“It has scenes of graphic, pointless violence”

Hmmm… I really liked Cache, but I think I’ll give this one  a miss. But I am glad I read all the way to the end for that priceless summation by AO Scott.

I’m totally confused for a moment

Right under the category “Rules for Let’s Shall,” there’s a rule that goes, this blog shall not become a dream journal. If you follow this break, I am breaking that rule.

Can I say that my lawn looks onto I-95?

I heard a snippet of this story on NPR this morning as I was getting out my car (wow, I just typo’d that very tellingly: “as I was getting out of my career”), and I just had to follow up. Don’t get your hopes up, but some police departments in some cities are starting a program where they loan out the radar gun for people to catch their neighbors speeding, with the threshold for a written warning being 13 miles over. YES please! I would be so good at that job. First of all, I’d target all of the Land Rovers first, then all the Lexcedescalurano’s. Then I’d move on to luxury sedans. Last on my list would be open bed trucks w/ lawn maintenance guys in them, b/c hey, what can a speeding ticket really do to them that they aren’t already doing to themselves? Where can I please sign up to get me one of those radar guns and start nailing some Boca peeps? This sounds like my kind of self-medication.

The only downside to this, I think, is that you are supposed to do it in your own neighborhood. The people in the story all seem to be sitting on their own lawns. Which cuts out my glorious visions of nabbing Corvette, Maserati, and Ford POS alike as I drive down to Miami once a week. Oh well, like the title of this post applies, there may be ways around such strictures…

You know, I totally could have blogged about something serious here, like the full segment that came just before this that they devoted to reading response letters to one of NPR’s correspondents apparently being present at an interrogation of tortured people, but I didn’t. And it felt like just that choice–as I walk into work, would I like to a) think about getting passive agressive revenge on all of the overly affluent people in my neighborhood would can’t drive or b) think about something challenging, like my country’s involvement in torture? It’s kind of sad how easily that choice got made.

Donc je suis un malheureux

Yesterday was a strange mood day. It should have been my all out favorite kind of day: dark and rainy, a nice mix of library work, writing center work, school work, and actual class which I was actually prepared for, the prospect of an easy run on a fancy treadmill, dinner w/ D and Gossip Girl. Nothing too demanding, yet enough schedule activity to keep me from feeling lazy and unproductive either (a pathology in itself, I know, but I’m kind of at the why fight it phase on my need for full schedules). Instead, I kept feeling overwhelmed by sadness, as if there was a sinkhole inside of my chest that was constantly threatening to open up–like there was some feeling, some clarity, some sense of purpose that I just couldn’t reach, and I didn’t know what it was, and it was worse not to be able to identify it because, by all of my measures, I should have been fulfilling it exactly. Is this what they call ennui or something else? Everything’s better than fine and I’m still… inwardly mopish. This leads to frustration, and beneath that frustration, fear. Frustration b/c I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to combat the things that were bugging me in the short term, and it seemed to be working. Fear b/c, well, if even fixing all my problems doesn’t make me feel buoyant and adequate and purposeful, maybe those things are just not in the cards for me (or anyone, and thus Buddhism becomes an appealing option). I don’t want to dwell on this too much, because I don’t want overanalysis to cause this odd blend of feelings to carry over longer than it needs to, but of late I haven’t been particularly emotionally engaged w/ this blog, so this seemed like a chance to get back on the soul-baring track a bit. Maybe I’m just having writing hangover after churning out my first essay for creative nonfiction over the weekend.

After a coffee break, I am, however, feeling much better, because I picked up Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives from the stacks, and on the very first page is just the epigraph I need:

Thus I am unhappy and this is neither my fault nor that of life.

–Jules Laforgue

I still want to go by SJ, not JMcJ

Is anyone else disturbed by this NYT article about parents buying condos in their kids’ college towns instead of sending them into dorm life? I find it disturbing, nay, angering… nay, enraging. First off, it’s bad enough that I walk around a campus all day where I overhear complaints from people whose parents bought them an Audi rather than a Benz. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it anymore when I start hearing people compare their condos. Secondly, I think a lot of these parents are nuts. I met a couple of students at Michigan Tech whose parents bought houses and then rented out the rooms to other students to help finance their own child’s education, but we’re talking about entire houses that went for 30-40k. Plus, the child in question had to pony up for her share of the mortgage too. But being newly immersed into the upper middle class world where parents micromanage every single detail of their child’s entry into college, I only see potential for further smothering, control, and unwillingness to give the child responsibility in this article. This might suit the kids in question just fine–hey, would I really have complained about someone buying me a swanky 2/2 condo instead of having to live in Norton?–but it’s not really setting them up for anything other than continued pampering and refusal to take responsibility for their own livelihood. Do you think a parent who has bought a condo is going to sit back and let the quality of their investment depreciate while their child is living the carefree college life? Oh no. You can bet there’s gonna be a maid in there, and you can bet that all the paper work is coming to mom & dad’s address. There’s probably a hint of jealousy lurking under this rant (my parents made it clear to me from a young age that I was largely going to be on my own when it came to paying for college, even though they fully expected me to attend), but honestly I think I would have hated being micromanaged even more. If that’s the price of access to a deep pocket, it’s not worth paying. The whole scenario gives me the creeps.

