So. Yeah. Been a bit of a basket case for the last little while. It takes its toll. I mean, I’ve been a stress case for my entire life so far. I worry. A lot. About everything and about other people’s everything. There are several lovers, husbands, wives and friends of friends over the years who have absolutely no idea how much they were angrily obsessed over and/or how near to them was wanton retributive destruction… Alternately, I have also sent piles and piles of good vibes into the universe for people going through hard times, administered many hugs, written many words of support…

And, though it is clear from how much love and support came my way last week that the universe is not mocking me for my efforts – I do pay for all of this emotional froufrah and stress. Muscles seize up and I wind up looking like pretzel. I wind up with strange infections – usually but not exclusively of the throat. I lose my ability to concentrate on anything and wind up in parts of town I’ve never seen or forget to pay bills, return library books, or, you know – EAT – which, of course, just further impairs my ability to concentrate. Sometimes an eye will start to twitch or little patches of excema will show up like aliens landed on the field of me with their spacecraft in the night.

The weirdest symptom of stress I have ever experienced, though, is the one I discovered just a few days ago…

All the hairs in my right nostril have turned white.

Yes. You read that right.

My right nostril has aged about 30 years in what I’m imagining is about a month or so. I can’t be certain when it happened as I do not routinely look at my nostrils. They get a gander when I have a cold and have to teach so as to make sure there’s nothing scary in there for others to see. They get a firm eye-stinging tweezerish talking to if a hair seems to not understand the boundaries of its existence. Other than that I have no desire to look up my own nose. So, all I can say is that sometime in the last month those hairs, in that right nostril, all turned white.

Nothing I can do about it, nor do I care very much, though I can’t help thinking there is comedy to be mined from a Q-tip’s worth of “Just for Men” and turning myself into an anosmatic… Hmmmm….

For now, I will try to spin some tale for myself whereby this freakish follicular nasal folly is the result of increased wisdom…

Yeah… That’s right – W.I.S.D.O.M.

MUSING # 1………

Technology likes to mess with me.  I have not yet figured out how to cope.  Landlines. Cell phones. Email.  IM.  Texts. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. Google has this thing they are developing called Google Wave…  I tell you… It will either make it all make sense or be the end of the world as we know it.  The hard part for people whose worst possible nature is marked by insecurity and control freakishness is that one cannot ever guarantee that a message has gotten through.  I am the reigning sovereign of “please let me know you got this…”  But I feel like a needy wench every time I do it…  I love conversation and will have it via many different technologies quite happily – though voice to voice and face to face seem to be a dying art in some ways… It’s just that “con” means “with” in the context of the word conversation and thus I like to be sure I am not doing it alone. Thus, any suggestions as to how to cope with this ongoing “Did it get there, did it not get there?” madness would be most welcome.

MUSING # 2………

I have become convinced on reading a few previously unpublished and rarer works that landed in my lap by Mark Twain – that had he been born a century later he would have been one of the founders of Sesame Street.  Go ahead.  Argue with me.  You know, send me a text message or something.

MUSING # 3………

I have still not read very much Kurt Vonnegut but I think he might be something of an evil genius when it comes to understanding and manipulating even the most hardened and self-contained people.

MUSING # 4………

I have intimated this before but the plain truth of the matter is that I have a magic itunes playlist.  You ask it questions, hit shuffle or “next” on random and it gives you answers.  Sometimes you do not like the answers you get and sometimes you think that the answer has nothing to do with the question you asked.  But then you think about it.  And you can argue with yourself that you are just trying to shoehorn some sort of interpretation into a the space you want it to fit but no. It’s really magic.  It is right and if you are really being honest you realize that the question you asked was not actually the question you were thinking.  You were thinking a scarier question.  A question you’re not sure you even want the answer to and it knew that and it answered that question and you just have to suck it up.  So there.  And if you don’t believe me then you can ask one of my best friends.  She calls me to ask my itunes playlist questions.  And if you don’t believe her and give her any kind of attitude I will kick your ass so hard all the yous in all the alternate universes will stop and go, “What the fuck was that?  My ass hurts…”  because she is the friend who stayed at the hospital the whole time and was so awesome and loving with me and my son that we’re both pretty sure the nurses on duty thought we were lovers…  I truly feel sad for any woman who has not had a friend as good as my friend that they cannot tell the difference between supportive affection and sexual attraction.  Truly.  But whatever.  Not only can she hold her own if you mess with her but, like I said,  octopus ass-kicking – all yous everywhere in the universe, across all dimensions…

