there is only fear in here, where I live

Today we’re going to play Let’s Pretend.

Imagine that some years ago, when you were in a bad relationship, lonely, and trying to build a life, you reached out to someone you slightly knew in the hope that you could make a new friend. Imagine that you behaved like yourself around this person, said normal things, treated her the same way you’d treat anybody. That you laughed and talked with her, that you made her dinner, that you finally drove her home in the wee hours because things went so well between you.

Imagine that a week later she emailed you with a laundry list of all the things you’d said that offended her, all the ways that you were a bad person, and that she told you that you should probably just keep your mouth shut if you didn’t want people to think you were stupid and bigoted. That she refused even to see you so you could return a DVD she’d lent you, and you had to mail it back to her.

Imagine that for the next two years you constantly heard her words ringing in your head. You watched every word that came out of your mouth, petrified that one of those words would be the wrong one, and you’d offend someone, or someone (everyone?) would find you silly or detestable.

Imagine that now, as a rule, you fear people. Not just strangers, who might want to hurt you, but all people. People who like or love you, people who are friendly with you, people who are family. What if you say the wrong thing and these people decide they don’t like or love you anymore? You thought you could trust her, and she ruined your perception of yourself; who can you trust now?

Imagine that the idea of holding a ten-minute conversation with someone makes your heart drop into your stomach. Imagine that “casual party” means the same thing to you as “giving a speech on supercomputers to the Senate”. You don’t know anything about what you should say to them, you don’t know what they’re going to think of you, and the whole notion is terrifying.

Imagine that you are afraid all the time. Afraid that you’ll have to talk to the cashier at the supermarket. Afraid that someone will walk into your office at work, or call you on the phone, and you’ll have to talk to them – talking to others involves risk and fear, every time. Afraid that you’ll be asked to go out with friends, again, and you know that you can’t explain why you don’t want to. The only safe place is at home, with the one person who understands you. Everywhere else in the entire world is somewhere in a range of hostility, from bearable to unbearable.

Read those last two paragraphs again. Don’t just skim over them, and think that I’m writing this with the “imagine” framing device to be cute and creative; close your eyes and really consider it. Afraid all the time. Nowhere is safe.

Everywhere there are people, and you are afraid of people. Every time you open your mouth, all you can hear in your words is ways that you could be sounding insulting, or stupid.

Anything with people is not fun, it is frightening. You are sad and indignant at the rise of “networking”, and don’t understand why your success at doing a plain old job should hinge on your ability to mingle at cocktail functions. You can do one easily; the other is a minefield.

Even the familiar places – your gym, your workplace, your favorite restaurant – have only a bearable hostility level. But it is all hostile.

Imagine that this is how you live your life. Every hour. Every day. Every sentence; every glance.

This is how social anxiety feels.

those lucky auto mechanics

Update: I’ve discovered that the links to the NYT from this blog don’t seem to send you right to the article, but instead to a login page. I didn’t mean to do this, sorry. For some reason, I was able to click right to the article when I Googled it. The first one is called “My Personal Credit Crisis”, and the second is called “The Case for Working With Your Hands”.

I read a couple of very interesting articles in the New York Times Online yesterday. One of them was this one, the tale of an economic correspondent for the New York Times who found himself in a subprime mortgage and $50,000 of credit card debt. Believe me, it’s a story worth reading. I wanted to roll back time, jump into his life, and criticize him and his wife for their thoughtless spending habits, but that would not only be impossible but very wrong of me. I couldn’t help feeling a little of that Alexandra Penney feeling towards him, though – the monthly take-home pay that he characterized as impossible to make ends meet on is slightly more than my own.

The other interesting article was this one. Slate wrote a gushing, glowing review of the book that this article is excerpted from – a book that echoes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but is, I think, more a practical discussion of why the working world is going in the wrong direction these days. I firmly believe one of the key tenets of the article: that there is value in the skilled trade professions that is absolute and incorruptible, and that the practice of looking down on these professions because they don’t require higher education is absurd and must end.

