glower

Today I feel like arguing with people about the weather--ABOUT THE WEATHER. There should be more naptime and less rushing.

slashes from this week

An extra hour's walk in the rain/an umbrella bruise

Forearm and wrist massage lessons from/for love

A 1.5 track mind/could be worse

Husband adoration/lap naps

Bran muffins/frozen cupcakes

Regret/pride for things that happened seven years ago

The Maddaddam trilogy/(finally)

Accidental honesty/on-purpose hedgery

schmentiment

I am biding my time. I have to wait for things. I had lunch with someone I love a few weeks ago and she asked, 'how are you doing?' and I said, 'I'm impounded.' I'm living in a place that keeps me small and keeps me from trying new things. I'm living a time in my life when being just a human without a silk thread attaching from me to the next generation feels like an oversight. I'm living with a husband--three years as of tomorrow--who is so wonderful, so kind, so loving, and overarchingly so so so busy. I try to answer his business with activity of my own so I'm not just sitting in a stew. I'm back to saying yes to things (this is good! This is limiting!). It turns out that when we're working opposite schedules and when he's in his penultimate semester of nursing school the norm is that I can count the number of hours we spend together just BEING together during any given week on one hand. Sometimes it feels like less. It could be worse. His passion and drive and his goals are wonderful. It could be worse: we could just be starting out. There's the (an) end goal coming up this spring. It is less than 250 days away.
Sometimes it feels like my number one sentiment is resentment. Sentiment resentment. Flentiment schmentiment. I'll turn this all to the absurd. I do know that this is the kind of limbo that eventually ends. I do know that I'm living well anyway. I do know that I am loved down to my cellular level, and I love just that much in return. I do know that there will be a year (maybe next!) when we'll be able to celebrate an anniversary with more than a quick pause for take out Thai food and three kisses. I'll keep making him breakfast and folding down the sheets.

navel gazing

I think there are a lot of things I'm willing to work around in order to keep my sense of self in tact. I think I'm lazy (or, I say out loud: my goals are small), and I defend my laziness, my tiny plans, as high standards. I believe in personal and relational and communal contentment-care-coziness over almost everything else. I think I leave excitement and adventures on a small scale so they can be created anywhere and any day instead of planning for excitement and adventures in the macro. I don't know which is wiser. I think the bubble wrap of a husband bundled around me has changed the way I plan for things and the type of life I want to live, and I wonder sometimes what that says about me, and who I'd be if I were suddenly alone again. I think sometimes I use the idea of living simply as a crutch. I don't fault me for it. I am full of hurdles.

dodging spotlights

I have finished a summer concert series as a tiny but enthusiastic front row blip in my community band's 160 year history. My fourth season, and the first after a two year ick + lack of compromise hiatus. I have my musical strength and control back and 75% of my ego. I don't know if the remaining 25% is even available inside me anymore, and I think that's probably ok. I have a sweet, serious high schooler section mate to take up all the extra emphasis I used to just direct at myself. My number one goal in life is to be useful, and in my three-quarters performer one-quarter coach, I truly believe I serve a purpose worth keeping on coming back for. I actually think this is good.

I think maybe I think about this too much?

a long sentence about Wednesday nights

There's a time every week in the wee hours of a Thursday morning when after a restless attempt at sleep and throwing off the covers and reading Rainbow Rowell books on the kindle app in the dark, after tossing myself around limply, stationarily pacing, noise-cocked and impatient, I--in either half-awake or half-sleep--finally hear the click of the door and the pitch shift as a shadow passes between me and the fan and finally feel the sag on the bed beside me and the gentle in-case-I'm-sleeping forehead kiss and finally hear a whispered I love you, and then I sleep.

