Meeting followup

Just wanted to follow up on the meeting by taking note that I was one of only a few folks in attendance who are NOT some kind of health worker, and it was disturbing and validating all at the same time to be in a room with upwards of 60 health care professionals who all seem to passionately believe that there is almost nothing worth salvaging in our current system. Among other things we discussed working with the system as it exists, vs. incremental reform, vs. sweeping and immediate reform, and almost everybody agreed that the last option would be by far the best, because the situation really has reached crisis proportions and the longer we wait to fix it, the more it is likely to cost in both dollars and human suffering. In other words, no big surprises and a lot of preaching to the choir.

It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of these meetings. Supposedly the organizers will report our input and stories back to Obama's Transition Team, which will take it all into consideration when they decide on next steps. I'm curious to see what they come up with.

At the meeting I talked with a couple of friends who've started a local Community Action Network, which is a continuation of the movement started during the Obama for America Campaign. I like the idea of working on a small scale and at the local level, and am going to meet with them after the new year to talk about an idea I've had for a small community project having to do with getting the city and the visitor industry to underwrite the distribution of bike lights to people who don't have them, especially restaurant and hotel workers riding home late at night sans lighting – very dangerous. These are shit jobs at high-end tourist spots that don't pay their people enough to have cars; it seems like the least they can do is help them make their bikes a little safer.

Speaking of riding home late at night – my ride home after that meeting tonight was one of the most delightful rides I've taken in awhile. It was foggy all day, and by the time the sun was gone the fog was so heavy and low you could hardly see across the street. There were NO cars on the roads and my lights made a beautiful silver tunnel in the blackness. There was fog dripping off my eyelashes, fog dripping off my fingers, fog dripping off the back of my helmet .... it was so cool and fresh and delicious I just wanted to ride and ride and ride all night long.

Skunk envy

Last night on my way home I rode through a potent cloud of skunk odor that lasted about a quarter mile, and found myself overwhelmed with compassion for the poor creature who'd released it into the world. It was either dead (hit by a car, most likely) or felt so threatened that it had lifted its stripey little tail and blasted someone. I know how it feels to be that anxious!

I myself was on my way to dinner, and hungry. So I imagined the skunk out and about, looking for its dinner – insects, larvae, frogs, mice, or maybe a nice little plate of cat food left out on someone's back step. Suddenly, an obstacle appears. It could have been a curious dog, or a man with a flashlight, or a kid in a pickup truck who thought it would be funny to run a hungry little skunk off the road. The skunk tries to back off, escape, get away ... and is unable to.

Somehow I don't find this moment half so poignant when it's my curious dog who's backed the skunk into a corner, and I spend the next six months smelling skunk again every time the dog gets wet. But last night for some reason, my heart kind of went out to the little guy.

I also spent some time imagining what it might be like to have Skunk Power myself – the ability to instantly make people want to get as far away from me as possible. I can see how that could come in pretty darn handy at certain times.

In other news, I'm dipping a toe back into town life tonight by attending a community meeting on health care. It's being held at the request of the Obama-Biden Transition team and is number three on the agenda – right after "revitalizing the economy" and "ending the war in Iraq," and ahead of "protecting America" and "renewing American global leadership." This last item I have mixed feelings about ... but I guess you've gotta give the capitalists something to chew on. Personally, I don't care so much about leadership – why do we always have to be ahead of everyone else? My needs are small, and as long as they're being met, I'd rather have the surplus go to increasing social justice and economic security for everyone on the planet. This is partly altruistic and partly pure self-interest on my part, because I believe (as I've said before) that as long as there are people with unmet needs, there's going to be more violence and conflict in the world, not less. All the way from shoplifting, burglaries and muggings to full-scale global war without end.

Anyway, health care is huge for me right now and I'd love to contribute to figuring out something that's going to work better than the for-profit system we have now. My confidence that my job will continue is not strong, and if the company goes under I won't even be able to get COBRA benefits – those are only for people who are laid off from companies that still exist.

Right now I'm paying about $300 a month out of pocket for insurance that doesn't cover ANYTHING unless there's some kind of catastrophic event that shoots my health care cost to over $6100 in a calendar year ($3600 + a $2500 deductible). Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth it to pay that $3600 a year – but just a few days in a hospital could easily cost more than $6100, and I guess that's why they call it "insurance." It's like a huge lottery where everybody pays and only a few people can win. And you only win if something really crappy happens to you. Nice system!

I've talked about all this before. Tonight, my goal is to find some friends to sit with, and meet some new people, and speak up about my own experiences with the health care system and hopefully learn from what other people have to say. That should be pretty easy to accomplish, eh?

