MyHead Revisited

I can’t even remember who it was now, but recently a friend told me that she is consistently revisiting and reevaluating her goals. What seemed like the best and truest goal two years ago may no longer hold the sway, and so, daily almost, but certainly every while or so, we must revisit what we’d thought we were heading toward – like recalibrating our compass.

I’d come up with this vision a few years ago, maybe 2 or 3 now, of my ideal daily schedule. The early morning, of course, is inner work like I already do (journaling, meditating, blogging); the rest of the morning hours would be spent in working on my craft, in a detached studio in the backyard that would be half an art studio and half a music studio. Couches, light, friends to jam or visit.

In the afternoon, I would go out “into the world,” and do *something* of which I’m still unsure having to do with the community -- being involved, helping others, maybe working after school with kids, or facilitating my workshop, or some kind of public speaking. Unknown task, but known purpose: to help, to connect, to be in community.

The evening would be play time. Either I’d be in theater productions, performing with my band, out at art shows or readings. That would be my friend, fun, out, “On” time.

And that’s my day. All seen from a white kitchen, where I stand, maybe 50 years old, chopping something at the island block, the art studio visible from a door to the backyard.

Not a bad vision, eh?!

But. It’s also time to revisit it. And my thoughts and goals in general. Are these intentions still relevant, powered, intended? Are these my values? Dunno. I’ll have to sit with them for a while.

What I surprised me this morning, however, is that several of my intentions have become realized. Though I know I am unfulfilled in my employment, as I remember where I was when I discovered the above vision a few years ago (also unfulfilled in my employment), I recognize I am no longer looking at this vision from a place of Yeah Sure, Right. As a completely foreign land.

I guess I’m being vague.

To drill down: This morning, I’m boarding a bus, to a train, to a plane that will carry me across the land to visit a girl friend and her new baby. Three years ago, this would be impossible.

And that’s what I’m trying to get at here: Something that was impossible, is now utterly completely possible, and it’s happening. In 4 hours. It is. There is no waiting, no longing, no hemming, no envy. I am doing what I’ve wanted to be able to do because I am able to do it.

Perhaps this all sounds quite bent this morning, perhaps having not packed yet is making me anxious to put all this down and get onto that plane.

But, I hope you get my meaning.

Because even as few as 2 weeks ago, I was as depressed and lost-feeling as Tom Hanks without Wilson. Despite the mantra of my friend that, This too shall pass, it didn’t feel that way, and I had no idea how that could happen. Nothing can really change, can it? It’s all the same Groundhog Day, isn’t it?

But, Bill Murray wakes up in the end to a new future, doesn’t he?

What looks like the continuation of a road going nowhere, long and desperate and desolate… well, this morning at least, I see that it’s not.

It doesn’t solve my life. It doesn’t offer clarity or freedom or a path lit up like the exit lines in a plane. But, in some ways, my recognition of my being here does fucking solve it.

The fact that this is enough. That I am happy – that I allowed myself to take a vacation, to visit a friend, to take action toward something that was valuable to me. … Actually, that does solve my life.

To look up from my navel-gazing and my despair and my coordinate-less destination, to remember (oh forgive me) that the journey is happening right now, and that I am (FINALLY) participating in it and NOTICE that I am participating in it:

Well, it feels like Alice in the ‘50s cartoon version of her story, walking along a path through the woods when a dog with a push-broom nose comes along behind her, and erases the path from which she came, cuts around in front of her, and continues to sweep away the path toward which she’s going, so that finally, all she’s left with is one illuminated square.

But for me, I’m seeing today (and this all may change tomorrow!) that this is pretty good square. 

Smalls tasks. One thing. Little pieces. Eventual mountains.

The thing about “eventual mountains” is that we actually have to have the presence of mind to turn around and acknowledge we’ve reached the top of a mountain. Otherwise, small tasks never seem to add up to anything significant, because we’re always striving without appreciating our own efforts.

I’ve noticed this week that my patience with people I come into daily contact with is … thin. That I envelop the small irks with a candy-coating of relish. (Not like real relish, that’d be gross.) From the first work email I replied to yesterday morning, back from the long weekend, to the impatience I had toward someone else, I knew that I was taking on more emotional attachment to these interactions than I truly had to.

None of this was personal. "I didn’t cause, can’t control and can’t cure" you or your behavior. It is not my fault or responsibility that you, woman, are a tight-ass, type-A, micro-managing, self-righteous, impervious, judgmental bitch.

IN THIS inner maelstrom of judgment toward others, I remembered something significant: We are only a percent as judgmental of others as we are toward ourselves. It’s something I’ve heard again and again. If you hear someone being judgmental of others, just know that they treat themselves with a spiked lash of self-derision infinitely more rigid than they use on others.

And so, I’m brought back to myself. Where the only chance for change, love, release, is ever possible.

If I’m so mean to others, so angry, and rigid, and correcting, and impatient and punitive toward them… how on earth am I to myself?

And, I’m reminded of something else: Every single person who’s ever told me that I’m too hard on myself.

I never actually take this in. I brush this comment aside like so much hippie, free-love nonsense. I don’t treat myself harshly. I’m fine to myself. Fuck you.

But. I’ve begun to see the veracity of this opinion. That it’s not actually opinion, when I really listen to the thoughts I fling at myself. I am very exacting and punitive toward myself, though I’m very good enough to hide it, or to brush it under the rug.

I’m coming to see that I have internalized a pattern of self-deflation. Having experienced enough external feedback in response to being authentic, I’ve become habitualized to doing it to myself. Better not to show who you really are, what you really want to do, what talent you really have, because it will be taken away from you. Trouble is, I’m the one doing the taking these days.

Better to stop myself early from doing anything worth doing, because I “know” I’ll just fuck it up, it will be taken away, it will be flawed eventually.

It’s the reason I continue to hold on to second-rate things (and ideas, and jobs): No use in having something really nice, because you, Molly, will fuck it up anyway. OR, it will be taken from you, and you will be heart-broken. Better to have or do something only half-assed, because then you won’t be disappointed.

Nor will I actually be fulfilled.

And, by the way, did you happen to catch all that self-derisive talk up there? It’s not actually that explicit when it’s happening. Instead it’s a mercurial thread of poison in my water supply.

A friend told me last night that I haven’t caught a break in a while. That no wonder I’m tired and frustrated and feverish with the “Divine unrest.” The Universe owes me a break.

But as we spoke about self-flagellation, I replied to her, I haven’t given myself a break in a while. To which she replied, Well, you are the Universe.

Tis pity, tis true.

I believe we, in some ways, create our own reality. And if there is a constant badgering of myself, a constant deflation, and a “cosmic” interception of my touchdown passes, born of an (old) idea that I can’t have nice things, do good things, have success, and ease and partnership and fulfillment and joy … then of course that’s what will be reflected back to me.

