NO APOLOGIES

Vision without action is a daydream.

2010-06-16T14:30:00.001-07:00

Action without vision is a nightmare.

- Japanese Proverb

Prudes Don't Grow Peonies

2010-06-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

I really identify with this poem, and not just because peonies are my favorite flower. Click on the title to find the magazine and issue in which I found the poem. Click on the author's name to read more from the poetess.

Prudes Don't Grow Peonies

The only thing I ever saw my mother grow
were peonies. Extravagant red and pink
flowers on long legs she watered and weeded.

She never fooled me with her line
about sex not being fun after the first time.
Even in my tomboy days, I knew better.

Because her peonies told me.
Lush, feathery show girls
strutting and opening,

proving appeal,
as in sex appeal,
is half the fun.

In one hand she held dry booklets,
in the other, a bouquet of frothy blooms.
The deck was stacked against her.

I don't remember a word of the pamphlets
but crimson blooms inside my head
burst open when pleasure wins.

-- Gwynne O'Gara

And this our life...

2010-05-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees,
books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones,
and good in everything.

-William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616)

Paid Position at Blue Cliff Monastery

2010-05-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

Blue Cliff Monastery is currently offering a temporary paid position in registration for the 2011 US Tour. The position would begin mid-December 2010 and continue through until mid-November 2011. The Monastery would offer housing, food and salary. There is also the possibility of the position becoming permanent after the Tour. The position requires basic office skills, organizational skills, people skills, much patience, the many arms and ears of Avalokita, the great aspiration of Ksitigarbha and the great sword of wisdom of Manjushri (to cut through the you-know-what). Other than that we are pretty open. If brave enough and interested please email Br. Phap Vu at brothers@bluecliffmonastery.org. Under the subject please put Br. Vu – position.

Be well and happy, Br. Phap Vu
Blue Cliff Monastery

Koan - Buddhist

2010-05-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind.
One said, "The flag moves."
The other said, "The wind moves."
They argued back and forth but could not agree.
Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch, said: "Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves."
The two monks were struck with awe.

ABA: Psychology of Conflict Resolution Committee to discuss "apology"

2010-05-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am writing to let you know that the next meeting of the Psychology of Conflict Resolution Committee will focus on apology, and the date and time will be June 25, 2010 at 12 noon Pacific by telephone. We are extremely honored and excited to have Lee Taft with us to open the topic and present some of his profound thoughts on the subject. Following that, there will be a discussion so participants can also offer their contribution.

The Committee is a subcommittee of the ADR Committee of the TIPS section of the ABA. However, for these teleconferences, you do not need to be a member of the ABA to participate and there is no charge.

Lee's bio and our mission statement follows. Please email me for further information if you wish to attend.

Thank you all,
Elizabeth Bader

Bio of Lee Taft

Lee Taft is a nationally recognized expert on apology and the related reparative processes of forgiveness and reconciliation and is a pioneer in the movement to transform cultural and legal responses to conflict. Lee was a board certified trial specialist in Texas for twenty years before entering Harvard Divinity School in 1996. After his 1999 graduation, he was named dean of students at Harvard Divinity School. His scholarship focuses on the interrelationship between accountability and healing in mediation and litigation contexts. His essays have been published in the country’s leading scholarly journals such as the YALE LAW JOURNAL, the MICHIGAN LAW REVIEW, and the HARVARD HEALTH POLICY REVIEW. His mediation protocols help parties not only resolve the conflict but also heal the hurt. His website is TaftSolutions.com. He can be reached via email at lee@taftsolutions.com or by phone at 214.384.6624.

Mission Statement of the Psychology of Conflict Resolution Committee:

The Psychology of Conflict Resolution subcommittee will be a place in the ABA where members can discuss and share information about the human aspects of the resolution of civil litigation. The focus will be on an interdisciplinary approach so that the range of the discussion will be broad. Topics of discussion may include the work of the social psychologists, but also the interface with psychoanalysis, mindfulness, neuroscience, spirituality and other disciplines. The parent committee for the subcommittee is the ADR Committee of TIPS. Interested parties should contact the Chair of the subcommittee, Elizabeth Bader, at elizabeth@elizabethbader.com

--
Elizabeth E. Bader, Esq.
Bader Conflict Resolution Services
580 California St., Suite 500
San Francisco, CA 94104
Tel: (415) 391-7272
Fax: (415) 391-0979
ElizabethBader.com

The "The Psychology of Mediation: Issues of Self and Identity and the IDR Cycle" 10 Pepp. Disp. Resol. L. J. 183 (2010);
"The Psychology of Mediation, Part I: The Mediator's Issues of Self and Identity."

Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger...

2010-05-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

I frequently feel the judgment of the PC police in many spiritual circles. Common topics in those circles are “reverence” and “respect.” Not that these are bad things; I can express them when called to do so. But I also have the habit of peppering my discourse with words such as “fuck,” and “shit,” and pop-culture references and liberal doses of double entendre, innuendo and sarcasm. “Fuck,” may or may not be disrespectful in a spiritual context – I am not posting an opinion about that here. What I am opinionated about is not the use of or lack of swear words in a spiritual context, but the judgment that is generally lobbied against me, not by God, but by another human being, as being “disrespectful, or “irreverent,” because I might have let the word “fuck” slip out during a meditation circle. I mean, sacre bleu! It’s as if that one little word has the power to make God disappear from the building. I’ve got news for you – I am not that powerful. And neither are words.

Yes, yes yes. I know that words are important – that integrity requires using words that we mean, and aligning what we say with our actions. Right action, however, is the subject of another post. Please do not assign the following theory of intent to what you do, only to what you say. Because it’s not the words themselves that are important – words are only symbols to which we have assigned, and communally agreed upon, a meaning. The minute I decide that “dog” means something other than your beloved pet Spot, then it means something else to me, agreement be damned. That is the fallibility of words. Listen to the old Lenny Bruce routine which so profoundly demonstrated this concept back in the ‘60s (and from which I borrowed the title of this post). Further more, if words were all that important, then what’s a poor, illiterate person supposed to do? Are we going to tell him that he cannot aspire to greater heights of enlightenment unless he not only knows but can correctly use the word “agape,” or “ascension,” or “sabikalpa samadhi?” Ya, I think you’re getting it now.

In my family history, spouses like to use endearments like “poop-face,” “jerk,” and “you rat bastard.” Yes, En.Dear.Ments. Which may be why I discern that what’s important about words, or at least what God cares about anyway, is intent. I mean, does it make sense that God who, granted, gave us the Grand Canyon, cats and peonies, but who also simultaneously gave us underarm odor, vomit and farts would be offended by the word “fuck?” That doesn’t compute in my brain. You know what else? He can also handle all the tirades I lob at him. He actually understands and has compassion for my anger. Unlike most humans whose eyes either glaze over as they internally search for their “happy place,” or who quickly change the subject to hopefully disperse my anger. So tell me, is it better that I tell you to fuck off? Or would you rather that I told God to fuck off? Frankly, I’ve always felt that he finds my saltiness kind of amusing and as desirable a color in the rainbow of humanity as sweetness and reverence. Polly PC doesn’t taste nearly as sweet without the likes of me against which to compare her.

If a spiritual journey is about the search for freedom, then using political correctness to elevate oneself above another – which is how it is frequently used, at least against me – is just another form of separation – an anti-spiritual practice that would imprison instead of freeing oneself. Only in this context, it disguises itself as “spiritual” and that’s the part that really steams me. Nothing tempts me more into letting loose a string of four-letter epithets than that Knowing/Admonishing glance or the softly spoken but steely wielded reminder to “be respectful” that I sometimes get in group spiritual settings. Because I know it’s the human, not God, who would be offended. To my credit I don’t recall ever succumbing to that particular temptation, but boy oh boy oh boy…

I am here to remind you – God doesn’t care if you swear. Honestly. In fact, the next time I pray, I’m going to address my prayer to “Oh holy mother fucker!!”

A-goddamned-men.

The Unbearable Weight of Lightness

2010-05-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

A spiritual journey is likely to bring up many questions. Probably more questions than answers, at least initially. And my favorite way of crossing a moat of confusion and questions is to swim harder, faster, and more directly. Which usually means more meditation, more reading, and more time alone.

And that, my friend, is the manner in which my spiritual journey has frequently snuck up on me over the years – has quickly swung from comforting and inspiring to overwhelming. Or overbearing, depending on how you look at it. It starts one day with some kind of spiritual insight that urges me to seek out a book on a particular topic like, say, “agape,” or to seek out church for an hour on Sunday. But then quickly snowballs into an urging to meditate three hours, twice a day, every day; do sunrise yoga for an hour every morning; go on a cleanse every week; fast for one week out of each month; wear only organic clothing; eat only organic foods; give up my car in favor of bicycling everywhere; give all of my money away to charity; study every single book written by Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, and Eckert Tolle, not to mention the classics like “Autobiography of a Yogi” and “The Bible.” And then, on the weekends, I can get to “A Course in Miracles,” and Dr. Wayne Dyer’s and Deepak Chopra’s books. That is, if I’ve finished Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ “Women Who Run with the Wolves” by then. Oh, and don’t forget, as I’m on my way out the door to volunteer at the soup kitchen, to pet the cat and then stop at the ashram and sign-up for that six week course on celibate-tantric-tai chi. ‘Cause let’s face it, if a little spirituality is good, then a lot of it must be really good. Right?

Um, no you big bodhi – buddha – doo-doo – head. As in all other things, spirituality too requires balance.

Duh!

Immersing oneself in spiritually, by, say, joining a monastery, is admirable. But if we all did that, how would we have discovered the internet, and bubble tea, and skateboards, and what about all that sex that’s to be had in the somatic world? Not that monks and nuns don’t participate in many of those things, or that they can’t invent or evolve such things themselves (which they have). It’s just that many wonderful, fun things that make living on this planet the breathtaking adventure that it is wouldn’t exist if all the majority of us ever did was sit around pondering our navels and questions like, “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” And, just they are likely to exist in the somatic world, Type A Personalities abound in the spiritual world as well.

Which is the trap I sometimes fall into (more frequently than I like admitting) in my own spiritual practice. And so it was that I recently found myself in the position of having to remind myself to get a life already! I forced myself to schedule activities with friends – real, flesh ‘n blood, perspiring, masticating humans – to get me away from all the gods, spirits, and fantasy characters of the astral. Because when Tinkerbell the fairy becomes more real than Wendy the little girl, it’s time to seek conversation that requires verbalized words (and not thought forms) and nourishment that requires biology (instead of light). Like a day paintballing. Or throwing pottery. Followed shortly after by a scotch on the rocks.

Ommmmmmmm... cheers!... ommmmmmmmm...

Justice as Healing

2010-05-04T12:18:00.002-07:00

A nice little primer on restorative justice.

A Koan - Chah

2010-05-03T08:13:00.003-07:00

"When we carry a burden, it is heavy.
When there is no one to carry it, there's not a problem in the world."
--Ajan Chah

Woman is a gift.

2010-04-10T08:55:00.001-07:00

She is not an entitlement.

One cannot do right in one department of life...

2010-03-24T08:30:00.001-07:00

...whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole. - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

Your children will not lie to you.

2010-03-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

If you do not teach them how to lie.

Shiny Happy People - I

2010-02-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

There was a time when I was taking yoga classes at a dance studio, wherein I found myself stretching my lightly marbled thighs next to size 0 Asian girls who could bend over and lick their own bunghole if they wanted to.

Well, let's back track a little. I learned and loved dance in my late teens. I entered a renaissance period as I approached 30 and started taking classes to re-experience the joy dance had given me as a teenager. But, in my second go-around, it turned out that I hated ballet. And the studio didn't schedule any modern dance classes, which was the really fun stuff, for after work. So I ended up with these class credits that I needed to use up, which I did by taking the aforementioned yoga classes.

It was discouraging, grunting and straining next to these wispy, rubbery dancers. My self–esteem took some serious hits. But I wasn't going to walk away having pre-paid for classes. My stinginess won out, and I ended up continuing with the yoga even after I had used up my original class credits.

What helped a lot was that I really really liked the yoga instructor, Tobias. He was a tiny guy with dark curls. When I did Cobbler's Pose, he would, from behind, lay his hands on the base of my neck, put his right foot on my right thigh, and his left foot on my left thigh, and stand on them while pushing my torso forward in order to help me deepen the pose. That's how small he was. Or how big I was, depending on your point-of-view.

This is a rambling, nostalgic way to get to what Tobias used to tell me. In response, no doubt, to some grumblings of discouragement from me, he responded that he was more interested in watching the students who struggled in class than in watching the students who could asana 'til the cows came home. In other words, he preferred standing on my non-dancer thighs than watching the dancers gracefully tie themselves into knots.

The dancers are my metaphor for "shiny happy people." I’m sure you've seen them in your own lives – people with a special light, who make something you're endeavoring to master look like peeling a banana, like something anyone could master with minimal instruction. It is difficult to not become jealous of shiny happy people. And this jealousy spawns exceptional significance in the spirituality context.

The Ecstasy of Belle

2010-02-21T09:58:00.000-08:00

Sometime around ages 10-11, I spontaneously woke up to the fact that I AM not my body.

My clearest memory of this phenomenon is of standing in a childhood living room in Phoenix, Az. (I won't say "my" childhood living room because there were so many.) There were archways opposite each other at one end of that living room that led, on one side, to the dining room and, on the other side, to a hallway that led to the bedrooms and bathroom. Between those archways was my baby sister's crib.

Imagine standing in front of that crib a gawky kid in shorts and a stained, probably, t-shirt. She has a homemade haircut, short to keep gum out of it, and a wicked cowlick that makes a tuft of hair stick up in odd curls from the right side of the back of her head. She has two upper front teeth that are too big for her face, and freckles that out-pigment her Arizona tan. There she is, smelling like dirt in a living room with carpet so old it smells like wet dog and dead cockroach, holding her arms out in front of her looking at them as if they don't belong to her.

Doesn't strike the same spiritual image as, say, the Ecstasy of St. Theresa now does it?

But that's what I was doing, staring at my arms as if I were a driver and my eyes were the front windows of a car, and my legs were the tires and my arms were the car doors opened on either side of myself. I felt I was inhabiting my body only. Borrowing it. Driving it. And that one day, I would abandon it like the cars one finds stacked high in a junk yard. Up until that day, I was my body, or so I had assumed. I hadn't really thought about it. When I cut my finger, I cut myself. When my body was hungry, I was hungry. Until that day, it had never occurred to me that what happened to my body wasn't necessarily happening to Me. That Me was something more, something beyond my flesh and blood and bones and cowlick. Me was the energy that noticed it was inside this car, that noticed it was inside my body.

The funny thing is, I forgot about it. I had that "I'm not my body" sensation a few times during my childhood. And then it went away. And I never really thought about it again until I was several years into a conscious spiritual journey. Then I remembered it and realized that I was - had been all my life - a very spiritual person. I just didn't know that that was what I was experiencing – my spirit. Calling to me, to wake up and heed its needs.

"Few are guilty...

2010-02-19T08:31:00.000-08:00

all are responsible." - philosopher and activist, Abraham Joshua Heschel

Where did men’s shame come from? or X & Y

2010-02-09T10:16:00.001-08:00

First off, in reading this, it would be helpful if you agreed that a lot of the dysfunctionality between the genders is caused by shame. I don’t know if/how I can prove this to you. Even if I did, I would advise you to not take my word for it but to apply my theories to your own lives and measure your results. I have, through the years, provided numerous personal examples of gender shame on this blog; if I can find them, I'll link to them. The examples won't prove anything however.

For this post, I start with the premise that all dysfunctional gender relations begin with shame. Period. You can read further or not according to your pleasure.

It has been pretty well agreed that female shame stems from the patriarchy. Because women hold the generative powers (ability to breed baby humans) and they do not have sexual limitations (multiple orgasms without a need for "down time"), they are feared by men. Men shame women in order to control them and remain relevant, i.e., men's bad behaviors stem from their debilitating fear of becoming useless to women. This is the fundamental feminist theory, and I am not agreeing or disagreeing with it. I am only pointing out that agreement exists on the female side of this equation.

I can see all my male friends now – who are all non-spiritually inclined – rolling their eyes at me. Telling me that I am reading too deeply into it. "Men just want fun and adventure. They are not deep or complicated. So why, Belle, do you keep trying to project some significant meaning into us?"

I've known many men. Each and every one was complicated. And I wasn't projecting. I was confused. Because I was operating under the assumptions enforced upon me as above only to be left wondering why men didn't fall pat into those assumptions. If he's really so uncomplicated, then why is he withholding? If he's really so uncomplicated, then why is he controlling? If all he really wants is fun and adventure, then why does he brood? But especially I was confused as to why – men more vociferously than women – hang onto the male assumptive stereotype when it is so patently wrong? And why is disagreement with this stereotype absolutely verboten? Whereas agreement exists as to the origins of female shame, why do we act as if male shame doesn't exist at all - in ANY form?

I do not know what a spiritually inclined male would say. There are some Robert Bly and Sam Keen books out there with some ideas. But, mostly, male mysteries are not to be shared with women.

If pinned into a corner, I could see some men blaming women for male shame, i.e., if men cause female shame, then it is only logical that women cause male shame. Take for example, the nagging wife whose bitter complaints against her husband are obviously the fodder from which his own shame would sprout.

To this I respond that, if I am expected to rise above the patriarchy and take responsibility for my gender shame, i.e., not let it control me or affect my romantic relationships, then men should be expected to do likewise. But how can men do that, if they never admit they have any shame in the first place? As part of my spiritual journey, I've had to assess and question and process my shame. That journey started with recognizing that I was even carrying any around with me. And that is an odd concept, feeling ashamed for nothing more than being that which I was born – a woman. It was not an easy concept to wrap my brain around. But I can and have done it.

How would a man, under the assumptions above, ever get to wrapping his brain around a similar concept for himself? If he never does, has/can he really progress(ed) spiritually?

Winter is Hard

2010-01-27T04:20:00.001-08:00

I recently read somewhere that humankind was not used to working all year around. That’s right, it was the PBS special of the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond - yet another book on my ginormous reading list. Humankind was used to holing up and resting during winter time because the weather was too inhospitable for anything other than sitting by the warm fireside. Provided you had cut enough wood in the warmer months to sustain you. Yes, these days pre-dated electric, oil or gas heating systems, protective metal vehicles, and Gortex.

Now. Now, we have people like Barbara Lynch whom I saw on television last night. She already owns nine highly acclaimed restaurants in the Boston area. Last night’s show was reporting her work in creating yet one more highly acclaimed restaurant. Because, you know, nine isn’t enough. All this work, in the middle of winter. How does she do it? I mean, all I want to do is sit in front of my fireplace sipping tea and reading a good book.

Well, she had terrible circles under her eyes. And pockets of weight indicative of a woman without the time to hit the gym. Which is strange for a person in her socio-economic class – fitness is the post-modern equivalent of fat during the renaissance. It used to be, if you were rich, you were fat. Now if you are rich, you’re sculpted to within an eighth of an inch. As if yourself were as much a part of the perfection of a carefully designed living room as the water color artwork or the marble fireplace.

It seems the pendulum has swung in the complete opposite direction. Not only do we now work even in winter, but we overwork all year round – winter, spring, summer, and fall. Or at least, in Barbara Lynch’s and my case.

How did this happen?

I told you so

2009-12-18T11:56:00.000-08:00

Remember this outrageously long rant? Well at the end of it, I predicted that now that I no longer want an attorney position, I'd be offered one. And here I am, the new "Federal Filings Counsel" at my company.

This is one of the things about spirit that twists my knickers into knots.

I am Done - an outrageously long rant

2009-11-14T07:24:00.000-08:00

So, I’m writing again. Finally. Geez, it only took two years. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that several people from my past have reached out to me recently, some have even taken a gander at this site to see how I’m doing. It’s not a coincidence ‘cause astrologically, it’s a good time to make a big change in my life. Plus, I haven’t really given much thought lately to where I am. Haven’t navel gazed, if you can believe that. If I could have gotten someone to pay me to navel gaze, I’d be rich for the pathological heights which my past navel gazing reached.

So where am I?

As you know, after 18 years as a mostly single artist of some type or another living in New York, almost everything about me changed in a relatively short period. I think that during that transition, I shut a part of myself off with a promise that once I get “settled” I would return to my regularly scheduled navel gazing. And this blog is nothing if not about navel gazing.

“Settled” however included getting hired in my new career as an attorney, which hasn’t happened yet, even though I’ve been a graduated and admitted attorney for going on three years now. For two years I kept my eye on that prize without journaling, meditating, none of my normal practices that keep me centered. And I’ve paid a price for it. I’ve swollen up about 40 pounds and now feel like I’ve wasted five years and $120,000 of my life and energy for nothing – struggled for, as yet, no reward, and with none in future sight.

If that ain’t the fertile ground from which artistry springs, I don’t know what is.

Since this past summer, I’ve been slowly returning to myself. Started journaling. Started “therapy.” Meditate more often than not. Drink less. Still eat a lot, but started a boot camp to get me back to the gym for the first time in over a year.

What it’s done is given me the courage to tell the legal profession to fuck off. I actually hate it. My experience of it has been of pompous old white men engaged in "Inflate-the-Ego" with each other. Not that there isn’t some genuine collegiality involved as well. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the law or even necessarily lawyers. I hate what our culture has turned the law profession into. Private practice, with its needy, life-draining and potentially crazy clients, scares me. Corporate practice is a joke – General Counsel are mostly (bad) managers spending shareholder money on outside counsel who do all the heavy legal lifting. And the gates to high-level, research, writing and policymaking jobs are so well-guarded, I’d have to go back to my birth – fake my birth certificate and all my educational degrees dating back to grade school – in order to even get someone to talk to me on the phone for those handful of jobs. Either that or pretend to be more of a minority than I actually am.

Though I sound bitter, I’m actually not. My spiritual practices have put me back in touch with my resiliency, which a former therapist has told me is my unique strength. Telling the legal profession to fuck off has done wonders for my mental health. And I’m writing again, with a vengeance. And I have a writing partner. And I am registered for a couple of writing seminars here and there. I will have, if not a full novel, at least a novel-sized anthology of short-stories ready to publish by next spring. And I have a plan. I will self-publish.

I am DONE with gatekeepers and everything, and every and any one who has or will ever tell me “no.” I do not know that word. You can all fuck yourselves. I haven’t accomplished all that I have by listening to anyone who’s told me “no.” I don’t see a need to start now. The legal profession, not I, suffers for this change in my heart. Because if the world needs anything, if America needs anything, it’s more ethical, compassionate and nuanced attorneys. But it’s too late. That profession has been captured by peacocks and muckrakers, and I’m not going to waste a second more of my time “Yes’m”ing another old white guy who graduated from Georgetown/Yale/Harvard/Name-Your-Ivy League-Legacy-Concerned-Only Law School-Here (because we know that the best way to develop the pool of good lawyers in America is to admit into the top law schools, just because their forebears attended them, their less than talented offspring).

Instead, I will write. And I, not you, or you or you or you or you, will express myself to the world. And I will control Who I am and What I do. And I will give to this Planet and I will make a difference. So take it and shove it up your cornhole you bastards.

The irony of all of this is that, now that I don’t want an attorney position, I’m most likely to be offered one. And one that would, no doubt, compete with my time for writing.

Stay tuned true believers.

Wow, a lot has changed

2009-10-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

About four times a year I am awed by something that rubs my face in the passage of time. Reviewing receipts while preparing my taxes is usually one of them. "Oh yeah, I remember that dinner. That was the night schmuck-face broke up with me and stiffed me with the bill." "Oh, yeah, that was the gift I purchased for my mother that she promptly returned to the store." Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It might come as a shocker but I haven't been writing much on the blog lately. Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone else. I'm revealing this to you and you only. Even today, I only logged on to transfer into Word some fiction I wrote last November...Jesus Christ no. It was 2007. 2007. WHY CAN'T I CAPITALIZE NUMBERS???!!!! So long as I was already logged on, I tooled around a bit on my dashboard - cleaned up my links and sighed in disappointment at how little value this blog's contributed to the Blog-O-Sphere these past two years.

Some bloggers are still here; some have closed down; some have sold out. Me, I'm just struggling with the same old challenges - abundance, fulfillment, trust. You know, the usual. And while I've been struggling with that in the non-pixilated world, the Blog-O-Sphere has been changing without me.

If It Is Your Destiny to Be this Laborer Called a Writer

2009-01-12T17:36:00.001-08:00

"Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise, ... we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it's perfectable, that you're gonna get it all straight.

I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. I tried to put this into that song called 'A Thousand Kisses Deep,' you know, where you understand that you abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece."

-- Leonard Cohen, from I'm Your Man

Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T15:28:00.000-08:00

If I channel surf to find only Home Alone (any variation), Bourne Identity, Ice Age or Prancer playing on all the movie channels - AGAIN! - I’m gonna scream.

My beloved Mac G-4 died this morning. It makes a car-gear-like grinding noise when I try to start it - you know, like when you try to shift gears on a manual and miss. And after mucho minutes twirling spikes in a circle, up pops a folder icon with the Finder logo trading flashes with a question mark. I take that logo to mean that my OS is somehow corrupted and I need to re-install. I would re-install except that there’s a DVD stuck inside the drive, a kool one too - I’m Your Man, a documentary about Leonard Cohen. So re-installing is out of the question. And no, it’s not the DVD that’s making that terrible grinding noise. That was happening before I inserted the DVD. Besides, the noise is coming from the battery side of the box, not the DVD side of the box. I’m not brave enough to open up anything more than the battery port and the memory port. As far as I can tell, nothing’s out of whack in those two places.

Sigh. It’s been a good machine for five years. I’m going to have to bite the bullet and take it to the Apple shop and cross my fingers that it can be saved. And while I’m at it, get an OS upgrade, if it’s not too old. The timing sucks as Christmas has left us cash strapped. Blah.

Dan is performing tonight and again tomorrow morning. I’m off work and will spend the day baking, by special request, my first ever red-velvet cake. When Dan gets home, we’ll put pizzas in the oven – after Thanksgiving and all the Christmas baking I’ve been doing, I’m too burned out to cook again – and then open gifts. Who knows after that. No new snow is predicted over the next few days. Back to ghost-town work on Friday – I kind of enjoy working when no one else is around. It’s stressless and I get a lot done when I don’t have everyone shoving “emergencies” my way. How much of what people shove at you are emergencies anyway? Honestly, nothing that crosses my desk would cause death, destruction or even mayhem if left undone. Such drama. So, though I’ll be at work on Friday, it’ll probably feel like a seamless beginning to the weekend.

