Sacramento, Peter Berlin, My Marine Friend

I had a very lovely weekend. Tom (aka The Big T.) and I went to Sacramento on the train, as we do several times a year, for a birthday dinner for his very wonderful nephew, Chris, who lives in New York. Going to Sacramento is one of my very favorite things to do. Tom’s entire family is extremely great and I am very lucky to know them. (I was trying to count once how many fantastic people I met because I met Tom; the list is quite long.) Tom’s sister-in-law, Eva, is a fabulous cook who makes spectacular feasts with lots of fresh veggies and fish and/or meat. In this case, she had been sick in bed for a week, and then got up and made a wondrous meal which began with an appetizer that had raw (or cooked via marination in lime juice) ahi tuna in a light coconut milk sauce with fresh green onion and tomato. Eva said this is something everyone eats in Tahiti, where she went on vacation last year. It was so good.

When I got home from Sacramento on Sunday afternoon, I made lentil-potato-tomato stew, and chocolate-chip cookies, including chocolate chips, which I usually omit. I think I don’t actually like chocolate-chip cookies. Next time I make them, maybe I’ll leave out the chocolate chips and the nuts, and if they still don’t seem good, I’ll stick with butter cookies with lemon frosting, which are always good.

A year or so ago, a bicycle I’d had for fifteen or more years got stolen from work. I went outside after work and there it wasn’t. (My friend Alix’s son Wolf, when he was quite young, once began a conversation by saying, “Know what I don’t think?”) Know what wasn’t there? My bike. I took a cab up to Freewheel on Valencia and bought a new U-lock and a new cable for locking up my other bike the next day, but when I got home and unpacked my new items, I’m sorry to say that my old locks were also in my pannier: They had not been on the bike! A physical therapist I was seeing then had asked me to do some stretches each time I got off my bike. That morning I had put my bike in its usual spot, conscientiously done my stretches, and then had gone into the building, leaving my beloved old Diamondback unlocked all day long.

After the sharp edge of loss had dulled somewhat I went and bought a Marin Novato, which I really sort of hate, probably mainly because it’s not my old steel clunker. I suspect it of wanting to kill me; it seems to lose its grip on the earth way more than any other bike I’ve ever had. I put some Continental Contact tires on it, and that did solve that problem, but also increased the rolling resistance by about 50 percent.

Now that the rainy season is ebbing away, I’ve bought some other tires that Eric at Freewheel likes (Panaracer Tservs). Those can be the summer tires and I’ll save the Contacts for winter. The Marin also needs a brake upgrade, and I broke a spoke, so that needs fixing and the rear wheel needs trueing. I called Dan at Freewheel to see if he could do all of this later this week. I like Dan because he is very calm and when you say what’s wrong with your bike, he says, “Oh, yes, I’ll fix that. That shouldn’t be a problem,” as opposed to something that makes me feel discouraged, anxious and irritable.

On Monday night I saw the documentary That Man: Peter Berlin at the Castro Theater. Peter Berlin was a gay sex icon in the Castro in the 1970s and the pictures of him from that era are extremely provocative. He is still alive and is interviewed in the documentary. At some point, Jean Paul Gaultier wanted to use him in advertisements and had someone give him a call. Peter Berlin answered the phone and said something like, “This is the maid. Peter Berlin will be away for eight months.” When his friends asked why on earth he didn’t want to model for Gaultier, Peter Berlin said, “Oh, then I’d have to call him back, and he’d have to call me back, and there would be all these things that would have to be done,” or words to that effect: Too much hassle.

As I walked home down 18^th Street after the movie, I called P. to see if he’d ever met Peter Berlin. He said he did meet and talk to Peter Berlin about ten times downtown, and that he liked him.

The other day I went to say goodbye to my Marine friend, who is on his way back to Iraq for the third time since the war started. He’s looking forward to going back; he jokes that it’s safer than being in a corporate cubicle. Our friendship has cooled since he figured out I’m a far-left liberal, which I had assumed he assumed, just going by where I live, but there is still a flurry of communication now and then and I still care about him and wish him well. (And I still think he has extremely gorgeous green eyes and the most beautiful deep voice.) I went to one of the first anti-war demonstrations, which must have been in March of 2003 or thereabouts, but once the war actually started, I couldn’t bring myself to go to another, even though I knew I wasn’t demonstrating against the members of our military.

