Aug15

a southern girl’s rebellion

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I feel left out.  I feel like I have to compromise who and what I am to play their game (join, join, join, no matter what the outcome). I prefer to maintain my autonomy and let my gestures be from me and not from an amorphous political group. But I feel left out.

So I’m looking at WHY I feel left out.  I’ve never been a part of that group. Never.  I’ve been wooed and solicited by them as individuals, and even by women who are not a part of the group. I suppose I took some sort of proprietary interest in the group through others.  But I am no more a part of this group of women than I am a part of my mother’s church.

So there must be a part of me that WANTS to be a part of them.  And that stuff goes back to junior high! when I was the weirdo on the outside, the girl with the strange pantyhose, too tall, too homely, too moody and too foreign to fit in with the cheerleaders, the popular girls, the ones who were always at the top of all the lists.

But such is the incubation of the artist, I think. Even then I was ahead of the curve and not afraid to express what I saw coming, in spite of the guffaws and the naysayers.  When trends eventually emerged and they remembered that I was wearing those strange hose a year ahead of them all, they looked at me with something that looked like fear.  I didn’t like that part of it, but they began to treat me differently.  They began to ask my opinion of things, and when I answered they listened.

I suppose it all comes down to trusting my instincts, believing my inner voice, the body of work I’ve done around romances gone wrong, when my instincts were derailed and my voice was silenced.  That guidance is just as strong as it ever was.  But as an addict, I constantly look for affirmation from other sources: people, food, sex, drugs, etc.

So the incubation continues.  As the Big Book says, it’s a lifetime pursuit.

Jul27

Democracy

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Democracy is about arguing position.  It’s about debating.  It’s about eventually, at the end of the day, settling on what will be in the best interest of the whole country, of the whole nation. ~ Christine Lagarde

Christine Lagarde is the first woman ever to head the International Monetary Fund.  She assumed the role at the head of the troubled enterprise in the wake of former director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s sexual assault legal case, during the U.S. debt ceiling crisis in mid-2011.

May16

Speedy No-Knead Bread

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Published: The New York Times, October 3, 2008

3 cups bread flour

1 packet ( 1/4 ounce) instant yeast

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Oil as needed.

1. Combine flour, yeast and salt in a large bowl. Add 1 1/2 cups water and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest about 4 hours at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Lightly oil a work surface and place dough on it; fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest 30 minutes more.

3. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6-to-8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under dough and put it into pot, seam side up. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes.

4. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: 1 big loaf.

May12

not long

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STRAWBERRY © Beata Wojciechowska | Dreamstime.com

I think to myself, I just want one night of love with you. Just one. Just one night. A few hours. One hour, maybe two. That’s all I need. Not long.

I think this and then I go back to work. I work for a while. Then I find myself thinking it again.

Then I go back to work some more, only now I am aching and wet. Thinking I will mow the lawn even if it doesn’t need it, so I can exhaust myself and maybe the fire in my knickers.

Salad. I’ll make a salad. I’ll use balsamic vinaigrette and strawberries and romaine and that will satisfy my need for wanting to lick you from neck to thigh.

Tears well up into my eyes and I wonder why. Maybe I’m so wet it’s leaking out from my eyes.

May10

a whole new world

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Ecclesiastes 2:12 Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom, and also madness and folly.

I was writing to a good friend on Facebook, and this just sort of spilled out of me.  It seemed like a good thing to repost here, because I need these sorts of revelatory experiences to remind me of where I’ve been, where I am and where I’m going.

***

I don’t recommend it for everyone, and I wouldn’t have recommended it for me five years ago, but I have settled into a nice little life without making The Group the center of it.

I have a well-rounded set of friends and acquaintances and we rarely lapse into tirades of personal drama. But I have stopped soliciting that, too, and so my communication with my peeps is more about what we’re doing and where we’re going.

My recovery from alcohol is not the neon sign over my head any more. It’s a fact of my life like my adoration of God and my love of good poetry and my obsession with art direction.

The best thing is I don’t feel like I have to compete with people just to be who I am.

I look back on all the angst I felt around the women at The Group, and especially the women in certain cliques, and it seems so strange to me now.

I feel like I have spent great chunks of my life trying to shoehorn myself into places where I wasn’t welcome or even that I didn’t care about, as if that would somehow complete me.

I see it in my romance, trying to get men to accept me who weren’t even worthy of me. I see it in my family, as if they could provide the solace I needed when they were so overwhelmed by their own pain that they forgot I existed.

I went to The Lake with David last week and, for the first time since I’ve been going there, it felt just right.

Something is different with me, and I chalk it up to God changing me when I wasn’t looking. That, and all that TRUE drama in my life has sort of brought me around to a clearer perspective.

It’s really a struggle for me to muster much sympathy for the strident shrew who screeches because she hasn’t accrued an appropriate level of sympathy for her latest self-styled crisis.

Friends are putting their furniture up on cinder blocks at Harbor Town. Hopefully they stacked the blocks five or six high, because the water is thigh-deep there now.

I am happy because I am strong enough to push the lawnmower up the hill.  Even though it takes me three days, cutting the front yard is great for my waistline, and I revel in the personal glee I experience when I think, this body belongs to a 57-year-old woman, and it still works.

My life doesn’t really look that different from the outside.  From behind my eyes, it’s a whole new world.

May7

OMG

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Last night’s dinner conversation included a debate on the necessity and/or appeal of texting and instant messaging.

My date was mildly astonished that I’ve never met my boss or my coworkers.  As a matter of fact, I don’t even know what they look like or how they sound.

I’m a telecommuter.  I applied for work online.  I interviewed and tested via email and FTP. I get assignments via email, phone text and AIM.

I have fibromyalgia.  It’s an odd illness.  It prevents me from sitting or standing for long periods.  As long as I keep moving, I’m fine, but that has its limits as well.  Eventually my back and knees will complain, and after a while they demand bedrest and Advil.

So I ended up here. I do all my work on my bed.  While sitting in a chair becomes painful after a couple of hours, I can work long days sitting on a mattress, propped up with many pillows, and still be able to cook, exercise or hook up with friends at the end of my “shift”.

When I was a child, we had a rotary dial telephone, four television channels and a Kodak camera that shot 2-1/4 x 2-1/4 black and white film.  Dad was in the Air Force, and I grew up around tubes and solder and meters and stuff.  Mom was a public school librarian, and when the budget enabled the system to put computers in, she learned how to use one.  But they do not have a computer at home, and while she has a cell phone, she keeps it turned off most of the time.

It’s an interesting time we live in, and I seem to be squarely in the middle.  I’ve resisted using Twitter, because I already spend so much time on my Treo and Facebook and email and AIM.  But the Red Cross and the National Weather Service are finding that during an environmental crisis, satellite TV really bites, and when the power goes out there’s not even that. So status updates and tweets help folks find food, water and shelter — and loved ones.

I do have a Twitter account.  I check it online about once a quarter, if that often.  But methinks a more proactive path lies ahead.

May5

Hopscotch (excerpt) ~ Julio Cortázar

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My hands want to hide in your hair, stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance.

And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty.

And there is a single saliva and a single flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.

~ Julio Cortázar

Apr13

Wild Geese ~ Mary Oliver

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You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
…You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver

Apr3

The Laughing Heart ~ Charles Bukowski

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your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.

you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

@Charles Bukowski

YouTube: Tom Waits Reads “The Laughing Heart”