But still, I think, these are just people of questionable motivations and even more questionable judgment having a little fun with their money, so why the heart palpitations, self? That brings me to Cary Tennis’s advice column for the day, which looks like it was written just for me. At least, the letter part was. It’s from a woman (pseudonym: Judgy McJudgerson) who wants to stop being so judgmental, and lately, I’ve been wondering if I should want the same thing too.
I hope any who knows me and reads that is going “whoah, Liz, you? judgmental?” I hope. I don’t mean in any way to sound immodest, but for most of my life I’ve been one of the least judgmental people I know. I’ve read it on job evaluations, I’ve heard it from friends. I am a Libra. A diplomat. When I’m around, people come out of the closet, tell me what’s bugging them, vent about evil co-workers and family members, and share their religious views even if they know them to be in conflict with mine. I listen, I ask gently probing questions in the manner of a hippy dippy therapist, and I never really care much one way or another what other people are doing with their lives if it doesn’t involve bodily harm to herself or someone else (I mean, I want to know all about it, but I don’t usually have an opinion about whether or not it’s a good idea. I want to support you in whatever you want.) All about balance. Judgmental is not something I have typically thought of myself as.

Now that I am old and crotchety and a little more cynical, however, I feel this changing. In some ways, this is a positive change. I’ve started to see that sometimes keeping my mouth shut when I knew that something was going on that hurt one of my friends may not have been the best idea–even if I couldn’t (and none of us do, I know) get them to consider changing, at least they would have heard it from someone. I’ve started to feel responsible for my very own self, and that means making lots of judgments about what’s a good idea or not in terms of where to work and live and how to spend my money. Opinions: I have them now.

In other ways, I’m a little scared of the person I’m becoming and how much I am starting to relish being able to say, ah-hah, that was your mistake and that’s your problem, not mine so hasta la vista, dumbass. If you’ve spoken to me lately, you know that is pretty much my new motto for life. I’ll take care of me and you take care of you… but if you don’t, the best thing I can do for you is to let you fall on your own behind so you have some motivation not to let it happen again. I know, I’m a cold hearted one, aren’t I?

Case in point, the subprime mortgage crisis. Am I crying for people who are getting foreclosed on after putting zero down for a negative amortization or adjustable rate loan on a much more expensive house than they could realistically afford? Not a tear. D and I were offered those same loans to buy those same expensive pieces of real estate, and did we do it? No. Why? Because it was a bad idea! We didn’t care that someone would give us the money. We did a little reality check and realized that there was no way we could take on a mortgage for 200k+ and reasonably expect to handle it with no bail-outs from family. In the end, if someone tells a pig it can fly and then the pig jumps off the roof, the pig is the one with broken legs. We could have gotten someone to fork over some cash so we wouldn’t have to live the renter life, but as soon as we put our name on the dotted line the fact that we weren’t 100% sure we’d be able to make the payments in years to come become our problem, not their fault. So, we said no thanks. A lot of people did not. They are defaulting in record numbers, and we are all going to pay the price for them via either a government bailout (not likely) or a tanked economy and job market. Some of the blame lies with greedy financiers who approved this nonsense and started the housing bubble going in the first place, but in my mind the ultimate blame lies firmly on the people who used their best “I deserve this no matter how much money I make” mentality to decide to sign up for a commitment they couldn’t fulfill. I’m not talking about people who lost jobs, I’m talking about people who had jobs that never would have qualified them for the mortgage they took out and used whatever flaky mortgage product they could find to get it anyway. Possibly more angering than these people, however, are the journalists writing about how no one saw it coming. Ahhh! The bullshit! Anyone with half a brain has seen this coming for at least two years now. On what planet do people making my kind of money (20-30k a year) live in houses that cost over 200 grand with monthly interest-only payments of 1500 a month (not counting taxes and insurance and homeowner’s). Not a planet with a sound economic future. You didn’t need a Harvard economist to tell you that, surely. Thus, I am judgmental when it comes to wacky mortgages and foreclosures. Shouldn’t a-had done that, people.

More famously on this blog, I have found out that I am also judgmental when it comes to pregnancy for teenage high school drop-outs who had both the economic and educational advantages to be able to avoid it and chose not to. Thus, I’m not jumping on the happy baby name boat of denial. I’m just not going to do it, and anyone who has a problem with that can just have a problem with it.

