Category Archives: life
Not About Anything: Am I Weird?
Before I begin: the answer, my friends, is a resounding, “YES!”
I am weird. It is fair to say that we are all weird, some of probably more than others and “weird” is an identity that I had accepted and embraced by the time I was 7 years old to such an extent that I once tried to teach my fellow summer school arts program kids how to be weird, too. They tagged along for a while, presumably ’til it got too … you know. Weird. To each his, her, its*, or their** own.
At the time, I think I felt as if my weirdness was my best selling point — the thing that made me interesting.
That being established, however, what I’m driving at today requires a slightly different sense of the word “weird.”
What I’m asking is, “Is there some way in which I am fundamentally unlike the people who are supposed to be most like me?”
So here’s the thing. I am by nature deeply monogamous. I always have been. I rather expect always to be, barring one of those personality-altering brain injuries. I can look at and appreciate the attractiveness of people who are not my mate, but I have no interest in acting upon that appreciation — much in the sense that people who are happy with their bicycles might notice other nice bikes at club rides, and might even comment on them, but won’t automatically feel an itch to replace their own perfectly-satisfactory bikes.
Okay, so this is actually not a very good analogy: as cyclists, we routinely cheat on our beloved machines and we even keep veritable harems of bikes, sometimes including multiple iterations of one flavor of bike. Also, I am sure there are people who will get all huffy about me comparing my husband to a bicycle; to them, I say, “Try a really great road bike some time, and you will understand — and, no, you can’t try my husband. You’ll just have to take my word on that part.” 😀 That said, I’m sure you get my point. At least, I hope you do.
Like me, Denis is also innately monogamous. We do not have massive circles of gay friends (indeed, we do not have massive friendship-circles, period); we know two other gay couples, both of whom are (as far as we know) also happily monogamous. We used to know three other happy gay couples, but both members of the third couple have died in the past few years.
So, basically, if my immediate experience took place in a vaccuum, I would conclude that the norm is for gay men to occupy happy, monogamous, and (to include the whole picture) inter-generational**** relationships.
Yet when I hear reports from the field, as it were — be it in the form of stories about the queer friends and/or siblings of non-queer friends of ours or from Big Gay Media or from Little Gay Media (the blogosphere!) — there is this current of, you know, swingy-ness … and still, even now, this assumption that because we’re queer we should reject heteronormative norms like monogamy.
For me, this creates a significant cognitive dissonance. My lived experience is not only different, but very different, from the one I read about — and, in this case, I’m not sure that’s actually because the one I read about is total crap
Like, if you watch those teen soap-opera shows on prime time TV, you will think that high school is basically all about backstabbing social intrigues, hooking up, and people being really bitchy to each-other, when in fact my experience was that it is, for almost everyone, a hellish period of feeling akward, trying to figure s**t out, and actually not having as bad a relationship with your parents as all those TV shows suggest — and, sure, there’s some social intrigue and whatevs, but also a lot less sex and back-stabbing: sex mostly comes later, and as for the back-stabbing? That’s so middle school, bra.
But this isn’t like that. I mean, like, people who purport to be more or less members of the same community to which I belong actually really do seem, in statistically-significant numbers, to be living very differently from the way I’m living … but they’re, you know, basically invisible to me in my own daily life.
I realize some of this is that my own daily life has its own weird structure. I ride my bike. I go to school. I ride my bike. I go to ballet class. I go home and make dinner and mark the stuff I struggled with in ballet class and I do my homework and I go to bed. We go to the ballet. We go to the opera. We live like members of a generation older than Denis’ own generation, or like people from another time. Once in a while, Denis lets me off my chain and I go own the dance floor at a club, where I don’t meet anyone, presumably because people don’t want to get close enough to collide with a jete or a saute or that one move that I totally stole from some Broadway show I saw one time. Needless to say, this does not increase the dimensions of my sphere of queer acquaintances.
