Daft Idea

Yesterday I was informed that my single course has been reassigned.  I don't think this was due to being an inadequate teacher.  Times are tough and senior/full time staff have first dibs.  My course leader wants to keep me "active" in the sense that if courses are available this summer, he will hire me.

Still, I'm in a desperate situation, made more desperate after a very frank cards-on-the-table talk with my brother last night.  His advice, which is intensely sensible, is to find as high-paying a job as I can and stick it out for two years to pay off all debt and then resume my writing career.  This would include voiding the contract for my current book, the manuscript of which requires me to write three pages a day in order to turn it in by its due date of June 15th.  The first thing I would have to do is pay back the advance.

This is a problem.  I need that third book, Sex and the Pity, which will be more PG than R-rated, because Angry Fat Girls (soon to be released in paperback under the title Eating Ice Cream with My Dog) did not do well.  I must redeem myself as quickly as possible in the cut-throat world of publishing.  That's a reality I don't expect someone outside the business to understand.

And besides, what would I do?  My computer skills have always been limited and I'm afraid they are positively outdated at this point. 

So I began to consider my skills.

1. Pam Peeke recently wrote, "Your words are so amazing Frances.  I know no one who can capture feelings the way you do."  And I have to say I'd along with that insofar as I do a really good job of writing about feelings.
2. I'm a good writer in general.
3. I bake great cookies.
4. I speak Dog.
5. I can relapse like nobody's business.
6. I can lose weight.
7. I can hang on through nightmare depressions.
8. I have the ability and willingness to be an open book.
9. I'm a good teacher.
10. I'm a good editor, from line-editing (thanks to 20 years of teaching composition) to rearranging the parts of a book to finding the idea for a book in the first place.
11. I have a certain amount of wisdom, humor, intelligence, imagination, compassion, empathy.  I spin back what people tell me in ways that they appreciate and can use.
12. I buy nearly perfect gifts.
13. I have good taste in clothes.
14. I take good photos.
15. I'm a good researcher.
16. I've read a lot.

That's an incomplete but decent and random list of what I can do.

I placed a Craig's List ad this morning offering tutorial services.  I'm reopening shop as a writing coach, which I'm very good at.

I'll pick up more dog gigs.

I'll put up signs around the neighborhood for tutoring and dog-walking (on different tear sheets, of course).

But Pam's words and my balls-to-the-wind confessionals began circling in my head as I was dashed out to pick up dog food.

What if...

What if I attack relapse, weight loss, depression, job hunting, the writing process and the odd dog in a closed media.  What if I get abstinent and write about it in a way that will help readers feel what I have always wanted to say: you're not crazy and you're not the only one. 

I am not dogmatic about how anyone should lose weight unless it's clearly insane.  I understand as well as anyone that weight loss is not simple -- I have to combine it with all of the above and other women have yet more complications in their lives.

I have read a lot on the subject and know a number of experts.  I could interview people.

I could create a closed blog in which, with the newsletter subscription, readers can ask me questions, criticize my lack of exercise and gloomy outlook, request more attention paid to whatever topic or aspect they want, and talk to each other.

I would do this as an email newsletter -- daily? three times a week? -- by paid subscription.  If someone wants to receive the newsletter and can't pay, she can refer one? two? subscribers and receive a free subscription/password.

Hell, I'll even try to figure out a way to give readers 10% off either Ice Cream or Sex and the Pity.

So what do you think?  Really: is this a good idea?  If so, how often would readers want such a newsletter and how much should I charge?  Is there anything else missing from what I could write about that would be of use to people (women, really) trying to lose weight or lose weight again?

Please, please: respond!


I think it would be fun.

Don't. Push. Me.

5.30 a.m.

An email from someone I went kaboom over twenty years ago.  Yes, he says, he thinks we can be friends.

7 a.m.

A young man in a top coat hurries away from the deli with a bunch of white roses in tight bud under his arm.

7.15 a.m.

A heart shaped balloon bobs with each lurch of the train toward Borough Hall.

7.20 a.m.

A bouquet wrapped in a plastic bag full of water held like the torch of the Statue of Liberty as we pull into Wall Street.



8.05 a.m.

A Venezuelan student asks if I like chocolate.  His parents are visiting and brought a lot of chocolate with them.  If I could cry, I would.  I say no.

10.15 a.m.

An Italian greyhound keeps jumping on me as I pee and I finally shout, "Off!"  She whimpers and runs away.

This feels oddly satisfying.

10.30 a.m.

An email from someone I am still going kaboom over telling me that "Need You Now," a song we loathed loudly on a car trip, won a Grammy.  Per.  Fect.  "Our" song is about booty call.

11.15 a.m.

Daisy and I meet Boomer and his owner as we walk home from the dog run.  She reminds me it's Boomer's birthday.  Happy birthday, Boomer.

11.25 a.m.

Proflowers reports it has delivered the dozen red roses I ordered for my father's amour.  Tomorrow they will deliver another bouquet to his neighbor. 


12.30 p.m. 

I'm feeling more than a little sullen & short-tempered.  Do not tell me Valentine's Day is no big deal.  The world is skim milk-blue and blackened snow.  Big velvet boxes and big flowers are a powerful antidote to the feebleness of February.

12.38 pm.

I'm pouting and jealous and craving chocolate.

Why isn't St. Agatha's Day honored on February Fifth?  The timing is perfect and she's the patron saint of single women.  Aside from that little matter of also being the patron of rape victims, I think there is a need for a day celebrating all of us who are trying not to live in perpetual bitterness.  First of all, single people are there to listen to everyone's problems.  We are always free to do whatever.  We are at least four-to-one ahead on gift giving (shower, wedding, shower, baby).  Hallmark and the rest of the economy could use another holiday -- DVDs, books, pop corn poppers, bubble baths, half-bottles of champagne...there a lots of things single people need to pad out their singleosity.

St. Agatha's Day can be co-opted by new mothers, depressives and workaholics as well.  Her final prayer before dying of torture was, "...you have taken me from love of the world and given me patience to suffer".  Because her torturers twisted her breasts off, she is also the patron saint of breast cancer.  Your gifts to us could be tax exemptions!  In a neat irony in which her breasts are suggestive of other stuff, rather than other stuff being suggestive of titties, she patronizes bell makers (which could add a merry noontime carillon to delight everyone and pump up Ivy League ambitions) and bread makers.  I could live with a bouquet of croissants, a warm focaccia with some dry-cured olives and a half-bottle of chardonay, or a box of diplomats, along with a nice card ("with a bit of my heart forever," "You're in my speed dial, your wedding gift's on the mantle, you'll be mine until we redecorate").

