A Treasure Found at Home

A few weeks ago I was at a friends house trying to sort out my RSS feed. For the life of me, I could NOT remember the username/password combo to log into the WP dashboard.

Just now I’m in Colorado. I made it in on the first try.

Maybe the fresh mountain air is helping to clear my head.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): There would be no apples if it weren’t for the bees that pollinate apple blossoms. Likewise, chocolate wouldn’t exist without the flies that pollinate the flowers of the cacao tree. In the coming week, Libra, I encourage you to imagine you’re analogous to those bees and flies–a social pollinator who spreads good influences from group to group and connects people who should be allies. In addition, I’d like you to imagine you’re cooking up metaphorical versions of chocolate mousse and apple pie. In other words, make it your goal to generate delicious effects that are both gourmet and down to earth. You might also want to be like another pollinator, bats. They ensure the fruitfulness of agave plants and hence are responsible for tequila.

This is dead on what I would like to do with my life. I love bringing people together for the greater good. The big question is, how do I get paid to pretend I’m a bee, fly, or bat?

I look back on some old relationships that I had and I miss them, to some extent. It still hurts sometimes to have it shown to me so publicly that I am just not worth the effort… or whatever it is that I’m supposed to think which is non-demeaning to me. (Can’t I just say I feel like that person thinks I’m not worth the effort, and be sad about that, while at the same time knowing that I am totally worth it.)

Anyhow, I got just such a bop on the nose recently. I suppose I’d known all along that friendship was completely over but I still miss it. I wasn’t ready to let it go completely.

And what caused it to end, really? I had a lot of friendships end within the past couple years. Have I turned into such a horrible person? Or am I really just starting to set some more firm boundaries?

“B” asked me the other day what meditation does for me. Well, this is part of it. I’m much more willing to refuse to play along when I don’t think something is right, especially when that something is how I’m being seen and interacted with. There is a huge shift in how I relate to those around me, and the result is losing some people who meant the world to me at some point in my life.

Last night at Women’s Group, we talked a bit about my relationship with my parents and how I have a hard time really talking back to them and standing up for myself. Part of that is that I’ve always been waiting for them to be done with me; a side effect of having three names and three sets of parents in the first three weeks, maybe? Whatever the cause, it’s always been there. Pair that with the loss of some of the people closest to me since I moved to California and suddenly I see why I’m so scared.

In each case so far I know I’m essentially better off without said person; less drained, less second guessing myself. I never doubt I made the right choice.

Sometimes it still hurts, though.

I miss you.

I finished Book 6. Wow, ok, yeah that was a little more dark than the ones before.

Tonight I get the ‘chair and a half’, essentially a small love seat, from my upstairs neighbors. Now I’ll have somewhere more curlable to curl up and read. The chairs I have already are really comfy, but I would prefer a little more space for moving about as I read. Now I’ve got it! And the thing pulls out into a twin bed. I have a guest bed!

Come visit, all ye guests who don’t want to share a bed with me and my cat!

It’s funny that I’ve always sort of thought of my job as getting in the way of my doing a lot of things I want to be doing. Now that tomorrow is my last day, I’m already booked until the 8th! I was right.

I’m trying to find a way to finagle all of August off so I can re-org the apartment and prep for the burn… and take the time to find a job I really like instead of something 60 miles away… and catch up on my reading.

But right now I’m still overbooked.

The stress of not having work is starting to get to me now. Maybe also because I still have so much to do that my schedule was full before I added ‘job search’ to the list. Not to worry, I’m not putting other things before the search…much.

Yesterday was chock full of meetings, and I have a to-do list a mile long. Including finding those extra Burn tickets I was supposed to sell for my friend which I now can’t find. Talk about stress. I certainly don’t have the money to reimburse him if I really lost those suckers!

34 days till the playa… and I really only have 19 of those because of the CO trip and the dharma weekend I’m co-coordinating.

*fret*

All I wanted was a bath. Nice, hot, soaking, bubbly, yummy bath. But, I made the mistake of calling a few people first about things I needed to coordinate. And, I made the mistake of bringing my phone with me into the bathroom. Just as the tub filled, Garma called back. That was fine, she didn’t care if I was in the tub. Plus which, the water was too hot so I just spent our phone call lowering myself into the scalding hotness. Just as we were wrapping up, “B” called…well, sure, it should be quick and I wasn’t quite settled.

“B” was interrupted and had to go. I managed to get both legs shaved and *just* got to lean back my poor stress-packed shoulders into the still steaming water when “B” called back. I quick wrapped up with him, leaned back–the newsletter guy called with questions (work, ya know). So I left a message for Dawa trying to get some clarification and once more leaned back, took a deep breath…and the newsletter guy called again! I looked longingly at the colourful pile of bath entertainment I’d set out and realized this just wasn’t going to happen today.

