Made Up

Today is my step-mom's birthday. We don't generally get along. Or rather...maybe we don't specifically get along, but do okay as long as we keep it general.

In honor of Mom's bday, here's a specific memory that keeps floating in like a recurring dream. When I was little, I liked to watch her put on her make-up. I would sit on the toilet seat lid while she stood at the vanity and put mascara on her eyelashes faster than anyone should be whipping a wand around their eyeballs. She would dab a runny, tan cream onto her fingers then disappear it into her face. And she would pop her pink Mary Kay eye shadow brush into her mouth to get it wet, and dab it into a smoky brown, a silvery white. When I got old enough to get my own Mary Kay eye shadow set, the colors were enchanting and inviting in lavenders and green. But I never got used to the cool feeling of spit on my eyelids.

Sometimes I would ask my mom not to put on makeup before we went out because she looked so much prettier to me without it. After she washed her face, you could see the tiny fractures in the skin under her eyes. I could see the set to her mouth, and hear it talking before she ever said a thing. I didn't know how or why, I just felt more at ease when I could see her face glower and glimmer this way. She looked happier when she smiled, angrier when she scowled.

I think of that often when I put on my own makeup. I was never a big fan, and still don't love standing in front of the mirror giving time to my own web of fractures increasing monthly under my eyes. But I get it, what my mom did back then, when she was the age I am now. I look better with a little cosmetic help. I look presentable. With concealer and some eyeshadow, and color on my cheeks, I direct people to the pretty, not the weary, or wary, or love worn, or ambitious, or lonely. I cover the tracks, gloss the lips, and smile into public view, knowing that if there were a little girl on the toilet seat lid watching me cover what she sees and knows is real-er than pretty colors and subtle distractions, I might feel a little more revealed.

But there's not. So I creep, y'all. Sneak.

Oh My Gosh

This song is arresting.
I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied ’round their throats
to keep their little heads
from fallin’ in the snow
And I turned ’round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime

Original by Fleet Foxes. Any way you hear it, holy cow:"Everything is transitory. Still, every thing is."

Unfortunate Web Address

Funny Thing to Forget

I'm in the business of interviews. Often, I record calls with clients, then transcribe them to work with the content.

Today's Realization: I like hearing my voice on a recording. Outside of me. Speaking at a time when my own attached mouth is no longer moving. I like to listen to myself talk. It reassures me that I exist. I guess it's like looking in a mirror to see where I stand, what I'm wearing, how I'm aging.
I exist.

Funny thing to forget, but it happens.

*

Part Dude

REGINA: Do you have any snacks?

(Opens fridge. Looks at PEMA. Laughs.)

PEMA: Augi opens that and says, "You're not like any woman I've ever met."

REGINA: Doesn't he know? You're part dude!

*

Work + Whidbey Island = Novel Feeling

What the Body Knows

Ye olde break-up and ye olde therapist have had me circled by events past, so much so that I don't know which way to turn to transform them. Ye olde writing teacher says that you have to create chaos in your story so that it can then be ordered. In recent weeks, when I turn to what I know to order chaos in my current life story, I see a shadow or a skeleton looming at me, saying, "wanna fix that? Use me." I see a whole circle of them around me. By shadow or skeleton, I mean certain events from life and youth that have taken up residence in my habits, and lurk there like they were bonafide me. 

And the thing about that is they are. Till they are not. Those habits we pick up to handle our lives in weird moments stick with us and we forget that they still look and feel exactly like the workaround they were when we first used them...forget they are just tape on the glasses to keep them on your face, but dern, you look like a nerd that way. 

So there're all these shadows and skeletons around me every time I reach back to pick a tool out of my resource bag to "fix" something emotional. Something that is usually blocking something else really flipping cool in my life, like happiness or success at work, or a lovely lover happy to play fair and fun.  

Last weekend, I could see this circle in my mind. It was agony. How do I freaking evolve, goddamnit, if I can't see past these creaky bones? How do I make different choices when Bones and HooHoo are chattering at me like chickens on speed? Running in circles.

Today I went to ye olde chiropractor. I was there a long time. He worked on one hip. Then another. He unwound one creak in the neck. And then another on the other side, half way down. When we were done, he said, "It's like you're unwinding in a circle. Your body is moving through these places it got stopped, resetting and then moving on to the next one in a circular motion."

He just raised his eyebrow and patted me on the back when I mumbled, "HooHoo and Bones."

*

Liberated

My first trip to San Francisco, I was 19 and found a 1st ed. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. I was blissed out at a coffee bar, belly-up and as far from suburbia as I had ever been. A guy asked me what I got. I held the book in its thin paper bag like it was my dead mother's last possession, recently unearthed.

I was embarrassed to tell him it was Ayn Rand, San Francisco being such a liberal city, and told him so. He was older than me by 20 years and suggested that because SF was such a liberal city, it would be just the place to share that kind of thing.

My bliss increased. My fingers felt the hard cover under the brown paper. Liberation.

Hm. Liberated. Liberty. Library. Libreria. Libro. Libre. Book. Freedom. You could mix them up without knowing it. Knowledge = freedom. There's a topic for another day.

Chutes & Ladders

I read this in a newsletter sent by author and energy psychologist, Gloria Arenson. Funny timing. Yesterday my therapist sang me the last sentence in the passage. I didn't even have to pay extra for the singing. I'm thinking of asking him to do some singing telegrams for a select few people on my list.

Life Is A Game

My five year-old grand-daughter likes to play Chutes and Ladders. As I was playing with her last week, she became frustrated when she was on the brink of winning and hit a downward chute that sent her almost all the way back. Did you know that this game is derived from the ancient Hindu game called Leela, which charts the ups and downs of the soul's path toward reunion with the Infinite? This is a game of self-understanding that encourages a gradual detachment from the ego's delusions. There are explanations for each step that help the player realize the patterns in his life. Each space represents an aspect of consciousness and each roll of the dice is related to the forces of Karma.

We are all playing this game. Some of us, like the five year-old, just pout or get depressed when life throws us into a slide. This game suggests that you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start [all over] again.

Character

I knew a guy who woke up and steeped six bags of Earl Grey in his first cup of tea. And then three more in his second. Daily. I wanted to give him a bottle of bergamot and some caffeine tablets so he could eat them in a paste.

Character Definition

I'm looking at my blog's cast of characters thinking it's time to change it again. I don't write about Allen, the guy I dated a minute, anymore. Grams makes the blog a fair amount, but Nico is so far away, and Suzy. I'm afraid if I move them from the cast list, I will be sad. And my cast will be really small. I don't write small cast productions. I write really really big ones, and then get asked to pare them down. "Combine some of these characters, Pema," is the feedback I've received in the past, and will likely receive again.

That'd be a weird note in real life. "Combine these characters." What if you had six people following you around all the time, chiming in to answer something on the tip of your tongue, questioning your involvement in the kiss you're about to get. And someone completely outside you and your six said, "Jeez, ya might wanna combine those, if just to get invited to dinner more often." What would you combine? How would you choose which of whom to composite? And what if these six were people were not shades of you, but actual people who added to--or took from--your life in some way? How would you combine them, and you, then?

Paper: 2D
Life: 3D

Sounds from a Town I Love

Remembering 9/11 on 9/11.
Woody Allen made a short for Concert for NY, a free show at Madison Square Garden for NY's emergency and civic workers, and families of those who died in the attacks. Love letter in a time of loss.

World Smiles With You

You know how it's all exciting when you have a new boyfriend, and you go around saying, my new boyfriend this and my new boyfriend that? Yeah. Me not so much either. I don't know if I ever said, "My new boyfriend." In any case, I do have a new ex. Today, as it stands. For the sake of conversation. I do. And that makes him all new again. My new ex this and my new ex that. Ohmigod! Y'know?

So, yesterday the new ex and I are driving somewhere, taking care of unfinished business. Theoretically I am really pissed at him. He's a big weenie. But on a practical every day level, he's just a guy. He looks over at me from the driver seat and says something funny or endearing. Something worthy of a reaction. I feel a smile on the inside but on the outside I can't decide whether to give him even that much. And then I do. Civility is important. At least I think I do. Maybe I should check.

ME: Did I just smile at you?

EX: I don't know. I couldn't tell.

ME: I felt my face move.

And then we are laughing and polar ice caps melt. Dammit. Feels better than the freeze, though.

Awake.

Geoffrey Smith, director of "The English Surgeon," says the purpose of the brain surgery patient being awake during surgery is to be the last valve of safety, to save themselves, potentially, from the doctor inadvertently slicing away "1968," in other words, slicing away whole swaths of memories.

Awake. Save your memories. Save what you know.

And others of us so willing to give them away in order to believe a story. Shaking my head in amazement right now.

(Geoffrey Smith, as interviewed by Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's "The Treatment" today.)

Tell Me Lies

Been thinking about truth. Trust. Honesty. Lies. The absolute need for some of us to have the absolute truth. I've always said I'm best with information. Just give it to me.

Wondering if my need for the truth, always the WHAT HAPPENED? is me depending on others to make decisions for me: If I can trust you completely, I can make solid moves in my life, based on what you've said. If I can't trust you to talk to me straight, I can make other choices and feel safe in them.

But what's missing when I cling urgently to the need for your honesty?

I knew my boyfriend had a capacity for the deceptive arts from the beginning. But when the lying began, to cover that other unmentionable that happened, I believed it. Well, almost believed it. I had to hear it over and over again in various ways for it to finally make sense.

What made better sense? What I observed, felt, sensed, saw--knew, really. I knew something was out of place. A lot of things were. Circumstantially. But he was resolute. I wanted so much to trust him that I didn't--hello!--trust myself. What's up with that?

There's a lot of crazy world-changing foundation-wobbling happening on the bigger, broader stage these days. What happens when you can't trust things to be how they have been...how they are supposed to be...fine and good and right? Just like you know 'em to be?

Maybe what happens is you ask a lot of questions. Trust what your spidey sense knows before you do. When you get the spidey sense, ask questions. But listen for the internal answers. Not the external ones that sound right but feel wrong. Maybe we're learning to live in a world of extra-sensory sensing, intuitive knowing rather than concrete evidence that builds a bullshit case. Forgiving bullshit cases, it seems that even the concrete things we have known--economic trends, Twin Towers, airtight mortgages--are melting before our eyes, and maybe it's time the spidey sense came to life.

The moral, Grasshoppa? Close your eyes and trust what you know.

(P.S. I'm joining you in the grasshoppa gallery here.)

*

Powers of Perception

Power animal—Chameleon

by Amy Katz, MA— www.schooloflivingdreams.com

The power animal for September is the chameleon....Subtle shifts in physiology, emotions, climate and camouflage-needs can cause the cells of this sensitive-skinned reptilian to alter pigmentation. It is both a joy and an amazement to see them turn from brown to green, yellow to blue and back again...he proves that our bodies are inextricably bound to our emotions and environment...

Chameleons are also extraordinary seers: their cone-shaped eyes glance in different directions at the same time. This gives them...the ability to know what is coming at them from all directions, and to “see out the back of their heads." As Animal Guide, Chameleons leads us to accept our own abilities to track the movements of others intuitively, and teaches us to improve our own vast but usually untapped powers of perception.

Dinner of Champions

Course 1: Chocolate pudding
Course 2: Corn chips and salsa
Course 3: Corn chips and hummus

Bachelor(ette) living.

Life is good

Homemade chicken soup.
Night music from KCRW.com.
And patience.
A whole hell of a lot of it, asking me to have perspective, because who knows what's to come?
Ever?
Healthy.
Sane.
Housed.
Employed.
Fed.
Loved.
Life is good.
And Pollyanna grew up to be my Grandma. That shit is genetic.

Quiet pulse

While u hear silence, I hear my ears ringing and traffic out my window on the 405. It doesn't stop. Nor does the ringing. Indiscretions in tact and one more thing in my ears: Your silence will not protect you. -Adrienne Rich

Grand

I'm at a bar.
After indiscretions have been made.
Not by me.
Tally ho, motherfucker.

Home. Ish.

Coming up on a year here in Portland. I arrived Sept 7 last year.

I'm finally feeling inklings of settling in, feeling like everything is not new anymore...even the ways that I think. When I've felt anxious about being new here, still unsettled, I have remembered people saying it takes a year to get used to a place. To feel at home.

A different friend said otherwise yesterday. He said, "Three-and-a-half years."

I almost fell over. "Whyyy????"

"Because cells in the body regenerate completely every seven years. So at 3 1/2, you are more of the place where you are than where you came from."

I love him.

I'm happy the year is up. I came from so many different places in the many past years, my cells may be scrambled. But I live here. Here is where I live. I'm one-seventh home.

I am (hardly) the very definition of discipline.

8:09am and so far a few distractions.
The beeping outside my window at 7am. What the? I went outside for a walk to check it out and discovered it is temporary. Two guys on an airlift, prepping the building next door for paint. In parts of my neighborhood, there are garage doors that sound off a nerve-wracking beeping every time a car goes through. Imagine living above that? I had to go scout the my hood to see if it was coming to such calamity.

8:11
Then a little peek at, email. But only a little peek. Then a peek at the Bench. Don't I have to move this over to Wordpress? I'll look into...no! Stop! Get back to the plan. Meditate. Breakfast. Write. Yeah, I'm going to, but I should just post something before I get into...oh, that's a cute entry. I'll just do something quick. Who knows how long it will take to convert/transfer all that content...the Bench might be unavailable a long time...

8:14 and coffee is getting cold because I was going to drink it after meditating. It's wiggling in its paper cup from my tapping on the table. I'm still typing text that wants to be typed but that cut into line and is now giggling and sneering at me, wiggling its tail. If text had tails.

8:17
Stop.

8:18
The whole reason I opened the damn laptop to begin with was to start the music from iTunes I like to hear while I'm meditating. Curse that shiny pretty thing. And that one. And that! Oo!...

Thursday Already?

How does that happen? Yesterday was the first day in the week I had any energy, and it was busy enough to feel like a Monday.

I have been toying with creative work hours, feeling guilty about the relaxed nature of mine, even though they usually extend into the wee hours of moon in midheaven. But guilty nonetheless about how much more productive I would be waking up at 6, rushing around to get fed and clothed, cramming my feets into heels and clacking out the door to be slave-driven till 5, or 6, or 7 or 8 depending on what drama lay behind the desk at the office. Someone else's vision.

