SuspendedAnimation

dark mysteries of parenting

[Jellybean]:Mommy, look at how fancy I can lick my lollipop!
[Me, first observing amused, then thunderstruck]: Er, *stop*, okay?
[J]: ??
[Me, thinking fast]: It's ... not good manners to eat your lollipop that way!
[J, eyeroll]: Why??
[Me, not believing these words are leaving my mouth]: I'll tell you when you're seventeen.

*cue Janis Ian music ...

only for a really good pal ...

would I do a meme, because I'm a horrible blog snob and he damn well knows it. So Zeno, here's another lumen for my halo: I'm propogating this for your sake, sweetie.

1. What book would I like to be?
This is an impossible question. Is it what book am I?, or is the assumption that I would want to be other than I am? The book that comes to mind is Out of sheer rage: wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, by Geoff Dyer, and that's funny because I'm not fond of Lawrence. But I have a crush on Dyer. He's gangly and sex-obsessed and wry and his autobiographical persona is so tangled up in himself that he can't get anything done (except writing brilliant hilarious award-winning prose apparently) ... anyway: I still love this book, the Lawrence part notwithstanding.

2. Have I ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Duh.
Not all the Austen heroes, but some of them: Knightly, Darcy, but especially Captain Wentworth.

3. What is the last book I bought?
A chapbook of poetry by James Haug.

4. What is the last book I read?
I read the chapbook in its entirety in two fairly brief sittings ...

5. What book am I currently reading?
I'm reading a number of books, but the one that is foremost on my mind is Women, fire and dangerous things by George Lakoff.

6. What five books would I take with me if I was stranded on a desert island?
I'll start by cheating and say:

• The complete works of Jane Austen
  
  and continue more honestly ...
  
• Webster's 3rd unabridged
  
• Ulysses
  
• A collection of dharma scriptures and commentaries and
  
• something hard and interesting and nonfictional that I'd never read before, preferably in cultural history. Something akin to Bakhtin's Rabelais and his world or Love and theft by Eric Lott or Canguilhem's The normal and the pathological, except I've sort of read some or most of all of those, but you get the idea.

Note that these aren't my favorites; I just had to think of what would offer a balanced repertory of things you can do with books. Except I left out porn, because really, could there be any one pornographic book that could amuse someone indefinitely? If so, you know, my birthday is coming up.

7. tag, you're it: amber, scott (who I know will be especially brill with this), and sheryl ... will be checking on you ...

plato was a fucking simpleton

'people are inclined to the good'—meaning, to what they think is good, for them. The problem is this: I've noticed for quite some time—and believe me I base this as much on self-observation as on my study of Other People—we don't do what we think is in our best interest all the damn time.

Now lots of traditions, dharma included, make the claim that in the largest sense, there is no distinction between self-interest and what's For The Best in the Best Of All Possible Worlds. But we don't experience it that way. When a madman is charging toward you with a freshly-sharpened razor and you're holding a pistol, and if you're a good shot, you may feel that it seems pretty clear that what's in your best interest is to shoot to kill.

But what's really in the best interest of everyone is for the madman to be entirely disarmed—in fact, for the madman to be entirely recovered of his mental health and happy and whole and at peace. What's merely expedient is to dispatch him with alacrity.

At this point, I start to hear a lot about how dharma is just a bunch of nicie-nice softie bullshit. But I certainly wouldn't claim it's best to stand there and get your jugular severed—and it's not in the interest of the person charging you, either, of course. The reason that the bullet to the brain is not one's best option (given options) is that, irrespective of the outcome, you're stuck with the traumatic memory of having blown a fellow sentient being's brains out.

You may say, "Doesn't bother me in the least—I'd do it again." Maybe so, but you'd still be better off without the memory.

Now to expand the scenario a little further: it seems as though ever since humans figured out how to record what they were up to, a pragmatic strategy for dealing with ones enemies was to crush them. And the justification for this is almost always an urgent sense of self-preservation. Every scenario has its w3apons of m4ss d3struction.

My major objection to this strategy is not novel and I am not anticipating getting a call from the Nobel Prize Committee any time in the next half-century. I'm not the first to point out that, for as long as we've been reading about the deployment of this strategy—for that long, it hasn't worked. It often works great in the short term, yes. You can beat people down for a decade, you can commit genocide; we may be even getting more efficient in the twenty-first century with our various technologies of termination with extreme prejudice, though it seems that machetes worked as well for a Rwanda of the nineties as two bombs in Japan fifty years earlier. Some parents beat the hell out of their kids when they misbehave because they observe that it makes for some very well-behaved and obedient children. Don't you let me ever catch you ... No'm, you may bet your ass that I will not let you catch me.

There's always payback, and that is never, ever going to change. The only way truly to dispatch your enemies is to figure out how to make them no longer your enemies.

