Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Going down.

I woke up okay. I made coffee, Clooney's antics made me smile, Mario liked the Valentine I gave him, I felt mentally stable. And then that snake of panic and fear that lives in my guts woke up and the ghost of future-tripping started rattling its chains: you'll never get an agent, you'll never get a job, you'll never have healthcare and will die a painful death from a treatable disease. Not even the kitty could pull me out of it.

I think, besides hormones and the fact I don't sleep at night, my problem is that the writer's conference is this weekend, along with the speed dating for an agent business. The closer it gets, the worse I get. Because, in my head, the before is full of hope and anticipation that things will work out. But come Monday...well, it could be bad, day after a bad Christmas bad. I have psychically put all my eggs in one basket. 

Friday, February 10, 2012

Really, God?

Dear God,

I don't hate being a woman. Thanks for the hair, makeup, pedicures, clothes, and vagina. But menopause, really? Let's just go through my menstrual history.

First you made me wait. I was the last of my friends to get the curse. Did you even hear those prayers? They lasted three years. Then came the hemorrahagic years of of anemia, white-pant avoidance, and worry. Next came the amenorrhea caused by starvation, resulting in whole other levels of worry. Things eventually normalized, if you consider normal a week every month of tender breasts, major bloat, insomnia and moodiness, followed by a week of leak worry. (Oh, and tampons cost $8 a box now. That adds up, God.) Haven't I suffered enough? Apparently not.

Two weeks ago I began waking up at night in a puddle of my own sweat. At first, I blamed it on Big Guns. I thought he turned the heat up. I'd throw off my moist covers only to realize it was freezing in my room. Then these hot flashes, more like flash floods of sweat, started happening during the day, all day, over and over again.

The spark begins in my solar plexus, where my pilot light apparently lives, then spreads upward like the Santa Ana winds until I'm sure my hair is on fire. I rip off all my clothes, grab anything to fan myself, and sweat. Even my calves sweat. In minutes, it's over and I start shivering.

You have thrown some compassionate people in my path, I'll give you that. My therapist had plenty of sympathy. She said it gets easier, that the first two to five years are the hardest. Two to five years!! She offered me her industrial size hand fan. She's small and it covers half her body. She told me a story about driving somewhere and having 23 hot flashes in the space of an hour. We laughed and laughed. I still laugh when I think about us jumping off the bridge and opening our t-shirts to enjoy a final, cool burst of air on the way down.

Intelligent design? Fuck that. This is a faulty design. An unnecessary glitch. I wish Eve had told you about it. And she probably would have, but by the time she figured out your error, she'd already eaten that apple and I'm sure her guilt prevented her from saying anything to you.

If I have to go through this, then could you please make it as brief as possible? I'm sure you have some pull in that department.

Thanks,

Eileen, I dress for sweat

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Heidi Klum and Seal?


They look happy, don't they?
There are some couples I kind of expect to divorce. And then there are couples like Heidi and Seal who I assumed were happy and fulfilled. (What's it say about me that I have fantasies about other people's lives?) I should thank them for demonstrating that I can never know what a marriage is like from seeing pictures of it in People magazine. I can't even know what a marriage is like when I know the people.

Monday, February 6, 2012

This is NOT right.

http://cupcakesandcashmere.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/burger9.jpg 




Behold the Brownie Burger.  These little delicacies are actually brownies sandwiched between two peanut butter cookies and dressed with coconut "lettuce" and red "ketchup" icing. 
I'm not opposed to food masquerading as something in the same flavor category, i.e. tofurkey. At least they are both savory. What really turns my stomach is when the food jumps categories. I'm all about whimsy, but this is just white trashy. (Although, shockingly, the Brownie Burgers came from Martha Stewart!) It subverts the sensory process of eating.
 

Pictures of Birthday Cakes
Spaghetti and meat ball "cake."




Candy Sushi
Candy "sushi." Yum.


Meatloaf Cake
Meatloaf and mashed potato "cake."


Thursday, February 2, 2012

A little program in the day.

