from March 5, 2010*:

And Finally, God

I think, now, that it’s been probably, mostly, me. I think in some ways maybe I’ve been open and supportive and loving and tolerant of my Christian friends for so freaking long, and I’m just tired of always being the odd man out. I’m tired of being defined by what I’m not. What I lack. What I don’t believe. And all that, long before Atheism, too. I’ve never been a part of a church, never had an entire group backing my philosophy and assuaging my doubts and validating my assertions. It’s always just been me, and a little bit my Dad, and then it was just me again. And it was nice when you were sort of in the same place with it. But then you weren’t. Like when you’re a smoker and one of your friends quits and you know you should be happy for them and their lungs, but really you just miss the cigarette breaks together and know that even if they come and sit with you it won’t be quite the same.

And then we introduce the Atheism, and that’s where I do get touchy. I see that now. I understand that you don’t really get it, because I didn’t really ever get it until I got here. Atheism is a belief, it isn’t a lack of belief. And that’s a hard distinction to see, but an important one to me. And I just feel so peaceful, and so – genuine in it. For the first time in my life. It was a relief, to finally admit that I didn’t believe in God, hadn’t for a long time, maybe didn’t ever. To drop a pretense that I didn’t even know was a pretense but it was so heavy and my arms were so tired.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t happy about it at first. I hoped I would find my way back. I looked for it. But the longer I haven’t believed in a God, the more I can’t ever imagine believing in a God. And the more the world has opened up to me and seemed more miraculous and beautiful than it had been for me in years and years. And I still expect my belief, my new belief that sort of seems to transcend a need for a God, to grow and change and expand with time. It isn’t an absence. And I know that’s hard to see from the outside of it, just as it’s hard to communicate your own very personal relationship with the God of your understanding.

As for why I got so angry at your comments – well, for one, you were talking about helping me to see the “Truth,” which is the same condescending garbage that certain Christians, Methodists and door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses have been trying to feed me for years, using those exact same terms. It was a hot button. I see that you meant it differently, I do now, but how could I really honestly know that then? You’d been so absent! I’m not trying to make you feel guilty all over again, and I’m not trying to foist it all on you, either. I accept my part in it, too – we had known each other and been through too much together for me to have lost such complete faith in you, as I did. I bear that responsibility and I apologize for it – a piece that, for what it’s worth, ties back again into all of those doubts and fears that came from my past relationships and experiences. And I also absolutely recognize that we both made the choice not to talk about God and our very different experiences there for a long time, feeling it was best on both sides. We were completely stupid in that one, of course. I see that now, too. But I also think that neither of us had quite found our words yet at that point. Unfortunately, all told, it left plenty of room for doubt between us.

And finally, the other piece that ticked me off is the connection you insisted on making between Atheism and anger at God, specifically my anger because of my Dad’s death. I mean, I can’t really sit here and deny that my father’s death had an influence on my path toward atheism, but then, the ripples of my Dad’s death have played across the surface of EVERY choice I’ve made in the last seven years outside of, maybe, ice cream flavor. So in an attempt to put it into my perspective for you, imagine for a minute that I was to claim that the real reason you’ve embraced Christianity now has nothing to do with the right people and the right doctrine and the right open heart for understanding or even a relationship with God, but that it’s really just the direct result of you being in a stressed out, vulnerable place in your life and flailing around for anything remotely solid to keep you afloat.

It wouldn’t necessarily be a wrong assessment – how could your stress and your vulnerability not be affecting every inch of your life right now? But it wouldn’t really be fair, either, and it certainly wouldn’t be anywhere CLOSE to the whole story, or even the heart of the story.

And I know that it’s tempting to think that being angry at God is the most common path to Atheism, but that’s sort of like saying the real reason a person stops celebrating Christmas is because they’re still mad at Santa for not bringing them the bicycle that they wanted when they were ten. Do you see why that feels dismissive? I waited to be angry at God. I waited for it for a very long time. It never happened, not in any real way. I got angry at my mother. I got angry at my father. I got angry at myself. And I got angry. In a helpless, general, striking out at whatever comes near sense. And sometimes I called it God, tried to push it in that direction, because it’s what I was taught, what I wanted to believe, what was the next logical step for someone with faith. But it never felt entirely honest, it always felt a little like play-acting.

