Fun

7:52

When I started studying for the LSAT for the second time, in 2000, the first question I encountered on the logical reasoning section was about a bumble bee.  I bumbled (pun intended a little bit — it’s the bourbon typing) the question because I overthought it.  I imagined contingencies that the question refused to countenance.  I saw multiplicities, unintended consequences, and none of the answers was on my side.  Eventually I learned to simplify, to stay within the boundaries of the question, and I got a perfect score on the LSAT.  That was the last time I was perfect.

I’m also a disaster at personality assessments and magazine quizzes.  Do they mean always?  More often than not?  On Tuesdays when I’m not busy?  With beloved friends or strangers?  When I was young or now? But now I’m particularly anxious, so maybe they mean when I’m not anxious.  Except, aren’t I always anxious?  But how anxious?

This is my oblique approach to the question that I can’t answer: What do you do for fun? Variation: What is “play” for you?  Please ask me something else.  But, no, the authors of Designing Your Life won’t budge.  They want me to evaluate myself on play:

“activity that is done just for the pure sake of doing it.  It can include organized activity or productive endeavors, but only if they are done for fun and not merit…. Play is all about joy… Play is any activity that brings you joy when you do it.  When an activity is done to win, to advance, to achieve — even if it’s ‘fun’ to do so–it’s not play… The question here is what brings you job purely in the doing.”

Can I have another question, please?  The authors also ask me to evaluate myself on health, work, and love.  You’d think I’d stumble on love but in fact I’m rock solid.  I have lots more love in my life, or I recognize lots more love in my life, than I did a year ago. I’m also much clearer on what is and isn’t love.  I don’t have all the varieties of love I want, but I understand the question.  Work has a complicated answer, but again I understand the question.  Health, I’m also solid, even on mental and spiritual dimensions.  I’m lagging spiritually, as always, but I know what it means.

Fun.  Play.  What are those things?  I find fun and play in the other things I do.  I find joy in the instrumental things, like cooking to feed myself and walking to work and walking to synagogue with Milo.  And thank God, because I am not sure I do anything at all that is not instrumental.  I read.  I read Louise Penny and other mysteries, not just excellent improving books (although I AM very literary.  I just choose otherwise sometimes.  Often.  When I’m stressed I read mysteries.  I have read mysteries almost exclusively for the last three years. Or five. )  I deeply enjoy yoga, but there is an edge of advancement and improvement.  I try to go for slow, aimless walks, but I find myself speeding up, my heart pounding, taking the hills.  And that’s fun, but would I do it if it weren’t good for me?  Cooking, but I get sad when it turns out badly, so that’s clearly instrumental.  Blogging?  It’s not joy as much as it is unpicking tightly, wrongly woven stitches.  Sighing and starting again at the beginning.  I aim to knit.  It seems soothing.  Is soothing instrumental?  It doesn’t sound like joy.

And yet, I want to believe, ALL evidence to the contrary, that I am a fun person.  Cruel men have told me otherwise, when I decline to do what they want me to do: “You’re no fun.”  I have a lot of joy in my life, even more in the last year when what I thought was my life was falling apart all around me like a building imploding in a summer blockbuster.  Milo and I make each other laugh till we can’t speak, and we go on and on and on.

Is this a gendered question?  Can women in families ever detach from instrumentalism? I’m about to find out, aren’t I, as Milo chooses to spend most of his time in the only home he’s ever known, which is not where I will live.  Creating my new apartment is fun, and instrumental because a person needs tables and chairs and rugs.