But I wonder: is the swingy-ness of modern queer culture over-reported? Are we still stuck in a kind of adolescent obsession with it? Is the norm really, as some people report, to be part of a nonmonogamous couple, or is it just that the nonmonogamous thing is kind of having a heyday right now, with the heterosexual community owning up to the fact that it, too, does a bunch of that polyamory thing?
I am not, by the way, asking heterosexuals. No offense to people outside the queer universe, but just as some of my basic assumptions about what’s really the norm for heterosexuals have proven to be incorrect, I suspect that non-queer people probably don’t really have any better a finger on the pulse of queer reality than I do. Which is weird, because that means I’m almost, like, not queer.
Except, that’s not weird, because that’s just me. Weird. I am never entirely a member of any collective group. I am queer, but I don’t really belong to the queer community in any real sense (though sometimes I wish I did, because it would be cool to really be part of something). I am usually too busy pursuing my interests, which are really kind of off the radar even in the queer world. Serious cyclists and serious dancers don’t seem to get out much, and I don’t know how to do things without becoming Serious about them, because that’s just how I am. Either I bury myself in my interests, or I let them drift away.
So I guess I am saying this: I am functionally queer (even triple-queer, since being in an inter-generational relationship and being intersexed shuttles me two minority boxes deeper) and in many ways I live a life that many people, straight or queer, would label as very, very queer — almost laughably, stereotypically so. Seriously: my extracurricular life currently revolves around ballet, dining, opera, and a hobby that involves men in brightly-colored lycra, though cyclists in groups are, in my experience, pretty much asexual*****; we are brothers and sisters in arms, battling together against wind and hills.
Yet, in a deeper sense, I am out of touch with Queer Experience, if there even is anything that could be called “Queer Experience.” I suspect that’s actually like trying to sum up everything that disparate groups of black people do and say and live through as “black experience,” or simply labeling all those striving, disparate patches of ethnicity in Eastern Europe “the Former Soviet Union.” Yet there are, undoubtedly, common threads about whose existence I am starkly blind.
So, you know. What’s up out there in the world, guys and gals? Am I really failing to observe some kind of huge, important phenomenon, or what? Some day, am I going to look up from yanking my ballet shoes onto my feet and realize, “Oh, whoa — it really is like that?”
Or is it really just kind of hyperbole, the navel-gazing flavor of the moment?
Let me know. That’s what Comments are for, people.
And keep whichever side down. Don’t fall over. That’s awkward.
Notes
*In addition to just basically changing my entire perception of what it means to be this androgynous intersex thing that I am, I would like to thank Clive Barker for teaching me to embrace the word “it” where appropriate and not feel all dehumanized about it.
**Turns out, as I’ve probably mentioned before, that there’s perfectly fine linguistic precedent for using “their” and its various declensions to refer to individual entities of unknown, indeterminate, or irrelevant gender. We’ll talk about this another time, after I dig up all the scholarly junk on that. Just don’t be that annoying guy, gurl, or entity that gets tangled up in his, her, its,*** or their own attempts to use Inclusive Language and instead akwardly mixes things, like, “Make sure your child brings their ballet slippers and his/her dance clothes.” That’s just awkward, peoples.
***(O NOES! RECURSIVE FOOTNOTES!!!!) …And for safety’s sake, definitely try the Oxford comma. You might enjoy it!
****It so happens that all four of the happy gay couples in question, including Denis and I, are also what people might term “inter-generational,” which is something I sometimes sit down and think about. I don’t know any happy gay couples that aren’t inter-generational, but that’s only because my Circle O’ Fabulous Friends is very small, and does not include any further gay couples.
*****We even reproduce asexually, by infecting non-cyclists with our spores, or something. I haven’t figured out exactly how it happens, yet. When I do, I will certainly write some kind of Nobel Prize for Science or Medicine-worthy paper about it. Or not.
No Bad Weather … Okay, Except Lightning and Tornadoes
This morning, I kitted up the Karakoram for a nice rainy ride.
I made it about one mile before the lightning that had been playing a little way off started streaking across the sky right on top of me.
