Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Do you remember being in high school and that rush of hormonal emotion that would tide through your belly and veins when you heard music that got underneath your skin? That was the time when music affected me more than it did before or has since. I would listen to certain voices and feel like I could get right inside of them, right next to their vocal chords if I was just still enough. I would listen to a song over and over again so I could hear the inflection exactly. Back in the days of vinyl and cassette tapes, I wore scratches in my records from listening to them so much, my tapes snapped their black ribbons of sounds from the rewinding. But I listened so I could see the look on the person's face as they sang, I knew exactly how their cheeks would bend around their bones as they belted out their songs, even if I'd never seen them before.

There is something about being intensely aware of your world during puberty (at least certain parts of your world) that we lose over time. A heightened acknowledgement of things that zing through us. Like music. I fell in love with voices back then. I didn't have to see who was singing. It didn't matter. I could tell by the voice and the way it could sing that I was a goner - hook, line & sinker. I had a huge crush on a local singer named Eric Martin for years because of his voice. When I finally saw him live, I almost fainted. I felt like one of those girls you see in old Beatles footage falling over in front of the stage. When I watched him sing, he sang exactly like I knew he would. His face and his neck and his mouth and his eyes and his forehead - everything moved the way I knew it would. It took years to get over the hold of his voice. I think it happened when my hormones levelled out.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 5:02 PM

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

I've been working late again the last couple of nights. Well, I suppose late is relative, but I was there last night til 7:00, tonight til 6:00. Considering most days I've been leaving at 4:00, that's late I'd say. Anyway, it's been good to have some structure back in my life. I like my new boss. I've actually known him for about 4-5 years, but this is the first chance I've had to work one-on-one with him. He's young, only 40 (whereas my last boss just retired after 37 years with the company), and extremely organized. Almost to a degree of pointy-headed anal-retentiveness. Well, let's face it, he is anal. But he's a self-proclaimed anal-retentive and he makes efforts to assist those around him to "dial in" to his way of doing this.

It's an interesting dynamic. He's not pushy about what he wants. In fact, he spends a lot of time asking you questions, making you feel you're being listened to. Which you are, he does listen. Very intently. What I have figured out after 3 weeks working with him is that he asks all those questions to see how he can use the information you give him to align you to his "vision." (<-- notice all the company lingo I am tossing around; nice, huh?). Which isn't such a bad thing, and if you're not aware he's doing it, you feel like someone actually cares about you and what you have to say. Not to say that he doesn't, but it's not his primary focus. His primary focus is to make sure his long-term view is realized. Which, let's face it, is a key to effective leadership. He just does it in a manner that's more palatable to the people who work with him. Which I can totally appreciate and respect, even.

I don't know what I'm going to do. I know I need to give this new structure some time to sink in. Working with this new team has been a good experience so far. I do know I can't make any quick decisions right now. There's just too much else to deal with. Which I have not dealt with.

We had a meeting today with all of our agents. A good meeting. My new boss got everyone engaged and excited about the rest of this year. I haven't seen many of my agents in a month or so. Everyone made the effort to come up to me to tell me I look good, that they notice the weight loss, the difference. It is nice to hear. But the inner critic still shows her face to remind me "It's not good enough, don't get your head blown out of proportion, sister, 'cause you've still got a hell of a long row to hoe." I'm only about 1/3 of the way to where I want to be, it just takes time. I'm working out like a fiend, eating almost entirely non-processed food, and have given up my daily coffee & fake sweetner. It's not difficult, which is so strange. But with nowhere else to focus my energies, I have necessarily focused them back on myself.

I guess this is what people mean when they say, "Now's the time to be doing things for yourself"? I'm not sure. What I am sure about is that I am working toward a day when I can look in a full-length mirror with the absence of a flinch. I am heading toward the coordination point where body and pyschology and heart meet on the same plane.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 10:32 PM

Sunday, September 26, 2004

I spent the weekend in San Francisco with my best friend Nicola. She & her husband bought a condo last year in South SF, just a hop, skip and a jump from SFO. They did a major remodel and this is the first time I got to see it. Totally cute. Totally made me yearn to get away from here, this home I have known my entire life.

I do not want to be here. I have wanted to be away from here for awhile now. The only way I am going to get out of here is to take the plunge into the unknown and just leap. I have played it safe. It has been easy to play it safe. But playing it safe has gotten me no closer to anything that has any real meaning. Insurance? I mean, DUH. I am so not an insurance type. I'm the stray mango in the applecart, constantly at risk of upsetting the whole thing. I can do this well. I know this business inside and out. But people always ask me what in the world I'm doing in this business.

