Silverbrook Farm

This year, I signed up for the company's organic farm share, and I'm splitting a share with one of my co-workers. What this means is every Tuesday, I march down to street to the distribution point with a post-recycled waste tote bag, wait in line, and transfer a random assortment of organically produced farm goods into the tote. This week, there was enough kohlrabi to choke a a herd of goats. I wish I'd taken a picture of this vegetable, but I didn't have the presence of mind, so I'll remember next time. I had five or six kohlrabi with full greenery still attached, which meant my tote was abundantly overflowing with leaves, and that was only one item. There were also purple spring onions, dandelion greens, a red leaf lettuce, sweet peas, snap peas, and snow peas, strawberries so ripe they had to be eaten the first day (smelled so sweet in my office all day), a little carton of red currants, and some cloumage, with is sort of a like a ricotta cheese, but more pungent (and more delicious, by far).

At home, I shelled the peas and served them steamed. They were beautifully fresh. I love fresh sweet peas. I sliced and caramelized the spring onions, which was sort of a shame because they're so pretty when they're fresh, but they were great poured over thinly sliced kohlrabi and tossed with chopped dandelion greens, olive oil, and lime juice. Lots of salt is needed to sale up a root vegatable, and this turned out very much like the turnip salads I made with last year's farm share, whenever another person in the office had too many turnips. Kohlrabi is crisper than a turnip, and not spicy, but is very good mixed with strong tasting things like onions and dandelion greens.

The week before, I came home with snap peas and snow peas, napa cabbage, kale, fresh eggs, green spring onions, and I'm sure other things that were great, but I just can't remember. I take so many pictures for a reason; no matter how much gingko I take, my memory is going. I do know that I enjoyed my half share, and I think I used all of it, which is pretty impressive for just one person. The other people in the family are indifferent vegetable eaters, which means half a share of organic produce a week is just a lot of washing, chopping, peeling, sauteeing, etc. One thing that's hard to get used to is that the produce arrives so dirty. I'm used to everything being washed and prepackaged and neat and tidy. Organic produce just isn't like that. It's dirty, and the leafy things are often full of holes because they don't use pesticides, but it's not like the stuff is full of bugs when it arrives, just dirt. So it takes some extra time to prepare, but I think it's worth it.

Last week I made a soup from the onions, kale, cabbage, some beef stock, and sliced packaged ham. Next time perhaps I'll use some uncured bacon instead, although the ham was quite tasty. I had the uncured bacon for breakfast this morning, with the farm fresh eggs and a dollop of the creamy cloumage cheese. Note to self: going shopping tomorrow, but PURCHASE NO PRODUCE. This particular organic farm also has fruit, cheese, eggs, honey, and occasionally brings plants for their farm shares. I don't know what it works out to, per half share, financially, but this stuff is paid in advance, so I need to make sure I eat it all up and waste nothing. Because of my crazy house (three kitchens, three cooks), it's sometimes confusing, figuring out what to cook so nothing is wasted. I'm still feeling my way through that, and things will be even more complicated when I start growing vegetables in the back yard.

It's expensive, and it's yucky dirty and needs to be washed really well before eating, and you need to make sure you eat it all to get your money's worth, but there's something deeply satisfying to me about not knowing what's going to show up every week. They do send out an e-mail ahead of time to give you an idea of what will be in the shares, but it's a funny thing. Sometimes, they say they'll bring bok choy, and it never shows up. Sometimes, they promise a potted plant, and you get strawberries instead. There's always something missing, and always something unexpected. It's almost as if they've got a secret agenda with the contents of the shares. Don't get your hopes up; anticipate something surprising. Don't get too set on one thing. Think creatively about how to plan a menu around mystery ingredients. A salad doesn't just have to be lettuce, and you don't have to cook everything you think you have to cook. You can eat sweet peas raw right out of the shell. My aunt taught me that, how good raw vegetables taste.

The vegetables in the market are often tasteless, tough, and old (because they've been on a boat or a truck for weeks before they get to you). I'm trying to keep my ears open when people talk about going blueberry picking, apple picking, or seeking whatever is ripe and available. I try not to pay exorbitant prices, but I am willing to pay a premium for an apple that tastes like an apple, instead of some fibrous nothing from somewhere far away. I'm trying to get organized enough to grow herbs in my yard. I have some chives back there, and a new mustard plant. I'm looking for foods that taste like what they're supposed to be, not bioengineered to resist bruising on a three-week long truck ride across country. I'm looking for melt-in-your-mouth, crisp, fresh, and full of life.

Life's too short to eat crappy food.

On Four Hours of Sleep

I sat down with good intentions of writing a post, but I have to admit that my brain is full of fog. I stayed up very late last night writing the post about my uncle, and then had one of those strenuous days at work where I spent the greater part of the day moving from one crisis to another. I'm not a firefighter, so while I'm fighting the fires, I'm also laying in infrastructure for a good fire suppression system, and that kind of simultaneous right-now versus long-term thinking is exhausting. Some days, I come home feeling as if I've spent all day trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. Today wasn't like that. I did receive some very nice feedback from people that shows that over the long term, what I do at work creates lasting improvement.

I'm just tired. Tired, and not thinking well.

There's also the strain of trying not to fall into bad habits, and having nowhere to hide from myself. So I just have to sit there and feel things, and feel the desperate urge to use those old bad habits to soothe myself, and just refusing to use them. Instead, I'm rising above myself, watching my reaction, and saying, "Isn't that interesting? There's that urge again. Wow, it's a pretty strong urge. No wonder I've had such a hard time resisting it." All the time, not really resisting it, but not indulging in it either. Just witnessing, noticing, allowing myself to feel those things, and sitting with the agitation until something else catches my eye and without my noticing an immediate relief, it fades into other concerns.

Instead of indulging myself in flailing, I'm going to write a blog post, this blog post. I'm going to witness whatever feelings come as I wrangle with having no topic, and I'm going to let them be, and not try to stop them, and not allow them to inform my actions. That's what I've rarely managed to do; let things be. It sounds so passive. One of the things I struggle with is how to see myself as an active, powerful person if I just "let things go." But letting things go isn't about being passive, or letting people stomp on you. It's the opposite. Lettings things go means relinquishing control over other people, and acting only when you understand where your power to influence starts and stops. It means refusing to be controlled by the fear of not knowing which possible future will actually occur. Refusing to get lost in trying to figure out all of the possible outcomes, especially with new data coming in every moment. Imagine if you spent your life trying to solve a math problem where the variables won't stay put for longer than five minutes. Imagine the time draining away, the life draining away, as you sat in one place un-showered, and unfed, trying to figure something out that's just going to change every five minutes.

