Intentions check-in 2016

I am so relieved.  For a moment, I thought I was on the hook for intentions 2017, and I don’t have them yet.

(short pause to run to the basement — which, Freudian-ly, I originally typed with a leading “a”, and now I wonder what that’s about — to put in a load of laundry.  What IS that about?  Is that I have to abase myself by making sure that I am doing the right and proper thing for the care of the family — a family that doesn’t care about the done-ness of the laundry and wonders what the hell I’m on about all the time?  Is it that I come to this site to abase myself?  Charmingly, the archaic use of “abase” meant to lower physically, and I did go downstairs.)

Aaannyyyway.  For the second year running my intentions were Pay Attention, Have Fun.

Readers, I was awesome at both.  So much of this stems, as it did last year, from my meditation practice.  My job also requires me to pay attention, deeply, because I have so much to learn.  One of the things I do in my job is lead days-long group discussions between near strangers on Big Issues.  That requires a lot of exquisite attention, and while I sometimes cannot get through a 30 minute conference call without wandering to Gmail or worse, I can attend and hold those discussions.  2016 was the first time I was called upon to do that, and I did it well, according to the people who were there.  Paying attention is a gift and a skill, and I am blessed to be in a position to have a little bit and cultivate the rest.

I was better, although far from perfect, at paying attention to Milo when he needed it, and understanding that what he really needed was attention, and not the thing he was leading with.  It is deeply satisfying to do that, although I am inconsistent about it.

And Daniel. Well, y’know.  My beloved Daniel is the black diamond slope of my relationships.  Pity I didn’t have a harder time with my parents or sibling, so Daniel could look like easy, or easier.  I realize how reluctant I am to give him my full attention, although, again, I think I’m better than I have been in the past (which has been pretty horrible.  Two people, one oxygen mask– I’ve written that before, but I don’t remember which post — that was how our marriage seemed.  Or no oxygen mask.  Or an oxygen mask way over in the kitchen, which was where I was desperately trying to get to at any given moment).  The stated-to-myself reason why is that I am afraid giving it to him will leave nothing for me.  That is sounding a little stale now.  I wonder what is the reason behind that reason.  I was just typing, “Daniel’s need for attention is bottomless,” which is why I allow myself to shrug it off so often.  But maybe Daniel’s need for attention is not bottomless.  Maybe it can be met with 10 minutes, but I get really, unbearably antsy after about 7 (that’s being generous to myself.).  Maybe I can hold the pose (in the yoga sense, not the poseur sense, but I am open to the second) for just a little bit longer than I think I can.  That’s worth thinking about.

And, if my attention to Daniel at the end of the workday is measured by my lack of attention to cooking (Daniel set up an either-or years ago.  Why was I in the kitchen cooking dinner when he wanted to talk at the end of the day?  No, he couldn’t come into the kitchen and talk while I was cooking because I wasn’t giving him my full attention then.  Daniel has abysmal eating habits, and believes he doesn’t care about food.  This is not exactly true; food does a lot of non-food work with him.  It is true that he cares nothing about me cooking.  Like laundry.  He wants domestic work to be outsourced & invisible. I’ve written that before.  I want it to be out loud and proud.)

Wow.  That may be the longest parenthetical this blog has yet entertained.  Restart: And, if my attention to Daniel at the end of the workday is measured by my lack of attention to cooking, then 2016 was aces for Daniel.

What feels really good to me now is that I feel like writing about my marriage here is getting less and less interesting.  Also less and less original.  That feels like progress.  It feels like the marriage is not the main thing I’m working on now.  Which has to be tied in some way to my un-listed intention around divorce, right?  Maybe I did divorce myself from something in 2016.  I divorced myself from my initial views of what my marriage should and must be.  I ended that marriage-in-my-head, which was not working, and got clear, or clearer, about the marriage in my real life.  I decline to say whether it is working or not.  It is still going.  It is going more happily now than it has in a long time, and Daniel’s emotional volatility (I originally wrote “squirrely-ness”.  It’s wonderful and precise and inexplicable, but see urban dictionary) doesn’t entirely undermine it.  Except when it does, and that just means we’re two humans being all human together.

