Care less

8:51

I usually start with a title, but caesura doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, and I’m stalled.

My joy machinery needs repair, the wifi connection to wonder and delight is sporadic.  I am surrounded by people, and books, and work, and love, and tea, and wool socks and warm hats, and yet I imagine myself alone in a tent, out ahead of the rest and I’ve got some unspecified work to do, all by myself, for an unspecified time and an unspecified reason.  Last night, I dreamed I was stranded in Columbus Ohio, with Milo (Ohio and Milo, that’s a nice sort-of rhyme), and not sure why I was there or what the agenda was, and how we would get home, and nothing was urgent but nor was it settled.

The title just arrived.  There is insufficient care.  I wish I cared less and others, perhaps, cared more (except my dear sweet assistant, who is 4 feet 11 inches of perpetual anxiety and epic vocal fry.  I work her too hard and then wonder why she can’t lighten up.  But I am generous, so generous with compliments).  Cared more for me, and less about what I was doing, or rather not doing.

At work, I’ve just passed the point at which pent-up ability, native intelligence, new-found curiosity, and a lot of poorly remembered reading from the 1990s was sufficient.  Now I’m truly at the frontier of my own abilities to be nimble, careful, curious, present in the specific and yet capably monitoring the field — that bifocalism that leadership requires.  Surely it’s learnable, but at 46 learning hurts.  There’s no lubricity. Wait — wordpress isn’t objecting.  No way!  Lubricity is a word?!  Does it mean what I think it means?  Oh, no.  Not really.  In the neighborhood, but not the living room.  I meant there’s no juiciness in the joints, mental or physical. Just metal on metal and bone on bone.

I’m sure it will be great past this frontier.  But I’d hoped for more regular installments of joy along the way.  I remember how, after leaving school, I found it hard to describe my life to my parents.  The punctuation marks were so far between, not like tests and semesters.  This may say too much about my relationship with my parents.  We love each other a lot, it’s just non verbal.  We can talk about everything except what’s important.  But it’s our own language, and we know what we mean, and mean to each other.

And at home… oh, worn out, worn down, worn through (any more prepositions that go with worn?  worn in, yes, certainly.  worn away?  No, not yet. )  We love each other a lot, it’s just non … nonsensical? Well, yes, sometimes our relationship is nothing but nonsense, and not in the fun way.  Non-negotiable?  Yes, that too, except the negotiations about everything else seem endless, and I try to stop but sometimes I don’t know how else to fill the space and the expectation, and to get the simple information and space I need.  I write this time and time again, but Daniel is a resister by temperament, and in the current circumstances the resistance is relentless.  He is putting so much energy into doing so very little.  And I’m the one who brings balance to the force, happiness be damned.  I could care less, perhaps.  The thought amuses me.  If I care less, will someone else care more?

9:13.  Don’t love it.  Still too much inside my head.

Cooking against the apocalypse

2:26

I gave the speech I had to give last week, and it brought no particular sense of relief.  My visit to the city wasn’t satisfying to me at all.  I was brought in as The Expert, and I am not.  Rather, I’m a collector of questions and maker of connections between people who ask them and act on them.  But people prefer answers to questions, at least from people who come trailing my particular clouds of privilege and institutional credibility.  I knew I should resist, but didn’t have a good way to start, or didn’t believe in the questions enough.  So I came home disappointed and frustrated and false-feeling.  And, to be honest, a bit bruised in ego.  Part of me did want to be The Expert, and dazzle them with what I knew and what I could give them.  Then their questions quickly outstripped my knowledge and scrambled me; I stuck myself in an unsatisfying place between telling and listening.  I told more than I knew or responsibly should have.  I listened not nearly enough.  I’m so disappointed.

I could call a friend who knows what this is like and talk to her about it, but I’m scared to. I’m scared that she’ll draw more out of me than I want to give — she’s amazing and needy, and it shouldn’t surprise me that those two things go together.  I’m scared that she’ll find me fraudulent.  I’m scared she’ll turn loose her own collection of questions and I won’t have good answers.  I can decide to sit with this for a while, instead of not calling her, I’m just not calling her yet.  I think I’ll have to call her, but I have to catch my breath first.  She’s work, and I need rest.

