Simple Thoughts

S & M

When I was pretty and menacing,
I wasn't manipulative -
Tried, failing miserably.
Such a dismal shame.

Hustle of Dawn

Aerial aerobics
of geese.
Aquatic jet streams
of ducks at sunrise.
Shimmering white veils
of snowy egrets.
Heron's harangue
disturbing the sun.

Emotional Eater....or Not

I know a woman who belongs to Overeaters Anonymous; she refers to herself as an "emotional eater" and frequently repeats one of the many cliche sayings that are part of any twelve-step program. "One day at a time" and "This too shall pass" are biggies amongst the many mottoes. There's more to the programs than just the sayings, but they work. ("It works if you work it.") Maybe some folks could take a drink or overeat while saying "This too shall pass;" however, the irony and the bathroom humor would crack me up. I'd probably blow the Bloody Mary or Boston cream pie out my nose. Anyway, as I was saying, this woman is a self-proclaimed "emotional eater" which begs the question....what is a non-emotional eater?

The non-emotional eater can't order from a menu. "I could care less what your specials are. Bring me anything. I just don't care."

Or the non-emotional eater might respond in a Mr. Spock-like monotone. "I'll have lamb, specifically the posterior cut of a young sheep; sheep being akin to the Greek term, "élaphos." Please don't confuse my use of the word, lamb, as meaning 'a gentle person'. I do not want the posterior end of a gentle person, nor do I want a slice of Christ. In addition, I want three-ounces of a form of a cultivated cruciferous plant, Brassica oleracea botrytis, whose leafy stalks and clusters of usually green buds are eaten as a vegetable known to the common man as 'broccoli.'

The non-emotional eater would break his Jewish mother's heart. "Who cares that you spent four hours in the kitchen with the air conditioning broken leaning your crutch against the counter while applying a tourniquet to the hand that got caught in the meat grinder? I don't want to eat dinner with you. I'm just not feeling it."

If a person has a pulse, they must be experiencing an emotion of some kind, unless the person is in a catatonic stupor. Maybe even the catatonic schizophrenic is feeling something; he just isn't going to tell us what it is. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," is a statement of emotion.

Therefore, I question the self-diagnosed label "emotional eater" as having anything to do with indulging in excess amounts of food. Personally, I feel emotional after I've indulged. "I am so happy that you shared a quart of Rocky Road ice cream with me. " "I'm miserable and embarrassed that I stepped up to the AYCE buffet for the third time."

Personally, I lack discipline in several areas of my life, and I am well-disciplined in others. However, I don't identify myself as an "emotional procrastinator" anymore than I am an "emotional hard-worker." While it's true that emotions motivate people toward action, I don't think that the emotion is an adequate descriptor of the action. Being non-emotional will probably not restrain someone from a habitual behavior, unless the person is catatonic or doesn't have a pulse. I'm perfectly capable of nonchalantly, apathetically approaching the buffet for the third time.

Vibrant But Not a Beauty

She was vibrant, but not a beauty. At first I didn’t notice anything at all about this woman working at the fabric store.

I handed her the four bolts of fabric and requested a quarter yard of each one. As she unrolled the first bolt and measured my meager request, I told her that I was making the first quilt for myself. Not wanting to appear a novice, I added that I had made other quilts, but this was the first one just for me. “I already have lots of fabric, but I liked these.” She glanced at me and we both laughed. Quilters always have lots of fabric, but always want more. “My quilt will be a variety of browns and dark reds.” Then I added, “I like those colors.” She nodded as she snipped a perfect cut. Feeling a little foolish about filling the silence with chatter as she worked, I decided to just shut up.

I watched her as she rolled and pinned the remaining fabric back onto the first bolt. Then, without looking up from her work, she said, “The darker colors help me to find my center, to feel grounded.”

There was a moment when I couldn’t respond; I could only look at this woman. I was trying to process this incongruency, a haggard-looking woman and a Zen-like observation. She was probably ten years younger than I am, but she looked much older. She was far too thin, no make-up, and her thin wisps of mousy brown hair hung down in her face as she leaned over the fabric. Her faded jeans hung straight, no hips, no thighs. As I stood in a moment of suspended reality, her words echoed in my mind. “The darker colors help me to find my center, to feel grounded.”

Suddenly we were both animated, sharing with each about the projects we had done and the ones we intend to do. She continued to cut, fold and pin as she talked about a wall hanging that she had seen and wanted to make one similar to it. It was a quilted wall hanging, a grand piano with a long-stemmed red rose lain across it. She talked about its elegance and that she wanted to make hers in black and red silk.

