Unmapped Country

Can a Dilettante Be Successful?

2012-02-22T09:19:00.000-05:00

It's school vacation in our state, so I don't have time for a long blog post. I'm too busy visiting family and reopening psychic wounds to post anything long. On the plus side, perhaps there will be fodder for future posts to excavate from the effects.

But I am thinking about this. A friend of mine, who is decidedly successful professionally--you can tell because now she is a consultant--mentioned that she often feels dissatisfied with herself. She said she finds that she's always thinking about her weaknesses, so that she can improve those areas, and balance out her skills. Whereas men she knows, entrepreneurs and professionals, don't worry about areas they might be weak in; they focus on what they're good at and interested in, and keep on building on it.

I don't know about you, but I related to that. I might decide I don't know much about, say, philosophy, so I'll start trying to brush up on that topic. Which is of course, a lifetime's work. Doomed to incompletion. Adding to my resume as a generalist.

I see it in my daughter, the 8th grader, too. A young girl who has many natural gifts, to whom academics come so easily, that she could just climb on them and go sky-high. But what is her passion? Ballet. Something she actually struggles to do. Something that can make her feel discouraged about herself. An area in which she puts herself second (or third, or twelfth) behind other girls her age.

I watch her bring herself down over that and I want to point out to her how far she could go just building on her natural gifts. Why not spend her 10,000 hours on those? Why take the time to build up an area that is not easy?

I ask you, my dozens of readers, does this have fallout for women and how successful they can be?

Finding the Sock

2012-02-13T20:27:00.001-05:00

I was in labor with my first child. Contractions, fear, anxiety, and excitement rippled through me. The husband had my suitcase. The bed was made. Our one-bedroom-with-a-den apartment was tidied. I was all ready to go.

Then I saw a sock on the floor. It seemed, in my contracting and anxiety-ridden state, too hard to bend over and pick it up--and I am proud to say it also seemed too niggling a detail about which to bother the husband.

I'll get that when we get home, I thought.

And I went and had the baby. Which, as you can imagine, based what you know of me, was a totally trauma-free experience from which I got out of bed and danced a tarantella within twenty-four hours.

Not so much. But I digress. This is about a sock, not a baby.

Six months later, when I could finally bend again, I picked up a pile of dirty towels and soggy breast pads and discovered, pushed into a corner of the bedroom, that dust-bunny covered sock.

*

I used to tell that sock story as an analogy for the chaos that having a baby creates in a life. You know, so that something as easy as picking up a sock and putting it in the laundry hamper just gets swept away in those early months. I had the naive idea that I'd actually notice that sock once I had a bobble-headed barracuda gnawing on my boobs day and night, a c-section to heal, and amazing and engulfing surges of thirst and hunger.

Now that I'm older, and I've used up that story--all my friends that are going to have babies have had them-- I've discovered another use for the sock. Another analogy.

Because the thing about having babies is that nothing is quite as overwhelming as that first one. You can learn from the first one, and apply what you've learned to the second one.

Life, though, you can't learn from in the same way. Sure, you can learn from it; but usually it's a matter of realizing stuff and then not really having any way to apply it to yourself. So you want to tell other people about it--so they can apply it to their lives, and thank you for your wisdom.

My point, my dozens of readers, is that it's not just babies that cause you to lose the sock. It's parenthood. Parenthood does it to a lot of people. To women, especially. It's a long-term radical change that sweeps you away from who you were before babies.

I'm thinking of Eric Fromm and his theory of love. That when you fall in love, you cathect with the person you love. It's an all-engrossing feeling of being totally bound up with this other person. And really, it can't be a permanent condition, because the sense of self dissolves. Which isn't that healthy for a prolonged period. Although it's gratifying for awhile.

Parenthood creates a cathexis of sorts between the mother and her offspring. Eventually, once they can wipe their tushies and brush their hair, the boundaries start to resolidify. At least for the children. That's what growing up is about, after all. Becoming yourself.

Which leaves a lot of moms like me feeling undefined and confused. Women tell me they're not sure who they are, that they're not sure what they've accomplished. These are educated women. Women with advanced degrees and theories of child-rearing. Women devote prime years to motherhood, forgo capital-P professions, and then find (for too many reasons to enumerate here) that they don't feel on firm footing with themselves without a professional frame on which to hang their identities. They don't feel successful, because how does success apply to raising 'tweens? How can they feel successful when we measure success by end-product and parenting is a process?

And we start cleaning up a bit, taking inventory, considering values, writing blogs.

And we find, pushed back in a corner somewhere, maybe caught in the rungs of the old Dutalier glider, covered in dust bunnies, a sock.

Average Perfect Day

2012-02-08T09:06:00.001-05:00

Aside from providing some good laughs for me and the husband, a couple of Noah St. John's theories of success, have stuck with me, like rice grains wedged in the crevass between the burner and the stovetop. In a previous post I talked about his "loving mirrors," about how if you're trying out a new idea, having a trustworthy friend there to tell you it's a good idea is better than psyching yourself up in a vacuum. Having someone you believe in believe in you can be just the nudge you need to get yourself unstuck.

The other idea that has stayed with me is about setting goals. He suggests that instead of imagining your biggest goal and visualizing the moment you attain it--like winning an Oscar, or accepting the Nobel Prize. Or opening your front door to find a couple of people with a big check from Publishing House Sweepstakes, or (much more highbrow) from the MacArthur Foundation. ...

Pardon me, I drifted off into such a fabulous reverie.

Anyhoo, INSTEAD of visualizing your moment of greatest glory, Noah St. John suggests imagining your average perfect day.

You know, what your life would be like once you've won that "genuis" award, once you've appeared on Oprah or Mike Douglas or....

Pardon me, I drifted off again. And I know neither of those hosts has a talk show anymore, but it's my fantasy.

What your regular day would be like if you'd achieved your goals. His point is to imagine what your life would be like from day-to-day, if you were doing the thing you love to do. Are you in an office? Are you in a hut on the beach? Are you surrounded by gladiator/dancers who pull you in a chariot while you're dressed in something tight, short and fabulous with amazing gold-heeled boots and you're incredibly fit even though you've got to be at least 52 or 53...

Sorry. Did it again.

And I thought, hmmm, that I can do. Imagining The Average Perfect Day appeals to my pragmatic side--yes, I do have one. It sidesteps hubris and hyperbole. It also daintily steps over Self Doubt that likes to settle down at my feet but is always ready to race to the window and bark at any stray positive thought I might entertain.

And I thought, well in my average perfect day, I'd have blocks of free time in the afternoon. I'd spend my time writing. I'd have time to walk outside and exercise; I'd meditate. I'd have some solitude. And then my kids would come home from school and I'd focus on them. And then the husband would arrive and I'd still focus on my kids....

And THEN I thought, you know what? I'm already living my average perfect day.

I have succeeded, my dozens of readers.

Now if only someone would PAY me to do this.

Habit #3, The Fruit of Your Labors

2012-02-04T16:36:00.000-05:00

Now that I've zeroed in on my personal mission statement and know my true values and have a principle-centered life, like a good little doobie, I am ready for Habit #3 of Highly Effective People, which is quite simply, Put First Things First.

This is the time management piece, Covey's way. He's got a helpful diagram:

I love that he thinks my time can be apportioned in this nice, neat way. And yours, too.

Resentful though I may be for being so easily put into a bunch of bins, I do find the general categories thought-provoking. You've got Urgent and Not Urgent and Important and Not Important.

Those of us with time management issues spend a lot of time in quadrants I and IV. Notice that quadrant IV contains "Pleasant Activities."

Now learn, my tens of readers, that Stephen Covey would have me spend none of my time there. Nor you.

That's right. Guess where I'm to focus my energies? And you?

Quadrant II--Important, but Not Urgent activities. Of course you can't ignore Quadrant I--Urgent and Important. Lice, for example, must be dealt with. But Quadrant II is the goal. Quadrant II is the bin for non-urgent but important activities. Things that tend to get put off. And it's obvious (to S. Covey) that the more time I spend there, the less time I'll need to spend in Quadrant I.

But what about poor, neglected III and IV? Note that Quadrant III contains "popular activities." I'm unsure how those differ from pleasant activities. Are they unpleasant, yet popular? Like reading about the Kardashians? Well, nevermind. Now that I've got my life going in the right direction, if I spend some time every week planning in Quadrant II, I'll be eating the ripe fruit of all my labors in Habits 1 & 2.

And I guess I'll no longer need "pleasant activities." And I've certainly never been all that concerned with the Kardashians.

On the plus side, what I will be able to do is prioritize my to-do's, and then decide which ones I need to schedule, and which ones I'll delegate. Or, as my friend Walter said, his goal for the future is to "do less of what I don't want to do, and more of what I like."

So does this mean that if I focus on Quadrant II like the bejeesus, the next time lice come around, I'll be able to delegate that little chore to someone else? To that nit-picking Orthodox Jewish lice lady in Brooklyn?

What would you delegate?

Success as Change

2012-01-31T09:59:00.000-05:00

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You know, Stephen Covey has quite a program for personal growth--also known as personal change. All of these self-help people do.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. On one level, all these self-helpers, whatever their subjects may be--happiness, contentment, success, fulfillment--are talking about how to live. They all have these programs for changing yourself.

Maybe you're an outside-in kind of person, so you like Dale Carnegie's "smile and the world smiles with you" approach. Maybe you're more of an analytic navel-gazer, so you like assignments that have you come up with your values (Covey, for example). Maybe you're more spiritual, so you like Deepak Chopra's methods.

Whichever you prefer, I would like to point out that some changes are much easier to make than others.

Eons ago I attended a parenting talk at the younger daughter's nursery school. The school psychologist addressed the tendency people have to fall back into situations that are "comfortable" for them. Comfortable, in this sense, means "familiar," what you were accustomed to as a child. So if you came from a warm, open, loving, and supportive home, you'll tend to recreate that for yourself later in life. And if you came from a dysfunctional home where perhaps you were ignored or neglected or worse, you'll tend to feel "comfortable" re-creating these things in your adult life. Indeed, if you start feeling too happy, you might be uncomfortable, and screw things up for yourself until you feel "comfortable" again.

Moving out of those situations takes a lot of mindful effort.

Reminds me of a gal I knew, a student at MIT, who got pregnant and had a baby in college. Seemed like such an unusual choice for an engineering student--until she mentioned her mother had become pregnant with her when she was 19, too.

Also consider your personality within your home environment. In the best (or most friction-less) scenario, you're temperamentally and taste-wise in accord with the rest of your household, with similar interests. So you grow up, and you join the family business--metaphorically speaking.

Think about it. How much easier is it for the musical child of musician parents to contemplate becoming a musician than for the musical child of lawyers or bankers to do so? That kind of actualization might take a lot more effort.

And if the musical child has grown up to feel somewhat embarrassed by his "crazy and impractical" embracing of the creative lifestyle, think of the conflict he faces when he not only disappoints his parents by failing to become a lawyer or a banker, but grows his hair long and wears ratty t-shirts and travels around the country selling bongs out of a van. Without parental approval, he's going to feel pretty bad about himself, unless or until he succeeds in a way that they can understand. This means he becomes famous and wealthy (the prodigal son); or he goes into entertainment law.

The other option for our musician is to be able to accept that success in his terms is living by his own values, not his parents.' Boy, that is hard to do. But it will give him lots of song-writing fodder.

So I think, my tens of readers, that programs of change and self-improvement can be terrific inspirations. They can even give us tools to evaluate what's important to us if we weren't equipped with them by nature or nurture. It's important to remember, however, that change can take a long time, and it can be uncomfortable. There can be a lot of backsliding. So it's important to appreciate the process, and remain mindful of the goals.

A Hindrance to Success

2012-01-26T13:16:00.004-05:00

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Day before yesterday, I read this post by blogger and writer Jeff Goins. He writes tips on getting published. Here he suggests that you publish short pieces in magazines before going for a book proposal. Something I have considered myself. I even have a couple of short pieces in the works, in fact. Helpful and uplifting, right?

But after I read it, I went into a funk. Jeff's plan of action just stopped me. It felt like the most impossible thing in the world.

Remember Harvey, the giant, invisible rabbit friend of Jimmy Stewart in the eponymous film? Well, my, um, friend, is self doubt. Only instead of being a giant, friendly, invisible rabbit, it's more like a dark, gloomy, amorphous, heavy blob. Chained to my ankles. Or sitting on my head. Or employing any other number of invidious tactics to immobilize me.

And what brings out my self doubt most is facing the task of querying editors--or agents, or publishers--to seek placement of my work in their hands. This aspect of writing, the ordeal of getting it out There, triggers all my weak points. The sheer number of journals, blogs, newspapers, and magazines flattens me. The ones I've heard of, everyone's heard of, so I feel like they're out of reach. The ones I haven't heard of, that might fit my writing, I don't know how to find. And no one else does either. Wall. Wall. Wall. Wall.

Totally boxed in. I want someone to help me.

Serendipitously, one of the most helpful bloggers I know, Jane Friedman, recently published this post on dealing with self-doubt. And Tara Sophia Mohr, about whom I recently heard from another blogger*, posted this one.

What does this tell you, my tens of readers?** It tells you not to worry about my mental health, because I am not alone. And no, I am not talking about my smokey, shape-shifting friend, Self Doubt, that now looks like a dark version of Harvey.

Of course, I already knew I wasn't alone. I've read so many books and articles about dealing with doubt that I could probably write one myself. I read all these inspirational articles for the same reason: I read them to confirm what I already know, told to me again in a new way.

Self doubt is part of the creative process. An annoying part, to be sure. One that tries to sabotage you, to be sure. But a part that you have to work with.

Which is sounding a little bit to me like an analogy for certain Republicans in Congress who feel their most important job is to sabotage the president.

But I digress.

My point is, that after I read that blog post about publishing articles, after I went into my funk and wasted time surfing the web and eating too many almonds--after that, I wrote a self-pitying screed in my journal. And after THAT, I wrote a list of possible articles I have. Then I queried one blog site. And called it a day.

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*In the Twittersphere somehow I came across this blog by Amy Gutman, Harvard grad and author, whom I met ten years ago, in a crunchy phase, at a weekend at the Kripalu Institute in Western Massachussetts. She's another creative person trying to figure out how to live well.

**I think it's time for me to let you know, my tens of readers, that you are more than tens now. Maybe dozens? Maybe more.

Mission Intuition: Find Your Principle-Centered Life

2012-01-23T09:52:00.000-05:00

Did you think I'd forgotten about Stephen Covey and his Habit #2, Begin With the End in Mind? Did you think I was skirting the mission statement exercise? Avoiding it? Hoping it would blow over?

I had not. I was not.

Okay, I admit it. I was having a problem with the Mission Statement. It really felt too enormous to tackle, especially during the holiday season, in any logical way.

Sometimes, though, my tens of readers, logic isn't the best way to get at a solution.

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What?

That's right, you Type A's. Sometimes you need to let a problem set awhile, sippin' a mint julep; sometimes you need to let the pot simmer; sometimes you gotta throw a question out there and trust the unconscious to gnaw on it awhile and eventually spit out an answer. Sometimes you have to mix a lotta metaphors.

(Previous paragraph to be read with a Southern accent.)

That is the way I roll. I'm a believer in letting intuition work on problems. When I write fiction, I often ponder my characters, plot, or themes right before I go to sleep. I may not wake up with a solution ready to write down, but usually something comes up that leads me onward in the story.

Over the last several weeks, while I narrowed my expectations to smaller goals, and tackled a few issues, I had the mission statement in the back of my mind. I was simply letting my brain work on the problem behind the scenes.

Part of what preoccupied me was New Year's Eve. How high school, right? But it weighed on me. I wanted to have people over, but was nervous about inviting them. I wanted to be invited somewhere, but no invitations were forthcoming. We've lived in this town for 2.5 years, and everyone has their circles of friends. We have two couples we're friends with, and one of them was away. (Sound of tiny violin, please...)

And then, it all happened. Someone invited us over for New Year's Day. This gave me courage to invite a new friend and her family to our house New Year's Eve, along with our old friends who were in town. And they came. And the 8th grader had two friends sleep over.

And we had fun at our house, and we had fun at the other people's house, and I felt like part of a community, and the word "hospitality" popped into my head, and I thought, yeah, hospitality is something I value. Extending it, and receiving it. Value it highly. Value. Mission statement.

So I had a little hook.

Hospitality links to something else: generosity. Whoever said it first was right, that unless you've experienced being unable to be generous to someone, you don't realize how important it is. Which I definitely felt, our first year here, when I felt like we were hanging by our fingertips over a precipice, our budget was so tight. And if you can't feel generous, you can't feel like part of a community, except as a poor relation.

Being part of a community reminded me that thanks to my phase channeling a Type A version of myself, I had this nice chart of all the activities I was trying to do. It really needn't be so difficult to come up with values and principles. After all, the things we spend our time doing are the things we value, whether we like it or not.

So here's my chart, which mentions community right near the top. It shows me that along with community, I value my children, my marriage, fitness of mind and body, and writing/ work.

Add hospitality and generosity to that, and I think it'll do. I can move on to Habit #3.

So what's your list?

If You Don't Have This, You'll Never Feel Successful

2012-01-18T08:39:00.001-05:00

What is it?

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Healthy self-esteem, my tens of readers.

That's right. Odious subject.

I'm not talking about giving ribbons and trophies to everyone on the soccer team and not keeping score to build self-esteem. I'm talking about--

Well, what the hell AM I talking about?

Merriam-Webster online defines it as "a confidence and satisfaction in oneself."

Huh? These words are nonsensical and also make no sense to me.

Thank God, my sister the psychoanalyst emailed me. She had this to say:

As for self-esteem, I guess it's basically how you feel about yourself. There could be global self-esteem - your overall feelings/ evaluation of yourself, or more domain specific self-esteem (I'm a good musician). Healthy self-esteem would be positive feelings about oneself that aren't fully dependent upon external feedback or events ....

You see, one day when I was talking to her about success, she had this insidious point: that some people will never feel successful, no matter how much they accomplish, because of their early nurturing.

Because of their early nurturing. SOME people. Faulty nurturing. Well, she IS a psychoanalyst.

Do you think she meant me? (Motherless child. Cinderella identifier.)

But instead of me, let's consider some perfectionists I know who admit to never feeling satisfied with anything they do, except perhaps for a fleeting moment.

Of course, all moments are fleeting. So why complain? At least they have flashes of success-feel. Maybe that's all we get.

No, no, no, of course not. As my sister the psychoanalyst points out, there's global self-esteem and domain-specific.

So global would be just generally feeling pretty good about your self-worth.
And domain-specific is, well, specific to a domain. Like, I'm good at math. (Actually, I'm not; not terrible, but not great.)

Seems like domain specific self-esteem is linked to self-confidence. Self-confidence being something you can build by baby steps--small wins--measurable, point-to-able achievements. Like learning long division. These things build confidence and confidence beefs up your self--esteem.

But you can be confident of your mathematical abilities and still have low self esteem.

So the global part, just feeling overall (or underneath it all) that you're a decent person deserving of as much good as is possible in this vale of tears, is the more amorphous self-esteem. Self-esteem that isn't dependent on finding an agent and publishing a book and getting on some kind of list somewhere for something. Self-esteem that doesn't need a mirror to tell you you're beautiful.

Without that, it can be impossible to enjoy the fruits of your labors, your achievements, your successes. Thus, you can be extremely successful in others' opinions, but not FEEL successful yourself.

And thus concludes my diversion into self-esteem.

That Darned Mission Statement*

2012-01-11T12:57:00.000-05:00

My left eyelid has been twitching intermittently for two days. Is it the lice? Is it the husband being on call again?

Following up on my last post, I was going to talk about self esteem, only oh my God is that subject so boring and 1980s and eye-roll provoking. Also, I wanted to ask my sister the psychoanalyst to define it for me. I could just look it up, Google it, even go to the library, but I want to talk to my sister about it because she's an excellent psychoanalyst and will explain it to me in terms a layperson can understand.

Which isn't me, because I consider myself an honorary psychoanalyst, considering how many books I've read, and how many hours I've spent in therapy.

Okay, never in actual psychoanalysis, but only because I refused to lie down on the couch, and refused for so long that my shrink agreed it was probably better for me to have eye contact with her.

The real reason I want to talk to my sister about this is because I will feel so aware of my deficiencies afterwards. She's smart, and she has a career that pays her money.

And then she can tell me more about my two-and-a-half year old nephew and how he still insists on wearing this one shirt and one pair of shorts every single time he leaves the house, even though it's 2012, winter, January, and this has been going on since at least last April when I visited.

And it's not so then I can try to raise my self esteem by feeling smug because my little children didn't do that craziness when they were my nephew's age. After all, they had their own little crazy happening. The 8th grader, when she was two-and-a-half, responded to every well-intentioned stranger who asked her name that she was "Dudley" (the pig from Richard Scarry), held up her hands and added, "and these are my trotters." Which scared more than one grocery checkout clerk. The 4th grader, when she was four, wanted me to draw a cat nose and whiskers on her face every morning for months and months.

And I did.

I'm that kind of mom.

And so is my sister.

Which is why after she defines self-esteem for me and we recognize the roots of why I have none and I berate myself for becoming a writer instead of something more defined and lucrative like a psychoanalyst, I will feel relieved that my children are now much more reasonable critters than her little boy.

And then I will remember the lice.

So I hope she calls me back soon.

* And I've really been thinking about Stephen Covey's Habit #2, Start with the End in Mind, and have been pondering my Mission Statement. And eventually I will get there, so hang in with me, my tens of readers. It's just that my head has been so itchy.

Bonus: can you identify the store that shopping bag came from?

Keep Swimming

2012-01-04T15:05:00.002-05:00

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I'm feeling a little blue today, and it's not just because the 4th grader has lice.

Nor is it because I've cheated on my New Year's resolutions, because I haven't.

Nor is it because I'm fundamentally unhappy. I don't cut myself or take antidepressants or self-medicate in any particular way. (Check out Betsy Lerner or The Bloggess for more on those types of unhappiness. Though they have hundreds, if not thousands, of followers and readers, so why are they kvetching?)

It's certainly not because of my new iPhone4s. I love my iPhone4s. But even the iPhone4s can't keep a person feeling happy and successful. Besides, Siri got confused about which number to text the husband on when she discovered I had our NYC home phone number plugged into the Home slot on my contacts. So I had to delete it. Maybe that's why I'm a little blue. I had that number for 6 years. I didn't want to give it up. Who knows if I'll ever get a 212 area code again.

Okay, it might have something to do with the lice, because lice are a real bummer. If you haven't had to deal with lice, just pray you don't ever have to. Naturally, the 4th grader came to me with her itchy head just moments after the pediatrician's office had closed for the day yesterday. So I was left with my old remedy, the one I used on the 8th grader when she was in 1st grade. When I spent 27 hours picking nits out of her hair.

(Incidentally, if I were living in NYC still, I'd be sitting in the crowded home of the Orthodox Jewish Lice Lady, paying her whatever she asked for to pick the nits out of my child's head. But since I know of no Lice Lady in this area, it was Hellman's and Glad wrap and my Licemeister metal nit picking comb.)

Which meant I spent this morning washing the mayo out of her hair, and then going through it with the Licemeister. The pediatrician told me there's a new prescription lice killing product that "makes the nits basically explode" that I can use if my routine doesn't work. If only the 4th grader had come to me a half hour earlier yesterday, we might have had some interesting fireworks over here. Alas.

Of course this wasn't all bad, because it gave me an excuse to watch (listen) to Finding Nemo, which is a great warning shout about overprotective parenting and the virtues of independence.

But it's not all about the lice.

It's about the pots I'm stirring. Stirring and stirring. And nothing is coming of it all. I mean, maybe something is in the works. But maybe not. My latest effort met with sort-of rejection. Not total rejection, but semi-rejection.

It's time for a win. It doesn't have to be huge. But it does have to be tangible.

I'm tired of stirring the pots. I wonder if--no, actually, I don't wonder, I know--writing is very poor career choice for a person like me.

I have low self-esteem.

Yup. Tiresome as it is for me, and for my nearest and dearest, I just do.

So I take rejection, or partial rejection pretty hard.

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I know I have to be all Chumbawumba and Japanese proverb about it. But it's exhausting.

I collect pep-talking friends and professionals around me who tell me if I keep on stirring, something will come of it. Except maybe it won't.

I'm not sure.

I am unsure.

Oh dear. Spiraling down. Administer gin and 70s pop music.

And remember dear, daffy Dory from the movie: Keep on swimming. And sometimes a short-term memory problem is just the solution. Forget those little bumps.

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Hey, Dory was blue, too.

Boddhisatva or What? S. Covey's Habit #2, Continued

2011-12-29T16:57:00.000-05:00

The ham was delicious. And huge. It weighed several pounds more than I was led to believe it would when I ordered it, and for a germaphobe vegetarian-at-heart like myself who has a touch-and-go relationship with meat, it presented a challenge. I did purchase it from a regionally famous butcher pre-cooked, cured, smoked, and shot through with some preservative that kept it looking pink. I probably could have gnawed on it in the back of the car.

Nevertheless, I was nervous about cooking it through. Or heating it through, to be precise. We were feeding a lot of people, including children, who were sleeping over. I didn't want any vomiting. So while everyone seemed to enjoy it, I really only fully appreciated it the morning after Christmas, when I woke up, and said my first words to the husband: "That ham was delicious, because nobody got sick." Happy Boxing Day.

***

Back to Effective slash Successful People's habits.
Still splashing around in Stephen Covey's Habit #2, Start with the End in Mind, I've avoided describing my funeral only to run smack into the instruction to write a mission statement for my life, so that I can direct myself towards those things that are in accord with my deepest principles.

Oy vey. Is that overwhelming or what? I decided to put off the task again.

So I took the dog for a walk, and decided to listen to a Zencast, which I hadn't done in a long time, on my brand new iPhone4S. Zencast was a talk by Jack Kornfield. Jack Kornfield was one of the first Americans to popularize Buddhism in the West starting in the 1970s. He's got a nasal voice, but he tells good stories. I like his talks, although he does repeat himself. Then again, so do I. Lo and behold, Jack started out talking about success. What it isn't: avoiding difficulties and suffering in life. As if experiencing these things is somehow shameful. Which is actually true. We do feel ashamed of our misfortunes, don't we?

And of course, he talked about meditation as a way to understand the nature of the suffering and misfortunes of life, as well as our reactions to them (avoidance), which often increase our suffering. But what he was really talking about was the purpose of meditation. First, to quiet the mind. To allow yourself to understand what's going on, in your own head, and in the world around you. To observe and understand that suffering and bad stuff happens as part of life, and so does plenty of good stuff.