Have fun.  Yes!  I did !  Flywheel is fun!  Deciding that self-care in the form of an unwavering commitment to working out is absolutely necessary for me to do my job sounds grim but… it was fun!  Binge-reading Louise Penny?  SUPER FUN!  (I thought I was having an affair with Armand Gamache, but now I realize I’m having an affair with Jean Guy Beauvoir.).   I’m reminded of the summer Shakespeare program I did in college, which was centered around the idea of play.  We lived in dorms in a tiny town next to nowhere, and performed Shakespeare plays on stage (not just comedies), but really the eight weeks were less about performance than an exploration of play.  Of course, we thought it was about performance.  The professor and mastermind of the project kept telling us it was about play.  We read Homo Ludens, even!  Now, more than 25 years later, I am getting it.

And suddenly I am winding down and feeling done.  One last observation: I think paying attention is essential to having fun.  Paying attention opens up so many opportunities for delight, joy, silliness, and play.  They are not opposites, they are complements.

I am very happy with the personal history of the year.

 

Unwinding

11:50

Trying VERY VERY HARD TO BE RELAXED.  And that’s just about how successful I am, stretched between the anxieties and anxiety management styles of two very different families.

At least I know the right words and the right mindset.  The right words are: I release all my specific desires about where to go and what to do while showing my in-laws the really lovely and cool town I grew up in, which has only gotten cooler in the decades since I left.  I certainly release my desires to go to new places and new parts of town that were not on middle-class-white-people map when I lived here, but are now interesting and desirable.  I release my desire to approach this city as an urbanist, and explore the exciting new mixed income, mixed use redevelopment project (to be fair, I could not do that with just Milo & Daniel).  I release my desire to go to the excellent makeup store, at least today.  I release my desire TO GET THE HELL OUT OF THE HOUSE BEFORE 1PM.  That is a sticky desire, or a desire that likes to play fetch.  Or maybe I’m the one playing fetch, and the desire is the stick, and I don’t truly want to release the desire, I want to chase it and bring it back again and again and again.  Who is the dog?

Anyway, it’s good to know what the aspiration is, even though the tension in my shoulders and neck remind me that it is very far away.

About all those books I brought — books, I could in fact be reading right now, books that could lower my shoulders to my elbows, that could make the time pass so that I didn’t notice the whole lovely morning disappearing forever, while my in-laws sleep late, shower, putter, get breakfast (AT NOON! What are they college students? Oh, wait, two of the three of them are), and act like they are on vacation or something, rather than participants in Dorothea’s tour of wonder and delight.

Anyway, I brought a lot of books. And so far, I’m only about 1/3 of the way through one of the Louise Penny novels.  I read work material on the plane, which was satisfying. It’s interesting stuff, and I liked to see myself continuing to work and be curious. The biggest gift of the last two years at work (and I can’t believe it’s been two years) is the full throttle restoration of creativity and curiosity.  I don’t ever recall being this curious before.  So that’s several hours’ reading diverted elsewhere.

And on Shabbat, which is normally maximum reading time, I did something I almost never do, which is… hang out and do what the people around me were doing, which was… hanging out, mostly.  I looked at magazines.  We watched a lot of West Wing and Die Hard, which apparently is a Christmas movie (here is where I remind you that, although we are on the stricter side of observance on many things, we do watch TV and DVDs on Shabbat.  We don’t use computers or iThings on Shabbat, and we are iffy about radio & CDs.  Radio if our beloved local baseball team is playing and I’m cooking dinner.  But not CDs unless Daniel puts one on when we clean up.  We are not models of consistency or right behavior.)

This morning I worked for a couple of hours, and that, too, felt good.  I chose to, even though it meant missing out on a great yoga class (like all cool North American cities, my hometown has great yoga. Also local kombucha).  I felt like a leader.  Perhaps this is just the bare minimum of responsibility, rather than extraordinary leadership.  Either way, I like being drawn back into my work because it’s extremely satisfying.  Even the administrative problem I was working on is a good exercise in solving these kinds of problems.  So I should be grateful to my indolent in-laws for sleeping while I was examining a budget spreadsheet, since there was no stress about getting out of the house at, say 10am. And I did yoga in my parents’ backyard, with a nice breeze, and it was a good sequence.  Yoga Journal is really iffy these days, but the May 2016 issue is first rate.

