Category Archives: Admissions

For the first time in my adult life I didn’t want to smoke!

Admissions, Gadgets, Health, , ,

In which there’s good news.

We flew to DC last Thursday so I could see Amma.

We had a very short layover in Milwaukee, then got to Reagan, walked to the hotel shuttle stand, and waited for the bus. Got to the hotel, went out to eat on a cute little street a few blocks away, and walked back to our hotel around midnight. Only when back in our room after having been in Arlington for hours did I bother to unpack, assemble, fill, and use my ecig device, and then only briefly before going to bed.

The next day, I realized that in all that travel I never once wanted to smoke. I thought about smoking in a vague sort of way when we were waiting at the bus stand; I thought, “A few months ago, I’d be considering smoking now, even though it’s probably not allowed. I’d probably cross the street and stand over there and suck down a cig and hope the shuttle didn’t come until I was done.”

Every previous layover on every previous flight I’ve ever taken, I’ve furiously crunched times in my head and if there was enough, I rushed to smoke. Is there a smoking lounge in this airport? How far is it from my gate? Can I get there and back in time? Will I miss my flight? If not, do I have enough time to get all the way outside, smoke, and get back in through security and still make my connection?

And on arrival, the same thing: where am I meeting my ride? Where’s the smoking area? Do I have enough time to smoke? HOW DO I GET OUT OF THIS PLACE SO I CAN SMOKE?

It was really nice, not giving a shit about smoking! I didn’t even remember that I was a(n ex) smoker during the Milwaukee layover; past me would have been infuriated that it was so short and that I’d been denied the opportunity to try to get a cig in, but current me didn’t even think about it.

Same on the trip home: instead of standing outside, sucking down a few cigs while waiting for the cab back to the airport, I just sat inside the hotel lobby by the doors to the taxi stand, waiting like a normal person. Didn’t think about smoking at all during the two-hour layover, didn’t think about it when we arrived back in MSP, didn’t have to smoke in the parking garage before getting in the truck to drive back to the apartment, didn’t have to smoke when we got home. (Did have a lovely chain-vape later, before finally keeling over from the exhaustion of having been up all night, though.)

Vape

Having never travelled without having to figure out how and where and when to smoke before in my adult life, the experience was really wonderful. No cravings, no anxiety about how and where to get my fix in. No simmering rage at the constant non-smoking announcements and signage one is endlessly subjected to in airports and on airplanes.

Vaping continues to be a fantastic solution for me. I have to admit to being quite surprised at how quickly it has broken all the habits and thought patterns associated with being a smoker. When I leave the house now, I just leave and don’t automatically check my bag for a pack of cigs and a lighter. (I rarely take my mod with me when I go out, unless I’m going to the ecig store for liquid or coils, and only then because it’s fun to vape inside the store itself since it’s allowed.) I have 31 years of smoking habits to overcome, but they just seem to be going away on their own without stress or even effort. I didn’t even think about smoking while we were traveling! I was not annoyed, I did not have a nic fit! Not even a little!

I have yet to go an entire day without vaping at all, since quitting smoking 62 days ago, but while on some days I do start vaping earlier than I ever smoked (I’ve never been a morning smoker; I always did all my smoking from late afternoon on), or I indulge in a few hours of “chain vaping,” on other days I just use it for a few minutes a few times in the evenings. It continues to be much cheaper than smoking, because even though a 30ml bottle of liquid is twenty bucks, it lasts many more days than the same value of cigarettes ever did. My lung health is much, much better. I don’t clear my throat all the time, I don’t have weird snot, and my voice doesn’t sound like that of a smoker, either, which is a cool benefit.

While I suspect that Scott doesn’t like the smell (he’s too nice to say, really), it’s very mild and leaves virtually no permanent odor. I’ve tested this by vaping for a bit, then going out to the corner store and returning with a fresh nose. One gets the impression that there was maybe some weak-ass incense burnt a few days ago, but that’s about it (and as we do burn incense fairly regularly, sometimes I can’t tell if it’s that or the vapor residue). For awhile I had a little bowlful of used coils sitting around, but that did smell bad, so I got rid of them; and I now keep the bottles of liquids in a plastic bag because the combination of their various scents is gross, but in general I see no reason not to vape indoors.

