Patriotism

Where to start. I will get running out of the way. I made up last week's failed long run attempt again at the beginning of this week, and I actually made it the full 80 minutes, and it wasn't altogether horrible. I made it 7.4 miles (average per-mile pace of 10:49), and maybe I could have tried to go faster, but I was okay with it. I actually really sort of enjoyed miles four and five, no clue why. Tomorrow I'll run again on the last day of the year.

It's been a holiday season of movies for sure. It's Complicated was funny and cute, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my very favorite person in the movie was John Krasinski (Jim Halpert), who pretty much stole every scene he was in, as I told mo, with his comedic adorableness. I didn't love it the way I loved another Nancy Meyers film, Something's Gotta Give, but I definitely had a good time watching it. Next was Nine. I have to say that I understand why a lot of people would not enjoy this movie and might actually hate it, but I liked it! Mostly I just liked Marion Cotillard, the most beautiful woman on planet earth, as far as I'm concerned. Her part, her first song, and her overall gloriously luminous face were the best things about the movie by a mile. (Hear the whole song here. Just trust me. It was gorgeous.)

Today I went to the big city with my parents and little brother to have a totally delicious lunch of crab gumbo, grilled shrimp, fish, shrimp etouffee, bread pudding with whiskey sauce -- pretty much straight ridiculousness. It was off the charts fantastic. We headed in the rain afterwards to a museum where we watched a new film and visited the exhibits. It was all very stirring, as you can imagine, and I think we all felt a bit raw emotionally on the drive home in the pouring rain. I made the mistake of trying (and failing) to articulate effectively some of my mixed feelings after seeing the movie and visiting the museum. About how it's hard for me to feel pumped up about America and victory while feeling overwhelmed, sick, and sad at the same time. About how everything and everyone now presents it as fact that we did the right thing in bombing Japan, but is that just spin to justify that we did it? Well, this did not go over very well.

I try to remember that my parents were born in 1946 and grew up with a different perspective on this, having parents and siblings who lived through it all. And I know that they think I Just Don't Get It. And I know that I don't. I have tried to get it, though, I really have. I took something like 27 hours of history classes in college, trying to understand. I spent days in Normandy (series of entries starts here) and at the Imperial War Museum in London and the Holocaust Museum in D.C., trying to understand. I dined at the same table as an English D-Day veteran and talked to him about it, trying to understand. I watched and cried through hours upon hours of The War, trying to understand. I have rented untold numbers of WWII documentaries on everything from the Battle of the Bulge (which basically caused me to have an emotional breakdown) to hidden Jewish children and Anne Frank and Hitler's final days to the Berlin Airlift, trying to understand. I was lucky enough to go on a special tour of Pearl Harbor, where I kept on trying to understand. Today was my third visit to this museum. What I'm saying is that I've tried to expose myself to lots of different avenues of understanding. But still. I do not.

It's just impossible for me to process. Maybe it's impossible for anyone to process, and maybe that's why it's all boiled down to we were right, they were wrong, the end. Maybe that's the only way that, as a nation, we could recover and heal from all that happened. My brother tried to tell me that I can't look at it through a modern filter, and maybe he's right. The wars of our lifetime have certainly not been not very clear cut, but back then, maybe things really were a lot more black and white. I guess we had to try to win by any means necessary because losing was too unimaginable. But I swear, I was permanently changed by The Book Thief. All I could think about during the film today when they showed the rubble of a bombed German town, the shell of a burning community, were the people who lived there, who probably were poor and starving and completely effed by the Fuhrer and now dead. And that ultimately it was his fault, not ours. And that ultimately the deaths in Japan were the psycho, un-surrendering emperor's fault, not ours. Right? I just cannot deal with the fact that so many regular, innocent people died who were just living their lives. And I can't even begin to deal with all of the soldiers and military people who died. I mean, I just can't. It actually sits on my chest like a weight, especially after days like today.

And when I tried to explain this, the reaction was that I was simply wrong and we had no choice and we saved the world and that's that. And -- yes. I get that. Of course I recognize that unspeakable horrors and atrocities were being committed that needed to be stopped. Of course I am glad that we won the war and liberated the camps and ended the power of the reigning mega-crazies and appreciate the sacrifices made by millions and recognize, on some level, that we did what we had to do. But it doesn't make me want to stand up and cheer; it makes me feel like throwing up because all I see is the death and destruction. And I think what I did the worst job of explaining today is that while the movie was very cool and riveting, I don't like things that pat America on the back to the extreme about how right we were and are about everything and emphasize that we are the best country ever, because I get icky associations of "enemy" countries patting themselves on the back using the same reasoning about how they're right about everything and are really the best. It is like I am hyper-propaganda-paranoid. IS THAT CRAZY? I think maybe it is. I think this is what sent my family over the edge on the way home. But I can't help it! I think I am in the midst of a personal patriotism crisis! I am just trying to honestly reflect upon this and figure out what it all means. Maybe at the end of the day, part of being alive is being for your own country. Like how you're for the college football team in the town where you were born. Maybe it's just what people are supposed to do.

I think I'll just go watch this and cry some more.

The joy on the other side

For the most part, I've felt pretty brave at 34. Today I marked the halfway through 34 point, so I stopped to reflect a little on this. I've been reading a lot of Anne Lamott lately, both her books and her Salon archives online, and one paragraph really stayed with me.

I think that even though I've felt pretty brave -- being on my own after four years of couplehood, getting my bike and learning to ride it, doing the triathlons -- I'm still fearful of some things. Of taking some steps.

The backstory of this passage is that Anne Lamott's dog Sadie had been attacked by a pit bull on a walk and Anne was nervous about going back out on walks after that.

So I took Sadie for a walk, right past the house where the pit bull lives. What else was I going to do -- get her a treadmill? No, she's a tracker. She lives to walk along sniffing things. And, anyway, you just can't stay holed up. You've only got this one mongrel life, and you don't want to spend it hiding indoors; pretty soon the menace is everywhere and you're left worrying about what's going to rise up out of the basement. You have to wear down the fear. You can't kite yourself up over the places you wish did not exist. You have to suit up, show up, move on through. The good news is that the joy is on the other side of the dark stretch of sidewalk. Also, you can ask someone to walk along with you, someone or something you trust. So I decided to be that person for Sadie and help her take back her joy in the street.

I read that, stopped, and read it again. And then again. And I let the words really sink in.

The thing about Anne Lamott is that she is not just that person for Sadie. She has also, many times, been that person for me. Like now. Again.

This time, she's reminding me that we can't hide from what we're afraid of. And that is something that it never hurts to hear. No matter what it is that we're hiding from, no matter what we are fearing at any given time of our lives -- taking charge of our health, going for what seems like an impossible dream, putting ourselves out there in any number of ways, creativity-wise or relationship-wise or whatever -- we just have to face them -- our problems, our hang-ups, our fears. Whatever is stalling us on whatever path we're trying to take.

As Mother Superior tells Maria in The Sound of Music, "Maria, these walls were not meant to shut out problems. You have to face them. You have to live the life you were born to live." And then Maria later tells Liesl, "You can't use school to escape your problems, you have to face them!" Maria was hiding behind the convent walls, Liesl was hiding behind school, we all hide behind something. I just want to climb my own walls. Don't you want to climb yours?

I told a wise friend recently about something that was making me feel really jittery, frazzled, and self-doubting and wondered if that was a sign I should not do it or if those feelings are just part of Going Through It. As I thought she might, she said she suspected that underneath those feelings, "Some very interesting treasures are buried." Which is pretty much exactly what Anne Lamott was saying about the joy on the other side of the dark stretch of the sidewalk that we just have to walk down sometimes whether we want to or not.

I picture you in the sun

It's now the end of the last day in June. How did we get here? Half the year gone, just like that.

Today dawned at 5:39 a.m. for me when the garbage trucks made their thunderous, window-rattling roll in front of my house. I was reluctant to get up, but I did. I lounged around for a little while, ate a half a banana, and decided to go on a bike ride since I was up anyway. I rode for 7.3 miles, and everything was so still, the water and the air. It was less atrociously hot than usual because of last night's rain. Still muggy and extremely warm, but tolerable. I enjoyed my music and the morning light and the cute dogs being walked and the way people get up earlier and earlier in the summer to exercise just so they can actually do it outside and not fall over and die. I celebrated all of the people out there jogging and biking and walking and thought, "Look at all of us, taking care of ourselves on this summer morning!" I might have been a little delirious. I thought about probably my favorite moment of any bike ride so far, one last weekend when a woman approached me running, recognized my triathlon shirt, and called out the name, greeting me, one triathlete to another, a runner and a biker. It made me feel kind of awesome. I felt like I was in a club of awesomeness. I love that this club is all women.

