bye

I’m shutting down the public part of this blog for a while. Peace & blessings.

gloom

A friend of mine from my days in New England died in a car wreck early Friday morning. He was a few years younger than me, perhaps not even 25. I can’t say I was surprised, per se; Tim lived a life that was neither safe nor responsible. But I cared for him, and I’m very sorry that he’s gone.

This cast something of a pall over my weekend. I couldn’t stop thinking, at odd moments, “Tim’s dead.” I still laughed and ate and taught and cooked and did what I was supposed to do, without dissolving into grief (that’s not really my style, anyway, not so far), but it was a sorrowful thing to bubble up in my mind every so often.

I came in this morning to immediate email messages from my boss that made me feel angry and inadequate. I worked for two hours on Saturday to catch up from last week’s mess, and still these emails told me that I wasn’t doing enough. Even despite the change in my job, that they fired our secretary and gave me her responsibilities – a move that should have made me feel more secure in the idea that they think I’m doing well here – and the accompanying knowledge of the files and close work with the attorneys, I am still very unhappy here. I feel stuck here, and I don’t feel like I’m working particularly well per my standards, and I am getting more depressed and inert and loath to get out of bed and drive to work as each day passes.

I’m reading a book called Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal. It’s about a woman whose husband dies suddenly in his early forties, and she discovers after his death that he’s had a series of affairs, none of which she’d had any conscious knowledge of. It’s an extremely emotional book, and the author does not come off well, by and large. It’s written well, but the blurbs are a little over-effusive compared to the actual book I’m reading.

The book is putting into my mind the terror of what my life would be like if BF left me suddenly, and that is a sincerely unpleasant experience. I am trying to continue on the thought path to purge the terror, but that’s not really happening, I’m just more fearful and sad about the idea of it as I go on.

The interesting thing about me and this book is that I have no idea how it got into my hands. I put it on my Amazon wish list and MM got it for me for Christmas, but I haven’t the foggiest idea why I wanted to read this book. It’s not my usual thing at all. The only thing I can think of is that it may have been referred to in The Meaning of Wife (at which I’m still plugging away), in some way that made me think it would be a good read. But I have no memory of that. It’s a mystery.

There’s work to be done this morning. And apparently I’m hopeless at the work done in the past. So wish me luck.

oog, the last 24 hours!

Yesterday I stayed at work until 7:00 in an attempt to organize a file with somewhere between 9 and 12 boxes of giant cluster-fuck mess in it. I made some headway, but not much. I’ll need to spend a lot more time on it before it’s presentable.

Then I went to the police station in the town where I live, because a police officer there was owed a subpoena service from our office, and I thought it would be cheaper for our client and more convenient for all if I just served him. I ended up waiting for the officer for 40 minutes, which meant at my billable rate that the cost was about the same as a private process server, if not more expensive. Sheesh. You’d think I would have been bored, waiting there with nothing to do, but it was kind of a relief to have nothing in front of me I had to consume, edit, or complete. I sat and stared. It was relatively pleasant.

I got home at 8:30, ate a Chick-Fil-A sandwich I’d picked up as a present to myself, and went to bed, because the alarm was set for 5:00, because I agreed to substitute for a 7 AM class this morning.

So, in the morning, I got up, stumbled through my shower, ate a small breakfast around 5:45, went to the studio, and found that the commercial-quality fire alarm was going off, full blast, all throughout the studio. It was incredibly loud. I searched the studio for a fuse box, and ended up finding the fire alarm box in the very back office, where I screwed with it until the alarm shut up. There was still a very noisy beeping coming from the lobby, and I had to fiddle with that box too, eventually screaming at it in frustration, until I figured out how to shut it up.

After that, I taught yoga to five people, most of whom were much older than my usual students, and I think I taught a good class, but I got some guff from them about how I was capable of more in the postures because I was younger. I am really tired of hearing that. I was extremely inflexible before I started yoga, okay, and I worked really hard, and anyone else can work hard too instead of going to yoga once a week and cracking jokes at the expense of someone who hasn’t had the privilege of living for 30 additional years as of yet.

