Not Calm (dot com)

Your own good company

I am so damn sad.  Sad like as in I have that feeling like I'm about to cry all the time and if I breathe wrong suddenly, tears come.  So sad that it feels like my heart is outside my chest.  Or just missing.  Like I have glass bones and no skin and my whole body is about to be as broken as my head. 

At least I haven't lost my flair for the dramatic!

Cause, you know, that would be so sad!

The girls like to watch Free to be You and Me and you should see me sprint out of the room whenever Rosey Grier starts in with his song about it being alright to cry.  That said, it is fascinating to see Michael Jackson sing about being happy with himself no matter what he ends up like as a grown up.  Just sayin.

There are some not-bloggable things happening in my life at the moment.  I just spent an hour wringing out a post, a long one, word by word by word, and then I lost it somehow.  Funny, because it was just a bunch of stuff that I CAN say, but was so hard to put into words.  Right when I got it and went to publish, it was lost.  I'm thinking of the time when I was a kid and I was shaking a mercury thermometer down below normal so I could take my temperature again.  I had a pretty good fever, and I was fascinated with seeing how hot my blood was.  I hit the thermometer on the couch cushion and it broke, spilling the mercury onto the floor.   It's like now that I wrote that stuff all out, things are shifted enough for it not to apply anymore and I can't even begin to rewrite it.   And that analogy doesn't even make sense except for it does to me and one of the things I wrote about before was how I write this blog for me (so I can remember the small moments of these blurry days) and for my kids, f-bombs and all, so they can see their childhood from another angle.  Also?  I said they can go to therapy when they're grown and be all, My childhood?  Here you go! and hand over a laptop.  Heh.

One thing I did write about is one of my yoga instructors who always starts her classes by saying a version of this: Breathe, and settle into your own good company.  I'm just over here trying to do that.  It's good.  I am a kick-ass listener.  I tell funny jokes and I have an open heart, even if it letting it be that way can sometimes hurt enough for it to feel barely worth it.

Bookmarked

You will love righteously and stupidly and with all the poetry of your body.

God, do I ever love women who can write like this. 

I can read a map

I have two options freeway-wise when I go to and from work.  101 is this gritty, intense, skinny-laned path of concrete that I call the Grown Up Freeway because, to drive it during busy times takes some balls.  Steel ones, even.  280 is lush, wide, relaxing -- honestly one of the most gorgeous drives around.  It unspools through hills of live oaks, cows, wildflowers, and water.  The mountains toward the coast are close by, and you can usually count on at least a little bit of fog to be hugging the peaks, looking for all the world like it's trying to decide if it wants to come over the hill or stay near the ocean. 

The office building I work in is so close to 101 that I can see the cars and trucks from the window.  It's probably as far as a baseball sails from home plate to home run.  To get from my office to 280 is a 20 minute drive over surface streets with speed traps and stoplights. 

I know it's not sensible, but I'm a 280 girl.

Driving on 280 reminds me of being ten years old and coming to California for the first time, sitting in the cab of a Ryder truck between my mom and my brother, my brand-new step dad driving.  It was April, and the hills were bright green.  It was long ago enough that there were orchards and cleanblue sky.  There was some of that thick fog over the hills, different hills than 280, hills that gave me goosebumps and made me elbow my brother to tell him that it looked like we were driving right through pages of The Hobbit, and that it looked like where Smaug lived.  It looked like what I thought Scotland would look like. 

I'm not a great driver.  It's too much for me to have to process all that crap coming at me all at once.  When I was seventeen I crashed my Audi because my friend in the passenger's seat told me to check out the cute guys in front of the stereo store.  That said, in college I drove a little gold sports car with a sunroof and I took it down to southern California a few times.  Driving over 100 miles an hour on an arrow straight road appeals to me still, even though it seems like such a counterintutive way to enjoy being alive. 

Right now I am in my living room in my PJs.  The windows are open and it's a little cold, which is nice.  Lex is on the computer, John is having breakfast and reading the paper.  Coffee is brewing.  Willow is asleep in my bed.  Nathan is standing by Lex, talking about candy, and Sophie is right near me, wrapped up in a striped blanket and trying to make a ring that is too big stay on her fingers. 

I love my job, but I still hate driving away in the mornings.  Especially in the summertime.  I miss my kids.  This sounds weak, but part of the reason I take the long and relaxing road to work is that my energy is drained from so much wanting.  I can't tackle the grown up freeway unless I'm really motivated and want very badly to get where I'm going.  280 is a soothing drive.  The cows cheer me up for some reason.