Ask me about coverage for auto, fire, life, health, business, and commercial in California and I can usually tell you more than you want to know. And if I can't, I can find the answers and the resources to tell you more than you want to know. I can tell you about legislation like SB1 and how it affects our industry. I can tell you all about how to integrate values-based selling into your business plan and why it's important that you do it because if you're selling to hit numbers and not to do right by the client then you are never going to be really successful, really good, or really trusted. And I even believe in all that values-based selling stuff so much that I will come into your office and show you what I'm talking about by pretending you're my client and I'm your agent. But all of it, ALL of it, just makes me shrug because the bottom line is people only care so much. I can show that to people I work with, believe in it, be animated about it, but I can't impart the necessary fire. So few of them have passion about what they do. It is easier and safer not to in many instances. Doing what is known is easier even though it makes happiness, perhaps, more elusive.

Which brings the reality check back to me & my easy & my playing it safe. Is doing something because it's easy the right thing to do? I suppose in some cases it is, when you have to make sure you have a paycheck and the bills get paid. Maybe if you have kids and a house payment and responsibility. I need a paycheck and I have to pay bills, but can't those needs get met and my life be lived by not doing easy?

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Nicola and I looked up domain names today for this business we want to try to get off the ground. I know nothing about doing this. I don't care. I will figure it out. The domain name we really wanted was taken, but we came up with some other ones that weren't that will work. This idea has all the earmarks of being able to incorporate all of our strengths. I did a search and there is only one other major website I found that does what I want to do (OK, so someone else thought of it before me...), but they aren't doing it the way that I would do it, that I know Nicola and I could do together.

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This in my email tonight at the tailend of an advertisement:

Watch for the right opportunity. Take steps to discard the old and embrace the new. Clear your throat and prepare to walk tall. Clarity is a fleeting thing.

Unfortunately You are in a very industrious and creative cycle that will bring you profits and satisfaction. Your dinner plans may turn out to be a bit more challenging than you thought. Take it slow and you'll have a better chance of winning approval.

Later on you can decide whether this is the beginning of a permanent change. Keep an open mind. Prepare to fight hard for your position. Today is your day. You will probably find someone you are totally compatible with on all levels.

A bit of drama is kind of fun -- sometimes. Your support and suggestions will lead to respect from others. Quick thinking gets you out of a tough spot. Take care of business. Let everything else happen on its own. Partnerships will be confusing.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 9:42 PM

Friday, September 24, 2004

I find it difficult these days to focus on anything for a long period of time. I start to read a book or watch a Netflix DVD and I can't pay attention. I am distracted easily and find myself unable to finish things that I start. This is a new sensation; me the one who always has to do things from start to finish, who frets when things are left undone for too long. Too many things left hanging open and I feel like my zipper's open, letting it all out in plain view. But not these days. I don't care much. It's disconcerting. I'm not sure what to make of it or how to change it or if I should even worry. These days the effort to worry is so heavy, like a millstone that I just can't carry. So I don't. I leave it by the roadside because I can't do anything else with it. Maybe someone else can use it.

I was blow drying my hair this morning and a thought occured to me that almost made me catch the ends of my hair in the rearend of the blow dryer because I stopped paying attention to what I was doing. I was thinking about when you say something to someone that you wish you hadn't said, or wish you could take it back. Like when you're mad at your kid and you tell them they're stupid, or something like that. Usually it's something negative. But it occured to me that this could just as easily be the case with positive things that people say to one another. I guess you wish you could take back the positive things you said because maybe they turn the situation into a negative, I dunno. I was thinking, for instance, of a lady who used to come into an office where I worked last year about this time. I was really nice to her and listened to her and what she was saying and gave her some off-the-cuff advice related to her insurance and just spent time with her. The next thing I knew she was bringing her mother in and asking me out to lunch and wanted my phone number at my new job. It was weird. I guess guys must feel like that when chicks want to start carting their stuff to the dude's house after the first month of dating. But I remember wishing I could take back what I had said and regretting being nice. But then I felt bad that I regretted being nice. ANYWAY, it made me wonder if people had ever been nice and said kind or nice things to me and then wished they hadn't. It was a sobering thought.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 1:42 PM

Thursday, September 23, 2004

I ache for clarity. I have spent so much of my life doing things for other people that now, alone and adrift, I don't even know what I want, who I am, how to define myself. In the past, when people asked me what I wanted to do, it has always been contingent on the person with whom I was most deeply engaged. My husband, my mother, my boss. A friend wrote to me today that now that I am alone, I don't know what to do with myself. Nail on the head. How can I have gone through 34 years of life and become this intangible?

WHO AM I?

I am 34 years old.
I am a woman.
I am half Hawaiian.
I am half Caucasian mutt.
I am a daughter.
I am a sister.
I am a friend.
I am a best friend.
I am funny.
I am witty.
I am creative.
I am a chef.
I am an insurance shmoe.
I am quirky.
I am a sexy bitch.

