Category Archives: life

Real Life is Lifing…

Books, bookworm, Corona Virus, family, health, life, music, nature, Pandemic, podcasts, reality, self love

As the kids would say…

And I’m officially living a life that’s more real than anything I’ve encountered so far. I’m journaling more than usual, remembering my dreams less but still listening to music all the time. I finished a book (The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry) I didn’t expect to read a few days ago, a book I would never have read if not for my childhood TV fave, Claire Danes. It’s strange how one can escape the pain and confusion of present day in the pain and confusion of a bygone era. It’s safer I guess. The book is written. Based on the Apple TV series I already knew pretty much where the story was headed and what it was really about.

My husband and I closed on our first home the beginning of 2022. My mom moved in with us a few weeks ago and is settling in nicely. I find myself in a new position of caretaker and personal shopper, and I’m not quite sure how I feel about it or even if it’s important how I feel. I just do. Because I have to. It does feel very satisfying when I can find things from my mom that she wants and needs. I’ve mostly gotten over that feeling of panic I get when I feel like I’m going to disappoint. Because I never want to disappoint anyone I love or even like. But I’m the hardest on myself when I “fail” myself. My husband is just the greatest with me. He really is. And for him, because he is patient and tolerant and endlessly helpful with me, I try harder not to be an a-hole. I try to temper my dripping sarcasm which is just compensation for being lousy with uncertainty and fear of facing the unknown.

I still have a weird hybrid work schedule that allows for some flexibility I really am grateful for. The world is in a tailspin of denial about Covid and it’s variants, the cost of which will not show up in concrete numbers until the Winter. And generally the country/world is up against the threat of an urgent climate emergency, unprocessed collective trauma, mass shootings, and an effort to back pedal into the dark ages to name just a fraction of our collective challenges.

Unmasked white men ask if they can “squeeze in” between me and others during daily commutes and I feel assaulted in a way unsolicited requests to smile from street strangers never have.

I made a list of things yesterday that ground me. Things I didn’t have to think about but which I know I enlist to immediately bring me to some center, peace and a sense of stability.

Music – It’s magic still works on me the same as it has since I was a girl. And there’s always more to discover. I will never hear it all and that fact baths me in relief and soothing, excitement and inspiration. Music is the free thing that contains an endless multitude of worlds and universes to access and they can lead you to places within that cannot be discovered any other way.

Skincare -In the morning but more so at night when I’m unwinding, my skincare routine continues to be the thing I do no matter what is happening in my head. It is the constant daily ritual I never skip. I’m usually playing music while I go through my steps. It’s probably the only time in my day when I’m fully conscious that I’m caring for myself and myself is grateful for it. An excuse to touch, wash, cleanse, exfoliate, rinse, massage, slather and apply to my skin lovingly, gently.

Reading -I used to be an avid bookworm. Reading was my first love, my first teacher outside of my parental instruction. Much like music, it helped me to escape, to discover, to understand, to broaden my understanding of differences, to travel and explore, to connect. I haven’t been reading in print anywhere near as much as I used to but while reading “The Essex Serpent,” I was surprised to remember how easy it is for me to disappear and forget the world outside while entering a strange, raw, muddy, foggy, tough but beautiful coastal landscape in the Victorian age. To be able to disappear into a book. I haven’t done it in a while, let alone in a book by a writer outside of my small cannon of favorite writers. And I needed it like a shapeshifter forced to remain in one version of itself for too long.

WTF with Marc Maron-I love listening to podcasts, and there are several that I love but none that I’ve listened to as long as WTF. Maron is raw. Maron is funny. He’s got problems and knows it and doesn’t pretend to something he’s not. He lays it all out and I continue to appreciate that. I root for his happiness even though he’s not good at being happy. He shares so much personally with his audience that it’s hard not to feel like we know him intimately. He’s taken care of cats most of his life and the two that remain with him play such a defining role in his life that they spill over into his show merchandise and comedy tour branding. Sometimes I’ll just listen to his opening monologue if I’m not interested in the person he’s interviewing because I just like hearing his take on things, even if I don’t agree. I’ve been listening to him ceaselessly for over a decade as my love of other podcasts come and go. I don’t like to think about what life will be like when he’s gone.

