Intermittent Spirituality

Happy Thanksgiving.

2011-11-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

Food Obsession. Our country is in the throes of food obsession. From where we’ve gotten it, who produced it, what’s in it, how it’s cooked, saved, presented, traveled, sourced, the quantity and quality, the affordability, the nutritive value, the cruelty inherent in it’s eating, food stands along as one of the most controversial and ceremonially-laden topics of the land. And especially as Americans approach the high holy day of food, Thanksgiving, these food issues multiply, mount and become hopelessly intertwined in the controversies of our day...serving to confound and confuse us. Sometimes we just want to eat. But modern life doesn’t always afford us such easy congress with what we put in our mouths.

I personally have always been consumed as it were with food. First as an overweight kid and then as a fat adult. About two years ago, I decided that my body could no longer support my foodie habits. I abruptly cut out all grains and most starch and began a troubled love affair with vegetables and coffee. To date, I am healthier. The pseudo South-Beach-cum Atkins meal plan worked and I am about 50 lbs lighter. I love this part. I can buy designer skinny jeans on the cheap from trendy second hand shops and easily find something to wear in the morning without having to go through an elaborate body cloaking procedure.
I repeat. I love this part.

But now, as we get deeper into the recession, I realize that the falling away of my eating habits reveals, lays bare certain things that I was unaware of in my former foodie life of addiction. I now see the depths of what I have lost in buying power, must acknowledge that I no longer should have any expectation of promotional opportunities, or improving my earning ability. To wit…now that I don’t eat pizza and popcorn, now that I never partake in the sensual delights that are savory experience of eating a cherry pie, without the pure visceral joy of a freshly baked biscuit dripping with butter and jam, I understand just how much, how bad my situation, and by extension our country’s situation has gotten.

Yes, I still have a job but each day its very existence is called into question, as is the pension that was once a highlight of my public service. Crime is rampant in my city, civic improvement is waning, and community morale is as low as my real estate valuation. I know this isn’t news to anyone but my God, we have lost so much.

But in the early years, when this started happening I managed to feel like I was on an even keel because I was using eating to satisfy my inner, non-nutritive hungers. I ate to forget, to assuage fear, to mark special events, to grease the wheels of social interaction. And let me tell you…while those things are still possible today, they are a lot less possible when your paycheck doesn’t cover what it used to and when the contact high of gluten, starch, and sugar are exposed for what they are --fattening agents and largely ---instruments of satiation.

Without a doubt, these are first world problems. Having food…being able to choose to eat certain types of food over other foods—that’s a luxury a very large portion of the world cannot afford. I get that. I don’t go to bed hungry. Acknowledged. I’m lucky (and the food bank is my main charitable organization, especially during the holidays)Th

Still.

Sometimes, some days like when I’m more fearful over losing my job or when protestors are tagging the building that I’m working in, I just want to eat a jelly donuts with a tall cold glass of full fat milk. It worked to quell the demons when I was a rotund little 12 year old in Allendale, New Jersey. I’m so tempted to see if it works now.

And no amount of new age foodie gambits will be a good substitute for the loss of jelly donuts. No amount of beekeeping or backyard chickens, classes in olive or cheese making will help me to fill the hole. Truth be told, the hole will probably never be filled. I will need to live with that hole. Just like any addict does. That’s a parable of life. Living in spite of the holes we acquire along the way.

In two weeks, I’ll cook a very big meal that will be delicious. It will be cooked with love and enthusiasm. But it won’t fill the hole. And really, I should never have expected it to.

April 6

2011-04-06T16:16:00.001-07:00

Universally a 5 day, which means you will find yourself moving faster than
usual. During a 5 we tend to experience things in one long blur...a strung
together, highly indistinct buzz.

Highlights are so fleeting they are hard to separate from the lowlights. Take care operating machinery and
negotiating around corners. And be aware of the tendancy to want to tamp
down the buzz with interesting substances. There's a good chance you'll
miscalculate and over do it.

Meh

2011-03-27T12:55:00.000-07:00

It has to start with the writing. That’s what I keep telling myself as I stop for the umpteenth time and say you aren’t good enough…there are so many more ahead of you.

I’ve been saying this for almost 20 years. Almost but not quite. I’m just shy of my ticket to escape. In the scheme of things I’m just months away from my proverbial promise land.

Of course, there’s a good chance that fate, in the form of Saturn herself may have other plans. Worming it’s way through the California legislature is a bill, a mean-spirited bill that if passed will not allow me to take my small clutch of marbles and start life anew. It would require me to wait an additional decade and change, watching my life and times drain away from me, it would chain me to a beige, bureaucratic gulag for 12 more years.

The thought of that is almost too much sometimes.

Yes, I’m not stupid. It’s lucky to have a job.

But I had a plan…nothing too formalized but a plan nonetheless hatched at the very beginning of this stint, right before I gave away my freewill and youth.

The plan was to retire at 50 and go do something else.

No, it’s not the end of the world. It’s not a death sentence like those Japanese workers who walked through irradiated water. That is the ultimate sacrifice for work. My little bleats sound so self-serving in comparison.

But I still wanted what I wanted. And right now I’m angry at the thought of it vanishing into thin air.

We don’t always get what we want do we?

Is what I need really to work another 12 years for someone else? I was hoping to go out on my own using my small monthly pension as a stop gap. But who knows? Our fate is unknown until it smacks us in the face in the ever evolving present.

Birth. Or Transformation. Or something like it.

2011-03-01T13:05:00.000-08:00

Do you know what I love about astrology? You don't have to pretend that you're all seeing or all knowing. You don't have to adopt the pretense that you love everyone. That you think everyone is cool.

Of course that's the ultimate goal. But if you are heavy with the conflict, in the midst of your process, you don't necessarily need to accept all at the shores of your consciousness.

What a relief!

Currently, I'm studying astrology...it's a huge boon to my devotion to numerology...in that profession that I've placed on the back burner almost two decades ago.

Studying it, thinking it could be part of my dream of writing and living in my spiritual passion makes me happy as long as I don't dwell on the fact that I'm still in the straight job.

Still. Happiness hasn't been this consistent for a while. S'Nice.

Same or slightly different? Does it matter?

2010-09-09T06:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while. That's because I'm tired of reading the same story. Same sh*t, different day. Ok. Maybe not the exact same sh*t. And maybe I can see where I've gone wrong here. And maybe I can see a path...a very long trajectory where what exists today could be different...that could course correct somehow.

Maybe.

If I were a painter

2010-04-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

My artistic statement:
"It's endemic to the human condition, the need to communicate is a primal, elementary force. Painting gives me a freedom of expression with color and movement that hasn't found it's way into my journals and letters. Fluidity, morbidity, life...these are big ideas that I want to convey but I've always found my writing too one-dimentional to capture the full sense. As a new painter and lifelong writer, I hope my brand of visual language speaks to those who choose to linger."

And here is more:

" With regard to art, ---to paintings both abstract and figurative, above all, art that I favor has to leave a mark. The best work can illuminate and elevate me. And while important writing can do the same, as I've grown older I've craved the immediacy of the visual-- that unmediated and blissful assault to the senses. I want to seek this out and explore another aspect of my persona.

Like many individuals, I create to satisfy my palate. Though I'm not formally trained, I'm pleased with the results. It does what I want it to do."

It's late and I've been drinking equal parts coffee and wine.

2010-02-19T01:27:00.000-08:00

I'm sad. Sadder than I've been in a long time...but not too far gone to know why I'm so slack. A very large part is the perimenopause, that insidious little condition that inflates the down times and suppresses the memory of anything good and stable. It's also that she's away, and even though it's on a mission of mercy (for family...another aspect of the sadness)I'm still very lonely without her. Actually it's more than loneliness...it's disappointment at my rudderlessness when she's not here.

After all I'm not my mother. I can drive in the City and pay bills and even go camping if I absolutely have too. I know how to kill bugs (hairspray, of course!) and cook a gourmet dinner for twelve from scratch. In my time I've even switched out an electrical fixture. I'm an independent sort though not above liking to be pampered, a loner certainly--so why do I feel like I'm missing a secret ingredient when she's not here?

I write these words anonymously, but I wish I had the guts to speak with my true identity. But I don't. And that lack of courage has informed so much of my existence...this is another facet of that intercontinental sadness. I've been given so much, so much really but have done so very, very little with it. The minimum in fact that allows me to maintain my lifestyle at the edges of the middle class...the very least I can do without risk.

I may feel better tomorrow, but then again, I may not. Still, tomorrow isn't fated and my life isn't over yet. There is still time. Time to change.

Lone Wolf

2010-01-30T23:34:00.000-08:00

One thing about Facebook...it really highlights how many "friends" you actually have...and for me it's precious few. Most people have upwards of 200. I have 13. That's it. And I've wracked my brain, trying to come up with names but either they are too successful for facebook (more likely to be on LinkedIn) or they just hate social media in general and don't participate.

Still, I feel rather chagrined at my paltry friend list. And at whose feet does the blame for this one lie? Mine of course. I have the profile of a hermit.

The other thing that is going on for me is that I find it rather presumptuous to ask someone who I haven't seen in a while if they'd like to friend me. It just feels kinda like begging. (remember that old saw by Groucho Marx "I'd never join any group that would have me as a member." Yeah...like that.

So most of my "friends" are family or extended family. Or 'pity-friendings' from friends of friends. And my mother.

I've tried to make up for the lack of friends by joining groups--typically writing related groups or listing myself as a fan of certain writers. I'm that weird one with no friends but lots of passionate devotion to certain organizations.

Bad-Ass Kitty

2010-01-18T14:25:00.000-08:00

My cat, my formerly sweet tempered and intelligent black cat has morphed of late into a harpy. Whereas she was deferential and equable before, she’s now a shrew-bully who’s got it out for any four-leg within sight distance. She picks fights, both those she can and those she can never hope to win with the heedlessness of a teenage kitten, and while she’ll be sixteen in July, I had expected her to behave closer to a feline in dotage than to a homosapein sapien (yes, I mean to say sapein twice) in adolescence.