(OK, so the last one was a joke. But someone told me if you tell yourself something often enough, you'll start to believe it.)

But all of those things, they seem to be what I am not who I am. Is there a difference? WHO the hell am I?

Someone told me the best way to know who you are is to hold up the mirror of the people who love you, to use them to see who you are. I am in need of a True North. It is time that I hold, like a compass, the people who love me so I can begin to know who I am. I have never felt so wiped blank in my life. All notions of selfhood and definition have no mileage on my map. Unmarked terrain, I am featureless for the cartographer's pen because I have never made the trek. There are mountains and meadows and riverbeds and desert plains here, I know there are, but they have yet to be as familiar to me as the maps of others that I carry in my knapsack.

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A huge limb of an oak tree fell 2 days ago in the parking lot at work. The massive blow struck the pavement and the two nicest cars in the parking lot - a BMW and a Mercedes that both cost a mint (while totally missing the Saturn on the right - the irony of this I found to be a tad giggly; I thought it would make a good Saturn commercial). I felt the reverb of the branch and the cracking smash. The building shook, I thought it was a bomb. I asked Twinkle if she'd felt it and then through my office window I saw people walking toward the back of the parking lot. The two cars were crushed. The tree limb was as thick as a wine barrel. The oak had a fresh, yellow scar where the limb had separated from the rest of the tree. I was so thankful that no one was hurt. Telling your insurance company your car just got wiped out by a tree is infinitely easier than talking about a person. The guy who owns the Saturn had taken a lunchtime snooze in his car and had just returned to his office when the tree limb came down. Can you imagine?

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 7:34 PM

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

I do not think denial of fear will give us freedom from it...Each time I follow my deepest desires, fear is there wringing her hands, cautioning me with her litanies of what-ifs. I do not try to counter the reasonable arguments about acceptable risks. I no longer try try to shame myself into action with admonishments to stop being the wimp, nor do I pretend to be unafraid. I simply move in the direction I have chosen to go, taking care to do the things I know will help me keep the fear at a level that allows me to continue to feel it yet still keep moving. I put myself to bed early, eat well, sit with friends, take long walks by the lake. I have learned that doing things the hardest way provides no currency to be traded for greater future rewards.

~ The Invitation

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 2:04 PM

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Tonight, right now, I am hanging on tight. Trying to keep everything in perspective. The highs and lows, they come on with such force. I wish on nights like tonight that I lived in a metro area where I could lose myself in a crowd for an hour or two, around people I don't know, just to be in the presence of lives that are not my own. I don't know why this comes tonight. I'm not sure why.

I have been on-line for a few weeks, trying to figure out how to start an on-line business. I have the best idea, and I'm trying to build a proto-type website to get feedback about it. I've run it past a few people, everyone's told me it's brilliant. It doesn't require much start-up cash, so I think I can swing it. Something in which I can invest myself, my talent. It doesn't really require a specific geographic area. No matter where I end up, I could do it there. Tonight I was all set to do research, look into domain names, etc. But I crashed. I have been downloading music, listening to sad, solemn music. It is doing nothing for my attitude. Airplanes fly overhead, I can hear their passage. I wish I was on one, going away, somewhere. But where? I have limited myself by forgetting what the world has to offer. There is a part of me that would take off this instant for a faraway place if someone came up to me and said, "Here's a ticket to go to _________. C'mon. Right now." OK. Damn the torpedos, who cares? But that is my escapism speaking and it's not going to happen. So instead I am just holding on. Tonight, more than ever, I'm hanging on tight.

I am now going to get off my butt and exercise. Yippy-i-ay.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 8:03 PM

Saturday, September 18, 2004

I went into San Francisco today on the Larkspur ferry with an old friend of mine who lives in Marin. We were supposed to go for a sail on his yacht, but his boat got hemmed in by a barge that was docked behind his slip. But I haven't taken the ferry in years, since I was in high school. The weather turned colder today, but the day was still lovely. It was good to be outdoors, salt-sea air, sailboats in the Bay, cargo plane flying low near Alcatraz, seagulls in formation overhead as we pulled into the San Francsico ferry building dock. There was a farmer's market at the ferry building and we bought figs and watched people push themselves busily, with purpose, from stall to stall, intent on what they could buy. We walked and walked, Mick talking a mile a minute about everything under the sun. I listened and nodded my head and ate figs. The seeds burst between my teeth, the purple and white flesh of the fruit soft against my tongue. I adore figs and these were stunning.