Last night, I re-posted a 2012 blog of “What ifs” in the style of Shel Silverstein. As I read it, I began to rephrase the questions in terms of affirmations. Instead of “What if I believed I were safe,” I read to myself, “I am safe.” “What if I allowed myself to laugh,” becomes, “I allow myself to laugh.”

I see that how I am behaving toward others is a reflection of how I behave toward myself. And that awareness is one of those tiny steps I need to be conscious -- and appreciative -- of as I climb this mountain toward health. 

Dive In

I never actually go in the pool. For years, 6 of them, my friend and her family and our friends’ families go out to the east East Bay for Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend. 

There is a pool there. I attend by the side. Perhaps I’ve gone in the hottub, but I can’t even remember doing that. I lay on my towel or a pool chair, slathering in sunblock, catching up, chatting, sharing with these women I see only occasionally, and it’s wonderful, this catching up chatting and sharing, but I never go in the pool.

On Saturday, before I left for the weekend, I made a commitment to a friend that I would actually go in the pool. I made a commitment to let myself have fun. To enjoy what was being presented to me, to not literally be on the sidelines of my own life.

It’s hard – or it has been – to let myself take part. I’ve been so reserved, analytical, watching, the consummate wall-flower, when in fact I feel anything but.

And so, at some point soon after the sun had soaked far enough into my skin to want relief, I walked into the water.

I’m a slow pool-acclimator, as I am a slow band-aid puller. Later that night, the women-folk stayed up to play a board game, and my strategy was to move slowly but eventually around the board. I admitted, laughingly, that it’s the same way I play chess with my brother: I move pawn after pawn. One little square at a time.

After my first timid entrance into the water, and a few laps across the pool, my heart rate up, the water refreshing, my second entré was different. I was inspired by my friend’s daughter, who lay over an inner tube, head back, dousing her hair in the water. Only nine, I watched her luxuriate in the tactile and sensory pleasure, the instinctual joy of just letting the water carry her hair out into the water. Of soaking the top of her head, running her fingers into her scalp to get each follicle up and satisfied, eyes closed, in the moment, in the sensation, in the freedom of doing what felt wonderful just for its own sake.

My second time in, all the others were under the shade by the house, and I waded in. About half-way wet, I just dove in. I let my body be strong and carry me to the bottom. I borrowed some goggles, and played the same game of fetch I’d watched the kids play, throwing plastic sharks to the bottom, and diving down to retrieve them. Seeing under water, holding my breath in that suspended moment, moving quickly and gauging the time I had left before I had to surface. Running my hands along the bottom, and pushing against it with my feet to shoot up through the clear water. I laughed.

It was invigorating. It was fun. It was entertaining and special and out of my ordinary. And on my way out of the water, I lay back into it, soaked the top of my head, however briefly, and luxuriated too. 

LiveStrong.

Yesterday, I was given the cosmic and delightful (sarcasm) opportunity to put that day’s blog message into action: I was asked if I was coming out to spend time with folks. … But I really had to go home and watch Netflix, you know. Not that I have anything I’m particularly watching at the moment, not that you can put that on my tombstone (“Excellent t.v. watcher, Achiever of many episodes”). But the alternative was to spend an hour with people. Blech.

But, health won out. (Damned health.) I went, I smiled, I listened, I shared, I had conversations with people. Netflix won’t really converse with me. It’s selfish that way.

I got the chance to hear what was going on with a friend and offer some suggestions, and she got to hear me share what’s going on with me and offered me some help, too.

Again, Netflix is really loathe to help me out. The bastard.

I also got to notice that I’ve gained a few readers in the past week who’ve gotten to read things about me that some of my closest friends don’t know about, and that … well, that’s okay. It’s what this, the blog, is here for. Not to “connect” with people in a complete way, but to offer something. To offer a catharsis, a container, a mirror into their own experience. To hear someone say – or read someone write – about what have been issues or concerns or triumphs in your own life is to get to feel you’re/we’re not alone. Our experience as humans is not isolated; we’re not as different as we think we are when trapped alone in our heads.

I’m grateful for that, for this opportunity. And I know it can be intense. For anyone who’s joined us this week, it’s not always so dark. But, it is likely always as honest. Don’t worry, I don’t tell you everything. You don’t in fact get the all of me by reading me, and we both know that. But it’s a good thread between us. And I get to feel cathartized, too. Not that this is therapy or anything, but that I’m putting my voice out there in a way that feels relatively safe, but also authentic.

On voice, I emailed an old voice teacher yesterday to ask if she still gives private lessons. I was in her voice class when I was at Mills, and earlier in the week, I got the message from Theater Bay Area that applications for the General Auditions for the South Bay are open. And, you have to note on the application if you think you might sing. You don’t have to sing if you check that box, but you have to indicate if you might so they can group you with the other singers in that day.

I applied to the Generals last year, and didn’t get in. But I have real headshots this time, and two more credits, and possibly a third that I can add before I send off my resume. I certainly have enough gumption and the substance to try this time, especially if I had even less to my name last year!

I was talking yesterday with a friend about singing. About how I know the voice is there, but I hide it all the time. Even when I was in the band, I hid it. I didn’t sing to the best and fullest of my ability, and I also don’t even know what the limits of my ability are. I want to sing. I’ve always said it. Or thought it, so most of you didn’t know anyway.

It’s secret. Private. It’s tender, is what it is. It's the most tender dream I have, honestly. And I think that’s what makes it the most protected and least acknowledged one. For me, singing has no place to hide, and it’s an outpouring of your soul – or it can be. As I know well, it can not be that very easily, and no one would know the difference but me. They’ll just think that’s what I’ve got.

It’s like when I work at 80% most of the time at my job. They don’t know. They just think that’s what I have to offer, but the reality is that I hold back, in that case because I’m resentful, entitled and begrudging. But I digress!

Or I don’t. It’s the same side of the coin of not participating in life fully, of not offering myself fully. They’re different angles toward that, but they’re both about self-protection and -preservation.

Tender shoots of hope always need a little more room and space and care. For me, they’ve needed to be hidden so as not to be trampled by the onslaught of life. But by keeping this thing small, myself small, by harboring it and mentally reinforcing it as a tender and sensitive and fragile thing, it will always remain that way.

A redwood starts out the same way, you know. As tender as a sprig. But if you take the cage off of the plant, allow it air and sunshine and nourishment. Soon it won’t be a small and tender, fragile thing anymore. Soon it will be able to weather the strokes of life. By letting what I’ve carried as a secret and a calling out of its confinement … I can allow it to become what it’s always needed to be: Strong. 

Nasty Jenga Partners.

I wanted to be a botanist. In 8th grade, I decided that if I were a botanist, I could live in a tree, far away from people. It had little to do with botany.

It’s funny to see that what I wanted most, isolation, is what I’ve actually been fighting against most of my life, into the present. For someone who purports the necessity of community, and told my interviewers that what underlines all of the work I want to do in my life is a passion for bringing people together – they sure do scare the crap out of me most of the time.

