Enchanting Juno

The total package

I'm having a brain problem right now. 

I remember when I was a kid there was always some complaining going on about whether reading junk was really reading and people trying to Save The Children From Trash.  Me, I loved trash, it improved both my vocabulary and my working knowledge of human sexuality and I am all for both.  And I believe that the more you read the more your sense of nuance improves.  Which is to say, you grow out of junk the way you outgrow Twinkies. 

Tastes like plastic, but EVERY once in a while you just gotta.  Maybe even a lot.  And then one day, revulsion (I'm trying to find my revulsion for fudge iced yellow cake right now).

Which is fine.  I don't approve of calling books bad names because someone somewhere decided they weren't respectable enough.  In the end the quality of the writing shapes you and sends you in new directions.

Which brings me to my brain problem.  I seem to be going in a new direction.  I had a long no reading period after my dad died, and then I was more into - pop non-fiction.  Some of which was great. And satisfying, because it grappled with big modern questions of survival and understanding. 
But fiction grapples with survival and understanding right?

Not the fiction I'd been reading.

So over the last 2 years maybe I've been reading again, but sputtering over it - 12 books at once, not much focus, trouble tracking complex ideas over the structure of the book.  I feel like an old dirty engine, not quite turning over, idling roughly before dying again.  Feeling like I used to be smart.   No - AGILE, I used to be agile. 

Then, last weekend I came to be hanging out with the parents of someone I went to grade school with.

She was the hippy mom when I was a child, who taught yoga and went back to school and worked as a physical therapist and fed the geese where they lived on the lake and worked for the environment all those years ago.  She took me for my very first walk in the woods when I was in the first grade.  It was magical, with rocks and lichen, like nothing I had ever seen or felt.  I told you about her a few months ago actually, which makes it especially weird I should run into her NOW. 

We talked about oh - people we knew in common, and how my hometown is bad and good, and how to change the world in small pieces and later her husband came downstairs and we talked about human potential and The Trial and the doors that are ours to walk through if only we know how and Slavic literature and the Good Soldier Svejk - which is one of the 17 books I am 3 chapters into right now - and she mentioned the Master and Margarita, which coincidentally, I had bought a month or too ago, but hadn't felt up to starting.  

And there is a fantastic story about THAT that I can't really tell you 'cause it's about their stuff but it ends in a oil painting like a Russian fairy tale and it made me glad to be alive.
It made me remember not feeling rusty, made me remember agility, it made me remember this piece of myself I've been looking for, and I feel like I just backfired through my own carburetor and woke up.  

I confessed to a few of my friends Monday this realization, that really, I'm an intellectual.  Over the howls of laughter and my defensive explanations - Bookish Wendy said "dude - it's like you're coming out of the closet - but we all already knew..." which is mortifyingly accurate - came awareness: I have sort of gotten into a place where I suppress this bit of myself - at least partly because it has no non-recreational outlet in my life.  Suppress it so hard that the skills, the habit of complex though is corroded.  I've been neglecting my brain.  Maybe I had to.  10 years ago I was all brain and nothing else and I had to learn to be heart and body too. 

And I did.  

I think its hysterical and inevitable that I discovered yoga NOW.  Of course.  Because now I need balance and integration (as well as the calm to survive this economy and its et ceteras) not merely the brute strength to change.  

Where was I?

Oh, brain problem.

My goopy old, gunk-clogged engine of an intellect is coming alive and I am glad to see it but boy howdy am I worried about the damage that may have been done.  I've been reading more, and struggling with serious, complicated paths through other people's thoughts.  I'm 50 pages into a dozen things, digging my mental fingers into the rock, looking for traction and it hurts like weightlifting after a 6 month break to go a bit deeper than the facile.  

Its all about fear too, isn't it?  What if I can't deliver, what if I'm not so all-fired clever after all, what if I dig and come up short? What if the brain that is the one thing about myself I've never doubted turns out to be a thin shield. 
I am always surprised to rediscover how little maturity and experience really shield you from fear and change.  Stress, yeah,  experience lets you eat stress for breakfast, but self-doubt not so much.

Ah well, I'm only ever happy when I'm evolving. 

Hai!

I got distracted there.  I always do. 