I can feel this tendency creeping outward, into other areas and situations. I can feel myself thinking differently about things related to welfare, healthcare, and drug addiction. I don’t think I’ve reached the point where I believe that everyone needs to be perfect (and I would never say I am), but I definitely feel more and more resentment about being asked to help shoulder the burden for people who consistently make bad choices. It’s such a grey area that I don’t think any of us will ever be able to say well, this person deserves our help and this person doesn’t, but how about some differentiation between plain bad luck (getting laid off, getting cancer) and piss-poor decision making (credit card debt for luxury consumer products or a fancy vacation, drug abuse without any attempt at rehab). For everyone but a saint, it seems like there must be some kind of healthy line to draw between being shortsighted and selfish and being a doormat. Also, who is really helping a person who makes the same mistakes again and again? The person who fixes it for them or the person who steps back and lets them learn how to fix it herself? I’m not saying it feels good at the time–it feels pretty awful re: my car right now–but sooner or later we are all better off if we’ve had to do that a couple of times.

So Cary’s advice doesn’t really ring true to me–I do care about people in bad situations, even ones of their own making, but I don’t see it as my job to pull them out. I’ll offer my advice/opinion if asked, and even help if asked nicely. But I don’t see crusading as the answer. Still, one of the starred letter writers brings up an even more important question for me: why does all of this bother me so if it does not directly affect me? There’s a couple of obvious answers–it might affect me one day, I might be scared that I am actually a fuck-up too, it’s plain upsetting to think about how unfair life really is–but none of those are quite what I’m looking for. Something about my own life isn’t good enough for me, and it’s easier to find fault with others than to fix the problems with my own. I don’t want to be a doormat again, but that’s definitely got to change.

But if you try sometimes

When I was a kid, my mom would occasionally say things that would terrify me. Most of these things were actually lines from pop songs.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

“Give me, give me, give me a man after midnight.”

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

Aside from the second, which is just upsetting to hear your mother say for obvious reasons, these sayings scared me because even when I couldn’t articulate it, I could understand what they implied. Sometimes, you just have no choice about what happens to you.

This was hard for an ambitious whatever year old I was, and I was pretty much always ambitious. My goal, again unarticulated at the time, was not to end up like my mother. My life was going to be healthier, easier, richer, in a cleaner house… all around, better. I didn’t really want to think about things like the importance of timing, unplanned disasters as well as unplanned successes, or simply the amount of time it takes to learn how to stand up on your own two feet. Actually, I didn’t even know about these things. I thought somehow, if you were careful and did everything right, you just wouldn’t end up like my mother, with her credit card debt, her idiosyncratic car, her dead end government job in a factory town in the Midwest. If any of those things happened to you, it would be because you had not tried hard enough, simple as that.

I’m starting to see that’s not exactly true, although when things are going well it’s a pretty seductive illusion. Yes, I’m pretty sure you can already tell it’s going to be one of those blog posts, in which I talk about the most basic life events like they were earth shattering news–but if you haven’t seen it before, it’s new to you, right?

I’m not even sure how to introduce the two events I am going to discuss. I could say “it’s been a doozy of a week”–but really, what week hasn’t? More often than not this year, they are doozies. I guess I’ll just say, we’ve had two basic events on the more traumatic, less uplifting side of the scale this week.

Event 1: In which my sister loses $2700 dollars to a crooked landlord

Most of you already have the lowdown. Sis & bf went to a showing of a 2/2 cottage that a husband and wife were renting. The cottage was on their property, like the servants quarters that Mc Mansions in my in-laws’ neighborhood can no longer get away with. The place was dirty and had a hole in the roof, but the price and location were right. Sis & bf wanted it, landlords said give us a check for two months rent and we’ll fix the stuff before you sign a lease. Check was given, and a follow-up half month’s rent when the check (drawn on an out of state bank) took time to clear. Roof never fixed, carpets never cleaned. Everyday landlord says the lease will be ready, and then cancels. Sis & bf, two weeks later, ask for money back and the landlord refuses. Has probably already spent all of it. Yes, someone can just keep your money like that. It’s called theft. They are going to small claims court, but there’s no guarantee they’ll ever see a penny of that again. Bienvenidos a Miami!

Event 2: In which timing is everything… timing belts, that is

Thursday: D is driving down the turnpike, on his way to a teacher training day, when the Honda dies. Just dies, totally stops running. Fortunately he is able to coast safely on to the right shoulder and begins the long process of figuring out what his Triple A number actually is and getting towed to the mechanic.