Not surprising. Not unique. But funny to have a primary motivation in my life be the thing that is also hardest for me to let in, let percolate. I suppose it’s that way for most people. Or not.

I told my therapist the other day that I want to strive without questioning/battering myself at every step. I asked her if that was possible, if “normal” people can actually do this? She said, Yes.

I told her that I’d once admitted to a mentor that I was scared I was too analytical to be happy. I told her I still have that fear. If at every turn in your life, you hound yourself, where is there room for happiness, satisfaction, self-acceptance?

Where is there time?

Because time continues to be a mindfuck for me too. I’ve been typing up this woman’s life stories she’s compiling at a workshop where I work. The one that’s sticking with me is entitled, “Turning 80.” At 60, her family brought all her old friends from her home town whom she hadn’t seen in years, and had a big party. At 70, she got together with the close friends she’d met while living here in the “new” iteration of her life.

What will she do at 80? How will she celebrate? What’s important?

I was driving my boss’s dad to and from dialysis in San Francisco several years ago a few days a week for a few months. He was probably about 80, too, and I asked him the key to life, as he seemed happy and satisfied enough. He answered, Do what you love, and Travel.

Simple enough… if you’re not also standing at your own heel questioning the importance and wisdom of all your moves, like a crappy Jenga partner.

But, my therapist seems to think it’s possible. No. She knows it’s possible for people to go through their lives, interesting, interested, engaged, without the “itty bitty shitty committee.”

I’ve said that I don’t think that committee ever actually “goes away;” I just think the volume gets turned down. On good days, it does. And certainly, I can admit with fervor that my own self-doubt is light-years (light-decibels?) quieter than it had been.

Because it is those voices – those nagging thoughts to be better, wiser, travel more, act more, play music more, paint more, engage more, be friends more, be available more – that serve to do the exact opposite. Leave me the fuck alone, voices! And the lie is that being alone is the antidote, is the cure, for those voices. That isolation is the cure for loneliness.

The lie is that isolation is the cure for loneliness.

Of course I’m not meant to live in a tree, or observe the apes, or tick away hours in a lab, or in front of Netflix. My primary motivation for living is to engage with people, connect with them and help them connect with each other. I am the diplomat incarnate. “Did you meet so and so? They make jewelry, and you make hand puppets, maybe you should talk.” “I know someone who just did what you’re looking to do, I’ll give you their number.” “You’re both writers, bakers, candle-stick makers, let me help you connect.”

Bringing people together means that I have to be willing to get together with them. I know my hesitations, I know my underlying reasons and history, I know all the "justifiable" reasons not to. And I know how that looks like me abandoning relationships, abandoning hobbies, abandoning myself.

But this path has become boring. Not to mention lonely. And if I’m such an intrepid world/life traveler, then (my breathing becomes shallow as I even contemplate this) I will have to allow myself to try this other route, this one called Sustained Human Connection and hope the voices get bored of me not listening, and fade out.

I think I might be...healthy.

It’s been surprising to notice how nice I’ve been to myself this week as I crawl out of the hopeless, “what am I doing with my life,” place.

Without real conscious intention about it, while I’ve been wading through the mire of job postings and life meaning, I also allowed myself to buy a silly book, read it in the sun, and then go see a funny movie. I went to a community party, even though I still don’t feel “cool” enough to be a member of that community. Surprise! I know people who were there, so I guess I must be. I mean, I knew several people, wasn’t lonely, had many conversations, so I guess I belonged, right?

I made another nice meal for myself after therapy last night. I painted my nails for my job interview, and I’m awake again early to go to the gym to feel strong and proud and accomplished. 

I participated in a staged reading Tuesday night, my first. And I had the insight and perspective, as I sat in that empty stagehouse, to notice that I was doing what I told myself I wanted to do while going through my chemo. I could realize I was accomplishing my dreams. Following them. They sure don’t feel accomplishy (yet) in the dim lighting of a poor cast and poor audience. But, it’s a case of feelings aren’t facts.

I’ve had several long phone calls with good girl friends. Went out to coffee with a co-worker and sat in the community garden nearby, plucking a strawberry off its vine. I stood on a dock swaying in the Berkeley marina one day after work.

I showered.

Despite going through what feels like a dark time, a lost time, I realize that I have an impulse toward self-care I didn’t know I had.

Two friends texted me yesterday to reach out for support in their own journeys. To ask me to remind them that life is abundant and fear is an asshole. Which I gladly did. And it reminds me to remind myself of these things too, but moreso, it reminds me that those are core pieces of myself, pieces that friends see in me, and reach out to me for: I’m an uplifter. Not always, I’m not Pollyanna or inhuman. But, I am someone who more often than not is there to remind my friends that what we’re doing is not impotent. That life is worth living.

I’ve been prefacing my sentences this week with, “Despite the fact that the planet is dying…”! Despite the fact that the planet is dying, I want to leave an imprint in it; I want my life to count; I want to move the needle of human progress forward. Despite the fact that the planet is dying, we continue to bring children into this world because every generation has had its reasons not to. Despite the fact that the planet is dying, I will go to the gym today; meet with a former theater collaborator to who reached out to me about a book she wants to write; I will go to the farmer’s market and eat a plum off a tiny toothpick.

My habit toward self-care, toward health, has become something so natural in me that it’s unnatural. And if such things as this can make seismic shifts, I guess I can remember that life is abundant and fear is an asshole. 

How I met my best friend from Long Island in South Korea

It’s 10 years this Fall since we met. I’d come off a 14-hour flight from JFK into Seoul. I seem to recall I was actually picked up by the Assistant Principal of the pre-school where I’d be teaching who drove me the 45 minutes back to the Samsung Apartments. The LG Apartments were over the hill. 

I arrived to a large 4-bedroom apartment with heated floors, one Texan, and a Canadian, the two other “native English speakers” who taught at the school just up the road – or over a fence if you were late and feeling adventurous. I tore my favorite pants that way.

Further up that road was a mountain spring, where my Canadian roommate, the one who showed me the short-cut, would refill his water, in line with agimas, old hunched Korean women with no front teeth who would cut in front of you no matter how long you, young white person, had been standing there waiting to fill up at the fresh, cool water tap.

The Texan insisted that I come “into town” that very first night, before jetlag and culture shock set in. Beer. The great equalizer. It was halfway through the school year, so the Texan had met some of the other ESL teachers in the area, one from South Africa, one from Ireland, all in our early to mid-twenties, all young enough to be stupid and adventurous, but old enough to have consequences. We celebrated on the first of many nights to come over uncountable pitchers of piss-water beer, bad games of darts, and laughter that always got too loud, and if you were me, too sloppy.

About a month into my new life there, culture shock, homesickness, alcoholism running like a hotshot through my veins, I found myself hailing a cab in a dark corner of Seoul. Well, I was attempting to hail a cab. But wherever we’d ended up wasn’t the typical wei-gook (white person) hang-out, and fading, wasted, and tired, there weren’t any cabs.