So thank you for all the hosting recommendations.  I looked at a bunch of stuff but in the end the awesome Sweater Project David led me to Google Apps which let me set up a free account WITH my domain name and then forwarded it to my regular gmail account so it's all seamless and shit, at least once David explained what an MX record was and how to update it. Yay for David.

And yay for google which better stay not evil because I dunno if I can give them up

For those have you who have experienced my incredible bouncing email account, this should all be a thing of the past.  Email at will. 

The only channel that ever has anything on is BBCAmerica.   And yet I am watching a Nora Roberts Lifetime movie.  I used to like her books but either my perspective has changed or the translation to film is awkward.  Everything seems imbued with a kind of fake-gothic-quasi-hardboiled demeanour that's hard to take seriously.  Also, there are a lot of hostage events in this (apparently) medium sized town.
Not that this is stopping me from watching.
OK she just shot her own car in frustration.  Not that I don't sympathize.  But really.

She's got some great sweaters though.

I love Twitter.  Unfortunately, it diverts potential blog ideas into 140 character snippits.  I have a short attention span. 

Today was really beautiful.  Driving with the windows open and great music on the first fine spring day of the year is one of life's great pleasures.   I car danced and I am not ashamed to admit it.

I ate too much Indian food today and it gave me a headache.  I've noticed this about sugar recently, headaches.  I had a food aversion during the kidney stones and ended up caffeine free - which has stuck - and sugar free - which has not, particularly during PMS. 
But now when I over do it, I get a headache.  So is there sugar in Murg Tikka Masala? Navratan Korma? There BETTER not be sugar in the lemon rice, cause it rocks my world. 

New favorite beverage:  Filtered water with a lot of lemon juice.  I know, do I know how to party or WHAT?  Hydration is my new religion.

I tried to explain to my mom that lip and nose piercings aren't even all that radical anymore and I should totally get my nose pieced for my 40th.   She was...unconvinced, shall we say?   I can't decide if I was serious or just winding her up.  I guess we'll see.

I'm in love with yoga.  I'm going four times a week and rearranging my life to make it five.    I have this weird leg/hip problem that has been a problem for like, 4 years.  Gone.  I can sleep in any position I want now too, which my spine has been unwilling to discuss for  - 5 years maybe?  Plus I feel amazing.  This is after three weeks.  I am crazy with curiosity to see what happens over the next six months.  (Yeah, yeah, I KNOW you told me I'd love it.  Times and season, my dear, times and seasons.)

Reading: Titus Groan (slowly) (very dense and very good)

Knitting:  Baby Cables (also slowly)

Watching a bit too much TV cause jumping from weights once a week through kidney stones into weights once and yoga four times per week has left me a tiny bit wiped (by 'tiny bit' you should understand I mean utterly flattened), but energy is coming back up.  Soon I will dig out of my couch nest.

Hope you are all well.

Fat, Female & 40

So I had a very interesting week.  It began Monday with what I thought was a case of food poisoning that just would not quite clear and than clarified into acute abdominal pain on Thursday.  I know doctors mean acute in some kind of diagnostic way, I mean it like, fuck that hurts.  Oh wait, fuck, it hurts even more.  Is it hot in here?  I need some air.  ow.Ow.OW. 

Of course we are in the middle of switching health insurers, just to make things more complicated.

Eventually I drove myself to the emergency room, shouting incredibly colorful things at anyone who dared stop at a light in front of me and garnering stares from a woman walking by, as the windows were wide open.  Since, as I mentioned, it was hot in here. 

While I was being evaluated by the nurse he said, "probably gallstones".  My GP had said the same thing on the phone when I talked to her earlier and I asked him why everyone was so convinced of this on no more evidence than it all seemed to have started when I ate something greasy.

And he said "well, you can't sit still", which is true, I was pacing and standing and sitting and bending and kneeling and walking, "but mostly you're the right type."

Type?  Sure, he said.  A woman, forty (39 I said) and...small pause...not slim.

I was amused.  "Tactfully phrased"

"There's a phrase we use, a mnemonic.  But I'm not telling you"

Eventually I achieved a kind of weird yogic prone lotus on the exam room bed - it's funny what pain does to your sense of self consciousness - that was semi comfortable and remained thus until the doctor came in. 

"I think you have gallstones"  he says. 

