Made Up

Today is my step-mom's birthday. We don't generally get along. Or rather...maybe we don't specifically get along, but do okay as long as we keep it general.

In honor of Mom's bday, here's a specific memory that keeps floating in like a recurring dream. When I was little, I liked to watch her put on her make-up. I would sit on the toilet seat lid while she stood at the vanity and put mascara on her eyelashes faster than anyone should be whipping a wand around their eyeballs. She would dab a runny, tan cream onto her fingers then disappear it into her face. And she would pop her pink Mary Kay eye shadow brush into her mouth to get it wet, and dab it into a smoky brown, a silvery white. When I got old enough to get my own Mary Kay eye shadow set, the colors were enchanting and inviting in lavenders and green. But I never got used to the cool feeling of spit on my eyelids.

Sometimes I would ask my mom not to put on makeup before we went out because she looked so much prettier to me without it. After she washed her face, you could see the tiny fractures in the skin under her eyes. I could see the set to her mouth, and hear it talking before she ever said a thing. I didn't know how or why, I just felt more at ease when I could see her face glower and glimmer this way. She looked happier when she smiled, angrier when she scowled.

I think of that often when I put on my own makeup. I was never a big fan, and still don't love standing in front of the mirror giving time to my own web of fractures increasing monthly under my eyes. But I get it, what my mom did back then, when she was the age I am now. I look better with a little cosmetic help. I look presentable. With concealer and some eyeshadow, and color on my cheeks, I direct people to the pretty, not the weary, or wary, or love worn, or ambitious, or lonely. I cover the tracks, gloss the lips, and smile into public view, knowing that if there were a little girl on the toilet seat lid watching me cover what she knows is real-er than pretty colors and subtle distractions, I might feel a little more revealed.

But there's not. So I creep, y'all. Sneak.

Oh My Gosh

This song is arresting.
I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied ’round their throats
to keep their little heads
from fallin’ in the snow
And I turned ’round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime

Original by Fleet Foxes. Any way you hear it, holy cow:"Everything is transitory. Still, every thing is."

World Smiles With You

You know how it's all exciting when you have a new boyfriend, and you go around saying, my new boyfriend this and my new boyfriend that? Yeah. Me not so much either. I don't know if I ever said, "My new boyfriend." In any case, I do have a new ex. Today, as it stands. For the sake of conversation. I do. And that makes him all new again. My new ex this and my new ex that. Ohmigod! Y'know?

So, yesterday the new ex and I are driving somewhere, taking care of unfinished business. Theoretically I am really pissed at him. He's a big weenie. But on a practical every day level, he's just a guy. He looks over at me from the driver seat and says something funny or endearing. Something worthy of a reaction. I feel a smile on the inside but on the outside I can't decide whether to give him even that much. And then I do. Civility is important. At least I think I do. Maybe I should check.

ME: Did I just smile at you?

EX: I don't know. I couldn't tell.

ME: I felt my face move.

And then we are laughing and polar ice caps melt. Dammit. Feels better than the freeze, though.

Awake.

Geoffrey Smith, director of "The English Surgeon," says the purpose of the brain surgery patient being awake during surgery is to be the last valve of safety, to save themselves, potentially, from the doctor inadvertently slicing away "1968," in other words, slicing away whole swaths of memories.

Awake. Save your memories. Save what you know.

And others of us so willing to give them away in order to believe a story. Shaking my head in amazement right now.

(Geoffrey Smith, as interviewed by Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's "The Treatment" today.)

Tell Me Lies

Been thinking about truth. Trust. Honesty. Lies. The absolute need for some of us to have the absolute truth. I've always said I'm best with information. Just give it to me.

Wondering if my need for the truth, always the WHAT HAPPENED? is me depending on others to make decisions for me: If I can trust you completely, I can make solid moves in my life, based on what you've said. If I can't trust you to talk to me straight, I can make other choices and feel safe in them.

But what's missing when I cling urgently to the need for your honesty?

I knew my boyfriend had a capacity for the deceptive arts from the beginning. But when the lying began, to cover that other unmentionable that happened, I believed it. Well, almost believed it. I had to hear it over and over again in various ways for it to finally make sense.