Strange commerce

In my wanderings on the web today I found this site where you can buy (and sell!) human hair. This long red braid is one offering; most of the others show the hair actually still attached to the person who's growing it, along with a description, and the terms and conditions of the sale.

I've read that the best wigs are made from human hair, but I guess I always thought that wigmakers would find the hair on their own ... On this site though, apparently anyone who wants to bid can buy the hair. And once you buy it, presumably you can do whatever you want to do with it.

Somehow I think it would really creep me out to know that someone out there in the world was walking around wearing a big hank of my hair. Hair just seems so personal, and private in a way. I don't even like leaving my hair on the floor of the salon when I go in for a trim.

One of my ongoing art projects has to do with hair as a symbol of personal power and change over time ... I've been archiving my own hair from washings and cuttings for going on five years now and that's all I want to say about it at the moment.

The new header photo is one I took standing at the end of my driveway this afternoon, just as it was starting to get dark. I love the sunsets we get around here in winter.

Interesting reading

Can't remember exactly where I ran across this, but I've been reading this site by a fellow named Dmitry who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and wrote about the experience (and what Americans can learn from it) in 2006. This little passage made me think of what I wrote earlier today:

If the economy, and your place within it, is really important to you, you will be really hurt when it goes away. You can cultivate an attitude of studied indifference, but it has to be more than just a conceit. You have to develop the lifestyle and the habits and the physical stamina to back it up. It takes a lot of creativity and effort to put together a fulfilling existence on the margins of society. After the collapse, these margins may turn out to be some of the best places to live.

This is a pretty good description of the way I've been trying to design my life for about the last eight years: trying to put together a fulfilling existence on the margins of society. It's such a relief to hear it put into words like that, and to realize, upon thinking of it in those terms, that the reasons I've sort of withdrawn from "society" still feel right to me. My indifference to certain social conventions is not just a conceit, and I really have developed the lifestyle, habits and physical stamina to live outside the mainstream in some powerful though not always very visible ways. It does take a lot of creativity and effort. Also courage and sacrifice.

"After the collapse, these margins may turn out to be some of the best places to live." In fact, these are ALREADY some of the best places to live. I'm not saying I want to be a subsistence farmer or give up my iPod (or my glucometer). But I'm glad I'm already comfortable and competent at living a fairly low-impact life. A lot of people may soon be needing to learn to live this way, whether they want to or not.

So yeah. Mostly I still feel pretty good about the choices I've made. I'm not immune to the terror tactics being used by the media though, or to the knowledge that to a lot of people the way I live might seem kind of ... disappointing. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that it's disappointing to me too, in my weaker moments. But when it comes right down to it I've just never had the inclination to spend a lot of time or money to get things that need to be taken care of, owned, washed, dried, stored, repaired, worried over, paid taxes on, etc. etc. I love the idea of living in a gorgeous mansion like the one that's being built on a $2M oak-studded lot just down our road, but the reality is, being responsible for a house like that would make me sick with anxiety and stress. The life I have, somewhat on the margins, is a life I'm generally pretty OK with, at least in terms of material possessions and lack thereof. I like to travel light.

The main thing I want to change in my life right now is to bring more people into it. There have been times in the past when I've had a lot more friends, felt much more connected with neighbors and community. I want to continue moving back in that direction again.

A very bikey Christmas

Bike to Work Pants from Cordarounds on Vimeo.

I ought to also mention that Mr. A and I created the Yule-timate Celebration of the Bike this Christmas by giving each other mostly bike-related gifts. The product in the video above was not one of them, but it's a cool idea, no? Work-ready pants with built-in reflective technology! Maybe next year.

It feels good to be all stocked up on lights, tubes, lube, chain, tools and other various bike-related gear. The best thing, or at least the most immediately useful thing, was a pair of warm wind-resistant cycling gloves, to replace the pair I lost one of sometime over the summer. The coldest weather I've ridden in here was only in the low 40s, but that's still pretty cold – and the regular gloves I wear the rest of the time (for example, while working in my freezing cold office) just don't cut it when the wind is blowing freezing rain onto my hands.

We've also been planning ahead for next summer's garden, first and foremost by reading this book titled, most appropriately, "Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times." The book's main point is that the high-fertility, high-intensity small-space gardening that has become so popular over the last few decades is only really possible when both water and soil amendments are cheap and abundant, which they are fast on their way to not being anymore, what with peak oil, climate change, and the global economic crisis. For people who are not hobbyists but hungry folks in need of real food, he recommends a return to climate-specific plants grown by older methods that require much less water and fussing with soil, and much more room – the idea being that when plants have plenty of space to develop the root systems they need, they can more consistently withstand a wider range of stresses and yield vastly more nutritious food.