Second, after understanding by observing your own mind, moving out into the world. That is, forming intentions. Am I in a funhouse or what? All these gurus keep telling me the same things. Anyway, he was speaking of intentions both micro and macro. Micro being taking a slight pause and observing your anger at your 4th grader for losing her purse with her cute panda wallet and fifty dollars, and also observing her quivering chin, before deciding how to respond. Macro being, you guessed it, understanding what's most important to you in life, your core values, your principles, so you can act in accordance to them.

Sound familiar?

And as he went along he mentioned that if you're meditating, you are on the path to enlightenment. Even if, I suppose, you're only doing it to lower your blood pressure and keep your stress at bay, you're at least on the path. And somewhere along the path, some people take the Boddhisatva vow, which is to strive for enlightenment for the purpose of helping other sentient beings become enlightened.

Which brings Jack, and me, and you, my tens of readers, right back into the stream of finding the purpose and motivating principles of our lives. "Wherever you go, there you are," as Buckaroo Bonzai said.

Why does it seem so hard? That I listen to Zencast and read these books and take an interest in these questions of purpose and principles shows me something. A couple of things. One, I know I'm not so unique in these interests. There are lots of people like me who want to consider these deeper questions, at least on some level; but we're just as happy talking to Siri on our new iPhone4s or rushing to the outlets on December 26th with the MIL and the SIL for some major bargains.

Another thing I begin to see is that my reluctance isn't about some hangup in myself about facing my deeper values. It's about a sense I have that this is a shameful or embarrassing activity. That there's something silly or New Age or creepy clammy-handed about being interested in a greater purpose. And if I think that, lots of other people do, too. So while we all might have this hankering for a deeper understanding, we also have this reluctance to say it out loud.

Why is it more embarrassing to say I'd like to cultivate my understanding, compassion, and wisdom so I can make choices that improve the world, starting with my nearest and dearest relations, through my good intentions, than to say that my iPhone4s makes me happy? Which it certainly does.

Maybe you can answer that question, my tens of readers.

What's Success Got to Do With It?

2011-12-21T06:59:00.002-05:00

http://www.panoramacitync.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/SeasonsGreetings.jpg

Honestly, I’m far too scattered to share anything profound. I'm thinking in lists, not paragraphs, in small units, not abstractions. Hanukkah, Christmas--Christhanakwanzika, as the DJson 92.3 FM refer to the festivities that have engulfed me—have engulfed me.

What’s a nice Jewish girl to do? Drive two hours for a ham,what else?

And an hour for the 8^th grader to spend somequality time with her bestest friend, which is what happens if your child goesto private school and not to the local public school.

And soak the glasses, mugs and cutlery in avinegar-dishsoap-water mixture to remove the hard-water rime from them.

And go to CVS threetimes, each time forgetting the annual Toblerone for the husband’sstocking.

And hand-grate the potatoes for the latkes because thegrater attachment for the Cuisinart is broken—which I forgot, since the onlytime I use that attachment is to make latkes, and the only time I make latkesis once a year.

Last year, I made so many latkes it was wondrous. And then,two weeks after Hanukkah, which must have been Christmas, I opened up the ovento put in something (the goose?) and discovered a full platter of gorgeouslybrowned two week old latkes.

Reader, I ate them.

http://weblogs.cw11.com/news/local/morningnews/blogs/IMAGES/FOOD1219B.jpg

Okay, no, I didn’t. But it hurt to throw them out.

This is a week for scaling back the idea of success to smallgoals:

Doa few minutes of yoga every morning so you don’t turn into a two week old latkethat crumbles instead of bends.

Rememberthe Toblerone.

Rememberthe new Aerobed.

Rememberthe needy (and I’m not speaking of myself here, my tens of readers)

Drivethe Prius to the ham and the bestest friend and use the time for some isometric abdominal exercises, since there is no time for the gym.

Walkthe dog for some nice, fresh, suburban air and wonder, dispassionately, if this will be the year the tree falls over. It's listing to the left, just a little.

And let me pass on my accountant’s take on success, since she shared it with me and the husband yesterday: Thatsuccess is doing what makes you happy.

What are your scaled back goals for the holiday season?

Guess What Stephen Covey Suggests?

2011-12-14T11:35:00.002-05:00

http://contrarianinconsistent.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/contradiction-1.png

Okay, I hate to beat a point home, but I've gotta take this one on. Last week, I wrote about visualizing your funeral, one of the first excercises to develop Stephen Covey's Habit #2 of Highly Effective People.

After you do that, he's got another "little" exercise -writing a mission statement for your life. For your life, people. Or for your corporation, if you're a honcho. Or for your family. A mission statement is something like a personal constitution, laying out your ground rules for a PC life. (Remember, that's principle-centered, not politically correct.) It's a bit challenging, to say the least, which is why I'm on page 144 of the book, and I've only gotten through two habits.

There's a lot of humdededumdee and howdydo in this chapter about proper principles and so on, and many examples of fine mission statements written by people who have a lot of time and ability to think deep thoughts. (This book came out in the mid-nineties, by the way, when we apparently were able to think a little more deeply and a little more linearly than we are now, in these multi-tasking days.)

I won't bore you with the mission statement details. At least not today. Because my attention was caught by this subsection: Visualization and Affirmation.

Yes, my tens of readers, affirmation and visualization. As in using positive language and imagery to imagnine attaining your goals. Where have I read this before? Where have I not read this in my exhaustive scan of the success literature?

Now, Mr. Covey is clear that there's a big difference between his use of affirmations and its use by other self-helpers. They buy into the "Personality Ethic" of transformation, while he espouses the "Character Ethic."

Personality Ethic types are "outside in" believers, like Dale Carnegie.* You act like you wanna feel, and soon you get yourself into the habit.

Character Ethic types are--well, Mr. Covey puts himself into a different class than everyone else. Of course he does, because he's deeply invested in his point of view--and he has some books to sell and speeches to make for which he wants some compensation. But anyhoo, his idea is to change yourself from the inside-out. Working from your principles.

And here we run into our little overlap. So he suggests engaging your creativity in figuring out your deepest principles and how to put them into words.

And he suggests using affirmations. His are different--of course they are (!) But they are still affirmations. A good affirmation contains 5 components: it's personal; it's positive; it's present tense; it's visual; and it's emotional.

So here's the thing. While Covey says that affirmations are a very strong and useful tool for transformation when used to "become more congruent with my deeper values in my daily life," and while he suggests than anyone who uses affirmations for the crude and valueless purpose of attaining riches is misusing them, he doesn't say it doesn't work to use affirmations and visualization to do so. He just suggests his readers would be above using positive visualization and affirmations to accrue said riches.

A nod to my former stompin' grounds via Teropongskop.blogspot.com

And then I checked my Twitter feed and found this article from Forbes.com. It's about research "testing the mettle of self-help platitudes." Apparently positive visualization can actually trick your brain into thinking you've succeeded, causing you to relax, and your ambition to abate. Which is a bummer, because it says right out that "the more pressing the need to succeed, the more deflating positive visualization becomes." Not only that, but it makes you less energetic, at a time when you need energy to fuel your ambition. You'd in fact be just as well off daydreaming.

But fear not, my tens of readers! There is a plus side here. Positive visualization works wonders for relaxing you and calming you down. So you don't have to feel so sucky about your failures.

There is also a caveat. Yes, really! The researchers says that "critical evaluation" may do the trick. Instead of visualizing the moment you win the Noble Prize, for example, visualize problems you may encounter along the way and visualize overcoming them.

And now I have to admit that that is exactly (okay, not exactly, but similar to) what Mr. Covey says. Use your affirmation, which you've crafted with care, and then visualize situations where you might need help. Like dealing with a difficult child. Or a troubling situation at work.

Or turning down those vats of money that you ordered up in your previous, poorly-chosen affirmations.

* See, now Buddha was a bit of an "outside in" kind of guy. He suggested that if you're feeling blue, try smiling, because the act of moving your muscles into the smile will remind your brain about those happier emotions connected with smiling. And research has born this out. And anyway, who is going to impugn Buddha? He knew a thing or two.

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Why Habit #2 Might Kill You; But if it Doesn't, You'll Be Stronger

2011-12-07T10:44:00.001-05:00

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You're at a funeral. You're looking at a satin-lined box. It's open, or it's closed. Inside is a body made up to look like a facsimile of the living person it once was. Or maybe you're looking at an urn, or some kind of black box, filled with cremated remains.

The funeral home is filled. The service hasn't begun. You listen in on conversations. Vague murmurs begin to disturb you. You hear a familiar name. An organ begins to play. Family files in. You know these people. The minister or rabbi or imam or funeral home presider assumes position. You have a strange, disembodied feeling, and then you understand.

It's your funeral.

Yep, that's right. Stephen Covey wants you to imagine your own funeral.

Habit #2 of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is Begin with the End in Mind.

Your end.

Macabre? Perhaps. Oddly satisfying? Maybe. Disquieting? Uh-huh, sure.

But to achieve Habit #2, you gotta.

He wants you to not only picture your funeral, but also to imagine each speaker.

Pick a family member, a friend, someone from work, and someone from a religious or community organization with which you're involved and imagine the things each of these people say about you.

Write your own freakin' eulogy, even.

Now, I'm not going to tell you about my funeral. Not that I'm shy, exactly. Not even that I'm aware it would be extremely boring to read. But because shades of my junior year abroad at Oxford waft over me. I actually did imagine my funeral. Or close to it--my death bed, with all my bestest buddies and some family ranged around me, all telling me they loved me and being generally devasted by my demise.

Just a little depressive, okay possibly suicidal, reaction to leaving my familiar terrain, all my friends, and a boyfriend so that I could live in a basement room and write essays about English Lit.

Actually, the year was great overall. That first term, though. Ugh.

Why do this?

Well, my tens of readers, the reason is that by so doing, by engaging your imagination and your conscience in this exercise, you will uncover the values and principles that matter most to you.

And also because Stephen Covey says that if you do this, you will have defined success. He says it right on p. 98. "If you carefully consider what you wanted to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success."

I am telling you, I may not get through this step. I mean, shouldn't I just look for a job?

But wait. If I do this exercise, I will get something much better than a job. I will get a PC life.

That's right. A PC life. PC as in "principle-centered," not as in "politically correct." And a PC life is much better than your basic money-seeking, self-centered life.

According to Stephen Covey.

And here may be the root of my problem. I suspect that I don't have any values or principles.

Also, I have a certain skepticism about what people say at funerals being the unvarnished truth about the deceased. I mean, it's usually pretty varnished. I mean, think of Tom Sawyer and how he got talked about at his faux funeral. Everyone in town suddenly weeping all over themselves when just days before all they wanted was to hide and tan a little piece of that rapscallion. How could I trust my imaginary funeral-goers to tell the truth? Wouldn't they be varnishing me? And since it is all in my mind anyway, wouldn't I be varnishing myself?

Um. Yes, I do see my flawed logic.

Okay, look, having spoken to various professionals at various times in my life, I am aware that I am avoiding something here that might actually be fruitful.

So if you'll do it, I'll do it. At any rate, I'll keep on trucking through Covey's book. Because, gosh darn it, I want to be "effective."

Habit #1 in Action: Read My Lips

2011-11-30T09:04:00.001-05:00

Last Year's Song: Walking On Sunshine Glee Mash-Up

The 4th grader's school has a lip sync concert every year.

Yes, I agree, it's like some weird caricature of suburbia: a lip sync concert; but it happens.

This is our third year here, and our third concert. I wasn't going to let the 4th grader be in it this year because the last two, the concert happened on the same night (of course) as her older sister's Science and Learning Fair at her totally different school, and which was a much more worthwhile endeavor (shhh, don't tell the 4th grader.) Plus also, as Junie B. Jones might say, there were like three months of rehearsing the lip sync routines, which was a nightmare of coordination.

But this year, they've moved the concert up to the end of January, making rehearsal time much shorter, and eliminating the conflict with the 8th grader's Learning Fair.

So I let her do it.

Which means the wrangling over song choice began for her. Oh, and the ducking of responsibility/refusing to be the parent rep for me.

I think I mentioned that the 4th grader has this friend, a sort-of minx-in-training, a queen bee wanna be? Anyway, the kid is pushy, not just with her friends, but with adults, too. This gets on my nerves. She was in a different class than my child last year, and we didn't see her much, but they ended up together this year, and the merriment began again. I've decided that the best way to cement this friendship would be to admit to any negative feelings about the kid, so I suck it up and wait for time to take its course.

Anyhoo, the wrangling over song choice involved my 4th grader and Pushy Girl canvassing others in the group about their choices. Everyone agreed on something called "Bang, Bang, Bang," except one girl. I was already up to the neck hearing about the ins and outs of the songs by then, but they agreed that since one girl didn't like the song, they'd pick another one. I was pretty sure "Bang, Bang, Bang," was going to turn out to be inappropriate (just a hunch, based on, gee, I'm not sure what?--the title?) anyway, but I would let the parent rep, whoever she might be (I heard rumors it was my neighbor) put the kibosh on it.

I said, Why don't make up a ballot with your top few choices, have everyone get together at recess, and vote?

I then had to explain what a ballot is--even though she'd come with me to vote in our recent town elections-- but hey, teachable moment. I didn't mention chads.

The 4th grader thought this was a good idea, and told Pushy Girl. This was on a Friday.

On Monday or Tuesday evening, Pushy Girl called. I hear the 4th grader saying, "Oh, okay. Uh-huh," etc. Not sounding happy. She hangs up and reports, "I guess the song is Price Tag."

Well, I rather like "Price Tag," but clearly the developing red eye rims and puckering chin on the 4th grader indicated she was not so happy with that choice. She said that, according to Pushy Girl, all the other girls had decided on that song, so that was the song.

Have I mentioned I'm an Aries?

Have I mentioned Habit #1 of Highly Effective People?

Have I mentioned that I find Pushy Girl annoying?

The husband and I looked at each other.

I said something along the lines of, Well, if you don't like the song, why don't you speak up? After all, when that other girl didn't like the song, you all chose another one?

Shrugs. Fatalistic commentary like, They all chose this one and so that's the one they want to do. Tears. The 4th grader is not one to express her emotions unless under duress; she's a swallower, not a blurter, so the tears were particularly heart-wringing.

Me: You have a couple choices here. You can go along with the song. You can quit Lip Sync. Or you can speak up for yourself and say you don't like the song, that you thought you were going to vote on the song, and that it hurt your feelings that they made this decision without you.

Lots of talk ensued, with the husband and I convincing her it was right to speak up. Most important, I felt, was that she tell Pushy Girl that she didn't like being treated this way--going behind her back, not listening to her suggestion about the ballot, etc. So this took a fair amount of time. Several minutes. Several looonnnngggg minutes.

Finally the 4th grader, definitely nervous, got a piece of paper and wrote down what she wanted to say. Then she called up Pushy Girl and said her piece.

I'd like to say that everything went swimmingly. At first, the 4th grader sounded a little wobbly; but when she met some resistance, she restated herself loudly and clearly. Not fair to decide without her. Wanted to do a ballot vote on Monday after Thanksgiving. If "Price Tag" won by ballot vote, she would go along with it.

Of course, Pushy Girl doesn't like to be talked back to. In truth, neither does the 4th Grader. The conversation settled into a rut: vote by ballot vs. "Price Tag" by fiat.

After about ten minutes, maybe fifteen, I decided enough was enough. Trench warfare wasn't required. Parental intervention was. I asked to speak to Pushy Girl's mother. I said that the girls were having a tough time deciding on the song, that my child was suggesting they vote with a ballot on Monday, etc, etc. Pushy Girl's mom agreed readily. End of conversation.

Then I contacted the mom I thought had agreed to be the parent in charge of the lip sync group. She confirmed, and said she'd already nixed all the girls' song choices because of bad language or raunchy content, that she was going through Disney songs on YouTube, and the girls could listen to a couple of them, and vote by ballot on Monday after Thanksgiving.

On Monday morning, the 4th grader wrote up her ballot, including the songs suggested by the parent rep.

Monday afternoon, she came home, delighted to note that they'd voted, and that NO ONE had voted for "Price Tag." (If the significance of this escapes you, my tens of readers, don't worry; it took me a minute to note she thought this meant a score for her against Pushy Girl.) I said nothing. I think that was wise. I thought it might be a score for Disney.

So they'll be performing to "Dancing Crazy" by Miranda Cosgrove on Jan. 27th at the town middle school.

I don't feel so bad about the concert now, since the 4th Grader has had a Learning Experience. That's as worthwhile as the 8th Grader's Learning Fair. I'm just going to buy whatever costume I'm told to buy for her, insert ear plugs, sit back, and enjoy the show.

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Highly Effective Habit # 1: Be Proactive

2011-11-22T11:55:00.001-05:00

After my last post, I was all set to make fun of my next book's title, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey, because, who is he kidding? He's saying "effective," but meaning "Successful," and success means.....etc., etc., etc. Please see my previous post, etc, etc, and we are simply talking in euphemisms.

That was going to be the gist of my argument. Except a couple of my tens of readers, the husband and my faithful reader Scrollwork,* commented that I seemed to have overlooked a wee part of the dictionary's definition of success. The part of the definition that says that success, n., is the achievement of intention; the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.

Hmm. Well, yes, now that I look a little more closely, I have to admit they are right. And that this definition does not actually have anything to do with wealth, status, or money per se. That I overlooked this aspect of the definition says a lot more about my mindset than anything else, I suppose. Or about my reading comprehension skills.

So I am forced to face up to Stephen R. Covey and his 7 Habits and not make fun of his so-called euphemism. I am forced to admit that Effective can actually be a synonym for Successful. And I am forced to examine more than the title of this book, which several reputable people who aren't at all pretentious have recommended to me.

Why make fun of it in the first place, you might ask? It is an international bestsellar, after all.

Why? Because I'm intimidated, of course.

This is one of those daunting books that say, Look, here are 7 simple rules for being successful, and all you have to do is all this scary stuff about evaluating yourself and your behavior and your values and your principles, your goals, your motivations, your psychological hangups, and pretty much everything else that your life has been carefully constructed to obscure -- and you have no chance of really understanding without therapy.

But it costs about $16 plus tax, and one session with a paid professional is at least 10 times that, so--might as well give it a shot.

Habit #1: Be Proactive

Be pro-active, as opposed to re-active. Take charge of your behavior. Don't let things happen to you because you are passive.

This habit is about concentric circles...

http://www.ansci.umn.edu/dairy/dinews/10-1circle.jpg

Your circle of concern is all the stuff that is on your mind, and the smaller circle is the stuff over which you have some control. So you worry about global warming, but you can't control that. What you can do is drive less and walk more. Or you worry that you're going to get all flabby and old and wrinkly and then die; but what you can do is starve yourself, get Botox, and exercise like hell. And eventually die.

So focus on today (Geesh, this sounds familiar), and what you can do today to further your goals. Like make that appointment for that Botox.

Some things within your Circle of Influence: yourself; being happy; being a good listener; admitting mistakes; setting goals and following through.

Some things within your Circle of Concern: the weather; mistakes; other people's flaws and annoying habits.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_n1To8vzATCw/TS8d4U3etcI/AAAAAAAAAsg/w2pAiXZblWY/s1600/flood%2B001.jpg

Covey has a nice coda to his chapter, a little lesson about a stick. On p.21 he says, "'When we pick up one end of the stick, we pick up the other.'" He means that you can choose your response to a situation, but you can't choose the consequence. The consequence is outside our Circle of Influence. There's no way around this, he says. If you cut off the end of the stick, you've still got two ends, the one you're holding, and the other one, the consequence, that you can't control.

So this is a nice way to try to deal with control: that which you can control, that which you can't. The truth is that there's not too much you can actually control, beyond your own responses. (And some of those are involuntary.) Which realization is quite anxiety-provoking, don't you think?

And anxiety is at the root of it all, whether you're a nail-biter or a control freak. Anxiety is just another way of trying to control the uncontrollable, through such magical thinking as, If I worry obsessively about every single thing that could go wrong, then nothing will go wrong. But if I forget just one little thing, all bets are off.

So I'm afraid to say it, but the best thing to do here is to take deep breath and try to relax, then make a choice, and then another breath and another choice. That is within your Circle of Influence.

The good news, according to Covey, is that the more proactive you are in your life, the larger your Circle of Influence becomes.

http://www.womensownresource.org/rope/images

And also, if you have a dog, you can toss the stick to him, and he'll chew it to bits.

*Scrollwork, by the way, has an Etsy shop where she sells fantastical, "upcycled" clothes that, if I were 25 years younger and lived farther east, or south, or definitely west, I'd be happy to pair with some Dr. Martens and wear dancing.

Success, n.

2011-11-17T08:58:00.001-05:00

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Let’s be honest, I’ve gone over to the namby-pamby side of things, wheresuccess is called abundance and is defined in much the same way we talk abouthappiness or contentment. You know, success is whatever makes you feel good. Wealth is friends, family, feeling a little buzz about your place in the world. It’s been a little New-Age-y around here. A little sticky.

What is it with all this garbage about happiness and contentment? These areconsolation prizes, people, for if you happen to notice that while you’remeditating and chanting “ommmm” and smiling at people and giving them candy(did I say that? Is THAT what I want? Candy?) and everything, you haven’tactually gotten rich or famous or become highly prestigious.

These are the kinds of helpful thoughts that buzz around my head when I try to meditate. Or to work.

For some clarity, I headed to the dictionary. DidI mention I used to work in a library? That’s right. Even considered libraryschool, which has become way cooler over the last 20 years than it was when Itook one course and decided no, thanks. Still, I’m all about the reference books.

Besides, as any writer knows, when defining terms, youmight as well start at the dictionary.

So I started with my actual dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage (1969) that I seem to have lifted from the cooperative house Ilived in for five-and-a-half years in my 20s. No, that wasn’t the 1920s, thatwas MY 20s.

Success, n. 1. The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.2.a. The gaining of fame or prosperity. b. The extent of such gain. 3. One thatis successful. 4. Obsolete. Anyresult or outcome.

I ended up online, of course, where I looked up "success" in 30 dictionaries. Thirty dictionaries, which all said pretty much the samething, so I’ll quote you the Mirriam-Webster online definition, since we knowand trust the Mirriam-Webster name (although maybe not so much if you’ve takenReference Librarianship and know things like the 11^th edition of theEncyclopedia Brittanica was an extraordinary achievement, whereas the 15^thwas not.)

Success, n. 1. (obsolete) Outcome, result.

2.a.a degree or measure of succeeding. b. favorable or desired outcome; also theattainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

3. One thatsucceeds.

For thoroughness, I looked up succeed:

Succeed, intransitive verb.

1.a. to come next after another inoffice or position or in possession of an estate. b. to follow after another inorder.

2.a. to turn out well. b. to attaina desired object or end.

Transitive verb.

1. To follow in sequence andespecially immediately.

2. Come after as heir of successor.

Guess what? Not a single mention of abundance. All this talkabout “wealth” and “abundance” meaning something other than having money andachieving concrete stuff notwithstanding, the dictionary offers a pretty darndepressing reality check. Success means having money and achieving things thatother people have noticed you have achieved. I could have started and endedthis post with the Word tools dictionary:

Success

1. Achievement ofintention.

2. Attainment of fame, wealth, or power.

3. Something that turns outwell.

4. Somebody successful.

Bummer for me.

Can thirty dictionaries be wrong? I mean, is there a way around those key words like fame, wealth, power, achievement?

http://agsblingblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/confusion.jpg

Well, my tens of readers, of course there is. There has to be. And I think--yes, I think I'm pulling out of my slough of despond--and I can see it.

The dictionary is concerned with the standard definition of success, but most of the successful people I've talked to don't concern themselves with that one. They are, all of them, much more concerned with the day-to-day pursuit of their goals than with the glorious proofs of their attainment. They're more about quality of life, and about purpose than about the fruits of their labors. And if that's how the obviously successful people define success, why should poor slobs like me be any different?

And that brings me back to where I began, really: finding out what makes people feel successful. After all, as my sister the psychoanalyst told me, you can be one of those people who achieves a great deal, but who, because of your psychology, is incapable of feeling good about any of it.

Who wants to live like that?

Phew, that was a close call. I almost had to shut down this whole operation.

Navel Gazing to Find Success

2011-11-09T16:12:00.000-05:00

Immersing myself in all these books about Success has actually been helpful in some ways. All their talk about wishes and desires and intentions has freed me from a certain amount of guilt. They’ve allowed me to pursuesome things I was already sort-of pursuing in a guilt-riddenbecause-they’re-not –leading-to-employment-and-money-earning-half-assed-way.

Like napping. Just 20 minutecatnaps. I’ve always taken those, since college. Even at my library job. Mycolleagues more than once caught me with keyboard impressions on my cheeks sometime in the early afternoon.

Or like meditating, which I’ve mentioned before.

http://blogs.mcgill.ca/iss/files/2011/01/navelGazing1.jpg

But one thing keeps coming up in these books that I’ve really had a hard time wrapping my mindaround. It's this whole asking God or the universe or your subconscious for what you want phenomenon. Whether it’s affirmationsor afformations or writing a list of your intentions and desires, I just can’tquite get my mind around it.

First, how specific should this list be? Is this list meant to include new headphones for myiPod? Because I do need those. I can only hear Pink from one speaker, and that’snot cutting it at the gym.

Second, is the list meant to be abstract, in which case it ought to be wholly altruistic? Peaceloveandunderstanding and all that.

Third, there are complexities to the wholewishing/desiring/intention thing.

For example, is there a zero-sum calculation at work here where if I wishto publish an article in a major magazine, then one of my children will be hitby a car. Because I DIDN’T wish for my family’s health and happiness?

What about wishing forsomething that has ramifications you don’t understand at the time? Think Sibylof Cumae: she wished for immortality, but forgot to wish to stay young forever;so she shriveled up into an ever more wrinkly and elderly old woman; furthermore, she was doomed to constantly lose her loved ones because sheforgot to wish for their immortality, too.

I used to wish for wisdom. Yep. That was me, the practical-mindedteenager. I wanted wisdom. I wanted to be one of those old people at whose knee young people sit and ask for advice. Later, I thought, why did I waste time wishing forthat? I ought to simply have wished for health and happiness. Those make for amore comfortable life.

So the wishing/desiring/intention-planting becomes thisthing. Like a birthday wish. Youknow, make a wish and blow out the candles. It seems simple.

