Cactus Juice

Putting Myself Out There

On Sunday, I had the opportunity to have a leisurely morning before mid-day church and then go over to the fairgrounds for the Greek Festival and a big Flyball competition.  Or get up at dawn for early church, drive half-way to Fort Bragg, and play paintball for the first time with 50 strangers who formed up a group on the internet because we all wanted to give it a try.

(Paintball marks above left knee.)

Of course, I picked the paintball.  Someone mentioned a romantic comedy where they played paintball.  I think Hollywood schedules that a lot- I remember Ten Things I Hate About You.  In those movies, paintballs make luscious drips of brilliant paint.  Something like what you'd expect to be left with after getting licked by a Saint Bernhard.  Real paintballs leave things they don't show in those movies- a bit of goo and some lasting damage.

The paintball we played didn't have a specific goal.  Experienced people play to capture a flag or a house or a title but newbies, it turns out, don't require goals.  Hanging back behind cover is boring and you advance just because you can.  Our game turned into a land grab of sorts, with no other particular goal, until we were tagged out.

Since playing I've learned that a lot of women won't play because they're afraid those bruises mean that something hurt.  Of course, if 50 people ignored you and left you wandering around the woods without a game that wouldn't be very good either: I showed up to get hurt.  It was far better than sleeping in.

The World of No

As previously mentioned, I've started back into the dating game, which seems to involve more circling and growling than actual flirting.  Which is inevitable: let's say that you are willing to date 1 in 100 people (honestly, it's probably lower than that).  Of those, perhaps 1 in 100 are willing to date you (you have really good sense picking people that are going to like you!).  That's at least 9,999 people that you need to ignore or offend before you get your one. 

But it gets better!  Because I never said that you were perfect for each other, just that you were willing to date each other.  Do it four times and you've cast aside at least 39,996 people.

In other words, if you are on the hunt, your karma is f****d.  CNN says so, sure, they want to blame your divorce, but what bigger kick is there to your relationship karma than having the opportunity to really screw up another person's life?  A good heart attack is probably the mildest of retaliations of the universe.

So today was not the best day for me.  It was a dreadful weekend anyway, and then the dreary weather rolled in, and then a bit of a disappointment on the dating front to drive me into the ground.  I've done at least 30 things in the last three weeks to ensure I deserve so much worse.  At least I still have my health.

Joyeux Deuxième

I started the day reading an intensely intellectually and spiritually satisfying book (there will be more later!), and scribbling madly in my journal.  Something, somehow, today, had to tell me why I am here.  If I'm expecting something to change in my life this weekend, that is still no reason to be here.  If I'm here for the race, at 20 pounds heavier than I have ever completed a half-marathon, it's not a very good reason.  If I'm here to spit in the eye of the universe and insist I will not be bullied by anyone- well, that doesn't quite meet the requirement either (even if it is something I have to do).

The twists of fate left me sitting on the wall in front of the Legion of Honor art museum for an hour with nothing to do but stare at the view.  Still waiting for my epiphany.  Eventually my friend arrived and we took her two delightful children to Fisherman's Warf, where they had never been, and dinner at the Franciscan Crab Restaurant, where I had never been.  After sending them on their way I made my annual trip to Old Navy to get some throw away clothes for the early morning mists of the race.  Walking down Market Street in the early evening, I finally realized why I am here: because I love San Francisco.  I would like to finish the race.  To put one foot in front of the other in an organized event is a worship of place like no other.  I may fail in that, this time more likely than any other time because really I am not well enough to be doing this, but even if I do the fact is that I came here because this place is wonderful.

Joyeux Vole

 My flights were not nearly as traumatic as I had imagined.  One version had me in tears, but in fact I read two books (which you'll be hearing about) and sat next to a talkative mother and adult daughter.

The plane was equipped with wireless internet and I observed a woman video-chatting.  Telephone calls have been available in planes for many years I have made an in-flight call myself, but to actually be able to see someone on the ground (to actually be able to see someone on the plane!) was truly astonishing!  In fact, I ended up in the video myself, so someone on the ground saw me!  In contract, the in-flight magazine still advertised Michael Jackson's tour as a reason to fly to England.