His ideas mostly make a lot of sense to me, and we'll be adapting them as best we can on our hard-scrabble scrap of a garden, which is basically a 3-foot-deep box backhoed out of the boulder-choked alluvium that is our lot, and filled with soil and compost from the building materials yard. The sad fact is that even though we have plenty of space (about three acres), we have very little actual soil, and we'll probably never be able to have the kind of garden here that we both would like to grow. I was thinking today that rather than growing vegetables we might be better off fencing off part of the back field and putting a few goats back there, or sheep ... but meat is still relatively cheap, and livestock are more work than I really want to commit to right now. At most I'm still thinking about getting a few chickens again, sometime this spring.

I'm also starting to casually peruse the offerings of the various colleges and universities within a reasonable distance of home, with the half-formed thought that this might be a good year to finally get back to school and finish my master's, or start a new one, or complete some kind of certification for something. What that might be I still don't know. Living in this very small town, and feeling more or less committed to staying here, and to trying to make a living here rather than commuting – this has severely limited my options, to say the least. To the point where I'm sort of starting to think maybe I ought to at least consider changing my mind about one or more of those prerequisites.

Because really, what am I gonna do for a living in a town like this? Especially given the additional requirements that I must work for a company that offers health insurance (since I am excluded from being able to buy my own as a self-employed person, even if I could afford to), AND that I must also avoid at all costs any endeavor that requires networking or work-related socializing of any kind? That last requirement, I suppose, I will need to ease up on, though it throws me into a sweat just to think of it.

Maybe all I need is a good girdle, or a really beautiful suit. Some kind of business-person disguise that I can put on and pretend to be the kind of person who loves to mix & mingle & talk shop with aftershave-scented acquaintances.

But back to the idea of school. There must be something I could do in this town that would be more interesting and satisfying than what I'm doing right now. Something that would allow the use of my mind, and that would not require that I become a totally different person – though I'm willing to work outside my comfort zone, within reason, understanding that the zone will tend to expand as I spend more time at its edges.

I could also consider working outside the valley again, though that would require me to buy and maintain a car, which means the new job would have to offer more than just a little bit more money than I'm making now. Public transit is not really an option; I looked up the route to a job I was considering in a town just ten miles from here, and found it would take me two hours and a four-mile bike ride each way just to get from my house to the office – a trip that takes about 20 minutes in a car. No wonder nobody uses the bus around here.

Nobody's said anything about hours being cut again at my main job, but the first few months after Christmas are historically the slowest of the whole year, and this has already been the worst year in the 130-year life of the company. I'm thinking I need to be ready to hit the ground running if necessary, or at least have the beginnings of some kind of plan.

One of these days I also need to figure out if there's any way to keep what's left of my investments from disappearing down the drain along with the rest of the sinking economy. Must call broker ....

Just rambling now.

Still diabetic!

Once again the Christmas miracle failed to occur. I am still diabetic.

We spent the day at Mr. A's sister's yesterday with all his family. Throughout the day I stayed pretty aware of what I was eating, but toward the end of the afternoon the pies appeared, and that was when I sort of decided, well, it's Christmas, and I know for a fact that these pies are delicious, and one day of higher blood sugars is not going to kill me. So I went ahead and had a whole slice of pumpkin, and several bites of an amazing cinnamon apple pie that his mother had made.

Eighty minutes later, back at home, I decided to test, just to see. 153. Not great, but not terrible. I kept thinking of something I had read, about how even a non-diabetic person's blood glucose will spike fairly high after eating a lot of carbohydrate – it can go as high as the 180s – and that an occasional high number is not necessarily anything to freak out about.

So it occurred to me, since Mr. A had been eating pie at the same time as I was eating it, and had eaten even more of it than I had, that it would be interesting to test his blood sugar and see how high he had gone. Somehow I was expecting that he would also test at 153, and all my pie-eating would be vindicated – because if a non-diabetic person tests the same as me after eating a bunch of pie, then I must be not really all that bad off.

Of course he did not test 153. He tested normal. Which is about what I should have expected for a non-diabetic person – he would have spiked at the same time as me, 40 minutes or so earlier, and then his pancreas would kick out a bunch of insulin and he would very quickly be brought back down to a safe level. Whereas with me, either my pancreas isn't able to blast that much insulin anymore, or it's blasting away and my body's not able to respond to it anymore. Or some combination of the two.

So blah. I should emphasize again that 153 isn't a really dangerous high, and I'm not beating myself up over eating dessert or letting my glucose go over 120 or anything else. But comparing my 90-minute levels with Mr. A's was kind of a wakeup call, a reminder: I really am diabetic, even on Christmas, and every day, and it's okay to take a day off on occasion but over the long haul I really cannot afford to slack off on carb-counting or nutrition or portion size or exercise or anything else.

