Revising, not revisionist

After reading yesterday's post, the Love of my Life expressed concern for me. He said, "That reads like the writing of an unhappy person who's trying to convince herself that she's happy."

In fact, I have quite a few journal entries where I have written like that... I'm not going to share them with you here because they are sad and they embarrass me. However, because I've written that story before, I know that yesterday's post is not the same story. The problem with yesterday's entry is that it reads like the writing of a person who says she cares about writing but was too lazy to write well.

Here's the story: this weekend was dull. It wasn't fun, it wasn't busy, there was nothing doing and it was just dull. When I wrote about it, I was trying to get some perspective on it and I didn't do a good job.

My husband asks me on a fairly regularly basis, "Are you happy?" When he asks me this, he's not asking if I'm happy on a superficial level... it's not "Are you happy with your salad dressing?" or "Are you happy with the way your lipstick goes with your blouse today?" When he asks, it's because he knows that in my life I've had plenty of reasons to be unhappy. I struggle with it -- I don't want to suffer all the time precisely because it is dull and heavy and it's a drag on the person who I love most. It also bothers me when he says that my writing sounds like unhappiness because it doesn't do justice to my life now. I have things in my life worth being unhappy about. A boring weekend is not one of those things.

So let me be clear on this point: This weekend was dull. Years ago, I would have never considered a weekend like this possible because I lived Friday nite at least 3 nights a week. It was fun. During that time of abundant Friday nites and fun, I had no hope of any real future, no hope of a permanent partner who is good and kind and trustworthy, no hope of having my own house, and no hope of having a job other than waiting tables or tending bar. It might seem I've made a deal with the devil: I've given up all those Friday nites (or I've spent more than my lifetime allotment), now I get stability and wholeness and goodness. If I have to sacrifice the occasional 48 hours to the demon gods of boredom, then so be it. The glory of Starz and Some and the duplex on Broadway is over. But since then I’ve had some moments that make those old Friday nites seem like dry toast. I’m not finished, y’hear me?

It has come to this

This weekend's itenerary:

Friday night: cook dinner and eat with my husband's parents. They are funny, intelligent, interesting, and entertaining people and it's a pleasure to spend time with them. They don't even read this blog and I still say those things about them. Definitely the highlight of the weekend.

Saturday: the area expected big snow, so we took the dog to the P-A-R-K (can't say it, he knows that word) when it was just snowing a little to let him get rid of some energy. Then to grocery store where we bought groceries as though we wouldn't be able to leave the house for 4 days -- it was mostly eggs, coffee, cheese, and wine. Then we watched some Star Trek; exercised a bit; watched some more S.T.; watched Anchor Man; more S.T.; fell asleep watching SNL.

Sunday: did some work (yep, for my job) while sitting in my PJ's; shovelled some snow; finally got dressed and went to the store to buy stuff for my job.

I might not be the most boring person in the world, but I think I'm a contender. The kicker is that I'm not even upset about it... I am what I am and this weekend is what it is. How can I live this way? Why is this OK for me now? It's gotta be because my life is so good that I don't have to honkey-tonkin' to chase down something that I don't have. I've got it and it's at all at home.

Inauguration

I think that tonite I became the president of our Home Owners Association.

"How in the hell could that happen?" one might ask. The quick answer is that I'm a sucker who likes to be in charge of stuff, no matter how stoopid the stuff. The long answer is that I'm a sucker who likes to be in charge of stuff.

I believe that I shall close traffic on our street, declare that our county must pay for our expenses out of the homeland security budget, and that my spouse shall wear Oscar de la Renta to the ball. Join me or be left behind.

Can I call it a mandate if nobody else wanted the job?

Ms. Manners does not approve

I have this thing about manners: I love 'em. Manners help us live comfortably with one another and are an obvious way to show respect to others who happen to share the same space as you at any given moment.

The best gifts my birth mother gave to me was to teach me to always say please and thank you; to put my napkin in my lap before taking a bite of food; and to chew with my mouth closed. I loved learning the proper way to set a table and if I'm faced with more than 4 utensils at a setting, I can cipher which fork to use. I'm proud that my best friend refers to me as an authority on protocol because she considers me a Southern Belle. (Yes, she grew up in a different country than this one and she doesn't know many other Southern Ladies -- I'm still proud).

My love of manners puts me in the habit of wanting to avoid embarrassing another person. That's why when a student in an advanced degree program at Prestigious University buuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrppppppped during my lecture today, my reaction was a very subdued, "That's Nice. That's Very Classy," and then I proceeded with my point.

What I really wanted to say was, "Look, you spoiled, punk-ass medical student! You don't know what I'm talking about and I do. So sit up and pay attention!" However, that's his momma's job. If my mother could do it, I know his momma could.

I have dreams that out of those 140+ students sitting in the auditorium during that lecture, one of them will suffer embarrassment on behalf of that classmate and email an apology to me. One of the things about having good manners is that you expect that someone else in the room will know how to respond. However, another trait of a person of good manners is that she treats others personally while she avoids taking personally most of the actions of others.

