If you write about writer’s block, does that officially end it? July 23, 2008

So I haven’t written at this blog in three months or so.  That’s not surprising.  I have four blogs, and have only written at one of them lately (if you call one post in a month lately), and that’s because it’s my job.  And even at that one, I’m having real trouble writing something significant.  I love to write, and while I’ve had some bouts of being too busy to write, I’ve never faced anything like this before.  It feels like my bout of laryngitis last month– I’ve lost my ability to communicate in my favorite way (even more favorite than talking, which I know is hard for some to believe.)

So what’s behind it all?  Here goes for some online therapeutic self-diagnosis.  (Don’t worry, I’ll still ask my therapist to weigh in.)  I hope it will help me — just forcing some exercise on unworked muscles — and maybe some others too.

Over the last three months, I’ve gone through a tremendous amount of changes.  First, I changed jobs, and have returned to lead the organization I love the most, after a year elsewhere.  We’ve been given essentially a year’s budget to make it work.  While I was making the transition, there was much that I couldn’t write about (and still can’t.)  It’s hard to write when one of the most significant things in your life — work — suddenly becomes something you can’t talk about, and especially ironic given my career focus on workplace issues. 

Then, I was dealing with a whirlwind of relationship issues, some of which were alluded to in my last post.  Things have more or less righted themselves, although I can’t say I’m in what you call a stable situation.  But the thing I wanted the most to work out didn’t, and the one that had to end ended, both of which were harder on me than I expected.  And I’m frankly ambivalent about what’s currently happening.  On the plus side, it’s fun, and it’s a good learning experience.  On the minus side, I’m not sure what’s happening is entirely good for me.  About all of this, as Forrest would say, “that’s all I can say about that” — yet something else playing a big role in my life that I really can’t blog about, not without the blogging itself becoming part of the story and hastening the end of things.

But also, I think a lot of writer’s block is rooted in a fear of failure, and this is probably no exception.  I’ve bitten off something huge, and I’m terribly impatient to make it work — NOW.  I don’t have nearly enough resources to do it the right way, so I’m constantly devising workarounds and shifting priorities.  It’s easier to cross off your to-do list something that must be done, like communicating with the IRS or filling out certain forms, than it is to focus on the big picture and really dig deep into the issues that matter.  It’s hard to have the mental space to blog when so many other things have to get done.  And part of my job now is to draw much more attention to my work, so that means I feel even more pressure for it to be really good.  With nobody to delegate to, it’s all on me, which is scary.

Okay, so now I’ve thrown it out there.  Hopefully now that it’s been aired, I can find what I need to write about something else, and get everything going again.  Maybe even you’ll be wishing I would shut up — I guess there are worse problems for a blogger and writer to have, right?

Magic or Mojo, You Make the Call April 26, 2008

Let’s call it magic. Or maybe it’s mojo. Whatever it is, I suddenly have it, after a lifetime of not having it. Things have been rolling my way, in a way that someone two decades younger can appreciate. Actually, someone almost two decades younger has been quite appreciative. Or truth be told, two or three someones in that age range lately, depending on what you count. Then there’s the age-appropriate one – the object of a crush that materialized out of nowhere (the mutual realization, that is, not the crush itself, which has been hanging around for a little while at least). And then the older one, who gives great phone (but not quite exactly like you’re thinking). It’s as much of a surprise that he’s over ten years older, as it is with the ones that are younger – we all seem to be in the same place right now. That’s the good stuff in my life at the moment…

Then there’s the not-as-good: not bad, exactly, just not working for me. There’s the married one: they’re always trouble, and this is no exception, this blast from my past. There are also the couple of crushes that recently faded, which in prior days would have left me heartbroken. Now, I can see why they never would have worked in the first place, and even why I’m glad things weren’t ultimately reciprocated. I’ve figured out how to keep them in my life – in a good, enriching way, not a painful, torturous way – hanging onto the things that I initially found attractive. Oh, and I can’t forget the past that’s still hanging on (or clinging, more accurately) – history keeps repeating itself. In the past, I would have been trying to make some of these bad situations work, instead of realizing their inadequacy.

Add in a couple of instances of indeterminate but definitely flirtatious chemistry that might have been taken farther with a little more time and effort, and you have my life right now. It probably sounds like I’m bragging, but those close enough to me have witnessed it lately. You can’t make this stuff up (well, you can, I guess, but that’s not the way I roll). I don’t think that much has changed when I look in the mirror – I see the same old person who has always struggled to get what (and who) I wanted.

One observation is that by starting to become the person I want to be, instead of the person I thought I should be, I become someone that others can more easily be attracted to. I’m giving off the right kind of vibe (or again, that mojo) to make those that I’m most likely to find attractive start gravitating in my direction. Or maybe it’s that I’ve stopped giving a flying…fish (like Pike Place Market, you know) about finding “Mr. Right.”

