Sometimes I like my job

Today, with very little finagling, I was able to work the phrase "For those about to rock" into a headline. Not gratuitously, but cleverly and appropriately. Writing headlines, captions and other various blurbage has always been one of my stronger skills as a writer, and one of my favorite parts of the job. It's just so satisfying when these little bite-sized bits of copy come together, and they're so quick and easy it's like eating raspberries out of a bowl. Popping them into your mouth one by one – yum!

Also today, I committed to writing a 500-word fluff piece on a local business, for a hundred bucks. Is that a terrible rate? Not so much, I guess. I figure I'll spend an hour talking to the lady and an hour writing it, and that's not so bad – especially since I'm the one who edits these pieces anyway, so I'm fairly sure I'm not going to be spending any extra time revising it for some stern and picky taskmaster.

It's funny ... when I was writing full time I used to pop things like this out like I'm doing headlines now – quickly, easily, effortlessly! Five hundred words? No sweat! Maybe I'm just out of practice but I'm a little nervous about this one. The usual anxiety pecking away like a hungry little bird: what if they don't like my stuff?

More and more it feels like my professional life is trying to move away from the security of an office job working for someone else, and toward doing more freelance stuff at home, working more or less for myself. (Although really, even with an office job you're still working for yourself – it's just that you have only one big client instead of several, and the client pays all your expenses in exchange for being able to tell you when, where, what, how many, etc.) Contemplating the cost of duplicating my office setup at home has given me pause to consider whether this is really something I want to do ... Because I know I don't want to work on equipment or software that's any less up to date than what I have at my office. But paying for it all myself, and paying to maintain it – I'm not sure it's really worth it for me right now, especially since if I'm still working full time I know I'm not going to want to take on much new additional work to do at home.

Still, people are starting to come out of the woodwork with projects they want me to do, and my hourly rate for those jobs is more than twice what I get paid at my "real" job. In particular, Mr. A's old boss has approached us with a proposal for some work that could be ongoing and fairly lucrative, so that's kind of got my attention at the moment.

One of these nights I really need to just sit down and do the math. Not tonight, though. Tonight I have to run home and vacuum, and wash a load of towels, and give the dogs their dinner before my three-year-old house guest arrives. Actually, she isn't even three yet – her birthday is this Sunday. I was her mom's doula when she was born. Hard to believe she's turning three already.

Gusset (resurrection)

Even when I was thin (and these days, even more so), I've always had the kind of thighs that rub together at the top. It's murder on the crotches of pants, which tend to wear out long before the rest of the pants do. The big loose Japanese linen pants – the ones I wear all summer – are the worst, because the fabric is the softest. I have a whole stash of them that I love, that still fit and look great, except in the crotch, which in most cases is either totally blown out or so thin that I dare not wear them in public for fear of giving friends and loved ones an unwelcome eyeful à la Britney or Lindsay or any number of other bald, shrivelled and attention-starved pseudo-celebrities.

Last night I decided it was time to rehabilitate that pile of pants. From the ones that were too far gone to repair I cut many triangles of pristine fabric, and sewed them into gussets to replace the crotches of other pairs that still had a little life in them. I wasn't sure how it was going to work out, but I'm pleased to report that the operation was a tremendous success! So much so that I'm not going to have to do any pants shopping at all this summer.

Which is great, because there are so many other things I'd rather spend money on right now. These beautiful bougainvillea bed linens, for example, which, if I were to buy them, would set me back seven hundred and change for just the duvet cover and two pillowcases. Did you hear me? Seven hundred! If you add sheets, my entire bed would be $1589.50, plus tax and shipping. Needless to say, I won't be getting these this year. Still, click the picture to see the big version – the color and details are so pretty!

I did use my REI dividend to buy myself a little present that I've fallen madly in love with, though – this cool brown "adventure" skirt. I love the fabric, the fit, the pockets and zippers – everything about it. I'm actually considering buying a second one, just to have on hand in case anything ever happens to the first one. It's dressy enough to wear to a meeting at work, and it's so comfortable I can ride a bike in it (if I unzip the side zippers all the way up). Highly recommended.

Sigh. More boring blog posts about clothes.