The day continued with no tears! I made another mixture of fruit and yogurt and added some cereal to the mix and it was delish. I drank my slushy homemade granita. I ate lunch with a girlfriend, a veggie burger and hummus and fries, and bounced her baby on my lap. There were more conversations as the day and afternoon went on and some more tears. But it was okay. My mom says that tears are words you can't say, and I think that is true, but sometimes you have to try to say the words. So I tried. I had a most excellent visit with my mom that was supposed to be just a brief suitcase pick-up and ended up lasting several hours. My mom is a very wise and understanding woman in case I haven't mentioned this one billion times already.

The quote for today is from, as are many things worth knowing in this life, The Sound of Music: "Well, you cry a little. Then you wait for the sun to come out. It always does."

Tears redux

There are times in a woman's life when she inexplicably cries for days on end. And by "a woman's" I mean "mine." The past few days have been like that for me. It all started with Marley and Me and has been going strong ever since. Just flowing, constant tears. In the car. At my desk at work. While sitting on the couch. While scrambling eggs. You name it.

One of the many strange things about keeping a journal online for nearly ten years now (what?) is the easy access to your emotional archives. Even stranger is when you notice patterns from year to year. And still even stranger is when you think back to another crying jag and realize it was happening two years ago, exactly, to the day.

Maybe it's The Book Thief. I suspected two years ago that it was the culprit of the beginning of the tears, and lo and behold, I am smack in the middle of it again. I don't think that's solely it, though.

Here are some strategies I am going to employ, starting tonight, to stop these tears from flowing:

(1) Cease and desist, immediately, listening to The Last Five Years on repeat. Stop pretending you can hear Norbert Leo Butz sing these heartbreaking songs and hold it together even on a good day, especially when the violin kicks in at about 3:40 in this clip. Turn your back on this devastating musical for a while and instead watch him as the emcee in Cabaret.

(2) Look forward all day to going on a swim because you can't cry underwater and then do not freak out when the pool is closed because it's thundering for the first time in weeks. Be happy because your grass is dying and all of the plants and farmers need the rain desperately. Come home and pop in Jillian Michaels instead and don't start crying when she says "Just a couple more!" during the squats/bicep curls and you know it's an evil lie because it's really eight more. Just suck it up and feel strong.

(3) Whip up an everything left in the kitchen dinner of quinoa topped with farmer's market zucchini, frozen peas, almond slivers, and about a million cloves of fresh garlic with garam masala and olive oil. Eat it.

(4) Have some plain yogurt with blueberries and banana slices drizzled with a little agave nectar for dessert.

(5) Watch your cat lick her paw and wash her nose with it because this is cute no matter how many times you see her do it.

(6) Read David Sedaris, any David Sedaris.

Or maybe I should stop trying to stop the tears. Maybe the tears are a healthy thing. Maybe they are a delayed reaction to major life changes, to actions of others and actions of my own that I have not dealt with even though I totally thought I had. It is very strange how you can coast along feeling perfectly at peace about something and then you get shaken up and bam. Tears.

Many kind readers out there have left comments I haven't published over the past several months wondering about my relationship status. Though it was obvious in this space that I was with the same person for a long time, I never felt right about posting too much here about the relationship and thus haven't felt right about posting about its end. But there it is, and I will leave it at this: even if it's for the most reasonable reasons in the world, and even if you square your shoulders and know it's for the best, and even if you part friends and part with love (which, let's face it, is a miracle never experienced by the likes of me until this time around), breaking up with someone you love sucks a whole lot.

Maybe this teary interlude is due to hormones. Maybe it's extended bike rides and swims when I can't avoid the quiet space in my head. Maybe it's the busy season at work screeching to an abrupt stop. Maybe it's heat so swelteringly oppressive that it's impossible to keep up defenses against it. Maybe it's a million different things. And maybe six months or so is a sensible amount of time in which to have stopped crying. Or maybe, if you're me, it's when you really get started.

And maybe it will stop when I see my sister soon. And maybe all I need to do is go see The Hangover and laugh and think about how much I enjoy Andy Bernard in general and when my little brother does that thing with his hand, like marking the notes in the air, while singing when imitating Andy Bernard doing his musical notes from Here Comes Treble. Maybe all I need to do is think about how happy my older brother is right now and how blessed I am to have parents who just celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and about friends who are having their own happy milestones. Maybe I should think about how much fun it was to get gelato with my girlfriend yesterday and her precious girls I love so much. Maybe I just need to remember that I've tried to be as honest as I can with myself and everyone else during this emotional madness, even when it's been hard, and that's something.

In Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler says, "The rain on my car is a baptism." ("The new me, Ice Man, Power Lloyd, my assault on the world begins now.") And not to be all metaphorically barfy, but maybe this much-needed rain tonight and these sudden tears are a baptism. Rebirth, starting anew, and all that jazz. On that note, what better song is there to listen to right now as the rain pours and the thunder and lightning pound the sky than Patty Griffin's "Rain"? I sure can't think of one.

Weird.

It's unfortunate but unavoidable that pretty much the most traumatic time of my life coincided with my birthday, so every time a birthday rolls around, I can't help but feel a little twinge and remember that time. It feels like a lifetime ago, in a way. Entries from that time are offline now, but I can still go back and read them. Which I don't, normally, except that I just did. I'm not sure why. Reading those entries brings back how I was so unspeakably devastated and sad and functioning so minimally. I look back and wonder if people thought I was totally nuts. Apparently all I did was cry and walk around in a fugue state, all day, every day, and all night long. I can't believe I put all of that rawness on the internet, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Showing my craziness made me feel healthier. It's a mystery.

More than my shock and sorrow at the time, I remember the faces of my friends, my parents, and my siblings. I remember the flowers and gifts and and books and music people sent me and the notes people wrote me, the prayers they said for me, the walks they took with me. I remember how my loved ones gathered on the night I was supposed to get married and lit sparklers with me. I remember how, even though clearly no one DIED, it was something hard and sad for me, and people recognized that and helped me get through it. I will always be so grateful for that. I hope I can be to them what they were to me in that sadness, should they ever feel so sad.

I look back on the past six years, from that point when my life took a sudden turn from the direction in which I believed with all my heart it was going, and see mostly good things. I still have a job I'm very lucky to have, maybe luckier than ever, considering the sad state of economic affairs. I still have these four animals who drive me berserk but whom I love. I spent four years with someone wonderful. My family and friends are still healthy and with me, babies have been born whom I adore, my sister married someone beyond fantastic, and my best friend is having T*W*I*N*S! I wish I could throw some confetti around those letters to show how spastically overjoyed I am about this development. It feels both like a huge span of time and just a heartbeat between 28 and 34, and I definitely have some clearer visions for what I want out of life than I did then. In another six years, I will be forty. My mom had four kids at the age of forty. Jeez! Can't really process that ... moving on. This entry really has no point. Sometimes I feel a little nostalgic is all I'm saying, even nostalgic for times of heinousness, because those times are so f-ing formative in our lives.

Now I'm going to feed the insistently meowing Marley before before her vocal chords disintegrate forever. And I am going slap down some Patty Griffin lyrics, because lately I'm all about Patty Griffin. Seriously -- where has she been all my life?

May you dream you are dreaming, in a warm soft bed
And may the voices inside you that fill you with dread
Make the sound of thousands of angels instead
Tonight where you might be laying your head

I wish you well
On your way to the wishing well
Swinging off of those gates of hell
But I can tell how hard you're trying

I still have this secret hope
Sometimes all we do is cope
Somewhere on the steepest slope
There's an endless rope
And nobody's crying
Nobody's crying
Nobody's crying

Yes, we can.

This morning after unsuccessfully attempting to get some news about Ike (no internet and no cable at home post-Gustav makes that tough), B. and I decided to head to the store. First we stopped for coffee; he waited in the car. I walked into the coffee shop wearing this Obama shirt. I made conversation with a couple of employees and served myself a large half-cafe au lait, half-hot chocolate, paid for it, and went to the little coffee counter to mix my drink, put the top on the cup, and so forth. It was a pleasant morning so far, Ike worries notwithstanding. There were three men sitting at the table adjacent to the coffee counter.