I can see coming to understand this question.  The previous question that used to stump me, stop me cold, cause tears of frustration was, “What do you *want* to do?”  What I wanted to do was a good job.  What I wanted to do was please, appease, get an A, exceed the standard, be praised and therefore loved.  Wasn’t that enough?  What do you want me to do, oh questioner?  Tell me and turn me loose and we’ll both be happy.  I am better now at this question.  I know the answer more often than not, and I know when to ask it. It tugs at me when I pick up the improving book (Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach.  I don’t think I trust her after Visit From the Goon Squad.  She didn’t answer the essential question, “how did they get from A to B?” I could have forgiven her in the name of experimental fiction, but then she put it in the mouth of one of her characters, which seemed like a cruel wink.  She knew what she was doing and she knew it was mean.  I don’t like mean girls.  But Manhattan Beach is supposed to be straight up traditional narrative.  Still…. I also have Homegoing, which I really wanted to read when it first came out.  But it still seems improving-ish.  So I read the second Joe Ide IQ novel, which was less wonderful than the first.  And not very literary.  But that former professor of mine can go jump in a lake.  I read Hopscotch for his class, which was not fun at all.)  It reminds me, per Mara Glatzel (she’s quite good, and quite woo-woo), that I should eat before I unload the dishwasher, go to the bathroom before I finish the email, get some water even when I’m late to the meeting.

What will that even be like, not to pay the debt to my family in the form of laundry and dishes and housework before I leave the house to go to yoga on Sunday?

I texted this question to three beloved friends.  Two have responded and they don’t really know either.  So I’m leaning towards it being a gendered thing.

8:31

Quotidian

4:27

I considered Quondam, just because I like the sound of it, and am I sure I could have made use of its meaning (“that once was; former”), but I shied away from that because quondam husband, quondam marriage… I am and am not there.

Much less outer tumult, but so much inner tumult.  Quandary, you might say! I am paying close attention to how I feel when I am around him, or when I think about him, or the future.  It changes, a lot.

Friday & Saturday, I felt enormous relief at thinking, “I don’t have to stay with him. I don’t have to stay, I don’t have to stay, I don’t have to stay.  I get to decide.  He doesn’t decide, he doesn’t decide.”  I saw him talking to an old emotional-affair flame at synagogue and my guts feel to my feet.  And then I sat next to her, which was weird.  Avoiding her would have been weirder.  Why do I do this to myself?

When we settled in to watch our new Netflix series (Luther), I noticed how much I was doing to justify the choice, and to remind him that I have chosen a lot of great TV series… so much justification… what’s that for?  I also noticed that I felt uncomfortable around him.

Today is better, or rather today is different.  We had brunch together, unexpectedly.  We thought we were meeting another couple, but Daniel got the dates wrong, so there we were. It was nice. I asked if he wanted to go to the used book store around the corner.  He said no. I said, “I’ll say it differently: Will you come with me to the used book store?” Then yes.  It was role reversal — he had felt the pressure of other things when he declined.  He noted that.  I said, see, that’s how it feels to me, too.  Then I was explaining why I was so eager to go look at books: “As you know, I treat Sundays like weekdays, but without makeup–” “I know,” he interjected, not kindly.  “So, now that I have more time than I expected,” I continued, “I am very happy to do things I don’t normally do.”  Then I suggested we watch another Luther episode when we got home, and said we could even skip the bookstore to do it.  He was committed to the bookstore by then, though, so we went.

On the way there, I said, don’t worry about walking the dog before the episode, we can get right down to watching.  I realized, in the sting of what he said, that we both do a lot to control how the other person spends time, it just manifests itself differently.  He complains I boss him around.  He is right, I do, overtly.  He bosses me around in an insidious and indirect way, through his disapproval and disdain for my choices, by questioning, by sighing, by disrespecting.  When we got home I said, “We need to –both of us– respect how the other person spends time.  It’s not nice.  What you said stung.” He said what he always does, which is that he feels left out, like I prioritize these other things over him.  I don’t know what to do about that.  I could concede. But he prioritizes sleeping all day Saturday, and late into the mornings, and not taking an interest at all in kitchen matters or talking to me while I cook, or walking with me — that is Daniel’s anti-empathy M.O.  It’s always me coming to him, or not, while he never considers moving to my realm.  And then he rails that I am not interested in the things that interest him.