In other news, my only real friend – as in, the only person I actually hang out with on a regular basis, other than Mr. A – is moving to Arizona this week. They lost their rental when the owner died, and haven't been able to find anything else here that they can afford. Her husband is leaving tomorrow with everything in the van, and she and their three-year-old daughter are staying with me and Mr. A for a few more days to wrap things up with her business. I'm a little nervous about how it's going to be with a toddler in the house – our "lifestyle" is not very kid-proof, and the Jeeps is so frail and unpredictable that I think we'll probably keep him in the bedroom most of the time when the kid is up. Tater's always been great around kids so far, but I'm going to be keeping a close eye on him, too. All that aside, I'm mainly just glad to have some time to spend with her before they leave town for good. They made the decision pretty suddenly, so I haven't had much time to get used to the idea.

I do have other friends, of course. And now I will be spending more time with them again. Something to look forward to.

Things continue to be weird at work, but I'm going with the flow. I found out from a neighbor that we're supposed to be getting cable service up our road, FINALLY, within the next couple of months, so once that happens I can upgrade my equipment at home and start ramping up my roster of private clients again. Maybe. I don't really like spending extra hours in front of a computer at home in the evening when I've already spent the whole day in front of one at my office. But if things go on the way they have been at work, I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to want to stick around there anyway. For now, though, it's okay.

Just FYI, I'm somehow starting to feel pressure (from myself) to be more interesting and witty and wry and self-deprecating when I write here, and so I want to declare publically, and mainly for my own benefit, that I've decided once again to acknowledge and let go of this pressure and keep on writing the same old boring things I always write, the things that concern me, that I want to remember or work out or play with. Sharing these thoughts with the World Wide Web is secondary to recording them for myself. Which is good, because really, who else cares what sheets I coveted online, or what skirt I bought to hike around the yard in?

P.S. I also like these leafy green ones. Sigh. Must learn to block print fabric ... I could make my own! Or I could even just paint them freehand. That would be a fun project for a sunny spring day.

Notes on maintaining the ol' chassis

A few things I wanted to also mention today, just to help me remember the timing:

1. Skin. I got the labs back on my skin thing, and it is not cancer, or anything else that requires worrying. All the same, I will be going back in for a full-body examination, with photos and everything, which she assures me will vividly illuminate any serious skin damage that does now or will ever require worrying and/or treatment.

2. Cough. I also went to see my GP yesterday, to get his opinion on this lingering cough I've had since the last week in December. He took my temperature and blood pressure (both normal), weighed me (15 lbs. less than last year at this time), asked me some questions and sent me to the hospital for a chest x-ray, "just to see." Results on that should be in by Monday or Tuesday.

3. Mams &c. Next week I'm also having a mammogram, and the week after that I'm going in for a complete physical AND having a plantar's wart removed from the bottom of my foot. After that I should be good to go for awhile. At least until next year.

While I'm at it, here are a few more things related to the body that I've been meaning to record.

1. Stretching. I know it isn't exactly yoga, but for the last several weeks I've been operating under a new rule: if I'm going to watch television, I have to stretch. The results have been inspiring! I started feeling more relaxed almost immediately, and even just in the first week I noticed my flexibility was really improving. This is also partly thanks to my latest invention, which I'm calling the "yoga bath." Surely others have already trademarked similar practices, but I do my own version, consisting mainly of stretching my legs, arms, back, shoulders and neck under warm water, using the sides and wall of the bathtub on my back patio as props. Basically, any way I can stretch while in the water is fair game to try – so no headstands, of course, because then I would drown! But lots of bendiness is happening, and I like it very much.

2. Healthy habits. I'm hoping (and it's starting to happen) that I'll become addicted to stretching and exercising, just like I've become addicted to flossing. That would be so cool!

3. Wrists. My carpal tunnel problems are getting kind of bad again. I will probably go ahead and get a couple more braces this weekend; they did seem to help a lot when I used them before.

4. Vision. For about the last week or so I've been experiencing a strange and mostly pretty enjoyable visual phenomenon I've never noticed before. It's hard to describe, but it's kind of like super 3D vision. For instance, when I was walking the dogs down our road last night, I was hyper-aware of the shifting perspective of all the objects around me – trees, fence posts, tufts of grass, rocks on the street, the movement of the dogs around me, clouds in the sky, and even the apparent movement of a couple of layers of hills and mountains in the distance. Anyone can notice this effect if they try, but usually we filter it out, because it's distracting and we don't need it. Somehow lately I've been unable to turn this "feature" off completely, and as a result I often feel like I've stepped into a full-body 3D movie and can't take off the glasses. Everything's always shifting slightly. It's kind of disconcerting, and also kind of cool. I have a note to mention it to the doc when I go in for that physical.