So, bitch slap that seasonal affective disorder to the curb and count all your blessings, yo, ‘cause we all have them, no matter who you are, no matter how broke, how lonely, how sick, there is something good somewhere going on in your life. Look at it, embrace it, warm yourself with it, even if just for this one day out of the year. Live in a little denial and fuck the rest of it. At least for 24 hours, believe that nothing but good exists in your world. Even if you read this and roll your eyes, think for a minute. Even if you have to work at it a little bit, isn’t it better to explode into the New Year than piss and moan your way into it?

Well, okay, piss and moan if you want, but don’t blame the rest of us if pissing and moaning is all you get out of 2009. I mean, if that’s the way you start out…

I, however, will hear none of it, at least until January. I mean, Daniel Craig was just on tv without a shirt. And Ghost Hunters airs later tonight. Things are looking up. Have a happy ya’ll.

PTSD and the Working Girl

2008-12-22T06:14:00.000-08:00

And most impactfully, I have been and am still training myself to react according to the truth of the moment, rather than to overreact to events that trigger a trauma memory. More on that in another post.

So I started my job last February. It had been a pretty bleak job search. When Dan and I strategized our life together – my moving to Boston because a law degree was more portable than his freelance musician work (not in terms of pulling in a paycheck – Dan always pulls in a paycheck – but in terms of pulling in a steady paycheck, which was important as I had consolidated my education loans to lock in a low rate, which meant there was no grace period after graduation – I had to start paying them off immediately) – I had not factored in the number of good, local law schools that were feeding the area’s legal job openings. And, not being an economist, there was no way for me to have predicted that the country had gone into a recession last November, the month of my admission to the MA Bar. So here I was, very bright and hardworking, graduated from a 4th tier, albeit prestigious public interest law school, not summa cum laude (there was no such thing at my alma mater) but with impressive accomplishments nonetheless, competing for $40,000 a year jobs at Legal Aid (high by Legal Aid standards, but still not enough to cover my expenses, by the way) that were, in the end, being awarded to Harvard graduates. None of my cold-call resumes, of which I mailed out about 200, resulted in an interview. My targeted search resulted likewise. The most exciting position I applied for was as an attorney at the new consumer protection unit at Boston’s Legal Aid (my sources inside Legal Aid had told me the organization was undergoing a renaissance – an unusual surplus of funds – I don’t know if this is continuing). Even though I had an inside connection who allowed me to use her name when I contacted the Consumer Protection manager directly, the best the manager could do for me was to suggest that my chances of be awarded the job would increase substantially if I were to volunteer my time with the unit. That wasn’t possible on a full time basis what with $120,000 in loans immediately due. But I was willing to try to squeeze my work-week around to volunteer at least a couple of days a week – maybe even weekends. But the unit manager wouldn’t return my calls after that first conversation. She was willing to see my resume. But I had to find out well after the fact that the position was filled without my even being called in for an interview. During those uncertain months, I couldn’t even get a contract attorney position even though I was registered with and checking in every day to all the agencies in town – and firms don’t care from where you graduated if all they want you to do is document review. No, during those uncertain months, the only work I could get was administrative work, paying between $8-$15 an hour.

So when my company offered me a paralegal job starting in early February 2008 at a substantial increase from the salary I was last making as a paralegal, I took it. It was at least a law related job, in an industry with which I had experience, and my manager had put the possibility on the table, right up front, of my being promoted into an attorney position somewhere down the road. It was the best offer in a series of non-existent and otherwise terrible offers.

I’m not cocky about too many things, but I am cocky about my ability to bounce back from adversity or change/violence, because it’s been tested so often. I’ve always been resilient – more resilient than most. Which is what my last therapist credits for my survival. And, while I’ve lamented ad nauseum about all the change I’ve been through in the past two years, I don’t think that most of what I went through in the last couple of years was too much for me to handle. It was draining yes, and more so than I expected. So there I was, depleted after the marriage, the move, the graduation, the Bar exams. Depleted, needing rest, and vulnerable. But not so much that a month or three of keeping my head low and getting enough sleep every night couldn’t have healed. What it was, was the grim understanding that I was in the exact same professional circumstances I had been in four years ago. I did not have to spend four years struggling through law school, go into$120,000 of debt (indeed, I’m still paying off a portion of my undergrad loans), and move states in order to be a paralegal doing SEC disclosure work at a large, multi-national life insurance company. The straw that broke the camel’s back (funny, I almost wrote, “the camel that broke the straw’s back,” which somehow, feels even more appropriate), what depleted me in the end, was the enormous amount of energy – because time is energy, money is energy, physical motion is energy – I spent to go absolutely nowhere.

"What I Know For Sure"

2008-11-12T05:59:00.000-08:00

Some people, told of witness trees,
pause in chopping a carrot
or loosening a lug nut and ask, witness
to what? So while salad
is made, or getting from A to B
is repaired, these people
listen to the story of the Burnside Bridge sycamore,
alive at Antietam, bloodiest day
of the war, or the Appomattox Court House
honey locust, just coming to leaf
as Lee surrendered, and say, at the end,
Cool. Then the chopping
continues with its two sounds,
the slight snap to the separation
of carrot from carrot, the harder crack
of knife against cutting board,
or the sigh, also slight, of a lug nut
as it's tightened against a wheel. In time,
these people put their hands
under water and say, not so much to you
but to the window in front of the sink,
Think of all the things
trees have seen. Then it's time
for dinner, or to leave, and a month passes,
or a year, before two fawns
cross in front of the car, or the man
you've just given a dollar to
lifts his shirt to the start
of the 23rd psalm tattooed
to his chest,"The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want," when some people
say, I feel like one of those trees,
you know? And you do know.
You make a good salad, change
a wicked tire, you're one of those people,
watching, listening, a witness
to whatever this is,
for as long as it is
amazing, isn't it, that I could call you
right now and say, They still
can't talk to dolphins
but are closer, as I still
can't say everything I want to
but am closer, for trying, to God,
if you must, to spirit, if you will,
to what's never easy for people
like us: life, breath, the sheer volume
of wonder.

- Bob Hicok is author of This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press), this quote taken from Oprah Magazine (click on the title)

The Devil You Know

2008-11-09T06:06:00.000-08:00

A favorite saying from a former acquaintance is that “change is violence.” A dramatic statement to be sure, but I think it accurately makes the point that change is not smooth, even when it’s positive. And in the midst of that kind of violence, it’s easy to embrace the devil you know than to reach for the angel you don’t.

It’s taken some time for the dust to settle so that I can see clearly. So that I can see that I have a disability. An invisible one – which is hard enough to see without the dust – but a disability nonetheless. And like all good drama queens, when I need to the most is when I’m least likely to take care of myself.

I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve mentioned it in other posts (which have not survived the "best of" scissors – so no links; be grateful! Very very grateful). The short of it is that growing up in the shadow of fear – that the very source of my life, my parents, could very well also be the death of me – gave me many of the same symptoms as veterans returning from war. The stress chemicals released when it appears likely that you’re going to die, and the long term effects of regular and consistent application of those chemicals to your body – those are real, regardless whether the threat would be from enemy hands during combat or from one’s own family.

It might seem odd that I “suddenly” come to this conclusion, that I didn’t recognize my symptoms earlier, especially since I spend so much time navel gazing. What kind of idiot misses something like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? Sheesh! Well, it is not widely recognized outside of disaster and combat survivors. And since my childhood abuse didn’t result in bruises or hospital visits, in other words, since it wasn’t Visible, mental health professionals wouldn’t even consider it as a diagnosis. I mean, if a child comes in with pain in her feet, absent a genetic history of it, a doctor is unlikely to consider diabetes as his first diagnosis. After treating other possible underlying causes for the pain, a doctor might eventually come to a diabetes diagnosis after those other treatments fail. Complex PTSD, which is what I have, is as difficult and nuanced to diagnose in the absence of other obvious markers.

In that earlier post, I wrote about a recurring sensation that comes while I’m just hanging around, minding my own business, and feels like something – usually something big, fast and heavy – was going to come out of nowhere and blow my head off. Only now do I realize why I started getting that sensation in my late 20s. It was because that was the same period of time when I overcame some of my worst addictions – the addictions that kept the trauma at bay. Ever wonder why so many veterans do drugs and/or drink? What do you think would happen to them if you took their addictions away? They would probably suffer some similar version of symptoms from which I suffer. Indeed, many of them do despite the addictions. The sensation of violence isn’t all. I have also had to retrain myself to sleep again. And most impactfully, I have been and am still training myself to react according to the truth of the moment, rather than to overreact to events that trigger a trauma memory. More on that in another post.

Now, without addictions to anesthetize my symptoms, I have to mollify them through heavily applied “treatments” – meditation, healthy diet, exercise, and rigorous checking in. Like a diabetic who doesn’t take his insulin on schedule, when I fail to apply my treatment, I pay severe, though different, consequences – anxiety, depression, erratic moods, and sluggish living. And still being new to taking care of myself, my treatments fall off in times of change, oh say, like when I get married, graduate, move from my home state of 18 years to a new state, and try to get a new career off the ground in my late 30s. Nothing in my life right now is familiar, not even the weather. I should be doubling up on my treatments. Not slacking on them entirely.

So why am I not writing? Because I am not myself at the moment. I am in that spiral – needing energy to reinstate my treatments but not having energy as a result of not having followed my treatments. I might have to let some things go – searching for work, hell, even work itself – in order to focus on just getting myself back up to speed. With money as tight as it is right now, however, I’m just not sure how that’s going to be possible. But, you’ve already read about that.

It just never ends

2008-11-06T04:51:00.001-08:00

Perhaps I was naive - Hindsight frequently reveals that I am. I'm beginning to think that I'm like Michael Crichton - that I pursued a graduate degree in order to have something to write about. What makes me naive is that, considering the number of attorneys who are deeply dissatisfied with their jobs, I still went to law school for professional happiness. First, I did feel that I met my intellectual match in law school. But then the professional realm is very different. More on that later. For now, things are cuckoo crazy busy at my job. And there is no end in sight. I'm getting fat and I'm going insane because any personal time I have in which to exercise or write is spent recuperating from insanely long hours and unnecessary wackiness at my job (some of it caused by dysfunctional processes, some of it caused by nutjob co-workers). Well, I also spend some of that time drinking with compatriots - generally not other attorneys - who are similarly psychologically inclined. That adds calories to the waistline as well.

I mean even now, as I'm writing this, in the back of my mind is a voice chastising me for not using this time to do some work instead. I'd like to stab that voice.

I work in financial services, and the grim joke on the floor is that busyness ensures job security. I internally roll my eyes every time someone cracks that joke. I *don't care* about hanging onto a job that isn't the right fit for me, or working with crazy people. Unfortunately, the current state of the economy and the burden of education loans greatly restrict my mobility.

They say that every obstacle is a spiritual opportunity. So I'm still struggling to solve this obstacle. Unfortunately, this situation doesn't allow for much interesting reading on this site. Once it does, then we'll know that the "obstacle" has been dissolved.

Oh yeah, go Obama!

Again and again and again

2008-10-14T04:35:00.000-07:00

Yeah, okay, so I’ve been away for awhile. I have all sorts of excuses, etc. The short of it is that the transition I just went through? Well, instead of the ripple I expected, I got a tsunami.

I’ve been spoiled my last decade or so. After the first five or six years, during which I was miserable, I adapted to and became good at living in New York. As much change as I navigated during those cumulative 18 years in New York, at a minimum I always knew who I was and where I was. I didn't credit that knowledge enough for the comfort and stability it gave me. I've lost my mooring in New England. There have been identity struggles, adaptation to not only the region but also to my new marital and professional status. Even now, 1.5 years after graduating and moving, writing this list makes my chest seize up. The list overwhelms and angers me.

Reading this, you’d think that I was/am miserable. Not true. It’s just that I have a delicate constitution when it comes to writing. That might seem like a cop-out… even I have a voice in my head that chastises me for making excuses: “If you’re a writer then you write; if you don’t, then you’re not.” But that’s exactly the point: what/who am I now? The absence of my reflection in the world has always been the norm, but *now*, now that I have a clearer idea, believe it or not, of whom I am and what I'm to be doing during this life, this planet, instead of becoming more familiar, has become more alien. This disconnect makes me question my new certainty about my place in the world. And writing feels more and more dangerous in proportion to the width of that disconnect. But this is a larger story we’ll get into later.

For now, amazingly enough, I do have a couple of series of posts that I started during this long hiatus. That’s right! A couple of *series*. One post is so old, I was still in law school when I drafted it. I think they’re relevant for explaining what I’ve been going through the last year and a half, so I'll dust them off, but they need editing and elaboration. Stay tuned Mr. Moth.

The Smartest Guys In The Room

2008-01-28T07:20:00.000-08:00

Just watched this video. Spooky. If you learn nothing else from this site, learn this: do not ever trust a corporation. I repeat, do not ever trust a corporation. And get off the utility grid as soon as you can.

Don't get me wrong. If you have the discretionary income and you want to buy corporate products, go ahead. But the minute you decide you NEED 1000+ cable TV, or the Apple Air with the latest (buggy, no doubt) operating system, and the super deluxe, latest, greatest cellphone-videoplayer-mp3player-palmsized-supercomputer, they have you by the short hairs.

Fact is, they spend a lot of money to convince you that you NEED things you don't need. Buy the gadgets and services, enjoy them, but be prepared to walk away from any of it at any time. That's the only way to retain power over corporations. You think this is self-evident don't you? Then try this experiment. Use absolutely no electrical gadgets for a week. Do not use your gas or oil fueled heat. Use battery operated gadgets until they run out but do not recharge them when they do. I guarantee you that you'll think you need these things after about 48 hours. But if you had to live without them like, for real, you'd realize that you don't really need them.

California was as electricity dependent as the rest of us. And look at what Enron did to them. Don't think Enron is an isolated example of corporate malfeasance. And get off the grid as soon as possible.

It's the End of the World

2007-11-30T05:06:00.000-08:00

1. In a news report over the radio about some oil drums catching fire, the first piece of information reported was that the fire would affect gas prices. The second piece of information was that two people died in the blaze. This was a headline piece, aired every half hour that morning. The order of importance of each piece of information never changed.

2. I usually love Kathy Griffin because she is outrageous, but I was disappointed by her latest Bravo special. It was boring as sin, mostly because she talked about herself and how she responded to the celebrities she runs across rather than talking about the celebrities and the wacky, fucked-up things that they do. Maybe it was the recent Emmy speaking, but all I know is that someone finally got to her. She's not watering down her act on her own. I guess this qualifies for this list because I thought of all people, Kathy Griffin would be the last to succumb to Hollywood establishment.

3. It took 17 years of living in New York before a member of my family finally came to visit me there. I've been in New England approximately six months and already, my sister and nephews are visiting. What the fuh?!!

4. And finally - today I was made I an official card-carrying member of the Massachusetts Bar. You can now legally sue me for malpractice. At one point in my life, I would have said that I didn't want to be a member of any Bar that would have me. But after having met a few of my fellow admittees, I'm sorry to be a member of a Bar that would have them. In my defense, I have to remind you that I've come a long way from the time when I was happy to be admitted to any bar (note that that last is spelled with a small "b").

All the above is pretty clear evidence that the end is nigh.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer IV

2007-10-17T17:07:00.001-07:00

1. What the fuck is up with John Cusack? From Say Anything, to The Grifters, to Grosse Point Blank, and then High Fidelity, the guy then does America's Sweethearts, Serendipity, Runaway Jury, Must Love Dogs, 1408. And now, NOW, Martian Child. When will the guy do another decent film?

2. We have a ghost in our upstairs. It spoke through me the other night as I was drifting to sleep and vulnerable. It made me say, "urrgurgle."

3. My husband will play his first bar gig next month - something fun and contemporary, something other than the stuffy classical music he usually plays. That's right, I married a rock star!

4. Filed our taxes (after getting an extension). Getting quite a bit of money back. Just in time for more of my school loans to come due.

5. Okay, I'm at a temp assignment where the people have been very nice. I'm breathing easier now about Bostonians. But this weather! I'm going to have to rethink moisturizer.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer III

2007-10-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

1. I don't get the whole Norah Jones thing. Yesterday, one of her songs came on the radio (and I hate to admit it, but I'm so Norah-apathetic, I can't even remember what song it was), and it had this repeating chorus that brought to mind Keanu Reeves in Speed. Early in Speed, our nemesis Dennis Hopper asks Keanu a repeating question, "What do you do?" after offering him a choice between bleak and bleaker options. Hopper's inflection changed with each utterance of the question, presumably, as would be true of any good actor, because his intention for each changed. Later in the film, after our good guy Reeves turns the tables on Hopper and likewise offers him a choice between bleak and bleaker options, he asks the same question, "What do you do?" Twice. That moment has got to be one of the most mocked line deliveries E.V.E.R. Because Reeves' inflection doesn't change at all between utterances. Proof that he doesn't have any intentions when he acts. Blech. So Norah's repeating this chorus, and that oft mocked Reeves' moment comes to mind, why? Because Norah's singing blues and there is no change in her inflection from one utterance to another. This is the blue's lady! You're supposed to be moved by your soul, which would then inform your delivery. But no. She sang the chorus the same way every time, and, though pretty, I wondered if Norah had any soul. Because this song was as telling of that absence as Reeves' moment in Speed was of his lack of intention. I'm afraid enough of the backlash from crazed Norah Jones fans - have you ever looked them in the eye as they are talking about her? it's like Children of the Corn! - so I won't go so far as to say that she has no soul, or that she is to blues what Keanu Reeves is to acting. But at a minimum, she is what my husband would call "musically rudimentary," and hardly worth all the adoration showered upon her.

2. Go Gore!

3. Hmmmm, I got so impassioned about the Norah Jones thing, I can't remember what else I've been thinking.

Like omigod! That's so tubular. or Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer III

2007-09-28T04:31:00.000-07:00

Like, Moon Unit Zappa turns 40 today. Omigod! I am so old.

Or, I still have half my life to look forward to. And now that I am actually beginning to understand my way in this life, I suppose that it, the rest of my life that is, is worth looking forward to.

I feel different these days. I'm not sure how to explain it. I've been on a temporary admin assignment these past few weeks, and it's been pretty good, but not for the salary or because it's fun or anything. But because it's given me the apples-to-apples comparison helpful in seeing exactly how far I've come. Not only in my Word skills, but in my ability to handle people and my ability to take control and manage my life. A few years ago, I would have grabbed this job and hung on for dear life, despite the fact that it's terribly stressful and way beneath me, because my fear of not having any money ruled the day. Not any more. My fear used to weigh so heavily because I lacked belief in my own value. It's easier for me to risk unemployment because I am certain that I offer something to the world - something it needs - and that my place in the world will find me so long as I continue to put in the requisite effort necessary to help it do so.

Sounds simple doesn't it? Like, something we should all feel about ourselves by the time we wrap up high school. Well, I don't know about you, but it took me a helluva lot of blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention humiliation, shame, fear, and anxiety) to learn such a simple-sounding lesson. Now if I could only make this new skin fit better.

Insert Really Great Title Here

2007-09-18T04:44:00.000-07:00

I get these random thoughts during the day. And every so often, I'll think "that'd make a great title for a post." But none of them are coming now; so I'll let you provide one. Name this post whatever you see fit.

Managing change is never an easy task. And, as you can see by the dearth of interesting posts on this site, managing the monumental changes in my life has superceded my creative side. I've been thinking about, trying to isolate the reason why, I've not been able to sit down on a semi-regular basis and write these days. The closest I get to the cause, is the fact that not only has my single life changed, but that my life is itself no longer single. The most difficult change (practically) has been to integrate my life with another's and still keep it looking like my own.

Of course you know what I'm talking about. Everyone who's ever had a relationship that extended, however minutely, beyond semi-regular, midnight booty calling has struggled with and complained about this problem.

For instance, most of my writing used to happen in the morning, before I left my house for the day. Now, my husband and I wake up together, make breakfast, listen to the news, fight over what time we should leave for the subway. Sounds nice doesn't it? Except that I don't sit down to write. And too much absence from this blog, and I begin to forget who I am. So what (or who) the hell am I bringing to the marriage if I don't know who I am? Not a comfortable place to be, and the crevice, I suspect, of the slippery slope that is the demise of many relationships.

"So stop yer bitchin' and just close your door and write already. What a whiny post."

Yeah, it's not that easy. I don't know why yet, but it's not.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer II

2007-09-14T06:15:00.000-07:00

1. There is definitely a New England state of mind. I've been bumping up against it, but don't quite understand it yet - except that it strikes me as a bit more classist than the New York state of mind.

2. Eyebrows are really hard to make up. And why on Earth am I wearing make up every day anyway?

3. My husband is on the verge of getting a really good job. Keep your fingers crossed.

4. As hard as I try not to get sucked up into the whole "I'm not worthy to be a lawyer because I didn't get a job while I was still in law school" line of thought, it's a struggle. First off, I didn't even try to get a job during my last year in law school, except for one or two very specific applications, because I made a decision to commit my energy to my clients instead. Second, it's not easy to get a job when you're moving to not only a new market, but also a specific market. If finding a job is a numbers game, my situation limits the numbers drastically. Third, I'm only six weeks out of taking the Bar exams, and it's only been three weeks since I started actively looking for work; this is no evidence of unemployability. And finally, if I'd stayed in New York, I'd probably already have a nice corporate job thanks to all the contacts I'd been cultivating in the 18 years I lived there. Sigh. I know all these things are true, but still... I'm doing some admin work at a hoity toity Boston firm, and when I look at the educational backgrounds of their new first year associates... It's really ludicrous. Really. None of us, it seems, has moved very far from the clique mentality of high school.

Random Thoughts from the Wandering Lawyer

2007-09-07T04:19:00.000-07:00

1. Islam is the new punk rock.

2. Faith is essential in free will. Patterns from our childhood govern our beliefs which, in turn, govern our actions. Free will means making a conscious choice among foreseeable options (rather than having our choices dictated to us by unconscious patterns). Therefore, in order to exercise free will, one's mind must be conscious enough to recognize that options exist, that we have many more choices than we are capable of recognizing or are willing to exercise because our childhood beliefs limit our ability to either see or accept them. Which means, in turn, that to exercise free will, to make a conscious choice, we must have the ability to have faith, the ability to believe in something for which no proof exists. We must be able to believe that our choice will resolve as we intend regardless that no proof exists to support our desired outcome. So the random thought is this: isn't it funny how many people will reject faith because, they claim, it is antithetical to free will? I will expound on this random thought in another post.

3. Snail mailing hand-written Thank-you cards build a great deal of good will.

4. I must must must clean and organize my office. I'm stalled in rewriting my corporate ethics article, which is arguably the most valuable piece in my job search, because I have no place in which to set my materials before me and organize my thoughts. Why have I been procrastinating on this? A question to be answered, perhaps, in the next random thoughts segment.

5. Got my J.D. in the mail last week. I have always found getting a degree in the mail to be anti-climactic. All I see after I open up that tube is a really, really expensive piece of paper. Feh.

Seminal

2007-08-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm brain dead. Too much organizing, planning, emailing of resumes and making new contacts. I do have an interview on Friday (tomorrow), but for a temp job. Nothing exciting, except for the thought of having a reason to get out of the house on a schedule. Funny, when I can't stay home, I want to. When I can, I can't wait to get out again. Well, not really. It's been nice. Harsh during the period while I was studying, but in the three weeks since that period ended, staying home has been pretty nice. I think three weeks is about my housebound limit, however.

I don't miss New York at all. It's amazing to me that perhaps five or six years ago, I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I guess it's like being an artist - if you can imagine doing anything else, do it. And if you can imagine living anywhere other than New York City, live there. I have to say, three floors of house have been overwhelming to organize, after 18 years of living in studio apartments. I've made a substantial foray, but am now over all the initial panic to get it done now, today, immediately. Dan keeps telling me that I have time to put everything away, that it's not going anywhere. And he's right.

Basically all I could tell you about right now is television, but I won't. Except to say that Saving Grace is pretty interesting, and I'm totally glued in to Design Star. Thank God glitter Josh didn't get axed last Sunday! Oh, and am rubbernecking Flipping Out like it's a car crash (Jeff reminds me of some people I used to know).

So, TV, decorating, and emailing resumes. Bored yet? Before you answer, I have to mention that last Saturday afternoon, I actually sat on a beach reading trashy magazines and breathing in the view of sailboats and calm, sunny, blue ocean. I think it was the first time, in four years, that I've done anything remotely lazy without the pressure of..., well, so many things, hanging over me, ruining my calm. Last Saturday. For the first time in four years. I didn't know I had it in me anymore to be bored. Bored now? Yes. Thank you God!

In Full Swing

2007-08-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

Job hunting that is. Has anyone ever gotten a job through an online job board? I tell myself it's a waste of time, and I do so easily enough as the last ten years of my professional career were all linked by personal referrals (even my first temp agency application was through a personal referral). But then, I remember many many years ago, when I was working in the marketing department of a national life insurance company, we hired the new director for our New Jersey office, at a six figure salary, off his resume on Monster.com. So it's not impossible I suppose. I just wonder if it's possible for someone like myself, who isn't interested in creating 10 billion versions of my resume, to be hired in such a manner. All traditional job searching advice warns us to market, market, market ourselves! As such, it takes a tremendous amount of faith to believe that if I just tell the truth, that the right job - the one that wants, not the super-polished marketed me, but the actual me (as that's the one who's actually going to show up every morning) - that that job will find me. 'Cause that super-marketed me? The one that's always selling herself? She's actually a pain in the ass to work with. And you already know someone like that don't you?

And I suppose what I really want is to find the employer with a little imagination who knows this as well as I do. I mean, what's the point of everything I went through the past four years if I don't get the job that is absolutely fulfilling to me? Because, hey, I didn't need to get another degree in order to get a job I hate.

Shake Your Pee Pee

2007-04-20T09:43:00.001-07:00

I’ve been told over and over again that men are simple. But I never believed it. I was suspicious, couldn’t accept that any so-called male bad behavior was caused by mere lack of thinking, that there hadn’t been some ulterior motive behind some man’s thoughtless comment or action. That, whenever a man I was dating pissed me off, he was personally persecuting me and maybe I deserved it because I had done something wrong. And if, after reflection, I realized that I hadn’t done anything wrong, well then, he was just a bad, bad person. And since this ultimately happened in all my dating relationships, I eventually concluded that either men were just bad bad people, or else I was perennially doing something wrong. I didn’t understand men at all. But then, like a lightening bolt of truth in the midst of the turmoil that is the end of law school/pre-Bar exam, comes Detroit Rock City to explain and enlighten my sorry contemplative ass once and for all. And now I realize that, really, there probably never was any ulterior motive or personal persecution at all. Oh, if only I could have all those years back! How is it that I lived until almost thirty-ahem without seeing this movie?

