Re: the font of my blog looking weird, if it does, for some posts. I lately went mano a mano with Blogger and I don’t have to tell you who won. Adding injury to insult, the struggles generated so many HTML errors that my blog got flagged as a “spam blog,” whatever that is.
The day before Memorial Day, I went without Tom (he had left for a five-week bicycle tour of the South of France) to Sacramento for a birthday party for Eva and Sarah, which was well populated and very nice. A long table full of mouthwatering edibles was set up in the backyard and we ate outside as the sun set.
On the train trip there, I was joined by three tiny girls, ages four, five and six, who sat facing me, and their grandmother, who sat next to me.
The parents of the girls were both deaf and were seated across the aisle. All three children had long hair in braids: one with blue eyes and blond hair, one with dark eyes and dark hair, and one with reddish-brown hair and a ruddy complexion. They were adorable.
After we’d all been talking for some time, the most talkative one—the middle one—announced, “We’re chit-chatting.” The youngest one confided that she was “in pre-school, but I’m on vacation right now.”
After I returned from my retreat in mid-May, I took a couple of additional vacation days, so I was off work clear through Memorial Day. I really enjoyed having several relaxed days to myself at home, and it was also good because it’s not unheard of for there to be some type of conflict right after a retreat. In fact, near the end of this one, during a question and answer period, another retreatant said she ALWAYS gets in a fight with someone right after she gets back from a retreat.
I suppose that’s because one is ultra-sensitive for a while? Or maybe one just gets used to the silence and to being around people who are on their absolute best behavior?
Sure enough, when I returned to work on Tuesday, I found myself feeling extremely annoyed with the slurping co-worker and said something critical to him, which I’d avoided doing for months and for which I had to apologize later. (Hence the need for a class on integrating meditation with life.)
The following Sunday, I got a call from Nancy, whose partner Terry was traveling with Tom in France, saying that Tom had not been seen by his two companions for five hours. In the end, he was missing for more than 48 hours, and there was much concerned consultation on the phone between various parties, and plenty of speculation: why didn’t he call? Was he lost? Was his bike broken? Was he, heaven forbid, lying in a ditch somewhere?
When night fell the first night, it was gloomy to think of poor Tom goodness knows where, all by himself, unable to speak a word of French and without a cell phone. The second night was more so. But on the third day—by which time Ann had called the State Department for help finding Tom, and Terry had contacted the local police in France—Tom rolled up and cheerfully announced he’d taken a wrong turn a couple of days back. Ann said that was good; she would now tell the State Department he was found. She said he replied, “Mom!!!”
Various theories had been proposed and developed during the fifty or so hours: He was lost, he had suffered mechanical difficulties, he was having trouble making an international phone call, he had met two comely young French ladies and decided to stay with them permanently, he had deliberately dropped out of society. It turned out that almost all were partly true (he had not deliberately dropped out of society, and it was actually two English paramedics).
Apparently only one person in Tom’s group of three had a cell phone—which Tom didn’t have the number for—and they had not made a plan for what to do in case they got separated, though, as Nancy said, it happens at least once on every such trip. It was a big relief when Tom was back in hand, and good to know he had been perfectly unconcerned himself.
I’ve been working on replacing more incandescent bulbs with CFLs, though I still think the latter die too soon, and I’m still worried about mercury in the water. At the moment, I have two “daylight” CFLs in the bathroom, and it’s so blindingly white that when I step out of the bathroom, the rest of my apartment looks like it’s drenched in melted butter. In fact, when I just look out of the bathroom window, the dull yellow wall of my own building and the off-white paint on the next building appear as luscious shades of gold and pearl.
Every other CFL I’m using is “soft white,” which is nice and yellow, plus I still have some fixtures where CFLs won’t fit. Cole Hardware on Fourth St. is ordering me smaller 23W CFLs that might do the trick.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Several Restorative Naps at Spirit Rock
After a whole week of not sleeping well followed by my night in the hospital, during which my self-image changed radically if temporarily from “perfectly healthy” to “invalid,” I was feeling a bit vulnerable. Tom said I was welcome to sleep over, but I suggested we both sleep at my place, platonically speaking, of course. (One does not necessarily trust the freshness of the bedding of the confirmed bachelor.)
He said, “Oh, very comfortable!” when he sank onto the McRoskey, and in the morning, he reported that he’d slept “very well.” He went off beaming, and with a spring in his step, but then, that’s how he always is.
Not so Hammett, who had the worst night of his life: another man came and slept in his half of the bed, right in front of his disbelieving eyes. I heard a couple of sounds in the night that made me think he was trying to shred Tom’s sweater, bunched up on a chair, and around 6 a.m., he meowed for half an hour, plaintive cries that got louder and louder.
Then it was quiet, but when I got up, I found him concealed in his most secret hiding place, burrowed under two or three layers of blankets on the back of the upholstered chair. I’ve never known him to go there when I’m home, though I sometimes find him there when I get home from work.
I think that when his loud laments failed to scare Tom from the apartment, he concluded he was dealing with a much more formidable enemy than he’d at first thought and prudently retreated.
As for the gastritis, two seconds after I took Pepcid, as directed by my doctor’s office, the pain went away, and when I quit eating so much vinegar, the pain stopped arising at all.
When they said in the emergency room that they were going to admit me, by the way, my first thought was that this evening of entertainment was starting to add up, monetarily, and when I discovered I was being admitted to a private room, I thought, “Uh oh, this looks expensive,” and I asked, “Is this going to cost a fortune?” A nurse answered airily, “Do you have insurance? It will probably be covered.”
In the end, it was pretty near $11,000—the ambulance ride alone was $1,000—but indeed my insurance did cover almost all of it. If I hadn’t had insurance and if I worked at McDonald’s or had no job, that could have been a major financial crisis, and so it seemed a bit irresponsible of the medical personnel to be all, “Let’s do this test! Let’s do that test! Stay overnight!”
But upon further reflection, I decided that that was much better than if they’d said at every turn, “Can you pay for this? Are you positive you can pay for this?” That would make people reluctant to seek care. Or then again, maybe it was simply a matter of CYA, as Ann, Tom’s mother suggested—avoiding liability.
The following weekend I went by myself to see the musical Wicked, at the Orpheum, which was pretty good.
The Friday after that, I went to hear Jon Kabat-Zinn speak at the Unitarian Universalist church at Geary and Franklin. I’d read his book Full Catastrophe Living about 20 years ago and liked it. I wanted to hear him speak because I’d liked his book, and I also thought it would be good to get an extra bit of inspiration before my annual meditation retreat began two days later.
This was a concentration retreat—samatha practice—the only one Spirit Rock offers each year, and I was looking forward to at least a moment of blissful tranquility. I did generally feel calm, but most of all I felt sleepy, and I slept, and slept, and slept, and slept. Some days I went back to bed after lunch and stayed there until dinner. It was very nice, but maybe not necessarily what I had gone there for.
I had a room on the back side of my dorm. Out my window I saw trees and a little stream, and heard the wind rustling the leaves and deer nosing about. Toward the end of the week, I got a bit concerned that I was doing it wrong, or wasting my retreat, and I had an an hoc meeting with one of the teachers, who said maybe I needed all that sleep. He added in firm tones that “Gandhi, the Buddha and Mother Teresa put together couldn’t have done any better.”
One thing of immense value that occurred was an exceedingly clear look at the workings of my mind, a tour of my thoughts in detail that made it glaringly obvious how much misery is self inflicted. It's also very impressive how the mind can create an entire vivid world full of convincing color and detail in no more than two seconds.
Since coming home from this retreat, I’ve found it almost effortless to notice what I’m thinking after a moment or two rather than after two hours or two weeks, and to let the stories go, not that the next story doesn't arise a split second later.
Another good thing happened at this retreat which was that there was a woman there with a very pleasing swagger—an obvious swagger is a good thing for a woman to have; few do—who turned out to be my across-the-hall neighbor, which I didn’t figure out until maybe one or two days before the retreat ended.
We talked at the end of the retreat and it turned out that she lives in San Francisco and that she is participating in an ongoing class at the San Francisco Zen Center which is about integrating meditation practice with daily life.
That sounded really great to me, so I called the Zen Center and asked if I could join late, and was allowed to; so far I’ve been to one class meeting. I’d never been to the Zen Center before. It has a very nice, tranquil atmosphere. I will enjoy going there.
The Case of the $11,000 Case of Gastritis
The Friday following dinner at Ramblas was very stressful at work, and in the middle of the afternoon, I started having chest pains, which I have experienced now and then over the past six months. On this day, the pain was greater and more persistent than ever before.
