Category Archives: Love

Why boycotting BP is a lame idea.

Soapbox

In which I argue with our collective conscience.

Everyone’s pissed off at BP.

They’re so mad they want to put the company out of business right this goddamned instant. At protests, their posters say things like, “BP gets rich, the people and the planet pay the price” and “Seize BP’s assets!” (1)

The heartbreaking images of birds covered in muck stir them to a seething rage. They’re instigating anti-BP groups all over the net(2). They’re pissed off, and they want you to do your part and boycott BP stations beginning right freakin’ now.

I humbly submit that these people are all being ignorant asshats.

What? What?! You’re wondering how I, your friend and previously non-insane person, could possibly think that? Well here’s the deal, people:

BP is our fault.

A 42-gallon barrel of oil(3) only produces about 20 gallons of gas. The rest of the barrel is used to make virtually everything in your home. And I mean everything: umbrellas, pillows, thermometers, Scotch tape, snorkels, ear phones.

Poker chips, insulated boots, Q-tips, prescription glasses. Bubble bath. Coffee pots. Glad Ware.

Vacuum bottles. Patio furniture. Garden hoses. Caulk. Brake fluid. Crayons.(4) I don’t care how crunchy and “green” your life is. If you’re in society at all, you use oil every single day of your life.

So this BP disaster is our fault, because BP exists to obtain the oil we need to make the items we buy every day. We buy a lot of toothbrushes and Crayons, because we’ve increased the world’s population by over two billion people in the last forty years(5). BP didn’t make us do that.

This event is not only a terrible environmental disaster, but it’s arguably the mother of all public relations problems. BP is losing money hand over fist, something I feel safe assuming they don’t like to do. This was an accident, not a calculated insult to the world’s ecology.

Most sadly, it’s simply one more accident in a long, long list of horrible accidents(6) that we’ve all ignored.

The reason us rich white folks are galvanized right now is because this disaster is in our rich, white backyard. We don’t even know that Nigeria is a toxic wasteland due to our endless need for oil(8).

The insult we’re perpetrating on the world, in my opinion, is that we’re not even smart enough to use our extensive education and wealth to do this indignant reaction thing right, we’re just slapping up toothless boycottbp.org websites and feeling smug about our FB groups and about how committed and pro-active we are, and then we go on using all the petroleum-based products we always use, and don’t even bother to learn that they ARE petroleum-based products or what they cost the rest of the world.

People are standing around in their clothes made of oil derivatives in their houses made of oil derivatives with their oil-derivative toothbrushes in their mouths screaming, “Fuck BP, those motherfuckers, look what they’ve done! They’re evil!”

Well, they’re not evil. Greedy, maybe, and lazy, and rich, but they hardly did this on purpose. They’re a big goddamned nasty clusterfuck of companies, sure, but what they’re doing is getting oil out of the earth so you can live the way you like. Your sputtering outrage and indignation makes you look foolish, don’t you see, because you choose not to understand that you’re culpable, you yourself. It’s not a them-versus-us issue here: BP is not the villain in some kind of thin little morality play. WE’RE ALL THE VILLAIN, everyone who buys pretty much anything, ever.

Of course we didn’t mean it, of course we didn’t mean to destroy 120 miles of gulf coast, but it happened. Of course we want to do something about it. But. Boycotting BP is a horrible idea because it lets people believe that they’re making a difference when they most assuredly are not. Boycotters will buy their gas across the street from their local BP franchise, and then they’ll go shopping at Walmart, not even knowing that most of what they’re buying has some oil-derivative component in it. Then they’ll go to bed at night feeling smug, while small franchise gas stations have to lay off their staff. What steps are we taking, with this boycott, to reduce or oil consumption? Um, none.

The salient point is that BP doesn’t even own the majority of its gas stations. They’re all franchises(7). Come on, people, you’re boycotting your community members and neighbors. During a recession. In what universe does this even make sense?

The screamers and the outraged ones seriously need to go home, shut up, and take an honest look at how oil affects their lives. If they want to give up all that stuff, fine: they need to find a way to do so and thereby change the market. I’m all for that. If they don’t, they need to knock off the bitching and vitriolic language and figure out grown-up ways of expressing their grief over the gulf, like getting trained and going there to help, or helping to draft new safety regulations and responsibility caps, or deciding where not to drill, or giving their money to brain trusts who can figure out how to replace oil’s ubiquity in modern life.