(I have something of a personal investment in this notion, because my mother is a professor who very clearly looks down on skilled trades, while my father is a born and bred mechanic/carpenter/tradesman who was unwillingly sewn into an office job in his final years in the Navy.)

I was inspired to think quite hard about my own job and my own direction when I was reading this article.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this. Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate.

Crawford writes of the lack of visible progress inherent in most office jobs. The work is unending, non-episodic, often tedious, and generally does not have any measurable output. In my own job, I see letters that are signed and mailed out, and a few weeks later I see medical records placed on my desk by the mailman. I see letters come in requesting material and I see that material go out. There is measurable work being done. When a case settles, I share in a tiny percentage of the relief of our clients, because I did work – wrote letters, organized papers, shared insights – that had a part in achieving this result.

But I hadn’t thought about the kind of results he’s talking about: a motorcycle comes into his shop broken, and the owner drives it out of his shop fixed. I am not often given the chance to directly help a client achieve a good result. My mind returned to a thought I’d picked up and turned over a long time ago – how unfair it is that paralegals are not allowed to offer legal services directly to the public, because doing so would be the unauthorized practice of law. I firmly believe this rule should be modified such that paralegals can directly complete very simple tasks, all designated specifically in the law so as to avoid that slippery slope problem, so that people with simple legal problems and no money can be helped. That is something I’d like to do for a living; that, even though it’s office work, I’d consider real, rewarding work.

But only attorneys can do the kind of work I’m talking about, and there are precious few attorneys who are interested in that kind of direct help, rather than renting their laurels to the highest bidder.  Honestly, yesterday morning was the first time I’ve seriously considered law school in years, for this crazy altruistic reason.

Teaching yoga might be helpful, and might help make the world a better place karmically, but it’s not necessarily going to provide any visible positive result to me. Change of the yogic sort takes a long time, and is the work of the student far more so than the teacher. Life coaching is sort of the same way. I still believe that these vocations are in my future, but after reading this article I have a yen for using my brain to work with my hands – constructively, not literally, as being a plumber is not for me.

There’s a little storefront down the street from my office where an attorney sells help with pro se legal issues (pro se means you represent yourself, and it’s for things like landlord/tenant, DUIs, little stuff like that). He will give you legal advice, but you don’t really engage him per hour ad infinitem like most attorneys. He does the work that I’d love to do. I’ll bet he doesn’t make much in his little shop – probably not enough to employ a paralegal – but he may know someone else who does the same kind of work who’s looking for help. I think I’ll stroll down there next week and ask him.

Friday afternoon yogurt discussion

So, a couple of weeks ago I came to a horrifying epiphany: I just don’t like fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt. I’ve been eating it for years and not enjoying it remotely as much as pre-blended yogurt. You never really can get it blended all the way, and plain American-style yogurt is DISGUSTING and there’s nothing you can say to change my mind on that opinion.

I finally accepted that I just prefer blended yogurt, and buying fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt meant I had to put up with something I really didn’t like. And you know what? Yogurt-buying suddenly became a zillion times more difficult. Practically all the brands you’ll find on sale are fruit-on-the-bottom. The only fairly inexpensive blended yogurt that comes in more than one flavor is Yoplait, which I love, but which is never on sale.

Which makes me think I must be the only person in the world who doesn’t like fruit-on-the-bottom. Am I?

only I can do my own backbends

I could have written the first two and a half paragraphs of this article. It’s a notion about sex that’s very near and dear to me – the hilarious, messy reality of actual sex that is extremely difficult to accept if you’ve been raised on a lifetime of Hollywood sex.

The rest of the (somewhat long) article is good too, funny and sweet, but the first page was what really got me.