I’d taken BART to work for some reason or other (i.e., not ridden my bike) and had planned to take BART home, but I felt so lousy when I left work that I took a cab to El Toro, where I got a tofu burrito which I expected to restore me to full health, which it didn’t.
I called Tom and said I was having chest pains. He said to call my health insurance provider. The lady there said to call an ambulance and go to the emergency room. That sounded expensive, so I asked if I could call a cab and go the emergency room. “That’s fine,” she said, “but do it right now.”
I called the cab and went outside to wait. While I waited, I considered that I might actually be having a heart attack and would never see my green home state again, which caused me to burst into tears. After five or ten minutes had passed with no sign of a cab, I asked Tom to go ahead and call an ambulance, and a fire truck and ambulance came flying down the street ten seconds later the wrong way with sirens blasting, as I stood on my porch having a good cry. (Naturally, one of my grilling nemeses came home just then. Of course.)
I was helped into back of the ambulance by a particularly good-looking paramedic and Tom hopped into the front seat with the driver. At some point, we had a police escort through the rush-hour traffic. I was given nitroglycerin in the ambulance, which didn’t seem to help, probably because nitroglycerin doesn’t help gastritis.
In the emergency room, they stuck EKG patches to me and perhaps started an I.V. They gave me two more doses of nitroglycerin and a cocktail of stuff for gastrointestinal problems, just in case. Nothing seemed to help. They were going to give me morphine in a last-ditch effort to get the pain to go away, but I said I’d rather not take that, and didn’t.
I was wheeled to another department for a chest X-ray, and blood tests were performed.
Tom, good friend that he is, sat in the waiting room for several hours holding my backpack, out of which he’d dug my insurance card. I assumed they would eventually say, “We can’t find anything; go along home,” but instead they said, “We can’t figure out what it is; we’d better admit you.” This was on a Friday night, as mentioned, and there was talk of having me stay in the hospital all weekend! Tom brought in my backpack and I explained to him how to feed Hammett, and then he left, which was kind of a lonely feeling.
Then I was wheeled into a big elevator and up to the telemetry unit, where I stayed until late the next morning. I actually slept rather well considering that I had EKG patches all over me, an I.V. stuck in the back of my right hand, oxygen tubes in my nostrils—turning over was not possible—and received periodic visits for further blood tests.
At approximately 3 a.m., the nurse assigned to me, who was darling, said my latest blood test had revealed elevated cardiac enzymes, which was startling; all prior tests, including the X-ray, had been normal. The only abnormality was my low pulse rate of 50 beats per minute. (Normal adult pulse rate is 60-100 beats per minute; frequent worrying about whether people may or may not grill in the future can bring it down, like mine.)
Ooh! The Internet says “well-conditioned athletes may have a healthy pulse rate lower than 60 BPM.” That proves it: worrying is excellent exercise.
However, they repeated the blood test, got normal results, and concluded the determination of elevated cardiac enzymes had been in error. I should say I continued to feel the original pain all night long, and even when I left the hospital the next morning, it was still there. But by then it was clear that there wasn’t anything going on with my heart.
By the way, the reason I hadn’t called my doctor’s office to say I was having chest pains was that my primary care provider is an AIDS specialist, so I hate to bother her with my little chest pains or dripping blood or throbbing goiter or whatever. I secretly suspect that she thinks that if I’m able to ride my bike to her office, I have nothing to complain about, which is probably more or less correct.
I knew that I would probably talk to her lovely and very competent but eternally harried assistant, who would say, “I doubt you have heart problems. Do you have a family history of heart problems? It’s probably heartburn. Take a Pepcid.” And that is exactly what she did say after my stay in the hospital, the difference being that after my night in the hospital, I believed her, whereas if I’d called her before going to the emergency room, I would have just kept worrying that there was something wrong with my heart.
I’d taken BART to work for some reason or other (i.e., not ridden my bike) and had planned to take BART home, but I felt so lousy when I left work that I took a cab to El Toro, where I got a tofu burrito which I expected to restore me to full health, which it didn’t.
I called Tom and said I was having chest pains. He said to call my health insurance provider. The lady there said to call an ambulance and go to the emergency room. That sounded expensive, so I asked if I could call a cab and go the emergency room. “That’s fine,” she said, “but do it right now.”
I called the cab and went outside to wait. While I waited, I considered that I might actually be having a heart attack and would never see my green home state again, which caused me to burst into tears. After five or ten minutes had passed with no sign of a cab, I asked Tom to go ahead and call an ambulance, and a fire truck and ambulance came flying down the street ten seconds later the wrong way with sirens blasting, as I stood on my porch having a good cry. (Naturally, one of my grilling nemeses came home just then. Of course.)
I was helped into back of the ambulance by a particularly good-looking paramedic and Tom hopped into the front seat with the driver. At some point, we had a police escort through the rush-hour traffic. I was given nitroglycerin in the ambulance, which didn’t seem to help, probably because nitroglycerin doesn’t help gastritis.
In the emergency room, they stuck EKG patches to me and perhaps started an I.V. They gave me two more doses of nitroglycerin and a cocktail of stuff for gastrointestinal problems, just in case. Nothing seemed to help. They were going to give me morphine in a last-ditch effort to get the pain to go away, but I said I’d rather not take that, and didn’t.
I was wheeled to another department for a chest X-ray, and blood tests were performed.
Tom, good friend that he is, sat in the waiting room for several hours holding my backpack, out of which he’d dug my insurance card. I assumed they would eventually say, “We can’t find anything; go along home,” but instead they said, “We can’t figure out what it is; we’d better admit you.” This was on a Friday night, as mentioned, and there was talk of having me stay in the hospital all weekend! Tom brought in my backpack and I explained to him how to feed Hammett, and then he left, which was kind of a lonely feeling.
Then I was wheeled into a big elevator and up to the telemetry unit, where I stayed until late the next morning. I actually slept rather well considering that I had EKG patches all over me, an I.V. stuck in the back of my right hand, oxygen tubes in my nostrils—turning over was not possible—and received periodic visits for further blood tests.
At approximately 3 a.m., the nurse assigned to me, who was darling, said my latest blood test had revealed elevated cardiac enzymes, which was startling; all prior tests, including the X-ray, had been normal. The only abnormality was my low pulse rate of 50 beats per minute. (Normal adult pulse rate is 60-100 beats per minute; frequent worrying about whether people may or may not grill in the future can bring it down, like mine.)
Ooh! The Internet says “well-conditioned athletes may have a healthy pulse rate lower than 60 BPM.” That proves it: worrying is excellent exercise.
However, they repeated the blood test, got normal results, and concluded the determination of elevated cardiac enzymes had been in error. I should say I continued to feel the original pain all night long, and even when I left the hospital the next morning, it was still there. But by then it was clear that there wasn’t anything going on with my heart.
By the way, the reason I hadn’t called my doctor’s office to say I was having chest pains was that my primary care provider is an AIDS specialist, so I hate to bother her with my little chest pains or dripping blood or throbbing goiter or whatever. I secretly suspect that she thinks that if I’m able to ride my bike to her office, I have nothing to complain about, which is probably more or less correct.
I knew that I would probably talk to her lovely and very competent but eternally harried assistant, who would say, “I doubt you have heart problems. Do you have a family history of heart problems? It’s probably heartburn. Take a Pepcid.” And that is exactly what she did say after my stay in the hospital, the difference being that after my night in the hospital, I believed her, whereas if I’d called her before going to the emergency room, I would have just kept worrying that there was something wrong with my heart.
Pete at Peet’s
“[Mumble mumble mumble] O-KAY!”
Another day I took the bus to Novato see Carol Joy and we had lunch at a restaurant called Toast, saw the movies Duplicity and Sunshine Cleaning back to back, had dinner at Thai Smile, and retired to her place for a game or two of Sneaky Pete.
The next day we had breakfast at Toast and played more Sneaky Pete at Peet’s before I took the bus home. I always have a splendid time with Carol Joy.
One day at work we had a fire drill. Normally we gather at a certain location outdoors, but there were signs up saying we were supposed to go somewhere different, so I went there, by myself except for two Indian fellows who were chatting with each other and soon fell far behind me.
Almost everyone went to the former location. When I got to the designated corner, there was only one person there, a guy who has worked on my floor the entire time I’ve been there, maybe four years, but whom I’ve never heard utter a single word, not to me or anyone else. He walks around staring at the ground and has an air of being extremely taciturn.
However, when I walked up to him that day, I introduced myself and he shook my hand as warmly as if he’d been waiting for me and smiled what turned out to be a beautiful, friendly smile. His name is Eric. He’s just very shy. He also is about ten years younger than I had assumed.