Knowing someone who was over there made me pay much closer attention—I always knew what time it was in Baghdad—and broadened my perspective, not to the extent of approving of war (and particularly not this “war”) but to the extent of realizing that every soldier or Marine is a human being with hopes, loves and fears, and also that there are many viewpoints in that group; I’m sure there are some people in the military who are just as anti-war as I am. I also was very touched by how openly my friend, who is as pro-war as you can be, shared his thoughts and feelings. We wrote and emailed often during his first tour there, and he sent me, upon request, a photo of himself in the desert which is still on my living room wall. I still have all of his letters and emails. I never told him that because of him I stopped demonstrating, because I didn’t want to mention that I’d been demonstrating. It would be kind of like saying, “Good news! I’ve decided to stop punching your mother.”

Two Terrible Problems!

They’re not really so terrible, but I thought this would make a good blog entry title (though I’ll regret it when I really do have two terrible problems and have to pretend it’s one or three problems so I don’t use the same title again). It also makes a good email subject line.

(Or you can start emails with the phrase, “I insist!”, just to set the right tone immediately.)

First problem: Unwanted hairs! (Plus my mother says when you turn 50, you start growing a lot of unwanted hairs everywhere.)

Solution: My very friendly, well-traveled, talkative electrologist near Union Square. She is Japanese and very short and I enjoy my visits to her very much. We discuss all sorts of things while I’m lying on her table: recipes for tasty dishes, places she’s been to, if Angelina is moving too fast letting Brad adopt her kids so quickly. To make sure no unwanted hair is missed, I put a black dot next to each one with a Sharpie beforehand. Every time I catch sight of the dots, I’m startled: A pox upon me! My electrologist says she’s comfortable working on all areas of the body, but not if someone wants something she doesn’t think is natural, like if someone wants her pubic hair transformed into a tiny (vertical) stripe. Dancers sometimes want this. She writhed briefly to indicate the type of person who might want unnatural-looking pubic hair. Someone who wants her pubic hair shaped into a horizontal stripe is probably even less welcome.

Second problem: Drippy eyes. I’m going to be one of those old ladies with drippy eyes; right now I’m a medium-old lady with drippy eyes. (Plus I’ve noticed my jowls are starting, just barely starting, to sink into two clumps on either side of my mouth, which gives me a stern expression that I find very pleasing; a stern expression comes in handy more often than not. It will be good to have one permanently.)

My eye doctor of the year (I like to switch eye doctors every year, for excitement) said that my tear ducts might be blocked and in need of irrigation. When you have a tear duct irrigation, they use a little skinny sticklike thing to stretch out the entrance of your tear duct, which is in the inner corner of your eye on the bottom side, and then they stick a long needle down the duct. Then they squirt a bit of saline solution down the duct to make sure there’s no blockage. Basically, you’re sitting in the chair and someone sticks a needle in your eye and you can’t move a muscle, let alone scream and flop back and forth in terror. I had several of these, all but one performed by a woman who worked in the office, not my eye doctor himself. The woman seemed pretty no-nonsense and there were no untoward incidents, but I noticed that when the eye doctor himself had to do this, one day after we waited and waited for the woman but she was just too busy, he seemed rather tense and kept reminding me not to move. I figure he had had a mishap or two in the past. I wonder how many eyes you have to put out before you decide to leave the tear duct irrigations to someone else.

As it turned out, I don’t actually have drippy eyes, I have dry eyes, as the following year’s eye doctor told me. Because they’re dry, they get irritated easily, and then they drip. She prescribed some medication that didn’t help and finally she said just to take fish oil religiously every day, to lubricate my eyes from the inside out. It doesn’t seem to be helping, and I guess that’s that. I guess I’m going to start carrying a small dainty handkerchief with which to dab at my eyes, which will also draw the eye to my jowls, though if all goes well, they'll be visible without such artifice.

Mystery Unsolved

The rumbling continues as always, or what seems like always; it woke me up at 5:30 this morning. Alas, when I put my ear to the wall, I heard nothing coming from below in the way of music, so it must have been that my downstairs neighbor happened to be listening to music in the middle of the night that I was doing my rumbling research, which consisted of putting my ear to various surfaces within and without my apartment, but she evidently is not the cause of the part that’s always there. I heard the words “underground bunker” pass through my mind about 5:31 this morning and thought, “Uh oh.” I suppose it’s just some piece of residence-related equipment, and it’s probably been happening all of the seven years I’ve lived here, and I’m just tuned in to it now, and I can’t untune. At least now I can go back to trying to feel friendly toward it, whereas it’s hard for me to feel friendly toward something I think I might be able to control. (Lately I’m starting to think my list of what I may be able to control is optimistically long.)