It says a lot about a creature when they change who they are so late in the game.

I’m angling for the same type of change.

I’ve been the type of person who has given herself lots of room to shirk off big goals. Instead I’ve focused on the smaller stuff, trying to get along, be appropriate and pleasant. But it hasn’t gotten my anywhere except older. And most people who think they know me consider me a very “nice and considerate” person without any major heartaches. Hmph!

Inside I’m awash in Klingon-style outrage that exists beyond the cantankerousness, treading very close to recklessness, just like my newly bad-ass cat. And just like her, I’m having a hard time concealing it anymore…discontent keeps punching its way through.

By a stroke of fate though, I’m not a cat and have more leeway in creating my own reality (nor do I have to poop in a public sandbox or wait on someone else to put the kibble on the table). I’ve no excuse to let my concealed resentment erupt onto everyone else’s landscape. Admittedly kitties are smart and have the right to be spiteful when they want to be but I’ve been given many TOOLS to be smarter about going after what I want.

So meow. Do the right thing, kiddo. Writing is a duty.

Sick days

2010-01-17T18:38:00.000-08:00

After two days of being sick (I never really got over being sick at Xmas) and my wife being sick too, I've begun to understand why a certain cadre of people who work at home stick to the ritual of getting up and getting dressed.

It's rainy and cold out and we two, stuck inside, feel stale and warmed over. Coming in and out of sleep I've had the dream that somehow, my hair is washed, cut and styled just the way I like it but without any work on my part. Likewise my eyebrows have been shaped to perfection, a peerless line etched timelessly across my forehead.

Winter sick days (or summer ones for that matter) call out for the clean, well-tended trimness of health.

Pain and no peace

2010-01-16T20:28:00.001-08:00

I haven't been able to achieve plain old peace in a very, very long time so the question, naturally, is can I actually achieve this state? Reading over the entries of the last year or so, I'm not so sure that melancholia isn't more of a better fit than say contentment.

I've mentioned ad nauseam that I want to be writing but it does seem that an awful lot of things are happening in my life that do not include writing. When, writing, like brushing one's teeth each night and regular sex (none of which occurs consistently for me due to my own lack of constancy) isn't habitual, do I really want to write at all (or have sex or have gleaming pearly whites??)

Yes and no.

One of the little pronouncements I've been making lately is to state the obvious when someone suggests a new method for achieving better habits ("Well, what I've been doing hasn't been working so I'm willing to try something different"). This mindset-- which acknowledges that I've failed in the past because I simply wasn't up to making changes-- has helped me lose weight and become a tiny bit less disorganized. It has given me the strength to overcome my natural inertia.

As I write this my wife calls to me from the bedroom. She's watching TV and missing me. Heck I miss her. This often happens when we're not in the same room. Most of the time, I go hang with her and try to write with Grey's Anatomy or football competing for mindspace. Typically, I stop writing soon after relocating. But this time, setting aside my culpability with the practiced selfishness of a veteran hack, I say "I'm writing." And even when her small voice says "oh ok. do what you need to do" and I feel that pang of guilt, I remain committed to the keyboard, to this passage, to wanting to change my life in the face of what–has–been–before.

It's all so GD complicated.

At least I lost weight

2010-01-16T19:57:00.001-08:00

Way back in October I started trying to lose weight and I finally have made some progress. 20 lbs worth of it. I'm back to fitting into jeans that haven't seen the light of day for 2 years. This is uplifting. A singular good in a season of low spirits. I'll take it.

Pretend

2010-01-16T19:50:00.000-08:00

Just visited littlebrownpen. Sigh.

It's clear I've been fooling myself. I pretend I don't care about going back to Paris but I do.
I pretend I'm not all that bothered by having gotten older (and thus no longer able to achieve the fabled cool phase of my life), but when I look at the video clips of the Marais from this blog, I'm very bummed.

Gotta find a way back from bumdom.

Learning very slowly

2009-12-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

OK...I tried something else new. Tried my hand a freelancing a web design. Bad idea. Crashed and burned. The client hated it and my self worth is completely smashed.

Wow. I didn't see this coming.

So what have I learned from this?
a) I need a thicker skin
b) I need to hyperfocus on the things that I know I do well, not the things that I kinda do well.
c) Never, ever do work for friends. You'll not forgive them if they don't appreciate your work with the same urgency you do.

Funny...I've been yelling at myself for not writing. This latest failure has been instructive in that I need to listen to the authentic voice in my head. Disregarding it like it's a bag lady on the street holding a cardboard sign ("pay attention to me") isn't smart.

I'm also comforting myself by remembering what happened to Terry Gross. She famously failed before finding her niche.

It's Sunday. Cranky much?

2009-12-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

As I read the digital copy of the newspaper, I am aghast at how there are so many people who write well, with authority and skill and copious amounts of talent. I’m amazed that most of those people:

a) are not me,
b) are younger than me,
c) are not in the food line or on welfare.

Also, I imagine most of those people to be women and to have working husbands that support them…that their writing isn’t enough to sustain the family or even one family member. And then I think of the fact that this is a Sunday and I have to work at someone else’s behest in a cubicle the color of burlap for at least seven more years (of course to have a job is to be lucky. To only have to work for seven more years is lucky. What a dunce I am) before I have that type of freedom.

And then I just get cranky.

Clarity

2009-12-04T07:01:00.001-08:00

Answering some questions from previous entries:

Why am I not writing? - Because I'm afraid I won't be any good at it anymore. Because I'm afraid I'll be good at it and then discover I'm bad. Because then people will know what I really think and who I really am. Because it gets in the way of television couch surfing.

Why haven't I taken tests for a promotion? - Because instinctively, I know that to promote means to commit to a higher level of dedication and responsibility at work and I don't want to go there. I have other dreams I want to pursue. If I promote, everything else must come second.

Why don't I call my mother more often? - Duh....because she's your mother! She's never satisfied and you always end up wanting to eat your weight in pie after you hang up.

Why have I stopped going to the dentist? Obviously because it hurts. Less obviously because it's overwhelmingly expensive.

And why is my office reminiscent of the wreck of the Hespers? Because you are afraid of the Dimensions of Paradise. What would happen if you could actually work in there? Then you would want to actually work in there and challenge on your addiction to being a sheep-like cube junkie who depends on her employer for her wherewithall. You'd have to take care of your own financial well-being.

Tarot readings as therapy

2009-12-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

My head is screaming...you need to write, you need to write. But up until now, I've just done a series of obsessive tarot card readings, talking myself through my conflict by compressing my issues to a string of yes/no answers. Sigh. I'm convinced that the thing I want the most is almost always the thing that I avoid. This is instructive in a backhanded kind of way...all I have to do is look at what I have been secretly preoccupied with and voila, there they are...my underground desires.

Digging down

2009-10-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

Apparently I was not done posting today, because I've got more thoughts here that I've got to get down. My whole kick to lose weight is symptomatic of my desire to change my life somehow--to make it feel more fulfilling. Some things (like not being monied enough able to afford to move away from a ghetto, or not being able to retire early) are unmovable. They simply are and there isn't much one can do at a particular point.

However there are some things that if not overturned, can be shifted and one of these things is weight. So I'm dieting and exercising and some things are changing for the better. Yay. But not enough things.

Like what?

Like I haven't been writing. At all. I haven't paid attention to my mind, at how it questions certain things at how it laughs at life or wonders at it. I've simply been mute. This isn't good. Historically, I've been at my best after a long period of writing and rumination. But note--best doesn't necessarily mean happy. I stopped writing in part because it made think...made me start peering deep into my roily soul for answers that I've been avoiding for a long, long time. Like why haven't I made writing a basic part of my life? Basic as in I do it everyday, not as in I am taking an expensive class. Basic as in I write in my blog regularly, I develop essays regularly. I submit articles regularly. All these things can be accomplished without any extra outlay of cash on my part...just an outlay of time.

Sigh. And writing is just the tip of the iceberg. Why haven't I taken tests for a promotion? Why don't I call my mother more often? Why have I stopped going to the dentist? And why is my office reminiscent of the wreck of the Hespers?

Messy, messy, messy. I'm going to stop here. All these root issues out on the table at once are very off-putting...

1/16/10 Update on weight. And I have gone to the dentist since this post (to the tune of $1,500 dollars!). And I'm redesigning my office with custom bookshelves and real curtains. And I finally found a test I'm willing to take.

not satisfied with first world issues...

2009-10-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

I'm lucky. I have a house, a partner, some nice friends, a family. I have clothes to wear, cars to drive, a job to go to and generous health insurance. My pension fund is still up and running and I have the great fortune to have more than enough to eat.

But I am unhappy. And from the looks of it, I'm not alone. I'm not going to into all the reasons posited in the article, I'm just here to relate that I've got a profound sense of discontent going on that

I haven't been successful in kicking,
That I don't feel I deserve.

So I've the continual ennui of a person who has enough but can't feel sufficient gratitude to make themselves happy. Oh I've read that an important factor in dealing with such angst is to help other people and to that end I now work in a job where I'm almost continually helping people. It is diverting, yes, but at the end of the day, I still feel unsatisfied and lucky all at the same time. Hmph.

Maybe I'll go eat an apple.

One clue that I have identified is that I've recently gone on a diet. And not eating what I want and forcing myself to exercise when I'd rather masquerade as a couch cushion lays bare any sort of immediate gratification. As I've mentioned before in my tweets, chocolate croissants go a long way toward improving my mood...much farther in fact than a 50 minute work out. At least in the short run.

Sigh.

new job, different day

2009-09-06T11:25:00.001-07:00

Well, I did it. I changed jobs yet again. When it came down to it I simply couldn't stay in the old job...it was just too far from my core interests. I wanted to like it because I adored the people, adored what they talked about, where they went for dinner and where they traveled to on vacations. I loved where they hung out, admired their hobbies and the fact that they were very literate and witty. Their jokes were funny, their analysis of current events insightful and multi-layered and they were by and large an extremely articulate bunch. But I hated the career...and for all the stellar social connectivity, the work was, in the end, much too dull.