But what if you don’t blow out all the candles and youwished for something specific and particular that you really, really want, like David Bowieto kiss you, and then you have to face your disappointment? (Okay, that was aloo—oo-nng time ago.) You don't want to risk that.

So then you wish anodyne wishes: you wish for world peace, say. Something faultless but also impossible. If your wish comes true, then great, you helped; but if it doesn't, no one will blame you. Meanwhile, you get brownie points (with whom, you might ask, sinceI’m pretty much an atheist—but I never claim to be rational) for yourbenevolence towards humanity.

Fourth, what do all these lists have to do with success? By now I've forgotten, caught up in this rather self-serving exploration. Luckily, one of my successful old friends hasn't, and he contacted me, and suggested that perhaps my entire line of reasoning here has been misguided.

Okay, he didn't actually say that. What he did suggest is that success is about setting an impossible goal, a goal that has nothing to do with personal enrichment but with doingsomething or making something that improves the world a little bit.

Damn idealists. They always make you look up from your navel.

His is an interesting suggestion, though. To make sure youalways have something to strive for, to inspire you, to occupy your time (andto prevent excessive navel-gazing), choose a goal you can never fully achieve.Even though you'll know you’re never going to succeed, you’ll always be able toplace stumbles and achievements in perspective. Best of all, you'll always have something to occupy you.

Besides your navel, my tens of reader, as fascinating as it is.

Don't F**k With a Bus and Other Rules for Successful Living

2011-11-04T10:02:00.006-04:00

In high school one of my best friends, Maude, taught me two rules for driving that I've never forgotten. The first is self-explanatory, or it should be. It's the second that interests me today.

1. Don't f**k with a bus.

2. Look where you want to go, and you will automatically steer the car there.

Maude, as a few of my tens of readers know, was (is) delicate, small-boned, had the neatest cursive for a lefty and possibly ever, and a mouth like a sailor.

Maude's father taught her to drive, and she passed this one on to me. (#1 was entirely her own, I hasten to add.) Which was good, because my father taught me to drive, too. This meant we went over to the Walt Whitman High School parking lot and I drove around in circles while my dad white-knuckled both the door armrest and the back of the seat. After completing a few circuits, he congratulated me, and I, who was unused to praise of any kind, forthwith drove into the chainlink fence.

After that, I went to driving school.

Look where you want to go, and you will automatically steer the car there.

Miraculously, this works.

If you concentrate on the nose of your car, you can't see anything else. If you focus on the road right in front of the nose of your car, you become over-aware of the micro-adjustments you need to make to steer, which can scare you with the unpleasant realization that you're operating a potential weapon of destruction and you can't possibly imagine you can make it do what you want. You might freeze. Or drive into a fence.

However, if you look ahead, towards the curve you're approaching, not too far, but not too close, your hands know how to get the wheel in the right position. Your brain takes over and your hands respond. All those things you need kick in, like depth perception, and the sense of the road, and the instinct for when to apply the brake and when to let up, and you just flow.

Hey, this is the United States of America, where car and road metaphors have a long and prominent precedent.

And this is my homily for today.

http://pre.cloudfront.goodinc.com/posts/full_1309199215curvyroad.jpg

Implementing Chopra's Seven Spiritual Laws of Success

2011-10-31T12:20:00.002-04:00

Okay, so last post I reached the unspoken word count limit and I promised I'd give you the rundown on how to implement Deepak Chopra's seven laws next time.

Ready?

Meditate, spend time in silence daily, commune with nature.
Focus on the moment, let go of worry. How? Meditate, spend time in silence daily, commune with nature.
Give people stuff, particularly stuff you want. (!)
Make a list of your desires and intentions and keep it in mind, but remember not to micro-manage their implementation. Affirmations, anyone?
Find your dharma: ask yourself, Self, what would I do if I didn't have to worry about getting paid? And, Self, how can I do that thing such that it helps people?

I assume one can construe that last answer broadly. For example, a blog, perhaps, might be of help to some people. It's not necessarily that you have to help little old ladies cross the street, or cure diabetes.

Okay, got it? Easy-peasy?

http://www.dreamyoga.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/monkey-meditation.jpg

The thing is, all this talk about success or abundance notwithstanding, what Deepak Chopra, and a lot of these other people I've been reading, are really talking about is How to Live.

I mean, if you do everything Chopra suggests-- meditate for 30 minutes TWICE A DAY; spend ONE HOUR in silence, which you multitaskers can combine with COMMUNING WITH THE NATURAL WORLD; figure out WHAT YOU CAN GIVE to people you encounter, even something as small as a flower (and, this writer wonders if perhaps her presence might count on occasion as a gift?); DISCOVERING YOUR DHARMA & it's BENEFIT TO HUMANKIND-- you don't really have time for much else. Like worrying. Like noticing that you've not received a paycheck recently. Like making sure your children have brushed their teeth. Your day, my tens of readers, is full.

The thing is, I've been meditating off and on for over a decade now, and I have to say that when I'm in a meditating phase, I feel much happier than when I'm not. I don't know why exactly. There's something about being in a state of panic because you think your fridge is broken and you just spent your last penny on a house, for example, and then you sit down and make yourself focus on breathing in and out and you're able to notice, for maybe a second, that while you're sitting there, with your fancy Australian Labradoodle perplexed beside you, nothing has exploded, flooded, or collapsed on or near you, and for at least this inhalation and that exhalation, you and your loved ones are okay.

So, inner eye on the future, planting your wish list, outer eye on the moment and breathing. Heck, my tens of readers, success is really easy to obtain. Even I have it, on occasion, for a moment.

Get busy!

Deepak Chopra Tells Us How to Succeed

2011-10-25T18:53:00.000-04:00

Deepak Chopra's written a lot of books, given a lot of talks, and he tweets a lot, too. He's an active purveyor of the secrets of Abundance (aka, success, wealth, and happiness). Before he became this guru, however, he was a long time student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, better known as the dude who started Transcendental Meditation. And he was once a doctor, too, although since he's acquired so much Abundance, I doubt he practices medicine anymore.

According to his website, Dr. Deepak Chopra has written over 60 books. I've read one, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, which turned out to be a condensed version of a different book of his, so I feel totally confident that I have a full understanding of his teachings. Which I will pass along to you, my tens of readers.

Why? Well, I actually found his book quite compelling.

I'd have to characterize it as Buddhism Lite--or Hinduism Lite, since he was born in Delhi, or was it New Delhi? Or maybe it's just New Age. Anyway, at the very least it's well-written, even if he does crib from Florence Scovel Shinn.

In brief, the 7 Laws are:

Underneath it all, we are pure consciousness or "pure potentiality,"

so if we get in touch with that universal energy, we can channel it for our purposes.

Giving.

This is pretty clear. Have to give to get. Give and take keeps abundance circulating. And, the kicker--you have to give what you want to receive. So, you want money? Got to give to get, baby.

Karma, or cause and effect.

Your choices affect you and those around you, so make them for their benefit as well as your own and you create good karma.
What to do if you've inherited a lot of bad luck (karma)? Well, learn from the bad stuff and try to make good choices as mentioned in previous sentence, so that you nullify the bad effects of previous bad, um, effects.

Least Effort.

Meaning to stop struggling against yourself or the world. When you live "in harmony," your efforts flow and so does good old abundance.

Intention and Desire.

I've talked about this in a previous post. The idea is you plant your seed of intention in your mind (in your pure consciousness, that is), and let it sprout and bloom.
This is right out of Buddhist dharma talks I've read in Thich Nat Han and others: that our minds possess the seeds of all possible emotions, and that the ones we water with our attention are the ones that grow.
So if you're all negative and grumpy and water those seeds, you develop your negativity and grumpiness; but if you cultivate happiness and gratitude, then, well then you become an annoying Pollyanna. But I've seen that movie, and really, she was so hard to take, because life really laid the s**t on her.

Sorry, I digressed.

Detachment.

This is actually also very fundamental to Buddhism. It means here that you plant your seed of your intent: for success at whatever your endeavor is--and then you let go of trying to control the way it comes about.
No micro-managing allowed. You must plant your wish, then allow it to come to fruition at the right time in the right way. Breathe.

And finally,

Dharma. Which here means purpose in life.

Which here means that once you listen to your true self (how to do that follows) and discover what your unique talent is, you pursue that.
And according to Deepak Chopra, we each have a special and unique something. So we find that something, and align it with our deepest wish. And all will be well and abundance will flow.

Wait, I forgot to mention one thing: this dharma has to be used in service to others in order to create real abundance in your life.

Wow. that's a lot of info there, my tens of readers. And I didn't even get to it all. Like how to implement these laws. Phew. Tune in next time, when I add my three cents to my two cents. And get: Abundcents.

Ouch!

How We Do It with Success

2011-10-17T10:19:00.000-04:00

One of my high school classmates told me, "You have to talk about the unspoken working mother--at home mother divide." This classmate starred in a couple of movies, then focused on raising kids, while staying behind the scenes and helping her husband's company in the entertainment industry. She said it's prevalent or conspicuous in her childrens' schools. Who's available to volunteer for the PTA, and who's not? Who donates money to the school and who logs hours?

It's something I've noticed myself. There's this feeling--animosity might be too harsh a word--between the groups. The at-home moms assume the working moms feel tormented about leaving their children; yet we get the sense the working moms view us stay-at-home moms as a step above domestic servants, certainly as traitors to feminism, and above all, as idiots for ensnaring ourselves in financial dependency on our wage-earning spouses.

Doth I project too much?

The point is, as Motherlode recently mentioned, in an article about a movie I have no hope of seeing until it is streamed by Netflix, working parents are overstressed. The article says, "The picture of mother as superwoman, however, is not simply a personal hand-knitted hair shirt. We’re struggling against not just our own guilt but an entire mind-set about mothers, backed by “research.” We no longer question the idea that mothers are “naturally” better parents, and that a good mother is one who satisfies the child’s every need." (Motherlode)

On the other hand, if we ignore how much a child really needs to become a functioning concerned citizen, we diminish motherhood itself. Or parenthood.

What no one is saying is that taking care of children is a full time job. Maybe it is true that mothers are "naturally" better; but isn't it possible that with so many families forced to have two wage earners, there is no one left to carry on the feminist fight? I mean, do you have time to march on Washington when every third day from the moment your children enters school until they're 7 or 8, one of them is home sick? and then you get sick? And then you have to go to work sick? I mean, if you have two or three children, you are physically depleted for a decade or more. Who's got the energy?

Sure, I'd like to think the best thing for my kids is that I, Mommy, am here for them. I mean, whatever sense of accomplishment I can eke out from the mostly thankless work of raising children depends somewhat on that belief. If there's no way to even know if what I'm doing is going to turn out well, then, yes, I like to think that what I do is important. Which kind of puts me at odds with the moms who are working outside the home AND doing the mom stuff. I mean, by saying kids need their mom at home, what am I implicitly saying about moms who aren't there?

I know one stay at home dad. Like me, he was a teacher and his spouse is a doctor. They needed someone to take care of their kids. He made less. He stayed home. Someone needs to be there for kids. They're more than afterthoughts, after all. They take a lot of creative energy and endurance to raise.

Which is why I think we've run aground on progress towards equality. At least in part. So I'd like to bridge the divide. Wouldn't it be nice if every societal role involved with children were valued, because children were valued? I mean, if you choose to specialize in anything in medicine involving children, you will earn less than you would in that specialty treating adults. And teachers? Well, I value the hell out of them, but our message as a society certainly runs the other way. And don't even get me started on how we treat at-home moms. Or nannies. Or daycare teachers. Where do they rank on the ladder of respect?

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to earn Social Security for all the years you spent lolling about on the divan eating bon-bons and, oh, right, raising the children?

And I am totally open to the idea of dads being as good primary caregivers as moms. Just that not too many do it. And until someone can watch our kids, we can't get out to change that.

Admit When You're Wrong- Rule of Success

2011-10-07T16:06:00.003-04:00

http://www.allsportmedical.co.uk/images/catalogue/product/ST7021-L.jpg

Okay, I might owe an apology to Norman Vincent Peale, because in a previous post, I wrote that Peale expects people to be Christians to reap the benefits of faith (i.e., success.) According to Matthew Syed, who wrote a totally fascinating book Bounce: the Science of Success, which is worth a whole post of its own, N.V. Peale advocated faith in any god--not only in Jesus Christ. Syed talks a lot about success in the sporting world, and he addresses the power of faith and its role in success. (More on that later).

I figured if this bestselling author pronounces N.V. Peale as non-prescriptive about which religion, just as long as it is some kind of religion, he must know. And I admit when I'm wrong.

Admitting when you're wrong is one of the crucial underpinnings of Dale Carnegie's philosophy, by the way. It just might be the only one that comes naturally to me. Smile, admit when you're wrong, make decisions and don't look back, focus on Now. No, yes, no, and nope, can't do it.

So, worried that my tens of readers might be led astray by foolish and weakly-researched statements by yours truly, I reread N. V. Peale's book, The Power of Positive Thinking.

Thing is, I can't find any place where he says You Can Be Any Religion You Want. I mean, he's got one anecdote about a Jewish woman who, by reciting every morning, "I believe, I believe, I believe," changes her whole tale of woe into a tale of, well, WHOA! And he's got one paragraph about a religious magazine called Guideposts that he was involved with that is "interfaith"-- by which I think he means all kinds of Christianity, from Catholicism to Episcopalianism.

So I'm not sure how Matthew Syed arrived at this conclusion. Maybe it was reading between the lines. After all, there's no mention in Power of trying to convert the Jewish woman. Or maybe N. V. Peale relaxed his standards later on, and I haven't read that book. I just don't know.

Which is why I might owe him an apology. And I might not. But Yom Kippur starts at sundown tonight, and it is the Jewish Day of Atonement, so I'm hedging my bets.

This feels a little bit like getting back in touch with my compulsive-superstitious childhood self. In sixth grade -- okay, seventh-- I went through a phase. You know the saying, "See a pin, pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck; see a pin, let it lay, and bad luck is here to stay?" Well, I must have been looking down a lot, because almost every frickin' day I found a pin. Naturally wanting to avoid bad and ensure good luck, I had to pick it up. And then at night, when I emptied my pockets, I'd put the pins on my dresser. And then in the morning, when I woke up, there were the pins from the previous day on the dresser. So I had to pick them up. Until finally I was pinning a large collection of safety pins to -- oh, heck, why not admit it--to my underwear. Which I had to unpin every night...

I made it to adulthood. Really. With just a little help from paid professionals. I promise it's not contagious. And I don't do it anymore. In fact, I don't even know where the closest safety pin is.

While I'm not entirely sure I owe an apology to Norman Vincent Peale, I am pretty sure I do owe one to the Husband. Yesterday was our anniversary. It's kind of a big one. I got him a watch, which is the so-called official gift for the fifteenth. So maybe I was just a little less than overwhelmed by the flowers he brought me. He's been very busy lately, on call fifty percent of the time, so it's a lot easier for me to shop since I'm un(der)-employed.

So why complain? The flowers are gorgeous, and they came in a vase. Crystal is another traditional gift for the fifteenth anniversary, after all. On the other hand, the vase is glass, not crystal. Jesus.

Which is why it's important for even the most secular Jew to go to synagogue once in a while.

Abundance Redundance

2011-10-04T10:51:00.002-04:00

http://www.newthoughtlibrary.com/shinnFlorenceScovel

Last week, after spending two long hours taking care of my car's regularly scheduled maintenance plus unexpected fitting with new tires, I treated myself to a visit to our local cafe. While sipping my decaf, I felt suddenly light-headed. I immediately assumed brain cancer, at which thought my heart began pounding at high anxiety and I began feeling over-warm; reason soon suggested perimenopause. Occam's razor and all that.

Needing air, I wandered outside and down the block to Peaceful Inspirations. I don't think I need to explain what kind of store it is. But it is interesting that my little town center has, besides the coffee shop and pizza places, and a nice book and gift shop, an integrative medicine center, yoga and Pilate's studios, and Peaceful Inspirations. It's like a microcosm of Berkeley, or Cambridge, MA, places I hold dear.

And you thought Upstate New York was conservative...

Anyhoo. I wandered into the new age store, and discovered a bookshelf devoted to success. Only in this store, it's Abundance. Abundance is the mystical-spiritual term for Success. I scanned the shelf and found many of the usual suspects; but I also found a book by a woman, Florence Scovel Shinn. Written in 1925. Twelve years before Dale Carnegie began winning friends and influencing people.

So natch, I bought Florence's book, The Game of Life and How to Play It. Because she wrote it a long time ago, and because I'd never heard of her. And because she was a woman. Unlike Dale Carnegie, of whom I have heard, and who was a man.

The other reason I had to buy it was that when I opened it up to the table of contents, I saw this:

And I had just begun reading Deepak Chopra's book from 1993, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, whose table of contents is this:

Which one of those was written first? Which one have I heard of? And which was written by a man?

So either Deepak Chopra owes a debt to Florence Scovel Shinn, or I haven't read deeply enough in his books to learn that he has indeed credited her with inspiration.

A third possibility is that Chopra and his ilk and Shinn and hers, arrived at similar conclusions independently, coming from Eastern spiritual philosophy and Western respectively. The so-called Wisdom Traditions, which is the semi-academic name given to these books that all seem to suggest the same types of spiritual practices as the key to success--excuse me, my tens of readers, I mean abundance--is a general public-domain type deal. In other words, everyone who draws on it, is drawing from such an established and understood pool of ancient wisdom that, you know, copyright isn't necessary to be observed.

There's not a single book I've mentioned lately that doesn't mention meditation, relaxation exercises, and positive thoughts as keys to success. This hodge-podge cross-fertilization of Hindu- Buddhist and Judeo-Christian ideas has been around for a long time. It blended into a strange mix of new ideas in 19th Century America.

William James, psychologist, philosopher, brother of Henry, and a dabbler in spiritualism himself, if memory serves, described Shinn's precursors as Mind Cure people. They called themselves members of the New Thought movement. Whatever they were called, they believed that through proper prayer and thought one could cure any physical or mental ailment.

Through prayer and thought, did I say? Yes, I did. That would be through AFFIRMATIONS. Shinn's books are chock full of miraculous cures for everything, especially poverty (she wrote from the 1920s through the 1940s) using prayers and affirmations in the name of JESUS.

The corollary being not so kind to the sufferers of chronic or acute illness or emotional problems, or the unemployed. Blame the victim anyone?

But I digress. And I haven't even gotten to Deepak. Another time. I've reached the maximum acceptable word count for blog posts.

Besides, I've got to meditate. And review my affirmations.

Success & Recognition, Actual & Virtual

2011-09-26T12:32:00.000-04:00

It's incumbent upon me to report on success on my blog about success. Don't you think? I do. So please don't think I'm tooting my own horn just for the sake of it, my tens of readers, when I report to you that I've received a special mention AND a blogger award in the last few days.

The blog-o-sphere, which is still a huge, amorphous tangle to me, is full of very supportive people giving each other awards. These tend to be from bloggers with not enormous lists of followers to other bloggers with miniscule ones, so we know that we aren't all standing on different mountaintops spitting into the wind. We're actually spitting onto each other.

Okay, poor analogy. On to the recognition part.

First, I was listed as a Funnarchist blogger by my faithful and definitely-not-related-to-me commenter Scrollwork on her blog. Once my head deflated enough to fit back inside the house, I realized I wanted to thank her. But just as I was preparing to do that, I received the following award from Andrea S. Michaels, all the way from her blog Wordy Living in Belfast, Ireland. That was pretty cool. Especially since I love Tana French novels.

So this award comes with some rules. Here they are:

Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post.
Share 7 things about yourself.
Pass this Award along to 15 recently discovered blogs and let them know about it.

I bristle at rules, but I'll give it a go.

Thanks and thanks again!

I'm a lapsed reform jew with Buddhist tendencies; I'm short and short-tempered; I eat something chocolate every day; I love a good Spoonerism; and everything else you need to know about me is in my blog--and quite a bit more.

Rule three poses a problem. I don't have a list of fifteen blogs to recommend, so I will work on that. I've got a good start from Rachel Harrie's Writer's Platform Building Campaign. I don't even know how I stumbled upon that one, but I did. In the meantime, I can pass this on to two bloggers who are friends, Lena Roy, who is sharing her experiences as a first time YA novelist and writing teacher on her blog at www.lenaroy.com; and Reyna E. for her recent post at her blog Quickly and Slowly.

So, thanks, readers! I will continue to strive to deserve recognition. Recognition is a hallmark of success.

Scofflaws, Karma, and Success

2011-09-20T10:47:00.001-04:00

http://students.ou.edu/Y/Jacob.R.Yandell-1/karma.png

I've been reading about karma a lot lately. The mystical-spiritual success folks like Deepak Chopra and Florence Skovel Shinn (more on her later) are big on it.

One aspect they're particularly keen on is choosing your words carefully, so you create good karma. Right speech, in case my tens of readers aren't up on Hinduism and Buddhism, is part of the Eightfold Path to enlightenment. For Chopra this is all about creating an intention that can then grow into the perfect success you crave. He suggests writing a list of your desires, which you look at before meditating, before turning in for the night, and first thing in the morning. Stating what you want plants the seed. Time, and your rapt and focused attention on the present, takes care of the growth and blooming.

Shinn is more about getting the right prayer to Jesus Christ (oy) and having your wish granted out there in the world right now. For example, she talks about a client who was broke at Christmas time and who needed cashish. F. S. Shinn told this woman to act as if she would have the money by buying wrapping paper and ribbon, meanwhile saying a prayer. Dubious, the woman left. She did as she was told, and that very evening, upon returning home, discovered a check in the mail from a distant relative.

Deepak Chopra is a little less definitive about wish-granting. He clearly has a thorough knowledge of karma. In fact, he cautions that once you plant your intention, you have to let go of trying to control how and when your wish will be granted. This is his escape clause to his otherwise pretty astonishing assertions of our personal power to attract "abundance" to ourselves. Karma may cause this abundance to occur in a profoundly different way than we might have intended. Or at a different time.

Say, in another life?

http://www.predictyourfate.com/images/glass_button.png

So how bad is it that I lost my temper on the phone when some poor telemarketing person interrupted me, deep into my list of desires, to ask for the scofflaw who used to have my home phone number? I didn't mean to. It was just that I was so deeply concentrating that the call really got to me. In fact, the number of calls I receive for this debt-ridden, possibly ill and elderly man named Joseph Addario (this is a common name, so I mention it without pointing a finger at a particular scofflaw) has dwindled from several a day, two years ago, to one or two a month, usually.

You may ask why I didn't change my number two years ago. And I considered it, but when I learned that phone numbers become available for reuse after only 30 days, I figured I'd be just as likely to end up with a different scofflaw's former number, so I stuck with the scofflaw I knew.

Yesterday I recognized the number on caller id as one that had been calling for a few days, annoying me. So this time I answered, preparing to give my long-winded explanation and ask them to remove me from their call list; but I just wasn't as nice as I could have been. I asked them to remove my number a little louder than I meant to. As I mentioned, I was deep in thought. I was considering the implication of adding "screened porch" to my list. Should I ask to be able to add it on to my house? Or would it be better to simply ask for a screened porch -- once I relinquish my attachment to the way in which my intention for a screen porch manifests (Chopra word), I will be able to see the good, perhaps, when I am forced to sell my current house and move to a small shack--with a spacious screened porch attached.

I hope Joseph Addario is having a good day.

Many Heads, Much Success

2011-09-14T12:32:00.001-04:00

I really enjoyed making fun of Noah St. John last week, but there was something original he said that made me think. At least I think it's original. I haven't come across this exact thing anywhere else yet.

He points out that all the success lit and inspirational speakers tell you you've got to believe in yourself first, before you can succeed. You have to trust yourself, you have to believe in your goals, you have to think postively about your abilities, and then everything good and wonderful will rain down upon you. This is frustrating, St.John says, because many people have the hardest time of all believing in themselves. If you're in a crappy job, or an abusive relationship, or you want to change careers and become a movie star, you're probably feeling pretty bad about yourself as your starting point.

What you need, he says, is a couple people who believe in you. He calls them "loving mirrors" and "safe havens" because they reflect the good they see in you back at you. You need them in your personal life, just to know you're a decent person with a right to have dreams (loving mirrors); and you need them professionally, where they know what you're capable of and urge you on, despite your efforts to undermine yourself (safe havens).

If you find a couple of these people, whose judgement you trust, then you can believe in them. And finally, after you believe in them and their belief in you, you can believe in yourself.

It now occurs to me that once I attended a lecture about literature and psychology. The speaker talked about the Hero's Journey, as described (long before Noah St. John) by Joseph Campbell. A crucial part of the journey is meeting a mirror for yourself. Someone who believes in you and helps equip you for the trials ahead. And actually, the best thing about this lecture was that the speaker told us that the movie Strictly Ballroom depicts this journey, so we watched it afterwards. If you've never seen it, you should, you really should.

But I digress. St. John's point is apt, as far as I'm concerned, even if it is cribbed from Joseph Campbell. We need other people to help us do our best work. And actually, when you put it like that, then everyone else I've read agrees. Benjamin Franklin started his Junta so he'd have a group of people to bounce ideas off of. Dale Carnegie says that Thomas Edison had a coterie of gentlemen who helped one another develop their ideas. Napolean Hill goes so far as to explain the phenomenon that two heads are better than one using the analogy of radio waves and our brains as receivers.

http://getyourbusinesstowork.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/two_heads.jpg

Or, as Ruth, a lovely older lady I once worked with, shocked us all one day by singing, in the middle of Technical Services at Cabot Science Library, "People, who need people, are the luckiest people in the world." Ah, Ruth. She loved to treat herself to a pizza at the Cambridge House of Pizza, and she always asked them to bake it extra long so it would be really crisp.

So, when one of my friends from college who seems to believe in me, suggested forming a monthly group with another woman, so we can be accountable for our writing projects, I leapt at the arrangement.

Do you have any loving mirrors or safe havens?

Form Your Success?

2011-09-07T16:32:00.003-04:00

The library didn't have Deepak Chopra's Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, so I browsed the shelf where it would have been and came across my latest instruction manual, The Secret Code of Success: 7 Hidden Steps to More Wealth and Happiness, by Noah St. John. It's one I hadn't heard of, but I took it anyway. The cover was new and shiny, and it brought me into the 21st Century.

Overall, let me say, it's a very easy read. Lots of short sentences. Colloquialisms. Bolded words. Much space around paragraphs, and a few charts with titles like The Scales of Success and The Iceberg of Consciousness.