—

Yesterday I went to a fairly meh yoga class. There wasn’t much in it that I felt was remarkable. I was also disappointed by my inability to lift up into a headstand on abdominal power (attention was drawn to me in front of the rest of the class while I was struggling), and I think I need to work on that at home. There was a woman two mats down from me who is a new teacher at the studio, and she’s the kind of woman who makes my self-esteem plunge. She makes easy all the stuff about appearance that I find difficult – she’s slim, with unblemished legs, and she wears dangly earrings even when she’s doing yoga, and her hair is never in her face or lank with sweat, and her face doesn’t get flushed when she’s working. I also saw in glimpses yesterday that her yoga is extremely lovely, and she has long hamstrings that allow for perfect forward bends. She is also the woman who snubbed me out of a conversation I tried to join several weeks ago after class.

I was not feeling very charitable towards this woman by the time we got into savasana. (Very, very, very long savasana yesterday, too. Like ten minutes. After several minutes of a restorative I disliked. Boo.) I was jealous of the stuff she could do that I couldn’t, and I tried reminding myself that in a few years my hamstrings would loosen up all the way, and I’d be able to hold crow as steadily as she did with enough practice, and so on. I was feeling peaceful again, and one final sniping thought crept in: “Well, I’ll bet her backbends don’t look like mine.”

It occurred to me suddenly that of course her backbends don’t look like mine. The thought was meant competitively, but I realized that even if her backbends are deeper and better-looking than mine, they are executed with her body, not with mine. And no one else’s body looks like mine when I’m doing yoga; what I do is completely unique to me and the flesh that I inhabit. In this light, competitiveness (and imitation) is mu, and the point is to make one’s own poses as refined as possible. I find this freeing, and I only hope I can hang on to it in the face of all those enviously flexible hamstrings out there.

—

My letter to Dear Margo was published today. I am not remotely surprised to hear that everyone on the planet, including Margo herself and all the Wowowow commenters, believes that I am wrong about this situation. Rather than making me angry that it doesn’t matter when my wishes are trampled on, at this point it just makes me sad that social anxiety is so poorly understood. I’ve tried to write a post about what social anxiety feels like when you’re inside it, and I think I’ll publish it this weekend.

I admit part of me wishes the office had burned down

On Tuesday DT and I started noticing a nasty smell in and near the copy room. It took me right back to 1993, as it smelled EXACTLY like a spiral perm. It was a thick, burning smell that got steadily worse, and by the end of the day I was starting to find it hard to breathe. The smell stuck to my clothes and hair when I went home.

On Wednesday morning (yesterday), OG came in, and with her I-ain’t-takin-this-shit hat on, she called electricians, the power company, the computer company, and an HVAC guy, all to see what the heck was wrong and how the smell could be gotten rid of. So we had all kinds of people running in and out, the servers all went down for about an hour, I had people telling me to fax things when the fax machine was off and I couldn’t save the documents they were dictating to me, and generally it was headless-chicken-chaos. When things got up and running again I worked steadily and stressfully for about two hours, which is very rare – I usually have little 20-minute bursts of work in between longer periods of sitting with my chin in my hand. Meanwhile a client had come in to meet with EP and the computer guy was still tinkering in the copy room. It was bizarre.

The problem, as it turned out, was not a slow electrical fire creeping through the entire building, as it seemed (the smell was prominent upstairs on Wednesday as well), but a battery melting in one of the servers. I think. Something like that, a battery thing.

The afternoon was pretty slow, and I was exhausted as I was driving home. Stress is very powerful to me because I so infrequently allow it to affect me.  I had a snack, watched the Simpsons, and did a darn good 45 minutes of yoga. Bird of paradise is getting a little more comfortable, and I pushed my edge on a couple of arm balances. I still don’t know how I can get my knee to stay put when I shove it over my shoulder for this balance, and not slide down my arm, but it’s getting a little better.

I did some pigeon push-ups (which are difficult to describe so I won’t try) to try and loosen up my right knee, which had been inexplicably hurting all day. It worked. Yay yoga!

After BF got home, we changed clothes and went out to dinner for MM’s birthday. MTAE, this dinner lasted two and a half hours, and it was comparatively short by MP’s dinner standards. I ate heartily and well, but I was tired when we left for dinner at 6:45, and sitting for two and a half hours felt like it pretty much removed whatever benefit the yoga gave me.