Sometimes you have to disregard the map and find your way by listening to yourself.  The hard part for me is figuring out if what I'm telling myself is solid advice.  I'm about to go totally off the map.  I'm holding my breath a little and waiting to see where I land.

rawk star

rawk star
Originally uploaded by jenijen

Who needs talent when you've got attitude? Who can stop you when you've got both?

On being a self-confident dumbass

I love my emoodicon ring.   I have the kitteh AND the robot, which is really fortunate since my moods tend to run all over the place faster than I can figure them out.  My friend from London once said (after flying to San Francisco, performing at the Great American Music Hall two nights in a row and then going out to dinner with a big group of us) that she was absolutely shattered.  I didn't fly anywhere, but damn I feel the very same way. 

I want to write (online and off) about so many things from the weekend, but just thinking about the task of moving my fingers over the keyboard makes me sleepy.  I found out at the last minute this morning (because I don't check my email enough!) that all us BlogHer workerbees get a work from home free pass today, so I'm camped out in my living room with two computers, a latte from Peet's, open windows and the sound of my neighbor practicing the violin.  I hope that one doesn't move away before I do.

At the BlogHer conference in 2006 I met Karen Walrond and she gave me my first ever (and really only ever) paid writing job over at Blogging Baby (now Parent Dish).   She opened up so many opportunities to me, but she also did something else for me; she told me that I am beautiful.  For whatever reason I have struggled (understatement) with my self confidence all my life.  Partly I am terrified of coming across as conceited.  I'm constantly looking at myself and seeing failure, ugliness, ineptitude, and awkwardness.  I still beat myself up over something I accidentally said to someone else TWENTY years ago.  I set such impossibly high standards for myself that there was no chance of me ever feeling comfortable about how I am in the world.  It's been an excruciatingly slow process, but I'm finally getting over it and embracing the parts of me that I used to hate.  It's exhausting to be mean to yourself all the time.  Seriously.  Over the past couple of years, Karen has made a huge difference in my ability to be kind to myself, just by being kind to me.  This weekend I saw her in the hotel near the elevators with her camera around her neck.  I want to shoot you! she said.  I said, Will you do it right now?  Because I'm totally overwhelmed and done. She laughed and said, Not SHOOT you, shoot you -- I want to photograph you.  I'm doing a project on beauty and I have to include you. 

I don't remember the rest of the exchange because I was too busy trying to not cry. 

The next day we caught up with each other and dashed off between panels to a room with a good window where she took my photo.  I was hung over and tired and hadn't eaten in too long and had zits all over my face, but for once I totally didn't care. 

She asked me what makes me happy, and after a moment I said what had immediately come to mind: Finally having a little self-confidence.  Because, while it's true that there are a lot of happy things around me that I can point to and say: that, that makes me happy, finally starting to love myself and be my own friend is making all those "thats" magnified.  Feeling good about myself is brightening the overall picture.   I totally recommend it for anyone considering. 

All that said, a couple of things happened this weekend that made me feel like a complete and total dumbass.  It's a lot less terrible, though, to find myself thinking that I've done something stupid as opposed to thinking that I am stupid.   It's a small difference.  And an immeasurable one.

Rust

The BlogHer conference was amazing this year.  It felt like 2005 again to me in lots of ways, only much bigger.  It was also overwhelming, and more than once I had to go up to my room and just get into bed, covers over my head and all.  And, for an extroverted extrovert, that is sayin something. 

I went on the Shutter Sisters photowalk, following Karen Walrond and our awesome SF (totally was too dense to get her name) native through the streets and alleyways of Chinatown. 

She was amazing, pointing out buildings that used to be brothels before the earthquake and keying us in to the fact that the fortune cookie company would let you in to take photos for fifty cents or a dollar.  I'd have gone in, but I don't have a good flash and it was dark in there.

One of my favorite things, my favorite non-conference things, was getting dressed in the hotel room in the mornings with Jenny.  We put on music and made coffee and took all the time we wanted to shower and sit on the floor by the mirror putting on makeup and talking.   I've always been made happiest by the little things in life, which comes in handy when the big things get rough. 

It's going to be one hell of a long week getting back into the usual routine of my life.

You are my sunshine

I've been out of conditioner for the past few days and so I've been using some of the kids' stuff.  I might switch to theirs because it's pretty great to be sitting there doing whatever and get a whiff of grape bubblegum and think, Hmmmm, what smells like HubbaBubba?  OH!  It's my head!

The kids started their third week of summer camp yesterday.  They are spending their days outside in a redwood forest on a mountain.  They swim and hike, paint their faces, make bracelets, sing songs, climb trees.  They come home covered in dirt and sweat.  The first week and a half or so they'd also be a little sunburned despite the constant sunblock applications, but now they're just getting more and more brown.  I hug them at the end of the day and they smell like summertime.  They are so worn in the evenings that they are almost mellow and will just stretch out on the floor watching videos or reading a book.

