I'm Fine

I miss being fine. I would love to be great. You know, when people casually ask you how you are doing, and you say “I’m fine, thanks. How are you?” It is just a greeting. People don’t really want to know if you are NOT fine. So sometimes, if it is a person I don’t know well, I just go ahead and lie.

It isn’t that I mean to be untruthful. The truth is just too complex and too sad and to wearisome to tell. I’m not so fine these days. But I am well, I suppose.

I’m clinging to my cosmic egg theory. I am nesting and keeping this precious, delicate thing warm until it hatches and I get to become acquainted with the nascent universe inside.

The truth is, I don’t really know what I am becoming. The pain of surviving nursing school and losing Little A and all the other hurtful things I am enduring now may be making me into a goddess or a monster. Or both. I am more ferocious now, but I am also more tender now. I cry more, but I also laugh more.

I was telling a friend yesterday that all the weak and useless things in my life are falling away. We are nursing students, so we are learning to be like firefighters in that we run into the crisis when others are running out. We face down the blood and viscera of other people unflinchingly. That is shaping me emotionally, as well. I am learning to see people much more clearly, and by extension, myself.

I know what I want. I want to bed down in hot coals. I want to howl at the moon. I want to make the world tremble when I roar. I also want to hear the whispers in silence. I want to cradle precious love in my hands. I want to heal. I want to be able to rest my head somewhere safe.

I can’t fall apart. If I can survive being hollowed out by grief, then I can be a vessel to contain joy. If I can avoid filling myself with anger and bitterness, I can fill with the appreciation of all of life’s small, almost indiscernible moments of beauty and truth. That is what happy looks like to me. Then I will be beyond fine. I will be transcendent, incandescent, and very, very good.

Have you seen this woman?

Because she is coming back!

I have decided to re-order some of my priorities lately, in favor of doing the things that make me the most happy and contribute to my health in positive ways. I have to cut some of the things that kept me from bellydancing. I miss it too much. The hiatus must end.

I am excited! Plus I think Little A might be interested in seeing me like this. Maybe I'll end up with a baby bellydancer. She'll at least be willing to play dress up and I can teach her to drum!

The bigger question is: should I grow my hair long again?

Let's Play

It is time to hurt the ones I love.

I will admit without a tincture of shame that I am in love with the boy I have created in my "Daniel" series. I have, with loving attention to detail, expressed my affection for him in deep and nuanced ways. I have raised an icon in him that I am in the throes of a passionate, if too rarely consummated affair with. That he is a figment of my imagination, and a literary creation does not change the fact that I have strong feelings for him.

But I need to make him hurt.

He's spoiled. He's had it too easy. He's cocky and simply must start to suffer or risk lacking in character. It will give me no pleasure. It will hurt me more than it hurts him. Or maybe I'm afraid that it will give me a sadistic thrill to twist him and make him cry uncle. Maybe I am blocked with writing this not because I am too busy or too tired, but because I don't want to look at how cruel I am willing to be.

I've been putting it off, lingering over better days when it was new and flushed with innocent and compelling curiosity. Flushed with new love, I shaped him with my hands and breathed life into his limbs. I became his goddess, the focus of his rapt and fevered attention. Now I need to pull him up by the root and cast him into the world to fend for himself. I need to tear his heart out and feed it to raptors. I need to crush him, hurt him, bloody him a little.

He's a nice boy, but he needs to become a man. Everything costs something. I can't cling to him and protect him anymore. He'll thank me for it later, I can only hope.

Creativity and Libido

The drive to be creative artistically is closely tied to the sexual drive. Creating babies and creating works of art are similar quests in that they attempt to produce something that will last outside of us after we die. Perhaps not every artist or skilled technician feels this way, but for me, the two are linked more clearly because I love to explore sensual feelings in my writing. I have spoken to other writers who balk at crafting the kind of blushingly frank sexual prose that I engage in when I am at the height of a creative cycle.

There is a self-consciousness there, where if I put these fantasy-based things on paper and other people read them, I have made myself very vulnerable indeed. Some writers (and perhaps readers) find such content distracting, or disturbing, or even cringe-worthy. Some might think I am interjecting too much of my personal stuff into the work.

I like to think that if I show characters interacting sexually with each other that it is done in service to the narrative. Could I accomplish the same thing in a more subtle, mainstream, commercially acceptable way? I guess I could and I sometimes do. The suggestion of intimacy is a very powerful thing, too. But in some of the manuscripts I have written, the revealed intimacy tells us something about the characters that the mere suggestion wouldn't.

There is something really compelling to me about showing what happens in an intimate moment between two people. There are things you just can't learn about a person in another way. Small, vulnerable things, predilections and kinks for example, say a lot about a person. I like the pillow talk and little bits of conversation that lovers exchange while working towards a goal of shared pleasure, and how isolating it is when one partner withholds part of themselves even as they give their body to it.

Again, could I reveal these character traits in another way? Sometimes I can and I do, but the interplay in those scenes gives me a lot of enjoyment, and not just in the sensual way one might imagine. The problem for me creatively comes up when libido gets stifled. My ability to write any content is closely linked with the sorts of things that turn me on sexually so to speak. So, conversely, sex-stifling things like stress, poor diet, lack of exercise, and lack of sleep really affect my ability to work.

