Pumpktoberfest

I’m sure I write about it every year, but as the wafts of pumpkin spice glide out of my coffee mug, I’m moved to write about it again.

Fall. Fall on the East Coast. Growing up where Fall means a certain smell of chill and decaying leaves. Kind of wet, sometimes, the piles you’ve helped stuff into enormous black plastic bags that I’m sure are illegal in California by now. And heaping them into the street, spilling off the curb, where you and your little brother will take a bounding head-start and leap into the center of the pile, the slightly moth-eaten leaves enveloping you up to your shoulders, softening your fall and bathing you and your senses in its musty, alive scent.

I noticed the leaves blowing last night, and here, they sound different as they tumble across the pavement; they sound dry and tired, each one brown and curled up on itself. Back East, they’re still half-alive when they fall, some of them. So they lilt and are soft, and … colored. How many people must write about the color of the leaves, the ombre fade of red and orange and gold. There’s something about their display that radiates joy and change and marks something miraculous, something that we, as humans, have the unique privilege to recognize and admire.

Pumpkins start popping up on doorsteps. We hang Indian corn, the same set of three tied to our front door for as long as memory serves, and three small palm-sized pumpkins decorate our own stoop, before squirrels begin to bite chunks out of them, and a jack-o-lantern we've spent all day carving.

Fall begins the part of the year when I felt and feel most loved and normal and inviting and, again, loved. It begins with Halloween, and follows through Christmas (celebrated at my dad’s folks house, who are/were vaguely Christian). The time of year when we feel swept up in something, in something communal, town-wide, Jersey-wide.

We celebrated, we decorated, we invited, and we lit fires in the fireplace, and ate my dad’s pumpkin pie. Our one time of year when my family could gather together in a semblance of normality, and put on the most average and happy face we could, and it was all decadent. The feeling of it was.

The change of the season with its scent and sights, and the length of the days, the incoming dusk approaching like a secret to encase you. Creeping slowly closer and closer, but welcoming, the cool still amenable, coaxing and gliding you home in the dim light, toward a mug of hot apple cider perhaps. Maybe one of the gallons we’d picked up from our annual apple-picking trip, harvesting hoards of apples, plucked in those wire basket poles that my brother and I would wave menacingly at each other, slipping on fallen rotting apples in the orchard, filling up woven wooden baskets we could barely carry out.

It’s the change of the light and the scent that’s been my indicator these California days. It’s not the same as Back East, but there’s still the aroma of crispness and an excitement.

I will begin to buy all things pumpkin, like the rest of America. Like the pumpkin pancakes my friend treated me to yesterday, and the abomination of flavored coffee that I’m drinking right now.

I will use the pumpkin ganache cookie recipe that was given to me by a college roommate and make the pumpkin pie that my dad’s passed down through trial and error – a recipe that would never, ever, include “Pumpkin Pie Spice,” but itself includes about 8 individual spices, which I own expressly for the pie’s creation.

Fall is a time of coming back to center, of reigning in the resources. Of whittling down excess and getting the necessities done in the light of day. It’s a time that rings with good memories, full, warm, joyous memories. Fall reminds me of the earth, of how the natural world has shaped my experience. And it tastes like the release of a constriction you've held the whole year, the exhale and inhale of a breath you haven't dared relax to take. 

To me, Autumn tastes like love.

Open Sesame!

I’m still a little giddy from last night’s show with my band. Our debut and farewell show! (Though, there are rumors we may have a “reunion show” on Halloween.)

But a friend said something to me after the show that’s been sticking with me. She said that I am so much more open and confident now, that I’ve changed so much in the last year.

This same friend sat with me in ERs, cared for my cat while I was in chemo, and allowed me to bawl on her couch when things seemed so hard.

We’ve known each other only for maybe 4 years, but a lot has certainly happened since then, and she said she feels like she’s seen me blossom. And that, especially with everything that I’ve been through, how heartening it is to see that I’ve become and am becoming more open, and more engaged.

She referenced a quote she’d read in a book about women’s aging, that women come to a crossroads in their lives where they choose: become more open, or become more rigid, and therefore bitter. I told her, I don’t think that’s just women!!

But, what struck me about her initial comment was that it echoed something I’d thought to myself only a few days earlier.

I was in my car, and made some kind of comment aloud to myself, and laughed about it. And I had a flashback to when I was in junior or senior year of high school, and this one frenemy commented that I’d become much more relaxed and funny in the last little while.

Which may have had something to do with the fact that I started drinking and smoking pot… but… She was right. I wasn’t as exacting or perfectionist as I had been.

I sort of took that “easy-going” train off the rails a few years later... But I remember feeling then that she was right, that I felt less … not “square,” but serious, I suppose. (I was a very serious teen!, like most emo children.)

And as I sat in my car laughing to and at myself the other day, I had a similar self-awareness: I’ve become and am becoming more easy-going. (In some ways! In others, you have to untangle my brain with a tweezer and a magnifying glass!)

To have that same sentiment reflected back to me only days later by my friend was heartening, affirming, and... sentimental.

She said that as she watched me play, she found herself getting teary, thinking about everything I've gone through, and what I’ve made of it. And then she had to check herself, because you don’t cry at a rock show! 

The same understanding about rigidity or openness I heard on an audio CD about “Exceptional Patients” from Dr. Bernie Siegel. He said that after cancer, people tend to go one of two ways: become scared of everything, because death is just around the corner, or (finally) throw caution to the wind, because you’ve literally faced one of the worst things that can ever happen to you. You’ve stared death in the face: Will you now shrink at all risks, or will you say, Tah, this is cake?

Well, we all know, I don’t think it’s “cake” to say “Tah” to fear, but we all know that I’ve been doing it anyway. Because, really, there isn’t anything greater to lose. There isn’t any harder challenge. (Now, yes, there are other challenges that people face that I cannot imagine, child loss being one that’s top of mind lately.)

I find no glory in shutting down. I’ve lived most of my life in a state of “flight” and paralysis. I will never call it a gift, but I do recognize with appreciation and awe that, following visceral horror, I have become a woman more willing to be open, free, funny, and present than I’ve ever been. 

We Can Do This the Easy Way . . .

