Aging Well?
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I got carded yesterday!

I was buying a case of Mountain Dew, which I have never let myself do before (a six-pack is my usual limit), and the cashier, glimpsing it out of the corner of her eye while she rang up my Kleenex, mistook it for alcohol and said, "You don't look quite 27. I need to see some I.D." At first I was confused, then happy! Considering my 20-year high school reunion is happening next month, being carded was a huge rush! Of course, one could argue that getting carded by a woman who mistook Mountain Dew for beer is no great accomplishment. Or, you could take Hans's view and argue that the cashier carded me because I had such a guilty look on my face for buying so much caffeine. (I counter that by saying that the caffeine is an Experiment - with a capital "E" - in ADHD management, and so I had no reason to look guilty.) I was asked a few months ago by a cashier at Lowes Foods if I were a student at Elon College, so I'm sticking with the story that I am simply aging well.

The last time I bought alcohol was a single wine cooler that I didn't finish eight years ago at a bar in Sandusky. The Big Ride was passing through there and I dragged Ron, Randy, Cindy, and an under the weather Zoi downtown the night we arrived. (We were saving the roller coasters for the next day!) Of the group, I was the only one who got carded, maybe because I looked out of my element in a bar. The rotten bartender looked at my driver's license and said, "Man, you're even older than me!" So much for his tip....

Now all I need to do is convince RealAge.com that I'm still young enough to be carded!

July Already??
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Apparently May and June are black hole months for me at work. In 2005 and 2006, both of those months just got completely swallowed up in tech issues and small details and I feel like I went to bed at the end of April and woke up in July. I can hardly remember the events of the past two months. Part of it is that in both my professional and personal lives a great deal of the work was internal, so there's very little "evidence" of change or growth or progress of any kind.

Luckily, I survived and have managed finally to set up both new computers in both of my offices at work. I still have to figure out how I'm going to update each of them on a weekly basis without their being networked and I have to find a printer/scanner for the studio, but those issues feel like small potatoes after the struggles I had just to get the machines up and running. I don't know what it is about me and PCs. My Apples and I have always gotten along great, but PCs are simply not intuitive for me. James says I have a lack of knowledge and familiarity with PCs because of my job path, and I'm sure he's right. If I had gone straight into the business world, rather than playing around in the nonprofit world for so long, I would have gained PC experience and expertise much more quickly. I considered buying two new Macs to work on at Sudie's, but her tech guy knows nothing about Macs and I want her to have support on her technology for the life of the computers, regardless of whether I am here or not, so I decided to go with her tech guy's recommendations. The computers are faster and much cooler than the old, clunky laptop I've been working on for the last year and a half, so I think I'll be happy once I get used to the new machines.

As for my personal life: I started the first steps of a lifestyle management program I'm hoping will help with the ADHD, including a moderate dose of a medication from which I am seeing only the subtlest of results. Hans and I had a major eruption in our marriage that, while extremely scary at the time, seems to have gone a long way toward smoothing things out for our future. I did a face plant and sprained my right ankle in a big way while I was out "celebrating" the solstice last month by running a wooded trail I had never been on before. I'm learning that medication won't prioritize my to-do list for me or even help me make sure I'm working on priority tasks once I've categorized them - translation: medication is not discipline in pill form. I'm learning that I need to make a plan for reevaluating my strategies every time I adopt a new strategy so that I don't find myself reevaluating only a few days after adoption and too soon for me to see any results. I'm learning that I need to set aside time every day with a clearly defined start and end in which I can obsess and worry and second-guess - and then I need to get on with my day and follow through on whatever schedule or plan I have created. I'm learning that my time really is my own but that it is finite and I have to impose limits, whether I like it or not, on what I attempt to accomplish if I want to see results. (Although, my most recent One Spirit catalog listed a book about how to do everything you want...Refuse to Choose! by Barbara Sher, but, as a perfectionist and a procrastinator who already thinks she can do more than she really can, I'm a little too scared to read that right now.) Most surprising, I'm learning that I still have a lot of work to do to learn to trust myself. I seriously thought I'd tackled that issue already. Wasn't that what college and the early nineties were all about? Academic probation and suicidal impulses and therapy and losing Ken (and Marc, and John, and Aaron's friendship) and learning to be without a boyfriend and surviving PIRG and surviving weekly critique workshops in a master's writing program in Los Angeles and awful, awful, sexist, ageist Ned at ACMG in Seattle - weren't all of those experiences designed to teach me to trust myself? Can't I be done with that lesson now? Maybe all of those were successful lessons and I did learn to trust myself then, but have somehow forgotten everything I learned in the years since? I knew how to trust myself for six weeks in 1998 when I was on a cross-country bike trip, but, psychologically, I crashed immediately after and maybe I still haven't recovered. Distressing, but what is there to do except face it, and get going?