What's the big deal, really? Right now, probably it is no big deal. But the damage is cumulative. A couple of weeks ago a diabetic friend told me she'd been googling images of "diabetic feet" and those images really shocked her into getting back on track. I took a look, and I've been haunted by those images ever since. (A warning – if you decide to look, be prepared. These pictures are gruesome and disturbing and not easy to forget.)

So anyway. Back in the saddle.

Bah humbug, herr governator

Remember last spring when I quit my job to work for a nonprofit, and then freaked out with anxiety and changed my mind and got my job back?

Turns out that was a good call. I just got a press release announcing that basically the entire staff of that organization has been laid off. The state department of finance has just ordered all work funded by state bonds to stop immediately – in fact, we've been told they're even withholding payment on some work that's already been completed, pending resolution of the budget crisis.

I've been working between 5 and 20 hours a week for that organization since about April, and it's not much money but I've been glad for any opportunity to supplement my meager income after my hours here got cut in January. Now I've been told not to do any billable work for them until further notice.

Someone I know who is in the know about such things said it's probably not legal for the state to withhold or redirect bond funds like this for various boring technical reasons I won't go into here ... but that's not much help right now. Five hours a week more or less is not going to make much difference to me, but some of my co-workers over there are really going to be slammed.

Not that I feel very secure in my main job, either. But at least, for now, I still have a job to go to.

Times like this I am grateful that I've made an effort to cultivate an open and curious mind, even when I don't necessarily like what's going on. Right now I feel sort of scared and nauseous, and also kind of interested to see what all is really going to happen between now and the day the second Great Depression is pronounced officially Over.

Sick-o-meter

You know those days when you think you might be about to come down with something, but you can't quite tell? You feel sort of tired, but maybe that was just because you stayed up too late the night before. Or maybe had a little too much cheese – that could be why your head feels a little stuffy. Should you stay home from work and try to nip it in the bud? Or is there really anything the matter at all?

If you're diabetic, there's an easy way to answer this question. Test. I've found that if I'm starting to get sick, my blood glucose first thing in the morning (FBG, or fasting blood glucose – typically the lowest number of the day for me) will be as much as 30 points higher than usual. That's how I knew on Monday that I really was starting a cold, and was able to call in sick with a clear conscience.

When I was growing up we did not stay home from school unless we were practically on death's door, and I've always retained the fear of being seen as a faker if I claim to be too sick to go to work. It's weirdly gratifying to be able to "prove" that I really am fighting an infection. And taking the day off to sleep and drink tea and sleep some more made all the difference. Yesterday and today I forced myself to stay in bed all morning as well, since I don't have to work until the afternoon, and that has helped a lot too. A cold of the type that usually takes about a week to work its way out of my system is already about finished, and today I feel well enough to ride my bike to work (the sun is out, it's only three miles, and I may call Mr. A for a ride home depending on how I feel by the end of the day).

In other news, we finally replaced the faulty big front burner on the stove, and I keep burning things on it. I had gotten used to the old one, which took forever to heat up and never really did get as hot as it was supposed to. Someday I would love to replace the whole stove with one that runs on propane – which is the next best thing to gas, if you live someplace where gas is not available, like we do. I hate, hate cooking on an electric stove. This one is not original to the house but it's from the same era, and the main thing I do like about it is its color – dark avocado green. I don't think they make them that color anymore, unfortunately.

The first house I lived in out here was way out in the mountains and it didn't have a furnace or gas lines – the heat was a big wood stove, and we cooked on propane. I loved it. This house does have baseboard heaters, which smell and are inefficient ... so I've been loving the wood stove we installed at the end of the summer. Chopping and hauling wood is not as romantic as some people might try to describe it, but it is kind of a satisfying routine and wood heat is just the best. I don't know why 70 degrees of electric heat should feel different from 70 degrees of wood heat, but it does – maybe it's the humidity? With wood, the heat seems to penetrate my body more. It radiates off everything – the fireplace bricks, the furniture, the walls, everything.

The one thing I had forgotten about is the dust. Heating solely with wood produces a lot of ash that invisibly filters into the air every time you open the stove. Dusting is one of my least favorite household chores, and I'm finding I have to do it a lot more often now than I did before – twice a day right around the stove, and at least once a day in the rest of the room. I'm wondering if there might be some kind of air filter that could help keep the air a little cleaner; must look into that.

New neighbors + random photos

Every September our neighbor down the road gets four new red and white steers, and every summer, at the end of August or so, they disappear. We're pretty sure we know what happens to them.

This year the poor creatures were whisked away on schedule – there one day, gone the next, the gate left open on an empty field for more than two weeks – but their replacements did not appear until just before Thanksgiving. Then one day, there they were.