I was reminded of a maxim of cycling life in the United States’ midwestern tornado zone: there is no bad weather — except for lightning and tornadoes. You really can’t dress for tornadoes.
Now, lightning by itself isn’t a huge problem, as long as you don’t get struck (thus far, I never have). I still prefer not to ride when it’s right on top of me, in an effort to avoid becoming a Bike Crispy.
Tornadoes, on the other hand, are just not acceptable riding weather. Winds that can suck you up like a giant Hoover, clobber the snot out of you with debris, and deposit your broken body G-d only knows where just don’t really make me want to ride.
Needless to say, I stopped and picked up the #6 TARC bus (which was, conveniently, due in a minute or so anyway) and rode it downtown. I am immensely grateful both for the existence of our bus system and for my bus pass, which allows me to do things like fail to bring any small change and still ride the bus.
In other news, though I probably won’t get to go see any of them because we are booked solid through the next two weekends, if you’re in the LouTown metro and you’d like to see some creative theater, consider checking out the Alley Theater’s Superhuman:a Festival of alternative new plays (a companion, or perhaps a send-up, to the better-known . With offerings like “Bat-Hamlet,” the Superhuman:a Festival… looks like a good time.
We, meanwhile, will be enjoying dinner and dancing with friends from out of town; the Met Live in HD’s broadcast of La Bohème; the Louisville Ballet’s final offering for its 2013 – 2014 season, the contemporary Complementary Voices; and the wedding of our good friends Dave and Diane, at which I will be playing the organ and hopefully not screwing everything up too badly. The following weekend is equally insane, but I can’t remember what exactly is going on.
Okay, I need to go catch the next bus up to school. Keep the rubber side down, and remember: tornadoes are not your friends.
Spring Break
So last week was academic spring break and this week is ballet spring break. Fortunately, the Ballet 101 video we ordered for Denis should arrive tomorrow, so we’ll be able to get our ballet fix (and I’ll be able to write a review, if I somehow manage to wrestle a few free moments from what is guaranteed to be an insanely hectic academic week).
I got out on the bike yesterday briefly and am looking forward to riding a wee bit tomorrow. Today, battling some kind of really nasty gastro-bug or possibly a bad food decision, I stayed in bed, more or less.
That’s it for now. Nothing further to report. Keep the rubber side down.
Career Considerations
Not ago, my Aunt-in-Law (Is that even a thing? She’s just “Aunt Cindy” in my world) wrote a really cool letter from Vermont, home of Brattleboro and the best skiing (in my New England-bred “vertical ice-skating” sense: KILLINGTON, y’all) and shoelaces that say “I LoVermont” and gay huntin’ lodges. She and her better half were getting hitched up there in the Green Mountains, and she took the time to send a note to Denis and me — especially me.
Aware of my undying quest for what I will describe as “A Job I Don’t Hate But Which Actually Pays Money,” she noted that some of the happiest people she knows, including some of the good folks she met back in my old stomping grounds, don’t have what anyone would describe as normal American “careers.” Instead, they do lots of things, cobbling together a living from the sweat of their brows and hands and brains and creative faculties. She suggested that maybe a similar path would work for me.
At the time, I was horribly depressed, and all I really heard was a message about how the only course of action for someone like me is an overwhelmingly hard one that leads to working long hours just to survive. I am quite sure, having re-read the letter a couple of times since then, that she didn’t intend to send me that message at all.
Instead, the message she was sending was this:
You’re a restless, wildly creative free-spirit. You weren’t built to abide by arbitrary rules or sit behind a desk or climb a corporate ladder. You want to do everything — so why not do it?
My inner collectivist says, “But that’s not how things work.”
My inner iconoclast says, “Who the **** cares how things work for anyone else? No matter what the song says, sometimes fish gotta fly.”
Even in collectivist societies, there are people whose role it is to do creative stuff, to dance in the gaps, to bridge them — not as the George Washington Bridge spans the Hudson, but as a spark jumps a gap in a combustion engine.
