over to the care of God?

As is my unhelpful way when it comes to stepwork, I puzzled over this and pondered it in my heart for many weeks, not to say months, before starting to write. I somehow get this idea I have to "solve" the step before I can write anything about it—as if it's a koan, perhaps? Figure it out, then tell the teacher and hope I have it "right." Hard to convince myself that I'm doing this for me.

Finally I came to what I decided was "the answer"—but am not sure yet I have words to précis what I understand to be the difference between the two.

To turn my life over to the care of God (as I understand God) means, I think, the events of my life—to accept that I can only control my actions, but not what happens in my life afterward. I can tell myself I'll apply one more time for PhD programs this fall—or I can inform myself and my friends that I'm going to give my notice to my landlady, and plan to move out in January (where to? I don't know, I just know I'm sick of living in the same bioregion as my ex)—I can make all kinds of plans and set all kinds of intentions for this body and the arc of its trajectory through life—but to turn my life over to God's care has to mean that I give up any attachment to outcome and just do the footwork, as people say in program. On some level it's hardly even really turning it over—more like, just acknowledging that my life hasn't been in my care ever anyway. I've just pretended it was up to me to care for it—and besides, have I been taking very good care of it anyway, to focus on that word for a moment? Someone needs to take decent care of me. I've done an indifferent job in many ways, so far. I've done my best, but I can't help but notice that quite recently I stayed in a pretty lousy situation for a long, long time. And I'd probably still be in it, if it were up to me. But it wasn't up to me. I prayed their stupid Third Step Prayer and sure enough, quote, God did for me what I couldn't do for myself. I couldn't bring myself to leave the Qualifier. So God gave him a big spiritual experience of nonduality, whereupon he left me. Problem solved.

What's the difference, then, between turning my life over and turning my will over?

Turning my will over seems, to be honest, much more difficult. Now we're not just talking about setting out a course of action and reminding myself that the outcome isn't up to me—now we're talking about giving up the planning stage, the pre-game part of the sequence of events. It's like God's going to take a bite out of either end and all I get is the middle, dominated by the Next-Right-Thing slogan:

my will <----- stuff I can actually do something about ----> my life

My big plans, my best intentions, pet projects, dreams and schemes—now I'm being asked to fork those over as well. There's a nasty intrusive little bit in the New Testament where someone (probably St. Paul) advises us not to say we'll be in such-and-such a place on such-and-such a day, but to add, "if God wills it," because who are we to say where we'll be and when? This is basically stolen from Stoic philosophy, and it trickles down through the Oxford Group into Bill W.'s writing, probably via Jung or Christian mysticism. "God, I offer myself to thee," begins the prayer; it was a prayer the Qualifier and I said every night together, holding hands like trusting fools.

It's a step quite frankly I haven't wanted to take since all the shit went down. My brain puts it something like this: Yeah, so I offered myself to Thee, and look what I got in return. Thy will be done, and apparently Thy will is that my boyfriend should cheat on me with prostitutes and then, when this is discovered, leave me? Really? Seriously? That's your will? That's the best you could do? That said boyfriend wouldn't be all Oh darling please forgive me I am so sorry what can I do to make this right I will do anything I don't want to lose you I love you please don't leave me? That instead he would say, I've done my Step Four and through its power and wonder I have discovered that I am meant to be free as the wind e.g. to sleep with many women, including you, no whoops sorry apparently that should have been any woman but you, my mistake? This is seriously God at work?

Somehow I can handle turning my life over (since it's not in my control anyway, self-evidently) but I really don't want to turn my will over. It feels like the only part that's still even remotely mine. Besides, if I turn my will over, who's going to make the plans around here? Is God really going to take care of the scheduling piece? Because there's been a lot of ominous silence on that front, for most of my life. Unless this is another one of those moments where I'm supposed to learn to see God in the ordinary—I'm supposed to learn to call it "God's will at work" where I would modestly call it, me reading Poets & Writers and figuring out the fellowship application deadlines.

I don't mean to be irreverent. Well, a little bit. I mostly mean to be ruthlessly honest. Because I seriously do not want to take this step. I literally can't even say the Third Step Prayer right now. Or, if I were to try to say it aloud, I'd wind up punching my pillow or mattress with every word, teeth gritted. I so dislike it. I am so pouting because God didn't give me the experience I ordered.

The problem may be this God-of-my-understanding business. If I liked God at all, or trusted Her/Him one iota, I might not mind so much turning my will over. But if I think God is only in it to mess me up and take things away from me—that the one time in my adult life I really let myself trust someone and hope that maybe I could have that real, genuine, committed relationship some people seemed to make so much fuss about—the first time I ever let that hope be fully alive in me, for something honest and true and real and sweet and full of love and giving and support and commitment to showing up—then S/He swipes it out from under me like a slippery rug and sits back and laughs and laughs.

"Fire that God and get a new one," the program people say cavalierly. Well, not all of them. Mr. Sponsorpants gave me some powerfully good suggestions and I think here I have done all the writing I can do on my life and my will and the care of God…I think now I have to drop back again and take another look at this business of who is God, because I am in no way shape or form ready to hand anything over at present.

(I will say that this whole thing about turning my will over to the care of God might come in handy in one respect which has nothing to do with the Qualifier: I might not freak out as severely about situations that don't even exist yet. I might not lie sleeplessly planning for exigencies which seldom arise. I might not be in a lather of cold sweat at 3 a.m. about the fellowships for which I haven't applied and I probably won't get them anyway and oh God I can't even face the thought of asking my referrers for letters and wait whose name did I just insert in there? Right.)

