You’re an idiot and this hinders my enlightenment

See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.

Tao te Ching

——————-

As long as stupid people roam the planet, I will always be a failed Taoist.

There are many brands of stupid, but there is one particular subset of humanity that makes my jaw drop and builds a case for selective breeding.

I call these people “Oblivee-ohs.”

Oblivee-ohs are a liver spot on the hand of god. They are a stain on the genetic future of the race. They are the scourge of my existence.

Put simply, oblivee-ohs are the people who wander the planet, bumbling along like pinballs in slow motion, completely unaware of their actions or how they impact those around them.

You can’t really pick an oblivee-oh out of a crowd by appearance. At first sight, they might look like perfectly normal, functional human beings. Unfortunately, they can’t even self-identify. Oblivee-ohs aren’t aware of their dangerously deviant natures. If they were, I’m confident that their behavior would cease immediately.  They’d be so humiliated they’d either work very hard to change, or they’d kill themselves on the spot in an altruistic gesture to save humanity from their poisonous effects on the gene pool.

Although I’m sure my general readership would never fall into such a category, there’s always a chance that one of them snuck in here while the doorman wasn’t looking. Just in case, here’s a little self-test to determine whether or not you are in need of a radical self-improvement/elimination plan.

You are likely an oblivee-oh if you:

• get off of an escalator and immediately stop at the bottom to “get your bearings,” backing people up behind you like a colon on a high fiber diet.

• Do the same when exiting an elevator

• Do the same when leaving a crowded building. Especially movie theaters. God I hate those people. That includes the ones who stop en masse to discuss the film (which they likely didn’t understand) right at the exit. Yeah, why should I mind standing all night in a room that smells like urine-soaked popcorn and flatulence so you can figure out why the eagles didn’t just fly Frodo to Mount Doom?

• Wait in line at the grocery store until all of your groceries have been rung up and bagged, only then to think of opening your purse to rummage around searching for $112 in loose change.

• Leave your grocery cart all akimbo in the middle of an aisle while you wander slowly around the store, gathering your goodies in your hands, occasionally wandering back to dump your load and forage anew. Keep your cart with you. At all times. Usually I like to take those abandoned carts, purses and all, and move them to the personal hygiene aisle right in front of the condoms. It’s fun to watch you panic, and frankly, you could use the hint.

• And while we’re at it, how hard is it to sound out “corn” on a can label? Grab what you need and move on! If the labels are that confusing, maybe you shouldn’t be eating food with labels. Your ass DOES look kinda fat in those jeans, after all.

• Drive slowly in the left-hand lane on the freeway. “Slow” may be a subjective term, but here’s a test: if there are no cars in front of you and 10+ cars on your bumper, all giving you the finger, MOVE TO THE RIGHT! You’re not just an oblivee-oh, you’re a left-lane hog. Double sin, double debt to humanity. Driving is a not a privilege, it’s a social responsibility. Your very selfishness exposes you as an evil baby-killing fascist. You probably kick kittens, too.

• Drive 10 miles an hour down the road trying to find your destination or next turn. Pull over! Look at a map! Or better yet, if you can’t get GPS, get on Google and plot your trip before you set out with your addled mind behind two tons of steel.  And if you can’t see the signs, how are you going to see that little boy who just ran into the street? Or is that just one more acceptable casualty on your road to uselessness as a human being?

(Jeff Foxworthy aint got nothing on me. Obviously I could go on for hours on this subject. It might just be the subject of my break-out novel. I see a Pulitzer in my future.)

To all  you oblivee-ohs. You are not only impeding the forward momentum of the planet. You are, through your continued existence, personally preventing me from achieving enlightenment. How can I learn to love myself if I can’t love humanity? How rude of you!

And just in case you learned today that you are, in fact, an oblivee-oh, remember kids: it’s up the road, not across the street!

Maybe I’m a little cranky. It’s early and I need coffee.

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California: from summer of love to fear of love

When the great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.
When the body’s intelligence declines,
cleverness and knowledge step forth.
When there is no peace in the family,
filial piety begins.
When the country falls into chaos,
patriotism is born.

Tao te Ching
—————————–

“OH MY GOD! A faggot touched my lawn! Somebody call the swat team!”

