So... as a direct result of my experience in the previous entry, I went over to my good friend's apartment last night, had Ethipian food in Harlem (OMG go to Zoma if you can), and then proceeded to get drunk as a skunk with her in her apt listening to music and smoking WAY too many cigarettes (I quit, dontcha know).
I will tell you, it never ceases to amaze me how much booze I can drink when I'm wrestling with grief. It literally is three times what I normally drink. And I'm feeling it today. Oof.
So I went to Staples on part of "get my life organized" plan. And when you have a significant hangover, Staples can be... hell.
SO many pens! Holy crap, which one do I fucking pick? I just wanted it to be over. Why are the bloody tab inserts in a different isle from the plastic zipper-pockets that also go in binders? And where the fuck is the compressed air?
So many problems. And while I was struggling with these mountain-molehill issues, The Cranberries came on. I used to love them in college and it was the over-played "Do you have to let it lingeeeerrrrr?" song.
So I am walking through the isles of Staples, sweating, wearing sunglasses because florescent light was NOT going to happen, and singing my own lyrics. Instead of:
Do you have to,
Do you have to,
Do you have to let it lingerrrrrr
I was singing:
I think I'm going to,
I think I'm going to,
I think I'm going to fucking vommmmmiiiitttt!
I recommend it if you need to grasp a thread of sanity while trying to decide what kind of tab inserts to buy.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
distant constellations
This morning I had a dream that I was with my mother. I had missed her so much, was so glad to be with her. I was walking with her somewhere slightly familiar and also new. She was with me, close, so close that speaking was almost not necessary. Almost.
In real life my mother passed away seven and a half years ago. Even writing that today seems insane. As I told my good friend a few years ago, when in tears in a taxi cab on the way to meet some friends for dinner, "You think 'If someone told me I would never see that person again, I would die... I would just die'...but you don't. You just get up and look at the sun and keep moving and fall apart and cry in the back of taxi cabs".
In my dream she was back for a reason - she had been brought back for a singular purpose... my father's death? I can't remember. I was walking with her and remembering how simply walking slightly behind her I could smell her, feel her presence.
When the purpose for her visit was over she said she had to go again. I was ravaged with sadness. But I also knew it could be no other way. In the dream I asked her, "Do you think when you're dead?" and she looked at me with a deep sadness mixed with a sense of acceptance or... peace? And she shook her head. Then she said, "There's such an overabundance of... everything." And she was gone.
Then it was my husband. I was walking with him much in the same position and he was telling me he had to go. I felt that same sense of fight in me that had torn me up when I was watching my mother die and that sense of rebellion of "I WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN" mixed with a deeper, more still, realization that it would be no other way.
He was crying in the dream, but had already started to fade away from me. I kissed him one last time and whispered something - maybe "I will find you"? I can't remember.
This dream is different from the dreams I had when she was dying, and for the first year and a half after she passed I had nightmares every night. I would be underwater with dead bodies, gaping mouths, flesh floating as fish swam by, I would be screaming so long and loud for doctors to save her that I would start choking, and my gag reflex would silence me. I would vomit up blood over and over as doctors in lab coats stood over me, cold and silent.
So you see, this dream is relatively calm in comparison. And in these dreams she feels much farther away. She has moved on. But when she returns our connection has not diminished at all... it's a strange combination.
I woke up and today is Thursday in NYC which means on my husbands favorite radio station it is time for my favorite dj's show - Trouble in the Modern World on WFMU. He turned on the radio when I was waking up and after he had left for work she played a Euro-tech dance type of song whose main lyric was "Resuscitation" being repeated over and over with the beat. The female singer says, "Give me the kiss of life... resuscitation, resuscitation".
I stared at the radio and got dressed. Now I'm trying to shake off that feeling of an old, deep pain that will never go away. And a feeling of trying to reach out beyond the grave.
In real life my mother passed away seven and a half years ago. Even writing that today seems insane. As I told my good friend a few years ago, when in tears in a taxi cab on the way to meet some friends for dinner, "You think 'If someone told me I would never see that person again, I would die... I would just die'...but you don't. You just get up and look at the sun and keep moving and fall apart and cry in the back of taxi cabs".
In my dream she was back for a reason - she had been brought back for a singular purpose... my father's death? I can't remember. I was walking with her and remembering how simply walking slightly behind her I could smell her, feel her presence.
When the purpose for her visit was over she said she had to go again. I was ravaged with sadness. But I also knew it could be no other way. In the dream I asked her, "Do you think when you're dead?" and she looked at me with a deep sadness mixed with a sense of acceptance or... peace? And she shook her head. Then she said, "There's such an overabundance of... everything." And she was gone.
Then it was my husband. I was walking with him much in the same position and he was telling me he had to go. I felt that same sense of fight in me that had torn me up when I was watching my mother die and that sense of rebellion of "I WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN" mixed with a deeper, more still, realization that it would be no other way.