We took a cable car from Market St. and hopped off at Chinatown. We got waylaid and escorted to a restaurant there, where we ate outside on this miniature red balconey above the street. There was a show right below us, half in English, half in Chinese - dancing and a magic show and singing. The food was strange (tomatoes in sweet & sour soup???), but the ambiance was worth it. I drank jasmine tea and remembered the last time I ate with my grandma and she said the tea, it tasted like flowers. We walked the streets of Chinatown, the bustle of a million feet hitting the pavement, voices raucous and clanging, the scent of incense and ginseng. In the late afternoon, we sat on the dock, waiting for the ferry to pull in, watching 2 boys crab in the Bay, sailboats racing on the blue pan of ocean beneath the Golden Gate.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 10:54 PM

Friday, September 17, 2004

Twinkle & I went here for lunch today. Major yum. I had to film Hotel Healdsburg and the Dry Creek Kitchen to make a moviette for my agents. We're going to have our Holiday Dinner there this year and as part of an incentive, we'll throw in a room at the Hotel Healdsburg the night of the dinner if they meet their goals.

This hotel is lovely. Everything about it makes me wish I could just live there. The rooms smell like green tea and lime and warm earth. The amenities are particular with attention to detail, which I found absolutely charming when I stayed there a few weeks ago for our business meeting. The bed alone was a swoon fest, all goose down and puffball. I felt like the the Princess and the Pea only there was no pea. So I ran around and took some DCV footage. Hopefully this weekend I'll put the movie together, show it my interim supervisor on Monday, and be able to put this whole thing together exactly the way I wanna!

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 3:40 PM

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Well, if I lived in Jersey, I would want to be eating a dozen of these sugar cookies right now. I don't know what in the heck my problem is, but for 3 days, all I've wanted to do is eat SUGAR.

Ho.Ly.Cow.

But today's tasty treat comes to you from China.
Tah-dah!
Bird's Nest With Rock Sugar Flavoring
No kidding.
I really drank it.
Fo' reals.

So Twinkle gave me this Bird's Nest drink to try. I decided to stop being a big chicken and try it. I was a little tweaked about drinking bird nest juice (all I could think about was the fact that at one point aforementioned nest probably had bird poop in it) brewed in rock sugar. This is what it said on the box: "Brand's Bird's Nest with Rock Sugar Flavoring is formulated with premium grade genuine Indonesia's Bird's Nest that has been meticulously hand-cleaned and brewed with pure rock sugar. It is prepared by following traditional recipe that seals in the flavor and nutritional value. All bottles of Brand's Bird Nest with Rock Sugar are vacuum packed to maintain its fresh taste. It contains no preservatives or artificial coloring and is 100% cholesterol and fat free. This nutritious product can be taken straight from the bottle and is perfect either at room temperature, chilled and warmed. Once opened the content should be refrigerated and consumed within 24 hours.

It didn't taste bad, despite the grimace on my face in that 3rd picture (Twinkle took pictures of me so I had PROOF I actually drank/chewed the stuff...). It was just kind of gelatinously chewy and tasted like sweet hay. But look at the smile it put on my face later! (Twinkle & I posed today for good-bye pictures for a co-worker who is leaving at the end of the month) Wow, Bird's Nest drink really does boost your energy! Maybe Twinkle should have had some too so she could've grinned like a cheeseball right beside me. Thank you Brand's brand Bird's Nest drink for putting a smile on my face.

Can't say it did much for my sugar yearning, however.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 3:55 PM

Sto pensando...

Sono umane condizioni
stare bene oppure no
puo dipendere dai giorni
dalle nostalgie che ho
gia ... come vedi
sta pensando a te

I found a CD by Eros Ramazzotti that I'd forgotten I had, Tutti Storie. He was all the rage in Italy when I lived there. I listened to the CD on the way to work this morning. It almost made me cry. I'm not sure why. I guess I started remembering Italy and living there for 3 years and the fact I haven't been back in 9. Nicola and I have talked about going back together, just the two of us. The year that she & I were there, 1993, changed us in ways that the two of us will never shake. That we don't want to shake. It means too much, I suppose.

Remember your past but live in your present to create your future, right?

[I am very impressed that Mr. Ramazzotti is now sporting some grey at his temples. Very distinguished looking, indeed.]

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 1:15 PM

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Yesterday my office secretary and I went out to lunch at a Vietnamese place down the street from our office. We work in a business park off the 101 that is really quite beautiful. We walked to the restaurant and ate and on the way back to the office, we stopped at the 12-plex movie theater and decided we were going to see a movie that afternoon. So we were hookeyers! Whee.