(And I hope you know I know how cracky all this sounds. Because I do know.)

PS:

a brief manifesto

2010-09-25T18:36:00.001-07:00

I AM ALIVE
I AM HERE
I COUNT
I MATTER
MY FEELINGS ARE NOT DELUSIONAL
MY LOVE WAS NOT A DELUSION
IF THAT IS WHAT THE Q. IS SAYING, HE'S WRONG
I DO MISS HIM
IT IS OKAY TO MISS HIM
IT IS NOT BAD
I AM NOT BAD
I AM A GOOD GIRL
EVEN THOUGH I CAN'T STOP CRYING
I AM SMART
I UNDERSTAND THINGS
I CAN KEEP UP
I DON'T DESERVE TO BE TALKED DOWN TO
I AM LOVEABLE
I AM WISE
I AM VALUABLE
I AM JUST TOTALLY FINE

soul wedding

2010-09-25T18:33:00.004-07:00

Do you know when they say soulmates? Everybody uses it in personal ads. "Soulmate wanted." It doesn't mean too much now. But soulmates—think about it. When your soul—whatever that is anyway—something so alive when you make music or love and so mysteriously hidden most of the rest of the time, so colorful and big but without color or shape—when your soul finds another soul it can recognize even before the rest of you knows about it. The rest of you just feels sweaty and jumpy at first. And your souls get married without even meaning to—even if you can't be together for some reason in real life, your souls just go ahead and make the wedding plans. A soul's wedding must be too beautiful to even look at. It must be blinding. It must be like all the weddings in the world—gondolas with canopies of doves, champagne glasses shattering, wings of veils, drums beating, flutes and trumpets, showers of roses. And after that happens—that's it, this is it. But sometimes you have to let that person go. When you are little, people, movies, and fairy tales all tell you that one day you're going to meet this person. So you keep waiting and it's a lot harder than they make it sound. Then you meet and you think, okay, now we can just get on with it but you find out that sometimes your soul brother partner lover has other ideas about that. They want to go to New York and write their own songs or whatever. They feel like you don't really love them but the idea of them, the dream you've had since you were a kid about a panther boy to carry you out of the forest of your fear or an angel to make love and celestial music with in the clouds or a genie twin to sleep with you inside a lamp. Which doesn't mean they're not the one. It just means you've got to do whatever you have to do for you alone. You've got to believe in your magic and face right up to the mean nasty part of yourself that wants to keep the one you love locked up in a place in you where no one else can touch them or even see them. Just the way when somebody you love dies you don't stop loving them but you don't lock up their souls inside you. You turn that love into something else, give it to somebody else. And sometimes in a weird way when you do that you get closer than ever to the person who died or the one your soul married. —from Missing Angel Juan, by Francesca Lia Block

this will be the last time "you" means you

2010-09-24T23:54:00.006-07:00

(So listen up, if you're reading this blog, which you may be. And if you are, the only decent thing to do would be to tell me, so I can move it.)

Dear Qualifier,

Tonight me and my girlfriends all attended a well-rehearsed, very moving piece of theatre. I cried in the car on the way home because I miss sharing things like that with you. When we first met you were working as the theater critic for the newspaper where I was the movie reviewer, so of course our first date was a play. I thought to myself again and again during the performance of the parts you would have loved, the parts you wouldn't have enjoyed so much. Everything still makes me think of you.

Anyway I drove home crying (almost mechanically, I'm so used to it by now) and before hopping into the bathtub to calm down, idly checked my online thises and thats, and found this as the status update of one of your Facebook girlfriends:

Of course you'll recognize it, because you wrote it. It's public writing so I'm putting it here without apology. Not only is it interesting that your younger female FB acquaintances think you're such an authority that they copy-paste your pronouncements as their status updates; but also, WTF, Qualifier. If you were my rhetoric student there's no way I'd let even the first clause of this stand.

There's no doubt? There's no doubt? Pretty sure of yourself there, aren't you? I happen to think there's a lot of doubt. I think it could be argued that when people get together, as friends or lovers or in groups, it's NOT always in order to maintain and groom shared sub- or unconscious falsehoods. Sometimes, just maybe it's because they like each other. Don't you think you have to at least allow for the POSSIBILITY that people might come together for other reasons? Such as intimacy, sharing, support, care, and love? Or do you think those are the lies?

Some people prefer to be together because it's easier to care for someone that way. It's harder to do (not impossible, just harder) when you're at a great spatial remove. It's easier to get to know someone and learn their least-dishonest self when you spend a great deal of time proximate to them. It's harder to hide out when someone has a daily chance to see who you really are. When you live intimately with someone in this way, you start learning their true nature, deeper than the personae they perform. Why do you think the Zen student cleans her teacher's toilet?

I started to state as much on this poor young woman's thread—my God, I hope she's not trying to decide whether to be in a relationship based solely on your advice—the irony of all these New Agey "feminist" women thinking you are quote a jewel among gems, when I've no doubt they'd all be horrified to learn how much anonymous sex you had while in a committed relationship. Anyway, I let discretion be the better part of bitterness and I simply unfriended her. If she's going to quote you, I don't want to hear it, read it, or be sucked into mentally debating it or you. My not wanting to talk to you extends to refusing to give your feebler arguments even one cubic centimeter more skull space.

