I finished my last shift for SXSW at the convention center last night and am looking forward to a weekend outdoors, away from glass and concrete and escalators and questions about wristbands. Here are some random statistics for the last eight or nine weeks:
hm. maybe I should make mix CDs like James. Which reminds me, I didn’t get one of his CDs this year. argh.
Also, I do the sock-sliding thing even when my kids are over at their Dad’s house a few nights a week. Feels good to be honest about it.
Speaking of replenishing, now we are off to the creek for an afternoon in the sun. Swimsuits and sandals in march!
I have to confess that I have been dreading this day for the past week. Although I have been coming around to a lot of the benefits of being single and occasionally even *gasp* revelling in it, I was not looking forward to being alone on Valentine’s Day. I subbed for my friend Wayo last night, and in looking for an inspiring quote for the class, stumbled upon this little gem by Hafiz:
THE SEED CRACKED OPEN
It used to be
That when I would wake in the morning
I could with confidence say,
“What am ‘I’ going to
Do?”
That was before the seed
Cracked open.
Now Hafiz is certain:
There are two of us housed
In this body,
Doing the shopping together in the market and
Tickling each other
While fixing the evening’s food.
Now when I awake
All the internal instruments play the same music:
“God, what love-mischief can ‘We’ do
For the world
Today?”
After class, as I sat at Whole Foods pasta bar slurping my way through a big bowl of angel hair and tomatoes, the cook started making jokes about the very long line of men at the candy counter behind us. “Glad I don’t have a girlfriend. I don’t have to stand in line for candy.
“Then again,” he said with mock sadness, hand to chest, “I’ll be crying myself to sleep later.”
So I left him a little note on the back of my receipt: “you are terribly cute. please don’t cry. happy valentine’s day.” Then, of course, skeedaddled outta there, lest my friendly little note be interpreted as an actual overture rather than a simple statement of fact. Besides, mischief has to have a component of sneakiness in order to actually be mischievous, right?
Everyone is my valentine today! Now, go forth and make mischief.
I’ve been sucked into writing about my daily practice at WoYoPracMo (World Yoga Practice Month). I usually keep some kind of a written journal about my practice, but it’s been fun to do it as part of a social network. Please join me, fellow yoga nerds! I think anyone can join, but let me know if you want/need an invitation.
I had to find a “holiday pet photo” for the sxsw blog, and luckily I was able to unearth this classic from 2002. This is Miles before he had a proper wattle, but I love this photo nonetheless. He looks like the gentleman he is.
here’s hoping you have a fabulous holiday celebration of your choosing!
So yeah, I tend to stew over things for a while. Every time I come back to work on this post, I manage to get stuck somehow. It may not be much to read, probably not such a big deal to someone who isn’t living it. Or maybe it’s just the title that keeps me from finishing, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But a few weeks ago, one of my friends from the blog world said “if you don’t write, you don’t know what you think.” At this point, I’m thinking maybe I just need to write this out in order to stop thinking about it.
There is an old cliché that goes something like “if you want to know what kind of person you really are, have kids.” I don’t think you have to have a child to really know yourself, but it’s obvious that some sort of revelation seems to come with every major life change. Just as you will discover how sleep deprivation and emotional overload can affect your personality and decision-making after having a kid, maybe being victimized by crime leaves a shadow of helplessness, or losing a loved one leads to a radical shift in priorities.
This year I made up another maxim: “if you want to know what’s wrong with you, get divorced.” Some couples scream insults at each other all the way down as the ship is sinking, others get an earful from family and friends about every shortcoming that led to the downfall of the relationship, and then there are those who dissect their interactions in a therapist’s office, (over)analyzing every misstep, whether actual or perceived, as Michael and I did last spring.
To say that the past year has been a little humbling is kinda like saying the ocean is a little wet. It feels as though all of my faults have been highlighted, labeled and catalogued for future reference. I learned that a lot of the things I was doing to preserve my marriage actually helped to destroy it. The concerns I didn’t address in an effort to keep the peace slowly festered and hardened into barriers. My attempts to divest myself from Michael’s addiction ended up divesting me from the entire relationship. And the sheer exhaustion that kept me from trying harder to renew that connection, feels in my darkest hours like sheer laziness instead. For these things, I will forever be ashamed. I failed.
I failed.
