It's Nice to Be Wanted
Mood:  special
Now Playing: Addicted by Saving Abel
Topic: 2008

I should really be in bed, but I just came from a meeting where I was voted onto the board of a small art gallery, and I'm buzzing a little.  I haven't been voted onto anything in a long while, so it's nice to be wanted.  I ran because I want to make a contribution to the success of the gallery, even though I'm not an owner or exhibiting artist, because the artists there inspire me every time I step foot in the door and because I believe it needs to exist.  As soon as I realized there were six people running for three spots, I didn't expect to claim one of those spots and found that my ego was not invested. The membership surprised me, though, and tonight I find myself committed to this enterprise in an entirely new capacity.

I wish I could stay up and write--I have a long list of topics!--through the night, but my eyes are tired and I won't last much longer.  I feel renewed energy flowing through me today, though, maybe the delayed effects of the new moon?  It's as though Lammas started the summer for me all over again and I'm feeling the need to become light in my body in response to the heat.  I've decided to try a vegetarian whole foods diet and five months of Harley Pasternak's Five Factor Fitness workouts.  I was vegetarian for nine years, then started eating meat halfway through the Big Ride, and then ate mostly vegetarian for the next three years, but when I was (incorrectly?) diagnosed with gluten intolerance, I gave up.  And when I went off the gluten-free diet, I didn't resume my vegetarian diet but instead became quite dependent on meat all over again.  I'm having to remember how to eat without meat, and I'm actually trying to be even healthier this time around by limiting my fat intake from dairy and trying to be a vegetarian who eats vegetables, not just pasta, cheese, and meat substitutes (that's an exaggeration, but not a huge one).  I'm not saying I'll never eat another hamburger or that I won't jump at the chance to take any visitors from out of state out for North Carolina barbecue, only that I'm again making the choice to reduce my dietary impact on the planet and improve my health by eating lower on the food chain.

Okay, off to sleep.

Namaste,

K 

Happy Lammas!
Mood:  celebratory

Today marks the half-way point of summer, the time of year when (in times when food was real and grown in the ground) the first plantings were harvested and the second crop was sown, when the first loaves of bread from the harvest were baked and shared, when people celebrated life with the fruits of the earth and their own labor.

What fruits of your own labor can you celebrate today? 

No Fear?
Mood:  surprised
Now Playing: All Summer Long by Kid Rock
Topic: 2008

I was rereading some of my recent posts and realized that I haven't felt that fear or dread in the pit of my stomach feeling that I described in my Feel the Fear (and eat it any way) post in several weeks!  Is that possible?  I think maybe it is.  I've had some things happen lately that have worried me, but the solid state of my body did not change.  There was no sick to my stomach feeling of helplessness attached.  And recently I had some little chemical thing float through my brain that felt like the precursor to one of my free-floating guilt attacks, but the attack did not materialize.  My body refused to play along. 

Have I really found my center? 

Do I really trust myself to be able to handle anything that comes my way?

It sure feels that way at the moment.

And although I wrote just last night that I feel completely exhausted and insist there is a physical component to the cause, I realize today that I have not been carrying pain around in my lower back.  This is where stress, and all the negative things I pick up from other people, usually gets stored, but it's not there now. 

This makes me think that the energy work I did last week has already begun protecting and centering me.  Wow.  So it probably would be a good thing if I chose to aid the energy in clearing out my body and energy field by not putting more unhealthy food in....(she types between sips of Mountain Dew)

Downtime
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: 2008

I have lost my momentum.

All of it.

I had been doing so well--launching a new children's website at work, writing daily, walking, eating more or less mindfully, and feeling like I was making progress on a spiritual or philosophical level.  I actually launched the website after we got back, but ever since Hans and I went to California, I haven't really gotten back on track with most of my life.  In fact, I feel absolutely exhausted.  I go to bed at 9:30 and can barely drag myself out of bed at 7:00 to be to work by 9:00. I have a hard time committing to any one project at work and don't feel like my real energy kicks in until lunchtime, and NOTHING gets done at home.  I can't even seem to find the energy to make hummingbird food or water my flowers regularly.  There is some kind of worm or caterpillar making spikey cocoons in my evergreen tree and my neighbor says I have to pull them off one by one, but today I didn't have the heart or the energy.

This is probably just me being lazy, but I insist there's a physical component.  I did some energy work last week and when I told Danielle what I'd done, she understood why I'd done it but thought I had overdone it.  She thinks I need some major detox, as in no sugar, no caffeine, no animal products, and that the work I did is likely to bring lots of things in disparate parts of my life to a head. So, maybe I'm a little depressed; maybe Epstein-Barr is real and I'm in the middle of one of my 6-week can't-drag-my-ass-off-the-couch chronic fatigue episodes; or maybe I simultaneously became more ethereal and more grounded in my body and so now have a body that is more sensitive to the crap I put in it and the stresses to which I subject it.