Remember all that writing I did about who-where-what-when men are-can be-want to be… basically, my quest for today’s definition of manhood? Well, Detroit Rock City lays out all that men want: 1) despite a man’s ugliness, skinniness or other inadequacies, he always wants to get the hottest, finest chick; 2) men want to have fun, and they’ll go to great lengths to have fun; 3) men want to pursue goals (like quests), especially goals that are fun; and 4) men want to be needed and admired. SPOILER WARNING. In Detroit Rock City, each boy becomes a man during a quest to secure tickets to the concert by the greatest rock ‘n roll band ever – KISS. In that quest, each “boy” gets pushed beyond his limit as he thwarts a villain, saves the girl, gets kissed or laid, and in the end, they, collectively, not only meet their goal of getting into the concert, but the bullies/bad guys all get theirs. By the end, they’ve become men - [insert caveman grunting here]! It’s a fun and funny late-70’s styled romp, which had me, if not laughing, then plastered with a silly grin all the way through.

But this is one of those moments where getting what I want – an understanding of men – has a double-edged sword. Okay, so men are not the bad guys that I generically thought them to be during my long, long, loooooong stretch of dating. They did not deserve my constant scrutiny or suspicion because there just wasn’t any wizard behind the curtain – what you see is what you get. And the girls who caught on to this early, as I’m now figuring out, were the ones who used to always get the guys. Because knowing the above allows one, when a guy misbehaved, to just wave it off as him being a guy; one could call him on his shit in a nice way, without the drama of having taken his actions personally. If I had known this before, I could’ve stayed or bailed on my relationships without getting all wracked up about what it was *I* had done wrong, because I could’ve, instead, assumed that I had done nothing wrong, that the failures of the relationship amounted to simply him being a guy.

But this is kind of the way I think of children. Is it the way I should be thinking of men? Which is why, I guess, men like my husband stand out. They do, at least attempt, to take responsibility for their actions. They do not pin all the responsibility on women to teach them good behavior. In other words, they step up. That’s a man. Which doesn’t mean my husband and men like him stop wanting to get the girl, have fun, pursue goals, or be appreciated and admired. It just means that I and the other circumstances around my husband are no longer responsible for his sense of self or his self-esteem – he is. And it also means that he won’t bail on me for some other admiring chick just because I’m having a bad week and can’t appreciate and admire him as much as he needs. Because his self-esteem will stay in tact even when I can’t step up. It means that, instead of whining when I can’t pay enough attention to him – because, you know, whining really gets a girl hot – he has enough self-esteem to do something to earn my attention, like offer me a foot massage or do the dishes without my asking. The Detroit Rock City guys would assume that it was my responsibility to admire them, not their responsibility to earn my admiration. See the difference? If not, no big deal. You’re just being a guy, right?

So, the double-edged sword: now that I know the holy secrets of men, do I follow it down the line, or do I continue to rebel as I have already been doing? I mean, do I just condescend and treat men as inferior (which appears to be the way the American majority likes things and is, thus, easier to live), or bail on any man who doesn't know how to take responsibility for his own actions and risk living a male-free life? The men who are in my life already, well too bad. I've been holding your feet to the fire and I will continue to do such. But what about forging new relationships - professional and platonic? I suppose that knowing what I know now allows me to, at a minimum, rebel with more confidence and certainty. And I suppose that maybe KISS was, after all, the greatest rock ‘n roll band ever.

Effort

2007-04-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

It’s taking effort to get started writing again. Knowing that the end of my law school career is near has brought up a lot of conflicting feelings. Many of my classmates, anticipating release from class schedules and no more unrealistic work assignments, have started acting as if the bell has already rung. The massive, unrelenting effort of law school has had me running on fumes for so long that I can’t even muster up enough effort to meditate – because, you know, meditation is active relaxation, meaning I have to do something affirmative in order to meditate, while watching TV is passive relaxation, meaning I don’t have to do jack shit. And jack shit is what I’ve been doing. Oh, and watching a lot of TV. My HGTV addiction has gotten so bad that my husband has threatened to stage an intervention.

This anticipation comes with anxiety – over what I’ll be doing for work and how to manage all the debt – and a splash of excitement – of having the whole world as my oyster. I mean, this is a clean slate. I could, in theory, do anything I want. But not really. How would the world respond if I were to decide, after all this effort, that I didn’t want to be a lawyer? That all I wanted was to stay home, push out a couple of puppies, and redesign my house? Or that, all law school has done has been to reinforce that I’m a writer, an artist? I’m in so much debt, how could I afford to be anything other than a lawyer, and a corporate one at that? Faith is believing in what can’t be seen. In a moment like this, is it faith to hold out for what I want absent any sign of its plausibility, or would that just be burying my head in the sand, living in a fantasy?

I only have so much effort to give and, having been pushed past that point, a whole lotta contradictions have been kicked up. If you were to look at me from the outside, you’d see me slumped in front of the TV, preferably watching Design on a Dime or Divine Design, but if you could see inside… Aaaaaaaaaah! This is why I haven’t been writing, because I don’t have it in me to do yet one more affirmative thing. And even if I did, I couldn’t begin to unravel the mess inside enough to make sense in a post.

And the wry twist* on it all is that times like these are the exact moments when I need most to write. When writing would be most beneficial. It’s hard to convince myself, though, that writing is going to feel better than, say, buying stuff online with money I don’t have. Or surfing the web. Or scrubbing the bathtub inch-by-inch with a toothbrush.

Where’re the remotes?

*The misuse abuse of “irony” stops here.

Marginally Employed

2007-03-28T05:25:00.001-07:00

I guess I blew my writing wad back in February ‘cause it looks like I’ve missed the entire month of March. I’m sorry. Or not. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much to you. That’s okay. I’m used to it.

No, actually, it wasn’t February that did me in. We’ve rounded the bend towards the end of the semester. I had an out-of-state job interview in the first week of March, followed by spring vacation – which didn’t feel like a vacation because I used it to catch up to a three-credit independent research project for which I had yet to write a single word. And there was also client work to do, believe it or not. And then I hit the ground running on my return because I had a court appearance the following week – culminating in an actual trial, the holy grail of clinical education. And now, today, this morning, in the final week of the month, I handed in an 8-page outline for that research project (took 9 hours just to write the outline!) and will be leaving for campus soon to gather documents for a Know Your Rights Workshop at which I’ll be presenting later today. Oh yeah, and isn’t it time to register for the bar exams!!? My regular class schedule has continued all this while. Well, not really. I haven’t read for my one substantive class in three weeks. But that’s usually the way it is by the end of a semester.

I was listening to an ad on the radio this morning, promoting a show about young adults. The guy in the promo called himself “marginally employed” and spent most of his time running a radio show out of his house. Hearing his story, I fondly recalled my own youth, back when I could afford to be marginally employed. When I had no debt, I didn’t need much for a salary, just enough to pay rent on an apartment shared with roommates, food and transportation (and I didn’t eat much when I was younger; in fact, I drank more than I ate). I could survive on approximately $24,000 a year. The marginal salary was the trade off for having the time and mental alertness necessary to pursue what really fed me – for this guy, his radio show; for me, it had been the performing arts.

I couldn’t accept a marginal salary today, what with my debt load, which will be crashing down on me in about two more months. I like to joke with one of my classmates that law school is the only thing you can do where leaving it to work full-time at just one job feels like a vacation. We can’t move backwards though, can we?

Soon, though. After today, I expect my workload to lessen considerably. There will be 3.5 more weeks of a regular class schedule, and then three weeks of exams, which always feel like a vacation, ‘cause all I do is study and sleep. And then graduation. Sweet sweet graduation…

Emboldenable

2007-02-08T20:13:00.000-08:00

A friend recently made a mix cd for me and my husband. I thought there might have been a theme to the mix, but if so, I haven't yet discovered it. Instead, I have taken a random sampling of lyrics from the cd, and made a found object poem for your consternation. Or, alarming amazement or dread that results in utter confusion. Enjoy!

******************************************************************

New Slang

Sitting at the edge of the sea wishing you were here by me. You look like my mother did when she was 19 – not afraid to die. She makes every day a new adventure in interpretation. She opens my good fortune. That’s why everything is better in bed.

In this world where we are, who can say what’s going too far? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Shame on your wicked schemes. God only knows what for. You can’t buy what you can’t find. You can’t even tell me where you’ve been. Waiting under the waves.

The last job you pulled wasn’t big enough. It’s a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. Maybe 20 years in state will change your mind. You punch out the windows. Baby, I’ll slash all the tires. Burn your tvs in your yard. Warm your hands upon the fire and start again.

‘Cause diamonds they fade. And flowers they bloom. But I’m telling you, these feelings won’t go away. They’ve been knocking me sideways. I keep thinking in a moment that time will take them away. Well slow gin fizz works mighty fast when you drink it by the pitcher and not by the glass.

Take your cautionary tales and all the syncophantic games and throw them all away. The enemy is within. Don’t confuse me with him. Got a foot in the door. I’ve sucked the milk out of a thousand cows. Now I’m filled with pharmaceuticals right down to my cuticles. Had to leave myself behind. I’ll say this. I don’t give a damn about your dreams. We’d hit the bottom. I thought it was my fault. I’ve already confessed. I don’t need to confess again.

Take me in and dry the rain.

What Changes Everything

2007-02-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

February is Fiction Month.

It wasn’t the destruction of the world that changed everything.

It wasn’t the skyscrapers reduced to rubble, the garbage blowing everywhere, the uncertainty of finding water or electricity, or, once found, how long either would last.

It wasn’t the danger of running out of oxygen, of learning how to find, access and retain pockets of oxygen, all the while avoiding pockets of other, deadly gasses; or the constant fear of encountering roaming mutant beasts that only vaguely resembled what they once were.

It wasn’t the uncertainty of finding food, of having to remember his Boy Scouts’ lessons: remembering how to make a fire, how to build a shelter when one couldn’t be scavenged, how to tell when water was safe; or adapting those rules upon discovering that they didn’t apply anymore.

It wasn’t the discombobulation; never knowing where or when the moon or sun would rise, if they would rise at all; not being able to tell which direction is now North or not knowing how long it would stay North; or long it would be before the planet shifted yet again so that South America became East America and Australia became Africa; or the poles switched so that heading towards the equator from what (he thought) was New York meant heading West instead of South.

It wasn’t waking up every morning to the erratic, unseasonal weather: one day rainy, one day snowy, one day sunny, regardless of the month. Winter came in July; Spring came in August; the dog days of summer arrived in December. Or not. One never knew.

It wasn’t even the loss of his young daughter in the initial strike. There was already too much loss to count. What was one child, more or less, when there remained nothing left with which to sustain any of the world’s children, even his own? Besides, if there was life to resume here, if he and his wife could heal and survive, if there were others with whom to rebuild a safe community, there could be more children. Then, there would be time to mourn her loss. There was no time now, though. There was too much to do, and just living took every bit of his concentration.

But it was one day. After several weeks of scavenging, of navigating the new, demolished landscape, of relearning how to wake up in the morning, how to breathe, how to eat, how to find their way about. Finding themselves near what might have once been Southern California, only split down the middle now. He could see (what was once) the western half, mere islands floating way out in the ocean, and estimated the new coastline starting at around what had once been, perhaps Los Angeles? His wife threw herself over a ledge of that new coastline and drowned herself in the ocean.

It was then that the weight of the chaos finally descended on his malnourished shoulders, pushing him down so his legs buckled and he slumped onto a nearby slab of concrete. It was then that he finally thought, “Now that changes everything.”

Meme for the New Year

2007-01-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. hotdog vendor
2. nanny
3. office manager for a holistic medical center
4. actor

Four movies I [have watched] over and over:

1. Star Wars
2. Valley Girl
3. Purple Rain
4. Grease

Four places I have lived:

1. Saigon, Vietnam
2. Phoenix, Arizona
3. Fayetteville, North Carolina
4. Portland, Oregon

Four TV shows I watch obsessively:

1. Farscape
2. Medium
3. Battlestar Galactica
4. Rome

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. London
2. Tijuana
3. various beaches: all the way down Florida to Key West, all the way down the Jersey shore to Cape May, all the way up Long Island to Montauk, and, of course, Southern California
4. all across the U.S., from the big - like San Francisco and Chicago - to the obscure - like Wall Drug, North Dakota - to the trashy - like the World's Fair in Knoxville, TN; Las Vegas; and New Orleans. Let it never be said that I am tasteful.

Favorite foods:

1. all things eggs: over-easy, omelets, quiches, anyway anyhow
2. tea, tea, tea (wee wee wee)
3. greens, greens, greens - topped with Annie's Shitake Mushroom dressing
4. Green and Black chocolate bars

Today’s Favorite Word:

rutabaga

A Stretch of Desert

2007-01-05T07:09:00.000-08:00

“I want to get away. I want to fly away. Yeah, yeah.”

Someone has just had a cigarette in the bathroom and then tried to cover it up with some kind of spray. Who does he think he’s kidding? I’m sitting on the Lucky Star watching black Connecticut stream by my window like a David Lynch film: obscure, occasionally breathtaking, and plotless. I want to write something meaningful, interesting, and cathartic, but nothing is coming to me. And I’ve been doing this long enough to know better than to force it. Like a young sibling keeping up, trying to impress an older one, when I force it, the piece comes off gangly and awkward in its self-importance. Read me. Read me, now. I am profound and you must weep! Well, maybe it comes off more absurd than anything else.

“I hope you meet someone your height so you can see eye to eye, with someone as small as you.”

It can’t happen that way. I’ve been doing this long enough to know when it’s right - that feeling of flow, of not being sure where it’s headed, but liking the words as I see them tumble out after having birthed themselves, and trusting that the final creation, the completed piece, knows what it’s doing better than I ever could. That’s the feeling I thirst for as much as a dry mouth thirsts for a sip of water or a shriveled passion thirsts for a shot of tequila. Yeah. There. What I just wrote. See what I mean? I’m not sure the flow is in me today.

“You’re spring to me. All things to me. Don’t you know you’re life itself?”

Meanwhile, through my headphones pumps words from writers who’d had better days than the one I’m having now. I’m swimming in an aural sea of meaning, without a drop to drink. I couldn’t resist that last bit. I’m feeling self-conscious now. Feeling the pressure to produce - to keep your attention, feeling ashamed that I’m posting this dreck. I mean, shut up woman, if you don’t have something to say. But I can’t stop. This desert could stretch forever if I allowed it. And I’m prone to dry skin and dehydration. The last thing I need is to sit here like flour. Or decay like a flower, depending on which frame of reference you prefer. Pick one. I’m having a hard time doing the work for you today. Sorry.

“There’s nothing left to do tonight but go crazy on you.”

But I can’t stop. I press these keys for a way out of this desert and I drag you with me. Soon, it will rain again, and then, a round of shots for all!

Approx. Spring 2004

2006-12-26T04:18:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

The Irritating Grain of Sand Inside My Shell

In a recent comment, Mister Swill asserted the freedom he feels from being an atheist, and then asked:

"If, indeed, we came into being by chance, and we were not designed for any specific function, why is that depressing rather than liberating? In other words, why does our purpose have to come from the outside rather than being defined by ourselves? Bonus question: Even if we were created for a specific purpose, why can't we decide that we really want to do something else?"

Jean Paul Sartre wrote long ago:

"The existentialist...thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be a priori of God, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevsky said, 'If God didn't exist, everything would be possible.' That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to."

Others, however, do not find existentialism distressing. Like Nietzsche. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85; Eng. trans., 1954), his most celebrated book, he introduced the concepts of the death of God, the superman, and the will to power. Vigorously attacking Christianity and democracy as moralities for the "weak herd," he argued for the "natural aristocracy" of the superman who, driven by the "will to power," celebrates life on earth rather than sanctifying it for some heavenly reward. Such a heroic man of merit has the courage to "live dangerously" and thus rise above the masses, developing his natural capacity for the creative use of passion. Which is why it is easy to see him saying things like the following: "In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. . . . Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty- he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world...."

Everybody, however, has their own reason for viewing existentialism darkly or lightly, and I can't speak for any of them. I will address, however, your assumption that for humans to have been created by a higher being means that any purpose which drives us must come from outside ourselves. This is not a given as I conceive of god. My assumption is that we are god. Under that paradigm, whether god made us or we made us becomes irrelevant. What is relevant is that we are all spirits having a human experience. Because we are spirits, living within these bodies is the spark of the divine – that’s what makes us god. Since this is what I believe, I can only answer your questions based on this assumption.

So, why are we here? There's probably something we need to learn. The purpose question, however, is a little more difficult. What do you mean by purpose? Do you mean what we do with our lives or what we learn? My purpose here is to learn how to speak the truth in a way that other people can hear it. I could be an actor and accomplish this. I could be a lawyer and accomplish this. I could be a writer and still accomplish this. So when you assert that not believing in God (Charleton Heston on the Mount as many christian faiths use the term) allows our purpose to come from inside ourselves rather than outside, I partly agree with you. Where we disagree is in our definition of “purpose.” I think you’re defining “purpose” as that which we do. I define "purpose" as that which we’re to learn. And I believe that neither is affected by a belief in God (or god either, for that matter). What I’ve come to learn is the same, whether I believe in God or not. And what I end up doing while I’m here is up to me, whether I believe in God or not. If, however, I believe in god - that spark of the divine within me - I will at least search to understand that which I’m supposed to learn. Because if I can learn consciously, then I can learn more, regardless of what I end up doing. The more I learn while I’m here, the less time I waste and the more meaning infuses my life. For me, meaning is everything. And if believing in god helps me with that, then it’s a good and useful belief. If you, however, find more meaning by not believing in God, then so be it.

Ultimately, you can do what you really want. You do define your purpose for yourself. And it is not necessarily depressing to think that God doesn't exist – I don’t know where you got that idea ‘cause I don’t believe I asserted it. By the way, just because you think God doesn't exist, doesn't mean he doesn't. (Say that five times fast.) Try this. Put aside your doubts for a moment and imagine that you are God. Are you imagining? Okay. Now imagine what it would feel like to not exist. I recommend trying to do this without the help of illegal substances.

Approx. Jan. 2004

2006-12-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

Revolutions

Sounds a lot like "resolutions" doesn't it?

One of my favorite sayings is, "You have to refill the well before you can give out sips of water."

It's easy to dismiss such pithy sayings, because they're easy to say but hard to truly understand; so hard sometimes, that they feel impossible to live much less understand. How can you live something you don't understand?

On the one hand, they’re easy to grab onto because they're warm and fuzzy and relieve us of reality. Like any other addiction, they allow us to forget how, or rather relieve us of the need to even try, to solve and salve reality on our own. Life can be overwhelming. It can push us to do something, but leave us too frazzled to know what. Is there any clearer a definition of despair? And when this happens, is anything harder to remember than that we are okay just as we are? That we need do nothing to be loved and accepted except be? Hard to remember, and, when gripped in those moments, impossible to live. That’s when we grab the pithy saying to do the work for us. Why despair? Just homilize! It’s okay. Everyone’s doing it.

On the other hand, a pithy saying may contain truth, but its truth can be hard to decipher because truth is different for each of us. What makes it even more difficult is that, when we do pinpoint it, truth rarely appears how we pictured or anticipated. I can’t think of anything more Sisyphean than the attempt to discover truth that is unique to each of us when we, additionally, have to overcome our expectations to find it. I’m reminded of Polonius, who, early in Shakespeare’s play, told Hamlet, “This above all: to thine own self be true.” That character was easy to laugh at because he homilized his entire way through the play, until he was pierced by Hamlet’s sword. Perhaps because he didn’t grasp the difficulty of doing that which he’d urged of Hamlet.

For some people, going home to our family and childhood friends is a form of "refilling the well." For me, it's an exercise in will. Don't get me wrong. I have made peace with my past. I take responsibility for myself and no longer actively cultivate accusations against those who shaped me. But when I lived in Oregon, "I" was shrouded by the misconceptions I lived. My journey over the past 14 years has been a slow, and often painful, stripping away of those misconceptions. I am more myself than I've ever been. Partly because, no longer camouflaged by misconceptions, I've begun to know myself. Mostly though, because, knowing myself more and more allows me to live more and more as myself in the world. And what are we, if not what we do?

Misconceptions, Addictions and Fear are the triumvirate controlling most lives. Most of us live as others think we should, because we Fear losing their love and acceptance. In order to do this, we employ Misconceptions - erroneous ideas about how we should live. Because living our lives for others, living lives contrary to our true feelings, causes pain, we then employ Addictions, because Addictions dull that pain and allow us to continue the course of our Misconceptions. If we don't feel our true feelings and continue to live our lives as others dictate, we remain unhappy. Turning this cycle around, making real change in our lives, learning how to listen to ourselves and cultivating the bravery to be ourselves in a world that wants us to live for convenience rather than for happiness, means we must confront and work through our Fears.

One way to do this is through New Year's Resolutions. Examples: I resolve to quit smoking; I resolve to lose weight; I resolve to manage my money better. Why do so many of us fail at our resolutions? Because once we start enacting these changes, our lives actually start to change. Shocking, I know. And what's more frightening than change? I'm supposed to quit smoking, but I had no idea that it would open my eyes to what a miserable sham my marriage is and lead me to think about leaving my husband. I'm supposed to lose weight, but I didn't expect that once I no longer had my weight as an excuse to feel badly about myself, that all the other reasons why I feel badly about myself would come to the surface. I'm supposed to manage my money better but I didn't expect that once I did, that I would have nothing left to complain about and that having nothing to complain about would be so frightening. Most of us fail our resolutions because we want change to come without fear. Hey, Universe, I made a resolution; why the hell are you handing me this revolution? Well, if we had just confronted our Fears in the first place, we would never have even entered into whatever ridiculous cycle that traps us. We cannot succeed at actually changing our lives if we cannot accept the fear that inevitably accompanies change, if we cannot accept the revolution. And since most of us evade fear, we fail at our resolutions.

When I go home to Oregon, it takes every effort to not slip back into my old Misconceptions, the ones that ruled my life when I was a teenager. In New York, I'm a scholar, a writer, a woman in touch with her feelings. In Portland, I write nothing. I read nothing but glossy women's magazines. I stay up late, drink more, spend most of my time on the couch in front of the television as a way to keep from talking to the people around me. Why? Because I need a lot of time alone. But in Oregon, I feel trapped with nowhere to hide. It’s a feeling I perfected as a teenager. Nobody's stopping me from taking time alone. It's just me stopping me as my newly discovered self struggles but fails to overcome years of habit. I cave in to just numbing myself and maintaining, rather than fighting, the status quo.

Not all is doom and gloom however. I reaped many benefits from my trip home - insight, laughs, warm moments with friends old and new, and a hefty chunk of Christmas money. Did I fill the well? Not really, but I have another week before school resumes in which to shake off those old Misconceptions and remember whom I am, again, and then to digest those insights and laughs, and then maybe to share them with you. Maybe. But I’m going to refill the well first, which, contrary to expectations in my case, has nothing to do with holidays, family or childhood.

Approx. Oct. 2004 II

2006-12-20T09:15:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

Adventures in Couch Surfing

One morning not so long ago, I was surprised by a hump of sleeping Indianians as I was making my scratching, sleepy-eyed and bathrobed way to the kitchen. In the two months we’d been co-habitating, it felt as if the entire Indiana tribe was slowly pilgrimaging after my then roommate, fresh off the bus herself, and that Ellis Island had relocated to our Queens living room. I’m exaggerating of course. She was just generous with our couches. This particular bunch had stayed a night longer than expected. And discovering their bodies still and unexpectedly entrenched in our living room - their alcohol-fueled, music-festival-adventures of the night before evaporating with each gentle snore - had caught my dream-addled personage off-guard. As if I had farted in privacy only to discover afterwards that I hadn’t been alone after all. I hadn’t actually minded though. In fact, being surprised by sleeping strangers in my house reminded me of my own youth, a time when I had frequently been generous with other couches. No really. Like the time I let a homeless person stay with me.

One summer, back in Portland, Oregon, this guy caught my attention. He always wore a parka and had been hanging downtown at a square usually inhabited by skate-punk, street-kid runaways. I noticed him because he was cute, and I was curious why he was living on the streets when he didn’t look like he was a punk-runaway himself. So I went up to him one day and asked what his deal was. John told me that he had found God/Jesus/what-have-you, and had given up his material life to roam the planet spreading the gospel as Jesus had. Though only 18, I was awed by the magnitude of his sacrifice. Here was a man who had given up everything even though his reward might amount to nothing more than Quixote’s windmill. My curiosity bloomed. What kind of person would do this? What had his experiences been so far? So I did what any hot-blooded teenager would do. I invited him to spend the night at my place.

At the time, I told myself that I was being altruistic, that I couldn't fathom anyone wanting to sleep on the hard sidewalks more than he'd have to, and that, with my roommate out of town, there was plenty of room in our top floor, two-bedroom for an errant messenger of God. And though I was truly curious about, and kind of admiring of, his life choice, I would be lying if I don’t also admit that I had hoped for a little sumpin-sumpin to add to my barely notched belt. Stop reading now, however, if you’re looking for a gruesome or lascivious end. John accepted my invitation on the condition that I allow him to labor in exchange for the shelter. So he cooked dinner, we talked, and I got to know him a bit. He wasn't a freak, not like New York City soapbox stumpers anyway. And his life-choice had been personal, not the result of cult indoctrination or orders from any specific religion. But mostly, he was humble. It's amazing how a little humility will egg-on a conversation about God. Patient? That’s the word I’m looking for. I was agnostic back then, but my difficult questions didn’t frighten him or put him on the defensive. John was extremely patient with me, in the way, I suppose, most girls need their first sexual partner to be. Except not only was there no sex that night, there wasn’t even any flirting. I do remember the conversation being light and fun though. And compassionate. We didn’t own any couches (but we did have plush carpeting, thank you very much). And, after dinner, John fell asleep on the floor of the living room. When I woke the next morning, he was already gone. He came by a few days later, to drop off a thank-you gift before he left Portland for good. It was a Salvation Army Bible onto which he’d stitched a leather cover. Inside, he’d marked his favorite passages and inscribed it, "To Belle, from Jesus (by your friend John)" with a quote from Philippians. That was the last time I saw him.

