Category Archives: Life

Ah, well, at least shit gets fixed now!

Decisions, Love & Marriage

In which my baby left me.

I’ve written this post about five times now but they keep getting away from me so I don’t post them. Can’t find the balance between the part of me that has a lot of grievances and wants to bitch, and the part that knows bad genes aren’t really a fault and endless litigation solves nothing.

The short version is I thought the relationship I was in was going to last the rest of my life, but it didn’t. He lost his mind, turned into a shithead, we had a miserable few years, and then he suddenlyh moved out. It was the honorable thing to do, under the circumstances. Apparently he’d realized he would not or could not stop behaviors I could not live with, and would or could not do the behaviors I needed. And since I really was genuinely miserable he did the only thing for me he felt he could, and threw himself out.

It hurt like hell, of course. I’m still sad. I miss him, and our life, and his presence and voice and hugs and terrible storytelling. But I’m no longer constantly, relentlessly hurt, angry, miserable, unhappy, and afraid. I’d thought for a long time he was depressed and slumming because he could afford not to work for awhile, and though I didn’t understand the episodes I witnessed I trusted he’d tell me whatever I needed to know when I needed to know it.

He never did. (If he had, it would have gone much differently, but I guess he couldn’t.) He always tried, but some shit is beyond trying. And even crazy people have rights; you can’t make them do shit they don’t want to do, or even convince them they need help before they’re ready. To him, if I understand correctly, his worst behaviors are necessary, he has to do them, they’re who he is. In certain states, my rejection of the drinking and lying and baiting is totally reasonable, but in others it’s not a rejection of symptoms but a rejection of him and it hurts too much.

My dad’s been living in an RV for twenty-odd years and was house hunting in the area. I can’t afford to live on my own because I don’t earn enough. So the love of my life and I broke up and over the next two weeks signed all the relevant paperwork, and then on the 29th of May he got into his vehicle and drove away from me forever. I spent two nights alone, then my dad moved in, and two weeks after that became the new owner of the house, and while I did get my heart broken at least I didn’t have to move.

In the twelve weeks my dad’s been here he’s fixed, maintained, or replaced all the shit that you’re supposed to fix, maintain, or replace when you’re a home owner. Faucets work, gutters are clean, furniture’s been repaired, lamps have been fixed. Right now his old ass is doing maintenance up on the patio roof that will hopefully stop it from leaking when it rains. I think he’s too old to be on the goddamned roof, but apparently he doesn’t agree.

The guest room is now my bedroom, and it’s clean and cute and comfortable and just like I like it. The curtains and blinds are open and it doesn’t smell like socks and beer. I’ve been through every single box, cupboard, drawer, and closet in the whole house, dumped a lot of stuff and organized everything else. I have a dresser now. All the holiday decorations are in one place. The office is cute as hell.

My dad is a great housemate. We go to wineries. We read books. He runs the dishwasher, I put the clean dishes away. We have separate containers of milk in the fridge because I work in a literal creamery and he drinks almond milk. He bought the cat a scratching post. One morning I got up to find he’d fixed the flat on my bike for me and I nearly cried because I hadn’t received that kind of help in a long, long time.

For me, this is much better, and I’m extremely grateful and slowly relaxing and unlearning the defenses and preemptive disappointment. I’ve been doing stuff I quit years ago, plucking my eyebrows, the occasional face mask, pedis. I’ve been decorating, redoing the bathroom just for fun. The way you do when you’re not stressed, worried, and miserable.

My ex is back home again, 1620 miles away, and with family so I don’t have to worry that he’s alone. We spoke every single day for twelve years, but now it’s been three months of occasional texts.

Long story short, I’m heartbroken but doing fine.

And now that I’ve gotten this posted, and I’m not in a relationship I wanted but was catastrophically failing no matter what, I might be able to blog regularly again!

May!

Life, Weather

In which spring is well and truly sprung!

It was 81F in the house yesterday afternoon?! Today I even turned on the air for half an hour or so. Everything’s in bloom and leafed out, and the yard is really lovely and nice. Spring in this town is glorious.