All I know is it's not pleasant.  I've even begun thinking over the last two weeks that the ADD is getting out of control again and could use a pharmaceutical solution, but I haven't called to ask my doctor for a prescription.  I might try some of the exercises in Delivered from Distraction this week instead.  I need something to jolt me out of the daydream I've been in for the past week and to help me get to work making dreams come true in my real life.

Sticking with *Hancock*
Mood:  lazy
Over the weekend we saw The Dark Knight, and I have to say I'm sticking with Hancock as my favorite superhero movie of the summer. I felt TDK went on too long and tried to cram too much story into a single movie. I found the characters interesting and some of the effects stunning, especially the Hong Kong shots, but overall I was bored after about two hours. And as much as I love Heath Ledger's work, I wasn't blown away by the Joker performance. Do I need to have that silly Y chromosome to fully get how great this movie is?

Notes from My Life
Mood:  happy
Topic: 2008

I'm about two weeks past the half-way mark for my summer meditation project and the meditating I've been doing is not necessarily the closed eyes, perched on a pillow, legs crossed, deep breathing, thought watching kind one might expect.

My meditation has been mostly with my eyes open, often while moving from place to place, with deep breathing thrown in when I remember, and probably more attachment to my thoughts than an enlightened person might recommend.

Still, I am pleased and mostly peaceful.

Random notes:

My pedometer stopped working about two weeks ago....  Had I gotten too caught up in measuring and comparison?

The trip to California to see Hans's family went very smoothly and was more relaxing and fun than I anticipated.  It was wonderful to see everyone, and Grandma, for whom we had moved up our trip due to health concerns, looked better each day we saw her.  She is still quite strong and her mind is sharp, and it was quite reassuring to sit with her and hold her hand.  Grandpa took my hand the day I arrived and said, "I know you; we go way back."  It was very sweet. He couldn't think of my name and I'm not sure he remembered that I was his grandson's wife, but it was lovely to see the genuine emotion he felt for me.  I fell in love with Hans's family at the same time I was falling in love with him, and I forget how much I miss them when I don't see them regularly.  I wish I felt more at home in California, but the place is not healthy for me.  I realize now that I spent a great deal of my time on this last trip looking out of windows, focusing on anything I could identify as "nature."

Kaija, who had never been left by both me and Hans at the same time, survived a week at my parents' house, does not appear to have lost any weight, and seems to have forgiven me for abandoning her.  We've been cuddling like crazy to make up for lost time and she's as sweet as ever.

Coming home from California was difficult.  I felt the need to put my armor back on, which disappointed me.  As much as I tried to disassociate myself - my true self - from the "realities" of my every day life and remind myself that they are only temporary and only relevant in a physical sense, not a spiritual one, I couldn't shake the feeling of trepidation I felt upon returning to work.  The person I work with is unpredictable as a rule and has been going through some personal upheavals of late, so I was really not sure what I would find.  Things seem fine, however, and I'm finding my center again.

Also, I recently stated here that the source of all of my discontents, past and present, was my tendency to judge various circumstances in my life and to assign moral value to things that didn't merit such distinctions.  I want to make it clear that I do recognize that it is not truly the act of making a judgment that is the source of my discontent but the fact that an ego - my ego - which I endow with power is doing the judging.

On my refrigerator (next to a postcard I sent Hans of a fat woman spilling out of a tiny bikini with the caption "The fudge has been great here on Mackinac Island!" and above a magnet with the Joseph Campbell quote "follow your bliss"), I have a quote from Zen Master Dogen:

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.

I realized in California that I, my ego-ful I, is not yet willing to let go of the ego.  I have come to accept that I am enough, that I am not my physical body or any of the things in my physical life, that I am more than my ego, outside my ego, larger than my ego.  I can't quite accept that I don't need my ego or that I might be better off without it.  For one thing, I foresee having a terribly difficult time functioning in daily life if I give up my ego.  How does an egoless being (unless one is recognized as a living incarnation of God) make a living, for example?  How would I live as a writer without ego?  If I give up the value of my own thoughts, what is there to write about?  Can you write from the place of peace that resides beyond the ego?  (Better yet, can you sell writing that comes from that place - a body has to eat and pay the electric bill, afterall.)  Of course, this is fear and the ego's self-preservation strategy, but for now, I'm okay with that.   