He was crying in the dream, but had already started to fade away from me. I kissed him one last time and whispered something - maybe "I will find you"? I can't remember.
This dream is different from the dreams I had when she was dying, and for the first year and a half after she passed I had nightmares every night. I would be underwater with dead bodies, gaping mouths, flesh floating as fish swam by, I would be screaming so long and loud for doctors to save her that I would start choking, and my gag reflex would silence me. I would vomit up blood over and over as doctors in lab coats stood over me, cold and silent.
So you see, this dream is relatively calm in comparison. And in these dreams she feels much farther away. She has moved on. But when she returns our connection has not diminished at all... it's a strange combination.
I woke up and today is Thursday in NYC which means on my husbands favorite radio station it is time for my favorite dj's show - Trouble in the Modern World on WFMU. He turned on the radio when I was waking up and after he had left for work she played a Euro-tech dance type of song whose main lyric was "Resuscitation" being repeated over and over with the beat. The female singer says, "Give me the kiss of life... resuscitation, resuscitation".
I stared at the radio and got dressed. Now I'm trying to shake off that feeling of an old, deep pain that will never go away. And a feeling of trying to reach out beyond the grave.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Dust ourselves off, pick ourselves up...
So we have a new President. Someone I am proud to claim to be the leader of our nation. Maybe for the first time ever. I am not as much patriotic as I am emotional and loyal to my family, friends and experiences. I love the land of the United States because it is so varied and vast.
Whatevs. No one cares about my political affiliations and I shouldn't print them on the internet anyway. What I'm trying to say is: Yay. Obama's President. The winds of change are blowing and they are long overdue. For this, I am grateful.
I'm not a particularly religious person. I don't subscribe to any faith of organized religion or worship any deities. But I will admit there is a lot about this world we don't understand. I just don't necessarily believe that is what most people refer to as "God".
I don't know what to call these moments of transcendence, coincidence or awareness. Perhaps they are just that. Perhaps there is a pattern related to something we can only sense on a rudimentary level. Perhaps it is related to the time-space continuum, and we fumble about bumping into other forms of existence or levels of consciousness and get deja-vu or experience epiphanies or nirvana. I don't know. I love reading about quantum physics, philosophy and religion to imagine what the code, pattern or story is that we can't see. It's fascinating. But I try not to worry too much about it, since I'm pretty darn sure we'll never find the equation, formula or unlock the secret to Heaven during my lifetime.
But sometimes... the world catches my attention. I see patterns forming and I don't know where they originate or what they mean, but I can't help noticing them.
For instance, here is a small one. Yesterday I was at the gym working out on the elliptical machine and I glanced at one of the two tvs positioned on either side of the machine I like to use (I hate watching tv while I work out and choose the machine that has a somewhat straight view out a window), and saw a brief moment of gloppy, glossy, thick peanut butter being scooped out of a jar. I glanced away and then back and couldn't decipher why it had been there, it wasn't a commercial, but part of a news report. I guessed it was about American obesity and forgot about.
Today I rented via HBO On Demand a horrible movie called "Wanted" with Angelina Jolie and watched it. If you have seen it, you know that there is a plot line that involves peanut butter. And in the movie there is a brief moment where one of the lead actors is "pouring" peanut butter out of a can. It's thick and gloppy and remarkably similar to what I saw on the evening news last night.
Not a big deal, but almost the same image.
When I was a young teen one night I dreamed my mother and I were cleaning out the coat closet on the first floor of my then home and I turned to her as she handed me a fedora that was my father's from a shelf high above. I didn't even remember the dream when I woke up, until later that week when we did in fact clean out the coat closet and as she handed me the fedora from a shelf I got a prickly sensation up and down my neck and back. A psychiatrist two decades later would tell me I had the experience first and the dream later, that my memory is flawed. Perhaps it is.
Four years ago when my dear friend called me one night to see how I was doing (I had just moved back to NYC after living away for several years). She asked, "What have you done tonight?" I said, "Well, I decided to take myself out on a date to Turkish food to the restaurant down the block since I had never had Turkish food and now I'm knitting and singing to the radio". She asked, "What songs are you singing along to?" and I answered, "Right now I was just singing along to 'My Cheri Amor' by Stevie Wonder". She said: "That's strange. My work had a benefit tonight and they served Turkish food, which I'd never had before, and Stevie Wonder was there and he sang that song."
Perhaps it is a coincidence that last night both my husband and I dreamed about past lovers, meeting up with them and comparing that love in different ways to our current life together.
Perhaps not.
But when I see an almost replica of 2 images of gloppy peanut butter within 17 hours of one another I have to wonder - is there a pattern?
The meaning, well, I will leave that up to other people. We always want things to mean something, lest we be lost in a sea of randomness and icy cold indifference. I suppose even that has it's reassurances. Many times, I find that sea quite comforting. I am, after all, only someone who will be forgotten, until one day someone in the future hears my name twice in one day, or sees my photo too many times to be explained. And then maybe he or she will wonder... is there a pattern?