The writing is doing what I needed it to do, which is to remind me that I am steering my own little fate today, and doing things that satisfy me.  It is half-fulling me.  But if we are still here at 1pm (and of course we will be)… if we are still here at 1:30, I might need to re-full.

12:15

Unpacking

8:03

Not really — tonight I’m packing.  Normally packing makes me a wreck. There are so many ways to go wrong. There are so many previous wrongs to confront: why do I spend so much on clothes, yet still lack a perfect capsule wardrobe that can span 7 days in a variable climate and fit into an envelope?  There are so many things to forget: teeth-saving night guard, recondite facial care products, books, those other books, those other other books, socks, tights, yoga mat, underwear (one year I forgot to pack underwear for Milo. My mother dashed to Target without complaint. She says she hates to shop, but she loves to be in motion & to get things done).

But tonight, packing is a joy.  Packing is being in motion and getting things done without having to make heavy decisions.  Without having to talk and concentrate and be smart.  Because it doesn’t really matter if I forget my black t-shirt, or underwear, or recondite facial care products. I can get them where I’m going.

Yesterday I had 7 meetings or calls at work. Today I had 8.  I don’t recommend it.  And now I’m done.  Done-ish.  I have a videoconference on Friday, and I’ve reserved a room of my own in a co-working space near my parents’ house.  There is no way I could pull away from  being mother/daughter/wife for 90 minutes under that roof, plus their wifi is unreliable.

I feel free.  I feel like finals are over.  I even went back and did some work email after yoga tonight because I felt I didn’t have to. I feel free.

I could talk about why my time at my parents’ house will be stressful.  Briefly: I’ve come to realize that my mom, who we always thought was so easy and helpful, actually needs a lot of attention and support, in her own helpful way.  My Dad voted for Trump. And Daniel’s sister and her two kids are coming to my hometown for a visit, because they’ve always wanted to see (City) and won’t it be fun to spend time together!  Daniel’s sister is a person who says, “Oh, don’t worry about me, I’m easy.” Is that ever true? Is that ever not a self-falsifying statement?   Daniel’s family and my family have very different relationship metabolisms and boundaries.  We’ll see how it all unfolds. I don’t expect it to be restful.

But tonight I don’t care.  Tonight I am buoyant and free.

Now I’ll list the books I’m considering taking:

1. We Gon Be Alright, by Jeff Chang (for work)
2. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang (for work — a 500 page history of hip hop. I have a cool job)
3. Vital Little Plans (Short Works) by Jane Jacobs (for work, kinda)
4. Bury your Dead by Louise Penny (plane ride there & Shabbat)
5. A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny (plane ride home, and if I need to escape)
6. A Wave of the Mind: Talks & Essays by Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
8. Our Declaration by Danielle Allen (for work)
9. Divorce is in the Air by Gonzalo Torme
10. The Black Swan by Nicholas Nassim Taleb (I think this might be one of those utterly of the moment books that doesn’t survive its moment)
11. In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman

It’s deeply ridiculous to take 11 books for 7 days.  The first six are the only definite ones. But then I need a little more fiction to mix it up, and then I’m already halfway through Our Declaration, and maybe I don’t really need to read all 500 pages of the hip hop history.  A Kindle would make so much more sense, but I can’t use it on Shabbat, so it’s really of no use to me.  And screens are for work… um, except when they are for blogging. I need pages and covers and paper and fonts and texture and design.  I have read a few books on Kindle & iPad, but I honestly can’t tell you what they were.  (To be fair, I have forgotten paper books that I’ve read. I think I bought a Penelope Fitzgerald for the second time. But she’s Penelope Fitzgerald, and it was remaindered, and it was a great local bookstore.)

And I feel done, and have no ending, and I don’t care!  Because I feel so happy and free.

8:29

What there is now

9:29

Contentment.  An old CD (redundant by now) is playing in the background, part of the soundtrack of my college days, reminding me of great music.  The memories of the bad boyfriend who took me see all the great music have both softened and sharpened over time. I realize how bad it was, but it matters less.