This is where we flash forward through the two Indian men offering to give me a ride home, me saying no thanks; long minutes passing without a cab, and them coming back; me agreeing to the ride. This is where we flash forward through them pulling the car over on a lonely stretch of highway, and taking turns raping me, too drunk and immobilized to fight.

This is where we flash to them actually driving me home, and where I collapse inside my apartment’s front door and begin to wail.

And, by the grace of something I will never quite call coincidence, this is where Jess walks out of her boyfriend, the Texan’s room, and comforts me.

She picks me up, I tell her what happened; she offers to stay in my bed with me, I tell her it’s alright. But the darkness of my bed is too large, and I pad across the heated wooden floor to their room, knock on the door and ask her to stay with me after all.

Jess insisted the next day that I go to the hospital. I wouldn’t have. Never would have even crossed my mind. She came with me to all 4 of them, because at each we were turned away, because “rape is not an emergency.”

To flash forward over the harrowing and humiliating events of that day that only compounded the isolation and violation I’d suffered, I’ll tell you it’s over. And the rest will have to remain the content of therapy sessions and the slow course of healing, which over the years since I’ve considered turning toward volunteering at a crisis hotline. But honestly, it's not over. I’m not over it enough to help others. 10 years later.

Two years later, I lived in San Francisco. Jess lived in upstate New York in a partially-converted garage next to a washing machine while earning her Teaching Certificate. 5 years later, she met an old high school-mate at a New Year’s Eve party. 9 years later, I watched them get married. And three weeks ago, she had a baby girl. Who I’ll get to meet, and hold, and smell next week on Long Island.

My friendship with Jess is inextricably linked to one of the hardest events in my life. I’d barely known her before that night, met her sure, another East Coaster, great. But friends? As dramatic as it is to say, but real enough anyway, it was while holding the hand they’d botched the IV into that Jess and I became friends.

It’s accrued and built and become many more colors and tenors and experiences over the decade, mainly on the basis of a shit-talking, wise-cracking, overly honest relationship. (Yes, the nurse stuck her hand up Jess’s vag to pull out the rest of the placenta.) And although it started as it did, and though I would eagerly and instantly give that experience back--despite how it might “benefit others”--our friendship is easily one of the great and unexpected treasures of my life. 

WWWD?

This morning, I imagined myself going into my interview for the “Gold/Coal” job tomorrow morning. Going in as I felt at the moment I was reflecting, hunch-shouldered, weary. Why do you want this job, they’d ask? For the money, I’d bite into a lie that would instead say something about supporting the education of children, though I would have zero direct influence in that education.

I imagined the gray, and lonely march, with the exterior painted for display.

Somewhere in my reflections this morning, I remembered what I always seem to forget: I am a witch. 

I am a shaman warrior goddess. And like many of the women I know who are, I do not fold into a box of forget-me-yes’s.

Raise your brows if you like, but I forget, with apparent force, that I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to subsume my person. I don’t have to abandon myself.

What would a witch do? She would see opportunities. She would create them.

I don’t know in this instant what that is, but I have remembered that I am a healer, and that I love helping others to heal.

When I was sick, and was tired of others bringing me things and taking care of me like I had nothing to give them in this world, I hosted my workshop. My workshop called, Creativity and Spirituality. I sat for an afternoon with 5 women, and helped them find something in themselves they’d lost or thought they had to abandon. I am a witch. I am a healer.

I am six feet fucking tall. I don’t have to hunch my shoulders, and roll over dead for anyone, including for the spite and ire and bile in my brain sometimes.

It’s shorter, these lapses in memory. And today, I finished my journaling and meditation with a smile of confidence I haven’t had in a bit. The smile itself may wane, but I hope that the centering thought does not.

And here’s where the real miracle is: The thought hasn’t waned. For years now, I’ve eventually come back to that centering truth that I am not powerless and I am not worthless. Sometimes it takes longer than others. But after seriously considering this morning whether I should go on meds, something else happened. The bottom dropped out of my short-sightedness, and I remembered that I am not as narrow or narrowly defined as a drone, the drone I’m trying to prove to someone else they want to hire me to be.

Who knows. Is that more school in some kind of healing art, is it running my workshop again just to get some spiritual juice flowing, is it looking back into working with kids in a direct way, revisiting my idea for an after-school program for them?

I don’t know. But I remember.

And I’ll show up tomorrow, and I’ll place on my lie. I’ll do it because that stability could finance further education. I’ll do it because I show up to things and never know how they’ll turn out.

But, unlike when I took the job I have, and cried mercilessly after work while waiting for the unfailingly 45-minute late bus, after earning a master’s degree through words and performance that I created, after accepting what I thought I had to at the moment (and perhaps did) – and one month later developed cancer … Unlike then, I seem to be remembering that I have power. That I don't need to accept a life sentence of menial work, or define myself under such disparagement.

I’ve been depressed because I have thought that to be what’s happening again. Once again applying to things I don't want because I want to afford healthy food and visit my mom in New York. Once again, I'm poking around the internet half-heartedly saying, yeah, sure, I can answer your phone and type up your emails. I can hack away my power so you can look good. ...

And if it weren’t for cancer, this time might indeed be that away again. But because I am hyper aware and viscerally afraid that subsuming my light in pursuit of “stability” can cause repercussions of atomic scale, it is top of mind to not allow myself to shrink into that dull, flatlined human who trudged her death march to Muni every morning.

What would a witch do? Firstly. She would remember she’s a witch. Then she would put on high heels. 

"What's the Point?"

I intended to buy this book I heard about on NPR: Data: A Love Story. It’s about how this Jewish woman my age, a statistician and analyst, decided to create her own algorithm to “crack” online dating. In the end, so it seems, she did. For herself at least.

So, with a wry smile, I went in to ask for it. They showed me the general area, I didn’t see it, but perused with rare time to kill in the early evening. I ended up with a book of essays by Ray Bradbury, and this funny little set of them by another Jewish woman my age called I was told there’d be cake.

I am usually loathe to buy books in general, thinking that the library is one of god’s safest havens. And am especially averse to buying something I’ll read once for entertainment value and then never pick up again. But, my entertainment budget for the month hasn’t been touched at all, and I figure I can pass it along to others, like the sisterhood of the traveling satire. – After its purchase I actually sat outside reading in the fading sunlight laughing out loud. What a rare treat!

There’s one essay in which she reports that she and her cohort are lost in the first-job abyss, each sector of her friends languishing underslept, underpaid, underappreciated. And it occurs to her that she should volunteer. Instead of focusing on herself, despite being the world’s great self-indulger, she decides to volunteer at the butterfly exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.

Hilarity ensues.