I continue to be a stranger to rest. I spent Friday afternoon cooking against the apocalypse.   After watching the inauguration, I started on a potato kugel for Shabbat dinner, which is actually pretty easy because the food processor does the hard work.  Lots of clean-up, though.  Then I decided I really wanted lentil soup, so got that going but ended up putting in not enough water at the start and too much at the end, so the flavor is a little wan.  Then pureed some white beans with olive oil, dried sage, shallots and a few other herbs because I thought I should do something with the white beans sitting in the freezer.  That was great — shallots are vegetarian bacon, wonderful flavor bombs.   Then tahini brownies because Milo likes them and because I needed to be busy but not with my brain.  I defrosted one of the challahs from new year’s, too.  And made deviled eggs, because I do that every Shabbat.  It was marvelous, I must say, to have so much good, homemade warm food.  To unroll into richness like that.  My guys don’t care about my cooking, but I care a lot, and that’s enough.

Yesterday I took a long walk with lots and lots and lots of friends: Milo and I went to the march in our city.  Milo was comfortable among the pussy hats and uterus drawings, although the slogan “The Future is Female” hurt his feelings.  “It’s supposed to be about equality,” he said, with a mixture of righteousness and confusion.  He held my hand when we were in the crowds, but when we ran into two of his friends from school who appeared to be un-parented during the march, he pointedly ignored me. I know my job, so I kept silent and didn’t even smile too much at them.

I might neglect the laundry and take to bed for an hour.  Today has been more and more and more tending to the externals, the dog, the laundry, the breakfast cookies (Milo eats them 10 at a time).  I did yoga and bought lots of delicious, expensive, recondite teas.  Well, I believe that they will be delicious.  I know them to be expensive and recondite.  Yes, to bed now.

2:50

What it’s like

8:43

It’s like this:

(That song is 4 minutes and 26 seconds long.  Does that count towards my time?  Against my time?)

It’s not working tonight.  I’ve deleted everything I’ve tried to write.  And I don’t have to write anything at all.  This is something I do for myself, and if it’s not a kindness to myself, then I don’t have to do it.  I don’t have to challenge myself, push myself or improve myself.  I can be content and complete exactly as I am now.  I have, let’s say, a writing injury.  It needs to heal before I return to my regular practice.  Wow, that is massively comforting, when I needed comfort.  I would very much like comfort to come upon me, perhaps even to fall on me like a sofa (I am in love with my own simile, which tends to end with a broken heart or at least a tin ear, but for now, it’s a loveseat love fest.  Go ahead, groan all you want but this is helping me.  This is play and I so need it right now.)  Anyway, at the moment, comfort does not fall, settee-like, from the sky but rather has to be dug up like root vegetables (beets, please, I like those and they are so pretty).  So now that I’ve got the dirt under my nails, it’s time to say goodnight.

9:05, with most of the minutes devoted to deletion.  Elegance is refusal.  (Different commenters attribute this to Coco Chanel or Diana Vreeland.  I’m the Vreeland camp myself. And I’m not sure that elegance is refusal.  Perhaps that’s because I’m feeling very refused these days, and being accused of being aggressively refusing — see prior overworked riff on resistance. Re re re re re re re re respect… I hope it ends there.  Anyway, I think elegance, true elegance, comes from graciousness and generosity.  And if it doesn’t, I’m not sure it’s worth aiming for.)

 

 

Falling short

8:52

I could, perhaps, stop this.  I could stop doing the thing I think I have to do next, and just sit and laugh and replenish myself.  Except… there are real deadlines, and real consequences.  The clothes I’m taking to a bat mitzvah in the suburbs will not arrange themselves into my overnight bag.  And not doing it now just means doing it later.  That’s the hard thing.  It’s not a matter of do or do not (“there is no try” … except of course there is, which is what this post is about).  It’s do now, or do later, and bear the burden of remembering and keeping between now and then so why not just do it now?  I struggle to balance the tax of doing and the tax of remembering.

I did not finish writing my speech, the speech I will give in one week.  It turns out that 6000 words is a big task for a week, or rather for the hours I gave to the task in this week.  So I’ll finish it on Monday instead of taking the holiday.  This disappoints me, but I saw it coming, a bit.  I spent extra time on my physical therapy exercises.  I chose, weirdly, to wash some makeup brushes before leaving for work.  I had no meetings on my schedule today, a completely wonderful and blank work day set aside entirely for writing, and I bruised it a bit at the start.

And once I got to work, I spent two hours on another project — hours I greatly enjoyed.  This other project is going to be a lot of fun, and will almost certainly be more important to the future of my work than the speech, or the article that I write out of the speech.  And it’s not as hard as those 6000 words.

The last 2500 words are harder going than the first 3500. I thought it would be otherwise, because I thought I was more confident in the latter material.  But I’m tired and finding myself to be just a bit auto-obstreperous.  I mean, obstreperous about my own professed goals.  Obstreperous about my tight control, my deadlines, my sense of order and duty.