Being one of those liminal people is not necessarily easy. It means that you don’t get to follow a predefined path (a route, by the way, that offers its own challenges). It means you have to reinvent the wheel, build everything from the ground up for yourself.
No biggie. I’ve been doing that all my life. In every way, my life as someone who has never fit in, anywhere, period, has optimally fitted me to be a gap-jumping spark. So has a happy marriage to someone who is willing to patiently pay the bills while I figure out what the heck to do with myself; who would be just as happy to let me stay home and be a nice little homemaker and never earn a red cent if that’s what I wind up choosing.
I say that because I recognize how lucky I am. I am in a position that allows me the luxury of choice. I do not have a family to support or mouths to feed (well, except the cat, who frankly costs almost nothing to feed — a huge sack of cat food costs about $20 and seems to last forever). My husband is a well-paid professional who works for himself in a career track that isn’t going to dry up and blow away any time soon — but if it did, between us, Denis and I have an extensive support network. It is deeply unlikely that, barring a disaster that wiped both Louisville and Connecticut off the map, we will be homeless or hungry any time soon.
So am thinking that with that good fortune — that fortuitous dose of circumstance — come both opportunity and responsibility: opportunity to do what I’m good at and what I love; responsibility to make the most of the talents I’ve been given.
I don’t know exactly what that means, yet. As Cindy suggests, it might mean doing a whole bunch of things.
Certainly, writing will be one of them — whether it’s in the confines of academia or in the books-that-people-read arena.
I hope to find some way to make my obsessive need to do crazy physical things at least pay for itself (maybe I will teach Zumba some day; maybe I’ll even learn enough to teach ballet to beginners, who are always my favorite group of people everywhere). I hope I can do at least some of this work in the service of mankind: like I said, interfering busybody. It’s not really that I’m some kind of goody two-shoes; it’s that I’m pushy and I want to spread the gospel of moving around and dancing and jumping up and down.
I think I’d like to teach something. Why? Who knows? Who cares? It sounds interesting.
For a while, realizing (yet again) that medical school was not really a very realistic option for me was a shattering loss. Now I’m starting to see it in a different light. I suspect that I have a couple of vocations — in the most technical sense: callings — that I couldn’t really answer with full faith if I also worked as a physician.
I think I can begin my career-finding journey much in the way I began the mate-finding journey that led me to Denis: by defining what I don’t want.
So here’s what I don’t want:
- I don’t want to sit behind a desk all day, or even most of the day.
- I don’t want to wear normal clothes to work.
Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy a really smart suit as much as the next guy — but I prefer to keep my suit-wearing opportunities in the context of playing “adult dress-up,” the kind that involves going to the opera or a wedding or what have you.
What I mean is that I like running around in what most people think of as “exercise gear,” and I’d like to work in an environment where that’s okay. - I don’t want to work forty hours a week at something I kinda hate to pay the bills and push all my passions into the “hobby” category.
It turns out that I already have a couple of things on my “do want” list, as well:
- I want to be able to travel. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a function of my job (though that would be super cool), but my work life does need to allow time for it.
- I like the idea of teaching, though it might turn out that I hate the reality. I guess we’ll find out.
A lot of people will think this sounds like a tall order. Maybe it is one; maybe we’ve just lowered our expectations so remarkably that any stack of such criteria seems tall.
Some part of me feels like I’ve lost a lot of time, wandering in the wilderness of corporate IT work and so forth. Another part of me realizes that I still have many, many years ahead of me in which to do great things, even if in the end only I think they’re great.
So now it’s time to start exploring what’s out there, and asking questions like, “How can I combine my background in psychology with my love of dance to make make something good in the world which hopefully also gives me at least a little income?” and “Is there some way I can plug that into cycling, too?”
And, of course, that all-important question,
“Do these tights make my butt look triangular?”
Ballet for Mood Management?
I’m throwing this up here as a mental sticky note.