The truth, my truth, is that I prayed the rosary for an entire year, in memory of my father. And then I put that rosary into an envelope and sent it to a friend because her father had died that year and I had prayed for both of our fathers on that rosary, and it felt right. And then I never prayed again. It wasn’t a conscious decision, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with anger. I didn’t even realize I’d stopped praying until about 7 months later. My whole life, I’d been in the habit of praying on and off all day long, even if it was just a “Please help me through this.” And I just stopped. Not like I got mad at a friend and stopped speaking to her. Like the line went dead and I didn’t even notice because I’d fallen out of the habit of picking up the phone. Like I’d outgrown it. “Please help me through this” had been naturally replaced by things like, “I can do this.” And my life got noticeably better. I was empowered for the first time, ever. But that wasn’t the end of the story, of course, I wouldn’t have become an atheist just because of that, I would have attributed it probably to the whole “God helps those who help themselves” way of thinking.

What happened was that my daughter announced one day that she was an Atheist. It didn’t come as a surprise, she’d always been the most skeptical, the most resistant of conformity, and she’d just mentioned a few days before that her best friend’s family were Atheists. I figured she would try it out for a while, no big deal, we all have to find our own way and giving my kids the freedom of that had always been my goal. But the thing about my daughter, she gets me to consider things that I always dismissed before. I’ll give them a second look when she does. So without even really meaning to, I tried on the word Atheist. I rolled it around in my mouth to see if I liked how it felt on my tongue. And that’s when I realized I’d already been one for a really long time. I realized that I hadn’t prayed. I realized that while I’d cobbled back together something of a belief in God once Dad died, the one thing I never could quite pretend to believe in any more was the continued existence of my Dad. I could fake God, but I couldn’t fake that.

So no, I never found the anger. If I had, maybe I would still believe. I don’t honestly know.

And at first I did mourn it, this loss I hadn’t even known I’d experienced. And like I said, I looked for a way back, hoped it would come. Supposed that this was the part of the poem where the one set of footprints was supposed to mean I was being carried. But no matter how many times I looked back at them, those footprints remained very clearly my own. And I felt bleak and sad and like I’d lost all magic and spark. But even then – I didn’t feel lost. I felt more genuine, more true to myself, like my path was more authentic to me. So I couldn’t really regret the path I’d started down, even when I wished it was a different one.

And then, when I’d sort of resigned myself to not believing in ANYTHING miraculous or out of the ordinary, I listened to the audiobook of Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Nearly Everything. It’s a science book, and it changed my life. It made me see that miracles still exist, without a belief in God. Regardless of God. God or not. It made me see how amazing life and the universe really is, in a way that I’d taken for granted for most of my life. It’s like what I was supposed to think about God kept blocking my view. I felt joy and wonder and magic and passion in my soul again.

I don’t pretend to know for fact that this is my final answer to life, the universe and everything. And like I said, I foresee this growing and leading me onward. To the faithful, it looks like an absence, an ending. But to me it feels like the beginning of something real and my own and fulfilling in a way I never found with spirituality as I always understood it.


*I wrote an email fairly recently to a close friend of mine and I was very proud of it, I felt like I’d managed to express a lot of things that I’d been wanting and needing to express, in general, for a very long time. So I’m reprinting bits of it here, the salient points. In three parts.

from March 5, 2010*:

The Diabetes Thing

But I’m truly sorry that it hurt you to feel that I was keeping something from you, and I understand why you would feel like it was because I didn’t trust you to give me the support I needed. That isn’t fair to you and isn’t the real truth of the matter, but I don’t know how to convince you otherwise. I will say, though, that the crux of the situation, really, is that I am fat and you are not. I wish that didn’t make a difference at all ever, but it does. A little bit, in that situation, it does. And I have, in the past, talked to you about weight issues more than I ever have or probably ever will with any other thin woman on the planet. But that doesn’t make it easy for me to do so, always. No matter how compassionate and supportive and accepting you are. It doesn’t make our experiences common to one another, for one thing. I don’t mean to be dismissive of your compassion or your ability to put yourself in another’s shoes, and I’m sure that as a woman you’ve experienced plenty of insecurity, prejudice, and pressure to conform to impossible standards of beauty. We both live in that same world. And maybe there are other things that you deal with that I’m not aware of because my experience is lacking.