Now isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Shouldn't we be able to open our homes to those less fortunate without fear of rape or burglary or lice? How many Christians, much less ordinary non-religious people, do you think open their homes this way? I had no ulterior motive for my kindness: he offered dinner, I didn't require it; I was not looking to convert him to agnosticism; and any hope for sex was just that, hope, and not my ultimate motivation. But neither had John any ulterior motives. Though I did not follow Jesus, he did not need, nor did he try, to convert me. He was just grateful for the shelter. For life and breath. And for the opportunity to give. And I was just curious. And fearless. I have never invited a homeless person to sleep on my couch in New York, though it crosses my mind frequently, every time I see one of those college-aged kids sitting with the cardboard signs, the ones who look like they took a right in Albuquerque when they shoulda taken a left. But I have not felt that kind of fearlessness in a long time. I miss it. What changed, the world around me, or me?

I keep John’s Bible by my bed. Every time it catches my eye, I wonder what he’s doing now. Is he still on his Jesus kick or did something cynical boomerang him back into secular life? Did he ever meet the woman capable of knocking him off his celibacy? Or did he finally glide into a secluded monastery and continues his good works to this day? But I haven’t read it yet. I know that one day I will, but for the same reasons that I will also one day read Moby Dick, War and Peace and other great works of literature - because they are the greatest stories ever told. It’s interesting that, once upon a time, you were considered educated if you had read and could quote from the Bible. Nowadays, Bob Jones University is unaccredited. Maybe both have happened: I've changed, and so has the world around me. So John, if you’re still out there, I now own a couch that pulls out into a bed. You know, in case you still need a couch to surf.

Approx. Nov. 2004

2006-12-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

Giving Thanks after Thanksgiving

The day after Thanksgiving was one of the best of my life. God knows I needed it - it's been a helluva week: lots of miscommunication, high emotional energy from every front, and fatigue from running myself around too much. So I took advantage of having the apartment to myself (both roommates had left town for the holiday) and sent the alarm clock to hell, without dessert, the night before. That morning, for the first time since I don't know when, I woke up on my own volition. After lolling in bed for half an hour (no, I'm not going to tell you what I was doing), I padded into the kitchen - NAKED - and whipped up a breakfast burrito that Jamie Oliver would have creamed over (but not while naked, go figure), and put on a pot of tea. After eating and then popping my vitamins, I padded back into my room where the heat was cranked up against the first frost of Winter '04 and finished watching Tootsie, which I had started the night before while still in the throes of a turkey-induced coma. And then watched all of Kramer vs. Kramer.

Have I mentioned that I didn't shower until dinnertime? That I hadn't washed my hair in three days? Yes, it WAS the perfect time to lean in and give me a big kiss - I know you would have. Oh, and the piece de resistance was that my phone had spent the night in Manhattan, at my hosts' house, after I forgot it there. Again I blame the turkey. That was some good turkey. And I didn’t miss my phone at all.

God that was a good day.

Today, the day after the day after Thanksgiving, is turning out pretty good as well. I exchanged last night’s party plans for staying home and cooking for myself. I took an herbed bath, and I think I was asleep by 9:00. Unlike the day after Thanksgiving, I didn't linger too long in bed this morning. Oh wait, yes I did. I watched Rooster Cogburn, starring a cancer infested John Wayne and a wobbly Katherine Hepburn.

I read over this and have the urge to defend myself against those who might think that I'm getting old, I'm boring, or I'm a misanthrope. How is it that days in which I do absolutely nothing and see and speak to absolutely no one are the zenith of my life? It's that they were the days when I finally learned the pleasure of my own company, something that, when I was younger, I thought I already knew. I wasted faaaaaar too much of my 20's strangled by loneliness, before I figured out that, as a child, my own company had not really been pleasurable to me - that I had hid myself away only because being alone had been preferable to the company of my family. Isn't it interesting how long we can hang onto a lie? But really, if you're incapable of being your own best friend, what are you going to do in those moments when others - family, friends, lovers - have no time for you? It happens you know.

It took a long time after waking up from the lie before I actually and finally learned how to enjoy my own company. For real. And it's because these were the days in which I learned how to be my own friend that I give thanks after Thanksgiving.

Approx. Oct. 2004

2006-12-15T18:26:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

A kinder, gentler Belle

I was watching When a Man Loves A Woman the other day. The movie stars Meg Ryan as an alcoholic and Andy Garcia as her enabling husband. There was a scene where Ryan hits bottom and confesses to Garcia that she needs and is prepared to get help. She's scared. And Garcia looks at her lovingly and says something supportive along the lines of, "I love you, we'll get through this." And I started crying. Not because it was a touching scene - though it was. But because Garcia was kind in a situation where I would have been mean. I wondered why he wasn't screaming and yelling at her, "It's about time. Look at what you did to the kids. Look at what you've done to us. Not to mention what the neighbors think!" Because that's what I would have said.

My family's emotional response of first choice has always been anger. Things in our house were either peaceful or explosive. I don't remember there being anything in-between. I noticed this habit in myself early in my 20s, when my acting teachers would push me to reach for something else - sadness, vulnerability, charm, anything - before exploding into anger at the first turn of a scene. Audiences pay money to see truthful human behavior, all of it, not just anger; and with anger specifically, audiences (read, people in general) have a low tolerance. There's only so much of it they can be subjected to before they tune out. I inherited my family’s nasty habit of jumping first and quickly to anger, and it has stopped me from living my life. It has turned a lot of opportunities and people away from me, shielded me not only from the things I don't want, but also from things I do want.

So when Andy Garcia reacted to Meg Ryan not with anger, but with gentleness and support, I cried for the person I yearn to be - a kinder, gentler Belle. Someone who isn't so consumed by fear that she only knows how to push people away with her yelling and screaming and accusations.

My name is Belle, and I have anger management issues.

Hi Belle.

Approx. Sept. 2003

2006-12-09T05:54:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

Love is an absent gun

One of my guilty pleasures is the occasional devouring of a women's magazine like Glamour or Cosmopolitan, partly to see if anything new has been added to their cycle of topics, but mostly to keep abreast of the crap we're feeding the next generation of women. A couple of months ago, I read one that featured an article on domestic violence. It contained a chart listing all women who'd been killed at the hands of their significant others within a local area and a specified time period. The article didn't provide the statistic, so I counted up manually, how many deaths, out of the total, had been caused by a gun (instead of strangulation, knives, or other means). Unfortunately I don't have the article any more so I can't recall exactly what my statistic was, but a ballpark would be 45 out of 50. I had to wonder, given the general laziness of people, how many of those deaths would have occurred had the perpetrator been forced to make an effort to kill his beloved? The body is resilient and has an ability to reshape itself that is due more credit than we give it. Plus, it's hard to kill someone. Many bullets to the head don't actually kill their victims. If a gun is an easy way to kill someone and many bullets to the head don't actually kill their victims, imagine how much of an effort it would take to kill another person with one's bare hands.

I had read the article the day after my birthday party, during which a friend of a friend had shocked me with her declaration: "I like guns. Shooting them is fun!" And then proceeded to wax rhapsodic about its pleasures for five minutes. If reading the article alone didn’t sadden me, having done it on the heels of the birthday declaration certainly did the trick. You see, I grew up in the stranglehold of domestic violence. When there was no Mommy or Step-Mommy to distract my father's rage, it was directed to me. I shudder to think what might have happened had my father kept a gun.

Domestic violence is a pattern. Generally, those who grew up in violent households become perpetrators and victims as adults. This was the case with my ex-husband Jeffrey, who, during our marriage, had been keeping a gun, against my wishes, in our apartment. The day I left him for good, I told him that I had fallen in love with someone else, and that I was moving out. As he held me up against the bookshelf by my neck, all I could think about was that a firearm was within reach. Not that I was going to use it - by choice, I didn't even know where it was kept. But I prayed that he wouldn't use it. After about a half hour, the police intervened, and I had them confiscate the weapon. My words were, "Take it before he hurts himself or someone else with it." At the time, it was illegal in New York to possess an unregistered, sawed-off shotgun. I hope that is still true today.

I had tried to leave Jeffrey before, at other times during our tumultuous relationship. There had been a history of verbal abuse and furniture destruction, but, until that day, he had never put his hands on me. I'm certain, however, that had I stayed any longer, the violence would have escalated. When I left my father's house, I swore to myself that I would not repeat the domestic violence pattern. I made good my promise the day I finally left Jeffrey.

I do not believe that eradicating guns is the cure-all to society's violence. Men would still murder their girlfriends and wives. Mothers and fathers would still beat their kids. Incest would continue. And I'm not sure that I want guns completely eradicated, because I can't predict all contingencies. I can't declare with certainty that there will never be a day in the future when I might feel it's necessary to take up arms either against my own government or another invading force, or to just protect myself and my children should we ever find ourselves living in lawless times. And it is true that a gun is not capable of killing anything without a human hand, with its opposable thumb and all, pulling the trigger. But the problems we have with violence are centuries away from being solved, and until the day we have systems in place that ensure the peaceful resolution of our collective anger, deregulation of guns - putting them in the hands of persons who do not comprehend the consequences of their actions, letting guns freely circulate within a society that not only can't manage its anger but actually engages and escalates it - is both suicidal and genocidal.

Whatever I feel about Michael Moore's propagandist tactics, I believe and support the content of Bowling for Columbine. If you haven't already, go see it. And if you feel the need to do more, learn about Sarah Brady and the Brady Campaign.

Approx. Dec. 2003

2006-12-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

Poker with the Boys

I'm three scotches to the wind and it's fuckin' ass cold outside. I've lost $25 in a game with a $20 buy-in, on a budget with nothing coming in. Andy, drunker than I've ever seen him, claims that I am “the best looking one at the table.” “Without a doubt,” confirms Paul. I play Vanna White, dealing their final games of high stakes Omaha. “This is POKER!” Andy exclaims more than once. After, we convene under the awning, hands shaking as we light up our cigarettes, talking about the euphoria of high-stakes gambling, why Bruce Springsteen sucks, and what it's like growing up with Central Park as your back yard. I think my luck has finally turned around because, just as I push my way through the turnstile, my train arrives. It takes a minute before I notice, in the corner opposite me, a voice that puts Tom Waits' to shame.

“... and I was neither cold or hot. And I was neither alive or dead.” His teeth were rotted. His hair could have hosted birds. “How do you know what God looks like? You don't. You don't. He is energy.” His jeans were ripped in unfortunate places and held together with a cacophony of stitching and safety pins. “He is energy that wraps around you. All that stuff about male and female... it don' mean nothing, 'cause God is energy.” He's looking at me now. I share embarrassed smiles with the yellow-fleeced man sitting next to me. On the next bench down, two hand-holding lesbians giggle. Further down, a Hispanic man wraps his arm protectively around his Latina. The bench after that, a gay man stops digging in his gym bag long enough to check out a trim blond exiting the train. “And it is so warm, that feeling that you are loved. When you are wrapped in that energy. You don't care about your physical pain, you don't care about what you own, because of that feeling of warmth, because you are loved.” He's looking at me still. His foot is wrapped in a bandage all the way to his ankle. It is stained yellow by its own juices. And. God. The smell! I exit at 103rd and wish that I had brought gloves to protect against the biting cold. Wish that I had $6 to buy more cigarettes.

My life is so compartmentalized and harried these days. I wonder if it really happened that, this morning, I woke up in the warmth of my lover’s arms. Longing to lounge away the day with him, my schedule, stabbing me out of bed, triumphed instead. That, this afternoon, I was so absorbed in a paper on copyright infringement that I was still writing it in my brain an hour after I arrived at the poker game. And that, not an hour ago, I was rocking out to AC/DC watching my mid-thirties poker buddies air-guitar and beat imaginary drums as if it were all still good. But now, I open the door to my empty apartment, and I am alone in the way that only happens in Manhattan. And in that darkness, it’s easy to worry whether my fate isn’t going to be the same as God-man's.

Approx. Aug. 2003 - first ever post

2006-12-02T16:19:00.000-08:00

December is "Best of" Month - Introduction

9/11

Frankly, I think it makes perfect sense for us humans to simply destroy ourselves, wipe the planet clean of our mess and start over. Maybe next time, the Native Americans, who live for the 7th generation, will win out over the Europeans and Americans, who live for....what? I still haven’t figured it out. It’s not such a horrific thought if you consider the age of our planet and how it has already survived the human race destroying itself many times over. If you stand back far enough – take a look at a big enough picture – humans are insignificant. We have time to start over, to learn, to eventually get it right. It just means accepting the potential deaths of our loved ones, our cultures, ourselves. Oh but wait, we’re all gonna die anyway aren’t we? So how is what I’m proposing any different an ending?

To fix the crises human beings have created, it will take a universal movement of each and every single one of us taking personal responsibility for changing ourselves. Because every single existing institution – government, religion, science, etc. – is manned by humans who are tainted with the pain, erroneous thinking, and hopelessness that is insidious in civilization. It’s like building a house. If all the bricks are removed and replaced by soapstone, granite, twigs - anything – then the house itself changes. As an aside, there are certainly plenty of good things about civilization worth saving: art, charity, toys, chocolate cake. But those aren’t what's causing wars, and I am certain that we will find them again when we rebuild.

I am not a savvy political thinker. I have no recommendations for how the human race can do this - force a universal change in our fundamental understanding of what it means to be human and how to treat each other – but I know for certain that until it happens, nothing but nothing will stop our current course towards complete annihilation. Not in our lifetime but in the not-so-distant future, New York City will be uncovered in an archeological dig similar to those that uncovered the Mayan ruins, the Egyptian pyramids and, some say, the lost city of Atlantis. Who cares who’s to blame at that point? Osama bin Laden or Bush or Clinton or the Israelis – what the fuck will it matter by then?

This is simple thinking, maybe, but it is the only thinking that I believe will bring about real and permanent change. Everything else is a band-aid slapped over a wound that needs antibiotics.

"Author's Favorites" Defined

2006-12-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

I'm kind of amazed at how long I've kept the site going, albeit in new and evolving forms. I've seen other sites come and go. And also evolve. But mostly go. I don't think the content of No Apologies has changed that much over the past four years. Except that, after experiments with different storytelling conventions - writing as other characters, linking more than writing, attempts to specialize, comment whoring, etc. - I've found my voice.

"Finding one's voice" is the appropriate, graduate school, writing class phrase used to describe when a writer finally becomes comfortable with herself and stops being self conscious about what anyone else thinks about her writing. It's also the red herring of writing. Finding your voice doesn't necessarily mean you'll become successful as a writer, at least not in the conventional, financial sense. So many writers strive to find their voice thinking that once they do, they'll be able to quit their day jobs. It's kind of like going into therapy thinking that once you name your issues, you'll be done. You realize that you do A, B, C because of that time in your childhood when your father did X, Y, Z. Then you get disappointed when, after the big "break through!" happiness fails to flood your life. Naming your issues is only the beginning step towards self-realization. And a writer finding her voice is the same - only the beginning of her journey. But judging by how little I care anymore about what anyone else thinks about my writing, I think I've made progress. I'm not about to quit my day job, however.

I've saved a handful of articles from the original site that I thought were any good (there weren't many I tell you wot), and will be posting them throughout December. Judge for yourself whether I've grown.

Ouch!

2006-11-28T05:48:00.000-08:00

By the end of this week, I will have turned in three papers and begun researching my civil disobedience paper in earnest. Can you see the blood dripping from my ears? My brain hurts. And I’ve pretty much given up on all my other schoolwork, except for client related work. Knock on wood, that’s been quiet for about a week. Though in another week, I have my next court appearance for one client, and I’ve requested a new hearing for a returning client. Ya, that shit’s gotta end.

Thanksgiving was good. I cooked my first ever full-on Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and stuffing and gravy and everything. Then I didn’t cook for the next four days. Well, except breakfast – French toast, pancakes, omelets, etc. I am sad to now be returning to New York. My return is a day later than it’s supposed to be, because I do not want to return to class. I do not want to see classmates and get all caught up in school drama. I just want to hole up and finish off these papers and do research.

In fact, I just want to hole up. It happens to me every winter, the need to hibernate. To crawl under some large quilt with my feet wrapped in fleece, drinking warm liquids all day long – tea and coffee and broth – and watch TV and write and read. Whatever I want. With no obligations to anyone other than my own whims. It seems about the only time I get to do all that is when I’m sick. Which is what I was last weekend – with the flu. Kids, don’t get the flu this year. It’s horrible. I haven’t had the flu in years, so this year’s is particularly kick-ass. I was throwing up and out of commission for about three days, and my energy is still slowly, coming back. There was no way I was escaping it this year since my husband and one of my roommates got it. I was cornered. Anyway, when I talk about hibernating, I’m talking about all those things you do when you’re sick, only doing them even when you’re not sick. You get the picture.

I will have a handful of days in which to do that. The semester ends Dec. 7th, then there’s two weeks of exams, most of which I will spend in Boston studying and writing. I have one sit-in exam and two papers, that I will be redrafting for the end of the exam period, which is Dec. 22nd. Then I’ll have three days before I bring the hubby home to meet my family in Oregon. Can you guess what I’ll be doing for those three days?

Whew!

2006-11-17T05:15:00.000-08:00

What a week. I'd like to stay home today and recuperate because I feel a cold coming on. However, my school nominated me to attend a women's leadership conference in Manhattan. It's an honor to be nominated, so I feel I shouldn't blow it off. Besides, there's an afternoon sesson on ethics in business, which I hope to make my area of expertise. So, despite being on antibiotics and underslept and gargling saltwater and popping Air Borne, I will dress up and get out there and network network network - WOO HOO!

In other news, I have a session scheduled with Professor Ghandi to discuss my civil disobedience paper, as it stands so far. Wish me luck. I don't know if the whole "writing a journal" thing has been working, especially considering I have not read much in the current reading package on slavery. No, I take that back. The writing has helped - my position on what we've read this semester is actually pretty clear to me. My insecurity stems from my aversion to writing objective analysis of other people's theories. I feel that the best I can do is write my subjective opinion, formed by comparing my experiences against those other theories. So that's what I write. My trouble lies in believing that what I write carries any weight whatsoever. I mean, who am I? Why should anyone care what I think about the social contract, positivist law, or whether or not there are any justifications for civil disobedience? Because I don't yet have any cred, I presssure myself to super support my assertions with work by those who have cred, or else, in the absence of other authority, to walk readers through an air-tight rationalization of my assertions. And who has the damn patience to do that??!! I know, it could just all be part and parcel of my own issues with arrogance and humility. But hey, this is the journey.

So here's a question for all you blurkers out there - should I take my school's Bar prep course for four credits next semester, or should I take two two-credit classes that are being taught by a visiting professor that sound much more interesting to me: Law and Psychology, and Critical Legal Studies? Everybody at my school freaks out about taking the Bar because the school traditionally has a low Bar-passage rate (except last year we pulled up to the state's average). This isn't because of the quality of the education, but because my school offers and emphasizes non-traditional classes. The school I attended in my first year had an incredible Bar passage rate, but students were required to take Bar classes well into their second year. Man! That would have killed me. I'm already registered for a couple of Bar prep courses and I'm not certain that an additional Bar prep course is going to help me do any better. Additionally, after all the agita I've been through with law school, I'd like to spend my last semester studying stuff that I'd enjoy. Plus, the two classes I'm interested in don't have a final exam, which would free me up to start my Bar prep courses on time, as our exam period overlaps with the Bar prep schedule. But I don't know. Maybe I should be worried about the Bar. I mean, what's the point of everything I went through with law school if I don't pass the Bar? On the other hand, who says I have to pass the Bar the first time around?

What do you all think?

Perfection

2006-11-16T04:44:00.000-08:00

This is the perfect post. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this post in even the most miniscule way. Everybody loves this post and consequently loves me.

Hah!

We all know perfection's a trap, don't we? If self-righteousness is my favorite addiction, then perfectionism is my second favorite. Perhaps I have control issues? I can see my husband nodding his head "yes" right now. But I'm better than I used to be. No, really! I am. Yesterday I represented a client who had a weak case. We (my supervising attorney and I) made our best arguments in front of the most irritable and unhappy ALJ I've had to go before thus far. When I insisted on making closing arguments, he rolled his eyes and exclaimed, "You mean we're not done yet?!" My supervising attorney had to explain the law to him cause he was offering us remedies that were not provided by the laws we were using to support our arguments. Yes, it was all very exciting. After we were actually done, my supervisor exclaimed that we weren't going to win, though she did confess that the more certain she is of what an ALJ will do, the more likely she is to be wrong. Which basically leaves us at, "I don't know how the ALJ will decide." Unfortunately, she said this in front of our client. We remedied the gaff as best as possible by assuring our client that she'd done everything right (in her actions and testimony), and we had made all our best arguments. Our client appreciated the help, and was impressed by our performance ("It's good to see you guys in action!")

Back to control. Friends have told me more than once, and I try to remember it as best I can, that all I have control over are my responses to what the world brings me. And yesterday showed me that I have made improvement in this area. Before, I would have been torn up and upset over my lack of certainty (read: control) over what the ALJ will do. Today, I'm happy that I did the best I could and understand that I don't have control over any more than that. The funny twist to this is that my freedom from the trap of perfection does not reduce my concern over my client's welfare. If she loses this hearing, she has to reapply for benefits, PLUS the agency will take back the money it's been paying her during the pendancy of the hearing. She is a single mother of two who is going for her bachelor's degree in biology. She's smart and capable, and I'm worried how she'll get by if we lose. We, of course, can appeal. In fact, there's major litigation developing around the issue in this client's case. But that will take months - possibly years - and won't help my client in the short run. In other words, I don't have to be torn up over being imperfect, because even when I am perfect (to the best of my ability), I get to be worried over something else.

Back when I was still justifying my addictions, I used to like to say that being perfect would be boring, ie, I have to drink to excess, because my flaws made life interesting; I have to have dramatic relationships, because life would be boring if I were loved and happy and had everything I wanted. So, while I've learned/am learning one lesson, new unforseen lessons are developing: that, in letting go of perfection, I, ironically, become more perfect; and that life itself is interesting, I do not have to develop or nurture imperfections for fear that perfection is boring. Yeah, it kind of makes my brain hurt too.

Conclusions

2006-11-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I’m freaking out about this paper. By some divine intervention, I was able to squeak out about two hours last week to pound out an outline of what I’d love to write. At first it was amazing and exhilarating. But then I started reviewing the outline during class and realized that there’s no way in hell I can write what I want, because I barely have enough time to read for class much less do the additional research my outline requires. All I can give to this paper is my own understanding of spirituality, and whatever skill I can muster to analyzing the materials from class according to my spiritual understanding. That has to be good enough and I intend to approach my professor with my idea as it is not entirely out of line with other options he has offered the class. But for some reason, I am terrified of discussing it with him. I think mostly because I am proposing that I lay my spiritual-self bare to the legal system. If I possessed any true faith, I would understand that faith is stronger than any man-made set of rules like the law. But my faith is not so strong. I look around me and everywhere I see ego laying waste to consciousness. Faith is about the unseen. Reaching the unseen takes energy, and I have none at the moment.

On a similarly gloomy pitch, I’m arriving back in New York armed with several documents dug out from my archives: an agreement with a credit card company that actually does not reverse the negative status of my credit reports; a letter given to me at the beginning of my transfer to my current law school detailing the number of credits that I have to complete in order to graduate, and which does not help me argue to have the number of credits I have to take next semester reduced to a manageable level; and a loan application co-signed by my husband, which may or may not pass.

I am tired of finishing off old business. This past week I put out extra energy and effort I didn’t have in attempts to complete future tasks. Those efforts did not pay off. And most of all, I do not have the energy to struggle with my financial situation any longer. I think about quitting law school every day. It is a reprehensible, hazing system that everyone agrees is horrible but which no one changes. The problem at my law school is its representation of itself as being different from other law schools. Because of this representation, the student body is different from other law schools, but ultimately, the school itself – its administration, its understanding of law – is no different. Generally, I don’t fight it. I keep my nose to the grindstone and attempt to flow with the punches, and this, mostly, saves my ass. Because I don’t waste energy on battles I can’t win and put all my energy into those battles I can.

But today, on the heels of this past week, I have no extra energy to give to anyone. So don’t even bother to ask.

Headless and Homeless

2006-11-04T04:01:00.000-08:00

I dreamt last night, that I had returned to New York after a long period away. I was trying to get to a place that I'd been to before, some place uptown on the west side, but got lost because the subway systems and such had changed so much. Frustrated by my ignorance and overwhelmed by the crowds, I staggered down a hall that led out of the subway station and slumped against a wall, trying to regain my equilibrium. I was slumped across from the open door of a liquor store - some of the underground subway caverns boast businesses. Through the open door I saw a person - a man, I think - walking, so to speak, around the store buying booze. He was homeless from the way he was dressed, and one leg was missing from the knee down. But he didn't have crutches or a prosthetic or anything. So when he limped, he had to bend a long way to accomodate the missing limb. And his head was wrapped with a bandage. From the shape of the bandage, it looked as if half his head - from his lower jaw up - was missing. I wondered how it was that he could see much less think with the entire upper portion of his head completely gone. But that's only what it looked like, remember, because he was wrapped with a decrepit bandage. I could still see, however, part of his jaw, the part that sloped into his neck.

The man bought his bottle of something - big and expensive it looked - and walked out of the store. Once outside, another man who'd been waiting for him, put his arm around him and helped him walk deeper into the subway station. From the back, I could see stains of puss seeping through his pants. His clothes and bandages were obviously covering some serious disease or wounding. And after they'd walked a couple steps, I heard him groan. It was short and quiet, but it carried about a hundred pounds of weary in it. The image was so disturbing that it woke me up. It was about 20 minutes before my alarm was set to go off.

I have no idea what my subconscious is trying to tell me, but I suspect it's nothing good. Can you hear me laughing maniacally?

Not from the Same Place

2006-11-03T05:37:00.000-08:00

I write a lot about feeling different from everyone else. But then constantly reaffirm that I am equal to everyone - that we are all equal. These two assertions could seem contradictory, especially if you have a hard time with the "separate but equal" theory that supported major judicial decisions during the segregation era. Where these potentially disparate assertions come from is complicated.

I believe that there are three parts to all of us - the body, the ego, and the spirit. There are variations on this that one can find throughout psychology and new age practices - the id/ego/superego/child/adult/8 chakras/energy meridians, etc. There were enough theories out there to lead me to believe that there are separations and "parts" to ourselves, but it was my own inquiry that led me to the three-part-division above. And it is on the basis of my own inquiry alone that I assert the three-part division to be true. The body is simple - it is the particles that pull together energetically to build our material form. As I consider emotions to be physical, the body includes them as well. The ego is any part of our logical/rational selves, whether conciousness/ego/left or right brain. It is the part that knows how to animate the arm, to read hunger pangs and find nutrition to satisfy them, to develop language, and to express love.* The spirit is the eternal mystery of us all. Some call it the subconscious. Others call it God. It is the place inside that is unaffected by material or physical concerns, and it has a voice that all of us are capable of tuning into, but relatively few do. And even after one learns how to tune into it - through yoga, meditation, nature, self-reflection, etc. - one then has the difficulty of learning to actually listen to it.