Now I've rejoined a cadre of workers that are mostly unlike me, less educated in the book sense, less pretentious probably (!)--more like the plumbers union. Don't get me wrong...there is nothing wrong with plumbers...I love plumbers and they are vital. Just like the job I'll be doing, plumbing work is more essential in terms of performing a necessary maintenance duty such work has a wonderful symmetry to it: a beginning, middle and end. And like plumbers, I'll get paid better too, which was also an added incentive to return.

But the brotherhood and sisterhood of plumbers don't populate my social group. I have little to discuss with other plumbers other than the work at hand. Tried though I have, I will never be an intrinsic part of their confederacy, never will I be 'brethren'. There's no sense of natural belonging like I felt with the "non-plumbers".

And that is a fact of life that I've chosen to live with until I can figure out how to change it. The work is cool but after only three days on the job, I sure am lonely.

Dang that's funny isn't? But it does explain why I bopped between these two careers so many times (temperament vs. talent?).

I know I need to start connecting authentically with my co-workers asap. I may not ever find myself at the same gathering with them outside of work, but I must, must feel like I'm connected to them in some way. It's really the only way I can finally settle down and work the rest of my time here.

It's a question of time

2009-05-03T05:36:00.000-07:00

I wish I were prolific or at least consistently disciplined. I've got all these pseudonyms I can use if I need to shield how productive I am...if I needed to protect the world from my great work. But that's not the case. Actually, my creative output is rather puny, stolen away from days where I'm at work and don't feel guilty about "not spending time together".

It's a funny thing that has developed now that we are on different tracks. My love for her hasn't slacked but my time with her has. And since the new job, my time with myself has too. So there are fewer occasions for me to spend in quality activity with both of us.

When the weekends come, she's had sufficient time with herself, sufficient time to be productive or creative if she chooses, sufficient time to slack off and read a novel or be artistic or undirected.

But not so for me, myself and I: the kind of work I like to get into...reading online or writing, or setting up websites or working through big projects in my office is done only in stolen moments after work in the four hours I have between leaving work for the day and my mandatory bedtime. Regrettably, these solitary pursuits get short shrift. Love that she is, she wants to be out in the world doing stuff with me (really I am so lucky), whilst all I can think about is my big stack of New York Times book reviews waiting for me in the corner.

It's worse now that I hate work --it is not aligned with what I want to do this lifetime other than building a financial nest egg. I have no curiosity about my job so undertaking it feels unrelenting. And when I'm free of it, selfishly the first thing I think about is running to my writing or reading. Immersing myself in a sequestered project. But when I return home she figuratively comes to stand by me and says with that delightful coltishness "What do you want to go do?"

Shamefacedly, I realize I hadn't even given that a thought...all I could entertain was my time by myself, the luxury of no outside obligation other than feeding the animals. But that's not reality. Couples that do best, do things together but the things we used to do...go to restaurants and go shopping, European travel and expensive daytrips (lifestyle sampling I used to call it) those things evaporated when she and the boom boom economy retired. Her current hobbies that we might do together (golf and gambling) are so far removed from anything that I'd consider fun that we're left adrift trying to figure out how to connect.

For a time I tried halfheartedly to figure out how to make my work my play...because then I'd satiate my obsessions...enough to let me feel fulfilled in that realm. Then I'd seek her joyously (and perhaps learn to love golf?) without the niggling feeling that I was leaving some master vocation undone.

But that hasn't panned out...the majority of my most tender dreams live in the territory of jobs that pay very poorly. That country is populated by men and women who have no intention of those pursuits being their sole economic support.

So off I go to a deadening job, begrudgingly lavishing my time and energy on dreck only to return home and deprive both the things I desperately love of attention. How pitifully hollow.

There must be a way to reconfigure the equation here (the new job possibilities in a radically different field on the horizon), to reshuffle the choices available for us all. Because none of us are happy.

Money

2009-04-12T05:36:00.002-07:00

Yesterday I took a class that I've been meaning to take for nearly 5 years. One of the topics of discussion was on controlling one's career. A young woman stated early in the day that by following the precepts laid out in this class, she was taking a step forward in her own self direction.

The teacher, an old hand, said "no matter what you do, it's a step toward self direction."

We all had to sit and think about that for a while.

And it's true. No matter what we do, we are creating a path, a way...even if our path is to stand still in one, blame place.

The class---more of a workshop really---was on learning how to be a freelancer; how to run your own business. It was for a particular type of business and the people in the class were all in this particular field where they made almost no money or OK money but with almost no raises---for decades. The field is populated with those who live in small cramped apartments or with room mates or with their parents. Or with husbands who support them. Few have employer paid benefits and there is no talk of pensions or retirement.

I was one of the very, very few who had a conventional job that gave me a modicum of security. High irony was when the instructor said..."you've planned well. You have set yourself up in a very enviable position for this field because you can slowly start building your freelance side. And when you do retire early, your initial freelancing won't feel so desperate since you'll have some income and essential benefits at your back."

Hah! How "lucky" I've been. How well I've planned. Funny. It was all out of fear of being a bag lady. Surprising that my fellow students did not demonstrate this same fear...they willingly flung themselves toward poverty for love, not money. For the integrity of choosing and following a path that had meaning to them.

And here I have been feeling like I've wasted my life when in fact I have been choosing and following a path based on my essential principles...the essential principle of not being an abject pauper or depending on my own wits to find the next gig, forever.

I had a revelation similar to this last week when in conversation with a colleague at work. I was recounting a quarterly meeting I attended during my very brief tenure in the private sector. The meeting was held in rather large and well-appointed auditorium, catered by an exclusive local restaurant. And there was an open wine bar.

To begin the meeting, a huge JumboTron screen descended from the ceiling. A video began, showing Steve Balmour, now head of Microsoft, standing at a podium in yet another auditorium. He was smiling and screaming, pumping his hands in the air to the rhythm of his bellowing.

"Make money, make money", he roared.

The crowd in my auditorium rose to their feet, as the real Steve Balmour walked out onto the stage, joining his image in the rallying cry.

"Make money," people shouted around me, emboldened by the wine bar, no doubt. "Make money". Many punched the air as Steve did.

Peer pressure forced me to stand up but I could not join the chorus. I was horrified and knew I had to leave both the auditorium and the field. This was a long time ago...during the tech boom-boom years and ever since I've secretly felt ashamed that I was not quite up to the challenge of being one with the crowd.

"It sounds awful", said my colleague, himself a serial bureaucrat. "...a bit like an assembly of capitalistic automatons!"

It was at this point in retelling the story that I realized why I was a civil servant.

For over a decade I've hated myself for not following my dreams; for not living up to my potential; for not following what I thought were important life principles.

How silly I've been.

I have followed my dreams (albeit unconscious ones). I have explored quite thoroughly vast swaths of my potentials even in my-dry-as-toast but noble field. And in following my career path I have cleaved rather closely to my principles...the principle of security and the fairly creaky notion of public service.

But people do change...they evolve. And I am aware now that my dream for freedom is trumping the old dream of security. Maybe it's that I've explored all the potentials I care to in public service or perhaps I'm simply searching for a different way of approaching it. I just know it's time to start preparing for a change.

What an interesting weekend it's been so far.

Just say no to yuppie angst!

2009-04-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

This last week I've been filling in for my boss. No I'm not a glutton for punishment nor am I a suck up. I did it because I wanted to see if I could do it.

I've known for a while that I haven't actively pursued promotion even though others have clearly thought me ready for it. I've hesitated because I've seen so many people regret the decision.

Promotion caused a huge spike in their stress level.
It caused them to be different outside of work.
It made them hate their jobs a lot more than when they were mere worker bees.
It forced them to care about stuff (boss stuff, subject matter stuff) that they would have preferred not to waste their time with.

Based merely on this brief list, I figured promotion was a non-starter for me.

But I had to be sure.

So I did it for 4 days, clearly not enough time for a representative survey...but enough...enough for me to know that it would siphon the life right out of me. So instead, I'm going to try to train myself in a related discipline and figure out how to do some freelancing on the side. That way, perhaps I can make a little more money without bringing more yuppie angst into to it...

I lived four lives...

2009-03-19T08:54:00.001-07:00

Well, that last post wasn't very spiritual (or unique...I think almost every woman on the planet has mother issues!) but perhaps it was cathartic. And I'm only airing my issues here because they've been an obstacle to my getting to where I want to be.

In that way, that last post was successful because it helped me understand how my writing actually serves many masters:

One master is my therapist oversoul who wants to help me out by listening and occasionally critiquing my world view. This master is often frustrated by my lack of insight.
Another master is surreptitiously entrepreneurial. She wants me to make money off of my writing and doesn't care too much for the soul searching, unless it improves my ability to sell something. Of course, she vehemently denies that money is the end game because she considers it too crass. That lack of self-esteem is a problem.
Yet another ruler is my pragmatic side. It's the aspect of my personality that says just continue to produce and practice, keep writing, learn how to be a better craftsperson, organizer, and communicator. She's the taskmaster.
The final boss is my creative self...who simply derives a great amount of pleasure from the process of writing, from the work of imagining to the act of committing thoughts to a page or screen. This master is typically the one that encourages me to write but gets short shrift when I shift into another mode.

With all these conflicting messages and roles rolling around in my brain, I find it very easy to get sidetracked and discouraged. But perhaps now that I'm aware of these very diverse personalities, I'll be able to proceed with less confusion...at least that's the operating principle I'm going to try to work with!

Mine, mine, mine

2009-03-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

There is a habit that my mother got into whenever we had the infrequent phone call.
“Well," she said, "you could always put this in your book!”

“This” refers to some incident she was recounting about a student she worked with or a relative that she’d recently visited back east. Or it was in reference to an experience she had at the store when inserting herself into the life of a stranger or engaging with a previously seldom referenced neighbor.

No matter what it was, I was uniformly uninterested in her well-meaning suggestions, her insistent desire to insert herself into my “writing process”.

A natural promoter she’d say, “You should get together with this person. They are fascinating. Can I introduce you when you fly in next Tuesday? You could write about them.” Of course the answer would be an unambiguous no.