"Barack Obama is good, huh?" one of them asked. I smiled, thinking they were just making friendly conversation with a stranger, as people around here, myself included, are wont to do. "Yes, I think so," I replied.

"I don't think he's good," he said. "Barack Obama scares the shit out of me." He said this is a loud, angry voice. I blinked for a moment, still smiling, and said, "Well, sir, this is America. We can disagree, and it's okay." I was very conscious about being as cordial and polite as possible, partly because I am brainwashed by Southern etiquette to respect my elders but mostly because I was not about to cop a 'tude while wearing a Barack Obama shirt. As dumb as it might sound, I am always very conscious about not displaying assholish behavior in public (impatience in Wal-Mart lines, honking my car horn at people who don't know how to do the four-way stop thing at our many still-powerless stop lights, etc.) when wearing one of my Obama shirts. I want to be a good ambassador in whatever small way I can. So I gave what I thought was a diplomatic, polite answer and prepared to be on my way.

Then he said, "You're not welcome in here." On the inside, I did a double take. Surely he could not have said that.

"I'm sorry," I said before I could stop myself, still smiling and polite, "Did you say I'm 'not welcome in here?'" I could feel my face start to get red and my hand start to shake as I stirred my coffee, but I tried to be steady. He and his friends hemmed and hawed and he denied saying it, still without wiping the scowl from his face, but it was in a way where he clearly had and it was obvious. I said, steeling that smile on my face with all the force I had within, "I'm just trying to get coffee here."

"Obama!" another man at the table sneered. "He's one step away from communism!" I stirred my coffee determinedly.

Then I said, "Y"all have a great day. It's been really nice talking to you," and though I wanted to say it sarcastically, I tried to say it nicely. I was just determined to be nice. I did not want them to see that they had upset me, and I surely did not want to reveal the bitchface that was now boiling beneath the surface. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, but I just felt it was the best call I could make at the time.

As I turned and walked out, I felt the tears springing to my eyes and said a fast goodbye to the employee I normally would have hugged and chatted with a little longer. He looked a little confused and worried but I rushed to the car, by which point I was fully crying. B. was alarmed and promptly wanted to go back inside and "talk to them" (punch them out). But I figured that could have led to nothing good, so I just bawled in the parking lot for a few minutes to the point where I began sweating profusely and then composed myself. He said I need to get in touch with my mean side, but I said I couldn't, not when wearing my Obama shirt.

Here is the thing: I am very familiar with the playful, friendly (if often condescending) way that older men joke around with and rib younger women. It happens all the time, particularly in my work environment and just with men I encounter all the time in every day life. Normally I will go along with it even if it's sexist and rude because it's usually in a playful way and in a way that is so ingrained in our society that it feels easy to roll my eyes and let it roll off my back.

This was not that kind of encounter. It isn't even so much what they said as the way they said it. They weren't doing the "Ah, the folly of youth!" thing. These men weren't smiling, they weren't friendly, and they weren't doing that harmless joking/non-sexual sort of flirting that men of a certain age do with women of a certain age. They were acting with outright contempt. They were sneering. I'd say they were even snarling. They were like three mean, hateful, angry snakes. Their behavior was almost cartoonish. They were like villains in a cartoon, except they were right there in real life. It's shocking to me now, a few hours later, to think about the disgusted looks on their faces. The way they looked at me, like I was disgusting. Because of the name of the man on my shirt.

I called my mom, who made me feel much, much better. She wisely pointed out that confrontation is a risk you take when you wear a shirt advertising a candidate or a religion or whatever. She said, "I'd be taking a risk wearing a shirt with something about the Catholic church." Correct, and duly noted. She also said that it was three against one and they felt like they had the power in the situation because they were three older men and I was one younger woman. She said that made them feel "macho and cool" but that alone, each is "probably a little weenie." (These are direct quotes. I love the way my mother talks sometimes.) She said lots of people hate Obama and "some people hate George Bush." I said, "I really hate George Bush, Mom. I am counting the days until he leaves office. But I would never attack a stranger in public for wearing a Bush shirt!"

She said, "It was an attack. You were attacked for being who you are. They might as well have punched you in the stomach." I could have kissed her for saying that, for understanding that. She said there are plenty of McCain supporters who would "never, ever behave that way."

She said, "I think we should pray. Lord, we know you love those men -- even though they are an insult to humanity. Please help us not to let them exert any more power over us." I wish I could remember more of what she said, because it was truly classic. After this wisdom and prayerfulness, she said, "I really wish I could just get a gun and shoot them." I wanted to say, "Well, Mom, if the election goes your way ..." but I didn't. As for my dad, he asked me, "Who were they? What did they look like? Had you ever seen them before? Do you think they're regulars?" I think he wanted to go start a fight! It was very nice and dadly. Then he sighed and said, "They're idiots. We should pray for them." In case I haven't mentioned it lately, I love my parents a lot.

It was a small encounter, but it feels so much bigger to me. I think I sobbed both immediately following and when relating the story to my mother for many reasons. Because of the way that men treat women. Because I hated myself a little for not standing up for Obama and for myself. Because of the way white people treat black people and treat anyone who plans to vote for a black man. Because Obama "scares" people so much that they HATE him. What is scary about Barack Obama? I will never understand this. Because they actually behaved that way to a woman trying her hardest through gritted teeth to treat them with respect and fight back the tears at the coffee counter of the oldest, friendliest coffee shop in town, a place she's come with her family her whole life, a place where she's never felt anything but happy, welcomed, and safe and that they would actually mutter the words, "You are not welcome here." WTF-ing F? Seriously? I have made plenty of cracks about McCain and Palin, but I don't feel actual, visceral hate for them. (Wish I could say the same thing about GWB ... cannot.)

Most of all, I think I sobbed because it hit me like a ton of bricks that if these men's hate is multiplied by the thousands and millions that Obama could really, truly lose. And more than being treated rudely by a trio of assholes, more than living in a world where men are dickheads to women just because they think they can be, that is what truly breaks my heart about this situation. If they could muster up that much hate in a coffee shop while surrounded by the smell of beignets and the joyous sight of children practically inhaling powdered sugar -- what are people in the rest of America doing? What will they be able to pull off on November 4? I think that love is stronger than hate. If love were the deciding factor, I think the people who believe in Obama could love him right into office. That's how strong my love feels today.

Processing

It's hard to know where to start talking about this week. I'll start with flashes of memory: the sound of the wind on Monday afternoon as the hurricane passed through, sounding like an ear-splitting whistle or a woman screaming, for hours. The sight of my roof shingles strewn across multiple yards. Walking the dogs with my cousin through the neighborhood puddles. Eating shrimp and chicken breasts saved from a powerless freezer by my cousin, who cooked them over a camp stove in the backyard. Putting pots down under one ceiling leak, then a second, then a third. Watching leaks that were drips turn into leaks that looked like a stream from a running faucet. Watching the mold appear on the ceiling in one place, then two, then three. Smelling the mold as the stench set in. Seeing my dad pull up my driveway in the rain and hold out a ten-pound bag of dry ice that he found heaven knows where for me to put in an ice chest. Stepping in mid-calf-deep water in my Tevas while splashing through my backyard picking up shingles. Lying in bed sweating because there's only so much air a small battery-operated fan can produce. Laughing deliriously with my cousin and B. Running down the driveway in my pajamas in the pitch darkness and rain to tell a truck full of very tired-looking firemen carrying hoses up my driveway at two in the morning that my smoke alarm was set off by the water flowing from the monitored smoke alarm in the ceiling and that there was no actual fire. Watching my cousin and B. disappear into my dark attic to survey the damage. Watching B. climb onto the roof to put up a tarp with bricks from my dad's house while the dark clouds swirled behind him just before it started storming again. Hearing about how my dad fixed his phone line by climbing into a ditch with twist ties and a plastic bag. (Still not sure how he did that.) Seeing how excited my mom was to have a phone line again.