But it struck a chord with me. I’ve been feeling languishy lately, too. I’ve been feeling, What’s the purpose of it all. Why even try to strive for anything, what’s the point anyway? Why am I feeding myself farmer’s market food; buying organic food for my cat; going to the gym; meditating; reading; acting? Why am I passing my time this way anyway? We’re all just passing time to an inevitable erasure. Why do anything at all?

Reading Cake girl’s revelation, it occurred to me yesterday that I haven’t helped someone one-on-one in a long time. I’ve been in a limbo of my own work, and until completed, I’ve been instructed to wait before I help someone else in this area. In the meantime, I could be looking to help someone in the field I already know, but that hasn’t happened.

I hypothesize my own languishing could be offset my a dose of selflessness and help of another person in the unique way that people with our set of experiences can help another person.

Enter: Email this morning from a woman asking me to help her out one-on-one. In the area I’m not supposed to be working in yet.

Hrm.

I’m going to talk with my own mentor about it. I think the anchor of helping someone else would get me out of my own head, but I also don’t want to pass along my diseased thinking in this arena if I really haven’t had the kind of psychic shift that could help.

But. I may lobby for it anyway. Things are all weird with me and my own mentor, which could also account for some of this languish. I did ask someone else if they could help me one-on-one, but I have yet to follow-up to set the actual coffee date to discuss.

Whether I end up helping this girl out or not, it reminds me that some people actually look to me for help. That there’s something I do have to offer that is unique in this world, and isn’t that the point in living? Could it be the point?

Not to live for service, but sort of. Otherwise, I find myself questioning whether I really am a Zoloft candidate after all. 

Meet Cute

It was last Saturday at Live Oak Theater. Auditioning for a staged reading set in Texas. Trying to remember how Texans sound, trying to channel my memories of True Detective and Saving Grace to get close. About 10 of us are milling around the lobby, there’s only one young cute guy I can see across the millers, tall enough to see me back.

He walks over and makes introductory chit-chat. I tell him he looks familiar, because he does. I ask if maybe I’d seen him at other auditions. He says he doesn’t think so. That he’s trying to get something in before he moves to LA next month. I inwardly resign this one, and try a cheerful, Well that’s a big move! The producer calls my name.

I don’t see him as I’m walking out of the audition. And that is that.

Until last night. While at my friend’s tattoo shop opening, I look across a very different enclave of millers, and see him. He smiles, I wave. I go back to my conversation, but the nag to excuse myself and not miss the opportunity prevails. I walk over toward him and his friend, a girl.

He replies, they'd heard the music as they were walking by, and decided to check it out. No, they don’t know any of these folks at all. Total coincidence. We laugh and light chat, and I walk back over to my conversation.

Some bit later, he walks over to me, says they’re going to take off. Asks if I’m ever in LA. No, not really. When does he move? Three weeks. But he’ll be up to visit sometimes. He offers a, Maybe we can get coffee or meet up or some other I want to see you again euphemism. I offer my phone number, he calls it. Exchange complete.

Exit stage right, man with the ocher skin and topaz eyes. 

Magical Realism

Be realistic.

This is often followed by sentiments like: Enough with the pipe dreams, with “follow your dreams,” with fantasy.

Be realistic. It connotes a demand to abandon fancy, to come down to earth, to stop being naïve. To be realistic, we tell one another by our tone, is to abandon fun, and even hope. Be realistic is a shorthand for life is hard. Or at least that’s how I’ve heard it.

And because that’s how I’ve heard it, being realistic sounds like the last thing I’d ever want to be. If to be realistic is to subsume ambition and desire underneath the sodden blanket of eeking out a life, then screw realism. If to be realistic is to hear that “real life” is something sharp and bruising, then it’s no wonder people including myself have avoided the reality of life. Better to have eyes in the sky and accidentally fall into pits, than to look down, and know that all of life is littered with pits.

But.

Realism gets a bad rap. Realism seems to sound like what Peter Pan was actively eschewing with his Lost Boys. But, there’s a reason they were lost: they weren’t looking at the ground either.

So, where is realism a positive? And can we change the idea and the stigma of reality?

There are pits. Si. Oui. Hei. and Yes. Plenty and abundant pits in which to bust an elbow, break a leg, and sink despairingly like a zebra in quicksand.

But reality offers us the chance to be aware of them. To avoid them if we can. Yet, if we fall in one--despite our diligence and through no fault of our own--if we are in realism, we can recognize the tools we have around us to get out of the pit.

If my eyes are focused in reality, in groundedness, in fact, then they’re also focused toward opportunity. I can’t see the stepping stones through the swamp if I’m looking at the trees.

(Fun to notice that my exposition on the advantages of realism are based solely in the fantasy of metaphor!)

Realism has its pitfalls. Realism isn’t as fun as discerning animal shapes out of clouds. But realism gets you to the solid ground that enables you to look up and do so. 

Be a Royal

Yesterday, I auditioned with the weird, avant garde theater company I saw perform briefly on Saturday. Last week, after telling me I didn't in fact get a 'Pride and Prejudice' role as I'd thought, the producer of the company I’ve been auditioning with these past few weeks continued, “You must know your height gets in your way.….

“But, we’re doing this 'Queen of the Amazons' play, and I’d like to introduce you to the director.”

So, I met the director last Saturday. At the weird hippie commune cult Renaissance patchwork crystal-wearing children-of-the-corn-toting ensemble performance.

I’m hippie, people, but I’m not that hippie. Really.

Nonetheless, I spoke with the director for a little while, he invited me to stay for the performance, which I could only for a few minutes, and then the producer called on Wednesday to say the director would like to audition me. And yesterday he did.

He asked at our initial meeting if I really played bass, as is listed on my resume, and I said yes. So he asked me to bring it. And I did, along with my guitar, since I really am only a novice at bass, and can’t really improvise how some might.

We met. He showed me binders and binders of photos from his previous performances. Despite being achingly weird, some of them, they were interesting. Achingly weird. He said American theater bores him – he’s Italian.

And then I played two songs I’d written on the guitar, and sang. And it was strange, just us two, but so nice to be back behind an instrument again. My throat is sore from it, from being out of practice – just another muscle, you can’t just decide to run a marathon without training.

And then he had me read some of the scene. The main role, the Queen of the Amazons.

It was challenging. I’m not that experienced, you know, and it was great to have his feedback on what I was doing, like a private acting lesson. “Be more open, more proud, you’re a queen.” Smile, melt us with your smile, make us love you even when you’re angry. Speak from down here, not up here. Crouch, get physical, you’re an AMAZON.

Ha.

It was weird, and fun, and hard, and intimate, and vulnerable. And it’s still unclear to me if I’m “in,” and because of my "too-soon" (my brain can’t find the word I mean – need more coffee) -- PREMATURE!! -- that's it -- premature declaration the other week about landing a role, I’m cautious to do that here. But. It seems very positive. And even if not, I got some great notes.

