Jeopardy!

Jeff just took the “Jeopardy!” test online.  It was fun.  I helped him out when he didn’t know the answers.  We’ll see what happens…maybe they’ll just pick him even though he didn’t get enough right.

And, now, the night we’ve been waiting for for nine months…..the “Lost” premiere!  It’s like a lifetime ago when it ended.  I knew it would seem like forever when it would come on again, and it has as it does.

I have a three-day weekend: yeah!  I already celebrated by making my fav’rite parmesan popcorn.  Yum, I’m a umami whore.

Tomorrow I have a massage and an opthalmic appointment.  I like it when I can get my health appointments done, it’s like an oil change for myself.

So sad that Edwards is outta the race, but I remain confident that he’s going to be the veep.

Someone brought donuts to work and I didn’t even eat so much as a donut hole!  It was difficult, especially with the heavy smell of sugar in the break room, but I managed to get through it.  Can’t wait to go to Portland’s Voodoo Donut someday and get one of ‘em giant donuts they sell.

Today is Friday for me, and I have that krazee feeling, like before a holiday weekend or something.  Will have fun and get things done but swim and shop and have sex!

Wednesday morning

I just got off two consecutive days of work, twenty hours total, and I always feel the difficulty of “life re-entry” after work back-to-back like that.  I don’t have to eat room temperature food out of plastic Ziploc containers anymore!  My beans and rice can have piping-out melted cheese on them!

I am sad this morning, but I am sure it will go away.  This is one of the very reasons why I started this blog, to get down to the roots of my difficulties at home.  This is very difficult to do.

I am sad for no apparent reason.  Well, I have a ball of anxiety in the pit of my stomach.  There are many tasks I could come up with to fill my day (bury compost, vacuum, clean off the stovetop, weed the front lawn, organize the mass of clothes in the bedroom) but it all feels so useless.  Are those tasks the reason why I work part-time?  So I can keep up the literal housekeeping part of our marriage?

No, I wanted to write a novel and work toward my best self.

The women at work who work part-time are all given a pass because they have children.  I am just regarded as odd.  Frankly, some days I feel odd.  Like now.

The two days were hard.  I woke up stressed-out because of possible errors/mistakes I made yesterday, not much I can do about them today.  This is the way work always is with me, substrate for my anxiety.  A way to torture myself.

The thing is, I had one of my best days ever on Sunday.  The reason was no secret, I had a very high-intensity swim workout around 1pm, and its after effects kept me with that wonderful sense of well-being all the way past 9pm.  So I should do more aerobic exercise, right?  But how do I do that when I work ten hour days?  I feel very trapped right now, so I need to breathe and not find answers right now.

Is that the point of life, to raise children and work?  And if I’m not doing the former, then I’m sort of freak?  I think on some level I think that, or I want so much more from myself than that.

I also need to not work so much so that I can rest my body.  I am not neuro-typical, or at least I wasn’t at one point.  It’ll be nine years in July.

If my house is spotless and there is nary a stray thing in sight, will I be happy then?  I just burst into tears, and I think it’s because I know I won’t be.  Why am I so sad?  Why am I so tortured?  I need to sort this out.  That’s why I meditate.

Am I still just identified with a teen version of myself?  That, as long as I am a certain weight such that I can wear cute outfits, everything is as good as it can be in my life?  I fear that there’s some truth in there.

I got a bounce yesterday because I got parking for free.  At the end of the day, the parking lot attendant wasn’t there like he has been since the first of the year.  Actually, I guess it’s a good thing that I can be cheered by so little.

There need not be any decisions, resolutions, action items from this.

I have a massage today, that is usually something I look forward to.  I am a bit more neutral about it today, but know that I will feel terrific afterwards.  And I will ride my bike there and purchase bread on the way home a la velo.  That’s cool and makes me feel happy inside that I can do such a thing.  Maybe it’s because I have that expectation, that I expect no less, that doing it a la velo is what’s right and proper and if I don’t is just failure.  Yep, that’s it.  Just like my mom expected straight-A’s and me being valedictorian.

Usually I can feel happier if I pose it as a question to myself, thinking of myself as a young girl, Little Jenny.  I can’t have any children because I’m parenting my younger self!  That has taken me lots of good places and I’ve seen how I don’t really value myself.