Why do I have to control myself so much?  Oh here we go!  First and foremost, old habit and a houseload (yes, purposely echoes household) of conditioning.  Two houseloads, at least, and probably dozens.  The house I live in, the house I grew up in as the dutiful eldest daughter, the house Daniel grew up in as the privileged and adored son, the house my mother grew up in as the dutiful eldest daughter, the houses of my grandmothers and their mothers and….  I was taught at a young age that I needed to control myself.  That an uncontrolled me was dangerous to others and maybe not lovable.  My parents, especially my mother, weren’t trying to be ugly.  They were passing on the messages they themselves had learned and lived by.  They thought this was necessary.  Throw in boyfriends’ houses, too.  Throw in several houses of worship, both Catholic and Jewish, with deeply gendered rules and roles.

Throw in beloved Daniel.  Throw up my hands again and again and again at his manipulations and expectations and demands and sulks and instance after instance after instance of “do not” (or, to be literary, I would prefer not to)  I crave that resistance for myself, but the warp and woof of the household load is that only one of us can resist at a time.  This being not at all how Daniel sees it.  Daniel begs for me to join the resistance, by not resisting him and his pleas for stillness, for the utter lack of productive effort, for company while he sleeps, his feet heavy and confining on my lap while I… wile away the hours? No, while I wonder why Daniel believes himself to be so fascinating that even in sleep he is worthy of my undivided attention.

And maybe it would be different if I could fall into Shabbat as I usually do — a sprint through the cooking, and then done.  Resistance to rest is futile or and resistance to productive work is required.  I can get with that.  But no… This Shabbat is a marathon of sociability.  We love the family celebrating this Bat Mitzvah, we really do.  We love our friends who absconded to the suburbs and who we rarely see anymore, we really do.  What I really do not love is 25+ hours in which I am either asleep or surrounded by people and bright and chipper and charming and correct (in observance) and on.  And not asleep nearly enough.  Services, then speeches, then lunch, then a special women-only service so girls and women can read the Torah.  Opinions differ, but this synagogue follows  the mainstream interpretation that women can’t read the Torah in the presence of 10 or more men — a quorum for prayer.  Then more stuff and stuff and stuff.  No privacy, no nap, no mystery novel, no yoga stretches, no respite for the introvert.  I could try to walk around the block, but an ice storm is predicted.  An ice storm for pete’s sake (who was Pete, by the way?  St. Peter, maybe?  The first few Google hits are unsatisfying.)  Resistance is futile.  Crankiness is inevitable.

9:30, with some goofing off.

Poem for Wednesday!!

8:56

So many sofas falling on me.  You’d think I’d take the hint and maybe sit down, or even recline.

But no.  When I arrived home near 7pm — admittedly after a spectacular yoga class — bearing 3 dozen donuts that Milo “needs” for school tomorrow, I was feeling the bitter tang of resentment at doing too much.  I said to myself, “I need to put myself first. I need to see myself putting myself first.  Therefore, a glass of red wine is in order” (I dropped out of my challenge to quit drinking for 30 days.  I stopped for 5 days, and very much enjoyed the stopping.  Then I stopped stopping, and I’m drinking again although much much less than before.  There’s only so much energy I can spend on resisting.  I’m very happy I did what I did.)

And then I made breakfast cookies for Milo.  And put away the laundry.  And sorted the mail.  And washed dishes.  And then, THEN, I decided I was worthy of my own attention and made myself dinner.  The same meal I’ve had each night since Sunday, because we never seem to have the right groceries for anything else.  Even as I was doing all these things I thought, why? Why is this more important than a hot meal for myself?  But the terrible momentum of doing and doing and doing was not to be stopped.

It does feel nice to eat without thinking about the next thing (and the next and the next and then next), to be done with chores before enjoying the pleasures of softly fried eggs and cheddar cheese and salsa in a tortilla, with that glass of red wine.  (I can keep a bottle of wine alive from Friday night to Wednesday, it turns out.  It’s all about vacuum stoppers, storing it in the fridge — even red, and not letting it breathe for a minute in the bottle, only in the glass.)  But there’s always a next thing.  I gin myself up.

Which reminds of a line in a poem that was read at my (first) wedding to Daniel.  (Have I explained that we married each other three times?  We did.  No divorces in between, just increasing entwining in escalating secular and religious legal systems.)

And it’s Wednesday, isn’t it?

The Continuous Life

Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

9:13

How it started

9:44

It started with sit-ups.

Not really.  Not precisely. Starts are often cumulative — an accretion of things too small in themselves to matter, but they gather and weigh and push.  Also it wasn’t sit-ups.  It was physical therapy exercises to strengthen my core, and physical therapists are perhaps the last ones to prescribe sit-ups for this purpose.  More truths that get in the way of economy of expression.  Now, especially, inelegant and inefficient truths seem important.  Truth seems important.  Precision and clarity in something small that doesn’t matter, so I’m in practice for things that are big and do matter.

