Archive for the 'Life' Category
It WAS on My Mind
Sometimes other people are able to speak/write about things I think about but can never articulate as well. Slickaphonic is one of those people, and sometimes I swear she’s got a direct line into my brain. We sometimes joke about being long-lost twins, but no, she’s just an eloquent and well-written kindred spirit. Her latest post, “But I Didn’t Mean To…” on forgiving “accidents” vs. “non-accidents” was an issue that was on my mind a fair amount in the not too distant past. Particularly how to communicate this. I had failed, frustratingly so, but I changed my circumstances so it was out of my mind, but when I read her post I had a “yes, that’s how I meant to say it!” moment.
It seems that there are two types of people I meet in my life. Those who find me easy-going and forgiving, and those who find me “difficult” and unyielding. The latter I can count on one hand. I’ve never been able to articulate very well to the second type just what it is about their behavior that inspires me to anger, though it’s much more frustration and disgruntlement. The “difficult” part is because I try so hard to communicate this to them, but fail time and time again. Perhaps if I had had Slick’s words in my arsenal, some of those conversations would have turned out better. She illustrates so well the difference between an honest mistake and a careless mistake and why the latter carries more weight and less forgiveness.
However, there are occasions wherein “I didn’t mean to” just doesn’t cut it. If you knock a glass over and break it because you didn’t see it, I won’t be angry. If you try to take the tablecloth out from under a fully set table and all of the dishes crash and break, then we’re going to have words. In neither case does the individual “mean to” break something, but in the latter, the offender knew there was some probability of breakage and proceeded anyway, hoping to land in the “happy” tail of the probability distribution–hoping to “get away with it.” In the courts, we call this negligence. If you own a pit bull and build a ten foot tall impenetrable fence and the dog escapes, you are not held liable when Fido bites someone leg off because you took reasonable actions to guard against such misfortune. However, if you are a pit bull owner and built a 3 foot tall shrub around the back yard, you are liable under the law for negligence. Further, even if you are the responsible fence-builder, the second time that dog escapes, you’re in trouble. Almost every known set of laws from Hammurabi’s Code to the Laws of the Old Testament lay out punishment for such negligent behavior.
So, in my life this translates that I am very easy-going when someone “breaks a glass” truly not meaning to, and could not have taken much precaution against the accident but is sure willing to be more careful in the future. Mistakes will be made, verbal blunders will slip out, but when the core intent of someone is noble, those mistakes and blunders are just that. Mistakes and blunders to be forgiven, to be laughed at, to be dissolved and blown away on spring breezes. I have no bone to pick, no “beef” with such individuals, and often I cultivate friendships with this type because I can trust that whatever their flaws, their intent toward me and others will be thoughtful. Everyone gets along swell.
The second type, the ones who find me difficult are the type who don’t look before they step, think before they speak, or consider before they act. They are the table-cloth pullers. They seek thrills and pleasure and give little thought to the consequences of their actions. What’s worse is that they often feel self-righteous when others around them get upset. The whole world ought to “lighten up” in their view. I don’t get along so swell with this type. It’s hard for me to not want to point out that their mistakes are more often attributed to carelessness rather than honest mistakes, particularly when they continue to make the same type of mistake and refuse to change their own behavior. Or as Slickaphonic says:
There’s also the problem of cumulative emotional neglect. When you see that someone has rolled the emotional dice with your feelings and their actions, you begin to question their innocence for past transgressions you might have assumed at the time were cases of true accidents. I have the problem that until some transgression really pisses the hell out of me, I smile, rationalize their behavior for them using much better excuses than they could ever contrive, and sweep it under the rug and out of my mind. It’s like putting the raging pit bull back in the yard without telling the owner it escaped. When the dog finally takes a bite out of my hand, I’m out of grace and understanding and am ready for the pruning scissors.
So I’m learning. Learning that I simply don’t need to point out the obvious to anyone. To date, my talking has done little to reverse this behavior in anyone anyway. Besides, it’s a form of arrogance on my part, that I feel I can persuade anyone to change their behavior. In future, as soon as I get a whiff of the negligent type, I’m just going to get up and walk to the nearest exit. No harm, no foul.