So what would “happily ever after” look like to me?  Well, I can definitively say that it would feel like how I felt on Sunday, with that awesome state of well-being.  Everything was in its proper place, and even though the house was still messy, I wasn’t upset about it.

It’s like I’m essentially unhappy on the inside, but I can get lifts from changes in my external environment: messy house, ugly outfits, dirty bathroom sink.

What I would wish for for myself is that I could enjoy and feel deserving of this day off.  That’s why I’ve arranged my life like this, so I can have a day off in the middle of the week to have a massage.  And write.  Instead, I can’t even accept the gift and just want to sleep it away.  I don’t know what to do, so I make up a list of very un-fun tasks instead.  Well who would want to do that?

But now I can see very clearly why I feel, especially when I don’t feel well, that I should go to the gym and make all this go away.  But I guess it’s just another biochemical lift and if I really want it to go away for good, I’d better get to the root of it.

Don’t know what to do with myself.  Ok, I am definitely sleep-deprived.  I could feel sores wanting to form in my mouth.

Ok, let’s go down my gratitude list:

healthy me, Jeff, kitty & all my other loved ones (how great is that?!)

I’m a modern woman who has money & opportunities: I can do anything I want, the only barriers are myself.

Great home, car, bike: I have all the tools I need.

I only work part-time!

I get regular massages!

I am going to Hawaii in a month!

I have a backyard and wildlife and pretty flowers and a compost area.

There is much dissonance in me right now, I have much to be grateful for, yet I am still profoundly sad.  I think maybe I should go for a walk.  Enough navel-gazing, maybe.  What would Cary say?  Probably exercise and eat right.  Well, I’m doing it, but it’s tough to do it long-term.

Heck, I even lost weight (half-pound) but you can bet I’d be super-upset if I had gained that much!  Yeah, going for a walk is probably good for me before my appointment.

Blind Date

So my friend Geri went out on a blind date the other night…a friend of hers set her up with her boyfriend’s friend…It is said that’s the ideal way to meet people, friends of friends tend to move in the same circles, values, class.

So Geri is a liberal NY woman, a doctor, who doesn’t really like to date anyone outside of Manhattan (yeah, yeah, one of those).

She got set up with an art teacher from Jersey.  Ok, nothing wrong there, she agreed to it and all.

Saturday was the SC Democratic primary, so she asked him what his political  values were.

Well, he said that he voted for Bush the *second* time.  Dismayed, she asked him who he liked for the November election.

“McClain,” he said, mispronouncing it.

I howled with laughter.

Russian, da

Oh, one of Sasha’s patients is Russian and recommended a Russian restaurant to her locally to dine at.

The weather’s been hella cold and extra humid, which makes it that much more cold. My fat’s been screaming out for reinforcements like the next Ice Age is coming around the corner. Let me tell you, I’m well-prepared for an Ice Age.

I’ve been cutting down on the carbs (been trying generally to eat a diabetic diet, low on carbs, high on whole grains and legumes) but this past week I’ve been dying for anything baked: brownies, cornbread, muffins, cake, you get the idea. And I don’t find it coincidental that all the above require using an oven, which would also make my house feel warmer. It’s all related.

It’s like when we went to Dublin last year, and I was cold to the bone. To my very marrow. I couldn’t get warm, it kept raining which only made it feel colder, I had a crick in my elbow from holding a damn umbrella everywhere we went….for the first time in my life, I understood the siren call of tea and soup. When it’s that cold, you want steaming hot liquid in your body, not food.

I just want something with lots of flour & sugar that’s been leavened. And, oh yeah, I miss baking. It’s one of the best chemistry experiments ever.

So back to Babushka from last night. Oh my lord! Chicken Kiev, perfectly prepared. A tender and juicy breast of chicken stuffed with cheese, breaded and baked.

I read the biography of famed pairs skating champ Sergei Grinkov (written by his wife, Ekaterina Gordeeva) and she tells of going to a skating competition in Kiev, her first time ever. She had the “famous chicken” from that city every night they were in Kiev, and her coach was angry at her for putting on extra weight as a result. I have wanted to eat an authentic Chicken Kiev since I read that biography in 1996. Seems like a situation ripe for disappointment, eh? I was not!