I actually screamed that from my balcony in October, 2008 to mock my neighbors who called the police in response to the theft of their pro-Proposition 8 sign by a kid. Being a left-wing pinko nut myself, I laughed and cheered as he ran up to their property, deftly leaped their conservative little picket fence, and ran off with their propaganda material.

I don’t think my neighbors like me much.

“The liberals are coming! The liberals are coming! Everybody take cover!!!”

The police, who actually showed up and stayed to guard the property against this dangerous criminal, didn’t appreciate my contributions either.

About 15 minutes after the police arrived, our law enforcement helicopter took to the sky, hunting down this dangerous rabble-rouser. The perp couldn’t have been more than 17-18 years old, but apparently in Conservative Christian California nothing short of a full armed response would do. I kept expecting to see the National Guard march down the street in riot gear.

The sight of a multi-million dollar helicopter circling the skies above our placid little beach town was too much for my logical sensibilities to handle. I made a call to the police. I asked them to please explain to me why my tax dollars were going to support a manhunt complete with aircraft to catch someone in the act of what really amounted to a childhood prank. The woman at the desk mumbled something about potential for violence in these situations (???) and said that the resources were available, so… I could actually hear her shrug with apathy.

That night, these signs went up on my 2nd story deck, where they could be clearly viewed by my neighbors.

Later I found out through http://eightmaps.com that those same  neighbors had donated $10,000 to the “yes on 8” campaign. Ten. Thousand. Dollars.

That’s a lot of personal hate. Wouldn’t that kind of money be better spent on therapy?

Human Rights are only for those that think like me…

When it came time to vote, I was shocked to see these words on the ballot under the proposition description:

“Eliminates the rights….”

Hoodewha?

How could any sane American in the 21st century click “yes” next to anything that starts with the words “eliminates the rights?” I don’t care what you think about homosexuality and marriage or whether or not you’re afraid of butt sex and how its existence might tear apart the fabric of society; it was unfathomable to me that any human being could click “yes” after seeing those words.

And yet they did. 52.5% of them. They saw a chance to take away human rights from a group of people whose crime is wanting to love one another. Victory for the baby Jesus.

Even here in hyper-conservative Orange County, protestors came out in droves. My husband and I carried 5 foot signs saying things like “Recent Polls indicate there is a 52.5% chance that you are a BIGOT.” Most of our resident gays were much more peaceful, carrying rainbow flags and messages of love and hope. It was us Straight Against H8 folks who were flying flags of anger, calling upon our inner 1970s child to rage against the Man.

But for all the marches, protests, and public outrage, so far we are still the state that eliminated human rights. California. The same state that successfully shot down the Briggs Initiative in 1978 has wandered backwards in time to become a stronghold of prejudice, fear, and hate.

Will California be the last?

I read this morning that Connecticut finally ended its battle late Wednesday, passing a bill to update their state laws to allow for gay marriage. They will now be the fourth state to do so, after Massachusetts, Vermont, and Iowa.

IOWA?  Yes. Corn-eating, truck-driving farmers are now more progressive than the state that hosted the Summer of Love. Every Californian should hang their head in shame. We should be leading the charge towards civil liberties, and yet we’re an anchor dragging in the beds of oppression. Shame on us.

Now we have Miss California, Carrie Prejean, proclaiming during the Miss USA pageant that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. She later defended her words by saying “God was testing my faith.”  Her faith in what? Massive stupidity? Ms. Prejean, a very public representative of our state, is proudly giving our message of intolerance and prejudice to the world. And the world is listening.

Our legacy

In the future, history books will contain the records of this battle right alongside the stories of racial freedom and gender equality. California’s shame will be preserved for eternity, causing students to shake their heads and cluck their tongues. They will try to fathom the minds of those who could vote in such a way, just as they try to understand those who could support apartheid, slavery, discrimination, and McCarthyism.

My parents’ generation is famous for a worldwide revolution of love, peace, and acceptance. My generation will be famous for hatred.

I’m so proud.

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When they stop being sluts

If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.

Tao te Ching
——————–

“She’s way too fat for that skirt.”