Exam, blah, blah.  Tenderness in wrong location for gallstones, possible appendix?  He still thinks gallstones and sends me for an ultra sound, not before giving me a big fat syringe full of something just delightful in the line of an anti-nausea med, as well as something equally delightful by way of a pain killer.  I really could not tell you which one I liked better. 

When he comes back to tell me what next I am high enough to say, "explain the gallstone conviction to me.  Why does everyone start there?"

"You're the type."

"And the type is?"

He would clearly rather not tell me.  I insist, in my charmingly narcotic persistent way.

"Female, 40 and...another word that starts with F"

For some reason I found this hilarious.  Female, Fat & 40.  

Well, ok, fair enough.

Fat is a word I have been avoiding my whole life, treating it like something between a moral judgment and a declaration of low value.  But in the end, it's just a description.   We forget that, there's a lot of other baggage attached.  Higher body weight has some straight up medical consequences that are based in biology and chemistry, not opinion.  No matter how much we might like that to not be true.

To my mother, fat is the most important thing about me.  It's both a judgment and a fear, she sees her own weight problem as the root of her life's dissatisfaction and monitors others as harshly as she monitors herself.  I grew up hyper aware of fatness.
And of course people who love me, if I say I'm fat will say, no, you're curvy or no you're above your ideal weight or no, you're big not FAT. 
What they mean is that I am not unattractively fat, that I'm healthy and fit and pretty and smart and they love me.  And it has always been very, very important to me that they say that, that they believe that.  So I can believe it myself.
It's always been important that I not have any health conditions associated with obesity too.  Cause then, you know.  I'd be FAT.  And have no self worth.

So you would think FEMALE FAT & 40 would be the worst thing I ever heard.  But I thought it was funny.  And not just cause of the opiates, because I still think it was funny.  Also the way everyone tip-toed kindly around it so as to not be mean was really sweet.   Silly.  But sweet.  Though I think now, they were waiting for explosive denial and anger.

I'm just so over it, working so hard to pretend I am other than what I am.

I was dating this guy last summer, and one time we were in my bedroom and I was getting dressed and he stopped me and said "you have such a beautiful body" and my jaw crashed onto the floor, like do not pass go, WHAT?!  Because he was entirely sincere.
And eventually I pulled myself together enough to say "thank you, I don't ever think of myself that way but, um.  Thank you" ('cause of course I need to file the disclaimer on the compliment WHILE accepting it)
And he said "well, why not?"
And I'm like "well, uh, um - I'm kinda of fat, you know?"
And he said the most remarkable thing I had ever heard.  "Does that really matter?"

Do you mean to tell me someone could like me not in spite of my weight, but because my weight is irrelevant to my attractiveness and worth?

Weird. 

I tell you what too.  When I was sitting there all drugged up and waiting for the cat scan the nurse who checked me in came to hang out with me.  I mean, he checked vitals and stuff, and we had a long and probably not as witty as I remember conversation about the blood pressure cuff and how if it was accurate I was probably dead and he got it working and what have you, but I think he was getting off duty and came to see how I was, 'cause he wasn't the nurse assigned to me or one of the floor nurses in my section.  He just liked me enough to see how I was doing. 
Even though he knows how much I weigh. 
He was cute too, I should have asked him out. 

This maybe doesn't make sense, but it just felt like a really powerful moment, a tipping point.  I've been fat my whole adult life for lots of reasons beyond the simple I like to eat too much.  I don't really have much belief in plain old simple reasons.  But I've never been able to say it without bracing myself, or explaining why it's only sort of true or flinching deep inside. 
And how can you thrive if you flinch whenever you think of yourself? 

But moments of pain strip off the bullshit always, and it just all seemed so stupid in the ER.  It still seems stupid to think of myself with an asterisk next to all my good qualities, a footnote that says, *but she's fat, you know.  Why on earth would I need to tell a man who is looking at me naked that I'm fat?  He's had sex with me, he knows what I look like. 

This isn't a fat acceptance thing really, I have some problems with the way that discussion is framed, and no, I don't think obesity is just as healthy as thinness, save your breath.  I...
I guess I'm officially done flinching.  And yeah, I'm fat.

Oh, and no, it was not my gallbladder.  Kidney stone.  Don't recommend it.

A step at a time.