I'll just say one more thing before this is the last time "you" means you—I really wish I'd never taught you that term "dealbreaker." I told you repeatedly that I got it from The West Wing, that I used it in the workplace, that it has to do with how the President works with/against Congress to shape legislation, and it's not really appropriate vocabulary to use in discussing a sexual/romantic relationship. For the last time I'm going to remind us both, in my brain: Your seeing sex workers and lying to me about it actually wasn't the dealbreaker. Your walking out on me was what ended our relationship. I didn't stay living in that house with you because I was interested in curating dishonesty. I stayed with you because I was interested in you, in how your mind worked, in learning who you really are. I stayed with you because I wanted a real relationship, not a simulacrum of intimacy. I stayed with you because I was tired of lying and being lied to, and wanted to see someone all the way, and to be seen myself, right down to the bone. How can wanting to know someone be a lie.

And yet, I don't need to have an opinion. You have a right to think what you think, and you think all relationships are based on confabulation; fine. Who knows, maybe you're right. And you know what else? I can love someone even as that person is lying to me about who they are. I can continue to love them, from a safe remove, even when they start telling whole different stories about who they intend to be from now on. Even when they exit the relationship and then have to disparage not only it but all relationships, and insist that all relationships are based on a pack of lies, I can still be filled with love.

And you know how I can do this? How can I still love someone this way? Because my love is what you kept telling me it wasn't: completely unconditional. Because I wasn't lying to you about my love. And because—there are no dealbreakers when it comes to how I feel about you.

Love, Jezebel

angry hungry ingrate

2010-09-23T00:00:00.002-07:00

Have you ever heard that there are only three words in English with the consonant combination "ngr" in them? I think that was in, like, an episode of The West Wing or something. It's the kind of important-sounding useless stuff in which President Bartlet would sometimes specialize.

Anyway, I'm having a kind of terrible miserable moment. Thus, the title of this post. And thus, the antidote:

1. I'm grateful I made it home from school at 10 pm with a dangerously flat tire, the valve stem cap of which I cannot remove to save my life.

2. I'm grateful I got the neighbor's slavering pit-bull cross put away safely in her yard before she attacked me and/or the cat.

3. I'm grateful that I was able to make a short-notice ob/gyn appointment for next week.

4. I'm grateful that I'm having something called "the Serious Mental Illness evaluation," also one week from today, which will (I devoutly hope) qualify me for medication management from an AZ psychiatrist who accepts Medicare. I fully intend to act as crazy as possible, which, given current circumstances, shouldn't be difficult in the least.

5. I'm grateful that I have a part-time job through the first of December.

6. I'm grateful that I don't have to interact with the Qualifier at all.

7. I'm grateful that tomorrow's a relatively easy teaching day—just the logical fallacies, which I know like the back of my hand and can teach sitting down (literally).

8. I'm grateful that the day after tomorrow is Friday.

9. I'm grateful for dessert, which was très Normandaise: a little Gala apple sliced thin and simmered with a sizeable knob of really high quality grass-pastured butter, a cloud of cinnamon on top, and then some heavy cream.

10. I'm grateful that I finally finished the laundry and got it all folded/hung up and no longer have piles of clothing in various stages of cleanliness lying uncertainly around the house.

11. I'm grateful for my best friend, who has been mighty cheerful about the number of voicemails I leave on her cellphone and Skype account—many of which (the voicemails) are unvarnishedly surly and/or victimy about the Qualifier and quote "what he did to me"—and I appreciate her letting me blow off steam in private.

12. I'm grateful it's cooler tonight, so that it doesn't matter as much that the a/c in my car suddenly quit working today.

13. I'm grateful that my friend who is not named Alabama but who actually lives in Alabama can call me in the middle of the night when she wakes up with Thai food indigestion and that we can laugh over all kinds of foolishness and that she actually seems to like me even when I feel super-unlikeable.

14. I'm grateful that I can afford to pay some dude to unscrew my stupid valve stem cap and put air in my damn tire.

15. I'm grateful for my cherry-flavored dental floss.

16. I'm grateful for this Internet connection, and that Blogger is, after all these years, still free. I started my first blog in 2001, back in the Internet Dark Ages (well okay the Renaissance I suppose), and I still remember the thrill of clicking on the little orange "Post" button. And trying to explain to my friends and my then-husband, at a dinner party, what a blog was. And having them all listen politely and then change the subject.

17. I'm so So SO grateful for what may be the funniest Hyperbole and a Half ever. I don't know if you will laugh as hard as I did. Maybe only if you find variations of English as funny as I do. But I literally had to remove my t-shirt to mop the streaming TEARS off my face with it, I laughed so hard. So don't read this anywhere you have to be quiet, like church or the library or a crowded elevator.

18. I'm grateful that I have beautiful hardwood floors and not carpet, and was especially grateful for this the other night when a feral cat got in the house at four in the morning and my cat bravely chased him under the bed and then they were both under there, snarling and growling at each other, and I stood up bewildered half-asleep to try to deal with this situation and found I was standing in a puddle of cat urine, and did I mention that all this was happening at four in the morning?

19. I'm grateful that the feral cat finally ran out through my bedroom window.

20. I'm grateful that my cat has all her shots.

21. I'm alive.

savage love

2010-09-22T11:54:00.004-07:00

(Definitely NSFW! Extremely naughty bits! You have been warned.)

I never thought I'd quote at length from alt-weekly columnist Dan Savage in this column—he's in general completely supportive of men who use porn and insist it doesn't damage or change their partnered sex lives at all—but Podcast 200 was different (thanks, NM, for tipping us off to this one!).