My left leg – the one affected by that nerve problem in my back – woke me up around 4 this morning with pain. I’m pretty pissed off that the pain was entirely gone in the week before I went for that stupid epidural and now is worse than ever. I’m going back for a checkup with the bone doctor next week, and I’m going to tell her that I want to treat with Aleve from here on out, because that seemed to, you know, work. And I didn’t have to miss any work or cause BF to miss work for that treatment. (Which worked.)

So I guess I’m pretty out-of-sorts today. Sorry about the grumbling.

one of the rare times I wish I twittered

This day is fucking WACK.

whey is actually pretty gross, by the way

I am jammed full of dairy. Last night I threw all the little leftover cheeses we had with some half & half into a pot and melted it down into an amazingly delicious cheese sauce, then we had it over broccoli. It was pretty rich. Then, for dessert, we had my new favorite dessert of all time: tres leche cake. I had this out at dinner at a tapas restaurant last weekend and discovered that it is to me what tiramisu is to so many. (Tiramisu doesn’t do anything for me, but I’ve found generally that people just go wild for it.) It’s basically yellow cake soaked in three kinds of milk (hence tres leche), and it is just heavenly. It had a rich whipped cream topping, and the entire thing was made from scratch by BF. I didn’t want to help at all so I could lavish compliments without feeling self-serving. Which I did.

So I feel as if you could wring curds and whey out of my hair if you squeezed hard enough. Oof.

I don’t have much else to say today. Going out to dinner with the good ol’ fam tonight. Again. I made another pair of earrings that I don’t particularly like after I took the pictures in the last post. I am so happy about all these things I’ll have to give away! I found a good hostess gift for my mom for July (she does not have pierced ears, so it was harder than it sounds), and I’m still playing the waiting game with the calligrapher. It is not as much fun as Hungry Hungry Hippos.

self-made mala

I promised pictures!

It's less blurry in real life.

Okay, I know, this picture is HORRIBLY out of focus. If Santa had listened to me about the new camera, we would not have this problem. The beads are wood of some kind, and there are 108 of them, with two spacer beads and an ending bead, the flat thing on the right (it’s a silver tag charm with “balance” written on one side. Hello, Libra). They’re made this way so you can count prayers or mantras, and the spacer beads make it easier to keep track. Today I wore it wrapped three times around my wrist and the silver tag dangling. I love it already, even if I may never count prayers on it.

This afternoon I stopped by A.C. Moore and bought some earring supplies, and I made m’self some earrings, too.

Made for about six bucks altogether, in about 40 minutes.

I don’t really love the brown triangle ones, but they’ll make a nice gift. The ones on the right match the mala, and the butterfly ones were just pretty charms that I couldn’t resist. I bent the wires myself on that one.

I think this might become a hobby!

Things wot I made!

et cetera, et al.

I called my dad this morning. I got the number to the embassy, used a phone card, and called him at his desk. I had sent him an e-card (as well as a paper card) for his birthday, and the e-card was never picked up. He also didn’t reply to an email I sent him at the beginning of May. I was worried that he was out of the country, had changed his email address, or was perhaps dead. No, he was at his desk, just unbearably busy and way behind on email. He asked me three times if everything was all right. I guess I couldn’t keep the weariness out of my voice.

—

I learned how to make falafel at home. It’s so easy. You have to try it. (I left out the mint, and baked them as a commenter suggested instead of frying.)

I also made myself a mala with materials I got at A.C. Moore. I will post a picture this evening if I remember. The last time I tried making jewelry was many years ago and I sucked at it; now, I can’t wait to go back and buy some earring posts to use up the leftover beads. More options for homemade Christmas presents!

BF was not at all surprised, as I was, that I was able to make a mala that looked perfectly passable as a purchasable item of jewelry in an hour or so. “You can do anything,” he said, throwing up his hands. He has not met Tanaudel.