Sadly, the stuffed cabbage was sold out, so we opted for beef-stuffed blintzes. I love that spiced ground beef the Eastern Europeans do so well…but the blintzes didn’t come close to how expertly prepared the chicken was.

I could not stand the veggie side dishes of pickled carrot and cherry tomato. I was looking forward to the crunch of a green salad and just couldn’t stomach the veggies.

Just went to the grocery store and I picked up some heavy whipping cream, in preparation for potato gratin. Am I shooting myself in the foot, just as I am noticeably losing weight and all my clothes feel looser? Do I have fear of success? Does some part of me want to remain overweight? If I don’t peel the potatoes, will that make it better?

Maybe I should just go to the gym and figure it out later.

Time to build an ark

Pretty much rained non-stop here all day….and the forecast is to continue this way through the weekend.

Good thing we stocked up on popcorn.  Ordering pizza and snuggling by the fire seem to be in order.

Sad

So apparently I am still grieving my kitty.

Just woke up sad, like I did on Sunday.  I guess it’s the path through grief, it comes & goes, but mostly I want it to be done and over.  Life, of course, has other plans.

I took a walk today and saw an all-black cat with yellow eyes sitting in front of a house.  He looked a lot like my cat.  There happen to be a lot of all-black cats on my block, but they don’t have that same eye color.

Gee, this is kinda boring, but that was the purpose this blog was to serve: to capture daily life, including the mundane, repetitive, everyday stuff.  It doesn’t help that it’s overcast, so I feel so tired!  And I already took a nap, so here I am, typing away, typing it out.

I go to a therapist every other week.  She’s African-American, and I’ve noticed that I may be the only non-AA client she has in her practice (maybe I saw one other).  I don’t usually have anyone in the time slot that follows mine, but today there was…. a couple!  Even better, a mixed couple!  Even better better, it was a mixed couple where the dude was white and the chick was black!

Jeff and I talk about race all the time, especially mixed-couple relationships (because we comprise one)  and it is extremely noticeable, due to a variety of sociological reasons, the vast majority are between white males and women of color (and not with the races reversed).  Except when you have a black-white couple, which are almost always uniformly black guy-white chick.

I have an AA female friend, and she bemoans that she is on the bottom of the dating pool here in the Bay Area.  She found it much easier to date in DC, which is unsurprising.  She says that back there, she’s considered hot, but after she moved to the Bay Area, she was ignored.  And mainly because all the brothers were chasing white women.   She specifically cited that she finds Obama to be of  good character because he married a dark-skinned AA woman (which is kinda scary, because I think he married his wife because he loves her, not because he was trying to make dark-skinned AA woman feel better about themselves).

That fascinates me, because though there is light-skinned worship in Asian cultures, there isn’t much of a range, so no one really suffers.

Anyway, so in the waiting room of my therapist’s office was a white guy-black woman couple.  ‘Course, they’re in a therapist’s office, so maybe things aren’t going so well, but they’re working on it!  And I think I’m therapist is just great, so I hope they can work out the troubles they have.

Funny, I start off on one topic and then go rushing headway into a completely different one, unrelated save for the fact that they both came from my brain.

I’m supposed to have dinner with my sis tonight, and then I think I’ll go to sleep early.

Exercise

is the balm for my soul.  It is the only thing that consistently elevates my mood (even if it doesn’t need elevating) and leaves me with a sense of well-being (physical & emotional) for hours afterward.  I am in such a state right now.  Everything is great; I am great.

I rode my bike to the gym on a blustery, cold day and then hit the pool with twenty laps of interval swimming, alternating freestyle, back, and breast stroke.  Then I showered and rode my bike home in a kind of cool-down, but mostly I coasted, hands-off the bars.  [I only successfully tried it last week, and already I'm very comfortable with it.  Seems that I was only afraid of falling; isn't that so true in many aspects of life?]

Usually I need aerobic exercise for the benefit, though my ninety minute yoga “flow” class can be beneficial, too.  I think I feel better for having done yoga rather than it makes me feel better from the inside out.

It’s why regular, sustained aerobic exercise is a top goal for me to achieve week in and week out for this year.  It’s a drug that has no ill side effects!