We saw Hero with Jet Li, which everyone I've talked to so far hasn't liked. But I did. All of the wire work that was brought to mainstream's attention with Crouching Tiger and made more famous by The Matrix has already been seen and done. Nothing new there, and that, to me, didn't seem to be the point of this film. I actually liked the way the tale of the story was revealed in layers and how each layer was signified with color - red, blue, white, green. And how the colors got more muted as the truth was uncovered. It brought to mind Scheherazade's tale-telling ability. The fairytale quality of the movie so appealed to my idealistic sense of things. It was, after all, about idealism almost as an absolute construct, separate from human desire and yet utterly at the mercy of it at the same time. And the actress who played Flying Snow was so beautiful in the Red scene beneath the autumnal ginkgo trees. I could have watched her forever.

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I've been wondering for the last few days what the Soundtrack of My Life should be right now. I find myself, these days, listening to Bic Runga, Norah Jones, Train, Poe, Moby, Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Dead Can Dance, Coldplay, Lamb, Radiohead, Incubus. No particular order. If the CD ends, I'll play it again. I listen to the words. I hum the tunes and then I'll forget about them all day. I considered asking Michael to put a compilation of songs together that he thinks would encompass my Life right now. He has a good handle on all different sorts of music. [sidenote: Why did I ever stop playing piano? I wish I could play an instrument, now. It seems like it could be calming, somehow.]

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I've started taking B12. A friend of mine who's totally into blood type claims it will help me to stop "dwelling." I figured it sure couldn't hurt. I thought I noticed a difference yesterday, but today I was just as dwelly as ever. But I did get my pencils out again for the first time in years, just sketched an eyeball. But the feeling was in my hands again, that lookingness you do with your fingers when you draw. The subtleties of shade and light. I am not abstract with my drawing at all, which is probably why I could never be a "true artist." But the details that are revealed are lovely. This is the part I do cherish when I remember I actually have a knack for it.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 6:03 PM

Monday, September 13, 2004

I sat on the door stoop tonight watching airplanes fly overhead out of SFO, some 50 miles away. Some fly north and some fly northeast. The faraway sound of their flight does not carry down to the ground until their flashing lights disappear over the eaves of the house. The crickets are like a metronome this time of night. Finally the heat has broken. I have known that being alone is difficult. I am busy, intentionally, during the day. Evenings I spend in the company of friends. Then night falls and every sound is amplified. The exhasution of a work day and a work out is not enough to quell sleeplessness.

Last night as I sat outside, toes cold in my flip-flops, a shooting star zinged through the sky, quickly, a flashing line, then gone. I made a wish, childhood habit ingrained in my head. Tonight there were no shooting stars. I offered up a prayer instead. To have the humility to be held by God instead of trying to hold myself. To give up thinking I know how or why anything can or will be. I don't. Being alone forces the realization that I know nothing. And it doesn't really even matter.

Because putting all faith in humans is only a sure roadmap to disappointment. There has to be something bigger than me, than a spouse, than a parent, than a friend, in which to have faith. Otherwise the overwhelming disappointment will crush you. I have disappointed people. I have been disappointed by people. I am wracked with guilt when I disappoint others and wracked with pain when I am in turn disappointed. This teetering see-saw between guilt and pain can be alleviated by nothing if that is the most I can hope for.

It's the old up and down perpetual motion science project of the candle burning at both ends: I disappoint you, you disappoint me, I disappoint you, you disappoint me. Back and forth. I remember my 7th grade science teacher telling me how the perpetual motion science project is a fallacy because eventually the candle will burn itself out, there's no more wax to sustain the motion. That's kind of where I see having faith in something outside of humans, in God, coming into the picture. Where you take the candle off its pinned axis, cut it into two separate parts, set the two pieces side by side and the lighted ends can remain aflame with faith, individual yet side by side. No need to rely on the other end dripping, pinned in the middle, to keep a candle in motion that was never meant to be placed on its side in the first place to teeter-totter itself to death, burned out at both ends.

Achieving this kind of faith, it's a terrain I am ill-suited to traverse. There are no airplanes I can catch to fly me to a True North place. No shooting star whose tail I can grab and tag along for the ride. The only thing I have is a prayer whispered in the dark in humility and entreaty. It's the only thing I have to get me there. It's all that is left.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:49 PM

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Dear Sta'Shellie,
You and me. We were everthing back then, weren't we? Slipping down the river rocks, over the fallen tree, beneath the passion fruit until we found the water fall and the swimming hole. Topless, giggling college girls on a tropical island, getting a tan, talking about boys, yearning so hard for life. You fell off your bike and swore you'd never get on another one again. And you never did. Two hapa-girlies, skin like caramel, we knew a bias-cut world. You and me. We were everything back then, weren't we?

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Dear C.D. Cuisine,
You and your East Coast grin. You were so fun to tease. I could never resist. Back then I was just naive enough to think things could remain simple, no strings. Chinatown and Pt. Reyes and Yountville. That awful red Fiero, careening around hairpin curves, me & my need for speed, with the stereo ablaze with angry chick rock "...and I'm here to remind you of the mess you left when you went away..." And then when I had to leave and it meant you would be left behind and I thought there was no turning back and you had too much ahead of you and my heart, it was my heart that was being left behind, right there where I'd left it under your pillow.