Water– Being in it, walking beside it, listening to it, seeing it. Seeing bodies of water is always a blessing to me. Water is a great rejuvenator for me. A powerful element of yielding, submerging and force. Hypnotic, mysterious, awe inspiring and sensual. My dream home includes a deep old copper or porcelain tub in a wet room with a skylight or a high landscape window letting in natural light. It also includes an outdoor path leading to a wide lake or beach. Water instantly takes me to peace. I don’t need to try to find it. It’s just there.

Cats- My cat can make me smile through just about anything. Me and my husband rarely fight or argue but when we have, it’s the cat that we lay down our disagreements for. The cat doesn’t give a shit what we’re arguing about. Watching my cat watch the world, clean himself, eat, drink from the tub faucet, meow at me, stretch, sleep, make biscuits, sit in my lap and a million other little things does wonders for my blood pressure. If he’s okay, I feel better about myself, about life in general. Brushing him. petting him, sparring with him, talking to him, brings me back to center, to purpose. He has his own inner world, motivations, irritations and things that sooth him which I will never understand. Cats are charming weirdos and I enjoy the routine and stability he has provided in our lives and the way my husband and I share time with him.

Nature– The difference between being depressed and looking at the view of the side of another building across the way vs. sky high pine trees in the yard is huge to me. Huge. walking through Isham Park every week during the Covid shut down saved me from total despair and engulfed me with hope and regeneration I needed to get through the pain of isolation and languishing.

I made this list of things I engage with often, if not daily as a way to keep things in perspective and also to remind myself that there’s so much to be grateful for as I navigate a path that for me is still unstable and unknown. Home ownership, aging, caretaking, budget managing, “adulting” and more is some real ass shit. Something always get’s missed, dropped, forgotten. God bless people who do this with children.

Pandemic Reflections in a Pandemic

Feminine, Isolation, life, work

You have any favorite clothes that used to fit you but they don’t anymore? And do you still hold on to those clothes out of sentiment? Yeah? I used to do that as well. But here’s the thing, I took a look at those clothes last year and finally realized there was no point in holding onto them anymore. I don’t want to fit into them anymore, and I doubt I ever could or should fit into them. I’ve outgrown them, not just because of weight gained (pandemic pounds are real asf) but also because I’m not that person anymore. I held on to them because I missed the memory, the time and the relationship I had with the world then, when I fit into those clothes. There is no going back.

That’s what it’s felt like for me, being back at work in the office part time. And nothing is going back to “normal.” A year and a half of working from home has turned the majority of my immediate focus to home life, my husband, family and my cat. So many of the devices I used to employ to distract myself have fallen away and to be honest, I’ve no desire to have them back. It’s actually a bit scary. Eerie.

There’s been all this space to process and see clearly what mechanisms I’ve employed to hold myself back from really evolving. And those mechanisms have become useless and unattractive. All I want to do when I’m in the office is hurry back home to my apartment with my cat and my partner where I feel considerably safer and much more comfortable.

This morning, I sat at the desk I work from and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Naturally, I couldn’t rip my face mask off so I made the decision to just unhook my bra. Then I just took it off and chucked the thing in my tote bag. No shade to anyone who needs one, but after a year of working from home and not wearing one, my breasts feel nothing but oppression when it’s on. 2020 made me hyper aware of how bras, aside from understandably needed support are really just meant to hide nipples away from the patriarchy.

I HATE IT.

MY BREASTS WANT FREE.

So my bra is in my tote. And I’m thankful that since I’m surrounded by zero people and this liberation is possible. I also toyed around with unbuttoning my jeans but that seemed to be the deal breaker. I’m pro-breast liberation but I’m not tryna go all Al Bundy in public. That’s just disrespectful. LOL!

But in addition to shedding old clothes, old modes of distraction and…my bra, I also seem to have shed a deep longing to reconnect with old colleagues.

