Looking for a Pattern

Sophia has an interesting entry in her blog about originality/redundancy of thoughts. I know I blog about a lot of the same things, over and over. But I kind of like it when I look back through my blog and start to see themes emerging. It makes me feel like I am one step closer to developing my Theory of Everything.

When I was a kid, I was always generating sentences that began "All of life is about...", trying to capture the essence of existence. Then I'd check back in a few days to see if it still rang just as true. There was probably some kind of progression as I got older, from thoughts like "All of life is about being told to do things by other people" through "All of life is about longing for things you can't have" to "All of life is about jostling for rank in the social hierarchy" or "All of life is about trying to find other people to love you."

Love and Marriage

Here’s a question for you: If, after marriage, you could flip a switch and never feel romantically attracted to anyone again except for your spouse...would you? Or would you let that part of you stay alive?

It’s tough because while marriage is the dividing line after which people (ideally) don’t experience intimacy with anyone other than their spouse, interest in other people doesn’t go away. At least, I don’t think it will. Any attraction I’ve felt to others has been muted for the past few years because I’m happy in my relationship. But will it be muted forever? What if boredom strikes a few years down the line? Or what if I meet someone sparky, someone who, if I was single, I would like to date? Or someone with lots of flaws – just different flaws from the ones I’m familiar with. No matter how committed I am to never crossing the line, it seems unrealistic to expect that I would never have a desire to. So in a way, being able to flip that switch would be a relief. I could relax and stop policing. On the other hand, those flickers of excitement when you have a crush on someone or even just a passing interest are one of the great joys of human experience. It seems wrong to neuter yourself.

How come pre-marital classes never cover things like this?

Not Just a Job

Today I watched a crossing-guard tweeting her whistle at a car, in increasingly strident blasts, and finally, when it became clear the car was not going to stop at the crosswalk, actually throw herself up onto its hood. The car slammed on its brakes and she rolled off the hood, cussing at the driver. She put her head close to the driver side window and screamed at him, pointing at the pedestrians. She was so mad she kept muttering and twitching even after he had driven away. It’s really noble when you think about it, to be that invested in your job – to have the safety of strangers so paramount in your mind that you apparently take any threat to them personally. All the pedestrians were just watching her in awe.

Too Late

This morning, my bus was just starting to pull away from a stop when a girl ran up alongside, calling, “Wait!” A bunch of people on the bus called out on her behalf: “Hold it!” “Wait!” but the bus driver, after a moment of hesitation, put his foot down hard on the pedal and pulled away from the stop. I felt sorry for the girl, who would never know that she had a bus-full of advocates. Such is the way of the world – it doesn’t matter how many people you have on your side if they are powerless.

The Sensational Nightingale

I'll never be as good a writer as Billy Collins. Sometimes I like to take refuge in thinking that I am young, still developing my abilities - Grandma Moses didn't start painting until she was in her seventies. I have good ideas stored up, some things that, if I can get them recorded properly, might make people try to smile and cry at the same time - the hallmark of the best writing, in my opinion. But Billy Collins does that to me with practically every poem. I can see the trajectory ahead, and I can see I'll fall short, perhaps disastrously short. I should just sigh and be grateful that there is a Billy Collins out there, producing all of the poems I wish I could.

Indecent Exposure

I just took my clothes off for a total stranger, and let him look at me and touch me all over. And I even paid him to do it.

This blatant exhibitionism was triggered by a friend's cancer scare - she was urging everyone she knew to get screened at a dermatologist. So I made an appointment, not really thinking about what screening would entail. I got a better sense of what was coming when the nurse asked me to disrobe and put on one of those paper gowns. Then the doctor came in. He was young and handsome, which ironically helped - made me feel less like what was happening was perverted. He asked me to take my robe off and I stood there stark naked in front of a full-length mirror, while he looked me over. We had a brief conversation about some freckles on my ass, with him staring at them from a distance of about a foot and me looking at them in the mirror. He was kind enough not to mention the hearts with arrows through them which my fiance had drawn all over my hip, and which I had forgotten to wash off. Then he removed a mole on my back that I've had since childhood. It was very quick - I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye.

Afterwards, when I was dressing, I was sort of stunned by my lack of embarrassment. I felt like the encounter should have shaken me up a little more than it did. Either his superb professionalism put me at ease, or I really am a shameless exhibitionist, or I am finally getting to the point where I'm just not embarrassed about any part of my body. It's about time.