The next time I saw him on our floor, I said hello and he said hello back, but since then, it’s back to the customary procedure, almost as if we had never met, but now I know better than to think he’s grumpy.
In mid-April, Tom and I went to Sacramento for Easter and, if memory serves, we slept on an air mattress at Paul and Eva’s. It’s fairly entertaining to writhe around on an air mattress one’s neighbor is sound asleep on even if you don’t manage to wake that person up. There’s something endearing about a person, innocently asleep, bobbing up and down unbeknownst to himself.
On April 14, my extraordinarily sweet cat turned three. I brought Ham home the exact day he was six months old, so he’s been with me for two and a half years.
Around then, I heard a Professor Cole of the University of Michigan say on the radio that while women’s lives in Iraq are much worse, that’s not to say human rights have declined. I sent an email saying I'm inclined to think that if half the population, give or take, has been stripped of many rights, it would be fair to say that human rights in general have suffered: Women's rights ARE human rights.
Further, to separate one from the other is to fail to consider that if the potential of even one member of a family is stunted or denied, the malign effects will be felt by the entire family, the greater community, and the country as a whole.
I was having a weird problem with my iMac where it refused to go to sleep on its own but had to be instructed to go to sleep; then, if it happened to wake up on its own, like if the cat bumped it or there was a small earthquake, and then it tried to go to sleep on its own, it would get stuck and be unable to be roused. I would then have to do a forced shutdown.
On or about April 18, I figured out the problem was the hub I was using to provide more USB ports. No hub, no problem. But: no hub, not enough ports. In the end, I decided to re-attach the hub and just not use the sleep function. When I want to use the computer, I turn it on, and when I’m done, I turn it off, just as I did with my prior computers.
Right about that same time, Tom and I had dinner at Ramblas on Valencia St. with Sarah, Chris and Kristin. I’d never been there before. The ambience, food and company were excellent.
Dinner, Complete with Two Shannons
Many things have happened since my last substantive update, but before we get into all that, first you’ll want to know this about Hammett: Sometimes he likes to topple the brown paper grocery bag I use for recycling in the living room and claw his way into it, kicking debris out behind him as he goes.
I have now and then found him after such an operation lying atop the pile of paper with a spent but pleased air; one on such occasion, one of his long skinny legs was still thrust through a toilet paper tube when he was apprehended, leading to a moment of bafflement on his part when he tried to stroll off.
“Did you ever hear of a cat doing something like that?” I asked my mother.
“No, that sounds more like a dog,” she agreed.
Back there in March, in front of MOMA I gave $20 to a panhandler with giant expressive eyes—I had just gotten a raise and felt I could share—and she walked with me all the way to Market St. and told me about being in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Before we parted, she darted in and gave me a quick kiss on the neck.
I had some work done on my brakes at Freewheel and asked the fellow there (I still miss Dan!) to make sure they were tight, but not so tight I wouldn’t be able to get them undone. I don’t know what you call the kind of brakes I have, but whatever they are, it’s always extremely difficult for me to unfasten them (which you need to do when fixing a flat tire, for instance).
I didn’t want to wait until I had a flat tire at night in the rain before finding out I couldn’t undo the brakes, so I checked when I got home, and sure enough, I couldn’t do it. After struggling for a bit and getting more and more frustrated, I called Tom and told him I needed help.
I’m glad to report that he couldn’t do it either, which was soothing to my nerves. He told me that if it came right down to it, I could undo the brakes completely when I needed to fix a flat; it turned out I already had the right hex wrench in my bike bag. He showed me how, and how to adjust the brakes in general.
Thanks to Tom, for the first time in the four years since I got the Marin, I’m entirely free of worry about its brakes.
In late March, my old friend Frank Manahan came to town from Dublin, Ireland, with his girlfriend. We had dinner in North Beach along with a heterosexual married couple who live here in San Francisco, BOTH of whom are named Shannon and BOTH of whom are tax attorneys. That is to say, they both have the exact same name: Shannon Drexler, or whatever their last name is, which I’ve forgotten, but wouldn’t have used here, anyway. Lochlainn, Frank’s close friend and an ex-coworker of mine, was there, too.
Shortly thereafter, another old friend, Elea, visited from Poulsbo, WA, with her charming young son Jack, who immediately stuck his hand into the open window of my cab, ready for a polite handshake. We walked around Chinatown and had lunch there, and then spent the afternoon at the zoo.
At the end of March, about a year and a half into my project at work to install secure bicycle parking company wide, we finally identified the first site, in Salt Lake City, that will install racks! We’re gathering quotes now.
I have now and then found him after such an operation lying atop the pile of paper with a spent but pleased air; one on such occasion, one of his long skinny legs was still thrust through a toilet paper tube when he was apprehended, leading to a moment of bafflement on his part when he tried to stroll off.
“Did you ever hear of a cat doing something like that?” I asked my mother.
“No, that sounds more like a dog,” she agreed.
Back there in March, in front of MOMA I gave $20 to a panhandler with giant expressive eyes—I had just gotten a raise and felt I could share—and she walked with me all the way to Market St. and told me about being in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Before we parted, she darted in and gave me a quick kiss on the neck.
I had some work done on my brakes at Freewheel and asked the fellow there (I still miss Dan!) to make sure they were tight, but not so tight I wouldn’t be able to get them undone. I don’t know what you call the kind of brakes I have, but whatever they are, it’s always extremely difficult for me to unfasten them (which you need to do when fixing a flat tire, for instance).
I didn’t want to wait until I had a flat tire at night in the rain before finding out I couldn’t undo the brakes, so I checked when I got home, and sure enough, I couldn’t do it. After struggling for a bit and getting more and more frustrated, I called Tom and told him I needed help.
I’m glad to report that he couldn’t do it either, which was soothing to my nerves. He told me that if it came right down to it, I could undo the brakes completely when I needed to fix a flat; it turned out I already had the right hex wrench in my bike bag. He showed me how, and how to adjust the brakes in general.
Thanks to Tom, for the first time in the four years since I got the Marin, I’m entirely free of worry about its brakes.
In late March, my old friend Frank Manahan came to town from Dublin, Ireland, with his girlfriend. We had dinner in North Beach along with a heterosexual married couple who live here in San Francisco, BOTH of whom are named Shannon and BOTH of whom are tax attorneys. That is to say, they both have the exact same name: Shannon Drexler, or whatever their last name is, which I’ve forgotten, but wouldn’t have used here, anyway. Lochlainn, Frank’s close friend and an ex-coworker of mine, was there, too.
Shortly thereafter, another old friend, Elea, visited from Poulsbo, WA, with her charming young son Jack, who immediately stuck his hand into the open window of my cab, ready for a polite handshake. We walked around Chinatown and had lunch there, and then spent the afternoon at the zoo.
At the end of March, about a year and a half into my project at work to install secure bicycle parking company wide, we finally identified the first site, in Salt Lake City, that will install racks! We’re gathering quotes now.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Coming Soon
More words! Sorry I’m so far behind. In the meantime, here’s this:
Mom: Should we give this brass lantern to [such-and-such person]?
Dad: Sure. Where did it come from?
Mom: It was a gift to you from your true love.
Dad: [Pause] You???
***
Mom recently acquired a flashing-light gizmo and put it somewhere, leaving it turned on. She wondered if Dad would notice it when he next went into that room.
When Dad did go into the room, he yelled, “Oh, my God! Where did THAT come from? Holy cow! There must have been a break in the space-time continuum.” Etc.
Mom reported that this reaction was extremely gratifying.
***
Context for this one: It’s about cell-phone minutes, which Mom uses the vast majority of in their shared account:
Mom: We’ve used up half our minutes.
Dad: What do you mean “we,” white man?
Mom: Should we give this brass lantern to [such-and-such person]?
Dad: Sure. Where did it come from?
Mom: It was a gift to you from your true love.
Dad: [Pause] You???
***
Mom recently acquired a flashing-light gizmo and put it somewhere, leaving it turned on. She wondered if Dad would notice it when he next went into that room.
When Dad did go into the room, he yelled, “Oh, my God! Where did THAT come from? Holy cow! There must have been a break in the space-time continuum.” Etc.
Mom reported that this reaction was extremely gratifying.
***
Context for this one: It’s about cell-phone minutes, which Mom uses the vast majority of in their shared account:
Mom: We’ve used up half our minutes.
Dad: What do you mean “we,” white man?
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Yes, I DID Cut It Myself—Why?
Speaking of flak from motorists, this week I got some. I was on Fifth St. heading from Mission to Market. Near Mission, a guy in a pickup truck passed me in the other lane and yelled at me to get out of the way, even though he wasn’t behind me.