It’s clear to me that I have some education to continue around acting. That it would be worth it for me to look up classes or lessons again. If I do get this role, it’s intense, starring, physical, musical, and (word for pushing & challenging I can’t think of). It may be more than I can chew, but I’ll face that if I get the role.

The piece that stands out to me about the audition yesterday was the director inviting me to be more queenly, assertive, confident. To allow what he saw as I played my instruments and sang. To let that person out. To not be a queen through me and my mishegas (not his word!), but to be a queen as she would be.

I drove from the audition to a very long, but good meeting at work, and on the ride asked myself aloud, “What does it feel like to be a queen?”

Role or no role, it’s my job to find out. 

Chief Happiness Officer

Not kidding. This is actually a job. In Brooklyn. “Community Manager and Chief Happiness Officer.” God, I love this generation. For all its foibles and failings and impending earth-dying doom, I don’t know if there was ever a time in history (maybe the 60s) where this could be listed in semi-earnest.

Yesterday as I was driving home from my chiro in SF, I had my windows down. It was hot, but not too hot, and it was curious to see who had their car hermetically sealed with A/C and who enjoyed the breeze. At first, of course, my elbow is resting on the window ledge, half committed to experiencing the flow of air. Then, as we begin to move faster onto the Bay bridge, I place my palm into the air, and let the wind carry it, make it dance, still tethered to the anchor of my resting elbow.

Finally, I decide or am pulled to go for it: My arm floats up off the ledge, we’re whizzing over the bridge now, and my arm, elbow, hand are carried up into the wind.

My arm pumps into the air, high up, almost straight up. People can see me, I see them driving past looking back at me, smiling, and I’m smiling. In fact by the time I get over the bridge, I’m laughing gleefully and giddily. This is so FUN! I see people in cars ahead and behind me tentatively reach their hand out the window too, still elbow-anchored, but it’s a start.

I am my own Chief Happiness Officer, and I’m spreading it one car at a time. It was brilliant. To be unself-conscious, to let myself be silly, be seen, to laugh at myself, to experience the world. The air.

My belly full of laughter at myself and the sensation and playfulness, thoughts pop in as I exit the highway past a Kaiser building. It wasn’t long ago that I was hermetically sealed myself in one of those buildings. Absent of fresh air, unable to touch this freedom.

It’s why it’s sometimes easier for me to take risks like this, to take the risk of having fun, for its own sake, with no stakes except silencing my internal critic. I did it because I can, because I saw a little girl earlier in the day hanging her whole head out the back window on the slow Berkeley streets, and she looked happy.

I looked happy then, too, in the grins and gawks of passing cars, my hand only beginning to chill as I pull to the stoplight toward home. I forget what silliness feels like, what glee is, how freeing it all is -- and how simple. I forget what it’s like to laugh infectiously and appreciatively at my own antics. Until I see you hanging your arm out a window, and I remember.

Gold, or Coal?

There’s a story in the bible that tells us Pharoah tested little baby Moses to see if he was interested in money, like all good Jews (kidding!), or if he was just attracted to shiny things, like all good raccoons.

Pharoah puts a lump of hot, glowing coal and a rock of gold in front of the baby, and waits to see which he’ll reach for. Moses goes for the gold.

So, G-d sends down an angel to move his hand toward the coal, and when baby Moses touches the coal, it burns his hand, he stuffs his hurt fingers in his mouth, and thus develops a speech impediment.

Thus Pharoah is satisfied that the little tyke is just precocious and not going to usurp him.

I’m looking at this job description right now. I’m perfect for it, have the experience, though certainly would learn and do more on this job than I had previously. It’s in the community I would like to stay in. And it pays up to double what I’m making right now (“commensurate with experience,” of course).

But. I have near to zero interest in it. It doesn’t put me closer or further on the path that I’ve seen I want. It won’t, in several years, be a stepping stone, really. It’s over in X land, and I want to be in Y land. They have the wall of Jerusalem between them.

So, Gold? Or Coal?

I can apply, see what happens. May not even get called in for an interview. I could land the job, and gain a bargaining chip with my current employer. Or, I could land the job, take the income increase, finally put money into savings and retirement, come what may. So what, clock in clock out, so what.

Perhaps this job option is both the gold and the coal, then.

It’s good to keep looking. It’s good to see that the same realm of what I’m currently doing is getting paid a much different wage than I am, even if my current employer is really not set or able to offer me anything more.

It’s also good to see what values have formed from being at the job I currently have: Did you know that I can walk 5 minutes to an organic co-op café for lunch? Or to a Peets? Or to a park with large swaths of grass where I can lie down in the sunshine when I need a break from people and computer screens?

Did you know that I can drive 30 minutes to and from work, and can actually work out in the morning and meet up with people or cook dinner or audition in the evenings because I stay on this side of the Bay?

Tell me then, about BART rides to a Muni bus and back? About adding an hour to both sides of my commute? About the urban detritus?

And then tell me about a realistic and abundant retirement plan….

I will probably apply. I will certainly keep looking. And I will have faith -- that sordid word (look what “He” did to Moses’ hand!) -- that I can have the ease, expansion, and fulfillment I want with a salary that supports a life of ease, expansion, and fulfillment.

Right? 

Work It.

I’m up at what I would call atrociously early, if I hadn’t just signed up to be the desk person at my gym at 5:30 am on Mondays starting June. That will be hellaciously early. This is only moderate.

I do a work-trade at my workout studio so I can get free unlimited classes. Last time I was on the trade staff, I barely took advantage of it; since I could go whenever I wanted for free, there didn’t feel like any urgency. Now. … Well, I started back on staff just before my Boston trip, so I felt a bit urgent in “lifting my seat"! And in hoping not to wheeze like a rhino during any strenuous activity!

Now that the trip is well over, and schedules are back on track, I’m trying to get back a few times a week again. It’s good for me. Mentally, mostly. Though, yes, when I go regularly, I see and feel changes that I like. It’s nice to feel strong, capable. It’s nice to push myself because sometimes the class is peopled with 60 year olds (along with the 20, 30 and 40 somethings who are straight out of a Marina postcard) – and if they, a sexagenarian, if you will, can do it, can hang for an hour, then so can I. Moderately!

I also asked a friend to meet up and do our writing together yesterday evening, since we’re both in the study group that’s doing all this together. It was good to see her, and we got a lot accomplished. I can already see that this work is a lot deeper and more meaningful than the last time I did this, so I can hope for change because of it.

It has already shown, in just the 15 timered-minute increments, that there are some messed up ideas around self-worth, what I can expect in this world, and what I think I deserve. So… it’ll be nice to get them out of my reflexes and onto the page.

Also, I did show up to an audition for a staged reading this past weekend, and in fact, actually got the part. Like, in writing. In an email saying, “I’d like to offer you the role of…” and then the follow-up email entitled, “Welcome to the cast.”

So, I’m now Various Roles! Ha! Yay for me. Goes on my resume.