A Lovely Film

Once in a while I get a flash of just pure happiness. The other night, I almost didn't get into the film screening - I found out about it half an hour before it was going to start, and it was being shown at a location nearly two miles away from my apartment (hence, the racing). When I got there, I hadn't RSVPd and the screening was booked up. I hung around in the entryway, trying to look pitiful and stand kind of in the way so that the organizers would want to let me in, to get rid of me. Finally they nodded and said I could go in, just as the film was starting. Yessss.

The film was wonderful. It was about a year in the life of a tiny farm in the Netherlands, that a couple in their 70s still work all by themselves. Long, paced shots of the old man doing patient work: milking cows, melting the ice in their trough with hot water from a kettle, carrying hay bales, sowing by hand, tasting the grain kernels to see if the grain was ripe for harvesting. Everything he did, he did with the skill of a lifetime of experience, but also with obvious effort - a lot of it was really heavy work, especially for a man his age. Meanwhile, his wife did the cooking and laundry (by hand), and pored through farm catalogs at their tiny kitchen table. I could tell how the kitchen would smell, how everything in the house would have that musty, old-person, comfortable smell. Their nostalgic commentary on the problems of overproduction, subsidies, the mechanization of agriculture, and social change was fascinating to me. I also loved seeing how they did things - watching her pluck and prepare a chicken, watching him pitch hay to make a haystack. I've never seen anyone do these things before, and I feel like they're something of a dying art. Overlaid on these themes was the pathos of the fact that no one would inherit their farm, their son having chosen not to become a farmer - so they were farming it, in her words, "for no one," just working every day until the inevitable time when one of them would suffer an accident or ill health. Although it was obviously a hard life, they both said they wouldn't have chosen any other. And the farm itself was beautiful - long landscapes with straight rows of trees marking the field divisions, flooded with pure, clean light like in Vermeer paintings. I came out of the film glowing.

As if that wasn't enough, afterwards they served us wine and there were trays piled with cheese and green grapes. I stood there sipping my wine feeling just really happy and grateful that I got that experience.

Racing

I've been racing a lot lately. Last week I was meeting my friend for lunch at noon, but I was stuck in a meeting and couldn't leave when I was planning to. So I ended up running a mile and a half to the restaurant - weaving in and out of pedestrians, catching my breath on street corners when the light was against me. I arrived right at noon. I was happy that I got there on time, kind of proud I guess, but seeing her there - composed and perfectly calm, having arrived early and without rushing - made me wish I could be more like her. Why do I always have to rush all the time? Why, over the weekend, did we have to rush to return the rental car, rush to get to church on time, rush to the cake-tasting, rush to meet our friends? Why did I have to run two miles yesterday to get to a film screening? Why am I going to have to run another mile and a half today in order to get to my doctor's appointment, which I can't leave early for?

I want to blame it on my job, since I'm often required to work through lunch and don't have time for myself, or on having too many things to do, or on poor scheduling. In general I'm just starting to feel like too much is expected of me. I want to fall asleep some night without racing through the whole long checklist of things done, undone, priorities for tomorrow, etc. I want to spend a weekend doing what I want, instead of frantically trying to get as many things off the list as possible. I want to *walk* to an appointment sometime. I'm just...tired.

Opposites Are Attractive

A great and I think unappreciated category of pleasures in life is the luxury of contrasts. It's particularly relevant with temperature. For example, sitting in a hot tub on an outdoor porch when it's January and snow is falling. Your body is immersed in nearly scalding hot water, but you have icy air washing your face and shoulders. It's terrible from an environmental perspective - all that energy! - but it sure feels nice. Or sitting outside on a porch glider while it's snowing, wrapped in a comforter with a mug of hot chocolate. Being really thirsty, and drinking, at the same time, is related but not quite what I mean.

Tough Love

One of the most useful things anyone ever said to me was in college, when my roommate said, one afternoon when I was lovesick and miserable, "Well, for starters, you could stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself." Nothing like a bucket of ice water in the face to wake you up. She'd never spoken to me like that before, and never has since. It really did help.

Sharing the News

I finally told people at work that I'm getting married. I don't know why I've been weird about telling people. From the start, I had a hard time sharing the news, because it seemed too much like boasting. I always used to hate it when I was single and girls went around talking nonstop about their boyfriends. Once, a girl I knew who was married chipped into a conversation about bad dates with, "I'm soo glad I'm married and I don't have to go on dates any more!" The rest of us just felt like crap when we heard that. Like we didn't want to be married, too - or weren't trying our hardest to meet someone so we could stop going on bad dates.