Perhaps this will convince you: St Agatha protects against the outbreak of both fire and volcanoes. 

N-i-c-e.  Ignore me on February Fifth and I'll set your roses on fire.

The Human Race - Joining It

It's a slow road with switchbacks.

In too many ways I'm still doing damage control from the Descent that began in July.  My job has been threatened.  I don't know how I'm going to make it financially.  There is so much stuff I have to do that I go blank contemplating how to get my life back in order.

I was wandering around on Kindle the other night, looking for something nonthreatening, and made a discovery that put me in a cold sweat.  I haven't been a literary agent for eight years but there was someone I had worked very, very hard for and been unable to sell.  That person's books, which I edited with an Exacto knife, are now published.

I was surprised that my former, er, career still has that kind of power over me and I noted on Facebook that I wanted to chew my right hand off with jealousy.

"X (the literary agent who made money off some serious work I had done on the manuscript) doesn't have Daisy," I mantra'd as I turned off my computer and crawled into bed.  "X doesn't have a new flannel nightgown and clean flannel sheets and Daisy."

Of course, X might well have much better stuff but does not have that ineffable alchemy of flannel and Daisy, the solid 70-pounds of muscled weight sleeping next to me.

The Prozac, you see, is working.  The dosage isn't yet right but the worst is over until the next time.

Sometime in the last month I had a severe loneliness for a god I can't quite believe in.  One evening I went out to walk Sandy, a mild enough golden retriever, and demanded that god get down here and show himself to me.  It was a week of fuck-ups at school coming back to haunt me and I was scared and, always, lonely.  This demand was a bratty win-win: I know there is no god with a personal interest in me so there would be no answer and I could continue my terror and loneliness in blissful non-peace.

Then Sandy's owner gave me a hundred-dollar tip she referred to as "snow duty".

It was not Fatima but it was a penny placed on the other side of my personal scales of life.

And so I told the green-eyed dog of jealousy that I have a silky yellow one to sleep with, thank you very much, and fell asleep wondering how much of a wreck I would be the next day.

I woke at six in a rush to get to Facebook and quit all my farms.  Suddenly, I had to declutter that much of my life.  (I kept my city.  It's my only game and takes little time.)  And I was surprised to see that my post had several responses from women I respect saying, me too.  I was comforted not to be alone.

Not to be alone.

Not to be alone.

By writing a sentence I had let some people admit to the green dog as well and I could begin to laugh.  I began to hope that the version of the manuscript I worked hardest on had been the one to sell.  I owe that boss amends, although not for what she probably thinks I owe.  Maybe I can say I made them with that work.

Maybe it augers well for the novel I'm editing now.

That morning, the winter light poured through the windows of Grand Central so purely that I thought there was a spotlight shining on the west windows.  I asked one of my students if he'd seen it and yes, he said, he thought it was a special effect, too.  And I felt I had not been alone in that cold bath of early light, and that my loneliness and my isolation are not one and the same but are, certainly, related.  If I can't break the former maybe I can break the latter.  And maybe that will begin to mend the day-to-day lack of family and close friends at hand.

By whatever means.

Trending in Francieland...

Why I Won't Tune in to Next's Week's Episode of Heavy on my Psychology Today blog.

What It's Like

Fear of Tights

I'm slightly amused that anyone would be fearful of wearing tights...except that I'm fearful of taking two bags of books to the library to donate.

A word of reassurance: they're more comfortable, warmer and less revealing than pantyhose.  If the patterns are too much (and I find most of them to be too much: who needs lace on her legs, for goodness' sake?), the plain tights in basic black, nude, white or brown ought not to cause undue concern about calling attention to one's body.  In fact, because they cover up the inroads of age, I, for one, feel much less exposed in tights.

And a p.s.: I got a Chadwick's catalogue in the mail yesterday and flipped it open this morning to find the only patterned tights I really love: ribbed, which were missing from the last great find and which make me feel school girlish.  They also have chevron-patterned sheer tights, which is as close to second place as I can go.

The ribs (up to 2X/3X)  come in black, "garnet," charcoal and chocolate, so I guess you could make a barbecue of this AND have dessert.  Why do clothing colors come with food names?

*

The weather vacillates between warm, cool and downright chilly here.  It's impossible to dress.  Luckily, I had a lovely nervous breakdown yesterday and didn't need to.  My moods are as variable as the temperatures -- or were yesterday, when it took a straight plummet.  I feel the courage of a new day, however, so nothing I say is fact until it happens.  Fresh coffee calls me...

Trending in Francieland

After years of needing sweat pants and crappy t-shirts, I have to dress up.  This fall, it's four times a week.  It is astonishing to me that I could probably go through fall quarter -- 48 classes -- and not completely repeat the same outfit.  (Today is Wear Denim for Breast Cancer Research Day at school: yee-haw!)

Still, some things need refurbishing and I thought, for those of you in plus sizes or agoraphobic enough to avoid malls, I'd pass along two useful links.

For the best selection of tights, Woman Within. They've got vine patterns, diamonds, sweater tights, lace and -- oh! things I would never wear, "floral metallic tights".

Still, the colors are great -- cinnamon, grape, cranberry, chardonnay, charcoal.  You can cook and eat these tights for dinner!

Bras ranging from 32 - 58, cups from AA to N (I have a large chest circumferance but a B cup: not always an easy find), Lady Grace.

Rules 1, 2 and 63

I've been thinking about a couple of important ways to keep myself centered, proud, useful, loving and sane.  I think they're worth sharing.


1) Pay it forward.  When I was a graduate student at NYU and living at the St. Mary's Residence for Working Women (i.e., my worst nightmare, cheek-by-jowl with nuns), on a budget of $700 a month that had to cover everything except tuition, one of my professors from Cornell sent me $250.  It was a fortune and it saved my ass.  In coming to the end a difficult year, I've been able to help a few people out both financially and with my time/knowledge.  It hasn't been much.  I no more expect to be paid than I repaid my former teacher.  I understand now why he did it and I think such gifts carry not only a small morsel to distract the wolf from the door, but a karmic morsel as one.  That which is freely given and freely taken holds a glimmer of what we all want: freedom.

2) When a dog asks for a belly rub, make it twelve times as long as you think you have time for.  The one exception is first thing upon waking when peeing is urgent.

3) Never go to a friend's stoop sale when you have given said friend "clever" gifts in the past.