5. Mind. Last night while I was sitting at the creek I wanted to process some things I was remembering from the day, and for the first time ever in my life that I can remember, I found myself unmotivated to write about them. My mind just didn't want to go there. Instead, it wanted to make a picture. So I did that. I drew the things I was thinking about, and it felt so good, the way it stretched my mind in a totally different direction. I've been noticing this a lot lately, now that I've been working primarily with images for a few years. Until recently, for about the last 20 years or so, I was working mostly as a writer and editor, and my brain just naturally always seemed to go in that direction whenever there was something urgent I wanted to express. I always used to draw too, but words were my main mode of expression. Now, my brain is starting to want to go in the direction of colors, shapes and pictures, and I am enjoying it very much (although I think my blog is suffering from my unarticulateness and longwindedness more than ever!).

And finally, something related to somebody else's body:

I found out today, via an email from a friend of the friend who died earlier this month, that she did have what I would call a good death. She was a very private person so I'll leave it at that, except to say that I'm so glad and grateful to know that she was able to meet it more or less the way she wanted to.

Re-raveling

The only dream I remember from this morning: I'm knitting a large pink and white square of soft, fuzzy, cottony velour yarn. Suddenly I realize I've made a mistake a few rows back, and all the yarn has slipped off the needles. I'm trying to get the stitches back on, and the more I fuss with it, the longer the slipped stitch unravels. I pause, thinking, "I oughtta just tear the whole thing out and start over." But it's a nice, big square, and most of it is fine. It's just the part right at the top that's a mess. Suddenly, my teacher appears next to me. "It's okay if you want to go back," she says.

"But won't I learn more if I stick with it, and figure out how to fix the mistake? Wouldn't that make me a better knitter?"

"Either way," she says. "Just keep knitting."

Sigh. My dream life has always had something of a flair for the obvious. Today it's commenting on the fact that once again, finding myself in the limp, clammy grip of my usual mid-winter ennui (nevermind that winter is now officially over), I've been fantasizing (a lot) about just ditching everything and taking off to start a new life somewhere else, in some new, clean, bright-white space that has nothing in it from my past or present life. Just last night, talking on the phone with an old friend and wandering around the yard in the final glimmerings of a less than spectacular sunset, I felt myself getting all clenched up inside over the various assorted piles of broken-down cardboard boxes and other items Mr. A is saving for some unknown (to me) garden-related project ... and yearned for a clear, empty expanse of wild, unmowed grass and unpruned trees. Fresh wind. Silence.

Maybe I need to go backpacking for a few days. Or even just spend an afternoon at the beach.

I had spent a half hour or so at the creek earlier in the evening, sitting on the rocks next to the waterfall and trying to empty my head. The willows are leafing out now and there's a thin green wash of color over everything back there. I was just entering my zone when the thumping, howling and screaming began ... I always know spring has arrived when my heavy-metal speedcore neighbors start rehearsing with the garage door open again.

Anyway! Dreams of escape are comforting for a few minutes, but the reality is (and I know I'm not the first to discover this), there IS no escape, except effort and acceptance. Like the lady in the dream said – stay and do the work here, or go somewhere else and do it there. Either way, the task is the same: to create something I feel good about. In this case, a life.

Another thing I saw last night, in my wanderings around the property: that old deer skull Tater found in the creek, lying on the ground next to the neighbor's wire fence. It's bleached white now and the grass has grown up around it so that it's deeply cushioned and protected there, like a jewel on a velvety green fur pillow. If I get the new camera before summer hits and the grass turns brown, I will take a picture of it for you.

On Flossing and the Formation of New Habits

Every time I open my mouth for a new person at the dentist's office, I hear the same four things, basically in the same order:

1. "Wow. You have great teeth." (Thanks.)
2. "Did you ever wear braces?" (No.)
3. "Do you bleach them?" (No.)
4. (Upon further examination) "You know you grind your teeth at night, right?" (Yes.)

The last time I went, in January, she added something new: "You have really got to start flossing every day."

Usually I ignore this kind of advice, because I really, really hate flossing. I've always hated it, have never been in the habit of doing it, and nothing bad has ever happened before, so why buck tradition? This time, though, for some unknown reason, the words sank in. Maybe it was the poster of advanced peridontal disease, or maybe I felt challenged by the suggestion that my perfect teeth may not be as perfect as they used to be. Maybe it was the fact that I just spent so much money having my dog's teeth cleaned and repaired. Or maybe I'm just growing humbler and more susceptible to suggestion in my old age.