At some point, the sane person puts down the slate, and puts down the chalk, and decides to acknowledge the desire to be paralyzed, while chasing butterflies, and washing her hair. That's letting things go. Choosing to observe the brain hamsters while washing your hair with ginger shampoo, making tea and cookies, and making whatever other decisions are right in front of you. Not trying to decide on the millions of things that haven't yet happened. Not trying to come up with a contingency plan for every possibility. Not building a bunker in the basement to cover every possible catastrophe from the zombie apocalypse to the super flu. It's spending some time looking far enough ahead to determine what's likely to happen, and planning for that, but being flexible enough to shift in the moment, instead of freezing in place, in terror, all the planning in the world unable to save your life. Wouldn't that be silly? To plan for a million futures, and end up dying anyway, of the one you didn't plan for. When you could have been chasing butterflies, making pots, chopping dandelion greens and spring onions. I can't build a failsafe plan to be Vice President of my company in five years; however, I can take a class next semester, and then one the following semester, and another the semester after that. If I don't let it go, I won't take any classes, I won't write any blog posts, I won't chase any butterflies.

I'll just sit doing nothing on four hours of sleep, terrified of life's possibilities.

That's no way to live.

Wait and watch for the choices, carefully consider, and then act.

Repeat.

The Last Day

Tomorrow is my uncle's funeral. I am not at my family's side as they honor this much beloved man, but I can do this. I can remember the last day I saw the man himself, in the summer of 2008, and I can share my impressions of that day, which I will never forget. The poem and the songs are not mine, of course, but the photographs are. I will not tag these photographs, but if you recognize yourself or your friends and family in any of them, and want me to take them down, I will do so immediately. It would not do for me to offer respect to one of my family by inadvertently offering disrespect to one of yours.



To those of my family who find internet navigation a little confusing: If you want to know what I was listening to while I was putting together this album, click the links between the pictures. Right-click to open YouTube in a new window if you want to listen while you look at the photos; or you can click the link to go to YouTube, and then click back to return to the blog.

Lullaby - Loreen McKennit

Amazing Grace - Leann Rimes

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

 ~ High Flight, John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Scarborough Fair - Carly Simon

Down in the River to Pray - Allison Krauss

This is Why We Fight - The Decemberists

Silent Lucidity - Queensryche

Big Rock Candy Mountain - Harry McClintock

Keep on the Sunny Side - The Carter Family

The Hill - Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova

Here Comes the Sun - Nina Simone

Somewhere Over the Rainbow & What a Wonderful World - Israel Kamakawiwo'Ole

Tears in Heaven - Eric Clapton

We'll Meet Again - Johnny Cash

Don't Stop Me Now - Queen

Drive - Incubus

Closer to You - Brandi Carlisle

You Will be My Ain True Love - Allison Krauss & Sting

Pithy Quotes

A writing colleague, Luc Reid, has been collecting sayings from members of the Codex online writing community, and has chosen to post a few of mine, along with a nice bio and links to my websites.

Thanks, Luc!

Read about it here.

If I Didn't Have to Be Perfect

If I didn't have to be perfect, I might consider killing my darlings. Yes, this is a photograph of a statue of Medea. No, I don't mean I'd kill my actual human children. I mean the brain children I've been hauling around ever since I was 10; I'd maybe kill them. The best I've been able to do is to banish them to the basement. They're in a plastic tub marked "L's Dresser," because the tub was inherited from someone who didn't need them any more, twice removed, I think. Notebooks, that's what's in the tub. Notebooks and binders full of stories I wrote when I was 10. I remember letting a friend's older sister read the first page of a story once; I'd painstakingly typed a story out and put it in one of those folders for reports, the ones where you thread the bendy aluminum bunny ears through the holes in the paper and then splay the bunny ears to hold the paper in. She was so amazed by the first page, she read it out loud, and praised it. I can't help thinking she did me no favors, however well intentioned.

As a child, I was often praised for being smart, smarter than most other kids, and although that was done out of love, I'm not sure that was a favor either. When my writing was praised, I think I got addicted, and the stories became my children, which I'd die before abandoning. I wrote a lot from the age of 10 to about the age of 17, when I went into the Army. The Army killed my creativity, and I didn't get it back again until I was in my early 20's. Somehow, I was able to ignore the screaming of the old stories in the box, and write something new. Only a few stories in, I sent a story to Writers of the Future and won an award. I'm sure that this did me no favors. Looking back, I wish I'd labored for years before publishing a story, but I didn't. I wrote a few stories and then I won an award (second place that quarter), and they flew me from Massachusetts to Hollywood, and drove me around in a limousine, and let me shake John Travolta's hand on the roof of the Celebrity Center, where the Scientologists gave us a barbecue, with the cooks in chef's hats against the palm tree skyline of Hollywood. No favors. I also met my childhood idol, Anne McCaffrey, on that trip. Hers was the first SF novel I'd ever read, and I loved it so much, I started typing it out by hand, using a dime-feed typewriter at the library. The trip to Hollywood did me no favors.

There's a reason I don't have a large bibliography, and there's a reason none of my books are in the library. It's because with each story I published, the slower and more meticulously I wrote the next one. When I wrote a new story, I felt in my bones that I had to sell it. All the professional writers I knew said this was a stupid idea, and I nodded, but down in my heart, I refused to give up on a story. I'd rewrite a story every time I sent it out, and if I didn't sell it, I'd keep it in a vault on my computer and caress it with sickening obsession. "I'll write it again," I'd say to myself. "I'll write it until I place it. But I won't give up on it." There is a very real condition called obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I have it. I have an obsession: to sell every single story I write. Never mind that I've actually written hundreds of drafts of very few stories, and many of them became new stories during revision. My obsession said that, provided the story had the same title, and the same essential story seed, it was the same story, and come what may, I would publish every damn thing I wrote. Eventually, this perfectionism became paralysis, and I stopped writing. Ever since I was ten, I dreamed of becoming a novelist, but I have never finished writing a novel. The novels I wrote when I was fourteen went unfinished. I'd just write THE END at some arbitrary chapter, and then start on the sequel, and I never finished a "series" this way.

The reason I love the picture of the guy playing chess is because he's obsessed. He sits in Harvard Square and plays chess, gnawing a cigar, with a squirt gun on the table. I'm not sure what offense merits a shot from the squirt gun; maybe he squirts his opponent if he wins. I doubt he ever loses. The younger players stand in line to play with him. Some scribble in notebooks while they wait. I wanted to write novels like this guy plays chess, and turn out some intricate, ludicrously layered thing that critics and academics would pee themselves to write essays about. The kind of novel that could be taught in college classes. Yes, I am that narcissistic and self-destructive. I'm not kidding you. It's embarrassing, but there it is. If I didn't have to be perfect, I might have written several novels by now. I may even have gotten one published, if the novel were decent and I got lucky enough for all the publishing tumblers to have fallen into place (there is no guarantee). If I didn't have to be perfect, I'd probably be writing fiction right now.

I've included the photographs in this post, because I took most of them (the squirrel photograph was taken by my companion at the time, back in 2003. I don't have to be good at photography, so I take a lot of pictures. There are 7,500 pictures currently in my Aperture library, and at least a few of them are probably good enough to frame and hang. I'm a big fan of postcards, and I think some of my photos could probably be on postcards; I can't say. I've never tried to sell a photograph. I don't have to be good at photography, and I don't have to be good at blogging, so I can just take pictures, and write about them without breaking a sweat. This stuff I write isn't perfect; it's often riddled with typographical errors, and sometimes the writing just isn't very good. Because I don't have to be perfect at it, I blog often. I like doing it. It's fun. Writing fiction has stopped being fun. Writing poetry has stopped being fun. Because, you know. I have to be perfect at it. It's been my dream since I was 10, and because I had a pretty good start, with the limousines and everything, I had better be perfect at it. Because, you know, the work has to be worth the sacrifices. It has to be so good you're willing to starve to do it. I've heard people tell me this. You have to romanticize it, and be willing to starve.

