There's more to life than work.
There is more to life than errands.
Doing many things does not make you productive.
Letting go must get easier.
Relaxing in your house is good.
Remember how you used to relax?
Small spaces are better.
Less stuff is a lot better.
Your life will never be simple.
Life isn't supposed to be tidy.
Let it be.
Are you running down a road that has no end, tired?
When do impressions about others cease to matter?
When do you admit that you are the Mad Hatter?
Your life will never be easy.
Its not like you've been thinking of.
There's a whole spectrum between upset and medicated.
Namaste.
When will your heart float out of your chest and away?
Growing up feels like a soul-shellac.
I wouldn't mind getting my soul back.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
For feng shui reasons, please don't take this post seriously.
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A friendly reminder above a toilet in a yoga studio in Burbank, California.
As a concept for use in other applications, this is a hot little putter. Considering how many people know the actual tenets of feng shui, versus a general idea of it, one could potentially have wide latitude to make any kind of statement for almost any situation.
For feng shui reasons, please do not give me any work today.
For feng shui reasons, please realize it is your turn to make dinner.
For feng shui reasons, please keep your pie-hole shut while I am talking.
For feng shui reasons, please stop spamming my email box with your urban myth forwards.
For feng shui reasons, please realize I have to unfriend you on facebook.
For feng shui reasons, please talk about something else other than your adorable children and your house projects.
For feng shui reasons, please make this round on the house.
For feng shui reasons, please someone follow or comment on TOL.
For feng shui reasons, please sell me those tickets at face value.
For feng shui reasons, please say yes.
What would you suggest best serves feng shui reasons?
Space, and how we occupy it.
I travelled recently and it has once again confirmed what I thought last time I left our borders: we are penultimate consumers. You can read the statistics about how our obsession for acquiring and consuming stuff outstrips all other countries but you appreciate it more when you realize that in Hong Kong, a solidly middle-class family of four lives in about 450 square feet of space.
In such a space there's usually a stove that spits like a flamethrower (but no oven), a single box that neither washes nor dries your clothes very well, and no opportunity to ever pick your nose in privacy, ever. With a set up like that, Hong Kong must be a breeding ground for the voyeur, and a Ph.D. program for executing sneaky sex, among so many other things for which we appreciate privacy. So, then, you spend your time out of doors. And it is busy, crowded.
But far from being a social pressure-cooker, from what I experienced in the city there's an orderliness to it, a sort of agreed-upon-process among the citizenry that feels sane and civil. I learned that the crime rate was virtually non-existent. Our Chinese friend told us that it was in large part because "there's so much police". It was then it struck me that in the five days I spent on the main island I never saw a single police car or cop, and I cannot recall hearing sirens of any kind - ambulance, fire, police. Hong Kong is a place of much wealth, whether coming over from the mainland to spend their yuan or generated by business right there. And wealth can demand certain social niceties that lower-income folk alone cannot usually afford to command. Even as that wealth is 7 million strong in a space smaller than Rhode Island.
Opportunity to pick your nose or boink in privacy aside, Hong Kong comes in 88th in the Global Happy Planet Index....want to guess where the US comes in (forgetitIwontdepressyou150). This measures social well being and environmental impact on the planet. I don't conclude from this they're "better" than us. The things I envied - the spotless streets; the beaches and mountains; the near-non-existent crime; the dizzying number of awesome mass transit options; the shiny grafitti-free storefronts and side alleys; the abscence of homeless and beggars to remind you that the world is an unfair and cruel place; and the tidy chaos of the open air markets...it presented a copasetic Stepford Wives mix of two worlds: bustling metropolis and country club genteel. It is initially a marvel, but after the novelty wears the mystery of how such a mix is acheived and sustains lingers.
A mystery, like how a 6,500 square foot home is so much living space but is yet packed to the gills with stuff. Lovely on the eyes, envious at first glance, but puzzling as how it is pulled off. And the suspicion that, somewhere, to have things look this good, there's a massive tradeoff that's lurking in its closets, cabinets and drawers.
In such a space there's usually a stove that spits like a flamethrower (but no oven), a single box that neither washes nor dries your clothes very well, and no opportunity to ever pick your nose in privacy, ever. With a set up like that, Hong Kong must be a breeding ground for the voyeur, and a Ph.D. program for executing sneaky sex, among so many other things for which we appreciate privacy. So, then, you spend your time out of doors. And it is busy, crowded.
