During times of stress, I’ve learned two important things: Do not skip my workout, and resist the temptation either to binge on crappy food or not eat at all, because either of these extremes will only make me feel worse.
Stress chews up vitamins, so I find I need even more of the good stuff like fruits and veggies and protein before a family visit. Started the day with a spinach/prosciutto/parmesan omelet, and for lunch turkey& cheese sammy with escarole/endive/radicchio salad, and asparagus with garlic, oil, and lemon. For dessert, fresh peaches.
I’m knuckling under and taking a Xanax, too.
Obligatory gifts piss me off. It bores me excessively to have to participate in arcane rituals such as managing a gift for my cousin, whom I never see and will certainly never lay eyes on again after her wedding, just so that I can participate in civilized culture.
My parents always forced intimacy with this segment of the fam because they lived up the block from us. Therefore we spent most holidays with them. And there’s no question that my aunt saved my bacon on a number of occasions by literally hiding me somewhere in her house because my mother was roaming the nabe looking for me like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” complete with the sweat-stained grimace and the bellowing of kicky phrases (as in “it will be worse for you when I catch you.”) . That oughta be worth a china pie plate or something, I guess, my aunt’s preventing me from a beating or two or ten with a wooden spoon.
My two sisters and my niece are the only family members with whom I care to associate, and it is for their sake that I gnash my teeth and choose Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts. Until they are ready to reject my parents out of hand, to secede as it were and form our own Lone Star Family Republic, I will have to face down the villains of my childhood and make nice a few times a year.
Am I a brute? Depends on who you ask. I was no Omen-style Devil Baby, but as Anne Sexton so rightly observes, women are born twice, and it was during my second awakening at around age 11 that the fur really started to fly. To be precise, I stalked off into a Brothers Grimm forest and never looked back until Rod lured me out of there nine years ago.
My default setting is still that dark, safe place. Still learning how to carry it with me, embody it, when I am obliged to occupy hostile territory.
I cook a lot because prepared foods are usually disgusting. Case in point, the jarred salsa I bought yesterday because I was too lazy to walk down the produce aisle and get limes, tomatoes, bell pepper, and celery, and then go home and wash the food processor after I’d made some salsa that actually doesn’t taste like it’s been scraped off a dog’s butt.
I wasted $$ and time and tastebuds and calories on inferior salsa that whetted my appetite even more for decent salsa, which I will now have to prepare anyway because I will have no peace until I do. Yes, I can add food addiction to my ever-burgeoning list of soft addictions (I can’t even pass a MAC, a Jamba Juice, or a fragrance store without experiencing tachycardia and sweaty palms). I often have a form of culinary autism, in which I get sucked into a vortex of a certain kind of cuisine for a few weeks. For the last three weeks it’s been gazpacho, salsa, black bean dip, and guac.
Can’t wait to try this Watermelon Gazpacho.
I’m so glad I found that clip on You Tube because I have been thinking about it constantly for the last week. It’s how I answer every question I put to myself: Do it. Probably it’s in our stars, because most of the Capricorns I know are so ready for change that we’re jumping out of our skins. I keep having pregnancy dreams, and dreams of snakes shedding their skins.
The Sterile Cuckoo made me rethink the entire novel I just drafted, in a good way. Also a humbling way, showing me exactly how far I have to go. But I am not afraid of hard work. I do fear losing the thread of my desire: that is what depression is.
Although the slang in the book is dated, the progression of the events of the love affair rings true, and the way the symbols are used to tease the reader and forecast events of doom and joy, that’s the stuff I’ve got to seed into my book. I’m having a good time just creating independent scenes. And poems.
Yesterday my sister and I agreed that nothing says I Love You like Italian cured meats, because we both stock the fridge with prosciutto, sopressatta, and mortadella for our respective partners when we want to spoil them.
I also bought kalamata olives for the first time since I started unemployment. And some roasted red peppers. Now that is decadence.
Can’t wait for Nacho Libre, the new Jack Black vehicle. In his honor, another clip from You Tube, this time Jack’s 1999 appearance on Conan O’Brien.
Donald Hall has been named the new U.S. poet laureate. The only book I’ve read of his is Without, his book of poems covering his last days with wife Jane Kenyon when she was diagnosed with cancer. Their love story and devotion to each other made me take notice of a poet whose work I otherwise probably would not have sought, as I don’t gravitate to clipped New England poems, generally.
After trying and failing to get interested in a Judith Krantz novel, I picked up John Nichols’s The Sterile Cuckoo, a book I’ve been meaning to read since forever, and which hooked me from the first paragraph.