More productive? I've been freelancing full time for a year now. No dry-cleaning. Spare heels. Equally voluminous to-do lists but less pressure to please. I'm going for fewer pats on the head and more strokes for the work. More strokes in the bank account for the pleasure of practicing what I love. Difference: it's my bum on the bottom line. Scary! And thrilling adventure.

A Bench & So Much More

If Picture Paints A Thousand Texts

Queen of Denial

PEMA: My boyfriend is a real sweetheart.

GRANDMA: You better hold onto him.

We eat a few bites and stare off into space.

GRANDMA: Good friends are good to have.

- - - - -

On nature's monthly arriving the day of my 20 year HS reunion...

GRANDMA: I'm sorry that had to happen to you today.

PEMA: I'm glad it happened at all.

GRANDMA: Well, you weren't expecting it not to, were you?

PEMA: No. But I'm always glad to see it.

GRANDMA changes subject.

Names Changed

Some of the reunion people were perplexed at my name change.

Name changes on the weird-o-meter are relative. My grandma thinks "Pema" is the strangest thing she's ever heard. Newer friends think my given name, "Heather," misses the mark. I think "Pema" is nothing compared to the judge's son I once met who changed his name to "Fire Penguin Disco Panda."

Facepaint, Fires & Footstamping

I've decided high school reunions are an important tribal ritual. Last weekend, hundreds of us walked into the reunion oo-ing and awe-ing, greeting after 20 years and laughing over how so many of us looks exactly the same.

Then, someone turned on the reunion video, which was a video that was taken our senior year, for the purpose of playing at the reunion.

Oh my God. We were 17. A bunch of those former 17 year olds now have kids that age. We were children. And we most certainly did not look the same. Or feel the same.

The reunion ritual. Gets us all together to make us see how much time has passed, how much life has accumulated, and to push the go button, the fly, be free of any regret you left back in high school button. The you were a child and now you're an adult button. You're free!

I like the reunion ritual. I got to apologize to Rick Daynes for being such a bitch on the night of our Winter Formal. Before the dance, Jennifer Strauss told me he broke it off with Laura Nero and asked me instead because he heard he could score. Don't know where he got his intel, because that night. My shoulder. Ice.

In years that followed I felt bad I didn't check with the source before putting my Jerky McSourpuss in a party dress. Two decades later, I'm apologizing in front of his wife.

He said, Really? I don't remember that. His pretty wife smiled prettily.

Ah. It's nice to not be 17 anymore.

:)

WC

Rob's my brother. Sue's his wife. Last visit I made, they were building a 2-story addition to the back of their little bungalow. Garage on the bottom, bedroom on the top. Three months later, the single finished feature is the upstairs toilet, which they have lovingly given two names:
The Think Tank
and
The Poop Tower.

Tonight's Gem

On the toilet, on the phone, head in hand, trying to express in words how long the day has been. It's apparent I'm finding better success peeing than talking:

"My eyes are so...dry they're like...sandkittens in my...forehead."


*

Showing Up

Can you believe I'm still deciding whether or not to go to my 20 year high school reunion? It requires a two-day drive there and a two-day drive back. Which requires I decide by Tuesday, as my departure day would be Wed.

My reservation? All that. Plus the cash it would take to do it all and the time away from work.
My compulsion? To show up. I was so shy and isolated for so long in my life, I think that I am missing everyone in every place I've ever been because I am coming into myself in a way that is closer to whole, not so eclipsed by fear or embarrassment or harsh judgment on myself. So I want to go back and see the people I knew before, with the fuller parts of me showing, and with the expanded capacity of taking them in without my self-consciousness getting in the way.

I was visible in high school because I was the girl whose brother died the summer between sophomore and junior years. Then I was that girl, plus the one that cut her hair short, fell in love with the best friend she idolized, and became a lesbian. (Not that I had any idea what that meant at the time.) So when I looked at kids looking at me, who knows what they were thinking, but I was seeing them see me as THAT girl, and that's it. They still were nice. Still said hello and included me. But I was so incredibly withdrawn. My best friend is the only person who got much from me after all that. And when others would try, I wouldn't notice, or I would think it wasn't for real. I would wonder why they were talking to me. Not wondering in a snotty, I'm-too-good-for-you kind of way, but a why-are-you-talking-to-ME kind of way. I just didn't get it.

I think this is related to the emotional hangovers I had when I was in my 20s. I'd go out, have a great time. Wake up the next morning feeling like a terrible dork for how expressive I was the night before. Like I was several people, and the one that wakes up in the morning is a Catholic nun shaming me for dancing and laughing and sitting on a party couch interacting with peers.

In any case, I have this idea that showing up for the reunion would be a great exercise in showing up. All of me, which is so much more than I brought to the party before. Seems like it would be a nice way to mend the past to the present, and make friends with the friends that may have been back then. I'm romanticizing. Who knows such a thing. It just feels like showing up would be a good idea.

To go, or not to go.

Craigslist Poetry - Missed Connections

You were crying in front of Keybank Tower - m4w (downtown)
You were over by the bikes (rather than in front of Spicy Pickle). I was wearing a blue, buttoned short sleeve shirt and carrying a book. I doubt you'll see this, but if somehow you do, I want another chance to ask if you're OK. Include your hair color and the color of the shirt you were wearing so I'll know it was you.

Cute guy with a 2:00 haircut appointment - w4m (Roberts of Portland)
I was sitting in the front when you walked in. You looked like the type of guy with a great job, a house, a dog, a wife and a kid on the way.... but maybe there's a chance you're single? I doubt you check these but figure it might be worth a chance. Anyway.... I was the petite blonde in the yellow flowered dress.

New Seasons Market - m4m - 28 (Scholls Ferry)
at 2:30ish you were outside reading a book. We sort of made eye contact a couple times. Please be gay, please be gay, please be gay. Or at least bi. Hit me up if I looked "doable".

I farted on the max - w4m - 26 (At The back....)
It was packed.... It really stunk... You where the nice looking guy standing next to me that everyone looked at...... Our eyes met..... You knew it was me and didnt say anything......
What a guy...... Id love to meet you... It dosnt happen very often..... please email me.....

-Blondie

Coffee Shop - w4m - 28 (Portland)
To the guy who I'm sitting behind right now at my local coffee shop (NON-starbucks). Damn you are great to look at from behind. Thank you! :)

Hoops and Rewards

Speaking of money and getting personal (weren't we?), I made a big breakthrough in therapy today. I'm so happy to be in therapy again. It's been a lot of years since the last bout, and sanity is worth the investment. The absolutely glorious thing, is that therapy is not just sanity-inducing, it's personal growth. Big fat life lessons learned, with the perspective of somebody outside my head, equipped with brainaical skills, willing to push me through my fortress doors out into the bright of day, the bright of life. Yes, I write for Hallmark, dammit.

Today's breakthrough...I walked in and told my therapist it was over. I ran out of money for therapy. I have to come back when I've got a stronger foundation and extra money for such a thing.

The parenthetical to this is that all week long I've been pining over the school program I left in New York eight years ago. EIGHT YEARS AGO. Holy Jeez. I thought I was over the regret, but New York keeps coming up in the hot weather, in my city walks, in conversation, photos on Facebook. I miss the people I left. I miss the dream I stepped off of, thinking I was stepping further into it by leaving. I am jealous of the success my peers are achieving in their faraway states and camaraderie. I want to be achieving it with them. Practicality states that survival is success and the pace of both for me is just a little slower than the others I'm comparing myself to. But the fact is, I don't have any babies or marriages or award-winning plays under my belt, no fancy grants or creative foundations tripping over themselves to give me development money. Not yet anyway.

I love it when thoughts that seem just along for the ride in life and its circumstances tie right into a day's therapy session. So I tell Ken-the-therapist that it's over and he tells me based on the six or so sessions we've had and the voluminous heat of each of them, that it'd be an apropos time for me to bolt. Ah, yes. I agreed. If only I WANTED to bolt. But I wanted to stay, I just didn't have the means. Then all of a sudden those New York thoughts came breezing in, remembering I left in part because I thought I was going to lose it, and I needed to be in a familiar place if my mind was going to go...so that I could survive the fall. I didn't have the means to survive it. NYC was new, as were my friends and my circumstances. Who would take me in if I crashed? Who could I ask for help if I didn't have a fight in me left?

It's all very melodramatic isn't it? I was in a dramatic arts program, if that redeems me at all. But it's true. I felt a niggling sense of doom, and a faraway call to find a nest, find it fast, and prepare to lose my head.

The parallel of needing help, and not having the means to acquire it, came clearly into view. Even the time span that I've been here in Portland, following another dream, is the same time I was in NYC following that dream before I felt the foundation begin to shake.

Ken-the-therapist nodded as I pulled this all together. Threw in sage words. And offered me a deal I couldn't refuse. Breakthrough: I'm staying in therapy. I'm getting the help that's supporting my creative brain and my business success...and lest we forget, healthy relationships with men, boyfriend in particular. It feels, I feel, relieved. I feel really good. And I feel like I made a different choice than the sad, regretful one I made to leave New York.

As for missing places in general, I've been doing that a lot lately.

I miss the rosewater ice cream in Hollywood, and my old mob of cohorts at 415 in San Francisco, and the Fritz Blitz festival selection committee in San Diego, and my friends and the the foothills and ocean running path and the ocean itself in Santa Barbara. Melissa Lion wrote a cool book called Upstream. In it a teenage girl comes to grips with a devastating loss, and in her healing progress realizes that what she misses is who she was. I miss that sometimes, in the gap between what I am and what I'm becoming. Thing is, I've been becoming for a lot of months now, and I forget who I am in the meantime...making me remember who I've been and miss myself.

Curious, if I didn't think so much of myself, I'd think I were a narcissist. ;-)

Thanks for hearing my breakthrough today. It's a big one and I am happy. I feel older. By two days. At least.

Cash for Crustaceans

Money makes the mood go up, the mood go up, the mood go up.
Money makes the mood go up, the mood! go! up!

Was walking and driving around, composing today's blog post in my head. Watching my mood sway with anxiety, resolve, encouragement, anxiety, resolve, thinking it'll be one of those deep days, posting about my internal life. My bench on the inside. I started a new writing schedule today, and I guess anytime I'm in between things new and old, I get soft like a crustacean growing out of its shell. Soft and vulnerable and worrisome, wondering if the end is near, if the sky is falling, and if I'll be an unfortunate soft and squishy when it lands. On me. Squashing me dead. Hm. Maybe that's the point. To be squishy, so that you're not broken, but malleable when it hits. Maybe then I'd squish into a whole new kind of creature. A giraffe, maybe.

But the sky is not falling, or at least, the confidence of money in the mail pops a parachute on that gravity and tells it to take its time sweet time. Sometimes when confidence is lacking, money makes up for it. And caffeine. I now have introduced both into my bloodstream.

Birthday Weather

My blog is doing something weird. It won't let me comment on my own posts. Sorry, friendlies, to whom I would like to comment back. I'll look into that. In the meantime, thanks for reading and commenting.

It's 40 minutes before my birthday. Late night, dark and warm, make that really warm, with a breeze that's kind of thick. Humid. The kind that opens you up and gets you all nostalgic for what once was or what is to come. Hm. Appropriate birthday weather.

The Little Line Was Blue

The month of July has potentially seen the most transformative days in a row of my whole adult life. I could be wrong. I have had some swerves and misses. Some direct hits. My friend/boss died in a plane wreck. I moved to another state. I left 15 years of day-jobbing to leap into doing bizness for myself.

But two weeks ago I peed on a stick and turned it the faintest shade of blue. It was so light blue, the little line predicting the rest of my life, that the digital readout read, "Not Pregnant." My girlfriends, however, are all sorts of savvy. Peeing on sticks is a national sport in some households. Every last symptom under their belts, they know when the jig is up. And these pros in the field suggested I pee on another one, then bust that thing open with a hammer to read it the good old fashioned way: White strip. Thin blue line. You can only have the hormone in your system that turns sticks blue if you are pregnant, they said. Even if it's a tiny bit blue, you're 100% knocked up.

So I got out the hammer. Opened a fresh test. Peed. And waited. Three minutes later, it read, "Not pregnant." I got down on the floor and bashed that digital thing open. What did I pull out? White strip. Thin blue line.

Here's the calendar of events.
Wednesday - My boyfriend and I break up.
Friday - I'm four days late. I pee on a stick. It's negative.
Saturday Night - Pregnancy jock girlfriend instills doubt about my negative.
Sunday Morning - Pee on the stick. Doubtable shade of blue. But blue. No. Can't be. Yet.
Sunday - Six days late.
Sunday Night - Undeniable symptoms. Come to Jesus. My very molecules changing everything I know. Pema Teeter, This Is Your Life! I'm telling you, everything changed. I woke up the next morning recommitted to my core values, my spirituality, my purpose in life.
Monday Morning - Can't eat breakfast. Tastes funny. Nauseated. Make appointment for doctor.
Monday Mid-morning - Period comes. Seven days late, and one transformation later.

Now that we have the calendar down, I'll go back and tell you about the boyfriend. We broke up because of my complaint. I felt like I didn't exist for him, that I was a convenience, and that he was wholly self-absorbed. I tried hard to be a good girlfriend, being open and understanding, slow to judge, slow to anger. Simply put, he was in a better relationship than I was. And based on weeks prior, each of us battling to be satisfied in our worlds, he seemed happy to head for the door once I opened it.

Then I asked him to come over to help me with something. He brought flowers. Truce, he said. I told him I was four days late. His eyes got gentle and settled into me. He watched me a while with a slight upturn in his mouth. He said quietly without ever looking away, "Okay." He went out and came back with a bottle of wine, a box of pregnancy tests, and a bag of donuts. We clinked glasses. Hugged. Then I peed on the stick. We hugged again when it read negative, and amid all the relief, I felt sad.

That was day four. As the days progressed, we talked and talked. Not about being late or pregnant, but about what had us break up. I was traumatized by the event that kicked it off for us, and so I called him each night my head was spinning, to ask him to help me through it. Every night he would. So by night-six and morning-seven of my thin blue line journey, he was right there with me, offering whatever he had, to let me know he was with me all the way. Want me to go to the doctor with you? I will. Want to marry me for my insurance? We could have a courthouse wedding. He showed up in ways I had doubted he ever could. Just days after I had doubted him so completely as to call it off.