My clothes, hair, skin, pockets, and purse don’t smell like cigarettes, butts, or smoke anymore. It’s great! Added benefit: I’m no longer terrified of catching a cold and ending up in an oxygen tent with a lung infection.

Like I’ve said before, it’s probably not a zero-harm activity, but compared to smoking cigarettes the benefits of vaping are enormous.

Hillary

Admissions

In which I comment.

I’d be more into the whole ‘we may be about to witness the first woman’ etc etc etc if she was a better example of the qualities typically associated with my sex.

woman

There’s nothing particularly womanly about her as she runs for president, so talking about her sex is, to me, irrelevant.

If she seemed to embody, for instance, qualities of motherhood, or leadership through service, or anything, you know, specifically womanly rather than human, the chatter would make more sense.

Total convert here, guys.

Admissions, Gadgets, Health, PSA, Soapbox, ,

In which I’ve quit smoking!

I started smoking at 16. I’m 47 now. That’s 31 years.

I was down to smoking less than a pack a day, usually less than half a pack, but my lungs felt dry and tight. I was having difficulty breathing.

Every morning, I decided not to smoke. Every evening I smoked anyway, because the power of habit is massive. I’ve tried keeping my regular behaviors and just ditching the smoking part, but it’s hard. I’ve gotten up, put on my coat, grabbed my ebook, stepped outside and not smoked, just to keep up my normal routine, but it doesn’t really work. Before you know it, you’ve bought yourself a pack of cigarettes.

You need a substitute. And no, not for the nicotine. The gum and the patches are worthless; I’ve tried both. For the smoking.

Luckily, here in the future, we have such a thing! It’s called vaping.

A well-controlled trial has recently been carried out by Dr Grant O’Connell and colleagues working for the vaping manufacturer Fontem Ventures. They asked 15 smokers to give up altogether for five days, 15 to vape only for five days, and another 15 to mix vaping and smoking for five days. They measured the harmful and potentially harmful constituents in the urine, blood and breath of each group, and the results were striking. After five days, the vapers’ carboxyhaemoglobin levels—an indication of how much carbon monoxide they had in their systems—had dropped by 83%, which was an even bigger drop than in the cold-turkey cessation group, whose levels dropped by 75%. Even the dual users had seen a drop of 23%. The amount of carbon monoxide they exhaled had halved in both the vapers and the cessation group. Much the same was true for all the other biomarkers except, of course, for nicotine.

– Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016

So I bought a Vuse at the corner gas station. It was a piece of shit and just as sketchy as the first ecig I bought a decade ago and it was so awful it basically drove me back to cigarettes. (The Vuse is by RJ Reynolds. There is speculation that they were specifically designed to drive smokers back to cigarettes. They taste bad and they’re incredibly inconsistent, delivering either burnt-tasting air or a massive hit of lung-scorching, scaldingly hot vapor. Each replacement cartridge costs at least as much as a pack of cigarettes, if not more.) The Vuse would be an acceptable experience only if you were a hard-core smoker locked in an airport or hospital for days with no other way to deal with your discomfort.

Then I bought this sciencey-looking little Pro Tank II for only $20 at the ecig store over on Lake Street, and I haven’t had a cigarette since.

Kanger 650mAh Pro Tank II

It screws together. The whole bottom section is a rechargable battery, with a button you push to send power to the coil; the tank is Pyrex and holds e-juice, which is vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol with flavorings and nicotine, and contains a coil, which is what actually heats up and turns the juice into vapor; and then the tip is the part you inhale through. There’s an utterly bewildering variety of these things, but all of them are basically made up of these three components.