I made cookies tonight — short pause to take them out of the oven and put on another CD, this one part of the soundtrack of college and high school, Dire Straits. I started with Money for Nothing in high school, worked my way backwards courtesy of the album-oriented rock station I listened to, much to the surprise of some of my classmates.  I looked like a Top 40 girl.  I knew that.  I knew how I looked, and I kept trying to twist away from that, a little bit (classic with a twist!).  So album-oriented rock, and cheerleading, and advanced chemistry and a bunch of other things that weren’t supposed to go together.    And Espresso Love and Tunnel of Love and Roller Girl in the background.

The college bad boyfriend used to request Portobello Belle on the jukebox at the pub where we’d drink pints (Harp for me, Guinness for him), and throw darts.  As if we were somewhere in the UK, rather than the middle of the US.  He’d play Telegraph Road while he was falling asleep.

My memory sifts and sorts unreliably.  Often generously.  We took a vacation to Spain about a month after giving up on fertility treatments.  We’d planned it well in advance, but it came to be something of a consolation tour.  Not that Daniel would ever ever ever have conceded that there was anything (ANYTHING) to be consoled about.  At the time, when we posed for smiling pictures in Barcelona, a city I love, I thought, this will always remind me of the crushing sadness I feel right now.  This vacation will always be tainted by the pain of the end of this dream, the irrevocable end.  But a few years later I was surprised.  What I remembered mostly was the nice family vacation, and swimming in the Mediterranean with Milo, and driving to Girona.

But sometimes it’s not generous at all.  I remember college as mostly a disaster.  Well, not a disaster, but as not particularly fun or fulfilling, although I had some exquisite moments with the commenter-known-here-as-Sister, including trying to distract her parents from her painful and obvious hangover at brunch the morning after her 21st birthday.  Her mother was and is a gem, and played along so beautifully.  But college overall looks like a lack.  I describe it as “not the right place for me… a bad fit,” and then I concede that my education in English/American lit was quite solid… but I choose to portray the whole experience as sub-standard. Yet when I last visited the campus, I felt uplifted.  And at an alumni event years ago, I said, “Wow, my college experience was pretty good.”  A friend added, “Yeah, it was. I was there.”

I’m reaching for some conclusion about regret, and self-blame, and how that shapes memory, but it’s elusive.  Something towards shaping my memories of college based on what I think I should feel about the school I went to, given where I live now and who I spend my time with (not Daniel).  No one where I live now aspires to send their kids to the school I went to, which was the flagship institution of the state I’d grown up in.  But if I’d stayed there, I might have an entirely different cast to my memories.  I might remember the intellectual experience, rather than the gaps.   As for the rebalancing of the vacation memories in the summer of 2010, for that I am just grateful.  There was enough suffering.

And I lingered long enough reading old posts to hear Romeo & Juliet play on the CD, and it’s one of my favorite songs ever.

10:04 (but with lots of breaks for the cookies & re-reading)

 

 

A reply to Materfamilias

9:54 (so late)

Mysteries in translation were, depending on how you look at it, my bridge or my gateway drug. Even now, when I go to the used bookstore to get my mysteries — again, there’s that slight shame, the sense that this isn’t real book-buying (although I’m happy to buy any interesting book at the used bookstore), that there’s something almost disposable about mysteries, and indeed I do recycle them by sending them on to another used bookstore just about as soon as I finish them.

And now I have to restart that sentence, because you have to be famous to digress that extensively and resume as if your readers are happy to make those hairpin turns and loop-the-loops and land exactly where you place the return of the main thought.

When I went to the used bookstore to get my mysteries, I scanned first for the distinctive spine of a Europa Edition or World Noir (not “or” necessarily– World Noir is an imprint of Europa Editions) or SoHo Crime.  Or rather, I did, until I bought a Europa Edition that turned out to be the worst novel I ever attempted.  No contest.  The novel wasn’t a mystery. Well, it was a mystery that a quality publisher or any publisher agreed to sent it into the world.  So now I’m a little skeptical about their quality control.

Literature in translation was smart, so smart!  Israeli mysteries by Batya Gur started it.  I’ve sold my history, so I can’t remember who or where was next.  Lots of Italians have happened.  Very few French.  I had so many rules, too.  First, no mass market stuff.  That’s what my mom and grandmother read.  Second, only bought used.  It had to be a find, too. No hunting on AbeBooks.com, that was cheating.  I more or less held to those rules, except to complete the Maisie Dobbs series up to last year (I wasn’t interested enough to buy the most recent ones) But now with Louise Penny, all bets are off, per yesterday’s post.  I’m rambling now, and this is not extremely interesting, but it’s 20 minutes.