—

I have been struggling for a week or so with the practicalities of the tattoo I hope to get in a couple of weeks. I have engaged a calligrapher from Florida, who may or may not be able to get me his work in time for me to get the tattoo, in time for it to heal, in time for going on vacation in July where I will be out in the sun a lot. I may or may not be able to pay for all the expenses I have upcoming, including the tattoo itself, paying the calligrapher, getting our sink replaced, an expensive prescription, the monthly condo fee, etc. My brain keeps going over and over and over and OVER the day and dollar calculations, and I’ll be cutting it close in both time and money if all things go well and I don’t get a flat tire between now and June 15; if things go less than well I will be cutting it VERY close; and if things don’t go well the tat will have to wait for another couple of months. I know this, but my brain keeps running its finger down the list of calculations anyway. Again. And again. I wish I could afford cognitive behavioral therapy!

—

Some beautiful thoughts on this rainy morning – a morning in which I found it far more difficult than most to get on out of bed, to get on into the car, to walk on into the office. It was a lazy-ass weekend, the best kind I know.

A fortune from a Chinese restaurant where we ate last night: “He who hurries cannot walk with dignity.”

BF made a joke about walking with dignity out of a burning building and causing one’s own death for want of hurrying. Yes, well, dignity is not always called for, smart guy.

My mother: “When you’re really considering something, really thinking about it, there’s no one better than you.” In context, this was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten. We’ll see if she feels that way when she sees my tattoo in July. I’ve really thought about and considered that decision, too.

And, BF. We were discussing death. He had this to say about the death of loved ones: “I think it’ll just be a ‘parting of ways’…our journey was a good one and now we must walk apart.”

This is just how I feel. He has such poetry in his heart.

a lengthy, overcritical summary of the chakra workshop

We started off Saturday with a long discussion, an explanation of what’s been going on in each of our lives since the prior workshop, which was several months ago. Jeannine talked for a very long time, and she has the tendency to start talking all over again after someone else has finished what they have to say, either reiterating what she said previously or adding on to it. We are all supposed to be sharing, of course, and that includes the workshop leader, but I can’t help feeling that for her to dominate the conversation all day may have discouraged other people from talking more. And it clogged up the gears of the workshop, too. She has mentioned before that she’s very excessive in her third chakra, and the more I saw her and talked with her the more I agreed with this assessment – and it was in full force on Saturday.

I talked about my back/leg injury, about losing enough fear to be able to get a tattoo, about how stifled I have felt creatively and how my body has finally shouted loudly enough for me to figure it out. I’m not sure anything I said was groundbreaking, but in summing up what’s happened to me on the interior of my life I realized how important these things are to me – even though I’ve shared my feelings about them with practically no one else. It made me long for friends.

There were five other women there besides Jeannine, and I liked them all just fine. One of the women was a friend of Jeannine’s who took all things in the workshop with equanimity, didn’t really talk about herself, and on whose face was a look of utter disinterest and disdain when I was talking and making eye contact with her. I may have misinterpreted her look, but it was actually startling when I looked at her, making me want to shut my mouth mid-word so as to take that look off her face. My guess is that she was there to fill out the workshop and be supportive to Jeannine, not because she wanted to be there, and her energy was not really a positive addition.

After the first round of talking, and a singing bowls meditation, was about an hour of asana practice. I stopped going to Jeannine’s classes quite a long time ago because they were so difficult and, the next day, painful. The asana she did during the chakra workshops was always a lot more reasonable, so I never really felt like I had to prepare for them. Not Saturday. It was the same thigh-screaming, arm-burning, hopeless-feeling, horribly difficult asana practice as she usually teaches. Since I pledged to myself to stop going to classes that were too hard for me, I was pretty frustrated that I was forced into this one. So I did modifications and stopped in the middle of several minutes of kundalini frogs and moved in and out of warriors instead of holding them and totally didn’t care what the rest of them thought of me.

We had lunch, a potluck, and the rest of the women kept exclaiming how healthy it was. There was a salad that one of the women said she bought (I’m guessing at Whole Foods), and the main component looked like white lentils. I’ve never heard of white lentils, and she said uncertainly that she thought it was Egyptian bulghur, but either way I think I’ll look it up. It had the perfect balance between starchy and moist.