So… it started with my stomach, my core.  A day after a colleague told me that other colleagues (unspecified) thought that I acted like a diva, like I had a sense of entitlement, and that the project I’d completed that had brought so much good (I thought) to my workplace was now toxic and we had to stop talking about it, I had my first appointment with a physical therapist.  I had nagging sciatic pain off and on for years, and in 2013 it was on a lot.  (Nagging pain is a cliche, except it’s the right one.) My yoga studio had an arrangement with a physical therapy practice, so I took up the offer of a free evaluation.  The physical therapist recommended core-strengthened exercises to start.  Maybe she recommends them most of her new clients.

I started core strengthening, doing my exercises diligently several times a week.  And as I got stronger literally at the core of my being, I got stronger in my spirit and I got serious as hell about changing my work situation.  I was doing psychotherapy, too, and of course that mattered enormously.  But the physical changes were grounding and motivating.

(pause to check Twitter for commentary on Obama speech)

My brain needed my body to be strong, to make progress every day towards being stronger, towards getting out of pain, to do small things, diligently, that would change a situation that I had accepted as normal.  My body made the metaphor.

And now I’m doing more, finally, after years of intentions.  I am explicit, when I leave the office at 5 or at 6 to go to a workout, that I have to do this with my body so that I can do what I need to do with my brain and spirit. I need to be brave and tireless. I need to do more than I can, and also decide to hold back when I want to because it’s best for me in this breath or this moment.

Why am I saying this?  Because Girl of a Certain Age asked for stories of reinvention, and I thought to myself, “It started with sit-ups.  Well, not really, not precisely…”

10:04

 

 

Sofa

10:10

Fatigue fell on me like a sofa.

That’s what I was going for.  I never use the word sofa — I say couch, it’s probably a regional thing.  Daniel says sofa, always.  I don’t know anyone who says davenport, but I understand some do, or did.

I remember making a doll-sized chaise lounge out of a forest-green Stride-Rite shoe box, when I was about 7, according to instructions in one volume (11, maybe?) of the Childcraft encyclopedia.  Oh, the rapture of the Childcraft encyclopedia (God bless you, wikipedia), and the annual supplements, on math, on Native Americans, on “the Magic of Words,” (yes) one on dogs, from which I unblinkingly plagiarized a second-grade essay. “There’s a lot more to having a puppy than saying you want one,” it, and I, began.  That’s a great opening line, memorable almost 40 years later. No wonder I wanted it for my own. I cared much less about having a puppy, although maybe that was the same time we did get a puppy, a springer spaniel we named P.J.

None of that matters to anyone but me, and perhaps a few other children of the 1970s, but it gave me great pleasure to write that paragraph.

10:18

The hours

8:31

If I’d written this post at 2:30, it would have been glowing.  I would have rhapsodized about how happy I was — no kidding — to be at a work-relevant conference on a Sunday morning, even though it meant getting up at 6 (as I do every weekday, and I have come to hate, especially this morning), and effectively having a 6-day workweek. I would have written something about how good it is to be curious, to have finally learned how to learn at a conference.  I would have been feeling lucky and smart, and like so many pieces of my life, including that hard, hard, hard-won master’s degree in politics, were coming together in a wonderful way.

But shortly after I came home and sat down to do more work, the drop cloth of fatigue fell (not sure that works.  “Cloud” and “fog” and “blanket” are cliched.  “storm” and “rain” don’t quite work with fatigue — too active sounding.  Fatigue fell like a curtain? No, trite. I need a better falling thing.  Or an entirely different approach.  Fatigue fell like darkness? Maybe like a dark and stormy night…)

I wonder, well, actually I fear, if I ran out the the physical and emotional surplus I built up during my week off.  It’s not a completely terrible ratio: a week’s vacation brings a week’s respite from exhaustion.  I had hoped for more, though, maybe even a month, just to see me through a particularly excruciating — or rather high-personal-and-professional-growth — period at work.

I have to write something.  This week. I have to write 25 pages to give as a 40 minute speech on January 19th.  There’s no wiggling around or under or out of it.  40 minutes’ worth of new words.  New-ish.  I think pages of my book will be re-pressed (hee hee) into service.  Once the speech is done, it’s just hard work through the end of March.  Very hard work at very high volume to a very high standard.  But not expanses of blankness that I have to depend entirely on myself to fill.  Well, again, I have a research assistant.

I am tired of my tiredness.  It’s daunting to feel this way on a Sunday night.