A brief post.  I began the fall quarter today by getting completely lost.  Bad address, bad Mapquest -- I don't know.  But in the heavy air between rains, I saw a part of Wall Street that made me feel I was back in Prague again.  It's easy to forget that the steel-and-glass cauldron of evil is also the oldest part of New York and, therefore, the tiniest.

And there is a new batch of roses in bloom.  They flourish in June and make another appearance in September.  In ways, I will always be a Montanan when it comes to seasons.

I promised Dr. It's-Never-a-Cigar I would try to take time to myself this quarter rather than getting worn out by academic details.  We decided that I would continue to pursue what I began in my week off: decluttering and editing a friend's novel.  I did not get rid of anything today or put anything away.  I came home to wait for the cable company to install a new cable box, a task which in itself is an accomplishment for one who was too deer-in-the-headlights to schedule the call last quarter.  I had to clutter up my apartment in order for him to do that voodoo that he do so well, moving junk off the TV hunk and pulling out the bags of clothes stored behind it.

Needless to say, Cable Man, despite calling at 4.30 to say he was on his way, did not show up.

So now I have three big bags of clothes mauling my room and have not yet made a new appointment.  I suppose I have to put them back but I'll still be overwhelmed with the plastic Brownie Scout and eyeglass sprays and whatnot.

So here's my question.  If I actually made more of a mess, did the half-bag of dog hair and grit that I swept up from behind the TV mountain count as decluttering???
 

Waking Up

One of the reasons I don't blog as often as maybe I should is that once in a while I write something -- like "Fred" -- that I want to hang like a Picasso lithograph in a millionaire's living room.  However, I am in desperate need of shaking off some difficult years so today I'm going to tell you what I've seen and the conversations I've had.  It's a rare opportunity because I'm substitute dog-walking & out for three or four hours...

In other words, I want to document a day in order to wake up from my ongoing stupor.

*

8.20 a.m.  Daisy eats a half a powdered sugar doughnut on Love Lane that someone didn't pick up.

8.50 a.m.  Recycling day is tomorrow.  Unwanted furniture is starting to line the curbs.  Tuesday is the day Brooklyn Heights collectively outgrows Ikea.

8.55 a.m.  Long talk with dishy doorman.  He has a hard, hard body.  The squirrel he rescued and was tending in the outside lobby of the veddy exclusive building he works for had run away.  "Probably to die," I said.  "Animals are like that."  He told me that "in the country I come from," they have all these saying about donkeys because when a donkey is dying, it will break chains and knock down fencing to get out and go off to die in private.  "Remember Solomon in the Bible?" he asked.  I nodded.  "He has a donkey's jaw.  Think about that.  Why not another animal's jaw?"  His "country" is Romania so we talked about the Roman Empire and how he can understand about 20% of the janitor's Spanish and the fall of Communism.  I liked it.

9.10 a.m.  A hoary man sits down backwards on a bench outside Harry Chapin Playground and begins to do sit-ups using the backrest to keep his knees from lifting.  First thought: Innovative.  Second thought: I would never have the nerve.

9.25 a.m. A frisky young malamute mix decides to eat my hair, wash my neck and pierce my ears.  "I can give you his leash and he's yours," his frustrated owner said.  Later I saw that she had her notebook out on a picnic table and was working, her dogs wandering quietly around and under the table.  First thought: Daisy would jump up on the table and sit on a computer in the dog run.

9.30 a.m.  Honey Bear, part Australian cattle dog and a notorious herder, got humped and herded by a Pyrenean mix.  The owner took Pyre to task but I was laughing and laughing at the well-deserved comeuppance.

9.38 a.m.  For no real reason, the thought occurs to me that, today, I am close to my inner serial killer.

9.40 a.m.  The first pumpkins of the year, on a stoop on Willow Street.

9.45 a.m.  Ran into the former nanny at Zeke's house, pushing a wise and somber three-year-old and tugging two toy dogs behind her.  She still sees the kids at Zeke's house and told me how the youngest has grown up in the years since Zeke was put down.  "Why don't you take me out for sushi?" he asks her every time they se each other.  He must be...four?

9.55 a.m.  Hunky Doorman walks part of the way with me and Honey Bear and tells me he now takes his coffee half-cappuccino/half-vanilla.  I tell him I used regular canned coffee but dump about a tablespoon of cinnamon in before brewing it.  A short conversation about the virtues of spices and the use of them to kill oneself by eating too much ensues.

9.57 a.m.  An elderly gentleman has brought a folding chair outside to read his newspaper in the sun.  This pleases me.

3.35 p.m.  Honey Bear, Daisy and I are about to turn onto Pierrepoint Street but first pause to let a woman with a double-decker stroller go by.  Inside are two enchanting Kate Greenaway tots, one about three, the other possibly 18 months old.  Blonde as Alice falling down the rabbit hole.  "Hitler would approve," I murmur to Daisy.
3.40 p.m.  The golden retriever barks up a storm when I step out of the elevator but it's all show.  She won't get off the bed, merely rolling over on her back for a belly rub.  I seduce her with a cookie.
3.42 p.m.  The Not Quite As Hunky Doorman tells me I don't have to leave Hunser and Daisy leashed to the fence so far from the building entrance.  I tell him I was walking the golden when the brouhaha began over dogs and elevators in that building.  It's a CEO sort of building and the owner of the ground floor apartment on the south side is, as Not Quite says, a bay-itch.  She demanded that no dogs be leashed outside her window because of the pee.  (A dog won't pee in a spot it can't get away from, but never mind.)  Then she complained about dogs in the elevator.  (She lives on the ground floor, but never mind.)  "So," I summarized, "I figure it's best to keep the dogs as far away as possible."  It's my last day filling in for Mike so the point is moot.  Still, he tells me the bay-itch complains all the time about the ice cream truck outside the Promenade Playground across from her aparmtent.
3.46 p.m.  The rag and bottle pickers are out, going through trash to find whatever they can resell.  Remind me not to throw out a shirt in a bag that has bills and stuff in it.
3.55 p.m.  We meet Hudson, a black English Lab.  Black Labs practically make me lactate and Hudson is a perfect specimen, not as fat as a lot of English Labs, with a perfect otter tail.  His owner is throwing balls for him but he takes time to wink conspiratorially at Daisy.
4.10 p.m.  I look up to see a large family hanging over the fence of the dog run.  The dog run is the local zoo -- the fence is often lined with people watching the free play of the dogs.  This family is dressed to the nines.  Out-of-town Jehovah's Witnesses who have come to marvel at their organization's HQ in Brooklyn Heights.  I'm glad Daisy jumps up on the water fountain to drink rather than trying to nose Hudson away from the dog pan that is at the foot of the fountain.  They point and laugh and I think about how they've been hearing the party line all day as they looked at printing presses and whatnot.  They need a little comic relief.
4.13 p.m.  Honey Bear decides Hudson needs to be corralled from his wanton ways of chasing a ball.  She nips his butt.  Hudson.  Doesn't.  Like.  It. 