At Market, I stopped next to him at the light. As we both drove off, he shrieked, “Does ‘bike lane’ mean anything to you?” “Well,” I thought to myself, “As a matter of fact, it does, but there isn’t one on this street. What we DO have on this street, however, is a sign saying that cyclists are entitled to use the whole lane.”
In fact, I was probably right under that sign when he offered his first observation.
Using the whole lane, by the way, is permitted anywhere the road isn’t wide enough for motorists and cyclists to share, not just where there happens to be a sign, but it’s always a nice feeling to see an actual sign, per California Vehicle Code 21202, a number engraved on the brain of perhaps every California cyclist. Probably if you walked up to a California cyclist on his or her deathbed and said, “CVC,” he or she would answer with a last feeble whisper, “21202.”
I read a very helpful thing in an Al-Anon book this week. To paraphrase greatly, it said something like, “We don’t have to go around telling other people what to do or not do. Who knows what that person’s higher power has planned for that person?” (Note that this was after I plugged my ears on the bus.)
I’ve encountered that general idea many, many times, but for some reason, that way of putting it was helpful to me, though of course I also found a way quite soon to misuse it, when I saw a cyclist riding on the sidewalk and thought, with a slight but distinct feeling of anticipation, “There’s no need for me to correct that cyclist. Why, maybe his higher power has arranged for a safe to fall on him from an office building window. That’ll learn him not to ride on the sidewalk!”
(Again, I don't believe in a higher power of the conscious variety, but I find it useful to use the idea in some contexts. “Maybe that guy’s higher power is going to make a UPS truck back into him” sounds more realistic to me than “Maybe the universe is going to … ”)
So, I’m not quite sure that’s the feeling for my fellow man the anonymous author of the Al-Anon book wished me to have, but I’m sure there will be some positive fruits, as well.
Actually, here's one: When the guy in the pickup truck was shouting, I was able to think, “Oh, well, whatever. I don’t need to yell back. Perhaps his higher power has some lesson arranged for him that will come in time as a result of that behavior.”
I also thought that, given all the times I’ve offered unsolicited advice, my karmic debt probably requires me to receive three or four thousand unwanted pieces of advice with serenity, even if they’re yelled in a rude fashion. It’s not as if I didn’t employ that exact method myself more than once.
I’ve been letting my hair grow for the past year or so, and it had gotten long enough that I could put it in a ponytail, though it also tended to form a frizzy corona over my forehead, because it IS frizzy and allergies prevent me from using most products that could clamp it into place.
I went to see Stefano at MNKYTHMP a couple of weeks ago for a trim, though I was tempted even then to have it all cut off. After the trim, Stefano applied a very hot blow-dryer and, without a molecule of product, rendered it nearly straight. It looked very glamorous.
Stefano said I could probably get it to be approximately that way all the time, or something near to it, by having it relaxed or straightened or using this or that product. For a few days, I considered it, but the fact is, I don’t like the feeling of hair touching my neck or face, and it turns out that straight hair touches your face even more than frizzy hair does. It’s almost like it was REACHING for my face.
Frizzy hair or less frizzy, it would always have to be kept in a ponytail, and I know the chemicals involved in defrizzing would have caused problems, no matter what anyone says, so after I realized straight hair is no better to have a lot of than frizzy hair is, I used scissors to produce a cut that was rather spectacular in its way, quite tall on top, which I called “The Grover. I forgot to take a picture.
Then I went to see someone who actually knows how to cut hair to have it fixed, namely, Cara at her shop called biNk!, which is at 10 Guerrero. She’s very nice and very relaxed and mellow, and she did a nice job, meaning that it's SHORT. (As for the crisp wave, that's courtesy of my higher power.)
I could have gone to see Stefano, but his only appointment was quite early, and also I was scared to face him after desecrating his work of art, even though it’s my hair. As it was, word got back to him, and I got an email from him in which he asked evenly, “Did you cut your hair after I cut it?”
After that thing that happened to poor Natasha Richardson—how sad, and how horrible for her family—I decided to upgrade my own head protection. All she did was bump her head, and now she’s gone, and a bumped head can easily happen to someone balancing on two wheels.
I always wear a helmet when I ride my bike, but I’ve had a baseball cap underneath my current visor-less helmet to help keep rain off my glasses. This is not good, because it reduces the effectiveness of the helmet—it can make the helmet slide out of position just when it’s needed most—so I went to Freewheel yesterday and bought a new helmet with an attached visor.
For months, I've had another helmet with a visor in my closet to which I'd intended to attach a second visor to form an extra-long awning for rainy days. I'm now inspired to complete that project right away.
While I was at Freewheel, I had my brake pads replaced, which cost me $40. I know Dan would have charged me a lot less, but that’s another era that’s over. I can’t complain. I got a huge amount of underpriced labor when Dan was there.
Here’s one thing that’s still the same, at least: Nearly going over the handlebars the first time I apply the brakes after a brake adjustment. That always happens.
At Market, I stopped next to him at the light. As we both drove off, he shrieked, “Does ‘bike lane’ mean anything to you?” “Well,” I thought to myself, “As a matter of fact, it does, but there isn’t one on this street. What we DO have on this street, however, is a sign saying that cyclists are entitled to use the whole lane.”
In fact, I was probably right under that sign when he offered his first observation.
Using the whole lane, by the way, is permitted anywhere the road isn’t wide enough for motorists and cyclists to share, not just where there happens to be a sign, but it’s always a nice feeling to see an actual sign, per California Vehicle Code 21202, a number engraved on the brain of perhaps every California cyclist. Probably if you walked up to a California cyclist on his or her deathbed and said, “CVC,” he or she would answer with a last feeble whisper, “21202.”
I read a very helpful thing in an Al-Anon book this week. To paraphrase greatly, it said something like, “We don’t have to go around telling other people what to do or not do. Who knows what that person’s higher power has planned for that person?” (Note that this was after I plugged my ears on the bus.)
I’ve encountered that general idea many, many times, but for some reason, that way of putting it was helpful to me, though of course I also found a way quite soon to misuse it, when I saw a cyclist riding on the sidewalk and thought, with a slight but distinct feeling of anticipation, “There’s no need for me to correct that cyclist. Why, maybe his higher power has arranged for a safe to fall on him from an office building window. That’ll learn him not to ride on the sidewalk!”
(Again, I don't believe in a higher power of the conscious variety, but I find it useful to use the idea in some contexts. “Maybe that guy’s higher power is going to make a UPS truck back into him” sounds more realistic to me than “Maybe the universe is going to … ”)
So, I’m not quite sure that’s the feeling for my fellow man the anonymous author of the Al-Anon book wished me to have, but I’m sure there will be some positive fruits, as well.
Actually, here's one: When the guy in the pickup truck was shouting, I was able to think, “Oh, well, whatever. I don’t need to yell back. Perhaps his higher power has some lesson arranged for him that will come in time as a result of that behavior.”
I also thought that, given all the times I’ve offered unsolicited advice, my karmic debt probably requires me to receive three or four thousand unwanted pieces of advice with serenity, even if they’re yelled in a rude fashion. It’s not as if I didn’t employ that exact method myself more than once.
I’ve been letting my hair grow for the past year or so, and it had gotten long enough that I could put it in a ponytail, though it also tended to form a frizzy corona over my forehead, because it IS frizzy and allergies prevent me from using most products that could clamp it into place.
I went to see Stefano at MNKYTHMP a couple of weeks ago for a trim, though I was tempted even then to have it all cut off. After the trim, Stefano applied a very hot blow-dryer and, without a molecule of product, rendered it nearly straight. It looked very glamorous.
Stefano said I could probably get it to be approximately that way all the time, or something near to it, by having it relaxed or straightened or using this or that product. For a few days, I considered it, but the fact is, I don’t like the feeling of hair touching my neck or face, and it turns out that straight hair touches your face even more than frizzy hair does. It’s almost like it was REACHING for my face.
Frizzy hair or less frizzy, it would always have to be kept in a ponytail, and I know the chemicals involved in defrizzing would have caused problems, no matter what anyone says, so after I realized straight hair is no better to have a lot of than frizzy hair is, I used scissors to produce a cut that was rather spectacular in its way, quite tall on top, which I called “The Grover. I forgot to take a picture.
Then I went to see someone who actually knows how to cut hair to have it fixed, namely, Cara at her shop called biNk!, which is at 10 Guerrero. She’s very nice and very relaxed and mellow, and she did a nice job, meaning that it's SHORT. (As for the crisp wave, that's courtesy of my higher power.)
