Discussions with the Pale

I’m back from a refreshing week at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. There was much meditating, much napping, and much ingestion of delectable vegetarian fare.

Hammett was very happy to see me when I returned, but also relaxed and cheerful, so I think the cat care lady did a good job, though she does seem to be a tad forgetful, in that when she came over to meet Hammett and get the key, I told her my living room was a shoe-free zone, but before the end of her brief visit, she walked into the living room in her shoes.

The day before I left for my retreat, I heard what sounded like someone bumping against the outside of my apartment. Then I heard someone fumbling at the door, a key turning in the lock. “Interesting,” I thought, and stood near the door to see who was going to come in. It proved to be the cat care lady, one day early.

So then I was slightly worried she would space out and open a window while I was gone or something, but she didn’t.

The night before I left, I got together with Susan B., who was visiting from Vancouver, and Nell, who lives here. I hadn’t seen either of them in a million years (certainly ten years or so) and we had a really nice time. We went to El Toro for burritos and as we were waiting to pay the cashier, a street person, black, apparently male-to-female transgender and with a line of snot running down her upper lip, approached us to make some sort of a deal: “If you have a five-dollar bill, I have four dollars and seventy-five cents.”

One of El Toro’s employees walked up to ask her to leave, probably for the millionth time, and she snapped at him, “I’m talking to a white person!”, which made everyone within earshot smile.

Kind-hearted Nell stepped outside with the woman to negotiate, but it turned out that the four dollars and seventy-five cents was not literally available; when it came right down to it, it was more of a request for the five-dollar bill, period.

Meanwhile, Susan asked in confusion, “Wasn’t there just a tip jar here?” At this, the cashier silently brought it from its hiding place, eliciting more understanding smiles.

I have been on this particular retreat three times. It focuses on samadhi: concentration. It’s offered only once a year, amid about a million vipassana retreats, where the aim is insight. Two years ago, we were warned to be careful in our communications once we were back at home, as we might find ourselves being harsher than intended, with all the concentration we’d built up fueling whatever we might say. Sure enough, just a couple of days later, I mortally offended a coworker without having meant to.

However, last year’s homecoming was smooth and peaceful, so I wasn’t expecting problems this year, but it has actually proved to be extremely rocky. I returned home Thursday about noon, went to work on Friday, and was about one inch from quitting my job by the end of Friday. My goal for the weekend was not to think about my job at all, which I did not succeed in.

On Saturday, I saw After the Wedding, a Danish film featuring the exquisite Mads Mikkelsen, whom we saw in Casino Royale, playing Le Chiffre. In After the Wedding, he plays a Scandinavian aid worker in India—he cares for orphans—who is obliged to travel to Denmark to accept a large monetary gift to his charity. This he is not exactly eager to do; he arrives in a barely civil mood, despite what hangs in the balance. He attends the wedding of his benefactor’s daughter and surprises ensue. Recommended.

In the bathroom after the movie, I was thinking about one of the teachers at the retreat, Pascal Auclair, who was very charming. He is French and speaks in heavily accented English, stopping now and then to seek a word. In a talk he gave, he spoke briefly about passive effort versus active effort. For instance, if you are studying beavers in the passive investigation mode, you “don’t mess with the beavers. You hide in the bush and you look with your binoculars and you say, ‘Huh! Lookit that!’”

Another time, he said, “I would like to support your efforts, and to make sure I do support your efforts, I am going to speak in English.”

At the end of the retreat, he advised not making any big decisions for one week, such as “belly or nostril?” Twenty seconds after I got done thinking about him saying that, I walked out of the bathroom and smack into one of the women who had been on the retreat! (There were 84 retreatants, all told; people come from all over, including other countries, to go to Spirit Rock, though I don’t know if we had any international visitors on this retreat.) “My god, I can’t believe it,” I said.

We walked to Market St. together and had a very nice chat.

Diminutive Addendum

I didn’t mean to imply that I ever think anything I wouldn’t want my parents to know, heaven forbid! They are welcome to know every little thing I think. In fact, they probably would like to spend less time hearing about every little think I thing. More accurately, I meant I hesitate to recount lurid incidents of the past for fear of causing distress.

This reminds me of when my father referred to the fingle finker of fate. Indeed.

Teensy Steps in What One Hopes Is the Right Direction

I was brooding again lately about why I can’t be nicer. I know people who seem to be effortlessly friendly and patient and magnanimous on all occasions, though of course this is the view from my perspective, which misses most of their true thoughts and feelings. (They say in 12-step programs, “Don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides.”)

