An Electric Flower’s Heart’s Desire

Today I am thankful that Milo, Daniel, and I had a marvelous long weekend.  We went to a wedding, and I was reminded again that good weddings are small acts of public service.  They remind established, fretful, static-prone couples of why they are in fact couples.  When I was younger and not yet married, weddings were great because they reunited me with my friends.  Now, weddings reunite me with Daniel, and with our best selves as husband and wife.

I had been writing the vampire sex post in my head for weeks and weeks.  The post I’m going to try to write tonight (essay, as a verb) is still inchoate.  For a week, I’ve been trying to come up with a term for the compelling opposite of the electric flower.  How can I describe the person that the electric flower wants for her own purposes? Who does she want to hijack?  If, as I wrote, the promise of vampire sex is that it collapses the difference between 25 and 40, then what’s the term for the 40-year-old so deeply desired by the 25-year-old?  If he wants her youth, she wants his experience, she wants to pole-vault into his sophisticated, intelligent world with good wine, real art, esoteric cheeses — no IKEA in sight.  She wants to skip the starter life stage, and go right to the payoff.  Readers, help me out here.

When I was an electric flower, Daniel was this as-yet-unnamed entity for me (I keep coming back to something with a cello, because I love the sound of the cello and find it mysterious and mature.  Something with a sun?  I really should have thought more about this before starting to write, but I couldn’t think of anything else to write but this.  So bear with me — this is a post-in-progress.)  I loved him for himself, of course, but also because of his magic life.  He was the most glamorous, most grown-up individual I had ever met.   Daniel had much more money than I did when we met — I was earning $200 a week, pre-tax.  The cliche is that older men attract younger women with their money and power.  I did enjoy much better restaurants than my peers, and much better birthday gifts.  But the draw wasn’t money, it was his opposite of youthfulness.  I had enough youthfulness for the both of us.  Youthfulness, if we remember it clearly and not covetously, comes with a lot of anxiety: how is it all going to come together?  How do I get from here to there?  I wanted to be with someone who had certainty, I wanted done deals, I wanted experience and stories, not promise and anxiety.  I wanted to be with someone who had a credible claim on actually knowing the answers (and to be done with young men who just thought they knew the answers) I wanted to skip to the end (more accurately, deep middle) of the story.

My dearest and most beloved women friends are very much like me.  Come to think of it, my three closest friends and I were all born in the same month of the same year.  We are smart, strict, witty, careful eldest daughters with with excellent accessories.  We radiate sanity.   Your children, your credit cards, your car, your secrets are very safe with us.

But my happiest romantic and sexual relationships have been with men who are not very much like me at all.  An ex-army man who rode a motorcycle and side-stepped his way through college.  A brilliant Jewish man who could make puns faster than most people could breathe, with no taste in clothes or food and certainty about everything else (he was also extremely sane — we started at different places, but we were headed to the same place.  Our differences would have evaporated too soon and left us like two scorpions in a bottle.  I adore him to this day, but we could have made each other very unhappy).  And Daniel — wrong age, wrong religion, wrong history, wrong attitudes, wrong everything.

What would love or sex be like if you weren’t trying to use it to get inside of something — a way of thinking or living or being — so different?  What is it like to be symmetrical?  (Actually, I know the answer — see the next paragraph.)  Maybe I recognize vampire sex now not just because I am feeling vampiric at 40, but because I was already a vampire at 24.  If sex is (sometimes, sometimes) about dissolving the boundaries between you and another person insofar as you can, the boundaries might as well be high, thick, and well-policed so that their dissolution is an adventure and an achievement.   Oh, but it does sound sweet to find yourself in a similar other, too.

Eventually, electric flowers run out of juice, and cellos sound familiar.  The compelling asymmetry is gone.   I can’t tell if our past made us better prepared for this point,  because this familiarity is actually kind of new for us — or worse, because we have a memory of this intoxicating otherness that drove us for years.  What do we do with each other now?  That’s not a desperate question, hardly even a serious one.  We do what we do, we keep going.  But I think I miss the difference.  I have to learn to find the charge in the absence of difference.

Poem for Wednesday, one day early

Today I am deeply, deeply thankful that I can write about vampire sex and my readers don’t say “That’s appalling, you are ungrateful, you are a bad wife/mother/Jewess/colleague/person/writer.”  Thank you.  I was worried about that, but once I committed to the post, I couldn’t not say those things.  It would have done violence to the spirit of my blog, and that spirit is precious and sustaining to me.  That’s not to say, of course, that if you disagree you should be quiet.  Disagree by all means and we can work it out or not.   But I am so grateful for the responses.  I may start a new feature: “Vampire Sex for Monday.”  Guest posts welcome!