I'm not saying any of this to complain. I am better off than many people, most people even. It has occurred to me as I've begun to peek my nose past my cellphone, which was my main communication for a few days, that there's a lack of understanding beyond this state about what has happened here. I'm as happy as everyone else that the waters did not flow through New Orleans this time. But that doesn't mean there hasn't been water and devastation. I have friends in this city who have been told as recently as today that the best case scenario for their power being restored is 21 days or more. Living without power might be better than being flooded (as many have been) or crushed by trees (which many, many, many, MANY homes and businesses have been and which actual PEOPLE have been) or dead (not sure of today's count, but yesterday it was 19 in this state), but it sure is miserable, especially for old people and sick people and little babies and kids. And it sure makes it hard to dry out homes if there's no cool air circulating and it's topping 90 degrees every day. My relatives would like to go home, but you can't go home when you live in a city where you can't drink your water or flush your toilet and have been told you won't be able to for the next month.

I guess I just want people to understand. Kids are out of school. People are not going to work. Small businesses are losing income and throwing out tons of spoiled food and products. People are waiting for hours for gas -- my cousin got to the gas station at 7 a.m. yesterday and did not fill up until 10 a.m. Three hours in a gas line. Few stores are open. The line just to set foot in Walmart? Around the entire circumference of the building. I've stopped counting the trees I've seen that have cut through houses because they are everywhere you look. Both houses next-door to my parents' house and the house across the street from them all have holes in the roofs. It just kind of freaks you out to realize it could have been you and then it makes you feel really sort of guilty to feel such deep relief that it was someone else. I am sort of an emotional basketcase over three leaks and mold and a messed up roof. Which is sort of unacceptably self-indulgent, and I am working on it. And I GOT MY POWER BACK. Making me one of 25% of the city's people who have power right now, 5 days after the storm. I am so thankful for that it makes me want to fall to my knees and weep.

Meanwhile, I've missed the entire Republican National Convention, not that I think I could have stomached watching it anyway, and I'm now reading things like this that are just about pushing me over the edge of sanity. Wake up, voters. Please, please, please let's all be awake and pay attention and not sit back and let this happen. It is terrifying me and making me feel like puking.

I don't know what else to say. I am worried about the people of my state and of my country. I want us all to come to our senses and be okay.

Scenes from my neighborhood:

Some things I know

Here are some things that I know:

I want Barack Obama to be our next president.

That he won the state where my sister spent Super Tuesday standing on corners with a sign and pounding the pavement and knocking on doors makes me immeasurably proud.

That it would be wrong for me to miss work at such a busy time to attend his visit tomorrow morning makes me unbelievably sad and has made me weep more than once today.

I had a picture of Barack Obama hanging on my office wall for over a year, and I felt like I should take it down a few days ago because we're not supposed to advertise such opinions there. Which bums me out and makes me mad. I think it's even made me afraid to talk about it on my own personal website. Which is just ridiculous and it's stopping now. It should have stopped a long time ago.

My vote for Kerry was my vote against Bush. I never felt any kind of love for Kerry or any deep belief that he could save us from ourselves. He just wasn't Bush and that was enough for me. But now I feel so much love for Obama, and I believe in him so intensely, and I feel like if he doesn't make it, it's going to leave a trail of broken hearts all throughout this country, my own included.

I have no idea what is going to happen. I know I will be voting in my state's primary on Saturday and for whom I'll be casting my vote. Mine is just one little opinion, mine is just one little belief, but it feels huge inside me right now.

I've watched this video at least a dozen times, and I've cried big honking tears every time. I sent it to my mother, who is a Republican because she is pro-life, really, I think is the real reason; she was zealously, obsessively into politics during Clinton's final term but has stepped back the past few years and focused more on spiritual matters; she told me recently that thinking of Hillary as president makes her "sick to her stomach." She is one of those people who would never, ever, ever vote for Hillary under any circumstances, but I think she would consider voting Democrat if that Democrat were Barack Obama. Case in point, I sent her this video even though as a rule we do not, cannot discuss politics, and she wrote back, "What a GREAT speech!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" with all those explanation points. It made me feel close to my mom. I truly think that if Obama were the candidate, she would at least stop and think about him as an option before voting in a knee-jerk manner along party lines. I feel like he could really speak to her heart. But I worry there are many like her who would cast a vote that would in essence be a vote against Hillary. I think a lot of people's dislike of her dates back to 1992 or even before then and that's a long time to dislike someone. That would be the message they'd send with their vote for the Republican candidate -- no Hillary, no way -- just like my vote was not really for Kerry but against Bush. And I don't really see people lining up to vote against Barack Obama in the same way. You know what I mean? I am no political strategist but this is what my instinct tells me. And I swear I believe that my parents are both big bleeding liberals deep down inside. I do not hate Hillary, and as my sister and I discussed in one of our many rapid-fire e-mails about this, it will not take long for us to get behind her if she's the nominee. But. But.

Obama makes me feel like I have a string of explanation points in my heart. I love him, and I believe in him. I think that if he were our president, the world might stop hating us so much and might even love us a little bit again. Maybe that is simplistic and maybe that is naïve. But I really believe it.

Boys & girls

Last night, B. and I watched Friday Night Lights, and Smash's little sister was receiving obscene phone calls from the complete jerks who were harassing her at the movies in last week's episode. And it made me remember something that I hadn't thought about in a long time.

I'm not sure how old I was ... I think it was sometime in 6th, 7th, or 8th grade. I woke up one morning and there was an envelope with my name written on it taped to the outside of my bedroom window. I opened it, and it had some rude, foul things written in it. The main thing I remember is that it asked me to circle my lingerie size and leave the note out for the sender to retrieve. I remember that it freaked me out, and I threw it away. Some time later -- not sure how long -- I got another note. For this one, I remember that my parents were out of town and the older sister of my older brother's friend was staying with us. She was a really nice woman, and we loved her. I remember she always smelled really good. Anyway, I got another note and this one had something about wanting to do something that rhymes with top my ferry. And I was SO completely mortified and horrified and I don't even remember if I knew what that meant. I don't think I did, actually. At least not in those terms. I remember sobbing and sobbing and the babysitter holding me and telling me it was okay and not to be scared. I remember saying through bawling hiccups that it was probably just some stupid boys from the bus, several of whom lived in my neighborhood and would have been in walking distance or biking distance from my window.

I know that it was probably one or more of them, and I knew that then, and that the notes were harmless, but I still remember being so upset and so scared by them. I did not like the idea of someone talking to me like that, thinking of me like that, even if they were just being stupid and playing a joke. Maybe to them it was funny, but to me it was so mean. And though we had our afterschool arguments and dramas on the bus, I thought that we were all friends at heart and that it was mean to do something like that to a friend. Maybe somewhere deep down I worried that it wasn't one of them and that it was some grown-up weirdo, but I don't think I allowed myself to entertain that possibility. After all, only the boys on the bus would know my house and know which window was mine and all that jazz, right?

Anyway, the minute I remembered these notes last night while watching Smash's sister cry over those mean phone calls, I started crying, too. And I cried for Smash's sister and for me and for all the little girls who are taunted, harassed, bothered, and scared by mean little boys or big boys who might think they're being funny but who are really just being awful. I've been thinking about it all day, and it just makes me so angry, thinking about how in 2008 we still live in a society where boys being lewd and disgusting to girls is something that happens and makes girls cry. And it makes me feel frustrated that the way this makes girls feel is something that men will never be able to understand, even the best men.

I never found out who left those notes on my window. I ended up going out later in life with one of the neighborhood boys, and I wish I'd thought to ask him if he knew anything about it. I remember knowing then that the notes weren't in his handwriting and trusting that he was my friend and would not treat me that way. I remember not recognizing the handwriting at all. Again, I know they were just jokes, and I know they were put there by kids, but they were still gross and made me feel so heartbroken and terrified inside. I don't know if I can explain it, really.

I don't really have anything else to say about it. Except that I understand why Smash wanted to smash those boys' faces in. I hope my brother wanted to do the same thing for me.

Thoughts

I have now watched Fever Pitch on FX two times in two days. I first watched this movie on an airplane and liked it well enough then, but apparently I like it more each time I see it. If it's on tomorrow, by God, I'll probably watch it again.

Now as I wait for Pushing Daisies, I'm watching Designing Women, which markedly declined with the arrival of these two women in place of Charlene and Suzanne. Whoever they are. Anthony is giving a tearful speech to Julia, accompanied by slow piano music, about hard it is when women clutch their purses when he walks down the street. I much more enjoyed fiery moments like when Julia yelled at that horrible woman who came to show her home on the historic homes tour. And of course when she yelled at that beauty queen about the night that the lights went out in Georgia.