4.25 p.m.  The wind shaking the lime trees on Willow Street makes me think of Flathead Lake, which makes me think of a comment my shrink, Dr. It's Never a Cigar, did not pick up on.  "If I was rich I'd be sitting on a beach at Flathead," I said in response to something.  "It's the only place I am truly myself."  I thought about that as he tried to drag some Totem and Taboo truth out of me.  It was too simple a statement.  I feel myself when I'm traveling, especially abroad.  And when I'm writing.  I should write a book cataloging people's various authentic selves, I think.  I would call it The Wind on Willow.

9.15 p.m.  Daisy grins broadly when we walk out the front door.  Recycling night!  All those bags to either rip open (I had to prize a bag of fried chicken out her mouth from Monday's garbage) or pee on.  My girlie-girl: lifts her leg especially for plastic.
9.16 p.m.  We're expecting a mini-heat wave but I wish I had a sweater on.
9.17 p.m. No, we are NOT going down Love Lane to find more powdered sugar doughnuts.
9.18 p.m.  What do you mean, you forgot the cookies??????
9.21 p.m. The blast of grilling beef at Heights Cafe hits us.  My stomach growls.
9.28 p.m.  Am I even hungry for dinner?  What would be good?  Ham and cheese roll-ups?  Yogurt.  I'll have yogurt.
9.29 p.m. Three boxes of Milk Bones fall on top of me and bounce into my basket.  What I do for love.
9.31 p.m.  I didn't bring enough money with me & have to pay by debit, which is not what I planned on doing.  Visa can wait another day.
9.35 p.m.  Theseus is tried up outside Starbucks so we go over to say hello.  Another black English Lab but as hyper as a popcorn machine.  Daisy takes advantage of the diversion to try to crawl into a trash can.  There are big black bags of garbage outside Pick-a-Bagel.  Montague Street the night before trash pick-up is Daisy's heaven.  It could only be topped if I had a Sanitation Services guy for a sleep-over boyfriend.
9.45 p.m.  Despite barking at a man with a CVS bag and a Pomeranian we make it home, but only before Daisy looks at me with the Cookie Question after the Pomeranian squabble.  No way.  "Do you want love?"  And yes, she does, going between my legs in the Tunnel of Love that reassures her everything is OK.

I'm having yogurt, oats and a banana for dinner.  My father is tucked in with his beep-beep channel hopping between National Geographic and a Rocky Marciano marathon.  I soaked my feet before shaving them tonight (no, I am NOT a hobbit) and did something to the plunger that drains the bathtub.  Tomorrow's second move is already mapped out: call the super.

*

What if I'd gotten cereal and pastry tonight, or ice cream?  Would it have effaced a day of conversations and mental photography?  Which is really me -- the sugar freak or the walking blogger?  Somehow it's a question that matters very much.

But not quite now.

And so to bed.

Fred

I call my father most nights to read him the "funnies," his expression for the television schedule.  He lost his 90% of his vision about ten years ago and while he still cooks and does his laundry, he's dependent on other people for such niceties.  His housekeeper in Arizona is wonderful and my brother as faithful as molasses, but when I'm with him I come in for heavy duty reading -- he wants to look up something in Merck?  You ask the English major rather than the Costa Rican or my rather unschooled brother.  I read him the best of the catalogues, the grocery store aisles, eBay, the Missoula obituaries, liner notes from his CDs, the contents of his desk.  Whether I'm with him or not, most days I end up reading to my father.

He's trying out assisted living in Missoula for some six months just now.  The food, he says, ranges from awful to very good.  He eats dinner at an assigned table of taciturn men.  He spends his evenings with football or baseball or one of the science channels, and he spends his days listening to books from the Library for the Blind.  Losing his vision turned him from a sort of free-thinking Republican into a raving progressive because one of the first subscriptions he got was The Nation and he discovered he likes spending an hour or two waking up with NPR.

He's about to have a girlfriend back in Arizona.  My brother called me a few days before Mother's Day to ask me to take care of Dad's command that we send flowers to -- we'll call her Lois.  I called Dad because flowers are a personal thing and read him the website.  He wanted red roses.  I told him that women regard red roses from a man as a love token.  "That's fine.  Send her three dozen on Mother's Day." 

Mother's Day I refused to do.  She is not his mother.  She is not the mother of his children.  She has sons in the Phoenix area who would most likely give her flowers so Daddy's gesture would be lost.  I sent them on the Thursday after Mother's Day.

My father has never picked up the phone and called me but he calls Lois each Sunday.

I think this is fine.  She's an old friend; her husband was one of my father's lab partners in medical school.  There's a best man/maid of honor thing in there somewhere.  She's small and pretty like my mom but possibly, in some ways, more of a lady where Mom had a touch of the dame.  When we had a small get-together in Sun City after Mom died, it was Lois I turned to.  She has so much joint-history, you see.

One of the godmothers of my gray mood has been a consciousness that on Wednesday the 29th, it will be a year and a day since my mother died.  I miss her a lot.  I had new author photos taken and one of them is really gorgeous.  I feel sad that she's the only person for whom I would have made a print, framed it and sent it to.  Daddy would appreciate it but he couldn't see it.  The sense of a safe haven left with my mom because she always wanted to hear about my deepest thoughts and feelings.  That's not how my father operates and that's fine, too.  I couldn't talk about Sibelius or 15th century England with my mother.

I called Dad tonight with the wonderful news that there is boxing on TV and a couple of college football games until then.  He said he'd been watching football and then 60 Minutes because he was resting up from his big day yesterday.

His big day had gone right over my head.  Actually, I think it went over his head as well until today when everyone in the complex had something to say.  It seems they had a dance yesterday.  Dad put in an appearance because he didn't want to disappoint the recreation director.  Said director pulled him out on the floor for the rhumba.  "It's been twenty years since I danced," he said.  "I didn't think I knew how any more."

One of my favorite phrases from the movies is Woody Allen's aunt in Annie Hall confiding to his kid-self that once upon a time she "was quite the lively dance-ah."  My parents courted on dance floors.  They collected Glenn Miller 78s.  As a kid, I remember how much I loved/hated their dancing club nights.  I loved them because I hung out on the bed in their room and watched them put on their formal clothes.  The smell of face powder and Channel No. 5 and a waxy kiss goodbye are physical sensations even on this warm Sunday night ten days before the first anniversary of my mother's death.  I hated dancing club nights because my brothers were "babysitting" me.  I never knew what that would entail except that I would either be used, hurt or told to get lost.

