Craven capitulation

I created a Facebook profile. I hate social networking sites. I'm ashamed. It was peer pressure. It was the sense that the bandwagon was about to jump the shark and I felt I should at least try to be along for the ride. I will probably deactivate my account again and sooner or later none of my online friends (who are also my real life friends) will want to be online friends with me anymore (but they will still be my real life friends). I know that it makes people feel good to have the sense of connection with people with whom they have no real connection. I have a real connection to some of the people I'm going to have a fake connection with on Facebook. This is so dumb. But it's the modern way.

Preparation

I've heard people say that you should prepare for the life you want to live. Unsure what that means, I've decided to figure out what life I am preparing for now, and see if there's anything else I think I should be doing.

I seem to be preparing for the life of someone with healthy teeth, gums and bones, moderate strength, endurance and flexibility, no children, and a lifelong dependence on prescription nasal spray. So far this is okay with me. I'm also preparing for the life of a financially independent person by saving for retirement and not buying anything until I can afford it. So far I haven't prepared to be a homeowner, aside from maintaining good credit, but I think that's because if I own a home I want to really love it and so far that opportunity hasn't presented itself. So I'm preparing to be someone who commits to her home. I can usually move in one large car, although I've recently got a nice mattress that I might want to take with me next time I go. In this way I seem to prepare myself to jump ship at a moment's notice; this is not a preparation for a settled life. I have not 'invested' in anything, aside from my IRA - not jewelry, not a good suit, not a great pair of jeans or boots or even a digital camera. I found that when my hard drive died I was sad to have lost some of the songs I'd downloaded and some of the photos, but not too sad.

I've been through therapy and am still working on things, but I am useless in relationships because I try so hard to never cause any problems and to just accept everything. Or I go out with people I don't really like and treat them however I want. So far I am still in the early preparation mode for a successful relationship.

So I'm preparing for a life of good health, few attachments and the possibility of eventual commitment to a place, and even further eventually to a person. I could be making more of an effort in my professional area, but nobody's perfect.

Except my grandma.

I have enough friends

Every time someone bails on me I feel I should be thanking them for doing me a favor, because their presence does me more harm than good and I wouldn't have whatever it takes to push them away. And then I get angry at them for pushing me away, but really I must be angry with myself, right? For not respecting myself enough to flick them from my skin like so many mosquitoes.

Moody!

Good...bad. Good...bad. Baaaaaaaaaad...better.
Today I bailed on a massage job opportunity, mainly because it seemed like a bigger hassle than it was really worth to me. I know I run away from everything that smacks of commitment, anything that impairs my freedom to run away or make plans at the last moment...but I'm torn over whether this is an egregious example of that character flaw.

Stay Frosty

I'm fighting the urge to say this to my brother every time I say goodbye to him. He won't find it anywhere near as funny as I do.

He's frosty but he's cute too - look at him with his nephew:

When it's over

I look forward to change - once it happens I'm not usually thrilled with the result, but there's always the hope that it will be better, and sometimes it is, at least for a little while. But I wonder how I'll feel about death, when it looks like it's coming soon. It's not really change for the person who's dying - it's the end of change. It usually represents a big change for those left behind, though. Both of my paternal grandparents are nearing the end now; my grandmother has been unwell for years now and has made it clear that while she loves all of us, she's ready. But she's stuck in a hospital room attached to oxygen. Her husband of 71 years fell two weeks ago and broke his hip - since then he's been not in his right mind and is now refusing to eat. They are both in their 90s and have lived long and interesting lives, much longer than most. I was sad earlier thinking that when one of them goes the other one will likely not even be aware of it - but then realized it's probably better that way for them. It's only bad for those of us watching.

I don't know what to do about my moods - I'm angry, so angry I'm clenched and shaking, with chest pains, and then once that's over I'm crushed, just completely sad. I have no ambition and no direction, and neither of those things even seems like something I would want. This is why change is attractive to me: something new is always good when you don't have any real drive - when you have nothing to lose you don't really mind leaving things behind and starting fresh, because maybe this is where happiness finally lies ('lie' being the operative word there - you can't find happiness in a new place). But how long can I go on like this - and how long before the end of change starts to seem more attractive than yet more change itself? The drugs don't work.