I don’t have the answer. I don’t know how to fix it. I live as lightly as I possibly can: I don’t own a car; I consume less than the typical amount of resources most Americans do; I don’t eat 200 lbs. of animal flesh every year; I reuse my baggies and Ziplocs and even take-out containers… that’s what I do. That’s all I know how to do. But most people don’t live like me [seriously, I don’t blame them]. Most people need Crayons, and insulated boots, and refrigerant, and Glad Ware. Who the hell am I to take it away from them?

Nobody. That’s why I don’t try to. Besides, it’s not like I don’t have a netbook, and earphones, and CDs and DVDs and prescription glasses and contact lenses and toothbrushes myself.

Yes, it’s a mess. We all get that. Now: since we’re done with our silly “Boycott BP” thing, how do we fix it?

1 BP Oil Spill Protests
2 Boycott BP
3 Barrel
4 A partial list of products made from Petroleum
5 Total Population of the World by Decade, 1950–2050
6 Oil Spills and Disasters
7 Punishing BP Is Harder Than Boycotting Stations
8 Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it

I hope they put his ass in jail, actually.

Health, Soapbox

In which I heartily approve.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.

If you’re not familiar with the details of the good doctor’s story, Dr. Wakefield is the guy who published the shoddy research that led thousands of people to believe that there was a link between certain vaccinations and autism. I say ‘shoddy’ because The Lancet retracted the paper soon after it was published (the research was bad and no one could replicate the results) but people continued to believe the results anyway. Long story short, the kicker is this: Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid for by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. The anti-vaccines guy? Was one of them. A guy who didn’t mind doing unnecessary tests on children to get a big paycheck. A big pharma asshole with low morals and a lust for money.

Actually, go read this comic. It’s informative. It’s awesomesauce. It’s just plain easier. I’ll wait here.

Okay, are you back now? Great. Allow me to go off for a minute: I’m totally and completely pro-vaccination, even though I know that once in very, very great while there’s some kind of complication. Why accept the risk? Because vaccination WORKS. If you don’t believe me, go look it up. Look at juvenile death rates by disease for the past century, correct for nutrition and education, and then tell me that you really don’t think vaccinations work.

And if you can’t read, go ask someone over eighty: they’ll tell you right to your face that kids “just don’t die as much as they used to.” (G’ma told me that when she was a kid, “everybody knew someone who had lost a child to illness.” I personally know no one who has lost a child to measles, TB, smallpox, mumps, rubella, or polio.)

needle

And it’s not because those germs just went away on their own, people. More kids survive childhood because of the use of vaccinations. Period. This is not a belief, it’s a fact. If you think vaccines cause [insert latest paranoid scare], go find the research to back up your assertion before you let your offspring become a disease vector in the middle of the culture I live in, thank you very much, because many of my own vaccinations are really quite old and I deserve to live somewhere with herd immunity.

In the autumn of 2008, some areas of the U.S. had school populations in which 10% or more of the children were un- or under-vaccinated. “We’ve already dropped below the level of vaccine coverage where herd immunity exists for some diseases,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases and head of the vaccine institute at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “At some point, we’re going to be forced to decide whether it is an inalienable right to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.”

Kids are now suffering from outbreaks of things like measles and – get this – whooping cough because their parents have skipped their vaccinations. The world is small. People bring germs back from overseas all the time. How bereft would you be, seriously, if your child got sick and died from a disease like that? A disease that was, in the not-too-distant past, virtually wiped out? A disease that is preventable?

Remember, before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles used to kill on average of 400 kids each and every year. Measles! I’ve never even seen a case of measles. (And, after googling the disease and catching some images, I’m glad.)

If you surf the anti-vaccine web sites, you’ll notice that most of the cited research isn’t linked. The claims that unvaccinated children are “healthier” are unsubstantiated because there’s no such condition. (As far as the medical sciences are concerned, either you’re healthy, i.e. free of disease, or you’re sick. Of course there are gradations – the kid whose mom feeds him a balanced diet and who runs around outside is going to be less likely to have behavioral and emotional problems than the kid who lives on junk food and never leaves his computer – but even if it seems counter-intuitive, there’s no proof that one is more likely to survive a deadly infectious disease than the other. And a slightly better first-world diet is not going to produce an immune system incapable of catching a deadly infectious childhood disease.)