I don’t mind my literary decline, if that’s what it is — after all, I wasn’t very literary in the first place.  I take it as a way of honoring great literature.  Great literature needs a lot of headspace, a lot of quiet mind to fill with someone else’s giant story.  I don’t have that headspace right now. I work too hard for it.  My escapist reading is the opposite of lazy, it’s exhausted.

10:18

 

Omnivorous, not literary

9:55

How did I leave this out of my previous post?  I was, as I said, a voracious and undiscriminating reader. Instead of classics, as I child I read whatever looked most interesting from first the Arrow and then the Scholastic book club fliers.  I remember the thrill of the pile of books that arrived for me, and the occasional copy of Dynamite Magazine, and once a poster composed entirely of stickers, which I hung as a poster, feeling even then that it was kind of an arty thing to do.  No one guided my reading.  I met Charles Dickens as a high school freshman when A Tale of Two Cities was assigned. (My brother inherited my marked up copy, with, “Christ Figure” repeated in the margins. I bet he did really well on his paper.)

I remember in fifth grade, maybe, checking out Charles Lamb’s Shakespeare from the school library because I felt Shakespeare was something I should know about.  I remember trying to read Richard Hofstadter during a summer swim meet in early high school, but the only other thing I remember about that afternoon was that a younger teammate pointed out that I had armpit hair, and I was deeply embarrassed.  I bought that Hofstadter (I had to Google the correct spelling, and I got it wrong the first two times, and it turns out WordPress recognizes the correct spelling, which is awesome) in a used bookstore. I also bought the Brothers Karamazov from that store, only because there was a poignant, tortured note on the fly leaf.  The woman who let the book go wasn’t as moved as I was. And I don’t know where that volume is. I kept it because I wanted to write a book about the man who wrote the inscription.  Perhaps someone else will.

All this is to say, there was no program other than what I could get my hands on.  So, when in our junior year (maybe) of college, my beloved friend and I (who comments here as Sister) sat in the office of our Latin American literature professor just to chat, he and she danced through the canon and beyond. She is now a literature professor herself, by the way. I kept up a steady chorus of, “I haven’t read that.”  “I haven’t read that.”  “I haven’t read that.” (He didn’t ask about Hofstadter, or Trixie Belden, or the Tombs of Atuan or Camber of Culdi and its sequels.)  Eventually he paused and said to me, “You’re not very literary, are you?” I still joke about it with my friend.

And for so long, I tried to be literary.  After I read A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse, I pledged to read only great literature. Daniel, who is VERY literary, was delighted.  He’d been pushing French translations on me for years.  (Andre Gide. Meh. See, not literary.  Also, when I read Madame Bovary, I just wanted to give her a good shake.  But I was in my 20s then, and hadn’t had that moment when I thought, “Oh. I am at the end.” then. I might like her better now.) I gamely jumped into The Red and The Black, which Daniel adores.  I staggered out after about 100 pages.  Sweet Daniel loves tales of the sexual and intellectual awakening of young men, and their first experience of forbidden urbanity. Good on ya, Daniel.

I had a good run with current Israeli fiction in translation, although I’m too scared to read David Grossman’s masterpiece about a woman’s reaction to the death of her son (and she even had extra sons).  But after a while the magical reality ceased to interest me.

Now, it’s all mysteries all the time.  I get twitchy if I can’t put my hands on the next Louise Penny.  I broke my own rule about not ordering books from Amazon because I really, really, really need to see what happens in Three Pines after A Brutal Telling.  My local used bookstore didn’t have the next novels, and the regular bookstore usually has only the most recent ones, and I can’t quite escape the feeling that these novels, despite the extraordinary pleasure I get from them, don’t merit full price.  But I bought them from a used dealer on Amazon, so I’m only half bad.

10:16

p.s. I was at a fancy event tonight.  An original cast member from Hamilton was there to perform.  He eyed my outfit and declared it elegant.  That might be better than literary.