Anyway, I'm sensitive enough to it that it still rubs me the wrong way when I hear people going seemingly out of their way to mention their relationships, and it's still hard for me to say the words "my boyfriend" or "my fiance."

I also had the sense that people at work wouldn't be particularly happy for me, because most of them aren't in relationships. Maybe that was unfair of me to assume that. Anyway, I finally had to say something because I need to ask for time off for the honeymoon. They were very happy and excited for me, and even told me I should feel more free to celebrate these things.

I'll probably be just as weird about it when/if I get pregnant - put off saying anything until I look like I have a beach ball under my shirt.

In the Tradition of Good, Fast, Cheap

Clean, fed, rested: Why is it that I can never manage to be more than two of these at any given time?

Disdain at the Doctor's

I was in the waiting room at the doctor's office when I saw, encapsulated in the space of three seconds, a marriage I wouldn't want. A woman in her seventies was shuffling out from having seen the doctor, to the window where you have to pay for your visit. As soon as she was within sight of her husband, who was waiting in the lobby, she barked, "Getcher coat on." Then she turned her attention to the secretary.

He quietly put his coat on and shuffled over to join her, and together they fussed and mused over the new phone number for the office that was posted on the window, trying to figure out whether it was the same one they had written down. (It was, but they went back and forth for several minutes confirming it, in the slow, muddled way of old people.)

They've probably been married for fifty years, twice as long as I've been alive, so it's not my place to say anything about their relationship. But I hope my marriage never degenerates to that level of disdain. It just made me sad.

Why I Am Not A Sommelier

Wine is confusing to me for several reasons. I love reading the descriptions of different wines: "rich apricot overtones", "hints of melon and cantaloupe", "smoky oak", "jasmine and vanilla notes", "creamy follow-through", "approachable tannins," etc. I can never taste any of those things when I drink wine though. To me it's tart, somewhere along a sweet/bitter continuum, with an alcoholic bite. Where is the cream? or the vanilla? The other thing is that it never tastes the way the color looks. I keep buying pink wine, thinking it will taste like peaches and nectar, or red wine, thinking it will be like pomegranate, but it never is. Clearly, I'm going to need more civilizing than Beethoven alone can accomplish.

People-Watching

The weather's too nice for me to feel sad for long. I ate lunch outside in the park today and saw, within a short period of time, the following interesting people:

- A woman wearing a weird knee-length skirt/pants thing - like capri pants, but wide; like a skirt, but split into trousers. A hard look to pull off. She had paired it with knee-high leather boots.
- A pair of businessmen walking slowly together, both in blue shirts and black pants, looking like confident alpha males as they patrolled their domain.
- A girl confiding to her friend, "She got a big-ass stomach."
- A woman wearing a professional-looking suit and sporting a severe mullet: short, curly gray hair all over her head, then about two-thirds of the way down, long straight gray hair cascading down her back. Yikes.
- Two harassed-looking teachers trying to get a bunch of six-year-olds to play kickball. At one point, one of the teachers was getting them to raise their hands in the order that they were going to kick, and clearly forgot one of the kids' names: "So Ashley's next, who's after Ashley? Blake, okay, who's after Blake? Umm... you, who's after you?"
- A couple of lovers walking hand-in-hand, not talking, just looking at each other and smiling.

Depressed Like a Mouse

Today I'm feeling beaten down. It has to do with having a job that isn't up to my intellectual ability, and being the lowest-ranking person in my department. While most days I like my job, occasionally I get these flashes of fear - like where is my career going? is it going to stall out at the administrative level, when I am capable of doing so much more? and - how will I ever progress, if I am repeatedly given these low-ranking assignments that don't allow me to develop any experience to prove that I can handle more?

In studies where mice were repeatedly confined with more dominant and aggressive individuals, they became withdrawn and exhibited symptoms of depression. They actually experienced permanent changes in brain chemistry reflecting greater susceptibility to depression, fear, and other emotions related to low social rank. I am afraid this is happening to me. All through school, I was one of the brightest and best, and I still have that intelligence and drive and creative power and passion. It's just not getting any outlet, and instead I am repeatedly handed menial tasks, and getting disciplined about my place in the hierarchy every time I try to take initiative. My self-esteem is flagging, and I'm worried that over time all that promise that I had is just going to dry up.

I Will Be Cultured!