I suppose now, when I’m complaining about noise, is as good a time as any to confess that I play the trumpet. But not after 10 p.m.! And not before noon on weekends. And, actually, I haven’t been playing it lately. Unfortunately, the older I get, the less comfortable I feel about inflicting this on my neighbors, plus I’m not in a band now. Many years ago I had a neighbor who came not to enjoy the sound of the trumpet and one night simply turned the power in my apartment off. I could hear his music playing, but I was in the dark. Turning off my electricity didn’t turn off the trumpet, but it did have a disorienting effect on the trumpet player. The same neighbor had covered all of his windows with Mylar, to stop people on ladder trucks from looking in at him, and he was often awake around the clock doing speed. Another time, he piled a bunch of wet garbage outside my apartment door. The landlord had tried without success to evict him, so after the garbage incident, I decided it was time for me to move.

I went then to live in another apartment in the Mission where I played the trumpet happily for 10 years—some neighbors kindly swore they enjoyed it—until a lesbian couple moved in above. It’s always nerve-wracking for a trumpeter to acquire a new neighbor: Will this be the one who can’t stand the trumpet? I didn’t worry when these two moved in, however, because the previous occupant had been a friend of theirs, who had surely alerted them to the occupancy of a musician below. I was therefore rather surprised when the blond-haired one came down about two weeks after moving in to ask me to stop playing. Soon they began jumping up and down every time I played; they could keep it up for an hour. It made my lights flicker, and also terrified me. (It sounds odd in retrospect, but it really did scare me to have this violent reaction going on every time I did the thing I loved most, which I had to do pretty much every day to be able to perform well.) The landlord went up and asked them to stop jumping up and down. “We’re dancing!” they said.

The neighbors and I talked several times and I compromised until my performances began to suffer ill effects; at one club I had such an off night that the bandleader decided we’d better skip my big solo that evening. I agreed to virtually everything the neighbors asked (why?), and still they jumped up and down. It was absolutely ghastly. After some months, the jumping began to wear them out—I hope it destroyed all four of their knees, and gave them unsightly tough skin on the bottoms of their feet—and they switched to bouncing a ball on their floor instead, every minute I was playing. The landlord went up and asked them to stop bouncing their ball. “We’re practicing our juggling!” they said.

Obviously they felt no compunction about lying, as on the day I played for a few minutes early in the day and for half an hour later in the day; they announced to the landlord that I had played “for seven hours straight!” Basically, they were enormous jerks and I hope they’re extremely unhappy, wherever they are now.

A shocking piece of information emerged just before I gave up and moved to a musician-friendly building: One of my favorite people on earth, Mr. Marilyn Bull, turned out to be acquainted with one member of this couple and told me that she came from Ann Arbor, Michigan—my very place of birth! I was horrified to hear that someone so awful could go around claiming my hometown as her own. And get this: She actually went to the same junior high school I went to, Tappan. I dug out my yearbook and, yep, there she was, one year behind me.

The moral of these stories is, I think, rather clear: people should not make noise that I find annoying, and they should not object when I make noise they find annoying.

(All right, I suppose the real moral is that the less you object to, the happier you’ll be, and also that I should have yelled “Fuck you morons!” at the ceiling and then played twice as long as I’d planned to.)

Mystery Solved!

Last night I solved the mystery of the rumbling: It’s the stereo of my downstairs neighbor or her roommate, on at a very low volume some 36 hours a day. She has demonstrated an incapacity for civil discourse in the past, so I’m not sure where to go from here. Now that I know it’s being perpetrated by a conscious being and not random misery sent by the universe (“Turds from Satan,” as Paul Trupin used to say), it’s a lot harder to feel friendly toward. I suppose I could talk to the building manager, but the uncivil neighbor is the building manager.

I decoded successfully a couple of times lately, most thrillingly. “Decoding” is the term Overcoming Overeating uses for figuring out what is really meant by one’s critical thought about one’s body or what one ate. When I started OO about six and a half years ago, I immediately got that thoughts about my body were really about something else; unfortunately, it took me until about two weeks ago to figure out that thoughts about what I ate or how much I ate also are not to be taken at face value. I’m positive now that when I overeat and think, “I wish I hadn’t done that,” even though I’m not berating myself, I’m really trying to say I wish I hadn’t done something else, or that I’m bad for having done something else. I have failed to live up to my own standard in some way. And while the answer might end up being to try harder to live up to my own standard, more often the need is for self-forgiveness or re-examining the standard.