A helpful analogy (or not) is that of a bus. The bus is the body - the physical and mechanical form. The driver is the ego - the guy that makes the bus move forward, turn, signal; the guy who fills it up with gas. And the navigator is the spirit - it has and interprets the roadmap that we're supposed to follow in this lifetime. It's possible for the driver to listen to the navigator, but a lot of times it doesn't. When the driver doesn't, is when we get onto the wrong road, or get into crazy accidents that damage the body. The driver wants to be in full control of the bus. It knows that it will no longer be useful, and that it will dissolve, once the bus goes to The Great Junkyard In The Sky. So its power struggle with the navigator is, in essence, a struggle for its life. It can't reconcile itself to the truth, which is that, its life IS limited and nothing it does will change that. It is subject to road rage and tantrums and affected by all sorts of material concerns such as dead ends, stopped traffic and mechanical malfunctions. It's almost as if it believes that the busier it is, the louder it screams and the more intense its emotions, the more proof it has of its permanency. But it's not permanent. Only the navigator is permanent. The navigator doesn't get angry or perplexed when the driver doesn't listen to it; it has infinite patience. When you're eternal, what the hell do you care if the bus breaks down or you get a speeding ticket, or that some asshole ego wants to turn right instead of left at Albuquerque?

I feel that most of my decisions result from my struggle to shut up my inner driver and pay attention to my inner navigator - that my thoughts and perceptions, more often than not, come from a spiritual place, though only after great concentration and effort mind you. When I say I feel different from everyone else, it's because I feel most people are listening, instead, to their driver and, when I express my opinion, those who don't likewise base their decisions on their navigator - which is the majority of us - can't understand me. In fact, they're all wondering why I'm not pissed off because I got a ticket or that traffic has slowed down; they don't know why I'm not, like them, listening to my driver. When I say that we're all equal, it's because I believe that we all have this inner driver and navigator, and that we are all capable of getting in touch with that part of ourselves that is eternal. Most of use don't, however, for many unfortunate reasons: fear, ignorance, we haven't hit bottom yet, class-based reasons, etc. While I have made one choice and most of the world has made another, the entire world has the capacity to make the same choice.

When I say that I feel different, it's because I feel that my decisions and most of the world's decisions are not made from the same place. But it does not then follow, necessarily, that we are unequal. We all have the same capacity. The only differences between us are in the choices we make. Capacity and choice are connected, but not in a cause/effect way. But the way in which they are connected can cause a great deal of frustration and discomfort. Feeling different and misunderstood all the time is frustrating and annoying, and, when one lives with it on a continual basis, an easy way to explain one's discomfort is to assign it a cause/effect relationship. "I feel different all the time, and no one around me understands me - I must be better than everyone else!" is much easier to understand than, "I'm different, and no one around me understands me - we must be equal...." Wha!!?? But that assignation is where a lot of well-meaning people - like, dare I say it, my father - get stuck. That's why we get a lot of sourpussy, liberal, dogmatic progressives. But I'm certain, without an authority to cite, that two dogmas do not a hierarchal relationship make. They just shut down dialogue and replace it with violence.

And that, my friends, is my not-so-simple explanation for my complicated way of living.

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* Note that I write "express love." It is the purview of the body to feel love, but the purview of the ego to express it. Feeling and expressing are separate. Ever had someone claim to love you but who then never expressed it?

Time Wasting

2006-11-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

Should be hightailing it to school right now to wrap up any one of several obligations, but fuck 'em. I did ten hours of client work yesterday and I'm not even getting paid. Below, for your apathetic pleasure, yet one more MySpace survey.

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1. You're Infected. Your Top 8 has the cure. One must die. Who goes?
I don't even know 8 people. Oh, you mean on MySpace - probably one of the guys I've listed as a "friend" whom I don't even know.

2. What MySpace friend knows the REAL you best?
What is real?

3.Describe a typical Sunday for you:
Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, laundry, lots of cooking, a movie in the evening.

4. Any odd routines you follow when you wake up?
Odd? I find waking up pretty odd.

5. If alcohol was banned worldwide, what would your reaction be?
"Yeah, like that worked really well last time they tried it."

6. When was the last time you cried?
Prolly within the last week.

7. Your CD collection is going to be repossessed. You may keep one.
Take them all - don't need them.

8. Do you believe world peace is possible?
I often think the impossible is possible. But the way I envision the impossible happening never looks how others might imagine. Yes, world peace is possible, but only within communities of 150 or less, and community by community. If the world ever broke itself down that way, and every community committed itself to finding peace among its own, then yes, world peace is possible. Will world peace ever happen on a global scale, across international borders, among communities of the sizes that now exist? Prolly not.

9. I'm a genie. Name your wish. (Money and Love cannot be granted).
To dissolve my own blocks to personal happiness. Basically, I'd like to learn how to stand up and say, "No."

10. Name one thing about the OPPOSITE sex that automatically turns you off.
Willful blindness

11. Name one thing about the SAME sex that automatically turns you off.
Willful blindness

12. Speaking of SAME sex, what do you think of Brokeback Mountain?
A poignant statement about the world's inability to allow people to be themselves.

13. What popular phrase do you find to be incredibly annoying?
Nothing out there is nearly as annoying as this question. Just point out to me how out of the loop I am why doncha?

14. Where are you?
My New York apartment.

15. Leatherface is in the kitchen. Will you fight to victory, or hide?
How 'bout shoot him with the tranquilizer gun I just happen to keep under the sink *ahem* and then call the guys with the white coats?

16. Do you feel that people underestimate you?
I feel people overestimate me.

17. When you're in a bad mood, what will always put you in a better mood?
Blogging usually.

18. Honestly, do you talk about MySpace in real life?
No.

19. Have you met someone online in person?
Yes, lots of people, but not anymore.

20. When it comes to cybersex, are you game?
Boring.

21. Do you believe minimum wage should be raised?
I think corporations should be democratized. If they were, we wouldn't have to worry about a minimum wage.

22. If someone at a bar gives you "the look" how do you respond to it?
Laugh. Whose he kidding?

23. Desperation happens. Do you take advantage of desperate people?
No.

24. Pretend you're 15 deep in beers. Describe what you would be doing now?
Puking.

25. Does everyone in your life know the real you?
See 2., above.

26. What is something you're afraid of?
Inadvertently letting someone down.

27. Pretend you took a hit out of a bong. Describe what you would be doing now?
If I were smoking weed, I'd be unable to do anything, much less describe it.

28. Have you ever had a beer bong?
Tried one once when I was 18; couldn't keep it down.

29. You have two weeks to live. Would you tell anyone?
I'd probably blog about it.

30. Do you deny people from friend request and why?
No one ever asks anymore. I don't check into MySpace enough to be popular. And I'm weeping into my tea over it.

Part of the Same Addiction

2006-11-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

So law school was a decision made in the grips of my worst addiction. The truth - which I can see only now that I’ve tried to do something else - is that I’m an artist. My dissatisfaction with art came from the perception that artists have no power in this world. And for the most part, they don’t – that perception is valid. My error was in thinking that lawyers had more power. No one has the power to make the world go in any direction. At least not consciously.

I had wanted to be an artist so I could tell stories that would change the world. After 10+ years as an artist and having changed nothing, I decided that lawyering would be a better route to create change. Hah! I can be there for my clients, support them and help them accomplish what they want, but I can’t change my client’s underlying belief system, can’t erase what she thinks about herself or how she envisions her world. Her thoughts are what direct her choices and create her behaviors. If the way she thinks doesn’t change, then her choices and behavior won’t change, which means her life won't change. All I can do is try to create a safe place for her to land (create it sometimes in spite of my client) - try to get her into a place where she can stop and think about changing her beliefs. Whether or not she takes the opportunity to do that is completely beyond my control. You can lead a horse to water, etc. Nothing changes on the outside that hasn't first changed on the inside. And nothing that comes from the outside – whether it be art or a trial – makes any difference. The only reason to think I can make any change in the world is because I think I’m right and everyone else doesn’t get it, which is, as you know, my worst addiction.

Flash forward four years and $120,000 worth of debt later. Law school has been an expensive lesson. And my future career remains in doubt. I know the direction I want to go in, but it will only be worthwhile if it brings me stability and peace. Fuck changing the world. Fuck defining what I am – artist or lawyer. That’s hubris. I am just like anyone else. I am as small as the rest of us. Which means none of us is small, because we are all equal. And adding a bunch of letters behind my name makes no difference. Leaving pieces of my life behind me, archived in some museum or library also makes no difference. The only thing that makes a difference is realizing that nothing makes a difference.

Do you ever wish people were dead?

2006-10-31T03:08:00.000-08:00

They say that one of the symptoms of trauma is unbidden thoughts coming to one’s mind. Like, memories of the traumatic event, or thoughts of similar types of trauma. I’ll walk around the streets of New York and, out of the blue, I’ll have an image of getting hit in the head, sometimes with a bullet, sometimes with a blunt instrument. I used to worry about those thoughts, used to worry that I harbored secret desires for suicide. Except now I know that they’re just echoes of trauma. Not that I was ever bludgeoned in the head… no wait a minute. Yes I was. Remember The Butcherwoman of Phoenix? That was a blow to the head. Well, there you have it. Echoes of trauma. And that’s just the way it is when you’ve survived stuff like that, and I’ve come to know it now.

But what I want to write about today are thoughts that disturb me still. Sometimes I wish people were dead. And no, I don’t wish that they actually were. I only long for the peace that I suspect their disappearance would bring me. Truth be told, I probably wouldn’t be any more peaceful. But it’s nice to blame something outside myself for my unrest, isn’t it. It’s weird when these thoughts come unbidden, because I don’t have the same reaction to death that I suspect most people have. I don’t wish death on anyone as revenge. In many instances, when I think of someone’s death, I think how much happier that person might be if he didn’t have to deal with what plagues his conscious life. Of course, I know that death is not my decision to make, and these thoughts are NOT accompanied by ideas on how to bring about anyone’s death. But they ARE accompanied by guilt because I’m so entrenched in the world, that something inside me says I MUST feel guilty for wishing for someone’s death. Even though I don’t feel like death is a bad thing. It just is, like being sick with the flu, or like the color of one’s hair – pre-ordained, immutable and/or inevitable. So why the guilt? If death isn’t a bad thing, why should I feel guilty wishing it upon anyone?

We fear the unknown. And despite all science’s advances, we are still no closer to understanding what exists beyond the life we know here. It is the unknown we fear, and it is the unknown we judge. If we don’t know it, it must be bad. And I’m as caught up in all that illusory thinking as anyone else. Certain people, I would miss if they were to die. But I don’t think anyone close to me who died would really be that far away. And I’m old enough to stop caring what other people might think were they to catch me talking to a dead loved one, say, in my kitchen while baking muffins. They talk about carrying one’s loved ones in one’s heart even after they pass. I’m a little more literal. Someone may be in my heart, but that doesn’t mean that particles of his life energy aren’t still floating around this plane of consciousness after his body has been discarded. Call me crazy if you want. It’s okay. But don’t call me on my guilt. I’m sensitive about that still.

V for Vendetta

2006-10-22T10:53:00.000-07:00

I hadn't considered that watching that movie might trigger some thoughts about civil disobedience. There are some nice quotes in it. And I like the Wachowski Brothers. I think a lot of times, when they get criticized for bad filmmaking, it's not the filmmaking the critics are responding to, but the content of the films. Rather than admit that it makes them uncomfortable to think about their own complicity in the shittiness of the world - which the Wachowski's deal with a lot - critics will pull apart their films for being bad art. But people - read critics - aren't stupid; they're probably, mostly, willfully blind. Of course, as the film was wrapping up, I was thinking I should get right online and put all my thoughts down. But I took a shower and made tea instead. And now that I'm finally here, an hour after I put the dvd back into its case, I can't recall what I thought was so profound.

I am avoiding going to school. I have a hearing tomorrow and there are some niggling things to pull together still. But I am still reeling from a client emergency that happened yesterday and that tugged on my childhood issues. It's tough. I sometimes feel like I'm working twice as hard as my classmates. Twice because not only am I doing the work of representing my clients, but I'm also working to manage myself. I don't get the feeling that any of my classmates are having the same struggles. I know that ultimately what I'm doing is good and right and I'll come out the other end stronger (better, faster, cue Six Million Dollar Man theme song here), but right now, life kinda sucks. No, not really. Right now, it's my attitude that sucks.

[SPOILER WARNING - DON'T KEEP READING IF YOU HAVEN"T SEEN V FOR VENDETTA AND CARE TO BE SURPRISED BY ITS ENDING.]

So, V for Vendetta... For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Does that really mean that if there are monsters in the world, they are merely products of the world? And does love conquer all? After having accused V of being a monster, was it her love or her own conversion to the dark side that caused Evie to pull the lever? And why didn't Stephen Rea stop her? Do we really believe that words are that powerful? Could I say that blowing up the Parliament building is a way of shutting down dialogue? How much is enough when we live in the shadow of a government that shuts down dialogue? Can you say "Bush administration"? During those times, is killing a justifiable form of civil disobedience? And if it is, what is the criteria, how can we be certain when it is justified and not just another form of insanity?

Nowhere Closer

2006-10-21T05:35:00.000-07:00

To thinking about civil disobedience. Except that I just finished reading a law journal article written by a professor at Boston College Law School who writes extensively about corporate citizenship. There aren't many who are as progressive, which could explain why he frequently cited to himself. The article doesn't have much to do with dissent except that, towards the end of the article, he also cited to John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, which we just discussed in Civil Disobedience. But I read it going on three weeks ago now and I can't remember much except that Rawls pretty much thinks there's never a good rationale for dissent. Or rather, there are very limited circumstances in which dissent can be justified and even then, it's only justifiable if it remains within certain constraints. Rawls' theories only hold weight if you, a priori, buy into the validity of the revolution and "democratic" process that created America. I don't think much of Rawls, except that he argues for the status quo and a form of dissent that won't bring much change.

But then, I'm weird. I think most dissent as it's currently conceived is ineffectual - including the extremist, pro-revolutionary versions. I feel that dissent gets its message across and is more readily heard by those holding the opposing opinion if it's creative and inclusionary. Go ahead and break the law, but do it with a smile. Like the pranksters who hung a yo-yo off Portlandia's finger* over a decade ago. Though they weren't protesting anything, locals and Portland's tourism mill still talk about the incident, and it's risen to the level of an urban legend, with people claiming that it has happened more than once, which it hasn't. Or the artists who painted abandoned buildings Tiggerific Orange in protest against Detroit's urban decay. Or the Billionaires for Bush, who've gotten much more publicity than any of the anti-war protest marches over the past six years. What protest marches you ask? Exactly!

Professor Ghandi keeps reiterating that dialogue is necessary for a society to adequately (attempt to) meet the needs of all its members. I get the feeling he's trying to incubate the idea that protest is necessary when dialogue stops, regardless of the external circumstances that all these other scholars write about - legal injustice, laws made for the minority that don't apply to the majority, laws that diverge from divine law, etc. It doesn't matter. So long as dialogue stops, dissent is necessary, but only dissent that reopens dialogue - hence Ghandi's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s adherence to non-violence. Violence is a shutting down of dialogue. Just as much as anger and sourpusses and rigidity to a politically correct dogma shuts down dialogue.

Hmmm, maybe I should write about that?

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* A search has failed to discover any photos of the infamous incident.

Now, Where Was I?

2006-10-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, I was supposed to be keeping a daily journal for my Civil Disobedience class. Nothing has been further from my mind. Professor Ghandi took a week off for his son's wedding. So last week, we had a guest professor and a new, additional reading packet. I like the guest professor, but took that day off to complete urgent client work. Since the class is only once a week, missing a class makes it seem like a semester ago since I last attended. And my system is beginning to short circuit from all my client work - I lose my train of thought easily, I have difficulty making logical connections, and I miss my husband something awful. On the upside, I have a nibble at an internship, in Boston, for corporate citizenship work. Keep your fingers crossed.

But back to civil disobedience, I have thought some about the paper I want to do for my final. It has to do with spirituality and civil disobedience: when do spiritual doctrines justify disobedience - how far can the disobedience go? Of course, I'm nowhere near the sociologist or theologian I need to be to write a paper that draws any conclusions. I suppose the best I can do is a survey of certain important movements/leaders - Martin Luther King Jr & civil rights; Ghandi & Indian sovereignty; Bonhoeffer & assasinations against Hitler; and Kevorkian & assisted suicide - and see if I can later draw any conclusions after I've explored whether those situations were indeed acts of civil diobedience and whether the disobedients were motivated by spiritual doctrine. I'm assuming up front that, by the end, I'm not going to have anything remotely close to publishable. I couldn't possibly - I don't know enough and I won't know enough by December, and the topic is extremely broad. But at the very least it should be interesting. And that's where I started out when I elected to take this class.

No Clue

2006-10-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

I haven’t done this in awhile – written without having a topic in mind. I can’t imagine that this type of writing produces anything of interest to anyone but myself, but I’m compelled to engage in this experiment today – for some reason.

I’m debating not going to class today. In fact, I’m beginning to resent school. Of course I’m not going to quit – I’ve come too far and it’s temporary, so I will complete it. But I’ve discovered that I really, really, really resent client work. I suppose it took immersing myself in it to actually discover this. If I’m interested in social change, and most social change comes with some type of litigation, client work is a must. However, I’d rather be doing research and writing and I’m getting absolutely no time to do that right now. And it’s pissing me off.

I’ve been examining my resentment and something’s come to light. My family was all about their problems and their dramas, to the exclusion of what I, the child, might have needed or wanted. So long as there was food on the table and clothes on my back, my parents met their obligation and anything else I might have wanted – like companionship, direction, recognition – were spoliation. I however, was expected to act as my father’s therapist. And, my own survival instinct kicked in – I began to work to fix things between my parents, to be a good child, to excel above and beyond my capacity. If I could do that, then maybe mom and dad’s problems would resolve and then they could turn their attention to me. Basically, I was coerced into service as a young child, and being of service to clients today engenders the same feeling of coercion within myself.

When I’m meditating, exercising, am devoting enough time to my own pursuits – here, research and writing – then I have extra with which to help others. Right now, I have nothing and I’m feeling coerced. And I’m becoming resentful. I can’t quit a client though, after I’ve accepted their case. That would be unethical.

Hmmmm, what to do about this.

My Worst Addiction

2006-10-16T03:49:00.000-07:00

I learned from my dad. No, he wasn't a drinker. And no, I don't have a penchant for smacking down people who are smaller and more vulnerable than myself. But I can be dogmatic, judgmental, and closed-minded about my own weaknesses. And that, my friends, was my inheritance and is my worst addiction.

I've been journeying a spiritual path for awhile now, and the collective wisdom of that journey thus far indicates that 1) we are all one, and 2) our purpose in being here is to learn what it's like to be separate and individual. Spiritually, we want submersion and reunification. But physically, we are separate and nothing we do - even great amounts of meditation and drugs - will dissolve that illusion. Well, nothing except perhaps death. It's the tension between separation and unity that is the pedagogy of our lives. And this same tension comes into play every time I struggle with my own dogmatic nature.

I've written before about how, most of the time, I feel different (hence, separate) from the majority of the world.* And every time I experience that feeling of separation, I respond in strange, emotional ways that tend to undermine my life. The problem is that most of the time, that feeling of difference is probably self-generated. I mean, how unified can I be with any other part of humanity if I constantly feel like I'm right all the time, or that I see more clearly than, or that I'm... well, different from everyone else? No amount of meditation or self-reflection, however, removes this feeling of being more insightful, or enlightened, if you will. In fact, the more I meditate and the more self-aware I become, the stronger the feeling becomes. If I were my dad, I would just accept that feeling - never question it, and go through life trying to figure out ways to distance and remove myself from all the other peons who populate this planet and who are hell bent on getting in my way and ruining everything. But I am not my dad. I try, to the best of my ability, to rein myself back when I hear his voice rising in my psyche, and remind myself that others have opinions that I can learn from. That others see things that I don't see. That others, especially, see my faults and shortcomings of which I am blind. That perhaps a large part of self-awareness comes from listening to what others reflect back to me. Not always of course; that's where self-reflection comes in. Perhaps someone else's opinion is just an obfuscated fog of his own issues and shortcomings, but perhaps, also, his opinion is a bright ray of light shining through that fog, to illuminate my own shadowed wonderings. As difficult as it can be to gauge the difference, I will never benefit from the wisdom of others if I never engage in the analysis. I have, to the best of my ability, abandoned the willful blindness part of my inheritance. But this does not mean that I'm even occasionally successful at engaging in that analysis.
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* Different, but not better than. Remember?

My Worst Addiction, II

2006-10-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

Last week, there were a couple of heated discussions in my clinic, and, of course, I spouted off some of my unpopular opinions, and then marveled at how my classmates couldn't understand what I was talking about. I mean, how could they not see it the way I see it? And if they don't see it the way I see it, can they be trusted? Thoughts like these overwhelm me and make me want to shut down. I begin to wonder if anything I aspire to at all can be accomplished when I am clearly up against so much opposition. If it's true that nothing gets accomplished in this world singly, but only through the power of popularity, then I'm doomed. Why bother? That's when the analsysis must kick in, or else I'm more than doomed, I'm dead. I have to consider what my classmates think, figure out if it's a cloud or a ray of light and then either dismiss it or find a way to reconcile it within my own beliefs. And then I have to move on.

Perhaps those who grew up with a healthy childhood (yes, all one of you) engage in this process automatically. But as I previously mentioned, my childhood teacher, nee my father, did not engage in this process, and I've had to teach it to myself. Not an easy task. Until I made the process conscious, my life was a never-ending cycle of reaching out and shutting down. That's debilitating, and I eventually arranged my life so as to have as few people in it as possible, so I could avoid that constant shutting down process. Now I'm learning to move on, but I still need training wheels. Learning how to ride a bicycle was much easier - these training wheels will be on for awhile longer.

Why do I call dogma thinking an addiction? Because it's easier to live life unquestioningly. There is no fatigue, no shutting down. Addictions allow us to armor ourselves and ignore anything that requires struggle. In short, addictions take us out of the present moment. And who wants to live in the present moment when there's so much work and analysis involved in it? Well, I didn't always want to live in the present moment. Eventually, I learned that I had to. Otherwise, my life was going to be a cage, my thoughts and actions dictated by someone other than myself (like my father). In that case, why bother setting any goals or having any dreams, when it wasn't going to be me propelling myself towards them? If that's were the case, would they even be my goals and dreams? It's a tough call. I can commit to pursuing my own dreams, or I can have an easy life. Last week, the latter was beckoning to me as seductively as a glass of scotch.

It Makes a Difference to This One

2006-10-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

There's this story I heard in church. Every day at sunset, a man walks out onto his balcony which overlooks the ocean. The tide has begun to retreat by that time and the beach is always littered with starfish that will die if they are not thrown back into the water. One day, during this man's usual time on his balcony, he looks out and sees another man walking across the beach and randomly throwing starfish back into the ocean. The man thinks, This guy is crazy - he'll never save all those starfish!. Nevertheless, each afternoon from that day forward, when the man walks onto his balcony, he sees the other man throwing starfish back into the ocean. This drives him crazy and, one day, when he couldn't stand it anymore, he leaves his balcony and walks down to the beach. When he approaches the other man, he says, "You're crazy! There's too many of them and you can't save them all. Why are you here when what you're doing doesn't make a difference?" And the other man replied, indicating the starfish he was holding, "It makes a difference to this one."

I try to remember that story when I get overwhelmed with my client work. After one particularly grueling day, I stopped at the grocery store during my walk home. In front of me at the checkout was an hispanic woman with an S curve to her spine that could have sponsored an episode of Sesame Street. All this woman was buying was an eight-pack of Jell-O. Unfortunately, she had $3.25 and the package cost $3.75. The cashier told her that if it were only a matter of a couple cents, it would be alright, but the $.50 difference was too much. He couldn't sell her that Jell-O, and if she still wanted some she'd have to go back to where she got it and pick up a smaller package. The woman didn't speak any english. The cashier took her to another cashier who spoke spanish to explain the situation. It would have been easy for me to just give her $.50. From the shape she was in, it looked likely that she hadn't eaten well her entire life, and she looked as if she was well into her 60s by now. But instead, I just stood there behind the lady watching her confusion and probable humiliation and just did nothing, despite the thoughts in my head that urged me to just hand over the $.50 now, give it to the cashier now, before it's too late!

After spending a day putting out fires for clients on the verge of losing their homes because welfare screws up their benefits, I just didn't have it in me anymore, not even enough to just reach into my pocket and pull out some change. So I try to find comfort in the starfish story. But it doesn't always work.

Existential crisis

2006-10-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

I have been writing in fits and starts as my life has been swallowed up by an existential crisis. Probably all part and parcel of the usual getting-everything-I-want-but-of-course-I-don't-deserve-it tension. I'm staying open and reminding myself of just how good I have it. My reward, it seems, is to fall deeper and deeper into depression. The depression is grief. For all the times I was told I couldn't have what I want. For all the times the universe told me I wasn't good enough. For all the times I was left behind. And remember, these are feelings from childhood, so they have childish intensity, like how a child feels when she's told she can't go to a birthday party that she really wants to go to, that she believes her well-being is dependent on. But instead of being allowed to throw the fit raging inside her when she's denied, she's admonished to "be good." Good meaning quiet and cooperative. For God's sake don't do anything to inconvenience the parent in this household. And so she is, good that is. And, so, where do the fitful feelings go? They don't disappear. They hide somewhere inside the child. If she doesn't one day release them and dissipate their power, they drive her life in their efforts to finally be recognized. In addition to releasing all those old "fits," I, now as an adult, grieve when I recognize that child.

And while all that is going on, I get up and go to school anyway. I get up and smile at people, cooperate in our activities. Go to the gym anyway. When all I really want is to lie in a supine coma in front of the tv.

All of this makes writing hard. Sorry.

Humility

2006-09-29T08:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve been writing recently about arrogance. Let’s explore the flip-side of that coin and talk about humility. I’ve been thinking about it because I recently participated in an art project that questioned people about their belief systems and how those systems affect their day-to-day actions. The final question the collaborators asked me was whether there was a media icon or image that accurately reflected my core belief. I couldn’t come up with an answer immediately, but later, I thought of Joey Buttafuoco.