Up until about 10 years ago, any pretty young thing walking by was immediately grabbed by my mind’s eye and held under the microscope of my scathing criticism. “Doesn’t she know how ridiculous she looks in that color?”  “Who does her HAIR? Ewww!”  “Does she put that makeup on with a trowel?” “She’s got a freezer mouth – everyone puts their meat in it.” “Desperation, party of one!” “Oh yeah, there’s a Macintosh girl: she’s user friendly. Skanky slut.”

The insecurity of young women is buttressed by their jealousy, rivalry, and bitterness. For some reason, the green-eyed primordial ooze that makes up the lizard portion of the female brain tells us that other women are our competition for survival.

Women who are now entering middle age grew up in an odd time. The cultural revolution was just starting. Housewives and mothers were still the role models in our entertainment fare, but women like Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King were tearing down walls and changing definitions. Baking cookies and burning bras competed equally for our attention.

We should be the first generation to know better. Somehow, though, we didn’t get the right message. We still  instinctively went to battle against anyone who might be younger, prettier, thinner, or sport a larger cup size. We sharpened our nails and our tongues and ripped apart the enemy, making sure that she looked undesirable in the eyes of our caveman rescuers.

If only we’d spent that same energy empowering each other. Imagine the cooperative force of women united, building each other up, giving each other support, basking in our collective beauty. We might have freed ourselves of the self-imposed shackles of insecurity and dependency.

Yeah, I’ve heard that same speech for 40 years now. Maybe in a happy shiny world where rainbows dance and clean fuel alternatives make the flowers grow under a haze-free sky.

Sit down among a group of 20-somethings now. Little has changed. They fidget with their hair, meticulously check their lipstick, and slit their eyes in cruel examination of any girl unlucky enough to enter their scope of attention. “MUFFin top,” they whisper at each other. “OMG, 1990 called. They want their hairstyle back.” “Peanut butter legs – easy to spread.” They feed on their loathing like John Pinette at a Chinese buffet.

Around 40 though, if you’re lucky, something changes. While there is still a percentage of the older population that thinks that “cougar” and “MILF” are desirable designations, most of us have learned that trying to rule the world by our tweeties is a waste of our much more powerful resources.

Nowadays I see those young things walk by in their little skirts and their perky boobs and I want to run and grab them. I want to throw my arms around them and reassure them. I want to shake them into realizing how gorgeous they all are. Every one of them. Fat, thin, tall, short, they’re all so beautiful. They sparkle with it. They are far more lovely than they realize. The very fact of their youth makes them shine – dazzling my eyes with memories and hope. The world is at their feet, and there is a clear path to the horizon. I pray that nobody dampens their light. I pray that they realize their power. I pray that they grab hold of and ride their future with the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces. I hope they revel in their beauty and then celebrate the better things to come after youth calms down its hormonal hold on their consciousness.

I wish all women could see youth this way: as the building material of future greatness rather than a lost treasure. I wish we could all put down the push-up bras and just roll up and pin our boobs under our arms or tuck them into our waist-bands like the universe intended. Step away from the scalpel and just get yourself a good moisturizer. Leave youth to the young. Enjoy them, at a distance. If you are competing with these girls, you’ve lost sight of the prize, because no man who wants them has a chance in hell of getting into my elastic-waisted pants. I’ve already won all the glory that youth and beauty had to give. I’m working on broader horizons, now.

Do yourself a favor, ladies. Go hug a skanky slut today. You’ll feel better for it.

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Writing is a form of flatulence

True words aren’t eloquent;
eloquent words aren’t true.
Wise men don’t need to prove their point;
men who need to prove their point aren’t wise.

Tao te Ching
————

Every man loves the smell of his own farts.

Apparently that’s an old Icelandic proverb. I heard it for the first time long ago, and although I have learned and forgotten many valuable things in the intervening years, that one sticks with me. Go figure.

As tempting as it might be to go off on a diatribe about the relative olfactory values of flatulence, I’m instead going to focus on something slightly more metaphorical, and equally personal:

Writing.

Writing bubbles up within us. Words and expressions can build up in us until we have no choice but to vent them. They are the output and excess of our daily input. Without relief, our words and ideas can create unbearable pressure. And so out they come, through one path or another. You could even say they are the unavoidable offgassing of our brainwaves, but that would be kind of obvious and eye-roll-inducing.

