December 2009 Archives

Okay, okay, yes. I'm having difficulty posting. I've taken pictures for posting, I've written drafts and then been unaccountably dissatisfied with them. I've tried for holiday spirit, charming curmudgeonry, and several other tones. None of them work. It's all just a big jumble of flat-colored jellybeans here, and I don't know how to make an amusing anecdote out of it for you. A friend asked me today what I've been up to, and I had absolutely nothing to tell him, other than that I've been sick.

Sometimes I just don't feel like talking, or writing, or sometimes my head is just not a place I am able to discuss. And when one has little money one tends not to go out and do fancy things, so there isn't much to describe.

I've watched a bunch of movies on TV, including some enjoyable old ones that I hadn't seen before. I acquired a new crush on a TV actor, one which will make no sense to anyone but me, I expect. Which is fine. That way I can have him (imaginarily) to myself.

I received some cycling gear as gifts, and I'm glad to have it. I knitted some gifts from stash (plus one trip to the LYS because I had a dearth of "manly yarn"). Dad liked his Fair-Isle hat, which was nice, because I wasn't sure he would (not manly enough).

It's getting cold out, serious cold, the cold that separates the men from the boys and all that jazz, except that if last year is anything to go by, a lot of those selfsame men will be riding the subway to work, leaving me the little lone solitary cyclist slugging it out in the wind and snow.

That's fine with me. I like the quiet. I had company for the ride home tonight, and we went slow and easy, my preferred winter speed. I tend to ride at sunset this time of year, so I look west and see a lot of pink striped sky draped around the Statue of Liberty. Then I look east and there's the low sun blazing on the metalclad tops of the famous buildings: Empire, Chrysler.

Things are rough and beautiful these days, which seems fitting for winter.

My, but it's hard to write anything other than sheer crankyness when I'm sick. I tried a few days ago, and came up with nothing other than fear and loathing, minus the copius drug-induced antics that that phrase implies.

It's grey and darkling out (I'm not even sure what darkling means, but I always imagined it to describe that state of half-dark where the light fades fast but imperceptibly so one minute you can see through sunglasses and the next you feel like a total dolt for wearing them), and there's snow.

I used to love snow. What am I saying - some part of me will always have a gleeful reaction to it. It always seems like a miracle, no matter how many times I see it fall and drape everything in soft layers.

My ritual with snow is generally to go for a walk in it, even if it's blizzarding out. With a nasty cold like I have this week, I probably oughtn't to, but the snow is coinciding with an apex of cabin fever, combined with massive annoyance at my neighbors for having incessant parties while I'm dying over here. They're weird, my neighbors - both extremely nice and extremely inconsiderate. Who parties with an open door, I ask you? And more importantly, who parties with an open door after you've asked them on many occasions to close it?

Bleh.

One of the many reasons that I am fed up to the eyeballs with being trapped indoors. We're not even going to talk about the fact that I haven't been able to ride since Tuesday. You see? No matter how gently I start out, I end up ranting about the state of my affairs.

I don't mean those kind of affairs, since those kind are completely nonexistent and have been since I stopped seeing summerboy in September.

I don't know what to make of anything at all, these days.

It's obviously a low point, and lately I can feel everything sliding to the bottom, like a bathtub drain running out of water.

So I suppose it's not just the cold making it difficult to blog.

I keep having sex dreams about past lovers, some recent and some distant, which is interesting given how little interest I seem to have in actual dating lately. I guess that part of me is only alive unconsciously at the moment.

I wonder what else is only alive unconsciously. I've spent a great many years ignoring everything I really want to do in life, because it seemed necessary to do that in order to get through the daily work of living, and now I am fed up with that. But I don't know how to change it, yet.

Who knew you could tread water in snow?

This turned out to be a real old-fashioned stinker of a Monday. I often feel like I shouldn't complain when other people have it so much worse than I do, but then there is the fact that my experience is my experience, and life is not graded on a bell curve.