But far from being a social pressure-cooker, from what I experienced in the city there's an orderliness to it, a sort of agreed-upon-process among the citizenry that feels sane and civil. I learned that the crime rate was virtually non-existent. Our Chinese friend told us that it was in large part because "there's so much police". It was then it struck me that in the five days I spent on the main island I never saw a single police car or cop, and I cannot recall hearing sirens of any kind - ambulance, fire, police. Hong Kong is a place of much wealth, whether coming over from the mainland to spend their yuan or generated by business right there. And wealth can demand certain social niceties that lower-income folk alone cannot usually afford to command. Even as that wealth is 7 million strong in a space smaller than Rhode Island.
"play nice" signage on the Hong Kong mass transit rail
Or perhaps the mainland used its Communist-brainwashing-techno-blaster to turn everyone into little obedient automatrons. While there is a predominant Chinese element in the culture, the expats seem to take up just as much cultural space as the Chinese. (It odd to call the British "expats" when they basically founded the place.)
In contrast to Hong Kong's tight quarters, I spent three hours in a 6,500 square foot home today. A family of five live there. Oh, its beautiful, I won't front. But 6,500 square feet begs for stuff to inhabit it, lest it look like an empty warehouse. Then you have to take care of that stuff: dust it, repair it, put it away, hell, just remember that it exists. The owner, a lovely person, confessed that every room, every closet, every cabinet, every drawer, is packed full of stuff. This person says they lay awake at night stressing about how the "warehouse" is full of inventory and nothing ever gets shipped out. Stressful, as I gather, to lord over so many things. A psychic pressure, all these things, some of which you've forgotten entirely, which need you to account for them, to employ them, to justify their existence.
We could spend all our existence justifying the existence of all of our shit, I say.
We could spend all our existence justifying the existence of all of our shit, I say.
Opportunity to pick your nose or boink in privacy aside, Hong Kong comes in 88th in the Global Happy Planet Index....want to guess where the US comes in (forgetitIwontdepressyou150). This measures social well being and environmental impact on the planet. I don't conclude from this they're "better" than us. The things I envied - the spotless streets; the beaches and mountains; the near-non-existent crime; the dizzying number of awesome mass transit options; the shiny grafitti-free storefronts and side alleys; the abscence of homeless and beggars to remind you that the world is an unfair and cruel place; and the tidy chaos of the open air markets...it presented a copasetic Stepford Wives mix of two worlds: bustling metropolis and country club genteel. It is initially a marvel, but after the novelty wears the mystery of how such a mix is acheived and sustains lingers.
A mystery, like how a 6,500 square foot home is so much living space but is yet packed to the gills with stuff. Lovely on the eyes, envious at first glance, but puzzling as how it is pulled off. And the suspicion that, somewhere, to have things look this good, there's a massive tradeoff that's lurking in its closets, cabinets and drawers.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
los angeles
this infinite table
a grotesque feast, a presentation of precedent
pomegranates and oranges,
concasse of hunger and silver-plated spittle,
cuvee, red beans and beer.
and the carcasses of gazelle and lamb
leather central and gristle-adjacent
napkins unfolded on laps, grasping
coddled eggs and eclairs,
lust and fear
my mouth fastens upon a peach
alcoholic, sick with ferment
my organs are undressed of their varnish
I'm inside out now
and try not to notice.
a grotesque feast, a presentation of precedent
pomegranates and oranges,
concasse of hunger and silver-plated spittle,
cuvee, red beans and beer.
and the carcasses of gazelle and lamb
leather central and gristle-adjacent
napkins unfolded on laps, grasping
coddled eggs and eclairs,
lust and fear
my mouth fastens upon a peach
alcoholic, sick with ferment
my organs are undressed of their varnish
I'm inside out now
and try not to notice.
Friday, October 9, 2009
What I Mean, When I Get Mean
5:42 to 6:10pm:
I'm sitting on a completely full train yesterday and this balding-blond, glasses-wearing, ruddy-waxy complected, late 30-something suited dude wearing a blue tooth (I'll call that an Ear Manacle) sits down across the aisle and one row back and crows unceasingly about a kind of chapstick he found in Milan. ("And the Milanese CALL it chapstick too! Can you BELIEVE it?") But its reality is simply too much for our ethused neighbor, this interloper of passenger train peace. He himself certainly can't BELIEVE it, that he's FOUND it, and how GREAT it is. His voice sounds like his lips were coated in frosting after swallowing a teaspoon of strong cough syrup. A tone that is at once chewy, masculine, and saccharine. He spells out the name of the brand for the trapped ear on the other end of the line, he discusses each flavor it comes in, while fondling the Milanese tube in his own hand. I know this because I look up from Tropic of Cancer in incredulousness, and I can only think "What Would Henry Miller Do?" (I'll call this "WWMD"?) I look back down to my book and read the very next sentence:
WWMD gives me permission: I began fantasizing, vividly (I'll call this Mental Masturbation) at what, I've come to realize, I desperately want to do. My stop is next and I, calling forth my best amateur acting ability, rise from my seat a bit early and step back to him. Wearing my best disarming smile and tilting my head to the side in flirtatiousness, I say in polite, measured tones for everyone to hear "I would fucking kill you with my bare hands for what you've done to us on this train ride."