Whatevs. No one cares about my political affiliations and I shouldn't print them on the internet anyway. What I'm trying to say is: Yay. Obama's President. The winds of change are blowing and they are long overdue. For this, I am grateful.
I'm not a particularly religious person. I don't subscribe to any faith of organized religion or worship any deities. But I will admit there is a lot about this world we don't understand. I just don't necessarily believe that is what most people refer to as "God".
I don't know what to call these moments of transcendence, coincidence or awareness. Perhaps they are just that. Perhaps there is a pattern related to something we can only sense on a rudimentary level. Perhaps it is related to the time-space continuum, and we fumble about bumping into other forms of existence or levels of consciousness and get deja-vu or experience epiphanies or nirvana. I don't know. I love reading about quantum physics, philosophy and religion to imagine what the code, pattern or story is that we can't see. It's fascinating. But I try not to worry too much about it, since I'm pretty darn sure we'll never find the equation, formula or unlock the secret to Heaven during my lifetime.
But sometimes... the world catches my attention. I see patterns forming and I don't know where they originate or what they mean, but I can't help noticing them.
For instance, here is a small one. Yesterday I was at the gym working out on the elliptical machine and I glanced at one of the two tvs positioned on either side of the machine I like to use (I hate watching tv while I work out and choose the machine that has a somewhat straight view out a window), and saw a brief moment of gloppy, glossy, thick peanut butter being scooped out of a jar. I glanced away and then back and couldn't decipher why it had been there, it wasn't a commercial, but part of a news report. I guessed it was about American obesity and forgot about.
Today I rented via HBO On Demand a horrible movie called "Wanted" with Angelina Jolie and watched it. If you have seen it, you know that there is a plot line that involves peanut butter. And in the movie there is a brief moment where one of the lead actors is "pouring" peanut butter out of a can. It's thick and gloppy and remarkably similar to what I saw on the evening news last night.
Not a big deal, but almost the same image.
When I was a young teen one night I dreamed my mother and I were cleaning out the coat closet on the first floor of my then home and I turned to her as she handed me a fedora that was my father's from a shelf high above. I didn't even remember the dream when I woke up, until later that week when we did in fact clean out the coat closet and as she handed me the fedora from a shelf I got a prickly sensation up and down my neck and back. A psychiatrist two decades later would tell me I had the experience first and the dream later, that my memory is flawed. Perhaps it is.
Four years ago when my dear friend called me one night to see how I was doing (I had just moved back to NYC after living away for several years). She asked, "What have you done tonight?" I said, "Well, I decided to take myself out on a date to Turkish food to the restaurant down the block since I had never had Turkish food and now I'm knitting and singing to the radio". She asked, "What songs are you singing along to?" and I answered, "Right now I was just singing along to 'My Cheri Amor' by Stevie Wonder". She said: "That's strange. My work had a benefit tonight and they served Turkish food, which I'd never had before, and Stevie Wonder was there and he sang that song."
Perhaps it is a coincidence that last night both my husband and I dreamed about past lovers, meeting up with them and comparing that love in different ways to our current life together.
Perhaps not.
But when I see an almost replica of 2 images of gloppy peanut butter within 17 hours of one another I have to wonder - is there a pattern?
The meaning, well, I will leave that up to other people. We always want things to mean something, lest we be lost in a sea of randomness and icy cold indifference. I suppose even that has it's reassurances. Many times, I find that sea quite comforting. I am, after all, only someone who will be forgotten, until one day someone in the future hears my name twice in one day, or sees my photo too many times to be explained. And then maybe he or she will wonder... is there a pattern?
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
A new year, a new era, and some photos of old & new
Happy 2009!
I couldn't be more excited about the change in political climate. So far, 2009 has brought with it some great times, some difficult changes for me and those around me, but it has an optimistic feel.
Here are a few photos from the end of '08 and the beginning of '09.
Today, I was walking around midtown after an appointment doing errands and I passed the Empire State Building to see a collection of police and emergency vehicles. That's never a welcome sight for a New Yorker... it makes me nervous. But by the time I had picked up my items from Staples and come back to the same corner, everyone had disappeared. I managed to get a couple of photos with my iPhone. For some reason I thought the sight was worth catching.
Here are spattering photos from the end of 2008 and the start of 2009.
I couldn't be more excited about the change in political climate. So far, 2009 has brought with it some great times, some difficult changes for me and those around me, but it has an optimistic feel.
Here are a few photos from the end of '08 and the beginning of '09.
Today, I was walking around midtown after an appointment doing errands and I passed the Empire State Building to see a collection of police and emergency vehicles. That's never a welcome sight for a New Yorker... it makes me nervous. But by the time I had picked up my items from Staples and come back to the same corner, everyone had disappeared. I managed to get a couple of photos with my iPhone. For some reason I thought the sight was worth catching.
Here are spattering photos from the end of 2008 and the start of 2009.
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