I sometimes worry about the ethics and morals of it all. Not in a puritanical, religious sort of way, but in a Golden Rule kind of way. But do guys believe in the Golden Rule? That’s not just a gratuitous slam in a Mars/Venus or chauvinistic kind of way, but a real question. Do guys ever worry whether they’re treating someone the way they want to be treated, or do they take for granted the differences in the way that men and women treat each other? At any rate, I feel like I’m dealing with folks who know the score, and not representing any of the situations for anything more than they are.

Who wins? There’s a clear winner in my head, but holding patterns don’t work so well for me (as you might have guessed from this post) when there are so many life experiences out there to have. I’m not so good with playing it cool, pretending it means something different or less than it does. I’m being honest, genuine, not holding back, not worrying about being liked or loved. I don’t have to settle for less than optimal right now, with the confidence I now have that something better could come along, and will, if it’s meant to be. Until then, I’m having lots and lots of fun, and seeing what becomes of it. For those of you involved in this tale, I hope that’s okay.

Saying Hi to the Puppies and Kitties April 20, 2008

In my last post, I referenced a New York Times article about people who blog about their divorces, publicly airing their side of the story and the pain. That’s how I discovered NakedJen. NakedJen is another blogger that I think I would be the best of friends with in real life, but since we didn’t meet in real life, it would never be the same. NakedJen’s account of her divorce is almost identical to mine, and a recent post of hers, Say Hi to the Puppies, Seriously really took me back to the animal travails involved.

Here’s what NakedJen said when DearSweetDave, her husband, walked out:

he’s done.

he says he loves me, he thinks i’m the most amazing woman he’ll ever know, i am his best friend, he can’t imagine his life without me in it, but he’s done.

and he doesn’t know what his path is, he just knows that being married to me is not it.

my heart, to put it bluntly, is absolutely shattered. i feel like the biggest fool. for trusting him. for believing that he really wanted to be my husband. for being the best wife i could possibly be and having it just not be enough.

i feel like he’s broken one of our most sacred promises. and i know i always say that marriage happens every day. that we wake up each morning and say, “today i choose to be married.” and i understand that dave no longer chooses to be married.

(He’s Done.) Let’s just say that this is an almost identical account of the way my marriage ended, and how I reacted. I don’t need to talk about it so much any more — I think I now understand that it happens, regardless of your best efforts, and sometimes you just run out of gas trying to fix something that takes so much work. But hearing Jen’s account made her puppy post that much more poignant — I got it, really got it.

Jen tells of a recent conversation with her ex, in which he tossed off the comment, “Say Hi to the puppies for me.” It hit her hard — here’s what she observed:

When David left last October, he not only left me, he left the dogs, as well. He not only broke my heart, he broke their hearts, too. And while I was a human with a brain that could somehow, someway wrap itself around the fact that he no longer wanted to be a part of my life, Buddha and Stella still have no idea what on earth happened to him?

He just left. Packed everything that he believed was his and disappeared.

As much as I am their world, David was a very large part of their world, as well. I know for a fact that those dogs miss him. Terribly.

Say Hi to the Puppies, Seriously

My story isn’t about the puppies — it’s about a couple of cats.

Cat #1 is my cat Morgan, the one I have now who brightens my life every day. I have Morgan because of my ex, although I don’t think either of us expected just how much she would end up meaning to me. I had just lost my cat of 16 years, Athena, who had been with me since my senior year of college. I didn’t think I was ready for a new cat, but I was working at home by myself, and realized that my grief was paralyzing me because I was used to having someone there all day — that someone being a cat that I could have nearby to talk to. (In many cases, they’re better than coworkers.)

So we decided to get a new cat, but J wouldn’t let me have a cat that looked anything like Athena — he said it would be too hard and not fair to the new cat. So instead of the green-eyed black cat that had shared my life, we identified a whitish-grey (seal point) blue-eyed cat who was simply beautiful. She was at a shelter across town, and when we arrived and asked to see her, they brought her out and handed her to J. She immediately went from his arms to climbing up to snuggle around his neck, essentially hugging him. That was it — we looked at a couple of kitties, but Morgan was the one.

Even though Morgan was “our” cat, in that we picked her out together, he considered her my cat. I found this out when a couple of weeks after we brought her home, she got sick and was vomiting. I didn’t clean it up right away. That makes me a horrible, filthy person, right? As strange as it sounds, I couldn’t. Athena’s kidney failure was diagnosed when she started vomiting, and having Morgan be sick right after I had dealt for so long with Athena’s illness triggered something I couldn’t immediately process in the midst of my grief. I was scared to love again.

Even more strange, I found some of Athena’s vomit in the back of my closet, and couldn’t clean it up either. It was all I had left of her, the evidence that she had been here with me and loved me, and for a very painful time, I developed the habit of sitting next to the closet and talking to the remnants of her DNA. That mess was the essence of her in the last year of her life, and as disgusting as it sounds, I still felt her presence through it.