Such sources are rife with emotionally-phrased speculation about how the medical and pharma establishments just want to make money off of selling vaccinations, as if the act of making money immediately means that there’s no reason for vaccinations in the first place. I’m not even going to bother to point out how utterly irrational that kind of argument is, because it’s so irrational it can get your kids dead.

And for what? Are you really going to feel good about sticking it to the man as you bury your kid?

I mean, think about it. Vaccines work. There is no evidence that any kind of vaccine is linked to autism or any other condition. The people we think of as “them” have children too, and they get their babies poked with needles full of the same stuff: it’s in NO ONE’S interest to continue producing and selling any vaccine that harms or kills, not even for money.

Vaccination works. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

Sources:
Thousands of unvaccinated children enter schools
Demographics of Unvaccinated Children
Unvaccinated Children at Center of Measles Outbreak
The ‘herd’ doesn’t protect unvaccinated children

Amazon and DRM.

Gadgets, Soapbox

In which I’m torn between really liking a device that works well, and feeling like I should never use it again.

Last December, I bought myself an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas-slash-layoff present.

Can has shiny new Kindle!

I bought it not because I didn’t already have a way to read ebooks (I have four separate ebook apps on my iPod Touch) but because I had device envy: the Kindle was a sleek little number with a 3G connection.

Plus, NLW said I’d like it, and she’s usually right.

The 3G connection was the kicker. I could buy books anywhere – in the car, at the store, in an airport! Imagine how great it would be to finish the second book in a trilogy and be able to download and begin reading the third book without even leaving your chair, man. That’s just plain hawt.

So now I have a Kindle, and it really is a slick little device. I carry it around with me more than I expected to. I currently have 77 items on it, from full-length books to short stories to today’s New York Times and this week’s Amritapuri news.

Since acquiring my Kindle, I’ve changed the Amazon bookmark in my browser to take me to the Kindle store instead of the main page. I have 31 items in my Kindle account, which means that Amazon got much more money out of me then they ever did when all of my ebook money went to Fictionwise and Baen and Mobipocket.

My Kindle works really well. It recently received an operating system update that made it even cooler than it already was. For the first time in all my years as an Amazon customer I started a second Wish List, so I could track the Kindle books and accessories I’m lusting over.

But then there’s Amazon’s party line:

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.

– Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service

Which means, in a nutshell, that Amazon can brick your Kindle remotely whenever it likes. Which means you don’t own your ebooks, you’re just licensing them. (They’ve already mass-erased books from lots of devices.) If you decide to break the DRM and read a Kindle book on another device, you’re breaking the agreement and possibly even the law as well.

Cory Doctorow refuses to sell his works in Kindle format – you can get them for free from his website, but you can’t buy them from Amazon.com: he’s that against DRM and all it implies. He says that book ownership predates even the publishing industry itself, and he’s right. The ideas in a book might belong to the author, but the book itself belongs to its owner.

In the olden days, after you bought a book it was yours. You could read it, burn it, loan it, re-read it, let 11 family members read it, and then sell it: it was YOURS.

Now I’m giving money to a company who can brick my device if they merely think I’m acting funny. I have to back up all my Amazon ebook purchases and DRM-strip them just in case, or I risk the possibility of having rented rather than purchased the works in my account.

All of this pisses me off. I want to use my cool new technology, and they make it really easy for me to do so, but I don’t want Amazon thinking they’re getting away with this. They probably think the majority of their Kindle users are morons, and the more we use our Kindles and the more we accept their crappy licence agreements the more proof they have that we really are.

Yes, I still buy books from the other sites, but it’s just so much easier (and often cheaper, because Amazon sells the majority of their ebooks at a loss) to buy them directly from the Kindle itself.

Read The Future of Reading. It’s short and sweet and says most of what needs to be said.

I’m wondering if I shouldn’t abandon ebook reading on both the Kindle and the iPod Touch and find some other way of doing it. Isn’t it my duty to vote with my money?

Bindu

Pets

In which we take a look at the blue dog for a sec.

Best dog ever, scowling at me for making her sit while I snap her picture with my cell phone.

Bindu-ji

Meta. It's all meta.

Introspection, Music, Whining, Work

In which I tell you about my weekend. And the crazy fluctuations in my state of mind. (Seriously, watching your mind do whatever it does is EVER an exercise in weird.)