Exercise pretty much always exerts a positive influence on my moods. Some forms of exercise work better than others. The top five appear to be, in order:
- ballet
- horsemanship (and all it entails)
- running
- swimming
- cycling
Any number of studies have demonstrated the positive effect of exercise on mood (see, for example, Matta, Hogan, Jorrman, Waugh, & Gotlib, 2013; Steinberg et al, 1998), though some have noted that additional factors, such as a telic (that is goal-centered) or paratelic (non-goal centered) state of mind also influence outcomes (see Legrand & Tatcher, 2011).
Because I have found the impact of ballet on my mood to be both immediate and longer-lasting than that of, for example, cycling (which tends to produce an intense immediate uptick, but does not seem to support as stable a day-to-day mood as ballet does), I think it would be really interesting to explore whether that’s, you know, “just me,” as it were, or whether the effect might generalize.
Since I have a senior seminar project proposal to design, I’m seriously thinking about seeing if I can find some way to swing this sort of thing: for example, a six-week study involving randomly-selected people who will be randomly assigned to one group that does three sixty-minute ballet-based workouts a week; one group that does there sixty-minute non-dance workouts at similar intensity; and one group that doesn’t do anything (they’re the controls who don’t do any— hey, wait a minute!).
I don’t know why ballet works so well for me. That’s another question entirely. However, I do see some potential here for a therapeutic application.
Presumably, other disciplined forms of what is generally called “concert dance” could work as well — modern dance worked similarly well for me during my “modern dance is better than ballet because tradition produces stagnation” phase in high school. A sound background in ballet, however, creates a firm foundation for other disciplines, just as a solid dressage background forms a firm foundation for other equestrian disciplines — so ballet seems like a good place to start.
There are a couple of programs out there that already harness the power of dance to lift up the lives of troubled youth and other underserved populations (see Dance United and Promethean Spark International); I think some grounded scientific research might make it easier to get programs like these ones off the ground.
I can’t help but think of the positive impact that the best ranch-based programs for struggling kids have had on so many lives, and likewise the positive impacts that both dance training and working with horses have had in mind. Boiled down to their lowest common denominator, both dance and working with livestock share a surprisingly large number of features: hard physical work, rigorous mental discipline, immediate and tangible consequences, and transformative outcomes.
I feel like I might be getting ahead of myself, here, but I can’t help but think it would be really cool to take something like ballet (which is, after all, a lot more amenable to an urban setting than setting up a ranch) and make it accessible to kids in an under-served urban community or struggling youth and young adults.
I mean, sure, there are magnet school programs in some places, but I know from my own experience as an absolutely shattered thirteen-year-old who opted not to audition for a magnet program in dance that it takes a confidence that kids in difficult circumstances might not have to apply and audition and so forth. My outcome was positive because my family had resources: I wound up going to the same magnet school for a different program a couple of years later, thanks largely to a lot intervention that cost a lot of money. Where would I be now if my family hadn’t had that money?
In short, quite probably, dead.
I keep thinking about this in the context of my own experiences, both growing up and right now: I was lucky because I could afford to take ballet classes, and I am still lucky because I can still afford to take ballet classes.
However, there are a lot of people out there who could benefit just as much as I can or even more, but who can’t afford it, even at LBS’ extremely-reasonable rates. And, of course, health insurance doesn’t cover the cost of ballet classes (and even if it did, a $25/co-pay would be a higher per-class rate than I’m paying right now!).
I also think that opportunities like this shouldn’t just be available to kids, but making them available to kids is a good place to start.
Maybe getting ahead of myself isn’t such a bad thing. That’s how you come up with goals, right?
I know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting behind a desk. I also know that I am too much of an interfering busybody to keep from trying to find a way to make everyone else on earth try ballet 😛 Perhaps there’s some way I can turn all this into some kind of meaningful thing that would be useful to humanity.
So, anyway, this is far longer than I ever intended it to be. That’s it for now. Keep the leather side down!