jealousy

You know how sometimes you are finally getting to the point in your life when you're starting to be rather good at a Thing, or getting ready to be rather good at a Thing, and it's going along swimmingly and you're really quite proud, but then someone pops into your life who is, woah, already so good at the Thing and is effortless and confident about the Thing for which you were only starting to feel like bragging about yourself?
That's happening to me.
I'm pretty good at doling out this particular advice: I say, if there are people who are more talented than you or more driven than you or who make choices you wouldn't be able or wouldn't WANT to make yourself, the best way to handle it is not to squeak out the 'but I...' or the 'hmm...' and instead say, 'Oh how INteresting of them!' You know, don't take other peoples choices/gifts/lacks personally. I've given that advice to more than two people in my life, maybe three or four! But I'm not doing so well at consistently taking it myself.
Man, jealousy. Man.

permission for feeling

I've had a lot of drama in me the past few weeks. The necessary release of a long, heart-spilling walk in the rain with my most understanding-of-me friend, the audaciousness of the mimosa tree in the front of our yard. Pride in produce from my little square of a garden, and the zinnias blooming at the back. Vicarious drama: drama in sports, drama in my brother-in-law's love life, drama in a presentation I didn't have to give, drama in administration wanting to throw us a bone because we're not getting what we really want. Ice cream and ladder golf.
The stomach swooping realization that my grandfather was dying, and the hug from a purple haired pixie girl I don't know well after I said so out loud. The aching sense of loss when my grandfather did die, and walking in the twilit woods with S, eating wild blackberries and watching spiders spin webs and deer run on ahead of us, and talking about what it means to be losing another generation, to be losing the man himself, although for years he wasn't fully the man himself, about his laugh. I just twist up with losing more of my links to the past, and it's so very limiting, in our narrow little world, to lose one more. Plans change. I handle telling my boss about it badly.
Sometimes I worry I cry too easily and that crying means I don't handle things well or don't keep an eye on silver linings. But I think I actually do keep an eye on silver linings and on the macro and on my micro, I just let myself drift along inside of these things when I'm sad, and when I'm around others who are experiencing a loss, I vibrate with empathy, and let my heart beat however it wants. I don't mind getting stuck sometimes in the mire of messy tears and aching chests. I don't know if I feel better afterward than if I'd stiff upper lipped through, but I don't feel worse. I don't think I need to keep scolding myself for feeling.
There's a lot coming up in two states to grieve and celebrate life and remembering and then in a third state to spend the remainder of a heady week in simple communion with the family at large. We're shrinking and we're definitely growing, and both ends sting, and that's ok.

of course

I've noticed that lately I've been saying, 'Of course!' instead of 'You're welcome'.

I had a pot of mint in my backseat and was a bit too sweaty to be talking about book recommendations, but I just keep getting asked. Of course, anyway.

this is full of parentheses

I'm feeling a solid iron rod lodged in my chest today. I spent a few days righteously sweating (a friend moved and I was there to be a lifter and encourager, I mountain goated up a humid mountain, I'm getting close to feeling my old rhythm at the Monday evening community band summer concerts), and then after that I spent a restless night worrying about things that have not happened yet (and may never happen) with S's family, and then I get stuck in a memory hole, and then I sat on a cookie, and then I reach a Wednesday noon full of a solid pressing down. It's gravity, it's feeling a little out of my depth in a few relationships, it's not being sweet and kind (me), and not slowing down (you). I feel like a turtle! I am glacial and solid and bitey. I can't keep worrying about things I can't fix (I can). I can't keep comparing myself to alternate reality April (I can). I can't keep asking for re-dos (I can). I can't last through this next interminable year of school and basements and being observed (I can, I can, I must).

yawn

I'm not very well-equipped to handle tedium in human form.

imprinting

My husband and I spent a while talking a few days ago about what happens when someone is poisonous and prickly to hide a soft gooey center. Sometimes I feel like I'm the opposite of that, and almost all of the time I don't know how tell. I struggle sometimes with being able to identify others' anxieties and faux-courage because I get stuck looking at my own. How do you get better at not giving up on someone who requires you to have a thick skin so you're there long enough to get past their own thick skin?