Friday night I went out and got drunk for no good reason. I hadn’t intended to get drunk, but I was sitting at the bar having a really nice conversation with one of the regulars and Amy kept pouring the way she does, and, well: shit happens. Saturday I had to get up about three hours earlier than I usually do and if it was a little rough, well, that was my own damn fault, wasn’t it!

Curt & Shelly came and picked me up and they gave me an egg biscuit and hash browns from McDonald’s the very minute I sat down in their ride (and OMG I srsly LOVE THEM for that). The drive to the Benton Franklin County fairgrounds was uneventful; we didn’t need to be there early because it turned out there wasn’t going to be a sound check after all. I was, hangover-style, a little agro that I’d had to get up when I did. We milled around aimlessly instead. Steve bought me a coffee. I love him, too.

At noon, Romagossa Blu kicked off the festival with a bang, and then Vaughn Jensen went up and smoked. Coyote Kings went on at 1:30 and three songs later I went up and joined them.

UnTapped

Playing festivals is great. The stages are huge, the crowd is way into what you’re doing, and there are actual professional sound people at the board. Monitors! Lights! No schlepping!

There was a wedding on stage directly after our set. I got to sing ‘At Last’ for the happy couple, then bluesman Billy Stoops officiated the marriage of (our friends and fans) Nancy and Steve right there in front of everybody. It was cute.

After the set I changed into comfy clothes and promptly started drinking the free beer from the craft services tent. I spent most of the day backstage because I could (UnTapped doesn’t take your VIP pass away after you finish playing, like other festivals sometimes do) but I did wander around enough to have seen absolutely everything. UnTapped has tons of beer and wine makers and lots of food and a scattering of other vendors. It’s a really cool festival.

A few of the NW players I met told me they’d heard of me, which was, as you can imagine, immensely gratifying. I was encouraged to move to Portland; I was encouraged to start my own band. In short, I got a lot of ego stroking, but – because the mind is a terrible thing – I somehow managed to feel self-pity anyway.

I know, right? WTF, Mush? Fun blues festival, stage time, free beer, beautiful weather, good friends, and my internal dialog is fux0red. This is what happens when one doesn’t deliberately choose the upside.

My (admittedly not accurate) perception was that the musicians got younger as the day went on. In the early afternoon we had guys pushing 60 but the kids in the headliner’s band all looked like they were still on the fresh side of 30. I was having, in the back of my mind, one of those completely negative “since I wasn’t headlining at 26 it follows that I suck” thought processes. Why? It’s stupid, but lemmie tell you what: all that crap about the negative psychological effects of unemployment? Appears to be true. After not getting yet another job, I’m having a glass-is-half-empty crisis in the form of a really insidious “I’m totally mediocre” mental litany.

It doesn’t help that this is my second long-term bout of unemployment in the last five years, either. Stupid job market!

I met a metric ton of musicians, including the superawesome Miriam (of Portland band Miriam’s Well) and her bandmates; Chicago tenor player Eddie Shaw and his son Vaan (who is a really cool dude); trombonist Ed Earley; and the headliner, Hamilton Loomis (who was not only a smokin’ musician but a really, really nice person), to name a few.

Loomis’ set was not at all what I’d call blues; his has been described as a “blues-rock-funk-groove-soul band,” and he did charts that broke down into funky Stevie Wonder grooves, charts that were pure rock, charts that were pure soul. It occurred to me that from here on out, it’s all meta. Every song will contain shades of every genre that’s ever gone before, and descriptors like “R&B” and “pop” and “blues” will go the way of the dinosaur. Listeners will be expected to understand music from a global perspective that spans the whole of recorded music.

In other words, it’s so meta it’s actually like this: I have some cheesy pop in my library that features a raga in the bridge, house with a gypsy violin in it, and funk with a banjo solo. There’s really no reason I can’t do R&B-soul-blues-jazz-rock and still get booked at blues festivals, that’s all I’m saying.

Applying this meta concept to the idea of “work”, I’m realizing that my bad attitude is stupid. I’m online all the time, so I know that very little can truly be monetized. All this free information on the Internet is there because people want to do it. They try and try and try to monetize and the vast majority of them fail; overall they do this shit for the love of it. Free ebooks, free TV series, free how-to videos, free games, free lessons, free recipes: some people manage to be offering the right thing at the right time and they break through to monetization, but most of them don’t. And that’s okay.