I’ve been reading Awakening the Buddha Within: Tibetan Wisdom for the Western World, by Lama Surya Das, a warm-hearted soul. After reading the section on Right Effort, I was thinking that I am probably never going to have a personality fundamentally different from the one I have now, and that if I want to make a change, it will require sustained effort balanced with self-acceptance.

I’ve made a million mistakes and I will make a million more. I can’t undo them and beating myself doesn’t help; it hurts. What I can do is decide on some means of heading in the right direction, and try to remember to put my intention into practice. To that end, my new mantra: This person is just like me, and wants the same things I want. (Namely, to be seen, to receive attention, to be treated kindly, to be loved.)

Be being nicer, I don’t mean saying yes to things that warrant a no, or not sticking up for myself when necessary. I mean having a feeling of friendliness and good will. My newest note to myself by my front door says:

“Patience.
Generosity.
If it were easy, everyone would do it all the time.”

It’s not easy. It’s work.

Obviously, perfection will not be achieved. I will do the best I can, maybe going one notch in the right direction as often as possible. For instance, if I can be kind, then I’ll be kind. But if I can’t, I can try to keep my mouth shut. Or if I’m mentally savaging someone, I can try to just drop it, which I can usually do if I remember to.

So maybe it is lucky that my personality is naturally rigid and exacting, because it gives me a million opportunities to practice being kinder, which I am convinced is the most worthwhile goal I could have. I do believe it is absolutely true that my problems are not obstacles on my path, but as Ezra Bayda says, the very path itself.

So now I feel rather liberated: My gosh! All I have to do is have the right intention and do my best! I can do that.

I had mentioned that I almost always do something wrong on my taxes such that they send me some surprise extra money months later. This year, my refund was less than I expected, and in due time, I got a letter saying I had done something wrong in regard to Schedule D.

Well, indeed I had—I had carefully entered my capital gains amount on Schedule D (which gains, by the way, were themselves the result of a mistake I made) but never bothered to transfer the amount to the main tax form, so my taxable income appeared to be less than it was.

That kind of surprised me, because I’ve always had such a tight grip on those kinds of details, but I take it as a sign of general letting go, which is a good thing.

I just finished quite a good book, Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time in Iraq, named after the Black Flag song; I have that album. He holds a rather surprising set of attitudes, and writes with great directness and equability. I guess it’s a quality of acceptance, of himself and of what he sees around him, which leaves him free to describe everything without equivocation. At one moment, he mentions considering throwing a grenade at a baby alligator; the next, he says what a huge fan of NPR he is. More than once, I found myself saying, “I like this guy,” though of course any mention of hurting animals is utterly abhorrent. (They didn’t throw the grenade.)

Ugh, I have to say that yesterday Twisty Faster posted a video of a 17-year-old Iraqi girl being stoned to death in an “honor killing.” I forced myself to watch it and was grateful it was short and pretty murky. The girl is lying on the ground in a shirt and underpants, with her long black hair streaming around her, and rocks the size of basketballs. No one came to help her. It took 30 minutes for them to kill her. I felt gloomy the rest of the day, and again now.

Colby Buzzell started out blogging from Iraq and ended up publishing this critically acclaimed book. His website is still up, and it looks like he is a full-time writer now. I’m totally jealous. But then, he started out by saying every single thing he thought—while he was in the Army in Iraq!—whereas I don’t because I don’t want to lose my job and also my parents read this. So he deserves it. He followed his heart exactly, it appears.

Still Got It!

Two weekends ago (I guess I’m getting behind here) I bought a new bike helmet and took the rearview mirror off my old helmet and duct-taped it onto the new helmet. I had to do that over two or three times, trying to get the spot right. The mirror took a couple of days to get used to when I first got it, but now I love it. It’s like a little TV right next to my eyeball that always has a show on about a street.

There was no movie I wanted to see that weekend—I know I should want to see The Lives of Others; on the other hand, I did want to see Mark Wahlberg in Shooter, but, shockingly, it was no longer in the theater—so I got some long-deferred chores done, like patching bicycle innertubes.

I also finished sewing a pair of baggy pants, the final pair from last fall’s annual sewing project, in quite a bright shade of green; green is my favorite color for pants; I have five pairs of green pants. When they were done, I put elastic in the waistband, and did the same for another pair in an eye-catching yellow, and that takes care of that. It’s funny how you can’t tell if a pair of pants will be any good until they are one hundred percent done. Fortunately, all of my pants can serve as pajamas if it turns out I can’t leave the house in them.