Why does nobody ever put a period after that phrase?: 

We can do this the easy way. Period.

I heard it again on a radio interview the other day: Well, anything worth doing is hard. It’s the hard work that makes it worth while. Nothing good ever came from taking the easy road.

Really?

Here is a brief list of activities that I find most worthy and fueling in the world:

Holding a baby

Making conversation with a child

Laughing with friends

Singing showtunes with my mom and brother

Singing camp songs while my brother plays guitar

Dancing

Not one of these things is “hard.” Not one requires advanced degrees, mountains scaled, or scars incurred.

Each of these things are, for me, Easy. Joyful. Miraculous.

This value our culture has attached to struggle and adversity and toil is sickening and disheartening.

Why would we try to do anything if we know we’re gonna get our butts kicked in the process?

Now, I know what they’re getting at. I know that I wrote just yesterday that showing up is hard and scary, so I don’t know that I have a soap-box to stand on here. But, I am tired of being harangued by the idea that I have to struggle in this life to do anything worthwhile.

That anything that comes easily, naturally, feels good, joyful or pleasurable must have a toll paid in flesh.

Sure, caring for children all of the time is taxing; and I’m not a parent, just an eager attendant and friend to others' kids, which demands its own responsibility. Making the time to show up with and for friends, and to maintain friendships does take effort. Dancing means making myself vulnerable to being seen, which requires taking a deep breath before diving in.

But it doesn’t follow that these things are struggles, adversities, or stories of redemption.

God, how we love a redemption story. We hate people who “have it easy.” We want to hear how muddy the water was you had to slog through toward your goal. We want you to express fear and isolation and doubt and a “dark night of the soul” before you are worthy of a story of triumph, joy and ease.

What kind of fucking schadenfreude society are we?

I “get” that we all want to feel a kind of connection with those who have struggled, because often we too find ourselves in struggle and we don’t want to feel alone. It feels disconnected to hear a story of ease, success, and Life’s mercy. Because we don’t have or believe we can have that ourselves. And so we want you in the mud with us.

Sometimes we do slog through mud. I get that, too. But not everything in life that’s worth doing requires that. Sometimes we cross the bridge, our toes are not calloused, there is no troll to pay off, and we simply arrive at our destination.

I know that doesn’t make great drama. But I’m not looking for drama. I’m looking for joy. 

Jazz Hands.

Yesterday was quite the hilarity.

I was called back for the dance audition for Addams Family the Musical, and it was just too funny and fun! There was a choreographer, who taught about 25 of us in a small side room off the theater, that had a wall of mirrors and a ballet bar.

There were people who were obviously dancers, and many who obviously weren't. But, we're shown this whole dance routine for about 40 minutes, going over part by part, to make up about only 2 minutes of dancing! Then we were called in groups of 5 to do it on the actual stage... Eek!

It was awesome and hilarious and super fun. I did alright. Everyone had to go a second time, and about half of us forgot it by then. Witness! Human's amazing short-term memory!

I was called to stay afterward to read for one of the leads, and although I would certainly love to take that role, I don't know if I have enough experience. I do think that I'll take a role in the chorus if I get it. I mean, it was a lot of fun.

And the whole concept is just ridiculous enough to be my kinda ridiculous. And FUN.

A friend of mine always used to tell me: Don't forget the "f" word: Fun.

That is the point of all this for me. Yes, theater is meant to be moving and evocative and a distillation of real life for two hours in a way that makes your hours outside of it gain meaning, at least for the few days after you leave the theater.

But, for me, knowing what I do about this very short mortal coil, I'd really love to have fun while I'm at it.

(Monday's truncated blog due to workout studio shift.)

Prerequisites

I’m still wading through Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly. I can only take mind-blowing awareness in small chunks! The latest chunk being:

The important thing to know about worthiness is that it doesn’t have prerequisites. Most of us, on the other hand, have a long list of worthiness prerequisites [most of which] fall in the categories of accomplishments, acquisitions, and external acceptance. It’s the if/when problem (“I’ll be worthy when…” or “I’ll be worthy if…”)

Sound familiar?

To me it does. And yet. I have other quotes to help combat this if/when thought habit.

One of which is on my fridge, and comes from a book on auditioning, actually: “There are no mistakes, only misinterpretations.”

Brene talks a lot about the difference between shame and guilt. Shame = I am bad. Guilt = I did something bad. With guilt, your inherent worth and worthiness is not called into question, and she encourages us to use “guilt self-talk” instead of “shame self-talk,” if we have to use anything at all.

Which, we usually do, because… we all make misinterpretations!

It’s interesting. Yesterday, I got the chance to spend some time with a coworker’s 10-year old daughter who was home for the summer, but didn’t have anywhere to be this week. After way too many days watching t.v. on her phone, I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk yesterday. And so we did.

We walked to the nearby park, and when we got to the water and I encouraged her to touch the cool, lapping stream, she was surprised and delighted, and asked if we could walk in it.

Well, I wasn’t expecting to do that, but SURE! Off come the socks and shoes and into the shallows we go.

On our walk back to civilization (a whole block away), she was reporting a story to me about something that had happened with her father the day before. A story that would likely be categorized as one of Road Rage. As she told the story, I experienced many reactions and opinions. Aghast, sad, worried, judgmental, superior.

But what I said was, "There are many different ways to handle situations, and that was one way to handle it."

I’m NOT the person to tell her her father was wrong, inappropriate, endangering, or negligent. I am the person, in that little short hour, to tell her, Yes, we can play in the water, and you are safe with me. I am not going to pile my opinions onto you, because I know you’re making your own.

You go ahead and love your dad. You observe him, and make your own choices. You be influenced by who and how he is, and you’ll have the chance to work through any of that if you need to.

But for right now... I didn’t even say, "That sounds scary," because she wasn’t telling it that way. She was reporting, to see how I’d react, I think. Was what he was doing appropriate? Wasn’t that funny or awful? No. It was neither. It was human.

(As I write this, I realize that I can use this lesson and aim it in a parental direction in my own life.)

It’s slow-going through Brene’s book, because there’s so much meat to her observations and suggestions.