Starting at 22:30, a young straight woman calls in saying she's having a problem with her boyfriend, because he'd apparently rather masturbate than have sex with her. There's a quaver in her voice throughout, and as she talks she shares more about his habits, including porn, and various behaviors she's proposed which he won't take her up on, and how the boyfriend increasingly just tells her masturbation is normal and she's freaking out about nothing. Frankly I figured Dan would give her his standard men-wank-at-porn-so-women-should-get-over-it-answer. But maybe because the woman is so audibly upset, and occasionally falls silent and heaves quiet heartfelt sighs…? Anyway, here's his incredibly validating answer.

Before I get to your question—first, a word to folks who may be listening who are like this woman's boyfriend. And some of those folks may be men, who prefer masturbation or solo sex over time with their partners—or maybe women, who prefer masturbation or solo sex or no sex, over sex with their partners: Listen to the pain in this woman's voice from the constant rejection that is her quote-unquote sexual/romantic relationship. That's not okay. That's not fair, to do that to someone—to initiate a romantic relationship, an intimate relationship…if you are not interested in or capable of or healthy enough or stable enough to be sexually intimate with that person. Coming into the relationship that person has reasonable expectation that you are presenting yourself as dating/relationship material, in part because you are interested in sex generally and interested in sex with them in particular. If you are not, don't fucking date! Be alone! It might mean having to do your own fucking laundry, it might mean having to pay rent all by your fucking self, but that's just something you're going to have to shoulder on your own, because it isn't fair to torture someone like this woman has been tortured.

Now—addressing you, caller—your boyfriend. Maybe he's not attracted to you, maybe he's not into sex, maybe he's so fucked up sexually he's incapable of performing, maybe your friend's theory is correct—who the fuck knows. What we do know is that this relationship, and this boyfriend? are making you miserable. Get OUT. Dump the motherfucker already! Recognize what he's doing to you for what it is: emotional and sexual violence, really! And get the fuck out. You will be happier alone than you are with this guy. How could you not be happier alone? At least then you can live in hope of meeting somebody who isn't a piece of shit douchebag with some problem that he can't get over who makes you miserable. You will hopefully meet some better guy, some other guy—and in the interim you can masturbate holding yourself, you can masturbate and have sex with someone who treats you well—that would be you. He doesn't treat you well.

But there's nothing you can do in a situation like this. It's not like you're doing anything wrong here. It's not like there's the right thing to say, or the right sex act to propose, or the right fix that you can impose on his head and whatever the fuck is wrong with him. All you can do is leave, is bolt, is walk away. And I recommend that you do it, and do it now.

redacted from an email to a friend

2010-09-20T14:38:00.008-07:00

[NB that this friend recently blocked the Qualifier from their Facebook friends, because, direct quote, "HE'S GROSS," end quote.]

Dear ——— ,

I don't know if it helped, but I did find myself muttering "HE'S GROSS" under my breath, and every time it made me laugh aloud, because of the all-caps; so thank you for that. BOYS ARE GROSS.

I'll need the laugh, because as my therapist says, in her pragmatic way: "Women mourn, men replace." The only comfort I have is in knowing that I am, frankly, baby, irreplaceable. Whoever he picks up at AN AA MEETING isn't going to have read the plays of Shakespeare, that's for freaking sure.

We hug our books to our chests in consolation.

As for moving to Texas…I don't know. It's strange—it hasn't been on my radar for literally twenty years now, being almost entirely the place I was trying to get far away FROM, not move back TO. But I'm trying to keep an open mind, since it's suddenly alive for me as an option. It sure is cheap to live there, compared to other places I've lived/would want to live. And relatively sunny, though not like here (it's 111º today).

Sometimes I wish the Qualifier had been more outrageous in his loathsome activities because then it would be even clearer. Instead, going three times to the massage parlor and once to a Craigslist escort's place of business (she was, like, operating out of the back of some ratty men's gym in the suburbs?) plus occasional, maybe weekly use of porn...it's not like I could be all YOU SIR ARE AN OUT-OF-CONTROL SEX ADDICT, he didn't drain the bank account or lose his job or rub his little weenie raw, you know? I just, I hear such horrific stories of other people's partners and sometimes I honestly wish he'd been just that bit more OTT in his sluttiness, so that I could be really super-clear in my head that all his arguments about why he did what he did would just be TRANSPARENT NONSENSE and I could dismiss them, and him, completely. (Which I am gradually doing anyway, with time. Though the progress is mighty slow.)

But then it occurs to me—if his behavior had been any more outrageous, then he would have to admit that to HIMSELF. And of course he doesn't want to, has said outright he's unwilling to take Step One with regard to sex—he doesn't want to admit he's powerless over yet another addiction—so of course he kept it "within bounds," unconsciously or semi-consciously, so he could excuse/justify it to himself.

Ha. I'm smart sometimes. Too bad I'm smart and ALONE hahahahaha.

In other random news I'm looking for an affordable (!) yoga retreat for the Christmas break. All the Bali-Hawaii-Costa Rica ones seem in the neighborhood of $3-4K, though. If I can find a cheap one it's gonna be all Eat Pray Love up in here, complete with flawless skin and Javier Bardem.