Monday: We pick up Honda from the mechanic. Turns out the timing belt broke. That’s a 500$ fix, but the valves that the pistons damaged while unrestrained by the timing belt would cost another 1300$. And we are talking about a 1993 Honda Accord here–that would definitely go over its current street value. Is that technically what totaled means? Anyway, the good news is even with bad valves it runs… kind of. And it’s the “kind of” that is really bumming me out. What did I do to deserve driving another car that stalls at stop signs and jerks likes its having an epileptic fit while in idle? For now, it’ll still get me from home to work with a few “oh crap”moments along the way. In the near to midterm, it will have something else go wrong, and the question will again come up about whether or not to sink money into making it last a little longer or not. Or maybe we should try to get what we can in trade in before that happens. Or maybe I should invest in a bike and a helmet and a taser and start braving the traffic at least as far as a bus stop. While we’re at it, we could even try to figure out which of these two is the actual worst case scenario. A) We have only one working car for the next two years or B) at the end of two years, when we dream of moving someplace with public transportation, we have two newish cars with outstanding loans and not enough street value to pay off what we owe (the major downside to buying Hyundai’s right now is the resale, ’cause you can’t beat the price or the warranty). Of course, this all could have been prevented if we’d had the timing belt replaced before it broke, which would require either knowing to replace it (we didn’t) or having a mechanic who believed in maintaining cars over 100k miles who would think to recommend that we did. American mechanics pretty much assume that after 100k all you want are band-aids, not the kind of upkeep that keeps you riding in the long term.

Chalk it up to live and learn, but I am really not enjoying all this living and expensive learning. Especially when, in the back of my mind, this must all be my fault. Somewhere out there is a girl who got a marketable degree, didn’t move to south Florida, knew to be a hard ass about real estate and protected her sister from losing almost 3 grand for nothing, and remembered to change the timing belt. Every incident like these ones simply reminds me that I did not turn out to be her.

The one small consolation seems to be that after about three solid rounds of nasty life surprises, I’m learning to say oh well when I realize that. Oh well, I’m not that girl. Chances are that girl isn’t even that girl… but even if she is, and some of them are, I’d still rather take my chances on me, and my life, which currently includes a cat standing on her hind legs in my lap to reach up and put her front paws around my neck. I may not know jack about cars or earning a living, but I have a hugging cat.

Also, now that I’m beginning to expect rather than hope to avoid getting battered like a punching bag every other month, I’m also getting better at reminding myself that bad things do not happen just to me, and that for everything that seems bad so far there probably could have been something worse. The car could have been totaled in a wreck, which would have hurt the driver and caused our insurance to go up. Sis & bf could have moved into the place only to find out that a badly patched roof blew off during the upcoming hurricane season, destroying all of their stuff. Things could definitely have gone better, but they also could have been much worse, and we wouldn’t have probably “deserved” any of it either which way. It does just kind of happen to you while you are making those other plans about how you are going to make more money, run more miles, and really clean your apartment.

Still, when all the ways it could have been worse have been imagined and the war stories have been compared, deep down inside you’d still rather be the person this had just never happened to. You’d rather be the person who had never even imagined it could happen. That’s why the Stones were right, and so was my mom, and just like both of them I’m getting older and wiser.

My Whole Foods turkey sandwich tastes like… turkey, can you believe it?

One scientific reality that I am currently lamenting is the fact that nobody really knows what hormones are or how they work or what they are truly capable of doing. At least thats my impression and my experience, and in the year 2007 isn’t that all that really counts? I feel strongly in my gut that I may, more often than I would like to think about, be more controlled by chemicals in my body than thoughts in my head.

Exhibit A: Senior year

In brief, starting the pill and being anemia do not a happy year make. The effect of the pill is still pretty much unquantifiable, as it varies widely from person to person and I was never particularly conscientious about taking it at the exact same time every single day. So that narrows it down… not at all! Maybe the pill made me crazy, maybe Iraq made me crazy, maybe being just about to graduate made me crazy, maybe a lack of iron in my blood (which creates many of the same symptoms as depression all by itself) did it. The point is, I was crazy. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to not be crazy, with moderate success. Still, it’s hard to know if that is because I just wasn’t good at getting uncrazy or whether there was something physically wrong with me. Who knows? Either way, it was a craptasm of a year in many regards.

Exhibit B: Yesterday

For the former RA’s among us, no, I did not have a plan, but yes, I felt cosmically crappy about almost every single choice I had ever made (notable exceptions being learning to play the oboe, marrying D, making friends with people who have exquisite musical taste). I know everyone has these days. They are normal. But it was just fucking relentless. Everything I looked at wham, there was it’s bad side. The fantasies I generally use to get myself through the library workday, such as moving out of Florida into an apartment with hardwood floors and a location north of Mason-Dixon line, all seemed out of reach and likely to cause doom anyway. I was pretty sure that I had sold myself out in every way possible. I was pretty sure I could feel a mole on my face turning into skin cancer. I do not recommend a day like yesterday to anyone. Neither does Anne Lamott, but she does give one reassurance that they can be lived through, so I’m glad I’ve been in a heavy Lamott phase of late.