As she talked about the sheen of the silk, the contrast of black and red on a white background, the way black and red combinations pull together all the other colors in a room, I looked again at her hands. Her hands were dry and rough with several scabs and scars, probably cut and poked by scissors and needles. As if she knew my thoughts, she told me about the hand quilting she kept nearby when she was at home. “You have to be very efficient and disciplined to quilt by hand,” she said. “Otherwise, a project would never be finished.”

When she handed me the four carefully folded pieces of fabric, I thanked her for the conversation. Thanking her felt so inadequate. I felt lighter. I felt centered. I had been in the presence of a wise woman, a vibrant woman, though not a beauty.

Insulting a Sweet Potato

I spoke to a sweet potato yesterday. Insulted him, really. I looked him in the eyes and said, “Oh my, you’re an ugly little fellow.” He didn’t reply, as far as I know. After insulting him, I immediately stuck him in the microwave so he really didn’t have time for a comeback. If he had a second or two to think about it, he might have said, “Beauty is ephemeral; my sweetness is eternal.” That would have put me in my place, of course, but then I would also have had to deal with the reality that not only had I insulted a sweet potato, but had been humbled by one as well.

As it was, I had only to come to grips with the fact that on the third day of being housebound by a very deep snow drift across my driveway, I had finally succumbed to cabin fever, the “talking-to-vegetable” type of cabin fever which is considerably more tolerable than becoming a vegetable-while-talking.

There has been an odd variation of snow depth in my front yard. There are areas where I can see tufts of grass, still green, poking through the snow. In other places, there are snowdrifts over a foot deep. One of those snowdrifts stopped just before coming up against the door of my Ford van. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to get in the van each of the three snowbound days to know that the battery was still charged (a moot point, since I couldn’t go anywhere.) There was over a foot of snow in front of my van.

Occasionally, I entertained thoughts of bundling up and attacking the problem with my snow shovel (assuming the storage shed was free of a snowdrift.) Then I found it more entertaining to cook and bake (and eat) as well as to read and quilt. I enjoyed what I was doing and got a lot done.

However, I didn’t think about writing more than a nanosecond or two (does the second nanosecond really need to be mentioned?) I know that some writers find inclement weather useful to their craft. For example, Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) wrote in his book of essays (the title was something about geese, maybe ducks, flying backward?) that his hometown, Seattle, is a perfect setting for a writer because of the dismal weather. That works for him but apparently not for me.

To write, I need to be un-bound. Lacking the discipline to write because I should write, I need to be free to choose to write. I need to know that while I could breeze off into the day with a bundle of impulses and no objective at hand that I, instead, freely chose to set up my laptop on my table. (They should be called tabletops because it’s ridiculous trying to keyboard on wobbly, flabby thighs.) I write because I choose to write. (This is of no help in actually finishing my novel, but such is the price one pays for freedom.)

Therefore, I didn’t write this entry for my blog (even though every day in my planner since the first of the year includes the message to myself to blog) until the evening after my grandson and I dug out the driveway, scattered salt over the icy patches, and rewarded ourselves with oatmeal cookies. No sweet potato pie. I’m giving the ugly little fellows a break until the next blizzard.

Descendants of Survivors

We are the descendants of ancestral human survivors. We can all agree with this statement (which I may have lifted, but don't remember the source) regardless of our confidence in the evidence of scientists or our faith in the dogma of theologians.

The conscious thought that we exist (at least until we no longer exist) is the raw material with which we establish ourselves as thinking, feeling, behaving organisms on a planet whose origin is unknown and its future unsettled. The only certainty is our past and maybe our present (except that as I typed the word "present," it, too, became part of my past.)

However, at no other time does the past assume such importance in our consciousness as when we acknowledge the passing of someone we love. This week, I attended a funeral service. During the meal following the funeral (there's always a meal because it take so much energy to survive the present...or was it the past?), my relatives (LOTS of cousins) and I talked about our past...mostly the silly things like the near-drownings as children, the joys of humiliating each other, and more somber events like remembrances of actual loss.

So much of the socialization of my cousins and myself (being shaped, poked, and cattle-prodded into adulthood) was a shared process and the process was influenced by so many of the same people. Yet the twenty or so people sitting around the table looked to me to be so different from one another (other than the baggy eyes, a persistent, pervasive family trait) and, in some ways, looked to be strangers to me. For all the talking, what do we really know about each other and what secrets will we carry with us until the time of our own passing and (bed, bath,) and beyond?

A few months ago, I tagged along with my mother to a writer's group that she has been attending for the last five months. During this same time, I was trying to start a local writer's group and was completely unaware of her group and writing activities. Isn't it ironic that two closely genetically related people, both interested in communication, both living in the same small town failed to communicate this information to each other before?