Love, Jezebel

step three · kyrie eleison

2010-09-20T00:00:00.001-07:00

O waters of the moon
your vapors swirl and swoon
your wake is wide

and sorrow's like an arrow
shooting straight and narrow
aiming true
its sting goes reaching to the marrow
silence cried

still the echoes aching
leave us not forsaken
kyrie eleison

birthday

2010-09-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

Yes it's his birthday today his 49th birthday and yes I had something planned all year because it's a big birthday your 49th birthday and someone should plan something for it and also because his birthday last year was so bad, nothing special happened, I got him a gift card from REI that didn't have enough money on it to buy a sleeping bag he needed a new sleeping bag and on the way to REI to pick up the card we were driving together and I burst into tears in the driver's seat I'm sorry I said I kept apologizing I'm sorry for crying on your birthday and he said he said that's okay he said it's hard to have a birthday celebration together when you're not getting along very well, that's what we called it euphemistically not getting along very well, it's not your fault he said it's no big deal we'll do something fun when things are better things were not going to get better and it was the next day he told me he was going to school to grade papers and went to the massage parlor instead, when I found the receipt in October and kept puzzling over the date he finally said it's because it was my birthday and I looked at him stupidly it was my birthday and I wanted to do something nice for myself. That's what he said I wanted to do something a little bit nice for myself because it was my birthday, and of course I had felt guilty because I didn't sleep with him on the night of his birthday, I didn't give him a backrub or a massage or anything and now it's a year later and it's his birthday again and I had planned a surprise weekend trip away for us, I wasn't sure where but I would tell him only once we were driving away and it would have been fun I had decided this year would be more fun than last year and I would already have bought the present and I wouldn't cry. And I don't know who to tell this to, because everyone is getting tired of hearing about him everyone is being very polite but this has gone on long enough they are thinking politely saying yes of course you are still hurt and sad of course you are still upset but even though it has been five weeks tonight or really almost four months now depending on how you count I am not over it I am not I still am not by a long shot the missing comes back and it is fierce and utterly specific, no one can stand in that place, it is a singular space which only one person can fill except that person has other places to be and it is his birthday and I can't get him anything, I can't do anything for him, I can't call to wish him happy birthday, I can't get him a present, and I won't be in his life for the next year of it, he won't turn fifty with me, we won't be aging together we are all aging all the time but not necessarily together and for the first time in my life the thought of that made sense to me, had become sweet to me, and yesterday I saw pictures of a dear older male friend's summer vacation with his wife and they were beautiful they were sweetly aging together, traveling in hot places laughing and wrinkling in the sun just as he and I used to travel together sun-creased and happy in our pictures and now we won't travel together and we won't be aging and gray-haired together anymore and he will celebrate his birthday with other people or alone but not with me happy fucking birthday.

louise glück · "unwritten law"

2010-09-18T18:54:00.001-07:00

Interesting how we fall in love:
In my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often—
so it was in my youth.
And always with rather boyish men—
unformed, sullen, or shyly kicking the dead leaves:
in the manner of Balanchine.
Nor did I see them as versions of the same thing.
I, with my inflexible Platonism,
my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time:
I ruled against the indefinite article.
And yet, the mistakes of my youth
made me hopeless, because they repeated themselves,
as is commonly true.
But in you I felt something beyond the archetype—
a true expansiveness, a buoyance and love of the earth
utterly alien to my nature. To my credit,
I blessed my good fortune in you.
Blessed it absolutely, in the manner of those years.
And you in your wisdom and cruelty
gradually taught me the meaninglessness of that term.

joy · lucinda williams

2010-09-17T23:39:00.003-07:00

Lady says she wants it back. Reckon I was you, I'd return it right smart.

plastic tori band

2010-09-17T22:00:00.002-07:00

One of the most depressing events of the summer—in addition to an opened pipeline vomiting oil into the Gulf of Mexico, ongoing war in the Mideast and elsewhere, and the fact that my lover almost had me convinced I was spiritually unfit because I felt sexual jealousy—has been the fact that Tori Amos got so much bad plastic surgery.

Seriously, y'all.

Tori has been a friendly goddess introject for me for many years now. Her albums have long accompanied me and preceded me on my journey (especially Little Earthquakes, Boys for Pele, From the Choirgirl Hotel, Scarlet's Walk). She was like a slightly older sister who lets you wear her sexy sweaters and use her lipstick. She just didn't know I existed, but that wasn't a big problem for my unconscious mind. Maybe once a month I'd dream about meeting her backstage and she'd drop some pebble of womanly wisdom into my pond, give me some gift (she's given me some uncanny dream-gifts over the years—a cloisonné bracelet, a bedsheet with poetry written on it), hug me warmly and send me on my way. I've never even dared see her perform, though I could have in DC as early as 1991. I just knew instinctively we were better kept apart, somehow. That way I could carry on my small idolatry from a safe distance (oddly I never felt that way about Ani DiFranco, whom I've seen more than a dozen times).

Also she looks a lot like my mom did, when I was a girl. High cheekbones, nose with some character to it, thin red hair, curved lips.

And then first Tori's music got plastic surgery; and then her face did. And it's BAD plastic surgery, that's made it painful to look at her now. PAINFUL. Eyes, nose, forehead, mouth—all of it. It's all bad.

I also worry that she's become addicted to prescription painkillers, too, post-surgery...maybe even meth. Seriously. I adduce the evidence (check her teeth starting at about 2:30) (the ending of that performance is just embarrassingly awful, if you can make it that far). I mean, how else can someone's mouth fall into such disrepair, when she owns like five houses on three different continents? Even if one of those houses is in the UK? I lived there 3 years, my teeth didn't disintegrate. I know she's a pothead and a wino, but do these make your teeth turn into brown and nubbly rubble?