What made better sense? What I observed, felt, sensed, saw--knew, really. I knew something was out of place. A lot of things were. Circumstantially. But he was resolute. I wanted so much to trust him that I didn't--hello!--trust myself. What's up with that?

There's a lot of crazy world-changing foundation-wobbling happening on the bigger, broader stage these days. What happens when you can't trust things to be how they have been...how they are supposed to be...fine and good and right? Just like you know 'em to be?

Maybe what happens is you ask a lot of questions. Trust what your spidey sense knows before you do. When you get the spidey sense, ask questions. But listen for the internal answers. Not the external ones that sound right but feel wrong. Maybe we're learning to live in a world of extra-sensory sensing, intuitive knowing rather than concrete evidence that builds a bullshit case. Forgiving bullshit cases, it seems that even the concrete things we have known--economic trends, Twin Towers, airtight mortgages--are melting before our eyes, and maybe it's time the spidey sense came to life.

The moral, Grasshoppa? Close your eyes and trust what you know.

(P.S. I'm joining you in the grasshoppa gallery here.)

*

Life is good

Homemade chicken soup.
Night music from KCRW.com.
And patience.
A whole hell of a lot of it, asking me to have perspective, because who knows what's to come?
Ever?
Healthy.
Sane.
Housed.
Employed.
Fed.
Loved.
Life is good.
And Pollyanna grew up to be my Grandma. That shit is genetic.

A Bench & So Much More

If Picture Paints A Thousand Texts

Craigslist Poetry - Missed Connections

You were crying in front of Keybank Tower - m4w (downtown)
You were over by the bikes (rather than in front of Spicy Pickle). I was wearing a blue, buttoned short sleeve shirt and carrying a book. I doubt you'll see this, but if somehow you do, I want another chance to ask if you're OK. Include your hair color and the color of the shirt you were wearing so I'll know it was you.

Cute guy with a 2:00 haircut appointment - w4m (Roberts of Portland)
I was sitting in the front when you walked in. You looked like the type of guy with a great job, a house, a dog, a wife and a kid on the way.... but maybe there's a chance you're single? I doubt you check these but figure it might be worth a chance. Anyway.... I was the petite blonde in the yellow flowered dress.

New Seasons Market - m4m - 28 (Scholls Ferry)
at 2:30ish you were outside reading a book. We sort of made eye contact a couple times. Please be gay, please be gay, please be gay. Or at least bi. Hit me up if I looked "doable".

I farted on the max - w4m - 26 (At The back....)
It was packed.... It really stunk... You where the nice looking guy standing next to me that everyone looked at...... Our eyes met..... You knew it was me and didnt say anything......
What a guy...... Id love to meet you... It dosnt happen very often..... please email me.....

-Blondie

Coffee Shop - w4m - 28 (Portland)
To the guy who I'm sitting behind right now at my local coffee shop (NON-starbucks). Damn you are great to look at from behind. Thank you! :)

The Little Line Was Blue

The month of July has potentially seen the most transformative days in a row of my whole adult life. I could be wrong. I have had some swerves and misses. Some direct hits. My friend/boss died in a plane wreck. I moved to another state. I left 15 years of day-jobbing to leap into doing bizness for myself.

But two weeks ago I peed on a stick and turned it the faintest shade of blue. It was so light blue, the little line predicting the rest of my life, that the digital readout read, "Not Pregnant." My girlfriends, however, are all sorts of savvy. Peeing on sticks is a national sport in some households. Every last symptom under their belts, they know when the jig is up. And these pros in the field suggested I pee on another one, then bust that thing open with a hammer to read it the good old fashioned way: White strip. Thin blue line. You can only have the hormone in your system that turns sticks blue if you are pregnant, they said. Even if it's a tiny bit blue, you're 100% knocked up.

So I got out the hammer. Opened a fresh test. Peed. And waited. Three minutes later, it read, "Not pregnant." I got down on the floor and bashed that digital thing open. What did I pull out? White strip. Thin blue line.