I have noticed this before, but it is so worth noticing again - you all are terrific.   I find it awfully heartening to find out that there are (obviously brilliant and perceptive!) people out there, ones who know me in real life, and ones who only know me from the blog, who think well for me, as well as of me. In such a beautifully thoughtful way.

Nobody better ever pick on the Internet around me, because I tell you, it has brought me more than I can ever possibly measure.

Spent the week paring the corners off my budget and exploring different ways to expand my business.  I have some ideas and got some notions from others; unfortunately everything takes time, so let us hope for slightly looser pocket strings in my existing customer base while I try this out.  
Oddly, I feel better.  Faced this set of my own failings, working on a plan....if it succeeds that's great, and if it doesn't, well......then I'll have a new life.  And that will be OK too.  Transition sucks, but you know me well enough now to know how I love me some evolution.  Plus I had a revelation while thinking about it, a good one, though that's a post for another day.

And I stand corrected.  I am a creative person.   I will make sure not to doubt that again.

In the meantime, I went for a walk this weekend.   I have such a mixed relationship with walking.   The very first time I ever walked in the woods I was in first grade and I went with Rob-from-my-class and his family and by the end of the day I had a gorgeous worm-eaten walking stick that I kept for years and a crush on Rob, which was more likely a crush on Rob's mom, who was the yoga-teaching hippy mom at my school.  They lived by the lake and fed the geese and thought about the environment and were the first people I ever knew who had those 5 gallon bottles of water for drinking and cooking.  It was like going to another, very, very cool planet. 

But other than that first experience, and walking by the ocean at my aunt's house - I hated it.  Walking out of doors?  With the bugs and stuff?  And sweat?  (I was a very girly little girl).  Even when I was young and limber and well able to walk the lead for a day, I got through hiking by shutting my head down and going on auto pilot.   Which kind of misses the point, yes?   Walking in NY is ok, cause there is ALWAYS stuff to be amused by and usually friends - walking and talking is great.  

These days the bugs don't bother me so, and I have rediscovered the beauty of discovering what might be under a leaf, but I am older and creakier and less fit - it takes a half an hour for my hip to loosen up and stop hurting and about an hour UNTIL my foot starts to ache.  So I have tended to avoid.   But more and more I hate being limited to 'indoor girl' and the aches and pains which once seemed like a reason NOT to do things now seem more like a reason to DO something. 

Ferociously determined is just another way of saying obstinate as a pig and 40 can bite me in the ass if it thinks its going to make me LESS.  Not that I have a plan.  More an inclination.  I like inclinations better than plans anyway.

So I went for a walk in the park near the canal with a friend and had a fine time and my foot never even really hurt much after an hour and a quarter which is huge thing and it was only a little bit sore this morning and we saw naked trees and people with happy wet dogs and geese and ducks and no squirrels which is odd, and reproduction Durham boats and a spinning wheel through a window and watched the river current and I wore her son's hat cause I forgot my own (bad knitter!) and it kept sliding up until I looked a complete dork, and that was funny too.   And at the end we were walking by the canal and there were three ducks, one white and two green headed, and the white one was diving for something tasty and I do not think there is much in the world I like better than a duck's ass pointed at the sky with his little orange feet paddling hard to balance him.

Which led to me calling out to the duck - loud - "do it again, baby".  And then to his friends, "Give me some mallard ass, lemme see your duck ass".   Which they did.

My friend, needless to say, laughed.  But seriously.  What is better than diving-duck butt? 

I'll tell you what's better, is a few minutes later when a small group of four landed in formation, wings back breaking and slicing the water like art.

 

Trout for thought*

Sheep & Goats at large, I am frightened.  I know I am not alone, but the fear is so large now it is sort of preventing me from talking about anything else.  Have to say it aloud to start maneuvering around it.  So here I go: I am scared to death of what comes next.

I was going to tell you a funny story about the cat, but well.....that would be a kind of bullshit, yes? (It was a good story though)

Business is bad.  We've had three of the worst months ever - a term I keep having to redefine - in the last 8 months.  Our single biggest customer hasn't made a substantial order from us in a year.  Yesterday I cut people's hours 20% and my own salary for the second time. 

Today I have to rewrite my personal budget and decide if I can still afford to fund 100% of the healthcare coverage I offer the people who work for me.