He got five this year instead of four, and he went with solid colors for a change – four reds and a black. They're very young and curious, and wasted no time getting the hell away from me as soon as they realized I was not going to give them anything to eat. I think it was the bike that aroused their suspicion ...



In other baby animal news, Mr. A's niece has a new puppy who's just about as cute as they get.



There's also this – a rubber monster hand we found in the parking lot on the way into a restaurant the other night. Note the partially worn off strips of creepy black fur:



And finally, here's a picture of two ladies dressed in identical outfits that I snapped a couple of months ago intending to post it for Fashion Friday, back before I'd accepted the fact that although this valley I call home may hold many charms an abundance of fabulous fashion photo ops is not one of them. Enjoy!

I've gotta head full of ideas /they're driving me inane

Yes, inane!

1. Las Vegas just continues to get weirder and weirder. Another press check trip found me late last night squashed into the back of a cab with a driver who whispered nonstop into his headset in a language I did not understand, while alternately flooring the gas and slamming on the brakes every 15 seconds or so for the entire 20-minute ride to the hotel. Upon checking in I found out that the press check was not scheduled for 9 or 10 a.m. as usual, but "possibly as early as 4, more likely by 6." Well. I threw my stuff on the bed and went back downstairs, out across the parking lot in the icy wind, and into the restaurant – only to be greeted by a cloud of cigarette smoke and a very large sign that read, "Now Smoker Friendly Bar!" And in smaller print: "Dining Room Closed. Sorry For Any Inconveniece" (sic). I ordered up Chinese to my room (it was good) and slept fairly well, waking at 3:45 in anticipation of a phone call to let me know my cab would be arriving soon ... then fell back asleep for awhile ... and to cut to the chase, they ended up not needing me until 8. A nice change of plans, though I sure wish I could have known that before I went to bed. We were done by noon, which left me 7.5 more hours before my return flight. Luckily I was able to get on an earlier flight, on which I did something I've never done before – fell asleep in my seat. I woke up two hours later with the vague feeling we were probably just about back home again, but when I looked out the window we were still sitting on the runway in Las Vegas and it was not two hours later, but only about 10 minutes later. All in all, a delightful trip, and I'm not being facetious – despite the weirdness this time around and all the last-minute changes, I still mostly enjoy these trips. And the book looks good too – always a plus.

2. Remember the other day when I was contemplating the nature of violence and aggression? I guess it was only a matter of time before I started seeing some new angles. The first came in the form of an old Andy Griffith show I happened across while flipping channels, in which Barney Fife finds his relationship threatened by a big goofy guy who looks suspiciously like the Skipper from Gilligan's Island ....

The big lunk of a farmer has his heart set on Barney's Thelma Lou, and the situation quickly escalates until only Andy's wisdom and humor are able to prevent it from turning into a gruesome bloodbath. An interesting side note: Throughout the episode, the Alan Hale character repeatedly addresses Barney as "little buddy" – a full TWO YEARS before the debut of Gilligan's Island in 1964. Props to A.H. for upgrading from a totally ridiculous character to one with at least a little authority – not to mention his own boat.


3. The conflict between Barney and The Farmer had set the stage for an even deeper look at violence – do you recognize this scene? I'd always thought the movie was called "Rambo," but it isn't – it's "First Blood." It's the kind of movie I usually make a point of avoiding, but the beautiful misty forest scenery drew me in before I realized what I was watching, and then I was curious to see what would happen next. I can see why it ended up such a blockbuster. It has something for everyone – conservatives can feel good about the fact that the protagonist is a patriot and a war hero, lefties can love to hate the evil "establishment" that hunts him down and mistreats him so egregiously, plus there are car chases, explosions, and of course tons of guns and gore. I won't be adding it to my "favorite films" list but I guess it's good to know what all the fuss has been about all these years.

4. Speaking of gore, I went out to check on the mouse traps in the garage just now and discovered something I had not known before – mice are cannibals. The first trap I picked up was behind the dryer and looked to have been sprung and left empty except for a stringy gray mass of dryer lint which turned out to be a little mousie spinal column with a chewed up pelt and a couple of ears still attached, and one hand. Mr. A requested that I not take a picture of the remains, and upon some reflection, I decided to comply. The light's not all that great out there anyway.

P.S. Next Morning: That cab driver reminded me of something Gertrude Stein wrote about living and writing in France, where she was always surrounded only by the sound of a language other than English – how writing in English was easier without the distraction of hearing it spoken all around her all the time. I can see how that would work; it was interesting to note how quickly I was able to tune out that cab driver's voice once I realized I couldn't understand what he was saying.

And now: must go chase down loose neighbor dog Mr. A just saw running past the windows.