I could have gone to see Stefano, but his only appointment was quite early, and also I was scared to face him after desecrating his work of art, even though it’s my hair. As it was, word got back to him, and I got an email from him in which he asked evenly, “Did you cut your hair after I cut it?”
After that thing that happened to poor Natasha Richardson—how sad, and how horrible for her family—I decided to upgrade my own head protection. All she did was bump her head, and now she’s gone, and a bumped head can easily happen to someone balancing on two wheels.
I always wear a helmet when I ride my bike, but I’ve had a baseball cap underneath my current visor-less helmet to help keep rain off my glasses. This is not good, because it reduces the effectiveness of the helmet—it can make the helmet slide out of position just when it’s needed most—so I went to Freewheel yesterday and bought a new helmet with an attached visor.
For months, I've had another helmet with a visor in my closet to which I'd intended to attach a second visor to form an extra-long awning for rainy days. I'm now inspired to complete that project right away.
While I was at Freewheel, I had my brake pads replaced, which cost me $40. I know Dan would have charged me a lot less, but that’s another era that’s over. I can’t complain. I got a huge amount of underpriced labor when Dan was there.
Here’s one thing that’s still the same, at least: Nearly going over the handlebars the first time I apply the brakes after a brake adjustment. That always happens.
End of a (Long) Era
On Friday the Thirteenth, I was stopped at a red light on my bicycle on Market St. when another cyclist pulled up next to me—just a tad too close—and asked if I get flak from motorists for taking the lane. I told him I hardly ever do. He said he gets a lot, but he always does it anyway.
Then he zipped off to position himself in front of all the motorists waiting at the light, which might partly explain some of the flak he gets.
Later that day, I was in Rainbow selecting produce when a woman I’d never seen before told me she often sees me on my bike on Market St. when she is in her car. She noted with approval that I don’t dart in and out of traffic, and otherwise complimented my safe cycling! That absolutely made my day, and it was surely perfect timing: the exact opposite of flak on the very day the subject had arisen.
Last weekend Tom and I went to Sacramento for a birthday dinner for Chris, which was nice, though Eva was ill and unable to come downstairs, which left Sarah, I believe, largely in charge of all the tasks a beautiful sit-down dinner for ten or so involves. However, Sarah herself was having a dreadful bout of food poisoning, yet everything seemed just as always, which is to say it was perfect and gorgeous and delicious, so tremendous appreciation to Sarah for working so hard for us, and the other helpful behind-the-scenes cooking elves.
Among other things, Sarah made a salad dressing that was extra scrumptious: canola oil, a bit of water, white balsamic vinegar (she gets this at Trader Joe’s) and tons of pressed garlic.
Lately I’ve been making a tasty dressing out of red wine vinegar and Stonehouse’s garlic-infused olive oil, which is fantastic stuff and which Tom’s mother, Ann, introduced me to. There is a Stonehouse location at the Ferry Building (and one in the mall where Bloomingdale’s is), and if you bring a bottle back, they will refill it for $3 off. Before they do that, they sniff the bottle, which completely turns my stomach.
I’ve been having a certain amount of nausea off and on, and all kinds of things get to me that never used to, so I sent Stonehouse an email to see if this is something they absolutely have to do. I didn’t say, “I don’t want your employees’ boogers and/or nose hairs in my oil,” but I did liken it to having a stranger come up in a restaurant and put her or his nose one inch from something one was planning to eat: blech.
When I arrived at Stonehouse that day with my bottle and asked if we could skip the sniff test, the sole woman there asked, “Oh, did you just send us an email?” I said I had, and she said she had just answered it.
During our short interaction, she all but rolled her eyes and generally was barely civil, no more. When I left, she wished me a good day in a tone that clearly expressed that she hoped I would die of an aneurysm before I got back to work.
Well, I understand that. I understand that, these days, the customer is always wrong and that we have no role other than to produce a method of payment. We are not to ask questions, or want something to be different, or have opinions.
But I had to interrupt my brooding about that to take up a period of brooding about something even more serious: the closure of Stacey’s Bookstore. If you go to their website now, all you see is this:
Is there a sadder sight than that of one’s favorite bookstore with nothing in it but bare shelves? There is not. I didn't go there after I knew it was going to close because I thought I’d prefer to remember it as it was than to see it during liquidation, but when I approached it that day, I decided to go in, after all, and it was a sorrowful sight indeed. I cried.
I guess they’re going to keep the doors open until every last fixture in the place is sold, but all the books and most of the employees are gone. I didn’t recognize the person at the cash register. He might have been a Stacey’s employee, but he also might have been from the liquidation company.
After I left, I “needed a moment,” as they say. Fortunately, See’s Candy is right across the street, a good place for a moment.
By the time I’d gotten back to work, I’d decided not to send an email lecturing Stonehouse for having a mean employee, and also not to say I wasn’t going to buy their oil anymore—I might not buy it at the Ferry Building, but there’s always the mall at Bloomingdale’s, so any mention of a boycott would have been a fib.
The email waiting in my inbox from Stonehouse was from “Patrick” and was perfectly friendly. It said they sniff the bottles to check for rancidity, but maybe, per my email, they should rethink that policy. In the meantime, I should just make sure the bottles I bring for refilling are clean and dry, and let the salesperson know that.
This was slightly confusing, since the mean woman at the Ferry Building had said she had answered my email: Is her name Patrick and she’s rude and condescending in person but utterly gracious via email, to the point of saying they might change their policy? I wrote back and thanked her/him politely and said I would make sure my bottles were clean and dry and that I hoped my requests to skip the sniff test would receive friendly responses, and left it at that.
The morning after Chris’s birthday dinner, Steve and Julie and Tom and I had brunch at Ann and Mac’s, also just as nice as ever (especially considering we had basically invited ourselves over).
Due to work on the train tracks, we had to take a bus from the train station in Sacramento to Suisun, and were seated right in front of a woman who yelled into her cell phone at top volume for half an hour straight. (I note that most people who do that kind of thing seem to do ALL the talking; it’s more delivering a monologue than conversing, as such.)
Then we got on the train, and then on another bus, in Emeryville. As we sat down on that bus, Tom said, “Here comes the cell phone woman,” a measure of the trauma he had suffered—he had had to just give up on reading and shut his magazine while the woman talked—because he usually refrains from remarks that are even that mildly pejorative, and even when the person is out of earshot, as this person was.
Whereas during the offending event I went ahead and put both fingers in my ears in full view of the woman, because I’m very childish: If she can force me to listen to a description of everyone who was at the event she just attended and in what ways, to her eye, they looked different from in the past, I can signal that I’m not enjoying it.
I consider this to be a step in the right direction from turning around and glaring at her, or asking her to lower her volume. But maybe someday I’ll be all grown up and sit there patiently and maturely, like Tom. Maybe someday I'll think, "Not for a million dollars would I risk hurting the feelings of this stranger, no matter how inconsiderate she may happen to be."
By the way, one time I was a bus with Tom, whose voice happens to be on the loud end of the spectrum, and someone turned around and told him to shut up, even though no cell phone was involved. Like, they just plain told him to stop talking.
Then he zipped off to position himself in front of all the motorists waiting at the light, which might partly explain some of the flak he gets.
Later that day, I was in Rainbow selecting produce when a woman I’d never seen before told me she often sees me on my bike on Market St. when she is in her car. She noted with approval that I don’t dart in and out of traffic, and otherwise complimented my safe cycling! That absolutely made my day, and it was surely perfect timing: the exact opposite of flak on the very day the subject had arisen.
Last weekend Tom and I went to Sacramento for a birthday dinner for Chris, which was nice, though Eva was ill and unable to come downstairs, which left Sarah, I believe, largely in charge of all the tasks a beautiful sit-down dinner for ten or so involves. However, Sarah herself was having a dreadful bout of food poisoning, yet everything seemed just as always, which is to say it was perfect and gorgeous and delicious, so tremendous appreciation to Sarah for working so hard for us, and the other helpful behind-the-scenes cooking elves.
Among other things, Sarah made a salad dressing that was extra scrumptious: canola oil, a bit of water, white balsamic vinegar (she gets this at Trader Joe’s) and tons of pressed garlic.
Lately I’ve been making a tasty dressing out of red wine vinegar and Stonehouse’s garlic-infused olive oil, which is fantastic stuff and which Tom’s mother, Ann, introduced me to. There is a Stonehouse location at the Ferry Building (and one in the mall where Bloomingdale’s is), and if you bring a bottle back, they will refill it for $3 off. Before they do that, they sniff the bottle, which completely turns my stomach.