So, I help my day out with a few gmail chats and a couple beers and the Lost second season, all seven discs of it, in my hands, and I come to that time of going to Bedfordshire. I have the foggy notion that (TMI alert) it was about time for me to remove my current form of birth control, the ring. I do so, and then I get to thinking, did I wait too long? It turns out I did, but a full week. So instead of using it for three weeks I’ve been using it for a month.

Now, there is no scientific evidence for what I am about to suggest, but it did occur to me that perhaps my relentlessly, atypically miserable day could have had something to do with that little extra week. Come to think of it, the past week had been on a bit of a downward spiral in the absence of any additional external stressors. I mean, nothing really changed. I got home from NYC to a dually employed husband and an acceptable grade on the most recent paper for psycho prof, and the joyous birth of LL (to whom I am rapidly becoming addicted) so why did I spend so much time trying not to cry? Again, there’s no scientific evidence for this and I normally don’t even bother to try and figure out a reason why I feel like crying, but it did seem a little weird, like something that was happening to me from the outside not from the inside.

Exhibit C: My lunch

I took a bite into my sandwich today, the first sandwich fully of the Whole Foods Era, with natural turkey and natural colby jack cheese and organic black pepper on WF baguette. I guess I figured I would taste something different going, since my fare of late has been the cheapest Publix food I can find, but I was genuinely taken aback. It tasted like actual turkey. Like actual food. Like actual something. Could this be related to the fact that natural turkey has no extra hormones of antibiotics attached to it? Of course, it was also better quality in other regards, but my point is, I tasted something more like the real thing and it was a lot better.

So, are there any conclusions here, other than the fact that I really need to stop being a cheapskate on my food supply?

Who knows, certainly not me as usual. But I had a much better day today. I just turned my second of three total library papers for this summer (so just one big headache left, and a few little ones). I have a thought about how to make the shitty first draft of a story I just completed (yay) a little better, and while I’m not sure that it will actually pan out I have the will to at least try it, which is a nice change from 24 hours ago. I’m listening to The Tragically Hip, but that doesn’t feel tragic at all.

Maine: Smells Like Trees

I thought up the title to this post while getting out of our rented champagne colored Toyota Corolla in the parking lot of a Friendly’s in Bedford, MA. It smelled like trees, and that was nice. We had just barely made it out of Boston and onto 95 and I was starving. We: me, D, and T-Fap. After making myself so full of tuna melt and waffle fries that I couldn’t even contemplate the peanut butter cup sundae I had been planning on ordering, we got back on the road and didn’t stop until we were in Maine, which I just knew would smell like trees even more than a Friendly’s parking lot in Bedford, MA. It did, especially because we got there in middle of a cool spring night and did a lot of happy schlepping between Bowdoin dorms meeting up w/ T and his gal and figuring out exactly how we were all going to spend the last few hours before his graduation together. The plan ended up to be, sit in one of the vacated rooms in the house that he was the RA of and make iceless Cape Codders for each other until we were all too tired to drink any more. They were briefly iced, but then we ran out of cubes in the ice tray and decided that the remants of ice in the bag smelled too weird to put in our drinks. Such is the way of college freezers a week after most of the students have moved out. With enough lime, they weren’t too bad iceless although I did kind of screw up and make my last one so strong I could barely finish it. Maybe that’s why I had such a bad headache the next morning and kind of felt like I was going to faint if I didn’t eat something greasy and fast. Fortunately for me, 1) Bowdoin has been rated to have some of the best cafeteria food in the country and 2) their cafeteria was still serving all you can eat hot buffet breakfasts for only 4.25 by the time I got there, looking a lot spiffier than I felt. Well, at least I hope I looked spiffier than I felt. Wait, one more revision: my mind felt spiffy but my tummy felt iffy, and I hope my skirt wasn’t too wrinkled. There we go. I felt so much better after my home fries and eggs and coffee that I had enough spunk to join T-Fap in a movement to boycott the folding chairs set up in the middle of blazing sun and instead find a nice granite bench in the shade, which had the added benefit of being far enough away from any preppy parents to spend most of the ceremony making sarcastic comments about assuredly overpriced sundresses and purebred dogs. Could I ever truly live on the east coast? Sometimes I’m not sure. If I did, I would definitely be the kind of person who lived in Maine or Vermont rather than Massachusetts, is my conclusion. Right when T was about to walk, we relocated to the little tarmac they had set up for the paparazzi, I mean, parents and gave a great cheer as he accepted his diploma, almost doing so in his aviator sunglasses but at the last minute swapping them out for the Prada regular glasses that Frida helped him pick out. Almost immediately after that, while a few more overly long-winded speakers held the graduates hostage, we met up with some more recent converts to our sit in the shade movement (the rest of D’s family, basically) and beat an early retreat to the catered lunch. Sorry Kenyoners, this lunch made our post-graduation box-lunches look pretty craptapulous. We stuck around for hugs and photos and then whoops, had to get our rental car back to Boston and thereby missed out on the ever-joyous experience of finishing off a dorm room pack up.