If at first you don't succeed....
Mood:  lucky
Now Playing: "Stompin' at the Savoy" by Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
Topic: 2008

"Guys are jerks" is not the first line of my new novel.

I don't know that I've found the first line yet.

I couldn't sleep last night (jet lag as a result of returning home from six days in L.A.? or caffeine from a Mountain Dew??) and so got up and wrote out the idea for a new story and then took a look at my most recent beginning to the novel.  I ended up deciding that the first person beginning I'd done a few weeks back was no good and started over from a different point in time and in the third person.  It takes longer for me to write in the third person and I was up until 2:00 a.m. just getting three pages down.

I like what I wrote, but I'm pretty certain that those three pages are not the beginning of the novel either.  Third person point of view affords me the ability to have an omniscient narrator which could be very cool, but it won't achieve the tone I want.  It's hard to be bitchy in third person.  So I will likely have to begin again in first.  (Second person present tense is an unlikely possibility - I have two short stories written from that perspective - but I don't see myself being able to sustain it for the length of a novel or it being the right vehicle for this story.)

I'm hoping that the next beginning will be the last beginning (at least long enough to get a first draft written!), but none of the writing I've done previously has been wasted.  Each of these beginnings has the potential to be developed into a short story, and I have learned more about what my novel is about each time I think I have begun it.  This time, I really, really think I have a skeleton structure, some good notes, and a strong overarching theme that will tie the multiple story elements together.  Now I just have to remember all of these things long enough to get the thing down on paper and find a way to create some momentum....

Feel the Fear...
Mood:  irritated
Topic: 2008

After the Big Ride ended, I spent a few weeks lounging on my parents' oceanview deck in Virginia before getting up the guts to fly home to Seattle and let my summer adventure truly come to a close.

While I was there, I read a book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.  In some instances, I'm very good at feeling the fear and doing it anyway.  For example, in 2001 I decided to conquer my fear of open water swimming by competing in triathlons.  In other instances, the normal, every day instances in which low level fear or dread settles in my stomach and makes me want to crawl back in bed until the sun rises the next time around, I'm not always so good.  A lot of times this fear is kind of amorphous and non-point specific so I don't know what to avoid (or what to tackle head on) exactly and I'd just rather do nothing at all. 

For those days, I think I should write a book for all the recovering food addicts and non-recovering food addicts called Feel the Fear and Eat It Anyway.  Seriously.  I talked to my mom last night and Hans talked to his mom last night and both our families are in distress over health related issues affecting one or more of our relatives.  I woke up feeling serious dread and concern and a little bit of fear about our impending trip to California to visit Hans's family.  And really unmotivated to care about what I eat today or how I look.  So, since I have boldly named the feelings I am feeling (gold star for me), I think I should be able to feel okay about eating a package of 3 chocolate Zingers for breakfast.  (I wanted Ding Dongs but all the convenience store had were Zingers or mini donuts....)  I also bought two cans of Mountain Dew (cans in part because the serving size is smaller than a bottle so I have to exercise less restraint and in part because the aluminum really does enhance the flavor), but I haven't broke those out yet.

I will be diligent about my nutrition over the next few days in part because my choices will be limited by lack of transportation, but today, I just may eat whatever I want when I want it.  And I'm deciding now that that's okay. 

So, just for today, I will feel the fear and mindfully eat it anyway.

Stranger in a Strange Land
Mood:  hug me
Topic: 2008

I feel like such an alien!

For instance, the Don't Diet, Live-It Workbook I'm using as a tool to learn to deal with my "food, body, and weight issues" is really just a book of "Okay, you should have learned this in first grade, but since you didn't, it's okay that you're learning it now at whatever age you happen to be.  Let's begin: this emotion (yes, we know that's a big, scary word) is anger.  This is how you feel anger.  This is how you express anger in a less healthy way.  This is how you express anger in a more healthy way.  Okay, now you try!  See?  You can do it. Good for you!  Now continue on to the next chapter, where you'll learn how to say 'no' when you mean 'no.'"  I'm not knocking it, I think it's probably a really healthy and necessary tool.  I'm just saying it contributes to my feeling of being an alien.  Seriously, I need a book to teach me how to feel angry?  That's really very funny because I've learned just about everything from a book.  And, yes, apparently I do need the assistance of a book to help me get comfortable with feeling angry and with expressing it in an unhealthy way (As I've mentioned, I'm very good at expressing it in healthy ways when I actually face it and decide to express it.)