I don’t especially find it calming to read about rich people; in fact it tends to raise my class dander, so that brand of escapist fantasy fails to interest me. I like my fantasy people to be aliens or to have special powers, as in the Piers Anthony Xanth Series.
What did I do yesterday in an attempt to relax and fill the well?:
Crafted an exquisite forbidden rice salad with red lentils and mango salsa.
Watched two girly movies, Raising Helen and Under the Tuscan Sun.
Went with Rod to BAM to see Blowup.
When asked what he would most like to do last evening, Rod chose this boring movie as an alternative to the Museum Mile Festival, but whatever. He has had to sit through more MGM musicals with me than any straight man I’ve ever known, so if he wants to drag me to see a film that’s a period piece about London in the Swingin Sixties, packed with more existential ennui than Orson Welles’s screen adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, then okay. At least I stayed awake for it this time, unlike when he tried to get me to watch it at home on our teeny television.
Anyone who is ever tempted to call me an intellectual, just remember this: The more art-house films Rod exposes me to, the more I am growing to love “Legally Blonde.”
But here’s the thing: I like my fluff well-crafted. So about the two chick flicks I watched yesterday, I can only say that each made me a trifle sick to my stomach with its predictability and scary lessons presented with sledgehammer subtlety. Namely, that a woman alone is shallow and unsatisfied, and that family is more important than career, even if you have to create an attenuated family.
Although it’s quite true: If I ever get divorced, the first place I’d think of to go in order to recover would be Tuscany. But I think first I’d watch a lot of movies like Kill Bill.
The Museum Mile Festival is tonight. I’ve never been to it and am looking forward to checking it out.
I’ve just laid out an extraordinary amount of energy to finish the first draft of a novel and also continue looking for a job, so today I’m definitely feeling the need to fill the well, and a buttload of museums will fit the bill nicely, as will a healthy run and some escapist activity or other, to be determined later.
Can’t seem to get into the Judith Krantz novel I got from the library, and the Robertson Davies Deptford Trilogy isn’t doing it for me, either, although I read it once years ago and loved it. These authors represent both ends of the spectrum of catchy storytelling, being trashy and literary, respectively, and so I think it’s safe to say that I feel like I’m in limbo and am having a hard time concentrating or deciding what to do with myself today.
I could clean the house or tack myself to the couch with the help of some egg rolls and a silly movie. I could experiment in the kitchen or on the page. Dreamt of snakes all night long, and people turning into snakes, tongues out and flickering to locate their way in the dark.
Every time I have an interview, I spend the whole next day feeling like I must be unemployed with a vengeance, sit around in my undies watching talk shows and eating ice cream out of the carton, because I don’t know when the holiday’s going to end and I want to ensure that I’ve gotten the full bang out of unemployment before I sign up to run in harness again.
Had a long interview today for an educational book publisher very much like the one I recently left. Walking over there, I was as sullen and recalcitrant as any teenager, thinking that I didn’t care how the interview went or what the upshot of it would be, as I’d probably rather be dipped in hot Cheez Whiz than work there, anyway. See, I’m a Sensitive Artist, which means I’m supposed to be above paltry things like health benefits.
Therefore it came as a nasty shock when excitement flared in the pit of my stomach at phrases such as “401K” and “employee lunchroom.” I found myself gossiping with the copy chief about the vagaries of the Chicago Manual’s fifteenth edition, yelling with laughter as though we were talking about Britney’s driving exploits with baby Sean.
I was forced to admit to myself that I have no serious objection to copyediting in educational publishing. Yes, it is unglamorous and thankless work, but it also allows me financial security and a work environment in which my brain is constantly stimulated and I have to interact with almost no one, which is actually pretty much what I require in life.
There must be a good reason that I have never landed a magazine publishing job, and I think part of it is that it would add insult to injury for me to be required to look like a movie star just to copyedit for twelve fucking hours a day. You can be frumpy and overweight in book publishing and no one cares.
For a great movie about the frustrations of editing, see Office Killer.
I know someone who had the job I just interviewed for, and by the time she left, she was ready to blow chunks on her boss and anyone else who got in her way. This is why they say that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.
Done! The first draft of the novel is finished and though I know the real work is just beginning, it feels great to have the first part off my chest, so to speak. Nothing goading me awake at all hours of the night and early morning. Now is the pleasant task of jotting down random ideas and using them to polish.
I usually like to let a draft sit for two weeks or so without touching it, so I can get back to poetry and belly dance and everything else for the next little while. My finger cymbal practice has dropped off shamefully lately.