An old Fairfield friend saw my interest in ecigs on Facebook, and kindly sent me his unwanted stuff (he’s discovered a favorite brand of tank, and no longer uses any of this):

Vaping stuff

That’s hundreds of dollars of equipment and ten flavors of juices! That he was just going to throw out! A Vaporfi kit, a Nautilus tank, an Aerotank Mega, a Halo Tracer kit, a second Vaporfi tank, and coils!

Now I have tons of everything. Batteries and chargers, tanks, tips. Most of the parts are interchangeable, too, so you can mix and match and make devices that look cool and draw, due to adjustable air flow rings on the nicer tanks, exactly the way you want them to. These are the two I’m into right now:

Vapor

I’m into the 6% blueberry and 3% cocoa flavors right now. (I hate even typing that because it sounds so douchey, but it is what it is! Blueberry! Cocoa! I’m a twat!)

I started with 18% juice, but I don’t think I need it. They tell you that nicotine is incredibly addictive, but I’m perfectly comfortable with 6% and 3% juices. I do have a tank loaded with the 18%, but haven’t used it much in the past two days.

I haven’t gone five days without a single cigarette in years. I’ve gone one, two days without a cigarette, sure; I’ve gone days only smoking one or two. But zero cigarettes? For five days? In a row? No, not in years.

With low-nicotine juice and a device that works well, one can enjoy the activity of ‘smoking’ almost to excess, and yet wake up in the morning feeling better than she has in years. It’s fucking wonderful.

While I doubt vaping is a zero-harm activity (after all, what is), it’s definitely lower harm than smoking cigarettes. It’s almost therapeutic-feeling; inhaling mist into dry, damaged lungs actually feels good. (Turns out that juice uses the same base used in asthma inhalers and nebulizers.) And apparently my carboxyhemoglobin levels have dropped by 83%.

Eighty-three percent.

The devices themselves probably last for quite a long time, being made of Pyrex and stainless steel. You have to replace the coil, the part that heats up, and the juice, but from what I can tell that’s much less expensive than 3.5 packs of cigarettes every week.

There’s a bunch of negative hysteria around e-cigarettes, but it appears to have been deliberately manufactured by pharmaceutical companies involved in nicotine replacement therapies and cigarette companies. The recent FDA regulation binge was brought on by these lobbies, apparently. Of course. Since so much money is generated by the luxury taxes on cigarettes, anything that threatens the market is worrisome… even if it’s a technology that is reducing harm and by extension probably saving lives.

The bulk of the evidence so far leans heavily toward vaping being much safer than cigarettes, and much more effective than NRT in helping people quit smoking.

– E-cigarette studies, research and reports
– E-cigarettes save lives
– UK doctors urge wide promotion of e-cigs to help smokers quit
– Smokers Urged to Switch to E-Cigarettes by British Medical Group
– Vapers Helping Smokers to Quit

So, the take-away here is that we’re seeing research showing that vaping is much less harmful than smoking, and that if you wish to vape, you need to buy a decent piece of equipment and avoid shitty disposables made by cigarette companies. The vapor, even from low-nicotine juices, is so satisfying that you don’t even want cigarettes. Vaping is credited with helping tens of thousands of smokers quit.

“In the case of addictions, where people find it genuinely very hard to resist temptation, harm reduction surely makes sense,” said Viscount Ridley. And I agree. Being against vaping because it’s not zero-harm is ridiculous. If we expected driving to be zero-harm, we’d never build another car again. But as far as risk management goes, vaping is safer than smoking by orders of magnitude.

2015 Kindle Fire 7″

Admissions, Gadgets

In which there’s a review, sort of. Not really. Whatever.

I more or less demanded this for Christmas, because they had them marked down to $35 and you know that’s a shitload of hardware for $35. I thought we’d put Android on it or something, if it turned out nobody was using it.

61vuTHMmf0L._SL1000_

Well, I love it. So much more comfortable to use than the big ol’ 8.9″, plus the OS is kinda neat. Way more store-like, but still, fairly charming in its way. And it’s really, really fast.