But, at least I got my legs shaved.

I’ve got new glasses. It’s funny, I think of these as the red glasses because the runner up pair were a lavender colour, but everyone I’ve specifically shown them to in the office has said, “Purple!”

They do have a good deal of purple in them, but I still think they look red from the front.

They’re progressive lenses, which are going to take some getting used to. The advice was to wear my regular glasses then put these suckers on at home where I know where everything is. I won’t be ready for stairs for a while. Things look about as weird now as they did when I first got glasses back at 14 or 15 yrs old. I feel like I’m in a 60s Sci-Fi TV show and we’re about to enter some time warp.

There’s lots to get used to in this life of mine right now. How spacious, how groundless, how fun.

I left my phone at home today. At first I was a little ruffled at myself, then I realized I’ll get a day’s break from M&D calling with ‘help’ for my job search.

Just for perspective: I found out noonish Tuesday. By 9PM Wednesday, 33 hrs later, I’d already talked to my mother about this three times. That’s once every 11 hours, on average. And the third call started off with me on speakerphone and M, D, and Bro all trying to help revise my resume!

If you were with me Saturday night and saw me feeling a little challenged by the high energy of everyone else, may I use that as an example for how I was feeling during that particular phone call.

Ugh. Please! Less with the pointed, focused attention!

I am grumpy. There is clearly no question about that anymore. I realize I’m pissed at Tarzan for not wanting to drive home in rush hour to meet me when I’m in his neighborhood so I can return the things I borrowed from him.

Um…he was doing me a favour letting me use the walkie talkie, and now I’m pissed I can’t return it as easily as I want?

I think I’m fighting a cold, I woke up with a bit of a sore throat, and that’s the crux of the grumpiness.

That, or the fact that I just found out I’ve only got another week and a half at work. OK, it’s not even that I only have a week and a half left, it’s that it means I’ll have to be looking for work again. Which is the Worst Thing Ever for me. Not just the stress of looking or the nervousness of interviews, not just wondering how I’m going to make rent… but having to talk to my parents almost every day and have them ask me if I have a job yet and did I check the newspaper (no, they don’t advertise for my sort of work in the newspaper) and have I talked to so and so who works for that company I don’t like which is way too far away from where I live to be a feasible choice since I don’t have a car–but none of that matters I should talk to him anyhow.

*sigh*

Maybe it’s both the cold and the lack of job.

I fell asleep reading last night. Still with my clothes on and lights on and computer on and downloading something. Lucky for me, I’ve got so much to do with Shambhala I’ll still feel sort of busy. Though I’m pining for that laptop again.

Out Of Work Vows

• I will leave the house at least once a day.
• I will sit.
• I will sew some.
• I will knit more.
• I will clean up the house a bit and maybe reorganize.

BigD says: I don’t think you can pine after a mechanical object. [pause] Well, maybe you can.

LIBRA September 22-October 22
Reluctance to press for answers means that you should. You can spin theories until the cows come home. It’s time to ask where’s the beef.

I like it when my horoscope echoes what I’m thinking. It means there’s something I’m thinking about so much that I’m seeing references to it everywhere and I should probably do something besides just think.

Tut offered me a ride to BRC this year, and I realized I hadn’t told him yet I won’t be camping with them. It will be interesting this year to be going to visit nosefish instead of having that be home base.

I was with them three out of four years; time to shake things up.

And, in the spirit of shaking things up, I ask you: So, where’s the beef, eh?

I think for lunch today I’ll go home and get my wallet.

Camping this weekend was fantastic.

I sorted though my questions around the guy I’d been seeing. It became clear we don’t work well as a couple. The way he reacts to stress between us creates a lot more stress for me so we just called it off. It was a pretty easy decision and didn’t take any hashing out.

I think I only managed about an hour of sleep Saturday night. I love the early morning light and the way the air feels, especially on a day which is going to be hot later.

I spent the very early hours helping “B” with his traditional grapefruit mimosas, then it was into the hot tub. The way the trees looked in the light was breathtaking, and we could see a huge swarm of gnats mating–zooming and swirling in a shaft of sunlight on what had been our dancefloor the night before.

I got a good baby fix later in the morning, complete with mashed banana smeared all over my shirt. Luckily, I hadn’t changed from the night before yet.

“B” also ended up sans passenger for his ride home, so we caravanned. R (who needs a better nickname) and I borrowed a walkie-talkie from Tarzan so we could communicate easier. For entertainment purposes only, we sang bits and pieces of songs to each other on the way home.