If I am honest, this is really hard for me.  It's the first summer that I haven't been a part of.  They've made dozens of new friends, learned how to climb up ropes and ride a zipline between redwood trees.  Willow's learning how to swim.  Sophie will put her face underwater now.  At the end of the day she wants me to wiggle her lose teeth and tell her when they'll fall out.  I grab onto her teeny little tooth and move it back and forth and remember that those top teeth came in when she was six months old.  Wasn't I just running my finger along her gums feeling for them to come in?

I keep typing and deleting because I can't get what I want to say to not be clumsy.  The thing is, I know that they are having a really lovely summer.  The sort of summer I want them to have.  If I were home with them we'd have fun in our own way, but it wouldn't be this magical, kid-centered, electronics-free existence of creeks and dirt and lizards and campfires.  Summers at home tended to feature me trying to find something to keep the kids occupied so I could do stuff around the house and keep the kids out of the kitchen long enough to clean it.  Outings were a pain in the ass because one kid was still pretty little, another would get upset and bolt across parking lots, somebody always had to pee when there wasn't a bathroom, and on and on.   So, okay, me not being here with them has allowed them to go off and have a proper kid summer.  What kid wouldn't pick a zip line over making homemade popsicles as the highlight of the day? 

And then there's me.  For as much as I desperately miss my kids, I love having myself to myself again.  Love it.  Lex will be twelve this fall, and since I was twenty-six my focus has been on my babies.  That's not a complaint; the very best days of my life were the first few weeks after each of the kids were born.  Except Willow, because that was too scary, but still.  I am happiest with a brand new baby curled up on my chest and sleeping: it's just how I am wired.  I chose to focus on them all this time.  But now that I also have a life that they are not a part of, I am not completely focused on them.  And it is as nice as it is painful to be away from them this summer.  How, I don't know, but I miss them and am relieved in equal parts.  It isn't that I don't want to be with them.  It's that it's nice to just worry about myself again.  Another way that I seem to be wired is that I feel no end of guilt over enjoying the breaks I have.  (Are they really breaks if I am mostly at work during them?) 

Like I said; clumsy.  What I am trying to wrap my brain around is how this summer that is breaking my heart in two is actually good.  The kids are thriving; I am soaking in the stillness and calmness of not being in charge of them all the time.   Still, I can't help but feel sad and like a bit of a failure that it takes me being removed from the equation for them to have this summer that they'll always remember so happily.  I just wish that the summers when I did have them that I'd have been more present and done better by them.  I wish I knew it wasn't going to last.

Deep breaths

Wow.  I am wound up so tight if I were to trip on my shoelace I'd probably go sailing up over the treeline.  (Does that even make sense?  Who cares, really?)  A long time ago I used to have two jobs (barrista in the morning, waitress/restaurant manager by evening) and go to school in San Francisco, which was 57.5 miles from where I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains.  Back then gas was about a dollar a gallon and I drove a Mazda RX7 (with a sunroof, natch) so the commute was just a scenic drive with good music. 

And, you know, I thought that I was SO busy, and that from then on out, my life would be more manageable and less hectic.

Let me take a moment to laugh at that silly young girl who had no idea she was simply honing her busy skills for a lifetime of bouncing around from task to task like a panicked pinball on speed. 

I've got a list of ShitToDo that is, literally, longer than my arm.  The BlogHer conference is this week, and I'm admittedly one of the shallow and vain ones who feels the need for new shoes and sparkly toenails and all that.  I'm not going up to the hotel until Thursday, but I'm going to begin packing tonight because the week ahead of me is so jam packed with ShitToDo that it's now or never.  I shouldn't complain, because lots of my list is fun stuff.  Shoe shopping?  Bring it!  Pedicure?  I know!  You are calling the wahmbulance for me this very minute.  I guess this busy is of the mostly exhilarating kind.  Honestly, I prefer life this way.  I've always been a candle at both ends kinda person.

It's all fine, so long as I don't burn out.

Reunion dot not

Right now, if I were willing to shell out the 93 bux and show up with a chin covered in huge and gory zits, I could be at my 20th high school reunion.  Instead I am sitting in bed in my PJs with an adult beverage and my hair in pigtails.  Kinda like high school, actually.  Except I think I was afraid of the pigtails back then.  Actually, looking at my tank top, I realize that I was in high school when I bought it at the army surplus store in something like 1987. 

Um.  Maybe if my tank top is old enough to legally drink I need to shop for clothes more often? 