Eventually J prevailed upon me that we were in the midst of a horrible unsanitary mess, and it had to stop. It later was evidence of what a terrible wife I was, and how I obviously wasn’t ready to be a parent. He never understood just how devastated I was during that time — I don’t think I did either until I later realized how much talking to the vomit I did for a while. Morgan eventually adjusted to her food and her life with us, and was the perfect traveling companion when post-breakup, I moved across the country.

When I moved, I left behind cat #2, Rerun. Rerun was J’s cat, in every sense of the word. She eventually grew to tolerate me, but I always understood who her heart really belonged to, which makes what happened even more painful and sad. J found Rerun as a young kitten inside the hood of his car. His car was purring in a completely unexpected way, and he found this scared and abandoned kitten trying to keep warm. From that moment on, Rerun depended on J not to abandon her. In turn, she was constantly at his side, protecting him — even literally once, when a raccoon came in through the open window and landed on J’s bed.

One of my most memorable birthdays was my first birthday with J, when Rerun had five kittens. (Yes, he should have had her fixed much sooner than he did — I’m not the only bad animal parent.) The time when I was newly in love with J and spent all my time with him was for a time punctuated by the antics of five adorable kittens, which was better than any gift he could have given me.

Whenever we would leave town, Rerun would always look at him upon his return with a reproachful gaze that always meant, “How could you leave me? I didn’t think you were coming back.” She would be very needy for a while until he could reassure her that he hadn’t abandoned her — I could never soothe her in the same way, even when I had stayed with her and not left. Many of our friends and family never really got to know Rerun — she would hide for most houseguests. For her, it was all about the person had saved her.

After my breakup with J, when we were still living together, I had some long talks with Rerun. I explained that I would be leaving soon, and that J really needed her, more than ever, because there were a lot of things messed up in his life right now. I don’t know how much she understood, but she was more affectionate than ever with me. It was hard to say goodbye — she had become my stepcat. We never got around to having kids, but the way in which she was bonded with J helped prepare me a little for what I might have faced.

When I went back to my old house after moving here, J met me to get rid of the remaining stuff, so that we could get the house ready for sale. I asked if I could go see Rerun, because I missed her terribly. It was then that he told me he no longer had Rerun — that he gave her up. When he moved out into his own apartment, he discovered that he would have to pay a large pet deposit. There was some pet damage in the apartment we lived in before buying the house, from what I now know as the early stages of Athena’s kidney failure. It wasn’t Rerun’s fault, even though she had lived there too. But he was responsible — his name was on the lease — so unless he came up with the money (which he didn’t have), he couldn’t have Rerun with him.

So he took her to the shelter where we had found Morgan. And like that, she became someone else’s cat. Probably most begrudgingly — it took her so long to warm up to me, and that was with J around. They probably don’t call her Rerun any more — I guess it was a silly name. (It had something to do with the “What’s Happening?” character Rerun, although I can no longer remember why J decided that applied to her.) And I wonder just how long it took her to realize that J was never coming back, and the cat whose biggest fear was abandonment had to live with that fear being realized.

I’m a person with the capacity of understanding what was happening, and it took me a long time to understand that J wasn’t coming back. I still miss Rerun, though, and hope that she’s now okay. Morgan and I are, and Jen, you, Buddha, and Stella will be too.

Privacy — or the lack thereof April 19, 2008

The visits to my humble little blog have increased dramatically lately, when the last post (Small Town People Are Bitter — Get Over It) was cross-posted at TheSeminal.com, a political blog produced by my friends that appears to get a fair amount of traffic. I didn’t think about having The Seminal link back here until my friend Jason did it, and I’ll have to admit it scared me a little at first.

Some of the posts here are quite personal, but there’s some relative anonymity in just throwing a blog up on the internet. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come — it takes a lot of effort to make your blog stand out from the millions and millions of other blogs out there. Nobody’s going to wake up overnight and be Dooce or Penelope Trunk — it took a lot of hard work for them too to make their blogs prime internet destinations. (And I’m sure the daily traffic that I’m now talking about is what they get in five minutes or less.)

After the mad scramble to re-read some of my prior posts (it didn’t take long), I realized that I didn’t care so much any more. I’ve reached the point where if you know me, a lot of this stuff is going to come out pretty quickly anyway. Last night, at a friend’s birthday party, I met some new people, and told them about my divorce, moving across the country, my current relationship status, and my sex life. That wasn’t an overshare, either, in the context of our conversation — they were telling me about their own relationships, jobs, marriages, etc., in a similarly detailed way.

My ex-husband is unlikely to find this online — he just isn’t an online person (but you never know, I guess). But my recent ex-boyfriend is now on Facebook and Twitter, which means that he’s probably already found this or is likely to find it very soon. Part of the mad scramble was to see whether I said anything on here that I hadn’t told him to his face. Because that’s the danger of blogging and the Internet: it gives people false courage, and some misuse their ability to say whatever they want by saying what they don’t have the cajones to say in person.