I don't even know what to say. I finished The Pigman for the fiftieth time, and mostly it just made me sad.

You know how they have "unexplained" versions of illnesses? Like my sister knows a girl who suddently went deaf in one ear one day. Boom. Unexplained deafness. Do you think there is such a thing as unexplained sadness? Maybe I am sad because I feel heavy and bulbous. Maybe I am sad because I got a C on a midterm in a class I've worked really hard in. Maybe I am sad because Daisy (spoiler-coded for the squeamish) somehow tore her dewclaw off and all that's left is a tiny bloody stump and I don't know what to do about it. Maybe I am sad because I don't know why I am working so hard in these classes when getting an actual degree will take years upon years and I don't even know why I want to get it. Maybe I am sad because all my boyfriend and I ever do in our "spare" time anymore is study. Well, I occasionally spend entire nights on the couch eating homemade stir fry with vegetables and brown rice and watching TV, just like always, but otherwise: studying. I don't know why I am sad. It is unexplained sadness. But it's sadness all the same.

How cute and wonderful is Pushing Daisies? It's like its makers knew just the TV show I needed this fall. And Barbara Barrie's name just appeared in the opening credits! Which is always a good thing. I loved her on Double Trouble, I loved her as Rick Sammler's mom on Once and Again, and I'm sure I'll love her on this.

What else is there to say about TV? I am most delighted that about the turn that Mark's storyline is taking on Ugly Betty, and any upcoming episode of it that features an outing to a Broadway show is just fine by me.

Movies I want to see: August Rush, Gone Baby Gone, The Darjeeling Limited, and Dan in Real Life, which I just found out has Norbert Leo Butz in it, for God's sake. And I love Juliette Binoche always. And I just found the clip of her talking about The English Patient on Inside the Actors Studio -- LOVE HER. (I dare tears not to prickle into your eyes almost two minutes into that clip.)

I am so proud of my friend Elizabeth as the opening night of her play approaches. She is a brave and talented woman.

Noted and cherished

I haven't been able to sit down and write about Madeleine L'Engle's death because every time I think about it I start crying. I tried to tell my mom about it on the phone the other night and I could barely get the words out. It is bizarre. But I really can't think of another artist who has touched me more deeply or for longer. I read my favorite books of hers over and over, and they are always both familiar and new. I just re-read Many Waters recently, and I've been itching to re-read A Ring of Endless Light, but the pages are literally falling out and it's not an easy thing to do, practically speaking.

I don't remember when I first started reading her. I know my friend read her first. I remember trying to read A Wrinkle in Time in grade school because a boy in my class was reading it and I did not have the faintest clue what was going on and I put it down. It was so far over my head at that point. This was maybe like third or fourth grade if my memory of what classroom I remember reading him in serves me. Anyway, I can only guess that I first read it in 7th or 8th grade? Friends who were there, do you have any memory of this? I know I was deeply entrenched in the Murry books in early high school. And then came A Ring of Endless Light, which I could not possibly love more and which fully made me believe that if I called to the dolphins in the Gulf when we were on summer vacation, and even as a grown-up staring at any big blue sea, they would come. I chose A Swiftly Tilting Planet in an adolescent literature class as the book to present that I thought everyone should read. For my master's project, I gave my subject the pseudonym Meg. I called her school Murry Middle School. I gave the girl A Ring of Endless Light when it was all over because she helped me so much with my paper, and I wanted to help her in return by giving her Vicky Austin.

I don't even really know what to say. These books have moved me, shaped me, in many ways raised me. The characters are almost like real people to me. And Glimpses of Grace has provided solace to me more times than I can even count. I consider her one of the great writers and great women of our time. I am so deeply sad that she will never write anything again. But I am so immensely grateful that through her writing she will live on. Kids will be picking up A Wrinkle in Time forever. It will probably end up on the banned books list over and over again. I think it's so ridiculous for that book to be challenged by religious groups when Madeleine L'Engle, much like Anne Lamott in my mind, is one of the most inspiring Christians ever to walk on the earth. It is such a blatant case of people jumping to ban something because it has witches in it without possibly having read it. Ridiculous. I can't even get started on this topic because it makes me so damn mad. Madeleine L'Engle was so tough, though. She was so funny and sarcastic and brilliant and strong. I read once that an astronaut carried A Wrinkle in Time into space during a mission because it was reading the book as a child that sparked her interest in astrophysics before women were allowed to enter the space program. Is that not the most awesome thing you have ever heard? (In trying to look up the astronaut's name, I just came across this. I can't wait to listen to it.)

I love A Wrinkle in Time mostly because of the way Meg loves Charles Wallace, the treasure of her heart, so fiercely that she loves him back into being himself. I love A Wind in the Door mostly because of what Proginoskes does in the end and also because reading it made me think for the first time about how everyone and everything are connected and because thinking about them being inside the farandolae inside the mitochondria was largely why I ended up really enjoying high school biology. I love A Swiftly Tilting Planet - maybe my favorite of the three - because of the awesome mythology of Charles Wallace moving through history within other people. I love the names in that book, I love the rune, I love the story of Calvin's mom, I love the unicorn, I love the changing of the might-have-beens, I love the whole damn thing. I memorized the rune as a kid and it's still stuck in my brain the way things you memorize as a kid are. I love Many Waters because Sandy and Dennys were finally given something to do other than grow vegetables. I love A Ring of Endless Light so much that I can't even put it into words. I love Vicky's relationship with her grandfather. I love Adam Eddington. I love Basil and Norberta and Njord. And I've read so many of her other novels but I love those the best. Some of my favorite copies of her books that I've collected include A Wrinkle in Time in both hardcover and paperback with this cover and an ancient copy of And Both Were Young. I have whole shelves of her books, fiction and nonfiction, and I love them.

I loved her. She opened whole worlds and universes for me. She made my imagination come alive. I am having trouble articulating what her books mean to me, what she has always meant to me. So I will let Vicky Austin say it for me.

The earth will never be the same again.
Rock, water, tree, iron share this grief
As distant stars participate in pain.
A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,
A dolphin death, O this particular loss
Is Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried,
If this small one was tossed away as dross,
The very galaxies then would have lied.
How shall we sing our love's song now
In this strange land where all are born to die?
Each tree and leaf and star show how
The universe is part of this one cry,
That every life is noted and cherished,
And nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

Light

(This entry talks a little about The Road. I don’t consider what I say to be mega-spoilery – it’s nothing you wouldn’t gather quickly when starting the book or read in reviews, probably – but if you haven’t read it and are super spoiler-averse, you might want to skip it.)

There’s been a lot of crying these days. It seems to come and go. I cried at the end of The Road and The Lives of Others. I’ve cried during every episode we’ve watched so far of Friday Night Lights on DVD. I cried during multiple viewings of Paul Potts (thanks, Sally, for that wonderful link). I cried last night before going to sleep while trying to explain to B. how I want to try to spread light in the world.

I know that sounds stupid. But I’ve been thinking about The Road. Mostly about how the man and the boy could not ever stop to help anyone else. They couldn’t share food they needed to live. They might be attacked by the person asking for help. They had to be selfish to stay alive. Helping others meant hurting and possibly killing themselves.

I pass people asking for money at a certain stoplight I pass twice a day. They hold tattered cardboard signs that say they’re hungry and that they need money for food. Their clothes are torn and filthy. They are thin, and their skin shows the sign of exposure and sun. And they stand right outside my car window holding the signs while I sit at the red light and I just look away. And I don’t know why I do that. In the past, like years ago, I would sometimes drive straight to McDonald’s and buy a supersized meal deal and bring it to the person. I thought somehow that would help them more than a dollar. But sooner or later I just stopped giving anything at all. Maybe because seeing them day after day after day has desensitized me altogether. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. But yesterday something dawned on me and that is that it certainly does not hurt me to give one of these men or women a dollar. It does not mean I will go without. It would not endanger my own life like it would have the man’s or the boy’s in The Road. And maybe it would really help that person. I wonder if it is really up to me to decide what they need the money for. Do they want it to buy drugs or alcohol or cigarettes? Do they want it to buy lunch? An Icee? Shoes? How the hell am I to know, and who am I to judge them?

I want to be a more giving person.