But being overweight? It means having to shake off shame every time I go out in public, knowing that I will probably cross the path of at least one person who will view me with disgust. It means that when Kevin Smith gets thrown off an airplane because of his weight and dares to make a fuss about his poor treatment, I have to be careful what I read on the internet for a week because of the outpouring of venom stirred up and directed at the overweight. Venom. People are contemptuous. They take my weight personally, like a blight on their personal scenery. Now, I was a girl who was raised to hide everything that makes me weak, that makes me flawed, that makes me different. To be ashamed of it. So, where can I hide that weight?

Society today collectively holds the opinion that I am lazy, I am pathetic, I am undisciplined and likely uneducated – that’s all before you even get to just plain unattractive, and the butt of most jokes. It’s everywhere I go, every day of the week, and worst of all, it’s inside my own head. Lodged there, no matter what I try to do to shake it out. Do you know what my first thought was, when it became unavoidable to consider that I might be diabetic? I thought, serves me right. I did this to myself and I deserve it. And everyone will know now, how pathetic I really am.

This is not at all something that I’ve ever thought about anyone with Diabetes of either type, mind, but we always apply different rules to ourselves.

That is an awfully big hurdle to overcome when it comes to confiding in anyone, let alone a skinny girl who would certainly try to get it but might not, innately. And the really sad part is that the only thing that makes it even a little okay for me to talk so openly about my feelings on this to you – or anyone, really – right now is the fact that I’ve been actively losing weight since last July. I feel great about it and I’m really proud of myself and I honestly hope to keep it up. But on some level it also seems to validate every bad thing that anyone has ever thought about me as a fat woman. Guess I was lazy. Guess I was pathetic.

And if I put the weight back on? I probably won’t be talking about it anymore. Because I’ll be trying too hard to be as small and invisible as possible. It’s just the way it works.

from March 5, 2010*:

But I Was Okay, Right? I Mean, I Was Blogging and Texting Jokes and Sounded Okay…

Last week I experienced another really rough patch, the kind where just talking myself out of bed is a strenuous activity and I’m never completely sure I’m going to succeed. February being its usual rotten self. And so, knowing myself as I do, I sent a text message to my husband at work stating very plainly that it was a really bad day. To prepare him, to summon the troops for support, to send out a warning while I was still capable of communication, whatever. Because when he came home he found me joking, and hanging out with the kids, just like I knew I probably would be. Looking like any other day. And bless the man, even after 15 years of marriage to me and a text message portending doom I could see the moment in him when he looked at me hard and then his face relaxed and he thought to himself, “Oh good, false alarm, she’s FINE.”

Oh, I was far from fine. Trying to be fine. Doing a hell of a job of faking it. It’s what I do. I make jokes when I’m scared. When I’m vulnerable. I deflect. I try to make it easier on everyone around me. I try not to be a burden, try not to embarrass myself, try not to be sloppy. I was raised to be a good girl, and good girls are happy because that makes it easier on everyone else. Two sentences into conversation later and I was locking myself in the bathroom and completely unable to communicate with Shane for an hour. Too busy gazing into the abyss I’d been trying to ignore was there while simultaneously trying not to step in it.

And I did try to warn him.

I expect the people who love me to see through my brave faces. Sometimes that’s fair, and sometimes it isn’t. I do try to give a hint when I’m capable of it. I suppose that if even my own husband can’t always see through them when he lives with me everyday and I spell it out for him ahead of time, what hope do you really have from way over there? But I was so not okay. I’m still so not okay. How could I possibly be anywhere close, yet? The woman did a number on my head for seven years and then went and finally died like she kept threatening to and it was a relief and it was a complete tragedy and I never got that moment of absolution that I swear I was promised. They always get them in movies. In Nicholas Sparks novels. Redemption, reunion, that last farewell that makes it okay somehow. I was living for it. The last time I saw her I couldn’t understand a word she said. Did she tell me that she loved me? I don’t think so. I don’t think she did. I don’t know!

