Enchanting Juno

Focus. FOCUS.

 Youtube is making me want a kitten. 

 

In much the same fashion that etsy is making me want a ruby necklace.

I do not need a kitten. 

I do not need a ruby necklace.

There are the obvious reasons.  Kittens are a pain in the ass.  I already have a cat who would murder me as I slept if I brought home any such thing.  I do not have 2400 bucks to spend on jewelry.  If I DID have 2400 bucks to spend on anything I should spend it on my house, or my retirement.  Or travel.  Or not AT ALL.

But oh, I want them.  Because I want the life that goes with them - a clean house and the worry free time to play with an infant animal.  An event to wear a ruby necklace at - a party or a fantastic restaurant with great company at which I am dazzling and happy.   I swear this is the idea behind 90% of my spending and acquisition.

These are fantasies of a clean and glamorous alternate reality where nobody hairballs on my bedroom rug (I do not regret the steam cleaner ONE TINY BIT) and I did not spend an hour removing cat hair from a blanket - it never comes off in the wash, you have to brush it  - only to come back to the guest room and find this:

 "This is my room, not yours.  And if you get a kitten I will cut you." (Pardon the exposure, Vignette was having a brightness issue but I love this anyway)

Same blanket.  Of course.

These are fantasies of  happiness and love and contentment and joy that seem some days so very elusive.  

The most obvious and most important reason is that --surrendering, I guess  - to these fantasies perpetuates the least desirable aspects of your reality.   Blowing cash or worse, credit, on jewelry I may never wear will just take me a step further from a life where I might have more worry-free time to play with my existing cat.   Among other things. 

I have a lot of trouble with that, the indulgence of the moment.  I pulled two dozen books off the shelf this weekend, things I've never read and never will.  I packed up a dozen pairs of shoes for Goodwill.  In the last two years, while I 'wasn't buying yarn,' I managed to acquire oh, 24 lots that need documenting for Ravelry (TWENTY FOUR.  All excellent bargains! But still....). 

All of that together was probably enough to paint my house, with a nice dinner in Manhattan on the side.  A really REALLY nice dinner.  Which is sobering.

Etsy and youtube are not making me do anything.   They are somewhere between blameless and irrelevant in this equation.  It's me.  My wanting.  My confusion about how I get from A to B in my life.  I know better, but knowing better is not my first response yet, it's my 3rd, or 4th. 

I'm getting better, but how do you stop that voice that says this THING will make something better, get it, you deserve it.  I've said it to others, others have said it to me.  But no one deserves THINGS.  That grants a bit too much power to stuff, you know? 

How do you connect the synapse for long term understanding?  How do you act from there FIRST?

 

 

 

Why I am not afraid of becoming who I was.

So you know how pain hurts?

I was walking down the stairs last night and I had this moment of awareness of the miraculous way my body works and for a minute there I could feel it, all the joints and bones and muscles interacting smoothly with no pain or ache or weakness or stiffness.  It was really beautiful.  And then I had a glass of Bruichladdie and took my beautiful body and my mild buzz to bed. 

Things that are good:  muscular-skeletal structures and really great booze.

I noticed the beauty because I twanged my leg last week - I THINK it's the IT band?  But really, what do I know about musculature?   It is something that reaches from above the knee up to and around my hip and when it twangs it feels like the muscle was shortened by 6 inches and the hip is being aggressively pulled forward.  I can't stand straight and walking makes me want to cry a little.

It is extremely unpleasant. 

I find myself wanting to say its Nothing In the Grander Scheme, which is true and not true, but also annoyingly self effacing.  Pain is, your FEELINGS are.  Denial serves nothing but the status quo.  Etc. Etc.

So I used to feel this way all the time.  That's what is blowing my mind this week, the fact that I forgot that this is what I used to feel like almost every day.  For years. 

I was fat.  I'm still fat but in a very different way.  But then?  Unfit, unhealthy, full of bad food and depression and puffy and withdrawn and sad and sort of basically unfriendly.   I hurt all the time.  My legs felt tired, my soul was heavier than my body, my back hurt every day.  I had no energy.  I would no more have gone for a walk than set myself on fire.  