The first third of the book explains why typical "shelf-help" books fail us, my tens of readers. They tell us to set a goal, to think positively, to say affirmations, to act on our goals, and if we fail, to try again. All these steps, according to St.John, are behavior-based, and are therefore doomed. The problem? While we may consciously want to change something, our subconscious is much harder to convince. Our subconscious holds us back, because it contains all kinds of fears or reasons or beliefs we are unaware of and that we must change.

We say all these affirmations, a la Jack Handy. Every day in every way I'm getting better and better. I'm pretty, I'm talented, and gosh darn it, people like me. You know the drill. An entire industry (self help) is built on affirmations, or positive thinking. Or superstition. Whatever you want to call it. Thousands of bookshelves can't be wrong, can they? Louise Hay wrong? I'm okay, you're okay, wrong?

Okay. Fine. I'll buy it. My subconscious wants me to fail, so I fail. Maybe. So what do I do? Noah St. John will tell me.

After many fluffy pages, we get to his 7 Hidden Steps. There's a nice pyramid graphic to illustrate them. (Allusion to Steven Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but I'll get to that another day.) I am ready.

But first, I have to do a bunch of exercises. Filling in the blank stuff, with easy questions to answer like, what 5 things hold you back? Or, what is your deepest wish?

Hello?

If this stuff were easy to figure out, I'd have sussed it already. And I've had a lot of therapy.

But never mind. Skip ahead to the first step. Ready? Here it is: Afformations.

Yes, you read it right. Not affirmations, afformations. afFORMations.

These are totally unlike affirmations. Really. Because affirmations are statements, and afformations are QUESTIONS. Oh. Okay. And St.John drops in the Latin roots of both words to point out the difference. Affirmation derives from affirmare, to make firm; while afformation is from afformare, to form.

Get it? To form. So he says the idea is to form positive questions based on what you want. The question is supposed to assume you have what you want. For example, How is it that I am so happy? Or, Why am I so rich? Or just look up at that list of affirmations above and turn them into questions: Why am I so successful? Why does everything I do turn successful? Easy-peasy.

Throwing in the Buddhism principle of watering the seeds of intentionality (where, oh where have I come across this before? Why, in every book on success I've read, as well as in lots of excellent Zencasts), he says you have to ask positive questions to plant those positive seeds in your unconscious.

I hate to break it to anyone who's reading Noah St. John as a first foray into the world of success self help, but this sounds an awful lot like pretty much everything I've read so far, except Benjamin Franklin.

It did make for excellent dinner conversation last weekend. A glass of wine each, and the husband and I were compiling our Afformations as quick as we could think of them. Why was it so easy for me to hit number one on the New York Times Bestseller List? How is it that I am having lunch with Tina Fey tomorrow? Why am I appearing on Jon Stewart next week? Why am I eating dinner dressed in thousand dollar bills? Why am I surrounded by vats of money? Why am I so successful I am bathing in vats of money? Why did I choose to scrub myself with thousand dollar bills instead of saving some of them for my children's college funds?

That was last weekend.

Ahem. I'm still waiting.

Maybe I'd better read Noah St. John's step two.

Worry? Don't. Worry is Key to Success

2011-08-30T10:10:00.000-04:00

For the stressed out and high-strung among my tens of readers, let me assure you that stress-related illness, a.k.a. Generalized Anxiety Disorder, is not a new phenomenon.

I've been pursuing my semi-random, anything-but-comprehensive tour of the success subset of self-help books for a few weeks now, using as my main criterion for reading whether I've heard of the author. I recently completed Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which many of these authors, as well as genuine live successful entrepreneurs that I actually know, have indicated as a resource and inspiration.

No, I am not about to tell you that Benjamin Franklin suffered from anxiety. Sorry. In fact, I'm not going to talk about his book anymore today.

But I've been digging around in the early modern success sub-genre, among people my dad, born in 1925, has heard of. Dale Carnegie and Napolean Hill are two. These people, writing in the 1930s, devoted much of their books to methods for overcoming, or quelling, or managing anxiety. Indeed, Mr. Dale Carnegie wrote a whole book on the topic, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. His book is full of sage advice that plenty of, well, sages, such as Buddha, or your father, or your therapist might provide. You know, suggestions like focusing on today, rather than worrying about the future; or practicing deep relaxation exercises before bed. Stuff you can pay over a hundred bucks an hour for (trust me, I know).

His book is also full of anecdotes about hard-working business people like John Rockefeller, who became so over-stressed he couldn't sleep and practically stopped eating, and was advised by his physician to give up his high-powered job immediately or risk dying. Whereupon he sought out some anxiety management techniques and lived another 25 years, becoming the philanthropist he's known as today.

So here's the catch. See, John Rockefeller chilled out later in life. After he'd amassed his fortune. Sure, he developed an ulcer and some mental exhaustion along the way; but while stressing himself out, he was also making himself and others in his company extremely wealthy.

Which brings me to my next point.

In an article on success in the International Herald Tribune (May 14-15, 2011), Robert Frank, talks about research in behavioral economics that proves that worry is evolution's way of motivating us to succeed. So if you stress about your homework, you'll study harder, and get into a good college. If you stress about promotion at work, you'll work harder and be more likely to earn one. Of course, with all the other stress-jockeys worrying along with you, you might not get your first choice of college or earn that promotion right away. But it's likely that if you didn't stress about it ahead of time, just sat back under your cork tree like Ferdinand the Bull and smelled the flowers, you'd never even be considered for the prize.

And it's true. For example, yesterday, when I went into the basement and discovered water was pouring through a window near the sump pump, I was motivated by anxiety to rush outside to where the sump pump discharge pipe is. I was motivated by anxiety to realize that the ground underneath the discharge pipe was supersaturated and that I needed to get the water draining away from that area pronto. (The ankle deep water was a clue.) And motivated by anxiety, I grabbed a downspout from nearby, stuck it onto the discharge pipe, propped it on a piece of wood filched from the neighbor's pile, and wrapped a roll of duct tape around it. A few hundred trips up and down the basement stairs proved I'd stemmed the flow. Two hardware stores later, I had a proper discharge pipe extension, and water was turning a different part of my yard, well away from the house, into a wetland.

Success.

So if I hadn't been anxious about how the house was holding up after Irene, I might have learned much later and at much greater expense that in heavy weather my sump pump needs a discharge pipe extension.

Later on, I meditated with the husband to clear my head and relax. After all, there's got to be a balance.

I mean, if we're evolutionarily adapted to channel anxiety, what are we supposed to do with all the excess? If you suffer from extreme anxiety, does that indicate you're more highly evolved than someone who doesn't? Was it helpful to me that I shook uncontrollably for several minutes after experiencing that recent earthquake in Washington, DC? And while John D. Rockefeller nearly killed himself amassing his fortune, he's remembered today primarily for all the good he's done giving lots of his money away to help people when he learned how to relax. And all the books I've read, and the real live genuine entrepreneurs I've talked to, say helping people is the ultimate success.

According to Frank, "the anxiety we feel about whether we will succeed is evolution's way of motivating us." Which means I'm on the right track. Right?

Getting in the Flow

2011-08-18T16:10:00.000-04:00

There's a difference between appearing successful and feeling successful, and it's the feeling part I'm after. Of course the appearing part matters -- I do have various material goals. The main characteristic I'm seeking, however, is a feeling. Maybe it could also be called self-worth, or self-esteem, or self-confidence. I call it success.

Appearing successful, after all, is relative. Indeed, one of my friends described my life as "the classic success story," i.e., a lovely house in the suburbs; good marriage; good kids. What more could anyone need to feel successful? That's what I'm trying to find out. I could point out that what I paid for my house in upstate NY, wouldn't buy even a studio apartment in Manhattan. I might consider my friend H, who has a lawyer husband, doesn't need to work outside the home, and has a gorgeous apartment that is the entire eleventh floor of a prewar building on the Upper West Side, plus a home in the Hamptons, to be successful.

We all know plenty of stories, though, of people who have all the trappings of material, worldly success on the outside, but who are secretly tens of thousands of dollars in debt, secretly paralyzed by terrible marriages, secretly suffering with difficult children, etc, etc.

A corollary is the person, like my friend R, who has excelled on the worldly success level, but announces that she never feels totally satisfied with herself. She stands on her tiptoes, raises her hand way above her head, and says, "I always expect this of myself," then lowers her hand to chin level, "and I always feel I end up like this." Or the Pulitzer Prize winning writer I know, who can't help feeling bothered when a book of his doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times.

So it's the feeling of success I'm searching for. My sister, a psychoanalyst, describes feeling successful as being in a state of flow. I've come across the term, defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (No, I can't pronounce it -- but my sister can.) In brief, flow is a state of immersed, energetic focus on a task. The work must be intrinsically rewarding, and balance between being challenging, but not too challenging. In flow, a person is emotionally and intellectually engaged, working hard, but not aware of time passing. In short, we like to exert effort, but rewarded effort, and when the exertion produces results, we feel successful.

Success and the Secular Girl

2011-08-16T08:32:00.002-04:00

According to Norman Vincent Peale, to be successful, I have to be Christian.

So that sucks.

In his introduction, Peale asserts, "This book teaches applied Christianity; a simple yet scientific system...."

Do I need to go on? Well, I think I do, because his book, The Power of Positive Thinking, is one of those books we’ve all heard of, even if we haven't read it. Published after Dale Carnegie’s seminal tracts and before the 1960s and 1970s EST-y feel good type books like I’m Okay, You’re Okay and Feeling Good, The New Mood Therapy, it contains a lot of stuff that has filtered into the contemporary consciousness.

If reading it wasn’t like continually running into a wall, it might be more helpful. Some of the stuff he writes, minus the overt religiousity, is right at home in a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy session. There are exercises for “emptying the mind” of worry, and instructions in replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. There are visualizations of desired outcomes that any elite athlete might use to rev up for the next big event.

But then there’s a lot about turning over your anxieties to God, to putting yourself in God’s hands, and to remove any doubt about this god, there are specific Bible quotations from the New Testament to use as daily affirmations. Sure, the Psalms are mentioned, especially the 23^rd Psalm; but I’m not sure anyone remembers that the Psalms were part of the Tanakh, or Holy Scriptures, the Bible of Jews, as even this secular Jew knows. The term “Old Testament” trips easily enough from my fingers, and would have been a lot less wordy than the previous description; but is it perverse to remind my tens of readers that to refer to the literature that a particular religion other than Christianity regards as its spiritual foundation in this way is to reinforce the Christian-centric nature of our world?

Reading Norman Vincent Peale felt a bit like attending Cathedral services at my Episcopal prep school. Whenever I came across a tidbit that rang true, I was quickly thereafter reminded that it really didn’t apply to me, the Godless infidel.

It’s okay. My parents paid for my schooling, and they didn’t have to. I got an excellent education at my Episcopal prep school, and I don’t resent it at all. It’s important to understand the bias of the society, even in its most well-intentioned. Ecumenical means welcoming to all religions, as long as they’re subsets of Christainity or can be placed within that context. This is the way the world works in our neck of the woods. We poor godless folks can expect at best some pity from the Dominionists trying to overthrow our government and turn it into a theocracy. At worst? Well, I’ve learned a few tricks from Norman Vincent Peale.

I'm positive.

Help Yourself to Success

2011-07-27T09:23:00.002-04:00

I had to return those self-help books to the library today. I’ve renewed them twice already, which is the limit, and since they came to my branch through interlibrary loan, I’m going to have to request them all again.

I did have a chance to skim them, though, and I’ve gleaned a few tidbits.

I started with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s a classic. I know this because I’ve heard of it.

The first strategy I learned is that Dale Carnegie wants me to read his book twice, skimming the first time. Then I’m to keep it close by me for frequent study, perhaps by my bed. Bedside, huh? Good sales trick. If I need it bedside forever, then borrowing it from the library won’t do. I’ll have to spring for it, nevermind the cost. No indeed, I don’t need to worry, because one of Carnegie’s other books, bound up with this one is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

I’ve skimmed them both (pat on the back), the latter between 3:30 and 5:30 a.m., so I’m certain I’ve got all the basics now, ready to pass on to you, my tens of readers.

http://adailysmile.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/cat-smile.jpg

Ready?

Smile.

Yes, yup. It’s that simple. Smile at people. Act interested in them, because they’re interested in themselves. Assume everyone is self-interested first and handle it by noticing something about them and making them feel appreciated. That’s right, because the first principle of success, according to Carnegie, is that everyone wants to be appreciated, or recognized. (I give myself props for coming up with that one, if you’ll remember.)

Also, assume that people always have two motives for whatever they do, one they will be aware of, and one perhaps less laudible or more self-interested. Always appeal to their nobler instincts.

Since I work from home with a sales force of zero, and therefore have only myself to motivate, I’ve been practicing on sales clerks -- and circulation desk librarians. Also on neighbors and aquaintances. I don’t bother with close friends and family – they know the real me.

Okay, okay, I’m being glib. The smile thing does make sense. People have told me that when they first met me, they found me a little aloof, or possibly shy. Well, I’m not shy, just reluctant to risk rejection by starting a conversation with someone who doesn’t want it. So it makes sense to smile. I agree with Dale. Mr.Carnegie.

So I smiled at the receptionist at the optician, complimenting her eye make-up, which had precise swoops of eyeliner and eyeshadow so neatly shaded they looked airbrushed. These compliments, according to Carnegie, must be genuine, and this was. I was genuinely impressed by her precision. I was wearing my usual "natural" look, and given the two decades between us and her poreless, photographic exterior, I felt a bit carbuncular, but I was genuine about her artistry.

Next I smiled at the sales assistant, whom she called over to help me. I flapped my new prescription and mumbled that I wanted to try those rimless Silhouette glasses but wasn't sure they were appropriate for extreme myopia and he mumbled that they were probably not the best choice. He spoke very softly, though.

Then he fitted me for the rimless frames.

He did not repeat his mumblings about them being a poor choice for my prescription. I began believing perhaps I'd misheard him. I really wanted those rimless ones, the kind that look pretty much invisible against your face, but I hesitated. Could they really be okay? With Mr. Carnegie in mind -- the assistant's first motive is to make a sale, even if it means fitting someone with the wrong frames-- I asked him again, holding out my prescription, and he took a look at it for the first time. He shook his head. Not a good choice. So instead of getting annoyed that I was the one who had to bring home this unpleasant point to myself, I just said how disappointed I was.

"You don't want to look at anything else?" he said, starting to walk away, sensing that I wasn't likely to be a sale.

"I just need a minute to get over it," I said.

And then something switched on in the guy. He took my prescription and he went over to his computer and did some calculations and some measurements and he showed me exactly why rimless is not the look for me. Can you say "Coke bottle?"

Still thinking of Mr. Carnegie (appeal to the nobler motive), I said I appreciated his honesty. (Hard wrung though it had been.) He had the decency to mumble about not wanting me to buy something I'd be unhappy with.

Then we went and picked out a really nice pair of plastic frames.

Reading this over, I'm impressed. I effectively used what I learned from Dale Carnegie-- to allow someone else to make me a sale.

Did I say I'd pass along tips? Well, I'm not going to give them all away at once. You'll just have to come back and read some more...

Expectations and Success, Part Deux

2011-07-21T11:35:00.000-04:00

http://www.allfamousquotes.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/expectations.jpg

It's one thing to feel a terrible pressure to go to law school because your father wants you to, a pressure so strong that you have to let yourself fail out to convince him to let you choose your own career (true story - not mine); but what about the people whose parents, families, friends expect little or nothing? Or say little or nothing?

Did you read Jhumpa Lahiri's article in the New Yorker about her start as a writer? How she disappointed her parents' expectations for her, and that even with all the success she's had, she has struggled to feel successful?

Lahiri notes that her father never read fiction, and though her mother did, she read in Bengali, and kept her stories at a distance from her daughter. She says, “But my parents did not read to me or tell me stories; my father did not read any fiction, and the stories my mother may have loved as a young girl in Calcutta were not passed down.” So that when she became a reader and a writer, she felt she was “trespassing” and “defying” them. Guilt. Treading into territory that wasn't meant to be hers.

What they most wanted for her was steady, reliable work--becoming a professor was good, assuming it would lead to steady, reliable work. So when she went into a creative writing program instead of continuing her PhD, her parents remained "neutral." A devastating neutrality, for sure.

She writes, "Even after I received the Pulitzer Prize, my father reminded me that writing stories was not something to count on, and that I must always be prepared to earn my living in some other way."

If this is how Jhumpa Lahiri feels, well I can just put down my peeler and leave that carrot alone.

What strikes me in what she writes is how much of what she incorporated into her sense of what her parents wanted was unspoken. Simply by remaining "neutral" about creative writing, her parents sent her a loud message.

Remember the 1960s PhD candidate who dropped out before writing her dissertation, despite her star status, and despite the respect of her peers? She disappointed those expectations. Consider, though, the societal expectations for a woman at that time. It’s possible to view her decision to leave her program as fulfilling a more common expectation for an educated woman then. Perhaps her parents never expected her to have a career in academia--though surely they expected her to excel in school, and supported her education all the way. So perhaps she bowed to an unexpressed expectation that spoke through silence.

Trying to fulfill someone else's idea of how you should succeed is one kind of challenge. The flip side of great expectations to live up to, is none, or low.

It's hard to conceive of great expectations for oneself if others don't have them for you.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/bgr/lowres/bgrn1411l.jpg

My own parents adopted a studied silence on most aspects of my life after college.

I could rely only on my own interpretation. To me, based on our rocky relationship during my adolesence, their silence registered either disapproval, or a fear that if they spoke out one way or another, I'd likely choose the most perverse road imaginable, so they'd better not trigger me.

Sort of a don’t wake the baby feeling.

I've come to see that there was a sense, conveyed to me through silence and intuition, that people were just hoping I'd "make it." I call it the "poor Hope" phenomenon. Sort of a sense that my parents took a look at this damaged goods they were educating, feeding, and sending off to therapy, and every so often they lobbed an idea at it to see if it would stick, but really the idea was just to get this package up and out, and make sure it earned some kind of paycheck and wasn't a burden on society, and that was really about all you could expect from it.

Other people who were more supportive or encouraging also reinforced this "poor Hope" phenomenon. Trying to be helpful, they would say, "Look how well you've done, considering." Considering the dead mother. Considering the challenging stepmother. Considering the restrained father.

I always listened to this kind of talk with a mix of self-pity and irritation.

Yes, I would think. Yes, yes. Poor me. I don't have a mother, I have a shrink. But on the other hand, I have food, clothing, and medical attention. I have the best education money can buy. I live in the United States. I've never experienced war. Many others have been through much worse and succeeded. Why should the traumas of my early childhood define me?

What were the silent or negative expectations you faced? Which ones are you passing on to your children?

*http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_lahiri#ixzz1SSYiLawd

Dyspepsia and Success: Are They Flip Sides of the Same Coin?

2011-07-18T20:28:00.000-04:00

http://caines.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/anthony_trollope.jpg

Thanks to my friend Amy, I don't need to come up with anything new for this post. I will note that Orley Farm is one of my favorite Trollope novels, along with most of the others I've read. I'm also fond of The Way We Live Now, which is frighteningly topical.

Discerning readers will note that this quotation appeared in the comments section of my previous post. It was too good to languish there. It needs breathing room.

"Nothing makes a man so cross as success, or so soon turns a pleasant friend into a captious acquaintance. Your successful man eats too much and his stomach troubles him ; he drinks too much and his nose becomes blue. He wants pleasure and excitement, and roams about looking for satisfaction in places where no man ever found it. He frets himself with his banker's book, and everything tastes amiss to him that has not on it the flavour of gold. The straw of an omnibus always stinks ; the linings of the cabs are filthy. There are but three houses round London at which an eatable dinner may be obtained. And yet a few years since how delicious was that cut of roast goose to be had for a shilling at the eating-house near Golden Square. ... Success is the very misfortune of life, but is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early." - Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm

Discuss: agree?

Expectations and Success

2011-07-13T13:38:00.000-04:00

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/05/14/success.gif

Somebody told me a story. A college student who wanted to go on and study 18th century English Lit in grad school hit a wall: his father. His father told him to do something practical, like be a doctor, so he went to medical school and became a doctor. He got married, he joined a private practice, he lived in a wealthy suburb of Boston. He was successful, no doubt. But he didn't love his work. Eventually, when his own children were heading into the teenage years, he left his practice and went to graduate school where he earned his doctorate in English Literature. 18th century English Literature. Because he started out "later in life," and because, presumably he wasn't as flexible about where he would live as a young PhD graduate has to be, he never became a full professor. He worked in adjunct positions and so forth. And yes, he was very happy.

Now I don't know this guy. I only know his story third hand. What strikes me, besides his interest in 18th Century English Literature, which is what I would have studied in grad school if I'd decided to go, is that what finally made the guy happy was doing work that tapped into his True Self. As a private doc, he had a high income (this was in the dawn of HMOs and Managed Care), prestige, etc. But he was unsatisfied. When he changed to literature, he found work was inherently intrinsically motivating. (He also had a nice portfolio, equity in a home in a desirable neighborhood, and who knows, maybe a nice inheritance from the now-deceased paternal wall, but never mind. Bucking expectations takes courage, whatever the circumstances.)

What also strikes me is that success is often defined by someone else's expectations for us. If we are approval-seekers, or non-confrontational types, or just upper middle class strivers, we often sublimate our own interests in pursuit of Success.We might not trust our instincts about what we want to do (my situation), or we might just buy into our elders' world view without question. We may never question it (result: mid life crisis involving expensive car/plastic surgery/affairs) or we may finally (result: major change of career or marriage.)

Here's another story. As a graduate student in the early 1960s, she was at the top of her class; yet she never finished her PhD. Her classmates and professors all expected her to go on, but she didn't. She lost interest in the topic and chose not to. Instead, she raised a family and pursued her academic interests informally. She's pretty hard line about success. She "never accomplished anything" that people expected of her. Nothing to show, not known in a field? Not successful. According to her own inherited beliefs about success.

Neither this person, nor the late-blooming English teacher qualify as successful under such guidelines. However, this doesn't prevent them from feeling satisfied and fulfilled in life. And this is where my thoughts get a little murky. On some level, what I'm getting at is similar to those folks who dissect happiness or contentment or fulfillment. At the feeling level, these terms are somewhat interchangeable. This brings me back to where I started: at the macro level of success, visible, notable, recognizable accomplishments are the best indicators. Is it really any more complicated than that? What do the rest of us do then? Do we feel like failures until and unless we achieve at this level? Do we do what I perhaps have been doing and bring it down to the micro level, charting our mini-accomplishments, breaking our goals down into chewable size and swalling little tastes of mini-success? Or do we do what this woman does, and remove success from the equation of life? Does success matter?

Charting Success

2011-07-06T13:49:00.000-04:00

So, while I’ve been compiling my ideas about success, I’ve been trying to be practical, too. All this with an eye on that stack of self-help books. I want to see what I’m accomplishing without them, so I can compare how I’m proceeding before reading them to how I’m going to eject from my desk into the stratosphere once I’ve read them and started implementing their strategies.

First off, I needed some way to feel like I was actually accomplishing stuff. Accomplishing stuff – or feeling like I’m accomplishing stuff – lies at the heart of my feelings of success, nestled up close to feeling recognized. So I bought a notebook and dedicated it to everything about this project.

Next, I needed to channel my favorite Type As. Since I don't match my socks to my underwear, and my long time friend who does is far away and hard to contact, I turned, as always, to a book.

Remember that list of stuff that I’m trying to accomplish at any one time? Well, cribbing from Gretchen Rubin, I decided to try charting my activities on a nice weekly grid, so that I could check off everything I was doing every day, check, check, check, without taking a lot of time.

I made a chart:

Did I mention that the husband stifled a smile when I told him I had done this? The usually so supportive and kind husband? Yes, it’s true. And it is also true that I’m really not a chart person. I’m more of a list person; rather, I’m more of a write-a-list-on-a-sticky-note-and-forget-it person. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try to imitate more accomplished people, and so I made a pretty chart.

Still copying –er, adapting--from Gretchen Rubin, I decided to keep the chart for 2 weeks. Even a rule-evader like myself could stick to that, if all I had to do was a quick check-off before bed.

By the end of the second or third day, I realized how much a check-mark could not convey about some of these topics, so I decided that after my 2 weeks charting, I’d spend 2 weeks keeping a daily log. It also quickly became clear that some of my categories were uncheckable. Perhaps unsurprising. Much of what I do is ongoing. I mean, when is it appropriate to put a check mark alongside “Spouse," as in "To Spouse?" After an argument is resolved? When we actually go out alone together? (Well, that will be blank for months). Similarly with "Parent," as in "To Parent." Still, I did put a check mark under those once or twice, if there was some issue that I had to deal with out of the ordinary.

I could go into detail about all the categories, including the ones I never checked in that first week. But I won't. I will say that despite the smirk of the Usually So Supportive Husband, I stuck to it for 3 weeks before trying the log. I actually preferred the chart. Logging proved self-defeating. If I added details to what I’d done, then the information became repetitive, since I was already writing about it in a notebook. If I just listed things, then I felt as jumbled as I always do as a mom/writer/job seeker/human/spouse, etc etc. I started avoiding the notebook. It turns out I’m better at lengthy notes every few days, interspersed with interview notes and so forth. To record that I’ve accomplished tasks, the chart works for me.

Anything work for you?

Success: Some Conclusions

2011-06-28T09:06:00.003-04:00

Image via Google from alphabetgames.wordpress.com

Okay, so it’s time to check in. What I’ve learned, how I’m feeling about Success. Those self-help how-to be successful books are still in the (reusable) grocery bag. I wanted to wait until I’d examined my own ideas before cracking them – and I still haven’t gotten to them.

So one inspiration for this whole project was Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project. Since she’s one of those hard-driving, confident Type-As, her book and her website, because of course she has a website, are full of tasks, steps and mini-projects for her (and her millions of readers) to do to be, um, happier. ‘Course a happily married, materially and professionally successful Ivy-League educated woman seeking additional happiness seems like overkill. She admits it. But even I’ve had a few friends ask me, in re: success, How much is enough? For me, unlike perhaps for Rubin, my answer is, “Uh, at least some.”

We’re talking about personal measures of subjective states, ultimately, so it’s a little like trying to ride a seal – slippery purchase there.

Anyhoo, since my last two posts have been about my immobility (conflict, tantrums), I thought I ought to show a few of the things I have been actually doing related to feeling more successful.