Whatever – I decided to take her advice. I have flossed all of my teeth at least once a day every day since that last appointment.

This morning, as she was measuring the spaces between my teeth and gums (a series of 2's and 3's, which I understand are very good marks), she actually said to me:

"Well, you have some of the nicest teeth I've seen in a long time. No matter what else I see today [I had been quizzing her on what were the worst cases of decay she's ever seen], your mouth has already totally made my day."

My teeth and gums made my dentist's day! And to think, until three months ago I was hardly ever flossing at all.

So boring ... Writing about my teeth! But – here they are. I do kinda like 'em.

Anyway, the whole point of this entry is not to brag about my teeth, which I can't really take credit for (other than having kept them mostly pretty well brushed for several decades), but to announce that I have succeeded, in a very small way, in creating a new habit: daily flossing. Not only do I no longer hate flossing, but now that I'm used to it I actually enjoy and look forward to it. It's like a nice little massage for my gums, a part of the body that I have never paid much attention to before. And that's been a great bonus, too – I've discovered a whole new little pleasure zone I didn't know existed. Mmm ... the gums!

So yeah – one small but not unimportant new positive habit has been formed through daily practice, and that makes me happy.

What I'm working on now has to do with daily exercise, which I have totally neglected for more than a couple of months now. My entire body is basically back to ground zero in that department ... all the strength I gained over the last year has been lost, utterly. So I've started over.

More on this later.

Blood on my hands

It's almost becoming like a joke – every day I wonder if this string of bizarre and/or unsettling events is finally over, and every day, it turns out that it is not.

Today I didn't have long to wait. I woke up groggy and discombobulated, went to the kitchen for a drink of water, and as I was drinking it walked over to check the mouse trap I set between the refrigerator and the wall last night. There, upside down under a snapped trap and spreadeagle in a pool of gore, was a little feller who looked an awful lot like this one here, only with the top of his skull sprung open and, you know, dead.

Every year at this time I go through a few weeks of trapping and killing the latest round of fresh new mice. I already wrote about the flaxseed-bear-eating mouse. Since then there's also been the one that ran across the kitchen floor four times in ten minutes while I sat at the table reading, and the one who over the course of an evening made off (one at a time, no doubt) with almost half a bag of beans, and the one that was hiding motionless behind a loaf of bread while I (unaware) made a sandwich, until he just couldn't stand it anymore and made a break for it – zipping across the counter and diving into the space under a burner on the stove ...

In other words, they're out of control! So far, in the last four days, I've killed three of them. I hate to do it – they're so cute, and I really do believe they have a right to live – ahimsa &c. – but there are just SO many of them, and they're so destructive and pestilence-ridden ... And yeah, it's just stuff – what does it really matter, in the cosmic scheme of things, if they chew into a brand new unopened box of cereal, or eat the rickrack off the clothespin bag my great grandmother made in the 50s.

But they also have a taste for the wires in the wall, which has caused me not just a little worry of late, especially last night, when our power went out for a few minutes, and then came back on, flickering, and I looked (on a hunch) into the space behind the kitchen cabinets where they were chewing wires last year and found that they have been at it again. Reverence for life is a value I care about, and I include my own life on the list of lives worth revering! I don't want to die in a raging inferno.

The so-called "humane" catch-and-release traps don't really solve the problem, by the way. The mice just turn around and walk right back into the house. Or if not, other mice do.

So anyway. I dropped the unhappy little corpse into the garbage, unrolled two whole squares of paper towel – the thick, expensive kind – wadded them up (to provide the maximum buffer possible between my hand and the carnage), and started mopping. And maybe this is just too much information, but the blood – for such a small animal, this one sure seemed to have produced a lot of it. The more I mopped, the more it all just seemed to spread itself around ... a gruesome and grisly start to what I hope will yet turn out to be a lovely spring day.

The freakout continues

Continuing on the theme of at least one mind-boggling thing happening each day this week (one of these days I'll back up and catch everyone up on everything that went down last weekend, which is when this unsettling string of events began), I got a frantic phone call from Mr. A this afternoon at work, in which he told me that a long-dreaded project at his work is finally about to begin.

Usually when he has to go away for work, it's like this week – he leaves on Sunday, works through the week and is back home by Friday night. This time, he's going to be gone for three months straight. Sparing the ugly details, the schedule they have planned is beyond grueling, and he's understandably extremely anxious.