And while there’s a therapeutic value, certainly, in being able to share with a mass audience of “friends” what’s going on in your life, and for the major bloggers, it certainly brings in the traffic and page views, I think you have to be careful not to cross that line and say hurtful things just to make yourself feel better. When you’re in pain, your instinct is to lash out, with ever fiber of your being and every tool at your disposal, and if it just so happens that one of your tools is a blog read by a bunch of people, it takes remarkable restraint not to let some of the anger and bitterness creep in.

There was a New York Times article this week about bloggers who have talked about their divorces, which included the aforementioned Penelope Trunk (who is now Twittering). I guess I’m lucky in that, as painful as my divorce was to me, we never reached the level of bitterness that the article discusses. Sure, there are days, even still, when I want to impose on my ex some of the hurt he has imposed on me (mostly when I think about my financial situation and the fact he has now gone completely AWOL in dealing with it), but mostly, I want my life to be free of that pain. And for me, escalating things on my blog (regardless if 5 or 5 million people read it) isn’t really where I want to go.

I’d much rather blog about new and exciting developments in my life. But they involve other people too — people who read blogs — so I’ll just leave it at that. After all, it’s obviously hard enough restraining myself in person.

Small town people are bitter — get over it. April 15, 2008

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days (which you might be if you live in a small town), you may have heard that presidential candidate Barack Obama has kicked up a shitstorm (or more accurately, the handlers of his opponents have) for daring to suggest that people in small towns are bitter and accordingly embrace right-wing causes. Here’s the full quote:

It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Guess what, people, he’s right.

How dare I say this? As John Cougar Mellencamp sings it, I grew up in a small town. I can’t say that I will live and die in a small town, because I got the hell out as soon as I could, when I got to go to a mega-university in a bigger town, and have lived in metro areas ever since. But I grew up on a 360-acre black Angus cattle farm in MIssouri near an intersection that used to be a town (still had its own sign, even though there were only 8 people in the immediate vicinity), eight miles from a town of 629 people, where I attended the same school for twelve years with a graduating class of 26. That was in a county of 8000 people that was 98.7% white when I grew up there. It was 30 miles from a Wal-Mart (and let me tell you, that’s real distance in rural America) and 1 1/2 hours from the nearest shopping mall. The nearest major airport and metro area was 2 1/2 hours away. So I have the “midwest farmer’s daughter” cred down pretty well by now.

And let’s get this out of the way: yes, I support Obama, but a little reluctantly (I was a John Edwards fan, and still can’t quite figure out why he’s not the best candidate for president). And yes, I will generalize and stereotype in this post, and you can always find an anecdotal example to prove me wrong. We like stereotypes because they’re convenient, and often because they’re, well, TRUE.

Okay — back to the matter at hand. People in small towns generally don’t understand their economic circumstances very well. They work for a living, so they understand that when they work, they get some money. Either that money is enough to support them and their families, or it isn’t. Either it’s enough to allow them to buy a house, pay for their kids’ braces and new clothes, and maybe let them have a Harley, boat, and an occasional vacation, or it isn’t. They don’t own stock, and if they own businesses, it’s a farm, or a beauty shop, or a cafe where you can still buy lunch for less than $4.00.

And when their life falls apart (because the no-good man ran off with the blonde hussy down the street for the last time, or they get hurt at work but are told it’s their fault and get next to nothing from workers’ comp, or their job goes overseas and there’s nothing else to replace it), there’s nothing there to protect them. They’re either too proud for welfare, or it’s pretty much impossible to get it. Minimum wage jobs, especially if you don’t have child care, are next to useless — they don’t adequately pay the bills, and may make it more difficult to qualify for assistance. If your car dies, and you can’t afford to fix it, yet you live where there is not public transportation, forget about holding down a job.

Are you telling me you wouldn’t be bitter about this? If you’re not, you damn well should be. Nobody ever told you it was going to be like this. You’re supposed to have a better life than your parents. You’re supposed to live in a society that will help take care of you when you fall on hard times. You’re supposed to have a good life if you work hard and treat other people decently. You’re supposed to live somewhere that doesn’t practice social Darwinism by letting poor people die because they don’t have health care. You’re supposed to be able to have a couple of kids who love you and will protect you in your old age, but the deal is that you have to make sure you can provide for and protect them until they make it to adulthood.

The problem surely isn’t that small town people are bitter, because again, you’re going to tell me they don’t have a right to be? Now if we lefty liberals who live near a coast are being honest, the problem is that they turn to guns or religion or anti-immigrant sentiment (i.e., Obama was right.) Is the issue that they don’t turn to those things? No, many of them do. I come from a gun-owning, religious family, and I’m hardly a freak that way. (My family isn’t particularly anti-immigrant, but they’re hardly warm and welcoming either. They still refer to one of my cousins as the one who married “the Mexican.”)

Is the issue the implication they’re too dumb to see that these things don’t fix their problems? Well, they do and they don’t. If you think a hunter (usually, but not always, a man) isn’t escaping from it all when he goes back in the woods and starts shooting defenseless animals (often after leaving a hunting camp with other men scratching their privates and drinking beer), then you’re spending too much time on the golf course (and please tell me why whacking a little white ball around at a chi-chi country club who only recently decided that blacks and women could play along is any better).