First, channeling Gretchen Rubin, I bought myself a dedicated notebook to carry around and jot down short or long thoughts on success. With my trusty notebook secreted away, I’ve pigeon-holed any willing friend, relative or acquaintance and asked her or him for thoughts on success and feeling successful. Then, back at home, or huddled in the car, I’ve written down everything I can remember of what they’ve said.

A few conclusions:

People have more and different ideas about success than I expected. I expected most people to have what I’ll call the Standard Model.

Standard Model people feel successful by comparison to norms. By achieving societally selected markers of achievement, by moving up the ladder, they are able to evaluate their lives and feel successful by looking to their peers who are also climbing rungs. *

*Ambition drives motivation here, and outward signs of success (material possessions, etc) don’t guarantee feeling successful, as there is the drive to climb, and therefore satisfaction only lasts a short time, until the need to achieve kicks in again. Catch-22 operates here with the following exception:

Self-aware Standard model people, the rarae aves, who know what enough is for them, and can appreciate their achievements. They accept their limitations, etc, or aren’t hung up on proving themselves to others (!!)

Classicists take the long view. I’ll call it the Mensch Theory of life. In the Mensch Theory, the question of success is unanswerable until you’re dead, and then you’ll know you were successful if people talk about you at your funeral as a person you could depend on to do the right thing. If you were a mensch, you were successful. The classicists tend to be iconoclasts, or at least unafraid to live individualistically, outside the standard model.

Spiritual folk feel successful if they can retain faith in the ultimate worth of the pursuit of the Good while tolerating the problem of the ephemerality of everything in life, even the love of family.*

*This comes across in some as soldiering on in the face of life’s essential futility (and handing one’s friend who’s obsessed with attaining something in life a copy of the Tao Te Ching.) Kinda the shadow or flip side of spirituality and its implication of belief in something More, but I’m a stubborn gal and I can group them however I like.

Creative types, whether in the arts or sciences, seem to need the spur of feeling frustrated with their achievements to generate new ideas and create their next thing. They feel most successful when creating, and perhaps enjoy their creations briefly, before churning up reasons to make more stuff. Ambition obviously comes into play here, too.

Everybody’s definition includes recognition. Oh yes, even the classicists. They’re just willing to be absent when they are recognized as stand-up folk. Modes vary and may include money, approval, thanks, readers, or mourners talking you up, but however you look at it, recognition is one common essential to feeling successful.

Those are my general conclusions. I don’t want to make this too long, so next time I'll get into a few specifics. I will say that I feel more successful--by writing this blog and noting, through comments, or FB "likes" or compulsive checking of my page view stats, that each time I post, a few more people are reading my writing. That feels GREAT. (Recognition.)

Giant Elephant in the Room

2011-06-24T08:07:00.006-04:00

There's a story about me and a giant white elephant that my (step)mother liked to tell. Depending on my stage of life, I've listened with different degrees of grimace. It has become one of those family myths that supposedly defines a personality.

realbollywood.com

I remember this well. We were at my grandparents' for Sunday dinner. I was four or five. The elephant was plush, white and wore some sort of embroidered saddle. It was nearly as large as I was, and I wanted to get it across the room. The grownups were at the dinner table, and I really, really needed help. Or someone to do it with me. Or for me. Whatever.

"Ha, ha, ha," the story always concludes, "there you were, crying for someone to carry that giant stuffed elephant across the room, saying, 'I can't do it, I can't do it,' and all the while, you were doing it."

Now I’ve always heard this story with some degree of humiliation; but depending on my decade or stage in therapy, it’s had different meanings. For years the meaning was, Listen to how my (step)mother likes to humiliate me with this story; wasn’t she mean, weren’t they all mean, to just watch poor, motherless little Hope struggle to carry the giant white elephant across the room? Why didn’t they help her?

A later version, more evolved, went like, Listen to the subtext of this story: poor, motherless little Hope could carry the elephant, but she didn’t realize she could, and she really, really wanted someone to help her, so she wouldn’t have to do it alone. They, the mean grown-ups, thought it was more important for her to realize she could do it on her own than to give into her wish not to have to.

Perhaps the most evolved version is, Look at the situation. The poor old grown-ups are exhausted, they just want to relax and enjoy a dinner someone else cooked for them, and the last thing they want to do is get up out of their dining chairs and help that annoying, perpetual-motion machine known as Hope drag yet another goddam toy out into the living room.

I thought of the story the other day when I came across a diagram I drew in my Success notebook (more on that later).

My Creative Cycle

Okay, so there’s my creative cycle. Any one segment of it can last from hours to months. The gist of it is, though, that despite how I flail, I do get back to writing eventually. It’s just part of the cycle.

If my tens of readers harken back to when I began my blog, you may recall I was in the middle of a novel. I have been in the middle of this novel for a long time. I’ve been in the middle since before we moved out of NYC, since before we had to make our final, unexpected move within NYC, for over three years.

I’m having a problem with the voice. A problem with my protagonist. I also ran into a problem with the plot when the housing market imploded. Glitch city. So instead of working on it, I’ve written other things, tried to get paying work, and started this blog, when I was feeling really, really bad about everything.

When I looked at that creative cycle diagram in my notebook, it occurred to me that this whole Success/Failure thing I’ve been writing about here is one gigantic tantrum. A productive, entertaining and engrossing (I speak only for myself here) one, but a tantrum nonetheless. A gigantic wail that starts out as “I can’t,” morphs to “I don’t want to,” moves to “but I do want to and I am allowed to want to,” and will eventually end up back where I began, revising my story.

Do you know what this means? It means that my (step)mother was right.

Digest that one.

My stepmother was right? Well, I don’t have to tell her. Luckily for me, she’s developing Alzheimer’s. Which means, I guess, that if she remembers to tell me the elephant story one more time, I won’t hold it against her.

I can do it. I am doing it. Every moment that I think I can’t do it, I am doing it. Carrying that freakin’ elephant across the room.

Negative Capability

2011-06-21T12:56:00.000-04:00

I love confident people. Type As, control freaks, just-do-it types, who know how to ignore the urge to second-guess. Love them. They’re like aliens to me, beautiful, frightening aliens. I want to run away from them, but also I am fascinated. I have this feeling that maybe they’ll rub off on me, or that maybe by imitating them I can, you know, fake it.

Because while I love them, I am also completely unlike them. The one thing they have that I don’t, I’ve decided, is the ability to ignore shades of gray. You know, lack of intense introspection, avoidance of naval-gazing, perhaps even an unhealthy fear of being undecided. I can see it, I just can’t get there. The thing I have that they don't? A talent for conflict.

I mean, I debate tuna versus pb&j for lunch, the short cut or the scenic route, or any old decision until I exhaust myself. And that’s just the infinitesimal stuff I’m sweating. When you get to the bigger questions, I’m forever confused. Is it okay to be a writer? Yes? No? Do I have to get a “real” job, too? Yes? No? Am I moving forward? Yes? No? I'm a muller, a ponderer, a can't-decider. Basically, I'm conflicted. About ambition, money, creativity, professions, motherhood, marriage, suburban living, and crabgrass. (Which we have less of this year, in case my early readers were wondering, because we hired people to put-- organicorganicorganicnotpoisonous-- stuff on the lawn.)

Sure, yeah, I’m talking about self-doubt. Judging from the blogs and memoirs I’ve read, I’m not unique. Dealing with the doubt is part of the artist’s job. But Anne Lamott is only picking up icky spiders of doubt and putting them in a jar (Bird By Bird). I feel like I’m trying to walk a mile wearing leg irons while wrestling off a too-tight sweater.

So my second novel, the one I sent to 39 agents, has this hard-driving, ambitious, young female protagonist. She’s confident, smart, successful in worldly terms, and not introspective. Someone with whom I could only hope to identify. So what did I do to her? Well, naturally, I had to bring her life to a series of crises. I had to rub her face in her lack of insight, to force her to confront herself, to make her change. Like I had to punish her for being everything I’m not. To justify the more introspective, thoughtful life.

In the end, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want her crushed. I wanted her to just continue being herself, maybe with a bit of insight, enough to make her understand, but not enough to bring her to a standstill. There’s something so beautiful about living out your blunders instead of pondering all the possibilities without risking anything. At least it makes for good stories.

My point? Ah, yes, here it comes: my point. Let me get all Jungian for a moment. Perhaps all this doubt and conflict is the shadow side of something good. Let's put it another way. A Keatsian way. Maybe it's the potential for Negative Capability that I possess. According to Keats, "what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."*

Keats was talking about being able to dissolve his own personality so as to enter the psyches of all types of people, to understand much about human nature, in order to portray it convincingly in art. After all, nuance is the essence of round characters and the enemy of fundamentalism (to move to the religio-political plane for a moment.)

Well, ahem, I've written myself into a corner. I am NOT comparing myself to Shakespeare (or Keats). Promise. After all, on the "without any irritable reaching after fact and reason," front I'm a fail. It's the acceptance of all these uncertainties and doubts as fundamental to my make-up that I resist. No, I'm just looking for the positive spin, just looking for a way to take another shackled step.

BTW, I'm not loving this blog post, but as any one of my dear Type A friends might say (while completing another triatholon or starting another company), I'm not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

*(The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th Edition, ed.Margaret Drabble, Oxford Univ. Press: 1985, p689.)

Another Dreaded Topic

2011-06-08T07:37:00.001-04:00

My parents taught me two rules about money, one aloud, the other subliminally.
1. Do not discuss money.
2. Have it.

Am I all done here? I mean, that covers the topic. And I am breaking both rules right now. I don't have even a penny on me. In fact, the only loose change I can think of right now is on top of the dryer.

Yes, money makes me that uncomfortable. Why, aside from the taboo (#1)? Well, I suppose it's because the finer points of #2 were never clear to me, and because I have arrived at a Certain Age in violation of it.

Nevertheless, I have gleaned some tidbits. Since my parents kept mum, most of what I've learned was inadvertent:

They had a lot more than most people.
Money doesn't make you happy.
Most of my friends, not all, but most, got through higher education with loans.
Money is to be accumulated, not spent.
Don't be showy.
Put 5-10% of every paycheck in savings.
Invest aligned with the S&P 500 and diversify.
College will cost approximately $100,000/year by the time the 7th grader gets in.
Choose saving for retirement over saving for college if you can't do both.
Lack of money makes you miserable.

I used to say (to myself; never aloud -#1) that I would never decide not to do something because of money. Keeping my word was easy when I was single, even though I was working at a low-paying job, because I had a nice financial portfolio in my name, thanks to my father. So, you know, even if I couldn't afford to buy a car, say, on my salary, I had some means. Lucky for me, I also had such an inferiority complex that I was used to denying myself most everything - something to do with my mother buying me second hand clothes - and identifying with Cinderella-- but that's another story-- so those means lasted a long time. All the way through my husband's medical school, residency & fellowship, which included six years in Manhattan mothering two children and working very part time, and trickling out coincident with the recent financial crisis.

Boom.

The thing is, and this is hard to write, because I imagine my tens of readers' faces wrinkling in disgust as they perceive the hard-core materialist I am, I really identified with that money. It reminded me where I came from, and bolstered the illusion that I was still a part of that echelon. An echelon I took for granted in a way particular to it, that I could only see when I landed, with the family, in a town I didn't really want to live in, dependent on my husband's income, with a certain amount of credit card debt (Bulletin: Manhattan is expensive), on my proverbial butt.

As usual, I exaggerate. My father did eventually tell me a few things about money. Could you tell from my list? When I was casting about in my twenties, he sent me a few books, which I read and digested. They made my palms sweat and my heart palpitate, because I really couldn't follow any of the advice, not even the bit about saving from every paycheck, because I was working part time--preserving those blocks of free time in the afternoon so important to me, so much more important to me than financial planning. I'm not sure this counts as "telling" me anything about money, but he did transport the means of self-education to me. We never followed-up with any deep discussions. I consigned the info to the section of my brain that understood the Future would be Different and continued writing that novel and napping on my keyboard at Widener Library. When relaxing in front of the TV, I simply put my head between my knees whenever Suze Orman was on, harranguing women to take responsibilty for themselves, changed channels, and took deep breaths.

I never chose a job for money (beyond the basics of rent & food), nor a friend, nor a husband (alas?) I don't know a single person who vowed out loud to make a few million by thirty or thirty-five, although I know a few who have. I never made any decision with a monetary target in mind.

I pretty much lived by my most unspoken rule about money -- and this one I came up with all by myself. Ready?

When you need it, money will fall from the sky.

Well, really. I mean, is that such a bad way to live? You're not thinking about money, you're not caught up in the dirty business of accumulating it. You're worry free. Manna will arrive. Yes, you might spend your last twenty on a small deerskin pouch to remember your time writing that novel on Martha's Vineyard at your father's friend's house; but there will be a surprise check from your great aunt or a grandmother (disbursing funds tax-free in advance of death) waiting in your mailbox when you get home. Thank Sky, you'll be able to pay your rent after all.

I was recently at two college reunions, the husband's and mine. I couldn't help noticing that the money men weren't at our table. (They were sighted outside the Charles Hotel, comparing Rolexes -- by one of the husband's friends, a poet). I also couldn't helping noticing that with few exceptions, all the husband's friends, like most of mine, aren't in the money-making business. There are teachers, professors, writers, even a stay-at-home dad. People who save lakes in California. Museum folk. Librarians. The aforementioned poet. People in the helping professions. As I pummeled them with questions about success, I became uncomfortably aware that my financial expectations were different than theirs. After listening to me and reading my blog, one friend handed me a copy of the Tao Te Ching. By the end of the visit, I reached two conclusions. One, these people are fantastic; and two, I need to earn some money.

Now, nobody's starving in my house. We're managing, but I'm thinking a lot more about money than I've ever had to do. That change on the dryer? There's a budget line for it. This is an uncomfortable state for me. I'll say it freely. Maybe this is adulthood. Maybe you just have to think about money. Maybe all of you have your budgets and spend time thinking about them. Maybe my parents had a budget line for everything. If so, there's no doubt the allocations were larger, and all the lines were filled in. I don't know. The flow was mysterious.

Where I live there's a lot of sky. Beautiful clouds. College funds? Retirement accounts? I'm looking.

Sisterhood

2011-05-31T10:20:00.003-04:00

"I thought you were a feminist," the husband joked after reading my last post. I am a feminist. Really. Truly. Germaine Greer, Nancy Friday, The Boston Women's Health Book Collective collectively, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Sisterhood Is Powerful, Adrienne Rich, I read you all. Yes, sisters, I am a feminist, I swear. I was primed.

So why the weird stuff about ambition? And how to explain my existence as a stay-at-home mom?

I was never going to be a stay-at-home mom. I was going to have a profession. A sanctioned, capital- P profession. Sanctioned by the parents, I mean. I've dipped into that a bit already, but to recap: That ship ran aground in my mid-twenties, when I realized - surprise- that what I really wanted to be was a writer, and immediately began doubting myself. Stepped off the sanctioned path, got lost in the woods.

Bad mixed metaphor, and beside the point. The point is, I was going to work "outside the home." Yes, I wanted children; but I was in one hundred percent agreement with Adrienne Rich that just because women are biologically compelled/created to have children doesn't mean that having children is the ultimate fulfillment of a woman's destiny. Motherhood wasn't going to complete me. It wasn't my destiny, it was my choice. I agreed then. I agree now. Really.

So even though no childbirth was going to be my ultimate experience, even though having a child wasn't going to fill some hole in my womanhood that would forever go empty, no baby was going to plug a gaping hole in my psyche, well, maybe - definitely - because I didn't have a mother, it did.

Probably because my mother died when I was a baby I discovered a hunger for that mother-child bond that awakened with the birth of my first child. I took a leave of absence from my teaching job, and suddenly, I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to leave my child. Ever. Possibly to a pathological degree.

Who would want to miss a moment when every moment with a baby is full of change and growth?

At the same time, who wants to be "just a mom," a full time job with zero status (unless it is the status gained by proving that you're able to stay home when almost everyone else has to work at least part time, but that's really just reflected status from the breadwinner, not true status?) Who wants to give up autonomy, financial independence, future financial gain, lunches out, and fun shoes to stay home with this magnetic source of drudgery, filth, frustration, and fatigue?

Choose motherhood? You spend years on the floor or the bathroom--which, by the way, you can never enter by yourself (and closing the door while small hands beat upon it and little eyes peer underneath it or pass desperate notes through the slit does not count as privacy.) "They suck everything out of you," I've heard more than one parent say about their children. The best comment I ever heard, though, from a friend whose three children were under five at the time, was that she "felt like an elevator." Choose motherhood? I did.

If you'll permit an extended metaphor, I would say that being a mother is like a being a nail. You start out all shiny and pointed, and end up dented and flush against the surface of some structure whose shape you can't discern, and which is permanently under construction. Oh, sure, it's only you, doing your part to create a dependable, sturdy, solid corner of the scaffolding of society, but it's awfully hard to remember you're doing something important when your head's been pushed down so far, and not too many others notice, either.

And as wrong as it feels to agree that motherhood has such low status, I actually spend time distancing myself from this choice by making sure that everyone knows that I'm a writer, too. I'm a mom, but also a writer. I mean, it is true. I am a writer. And one of the benefits of being a writer is that I can arrange my schedule so my children are the priority when they're around. For many years they were the only priority, because the labor side of motherhood was so intensely physical and non-stop there was no time or energy for anything else. Even so, I clung to the writer-identity to give myself a modicum of self-respect. Oh no, I'm not "just a mom." I'm a writer.

And another thing. The raising of children is one job, the management of a home, another. I am a parent, yes, but not a maid or a domestic goddess. Who wants to be that? Only very famous people who get paid to do that work.

As usual, I am a welter of conflict about this topic. I feel the job is vital; but does that mean that mothers who work outside the home are doing a lesser job? I know that many who do feel they're failing at both, the paying job and the mom job. It's damn hard to do one thing really, really well. So doing two?

The bottom line is that I feel angry that I feel ashamed about this choice. I feel I have to apologize to the "real" feminists, because to choose mothering as a career places you in dependency on someone else, and that is a big, feminist no-no. Furthermore, I worry I'm being a bad role model for my children. Mine are both girls, but if I had a boy, I would also worry that he would think that being "just a mom" is what women should be. And there's reality, too, which is that my children have to plan to take care of themselves financially, and while I'm providing them a role model of a mother, I'm not providing them with a role model of a financially independent working woman.

That part I'm trying to change.

Ambition, Blind, Pure, or Otherwise

2011-05-23T12:45:00.000-04:00

“…thou wouldst be great, art not without ambition; but without the illness should attend it….” Macbeth I:5

So here’s where I have to talk about ambition. I have to talk about it, considering where I left my last blog post. “What if reach exceeds grasp?” One person commented, a question I was already considering, just as I was aware of a depressing sidebar to the idea that feeling successful means achieving an intersection of capability with desire. I admire these friends who seem so comfortable with themselves that either they can accept their limitations; or they are so self-confident they don’t need to prove the upper limit of their ability. Are they aliens?

Another friend, an artist, had already poignantly expressed the truth that in creating art, success may be a fleeting feeling, quickly replaced by the need to improve upon what failed in the last creation. (And let me note here, that I extend “creativity” to all endeavors that require synthesis; the arts are obvious, but the sciences, and plenty of other careers or callings require it.)

Oh, how I’ve hated to talk about ambition. Maybe it’s because when, a few weeks ago, I brainstormed about it in my notebook, the first things I wrote down were all negative:”witch,” “dirty word,” “self-aggrandizing.” I don’t know why, I truly don’t. But I have to face it; I’m more ambitious than I realized. (Of course, said my sister the psychologist, that’s the source of your problem.)

Why the negative associations? I mean, both my parents--all my parents--were/are professionals. My mother was an economist, my stepmother and father lawyers. Going back a generation they were all professionals, too: physicist (grandmother), lawyers, a federal judge. My father’s mother was the second woman to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I was primed for an ambitious career.

I even gunned the engine right out of college, starting as a receptionist at a law firm, being promoted to paralegal within weeks (dressing for the part, etc, etc.).

I hated that job, oh how I hated it. No blocks of free time in the afternoon. I might have gone to law school anyway, though, if my parents hadn’t dissuaded me. The practice of law has changed, they told me. It’s not the way it used to be. Don’t do it.

Zero encouragement. My engine sputtering, I asked what I ought to be. Civil Engineer. Stock broker. Accountant.

Seriously. These were their suggestions. Nothing aligning with my interests. Not a word about the written word. Stalled.

Not that I blame my parents. At least not in my rational brain. I think, though, my subconscious got the message of their silence, and it’s been a long, LONG time my writing ambition has been working it’s way up and out.

So now it’s here on the page, for my tens of readers. And it isn’t that pretty. And it’s really kind of scary. Maybe it's out of reach. But I have to agree with my aforementioned commenters, that the creative ambition is something that is often out of reach, and it’s the reaching for it that is creative, and it’s the reaching for it that’s also constant failure.

A word about Ambition versus Goal. I've been writing as if the terms are interchangeable, when they're not. Maybe ambition is a driving force, and goals are concrete achievements. Parsed that way, then, you know, you can feel successful when you’ve achieved a goal, while understanding the need that drives you onward to new goals is ambition. Maybe I’m just going in circles here. I'm trying to figure out how some people can achieve their ambitions and their goals, while some people keep gunning past goal after goal, fueled by ambition. My friends who feel successful lack nothing in the brains department. So what allows some people to feel successful is not so much the intersection of capability with desire as it is the intersection of ambition
with achieved goals. Those lucky folks aren't hung up on proving themselves. Clearly, as my 8^th grade friend put it, some people are just more ambitious than others. Sadly, I must be one of them. Oh dear.

Returning to the question posed by my reader. What if reach exceeds grasp? Well, I guess that's the definition of ambition, that's all. Not a referendum on talent, intelligence, or success, for that matter. Maybe it’s a new Laurie Anderson tune. Not Walking and Falling, but Reaching and Failing.

Know thy True Self

2011-05-19T09:24:00.011-04:00

courtesy of wikipedia/Gnothi_Sauton_Reichert-Haus_in_Ludwigshafen.jpg

The most unequivocal "yes" to my question, "Do you feel successful?" came from a friend I've known since 8th grade. She's a teacher, and just a couple of years ago, after a series of disastrous, disappointing, or just plain dull romances, she married a childhood friend. (That's another story, and quite romantic.) She told me she feels successful because she found something she enjoys doing and she does it well, she found a partner she loves to be with, and she was smart enough to know she didn't want children.

What really surprised me was what she said next. "I guess I have pretty low expectations, and that has made me happy."

She said she's never had a "burning desire for fame," just the desire to be "comfortable," to wear what she likes, to drive a nice car, and to take "two five-star vacations a year." She's been nominated twice for Teacher of the Year, but hasn't won. She's happy to have been nominated and says she's glad her principal appreciates that she works twice as hard as everyone else to make sure she gets her job done right. "I've never thought of myself as the smartest person," my friend said. "I'm not ambitious. I don't read much. I like to watch TV. I'm no Susan Rice (a classmate of ours)." She said all this with the utmost acceptance.

Now I've always thought she underestimated herself. No, she's not an academic nor an intellectual, but she's bright, practical, and down-to-earth. I started to argue with her. But as I argued, I realized I was really arguing with myself for doing exactly what my friend does: assuming I'm on some totally different level from ambitious, successful people. This assumption upsets me and is probably why I spent so much of my early adulthood trying to prove that I am smart (my calculus went something like this: I hang with engineers and computer scientists from MIT, they are smart, and they like me, and they only like smart people, therefore, I must be smart) instead of doing something practical like earning money. My friend, however, was completely unperturbed.

I thought about all I know about her, about how her parents wanted her to be a doctor or lawyer, and about how she struggled with those demands in her twenties, until she found her niche. My friend said that even when she tried law school, she never envisioned herself as a partner in a big firm, but rather as "one of the billion" lawyers at AT&T or some other company, "working in my little cubicle."

My sister's husband is a psychoanalyst. He said he would define success as living an expression of the True Self as described by D.W. Winnicott. While everyone in my "family of origin" has either been to a psychoanalyst or is one, I had to do a little research on Winnicott. Research is ongoing, but what I understand so far is that True Self is the authentic expression of personality, without concern for fitting into or living out someone else's expectations (that would be False Self.) Winnicott was an object relations psychologist, and believed that child development occurs in the bond between infant and mother. In infancy, any action that is self-initiated, such as grasping toes, is considered an expression of True Self. The response of the mother is crucial to the mix, creating the usual mess of False and True selves that make up most of us. And requires much psychotherapy when we grow up.

I digress. But not totally.

Other people who've identified themselves as feeling successful share my friend's realistic attitude. Some of them had early ambitions that might be described as "burning," but discovered, in trying for them, that they weren't the right fit. There was a certain amount of shucking of other people's unrealistic expectations about them before they reached this point. (By the way, they all seem to have managed this shucking on their own. None of them, to my knowledge, has been in psychoanalysis.)

It is perhaps too obvious to mention, but I will anyway, that the stage of life a person is in affects how successful she or he feels. If I'd interviewed these people ten years ago, their answers might have been quite different.

Nevertheless, I can conclude that people who feel successful share the trait of realistic self-knowledge, an open, honest self-assessment that accepts limits, eschews mountain-summit ambitions, and comprises awareness of intellectual and emotional strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps they've succeeded in living as their True Selves.

And perhaps that explains a lot of my feelings of failure.

A Parenting Fail (Elusive Success)

2011-05-16T11:28:00.000-04:00

While it's stimulating to discuss theories of success and failure, most of my time is wrapped up in the ongoing venture called motherhood, an endeavor whose ultimate success or failure is my biggest concern, and whose outcome depends on myriad small choices. Like the following one.

So the 3rd grader is in a school play. Something about fish and finding your unique self. There has been lots of drama about this play around our house, with involved daily updates about rehearsing for various parts and about when parts would be finally assigned. Each child would rank their first four choices and hand them in to the teacher. Then, one day, accompanied by lots of pouting and complaining, the update was that the 3rd grader's class had agreed to perform the play with another class, which meant each part would be doubled up.

"It's supposed to be a play about finding our own unique selves," she pointed out. "It doesn't work if there are two of everything." Well, she had a point, but two children reciting in unison would be cute, from a parent's point of view. I told my child it would be fine, meanwhile marveling at how much she seemed to care. She's not the most obviously dramatic of my two children, but she was actually in tears.