Sometime in that week, he asked if I was sure about wanting to break up. The afternoon of day-seven, leaving the doctor's office with him and a negative pregnancy test, I couldn't help but ask myself, "What's important?" We broke up because he wouldn't show up, in my estimation. And then, at a time like this, he shows up like a house afire.

A few days later we had a conversation about what we want in a partner and a relationship. It turned out we want each other. We were two single people living in a relationship a couple of weeks ago. Then we saw what was possible from what seemed inevitable. And we like each other a whole lot better. I for one like myself a little better, too. My therapist (good time for one of those right about now, wouldn't you say?) suggested that I had shown up in ways I never had, asking my (ex-)boyfriend for his help, being angry at him out loud, pulling him into my process to make it our process. So for all my complaint about his not being there in the relationship, apparently, neither was I. We need each other, people do. I guess if we don't offer, we don't get.

It must have been a big week for transformation in the cosmos. Because that weekend, I went to a Fire Starter group session with Danielle LaPorte. She said, “Go farther on your blog. Keep it personal. Take it a little crazy.” She said a good many things to all of us entrepreneurs awaiting enlightenment. And can I say, my world wasn’t just rocked. It was cracked, wide open like that damned pregnancy test, splintered and exposing what matters: White strip. Thin blue line. Me. Positively on. Being what’s possible. Seeing who I am. What I am. What I bring into the world. Pregnant with possibility. So just do it already. It’s time to give birth to it all.

Click It - Addicted!

In the interest of word game addictions, have you tried this one?

freerice

I think I've posted it here before, but, my, is it evil in the best of ways.

What's your high score?
Or better put, how many people did you feed with your addictive behavior today?

more word gaming

wow, you guys are good.
you inspired me...

pupu incense = 1,620
rickshaw trollop = 1,910
niggle swarthy = 2,680

sweat salamander

mink bikini = 34,300

milk biscuit = 4,320,000

silk sangria = 2,200,000

bilk bourgeoisie = 14,000

my friend, lisa, plays a party game on google. the gist is to enter the two words that generate the least amount of hits. 

try it. 

log your best shot here. 

Chicken Sex

Leave it to my lesbian friends to raise a rooster named Mathilda, and a hen that crows.

Mathilda the boy chicken is not such an uncommon development. It's hard to tell what sex those fuzzy little chicks are when they pop out of the eggs. When you get them home and growing in their little box, and then coop, you just gotta keep your eye, and ear, open for tell tale signs that your hen is becoming a man-bird. Like noticing the red crop growing on his head and the adolescent crackling that's trying to be a crow.

They had to get rid of Mathilda--dubbed Clark soon after puberty--because roosters aren't allowed in suburban backyards.

Rooster gone, this morning they woke to Daisy, the bossy hen of the brood, gurgling out a half-cocked screechy croon. In the absence of a rooster, she's taking on job. How very butch of her.

*

Dirt Where You'd Least Expect It

When I lived in New York, I had a lot of surreal experiences. Like the time I walked past a huge advert pic of a swimming pool and actually smelled chlorinated water on hot cement. And that first week I was there in that raucous loud city, seeing a homeless, deaf teenager, and imagining what NYC would be like without sound...I think it would be like being under water.

And there was the time I saw construction in the street. They had the road ripped up and I could see the dirt underneath. Dirt. Brown, sandy earth. In Manhattan. I stopped and stared before I realized I was gripped by the surprise of nature holding us all up.

Saw the Mannahatta Project today and it reminded me of that surprising earth.

*

iParts

A: Hey I think I can select my iPhone apps with my nipple. I'm gonna try it.
B: What? It should work. It's warm. Maybe I can take a picture with my Johnson.
A: Oh, it's working!
B: I just took a picture of my leg. I'm going to send it to you.
(beat)
B: Oh my God, I'm scrolling through my pictures with my Johnson. Wait. Check your email.

"Penis Poems"
K sZ
G blog
Doug
Stle

Typed by my Tip

*

Law School vs. Baby Uncertainty Principle

My brother has three nearly grown kids and some variation of a constant question whenever I see him:
"When are you gonna have kids?"
Or, "Why don't you go get some seeds?"
Or, "Isn't your clock gonna explode soon? Get all rusty and freeze up on you?"

Eloquence runs in my family.

Kids don't. Out of 5 adult siblings, only 2 of us have procreated. I'm not one of them.

My mantras: I *think* I want kids. I don't want to ruin them. I don't want them to ruin me, which will ruin them.

Snake eats its tail.

Yesterday, after the course of some high pressure darktime hours with God, I get it. Yes. Kids. Babies. Offspring. I'd be a good mom. And maybe a nutter of one, okay. But yeah. Kids and me would go very well together.

Then I saw this post today on THE HAPPINESS PROJECT and it made me snicker while giving me perspective in all of 20 seconds. It's in the video linked here.

Hollywood Movie

Been okay. But tonight I'm a girl. A regular girl the kind I always wondered about who loved "Dirty Dancing" and swooned over boys and babies. Everywhere I look are couples aging and sophistcated on a Saturday night, young and cute in the giddy twilight. And everytime I hold back tears. Tears! Are threatening my eyes and slipping down my throat. I force myself into the street into a bar with a book and I hide behind the menu mystified that I'm crying just looking at wines. Or trying to keep from crying, lights dim, bar marble-topped, music perfectly jazz. The lights just got dimmer and my red is served. I wonder if I will be someone's story tonight, to see and consider as they go to sleep, the woman at the bar brushing at tears before her book even opens.

Lisa Makes the Sweetest Peas

Facts

My boyfriend and I broke up yesterday.

My HS reunion is in a few weeks. To go or not to go.

Kittens slept on my head last night.

I just woke up from a three-hour nap.

Window washers dangled outside my 10th floor apt today, adept as spiders.

Yesterday I was angrier than I have been in a really long time.

Like maybe ever.

Anger is cumulative over years and bursts open like a storm cloud.

I am the same girl I was in high school. More talkative maybe. And as poetically morose.

I'm looking out my window at a river right now.

My friends make me feel so special I cry.

I ate halves of five different flavored cupcakes yesterday, with two of my besties, all of us in the haven of my bed.

We drank prosecco in the afternoon. Also in my bed.

I am tired.

I wonder a lot of things. Mostly about progress and reproduction and people.

I missed yesterday's blog post, busy living its content.

I miss New York sometimes.

Life is always just beginning.

*

Office Deluge

My eyes have an office-y ache and a laptoppy strain. But success was found on my new scanner today. Even though I failed at the fax.

A General Ick

What can be attributed to this ICK? I woke up and before I even opened my eyes, I hated my apartment. I loathed where it is located, isolated at the end of my block. I regretted the home improvements I made last weekend, and couldn't believe I bought that ugly little table and chairs. It disrupts everything with its wicker cuteness and caramel-colored brightness infecting my apartment's darker tones.

Ick.

In my late 20s I used to wake up with an emotional hangover. I'd have a fun night out the night before, no alcohol (special diet), nobody in my bed (no reason but shyness), and before I even opened my eyes, I'd be regretting all that laughing and joking and general self-expression of the night before...usually it involved meeting new people and having a really great time. And it wasn't just regretting, I was doing. It was a physical sensation. My insides churned in a kitchen mixer, getting folded into a batter headed for the flame and skillet.

What the hell is that about? Does everyone feel this way when they wake up? Is this why people drink coffee? Mood enhancer of happy prancers once static dancers. Stop me.

I'm still in bed. I wrote some morning pages then made a list of all there is to do today in lieu of hating myself. When I have stuff to do there is less time for that. In between lines, I considered when I have felt like this and remembered high school. Precious days of hormonal Jekyll and Hyde. Girlhood sucks sometimes.

Today is a girl day. In all the literature of all time, all those pagan fertility rites recorded and allusions to the power of women during their "moon time," why does none of it, not one speck say one thing about PMS?

If you know of an ancient reference to lady dragons, please post. I'd love some redemption in history.

Independent

I missed yesterday's post!
I was independent of the blog while celebrating our country's independence.
Now, a lot could be debated about what our country and its individuals are independent from--or not--these days. Oil? A crazy craving to always be buying something? Debt, and the Industrial Revolution hours it makes one keep?
But systemically, ritually, we are free.
And a lotta folks work to keep us feeling that way, from red tapers to storm troopers to grocery markets that stay open till midnight.
And for that I give thanks on Independence Day.
Powerful stuff, freedom.

Note the Floral Toes

Still learning to be a girl after all them bruthas...

Rhythm is Gonna Get You

My best dancing days all added together have not seen as much dancing as there's been in my life since Michael Jackson died, all that rhythm comin outta everywhere, radios all around.

I want a jazz funeral when I die. But if you play a little MJ when I go, it'll gimme some more boogie to woogie outta here on. And I won't mind a bit. As long as you keep marchin and swingin down the streets with them trombones and sassy colors, lovin the life I led as much as I did.

Lawty Lawty Got a House Pawty

This is three-fourths of my core Welcome-to-Portland crew. Note the cute girl on the right. That's Stephanie.

And this is the farewell crew.





Saying goodbye to Stephanie. Portland's loss. New York's gain.

We'll miss you, girl.

Love Me Forever

Specs Addict

One dark and stormy night, I lost my glasses.

I was traveling, and was headed for another airport in the morning. So, I made arrangements to cab it directly from the Portland airport to Sears Optical to get new specs. And you know, sometimes life has more adventures than time.

So I met a blind date there. At Sears Optical. He helped me choose new glasses. He helped a lot, actually. It had been a sad, heavy winter and along came a perfect stranger to help me lift it.

A few months later, back in Santa Barbara, I met another stranger. It was windy on the night of our first date. Really windy. We went to the movies. Watched. Then ducked back into the wind. He walked me to my car. Whereupon I discovered I had lost my glasses.

I began to wonder if my glasses are connected somehow to the people I date, and what, if any, metaphysical meddling might be manifesting in my losing them. For, once, on a first date, I lost my wrist watch. And lemme tell you, I still haven't stopped mourning the time that went missing from the year that followed that night.

For the record, I lost my glasses *again* shortly after I met my current boyfriend. But I figured the metaphiz got balanced or redeemed or something because the glasses were found and returned by a cross-dressing furniture dealer named Woody. ...something about "if it comes back to you it's yours. If it doesn't, it was never meant to be" rings a bell. And the cross-dressing. That's a representation of balance, right? Male and female in one?

:-)


*

Click It - Peadoodles

Just one pea(k).
So funny.
And cute.
And funny.

"Support for Spelling" ?

It's hard to swallow a hard-to-swallow rule.
But once you get used to it, sing-song a little mantra about it, and then become an editor, for Pete's sake, enforcing it with red pens the rest of your days, it's hard to let it go. Oh, i-before-e, must we? Part?

New Britain Teaching Guidelines Nix "I Before E" Spelling Rule

*

Tools To Live By

My friend and colleague, Jillian, was over yesterday, giving me counsel on my life architecture.

We were talkin story and she told me about how, after a big change in her life, she got rid of almost everything she owned...appliances, furniture. She wanted to keep it simple. So she didn't buy a TV. She made her coffee on the stove.

I was totally vibing on her story, drawn in like, yeah, I get it. Cathartic. Get rid of that stuff. And then I remembered my own moving story--story of moving, that is.

I am in New York to be a student, from San Francisco where I had a job. To get here, I have sold or trashed 75% of the possessions I laboriously accumulated between the ages of 19 and 30. Rent and tuition paid in the big city, I am so broke I am manufacturing air. I eat a lot of canned beans at this point in my life. You can buy 'em cheap and season them well, toss in an egg (yep an egg) and have a super high protein meal that lasts till lunch time.

That is, if you can open the can. Simplified and broke, I don't have a can opener. (Does this sound like a theme to anyone?) But I have a tool box.

I spend a week opening my nightly can of beans with a screwdriver and hammer. When I finally receive the student loan check and go to the store to buy a can opener, it is the best $1.27 I ever spend.

Sing it with Me

This is the way we gaze at our navel
gaze at our navel
gaze at our navel

This is the way we gaze at our navel
early in the morning.

Click It - Clock

Need a wake up call?
Or a reason to keep hitting snooze?

Bring home "The Perfect Valet."

(Click the audio samples for your daily laugh dose.)

Mi Familia

SUE: My big toe is smaller than my middle toe.

ROB: Your big toe is smaller than your little toe?

SUE: Yeah

ROB: That lady we were with today, her little toe went straight up like this. Did you see it?

SUE: What lady?

ROB: That lady. The one with the one eye.

Dinner With Grandma

My grandma is the only person I've ever seen eat a taco like a sandwich.


When I tell her that, she asks me, "What are you eating?"
(She can't see what I'm eating because she is blind.)
"A burrito."
"What's a burrito?"
(She doesn't know this because she's from Missouri circa 1910.)
"Everything that's in your taco rolled up in a tortilla."
"That's why I've never had one. I don't like those flour tortillas."

We are quiet a while. She and my grandpa used to come to this Taco Bell together a long time ago. They used to bring my brother and me here on get-out-of-the-kitchen nights. I loved the yellow paper my burritos came rolled in and the cheese shredded in super skinny slices. Grandma's vision has dimmed over the years. I am fully sighted. But we're both seeing the same history in our minds.

"I almost died laughing at Orin eating a tostado," she says.
"Why's that? How'd Grandpa eat his tostadas?"
"He had such a long nose." (And now she's laughing.) "Couldn't take a bite without getting it in it!"

Click It - Toof

My Milk Toof

Possibly the funniest, and the cutest, cute/funny combo ever.



(Web Cred - Thanks Kristin Thiel at Indigo Editing!
Ever the fresh source for mental rest stops along the road.))

BackFencePDX - Lawdy Lawdy Lawdy

Damn that was a good night. Sold out crowd of ~250, people in happy moods, lost in the stories, like they're sitting at a campfire, feeling the heat and sharing the love.

A stripper told a story about finding her vibrator in the bum of a half-dead man.
A preacher's grandson told the story of his accidental terrorist act.
A So. African ex-pat told a remarkable story of race, revelation, and The Jefferson's.
I told a story of childhood fantasy turned...fantasy.