It’s funny that you say you feel left out in November with NaNo stuff – honestly, I thought I was doing you a favor, and I was trying not to take it personally that you never showed much interest in my November activities. I just remember that first time I tried to write a novel, (!) when I was leaning on you and expecting you to hold my hand through every aspect of it, wanting your opinion on every. Single. Line. Sheesh! And you were such a trooper about it. It’s embarrassing to me to remember that now, and so I operate on the idea that if you’re curious you’ll ask and otherwise I won’t burden you with my insecurities and constant need for validation. And when you don’t ask, I think, “God, I must have been even worse than I realized!”

As for the blog – more then anything it was a desire to get somewhere with my writing – to finally break the gag that was placed on me by having to be the good child for so long, thinking that if one good thing might come out of my mother’s death it would be a new freedom in my writing – that’s what caused me to put so much of my early grief into blog posts. It didn’t get me anything that I could really see, though. In my fictional writing, if anything, I’m buckled up tighter than ever before. And blog-wise I lost a lot of my followers somewhere between “death is catching” “I don’t want to say the wrong thing” and “Hey, I thought this was the girl who posted pictures of celebrities and funny stories about the dentist, this is too depressing.”

And a blog is a poor friend, it doesn’t talk back, not really. So in that you saw the beginnings of a healthy process there in those early months, maybe. But honestly, I don’t know where I am now. There’s no movement, when you talk to yourself. You just spin in circles, I’ve found. That’s where I’ve been, mostly. Pirouettes.

Not okay. But. I can see why it looked that way from where you’re sitting. So I’ll say it. I’m not okay.

*I wrote an email fairly recently to a close friend of mine and I was very proud of it, I felt like I’d managed to express a lot of things that I’d been wanting and needing to express, in general, for a very long time. So I’m reprinting bits of it here, the salient points. In three parts.

My burst of forced optimism only lasted about a minute. Now to even say I’m barely keeping my head above water would be misleading – it’s more like I’m still managing to come up for the occasional gasping lungful of air before being dragged back down into the depths by the oogie seamonster of the moment. (Today his name is Grog, he’s sort of gooey gray and his fingers are icy wrapped tight around my ankles and when he grins you can see the black rot of his teeth.)

While Grog is distracted, here’s what’s been stuck inside my head:

Dad was my foundation, after his death I was rebuilding from the rubble for years. But Mom was something very different, once such an integral piece, she worked hard in her remaining years to separate herself from my structure. I had no idea what to expect from her death except, perhaps, bloody carnage, but that was only out of habit. I see now what it is that she did, though – I see that she took up such a large space inside of me and I was so terrified to fill it with the wrong thing that I kept it gaping open instead. Eventually gravity did its gravity thing and everything began to slide downward. Now I walk around with my heart in my toes and my brain wedged into my left shoulder. On the surface I’m unchanged, but my insides are lumpy and displaced and nothing works quite the way I expect it to.

Meanwhile, conversations veer unexpectedly into strange territory, I find myself agreeing with things that don’t even make sense, what I mean to be heartfelt gets interpreted as sarcasm, potayto potahto. The words I once used to rely on get stuck in my throat because I can’t trust them any more. Not one. I lose more of them every day, I watch them breaking off and washing out to sea.

Who would I be without the purple in my prose?

You don’t have to watch Doctor Who to have picked up the basic premise – the Doctor, a bit mad, travels around through time and space in a little blue box that’s always bigger on the inside. Often, he saves the planet. Every once in a while the actor who plays the Doctor moves on to other things and a new actor takes his place, but it isn’t like soap operas where as long as both the old actor and the new one are vaguely blonde, we all pretend it’s the same person. Instead, there is death and rebirth, there is transformation, a regeneration. And the Doctor remains the Doctor but no one disputes the fact that he’s altogether different from what he was before, nonetheless. And in between more running and more world saving in that first episode back, as we’re getting to know him, he’s still getting to know himself.