The only problem I have with it is that that battery life sucks. Really bad, actually. Thing dies every day and needs to be plugged in, and I really don’t think I’m getting 7 hours of battery life out of it. Well, that and the fact that you can’t find the pictured wallpaper anywhere.

But other than that, it’s pretty great.

The 8.9″ is still worth, on eBay, between $80 and $100. I’m considering selling it, plus its keyboard and case, and then getting myself the Fire HD 6″, the model up from this one, which is HD but actually a wee bit smaller than this one. Maybe I’ll sell this one too, or give it to someone who needs a tablet.

Seriously, having three Kindles — two Fires and a Paperwhite — is pretty ridiculous.

Living in Uptown

Admissions, Life, Moving, Weather, Whining

In which I’m all about the neighborhood.

I’m an Uptown girl!

Uptown!

After a full month, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not that I’m stupid and missing something, it’s that there really is nowhere to put our remaining stuff. It has to go away somehow, or get packed into the basement storage closet, because there’s just no way to organize it. And I’m sick of having bags and boxes in my living room! Ugh!

For people who don’t have much shit, we have too much shit. Hell, we have an entire drawerful of single-function kitchen gadgets. I mean, I’m sure I really did feel like I needed a garlic press, tongs, corkscrew, can opener, and thermometer at one time or another, but all that crap in one drawer and it’s basically a bunch of shit that wants to gnaw your arm off at the wrist. Dude, seriously, that drawer is dangerous and pointy. Stay out of it.

I’ve also got a bit of buyer’s remorse, on the level of the apartment’s issues. The window and air conditioner leak when it rains. None of the outlets will hold a plug, so everything’s always falling out, which is frustrating as hell — I can’t even count how many times we’ve had to reset the digital alarm clock on the nightstand, or how often the internet’s gone out because the router plug (which we have taped to the wall) just fell out.

Laundry list of first world problems. I know. I know. There’s more, of course:

The A/C basically only half-works. It comes on, but even if you have it on full blast, it cycles off every few minutes and just blows recycled air. (Even if you run it for hours it never gets cold in the apartment, and merely cooking a meal makes the place unbearable even with the door freshly weather sealed and two fans circulating the air). Half the lights in the kitchen overheat after ten minutes and turn themselves off, so cooking and dishes and cleaning is done mostly in a sort of dim gloom. And it’s smaller. And there’s no cross breeze. Plus it costs more than the other place!

But the location is great. I love the location. Bars, stores, tacos, falafel, liquor, parks, lakes, libraries, coffee, nail salons. Pretty much anything you could ever want is within walking distance.

Well, except for a job. I still don’t have one of those, but I’m not out of money yet so I’m trying not to freak out about it. I basically don’t let myself go out and spend money more than once a week, and usually that’s either a trip to The Egg & I for breakfast, or down to CC Club for a drink. Just to get out while it’s not blizzard season and enjoy the fact that I can. But basically I’m afraid to spend, because part of me is convinced I’ll never get another job again. Too many online friends out of work for two or more years, all those ladies at Home Depot with two or three jobs, my age, plus getting turned down by that little CU for both of their P/T teller gigs…

Oh, and this: I applied at the wrong grocery store. My Saturday interview last weekend wasn’t over here at the neighborhood store, it was 4 miles and a half hour bus ride away, on the other side of what Scott described as “pretty sketchy areas.” Never occurred to me that the Cub on Lake street would actually be on Lagoon, and that the one on 26th is actually called the Lake Street one. Because how would anyone who doesn’t work there even know that?!

Anyway, we moved here so I could make friends and have a life without needing to buy a car or drag my beloved everywhere all the time. To make friends, you go out. Frequently. And people get used to seeing you and start talking to you, and the next thing you know you’ve been off on adventures and you have a back story and now you’re friends. The last time I went through this process in a new town I was spending the last of my money like a dumb kid (which obviously worked out okay or I wouldn’t be here, but still isn’t very responsible) or I was on unemployment. It takes a lot of money, actually, to just hang out in a bar or a bookstore or a coffee shop enough to belong there. Well, “a lot” if you have no income, I mean.