And I'm an alien even among my best friends.  I was a girl who didn't have much in common with girls when I was growing up.  My female friends always had another girl with whom they were closer friends and I was always the third wheel.  It was Chris & Stacey and, oh yeah, Kris or Kathy & Diane and, oh, there's Kris.  Luckily, I think?, I got adopted by a group of geek guys who at least talked about more interesting subjects and seemed to like having me around.  These guys are still my best friends.  Tad is my spiritual, philosophical, artistic soul mate.  Chad is my grounded in the real world but still interested in the bigger picture best friend (until his twins were born and now he's hubby, daddy, scientist who has little time to even think of anything else).  Scott is my alternative, fringe, ethereal in a grounded kind of way, Gen X hippie friend who lives off the beaten path not all that far from where I live and who helps me push my boundaries when they need to be pushed.  (He is an experience maker extraordinaire!)  There are other sweet men who have played various parts in my life (but you'll have to read my new novel to find out exactly what parts) and somehow these super smart, engaged, funny, nerdy guys have all managed to stay friends with each other and with me.  Most of them are married now and while the wives are mostly tolerant of the guys wanting to get together, none of them (except maybe Kristin?) really want to hang around with the group during those get-togethers.  I, however, still love to hang around.  Sort of. Individually, I know where I stand with all but a few of the guys and we get along great and we can talk for hours on the phone and I can say what I want and take emotional risks and know that if they laugh there is love behind it.  But, something happens when we're in a group.  Somehow I revert back to the shy high school girl who was afraid to say too much for fear the guys might figure out she wasn't as smart as she was made out to be.  I lose my center and get hyper-sensitive and nervous.  At least, I'm assuming that's still the case as that was my experience the last two times I saw them, although I was really only unhinged half of the time during my most recent visit.  (And since I am lucky to see them once every two years in person, it's not like I get a lot of practice being in their physical presence.)

And the same thing seems to happen on the Internet.  At the last gathering I attended two years ago, the guys agreed to include me on their private listserv and it's wonderful because now I feel like I'm still in the loop (after several years of being out of the loop; again, I refer you to the forthcoming novel). But it's only wonderful right up until the moment when I send an email to the group or reply to a message sent from someone else.  Then I become an alien again.  And it's AWFUL.  

I understand that what I'm feeling comes from me judging myself and putting thoughts into the guys' heads.  None of them has ever, in email or with one exception even in person, made fun of me in a mean way, questioned what I'm doing hanging around, or made me feel intellectually stupid.  And, yet, I anticipate them laughing at me and feel stupid and awkward the moment I hit the send button on the email.  And it haunts me, sometimes for weeks.  Because, even among my oldest and best friends, I am an alien.  They are guys.  Their brains are structurally and chemically different than mine.  They only respond to posts they find really interesting because they're guys and why would they spend time responding to a post they didn't find really interesting....  They don't respond to mine.  And apparently my humor doesn't play well electronically either.  I think Joe is the only one who has ever e-laughed at one of my jokes--bless you, Joe!!  So I send my not very interesting links and comments out into oblivion along with my not very funny jokes and I hear nothing in return.  And I remember that I am an alien.  Our differences may be in part due to the fact that one of their X chromosomes mutated to a Y very early in their development.  But then, why don't I have more in common with other XX's? 

In my favorite poem I've written, I make reference to the fact that marbles, no matter how tightly you squeeze them together in your hand, only touch each other at a single point at any given time.  It feels like so little, to touch at only one point when I want to psychologically and emotionally link up with another person along the length of a whole plane, and yet I am so grateful for those moments when I get that one point of contact for even the briefest of moments. 

It is so difficult knowing you are part of the continuum, part of the whole, a strand without whom the entire design would be flawed, part of all that lives and has ever lived and will ever live, while at the same time feeling like you are an alien who has come to Earth and is learning everything way too late and taking everything way too seriously and trying really, really hard to fit in and yet still missing that one thing that you can't quite put your finger on.  Does that one thing even exist?  And if it does and if you had it, then you wouldn't be you any more but would you really fit in?

Mitch Ditkoff argues that people blog to connect with themselves.  I can see his point that blogging is a way for people to slow down and figure out how they really feel or think about something--writing in any medium can serve this purpose.  But I think he might be wrong when it comes to blogging.  I think people blog at least in part as a means of shining a light into the night in the hopes that someone will signal back.  When we ping the search engines to let them know we've registered a new thought, we're pinging the Universe hoping intelligent life will ping in response.  Or am I alone on this point, too?