I myself am caught exactly between the future and the past, but that is the reason for the trip.  Today the pleasure of it slightly outweighed the discomforts of the unavoidable purgatory.  After arriving to a picture postcard perfect day --San Francisco indeed exists mainly to break my heart-- I had myself delivered to a luxury I had forgotten that I had selected for myself.  With the addition of an upgrade because it "it is so nice to see you again."  If one is to serve out a purgatory, one could do worse than my present arrangement.

For my afternoon, I wandered by a See's Candy store where I was sold a chocolate for $1.40 with cold efficiency and immediately left to myself while a chocolate and a banana was delivered for free to the gentleman residing on the front step.  A bus passed by featuring three penis's discussing the importance of STD testing.  I continued to Alexander Book Company, where the book covers curl in the ocean dampness but no one closes the front door.  Ah, San Francisco!

Is it a sin if there's no one left to sin against?

About 0.5 second ago I was swearing off dating, and suddenly I realized...

Hey, I spend all day at work alone.

Hey, I spend all morning walking alone.

And all evening.

Oh my heavens, I haven't cuddled up next to anything aside from a bunny for a year.

And the bunny's dead!

So I signed on to all those dating sites again.  As if that would solve these problems.  Actually, dating sites just turn you into a kind of a predator.  Chris Hansen should bust in and arrest me alone in my kitchen.

It makes me think of the spoken lyrics by Ani Difranco:
They say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
Even when they're dry as my lips for years
Even when they're stranded on a small desert island
With no place in two thousand miles to buy beer
And I wonder is he different
Is he different
Has he changed
What he's about
Or is he just a liar
With nothing to lie about

Can you be a predator if you are alone?  Is it a sin if there's no one left to sin against?

I already did this online dating bit once.  I chased down a gazelle like a lion in heat.  Dragged him back to my lair.  He suddenly realized he had four quick feet and ran out of there.  I sniff, maybe I paw a little, I look back over my shoulder.  If he wants to follow, fine, but no way am I putting my heart into something I've sunk my teeth into.  Those go away too damn quick.

So instead I hit up a singles group.  Much better when everyone is a baboon.  My teeth aren't what they used to be anyway.

I'm left with this cursed trip to San Francisco.  Now that I actually see real human beings, flying away from the weekend alone isn't that attractive.

I don't want to go, but it seems like a chapter I have to close before I can finally be free and move forward with my life.  The plane and the hotel are already paid for.  It's absurd to do the half-marathon at my current weight, but the fact is that I can finish and I'm going to be there anyway so I might as well.  Four days of purgatory are required of me for my carnivorous ways.  I'd rather be hanging out with baboons.

The Perfect Plan

Where shall I place my first footstep if I don't know in which direction I am going?  It seems obvious enough, but more mornings than not I rush into my day without any kind of a plan.  There is a famous quote from an executive at FedEx that goes something like, "We start every night with the perfect plan and watch it fall apart."  And still, more times than not, my priority overnight package is on my front step at 8 AM.  This is a result of a perfect plan that didn't happen.

So, an effort every morning to start off right.  Which means morning prayer before sunrise, because that is right.  And it means reviewing my plan.  I was surprised a few weeks ago to read something on my New Year's Resolution.  Surprised!  How is it supposed to direct my year if I don't even know what is on it?!  And then a look at the calendar for the day and a mental rehearsal of what the perfect day will look like.  This entire process is meant to take an hour, in any case not less than 30 minutes.  It is at the moment the single best thing refreshing how I live my life.

Just today, finished reading The Act of Will by Roberto Assagioli.  I was going through Davis Library purposefully toward some distant stack and happened to notice it- a sunshine yellow binding and that title.  In the book he doesn't speak directly of existentialism, but the book is something of a handbook for the existentialist life, between Tillich and Getting Things Done.  And he does reference Paul Tillich, as well as Viktor Frankl and Rollo May.  Despite having read all of them, I had never heard of him.  Unless the worm in the brain becomes distracted (entirely possible), I foresee several posts about Assagioli and his book.  For today, just the reminder that the will is nothing if the goal has not been envisioned.

Gifts and Pleasures

I googled my name today and learned some things.  In November, when Weekend America on NPR asked for stories about weekends at home, they picked my story as one of nine to go on their webpage about the topic ("After Five Years as a Road Warrior").  In late 2007, when I submitted the word I used for my ex-husband during our separation ("exish" of course) to the "Word Fugitives" column in The Atlantic Monthly, it ended up getting published in the May 2008 column.