Speaking of, I did a little more work last night – or action, rather, and sent something out. I still have loads to wade through following my info interview with my former boss last week, which was awesome, but I can try to take a small action every day. In fact, I took that action last night after all that writing during which my fears and beliefs tell me that no matter what I do or accrue or amass, it’ll be taken from me because I can’t handle it properly, because I don’t deserve it.

SO, I told that thought and belief to screw itself and got online to follow-up on something I’d seen earlier last week.

I also replied to the Volunteer Usher group I belong to who’d put out feelers to see who’d be interested in ushering the Sir Paul show at Candlestick in August. UH. ME. We won’t find out if we’re “chosen” until August, but I'm throwing my hat in the ring.

I continue to throw my hat in the ring. It’s kinda one of the things about me. I can have all these creeping, sodden beliefs and habits and reflexes that undermine what I do and want to do in this life, and I seem to continue to do this stuff anyway. I don’t know what or where that came from, that same impulse that told cancer to fuck itself, that knows this work is worth it, that isn’t satisfied accepting less than I deserve because of reasons I learned long ago about only deserving a second rate life, job, relationship, since it’ll be taken from me anyway or I’ll screw it up anyway.

I seem to have some bloody impulse that impels me to keep trying. I squawk a lot about dilly-dallying at the cross-roads of my life, and that’s true in many regards, and makes sense if I believe the above is true. But despite my procrastination, my self-sabotage, and my self-judgment, I’m awake at 5:30 this morning to do something that’s good for me. And my ass. 

But, damnit, I *do* care.

I’ve had “I’ve got you, babe” stuck in my head for the last few days. I’m catching up on the 2nd half of the final season of House, and one of the characters was singing and playing it the other day. I’ve been thinking about it, vaguely, in relation to the whole “turning it over” concept that’s asked of me in my current work. Turn it, everything, present, past, future, over to something else, something “caring,” it tells us because, as we’ve learned by now, trying to do it, to finagle it on my own, doesn’t work out too well.

However, this “care” business... Well, we heard me gripe about “god” the other day. And luckily I still have a few prompt questions to write through and maybe get somewhere with around … “god.” I just don’t know what will come of it. Although I’ll do it anyway.

I know I’m “not alone,” I know that there’s healing and progress and momentum in doing this work without knowing the outcome. But, I’ve had to up my own woo-woo-ness to help get me there a little. Because, as I’ve said, sometimes “god’s plan” includes some really fucked up shit. And fuck trusting that “thing” whatsoever. Asshole.

Jews are supposed to “wrestle and grapple” with god. It’s part of what we’re asked and allowed to do.

On Saturday night, I saw a play that was focused around a Catholic family in the 50s and their relationship to each other, Catholicism, and a nun with a heart condition. The main character is a 12 year old boy, heading to confirmation, and he keeps on questioning the doctrines. Why did god put us here, is one of the questions the nun asks. He replies, To have fun. – That’s not the proscribed answer, by the way.

If you don’t learn this, you go to hell. Well, I’m not sure I believe in hell, he replies.

He isn’t quashed at the end; in fact, his questioning helps to open everyone else up.

And so, I have to believe that my questioning, my hesitance, my ire will do the same.

I am past a point of blind faith. But, sometimes there’s nothing else than that either. So, what then?

There’s a billboard I drive past on the way to work. For about a month, it was an ad for a casino, portraying simply the eyes of a ravenous, coy, coaxing woman. The copy read: Luck will find you.

Each time I drove past it, I said aloud, No it won't.

Luck doesn’t find us. We find Luck. To quote the 80s: “There is no fate but what we make.”

And yet, … I’m past the point of blind willfulness, too.

I know that a belief in hope and change, in love, lead me to show up for things that are uncomfortable. I know that my knowledge that I really can’t do it alone leads me to call people, write this homework shit, and hope that the next right action will open up to me.

I know I’m not hopeless, or a hopeless case. I know I’m not throwing off the mantle of faith in favor of self will-ing myself through my life. I’ve spent plenty of torn-up hours trying to “make it work.” Trying to change others, my past, present, and future.

So, I know I’m at surrender. I know I’m at the place of letting go, and trusting “what is.” Or trying to trust it, rather.

But, I’m scared. I’m scared for me, I’m cautious with my hope for others; I’m a great scoop more apathetic about the god thing, at the same time I’m more charged about “moving forward” in many places in my life.

I’m tired. I’m grieving the loss of innocence. I cannot yet believe in the (fucking) “care” of a higher power. I think Fate is an asshole. The schmuck who pulls your chair out from beneath you when you’re about to sit and, like Nelson on The Simpsons, cackles, “Heh Heh!”

I thought I’d given up that one, that punitive idea, that pull me closer/push me away god.

I could decide to call this all evidence of that god, and therefore defy and reject the whole concept. Every day I go to work with a woman who lost her baby at 8 months pregnant. Every day, she and I, simply by our presence, remind one another that nothing is certain in this life. Joy is not guaranteed.

So, like I said, I’m ramping up my woo-woo tools again. I’m reading affirmations, listening to them, signed up for the Oprah/Deepak meditation month. I’ve got to. I’ve got to give myself some pudding in which the medicine is slipped.

I’ve got to tell myself, in a fake it till you make it way, that I am alright. That 5-year mortality statistics don’t mean anything to a bad-ass like me. That I am cooler than I think I am, and worth every effort and so much 'then some' that I take toward my health and my goals.

I’ve got to say, I believe in the care of these simple things. In the care of a little self-love. In the care of a coffee date with a friend, the soft breathing of a baby.

Anything else can go fuck itself. 

Dear Mom, I Hallmark You.

It was always very clear what our family would do on Mother’s Day: We would have bought hanging fuschia plants at Metropolitan Plants up on Route 17 in Paramus, one for our mom (Ben’s and mine) and one for my Dad’s mom. We’d make the U-turn by Grand Union, near which, whenever driving past it together, my best friend M. and I would parrot a mean jingle about our babysitter: “Get everything you don’t want aaaat Grand Pam!” (name changed for anonymity!)

Once home, we’d exchange the broken and feeble fuschia that hung by the side of our house all winter for the new one, hook the other in the Camry, and drive over to Queens.

After the lovely awkwardness of pizza with them, our family would reward ourselves by stopping by The Pastrami King. Which has since closed, and there’s now a Pastrami Queen somewhere, which, sorry feminism, is not as good.

Pastrami King had the real barrels of pickles along the wall, all different kinds, fat, warty, dark, light green, and my mom would dive into the barrel with the plastic tongs to fetch these prizes out of the water. My brother and I would gag at her.

We’d get round potato knishes and pounds and pounds of, really, the best pastrami I’ve ever had, and also some of their own spicy mustard – because people, no mayo, no ketchup, nothing but MUSTARD, is supposed to go on a pastrami sandwich. Sorry. It’s the Jew way. Well, at least, our Jew way.