I was already two years into therapy and it was WORKING.  This was an IMPROVED place for me. 

I meet people now and they notice most of my friendships are under 10 years old.  Why?  And I'm like, you would not have liked me.  And they are all, why do you talk about yourself that way?  And I am like NO, you would NOT HAVE LIKED ME.   Not many of my old friendships survived my learning to like myself. 

All this from a muscle spasm, right?

The first time I went to the gym as an adult was in maybe 2003 - February I think.  A neighbor dragged me.  And I was all I WILL DO CARDIO ONLY and when I am thin I will do weights (Free weights are for FIT PEOPLE<--------This is what disordered thinking looks like, in case you would like an example).  Thus guaranteeing that I would gain nothing from this process because who could go on the cross trainer for 3 continuous years without dying of boredom?  It's grim.

But the gym membership came with a training session with my mad Russian and for some reason, some bit of progressive thinking that was beginning to stir in my brain, I DID the session instead of putting it off until a year from never.  And it was...fun.    I lifted things.  Very light things.  But still, this was new.  I liked the Russian.

(He told me recently - we still work out once a week - that when he first saw me trailing behind the salesmen he was, not to mince words, horrified at what stood before him.  Me too, my friend, me too) (Don't be hating on him for saying that.  There was context and I was not offended).

So I lifted wights and did cardio and lost 20 pounds and then gained it back in muscle, and I learned the DIFFERENCE between fat and muscle and met with him 4 x a week for several years and the outside of me changed and the inside of me changed and honestly I was still at the bottom rung of human fitness, but I was so much better that I could begin to learn to be a real person.  Because the one thing I have really come to know is that I'm a body AND a mind.  I only ever valued the mind and neglected the body and the lack of balance very nearly killed me I think, which sounds a bit melodramatic but is true.

I have a related post brewing about my relationship with my appearance which will continue to brew until I can talk about being pretty without feeling like a total douche-bag.

ANYWAY.

Somewhere along the way I hurt something, or - more likely - discovered something I hurt a long time ago but which only began to nag when I asked my legs to DO things regularly, this shortened feeling at the front of my thigh that limited movement and for a couple of years it was with me most of the time.  I never even really thought of it as an injury or a chronic problem.  It was just the latest in a line of small things and I almost didn't notice when it didn't heal and fade from my head.  The Russian moved back to Russia for a while and I worked with a young woman trainer.  We switched to more mat work,more body weight work than free weights and that was an interesting change, and with her I began to work around the leg, target it with stretching and sometimes, for a week or so we'd get it working again without pain.  I saw the rolfer* then and the chiropractor and it helped.   But I began to understand that this was a problem that I wasn't getting rid of.  This was middle age.  And in middle age I limped. 

Time passed, leaves fell, hearts broke and mended, flowers bloomed.  The Russian was back, I was restless and bored with weights, I was stronger, my feet hurt and I had kidney stones and I was turning 40 and the whole thing was just an OUTRAGE. 

And so I started to practice yoga, turning the vague notion of years into a reality.

My first class twanged that thigh hard and I limped out, but it also receded after that to better than it had been in years.  And then a month later it twanged again and then faded for a month completely and then it twanged hard and stayed twanged until I finally made the synaptic connection that resting this NEVER HELPED and made myself go for a walk,  the first 3K of which made me want to cry with every step and the last 2K of which were as pain free as I had felt in a decade.  Oh. OH.

That was Summer 2009 and until last week, I've not felt a twinge.  I'd begun to forget about it, in fact. I have a deep hippy suspicion about why this twanged now but it requires a whole 'nother digression and I'm not in the mood.  Superficial summary:  I reached a new place with pigeon pose and didn't respect how wobbly and open my hips were feeling, accused myself of laziness and went to class when I didn't want to, and in the simplest of movements my leg said fuck you for not listening, HERE FEEL THIS DUMB ASS.

Ow. 