Finding the Weekend America essay was an unexpected pleasure of accomplishment on an otherwise dull day.  The Atlantic Monthly win would have made me happy on its own.  I remember submitting that word in November or December of 2007 and then checking each subsequent issue of the magazine.  Apparently I gave up before May and, though I am a regular newsstand purchaser of that magazine, I did not read the May issue.  No matter, I had other pleasures in life at that time and these two were saved up in little boxes to be given to me today.

It is possible that my enjoyment of life would be greater if I pulled more time for letters out of the considerable amount of time that goes to walking.  Particularly at this moment, I resent the walking in consideration of what could be happening with reading and writing.  The packing from the gifts I received today is tilting the scales; the day I reach the end of the virtual Appalachian Trail or the day I finally finish a marathon or the day I get back to VFT (Virgin Fat Territory- the lowest weight from before my re-gain) the scales will surely be tilted the other way.

Meanwhile, those two items have to be weighed against so many more.  I feel certain that another rabbit in this house will be a joy, so there has to be time to find and get to know one.  Human visitors would be good too, something else that takes time and effort.  In a couple of days a few crates of family history things are going to arrive at my front door.  Working on family history has always given me a sense of purpose and meaning.

All of these potential joys make me want to hide under the covers and never get out of bed again.  If I do nothing, there is grayness to life.  But selecting what to do to be happy... oy!  How much better it is when some choices I made months or years ago suddenly appear and give me pleasure for free.

Cactus Juice's 100th Post!

Somewhere around 1997 I put up my first hand-coded website, loafingcats.com.  At some point there was a billing disagreement with my ISP, they kept my URL and now when you type "loafingcats.com" into Google, it returns "Did you mean to search for: loafingcactus.com".

It is difficult to believe that the internet was around way back then.  I'm not sure what I did with it in those years.  No one used usenet any more (My horror that usenet is now all searchable on Google is only ameliorated by the fact that I've changed my name since then- yes, those were the days when you used your real name on the internet.).  Amazon.com was there.

After moving from hand coding to my first WYSIWYG program, I had my first blog was going by 1999.  I knew who all the famous bloggers were and had a copy of We've Got Blog when it was the only book about blogs.  I would fly to Palo Alto and sit in a coffee shop with my friends and think that I was at the mother ship.  Eventually I moved to blogger, but it ate my blog when it was bought out by Google (I'll never forgive you, Google!).  I made a half-hearted attempt to go back to my WYSIWYG, but that didn't work out and meanwhile the universe of blogging services had gotten very big and --after my Google experience-- very untrustworthy.

I've been back at it for about a year, and things are very different.  No one is famous for being a blogger, instead people are famous for what they blog.  Anyone who is a rabbit blogger knows rabbit guy and his house full of rabbits.  Some guy down the street blogging about snakes or woodworking or scrapbooking doesn't even know he exists.  RSS and compilers like Bloglines have changed how I read blogs.  Instead of clicking through 20 or so blogs in my favorites, and getting irritated when I've clicked 9 or 10 times to no update, I can compile 100 and they show up when they are good and ready.  A blog used to have to be updated several times a week to have any kind of readership viability; no more.

I don't remember what I was trying to accomplish with those earlier blogs.  I think I found myself in situations where I didn't have anyone to talk to, and sending a missive out into space was the best I could manage.  Diaphanouswrote about something being not easily remembered unless it was blogged.  At that moment she was talking about experiences, but for me it is about thoughts.  I don't know what I think about having blogged over more than 10 years until I start to write it down.  And then I remember that 10 years ago I was trying to make connections and at the same time feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities of the internet.  I think that's part of the reason for the obsession with fake names and internet security and people getting fired for their blogs.  To get fired for your blog, someone had to notice it existed first.  If there is one thing 10 years of blogging should have taught me is that it doesn't matter what I write, I won't be found.  And yet I do write, because there is always the possibility I could not only be found, but overwhelmed.

Fatday: Finding my place again.

