Notes to self

8:14

Hastily, because Daniel will arrive any minute with dinner (he doesn’t cook, but he’s an ace at order-and-retrieve)

I am uncrushable, even when I think Daniel is trying to crush me to save, or to avoid, which can look like the same thing, himself.

There is no Archimedean point for our marriage.  We are making it up as we go, as is everyone, and there is a massive, massive industry designed to make me think otherwise.  Endeavor to care less about that.

My exquisite attention to fair play and right behavior might be part of the problem.

Each round might not matter that much, and they might not aggregate.  See uncrushable.

And when I forget all of this and fall back on the old and unuseful behavior, that is also okay and even precious.

8:18

One imagines

6:19

One (one=me) imagines that there is some extra value in writing when it’s difficult, when one doesn’t feel like it, or rather — as is the case right exactly now– when one yearns to write but the yearning is much bigger than the material at hand.

I’m reading so many glowing reviews of Insomniac City, and wondering if I should read it myself.  I want to, because I want it to teach me how to love someone who is older, who is enormously brilliant, who is failing (gradually, and then suddenly).  I want to read the instructions for how to put socks on and take socks off of a partner’s failing body.  I want to read it as an instruction manual for how to be a better, more loving, more patient, more tender, more submissive (I’ll get to that) wife.  But I fear it would make me so very very sad because of how much I struggle to be those things, and because the author just might make it seem so effortless and correct and obvious.  That would be hard to bear.

Neither Daniel nor I are submitting these days.  Did others play that meaningless childhood game of piling your hand on a friend’s hand on a table top again and again?  Because there were only four hands, the pile never rose, you just answered hand with hand, until something else became more interesting.  Daniel and I are like that with umbrage.  I give, he takes, and off we go, and it’s just as meaningless.  Neither one of us chooses to be the grown up who says, “I will not take the bait.  I will answer your tart question with perfect blandness. I will transcend.”  Oh my God how I want to transcend.  Oh my God how I am unable to. Oh my God how I want Daniel to transcend, because that’s like an embrace.  That’s saying, “I got you, even when you are not your best self.  I’ll hold you and love you anyway.  I won’t be distracted by your bad, because I am so deeply connected to your good.  I’m not going anywhere.  I am, and we are, stronger than your passing weak moment.”  So pretty, and, at the moment, so unreachable.  That’s why I’m sad.  I want to be that person, and I want to be married to that person — the desire for the latter is much stronger than the desire for the former, but okay, it’s allowed.  Neither one of us are.

What is marriage?  Is it merely overlapping assertions of power, sometimes tempered by love?   I demand that Daniel — well, no.  I request ardently.  I am not in the demanding business.  My whole life has shown me that demand is not an avenue open to me.  Demand gets me sent into a corner, into exile.  I request.  I plead, but I must not demand.  So… I ardently request that Daniel accept me as I am, that he stop taking the things about me that I love so and making them damnable, and that he transcend the occasional poisoned darts, the absence of attention and show me especially in those moments that I am beloved.  And right now, I am not seeing that.  And Daniel does not in any way, as far as I can tell, see that I am giving that to him.  And, in fact, there are many things about Daniel as he is that pain me deeply, and that I resist mightily.  Can I be right and he be wrong?  Can it be that he must submit to me but I may not submit to him, at least not any more than I already have and maybe a little less?  (We’ve also argued about why I think in terms of submission and surrender, and he doesn’t.  Well… because he doesn’t. He never does.  He’s exempted himself, by only ever ever ever doing what he wants to do, when he wants, if he wants.)  I want a judge, or even a damn stoplight: Green for Dorothea, Red for Daniel. Or, even the opposite.  Just some thing outside of him and me.  Some objective thing that will say when to give and when to hold and how not to be wrong.  Negotiating it ourselves is feeling just like power, insufficiently tempered by love.

Is this the flaw in me, in my whole conception of love and my ability to love, or is this the warped world of Daniel’s current episode of depression?  I want to be perfect, and deeply loved especially when I am not perfect and when I’m not perfect when it matters most.

And in the midst of this, I thought of this gorgeous song.  That is what I want to give and receive, and it seems so not possible right now.

6:54

 

 

In which I am not feeling Valentine’s day

9:09

I pulled these sentences out of my drafts folder, from a couple of days ago.

“I miss not writing.  I have nothing more to say than that, really.  I miss the absence of committing story to space (and time, too).

So of course instead of writing I will link.  To this”

And I stopped there.  I cannot recall what I meant to link to.

I have lost the fluidity that I thought I had found again in writing.  Lost the rhythm, the play.  It’s get-backable (wordpress changed that to “get-packable” which makes no more sense), it’s just arduous to get it back.  That is age.  To work fantastically hard to stay in place, and to lose ground with just a moment’s inattention or desisting.  There are gains, yeah yeah.  I’m so much steadier than I was in my 30s (oh… tough tough 30s.  Tough tough tough and sad 30s.  Many beautiful things happened but I can’t see them for the pain, which is a scrim over all the rest), I have a greater capacity for gratitude, appreciation, joy.  I don’t have much patience, but more than I ever have before.  Such a pity one can’t have all the good things at once.

Waiting for a story that won’t come… hell, waiting for a sentence, a syllable that won’t come.  That’s how drained I am, how deep into a February funk… I so want to write but can’t generate what to say.  All the rest I’m giving myself — and I think I’m giving myself quite a lot — is insufficient.  My attention to work is insufficient.  I have a bad case of the insufficiencies.  And not even the 80s music in the bodega can pull me out.