I know what to do, and I did it, OUTRAGED every step of the first few days.  I FIXED YOU you betraying bastard.  And then I stopped being such a damnpissytwerp about it, and noticed that I hadn't had this chronic pain for over a year and that was really a cycle broken and a remarkable thing.   A little respect please.  Last night - after 5 days - the spasm eased in a moment I didn't even notice, during yoga of course.   And meditation was amazing afterward, the silence that the pain left behind it was big.

I'm not sure there's a lesson here - my pain is not yours, not everything can be healed this way - though I have a tendency to say that yoga fixes everything because in some larger sense I think it really does. 

But last night I walked down the stairs and felt the exquisite working of my body like the miracle it really is and I was grateful.  I love that. 

 

 

 *love the Rolfer.  This is Rolfing

 

The Fear.

Here’s something I just learned that will blow your mind.  Unless you already know it , in which case you are wise and I want to be you when I grow up.

Creativity is about not being afraid of making a mess. Not letting The Fear stop you from making…mistakes, problems, piles of shit, a ruined mess of not right.

I had no idea. 

I’m sure there are many, many fine books discussing the creative process which talk about this very thing.  But I have never read them because I am not creative*.

I have this friend who has a technical job; recently he took on a project for no money that was way, way outside of his comfort zone, way on the creative side of the field he works in as a tech guy.  When the person he was doing this for asked him WHY he was willing to go out of pocket to do this for free he said, “Well, I know I can solve problems, but I wasn’t sure I knew how to create them”.

He had The Fear during the whole planning and execution process.  And he did it anyway. (I was, and am, really proud)

It is so simple and yet I have failed to comprehend this my whole life.  It’s a family thing.  My mom is creative and makes messes all the time and all we saw was piles of shit in the way of family life and disrespected that, and my dad…well, I remember I was sitting at a table working on some craft project when I was just post college and it was going great and it was SO satisfying and I had such a great feeling and I showed it to my father** and he was like, um, you know you need to find a profession right?

Indulging your creativity is an obstacle to progress.  Hard to even type that since it about as backward as it is possible to be.

But I absorbed it like a sponge, bought the whole package – creative endeavors are selfish and disordered and not respectable and an indulgence that needs to be set aside in the face of life’s responsibilities. 

Insert 10 years of workaholic depression and misery followed by 10 years of therapy and professional confusion. 

 I already knew that The Fear is a protective mechanism, and that The Fear is something I need to question, because it stops me, limits me.  Hell I almost didn’t go to my first SOAR because I had The Fear (fortunately I also have friends who made me work around it).

For me The Fear is primarily about doing poorly, not seeming competent, making mistakes.  It looks like a little bit of control freakishness, but really, it is the Fear.  But subverting it is so hard when it feels so strong and …responsible and good to abide by the limits.  Work hard, do well, don’t make a mess, don’t step outside normalcy no matter how much conventional work feels like dying.  Dying inside makes you a good girl, you know that.

And so I am listening and my friend said this remarkable sentence.  Let me show you again:

 “Well, I know I can solve problems, but I wasn’t sure I knew how to create them”.

 And some gear in my head rotated into place.  If I am too afraid to make a mess I will never make ANYTHING.  Being creative is about creating problems.

 Just writing that down gives me a damn chill. 

 

*Someone will yell at me for this.  I swear, it's not low self esteem, that's not really what gets in my way.  My self esteem is FINE, but I am not artistic - can't sing or draw or arrange pebbles in meaningful patterns, and for a long time I have laboured under the limiting idea that creativity was confined to art-y things for which I have no skill or talent. 

** My Dad defined himself by how well he fullfilled his obligations in many ways rather than by how he met his own needs, but to be fair, I was 22 and having some real trouble thinking about my future.  I looked kind of dead in the water.  I was kind of dead in the water.   I don't think he meant to stop me from thinking about what I really wanted or was good at for a decade.  Or maybe he did.  It used to amke him really angry when other people were better at living their lives.

 

So you know how I want a new life?

I wonder what it looks like.

I keep running into this problem with dating where I'm so convinced that anyone who's happy around here is a lunatic that I can't find anyone who's happy around here interesting.  It's a mad chicken and the egg situation.  (proviso:  I am talking about single people.  If I had a family I still wouldn't want to be here, but I can see how some people might).  I work around this by looking in nearby cities, which works in a limited kind of way.