Here's the calendar of events.
Wednesday - My boyfriend and I break up.
Friday - I'm four days late. I pee on a stick. It's negative.
Saturday Night - Pregnancy jock girlfriend instills doubt about my negative.
Sunday Morning - Pee on the stick. Doubtable shade of blue. But blue. No. Can't be. Yet.
Sunday - Six days late.
Sunday Night - Undeniable symptoms. Come to Jesus. My very molecules changing everything I know. Pema Teeter, This Is Your Life! I'm telling you, everything changed. I woke up the next morning recommitted to my core values, my spirituality, my purpose in life.
Monday Morning - Can't eat breakfast. Tastes funny. Nauseated. Make appointment for doctor.
Monday Mid-morning - Period comes. Seven days late, and one transformation later.

Now that we have the calendar down, I'll go back and tell you about the boyfriend. We broke up because of my complaint. I felt like I didn't exist for him, that I was a convenience, and that he was wholly self-absorbed. I tried hard to be a good girlfriend, being open and understanding, slow to judge, slow to anger. Simply put, he was in a better relationship than I was. And based on weeks prior, each of us battling to be satisfied in our worlds, he seemed happy to head for the door once I opened it.

Then I asked him to come over to help me with something. He brought flowers. Truce, he said. I told him I was four days late. His eyes got gentle and settled into me. He watched me a while with a slight upturn in his mouth. He said quietly without ever looking away, "Okay." He went out and came back with a bottle of wine, a box of pregnancy tests, and a bag of donuts. We clinked glasses. Hugged. Then I peed on the stick. We hugged again when it read negative, and amid all the relief, I felt sad.

That was day four. As the days progressed, we talked and talked. Not about being late or pregnant, but about what had us break up. I was traumatized by the event that kicked it off for us, and so I called him each night my head was spinning, to ask him to help me through it. Every night he would. So by night-six and morning-seven of my thin blue line journey, he was right there with me, offering whatever he had, to let me know he was with me all the way. Want me to go to the doctor with you? I will. Want to marry me for my insurance? We could have a courthouse wedding. He showed up in ways I had doubted he ever could. Just days after I had doubted him so completely as to call it off.

Sometime in that week, he asked if I was sure about wanting to break up. The afternoon of day-seven, leaving the doctor's office with him and a negative pregnancy test, I couldn't help but ask myself, "What's important?" We broke up because he wouldn't show up, in my estimation. And then, at a time like this, he shows up like a house afire.

A few days later we had a conversation about what we want in a partner and a relationship. It turned out we want each other. We were two single people living in a relationship a couple of weeks ago. Then we saw what was possible from what seemed inevitable. And we like each other a whole lot better. I for one like myself a little better, too. My therapist (good time for one of those right about now, wouldn't you say?) suggested that I had shown up in ways I never had, asking my (ex-)boyfriend for his help, being angry at him out loud, pulling him into my process to make it our process. So for all my complaint about his not being there in the relationship, apparently, neither was I. We need each other, people do. I guess if we don't offer, we don't get.

It must have been a big week for transformation in the cosmos. Because that weekend, I went to a Fire Starter group session with Danielle LaPorte. She said, “Go farther on your blog. Keep it personal. Take it a little crazy.” She said a good many things to all of us entrepreneurs awaiting enlightenment. And can I say, my world wasn’t just rocked. It was cracked, wide open like that damned pregnancy test, splintered and exposing what matters: White strip. Thin blue line. Me. Positively on. Being what’s possible. Seeing who I am. What I am. What I bring into the world. Pregnant with possibility. So just do it already. It’s time to give birth to it all.

Law School vs. Baby Uncertainty Principle

My brother has three nearly grown kids and some variation of a constant question whenever I see him:
"When are you gonna have kids?"
Or, "Why don't you go get some seeds?"
Or, "Isn't your clock gonna explode soon? Get all rusty and freeze up on you?"

Eloquence runs in my family.

Kids don't. Out of 5 adult siblings, only 2 of us have procreated. I'm not one of them.

My mantras: I *think* I want kids. I don't want to ruin them. I don't want them to ruin me, which will ruin them.

Snake eats its tail.

Yesterday, after the course of some high pressure darktime hours with God, I get it. Yes. Kids. Babies. Offspring. I'd be a good mom. And maybe a nutter of one, okay. But yeah. Kids and me would go very well together.

Then I saw this post today on THE HAPPINESS PROJECT and it made me snicker while giving me perspective in all of 20 seconds. It's in the video linked here.