One of the most tumultuous relationships I was in was with a man who was a manager of human resource managers. At the time, I was working as a psychologist. In other words, we both worked in fields whose essential feature was communication. However, our relationship was stormy because our problem was a failure in communication. (Go figure.)

Back to the past, what exactly do we really know about our ancestral human survivors (cave dwellers or more recent twigs on the family tree)? Perhaps they survived because they wore masks, kept secrets, realized that the present moment (no matter how joyful or sorrowful) passes as quickly as it came, and because they didn't spend a lot of time dwelling on their awareness (unknown to other animals) of (bed,bath, and) beyond. The cave dwellers buried the dead, had a meal, and made a few markings on a wall...as I've just done...and hoped that their descendants treasure the past, enjoy the moment (now in the past), and try to not screw up the future any worse than they did.

To not communicate causes inconvenience at the least and failed relationships at the worst (though some of them ought to fail), but sometimes its better not to know too much. Knowing too much about each other and (bed, bath) beyond takes all the thrill out of survival.

There is an old saying that the shoemaker's children has no shoes. I think this saying may be applicable to communication, but I'm not sure how to say it. The End (but not yet bed, bath, and beyond.)

Foreplay Is Not Just For Sex

Writing coaches recommend journaling or some other kind of warming up activity before writing the REAL thing. Here are five other things that need a warm-up activitiy (besides sex.)

• Warm up before taking a prescription drug. Just pop a few of anything you might find in the medicine cabinet. Then try opening that child-proof cap on the prescription bottle. This sometimes works for celebrities and sometimes not.

• Warm up before brushing teeth; prepare the gums for the assault of bristles and sweet-tasting sticky stuff. Scrape the gums (gently) with a piece of fine sandpaper and rinse with Mountain Dew.

• Warm up before mowing the lawn. Push a lawn chair up and down the yard making sure that you are making parallel indentations as it flattens the blades of grass. This warm-up may actually delay the need to mow.

• Warm up before paying your bills. Shove other paper items addressed to your creditors into the big, blue mailbox and work on your technique. (Practice power walking techniques if the mail carrier approaches.)

• Warm up before asking for a promotion. Begin by asking for more toilet paper in the ladies room (regardless of your gender); work up to asking for more knee space under your desk, and eventually ask for the boss’s job.

Alrighty then, I’m ready to write (right after I take my meds, brush my teeth, mow the lawn, pay my bills, and apply for a publisher’s job.)

Mind-Catching

I hadn't intended for my blog to become a series of "book reports", but because I've been doing more reading than writing, it seems to have come to this (at least for now.) It wasn't until I finished Mind-Catcher by John Darnton, and then went to his blog, that I realized I had read the first of his books, The Darwin Conspiracy which was, at the time, another one of my favorites (overlooking the fact that it was truly a work of fiction, hardly biographical, except that he spelled Darwin's name correctly.) I humbly forgive Darnton his license to fictionalize Darwin (and to use the word opprobrium twice in Mind-Catcher.) So, here is a review of the most recent of my "personal favs," Mind-Catcher (2003) by John Darnton.

The personal appeal of Mind-Catcher was that it is a wonderful meld of my passion for the study of the brain from an anatomical, mechanistic point of view and my interest in whatever may exist beyond the physical, what some may refer to as the supernatural. Others simply state the meld as the "mind-body" problem. (This was also referred to in the non-fiction memoir My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor.) I don't remember who said it first, but I like the explanation that the mind is what the brain does. In other words, while the miracle of who we are results from the neural connections and electro-chemical processes, we are nevertheless the miracle.

The characters of the story are both miraculously good and miraculously evil. In other words, they are human. The father of the comatose son who has been the model single parent now wallows in an alcoholic cesspool and belabors his own self-centeredness in violence as well as verbiage. The villain in the story has his compassionate moments and I reluctantly sympathized with the villain's abused childhood which left scars on his adult intellectual genius.

For me personally, I felt most strongly attracted to both the egomaniac male neurosurgeon that unwittingly set the stage for the genius villain and the compassionate, spiritual, self-aware female neurosurgeon who was willing to set aside professional conduct for doing what was right for the father and son. The neurosurgeons are two sides of the same coin and if do-overs were possible, I would do whatever I had to to become a neurosurgeon. (Maybe in the next life.) Do-overs occur in the Mind-Catcher for all but the villain whose punishment perfectly fits the crime. Do-overs and justice sound like cliche denouements but this book is a thriller from start to finish. Yes, I know the last half of that statement also sounded very cliche, but most book reports are.