Somehow, though, I don't have to be willing to starve to take a picture of a squirrel. I can just go to a park and wander around until I see a squirrel, and then take a picture of it while it's on a tree trunk, looking ridiculous. Taking photographs of squirrels is expectation-free. Nobody gave me a lift in a limo because of a picture of a woodland creature. Nobody has written me a letter to let me know how much the picture of the squirrel meant to them when they were deployed overseas, that the picture explained to him what his wife was going through when he was gone, and she was left behind, left alone. People mostly just say, "Heh. Cute squirrel," and the pressure's off. Nobody feeds my ego over this squirrel picture (and if you do, I'll hunt you down; I really will).

This morning, I wrote longhand in my journal. "Now that I no longer need to be perfect, does that mean I don't have to write a novel any more, or that I can start?" The person I asked about this, this morning, suggested it might be one or the other, neither, or both. When I was talking to my daughter last night about her fall schedule (first semester of college), I found myself encouraging her about calculus. I'm not very good at math, so I had to study a lot to be good at calculus. I wanted to tell her that calculus was hard for me, and that if she found it hard for her, I hoped she wouldn't get down on herself about it. She hadn't been given the math gene from anybody, but still I wanted her to know that being good at calculus could be a choice for her. It might be scary, but she could do it. People with good brains and determination can do a lot of things. They can do calculus, learn Latin, take pictures of squirrels, write prize-winning stories, but they can also lose their minds, and become paralyzed, and stop being able to do much at all. They're still smart, but they're paralyzed, and so being smart doesn't matter any more. The smart brain can turn on itself and cannibalize its creativity, and turn it to harmful purposes. A good brain can do a lot of things.

If I didn't have to be perfect, what would I do? I would throw away the tuna I bought on Monday, because it spoiled before I could cook it, and I'd say, "Oh well. Next time I'll only buy fish if I plan to cook it the same day." Then I'd cook a dinner of snap peas and snow peas instead, and a pot of soup made from my Silverbrook Farms organic farm share vegetables. Cabbage, and ramps, and chard, with a bit of Virginia ham thrown in. I don't have to be perfect when I cook. I just have to be good enough, and even when I'm not and I have to throw an experiment out, I just eat something else. I don't get paralyzed in the kitchen, feeling undeserving of the Wusthof knife I got for Christmas. If I didn't have to be perfect, I'd run out in the rain and buy clay, and an expensive set of clay tools, and sculpt a flower and a frog with a seven-year-old, and bake it in the oven. I wouldn't be sad when the "eraser clay" didn't actually erase anything. I'd give both things I made away, and think about what I wanted to make next time. I did that yesterday. I didn't have to be perfect at any of those things, and I had a ball.

I've been encouraged to take some of these blog posts and make them into magazine articles and sell them. I couldn't write anything for a couple of days after that. Oh, these posts are salable? That means they need to be perfect. Oopse, there go all of my ideas. There goes my fluency. Make sure the themes are deep, and the composition is right, and that you comb through obsessively for typographical errors. Better go back through old posts and edit them, because you never know when someone might happen across this blog and say, Wow! This should be turned into a book of some sort. Fie, fie. A pox on that noise. I'm writing. Leave me alone. Let me do this in peace. If I have to sell it, I'm doomed. I might as well hang up my blogger hat, and go into a coma in front of the television instead of working. In order to work, I have to fool myself. I have to use one side of my good brain to fool the other side. Good thing it's a sick brain; it's good at fooling itself, and I've somehow figured out how to work despite the paralysis.

There's a certain lack of perfection in the angles in this photo, curves and planes, and I don't know anything about photography, so I don't even know if it's good. Trinity Church seems a little skewed, and the Hancock Tower skewed too, but I like it that way, not knowing if it's a good photo. Never mind the weird ass angles, I like the cloud in the window glass. I don't know if this is a good picture, and I'm so happy with it.

I think if I didn't have to be perfect, I'd probably sleep like my dog does, with tummy-up, paw-twitching abandon. I'd work like a demon, guzzling the ideas flowing in from the spirit world. I'd spend more time at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in my paisley pants and my hat with the bumblebees on it. The hat is reversible, shapeless, unflattering.



I love that hat.

The Power of Models

Hello, my name is Joy, and I'm not a fashion model. This photo was shot by someone who loves me. You can tell, can't you? The photographer waited for me to look my best, waited for the "right" angle, because I actually do have a good side. I'm not one of those people who look their best in every photo or even most photos. In most photos, I look awkward. In this photo, I don't.

I am a model in a lot of other ways. All mothers are models, whether they want to be or not. Every manager is a model. Every spouse is a model. Every friend is a model. I'm not talking about fashion models any more, of course. I'm talking about life models. I'm reading a new book, this one called The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model by Patrick Hoverstadt. I've been reading a lot of books on philosophy and self-help and psychology because I've been going through a lot this year, personally. I've been going nuts trying to create a sustainable organization in my house, pouring all of my creativity and energy into doing that, and along the way forgot how to nurture myself. Believe it or not, reading business leadership and organizational theory feeds my spirit as much as a trip to Mystic Seaport, which is where that photo of me was taken. A few months ago, I looked at the mess I had made of myself trying to "fix" my family, and I fell down the rabbit hole. I fell down, and I had a hard time getting back up again. I lost my faith and my focus and myself.

I knew I was a model for my family, and I tried to be a good one. I've also been a manager for a year and half, and I've learned a lot about modeling doing that. At home, I'm a mess at modeling the way I do at work, because although I thought the process was pretty much the same and I thought I was adapting and choosing my mental models as flexibly as I did at work, I wasn't. At work, I consider all of the data objectively, and I (relatively) patiently allow the most appropriate mental modeling to work for positive change. Here's a passage from the book I'm reading, which describes how our mental models influence the world better than I can:

The idea that the mental model you use affects the way you see the world is itself quite radical for some people, obvious to others. The idea that these models do not just affect the way you see the world, but also affect the way the world sees you and thereby affect the way the world interacts with you and in very practical ways effectively change that bit of the world you live in, is more radical and is quite scary to many. The obvious conclusion that you have real choices about this is for many deeply scary and for others deeply liberating. Scary because it means that you have real responsibility for the way you choose to view and interact with the world and that this will have consequences for the way the world interacts with you. Liberating because you have the power to change the way that the bit of the world to which you are directly coupled works, simply by selecting, testing, and using different mental models.