References
Legrand, F. D., & Thatcher, J. (2011). Acute mood responses to a 15-minute long walking session at self-selected intensity: Effects of an experimentally-induced telic or paratelic state. Emotion, 11(5), 1040-1045. doi:10.1037/a0022944
Mata, J., Hogan, C. L., Joormann, J., Waugh, C. E., & Gotlib, I. H. (2013). Acute exercise attenuates negative affect following repeated sad mood inductions in persons who have recovered from depression. Journal Of Abnormal Psychology, 122(1), 45-50. doi:10.1037/a0029881
Steinberg, H., Nicholls, B. R., Sykes, E. A., LeBoutillier, N. N., Ramlakhan, N., Moss, T. P., & Dewey, A. (1998). Weekly exercise consistently reinstates positive mood. European Psychologist, 3(4), 271-280. doi:10.1027/1016-9040.3.4.271
Here Is Fine.
Just a quick check-in today.
We’re having a snow day, which is sort of irrelevant for me since I don’t have classes on Monday anyway. Denis and I got the walk and driveway shoveled this morning, and now the remaining scrim of crusty gritty ice-snow stuff is melting off as the sun hits it. The world looks all pretty and properly winter-y.
I’m starting to feel a little bit more like myself these days. I’m working on damage control for the time being and hoping that things will remain on a more even keel until I can start to get this under control.
The tough part now is kind of accepting where I am right now. In his book Dark Nights of the Soul, author Thomas Moore writes about the appreciating the “night sea journey” for what it is — a concept that fits neatly with Zen teachings about being here, now.
It isn’t always comfortable to be where you are. It definitely isn’t comfortable to be where I am right now, though it is more comfortable to be here, now than to be where I was, like, a week ago.
Of course I want to rush forward to “the good part.” I want to get to the next phase where I feel okay or even good. I want to get to spring, so I can get out on the bike and ride. I want to get there.
Thing is, here is where I am now. The trick is to be here, now — to be in this when and this where — and not be quite so focused on getting to the next phase, the next destination.
Shamelessly stolen from Hendy Mp/Solent News via The Telegraph. Captions mine.
In other news, tomorrow I’ll be handing in all my reams of research paperwork. Friday evening we head up to Bedford to irresponsibly watch cable TV in a hotel room feast upon the bones of our enemies attempt to not die during Death March (which is on Saturday).
Neither Timothy nor I have spent any time on the bike worth speaking of, so this year’s “race,” as it were, might be interesting. Conveniently, I will get to knock out both my first significant ride of the year and my first (and probably my only) race of the year. I’ll leave it to you, gentle readers, to determine whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I’ll report back on it at some juncture, though evidently I’m horrible at getting race reports posted. I definitely won’t be posting directly after the race, because we’ll have just enough time to shower, change, and haul bacon back to town to catch The Trocks at the Brown Theater. Any way, I’m sure I’ll manage to fill you all in on whether I live or die. That is, assuming I live. Which is probable.
In other, other news, I made my first lasagna ever last night, and it was gooooooood. Needless to say, a recipe that I’m happy to have in my repertoire (Denis is a good teacher!) and one I plan to make again.
That’s it for now. Nothing else to report.
Rubber side down, everyone 🙂
This Stupid Day
In fact, today wasn’t really a stupid day.
It was a pretty good day.
We worked on stuff in Chem lecture that went really well for me (it turns out I freaking love math, but that’s another post). We got Exam II back in Sensation and Perception and I did really well (a 96; could’ve had a 98 if I hadn’t completely forgotten to answer question 31, but 96 is fine). We even got out of class early, and I got to ride my bike 8 whole miles (whoopee!).
Given the Usual Bronchitis (which, it turns out, is more like a sinus infection that has been exacerbating the crap out of my asthma and maybe a mild bronchitis), riding 8 miles in cold weather actually does feel like a big deal. I had forgotten what a difference my little nylon terrorist mask balaclava makes — I can breathe through it pretty well, but it somehow takes the cold edge off the air; the edge that freaks my lungs out so badly. And, of course, medicine helps.