The Way I See It #37

Embrace this right now life while it’s dripping, while the flavors are excellently woesome. Take your bites with bravery and boldness since the learning and the growing are here in these times, these exact right nows. Capture these times. Hold and kiss them because it will soon be very different.
–Jill Scott Musician.

I am now living on coffee. This is not taking care of myself. If I’m so tired my extremities are hurting, more caffeine is not really the best way to go. But, that was the choice I went with.

Way o’ the Bodhisattva class after work, then the grocery store and some packing for the weekend. Work tomorrow then leaving for the fabuloso weekend in the woods. Full of relaxation and sleep and 90F temps. Oh so just what I need. I need about a week of it, though. Or I need to do better about taking care of me while I’m in the City. And since I don’t have a week, it will have to be the latter.

But, I love this quote, too. I love the way the first two sentences sound in my head. I love the way they feel in my mouth.

I wish I could write like that.

I am the smartest girl in the world! I can spot my own screw ups even after getting someone else to work on them for half an hour.

My note to our CMS guy about the number of colons in our code:

he he. *blush* see, well, in the other CMS it’s two, right? so… um… yeah, I’ll go edit that.

At least it’s not like the other day when I edited a document for about an hour then closed it without saving, then later spilled wine all over the inside of my backpack all over a friend’s DVDs.

I think I’ll take a break for a cup of tea. Later I get to go try on my new contacts! If they work, I’ll even buy some cheap sunglasses for my weekend in the woods. Life is pretty good, even if I’m spilling wine and have an overabundance of colons. Or maybe that’s the delirium talking.

Last night I was hanging out with “B” helping with an EL wire project. We had a nice little system down: he mixed the epoxy as I bent the wire, then he put the epoxy down and we held the wire in place until it set enough to be sure the wire wasn’t going to slip too far off the design. We were using a quick acting 5 minute epoxy so we had some time to make adjustments but didn’t have to spend too much time trying to hold the wire in place as it got tacky. He’s had years to work out this procedure.

And as we bent and mixed and squished and picked drying epoxy from our fingers, we ended up talking about commitment and what drives our Thing about commitment. (Doesn’t everyone actually have this? A Thing? About commitment?)

I tried to find an overarching excuse for my non-commitalment, but I was having trouble. It’s pretty much person specific. But, then, what makes me keep looking for reasons in each person?

Finally I told him part of my Story about myself. You know, that Story I’m trying to get rid of but that keeps hanging on: I just don’t think whomever it is will really want to stick around that long, so it’s better to hang back.

Yeah, he got on me for that one.

I haven’t had a really good track record when it comes to relationships. I think I would actually be pretty good at one at this point, even. The thing I’m working on most right now is picking the right sort of person. I have habitually picked The Wrong Guy.

As we started setting the beginning wire of the second set, I explained how it’s taken me some time to figure out what’s normal and what’s acceptable in relationships. I was thinking of how I felt being yelled at and criticized was normal for so long as we tried to hold this little wire in place.

As it slipped off of and back on to our maticulously drawn guidelines, I thought about how I felt like what I found important had seemed so different from what my parents found important. (It’s not really, we all want comfort and security and exploration. It’s just how those manifest for us that seems so different now.)

I’m just this girl who’s had to find her own way a little more than some, but not as much as others. I’m really starting to get it now (I think — I hope). I’ve got a community for the first time in my life and I’m consitantly surprised by how community works. It’s a support, and a set of examples (both of what I want and what I don’t want), and a new sorts of friendships.

Maybe it was feeling that I was feeling uncomfortable trying to explain why I had these weird, unhealthy ideas about myself, but it really did seem like this round of epoxy (from the new package) wasn’t getting tacky as quickly. “B” remarked on it, too. (Remember from above it was 5 minute epoxy?)

Then he looked into the trash can at the package, “Oh no!”

I looked up, “Did you get the wrong kind?”

“Yeah, I got the 2 ton epoxy.”

“Well,” I say, “as long as it doesn’t take, like, half an hour to dry!”

He looks down at the wire. I look at him. He keeps looking at the wire. I keep looking at him. Finally he looks up at me and back down at the wire.

Didn’t he hear me? So, I ask again, “How long does it take to dry?”

“30 minutes.”

oops!

It was late (for me) and I was suffering some skips in conversational logic. You know, where you start a thread in your head and finish it out loud without cluing the other person in to what the heck you’re talking about. Yeah.

So as far as my sleep goes, it was a happy accident. But the sign still needs some work–and some faster drying epoxy.

