Devil on My Shoulder

Ever since I was about 16 there was been something that burdens my mind and spirit. In the beginning, and for a long time, it was various aspects of my appearance. Over the years most parts of my body have come under fire, some more than others. In the end, there are only two body parts whose appearance I can say I like: my eyes and my wrists. Ironically, my eyes are functionally defective, but at least they look nice. My wrists are tiny and for some reason I like that. I just wish my ankles were tiny too. I am not “over” all that nonsense, but it has become dulled, taking backstage to other burdens that have waxed and then maybe waned over the years.

I have learned to not dwell on things and get sucked into the dark side of my mind. Of course, at some times I am more successful at it than others, but in general I try to stay above it all. When I was in my appearance-centric days I used to spend way too much time in front of the mirror picking my appearance apart. I also used to look at fashion magazines and compare myself to the women pictured in them. Over the years, I realized it was healthier to stay away from mirrors and fashion mags. I use a mirror for necessity and that is it. I really would like to get a full length one so I could see what my outfits look like sometimes, but have thought that perhaps this is not a good idea – too much temptation to pick myself apart. But, maybe I should give myself credit. Maybe I have grown over the years. After all, I am able to watch America’s Next Top model without getting too upset about the way I look – now that’s progress!

During grad school, some of burden was shifted off the way I look to the way my mind works. I belabored the fact that I was not a genius, that I had to struggle through reading journal articles that seemingly had more equations than words, and that I could never think clearly enough about the subject that I was studying. This mindset generalized into feeling like I had nothing interesting to say about anything. Eventually I came to terms with it all. I still don’t think I have much of interest to say, but I am okay with it. I have learned how my mind works….it has a fair amount of RAM but little ROM. I am reasonably good at critical thinking and problem solving but suck at remembering anything long term . I would not be smarter than a 5th grader.

My newest burden was fueled by news of the American Airlines flight 331 crash in Jamaica yesterday. I told K something like “well, I don’t want to go to Jamaica now…I don’t want to get run into the ocean on a big jet.” He said that he would just fly us there himself, but I have issues with that too. I know he wants to fly us to the Bahamas or Jamaica someday, but I have spent many a night laying awake in bed pondering bad scenarios, things like…”the engine goes out and we have to crash-land in the ocean. The plane starts to sink and then sharks come.” I came up with a fine remedy for shark attacks, “we’ll just bring a gun” I said. But, noooo, that would apparently not work very well for us going through customs. So, I am afraid of flying to tropical getaways, even though I want to go. I am afraid of making the decision that will prematurely end my life. After all, many deaths are the result of decisions…someone happened to decide to do something at the wrong time, like the woman here who recently got killed when she hit a deer in the road. If she had decided to leave a few minutes earlier or later she likely would have been fine.

This fear and realization of the tenuousness of life is new within the last few years. Often I wonder if marriage triggered it. K once told me that I ended his life; he has made me very conscious of mine. His statement was actually a positive one that just didn’t come out quite right. I tease him about it, just like he teases me about the time I told him he needed better equipment – I meant gear for the snow, but he saw a great opportunity to twist my words. Anyway, before I was married, I could not easily play the “where will I be in 5 or 10 years” game. Life was unpredictable then. Now there is more stability. I can, in a sense, see the future better. I know that one of us will see the other die, and this is a scary thought. Also, marriage (and baby L) has made me very happy. For the first time in my life I have felt truly content. I feel like I have so much to live for now, which makes me more fearful that the grim reaper will take it away. So, nearly every day I wrestle with my mind to shut up the devil on my shoulder, as I have done with other issues in the past. If I am hesitant to get in that car, I do it anyway. If I am afraid when I feel flulike that I might have a heart attack, I try to think “what a silly thought.” I will get on that plane anyway, even though I will be plagued with thoughts that “this may be the one decision that ends it.” I try to live in the moment, more than I have ever tried before.