But I said nothing when it was clear to me that he would not have nearly enough time to do his errands before his 5pm meeting today.  That’s on him, he’s a grownup.  It felt good not to care, to leave it entirely to him, not to try to perfect him.

I usually don’t write in such detail. Maybe it’s because I am writing now only for myself.  The small matters (quotidian!) seem important, because I am looking for change and not-change in me.  Not change: justifying, appeasing.  Change: observing my reactions without judging them, holding off decisions, observing ways that it might feel good for me to behave differently, observing when I reach for Daniel’s medicine (metaphorically) to take it myself because it SO CLEARLY NEEDS TO BE TAKEN, and if he won’t, then I will, to model the behavior.

And now I feel exhausted.  Insufficient sleep.  Observing is tiring.  Holding myself at a distance, seeing it, explaining it to myself and mentally to him — even though I don’t owe him an explanation or anyone an explanation.

A realization as I re-read, briefly, about Daniel being a grownup.  Subtly but unmistakably… and in a way that is deafeningly loud to me… Daniel refuses to be a grownup in a million ways.  That is another significant issue. He refuses to take care of himself, physically. Okay, that can also be a choice and lots of people make it. But he also refuses to take responsibility in a serious way for his actions.  It is always someone else’s fault, usually mine. His demise is complicated, but he never has said, “I’m sorry for what I’m putting you through.” He has explicitly said that he can’t be held accountable for his behavior when he is angry or in the first two months (two months!) after his fall.  He has never considered that he was both a prince and an asshole, to the same people, at almost the same time. He refuses to be wrong, for anything.  The number of times he has shouted “My conscience is clear!” when he has lied or hurt me.  If your conscience is clear, why the lying and the sneaking?  “Because I know how you get, how you are, you are suspicious of things.”  Translation: Because I know it hurts you, because I want to keep these things secret, because (maybe) I love them because they are secret and because they hurt you and I kind of want to hurt you because you love me so much and I can’t bear it,

That last one is purely hypothetical, but it makes me cry. I do know, I do indeed, how it feels to be unable to bear that someone loves me so much. I know how it feels to want to hide.  The agreement I thought we made on our wedding day was not to hide.  I stopped feeling it was unbearable when I realized Daniel loved me a lot less than I thought.  And he has done a lot of work pushing my love away and steering me towards the nagging and bossing and away from how much I love him.  I take responsibility for my own business, and at the same time, I recognize when I’m being manipulated.

The not taking responsibility is old & deep and familial — his sister has it just as bad. He used to rail, “There is no music in the house!” So put on a CD! Or “they stole my day from me,” so tell people no, or quit spending half the daylight hours in bed, or do something. He has weird one-way boundaries (towards himself, but insufficient respect for those of others), and his sense of agency is like airport free wi-fi — maddeningly inconsistent. And when he has no agency, I am called upon to do the magic of reading his mind and doing all the salving.

He takes very little emotional responsibility.  Yesterday all was going well enough, and he asked me a question about work.  I said I can’t be sure, there were promising signs, I’d know more in a week, and I can’t attach myself to a good outcome because I’ve been so disappointed, but I’m sure something good will happen — I just don’t know what it will be.  Daniel sank. He got very low and said, “I wish we could have a conversation that wasn’t heavy all the time.” BUT HE ASKED!  To be fair, and scrupulous, and even handed, and the eternal keeper of the good girl flame, we had had a difficult conversation at lunch that he handled reasonably well (why he wasn’t mad at L, who caused it all, with an added does of H alerting him to trouble ahead. He tolerated my “thinking forensically”).