In the mysteries of a marriage, my parents were a united force when it came to dancing.  I saw them dance once, in a taverna in Rome when I was twenty.  The band struck up "In the Mood" and they were there, swinging and moving to the rhythm in such a circle of knowledge of how to dance to that music that the other dancers fell back and watched in admiration.

I was drunk as a boiled owl that night but I remember the people parting like a curtain and seeing my mom and dad at it.

Lois is passionate about dancing.

So my father allowed the rec director to pull him into one rhumba and history was made.  She didn't know what she was doing but all the steps were buried memories in his 92-year-old body.  Ladies were lining up to dance with him.  "When I finally got to sit down, I was sweating," he told me with surprise.  And today, ladies were still lining up to compliment him and ask that he save a dance for them the next time.  And Daddy is thinking he will start going to tea dances in Sun City.

He lost his Ginger but he's got a long career ahead of him.

Trying

Where have I been for the last 36 days?

In a gray funk.  Not a black one but not a clear blue sky one either.

Doing everything I can to escape myself & my responsibilities.  I owe amends to self & to dawg, & to everyone with whom I've had scant contact with.  I simply haven't wanted to speak.  Last Saturday I mostly sat looking at some random office plants very blankly while my therapist tried to find a way into my non-working brain.  For this I paid seventy dollars.

It's been a bitterly hot summer.  I began teaching two months ago after not working in nine years and not teaching in twelve.  I spend 210 minutes, back to back, trying to explain commas.  I'm exhausted by the time I get home.

Friends have been asking if I like teaching.  Yes, of course.  I like bringing disparate parties together to focus on what is impossible (commas, for instance, are impossible) and to laugh together.  It's a performance, another word my therapist likes to bandy about.  Why a performance?  Well, Dr. A-Cigar-Is-Never-A-Cigar, I have to be high energy to get them to maybe pay attention to commas.  Why not be yourself?  That would be staring at...what?  There is nothing in my sleek, squeeky-new classroom to stare at.  My self is not a self I like very much lately.  They don't pay me the pitiful bucks to come in & be blank.

Yes, but do you like it, B & D press further. 

What is "it"?  My students are interesting.  About half are international students, adding English and the cachet of studying marketing or business in New York City to their resumes.  They come from Norway, Paraguay, Nigeria, Kosovo, Korea, China.  They have studied hard to be able to take college classes in English & their study of language has paid off in sharpening their brains.  The other half are more motley, many of them condemned by Creole street talk & bad New York City schools to constitutional blobbiness.  It's not so much they that can't think outside the box as that they can't think.  Their brains are in danger of atrophy & this makes me terribly sad, adding to my desire to atrophy by self-will.

The despair of 45 papers is beyond words.

It's even beyond ice cream.

I feel sick with dumb Facebook games, ice cream and a winter gray when it's 95-degrees outside.

There are brighter notes but they are spectator sports for me.  Friends have included me in their lives but it is not what I would call being alive myself.  Perhaps fall & a different, more diffused class schedule will help.  Maybe a new flavor of Ben & Jerry's.  Maybe having finally traced fragments of my life on the foggy window of this blog.

As Open Letter to Maxwell House Coffee

Dear Max:

I appreciate your efforts to provide the freshest possible coffee in the most number of flavors and strengths that you can.  Snobs may turn up their noses at you in favor of Sumatra beans they roast themselves, but I am not a snob and I take great pleasure in the two cups a day I drink of your coffee (or whatever brand is on sale).

I was especially delighted when, shopping at CVS this morning for hair dye and other accoutrements that are the bare minimum of catching a man, I discovered a two-for-the-price-of-one on you 11-ounce can.  I snatched them up, was bossed shamelessly around  by the new self-service check out CVS has installed (I only needed a human clerk to bail me out once), and came home to empty both cans into the big Chockful-o'-Nuts can that was running dangerously low.

Thankfully, that CoN can was so big that, for once, I could knock out all the coffee that usually get sticks under the protruding rim of the opening that, by the end of the year, wastes at least one cup of joe and earns Kraft some million extra dollars.

[Mental note: Keep the CoN can when I run out of coffee the next time.]

Upon finishing this task, however, I was faced with an unsolvable dilemma.

I had already placed the tin "vacuum tops" and the plastic lids in the recycling bag for metal, glass and plastic, but I was stuck with two containers, the sides and bottom of which are made of cardboard.  However, your heavy waxed cardboard is reinforced by a steel band at the top (with the wasteful lip) and the bottom.

Do these containers belong in the metal/plastic/glass recycling or in the paper recycling?  If I go by mass, I believe the heavier steel would dictate that the containers follow their lids, but if I approach the problem by area, then clearly they belong with the toilet paper rolls and Steuben Glass catalogues -- or the oatmeal container I had also just emptied into its bigger parent box.


Having, by serendipity, stored both coffee and oats in one five-minute period, I am led to wonder if you have taken a look at Pepsi's traditional packaging of Quaker Oats?  They, too, come in a cylindrical cardboard box, although less enforced against the flavor-sucking humidity of CVS's air conditioned shelves.  However, instead of having steel reinforcing rims that rob the consumer of one bowl of porridge a year, Quaker and other generic store brands trust that their oats will not fly apart in the hands of the consumer or stick together in the way they might if we, the consumers, lived in, say, Saigon.

As Kermit-the-Frog said so eloquently, "It ain't easy being green," but, by following the Pepsi Company's lead, it could be less time-consuming.  The lid and the sealed top go into the glass/plastic/metal recycling and the container into the paper recycling.  No thought is required.

I know that asking you to change your packaging concept is probably futile, but could you at least provide wording on your containers regarding which recycling bin they belong in?  I've got the wasted grounds covered but have now lost twenty minutes of valuable farming time (the cherries are ripe on Farm Town!) to pondering this question.

Yours sincerely,

Frances Kuffel

In Which I Become Professor Kuffel

I had an incomplete fantasy that I would never have to work for The Man again. 

We all have to work for The Man.  The only question is whether we can keep The Man at arm's length.

I could see my last advance money dwindling.  Angry Fat Girls -- soon to be retitled Eating Ice Cream with My Dog and Other Adventures in Fatland: A True Story of Food, Friendship and Losing Weight...Again -- bombed so badly that we're hoping for a miracle with the paperback.  As much as I try to look at the bright side (I'll have a Marley and Me look-alike: maybe it will be a sell-alike too!), my next advance is more than an 85% reduction.  I have plans that require money.  Paying off my debt.  Figuring out the third act of my life.  Yogurt.