Too much “I” in this post.  It’s not satisfying to me.  And too many self-propelled interruptions when I’m trying, or trying not, to write.

Too many people around now, so ending early.

8:50

 

Good to be bad

10:17

I think I started writing again to have something to be bad at, when necessary, something to neglect, and amuse myself by neglecting.

No alcohol for four days now!  Although… a few weeks ago, I made Mark Bittman’s recipe for braised lentils.  I approximated the seasonings, and they were fine.  Not amazing, but perfectly reasonable.  The sauce was very thin, though, and I worried there wasn’t enough liquid to prevent freezer burn.  So I emptied half (maybe a third?) of a bottle of wine into the pyrex container with the lentils, popped the container in the freezer, and hoped for the best.  It’s less random than it sounds — the recipe called for a cup or so of wine in the original braise.

Upside: no freezer burn when I removed the lentils.  Downside: what, exactly was I going to do with the wine, which was going to sour once out of the freezer?  Also, who needs drunken lentils?  The wine was good only as a preservative, not as a flavor enhancer. (That said, the wine froze nicely.  Next time I have some good wine I don’t want to waste, I’ll pour it into an ice tray and drink the melted cubes later.)  I poured off the wine, but not very well.  I didn’t rinse the lentils, or even put them in a colander to drain properly (didn’t think of that, even).  Today, four days after the defrost, I ate the lentils over rice for dinner.  They tasted odd.  I poured on olive oil and salt told myself that was the over-aged wine, not spoiled beans.  I should know by 2am if I was right.

This was not the way I thought I would cheat.  I dumped out the rest of the lentils.

10:29

Again

9:37

My knees forgot how to work fluidly as I climbed up the stairs.  I laughed at this preview of things to come.  It’s funny for now.  It will be wretched when it’s an every day thing, and then it will get worse.

My grandmother is dying.  Not officially — there is no vigil, no named number of days. But she’s in the hospital again after another fall.  When she fell last spring, the resulting hospitalization triggered psychosis and paranoia, which is apparently not uncommon in the elderly.  For months she believed that “the society” was coming to kill her.  She never felt safe.  She didn’t always recognize her children, and sometimes thought that they were threats.  Eventually she got the right dosage of an anti-psychotic, stabilized, and was weaned off the medications.  She’s back on them now, preventively, during this hospitalization.  But she’s combative, and can’t be moved into a rehab center until she calms down.  Each day she’s in the hospital she weakens — as do all elderly people in the hospital.  And it doesn’t do anything good for her emotional state either.  So she’s in a place that will make her worse until she gets better enough to go to the place that will make her more better, a rehab center.

She has to go to rehab to regain confidence that she can stand up long enough to move from wheelchair to toilet. That’s the goal of rehab, a respite from sitting in her own waste.  The merest scrap of dignity.

I tell myself that all the yoga and walking and eating and climbing stairs and hard physical training will keep me from this fate in 50 years.  I ignore the fact that my grandmother was herself pretty active, physically and mentally, until she started falling and falling and falling.  She will die of gravity.

***

The “again” in the title was meant to indicate me being back at work, after more than a week off.  I’d like another week off, please.  A more restful one.  But I don’t get that.  What I have instead is: again the feeling of being shot out of cannon, which is kind of fun, the flying aspect, but loud and you land hard.  Again the feeling of accomplishing so much more in each day than I ever did before, and still having it not be quite enough.  The next three months will be ridiculous and barely tolerable.  They will make a mockery of intentions & challenges, although it is day 3 of no alcohol, and so far so good.  It makes me wonder if there’s more of a kick to my Bach’s Flower Essence sleep aid than I know.

And yet, I still feel myself being curious. I still notice myself noticing and wondering.  I had a whole new set of minor challenges or opportunities for awareness in my head when I got off the bus this evening.  One of them is: notice how I present myself.  I tend to lead with wackiness or weakness — the preferred self-preservation tool of the mid-1980s smart girl.  It’s not the mid-1980s.  I’m not a girl.  I don’t have to do that.  I can start by noticing how often I do that, and perhaps deciding not to keep doing it.  I may choose to be a little quieter about my interior state, at least out there.

***

I have a new way to think about the main character in my novel.  In movies, she’s the wife you see in the background, the one who gets left about 10 minutes in, as the husband embarks on the odyssey that becomes the subject of the movie.  What would happen if the camera lingered on her longer?  That’s the novel.

Okay fine, that’s also Colm Toibin’s oeuvre, that is in fact the whole damn point of Middlemarch and maybe no one needs me to write that.  But I might need me to write that.  There might be something I don’t know about her that needs finding out.

10:05