Capital I

Awhile back I was thinking of a skit from Sesame Street about a kid who goes to the store for a loaf of bread, stick of butter, and carton of milk….or something like that. I wanted to watch it again, after 30-some years, so I asked Google to tell me where it was. A few keystrokes later and I found it – thank goodness for YouTube! The skit was not as good as I remembered, but I did find other gems….long lost ditties from my childhood: Ladybug Picnic, the Operatic Orange, My Hero Zero, Lowercase n, and my all-time (ok, adult-time) favorite Capital I (click on the titles to play the videos). I have played Capital I way too many times, and did so yet again today after watching part of the Electric Company (EC). I had last seen EC around the time I last saw the “loaf of bread” skit….a loooong time ago. I was very disheartened to see that there are now rap song skits on EC. I actually cannot remember the content of the show from 30 years ago, but I know it did not include rap. My first thought when I saw the 2K EC was “ew, I don’t want baby L watching that? Why can’t they play things like Capital I and Lowercase n anymore.” Now, the rap lyrics were not bad….I mean they were just rappin bout the letters “e”, “a”, and “o,” so how bad could it be….word up letter “e”, YO! Anyway, in case you cannot tell, I don’t really like rap. Thanks to K I have learned to appreciate the genius of Eminem, but that’s about as far as it goes at this point. Well, I take that back...I did write a rap song for our pet chinchilla, T Rat:

T Rat Rap

Gimme a “T” for “the”

My name’s T Rat, YO,

And I’m here to say

I eat little dried pellets and clumps a’ hay

Rockin it out in the U S of Aaaye

Got a Homie called bunny

And he’s my little honey

But whoops I dunno if he’s a she or what

All’s I know if we c’make a baby It’d be rabilla mut

Cuz I am a’chillin, real chinchilla heir

Got the fur worth millions that those rich ladies wear

I been to Massachusetts, been to Tennessee, now in Alabama

But wherever I am, always stuck in the slammer

Little paws behind bars, what’d this chilla do

Just pee wherever and drop a bunch of poo

My keepers they bought a house in Tennessee

Where they promise I’ll be a lil more free

But me, I dunno, they take me there now

Let me run in the fields like I’s a little cow

When all’s I wanna do is chill in the shade

Cuz its daytime and that makes me real afraid

For I’m a wanted Rat, they all be after me

From the fox in the woods to the eagle in the tree

To the snake in the grass to the man with a gun

Out to get his wife some soft fur for her bum

But I got some pleasures, I love them dried grapes

Love to break free and hide behind the drapes

Like to chase my honey round and round

Pretendin like I’s some big tough wolfhound

My keepers, they done this to me

So the circle goes round, in attempt to feel free

It’s all okay, YO, word to your mother

For T Rat’s here, just a chin chillin, rockin out like no other

T Rat

Many many years ago, when I was in my hoochie mama fashion phase, I was shopping with my mother and found this wonderful (so I thought at the time) red off-the-shoulder sheath mini dress – one of those skin tight numbers that was in style in the 80’s and early 90’s. I had been looking for just such a dress to wear out dancing and was excited when I found it. I don't know why I was so enamored with red since it might as well be black as far as my perception goes. I suppose I have always had an affinity for the concept of red; when I was a young child I apparently told my mom that I wanted a red bra when I got "those bumpy things." Ok, back to my story....I tried on the dress and showed my mother, who was mortified by it, saying something like “I would be ashamed to be out with you in that.” I really wanted to buy the dress (more for my stupid boyfriend at the time than for myself), but she got very upset about that prospect – I think she literally was in tears. I bought it anyway (partly just to spite her I think....sorry mom) and we both went stalking out of the store.

When I realized that baby L would be watching rap on PBS and probably liking it I had to accept the fact that I will need to let her like things that I do not. I will have to let her buy clothes I think are ugly and listen to music that I think sucks or is lewd. There are limits, of course, and I will need to intervene if she (god forbid) develops a crack habit, but clothes and music, in and of themselves, are innocent. I must accept change once again; baby L will grow up in a world of cell phones, rap music, instant messaging, email, hyper-real video games, DVDs by mail, and who knows what else. This is a far cry from my childhood of, um…..hmmmm….phones with cords that tangled up, heavily synthesized music, snail mail, Atari with 2D graphics and the Lemonade game, and movies on giant tapes that you had to go to the store to get.