So we write. And we sniff. And we like what we smell. It’s delicious, no? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve patted myself on the back after a particularly pithy phrase, only to notice the not-well-disguised wrinkled noses of my intended audience. Oops! Pardon me.

I’m guilty of what my mother calls “purple prose” and my mentor calls hyperbole. I use adjectives like cheap toilet paper, regardless of the fact that the need for an adjective usually indicates a poorly chosen word in the first place. Verb tenses are chameleons under my watch. They change as quickly as my mind. I forget transitions, because the subject has already progressed in my own head and I’m sure everyone will dance along, hopping to the next ideas right with me. We don’t need no stinkin’ bridges.

I know, of course, that there’s this magical and wondrous process called “editing” that might actually turn some of my diatribes into something more readable than the phone book. I try. I really do. But somehow once a word has been typed, it’s like a red-headed stepchild. I cease caring for the ones I’ve already released and there’s this great pressure inside of me to let the next one out.

I’m reminded of the sad reject auditions on American Idol. So many of those people believe they can sing. They’re sure that someday soon their great talent will be discovered and they will be loved by millions. Simon is clearly a moron for not seeing that brilliance immediately. Each time I see them, I cringe. Not for their squeaking, howling, wailing tunelessness, but because it forces me to realize that there’s a good chance that I’ve avoided my own truth: my farts, metaphorically speaking, might actually stink.

But still I write. Rainer Rilke was talking to me when he wrote those letters. I’ve been writing, journaling, and penning purple prose since I first gripped a well-chewed #2 in my grubby little hands. I am a writer. Maybe not published. Maybe not well-read. But I love the scent of my own hyperbole and I’m not likely to stop any time soon.

Oooh wait. Do you smell that? MMMMM. Heavenly!

no animals were harmed in the production of this post.

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My inner Sweeney Todd cries out

Know the personal,
yet keep to the impersonal:
accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,
the Tao will be luminous inside you
and you will return to your primal self.

Tao te Ching

——————-

I want to kill a chicken.

At first sight, that confession may seem like a good anecdote for the true-crime novel that might someday be written about my life. But there is actually a wholesome and pure motivation behind my bloodthirsty desires.

I believe we are dangerously disconnected from our food. And if I’m going to be a meat eater (and yes, I am, have no doubts) I need to truly understand the source of that meat. Its origins. Its holy place in the revolving circle of life. Many of us city-folk are so separated from the source of our nourishment we believe that meat comes neatly packed in Styrofoam and plastic wrap, as cleanly prepared as a bag of frozen broccoli or a box of crackers. I find this profoundly disrespectful to the animal that feeds us. It’s criminally callous.

My need to acknowledge and participate in the food chain in a more intimate way started almost 10 years ago. When my daughter was 8, she said she wanted chicken for dinner. When I pulled some from the freezer, she said “No, that other chicken. The steak kind.” I realized that for her the word “chicken” was synonymous with “meat.”  I carefully explained the difference between chicken and beef based on the animal it came from.

She was understandably horrified.

She had never known what meat really was. She vowed eternal vegetarianism (until a few weeks later when she was visiting with her dad and he taunted her with the smell of cooking bacon). While on one hand it’s kind of an amusing story of childhood semantics, it stuck with me.  She was so saddened to know that meat was animals. And I realized that for many of us, although we can identify “beef,” “poultry,” and “pork,” we are almost as poorly educated as to the true meaning behind the names. I had been deluding myself, keeping myself from facing the reality of it. I just never thought about it. Intentional ignorance may sooth the soul, but it’s as valuable as good intentions for keeping us from hell.

And so I feel I must kill a chicken.

If I find myself unwilling to face the animal and cleanly end his life, then I must also find myself unwilling to enjoy him (broiled or baked) on my dinner plate. I have a responsibility to the universe to cherish the life enough to admit it exists in the first place. If I refuse to do that, I am more cold-blooded and heartless than any sociopathic killer. I am merely a profiteer, benefiting from those who are willing to get their hands dirty on my behalf, while metaphorically and literally keeping my own clean. Shameful.