Anyhow. I think I taught a good class.

Not my MRI. Just an example of how weird eyes look in MRI.

So then I took myself off to a radiology office for the brain MRI I had scheduled for 9:00. I was very, very early, and I settled in to read, but to my surprise they called me back early. They secured my head, gave me earplugs, and put in my CD, and I stayed still and breathed for 20 minutes while Ella & Louis, and Frank, and Carmen MacRae kept me company. I really like MRIs. I know for some people the claustrophobia is unbearable, but I just keep my eyes shut and breathe slow and smooth, and it’s kind of a nice relaxing episode for me. My co-worker told me she hates them because they’re super-loud, and I said they always give me earplugs. Maybe that’s why people don’t enjoy them; bring earplugs, everybody!

I finished before 9:00 thanks to being so early and the office’s efficiency, so I read a little more while I waited for my films, and then took them and left. (I looked at them in the car. I didn’t see any brain tumors, but I’m no neuroradiologist. My eyes looked really damn weird, though. The human body is so cool!) My intention was to go straight to work, but I realized I was very hungry. I thought, you know, it’s been like three hours since I ate my small breakfast, and lunch isn’t for another three hours, and so I think, lo and behold, that second breakfast might just be appropriate.

So I got some. A delicious egg-cheese-ham-bagel sandwich from a local bagel place. And orange juice. Delicious. And I went to work. And that brings us to now.

I cannot wait to go home and put my feet up and watch MTM and perhaps eat ice cream. It’s going to be a tough weekend, too, with my mom and a dance class included, so I look forward to next week. Of course, by then I’ll have to make some more headway on that cluster-fuck file, which leads us back in a nice circle to the beginning of this post. The end.

maybe I need a phrenologist

So I’ve had this headache. For, like, six weeks. It’s been on and off, and has been very mild all along, but it has been annoying and relentless and has sometimes crossed over into light sensitivity and malaise and weakness.

At the beginning of December, I went to the doctor. She prescribed no more Bikram, continuous aspirin, and trying to get a handle on my stress. I did these things to the best of my ability. She saw me two weeks following, and although I had more heartburn I had fewer headaches and so when she asked if I was feeling better, I answered yes with honesty. Since Christmas, though, the headaches have returned and changed in quality. So my referral appointment with a neurologist two days before New Year’s seemed like a great idea to me.

The appointment itself was weird, for a number of reasons, including the doctor not hearing me at all when I talked about my diet and exercise habits, inadvertently making me feel that I was inventing my hypoglycemia, giving me such an efficient exam that I wasn’t sure I’d really been examined, and his secretary going home during the appointment and leaving me alone in the office with him. (I read this terrifying novel when I was a kid, The Trouble with Wednesdays, about a girl getting molested by her dentist, and since then I’ve been seriously wary about being alone in a medical office with a male doctor.) He diagnosed atypical migraines. He recommended vitamins and ibuprofen, gave me samples of two migraine medications, and referred me for a brain MRI just in case.

Something he said has really stuck with me. He told me that there can be many reasons for a headache, involving brain chemistry and cranial nerves and whatnot, but the basic premise is that the headache occurs when something in the system gets overwhelmed. I wanted to respond with “Well, that would be me.”

I have been overwhelmed. At my original appointment in early December, the doctor asked me if I had been experiencing any more stress than normal. I thought for a moment and said “Let’s see, the holidays, my job, my other job, getting married, estranged from my father, my mother’s moving here…yeah, I guess so.” Hearing all those things stacked up and coming out of my mouth like that made me feel…overwhelmed, as if I can’t believe I’m really living it all. All along I’ve been telling myself that this is nothing compared to people who have children to deal with along with all the other stuff, or chronic illness, or dying parents, or whatever else. That’s how I live a lot of the time: feeling like a whiner for not handling my mild little life as well as I could, while people with bigger stresses are more graceful and don’t complain.