Two days later, the 3rd grader's traverse from the school bus to the front door looked like the gallows walk. Parts had been assigned. My child had been given her fourth choice, Clownfish 1.

Oh the tears. Oh the misery. So much angst. "Clownfish 1 doesn't even get to tell Swordfish his problem. All the other fish get to tell Swordfish their problem." So there I am, staring at my usually rather stoic child, in tears again, this time over her lack of lines. At least I'm assuming it's a lack of lines that is the problem. I'm also thinking, wow, how did acting get to be so important to this child? She has recently joined an after school acting class, and I guess she really likes it. Maybe she'll become a movie star and I can finally go to the Academy Awards. I hope James Franco won't be hosting by then. Maybe Tina Fey.

Anyway, it seems the trouble is the lack of lines, and that she didn't get her first or second choice part.

So here's where the parenting needs to happen. Do I say, in effect, look, not everyone can get her first or second choice, and some people don't even have a line, so buck up? That's the "Sometimes we don't get exactly what we want but we're all part of a community" lesson.

Or do I say, well, look, if you're really upset, maybe you could talk to your teacher about adding a line to your part, so Clownfish 1 can tell his problem to Swordfish, too? Advocate for yourself. Maybe that's the parenting lesson here.

Reader, I chose the latter. Immediately my child wanted me to e-mail her teacher. No, I said, you can write her a note, or write her an e-mail from my account, and we'll make sure she knows it's from you. So during the 7th grader's piano lesson, the 3rd grader wrote a note, apologizing for being upset and making her suggestion about the line. I open up my e-mail, make the subject line state who the e-mail is from, and my child types out her message and we send it.

Cue to dinner time, when the 3rd grader is relating all the iniquity of the situation to her sister and her father. There's a certain amount of sympathy, and a certain amount of tearful eye-welling. Before dessert, I check my e-mail. The teacher has responded that she's sorry my 3rd grader is upset; that she'd had her do Clownfish 1 because she got the beats on the humor so well in all the lines. She'll be happy to talk to her about the change tomorrow.

Do I detect a certain weariness?

Lines? Plural? I go back to the table. I confirm with my child that she does, indeed, have several lines. How did I miss this? How did my child miss this? Now I'm annoyed. And embarrassed. Look, I tell the child, your teacher gave you a real part with lots of lines and said you're good at it. If you want to be part of a play, you have to accept you might not get the exact part you want. That's the way acting is. At least you got a part. So buck up, quit being so negative, and do your part.

I go back to the computer and send another e-mail to the teacher, subject: Sorry. I tell her I'd encouraged my child to advocate for herself. I had also told her, I assured the teacher, that her request might be denied.

I had a parenting choice, and I made the wrong one. That's what my 7th grader calls "a fail."

Suggestible

2011-05-10T08:02:00.000-04:00

The inevitable moment has arrived. I've collected a small stack of self-help books on Success. I had to, after all. Research. The thing is, I'm not sure I'm ready for them. I'm afraid.

What if, when I open them, I discover that everything I'm writing about has already been written in them? More important, what if, when I read them, I learn that I actually possess some quality that would eliminate the possibility of my success. What if I fail the checklists? I know they're going to tell me I have to have faith in myself, or some similar pablum. Well, hello? Need I say more?

And then there's the other fear, the one I really don't want to admit to my tens of readers. The fear that after reading these books, I will become an INSUFFERABLE self-promoter with a falsely inflated ego. You see, I am suggestible. I know that. I've read some self-help books in my time. Louise Hay? I've affirmed. Julia Cameron? I've tried to believe in G.O.D. and ask the universe for whatever I need.

Once, I borrowed a guided relaxation/self-improvement tape from a housemate who was relentlessly pursuing escape from herself. In the tape, I had to picture myself in a lovely place, yadda yadda, picture myself relaxing in a comfy seat in this lovely place, yadda yadda. Then I had to imagine a young child coming into view, approaching my maturer self, and offering a gift to the older me. The tape told me to accept this gift. Well, I pictured, for some reason, the young child handing me a gold ring, and then, although the tape didn't tell me to, swallowing it. Strange, I thought, I am swallowing this symbolic gift from my symbolic inner child. Hmmm.

Nevertheless, I felt one hundred percent relaxed afterwards.

Later on that day, I told a friend who happened to be a very religious Christian about this experience. She said that I had to be careful with these sorts of visions, because the Devil can come to people that way.

Now I don't believe in the Devil, but I am suggestible. I was disturbed enough by her reaction to mention it to the professional I was then seeing twice a week. Dr. B, a nice, Jewish professional in a beautiful house in Weston, MA, laughed--laughed, at me-- and said, "You're very suggestible." If your shrink tells you that, you know it's true.

So am I ready for Dale Carnegie and that guy who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? I think I have more prep work on my own definition before I swallow theirs.

Worldly Success and the Artist

2011-05-05T11:24:00.000-04:00

A friend subdivided success into public and private realms. The public realm is the one I need to talk about right now. Feeling successful in this realm, my friend said, means feeling on par with your peers, and doing the things you're supposed to be doing at the time you're supposed to be doing them. Going to school, starting a career or getting a graduate degree; finding a mate; creating a family; owning stuff. We're not entirely sure about the next Shoulds, but they're on the horizon.

I thought this definition was useful -- to the degree that it was not useful to me. This definition of worldly success is the one I was raised with, and the one that's made me feel most like a failure. It's an upper middle class definition. At times I've worried that to be a successful artist a person must hail from either lots of money or from none to possess either the insouciance about position or the desperate ambition to attain it necessary to persevere in the arts. The upper middle class is not the place for experimentation, as experimentation puts you right into conflict with security and direction. In my 20s it was fine to be working at a menial job and writing, even if some of my friends were climbing various professional ladders. I wrote a novel. Seemed legitimate for a twenty-something. A novel was good. I sent it around to about ten to fifteen agents. A few read it, and one, who is actually and truly a very famous agent, ALMOST took it. But she didn't. I was crushed. Single, still working at a menial job, and close to thirty. Meanwhile, in the years I spent writing that novel, friends who had started in menial jobs along with me now had promotions and advanced degrees.

Life history follows, and I could go on and ON. My point is that the linear, clear-cut ladder of success doesn't work to the advantage of artists. Duh, you're saying. Well, it's one thing to know that, another to FEEL it (as those professionals like to say). Artists wander off the path, or get stuck on a rung near the bottom. Arranging a life to create art doesn't leave the energy a professional needs to succeed at law or medicine or business or teaching or engineering. One of my priorities for a job, I used to joke, was that it give me "blocks of free time in the afternoon." Thus, the menial work. It left me brain power for my writing. What it didn't give me, though, was a sense of pride, a sense of progress, or significant money beyond basic living expenses.

I was creating art, though, you might point out. Well, true. But my art wasn't giving me any of those markers of worldly success either. In fact, I was embarrassed to talk about my writing, since the obvious follow-up question to "What do you write about?" is always, "Are you published?" So I took my writing down a notch or ten or twelve on the priority list, and went to graduate school. I became a teacher. Another extremely valued, prestigious, and well-paid career choice. Nevertheless, it was a relief to me (and to my family) to have a profession, capital-P. I tasted what life would be like without this other thing calling to me, without the secret and shameful wish to be a writer, capital- W. And actually, although among certain professionals, teaching is held in low regard, in my circles, teachers were pretty darn cool.

However, there were absolutely no blocks of free time in the afternoon. There was no energy left. There was no room in my life for writing. I was a successful Something, judging by my peers, but that something wasn't the thing I wanted to be. Is that compromise worth making?

Success

2011-05-02T09:20:00.009-04:00

As you know, I've been mulling success and failure on this blog since I started it. Last summer, my mullings, and my feelings of failure intersected with an inquiry from my college alumnae magazine asking to hear from people who didn't feel they measured up to the illustrious alumnae usually profiled in the magazine (Hilary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Cokie Roberts, Diane Sawyer, Linda Wertheimer, etc, etc). E-mail us, the magazine asked, and we'll see what kind of responses we get, and decide what to do with them - and if we like yours, we'll contact you. Well, I had a lot to say on failure to live up to the Wellesley name, and so did many other women. I got a nice reply to my e-mail, but no follow up. My letter on failure FAILED. But I have persevered. And I'm making it a little more formal.

I've been advised by various professionals, that one way to stop feeling like a failure is to reframe my definition of success. Or to broaden it. Or to uncouple Success from Publication. I've usually brushed off these suggestions, while assuming their implication is that these professionals can look through my blue, myopic eyes, down my throat, into some part of me, probably in my solar plexus, and SEE that I am DOOMED to FAIL, and that therefore, they are doing me the service of prying my fingers off of the pretty toy hope I clutch to take it away and replace it with something more mature. After all, they are paid professionals. Turns out I have very strong fingers; but I am listening a little better now.

Before reframing success, I had better define it for myself. I've been talking to people about how they define success and whether they see themselves as successful. I'd love to see comments here on the topic, too. Success or failure.

yesterday

2011-04-25T14:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the sixteenth anniversary of the death of two young men who were very important to me (and to many other people), and of a third, whom I didn't know, who left behind a widow and two small boys.

My boys, my young men, were climbers. Fraternity brothers, climbing partners, and friends. Theirs was a yin-yang friendship. They were opposites with a shared passion for rocks, fear, and accomplishment, and admiration for one another. Hard to know one of them without knowing at least something of the other; impossible to know either without loving him.

These guys, so much younger than I am now, with their third partner, made their assent. Details elude me: name of mountain, for example. But the point was, it was a first assent of the north face of an Alaskan peak. They travelled a bit late in the season, aware that the changing temperature made avalanches a greater than usual risk. They made it to the top, called home, spoke to family, then started down. They never made it.

Great guys, great young men. I am thinking of you, and of your siblings and widows, parents and children.

Multitasking

2011-04-14T08:55:00.004-04:00

The husband is due back from Hawaii today. He has been at a conference, and oh, dear, I've read enough David Lodge to know what kind of shenanigans go on at conferences. Despite the time difference, he has managed to catalogue to me every event he has attended and every contact made. I get it, he's feeling guilty.

As well he should. Since he's been gone, I've dealt with a gas leak, discovered the need and arranged for installation of a complete heating and cooling system, taken a child to the doctor, felt a bit under the weather for a day myself, listened to and smelled the aforementioned installation, which is yet unfinished. And my hair appointment got cancelled.

Meanwhile, I'm contemplating Success and Failure, my novel, and a new short story. It's a bit herky-jerky, this creative part of my life. Not just the creative part, all of life. For a writer, it's important to have a routine; but having a routine is really, really hard, especially when single parenting. The routine is like an old jalopy: hard to get going, such a relief when it's finally rumbling along; then, just when the engine starts to purr, a wheel falls off. Last night, for instance, when I remembered it was time to blog, the 7th grader was in tears over blow drying her hair, and the 3rd grader was bent over the sink, spraying saline up her nose and gagging. Hard to be contemplative under those conditions.

I took a minute and listed everything I'm trying to do in my life. I tried to make broad categories. Here's what I came up with, in the order they occurred to me:

make friends/a community
mindfulness
find paying work
finish novel
write interconnected short stories
parent
spouse (as in "to spouse")
make home Home
stay fit
blog
therapy dog work
volunteer at school
take care of my mother;
read and stay up-to-date on news
send stories out

Quite a list. I'm sure most everyone has a similarly long one. Each category breaks down into several sub-categories, too. On days when I make no progress in any one of them, I feel very frustrated. So it goes, I guess.

I blogged, today. So I can put a little tic next to that item.

Not Safe

2011-04-07T20:28:00.000-04:00

Today I clicked on the "Stats" tab on my blog and discovered more visits to my blog posts than I thought. Thanks, people! Stats also told me which posts were read most. I probably shouldn't have found that info, though. I'm feeling very conscious now. The post on Independence got the most hits. Well, I don't have another one like that, do I? Racking brains for kid related information...

My 7th grader last week confessed that while we were trusting her and leaving her unsupervised at music school two years ago, she and her friends were entertaining themselves during their break by pouring water through the vents in locked lockers. Retroactive anger doesn't have much use. I was left to cringe aloud at the stupidity of her behavior. Locked lockers at music school probably contain, you know, instruments and sheet music. Presumably instruments tucked nicely into cases built to withstand the streets, subways, buses - and cups of water of NY. Still.

Never mind. She could have been doing so many other, worse things. Or stupider things. Like sticking things up her nose. My sister did that when she was nine or ten, far too old to be excused. She stuck a berry up her nose while at the pool with a friend, then was too embarrassed to tell anyone. When she got home, she confessed to me, breaking into tears. I, being a sensitive, thoughtful teenager, laughed heartily and called my best friend. Eventually, I tried to pry the berry out of my sister's nose with my mother's tweezers. (Forgot to mention that, mom. Sorry.) When that failed, my sister became hysterical. I decided Mom needed to know, so I called her at her office. Mom came home and took sister off to the doctor or the hospital. They returned later, my mother amused there was an instrument designed to remove nasal obstructions, presumably because there are so many stupid people out there.

The lesson to me was that it's the careful people who end up doing the really dumb stuff. We spend our lives making sure, for example, that we can retreat down the rungs of the jungle gym before advancing up another step, don't run too fast over rocky ground, always wear seat belts, eschew skiing, sky-diving, bungee-jumping, and other assorted behaviors. Always look both ways before crossing the street, etc., etc. Then one day, the urge will not be suppressed. There's a lovely bush full of hard red berries. We know we ought not eat them, but what would it feel like to...?

Despite this knowledge, I spent several years yelling "STOP" as my children raced or rolled or scooted headlong down the streets of Manhattan. "Not Safe," was my two word reason for denying many an activity, and I even remember watching with stomach clenched in fear as my first child gummed a Cheerio at 6 months and choked. Food = Not Safe. Hmmm. Problematic. My kids are basically cautious. Which of course makes me worry what asinine things they'll decide to do when they are old enough to know much better. If it's as simple as pouring water over an instrument through a locker door, I'll have gotten off easy.

Butterflying Around

2011-03-31T07:55:00.002-04:00

Just do it, to borrow from Nike. I'm going to keep blogging, even if my ideas are a little thin right now. I'm in one of those writing dithers that infects my whole life. Projects are stalled. Confidence is low. I'm butterflying around, landing on this thought or that worry. I'm trying to get some consistent paying writing work, wondering if I should go back to the novel I'm working on, or start a new story in my collection of interconnected short stories, or revise another story that seems like it might actually belong with the interconnected short stories. Meanwhile, I'm questioning my usefulness, or really questioning whether I'm justified in pursuing any of these goals. And wondering why I'm wasting time questioning, since I persist, questioning or not.

I've been reading a few recent articles about how writers need to be huge self-promoters these days if they hope to be read at all, and watching my compatriot Lena Roy (http://www.lenaroy.com) work to promote her first book, and wondering about the purpose of it all. Then there's a long list of literary magazines to which I am supposed to be sending stories. And I am, but the responses are slow, like glass is really a liquid slow -- and so far, negative. I have this nice vision for myself, involving publishing a book and a few stories, or a book or two, and becoming a writing instructor at some nice writing program. I really enjoy teaching. I think I'd like that. Teaching and writing.

Flitting from there to here. I'm thinking about Dave Eggers' article on The Writing Life. As I dither, I like to think about Dave Eggers staring at the sheet tacked over the window in his writing shed. I like to think I share something with him. It's heartening to know that someone legitimate like him also butterflies around sometimes. Of course, Dave Eggers has earned his writing shed. Literally and figuratively. I have not. It's a viciously risky thing to put out there, the desire to write, or more specifically, the desire for recognition for writing. Just about everyone out there could spit on that goal. So impractical. Totally unremunerative. A chapbook of potential failure. Still, I do it.

Last night, leaving my novel beginnings workshop at the New York State Writers' Institute, one of my classmates shook my hand - very strong, dry, earnest, and overlong shake - and told me she really appreciated my insights, and that my comments were always very helpful to her. This made me feel good, if an understatement can express the pleasure of believing a few heartfelt words. I had something useful to offer the writing world. I felt good all the way home.

Update

2011-03-23T20:09:00.000-04:00

It has been a long time since I last blogged. Three months, exactly. That's a terrible record. I've probably lost my six faithful readers, just when we were all on a roll.

Winter derailed me. The husband had knee surgery January 4th. Going into the surgery, the prediction was two weeks on crutches, then on to hobbling around; coming out, however, the news was six weeks minimum, non-weight-bearing, on crutches. In mid-winter, in upstate New York.

As soon as he got home and settled on the couch with an ice pack, the snow began. Okay, not true. The snow began right after Christmas; but this sounds better. I am foremost a fiction writer. For the next several weeks I was busy shoveling and chopping ice, driving my children and husband places, and walking the dog, morning, noon, and night. If you read my status updates on Facebook, you know I was also on the roof, shoveling away old snow in preparation for new, and fretting about ice dams. That last was unnecessary, apparently, but I felt better after I chucked a cut-off leg from some old pantyhose filled with ice-melting stuff onto the roof. It didn't land anywhere near the ice bulging in the gutter, but, well, I tried. It will probably be up there until we have to reroof this so-called haven. I think I spent all of January and February in long johns and snow boots. I began to understand the exhaustion resulting from unending physical labor.

The low point was the morning when, just before I was to drive (through the snowy streets) the husband to his second post-surgery check-up, the toilet overflowed. We had been up all night because the dog had been licking himself obsessively. So I had to leave the bathroom mess, drive the husband to the surgeon's office, cross town to take the dog to the vet, return to pick up the husband, drop him off at work, and return to clean the bathroom. Probably shouldn't have mentioned that episode. PTSD kicking in.

But now the crutches are gone, and the husband is able to carry groceries and walk the dog. We've even glimpsed the sun once or twice. True, the lawn still has some eczemous patches of ice, and what ground is showing looks like a matted, filthy animal hide. And my writing group has been cancelled in anticipation of yet more snow, which so far hasn't materialized. But still, I muddle on.

Yellow Bus

2010-12-24T11:45:00.000-05:00

Anyone in elementary education knows what "children are not making good choices" means, but if you're not in elementary education, nor close to people undergoing or perpetrating it, let me be clear. "Not making good choices" means misbehaving. So naturally, when a letter containing this phrase in relation to riding the school bus came home, I perked up my ears. The letter came from no less a personage than the principal, who doesn't write memos often.

Last year, the district undertook a program, the Peaceable Bus program, which involved a couple of school-wide assemblies with the bus drivers and perhaps some community-building skills that involved children forming their bus groups and meeting with their individual drivers. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, since, well, since I have to rely on my 3rd grader (then 2nd grader) to provide them, and she was much more interested in how many times Zach chased her at recess than in the assembly.

The principal was sorry to state that the program was not producing the hoped-for results, and that some children were, you know, euphemism supplied. As a result, after the winter vacation children would be assigned seats on the bus for three months, after which the policy would be reviewed.

Curious, I asked my daughter what was happening on the bus. Just some screaming and yelling and jumping over the seats. Really? I said. Jumping over the seats? Well, not on my bus, the 3rd grader said. On her bus, the only thing besides the screaming and yelling was climbing under the seats.

I rode a yellow school bus for eight years, through 7th grade. One year, my nemesis, Catharina, developed a new idee fix for my humiliation. Unable to separate myself from her, I sat by her on the bus, day by day. Day by day she worked on me, goading me to scream at the top of my lungs. Go on, do it, she said, just do it. Just once, scream, really loud, just once, do it do it do it do it. Eventually, her persistence wore me down. One afternoon, just as Thomas the driver turned onto my street, I let out a blood-curdling scream that hurt my throat and surprised me. The bus lurched to a stop and my humiliation began the minute my volume muted. As I remember it, Thomas was prepared to yell himself, but when he saw that it was I who had done this, he relented. He told me I better never do that again or else he'd tell my parents. I wouldn't, I promised in a mumble, as I got off the bus.

As I write this, I am remembering that my 7th grader, who also rides the school bus, was once very late home and confessed to me that the reason they were late was that some of the people on the bus, herself included, were being loud and changing seats over and over again until the driver pulled over.

Now I have told my children to wear their seat belts on the bus. I even went so far as to read the District's rules regarding seat belts. They were a little lax, in my opinion, only suggesting that children wear them, not saying it's a law. My children were resistant to the idea, and I knew I was helpless to enforce it. According to them, no one else wears seat belts. So I pulled out the fear-based motivator, and assured them that the single most important factor in preventing death and serious injury in an automobile accident has been proven to be the wearing of seat belts. I gave them my most evil eye and spoke in my most solemn tone, and hoped they carried.

Both children were home, at the kitchen counter, having snack, when I read this missive from the principal. So, are you still wearing your seat belts? I asked. Yes, said my 7th grader in a dull voice. People have stopped bothering me about it, she added. Good for you, I thought but did not say. She seems to have friends, many friends, despite her instinct for self-preservation.

What about you? I said to my 3rd grader. You're not climbing under the seats are you?

No! She said. I wear my seat belt.

Good, that's good, I said.

Just today, this boy asked my why I was wearing my seat belt, she continued.

Oh?

So I told him I wear it because my mother told me to, she said. He said, Well, your mom isn't here...

So what did you say to that? I said.

I told him I wear it anyway, because I'm a good girl.

I am telling you this with only a small amount of pride, fully aware that the evil eye and the solemn tone probably won't hold out much longer under peer pressure. I am also marveling a bit at the extent of my power. And I am also a little sorry that what my 3rd grader said wasn't, Well, the reason I'm wearing my seat belt is that I value my life, or something equally pungent. She wants to be a good girl now, but I know that effort is doomed: eventually she will fall short of whatever standards she has applied to herself in her understanding of mine, and then, oh my God, and then. Then I'll be wishing she'd just given in and crawled under the seat herself.

My Mortal Enemies: The Jews, II

2010-12-13T19:44:00.013-05:00

In this blog I thought I would tie up some loose threads by letting you know that I did get those pants cuffs redone by Mr. Delmar Tailor. It took another visit to the defensive tailor in which he insisted that he would never sew anything as badly as the hem on those pants, and several phone calls from him in which he repeated that he could find no receipt to prove my story, but he did finally offer to redo the pants for free. When I brought them in to him, he told me that although he hadn't found the receipt, that I had bothered to come back a second time had made him think maybe I was telling the truth. Good thing I'm an Aries and don't shy away from confrontation, huh?

The other loose thread was crazy Joe the anti-Semite in 3rd grade. So there was crazy Joe, and my 3rd grader, and me (see Wed., Oct. 27th post). After sleeping on it, I decided I ought to talk to their teacher about this incident. Not wanting to make a big deal out of it, I caught up with Mrs. M at dismissal and we sat down on a bench outside the school. Without naming Joe, I described what my child had described to me, while my daughter squirmed in embarrassment.

Mrs.M was horrified, actual hand-over-mouth horrified, and apologized, which was interesting and unnecessary. She wanted to know how we wanted her to handle the situation and offered to speak to the boy. I told her not to single him out that way, but that since the whole school had been addressing the ever-popular topic of bullying, it might be an opportunity to discuss tolerance in other areas of life. If anything further happened, I said, we could consider direct action, but since I inferred that this child might not know the power of what he was saying, maybe he had learned a lesson just by saying it and getting the reaction that he did.

Then Mrs. M asked me who the child was. I was reluctant to say, but I did, and Mrs. M had a double-take reaction. Joe, she said, is from Yemen. "Ah," I said. "Yemen." Maybe the family is Muslim, I said. We nodded at one another on the bench.

This all happened early in the week before Halloween, and on the Friday, the papers were full of reports of packages containing explosive devices intercepted on several planes. Packages addressed, in some cases, to synagogues in Chicago. Planes flying out of Yemen.

Well, the mind does love a story, doesn't it? Suddenly Joe the Yemeni's family became the center of a terrorist cell, or if not the center, then a peripheral member of it; or if not peripheral member of it, then acquaintances of members or peripheral members of it. I live in a fairly conservative town. It's just the sort of suburban place, near a small airport, where terrorists might choose to lurk and form cellular structures.

I began to wonder if I should inform the principal, if not the superintendent -- or the governor. Visions of calling the police (not 911, have to call the non-emergency number) or Homeland Security, and the extravaganza of media attention and general goverment harrassment that would follow (I've seen a lot of movies) jostled for predominance in my imagination. Soon enough, I would become the subject of their inquiries, and my sordid past (I once watched two people shoot up heroin) would land me in jail. Alternatively, I could remain quiet, and suffer burning crosses on my lawn (perhaps that would get rid of the moss), and other subtler forms of harrassment, and eventually be arrested for NOT bringing to the attention of the authorities my suspicions about the family of this young boy in my daughter's class. A dilemma.

The husband was basically unmoved by the intrigue-terror-cell angle, so I made calls around to various family and friends. They were fairly split, but the friends who work in education felt pretty certain that the teacher would have already informed the principal. I let it rest, took the 3rd grader to the Halloween extravaganza at her school, and watched her play tag with a bunch of kids, one of them an exuberant gorilla. Joe.

Weeks went by. I heard from my 3rd grader that the guidance counselor had come in and talked about different religions, and that the teacher read them a story about how kind words fill your bucket and unkind words empty it, and that we should all try to fill each other's buckets. Finally, December conferences rolled around, and we went for ours.

After chatting and going over the report card, Mrs. M asked us if we remembered "our conversation on the bench" a couple of months ago. I said yes. Well, she said, Joe's mother had called her shortly after our talk, extremely upset. Joe had gone home the same day my daughter did, and told his mother what he had said to her. Mrs.Joe, horrified, had called up Mrs. M in a state, wanting to apologize to us and telling her that she had given Joe a big piece of her mind for what he had said, because they weren't like that. They do, however, have Arabic television on in their home, she said, so maybe he had gotten some ideas from it.

I'm not sure what Mrs. M told Mrs. Joe, but Mrs. M, my husband, and I discussed how we thought maybe Joe was just trying out a conversation topic. Mrs. M said that Joe is kind of shy, and also likes to be funny, so perhaps his offering about the Jews being his mortal enemies, was an unfortunate conversational gambit for a laugh from a girl he felt a little shy around and wanted to impress. Oops.

I left the conference one conspiracy short of righteous indignation, but glad that Joe knew he'd done something not right. I felt a bit better about my town, which had grown somewhat dark undertones in the last couple of months. I was able to congratulate myself for my (outer) restraint and posit that perhaps I had the start of a novel. When God snips a thread somewhere, sheheshe unravels a seam somewhere else? Something like that.