Since January, I have held in my heart the story of a woman who was killed pre-dawn just outside her own home. I keep returning to the website set up in her honor – to see if her killer has been caught, to look at pictures of her and her husband and their baby and their pot-bellied pig. I never met them or saw them in real life, and I hope it is not intrusive that I have gone to the site and peeked in on the remembrances of her and tributes to her. I am so moved by the outpouring of love that has been shown on that website for her and her family. And the recurring theme, it seems, is that everyone saw her as a burst of light in the world. And I hope it does not seem like I am trivializing a stranger’s life or trying to boil her life down into some kind of simplistic nutshell. But what I take from reading about her and learning about her in whatever limited way something like a website can portray is that she was the sort of person I would like to be. Someone who welcomes people who need welcoming, feeds people who need to be fed, rebuilds communities that needs to be rebuilt, creates what needs to be created, loves life with all of her being.

The other day after work it was thundering and cloudy and suddenly not swelteringly hot, so I plopped down on my back patio after getting home from work and just felt the thunder roll in and called for my dog. Unbeknownst to me, B. was standing in the open doorway behind me taking photos. I have the luxury of sitting in my backyard calling for my dog with my nice boyfriend waiting inside after coming home from my job that pays me enough money to live comfortably. I feel like I should appreciate that more and be more of a force for good and light in the world. I don’t know how. But I know I want to try. In small ways or big ways, doesn’t it just matter that we try?

Thoughts before midnight

Tonight my little brother and I drove to our aunt's 70th birthday party. It took us way longer each way than it was supposed to because both times we took the wrong route. It took, like, ridiculously longer that it was supposed to. We had been driving for an hour or more when we came to the sign that said we had 61 miles left -- the trip is only supposed to take an hour and 20 minutes -- and we burst out laughing because it was all that we could do. We passed towns we'd never even heard of. It was surreal. I thought we were driving to the ends of the earth.

Here are some songs we sang to pass the time, either along with a CD or the radio. I just want to write them down so I will remember.

--The first CD of the Rent soundtrack (original Broadway cast). He went to see Les Miserables on Broadway recently, after Daphne Rubin Vega had left, and he said, "If I would have had to hear her sing 'I Dreamed a Dream,' I think I would have died."

--"Vogue" by Madonna.

--"Don't Take the Girl" by Tim McGraw.

--"Hold On" by Wilson Phillips.

Already I am forgetting all of the songs. It was pretty great to see our cousins, aunts, uncle, and so forth. My sister wanted to come but was felled by a horrid cold that I think was brought on by her body's revolt of being driven from New York city to here on very little sleep. Hopefully she is sleeping soundly and will feel better tomorrow because she surely needs to go out for a pizza bagel. Soon she will be out of this country and far too far away from me. I am choosing to ignore that at the moment.

I am sleepy but awake. Overwhelmed with uncertainty following a school orientation about what the hell I am doing taking these graduate classes and what it would really mean to change careers at this point in my life when I don't even know if I want to? What? The hell? Is the color? Of my freaking parachute? Feeling so amused by my little brother with whom I have so much utter fun. Feeling moved by all of the old photographs at my aunt's house and awash with memories of my late uncle standing over the stove making really good baked beans and watching my cousin get dressed for her wedding in an upstairs bedroom when I was eight years old. Telling her daughter this as the memory occured to me, wondering immediately after if it caused her hurt to tell her I watched her mother get dressed for the wedding to her father to whom she is no longer married. My cousin's daughter is a very sunshiney person, and I like her quite a lot. My other cousin showed me all of the wonderful artifacts in that upstairs bedroom -- the bed his father was born in that he is now sleeping in, a tackle box his father made as a little boy, an amethyst rock he stole from Pike's Peak one day in July when it was snowing, the toys belonging to his mother, my aunt, and her sister, my other aunt, that were found in his grandfather's car after he was killed in an automobile accident when the little girls were babies. That kind of stuff is what life is made of. They are "just things," but they are so precious.

It's all so precious. All of it, all of us.

Tears

I think what it boils down to is that I am incapable of coping with the enormity of life.

So I either live in denial of the incomprehensible fragility and finality of it all, forcing myself to live in oblivion and be numb.

Or I find myself in a period of time, like the past few weeks, when I am so overcome by moments of beauty, sadness, terror, joy, and love that I feel completely raw and I cry. I cry every day, multiple times a day, over big things and small things. For short spurts of just a few tears or for prolonged periods of gentle weeping or blubbering sobs.

I'm trying to look back and pinpoint what set off this latest period of ceaseless tears. I think it might have been reading The Book Thief. I think I started crying then and haven't stopped since.

Sometimes I cry because I'm moved by beauty and sweetness, like when Keri Russell sings the pie song to her baby in Waitress. But then those tears morph into those of grief and anger at the senselessness of it all when thinking about how the woman who wrote that song, whose actual daughter played the little girl in the movie, got murdered. And those tears all mix together while I feel how beautiful and ugly the world can be at the same time.

Really, these days I'll cry over anything. I cried over Planet Earth and the Battle of the Bulge. I cried yesterday in our director's office while talking about how much I love my boss. She then teared up, because she loves her, too. Tears are so contagious. They're like yawns that way, or laughs.

Yesterday I also cried when my mom sent an e-mail to her four children after attending the funeral of a guy my older brother's age who had a stroke right after his honeymoon. "I know that there is a message to reflect upon in all that happens to us in this life," she wrote. "Today for me--and I pass it on to you who are dearest to me--is that life is precious. Every day, every minute is too precious to waste on anything that does not have meaning or is not life-giving. Let none of us put mindless TV, trash movies, resentment, worry, envy, regret, money--above being with those you love and those who love you. Dearest ones of my life, I prayed today that you will reflect on the suddenness of his death, that such reflection will call you in a new way to live your life to the fullest--loving others, serving others, spreading God's love and kindness within you to all whom you meet, seeing the preciousness in yourself, each other, your special friends, living, not in a morbid way, but with an adventurous, energetic spirit--each day as if it were your last.....because it just might be. Some of his last words to his wife: 'Don't worry, honey. God will take care of us.' May you grow in trust of this, too. May that beautiful young man rest in peace ... and may you, my precious children, live in peace and joy in all that you do."

The tears over that e-mail will be unending, probably, partly because I have a mom who would send an e-mail that loving and profound and because I feel what she was feeling -- being seized with that dread, that panic that we're not appreciating every moment and that it can all end so suddenly. I feel that on a regular basis, and it's an awful feeling, and I cried because I knew she was feeling it, too. I feel like I've always felt that way, that sense of urgency about the preciousness of life, but it used to be a much more positive thing. It used to feel like a blessing, a gift, even a joy. But lately it's felt like a burden, like a goddamn albatross, and I wonder if that's just part of getting older. Or part of losing belief in God and in heaven and that we'll never be apart from those we love even in death. I wish I could still believe that. I think I was much less afraid.

Today's crying jag started when cleaning out a closet. I'm doing some rearranging and organizing and I opened one of my grandmother's old journals. She had one for every year for about 12 years or so, late in her life. Maybe she had more, I don't know. But there's a week on each page and entries for each day of they week. Her handwriting is horrendous; she was raised when you were taught to write right-handed even if you weren't, and she wasn't, and it shows. I think maybe the scratchy scrawl adds to the melancholy of her prose. But her entries are so spare and so simple and they cause my heart to clench in despair. I know she wanted me to have them; she told my mom, and my mom told me, years ago. My grandmother loved each of us the most on varying days; I guess that day it was me. So I am glad to have them but also feel the weight of her loneliness and sadness with every word I read and I can never read long before I have to close them and cry a hundred tears. And I wonder if I should scan parts of them and share them with other relatives, like her children, when she wrote something kind or wonderful about them, but I worry that it will become a whole possessive mess because I have them and that reading them in full will make them dissolve in pain. They are so hard for me to handle, and I am her granddaughter. I don't know if it would be a gift or a cruelty to share the journals with them. Today I happened to be on the phone with my friend who knew and really liked my grandmother when the boo-hooing wave commenced, and she said something like, "Well, if you believe that we all carry pieces of each other inside ourselves," since her daughter has my grandmother's name as her middle name, "then she carries part of her inside." And that just made me start bawling, because, well. That's really it, isn't it?