Carol Munter demonstrated decoding at the OO workshop some months ago. She asked us to share critical thoughts we’d had about our bodies. I said that the evening before, looking in the hotel mirror, I’d thought, “My belly sticks out. Oh, well, at least it doesn’t come to a point.” Carol said, “I should really make Linda do this, but this one is so obvious that I’ll go ahead: ‘I really stuck out in the group yesterday. Thank goodness I didn’t come entirely to the point.’”

My two recent decodings were also thoughts about my body. I was bending over and observed that the line of my inner thigh was ripply. This was actually a thought about the fear of being seen and possibly giving offense—a fear of making ripples. The other thought was that my face was too red: fear of my writing being read!

I was writing about P.’s housemate Lourdes yesterday. Another person who lives at P.’s is Ed, an incredibly cheery soul of about 90 who is often to be found on the front porch enjoying the afternoon sun. One day he told P. and me about the house where he used to live decades ago, who had what bedroom. That house is near where I live now, so I offered to take him on an outing to see it. Amazingly, when he and P. and I got there, there was someone on the street who remembered Ed from decades ago. We took photographs of Ed sitting on his old front steps and then went to the tennis courts near Valencia and 20th, where he used to play in his youth. He was thrilled to see part of his history come to life again, and told us, “You know, I used to live near here! Boy, I’d sure like to see the old place one more time.” I said, as gently as possible, “Actually, we were just there.” “We were?” he asked. And so, with P. moaning and groaning, off we went to have one more look at Ed’s old house.

The pictures from that day show Ed smiling hugely, while P. looks absolutely distraught. He never seems to enjoy our time together much, but is very anxious to make sure he’s going to get more of it. I suppose that makes sense to any addict. I think he had asked me, at the beginning of the excursion, “What are we going to do next week?” And when I said I wasn’t sure, or that I was going to be doing something else, it sent him into a panic that destroyed his afternoon. It seems like a waste, but of course it’s fundamentally the same as my own worries: Things are fine right now, but what if …

Rumbling Update and Lourdes

The rumbling is still underway. My therapist said I may have to “let it be in the background,” meaning, “Live with it.” And I didn’t hear from my friend at DPW, so, a la Tara Brach in her book Radical Acceptance, when I retired for the night, I pictured myself sitting on a park bench with the rumbling next to me. I even gave it a cutesy name, Mr. Rumbly, and I pictured myself throwing an arm around its shoulder: “It’s OK; you can be here.” And then I went to sleep.

I ran into The Big T. as I got home from work yesterday and proposed that we view a DVD in his apartment Saturday night, as we fairly often do, but he is planning to go to a bluegrass show in Noe Valley, so it looks like we’ll get together Friday night. He usually goes to the annual bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park, but gave up inviting me after I said three years in a row, “As long as they don’t play any bluegrass music.”

The last two shows I went to were Korn and Megadeth, both at the Warfield. At the Megadeth show, I was seated in front of an enthusiastic fan who kept punching the air, his fist whistling past my ear. I had formed a solid disliking for him when he realized there was someone external to the demographic sitting in front of him and engaged me in conversation: “Do you like hard rock? That’s cool! Do you like Megadeth? That’s cool! My mother likes Megadeth, too! She’s very cool.” By the time the show started, we were best friends. He had his son, nine or ten years old, with him, who, like me, was about to see Dave Mustaine for the first time, and we were both terribly excited. It was a wonderful show, with songs from throughout the Megadeth discography, and the sound was nicely balanced; it was loud but it wasn’t an undifferentiated wall of murk.

I called P. after talking to The Big T. yesterday. I’m still not brimming with forgiveness, but I figure I can spare a few minutes a day on the phone. Also, I can’t swear off seeing him permanently, because then I would never see Lourdes again, a tiny Filipina woman about four feet tall who can barely walk who lives at P.’s house and who is a profane and unrepentant bully. I adore her. (When I ask P. how she is, he always says, “She’s on top,” meaning in the sexual sense.) P. once compared her looks to Napoleon’s and showed me a picture to prove his point; he was correct. She often spends hours screaming the same phrase over and over at the top of her lungs, and she insults people in the vilest terms, but she is also very funny.

Someone else’s visitor once chuckled at her and Lourdes glared at her and said darkly, “How loud you laugh me!”