So I now live somewhere cool! Yay! And I’m not doing shit. Boo. Right now I have time and no money; by the time I’m working again I’ll have money and no time (and it’ll be too cold to go anywhere anyway). I’m basically screwed either way.

I should really be looking for a band, but it’s too hot. I just can’t even. Actually I found a couple of musicians via Craigslist last spring and then blew off following up with them because of work and moving and travel and blah blah blah I suck.

The old place was closer to Scott’s work, had a park next door, no traffic, everything worked, was bigger, was cheaper. He didn’t want to move; I did. I just didn’t like the neighborhood, because everything was a mile or more away over an overpass. Now I like the neighborhood but I’m too old and too conservative to spend money without a job and I basically just look at it out the window and feel like an asshole because I know any second now there will be three feet of snow out there and it’ll be twenty below and it won’t matter that there’s a corner store because I’ll just wait ’til the weekend so I can get a ride in the car to the grocery, like I did at the old place, and we’ll have moved for nothing.

Because that’s how the Midwest works. You’re frantic in the spring and fall to Go Out And Do Things, and the lakeshores and streets are absolutely stuffed with humanity. During summer there’s still a lot of bodies (because these people don’t seem to understand that HUMIDITY IS AWFUL) but less than spring and fall, I think, and in the winter you hardly ever see anybody outside besides in grocery store parking lots, at all, ever, because the weather will legit kill you. They don’t even plow most of the sidewalks, because people aren’t walking.

Lots of traffic at our intersection. Really a strong noise comparison with the old place. Cars here 24 hours a day, lots of emergency vehicles, foot traffic pretty much all the time. Lots of activity and vibrancy. It’d probably feel amazing if I knew anybody, but mostly I still feel like a tourist. Or a tourist’s mother.

Seriously. I unconsciously classify the vast majority of people who walk by as “kids.” How did I get this old? Continue reading Living in Uptown →

Being here now, or, How the fuck do I feel better?

Admissions, Introspection, Spiritual

In which it really doesn’t matter where you go, because there you are.

Recently, maybe within the past couple of years, the Inner Guru appeared. Or maybe, to put it another way, I became capable of delving into mySelf enough to hear what the seers tell us has always been there. Or by the Guru’s grace — certainly not through my own merit or work — I’ve gotten enough dust off the mirror.

I have no idea how this came to be, but there it is. I can’t even describe my wonder and gratitude nor how utterly close and familiar the Inner Guru is. It sounds exactly like my own thoughts, it just knows shit I don’t, and regularly, if I’m sincere about wanting to know, dumps very large, entire concepts into my skull too subtle to be codified in language. I’ll just be riding my bike with questions about how and why and what for, and BOOM, there it is: I now know something I didn’t a moment before. It’s heart-breakingly loving and sweet and awe-inspiring and miraculous, and other times I forget completely about it. Because I’m human. Which is to say, my ego is still ascendant enough to make it impossible to sustain the wonder that will eventually destroy it.

I work retail in a gigantic industrial building with concrete floors and beeping forklifts and cutting equipment and horrible lighting and multiple incoming lines that ring incessantly. It’s a mile away from my apartment, over a giant interstate overpass not really designed with pedestrians in mind, and I often have to walk both to and from work, as well as untold miles inside the building each shift. I’m in my mid-40’s and my feet never stop hurting and don’t seem at all inclined to acclimate to my non-desk status. My bicycle has a flat tire and I don’t have access to a compressor — well, I do if you count that gas station a mile away in the opposite direction, but I’m not inclined to walk the thing that far to fill it up only to discover it’s a fast leak.