6 commentsLouCeel on Commitment
I don’t think I’ve ever heard commitment described so well as LouCeel does here:
It can be awfully lonely, being on the outside looking in. And as for your fear of ‘getting comfortable’, committing - Have you ever stood on the side of the pool, thinking to yourself “Man that water’s going to be cold” and you hesitated to jump in for fear of the shock to your system? But you got up the courage and jumped in and it wasn’t so bad - the jumping in - and once in, you didn’t want to get out?
That’s what it’s like, committing.
Who doesn’t enjoy the pool once in? Ok, maybe if there are imported sharks in the water, or there’s an 8 year old with a mischievous gleam in his eye and a yellow watery halo around him.
Image: “Arial of Woman Diving from Diving Board” framed photographic print by Rick Raymond, found at www.art.com
2 commentsI Spent the Night with Ira Glass
Never mind. The more important question is, what did I like to do before my Macbook Pro and the internet sucked me into their firm grasps? Meditate, run, exercise, bike, read, write, see live music, photography, videography, make art, cook, have dinner with friends, listen to music, find new music, visit old bookstores, sit in cafes and write about the people I saw, volunteer, get involved, bury treasure, climb mountains, drink chai, write letters, learn guitar, LIVE.
Not that blogging isn’t some form of a lot of the above, but really, I was beginning to feel like I was sinking deeper and deeper into the pixels on my screen and I wasn’t liking the way it felt. I was never one of those people that got deeply sucked into television except for my yearly January binges of Law and Order while I was an undergrad (at 32) at Smith. I would get bored long before I felt entertained. I always liked to be doing rather than watching.
When I was about 10, the first versions of cable were hitting my neighborhood. I honestly don’t even remember if it was satellite dishes or cable that came first. I just didn’t care. So when my neighbors, the short hair twins, got more channels through whatever mechanism it was, they stopped coming out to play after school. Then they stayed in later and later on Saturday mornings. I would go over, knock on the door, and one or the other of them would run to the door, distractedly looking back over their shoulder as they quickly and breathlessly told me they “couldn’t come out right now because Tom and Jerry was playing on the television”.
“Well, when?” I would ask.
“After this are two more cartoons. We got all the channels!”
Then she, whichever “she” she was, would run back into the living room, leaving me with treasure to bury by myself. I just didn’t get it. Many a friend got taken by the television monster that year. Other than not having my usual minions to construct my elaborate fantasy world, I was perfectly fine with it. I was a pretty solitary kid and didn’t like most other kids anyway. Mostly because no matter how clean, kids always smelled funny to me. And they were every bit as mean as they were stupid. Kids were always being mean to one another and my gawd it was always a drama.
I did watch some television, of course. At night, when I couldn’t be outside anymore, and when there were cool shows on like Grizzly Adams. Man I wanted to be that guy. Not marry him. I wanted to be him. He was the shit! I wanted that life of false accusations forcing me into the mountainous wilderness where my best friend would become a Grizzly Bear and together we would live out our lives in industrious dignity.
Most importantly, I’d have to figure out all those animals and all those plants and back when I was 10 that was as good as life could get.
Since I had this unexpected gift of openness, I figured it was as good a time as any to bring up the birds and the bees. I learned that it is true that she knows girls who “service” boys that they have no connection to, and they get nothing in return. I learned (thank God) that she can’t understand this behavior or why a girl would do this to herself, particularly when there is nothing in it for the girl except a bad reputation. I learned that she feels it is partly fueled by boys’ expectations and the girls’ desire to be liked for any reason.
I learned that we can still talk when we remove the electronic distractions that make it much easier to walk away then to talk. I learned that she still likes to have her hands massaged.
When my children were young, I purposefully kept television out of their lives for a long time. As they got older, all those things crept in, one by one, until we were all holed up in our sections of the house, chattering with everyone but each other. Our conversations were reserved for the rare dinner together when our schedules didn’t conflict, or car rides.
I’m going to turn off the internet and cable more often!
Velvet Verbosity Goes to Manhattan
If any of you were waiting with bated breath for my next installment and wondering why I didn’t deliver it is because I was swooped away on a business/pleasure trip to Manhattan. Stayed in the beautiful and quiet Tudor City section of Manhattan at the Tudor Hotel at the United Nations and enjoyed a blues show, an afternoon with my brother, and dinner with an art gallery manager. Oh, and a fabulous bubble bath that got a wee bit out of control when I decided to mix bubbles with jacuzzi jets. Fun, but bad idea.The biggest highlight was hanging out with my little bro. He showed off his IPhone by finding us all the antique shops and thrift shops that were close to us. We met up in Union Square and had a late lunch at a Thai restaurant that was every bit New York as a visitor could possibly stand. Cafeteria style but hip and packed to capacity with chattering New Yorkers. Except for the two guys who planted themselves next to us and never spoke a word to each other after the first two sentences they exchanged in Russian when they first sat down.