But her lamplight to guide us and offer hope on this journey of misinterpretations is as follows:

Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. I often say that Wholeheartedness is like the North Star: We never really arrive, but we certainly know if we’re headed in the right direction.

By not attaching my own value or values to this little girl’s experience, I get to let her have her own North Star and continue to follow mine. No ifs, whens or buts. 

"Push the Button, Max!"

In the 1965 hilarious film, The Great Race, Professor Fate (Jack Lemmon) chases our hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) around the globe. Whenever Professor Fate attempts to unleash a hidden gem of an engine booster or booby trap, he yells to his sidekick, PUSH THE BUTTON, MAX! – which Max does, to uproarious and hijinxed disastrous results.

It would have been a Leslie Nielsen film if it were done in 80s.

What sparked this memory this morning is how often there’s a voice inside me egging me on to push the panic button. Come on, Max, this is a great idea! Let’s pull all ripcords, let the chips fall where they may! Damn the consequences, HOO-RAH!

Yesterday, I got an email from Kaiser to follow-up on some routine bloodwork I get done every few months now, just to keep tabs on my post-Leukemia cells. Apparently, my liver enzymes were elevated. Like, Wonkavator-through-the-factory's-glass-ceiling elevated.

My doctor wrote me that I had to come in for follow-up labs right away, that if I drank alcohol I should stop immediately, and that she was informing my oncologist, Dr. Li (which humorously autocorrected to “Dr. Lithium”).

Professor Fate wanted Max to push the button so bad. It’s bad news, it’s tragic, it’s cancer, it’s death, it’s imminent! PUSH THE BUTTON!

But… here’s the thing I’ve learned about pushing that button, from the movie, and from my own life experience: It rarely does anything productive.

So, I texted my coworker and my boss that I would be in late, that I was going to Kaiser, and then I called my naturopath/chiropractor/nutritionist in SF and made an appointment with him for that morning, too.

Because, this is how The Great Leslie would approach it: Pause, Assess, Reframe, Choose Love.

Well, maybe he wouldn't use those terms, but he would pause, at least, and assess before leaping out of the hot air balloon.

I arrive at Kaiser, and walk down the hallway. I’m toodling to myself, softly singing/humming tunelessly, just making notes up to distract my thought-life. I realize I’m practicing something called self-soothing, a practice I read about for babies learning to fall asleep on their own.

Instead of fully freaking out, I’m using a positive biofeedback technique to calm my pulse, my panic. And, it works, a little.

After they take 7 vials of my blood, I drive into the city to see my chiro. The man I credit for saving my ovaries from nuclear annihilation during chemo, with his supplements, nutritional advice, and amazingly accurate diagnoses of what’s going on in my body.

I tell him that my Kaiser doctor said it had nothing to do with having poured chemo into my body for 6 months, since that was finished last March. It couldn’t possibly be related.

Assholes.

No: Idiots.

Of course my liver and kidneys are still bouncing back, shmucks. I “love” the way Western medicine brains work: There is no immediate cause of this that we can see, so it must be something new and traumatic and deadly.

How about a patient history, assh— Sorry, Idiots.

It’s like telling someone who broke their ankle a year and a half ago that that has no bearing on why they’re now experiencing pain in their hips. … You guys did learn the whole, “The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone” song in medical school, right?

Anyway, my annoyance with Western medicine aside, I went to the doctor I trust, after having done what the Western folks wanted me to do.

We did some muscle testing, which is like the coolest thing ever. He handed me a small vial filled with clear liquid marked GMO corn. Told me to hold my other arm out and try to resist his pushing it down. My arm fell like an anvil. It weakens my system.

He held out one labeled organic corn? My arm stayed straight as a compass.

We did this several times: Pasteurized milk? Down. Raw milk? Up. Non-organic eggs? Down. Organic eggs? Up.

What I should offer at this point is that I have been eating a ton of crap these past few weeks. Whatever cookies, candy, cupcakes have been lain out at work, I’ve eaten – because I’m stressed. And sooner or later, my ban against refined sugar and dairy yields, and I go to town.

I’ve also been busy so I haven’t been cooking at home, and have therefore been eating take-out foods, which, although aren’t the worst foods I could choose, are surely not all made with my liver in mind.

So, I’ve been tired, stressed out (as you’ve read), and eating crap to boost me back up.

Yeah, apparently my overworked and Hirojima’d organs need some TenderLovingCare.

(Heh. ... Organs... lovin'... heh...)

Pushing the panic button does nothing for me except exacerbate an already very sensitive system. I don’t like hearing that I really have to stop eating the cupcakes at work, and not use half&half at Peet’s. Or, since it's not organic, I can't drink Peet's at all. I don’t like knowing that because of something I didn’t ask for I now have to work extra hard to fix its effects.

But, What I like less is driving to Kaiser on a Friday morning, thinking about the children I won’t be able to have. The life I won’t be able to “figure out.” The X-Men movie I won’t be able to see.

Look, Death and I have a pretty intimate relationship. We’ve fought an epic battle, and He’s waiting and watching in the corner, seeing if my hubris will bring me down. If, like in Million Dollar Baby, I will let my guard down and He’ll have the chance to (spoiler alert).

What I got to see from yesterday’s panic/not panic "opportunity" was that I still am pretty keen on this Life thing. That I can’t quit my job without health insurance. That I stress out about things I don't need to. And that I’ve accomplished a whole lot in the year and a half since I was diagnosed, things I want to continue to do: play music, make art, be with friends, travel.

I don’t need to push the panic button to “wake me up” – Life has a way of pushing it for me. Of pushing the button on the side of my cosmic cell phone to illuminate the time and remind me to stop freaking out in my head and get into my life.

So, today, I’m going to hum tunelessly as I get dressed, cook organic eggs, do (some) dishes, and head to an 11-year old’s birthday party to shoot mini-marshmallows at my friends. Because that’s the text Life is sending me today. 

But don't worry, I won't eat any. ;)

"Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face." Scott Pilgrim Vol 4

As those of you who follow (or haven’t yet hidden) my Facebook know by now, I’m actively looking for work. I have been, but some dam broke this week, and I’ve pulled out more of the stops – those stops tend to look like “fear of looking bad, desperate, needy.” However, SURPRISE! I feel those things, so I guess if I look that way, then I’m just looking honest, huh?