On the flip side (or the third hand?), lack of writing stifles my desire for sumptuous food, pleasures in bed, and stimulating conversation. I feel less interesting when I am not writing. Not in the cocktail party "I'm working on a novel" type of way, but on a deeper level where if I am not writing I am denying a part of who I am, and therefore become a withholding lover, lacking intimacy in my relationships, romantic or otherwise. I skim the surface without tasting the core of my life.

If I can't make my writing as exciting to me as having a lover's flesh responding to my touch, why bother doing it? If I strip away all the things that raise my pulse, who would want to read such a sanitized, denuded thing? I don't write friendly, chicken-soup-for-the-soul type of stuff. Nothing taken away from people that do. They are making money off of their inspirational stories, and I am not at present selling anything.

It is just that for me, writing without the cathartic release is more frustrating than anything else. If that makes me an exhibitionist of ideas, then I can live with that. I just need to tap into that audience that, in secret or not, gets a thrill out of being voyeurs.

In the meantime, I'll be between the sheets of my latest projects, lingering over the way the simple act of opening one's eyes during an intimate moment can take the narcissism out of it and focus the intention on what is really important: namely the feelings one has about the beloved object of desire.

The Wayback Machine

Dang it Sherman, what the hell do you think you are doing? In that old cartoon, wasn't it Professor Peabody that was traveling back in time? He did it on purpose, but hijinks certainly ensued.

I think there is some kind of collective nostalgia going on in my peer group. Don't get me wrong, I think it is wonderful. I have had the chance to reconnect with people I haven't seen hide nor hair of since the 1980's and early 1990's. I love having old friends, and I keep as many as I can. I'm lucky that they put up with me.

They seem to pop in out of nowhere, either by chance or because they deliberately sought me out in a case or two. Maybe they are all watching that show "My Name is Earl" and figure we have some as yet unresolved karma. Maybe I am just in a vortex of people that should never have been separated and cosmic forces are conspiring to bring us back together. Maybe we should be forming some kind of super group?

We are all older and wiser(?) and fatter and balder and sassier. Some of us are more confident and sexier and more accomplished than our previous party hound selves. I like the new us a great deal, because I always liked the old us, and it is such a good feeling when you can pick up the ball and run with it without missing a beat.

Besides being self-conscious about the width of my heinie and my general lack of a giant pile of cash to bed down in, I worry about some of the people who have NOT showed up yet, as if the ones that DO show up are harbingers of the ones I would rather just stayed away.

A few of my old lovers have popped in on me in the last few years, and it gives me the willies. I did end up having a heartfelt exchange with one high school boyfriend with whom I had a particularly acrimonious falling out. We actually exchanged a volley of emails that, while initially uncomfortable, ended up yielding to a far deeper understanding between us. It was healing in the deepest sense of the word. After 22 years, we are finally friends again.

Taking heart in that reunion, I went looking for one of my most beloved high school friends with whom I had fallen out of touch. It didn't go nearly so well. I found her to be hostile to me in a way I really didn't expect. It seems that in the intervening 20 or so years, she had decided that I, for lack of a better word, suck. She even lit into me ruthlessly for dating a boy she herself had an unrequited crush on. She was actually still REALLY mad about it. The whole encounter left me shell shocked and deeply saddened. Now when I think of her, all those happy, warm memories of our friendship is end-punctuated with "But now she thinks I'm an ass."

Luckily for me, I am still friends with that boy. He helped me have a laugh about it.

There are only a few people left that might accompany the sound of the other shoe dropping. Shall I name names, in hopes of warding them off? I think it might be cathartic, at least.

1. Paul: Good god, Paul and I had a hideous breakup. I was SOOOOOO young and naive. I am still mortally embarrassed at the way I behaved when he unceremoniously dumped me, and how self-destructive I was for a while after that. We still have a lot of friends in common. I'm pretty sure they are my friends in my own right by now, but it is one awkward subject that we don't broach too often: that they met me when I was dating their friend. I got some damn fine friends out of that relationship, so he was at least that useful. My dog didn't like him. I should have listened.

2. Marc: He cheated on me when we were supposedly thinking of getting married. I still owe him a kick in the stones, although I lack the verve to seek him out to deliver it. It just seems so pointless, since I thank my lucky stars that I married Tony instead of him. (Not that the choice was laid out that way at the time). Oh man did I dodge a bullet, there.

3. Mark F. He would never seek me out. He was my mom's boyfriend and we lived with him for a few years. He was a bad, bad man. Abusive and petty. I googled him a couple of years ago and found he had gotten into some trouble for corporate malfeasance and had been censured by the IEC. Bastard. He could get a whole blog post of his own if he weren't so worthless. He uttered the most hurtful thing I have ever heard in my life when I was about 12, and I am still living with the feelings that produced. No amount of therapy has been able to erase what said in a fit of pique and probably never thought of again. That and he abused my mother. Nobody messes with my mother, yo. Don't mess.

There, now that is nice and gloomy, isn't it? I'm just going to make the sign to ward off the evil eye and enjoy the rest of my day. Lucky for me, the people who have showed up are people who want to talk to me because they actually LIKE me!

I love my friends. They are what makes me wealthy, sure enough.