Facebook freakout

For about the last year or so various friends have been trying to get me to join Facebook, and until today I always declined. It's not that I don't want to keep in touch with friends, or make new ones, or even be visible online – obviously! It's just the whole idea of networking that makes me panic. I had this fear that if I put up a profile on Facebook, suddenly my entire life would become visible to untold millions of people – not in a semi-anonymous way, like with this blog, but with my actual name involved, and possibly even a picture of me. It is, after all, called FACE book.

But today for some reason, maybe because my dear brother asked me, I finally decided, what the heck. I'll do it. So I did.

As soon as my registration was complete I was suddenly able to see all kinds of people I've known over the years who are also on Facebook – even some I've known as far back as first grade. There they were. Their names, faces, credentials, cities of residence ... and that's where the trouble began.

Even though I hadn't done much in the way of filling in a profile, and hadn't made it public, I was quickly and violently overwhelmed with panic – heart pounding, body shaking, nausea, to the point where I had to go hide in the bathroom and cry for about 10 minutes. Just the thought that some of these people might see my name online, and possibly want to get in touch, totally freaked me out. Nevermind the fact that I might actually love hearing from a lot of them, and might even contact them myself at some point – this was about being SEEN.

A long hard bike ride home followed by a long hard dog walk and a long hot bath calmed me down to the point where now I'm back to feeling kind of excited about possibly getting back in touch with a lot of these folks. I'm also thinking again about finding a therapist to work with in the coming year, and also considering starting some anti-anxiety meds again. What this little episode has really highlighted for me is the extent to which my social anxiety has kept me from staying connected with people, making new connections, taking advantage of opportunities, and enjoying certain things in life that I think would be good for me if I weren't too panicked to do them.

I've always had anxiety but I think it's gotten a lot more pronounced since I moved here 15 years ago and started living out away from town – away from people. It makes sense that a person with this kind of nervous system would naturally gravitate toward a life with trees and plants and creeks and animals rather than people ... The peace and safety I feel when I'm alone with my dogs, walking in the hills or just puttering around the house ... that's real, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. I've realized recently that one of the reasons I'm with Mr. A is because he's in some ways even more of a social hermit than I am, and so he never pressures me (much) to go out and party or socialize outside my comfort zone. Living with him, I could go weeks and weeks and never see or talk to anyone but him and the people I work with. It's comfortable. But it's sometimes kind of lonely and surreal. And it makes my anxiety worse when it does come.

This networking thing ... I have got to figure out how to do better with this. I love my quiet life, but in its better moments my mind really wants more, or at least more options. The only real security in the world is in knowing how to stabilize your own mind. Living in community with other people is probably the best practice there is for learning how to do that ... and I'm not getting as much practice as I could, living like this.

The very fact that I do have this kind of panic reaction is also embarrassing. I know it isn't normal, and it makes people uncomfortable when they realize how "upset" I am for no apparent reason. I've gotten so good at handling it that usually nobody even realizes I'm freaking out inside. Although it never lasts long, anyway.

Facebook I guess is a way to connect with people from a distance, and for me that's probably a pretty good place to start. That panic attack was a real surprise though. It's been awhile since I've had such a strong fear reaction to something that was supposed to be fun. A couple of things I should note – this kind of thing has happened to me before, and I know it passes quickly (usually as soon as I start talking to someone), so I've learned to just hang in there through the sweaty part until my adrenaline calms down and then I'm fine. So it's not like I'm a total social recluse – just that I have a strong tendency to want to be. Also, meeting new people or speaking to people I don't know doesn't bother me at all – this panic only happens with people I already know, who I haven't seen in awhile, and is directly related to how much I think they like me. I have this dread of being judged, held in contempt, disapproved of, compared to my former self and/or what they/I thought my potential was ... and found to be dismally lacking.

Of course, people are welcome to think whatever they want! I'm rational enough to see that even if they do think I'm a total loser, which I'm not, it really doesn't matter.

Getting back to the point though – for years this terror of being seen has kept me paralyzed and invisible, and I just got a little more clear today that it's time to step up my efforts to Get Over It.

So thanks, B. I think this Facebook thing will be good for me.

Watching the octopus breathe

Back before this watershed incident occurred – a day before, a whole night before – a bunch of us went down to the beach for one of the lowest tides in recent memory, to look at tidepool creatures in the middle of the night. Among other wonders we saw this little red octopus, rumored to be venomous, that my amazing friend M, the beach naturalist, photographed while several of us held the lights just so. The creature is small – about the size of my hand. The tide was still going out when we found it, and it was already beached on the sand, which means it couldn't breathe, or swim, or do anything but lie there waiting to die.

It didn't die though. My friend found it (a different friend – the one who really needed to find it), and it was scooped up ever so gently on a shell full of sand, and moved into some water where we could take a closer look. After awhile we walked it out to deeper water at the edge of the tide, and let it go. I hope it's still alive and breathing, loving every day of its little red octopus life.