I’ve been having a certain amount of nausea off and on, and all kinds of things get to me that never used to, so I sent Stonehouse an email to see if this is something they absolutely have to do. I didn’t say, “I don’t want your employees’ boogers and/or nose hairs in my oil,” but I did liken it to having a stranger come up in a restaurant and put her or his nose one inch from something one was planning to eat: blech.
When I arrived at Stonehouse that day with my bottle and asked if we could skip the sniff test, the sole woman there asked, “Oh, did you just send us an email?” I said I had, and she said she had just answered it.
During our short interaction, she all but rolled her eyes and generally was barely civil, no more. When I left, she wished me a good day in a tone that clearly expressed that she hoped I would die of an aneurysm before I got back to work.
Well, I understand that. I understand that, these days, the customer is always wrong and that we have no role other than to produce a method of payment. We are not to ask questions, or want something to be different, or have opinions.
But I had to interrupt my brooding about that to take up a period of brooding about something even more serious: the closure of Stacey’s Bookstore. If you go to their website now, all you see is this:
Stacey’s
San Francisco
Stacey's Bookstore
1923-2009
San Francisco
Stacey's Bookstore
1923-2009
Is there a sadder sight than that of one’s favorite bookstore with nothing in it but bare shelves? There is not. I didn't go there after I knew it was going to close because I thought I’d prefer to remember it as it was than to see it during liquidation, but when I approached it that day, I decided to go in, after all, and it was a sorrowful sight indeed. I cried.
I guess they’re going to keep the doors open until every last fixture in the place is sold, but all the books and most of the employees are gone. I didn’t recognize the person at the cash register. He might have been a Stacey’s employee, but he also might have been from the liquidation company.
After I left, I “needed a moment,” as they say. Fortunately, See’s Candy is right across the street, a good place for a moment.
By the time I’d gotten back to work, I’d decided not to send an email lecturing Stonehouse for having a mean employee, and also not to say I wasn’t going to buy their oil anymore—I might not buy it at the Ferry Building, but there’s always the mall at Bloomingdale’s, so any mention of a boycott would have been a fib.
The email waiting in my inbox from Stonehouse was from “Patrick” and was perfectly friendly. It said they sniff the bottles to check for rancidity, but maybe, per my email, they should rethink that policy. In the meantime, I should just make sure the bottles I bring for refilling are clean and dry, and let the salesperson know that.
This was slightly confusing, since the mean woman at the Ferry Building had said she had answered my email: Is her name Patrick and she’s rude and condescending in person but utterly gracious via email, to the point of saying they might change their policy? I wrote back and thanked her/him politely and said I would make sure my bottles were clean and dry and that I hoped my requests to skip the sniff test would receive friendly responses, and left it at that.
The morning after Chris’s birthday dinner, Steve and Julie and Tom and I had brunch at Ann and Mac’s, also just as nice as ever (especially considering we had basically invited ourselves over).
Due to work on the train tracks, we had to take a bus from the train station in Sacramento to Suisun, and were seated right in front of a woman who yelled into her cell phone at top volume for half an hour straight. (I note that most people who do that kind of thing seem to do ALL the talking; it’s more delivering a monologue than conversing, as such.)
Then we got on the train, and then on another bus, in Emeryville. As we sat down on that bus, Tom said, “Here comes the cell phone woman,” a measure of the trauma he had suffered—he had had to just give up on reading and shut his magazine while the woman talked—because he usually refrains from remarks that are even that mildly pejorative, and even when the person is out of earshot, as this person was.
Whereas during the offending event I went ahead and put both fingers in my ears in full view of the woman, because I’m very childish: If she can force me to listen to a description of everyone who was at the event she just attended and in what ways, to her eye, they looked different from in the past, I can signal that I’m not enjoying it.
I consider this to be a step in the right direction from turning around and glaring at her, or asking her to lower her volume. But maybe someday I’ll be all grown up and sit there patiently and maturely, like Tom. Maybe someday I'll think, "Not for a million dollars would I risk hurting the feelings of this stranger, no matter how inconsiderate she may happen to be."
By the way, one time I was a bus with Tom, whose voice happens to be on the loud end of the spectrum, and someone turned around and told him to shut up, even though no cell phone was involved. Like, they just plain told him to stop talking.
End of a (Short) Era
I had meant to see my new therapist, Monica, twelve times and then consider if I thought things were trending in the right direction, but along about week seven or eight, it hit me that I’d fallen into a old and bad habit that was causing me a lot of misery: believing my thoughts.
It’s so easy to do, because they’re being thought by someone I completely trust—myself—and they come with an exciting full-color movie and stirring emotions. But almost none of them have to do with the present moment. Nearly all of them are about the past and future, which don’t exist, in that it’s ALWAYS NOW.
This is not to say it’s bad to plan (or save money) for “the future,” but there’s only ever one time: now.
So then I remembered, again, to identify thoughts as thoughts. I find it helpful to note them very explicitly, though some meditation teachers, such as Steve Hagen, say no comment is needed. For instance, “Having the thought that if I make the wrong decision about such-and-such, the entire rest of my life will be wrecked.”
Just noticing the thought is 90 percent of the whole thing. If nothing else, it means all of my thinking facility is no longer occupied in having the thought, because at least a little of my brain is now devoted to observation. But also, as a finishing touch, it gives me the opportunity to ask myself, “Are you SURE about that?”
I’ve been pretty devoted to my moment-by-moment noticing practice in recent weeks, and it has introduced a bit of spaciousness that is relieving, though also sometimes a bit disorienting: If things aren’t the way I thought they were, then how are they?
Oh, right, they’re like this: I’m sitting in front of my iMac, listening to Jonatha Brooke. I can feel my left foot on the floor, and my right, and my butt on the chair, and my fingertips on the keyboard.
I’d started therapy with a particular idea about what I wanted help with, but that idea soon faded away, and then I was just turning up weekly, as planned, with the vague idea that something was wrong with me, and if I sat in therapy long enough, it would get fixed: There MUST be something wrong with me; otherwise, why would I be in therapy?
Meditation teacher Howie Cohn often says that of all the wrong things our heads tell us, that there’s something wrong with us is the biggest lie of all.
I believe the mental model of therapy is that there’s some lurking demon that will finally be exorcised by a sufficient number of office visits and painful excavation. But I’m not sure that’s true. I think we’re affected by all sorts of things, by many things from our pasts, but I think the task of this moment is not to dredge anything up but just to see clearly.
As soon as I realized I was believing too many thoughts, I stopped going to therapy and haven’t missed it, though I did like this particular therapist a lot. I liked that she is smart and sees things clearly and also expresses herself with clarity. If I wanted to talk about some problem in particular, I’d certainly go see her, though if I had an update on a long-running saga, I’d go tell Deborah.
Monica handled my decision quite well, though she did offer that maybe there doesn’t have to be anything wrong with me for me to be in therapy. It’s always a bit awkward when someone is explaining why you need her expensive services; it’s hard not to suspect a self-serving aspect. (Which motive is certainly understandable. Of course a person who offers a service for money wants and needs to have clients, but it’s not good if that overrides in any way what is best for the service-receiver.)
I agree it would be nice to have someone listen to me chat about my life for an hour per week, but I’m not willing to pay for it. Doing that every week adds up. If therapy costs $125 a week, which it pretty much does these days, and you end up going 45 weeks of the year, that's $5625, which is net income, not gross. If you take home 50 percent of what you earn, as an example, that means $11,250 annual gross income is required for therapy alone.
That last conversation made me understand something about why I was so furious at Deborah so often: Every time I tried to leave therapy, she discouraged it, which enraged me, because I interpreted it to mean she thought there was something wrong with me, and I also suspected, slightly, that she was guarding her income stream. But now I think maybe she was just saying the same thing Monica said: that you can go to therapy without there being something “wrong” with you.
Maybe Deborah was trying to say she wanted me to have a comfortable, safe place where whatever I said would be received in a friendly way. It’s kind of sad that we had a hundred conversations about this that left me beside myself with irritation, whereas Monica presented it in an absolutely understandable fashion in thirty seconds.
It was extremely helpful, a time or two, to sit with a powerful feeling in Monica’s office and note how the feeling shifted moment by moment, and also realize, hey, I can do this!
I often note my physical sensations, anyway, but asking myself “What can I notice in this moment?” is a little different in effect from asking myself “What do I feel emotionally right now?” even though it all boils down to the same atoms moving around in the same way (I think).
It’s so easy to do, because they’re being thought by someone I completely trust—myself—and they come with an exciting full-color movie and stirring emotions. But almost none of them have to do with the present moment. Nearly all of them are about the past and future, which don’t exist, in that it’s ALWAYS NOW.