If you're on Twitter, go to BACKFENCEPDX and follow some of the tweets on the night. What a great show, and so much fun!!

Catch the next one in Portland in September.

Video links to follow, I think.

Appliance Challenged

My trip to Trader Joe's so fulfilled my need for familiarity, that I walked out with items it turns out I wasn't prepared for.

To my delight this morning, I remembered I bought my favorite TJ's toaster waffles! Opening the freezer...grabbing the box...thinking of my topping choices...yum! almond butter? honey? Then I remember...

I don't have a toaster.

Wah-Wah-Wah...

Caught Red-Handed

Hey Folks,

I'm on stage tonight at BACKFENCEPDX, storytelling on the theme, "Caught Red-Handed." Uh-oh. :) Check it out!

Scentrageous

I have an inordinate love of fresh basil.

I heart basil.

I order Thai food, just for the basil dishes.

I love the scent, the soft feel of its leaves, its rich, rich green, and that taste, mm mm mm.

I finally found the Wednesday farmers market downtown in Portland's South Park blocks, an came home clutching a bunch of basil. Happy homemaker, I put it in a glass of water near the sink and off I went, back out into the day.

That night, when I walked into my studio, I went straight to open the window. WHAT is that smell? It's like...grapefruit...rind...no, it's like B.O., old, stale, stinky B.O. that has been sitting in a gym shirt in the corner too long.

I did the laundry. The air circulated. The scent diminished. Until the next day. I came home, and there was that...grapefruity, no, stale, six-day-old sweat stink again. Trash out, recycling emptied, I nosed around the house to discover it was the basil, the pretty, thriving in its glass, scentsational, scentrageously overpowering essence d'sweat herb.

Who knew that's what basil smells like in an urban studio?

Rebel Yell

In favor of peace between my dad and me, we skirt topics on race and politics. But when I was a kid, we would get into arguments. At 19, I began to harbor fantasies of moving away from home, and coming back with long, wild curly hair, tattooed and smoking, on the back of a motorcycle driven by my boyfriend, who would of course be black. (FYI, I am white, my hair is straight, and I was into girls at the time.)

Today over breakfast, 18 years later, my boyfriend and I were digging at the source of bigotry in an age that makes limiting beliefs about one's skin color sound archaic at best. My boyfriend, handsome as I find him, describes himself as a cross between Andy Dick and Woody Allen--5'6", near-sighted, self-deprecating, and a Midwestern shade of so-white-he's-pink. When I told him about my old fantasy, he looked slightly defeated and then offered:

"I could wear black-face."

Love is a Battle Cube

SETTING: Hotel Bar.

TIME: Evening, after day one of "Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women," a self-help seminar.

CAST:
Woman
Bartender

Bartender mixes drink.

WOMAN: One thing I do know is he falls for people he works with.
(Sip)
So if he ever gets his divorce and we get married, you better believe I'm gonna keep workin' with him.

*

Joe Sweet Joe

Q: How long does it take a girl to come to her senses and make herself feel at home in a new town?

A: As long as it takes her to find and frequent the nearest Trader Joe's.

I love a good farmers market. There are 6 of them within walking or biking distance from my house, selling yummy, locally grown organic fruits and veggies, and all kinds of other delights. But when I walked into Trader Joe's last weekend, I felt like I had found home in a dream where I had been lost a thousand years. There it was. Same as in every town I've lived in. Had never moved. It was only I who had forgot it was there. What familiarity it held. The scent, the layout of the place, the friendly faces and floral shirts and pre-packaged gluten-free gourmet-ish...foodstuffs, microwaveable produce...in plastic shrink wrap, and fruit in...plastic boxes...from...Argentina...or Chile. Yes, somehow, Trader Joe's is an island in the sea. Its non-local, non-recyclable, organic-from-far-flung-republics products calling to me like...like...like a lover I should have long ago outgrown but is too damned good to let go. Ahhh. Sweet Joe.

To Pee or Not to Pee

So, would you find it kind of weird if you saw me walking along with my friend downtown, and I stopped, pulled down my panties and peed right there on the sidewalk?

Would your shock be resolved if only my friend pulled out a water bottle and doused the pee puddle away?

Mine would. That is, if it were you I saw peeing on the sidewalk, and your friend doused your puddle, I might be more forgiving of the transgression.

So why do drunks get tickets or jail time for the same thing 100 dogs do every day outside my building? Why don't dog owners get ticketed for not hosing down the lakes o' pee that make downtown smell like a public toilet in summertime?

Two words. G-ross.

Back on the Bench...and Watching

Hi.
I'm back.
Too many observables have occurred to keep my mouth shut and brain quiet. Maybe more to the point, I'm over the hump in my move to Portland, making space and time for my brain to activate its Pemascope. It's a vast and airy place the Pemascope observes: Imagination's underbelly, and scruffy top. It's sparkly underpants. Thank goodness for airy there.

Here, I'll scoot over. Join me on the Bench and let's watch a while.

Things to tell you about as we sit...
Trader Joes
Women at Work
Basil
BackFencePDX
Birth Control
Boys in the Yard
(Just kidding, those last two, I just got carried away by the B's.)

For now, because it's clearing as prayer and sufficiently odd, I'll make another list for you. I'm a lister.

They're poetic, lists are. I can't get away from them, keeping them in odd places, on post-its, in backs of books. Lists are at once ominous because they forebode so much responsibility, and glorious because they pat me on the head everytime I cross something off. I love the "good-girl!" I get from my internal grade school teacher every time I cross something off.

My favorite lists are grocery and drug store receipts. How often does one buy a garlic press, Q-tips, condoms, and ketchup in one visit? Or mail twine, eggs, a toilet scrubber and birthday candles? I could make an art installation with mine.

For now I'll list the web windows I have open at present. Ironically, if I were not such a lister, such an out-of-sight-out-of-mind type, I would just write these open windows down and return to them when I had time. But these are live lists of a sort.

As they stand, open, they are portals I'll climb through, someday. Soon, I hope. But if closed and written down, who knows which misplaced post-it or which random book jacket I'll find six years down the line that reads...

Yoga Pearl
Tin House
Magnetic Attraction Analysis - White Hot Truth
Ojai Playwrights
Arts Club Theater Company
Tropical Salvage
Find a BEST Practitioner
Reiki Healing
iContact
Bettina Yelman
Lumina
Portland Parks and Recreation
Windows Hotmail
Gmail
The Student Loan People
Mortified
Shawn Colvin Lyrics - "The Story"
NextBus
Feminine Principle - Google Search
Community Cycling Center
The Hundredth Monkey Studio
Pacific Northwest Hikes
Capoeira Portland
195 Riders
Improv Everywhere
Amazon - Love You Forever
Upholstery Classes Portland
Consignment NW
Blogspot

...and what course in life I'll have missed because of it.


(Incidentally, can anyone tell me why my computer is so slow?) ;)

Overheard Kid Talk

He's five, the kid from the sidewalk. It's a surprisingly sunshiny moment under Portland's gray sky, and as he swings his arms and walks with his family, he engages his little sister. He is totally amused...

KID: Remember that movie? Remember the Wizard of Oz? Remember those Munchkins?! They were like tiny grownups! Isn't that so cool? They were SMALL grown ups.

Poetry of Living

Remember scratch n sniff stickers? This is listen n read blogging.

Play this:



To read this:

Sometimes you drive around doing errands, buying office tools, buttoning up against the rain and eating a fast lunch so you can get back to work.

And then you get home and dive in. To the work. Organizing paragraphs and making up story lines. You're listening to George Winston because you remembered that pretty sound recently, when it was way past midnight, and you were suffocating in wordsand--a letter-y kind of quicksand that writers fall into, especially after midnight. It can show up right there in the middle of their apartments, one step backward and s-s-s-squish, there they go, if they are not careful, and they are barely surviving a Code Bleak, wordsand kind of night. If you still have a hand sticking out, though, you can open iTunes and see what can save you. For me, three nights ago, it was the memory of the sound of George Winston's piano. The sound of it bounced inside my skull. Such non sequitur memories get squeezed out of the desire to survive.

Then day returns. Lunch is finished. You've turned on George's DECEMBER. And you're working, and you look up, out your window at the bridge. And over the rooftops, it has begun to snow. It's snowing. And you're writing, in the middle of the day. And you're listening to DECEMBER and you remember, of a sudden but softly as snow falling, you've dreamt this again and again your whole life through. To be a writer. By day. With a window. And quiet. And snow.

But Wait! There's More! TALKING DOGS Jan 30

Here I am, back already.

For your theatrical pleasure and nighttime intrigue, you are welcome to TALKING DOGS, my new comedy about men and marriage, er, I mean, divorce.

My new play, TALKING DOGS, is receiving a staged reading at Portland Center Stage's the Armory. It's part of the new FERTILE GROUND FESTIVAL, garnering a national focus on Portland's local theatre scene. Come be a part of the scene, literally, in the Armory's gorgeous reception venue: My crazy farce is set at a wedding reception.

EMAIL LIST: welovetalkingdogs@yahoo.com
(Email me here to receive updates on pre-party and play info)

PURCHASE TICKETS: Click here to buy tix online and save yourself a seat.

DATE: FRIDAY, JAN 30

TIME: 11pm (Pre-party starts at 9pm - details to follow)

LOCATION: Portland Center Stage's Gerding Theatre at the Armory, Mezzanine Stage

TALKING DOGS, by Pema Teeter
"Sit! Heel! Stay. A fetching comedy about men and marriage."

Marriage is not about getting the girl anymore. It's about keeping her. Grab a cocktail and pull up a chair to this raucous comedy about five men facing various stages of divorce and dissolution, all while discovering love they never noticed, and possibilities they never knew they possessed. Set at one man's second wedding, a group of lifelong guy friends--straight, gay, transgender, young and old--all face the same hard challenge: not tying the knot, but breaking it.


See you there!

Happy New Year

Hi Friends and Park Benchers.

So, uh, where HAVE I been?

What have I been doing to be so neglectful of the Bench?

Something happened.

That ever occur in your life? Something, that isn't necessarily any one thing at all, but some turn occurs in your direction, and you are cruising, or trekking, or careening along on another path a fur piece before you turn around and realize what you left behind? In my case, a (mostly) daily exercise in painting pictures in the ether.

Park Bench Daily is going to continue slumbering a while. It started in a poof, one day when I kept running into funny, and thought I should share. It became a practice in writing for the public and included many exercises in stretching and scratching past being shy and inhibited.

I still have to stretch sometimes. But I don't have to try as hard anymore. For your audience and participation and curiosity, I thank you.

PBD will be back...in some incarnation. Whether it's more internet text, or a few books, or more plays, all these thoughts and observations will find a landing, and you will be invited to read them. Send me a comment with your email address if you want to invited to the new blog, or be updated on my work. I will send you a note when the letters have landed, so that you can be the first to read.

From the comment section, your info will reach my inbox, won't be published, and I'll add you to my distribution list for notices (new plays, published articles, random observations on a less frequent scale, etc.).

For immediate fixes, you are invited to read the archives.

WHAT happened?

Well...I'm writing a book on a deadline, producing a staged reading of my new play, "Talking Dogs", transitioning to Portland, setting up a new freelance writing business, writing occasional articles for others, looking for an apartment, playing with my new iPhone, and watching snow fall. Snow!

Till the next incarnation...
...sit naked.

xo
Pema

Happy New Year

Hi Friends and Park Benchers.

So, uh, where HAVE I been?

What have I been doing to be so neglectful of the Bench?

Something happened.

That ever occur in your life? Something, that isn't necessarily any one thing at all, but some turn occurs in your direction, and you are cruising, or trekking, or careening along on another path a fur piece before you turn around and realize what you left behind? In my case, a (mostly) daily exercise in painting pictures in the ether.

Park Bench Daily is going to continue slumbering a while. It started in a poof, one day when I kept running into funny, and thought I should share. It became a practice in writing for the public and included many exercises in stretching and scratching past being shy and inhibited.

I still have to stretch sometimes. But I don't have to try as hard anymore. For your audience and participation and curiosity, I thank you.

PBD will be back...in some incarnation. Whether it's more internet text, or a few books, or more plays, all these thoughts and observations will find a landing, and you will be invited to read them. Send me a comment with your email address if you want to invited to the new blog, or be updated on my work. I will send you a note when the letters have landed, so that you can be the first to read.

From the comment section, your info will reach my inbox, won't be published, and I'll add you to my distribution list for notices (new plays, published articles, random observations on a less frequent scale, etc.).

For immediate fixes, you are invited to read the archives.

WHAT happened?

Well...I'm writing a book on a deadline, producing a staged reading of my new play, "Talking Dogs", transitioning to Portland, setting up a new freelance writing business, writing occasional articles for others, looking for an apartment, playing with my new iPhone, and watching snow fall. Snow!

Till the next incarnation...
...sit naked!

xo
Pema

To Blog

I told Tania, who is visiting, that I need to write down a list of blog topics, as they have been adding up. She suggested I blog the blog topics. So here they are, in no particular order.

Coming to a blog near you...

- Racial Profiling
- He really does resemble your dad!
- Portland Snot!
- Actually, that was a typo. Should say Portland Snow!
- Tania's visit

What U Did Last Summer

Don't you hate when it comes back to haunt you? Need an exorcism? This one's FREE!

Dolla Dolla Bill Y'all

Hey folks, KISS MY FACE offered you all 30% off at their webstore:

The promo code is at the end of this article I mentioned them in...you may remember it. If you already read it, snoop around elsewhere on the CarrieAndDanielle.com site for cool stuff to read. :-) You won't have to look too far.

P.S. I LOVE Kiss My Face. Fabulous products.

Meditation is for Meditators

Talking is for do-ers.
Just saying....
(Click to see me latest on CarrieandDanielle.com)

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Portland Gold

Sponge Breakfast

CAUTION: Breakfast making and bath tub cleaning don't mix. Just ask Gina, who was making French toast and handing the sponge to Regina. Oh sad fate of the naked bread, never to be bathed in its French Toast future.

It wasn't fun cleaning the tub with cinnamon egg yolk either.

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Antibiotics Kill Even Pride

REGINA: Pema, do you have acidophilus?

PEMA: No but I have fixyourpussilous.

(Mama said there'd be days like this. Be prepared, with these two supplements in the herb cabinet: 1. Oregano oil capsules, and 2. Cell Food trace minerals.)