I listned to part of the soundtrack from Wicked today on the way to work on my newly replaced (for the second time, thanks “B”) iPod. I’m wearing my new green eyeliner, which was a thank you gift, and my green zip up sweater. After logging in and getting settled, BigD and I head down for coffee. I grab my green bee travel tumbler and as I’m waiting for my latte I notice little green samples being put together… Green Tea Fropochino! YUM.

Green is good to me.

I got a brand new clay pot steamer this weekend at the clay and glass show! Tarzan talked me into wearing a sun dress since we’d be in P.A. where it was so beautifully warm. I got a couple compliments, and I think he was feeling proud of being there with me at those moments which made me proud to be cute with him.

There were fantastically yummy ice cream on cookie sammiches. They inspired me to ask Tarzan to let me use his electric oven to make some snickerdoodles sometime in the next couple months. I’ve still not quite gotten the hang of the gas ovens and my baking has suffered a bit.

I am going to cook up a storm with my new steamer, though! Dig it! I will be the potluck steamer queen, starting next week in fact with my next supperclub.

This is where we had our family reunion this past weekend. I actually once met a guy out here from there. I can’t remember his name to save my life, and as far as I know I only saw him the once. But, man was it weird to find I was next to someone from D0ylestown in a chill space at a party on a hill in the East Bay somewhere.

That was the same night Ex-Squared and I had a weird discussion about how he was not at all jealous. Except that he was. Jealous and possessive. It was really sort of funny how he didn’t see it at all.

Some guy was touching my face and Ex-Squared said something in the car on the way home about high people doing that a lot. But he wasn’t high. How did I know? He told me. Suddenly it wasn’t ok. The guy should have asked Ex-Squared first.

???

Yeah, I wondered if I’d heard him right.

Um, why?

Because I’m your boyfriend.

And, so? He asked (get this) … ME.

Still, he should have asked me.

But you didn’t actually spend much time with me, so how would he have known you were with me? In fact, he thinks you’re gay.

Still, he should have asked me.

But, he asked me, shouldn’t that be enough.

No, I don’t trust him.

Um…

It sort of went on for a while like that until I got bored with pointing out the obvious. Me, my face, my permission. You don’t got nothing to do with it, buddy!

Later Ex-Squared and I would have a similar argument about taking our children to Mass. Except, I don’t go to Mass–so why would I take our children? Somehow this point was lost on him and he was so mad at me for it he wouldn’t look at me.

Let alone the fact that we weren’t married or even living together so talking about our CHILDREN seemed a bit ahead of the game.

Wow. I pick some doozies, don’t I?

Back to D0ylestown:

As we walked up to my Aunt C and Uncle D’s house, their middle son, T was out in the back yard. My dad made some comment to him about looking “gay”.

T had a shaved head with a blue bandana wrapped around it, a blue golf shirt untucked over his torn baggy khakis long shorts…the kind with all the pockets.

I could tell T wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say in response to that, so I leaned over and told him secretively (but loud enough for my Dad to hear), “Don’t worry, if you were in SF looking like that no one would think you were gay.”

There were so many people at the reunion; D and C had to borrow chairs from the local funeral home. Appropriately, they were the ones who had handled my Poppo’s funeral. Reunion indeed.

By the end of the day we had a revolving volleyball game going. At one point my Aunt C was playing and just as her side served, her mobile phone rang. And she answered it! I think the best part was hearing JR say, “Mom! Don’t answer your phone!”

At least I was just on the sidelines when I was answering my calls.

I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep well last night for some reason. I woke up every hour or so, and had a fairly frustrating and violent dream (I was beating someone up for not treating me fairly) about 5AM and never quite fell back to sleep before my alarm went off. Galahad, of course, knew I was awake but not doing my duty as a human and petting him. This was the source of much angst, paws on my mouth, standing over my head, and general grumpy noises.

Tom Petty was on the radio this morning. Which reminded me of last weekend’s Family Reunion in D0ylestown. It was my Dad and his sibs and descendants as well as his Uncle’s children and their family. The Uncle is from his Mom’s side, so their last name is still Schmidt. So my cousin Matt printed up some t-shirts that said Schm1dt-Mc4nallen Reunion 2005 with a little German Flag and a little Irish Flag.

On the back they said, “Don’t give me any Schm1dt, I’m a Mc4nallen!” Very funny.

Turns out Cousin Bob’s wife is very musical, and that got passed on to her kids. B0bber and his sisters sang the couple songs they know, then he started playing “Last Dance with Mary Jane”–a Tom Petty song–and I was the only other one who knew all the words so I sat next to him and sang along. In front of people! Out loud!

On a different subject, they’re having us track our hours pretty closely here at work. So, in the immortal words of my Grandma R0se, “More Later.”