Oh, the thrill of effecting a surreal violation of social boundaries by clothing it in a traditional approach to a stranger!! Do I really want to kill him? Nope. I choose my words for their cache, for their novelty, much like he chose his Milanese chapstick. I want to violate the boundary, like he did with his Ear Manacle. I want to be Johnny Knoxville, with tits and green eyes.
But instead I do nothing, and in its stead begins an interior monologue that helplessly runs whenever a sense of ludicrousness overtakes me (I'll call this monologue "IfYouWearThis").
IfYouWearThis targets people who have put themselves together in an awful way -- but not out of a sense of personal style, or creativity, or their own personal brand of anarchy. No, not that, but instead they put themselves together as if they were so bored or uninterested that they negate themselves. That they'd rather barf on themselves than dress themselves. The dreariness of their existence or the laziness of their psyche are on display.
The woman next to me seems nice enough, and she too suffers the Milanese Chapstick Affair. But she's got a flimsy black cloth bag with little pills stuck all over it and stray threads trailing from the zipper. Uh oh, here it comes...
"SoIfYou get your raggy black cloth bag and you make sure it has these garishly painted glitter flowers all over it, SoIfYou carry that while wearing khakis fitted like a stiff paper bag and pressed with a center leg crease that could cut glass (why start now with the attention to detail? why now, at the crease!), SoIfYouWear that with a beloved, stretched red-white weaved polo shirt with Tigger embroidered on it and IfYouWear over it a long cotton navy jacket ripe with lint and plastic buttons and a string belt around the middle, which my 88 year old grandmother also owns, and SoIfYou walk around in this outfit adorned with a pair of black sneakers that look like they could withstand industrial waste and pearl earrings that dangle ...SoIfYouWearThis, where exactly did you go today? SoIfYouWearThis, what tasks did you fulfill, people did you meet? SoIfYouWearThis, did you look in a mirror and say, Yes, this is what I intend. This works for me. This is my message.
Sadly, certain things almost always PTSD-trigger IfYouWearThis:
- Quilted cloth backpacks or purses for women. I understand these are popular. Vera Bradley's made a killing. But you don't live in horse country. Nor did you have a Manhattan for breakfast. The print and cotton you love on your French Country placemats do not make for OK accessories.
![]()
- Christmas or Thanksgiving themed sweaters or sweatshirts with holiday icons on anyone past the age of 25. Why not just cut to the chase and wear a baby diaper?
![]()
- Men who unintentionally wear their pants too high under the age of 65. You're not a sausage.
- Wide belts on short waisted women. You're not a sausage, either.
- Mid-calf length loose-fit jean skirts with a slit up the back for women under the age of 50. Why do you hate on yourself so? A skirt this unflattering doesn't qualify as a skirt.
![]()
There's a saying that goes, "People don't think about you as much as you worry about what they think." Wear these, and all bets are off.
What's your most awful interior monologue?
I'm sitting on a completely full train yesterday and this balding-blond, glasses-wearing, ruddy-waxy complected, late 30-something suited dude wearing a blue tooth (I'll call that an Ear Manacle) sits down across the aisle and one row back and crows unceasingly about a kind of chapstick he found in Milan. ("And the Milanese CALL it chapstick too! Can you BELIEVE it?") But its reality is simply too much for our ethused neighbor, this interloper of passenger train peace. He himself certainly can't BELIEVE it, that he's FOUND it, and how GREAT it is. His voice sounds like his lips were coated in frosting after swallowing a teaspoon of strong cough syrup. A tone that is at once chewy, masculine, and saccharine. He spells out the name of the brand for the trapped ear on the other end of the line, he discusses each flavor it comes in, while fondling the Milanese tube in his own hand. I know this because I look up from Tropic of Cancer in incredulousness, and I can only think "What Would Henry Miller Do?" (I'll call this "WWMD"?) I look back down to my book and read the very next sentence:
"You are the seive through which my anarchy strains,
resolves itself through words." (p.11)
WWMD gives me permission: I began fantasizing, vividly (I'll call this Mental Masturbation) at what, I've come to realize, I desperately want to do. My stop is next and I, calling forth my best amateur acting ability, rise from my seat a bit early and step back to him. Wearing my best disarming smile and tilting my head to the side in flirtatiousness, I say in polite, measured tones for everyone to hear "I would fucking kill you with my bare hands for what you've done to us on this train ride."