Love School

Maybe to a degree we teach people how to love us. If love fails, is it we, personally, who have failed to teach our partner how to best love us?

If we are not loved the way we want to be loved, should we not take it upon ourselves to teach our partner how to love us?

And if they fail, do we call it a personal failure because they have not learned from the best person to have taught them?

Do we take any accountability for that?

No doubt, it takes a willing student. But I've always found that a student's capacity to thrive increases with the enthusiasm, commitment, creativity and drive of the teacher.

As a chronic single person who finds plenty of reasons not to date people past a certain knowledge of them (something to the effect of: we'd never get along, that would drive me crazy about him, no, no, that's dangerous, and i would never want to deal with that the rest of my life...), I wonder if it is a matter of picking an apt candidate and teaching like my love depended on it.

How to Be Sesame Street

Remember that little Sesame Street guy who is learning to read? Big and bold on the board in front of him is the word he is learning. He sounds out each of the letters and slowly--with so much suspense!!--pulls the sounds together to say the word:

BLOG

Buh Ll Ah Guh

BLl Ah Guh

((Meanwhile you're pinging in your seat, "blog! blog! it's blog! say BLOG!!!"))

BLl AhG

((BLOG! BLOG!! SAY IT!! (boing! boing! boing!))

BLOG. BLOG? BLOG!

And then he's pleasant and pleased and you, whew, are spent and relieved.

((Blog, I told you.))


The suspense of learning has really worn me out over the years, and my doctor suggested I do something regular to balance it out. So I turned to my pen and decided to share some tips of my own, sneak over to the teaching side a little while.

Take a peek at today's post on CarrieAndDanielle.com: Five Unexpected Tips to Get You Writing. Go ahead. Sound it out slowly. You'll be pleasant and pleased, like on Sesame Street, richer for your knowledge, like on Main Street, and maybe even a bit surprised, like on Wall Street.

SAVE THE DATE - Jan 30, 2009

No, I'm not getting married on that date. One of my characters is!

Come visit me in Portland, OR, on January 30, where my new play TALKING DOGS will get its first public reading.

Taking place at Portland's poshest digs for theatre, Portland Center Stage's The Armory, you can grab a cocktail and pull up a chair to a wedding reception featuring five men facing various stages of divorce and dispossession, all while discovering love they never noticed, and possibilities they didn't know they possessed.

TALKING DOGS is a COMEDY. A farce. A run-around-naked good time. Oh wait, that's the honeymoon. I haven't written that scene yet.

Drop what you're doing and come play with me this winter at the first ever FERTILE GROUND FESTIVAL. I'll promise you a rose city.

Lovin' Feeling

Wanna date on the cheap without looking like a cheap date? Allow me to show you how...Check out my latest on C&D.com.

Gut Feeling

If you pardon the typos, you might like my new post on trusting your intuition at C&D.com. I know...you knew I was going to say that.

Coffeeshop Overheard

Man: I'm not a germ phobe or anything, but--eww.

Woman: I'm not borrowing a swim suit. It's a yoga mat!

Woman (cont.): Do you have those tiny spoons? I love a good cappucino with a tiny spoon.

(Man hands her a cappucino)

Woman (cont.): That's not a really tiny spoon, FYI.

Man: Maybe you should get back to yoga and get a little more zenned out.

Other Man: Or have one of these white chocolate chip yummy cookies with coconut and cranberries...

Woman: You lost me at white chocolate.

Eateritas

On Alberta Street in Portland, I dropped into La Sirenita to bring home dinner. The Mexican restaurant sits in between two others, La Bonita and La Playita, all on the same block.

I haven't eaten at the others, but have wondered about them. While waiting for my food, I got confirmation I was in the right place. A woman wearing a black apron that had a red embroidered "La Bonita" on it came in, got in line and placed her order.

Dinner break? Good thing she works so close to a good Mexican joint.

In the Name of Research

I ate grasshoppers last night.

Served sun dried in a bowl with chili flakes and lime. Garnished with salsas, cilantro, and corn tortillas.

I resisted temptation to wash it down with a shot of tequila. I was on a date, after all.

The bigger story is that I'm doing research for a story that involves entomophagy. The grasshoppers were listed on the menu as appetizers, under "pre-hispanic" food. With the opportunity right there in front of me, I didn't know how I could rightly refuse it. Granted, I wouldn't kill anyone if I were writing about murder. But...I felt a little guilty thinking I would pass up such accessible research. I felt the draw of exotic adventure. And I felt curious enough, both, to say I tried them, and have an excuse to be so bold as to order grasshoppers on a date.

They were less crunchy than I thought they would be. Not a lot of taste. They felt scratchy in my mouth. They were indeed little carcasses. I couldn't bring myself to pick one up and eat it by itself, or any part of it that had fallen off in the bowl. Actually, there was a moment there, as I sat and chatted with my date, grasshopper-stuffed tortilla rolled in my hand, that I glimpsed in my peripheral vision a bug sticking out of my food!! I jumped. Then realized I just hadn't taken that bite yet. I tucked it back in the taco and took a deep breath, allowing myself only a half second to wonder what the HELL I was doing.

As we left the restaurant, my date joked, "Ah, grasshoppa-eater, you have come so far."

Gray Skies All Day

The thing about Portland is that it's morning all day long. At least that's what my history in SoCal tells me, where coolness and clouds clear out by 9am.

Under the perpetual morning skies of Portland, I have no indicator of time passing. Now that I work from home, I am prone to wake-and-work--I fire up the laptop before getting out of bed in the morning. I eventually move the work down to my basement office, but somewhere along the way, I forget to change out of my pajamas. And pink slippers.

You'd think when it's 9pm and nearing bedtime again, I would be happy for being that much closer to ready for it. Truth is, it's jarring. "Dark outside? But I'm still in my P.J.'s. Bedtime? I just got out of bed."

Today, I put on a bra and called it progress.


Photo Credit

Addiction

Sometimes the substance is a person and abuse feels nothing like the word.

Sound Play

I had a funny experience. Actually, I had a fun experience and parenthetically encountered a funny one. Portland hosts a literary festival called, Wordstock. It's a weekend of readings by authors from all over the country. Before I moved to town two months ago, I signed up to volunteer. I'm a word nerd.

Last minute, I got a call to pick up an author at the airport. It was Stefan Fatsis, book author, writer for Wall Street Journal and New York Times, but more importantly, to me, NPR commentator. I'm a radio junkie.

Back story, I have better aural recognition than visual. So when I picked up Mr. Fatsis and accompanied him to baggage claim, I couldn't help but laugh at the ten years of radio listening that stood up in my memory on hearing him speak.

Better, when I sat at dinner and asked him about his latest book, in which he, a sports writer, plays on an NFL football team in order to write about the experience, I reverted to the memories that began the evening, but with a slight Alice in Wonderland twist: I was now sucked INTO the radio, one of the radio hosts, interviewing Stefan Fatsis, sports writer and NPR contributor, who diligently, dispassionately answered questions in the clipped and animated way I had heard from OUTSIDE my radio for years.

God that can warp a person's brain.

Shortly, I forgot the man was Stefan Fatsis, and he became some cool guy again, who'd flown into town to talk at the literary festival.

But the funniest part came this morning, when I called Mr. Fatsis to let him know Regina and I were on the way. Regina sits on the Wordstock board, and we were taking him to breakfast. If you've heard the man's radio segments, you know he is always in conversation with the host of the show. You know that his inflections are all over the sound map, making for an interesting listen. And if you're at all like me, you notice the way he gets off the air...like the thing is over and he's had enough, already. His sign offs are unmistakably complete: "BYE, BOB." He'll say it with a flat directness. I love these goodbyes. They always make me laugh.

Our brief phone conversation ended this morning. Stefan Fatsis signed off...and there I was spinning in ten years of radio again, but this time they were distilled into my phone: "BYE, PEMA."

Content of A Man's Character

Gina heard this on the radio today, paraphrased. An African-American man was interviewed out on the street in his town, in response to yesterday's landslide vote to elect Barack Obama President of the United States:

"This election was the biggest event since Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. That piece of paper was supposed to free us. But we weren't free that day. We were sent out of slavery with nothing. No jobs. No property. No rights. Some of us no families. We weren't free that day. We were freed YESTERDAY. Nothing this significant has happened since the Emancipation Proclamation."

Can't help but hear MLK's voice: "Free at last, free at last. Free at last."

And Obama's acceptance speech last night: "Because of what we did on this day, in this election, on this defining moment, change has come to America."

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard Professor of African-American Studies, was on Oprah today, and repeated what his 95 year-old father said to him over the phone: "This is the greatest day in the history of the Negro and I am glad to see it."

Everybody's Doing It

I love election day! I love that I can fill in the bubbles on my ballot (which I am doing right now!) knowing millions of people all over the nation are doing the same thing today. Our nation has football and baseball games that bring fans together in hope and drive. We send athletes to Olympic games that pull our heartstrings in solidarity, and serve to expand our collective minds about regular folk all over the world. We have holidays that bring us closer to our families and help us reflect on feelings of love throughout the world. And we have election day...every four years the opportunity to cast our individual votes, raise our hands to be counted in a great and prosperous democracy. It is a perfect reflection of individuals coming together to form the community that is our United States. No matter how our opinions and passions differ, we vote together, to make our aspirations for our country a reality. Today, regardless of our differences, we are a community. Get out there and feel it today! It inspires!

Prop H8te

"Religions and their believers are free to define marriage as they please; they are free to consider homosexuality a sin. But they are not free to impose their definitions of morality on the state. Proposition 8 proponents know this, which is why they have misdirected the debate with highly colored illusions about homosexuals trying to take away the rights of religious Californians. Since May, when the state Supreme Court overturned a proposed ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, more than 16,000 devoted gay and lesbian couples have celebrated the creation of stable, loving households, of equal legal stature with other households. Their happiness in no way diminishes the rights or happiness of others."

LA Times Editorial 11.2.08

Traffic

This has been a week of traffic. Two weeks of traffic. Pink vapory joy on the road of life, so, good traffic, like a line of drivers on laughing gas, but traffic nonetheless, of opportunity and ideas and possibility, riding down the road bumper to bumper, passing and weaving through lanes of friends and writing gigs and bright ideas.

Election season doesn't hurt. Nor the transformation in the air. Had lunch with Suzy today, who never fails to make me laugh. When talking about caustic political email forwards she had received from a few family members, she marveled at whether they realized who they were forwarding them to, and said: Can you guys please vote NO on Prop 8, so I have at least the same opportunity as every other person in my family to get divorced twice??

Full

Fire in the fireplace, kitty on the chair in front of it, lights dim, night late, day long and so full I stopped capturing its marvels long ago and just let them wash over me.

It's good to be back in Santa Barbara a spell.

Strange Fellows

People think holidays are a stressful time for families. But Can we hear it for ELECTION season? Geez.

I heard it from a source who heard it from another source that I am voting for Obama this year because he has a pretty face and straight teeth.

Before that, I got some craaazzzyyy emails from a different family member, farther removed, telling me what I have read, whom I believe, what I have studied politically and what I haven't, and what a follower I am, based on these things I am allegedly reading, not reading, doing, and not doing.

A pretty face and straight teeth. Yep. Sorry folks, to confess to you that despite a life committed to learning, I have educated myself no further in these my 37 years than a smiling charisma. That my patriotism and passions for my countrymen and women, my beliefs and understandings about my employment and my taxes, my body of wealth and the body I live in, eek only from the vain terrain of a hormonal brain, and the vapid recesses of my blankness. Sorry, guys. Just give me the pretty.

If I were voting pretty, I'd vote Palin, 'cause McCain's gonna kick the bucket, and THEN we'd better stake politics on straight teeth, or we're doomed.

I *have* wondered the size of the pretty vote that Palin will command. McCain seems to surround himself with fine-featured women--his Senior Policy Advisor, his wife, his ex-wife, his Playmate, I mean, running mate. How many Joe Six-pacs will that pull in automatically, for pure viewing pleasure?

Then God Made IKEA

The New "U-Go"?








Photo Credit
Photo Credit 2

Exponents

My mind is TIRED from the long day of learning I had today. I'm in a workshop to learn how to teach kids financial literacy. Money's never been so fun.

BUT I've been thinking this thought all day, so I'll leave you with it:

People affect people exponentially. Would you agree? How many of you have someone in your life that has inspired you to change or grow the way you live or think or love?

How many of you learned from someone something that you have valued and incorporated to your life?

This is YOU to the power of that person.

If you get something from this blog post, that is YOU to the power of ME.
If my brother is changed by something my dad taught him, he is CHRISTIAAN to the power of JIM.

Do you get it? We are TANIA to the power of OBAMA to the power of the NATION.
We are our US to the power of our TEACHERS to the power of THEIR FAMILIES.
We walk through this world exponentially changed by each other.

Make your change for the good.


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Squeezed?? G I V E

Hey everyone, take a look at my new article on CarrieandDanielle.com.
You'll laugh you'll cry. It's warm like Christmas and sharp like a financial drop off a cliff.

HOW TO LIVE RICH IN A RECESSION


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Getting to Know You

MAN: Pema, that's an unusual name. Any special meaning or origin?

WOMAN: Pema means lotus flower in Tibetan. Also means compassion.

MAN: That's cool. Kevin means white guy with no rhythm in Gaelic. ;-)

WOMAN: Sorry about your rhythm.

MAN: I'm looking for a good rhythm coach, so I can forward you an application?

WOMAN: They say it's inborn. But in rare cases it's like the Tin Man. Little grease for the joints, little beat from the heart and suddenly Billie Jean is not your lover.

Curious Questions

You may have seen this in your inbox. If not, cue up your considerations.

WHAT IF...?

Obama/Biden vs McCain/Palin. What if things were switched around? Would the country's collective point of view be different?....think about it.

Ponder the following:

What if the Obamas had walked five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had married once, and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama had left his first wife after a severe car accident disfigured her?

What if Obama met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the candidate's wife who became addicted to painkillers and acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker and Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?

What if Obama were the candidate whose military experience included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

What if Obama were the candidate known to display publicly a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

If these questions reflected reality, do you believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

Could racism be the culprit?

Racism covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

Consider educational backgrounds, and the opinions they might effect, were the switch to continue.