Some of this is not my fault - the lack of liquidity in the marketplace is a far more effective illustration of trickle down theory than actual trickle down economics ever proved to be.
But the most paralyzing thing about what's happening is that some of it is my fault and that is not something I need to make any more excuses about.  I don't mean that in a self-immolating way, but yesterday I was hit in the face with the wet trout of truth.

I have been reading The Fluent Self on and off since JoVE first mentioned it and I find it a weird combination of compelling and repellent, in the way of things that have a message you do not want to hear.  I have been talking about feeling stuck for months.  Years really.  And the Fluent Self is about destuckification.  Terrifying. 
So I read and then avoid, read and avoid.  Yesterday, I read "It's Not the Economy" and this I cannot avoid, this is the wet trout between the eyes. 

Read it, I'll wait.

I have this love/hate relationship with my business - love the independence, really not  interested in the product.  Hate the responsibility, love the flexibility.   Wish someone else was holding me accountable, can no longer imagine working for any one else.  Unable to visualize how to transform it into something that is weighted more to the plus than the minus. Stuck.  Much rather think about yarn and perfume and books and love and friends and sex and cooking and the cat and family and ......

What I am living is more than duty and less than commitment, a fucked up middle ground that has bred a kind of panicked paralysis where I can come up with 1000 reasons why changing it for the better is impossibly out of reach and then sit there for another six months screwing around on the internet and seeing it get that much more out of hand.

I think I have been waiting for the universe to make the decision for me. 
My therapist often reminds me that silence is not empty and now I need to add the correlary that inaction is a choice.

I had this revelation yesterday as I read up on marketing consultants: everything I respond to in the material I am reading is aimed at people in creative fields - people selling their ideas and their work rather than goods.  I am not a creative person, but I do not need to be an artist to work in a field with more congenial values.  I need a new career.  But instead of letting this one implode and losing years to self-loathing, maybe I can transform it so I am not hanging my employees out to dry, so I can close or sell or grow it so it gives me more options, not fewer.

(Message to the universe:  I am looking (actually, actively, looking as opposed to hoping vaguely one falls from the sky into my parking lot) for a non-sleazy marketing consultant/business consultant with a perspective that straddles both my industry and my personality. 

And as long as you are looking into stuff, Universe, a yoga teacher. The right kind.  kthxbye)

*title belongs to the goddess Claudia

Interlude.

I am starting to understand the ways in which basic rules for civilized life serve a purpose, no matter how stuffy or pointless they might seem.

I have spent the day in my bathrobe after a bad night's sleep - a muscle spasm in my shoulder that has been my unhappy companion for 6 weeks or more, causing odd pains to run down my right arm and inevitably waking me after four hours.
I arose cranky at 10 after several disjointed sleep segments, read and made lunch and read Pride and Prejudice until my lids drooped and napped - ironically the couch upon which I slept one night to cause the initial spasm is also the only I can prop myself for comfortable sleep at times - until awakened by a very upsetting dream in which a person whose place in my life I currently doubt did something to rather confirm those doubts.  Thanks ever so, unconscious mind.

Now I am sweaty, cross, mildly depressed, premenstrual, feeling like all my ideas come only from opposition rather than creation, and suffering from that vague feeling of not being entirely upon the earth that sometimes accompanies a day when you do not dress or move around enough. 

If I were the kind of person who never lay down in her clothes or always did the dishes and never let the housekeeping get away....well, I supposed I might take to secret drinking instead, and would not be me anyway, so the speculation is useless.  
But the thing that strikes me in the between the lines reading of Lizzie Bennet's life on this trip through is how much ritualized boredom there is, particularly for the women.    Of course, we have ritualized boredom too, it's just noisier.

Nothing profound to say, really, just trying to get back in the habit of blogging and of not being so guarded.  Maybe, like in the folktales, I hope that naming my mood will destroy its power.  A shower might help as well.

the yarn we make OWNS the yarn we buy

Also I want to make sweet sweet love to the Verizon network specialist. 

My Internet went bye-bye Sunday night and unusually, it was not a problem with the Mac Time Capsule thingy, which is a clever idea but an imperfect technology and takes a little time off every once in a while, but with the FiOS router which lost it's IP address. Or something.  I was describing this to someone last night and I said iSp which makes me feel retroactively dumb, but there's no way to correct that without looking like a tool, so I shall have to just soldier on.