Big Pharma

I feel deceived and I am angry about it.

Apparently only solid data re Prozac was released to the public and as part of Eli Lilly’s approval data for its new drug application.  I have just become a little more cynical and I, a member of the pharmaceutical community, don’t know what to think anymore.

I hardly feel I have credibility with myself anymore.  All the things I said in support of SSRI’s stemmed directly from the data.  The data, the unobjective, peer-reviewed, statistically-significant data.  Now I don’t feel I can even depend on that anymore, because of Big Pharma’s manipulation of truth, and all to the mighty dollar.

I have friends who are of the woo-woo/New Age persuasion, and this only makes them dig in more.  And, I have to say, I feel myself floating more to that end of the spectrum.  Toward conspiracies.  Toward suspicious and skeptical.  I think it’s good to be a skeptical person, but I don’t think it’s good to question everything, to be looking to be duped around every corner.  I don’t like it, and it’s not the kind of world I want to live in.

Rowr!

I heart baby mammals

Sometime last year Jeff found a video from a wacky Japanese game show where a woman had to live with two firefoxes. They were young and playful and got into everything: kind of like a ferret crossed with a kitten. And oh-so-darling.

When it’s time for lights out, the two are wrestling nearby. The woman pats one of ‘em on the head, to tone down the boisterousness. Instead, he misunderstands her and think she’s asking for attention, so he promptly head-butts her with great delight. Then there’s the shot of her sleeping with the clock showing it’s three am, and the little firefox has discovered how to turn the light on and off multiple times.

I’m a great lover of baby mammals. I’ll just post a few of my favorites:

Bear cubs fighting. Now is that too precious? Check out the spindly legs with rounded-tummy action on the one on the left.

And below is a novel way to transport youngsters.

Zen and Japanese Culture

This is a fascinating topic to me, as I work my way through a book on just that.

Japanese culture, with its “mastership” of everyday life, it’s something I wish I could be a part of.  I want to be apprenticed to a knife master and train for sixty years, like them men in a documentary I watched.  They were highly specialized in the knife-making process: one focused solely on the blade making, another honing wooden handles.  Of course all the work is done by hand.  The dignity and grace that they go about their work — craft, skill, technique — is all transcended by their devotion.

Notice all the spiritual terms I used?  Dignity, grace, transcendence….it’s because their work is a spiritual task.  I want to live my life in that same way.  I want to be of use, to be skillful, but mostly I want to live in a spiritually fulfilling way.

So, I sit.  Every day.  It’s not easy, but I have to say that I seem to be slowly changing, like a glacier at the beginning of spring.  There is movement, but I am already changed.

I’ve had great interest in martial arts for the same reason: conquering a foe requires one to first conquer oneself.  And I probably over-romanticize the master-teacher relationship, but it seems so ideal.  I would love to give my life over to mastery of something.  I suppose that’s what parents do when they decide to have children, but since I’m not going to, I feel I need a rudder.

There are old Zen stories about masters and students, of which the story found in “The Karate Kid” is a classic.  Apparently Zen masters have been confounding their young charges for centuries, who inexplicably find themselves cooking rice and sweeping floors when they imagined a life of swordfighting when they were sent to live with a sword master.  So after a few weeks of this free housekeeper gig, the youngster asks when the lessons will begin.  The master says, “They start right now,” and even though he’s three times the age of the young man, he is quick and strong and skilled.  The young man decides to ambush the older man with a blow with a stick one night as the master bends over the soup pot.   Of course, the young man is surprised when the master blocks with the pot’s lid.

I think it’s also a great way for an old man to get help with his activities of daily life. 

What I find so thrilling about Zen Buddhism is that it’s experiential: you can read about it, but the true understanding comes in a flash (the “awakening”) when you are able to step outside yourself, see something in a new way, become conscious.  And I am just like any other student from Japan or China or India who was illiterate and lived in a dwelling with dirt floors.  We are all the same in our minds.

And that other bromide: the age-old wise man who lives far away, possibly on top of a mountain and utters crytpic answers to concrete questions.   Apparently Zen masters would retire deep within nature, living a hermit existence.

I read something intriguing about the Zen approach to life, which emphasizes the intuitive,  tends to train exceptional artists.   Yet another reason more to sit!