Fucking brat.

Snow, the book this time

I've finished reading Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely). It took me longer than usual to read this book -- I read Life of Pi in the middle of reading Snow. At first it was the overall sadness of the book that slowed me down, then it just became the book itself. I finished it because of a kind of contest -- it came down to that book or me.

How's that for a review? My real problem with the book is that I just don't care about any of the characters -- the only character with any promise dies as a teenage boy. The main character is a 42-year old man who can't make up his mind about anything. He's whiny, insecure, and worst of all, he doesn't think about anything besides chasing his own happiness throughout the entire 400 pages. The protagonist, a militant named Blue, says it best in a pithy quote about how when one only seeks his own happiness, he ends up miserable. I could give you the actual quote, but I already returned the book to the library.

If you must know, I did a very geeky thing and went looking for reviews of the book to see if I just completely missed the boat. Doesn't look like I did. John Updike reviews the book for the New Yorker and Margaret Atwood gives a review for the NY Times Book Review -- just in case you're interested.

So, can anyone recommend anything to read? I'm wide open.

Snow

Snow is the title of the book I'm reading right now. I've not digested enough of it to talk about it here.

But I'm in Weston, MA right now (a woodsy place outside of Boston) and they got TONS of snow yesterday. I'm not going out in it.

I was in Boston last year in January and it was the coldest winter in 17 years. I promised myself that I wouldn't make the same mistake and go to Boston in January ever again. I told myself that I'd go somewhere warm and sunny and green in January if I needed to take a trip. Funny how those promises I make to myself are the easiest ones to break.

I gotta learn how to make my own weather. You might think I mean that in some metaphorical, psychological sense, but you're wrong this time. I'm talking about some Dr. Evil / Mr. Burns make my own weather kinda thing. It'll be just right, I promise.

Life of Pi

** Warning: This post contains a mild spoiler. If you haven't read the book yet and plan to, you might wanna skip this posting. --Miss Kate**

I recently finished reading Life of Pi, on loan to me from my sweet friends in Brooklyn. Early in the story, a friend of Pi tells us that "this story will make you believe in God." I was dubious of that claim when I read it, since I'm fundamentally skeptical of any such notion. One of the questions for group discussion at the end of the book asks,"Did Pi's tale alter your belief in God?" My answer is a simple, "No." What Pi's tale did for me was make me think about the power of forgiveness. Specifically, about the power of forgiving oneself for being strong.

In order for Pi to survive, he had to do many, many things that he never wanted to do. But he did them and became good at doing them. His reluctance to do those things wasn't out of laziness or squeamishness -- he didn't want to do those things because he felt the pain that those actions would bring to others. But he survived because he did those things. The question is, how can one survive while acting in ways that are completely at odds with the ideal that one has established for herself? Pi did it by telling his story. He says, "The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?"

Pi tells two stories, one full with an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a tiger. That story contains all of the pieces that allow him to forgive himself for surviving when others did not survive. At the request of two investigators, he tells another story and he describes the story before he tells it. He tells the men, "You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently..." After he gives the men that story, all of them agree that the first story with the animals is the better one.

Survival is not for the weak because it is brutal.

I hope to learn to tell my story in ways that allow me to be compassionate with myself for surviving and that help me forgive myself for not meeting my ideals during every trial. Every minute is a new chance that I can make it and reach for my ideals again. Writing helps.

Here's to those stories that help us see higher and further and differently. Be well, R.P.

January 5

When I was in 1st grade and she was in preschool, someone gave her a Sesame Street alarm clock. It was in the shape of a school house and the clock face was set in the school house like you'd expect it to be. Sitting on the steps of the school house were Big Bird, Ernie, Oscar, and Little Bird. We slept in the same bed then because we were little kids and she liked to talk me to sleep at nite. When the alarm clock went off in the morning, it was Big Bird saying,
"Good morning, it's me, your friend, Big Bird. The old school house clock says, 'It's time to get up!' Ernie and Little Bird and Oscar and I hope you have a nice day. Now brush your teeth, wash your face, and don't forget to wind the clock!" When Big Bird finished his speech, the clock would make a cha-click noise and would start it all over again. When we had memorized the speech, cha-click and all, we used it to bug our mother on many occasions.

She is my sister and I will do anything for her.

---

January 5 is what we call Sammy Love Day.
6 years ago today, Harris and I brought home our dog. That night, we asked ourselves many times, "How can something so little smell so bad?" We still ask a variation on that question, except he's not little any more.
He is spoiled and stinky, but he's still the best dog you'd ever want to know.