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Dear Mr. Ash,
You came out of nowhere and shoved yourself right under my skin, got in under there and then held up a mirror. Look at your fear. Don't you dare turn away, are you listening? Face your fear right now! I hated you so much for that, right then, I wanted to tear your eyes out if I could have. Little girl. You are being a little girl. Don't make me look, I can't do it. I can't, I can't, I can't. And then I did and I didn't even turn into a pumpkin. A girl learns to take the lessons that you throw at her like hand grenades and educate herself before detonation. Knowledge under fire. My reflexes are much faster because of you. My survival skills are being honed. The rest of the game, it's irrelevant now. I get that now. Maybe one day I'll actually thank you.

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Dear Bowr,
My sweetest girl, my tiniest, fiercest friend. I LOVE YOU.

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Dear Mom,
Alike yet different, our voices resonate with the same tone. I picked up every one of your inflections until I twinned your sound. I watched you, everything you did, staring over the kitchen counter, watching you bake, wanting to be just like you. You were the smartest mom ever, knew how to do EVERYTHING. Snuck in your jewelry box and tried on your rings, I was a lady then. Always your opinion first, I always wanted to make sure you thought I was doing the right thing. No one is perfect, but you have tried, always, to never let me down.

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Dear Linny,
My twinner, thoughts kenning off one another, that deepest drift you catch it every time. You are the one who metaphors me, paradoxes me, the words never get in the way.

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Dear INiFPuh,
You will never be thrown away. That will matter one day.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 4:25 PM

Saturday, September 11, 2004

I got an email from Rupert Rudd. I have no idea who he is, he's probably not real. Anyway, the email was one of those Attract Women Now things (do they know something about me I don't know??). It was very short. But the first and last lines took my breath away:

In other Parts it leaves wide sandy Plains;
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch

Like Virginia Wolff, somehow. Reading those two lines reminded me so much of Grandma. She has been on my mind of late. Last night especially as I was awake in the small hours of the morning. It has been just over a year since she died. The shape of her sits squarely inside of me. I picture her, younger than me, her life in Michigan. The places to which she ran, the fictions that became her life. She was imperfect (...it is the human condition...). But she, more than anyone else, she knew a love for me that was the closest thing to unconditional I ever knew. Her book still sits on my shelf, unread. As though I can keep her there, a secret, her mystery locked away in those pages.

Remembering her has reminded me of the things I have left unsaid. The people I have wanted to return to, in some fashion, and just let them know how much they have meant to me. To let them know how their intersections on the timeline of my life have been material, shaping my heart. There are friends I have not seen in years, people I worked with or knew in school. Mustn't we let them know when they have been important? Isn't it part of our growth as humans to be able to give that to people, to people we have loved in some way - romantically, in friendship, as family - to let them know what they have meant? There are so many things I wish I had told Grandma. So many things I need to tell my family. There are things I need to tell the people who are a part of my everyday and there are things I want to tell people I have not seen in years.

Grandma has been on my mind of late. I miss her red lipstick and her White Shoulders perfume and her once-a-week bouffant hairdo and her Smithsonian mail order catalogues and her cookie jar and her too-thick-crust apple pie and her soft hands and her China doll shoes and the tears she'd get in her eyes when she laughed so hard she couldn't breathe and the notes she'd write in the front of every book she ever gave me and the typewritten letters and her watercolors and her. I just miss

HER

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 10:35 AM

Friday, September 10, 2004

Though this was a short week in days, it was a long week in all other aspects. The minutes some days seemed to drag like hours. I got things done zippily and then wondered what to do next. As though time had been stretched or I had been compressed.

Jeff and I went to dinner tonight at Vacquero. It was not very good. The mussels tasted like cow pucky. I adore mussels and these, though they weren't off, just tasted like yergh because the tomato-based sauce was so utterly boring. And then we ordered drinks that were so strong we both very nearly blew ourselves off our chairs. With a sheepish grin, all apologies, I very nicely told the server the drinks just plain didn't taste very good. Booze is booze, but these tasted like Grandpa Henry's greased lightning. Yowzah! Needless to say, he took the drinks off the bill. Jeff and I walked around the Plaza afterward, just talking about life. We don't spend nearly as much time doing things together as we did when I worked at mom's office. I miss being around his sense of humor. We make each other laugh so hard. He is such a good friend. Who'da thunk it when we had first started working together and had catfights in the middle of the office? I thought my mom was going to have to pull us apart by the scruff of our necks. Gay man versus Hawaiian wahine. Hmm.

I'm glad to see this week come to a close. Some weeks are just like that, you know?