Its Just Stuff Anyway

The other day while out shopping with my mom something triggered memory of my childhood Matchbox car collection; perhaps it was the little biplane ornament that I bought for K. Who knows, but at any rate my stomach dropped a bit when I thought about the collection because I realized that it might be yet another one of my things that has disappeared over the years. I then got upset and cranky. I tried to keep telling myself that it is only a material thing and should not upset me. I have had this self-talk many times now since moving out of the apartment building in Minneapolis that I called home for nine years.

I do not know how some of my things got lost. I first discovered that things were missing when I moved out. I went looking all over for the glass cups that went with the punch bowl from my grandmother’s estate. I checked all the storage areas in the building, but they were nowhere to be found. Later, other possessions would pop into my mind and I would realize they were gone….”what about my metal bank collection” –gone; “what about that Bavarian flag I got in Germany?” –gone; “where is that drawing I made?” –gone; “my high school yearbooks?” –gone. I try to think that my house got hit by a fire and I lost many things. But, in the end, after trying to put it in perspective I still get sad since I have lost a part of my history. This seems to mean more to me now that baby L is around.

Some things that got “lost” I actually discarded. My high school yearbooks suffered this fate while I was doing some serious down-sizing when moving from my apartment to a newly purchased condo. I was going through some emotional angst at the time and felt that it was very cathartic to discard things. I had given up on ever having a family, so did not think of saving things to keep history for my child! As for my yearbooks, I thought “why do I want to hang onto these when I had such awful memories from that time?” I had no signatures and notes in my yearbooks because I had no friends to write them. I also thought that if I ever really wanted to look at the yearbooks again I could borrow my sister’s. However, I forgot that she is two years older than me and that a few yearbooks would thus be lost forever.

Fast forward three years, and I wish I had kept the stupid yearbooks. My 20-year high school reunion was held this past summer (I conveniently used my 8+ months pregnant state as an excuse not to go) and I had the urge to look at my yearbooks. I have also wanted to open them and see how young all the teachers probably look to me now; teachers who would have looked old to me back in high school. Maybe it is good I did not get a chance to do this since it would just fuel my newfound aging and passage-of-time phobias. Finally, baby L might someday like to see these vestiges of her mother’s past.

It is better to live in the present anyway, so I will continue to let all these things go. However, I do still want to dig through all our boxes to find my Matchbox cars that probably are not there anymore…I had the cool Matchbox car case and everything!

Carpetbaggers

Each week we cut parts of it up into little pieces to hide in the trash. Yesterday we cut other parts into little pieces to take to K’s mom’s farm for burning. We feel like some sort of criminal - you can imagine the kind I mean - trying to camouflage the waste from trash collectors so they’ll take it away; they would not touch it whole, no not this dead stinky beast:

These are the lengths we must go through in the process of taking up the carpet (including removing baseboards) and redoing the wood floors beneath. I suppose we should really find the city dump as we have other artifacts from remodeling projects that need to find a resting place other than our garage and back patio, which at times I feared was approaching a redneck trailer yard in appearance. All this trouble has been worth the effort K has expended since we now have gleaming wood floors in a few of our rooms and the old musty stink that pervaded the house is gone:

Our attempts to hide the remodeling waste remind me of another time we had to sneak around in order to get a job done. The condo I have in Minneapolis has rules about moving in large things; you must schedule a time to move them and if you move them outside of this time you are subject to a fine if someone reports you. Well, we were not able to move the mattress in the allotted time, so we ended up moving it in at 2:00 AM or so, just so we would not be found out.

I wanted to title this post something different, but caved into the fear that web-monitoring feds might wrongly accuse us of something or that some bad element might find us from a Google search. If you are smart, you can imagine what the title might have been. As for carpetbaggers, well its obvious that we bag carpet, but as a bonus, we are northernes who moved to the south. Granted, we did not do so in the actual carpetbagger era nor are we republicans, but still....

As an aside, I am ashamed to say that K used to be a card-carrying elephant; I am glad he turned into an ass somewhere along the way.