Thus ended the graduation portion of our weekend. The rest of was gloriously occupied with more eating, much more drinking, and lots of Boston related activities. I finally got to see the fabled apartment and ride the T. I got to pick up where I left off with a passel of Kenyon friends. I got to savor the leafy treeness of a city not nearly as overwhelming as I remembered it being (visiting KAY, driving for two hours around the same four blocks trying to find her apartment on a little elbow of a road called The Fenway). Public transportation, Anna’s Taqueria, Harvahd, The Milky Way, and a last minute visit from Big Hollywood Director all mine to enjoy. The thought of relocating myself to be a part of it all on a more permanent basis teasing deliciously on every step up from the T stop, emerging–could I?–into the life of a city.

Knowing me, you can probably tell where this is going. That all felt great, and now I feel bad. Not so bad. This bad:

That’s a live version of “Black Cab” by Jens Lekman that I put on a mix for T-Fap that we played on our way back from Maine. When it first came on, I had completely forgotten that I put it on the mix, but then it became my favorite song of them all. It’s been going through my head all morning.

Anyway, I’m a bit mopey. Maybe it’s coming back to my real life, which I think is now under the working title “The Unemployed, The Pregnant, and The Distressingly Uncertain.” I have a new version of that old feeling that yeah, I could pick up and move and change my life, but it might not make a difference if the place that I’m truly uncomfortable right now is inside my head. Maybe it’s realizing that life with your good friends in many ways resembles life with your family, and that is good and bad and unescapable. Maybe it’s just my birth control, since I kind of screwed up the month to month turnover this most recent time. Maybe it’s nothing that a moody blog post can’t fix. (Hello–is there anything a moody blog post can’t fix? Haven’t found it yet.) Could be anemia. For that reason I made D make me a steak last night for dinner once we got home back to Boca, which shares the first two letters of its name with the name of the city that I just got back from, and I can’t really decided if that’s not enough or too much.

You can handle this one, God, be my guest

It was a good weekend. We went to the beach, watched the first two dvd’s of Lost, drank a bottle of wine. I devoured most of the Scott Smith’s The Ruins and stuck to the two-hour-a-day writing plan even though it meant getting up before 7am. I didn’t obsess about the job situation. I went running, and did a whole nonstop three miles for the first verifiable time ever. (Verification courtesy of Map My Run, which rocks btw.) In short, I was feeling as optimal as I’ve felt in a good long while.

There is just this one little thing called Bad News 2. Over aforementioned bottle of wine (a tasty Smoking Loon pinot noir, nice and fruity like I heart it), my MIL (who was in Boca for her Saturday library class) started discussing the possibility of life after the upcoming Tuesday. Tuesday is the last day for SIL to get an abortion in the first trimester, the last day when the procedure would not involve an overnight stay, the last day in which most people I know would be completely understanding of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. Wednesday will be the first day of the second trimester, when everything starts getting dicier. As it stands right now, the SIL is looking to her “boyfriend” (I have other terms I would like to substitute and will freely if you call me on the phone, but for the sake of clarity I’ll use the most generous one I can muster) for a decision. The “boyfriend” by the way has a sister who is 17 and pregnant and a brother who has one child by his teenage girlfriend already… or something like that, I might have the details reversed, but let’s just say that in “boyfriend’s” world, it is 100% normal for teenage mothers to give birth to children that no one is able to provide for and it is normal for that to just keep happening, like whoops, here’s another human life on the way, how did that happen. We’ve been blasting her for two solid weeks now with facts and figures and budgets and reassurances that yes, indeed, she deserves a second chance and no one is going to think less of her for it. Sometimes she says she’s considering abortion, sometimes she just sits there like a cement wall, deep down knowing that if she just sits there long enough something is going to give.

Anyway, back to the wine conversation. With a few sips in us, the underlying truths about our feelings about this situation started to come out with a bit more clarity, or perhaps just more openness, than they did during our last weekend at their house, when we were all struggling to find some common ground from which to stage our attempts at intervention. It’s been clear to me from the get-go that my MIL has already mentally moved on to accepting the birth of this child. Fair enough–if SIL chooses to carry it and it is born, it doesn’t matter what anyone accepts or rejects. The part that I am profoundly not okay about is the part that comes after, the part where all of us are going to be asked to shoulder some part of this responsibility that we not only didn’t ask for but also actively prevented dumping onto anyone else. There’s a great comeback for this feeling too: life isn’t fair. Again, fair enough. None of this changes my anger or my fear. Those are my feelings and those are what I have to navigate by at this moment in time. So when MIL started in with “you know, if it looks like SIL is going to have this baby, then there is going to be a baby shower and you will all be invited and you will all ATTEND,” I felt that it was in my best interest to establish that, no, for starters, I would not be attending any baby showers. In fact, my baby shower non-attendance is really the least of my refusal to take joy in this disaster. It will be followed by my non-babysitting, non-diaper changing, non-grocery buying, and non-cash handing out. But what about the innocent child? Sorry, that’s not my innocent child and SIL knows it. I will not be demonized for protecting myself. I just won’t. Agreeing to go along with this is too much to ask of me, at least right now. When I’m fifty and contemplating grandparenthood, maybe I’ll feel differently. Right now I feel like a young adult whose primary concern is making it on my own and figuring out who I am. That’s my responsibility. This potential baby is SIL’s, and I’m not going to do anything to obscure that fact. We harangued each other for a little while longer, quite good naturedly, and enjoyed our wine, and sat side-by-side at the dinner table with our own sets of uneasy feelings. Besides, a lot could still happen between then and Tuesday and between then and December.