Hollywood Movie

Been okay. But tonight I'm a girl. A regular girl the kind I always wondered about who loved "Dirty Dancing" and swooned over boys and babies. Everywhere I look are couples aging and sophistcated on a Saturday night, young and cute in the giddy twilight. And everytime I hold back tears. Tears! Are threatening my eyes and slipping down my throat. I force myself into the street into a bar with a book and I hide behind the menu mystified that I'm crying just looking at wines. Or trying to keep from crying, lights dim, bar marble-topped, music perfectly jazz. The lights just got dimmer and my red is served. I wonder if I will be someone's story tonight, to see and consider as they go to sleep, the woman at the bar brushing at tears before her book even opens.

Lisa Makes the Sweetest Peas

Facts

My boyfriend and I broke up yesterday.

My HS reunion is in a few weeks. To go or not to go.

Kittens slept on my head last night.

I just woke up from a three-hour nap.

Window washers dangled outside my 10th floor apt today, adept as spiders.

Yesterday I was angrier than I have been in a really long time.

Like maybe ever.

Anger is cumulative over years and bursts open like a storm cloud.

I am the same girl I was in high school. More talkative maybe. And as poetically morose.

I'm looking out my window at a river right now.

My friends make me feel so special I cry.

I ate halves of five different flavored cupcakes yesterday, with two of my besties, all of us in the haven of my bed.

We drank prosecco in the afternoon. Also in my bed.

I am tired.

I wonder a lot of things. Mostly about progress and reproduction and people.

I missed yesterday's blog post, busy living its content.

I miss New York sometimes.

Life is always just beginning.

*

Rebel Yell

In favor of peace between my dad and me, we skirt topics on race and politics. But when I was a kid, we would get into arguments. At 19, I began to harbor fantasies of moving away from home, and coming back with long, wild curly hair, tattooed and smoking, on the back of a motorcycle driven by my boyfriend, who would of course be black. (FYI, I am white, my hair is straight, and I was into girls at the time.)

Today over breakfast, 18 years later, my boyfriend and I were digging at the source of bigotry in an age that makes limiting beliefs about one's skin color sound archaic at best. My boyfriend, handsome as I find him, describes himself as a cross between Andy Dick and Woody Allen--5'6", near-sighted, self-deprecating, and a Midwestern shade of so-white-he's-pink. When I told him about my old fantasy, he looked slightly defeated and then offered:

"I could wear black-face."

Love is a Battle Cube

SETTING: Hotel Bar.

TIME: Evening, after day one of "Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women," a self-help seminar.

CAST:
Woman
Bartender

Bartender mixes drink.

WOMAN: One thing I do know is he falls for people he works with.
(Sip)
So if he ever gets his divorce and we get married, you better believe I'm gonna keep workin' with him.

*

Love School

Maybe to a degree we teach people how to love us. If love fails, is it we, personally, who have failed to teach our partner how to best love us?

If we are not loved the way we want to be loved, should we not take it upon ourselves to teach our partner how to love us?

And if they fail, do we call it a personal failure because they have not learned from the best person to have taught them?

Do we take any accountability for that?

No doubt, it takes a willing student. But I've always found that a student's capacity to thrive increases with the enthusiasm, commitment, creativity and drive of the teacher.

As a chronic single person who finds plenty of reasons not to date people past a certain knowledge of them (something to the effect of: we'd never get along, that would drive me crazy about him, no, no, that's dangerous, and i would never want to deal with that the rest of my life...), I wonder if it is a matter of picking an apt candidate and teaching like my love depended on it.

Quakes

When the Earth is shifting, it's all one can do to hold on till it settles back into itself, newly aligned.

My Earth is shifting. Something about history and the present colliding. 30 years of geothermic pressure finally blew. Spewed out long awaited relief on this front. Damage as yet untold. No deaths. Age the only casualty.


As my good friend, Dan, likes to point out to what degree I'm clothed when I'm making "naked" posts, :-) , I will acquiesce the point that this one is kind of like wearing a snowsuit on a summer day. Barely a neckline exposed. But give me some time to settle in before I strip entirely. The quake ain't done quaking yet.

Practicing Love

So, it came as a kick in the gut last weekend to hear that the boy I loved at 18 is now, 18 years later, getting a divorce. Nevermind that the man lives way over in the Midwest with two kids and is pissing off his family something fierce. It kicked me in the gut.