Mindfully watching my own breath is mainly what I do for meditation practice, and it was beautiful to breathe with this octopus and watch our breath together. Its body looked like a little red heart beating. It would expand as it inhaled the ocean, and then on the exhale a little clear burble, like a miniature drinking fountain, swelled up on the surface of the sea. The water was totally clear. I could see every grain of sand.

Sometimes just to breathe is enough. Sometimes, you do get saved.

New smell

I did something last week I've never done before – I bought something based on a sample that arrived in a package with something else I bought online. It was in one of those little tiny glass vials with the name of the stuff stuck on with a little white laser-printed label, nothing special, but I became obsessed with it after I spilled it on my sweater sleeve – obsessed to the point I kept catching myself sniffing my sleeve, and wearing the same sweater two or three days in a row, and finally realized I was putting off dropping that sweater into the laundry because I did not want to lose that yummy sweet caramelly-vanilla smell. Like cotton candy in a bottle.

And hey, it's funny, but I just this moment realized what this is really about – it's the smell of my old beloved Diet Pepsi Jazz! THAT's why it seemed so familiar ... that's why I was instantly hooked! Wow.

Anyway, the big bottle arrived today along with a few more goodies, and I know it's embarrassing to like the kind of perfume a 12-year-old girl would think is just delicious, but, well, I do like it. It IS delicious! And if it keeps me from going crazy over all the cookies, cakes, candy, fruit, bread and other carby comfort foods over the holidays, that will be twenty bucks well spent.

In other news, I've been thinking about the nature of aggression and finding it kind of disturbing to see how easily I can be antagonized when I feel threatened. Tonight on my way home from work I crossed lanes in light traffic – seriously, with about a half a block before the next car was due to pass me, and I did have all my lights on and signaled and everything, and there was plenty of room – when this lady zoomed in close as she drove by and leaned on her car horn and about scared the living @$#*& out of me.

I'm well aware that there are people out there who think bicycles do not belong on the road. Those people don't care that I'm legally entitled to take a full lane if I need to – not that I ever do – or how considerate I am of other vehicles, or how persnickety I am about following every single rule of the road down to the letter, even when nobody's watching – they think the road belongs to cars, and cars only, and they will go out of their way every time to make sure nobody feels safe on the road unless they're in their own private metal, glass and plastic cage (and maybe not even then).

After tonight's incident I had about 20 minutes to ride before I got home, so I spent that time pedaling as fast and hard as I could – to use up the adrenaline – and thinking angry, violent thoughts that were so alarming I don't even want to write them down here. I would never do the things I was thinking about doing, but I decided to let my thoughts do their own thing in that direction for awhile and see where they ended up.

Not surprisingly, the anger dissipated pretty fast and the thought of actually making contact with a soft, warm human body – with bat or boot or brick – sort of made me nauseous. Hard to imagine how people might feel who have actually done that kind of thing, physically brutalized another person ... I can see how it would be a total rush in that moment. But also, a total horror show just as soon as the stress chemicals settled down again.

My personal experience with physical violence has been so minimal I hardly know how to even talk about it. I don't even like to think about it. For people all over the world though it's a reality they live with every day. The news is full of it – one reason I don't watch the news anymore.

Maybe there isn't any reason to think about violence and aggression. Except that ... I find myself really wanting to avoid it. I hate it. I have gone to great lengths to avoid conflict in my life, more than most people, I think. It's kind of held me back, in some ways. Not that I want to go looking for violence and conflict – but I'd like to feel more capable of dealing with them when they come up. Because those experiences are part of life. They are going to come up. Maybe if I could learn how to stay calm, think clearly and hold my center in the face of aggression, instead of running away – or returning it – I might be able to get more of what I want out of life.

It makes me think of that story of the old monk who was the last person left in the village after everyone else had fled, knowing that a brutal army was on its way into town. When the general and his minions arrived, they found the monk still sitting where he'd been sitting all day, meditating peacefully. "What are you still doing here?" the general roared, holding his sword to the monk's neck. "Don't you know I'm the kind of man who could run you through with this sword without blinking an eye?!"

"And I'm the kind of a man who could let you run me through with a sword, without blinking an eye," said the monk.

Just something I've been thinking about.

All is well

I don't know what I was clicking when I ran across this, but I loved it, and wanted to share.

Still one of my favorite songs ever.

So totally not a badass

This whole thing with the boots has me a little unnerved. Because why am I obsessing over the perfect pair of badass black leather biker boots, when I am neither badass nor a biker? And let's not forget the fact that I promised myself to stop wearing black this year – it's too harsh for someone with my coloring, someone who before you know it is not even going to be a redhead anymore but some kind of pale apricot-color or even white-haired human. A person like me has no business wearing black leather.