A few weeks ago, I found a torn-up print, covered in dust and dead bugs, at a large antiques & junque store.  I lay it on the floor and knelt over it, looking over every inch, trying to decide what it might be.  I went home and looked up on the internet, read all about it and decided I was willing to buy it.  The price was good: a bit more than you would pay to have a poster nicely framed, but not what you would expect to pay for a famous print from about 1790.  I took it home and paid the purchase price all over again to have the bugs removed and the rips disguised with a coloring.  It's now on my wall, rescued from the junque heap, back in the place it was meant to be.

I like old things.  I like having them in my house.  That date of 1790, however, had been a little difficult to grasp.  Today, the church service I attended closed with "Onward, Christian Soldiers."  The song is great fun to sing, despite it's disturbing jihadist tone, and the congregation was bouncing on their toes.  The song seems eternal.  My father had a cassette tape of military songs ("Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition"- it take Christians to come up with stuff this good!) that he would play in his shop, and "Onward, Christian Soldiers" sounded as if it could have been sung at the American Revolution.  In fact, it wasn't even written until the close of the Civil War.  Where ever my picture was at the time the song was written in 1865, it was already pushing 75 years old.  There's some perspective.

Ever since I got addled up last year, I've lost my place in time.  It used to give me a lot of satisfaction to create a presentation of history and genealogy in a way that provided interpretation to my family.  I don't presently feel satisfaction in that task, or any other.  This week, I felt lonely and bored on Thursday and could not shake it even though I had an enjoyable activity planned with my ex-husband on Friday.  If I were to let that kind of thing go on, food would be my only reliable pleasure.

And so this week I've worked hard to recognize the pleasures in my life.  I've been acting like if I ignore my depression, it will go away.  A majority of my conversations have been about the unpleasantness of working at home, despite the fact that every conversation ends noting the fact that the only solution would be to work in an office and that doesn't seem like a solution to anything.  So I've been working on appreciating all the pleasures that are available to me: making tea and visiting with Brewster on the conference call that will not end.  Taking a walk in the sunshine (despite the cold, there was sunshine this week) in the middle of the day.  Sitting in my cozy office, isolated from the social indignities of cube life that my friends complain about.  The paycheck that arrived on the 15th.

I hope that after the winter, and maybe after some of my present disappointments dissipate, I will have the easier kind of happiness that I had in the previous year.  For now it's still an effort, but there are so many little pleasures in my life, and a purpose still to be worked out, that day must be coming.

258.5, which is -3.0.  No great accomplishment, as the previous week was unnaturally buoyed up.  Things are going to have to change, if things are going to change.

Nippleday (for Milton's Sake)

Following a week where nipples on Facebook (link is actually a very good social commentary on Time) was all the talk, I found myself reading this:

Obedience to conscience is easily transformed into obedience to self, and the narrow path of rectitude quickly becomes a compulsive and scattered impulse to say and do whatever constitutes the "real me."  The dignity of conscience descends into the banality of self-expression, alighting finally on that most unhelpful of maxims, one frighteningly familiar to Milton as Satanic advice: "Be yourself."  As Milton recognizes, this is a counsel of despair, and the form of enduring obedience crashes to the earth, as ordinary veniality is sanctified as "genuine" or "authentic."  If we choose to construct our dignity upon self-expression rather than inhabit it through obedience to conscience, then we are left with a very thin heroism of individuality for its own sake.  Far from heroically "thick" human beings, the achievements of modern individuality disappear into the thinnest vapors of feeling, the spectral and labyrinthine delusions of the "real me." (pp. 173-174)

Yes, I just finished reading Heroism and the Christian Life: Reclaiming Excellence by Hook & Reno.  And Facebook nipples is an excellent example of "ordinary veniality," the strident desire to post pictures that your own friends (pictures are pulled because your friends report them) find objectionable.  It's not an act, it's a picture.  If it is about the comfort to "be yourself," it's only about the comfort of certain people.  It is also about creating a special case where self-definition trumps interpretation: Pamela Anderson may be skanky, but Molly Soccermom is wholesome because she told you so.  If you think she's kind of skanky, and more than just a little passive-aggressive in asserting her post-pregnancy sexuality, go to your room!