I won't claim omniscience, but I'm an INFJ. I'm one those people who instinctively understands systems thinking, big-picture thinking, and cascading consequences. Some call the INFJ, "the protector," and I have strong P tendencies as well in some areas of life, and some call the INFP "the idealist." Add perfectionism, and OCD, and anxiety, and codependence, and you have someone who runs after people telling them how they're messing up your perfect system, and if they would only CHANGE, the home machine would function, dammit! Can I enumerate all of the ways in which this is wrong thinking? I don't have time. You don't have time. Let's just say, "Oopse," and move on. Yes, the mental models you use are important, at work or at home. Recently, I've been trying on mental models for my entire life, like hats. Maybe I'll be a fiction writer, a poet, a college professor of some sort, a journalist (food writer, travel writer), a graphic designer, a photographer, an interior designer, a philosopher, a psychologist. Maybe I'll quit everything and be a professional lunatic. Maybe I'll quit everything and be a Buddhist anchorite nun. (Is there any such thing?) One of my many brain rainbows was about getting a master's degree in organizational psychology, and becoming a business consultant. I could write, travel, teach and/or lecture, and do what I do best, which is to analyze complex people-related puzzles and streamline processes for large organizations. I was so excited about this idea that I was literally jumping up and down and screaming with joy. I wanted to create the Grand Unified Theory of Organizational Everything, marrying integral leadership and fractal organization theories with Buddhist philosophy. I wanted to spread the good news that it's possible to have a completely integrated life, and even be happy and fulfilled at work! Then I got scared, and resumed obsessing about fiction writing. I would only be a successful person if I wrote a novel or used my creativity to make art for a living, so I slid back into depression, and resumed whacking my family with the only mental model I had for doing that. I took my problem and made it their problem. Well.

Do you control your mental models, or, do your mental models control you? If you are not aware that you have a choice of how to look at a situation or problem, if you are not conscious of the decision you have taken to use any particular model to understand that bit of the world, then you are using whatever happens to be your default model for situations of that type. The model is running you. If you are aware that you have a conscious choice, and you can weigh up what the benefits of the different models available are, then chances are that you are running the models, and not the other way around. But to be able to choose, you have to have a choice - if you only have one model of organization then, to all intents and purposes, you have no choice. That is the one you will use whenever you think about an organization.

As they say in Cyberland - *headdesk*. I struggled for a while at work to maintain my integrity in the face of great pressure to conform to other people's mental models of how work "should" be done, and what "couldn't be done." This month, I will be finishing up a project that my boss and the change management people of my division said couldn't be done. Somehow, I was able to select the appropriate mental model and implement it at work, though goodness knows I cried a lot getting used to how it felt to work that way, having the courage of my convictions every day, and every day questioning and adapting them to the environment, without feeling as if I were selling myself out. Then I went home, where I only had one mental model and I made myself and everyone else utterly miserable trying to implement it. This "should" work, I said, "Because I want it to." As someone close to me knows, that's a damn fool thing to say, but sometimes really smart people say it, because they have no other mental model to choose from. It's not that they're stupid. They aren't. They just don't know all of their choices.

For a long time, I have been able to see my choices clearly at work. I can witness my own human mess without allowing it to influence my decision-making. I let the demons yawp, yawp, yawp, and then I work the appropriate mental model. At home, I just run around, going yawp, yawp, yawp, and hammer at my one mental model like a mental patient, thinking that if I just do the same thing long enough, things will eventually go my way. Yawp, yawp, yawp.

There's a little gray box in this chapter of the book, titled: Pathological Archetypes:

1. The Fantasist. Confronted by a problem, an individual can act on intuition. Generally though, the members of a management team don't have the same intuition and even if they did, admitting to one another that they don't have a clue what is really happening is not always acceptable. Faced with a problem, they build models of reality to make sense of the world and to justify the actions they want to take. The archetype of the Fantasist happens when managers don't bother to check their mental models against reality, don't collect the necessary research, or deny the evidence that they do have available. Fantasist managers have not learnt Crow's Law: "Don't believe what you want to believe until you know what you need to know."

Oh great! I know what I need to know at work! I'm doing okay at work! (I know this, because I don't hide under my desk and cry at work. I mostly just type on the computer and play with Visio.) But how on earth am I supposed to know what I need to know at home? Aargh! Monstro, hate! Monstro smash! Honestly, I have no answers to the home question. I've never had an answer that worked for the long term, a way of flexible relating that was sustainable at home. I'm far, far too attached to certain outcomes. People grow and change, and it's hard enough to keep up with it at work, where I'm not attached to my co-workers beyond a healthy professional interest. Very few of the demons that run around in my head make mischief at work. Somehow they've learned that a woman's gotta eat, and she's gotta feed her kids. But once I get home and put on my sweatpants, the demons change their tune. They have not learned that a woman's gotta rest sometimes, and garden, and paint, and wallpaper, and write, and take pictures, and play with clay, and have more than one mental model for success: pay off debts, write fiction for a living. (Without a novel, my demons say, you are nothing. You will die, alone, in a cold room, and be eaten by Alsatians.) This is my mental model at home, and it stinks. The Beast that drives my writing life is the King Chief Grand Poobah of all Fantasists. I don't know if this nightmare demon is guarding my heart, or cutting my hamstrings, most days. More and more I'm suspecting the latter.

At work, I run the mental models. At home, the mental models have been running me.

Monstro smash.

Sweet Apples

This is an angry post, because sometimes I get angry. It's also a hopeful post, because I'm learning how to be hopeful.

There's a colorful metaphor that describes having good boundaries when invited into a codependent conflict: "When someone hands you a crap sandwich, you don't have to eat it." I like to pretend this is a "family-friendly" blog, though, so I'm going to use the Snow White metaphor instead. "When someone hands you a rotten apple, you don't have to eat it."

Here's how it works. Someone you know and love calls you up on the phone and starts to verbally abuse you because you forgot their birthday, and you didn't send them a card. This is their rotten apple, not yours. They had it in their hand when they picked up the phone. It's possible someone else handed it to them when they were little, maybe forced it into their pudgy hands one Mother's or Father's Day, with some "innocent" little "teaching" comment where they were "just kidding," but something conflicted and confused inside them meant to deliver a wound little pudgy-hands would never forget. "If you love someone, you get them a card on Mother's or Father's day. And if you can't afford a card, you make a card. And if you don't have paper, you call them on the phone, even if you don't have a phone. You borrow a friend's phone. If you let this occasion go unmarked, it means you don't really love them. So you have to. Because if you don't, it means you don't love them, and if you don't love them, you're evil. Because if you don't love your mother or father, you're evil. And that's the truth." Wow! What a thing to teach a little tender person with pudgy hands! Maybe that person who has called you on the phone has been carrying this poisoned apple around their whole lives, but they think it's loving to pass it on to someone. After all, what if that other person doesn't know how to be a truly loving person? What if you're the only person on earth who could teach them to be a loving person. Wouldn't it be non-loving for you not to pass over the apple? Wouldn't that make you evil, if you knew about this whole card=love thing, and you never passed on that knowledge whenever needed? If you just go through life letting someone be unloving without teaching them what's right? Wow, that's borderline abusive right there! If you let that go, if you don't teach that love, then they're evil, and you're evil too!. And thus the poisoned apple gets handed over, sometimes out of love, because the giver mistakes a rotten apple for love.