As for me, I have my own stuff I'm worrying about these days. I don't like it – having worrisome situations in my life, or worrying about them. Actually, I feel like I've already used up my lifetime's allotment of worrying time – free-falling into anxiety and doomsday thinking seems to come naturally to me for some reason, and I've gotten so good at it over the years that I hardly have to make any effort anymore to just instantly descend into a seemingly bottomless pit – maybe more of a tunnel – of angst and nameless despair ...

Except! I'm trying to do things differently right now, and part of that includes not just automatically relaxing back into my same old familiar patterns when things start changing suddenly and at a pace I'm not completely comfortable with.

For example, when I was listening to Mr. A on the phone this afternoon, and he was so upset I was having a hard time understanding him, one thing I did hear him say was, "You know how I get when I have to deal with things like this."

And I thought, but didn't say, "No, I don't know how you 'get.' I know how you've gotten in the past, but that doesn't mean you have to go on that way forever."

I didn't say it because he's still on the road, and he's already upset, and my goal is to support him and help him, not to ascend the soapbox and lecture him about How To Change Your Attitude And Feel GREAT About LIFE!!!™

But seeing him in his struggle, and trying to figure out ways to help him through, is useful for me, too, when I remember to always mirror all my questions and complaints about him, back toward myself. If I feel grumpy, anxious and afraid because I think his attitude sucks, a lot of the time if I really look at it, it becomes clear that the primary reason I'm feeling that way is because my own attitude pretty much sucks. Kind of like right now.

I can really see myself, in this entry, slipping into some dramatic, catastrophic habits of thinking – the kind I'm trying to learn to bypass in order to see things more clearly as they really are.

Not to deny or disregard legitimate emotions and concerns, but the way I want to see this is simple. Not all deep, dark and convoluted. Just ... simple. I feel a list coming on:

1. He's going to be away for several months.
2. I know this does not make him happy.
3. I have some concerns about how he's going to handle his emotions.
4. As for my own emotions, I am stepping up my meek and tentative little yoga practice (which I also want to write about one of these days), making more art, gradually de-hermitizing and reconnecting with friends I haven't seen since summer, and continuing to speak as honestly as I can with him about things that are important to me.

In other news, I'm seriously considering breaking up with Blogger and moving this thing over to Wordpress. I'm sick of the neverending problems with the "new and improved" Blogger, and Wordpress has several features that I'd really like to use, including the ability to password-protect individual entries (not just the whole blog). I'm checking out the options and will leave a forwarding link if I do decide to move.

Homesickness

Sometimes when I get homesick for my family, or just sick of things in general around here, I go online and look at real estate in Utah. Setting aside for the moment the fact that the idea of actually living there again makes me want to cry ... look at this adorable little house. I lived in one almost exactly like it for five years and even though it was old and weird and had an utterly unusable kitchen, it's still my favorite house I've ever lived in. The one in this picture is available right now, in the heart of Utah County (Provo, if you must know) for a mere $137,000. The same house here, on the same amount of land (less than a quarter acre), would be in the neighborhood of half a million dollars.

Okay. Is it just me, or does Blogger basically suck these days? It's been hassling me about comments for months, and now it won't let me upload the picture, either. Anyway, trust me. The house is adorable. If anyone remembers, it's just like the last one I lived in before I moved out here.

Sigh. Travel savings accounts and spontaneous trips to ancient ruins notwithstanding, I just don't ever seem to get enough time with my family. Lately, nothing I have going on here seems to make up for that.

Last night I decided to check my email before going to bed, and found out that someone else I knew in college – totally unrelated to my friend who died over the weekend – also died over the weekend, at the same age, in the same town, of the same disease. Breast cancer.

Heavy heart.

Don't freak out or anything but I had a little skin cancer removed myself on Monday. The doctor said it's 99% probably nothing to worry about, and when she cut into it she said it actually didn't feel so much like cancer as like this other kind of skin thing, the name of which I can't remember, and that I should absolutely not worry about anything, but that all the same she was going to send it to the lab. Results will be here in a couple weeks.

So between all the death and cancer and weirdness going on at work right now, not to mention a raging yeast infection (my first in more than ten years) no doubt brought about by stress, I didn't sleep at all last night.

Basically, I'm just riding it all out. I've been through stuff like this before. And springtime always gives me a strange, vulnerable, happy-sad kind of feeling that is not my favorite way to feel ... everything's so bright and hopeful and budding, but I always have the feeling it could all still be frozen down to nothing at any moment.