In the evening, Tom and I watched Blood Diamond on DVD. There was farting, and an apology: “I’m sorry there’s always so much flatulence at your house: Saturday is burrito day.” It’s not so much the burrito per se; it’s the burrito plus ice cream, potato chips and orange soda.

“Can’t Sunday be burrito day?”

I have decided cooking one dish on Sunday instead of two is plenty, because making two really does take the whole entire day, so that weekend I made Cowboy Frijoles from the bean and grain cookbook, and this past weekend I made lentils and rice with fried onions from Deborah Madison’s cookbook, plus I saw Lucky You (Eric Bana!) and went to the farmers’ market.

I noticed trumpet playing was starting to fade out again, so I added a daily task just to buzz with my lips for a moment or two—the trumpet merely amplifies a rude sound one is making with one’s personal mouth—and this has really helped, because once I do that, then I think, “Hey, it would be fun to play the trumpet,” and then I do. Lately I’ve been practicing improvising with Aebersold tapes, or playing along as best I can with Horace Silver CDs.

The jury is still not quite in on the firm McRoskey mattress. I went to see a man who does osteopathic and cranial-sacral bodywork, who said my gluteus medius was mashed. What he did really helped my back, though it involved some frightening “adjustments.” In fact, I felt great after that.

I must have looked cheerful, too, because a couple of days later, someone tried to pick me up on the bus for the first time in 30 years. (When I told Tom that he said, “You still got it.”) Not only that, it was the cutest guy on the whole bus, a Costa Rican, judging from his baseball cap, about 65 years old.

When he got on, I thought, “Wow, this fellow is very handsome. He must have attracted women by the score in his day.” A bit later, he asked the man next to him how many stops to Geary St. The man didn’t understand, so I held up three fingers and told him it was three more blocks. At this, there were grins and waves and general expressions of enthusiasm.

When I stood up to get out at the movie theater, he asked, “Where are you going?” I saw he was missing some teeth in front and that others were entirely covered with silver. I said, “I’m getting off here; your stop is one more block.” Smiling winningly, he said, “Stay with me. I need you.” “That’s very flattering,” I said, and meant it.

I’m continuing my daily stretching, though prior to seeing Jack, I had noticed that sometimes it felt worse right afterwards, likely a sign of overdoing. I’m trying to remind myself to back off so that the stretch is slight, not major, and the experience pleasant rather than unpleasant. This is the same lesson I had to learn at last year’s concentration retreat.

Once I went on a retreat for three weeks and another time for four, but in recent years, it’s just a week, so I arrive determined to make the most of each moment, and always end up very frustrated after a few days, and then someone has to tell me to stop meditating and go take a nap. The teachers never say to strain or have a do-or-die attitude, but in the concentration retreats in particular, I’ve noticed they emphasize ease and pleasure. A fine reminder for all of life.

White Glove Smoking Man

Here’s me playing at the Blue Jay Café.

Last Friday night, Lisa C. and Ann (Tom’s mother) and I had dinner at Osha on Valencia (Thai food) and then to see Dan Hoyle’s wonderful one-man play Tings Dey Happen, about oil politics in Nigeria, based on his year as a Fulbright scholar there.

On Saturday I saw Fracture (in which Ryan Gosling plays a district attorney and Anthony Hopkins a would-be murderer), which I liked a lot, and later at home I saw two DVDs, movies I’d really wanted to see in the theater but missed: Dreamland, a coming-of-age tale set in a desert trailer park, and Opal Dream, about a young Australian girl whose two imaginary friends go missing.

I think Hammett and I are reaching a new level of mutual affection. He is championing my causes as his own, as when I saw him glaring out the window at someone who was smoking.

Last Sunday I made Two-Bean Chili with Bulgur, from 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains, and Split Pea and Rice Soup from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. The chili was really good; that cookbook is becoming my favorite. I also thawed some of the tomato sauce I made the previous week to try over pasta and it was wonderful. I liked the soup more than I liked the last split pea soup I made, but I guess my favorite recipe is in Laurel’s Kitchen.

While I was cooking, Hammett came gamboling into the kitchen with what turned out to be the corner of a picture that had been for years affixed to the wall with two push pins. I found one of the pins but could not find the other despite extensive efforts, including dumping out a bag of recycling and putting every single item back in piece by piece; I did this twice. I also moved the big chair away from the wall and looked underneath and behind it; ditto the bed. Nothing. Dr. Press said if my level of suspicion was high that Hammett had swallowed the pin, I should have him X-rayed.