I’ve been reading back into some of Brene Brown’s work lately. I have her book The Gifts of Imperfection, and have been reading through the Amazon previews of her other two books, most especially, Daring Greatly, because it’s got her own biographical story at the beginning that includes the following exchange: 

      Therapist: What does it [vulnerability] feel like?

      Brene Brown: Like I'm coming out of my skin. Like I need to fix whatever's happening and make it better.

      Th: And if you can't?

      BB: Then I feel like punching someone in the face.

Nonetheless, what she goes on to discuss is the virulent necessity to be vulnerable in order to achieve anything of worth, mainly love, connection, and compassion.

People have commented to me often that what I write here is “so honest.” Which I guess is another way of saying I allow myself to be vulnerable here. Partly I do this because this is a protected forum. There are many layers to getting here: You have to be my Facebook friend (or somehow have the link), and then you have to click on it.

Well, two layers then!

So, this is a bit of a more private club than public. And I suppose that I feel brave enough to share this all with those of you who have leaped those two “massive” hurdles toward connection with me. If you’re this interested, or amused, then why shouldn’t you get to see some of me? Which this blog always is: some of me. – It’s honest, but it’s not my diary, nor my therapist. (Aren't you grateful!)

I suppose that mostly what I feel about sharing here, and why I feel it's "safe" vulnerability, is that you’ve probably felt this way, too. I have heard that feedback many times from people from wildly different arenas of my life and backgrounds and circumstances.

We all feel the same way at times. Have felt that way, or simply “get” what it feels like to do so.

In short, we are an empathetic and compassionate community just by my writing and your reading. We create connection, however zero’d and one’d it is, in this exchange of ideas.

I suppose I write all this today to say-- No, to remind myself that I have great capacity for courage, authenticity and vulnerability. I don’t mind telling you about the depths because you’ve been there, and can relate. I don’t mind sharing my journey into and out of the chaos of my brain, because, surprise, you all have brains, too!

In this time when things for me feel uncertain and uncharted, this blog is a constant and a place for me where I know that I can do and be well. Even when I’m vomiting on this page, and raging into and at it, I know you’re here, smiling, waiting for me to pull through. Or nodding and saying, Me too.

And. (Point):

If I have the balls to be as vulnerable and honest as I am here behind these hurdles, then there is a significantly greater chance that I can own my authenticity out in the "real" world.

Which I’m pretty sure is what all this mind-fucking job/meaning of life search is about, anyway. 

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. 

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. 

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.

“Just about the time you’re rotting with seriousness or serious boredom, something happens or else you’d die.” ~ Lorine Niedecker, poet

“The thing about grief,” she told me, “is that something is broken, but you’re not – and you’ve got to keep going.”

Years ago she told me this, and I reflect on it in so many situations.

Yesterday, after writing that blog that tore me up a bit, I had to go assist at a work event, and then head to an audition for a play. I really wasn’t feeling it.

It’s been two months now since I’ve auditioned, as I'd been cast in a play (yay!), and then turned down for other parts that allowed me the time to go on vacation. In the meantime, I did go on vacation, and had elaborate experience and processing about relationships, values, love. I also got clearer about my career goals, and implemented some action around them at work, which not surprisingly, I was told last week were great ideas but probably aren’t going to happen “within the next year,” if at all. So, there’s been processing around that, too.

In all, it’s been kinda heavy around here. Making check-points of where I am, where I want to be personally and professionally. And so I showed up to that audition, late and lost in the hills of Berkeley, with little more than the feet I was standing on.

But, most times, that’s enough.

God, it was fun. I really had forgotten that I love this stuff. I’d forgotten the titillation and excitement, and the nervous sizing-up from the other auditioners, and the frantic reading of sides before your name is called, wondering if you’re supposed to do an accent or not.

It was great. It’s less than 20 minutes of life, but it pulled me back to center, away from the future-gazing, away from the grief-feeling. I still feel off today, and that’s alright, but for a few minutes yesterday, I got to do something I love doing, simply for the effort of trying it. I got to meet other women trying it too, and have a coffee date to pick one's brain on the whole “Bay Area Theater Biz.”

It’s strange to get back to this again, this thing that I just want to do because it’s fun and not because my life or income or goals depend on it. It’s strange to just have the fun thing simply because it’s fun. There’s no stepping stone here, no ladder, no life plan founded on it. It’s an extraneous, avocational, extra-curricular dalliance, and isn’t that so needed right now?

I told you I’ve been thinking about getting back into band-ing again, playing bass again. Simply for the same reason. I forgot what it’s like to have fun. To do the things I find fun.

In this time that I’ve been “figuring out” my life and my strategies and my goals, it’s been satisfying and reinforcing and relieving, but it hasn’t been fun. In fact, it’s been hella lonely in some ways I don’t get.

All work and no play, and all that.

But, without really intending to, every single day this past week, I spent time with women friends, mostly long-established, report-having friends. It, too, reinforced something – that combination of history and laughter and understanding and ease. It, too, brought me back to a sense of myself, a little lost in the myopia of “life planning.”

I saw a friend’s post this morning that read, “There’s got to be more to life than this.”

I replied aloud, “There is.”

Confidence: How To.

Think of something you know you know how to do. Something you enjoy knowing how to do. Maybe it’s making the lightest quiche, or playing the drums, or changing a bicycle inner tube. Maybe you know that you know how to plant seeds that germinate, or fix this computer bug, or mix the perfect vermillion. Maybe it’s as simple as knowing you know how to hug a child, or tell a good joke. Find something that makes you feel competent and confident.

Experience that feeling. The surge of blood through you, a sense of guidance, purpose, direction. A sense of being the right person for the job, in the right place at the right time. A feeling of ease and tension release, of certainty and even exuberance. I know how to do this – I love doing this.

For me, about 2 years ago, I realized it was (car) camping. I know how to do that. I knew when we needed wood, when we should start the fire, how to put it out. I knew how to set up my tent, how to walk in the woods, how to avoid poison oak. I knew how to brush my teeth at the tap, and use my headlamp to find my missing sock. I knew how to have fun, how to do what needed to be done, how to help others because I knew how to do these things.