Anyway. Life's kind of strange right now. Days like this I really, really, really want my own comfortable, safe, cute little house again. A home of my own. I miss that.

Returning to the source

This morning I found out that a friend who's been fighting cancer for several years has finally died. This is someone I've known for about six or seven years, although we never got together in person – we met through our blogs and collaborated on a few mail art projects over the years, including last year's infamous apron exchange. She's been so much on my mind over the last several months, ever since she emailed me last summer and let me know her cancer was back, and that this time she wasn't going to be getting better.

I'm so grateful to her for sharing some of her experience with me. I don't know very many people who will talk about death – for one thing, what is there to say, really? – and she and I didn't actually talk a lot about it, either. But just to know someone who's willing to just acknowledge the fact itself – yeah, it's real, we really do die! – without getting all metaphysical about why things happen, where we're going, or what it all "means" – to me that has meant a lot.

It seems important, while living my life, to always remember that somewhere down the line my death is already waiting for me. It makes everything seem more real, more vivid and saturated, more raw and sensitive, which is, I guess, the way I've always tried to live, even though I've often complained about how much it hurts sometimes. It reminds me to keep asking myself, "If not now, when?"

Anyway, this friendship was not about death, even when she was dying. It was about enjoying life. In a way it was a very pure friendship, because it only included a very thin, clear slice of both our lives. We shared the pleasure of making things, giving gifts, listening to music, enjoying colors, smells, textures. I'm going to miss knowing she's around, here on the planet somewhere still, making everything around her more beautiful.

The little statue up there is a Jizo - in Japan, this is the guy who protects the souls of children who have died, including miscarried or stillborn babies and even aborted fetuses, among other things. I started making little jizo statues this winter as a way of meditating on my own "lost" children, the ones I never got to have – something I've more or less come to peace with, but which still gives me a pang every once in awhile. Jizo statues are commonly seen in graveyards and also along roadsides, since they also protect travelers.

Tonight I'll make one for my friend. May you walk in peace and beauty, wherever you are.

Random frivolous thoughts

Today at lunch, while perusing a mountain of magazines on the table in our department break room, I read the following in a description of a certain perfume that shall remain nameless: " ... peach blossom blah blah blah gardenia blah blah blah tuberose. Mouth-watering patchouli adds a spiky note ..."

I don't know about you, but in my copywriting days I would have reserved the term "mouth-watering" for scents like juicy peach, vanilla, melon or even chocolate or spices – not patchouli for godsake! I love patchouli as much as the next left-leaning cultural creative, but come on. It smells more like something you'd find under that daybed in your basement (back against the wall, next to your second to last ex-boyfriends old sneaker you forgot about) than something you'd want to put in your mouth.

So I'm all indignant over that now. Mouth-watering patchouli, indeed! Bah humbug, I tell you – bah humbug! And anyway, I never wear perfume.

However! In my search for information about this perfume, one thing led to another until I was caught up in a long, tangled string of beauty product websites, which led to my realization that one of my favorite products from my 20s – Clarins Gel Nettoyant Purifiant Peaux Grasses (Purifying Cleansing Gel for Oily Skin), which smells so good and always used to make my skin feel so clean and fresh and dewy, is now no longer appropriate for me, because my skin is no longer oily. And the cleansing milk from Clarins does not smell good – does not in fact smell like anything at all – and so I'm definitely not going to be buying it. I hate unscented products! Why? Because they're never really unscented. If they don't contain ingredients that make them smell good, they usually end up smelling like stale clothes, or damp armpit, or chemicals or something. No thanks.

I was also disappointed to learn that there's no new news in my quest for the perfect lip stain, the one that really, truly STAINS the lips rather than sitting on top of them like a thin slick of plastic. Well, there is this, which has gotten some good reviews. But I hesitate to spend thirty bucks buying it online, because what if I finally get to try it on at home and don't like the feel, or the color? What I want is something that looks like I just got punched in the mouth, for several hours.

Also, I am down to my last tube of Bonne Bell's Honey Kiss Honey Latte lip gloss, and apparently it's not being made anymore. So sad. It's perfectly thick and sticky and tastes like melted caramel-latte-flavored candy. I know I have terrible taste in makeup, but I can't help it! And I know makeup is not for eating, but this stuff smells so yummy I can skip my afternoon snack break. Plus, it's always hard for me to find colors that look good on me because my own coloring is not your average ... and I really liked this color. Anyway. RIP, Honey Kiss. (Actually, I just found it for 99 cents on eBay ... but do I dare buy lipgloss on eBay? No, I do not.)