Sadly, Girls Rule

I've been reading Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities and today was struck by the realization that I've never felt like a woman. I'm 33, financially independent and sexually active and I feel like a girl. From a physical standpoint I know I don't present as a woman: my body isn't particularly womanly, my face is youthful (although my hair is greying), and with today's culture only clothing options being frumpy, manly or girly, most of us choose the third.

Because that's exactly the problem: this culture. Wolf talks about other cultures in which a girl is systematically and often ritualistically taught how to be a woman, and only when she has proven herself to have completed her education is she considered a woman. She is taught not only how to fuck, to please both herself and her partner, not only how to cook or dress, or take care of children, but how to see the world through the filter of grown womanhood; to no longer see herself as a girl.

Not only has American culture failed at this practice since its incipience, but it's only gotten worse in the last quarter century. Now there are no women. Everyone is a girl, no one wants to get old, no one wants to be boring or matronly or unsexy. No one has received any education that would convince them that womanhood does not have to signify any of these things, and can offer wisdom, security and self-possession besides.

I want to be a woman. I think it's time. I want to have confidence in myself as a grown female, and I think it's something we should all be working toward. Whether or not we ever manage to create an ideal, equal society, women will still have a specific role, and even those of us who don't plan to procreate play at least a part of that role. Things will go a lot smoother if we can all stop feeling (and consequently acting, dressing, talking) like insecure 14 year olds in the face of the quarterback's attention or derision. We are not conditioned to see our sexuality as our own, but instead as belonging to the beholders. Lacking a firm sense of adult identity, we look for it in bed and later in marriage. How can society be expected to function properly if half of its membership (the smarter, more reasonable half) suffers from such insecurity and lack of identity? We fight for our causes and do great work at our jobs and still go to bed at night empty if we haven't got anyone there with us. We run companies and raise children and still worry about whether we're attractive or thin or young enough, whether it will be enough to get or keep a man. Of course we want to enjoy comforting and cozy personal lives, but we should be able to enter them as women who know what they want and what they won't put up with, not as girls who are pretty sure they don't want what they're getting but are afraid to do anything about it for fear of being left alone.

We should have been told long ago that society needs us as much as it needs men, and not only as conception vessels. That our individual identities are too important, both to us and the rest of the world, to submerge in an effort to be somehow more lovable, or just acceptable. As much as anything in human existence can be said to matter, we matter. But we have such a hard time thinking we do, and therefore we are just not confident enough to call or consider ourselves women.

Backformation

Linguists use the term backformation to indicate the creation of one part of speech from another when the first should have followed on the second. A personally egregious example of this is the new use of the verb 'to impact.' There has always been verbal meaning to 'impact' - stuffed into a small space with no exit, e.g. molars, tonsils, colons. But the noun 'impact' means 'effect,' and more recently has come to mean 'greater than normal effect.' With an eye toward making an impact, then, marketers and other business jargon users have created another meaning for the verb impact, 'to affect,' and more to the pragmatic point, 'to affect in a big way.'

Backformation is common, and its enemies tend toward pedantic purism; therefore I pause in my resistance to this instance of the phenomenon. I think what I hate most about it is the laziness with which the jargoneers have latched onto it. Much like with 'amazing,' 'make sense,' and 'throw ___ under the bus,' the problem is not with these words and phrases but with the frequency with which they are used, to the exclusion to all other options. I understand comfort with one's vernacular but vocabularic complacency drives me insane.

Bottle it

So in spite of the sedatives I've recently been prescribed (favorite pharmacologist line: "you don't have a history of violence, do you?"), I've felt nervy, jittery, on the edge between collapse and flight all day. My stomach's been dodgy and my hands have occasionally shaken. Were it not such a dangerous high (if taken too often), I would wish that delicious anticipation could be bottled.

Today's anticipation lasted well into the evening, and only slowly stopped bubbling over, as if moved to low heat, once I realized the connection I'd looked forward to was not on the cards for tonight.