This is not to say it’s bad to plan (or save money) for “the future,” but there’s only ever one time: now.
So then I remembered, again, to identify thoughts as thoughts. I find it helpful to note them very explicitly, though some meditation teachers, such as Steve Hagen, say no comment is needed. For instance, “Having the thought that if I make the wrong decision about such-and-such, the entire rest of my life will be wrecked.”
Just noticing the thought is 90 percent of the whole thing. If nothing else, it means all of my thinking facility is no longer occupied in having the thought, because at least a little of my brain is now devoted to observation. But also, as a finishing touch, it gives me the opportunity to ask myself, “Are you SURE about that?”
I’ve been pretty devoted to my moment-by-moment noticing practice in recent weeks, and it has introduced a bit of spaciousness that is relieving, though also sometimes a bit disorienting: If things aren’t the way I thought they were, then how are they?
Oh, right, they’re like this: I’m sitting in front of my iMac, listening to Jonatha Brooke. I can feel my left foot on the floor, and my right, and my butt on the chair, and my fingertips on the keyboard.
I’d started therapy with a particular idea about what I wanted help with, but that idea soon faded away, and then I was just turning up weekly, as planned, with the vague idea that something was wrong with me, and if I sat in therapy long enough, it would get fixed: There MUST be something wrong with me; otherwise, why would I be in therapy?
Meditation teacher Howie Cohn often says that of all the wrong things our heads tell us, that there’s something wrong with us is the biggest lie of all.
I believe the mental model of therapy is that there’s some lurking demon that will finally be exorcised by a sufficient number of office visits and painful excavation. But I’m not sure that’s true. I think we’re affected by all sorts of things, by many things from our pasts, but I think the task of this moment is not to dredge anything up but just to see clearly.
As soon as I realized I was believing too many thoughts, I stopped going to therapy and haven’t missed it, though I did like this particular therapist a lot. I liked that she is smart and sees things clearly and also expresses herself with clarity. If I wanted to talk about some problem in particular, I’d certainly go see her, though if I had an update on a long-running saga, I’d go tell Deborah.
Monica handled my decision quite well, though she did offer that maybe there doesn’t have to be anything wrong with me for me to be in therapy. It’s always a bit awkward when someone is explaining why you need her expensive services; it’s hard not to suspect a self-serving aspect. (Which motive is certainly understandable. Of course a person who offers a service for money wants and needs to have clients, but it’s not good if that overrides in any way what is best for the service-receiver.)
I agree it would be nice to have someone listen to me chat about my life for an hour per week, but I’m not willing to pay for it. Doing that every week adds up. If therapy costs $125 a week, which it pretty much does these days, and you end up going 45 weeks of the year, that's $5625, which is net income, not gross. If you take home 50 percent of what you earn, as an example, that means $11,250 annual gross income is required for therapy alone.
That last conversation made me understand something about why I was so furious at Deborah so often: Every time I tried to leave therapy, she discouraged it, which enraged me, because I interpreted it to mean she thought there was something wrong with me, and I also suspected, slightly, that she was guarding her income stream. But now I think maybe she was just saying the same thing Monica said: that you can go to therapy without there being something “wrong” with you.
Maybe Deborah was trying to say she wanted me to have a comfortable, safe place where whatever I said would be received in a friendly way. It’s kind of sad that we had a hundred conversations about this that left me beside myself with irritation, whereas Monica presented it in an absolutely understandable fashion in thirty seconds.
It was extremely helpful, a time or two, to sit with a powerful feeling in Monica’s office and note how the feeling shifted moment by moment, and also realize, hey, I can do this!
I often note my physical sensations, anyway, but asking myself “What can I notice in this moment?” is a little different in effect from asking myself “What do I feel emotionally right now?” even though it all boils down to the same atoms moving around in the same way (I think).
Saturday, March 07, 2009
I’m Breaking with You, at Last
What my mother said when she found out I’d never seen Men in Black.
While I was in my Facebook-related funk, I made a point of chatting on the phone with Margaux, and Amy, and Lisa M., and Lisa and David, and maybe someone else I've forgotten about, and then I felt better. I said to Amy that maybe the difference between having a big social set and not is the difference between being 25 and 45(ish) and she said she thinks that’s true—that when she makes new friends now, it’s because they have a certain interest in common, such as running, and while they have a good time doing that, they don’t do anything other than that together.
That made me feel better; I felt connected in my disconnection, anyway. I think it did make a difference when Emily left at work, too. I didn’t chat with her every day, but she was always there nearby, and we talked often enough. Now we talk on the phone and that is quite nice, but it’s not the same as seeing her in person.
I finally finished my giant book on Henry Ford! It took more than two months, but now I know a lot o’ stuff about Henry Ford.
I also read David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which I’m afraid I didn’t like very much. It seemed to be a lot of his very early stuff, recycled. Now I’m reading Karin Muller’s Hitchhiking Vietnam. She is quite an adventurer and has a very vivid prose style.
I really enjoyed the story about Lesbian Nation and the Van Dykes in a recent New Yorker, and called Alix up to see if she’d ever met Lamar Van Dyke, who quite caught my imagination, and she said she had, many times. I was thrilled. The Van Dykes were a bunch of lesbian separatists who took to the road in a you-know-what; Lamar with her ex-, current and future girlfriends: “the lesbian Joseph Smith.” Lamar Van Dyke lives in Seattle now.
DVDs lately seen: Who Am I This Time? This came out more than 25 years ago and features a dewy Christopher Walken as a painfully shy hardware store employee who blossoms only when acting, ferociously, in community theater productions, and Susan Sarandon as the new girl in town who, unaccountably, falls in love with Christopher Walken’s character despite his obvious baggage. She cleverly finds a way to merge his onstage and offstage personas and wrings a proposal out of him by the end of the film.
In Suicide Kings, Christopher Walken plays a mobster who is kidnapped by a bunch of young men who hope to coerce him into finding out who snatched the sister of one of the young men.
I saw Sean Penn play surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I’d never seen before, the night before he won an Oscar for Milk. I thought it was marvelous that he seized the occasion to scold anti-gay protesters, and I loved it when he said, beaming, “You commie, homo-loving sons of guns.”
Here’s why the Bay Area is the best place to live: The best American actor lives here, and also the top metal band.
(I’m sorry to say that, shortly after the Academy Awards, I read an interview with Sean Penn in Rolling Stone in which the interviewer reported that he seemed to take pleasure in cutting cyclists off as they drove around Marin County for five hours. I’m crazy about Sean Penn, but hasn’t he heard of human-caused climate change and if he’s truly a lefty, shouldn’t he like cyclists?)
Tom and I saw two episodes of the Def Comedy Jam. I don’t think Tom cared for it much, but I liked it, especially Katt Williams roaring, “You’ve got to love your m*therf*cking life!” and taking young women to task for claiming that a man has damaged their self-esteem. He said you have to love yourself before anyone else will love you, and that there’s no such thing as someone else robbing you of self-esteem: “It’s called SELF-esteem.”
Speaking of which, on top of our climate problems, on top of our economy collapsing, on top of what’s happened to the imaginary money I used to have in stocks (to paraphrase something I saw in the New Yorker, it’s like a friend has died and the friend’s name was money), it is really depressing to watch Rihanna go back to Chris Brown, and to hear her father say he supports her in whatever she chooses. I’d like to hear her father say, “Over my dead body will she go back to him,” though of course it is her choice.
After Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered, I read an article about how O. J. had physically abused her and how her parents—this is so sad—had encouraged her to return to him. The author said that if a man assaults a woman and she doesn’t leave after the first time, he knows then that he can do anything he wants to her, including kill her. I fear for Rihanna.
I saw I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn plays, not always convincingly, a man with the mental capacity of a young child who is the single parent of a young girl he must try to win back after child protective services puts her in foster care. This is probably the least satisfying Sean Penn movie I’ve seen. He can play not so bright and enraged and slick and evil and gay and heartbroken and many things, but out-and-out developmentally disabled is perhaps too much of a stretch.
Also, the Michelle Pfeiffer character is almost a parody, which doesn’t help. And then there’s sort of a loose end with the agoraphobic neighbor. I’m also not really crazy about Dakota Fanning; so sue me.
I saw Megadeth’s video hits, which I actually did not like, though that’s one of my favorite bands. The videos were just too busy and didn’t feature the band themselves enough. I liked Alice in Chains' videos because they showed the band members a lot, and Metallica’s videos are mini-masterpieces, in my opinion.