For those who don’t know, Joey Buttafuoco was the love-object of the "Long Island Lolita" scandal that hit New York in the nascent 90s. I can’t speak for what those across the nation thought of him, but to New Yorkers Joey Buttafuoco was a clown. He was a stereotypical garish suburbanite in his tacky tracksuits, fuzzy pompadour,* and blatant rejection of any responsibility whatsoever for the attempted murder of his wife. In fact, Buttafuoco capitalized on his insta-celebrity through talk show appearances, television specials, and, rumor had it, his own television sit-com pilot.** Despite all this, we loved Joey, because any one of us was considered better than him. If we didn’t dress better, we were better looking. If we weren’t better looking, we were smarter. And if we weren’t smarter, we were at least smart enough to have not gotten involved with an underaged paramour who got caught trying to shoot our spouses and then celebrated the press it got us.

It’s difficult, and I frequently don't succeed, but I try to remember that I’m not better than anyone else, including the Joey Buttafuoco’s of the world. This is an unpopular sentiment. The few times I’ve engaged in conversation on this topic, I’m usually met with a dismissive, “Of course we’re better than certain people. Aren’t you better than Hitler?” Well. Actually. No, I’m not. WHAT?!! Who’s not better than Hitler? I don’t have any real argument to support my position, except that the minute you begin to think you’re better than Hitler, you become Hitler. I mean, Hitler was who he was because he thought he was better than many, many other people. And if you’ve ever considered yourself better than anyone, you too have the capacity to be mini-Hitler yourself. All you have to do is to start treating the person you think you’re better than as anything “other” than yourself, and you set up the first step toward persecution – the objectification of a fellow human being.

I know there’s a great deal of resistance to this idea, but just try it on – try to imagine yourself as equal to Hitler. Too hard? Then try to imagine yourself as equal to Joey Buttafuoco. Still too hard? Try it with the co-worker/classmate/professor/grocery store clerk/neighbor who drives you crazy. At least remember this experiement the next time someone tries to convince you that religion is the opiate of the masses. Perhaps religion is the opiate of the masses. But a sincere spiritual practice - real attempts to practice the doctrines codified by religion – is probably some of the hardest shit you’ll ever attempt in your life.

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* Unfortunately, photos of Buttafuoco at the time the scandal was hot can no longer be found on the internet, otherwise, you’d see what I’m talking about.

** Silly me, spending all that money on an arts degree when all I really needed to do to get my own television show was to play a pivotal role in the attempted murder of my spouse.

A Streak of Yellow in the Law of Economics

2006-09-22T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've always been suspicious of the law in economics crowd. I've been withholding judgment, however, because their scholars argue well and, in many instances, applying such a practical and amoral theory to law (amoral in the sense of leaving all judgment out of the analysis, not in the sense of being immoral) simplifies analysis (which is often a relief) and results in many fair decisions for many people. But I couldn't put my finger on my reluctance to apply it whole hog. Until the book review from Michiko Kakutani - herself no slouch - clarified it for me (attached below). Applying legal doctrine completely devoid of any moral analysis is like building your house out of cards - simple to do and, perhaps, aesthetically pleasing even, but not sturdy or safe in bad weather. This, in turn, explains my frustration with so many economists with whom I attempt to engage online - they purposefully avoid moral questions in their economic analyses. It's my theory that people who attempt to avoid moral questions are l-a-z-y. It's easy to be brilliant when we avoid moral questions because those are the hard ones to answer. In fact, some say they're unanswerable. But if one doesn't grapple with them, then one is seeking answers by shoving one's head in the sand. And that's why I feel unsafe when I argue with economists who refuse to see the morality (read, the humanity) behind all their numbers and cost/benefit equations - because they're the ones most likely to turn you over to the government in times of terror. It's easy to do when you don't see the human faces behind the government's objectifications of its citizens.

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NY Times, September 19, 2006
Books of The Times
A Jurist's Argument for Bending the Constitution
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Citing national security concerns in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush administration has repeatedly sought to expand presidential power, often doing so in secret and sidelining both Congress and the judiciary.

President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency, in search of evidence of terrorist activity, to eavesdrop on Americans without obtaining a court-approved warrant. The administration claimed that the president's war powers gave him the authority to detain people indefinitely and deny them access to lawyers and the courts - a policy it would later have to modify in response to challenges in the courts. And it pursued a plan to put detainees held at Guantánamo Bay on trial before military commissions, a plan that the Supreme Court in June said violated United States law and the Geneva Conventions.

The Bush administration's assertion that the war on terror is a new kind of war requiring new rules and a new equation between liberty and security is vehemently echoed by Richard A. Posner's alarming new book, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency.

In addition to being a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Judge Posner is a prolific author, a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and an intellectual leader of a school of jurisprudence that has pioneered the use of economics to analyze legal issues. He is known for his willfully provocative opinions - he once co-wrote an article recommending the private sales of babies - and the positions he takes in this volume will not only fuel his own controversial reputation but also underscore just how negotiable constitutional rights have become in the eyes of administration proponents, who argue that the dangers of terrorism trump civil liberties.

The very language Judge Posner uses in this shrilly [ed. - brilliant use of this adjective] titled volume conveys his impatience with constitutional rights, while signaling his determination to deliver a polemical battle cry, not a work of carefully reasoned scholarship. He writes about lawyers' "rights fetishes," complains about judges' "thralldom to precedent" and declares that the absence of an Official Secrets Act - which could be used to punish journalists for publishing leaked classified material - reflects "a national culture of nosiness, and of distrust of government bordering on paranoia."

Near the beginning of Not a Suicide Pact Judge Posner writes that "rooting out an invisible enemy in our midst might be fatally inhibited if we felt constrained to strict observance of civil liberties designed in and for eras in which the only serious internal threat (apart from spies) came from common criminals."

He argues that "it would be odd if the framers of the Constitution had cared more about every provision of the Bill of Rights than about national and personal survival." And he concludes that "the importance of demonstrating resolve at the outset of a grim struggle explains and to a degree justifies the excesses of repression that so often accompany our entry into war, including the war against Al Qaeda."

This willingness to bend the Constitution reflects Judge Posner's archly pragmatic approach to the law and his penchant for eschewing larger principles in favor of utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis. Efficiency, market dynamics and short-term consequences are what concern Judge Posner, not enduring values or legal precedents.

One result is a depressing relativism in which there are no higher ideals and no absolute rights worth protecting. It is a distinctly cynical outlook that imputes the most mercenary of motives to everyone from journalists to judges: just as Judge Posner has asserted that the media merely pander to the demands of their audiences rather than striving to inform the public, so he suggests in these pages that justices simply "make up constitutional law as they go along," following subjective criteria instead of striving to uphold principle and precedent.

In fact, Judge Posner appears to see the Constitution as a fantastically elastic proposition that can be bent for convenience's sake. "The greater the potential value of the information sought to be elicited by an interrogation," he writes, "the greater should be the amount of coercion deemed permitted by the Constitution. The Constitution contains no explicit prohibition of coercive interrogation, or even of torture, to block such an approach."

Many of Judge Posner's arguments in this book are riddled with self-serving contradictions. While he declares that "the Bill of Rights should not be interpreted so broadly that any measure that does not strike the judiciary as a sound response to terrorism is deemed unconstitutional," he also argues that "a constitutional right should be modified when changed circumstances indicate that the right no longer strikes a sensible balance between competing constitutional values, such as personal liberty and
public safety."

In another chapter, which discusses warrantless eavesdropping by the N.S.A., Judge Posner shrugs off the concern that government scrutiny of private communications could lead to embarrassment, intimidation or blackmail of the administration's opponents. While he acknowledges that "such things have happened in the past," he says that "they are less likely to happen today" because factors like "the growth of a culture of leaking and whistle-blowing" and "more numerous and competitive media" have converged "to make American government a fishbowl," and "secrets concerning matters that interest the public cannot be kept for long."

Later in the book, however, he suggests that people's privacy (regarding information collected by government data mining) would be better protected if there were more restrictions placed on the news media and "the principle of the Pentagon Papers case" were "relaxed to permit measures to prevent the media from publishing properly classified information."

Other arguments in this volume are no more than unsubstantiated - indeed, highly dubious - assertions. Judge Posner writes that "it is better that the president assume the full responsibility for national security surveillance than that responsibility be diffused" by involving judges because "when power is concentrated, so is responsibility": "There would be fewer executions," he reasons, "if the sentencing judge had to administer the lethal injection." [ed. - this is probably true.]

Judge Posner also insists that there is little reason for the judicial branch of government to act as a check on presidential overreaching when national security measures are agreed upon by Congress and the White House, because the legislative and executive branches "are rivalrous even when nominally controlled by the same political party." [ed. - but how he can assert this is beyond me. Perhaps I'm just not smart enough.] The Republican Congress, he asserts in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, "has not been a rubber stamp for the national security initiatives of the Bush administration."

By the end of this chilling book, the reader realizes that Judge Posner is willing to use virtually any argument - logical or not - to redefine constitutionally guaranteed rights like freedom of speech during wartime. For instance, he expresses irritation with the Supreme Court's 1969 Brandenburg ruling, which stipulated that speech advocating violence or other criminal conduct cannot constitutionally be suppressed unless it is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to
incite or produce such action."

Although Judge Posner writes that "in the present circumstances the enactment of laws forbidding radical Islamist expression would be needlessly provocative," he ominously adds that "the situation may change" and that he believes "the incitement/threat category could be expanded" to include "generalized advocacy of violence against the United States."

In his opinion, he says, "to tell Congress and the president that they can do nothing to prevent forms of advocacy likely to multiply the number of future terrorists makes no more sense than telling them that they cannot prevent the publication of recipes for bioweapons because it would probably take years to get from the recipe to the actual manufacture, let alone use, of the weapons."

Judge Posner believes that "additional counterterrorist measures, in particular in the related areas of electronic surveillance and computerized data mining, could be taken without violating the Constitution (even if there were a clear constitutional right to informational privacy), especially if the effect on privacy is minimized by a strict rule against using information obtained through such means for any purpose other than to protect national security." And he writes that "coercive interrogation up to and including torture might survive constitutional challenge as long as the fruits of such interrogation were not used in a criminal prosecution."

So is there anything Judge Posner thinks the Constitution forbids? He writes: "But there is no handle in the constitutional text for the unilateral assumption of dictatorial powers by the president, no matter how desperate the circumstances. We don't want the Constitution to be just an old piece of parchment."

That snarkily delivered "just," along with the use of the adjective "unilateral" to modify "assumption of dictatorial powers," says it all: this book suggests that Judge Posner does regard the Constitution as an old piece of parchment - a piece of parchment with certain rules, but rules that "are made to be broken" by a president during an emergency, no matter how long that emergency may last.

===

Making the unconscious conscious

2006-09-21T03:12:00.000-07:00

This has been a tough week. My tough weeks happen when there is psychological stuff going on that I don't recognize until I have a mental collapse. It's nice to have the mental collapse. Afterwards, things are, if not rebalanced, at least honest.

I worked my ass off this past summer so that I would have enough money to avoid the necessity of a job during this last year in school. How unfortunate that something in my psyche thinks that I don't deserve an opportunity like this. I feel guilty for not having a job. Or at least, I feel unlike myself. So I noticed last week that I was really pushing hard to do extra things - attending seminars and participating in projects outside of school. When an issue came up with a rental deposit - which may end up in court - and an overdue, extended visit with an old, dear friend of mine - who recently suffered a stroke - pushed me over the edge. Fact is, I was doing too much last year. The reason to be unemployed this year is so that I can continue expending the same amount of energy without blowing my brains out. The point is not to expend more energy! But the guilt drives me to it anyway, like I have to fill in the gap from not having a job because it is my lot in life to have to work twice as hard as everyone else. Because I don't have a job, I must do all my reading, hand all projects in on time, attend every class. I must accomplish all those things I used to complain I couldn't accomplish because my job got in the way. Wrong! I have to remember that that extra time doesn't need to be filled. That the same amount of effort that I put into school last year still applies today. Otherwise, when new issues come up, like the money and my friend's disability, I will fall apart. And wasn't that what I was trying to avoid in the first place?

But it's weird to feel guilty when I'm given something that many people take for granted. I used to envy my classmates who didn't have a job and didn't sympathize with them when they complained that they were overworked. Now, I'm one of them. But I don't have to be. The opportunity to be able to focus solely on my studies is a breath of fresh air, and I deserve it as much as anyone else. It makes me sad that I felt guilty, but no more. It's also weird that I didn't recognize my guilty feelings until I mentally collapsed. I'm always surprised when I have a negative reaction to the good things in my life. It's probably this same guilt that prevented me from being able to hang onto this same opportunity (not having to have a job) back in my first year of law school. We confess all the time those things we expect we should want, but it's our unconscious feelings that actually rule our lives. Somewhere inside me, a long time ago, I didn't want to have this opportunity; something subconscious was afraid of it, despite my conscious expressions of desiring it.

When they talk about "becoming whole," they mean aligning our unconscious selves with our conscious selves - making the unconscious conscious. This doesn't mean that I should stop wanting opportunities like this, but that I have to understand my unconscious fear of them so that when I create these types of opportunities, I am aware of and managing those fears. If I don't, my opportunities disappear and I'm left wondering why I don't get to have what so many around me have, and being angry at the universe for singling me out. When in reality it's me who's singling me out. It's me who's causing my own deprivation.

So after the collapse, I've been dealing with the guilt and the feelings of inferiority. They're not that deep or complex, just dangerous when hidden. And I'm committed to looking for them whenever something good happens to me now. Because I want to hang onto my opportunities. I deserve them.

Why Can't We All Just Be Arrogant?

2006-09-14T04:15:00.000-07:00

As for feeling "arrogant" that first day of class, I have dissolved that feeling. I'm so used to thinking I offer nothing of worth or value that every time I put myself out there, without apology, it feels arrogant. But under my standard - developed over years by an abusive family - declaring to a waitress that I want rye toast instead of wheat would feel arrogant. The fact is I am different from the world - this isn't a declaration I'm pulling out of my ass. I look at things differently, I connect things in ways that make other people go "hunh?", I'm certainly not motivated by many of the same things most people are motivated by, and, for sure, I'm much more concerned with developing my own self-awareness and enlightenment than what I see around me. The only reason to suppose my declarations above are arrogant would be to assume that by making them I'm asserting superiority over others. That would be erroneous, and anyone assuming superiority within my declarations might be served by asking: what is it about another person asserting that she's different from the rest of the world that could make one feel inferior?

We are all on this planet together. Some of us take one path; some others. I am, as we all are, the result of a combination of things: family background, inherent personality, the influences that have passed in and out of our lives, the random responses that the universe saw fit to attach to our actions. But for me, that combination has resulted in the following: when I sit in a group of people, I'm usually not interested in what they're talking about; when I speak about what interests me, I'm usually met with wonder, or reverence, or I'm written off. When I am myself in the world, and not conforming to culturally accepted norms for socializing, I make other people feel uncomfortable. This is not an indictment of anyone and this is not an assertion that I am better than anyone.* This has isolated me mostly, as various people have tried to categorize me or ensnare me in their personal scripts in an attempt to make themselves feel more comfortable around me. I have spent a great deal of energy trying to reconcile my isolation against my need to be myself, and I'm tired.

Awhile back, I made a commitment to simply be myself in the world from now on, and to damn the rest of the world for any adverse reactions. That commitment revealed to me a deep irony. Before I made my commitment, the only way I could socialize was to put on socially accepted masks and play socially accepted roles. Discomfort came with distancing myself from myself. In order to keep wearing the masks and playing the roles, I had to anesthetize that discomfort, which I did with booze. If you define "alone" as having no one else in the room, then I am more alone after having made that commitment than before. I have fewer friends and social engagements, and spend a lot of time by myself. But I'm not sure that the socially accepted definition of "alone," is accurate. Back then, when there was no one in the room, I was alone because even I wasn't in the room. Back then, even when there were other people in the room, I was still alone, because the person those people were socializing with wasn't me. How can I feel community with others if I'm not even present for them to commune with? Since making the commitment, I struggle less internally. I'm calmer. More peaceful. And I think it's because, while there are fewer people in my life - the generally accepted definition of "alone" - I'm actually less alone now than before. Now, at least I'm in the room. At all times. Even when no one else is.

That day, the feeling of arrogance came from my need to manage everyone else's feelings. It came from a fear that if anyone around me felt uncomfortable that I'd be in danger. Unsafe. Another legacy from my childhood that I still have to struggle to dissolve. But of course I am in no danger and the feeling is useless. I wonder, however, that if a little feeling of arrogance can actually mean less struggle and more peace and calm, couldn't the world benefit if all of us were arrogant?

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* In fact, it's always been my suspicion that people who claim to be superior because they're not like anyone else, ie, unique, non-conformist, etc., are actually trying to find a way to deal with their own discomfort over being different. But that's just my theory.

D. A. I. L. Y.

2006-09-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

We know what it means to me. I've been keeping journals off and on since I was 18. Earlier even, except when I stopped because my family had broken my trust more than once by reading my journals and then punishing me for things I had written. This was my stepfamily. I never got an apology; I'm not sure those people understood the meaning of private. But after I left my family's house, I resumed. And then there was that time when my first husband ALSO broke my trust and read my journal (though with him, he might have been reading them all along without telling me).

What is it with you people!!? Doesn't anyone know what a violation that is? Perhaps that's my attraction to blogging. If I put everything out there first, no one has the opportunity to violate my trust. Besides, at this point in my life, I could care less what anyone's reaction will be to what I write.

Except for those violations, I've been consistently inconsistent with my journals. There were times when I wrote every day - sometimes more than once. And then there were times when I didn't write at all. My drive to write was dependent upon my needs during any given period. But this "daily writing" I'm supposed to do as a class assignment is new to me. Suffice it to say that even if I don't put words down every day, I do think about the things I would write had I the extra half hour. Perhaps that ability - the ability to write without writing - is also part of my legacy of violaion.

To pick up where we left off. I figured out the mystery of the Indian woman. First off, it's annoying to be manipulated and that's exactly what she did to me. She pegged me for a sucker and used conversation to get me to pity her. Especially annoying because I consider myself a savvy New Yorker, bombarded by panhanders all the time and not easily suckered. But that night, I had exercised my savvy, decided that she wasn't a drug-abuser, and determined that, even if she wasn't using the money for a bus ticket, that I was willing to give it. Part of my definition of true altriusm is that one should just simply give, without conditions or expectations. Too bad my logical thought processes were a bigger scam than the Indian woman's. Once I saw that I was bothered by the fact that she wasn't on the bus, I knew I had to rexamine my thought processes. As Jung says, after all, ""Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

Turns out I was bothered because I was bothered, if that makes any sense. That for all my talk about true altruism, my interior motivations had really been annoyance and the desire to get rid of it, and not what "should" have motivated me - true altruism. So, while it may be true that I don't allow "shoulds" to rule my life, that doesn't mean I'm not plagued by them.

Speaking of shoulds, please replace all references above to "Indian woman" with "East Asian" woman. Thank you.

Arrogance

2006-09-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

A lot has passed through my mind since yesterday. It's hard to limit this entry only to those thoughts that are meaningful. So I will try to limit this entry to those thoughts I anticipate picking up again in the future.

First, I'm in Boston and the house here is finally beginning to feel like my own. I'm sitting at my desk where I expect to do a lot of schoolwork this year, looking out the sliding glass door at the marsh beyond ("Marsh! Not a swamp." Rousseau would argue.). The cats are draped about the bedroom resting up from their nocturnal adventures. A home is just about all I've ever wanted, and I mean the feeling of home, not any actual structure. Here is where my heart is, both himself, as well as my own energy - expended in developing safety and beauty inside these four walls, transforming them into much more than the sum of their mere particles. Having grown up certain I'd never get anything I want, and spending the past 16 years turning my thinking around... to see this home developing in front of me, to begin to actually experience that which I want... I'm still new enough at manifesting to be profoundly moved when it happens. And I'm still surprised to be overwhelmed by welling gratitude and grief, instead of ecstatic jubilation, whenever I reach a goal.

Last night, in NY's Chinatown, I gave an Indian woman four dollars. She told me that she was about four dollars short of the fare for the bus. After I gave her a dollar, she loitered around in front of me, trying to start up a conversation. I was happy to help, but her continued presence discomfited me. And despite my suspicion that she was lying about the bus, I eventually fished around and came up with another three dollars in change. And suspicion confirmed, she was not on the bus when it left the depot. I was conflicted at the time about why I gave her additional money when I thought she was lying, but then realized this morning that mostly, I probably gave it because I had wanted her to go away. I don't miss the four dollars, nor do I feel like I was chumped by that woman, but something about the event is nibbling at me. I will write more as my thoughts become clearer.

And finally, I am also bothered by my arrogant answer to Professor Ghandi on Wednesday. Now, I'm not neurotic. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one who still remembers my answer, and I'm not about to hide away into some shell because of it, or to assume that my class now thinks I'm arrogant and will treat me accordingly from now on. It's totally possible that I'm the only one who even thought I sounded arrogant. But while I've further developed my thoughts on why I always feel as if I'm different from the rest of the world, I haven't been able to unpack why I'm bothered by my personally perceived arrogance. Truth be told, I hate arrogance in all its forms. And you know what the spiritualists say - look into that which bothers you the most. I've a feeling that if I were as evolved as I could be, I would care less about arrogance. And therefore, this merits investigation.

Don't you have a lot to look forward to!

Obedience in Civil Disobedience

2006-08-31T04:51:00.000-07:00

So, my Civil Disobedience professor assigned us all to a daily journal. Not that he's going to read it. Or base our grade on it. But I'm a blogger, all I need is an excuse, no matter how flimsy. Besides, it's been awhile since I've written daily. And I'm excited to be in a law class that encourages us to "know ourselves." So for the next semester at least, this will be my online journal.

First, "Professor Ghandi," as I will call him here, asked us why we took the Civil Disobedience class, which was a question I hadn't anticipated. I answered truthfully: that I thought it would be fun and that taking another Bar course would have killed me but, since I hadn't questioned my decision beyond that, the rest of my answer floundered. I said something about having always felt different from the rest of the world, feeling as if, since I'm not like most of the world, that perhaps I engaged in small pieces of disobedience almost every day and that, even without a group, I felt they should amount to something by some point in my life. Then he asked me in what ways I'm different from the rest of the world. I thought for a second before blathering on about never doing anything because I "should." That, for instance, many had thought I shouldn't have pursued acting as a young adult and, again, that it was suicide to go into law school at my age. That I had made a promise to myself to go to bed every night having made life choices that would lead to my happiness. And that those who'd made life choices based on what their family or society wanted them to do confounded me. I didn't have a pat answer as I hadn't considered my decision that deeply. If my professor's reaction was any gauge, my answer was long, not nearly profound enough, and, in hindsight, I probably came off sounding very arrogant. I should have just said that I couldn't come up with an answer on the spot and left it at that.

Told you I never do what I should.

I'm getting excoriated.

2006-08-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

Over here. I started writing a comment, but really, I hate people who post comments that are better used as content on their own blogs. But if I were to leave a comment over there, pointing to people to my blog for my comment, I'd be accused of being a blog whore (if the comment ever got passed the moderators anyway). Since the point of commenting is more for one's own peace of mind than for anyone else's sake (or so it mostly seems), I've posted my latest and last comment here for... whomever. Because really, I'm kind of bored of that thread anyway.

************************************************************************************

Belle previously wrote:
>I’m not a bad sport. You can call me a ball-breaking lesbian feminist if you want. It won’t hurt my feelings, mostly because it wouldn’t be true.

Constanct replied:
"Yes, you are a bad sport, because your reaction to being contradicted isn’t to argue your position more thoroughly, but to make sexual comments about your critic."

Belle's current comment:
Thank you daddy, for chastising me publicly on the polite way to debate. Calling something stereotypical doesn't mean that it is stupid, however. A lot of intelligent people do stereotypical things. My point was that, if you were offended by my categorizing your theory as stereotypical, perhaps something in my comment rang true. If it wasn't true, then why should it bother you? If I were the type to get my knickers in a bunch, I'd say that your subsequent comments (I'm not worthy of a response, and that I'm a bad sport) are patronizing and dismissive. If I wanted to, I could further impute that you are dismissing me because I am female. But personally I don't care. I'm sorry if I hurt your itty-bitties, but I stand by my assertion. However, I do apologize for suggesting that you are 12 or that you're single.

This is my summary of this thread.
1) Some people have been arguing that sexual consent laws should lower the age for protection (hereafter "consent laws") though there's been no agreement as to what age is acceptable.
2) They argue that there is a biological imperative that drives older males to pursue younger females.
3) To be fair, there have been some explanations as to why sex outside of procreation is not desirable, offered to explain why consent laws are strawmen.
4) But then all kinds of justification have been made for why the winter/spring sexual combination isn't always predatory and should be allowed.
5) With some digression about whether scientists ever believed the world was flat. (What the!)

I don't dispute that a biological imperative to successfully procreate attracts us to each other. That is why, after all, women like short, bald, ugly guys who have a lot of money. Once she's squeezed out the baby, he provides the shelter and the protection and who's a better provider than a multi-millionaire? What bothers me is the disregard of the danger inherent in the arguments above. I'm beginning to feel like I'm the only one who perceives any.

I suppose that if one has never been a pretty and smart teenaged girl who's young adulthood was spent mistaking adult male sexual overtures for platonic camaraderie, then it makes sense that one would believe the imbalance of power theory mere rationalization. All the girl has to do, after all, is say "no," and, if the adult male is like most adult males, he will walk away without any harm having been done to anyone. And if some young pretty teenaged girls don't know enough to say "no," and get venereal disease, or unwanted pregnancies, or suffer emotional scarring, well, then that's just the price to pay for freedom. Because some 14 y.o. female out there undoubtedly has benefited from her romantic/sexual relationship with a 40 y.o. male, and she should be allowed that benefit regardless of the price paid by those other, less-fortunate 14 y.o.'s.