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:15 PM

Thursday, September 09, 2004

It's a funny thing. I don't know about every other person who has a blog, but I have found as a general rule of thumb that most people past the age of 30 who keep a weblog tend not to share it with their immediate family and friends. I shared mine with my husband because I didn't feel I had anything to hide from him. I still feel that way. That's not to say that what I write here can't and won't cause him pain. If he comes here, it most certainly will. I will come off as mean-spirited to him, like I am intentionally trying to gauge out his heart. Which I'm not. But when someone is bleeding and they perceive you as the absolute cause of that bloodletting, there's is nothing you can say to them to convince them otherwise. So anything you say will fall on deaf ears. Writing this out here is part and parcel of the whole process of trying to figure out WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED. Not just on August 6th when I rejected his homecoming, but from January 26th, 1970 when I was born and the ensuing years.

I didn't share this blog URL with many of my family nor friends nor associates. Mostly because things do come out here that I don't necessarily want to get into with my mother, for instance. Like when I worked for her. And we drove each other crazy every so often. And I'd come here and say, "My mom is driving me crazy!" (...let it be known that she could just have easily have said the same thing about me...). I mean, this blog is searchable, obviously, on any search engine. Just pop in my name and voila' ::BING:: welcome to my blog world. So this isn't exactly private. Which I know. Which is also why I don't write every stupid, inane, sexy, hateful, boring thought that passes through my brain. Some of them, but not all. Most of the people who come here have popped in not because they know me personally but because they found something that maybe caught their attention, held it, and then they moved on. And maybe they came back again a few days later. And then a few days after that. And some of you reading this right now are those people.

But from the recent spike in traffic this blog's been getting and the referral URLs, I'm pretty certain that some people who are reading these words have been told expressly to come here. Perhaps to witness, firsthand, the treachery of which I am capable. I don't feel particularly treacherous, but I guess that's a matter of taste.

What I do feel is:

confused

unburdened

lonely

hopeful

focused

thinner

better

worse

hydrated

open

There are some obvious paradoxes in there, but I would expect that. My point is only that it is necessary. Because I am not a Believer. My secular friends think I have lots of faith in God, but anyone who is a Believer knows better. As do I; what I have is just not enough. I am trying to work all this out in the best way I know how. With what I can. A Believing friend gave me a book she had by a Christian group of doctors that I am reading. It is amazingly eye-opening. It's where I found all my earmarks of co-dependency (what a bitter & overused but necessary word). It's what is forcing me to trace the patterns, not just the obvious surface level hurts but the deeper things that we can't have learned if we weren't raised with a strong faith and strong love. It's not about rehashing the past, it's about discovering what about my past is informing me on a daily basis - TODAY.

It's like faulty wiring, when you turn on the light switch and every time you do, you get shocked. You have to fix the damned wiring. You can't wear gloves every time you turn on the light or use a stick. You have to unscrew the panel and figure out where the wires got crossed. A marriage based in these sort of crossed wires cannot move forward. It is necessary to get the wires parallel again, wrapped in their black plastic piping, insulated from one another yet interdependent. If that doesn't happen, nothing can. Because I don't have enough gloves. And sticks are not very friendly.

Remember as you read you this can never know, fully, what goes on in my heart or mind or soul. Nor I in yours. And that is one of the wonders of being created exactly as we were intended to be.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 9:34 PM

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

I got a letter today from my husband. A letter. A check. A story. The story was about me. But I think even more it was about him. It is blood. The words are the blood of a man eviscerated by the actions of the woman he loves. The words speak a little of blame (my blame in his eyes) but also self blame. The things we allow to happen, again and again in our lives. I read this story and questioned, "Does this not make you ask yourself why instead of me? If it doesn't, it really ought to. Why does this happen to you, again and again? If you are the only common element in all of the memories, wouldn't it make sense that the memories you have, that they are directly related to YOU and your actions?" That is what I asked myself, but it is not for me to figure out. That work is always left to the one in the loop. My loop is of a different pattern.

This is what has been spinning in my head for weeks. The things allowed to happen, again and again. Because my memories, on the other hand, those are the jurisdiction of my actions. What I have allowed, the endless looping. The hurt, the excuses, the intense desire to make things right. Always at my own expense. BUT would it not then follow that if I continued down the path of putting things & people always at my own expense that I must have been getting something out of it? If I continue those actions, there has got to be something in it for me, right? Oh ya, you betcha. This has been the clarity, the wool pulling from the eyelids. I have the classic co-dependent stance.