Sunday morning, we drove down to church in Miami. Actually, I drove, because one thing this whole mess has made clear to me is that D and I need to get better about sharing our responsibilities. Normally, he drives and I freak out on the passenger side. So, I’m starting to drive more. It’s only fair and it feels good, at least good in a theoretical way even though I95 really stresses me out. We had just hit the outskirts of Miami when the sky started turning a beautiful blend of pitch blacks and pretty soon, we were in a major downpour. I kept my cool mostly and kept the car between the white lines totally, and indeed we made it to church on time and only a little wet.

It was the wrong service for me to be at.

It was volunteer recognition Sunday, meaning that they handed out certificates to anyone who had worked Sunday morning childcare or taught Sunday school during the past year. So, instead of all the babies being across the street being cared for, they were in their parents arms for the whole service. And I’ll tell you, the babies were out in force, goo and gaaing and looking too round and too cute in their fabu Sunday outfits (this is Coral Gables, after all). Meanwhile, here is SIL in her wheelchair, knowing that she is two days away from the finish line for being talked into an abortion. Not the best mise-en-scene, God, not your finest moment. Then we sang the hymn known as the Servant Song, which we last sang at MAW & DT’s wedding reception. We barely had to sing the first lines, “Won’t you let me be your servant..” before I was feeling that anger rise up again. I know that you are God, God, but I’m not volunteering to serve anyone who is voluntarily screwing her own self over. Nope. Not my job–I’m going to be someone else’s servant and there is nothing you can do about it, God.

Of course it got worse though, and instead of getting angrier I just got sadder.

Next there were the announcements, with the lead-off announcement being that our best Miami friends had their first daughter early early on Friday morning. I heard the news on Friday and it was like I had done three espresso shots in a row. I am so happy for them and excited for the life of their daughter I can barely contain myself. But how can I be so wholeheartedly excited about that baby, and D&F’s baby, and so unrepentingly negative about the one SIL might have? Also, as excited as I am, I know enough to be a little scared too. It’s a big, uncontrollable thing they’ve just started and as much as anyone can help them with it, they are still on a journey that I cannot yet comprehend. They’ll need prayers and help as much as anyone, and guess what, they waited until they were financially at least semi-stable. I just wanted to cry.

Then it got even worse. The elementary age children spent most of the service putting on a mini-musical about, of all things, Jonah and the whale. You know, Jonah, the guy who tried to run away from God’s command for his life and ended up in the stomach of a large sea creature? Every single adorable little song they sang was about how important it is not to shirk the responsibilities God gives you, especially the ones you didn’t ask for. And as an added bonus, the kids were painfully beautiful to watch. They put on a great show, with real inflection in the lines and loud singing of the kind our choir director could never quite get us to do. There was one little girl, the youngest one probably, who was just a half-second behind in all of her dance moves and I saw how that was just perfect all in itself, just the way it should be. I’m pretty sure I’m going to hell just for thinking the word “abortion” while watching these kids put on a Jonah play.

For our final hymn, we sang the one about “Here I am, Lord, is it I Lord?,” about how in my heart I am willing to do whatever the Lord calls me to do, no matter how inconvenient or difficult. Yeah, no. I had to stop singing for a whole verse at one point. I’m already an inadequate Christian, so I should probably avoid making myself into a hypocrite too. No, Lord, I will not. Not going to do it. Not if you lead me, not if you call me, not if you ask me. Well, you can ask, but my answer will be NO. There was not very much solace for me in church yesterday, and I guess that’s my problem. Unlike the possible baby, which is not my problem.

It appears the secular world may be lining up against me as well. Now, here I am on my Monday morning innocently reading the latest New Yorker short story while my budget spreadsheet updates. It’s by George Saunders and the title is, “Puppy.” It’s all going along quite swimmingly until this sentence: “he’d been raised on a farm, or near a farm anyways, and anybody raised on a farm knew that you had to do what you had to do in terms of sick animals or extra animals—the pup being not sick, just extra.” It may just be my symbolism honing instinct going of whack, but this sentence too seems to be smacking me gleefully in the face, saying, “see, the MIL’s right, you are going to have to deal with this, you are going to have an extra life in your life that like it or not you are going to have some responsibility toward.”