Finally, since I'm on the topic, I'd like to report that my under-eyes are finally seeming to call for a little help these days. Maybe it's just the lighting at my desk, but I'm noticing in my daily webcam self-portraits that it's getting kind of dark under there. Not baggy, exactly, but I notice that area now, and I never used to.

Maybe this weekend I'll swing by Nieman Marcus or some other department store that has nice makeup counters, and do a little testing. I'm going to the city for a two-day bookbinding workshop. I could make time for a lipstick run.

Anasazi!

One of the wonderful people who got in touch to find out if I was okay was my sister, who in the course of our conversation happened to mention that she and my brother and their spouses and kids and my parents are taking a spring break trip to Mesa Verde National Park, and invited me to join them. Yay!

I haven't even asked for the time off yet, but in my mind I'm already there. I've been totally fascinated with this place ever since I first saw pictures of it in elementary school, and later came across some wonderful descriptions in Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, which I'm excited to re-read again, now that I'm finally going to go there myself. I can't wait!

Click here to see more recent photos of this amazing place. The one at the top of this post is from Google images and was taken by Gustaf Nordenskiöld in 1891. Suddenly I'm feeling super-motivated to get around to researching and buying a great new camera (my big Christmas present from Mr. A, which I still haven't chosen yet), so I can take my own pictures on this trip.

Man, I miss the desert so much sometimes. Open spaces, huge skies, wild earth energy instead of tamed-by-humans energy, dramatic storms, all the amazing colors and smells. I've been needing a trip like this for a long time, I think.

Funny how this whole trip came about, in a way, as a result of the upsetting thing that happened last week. I was upset, I reached out (which I don't do very much, most of the time), people responded, and now I'm going to Mesa Verde.

In the Song of the Lark, the heroine spends time at the mesa as a way of re-grounding herself in her own life before going back to her work as an artist. A hundred years ago, when the book takes place, I guess people could just walk up into the old buildings and hang out there by themselves as long as they wanted to. Now that it's a national park, I'm thinking I probably won't be able to do that. I still can't wait to be there, though. Sharing that experience with my family – including eight little kids, roughly half of my nieces and nephews – I am really looking forward to this.

Small creatures

First of all, thank you to everyone who emailed me to express concern over my last, quite dramatic post. Just when I think that nobody's reading this thing anymore, I suddenly find out that a lot of people still are – and they are (you are) lovely, wonderful, caring people.

I'm okay. The thing that happened wasn't really such a huge shock or revelation, but more just an unwelcome deepening of my understanding of a situation I already knew about ... And if that's too obscure an explanation, I'll just say that I've been reminded of how important it is to me to try to stay present and aware in my own life, and that that is really the most important thing that happened. And it's not a bad thing.

Moving on: Last winter, in an attempt to keep ourselves warm at night, Mr. A and I bought a few of these furry bears that are stuffed with flax seeds, which you heat up in the microwave and snuggle up with in bed. They worked great, but over time their fur went kind of flat and they started exuding a strange (flax-like?) smell whenever we heated them, so we stopped using them. They were still cute, though, so we kept them around thinking we might give them away next time someone with a kid came to visit.

Then this morning I noticed the mice had gotten to them. They'd chewed little holes right through the fur and extracted a cup or more of seeds, which they'd hulled and eaten, leaving a huge and surprisingly neat pile of feathery chaff on top of the Yoga Journal on which the bear was sitting. So I'm back to killing mice again. Sad day. They're so cute, but so destructive. Not only of stuffed bears, but also linens, furniture, walls ... not to mention, they pee constantly wherever they go. Filthy creatures!

Also, on my way to work I accidentally killed a dove with the car. It was standing on the road with a bunch of its friends, who all flew off as the car approached. But this one last dove just kept standing there and standing there, and I kept thinking, "He's going to take off any second! They always do!" And then, he didn't. I hit the brake at the last possible moment, but it was too late. I heard a thump on the bottom of the car, and when I looked in the rear view mirror there was a big pouffy cloud of fine brown feathers trailing out from behind the car. And the poor little brown body, lying on the asphalt. Sigh. He will make a nice breakfast for some larger bird today, I imagine. And maybe there was something wrong with him already – why else didn't he fly away with his buddies?