Tech A got a little forest-for-the-trees about the presence of the secondary Mac router which no-ma'am-we-cannot-provide-support-for, and obviously the failure of the Mac unit to communicate with the Verizon base-station is not our problem.  No matter that I pointed out that a) it had never had a problem in the previous 6 months of my FiOS relationship and b) it was the VERIZON router that was failing to be seen wirelessly, not the Mac router, which was, by the way, disconnected and unplugged and no longer involved IN ANY WAY, please imagine it to be in Tahiti enjoying a pleasant rest, and yet the Verizon router was still not working, let us focus on that please.

He was a Mac hater and once he exhausted the 2 steps on his script had nothing to add except to explain to me that he found the Mac upgrades difficult.  To which I said, I would be sure to take that into account the next time I buy a computer, but it was rather late to do anything about it NOW.  Could we focus on the moment?

Fortunately he recognized the moment I was about to go from Forgive me, can you tell me what comes next now?  to WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CANNOT OFFER ANOTHER SOLUTION YOU MISERABLE SON OF AN ACRYLIC AFGHAN and passed me up the line to Tech 2, a network specialist, who helped me change my encryption, which had mysteriously reset itself and got me back on line in 40 seconds, at which point I professed my love and elevated him to the status of god.

I get antsy when deprived of email.  I am however, trying to spend less time on line.  Someone said something on Facebook the other day that struck a cord:   Am I going to get where I want in life spending 6 hours a day on Ravelry?
Now, I do not spend 6 hours a day on Ravelry, but I have been, if you add it all up, a little more involved with the ether than is strictly useful, or even healthy, for the last little while.  It is so easy to get distracted and read fascinating things and chat with friends and flirt with boys and look at Facebook and scan patterns and order shoes and cruise how-tos on any possible subject until suddenly, it's bedtime and you've been on your ass all evening and how did that happen? 

Life's Rich Pageant includes many things that are outside the magic box and this is good to remember.

In other news:

So, new president last week.  That was cool.  I am keeping the counter in the sidebar for a little while, I like seeing it at zero hour.  And I have added the White House Blog to the sidebar.  Someone asked me why I didn't blog the Inauguration/transition.  Truth is, I didn't have much to say:  It was a good show, I'm a fan, Dick Cheney in a wheelchair was noteworthy but in the end a bit unsatisfying (I would have liked it maybe if the earth had opened and Satan had come to collect his soul personally, but then, I only believe in Satan as a metaphor anyway). The speech was good, I got a bit choked up watching our new president's face assume the office - it was nice to see a political figure who takes that seriously, who has some gravitas.  I enjoyed watching the previous president's face while Obama indicted his entire philosophy of governance.   I was glad that there didn't seem to be anyone with a gun, I was on edge for the worst possible thing all the time.  And for sure, this is a remarkable moment in marking progress in race relations.  But only a moment. 

And nothing's fixed in a moment.  Racism and sexism still haunt this nation, and there is much work to be done to repair the errors of the past and build a nation we can all breathe in.   He's made a start I approve of.  It IS nice not to flinch with shame when the news comes on.   I really liked that that was the tone he took, no more easy solutions. Or non-solutions.

In a very positive way, I say....we'll see. 

Been losing yarn recently - the gorgeous gray Shetland I spun several years ago eludes me - I am trying to lay my hands on it so I can finish the last bag of locks and make a determination as to what I can do with it.  (Also I had a house guest this weekend I wanted to show it to).  No where to be found.

2 skeins, dk-ish to light worsted weight 2 ply, a bit sheepy smelling, answers to the name Freedom?  Seen it?

Also I made a thoroughly awesome and somewhat sparkly skein of fat fluffy yarn at SOAR.  Well I began it at SOAR in Maggie Casey's excellent retreat session, and finished it over Christmas (yay for remembering a new technique for several inert months.  Can't find my notes either).  Can I find it?  No.  I took it to the office for a daylight picture a month ago.  It's not at work any more.  It is in none of the usual places.  SUPER bulky but light and airy.  Natural gray with streaks of blue firestar.  Yarn I made the way it is ON PURPOSE.  And pretty.

 
It WAS going to be a hat.   A really, really good one.  The fiber was from Morro.  Sob.