Car Talk

I like the radio show on MPR called “car talk” even though I don’t care about cars at all and cannot drive them. Kudos to the Taproot brothers for entertaining someone who cares nothing for the topic of their show! It really is no fair I cannot drive. It hits me sometimes how this activity that others take for granted is so foreign to me. My parents were here this week and it was nice to feel a little freedom to go places. Today I find myself imagining what it would be like to hop in the car and drive to the craft store in Huntsville to look for more beads; that sounds so exhilarating!

Instead, I am relatively housebound again. I can walk to the bank and hardware, grocery, and pet stores as well as various antique stores on the square, which are fun to frequent only on a yearly basis due to their slow inventory turnover. It would be much harder or near impossible to walk to many other places here because the town was not built with pedestrians in mind – one thing that angers me about our country. In America, pedestrians have been lost. Apparently in Europe they have different standards for cars that take pedestrians into account, like bumpers have to be made in such a way as to minimize pedestrian injury. But, not here, no, cars rule. (click on "cars rule" to see an interesting, yet disturbing, article)

I miss my parents now that they’ve left. It was a nice visit but I did feel like I should have slowed down to enjoy it more. Instead, I was checking email, grading final projects, writing things in the blog, wrapping presents, ordering more presents online, making yet other presents. We went out shopping several times, but that must be boring for my dad, who is such a patient man. I think he wanted to go to the museum here yesterday, and I really should have pushed us to go, but did not and feel a bit bad for it. Yes, baby L was sleeping during some of the time we could have gone, and then my dad had to take care of a UPS problem that had cropped up back at their house, but still I felt bad that we dragged him around shopping and he did not get to see the museum.

Thinking Stinks Sometimes

"The skunk thunk the stump stunk and the stump thunk the skunk stunk"

I saw a recent episode of House MD where a genius was self medicating with cough syrup to reduce his intelligence. He apparently could not handle being super smart and wanted to just be a run o’ the mill delivery man with a dumb blonde girlfriend. I am no genius, don’t medicate with cough syrup or have a dumb blonde girlfriend, and could not be a delivery driver even if I wanted to. However, sometimes I feel similar to that fictional man. The more I think, the more I think, and I can think to the point where I get tired and I just want my brain to be quiet. I have often felt that my mind is like a dysfunctional engine…one that takes a lot of effort to start, runs well for awhile after starting, and then goes haywire, overheats and conks out.

At one point in my life I thought maybe I had mild bipolar disorder (BPD). I tried some drugs for it that totally wiped me out, so I abandoned that diagnosis. Now I am discovering that there might be a link between A and BPD, so maybe I do have some mild version…I have not researched this and only know about it from some discussions in an A Yahoo group, so who knows.

Wow, two posts in one day...I can't stop thinking. But I better, because my parents are visiting and I should attend to them, and of course baby L.

What's Stopping You

I started this blog last year and have pathetically made just one entry, until now. Sometimes late at night words flow through my mind worthy of a blog entry...."how brilliant, how poetic" I think. But, I am too lazy to get out of bed, so the words are lost. When I think about making a blog entry here, I feel like it needs to be perfect. I feel like I need a theme and can only write based on that theme. I feel the blog must be important. This year, a girl I knew from childhood had cancer and wrote about it in a wonderful blog. I say it was wonderful not because of why she as writing it (of course, duh!), but because of the way she wrote about it. There were times when I thought about writing in my blog, but in the shodow of hers I felt my entries would be silly and trite, so I did not write. All ridiculous reasons for not writing, I know.

I also feel like, what's the point in writing in this thing when I am not writing for an audience. I do not have a large group of friends or people who would care much about what I write. Maybe people would care. Maybe I have more friends than I think....I have never been good or confident in that department, probably thanks to my dad's genes and maybe because of the achromatopsia (though I bet the latter is just an excuse). Speculations about friends aside, I do have a new daughter and perhaps someday she might like to read my musings and learn about the mundane and petty details of my life.

So, I suppose I must abandon my desire to have a perfect, poetic, literary masterpiece of a blog and just write....write freely about whatever comes to pass, or that which I wish to come and pass. Afterall, at the base of it life is a chaotic mess of change. I learned some of this on a meditation retreat years ago....everything is changing, anicca, anicca, anicca. Things bubble up and float away. This blog should be a relfection of that.