My sleep schedule’s all backwards but I’m not having insomnia, thank fuck, it’s just clock creep. I’m staying up and getting up very late and have been for the past week or so. So far it’s been fine because the earliest I work is noon, but tomorrow (er, later this morning, it’s past midnight already) I have to be at work for a meeting at 9 o’clock. It’ll probably suck (lol) but I’ll probably survive.

Trap has become extremely vocal over the past two weeks. She’s still a very polite cat but holy shit she’ll just start yelling and keep yelling and yelling, for a straight half hour or more (stopping only for very brief scritches), until you get up out of bed and throw her out. And in the past couple days she’s started to talk-talk-talk at me when I’m on the patio couch, too? I suspect she’s decided we’re big dumb kittens she needs to herd around? She’s also been grooming my bare feet, which is fine until she tries to chew on my toe nails. Weird animal.

The day before yesterday I was, foolishly, in my living room in the afternoon when the sun shines directly in, and holy shit do I need to move my couch and clean the floor under there! There’s an insane amount of dust; looks like a quarter inch deep, swear to God. How.

Haven’t been doing any hobbies lately, so haven’t put the film mentioned in my last post into any of my cameras, or even managed to keep up with my journal. But I have been reading at my usual pace, which is a novel every couple days on average. A library card, Libby, and a Kindle are so great for voracious readers!

Right now I’m watching finally getting around to watching the second season of ‘Pokerface.’ I like this show a lot. After this episode I’ll try to put myself to bed, but since I slept so late I’ll probably end up reading.

Saturday (No Kings)

Life

In which I took a Saturday off.

When I got hired, I said I’d be happy to work Saturdays for as long as needed, but not forever.

Well, now it’s basically been forever and I’m still scheduled every Saturday; the only way to get one off is to schedule it. I picked today at random.

I was hoping to maybe do something fun with a long weekend. Go for a drive, spend a night out of town maybe. Instead I slept for fourteen hours. Didn’t get up until two thirty! Must have been tired. Can’t really summon the energy it would take to either drive off on my own or convince what’s-his-face to actually do something out of the house.

Gonna cook and eat, meditate, make myself go for a walk. Maybe find a movie and watch it the old-fashioned way: without my phone in my hand.

Starting to worry about stuff. Like: it never got particularly cold this winter but my utility bill was still a lot bigger than it was last winter. How will I afford air conditioning season if the prices keep going up? Like: should I be hoarding coffee? It’s 30% more than it was a year ago, the market is idiotic, the administration is a joke. Will coffee soon be for rich people? Like: should I just let the entire lawn die instead of watering it? Can I afford to water the goddamned lawn? There’s no snow pack. Half of the country’s already in drought (my county is in ‘extreme drought’) and it’s fucking March! Like: should I be hoarding food? With the war situation gas, which moves everything, is going up. Everything will get more and more expensive, right? I know a lot of members (of what’s left of) the upper middle class are doing so; I see people online talking about buying up stuff they expect to go up in price soon, like appliances and toilet paper.

On the other hand, there’s nothing I can do about any of it. The powers that be are venal fucks and I have no influence over them or their ridiculous AI or their wars or their racist cops; if the shit does hit the fan I certainly don’t have enough wealth to hoard enough to make more than a few weeks’ difference in outcome. If water rationing is necessary I’ll follow local expert advice. Best I can do is be a good person who isn’t a wasteful shithead. Compost, recycle, eat the stuff in the fridge before it goes off, manage the sun this summer with blinds and drapes as well as I can, etc. Worry doesn’t solve anything, it just makes one unhappy.

Reports show that today’s No Kings is possibly the biggest protest in U.S. history, more than 8 million people at more than 3,300 events. People are pissed about a lot of things: book bans, the death of science, that Kennedy idiot, DOGE, abortion care, vaccine policy, inflation, Iraq, the Supreme Court, propaganda, concentration camps, the death of due process, the takeover of the Fourth Estate, oligarchy in general. Things are a mess. It seems so obvious to me that instead of funding war and racism we could just, you know, fund health care and housing instead? But that’s not what the people in power do, they just double down on causing unnecessary human suffering. You really do wonder what the fuck is wrong with those people.