She can say dreadful things, but changes allegiances quickly. One minute it’s, “P.’s your boyfriend? I’m happy for you, sorry for him!” The next, it’s, “He’s lucky. You’re not.”

If I don’t see her in the TV room or creeping up and down the hallways, I go tap on her door, which is usually closed, and she yells, “Who is it?” “Linda, P.’s friend.” Pause. “Open the door!” I open the door three inches, which is as far as it can be opened, because she pushes boxes up against it and then sits behind the boxes in her wheelchair. I say, “You have a good fortress here,” and she might back up a bit so the door can be opened farther, and then we have a nice long chat. She mimics her young relatives holding out their hands and pleading, “Give me money!” She reminisces about her life and is very curious about mine; she always asks me if I had lunch and where I live and how I’m going to get back there. She advises me to be careful when I’m walking home. I told her my boss is, like her, Filipino and she said, “Ah! Does he say, ‘Linda! Do this! Linda! Do that!’?” I assured her that he does. Not long ago, she said with grudging admiration, “You’re pretty tall. Seven feet?”

At a random moment, she might announce, “I don’t like you!” But when we part, she gingerly extends an index finger and I extend one of mine, and, grimacing, we touch fingertips. Then I walk away, and whatever the time of year, can hear her calling after me, “Happy holidays!”

Some Things I Like: Venezuelan Chocolate, Kasper Hauser, David Lazarus, Naomi Wolf, and PRIMTER IS BROKE!!

Venezuelan chocolate, particularly El Rey. This was my conclusion after a couple of years of extensive taste-testing. I’m partial to the milk chocolate (41% cacao), though it comes in several strengths, including white chocolate. I get it at Rainbow in San Francisco. El Rey also has a website.

Kasper Hauser. They are an absolutely hilarious four-man sketch comedy group (“skit club”) whom I have seen six or seven times, most recently a couple of Saturday nights ago at the SF Sketchfest. Not to be missed. (I have met three of the four by the simple expedient of strolling about the Mission, which is kind of odd, though it occurred to me that maybe every single person in the Mission does something that someone else is aware of; whereas I said, “My god, it’s Rob of Kasper Hauser,” and thought nothing about the person walking behind him, if the right person had been with me at the bus stop, maybe she would have thought nothing of Rob of Kasper Hauser but observed of the guy behind him, “My god, it’s the lead singer of … ”)

David Lazarus. He is the San Francisco Chronicle’s wonderful crusading business columnist. He is always writing these columns--I read them at www.sfgate.com--that say, “This company is doing such-and-such horrible things to their customers,” which is great enough, but then he adds something like, “Oh, and the CEO also runs a secret torture prison in Ypsilanti, MI, and when he was a kid, he used to leave his dog chained to the garage instead of taking him for a walk.” He ferrets out everything. And then, two days later, sometimes he writes that Dianne Feinstein is sponsoring a bill to make whatever the company was doing illegal. That is to say, he is on the side of the average consumer, he is excellent at what he does, and he gets results. He’s one of my heroes.

Naomi Wolf. She is a genius. I just read, belatedly, her 1993 book Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21^st Century. It does sound drearily informative and PC, but it’s absolutely excellent. She discusses why so many people share the goals of feminism but don’t regard themselves as or call themselves feminists. It’s full of interesting tidbits, such as the fact that when employers want to discourage female applicants for a job, they simply advertise the same job again but with a higher salary. She discusses victim feminism versus power feminism—we already are a majority in this country, so it’s not a matter of asking for power but using it.

Since writing the above paragraph I have discovered that Fire with Fire is out of print, and also that everyone hates Naomi Wolf for being conventionally attractive and having a fabulous career and lots of money and having the nerve to address women’s issues when her life appears from the outside not to have been one of suffering. Well, I don’t care. She has the right to write about whatever she feels like, and I’m glad she has tons of money and a fabulous life (maybe not 100 percent fabulous; it looks like she got divorced last year—that can’t be so fabulous), and I think her books are excellent. Is the idea that if you look a certain way and have a certain amount of money, you have to keep your mouth shut? I think not. Onwards.