As for religion, yes, some people do end up voting against their economic interests by paying too much attention to issues like abortion and homosexuality. We’ve all read What’s the Matter with Kansas? Does that mean they’re not that bright? (First, let me say that I’m not a religious person, so there’s admittedly the temptation to just say “yes,” and move on.)

But to be fair, there are a couple of reasons why that happens. One is that in many small towns, the churches provide the only safety net that there is. I can’t tell you how many kids my parents have helped over the years, making sure they have Christmas presents, lunch money, and new pairs of shoes and jeans here and there. Yes, the price is that the kids go to Sunday School as often as my parents take them, but when you’re a kid, that may be the only time all week you feel like anyone really cares about (or frankly even notices) what your life is like.

And another reason is that most small-town religions (they don’t branch out too far from evangelical Christianity there) have a belief in the hereafter as a central tenet. Is it that crazy to think that when your life sucks, and you don’t have that much of a reason to believe it’s going to get better any time soon, that you should just cut your losses and start focusing on getting to heaven? After all, you’ve followed the rules here, and that and a buck will get you a cup of coffee (it’s not Starbucks, so it’s cheaper.) It costs a lot less to read the Bible, forgo the vices they want you to forgo, and judge other people who don’t have your self-restraint. (You conveniently forget that you wouldn’t have any self-restraint either if it wasn’t imposed on you by your life circumstances.)

As for not liking anyone who’s different…that’s a small-town way of life. Forget it if you haven’t lived someplace for at least three generations. To this day, I can tell you which of my school classmates was “from” my hometown (which means they were in my classes for 12 years) and which were not. I can probably even remember when they moved there. After all, most people live there because they haven’t had the wherewithal to get out, so they can’t possibly imagine why someone would choose to move there voluntarily.

The anti-immigrant stuff is a whole other post, but where I’m from, people don’t resent the immigrants for taking their jobs, because the immigrants do the jobs that nobody else wants to do, and keep the small-town economy and family farms alive. It’s just that the people are different, with a different set of cultural values, and often a lack of English skills, which make communication and understanding more difficult. When you’re down and out, the easiest way to cope is to find someone to feel superior to, and the immigrant community is a convenient target.

So the issue isn’t that people in small towns aren’t bitter, because they are, and rightly so. The issue isn’t that they turn to guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiment, because they do, and it even sort of makes sense. So what is the issue, really? That Hillary Clinton and John McCain are oh so sensitive to the plight of the working person? Puh-leeze. That Obama might not get elected if he appears to be elitist? Okay, we’re getting warmer.

Is it that Obama told the truth? Surely a politician who speaks truth to power won’t be crucified, right? Only if it helps someone else get elected.

Birthday on the Way April 1, 2008

I come from the kind of family that doesn’t make a big deal about birthdays, unlike the families where you get to be a princess for a day.  But my next birthday is going to be more of a big deal than I’ve had in several years:  actually, in 7 years, since I was married on my birthday in 2001.  This year, I won’t also be celebrating my anniversary (although I use the word “celebrate” loosely anyway, since I was separated for over two years before finalizing my divorce this past December.)  It’s also not a decade milestone this time around.  So why the big deal?  I will be celebrating what my life has become in the last couple of years.

I moved to the Washington, DC area fleeing what my life had become in Kansas City.  My marriage was over, my house was soon to be sold, and the good friend who was my boss at the time had resigned.  I knew my life had to change dramatically — there just wasn’t enough left to fix.  With the help of friends and family, I was able to stay on my feet (if only just barely) and start trying to figure out what would come next.  Along the way, the job I had fell apart when my organization lost its funding.  And a new relationship didn’t work out, despite our best efforts.

It took me some time to find my community, my network.  When I lived in San Francisco, I knew everyone in my professional circle and had many close friends.  But first living in Kansas City, and then working at home for a small organization that wasn’t very visible or well-known made it hard to meet people even after I moved here.  And being in a relationship meant I wasn’t spending much time making friends.  With the collapse of my position, I was forced to find a new job, and it’s with a much more prominent organization, with hundreds of employees in my building.  I’ve made some friends in the progressive world, which is where I started looking, and in the nonprofit world as well.

But I’ve also found a new circle of friends in the tech community.  I’m not really a tech person, although my work as a blogger and web content creator for an award-winning website gives me a little bit of a tech background.   Here’s how my evolution over the past year has progressed:

First, I read The Four-Hour Workweek, which inspired me to become more entrepreneurial.  Then, I decided to build a website, Pandapoly, to honor my passion for giant pandas.  After doing that, I attended Joomla! Day in New York City, which led to my attending more tech events in the DC area, with the goal of making my website even stronger.  I made major strides forward when attending DC’s Startup Weekend, where I met dozens of amazing people, several of whom have become friends since that time.  After that, I felt at home attending events like the Social Media Club, MashMeets, and RefreshDC, where I saw my new friends and continued to make even more friends.