I feel like such a dunce. How could I not have seen it before? Putting myself in these situations of physical rejection to recreate the one thing I knew, inside & out, from childhood? The rejection creates the format for diving into a pool of acceptance. In my case, however, I dig the hole, tile in the pool, fill it with water and create the whole schmiel to show how worthy I am so now I can be accepted, see? Look what an industrious little worker I am! You may not think I'm much now, but by gum, when I'm done with this swimming hole, you're not gonna know what hitcha! You'll see, sure as shootin', just how worthy of your acceptance/adoration/love I really am. The rejection, it feeds this addiction. Because that's precisely what it is. Co-dependent people are just as addicted as their partners, just in a different way.

The high or the rush comes from that feeling when finally I am proven to be worthy. Yay, can I sit on your lap now? Will you love me forever and ever? And always, yes, the acceptance, the adoration, the love, it all lasts. Until the next time. When I get knocked flat on my ass in the next round. And the rounds get less intense with time, but there is a wear factor to be considered as well. Because now it takes much less to trigger the rejection mechanism because the initial trigger was so devastating. Resentment builds, how could it not? Addicts always get pissed off at their Joneses. And if they are recovering, they give up the drug.

This is that from which I am trying to break free. This endless, looping cycle of addiction. I could easily paint myself as some martyr, but you can't attach yourself to the Catherine Wheel time and time again before you have to ask yourself, "Uhm, Anea? Are you impaired? Martydom is one thing, but you seem to be a masochist in which case you're getting your martyr points taken away from you. Get a clue!" Martyr? Not a chance. Addict.

And you can't blame other people for your addictions. I can't and don't blame my husband for that. I'm certain I chose to keep after him because of his initial rejection of me. And I'm also certain I helped assuage some of his addictions. It usually works both ways. In fact, it always works both ways. But his recovery will be his own. I assuaged his addictions; however, I wasn't his addiction.

But he was mine.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 5:47 PM

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

I realized on my walk home from the Farmer's Market in the Plaza this evening that today was our 2 year anniversary. For the church wedding. Not the civil ceremony. Together for 3 years, married for 2. Separated for a month. It is strange and normal and empty and full all at the same time.

I have been working hard on getting "healthy." I suppose that's a relative term considering the people I see who look healthy, who play tennis and eat right and are slim, they're dead from cancer. Or undergoing treatment. Or being diagnosed with something else. But I guess I should say I'm trying to be healthier. I've dropped about 25 lbs. I have a long way to go, but 2 people saw me today who haven't seen me in about a month and noticed the difference right away. Which, of course, is always an ego boost. Clothes fit that haven't fit in a couple years. I'm pulling out old jeans and shorts and trying them on and am frankly amazed at the changes. It's always somewhat insidious. All of a sudden ::BOOM:: and you're standing there looking at someone who looks different than what you're accustomed to.

I bought myself a bouquet of flowers at the market. A big posey of sunflowers and lilies and statice and bachelor buttons and puffy things whose names I don't know. It's a beautiful late summer bunch of color. I've always loved flowers. I thought I would have a little house between two willow trees with a garden that I would grow, fingernails packed with half-moons of earth from rooting around in the dirt. Years ago, I rented a little house and planted the most stunning array of sunflowers the neighborhood had ever seen. The garden fence was laced with sweet peas, heady like cotton candy. The birds came and tackled the seeds in the middles of the sunflowers that were as big as platters. The sunflowers were red and yellow and orange and russet and lemon and burnt sienna. So many different names. That was the same year the heirloom tomatoes went nuts and I had to beg people to take them off my hands. I took to gardening easily. This bouquet reminds me a bit of some of the flowers I used to grow.

My days have become very simple. I am trying to learn lessons I should have learned years ago. I wake up every morning at 5:05 for no reason, before the roosters even crow. I wait for my alarm. Days begin and then they end. And some nights there are flowers to alleviate the yearn I have for color.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 9:01 PM

Saturday, September 04, 2004

This whole summer has been modestly hot. Not the usual foot-searing heat of July and August that we're accustomed to. This year the heat waited until this weekend to show its rosy cheeks. I'm staring out the window at a big hole in the back yard where a pool is supposed to be. It's a mud puddle. Not a pool. Boo hoo for me. No splashing in the nice new pool.

Heat is sometimes a good cleansing ritual. Ever been in a sauna? You sweat out all the impurities in your body - at least the ones that can come to the surface with sweat. This blog's been in the sauna. Sweating out all the things that needed to come out. Just the way life is sometimes. You have to figure out which things will best serve you and that's what you stick with.

I've been hesitant to write here. It was easier to stay away than to know every word was being scrutinized. But I like having a blog. I like the community of blogness. I like reading the people I have found and I like being found. It's a reciprocal relationship that doesn't require intense amounts of angst. It's a nice addition to the living of life. So. I decided not to be cowed. To continue to voice myself. Changes and tweaks. My voice, though different and changing, is still my own.

And so it shall remain.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 2:27 PM