He also startled me by telling (or reminding) me just who he was when we first started dating, and telling me what it meant to him that I was me. I think we can chalk our entire contented and companionable and hilarious relationship to the weird combination of the people we were five years ago. He was a blank slate, not afraid of making mistakes by trying any- and every way he could think of to care for me and love me, and I was a student of my father's school of positive reinforcement. He was receptive and flexible, I was full of feedback, and lo, I managed to Dr Frankenstein an ideal husband. Sometimes I wonder what he gets out of the deal, but then I remember that what he wants is someone soft and warm (on the outside anyway) to love, and here I am. He wanted someone to nurture and support him, and I do. That is the simplest simplest way to say what we are, because there is more there--equivalent nerdery, enthusiasm, tastes, and physical and mental compatibility--to bolster the tabula rasa/firm stamp theory. Plus, as this is an appropriate global time to mention, I'm totally into guys who look like soccer players, and S has the tall, lean, muscley legged, great assed futbol look.

Is this weird? We're probably not as unique as I think we are. That's ok, too.

summer

I'm reading about a time when I was lost and my heart was weighed down in my chest, and after a conversation on Tuesday and a conversation on Wednesday about what has changed and what has gone missing in these years since, I come to the conclusion that despite the yawning maw of liminality that is my current life, I am infinitely wealthier than I have ever been.

I want to mention this now only because I think I am at the end of my streak (I just get the sense): I have gone 52 days in a row measuring at least 10,000 steps a day on my birthday pedometer.
I am heavier than I should be, and my legs are very strong.

I'm turning brown and making checklists and proving my prowess and having technical difficulties that find me sitting in my chair at work with nothing but humid, fidgety time.

There was a fierce storm yesterday evening and I was sheltered from the side in an apartment on the far side of town, and we watched the gusts and the lightning from the front door. Everything was tilted and dark blue gray.

reminding myself

I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok. I am not a career person and that is ok.

waiting for me

Today I feel like the chosen one because every time I've pressed an elevator button the doors have opened immediately.

getting back

It has been two years, two years almost exactly! since I've even touched my oboe. I am not even the last person to have played it. Until this afternoon, when snow blindness and thoughts of mortality (I stayed awake last night crying silently in bed next to my sleeping husband imagining what would happen if he were to die) and impatience all collapsed in on me. I bought new reeds a few months ago, knowing I'd need to start fresh if I were to ever begin again. I'm doing ok. I almost am not missing a beat.

I forgot that there are more ways to measure my own strength.

I'm walking a fine line these days. I think I'm just about catching up to who I should have been five years ago. I'm fighting with the kickback that always comes up when there's a host of good choices in one direction and I want to make them, I just don't want to make it seem like I'm being convinced. Sometimes I actually do come around on my own. I always want to make it seem like I do.

I can't believe how long we've been living in a basement and how much longer we have to go. I have this thing where my whole heart is a pendulum and I'm on day two of snow bound ness and I can feel that it's not swinging at all on its own. So I broke a 24 month losing streak. I can't run, I can't do more than clomp around in the snow. But I can nestle an oboe reed in the pillow of my bottom lip and curl it in like a drawsting and I can still make it sing. I have such high hopes for a spring and for making it seem like it's my own idea to cook and clean and volunteer and sweat and push toward filling in all my gaps. Walking that fine line until I have sussed out enough which direction I should jump off. 

buckling in

Sometimes I really do struggle with wanting to wait until after I've been rewarded to do good things rather than doing good things in the hunt for a reward.

I don't have the option of skipping

Well, I had a stink bug in my coffee this morning, which is only marginally better than stink bug in my cheerios, and also today fully 50% of my office is out sick with a stomach bug. Bugs! Also my back muscles are making a fist.

So it is coffee from Starbucks, with a shrug, and open ears. Glad for rice and lentils, glad for warm and strong and patient S. Glad for being not (currently) one of the ill 50% of ILL. Glad for this job and for recovery.

movement

Things I used to be ok with:

backtracking

midnight three-mile walks

shopping at Walmart

performing/wielding power toward an audience

insular thinking

flying by the seat of my pants