I do what I do for the love of it: I sing, I take pictures with old film cameras, I publish thousands of words online per year, I share recipes, I comment on tech. These things are fun, and I don’t need to feel guilty – or mediocre – about not turning them into money.

I have this belief that life is structured like this: there’s this job thing you do, and it pays your bills. You do not love it. You’re very fortunate if you like it. It takes up much but not all of your time, and it subsidizes the other things you do. Some people get paid a lot to play at whatever they play at and they don’t have to do the job thing. They are rare and special, and I am not one of them.

That’s my job meta. I don’t like it, but I don’t think I’m eligible to transcend it because it seems that if I was I already would have. So, I believe that I need a job, and I don’t have one, and it’s messing with my head. Since I can’t through any amount of effort on my part cause a job to exist, I need to do something else meaningful to structure my time.

Tomorrow I’m going to visit the WorkSource office and find out what options are available. I’m ready for some options. I’m a displaced worker, I guess, since there aren’t any ISP support gigs around here and I’m 41. I think I might be eligible for grants and scholarships.

I think I’d really like to go back to school. I’d much rather be in class than on the job market since the endless rejection, poverty, and uncertainty is, um, starting to bug the shit out of me.

I mean, sure: I love having nothing but free time. Who doesn’t? I like eating when I want, sleeping when I want, playing guitar when I want, going out when I want: it’s fun. I read all the time, I can meditate whenever I want, or do push-ups and crunches when the mood strikes rather than when I have to. The freedom is great, but apparently I just can’t stop worrying about what will happen. What will happen when my benefits run out? What will happen ifone of the minimum wage jobs I apply for actually offers me a position I really don’t want?

Anyway. Sorry about the digression. All the pics from the blues festival are here, if you want to check them out.

My next gig isn’t until July, but we’ll be playing The Pastime at the Ritzville Blues Brews & BBQs festival, which should be a total blast.

Pictures of stuff!

MP3s, Pets

In which this post is, like, totally ILLUSTRATED.

I lost two pounds last week, in spite of that four-slices-of-pizza debacle. I lost no inches, though, because of all of those damned squats and crunches and push-ups and shit. Nine weeks to go to achieve my goal weight.

So naturally, yesterday Adam sent me some Swedish Fish. They’re delicious superfruity fish-shaped gummi wonderfulness. They’re also 150 kcal per serving, so I am ignoring them as we speak:

Swedish Fish!!!1!

Last night I went to an afterhours party at a friend’s house. She has a cat that will walk into a plastic grocery bag and let you carry her around:

Cat In A Bag 3

I found it to be so hilarious I carried that cat all over the house. In a bag! LOLz!

This morning I took Bindu to her annual check-up. They poked her with a needle and her rabies cert is good until 2013. She has some tumors the vet thought were not fatty lipomas, but since her overall health is good for her age, I don’t think I’ll worry about them. She pants a lot, she’s nearly deaf, and she’s always rubbing her face on the floor like it itches, but she also eats well, has lovely ears and teeth, wants to go on walks, and runs up and down my bedroom stairs all day long: pretty good shape for a 13- or 14-year-old dog. I might get a basic blood panel done next month, just for the hell of it, but the vet thought she seemed fine overall.

Senior Pet Check-up

We stopped at the store on the way home, and although I did find fava beans (yay! ful meddames!) I didn’t buy any garlic. Ooops. I made freakin’ awesome delish chickpea curry for lunch, though:

Chickpea Curry

I realize that today is Tuesday, but there’s a nice disco-y Monday Morning Mix for you, if you want!

"We call that classy brass."

Music

In which there’s a YouTube video. Sorry.

Okay, I’m obsessed with this track right now. It’s musical brain crack, as far as my musical brain is concerned.

This is only the second time I’ve ever embedded a YouTube video here ever (and the first time the video was of me). So it’s not like I do this very often, since verily I don’t like blogs full of YouTube videos, and even then I kinda feel bad about it.

Anyway, the day before yesterday a friend linked to this from Facebook and for some weird reason I actually went and watched it. I’d downloaded the track from iTunes within minutes and have played it 23 times so far. I’ve watched the vid at least half a dozen times. It’s just so freakin’ wonderful.

Behold! Tightrope by Janelle Monáe ft. Big Boi:

Groovy choreography, great voice, great beat, fantastic costumes, weird freaky hair – it’s just freakin’ AWESOME. (Apparently the track is part of a concept album about androids, even. Can I get a hell yeah?)