My technological advancement was not limited to what I learned at the events I attended.  I also started using Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to communicate more regularly with friends and new acquaintances.  I continued to learn on a daily basis what my friends were reading and thinking, and began to share more of myself, as well.  Instead of feeling like a failure as a result of my failed marriage and failed job, I was able to share my successes with others, and start to help other people instead of just networking to advance my own interests.  I was even able to make an introduction that led to a friend landing a very lucrative and high-profile job.

I’m thrilled I was able to plan my birthday party — using Facebook — and already have over 25 people who are planning to attend (and nearly 20 who might attend).  (It’s not as many as my wedding, but then again, there aren’t all those extraneous in-laws and family friends I had to invite — it’s my family of choice.)  I’m headed to a restaurant that I like and going dancing at a club I really enjoy.  Regardless of what actually happens during the celebration, it already looks very different than any birthday I’ve had before.  And that’s something to celebrate!

[Note:  1.  If you’re reading this and in the DC area, you’re invited to the birthday celebration — just RSVP here.  2.  This post was inspired by Micah’s April Fool’s post — it’s not nearly as poignant, but I think it’s coming from the same place.]

About My Mother March 23, 2008

My mom is finally sleeping nearby, after a rough afternoon. She thinks something may be wrong with her surgery, and it’s hard to know whether her instincts are right (as they often are) or whether she’s just not progressing as quickly as she wants to be (she’s stubborn that way). At any rate, it’s Easter Sunday and answers are in short supply today (maybe they’re hidden with the Easter eggs it was too cold to look for at length here.)

My mom is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. But she doesn’t have the Stepford scariness that generally accompanies that level of niceness. There’s definitely an edge, there, too — she’s strong, she can be stubborn and opinionated, and you really don’t want to cross her (although you might not know that you had, since to your face, she’ll not give much away.) When one of my cousins told a younger family member that she was in the hospital, my younger cousin asked for clarification about which aunt it was (necessary because she has two aunts with the same name). Upon learning it was my mom, she said, “Oh, she’s really nice.” (She might have said more than that, but the point of this post is not to insult the other aunt with the same name.)

She provides the stability, the grounding for my family. When the farm economy tanked in the 80s, her income as a doctor’s assistant meant the only reliable source of income for our family. But when that doctor (whose office she kept running for 10 years) tried to cut her back to part-time so he wouldn’t have to pay her retirement benefits, she left the keys on the desk and walked out. She taught me that being nice doesn’t mean being a doormat, but there are days I’m not sure which part of the lesson I’ve learned most fully.

She’s the sports fan of the family — my dad couldn’t really care less. On Thursday, when she was still in recovery, some hospital employees came into the waiting room where my dad was to check the game scores against their brackets. My dad told them, “if my wife were not having surgery today, she could tell you who was going to win.” During March Madness, or the NFL playoffs, or the World Series, you can usually find her glued to the TV set, with strong opinions about who she thinks should win. (It’s often because the coach is religious or the star is cute, but who am I to quibble about that?) I really like that it’s a matriarchal thing in my family.

I’m not the only person who considers her Mom. Aside from my brother, she’s also helped raise four cousins and her grandson (my brother’s son.) She regularly visits the relative in prison that most others have forgotten about, and made sure another relative had a job after leaving prison when no one would hire him. She regularly asks about my gay best friend, and my other friend and his partner. She’s not wild about homosexuality — those religious views get in the way — but she’s always respectful to my friends. She loved my ex dearly (he called her mom too), and was nearly as devastated as I was when the marriage was over, but made sure that I got through it.

My mom has a sweet tooth. She doesn’t like to be addicted to anything, and went cold turkey off the Vicodin a couple of years ago, even though nothing had changed about her pain. She never drinks, consistent with her religious beliefs. But she just might be addicted to carbs. She’s been diabetic as long as I remember, and on insulin since my childhood. There’s always a home-baked dessert (or several) when I come home to visit. She thinks that there always has to be dessert, even though none of us need it.

My mom has dieted all of her life. I remember back when I was a kid, she took Ayds, an appetite suppressant candy. She’s done Weight Watchers, eating next to nothing, and has asked me a few time about Nutrasystem. I got her to do Atkins for a little while, but it was hard for her to undo the lessons she’d learned over her lifetime that fat was truly okay, and ridding her house of carbs was impossible. So she starves herself to the point of eating next to nothing, and loses and gains the same 25 pounds over and over again. Then she can’t do any more, and thinks it’s her fault. I resolved not to do that, so I just kept gaining. But with low-carbing, I’m now losing. I did it once, and resolved not to do it again, but life intervened. I have to do it this time.

My mom is diabetic, has high blood pressure, arthritis and inflammation, and fights depression. She’s missing a gallbladder, a uterus, a breast, and now a knee joint. She’s spent most of the last two decades in significant pain and without full mobility. She says that she’s now in more pain than she ever has been before, but having surgery on weight-bearing joints will do that to you. I don’t want to end up like that. I’m still young enough to make the right changes, and am hopefully armed with the right information. She’s been doing what the doctors have told her for a long time, and has still been miserable.