Maybe that's why I want it, though. I'm trying to perk myself up by disguising myself as some version of a strong, confident sort of edgey type person. Not that that's a completely unapplicaple description ....

Anyway, it's getting kind of ridiculous. Over the weekend I finally found my old black Frankenstein boots, and they're still wearable and I still like them, so I'm attempting one more iteration of the biker boots and if those don't work, then I'm going to suspend the search for the rest of this winter and move on to other thoughts.

Changing topics, but not really: The other night while trying to make myself fall asleep I watched a documentary about all these so-called "goth" folks who get together to take a cruise from New Jersey to Bermuda and back. I found it pretty depressing for a number of reasons, not least of which was – if your raison d'être is to skulk around in the darkness all the time, why in the world would you take yourself on a cruise to Bermuda? Also, almost without exception the people interviewed for the film seemed kind of aggressive and emotionally stunted, ridiculing the "norms" (their name for the non-goth people who were on the same ship) and going to great lengths to shock them, and then making fun of them when they were shocked, and acting self-righteous and offended at being "judged".... Basically challenging people to react, and then condemning them when they did.

I know not everyone who identifies as goth acts like that, and maybe it's just that the people they chose to interview were the ones who stood out the most, or who came forward wanting to be in the spotlight. And not everyone in the film was that way. Mainly I think it disturbed me because something about it reminded me, uncomfortably, of myself, and how wrapped up in image I get sometimes. I don't think I'm aggressive with people like that, but I definitely spend more time than I would like to, thinking about how I'm perceived and judged by others. It's ego-attachment, and it doesn't make me happy. With practice I'm getting better at staying open when I believe I'm being judged. But it doesn't come easy. I feel aggressive too, when I think I'm under attack. Unpleasant to see how ugly that makes people.

Changing topics again, but not really (again): My friend who assaulted my other friend has taken down his blog, and today when I was checking to see if he'd put it back up I found a notice saying that he's changing blogging services, and anyone who wants to know his new address should email him. I do want to know the new address, but I don't want to ask him for it. Surely I'm not as stunned and saddened as he probably is, but I'm still feeling pretty shocked at the loss of this friend, and at what I've learned about him in the aftermath.

In particular I keep thinking back to a time last summer when I saw him, and had a really nice visit, and then a week or so later he asked if he'd done anything during our visit that had made me uncomfortable, and I told him no. And it was true, he hadn't. I also told him if he ever did make me uncomfortable, I would tell him, and I truly meant it. But then when it came down to the night of that party, I just sat there and watched him running increasingly amok, and said nothing. Did nothing. At one point I felt myself getting so angry I started to stand up to leave the room, but then I realized that that would be sort of akin to making a scene or a statement, and I didn't want to draw undue attention to myself, so I decided to keep my space and just sort of chill, sit with the energy, experience it ....

I'm not saying what he did later that night was in any way my fault. But I do feel I kind of let him down by not following through with my promise to tell him if I felt he was getting out of line. If he'd been out of line with me, I would have, most definitely – and I'm sure he knew that, and that's why he never did get out of line with me. It didn't occur to me until later that if I'd been a little more self-aware in that moment, and a little less preoccupied with trying to imagine what everyone else might have thought of me, I might have been able to intervene and connect with him in a healthy, truthful, loving way and the night might have turned out differently.

Nevermind that (as Mr. A has often reminded me) most people don't want to be "helped" like that. Most people, if you try to butt in uninvited, will tell you to f* off and mind your own effing business.

Anyway. Still processing. The main lesson I've learned so far is one I already know, and just keep learning again and again – or trying to learn – and that is, never be afraid to simply speak the truth. Tell the truth, and be kind. My top two (only two) Rules To Live By. I think I even said that to him just a few days before the party ... can't remember how it came up, but I never pass up an opportunity to proselytize. Practicing what I preach, however ... that's the tricky part. I do try.

Except in this case. In this case, I missed a powerful opportunity to do both of those things.

Again: I'm not in any way taking on responsibility for any actions that were not my own. Just thinking about what my actions and inaction contributed to the situation.

And wondering what is the most kind, truthful and ... I don't know, useful? thing to do next.

P.S. I feel like I have to acknowledge that it could appear passive-aggressive to write about a person I know might read what I'm writing, when I'm unwilling to actually talk with the person directly. Blogging is a strange way to try to sort out your feelings ... the possibility of using it to facilitate some kind of dysfunctional sideways communication about things that are too awkward to address directly ... I suppose that's always there. That's really not what I'm trying to do though. My only purpose in writing here is to create a record of how I feel and what I think Right Now. Simple as that.