A dork competing against a non-dork for the sexual favors of a girl cannot be compared to a 14 y.o. male competing against a 40 y.o. The dork analogy, all other things being equal, generally doesn't raise the specter of predation. The age analogy raises it prima facie. I do not dispute that a 40 y.o. male has a biological imperative that makes a 14 y.o. girl sexually attractive to him. What I question is why the biological imperative is used to support lowering consent laws. Other factors besides beauty and procreative ability make a girl. She has emotions; she participates universally in our culture; what happens to her in childhood (including her teens) shapes her, which in turn shapes the way she interacts in our culture. And the way she touches others in our culture, in turn, affects the behavior of those others. It's a web, people! If a 14 y.o. and a 40 y.o. find themselves in love with each other (in a non-predatory way), what harms come to them if they were to wait until she turned 16 (or 18, whatever the age in your particular state) before consummating? On the other hand, a different 14 y.o. may find herself preyed upon by a 40 y.o. and then left, pregnant at the worse, emotionally scarred at the least. Maybe she suffers trauma that prevents her from being able to participate in another whole, loving relationship. Maybe the trauma is so bad as to turn her into a misandrist, so she responds to the male gender as the enemy. Neither of these situations is good. But then, if she were pass on her attitudes to her child, she catalyzes a generation of men-haters. It's better to have laws in place that protects the latter when it does no substantial harm to the former and when it can prevent a great deal of harm to the culture at large.

A 14 y.o. male competing against a 40 y.o. male in the Olympics also cannot be analogized to the same competing for the sexual favors of a girl. When one or the other wins or loses the slalom or the marathon, it has no effect on a third party's emotional being (except granting bragging rights to citizens of the winner's country) or on how that being will interact within her culture. So regardless of your hair-splitting defenses, Constant, you were comparing competition in sports, at least, with competition for sex.

These analogies offend me, because I do not want to hate men, and yet I'm handed all the ammunition to do so every day. I was at a spa with my fiancee the other day when an older gentleman struck up a conversation with me. Later, my fiancee informed me that the old geezer in the funny hat was flirting with me. But I was just being nice and thought he was just being nice. So is every conversation a man has with me a ruse covering up a sexual agenda? Of course not. But the world won't allow me to believe that, and I find myself consistently being disappointed for giving men the benefit of the doubt. So then there's this thread begun by some guy giving a young girl the hubba hubba. No big deal, in fact it's kind of funny to acknowledge the old biological imperative, until commentors start suggesting that consent laws should be lowered because of it. Just because you get a boner for a 14 y.o. doesn't mean the law should allow you to pursue her. As I argued above, there are consequences of biologically dictated behavior that are paid for by the entire culture. And biological imperative as justification for anything disregards all the ways that human kind has evolved over biology. If one is going to argue biological imperative for lowering consent ages, one might as well argue that shooting another for raping one's wife is a biological imperative, in contravention of all laws that protect civilization from vigilantism. How Ever did we manage to put aside our biological impulses long enough to build roads or write books?

As for the suggestion that consent laws are patriarchial - laws are only patriarchial if they protect those who are perfectly capable of protecting themselves. If they protect a class that is arguably incapable of protecting themselves, then they're not patriarchial. That only a small percentage of winter/spring relationships are predatory and so, therefore, the majority non-predatory winter/spring relationships should not be banned, is not a strong enough argument for lowering consent ages because, as I've argued above, predatory relationships cause a great deal of harm to the culture at large (and I'm not convince that they are a small portion of winter/spring relationships anyway) and non-predatory winter/spring relationships suffer nominal harm from consent laws.

But really, I'm too tired to care anymore. All you men out there that want to perpetuate this biological imperative thing, go right ahead. You're just digging yourselves into the new millenium Lysistrata.

It's hard to come up with five things to be thankful for isn't it?

2006-08-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

So I'm giving you a second chance by posting my new updated list.

1. The move is done and I am no longer living in the 3rd world country that is Western Queens, which means, I HAVE ELECTRICITY!

2. Rousseau.

3. I still have a lot of hair on my head, and 99% of it is still black.

4. Quirky but kind strangers on Craigslist.

5. Therapy is finally done with me.

Though difficult, finding things to be thankful for is worth it. It takes the "piss" out of "pissy mood." Try it. I dare you.

Unable to concentrate.

2006-08-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

Haven't done any work in about two hours.*

Found a new blog today. Posted the following comment:

"I agree with Brad, if you're still living at home you're not ready to have sex, regardless of your gender and age.

As for the power dynamics argument - men say things to women to get them into bed. A 40 year old male is more practiced at this than a 17 year old male. And a 30 year old female is wiser in gaugeing a man's sincerity than a 14 year old female. There is a power dynamic here based on simple age and life experience that puts any 17 year old (male or female) at a disadvantage against any 30-40 year old. This is why a 40 year old male should not be allowed to compete for a 17 year old female.

Everyone commenting here is male, right? Here's my question, what on earth would a 40 year old male want with a 17 year old female? I've read theories that older women - read wiser and more intellectually demanding - emasculate men. That it's easier for a man to feel masculine with an inexperienced girl who worships the ground he walks on than to be with a woman who is closer to his age and who will hold him to her higher expectations. But all my male friends claim they won't date someone under a certain age because dealing with the immaturity outweighs the arousal. And yet the winter/spring phenomenon persists in our culture. Why? The first thought is sex. But really, a 17 year old virgin isn't going to be better in bed than a 30 year old with some experience (barring any sexual neuroses). Does seeing a poreless face going at your member outweigh the artless blowjob?"

Perhaps some of you can help enlighten me? I'll also add Olympia Dukakis' theory from Moonstruck: men have affairs because they fear death.

*Funny, I originally wrote "Haven't done any work in about two years." Talk about Freudian slip.

Five things to be thankful for

2006-07-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

Started at Lily White Intentions. I'm doing my part to spread the meme.

1. Today is the end of summer classes and one of my jobs.

2. My new-found coupledom.

3. That somehow my health has remained in tact.

4. All the people who have been kind to me during the past two notorious years.

5. I'm finally done with therapy.

Tag, you're it.

Meme-o-rama

2006-05-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

I AM: what I am.
I WANT: to lose 4 inches of fat from my waist and belly.
I WISH: for a year off.
I HATE: arrogance and willful blindness. But generally, hate’s a waste of time.
I MISS: the playfulness of youth. But not its naivete.
I FEAR: dark shadows and suspect noises when I’m alone in the house.
I HEAR: too little silence.
I WONDER: if I’ll ever free myself from childhood induced anxieties.
I REGRET: my limited ability to love.
I AM NOT: an animal.
I DANCE: self-conciously, unless I’ve had a few.
I SING: songs from the set list of my imaginary lounge act.
I CRY: at movies. All of them. Even the funny ones. Sometimes, even during previews.
I AM NOT ALWAYS: anything. Too changeable.
I MAKE WITH MY HANDS: a safe place to seek comfort.
I WRITE: compulsively.
I CONFUSE: jumbalaya and gumbo.

Top Ten Things Every Man Should Have

2006-05-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

The long-promised reciprocal list. Posted in sections to prevent eye-strain.

Top Ten Things Every Man Should Have

1. At least one masculine skill.
Because a man isn't afraid of the masculine, he should have developed at least one traditionally masculine skill. Any masculine skill. Develop this skill for yourself so that, regardless of what anyone says, you will always feel that you are a man. I don't care if you are a hairdresser by day and read romance novels in your mud mask while soaking in the tub every night, you'd still be a man if you enjoy at least one of any of the following: sports, hunting, woodworking, or even just take responsibility for the killing the mice and taking out the garbage. But not greek-style wrestling. I'm just sayin'.

2. At least one feminine skill.
Because a man isn't afraid of the feminine, he should have developed at least one traditionally feminine skill. The reverse of 1., if you're all about sports, hunting and woodworking, and don't have at least one single feminine skill, you're obsolete. This does not apply to those feminine skills, however, that have a long patriarchal history. Like cooking. That's right, the world's most celebrated chefs are men, so sorry, cooking a mean lasagne doesn't count. Instead, pick up something unabashedly feminine like knitting, ironing a ruffle, or giving a professional perm (make mine a spiral curl). If you swing too far on the macho side, developing a feminine skill will keep you from sliding backwards into extinction, like dinosaurs and Dirty Harry.

3. A skill that entitles you to bragging rights.
Because a man needs to brag. This one is about degree. So what if you mix a mean martini. Do you mix the meanest martini in Manhattan? Got elected president of the United States? Pshaw. We all know that only wartime presidents are REAL men. Okay, so that last one wasn't a great example, but hear me out. People much smarter than I have suggested that having genitalia outside their bodies is what makes men direct their attention to the outside world and ignore their internal world. Women are the opposite because their genitalia are located inside the body. I don't know whether this is true, but it illustrates why 3. is important - shooting to be the best at something helps keep a man's attention on the outside world. The 70's ushered in a new male role model that has flustered both sexes. You know him, the sensitive communicative Alan Alda type that women supposedly swooned for in the movies, but in real life left men scratching their heads after one too many “I like you as a friend” speech given in place of a snog at the end of the date. The lesson here is not to revert to the primitive, strong-silent type of yesteryear. For God's sake, stay emotionally open and communicative, just don't lose your ability to look outside and into the world. All that happened with the “sensitive” role model was that the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. Keeping a goal to become the best at something without losing male sensitivity will help the pendulum swing back toward center.

Top Ten Things Every Man Should Have - II

2006-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

4. Lips wide shut.
Just because men need something to brag about, doesn't mean they should. If you're really great, your actions already speak for you, and bragging is really about insecurity. Anyone who's smart will see through you immediately. Yes, women do it too, but 4. is especially important for men because of the cultural stereotype of the strong, silent male. This stereotype's draw comes from its mystery - if he doesn't say anything, the drooling female types get to fill in the blanks with imagined heroic and studly deeds. Unfortunately today, when the guy finally opens his mouth, it turns out, more often than not, that the bravest thing he's been doing is increasing his X-Box skills. So 4. only works after you've mastered 3. Having a combination of both? That's called confidence.

5. Ears wide open.
Develop the ability to listen and not give advice. How many fights have you gotten into because your girl is crying on your shoulder and you keep giving her advice she doesn't want until she screams at you that you just don't understand? After 3.'s discussion about looking outward, it might seem as if women are giving men an impossible task - asking them to look outward and become masters of the universe, but then never allowing them to ply their mad skills in the service of making women's lives better. And if you're an outward looking male who hasn't yet become comfortable with vulnerability (see 9. below)? It might be near impossible to see a girl cry without trying to fix whatever caused her tears. But what I think is difficult about this one is that men take the phrase “you just don't understand” as literal criticism. This causes a great deal of frustration because, let's face it, I'm a woman and even I don't understand women most of the time. So how the hell are men supposed to ever understand women even a fraction of the time? Do yourselves a favor, throw that notion out the window - ACCEPT that you're never going to understand women and listen to what I'm telling you now: most female communication is about trust building. Your ability to just listen to us without judgment or condemnation is how we develop trust in you. Cutting a woman off by giving advice (even if it's a well intentioned attempt to fix things) short-circuits the trust building process. But here's something you should also know: the more we trust you, the safer we feel; the safer we feel, the more likely we'll hand over all those soft femininities that you seem to like so much. So, if you like soft femininities, it's not in your best interest to give us advice. It is in your best interest to just listen and accept us unconditionally.

6. Mastery of sex 101.
Okay, I don't care about who does/should/must take more responsibility for being good lovers, men or women. Regardless of where you fall in that argument, in this day and age of industrial sex advice, how-to books, instructional videos and instructional-how-to-video-books-on-tape, there's no excuse for anyone to not know the sex essentials: the location of the clitoris, the location of the G-spot, how to delay ejaculation, and how to maneuver the complexities of size and shape (yes, I'm saying what you think I'm saying). These are not the end all of good sex, but they are the starting point and no good man would leave home without them. This is particularly important for men not because it's bad to lean back and allow a woman to do all the work in bed. (What happens between you and your partner, so long as it's consensual and turns you both on, is your business and doesn't belong in a list of sweeping generalizations.) But what I've been finding is that a lot of men use female sexual liberation as an excuse to be L-A-Z-Y. That's right. I said it. Laaaaaaaaazzzzzeeeeeee. Adopting this position defeats you in the long run. Men have complained that female financial power has raised the bar so high that they can't possibly compete. For example, if a woman makes $50,000 a year, she wants a man who makes more. That's a reasonable salary for many men to top. But if enough women make, say, $100,000 a year, and still want a man to make more, that's more difficult and leaves a lot of men partnerless. In money, the sky's the limit; in sex, orgasm is the limit. I bet that $100,000-a-year-earning woman would change her mind about your $35,000-a-year ass if you were able to give her unlimited orgasms - a benefit HR can't deliver. And if you can read a computer manual and master computers, then you can read a sex manual and master sex. With the bar raising in so many other arenas, sex is a place where you can always be a man, no matter what.

Top Ten Things Every Man Should Have - III

2006-05-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

Because this one is such a personal bugaboo, it gets its own post.

7. Personal responsibility.
I've got news for you. Come here. Closer. So I can whisper it in your ear. WOMEN ARE NOT THE BETTER GENDER. This one's a pet peeve of mine so I will try to be fair, but forgive me if I come off a little angry. [rant] That defense about men having been biologically programmed to spread their seed to as many women as possible? That you know you're dogs but can't help it? That you're just built this way? I find a lot of men using this scientific “fact” to justify much cruel behavior. Like having sex with women who like them even though they don't reciprocate those women's feelings; or avoiding the stupid “I'm breaking up with you” conversation by treating women so badly that they'll initiate it instead. Similar to 6. above? These behaviors are just plain laziness, and the statutes of limitation on the biology excuse expired back when we started civilizing ourselves. When we set aside our biological imperatives long enough to study the stars, build skyscrapers and draft laws. Knowledge itself is never the problem - we should look to science for potential biological reasons for human behavior. But knowledge alone is not wisdom, and when knowledge is used to avoid wisdom? That's what causes the problems. Who's going to grow and become wiser faster: the guy who realizes that what he's done makes him an asshole and then uses the biological programming data to help him understand himself better, which will, in turn, lead him to making better choices in the future; OR the guy who uses the biological programming data to shield himself from ever admitting he's being an asshole? The latter never has to change. He's not an asshole. He's just being what he was biologically programmed to be. Where's the wisdom in that? And who wants to be the same guy at 40 that he was at 25? The lazy guy, that's who. L-A-Z-Y. And that's not the only damage this piece of crap causes. Implicit in the assertion that men are biologically driven to sex and can't help themselves is that women can. Help themselves that it is. If we have only two genders, and neither one of them can help themselves, who would stop fornicating long enough to raise the children and feed the clan? By using biological programming as an excuse, men take every shred of responsibility off themselves and burden women with it. And I've found this little factoid underlining so many male excuses, that I can't help but wonder if there wasn't some men's lobby somewhere who financed the male scientists who conducted this study and came up with this result for the specific purpose of making women do all the work. Well we, or at least this particular woman, will no longer shoulder your responsibilities for you. So knock it off with using this excuse. I don't buy it. [/rant]

Top Ten Things Every Man Should Have - IV

2006-04-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

8. Mastery over the male sexual impulse.
Male sexual impulse comes with being a man. Which means, first off, that you won't get far with 8. if you don't yet have 7. In other words don't use it as an excuse. But don't deny that it exists either. Admit that it's here and here to stay. Face it head on as a reality of masculinity, learn about it and learn the appropriate ways it's to be used. Second, note the word “master,” which means to conquer or overcome. Master, conquer and overcome - none is a synonym for “repress.” Or for "desexualize" either. This one's hard (pardon the double entendre) because I like the male sexual impulse and I don't want men to turn it off and become eunichs. But neither do I want male sexual desire thrust upon me uninvited (double entendre intended). This one is also har... er, difficult because of my own sexual shame. Which leaves me without any competent advice on how a man can acccomplish this mastery of which I write. All I can say is that if a guy can't look me in the eye when I'm talking to him because his own are locked onto my tits? Or he doesn't know how to say "no" to some tramp who clamps her vagina over his cock even though he loves me and doesn't want to end our loving, monogamous relationship? These men? Instead of having sexuality? Their sexuality has them. And any man who doesn't have mastery over his sexuality is, at the very least, an adolescent, at the very worst, a rapist. Most men, however, fall in the middle and are mere chumps. Adolescents, rapists, chumps - none of them are men.

9. Comfort with vulnerability - both your own and others.
Who's manlier, the guy who's only able to defend his family from attack because he's shut down all of his emotions and feels absolutely nothing, including his fear, or the man who feels his fear and defends his family anyway?

10. A personalized and comfortable definition of masculinity.
Throw all of the above away. Only if you want. Don't do it because I told you to. After all, I'm only a woman. What do I know about being a man? But I'll leave you with two thoughts. If you throw everything above away in favor of the current male model, you're being dictated to by the status quo. In the alternative, if you stretch and contort yourself to try to fit the mold of what you think women might want, again you're being dictated to, only, this time, by women. Ultimately, masculinity, like femininity, is a feeling and whatever it takes you to capture that feeling, so long as it doesn't harm anyone else, is what you need to cultivate in yourself. The fear, in our currently confused age, is that following your feelings will leave you single for many years, if not your entire life. But it's a fear worth overcoming (and is also generally unfounded). Women are given much more freedom to define themselves. Men should simply take the same amount of freedom, whether our culture grants it to them or not. Only by sticking to our individual paths will we ever finally shake out our new gender definitions. Only after our new gender definitions are in place, will the sexes ever find their way back to each other again.

Lucid Dreaming

2006-04-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

I dreamt last night that I was east asian, born to parents who'd been locked into an arranged marriage. Love had never developed between them, but they fulfilled their marital obligations enough to have had myself and my sister, about seven years younger than me. Our household was one of distance - my parents slept in separate rooms and had no contact with each other outside of mealtimes. They likewise ignored both of us. And so it was that on my sister's birthday (she was about six, I was about 12), no celebration was planned. A bucket of paint however mysteriously appeared at our house. We investigated and discovered that it was magic paint - it changed colors each time you dipped into the bucket. My sister tentatively dipped her finger in and tested it against the side of our house. But I knew what a find this paint was and showed her how to splash it against the wall, do Pollack drips and dribbles and mash a paintbrush loaded with the color against any flat surface. We painted everything - the house, the landscape, the dirt. There was a structure in our front yard, like a thick flagpole stuck into a base made from stacked and mortared rocks. After we'd splattered and painted our drab world into a caucophany of pastel colors, I climbed up onto the rock base and painted onto the flagpole "Accept that love may never come." The letters came out all in white. It was a well-known secret in our small town that my mother had taken a local tradesman as a lover. Right after I finished the final word and read over what I'd written, my mother's lover came out of our house, the front door slamming shut behind him. I looked over at my sister. She was watching the man who was not our father, fresh from an afternoon tryst with our mother, stride back to his shop, unconcerned that we'd seen him.

And that was the end of the dream.

Real Time Expression

2006-03-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

I should be working on any number of law school projects right now. But I’m sick and have no concentration. I’m sick partly because I have done nothing for myself in awhile. Though my life is generally fulfilling and it could be said I am pursuing this law degree for none but myself, the definition here is that which I am allowed to do at the moment of inspiration. Or “real time expression.” In the last month, I have written about 10 essays, finished three chapters, and planned an entire film festival. But they only exist in my head because I feel I can’t set aside anything that’s been assigned from outside myself. But whether expressing something defined as art (like writing, painting, or singing) or something non-creative (like flying a kite, taking a walk or scrubbing out a bathtub), I think we must occasionally express something of (any of) it in real time. It is as important to our health as getting enough sleep, nutrients and exercise. Delaying it, and delaying it, and especially delaying it, will make us as sick as stress, smoking or excessive drink. But the enemy of real time expression is our belief that no opportunity for it exists, and that is how I’ve felt for at least four weeks. So, to speed up my recuperation, law school has been relegated to hell for a day, and I, headphones ensconced, am expressing inspiration in real time.

Anyone who’s been following this site knows that the gender war has generally been on my mind, but that I stalled on writing about it because staring deeply into the ever-widening abyss between men and women has brought me up against my own, unsurprising, misandry. However, because I have, throughout my life, found more comfort in the company of men than my own gender, I couldn’t use this platform to vomit more bile into that abyss. I like men. I want them in my life. To that end, prodding this part of my psyche has been difficult, but necessary.

I had a lovely conversation this morning. Two points in that conversation are important. The first, was his question, “What do you like most and hate most about men?” That question got my brain juices going. The second, was the answer he gave to my question, “Don’t you want to sow your oats a bit?” Asked because he’s only a couple of years out of a long marriage. He replied that he was not that kind of guy, an answer I would usually roll my eyes at, except there was more. Childhood circumstances had inculcated in him a feeling of responsibility towards women. While he wouldn’t turn away an offer of casual sex, he could not do it unless he had reasonable certainty that the consenting female did not feel objectified by it. If he thought that she might feel that way, even a tiny bit, he’d feel awful. His credibility hinged on his implication that he was capable of objectifying a woman. Without that, his assertion that he was not “that kind of guy” would not have passed muster. I felt a catch in my chest after I heard his answer. Not knowing me very well, he worried about my silence. But he hadn’t needed to. The catch was merely the long missing puzzle piece snapping into place.

What I like most about men is that they objectify women. What I hate most about men is that they objectify women. I like sex. There is nothing that gets me hotter than my lover’s eyes right before he dives into me. In that moment, I want to be objectified and am honored to be the vessel from which he drinks his pleasure. However, the fact that I have a vagina does not give any stranger sporting a penis the right to objectify me. Objectification is a privilege that is only a woman’s to grant. The age-old feminist complaint is that men take that privilege as if it belonged to them. A child when Gloria Steinem burned her first bra, I grew up to the drumbeat of that complaint, marching alongside the men I would later date. A good majority of American culture, however, has continued to the other, patriarchal beat. The feminist adaptation to this deafness has been to sprout sexless, humorless, man-hating academic fringe branches to drown out that other beat with messages purposefully outrageous enough to shatter those continuingly impervious eardrums. The legacy of this escalating argument has been that my responses to my own objectification experiences have been confused. I would have casual sex with men thinking that I was having them, that I was exercising the sexual freedom hard-earned by prior generations. Only to realize a year or so later, that no, it wasn’t he, but I that’d been had. And that this supposed sexual power I’ve been told my gender holds over men was actually not power, not privilege, nothing that made me special, but a mere commodity to be consumed and then tossed once the consumer was satiated. The image that comes to mind are the bones of a fried chicken dinner left in the trash. I have felt shame over what men have done to me, what I have done to me, and what I’ve witnessed other men and women do to each other under the guise of sexual liberty. And the response by my friend over the phone leads me to believe that men may genuinely feel sexual shame as well.

That men objectify women is not new. That we still struggle with sexual power dynamics generations after the birth of feminism is old news too. And that both men and women feel shame about sex - yawn. The newly discovered puzzle piece is the idea that the abyss separating men and women only exists when they each deny their shame, and that full cognizance of their shame, bared and shared, may be the bridge that unites them.

This is a huge revelation for me and I’m not sure yet what it means practically. But looking backward through the lens of today’s discovery, I now see that with rare exception, the dissolution of any of my sexual liaisons was due to shame. And extrapolating through the same lens, all those supposedly sexually free people out there attending orgies and engaging in polyamorous unions –those who set the sexual standard I once tried to emulate? Probably do so successfully only because they somehow escaped the shame drilled into the rest of us. (The key word here is “successfully.”) And remember this excruciatingly long series? Of course that relationship was short-lived, and I took myself off the market, and have been off, ever since. But again, looking back through this new lens, I see that, in the car that day six months ago I learned how to stew in my shame, and – as horrible and terrifying as it was – it was the step in the right direction. And so has been each subsequent episode. Until I can tell you how all this will work out practically, I will at least testify to you now that naming and owning my shame has improved my life. And I look forward to all the other improvements to come.

The Latest Meme

2006-02-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

Seven Things to Do Before I Die:

1. Buy that house in the mountains with the wide expanses of wood floor, and floor to ceiling windows, sitting on enough acreage (that has some kind of water on it) that I have to ride a bike to my closest neighbors.
2. Plant a mean garden.
3. Learn the piano.
4. Learn the guitar.
5. Write a novel.
6. Finally get that tattoo.
7. Skydive.

Seven Things I Can’t Do:

1. Feel comfortable in a room full of strangers.
2. Not think.
3. Control my eczema.
4. Throw in the towel, buy a van, and just roam aimlessly for a couple of years finding myself.
5. Get excited or stay interested in shallow topics (which is probably why I dislike rooms full of strangers).
6. Make money the measure of all things.
7. Lose all hope (believe me, I’ve tried).

Seven Things That Attracted Me To Blogging:

1. The opportunity to improve my writing.
2. Anonymity.
3. Lack of censorship.
4. Feedback.
5. It is the meta-democracy.
6. Not having to finish lists if I don’t want to.
7. …

Seven Things I Say Often:

1. Actually.
2. I’m tired.
3. My understanding was…
4. Congratudolences (I don’t say it a lot, but I’m always looking for an opportunity to say it).
5. Like (she’s like, but then he’s like, and then you’re all like…).
6. [some coveted thing] drooooooolllllaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrggghglugluglug (ala Homer Simpson).
7. There’s this cellphone commercial playing now that stars a caffeinated cheerleader. The premise of the commercial is that the plan’s minutes will outlast the biggest talkers. In the commercial, the cheerleader pulls a long string of gum out of her mouth while wistfully saying “I love chewing gum.” I’ve taken to imitating her. For example, in the grips of a craving for noodle soup on a cold rainy day, I might get a starry look in my eye and say, “I love noodles," with the same, mindless yet delightful cheerleader inflection. I guess you have to be there. Or not.

Seven Books That I Love:

1. A Prayer for Owen Meaney
2. She’s Come Undone
3. Confederacy of Dunces (painful, but good)
4. Sophie's Choice
5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
6. The God of Small Things
7. Dunno if it falls under the usual criteria of "good", but I'm currently reading M.K. Ghandi's autobiography and it's pretty damn inspiring.

Seven Movies I Love to Watch on Sunday Afternoon TV

1. Anything with John Cusack (even the bad films): Say Anything, Grosse Point Blank, High Fidelity, The Grifters, etc.
2. Anything by Charlie Kaufman
3. Any adaptation of a Stephen King book (even the bad films): Carrie, The Shining, Shawshank Redemption, etc.
4. Anything with Tom Hanks (with or without Meg Ryan) (has he made a bad film?)
5. Anything starring the Brat Pack (they're all bad, but I love them anyway): The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, etc.
6. Almost anything by the Coen brothers (sometimes I don't get them, but when I do, it's sublime): Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, Raising Arizona, etc.
7. Classic 70s and early 80s films (you know, back when Hollywood displayed boobs in all their diverse glory): The Champ, Kramer v. Kramer, Tootsie, Saturday Night Fever, The Warriors, Urban Cowboy (ESP. Brian DePalma films: Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, Body Double - Brian DePalma drooooooolllllaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrggghglugluglug!).