The reason this doesn't happen much, I think, is that you have to be so extremely smart on the spot to know what to do when the madman is charging you. You have to know almost everything there is to know, it seems, to outweigh the risk that when you have to think fast, you'll perhaps fail to assess accurately the situation, and know just what to do or say to disarm it, so that no brains are spattered nor major blood vessels irreparably severed. There's not a lot of room for error.

That kind of smart is something that most of us just don't have at our ready disposal. Most of my life I've had people shouting in my ear about how damn clever I'm supposed to be, and I know that when I'm on the spot, I don't get it right just as often as I do. Dharma tells me that what makes you smarter is meditation. It's weight-training for the brain. Time on the mat correlates directly to knowing what the right thing to do is, in a given situation. You know what to say, you know what direction to step in. You don't end up with your throat cut, and the guy charging you doesn't end up dead either.

That brings me right around to my first point. I know it's in my best interest to keep up a sitting practice. Rarely does anyone have a sense of urgency about such things. I can't find the book, so I'll paraphrase: "If we really had a sense of how essential to well-being our practice is, we'd meditate as though our hair were on fire."

Still, I don't. And I don't know why I don't, but I guess I can't speak to the inadequacies of others very confidently when I am not able to take care of the basics myself.

And that's what I was unable to articulate recently.

Here is a sad story with a satisfying ending.

I waited some time before posting this, and passed the story round to a small number of people whose opinion I needed before I was ready to share it with you, my friendly Internets. Even for me, it's pretty intense on the personal side, but I just felt ready to have it on the blog, at least for a while. Though I may take it down after a bit.

In retrospect, I'm still not sure exactly how I did it. But it went something like this: one of my friends has sent me a few recorded stories, and I really liked listening to them, and so I tried it out on my own, about something that happened to me in my green years. Now I was really boneheaded in going about this, in a technical sense, and it was absolute hell for me to get the file down to a manageable (!) 15MB ... so in that respect I was true to form, fumbling my way through with buckets full of error.

But as for the story itself: I didn't script it, I just thought about it for a while and spoke it into a mike. It was one 'take', though I paused frequently. And strangely, it just came out right.Not that there isn't some odd stuff about it. Generally—typically—I talk fast; and I knew that talking fast wouldn't help telling my story, so when I recorded I made a heroic effort to slow myself down. And somehow as a result, that made me sound a little funny. There is one part of this story where I utter the word 'motorcycle' in a way that no one has ever uttered the word 'motorcycle' before. So that alone justifies the eleven minutes it would take you to listen to this story, which is called:

Smart girl.

Warning: this story has what the TV people call a 'mature theme' and contains a teensie bit of 'strong language.' Put the earphones on if delicate ears are within smacking distance.

I'm still here, but I'm not sure where 'here' is.

That would be figuratively. I have a fair degree of assurance in my whereabouts geographically speaking. In fact, I could probably pinpoint my location on any map of the mid-atlantic U.S. within seconds, as long as state borders were clearly demarcated.

But this is how I thought I was going to start this post:

I've got sunshine on a cloudy day.

I guess you'd say, "What can make you feel this way?"
My girl.

So let's get talking about my girl, with her badass pregnant self, and how we decided to run off to the wicked, wicked city with no clearer agenda that our own amusement.

Similar projects have been attempted within the last year and are documented here and here, but note: this time I was neither alone, nor was I meeting a potentially dangerous internut stranger. No: this not potentially but assuredly dangerous internut character I've already known for years. Jo my dear belovèd pal. She took a vacation day to go to delicious, decadent Gotham with me, me, me.

We took the train. First signal that we are a little too well-matched in personality: we skip onto a train that looks suspiciously comfortable, to find that we've boarded an Amtrak train, not the humble commuter line to which our tickets entitle us. Because we can't be bothered to actually look at the train with the AMTRAK painted on the side of it in LARGE letters. We did discover our error (hey, it looks like the inside of an airplane in here! There are table trays! and footrests and shit!) before being thrown off or having an exorbitant fare extorted from us ...

So this episode illustrates how a dynamic duo can be just a little too harmonious. Jo and I share the common trait of inattention to the humdrum details of our physical environment when there's anything entertaining in the vicinity. Such as each other.

That was kinda the theme of the day. Hitting the street outside Penn Station, we got almost a block before realizing that each of us thought the other was taking us somewhere. Later: after scrutiny of the subway map that combined brow-furrowing and a haphazard attitude, we felt fuzzily-logical about what stop we should probably take on likely this train that would go more or less to Soho ... and missed the stop due to the compelling nature of our conversation. This time I know it wasn't hemorrhoids because I would've remembered that. I can't guarantee that lube was not at least marginally germane to the topic, however.