Silent Visitor
Mood:  sad
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I had another dream this morning of Ken. He's visited me in my dreams every six months or so since I wrote to him via Classmates.com, but he doesn't speak. This morning he knocked at the door of a house I was living in and we went outside to a small trailer I seemed to be using as a writing studio. Then he was gone and I had the urge to email him at home, but even in the dream I restrained myself from doing that because I know it's against the "rules" he and his wife must have.

I woke up feeling more frustrated by this visit than any of the others because I couldn't sense any emotion or reason behind it. Once, he showed me his children and once he just sat with me and I woke up feeling peaceful, but this morning he just appeared and disappeared.

When I got to work this morning, a small, cornflower blue butterfly blocked my path for a few moments by flitting back and forth in front of my feet. Of course, this, too, reminded me of Ken because when we were breaking up I had recently heard about the butterfly effect for the first time and in one of his letters he asked me if I still felt him moving in my life even though I no longer saw him. So butterflies remind me of a man I haven't seen in seventeen years - how crazy does that make me?

I think he's on my mind because the class of 1986 is having its 20-year reunion next month and I don't think I'm going to go. I can't really justify the expense of going all the way to Michigan for it because I have to go (and WANT to go) to Chad and LaToya's wedding in Michigan only three weeks later and two trips in one month is beyond our budget. Plus, most of the people I really care about seeing are already in contact with me, many are from a different class, and most will be at Chad's wedding. I might like to see Brian and Paul and a few other people, but since I've reconnected with Scott in San Francisco, I've pretty well caught up again with the people who left a void. The thing that's still pulling me to go is Ken (and Tad whom I bugged for months to save the date before I knew Chad's wedding was happening and whom, of course, I would love to see). But, there is a chance Ken won't go to any of the reunion activities, and even if he did, he'd probably take Christine and I wouldn't have a chance to talk to him, anyway. There's also a chance that my being there might keep him away. I talked to Scott in S. F. about this (because the sweet man called me on a Sunday evening out of the blue!), and he wondered what I could possibly have to say to Ken now. Of course this is a reasonable question to which there probably is no reasonable answer, but it's one that still haunts me.

Bouncing Brain and Dragging Body
Topic: Daily Eruptions
It's been more than a month since I returned from my vacation, and I finally feel like I'm beginning to recover! While I was in line to see the Country Bears at Disney World, my doctor's nurse called to say that when I returned home I needed to see a hematologist at the nearby cancer center regarding my persistently elevated white blood cell count. Just what I wanted to hear when I was at the happiest place on earth! Stress from that, on top of the overactive schedule I maintained from February through April, led me to a bronchial infection and another course of antibiotics. I saw the hematologist, and, despite taking several vials of blood, he wasn't able to tell me why my white cell count was high. He did tell me that I have had mononucleosis - and may have it now, but determining that would take an additional test - and that if my cell count was still high in two months, he'd test me for leukemia. Oh, joy.

In other news, I started seeing a therapist to deal with my body issues, and have come to see that the food issues, intermittent depression, low self-esteem, and goal hopping I've experienced since my senior year in high school might all be related to ADHD. I don't seem to have the hyperactivity component, but just about everything else about the diagnosis, going back to childhood, makes sense to me.

I have read two books by Dr. Edward Hallowell about ADD, one called Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder, written with Dr. John J. Ratey, for people who have symptoms of ADD going back to childhood, and one called CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! for everyone else who, in the 21st Century, looks like they have ADD but don't have the childhood basis. Dr. Hallowell did such a great job of explaining the history of using stimulants to treat ADHD that I'm considering getting a full diagnosis and trying a prescription medication. He makes a great analogy between the treatment of ADHD and the treatment of poor eyesight: if you can't see, you get glasses - you don't say, I think I'll just try squinting harder for a year and see what that gets me. In his mind, medication is a first line of treatment for ADHD, but one that needs to be supplemented with diet, exercise, structure, and other behavioral changes. I'm hoping that if the medication works for me, it will give me the boost I need to be able to make all of those other changes....

Underground No Longer
Topic: Body Awareness
I've been underground for awhile. For a week I was trying to get things ready so I could go on vacation, then I was on vacation (again at Disney World with my favorite kids) for a week, and now I'm home but I've been in denial and avoiding responsibilities and contact with people and generally doing my agoraphobic re-entry thing that I sometimes do after I've been removed from my life long enough to actually relax.