So: lack of trust; lies; not taking responsibility for actions, emotions, well-being — not just in a physical sense but in a grown up emotional sense, sending out these demands for care and attention, so that being with him does become meeting need after need after need; emotional distancing.  That is a lot to overcome.  Did I just write an indictment?  That’s absolutely what he would say.  What I say is: I can indict if I want to; it’s helpful to see all the pieces together in one place; clarity is good, and I think seeing him clearly is essential for seeing myself and my own changes and choices more clearly.  Why do I boss him around? Because I see him not acting like an adult in so many ways — or like I believe adults should act — and I can’t stand it, so I take over. What happens if I give up the bossing, let him bear the stress of it, if I put it on him?  Will he take it up, or will I further give up things, and how do I feel about all of that. Today at least I can see more clearly the “we both did it” aspects of our marriage, and that seems important.

I don’t have to leave, I don’t have to stay, I don’t have to choose right now. I can even enjoy the Luther episodes.  I can feel uncomfortable and eager to be away from him on Saturday, and happy to have his company on Sunday.  I can have all that because I am a person. Because it matters a lot to me right now to stake out this ground.   Because I matter most.  I do.  I do  I do I do.

A few other things I remembered after I published:

My family are great at not-seeing. I was thinking of my beloved grandmother who has passed away, and how little I really knew her.  She was so lovely and dear, and yet my dad is kind of noodled up.  How did that happen?  My dad was never really seen, not like he needed to be. And then he didn’t see my brother. And my mom is a champion not-seer, or if she sees she doesn’t tell.  And I was an olympian (Olympian! as in Mount) not-seer of myself, entirely, or sometimes at all, and certainly not of many things about Daniel. So a lot of not-seeing.  Now I am trying to see both of us, entirely.  And I can see (ha!) that my not-seeing was damaging to both of us.  But Daniel also likes to hide, yet he craves being seen, until it might actually happen, then he hides again.  So much to untangle.

The Zoe character in Luther is admirable, or was — now she’s backsliding.  I wonder if Daniel saw how much I admire her and was fearful, whether or not he knew what was happening. She loves Luther, but can’t live with him.  But, as I said, now backsliding.  I strongly disapprove.

Quashed (or not)

7:00

very little time before Shabbat, but enough time to shore myself up.  Daniel wants to reset, to walk away from the wreckage and start to be normal again.  I understand why it’s compelling, and I see some of his points: we need to be normal again some time, and re-hashing is not the same as a redo.  We have to start walking even if it hurts and we feel unready.  Those are good points. I will turn them over in my mind and heart.

What I also see is, that is a good way for Daniel not to take responsibility.  What I also see is, that might not work for me over the long haul.  What I also see is, maybe I don’t want things to work under any circumstances.  And that’s my prerogative.  Daniel’s policy is exactly right in foreign relations, and he calls this a truce, and often often often invokes Israel & Palestine — no kidding.  I am not sure it is right in intimate relations.  I told him I have the bends — we’ve moved very quickly from not talking to each other to him lamenting how little time we spend together.  I said, “Um, yeah, but I need to keep going to yoga.”  He got very upset.  Shrug.  Yoga has been better to me over the years than Daniel.  Much, much, much better.  Yoga never broke my heart, yoga never scared me, yoga never de-personed me or kicked me out of the circle of its regard.  Yoga routinely makes me feel great about myself and my body and my life.  Even when I told him “We weren’t talking to each other two weeks ago,” he replied, “Sometimes that happens.”  As if we somehow mutually or even independently decided to stop talking.  No.  What happened was, Daniel stopped talking to me, brutally.

Daniel insists right now on equal fault.  That is a lie. I will not continue my marriage on a lie.  I can wait for a while for him to get strong enough, to spend enough time with his therapist, to stop that particular lie.  But it’s a giant fucking lie and I will not live the next 25 years with it.  I don’t have to do what he says.  I don’t have to believe what he believes.   I can say, nope, fuck it, and leave.  That is bringing me tremendous relief right now.  The thought of leaving makes me feel better than the thought of staying.  And I can observe and see how that feeling changes or not.  And my story doesn’t have to make sense to anyone at all but me.  That is my Shabbat gift to myself.  That is what feels great.  I am the boss of me.