Entropy

2010-12-02T09:34:00.000-05:00

Not actually my lawn

My front yard has been overtaken by moss. I ignored this encroachment all summer and fall, noting and immediately forgetting the husband's reluctance to mow, which seemed to be linked to an uncharacteristic (for him) existential despair over the state of the lawn. It was a little easier to forget than it might have been, because our across-the-street neighbor Steve moved out in July.

Steve, you may recall, was a living reproach to me about proper home maintenance. Stay-at-home Steve was tireless, thoroughly capable, and extremely visible. The person who moved in, let's call him Anti-Steve because I haven't met him and have hardly seen him, doesn't mow, weed or rake, or touch up trim, or find any excuse at all to be outside most of the day in most any weather. Instead of a visible reproach to me, this new guy is reproachable himself. He moved in, plopped a yard sculpture of a monkish robed fellow, presumably St. Francis, in my line of sight, and disappeared. Little tree-weeds left to grow in Steve's shrub bed! Leaves thick across the lawn. House lights on day and night and day and night. No sign of life. Give me Steve and his family and his boundless energy for home repair any day! Anti-Steve's next door neighbor has even mowed the lawn and blown the leaves off Steve's old lawn.

The neglect across the way, as well as a peculiar, pale, light frosty hue of green in our yard caused me to actually look at our lawn again. An aquatic-looking spongiform moss had sprung up everywhere. The husband was right: there was practically nothing left to mow. The only unmossy places were the areas with dead crabgrass, and the area along the driveway that we did rip out and reseed in early October, which is looking good. So gratifying: sprinkle seeds in dirt, add water, things grow. We did that after my neighbor who shares the lawn on that side, pigeon-toed, retired Betty, mentioned in passing that she was despairing of the lawn service she'd hired, because crab grass was encroaching anyway. I thought that might be a gentle hint that we weren't poisoning our lawn sufficiently, and that it might be time for me to get off the fence about whether I'm okay with reverting to what nature intended, or if I want to try to keep some grass, if it only requires improving the soil. Along that side, it only required two miserable hours of boring weed-pulling followed by seed sprinkling and then regular watering. No poisons.

Buoyed by the success on the side of the driveway, and by the sight of Pigeon-toed Betty and Tom next door trundling little carts of something across their lawns periodically, I told myself this isn't brain science, I can figure it out. And since the husband actually is a brain doctor, I think we just might succeed.

I checked GardenWeb (www.gardenweb.com). Mossy lawn could very likely be cured by adding lime. As I read this, I remembered that last June I had gone to the effort of having the soil analyzed by the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and their recommendation had been to add lime. I immediately failed to follow up on that, to which I attribute the broken a.c. and the long miserable summer.

After a consultative phone conversation with Laura at the local garden center, I sent off the husband to purchase a lawn product. Said lawn product, while not exactly lime, is ten time more expensive than lime, and three times better, according to Laura. Tom next door, who by the way manages to keep an impeccable yard and work full time, lent us his spreader cart, and we got to work. Too soon to tell if it's working. What it has done is leave little white splotches that look like bird poop on the driveway and little white granules on the lawn. We'll see. Some of the moss is very pretty.

Thanksgiving Double Rainbow

2010-11-25T10:11:00.000-05:00

Boring topic, huh? Sorry. It's been over a month since I last wrote, which I can hardly believe. They, They Who Know, say bloggers should post regularly, no less than once a week. I've fallen down on the job, apparently, so I might as well take advantage of the built-in theme offered by Thanksgiving and say a few words about what I am grateful for.

Aside from the dog keeping to himself whatever nastiness he ate on his afternoon walk and allowing us to sleep through the night, first and most, I am grateful for my improved state of mind, which has a ripple effect on my family. Now my children are no longer studying my face's every change of expression. While I have a newfound awareness of how acute my 3rd grader's observation of my moods is ("Mommy, why did you make that sound with your breath?"), I'm relieved I can offer her information on a broader spectrum of the emotional rainbow than I was accessing for a while. The change has been gradual, and I observed things must be lightening up when my kids started commenting on how stressed out Mommy was. If they felt safe enough to speak up, then things were improving.

There's a certain amount of grin-and-bear-it to adult life that I've lately come to appreciate. I can't really attribute the improvement in my mood to anything other than just enduring the rough transition from city to suburbs. My father-in-law, whom I am remembering today, used to say with a laugh, This too shall pass. Relative to the phases of my elder daughter's infancy I was dealing with at the time, I found the phrase extremely comforting. I am grateful to him for that, and I'm missing him now, on the ninth anniversary season of his death.

The other day, my 3rd grader and I saw a double rainbow. I've now seen a real rainbow twice in my life, and both times have been in my new hometown. However much I've begrudged my existence here, I recognize that where I am has a good view of sky. I am grateful for that.

My Mortal Enemies: The Jews

2010-10-27T19:03:00.000-04:00

My 3rd grader reported to me today that one of the boys in her class, said, "You know who my mortal enemies are? The Jews."

Hmmm, I said. He's probably repeating something he heard some older people around him say. Why do you think he said that? I asked.

She shrugged.

Does he know any other jewish kids? I asked.

More shrugs. Ethan's Jewish, she said.

Well, did that bother you, I asked?

A little, she said.

What did you say when he said that?

I told him I'm Jewish, she said.

Okay, good. And did anything else happen?

She said, He went like this (she pantomimed someone drawing away in exaggerated fear). And he said, Cc's Jewish, and I hate Jews.

Well, look, I said. You could tell him, if it happens again, that you don't choose who your friends are based on what religion they are. You could say that doing that is acting prejudiced.

Yeah, she said.

So how did Ethan take this conversation? I asked.

Well, he heard it, but he ran off and joined some other people, said my 3rd grader. It probably bothered him a little, too, but he didn't want to think about it. Anyway, Joe (who said it) is a little crazy, she said, sounding as if that would take care of the matter.

Yeah, well, now's your chance to let him know a little bit about what he's saying. It's crazy kids who grow up to become crazy adults. Hitler was crazy, I said.

True, she said, although she doesn't know much about Hitler beyond the name. We're not exactly browbeating Holocaust history into our kids here in this household. We don't even belong to a synagogue. We don't even believe in God, at least the adults in the house don't. Still, we're marked as Jews, and that marking still matters. There are plenty of scary people around these days. Sipping Tea, for example.

Being Jewish isn't something I think about often. At the High Holidays, sure, at Hanukkah, and at Passover. I'm poorly educated about Judaism. What I know, I've gleaned for myself. I had only one year of religious school as a kid, and my children don't go to Hebrew school. This lack of education has only bothered me at times like these, when I realize that my being Jewish marks me in others' opinions, and I feel ill-equipped to re-educate them. Take Israel. I can't stand the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's got to end, and it's got to end with two states. The hardliners are disgusting. As disgusting there as they are here in the US, although their religions differ. But I hardly know a thing about it, and I can't bear to pay attention.

About twenty years ago, I had a housemate who asked me, in all seriousness, why the Jews didn't just buy an island somewhere and go live there. This was an extremely well-educated woman, and the question was honest, an honest reflection of pure ignorance. She had a crazy father, the kind of crazy that led to building an underground bunker on his property to escape the Communists, the kind of crazy who believed in the Illuminati, the kind of crazy that saw all Jews as rich and evil power-mongers. Somehow, miraculously, he raised a child who was willing to ask an honest question born of ignorance. The kind of ignorance that crazy Joe exhibited today.

Refill, anyone?

Sartorial Blues

2010-10-26T16:17:00.003-04:00

At the beginning of October, I took a pair of chinos to the tailor to shorten them. This was my first time at this tailor, as I've not needed one since I left NYC and Leung's tailor shop on Lexington and 92nd (they make shirts there, by the way). The guy was very nice, the shop was full of work, so I left the pants. When I picked them up, I made my first mistake. I failed to check the hem. I was in a rush, we were going away for the weekend, and I had to go. When I pulled the pants out of the plastic to pack them, I noticed the stitching was very obvious. The pants are blue, and the stitching was contrasting, whereas all the other stitching on the pants was matching blue. Well, I threw them in the suitcase because I needed pants, and trundled off for the weekend.

The stitching really bothered me. I tried ignoring it, but when you're as "low to the ground" as I am, you don't want any contrasting stitching attracting the eye downward. The tailor had told me he was going away on vacation for a couple of weeks, so I waited until today to take in the pants. Needless to say, I had no receipt--my second and third mistakes were throwing that away, when I tried to convince myself the stitching was fine--but all of my information was in the cash register/computer, so I knew he could look me up.

There was a customer in the shop when I arrived, so I waited for her to leave before approaching the guy. I showed him the hem and told him I was not so happy with it. He took my name and number on a new receipt and said he would look up the invoice. Then he told me to leave the pants with him and he would get back to me in a week whether he found my information. Whether, that is, if, he found my information.

This was not going to be one of the "the customer is always right exchanges." And if he didn't find the receipt, he said, he would have to charge me to redo the hem. I told him I'd like him to call me before he did any work, and at that moment, I believe, the transaction changed. As I saw how the wind was blowing, he began fingering the stitching and told me he would never do work like that. He got out a spool of thread that matched the pants and said that would be what he would use. I said, yes, that would be the right color to use. Then he suggested that some people do their own hem and then they don't like it and then they come in and ask him to redo this work. For free, was the implication.

Okay, he said, leave the pants. I said I'd rather not leave the pants (fantasies of returning for the pants and the pants having mysteriously vanished), but that I'd be happy to bring them back in once he'd looked up my information. I asked him couldn't he do that right now, and he shook his head and said he couldn't.

Another customer arrived. I had been trying to avoid embarrassing him, but now I said that when he located my receipt, he could just give me a refund. He said, fine, and I left. At the car, I realized I had left without my copy of the new receipt of this transaction, which would be proof that this conversation had occurred, something I was now sure I would need. I returned to the shop. The customer and the tailer were smiling and talking and the customer looked away, suggesting that naturally I, the disgruntled self-hemmer was trying to take advantage of the reputable tailor. I asked for my receipt. The tailor refused. No pants, no receipt, he said. He could look up my information and let me know, but he wouldn't do work like that. Not in his shop.

I left the shop adrenelated. I know that's not a word, but it should be. He was never going to look up my receipt, and even if he did, he would pretend he hadn't found it. The cost was minimal, maybe twelve dollars, but I'm on a tight budget. Besides, there was a principle at stake, maybe more than one. My integrity had been impugned, and there was nothing I could do. It would take this guy a matter of seconds to look up my name and phone number, but he wouldn't do it. Short of creating an ugly stink of a scene, it was unlikely I'd ever get either satisfaction or a refund. It was only twelve dollars, but twelve dollars is clearly worth the fight to Mr. Delmar Tailor. I thought about going back in. I'm still thinking of it. I thought of walking back in and asking if he's had the chance to look up my information yet. When he said either no, or that yes, he had, but that I wasn't in his records, then I would say, politely, that I was sorry to end on this note, and that my blog readers would be very interested in this transaction. In my fantasy, I neglected to mention that I have, to my knowledge, maybe two or three readers within 50 miles of here, but that would be my secret.

Le Shopping

2010-10-25T14:44:00.000-04:00

I went to Macy’s the other day and bought some things for my kids. I really dislike shopping around here, where it's all malls, and nothing is interesting, and there isn't even the option of strolling into a fantastique boutique and finding some cool French kids' clothes way on sale. Nevertheless, children do grow, and so, I went to Macy's. I collected a few items, and went to pay.

Although there were several salespeople visible on the floor, there was just one open register, at which a line had formed. As soon as I joined it, holding my items, I realized I needed a restroom. Well, I figured I would wait. I was holding a bunch of hard-sought children's clothing that I didn't want to lose.

It quickly became apparent that the transaction underway at the desk wasn't your basic cash-and-carry. It could be a price check, or a return, or God help me, an account opening. I listened and observed. The salesclerk, who avoided looking at the line in front of her, was entering data into the register -- and apologizing. Not a good sign. She was entering this customer's vital stats -- and making typos, and apologizing.

I began looking around. An army of salesclerks and managers seemed to be standing around the children's section, gabbing. I nabbed a passing name tagged person and asked if there was another register open. Not in the children's section, I was told; but I was welcome to try another register in a different department. Why would I do that, when I would have to search through the minipods of goods in Bedding or Housewares to find the one lone register that would be open there? By the time I located someone to ring me up, it would probably be my turn in the children's department.

At this point, someone ahead of me in line left, probably setting out for the register in crockery. A relaxed, casual atmosphere now descended upon the salesclerk and the customer up front. I overheard more than I needed to know about this customer's son, so busy playing sports he had no time to shop for a blazer. Imagine, he was going to a bar mitzvah, and he needed to wear a jacket and tie. Well, he didn't own a jacket, and she didn't realize how dressy a bar mitzvah is. Oh, it's like a wedding. And on and on. I was beginning to question if I was on Planet Earth. Imagine being in any place called New York and not knowing about bar mitzvahs, at least enough to know they call for fancy dress. And what was with this whole chatty thing? I felt very far away from NYC.

Perhaps I was exuding molecules of impatience. I'm not the most patient person. I'm an Aries, for God's sake. But I was being as patient as I knew how. I asked politely about the registers, and only maybe mumbled something to myself about how when someone is not conducting a routine sale, that might be a plausible time to deploy another register to reduce the wait for those who just wanted to pay and pee and flee. I'm sure it was barely audible. Anyway, it was only an idle comment to the ether, as I listened to the customer signing up for one of those point-accruing cards where after about five thousand points they give you a ten dollar credit, and in exchange, you’ve given Macy’s marketing division all your personal info, as well as a lot of info about what you buy, how often, and when, which they can then use to enrich themselves further. I suppose if you're buying every navy blue blazer in three sizes for your son who's too busy with after school sports to shop with you, so he can attend a bar mitzvah in proper attire, you might want to collect all the points you could before you return all but one of those blazers, but still.

I started practicing mindfulness of my impatience as a way to survive it.

In time, the salesclerk placed each blazer in its plastic covering and this painful transaction ended. After that, the lady in front of me, who was next up at the register, actually turned to me and said she wasn’t in a hurry, and I could go ahead. People, it was one of those moments when your character speaks. When you say to yourself, I could take advantage of this woman who is more patient and certainly more charitable than me, but I shouldn’t, so I won’t. Or you could say to yourself, this woman has more time than me, and she probably doesn’t need to pee, and I hate Macy’s, and I hate shopping because every time I shop I have to wait forever to pay and then I have to return stuff later, and I will take advantage of her kindness – whether ironic and therefore hostile and meant to induce guilt and remorse, or genuine. So, which was it, people? Well, I really had to pee.

All items but one were too small, too see-through, or too big. I would have to return them.

City Gal Takes A Walk

2010-09-30T17:00:00.001-04:00

I always feel a little dirty after publishing a blog post. You know, because I've revealed something, probably something unflattering, about myself. Something usually negative. I don't actually hate my life. Today. After all, the leaves are turning, and there are a lot of trees around here. Tourists come here to see the scenery I see everyday as I grudgingly drive hither and thither pursuing my suburban aims. I often appreciate the open sky and the treeline, I'll have you know. Just yesterday I lived through a semi-glorious, semi-harrowing exploration of the natural beauty of Upstate New York.

Emboldened by an encounter with a woman at the dog park who told me about a great walk not too far from town, I decided to take advantage of the gorgeous day (trying to forget that it felt like spring, not fall, and to just enjoy the sun, clear sky, and weirdness of fallen leaves in the 70 degree weather). Of course I checked out the map on the interwebs before venturing out, saw the Bennett Hill Preserve of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy (http://www.mohawkhudson.org/preserves/Bennett.htm)was quite simple and -- most important -- basically a closed loop with only one entrance and therefore impossible, I repeat, impossible to get lost. I don't have the greatest sense of direction. In early days in Central Park, I am compelled to admit that I started out more than once, with a child in a stroller, at 79th and Central Park West, aiming for 84th and Madison on the Upper East Side, and ended up at say, 106th and Central Park West, after crossing to within viewing distance of my intended destination. The Bennett HIll Preserve is no Central Park. One easy path, one hard path up a largish hill to a loop, all color-coded. All I needed was green to yellow, avoiding red, zip-zoop. The woman had told me it took about an hour to go up, walk the loop and return.

I found the place very easily, just alongside a charming (smelly) dairy farm (cows are louder than one might think). I believe this is the dairy farm from which our milk comes. Anyhoo, there was one of those little sign-in boxes, which was cute, but gave me pause, as I recall some serious hikes in New Hampshire with my rock climbing friends where you have to sign in. Implication being if your body is discovered, they can identify you by your name in the log.....I signed in. I also considered calling the husband to tell him where I was since I was walking alone (!) except for one very fluffy, large dog no one takes seriously.

I brought water for myself and for the dog. Since the walk would only be about an hour, I left it in the car. (!) Then Milo and I set out along the one and only path leading to the two paths up the hill to the loop. It was a really lovely path, the first part following the edge of the meadow where the noisy cows grazed. We had to really bend under a fallen tree at one point, but that was fine. Then the path turned up the hill and wound along. I didn't see any trail markings or anything, but it was a path. Kind of steep at one point. I thought I saw a red marking on a tree and thought that was peculiar, as I had intended to take the easy path and wasn't sure now where I was. Eventually, we met up with the yellow path around the top. The intersection was marked with a pretty stile. There were two painted yellow spots on a tree right at the jointure.

Milo and I followed the yellow path, which was clearly marked, my pounding heart noted with relief. I remembered this path made the loop at the top and figured if I followed it around, we'd either get back to the stile or find the green path. So we walked. It was a narrow path, up and down, full of leaves and pine needles, and through a forest of pines and other finer limbed trees. Thoughts of how big a no-no it is to go off by yourself, especially for a woman, started intruding. I hoped the dog counted as a companion, although I doubted his, shall we say, efficacy in an emergency. Now rattled, I saw no sign of the green path, and then, indeed, saw the marks for the red path, which seemed to be taking over for the yellow path. Now I was confused and rattled. I had been on the red path on the way up, right? So I decided to retrace my steps. It had been about 35 minutes. Suddenly I thought of all the idiotic hikers who perish on seemingly benign hikes because they haven't compasses or water or even a granola bar, not to mention the seasoned travelers who get stuck in a sudden attack of bad weather on Mount Washington every summer. Here I was, in upstate New York, serious country, and I had left my water in my car. Furthermore, I was alone, and anyone who survives childhood knows you're never supposed to go off into the woods alone. Even if you do have a large dog with you - especially since he's fluffy and people don't take him seriously.

Sweaty, panicky, but neither hungry nor thirsty, I started back. The yellow marks were on both sides of the trees, so I had no trouble, until I came to a sort of openish area amongst the pines and found myself going down. This path didn't look right. There were blue and red ties around the trees here, which I hadn't seen before - and they weren't the right colors. I couldn't see the yellow path. The markers were pretty far apart. I debated whether I should continue, since down was at least the right direction, and so maybe this was actually the easy path and I had been mistaken about the green markers. Then I flashed back to one of those hikes with my rock climbing friends (my beautiful lost young men, Steve and Phil), when Phil's girlfriend and I hiked to the rock face with them, and then the girlfriend and I tried to hike down to the car, since we weren't climbing. Tried to hike down, I say, but couldn't find the path. Blundered around in the mountains of New Hampshire and ended up climbing down through treetops and scrabbling through underbrush for two hours until we found a road and managed to eventually find the car. Scared half to death. I decided not to just wing it down this time. Providence provided an exit once, but probably wouldn't reward such stupidity twice.

I started back up to where the yellow path was supposed to be. Milo had hesitated before going down this way, after all. He probably remembered the smell. With a careful look around, I found the yellow path again, found the wonderful yellow markers again, and after another little bit, I came upon the convenient, blessed, trail-marking stile. We started down the path, which was definitely the right path, and after a few yards I saw a marker - green - painted on a tree. I had been on the right path the whole way up. I found a few more markers - green- going down. I checked the reverse side of the trees. There were no green markers visible on the way up. Vindication of a sort.

I relaxed and we walked down. Milo got to run off-leash, which was a thrill for him, and we made it to the sign-in box, where I mentioned the poor trail markers in the comments section, to our water, and to our home. Milo needed a serious grooming to remove about a million burrs, and that was my foray into the great outdoors. There will likely be a blog post about Lyme Disease one of these days.

Divorce Saturday

2010-09-27T13:00:00.001-04:00

Thank God It's Monday.

My adored cousin L, who is about my age (once you're over a certain age, a year or so doesn't matter, now does it?), but who had kids way before I did, used to complain that she hated the weekends. At that time I spent every weekend going to bookstores and cafes, going out to dinner and movies with friends, maybe having a date here and there, sleeping late, lounging around in sweats - doing, you know, whateverthehellIwanted. Well, now my kids are the age hers were when she started saying this, and now I own a home, and now I know what she meant.

Friday night rolls around. We manage to coordinate dance drop-offs and pick-ups, get everyone home, and have a decent dinner (which I make). The husband and I, because we have such a spectacular social life, usually end up watching old Masterpiece Theater episodes and going to bed early. Saturday morning looms, after all, and I need my rest.

Saturday rolls around. It's cleaning day. It's laundry day. It's yard work day. It's grocery shopping day. But before cleaning and shopping; there's walking the dog, buying oranges and slicing them for soccer for the 3rd grader's game; there's a photo shoot for overpriced photos of the 3rd grader's soccer team; there's the farmers' market, which I have to get to early enough that the egg lady and the bread man haven't run out. Farmer's Market overlaps with soccer games, so the husband and I tag-team that. We reconvene at the house and start cleaning. At some point in this morass of human filth (around the toilet bowl usually), I am overcome with a rush of heated despair: while I am cleaning this- this- this object, the grass is growing, the crabgrass is dying and offering a brief interlude when we could easily pull it out and plant seed and improve the lawn before all the leaves fall down (glory of fall) and need raking; the spiders are spinning webs in the corners of all the vestibules of my house; the acorns are taking the morning to embed themselves further into the yard pursuant to their goal of turning it into a forest; the laundry needs shifting and folding; we have nothing to eat; we have to remember to get the 7th grader to her rehearsal; the lawn needs mowing, the shrubs need trimming; and there is a nature fair/river festival/craft fair/state park where I would much rather be.

Instead, I am cleaning this- this- this toilet, and I have two more, and the tiles need extra care, and really all the floors should be washed by hand; and I hate the trim on the shower door; and why are the knobs on all my kitchen cabinets gold colored? And while I'm cleaning and the yard is growing and tangling like some stop-action example of entropy, I'm unable to paint the family room a better color because I'm cleaning the ding-dong toilet and the floors and the shower (who picked these ugly bronze-like and very ornate fixtures? I would pick something very simple that wipes clean easily) and I'm just becoming hotter and hotter and hotter and it's time for a divorce now, because this is definitely not my fault that all this stuff has to be done and it has to be done on Saturday. Isn't Saturday the Sabbath somewhere?

Around noon the children, who have been pressed into various chores, are now hiding. The dog wants to play. The husband and I take off our ipods. I'm sweaty and smelly and hungry, and I want someone to give me lunch. Now. The husband may have similar feelings, but I don't want to know. Furthermore, he's not allowed to. He needs to give me lunch. NOW. Besides, there is still laundry and meal-planning, and the desire to go to the gym and the dog needs his long afternoon exercise and there is just this constant awareness that my whole life is like, well, like my backyard - plug up one chipmunk hole and and a chipmunk runs out of another one. Don't even get me started on the wildlife in the yard. Don't even get me started on the wildlife in the house. Who knew there could be so many spiders? The 3rd grader does. She tracks 'em like a zealot. We are wearing out the stair treads removing them (sometimes in a cup, with humane intent, to the outside, where they apparently immediately pitch their webs in the vestibule; sometimes crushed in a tissue, with murderous intent, right down the drain). And then there are those lovely little things I brought home from the Coop that require removing from the ceiling.

Thing is, I would much rather do yard work than clean the house. But I would much rather have a clean house than not. So while we exhaust ourselves cleaning, I am aware most unpleasantly of all the other projects not happening. The basic maintenance, and then the so-called fun stuff about owning a home: painting it to your own liking, or whatever. Some consider this sort of work fun. And don't even get me started on what I really thought I'd be doing when I owned a home (back in the 20th Century, when I even gave a thought to any of this): hiring a maid to clean the house, and consulting with a designer about the interior of it. That is so far away from me now that I'm not even exactly sure where I learned of those possibilities. Oh yeah, wait, I remember. I was raised in that kind of home. Sigh. My freelance writing career is going to have to really take off before any of that becomes possible. Divorce Saturday.

Lest you condemn me as a big fat whiner (or a short, plump one - whatever), I have to admit that my attitude might have something to do with my world view. Is that a tautology? I believe it is. I will check my dictionary later. I do understand that 'smile until you feel happy' philosophy. It just doesn't work for me. Enjoying a clean house is definitely not the same thing as enjoying cleaning it, and let me assure you, that enjoying cleaning depends a lot on whether you can afford not to.

Nevertheless, there are pleasant things about this list of chores. For example, the Farmers' Market, once I've stalked the eggs and bread, provides a pleasant outdoor interlude. I usually run into my friend Annie there, and Annie is always so much busier than I am, and so cheerful about it, that I am biting my lip even daring to complain. We take a moment to appreciate the Mushroom Guy - who has a very charming girlfriend who is missing half of her left pinkie - but only a moment, because that is all either Annie or I can spare with such a long list of to-dos. Then we're off, our baggy housework clothes flapping around us.

And at the end of the day, there is the occasional dinner that the husband and I have been invited to, or that we have invited friends to; if not, there is a clean house. Sometimes we've bucked the Saturday trend and spent the day at a festival/fair/nature preserve/state park/with friends, and we come home exhausted. We always turn in early then, because we are freakin' tired, and Sunday looms. Divorce Sunday. Hahahahahahahahahahaha.

I Know This Kid

2010-09-19T19:40:00.000-04:00

Lolita, I'll call her. Big, brown, almond-shaped eyes with dark lashes, hair falling in a messy Rita Hayworth wave across her face, perfect olive skin, willowy, if an 8 year old can be willowy-- she's a beauty. She's publicly polite, but privately, she's, well, she's an instigator. She's my daughter's friend, and she makes me uncomfortable. All her visits follow a pattern, so I'll use the last one as an example.

She comes over and they want to go on the computer. I give them a time limit (15 minutes each). Timer set, timer dings. A private, whispered conference commences, and my daughter asks if Lolita can have more time. Not wanting to seem too strict, I allow 5 more minutes. Timer set, timer dings, and Lolita remains at the desk. My child gets up and is ready for snack. Lolita lingers. Even when I say time to stop, Lolita lingers, tapping on the keys until I put out snack.