One of the hardest parts of life is to know the difference between love and rotten apples. It's hard to see that some of your apples are rotten, and then when you do figure it out, it's STILL hard not to hand them out. There's a compulsion to hand them out, even after you see that they're rotten. It's as if they are controlled by some apple-flinging monster inside you, and you just stand there inside yourself, yelling "Nooooooo!" and hoping the recipient does bullet time, and dodges, but as soon as the apple hits, you have to take responsibility for it, and make the best of it. A transformation happens, some weird reality warp that throws an illusion over the whole transaction. Now you've done it. You handed over the apple. Now you have some choices: 1) Pretend the apple isn't rotten; in fact, fight to the death to prove it's a perfectly okay apple; 2) Insist that rotten apples won't kill you; eat an entire bushel of rotten apples right in front of the recipient to prove that they're just being a big baby by refusing to eat it. If they cared about you, they'd eat the damned apple to rescue you from the mistake of handing it over in the first place; 3) Blame the other person for taking the apple. Yeah, well I handed it to you; you're sure a stupid idiot for eating it; nobody in their right mind would eat that apple. Stupid-head. 4) Attack the other person for eating the apple. If you love me, you'd know I tend to hand out these apples, and you'd refuse to eat them. Not only that, you'd do it with compassion, because my wounds are great and therefore you are obliged to save me from myself. I'm bad, and it's your responsibility to love me anyway. If you don't fix this for me, you don't really love me, and if you don't love me, you're evil (but really, what I'm saying is that I don't deserve your love, and I want you to prove to me that I do.)

That last part is truly diabolical. I would love to be a person who can look at a rotten apple being handed to me, and just love that person with my whole heart. I would love see that apple, see its rot, and its worms, and see the twisted heart that's offering it, and somehow say no thank you to the apple, and yes to the heart. This is what compassionate people do. I did this with my daughter. I took the apple, saw that it was rotten, and just refused to eat it, no matter how much she kicked and screamed. Where I failed my own standard of perfection is that I kicked and screamed too. How DARE you try to hand me that apple. If you're handing me that apple, you CLEARLY don't love me. Oh my god, did I do that often? No, not too often. As a mother, I have my crap togather more often than not, but there were some times, oh yes, when I didn't just politely and neutrally refuse the apple, but I put that rotten bad boy into a slingshot and sent it flying into the face of the giver. Gonna give me that? I'll show you. Wa-BAM! I'm not proud of that. I'm humbled and grateful to have enough self worth to go back to her later and say, "I'm sorry. That was a rotten apple you handed over, but I'm the one who ate it. When someone hands you a rotten apple, you don't have to eat it, and you don't have to shove it back down someone else's throat to make sure they never do it again. You can just say no thanks, and I'm going to try to do that next time." I could say that to her more often than not, even if it was sometimes months or years later. With friends and, worse, with partners, it's much harder. Not twice as hard. A thousand times as hard. I'm much more afraid of failing as a partner than failing as a parent. Right now, I'm an apple flinger, and an apple eater. I hand them out, and when they're handed to me, I eat them more often than not.

I'm in the "conscious incompetance" stage of rotten apple dealing. I see them flying everywhere, and I have not learned the Kung fu that allows me to move through them with flexibility and grace. I'm not a Kung fu master; I am but a newly hatched ogre with a club. "I see rotten apple! Monstro smash! No apple! Apple bad! I show you not to throw apple at Monstro! Raaahhhh!" The shame of this is almost unbearable. I imagine gliding through the hail of rotten apples with a serene Quan Yin smile on my face with nary a smear of apple on my silken hem, and I feel sick. I want enlightenment! I want inner peace, and I want it RIGHT NOW!!! 99% percent of the battle is just SEEING the stupid apples, right? Once you see them, they're easy to deal with, right? Right? Wrong. Oh, so wrong.

We've been prepared, some of us, since birth, to screw up with the rotten apples. Sometimes, it's in our DNA to screw up with the rotten apples. Sometimes it's in our childhood. We were taught all kinds of things. We were punished so often for mentioning the rot, we were first convinced it was a bad to ever point it out, and then we were convinced not to believe our own eyes, and worst of all, we were taught not to see at all. Rot? There is no rot. This is how children are taught to distrust and hate themselves. They are taught simultaneously that there is no rot, and if you mention the rot that does not exist, you're evil. If you believe you see the rot, you're evil. If you see the rot at all, you're evil. And you can't unsee what you see, and so there is no avoiding the unavoidable fact that you're just plain evil. Yearning and striving and reaching for love of self and love from others, some will do anything. They'll believe anything. They'll let people hold their toes to the fire, and they'll just keep insisting they don't see a thing. They'll accept any kind of treatment in order to avoid the ultimate judgment of abandonment. They'll pack things down inside until they don't even see they're dying when they look in the mirror. It's just a migraine. It's natural pattern balding. Bodies just give out sometimes. Everybody gets depressed and can't sleep sometimes. If I mention that rotten apple, well, that means I'm evil, so I'd best not see that either. I've been saying "they," but what I mean is "we." These are my people, the people who speak to themselves this way.

I guess some people move through their entire lives like that, pretending to be Kung fu masters, but really sitting with an apple barrel over their heads and pretending it's a hat. Some people die like that, and think they're happy the whole time. And who am I to chase after them, screaming about rotten apples? Well, I'm that person who's afraid not to chase after people screaming about rotten apples. I'm that person who thinks it's her job to educate the world about rotten apples, because I'm afraid if I don't eradicate every last one, I'll keep getting hit with them. How misguided is that? I'm going to lob all these rotten apples into the world hoping to eradicate them. Wow, brilliant! It's a process, learning the esoteric art of declining to throw or eat rotten apples, and I've been all up and down the progress chart. Sometimes, I do pretty good Kung fu. I'm a black belt at work, and maybe a reddish blue in parenting (purple belt?) But at home, I fluctuate up and down the scale and sometimes, humiliated, I find myself busted back to white belt. On the once-in-a-blue-moon instance when I completely lose my shit and I hurl a hairbrush across the room, I take off my uniform altogether and scrub floors until I can get the beginner's white belt back.

First, you must learn to recognize the rotten apple for what it is. You can learn this by reading books, by having relationships, by going to therapy, by going to church and asking questions. Spending time with a lot of people, especially all at one time, reveals the rotten apples people hand to one another. If it's just you and one other person, it's easier for you both to pretend the apples aren't really rotten, and help each other avoid learning to see them. Folie a deux. It's harder to fool a group, though. Someone, at some point, will say, "Wow, look, it's a rotten apple!" and then it gets much harder not to see the rot. Once you see the rot, you have choices. You can decide that the rot is too pervasive, and throw out the whole barrel, give up apples completely. You can decide that you'll look carefully in the barrel, and only eat the ones you're sure are good, and keep your careful distance from people who sometimes hand you rotten apples. Or you can invite someone to talk apple talk with you. You can say, "I have this apple problem. I've been lobbing these rotten apples at you, and I'd like to stop. And I have this feeling some have been coming my way too, whether or not you mean to throw them, and I'm going to stop eating them. And I'm nervous about having to tell you this, but I need a commitment from you that if you hand me one, and it's rotten, that you'll take responsibility for handing it to me, even if I've already refused to eat it. Or I won't want to take any apples from you any more."