There’s a tulip in bloom in the backyard! Must be just about Easter!

Saturday

Health

In which I was just sick a couple weeks ago! Unfair!

Friday there was some sneezing. Apparently that’s the tell now: if I sneeze more than once in a day I’ve probably been  exposed to germs.

Saturday afternoon at work I started to feel pretty rotty, and by the time I got home I was definitely Coming Down With Something.

Now it’s Monday and I still feel gross and I’m mad at whoever it was that decided to come into my workplace and FUCKING BREATHE AROUND ME. I don’t want to be sick! This is my weekend, I want to get chores out of the way and feel good and read library books and drink adult beverages! I do not want to sit on the couch like a zombie staring at the television! I do not want to spend sixty percent of my weekend asleep! God damn it!

Just the usual crud: congestion, cough, aches. I haven’t even taken a Covid test, because at this point I don’t really want to know that the people who make up the society I live in don’t “believe in” vaccines and are basically out there spreading disease more or less on purpose.

Going to work when you’re sick is stupid. Being sick is uncomfortable at best, and can kill you at worst. To stop from spreading most disease, just stay the fuck home when you’re sick, or if you must go out, wear a goddamned mask!

Some bastard got me sick and I hope they have a permanent itch somewhere for the rest of their life.

A blog post!

Life

In which I’m blogging, goddamn it, I don’t even care if I don’t even care!

Recently my brother gave me a speaker he found in the road because I’d complained all my speakers were crap. I guess he actually saw a vehicle drive over it before he stopped and picked it up. Well, it’s fine, it kicks ass, and it’s tiny.

a li’l speaker guy

It’s a Clip 5. You can clip it to shit! It’s waterproof. IT WAS TOTALLY FREE. It sounds astonishingly good for its size. Right now I have it playing bhajans.

Friday night I went to the Milton-Freewater Downtown Alliance Chamber awards dinner. My boss gives me a free ticket, and this is my third year attending.

The food was great, the wine was great, and the awards themselves are really nice because they remind you that a lot of people are actually quite humble and wonderful, and operate under the assumption that their duty is to care and help and give back, so they just go around fixing shit and funding things and quietly making life better. Which is something we need to see from time to time, lest we get all jaded and bitchy reading about politics and living and working with men, as we do.

One of the fun parts of the dinner is that there’s a table decorating contest, so not only does the place look nice for the event but no matter where you’re seated you get local business-provided swag because you get to keep whatever’s on your table. (The people who sat at the cheese factory-sponsored table this year got cheese, cream, butter, and tiny Jersey cows!)

awards dinner

My table this year had a giant tagine for a centerpiece and abundant chocolates; I didn’t want the tagine but I did get the little rug it was sitting on, which turned out to be probably a bath rug:

new li’l rug guy, on the living room floor next to a cushion and another li’l rug; this is where i sit to meditate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wanted it as a meditation asana, and it’s perfect for that! It’s extremely soft, even if I’m not a fan of the fake-distressed rug designs, and fine to sit on.

I also got a half dozen rocks glasses, and nearly all the candy on the table, because nobody else wanted it. Whoo!

Work’s the same, I mostly enjoy it because it’s not fucking Comcast or Home Depot, but I’ll have been there seven years in July and the new has definitely worn off. I still love what we’re doing there, and I love the humanity of the place (you don’t get fired for being nineteen seconds back from a break, for example), but I’ve never been promoted and haven’t gotten a raise in years. Doing dishes and cleaning grills isn’t exactly stimulating, and I sorta thought that by now I’d be in charge of a department or would be doing fun admin shit, maybe in design & editing, or HACCP or documentation & training or whatever, but the place is still run exactly as it was when I started: more or less like a hobby.

Which is fine, but there’s no path for advancement and without a promotion into an admin job that doesn’t exist I’ll never get to sit down! And I’m pushing 60 and would very much like to sit down, if I’m honest, please.