Even diehard fans are talking. They've named one of her new facial features "the eye wonk," and you can see it yourself (1:08). Most of them still defend her and say she looks beautiful, but I don't see how they can. Their denial must be nearly Al-Anon quality, when it's obvious her doctor botched the jobs.

And then it seems she's simultaneously become way too mentally interesting for her own good. And she's so skinny. Oh, Tori. I want to make her chicken soup. I want to turn back the clock. I want to rub her skinny shoulders and hold her hands and say: Honey-honey, you're a sexy forty-year-old woman and a genius composer, and you can write amazing music again if you just take a break from fucking touring, and OMG PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS.

She was still amazing even a few years ago, performing her older songs (and I loved her super-glam capes. I mean, please, Tori—Freddy Mercury wouldn't have had plastic surgery! Remember your role models!). So I think drugs are behind this. I just do.

And why has she stopped playing the Böse, most of the time? Because there's no point to it, when a Yamaha or Fazioli will do just fine now, given how conservatively she plays (she's had tendonitis for years, which could be worse now). And as for her voice, even the upper mid-range notes are gone, which she says is due to hormonal changes. She always chooses the lower pitch over the higher now, even when the dramatic moment in the lyrics would call for extending the octave.

I can't stand to go into much more detail. But when I feel really depressed and want to feel my sadness, contemplating the wreck of one of my favorite female songwriters now does it for me. It's heartbreaking—another one lost. And I don't dream about her anymore.

It's better to remember her as she was.

falling out of love is a tedious thing

2010-09-17T20:54:00.005-07:00

with its jailhouse smirk and its chain gang swing

(NB that this isn't the whole song, and the album track is WAY better.)

you

2010-09-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

every song has a you
a you that the singer sings to
and you're it this time
baby you're it this time

(ani difranco)

I never have to see you or speak to you again, if I don't want to. And right now I don't want to, because I have nothing to say to you.

[Goes on to say nothing for a very long while.]

You're actually the one who taught me this, that I didn't have to try to stay friends or be nice. I said this to you, when my ex broke up with me and then wanted to be friends. I'd say, "But I should respond" (to his emails/letters) and you'd laugh shortly and say, "Why? You don't have to do anything. You don't owe him anything." You were angry but not at me. You were angry at him for running such a huge head-trip on me before he left. You called him a rogue. You said, "You've got all these rogues in your life. You don't deserve to be treated the way they treat you. You don't have to put up with it." The simplicity of it dazzled me. If people were critical, judgmental, or just plain mean to me—if they didn't validate me, if they didn't see me or get me—I didn't have to spend time with them anymore. I didn't have to answer their pleading letters or their accusatory emails, I didn't have to feel guilty for not answering.

My ex had sent me an irate email the day after you and I walked into a party together and he'd unexpectedly been there. He criticized some comments I'd made to his friend and then "respectfully requested" that I behave better in the future. You read the email, and then said to me, "He doesn't get to make any requests—not respectful ones, not any ones. That's what it means to be broken up with someone."

Had you any idea of what you were going to do to me, yes, do to me. Had you any idea of what a rogue you would become.

[From now on if someone should be so foolish as to want to go out with me, I'll just say politely, "I'm afraid not, because if you date me, you will within months find yourself turning into a terrible person. You'll say things and do things that will horrify you, because this is what happens with all my partners. And I like you too much to let that happen to you."]

You were a different kind of rogue, I'll give you that. You never criticized me in the sense of complaining about my looks, my intelligence, my behavior. Instead you just neglected me, it was neglect, I can call it this. And when I would request your attention, that's when you would criticize me. Why couldn't I be happy. Why did I always want something more. Why did there always have to be a problem. Why couldn't you just have some fucking space.

You supported me otherwise. You said I was beautiful, hot, sexy, a great writer, funny, wise, kind, generous, a good friend. Only, increasingly, if I ever asked for more of your attention, your time or your sexuality. Then I was being controlling, demanding, manipulative. Then I was asking too much, then I was too much, then I wasn't letting you be free, be yourself, be left alone. Why can't you just leave me alone.

Now you're alone, or maybe you're not, and I wonder how you like it, but really I don't really wonder, because in me is growing a large hard inert mass like a stone, which is blank and gray, but if it had a name it might be called Don't Care. Carelessness, uncaringness, growing in me a few centimeters a day, sometimes more quickly, sometimes slowly. Sometimes like children growing I only notice if I don't check on it, and then I feel it in me and suddenly notice: I didn't cry today. I just felt a cold dull impervious indifferent kind of pain, where there was a warm living bloody pitiful pain, yesterday. Then I turn my attention dully to whatever needs doing right in front of me: I read, grade, prep, write, clean, cook, live my life, trusting that as dull pain replaces hot pain, so too will come real happiness and joy eventually and replace the dull pain.

Because it is clear to me now, and I say this very politely, you aren't worth my feeling hot bloody anguish over. You behaved, frankly, abominably. I see that now. And you tried to justify it. You didn't apologize for betraying me and you didn't ask forgiveness. You admitted that you shouldn't have lied, and that lying is wrong because it steals someone else's reality (all the months I tried to make sense out of what your mouth was saying versus what my eyes and ears and brain and gut were telling me, how crazy I felt)—but you haven't tried to make amends for the real wrongs you did. Nor have you asked me what those were. Maybe you know you're not ready to do that yet. You'll have to do it without me, that process, now.