I'm obsessed with gray yarn right now. 

The only knitting going on is slow progress on an old sweater.  Somehow I have made up my mind I need to finish it before I go on and lord, it bores me.  It's blue.  My favorite blue, mind you. 

Took this months ago when lady bugs were in season.  So it is even a LUCKY blue sweater now.  Not that you could tell by my progress. 

I want gray.  Or cashmere. Or new.  Or all three.  Or two of the three. 

I know, I know, start something.  But the thing I detest most about myself recently is the not finishing a damn rubbishing thing.  So it's a struggle for my soul now, not just a sweater.  Rassenfracking transitional stages.  Fucking evolution of the self.  Dammit.

I spun this weekend, that was cool. 

As the good doctor said to me recently, really, I am great.  I know how it might look from far away, but I am.  There are half written posts littering the place, posts that might even be good and worth reading, posts with books, and racism and growth and steam curled around cooking pots and books and lost skills and respecting history, but me, I have been as settled as the wind for a while and nothing is finished.  I might have mentioned it?

(I know the title makes no sense, I started out intending to write about the spinning.  Everything in the fullness of time, my poppets)

Auld Aquaintance

So, can I let you in on a little secret?  I didn't hate aught eight.  Not a bit.   Everywhere I go people are muttering good riddance, and I feel bad going, no, it all turned out to be kinda terrific. 

This doesn't mean that I am not worried about the future, my house value, my business, our country, the economy, the old president, the new president, Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, whether or not my brother and mother will murder each other, alternative fuels, the state of the world or the inevitable return of the appalling Governor of Alaska.  But a year is a big thing, a vast and astonishingly fast moving thing and it can hold a lot.
Mine mostly held good stuff.  Or stuff I ended up feeling good about, if you want to look at it from another angle.

I like New Year's in general though.   I like the idea of a holiday of self assessment.  A pause to consider before getting on with the business of living.

In truth I spent most of 08 thinking about one thing.  Well, a person.  Sort of in relation to a thing.  Or maybe concept?   But what I was doing really was thinking about my own belief in myself, my perceptions, my identity and comfort with all these, and learning how to plant a flag on who I am.
There were arguments as friendships redefined themselves and moments of panic and fear as I began to let some of my edges show on purpose.  It's not that they never showed before but it was more like they were escaping in unpredictable ways, rather than just being a part of me.  Trying to hold them back went poorly a lot of the time and the first attempts to just be were bumpy. 

Did you know I am funny?   I had no idea.  Also, I've been cheerful for about 5 months now, long enough that I have started to stop referring to it as freakishly happy and just started to call it me.  I dunno, I could go on and on about the little things and how they all add up but that seems boring and also, a bit forest-for-the-trees, so let's just say - that hope doesn't seem either forlorn or quite as audacious as it used to be .  And for that reason alone I will remember 2008 with fondness.

I read Neil Gaimen's blog pretty regularly, which is odd only in that the only one of his books I have read is 2/3 of Coraline.  (Which was great but I was reading at someone's house and that was as far as I got while I was there.  I liked it enough that now INTEND to read a number of his titles.  So many books.....)  I dunno how I missed him during the heavy science fiction and fantasy years.  I think I associated him with comic books at a time in my life I thought that that was a geeky boy thing, and never got back to it after I discovered I LIKE geeky boys.  And their things.

I like the blog though, I think the way he handles his fame is really wise and interesting and he seems like a genuinely nice man and honestly self-effacing, a thing there are not very many of, particularly on blogs.   Anyway, I like what he said about new years very much, so I am going to quote it, advise you to read the whole post with particular attention to the obituary link, and wish you a very wonderful evening and the best possible 2009 we can all manage working together.

"I'm lucky. I have good friends, and I have a fine family. I get to work with amazing people. 

And in addition to everything I said in http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/12/as-i-was-saying.html....

...I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be,  be wise, and that you will always be kind."

He should think about writing, yes?

When I am an old woman I shall.....be myself.

So I was knitting with friends this weekend - I know, shocking!  I made actual progress on an ancient project and someday when I am home during daylight I shall show you - and at some point I remembered I had two new books of poetry in my bag.

As one does.

I forget what brought it up, the conversation was wide ranging, but I pulled them out and passed around the poems that made me find the books in the first place.  