I sometimes think about getting a ‘real’ job, but I have no idea if I’m qualified for anything grown-up anymore. (I’ve been out of IT forever and it’d probably take me a week to set up Active Directory services properly! Heh.) And while it’s true the idea of a commute sucks, it’s also true that my IRA only has four grand in it. I figure something will fall into my lap eventually, because it’s usually who you know more than what. Or not! We’ll see.

I want my backyard to not look like shit, but I also want to not have to go out there in gloves and boots and pull a bunch of milkweed out of the gravel myself. I’m going to ask if the lawn guys will do it this month, before mowing gears up in full and they get too busy to help lazy people with stupid projects.

I also want to go back to Amritapuri again this year, but maybe not during peak monsoon season. I’m sure work would let me off again but I’ll have to see if I can afford it.

Trap, the feral ditch cat, recovered perfectly from her spay surgery, stayed five days in the guest room and was a perfect guest, and now hangs out with me all the time. I get the impression she thinks I’m an extremely stupid and lazy cat, but I keep ‘finding’ food so she’s willing to tolerate my lack of running around the neighborhood at night eating birds or whatever.

Sometimes she tries to boss us around by marching up to one of us or into a room and yelling, but since we don’t know what the hell she’s saying it never works. Most of the time she naps inside or on the patio couch. Yesterday evening I caught her playing, actually playing, with some dry leaves. I’d never seen her play before, not even when she had kittens.

So, yeah, I’ve been adopted by a fucking cat. I did not want a cat. I don’t even like cats. They’re an invasive species, they walk in litter boxes and then on your kitchen counters, they’re assholes. Fuck cats. I’ve seen this particular cat torture half-dead rodents, and I once listened to her eat an entire bird, skull and beak and feathers and feet and all! Disgusting! The cat is a terrible species, awful, just nasty. Buuuut I just feel responsible for her now and she purrs and is soft, and she’s happy to see me when I get home from work, so yeah, I love her.

What I should do is get a fucking goat, to eat all the weeds in the back yard!

Amritapuri Part 2

Spiritual, Travel

In which there’s more, but not much more… because I didn’t write it.

Most nights, I slept with my windows wide open and could hear the surf. It was glorious.

the sea at sunset

If I left the hall early at night, I could hear the bhajans slightly while lying in bed, and sometimes in the early mornings I could hear the archana. There was always traffic during the day, and some at night, and everybody honks while driving in India. Sometimes the horns sound like elephants.

The last week or so I’d figured out that if I kept the windows closed, the ceiling fan on, and the bathroom door closed (it had permanent openings and was always humid), my clothes would get slightly drier. I only bathed once a week because even though it’s the tropics and there are two taps, there’s no hot water. And no towels; I used a sheet or a dupatta. It’s cold to shower and it’s impossible to get dry.

The power goes out frequently, but rarely for more than ten seconds at a time. This is why not bringing a laptop was a good decision, apparently unshielded they get fried all the time.

(I started this the day I wrote the previous post, then saved it to come back to later.)

~+~+~+~

It turns out that after coming back to this post to finish it, I don’t want to finish it! Overall, the trip was utterly transformative: I thought thoughts, I had experiences, my spirituality deepened in ways that would sound ridiculous if put into language, so I won’t try.

Everything that exists is a metaphor for finding your real self, which is closer than close, and all the effort you do to ‘become’ whatever it is that your intellect thinks is enlightenment is more or less running around in circles, and only true Love can get any of us anywhere near understanding that, and that’s what my Sadguru gave me when I went to visit Her.

Plus I drank a cocktail with ice in it at the Delhi airport, which of course gave me Delhi Belly, which I suffered after I got all the way home, and it sucked REAL bad. So bad I even tried to go to the doctor about it after about five days, but gave up when the nearest clinic wouldn’t take my insurance. Nevertheless, I survived!

Amritapuri Part 1

Seva, Spiritual, Travel

In which I use my passport! And spend eighty hours in airports and airplanes!