A friend is coming to visit tomorrow, and we’re away this weekend, so I’m not sure when I’ll post again.  I was unhappy to miss Poem for Wednesday last week.  I was going to post poem below last week, but it means more now, after the vampire sex discussion.  James was reading the New Yorker article that shared the page with this poem.  We talked about the article, which is somewhat related to our work, and I pointed out this poem, which I’d seen in the magazine.  I said something along the lines of, “You may not understand this now, but you will.”  This is a poem for the vampires.

Turning

Going too fast for myself I missed

more than I think can remember

almost everything it seems sometimes

and yet there are chances that may come back

that I did not notice when they stood

where I could have reached out and touched them

this morning the black shepherd dog

still young looking up and saying

Are you ready this time?

W.S. Merwin

And since I’m already being careless with copyright (sorry about the formatting — should be two-line stanzas and a single line at the end), there is this, too:

Self Portrait with Tu Fu

Helen Barnard

 Like quicksand, I’m hungry. Like a bedbug,

I’m focused. Like an earthworm, I’m processing, processing, processing.

“I stand alone with ten thousand sorrows.”
Well, not quite. Lately, a little light has crept in.
There has been a broadening.

Franks and beans and macaroni.
Pudenda and penis. Like two motorboats crashing on a lake,
in deep fog, my husband and I found each other.

Entering phase 3: unlock, unload, recalibrate.
“I am brighter and more rested. I am happy here.”

Thank you, both of us, for waiting and ripening.
Two good melons in the field, lightly bruised.
Thank you, Chinese poet, for what does not pale in translation.

Thank you, firefly, in the darkened garden, for bringing
first light in darkness.

This poem originally ran in the June 9, 2011, issue of The New Republic magazine.

Vampire sex and electric flowers

Today I am thankful that I walked from our dining room up the stairs and round the corner to Milo’s room while balancing a book on my head the whole way — even when I paused and dipped to place something on the desk in my bedroom.  As I was doing this, I thought, “When my mother was 40, she would never have done something this silly.”  And I enjoy feeling that I am sillier than my mother was at my age, at least if silliness expresses itself in this way.

My first experience with vampire sex was when I was 22 and in graduate school, one of my undergraduate (and thus former) professors, Professor M., tried to kiss me after a lovely evening spent mostly in the company of his colleagues and undergraduates he taught in a summer program in the town where I was attending graduate school.  Actually, he tried to sleep with me, but I didn’t realize it at the time.  I still have the email I wrote, to ace commenter sister, the morning after:

You know how I feel about all of this?  I feel like it really was a date, a great date, and I don’t know what to do with that feeling… I feel like I’ve got a crush on him and want to see him and go out with him again.  And I think that’s exactly the feeling he intended to leave me with.  Yet there is no way.  He’s 37.  He lives in {town} WITH HIS WIFE…. It’s much easier for me to think that I’m imagining this whole thing, that he was just being charming and flirtatious in a bounded way and I couldn’t see the boundaries.  If it’s my interpretive error, then I can reshape it and deal with it.  If, on the other hand, it is a 37 year old married man hitting on me, then I am blown to bits. … What about propriety, acting your age, etc…. I am not prepared to deal with attentions, even for one night, from someone like Dr. M (notice I’m putting his title between us.  I like that.  I feel safer over here.)

I had forgotten some of the details of that evening until I re-read my ancient email.  Dr M was waaaay out of bounds, inquiring about my sex life, inviting me up to his apartment.  And I was too naive to understand what in the world was going on.

Now I know what was going on.  I was an electric flower when I was 22.  Oh, I was.  I re-read my emails from that time, and I see a volcano of energy, questions, enthusiams, discoveries.   That summer in particular.  That night in particular.  I was a little bit drunk, I was feeling very special and grown up as a graduate amongst other graduates, as a special guest of senior faculty at a fancy dinner, as the experienced local among fresh-faced guests.  And Dr. M. wanted vampire sex.  (I hope he got over it.  I hope he sobered up and realized he loved his wife and didn’t engage in such egregious foolishness again.)