I've been interested in poetry recently, there's something about the small vivid moments of perception, of memory or retroactive understanding, of beauty in the dark and sadness in the light that is really drawing me right now, and in the way of the universe I keep finding gorgeous ones that remind me of this.  Or possibly I see what was always there now that I'm awake to it. 

As one does. 

If one is lucky and paying attention.

So Tuesday night I had an interesting conversation with my therapist (about food mostly, and mothers and daughters and body identity and all the lines between them), and later a bowl of broth with rye bread and goat cheese and a ginger muffin or two, and then I was restless.   TV was stupid, internet was dull, the eleventy books I am reading did not appeal and knitting was too far away (about 4 WHOLE feet).

So I took a bath.  And I took my poetry with me.  I was sitting in the bubbles and I saw my hands against the cream of the page.  And I thought, when did I become the kind of woman who reads poetry, who makes herself cry reading poetry aloud even, in the bath, with a leaf green manicure? 

(The Colonel, Carolyn Forche)

I had paragraphs more here about becoming who you actually are, but it was pompous and annoyed me.  Some other time.....
I will say the library in my bathroom is starting to amuse me: I was having all kinds of trouble settling down to anything this past fall, and the jet wash of this is a thin film of partially read books on every surface of my house, including the radiator by the tub.  (Also, no matter how I try I cannot get into Eldest.  Same problem with Eragon.  I never learn.)

(I was actually reading Anna Frater but was too lazy to go fetch the book out of the bathroom.  Plus the Colonel is a mind bending poem.  And the photo pleased me.)

A not un-typical conversation

Juno: so I made TMW laugh really hard

 Smartgrrl: excellent.

  tell me

1:02 PM Juno: you know that apple yogurt thing that came with breakfast in Red Hook?

Smartgrrl: yes.

 Juno: I have been mildly obsessed with it.

 Smartgrrl: since first bite, I know

  actually since first sight -- I remember you were getting antsy when they didn't bring it out right away

  :)

1:03 PM Juno: I have strong feelings about fruit

  anyway. so I only had ginger golds in the house

  and those are great, but I thought the flavor would be wrong, you want a milder sweeter apple for that

1:04 PM so I got some galas and tried a batch and it was good..but not right. I had goat yogurt which is a strong flavor and I wasn't sure if they sweetened it or not

 Smartgrrl: right

1:05 PM Juno: so I am explaining this to TMW, and I'm going on about how you don't think about the flavor of certain things - like cucumber being seen as a mild flavor because its pale green and watery but really it's strong and distinct

1:06 PM and obvs. a granny smith is tart but really even galas are in some ways and so now I am thinking about the flavor of apples in a completely new ways and trying different ones to see which would make the best yogurt/apple/cinnamon mix......

  I get this way

  and TMW makes this noise.

1:07 PM Smartgrrl: yummy noise?

 Juno: disgusted.
And I go "I know! I can't even make a fucking fruit salad without having a personal epiphany"

 Smartgrrl: hahahahaha!

  that's hilarious!

1:08 PM Juno: I thought so.

  So then I go, Sorry dude

and she's like, that's the most insincere apology I have EVER heard.

 Smartgrrl: ha!

1:09 PM Juno: And I go "that's because I am not actually apologetic about it, duh.   It's the way I am and you just have to deal, EVEN when it completely annoys you."

  and then I say - I am SO blogging this.

  And then she laughed and laughed.

1:10 PM Smartgrrl: awesome

 Juno: And now I think if I blog this IM about the conversation, it will be even MORE amusing.

  I think that might be the definition of meta

 Michelle: totally

1:11 PM Juno: I do try and get the most out of the sands in my hourglass. In my own small way.

 Smartgrrl: heh

1:12 PM Juno: this is after I claimed to my knitting group that I was oddly at peace and had been for months and it was making me boring.

  And K looked at me and said, I will always find you FASCINATING

1:13 PM and I said, yeah, like a science experiment gone horribly wrong.

 Smartgrrl: what?

  to me, science experiments going horribly wrong end in explosions.

1:14 PM Juno: explosions, penicillin

  cyborg tyranny

  you never know

 Smartgrrl: heh

1:15 PM Juno: I thought it was funny

 Smartgrrl: it is funny.