What if… we allowed for the possibility that we could have that feeling in more places in our lives. If we could recognize the mastery we have in some areas, and allow that sense of confidence and competence support our less certain attempts. Maybe, it’s just knowing that I know how to put on liquid eyeliner with deft precision. Can I allow that to fill up my tank a little? – Come to think of it, can I recognize that I know how to fill my gas tank! (If you grew up in NJ, you might not!) ;)

But the point, today, is that although there are many areas in which I am not an expert, and that will always be so, and there will always be something to learn in the places I want to become more adept… there are also a host of places that I haven’t recognized I’m doing pretty well.

I think this is what they call, “building self-esteem.” What a concept.

But, it’s true. People in general, and people like me, tend to dismiss what we think is easy for us. For me, I have tended to dismiss my writing when its complimented, since it can be so easy for me. What’s the value of something that is wickedly simple for me?

Somehow the idea that valuable things are hard things came into our zeitgeist. This is not to say that you or I needn’t work for what we want, but it’s about recognizing what we have, and sometimes what we’ve been given, that we take for granted.

I take for granted that I know how to put on crisp eyeliner. I learned it, I do it, it’s a part of me. So, I forget it’s not something everyone else knows. I take for granted that I can write this every day, for better or worse! I take for granted that I can talk to the children at work and make us both smile. – Well, that one I don’t. I don’t take the smiling for granted, just the knowing that I know how to do it.

If I were to go through a given day or week, and take note of the things that I seem to “instinctively” and “intuitively” know how to do, how many things would pile onto that list?

Sure, there are blank spots, there are gaps, there are wide berths of where I want to know and learn and be more. But they’re gaps. They’re not the whole.

If I tried to recognize that I could feel the same self-esteem while cooking eggs in the morning as I do when making a teepee out of wood in a fire-pit; if I could remember to feel adept and facile when I parallel park my car; if I could allow a sense of ease and confidence for the simple act of knowing to pause in today’s heavy sunshine,

I imagine that delightful, intrepid poise can offer a foundation for my less assured endeavors.  

Too Hot to Handle

There’s a maxim around here that goes: G-d will never give you more than you can handle.

To echo Wednesday, bullshit.

I think this phrase is missing a key point at the end of it: G-d will never give you more than you can handle with the help of others.

I think G-d or the Universe or life will always give us more than we can handle *alone.* I think, in fact, that’s the point. In order to be able to handle that which is handed us, we must reach out for help from others, or help from “god,” which often comes in the form of help from others anyway.

I think it’s important that we are given more than we can handle alone, otherwise, surely, we all would. If we could live like Sandra Bullock in “The Net,” ordering pizza via the internet, watching a yule log screen saver, and never knowing our neighbors, we would. But I still think about that movie every time I nod or say a passing hello to my neighbors: I am not anonymous; I am not alone.

In that movie (sorry, y’all!), Sandra’s character gets accused of something or other, but no one can identify her, and her identity gets stolen. No one except one character (her shrink) actually knows who she is, actually recognizes her. The neighbor says, no she doesn’t think that’s her, even though they’ve lived in proximity for a dozen years.

What kind of challenge of growth is there in that? If we were intended to live in isolation, there wouldn’t be all this talk about connection and community, mehta and helping one another, and my understanding of tikkun olam (repairing the world) has a lot to do with eliminating disconnect.

I opined to my coworker, who was listening to Pandora the other day when one of these new modern radio songs came on (I don’t remember which one). But it was one that eventually has a chorus of voices yell, Yeah!, or Hey!. And I theorized that the proliferation of “modern” songs that feature a chorus of voices at some point is a call for connection, to refill and replace the actual being with others—if we hear a chorus of voices yell, Hey!, on the radio, we want to yell along with it, too. For a moment, we are also connected to those voices, even though they be computer over-layed with one another.

This “new” sound I hear has a lot of that, and my opinion is that they’re also trying to create community in the best way they know how, to create a moment of connection and a feeling of being a part of a crowd…even when you’re just driving alone in your car, and the person next to you is as well.

I do think “G-d” gives us more than we can handle. In the utter inability to handle things on our own, I think we’re intended to reach out to one another or to a “power greater than ourselves” for help, for guidance, for support, and mostly, for laughter.

The amount of laughter you can have alone is much less than what you can have in interaction with each other – like I’ve been saying about random connections with store clerks or bus passengers: You never know what will be said by the other, and it creates something totally unique.

This morning, with all of this on my mind, in my notebook is a printed quote by Anais Nin:

Each friend represents a world in us,

a world possibly not born until they arrive,

and it is only by this meeting that

a new world is born.

I make it a point to say hi, or at least nod to or acknowledge my neighbors, to let them see my face, and I theirs, as I rush in and out of the building at the ends of a long day. I want to be able to recognize, and possibly say hi, when I see them on the street, and, mostly, I want them to be able to pick me out of a line-up. 

Yo' Mama.

Apologies, reader, for the rain delay (lack of blog) yesterday. It was this wonderful Spring rain in the morning, and instead of sitting at my stoic kitchen table, and peering out the window while writing morning pages, meditating, and composing a blog, I took my mug of coffee into my studio’s bedroom/living room, tucked myself into the corner of my couch against the window, and sat next to my cat on the arm of the couch watching the rain make everything greener.

It was warm and cozy, and I just couldn’t bring myself to break the calm of the spell. The sound of the rain, the steam from the mug, watching my cat’s chest expand and contract with each breath. Oh, calm! How I miss you! Oh, rest, you ineffable minx!

I let my thoughts roam over the landscape, and thought how I missed my mom, when she was here last, and sat on this very couch with this very cat. And so, I called her. – Strange and funny thing to do, eh? Think of someone, and actually call them? Not text or poke or email – but make a phone call – God, it’s luxury and connection incarnate.

I knew she’d just returned from her annual trip with her beau to some Caribbean island (Back, Envy, BACK!), and even with only a half hour (barely enough time for us to scratch the surface of a conversation), I called to find out how it went.