Anyway, I’m being scheduled more hours than I want and my feet hurt and the roads are scary and indelicate and the job is loud and indelicate and I’m exhausted all the time and my brain is buffeted with noise and the ugliness of modern American values and my ego is all up in this trip about how much I’m suffering and how I’m not comfortable and not getting what I want but truth be told I actually like the job when I’m doing it and a lot of the people seem really great and there’s climate control and anyway you have to do something and I’m working on my humility and getting to serve and I’m trudging my tired aching body down these sidewalks on my way to a job I don’t want to go to that’s just going to make me more sore and more tired and more wiped out from the sheer volume of input and I’m spinning around and around in my head just trying to solve this whole suffering thing because it’s not lost on me that these are truly first world goddamned problems and finally about halfway across the overpass in the hot sunshine and choking exhaust I just give up and ask, “How the fuck do I feel better? What do I do?”

And the Beloved within promptly replies with, “Sit here [and on “here” there’s the indication of the heart center], and let the organs of perception and action operate themselves.”

Sit in the heart and witness. Let perception and action do themselves. There are, after all, entire laws of nature that define their behaviors. You are not them. They are not you. Let them do what they do. Understand?

Well, yeah. I do. Sort of. I do know that. Or I know about that, which is not the same thing, of course. I’ve read the Gita dozens of times, in as many different translations. But I still don’t know what the fuck the three gunas really are. Or what my dharma is. I mean, lower-middle-class white chick who drinks and sleeps a lot can’t be Dharma, can it? Even in Kali yuga it seems unlikely.

And so I’ve been trying to do that for a couple of weeks now. Trying and trying. Trying to figure out how replicate that spacious, contented silence I experience around Amma, thinking a lot about dispassion and what it really means, trying to quit bitching at my boyfriend about my feet and my fatigue and irritation at being scheduled 35 rather than 20 hours a week (because I really do believe you should treat your lover better than the strangers that are your customers and coworkers), trying to step back from my identification with and habit of having preferences that are, essentially, random and irrational. Doing japa and trying to serve and trying, just trying. And suffering at the jitteryness of it, like a radio station out of range, at my inability to not feel so sorry for myself.

Remember Ram Dass? That book Be Here Now? I bought a used copy at Powell’s Books when I was in my early 20’s. It was even signed. I enjoyed reading it, and kept it for a really long time because I thought it brought me some kind of importance, having a signed copy of Be Here Now, for fuck’s sake, but really my main takeaway from it then was that drugs are okay and you need a guru but you’re not cool enough to, like, go to India and find one, because you’re provincial and you didn’t go to Harvard like all these LSD trippin’ Western devotees. I have no idea what I might take away from it if I were to re-read it now, beyond nodding energetically at the part where he says the guru comes when the devotee is ready. Hell, I’ve still never gotten to India, but Mother came to me.

Well, Ram Dass is still writing and still pointing the way, even after a stroke. I bought Polishing The Mirror and read it and the advice to just sink into Self, to just keep gently coming back when you lose your shit, reminded me of something really important. Mainly that YOU ARE NOT DOING WELL, LITTLE SEEKER, WHEN YOU ALLOW YOUR EGO TO CONGRATULATE YOU FOR STOICALLY ENDURING YOUR SUFFERING. You’re not purifying, you’re not burning karma, you’re just feeling smug that you have decided — because that’s what happened, you decided — you’re miserable and you’re not bitching about it. Is this really a good use of time? Of your life?

And today I had to get up earlier than I wanted to, and when that irritation started I just sank below it, didn’t judge it, just sat in my heart and let it be. And my feet still fucking HURT but instead of thinking “my feet hurt” I just observed that there was pain and that it was okay and I didn’t have to engage my ego in having preferences about it, I just let it be what it was. And I kept gently returning to the heart while doing my morning stuff of coffee and eggs, and didn’t get involved with the whole OH MAN I REALLY DON’T WANT TO GO TO WORK AND I’M TIRED AND MY FEET HURT AND I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT AND WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME THAT I CAN’T GET A JOB MORE FITTING FOR A 45-YEAR OLD TECH WORKER, even though I certainly tried to get involved, oh fuck yes I did, habits die hard, and I sat in the heart while walking to work and didn’t do the martyr thing (much), and the weather was gorgeous and I nearly got lost in the flowers I don’t think I’ve ever even seen before in front of that giant Alianz building even though I’ve walked down that long block dozens of times. And at work I tried to see the souls inside the humans I interacted with rather than the meat.