 

My first feminist

7:47

The first feminist I ever met was…

I should restart. I might have met many feminists in my early life without knowing that they were feminists.  But it’s harder to wrangle that uncertainty into a sentence:

The first feminist who I recognized as making a feminist declaration was…

My first feminist encounter was with…

Writing is declarative, omniscient, edited, and kinda wrong because of all it leaves out, but the bargain is that wrongness is in the service of a truth.  Little accuracies get in the way of a big truth. 

How about this:  “I don’t let Cecilia read Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books.  Whenever they get into trouble it’s always ‘Dad! Dad!’ or ‘Boyfriend! Boyfriend! Come rescue me.'” That was the first feminist sentence I’d ever heard.  I was torn, when I heard it, between my deep love for Trixie Belden books (Nancy Drew was too patrician for my tastes), and my feeling that Mrs. M had just given my world a strong shake. I didn’t know real-life grown up women who said those things. I’d read that such things were possible. I’d read the Practical Princess,

although the publication date is such that I might have read it after Mrs. M’s declaration.  Again, facts in the way of a true story.

I was a big advocate of “Girls Can Do Anything” statements, and somebody’s mom (not mine) had played Free to Be You and Me in the background. But I hadn’t pulled the idea all the way through. Girls could do anything… if there weren’t any boys around to do all the boy parts of “anything.”

Maybe Mrs. M. was also the first critic I’d ever heard. I’m not sure I understood that you could dislike a book and have an idea antithetical to what the book said.  I was omnivorous as a reader and undiscerning.  I read everything and some things I really loved, but I was not critical.  It was dangerous to be critical.  It looked like mean.  It looked like smart, and not the good kind of smart, but smart like smart-mouthed, or smart-alec. And it looked like exercising authority, and “exercise authority” wasn’t in the penumbra of “anything” that the girl  I was could do.

I was in 3rd grade, maybe 4th, when Mrs. M gave me her review of Trixie Belden.  I didn’t stop reading them. Nor did I start being critical.  In 11th grade, my beloved English Teacher Mrs. S pushed and pulled us in that direction. I went along as best I could, but I was better at making clever connections than being critical.

I know there is a difference between being a critic, and being critical, and criticizing something. I mean all the senses of the word at once, and language doesn’t help here. Or maybe I’m just bad at nuance right now. 

When, as a college (college, mind you) junior,  I decided to have a go at a Marilyn French essay in a seminar paper, the (male) professor wrote, “You bash too much. What’s up with that?”  I got an A, and a warning.

8:10

Not tonight, dear

10:06

I wrote tonight.  Five long and, I hope, persuasive emails that will entice people to get on a plane or train and spend a night and day helping other people solve a big problem.  I wrote some other sentences to solve some problems in another email that will entice 20-30 people to get on a plane and spend three days solving a very very big problem that they all have to one degree or another.

I have never worked like this in my life.  I like it.  I like that my capacity seems to be expanding like an accordion, or like the houses in my stress dreams — doors and rooms and more doors and more rooms.  The more stressful the dream, the more of those rooms are bathrooms.  I like it.  I will also like stopping it for a little bit, and then stretching that accordion far out of tune in January and February.  And maybe I’m not even an accordion. Maybe I’m a pipe organ or a dragon, and I’m huge, endless, and I have been huge and endless all along, I was just invisible to myself.

When I explain to my sister in law why I wear a particular size in dresses and jeans, one that is larger than hers, I say, “I don’t squish,” meaning both that my flesh is quite solid and no mere fabric is going to make it a different circumference, and that I cannot bear to be squeezed by clothes. It’s a fact and a value statement. I thought of that tonight when I contemplated my astonishing workload for the next couple of months.  It will be okay. I don’t squish.

10:14.

Here again

9:24

With very little to say. I had a vague notion that I could write about something other than my life, that I could make some nifty observation, and that that would be a better writing exercise than describing my day.  But today, I am not sure I have the juice for that, even though it was an especially gorgeous moon this morning, huge and bright at 7am.  By the time I walked the dog this evening, 12 hours later, it was bright but veiled by clouds.  I kept hoping it would reveal itself.

Showing up is enough.  Showing up is enough.  Five minutes is enough, and I’ve already been here for three.