I keep falling for people who live really far away though.

I WONDER WHY?

I spent the weekend as I frequently do.  I had a first date Friday night - a perfectly nice man, a mildly pleasant evening.  I'm trying not to be closed minded - I'd like to be in a relationship - so I was prepared to repeat the date even though I had a certain amount of reluctance to kiss him.  I figured another dinner would clarify it one way or the other.

He turns out to not be QUITE divorced;  I'd have to be way more interested to overcome my....disinclination to step into the middle of THAT.  And he ended the evening by trying to fix the plan for the next dinner - like what about here?  or here?  Or this place?  I was like, really, we can decide later.  Let's talk...later.  Its hard to follow your own self knowledge when someone's pushing for specifics.

I think its ok to say I'd like to see you again on a first date, but unless there's some extraordinary chemistry at work, making actual plans is generally - often?- forcing the issue.  And then he called AND texted before I got out of yoga the next morning.  Leaving me with the idea that he had a WAY better time than I did. 

You know Don't Mug Yourself? (It's a great song. The Streets. Original Pirate Material). I used to think it was all wrong to have a strategy about these things, but you know, unless we spent 45 minutes making out against my car? Or slept together?  I don't want to hear from you first thing.  It's...unseemly.  Not because there are Rules, I don't believe in those, but because you have to have a sense of proportion, and awareness.  When you sat down to close to me I moved away. Did you not notice? 

I hate feeling crowded. 

Anyway.  Date.  Yoga.  Pedicure.  Groceries.  Much laying on the floor reading.  Some napping.  Twitter.  Some mild cookery.

Written out like that is seems like a nice weekend but I'm starting to find it worrying that I rarely leave the house except for work, errands and exercise.  I was going to go to the NJ Sheep and Wool, but it was bucketing rain and then I fell asleep.  And I am going away next weekend.  And I do like and need solitude.   But I don't belong in the life I have and I am - still - stuck on how to change that.  I hope I'm not hiding. 

I keep reading these things about believing in what you have to offer and discarding traditional thinking about business and time management.  And I feel instinctively that they are telling me a powerful right true thing.  I'm going to keep flailing around looking for the thing that I can do that works that way.  But damn, I could use a signpost. 

In the meantime I'll be laying on my living room floor reading and thinking. And going on the occasional first date.  

It's not ALL angst around here you know.

God, I'm in a good mood.  For no particular useful reason really.  I like Mondays now, as I generally take the morning off to do a challenging yoga class and the rest of the day passes both quickly and on endorphin-cushioned springs.  My hair looks really good today. 

I spent the weekend eating Indian food and laying around reading handsewing technique articles with Too Much Wool and examining the deeply alarming amount of fabric that has joined the deeply alarming amount of wool and yarn in my house. Although deeply alarming is a dramatic overstatement - there IS that much, but I am not alarmed by it.  By other things, yes, but not creative raw materials.  I will never have a genuinely small house, it is clear.  I do feel reorganization coming on, though NOT until the temperature drops down to the merely ridiculous from its present levels of absurdity. 

Am officially banned from buying black lycra-blend ANYTHING (by-the-yard) for ever and ever.  Need to face serger fear and make some damn t-shirts and yoga pants. 

The contractor came and rebuilt my front steps a week ago and they are beautiful, stained cedar with brass screws and delightfully solid underfoot and pleasant to sit upon on a fine summer night.  I want him to come back and replace the deck planking in back, but I worry that removing the surface will reveal other more expensive problems underneath.

Neighbor B walked by Saturday with her newly shy-eyed 4 year old- and deliciously grubby and blueberry stained 9 month old- daughters.  Friendliness was exchanged.

I knit a few inches and was astonished to be able to feel an ache in my arm in downward dog this morning.  Rehabilitation of the offending limb clearly still has a way to go - all this from a muscle spasm!  I'm too old now to heal quickly and too young for anyone - including me - to give a shit about the narrative of it.  

How was your weekend?

No smiling please.

The invoices are gathering dust in a pile on top of which I have placed my new keyboard. 