This conversation is particularly difficult to have with someone if your relationship has a long-standing habit of rotten apple exchange. Once the apples have been flying around, it's hard to believe that the other person will stop handing them to you, even if they pinky swear that they've stopped, honest, and they'll never do it again. Before you can get to a place of truce, you have to own those old rotten apples, and show that you know what a rotten apple looks like, and that you're willing to own it when you eat one, or throw one. An apple truce needs to be voluntary. You can't go chasing after somebody waving an apple and screaming that they threw it at you, and they have to apologize immediately, because it's likely all you'll get in return is more rotten apples. All you can do is apologize for throwing/eating yours, and hope for the best, and make a commitment to yourself to make amends for all the rotten apples you've exchanged over the years. For a truce to work when you've been handed a wagon full of rotten apples, you and the other person need to be willing to really forgive and respect each other. You must be willing to promise that nothing will be held back in the truce. "Okay, you threw one, and then I threw one, and I'm going to pretend I forgive you, and I'm going to pretend to accept your apology, but secretly I will still think it's your fault for throwing one first, or throwing one back" - this doesn't work. It's just another rotten apple in the barrel. Even if rotten apples look shiny and fresh, they stink. Some people have better noses than others, and some smell rotten apples everywhere because of old traumas, and some will keep handing them out long past the time when they know how hurtful it is, because they're addicted to handing them out. Relating with both of these types of people is extra hard. I'm one of the first kind. I smell rotten apples everywhere, even the ones that aren't there, or ones that were thrown long, long ago. Hand me one bruised apple, and I'll suspect every fruit thereafter to be rotten to the core, even if you never hand me an apple ever again. I am Monstro, argh! And that seems terrible, but it's not. I've come to accept that it's better to live and be Monstro, argh! than to die with an apple barrel over my head.

You have a choice, including the choice to pick your friends AND pick your family. If anyone tells you that you can't pick your family, they're just handing you another rotten apple.

You have another choice: you can hand out sweet apples, like the ones pictured in this post. The apples of compassion and love (tart Granny Smith notwithstanding). Like me, you can settle for offering a mixed barrel, some rotten (because they're in there, and I'm compelled to hand them out here and there despite my best intentions; nobody's perfect) but you can make sure some are fresh and sweet and real. Any time you choose to, you can, mindfully and without expectation of return, give out Pink Ladies and McIntoshes, Red Delicious and Yellow Delicious, Galas and Fujis, Cortlands and Braeburns, Honeycrisps and Pacific Roses. The most remarkable apple I've ever eaten was a bioengineered apple that tasted of Concord grapes. Technically, that's a Grapple (Gray-pul), but it's my party, and I can do what I want.

The Unexpected Diner Experience

When I first moved to Massachusetts, there were several things I missed about California. The produce was not an uniformly fresh, and menus were unreliable, even at very fine restaurants. You need to know what to order, here in Massachusetts, because the quality of the specials often has no overall bearing on the quality of the rest of the menu. One of the meals that I had a hard time with was breakfast. At first, I was charmed by the little railroad car diners. I liked the atmosphere enough not to be too worried about the quality of the food. Canned corned beef hash? Canned beans on toast? No biggie. Try to order beans on toast in California. It was "foreign food." Soon, though, the novelty wore off, and a diner was a just a place that charged you triple to open a can of something and dump it on your plate. I have a can opener at home, and I don't mind the washing up.

It took a while of shopping, and eating uninspired breakfasts, before I found Red's Sandwich Shop. An unassuming little place that looks like nothing much, Red's often has a line that tumbles out onto the sidewalk on Saturday and Sunday mornings. They have a dinner menu, but they don't serve dinner, so if you order dinner, you have to eat it for lunch. The menu is diverse and everything is pretty good. They have a breakfast/lunch counter near the grill, and Sunday breakfast is a great time to watch the line cooks do their jobs. It's the same guys doing the same jobs, Sunday after Sunday. There's the guy whose job it is to create thin sheets of egg the size of a king pillowcase, which another cook decorates with omelet fillings. Once the fillings are placed, the guy cuts the omelets out with his spatula and rolls each onto a plate. I've seen him do six at a time. There's a really tall guy who does the pancakes, which are like my uncle's: one pancake as big as a dinner plate is enough to feed two people. He drops chocolate chips or fresh blueberries on the bubbly side before flipping, then checks the done-ness with a fork before flipping onto a plate and garnishing with whipped cream and more of whatever went into the pancake. There's a guy whose job it is to do the meat and vegetables, with his pressing irons keeping maximum pressure on the sausages or the hash. The hash is made in the shop and it's the most unbelievably wonderful hash in the world. Just enough onion, just enough potato, savory shredded corned beef. Amazing. There's a guy who poaches eggs for whatever-Benedict (they have four kinds) by plopping eggs into perfectly swirling boiling water to create little poached egg packages without losing any of the white. I eat steak tips there, which are perfectly marinated in something savory before spending time under the iron on the grill. The shop is a little nothing of a place and people love it. The walls are covered with awards, Best of this and Best of that.

Red's doesn't call itself a diner, but it's a diner. It has the whole diner atmosphere and diner vibe. If you sit at the counter, chances are someone will talk to you about whatever's in the morning paper, or will at least smile at you when they ask for the sugar. It's a diner, and it's a good, homely diner with comfortable food.

I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I visited the Art Cliff Diner on Martha's Vineyard in Vineyard Haven. My companion was excited because it was a Zagat-rated diner. How many diners, he wondered, are Zagat rated? This diner must be special. It didn't look like much, the diner. Just a little cape-style building with bad parking, and cars piled atop one another as if they were selling sips from the fountain of youth. I thought of Red's Sandwich Shop, and I thought, yeah, okay. It'll be a pretty good little diner, and there will be awards on the walls, Best of this, and Best of that. I wasn't prepared for the menu. I wish I had made note of all the things they offered, but I'm going to have to do my best with what I remember. My companion had a ham and gruyere crepe with a mesclun green salad, and enjoyed it very much. My entree was the duck confit salad, and it was the best meal I had in all four days of being on the Vineyard. A confit is made from first salt curing the duck, and then poaching it in its own fat (yum!). It was a little bit sweet, but beautifully balanced by the mint, cilantro, avocado, mesclun, red onion, and the lemon thyme dressing. I feel sure I'm leaving out an ingredient, but each bite had a surprise in it, and it was a fresh and delightful final meal on the island. The atmosphere in the restaurant was exactly what one would expect from a diner except for the special boards, which detailed dishes with goat cheese, duck confit, brie, and artichoke, and lovely breakfast specials with poached eggs and dill, and fresh berries. I wish I'd taken a photo of the special boards, because I just don't think I'm doing the experience justice because the details are several weeks faded.