Many folks would simply advise vegetarianism as an alternative to murder. But as I examine my incisors, my canines, and my molars, not to mention my single-stomached digestive system, I have to recognize that I am designed by the universe to be omnivorous. I require lipids and proteins. And as I will discuss in a future blog, artificially synthesized versions of any food are as far removed from healthy eating as Styrofoam and plastic wrap. You might as well just eat the packaging.

Besides, as long as there is filet mignon topped with melted blue cheese, as long as there is the smell of turkey roasting in the oven, as long as apples and onions can transform pork into manna, and as long as rosemary grows for the sole purpose of turning my chicken into an aromatic heavenly delight, I will be an eater of meat.

We’ll leave my leather shoes for another debate.

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Bury me not on the lone prairie. At least not yet.

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

Tao te Ching
—————

School, Marriage, Children, Death.

In that order. That’s the summation of a life as I always envisioned it.

The thing is, school-marriage-children come in quick succession, boom boom boom. Somehow my life plan didn’t take into account that there might be some time before that last stage. Shockingly, at least to me, it’s not an instantaneous cause-and-effect (as much as it may feel that way when you’re raising a teenage daughter).

So as my child grows up, I’m actually surprised by the fact that I’m not quite as ready to have my old bones buried in the chapel graveyard as I once believed.

In fact, I’d like to argue that my bones are still rather supple. Despite the creaking and popping and feeble desire to grunt as I stand up, there is a distinct absence of the odor of lilac water and mothballs that should be accompanying my imminent departure.

I’m afraid this means I’m going to have to live for a while longer.

OK, ok. So I’m only 44 years old. There are a large number of individuals on the other end of the baby boom who might laugh at the mortality pressing down on my middle-aged brow. But really. I didn’t expect this.

The worst part, though, is that if I’m going to live, it means that stretching out before me there is still a FUTURE. I actually have to plan a life. And then live it. This kind of pisses me off. Nobody warned me.

The future is quite an ominous thing, no matter where we sit on our undefined and precarious time-line.

And if I’m going to have one, start all over again, I’m not sure quite how to approach it.

When I was young the future was a wide vista of endless possibilities. All the things I could do, all the things that might happen to me. It was all very exciting, and I was entitled to all of that excitement. I wasn’t much of a worrier back then, and I assumed it would all be grand adventures that would someday be assembled into a fascinating book that would be read and treasured by generations to come.

The one thing the future never was, though, was finite. “The end” didn’t figure much into my imaginative autobiographical musings. School-marriage-children-death was what happened to OTHER people. I was going to be different, because my path was most assuredly eternal. And yet there it sits now. Once I hit marriage and children, I realized I had no choice. I had accidentally slipped into mortalty. Maybe “the end”  lives far into the future at the end of long stay at some stinky old-home facility (where I’ll be lucky to have the drool wiped regularly from my chin). Maybe it is hiding immediately around the corner behind the wheel of a careening truck in the hands of a drunk driver. It changes nothing: “the end” is as inevitable as… well… those proverbial taxes and their hooded partner.

This new planning is so different from those endless dreams of childhood. Knowing that there is some mysterious drop-off point or a giant wall obstructing my hitherto presumed immortality lends a certain frantic urgency to the future, and a sense of wasteful idleness to the present.

Hurry, hurry! urges the universe. There is a deadline, in the most literal sense. Without infinite possibilities, suddenly choices matter. I’ve never lived too long in one place and I always imagined I’d be able to eventually live everywhere. I may have been overly optimistic, there. There are only so many places I might fit into this tighter schedule. All the women I thought I could be in my life are fading. There are only so many faces left to wear. Panic sets in.

The possibilities still FEEL endless, because that’s what possibilities always were. This contradictory reality has me frozen, unable to choose. I never feared choosing wrongly before, because there were always takesy-backsies and do-overs. Now every step I take seems to etch itself in stone, permanent and irreversible. They take me on a specific path. My power of selection is being snatched from my decreasingly flexible fingers.

This depresses the hell out of me. Whither my internal Auntie Mame, living an endless madcap adventure? Life may be a banquet, but apparently I’m on a strict diet.