After we got away from the Silent Russians, we poked our noses in all the underground antique and thrift shops we could get to without my feet falling off. The best was a little place run by an older couple and a friendly cat.
4 comments100 Words On Holiday Nostalgia - Across the Lake
Across the deep, dark, Vermont lake that is fabled to be home to loch ness’s brother, lights twinkle, nestled in the mountain. They are the lights of a home, winking to us in our little log cabin across the way as we fall asleep. There are eight of us, three sisters and five cousins, in the two big canopied beds. We giggle, our breaths mingle as we sigh, and our eyes twinkle in the darkness, winking back across the lake in Christmas tidings before we fall into slumber and dream of the fat stockings that will greet us come morning.
A Woman’s Education
This post is for the December Write Away contest over at Scribbit. Theme: Your Favorite Day.
Forced to choose just one favorite day from a lifetime, one day of personal transformation and triumph, I would choose my first day at Smith College. Could a first day at school really trump my children’s births or any number of days spent filled with the nourishment of love? No, not necessarily, but the truth is, my first day at this college was a long time coming and it fulfilled a yearning that had burned in me ever since I could remember. On that first day at Smith College, I wasn’t a traditional student. In other words I wasn’t in my late teens/early twenties when my feet first hit the pavement at Smith. I was 32 and a single mom.
Where and when I came from, kids just didn’t go to college, much less a college out of state, and certainly not a private college. In my graduating class, there were only three of us that went on to college at all, and we had all been advised to go to the same small state college a mere 45 minutes away from our high school. Even though I had dreams of other, grander, academic institutions, my experience and my environment made going to any of those colleges seem as attainable as packing a duffel bag and hitchhiking cross-country to Hollywood to place my bets on becoming a famous actress. I didn’t know any better, and no one was helping to enlighten me. So off I went to this small college that my other two classmates and I had been funneled into.
The college didn’t suit me at all. I found neither challenge, nor inspiration there. I dropped out after the first semester, and made a promise to myself that I would return to college when I found the right one and the money to to fund it. I was under a lot of mistaken impressions back then, one of the foremost being about how to finance college.
It took me one marriage, two kids, one divorce, and thirteen years to get back. So the day I stood on the Smith College campus for the first time as an enrolled student I could barely stand it, much less believe it. That first day, I gazed at the campus and my professors the way a young girl dreamily gawks at her favorite rockstar. I was in love.
I was also alive with thought, with energy, and ambition. There I was, at last, getting the education I had dreamed of since I was a young girl. While other girls had played House and Barbies, I had climbed trees, tried to read fat books, and prayed that I would grow up to be a genius. I didn’t dream of diamond rings or my future wedding and what particular style of dress I would wear like most other girls I knew. I dreamed instead of becoming an eccentric, fat-brained genius. Yes. I was odd.
I walked around the campus that first day with my eyes and ears wide open. I wanted to drink it all in through my senses and make the moment last forever. I craned my neck to stare up at the trees on the campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. I beamed smiles at passing students who, from the looks I received back, must have thought I looked slightly deranged. I didn’t care. I was at Smith! I owned a piece of this place! I belonged here! I was home. I wanted to scream and stomp and hurl myself toward the sky with happiness. If anyone had told me that day that the feeling wouldn’t last, that it was impermanent and I was just being a sentimental fool, would have been met with a crazed look of joy and a swift kiss on the cheek. Nothing, nothing, could have knocked me down that day.
In fact, if you had asked me how I felt, I would have lent you a pair of headphones that jacked straight into the internal dialogue of my heart and this is what you would have heard:
“Oh my God, I am here, here at Smith freaking College! My feet are walking up this path, to that building to go MY class! Look at the trees. Look at this beautiful campus. I’m in love with that brick, and that one, and that one too! I am Master and Commander of My universe, and in that universe I go to Smith College! Look at all the people. Look at all the women! I can’t believe it, a fantastic, brilliant college full of fantastic, brilliant women. And I’m one of them! I’m one of THEM! Happy, happy, happy!! I am home at long last!”