This time, I’m kind of not feeling the self-derision. I am struggling. I am hurting. As with my parental issues, denying the struggle and hurt and how it’s affecting me is doing me no good. I’m just…so afraid of being like some of the examples I’ve seen, from people who whine endlessly about their petty troubles to my mother who has this bizarre cycle of martyrdom and downplaying her illness and martyrdom again. I am admitting to myself that my head and my jaw legitimately hurt, that the pain is interfering with my quality of life, and while it’s not cluster headaches and hence could be worse, it could…you know…not be there at all.

The two medications he gave me were not winners, for different reasons. So I’m taking extra ibuprofen, taking the vitamins he recommended, trying to ignore the pain in my jaw, and moving along. No whining! But…a little bit of acknowledging. I think that’s the right balance.

Happy New Year

I feel a change.

Usually, for me, the new year feels a lot like the old year. I make resolutions with the hope that they’ll stick and my life will improve over time, but I think it’s pretty silly to imagine that a switch has flipped and everything is suddenly different because I threw out my old calendar and put up a new one.

When I was a little girl, we did a lot of car-traveling from state to state, and I always expected that when we passed over a state line, the license plates of all the cars around us would magically transform into plates for that new state. But it wasn’t like that; when we crossed over into North Carolina, the cars all stayed the same, some Virginia and some North Carolina and some other states, traveling along the same road as us. It was only the sign that told us that anything changed; the scenery was the same, trees and grass and pavement.

Of course, the topography of Virginia and the topography of North Carolina are different, on the whole, and the license plates are different too. You have to take the long view to see this. The differences are subtle mile by mile.

This time, though, I feel as if my outlook is different than it was four days ago. I’m trying to see this as a different year than last year because I had a rotten 2010. I also had an amazing end to 2010, with four wonderful days in BF’s company, since he was home from work, punctuated only by teaching and a few other commitments. I saw Black Swan by myself, and I went to the neurologist’s and to therapy. Mostly it was us together. That time made me feel more motivated than I’ve felt in over a year to find a different life to live. I need to write. I need to shape my leisure time more toward how I want to live. I need to find my fate, and then trust it and move toward it.

Maybe I don’t need to do all these things in the next twelve months, but for the first time in many a new year, I feel like those coming months are full of possibility, instead of being full of more of the same. I will do more and be more, I have faith, and at this time in 2012, I hope my life will be different.

resolute, 2011 edition

Whoo. I am so glad 2010 is over, and since I have friends who have had even bigger and more crappy things happen this year than I did, I know I’m not the only one.

Let’s take us a little look at my resolutions for last year before we get on to this year’s.

1. Be honest. I succeeded in this the very best way I knew how, and more importantly, I kept it in mind as I went about my business through most of the year. I’d call that a successful resolution, that I thought about it as frequently as I did.

2. Work harder on the house. I peaked at this in late fall, and discovered to my astonishment that I liked myself less when I was keeping up with all my chores. I have improved at doing a lot of the maintenance chores, cleaning the stove after meals etc., but I’m not constantly berating myself about the house being unkempt like I was for four years straight until now. I’m keeping in mind that it hurts exactly no one if the house is a little messier, and also keeping in mind that the house is nice to be in when it’s a little cleaner. I think remembering both those things simultaneously will help me to find a good balance.

3. Write more. Total failure, one that makes me sad. I’ve got to find a way to put this back in my life.

4. Find some private yoga clients. Fail, but things have evolved so that it’s not a bad failure, in my mind. Life would have been even more stressful with private clients to please.

5. Find a different job, or a way to give up full-time work. Success at the first, not so much at the second.

6. Decide about massage school. My choice is no, for the immediate future. One day, if I find a way to give up full-time work, maybe. But it’s way down on the list.