When did the lying start? With your clean-sweeping revisionist history, you can now say the lying started nearly five years ago when we met and got together and you declared yourself available for a relationship. I never really wanted to be in a relationship I just thought I had to be in one to get sex and love. You've learned this before, breaking up with other exclusive relationships, but now you say you're learning it for real this time, and this time you'll remember, unlike the last dozen times? No. You're just lying. I don't care, just, let's call it that. It's lying.

You behaved really badly and whatever I thought we had, we didn't have. I thought we were a certain thing, a committed thing, and we either never were or we stopped being without your telling me you were stopping.

Once when we still lived in Santa Fe a woman walked up to you outside a Starbucks and said, I never really do this, but would you like to go to dinner with me? And you were startled, so that you answered more honestly (you told me later): Thank you for asking, but I don't want to, because I'm seeing someone and I'm totally in love with her. You told me that night that you'd said this, and I was secretly happy. Because you didn't say, I can't; you said, I don't want to.

Sometime this summer, I asked you, when did you stop feeling that way about me? When did you start wanting to? And you said roughly, impatiently: Why does it matter? And I fell silent as your anger has trained me to do. But I can tell you now why it matters. It matters because that would be the moment when you started lying to me. When you started lying with your presence, staying with me when you really wanted to be somewhere else, with someone else. And I would somehow like to know when the lying started. But now I can only assume it started from the first time we slept together.

That's okay, that works fine. I'll just assume you were lying the entire time. That makes it easier, in a way, because I don't have to try to figure out when the lying started. It was always there. Like you telling your ex-wife, I never really wanted to marry you, I just did it so you would be happy and I told myself I could keep having sex with other women as long as you didn't find out.

She didn't particularly like to hear that and I don't blame her. It's a cruel thing to have said, even if it were true. You said that she wouldn't accept any other answer, so you were finally backed into a corner and forced to tell her the true one. We were in the front yard lying in the grass in the sun when you told me this story. I said, are you just saying that to me, too? Are you just trying to make me happy, and thinking you can have other sexual relationships on the side as long as I don't find out?

You said, no.

So I say no. I don't think I really have anything to say, if I were to see you. You'd expect me maybe to ask about your students, or your music, or your spiritual life. You'd maybe want to talk about our former relationship, or tell me about your new relationships, though I'd hope you wouldn't be that obtuse. You might, though, because your whole new spiritual-relationship theory is based around a kind of sinister misunderstanding of sympathetic joy/mudita/compersion. But it doesn't matter what you want or what you'd expect. I remind myself of this. That's what you taught me. I never have to talk to you again, if I don't want to. And I don't.

I catch myself wondering sometimes, imagining these conversations we won't have: what would I even call you now? I never called you by your name, which seemed like a silly name, and not your real name; it seemed like someone else's name to both of us. So I called you a vast series of pet names and pen names and pseudonyms. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe I should have always called you by your name. What would I call you now? One of your names for me was, lover. As in, "Hey, lover. How was your day?" You stopped calling me that in May, when you told me what you'd been doing, and it still took me three months, stupidly, to realize you'd left me. I had to have you stare straight into my eyes and literally enunciate the words: I want to break up, I do not want to be in a relationship with you anymore. Only then could I hear it. Maybe because I was so used to working with lies, maneuvering cleverly around the fundamental dishonesty that wove through all our days, that I needed it said straight to my face.

It's very simple. You said you wanted to be kind to me, to treat me with respect and love. You said we would have a real relationship, without lies—that whatever else happened, you would always tell me the truth. But you didn't do what you said. You say one thing and do something else. This is how you are. I am just now able to understand that. I had a hard time with it at first, I think mostly because I am not that kind of liar. You said you didn't want to hurt me, but I had to learn to stop listening to your words, because they aren't meaningful. You don't mean anything when you talk.

Sometimes I imagine talking to our couples therapist, to tell him what happened. I imagine saying baldly, Well, he finally told me he'd been cheating on me with prostitutes all year, and lying about it. And then once he'd told me that, he had a big spiritual experience and realized he can't ever be in a committed relationship again, and he left me. I wonder what the couples therapist would say. He probably wouldn't be surprised. He probably wouldn't see me as a victim. And do I want to see myself as a victim? Not particularly; or at least, not all the time. Yet there are victims. When you lie to someone, you take their choice away from them. I know I did know on some level that you were lying; or I should have known perhaps sooner that you were lying. But I didn't know, or I didn't want to know, and I stayed with you at least a year longer than I might have.

You shouted, you raged, you destroyed the alarm clock and the lamp, you threw things, you scared the dog, you scared the cat, you scared me, you scared yourself, you sulked, you isolated, you snapped at me, you refused to talk, you shut me down when I tried to ask, you left the entire care of the household to me for months on end, you behaved as though living with me were akin to being in prison—you behaved terribly. You really did. And I stayed around for it.

But now I never have to speak to you again. And now that I can see what you did, and who you are, I don't think I ever will.

"breaking" news, haha

2010-09-14T18:56:00.009-07:00

This just in! According to the chiropractor I saw yesterday, who took x-rays and showed me the appalling results, shaking his head in alarm, I have degenerative disc disease! Which might explain the increasingly disabling bouts of upper-back pain (since 2001). Cervical vertabrae #6 is crumbling, he opines, and is the cause of it all. I'll need to get a second opinion somehow before I get any more adjustments, or before I agree to the 20-session course of physical therapy he recommends. Medicare would pay for it, but is it the right thing to do, or could it cause more damage? Or should I throw myself (gently) into swimming, weightlifting, yoga, something else? Can I fix this one myself?