“I don’t know yet. I’m still cooking,” he says, and he’s spitting out yogurt because it’s a new mouth and everything tastes wrong, he’s trying out new ties and not recognizing his own reflection and when someone says, “You’re funny” he says, “Am I? Well, that’s good then. Still not ginger, though.”

When a timelord changes, he gets a new wardrobe, a new sonic screwdriver, a new interior design to his Tardis, and if he should chance upon some old companion, one that once stood arm in arm with him against a Cybermen invasion, they would have no trouble understanding that this is the Doctor, but not their Doctor, not quite.

And I am so envious! I wish everyone who looks at me would see these changes, too. It would save me the trouble of having to explain myself over and over again with words that no longer fit and a voice that doesn’t sound like my own.

We mere mortals, earthbound and saggy, we don’t have such a clear delineation between our regenerations. The changes, the deep ones, take so much longer to show in our faces. The pain that I’m feeling today will express itself in the wrinkles and gray hairs of ten years from now, twenty. No one will remember and connect it back by then but me. I feel like I’ll know the origin of every mark. I’ll have earned each and every one.

I suppose I’m still cooking.

Po-tay-to.

The Doctor: You know when grown ups tell you everything’s gonna be fine, but you think that they’re probably lying to you to make you feel better?
Amelia: [rolls eyes] Yes.
The Doctor: Everything’s gonna be fine.

Who will I be, then? And will you know me? Will you try?

Your result for The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test…

Modern, Cool Nerd

65% Nerd, 61% Geek, 43% Dork

Take The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test at OkCupid

It was March, and spring meant new beginnings, which might have given her some hope if her own new beginning wasn’t an early morning prep and lunch time waitress job at Pizza Hut during the era of the five minute personal pan. She was twenty years old, had long hair dyed an ever changing array of red shades and a burgeoning cigarette habit inspired by some heartbreak or other along the way. She was also directionless, lacking the ambition if maybe not the talent to pursue the career in theater that had been her only real passion for as long as she could remember. She’d lost heart for future thinking and was currently surrendering to the inevitable slide out of community college and into uniformed workforce. Also, she had sworn off men, as one does when a string of narcissists and Mama’s boys have caused a complete abandonment of hope and faith in one’s own taste.

He wore the green collared shirt and baseball cap of the fully assimilated Pizza Hut employee when they met; adorable man-boy with piercing Scorpio eyes only skimming across her surface vaguely, and when they were introduced he merely grunted in acknowledgment. It was morning and as usual he hadn’t slept, but she was certain that he hated her. She had no inkling that last week when she’d dropped off her application he’d been on duty, had made an excuse to go out back to watch her drive away.

For two months they worked together often in the mornings, and she didn’t acknowledge even to herself that she looked forward to seeing him. They still rarely spoke, as he was rarely altogether awake, and she still wasn’t completely sure that he didn’t hate her. In a letter to a friend at the time she entertained herself by listing the men that she might be interested in if she were to be interested in men ever again. He made the list.

She was intrigued by his quiet manner and the hidden depths it protected. Also, his complete disinterest in her. And his ass looked amazing in jeans, not that she noticed. She was still too lost in the depths of being twenty, in the twists and mires of her own head to take anything very seriously. She was moonic and intemperate. He was solid and unwavering, and he began to tease her sometimes, but gently. He made the other waitresses cry, but not her. She got him.

And then one day she walked into the restaurant to see him sitting at the employee table with his arm around Julie.

Our heroine was stopped dead in her tracks next to the jukebox, perplexed and alarmed by the sudden urge she had to claw Julie’s eyes out, or worse. She’d never disliked Julie before this. She stood staring dumbly for a moment and then two, while she mentally collected her chin from the floor where it had dropped in shock at the double whammy of seeing the man who was not really hers with another woman, and the realization that she cared at all. More than anything.