I still don’t fully appreciate how close we came to losing her earlier this year, from a blood clot in her leg. Luckily, my dad was home and able to apply pressure to her leg, and then she had to be life-flighted to the hospital where she is now. She was terrified to have surgery, but terrified of ending up in a wheelchair, and weary of the pain. Nearly sixteen years ago, she was told she needed a knee replacement, but has been postponing it for this long until she no longer felt she had a choice. Even with the incident in January, she was brave enough to move ahead. She’s angry and frustrated today — not making the progress she thinks she should be making, but I’m very proud of her for finally facing the demons.

We never say all we need to say to our parents and other loved ones, but today I’m making an effort.  I love you, Mom, and I’m glad I’m here with you now.

On Being Right March 15, 2008

Even though I have a law degree, I don’t typically have an overwhelming need to be right. You know the type, the person who will argue until they beat the other side into submission. Actually being persuasive often takes a back seat to focusing on the sartorial weaknesses of the opponent, and victory is often confused with bullying the other side into submission. I never wanted to be one of “those” people. So mostly I’m not.

I’m more an empathetic, relative-truth kind of person. There are so many so-called facts out there that when you get right down to it, aren’t really facts at all, but reflections of a person’s — or a group’s — experience at a certain point in time. As became the catchphrase for some of my friends in my political philosophy (that wasn’t its real name, but its real name was particularly fey) major: “truth is that which works.” So truth for me took on a practical, functional nature that allowed me to focus on what was real in my life, as opposed to what people have told us for decades, centuries, etc.

I’ve been a little tested, lately, however. A few things have happened lately which have made me want to pummel the truth into other people until they cry “uncle,” or whatever. Despite the fact I know that doesn’t work, I’ve become impatient waiting for people to see the light. And no matter how I justify it, it doesn’t sit well with me. I like the idea of being a more forceful advocate — there have been times I’ve felt like I just wuss out in order to keep the peace. But it’s a new style for me, and I’m still working through it.

The first incident involves someone I recently met whose political views and employment history could not be more opposite to my own. He commented on that fact, and wanted to “cross swords,” his words, not mine. We discussed doing that over a couple of drinks, which would have made it much more palatable to me, but ended up doing it via e-mail (well, via Facebook messages, but same difference.) I’m always more comfortable writing than speaking, so was up to the challenge, and tossed off some reasonably well-crafted missives. I even got him to agree with me on some things, although that really doesn’t matter so much — it’s highly unlikely to have changed his life.

But in person, I realized I didn’t have much of an interest in continuing the debate. That’s not so surprising — that’s not what I go to a networking event to do. But what was surprising to me is that I engaged in the debate in the first place. I happen to think that most people have pretty immutable views at this stages in their adulthood. (Although that’s ironic, since I’ve been in the issue advocacy biz for most of my career, so is it Washington that’s making me cynical?) Am I getting sucked into more personal debate than I used to? Possibly, but I should probably pick my battles where it matters more.

The next incident: I just finished a book that is just f-in unbelievable. It’s called Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes. I already knew that Taubes was capable of some really good stuff — an article of his back in 2002 convinced me to take a good hard look at the Atkins diet, which helped me lose 65 pounds back in 2003. But I’ve slacked off recently — even knowing that I should be low-carbing has not kept me actually doing so. Taubes’ subtitle is “challenging the conventional wisdom on diet, weight control, and disease,” and boy, does he. Everything you think you know (even me, and I’m pretty well educated on low-carb diets) is picked apart and deconstructed until you get to the source of the metabolic research that has been conducted.

Reading this book is going to make me incorrigible about diet issues, I think. It’ll help to actually use the book’s lessons to take off all the weight I regained in the last couple of years dealing with breakups, divorce, loneliness, and all the other things I was self-medicating using sugar. But people have died not fully appreciating how they spent their lives killing themselves.

My family is a perfect example. My mom is the only survivor among her siblings and spouses. Her mother died of diabetic-related conditions, and was blind and crippled when she died at age 62. She seemed so old when she died, although now that seems so young to die that way. Her sister died of a massive heart attack, after having a toe removed and being on dialysis for the last year of her life. Her two brothers, one older and one younger, are gone as well. Now her 52-year-old nephew is gone, as of last week, after having a foot amputated and a kidney transplant. So now it’s happening to my generation instead of hers.

So when you read a book that basically says that for the last 50 years, the evidence that carbohydrates are the culprit of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, certain cancers, and even Alzheimer’s has been suppressed, what do you do? I’m already a wacky low-carber, but this is different. I look around and see some pretty obese people, including my ex-boyfriend and some other good friends, and just want to hold them down and force them to read the book. But the truth is that most of them won’t. They’ll keep going on diets and starting fitness plans that just won’t work.