Whatever. Send your signs, your wrath, your couches full of pee. I tell you right now I’m not having any of it.

Fear–so what?

The title of this post is a paraphrase of a thought shared by Elizabeth Gilbert’s guru, which I read about in her latest book, Eat Pray Love. I just finished it, and I loved every page. At first, I thought her style wasn’t quite up to my newly acquired hardcore creative nonfiction tastes, but as I found myself drawn quite effortlessly through the pages I realized that it was not a book to be read as heavy lifting for one’s literary chops. It’s more of a book to read when you really need to expand your sense of what is possible in the world while laughing out loud pretty much every other page. It’s a book to read when you’ve been doing other kinds of heavy emotional lifting and you just need to live a little vicariously through somebody else’s spirtual adventures. And to fantasize about going to Italy for four months just to eat. In other words, it was just the right book for my mother-in-law to loan me last weekend.

Now it’s finished, and I might be on my way to weightier things or I might not.  Possible candidates include Ender’s Game, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (for the second attempt), and Song of Solomon. Or possibly this book I got at the library called How to Become a Freelance Writer. (Didn’t I already read this book when I was like 9? Have I made no progress in the ensuing 14 years?) Because as much as I love to read, I’m starting to get the sense that I need to get down to some more writing. That’s a topic for another blog, but the fact that in about a month I’m going to need to survive a fiction workshop with my dignity intact has not passed me by.

So, the book was not the only good thing to come out of last weekend, which actually didn’t go quite as badly as I was fearing. To recap, because I haven’t gone into great detail on this blog, last weekend was going to be my first face to face encounter with the sis in law since the accident and the revelation. I will refer to these things henceforth as Bad News 1 and Bad News 2. Of course, the main cause of stress was how to interact with her, expressing my gratitude for her being alive and not too hurt by Bad News 1 while the knowledge of Bad News 2 shoved its way to the front of my brain at all times. To my surprise, it came quite naturally. She was in good spirits and it was easy to find little things to do for her to make her life easier as she hobbled from home to car and back to home. I was genuinely glad to see her.  We managed to put off the having the talk re: Bad News 2 until late Sunday evening, after having spent the afternoon spent doing our best to create the kind of epicurean ambience Ms. Gilbert creates in Eat Pray Love by opening both bottles of D’s dad’s birthday wine and whipping up some delicious alio e oglio pasta if I do say so myself. And when we did have the talk, we somehow found ways to express our thoughts and feelings and still not come off as out of control, raving for no good reason older siblings. We talked for a good long time, and I felt like I had said most of what I had wanted to say. I have pretty grave doubts that she actually heard any of it, but that’s another issue and one I have no control over. Her decision is still very much her own to make and I have done all that I can to help her make a good one. A good one–as if I even knew exactly what that was. I don’t, but I’m also pretty sure she doesn’t either. Now, I think in one of my former, more trusting lives I would have prayed about this with some kind of open-ended attitude, ie: “I know this is in your hands, oh God whoever you are out there, and I trust that you are looking after things for the best.” In my current somewhat paranoid life, my prayer is more like, “God could you please give this young’un a serious ass-kicking because she doesn’t know up from down right now and I think her parents would be pissed if I did the ass-kicking for you.”

In other fear news, I often get paranoid that D is not looking for a job quite as hard as he should be, and I have taken to setting up schedules for him and inquiring as to the status of the action items I have assigned. Keep in mind that I am the same person who recently criticized her mother-in-law for being too controlling.  So add that to the fear tally too–that I am becoming not only my mother but also my mother-in-law.

So, this week, I’m kind of in between a lot of muddled feelings and plans of action. This is probably part of the reason why I responded so strongly to Eat Pray Love. It’s a pretty good story about a woman who doesn’t really know where she’s going but can from time to time see a sort of next step to take. Or just a way to spend this present moment. That’s a good description of how I’d like to be, rather than simply a collection of anxieties about things that aren’t currently happening. I’d like to acknowledge my fear and then do whatever the hell I’m thinking about doing anyway. Even when that doesn’t seem possible, I’m going to try to keep in mind the words of Ms. Gilbert’s guru. I’m afraid. So what?

For the next couple of hours, that includes doing a yoga video and drinking some wine even though the budget Nazi in my head says that unemployed people have no business drinking wine. D’s put in a solid day of job hunting and I’m hatching plans to get this writing part of my life in gear. Getting from plans to action will have to be my next trick pretty soon, but I think the yoga and wine are going to help with that.

(This is kind of a rambling post and might not make so much sense if you don’t know what Bad News 2 is, but oh well. I’m trying to get that standards bar down nice and low so I feel up for posting every day again, because I miss it!)