Its all very ludicrous, of course. Anyone in their 60s can tell me that the time I have left “post motherhood” will seem like lifetimes upon lifetimes compared to the time I’ve spent fulfilling the obligatory roles of youth, and I’m sure anyone in their 80s will scoff at the professed wisdom of those 60-year-old zygotes.

Maybe I should just forget all this self-indulgent existential nonsense and run away and join a circus. When I grow up I want to be a lion tamer. Or maybe a ballerina. Or a detective, like Nancy Drew…

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Romance of the Mundane

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Tao te Ching

————————

When it comes to romance, tightie whities and a toothbrush outweigh flowers and candy every time.

When my husband and I first entered into cohabitational bliss he traveled a lot. One thursday night I came home from work to find a message from him on the machine.

“You may not get it, but this is a very romantic message. Can you remember to take the trash to the curb tomorrow morning?”

Had we already been together for a number of years, I might have puzzled over why the hell he thought trash was remotely romantic. But fortunately, these were the early, chemistry days. The time in the relationship where the sound of his voice still makes your heart flutter and all the smarmy songs on AM radio finally make sense. My endorphin-addled mind understood the inherent romance immediately.

I swooned. And in an instant, my life changed forever. This was the secret to true love.

Taking out the trash. Putting away dishes. Folding laundry. Feeding the cats.  These are the moments of a life shared. When you brush your teeth and look in the mirror and there are two faces instead of one. Breathing in rhythm as you sleep. Chuckling together along with the canned laughter on TV. Things that you used to do alone, and now do in harmony (or counterpoint, or even beautiful dissonance) with someone else.

I think many of us keep wanting to recreate those feelings by repeating the “romantic” experiences of those early twitterpation days. We want moonlit dinners and walks on the beach and flowers delivered. And when Barbara Streisand wails “you don’t bring me flowers any mooooore,” we cry along with her at our failure to make love last. We put pressure on ourselves and our partners to invent creative and elaborate romantic moments. And along the way, we set ourselves and them up for failure and disappointment.

Of course we fail. We’re trying to create a fiction. We want to run across the heather-covered moors into the arms of the Lord of the Manor. Bah. What insipid nonsense! I prefer gazing through my half-lidded eyes at my lover as he pulls on his ridiculous old man underwear in the morning. If you haven’t seen that, you don’t know romance.

In the days after my beloved asked me to take out the garbage, I meditated on the meaning of romance. I made a firm resolution to remember the wonder I felt seeing all the potential vistas for lasting love opening up before me. And I decided to hold fast to that concept.

As I meditated, I realized that this newfound joy in the mundanity of every day life wasn’t limited to my partnership. What if I could take each of the tasks that seemed trivial and repetitive and find in them the moments of a life LIVED? Why spend more than half my life waiting for the weekend when every Tuesday morning brought with it the potential to exist in joy? So much life wasted trying to slog through the practical and get to the fun, when the fun was with me each time I drew breath. It is only a matter of redefining “fun.”

These days I do my best to notice the taste of coffee in the morning. I find music in the sounds of the gardeners keeping the neighborhood manicured and blooming. I appreciate the feel of the hot water on my hands as I rinse the dishes, grateful that I can feel and stand and work. I drive my daughter to school and welcome time spent with her in silence (or more likely the pounding sounds of her music coming from the radio), knowing that these moments will soon pass and relishing that they are still here. I create schedules and project plans and follow up on endless details for my work, enjoying the gift of a mind that can concentrate and organize and plan. Pulling a tomato from the vine, gathering basil leaves, and using the food I’ve grown to prepare a meal for my family takes on a spiritual significance so profound that I am sometimes overcome to the point of tears.

But best of all are the moments in the day when my hand brushes against my husband’s as we work in the kitchen, or I hear him laugh, or I can sit beside him and share a meal. My heart leaps at the romance of it all. The moments of a life shared.

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Good Enough

The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.

Tao te Ching

——————-
Pigs are perfectionists.

I love generalizations, don’t you? They sit there in all their platitudinous splendor, FEELING true and tidy and summed up like perfect little equations on the blackboard of reality. Axiomatic.

