Happy?

Lies I should have told, Lies I wanted to believe: A self realization guide about how to (unsuccessfully) unbury yourself.


A required warning to negate responsibilities .


This writing has no intention of saving or comforting anyone from their particular situation, if you are looking for that I may suggest the self help aisle at your local bookstore and if that doesn’t work perhaps an expensive trip to your local therapist. Either way, solutions are not provided here for the masses or anyone for that matter. Just remember as you navigate through, your guide (the author) is more lost than you are and the blind leading the blind will most likely end with all of us going off a cliff.


Yes, I am happy: People make this mistake constantly, it is always important to remember that when someone asks you: “Are you happy?” they are most likely invested in your answer. Answer appropriately, ie: “Yes, I am happy.” Do not try to over sell this answer; too much emphasis will either be misconstrued as overtly happy or insincere. It is better to stay in the neutral when you are massaging the ego and soothing the mind of your loved one. Oxford English Dictionary states that the definition of happy as a “feeling or showing pleasure or contentment, fortunate and convenient, or an inclined to use a specified thing excessively or at random.” The origin of happy comes from Middle English and was originally meant to mean a sense ‘lucky’ rather than how we perceive it today. Perhaps that is how the idea of lucky in love somehow began to equal happiness. I assure you, luck has nothing to do with love or happiness.


Let it be known, however, that not being happy is not a sign of failure, on the contrary it is a sign of success. Very few people who have been successful have also been happy; if you are miserable in your situation, just remember people with the same IQ of a cat are happier and have more money than you. (My apologies to cat enthusiasts for I know the previous comment was insulting to cats everywhere.) Are you comforted yet? Are you happy yet? If you are able to answer yes to either answer, please disregard the rest of this writing and move on with your undeserving bliss, this is clearly not for you.


To be continued throughout the month...

Regarding Dimples

My mother found a lump in my grandmother’s breast, and a dimple.  I always think of Shirley Temple when I hear the word dimple.  Cliché, nonetheless it is there amid images of  white picket fences and ringlets and crisp yellow daffodils.  I imagine that my grandmother’s dimple dances as she moves. 

My grandmother helped teach me to read. I rested against her breasts as she coaxed my voice to sound out the words of Dick and Jane calling “Run Spot, run.”  We always sat in the same chair, in her cool green living room, in the big farmhouse that I knew as well as my toes and the way they dipped in the ditch water to live, for a moment, with snails and leeches.

I regarded my breasts the other day, committed them to memory, noted the pendulous, dimplelessness of their sway, and cried.  

Melancholy

 

It is fitting that October would start out this way. I was hoping for a rainy day because I had enough of the half-warm, half-cool, humid days of September. I wanted sweaters and jeans and shoes -- but no socks until November. That's a rule.

I was always -- and assume will always be -- drawn to grayness and rain and the melancholy mood of fall. There is something comforting and cozy about feeling that first chill. But I think I used to fight it. Give me sunshine! Give me warmth! Give me bright colors! Give me summer!


Read the full essay on my blog

Spinning in the Light

In my first memory, I am in my bedroom, inside of a laundry basket, on top of someone’s head, and I am spinning. 

Just a foot below the ceiling, I’m seated on my diapered bottom, peering out between white plastic bars, and the room is revolving, the windows are whizzing by, the sunlight is strobing in my eyes. Both windows are alight with soft afternoon sun fractured through sheer-white curtains. The walls are pale or maybe a soft yellow. They don’t yet display the mural my mother and her best friend painted for me one day, likely while they were stoned: a colorful smear of acrylic paint depicting a cartoon rainbow set in a landscape of trees, flowers, bees, and butterflies spanning three walls. My tiny bed is tucked away in the corner, and fruit-sized toys are strewn across the floor. Between the windows is a child-sized dresser decoupaged with big-eyed children: Precious Moments. 

I’m giggling wildly, my chest heaving with half-panic-half-glee laughter, but I’m too small, too weak,to pull myself up, to get the attention of someone who might stop the chaotic spin. I assume it is Laurie who has me atop her head and is spinning me, even though I cannot see her face. It is Laurie in my memory because  I have no memories of my father’s face from my childhood.  He and my mother divorced divorced before I turned two. Laurie came into out lives shortly thereafter, and became my other mother, so it makes sense that she’s the one who has me in a laundry basket and is spinning me with her hands as fast as a basketball on her finger. Stopping the spinning is beyond my control. I still don’t have words to tell her I want to stop, and I’m not sure I would ask her if I could have because although I am terrified, I am also awestruck by the sheer speed of the spin. I am lightheaded, and the world is distorted in the spun-out afternoon light. 

In some versions of the memory, no one is in the room with Laurie and me. In another version of the same memory, my mother is sitting on the floor, leaned back, her long legs stretched out and folded over one another. She’s looking up at us, smiling, laughing at the scenario. She’s doesn’t seem to sense my desire to be freed from the wild ride.