When my marriage was taking its last breaths and I was freshly sober and working with my first sponsor, I was an anxious, paralyzed mess. Here was my self-fulfilling prophesy fulfilling itself, years of self-evident beliefs becoming truth: My husband did not love me, I was unlovable, people will always abandon me, nobody can be trusted, everybody lies.

My young and grace-filled sponsor gently, insistently reminded me that everything happened for a reason, that it was God's plan and that it would be okay. I would be okay. I did not believe her. To believe her would have meant I had to shift my perceptions in cataclysmic ways. This would have required a 7.5 earthquake.

Instead, over the years, I've experienced minor temblors and my view is starting to shift.

I need to hear something hundreds of times before it sinks in. At every meeting, people talk about faith. I had no faith, but thankfully I didn't need it because the rooms are full of proof. People can tolerate difficult life changes--divorce, death, loss, and unmet expectations--and be okay, even learn something from the experience. Some, in hindsight, even begin to view the trials and enormous roadblocks thrown into their lives as gifts. This is the proof I need. Proof of faith.

Now I have some proof to share. The last three years have been difficult--end of marriage, financial fears, two teenagers--but I am okay. Work has showed up when I needed it to pay my property taxes. Here's the thing: I believe that I will be taken care of, although what I'm given may not always be what I want.

I wrote this in the margins of page 65 in my big book: Willpower is my thoughts. Life is action.

For me, willpower is not pushing myself to go to the gym or pass on dessert. It's the voice, not always kind, that's trying to direct the way I feel about things: You will never find the job you want because you did not go to a good university; nobody will want your novel because it's not great literature; nobody will want your novel because it's not commercial enough; your stories only get published in tiny literary journals where the editors/undergrads will publish anything.

I have spent years of my life worrying about things I can't control, namely the future, but also other people, climate change, politics, and the economy. I believed that life was a veil of tears and full of hardship or luck, there was no in between. I was going to die fighting or win the lottery. Everything I had was given to me by mistake or as a payment for something I was going to have to pony up for in the future. This is my will talking. The action to keep that will in check? I make a gratitude list and, suddenly, things start looking like gifts.

“The outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to reflect their inner beliefs.” ~James Allen


I just read that quote on Tiny Buddha. You can read the whole post, but basically the writer says that our lives are shaped by experiences which we then turn into beliefs. For instance, if you spent your whole childhood being fed a food, say strawberries, that made you sick, you would eventually believe all strawberries were bad and avoid them. When you read the newspaper, you would give extra attention to stories about e coli outbreaks--See? your self would think, Strawberries do make people sick!

Maybe the strawberries your family fed you were always bad? Maybe you just got unlucky? But avoiding strawberries as a child served you well. Now that you're grown up, you're missing out. If you want to enjoy shortcake and smoothies and sorbet and a lot of other lovely things, you have to challenge your beliefs. This is very SCARY and there is no way around the scary part. Sorry.

It helps to hear stories from other people who have eaten strawberries and been okay. It also helps to have a lovely woman hold your hand and tell you that you'll be fine. I will be fine. I am okay, no matter what happens.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Sending my baby out into the world.

I'm preparing my novel for its launch into the cold, hard world. Part of that process is a one- to two-page synopsis of the whole enchilada, which I have written and re-written numerous times. It's much harder than it sounds. I worked for a couple days then released it to my writing group. We met at our usual place: Hong Sings, where the food is nearly as bad as the decor: beige walls, fluorescent lights, and the faint smell of sewer if we sit close the restrooms. When it was my turn to be critiqued, the group went silent. I could tell they were searching for something nice to say when one mentioned the nice font. I was crushed, but managed not to cry until I got to my car. I'm taking this novel to the SF Writer's Conference in two weeks in the hopes of landing an agent and my group had nothing nice to say. What a waste of $695. This is the hard part, letting your work go, which is why I've had it on my laptop, finished, for over a year. I'm prolonging the honeymoon phase.

I didn't look at their comments for two days and when I did I noticed I'd sent the wrong file, an extremely old draft, not even a draft, a stream of conscious-gibberishy piece of the dog's lunch that I hacked out long, long ago. It didn't even make sense to me. I resent the correct file and they loved it. I'm at peace again, until I start getting rejected by agents. Just see what happened to my friend, Simone. Ouch is right.