What was today?  Today was a big win, a triumphant return. Today was 20 years of preparation in order to say the right thing at the right time.  Today was walking into the room and saying, this physical set up is a disaster, and I can’t work here, and realizing that there was no remedy and making a success of it anyway.  Today was, as so much of my work is, a giant trust fall for high stakes with strangers.  (Not really high stakes.  Just failure and embarrassment.)  And, as it does, it worked.

And now, 7 minutes in, I remembered my new favorite poem, and then remembered that it’s Wednesday, and that I can reinstate Poem for Wednesday!

So, Listening, by David Ignatow:

You wept in your mother’s arms

and I knew that from then on

I was to forget myself.

Listening to your sobs,

I was resolved against my will

to do well by us

and so I said, without thinking,

in great panic, To do wrong

in one’s own judgment,

though others thrive by it,

is the right road to blessedness.

Not to submit to error

is in itself wrong

and pride.

Standing beside you,

I took an oath

to make your life simpler

by complicating mine

and what I always thought

would happen did:

I was lifted up in joy.

David Ignatow, “Listening” from I Have a Name. Copyright © 1996 by David Ignatow. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.

My work now is about listening and creating opportunities for people in cities to listen to each other, and I am often lifted up in joy because of it. And a little tiny tiny tiny bit of this mentality is seeping into my marriage. And this return to blogging was not supposed to be more writing about my marriage, but 20 minutes is 20 minutes, and I have 7 more to go and this is what’s available right now.  So, I do wrong in my own judgment. I release the monitoring of the thermostat, even though saving money and the planet is the right thing to do.  I release the monitoring of Daniel’s behavior, I stop being the harm prevention squad. I let Milo eat a dozen donuts at a time (he will not thrive by this, I understand).  “Not to submit to error is in itself wrong and pride.”  My young life did not prepare me for the truth of that sentence, just the opposite.

My other favorite poem at the moment which I’ve already used for poem for wednesday is Louise Gluck’s Humidifier.  Daniel snores and tosses and turns and is generally not sleep-enhancing, so we often sleep apart.  This has extreme drawbacks — the only thing worse is not sleeping.  So I sleep with a humidifier instead of a husband, upstairs in a room of my own, and I kind of love it.  That is certainly doing in wrong in my own judgment; Daniel is not thriving by it, and I don’t much care.  On weekends I am good, but on weeknights, I’m so given-out by the end of the day, I allow myself complete destructive selfishness in sleep.

9:45

This was a terrible idea

9:40pm

I am doing too much already.  I worry that I am adding another barnacle of practice, another thing to get anxious about if I don’t do it every day.  Not everyone can go from “none at all” to “entirely too much” in 24 hours.   I’m well trained.

But I did worry last night, and I worry today, after seeing my mind sputter and falter all day at work, that this is just too much.  It’s another practice in a life that is choking with practices and a million zillion work obligations.  I spent years telling myself I was incapable of working this hard, and organizing my life around that proposition.  I’m enjoying being wrong, but still, I need more free time, more down time, more nourishing time.

But what if this is free and down and nourishing? Evidence from day one is mixed. It was a great pleasure to sit and write, but my mind was racing when I went to bed.  And I am so tired.  My implicit bet, I think, is that this mental exercise will have a comparable (better, please) effect as physical exercise.  I am significantly less tired when I exercise hard.  Maybe my brain will regain its fluidity, its ability to concentrate and create if I do this.  Maybe.  I’m certainly not dazzling myself with tonight’s writing effort.

I do want to work on my endings, though.  I hate the way I end my posts.  My endings are so pat, and columnist like.  So wrapped up, but with a weird and unsatisfying tone.

Why, really, am I making myself do this?  Because there is never a right time to do this.  Because I must know that there is something I want to write my way out of and into. Because there’s another book in me and it will need to come out. Because when the right time comes, I need to have all this preparation so I will be ready to write the real thing.

These are my Hanon exercises. I’ve written about them before.  I loved them as a piano student.  There was something strong and rigorous about them.  They were the architecture of music — all hard, no soft.  Something in me is saying I need Hanon exercises again.  And, unlike the last time, the why is not super-interesting.  Last time, when I started this blog, the why was everything. Now it’s the quality of the exercise.  I think, anyway, to the extent that I can think at all tonight.

No good ending.

10pm.