I'm cranky! Oh, and I want your help.

Health, Music

In which there’s a barely organized ramble to get you up to date.

Health

I relaunched “Operation: Quit Smoking” on the 25th. It sucks and I hate it.

All I want to do is eat and sleep and never go anywhere or do anything that reminds me of smoking, because nic fits suck, but of course that’s unreasonable. I was miserable between sets at Saturday’s gig because every cell in my body wanted to go outside and smoke, and no the nicotine gum didn’t help AT ALL.

Seriously, though, in spite of my words my attitude is pretty good… I just want to complain because quitting is hard. Here are my notes on the process. There’s a link to my daily diary if you’re interested in that level of detail.

Did I mention that it SUCKS? Good. Because I hate it! Rar!

Help

My band has entered into a contest to play at the Crossroads blues festival in Chicago this September. It’s all very exciting.

If you could, please click here, register for an account, and vote for us. Every day, if you can. I totally want to go play blues in Chicago for my birthday!

Other

I’ve seen the Wolf a few times since we broke up, and he’s been totally cool about it. I’m both grateful and relieved.

Want to add some music to your library? Apropos of nothing, I posted a lovely mix here this morning. Have at it!

The Curse™ has arrived.

I still don’t have a job.

It’s totally spring here.

Four Out Of Thirty, or Why I'm A Total Bitch.

Love

In which I do a little brain dump about relationships, the Wolf, and responsibility.

So, I did that most horrible of things: I broke up with somebody via text.

The Wolf is a nice guy, of course, but he… well. Let me put it this way: I can only tick off four items from this list of 30 things I’ve determined are true for me about potential partners. So it would never have worked out anyway, and I needed to stop it before he got any more involved. It was my duty as a decent human being to dump his ass sooner rather than later.

I don’t even want a boyfriend, and I can’t figure out how a few hot and friendly make-out sessions garnered me one. We went from barely knowing each other to saying “Love you, babe,” in the space of a few days, and the next thing I knew I was being introduced as his girlfriend. Suddenly the entire entourage thought we were practically engaged, I had a bunch of new friends I wanted to keep, thank you very much, and his nephew kept telling me that his uncle had “never been happier.”

Scylla and Charybdis. How do I get myself in these situations?

He was sending me anywhere from 3 to 20 texts a day, everything from silly observations to poetry to not-so-subtle demands for attention and compliance with his idea of the shape and size of the relationship. Since the majority of them didn’t require a response, I didn’t send one. Making me complicit, I see now, in his idea of how involved we were.

He’s a musician and he’s got great hair and he’s romantic. He’s generous, he’s intelligent, he’s loyal, and he’s really good at Jeopardy! and crossword puzzles: that’s what he’s got going for him. Against him is pretty much everything else: no job, no car, what appears to be a fairly uneven temper, bad diet, no exercise, significant baggage, too much TV and not enough reading. He’s never heard of Maharishi or Amma, and he doesn’t even know how to use a computer.

It’s not like I have a job or a car, either, I’m just describing those things symptomatically. The relationship, such as it was, was incapable of going anywhere. All we did was bar hop, go to the occasional afterhours poker game, and make out sometimes in his driveway. I’d told him I didn’t want anything else, but he kept offering me new levels of commitment and fidelity I wasn’t interested in. He had even begun to work on being jealous and protective. He told me he loved me all the time. He made some comment once about growing old together. He was in deeper than I was, and I had to end it.

The last time we’d been out together we’d had a bit of a tiff about the frequency, or rather lack thereof, of my texts to him. He claimed there were entire days when I didn’t respond to any of his texts. I said, “Bullshit. There’s never been a day since we started hanging out when you haven’t received at least one text from me.” He suggested that we pull out our phones and prove it, and I told him he was acting like a twelve-year-old.

“Dude,” I said, “first of all, you’re wrong. Second of all, the facts in this instance aren’t as relevant as the underlying emotionality, which is what I’m more interested in. I’ve told you repeatedly that I don’t want a relationship, because I don’t want to owe anybody anything. You said you understood the parameters, and now you’re giving me this quasi-ultimatum that I must text you daily and tell you I love you? Are you hearing yourself?” He backpedaled immediately and retracted nearly everything he’d said up to that point that evening, but his willingness to accommodate me irritated me even more. We remained an item, though, when I dropped him off and went home.