I have those longings that are so hard to describe, or even to put my finger on, where they reside, carving out that hollow space in my chest. I miss homes I haven't lived in, people I haven't ever met or have any hope of meeting. I miss abilities I don't possess and never will, except in dreams and stories.

My cat yowls a lot, almost like a wolf sometimes. I've never really known why, except now it occurs to me that maybe she is a bit my familiar. Maybe she, too, pines for things she can't express, other than in a nameless, plaintive howling.

Me, I get on my bike and ride aimlessly. Slowly, in some cases, and that apparently gets me yelled at by obnoxious teeny boppers on the bridge. God, that girl made me mad. At the time I just wanted her to go away, so I pulled on the brake to slow down even more so she'd be forced to go around me.

But later, I wanted to go back in time and throw her off her bike.

Instead, I watched Mary Poppins.

That Dick Van Dyke sure can leap about like a panther. I am not sure whether he's the model guy for me, or whether I simply want to be that character myself. I do a certain amount of leaping about when I have room to, on a given dance floor. I'm right good at it, too. Another one of those callings I've missed.

While I was eating this dinner, I had a strong knifelike pang, the kind that tells you this is a metaphor for something. This simple dinner - just pasta, olive oil, a clove of the world's most beautiful garlic from the winter farmer's market (itself a miracle - local garlic is generally three-quarters dead by this time of year) and some Tuscano kale (or "dinosaur kale" as the guy working the farm table called it). And just a very few leaves of fresh rosemary.

Honestly, you could make this in your sleep, and it was the best thing I ate today.

Something so pure about it - it just was what it was. It was like a tree. Trees are never anything but themselves; they don't take orders and they make no apologies for the bends in their branches, for their knotty trunks, their gnarls, their fine woody smell.

I've often wished for that certainty, that simple knowledge that up is up, and one's path is one's path, and one can and should simply sing one's own song and make no bones about it.

That girl on the bridge hurt me - it was like being in middle school, or even earlier, when words were weapons. I don't like people very much at all, some days.

Post, unpost, post, unpost. Or rather, start writing something, lose steam, start writing something else, decide I'd rather be knitting, cycling, collecting vegetables from chilly farmers, etc.

Maybe I can get through a simple list.

a) Have realized I like winter cycling better than summer cycling. Reasons: fewer people out, bracing weather, object is to stay warm rather than avoid melting under sweltering sun, whole experience is both mellow and challenging.

b) Winter knitting proceeds apace. Have vowed to make all holiday gifts from stash yarn. Not sure I have enough "manly" colors in stock.

c) Cat asleep on couch.

d) Jeremiah Johnson on TV. Hard to decide which is more glorious - open, beautiful western landscape or young Redford. I also like the fact that there's barely a single page of dialogue in the whole movie.

e) Bulgarian disco music is fun. Just in case you were wondering. Oh c'mon, you know you were.

f) I really need to get over my fear of shrink wrapping my windows with a blow dryer. It's cold in here, and I can't find one of my fingerless mittens.

g) Have been scratching my head wondering what people who don't knit do for clothing all winter. I find myself wearing at least two or three handmade objects every day. I suppose that is some kind of knitter's fashion don't, but the fashion police can bite me. My knits are beautiful, and they keep me warm. And by beautiful, I do not mean perfect. My favorite things are often full of mistakes. Yes, there's a metaphor in there.

One night I wore a dress that I was afraid, when I got home and looked at it, might have been a little too revealing. I remember thinking, oops.

Yesterday while riding with a friend of mine and talking about how much fun we'd had that night, she said, you looked like a fairy in that dress! And I was warmed by that, because honestly, I ought to look like a fairy. That's just how I feel, inside, in some secret part of myself. Or apparently not so secret.

She also said, later that evening, you have a lot of aggression. And I said, yeah, I know what it's about. And she said, yes? And I said, it's complicated.

It's not, really. I just didn't want to talk about it because it's personal, and I get defensive about it. I assumed she was meaning it as a criticism, but as we talked, I began to see that maybe she wasn't. Interesting.