Right before I went to sleep that night, I looked at Hammett for a time, trying to decide whether he looked like a cat who had a push pin inside him or not. Then I reached down to pick up my hand lotion and there was the pin.

The firm mattress is a major improvement over the gentle; not sure how I could have gotten this so wrong in the store, but I guess it’s not uncommon. I think we may finally have reached a satisfactory conclusion to the Bed Purchasing Travail. May you never have to buy a bed or any portion thereof, but if you do, I guess my advice is to go to Sleep Train and buy whichever Simmons seems most comfortable, as long as it’s not a pillow-top.

However, my hip and lower back still hurt after getting the firmer mattress, which I now realize is probably due to having fallen on my butt in the tub many months ago, so I decided it was time to seek a therapeutic massage person or something along those lines.

I gathered a few recommendations, including one from Mily, and this week went to see Jing Li, an acupuncturist who works in conjunction with a massage person. Apparently, the more virtuosic an acupuncturist is, the fewer needles she or he uses. For anyone who follows competitive acupuncture, she used precisely four needles, three of which were driven into my belly button. So she may be the supreme San Francisco acupuncture master. I didn’t feel a thing when she inserted them, but I also have natural anti-acupuncture padding in that area.

She told me to move around as much as possible while the needles were in, and afterward her associate came in and did fifteen minutes of massage in the area that hurts (my butt, in case you forgot; left side). I would say there was noticeable improvement after this. I have been able actually to feel a knot where the impact was, and it was smaller after this treatment.

This week my company held a green event in one of its buildings downtown, and I went over to staff a San Francisco Bicycle Coalition table. Afterwards, I agreed to be the Green Team site coordinator for my floor in my building, and I told the manager of the project that I have a particular interest in bike commuting as a company-wide initiative and was invited to work on that, which I will.

Then I went to the top floor of the building to see the view, which was very nice, and then to visit a friend who works on the 26^th floor. Right across the street, far above the traffic, is what are apparently luxury condos, and as we watched, a man opened the door to his minuscule balcony to have a smoke. He was wearing a maroon and navy robe, and sporting a white glove on his right hand only. My friend says they see him all the time dressed exactly like that; they call him White Glove Smoking Man.

Corporation Possibly Not Entirely Evil

A couple of nights ago, I dragged my keyboard out of the closet so I could play a couple of tunes from the Real Book to see what they sound like with the accompanying chords.

Then I embarked on yet another vain attempt to find a place where I could have the keyboard out all the time. In the course of that, I was moving my bed around; though heavy, it actually slides quite readily on the smooth three-inch plastic legs the box spring sits on.

As I moved it, I heard an unmistakable ripping sound—sure enough, I had torn open the corner of the box spring, thanks to a little fixture that sticks out of the baseboard. I don’t think I ever damaged any mattress before (and I know I never damaged any box spring, because I never had one until now); naturally it would happen with this costly one, and only two weeks after buying it!

As for the firmer mattress, I received a call yesterday afternoon saying it was ready to be delivered. The delivery office opens at seven a.m. When the clock struck seven this morning, I called them and said it would be great if they could bring the mattress today first thing, around nine a.m., or last thing, around three p.m.

It arrived at 8:50, before I left for work, which was excellent service. Later I will sleep on it for the first time.

At work (which I don’t mention often here because I do not wish my relationship with my job to be severed before my lavish retirement begins in twenty years, give or take), we receive a newsletter now and then, the latest edition of which had a cover story on caring for the environment.

Some groups have been given re-usable coffee mugs, and the environment-unfriendly polystyrene cups near the tea and coffee removed. Battery-recycling is starting to be available, and probably every area has a means of recycling paper at this point. Motion-sensing light switches are being installed in company locations, which turn off after one minute without activity in the area, saving energy and money.

The story mentioned a fellow who is part of a “Green Team,” so I emailed him and said I’d like to join such a team, and I also emailed the people who put out the newsletter and asked them for a follow-up story on specific steps employees can take to help the environment.

I said I’d like to see the company provide secure bike parking at all locations and encourage employees to cycle to work where feasible, and I’d also like them not to send us little gifts made out of plastic, which is a huge waste. For instance, yearly we receive a plastic calendar/picture frame, which is a whole lot of plastic if all employees are getting them.