Barack Obama -
Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude (that means "top of class")

Joseph Biden -
University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)


John McCain - United States Naval Academy
Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin -
Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
University of Idaho - 2 semesters -journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Blooming

As a little kid, I saw a tiny yellow blossom sprout open on a scrubby stem. It was in the field behind the house of my mom's friend. It seemed impossible to begin with, to watch a flower bloom. Flowers are much more discreet than to jump out all in the open. And it happened so fast I doubted I had seen it. So I sat and watched the plant to see if any more would pop open before my eyes. They didn't. Just a yellow stain on my mind of a tiny yellow blossom.

Years later in college, I bought iris spears at the farmers market. They would bloom into big purple beauties in a day or two. I put them at the foot of my bed, where the lamp was sitting, clicked off the lamp and laid down to sleep. It was black in my room, not even light enough to see my hand in front of my face. Lying there in the stillness, I heard a faint rustle. I couldn't figure out what it was. So I turned on the lamp, and there in its light were the irises, bloomed. I had heard the irises blooming.

Years after that, I went on a walk with a date at the Douglas Preserve in Santa Barbara. It was dusk, and there were low-growing green plants that looked like pools of green leaves. There were white flower buds all over them, and as the sun set deeper, the buds began to unfold. We sat on our haunches and watched them all open, whispering to talk.

Pre-Historic Hardware

Gina and I were putting together a dresser from IKEA yesterday. If you are not privy to the IKEA experience, imagine finding the perfect piece of furniture, plucking the service tag to pick it up and take it home, and receiving not the piece you saw, but two heavy, flat boxes that can't possibly serve your purpose.

I'm pretty sure "IKEA" in English means "U-BUILD."

There were at least 200 pieces of assorted hardware.

GINA: I'm surprised there's no glue.

PEMA: Noah didn't have glue I'm guessing.

(We were listening to public radio. A bluegrass devotional was playing: "I heard a voice, must be the Lord's.")

GINA: Noah didn't have IKEA.

Snarky Home Remedy Suggestions

Think holistic home remedy types have nice things to say to each other? Read what commenters have to say about gas remedies. Maybe gas makes you cranky.

(Submitted at 2006-04-27 22:42:31 from 24.98.150.15)
1. Lie flat on the ground on your back. While inhaling, lift your left foot towards your chest very slowly.
2. Hold your foot to your chest with your hands for 10 seconds (hold your breath).
3. Slowly release the foot while exhaling.
4. Repeat steps 1-2 with the other foot.
You will keep passing gas while doing the above.

(Submitted at 2006-12-27 16:41:08 from 129.71.94.254)
Is it even possible to hold your foot to your stomach? This must be a joke.

(Submitted at 2007-01-21 08:04:33 from 72.195.150.126)
the above poster is clearly a moron. no your foot doesn't literally touch your chest, but that's what you're trying to do by doing these 'bicycle' movements. Haven't you ever seen this done at an aerobics class or gym? sheesh. . .

(Submitted by gassy at 2007-07-21 23:31:19 from 74.167.250.161)
maybe this person is a midget and her foot can touch her chest.

(Submitted at 2007-07-30 18:25:31 from 24.109.2.196)
I don't think you guys understand the directions. I think s/he's saying to pull your foot in towards your chest.. like bending your knee grabbing your foot and pulling it towards you, not up in the air. Like, keeping the bottom of your foot parallel with the ground still... If you understand what Im talking about.

(Submitted at 2007-10-23 15:19:42 from 72.159.40.249)
No, I think they meant literally hold your foot to your chest. Look at step number 2, '2. Hold your foot to your chest with your hands for 10 seconds (hold your breath'.

(Submitted by Sri.. at 2007-10-29 11:30:17 from 58.2.236.143)
Hi. Fold the leg and try to take the knee towards chest. During this process ur feet also moves towards chest but in feet base perpendicular to Hip & stomach.

Do the same with both the legs fold and bend the fore head towards ur folded knee... This pressuraise the gas in stomach and releaved from bottom hole.

(Submitted by Brad at 2008-06-14 08:06:09 from 76.104.202.109)
You hold your knee to your chest. I just tried it and it worked for me. Even burped a little afterward.

(Submitted by Varinder at 2008-07-15 22:54:29 from 76.30.159.31)
What he meant to say was bend your knee. Hold your knees with clasped hand and bring your knee closer to the chest. While you do this with one leg, you can raise the other leg straight ahead at 45 angle and then reverse with the other leg.

Learning to Age

Regina and I leave the theater after seeing the film, The Women. I wash my hands in the restroom while Regina waits for me outside. The light is bright in there, and fluorescent.

"Damn!" I run my hands over my hair and through it. "I just got it cut!"

I catch up with Regina and we're cruising down the street in search of libation and ambiance. I say to her, completing the thought I had in the bathroom:

"Who does your hair? I think I need another haircut." I touch my hair again, surprised I would consider such a thing only two weeks after a really great cut. It usually lasts months.

Then I realize. "Oh."

I drop my hands. "It's not my hair."

I walk ahead and think back to the mirror I was just looking into in the bathroom.

"It's my face!"

Baby Naming

Eleven weeks till due-date, and Jack and Linda are down to a few. Ryder and Cyrus are Jack's faves.


LINDA: What do you think of the name Chad?

JACK: The Chad. I could never take the name Chad serious.

LINDA: And you could take Ryder serious?

JACK: Touche.

(beat)

JACK (cont.): I could take Cyrus serious.

Palin Invasion

Linda is pregnant. Jack is the dad and husband. I've come to up to Seattle to help with some baby prep. We talk about events of the day, the world, our personal lives. I suggest that Sarah Palin is invading the psyches of women, and tell them what happened in my job interview last week:

Half way through, I stopped talking, because I caught glimpse of my hands, gesticulating in concert with the sound of my words losing track of my thoughts...and I got stuck seeing Sarah Palin in interview with Katie Couric, over and over in my mind. "Crap," I thought. "I can't sound like Sarah Palin talking to Katie Couric in a job interview!! Save yourself, woman!" Fortunately, the kind people interviewing me fell out laughing when I told them what happened.

...Do you see Sarah in every brunette with her hair pulled on top of her head? Surely behind every set of snappy glasses, say it, you do. The first night I was here, Linda had a sex dream about Sarah Palin.

Her invasion of our psyches has got to be that not only is Sarah Palin being Sarah Palin on every T.V. screen that can capture her. But Tina Fey is being Sarah Palin after every substantial appearance Sarah makes. So we get a Palin echo, like John Malkovich walking through a room of John Malkoviches.

Yesterday after dinner, the following conversation ensued:

JACK: I'm turning into my father.

PEMA: I'm turning into Sarah Palin.

LINDA: I'm having sex with Sarah Palin.

Who cares?

PEMA: Lisa, do you know when--? How do you--? Do you say "whom do you love?" or "who do you love?"

LISA: Whom cares, Pema?

(Then Lisa looked it up, because she is someone WHO cares after all.)

he = who
him = whom

(Repeat that a few times and see if you can say it without smiling. Or feeling sexy like an owl.)

This Is Your Oregon on Tired

I am Californian. Fan of the Romans, I morph fairly easily to my surroundings. But I was born, raised, conditioned, and teenage-tanned in California.

California is not necessarily super fast paced anywhere. Even San Francisco lopes along behind New York's exhaust. But Cali's no slow-poke joke neither.

Oregon. It's slow here. It's calm. The speed limit is 30mph. People go home from work at 5pm, and as a general population, are more wont to eat blackberries than be chained to them.

I got here and loved it. Love it, but I'm telling you a story, so it's past tense. Loved it.
"How nice," I thought. "I don't have to rush."
"How nice, I can go slowly enough to see the street signs and don't have to worry about ticking people off behind me."
"How absolutely lovely. The customer service at coffee shops and grocery stores includes the cashier asking you genuinely about your day and taking time to feel the weight and heft of each spaghetti sauce jar, the smoothness of each ripe apple. Isn't that...refreshing?...If you can let go of the fear that the people behind you hate you for every last item in your laden cart?"

It is refreshing. Until you don't sleep but three winks the night before. And you don't nap the following day because...you can't seem to fall asleep no matter how much you try...and you finally give in and go to the grocery store on this sleepy rainy day of no sleep, to buy popcorn because it comforts you, and you stand in a "line" of one person with three items, TOTALLY STOKED because you'll barely have to open your mouth to say hello, and you'll be out the door and into your warm car and sitting on your warm couch eating your favorite, popcorn, in front of Oprah in NO TIME FLAT...

...

Right? ...Please God, RIGHT?????

(cue the sound of God laughing)

I am Roman in Rome. I am Oregonian in Portland. Until I am Californian when tired in Oregon.


Photo Credit

Anonymous

David Duchovny, star of "Californication" and formerly of "X-Files" apparently entered a re-hab facility recently for a problem. Regina sums it up here.

He had to go to sex anonymous?
Addicts anonymous?
Clearly it wasn't anonymous if everybody knows about it.
Poor dude.

Givin’ and Gettin’: How to Solve All Your Money Problems Forever

This article went live on Wednesday. Ever wonder how mystery, sexuality, and money mix in your life? Read how it mixed for me on Carrie and Danielle.

Enjoy!

$ Tank

Jeez Louise, go sit in the forest a couple of days and pop goes the world! Check out this idea for an economic bailout by Birk T. J. Birkenmeier!

Hi Pals,

I'm against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG. Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a We Deserve It Dividend.

To make the math simple, let's assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up. So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billon that equals $425,000.00.

My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a We Deserve It Dividend. Of course, it would NOT be tax free. So let's assume a tax rate of 30%. Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes. That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam. But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket.

A husband and wife has $595,000.00. What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family? Pay off your mortgage - housing crisis solved. Repay college loans - what a great boost to new grads Put away money for college - it'll be there Saved in a bank - create money to loan to entrepreneurs.

Buy a new car - create jobs

Invest in the market - capital drives growth

Pay for your parent's medical insurance - health care improves

Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean - or else

Remember this is for every adult US Citizen 18+ including the folks who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is cutting back.

And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.

If we're going to re-distribute wealth let's really do it...instead of trickling out a puny $1000.00 ("vote buy") economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President.

If we're going to do an $85 billion bailout, let's bail out every adult US Citizen 18+! As for AIG - liquidate it. Sell off its parts. Let American General go back to being American General. Sell off the real estate. Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up. Here's my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn't. Sure it's a crazy idea that can "never work."

But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party! How do you spell Economic Boom? I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion We Deserve It Dividend more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC. And remember, The Birk plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.

Ahhh...I feel so much better getting that off my chest. Kindest personal regards, Birk T. J. Birkenmeier, A Creative Guy & Citizen of the Republic

P.S. Feel free to pass this along to your pals as it's either good for a laugh or a tear or a very sobering thought on how to best use $85 Billion.

Breitenbush Hot Springs

This is where I was the past two days. Hangin' at a cool hippie joint in Oregon miles away from anywhere. Got a lot of reading and writing and thinking done. My fiction client will be happy to hear that. :)

Photo Credit

Love Stretches Out

PEMA: i'm sorry you're sad
PEMA: i was really sad when you left too
PEMA: that was a weird void

LAURA: i didn't like feeling jealous of you
LAURA: not jealous of you
LAURA: of your new friends, is what i mean to say
LAURA: and yeah, it made me wonder if people felt that when i left

PEMA: new friends are like new views, maybe.
PEMA: they may turn out to be pretty and inspiring, but they're never the ones you leave back home

LAURA: aww
LAURA: this weekend was the twins next door's birthday
LAURA: so i was telling them after the party how much we loved them and loved sharing their growing up together, etc.

PEMA: that's really sweet

LAURA: and sophia got really sad and wouldn't say why

PEMA: oh no, did she ever say?

LAURA: finally she fessed that she was sad because i said such nice things to the boys and that i don't say that to her

PEMA: omg, that girl is articulate

LAURA: so i had this conversation with her that love is not like cookies
LAURA: a plate of cookies, every time you eat one, you have less cookies
LAURA: but with love, every time you love someone new, you only have more love to give, your heart gets bigger
LAURA: you can love more
LAURA: so anyway, here i was talking that talk, but not walking it when it came to you
LAURA: i was feeling like someone else was nibbling on my cookie
LAURA: you
LAURA: silly me

PEMA: i'm a bake oven
PEMA: not just a cookie plate.

LAURA: new friends could never be more sexy, exciting, new and shiny than your old friends, right?

PEMA: what does ani say?
PEMA: there's nothing like seeing your own history in the faces of your friends?

LAURA: yeah
LAURA: she also says f*ck you a lot
LAURA: was glad that wasn't your quote

PEMA: hehe

LAURA: ani quote time

PEMA: f*ck you?

LAURA: when i look down, i miss all the good stuff. when i look up, i just trip over things

PEMA: that's great

LAURA: its ani

PEMA: are you still feeling sad?

LAURA: better to talk to you

PEMA: can i blog that sweet cookie talk?

LAURA: yeah.

Party Tableau

a thousand words


.

Party Prep

Regina loves a party. She loves a party so much that she loves party prep and party clean up. She loves a party so much that even the yard work leading up to the party is a rockin' good time, weeding, edging, raking, sweeping, power mowing. I got enlisted to mow the lawn while she walked the dog. She was excited when, out in the garage, smell of gasoline in the air, she gripped the handle bar of the mower and instructed me on how to start the thing up. "You'll feel so butch," she said. "It's totally fun." Soon, I'm sure, you'll see a picture of Regina, tiny, curvaceous, fabulous-haired Regina, and you'll understand how funny that is.

Mmnllewup shlaagrrnepsh

That's me talking when my mouth's not awake yet.
Late night.

Welcome to Portland Party today! More later. Like pix n stuff. :-)

Heads Up

Hey, so I quit my job in finance to move to Portland and get paid to write.

I now live in Portland and I'm getting published on Friday.

Check out www.CarrieandDanielle.com today to nose around the site for context, and then on Friday...go there again to read my article! I promise it will titillate.

Things You Say But Don't Mean

Having moved just over a week ago, I am still organizing notes and files. Usually in stacks of creased and crumpled receipts, I find stray post-its penciled with found dialogue--which means somebody says it, I scribble it down. Thanks to my heterosexual friend, Steve, for these inadvertently generous bits.