I'm restless and not working, and I might as well admit it and do something that is purposeful, if not useful.  This is a key thing I'm still learning after nearly 10 years as the boss  - work has an ebb and flow thats about productivity and balance rather than hours in the day with your butt in the seat.  I waste a lot of time not accomplishing while denying my procrastination in such a way that I don't just go do something else enjoyable or useful. Its an strange internally-enforced passivity with a strong note of conventional thinking behind it.

This is on my mind a lot these days.  Allocation of time.

I'm beginning to see someone new and he got me talking about fiber the other day, a thing I have given some time to in the past.  Afterwards he said he'd been looking for a way into that conversation for ages, both because he is interested (He has Opinions about goats; namely, that they are Good) and because I am.  (It was oddly shocking to feel the absolute truth of that statement.  You know when someone's really interested in you, of course, but there's knowing and then there's feeling it like a shock in your ankle bones. In the ankle bones of your psyche.  Impact.  Real.)  What followed was a very amusing conversation revolving around his definition of gauge (diameter of wire) and my definition of gauge (stitches and rows per inch). And the economics of the cashmere industry.  And commercial vs. handmade sweater weights. 

Describing it - knitting, spinning, the tactile pleasures, the outlines of the art and technology of it - to someone with no prior frame of reference for it has me thinking about the fiber arts though.  So I like wool, right, this reminded me I have lots to say about it, but truly I must admit, I've barely been near it in months.  Lots of reasons. 
Why HAVE I let them lie fallow for so long? What are those reasons?

No spinning for more than a year really - I've had an on and off shoulder problem since December of 2008, and that didn't help.  I skipped the last SOAR because of money and worries.  I only went to Rhinebeck last year, rather than Rhinebeck and Maryland and Cummington and maybe New Hampshire and bought...a project bag I think. I didn't visit Toronto last year either.  Or buy any fiber and VERY little yarn (Oh Colourmart, I cannot resist you).
I've been reading about sewing, though not in any kind of action taking way. I've been a bit adrift.

I've knit the same yarn into a 8 inches of top down raglan THREE times between Thanksgiving and Easter, before realizing that I was not listening to the message I was being sent and switching to a knit-in-pieces design.  I have made a sleeve so far.  In 4 months. It's very nice.

So I still LIKE fiber, that's clear, my house is still full of it, as well as a strange spreading contagion of piles of fabric for the clothing I do not yet know how to make (I'm afeared of the serger, I am).  I made a passing and limp remark about getting rid of some of it recently, one that felt like a gesture to conventional thinking and, really, bullshit.  

It's been a frightening and challenging 2 years, hasn't it?  And that's what it is, the real reason.  I practice yoga and go to the gym not least because they help me not freak out, help me be in the moment rather than frantically trying to control outcomes that are out of my hands or just panicking.  But making things, learning things for pleasure, creating, writing all feel like the most profligate waste of resources.  Felt like.  Sit and knit, in selfish quiet, when I could be Planning What Comes Next?  Go on a date, enjoy myself and extend emotional energy to another, when I could be worrying pointlessly? This is Not Allowed.

I think its slowly dawning on me that denying myself pleasure and the refuge of things I love and am good at are increasing my sense of paralysis, decreasing my ability to shape my ideas for the future. These things are not a cookie I can reward myself with when I have Solved Everything.  They're part of the fuel that makes me run well.  It's hard to let go of the stern prohibition against enjoyment and to understand the difference between procrastination and experiencing creativity and creation as a life force.

I'm pulling it apart a little now:  as I said I'm involved with someone and it is, oddly, freeing more energy for creative thinking instead of sucking it all away, I'm reading more and I spun for the first time a week or so ago and the next day I felt amazingly good, lively and peaceful.  

I have these ideas and I need to make them into a thing and all this time I've been not doing anything that wasn't Making The Thing, and yet, not being able to quite Make the Thing because of fear, and punishing myself by taking away the things that make the fear less and the mind more clear.  When I say it like that it's a bit ...well I'm going to have to go with dumb. 

In which I get a LOT out of properly adjusting my camera.