Seven of the Last Things I Have Cooked:

1. Spinach barley pie with feta cheese and raisins
2. Corn/potato chowder
3. Every kind of salad you can imagine
4. Top Ramen and variations ("I LOVE noodles.")
5. PB&J on spelt bread (does that count as cooking?)
6. Every imaginable kind of omelette
7. Tomorrow, I'll be braising some beef.

The discussion at Asymetrical Information

2005-11-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Has been a heated debate on abortion. It's a debate I generally stay out of 'cause my opinion is that abortion needs to remain legal and those who disagree need to get out of other people's business. And there's basically nothing anyone can say to change my mind. That doesn't mean I endorse abortion as a means of contraception. But I believe the problems with criminalizing abortion outweigh the problems of keeping the status quo - forcing women to raise unwanted children (usually by themselves), or abandon them to inadequate social services, propagates an underclass that we all end up being forced to raise, whether or not we chose to risk conceiving it or were part of the decision to keep it.

There seems to be a new position rising in the progressive ranks, however: keep abortions legal, but make them hard to get. I don't have any thoughts about that. I jumped into the fray, however, when commenters started using women's plenary abortion decisionmaking power as a rationale to get out of paying child support. There's way too much rationalizing in the men's movement designed to keep men both powerful and irresponsible. That's when I couldn't hold my tongue anymore.

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Hm. So, a 14 yr old girl, whose bad judgment should bar her from the abortion decision-making process, should, instead, be forced to turn to her parents for consent. (What if the 14 yr old is the child of a single mother who bore her first offspring at 14? Would that mother's decision-making abilities be more nuanced than our current 14 yr old?) Her parent(s), then, may or may not grant permission for the abortion. If they do not consent to the abortion, what happens then? The 14 yr old then gets to excercise her bad judgment in childrearing decisions? What if the pregnancy was caused by paternal incest? The 14 yr old should be forced to get parental consent then as well?

As for fathers' rights, I agree that female hoarding of the decision-making power can be unfair. But I don't feel as sorry for men as others here seem to. Does it not occur to men that having sex with a woman, even if she's competently using contraception, might result in lifetime support of a child? Women don't get to divorce themselves of pregnancy when it happens, but men should be allowed to just because they're excluded from the abortion decision? Doesn't this absolve men of the consequences of their pre-sex decision-making? If you're worried about being left out of the abortion decision, then double up on your condoms and don't trust any woman who says she's on the pill. In fact, don't trust the pill itself.

Belle,

The whole point is that women can get out post-intercourse, while men can't. Besides abortion there's adoption, and also (in several states) legalized anonymous abandonment. No woman in the US can be compelled to support her coming baby just because she's currently pregnant.

Wow, Michelle, that's harsh. Well, not for fathers. If a woman abandoned her child, then by default, the father would "get out" as well. Perhaps a more compassionate choice would be to allow men to force women to abandon their babies since we won't allow them to force women to have abortions?

I'm not sure I agree that a woman "gets out" by putting her child up for adoption or abandoning it. The emotional effects of carrying a child to term and then letting it go are severe. Men never experience that kind of withdrawal.

What you're talking about is fiscal responsibility while ignoring any other impact a pregnancy has (how very common in our culture).

These are a woman's choices as I see them: keep the child and, where the man refuses to take responsibility for sticking his dick into her, risk raising the child by herself; abort the child, if she can, and live with the emotional scarring; or put the child up for adoption or give it over to children's services and, again, live with the emotional scarring. Nice. Women may NEVER escape a pregnancy when it happens; men can, even if by no other means than crossing a state border.

I wouldn't, however, endorse a mother abandoning her child any more than I would endorse a father withholding child support. The fact is, BOTH parties agreed to sex (I'm leaving rape out of this equation); BOTH parties should have considered the consequences of sex (even with contraception) before they engaged in it. Because women cannot escape a pregnancy no matter what choice they end up making, men should not be released from the responsibilities of sex either. And that they can't force a woman to have an abortion is not a convincing rationale to support the dissolution of those responsibilities.

However, the world is not black and white and even when the choice to have sex was made responsibly, things happen. Therefore options need to be available that protect the least of us. If those options aren't in place, then the most of us aren't protected either. That is the role of the judiciary - representation reinforcement. Equal access to abortions protect the least of us, and arguably, protect the most of us as well. Equal access to the abortion decision is not, however, an excuse for men to refuse paternal responsibilities.

My night with Marla Hooch

2005-10-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

Saw the neo-punk, pop confabulation called Marla Hooch last Friday (which will be the last social thing I do until the end of October, ahem) at a tiny space in the Lower East Side (no, lower than that, and East-er too, you know, where they don't speak english) called Bar 169, a place whose inhabitants don't know that the 80's are over. Well, some of the young'uns are wearing the style for the first time, unironically, and all the guys there, mostly my age it looked like, prolly never grew out of it. It was fun. I was trying something new, a vanilla vodka with tonic on the rocks with a twist of lime. Even that felt '80s. Below, is my ode to the evening, a poem made up of the only things I could hear while the music was playing:

The only boobies I saw were his mother's.
Didn't know you masturbated.
Where are all the pornos going?
I wanna see your boobies.
This one's for Brooklyn.
Lose your virginity.
Drink Drink Drink
Don't you wish your girlfriend smoked crack like me?
Don't you wish your girlfriend was gay like me?
This is a love song.
This song's for Harlem.
This song's for Collin.
You're lucky to have one.
Lasagne.
We're going to a gay bar.
I wish I could be famous
[sumpin sumpin sumpin] selling out like Uranus.
It's good to be alive - where's Daisy? Losin' sleep now.

IQ stands for Income Quotient: Duty or Meddling?

2005-10-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

In response to "Randy" who did not leave an email link (text of his comment below):

Belle,

Re; "...then don't we have a duty... to implement programs that give everyone the opportunity to wake up to his/her intelligence potential regardless of his/her social/economic background?"

I just saw the movie Serenity. I was impressed and delighted to see a movie with such a strong libertarian theme. To paraphrase my favorite scene...

Question; "Why would they [referring to the rebels in the outlying worlds] resist us when all we wanted to do was to make them happy?"

River; "Because we meddled. People don't like it when you meddle."

So to answer your question - no, we have no such duty - nor the right to meddle.

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I cannot speak to how programs to aid the educationally disadvantaged are implemented. And though I stand by my earlier statement, I don't think you and I necessarily disagree. I think the error is in your assumption that I would force these programs onto people who do not have an interest in participating in them. I see it all the time in New York: homeless people begging for change on the streets when there are programs available to help them re-enter the workforce, get medication (if necessary) and find a permanent home. Most of them are wacky enough in the heads to not WANT to avail themselves (and therein lies a whole other discussion that I will not get into here). But just because they do not avail themselves of public assistance, that does not remove any duty to provide it. And remember the part of my quote that you left out? "just as human beings, not neocons or liberals or any of those other false, manmade labels" I am making a spiritual argument, not political, scientific, or even religious.

My argument with most of the commentators over at Jane Galt's was not whether education, IQ, genetics, nurturance or earning capacity had any cause and effect on each other, but that they were all assuming that a poor child's ability to earn a high income as an adult was evidence that educational programs had been successful. They ask, "Is it IQ or education that allows a person to be successful?" without ever questioning whether high income is the correct measure of success. No, I'm not a communist. I don't have a problem with people making money. I do have a problem with how American culture diefies the dollar and, as a result, frames all arguments to limit solutions.

I do believe that, as humanists, we have a duty to level the playing field. I also believe that we cannot force people to change if they don't want to. Therefore, I believe that educational programs for the underprivileged are necessary but may also be implemented in ways that do not "meddle." BUT, until America starts taking responsibility for its poor choices and stops feeding the addiction of consumerism, we will not see clearly enough to figure out how to implement what I suggest.

I'll end by quoting another popular movie: "If you build it, they will come."

IQ stands for Income Quotient: Money helps you pass law school

2005-10-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

To "jp" who did not leave an email link (text of his/her comment below):

Belle -- I realize this is going off on a tangent, but I'm curious about your statement "I've seen a lot of dumb people pass law school with the help of their parents' money."

My question is, How does parents' money help a person pass law school? The only direct form of help I can think of is paying for tutors, and I'm not sure if that could really remedy dumbness (as opposed to laziness).

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First off, their parents' money sends them to private, elite lower education institutions where the quality of their education triggered their intelligence, if they were born with it. If not, they simply got the pedigree and perhaps the school got a new gymnasium in exchange for passing the dumb but rich student.

Then they get accepted into ivy league law schools despite poor grades and/or LSAT scores because their parents are alumni.

Once in law school, they do not have to split their focus from studying to work a job because their parents are footing the entire bill. This allows them twice the study time (and potential time to meet with tutors, to incorporate your example) as a dissimilarly situated student. I use myself as an example: my top 30 percentile rank dropped into the lower 50 percentile when my money ran out and I had to work in addition to attending school full-time. It wasn't because I was lazy, nor because I was dumber than my peers. It was because I had 20+ hours less a week in which to study. Throw in the lowered brain function induced by sleep deprivation and lower grades were inevitable.

Finally, ivy league schools have take-home exams and forego the class ranking system. On the following point I'm uncertain, but I've heard that the exams are also not graded. I find evidence to support my assumption, however, in the ivy league process for Law Review admittance: while one must compete for Law Review, there is no minimum GPA requirement (ie, one cannot "grade in"). If my assumption about grading is correct, then one could conceivably get F's one's entire ivy league law school career without any negative effect. Getting into the ivy league school (any one of them) is what counts. Any law firm will welcome you if you have a JD from Harvard, Princeton, et al., regardless of what your grades were. At my public law school, you get kicked out if you perform below a C+ average.

Granted, it's a stereotype, but how is it that stereotypes enter the modern zeitgeist? And granted, the situation is unlikely to happen in your second-tier law schools.

As my immigrant mother says: There are two ways to survive America. Either be really really rich, or be really really poor. Anything in-between is hardship.

IQ stands for Income Quotient

2005-10-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

Didn't know I cared so much, but I saw this article on this blog and the subsequent comments, and then blasted away with my own comment, posted below (in lieu of writing a real post).

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Dunno much about what's written above. From practical experience and my own observations of the world (anecdotes, eh?), it seems that, genetically, we are predisposed to certain conditions. I can't see any reason why intelligence wouldn't be one of those conditions. And it's the environment we grew up in that either triggers a given condition or depresses it. Money helps trigger intelligence when it buys the right education AND you have a predisposition for intelligence. But I've seen a lot of dumb people pass law school with the help of their parents' money. Alternatively, I've seen a lot of smart people never wake up to their potential because mom was too busy working two jobs to offer anything that would trigger her child's intelligence, had he been born with any. If I am right about intelligence being a predisposition that may or may not be triggered by the right environment, then don't we have a duty - just as human beings, not neocons or liberals or any of those other false, manmade labels - to implement programs that give everyone the opportunity to wake up to his/her intelligence potential regardless of his/her social/economic background? I'm not saying we don't have a right to the spoils of our own hard work, but tax dollars spent on education benefit all of us, not because we become safer when poor children grow up to be middle class adults, but because the more intelligent people we have out there: 1) the richer the marketplace of ideas, 2) the safer we are because more people are making more intelligent choices (ie, robbery is a bad choice to poverty, finding a way to cut expenses in addition to seeking financial help is a good choice to poverty), and 3) the more people who are exercising their intelligence, the more people are passing on the ability to exercise good choices to their children.

Nobody has questioned the nexus between intelligence and earning capacity - the data above seems to ignore any other measure of intelligence. Perhaps an intelligent person doesn't want to be the next Bill Gates? Perhaps these criticized educational programs are working better than we give them credit for, but we're not asking the right questions of them?

If I am right, then isn't how well adjusted poor children become as adults just as real a measure of the success of these programs as whether or not poor children are growing up to command six-figure salaries? I'm not certain that this debate can be neatly quantified into a blackline rule. I think the real mistake we're making is not in spending money for educational programs for the poor, but in attempting to equate money with intelligence and then using that to quantify the success of any of these programs. What results is the quantifying of human characteristics when we are all so individual and unique. I'm poor and I'm intelligent. Does that mean that the education I've received has been a failure or a waste of money?

While you're at it, ask yourself if an intelligent person would trust any kneejerk reaction he might have to what I suggest?

The butcherwoman of Phoenix - Conclusion

2005-08-18T08:10:00.000-07:00

Part I
Part II
Part III

My boyfriend and I reached his apartment by 7 pm. Despite the grief that had replaced the shame and aches, I could finally talk again. I’m not going to say that everything went great, but I felt that we were finally listening to each other and we were finally considering our own dysfunctions. Two hours later, we decided to take a step back from our relationship and to work with our respective therapists on our specific dysfunctions for a couple of weeks, individually, before deciding whether we want to continue together. In simple terms, we’re on a break. There’s no prediction for the final prognosis.

Hey… duh…WHAT?!! Isn’t saving the relationship what all this agita is about in the first place?

A mistake I made early on my path was thinking that, by gaining control over my person and my life, I would gain control over the world. This. Nevuh. Happens. My guy is a grownup; he can make his own choices. If he is invested in clinging onto his childhood beliefs, i.e., continues blaming me as the cause of the original humiliation that he now carries in his adulthood and which is triggered by the endearment “Poopoohead,” (see hypothetical in Part II), then he is not the guy for me. I can’t, will never, and don’t want to change him. I also don’t want the space I’ve reserved for My Life Partner taken up by a man who won’t do the work of releasing his childhood beliefs for himself, i.e., who won’t grow up. This is why I cannot attach to this specific relationship. While I struggle to take control – sever my defense mechanisms and end the shame spiral by sitting in the shame rather than passing it back – I must also simultaneously struggle to release control – let go of my man to do as he pleases. It’s the hardest dance I’ve ever had to learn. But if I don’t accept its latter lesson – that I will never control the world – I risk trying to control my man and his behaviors. And one trying to control the other is how we got into this mess in the first place. (Again, see the hypothetical in Part II.)

I, ultimately, want an intimate loving relationship with someone who is a partner in every aspect of my life. It may or may not happen with this guy; it may or may not happen with the next. Sometimes, I have to accept that it may never happen. But it is guaranteed to never happen, evuh, if I don’t connect with my shame and grief, and heal my childhood. Until I do, my childhood beliefs will continue to control me and I will continue to react inappropriately to the current circumstances of my life. I will push lovers away because I am responding to my parents instead of to him standing in front of me. I will withhold support from my man because clinging to a mistrustful worldview leaves me without the hands I need to support anyone. So I put myself through the cycle: shame, uncomfortable childhood memories, anger, grief and then, finally, healing, all the while accepting that I still might not get the boy in the end. It would feel hopeless except that, each day, as I parent myself, my grief slowly dissolves and I find that I am a little bit lighter than I had been before the fight. It is this lightness that is my reward for doing this work. It is my fledgling control over my life and my ever strengthening ability to hold a relationship - not control over this specific man nor the gifting of this particular relationship - that is my reward for putting myself through so much agita.

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The butcherwoman of Phoenix - III

2005-08-17T15:08:00.000-07:00

Part I
Part II

Sometime shortly after we hit the city limits, my aches subsided in conjunction with an epiphany. In the silence, as I was sitting in the shame, my mind ran through old childhood memories. Unpleasant ones. Ones, I’m assuming, that comprised the lens through which I was viewing this fight.

I’ve been “on the path” for over ten years now, and I have done a lot of work on my relationship with my parents. Forgive my parents? Check. No longer need to try to change them? Check. My happiness is no longer tied to their opinion of me? Check. And yet, I noticed a lingering and inappropriate anger response I still had to certain situations. This inappropriate anger response signified that there remained a lingering pocket of anger towards my parents that I had yet to locate and release. I hadn’t been able to find it. Until, as I remembered the butcherwoman of Phoenix slapping me across the face; my enraged father ripping the passenger seat from our family car while my mother and I cowered in the back seat; my father kicking me under my sister’s crib; and my mother scrubbing my skin raw in the bath, screaming over and over that I was a dirty girl; I finally also saw the others who had allowed my childhood abuse to go on. Well meaning aunts and uncles who took me in for the night with pitying eyes, but who never reported my parents to social services. Schoolteachers too harried to notice a little girl who preferred to play by herself and made few friends. Friends’ parents, who thought my family odd but who never saw anything dangerous enough to move them to interfere. My own beloved grandmother who, once or twice, tried to break up my parents’ battles by shushing my father as if he were not a virile and dangerous man of 30, but still a child in grade school - God bless her ineffectual bravery. This was the hidden pocket of anger that was still controlling my behavior. With each memory, my anger swelled until I could name its entirety “The World’s Apathy.” And then it miraculously subsided.

Connecting with and naming my anger was only the first step. Once the anger was named and my aches subsided, grief replaced them both. Grief feels like the common cold. My nose runs. My throat is sore. I am tired and achy and all I want is sleep. If shame is the hardest emotion for us to feel, grief is the second hardest. And I am, literally, sick with it right now. As children, we’re supposed to view the world as a benign place and feel secure and protected against its atrocities, at least until we become adult enough to protect ourselves (provided we’re even conscious of those atrocities at all). But that worldview was ripped from me early. While other children played in stupid unconcern, I kept turning from my Light Bright to look over my shoulder lest the next horror the world launched caught me unawares. And that sucked. I hate that I was always different, that I never got that simple childhood that so many others were allowed.

So I grieve the loss of my childhood: of never having had a period of my life when I viewed the world as benign and harmless and, since I never owned that worldview, my subsequent barring from the club of normalcy. I’ll probably still be grieving at the end of the week. I will potentially be grieving for the rest of my life. It would be a wicked pisser but for my brilliant body. By turning my grief into sickness, my body gives me the excuse I need to care for myself; to stay home and nurture myself with warm blankets, TV, hot soup; to turn off the phone and shut the door on that mean, evil world, and to replace it with a kind and sympathetic one, the one my parents should have given me. Only now, Belle, the adult, gives it to me. It’s called “parenting” myself, and this is how I heal my grief. This is how I teach myself that my childhood is over and that I am capable of turning what was once a dangerous world into a safe and hopeful one.

The butcherwoman of Phoenix - II

2005-08-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Part I

My therapist tells me that when one tries to control another’s behavior, he’s merely passing shame. Shame is an emotion that is so devastating to all of us that, rarely, are any of us capable of actually feeling it. Instead, we pass it back and forth like a continuous game of hot potato. One person tries to control another person’s behavior thereby passing shame onto her. Not being able to handle the shame, she passes it back via a defensive attack. And thus we fall into a spiral, crawling out of which is nearly impossible.

Here’s an example. My boyfriend confesses that he feels humiliated when I call him “Poopoohead” (roll with me, this is a hypothetical). Instead of responding as he wants with something like, “Oh honey, I’m sorry that that name hurts you; I will never use it again,” I give the wrong response, something like, “Why are you so sensitive about it? It’s my endearment for you; it means I love you.” Regardless that I am not trying to hurt him, that I have merely misunderstood his need and innocently do not understand the import of his request, he feels humiliated anyway, and now, also, dismissed. And so he attempts to control my behavior by shaming me with something along the lines of, “You’re being insensitive.” If I can’t hold that shame, I get defensive and pass it back to him usually through an attack, like, “Well, I wouldn’t call you that if you acted more like a man.” Ouch. My initial intent be damned, I've been shamed and I will defend myself, even if my only available weapon is untrue. Part of the point of the attack is to hurt him, but mostly the point of the attack is to get the shame off me - I’m a bad human being because I’m insensitive - and back onto him – all of this is your fault because you’re not manly enough. 15-all, the score is tied. Whose turn to serve? But there exists no response to a defensive attack that can prevent the spiral from deepening.

However, if I can simply sit in the shame and remember that its origin - the humiliation my boyfriend felt first - had nothing to do with me or my behavior, then (drumroll please) I get to feel like shit for awhile (rimshot). Shame feels like shit. But I idiotically sign up for this crappy deal anyway because I want to be the master of my life. Instead of looking at the world through the lens of unexamined childhood beliefs and allowing those beliefs to decide the direction of my life and then spending all my time retroactively fixing the destruction that those beliefs wreak, I want to react and decide my life on the basis of the truth as it actually exists in front of me today - the truth without the lens, the way the world really is, the truth of my adulthood. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

So, during the fight, I remembered what my therapist had told me, and when my boyfriend told me for the second time that he felt invalidated by me - I. Shut. Up. (gasp!) I was angry. Sad. Scared. Defensive. All of these feelings rose up to try to remove the shame that I was feeling as well. The space between my shoulder blades clenched up. My sinuses swelled. My neck ached. My forehead pounded. My eyes felt sticky and irritated. In short, I felt like shit, but I kept my mouth shut anyway for the whole four-and-a-half hour drive home. No defensiveness. No attacks. And I swam in old memories like the butcherwoman one.

It. Totally. Sucked.

The butcherwoman of Phoenix

2005-08-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

You know those butcher knives, the ones with the large rectangular blades that the Chinese use to chop a whole duck into squares right through the bones? My mother once slapped me across the face with the flat side of one of those.

She was in the kitchen. I don’t know where my dad was. It was early evening; she was cooking dinner. So it was likely that he was sleeping; he’s worked the graveyard shift for as far back as I can remember.

Me? I was in the living room playing with the pieces of a Monopoly board game – animating the shoe, thimble, etc., into something other than the capitalist story for which they were designed. Out of nowhere, for I was a quiet child, she found me and screamed for me to put the board away before I lost all the pieces. Then smacked me across the face with the knife. She was a small woman, but the blow was hard enough to roll me to one side. At first, I couldn’t cry I was so shocked. But when the tears finally did come, they were silent, lest I draw her attention to me once more. I don’t recall my exact age at the time – somewhere above six, somewhere below ten. Seven maybe? Old enough to know what damage she could have caused had the edge of the blade been turned even slightly towards me.

Later, she apologized. In hindsight, I imagine it was more out of fear than real remorse – fear of what my father would do if he found out. (Some perspective: a couple of years later, during a long, drawn-out custody battle, when my father contemplated having me testify, I fearfully told him that I’d choose to live with my mother. I was a truthful little fucker, even when my life was at stake. As a consequence, I was never put on the stand.) My mother’s apology came too late. If I hadn’t already feared her, from then on I morbidly feared her.

I revisited this incident this past weekend, in the silence that enveloped my boyfriend and me during what should have been a two-hour drive home from upstate New York. The ride ended up being four-and-a-half hours long. The fight had nothing to do with the length of the trip, but it sure as hell affected how the trip felt. We needed the extra two-and-a-half hours like we needed spontaneous nosebleeds. What did we fight about? Well, it seems my boyfriend feels invalidated by me.

Oh there I am!

2005-08-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

There are a million things on my mind (par for the course). But all that I'm capable of actually putting into words right now is a three-week catch up to Seen 'n Heard in New York.

The last week of July

Feeling staid and boring thanks to the lack of funds, sleep and stability in my recent life, I make a self-promise to get out this week and do whatever I want, emotional and spiritual fatigue be damned.

1 - I visit a friend and see her thousand million trillion pictures of her three-month jaunt through South America. Wonderful stuff. They have glaciers. And brightly painted houses. And interesting hats. And glaciers. Because my friend has a computer that's run by a mouse on a wheel, we loaded the glyphs onto my G-4. So if you're nice, maybe I'll post some of them here.

2 - I caught Edmar Castaneda at 55 Bar on Tuesday night. At 10:00 pm. Who does a fucking show at 10 on a weeknight?!! Well, most anybody who's in the jazz scene. I first heard about Edmar from Joe, and he was everything Joe cracked him up to be. He's as tall as his harp and he played with a drummer and a trombonist (whom I warmed up to as he warmed up). But Edmar didn't really need them. His harp played it all - it was drums, acoustic guitar, bass and even, at times, steel drums. Oh and it was a HARP! At the time, he was to have a cd out in a month; it's probably out now. Catch him before his shows get too expensive and crowded.

3 - I saw two apartments this week; one in Astoria and the other on Roosevelt Island. Both were roommate situations, which I had hoped to avoid after my last fiasco in Woodside. But they were great deals for the space and I still haven't been able to clean up my credit record enough for landlords to trust me with a lease solo (at least, not without signing over my first-born -- fucking Citibank). That's a long story best saved for, like, oh, never. But I ended up putting down a deposit on the apartment in Astoria - mostly because I liked the roommate better. What's not to like? She's from Colombia and takes month-long trips to India.

4 - I saw an off-off-Broadway, workshop production of a musical about the life of Charles and Diana, directed by a friend of mine. It was included as part of a festival of new works. It had potentional. But all I could think, as I was squeezing my way through the festival crowd was "Thank God I'm no longer an actor." I thought the same thing during the show and especially after, when I was talking to my friend who still had to break down the set and would be up well into the morning doing it. Thank Fucking GOD I'm no longer an actor!

5 - In between concerts, plays and apartment hunting, I had dinner out every night this week and caught up with friends. Some old, some new. Of note was dinner with a friend who's been having his short plays featured in a monthly cabaret. If you get the chance and you like sex, check it out.

First week of August

Well, all that traipsing around and getting to bed late every night took its toll and the beginning of the week found me sick. Of course, a new project at my job which required overtime didn't help either. Sometime during my fogged up state, I got a call notifying me that my transfer to CUNY School of Law got accepted. School starts the last week of August which was, at the time I was notified, oh, three weeks away. By the time I started feeling better, around Wednesday, I had too much to do to even think of taking a look around New York. But I did hear something.

1 - As I'm leaving the Starbucks closet, I overhear a guy on his cellphone say, "I'm assuming that they date their fathers before they marry them." I throw him a look that says, What??!!!! He notices, laughs and assures me that, "It's all legit, I swear."

Second week of August

Finished that monster project at work, scrambled to get all my documents in to CUNY for registration (and to figure out my damn class schedule!); have been surfing CraigsList dreaming of furniture for my new place (into which I'll be moving during the second week of classes - NICE!). I've had no room in my head for anything but TV. I have fallen in love with Ghost Hunters, Kathy Griffin's Life on the D-List, Hooking Up, and, of course, the final few episodes of Six Feet Under. Oh, and one night, during a bout of insomnia, I saw In the Cut, which boasts the most erotic sex scene I've seen in a Looooooong time. It was between Meg Ryan and Mark Ruffalo, and yes, I saw her boobies.

So, the end of this week finds me at a friend's country house in Saugherties, NY. I'm going up today, after work, after therapy, after I sign over a check for my tuition to CUNY. There will be more TV and probably a bit of reading. But there will also be silence. And in that silence, I hope to regain my voice. Patience grasshopper.