More recently, I went to a restaurant in the Seaport district in Boston set up very much like a diner. Seating was the familiar u-shape seating that you see in a lunch counter, except at Sportello, you might need to make reservations for a line of stools during the busy hours. This was my sister's recommendation; Sportello is one of her favorite restaurants to visit when in Boston, as it's around the corner from the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). She decided to deviate from her regular order (the tagliatelle) and had the strozzapreti, which was braised rabbit, picholine olives, and rosemary (perhaps with a pasta, but I didn't check). My companion had his usual order, which was the tagliatelle with bolognese sauce. It was a very nice bolognese, chunky and rich, and the pasta clearly fresh and tender. I ordered the pork osso buco with white beans, curious candied artichoke hearts, and a rich jus. This was not a cross-cut shank with the traditional bone-with-a-hole in the middle, but what seemed like a whole below-the-knee pork shank, roasted to falling apart perfection. Sometimes when I eat, I make little sexy moaning sounds, and I'm afraid I sounded a bit pornographic during my meal. It was that good. I will definitely go back again.

I didn't have dessert, but both of my dining companions did. The dessert on the left was a chocolate panna cotta with raspberry sauce, and the dessert on the right was a pavlova, which, for the uninitiated, was a sour cream custard served in a merengue with a strawberry rhubarb coulis. The pavlova won the ordering wars for dessert, and in my opinion, the osso buco was king of the entrees (because I don't eat pasta).




Speaking of the ICA, here is a picture of the media room, which was a lovely room projecting over the ocean, with a beautifully lit stairway and angled rail. In this shot, you can just barely see the heads of the people in my group, down by the expansive windows. Here is a photo of me and my sister, sitting down in that excellent room projecting over the ocean.

When I first approached the museum, I honestly didn't think it was visually interesting from the outside. But, Tardis-like, it seemed larger and more beautiful on the inside. It was a lovely evening. I had a great dinner at Sportello, and the evening culminated in some surprisingly lovely photographs inside the museum. The point of this post is that you can't always tell what kind of experience you're going to get by looking at the outside of things. You never know when you might see a menu that looks like every other diner menu, but it turns out that the food has a certain inexplicable something, whether it's freshness, or a unique seasoning or approach to a dish. You never know when the nondescript building has a fabulous interior, or when you'll fight through a crowd to eat in a restaurant that looks like everything should be greasy and poured from a can, but is full of fresh, surprising flavors, and ends up being the best meal you had all weekend.



Open yourself to surprises. Go to museums. Eat at diners. Bon appetite.

Feeding My Head

Today I realized how much I procrastinate on feeding my electronics properly.

I have a very nice android phone that takes pretty decent pictures. Several clicks and five minutes later, I have the shots imported to Aperture and deleted from the phone. From Aperture, I will sprinkle editorial goodness on them, and export them back to my desktop, mid-route to this blog. The photos will illustrate an adventure I had last week.

Last week, I also went to the library and picked up Allison Krauss's A Hundred Miles or More, which I have ripped to iTunes and uploaded to my iPod for appropriate appreciation. If I enjoy the album, I will purchase my very own copy, which I will then park in my collection to justify its continued presence on my iPod. I'm looking forward to listening, very much. My daughter just got back from the Bonnaroo Music Festival, and had good things to say about Allison Krauss's live performance (as well as the live performances of 12 or so other bands). I'm listening to the album as I write this post.

After a desperate but fruitful search for the appropriate cable, I've transferred 300+ photographs from my Nikon D40 into Aperture. I spent a little time de-skewing a few, but mostly just filed them into projects and left them there. I have the shots I want in order to illustrate my next food post, and I'm happy to let the rest sit there and wait for next time. I've done all of this with the assistance of my beautiful MacBook Pro, which I love. Truly, madly, deeply. I appreciate my phone, my iPod, my digital SLR, my laptop, and my Sony Reader. Most of you have Kindles, but I chose the Sony, and I'm pleased with it. I've read quite a few books downloaded from Project Gutenberg, and also have some ebooks from friends that I'm meaning to read soon.

I just backed up all of my data on an external hard drive (500G) and feel safe now, with all my photographs safe and sound in case of hard drive meltdown. It only remains for me to figure out how to back up my blog posts in some less labor intensive way than saving each post in a text file (ridiculous, I know, but I am still a novice). I'm aware, more than ever, of how much of my work depends on this tangle of cables, this small pile of devices that will all fit into one backpack. My entire music library, part of a book library, all of my photographs and stories, packed up in under than twenty pounds. A miracle, and something I'm consciously grateful for. It makes for nervous travel when I have all the devices in the one pack, but I feel powerful too, like I could create anything.

I procrastinate by leaving CDs lying around, unripped, un-transferred, and therefore unheard. My iPod docks in my clock radio, which I keep next to my bed. If I don't sometimes undock it and synch it with the laptop, I get no new music, and there is a near constant flow of new music coming into my house via my daughter. I procrastinate by leaving photos on my camera, and photos on my phone. Usually, I take food photos with my phone, because I'm not going to do anything with those photos but post them here to illustrate this meal, or that meal. The photos I take with my camera are those I may enlarge and frame, to hang in the gallery at home. Until recently, I had never enlarged one of my photos and had it professionally framed. The shot at the beginning of this post is my first professionally framed photo. I took it on Seventeen Mile Drive in Monterey in February of this year. This flower is called Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans).

Once in a while, all this stuff beckons to me and I have an evening like this one, where I take the time to hunt down all of the cables, listen to music, and get everything uploaded/downloaded/filed/organized, and it feels good. Once in a while I stop the procrastinating, and I take the time to feed my head with images and words. Not only have I gathered things together, but I've also browsed through old folders full of photos, and spent about thirty minutes exercising my Google fu to find the name of the purple flower pictured above. I want to know these things. I bring home treasures, and I want to organize them, and pin them to mounting boards, but I also want to know what they are. I want to know about this stuff, the species, the details, the names. Isn't that a lovely name for a flower? Pride of Madeira. I would never have known, if I hadn't stopped on the side of the road on the coast of California and carefully composed a shot of some random shrub. There is was, and now it's in my head, and framed on my wall, forever.

It's a kind of magic, really.

www.joymarchand.com

All or Nothing

Does she look like someone who says "all, or nothing?" How can you tell, one way or another? I can tell, because, of course, that's me on the bridge. That particular photo was taken in May of 2009, and believe me, I wasn't thinking "all, or nothing." I was thinking, "I want what I have."

I've flirted with "all or nothing" for a long time, though. I've advocated for figuring out what it is, this elusive "all", on this blog. I've said to myself: Focus. Dig down and distinguish dream from fantasy, separate the wheat from the chaff, and CREATE, damn you. Focus. Don't waste time! Get going right now! In order to focus enough to write, I have at various times cleared the deck of distractions. I've boxed up my art supplies, decimated my book collection, sold my guitar, crated up my needlework frames and threads. The only thing other than writing that I allowed myself was photography, so I have three cameras and assorted paraphernalia. But things creep in. I bought a house with a garden, and how I love that garden. I pulled a few weeds this very afternoon, and boy, does that feel good. I've learned to weed a little bit at a time, because otherwise I won't do it at all, and it will get overgrown. I've learned how to tend a garden little by little. It used to be I had to have everything done in one day, and then I was good for nothing else for a week afterward, because I'm not 19 any more, and I need to be gentler to myself.