So I was on the phone with a friend the other day, someone with a fair degree of expertise about cameras.  I've been getting outcomes I wasn't happy with and was, as I care precisely nothing for cameras other than as a tool (and a tool I hold awkwardly and probably from the wrong end at that), powerless to change this.

He downloaded the manual for my Canon and walked me through setting up a raw mode as well as the stupid mode I have mostly used, and explained some basic stuff to me. "I have a zoom lens?  Cool!" "Hey, there's a second focus ring! Who knew?" "ISO?"

I wanted to know what was wrong with my eyes that I couldn't read the green glowing text inside the viewfinder window.  Turns out that the diopter ("what's a diopter?") was "set for Mr. Magoo," at which point I laughed until I had to put the camera down for safety.

I bought this DSLR when my nephew was crawling out of the point-and-shoot frame before the shutter clicked.  He will be 7 this fall (SEVEN. I just had to call my brother and confirm that) so I've had this thing for six years and I use it like a point-and-shoot.  Not the best use of resources, but there's only so many things in life one can embrace at the nerdology level.  I have WOOL for that.  And yoga.  And words.  And sometimes cooking.  And fabric.  And self awareness and connection forming.

For this guy, cameras are a thing though.  He gave me his time, his enthusiasm and knowledge and we had a great time doing it.

We use our friends.  Which they love, because who doesn't like showing off the stuff they're good at?   That was a bear to learn, for sure.

I used to be so invested in appearing Ultimately Competent, a shiny surface with no finger-holds that might leave me vulnerable to foolishness or hurt.  Which is an odd reality, living the belief that making a mistake visible to others can HURT you.   And that asking for information or help is weak and really, rude and an imposition.  A failure.  The opposite is true of course.

No, really.  The imposition is in the failure to ask, the failure to take from someone else sometimes, the failure to need. 

I can't tell you how to stop that, it's come gradually to me, and the steps are hard to pinpoint.  You just.... stop trying to be perfect and let yourself be human and ask for information or help and you get to be connected and to make someone else feel clever and useful and solve a problem and learn a little bit and laugh until you can't quite breathe at your own mistakes. Those finger-holds are how people come to know the real you and how you come to know the real them and the truth of that knowledge is how we cement ourselves onto the surface of the earth and STAY.

I recommend it.

The latest dance craze.

I'm trying to write whenever the urge strikes me, even if it is small and sucky (see previous post).   

Because I'm having this thing lately.  It is, at bottom, why I got rid of my tv.  This thing where I come home at the end of the day and I am so sure that I need to change my life, my work, EVERYTHING, that I feel guilty that I am not actively working on the change.  So I do very little.  'Cause I don't know what to do, what that work on change looks like, but I'M NOT DOING IT.

And so must, therefore, not do anything pleasurable and frivolous like knit, or cautiously approach the wild animal that is the sewing machine, or watch a movie.  Or spin, or hang out with people or even sometimes go to yoga (I noticed about 6 months ago that if I screwed up or there was a problem at work, my first impulse was to cancel class even if staying at the office would change NOTHING.  Which is pathological). Read. Write. Think. Whatever pleasure looked like that day. 

Housework is OK with the very stern and Puritan ancestral spirit who makes these decisions, which makes housework unbearably punitive.  TV and the internet are frivolous (fun!) but also wasteful (punitive!) and a bit bad for my brain - so I am passively punishing myself, which that little vicious force is OK with. 

I felt (feel?) guilty when I am not actively improving something.  Now, I've been in therapy a long time and I am pretty good at working on my shit at this point.  I am usually aware of when I'm stagnant and reasonably good at knowing how to stir myself up, or ask for someone else to help me.  I'm not lazy about evolution, only the dishes.

But some things are harder than others.  And this whole question of work is my hardest thing.  recognizing what I am good at, figuring out how to turn it into a professional life, facing the need for change when I have never known what I wanted to be when I grew up.  My worst thing.  By a mile.

For years I just refused to think or talk about it.  Occasionally I would freak out in therapy and then go back to talking about the interpersonal things that were troubling me.  Still huge things, but more manageable that THAT ONE.