I even stopped and picked up dinner stuff — chicken, a take-n-bake multi-grain baguette, a couple other things — and came up with a dinner plan and rearranged some of the financial records in the basement (and discovered that Denis has complete financial records back to when I was in grade school — no, seriously, grade school, I’m not kidding).
When I got home, I ate lunch, I did the prep work so I could have dinner ready when Denis got home, and I ran a couple of loads of laundry…
…And still I find myself feeling pretty glum.
Some of it’s just the usual hormonal circus. I wouldn’t want to stop being an intersex person. I like me the way I am (and Denis really, really likes me the way I am). I would, however, not mind a little more stability in the hormonal department.
Admittedly, it’s worse than it could be right now, because being sick made for a quick, hard taper on the bike. Riding is totally my mood stabilizer, so right now I’m essentially off my meds, heh.
And then, also, our house is a disaster area right now.
I mean, it could be worse. We aren’t by any means at DEFCON-Hoarders or anything like that. It’s just cluttered; the surface clutter of the past two months or so. I just lost all control of my household responsibilities a while back and haven’t been able to regain it.
I am deeply and abidingly annoyed about the house (and the fact that I am like a month behind on the finances) right now. I just don’t know how to begin untangling the knot. It doesn’t appear that my recent efforts have made any improvements, and therefore they seem meaningless and like a waste of time.
Denis has taken over washing the dishes for me, which has been a help, but I miss being the reason that he never had to lift a finger once he got home. I realize for a lot of people that wouldn’t be a huge motivator; for me, it is. Different strokes for different folks.
The difficulty is learning balance. I still really, really suck at balancing … well, anything. This summer I learned that even a rigorous training schedule can derail my ability to manage the house. Two hours’ scheduled ride time somehow turns into two hours’ ride, plus lunch, plus rambling around after lunch running errands, and then I get home and I have essentially no time ’til Denis returns from work (admittedly, the fact that Denis gets home at a different time every day is very hard for me).
This is frustrating. It’s a problem I don’t know how to fix. I realize that medication might be part of the answer in the long term. Like, actual medication. Not just bike “medication.” I recognize that I’m probably going to need more help than that in the adult world, even if my adult world, after I graduate, means staying home and raising kids rather than going to med school or whatever. In fact, I’d say that medication might be about twice as helpful if I decide to keep doing the homemaker thing, because I’ll have to manage all the things I’m worst at — time, scheduling, etc.
I am no longer at a point where I’m willing to keep flogging myself. It’s stupid not to use tools that work. More effort won’t help; if I make any more effort, I’ll explode. More focus will help, and medication can help with that.
I’m just rambling. Anyway, at the end of the day, all this stuff sometimes leaves me grumbling, This stupid day. Which is, in fact, stupid in and of itself, because today was actually a glorious and a pretty darned good day.
And the rest will eventually get sorted, or the whole ship will sink and we’ll start over.
I guess I’ll try to remember that.
That’s it for now. Bikier stuff is coming.
Keep the rubber side down, and try to keep at least one surface free of debris. You need somewhere to put your wheel when you’re changing your tires, after all.
A Few Quick Words About Grief
I’ve been caught up in an inner debate.
You guys out there in the Blogosphere know the drill: “Do I write about this or not? Is it relevant to my audience? Is it just going to be, you know, a distraction?”
The answers are: Yes. Who knows? Maybe, but it might be a meaningful distraction.
We recently lost a good friend to pancreatic cancer. Very, very recently.
He was one of those amazing people who you would say are fearless, except I don’t think he was even afraid to be afraid. Definitely not in any way afraid of his feelings. The kind of guy who makes things happen; the kind of person who brings the party. A beautiful man gifted with the heart of a child and the mind of … oh, I don’t know, Quentin Crisp? Someone sharp and smart and sassy. He was dear and droll and funny and sweet and caustic and we loved him, and I didn’t even realize how much until now. He was a little older than Denis: too young for this.
Evidently I met him once before the memorial service for his first husband, but I am remiss in that I don’t remember it. I remember every moment we spent with him after that, though: first with him, then with the man who would settle into his life like … oh, I don’t know. Like a photon falling on some retinal pigment that has at last recovered from its most recent bleaching, activating it, giving it purpose again.