The Yellow Wallpaper

My high school held a contest every year for dramatic reading. Students were to pick some piece of literature and learn to read it with drama and inflection and had to finish within a very strict time limit. I was lucky in high school that in my senior year, I had a sister who was a freshman. She is a very dramatic person. I had never considered entering this contest in my previous three years of high school, but in her very first year, she had signed up to compete on the very first day the contest was announced. She brought home this incredible short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, titled The Yellow Wallpaper. I stayed uninterested in this contest until I heard my sister read this piece -- and then I had to have it. My sister is so nice to me -- she really should have told me to shove it -- that she let me start practicing with this story to read it for the competition. Throughout the story, the narrator loses her mind and her demise is brought on by some wretched wallpaper in the room to which she's confined. This is a dramatic short story. I read it and practiced it at home, in my english class, and for anyone that I could make sit still for the very strict 5 or 6 minute time limit. At the competition, I gave it my all (the key is under a plantain leaf! UNDER A PLANTAIN LEAF!), but was disqualified because I was a few seconds over time.

Two or three years later I learned that Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist in the late 19th / early 20th centuries who was called crazy for thinking like a woman. She was my first introduction to feminism and I was thrilled to meet her again when I was older and could appreciate what she was getting at.

My husband and I moved into our first house that we own last February. When we bought the house, I knew immediately that two things had to change: the kitchen and the wallpaper in the dining room. When we saw this wallpaper, my sister and I both immediately called to mind that narrator's description of the wallpaper in her confinement room:

I never saw a worse paper in my life.
One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.
It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.
It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

It is that bad.

The kitchen is now finished, except for some paint. I've finally worked up my nerve and have attacked the wallpaper. I'd like to say it's a satisfying process, but this wallpaper is printed on gold foil, which makes removing the paper a real s.o.b. I've gotten half of the paper down now and it has cost me 10 precious hours of my precious life. This process is so bad that I find myself using my fingernails to pull the paper off in strips, like my narrator. I haven't done it yet, but by the end of the fight, I'll probably have gone to work on the walls with my teeth. I will win this battle. You're not gonna find me hanging out a window, telling my hubby to pick up the key under any damned banana tree.

Would Charlotte Perkins Gilman be impressed? I wonder.

My Friends

I am a shy person. People who know me professionally never believe me when I say that, because my job is a very public job. I do a lot of public speaking and I do much of the public relations for my department. It's very easy for me to get up in front of a crowd and talk or teach or do whatever has to be done because none of that is about me -- none of that is personal.

It usually takes me a very long time (or some very intense circumstances) for me to trust someone enough to purposefully reveal myself to him or her. I am also often more comfortable not talking when I'm with someone -- I would rather speak only if I have something to say. I'm not good at that art of finding things to say -- for me, it's either there or not. My mother has told me that when I was little, before I started school, she and I would drive around doing errands together and that I would sit quietly and not say a word for miles. She told me that I got more talkative when my younger sister started talking, but by then it was just so that I wouldn't feel like anyone forgot about me. I think I still live like that.

With all of my reticence, it's a wonder I have any friends at all. But there are some amazing people in my life who have let me open myself up to them in my own time. The people who are my friends -- those whom I've trusted enough to let them see my vulnerable self -- are such rich, good, beautiful, and trustworthy pieces of art that I am humbled when I think about what they're doing in my life.

I live very far away from many of my friends. I am fortunate to live close to three of them and I see them almost every day (My husband is one of them -- it's a bad day when I don't see him!). Those friends who live close to me are very important to my daily life. We don't talk on the phone much, unless it's to say, "I'll be right over," or "will you bring some wine when you come?" With my friends who live far away, I almost never call and rarely email. I do my best to call on birthdays (the most important holiday of the year), but due to the nature of birthdays, I usually only get to leave a message. It's perfectly conceivable that I can go for more than a year without hearing the voice of one of my friends. It's back to that driving for miles without talking pattern: I'm really comfortable in that silence.

Maybe part of the reason that I don't have to talk to my friends so often is because I can often hear their voices as I live my life. In that whole process that it takes me to become friends, I'm learning about those people as much as they learn about me. Once we're friends, that person is a part of me and I start to see parts of the world through his or her eyes. Sounds a little like We are Borg, right? Well, maybe, except that the Borg are not selective and I am.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much I love my friends. When I am in trouble, I usually withdraw and don't talk to any of my friends about what's going on in my head. When I start to come out of a phase of trouble, I find myself trying to reconnect with those people whose voices sustained me without their being aware of it. I have also been thinking about how I feel when I am able to help one of my friends. I feel needed and loved when a friend trusts me with some frustration or heartache and when I have the opportunity to try to do something to ease my friend. It is so difficult for me share my troubles that I tell myself that I'm doing my friends a favor by not laying the heavy on them. I wonder, though, if I'm really being a good friend when I do that. Would I be a better friend if I ask my friends for help when I need it?

I want to learn how to be a better friend to the beautiful people who are in my life. Those who have saved me from unhappiness and despair many times over deserve my attention and evidence of my affection. I think I'll start looking for a book on how to be a good friend... and I'll work on letting them know where my head is. I'll bet they'd be interested to know what their voices say in my head when they're not around.