You know timing is a thing.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder for sure but too much distance makes you binge watch shows on a bunch of streaming services while the memory of what used to be normal in terms of a social life gets dimmer. At first I missed the fuck out of people. Then I got used to missing them. Then I got used to the idea I might never see them again. Then I stopped feeling like I actually needed to see them in person since we have social media, texting and still know we’re alive.

Now, I’m like…what-else-is-there?

I’ve outgrown what I thought I needed from these relationships…

Work is not life.

What-next?

It’s a weird feeling place to be. I see my physical therapist more frequently than I see my close work colleagues or friends and all we do is talk about TV and film while he’s stretching out my arm. That, I look forward to. LOL!

But this strange we’re back in business, back to normal, shove the toothpaste back in the tube mess is giving me extreme pause. I look around me and I see nothing is back to any kind of normal and never will be. And that’s fine. But I need a change. I feel like part of me has already moved on from this and is just waiting for the rest of me to follow.

Laughter in Hell

life, ,

When I was writing Mating in Captivity and was interested in making a distinction between eroticism and sexuality, I made a connection that I had never made before. That helped me understand why I was so interested in writing about the erotic – not in the narrow sense that modern society has defined it, but rather that quality of aliveness, vitality, and vibrancy that animates us.

-Esther Perel

I was listening to a podcast interview with Esther Perel recently where she talks as she often does about the study of aliveness and the erotic as related to the family and community of Holocaust survivors from which she hails. She often says that in the camps after the Holocaust there remained two different types of survivors: those that did not die and those who came back to life. One might wonder as I did when I first started studying Perel’s work, what the erotic has to do with Holocaust survivors.

As mentioned in the quote above, the term Erotic Intelligence coined by Perel, refers to a much broader definition of what it means to be alive than what most of us or used to. As a child of Holocaust survivors, Perel was very aware that her parents made the decision, to be not just survivors, but to make of their survival all that they could and to “come back to life” rather than to be alive and exist in a state of death. The energy that lay both in that choice and the work, the daily practice of joy and gratitude required, all contain the spark of the erotic and those things which universally signal aliveness for us all.

She talked in the interview about the role laughter played for survivors of the Holocaust, laughter in the darkest, the most terror filled times, “Laughter in hell.” This notion grabbed me and I took note of the times when laughter in my life during rough times (many of which I still wading through) have brought me and people around me to laugh totally at random. Marginalized oppressed people all over the world relate to this kind of laughter, the kind that pushes up defiantly through the ugliness and pain of human injustice and disparity and explodes into spaces blanketed with fear, sadness, hopelessness and depression like light breaking. Perel talks about laughter as autonomy in dark times when one feels that the sense of control over everything else has been lost.

The affirmation of this through Perel’s study touched me deeply. It confirmed something I had always suspected about why laughter is so important to me. There is a sense of unabashed freedom and bonding, a collective agreement, a belonging when we laugh together and even alone. There are times, in my therapist’s office when we will both share bursts of unexpected of laughter, sometimes moments after I have been crying. And that laughter…man, it makes me feel like no matter what, I still have the energy of life in me, that I have not shut down completely, that light can still enter and will again and again if I hold space for it. And I hold space for laughter in my life actively. I hold space for laughter and to make people laugh and to laugh at myself most of all.

Order & Space

life, , ,

I’m starting to feel really guilty about not having written on here in ages. I feel like I’m letting myself down by not doing what comes naturally to me because I’ve been processing multiple levels of grief. I’m still processing it.

But I’ve been doing other things as well. I’ve been on staycation for some time and managed to get some things done, practical as well as recreational. I think I’m starting to gain more respect for the staycation. It really has allowed me to focus on making my living space more livable by deep cleaning, dusting and most of all decluttering.

I get such a good feeling from getting rid of stuff. Clothes, make-up, DVDs and especially paper! OOOH PAPER! The bane of our modern existence! It also makes me look around and realize how quickly things accumulate and question whether or not we could be living more simpler than we do. I’m not talking about a forcefully restrictive or measured minimalist life, though I do respect those who subscribe successfully to minimalism. I know I’m not a staunch minimalist at heart. I like things. I have collections. What I do appreciate in a living space is order and space.