"Man, my ass took a pounding today."
(After a full day Harley ride)

"I'm gonna go get poked."
(On the way out the door to an acupuncture appointment)

The sound of sadness

Okay, I'm not dejected or depressed or morose. Or bummed out or sad to be here or thinking I made the wrong move. On the contrary, I'm happy for the change. But I have been silent. And slow to action. And loathe to email. And even further afield from making phone calls. Feh. (And let's tip-toe right over that word "Daily" emblazoned on my blog moniker, shall we?).

For me silence is the sound of sadness. I have dramatic tendencies in conversation (ask Lisa if she likes beets), and when finding humor in situations, and in my playwriting. But I am less emotive out in the world. Less ready to say, "hey look at me, I feel like crying! Hey, you know what? I miss my friends! I miss those damned kittens that drove me crazy and then grew up to be cute and friendly and around all the time! I'm sad I missed meeting Twilight's new baby because he was being born while I was driving to my new state." Nope that's not me, not my words, not even my awareness. My awareness, instead, is lack. Like a lobotomy. Not a lot of talking. A whole lot of busy (had some deadlines this week). And a whole lot of moving slow. (Isn't it weird the kitchen ALWAYS needs cleaning?)

I'm in the land of disconnect...where I am no longer where I was, and not fully materialized into where I am.

I'm in an in-between world, like waking up from a nap, not quite out of dream world. That might explain prolific dreaming since I've been here.

I'm looking forward to some solidity, so I can call my friends and talk and tell them all is well. And thank Tania for the little sauce pan. And everyone else for the going-away love.

Only today did the weather turn to gray, from spectacular sunshine. I'm really happy about that, because I've been down in the basement working all day the past week, and the weather change makes me feel less guilty about missing the sun for the sake of work. (I made a little office in the basement.)

So that you don't think it's all bad, here are a couple of bits of word lint I picked up in recent days:

I went on a bike ride with a nice guy whose house I looked at to rent. We took a spectacular path all around the river and then along it. We stopped after several miles to rest at the end of a little wooden dock, jutting out into water, surrounded by hills and evergreens and Portland bridges. We talked and stretched. He got up at one point, and bent at the waist to stretch his hamstrings. He looked through his legs upside down and commented, "Wow, the view between my legs is really cool!"

A few days later, Gina brought home burritos.

GINA: I didn't know what kind of salsa you like, red or green, so I brought both.

ME: I like both. I'm bi-salsa identified.

I realize I need to update the cast of characters on the side of my blog, but I'm not quite ready for that. When I defrag into Portland more fully, I'll do it.

Portland is Good Today

This is my new house on a warm Portland day (today).

I hear the rain will come next week, but we won't talk about that yet.

This is where I rode my bike today.

Garden Extraordinaire

We canned tomatoes yesterday!!

Hello Mother, Hello Mother

Readers will remember "Pema Has Four Mommies." That joke lasted, and made leaving Santa Barbara particularly sad on move day. ...by way of keeping my move news posted, here's the letter I wrote to Lisa, Tania, Kate and Kara yesterday.

Dear Mommies,
Camp Portland is cool but I miss you. After we got here on Monday night, I met up with my two counselors, Gina and Regina. Funny names, huh? They made a bunk for me that is up some stairs in their house. That’s the way it works here. You stay in your counselor’s house until you get your own cabin. I was kind of sad to leave my new friend who I met on the ride to camp, but he had to stay at his counselor’s house, too. He is 23 and traveled all around Russia and Scandanavia before going to Camp Portland, so he told lots of cool stories. His name is Ted. His brother chases eclipses! They went on a long hike with some other people to find the best place to watch an eclipse in Russia. They rode trains for longer than 24 hours sometimes! Going to some place that used to be called Siberia I guess.

It was really pretty when we got here. It was dark but the lights were twinkling when we drove over the river. It was finally not hot anymore. All day long on our drive we were very hot and all the farms and fields all around us were dry and brown. Oh, and we drove through a forest that was on fire! I probably shouldn’t tell you that ‘cause you’ll worry. But it’s alright, I’m here now.

My favorite part of the drive was when we were almost here. It was nighttime and the windows were down. We couldn’t see where we were because it was dark, but every few minutes we could SMELL what we were driving past. We smelled green onions, and then hay, and then cow poop (yuck), and something else I can’t remember. Then we got to Camp Portland and we smelled flowers.

Since coming to camp I have slept a lot and yesterday we took all my boxes and things out of the moving truck. Then I went around town to find my cabin. It is kind of weird because at other camps they already have a cabin and bunkmates set up when I get there. But “Cabin Hunt” is one of the activities at Camp Portland, and it’s not so bad. I met some interesting campers yesterday who live in a style of cabin called “Old Portland.” I guess they built it in the Olden Days. We went in the basement and it smelled like it. My counselors told me I could stay in my room up the stairs as long as I want and that “Cabin Hunt” is meant to go on during a lot of other activities, too. They said the prize for that activity is the cabin itself. Weird camp. But that’s okay. They said there are other activities I can get a Camp Portland blue ribbon for. Like cooking, and making friends, and picking vegetables from the garden, and good citizenship on rainy days.

I hope you can come visit me at camp soon. I miss you a lot and love you more.

Love,
Pema

Park Bench Portland

See it?



Photo: Tim Hanson

The Future's Open Wide

Hit play and listen to this in the background as you scroll down and read on...



Made it into Portland tonight. Driving over the Ross Island Bridge, building lights were shining off the water. Windows were down and our speed whipped the dark blue cool into the car. So beautiful after a hot 11-hour drive. Dido was playing some wah-wah song on the radio. I said to Ted, my passenger, we need an anthem for this arrival, not this whiny Dido. Ted moved to Portland today, too. We shared the ride from Oakland, CA (thank you Craigslist) and bumped fists when we crossed from California into Oregon. Ted turned the station and immediately found "Melt With You." (Modern English 1982! Perfect anthem.) Nothing like iconic 80s pop for nostalgia in the making. It filled the car and diffused on the wind as we drove over the bridge into our new town, night fragrant, air soft, and futures open wide.


Photo: Hisashiburi


Photo: Phoenixtx

In transit

Hi, it's Tania. Pema said I could guestblog, so here I am. Pema's on the road to her new home. The setting and cast of characters are changing (soap opera voiceover: "now playing the role of Pema's housemates are Gina and Regina"). It was sad saying goodbye to Pema, so I wrote songs. In case you missed the fabulous group performance at Pema's going away party, here they are...

So Long, Pema
(to the tune of “So Long, Farewell” from “The Sound of Music”)

There’s a sad sort of singing in Santa Barbara
And your friends are all feeling blue
And we think you must be crazy to leave us
Just a little bit coo-coo (coo-coo coo-coo)
Regretfully you tell us (coo-coo)
But firmly you compel us (coo-coo)
To say goodbye
To you…

So long farewell, auf weidersehen, goodnight
Despite the rain, your future will be bright

So long farewell, goodbye, auf weidersehen
Without you here, life will be so mundane

So long farewell, auf weidersehen adieu
We love you so with friendship tried and true

So long farewell, auf weidersehen and ciao
Brie and Zola say “meow meow meow meow meow”

So long farewell, you head to the Northwest
You’ve touched us all; with Pema we’ve been blessed

You have to go, we cannot change your mind
But don’t forget the friends you left behind

Your bags are packed; it’s time to wave and cry

So long farewell, auf weidersehen, goodbye
Goodbye...
Goodbye....
Goodbye....
Goodbye...


Pema’s Leaving
(to the tune of “Babe, I’m Leaving” by the most excellent 80’s band, Styx)

Pema’s leaving
She must be on her way
It’s almost time to go
Portland’s gaining a writer and a friend
Who’ll keep them on their toes
But we’ll be lonely without you
We’ll read your blog when we feel blue
Thanks so much for enriching all our lives
We’ll be missing you

You know it’s Pema
When you’ve had a bad day and you need a hug
She’s like cheerful drug
Oh, yes, it’s Pema
Knowing you can always call on Ms. Teeter
To go to the theater
Yes, it’s true
Pems, we’ll miss you

Pema’s leaving
This is our final verse
And then we’ll have to part
We’ll keep you close despite the long distance
Right here in our hearts
But we’ll be lonely without you
We’ll read your blog when we feel blue
Thanks so much for enriching all our lives
We’ll be missing you
Pems, we love you.

Truth is in the Timing

What's true?
That's up for grabs a lot, depending on who is telling the story.

Opinion, on the other hand, we can agree by definition that opinion is in the mouth of the beholder. But when that mouth keeps moving and the story changes before your ears, who do you believe? How are you persuaded?

I got it! Truth is in the timing. Take a (hilarious) look:

oink

Pigs keep crossing my path. Not actual pigs, but pictures of them, and pigs, strangely, have been coming up in conversation. Look at this smiley guy. I found him this morning while traversing the google fields.

So I looked up "Pig Totem," and this is what it says:
Pig: symbol of Wealth, Prosperity and Luck

The pig moves swiftly and with determination. It intuitively knows the best reaction to various situations. If the pig is your personal totem, learn from its determination and swift motion to take the right actions in your life.

The Greek earth fertility goddess, Demeter, kept a sacred pig which became a symbol of fertility.

Native American Indians recognize the pig as a symbol of the abundance of daily life and believe that it teaches us to celebrate life and share it with others.

The pig is a strong symbol of luck. If you need more luck in financial matters, the pig provides prosperity in abundance.

Manannan, the Celtic God of the Sea, kept a magical herd of pigs (which renewed itself as soon as any were eaten). Manannan hosted a great annual "Feast of Age", where the gods acquired the ever-renewing qualities of the pigs, and thus never grew old.


...Good timing. Because, tomorrow's my going away party and the day after that is me going away! Wealth, prosperity and luck are welcome to come along.

Photo: My Little Space

chirp

I wonder if birds get songs stuck in each others' heads.

list

Hi.
I know.
I have been
starkly absent from the
bench. I am sorry. It
seems to be all I can
do to move through the house and
move things around, and open boxes, take things
out, move them around, close the boxes, and move
through the house. Today, however, I got the car
serviced, ix-nayed the ew-nay ires-tay, got new
speakers, and got the car washed. I
also got a massage and
went to the chiropractor.
Because, ouch, I
hurt my
back.

if
this
continues
this
lethargy
this
pallor
this
pain
then
each
day
i
will
write
a
list
just
to
write
something
until
the
funk
moves
on
to
some
other
neighborbood.
as
it
stands
(while
i
sit)
i
am
guessing
this
move
to
portland
is
bigger
than
i
expected
and
i
am
feeling
it
accordingly.

tick tock

It's Wednesday.
I finished a triathlon four days ago.
Tania is a delegate at the Democratic National Convention.
Lisa is thriving in her new director-level position at work.
Twilight is about to have a baby.
Her due date is one day before...
...I pick up and move out of state...
...in 11 days.
Michelle is in love and sad about it.
The boy I loved before I knew what love was (we're talking kid-age) is now designing my business logo.
Suzy is back in Santa Barbara because of a break up.
And she's a psychotherapist.
My little brother has a one-year-old.
Classmates from high school keep contacting me on Facebook.
Our 20th reunion is coming up.
Time, in its infinite tramp, makes life's rollercoaster rides sound pedestrian sometimes.

Spirit Finds You

Yesterday just before my swim, I nearly walked into a young woman (about 13) who looked remarkably like Talia, my late boss' daughter who died with him in the plane crash. At the time, I wondered what she had to tell me...in such a way that I felt visited by Talia at that moment. It was more than the girl's look, it was her presence, the look in her eyes, and we were inches away from one another, face to face before stepping out of each other's way.

I was nervous for the ocean swim, it being packed with people and all, and I worried about being able to breathe through all the excitement and exertion.

Then today, recuperating from the triathlon, I remembered that I have a wonderful ocean memory of Talia. Several of us were floating in the waves in Panama, but we were all a little anxious because we were waiting for a boat to come pick us up from this tiny island we were on...and we couldn't relax on the shore because the flies were biting. Time stretched on as we waited for the boat. The sun got lower in the sky and our skin pickled. But Talia and her friend, Caroline, about 11 and 12, stood in the waves and performed hilarious comedy routines, sang funny songs, and played interactive games with us. We floated out in the swells, and laughed and laughed. They kept us light till the boat arrived.

With the entrance of that memory, I understood Talia's appearance yesterday, right before my swim in the ocean and my dip into my dream to do the triathlon. Today I still feel the calm I felt yesterday as I cruised through the water, and the ease I felt that day Talia and Caroline made us laugh in the waves.

It occurs to me only now that I went alone to the triathlon. I didn't invite any friends to the crack-of-dawn athletic event which requires a lot of waiting and a lot of roaming around for spectators. I felt a little lonely, seeing people's friends and family cheering them on. It was kind of like showing up at the airport and your loved ones aren't there to greet you. The tri was a big deal for me, but I didn't set it up in a way for my friends to be there. But you know who was there? Greg, Michael's ranch manager. He runs the event and I saw him throughout the triathlon weekend. He even discovered an error I had made in my set-up and fixed it before I started.

And Talia, it turns out.

So...I guess I didn't run it by myself after all. :-)

388

Today....I completed my first triathlon!
It was a sprint -- 500 yard swim, 6 mile bike and 2 mile run. The Santa Barbara Triathlon has been on my radar for about ten years now. A keen desire I longed to fulfill but for some reason or another never did. I once trained for a marathon accidentally, trying to gear up for a triathlon without a bike or a nearby body of water. I spent two summers, first getting over my fear of cold ocean water, and then strengthening my swim. And this year, this weekend, today! I finally did it! And guess what was my strongest leg of the race...the swim!

It was certainly nerve-wracking. And I have a way of getting into a deep deep focus so that not a whole lot exists outside the inner workings of my head and the brief snapshots of what my senses are feeding me.

I started the swim in the back of the pack, to elude the kicks and swats of the crowd all splashing toward the course exit. Also because it takes me a little time to get used to the water and the swell, to get through the jagged breathing and nerves hitting full tilt. But I made it out to the first buoy and started my stroke in earnest. There were only about 6 people behind me just before I started it. And when I did I was still a little nervous. But then my breathing evened out and I was stretching into my stroke, all in an effort to relax...and before I knew it, I was cruising by swimmers left and right. I was movin'! It was such a cool feeling. I was getting somewhere.