I love talking to her. Sure, there are times when it’s grating, and I have to remind myself she’s human with flaws and working on them. But, on the whole, especially these past several years, talking with her is more refueling than it is draining – which is a gift.

She’s just hilarious. Our conversations meander, and side-track, and disambiguate, and non-sequiter, yet always find their way back, like six degrees of separation. It’s these things that I know I’ll miss most when she’s gone. And why I’m trying to get what I can now, to call, and make plans to visit, and email when I can.

Call it morbid, call it realistic. I just want to store it all. Engage in it all.

Coincidentally, one of the anecdotes from her trip was about interacting with the armed guard at the airport, the process of going through customs and homeland security, and the stark seriousness of it all. And, so, as she is wont to do, she planted a funny sentence into the bleak and rote exchange with the check-point guard.

He cracked a smile and then cracked wise. Suddenly, it was an exchange between people instead of objects.

I told her how synchronistic it was that just this very week I wrote a blog about learning from her to talk with strangers, to make our interactions with one another just that much more engaged and alive.

I shared with her my own story about being in Port Authority around the Bush Iraq invasion, and bantering briefly with a guard walking through the orange-tiled halls about exchanging his gun for some flowers.

I love that she does this, and that I do it, as I wrote the other day. It’s part of what makes this life worth living and engaging in, part of the surprise of being alive. When you engage, you don’t know what will happen, you’re rolling the ball onto the Roulette wheel. Maybe the person won’t want to play, maybe they’ll look at you with a “look, I just want to clock out, please stop talking to me” impatience. But, perhaps, both of your days will be lightened just that little bit. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only time you talk to someone all day, as can happen in our disconnected world of modern conveniences.

I asked my “intuitive” once what she thought about my moving back to New York-ish to be closer to her, since sometimes it really is painful to live so far away, to not get to pick up the phone and say, hey that movie’s playing on 72nd tonight, wanna go? Or, I just saw this exhibit is opening at the FIT Fashion Museum, meet up this week? Or, can you come with me to Sephora, I need to find a new blush?

Honestly, it pains my heart to not get to do that with her.

But, my intuitive, whenever this was, a year or so ago, had a pretty logical answer: If you go, you’ll be her caretaker, and that will not be good for you.

It’s true. There’s a fine line from being involved to being too involved, and there’s a pattern of being her caretaker that I don’t want to repeat from my childhood. And it’s a role I know I can easily fall into, without strong enough boundaries: Love as Caretaking, instead of Love as Equanimity.

The jury has been out indefinitely on my move back to the East coast. It doesn’t have to be New York. It doesn’t have to look like moving into caretaking distance. It can look like, "I’m coming down or up for the weekend, let’s do stuff," which is easier than "I’m taking a cross-country flight."

Luckily, I am not in charge of my destination, I’m only in charge of doing the work. Perhaps my boundaries become stronger, perhaps I am better able to stay out of the grooved rut of caretaker. And perhaps they don’t, and I allow myself to say, That’s okay, Mol.

But, on a rainy Saturday morning, I can still give her a call, and we can laugh, meander, and enhance one of the cherished relationships I will ever have.

But We’ve Got The Biggest Balls of Them All!

When I was living and teaching ESL in South Korea, I earned a nickname: Ballsy Mollsy.

It was not uncommon for me to approach a stranger in a bar and ask inappropriate questions. Or, maybe I was with a group of friends, and wanted to steer the conversation in a more exciting direction, and would pose a candid question to a group that would earn laughs, but few answers. Maybe I would just stumble out to the next bar in search of new conversation without telling anyone, but that was more stupid than ballsy, fyi.

As chance would have it, one day last month, I attended a play my friend was performing in, and I ended up sitting next to the 25 y.o.’s mother. “How did it even come up?,” he answered via text. When I told him, he replied, “That’s right, I forgot you talk to strangers.” (Indeed, how we met.)

I do. I talk to strangers. I mean, how are we ever to meet anyone new if we don’t talk to them? Like the other day, waiting for my burrito, I ended up waiting on the bench next to this guy I see around my neighborhood a lot, who I’ve seen working at the café on the corner. We struck up a conversation, turns out he’s a nice guy, we had a pleasant chat about movies, and he went off with his burritos for himself and his girlfriend.

It’s not always about “meeting dudes;” in fact, it’s more than often not about that. I just like to find out about people, not walk around like the Ants that they talk about in A Waking Life who, unseeing, run into one another and then walk around and continue on their way, antennae down. I mean, that’s what New York is for. ;)

I suppose I learned this from my mom. My mother is notoriously gregarious. To the point, growing up where it was embarrassing, and not a little evidence of her manic tendencies. But, still. We’d be in a store, she’d exchange more than a cursory Thank You with the cashier or salesperson. We’d be on a bus, and she’d ask the woman next to her about the museum she’d just visited, based on that metal entry pin tacked to her lapel.

Sometimes, she’d flirt with the cashier or waiter or whomever. There was a base note to her conversation that wasn’t just cordial or conversational. Pre-divorce, this was a little unnerving.

But. A few years ago, she recounted a story to me that she held as an exemplar of growth and self-aware change.

She was in Zabar’s (Manhattanites will know), and was in an aisle next to a couple. She could overhear them debating which of the cream cheeses they should get. If the tofu spread really tasted like cream cheese, if the chive was better than the dill?

My mom. Had an opinion. She always does.

The success came when she didn’t offer it. She reported to me that she realized they were not asking for her help, they didn’t need her help, and she picked up the chive tofu cream cheese she loves, and went on her way.

Trust me. This is a big success. To “mind your own business, and have business to mind” is a very important boundary to learn. I was amused at how proud she was of herself, too, like she knew that she was learning something, that she was changing something.

I mean, it’s part of the reason our relationship has been able to grow where the one with my dad has faltered: she really is trying to change. And it shows.

Like all of us, change and growth takes time, isn’t simple, and sometimes means taking contrary actions.

But sometimes, how we behave in the world influences others, too. How she interacted in the world helped to inform how I do. Now, sure, I’m not Holly Go Lightly everywhere I go. Sometimes I wish I had a burka. But sometimes, the purchase of a burrito is transformed by the simple act of connecting with another human being.