Oh, the thrill of effecting a surreal violation of social boundaries by clothing it in a traditional approach to a stranger!! Do I really want to kill him? Nope. I choose my words for their cache, for their novelty, much like he chose his Milanese chapstick. I want to violate the boundary, like he did with his Ear Manacle. I want to be Johnny Knoxville, with tits and green eyes.
But instead I do nothing, and in its stead begins an interior monologue that helplessly runs whenever a sense of ludicrousness overtakes me (I'll call this monologue "IfYouWearThis").
IfYouWearThis targets people who have put themselves together in an awful way -- but not out of a sense of personal style, or creativity, or their own personal brand of anarchy. No, not that, but instead they put themselves together as if they were so bored or uninterested that they negate themselves. That they'd rather barf on themselves than dress themselves. The dreariness of their existence or the laziness of their psyche are on display.
The woman next to me seems nice enough, and she too suffers the Milanese Chapstick Affair. But she's got a flimsy black cloth bag with little pills stuck all over it and stray threads trailing from the zipper. Uh oh, here it comes...
"SoIfYou get your raggy black cloth bag and you make sure it has these garishly painted glitter flowers all over it, SoIfYou carry that while wearing khakis fitted like a stiff paper bag and pressed with a center leg crease that could cut glass (why start now with the attention to detail? why now, at the crease!), SoIfYouWear that with a beloved, stretched red-white weaved polo shirt with Tigger embroidered on it and IfYouWear over it a long cotton navy jacket ripe with lint and plastic buttons and a string belt around the middle, which my 88 year old grandmother also owns, and SoIfYou walk around in this outfit adorned with a pair of black sneakers that look like they could withstand industrial waste and pearl earrings that dangle ...SoIfYouWearThis, where exactly did you go today? SoIfYouWearThis, what tasks did you fulfill, people did you meet? SoIfYouWearThis, did you look in a mirror and say, Yes, this is what I intend. This works for me. This is my message.
Sadly, certain things almost always PTSD-trigger IfYouWearThis:
- Quilted cloth backpacks or purses for women. I understand these are popular. Vera Bradley's made a killing. But you don't live in horse country. Nor did you have a Manhattan for breakfast. The print and cotton you love on your French Country placemats do not make for OK accessories.
- Christmas or Thanksgiving themed sweaters or sweatshirts with holiday icons on anyone past the age of 25. Why not just cut to the chase and wear a baby diaper?
colin firth as mark darcy in bridget jones' diary
- Men who unintentionally wear their pants too high under the age of 65. You're not a sausage.
- Wide belts on short waisted women. You're not a sausage, either.
- Mid-calf length loose-fit jean skirts with a slit up the back for women under the age of 50. Why do you hate on yourself so? A skirt this unflattering doesn't qualify as a skirt.
There's a saying that goes, "People don't think about you as much as you worry about what they think." Wear these, and all bets are off.
What's your most awful interior monologue?
Friday, October 2, 2009
Until I get my (metaphysical) balls up to post my work of fiction, another poetic liberty
It was so satisfying to put an "X" with a box around it
just fill it, fill the empty space
since I've run off the road
the lines are a weak grace
I gazed upon the yard below
the way high hidden window a secure square
this little face filling it's frame
the perch - a throne
the room - a lair
And the distance and height a power
a lesson impressed hence
touch with out feeling
blindly freeing
the window an imprisoning consequence.
just fill it, fill the empty space
since I've run off the road
the lines are a weak grace
I gazed upon the yard below
the way high hidden window a secure square
this little face filling it's frame
the perch - a throne
the room - a lair
And the distance and height a power
a lesson impressed hence
touch with out feeling
blindly freeing
the window an imprisoning consequence.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Moving to a new hood.
"hood" etymology: a native English suffix denoting state, condition, character, nature, etc., or a body of persons of a particular character or class
Recently I shuffled my life around to be able to pick up my child from school. That might not sound like a lot but it involves taking a pay cut (but not a job cut), hauling in a babysitter in the mornings and paying an exorbitant sum just to see the kids off cuz I now start work earlier, and effectively learning what it feels like to actually be with my child at a time when I never usually am. To observe and be with him at a normal time of day, every day.