The water was green-blue in my goggle-view, there were tiny bubbles rising to the surface from the splash of my hands, there were pink feet first ahead of me then drifting behind me, then another pair. There was the sound and the feel of my breath, in, then out in a an unleashing of bubbles, then sucking in, then face in the water again, lungs working it out, all the while flashes of white swim caps, bobbing against the view of mountains, and sky, then that green-blue, and the bubbles and the breathing. It was hypnotic. I was cruising along in my focus when from the corner of my eye, face in the water, I saw the black felt-marker number on my shoulder: 388. And I realized...I'm doing a triathlon!!! I'm swimming in the triathlon! And my speed picked up another notch.

Already Always Listening, OR...Right, what SHE said.

Felicia and Emily are over for dinner. They tell us they recently took advantage of the new California law allowing same-sex couples to marry.

LISA: How did you two meet?

FELICIA: Sex club.

EMILY: Shut up. (punch in the arm)

Then they tell us the story of that answer...

Felicia's Mom sits in the corner of the living room knitting. Felicia's COUSIN, FELICIA herself, and EMILY stand nearby in the dining room.

COUSIN: How did you two meet?

EMILY: The internet.

COUSIN: A Sex Club??

FELICIA: THE INTERNET.

EMILY: It's a good place for singles.

COUSIN: The place is called FINGERS??

.

Gramcrackers

Back in L.A. Back in the land of NOW. Back to the landscape of flatscreens in bars with Olympics on them late into the night, to the corner of the key lime pie colored room that means for me INTERNET INTERNET INTERNET!! I can't drink it in fast enough! Must...slake...my thirst!!!

I've been in San Diego at Grandma's. Frequent occurrence of late, I know. She's 97 and blind and living alone because she's so derned independent, she'd rather totter around on fossil-frail legs in a macular degenerated fog than give up her digs. She's also waiting for the welcome from the part of the family that will take her in when her bones won't hold her up anymore [Cue hold music] ... Considering those bones are creeping up on a century that should be any minute now [More hold music]...

...Okay, we're just going to let that line hold while we continue with the rest of the program. So, Grandma has lived in the same retirement village for 31 years. I remember the night she and Grandpa moved in. It was rainy. I was 6. And tired. I remember sitting on the couch that had just been set down. 31 years later, I am prone to napping on the "couch" that has replaced it, this one short enough that my legs hang off of it (you shrink when you get to be 97--couch is Grandma-sized).

Since Grams is blind and has been getting that way for years, there is no internet connection. Her last memory of modern data entry is of the Word Processor. So I explain the internet by saying it's like magazine pages inside a Word Processor. And you can send the pages as if they were themselves on a phone call, and the receiving phone is another "Word Processor" where the message you wrote or the page you sent pops up. And you can "sift" through the many millions of pages stored on the "phone lines" like you can flip through a phone book, looking at all the ads...but the pages are glossy and pretty like magazine pages. ...How she translates the tactile experiences of paper, ink, heavy dial-phones, and the sounds that go with them, to a purely intellectual chain of events, I long to see what this looks like in her imagination.

Point is, at Grandma's there is no internet. And I no longer have my Blackberry from my office job. So I am completely without access to any brief little hop to the outside world and I consider claustrophobia, for, oh, let's say just a few moments, because it's sweltering hot in the empty bedroom, can't go in there, and the T.V. is blaring in the tiny living room--did I mention her hearing ain't what it used to be? I SAID, DID I MENTION HER HEARING AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE?? And it's nighttime, to which my Grandma is allergic, and she can smell it on me and immediately begin choking and wheezing in a feverish contact high, so God Forbid I Go Outside Where the Criminals and Rapists wait just outside the door.

It's near 8:30, though. Bedtime for Grandma. And I wait to pounce on the T.V. to find the Olympics. Grand display of amazing feats are on for two weeks, inspiring and heartwrenching stories unfolding in time-delayed real time. In a country far far away. THAT will take me farther than even the 6 o'clock news and I can fantasize about being connected to the outside world late into the night. Grandma has said she doesn't get that channel but I don't believe her. How can you not get the Olympics? Why, that's unamerican, and Grandma is most certainly card-carrying.

She doesn't get that channel. Criminy! Now SHE's in the tiny bedroom, sweltering or not, the place is locked down like Fort Knox, and I am sitting in Grandma's chair, not one foot away from the television (placed there so she can "see" it and hear it) and I am devolving into the caverns of my mind, collapsing in on itself. ... ... ... I realize that this is what Grandma does every day. ... ...

I get up and make a freezer waffle and eat four Oreo's when that is not enough. It takes me all of ten minutes from start to finish. It takes Grandma ten minutes to get the waffles from the freezer into the toaster (but she'd sooner bury me than not make breakfast for me, so she starts early). I turn off the T.V. and work on my play...thanking God I have the faculties to at least map this manic imagination, or distract it, in the absence of internet and the Olympics.

My Play on Stage in San Diego

Hey folks,
Tania reminded me that I didn't tell the blogosphere that a play of mine is getting produced in San Diego this month.

Here are the details:

GOD SAID QUIET is playing at

The Fritz Blitz - "Best of the Blitz"
(A selection of the best of 15 years at the Fritz Blitz Festival of New Plays)

WHERE: Lyceum Space Theatre, located at 79 Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego.
DATES: Performances run August 14 to August 18, 2008
TIMES: Thursday - Saturday at 8pm and Sundays at 3pm.

Tickets are $18 general admission, $15 for students/seniors/military/AASD.
A Fritz Blitz Pass to see all plays is only $49.

For information (press only) call (818) 633 5468.

For tickets (public) call Lyceum box office (619) 544 1000.

Passes available at www.fritztheatre.com

Shake Down Wake Up

"I think it may take an earth shaking an event like the end of humanity to bring people to their senses.”

- My friend Roy

Peace Is Personal

I realized something profound today: I realized that peace is personal. And that world peace is attained when each individual knows peace within.

Too woo woo for you? Read on.

Breaking it down, I realized that what brings me peace is the physical sensation I get when I know that I am loved. I know peace when I know that I am loved or have been loved. When I remember this, I am filled with a sensation, the presence of which makes anxiety, fear, impulse go out the window. They are canceled out by the exquisite calm I feel. The negative feelings have no bearing. They don't matter when I know this peace.

Other people, I imagine, come to peace in a variety of ways and experiences. What brings you peace? What slows everything down, brings an ease to your chest, breath to your lungs, and slack to your shoulders when you encounter it? What makes you warm and quiet and grateful, lacking absolutely nothing in that moment? This is peace. Your peace.

Imagine if you made every decision in your life from this experience, standing right in the middle of this sensation. Imagine if world leaders, community leaders, individuals in each family and community spoke and acted from their personal peace. Would there be any harm, any foul? Ever?

If peace is personal, then world peace is personal. If it only takes healing and exploration to recognize our individual answers to "What is Peace?" then what are we waiting for? Dive in, folks. Visualize personal peace. Wholeness is its own reward.

Priceless Park Bench Story

This is WAY better than the park bench pix I've posted in the past.
Thanks to Lo Smithie for the link.
Caution if you're squeamish.

Man Almost Loses Penis Humping Steel Bench | Weird Asia News

The Debate Continues

My friend's 9-yr-old, Ryan, picked an apple today and bit into it. I sniffed it and the following conversation ensued:

PEMA: Mmm. Smells like the kind you dip in caramel.

RYAN: What the heck is caramel?

PEMA: ...Caramel...you know, it's, like, a candy...it's soft?...brown...square...

RYAN: You mean CAR-muhl?

Infinity x 3 = Infinity

It's 8/8/8 !!

Jingle What?

It's 86 degrees in Los Angeles. We're baking in the heat. There's no breeze. In the refuge of the coffee shop, there is air conditioning, thank God. And CHRISTMAS SONGS?? Cute young cookie behind the counter thinks it's quaint. Personally, it's messing with my wiring, so I lean back, look at the ceiling for a stretch between "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "What Child is This?" and stare at the pull-cords that dangle under the spinning ceiling fan. What's that on the pull-cord? I watch it till it makes a full revolution and I can see what it is. Oy, me brain. It's a tiny wooden pine tree and a tiny reindeer above it. I give in. Deck the halls. At least I'm wearing red.

Lovin' Summer, Havin' a Blast

I've been in the no-internet zone of Grandma's the last few days.
I've been jobless the last 6 days.
It's summer and hot and lazy out.
I don't have 24/7 access to the internet with a Blackberry anymore--it went the way of my day job.

Can I just say it's felt more like a high school summer evening and long stretch of days than any since? Nothing pressing to do. Lazy socializing depending on who's under the shade. Chats with Grandma. Warm SoCal nighttimes and sleeping when tired. Waking without alarm. The only thing to move toward is curiosity.

Deelicious.

The Non-Woman

First off, let me just say that "The Non-Woman" is absolutely the wrong title for this. Just because you can't see something or someone doesn't mean it or s/he doesn't exist. You couldn't see the Wizard of Oz. But he existed behind his light show. You can't see Wonder Woman inside her invisible plane, but she's in there! All of her wonderful self is in there, unseen and fighting the forces of evil.

But this morning, I got out of the ocean after a swim. Wet and tired but energized, slick in my Speedo, I walked up the beach with my swimming partner, Dov. At the parking lot were a couple of guys kicking around a soccer ball, and a tiny little dude, probably not yet two, standing bow-legged between them, gripping the ground with his feet. Santa Barbara has been spilling over with overseas tourists this summer. America is on sale, after all, with the dollar weak as it is. These guys wore the soccer jerseys, cropped hair, slim builds and fine features of folks from a far-flung place.

Then from a nearby car came a billow of black cloth toward the child. A woman in a full length black garment, head cloth, face piece over her nose mouth and neck. She wore gold-rimmed glasses that covered her eyes. She wore bulky blue tennis shoes. And bulky black gloves. She wore gloves. There was no part of her exposed. It was as if I was watching a film and her presence in the film was not cut out, but inked out by a permanent marker--especially in contrast to the contemporarily-dressed men kicking the soccer ball. And suddenly, my natural half-nakedness at the beach after a swim in the ocean in training for a triathlon felt gauche and exposed as I walked past the men with the soccer ball and the tiny two-year-old boy who turned to watch Dov and me walk by. What an affront, right? Me in my skin tight suit, ambling by the little boy and the men with the ball? I toiled with this contrast a while, and finally heard myself say to myself sternly: I'm in my own country. I can dress like this when I go into the ocean.

The only identifying element that came from behind the black cloth, besides maybe the blue shoes, was her voice, which called out to the little boy. It was sweet and light and clear, young-ish, "Yusef!"

I have seen covered women before. But never in such stark contrast, to first the men who accompanied her, and then me, near-naked me. She wore gloves.

I couldn't help the thoughts that rushed in: Where is she in there? Where does she go to be who she is inside? Where can she be exposed? Expressed? What do these men think of their woman (because automatically I assume she is "theirs," my mind associating the full coverage with ownership of her ways), their woman, at the beach, with nearly naked westerners and her little boy exposed to them? I realize these are western thoughts applied to a non-western culture.

Oh, am I aware of my lack of education here and my assumptions and perhaps prejudices. But I can't get the image from my mind, of the billowing black cloth at the beach, early morning in a West Coast American town, and the notion of being blacked out of a part of existence.

Dream Progress

I had one of those ridiculous anxiety dreams this morning, you know those? The ones where you show up late to an important meeting, wearing the wrong thing (or nothing), holding the wrong material (or your tooth brush), and you have only minutes to make it right, but each attempt you make to get back to where you should be gets trammeled by some silly obstacle, like the company toilet overflows but the closest towel is across a field and around a bend, etc...

My dreams like this usually involve distance that increases rapidly as I try to gain. My running slows, no matter how much I focus on my technique to make me faster. And somehow, that weird distance between me and where I want to be, gapes open.

Last night's dream was one of those, but first I showed up to an important meeting wearing a short, red-checked waitress uniform, complete with cute apron and white hat. The meeting was to find out whether I was good enough to get hired on the writing team for this new client. My prospective boss was infuriated, because his new big time client was about to get off the phone and join us. I had just minutes to make my outfit right. As it happened, I'd had a morning restaurant job and forgot to change before I came to the meeting.

So the anxiety unfolded, the toilet did overflow, the distance did open wide (home was far away), my clothing was all wrong...but with each frustration came a modicum of success. As I chased my tail trying to find the right clothes and get back to the meeting on time, I heard in my head how confident in me the boss was. I heard how well he liked my resume, and how talented I would be on this project. Turns out, shoes that I didn't expect but that worked for the occasion showed up where I least expected them. Somehow I found myself in jeans, and that cute red-check dress tucked into the jeans to make quite a hip-looking top.

Maybe I should have turned the apron into a cape, because I made it to the meeting! And in it heard these words: small, break it down, the new client will be into this if you package the project in small pieces, comprehensible and tangible, doable. He likes you. You relate easily. You know how to do it a piece at a time.

I wake up from the dream taking mental notes. Because later this morning, I have a first meeting with a prospective client. :-)

And I Feel Fine...

Today was my last day at work.
Tomorrow I swim, go to the spa to INDULGE in my near-unemployed status, get some of my own work done, then go on a date.
Sounds like a damn'd fine dayyyheehee indeed.

Pill for That?

Laura called me as she was waking up, thinking that maybe a conversation would help get her brain back in motion. She sounded drugged, and definitely not awake, even as the conversation progressed. But being that it's Laura's MENSA-grade brain we're talking about here, she managed to describe her sleep-grog thusly:

LAURA: You think they make a little blue pill for waking up? I suffer from Erectile Dysfunction of the Brain.

Science Lesson

My friend Sophia is 5. Her reasoning is this:

SOPHIA: Fish are not mammals because they don't breathe air. Boys are not mammals because they don't carry babies in their bellies, and they don't nurse their young.

New parts

Had a date last night. I've known the guy a long time in a work context but that's it. Told Britt and Chris about it today...

ME: I kissed a boy last night.

BRITT: Oo!

CHRIS: Is this a new guy?

ME: New to my lips anyway.

"Everyone's Got One"

You know what I mean. Now there's a clinical term for it. It's called:

Adult Onset Opinion Formation