When I was pregnant with Julien, I dreamed of houses with hidden rooms. Each time I found a hidden space it was because of something I hadn’t noticed before: a stairway that had been obscured by a piece of furniture, a pass-thru that I had mistaken for just another window, a pull-down set of stairs camouflaged in the ceiling.
My favorite, the one I still revisit from time to time, is of ice skating on a pond in a community back yard after dark and looking up at my house to notice an entire basement and second floor I had previously missed. Rows upon rows of ice-frosted windows glowed with warm lamplight or fire from an obscured hearth. As I glided across the pond, blades scraping against ice the only sound, breath rising in faint white puffs of steam, I thought, “I’ll go see about that in a minute, but right now I want to keep skating.” (I can’t ice skate all that well, so being able to do so in a dream was actually more exciting than suddenly having a house twice as big as I thought.)
After about a year of being a mother, I began to understand the dreams as anticipating a shift in perspective. The hidden spaces were things I didn’t know about myself, about my marriage, about life. I have always had dreams of exploring buildings, and have actually spent a lot of my waking hours poring over architectural drawings. From the blueprints that Dad would unfurl and explain to me—tracing every detail, explaining what all the little symbols meant—to the piles of houseplan magazines and books I accumulated over the years, imagining the spaces in three dimensions and wondering what I would change became an ongoing fascination. But this was the first time I came to understand the metaphor: life as a house.
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“I like your wrap” says the cashier at Target. “Where can I buy something like that?”
After explaining that they’ve got all different sizes and colors available at the place where I teach, and ask if he’s looking to buy one for his girlfriend, he says,
“Oh no, my Grandma’s favorite shawl is wearing out and I want to get her a new one.”
what’s your costume? I blew five bucks on a pair of wings so’s I could be a butterfly. I saw some far more elaborate costumes at the school carnival/birthday party and at my friends’ wedding reception/oktoberfest/halloween pig-roasting festival.
I love halloween! Hope yours is fun and safe.
(for Christina, who reminded me that I don’t post often enough)
A couple of weekends ago, Julien had back-to-back sleepovers to attend, leaving Gabby and I to entertain ourselves. My bias with Gabriel is that I was the youngest kid too, not just of my siblings, but among my cousins and all my parents’ friends’ kids. So, aside from being tossed around like a ragdoll at family gatherings (”are you kidding? she LOVES being thrown into the pool”) and used as a human test subject for all manner of dangerous stunts (blindfold, check. spin around three times, check. furniture rearranged, check. “okay ari, see who you can catch first!”), I often felt left out of all the cool things the big kids got to do. I try to help Gabby feel a little more empowered when these situations come up, to remind him that where he is “at” is perfectly fine. And besides, hanging out with the big kids can result in a big gash on your chin from playing blind man’s bluff. Ten stitches. Awesome.
I let Gabby pick the restaurant, and after dinner we split an ooey gooey brownie sundae. Then I had to do some returns at the container store, and as we walk in, G sees this REALLY COOL pumpkin-headed flashlight that he wants REALLY BADLY for halloween. I told him if he was REALLY GOOD while Mom got all her boring container store stuff, I would get him the flashlight.
So, at the end, as we are heading for the register, G said, “Mom, have I been good?”
“Yes, I appreciate you being so patient, go pick out a flashlight.”
“But Mom,” he said, quietly stern, “I farted three times since we’ve been here.”
Struggling to keep a straight face, and wondering when I have him the impression that passing gas is a punishable offense, I told him he could have the flashlight anyway. “Thank you for being honest, sweetie.”
Of course he wanted to hold his new flashlight, even though it didn’t have batteries yet. As we pulled out of the parking lot, he gently waved it around in the backseat, quietly singing “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine …”
Just as I am thinking this moment can’t get any more perfect, and is there any way he can please just stay five years old for a few more years? There is an audible gasp from the back seat.
“Mom, look how pretty!”
Then I see it. The harvest moon is rising to the north, and we have a perfect view from our elevated perch on the freeway. I’ve felt as though the color orange has been following me around all year, and now here it was again, this time as god’s own pumpkin-headed flashlight.
“This is a pretty song, mom,” said G, as Cugat’s instrumental version of Perfidia started.
“I like it too.”
“Mom, is it okay for the moon to be orange?”
“Yes, I think it only happens once in a while.”
He had me play the song over and over again on the way home.
I have been away for a while, but never too far. So many things have happened in the past few weeks, most of which I’ll write about eventually. In the meantime, here are some random facts:
That’s all for now. That’s plenty.