MUSING # 5………

I am learning how to write by the inspiration different muses.  This is hard.  It is painful.  Letting go of – or losing muses through the vagaries of time, place, feeling, circumstance – having to find new ones… I am trying to embrace the fun of it…. The newness… I am better at change than I used to be but still challenged by it.  I am hoping for new voices to go with new muses.  So…. Here’s to:  New courage.  New sources of strength. New adventures.  I think I am finally, truly, ready.

___________________________________

P.S.  My son is still doing fabulously!  His father made a breakthrough in cream application so even that is better!  YEY YEY YEY!  I am still coasting on a wave of relief that it’s over… Some images I have to exorcise at some point – demons rattling cages from traumas long past – but I’m not ready to write about anything other than he is strong and beautiful and that I have good, good friends.

P.P.S.  And Happy 4th of July to all the American Folk!!!

Seriously well.  Smooth.  Amazing.

My son astonishes me with his strength…  No one that little has any business being that strong…

He HATES HATES HATES HATES the post-op cream we have to put in his eyes though and it has to be done four *%$#@*&#%# times a day for the next 5 days…  Screaming temper tantrum of high order with full on gonna’ choke tears.  Horrible.

But he’s well.  He’s okay.  He’s great and I am so tired I can barely see.

Thank you to everyone who has been in touch privately or through the blog — I am so grateful to you all and it made it all far more bearable.

Thank You Thank You Thank You!!!!

Now….. All of my options include having a good cry of relief & exhaustion but the question is do I do it over a glass of wine, over a pizza or in the shower before I collapse in bed?

Big Tired Tentacly Hugs from,

The Octopus in Residence

In worry.

And the thing of it is I am actually amazing in a crisis.  The few times I have been there when bad things – of different magnitudes – have happened I am level-headed and practical.  I calm other people down.  I get shit done and fix what can be fixed.  You want me in a crisis with you.  Really.  You do.

But anticipation kills me.  Unknown factors trailing each other one after another ahead of me into unknowns…. Anticipation kills me.  Paralyze me.  Take my breath and words and leave me near-manic under skin so thin a paper cut would spill me out – all of me out all over everything.

The weather has been cool and windy – small storms blow in and blow out into sunshine stabbing eyes not covered by forgotten sunglasses because it was grey when they left the house…

Awkward sentences.  Awkward movements.  Wrists and fingers catch doorframes, chins and calves are pegged by car doors.  Bruises bloom.  Forget all the words to all the songs.

Or the tunes.  Have the words but lost the melody, the beat, the plot, the lot of it.

Gone.

Want nothing more than to lose myself inside something, for something to get lost inside me.  Fill me until there is light in all the dark corners and the worry has been chased away by hope and certainty.

I resent fear.  I resent that I cannot conjure my crisis self when I need her.

And through it all I know it will all be fine.  I know I will be strong when it matters.

Strong in the immediate for the things I face right now and strong in years ahead.

I know it.

I just don’t feel it.

I feel like I am drowning.

Will return shortly.

Sorry to any and all of you two whom I have been either insensitive, unnecessarily whiney or outright bitchy.  Unless you had it coming of course (smile).

And if you are the person who keeps putting “Woman F-cks Octopus” into a search engine you are probably even less fit for human society than I am and should seek help immediately.

I mean I don’t tend to be that judgmental but seriously…  Get some help.

Much love,

The Octopus in Residence

So PLEASE……  Pretty please with sugar on top.

Go HERE to read the whole story.

Or – if you trust me (fools) and do not want to read any kind of fine print  and haven’t already voted for max with all your email addresses then go

HERE TO VOTE

She needs votes PRONTO people!!!

Get to it.
No fear.
Seriously.

What are you still doing here????

Go!!!

And don’t forget to confirm the vote when they email you to do so or it won’t count.