I leave you with this: I received a card in the mail this week from a friend. In it, she thanks me for what I write here and on my Facebook; that reading “me” helps to buttress her flagging spirits.

I told her how much that meant to me. How much it means to me that my interactions with the world are making a difference; that I’m not telegraphing into deep space for purely selfish and masturbatory reasons. I never really know if how I’m choosing to express myself here is “too much” or "too honest," and I have to trust that those of you who choose to click on the link to read me do so because you find something here, even if it be self-congratulations for not being as bipolar ;)

To hear that how I behave in the world influences and affects people for the better is one of the greatest gifts of having big balls. 

The X Factor

Yesterday morning, after I left you with my maudlin, mildly self-pitying blog, I went to meet up with some folks, and I was able to identify the word for how I was feeling: deprived.

Usually in those groups, we talk about deprivation around things like clothing (wearing your boots even though they're falling apart), or entertainment (not seeing live music for months in a row), or food (not going food shopping). I use these as examples because I’ve “used” deprivation in just these ways. I’ve been in deprivation around all of these things, and am working my best to walk away from those ways of being and treating myself, through recognizing that there is enough in&of the world to get my needs met, too.

So, as I sat down with them, I was thinking about how, precisely, I was feeling about my lack of group interaction, and I identified the term deprivation.

In talking with them about it, I came a little bit further into it: I realized that what I’m missing is being “on.”

About a year ago, I walked past a restaurant where a good friend of mine was finishing up brunch with her husband and a friend of theirs. They waved me in to sit down, and I spent a few minutes talking with them—not catching up, just making conversation.

The same friend later told me that she’d never seen me like that. That, in fact, she'd never seen me with other people. That I lit up, that I was funny, and charming, and conversant, and “on.”

I was “on,” because being with other people like that, in that way, a small group that isn’t there to listen to music or poetry or go to a movie, in a small group where I can turn “on” my charisma—man, that’s what I’m missing.

I took one of those Meyers-Briggs personality tests, once as a fun, short version, and once where an actual trained woman interpreted my zillion answers to the zillion questions.

What she came out with was pretty telling to this new awareness: I fall so directly between being an introvert and an extrovert, that I’m neither an “I” or an “E”—I’m an “X.” (An XNFP, if you care to know.)

I need both. I am fueled and fed by both. I need the kind of quiet, introspective time with myself, and the quiet, one-on-one interactions where we can get really intimate and honest. AND. I need the loud, boisterous, active hilarity of being with other people, where I don’t know what conversation we’ll have, and I jump from topic to topic, volleying back and forth with others.

I miss that. I miss that part of myself, and I think that part of what I was recognizing yesterday was an atrophying of that side of personality. It really only comes out in those situations, and I’m simply not in many of those situations these days. (Although, flirting has a very similar timbre to it.)

I love feeling “on.” I love the rush of feeling expressive and funny and bold and intelligent. I love the rush of feeling the charm that pulses from me when I’m in that state of being. I love feeling charming. Here meaning, engaging, self-possessed, active, social, humorous, with levity. Oh levity. Donde esta levity?

That’s another longed-for part of that style of interaction—the levity. We’re not going to get deep here, those are the rules of engagement. We may not chat about Karl Lagerfeld’s new collection (necessarily) or what mascara we’re using (though we could), but we certainly won’t talk about deep self-work or spiritual progress. We’ll talk at that mid-level of fluff that happens when you’re engaged with friends and acquaintances in a social setting.

I’ve had plenty of opportunity, and continue to, to talk about the heavy. And although people say they hate small talk, I guess that’s sort of what I’m talking about – the chit chat and conversations that happen over a bowl of punch, as you float from one corner of a party to another, or... at a dinner party.

I’m glad that I have been able to pin-point what it is that I feel has been missing, because it makes it much easier to invite it into my life, and find and create opportunities for that kind of Upness to happen. More importantly, I’ve gotten to see why these kinds of interactions are important, and indeed critical, to my level of contentment and happiness. And just like the other places of deprivation I’d identified, I first had to admit that those things were important to me, that they were “needs,” not wants, not brush-aways.

However, I am sorry we both had to read through yesterday's navel-gazing blog to get here. ;)

What’s My Age Again?

I stopped by the optometry office on my way out of the medical lab. It was the last week of December and I thought it would be a good day to get my labs drawn, test my blood, get some confirming news for the new year, good or bad, at least it’s truth.

At the eye sales desk, he told me that my glasses order was last filled in 2011, that I’d had the glasses I’m wearing for nearly 3 years. That people usually reorder every year or two.

And it reminds me that I lost a year. 

I was diagnosed with leukemia a week before my 31st birthday. I don’t remember it much, who was there, if we sang -- I think we did -- except that in my threadbare hospital gown, I opined, Next year, instead of cancer, can we get brunch instead? – And we did.

But in many ways, I feel like I didn’t actually live my 31st year (or 32nd if you’re being technical). Suddenly I find myself reminding myself, Yes, I’m 32 now. 31 sort of did and didn’t happen.

I know that a few years from now, these missing months won’t seem as missing, won’t feel as real, except sometimes it strikes me that I spent half a year in a hospital. That when I consider, “last year at this time,” I was bald and packing for my 4th round of chemo. And now it’s done. And it’s weird.

When I try to express this weirdness in a way that might make sense to other people, I say that it’s like my life took this enormous detour, but now I’m suddenly back to where I parted with the road, and that side road doesn’t even exist. 

How do you go back to “normal” after that? It’s not to give the event credence it doesn’t deserve, or to use my cancer as a talisman of pain or suffering, or even of validation – it’s just to say, Yes, it actually happened, and yet, so what?

So what. It’s a hard thing to say about cancer, without sounding callous. But, really, what does it mean now?

What has it meant this past year? That’s easy to answer – everything. Everything I do is in response to it, even though “nothing has changed.” That’s the weirdness of it. I work at the same job. I sleep in the same apartment. I watch the same t.v. shows.