Too late now, though, stupid head. She wasn’t built with the stamina of a fighter, she had already resigned herself to another heartbreak and a round of bad poetry before she’d even made it across the dining room and to the table. With gritted teeth and a fake smile she greeted them as though nothing were amiss. Later there was some kerfluffle with broken pipes and water that had something or other she didn’t much want to hear about to do with the new lovebirds making out in the back, and a little bit of her heart crumbled away. But she stoically – no, heroically – continued to take orders for pizza.

It went on in this way for two, maybe three, interminable days. And then Julie, bless her, dumped him for Pete.

She maybe managed to hide her giddy smile when she heard the sad news, and for certain she was all sympathy when he told her about it later that night at closing, when she just happened to drop in wearing a compassionate ear. She hadn’t completely forgotten her own romantic troubles, though. She took heart when he mentioned his shyness around women, she thought a slowly progressing relationship was exactly what she needed.

They rented their first apartment together before the month was out.

Every step they took from that moment on was the wrong one, of course. Bad timing, bad planning, irresponsible and shaky. But every step from there until here has been taken together, holding hands. In her loneliest moments after puberty, when the mind begins to turn constantly to matters of body and heart, she had listened sometimes to the sappiest music the Top 40 could afford and wonder if it was really possible that some boy could be out there in the world, wondering if a girl like her existed, too.

And there was. He was born 36 years ago today, just for her.

Happy Birthday to my husband. My love. My best friend.

I will try to keep it short and sweet today, seeing as how I’m already off to a rousing start at procrastinating on my novel. (I come from a long line of wannabe writers who never do any actual writing. We would be brilliant, I feel sure, if ever pen truly met page. But alas, there is a precedent to uphold.)

Today, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo and the procrastination thereof – and also because everybody likes to snoop – I’m sharing a few pictures of my writing space. It’s just a little corner of my bedroom, very nearly IN the closet, but it’s mine. Those of you who cohabit with other human beings know what I’m talking about with this. The space is MINE, it’s the only space I’ve had since I lived in a little hovel at the Duke and Duchess Apartments (named by someone with a rich and twisted sense of humor) when I was about 20, so it makes me very happy.

You’ll notice I went for a spartan inspired decor, so as to cut down on distractions when I am about the very serious act of writing.

A bit of a tour:

The desk is an itty little modern rolltop that belonged to my Dad. The leather portfolio on top of the desk was his as well. Among the stuff on top of the desk you’ll find my iPod dock, a “V – one drop is all you need” True Blood mug (a gift from my favorite R-rated Addams’ Family) a Captain Kirk cup from McD’s (a gift from my kids), a giant dandelion head gone to seed captured in a paper weight from my friend V, some clay copies of my kids handprints from when they were 5, 3 and 10 months old, a rubber band ball and a stuffed green flu microbe. To the side of the desk is a music stand with a program from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Summer/Fall 1988 season.

Above the desk is Einstein playing a violin, 6 framed pics of my husband and kids, some sharpie drawings I did on index cards, a paper fan from the Glide Methodist Church in San Francisco, a big creepy smile postcard from my old dentist, a naked man from a stamp of Mary Gold’s, a postcard from my friend Justin, a ticket stub from a Damien Rice concert, a picture of my kids on the Golden Gate Bridge, a picture of two of my kids with my friend Kristy on the Ferris Wheel at California Adventure (right before the screaming started) and a pic from a long ago Christmas of Khy and Shane decorating the tree while I held and helped a very baby Stormy. (Our heads are mostly cut off, but I still love the pic.) Also a drawing done by Storm that says “I don’t want to brush my hair” because she doesn’t ever, a thank you note from Dino Kourelis of the Lovehammers, a photo booth pic of me and my husband, a homemade birthday card from Nicky and a cut out Tim Gunn saying “Fierce!” Also, punching bag gloves.

And on the closet: Super Bowl, funny faces and a sweet little black and purple girl, all drawn by my daughter. A quotation by Guillermo del Toro, “Just because we understand how something works doesn’t mean we understand it.” A picture of the Elizabethan stage in Ashland, two homemade postcards by Justin, photo booth pics of Justin and I when we were in high school, an ocean with fish drawing by Storm, another set of photo booth pictures, this time of me and my friend Mike Baze. Four greeting cards that I bought for myself: One is a boy with a lion that reminds me of my son Khy when he was that age. A colorful one that says:

“Since everything is but an aparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.” – Long Chen Pa

The small white one in the middle says: “And in a cruel age I sing of kindness.” – Pushkin

And the black one says, “Let your tears come. Let them water your soul.”