I haven't done anything this week other than go to work, work on a 1,000-piece photomosaic puzzle that I'm going to frame and give to Dad for father's day, and draw. It has been years since I seriously tried to sketch anything. I think maybe the last time was when I was living in D. C. and drawing dolphins and whales because I needed a creative outlet but had lost my language. That's a little scary, because drawing then was my lifeline out of depression. I'm not depressed now, but I think the drawing is telling me that I'm really stressed and not ready to resume my life at the same stress level at which I left it two weeks ago. In any event, Hans had never seen me draw before, and we've been together twelve years now. I sketched a portrait of Wentworth Miller from an old TV Guide I dug out of the (overflowing) recycling bin. He has such an interesting mix of features with a wide nose and thin lips and great angles and shadows. It was the first portrait of a real person I've ever done. Way back, I used to try to follow directions in art books to reproduce drawings of faces that someone else had done, but I have never worked from a photograph or a live model. I surprised myself, and I got so much pleasure from the act of sitting there with a pencil! I returned to it over and over again in my mind yesterday while I was at work, still feeling the satisfaction of having drawn. I really surprised Hans. He had heard me refer to the fact that artistic talent runs in my family, but I don't think he believed I had any. He actually said, "I'm really impressed." I can't remember the last time Hans said I had impressed him. When I had done all I could with that piece, I started sketching a baby elephant that I still need to finish. I'm doing a full body sketch now, and I've lost interest in it. It just occurred to me that maybe I need to do a close-up on the face only. That might hold more interest for me. The new drawings are in an old sketchbook that I've had since I was about twelve. It still contains two drawings Ken did when he was visiting me in Farmington Hills when we were dating. One is a profile of a woman from one of my art books, and the other is of Hobbs, the tiger from the Calvin and Hobbs comic strip. The book was full, but Hans suggested that I could draw on the back of an already used page. It was a good idea. There was something comforting about adding these drawings at the age of 37 to drawings from when I was twelve, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-two.

In any event, there is much to do around the house and in my professional-but-not-work-related life, and it is time to come out of hiding. Time to get busy.

So today I took a step I've been considering for a year now, and finally made an appointment with a therapist to begin working on my eating disorder. I know that my life won't be what I need and want it to be until I get my body issues handled. And, I know that facing my body issues means finally growing up and becoming a responsible adult who takes care of herself. I can't fix my life without fixing my body, and I can't fix my body without fixing my life. Both require fixing my thinking and the actions that flow from my thoughts. In some ways I am feeling stronger than I ever have, more confident, more talented, more hopeful - ready to take on the world. But, in some ways, I feel just about as broken as I ever have. There are some basic mechanisms related to how I care for myself that are simply not functioning the way they should, and the hopeful, confident me is not going to move forward until I fix what's broken.

Now the work begins. Luckily, I'm in a place in my creative life where my skills are strong enough for me to be able to derive inspiration and productive satisfaction from the difficulty that is on the horizon. There are two books about to be born - one fiction, one non-fiction - and until I get to work on the real life issues, the writing can't happen.

Incensed by Incendiary Attack
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Daily Eruptions
In Florida, a 19 year-old woman set a snake on fire and the police failed to charge her with animal cruelty. The snake apparently "got away," but does that mean it merely managed to escape to someplace else before it died? The news report does not identify what kind of snake the woman confronted so there is no way to know whether she truly was in any danger from it, nor does it state whether she attempted to scare the snake off of her porch before she torched it - and her vinyl siding. Her first response, to call her apartment management company, was a good one, but people have to learn that they cannot simply kill animals because they look scary or dangerous. As we continue to destroy animal habitat at an alarming pace, encounters with wild animals are going to increase, and we need to educate ourselves in appropriate and humane ways of dealing with these encounters.

On Balance...
Mood:  happy
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Scott wrote me! Big, Big, Yay!! Apparently, I had been writing to him at an address he stopped checking six years ago. So he wasn't freezing me out, and, as long as he doesn't go searching for the messages I sent, I wasn't making a total fool of myself trying to get him to write back to me.

It was a blur of a great week overall. I had a fun phone interview with Stewart, in which he made it clear that I had misinterpreted his comments about not wanting a woman who was too smart, and a really wonderful conversation with James that finally started clearing away some of the breakup junk between us that we had been avoiding. I finished the pitching class, and actually managed to write drafts of six queries in six weeks! Totally amazing. I'm actually going to continue researching and editing them, and I plan to eventually send every one of them out in the mail. I managed to get off something of a course description for the children's summer class I want to facilitate on writing from nature. The only thing I let slip through the cracks was getting in touch with Billie about the PestEd curriculum. Will have to get on that first thing next week.