They became a couple that lit up every room they entered. The party they threw on the anniversary of the first husband’s death became one of the highlights of my adult life. The last dinner we had with the two of them — just them and the two of us, lingering on the deck in the late, golden summer light — is another one.
Grief is a difficult thing. I am not afraid or ashamed to admit that it is, for me, entirely selfish. Death is no great trial to the one who passes on. It’s the rest of us left behind that find ourselves hurting, aching, trying to figure it out.
How can someone I have only known for a couple of years, someone I saw so rarely, occupy such a space in my heart as this?
Denis pointed out to me that grief is a funny thing. You never grieve only for your immediate loss; rather, all the great losses of the past are stirred up again. I think he might be on to something.
I did not expect to find myself suddenly (and, I must admit, unsuccessfully) choking back tears in Chem Lab. I did not expect to be so off or so distracted or to take this so hard.
I didn’t think about it much at all during the weekend. For me, when things do strike me this deeply, they just sneak up, catch me unaware.
At the end of the day, grief, like everything else, is what it is. Pop psychology notwithstanding, there is no easy formula; no neat process by which we can check off all the boxes and be done.
In a sense, it is never done: instead, you learn to live with it, maybe even to make peace with it. Then every now and then some new grief comes along and stirs up the bottom.
That’s life. It’s okay. It, too, is what it is.
I don’t know what else to say about this, so I guess I’ll stop here.
I hope the bikes on the other side are awesome, and that the rubber side always stays down.
A Dark And Ill-Lit Place
This isn’t a very happy post, and it’s not about the bike … at least not much. I’m putting it behind a cut, admittedly as much because I’m not very comfortable writing about this stuff as because I’m not sure everyone out there is comfortable reading about it.
I won’t be offended if you don’t read it, and I won’t be offended if you do. I suppose I’m writing it as part of an effort to exorcise my own demons — an effort, if you will, to survive.
The MF Printer
No, seriously.
I just bought a laser printer. I’ve wanted one for ages for a number of reasons.
First, our printer is old and crotchety and will only talk to old and crotchety computers, and my computer is relatively young and sprightly. They don’t see eye-to-eye.
Second, I seem to print a lot of stuff for school. That takes forever on an inkjet. Yeah, I have an 800-page-ish printing allotment (per semester) at school, but it’s nice to be able to print stuff at home, too.
Third, and this may be the most important reason: RAIN PROOF CUE CARDS, yo.
So when I spotted a really nice deal on a well-rated laser printer at Amazon, I went ahead and ordered one. Because Prime is the bomb, it arrived two days later, on Thursday, in the giant box pictured in yesterday’s post.
Today, I set it up. When I fired up the driver CD-ROM (OMG! This is so like 1998!), I received the following message:
“I’ve had it with these MF drivers on this MF disc!” — Samuel L. Jackson (paraphrased)
Now, I am the first to admit that my inner child often takes the form of a sarcastic eleven-year-old … and my inner child saw that and just about died laughing.
It turns out that the model number of the printer is MF4880dw — a somewhat unfortunate name for what has turned out to be a fantastic little printer (of a much more reasonable size than suggested by the size of the box; they just pack it really well — which I guess is good, since it was lying flat on its back on my porch when I got home yesterday).
Anyway. So now I’ve got my MF printer, and I’ve installed the MF drivers, and it’s working beautifully. It’s fast. It’s quiet. It’s wireless. It produces crisp monochrome printouts that look fabulous. And the MF drivers work fine.
I’m also wrestling with an episode of black, bitter, restive, and unstable moods. The humor may have been crass, but I needed the laugh today — so I’d like to thank Canon for making a great MF printer and giving me a laugh.
I didn’t get out on the bike today. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. Denis flies out on Thursday for Burning Man, where he’d better have enough fun for both of us.
That’s it for now.
Keep the rubber side down.
danseur ignoble 