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for most of a month now, because I wasn’t sure how, since it wasn’t really a touristy trip. I went to see my Sadguru, an enlightened person, an avatar, for spiritual purposes, and most of what I have to observe was the ways my mind does what it does and how I reacted to that. It’s not like I went to any restaurants or shows or on any hikes or cruises.

view from the footbridge facing toward the Amritapuri ashram

The trip was Walla Walla to Seattle to Vancouver to Delhi to Trivandrum. I never left the airports, and it took a couple days each way. Absolutely exhausting. The shape of the trip was dictated primarily by politics; from what I’ve been told (by a Keralan living in Canada I met on a return flight) you’d typically rather go through Dubai.

The way over I was exhausted in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. My relationship has its struggles, I’ve been in the same entry-level job for six years with no promotions or recent raises, I’m older and fatter than I’ve ever been, and I live a life of, essentially, laziness and dissipation. I read a lot, I sleep a lot, I drink too much, I don’t bother to have a social life, and while I know the shape of my life would be perfect for sadhana I just don’t do as much as I wish. I was unhappy in every quarter. Which is why I wanted to go see Amma so bad. Get my priorities straight. You spend a lot of your evolution believing in doing things, but then comes the realization you’re not doing anything, you’re not the doer, and yet you have to do things to achieve states, and it’s all some bullshit Buddhist koan, and you need your guru.

After determining that I wanted to go and why, with literally no effort on my part, everything just fell into place. Suddenly there was money to go, and tickets, and a month off work with zero push back, and literally everything I needed was just… provided to me. (Thanks, dad!)

~+~+~

So one morning around three AM we got in the car and went to ALW, which is my favorite airport because you can go from the door all the way through security in literally four minutes. (I hate airport security for its waste, irritation, and ineffectiveness. It’s theatre and its tedious.)

Anyway, flight to Seattle. Few hours layover, I got a coffee but I don’t think I ate. Then flight to Vancouver, which is a really well-done airport. Nice to look at, immigration was a breeze, wifi, all the kiosks worked, nice art.

Flight to Delhi was either fourteen or sixteen hours, I can’t remember which, and by then my extremities were bloated and I was miserable because the seats are for takeoff and landing, not a dozen-plus hours of actual flight, and I’m too old and fat now to get my feet underneath me or curl up. I did sleep but it was terrible quality, weird and jittery.

Airplane food

The food was pretty good, though. They fed and watered us probably four times. I had a window seat and so had to bother my row mates twice to get out, walk, stretch, and pee. The bathrooms were still familiar plane-style weird little closets with toilet paper.

Weirdest part of the whole journey was that it never got dark. You’re just flying over the lid of the world with the sun. So, so many hours of bright daylight.

Then another few hours in Delhi, to get out through immigration and back in through security. The Delhi airport is a fucking people-moving disaster, the signage is either not there or useless, and both times I went through it I had no idea where I was supposed to be going in spite of being in possession of a reasonably high intelligence and a general concept of how to get through an airport. The airport employees I asked were contemptuous (which I do understand, I work customer service too, and being asked the same fucking question over and over does get annoying) and unforthcoming and rude.

The immigration guys were bored, grumpy, gruff, and slow. Yes, I had all my documents ready: passport, boarding pass, visa. Your job sucks, whatever, at least you’re sitting down for it, you huge baby.

Security in India is segregated by sex, so you give your bags to the machine for scanning and then have to hike way over to where the women are being screened, leaving all your belongings utterly unsupervised, to be wanded in private in a cubicle by a female soldier-slash-cop. (These were friendly and pleasant, and one even complimented me on my hair.) Then at peak disorientation, tired in a strange airport where you don’t understand the majority of the languages, you have to remember which carousel has your bags and figure out how to get back sans signage. It’s a trip.

Continue reading Amritapuri Part 1 →

31 hours and counting

Seva, Spiritual, Travel

In which I’m on vacation, as of Saturday at 6:10pm when I clocked off work.

I’m pretty much packed! Had to buy new luggage, because ours were a few inches too big for the new carry-on sizes and I don’t want to check anything. New suitcase is green, within parameters for cabin luggage on Air India, and came with a cute matching extra bag I’m using in place of the shitty old backpack I was gonna bring.