So I got me an adjunct job teaching freshman composition to business students.  They are a fascinating lot.  The international students have some problems with English and the homegrown students have more problems with English.  We have nothing in common, coming as we do from all four corners of the globe, so I'm giving them a lesson in American history as seen through the lens of New York in the years between 1890 - 1910.  Their faces are mostly glazed over like Dunkin' Donuts but I rattle on, asking questions like, "Was the United States, a hundred years ago, an imperialist country?" (We'd just fought the Spanish American War and taken possession of The Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and the American Virgin Islands.)  Or, "Is capitalism still the driving force of the U.S. economy?"  Or, "What has the long-lasting effect of the Ladies' Garment Workers' Union been?"

A molecule at a time I pull an answer out of them.  I tell them they can never use the word "just" in an essay they turn in to me again.  I snap when someone has not stopped texting after I've already asked him/her to stop three minutes earlier.  I have them doing daily presentations on their favorite aspect of popular culture and now know more about Korean boy bands and the Panamanian equivalent of Elvis Costello than I ever thought I'd need to know.  For 105 minutes, less 15 for presentations, I jabber on about commas, run-on sentences and the semiotics of Dreamland.  I'm terrified of that moment of silence when I run out of things to do and say so I over-prepare, which puts us behind schedule and exhausts me before I've set foot in the class each Tuesday morning.

I love it and I hate it.

But it could, of my department head's observation yesterday pans out, put me in a position to apply for Real Jobs.  You know, with, like, medical insurance and retirement and sabbaticals and a little house and yard for Daisy in Blow Hole, Oklahoma.

All of which is to say that I don't know what the hell I'm doing except that this weekend I'm doing only what has to be accomplished to get my kids thinking enough to begin working on a persuasive essay.  I have a date tonight with a Croatian named Bob and -- why did I PROPOSE this? -- a bowling date (I sprained my elbow when a friend, who was drunk, stumbled and I tried to break his fall) tomorrow night with a man twenty years my junior which makes me, my students inform me, a "cougar".  I will not color my hair for tonight because I'm tired and don't feel like it.  He'll be lucky if I take a shower.  Dates are not my life.  Words are, and they are precious because they're being spent on 420 minutes of standing at the head of classrooms each week.  I mostly don't want to talk because I'm weary with talking.  And I want to write but wonder if I have enough words.

So I thought I'd experiment here.

Now I'm going to go check my rye crop over on Farmville.

Trending in Francieland

Since when does any sane person eat ALL the dressing that comes with their salads?  How many calories should a dieter's menu be?  Is the "health" community desperate for fodder?

Devotion of the Nine Tuesdays

Today my world is a little smaller, a little lonelier, a little bereft of solace.

I have many cousins of whom I am fond but M. rather stands alone.  When I was three years old, she showed me the Man in the Moon.  I remember this lesson very distinctly.  We were hanging around the swing set in her family's sloping backyard.  She is seven years older than I and she knew about the Man in the Moon.

We fell out of touch, more or less, over the years, but one of the amazing thing about being in my 50s and having said goodbye to all of my aunts and uncles, is that some of the cousins are croneying.  Their kids are older or have left home.  We are the ones who know the family stories and are, therefore, the family we have left from the Before.  We don't have the energy to insist on identical politics or old envies or intellectual parities.  I've even found myself becoming friendly(ish) with people from high school.

And I hated high school.

M. wrote me out of the blue one day when I'd whined on about one or another of my depressions in this blog.  She told me she understood, that it was real, that one of her kids suffers from it too.  We began to discuss the family we are both adopted into.  She has kept a benevolent eye on me through my blog and Facebook.  She continually wishes me well.  Every day I know she wishes me well and would listen to me or attend to what I throw out there on the Web.

Except today.  Today she is in surgery, recovery, sleeping deeply.  I'm glad that the sisters went in together.  For a long time, that family of siblings was all each other had.  Nobody is alone today.

I went to Mass this morning as I promised M. I would.  At nine o'clock, I could picture M. and her sister, P., as they were prepped for the surgery that would transfer P's kidney to M.  Two cousins are in mortal danger and both of them are of faiths that are antithetical to the Catholic Church, and yet M. said my attendance that morning would mean more to her than she could say.  I joked that it should -- it's an eight a.m. Mass -- but I  made a promise that needed keeping.

I had no idea that my parish is in the middle of a novena to St. Anthony.  I went to St. Anthony's school and that persistent image of him has stuck -- with the infant Jesus, with the lily.  Just like the Man in the Moon, I suppose.  St. Anthony was a Franciscan, a gentle order.  He was a gentle man.  So much of Catholicism involves blood and martyrs and conversion, but St. Anthony was a parochial friar who preached and healed and calmed.  It's fitting that he is the patron saint of horses: P. is a fine horsewoman.  It's fitting that he is also the patron saint of letters: this is a love letter to M., to let her know how much of I've been thinking and praying for her today.

The list of places and things he is a patron of is so long that we could all find ourselves in there.

The Franciscans recently sent me this prayer to St. Anthony and I like it so much that it sits in front of my keyboard:

"Holy St. Anthony, reach down from heaven and take hold of my hand.

"Assure me that I am not alone.  You are known to possess miraculous powers and to be ready to speak for those in trouble.

"Loving and Gentle St. Anthony, reach down from heaven I implore you and assist me in my hour of need.  Obtain for me [your request].

"Dearest St. Anthony, reach down from heaven and guide me with thy strength.  Plead for me in my needs.  And teach me to be humbly thankful as you were for all the bountiful blessings I am to receive.

Amen."

I like that prayer a lot.  I like the idea that St. Anthony is reaching down to take my hand, M's hand, P's hand.  I like the idea that he walked across heaven this morning to talk to God or Jesus about my cousins' welfare.  I like that it ends on a note of promise.  M's religion is as vastly different from mine as two Christian faiths can be, but I think that there is enormous power in turning to one's roots for intercession.

And so I did, only to find myself lighting two candles at the shrine to St. Anthony, touching his feet, and crossing my lips.

Now it's up to him.

Trending in Francieland Now...

Jersey Moms scare me. So do their followers. Prepare to be horrified in a hundred ways from this Reuter's article:

I commented: 

"It's not fair to bring in suppositions about whether the public pays for her food or her medical bills.  I think Laura was right in asking why she craves this much attention.  Does she have a narcisstic disorder?