Order and space.

Minimal

I don’t believe myself to be inherently organized. But as I get older what I know is that when I have order, things are easier. You’re actively creating a situation wherein you are less likely to drive your own self crazy.

As for space, I’ve always loved space. I like there to be space in a room or home that is just elegantly dedicated to space itself, which is not to say that there shouldn’t be something in that room. Space is accentuated by objects. Without objects we would not appreciate space. It’s about the purpose and placement of those objects.

Sorry. I’m getting carried away in my own Feng Shui fantasy.

Space

Anyway, in addition to catching some great films, spending a weekend with my BFF and her family in Philly which I truly loved and creating some videos on my Youtube channel, we’ve been able to get rid of some stuff to make some space and also put things in order and dust places that have not been dusted in a while. It feels good. Never thought I would ever say this kind of cleaning gives me energy. But it does.

I will try to write more often before my staycation ends because I know right now I’m in kind of a bubble. I haven’t had to deal directly with people I don’t like in a while and well, that’s just not realistic. LOL!

But I’m on vacation damn it. I don’t have to be realistic.

Retrospection

life

You ever look back at a situation or a relationship that caused a lot of tension and foreboding and recognize that you can no longer even remember what that felt like anymore? Something or someone you couldn’t even imagine getting over at the time has now faded into the background. You have let it go.

And have you ever looked back at yourself in a time when you were so unsatisfied with your appearance or so insecure about something, no one else even noticed and realized, wow I looked great. What was I worried about?

I’ve noticed a lot lately, because I’ve been busier than I’m used to and often in a bit of a zombie state that when I take a moment to reflect back at the past, things always seem like they were better. Now, I’m not going to lie. There are things that happened, situations I had to deal with and several people who I do not ever want to deal with in my life again. But I’m always amazed by how unsatisfied I was with things that now I would give so much to have again; health a sense of security, confidence, purpose…less weight. LOL!

Dwelling on the past is a waste of time, it’s true and it usually means that the present is either lacking in some way or you’re having trouble meeting it or yourself in it fully or both.

Maybe right now is not as challenging as I think it is. I’m certain I’ll look back and wonder why I thought it was so challenging, why I was so full of doubt, fear and insecurity. Maybe that’s part of growth. I just sometimes wish I could skip ahead to that part, the part where I feel like I know what I’m doing, where I’m going and that I didn’t feel so alone.

 

 

 

 

Lessons in Non-Equality and Why Segregation Often Works: Part 2

america, equality, equity, life, men, race, racism, segregation, women, , , , , , , , ,

-Colored-_drinking_fountain_from_mid-20th_century_with_african-american_drinking

Merriam Webster gives the following definitions for the words Equity and Equality

Equity:

1:fairness or justice in the way people are treated.

Equality:

1:the quality or state of being equal

I do wish that Merriam Webster would go into detail about exactly how the state of being equal is defined but since it doesn’t I will venture to come up with my own definitions of equality as I have come to understand them.

I believe that in nature, no two things are ever created equally. I believe there are scientific studies which have posited this opinion. To me it makes sense. Not even identical twins are actually the same in all ways. They can look the same in appearance right down to their DNA strands but they are still not equal. They’re not the same person. Twins are two different people but they need the same things as any other human being in order to survive and thrive. Family, friends, community, education, spiritual guidance, opportunity, livable wages, etc.

The sexes no matter how it is you understand the construct of gender are not equal. Men and women are different and no amount of masterful renditions and reiterations of the song “Anything I can do” can change that fact. Men and women are not the same and if we were, what would be the point of our evolution and development? How would we serve one another or learn about who we are? In order to be in relationship or learn from relationships, we have to have something or someone outside of ourselves to relate with. Differences are necessary to that end; differences in species of plants, animals, atoms, stars. We are all made up of a unique combination of similar concentrations of energy. Differences are necessary in my opinion because ultimately they can be used to discover and reveal similarities and the benefits of balancing both as a way of navigating life harmoniously without a system of evaluation which quantifies or categorizes one experience as being worse or better than another.