The Green Team fellow emailed me back and put me in touch with the Green Team leader for San Francisco, who happens to work in my building. I met with him yesterday, and was invited to join his group that is working on environment-related projects.

He said that via a website like TerraPass that provides a means of offsetting emissions via contributions to renewable-energy projects, he paid to offset his personal emissions, receiving a discount of 60 percent because he works for our company, which itself purchases a vast amount of renewable energy, thus earning very high marks from the Environmental Protection Agency. It was great to hear that my employer is doing something so constructive, and it’s encouraging that many companies are heading in the same direction now. (Thanks, Al!)

The Green Team leader also stopped driving his car to work and is sending the money saved to a small community in an African country, which happens to be where his family is from, so they can install solar panels to have electricity for the first time, and cease cutting down trees for energy.

Because of his vast efforts on behalf of this community, the company has given him three months off with pay so he can go to Africa and install solar panels! I immediately pictured myself in Africa installing solar panels, or somewhere doing something.

My own team lead encouraged me to look into this, since I can hardly be in Africa installing solar panels and in my cube complaining to my coworker about my mattress at the same time. Unless … “Say, doesn’t this dang village have web conferencing?”

The Green Team leader said he took his own two children to Africa, kids who have lived in pleasant circumstances in the United States all their lives, and on the second day, his son said, “I didn’t get to take a shower today.”

“Today! You might not get to take a shower for a week,” replied his father. “See that bucket? See that river? Go to the river, fill the bucket, and ask someone to pour the water over you.”

He left his children there for three months and when they returned home, they had learned the community’s language and their perspective had altered dramatically. Their father said they now refuse to waste the smallest thing.

It was an extremely inspiring conversation.

Today’s haiku:

Thirty-minute soak:
A tremendous luxury
not enjoyed by all.

Strap: A Tale of Loss and Longing

Saturday morning was grey and wet. Tom and I went to see Halle Berry and Bruce Willis in Perfect Stranger, which had some interesting plot twists.

We stopped by McRoskey on our way back for a little mattress-testing, which convinced me that I need to switch to a firmer mattress. I called Jason today and asked him to send it tout de suite. (For $350 more, but what is money to a person in my position?)

Tom and I parted after mattress-testing, he to visit his favorite taqueria and I to visit mine. I also went to Community Thrift Store to see if I could get my strap back, specifically the strap to my one-trumpet gig bag. Several weeks ago, in one of my frequent purges of extraneous physical material, I came upon it and tossed it into the bag: “A strap. Why do I need a strap?”

A couple of weeks later, I remembered why I needed it. Before I went into the store, I visited the receiving dock to see if they would have garbaged this item or if I should expect to find it in the store. The receiving guy said he would have priced it, so I went into the store, but it wasn’t there: snapped up already by some strap-starved stripling.

(“Strapling” appears no longer to be a word, at least as I was going to use it; how can this be?)

I went home and ate my tofu burrito with double extra avocado and took a nap. Then I tootled on the trumpet a little and Tom and I watched Half Nelson on DVD. Ryan Gosling did a very good job in the lead role. He’s a nice young man. He brought his mother and sister to the Academy Awards.

I liked when the drug dealer, with admiration, described the little girl as having said to the neighborhood boy who stole her bike, “Get your fat ass offa my bike or I’m gonna f*ck your fat ass up.”

“Did she do it?” asked the drug dealer’s girlfriend.

“She didn’t have to!” crowed the drug dealer.

This reminds me of my favorite sentence in the darkly (very darkly) humorous A Personal Matter: when the protagonist, a teacher, refers to his class as “an inscrutable enemy” a hundred strong.

On Sunday I made Eggplant Stew with Tomatoes, Peppers and Chickpeas, from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. It’s very good, and it’s pleasing to look at, with big chunks of vegetables.

And I made Mexican Black Beans from 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains. This is also very good, served over either bulgur or buckwheat. It’s on the spicy side, containing two dried chipotles, one dried ancho pepper, two diced jalapeños, and a diced serrano pepper.

When it was nearly done, I took the chipotles out, removed the seeds, diced the peppers and put them back in. I meant to remove the ancho pepper at that point, too, but it had disintegrated and the only part that could be recovered intact was the stem; fortunately, the seeds, while faintly tough, are not too hot.