“I don’t understand how a person who wants to be a writer can be so uninterested in people,” she’d say with obvious frustration. “How can you write fiction if you’re not interested in meeting people? I’m feeding you these wonderful stories…how can you not want to use this material?”

How indeed? But I wasn’t interested in the people my mother wanted me to be interested in. I didn’t want to talk to her myriad of diverting friends and acquaintances. And I had no desire to be displayed to her friends as “my daughter the writer” and then later pimped out to profile her pals as characters in an anecdotal narrative, a benefit as it were to her associates for being her confederate.

Out of frustration, one day I finally said, “Mom, I’m not a fiction writer”.
“You aren’t?”
“No. I don't write stories”.
“Then what kind of writer are you?”
I struggled to come up with something.
“I’m a technical writer. I like writing help texts, manuals...and maybe and reviews and publicity”

“Oh…well sorry all this time I thought you wrote fiction.”

The next time we spoke she said. “I have a wonderful project for you. I’m trying to put together a cotillion for girls of color, a societal coming out party for them and I want you to do the PR. Won’t that be a wonderful opportunity for you? Plus we’ll get to work together!”

“No Mom. That's not what I want to write about.” I had no intention of publicizing an event that taught little girls how to dress up and be pretty prizes for boys. I think she must have had temporary amnesia about my 14-year marriage to a woman.

“Well, then what DO you want to write about?” Apparently if she couldn’t see it, couldn’t sing my praises about it to others, and couldn’t get it for free, then my writing seemed more fiction than reality.

---

Later, she privately wondered to my sister if I were passionate about anything.

Well, I am. But these conversations got me thinking about my writing and why I so loathed her trying to put a name to it.

My writing has always been an escape, a very personal shelter that I rarely let others into. It is unequivocally, in all it’s flawed execution and stilted phrasing, in it’s inexact and imprecise use of language, in it’s self-referential and dubious thematic structure (almost done here) in it's damaged, broken and warped way, MY misshapen offspring. And I don’t want to share my ugly baby with my mother right now, no matter how desperately she wants me to share it with her.

It’s one of the chief reasons I blog anonymously. I then get to devote a small portion of my universe to exploring me without the confines, obligations or designs of anyone (read especially my mother).

If this makes me a hateful child, so be it. But this is a singular act of defiance for a daughter who was the good girl for most of her formative years.

A return to letter writing...I hope

2009-03-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

I hate being on the phone. In the age of digital mobile technology, it’s awkward. It’s hard to hear the other person and often stymieing in terms of useful discourse. I like to think about what I’m trying to say before I say it and being on the phone short circuits that process. It also has the regrettable consequence of violating my privacy. Anyone within earshot gets to hear what I’d usually prefer to keep to myself.

That’s why when email and then the rise in texting emerged I was thrilled. The emphasis is in trying to communicate ideas and concepts via words not little, pre-rehearsed sound bites. Plus I’m way too distracted by life to actually spend time in a one-on-one conversation by happenstance. If I want to communicate with someone face to face (or receiver to receiver) then I like to plan it, not get stuck in it by default when I’m in the middle of taking a shower, cleaning out my office or enjoying Battlestar Galactica. I consider timing…my timing… to be primary to me, not the province of the person calling me.

This week I’m taking this asynchronous communication model even farther. I actually took pen to paper and wrote a letter. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday and it clearly wasn’t a holiday. I just felt that the distance engendered by a letter slowed down the whole discourse game. That distance gave me some room to breathe. Allowed for some time between the call and response.

I appreciate that psychic space afforded by written dispatches. As a fairly defended person it allows me to discuss things more thoughtfully rather than being placed on the spot (and I say this despite the recent spate of Twitter bashing. Actually I love the economy of language that Twitter imposes. Such constraints are not always a bad thing.). As a life-long introvert, writing gives me the ability to consider and then address a more comprehensive platform of my ideas, examining them for flaws, and misrepresentations. Even as we dive headlong into the twilight of books, newspapers, letters and the like, I still believe there is a place (as was found for radio) for the old tools of connection, if only as a tool to narrow down the clamor of our many trains of thought.

I hope today’s letter will be my first of many.

Novel thoughts

2009-02-27T16:53:00.000-08:00

I started to think about my mother after finishing the book “ The Time Traveler’s Wife”. In it, there were two templates of mothers (other than the maternal episodes experienced by the eponymous main character of the novel.). Both were very artistically gifted: the former, an opera singer was exuberant, generous and tragically short-lived. The latter, a secretive but virtuoso poet was the wife of an indulgent businessman. Petulantly mercurial, I think she reminded me distantly of my mother.

The take home point from that train of thought is that my mother’s story doesn’t start with my own story. It stretches far before and beyond my own. As I daily forgive her for our baggage (you know the imagined or real transgressions that mothers and daughters have between them, not the least of which are expectations), I have to remember that she is her own person first, and (no matter what she tells me) my mother second.

My newest economic reality

2009-02-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

How does one reconcile the keenly honed inquisitional instinct with the sour stench of the recession/depression? There have been many articles of late detailing the slaking of the consumerist habit…and perhaps that is the case with the unfortunate masses who have completely lost their jobs. Graciously, I haven’t lost my job and I still want stuff, with a passion.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve lost an enormous amount of buying power…my salary as been cut, my pension system is in peril and the value of my home has been slashed by half. But, as I mentioned in a previous post, I still want a new computer. I still want to learn how to use new, expensive software. I still lust after Paul Green loafers and I still don’t want to buy the cheap olive oil (gourmet extra virgin olive oil only thank you).

Yes, I have cut back on some things…going out to eat almost every night being the principle sacrificial lamb. The cable bill has been restructured and downsized, my clothes shopping has been greatly curtailed and my Amazon addiction has been curbed considerably. I’ve stopped taking expensive classes and going out to movies. I get by on cheaper wine, eschewing expensive jaunts to the wine country; I actually steer clear of most travel beyond that necessary to connect with family. My paid off cars, both of which are older will not be replaced with new versions but will last as long as I can make them continue to run. I’ve stopped thinking about moving up and out of my very affordable but transitional neighborhood to more affluent digs. I’ve also set aside my desire for upgraded furniture and various and sundry optional decorations from the likes of Pottery Barn and Z Gallery.

But I’m still purchasing many things I really want. Books (albeit second hand) and personal services (a house cleaner and a gardener) still populate my debit column. I’ve also upgraded my phone to a blackberry this year. And my home office, which has been a shambles since I first moved to this house over a decade ago will get a frugal but stylish makeover so that I can create an additional revenue stream in form follows functional fashion.

It’s a case of wanting what you have. Of having what you want, just not all at the same time or in the case of moving, sometimes never. I’m working through this new economic reality by simply making some things mutually exclusive, cherry picking and choosing which things will make me still feel like I have some economic choices and which things now deserve the moniker “superfluous”.

The pessimist in me wonders how far I can make this ride last.

Trying to find my Angle of Repose

2009-02-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

Just read the latest Outpost from the NY Times on the slighting of writer Wallace Stegner.

I was struck by the comments. Each of the short passages were written in lucid, clear-tempered prose. These folks were all well read enough to know of Stegner and his competitors and literate enough to voice their own fully functional treaties on his lack of recognition.

There is no writer alive or dead to whom I can mount such an impassioned, learned defense, even if I wanted to.

I’ve got some work to do.

Future Twin

2009-02-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

So as a woman of a certain age, I’ve started gaining some weight. It’s in that pattern that all the female mags describe…a couple pounds here, a pound or three there. And now, I’m at least 40 lbs over what I should be…maybe more.

No surprise, the weight gain impacts my wardrobe, putting some of my cutest outfits right out of reach. I’ve been tempted to go on a shopping spree but you know…the economy and my pocketbook are pretty battered right now.

As a result, I’ve whittled down my food intake and consciously made better food choices. I stopped having dessert. I’m trying to eat more salads and vegetables. And I’ve stopped getting a chocolate croissant in the morning.

This latest sacrifice has been the hardest to sustain. In fact this morning my resolve failed and I fully intended to buy a sweet treat of some kind, because my work load had been so enormous this week and I’d actually made it to my desk on time. Right before I planned to zip down to the cafeteria, I clicked on a link to read a bio on a writer who sounded a bit like me: zany, a book lover and an aficionado of fantasy and supernatural genres and a Latina. When the web page came up, her picture stopped me dead in my tracks. Not only did she look like me complete with glasses, short hair and a big toothy grin…she looked like me with an additional 40 lbs hoisted onto my extra 40. She was talented, working in a field I wished I were in, a published author and she was my future fat self.

I ran downstairs and bought an apple.

Wish

2009-02-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

It’s getting harder to hide my antipathy for this place. This morning someone said...”You know you should promote or go for this or that temporary management position” and I answered I didn't think I would. Then they asked me why since I seemed very capable. I impatiently replied...”because it's so incredibly boring”.

Perhaps I should not have been so candid because they were rather surprised. Then this someone tried to helpfully suggest that I might find another related agency or department more interesting (gag).

“No”, I said. “I think I'm just ready to do something else.”

And I am. And so mote it be...this is my statement to the universe.

Welcome Back to Me

2009-02-18T08:23:00.001-08:00

I haven’t placed a thought here in a while mostly because they were too raw and overwhelming. Now that the holidays (and I include Valentine’s Day in the holidays) are finally over, there are considerably fewer emotional landmines ahead masquerading as days for celebration. Here’s to a calmer progression into spring.

Into the flow...

2009-01-18T20:23:00.000-08:00

I spent the morning pouring over the electronic pages of apartment therapy, domino and Ikea, looking and searching. I’ve got this idea…that if I can make over my office then I can figure out how to make a home business work. It’s as if looking into the rooms of others, I can divine my own path. I know this sounds silly and incredibly consumerist in this dismal economy…but during this astrological Mercury Retrograde I am reviewing and sifting through what is important and what is not (yes, I follow astrology too, especially when it comes to world events. Here’s how I use it…numerology for focus on the warp and weave of a person's life, astrology for the overall backdrop of universal events). And besides, I’m a visual as well as a literal person. Having a concrete picture of what I’m trying to accomplish focuses my energy.