I can kind of understand weighing 600 pounds and deciding to accept oneself.  No one just balloons up to that weight and I'm sure she's tried diets and fasts and found them ineffective.  (FYI: 95% of the time they ARE ineffective).  But aiming to weight 400 more?  Glorying in her success on the fringe of fetishes?  Gorging on the food that's not only making her fat but is, in itself, dangerous?

"She lives 40 miles from NYC but she certainly couldn't get up the steps of the Metropolitan or stand in line at the Empire State Building.  She'll see Hawaii from a car. 

"And that's what makes me sad.

"What makes me mad is her and her fiancee's notion of curves.  I've weighed over half of what she weighs and I guarantee you I had NO CURVES.  I was one large mass, square shaped.  What she has are bulges and flaps.  And they're lying to themselves to think there is no difference between the two concepts."

PEOPLE!  LISTEN UP!  IT IS NOT OKAY TO TAKE DONATIONS IN ORDER TO EAT SEVENTY PIECES OF SUSHI IN A SITTING.


 
Now let's make fun of thin people striving for Jersey Mom Perfection:

Who's the scariest of all?

HEllo. My NAME is JERemy. How MAY I help you?

I've met a Max, a Peter and now a Jeremy, all in the same sing-song voice of the Subcontinent.  My Master Card is issued by a Nevada bank and yet each time I call, it is a "Frank" or a "Sam" or a "Jason" who answers.  I know these are not their real names because I know my call has been routed to India.  I know that because the agents' English is too crude to communicate anything tricky to.  My prescriptions, for instance.  I order them from Vancouver, B.C. but they ship either from the U.K. or Australia.  This means I have to call Master Card and warn them that a foreign charge is about to occur and that I made it.  Who knew that involving three countries could cause so much non-understanding?  Three times in a row they have refused the charge.  I call again and tell Leslie or Sarah that I called seventy-two hours ago and confirmed the charge.  Promises are made, then broken.  Finally, my Canadian pharmacy put the script through in India, where the charge is passed as though I were putting an envelope in the collection basket.

I've paid about half my credit card debt off in the last year and Master Card is the Mother of All Credit Card debts.  When I opened my statement this month, I noticed a $90 charge for credit card and identity coverage.  I'm sure it's a wonderful concept but hello -- that's almost a hundred dollars a month, which is twelve hundred dollars a year in additional charges.  I have credit cards whose spending limit is less than that.

All I want to do is pay that bastard off.  I told Jeremy to remove the charge which I hadn't approved in the first place and he began reading from a script.  I cut across him, "Just take it off and unenroll me."  He switched to another script in which it was all my fault: I'm carrying a high balance and that's why my identity is more expensive.

(Shouldn't I be less expensive, since a fraudulent me would reach my credit limit sooner?  A zero-balance only means Master Card would have to chase down or eat $10,000 in charges rather than $4,000, a significant savings to them.)

I cut across Jeremy again.  "Just.  Take.  It.  Off."  He tried again and I stopped him by telling him I know he has to read this script ("I'm not reading...") but the point is that I want to reduce my balance, not pay another hundred dollars just to stay in the same place.  He tried one more time but I started shaking in fury, something I communicated without swearing or yelling.  The way he pouted when he said he was unenrolling me and removing the charge was meant to shame me, as though his year-old-son would be going to bed hungry that night because of my evil.

Americans complain vociferously about our jobs being exported to Asia, where they are done sooner, cheaper and, in some cases, better.  But here is a job that needs to be brought back to our shores.  "Sam" and "Carrie" do not understand that I can order about two hundred dollars' goods from Canada but it might be shipped from England or maybe from some place else.  They can't even understand me when I call to say I'll be in Czech Republic next week.

Dear Direct Merchants:  My money is, like, really sensitive shit to me.  So is the Wellbutrin your agents are blocking.  Could you please move your 1-800 center to an American state in need of job opportunities?   The Rust Belt is yours or maybe Mississippi.  Montana is good -- very little accent, low per capita income, cheap rents, and the weather is, um, cool most of the year.

Except when it's not.

Trending in Francieland, right now...

What about the Japanese restaurant owner who has such a strict policy regarding uneaten food that she will ban you from her restaurant for not finishing your dinner?

Forced binging, or a new concept in Eating Green?

Information

Yesterday was a bad day.  So far, today is better.  My stomach doesn't have a knot in it, I haven't had to cut up a klonopin, I've proceeded in a logical path through both personal things and work things.  It feels as though there is time to do enough.

My reminder to myself, at least twice an hour, is that if I don't go off my food plan and no dog or human is injured directly by my actions, failure is impossible.  Disappointments, yes.  Crises, judging by yesterday, unfortunately certain.  But I have only two things I can fail at.

This reminding has been singularly helpful.

I came home yesterday afternoon clutching myself with the need to get to the bathroom twelve minutes earlier.  My stomach was in an uproar.  It can take a while to adjust to my food plan, with all its salads and fiber, and it's not always my timing.  I had plans to meet a friend to see Twila Tharp's Come Fly with Me and had about an hour to get ready.  I showered.  As I was trying to decide on something to wear, my phone rang.  It was my agent.

She had news I was expecting: my publisher is offering eight-five percent less for my next book than it did for Angry Fat Girls.  If it wasn't for being a really good writer, they would not be offering me a contract at all.  I already knew this.

But I had a melt-down.  It wasn't the money, it was my agent's badgering about what I should do next, in terms of Sex and the Pity, my novel, making a living, moving away from New York.  I was gasping for breath and for words as she rushed on with ideas -- movetoMontana, proctorbookclubs, writethreesamplechaptersandanoutlineofSPandsubmititelsewhere.  These are not tenable ideas and having to reject them, one by one, made me feel I was being horribly negative and sullen.  I felt trapped.  I felt...

...exactly how I felt in my last job, when Alix would call me into her office with an itemized list of everything I was doing wrong or not at all and would then demand to know what I was going to do to fix it.  I never had words for her in those moments.  I needed time to figure out what to do or felt a "yes" was a sufficient answer when what she enjoyed was watching me twist at the end of my employment string.

My agent wasn't doing that.  She was probably trying to give me options and probably trying to assuage her own disappointment by giving me a sense of future.  But it felt just like sitting in that floor-to-ceiling windowed office, twenty-nine floors above Central Park, being nipped and badgered by the gnats of failure.

This used to be my business.  I understand my agent's position and I understand my publisher's position. When I was an agent, I used to tell writers not to think they could work in their pajamas.  I've gotten a seven-year free ride in my jammies.  It's coming to an end.  I didn't need my agent to point that out.