The latter being the biggest change, and because I know I am the remedial Mom who, after being spending my entire motherhood diagnosed with ADHD in the remedial class, was given the basic assessment test again and was grudingly granted furlough, turning me loose on motherhood in a way I have not been before. Literally, before this my child's exposure to me was maybe 3 hours a day during the work week, and less than an hour of it could've been considered actual attention paid to said child. Most of the available fuel in the brain trust was spent wildly stomping on the desire to deal with details in lieu of dealing with the big picture at hand (just what in the fuck should I do with this small purple button lying here on the counter? keep it? toss it? what if I need it? I don't know!). The big picture being so large it was just a blob, and the substance of it...just left me feeling defeated, and so I squinted at the picture instead, and pondered the fate of the button lying randomly on our desk counter for the last three months.
But on that first day of school at 3:30 I jauntily walked up the street, eyeing other mothers trailing in from all different directions, answering the motherhood siren call. They stand around unhurried, watching their kids play with each other and talking a bit, before meandering away from school. They stand in pairs and clusters, in Tory Burch flats and worn expensive jeans, North Face fleeces, sloppy ponytails and modestly makeup'd faces. Relaxed. Its a scene, like anything else is a scene. They are the Motherhood. I want to fit. I want to fit purely because I want my child to fit. (Like me? Well, you'll LOVE my child!) My child, who doesn't really do playdates because I'm never around. My child, who doesn't have 6 extracurriculars, in part cuz I feel panicked that the growing stack of unread Sunday New York Times is a taunting detail existing to prove my willful ignorance of the world at large and must be addressed NOW.
So after weeks of remembering names, trading smiles, proudly standing relaxed in the playyard, with the security in knowing that I too have the ability to leisurely wander away from school when we're ready, I came home to know that I could walk by the stack of mail and not twitch. And the fucking button, its still there. And when the requisite tantrum has been thrown by the three year old and the requisite googl requests for treats has passed, I will still have time to go through the homework folder and put something together that some may consider dinner. These, little tsunami's all, are convincing of the truth of the adage "time heals all wounds", in an unique way. Motherhood may not be my nature (see etymology above), but it is certainly more my state now than ever. In this state, the big picture has form, and its substance is scalable.
Recently I shuffled my life around to be able to pick up my child from school. That might not sound like a lot but it involves taking a pay cut (but not a job cut), hauling in a babysitter in the mornings and paying an exorbitant sum just to see the kids off cuz I now start work earlier, and effectively learning what it feels like to actually be with my child at a time when I never usually am. To observe and be with him at a normal time of day, every day.
The latter being the biggest change, and because I know I am the remedial Mom who, after being spending my entire motherhood diagnosed with ADHD in the remedial class, was given the basic assessment test again and was grudingly granted furlough, turning me loose on motherhood in a way I have not been before. Literally, before this my child's exposure to me was maybe 3 hours a day during the work week, and less than an hour of it could've been considered actual attention paid to said child. Most of the available fuel in the brain trust was spent wildly stomping on the desire to deal with details in lieu of dealing with the big picture at hand (just what in the fuck should I do with this small purple button lying here on the counter? keep it? toss it? what if I need it? I don't know!). The big picture being so large it was just a blob, and the substance of it...just left me feeling defeated, and so I squinted at the picture instead, and pondered the fate of the button lying randomly on our desk counter for the last three months.
But on that first day of school at 3:30 I jauntily walked up the street, eyeing other mothers trailing in from all different directions, answering the motherhood siren call. They stand around unhurried, watching their kids play with each other and talking a bit, before meandering away from school. They stand in pairs and clusters, in Tory Burch flats and worn expensive jeans, North Face fleeces, sloppy ponytails and modestly makeup'd faces. Relaxed. Its a scene, like anything else is a scene. They are the Motherhood. I want to fit. I want to fit purely because I want my child to fit. (Like me? Well, you'll LOVE my child!) My child, who doesn't really do playdates because I'm never around. My child, who doesn't have 6 extracurriculars, in part cuz I feel panicked that the growing stack of unread Sunday New York Times is a taunting detail existing to prove my willful ignorance of the world at large and must be addressed NOW.
So after weeks of remembering names, trading smiles, proudly standing relaxed in the playyard, with the security in knowing that I too have the ability to leisurely wander away from school when we're ready, I came home to know that I could walk by the stack of mail and not twitch. And the fucking button, its still there. And when the requisite tantrum has been thrown by the three year old and the requisite googl requests for treats has passed, I will still have time to go through the homework folder and put something together that some may consider dinner. These, little tsunami's all, are convincing of the truth of the adage "time heals all wounds", in an unique way. Motherhood may not be my nature (see etymology above), but it is certainly more my state now than ever. In this state, the big picture has form, and its substance is scalable.
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