It reminds me of the Southern Baptists that I grew up with. I can’t quote it exactly, but the idea is…if you saw a house burning, of course you would do everything you possibly could to warn the residents inside of the danger. So if you see someone who’s going to burn in hell, you’re compelled to witness to them and do everything in their power to ensure that they are saved. Yeah, I know — I hate that stuff, and have decidedly ambivalent ideas about what the hereafter may contain. I’ve even driven off Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses by saying that I won’t talk to anyone who is part of a religion that proselytizes.

So what’s a non-religious person to do, when they’ve read what is in essence the diet bible? I haven’t found a single thing that dissuades me from believing this book is the absolute truth. The only thing I know to do is to be successful myself. I may get a little argumentative on a few blogs, however — I’ve always felt more comfortable doing that.

The third incident happened today: talking with my mother about the presidential candidates. The candidate I support has been the subject of a big smear, that I’m sure is big news on Fox right now (it would make my job so much easier if she would step away from Bill O’Reilly and friends.) Even though the statements in question were not from the candidate, but from someone the candidate associated with, and were almost certainly fed by the rival campaigns, it has still made a big impression.

In this case, I just found the candidate’s statement and sent it to her. I’m not sure she’s persuaded, but the way I see it, the candidates have to be able to respond to the crap that’s being sent their way. I can help, since my parents don’t use the Internet, but I can’t be the truth squad for the entire election. There are people with far more ability and interest to do that than I right now. How well they do that job (and I’ll be doing my share as part of my day job, so I’m including myself in that — it’s just a matter of degree) could determine what happens in November, so there’s a lot at stake.

As you can probably tell, I’m still pretty ambivalent about the whole truth and righteousness thing. But it’s helping me define what’s the most important in my life right now.

and life continues to fly by… February 9, 2008

I haven’t written much lately — not that it means I don’t have much to say, but life has really been flying by.  I’ve become part of a new set of friends that has turned my life into a whirlwind.  There have been lots of networking events.  I feel like I’m on the path I’m meant to be on, even if I’m not there yet.  (I guess when you get there, it’s probably time to start considering nursing home options.)

I’m also scared to write this — as feeling this way in the past has meant failure lurks just around the corner — but I’ve seemed to straighten out a lot of my worst eating habits.  I’ve lost 9 pounds since the start of the year, which is nice, but even nicer is the elimination of some of the craziness in my head.  If I want a bite of something, I have it, but I also know that if I have too much, it will trigger cravings and make me feel awful.  So I don’t.  It’s never been that simple before — I just want to keep feeling good and not bad, so I don’t eat crap.

I’ve actively taken steps to end the relationship with D that wasn’t working for me.  I know in my heart of hearts that we’re not ultimately meant to be together, but it’s been difficult because we do have so much fun when we’re together.  I’m headed to Japan next week, and when I’m back, we’re done.  I just need that space to figure out where I’m headed, and I wasn’t getting that.  (News flash:  that resolve didn’t last long — he’s coming over tonight.)

I had someone very intriguing show some interest last night.  It came from a totally unexpected quarter, and probably had more to do with our respective states of inebriation than anything else, but it still was a lot of fun to think about.  Ultimately, it was not wise to go there, and I’m glad that I didn’t pursue things further, but I’m on the road to getting where I want to go if I’m putting myself out there in a way that generates interest, rather than hiding behind my weight and low self-esteem.

Still continued on the journey, and it’s a fun ride!

The Writing Diet — Interesting Food for Thought January 20, 2008

In an effort to get more healthy this year, and try to deal with my weight issues, I’ve been reading a number of diet-related books lately.  Obviously, there’s no shortage of them, so the trick is to find what is helpful, vs. what is mostly annoying.  I made the impulse decision to purchase The Writing Diet by Julia Cameron earlier this week, and even had a bit of time over the last couple of days to start reading it.

It’s not really so much a diet (although there is an eating plan in there that’s not so bad as they go) as an approach for dealing with food issues.  That is, you can use the principles espoused by the book with any eating plan that works for you.  While I haven’t yet started to apply the book’s lessons, I think there’s some good stuff in there.

The basic premise of The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right Size is that you’re often eating for emotional reasons, or because of long-established unhealthy patterns.  So by writing instead of eating, you can bring those emotions to the surface, where they lose the power to compel you to eat.  Following the techniques in the book is also supposed to help you address the unhealthy patterns regarding food you’ve established, through a series of writing exercises.

There are a number of techniques adopted by 12-step programs, and anecdotes that illustrate how people have implemented the suggested tactics.  Recently, I read the book Intuitive Eating, and it seems pretty similar, in that the techniques are designed to get at the root of why you eat unhealthy foods and sabotage your efforts to lose weight.  All of the common self-delusions and rationalizations are there and will sound familiar to anyone who has attempted — and failed — to lose weight in the past.

I have so many things I want to implement in my life right now, and so little time.  Life is a massive to-do list, and the hard work of self-improvement often takes a backseat to just living.  But I do hope to implement some of Cameron’s techniques and see if it makes a difference and/or boosts what success I’m already having so far this year eating healthy.