And, maybe I skipped out on this reunion (that I totally thought I'd go to) because I just don't want to accept that it's been twenty years since I was in high school.  It scares me that the next twenty years will slip by even faster.  Then, another twenty and I'm just about done.  If I'm even that lucky.

We spent the day with one of my all-time most favorite families.   The kids got so tired that they were mostly asleep by the time we pulled into the driveway.  I'm that tired, too, but I needed some kid-free time and so here I am, staying up too late.

Gwendolyn did a pre-BlogHer meme thing, and I am totally going to copy her.  Here goes:

1. When you looked at yourself in the mirror today, what was the first thing you thought? wah
2. How much cash do you have on you? $17
3. What’s a word that rhymes with DOOR? nevermore
4.Favorite planet? mars
5. Who is the 4th person on your missed call list on your cell phone? my brother
6. What is your favorite ring tone on your phone? Going to Queens (by the Mountain Goats)
7. What shirt are you wearing? German Army tank (blue)
8. Do you label yourself ? nope
9. Name the brand of the shoes you’re currently wearing? barefoot. was in rocket dog flipflops all day.
10. Bright or Dark Room? dark
11. What do you think about the person who took this survey before you? I think she's incredible, and I'm lucky to be her friend.
12. What does your watch look like? it looks like an iPhone
13. What were you doing at midnight last night? sleeping.  hard. 
14. What did your last text message you received on your cell say? Hey there!
15. Where is your nearest 7-11? I have no idea. 
16. What's a word that you say a lot? dude
17. Who told you he/she loved you last? my kiddos
18. Last furry thing you touched? cat
19. How many drugs have you done in the last three days? beer, gin, & vitamins
20. How many rolls of film do you need developed? Six or so, belonging to the kids
21. Favorite age you have been so far? six
22. Your worst enemy? my poor self esteem
23. What is your current desktop picture? a dandelion puffball. i took the photo at the park
24. What was the last thing you said to someone? i left the sliding door open cause it's stuffy in here.
25. If you had to choose between a million bucks or to be able to fly what would it be? $_$
26. Do you like someone? yep
27. The last song you listened to? Guster -- Empire State
28. What time of day were you born? Four thirteen am. (or so)
29. What’s your favorite number? four. or maybe eight.
30. Where did you live in 1987? San Jose, CA
31. Are you jealous of anyone? duh. yes.
32. Is anyone jealous of you? Nope
33. Where were you when 9/11 happened? at home.  seriously thought the world was ending based on the phone message I got. 
34. What do you do when vending machines steal your money? kick them and curse
35. Do you consider yourself kind? mostly
36. If you had to get a tattoo, where would it be? i have one on my hip and another on my back.  next would be my upper arm or shoulder
37. If you could be fluent in any other language, what would it be? spanish
38. Would you move for the person you loved? i cannot even think about moving at the moment
39. Are you touchy feely? probably
40. What’s your life motto? make it happen
41. Name three things that you have on you at all times? Dr. Pepper lip gloss, iPhone, jewelry
42. What’s your favorite town/city? barcelona (san francsico, too)
43. What was the last thing you paid for with cash? a taco
44. When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone on paper and mailed it? last Thursday, to my grandmother
45. Can you change the oil on a car? yep.  but i don't
46. Your first love: what is the last thing you heard about him/her? he accidentally texted me and said, "dinner tonight?" (was meant for his current date)  he's doing well, i think
47. How far back do you know about your ancestry? 1600s or earlier
48. The last time you dressed fancy, what did you wear and where did you go?  i wore a red velvet dress to a book reading a few weeks ago.  it was at a restaurant in redwood city that is also an antique store.
49. Does anything hurt on your body right now? the back of my head
50. Have you been burned by love? oh, probably. whatever.

Ma mere

So for Mother's Day this year I helped my mom set up a blog.  As so often is the case, coming up with the title was the hardest part.  Her first choices were taken, so we kept reframing things until we came up with Vielle Femme.  Now, in theory, that is the French equivalent of crone. 

So far, so good. 

Except.  I made a teeny mistake.  It's not v-i-e-l-l-e femme that means crone.  It's actually (I think) v-i-e-i-l-l-e femme.  Lose that second i and you become Hurdy-Gurdy Woman rather than Crone.

Uh.  Whoops?  But, all things considered, not a terrible thing.  The hurdy-gurdy is undeniably cool.

Then, I made a banner for her out of one of her photos.  It's installed, but it still has the stock Wordpress text in there and I haven't figured out how to get that out.  (Halp is welcome, even though I have a lead I haven't done it yet.)

Anyhow, despite all that, her blog kicks ass.  Click on over and say hello.  You KNOW how good it feels to get comments.