The current Facebook rule (no female areolae) has the advantage of logical consistency, which neatly sidesteps the issue of individual privilege.  An alternative rule is difficult to conceive:  "No nipples except for in the act of breastfeeding."  Okay, a close-up with the baby just out is the act, but it isn't what you want.  "No nipples except for with a baby in the picture."  Fine, hold up a baby at Spring Break and it's girls-gone-Facebook-legal.

After all of that, my "Limbaugh to Allport" post contained an existentialist sin too.  It suggested that an individual can escape their place and time to create intellectual wholeness.  Existentialism calls for commitment to place and time and through the honesty of that commitment to be able to act with intellectual integrity.  The point was to not be stupid; I just missed an important step.  On this point, Hook and Reno discuss The Plague by Camus.  They have the book providing the message that "[t]he personal, however selfish, must have authority over our lives; otherwise, we become mere abstractions, shadows in the service of an ideal."  (p. 194)  They go on with the argument that it is in commitment to the lives we actually lead that we express the everyday heroism, which cannot properly be called heroism.  That commitment to individuality, without leading to the absurdities discussed above, while submitting to God, is a challenge.

The authors claim that there is an answer to that challenge in The Life of Anthony.  They write:

As Thanasius describes the scene, the voice of God comes down to the exhausted but victorious Anthony: "I was here, Anthony, but I waited to watch you struggle.  And now, since you persevered and were not defeated, I will be your helper forever, and I will make you famous everywhere." (para. 10).  This divine address has three components, each of which is indispensable to Athanasius's account of Anthony's heroism.  First, God is always present in Anthony's struggles... Second, the triumph of God's grace has room for human enactment... Third... the triumph of grace in which the disciple participates merits recognition. (p. 138)

The authors mean the book to answer existentialist questions; they frame the book at the outset as a response to Nietzche.  The overall structure of the book is absolutely lovely, using Homer, Virgil, Plato, Spenser, Milton, Paul and the saints, Camus and Bonhoeffer to make their point.  The create a heroic structure where worship and the enactment of Christian living are irrevocably linked.  Their last chapter, the prescriptive "reclaiming excellence," part of the book is absolute crap.  As it had to be: any attempt to summarize the major truths of the tension between existential commitment and banal self-indulgence cannot be anything but, as well demonstrated by so many modern-day Christian calls to repentance.  And by certain Facebook protests.  That being said, the book has changed my life and the majority of it is committed analysis rather than summery.  One of the back-cover blurb writers stated that it made him "rethink."  Rethink indeed.

I am at a point in my life that I'm calling "chaste".  It's not a commitment, it's just that for a variety of reasons I'm not looking for any.  As I've experienced this phase of my life, it's different from that phase of life that I've come to term "virginity".  It is not strictly speaking a dividing line of sexuality, but of knowledge, intent and conduct.  In America we fetishize innocence to the point that child molestation is punished with longer penal sentences than murder.  At the same time, men can honestly fill in online dating profiles "Turn off: power" without thinking that they have just negated their adult virility and advertised themselves as weasels unwilling or unable to match an adult partner.  We seem to want men totally ball-less in looking, acting, and being.  I've tried to blog about virginity vs. the chastity of fully committed adulthood, but it sounds like I'm writing about sex rather than about the possibilities of existential commitment.  I'm taken back to a book I read last year, Keeping God's Silence, by Rachel Muers.  She quotes Gemma Corradi Fiumaro,  "...silence is radically different... from an expressive inability or stuporous state of imposed muteness." (The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, trans. Charles Lambert (London: Routledge, 1990) p. 99.)  It is.  The more realized my adulthood becomes, the less interested I am in the phases of my own innocence.

Hook and Reno explain that this topic was a point of interaction between the writings of Spenser and Milton.  Spenser has his hero cycle through his temptations, innocent.  He arrives back at the Bower of Bliss and finds his temptation not only present, but recently satisfied.  He burns it.  For Milton, this is not good enough.  He calls the virtue of Spenser's hero blankness, as opposed to true virtue which is to "see and know and yet abstain."  Burning is not the same as walking away in wholeness.  For this reason, Milton rails against censorship because it creates blankness rather than virtue. (pp. 164-165)  Milton wants you to show your tits so that others can choose to look away.  In the thinnest expressions of self, that makes you a means to someone else's ethical end.  Ordinary, anyone?