Last but not least, this very evening I saw Telling Lies in America, about a young immigrant who has some painful learning experiences after he is taken in hand by Kevin Bacon, who does a very assured job of portraying a slick and nearly conscienceless radio deejay. A youngish Calista Flockhart is featured, as well as Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
I did some phone banking for the Bike Coalition one recent evening, meaning a last-ditch effort to get people to renew who have already received five lapsed-membership letters. The coordinator said the success rate for this endeavor is very low, and gave me just two membership forms, saying that if I got even one person to renew over the phone, that would be a good night. As it happened, I did get two people to renew in the course of the evening, but I think I’m going to rest on my slender laurels and retire from that particular form of service.
I finally found the right collar for Hammett, almost. There are lots of different kinds: ones that just buckle on and that’s that, ones that buckle on but have a short elastic section that will stretch a bit if needed, ones that attach using Velcro. The girl at the store said she would never use the kind with the elastic section again after coming home to find her cat hung up in the backyard and foaming at the mouth after what must have been a lengthy struggle to free itself; fortunately, it was still alive.
She said the only kind of collar she would use has a plastic fanny pack-type clip, with three prongs that fit into a second plastic piece. Sure enough, this comes apart quite easily. Unfortunately, I think the particular one I got was flea-infested, and the cute little mice sewed to it were soon shredded from Hammett scratching at it, but I think this is the way to go.
I’m going to get another one, with nothing sewed to it, and get the type of tag that rests flat against the collar, as opposed to dangling down. I’m paranoid about Hammett somehow getting out, and reading online that it’s rare for a cat without a collar to be reunited with its parent(s) has convinced me this is a necessity. He has a chip, but not everyone would think to have a cat scanned, or would have the means to do so. Also, when I adopted him, I signed a form agreeing to keep some means of identification attached to him.
This week I stayed home from work three days in a row with a cold. They were very nice days, though the cold itself got a bit wearisome, with lots of reading, and napping with Hammett, which is a very cozy and pleasant thing to do. He will stay under the covers snuggled against me for hours. Such a darling lovable cat.
While I was in my Facebook-related funk, I made a point of chatting on the phone with Margaux, and Amy, and Lisa M., and Lisa and David, and maybe someone else I've forgotten about, and then I felt better. I said to Amy that maybe the difference between having a big social set and not is the difference between being 25 and 45(ish) and she said she thinks that’s true—that when she makes new friends now, it’s because they have a certain interest in common, such as running, and while they have a good time doing that, they don’t do anything other than that together.
That made me feel better; I felt connected in my disconnection, anyway. I think it did make a difference when Emily left at work, too. I didn’t chat with her every day, but she was always there nearby, and we talked often enough. Now we talk on the phone and that is quite nice, but it’s not the same as seeing her in person.
I finally finished my giant book on Henry Ford! It took more than two months, but now I know a lot o’ stuff about Henry Ford.
I also read David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which I’m afraid I didn’t like very much. It seemed to be a lot of his very early stuff, recycled. Now I’m reading Karin Muller’s Hitchhiking Vietnam. She is quite an adventurer and has a very vivid prose style.
I really enjoyed the story about Lesbian Nation and the Van Dykes in a recent New Yorker, and called Alix up to see if she’d ever met Lamar Van Dyke, who quite caught my imagination, and she said she had, many times. I was thrilled. The Van Dykes were a bunch of lesbian separatists who took to the road in a you-know-what; Lamar with her ex-, current and future girlfriends: “the lesbian Joseph Smith.” Lamar Van Dyke lives in Seattle now.
DVDs lately seen: Who Am I This Time? This came out more than 25 years ago and features a dewy Christopher Walken as a painfully shy hardware store employee who blossoms only when acting, ferociously, in community theater productions, and Susan Sarandon as the new girl in town who, unaccountably, falls in love with Christopher Walken’s character despite his obvious baggage. She cleverly finds a way to merge his onstage and offstage personas and wrings a proposal out of him by the end of the film.
In Suicide Kings, Christopher Walken plays a mobster who is kidnapped by a bunch of young men who hope to coerce him into finding out who snatched the sister of one of the young men.
I saw Sean Penn play surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I’d never seen before, the night before he won an Oscar for Milk. I thought it was marvelous that he seized the occasion to scold anti-gay protesters, and I loved it when he said, beaming, “You commie, homo-loving sons of guns.”
Here’s why the Bay Area is the best place to live: The best American actor lives here, and also the top metal band.
(I’m sorry to say that, shortly after the Academy Awards, I read an interview with Sean Penn in Rolling Stone in which the interviewer reported that he seemed to take pleasure in cutting cyclists off as they drove around Marin County for five hours. I’m crazy about Sean Penn, but hasn’t he heard of human-caused climate change and if he’s truly a lefty, shouldn’t he like cyclists?)
Tom and I saw two episodes of the Def Comedy Jam. I don’t think Tom cared for it much, but I liked it, especially Katt Williams roaring, “You’ve got to love your m*therf*cking life!” and taking young women to task for claiming that a man has damaged their self-esteem. He said you have to love yourself before anyone else will love you, and that there’s no such thing as someone else robbing you of self-esteem: “It’s called SELF-esteem.”
Speaking of which, on top of our climate problems, on top of our economy collapsing, on top of what’s happened to the imaginary money I used to have in stocks (to paraphrase something I saw in the New Yorker, it’s like a friend has died and the friend’s name was money), it is really depressing to watch Rihanna go back to Chris Brown, and to hear her father say he supports her in whatever she chooses. I’d like to hear her father say, “Over my dead body will she go back to him,” though of course it is her choice.
After Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered, I read an article about how O. J. had physically abused her and how her parents—this is so sad—had encouraged her to return to him. The author said that if a man assaults a woman and she doesn’t leave after the first time, he knows then that he can do anything he wants to her, including kill her. I fear for Rihanna.
I saw I Am Sam, in which Sean Penn plays, not always convincingly, a man with the mental capacity of a young child who is the single parent of a young girl he must try to win back after child protective services puts her in foster care. This is probably the least satisfying Sean Penn movie I’ve seen. He can play not so bright and enraged and slick and evil and gay and heartbroken and many things, but out-and-out developmentally disabled is perhaps too much of a stretch.
Also, the Michelle Pfeiffer character is almost a parody, which doesn’t help. And then there’s sort of a loose end with the agoraphobic neighbor. I’m also not really crazy about Dakota Fanning; so sue me.
I saw Megadeth’s video hits, which I actually did not like, though that’s one of my favorite bands. The videos were just too busy and didn’t feature the band themselves enough. I liked Alice in Chains' videos because they showed the band members a lot, and Metallica’s videos are mini-masterpieces, in my opinion.
Last but not least, this very evening I saw Telling Lies in America, about a young immigrant who has some painful learning experiences after he is taken in hand by Kevin Bacon, who does a very assured job of portraying a slick and nearly conscienceless radio deejay. A youngish Calista Flockhart is featured, as well as Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
I did some phone banking for the Bike Coalition one recent evening, meaning a last-ditch effort to get people to renew who have already received five lapsed-membership letters. The coordinator said the success rate for this endeavor is very low, and gave me just two membership forms, saying that if I got even one person to renew over the phone, that would be a good night. As it happened, I did get two people to renew in the course of the evening, but I think I’m going to rest on my slender laurels and retire from that particular form of service.
I finally found the right collar for Hammett, almost. There are lots of different kinds: ones that just buckle on and that’s that, ones that buckle on but have a short elastic section that will stretch a bit if needed, ones that attach using Velcro. The girl at the store said she would never use the kind with the elastic section again after coming home to find her cat hung up in the backyard and foaming at the mouth after what must have been a lengthy struggle to free itself; fortunately, it was still alive.
She said the only kind of collar she would use has a plastic fanny pack-type clip, with three prongs that fit into a second plastic piece. Sure enough, this comes apart quite easily. Unfortunately, I think the particular one I got was flea-infested, and the cute little mice sewed to it were soon shredded from Hammett scratching at it, but I think this is the way to go.
I’m going to get another one, with nothing sewed to it, and get the type of tag that rests flat against the collar, as opposed to dangling down. I’m paranoid about Hammett somehow getting out, and reading online that it’s rare for a cat without a collar to be reunited with its parent(s) has convinced me this is a necessity. He has a chip, but not everyone would think to have a cat scanned, or would have the means to do so. Also, when I adopted him, I signed a form agreeing to keep some means of identification attached to him.
This week I stayed home from work three days in a row with a cold. They were very nice days, though the cold itself got a bit wearisome, with lots of reading, and napping with Hammett, which is a very cozy and pleasant thing to do. He will stay under the covers snuggled against me for hours. Such a darling lovable cat.
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