I have come to the conclusion that I had to work on some of the personal issues first cause I could not know what I wanted to do until I knew who I was, that's just how I work.  And I could not know who I was until I stopped thinking mean things about myself and doubting my fundamental lovability and all those things that sent me to therapy in the first place.  So its all logical and progressive.  

And now, ok, I'm awesome, I've got love and give it, I think that that's normal and good.  My mother only makes me mildly insane these days.  I know that I bring things to the conversation and I know what those things are.  And I am not trying to minimize that by being flip, this took huge, vast, enormous amounts of work. 

I am great.  I really am.  AND I kind of sort of know what I want to do, in a difficult to articulate way, but still.  And wow, in some ways that feels like I'm full of light and it will all work out perfectly.  I can SEE it. It will be AMAZING. And in some ways THAT is even more terrifying than not knowing in the first place because, oh my god, now I have to act.  And I am better at acting when I think I have nothing to lose.  Acting when I have everything to lose is paralyzing.  So I come home and feel like anything I am going that is not like, a business plan, is wrong.

So you know. Too much TV, not enough creativity.  Brains oozing out of the ears.  Only possible reaction (this is 6 or 8 months of back and forth and not getting it crammed into a paragraph.  It wasn't this LINEAR, is what I am saying).

So the TV went, and in the silence I am looking for new inspiration, signposts, a path to where I want and need to go.  And those things are coming not on demand or with a wish, but by letting go of the tight grip on logic and instead filling my head and heart with idea and texture.  I've been reading and thinking about language. Trying for enough sleep.  Cleaning the corners of the tub grout.  Leaning out the window to take pictures of the snow.  Trying to not let the impulse to write slip away. Staring at walls. And slowly I feel like I am filling up with something.  I don't know what it is yet - knowledge, purpose?   The last few times people asked me what I felt or thought or wanted I knew the answer.  The silence feels less empty all the time.  I feel like I am filling up with myself, with my real identity.  Like I need this before I can make a chart, diagram a program, be concrete.  And I accept that this is reasonable.

So now, when I read a book, or spin or sled in the park* with my neighbor what I am really doing is saying "go suck a lemon Ancestral voice. This IS working on it."  And it's fun. 

(*there could be a whole 'nother post about the sledding and being a person who does things that potentially make her look foolish now, which I totally never used to because I was In Control.  And also, Embarrassed and full of Shame. I flopped my ass in the snow today and made a snow angel.  A HUGE one.  I fell down in a show drift and laughed instead of looking around to see if anyone saw.  This is new.  And totally related to thing thing I STILL haven't told you.  Cause it is hard to talk about and also, sort of fixed in a way that makes it seem passed and past at once.)

Well this is new.

People, I keep making my bed and it is flipping me out.

You must understand I make my bed when I change my sheets, when I have a Gentleman Caller and...that's mostly it.  Oh, when I go out of town and someone else will be feeding the cat.  Just in case they have to go look for her under the bed or something.  But sometime last week I woke up and made it.  Without making a decision to Be Better, or a resolve to Improve My Housekeeping.  I just made the bed. 

The next morning I thought, it was nice to sleep in a made bed.  And I did it again. 

Its been 4 days now.  I still haven't decided that I am Going To Be That Girl Who Makes the Bed.  But some subterranean agency inside me seems to have done so.

This coincides with my decision to go to bed by 11.  Which is Ann's fault. Well Ann and Arianna Huffington.  Which is not a combination I would have expected to type.  But I get up 6:30ish (that's what my alarm is set for anyway).  and I have known since boarding school that if I wanted to make it to first period I need be lights out by 11.

(I did that for a whole semester in 10th grade.  Passed Bio!  Barely!)

Now, so far, I have not actually made into bed by 11, but I'm getting closer.  If I had goals for this it was to look more rested, be less of a zombie in the morning, maybe wake up in time to have some coffee and oatmeal before work.  Modest things.

But instead I get a made bed. 

Sideways changes.  So typical.

However now that I look at the clock I only have 3 hours left before tooth-brushing.  I want some dinner.   And to finish cleaning the living room.  So I guess I'll have to over examine this for meaning another time.  Ciao xx.

In which I say goodbye to an old friend.