Why? Wouldn't I like to know. This guy was someone I grew up with and came to love deeply over the years. He was also my brother's best friend over that time period. And then my brother died. So we had a lot to relate about. Except for that one time he got married and stayed that way.

The thing is it took a long time to get him out of my system. Even years later, when consciously I had forgotten about him, when I had moved into my own apartment and was living an adult life and enjoying adult friends, I would dream about him. Rapturous sleep. A deluge of familiarity and remembrance and longing. And then I would wake up. Alone as ever. In my big adult bed in my big adult apartment, and remember my big adult life. Sheeeouw, where did he come from?

It's been a long time since I've had one of those dreams. But this news from his mom last weekend hit the same replay button...what if, what if, what if? Why didn't he pick me?

So I called my therapist. The cool thing about my therapist is that he has this energetic psychic thing going. He tunes in, reads my energy and that of people I've interacted with, and describes them spot-on every time. When I told him this old-love thing is wearing me out already, he spied some pretty deep connections between us. Then he got soft and kind and said, you love him. You need to just feel that.

Hm. Feel it. Really? Okay.

So I felt it. And I began to glow. And I let it in more and I began to buzz. I let the love flourish even more and it overflowed so powerfully that I was sending it through thought waves and prayer and good wishes to this guy across several states and even more lifetimes, considering it's probably been about 10 years that we've seen each other. I sent him love in this very difficult time in his life.

Meanwhile, I was thinking, "Fabulous. How about this timing? Things are just beginning to get sweet with me and Bombo. We're having fun. We're opening up." But this other feeling I have is eons old. It's as old as my development from girlhood on. It's as deep as my first love and first loss. I have to just give it sway.

So for three days, I let the love course through me, so much joy. And would you believe that the more love I allowed myself to feel for my childhood sweetheart, the more free I felt to let Bombo in? In dating, I have these neurotic tendencies that keep me on guard. But those, my friends, have all but disappeared.

Then something else happened. This love thing was really working for me. I thought about Michael, how he was my mentor, my friend, my boss, my sometimes-confidante and I his. I remembered how much love I had for him when he was alive, and realized that now that he is gone, there are no social mores to respect, no boss-employee boundaries to effect, no professional distances to meter out. I love him. Plain and simple, like I always did, in the contexts we held. But now I don't have to follow any rules. So I just let the love flow. I lit up. I buzzed. I loved him.

Can I just say I've had the best couple of days emotionally that I've had in a long time? I feel like a humongous boulder kind of just yawned wide and mosey-rolled on its merry way, out of the way of my feelings. I feel like LOVE is accessible to me now, and is closer at hand than my need to protect myself, my need to be careful, my need to NOT love because I'll get myself into trouble or sadness.

Judging by this experience, I froze up around lost love way back when I was a teenager. My muscles cramped around the injury and my limping feelings allowed only limited movement. But this week, I let it flow! It's not realistic to believe I'll meet up with my childhood sweetheart as adults and all will return to what it "should have been" at the addled age of 18. But it IS realistic to recognize the intense joy I have felt in the past few days, allowing this feeling of love to overpower me and teach me a few things about loving as an adult. And it is deliciously realistic to recognize the room that love has made in my heart. I feel like my heart got cleared out by a love bomb, and that now, anything is possible.

The Forgetting. The Remembering.

I am walking up the stairs to work, like I've done day in and out for two years. And Michael crosses my mind. Not the Michael who is dead, or the Michael whose daughter died, but the Michael standing at his office window, phone to ear. The Michael I’m laughing about telling the funny thing I saw at lunch. The guy whose advice we could use—wait one sec, I’ll go ask. …Oh. I can’t. He’s not there.

Shit, how could I forget that?

It’s like the left side of me knows he is dead. The left side of me was there to get the calls, work through the days, tell his mother. Yes, I told his mother.

But the right side of me is where my memories are stored. My memories of Michael alive. And when they come up, it's like THOSE memories each in turn have to learn that Michael is gone. Each memory as it surfaces has to learn what the rest of me knows.

At some point, I am guessing—hoping?--they will reach critical mass, and the rest of the memories stored away will all at once absorb the awareness that Michael is no longer there to consult, counsel, laugh at, with…and the New Normal will be less of a jolt again and again.