But really, show me an incredibly disorganized home and I’ll show you a perfectionist almost every time.

I speak from experience rather than judgment, here. The pig is me.

Throughout my twenties and thirties, my world was chaos. I let dishes and laundry accumulate, the mess in my car overflow the floor wells, the papers on my desk grow like unstable high rises built on a fault-line. The chaos of my surroundings reflected itself in my emotions, my relationships, my parenting, and my work. The guilt of not “getting it right” ate at me and fueled ongoing feelings of inadequacy, sleeplessness, and the inevitable short temper.

I feared that my daughter was growing up thinking it was normal to have fast food for breakfast because there was no time to shop or to cook. Her homework may or may not be done, because I never modeled completion in my own tasks. Completion? I couldn’t imagine what complete looked like, I just held some vague image of a perfectly organized world, as misty in my mind as the peaks of Mount Olympus. And as I looked around at the impossible ungodly clutter, I could never even find the place to start. Hopeless conundrum.

Secretly I knew that with all this disorganization as her influence, she would grow up to be the parents’ worst nightmare: an epic failure, a beacon forever casting light on the truth of my bad parenting.

Something had to be done.

By nature I am a problem solver. Each time I would gaze upon the chaos, I would plan amazing and wondrous organization systems that would solve those problems forever. Periodically I’d throw myself into action, cleaning a kitchen until every surface sparkled, every bit of glassware was placed in the cabinets in perfectly spaced crystal rows, the drip trays under the oven coils were shining like mirrors, and the floor was spotless enough to invite a visit from Mr. Clean and his sexy bald head

Or I might tackle the laundry, not only washing every bit of dirty clothing that had accumulated over the weeks but also emptying every drawer and hanger and rearranging the closets until my wardrobe hung by order of type and season (not to mention weight-loss intentions… “by January I’m sure this dress will fit again, and by May…”).

Or I might create a multi-colored filing system complete with tickler files and prioritization tabs and sort every bit of unopened mail into its perfect vertical resting place.

I believed I had turned over a new leaf and life would now be better… even perfect.

My daughter would be surrounded by activity, cleanliness, and efficiency. By osmosis my newfound perfection would immediately turn her into a straight A student who makes her own bed and flosses her teeth. If I could only maintain my new inner June Cleaver or Martha Stewart, her teen years would be destined to be spent with the two of us giggling together over boys she liked, shared dreams for her future, mutual manicures, and the general goodwill experienced between mothers and daughters in a happy shiny world.

Right?

But after each herculean effort I’d fall back exhausted, never having enough time in the day to live up to the system I’d created. Who could?

I practiced visualization techniques. I imagined this woman who keeps up a perfectly organized life. I deluded myself that if I imagined her well enough I would become her? Her kitchen is always spotless. Her size 6 clothes are neatly pressed. As she surrounds herself with her perfectly cleaned and organized things, she has time to take up painting and poetry while cooking 4 course meals and sipping tea from delicate china cups on her spider-free veranda.  Because of her consistent and patient parenting, her children proudly march their perfect report cards before her loving eyes. They would be living legacies to her charity, her kindness, and her never-ending supply of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

However, as I held her in my inner eye, envisioning myself slipping into her reality, I pretty much wanted to kick her in her meticulously waxed nether-regions with my pointiest shoes (which were, of course, buried in my closet under a mound of too-small clothing which I was sure one day would be cleaned, pressed and donated to charity). I really hated that bitch.

I wish I could point to a moment in time when it changed. I want to be able to sum it up in a perfectly tidy little story of personal growth, inner awareness, and maturity that will inspire future women to lay down the mantle of oppressive perfectionism and rise, free of their shackles, to live lives of peaceful self-acceptance and competence.

Therapy helped. Therapy always helps. Those who fear therapy and its stigma need to realize that great therapy is like a spa treatment for the mind.

The only moment I can pinpoint is when my therapist said two words to me. Two liberating, life-altering, magical words that rung like incantations in the air around me.

“Good enough.”

She was talking about mothering. I had been weeping over my failure to be the perfect SUV-driving cookie baking soccer mom, and she assured me that my mothering had been “good enough, and good enough mothering is a hell of a lot better than most kids get.”