Tulips don’t wish to be dandelions. Fish don’t wish to be horse. They are what they are and they stay the course. They know what environment, what food sources and what systems of regeneration, socialization and development serve them best. But that is nature, not humanity. Humanity is the branch of nature blessed with free will.

I’m going to make a huge leap here.

Racism

: poor treatment of or violence against people because of their race

: the belief that some races of people are better than others

:  a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

Now who would go and create something like racism? Who would actually think to create, institute and perpetuate a system which says that one form of life based on the concentration of pigment should be treated inhumanely, beaten , tortured, raped, lynched, castrated, bought, sold, mentally and emotionally traumatized, stereotyped, stigmatized, followed around in public suspiciously, incarcerated for life in massive numbers with no hope for rehabilitation, treated like animals in the country his ancestors built, laid the foundation for, died for, bleed for? Who would do that? Who would create a system of laws which segregates one form of life based on a color, not so that they can create and build a community for the education, socialization and spiritual, cultural re-connection that is necessary for any life form which is uprooted, stolen, bred for slaves, torn apart and had its family structure obliterated but simply to say, “we brought you here against your will to serve us but you do not deserve to be given what you need to survive.”

Who the fuck does some fucked up, sick, dysfunctional, barbaric, unnatural shit like that? In other words who created a system of horrific inequity among those within it’s own species that are equal in biological category?

Still with me?

Next: When We Think of Segregation

Lessons in Non-equality and Why Segregation Often Works: Part 1

america, cacti, earth, ecosytems, environment, life, plants, segregation, soil, squash, , , , , , , , , ,

Earth Life

Have I lost you already?

Well if not just bear with me. It’s going to take me a few entries to work up to my point here (and I do have one) and when discussing touchy subjects like segregation and “equality I’m a fan of starting out with relatively simple examples that are easy to grasp and that most of us would agree are typically universal truths.

Let’s start with life forms and eco systems. Most of us can agree that different life forms, plants, animals, trees, reptiles, insects require different sources of energy and environmental sustenance to survive and thrive. Right? There are some plants and animals that have been imported and breed in non-native regions so we also know it’s possible to see life which had its genesis in one region, say South America growing and thriving in another region of America.

When you visit most any major Botanical Garden in America you will see the hot climate desert plants in the greenhouse where the environment is kept arid and moist. Domestic Cacti plants are perhaps the easiest plants to take care of because they need very little water. You over water a cactus and you could kill it. On the opposite spectrum are those plants that have very specific needs. It may not be enough to just water them every day or twice a day and leave them in the sun. The Phalaenopsis Orchid is such a life form. It’s rumored to be the easiest orchid to care for but you do have to pay considerably more attention to caring for it than you would a small domesticated cactus plant.

Now let’s consider a root vegetable like the Beetroot. Root vegetables rely very heavily on nutrients that come from the earth so it can be naturally assumed that the soil they live in is treated differently than the soil in which Orchids and Cacti or generally grown.

Years ago, when I lived with my family in the Bronx, we had a nice sized plot of earth in the back yard in which we planted tomatoes and peppers and squash among other things. And I remember that because we did not plant the squash far enough away their long tangled vines choked out a lot of the tomatoes we had planted. We weren’t experts and hadn’t anticipated it. Squash needs a lot of space. Certain varieties have vines with fine and curly creeping tendrils. It’s not like they mean to suffocate other plants. It’s just the nature of the way they grow.

Now, those examples being given, can we agree that Orchids, Cacti and Beetroots are not equal? Yes, they are all plant life forms, but they require very different nutrients, amounts of light, water and food to survive.  I’m certain that any skilled botanist and or farmer would not advise planting cacti, orchids and Beetroot side by side either. But! They could probably survive under the same roof.

Okay, I’m going to give you the rest of the day to let all this sink in and then return tomorrow with part two.

You might be thinking: Is this chick really going to compare people to plant life?

Maybe…Stop jumping ahead!