But the sense of being ambushed was horrible.  I canceled the theater because I knew there was a good chance I'd cry through the musical comedy.  I though desperate things.  Then I took off my fancy duds, put on my shorts and laid down with Daisy and the telephone.  I called my best friend and she was outraged for me when I had no energy to be outraged for myself.  I tried to call my editor to clarify a couple of things but she was gone.  Mostly thought, I laid there with Daisy's paws on my shoulder, holding me, and let my mind go blank. When I got up, forty-five minutes later, I thought about having spent many years as an adjunct writing professor, the couple of articles I want to submit, the fact that, unlike most dog walkers, I'm available at night and on Sundays.  I can squeak through this year if need be.  I can take actions.  I can trust that I'll be OK, just as I've hit this financial impasse before and lived through it.

My therapist, Dr. Sometimes-It's-Not-Just-a-Cigar, calls it post delayed stress.  I'm embarrassed by it.  Soldiers can have PDS.  Abuse victims.  Not someone who cowered in fear and muteness through two years of a bad boss.

And yet, there I was, Alix-ized. 

Somehow the quiet time both calmed me and presented an opportunity to me.  I will accept their offer but I will also tell my agent how I felt in the conversation.  I will not discuss what I'm doing to make a living with her.  I'm not sure I can even discuss this book with her because she has not found any humor in what I've done, a fact I brought up as a significant factor in staying with my publisher.

The biggest opportunity that fifteen minutes and forty-five minutes of recovery offered, however, was to see that it's really true that I if I don't eat and dogs and people are uninjured under my watch, I can't fail.  Sometimes I miss the lesson in being abstinent but yesterday I was able to get to a point at which I saw that exchange as information.  Given certain circumstances and a certain mode of address, I flash back.  When I feel my life is pulled out from under my decision-making, I flash back.  Flashbacks definitely make me want to run to sugar but they do so because A) that's my default setting, and B) flashbacks are uncomfortable. 

But it passed.  And I knew my boundaries had been crossed and I knew that to dither about accepting the offer and looking for the next financial chapter in my life would only make my feeling of being out-of-control worse.  No one promised me I could live in my jammies but what I choose to do when I get dressed has to be my decision.  And I cannot allow anyone, ever again, to have the power over me that Alix did. 

She had it because she had my job.  I've put in seven years of being my job.  Maybe it's time to simply get a job.  Not be it, not be under the yoke of it.  Just a job.  Because really?  I can't fail.

I'm Not in Kansas Right Now

Dear Ones --

I don't expect everyone to approve at what's going on at my other blog.  That's why I started a separate blog that is age-restricted.  The question has arisen concerning whether the actions of yesterday's post are self-empowering and I think it's certainly a question that deserves thought and discussion.

All journeys begin somewhere.

I'm fifty-three years-old and never-married.  I've had a few boyfriends and many heartbreaks.  My heart is still leaking, in fact, from something in my recent past that did not come to fruition, and it has had a thud after my encounters over the last week: in many important ways, the thuddee actually gets me.  That's a powerful turn-on.

Alas.

Consider, now, that I have been fat for something like forty-six years.  I was the butt of a lot of teasing up until I went to university.  Then I became the Best Friend, the Fag Hag, the voyeur of what my thin, pretty/handsome friends were experiencing.  I listened and sympathized.  I listened and wished.  I listened and grew fatter.

I passed through the chapters of my thinnitude under the stress of either gaining a new body and new horizons, or saying goodbye thereto.  I spent much of the time in my romantic relationships wondering if I could really be loved, if my battle scars were at least forgivable, or if I could compensate for them in some way.  I spent so much time in my head that I couldn't feel my body except when I was out and about, mostly in the gym or on my own, walking the city in black cashmere trousers or a short black skirt.  Then I felt tall and in possession of a secret: you don't know what I really am...

I was Beauty and Beast when I was thin.  As I gained weight I felt more and more that I was the Beast alone.

In these last seven years, it has been a surprise to me that men found me either attractive or fuckable.  That perhaps one man fell in love with me for a bit and that a couple of other men fell in like is astonishing.

It shouldn't be.  I'm not ugly.  I'm funny, smart, giving.  They even found me sexy, although that has never been something I felt.

Until the last few weeks.

What has changed?  I'm really abstinent for the first time in more than six months.  I've been through a great deal of grief and estrangement.  I'm not working as hard as I should be in my twelve-step program but I have done some deep digging in my stepwork and in throwuppy.  My old feelings of being the butt of jokes and excuses, of needing to be invisible, are shriveling a little bit as I take them out of the closet and place them in the light of the room for two pairs of eyes.  I'm slow to pick up on having boundaries crossed or argued about, but at least I remember, now, when my therapist points instances out.  I'm becoming more sensitive to them and more protective.

I don't know if I've lost weight or not, although a friend noticed that I was looking "healthier" and my food plan is so predictable that it would be difficult not to lose weight.  Not knowing has thrown me back on my day count and my body.  Because I'm also pretty disenfranchised from my size, I can't tell much from the way my clothes fit.  This pretty much leaves me only how and what my body is feeling.  It has a knot of anxiety in its stomach.  Its neck is sore.  There is a twinge in its left shoulder.  And it's randy.

There is also a brain in this body -- a mind.  And a heart and a pleasure center.  I may not be ready for a boyfriend or a boyfriend may not be ready for me, but for a change I'm relying on those other bits to tell me when a situation, a man, a sexual liaison, is not right for me.  And I'm walking out, shrugging my shoulders, taking pleasure in a cold drink and the searing acridity of a cigarette, relishing my messy Cave and my dog.   She is always glad to see me and manipulate me in our seven-year dance of often opposing desires.

So yeah, it feels good to say, "You're not the right one."  And it feels good to seek a Right One, despite, right now,  the sexual emphasis on seeking.  I missed out on so much in the years when boyz wanted girlz to be fresh and skinny, and in the years when I didn't trust myself.

It is empowering to trust my instincts.  It's bloody empowering to have instincts after the cloister of grief.  It's empowering to read or hear that a man I could like thinks I have a lovely body.

And it's most empowering of all to write, to write the journey.  It's only a journey; the destination is a place everyone recognizes.  Love.  Home.  Friendship.  Maybe health insurance.

But it's my journey, for better or worse.  I'm being careful.  And I'm shrugging my shoulders when that's what I feel like doing.  And I'm glad I know these things.  Somebody in my future will appreciate the self-acceptance I'm being tutored in, the joy, the frontiers of my self that I'm defining and learning to defend.

All journeys end somewhere, and the somewhere is always [re]new.