I can devote myself to the congenial task of tracking down an outfit to wear to the wedding we must attend in July.
I was a clockwatcher. Now I’m not. I can throw myself into one activity at a time and become so absorbed that I don’t feel time passing. That is because I’m mostly doing things that I enjoy doing. What have I learned from this? Pleasure and suffering bend and shape time.
The Big Mouths reading yesterday was fun. Wild Woman was not much interested in performing and consequently I wore jeans and a white shirt with a ring around the collar that I didn’t notice until Rod pointed it out at the cafe. I regret to say that we only stayed for half of the reading. What happened was that Rod whispered “stilton cheese fritters with cranberry relish” in my ear and I hastily grabbed my purse and skulked out of the second half of the reading, foaming at the mouth until we arrived at the Telephone Bar and Grill, where one can consume the appetizer with which Rod had tempted me away from my duty.
Yesterday Rod made me a gift of the recently released “Mommie Dearest” DVD, with commentary by John Waters. As soon as my fingers touched that DVD, much of the tension about the upcoming Father’s Day visit evaporated, because now I have the power to laugh myself sick over this film, shouting at the television and generally benefiting from the catharsis this movie affords.
Think about this for a moment: My mother is so self-absorbed that she never got the blatant insult of me and my two sisters performing whole sections of “Mommie Dearest” in the living room. She does not distinguish between negative attention and any other kind.
I’m thinking about scheduling my own interactive viewing of this DVD the week before Mother’s Day next year, as I think that my friends and I can make wisecracks that are just as funny as those of Hedda Lettuce, who hosts the Mommie bash at the Chelsea Clearview Cinemas.
Popped awake at eight this morning to get some writing done before I had to go over to belly dance. They still have not changed the grammatically incorrect sign at the studio, but I have such a girl crush on the teacher who teaches on Sunday afternoons that I will continue soaking up her instruction.
Came home and made a vat of mango/tomato salsa, and guacamole, for appetizers tonight. Rod’s making turkey burgers, and believe me that man knows his way around a burger. I scarfed down an indecent amount of the bacon cheeseburger I ordered at the telephone bar last night, and will not order that again there, as the shepherd’s pie or the fish and chips are much better than the burger was. I need Rod’s excellent hamburger patties in order to banish the taste of the inferior telephone bar burger fromy my tastebuds.
Thanks to the fashion advice of the scintillating and sensuous Boni, I went to the Astor Place K-Mart and purchased two superior sun hats because they were both under ten dollars: One a big cartwheel of a straw hat, studded with silver sequins that will ensure my blinding people on the glaring sidewalks in August, and the other an electric blue, floppy, washable, crushable, packable hat that I can already tell will be my “I need shade while I’m lugging the groceries” hat, as it has a drawstring inside the brim to ensure a snug fit.
I hope Boni realizes that if she keeps giving me fashion tips like that she will encourage a dependency and pretty soon I’ll be asking her to dress me every day. It took me years of living apart from my two bossy and fashionable younger sisters to be able to dress myself in a manner that elicited the fewest snarky comments and outright laughter of my erstwhile dressers. They have been known to remark in full hearing of others that I simply can’t get dressed without them.
After weeks of writing the phrase, “the more solitude I have, the more I want,” and after I pulled the Strength card almost every day this week, and after realizing that I get incredibly pissed off whenever I make the slightest foray into the outside world, I finally understand what’s going on.
Wild Woman is back, with a vengeance.
That is why I can’t be arsed to groom myself, why I actually require an earthier aspect right now. This is unusual, because I usually live to slather beauty products on myself. The only time I don’t is when Wild Woman is at the fore.
Wild Woman is a glyph for the goddess within, that feral and uncivilized creature that is our magic, our protective instinct, our intuition. Mine looks like the red-haired wild thing from Where the Wild Things Are, only she’s as tall as a skyscraper.
I first learned to conceptualize her in Z Budapest’s book Goddess in the Office, and ever since I’ve become aware of her, I’ve noticed that her presence has preceded most of the major changes in my life. She was extremely vocal during the months before I met Rod, when I was spending a lot of time alone writing and working out, which is also what I’m doing now.
When Wild Woman is with me strongly, I also get a sense of a black panther prowling alongside me most of the time. It’s Wild Woman’s familiar, I think, because the panther is protective of me, and howls, bites, and scratches when someone invades my space or is attempting to harm me in any way.
What all this means is that I suck at conversation right now. So if you want to hang out with me, it would be better to take a walk with me, or maybe we could go roller blading or dancing together.