Snack done, there's more whispering. Then my child wants to know if they can call up Zack. My child never calls up Zack. My child almost never calls anyone. She never, for example, calls Lolita. Every time Lolita comes over, this is what happens. Zack lives a couple of blocks away and he was last year's heartthrob in Cc's clatch of friends. I confess I've even suspected Lolita's interest in Cc is vested in Zack. Last year they called Zack, to no avail. He wasn't home, or didn't answer, or whatever. The boy has no interest in playing with them after school, although chasing them at recess was last year's big time game. So this time, I say, "Why?" Lolita says they want to see if he can play. It was nearing 5 p.m. I just say, "No." "Can we see if we can go over there?" Lolita says. At least she's speaking directly to me, but certainly not taking No as an answer. I shake my head. "Not today." My child says, "Come on, Lolita, when my mom says 'No' in that tone, she means it." (Victory!) "Go on, go play. Find something to do," I say.

They went into the basement and commenced thumping around. I knew they were playing with some old crutches, using them to swing off the steps. Moderately dangerous, but whatever. After a while, though, there was silence. Silence is almost always trouble. So I went over to the basement door and peeked through the crack. My child was sitting on the floor playing with some old dolls. Lolita was still on the crutches. I listened. Cc held up one of the dolls, a My Little Pony, and explained what she liked about it. Lolita was saying she stopped playing with those dolls when she was like four. Swinging around, one of her legs crooked, pretending she had a broken leg. Cc said, "Well, I don't play with them that often, but I like them."" Dolls are boring," said Lolita. "Well I'm waiting for you to give me a turn on those crutches," said Cc. "I can't, I have a broken leg," said Lolita. "Oh, come on Lolita," said Cc. "It's my turn now". "OK,"said Lolita with a heavy sigh. "Let me sit down on this chair." (She was still pretending her leg was broken, even though she's way too mature to pretend with dolls.)

I left them alone. Cc was sticking up for herself. But I wondered if there was a cost. For me, that kind of disapproval from a friend like Lolita would have cost me a lot. Instead of just avoiding her, or choosing other friends, I would have been hurling myself at her, trying to get her approval. It didn't seem that way for my child, I told myself. My child is totally different from me. I'm just projecting my inner child's insecurities onto my outer child. I'm thinking of years ahead, middle school, when Lolita is still boy-crazy and is ready to get physical/sexual.

Later on, I peeked again, and the disapproving, above-it-all Lolita was playing house with Cc. Blankets spread all over the floor, doctor's kit in use, imagination turned on full strength.

Lolita stayed for dinner, and she and Cc kept up the energy for the whole time. As soon as Lolita's mother picked her up, though, Cc's face sagged. "What's wrong?" I said. "I'm tired," she said. "Too long an afternoon for a school day?" I asked, offering a coded excuse for the future. I don't know if she understood it, but she nodded. "Okay," I said, "We'll keep that in mind."

A Step Too Far

2010-09-08T18:25:00.000-04:00

So last year the bus stop was at our house, but this year, to save time and money on gas, the Dept. of Ed changed some regulations to consolidate stops. Regulations stipulate no child may walk more than one tenth of a mile to a stop. Good, good, all good. I'm behind it 100%. Fine. So this year, the bus stop is around the U of our street in front of somebody else's house. Okay, fine. Do I really care? Not so much, except when the weather is snowy and 3rd grader will have to tromp along in the slush on the sidewalk-free suburban streets. Okay, so we'll suck it up. After all, didn't we tromp along in the slush of New York City's streets day in day out for six years to get to and from school and every other activity we schlepped to, carrying snacks, violins, leotards, bookbags, lunchboxes, purses, and often strollers on our backs? Yes we did. We never lived far enough from school (one mile) to qualify for a bus. Furthermore, riding a bus of any kind in New York is exquisite torture. I'd rather walk in any weather any distance under three miles (by myself, not with a child under age 12) in NYC than ride a bus, particularly a crosstown bus. And I did.

Today was the first day of school, so we walked around the U to the new bus stop, chatted with the neighbors, took photos, let the dogs sniff one another. One of the mothers said the distance from her house to ours was over one tenth of a mile, she wouldn't want to have her child walk it in bad weather. Fine, fine, whatever, little seeds of doubt planted, but whatever. Then the bus came along the street. Came along the U my 3rd grader and I had just walked, sailed around the U, right past our house, and stopped at the designated bus stop. Fine, whatever, fine.

I'm sure my clever readers know where this is going. Seeds of doubt sprouting, bus sailing right past our house, disapproving mothers who know more than I. On the way home from running errands, I clocked the distance on my odometer. By gum, if it wasn't more than one tenth of a mile. Not a lot more, but more. Google Maps put it at one tenth exactamundo. Fine, whatevs. At dismissal time, the 7th grader, the dog, and I went outside to weed, or dig up chipmunk holes with our noses, and wait for the 3rd grader. I figured the morning's bus sailing was possibly just one of those things, the driver would work it out more efficiently; but no, it was no fluke. When the bus finally arrived, late of course, having those first-day kinks, it sailed right past our house again. I waved, the driver waved back. A few moments later, the child came walking around the U.

Reports of first day followed. Nice teacher (thank God), happy child, a new friend or two already, a cool planner provided by the school, complete with translucent cover. Lunch, relax, gossip: Still on the bus, last year's nemesis, M. M lives on the next street over, with another child my child likes. This other child, Olivia, according to my child, said that this year, she and M were supposed to wait together at M's house for the bus. They live diagonally from one another on the same street. But M and Olivia "are feuding" according to my child. So somebody's mother called the bus company, and now M and Olivia are waiting at their respective homes for the bus, as they used to do, on the same street, diagonally across from one another.

Is this not petty? Still, if the bus company will reverse itself over this silly 3rd grade enmity, how about over sailing past my house on the way to the designated bus stop?

Well, they wouldn't change the stop just because the bus went right past the house. The bus goes right past lots of people's houses. The orders had come from on high at the Department of Ed, and the Superintendant had to enforce them. The woman on the phone was adamant, and a little peeved. Considering how long the phone was busy before I got through, I judged they'd been fielding a lot of calls like mine. But they would come and measure to make sure the new stop wasn't more than one tenth of a mile from the driveway. Okay, I said. Why not? I think it is, by a little.

So about ten minutes later -- I kid you not. This is a small town -- when I left to walk the dog, I met a man with a rolling ruler disk on a stick. (Somebody knows what those are called, but I don't). Looks like a giant pizza cutter. We walked the distance together, chatting about the very handsome dog lunging for acorns every step. My credibility on the line, I worried as he cut the corner to cross over to the bus stop. At the designated stop, he looked at his pizza cutter. 585 he said and turned back towards his yellow minibus. Huh, I said. Presumably one tenth of a mile is what, 500 feet? So I was right. I jogged after him and said, so what does this mean? He said, Means they're gonna have to change the stop back.

Now I'd done it. Now I remembered my child's reaction when I said she'd be picked up and dropped off at the neighbor's house: "Cool. You mean I can walk?" I said to the pizza cutter, Can we just make it casual, that when the weather's bad, the bus can let her off at our house? No, they can't do that, he said, because that would confuse the driver, especially if there was a substitute driver one day. Have to follow the regulations said the guy. Guess you've been getting a lot of these calls, I said. He rolled his eyes and said, You wouldn't believe.

I went on a long walk with the dog. Shortly after we returned home, the bus company called. Same lady. You were right, she said, apologetic. The stop is too far. By just a little, I said. I mean, I really don't mind the walking, except in crummy weather. We're adding your address to the list, said the lady. Number 38 will be your stop from now on.

I hung up. Victory. Now I'd done it.

Faith

2010-08-29T18:17:00.000-04:00

Another Sunday has rolled around and I find myself thinking about religion. Sunday being the sabbath and all. Except that I'm Jewish, at least genetically and culturally, so therefore Saturday ought to bring this question to mind. Sunday does, though, which I attribute to the dominant religion in American culture, to my lack of religious education, and to my attendance at an Episcopal prep school. Faith? Let's see. What can I say? Considering my secular philosophical underpinnings, I have a pretty high percentage of observant, religious friends. Most of them are Christian. Not surprising, I guess, considering the percentage of purported Christians populating the USA, but somewhat surprising to me. More than one friend has a divinity degree of some sort.

Where do I stand on religion? Perhaps a little discussion of my dog will illuminate you -- and me. See, we (the nuclear family) thought about, yearned for, planned for, anticipated getting a dog for several years. Much study of breed types and the pluses and minuses karmawise of adopting versus purchasing a puppy, of temperament, of training techniques ensued, along with much watching of Animal Planet and National Geographic TV shows about dogs. Anyone who has a dog knows about Cesar Milan the Dog Whisperer, and if you are reading my blog (thank you!) and don't have one, here is all you need to know about Cesar Milan: he whispers, dogs obey.

So full-up on information, and happily projecting all our hopes and fears for our future in suburbia onto owning this still mythical dog, we (the nuclear family) began listing names. Okay, I have a history with Eastern religions, yoga, and meditation, that started back in high school when I took yoga for PE. I was not a team sports kind of girl. Thank you Mrs.Wing and your stretch houndstooth slacks. Anyway, back to the future. There I was, coming up with all kinds of names like Roshi (teacher), Satori (flash of enlightenment), Metta (lovingkindness), and Beacon (you know what that is). I was really into the whole Cesar Milan philosophy of the dog living in the moment and teaching me how to live in the moment. Yes, the dog was going to be my guide to equanimity and mindfulness, my compadre on the Eightfold Path. I'm only a very short way along that path. Many incarnations to go.

We chose the name Milo.

And good thing, too, because Milo, cute as he is, at 9 weeks led me right smack into something awfully similar to post-partum depression. Once more, I was excrutiatingly aware of anxiety and entrapment, as I spent day after day locked in the kitchen with him, taking him outside every hour to house train him. Have I mentioned that it rained all day every day for about 6 months after we moved here to Delmar last summer? So, in the rain. Brought me right into mindful awareness of drudge and slog and mud on the floor, of self-pity and aversion, and I certainly had no time to meditate.

Milo. Very cute. Fuzzy, fluffy. Some might consider him a silly dog, more of a muppet. Certainly not DOG=GOD. Lesson learned? No, simply this: life is rainy, damp, muddy, sloggy, something to endure rather than enjoy sometimes, and dog is dog.

Borderline Hypochondriac

2010-08-23T19:44:00.001-04:00

It's been a long time since I posted and what has happened that I can write about? I had a scare at the doctor - a pseudo-scare, sufficient for a hypochondriac. As usual, when the nurse took my blood pressure, I asked for the numbers. I'm always low. Have low blood pressure. I fainted on my 11th birthday. This time she said it was 138 over 78 or something.

"That's high, isn't it?" I said, alarmed.

"High normal," she said.

High normal? Wha? Pounding heart, sweating palms, shrill voice for the doctor who asked if I was under any stress this year. Besides the job search, the tense homelife, and handling being a parent, did she mean?

Please note that the nurse did not even tell me my numbers -- I asked for them. Nor did the doctor mention them. Okay, I might not have given her time to mention them, since as soon as she shook my hand, I brought them up. Furthermore, no one described them as other than on the high side of normal. Nevertheless, I spiraled into heart disease, diabetes, and of course, because I'm married to a neurologist, stroke. Did I mention C is a stroke specialist?

If you have high blood pressure or any of the above mentioned terrible conditions, I am truly sorry. I know how you felt when you received the diagnosis. And you might be pretty pissed at my reaction to NOT having any of those diseases.

Nevertheless, the positive thing that came out of the visit was my realization that I have given up all of the stress-relievers that I have used at one time or another in my life. Exercise of any kind except walking the dog; yoga; deep breathing and finding my "special safe place"; and meditation. Okay, hold on. This is actually untrue. I was at the doctor due to a leg pain that began after I started using the weight machines at the Y, so I had already begun to relieve stress through exercise once again. I'm honest. To a fault. Usually my own. But anyway, any of the more groovy types of stress release I had abandoned.

That afternoon, terrified by my brush with coming close to the borderline of a chronic condition, I came back to the house and loaded up my ipodtouch with Zencasts on mindfulness meditation and started sitting. And except for a day or two, I've sat for twenty minutes every day, observing how difficult it is to concentrate on my breath and labeling my thoughts, feelings and sensations.

And you know what I've found? Absolutely everything in my life is exactly the same as it was before I went to the doctor and almost had high blood pressure. All the stressors are there, all the little pleasures that I may or may not succeed in noticing. However, I can tell that my heart rate slows down just a little bit when I sit still for a few minutes every day, and sitting still for a few minutes is a relief.

Independence

2010-07-18T17:30:00.004-04:00

It was a perfectly innocent suggestion by our groovy piano teacher. Let's call him Alan. He lives just down the street from where my younger daughter goes to camp. So, why not let her walk over to his house for her lesson?

She loved the idea. He assured me he had other kids who did it. Kids who went to school there. "8 year olds?" I said. I love the guy, but he has no kids (and very silky white chin-length hair and came of age in the late 1960s, early 1970s.) "Sure!" He said. Naturally, the daughter loved the idea. Frankly, I didn't mind it, either. Camp and piano lessons are on the same side of the quasi-major road. Only one side street would need to be crossed. The distance: one and a half blocks. Still, I hesitated. When I've got a parenting question, I head for the books. If the books don't answer me, I ask around. Parenting by committee, the recourse of the insecure.

I asked around. Most parents were dubious, some outright against it. One said, ask the camp director. One and only one said she and her husband have stopped asking what other people do and have decided to make their own decisions. This was novel. I put it aside for further research, as I do all untested theories.

I asked the camp director. Her wrinkled-up nose and shaking head told me much more than her polite words: wouldn't recommend it, were the words. You're crazy, was the implication.

Still, the bee was in the bonnet, thanks to Alan. And there I was, knowing my daughter could certainly handle it, thinking of all the freedom I had as a kid, thinking of all the recent articles about this question of how much freedom kids used to have versus how scheduled and escorted they are now. Just yesterday, I read an excellent chapter in Michael Chabon's non-fiction book Manhood for Amateurs in which he examines exactly this point. In fact, I felt as if I were reading my own thoughts -- as they would be written if I were a Pulitzer-Prize winning male writer. It's not really surprising that I share similar thoughts with Michael Chabon. Judith Warner discussed this question in her column a couple of years ago. All of us are about the same age, and share similar socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. It's not a wonder that we compare our childhoods of benign neglect to the way kids' childhoods are run these days and come up scratching our heads. How did we let this happen?

The question has been answered pretty well. The next step is the solution. One of the major problems with deciding to let the kids go "free range," is that not too many others are doing the same. The big difference between now and then, is that back then, when I was climbing through the dining room window of my friend Kelly's house because she'd lost her latch key, there were lots of kids all around doing similar things. Safety in numbers and all that.

One of the daughter's qualities is perseverance. The subject did not drop. I'm sure her ability to nag incessantly means only good things about her personality. I believe I read not too long ago that perseverance is one of the hallmarks of the successful person. So, the first week's piano lesson rolled around and I skirted the decision. I parked out front of Alan's house, walked over to camp, signed her out, and let her walk ahead of me to his house. She spent a very long time at that corner before crossing, turning her head side to side to check and recheck and recheck. I kept mum.

Week two came around. This kid is capable. Honestly, when we lived in the city, she used to like to tell me all the different routes we could take from our apartment to school, to the 92nd Street Y, to her sister's ballet school. She has a better sense of direction than her older sister. When I allowed them to take the elevator downstairs and go around the corner to buy me a coffee from Gourmet Garage, I felt secure knowing that big sister would have little sister beside her. I wished I'd never said anything to the camp director. But I had. The husband said forget it, the camp probably wouldn't dismiss her without a parent present. I considered writing a note, but decided I couldn't take the censure if I insisted on this extreme decision. So this time, I drove to camp, parked at the end of the driveway, picked up the daughter, signed her out, walked with her to the car, traded her backpack for her piano books, and got in the car without her. It took me a couple of minutes to make my way around the circular driveway with the other pick-up cars, so she had a head start.

I passed her on the street. She was striding with purpose and pride, and I felt it was a reasonable compromise. Although I was aware that my presence down the block, while freedom for her, was nothing like the freedom I experienced as a kid growing up in Northwest Washington, DC. By 10, definitely by 10, I was walking about half a mile along Connecticut Avenue, crossing major intersections-- to my shrink. At 8, I was definitely walking (running, racing, hurling myself across the neighborhood streets) alone or with friends to blow my allowance on candy at Broad Branch Market, and to play unsupervised at Lafayette Elementary School's playground, three blocks from home. On wrought iron monkey bars and cement tunnels and ramps. Unthinkable these days.

I considered honking as I passed, but opted against it. She was concentrating. I could see how much the journey meant to her. I parked and crossed over to Alan's house. Trees blocked my view of her and I denied myself the satisfaction of planting myself in the middle of the sidewalk and watching her walk toward me. Covered by the trees, I sat on Alan's front steps, pulled out my book, and waited a little anxiously for her to arrive.

The Mystery of Mysteries

2010-07-16T08:46:00.000-04:00

I've been reading a lot of Scandinavian mystery writers for the past year or so. Most of my life, I've been pretty uninterested in mysteries. Sure, I read bunches of Agatha Christie as a teenager, mostly because they were on my parents' basement bookshelves, but those were it. Later, pregnant with my first child, and afraid I'd never be able to read again, I got hooked on Elizabeth George. For the next ten years, I read a P.D. James now and then, tried a Patricia Cornwall (meh), but stuck to my major interests, contemporary realistic fiction and 18th and 19th Century British lit. Then my MIL introduced me to Tana French, and suddenly, mysteries were it. Tana French, Kate Atkinson. Thinky mysteries. Literary, thinky mysteries.

And then appeared Stieg Larsson. Neither thinky nor literary. More like out-of-control train rides. Jo Nesbo, Hakan Nesser, Henning Menkell. All different, all the same. Lots of burned out, jaded detectives with health problems due to poor diet, lack of sleep, smoking, and drinking. Why, I ask you, do I read them? Why?

Why? Maybe in part because I'm amazed by the human body's endurance. Considering how I've reacted to the stress of uprooting myself and family from a place I was enmeshed, to a job search, and to an adjustment to a life I'm still unsure I want, I see, feel, and know the physical and mental ravages of stress. Maybe I like to read about these burned out messes of detectives because they reassure me by enduring so much more than I have.

There is more to it, though. Yes, the stories are compelling, and plot-driven narratives are a lot like movie thrillers: pure escapism. But there are so many forms of escapism -- somatic illnesses, chic-lit, leafing through home decor magazines -- that I wonder why I choose this form now. Especially since I really dislike descriptions of violence, and these books seem to ratchet-up the horrific manner of death with each publication. Nary a one contains a single homicide. They're all double, triple, serial murders.

Shall I tell you my theory? It's because of the value placed therein on human life. I'm stating a paradox, considering how easily and emotionlessly these authors dispose of their victims. Furthermore, their protagonists are hardly models of emotional health. Therefore the general world-view promulgated by these authors is fairly grim. Nevertheless, their detectives (or as in Larrson, their de-facto detectives), will do anything to solve these mysteries, at the risk of destroying themselves. As I read these narratives, I am filled with reassurance that people still place that much value on a single life.

I think at this time in my life, filled with massive evidence of the general ineffectiveness of one individual against the blind forces of nature and humanity, I am reassured to find that the individual does matter. So I read.

Slipping Through My Fingers

2010-07-07T08:51:00.000-04:00

Yes, this title is an allusion to Abba. Yes, the movie was schlock. Yes, I saw it ("MamaMia") and I saw the Broadway Show. And you know what? It really touched a nerve, that movie did, anyway. I know I'm not the only one who thought so. One of my friends described the movie as a secret pleasure, her grown-up "Dirty Dancing."

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. with an ineffable sadness, thinking of my 6th grader growing up for almost a whole summer without me. Thinking of how she might have changed when we see her, thinking of how I'm still allowed to hug her now -- quick hugs, not too many kisses, always on her terms -- and wondering if I'll still be allowed to when I see her again. Thinking of how fast time is going by. None of this is unmapped country for any parent, I know, but sometimes the universality of an emotion really manifests in a moment. A moment of insomnia, usually.

As I struggle with myself these days, I have an added pressure that this little girl's awareness is becoming more profound, and that she is becoming aware of my struggles, too. Until now it's been pretty easy to present a reasonable facsimile of a well-adjusted parent to my children; but now the struggles are a bit more personal, and I am loathe to show them my humanness, because with it comes awareness of a lot of things about me and the world I would rather they not know.

I'm not speaking about Death, at least I don't think so. We've had many a late night conversation about it when she was supposed to be in bed, and I've felt for her, remembering those moments when I used to feel so terrified at the thought of no longer existing. C and I usually try to talk her down from her anxiety and then make jokes, and that works. I always remember, although I have yet to say this to her, what Victor Tolkein, a boy at St.Albans said to me (this was high school, probably senior year) when we were talking about death. He said he didn't worry about death anymore because when he was dead he wouldn't care.

Okay, maybe that's not so profound, but it struck me at the time. Sometimes the root of a cliche is profound. Still, I'm not sure my 6th grader is ready for that piece of existentialism. Unfortunately, I can't comfort her with God talk, because I just don't buy it and she knows.

I really wasn't thinking of death, although it occupied a whole paragraph, didn't it? And probably was what caused me to become wide awake this morning, thinking of time slipping away, of daughters slipping away, and therefore, of course, of myself slipping away. Before I've really got a grip on myself, is what I was thinking. Before I can demonstrate for her and her sister that grown up life is good. It's funny to me that until this last year, I have always maintained being grown up is much better than being a child. This year, though, while looking for a job and trying to manage a house, my teenage years are looking pretty good. I lived in a lovely house that other people took care of, without a care in the world about money, and with a sense that if life was hard now, it was going to improve once I got out of that house.

Sigh. It did, overall. But right now, sending out job apps, on a very tight budget, overwhelmed by responsibilities, I find life challenging. I wish I could show it to my daughters in a better way, but that's my route right now. I just hope it doesn't defeat me. That's the most important thing I want to show my children: that if I can meet a challenge, they can, too.

Gardens II

2010-07-04T06:07:00.000-04:00

I was derailed by the wasp incident reported in my previous post from my original garden topic. Friday evening I was weeding my enormous garden, full of resentment that I was weeding my enormous garden, and thinking unhelpful thoughts. Let me just try to make myself look a tiny bit better by saying that I had spent the day looking up jobs, sending out resumes, and bagging groceries at the Coop, not writing, and therefore feeling put-upon. As I was saying, I was thinking unhelpful things like, "I never said I liked to garden. What I said was that I like gardens." I spent many a lovely evening strolling in the Central Park Conservatory Garden at 105th and Fifth Ave., which was across the street from our apartment, and came to feel almost like a back yard - a back yard in which I could sit on a bench and watch my children dangle sticks and leaves into a lovely fountain and read little signs identifying all the flowers and herbs I did nothing to promote. I highly recommend visiting that garden. It's always beautiful, in every season.

I did enjoy gardening in our little backyard in Somerville, MA. The yard was all paved over by my landlords, retired Marine Jerry and his invisible wife Joanne. We lived in the downstairs apartment their daughter used to occupy. There was a dishwasher in the kitchen and a dryer outside on the enclosed porch. There was also a shag carpet in mottled pink. The backyard was cement, except for a nice 5' X 8' plot up against the house. Shades of Barenaked Ladies' "The Old Apartment" ("Why did you pave the yard? Why did you plaster over the hole I punched in the wall?") Without even checking for lead in the dirt (pre-kids), I planted six tomato plants and they flourished in a most astonishing manner. Someone told me marigolds protected tomato plants from something-or-other, so I planted a line of those around the perimeter. There were no weeds to speak of. Boom. Bazillions of tomatoes. And I wrote a poem about them, which was later published in Salvage magazine. I don't think Salvage exists anymore, but here's the poem:

Embarrassed By Plenty

My six tomato plants
stand over five feet tall.
They were one tenth that size
when I wheeled them to my car.

At the nursery they said
just plant them and let them grow.
I piled on compost and set
each inside a white wire fence of its own.

Now they've overgrown their cones.
Branches poke through the wires,
loll and droop with fruit,
slatterns careless of their loads.

That plot's an obstetrician's waiting room,
full of wildly fertile ladies
clumped and waiting to birth
dozens of green babies,

A nursery of hatchlings,
jostling like children clambering at fences,
hair wild and unbrushed,
feet stuck in the crumbly earth.

Next door, two refined tomatoes
grow up sedately staked,
pruned and decorous;
mine are riotous green,

spangled with copious yellow florets,
melodramatic and garish like bad poetry,
saying, "Look at us, look at us,"
immodestly.

Anyway, that was a manageable garden, mostly cement. The next garden was at the little house we rented for four years in Albany. I tilled, turned, weeded, dug out, and planted a perennial bed along one side of the driveway. After a year, I became pregnant with my second child, and it was hard to bend and weed. And then some sort of wasp that burrows in the ground invaded, and I was put off. I called the Cornell Extension Service and described these creatures, and the gardener there said with reasonable certainty, but still leaving wiggle-room, that these wasps would not sting. Nevertheless, I was fat and having hives and generally tired out from taking care of a toddler and so I let that garden go.

Now I have this gigantic garden, and well, that brings me back full circle. Ungrateful? You bet! I have this feeling we jumped up a couple of levels too many in our homeownership phase of life. We skipped the starter home, and now we have the home you move to when you can afford a little outside help with the yard, or you have enough time and interest to spend your entire life taking care of it. I feel a burden to carry on what Mrs.W, who raised 5 kids here, put in place, because I've met Mrs.W, and she's a formidable woman, as well as a retiree who lives not far from her long-time home.

Retired Marine Jerry had no regrets about paving. He once told me he didn't want to garden no more. So he enjoyed his days in a folding chair on his front stoop. Joanne his invisible wife might once have enjoyed digging in the dirt, but she was consigned upstairs by some mysterious illness. She was a frail, skinny lady. I saw her every once in a while, going from the house to the car, but otherwise she stayed inside. Apparently by the window, because when we went upstairs in our fourth year there to tell them I was pregnant, she said, "I thought so! I says to Jerry, 'Either she's getting fat or she's pregnant.'"

We had our first baby there, and we didn't garden there no more.