For some reason I felt reasonably confident that I could walk us back to where we'd wanted to go, and I did—but not without first guiding us in a series of tight concentric circles skirting Tribeca. Then, upon finding a likely streetname and cautiously consulting a police officer, we walked about twenty-five blocks to end up, ravenous, at Balthazar (again) where I got the lamb sandwich (again) but this time: rosé, baby--a Provençal rosé that was much better with the roast lamb than the Chablis of last May. Boring pregnant Jo drank orange juice. I assured her that FAS babies are loads of fun, but she ignored me. The excellent haute McD's french fries came with both our sandwiches. We ate at the crowded bar and the bartender flirted shamelessly with us. Choquées we were!

I had opportunity to flex my urban muscles more than once in that Hobbesian milieu that is a NYC popular restaurant. The bar was filling up with people who didn't want to wait thirty minutes for a table when I first approached it, but I spotted two empty barstools and swooped in like the condor that I am. One of them had a place setting waiting on the bar above, but the other was wedged uncomfortably close to a solitary diner at the end of the bar who eyed me, elbows akimbo, leaking territorial pheremones. As Jo approached, I gave him a piercing direct look and a steely smile, canines flashing. "Would you mind moving down a bit? We'll need room for both seats here." Later, one of the crowd around the bar was oozing into Jo's space, making lots of creepy contact and ignoring her attempts to squirm him off. So I just leaned back onto the fellow luxuriously, like a naugahyde banquette, and he evaporated.

I probably shouldn't enjoy such moments. I know it's aggressive. But it does seem as though so much of just being able to enjoy being in Manhattan is in having some sense of assurance with taking up one's alotted bit of space.

As noted, Jo and I are admirably well-suited for these outings, which is why I want to repeat them once a week until she moves away. We are compatible in not having tight agendas; in having a much-needed tolerance for getting a little waylaid or disoriented; in an ability to be remain hypnotized for well night unto an hour in stores like this (where we were hypnotized for well nigh unto an hour, and where Jo discovered much to her surprise that I had harbored a secret longing to have highlights of this color in my hair in my crisp and tender days. "Awww, do it now! do it now!" "Baby, when you are just longing to look 25 again, you're not trying to draw 'extry' attention to yourself in just that way.")

And then I got us a bit lost again finding the subway. But then we caught a train home just in time anyway. And then we were tired, in a good way. The end THE BEGINNING?? bwahahahhaaa ...

those whose birthdays I forget

will be pleased to note that I blew off my own blogiversary, which was March 9.
Woohoooo! *blows noisemaker*
But if you are expecting some sage retrospection? Eh. not in the mood.

Wanna see my fast draw? wanna see it again?

I took my most recent post down to work on it a bit more, and then it will reappear at an undisclosed forthcoming moment in a pruned and otherwise altered state ...

In the meantime, here's something to think about: what do you do when someone whose taste differs quite dramatically from your own, asks for your opinion in a matter of taste? Don't be glib and say something like 'Both barrels'—that's easy to say, and harder to do.

hidden in plain sight

So. Recently I was having a conversation with somebody, and the topic came round to feeling overextended. I know a few people like this—it's not exactly one of my own issues, but a variation: feeling as though there's always a line of people waiting to get a piece of you. The exchange I had with my friend went something like this (very rough paraphrase):

Me: "Too much attention, huh?"
[not-me]"Yeah ... "
Me: "Well, in a way, too much attention is really being ignored ...
[not me] [semi-annoyed comment about how I always am putting out this paradoxical pseudo-koan dharmic bullshit]
Me: Pbbbhhbhbhbhhbhbhhbh, I won't explain what I mean then ... dumbass.

Only it went a little friendlier than that.

That was a couple of days ago. Today I was driving back home after having spent two ADD hours on a fifteen-minute errand, and just as I was driving down my own street, mowing down pets and other people's pre-school age children, I had a related thought about my relationship with the Jellybean.

(Go away now if you're one of those people whose brain starts to pump out megadoses of serotonin whenever anything about mothering is mentioned—here it comes:)

gonna lose my licence

because I've been ... well ... this is kind of embarrassing ...

I've been content. You know: not all wringing-my-hands, furrowing my ivory brow, stamping my wide feet—none of that. So what's to write about?

But there's always something to latch onto, and I can thank zeno for providing me with an exercise for my febrile (or was that feeble?) mind ...

yes, I used to do the Haiku Smackdown in its brief but heady heyday. Of course we knew that those were merely cheap jokes (the more obscene the better) in the form of a haiku ... so I have some of the same self-consciousness about chiming in after zeno's prompt for sonnets.

But did that stop me? No. I've been feeling realllllly well. I can't stop looking over my shoulder when I say that; I really am still terrified that depression will just come swooping back in on me. It seems way beyond obvious to say that depression is not my preferred condition. I've been feeling so damn normal that I often almost forget to take my meds. Because I don't feel as though I need medicine! For! The! First! Time! Since! At! Least! July!

Therefore it is not entirely with tongue in cheek that I present a poem in praise of my antidepressant:

huh

yesterday's Thought of the Day:

"I must be a hell of a lot bigger than I thought, to be capable of holding so much Empty."

Don't worry my good friends—it was a fairly fleeting perception.