The spinning, the light, the glee and fear and awe are overwhelming. 

I wonder when I’ll find my way back to the ground. 

I wonder if the spinning will ever stop.

Lying Tamers

Images transcend the glow from my screen and permeate my thought patterns, turning the usual mundane thoughts of view numbers and similar links to metaphors between the actuality of what I see before me and a certain social phenomena that has been making itself known to me...
Two lion tamers are being filmed in the middle of of a circus ring. The shot is obstructed only by the fence around the ring which makes the onlookers feel separated and safe from the danger that stalks around the ring in the shape of muscle, fur, and teeth. The tamers continually pop whips at these majestic creatures, scaring them into doing their bidding, running up and down steel balance beams and sitting on stools much to small for the creatures' hulking frame. All events being instigated by these ring leaders are clearly not in the best interest of the lions and they have absolutely no interest or desire to complete the requested tasks, they do them to avoid a potentially painful confrontation with those who have entitled themselves as the masters. The discomfort in the animals is easily detected and the longer this goes on, the closer to lashing out at the tamers some of the lions become. In an instant, one lion, confounded by the audacity of these frail creatures, makes what must be the lion tamer's worst nightmare, come true.
The lion lifts it's massive head to let out a preemptive snarl and proceeds to barrel over the tamer, cornering him, making haste to violate his physicality. The other tamer begins to pop her whip around the head of the offending lion, realizing the urgency of the synapsis. The beast has become the master of the moment.
I watched, partly horrified that these beautiful beasts are handled in such a manner and partly routing for the lions to take over entirely. The scenario twisted it's way into my subconsciousness and suddenly the lion tamers became police, blatantly utilizing over excessive force, an the lions became citizens.....who had quite simply had enough of being forced, by threat of caged violence, to do tasks which serve them no purpose.
The other lions see and feel the genuine frustration coming out of the attacking lion and begin to come up off the silly little stools themselves. Another tamer enters the ring and another circles outside the fence with a fire hose (all too familiar to anyone who has ever witnessed crowd control in a potential riot situation). The momentum is shifting swiftly and the viewers outside the cage even begin to make exits to avoid being victim to the very real mutiny occurring before them. The parallel between this happening and people watching police brutality videos from the safety of their couches is astounding and at that moment I realized that if we as a society ever want to change anything real, not necessarily just police brutality, we need to be much more like the lions and a whole lot less like the fearful onlookers.
Don't be afraid to lash out at the injustices being served to you and your fellow man. Barrel over those showing the audacity to infringe on your basic rights as a human. Encourage others to join you in your efforts to overtake the power where you see fit, and to exert your prowess where it is actually useful, not where you have been told is acceptable......
..in short; don't be gullible customers, be fed up lions. Be lions, my friends, be lions....

                                        http://youtu.be/CigYI3v_2Wo

Hippy, Redux

Years ago in graduate school, I drafted an essay I called “How I Got to be a Hippy.” It was all about my transition from mainstream, typical-American consumerism and a general disdain for “environmentalists”—ingrained in me by conservative family and friends who seemed to view them as pagan tree worshippers—to a label-reading, high-fructose-corn-syrup-shunning, recycled-toilet-paper-using co-op shopper.

Reading that last sentence now, I realize how much more complicated it obviously was, this evolution of my sensibilities, how impossible it is even to summarize. It did not occur to me at the time of my MFA nonfiction workshop, however, that in placing my husband Jordan in a pivotal role throughout the essay, I was sketching him as an organic-or-die czar, a dictator who spurned my makeup-wearing ways and molded me into the submissive hippy wife he desired. My classmates said, "If we didn't know Jordan, we'd think he was a total jerk."

No, that’s not exactly how it happened. So let’s try to put this back together another way. […]

Louie's Diner

I eat breakfast at Louie's Diner in Forest Park, Illinois.  On Tuesday, I meet my friend Stephen there.  Stephen and I were going to write a book together but that project never materialized. We became friends so we still meet for breakfast every week. On Friday, there are five guys who meet.  Most weeks all five of us are there.  Three of them are lawyers and one is a salesman.  We talk in more depth about our lives than you might expect.  On Wednesday mornings, I go to an early meeting at 6:30 am then I go to Louie's. Sometimes someone from the meeting comes with me but not always.  On Thursdays, I go to Louie's alone and read the Chicago Sun-Times.  On Saturdays, I sleep in and go to Louie's later.  It is crowded then and not the same experience as during the week.  I sit at the counter and eat quickly.

I have a cold today.  This morning Sue, one of the waitresses from Louie's, made me an elixir of lemon, tea, and honey.  

The things I like best in life are patterns, companionship, and warmth. And corned beef and hash.