A wee bit ausgefreaked, I'll admit.

In other news of the unexpected (but what other kind of news is there?), over the last 48 or so hours my brain keeps spitting out the idea that I should live in Texas for a while, be near my parents (my dad turns 70 in November) and record music with them/him. Not SUCH an off-the-wall idea, since we're all three musicians and he's been begging me to do this for the last 15 years. But a strange persistent fancy nonetheless.

My therapist ventures that, "at the risk of sounding cheesy, you might be...blossoming." We both laugh skeptically, then I sigh. She notes that I was in a pretty miserable situation for a long, long time. It's not implausible that some seemingly strange ideas might burble up to the surface now that they're entirely free to do so.

Even as she's saying this, I have one. "I just thought, Oh my God, I hate this dress." I gesture toward my dress, which is innocent enough—a white cotton wrap dress with narrow grass-green pinstripes, that I got from the thrift store for probably $3. Why in the world do I suddenly hate it today?

"Just be observant," she suggests. "Don't judge the thoughts as crazy, just notice that you're having them: 'Wow, I just had another weird unexpected idea!'"

What am I about to do next? It's weird not knowing. Will I drop out and be a yoga student for 3-6 months? Will I go to Bali? Will I stay here and teach? Will I apply to PhD programs? Will I get my poetry manuscript published? Will I get a teaching job elsewhere? Will I teach English overseas? Will I go live in Texas and practice guitar and piano until I'm good enough again, write songs again, record them? Will I buy a beat-up little house, and if so, where? When I can barely commit to buying a pair of pants online? Does it even matter what I do? There's so little time left, between this breath and the last—

All I know for sure is that more will, as they keep reassuring me, be revealed.

you gave him your blood and your warm little diamond

2010-09-13T21:37:00.008-07:00

wrapped around
your feet
wrapped around
like good little roses

you've cut out the flute
from the throat
of the loon
at least when
you cry now
he can't even hear you

when chickens
get a taste
of your meat girl
when he sucks you deep
yes
sometimes you're nothing but meat

And sometimes harpsichords are strung with razor wire—

an interesting inner observation

2010-09-13T15:57:00.005-07:00

That I am having a hard time admitting to friends and therapist and sponsor that I am doing better—because the fearful thought comes up: Now they will withdraw their support and expect more from me. It's an old thought, I'm familiar with it and can argue it down, but it reappears whenever someone says brightly, "You look like you're doing better": Now they will treat me like I'm perfectly fine and I am NOT perfectly fine, I still spend most of each day involuntarily brooding and being in tears alternating with making angry declamatory speeches in my head. It's just that now I do all that more or less (today, less) with a pen or a sponge or a fork or a broom in my hand.

Which reminds me.

TO GET DONE THIS WEEK

~~sweep floors~~
mop floors
~~sort laundry~~
wash laundry
~~wash dishes~~
~~put dishes away~~
~~email self 2008/2009 tax returns~~
print 2008/2009 tax returns
collect all medical expenses 2009-2006 (AUGH)
fill out SSA paperwork
go to SSA office with paperwork (Weds or Fri)
call psychiatrists, get appointment
finish putting comments on poems (9 left)
prep for poetry workshop Weds night
prep for T/Th critical thinking
grade papers (they hand them in tomorrow)
~~chiropractor appointment~~
find more book contests/open reading periods
call Medicare about unpaid hospital bill
buy camera cable, blank CDs, cat food
call Credo and cancel
sign up with Cricket
fill out and mail Cricket modem rebate
email referrers and thank them—IMPORTANT
DO WRITING ASSIGNMENTS FOR WORKSHOP
kitty needs a haircut

How do you all do things? How does anyone ever get anything done? It mystifies me, when I feel this down and tired and sad and so very alone.

just because

2010-09-13T00:57:00.004-07:00

Because I love that we are almost never who we seem. And that this mousy-looking little woman isn't a reference librarian, but was Judee Sill.

just to show me / how to give my heart away—

postscript

2010-09-13T00:03:00.002-07:00

I'm sitting outside before the Al-Anon meeting and a nervous heterosexual couple in mid-life come looking for the meeting, finding only me and a dark locked room. I assure them they're in the right place, and that someone will come let us in soon, and they relax a bit.

"Are you one of the instructors?"

I become conscious of my breathing and let the smile on my face be genuine. When people show up this ignorant of what Al-Anon is, that just means they're completely at wits' end.

"No, we don't really have instructors. We take turns leading the meetings, and everyone shares."

I explain to the wife, who has sat down next to me and is scanning my face anxiously, a few rudiments of how it works, speaking slowly and warmly.

"We're here because of our daughter," the husband suddenly blurts out. The wife stands up and goes over to stand near him supportively. He's all but shaking with emotion. "She's eight months pregnant, and she's smoking heroin. And she's only twenty. It's her boyfriends—they're the ones getting her to do it. And we're here to find out how to stop her. If we have to call Child Protective Services, or what. What strategies we should use."

For a moment I am confused whether they want to call CPS on the daughter, or for the daughter. I abandon this line of non-reasoning and tell them about NarAnon—tell them that several of our group members have experienced the specific dilemma of having a child or children struggling with addiction, and share my own small experiments in detaching with love as the addict in my life chose self-destructive behaviors—mostly I say soothing meaningless things to hold them there until reinforcements arrive, which, thank God, they promptly do.

I know they won't remember a thing I say, anyway. Your first meeting, it's all adrenaline and frozen, locked grief and aimless fury. Keep coming back, you two.