Many things I’ve done differently, many things I’ve started, tried, done, seen, been. But, when does its relevance fade – does its relevance fade? If everything I do, which I assure you I measure against my cancer stick, is in response to it, when do I stop mentioning it, when does it stop being a significant part of who I express myself to be. When I stop mentioning it out loud, which sometimes I note I do, and sometimes I pointedly don’t, … what does that mean, if anything?

I text a cute guy, after actually asking aloud, “if today was my last day on Earth...” I drink a badly mis-measured version of turmeric tea, because it’s listed in Kicking Cancer in the Kitchen. I’m stewing marrow bones in a crock pot right now because I’ve read they have immune boosting properties.

I flew a plane, got into a band, went to Hawaii, because I had cancer.

I bought a car, had sex with that cute guy, built my first bedframe because I had cancer.

I saw Book of Mormon because I had cancer, and stopped talking to my dad because of it, too.

I measure how much time I waste or spend on Netflix against cancer. I measure how much sleep I get against cancer. I won’t read bad books, but I'll read damnyouautocorrect until it hurts to laugh any more.

What does it mean, though? Is it relevant? To you. To you, man on the street, do you care what makes me laugh a little freer? Do you care why I eat organic eggs, or buy gold boots, or notice the moon? Does it matter to you that everything has changed and nothing is different?

Probably not.

So, what about the missing year – if it wrought all of these changes, it wasn’t missing, right? That’s the point, right?

Sure. Maybe. 

Still, I wish I could have gotten new glasses, and gone without the eviscerating fear.

Thanks. 

Both/And.

Tonight I go back into Kaiser hospital for my second round of chemo. According to my current understanding, this is round 2 of 5.

However, I don’t really know. I went to Stanford on Friday for what the Kaiser folks had told me (I have it in writing!) was a “consultation” about bone marrow transplant (Can we all pass a moment of silence for my even having to use the phrase “bone marrow transplant?). But, when I arrived at Stanford, they seemed raring to go – ready, set, destroy your immune system & hope the new one takes!

I was not so prepared for that. The doctor spoke for about an hour and a half about what’s involved, and used the term “mortality rate” much too often for me to feel at all like this was something I want to do. Then, they want you to talk to a social worker about relocating down into the Stanford area for anywhere from 3-6 months. That conversation, they said, would take another hour and a half.

At that point, I was too emotional – I mean, come on, doctors, this isn’t a theory – This is MY LIFE, and I told them that I wasn’t able to speak to the social worker then. They seemed all shocked and surprised that someone couldn’t sit through 3 hours of people telling them how they may die, and even if they don’t here are all these lovely other side effects, then also sit through someone telling them how they need to up-end their entire lives to live somewhere alone and foreign and away from all the trappings of normalcy they’re trying so desperately to hold on to.

Really? You don’t get that I need to leave now?

But, leave I did. And have had a few days of overwhelming, What the Fuck – Now What?

I spoke with my friend who’s an oncology nurse at Kaiser – actually we met when she started taking care of me last round, and is coming this afternoon to pick up and foster my cat while I’m inpatient – so, we’re, like, friends now. :) But, she also knows about all this stuff.

Not all the facts are in, and I emailed my doctor last night to say, Um, so, Stanford seems to think I need a transplant NOW, and you have told me that we can wait to see if I have a recurrence of the cancer, and then do a transplant THEN – so, Uh, what’s the story here? However, my nurse friend said that with Leukemia, it can simply be a waiting game if you don’t go the transplant route.

As I was talking to her yesterday, I was waiting for my friend to come pick me up so we could go to Ocean Beach in SF. I said to her, yes, I have a good chance IF I make it through. She said, Well, have a good time at Ocean Beach, IF you make it through. …

I got some info in the mail from a cancer society, and they have a pamphlet about coping. In the back, they have a sort of daily inventory – how did you feel today, did you laugh today.

With all of this hyper serious stuff happening, it’s hard to find balance. I hadn’t laughed in days – certainly not after the Stanford “You’re gonna live if you don’t die” visit.

But, yesterday, I did laugh. My nurse friend ended up coming with us too. And off we were to Ocean Beach, laughing, silly, poking fun at ourselves and each other.

And, oh, the beach. I’ve been wanting to go to the beach since I got out of the hospital. Something about that massive body of water, this uncontained thing, this thing that is totally out of my control, but is working anyway – I wanted to witness it. I wanted to splash in it and squish my toes in the sand of it. To breathe in it. And I did. We did.

We were there for a few hours, walking, sitting on a towel, poking at things with our toes, crumbling sand in our fists. Laughing at children and dogs; admiring some very Ryan Gosling-esque abs on the surfers. It was a gorgeous day.

There was some cancer talk, but not too much. We went to Java Beach for coffee re-ups, and I ran into a friend there. I remembered how I used to spend my Saturday midnights there with a group of people who came to be friends – What else do you do on a Saturday night at midnight when you’re young and not at the bar? You drink coffee and eat left-over pastries by candelight and talk about how awesome it is we’re alive and getting better. And sometimes how hard it is to be alive and getting better.

We went down to the Bayview where a friend of mine was having an open studios art show. The whole warehouse was sculpture. Each artist a sculptor. It’s rare that I see so much sculpture – usually the museums I’m at are paintings or photographs. To see all this metalwork. It was amazing. So creative, and alive. And my friend’s marble sculptures, as if melted out of the unhewn block.

We walked around out back and took in the Bay from that angle. We saw the city from West to East, and we came home tiredly satisfied.

I sat for a few minutes, emboldened from my day of levity, sunshine, the taste of salt on my teeth, and read some of the binder Stanford gave me the day before. But I didn’t sit long with it.

I went to go meet up with some fellows for an hour, spoke a little of what’s going on with me, and then had burgers and a movie with a friend from SF. We saw that Seven Psychopaths movie, and it was really great – startling, gruesome in the over-the-top meant-to-be-funny way, and just creative tongue-in-cheek storytelling. For those hours, I didn’t think about myself or my cancer at all.

I laughed, gasped, sat in the dark with strangers doing the same normal thing on a Saturday night.

I guess it’s going to be like this for now. The pendulum from normal to not taking some very quick strokes. But last night, I got to note that I did laugh that day. The reality of my situation was just the same as the day before, but yesterday, I got to laugh, and reality became just an iota different.