Due to a pending refinance we have decided we’re going to stay in our beautiful little urban mid-century (our new mortgage will fall well below $400 dollars a month.). It’s a bittersweet decision since I don’t live in a perfect city and discussions over the civic problems that we’re currently plagued with can work me into a dither. However, I’m trying to bloom where I’m planted as is part and parcel of my personal year energy (3 – joy of living). Yesterday I made a step forward, gratefully giving away those pieces of furniture that others dearly need (a desk that is pretty but too small for my business needs and an extra bed) and actively making a plan to release to the universe some of my library.

What I’m trying to practice here is giving back. Outflow is as important as inflow as we’ve all discovered in this shrinking economy. And if I want things good things to cascade toward me, then I need to do my part in providing others with the same. This is by no means easy but if we all hold too tightly to what we have, then everything becomes calcified and stagnant…and no one profits from that. Plus, in January, it’s very, very important that I build a strong foundation…one that will steady me in the heady weeks and months to come.

A lapse and what it means

2009-01-16T12:19:00.000-08:00

So I was working yesterday when a co-worker brought to my attention a lapse in consciousness when preparing some paperwork...and not just a little lapse, a big one. It was clear that I was communicating on a different frequency from everyone else. At first I was embarrassed...it was such an obvious gaffe but then I had to look closer...what did it mean?

I've been contemplating a job change for a while now...but in my previous year, it was better to stay rooted and bide my time. But now...I'm fully in my three year, an expansive cycle in which I'm having trouble making the old tried and true ways continue to work. The error I'd made...it was clearly due to my leaping forward mentally while still rooted in my old environment. That's how life often is...we don't even know we're playing catch up with our lives until the signs start showing in uneven, and in my case, humiliating ways.

Wanting a new job when many are getting laid off completely, that seems rather counter intuitive. But, I can't deny it...I really don't want to work here any longer...but that doesn't mean I don't want to work.

Right work/livelihood are terms often bandied about in times flush with prosperity...not in economies that are devolving. But we are called to make the best use of our energies in whatever time we find ourselves in and truthfully, I think I'd serve better as a writer, editor, and document specialist than as a full time low-level bureaucrat. Squaring that with the ability to make enough money to pay my bills...that's the rub...but it's not an impossibility...just a very large improbability with my current mind set. So...my first active acknowledgment of my three year (in numerology it is synonymous with the joy of living) would be to *change* *my* *mind*.

I oughta be in pictures

2009-01-04T19:06:00.000-08:00

It's not everyday that a gal gets her face painted. I just commissioned a portrait from Christine Courington and I'm truly pleased with the results. I know that photographs with the obligatory Photoshopping are all the rage on the web...but I'm completely enamored with portraiture, mostly because the painter can often place emphasis on the quirkier aspects of personality.

Painting certainly can subtract things but it can also add and enhance things that air brushing can't. And thank god for that.

Blogger vs. Typepad vs. Wordpress

2009-01-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

So...we're almost done with the holidays...good. The expectations (and disappointments) of this season were rather overwhelming. Apart from the days off from work, I'll be happy to get back to a time where the obligations and responsibilities of family are lessened somewhat.

And refocusing, I've just done my third redesign on my business blog as I'm just not happy with what I'm getting from Typepad. I wish I were since I've been there so long...but...I'm seriously considering a move to Wordpress. I particularly am intrigued by the function where one can set up lots of pages...and have the blog be an adjunct aspect. It's what I've wanted all along but was too lazy to build myself.

As for blogger, nothing beats the ease of personal blogging with blogger. I'm here for the duration!

the problem with holidays...

2008-12-29T05:50:00.000-08:00

I thought we were on good terms, at least good enough to visit with the grandkids.

One call on Saturday, uninviting us all from a new year's trip derailed the whole thing.

Without a doubt, the call with a voice ragged with anger was made in the heat of an argument...and I was caught in the wake. Still. How could I in good conscience decide to bring kids into that atmosphere? Why would I want to rain some of the patterns of my Christmas past down on them?

As I've said before, we all have our sack of rocks. Some days the bag becomes too heavy to hold and we feel like flinging the contents around...

4 day work weeks a reality...be careful of what you wish for

2008-12-19T18:40:00.000-08:00

So...I just found out that a former action hero has put all civil service workers in my state on a 2 day a month furlough. Even though I said that I wanted a 4 day work week, I wanted it to be at my own choosing. But the universe choses to listen to things at the strangest junctures.

So now...I want to make the best of it. Starting my company holds the highest priority right now.

fictitious business name to-be-filed
newspaper circulation to-be-filed
bank account set up
paypal account set up
bed out of office - it has to go.
basic editorial schedule to-be-developed.
figure out how to combine existing twitter & blogs
New Year's postcard mailer - (email/ hard copy) sent out announcing the business.

I love 4 day work weeks...

2008-12-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

Coming off a 4 day mini-holiday. Got sick, got better, got a lot of stuff done. I know there's a recession/depression but dang...I love only working 3 days a week. OK so it's not feasible for me to do that right now unless I worked 10 hour days. My sup is never going to go for that.

But, I can work it so that maybe I have only a 4 day work week. That I can afford and I think for my sanity, I'm going for it. My industriousness at home goes way up...so does my creativity. Maybe that'll make me want to spend less money. I've seen it documented that being a wage slave truly does increase one's need to spend in direct correlation with dispair.

Willing to give it a go.

I'm hungry

2008-12-02T05:28:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie as right about now I should be getting ready for the boring income producing marathon (a.k.a. work). Yesterday I went to another town to pick up something that I'd ordered and I fell in love. Not with a person but with the town.

Living where I live, in a highly urban enclave where the central operating principle is more commonly the response to crime rather than quality of life, it was so refreshing, so mouthwatering even (think about the difference between a nice juicy 1 pound cheeseburger on a white bread bun from your local burger shack and say a dinner at a 4 star restaurant that consisted of a perfect truffle-infused sliver of salmon with a clutch of baby heirloom carrots and zucchini on a buttery pool of polenta). Both meals one would look forward to but the latter is smaller, more exquisite and more expensive. One might be hungry after the latter unless one adjusted one's expectations; poorer too.

So back to my beloved town. It shares all of those qualities of the salmon meal, in that it is transcendent and beautifully sublime and will require sacrifice. But I think to aspire to live there is like waiting for a perfect meal rather than settling for a merely hearty one.

I cannot afford to shift to eating heavenly fish right now (my appetites are too voracious) but indeed I have something to aspire to.

The Pull of Mumbai

2008-11-30T17:43:00.000-08:00

I read this rousing entry about Mumbai from Friday's NY Times...and I couldn't agree more. Mumbai or Bombay as I remember it from my youth, was for all it's problems an enchanted city for me. There was an undercurrent of the mystical and magical. It was a place of riotous life and death, a place where everything seemed suffused with meaning...this despite the crushing poverty we experienced leaving the airport and driving through the narrow streets at night lined with people sleeping near the curb, the flooding in the streets during monsoons and the choking stench of humanity during the dry months.

It seemed to me each person I met, whether well-to-do or destitute contained this concentrated kernel of desperate beauty, of ambition, of raw possibility. I've had a white hot streak in me to make a pilgrimage there for years...and if I had the wherewithall (which I unfortunately don't), I think I would travel there in the same way I ached to return to New York (my birthplace) after 9/11 or longed to return to the roost in San Francisco (my adopted home) after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Note to self: maybe I should start listening to these urges.

Maturity--for a time

2008-11-30T16:26:00.000-08:00

I don't know if it was the 10 day break from my job or me finding my own rhythm but this Thanksgiving was more satisfying than many in memory. We did a lot of cooking...quality cooking without making huge quantities of food. It was nice to know I was working hard to make a really delicious meal...working hard for something I WANT is always a wonderful revelation.

And I coasted on that high the entire extended vacation and it had a palatable effect. Things that typically would have vexed me, didn't seem as difficult or as impactful. In fact it was only today that I found myself returning to my old pinched self, well aware that my rat-race begins again tomorrow. Once again I try to imagine myself doing something as remunerative but considerably more enriching....

Living, Making it.

2008-11-16T20:39:00.001-08:00

I walked down the stairs, mentally restacking the pantry before our company arrived when my wife called out to me, “I want you to stay home with me”.

“What?,” I said? We’d had this discussion before.

“I want you to quit your job…you don’t like it and it makes you cranky every day. I mean we can live on my retirement. I can put you on my health insurance. It’d be tight but we can do it. I want you home with me and I know you’d rather be home.”

Of course she was right. I didn’t like my job and I would be happier at home. But we’d be a hell of a lot poorer. And who QUITS a job when the unemployment rate is soaring? I was not a “professional” (doctor, lawyer, programmer, etc.) who could work from home. I was an administrator. Bored, overworked and 9 years away from hitting the perfect age for my pension plan. And administrators don’t work from home. Administrators work at the jobsite so the other classifications (the well paid professionals) can work from home.

Still I miss her since she’s retired. We lead very separate lives now. But I can’t depend on her financially, that’s not right and I haven’t the foggiest idea how to support myself to the tune of my currently feeble salary by freelancing.

So this is what 46 is about. 46 is like 26 is like 36 except there are fewer choices and less time to save for retirement. If your risks didn’t pan out in the previous 2 decades, there’s even less of a chance of it working now unless you are independently wealthy which I’m not or really determined. Which I haven't been but I'm shooting for.

Of course from the standpoint of numerology, I’m ripe for jumping off the rat-race train. I’m a wisker’s length from leaping headlong into a questionable writing or life coaching or something that brings the things I love to the forefront. But there’s a price to be paid for such freedom and I’m mindful of paying the bill.

I miss my bff's

2008-11-12T05:48:00.001-08:00

You know what’s hard? When your bff’s start drifting away. I used to have what I considered two very, very close friends…people that I felt a kinship with, people that made me laugh and who I’d let see me cry.