PRIMTER IS BROKE!! At www.fixyourownprinter.com, there is an FAQ section that includes this question: PRIMTER IS BROKE!! The answer to that “question” is that they’d like you to survey the information available on their site before contacting them directly. Whenever I think of that, I chuckle. It makes a good all-purpose exclamation of distress: PRIMTER IS BROKE!! (In the end, I just bought a new printer, which, when it roars into life, makes all the lights in my apartment flicker, which could possibly indicate a fire hazard. My landlord spent probably a small fortune proving that the wiring throughout the building was sound and also, rightly, scolded me for using 100-watt bulbs in 60-watt fixtures, so now I have bags of 100-watt bulbs stashed away and I can’t see anything. Between that and my disappearing vision, I look better every day. Unless I get one inch from the mirror, my skin appears to be youthfully flawless.)

A Dust-Up, Rumbling, Snot

It has been a rather trying week. I have been sick, and I had a huge dust-up with P., who has long been requested not to call me and not to get any of the nice ladies who work at his home to call me on his behalf. One of them did call me on Sunday, because they couldn’t find P., and that was totally fine.

I’ve been calling P. every day, just about, but didn’t happen to call him on Sunday afternoon. On Monday evening, I got a call from the same woman who called me on Sunday. When I heard her voice leaving a message, I picked up the phone, and then P. snatched the phone from her and said, “It wasn’t my fault Gloria called you on Sunday! I didn’t tell her to do it! Don’t be mad at me!” I was instantly irate—frankly, it also scared me just a little, as it gave me a teensy little taste of what it might be like to be stalked, an experience I am very grateful not to have had so far—and said it was fine that Gloria had called me on Sunday but that it was not fine that he was calling me right then, and I hung up on him. He called back immediately and left a hysterical message, and then another.

I called him back (with some misgivings, as I was remembering what Gavin de Becker wrote in his book The Gift of Fear about how if the stalker calls you 50 times and then you finally call him back, you’ve just shown him that 50 phone calls will achieve his desired result) and he said, “I’m doing the best I can! I didn’t know you weren’t mad about Gloria calling you! You didn’t call me on Sunday so I thought you were angry at me! Forgive me! Please don’t punish me!” I found out later that he certainly did know I wasn’t mad about Gloria calling me on Sunday because his sister told me that she told him so: “Linda was not mad about Gloria calling her. Should you call Linda? No! Should you have Gloria call Linda? No!”

But even without knowing he was lying to me, I was really ticked off that I can’t make this simple request and have it respected. I know he gets unbearably anxious and his head fills with ideas that he can’t shake loose, and I know he can’t help that, but it still makes me mad, and it also makes me mad to have him say, “Don’t punish me!” as if the problem is that I’m a hardened sadist with my foot on his neck and not that he has done something I very clearly asked him not to do.

OK, here’s another thing. When I went on the 21-day vipassana retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center a few years ago (and spent most of it obsessing about the long-haired guy who was sitting in front of me; I even picked up one or two of his silver hairs from the floor and took them to my room, but if I recall correctly, by the end of the retreat, I put them back), after a number of days, I became aware of a low-pitched rumbling that became more and more noticeable until it overwhelmed most other sensory inputs. It wasn’t there twenty-four hours a day, but when it was present, it was oppressive and unpleasant. It made my ears buzz.

Finally, I wrote a note to the teachers: Is there something making a low-pitched rumbling, or am I nuts? Jack Kornfield wrote back and said I wasn’t nuts; that there was a heat pump or something that was probably the culprit.

Well, that same thing has been happening at my apartment lately. For about five or six days now, there has been roughly the same phenomenon, and while it sometimes does let up in the afternoon, it has been going on all night, or at least, so I assume, given that it makes it very hard to go to sleep and wakes me up during the night; sometimes I'm then awake until the alarm goes off. I tried earplugs last night, but they actually made it worse because they wiped out any actual ambient noise, leaving just the vibration.

About midnight, I could tell that The Big T. was still awake in the apartment above me (that’s my tall, handsome, extremely nice ex-boyfriend) and called him to see if he noticed it, too. Of course he did not but offered two helpful suggestions: that it might be some piece of equipment running all night at the possibly aforementioned construction site—the project where, once it’s done, when I lie in my bed and look out the window, instead of looking at the sky, as formerly, I’ll probably be looking straight into the beady eyes of some new neighbor whose living room or bedroom has a clear line of sight into my apartment—or it might be a pump at the nearby city swimming pool.

I called the DPW inspector in charge of this project, who probably thinks I’m a complete lunatic, as I called early on to grumble about being awakened six mornings a week. Monday through Friday seems reasonable, as many people, including myself, have to get up for work, anyway, but Saturdays, too, seemed like going a bit too far. The inspector, a no-nonsense type, said I should be happy it wasn’t Sundays, as well, but she said she’d have a word with the workers, and things did improve noticeably.