The only downside to the week is that today (Friday) is Hans's birthday and I managed to cause an argument (again, about baking for him in light of the three-page list of ingredients I am forced to avoid - you know, eggs, wheat flour, refined sugar, gluten, anything enriched) without meaning to. I think he heard what I said through a filter he's developed- he heard me say what I've said before, when in fact, I think I actually said something quite different. He thought I was complaining about how difficult it is to bake for him, when what I really said was I was disappointed that the system I set in place to make baking for him easier failed me tonight and I still didn't have the ingredients I needed. I seriously was just sad that, after stopping at one store to pick up lemons, I couldn't come home and find everything else I needed in the cupboard. That was the way it was supposed to work. But it didn't, and now I really do need to go to two more stores tomorrow, one of which is an hour away, to buy him the ingredients I need to make him what will most likely still be an inedible, gluten-free, vegan lemon cake. And I'm not mad, I'm just seriously sad that I didn't get it done for him tonight, on his actual birthday. He didn't hear that, though, and stormed off to bed, refused to open my present, and said he wanted to be left alone. So, now he's alone, and it's after 1 a.m. and I'm still sitting here writing to no one. Guess we shouldn't stop the marriage counseling any time soon. It's too bad, because we were doing so great, and I managed to ruin it. Takes talent, I'm tellin' ya'. Years of practice and loads of talent.

But I've been awake so long it's already a new day....

Love.

He Said, She Said
Topic: Books
I just saw this book by Ken and Jasmyn Klarfeld profiled in ForeWord Magazine. The authors are father and daughter, and the book recounts their separate experiences as smart, funny Jasmyn suddenly became an "out-of-control" teenager: smoking, drinking, doing drugs, running away from home, surviving rape.... The two wrote their parallel stories separately, allowing readers to experience the events through the mind of a parent and the mind of a teen.

I haven't read the book, and can't speak to its quality, but I admire the authors' goal of helping families navigate the treacherous teen years. The book was self-published through iUniverse (something else I, as someone who manages the day-to-day operation of a small press, admire) and is available through Barnes and Noble.

You can read a minimal description of the book and an excerpt at: www.buyhesaidshesaid.com

Or, you can read the ForeWord Magazine interview with the authors at: www.forewordmagazine.net

Thoughts captured by Kristine at 1:43 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, April 6, 2006 2:07 PM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

A Donkey or a Wife??
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I'm interviewing never-married men from the class of '86, so I find this story particularly amusing right now. If you're a guy, you'll probably enjoy it, whether you're married or not! (And for anyone who wants to revoke my right to refer to myself as a feminist, get over yourself - the serious aspects of the story are being handled, and even feminists are allowed to laugh now and then.)

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/str?guid=20060404/4431ef40_3ca6_1552620060404-1916958450

BTW, today is the one year (plus one day) anniversary of this blog and my 155th post. My, that's a lot of navel gazing for one person to do in a year - even for me!!

Peace!

Sleepwalking
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I went to the doctor recently for a check up, and found I have an elevated white blood cell count. My assumption is that the cold I got back in February didn't become a lung infection per my usual, but stayed in my nose and became a sinus infection instead. So now I'm on antibiotics, which I generally try to avoid, and they are totally knocking me out. I have wanted to do nothing but sleep for three days. Unfortunately, this is not a good time for me and sleep. I have one more query for my pitching class due by tomorrow night at midnight (and more article ideas than I can possibly follow up on!), and I got the green light to develop a writing from nature class for kids through the Alamance County Arts Council. I need to be writing up a course description and get that and my bio off to the education coordinator ASAP. On top of that, I am going to go ahead and write the article for which Gantry was the inspiration and so have to schedule interviews with the guys I want to profile, and get that written and in the mail as quickly as possible, too. Because it has a tie-in to men of the class of '86, it is timely and therefore also perishable.... Thursday, I need to wrap up my preliminary research for the PestEd Integrated Pest Management project, and get to work actually creating the curriculum. And, I need to figure out how to make Hans a gluten-free, vegan birthday cake for Friday (possibly without the use of Egg Replacer since he hasn't yet decided whether he's allowing potato starch back into his diet). So, as has become the norm, yet another busy week on the horizon with no room allowed for sleep. Adrenaline will only carry me so far, and then what will I do?