They weren’t my friends originally—they were my partner’s. But I basked in the glow of their companionship and then we became close in our own right; they became like extended family.

Once my partner retired, her attitudes toward these friends changed somewhat. She felt less beholden to them, had less of a desire to caretake the friendships. And I didn’t pick up the slack. Cracks began to show as we took them for granted, canceled dates to go do other things, or declined invitations just to stay at home.

The result now is both friends have moved themselves over to other friendships, making those other friendships primary, subtly counting on others to be their support and family. And where does that leave us? Without the family that we choose.

I don’t blame my partner. She was doing what felt right for her, protecting her beleaguered spirit. Many people come to depend on, then lean on, then deplete her strong soul. Between those demands and work that she hated, she was just exhausted. With retirement her priorities shifted and she wanted to breathe a little...to take a well earned vacation from emotional obligations.

I do blame myself though. If the quality of of their company were that important to me, I should have made more of an effort with these individuals. I should have picked up the banner or the phone and called them, had them over for dinner or met for a quick bite even when it wasn’t in my comfort zone…because now, all I feel is sad…it’s so hard for me to make friends and as I look around my life, the opportunities to make new ones is exceedingly small.

So, now I need to do the work of “friend curation”. I just hope it isn’t too late.

A couple mornings after

2008-11-07T06:42:00.001-08:00

Mulling over the events of the week.

The election of Obama, which despite all my misgivings about him, is essential to our nation's future. But it is also wrought with anxiety. Our country has slid into a state so far from grace the necessity of prioritizing the most troubling issues will feel more like failure than intelligent governance.

I have no idea if he can pull off.

Get off the bus

2008-11-02T08:53:00.000-08:00

So I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik… a man whose writing I find so intoxicating, it goes beyond reverence. Sometimes I feel lucky that I am not a god because in the personage of that god, I’d have wanted to steal Gopnik’s talent, his inquisitive, incisive but ironically worshipful/devoted view of the world around him. He is riotously self-referential and tangential in ways that so mimick my mind my best days, that I feel like he is channeling me…he is like my better half--- independent of my body, up, walking around eating a bagel, free of the flotsam that bedevils my everyday voice.

To wit…he’s a lover of those twin cultural icons, Paris and New York. I am a native if exiled New Yorker and a Francophile to the bone. These have been his principal subjects, though shot through with the gestalt of parenthood. That latter plain is one I can’t claim as my native land but I did a good 12-15 months abroad there my senior year, so I have a good working knowledge of the material.

I contrast Gopnik’s take on the world…arguably a world that has no concrete place in my life with the worlds populated with so-called California writers like Richard Rodriguez or in decades previous Joan Didion. I appreciate the nuances of both their writings, on how they find the nerve of a colonized place. I value the criss-cross, multi-hued points of view they present in their work…but there are points of separation. Rodriguez because he writes academically and knowingly with a cultural virtuosity that is very distinct and divergent from my own; while with Didion disconnection occurs largely due to the expanse of time. (Paradoxically, this ‘teseract’ of time is bridged for me by her amazingly textured latter-day descriptions of life observed by a transplanted Californian woman surviving the death of her family in Manhattan. I unfortunately could relate to the numbing sting of that loss).

But to return to Gopnik, for some reason I feel he is key to my own higher abilities, not because he is a god (well really, we all might be in our particular, highest achieving universes), but because he functions as more of a sentient trigger, a personal talisman that points the way to my honeypot of genius. That I am enamored of his talent is rather pedestrian...if I allowed my celebration of his skill to run amok, unexamined and delirious, I have a fear of it devolving dangerously close to the path of the sycophant a la Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. We become transcendent by association, not by achievement.

That I should use it to bootstrap my own gifts is perhaps the more difficult and companionable ambition, which is why I write this entry now. Accessing our greatness (as opposed to our idiosyncrasies, foibles, neurosis, and assorted low-hanging damaged bits) is not for the faint of heart. It invites doubt, scorn, and a bit of self-torture. It cleaves close to vanity, in the territory of pride, nestled snuggly in the county seat of narcissism. I don’t want to go there simply because I’ve made the trip before and not had much fun…neither did my traveling companions.

So to date, my answer to this call to evolve has simply been not to get on the bus. I intuit my capacity to err and then merely sit on my hands. Once again, I hope this time, I’m woman enough to risk more.

Personal is the political

2008-10-23T08:06:00.000-07:00

Riveting television on the Public Television Channel early this morning. British documentary on the Chicago 7. What impacted me the most was the discussion by the defendants regarding how what they were doing would bring about change and an increase in activism in successive generations. Um, that’d have been my generation. What have I done to promote freedom and civil rights? In my mind precious little except vote in almost every election I’ve been eligible to vote in (I think I’ve missed one in the last 14 years). I’ve also exercised my right to marry my longtime sweetheart each time it’s been available (2003, invalidated. And now 2008).

Other than that? I go to work every day. I pay my taxes. I show up. I try to learn every day (doesn’t always work but it’s wonderful when it does.)

There are more things I can do like quit being a PUMA and start stumping for Obama. It’s time, it’s time.

Here's the thing...

2008-10-05T08:14:00.000-07:00

Here’s the thing. Writers, authors, those who write fiction, there are many, hundreds, no hundreds of thousands that are good…very good. In my youth and young adulthood I was a compulsive reader…a regular at bookstores and libraries. I was the kind of kid that read under the covers, read at the breakfast table before school, in the bathroom, in the car. Who dreamt about becoming a writer, the sop who looked up words she didn’t know and had just one item on her birthday and Christmas lists (“Just BOOKS, please”).

I inhaled books, devoured them whole in marathon sittings. The silly bespectacled type who literally fell in love with the characters I read about…so much so that I was almost driven to steal one book (a Doctor Seuss book about a creature named Bartholomew) in 2nd grade because I didn’t want to stop my chaste unrequited tryst with the title character. In my teens and the threshold of my twenties, I dedicated myself to the spectacular heights of science fiction, consuming page after page of text on monsters real and imagined, soaring in speculative worlds, my mind and soul leaping from the heights of the fanciful alternate realities.

But not long after that, the life long love affair turned sour. I stopped reading fiction. I turned to magazines with their glossy therapeutic promise of retail therapy and newspaper stories, with a more controlled emotional core. I spent years getting no closer to fiction than the occasional feature-length piece, read on a plane or at a coffee house. I became a dedicated disciple of non-fiction if I read at all and turned to radio and it’s evil stepsister, television. I had to stop because the fictive slipstream had become the single note story of pathos. The negative narrative of most fiction I laid my hands was completely dispiriting.

But last night, two decades later, stuck for years in a job that had it’s own special brand of negative narrative, I tried to stoke that fire again. I went to the store determined to spend all my book card money and bought a couple of cheap, hard cover anthologies, “contemporary short stores of the late 20th century” or some such. I decided to start slowly and limited my reading to author’s whose names I recognized, of which there were quite a few. The pieces in both volumes were from writers born in the 40’s and 50’s mainly but there were a smattering born in the 60’s too.

You could tell which writer hailed from which decade by the way each story was assembled. The former were more conventionally constructed, careful, contained, polished to gleaming gloominess while the latter more stream of consciousness, with multiple sentence fragments and angst-ridden tangential passages tossed about.

None were without virtuosity, a striking brilliance that one just doesn’t get watching television. The expert technique to a person, male, female, older and younger, was intoxicating….I mean they were all very, very good. Inventive, descriptive, transcendent in their use of craft and structure. But they all shared that same fatal trait I’d tracked in my younger years… the stories to a greater or lesser extent were all depressing. One after the other, I flipped through very personally excruciating accounts of dead or dying loved ones, difficult marriages, abominable childhoods and crushing jobs. The terribly private news of mental depressives tumbled from the pages in beautiful, ripped language.

And then I remembered completely why I’d stopped writing in the first place and why I’d subsequently decided (how did I forget???) that writing wasn’t an appropriate career choice for me…because I was just as depressive as the folks who drove me to sneak not just one but two pieces of chocolate cake after I’d come off a reading bender. And I didn’t want to write or read that. I didn’t want to be talented kill-joy (Yes, in my heart, I know I have the potential to become a world-class fun-sucker).

I agree, stories must contain conflict but this was “discordapallooza”, this was mega-strife, a fracas in every paragraph, toxic anti-nourishment. Instantly I recalled one very bad year in my life when I knew in no uncertain terms that if I kept consuming this very cunningly crafted bile, there would no longer be a me. So cold turkey, I stopped. Amazing what we can forget.

But while the memory of why I left off being a reader and subsequently swore off writing was undergrounded, the urge to read and write--so primal-- never went away. It was never replaced by anything else though, so in my current career I am a nothing.

And now belatedly, I know rationally that fiction is not limited to the tragic and that one can start over at any age…although I pragmatically understand that only former doctors and lawyers, trust-fund babies and stay at home wives can painlessly realize this affirmation.

And now that I know…what do I do with this information?

What indeed? But it is a wonderful realization worthy of a Sacred Life Sunday. And no I don't have a picture yet that describes what I'm feeling but if i do find one I'll post it here.

2008-09-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt I am thankful for my Sunday's of late...because my step-family--once so very difficult to handle--- comes to visit. A six year old, a thirteen year old and a thirty-four year old, all girls, all different but all vital to my happiness visit to do laundry, eat lunch and socialize at the end of each week.

None of us is church going but this ritual does feel like good spiritual food. This coming together makes us all better, even if we don't completely understand how it works right now.

2008-09-26T13:51:00.000-07:00

Graciously I'm off today...and have been lazing around for most of it. At first I was mad at myself but then I thought...hey...what's wrong with down time? I worked exceedingly hard this week. So...leisure accepted! Now, though, I want to follow through and figure out how to do yearly progressions...I have a feeling this will be the key.

In any new age counseling that I've done, I've found that the progressions...the descriptions of what an individual is going through in their current age cohort is the most compelling portion of the reading. Yes, clients are fascinated by personality descriptions and insight into their hopes and dreams. But what any such reading really comes down to is "what happens next?" Heck that's the very reason I learned to do numerology in the first place; I wanted to find meaning in my otherwise very conventional life.