Over lunch there was more talking. Jeannine really whirlwinded us through the characteristics of the fifth, sixth, and seventh chakras during the day; if I hadn’t known anything about the system, I would have been thoroughly confused. As you move up the chakras, they get less easy to define and to treat therapeutically, but still…it was vaguer than I think it should have been. After lunch we took a short walk down to the water – her neighborhood is crazily put together and full of interesting people – and then we came back for more singing bowls, more meditation, more talking. Not a lot of this was specifically focused on any one chakra, which bothered me; part of what I liked about the prior workshops was that they were specific, one chakra at a time, focused and intense. This felt mixed-up and vague.

We chanted, each of the seven seed sounds of the chakras. For a long time. I have mixed feelings about chanting, but Saturday was interesting. My breath seemed to go on forever, allowing my voice to do the same, and the sound of it seemed as if it was coming from somewhere else at the same time as it was coming out of my throat. It caused a subtle vibration in my whole upper body – not the way a gong can make you vibrate, but as if I could feel the molecules moving as the electrons spun and spun. At one point I was sure that there were two voices coming out of my throat, one high and one low. When we moved into a circle so we could hear each other better, a good deal of this went away. Since chanting is supposed to be more powerful with more people, I’m not sure what this says about me. Nothing good.

Then we did an inner child regression. To be frank, I think the entire inner child concept is just stupid, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be involved in the best of times. But I was also overwarm, cranky, my legs were continually falling asleep from all the seated meditations and talking, and there was a very noisy squawking bird that called incessantly, circling the porch, as we attempted to meditate. It was so annoying that I found some very un-yoga-like thoughts about shotguns and the like. I tried asking it what it was trying to do for me, being as annoying as it was, but that didn’t make it shut up or extend my patience much longer.

During most of the inner child meditation I just blissed out to the sound of the singing bowls, going into nidra, I think. I don’t remember what we did to break them up, probably more talking, but the next thing was the past life regression that I’ve already discussed. Then there was some talking about what we saw during those meditations (I was the only one who really saw anything), and discussion of the aura, then we chanted some Sanskrit. This chanting did not go so well. She used fairly long lines of Sanskrit, so we mostly forgot what we were chanting before the phrase was over, and it’s hard for me at least to remember how the melody of the chant goes if it’s more than five or six syllables long. I read some of the prayer that I think we were chanting in the Jivamukti book I was reading yesterday, and I was pretty unhappy, as it invoked God in a very direct way. I don’t think it’s a good idea to do call-and-response chanting with students unless they know at least approximately what they’re singing, especially if it involves God. I feel very open about religion and so on, and I feel a little violated by it; I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I had a strong belief of some kind and went to services every week and then found out what I’d chanted.

Then it was over. Finally. And I went home. Muttering all the way.

Reading over this, I seem cantankerous and critical about the entire day, and how things went. I guess the reason for my bad feelings when I was going home was not just the vision I had in the past life regression but how poorly I thought a lot of the elements of the workshop were put together. There was discussion of doing a short singing bowls meditation with a potluck meal once a month with all of us, and as pleasant as I felt towards these other women, I don’t want to do that. At all. I think I’ve had enough of workshops for the time being.

Part of the reason was that Jeannine talked about the earth rebelling against our treatment of it, and about a lot of concepts that I haven’t come down from the fence about yet, with hippieish viewpoints. When I hear this kind of thing, I want to move further back to my firmly straight-and-narrow roots instead. It’s an act/react kind of thing. When I got home I didn’t want to think about anything that had to do with yoga, I was so tired of the flightiness and the unreasonable impracticality that Jeannine was espousing. I don’t know how to explain this any better, because of course I’m tolerant of what she has to say, even agreeing with a good deal of it, but…it bothers me when anyone in a position of authority assumes that everyone she’s talking to agrees with what she’s saying, and therefore goes farther towards caricature in expressing her opinion than she really should. A number of my professors in college did this, and I thought it was just as wrong then.

Whew. I think that’s enough.