What is vampire sex?  Vampire sex is when you want to consume someone who is in his/her 20s and young, alive, abundant, energetic, with more promise and vigor than experience, who knows nothing of existential exhaustion but thinks he or she does, who is just starting to eat up the world and finding it delicious and intoxicating.  In other words, an electric flower.  Sex seems the most direct and intense way to take all that youth and all of what you think it means and all of what you miss because you don’t have it any more.  Vampire sex with an electric flower is the antidote to spider veins, cellulite, mortgages, potbellies, disappointment, tiredness, windows that need cleaning, incipient arthritis, and chronic night-time teeth grinding.  Vampire sex is collapsing time so that you can be both 25 and 40 at once, but only the good parts of 25 and 40.

Eighteen years after Dr. M. tried to kiss me (actually we did kiss, but with correct closed mouths and only for a few seconds), I understand vampire sex because I have a crush on a much younger colleague.  I will not ask this colleague, James, about his sex life.  I will not try to kiss him.  I will not do anything at all but write this blog post and smile wryly when I pass his cubicle on the way to get a glass of water from the office kitchen.  Because James would be as horrified at my crush as I was at Dr. M.’s antics.  Because I am more protective of my marriage than Dr. M. was of his, at least that night.   Because I don’t actually want to sleep with James, I just want to…to consume and re-experience all that lovely youthful energy, all that time before life wallops you upside the head and you realize that some losses are permanent.  Some people get walloped and scarred early, well before 22, or 25, or 27.  But some don’t, and they become electric flowers.

This experience of craving youth, of being engaged by someone largely because of their youth (James has other winning qualities, but, really, if he were my age, I wouldn’t find them so charming.  I’d like him quite well if he were my age.  I wouldn’t be writing this post about him) is powerfully explanatory.  I can’t believe more people don’t talk about this.  I can’t believe we pretend that it’s only mid-life crisis assholes and creepy cougars (I hate that term) who are enamored of 20-somethings and craving their company.  Holy cow — a lot of 20-somethings are incredibly compelling.  I mean, really, have you seen them lately?  They’re fabulous!  I was fabulous — can I be fabulous like them again?  Can I pretend?  Can I invoke some transitive property to get that back?

Of course I can only feel this way because I am so firmly anchored to my Daniel.  There is nothing at stake in my crush on James.  When I think about it, I try to be nicer to Daniel to make up for my mental wanderings.

So now I have to figure out how to be friends with an electric flower.  There’s no model that I know of for a friendship between a 27 year old man and a 40 year old MARRIED (all caps, just so it’s clear that I know what my boundaries are) woman who have many of the same interests and work closely together.  I don’t think I flirt with him — although the young women whose cubicles are right outside my door and overhear my work-and-life related conversations with James (always with the door open, mind you, even when we talk about music or clothes or blogs or design — always with the door open!) may believe otherwise.  But I like talking to him so very much.  I like being his friend.  I want to hang out with him — as does Daniel, who met him at the staff holiday party and said, “Wow, I really like James. You should have him over to the house.  He’s great.” That was a bit of a buzz-kill, to be sure.  I was vexed but eventually grateful.

I think I may be able to write myself into propriety here, but it will take close to 1500 words.  I find myself now open to relationships (appropriate ones!) that I have not previously understood or appreciated.  Friendships of all kinds, not just age-and-gender matched ones.  I’ve written about this before, how all my relationship energy that I wanted to direct towards another child has to go elsewhere.  This is one of the places it’s going.  I am learning a lot from James, about myself, about Daniel and his friendships that previously have been opaque to me.  About being married and wanting to stay married but also wanting other things that aren’t compatible with the foregoing.  Life is more poignant and novelistic once you understand the longing for vampire sex.  When I am reminded in this very strong way that my marriage doesn’t contain my whole emotional range (nor Daniel’s, which is scary to me, but human and true), I feel more protective of it (the second time I’ve used that phrase in this post).  I feel more gentle towards it and, ironically perhaps, less disappointed.

And now, because I believe in truth, I’m going to hit publish.

Slow learning

Today I am thankful that I logged in again.  I always smile when I log in again after being away from the blog for several days.  I am also thankful that two commenters quite liked my shoes.  They are wonderful, even though they don’t quite exactly fit.  They were madly expensive once, and I bought them for 85% off.  I have double heel pads in them, and I stuff the toes with cotton balls so that they stay on my feet.  I can only walk about a block or two in them, although I can make it through the day on the carpeted floor at work.  I do not wear them in the rain, or even as far as the walk to the car.  I love them despite the fact that they aren’t exactly right for me.  They are worth the effort.