And it has helped...I do feel less adrift. But, with time I've learned that real "meaning" is different for each person. And sometimes we forget how to think or rather we forget how we think because we're too bombarded by life.

This afternoon is about going to A source and reconciling it with MY source.

Sacred Life Sunday

2008-09-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

As a way to try to deepen my commitment to writing here, I'm going to try at least for this next Sunday, being part of Sacred Life Sunday. The purpose is to center one's attention on what we love, what we are grateful for, to concentrate on what connects us with our center. Here's to finding that center, every week.

In memorium

2008-09-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

"...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master."

-Excerpted from 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 by David Foster Wallace

What an amazing bit of insight from a tortured writer. DFW committed suicide earlier this month. But the fact that he did so doesn't debunk the importance of this in the passage. In life, in our spiritual practice, in everything we strive for, if we don't approach things with the proper mindset, we may find ourselves at a dangerous cross roads.

Closer...

2008-09-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

C had a wonderful idea about starting to do workshops. It sparked something in me so I’m seriously thinking of following it forward. She suggested I do numerology seminars and it seemed a natural. Since reading a new book on “what I’d be good at when I grow up (ok when am I not reading about this???), I’ve determined that I enjoy teaching, instructing, giving people insight on how to do things. It makes me feel alive.

And perhaps I don't want to stop at a little old divination workshop...maybe I can teach other things? Time to dive into my past to see what topics might work.

In plain sight

2008-09-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

Why am I drawn to this picture of a tattooed woman holding a craft-embellished stuffed animal? Because part of me wants to be her, and could be her in another parallel universe. Because I love the aspect of camouflage in this picture. There she is, posing in a fully formed persona.

When one reads the article associated with this picture, the reader gets a clear idea of what's important to her, what drives her but; really, the interior life of this person is very well hidden. I love that feat. It's kind of why I wear funky glasses and why I sport my own very timid and low-key tattoo on my own wrist. (and why I daydream about having more tattoos and funkier clothes.) It's all part and parcel of the theatrical visual aspect one needs to construct to be a more public person.

People sport fictitious or fantastical public personas all the time (think Salvador Dali, the San Francisco Brown twins, Barak Obama, Dame Edna, Sarah Palin). These carefully established roles are worn like business clothes. It's a uniform and these forms follow function.

For years my coping mechanism was to hide in plain sight, to try to be invisible. It worked rather successfully but I've grown tired of that old game and its expectations (i.e. - fawning sycophancy). It's time to try a new one.

Another visit from the oversoul...

2008-08-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

Hello my dear-
I know you feel passionate about this moment...about how it is stealing time away from you and in a way that is true because our imagination sometimes is as alive to us as "real" life but...in another way, and perhaps it is the better way of seeing it...in another way there is no stealing going on at all. There is just life for as long as it lasts, for as long as you are given it and what you do here, each day---this is your life. Of course, as humans we all want other things. We'd all prefer to let our inner puppy out to romp or sleep all day. And some get to do that. But some of us, people like you and me, we work for a living and for our retirement. We must plan and be diligent even as the dull thud of work against our soul threatens to render us somnambulant.

You must accept work for what it is...work. I'll say this again. You have to work. That's it. You must until you don't have to...and I'd say that was a good 7 to 10 years away. And let's be really clear...if you don't want your standard of living to be reduced too much, you have to work until at least 57. That's 11 (actually 10.78) years from now...so you must find a way to make that work. So start figuring out how you're going to do it.

One way is that you're not going to stay in this job the entire time. Start scoping out other jobs that aren't as demanding...make it work.
This is a race that's not even 3/4's over yet so YOU HAVE TO FIND YOUR SECOND WIND. And yes, you hate the fact that your work is so procedural...but you like it too. There is something in it that you can find to motivate you.

How can you find that wind? Strive to be timely. Work hard first and then play later. But do play. For example. Take all your breaks. Like now.

Chop my own wood and carry it too (it make sense when you read the end of the entry)

2008-08-20T04:39:00.000-07:00

I talked to Mom last night and as she suspected, she's losing sight again in one of her eyes. Although surgery is an option, it was very traumatic news and brought up lots of memories about Dad. I felt very bad for her and also extremely thankful that my sister has returned and is there to be with her.

What's ironic:

When we were growing up, my sister was the queen of caustic. I cannot begin to count how many times G made Mom cry, lashed out, sought out her weak spot for sport, etc. Now, when Mom bemoans all of the tribulations of the present time, my sister says, "But I'm your blessing!" And damned if it isn't true.
My mother had 32 years of indulgent living. 32 years where my Dad made life heaven on earth for her. He's been gone 3 years now and Mom as taken to saying "I'm just over all this stuff. I'm tired of living." To which I reply "If you were on a plane tomorrow and it was going down, would you want to live?" Of course the answer is a meek "yes". It's that she's exhausted from how unfun this life patch is. She's mentally and physically drained by the effort it takes to steer her own boat. Once, whilst I was in university and working 3 jobs, I tried to explain it to her but it didn't compute. She could not remember that the simple act of living on your own could wear you down 'til you are a mere ghostly impression of your former self. I can relate to what she's feeling now and put my own hard times in perspective. Adversity can make us more resilient (now just to remember that lesson myself).
I recently returned from a reluctant trip to the wilderness. Although I protested loudly that "I don't do domestic travel or nature", I went and spent a fair amount of time trying to understand why everyone else was enjoying being outdoors so much. Physical exercise and spending time in the woods or near the mountains has never been part of my family's dance card. We are an indoor people. But Thoreau and Jack La Lane were not wrong. The natural beauty of the earth and the virtues of physical activity cannot be disputed. And they are valuable tools to fight the pulverizing blows of depression and hard times. And here's the final irony: I was able to vividly communicate this to Mom, having just arrived at these new revelations myself.

becoming - part two

2008-07-31T07:25:00.000-07:00

Back on the twenty-first, I mentioned that I was going to change my name. Well, I did it! It's still scary and weird. Not everyone is happy about it and each time I do my signature, I still have to actually recite my surname to remember who I am now. But each time I do, it makes me smile!

Lots of paperwork still to go ...today I request new business cards and a new id badge...important pieces of the pie.

How it happens...

2008-07-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

Wonderful quote from the late Evelyn Keyes:

"To become a big movie star like Joan Crawford you need to wear blinders and pay single-minded attention to your career. Nobody paid attention to me, including me. I was the original Cinderella girl, looking for the happy ending in the fairy story. But my fantasy prince never came."

For me, the fantasy prince is satisfying life's work, which I think part of me thinks will just drop in my lap. News flash, it doesn't. Focus, focus, focus.

Things look better in the light of day

2008-07-13T11:31:00.000-07:00

Had a fantastic night of sleep last night (maybe because I turned the lights OUT?). Anyway, starting to feel less indigo, partly due to the proximity of her return, partly to the fact that next week is a short week and I start in earnest on my new database/web app project.

I have to admit, I adore parts of IT, the web development, the freedom to dream up and create new forms and formats, new structures that help people do what they want to do. I've missed that terribly since I left the IT department. But IT's entire mission was fixing hardware and I promised myself I would not be on my knees climbing under another desk EVER just to get access to the cool toys in my 'downtime'.

So I fell back into my old standby discipline (which surprisingly has become 'hip' & 'green') even though I am mostly bored silly by it's bureaucratic pall. If I am disciplined, I can make opportunities. Please Goddess let me make them.

I wonder how to be happy?

2008-07-12T18:55:00.000-07:00

Just talked to my sweetie and I know I want to be more independent but she sounded so vital, so full of life...I can't wait for her to get home!

Last week my mother talked to me about her latest relationship with her ex- husband (my estranged bio-father). In it, she unapologetically said that being independent and strong as an individual is basically not as fun as being in a relationship. When it came right down to it, she'd rather have someone order her food for her restaurant rather than being alone. She'd rather have a partner to double date with rather than knowing how to manage her own money or drive herself anywhere (because you can get people for that, you know?).

This whole time that sweetie has been gone I started thinking...am I that different? I mean I had all these ideas of things that I was going to accomplish and all I did was a few twitters and blog posts . All this and dealing with the non-stop coughing and windedness that comes with my chronic bronchitis. I'd say my natural state is this side of cranky.

What will it take to make me happy?

In this article, writer Alain de Botton talks about the benefits of being more happy, not the least of which is having a stronger immune system. I'd love some of that!

One thing...I do think I am a clinical depressive personality (inherited it from the bio-dad) and yes I've tried the med's and I've tried therapy...neither really worked. The only thing that ever, ever worked was one month back in my 30's where I found my footing, somehow.

Though it wasn't the strategy then, maybe my strategy now is just to stay in a relationship with an A personality that kicks my butt into gear, no matter how much I resent being butt kicked. ( This isn't a particularly fun state of affairs for the butt kicker ).

God, I've got to be stronger somehow than this, if only to NOT be like my mother or the bio-dad. And for the sweet butt kicker.

Day 17 or how to go from moon to comet?

2008-07-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night. I was back in college and had lots of room mates. As is natural for me, there was one that I looked up to like a big sister, one whose words doted on, a person who I thought was funnier or smarter or better than everyone else, a person whose corona was like a magnet, irresistible drawing me in.

I was like a rogue moon pulled into a satellite orbit around a heavier, denser heavenly body, basking in the dazzle, feeling more secure lassoed by the gravity and cosmic polarity. Everything was illuminated and bright,

Even the course of my life seemed more certain, for I borrowed from their material to create my own luminescent path along the horizon.

But here’s the thing about the bright lights...they always leave. The have an agenda: to blaze their own trail. And no matter how high the luminary’s regard for her little moon, celestial bodies will leave to pursue their own dreams, for they are—actually--comets spinning off to the tune of their own agenda’s, leaving a trail of debris behind them. They have their internal compass set to a specific orbital period and when it’s time to go, it’s time to go!

I’m always crushed to watch them flash off, because I seem to lose my own motivation without the reflected light.