Last but not least, I made a vat of Provençal Tomato Sauce from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, doubling the recipe and adding one and a quarter pounds of sautéed brown Crimini mushrooms and a bit of extra olive oil. The result is blood-red and out of this world. I froze it in one-serving portions.

When Tom came down to do his Sunday-evening taste-testing, he said he wasn’t quite sure about the pasta sauce and would need a second spoonful to be really sure. I returned his container of oats, which I had borrowed to make High-Fiber Health Dessert (melt a stick of butter and stir in lots of sugar, some oats and a couple of teaspoons of vanilla).

I have been enjoying so much High-Fiber Health Dessert, I had run out of oats. When I went to Rainbow Sunday morning, I bought lots of oats and refilled Tom’s container. He said he had to have that exact container back because it has the instructions on it.

After my burrito but before my nap, I had a bowl of High-Fiber Health Dessert (yes, one serving has one whole stick of butter in it), and prior to the movie, I obtained a pint of Ben & Jerry’s for my personal use while viewing. In addition, Tom had gotten us each a piece of chocolate cake at Safeway, so before I opened the Ben & Jerry’s, I told him who my health-insurance provider is, in case of coronary emergency.

When I was loading my groceries onto my bike at Rainbow, a fellow cyclist said, “That’s very impressive,” and that he had seen me in the store and thought the way I’d had my Jandd grocery bag panniers in my shopping cart was clever. All that unexpected appreciation was very pleasant.

Today’s haiku:

once-proud dried ancho
makes ultimate sacrifice
spicy beans please tongue

In Pursuit of Environmental Perfection

Next up: reducing water usage. I was reading that the Sierra snowpack is at 46 percent of normal, the fourth lowest level since 1919, when they started measuring, and that we may have mandatory restrictions on water usage later this year, with fines for those who don’t comply. Scofflaws may even have their water turned off.

My thoughts turned guiltily to my (almost-)daily 30-or-so-minute shower. I think the building manager disapproves of how long my showers are because now and then she says to someone doing work in my apartment, “I have to go take a shower, which will take me ONLY FIVE MINUTES, so I won’t be available for FIVE MINUTES, but then I’ll be around again after that. IN FIVE MINUTES!”

Once in a while, I have tried to reduce the length of my showers, but I can’t figure out how to do it. I mean, what body part am I not going to wash? I know some people take three- or five-minute showers, but I’m far from convinced they’re actually daisy-fresh.

A certain compulsive approach is probably part of the problem: Making sure the washcloth is thoroughly soaked, lathering it with soap three or four times in a row for a half-inch buildup, washing one foot: rub-a-dub-dub and a rub-a-dub-dub! Is it really clean? RUB-A-DUB-DUB AND A RUB-A-DUB-DUB! Then the other foot, after re-soaping the washcloth, of course.

I go through a bar of Ivory soap a week.

And then there’s the exfoliation phase, employing a nice firm brush. The last time I visited my parents, I found a suspiciously pliant back brush in my father’s shower. “I don’t understand how you remove a layer of skin with that,” I said later. The next time I took a shower, I saw he’d supplied a brand-new back brush, though he probably hadn’t planned to remove it from the cupboard for a year. That was very hospitable.

The other day, I finally started to use the little lever that turns the water off right at the showerhead. When you turn the water back on, it’s more or less at the same temperature. I used much, much less water—mainly just when actually rinsing—but was kind of chilly when it wasn’t running, so the next evening, I didn’t open the window all the way, and that was better.

Because the window wasn’t open so far, I could leave the door open; I’ve had to close it for the past six months to keep Hammett from hopping out the window, which means everything in the bathroom ends up dripping with condensation and the mirror takes ten minutes to unfog. But now, with less water running and the door open, there is no condensation, and the mirror doesn’t get fogged up and there’s no water on the floor near the tub to speak of. A win-win-win-win! Plus Hammett can come in now and then to see how things are going.

However, if they are going to do water rationing later this year, maybe it’s imprudent to implement this now, because I definitely won’t be able to reduce my water usage any farther after this, other than by flushing the toilet less. (Well, so I say now, but I’m sure there are things that could happen to change my perspective dramatically.)

A coworker suggested showering at a friend’s house to save water. Crafty!

Someone once told me, possibly joking, that when he writes any computer program, he includes a pause of however long, say, 20 seconds. Then, when someone inevitably says, “This is great, but can’t you make it run faster?”, he takes out the pause.

So maybe I should stick with my previous shower method and demonstrate a dramatic improvement when the rationing begins.