One of the most valuable things about this blog is that it is an aid to memory.  Even though I am always thinking about the meta-story of my life and my relationships, I find it almost impossible to see patterns and act differently when a recurring situation arises.  Blogging helps me enormously.  Last week I was completely fed up with Daniel and feeling extremely vexed  (and now of course I can’t even remember what it was about), and I went back and read some earlier posts and thought, “Oh, okay, I remember that this will pass.  I remember that I’ve been here before, and got out of it, and I’m sure I will get out again.  In fact, I’m so sure, I’m not even going to spend much time being IN it.”

But when I am away from the blog, I lose the useful self-awareness and helpful meta-narrative, and get mired too much in the instant.  One of the challenges of my life with Daniel is that we both tend to lose ourselves in the instant when things aren’t going well.  All we can see is this moment of unhappiness, and all the other moments of unhappiness, and feel generally fallen from grace and in despair.  We lose the ebb and flow.

So I am using this post like I use post-its around my house.  Buy milk.  Pack Milo’s sports gear.  Cash reimbursement check.   Remember not to despair.

UPDATE: I typed up a list of post ideas, under the title Posts for Early May, and accidentally hit “publish” when I meant to hit “Save Draft.”   Obviously I’m not particularly sharp if I think that it’s still early May!  I realized my error and deleted the post.  I know most of you get my posts via email, so you received something nonsensical.  But I will eventually explain what I mean by vampire sex, and it has nothing to do with the Twilight series.

Closet archive 5

Today I am thankful that I made a joke about infertility, and did my small part to remind someone, gently, that child-bearing isn’t to be taken for granted.  I was talking to a very friendly acquaintance, telling her that we had started the process of adopting a dog from animal rescue (which we have — and there’s a whole post to come about my feelings about this dog).  I was talking about the application and the number of references and she said, “Oh, I know!  It’s harder to adopt a rescue dog than it is to have a child!”  I said, “Well, no, not for everyone,” and she immediately said, “Oh, sorry.”  And then I said something about how in this case, people are trying to tell you no, but in the other case, people are trying to tell you yes so you’ll continue paying them thousands of dollars, and she kept smiling and said, “Sorry, sorry.”  And it was actually a fairly pleasant exchange.

Except that as I type it now, when I am so so tired, and Daniel’s away and I realize I can’t run my life by myself, and I made a colossal mess of something at work, and fixing it completely will take a very unpleasant phone call that could lead to a cascade of difficulties, and all that… as I type it I think, “Oh my God, I can’t believe infertility happened to me.  I can’t believe I know all the stuff I know.  I can’t believe I’m on the other side of this particular looking glass.”  And if I think too much about it, I might actually cry from some combination of emotion and exhaustion.

So clearly it’s time for another closet archive.

The challenging item is the skirt, which is made of stretch satin (or a satin-finish polyester — it’s in the wash now so I can’t check the label).

Why I don’t wear it:  It wrinkles, a lot, although not usually as much as in the picture.  I had to run about a block today in hard rain, and the skirt got all puckered up.  On a normal day, by the time I’ve finished breakfast the top is quite creased, and it stays that way all day.  I also don’t usually wear shiny or dressy or fancy things to the office (of course “fancy” is extremely subjective).  I’m much more likely to wear something casual like a denim shirt or beat-up-looking boots mixed with typical office clothes.   Even here, I put this fancy skirt with a beat-up-looking belt and soft (as opposed to crisp) button-down.  And I have lovelier things to wear if I want to dress up.

Why I still have it: It fits beautifully.  I don’t think I would get much for it, if anything, at my consignment store, since it’s not made by a fancy brand — actually, the brand went out of business, signifying rather low demand.  Even though I have plenty of black skirts (6 — I know, I know — future closet archives), this one has always seemed just useful enough to keep.

What might save it: Inertia.  The fit is really amazing.  High-waisted skirts like this aren’t usually so flattering on me since I’m a bit thick in the middle, but this looked superb.  But those creases (again, usually less dramatic than in this post-deluge photo) are bothersome.   I love that it’s machine washable, but it really should be pressed at the cleaners.   Its good features only barely outweigh its bad ones.  It will probably be just useful enough to keep for another year or two, and then I’ll surrender it to Goodwill.  And my middle is only getting thicker, so it may not fit much longer than that anyway.

I feel a little better now.  Posting will be very light this week, because I’ll be traveling for work.