Human beings have been interesting me a lot lately, not least myself, because I am not always sure of why I am doing a certain thing. Or even of what I want to do next.

And that is interesting. I am so used to being the shining example of the examined life that it's a little anxious-making to not know the why. I think it might be good for me. I've been approaching a big shift in perspective the last few years, and I keep drifting toward it and backing off again, because I am not sure what it means. Or rather, what it will mean in terms of how I live my life and what I do with the years I have left, however many or few they are. (I hope I have years; I'd hate to get "IT" all figured out and then die in traffic the next day.)

What it is, is this. I always knew what the deeper purpose of my life was, and knowing that, I assumed that if I didn't manage to achieve that, well, I think really I assumed that I simply had to. There was no alternative option. It was a Dream.

Which meant, perhaps, that underneath my big faith in the dream, there was a lot of fear. And the fact that there was all that fear meant I needed to back off from actually trying the thing. Because, in that twisted interior logic that so often drives us, if I never stuck my foot out and tried, I wouldn't really have failed. It would be a stalemate instead of a loss.

Dude, I am such an idiot. I am miserable for lack of trying the thing.

What I've come to is this. The Dream isn't the purpose of my life. Well, okay it is the purpose. But it isn't the only purpose. The other purpose - and maybe the bigger, more important one - is to be in life itself. To experience it. To learn about being human.

I've been doing very well at that lately, as confused as I may be in any present moment.

So, the big "If" that I'm looking at right now is - what if I put that bigger purpose in the center, and let the dream be secondary - just something to try because I love it and I feel drawn to it. What if I make that part of the larger whole of living my life, instead of making the living secondary to the dream-thing?

Blam. Pressure off. With apologies to Yoda, I think the truth of me is that there is only Try. Life is short, just give it a try, because it's fun, because you want to. Just for the experience of it.

Wow, what a week. Lots of late-night shenanigans (no, not that kind) and random weirdness. Highlights:

Found two kittens abandoned in a plastic bag. Found someone to take them home. Wondered about the mess that is human nature. Who the hell would do such a thing? My diagnosis: Lack of ability to put oneself into another creature's shoes (or in this case paws).

Finished the first small item of holiday knitting. Started next while at laundromat. Annoying little girl came over and bumped up against me and got right in my space while I was knitting. If I were a child-liking person, I would no doubt have chatted with her and showed her what I was making. Instead, I glared until her mother came and got her. Hey, she's no niece o' mine.

I was, in fact, knitting mittens for my niece at the time. Yes, I know, that's horribly inconsistent, but what can I say? I'm a complicated woman. Also, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who dislikes children writ large but has special relationships with specific children who are related by blood or friendship.

Danced with handsome boy on Friday. That was fun. He lives far away.

Kissed different handsome boy yesterday. Nice, but you know, nothing doing there.

Had conversation with male friend that went like this:

He: "Hey, will you tell Summerboy XYZ?"

Me: "Um. I don't see him very...we're not...I don't..."

He: "Oh. Hey, you should just get a guy you can (less polite term for have sex with) on the DL."

Me: "No, I'm not built for that."

He: "You mean you want a BOYFRIEND?" (surprised)

Me: "I know you haven't heard that word come out of my mouth in a while (or ever), but yeah. I think it's time."

He: "Hey, if I wasn't doing so well with my girlfriend, you're totally my type."

Me: "Ack."

Later that night, I pondered. Lots of men say I'm their "type." And yet.

It gave me to think. And what I thought was this: I'm intimidating. I may look like someone they'd want, but get me in a conversation and within five minutes most guys are feeling kind of stupid. Or at least they're thinking, what the hell would she need me for?

And they're not wrong. I probably project self-sufficiency at a radius of 90 yards. I certainly don't like being approached by guys in clubs or bars, and I'm very adept at warding off all attempts. I tend to have a kneejerk reaction of, "I'm with my friends. Buzz off."

So how did I end up dancing with a handsome 20-something doctor? He was a friend of my friends, of course. And because of that, he had a chance where none of the other boys in the bar did.