And it was much less tiring. I mean, my hips and feet still hurt, but I’m just letting that exist rather than investing in it. It just is. And I came home and took a nap. And I have the next two days off to be quiet and NOT WALK TEN MILES IN SIX HOURS. And I had a few moments of really deep light and love, just walking around in the biggest of the big box stores doing my little job/doing my little practice/being here now/sitting in my heart, witnessing, letting the organs of perception and action operate themselves.

I mean, it’s not continuous, but it turns out you don’t try to do it, you just Yoda that shit. When you realize you’ve stood up, SIT BACK DOWN. IN THE HEART. That’s it. No judgement.

There are some great meditations in the book. There’s an expansive meditation that’s really great (reminds me in part of the original IAM technique), and the one on the breath I’m doing like japa, of course, because I rarely ever formally sit for meditation but tend to just do the techniques that attract me while engaged in activity, which Ram Dass actually discusses — maybe some of us just are spiritual debutantes by nature. I mean, it’s never been lost on me that it’s better to dig one deep well to get the water rather than a hundred shallow ditches, but I’ve never been able to want regular formal practice even though I would self-describe with utter sincerity myself as having been applying practices in earnest in non-formal ways at least since I meet Mother, if not long before (albeit in stumbling, sophomoric ways). I even ask Mother every year to help me keep a formal practice, and the desire just doesn’t arise.

But years ago I prayed to always be reminded to do japa, and my prayer was answered. There were many, many little nudges to do japa. Now it goes on by itself half the time I’m awake. It’s often going when I drift off or wake up. I also have a little thing I do to sort of… wipe thoughts away, but I don’t know how to describe it. It just occurred to me at Amma a couple of years ago, and when the mind-thing is just freaking out and chattering and not being at all useful I can wipe it clean. It’s often only for a split second, but that’s better than nothing. Especially when your head’s being a jerk.

And now I’m going to go drink wine and read period romances. Because I’m human. A human being, and a human doing. Dying the cloth, dying the cloth.

Om Namah Shivaya.

—
UPDATE: Here’s something I found today on meditation, and maybe it’s not always sitting with the eyes closed and the spine straight:

Upcoming birthday

Admissions

In which I no longer have any choice but to self-identify as middle-aged.

I’ll be 44 on the 29th of this month.

I feel mature, but I do not feel like an adult… whatever that means. I still feel like an idiot high school kid every time I’m startled awake by an alarm clock.

20 days

I do not have the things adults should have. I do not want them, to be honest, but sometimes I feel guilty for failing to accumulate them even though I didn’t intend to fail. I don’t mean ‘mature’ in the sense of material things anyway; I mean that I’ve found the inner guru and everything from here on out is a-okay. I mean that though I am indistinguishable from a worldly person, I’m not one and if I die living in a cardboard box under a bridge, it won’t be a tragedy.

My grandmother will be 90 on the 14th. The whole family will be here for her birthday party this weekend; I’m really looking forward to it. The last time we were all together was for her 85th, the party at which I decided to move to Walla Walla.

I’ll have been here five years in October! Since the end of my 30’s! The woman I came to help is only now beginning to slow down; maybe I’ll start being useful to her at some point. Sadly, I’m not any good at gardening but I can lift and carry well enough, and I can shop and do laundry and follow directions.

Of course, she might just retire into the Odd Fellow’s home, which means I’d be renting a room somewhere, and that’s okay too. Some of my aunts and uncles may retire here; it’s nice to have family around.

If I move again, I might go to a coastal town so I can meditate on the beach and cultivate an elaborate coffee addiction and fit in with the locals by bitching about never seeing the sun. I love the ocean. When I lived in Pacifica within sight of it I did actually go to the beach and walk and breathe and sit, which is why I think my love for the coast might not just be entirely tourist-love. (My tourist-love is New York, of course, but I’ll never have the money to move there and that’s okay. Plus I’m old now, aren’t you even paying attention?)