Two drawings made by my daughter, one says “God help us all” and the other says “Toast.”

On the right side of the closet door starting from the top – a picture of a dragon that my husband bought me when he was in Boston several years ago. Another greeting card, this one I bought for a friend’s birthday and then decided I needed it more. It says “I want to be well-seasoned. Peppery. Salt of the earth. Shot through with vinegar. Not bland and lumpy. No tapioca years. I want to  get spicier as time goes by. I want to stick in somebody’s craw. Lord, don’t let me turn into comfort food, easily managed and twice as tasteless. Don’t let me go down easy. I want to be well seasoned… every season of my life.” A drawing by Stormy of a stick figure holding a knife dripping blood over a clearly knifed to death stick figure, a picture of the whole family from about 8 years ago, two polaroids from when I was in the play The Mystery of Edwin Drood – on the left I’m with my best friend Jacqui, and in the one on the right I’m with Julie, I want to say her name was Anne-Marie? And Kristy. The purple heart flower was made by Stormy, and then there’s another picture of the Golden Gate bridge and another dragon picture from my husband.

Not pictured: my laptop, me, and a post it note that says:

make pasole

blog entry

write

And now I’ve done two of the three.

Today I woke up to the sound of rain. Today I woke up to find two of my kids camped slumber-party-like on the living room floor, heads bent together conspiratorially in sleep. My daughter was hogging the blankets.

I’ve been waking up incredibly early lately, which might be connected to the fact that I’m too tired to go on much past 10pm. I’ve been a hundred years old this month, at least. My lungs are slowly clearing now but I ate all the wrong things yesterday and today my vision is paying the price. Reminding me that I am not healthy. Reminding me that I am not smart. Today I have all the same reasons to feel sorry for myself that I had yesterday – more, even. But the black cloud has inexplicably cleared off. For now.

I have had enough of inward, for one thing. Today I look outward for awhile. But one thing, first. I was thinking this morning that my whole life has been about struggling to undrape, to open, to reveal myself to the world (or whoever happens to be looking), to open my robe not in a bawdy flash but to hold it that way, shaking, but unashamed. And it occurred to me that it’s so much easier to open up and put forth than it is to open up and wait to see what comes at you.

It’s easier to give than to receive.

(Stop making that dirty, you know what I mean. I know, I started it with the robe business.)

I am trying hard not to close in my pain and fear. I’ve taken a lot of hits this year – even more than I’ve let myself acknowledge, actually, so determined was I to stay stoic and unperturbed – but I’m still standing.

At least, I think I am.

Anyway, a love poem to you (but especially to me):

When the grids you slot them into dissolve,
think how people always surprise you.
Always better, kinder, than you allowed.
Think how each suffers as much and more than you.

Think how you love the things of this world.
The birds, the stone, the flowers, the water.
Everything that cannot love you back.
How easy to love the wordless wild and dead.

Your father said he believed in mercy,
not forgiveness. You never forgave him.
Think how the heart hardens in its cage,
repeating its moves. You must learn how to love.
- Mark Roper

*To get the whole story, be sure and hover your mouse over the pictures for alternate text. If that doesn’t work, check the comments for the full translation.**
**Trust me, you’ll want to read the full translation.

On Sunday will be in to read without me. The only thing I love more than is . Or maybe the only thing I love more than is . Either way, I’m very to miss it.

My friend was in a few days ago to see . Oops, I mean . She invited me along, but in between and I would have had to sleep on a .

Not that it wouldn’t have been worth it. But being honest, if I had gotten to see in I would have . But not so prettily. I would have looked more like .

And then I might have just died from the embarrassment of it all.

So it’s probably for the best that I’m waiting until October 19 to go to without , , and .

But I’m still bummed.