Gawd. What a coward I am. Are you counting these, my many flaws? Continue reading Four Out Of Thirty, or Why I'm A Total Bitch. →

Rando Things That Would Be Cool To Do.

Love, ,

In which sitting around being passive isn’t working, so it’s time to get positive.

There are these two people I know. They’re awesome. They’re my friends. I love them. (They each possess some of the shiniest, thickest, healthiest hair you’ve ever seen in your life.) They sent me an email the other day suggesting that I read this cheesy self-help book. He said, “read this and then see what you can do,” and she said, “I know we’re all jaded about techniques, but this is one that has proven to us to have some value about it,” and since it was a free Kindle download, why not go ahead and read it?

Um, because it’s cheesy self-help crap and I’m so totally beyond that?

But these two people are verily the embodiment of teh awesome (plus it was free), so I downloaded the book and started to read it. And it was, of course, totally cheesy self-help crap, written at a forth grade reading level and filled with repetition, and I couldn’t figure out why such smart, deep people would be suggesting such material to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought, halfway through Chapter Two, I know all this. What the hell, they think I don’t know this?

And then it began to sink in. Sure, I know this, but I don’t know it. If I were living it, I wouldn’t be feeling so… bad. Useless. Lost. Pissed off.

The basic premise of the book is this: love yourself.

That’s it. Just… love yourself.

There’s a bunch of material pointing out the ways in which we don’t love ourselves, and some little exercises to help get the mind out of the way, but essentially it’s just a reminder that people who are inside-out are working too damn hard. Quit trying to get love/affirmation/acceptance from the outside world, and go back to the source: yourSelf.

Duh.

Every year I go and see my Sat Guru and every year I re-learn that I am love, and then a few months later I’ve forgotten it again.

I’ve really really forgotten it in the past couple of years, and the result has been directionlessness, dissatisfaction, negativity, guilt, irritation, and random waves of hellacious panic attacks that leave me feeling helpless and hopeless.

I spent the day reorganizing the inside of my head, pushing back the habits of the mind, and disabling my “I suck” soundtrack. My shoulders dropped about two inches as I let go of the stress.

Oh. Duh.

I don’t suck, I’m not stupid, there’s no reason to beat myself up for {insert whatever it is that I’m judging myself about}, everyone is cool, the world is cool, I love myself, I am love, it’s all groovy.

HOLY SHIT, BUT THE MIND IS A STONE-COLD NEGATIVE BITCH! I’m just sayin’. And I know this, have known it for years, but it’s so easy to identify with the mind and live there in judgment and then get all, “This sucks. The whole thing. All of it. Fuck these people, fuck this situation,” and stay there while still believing that you’re the awesome radiant being you want to be.

Hell. Literally. It’s hell.

Anyway, there’s also a focusing aspect to the book, so I’m compiling this list of Rando Things That Would Be Cool To Do. Incomplete and in no particular order, it currently looks like this:

  • Travel to India.
  • Stay/live in Amritapuri.
  • Visit London.
  • Become a flight attendant.
  • Be free of panic and anxiety for good.
  • Get a cruise ship gig.
  • Vacation in Egypt.
  • Be a full-time musician.
  • Feel smart.
  • Take piano lessons.
  • Love exercise.
  • Be free of debt.
  • Have money.
  • Hang out with inspiring, engaged people.
  • Get divorced.
  • Get paid to travel.
  • Get more tattoos (particularly the karajishi I’ve wanted for, like, six years).
  • Fix the bike and ride it instead of driving.
  • Accept love without doubting its intention.
  • Be the leader of the band.
  • Get a job with great pay and a steep learning curve.
  • See more old friends more often.
  • Drop the self-doubt and regret thing.
  • Record an album. My album.
  • Do more spiritual practice. Want to do more spiritual practice.
  • Quit being afraid of death: mine, my dog’s, my family members’.
  • Celebrate pretty much everything.
  • See more high-quality live music.
  • Say yes more than no.

I think I’ll finally go get a passport next week. Why not be prepared, yeah? I’m not quite ready to do much else yet in the concrete sense, but at least I’m not sleeping all day and feeling stupid and guilty about it.

So, yeah. I guess the moral is that the truth is the truth, regardless of the source (even if it is way cooler from the East, with cute aphorisms instead of repetition). And P.S., your mind is a tool, not your identity. And P.P.S., your friends are freakin’ wonderful.