I have a Turkish coffee set but I’ll need to replace the gasket in my stove-top espresso maker if I’m going to start really nerding out on coffee again.

Autumn is weeks away. It’s dark by eight o’clock. I’ve put a quilt on my bed. It’s cold in the mornings. I hope there’s no ice or snow until February.

Doing it wrong.

Admissions, Finance

In which I wonder what my old age will be like.

Yesterday, I read an opinion piece in the New York Times. It was a good man’s story: older, loyal, secure; then his company “restructured.” Now he’s been unemployed for years. He’s too old to get a job; he has a preexisting condition so he’s unable to get insurance; he “always did the right thing,” and is now facing abject destitution.

He’s not much older than I am.

I have not done the right things.

I went to college, yes, but I didn’t have any discipline. I took classes that interested me, dropped out of those that didn’t, and in six years of higher education came away with substantial and still growing debt and no marketable degrees.

I got married, yes, but I chose badly. I didn’t choose someone who would make a good helpmeet and life partner. I chose someone who, at first, rocked my socks off in bed and who, unlike anyone else, actually asked me to marry him. But that was it, there really weren’t any other important qualities there between us, not the kinds of qualities that get you through your working years and safely into your dotage with your needs modestly taken care of. So naturally we divorced, and that left me with no equity and even more debt.

Now I’m of an age where I should be investing and building my retirement. Instead, I have no savings and no insurance. For the next few months, I’m giving 30% of my monthly income to my dentist so I can keep a tooth. As soon as the root canal and crown are paid off, I’ll do the same thing for my eyes, because I really need my prescriptions updated. After that’s paid off, no doubt, something else will happen, and I’ll pay that off too.

But eventually something might happen that I can’t make payments on. What if I get hurt, or need medicine? I’m employed, so I’m not eligible for many types of relief, but I earn too little to, say, be able to spend a bunch of money on meds every month.

I’ve been insured fewer than four years since I started working.

I’m not borrowing trouble. I’m stating that it is statistically likely that I will need something I won’t be able to to afford.

Which means I have failed my end of the social covenant. I should have educated myself more carefully and made myself more employable, no? I should have chosen a decent partner1, and together we should have earned and saved enough to pay for ourselves. I should have taken steps all my life not to be a burden on anyone, right?

I mean, isn’t that the social covenant?

Continue reading Doing it wrong. →

"Young man, put a light on that bicycle!"

Admissions

In which the universe thinks I’m a dude.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast autumn, as I was riding through Whitman campus in the dark, an elderly gentleman spied me and hollered, “Young man! Put a light on that bicycle!”*

When I returned to the bar and told the story, it got a pretty big laugh.

Fast forward a few months. I’m sitting at the bar with two guys having a chat. One gets up to leave, says, “Goodnight, gentlemen,” bows, puts on his coat, and is at least six paces away before he turns around and says, “Oh, shit, you’re not a guy.”

In the past three weeks, I’ve discovered that Google, Hulu, and last.fm all think I’m a guy as well. Not to mention that I haven’t worn a skirt since September.

Make of all that what you will.

—
* I have, since then, put four lights on my bicycle.

X-mas 2011

Admissions

In which I have waited until the last minute.

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]esterday I got on Amazon and ordered a bunch of stuff for Christmas. Luckily I still have Prime, so I got 2-day shipping for free. (Free!)

All of which means that I very well might avoid a hellish Christmas eve midnight run to Walmart. Yay!

In other news, G’ma has already made at least three different kinds of cookies (including those amazing molasses crackle things). My company’s owner sent the office about thirty pounds of candy and cookies (including a huge box of chocolate truffles). I’m trying very hard to avoid these things, but all I want to eat is macaroni and cheese. Ah, Christmas: it’s not the goose that’s getting fat.