Consciousness
Mood:  happy
Topic: 2008

I am definitely writing now.  I wake up nearly every day with a new idea for a short story and I've started having to stop in the middle of my day to write down a thought or observation that would work in the "novel" or in another story.  I am fully ON.  This is great! and scary....  If I just stick with the moment, do my writing, record my observations, all is well.  The scariness comes in when I remember that this state of constant engagement has come and gone in the past...meaning it could go again at any time.  What I'm trying to remind myself whenever I start to fear that the creative engagement switch may flip off is that those times when I let the writing get away from me, when I stopped even journaling or recording cool ideas, were times when I chose (consciously or not) to let my awareness fall.  I allowed myself to move too fully over to the thought-form physical reality part of the equation at the expense of the spirit part.  Just because I've done it before doesn't mean I will do it again.  And, if I do slip away from the Artist side of me, 1) it might be because some other part requires more energy and deserves more of my time for a stretch or 2) as I get used to living like this again and remember my choice each day to indulge in the writing and the awareness, the next time I slip away, I may come back quicker.  My periods of non-writing, non-awareness, and unconsciousness may shrink in duration as my ability to stay present increases.  It's a theory....

As far as the body goes, it appears I'm losing about a pound a week simply by becoming more aware of what I eat, how it tastes, how my body feels, and limiting the places in which I eat to the kitchen island or dining table.  I may have stumbled on another tool over the weekend.  For my birthday, my supervisor bought me a very generous gift card for a clothing store in the mall because she knew I was tired of all the "fat girl" stores only making skirts that come down well past the knee and end mid-calf--why would any woman of any size want a skirt that ends at the thickest part of her calf???  She insisted they had "all the sizes" and that I would be able to find clothes to fit.  When I went online and looked at their measurement chart, however, it seemed clear to me that their clothes would not come close to fitting me.  I've put off going for months, but then last weekend thought I'd stick my head in to see if they had any summer purses.  Turns out, they make clothes that fit me AND are flattering!  I went nuts and left the store with three skirts--all of which fit at or above the knee!--two blouses that emphasize cleavage (one of the benefits of being a big girl is that you can have cleavage naturally and now I have outfits to show it off!), and a dress.  The dress is going back today because Hans is concerned it makes me look pregnant--and he definitely doesn't want me to enjoy anyone asking "When are you due?"--but everything else is fab!  I wore the fuschia cleavage-enhancing blouse and a tan flippy skirt yesterday with new eyelet lace ballerina flats  and felt like such a GIRL!  Amazing concept.  I got to show off my legs--which I still love no matter how big the rest of me gets--and wear a demurely plunging neckline at my size and feel like a girl.  Maybe other people won't get how huge that is, but it's huge. 

What I realized is that wearing body-conscious clothes makes me conscious of my body.  Just as wearing spandex cycling shorts and sports bras ten years ago and being on a bike made me hyper aware of my body, wearing short skirts and clothes that give my body an actual silhouette makes it impossible to ignore that my brain is dragging a body around with it.  I was less hungry yesterday and when I thought of food it was mostly in a "I look great and I want to look better so maybe I won't eat that" kind of way.  I still had a Mountain Dew and a Reeses Peanut Butter cup, but I also walked six miles and thought nice thoughts about myself.  I am convinced that the thoughts I hold about my body make up at least half of my body's appearance.  When I am truly ready to be in my body, the weight goes away fairly easily.  When I am wanting to hide from the world and asking my body to shelter me, all the while resenting it for being large, it gets bigger and bigger, regardless of what I eat.

So, I'm a little torn.  If I can wear great feminine clothes and feel good about how I look, I can make mirrors my friend.  At the same time, when I was on the Big Ride ten years ago and losing five pounds a week, I did not have a scale to tell me I was losing weight nor did I have mirrors around to check myself in.  At the most, I saw my  salty, sunburned face in a small mirror as I was exiting a port-a-potty or occasionally saw my reflection in a glass store front.  In general, though, it was how my body felt and what it could do that kept me in touch with my physical self.  (I still often needed Zoi or Ron to recognize that I was having an asthma attack because my first reaction to diminished performance was always one that criticized my character.)  To help me fully get back in touch with my body, I'm considering covering my giant bathroom mirror for the remainder of the summer with large, neon flowers I will cut out of posterboard.  It will keep me from catching a glimpse of myself getting in or out of the shower and making an unconscious critical remark and might cause me to focus more on getting the daily workouts in, paying attention to what I eat, and noticing how clothes fit as indicators of whether I am making good choices.  I will still be able to see myself in Hans's bathroom mirror and in mirrors at work, but they aren't full length and I will be wearing clothes whenever I appear in front of them.  I don't know...the jury's still out on this one....

Overall, though, it has been a lovely, lovely week!  I don't know what god I need to thank but the humidity left North Carolina yesterday and we are having the most perfect summer weather.  I walked three miles this morning and am looking forward to getting a few more in this evening.

Be well, all!

K