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.
Another Door 