7. Write more about struggles with diet and sex. I think I succeeded, even if the sex troubles were written about mostly in private. I don’t feel the need to say any more about either thing at this time, so I guess that could be called successful.

8. Embrace a life lived bouncing from commitment to commitment, or, conversely, figure out how to spend more time at home. This is an interesting one, because I think I succeeded in the first half when I was secretly hoping to succeed in the second instead. At the time I made this resolution there were not enough hours in the day because of my commute and my awful job in Towson, and those practical things are totally different now. However, I have still had to do a lot of bouncing around, a lot of wild sledding through my life instead of walking measuredly on snowshoes, and I think I’ve managed to be at peace with it. I just have to let go a little and I feel a lot better. Because of how I was raised, it’s very hard to remember that.

9. Don’t stop the music. Success, even to the point of going to an actual concert.

10. Stop being embarrassed with myself. I think I succeeded more mightily at this than I expected. I wrote about emotional aspects in my resolute post, but there was a lot of external stuff that I needed to stop doing this about before I could even work on the emotional stuff (which I also did, more subtly). This was the year I embraced bright colors and giant earrings without worrying that I’d never find a place or time to wear them, or that people would think ill of me for wearing them. I think, though, that not being embarrassed with yourself is a process that happens with getting older and growing up, not a switch you can turn on and off. That was a good lesson in itself, beyond the resolution aspect of it.

And this year’s resolutions:

1. Don’t lose sight of my health. By which I mean, don’t stop exercising, don’t stop flossing, don’t stop going to the doctor and to therapy, don’t stop cooking dinner at home instead of going out, don’t stop buying soy cheese, even if all those things seem pointless and overly complicated for the result they obtain.

2. Remember the Bikram lesson. Ultimately, what I discovered from doing Bikram so much that a doctor told me to stop, even though I loved it, is that there is just no quick fix for my life. It doesn’t benefit me to run full speed into a solution – to what excess weight I have, to a lack of muscles and flexibility, to all the other things Bikram helped me with when I did it three times a week - because generally the solution ends up feeling an awful lot like a wall. Life has tried to teach me this one over and over, but this is the first time I was receptive to it, and I’m going to try to keep it more in mind.

3. Stop worrying about “normal”. ENTIRELY. D explained that as long as your behavior doesn’t do anyone any harm, there is no reason to compare it to others’ and feel bad that it’s not the same. I used as an example the fact that I watched 5 or 6 movies a week for a while there in the spring, and that seemed like I was just way too involved in movies, to a degree that it wasn’t normal or healthy. She said this just wasn’t true, and there was no reason to worry. I am who I am and I like what I like. Anyone who’s going to rag on me about it is just a jerk. Who cares?

(Right now, the answer is: me. Hence the resolution.)

4. Reeeeeead mooooooore boooooooooooooks.

5. Be better about my budget. I think the larger lesson from losing my wallet was that I am too careless with my money at this time in my life. I think that finding it again was being given one more chance. For those of you who don’t believe in the universe doling out lessons like this, I’m sorry, but I do, and this is what I got from that truly horrible episode.

6. Relax about turning 30. Shyeah. Best of luck, kiddo.

7. Find a direction. I feel like I’m muddling along. I keep dreaming about taking a year off and doing that film program I really want to do, even if it means a miserable winter in the tundra and a year away from BF, which would be absolutely horrible. I keep thinking about courses I could take to further my path to a master’s degree, but in a vague way, with no idea what degree I actually want. I think there’s other stuff I have to do before I settle down and get to the business of growing older, but I don’t know what that other stuff could be. I don’t know if I need another goal, because I’ve met a good few of them, but having a direction is better than having a goal anyway and I need one.

That’s all for this year. There’s big stuff in here, so I’m going quality over quantity. Usually I have a couple of smaller ones in there, but there’s nothing small that I particularly want to change this year. The shape of things needs alteration.