My insecurity should have rejected it immediately, but I sat transfixed by the potential inherent in those two words. Good enough mother… good enough friend? Good enough housekeeper? Good enough employee? Was it that simple? Was it possible? Could I be “good enough” and be happy?

Through fits and starts and trial and error, I put “good enough” into action. Giving up delusions of Mount Olympus took conscious effort and some mourning for what I still wished could have been. But I was willing to try.

And slowly, against the odds, it worked.

I discovered that a “good enough” filing system with just a few folders puts an end to paper avalanches. A “good enough” laundry system means that clothes can be washed and put away, as long as I am willing to let shirts touch slacks and blues can be hung next to reds. A “good enough” kitchen gets you cleanly wiped counters and plates you can find and eat from without fear of botulism.

While my inner anal princess still wishes the glasses in the cupboards lined up, like with like, in little military rows, I’ve learned that it’s ok if a coffee cup sits next to a water tumbler. The world does not tilt off its axis and go spiraling into the sun. Who knew? It took time to accept this good enough world, but it wasn’t long before I noticed that there were no mounds of dirty clothes, no stacks of unwashed dishes, and I actually had time and energy to run through with a dustrag to make a “good enough” pass at the furniture. Miraculous!

And most miraculously of all, “good enough” parenting can actually produce a child who finishes school, isn’t strung out on drugs, and only has piercings in places that aren’t too frightening or questionable in intent. And if there are any tattoos, I don’t know about them and that’s “good enough” for me.

I still hope that dress fits by May, though. You can’t lose ALL your dreams.

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All the internet’s a stage…

When a superior man hears of the Tao,
He immediately begins to embody it.
When an average man hears of the Tao,
He half believes it, half doubts it.
When a foolish man hears of the Tao,
He laughs out loud.
If he didn’t laugh,
It wouldn’t be the Tao.

Tao te Ching

—————–

Recent statistics indicate that the fastest growing demographic at facebook is us older wimmin-types.

We blog, twitter, facebook away our lives, broadcasting stuff and nonsense to a world that is too busy broadcasting itself back to even take notice.

Is it self-indulgence? Fragile ego? Do we feel somehow unheard and unnoticed as we collect our paychecks, feed our families, and catch the latest Housewives on Bravo?

Who do we imagine our audience to be? Do we fantasize that book publishers are scanning wordpress for a sign of the next Donna Tartt? Do we envision miles of lonely people, desperate for connection, hanging on to our every word? Or perhaps it is the misty visage of a future alien race, feverishly trying to piece together the fragments of a lost civilization in 140 words or less. Imagine the totality of humanity summed up by 9/11 conspiracy theories, acai diet miracles, and brangelina’s latest orphan acquisition. Funny, depressing, and utterly true.

So now we live in a world comprised only of strutting and fretting players with an audience of none. A cacophony of tweets and blogs and nary an eye to catch them. Why?

It has been said, by those who encourage authors, that in the end we will not be judged by what we have published but by what we have written. I’m guessing that there might be some room in there for what we have read, as well. As my third grade teacher Miss Millanessio said, we learn better with our eyes open and our mouths shut.

And so with my best intention of becoming a better listener to fill the aching void of humanity, I ironically close my daily narcissism and hit “publish.”

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It ends. It begins.

…the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

tao te ching

————————–

There comes a time when your children cease their role as major players in the story of your life and wander in to their own stories. For years, all your attention has been placed on this fascinating thread and then abruptly the thread is cut and they are relegated to inconsequential mentions in a holiday or a random memory flashback.

It’s likely that their role fades gradually, but our fascination with their subplots and themes is so all-encompassing we never notice their diminishing place and it seems more as if we turn a page and suddenly their names disappear from the text.

I suppose the most successful of us pick up the dangling ends of our own story arcs and rebuild them into a new and exciting narrative. But in that moment when you realize your children have rightfully taken up their place as their own heroes and heroines, the temptation to close our own book and follow theirs is overwhelming. It is a crossroads of mortality, the internal struggle between the pull of eternity and choosing to plant ourselves fully in the present and recapture our own spotlight, ignoring the fact that to the outside world we are merely fading divas.

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