More stuff coming up: Daniel keeps setting boundaries about what we will and won’t talk about, what is and isn’t allowed.  I need to show him that he is not setting the boundaries anymore.  We are negotiating them, and they have to be good for me, not just him.  No more fucking fiats from him.  I didn’t show that strongly now — although I suggested it.

Oh this is terrible, but I’m glad his anti-depressants are doing what anti-depressants do, which is suppress and crush and strangle and kill the libido.  I greatly miss sex, but I can’t have sex with him right now.  I’ll consider getting there.  But this is my pace, my terms for me.  Life is like that.  Daniel refuses to be on parole, but he kind of is… he broke things.  That sounds maybe vindictive, but it’s self-protective.  Anything else is a lie.  He needs that lie right now.  Okay, I won’t push.  He needs to take seriously — and I need to tell him — that the default is not staying married.  The default is me leaving, because I can do that.  What is he going to do?  And he can say “Nothing.”  Cool.  Goodbye, good luck, I’m so sorry.

This is why I write.  I write to de-quash, de-crush.

Also, while not writing, I’ve been over-spending.  Stress bought 3 books, one of which looks like loads of fun, one of which looks disastrous, one of which is in the middle.  Stress bought a pair of shoes, which I can justify as “needing” spring work shoes that won’t hurt my feet and will accommodate my heel insert and my lack of interest in pedicures.  It is true that most of my old sandals are useless to me now.  Stress bought a dress on Ebay for $35… but I am so so tired of all my black clothes, and this is made of organic cotton and under conditions that are good for workers.  Stress bought a fair amount of food in NYC yesterday — turmeric drinks, esoteric chocolates, lots of tea.  That said, it all adds up, I think, to less than the cost of a therapy session, and I missed therapy on Weds.  But… it’s not less than the cost of therapy after insurance reimbursement…  I’ll retune.

7:20.  must set the Shabbat table.

Contemplative

9:15

That title is a cop-out, the black-trousers-and-a-sweater of blog titles.

Daniel is away tonight, blessedly.  We both need the respite.  I have been working since I got home at 7, except for a brief break for dinner, and I liked doing it.  For years and years — really my entire professional career until this job (this endangered, fragile job!) — I believed that I couldn’t work at home, that it was too draining, and that I paid for it the next day in exhaustion and lapsed concentration.  The latter might be a little bit true, but now, I enjoy my job so much that coming back to it seems like less of a chore.  I wouldn’t want to do it every day all the time, but it’s nice to see myself not minding it.  It’s also nice to see myself working at maximum capacity.  (And, yes, it’s nice to contemplate that two beloved friends are taking me away for a long weekend, so I’m out of the office on Friday.  All those are true.)

Reading isn’t extremely satisfying these days — I want something really funny, and all I seem to have around are dark and serious books.  I pulled Anna Karenina off the shelf a few weeks ago, but still during our time of crisis. I didn’t know I was trying to send the warning to — Daniel or myself.  But I haven’t opened it yet.  Still mostly mysteries for me.  I appreciate that everything gets resolved within the structure of the book.  There is cause and effect, and it’s comprehensible.  I’m sure I’ve noted here before how, at times of great stress, I turn to mystery novels.  They’ve been the huge majority of my reading for at least the last year, maybe longer.   Anyway, since reading isn’t compelling like it once was, the alternative was to watch The Crown, but that would really be a betrayal of Daniel.  Besides fighting and admiring Milo, it’s what we do together these days.

I do like the idea I had about not going backwards, and giving up on getting an explanation from Daniel of all the whys.  I think he would find that humiliating, and I would feel suspicious of anything he said. Forward, forward, forward.  Or not, not, not, and then that’s a basis for a decision.

9:30 with a short break when Daniel called.  The conversation was careful and pleasant.

 

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.

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

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

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