Poem for Wednesday – vessels

This is what you get when you type “vessel” into the search engine on the poetry foundation website:

To the Harbormaster

By Frank O’Hara

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught

in some moorings. I am always tying up

and then deciding to depart. In storms and

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide

around my fathomless arms, I am unable

to understand the forms of my vanity

or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder

in my hand and the sun sinking. To

you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage

of my will. The terrible channels where

the wind drives me against the brown lips

of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet

I trust the sanity of my vessel; and

if it sinks, it may well be in answer

to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster” from Meditations in an Emergency. Copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara.

For something more literal and profane, see here, which is also from the poetry foundation website.

Closet archive 4

Today I am thankful that I walked through a beautiful neighborhood on a beautiful day, very near where I lived when I first moved to this city, and thought about what it would be like to live there.  My city is full of beautiful residential neighborhoods, although mine is not among them.  It’s a great place for me to live, but it’s not beautiful (or maybe I just take it for granted).

Closet archive 4:

The challenging item is the lavender/lilac jacket.

Why I don’t wear it: It’s a lavender/lilac jacket.  How often would you wear it?  It’s the top half of a suit (more on that below).  I decided to start wearing the skirt more frequently a couple of summers ago, and bought that moss-green t-shirt (the flash washes everything out, unfortunately) specifically to wear with the skirt.  I can’t remember the last time I wore both pieces together.  I don’t wear jackets very much.  I love cardigans, but I am not very comfortable in structured jackets.  I have broad shoulders and jackets often feel constricting.  I also dislike the weight of most jackets.  The armholes of this jacket felt tight when I put it on, although I got used to it by the end of the day.

Why I still have it: I got married in this jacket and the matching skirt.  Our official wedding was a civil wedding, out of deference to my not-Jewish family.  (Marrying Daniel was radical enough.) To that wedding, I wore the now-common strapless, full-skirted, barely off-white wedding dress.  The look was fairy princess’s sporty sister.  But a few months later we got married again, in a very small ceremony at our synagogue.  The Rabbi called us at 10pm the night before and said, “How’s tomorrow?  Is tomorrow good for you?”  I wore this suit.

What might save it:  Sentiment: I’ll never give this suit away, unless a girl I love finds it and declares it to be fabulous vintage and I make a gift of it to her (I don’t know such a girl yet).  But I’m not sure I’ll wear the jacket unless I need to wear the suit as a whole (bar mitzvah, springtime wedding, etc.).   I love the purple with the green (better light in the photo below), but the jacket isn’t very comfortable, and it spent most of the day on the back of my chair.

I also feel like the jeans-t-shirt-jacket combination has become a clothing cliche (on “What Not To Wear” the stylists always show something like this as the first look, and call it “stylish mom on the go”).  Or maybe by now, it’s no more stylistically interesting than wearing a sweater and a skirt — it’s fashion wallpaper.  Anyway, while I love the way this outfit looked, I did feel a little bit self-conscious wearing it today.  It was a bit too much stylish mom on the go, rather than stylish professional triumphing over other recalcitrant professionals (which is what I did today at work).  And when I really am on the go, I’m certainly not wearing a jacket, necklace, and heels.

Unexpectedly, a post about paintings

Today I am thankful that the view I see as I climb to the top floor of my house is really lovely, especially in the late evenings in this season.  The sky is always an interesting color, and beneath it is the red brick blind wall of my neighbor’s house, holding fast against our relentless green vines.  It’s a Hans Hoffman painting:

(I found this here.)

So now of course I’m noodling around trying to find more Hans Hoffman, and this has become a Hans Hoffman post, unexpectedly.

(narrated by Robert DeNiro, whose father, Robert DeNiro Sr. was also a painter)

And see here, and remember an era in which Time magazine was a cultural arbiter, and painters were as fascinating as movie stars.  Okay, not as fascinating, but deemed interesting to a vast, middle-class audience, which itself wanted to be educated as much as entertained.  My grandmother, in her grotty cattle town, bless her heart, took a correspondence course in the 1960s or 1950s from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Until she moved into her assisted living apartment, she had framed Pieter Bruegel prints in her living room — the first place I ever saw art like that.  (Although the painting I remember her having, and linked to, lives in Detroit… maybe the Met was feeling generous about using paintings not in its collection?  Perhaps I mis-remember the painting or the specifics of her story.)

Ah-hah — here’s the painting I was looking for:

Hans Hofmann, Elysium

The discontinuous life

(With apologies to Mark Strand.)

Today I am thankful that I mowed the lawn, and baked a pie (and made lentils, and rice, and then caramelized some onions because the lentils weren’t quite spicy enough), and did the laundry, and noodled around on the computer for a while.  I had an unrushed, gorgeously expansive day, doing just what I wanted to at my own pace.  It felt like many days in one.  It’s been a long time since I had this kind of day.  AND Daniel is in a mood to attack clutter, and piles and bags of books, and disorder in general.  Thrilling!