Finally, I will report that I'm very glad the low-rise jeans thing is coming to a close soon. Yesterday at lunch I saw a supremely curvalicious young woman sitting at a cafe table, with a full three inches of crack exposed at the back of her jeans. No doubt she looked fabulous in them standing up. But man. The crack action was something I just really did not need to see.

Watershed

Something important happened today that I just can't overlook or ignore, something I'm going to have to deal with and something I don't want to deal with. I can't talk about it except to say that my heart is kind of aching and I'm afraid, and I don't like it. I know it will be okay, but I don't like where I am right now.

So all day I've been trying to not to think about it, because today of all days I really have to focus on my work. But I got to a place this afternoon where what I was doing didn't require so much concentration, and so I decided that rather than let my mind go back to obsessing about the thing I don't know how to fix, I would listen to a podcast. I opened iTunes, and there at the very top of the list of new podcasts was this one by one of my favorite people at Insight Meditation Center, Shaila Catherine – titled "Judging: Who Knows Best." You can listen to it here – it's the one dated 2/19/07.

I really need to send those people a check or something, because even though I've never been to their center, I've gained so much from listening to these talks. Today I was reminded that when I find myself feeling angry and superior in my judgments of someone else, it's usually more about me than about them. She says, "We may be thinking that we're judging someone else, but really we are establishing who we are by comparing ourselves to others. Each time we express a judgment we're declaring ourselves and asserting a particular self position in the world, and usually we're judging from a very narrow and limited perspective...."

She makes the distinction between the kind of judging that Buddhists call "wise discernment" – meaning, the ability to identify what is skillful or unskillful, wholesome or unwholesome – and the kind that falls more into the category of contempt for someone or something that doesn't conform to my idea of how things should be. When I'm judging someone this way, I'm not really trying to see or understand them – I'm only looking for confirmation that my way really is the only right way. If I make the effort to look and listen deeply I may still come to that conclusion – but the point is to be willing to stay close enough to really see and connect with compassion, not to prove that I'm right and the other person is wrong, which usually only pushes the other person away.

Anyway, I'm not so interested lately in telling everyone else how I think they should behave. I have enough to do just trying to make good decisions for myself, about what I am going to do.

Augh. Sometimes my life feels totally surreal and out of control, even though to the outside eye it might not appear that much of anything at all is happening. These are the times when I want to just throw my dog and my pillows and a couple of really nice plates and bowls in the car and run away, run away, run away. But you can't run away from your own life.

Better to run toward it.

¡Crocante, crujiente, cremosa con cacahuate (mani)!

Imagine my surprise to learn late this afternoon that my beloved Butterfinger is not only crispety, crunchety and peanut-buttery, but also passably fluent en español! O Butterfinger, thou wondrous bar of many talents ... I can't even muster the flowery language your magnificence deserves, but you know – I'm impressed. And desperately in need of a sugar rush. So thanks!

In other news, work is still insane but everything goes to press tomorrow so I'm just soldiering on toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

Also, my ingrown toenail is healing up nicely thanks to a top-secret soaking solution I invented the other night, and I have thoroughly flossed between all of my teeth every single day without fail since the last time I mentioned it.

The early rising thing is keeping me humble, however. Over the weekend I got up on time, only to re-succumb to the sheets less than an hour later, finding myself still exhausted and with nothing more compelling to do. On Monday and Tuesday I slept til 7:05ish, and yesterday I decided to cut myself some slack and changed the alarm from 6:44 to 6:50. It's only six more minutes, but somehow 6:50 seems so much more civilized a time than 6:44 ... I know it shouldn't make that much difference, but it did. I had no problem getting up at 6:50. Which kind of proves my point – that to really challenge myself, I need to be shooting for an earlier time.

This morning I made up for it by rising at 6:40, and making it in to work by 7:20 – not quite a record, but pretty damn close. I'm planning to do the same again tomorrow in hopes of either taking a well-deserved extra-long lunch, or getting out of dodge a little early for a change, or both.

On Saturday I'm going to the Zen Center again, which will give me a nice incentive to be up and about early in the a.m. And Sunday ... I need to plan something to do on Sunday. Maybe a walk. God knows I could use some exercise.

The thing that's striking me about this year's spring training is how much harder it is to add a new practice than it is to subtract an old one. I thought quitting sugar was going to be hard, but after the first few days it was easy. Altering my dreamtime, though – this is hard.

More thoughts on this later.