Meanwhile, I decided the music I had to listen to while doing all of this closet cleaning and journal reading and crying was the Broadway soundtrack to The Lion King, and I don't care what anyone says about the Disneyfication of Broadway, this soundtrack is a thing of beauty. And it opens, "From the day we arrive on this planet, and, blinking, step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done." And I thought, yes. "There is far too much to take in here, more to find than can ever be found." And I thought, yes. There is far too much to take in here. And maybe that is why I am crying every day. And then, "It's the circle of life, and it moves us all, through despair and hope, through faith and love. Till we find our place, on the path unwinding ..." And yes, it's from a Disney show and I think it might have been written by Elton John and I realize it comes from a cartoon, but this song kills me. The Broadway recording, it is stunning. I feel like all my heart has been doing lately is blinking into the sun and trying to take it all in. And THEN the song "He Lives in You" came on, and I thought about what my friend said about my grandmother living on in her little baby, my godchild. And that also is truly a beautiful song, I am telling you.

I might need to rethink tonight's plan to watch Downfall and watch something else instead. Something with singing and dancing. Like Grease 2 or Waiting for Guffman.

And hi, I'm crying some more, typing this right now, big shocker. And I am grappling with accepting that surely it must be better to feel everything than feel nothing.

It's not like I am going through each day sad or depressed. It's not that way at all. It's just that as I told my boyfriend tonight, I feel like lately I just have an overflowing heart. And it's overflowing and exploding so much that it's always close to the surface and the tears are so accessible and I can't help it, and before I know it, they just come, and my heart is running down my cheeks, trying to understand life and death and the world, trying to get free.

Weepy weekend, whoa

This was a wildly weepy weekend. On Friday night, I drove to see my boyfriend. We went out for sushi and watched part of Planet Earth. Which for some reason sent me into a tailspin of weeping that I'll have to try to explain later.

The next morning, we headed to a museum that I could not have loved more. I kicked myself for not bringing my camera. We ate lunch, sharing crab claws marinated in amber beer and rosemary butter and a Thai chicken salad. I had a strawberry lager, which was scrumptious.

Later, we shared a pizza at Angeli and went to see Waitress. I started sniffling when Keri sang the pie song and cried and cried by the end. I must have had something hormonal going on, because that made two nights in a row. Certainly this called for gelato. He got white chocolate almond, and I had strawberry and vanilla.

The next morning, we crossed the lake to take care of some house business. We had our first coffee since Katrina at his favorite coffee shop, which just reopened a few weeks ago.

I became and remain obsessed with a five-note section of the Planet Earth theme. You can hear it here ... it's the first 5 notes of this interlude, lasting until about 8 seconds in. I played it on the piano as G E F G C. I know those five notes in sequence for some reason. Part of a movie theme? Another song from another life? It's been driving me totally insane. (That link goes to Windows Media Player, so apologies if you don't have it.)

Last night, my mom cooked crawfish etouffee, shrimp and corn soup, butternut squash with pecans and breadcrumbs, and ice cream dessert for Father's Day.

I found the actual recipe in an old church cookbook from 1980. I'll post it here at the request of sixmilechick, who asked for it months ago. Eat and love.

So as for my breakdown on Friday night. Which was some sort of strange existential crisis, brought on, I think by watching too many World War II documentaries, most recently American Experience: Battle of the Bulge. I told Jessie that I keep watching them because I'm trying to understand why and how that war happened. And she said, "I actually know exactly what you mean about having to watch 800 movies ... because something is too large to make sense of without a lot of different stories." And that is exactly it. And I told Jessie some of this in an e-mail and now I will say it here.

So the Battle of the Bulge really brought on the weeping. And after watching a tiny bit of Planet Earth, I started and could not stop. And he said, "What is wrong?" And I said, "I have a heavy heart." And he said, "Because of the Battle of the Bulge?" And I said, "Yes." And then I hiccupped a lot and said, "And the animals. All the beautiful animals. They're just trying to survive. And we're messing the world up. And we didn't learn anything from WWII." And I thought about soldiers with their feet frozen off and the little dead Belgian children frozen in the snow that the documentary showed. "And if we didn't learn from that war? What war will we learn from? We are at war RIGHT NOW." And we're killing the planet, and what is the point, and nobody lives for very long in the end, etc. etc. And I wept and wept. And nicely, he let me and patted me.

Anyway. All I'm saying is that World War II documentaries and Planet Earth are kind of a serious one-two punch in the soul, at least for me. I've hardly seen any of Planet Earth so far, but it's killing me. Especially the snow leopards and bottlenose dolphins and elephants who swim like they're as light as feathers or air.

Frogs and falling chocolate

Life is going on. I stayed home on Friday night and did a week's worth of chores in one night and watched Dragonfly upon my parents' recommendation. I will not pass the same recommendation on to you. We usually have fairly similar taste in movies, but this one is just bad.

I woke up early on Saturday morning, stopped for a frozen coffee, and headed north to see my boyfriend. We ate pasta with walnut pesto for lunch and went to the grocery store to stock up on food for our canoe trip later that night. We spent part of the afternoon watching The Good German, which had cool lighting and a neat style but was mostly a bore. That said, Cate Blanchett remains unbelievably stunning and amazing to watch. This movie looked like a series of very beautiful black and white postcards, but the story never grabbed me.

We had a good time canoeing though this trip was somewhat less exciting than the last. I really enjoyed eating our sandwiches in our boat as the sun set. My favorite parts of this trip were the two frogs who hopped on board, Fritz and Ferdinand, the latter of whom spent much of the ride perched on my boyfriend's knee. And it was cool to only be guided by starlight since there was no moon.

We had an excellent brunch Sunday morning ... a mimosa, great Nicaraguan coffee served in a French press, soup with pesto and orzo, grits with veal grillades, and warm bread pudding with sugared pecans and a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. It was pretty much ecstasy on a table. And seeing a little about how they do things there make me like it even more in retrospect.

I would like to randomly point out that I predicted before Rosie even joined The View that things between Rosie and Elisabeth would end badly. I remain somewhat obsessed with how suddenly things spiraled into such ugliness at the end, and I stupidly keep watching the show because of guests hosts like Kathy Griffin, whom I love. Damn you, The View.

I stopped at Maryelizabeth's house on my way home yesterday and hung out for a while. Her baby is a ball of cute with black hair and blue eyes, just like her three-year-old was. I actually strapped the two-month-old in the baby carrier and toted her around the grocery store on my chest, which was amusing. I have to say, it's pretty astounding to see my friend with these two little girls, juggling them and wrangling them like a champion. I am sure it's not easy, and I give her props for remaining upright. Meanwhile, our mutual best friend Shelley is moving to Hawaii in six days to take up residence with her fiance, Bachelor Andy and Tessa, and the cast of Lost. Holy shit!

Between watching The Good German and reading the amazing The Book Thief, I've been consumed with all things German lately. I recorded American Experience: The Berlin Airlift, and it was pretty fascinating. I'd never even heard of it. The entire time I was reading The Book Thief, it occurred to me that I never really gave much thought to the ordinary German people during World War II. As for the characters in the book on Himmel Street, they were just poor people trying to survive and eat and who truly lived in fear of not joining and following "the party." They weren't evil, murderous people who wanted to annihilate Jews and take over the world even though they were "Heil, Hitler"-ing with the best of them. Disclaimer: I am going to sound very simpleminded and like an elementary school child when trying to explain this: it made me wonder if somewhere in my mind, not really consciously, but if somewhere in my mind, I grew up villainizing a whole country of people, imagining them all as wicked and evil, because of what their leader did. I honestly don't really think I ever thought about anyone in Germany at that time except for Hitler and the Nazi party officials and the SS. But what about the people who were just trying to live, keep their jobs, afford bread, and not freeze to death, and whom we bombed to rubble? And my boyfriend pointed out that much of the world probably thinks the same way about us. Not that George W. Bush is Hitler or that what he's done is like what Hitler did, but he's certainly no peach and we've just sat back and let him continue doing and saying one stupid-assed thing after another.