A few weeks later I called to see if perhaps the blasting of the Irish national anthem, or whatever it was, at 7:30 a.m. sharp, could also be omitted from the program, and I never heard it again. So I have friendly feelings for this inspector, though they may not be mutual.

Haggard from lack of sleep and having a cold and fighting with P., I left her a message after I talked to The Big T.: “I’m hearing this terrible RUMBLING! It’s driving me CRAZY! I think there’s some sort of MACHINE under the earth? Or at your construction project? Running all night? Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the POOL! Or George BUSH! Can you look into it and call me?” So far I haven’t heard from her.

I went to see my therapist and made that horrible noise that happens when you snort snot back into your head instead of daintily blowing it into a hanky. It was so satisfying (for me) that I informed her I’d be doing it throughout our session. (When I did a really horrible multi-phase one, I said, “That was the Deluxe.”) I said I was trying to snerf snot back into my brain. She asked why it was leaving my brain. I said I didn’t know; it was drifting out of its own accord. I said this habit, anyway, is salubrious; that instead of chafing one’s nose on a hanky and putting pressure on one’s sinuses, the snot ends up in your stomach, where it’s neutralized by juices. She said doubtfully but gamely, after a repetition of the appalling sound, “It does sound like some muscles are being worked.”

I showed her a picture of my adorable second-cousins-once-removed, Ben and Lucas. They are the children of my cousin, and will henceforth be known here as my nephews. I’ve been sending them $20 on their birthdays (in the hopes that they’ll come and care for me when I’m old and incapacitated, or either) and yesterday, for the first time, I got a thank-you card, from Ben. It said, “Thank you! I love you! Aunt Linda.” That absolutely delighted me. Plus there were three extremely darling photos enclosed, of Ben with his sweet little earnest face (he just turned nine) and Lucas with his blinding smile (he’s younger). I wrote back right away, even though I guess you don’t usually send a thank-you card for a thank-you card, and said I was tickled pink and hope to see them in June. Maybe I should scan those photos and put them here. I figure that if they called me Aunt Linda, a title I am quite pleased with, it’s OK for me to call them my nephews.

Funny to think that when I was nine, I had my first alcoholic binge, and would start smoking pot the following year. My cousin’s kids look WAY too young for anything like that.

Horrible Coworker of Friend

In response to my grumbling about my coworker, a friend sent me this:

I once worked in a trailer at a chemical plant writing documentation.

The other writer would fill a mug with ice, then stick her paw in the
mug and chomp it ALL FREAKING DAY. She also belched quite a bit and talked loudly on the phone about her gynecological problems. We
reached a zenith of sorts one day. She was in the bathroom (paper
thin trailer walls, mind you) and I heard "OH MY GOD!" in a
hysterical voice. For a brief, flickering moment, I thought God had
answered my prayers and she had fallen in. But no. She came stomping out of the bathroom and picked up her phone (did I mention that by this point we shared a cube?) and proceeded to call her Gyn. to tell her "I was just in the bathroom, and I had a HUGE amount of discharge! It's white with a little bit of pink in it and it's like NOTHING I'VE EVER SEEN BEFORE!"

I got to where I'd send my friends a daily email filled with my
coworker's exploits. We ALL knew when she was ovulating, what kind of sex she'd had with the BF the night before, and whether or not Papa
John's Pizza had given her diarrhea. My younger cousin used to remove all identifying information from my emails and post them on his
website. My coworker had quite a following, and didn't even know
it. :)

A Tranquil Afternoon with Much Chomping

I have a new coworker who sits right next to me and makes a cacophony of unsavory noises with his mouth off and on all day long, eating-related and otherwise: much slurping, smacking, teeth-sucking, and chatting with others while his mouth is obviously full. I have been irate about it for a week.

I finally discussed the matter with my boss, who said he would also find that irritating, but, fortunately, he couldn't hear it from inside his office, and that I should just ask the person to stop, in a lighthearted manner. Given that I was boiling with resentment at this person and had stopped acknowledging his existence at all, I couldn't quite picture making a lighthearted remark to him about anything.

I was reading two books this weekend. One (The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts) talks about the futility of separating ourselves from our experience, because they are one and the same. It's not like there's me and my pain; it's all one thing, and my efforts to separate the two are what cause or worsen the misery, but if I can realize the futility of the effort, the mind has a wondrous capacity to absorb and deal with discomfort, according to this author.