So on my first (real) day of college, I wasn’t so much a fat-brained genius as I was a giddy fool. And that feeling never did diminish. I still get twinkles of pride and joy when I drive by the Smith campus during my morning commute.
November OR "Velvet Verbosity is Getting the Hell Out of New England"
Every year it’s the same thing. November comes to New England, bringing with it a bitter, gray cold. No snow yet to cover the dinginess, the dead grass, the naked trees. A low slate sky rests its belly on the rooftops and turns to darkness much too early at the end of each day.
My Mother would tell you that every year around this time I call her to tell her I HAVE TO MOVE SOUTH. I call it the November Itch. My version of the 7-year itch only unrelated to any relationship or person. It’s the itch to find a younger, more vibrant and exciting climate to live in. The itch to run when things get ugly. The itch to trade in browned lawns for white sand beaches and sallow skin for golden.
November in New England is to me like a lover’s morning breath, or unclipped toenails, or grey, sagging long underwear. Every year at this time I have to either ignore it, or embrace it because I know that I will fall in love again when the first real snowfall settles in and I breathe the crisp air that follows. My heart will thaw and swell when I hear the first running water of Spring and smell the wet earth. And summer is never sweeter than when you know it is fleeting.
Image from http://moblog.co.uk/view.php?id=45558
7 commentsHow to Flunk "Being a Grown Up 101"
1. Forget to pay the utility bill and then act surprised when the computer won’t turn on in the morning. (For a double flunk, find a way to blame it on the children!)
2. Sleep through your alarm and get to work an hour and a half late. (For a double flunk, show up with Dunkin Donut crumbs on your chin and sleepy seeds still in the corners of your eyes.)
3. Check your myspace. (Double F points for doing this while eating a banana freeze-pop and neglecting dishes in the sink.)
4. Think mean things about the other moms at your daughter’s lacrosse practice. (Double flunk by actually telling Mrs. “I’m so upper-middle class and proud of it” that you like her shirt and that your mother has one just like it that you bought her for Christmas.)
5. When your teenager bites your head off because she’s “hot and grumpy” and then stomps off to her room, make a face at her retreating back. (Oh, the possibilities for double-flunking this one are endless!)
6. Chew Juicy Fruit with your juicy boyfriend at the office. (Double F for chewing two or more pieces at a time. Loudly.)
To answer the question, “How can you double flunk anything?”, this is my blog and I make the rules ’round here (as well as the lies). Understood?
2 commentsAre we Serious?
Working in the tech industry, you might think I had heard about Second Life before a month ago. Well, you would have been wrong. I had no idea that over two million people are creating “second lives” and living for several hours a day in a virtual world. Dude…these people have even created a virutal economy and somehow, that virtual money is translating into real money. What? How does that work and not completely tip the universe over due to what has to be multiple infractions on the laws of physics.
Is anyone paying attention? If you think this is only for certain “freakish” people, I will have you know that Harvard conducts classes in this virtual world. On a virtual island. At a Tiki Bar.
Then again, I know some pretty freakish Harvard people. (No L, I’m not talking about you. You are not freakish at all. Except for that thing with the thing last year.)
2 commentsThe Goods
Just what have I been up to?
* Buying a car. This was a painful yet exhilerating process. After some false leads, and dashed hopes, I have found her. A creamy Subaru Outback. She is a sleek and sexy beast; capable, comfortable, powerful and delightful. If this car were a person, she would be a lean, robust woman, adept at everything she put her hand to, sensuous, mysterious, powerful, precise and quietly intelligent. What name should I give her?
* Searching for artwork for the program cover of the Christmas Vespers concert at Smith College. I spent a delicious afternoon in the Mortimer Rare Book Room, paging through the hefty volume of a German history of the world published in 1493 (the title escapes me now, and I kick myself for not writing it down) filled with woodblock prints of kings, queens, and saints being murdered. I’m not entirely sure why I was directed to this book when I described what I was looking for (Victorian angels perhaps), but surely the blank expressions on both murderers’ and victims faces’ was not it. No matter, it was a pleasure just to lay my hands on a piece of work that spends it’s time locked away behind protective glass.
* Thinking. Of course this is not unusual, for me, or anyone else. It is the intensity of it that has kept me from the keyboard.
4 comments