So here I am after only three days of non-blogging, and I feel as if that short interval has disrupted my connection to the blog.  And today, Daniel and I have been busy with our own pursuits, but happily and convivially so, which is entirely unlike how we were with each other just a week ago.  I used to remind myself, “The feeling is temporary, the breath is permanent,” but this is exceptionally strange.  My head-space feels like an AM radio on a long drive at night through an abundance of flat emptiness (and I’ve made those drives–not metaphorically, but literally.  A fair chunk of my childhood was spent on those drives.)  The signals go in and out.  One minute it’s a ballgame, then salsa music, then My Sharona (which is the first song I remember hearing on my first radio — the first radio where I controlled the frequency.  But 1979 seems a little late for that.  Surely I was listening to Kasey Kasem’s American Top 40 countdown by then?  The tricks of memory…  Wow, I’m enjoying hearing that song.)

I took a very challenging yoga class today, and about 45 minutes into the class, I was amazed at how limber I felt, and how stiff I had been when I walked in.  Maybe letting go of all of what was encasing me has given me this feeling of filling up the moment, and not necessarily putting it into a story about “My marriage is this way,” or “My blog is about this thing” or even, “I am this kind of person.”  This is odd for me, because the whole point of my blogging is to create a narrative about what my life is, and what kind of a person I am trying to write myself into being, and how I decide that my marriage does or doesn’t allow for that (oh hello!  that was a realization!)  Right now (I originally typed a W at the beginning of that sentence — Freudian keyboard fingering), I don’t feel like any particular type of person at all.  I feel vessel-ish.  (If sister were here with me, we’d be silly with giggles running with the vessel theme… vessel virgins would be the starting point and then we’d just run with it from there till we couldn’t even talk anymore with laughing. It would take about 90 seconds.)

Maybe this is what it feels like to be deeply relaxed — I wouldn’t know it well enough to recognize it for what it is.  Maybe this is what happens when I eat chai cream pie for dessert, and get an unfamiliar kick of caffeine rather than the wet wool feeling of alcohol.  I feel calm and still.

This is the first Mother’s Day in which my fertility is not an open question.   It’s the first Mother’s Day in which I feel extremely self-conscious about even noting the day.  I realized today, as I realize periodically, that the experience of not having a second child (and it has been an experience, not just the absence of experience, although what I get sad about is the absence, of course) has almost certainly made me a better mother to Milo.  I saw a mother with three very young children today at a restaurant, and she was so patient and dear to her middle child, about age 2.  When Milo was that age, I would have been vexed at his interruptions of lunch, or not at a restaurant in the first place.  She seemed happy and unperterbable.

Today, just now, I am feeling settled into my life, not straining at its perimeter to make it something else.  I had a dream last night that I was married to a man I dated very briefly in college (he is Korean-American, and Daniel and I were watching a Korean film last night).  At one point in the dream, I was desperate because I found being married to him so boring, but I was 30, and I knew I wanted to have a child.  I had to decide if I would stay with him and try to have a child, or leave him for someone else and try to have child with the other man (who, in the dream, was the man I actually did start dating immediately afterwards) — and neither one was a good choice at all.  And then I remembered, as I often do in dreams — “wait, I don’t have to do this.  This is just a dream.  I have worked this out already.”  I dreamed myself into contentment with my life.  I wavered a bit when I saw the beatific mother of three, but not nearly as much I as used to.  I have what I have.  What she has wasn’t ever really a choice for me.

This contentment feels better than discontentment.  That reads so banally, but it isn’t.  I have struggled with contentment, because it seems to betray the pursuit, the anger, the tears, and the fact that I was right, dammit, to want more.  A not-good thing happened.  How can I be content?  I have typed that paragraph or something like it so many times in the last 10 months.  There are times when contentment feels worse than discontentment; it feels incorrect, or impossible.  Even as I type, I can feel the old discontentment ginning itself up again, trying to settle back into place, trying to dislodge peace.  I may not be able to out-write it, so perhaps I will end abruptly.

I highly recommend the pie.

poem for Wednesday, minor adversity version

The internet is ay my house, and I am trying with dubious success to type this on my blackberry. This is not why my workplace issued me a blackberry.

Days
Philip Larkin

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

(Shamelessly copied from my ancient edition of The Rattlebag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.)