So how do I become my own icy spectacle?

Where is the bridge (in progress)

2008-07-10T05:25:00.000-07:00

Where is the bridge from here to there
where the birds sing
and I don't hate rich children
or have contempt for their stay at home mothers
or feel road rage
or derision for the kids hanging out with nothing good to do at the gas station
or distain for wild-eyed Obama haters and lovers
or impatience with big-bodied spiders in my home forcing me to assassinate them
or irritation with cheerful people
or blind anger against corporations and my thighs
or feel the the scowl of obligation that crosses my brow everytime my mother calls?

Where the hell is it?

Day 11 - controlled melancholia

2008-07-10T04:15:00.000-07:00

Sigh. Ok well, despite my best laid plans, I find that after working a 10 hour day in a job that is boring but busy and coming home at lunch and after work to feed, de-shit and pay attention to 4 animals, I've been fairly depressed. I've thought quite a number of times about writing myself out of it but instead I use the luxury of having to do nothing as a salve.

In the late evening, I finally have the sheer deliciousness of having some time without obligation stretch before me. In the hours roughly between 7 pm and 5:30am, save a couple of pee breaks for the dog, pretty much my only mandate is to lay slothlike on the floor watching the idiot box, surfing the net, reading or sleeping.

So that's what I do...I spend focused time indulging my need for a complete release from responsibility and unfortunately, that seems to be mutually exclusive of the act of writing.

As an aside...when she's home, I feel guilty with that bit of freedom. The house is spotless and often she'll make dinner and handle all the care for the animals...all that is wonderful but highlights what a shlub I am. The companionship is uniquely satisfying enough that it lifts me above the dull ache of monotony but then there are the responsibilities of companionship like doing things with friends, taking pains to tamp down my more slovenly behaviors, etc. With all this, I don't make a lot of time to do nothing and that generally leads me to glassy-eyed resignation.

This is difficult to explain to a Type 'A' personality. She doesn't understand this overarching compulsion to do nothing, mostly because she doesn't understand that it is my coping mechanism for a life I really can't stand.

Once, when I had a small, discrete, emotional breakdown in my 30's, I took six weeks off from work and it turned out to be the most productive happy time in my life. The first two weeks, I mostly cried all the time consumed with a cramping existential agony. But by the third week, the crushing depression cleared and I surprised myself by becoming willingly productive. I started cooking and experimenting with recipes. I cleaned. I exercised. I wrote. I started volunteering with a non-profit. I had a regular sleeping schedule and my insomnia dissipated. I finally felt on the road to something better, albeit poorer, but more me.

I've always attributed this period of personal renaissance to a freedom from obligation -- the latitude to pursue my own agenda, my own passions, a truer path.

I can't begin to say how very much I need this now...but 4 years away from my pension, that dream may need to be delayed once again. But I'm not sure how much more melancholy I can stomach.

Day 2 - 1 personal day

2008-06-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

I ritually prepared myself for my forced 16 day retreat (that is, 16 days without a partner) by killing 3 spiders. Large spiders. Spiders, half as big as dimes, who when they fall from the ceiling, made a discernible sound ("pap"). I've never before seen a spider fall down...it must have been that extra gloss-high coat that tripped them up.

Anyway, I suppose killing the spiders was a test...of my strength. Of my ability to stop focusing on the sickening crawliness of a spider that must be squashed...of changing focus from the fact that I am alone here and not on vacation (with 4 puking animals ) for the next two weeks...and focus on the gift that is time uncoupled from coupledom. Who will I be? Will I surprise myself?

Now that I'm alone, what do I know, so far?

I love unbaked oatmeal cookies and espresso.
If you feed the cats first thing in the morning, they'll mostly leave you alone.
The dog, bless his old heart, will sleep all day, if given enough treats, pee breaks and a short, steep walk down the hill to get the mail or the paper.
It takes me a day or so to get settled into my writing voice.
Television holds almost no appeal, except right before bed.
I don't miss talking to anyone --yet.
I prefer being in my office because I've got the light just right in there.
The house has devolved into messiness fairly quickly (I'm going to try to right that ship this evening.).
Writing, when done after this much silence, is a benediction.

I wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow or at least not for all 10 hours of it. Oh well, money and all that...

Notes on changing my name

2008-06-21T10:51:00.000-07:00

First, let me say, I’ve changed my name more than once…and each has been a transformative moment…I haven’t regretted leaving the old public image behind and trying on the new gal’s clothes. Now, after completing my first nuptials, I’m planning on changing my name yet again.
Why?

To claim my place as an adult. My other name changes had to do with my family’s divorces and remarriages, the remnants of my childhood. This name I’m taking on is my partner’s name. We actually picked out this surname for her in response to an identity theft incursion. Now, I’ll join her and we’ll start a new branch in our 21st century family tree.

I love beginnings. And isn’t what the threshold of marriage is all about? All last year I yearned for a certain elusive quality of newness. I was able to achieve some change by a shift in my career but I still want more pioneering elements to bring a discreetly different perspective. A name change creates a refreshed persona and I’m deliciously anticipating the ripples this additional development will bring.

And lastly, rather surprisingly actually, I want to change my name as another affirmative step in my desire to set and accomplish goals and objectives in my life. If left to my own devices, I’ve more of an inert personality, less likely to change things if the pot isn’t boiling over. Assertive action has typically brought me beneficial results. And so I go forth eager to complete this task I’ve set for myself.

It’ll take a couple of weeks for me to get all the paperwork completed. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

If at first you don't succeed, keep trying

2008-06-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

My sister (whom I love dearly) is a high-level management type at a Fortune 100 company. She makes a lot of money, has traveled much of the world in first class and regularly rewards herself with expensive jewelry, clothing and furniture. She brash, iconoclastic, popular…the picture of success and she’s done it mostly on the strength of her sharp personality and work ethic. She loves her company (warts and all) and loves her work. Pretty impressive for someone without a college degree!

I on the other hand went to college, a pretty decent one on the west coast, and ended up in civil service and have slowly been building a pension for the last 17 years. I have also traveled extensively but on the cheap. I regularly reward myself by eating high caloric meals or purchasing books on Amazon. My more modest achievements were accomplished through a very low-key, intelligent but empathic personality. People love talking to me and I've always had a knack for making someone feel good about themselves.

I’m also a hard worker-verging on workaholic- but only when the situation calls for it. I hate my company and my work, I’m chronically sick on the job and I’m finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain my low-key, people-pleasing outlook. A pretty bad situation for anyone, college degree or not.

I don’t recount this story to you just so that I can whine (although, I did get a good whine in). I also use it to illustrate my belief that passionate people tend to succeed while those who turn away from the hard work required of their passion tend to whither. This is classic example of not listening to the melody of our master numbers, interpreting the insistent refrains to take important risks as so much static.

I’ve been a poster child for this kind of wrong-headed thinking. I always wanted to write (technical writing, essays, columns, etc.) but felt it would lead me down the path toward bag lady-dom. Thus…

I didn’t feel especially passionate at college and had no real plan when I finished.
I didn’t feel especially passionate when I got my first jobs. I was just happy to have a position that had benefits and a pension.
I boomeranged between several different types of work at the same agency with no real commitment. As soon as I found I the work insufferable, I bounced to another department…but the intervals between when the work was tolerable and when I detested it became shorter and shorter. There was virtually no honeymoon when I started my current job. I hated it the first day. I also lost hearing in one of my ears my second week on the job. It hasn’t returned yet.
I no longer even feel well enough to have casual conversations with people at work ( which were more like professional listening-- can you tell I'm an INFP???)...these seemingly innocuous conversations were my way of networking and staying connected to the hiring powers that be. Instead, I cough alot and appear tired and edgy. Definitely not an asset.

I’m fairly confident I’m not the only one who’s done this in their lives…moving through it like it didn’t matter. I’m lucky though. I’ve finally figured out that it DOES matter. And that the hard stuff of working up to our potential must be done sooner or later…but it can’t be denied.

First post - an irregular committment to my inner life

2008-05-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

I made up my mind I was going to commit to posting here after talking with C. We were having one of those conversations where I was whining and she was trying to be understanding. I knew that she could take my little pity parties only so long.

" If you don't like your life, change it!", she said not without a little frustration. "Make it happen! Instead of negatively obsessing on everything you haven't done in the last 46 years (actually I don't turn 46 until next month but, I should stop interrupting) , start positively obsessing over something you want to do. But stop complaining about it. You're a numerologist you should know this stuff by now."

Yes, on all counts, I should have and in the past I have for my clients, friends and acquaintances been exceedingly clear on how they should proceed. About how their destiny's are waiting to happen. All that is necessary is the will and courage to push forward.

But when it comes to me, it's as if I'm in a fog and it's very, very hard for me to see my way past my own divergences and excuses.

Take for example my career...

I'm a civil servant at a large state agency in a fairly bureaucratic discipline. Not surprisingly, it is rather detail oriented and there are lots of rules and regulations involved with very little room for creativity. My duties require me to be very analytical and my tasks are dry and deadline driven. The kicker is I just started, in fact I called in some favors to get this job and already, not even a month into it, I'm ready to chuck it.

If I did not in fact know that I was talking about me, I'd inform my brilliant client of the following:

That often, we are attracted to the things we need, not literally all the time but in a general way. In this job, the emphasis is on accountability, responsiveness and daily organization, just the sort of skill I'd need if I were to start freelancing again.
Though this job is tedious, it's also important--in that the work is clearly in the public good--in fact it has rather high 'green' rating. I left my previous job because I wasn't making a difference in the world and that left me feeling dead inside. I wanted to feel like I was a steward of something important.

So, on the good side, I'd tell my client, I have made a move closer to mastering certain essential skills and making good on my souls desire to do good. It's just that most times in life, our victories are iterative...they build upon each other giving us nothing less than what we're able to handle. If I, er or my client still feels stuck, that just means that I STILL HAVE MORE CHANGE TO MAKE.

So ok, this is a little career reality check, I'm not done yet, we're all still masterpieces in the making.