The buzz is wearing off at last, helped along no doubt by convenient pharmaceuticals. I can't take it personally; I know him, he hasn't avoided me - he's fallen asleep. I can just hope to see him tomorrow night instead...because no matter what, I have felt it and will do what is required to feel it more, again, more again.

But it seems such a shame to let this effervescence go flat, or evaporate. As though something, sometimes the one thing, delightfully sweet in me has been allowed to fizz and fall out.

Amaze me

We've got to stop using 'amazing' to describe everything from childbirth to a studded belt. And by 'we' I mean you, because I don't do it. I do overuse 'awesome,' however, which started as an ironic throwback to my 80s childhood and remained constant mostly out of vocabularic laziness, so in truth I have no leg to stand on regarding the other 'a' word, but I don't care. Because 'amazing' is more annoying, as are the people who use it. They are the same people who own their own yoga mat bags and buy $30 'eco-friendly' shampoos. You know who you are: financially-solvent (is there any other kind?) hipsters.

Rich, liberally-educated white kids: put your parents' hard-spent cash to use, and deploy those overprepped brains in the service of something important: start looking around for synonyms. There are lots to choose from, all of which carry the same general sense of overstatement of greatness, but that's where we are as as society anyway: nothing can be just 'fine,' or 'good,' or 'acceptable;' employment of such lowballing adjectives smacks somehow of settling, and Americans don't do that. So let's starting making more of an effort to spread the love! 'Cool,' 'great,' 'fantastic,' 'wicked,' 'smart,' 'mental,' 'excellent,' 'very fine,' super' and 'edifying' are all patiently awaiting your attention. Allow 'amazing' to fade away quietly, and one day it too will return to its rightful place amongst underused overstatements, and you'll be the first oldie at the senior living facility to refer to your 'amazing new walker.' Until then: unmaze me.

Back on the Market

I've had it with my job. I'm older than half of my 'superiors,' smarter than 80% and capable of more than scheduling conference calls, taking minutes on those calls and getting yelled at because the agenda that it's not even my job to send out didn't go out in time. So nine months after my last job search began I'm back on the career sites, sometimes feeling the ephemeral and usually misleading excitement of finding a position that seems to fit my qualifications (and doesn't feature the words 'administrative' or 'assistant'), but mostly the familiar dull sense of 'is this all there is' - a job is a job and even if it's something I'm good at, at the end of the day it's likely I'll get fed up and jump ship. Again. Some more.

But in the meantime I'm at least having fun with it. Since I don't have the immediate desperation usually present in my work quests, I can afford to take risks, applying for positions I'll never get and sending the most audacious cover letters that aim to at the very least put a bemused smile on the face of the reader. Having been in the position of reading these mostly pointless documents on more than one occasion, I can attest that a well-written cover, even or especially from a totally unqualified applicant, is much appreciated.

And maybe it will work. But more than likely I'll ditch the the current dead-end with no immediate prospects and spend the next few months trying to persuade a family member to pay for professional school, because this time I'm serious, this time I'm really going to use that degree/certificate/training. Honest.

Greatest Team Ever? Just Enjoy It!

I am so sick of all of this nonsense about whether the 2007 Patriots are the Greatest Team Ever. Leaving aside the fact that changes in physique (and 'supplements') make it impossible to compare individual football players of different eras (cf the whole stinking controversy about baseball doping - it's only because the nerds want to be able to say someone was 'the best ever' and they need to know that no one cheated in order to do that), what is gained from all of this comparison and speculation? You can't make the past fit into the present, and if there are degrees of impossibility then it is even more impossible to make the present fit into the past. What we are witnessing is a great time in football - we are watching a team of excellent players working very well together in a quest to go an entire season without a loss. When their opposition is subpar, their flawless execution is beautiful to watch, and when someone makes a game of it, wondering how they will pull this one out remains exciting. We need to exist in the present and love this moment for what it is worth, and cease the endless chatter about 'greatest ever.' They are the greatest team right now, and we need to sit back and bask in it.