Lately, I've been driving myself crazy trying to narrow things down even further. I need to specialize, I've been telling myself. I need to obsess, or I'll fail. I'll fail! I'm not a multi-tasker, so to get anything done, I need to simplify, throw out the old food in the refrigerator to get ready to cook a meal. I need to get the cobwebs out of the windows before I hang curtains in one room. I need to get the house furnished, and have that done with. I need to have the garden weeded and have that done with. I want to be a writer, and so I need to clear out the junk, and read, and I need to write. Everything else is superfluous, unless it feeds the writing. Focus, focus, focus. All, or nada! Get with the program! Only, that's not how it seems to work. The more I clear away, the emptier I feel, the more the page looms before me, terrifying, like a blank obelisk on the moon. You have given up everything for me, now it had better be worth it! Boo! it cries, and then I cry, and run off to bed to hide my head. Too much pressure. I don't feel like writing any more. It's too important. I gave up too much for it. The quality of what I create will never justify the sacrifices.

My goodness. Is this how I have painted myself into a corner?

That woman is still standing on the bridge, and has been standing there for quite some time, waiting for Prince Charming to give her a support system and a room of her own. Now, she has a whole apartment of her own (and pays for it herself, thanks) and an admirable support system. She has evenings and weekends with which to pursue any number of creative endeavors, and still she's frozen on the bridge. Cross? Or go back? If you read Searching for the Castle of White Marble, you may recognize this as a turning point, at which I stand thoughtfully, gazing at my own reflection in a Japanese garden pond. Sometimes, I think perhaps I'll be there forever, pondering my options. What does this mean? What do I do now? Where do I go? That woman has a full life, and still, she stands frozen on that bridge. It's been two years. You'd think she'd have worked it out by now, what she wants to do next.

Maybe she hasn't, and maybe she has. Maybe there isn't a bright light and a divine voice that whispers into her ear to tell her about her destiny. Maybe she has waited for the voice, and maybe it has never come, but maybe it has. Maybe it has come every single day from that moment, and she just hasn't listened. Or maybe she has, and her life looks like it did on that bridge, for real, every day. Or maybe it looks more like this.



Or perhaps this, frolicking on a castle drawbridge.



Or tea at the Russian Tea Room adjacent to Carnegie Hall.



Or horseback riding on the beach on Puerto Rico.



Or hanging out with Ken Scholes at World Fantasy.



Or hanging out with my dog, while a professional photographer just so happens to stroll by.



This is what has happened while I've been waiting to cross that bridge, while I've been dithering in my chiffon gown and my tiara of orchids. I've been playing the game of all or nothing. When will my life start? When will I have enough to time to write something meaningful? When will I succeed? When will I achieve? When will I win? When does it start?

Here is the receiver platform of the radio telescope at Arecibo.



Here is one side of the dish, which is currently the largest single dish in the world.



Sometimes, I think I couldn't find my ass even with this big a telescope.

Life has started. In the game of all of nothing, I've got it all. It's all around me, every day.

I have to pay attention. Or I'll miss it.

At Rest, With Ice Cream Fantasies

It's been taking some time to write the last few blog posts, several days for each one. This is unusual. The posts about food, or the garden, or my writing anxiety don't take more than a couple of hours if there are photographs, and around an hour, if there are no photographs. My brain is a bit empty today; it seems I poured too much out, and there's not enough starter left to make a new batch of thoughts. You know, like sourdough starter? Or Amish friendship bread. Some sort of yeast metaphor.

The bare facts: I've been working a bit too hard, and I done fell down. The last five books on the reading list were psychology and philosophy, and those ideas have been permeating all of my thoughts, and all of my writing. It's hard work, thinking those thoughts, and processing them through my own experience to glean the goodness from what I'm reading. I finished Thoughts Without a Thinker today, and when I closed the cover, I immediately picked up another Epstein book, called Psychology Without the Self and had to put it right back down again. There were words on the page, but I was suffering from two issues: 1) Epstein has clearly recycled some of his stuff, and so I was reading paragraphs that I'd already read in the last book (they'd been repurposed for the last book, I think; this book has that material broken into previously published essays, which I believe he put together into book form for Thoughts Without a Thinker); and 2) when I've read too many psychology books in a row, the words starts running around on the page, the letters forming something like "yadda yadda yadda!" That's when I know I need to take a break and read something else. Note to self: Office Kaizen was probably not the best, most restful book on the pile, genius.

I have a house full of books, a brain full of thoughts, a heart full of passion for learning, and I need to rest whatever parts of my brain process abstract concepts. I'm finding myself holding a book, and desperately wanting to read it, and instead fantasizing about the ice cream I had at Toscanini's today. Yes, you heard it. For some reason, I've been able to eat ice cream and not fall down on the floor in agonizing pain. I had a scoop of Moroccan Lemon, and a scoop of Burnt Caramel. Two different tastes and textures, and both marvelous. The ice cream made up for the very bad Chinese food I had in Central Square. (Please do not eat at Pu Pu Hot Pot on Mass Ave. If you value your taste buds, you will trust me, and just not go there. Please don't mock me for trying it; I'm so tired of all the usual places. Thank you.) So, I had wonderful ice cream this afternoon, and this is what I want to do right now; eat more ice cream. But there is no ice cream, and so I'll lie down and dream about ice cream instead.

This is all I can do. This is all I have left in me tonight. I can't read anything. I can't write anything but a reminiscence on ice cream (I can't even be bothered to add a link to Toscanini's), I can take my vitamins, and pray for a quick release into sleep. I do sometimes drool on my pillow. Oh, one thing I can mention: when I went in for my two scoops in a cup, the owner of the shop was sitting at that big table in front of the ice cream counter, talking to a bunch of college kids about making ice cream. That was sort of fun, eavesdropping about his trip to London, how everybody there eats Indian food as the day-to-day throwing back some chow food, and how he brought back either a recipe or an idea for a recipe for ice cream with Indian spices. Khulfee ice cream was the result, and I've had it. I remember spitting out a lot of cardamom splinters. He certainly sounded pleased with himself about that flavor, but I prefer the stuff without the pointy shards of cardamom shell. Last time I went, I had the salted caramel ice cream, which was the burnt caramel, but with salt in it. Follow the trends. Sell more ice cream. Good luck, Mister Ice Cream Guy.

Some of my other favorite flavors at Toscanini's: Aztec chocolate (dark, with chile), sour cream (yes, really), sweet cream, mango sorbet, strawberry sorbet, lemon sorbet, chocolate sorbet, chocolate pudding. Strangest flavors I've heard of: porter stout (yes, beer flavored ice cream), goat cheese brownie, saffron. Of those three, I have only tried the saffron, and it tasted like ... saffron and cream. Too bad I didn't try the lobster ice cream on Martha's Vineyard; instead I had a sugar free butter crunch which left me incapacitated on fake sugar for 24 hours. For those who don't know firsthand, maltitol, a common sugar substitute in sugar free chocolate, is evil, evil, evil.

Oh, the agony. Oh, the sacrifice.