Love & Hugs from
The Octopus in Residence

Found this quote in the Fall 2008 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly: WAYS OF LEARNING.  My dad brought it with him when my folks visited last week and I’ve been trolling through, hitting on things.  Getting stuck in both good ways and bad and this one definitely seemed worth sharing.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned and, however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

– T.H. Huxley, 1877

Should you be curious to know who Huxley is his wiki page tells a bit and shows the adjacent image of him which seems to be its own in-joke featuring his somewhat simian features and a kind of complacent almost Mona Lisa’ish expression…

But – regardless of what he did or did not do or believe in his life and how one might feel about it – the above quote hit me hard.

Hard I say.
Hard. Hard. Hard.

I am largely terrible at doing what I ought to do, when it ought to be done and whether I want to do it or not…  I procrastinate.  I hedge.  I hide behind other people.  I re-read emails and old short stories.  I make unnecessary phone calls when I’m not even in the mood to talk.

I clean something.  Anything.  Everything.

I picture giant ticking clocks above my head, resting on my shoulders and cry.  And cry and cry and cry.  I brainstorm and brainstorm and imagine and fantasize my way in and out of endless ideas that never find purchase.

I mire myself in endless loops of fear.

I embrace paralysis and numbness and eat too many gummy bears.

I have long made the claim that the most difficult thing in life is not GETTING what we want, but KNOWING what we want.  I have since added the notion that it isn’t even really KNOWING what we want so much as ADMITTING what we want that creates obstacles but – somehow – this quote bypasses all of this.

This quote seems to say:

Cut the shit.
Just. Cut. The. Damn. Shit.

You know what’s right. You know what’s needed – required- necessary. You’re clear. You’re ready, it’s ready – TIME itself is ready – just GET TO WORK.

I mean, T.H. Huxley might as well have worked for Nike during the height of the “Just Do It” campaign…

Add to that the depressing truth of how few people actually DO “do it”…  Whatever “it” is…  How right he is that it is the most important lesson and the one hardest and longest to learn and I’m not sure if I’m feeling inspired or depressed right now…

It’s not like I’ve never done the hard thing or done anything in a timely manner.

It’s just that it never feels like enough because it really isn’t ever enough and there really is a clock ticking.

And, frankly, some days there aren’t enough gummy bears in the land.

No breeze.  
Have houseguests.  
Family.  

Sleeping on the new fancy sleeper sofa with air-top mattress.
 Not bad but the outside air
- not the air inside the mattress -
keeps trying to strangle me
if I get too far away from an open window
for too long.  

Don’t like being strangled.  

Bitched about winter all winter and now summer is here
- finally -
and it’s tough.  
Not as bad as this time last year, but close.
Still & Close. 

But the trees look like trees again, and well.

And I can handle heat better since I was exposed
to a lot of it last year and was happy in it.

Happy in any extreme temperature is not normal for me.  
Not usual.  
Unusual.

But I really can take it better than I used to.

Except the strangling part.

The close-in-and-still-and-strangling part.

And I want to write.  
I feel like there are so many things to write about
but I am stuck telling myself
the same stories over and over again.

Like the space for stories in my mind is small and lined with mirrors.

I’m not stuck in the big picture any more.
Just stuck telling the same stories over and over.  
And not just to myself.

Fantasy stories.  
Legends and Fables and ephemera born of memory.

I am distracted.
I am paused.  On hold.
Oscillating madly in a tiny space where it is too hot
and still
and too tiring to oscillate.

Equivocate.
Obfuscate.

Dance.

Too hot to dance.

So, sleep.

Yeah.
Okay.
Sleep.
If I can.

My son played soccer again.  He scored a goal.  aka.  He “winned”…  And he was happy to be on the field and he was upset when soccer ended.

He definitely needs surgery in his eye (there was  brief moment earlier this week where it was again possible he might not).

His surgery will be in the first week of July.

And I’m reasonably confident that it will be okay.  And I know that his brain will be able to rest more once it is not struggling all damn day to try to stabilize and eye and see properly all by itself and a friend of a friend’s very small daughter had an emergency surgery to cut huge polyps of a strain of the HPV virus off of her throat and vocal chords so my son will likely be okay with a routine, outpatient procedure but still.

Fuck.

Just — you know — fuck.