The other book (Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach) talks about pausing to take note of our actual bodily experience--noticing what we feel in our throat, chest, and belly--and accepting that our experience is currently as it is. She tells an anecdote about being on retreat and being irritated by everything: people sneezing and making noise and this, that and the other.

This sounded rather familiar, as I have lately been irritated by this smoking neighbor, the other smoking neighbor, the loud neighbor, the other loud neighbor, etc. And then the new coworker making the unmannerly noises. All very annoying.

The second author realized she had become very rigid, mentally saying, "No! No! No!" So she decided to try saying "yes." Yes to the lousy weather! Yes to the person who just sneezed on me! Yes to the cigarette smoke coming in the window! Yes to the sounds my coworker is making!

(This doesn't mean that you might not end up making a request of the sneezing person or the coworker, but rather that you pause to assess your actual experience and see how you're making it worse by how you think about it and tense up.)

So this weekend I practiced saying yes to various irritations, and resolved that I would also say yes to my coworker's noises.

After all, it's not like having my fingernails pulled out by Homeland Security. (I saw a Homeland Security vehicle pass by this weekend. It was frightening.) If I WERE having my fingernails pulled out by Homeland Security, no doubt I would say, "Oh, if only I could be in my cube listening to my neighbor eat his lunch!"

I'm pleased to report that either my coworker has gotten the hint by some other means, or the magical power described by the first author really works, or I've gone stone deaf, or it's that I was making the actual experience way worse via my mental processes.

The coworker is making the noises, but of course it's not literally every second, and when it happens, I think, "Yes to that noise," and it's over (for then, at least) in an instant.

Whereas last week I was thinking, "I hope he's not going to make that noise. Oh, I'll bet he's going to at any moment. Aargh--there he goes! This is terrible! Where does he think he is, in a barn? Maybe I should try to get him moved to another cube. Maybe I should move to another cube. Maybe I should try to work at home every day. There is not one place where it's quiet and peaceful! It was perfectly peaceful here until this fellow arrived; if only he would leave or if only he had never come." Etc. And THAT process basically took all day long.

(I just heard this coworker say to someone else, "I see your ball hog scored 81 points last night. What's wrong with that boy?" Kobe Bryant, playing basketball. I nearly chuckled at that. Maybe we'll even end up being friends.)

Unruly Self-Cleaning Meditator

One of the periodic small challenges in my meditation practice, underway since 1991, is sitting with the sounds of my beloved cat, Thelonious, licking herself, which she often seems to do while I'm meditating. I find the slurps and gulps almost unbearable, and confess that I have often hissed "Stop it!" or flapped in her direction the sweatshirt that covers my knees. Then I think guiltily of my meditation teacher, who has never said "Don't yell at your cat while meditating," probably for the same reason Jean Kerr neglected to tell her kids not to eat the daisies.

I've tried at times to treat the noise as just another object of meditation; I've tried to experience the sound as just a sound, without the labels and opinions; I've tried noticing my own discomfort.

Last night I realized I'm going to have to pretend that Thelonious is a fellow meditator on a retreat. I go on one retreat a year, either at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, or down near Joshua Tree. Quite frequently another meditator is doing something during a group sitting which is annoyingly audible: someone comes in late, after everyone is settled, and unzips her jacket; someone else has a chronic cough; a person some rows ahead sighs lugubriously every ten or so minutes. At one retreat, I sat next to a woman who spent a fair amount of time each day gently rubbing her hands back and forth on the tops of her own thighs. She probably wasn't aware that it made any sound at all, let alone what sounded to me like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. Another time, I was next to a woman who invariably whipped open a notebook five minutes into each period of sitting and began feverishly recording her insights. I once even saw a fellow consulting his Palm Pilot underneath his blanket, the little square of light a beacon to the faltering meditators behind him, unseen by the teachers up front.

These retreats are silent in the sense that participants don't speak to each other, or even catch each others' eyes, so it is not possible to vent dissatisfaction directly. It is possible to write the teachers notes to ask them, for instance, to remind everyone that such-and-such an area is for walking meditation and not for yoga or vice versa. I've written such a note once or twice myself, but would feel foolish writing a note about some small sound like the one made by the woman rubbing her thighs. And since there isn't a teacher at home to whom to write a note ("Could you please request that no one LICK him or herself during the group sittings?"), I am going to have to put up with the unruly meditator who licks herself.