I spent two days walking around with a theme from a piece of classical music in my head. Yesterday I finally called my dad to find out if he knew what it was. All I had to do was hum a couple of bars, and he said, "Beethoven, 7th Symphony, Allegretto." I was so impressed. I want to be able to do that. I'm on a classical music kick now, got out all my old CDs (and bought Beethoven's 7th) and am going to listen to them over and over (lying on the floor with headphones on, conducting at the ceiling), until I really know them by heart.

I also need to learn some foreign languages, take a dance class, read about art history, etc. There are such huge gaps in my cultural competence. What was I learning, all those years in school?

Side note: I like both Beethoven, and beets, very much. Coincidence??

Hot Air on a Cold Day

I went to lunch with a blow-hard. I'm not sure if I made that term up, or if it's in common use - anyway, I mean a person who dominates the whole conversation. Blow-hards always seem to have an agenda for what they want to talk about, and (sometimes very entertaining, but ultimately scripted) rants about specific issues. The challenge for me is trying to insert enough of my perspective in during a rant that it might actually get incorporated into the script and I'll recognize it next time it comes around - "Ooh! That's mine! that bit right there.."

Another friend of mine was there and she knows what he's like, so she was taking him in stride, but I felt sorry for her husband, who seemed a bit overwhelmed. He didn't get a chance to say anything the entire meal.

I know this is the nth rant about people who talk too much. I'll try to cut back on talking so much about people who talk. It just really irritates me. It's clear to me that I don't have any telepathic powers, because if I did, they would surely be getting my mind-blasts: "Stop. Stop talking. Let me go. I want to leave." etc.

A Paradox

It's funny that sometimes you get angry about a situation only after the fact. You'd think the anger would come first, then the desire to get out, then the getting out. Instead, there have been a couple of situations in my life where it didn't kick in until months later. I wondered at first if it was 'false' anger - figured if I had a genuine reason to feel aggrieved, I would have felt that way earlier. But now I think there is a kind of self-preservation instinct that blocks aggression when you're in the thick of things. Acting upset then just draws fire from the aggressors. It's only later, when you're extricated, that you have the emotional distance to react, in safety.

A Bunion is Small Fry

A lot of people I know are suddenly dealing with scary illnesses. One of my friends has ulcerative colitis, and another was recently hospitalized with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. A friend who is only my age was just diagnosed with melanoma (which has a 30% survival rate, but hopefully she caught it in time). My other friend's boss was diagnosed in January with uterine cancer, given six months to live, and died last weekend, and I heard today that the security guard who always used to talk to me has a pretty far advanced form of some kind of cancer. It's sad and unsettling to hear.

Speaking Up

So much of life is about making choices between doing what you need to do to make things better, and keeping other people happy and treating you nicely. This has relevance to the entry from a couple days ago, too, I think - re speaking up about cruelty. Actually it's relevant to any activism and, broadly speaking, any social situation. Why is it that doing the right thing is so seldom met with social rewards?

The Top Ten List

I read a lot about childbirth. Not because I'm excited about having kids, like my friend Rachel, or planning to do so imminently. Mostly because I'm scared to death of it, and for me, having more information about something tends to make me feel better equipped to cope with it. I keep hoping to read a childbirth story that says, "It's not that bad." Instead, I just seem to be accumulating tales of excruciating pain and terrifying complications. I'm sure it will all be worth it in the end, that the pain will be fleeting compared to the excitement and enormity of raising a child, yada yada yada. But I still have so many questions about the experience, that nothing I've read has answered. Such as:

10. Why does it hurt? Flexing other muscles in the body doesn't hurt.
9. Why does it take so long? I don't understand why the cervix can't just open in the space of a few minutes, like opening your mouth - what is going on that makes it take hours or even days?
8. Where does all the blood come from? Is the uterus bleeding from the force of the contractions? Unless there is a wound, nobody should be bleeding, right?
7. Is a contraction the whole uterus squeezing to push the baby out? or is it the muscles around the cervix flattening out?
6. What is the physiological basis for the common feeling during transition of wanting to give up?
5. Does it still hurt during transition, after the cervix is open?
4. Why are doctors so mean to women who want a natural birth? So many stories I've read are about doctors screaming at women, doing unrequested procedures on them, ignoring their requests, etc. It's almost like they resent a woman who is educated about the birth process and wants to do the best thing for herself and her child.
3. Why do some fetuses develop heads that are bigger than their mothers' pelvic openings (before the advent of C-sections, they would have automatically died, and their mothers too)?
2. Why do some women have life-threatening problems with blood pressure? Why do their bodies respond to pregnancy in such a dangerous way?
and my top question that nothing has answered:
1. Will I be able to do it?