So here’s something that’s just popped up to the surface: I’m crushed by the dissociation of perfection and love.  It should be liberating, and I can see that it will be eventually.  But now it just looks like my biggest psycho-emotional investment has tanked in value.  I was wrong all along.  I don’t want love to be mysterious, magic, ineffable (we used to joke about that word in college.  “It’s ineffable because you can’t eff it.”  We made ourselves laugh.  Sweet girls in Dr. K’s philosophy class sophomore year), all the stuff of story and song. I want to it to be predictable, a good bet, a solid if-then loop. I can trust myself to love someone through, for, around, in, beyond, imperfections, but don’t trust that it will be reciprocated, and I’m excellent, extraordinary, hyper-sufficient at finding evidence to support my case.  I come back to this over and over, it’s my recurring infection of the spirit, and it’s flaring up again.  This is my Big Sad.  Not that I am imperfect and therefore unlovable, but that being perfect is irrelevant to the whole project.  So what do I do when I feel like there’s not enough love, when the ambient love is insufficient?  Wait.  Read.  Rest.  Cook. Go to the bodega and dance a little in the aisle to make myself laugh. Write. Cry.

9:33

 

Meditation on meditation

9:04

The smell of my house when I walked in the door tonight: wood, lilies (because Daniel buys flowers every week), a little bit of damp, residue of incense burned a week ago, a hundred meals worth of potatoes.  It’s warm here, and our house releases smells when it goes from warm to cold.

The bodega around the corner, which always plays the oldies station, and, when you grew up in the 70s and 80s, your most treasured music is now oldies music.  Last Friday “Beat It” was on.  I never loved the song then, but my heart soared when I heard it.  I did the steps I remembered from the video in the aisle.  It was only a couple of steps.   Today it was the Pretenders, and Chrissie Hynde always is a pleasure.

The bus that pulled up a minute after I got to the stop, and dropped me off right at the bodega.

Those were the exit doors from my foul mood (hmm.  Not really, unless it conveys a sequence, and I don’t think exit doors conveys a sequence.  Off ramps has the same problem.  I originally had “antidotes” but that’s too cliched.  Maybe “rungs on the ladder out of..”?  Votive candles lighting the pathway beyond?  Time to stop.)

Meditation makes these experiences as big as the more frustrating ones.  The original title of this post, when I was writing it in my mind was Everything Girl, or maybe Everything Girl vs. the Demons.  I was set to carry on about frustrations, how I am piling on unnecessary and foolish discontents and bullying myself when I’m already carrying a very heavy load, and doing it pretty damn well.

Then I walked in and there was the smell.  And I remembered the song.  And I thought about how nice it was that the bus took me exactly right there.  And that became the most important thing to write about.

Everything girl, bless her heart, is never very far away, nor are the demons (actually the point of the post was or will be that everything girl is in fact a demon… it will make sense once I introduce her), but that’s for another time.

9:22, because I feel done.  And about 5 minutes were spent watching the Beat It video to make sure that the moves were really from Beat It, rather than Thriller.  So much smoking!  That wouldn’t be allowed now.  See for yourself:

 

 

 

Inconsequential

7:03

Such happiness to log in again.  Nothing in particular to say, but sitting here feels like such a pretty luxury.  My microclimate is more hospitable than it was 10 days ago.  (Emphasis on microclimate.  Maybe even nano-climate. Outside my door it gets worse and worse.)  I am moving too fast, probably, to feel any one thing for long, good or bad.  So the gloom of my trip gave way to anxiety about the next big work thing, which was wonderful and hard and very nourishing, but 48 hours after returning I hardly remembered that I’d been away.

Today, though, my body got the memo, as Daniel likes to say.  I relaxed.  Tomorrow holds a small adventure to a new store in a new part of town.  Well, not a new part of town, but a part of town that’s emerging and I haven’t been able to explore it yet.  My guys are not urban explorers, at least not in our own city.  But there’s an errand to draw us out, and I’m treating it like a picnic.  I might be a sucker for destination retail.  But more than that, tomorrow is not frantic, at least not yet.  I know what I mean by that.  I make days frantic well in advance, and I am usually right.

There’s also joy in writing things that are inconsequential.  I write so many emails, so many, many, many important emails, and agendas and invitations.  So many things to be scrutinized and worried over.  So many things that are meant to have momentous effect, to do a thing, to make a difference, to show impact. This riff here is not very good, not very interesting, just another Hanon exercise, and I don’t care.  I’m stiff and over performing and it doesn’t matter.  This is what play is.

When I was feeling really low a few weeks ago, wrapped up in how blue I was, I played a word game with myself, like hacky sack.  I started with Blue.

Blue Moon

Moon River

River of Love

Love train

Take the A train

A-team

Team sport

sport … and then I’ll stall, and that’s like dropping the ball.  It’s like the geography game Milo, Daniel and I used to play, in which one player says a place name, and the next player has to say a place name that begins with the last letter of the previous place name.  Key to victory: remembering Xenia (Ohio).  It always came up after Halifax.  But then you’re sunk if someone says Bordeaux (we never remembered that), and you don’t have any more Xs.  There are several Chinese cities that begin with X, but I never committed them to memory.  I knew play, something non serious, something that didn’t matter, would give my mind something useful to do.

I should also learn to knit.  That would drive Daniel mad, which is not not a reason to do it.  Daniel is anxious about signs of aging in me, and I don’t think he’s familiar with knitting as a hipster practice.  He says, “I’m the only one who is allowed to get old,” as he nervously eyes my fast-graying hair and says he likes it.

We’re off to dinner now, at a fancy restaurant.  I’ll wear something ridiculous and youthful to please him.  He’s blue right now, and won’t think to play his way out of it (but maybe I give him too little credit.)

7:24