I have concluded that Hernerakkan (Scandinavian yellow split pea soup) is horrible and have been having pasta with tomato sauce for dinner this week, using sauce I made previously and froze. I mentioned this dish to Eva and she was enthusiastic, but she said the recipe she remembers does not have parsnips or turnips in it. I’m sure this would have been much better omitting those ingredients, and also if I’d mixed it up after pureeing. There were some spoonfuls that were pure parsnip or turnip: yucky.

Yesterday evening Tom helped me take my box spring back out of the closet. A week or so ago, I slept on the mattress on the box spring (softer) and woke up early in the morning with my back really bothering me. The next night, I put the mattress on the floor (harder) and it helped, suggesting I need a firmer mattress.

But two nights ago, I slept on the mattress on the floor (harder) and woke up needing a lot of stretching. Last night, I slept on the mattress on the box spring (softer) and needed a bit less stretching, suggesting I need a softer mattress, according to my genial McRoskey salesperson.

Tomorrow I will go test a step firmer and a step softer. Maybe the one I have is just right.

The Hammett will be one year old tomorrow!

Emissions Offsetting and Moratorium on Lamination

Here is a good thing: Offsetting one’s personal emissions of carbon dioxide at the TerraPass website. Based on my monthly PG&E bill for gas and electricity of $13 or less, and my one annual flight from San Francisco to Detroit and back, it looks like I could emit with a cleaner conscience for a mere $40 a year. I am going to do this, plus add it to my annual task list.

My non-flight transportation-related emissions should be pretty low, but home-related emissions are unavoidable, and of course air travel emits.

Besides TerraPass, there is GoCarbonZero, where the estimate is that I could offset my emissions for $58.20 a year, also quite reasonable.

Next, on to greener cleaning products. I already use only Ecover and Seventh Generation products, plus Bon Ami for the tub and bathroom sink, which is a fine start, but according to Eartheasy, every single preparation I use (for the tub and sink, for the toilet, for the mirror) could be replaced by something simpler and no doubt cheaper, that I can probably obtain in bulk at Rainbow (think baking soda, white vinegar and borax). For ten percent off! (With Bike Coalition discount, assuming I remember to bring my Bike Coalition membership card and picture ID. That will be the hard part.)

The McRoskey mattress is still on the floor and I still think it’s too soft. Oddly, since I started sleeping on it, I am having one very vivid dream after the other, including a dream about a man riddled with tumors, including two or three bulging whitely on his chin, plus he had only one eye, large and in the middle of his forehead. I blame this on being in the middle of Kenzaburo Oë’s novel A Personal Matter, which my mother recommended.

Maybe all this dreaming indicates that I’m getting more deep sleep than I think, but the half-hour of stretching I have to do in the morning before I can leave the house is a contraindication.

The advice (of McRoskey) is to sleep on your new bed for two weeks before deciding to make a change, but since I sometimes have the mattress on the floor and sometimes on the box spring, I haven’t slept for two weeks straight on any one configuration.

I do have a nice new pen pal: a woman who has put a down payment on a McRoskey mattress but is not sure about having them deliver it after reading my posting on Craigslist seeking feedback from McRoskey owners. I haven’t gotten any, positive or negative, but did hear from three people who want to know what I think before they buy McRoskeys themselves.

When I most recently omitted the box spring, I stood it up against the wall and put the big chair against it to keep it from falling down. I covered it with a thickish blanket, but saw that evening that Hammett had clawed the blanket, the first time he’s substantially clawed anything other than his scratching post—something I very much wish to discourage—and had managed to make a mark or two on the box spring itself, though you’d hardly notice it if you didn’t know where to look.

While I was watching, he leapt on top of the box spring and reached up to seize the picture molding. Gosh, he’s a long cat. He decided not to hang from the picture molding, but looked speculatively at the metal fixture that once concealed the top of a set of drapes. He was clearly thinking about leaping on top of it.

I pictured him falling onto the lamp that lacks the lampshade and ending up in a pool of blood, and then I called Tom and asked if he’d help me stuff the box spring into the walk-in closet. With the little screw-on legs removed, it actually fit in there, but entering/exiting the closet is now kind of a production and I can forget about accessing my Alfred Hitchcock-edited collections of horror stories, or anything else on the west side of the closet, including the lamination materials.

About a month ago, someone destroyed the lock on the front door of our apartment building, but left without stealing anything, exiting through a different door. The other day, someone else came in and stole a bike that was, I believe, fastened to a railing in the third-floor hallway.