Mother’s Day did mean something in our household, and despite all the “It’s a Hallmark holiday” scorn it receives, and despite the mixed emotions it may bring up for people who’ve lost moms, lost babies, can’t or didn’t have babies, for me, it’s nice. Yes, even on this arbitrary date some CEO thought up some years ago, it’s nice to acknowledge my Mom. And so, I do.

This year, by coincidence and fortune, I came across a website with cuff bracelets with large metropolitan city subway maps engraved into them. Paris, Berlin, Chicago, New York. My mother, the consummate New Yorker. In fact, this very morning, she sent me a batch of photos from the window display of her local dry-cleaner. The purveyors apparently rotate a series of Barbie tableaus. Last time was the Oscars, complete with a miniature “Gone with the Wind” poster, red carpet, and a Marylin Monroe Barbie. This month, a Barbie Seder, with mini Afikomen and all!

She loves the city, and so, my brother and I split the cost of one of these cuff bracelets for her. She may never wear it, it may be “not quite right,” and sure, a nicely written card could have done the same thing, and for many years it has. But, this year, it was nice to say, “Hey, I know this is something very important to you, a part of you, this city, and I want to give you something that represents that, that says, Ben and I know you. You are not invisible, you are seen, you are recognized, and you are appreciated in your interests and oddities.” (Not many women her age would brave black and white saddle shoes with skinny jeans. But, her photo to us to mark the start of Spring was of just that!)

I am not a mother. I don’t know if I will be, the fates haven’t sent me that postcard yet. But it’s baby season around me. At work, I’ve gotten to snuggle almost weekly with what started as newborn for the last 4 months, and now teeths and laughs and dances and flirts all shy and coy sometimes, while his mom gets to compose emails with two hands. Like yesterday, I’ve gotten to snuggle another newborn at my friend’s house, letting him sleep on me for swaths of time where my little heartbeat rests right against his, and his flutters like a bird, and he’s so warm and soft and new.

It’s glorious.

I’m flying out at the end of the month to visit one of my best girl friends on Long Island. She got married last year during 4th of July, went on honeymoon in August, and got pregnant on a boat in the Mediterranean. 9 months later, baby. I asked a few of the new moms I know if it would be “worth” my flying out to see her. How “important” it was. If money were no object, it would be no question. It’s the only time at work that I can really go in the foreseeable future. 

How important is it? The baby won’t remember. My aunt tells me all the time how she was there when I was born. I don’t remember. Doesn’t really mean anything at all to me. Or, at least, it hasn’t. But, now I’m beginning to see that it is meaningful -- to the adults. To have the people you love around you at a time when everything is changing, exciting, exhausting, new – I’d want my best friend there, too.

I don’t have those “uteran tugs” that some women experience around their 20s and 30s, that ache for a baby in my body. But being so close to the motherhood around me makes it so much more real, significant, miraculous.

I’ve written before about my own “Maybe Baby” question, so this one is just to say, laying a baby – my baby or not – on my chest, having him nuzzle into me and rest because I’m a safe place, is Life’s great privilege. 

Bossypants

“You look like you’re leading something,” she said.

We met for an info interview. My former boss and I. I wanted to run past her my career ideas, my flailing, my desires, my questions. And what can happen in an hour (I should know by now), is phenomenal.

We caught up briefly, I heard about the cross-Bay move, the house hunt that fell magically into place after a year of city-looking, about the semi-adult kids, and about the current work.

I met her in 2008. I had a fever of 103 that weekend and had to cancel our initial interview, so we had to meet on a Sunday, fever or no fever -- I had a drastically depleting bank account, no safety net, and did what it took. What it took was meeting her in a Starbucks, rabid coffee addiction being the first thing we aligned on. We sat talking for over an hour, about the job, sure, but about lots of other things, too.

I didn’t even apply for that job. I’d applied for a different position in the organization, and having been passed up for that one, they handed my soon-to-be new boss my resume, and said, Here, she might work well for you.

I was blonde at the moment. I’d quit my job at the property management company with no net and no prospects. No plan and no direction. I’d simply had enough of crying in my car at lunch because I felt so stuck and lost over my “career.” I’d been there almost 2 years. They were great. But it wasn’t “me,” and I didn’t know what “me” was anyway, so I stayed.

Until I didn’t. Until my coworker there went out to lunch with me, and I can’t even remember exactly what she must have asked me, or exactly what I must have said. But it triggered action, for better or worse.

I called a friend of mine after that lunch, and he asked me two important questions: Why would you stay? “Financial security.” Why would you leave? “Love. Self-love.”

I’d never said those words before. I never knew I’d had such an impulse or a drive such as that. “love” or “self-love.”

What I didn’t have was a plan, a back-up, a safety net. And for all that people say about “leap and the net will appear”… well, I should do a leeetle bit of my part in assuring a safe landing, too.

So, that weekend, I gave my notice, hosted a my now-annual "Pre-Val Hearts & Stars" party, dyed my hair blonde. And then scoured the interwebs for hope. Which, FYI, is not where hope lives.

With a fever, a toilet paper shortage, and lots of “I want to do something 'creative,' but I don’t know what that is” spinning, one morning I woke up, and asked myself, What do I like to do?

Strangely, the answer was, “Well, I like being Jewish.” Ha.

So, onto the interwebs I went, and typed into google: Jewish, San Francisco.

I applied to everything there was. And I got called in for the first job at that organization. And then I got called in by my soon-to-be boss.

I was tired, desperate, and blond. I was feverish, scared, and brain-addled.

I got the job.

(Here, I could insert the same style story that got me the job at the property management company, under very similar circumstances including toilet-paper and food shortage, but I’ll leave that for now – except to say, perhaps you now can understand why it is that “Stability First” is my current motto and touchstone. – No, It’s not “fun,” it’s not zany, or “creative,” but – guess what, to paraphrase a friend I heard last week, It gives me the table upon which to build the puzzle of my life. Stability first gives me the freedom and the ease and the breathing room to … buy toilet paper.)

And here my now-former boss and I sat yesterday, at another coffee shop, so full circle it makes me smile, and here were are again, talking of Jewish, talking of organizations, of helping, of building, of changing. It’s 6 years later, now, almost to the date, that she and I have sat across tables sipping our addictions and exchanging our personal and professional lives.

She showed up for me during cancer. She brought me gift cards to Trader Joe’s so I wouldn’t go hungry or worry about doing so. She brought me a travel Shabbat kit with candles and a prayer that my mom and I would use once when she was here. She brought with her to Israel a prayer, a plea, I'd written during cancer that I'd asked her to take with her there, and she did, under a lemon tree in her parents' backyard, dug, burned and buried my prayer with her small niece and nephew. She told me how incredible I was and how inspiring I am.

And yesterday, she told me the same. She gave me hard answers, great ideas, helped me think through my own. This woman is a mentor and a friend, and lost or not lost, I have allies like her, unique as she is, all over this planet.