I have culture-appropriate clothing, shawls and wraps, new undies, compression socks for the planes, and a sweater. I have toiletries, jewelry, bug wipes, an eye mask, ear plugs, headphones, a rain poncho, and snack bars. I’ve decided not to take my contact lenses. I probably won’t take any makeup, or if I do it’ll just be the tiniest bit to wear in the airports. Can’t find my safety pins, but won’t really need them unless I buy a petticoat and choli at the ashram and wear a sari.

I have movies and music on my phone, and an external battery (or two, if I take his with me). Will finish loading up the Kindle with ebooks tomorrow. Have a keyboard to use with my phone if I want to type, and a journal to write in.

I have all my tickets and visas printed and neatly organized in a binder. I have all the travel apps anybody could ever want installed on my phone.  I bought a roaming pass for my cell phone, so will hopefully have coverage outside the airport while finding my already-booked-and-confirmed ashram taxi.

Checked Kerala weather, and I don’t think it’ll be so awful—the highs are lower than here, and the lows are in the mid-70’s, which is actually cool enough to wear a sweater if you’re sitting. The things I’ve read made it sound like monsoon is sizzling, but 75-85 isn’t that bad; more like it’s the humidity travelers must be reacting to. And I love rain.

They assign you your housing when you visit Amritapuri; I can’t decide if I want a room alone or to be stuck into a dorm. As it’s monsoon and Amma’s been in residence for months, I can’t imagine the ashram will be full to the rafters, so I might get my own room. Do I want a room alone? I am pretty old and set in my ways; if I get stuck in with other devotees they’re gonna hear more farting than they probably want. I leave it to God, I guess, to stick me where I’ll be most challenged—and this is exactly why I expect to be put on kitchen duty and to spend my entire vacation doing dishes every day.

All that’s left on my to-do list is ‘get travel cash’ and a last load of laundry so I can take a clean nightgown. Then I’m out of the country for the rest of the month.

It’s an awfully long way to go to not do any sight-seeing, but really I just want to spend more than 2 days near Amma for once in my life. Three weeks will probably trigger a breakdown but hey, it’s what I’ve always wanted!

 

 

India

Spiritual, Travel

In which I’m going to use my passport!

I’ve got the month of July off work, and I’m going to Amritapuri. I complained about the tedium of shopping for flights, so my dad offered to do it for me.

Today I’ve bought some items for the trip, including a rain poncho, bug repellent, and a little laundry line to use in my room. (I don’t intend to take much in the way of clothes so it’ll be handy to be able to rinse and hang stuff.)

I read what little I could find online about actually staying there, barely a handful of blog posts, and that’s where I got the laundry line idea. (The actual ashram site lets you register to visit but has almost no information beyond the fact that they provide linens and there’s a bank onsite.) Also grabbed a couple packets of Tide specifically for sink washing, a couple travel size toiletries like toothpaste and shampoo so I don’t have to check my suitcase, some talcum powder. A Bluetooth keyboard to use with my phone, since I’m not bothering to haul a laptop. I’m assuming I’ll take a pair or two of Crocs because they’re lightweight, waterproof, and bouncy for slogging through concrete airports. I already have compression socks for the flights, a Kindle to carry a few hundred books, and a phone I’ll probably stick some music and movies on for backup entertainment.

Actually, my phone broke in half last week but the new one is supposed to arrive tomorrow. It’ll be green! I’ve never had a green phone before. Pretty exciting. Anyway, it’ll have plenty of storage for some media.

Already got a passport neck purse (gift from dad, along with an eyemask for sleeping) and a power converter.

It’ll be monsoon season, so I expect to be moist the entire time, but apparently it doesn’t get much hotter than the 80’s so I think I’ll be okay since it’ll probably be in the high 90’s here.

I’m so excited to go, but I’m nervous about the long flights. Longest flight I’ve ever been on was SEA to DCA and it was so fucking boring and tedious; that was, what? Five hours? Fourteen hours on a plane sounds worse than a brief stint in jail, honestly, but I guess people do it all the time so it should be okay.

Anyway, flights should be booked in the next couple days, then I can apply for my visa and register with the ashram. Whoo!