(Not to blame the victim, but I do kind of think people’s personal property doesn’t belong in shared space such as hallways. If your stuff doesn’t fit in your apartment, you might have too much stuff. This is the third time, at least, that the building has been broken into in about a year. The first time, the person was obviously after a bike visible in the lobby, and probably ditto a month ago, so such objects also serve as bait.)

There was no property damage this time. Ironically, the new extra-security plate on the front door prevents it from closing securely on its own every time, so the person probably just pushed the door open and walked in.

Vivaldi Weeping in His Grave

Ruminating lately about stage fright reminds me of the most terrifying performance of my life, fairly soon after I had started playing again as an adult. My esteemed teacher of that era, Lauraine Carpenter, now Principal Trumpet in the Toledo Symphony, had two promising students and thought it would be nice—right, nice for her!—if we played the Vivaldi Double Trumpet Concerto at a Community Women’s Orchestra concert.

(Two of my former trumpet teachers are in the Toledo Symphony; so is Mel Harsh, my very first trumpet teacher. I didn’t study with either of them in Toledo. I had a crush on Mel Harsh. He was handsome. He drove a little dark-green Pinto. He told me all the time to play more quietly.)

All too soon the dreaded moment arrived, and Dev and I rose from our seats. I had actually considered, briefly, breaking one of my own fingers with a hammer to avoid having to do it.

Disaster ensued immediately. Then a cold clarity set in: Is it too late to get out of this? Yes, unless the earth swallowed us that very second. In the end, we hit a good percentage of right notes, and the audience, which was in fact very warm and supportive, loved it and our teacher was happy and we were happy.

Afterwards, a friend who was there said, astonishingly, that she couldn’t tell I was scared! The only time I was more scared was in telephone-pole-climbing school when I worked for PG&E.

I guess the performer is most acutely aware of any fear, and of anything that goes wrong. If you don’t signal that something is amiss, a lot of people won’t notice. My friend Paul Trupin, who played guitar in Pray for Rain but who is now dead, once told me, “No matter what happens, I always act like, ‘I totally mastered that.’”

If something very obviously goes wrong but you keep going—if you think, “Oh, well,” instead of falling on the floor and crying—I think most people are understanding and even sympathetic.

In Eloise Ristad’s book A Soprano on Her Head: Right-Side-Up Reflections on Life and Other Performances, she says to observe the physical manifestations of nervousness and will them to increase. A hundred butterflies in the stomach? Go for two hundred.

Sooner or later the symptoms will reach an extreme and naturally abate, whereas resistance prolongs them.

Lauraine advised visualizing the performance beforehand over and over, to let the anxiety well up and pass many times, to kind of wring it all out in advance.

When I was in music school, John Clayton, the bassist and bandleader, came to do a master class. Someone asked about stage fright. As I recall, his answer was kind of harsh: “What are you doing thinking about yourself? That’s your ego.”

But, put more kindly, I think that’s exactly right.

The number-one most helpful thing for me is, right before starting, to hear the first phrase in my head and to take a big breath and just play the first note. Very often, the fear washes away immediately.

Yet, it can always happen that in the last split-second, the mean trumpet gremlin whispers urgently, “I think you’re going to miss the first—” SPLAT! So you never know. Plus some days the overall conditions aren’t favorable. Some days you just sound good and some days you don’t.

But assuming you don’t actually die, the worst that can happen is that the conductor/bandleader stops the performance and screams “Get off the stage and never come back!” Then you would just have to find some group to play with who’d never heard of you.

For years I’ve thought it was too bad that I feel I have to play so quietly in my current apartment, due to the presence of the building manager below. It seemed like it took a lot of the fun out of it. Then I saw someone’s remark online that being forced to play quietly in a similar situation had done great things for his tone and control, and since then it has been fine.

I also have had this idea that when I do jazz improvisation, it should be extremely exciting and I should sound like Dizzy Gillespie, with lots of high notes and fast runs, even though that’s not my favorite thing to listen to.

Before I played at the café a few weeks ago, I decided to try for beautiful and lyrical rather than exciting, and it felt much better.

Maybe the way I’m supposed to do things is the way I like to do them rather than the way I think someone else wants me to do them.

Writing is the same. For many years, I thought, “I should write a novel,” ignoring the fact that this would be a backbreaking strain, since I have zero ability in that area. I really just like to write about my life! Finally it dawned on me, oh, maybe I should just write about my life.