A few months ago I had a moment (god, I am rusty, it took me three tries to begin this sentence) where I thought, self, you are rotting where you sit.

I have alluded to some business ups and downs and I’m formulating some loose notions about what I might do next (and yes, I STILL have to finish telling you about how my head exploded, which is entirely relevant to the development of said loose notions) and as always, chipping away at the life long task of change.

(In a side note, I must have made some progress because I was at the chiropractors last night talking about something while he adjusted my neck and he quite suddenly said, but you’ve changed SO much. I wish I could remember what we were talking about – my mother’s hip surgery? The holidays? It felt more like something he needed to say than it seemed directly related to the conversation. It’s nice though, when people feel moved to notice what you've worked hard on)

Over the last few months I’ve had a string of things – house guests, sprained wrist, sprained ankle, weeks of flu things, sinus things, cold things, holidays – that all add up to my house assuming titanic mess status. Even for me, things are too lax. And I’ve been looking around going, why do I never – make this, read this, clean this, sleep enough? It’s a long list of nevers, that all seemed tied to the fact that I've been coming home at the end of each day and disappearing into the old couch and the remote.

I've been feeling like I was shutting down mentally every day.  In a way that reminded me of the bad old days.  Before Therapy.  When things were Not Good.  And also, Very Bad.

Then Steph said something about Barbara Walker. At Sock Summit, someone asked Barbara Walker how she got so much done and she said her tv broke and she didn’t fix it for five years. I heard this and a chime rang in the way back of my head.

I ignored it.

I ignored it fully and with dedication.

The degree to which I was resisting this idea impressed me a little though, so I made up my mind last fall I would break up with my TV (except for Mad Men). And I did a little. I practiced turning it off after a show.  I started a couple of good books. I subscribed to the NY Times and convinced myself this was good progress, even though I somehow never had time to read it.

Then I got the flu (or something), and somehow spent the better part of two weeks watching On Demand police programs I don’t even like, and getting re-addicted to Gray’s Anatomy and Criminal Minds and yes, I was sick and yes, I had a headache that kept me from reading and yes, all I wanted to do was be horizontal. But somehow I do not think staring at the screen all those hours was helping.

By the time I was well TV and I were SO back together.

And I was not all that impressed with myself, to be frank. I still kept hearing that little chime that went Ding! You should get rid of your TV

Ding!

Ding!

Around this time I saw videos of dogs greeting their owners after overseas deployment – it was making the rounds a few months ago and will reduce even the most hardened cynic to goo – and I noticed that in nearly every video there was a TV running in the background. Possibly because I had already been thinking all this that I have described, it stood out a mile and it looked wrong to me, a distraction from emotion, from the moment. It looked like static in the home.

Ding!

It takes me a while to get used to ideas, but this one marinated.  I mentioned it to a few people.  I took it for mental test drives.  And one day last week I bitched on Twitter that I wanted to get rid of it and I found a taker and the half-ignored yet fully-formed notion went from resistance to completion in a moment.

I called Verizon to arrange to turn off my service – which was hilarious (You gave away WHAT?). I deleted all my recording instructions from the DVR, I closed the cabinet doors for the first time in 7 years and I mentally rearranged the room.  It’s still in my house, as delivery to its new home must still be arranged, but knowing it will soon be gone has changed something that I could not manage without formally cutting the cord.

I get the urge to open the doors, but I can’t think of a reason to follow through, and until I do they’re staying closed. I’ve been spending a lot more time on-line – which is not dissimilar, of course, but it's been more directed and livelier on-line time, not just aimless browsing while I half-watched the TV. 

And I’ve been trying to figure out what to DO with myself. I’ve been beginning to clean bits of my house in 10 minute here and there.  I picked up a book.  I watched a movie that’s been sitting on my TV for months.  I was surprised when I came downstairs Sunday and the room was arranged the old way, not the way it now looks in my head.  These are all good, but not what I want.  I want to make, and think and create.  To be a mightier version of myself.  To not look back in 10 years and wonder why I never did.....x.  Or y.  Or z.  I feel like I’m a baby step closer.

Anybody want to buy a TV cabinet?