Anyway, my point is that the show about the Berlin Airlift just drove home a lot of the thoughts I had while reading that book. The people in Berlin were starving and their city was crushed and divided, and they needed help. And so for whatever reason -- out of the goodness of Truman's heart or because he wanted to be reelected -- whatever the reason, this huge operation was undertaken to feed them. And the kids on the show talked about how the sound of American and British planes overhead was once the terror of their lives -- just like in The Book Thief -- and now all of a sudden they had to wrap their minds around the fact that when they heard these planes, they did not have to fear for their lives and hide in the basement until the all clear because it was now a friendly sound and chocolate bars would fall from the sky. Can you even imagine? And the American and British pilots talk about how they didn't have warm feelings towards the Germans because they were the enemy, after all, right? But when they landed with the food, they saw that they were just normal people, some of whom even ended up being mechanics on their planes so the project could keep going and succeed. They were like, hello, we were just blowing each other up a few months ago, now let's work together and make this work.

It's just a lot to think about. I saw photos of these kids and I thought about Leisel and Rudy in the book and it was like fiction and reality were colliding in my mind and heart. And the show talked a lot about the splitting of the city into the four quadrants and now all of a sudden Russia became the enemy and look, half a century of fear or more death and horror started and a wall was built and what the hell? It makes my head hurt and spin a little and wish I had taken a lot more history classes. I mean, my God, I think I took something like 8 or 9 of them in college, but not really from this period. And I kick myself for that. And now I have put truly an inordinate number of World War II documentaries into my Netflix queue. And I really, really, really want to go to Berlin.

Parents and children

Lately I've been thinking about parents and children.

One of my two closest friends just had her second baby, and I'm watching her take care of a three-year-old and a three-week-old simultaneously, and it's all very baffling and inspiring to watch. She is a mom, their mom, but she is still totally herself, the same person I've known since the age of 10. She still reads many books, likes celebrity gossip, is faithful to Gilmore Girls even when it has long ceased to deserve it, still likes peanut butter, still likes cheese, still speaks in the same evolving nickname- and abbreviation-riddled language with me that we have always spoken. How people change and stay the same after having kids is something that interests me. Obviously she has changed in ways internally that I cannot fathom, but in many ways, to me, she is exactly the same.

When you are fully grown, to what extent should you follow your parents' well-meaning advice? When it goes against what you want for yourself or what you think is right for yourself, is it possible to turn your back on their advice but not on them? Is it possible to go against their wishes for you and feel okay about doing that? I adore my parents beyond measure and don't like doing things that I know worry them. I think that knowing someone who loves me is worried about me might be one of the worst feelings in the world.

Does that nagging ache of knowing your parents are worried about you ever go away? Do parents ever have a moment's peace from the day their children are born? How can you watch your children grow up and send them off to college when they could be blown away in their dorm room or in German class?

I think a lot about parents and children, about my friends and their babies, about my parents and my siblings and me.

Anne Lamott has a lot to say about parents and children. She talks about how the reason that a teenaged boy becomes an awful beast toward his mother is that it's the only way he can distance himself from her so that it won't break his own heart when he has to grow up and leave her. And that makes a lot of sense to me. I guess part of why we separate ourselves from our parents, from their religious faiths or their political beliefs or how they would plan a wedding or clean a house or cook a meal or whatever else, is because we know that we have to leave them eventually, or that they will leave us eventually by getting old and sick and dying, and because that we think that being less connected to them and less intertwined with them will make it easier to lose them, for them to lose us.

It's thoughts like these that sometimes make me believe that I am in no way ready to be a parent and sometimes make me wonder how I could ever doubt wanting to have a child. Which is just one of the many contradictions in my life that make me feel mildly crazy.

And I wonder how other people think about parents and children.

Monkey Mind

Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind" -- the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but -- whoop! -- how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it's the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

So true. So true.

In the last five seconds, I've thought of anxiety over work assignments, my boyfriend's cat, running, and candy corn.

I wake up every morning after spending the latter part of the night (like, the last few hours in bed) alternately sleeping, dreaming, and thinking about every random thing possible to think about. Why Jennifer Connelly was so thin when she won the Oscar. Why Jennifer Connelly won the Oscar. Why I didn't recognize anyone on Saturday Night Live this past weekend except for Amy Poehler and why I had never heard of the musical guest. Why the song "Chasing Cars" makes me cry sometimes. Why my butt is so flabby. Whether our hotel in Cancun will be a rip-off. What in the world is my older brother doing with his life. Is my sister okay. What is my little brother going to do when he graduates from college. Are my parents sick of pet-sitting every other weekend. Are my pets going to be poisoned by the chemicals the exterminator sprayed this morning. Was I wrong to hire an exterminator for the first time since living in my house for 5.5 years because I was so utterly freaked by seeing a baby roach crawling over my dish rack on the kitchen counter and was it wasteful to promptly throw said dish rack away. Are the puppies next-door okay. Why waste time making homemade cookies when store-bought cookies are so good. How lazy Americans are to have moved past the brainless ease of slice-and-bake cookies to now have provided for them refrigerated cookies already shaped and simply broken apart and baked but God those cookies are so good aren't they. Whether I'm flossing correctly. Is the amount of dust and pet hair under my beds and furniture unhealthy. Are my dogs happy. Are my cats happy. Is there already mildew growing underneath my new bathtub caulking job. How can Alan Chambers believe what he does. Are the places the dogs have chewed off the house going to make my house rot from the outside in. Are the broken places along the fascia where I never caulked after the hurricane filled with mold that is going to eat my house and poison me. Will I ever get to replacing my shitty, shitty, shoddy sliding glass door or will it take Zuko finally breaking it down. Do dogs pee on my newspaper on their morning walks before I pick it up in the morning. If there is a God, am I going to hell. Is there a God. Is North Korea going to be the end of the world. Will the war ever end. Will I finish the half-marathon. Will the Democrats take Congress.

Tonight I went on a 2.25-mile run through my neighborhood. The high points were Roddy McDowell singing "The Seven Deadly Virtues" from Camelot, Jerry Orbach singing "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast, and Rod the puppet singing "My Girlfriend Who Lives in Canada" from Avenue Q. And stopping to pick a needle of rosemary from someone's front yard and holding it to my nose during my cool-down walk to Mary Chapin Carpenter.

The quote on my calendar this month:

When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive: to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. Marcus Aurelius

This is what I need to embrace when I arise in the morning. Instead of feeling weary and beaten down and unrested even if I do feel that way. Instead of feeling like I've just been through a battle with my sheets and my pillows and my mind. I am privileged. I am lucky. To breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love. To sing, to read, to write, to run. Every day started thinking that way will be a better day. I try. I hope.

Motionless

I was driving over some water recently and did what I usually do ... I unlocked my doors. I always unlock my doors. That way, if my car goes over the railing and I end up submerged under the water and the locks malfunction, I'll be able to open my door when the car settles and escape. I've heard conflicting reports about this ... some news show I saw said never to wait for the car to settle and to go ahead and start rolling down the window the moment the car starts going over and swim out before the car has time to settle because by then you'll be dead. But someone who survived going over the railings recently not far from here waited for the car to settle and opened the door and swam to the surface. These are the kinds of thoughts I have while driving over water. I thought to myself that I need to get one of those car escape tools. Then I thought that I want everyone I love to have one, so maybe I should buy all of them one for Christmas. Then I thought about how crazy they'd think I was if I gave them something like that as a gift and what the look on their faces would be when they opened it.

I never delete voicemails. I always save them. I know they eventually get deleted automatically a few days down the line, but I can't bring myself to be the one who deletes the messages because I think about the person who left me the voicemail dying and what it would feel like to know that I erased the chance to hear his or her voice one more time.

Lately I've been trying to mentally compile all of the things I'm afraid of. These are two. Oh, and one more is the overwhelming craving I'm having for candy corn lately, coupled with the strong compulsion I sometimes have to eat raw whole wheat spirelli noodles straight out of the box.

I've decided that Marian Keyes has written her last good book. Years ago, even. Anybody Out There? is not good. It's irritating and way, way too long. Does anyone want it? I'll mail it to you.

I am enjoying the ease of updating this way, but I do miss having "previous entry" and "next entry" links. I want to have them again, but I'm not sure how. If someone knows how to do this, will you please tell me?

Even though I don't enjoy the act of exercising, I'm realizing that I have to keep doing it because it's the only thing that keeps me from hating (a) myself and (b) everyone else in the entire world. I'm not sure that's the best motivation, but it's pretty much the only thing that works for me these days.

I can't stop listening to the song "Paperweight" on the soundtrack to The Last Kiss.

I'm feeling full of anger and sadness today. I'm thinking about the thousands of people who died five years ago and all of the loved ones left behind. I read somewhere that September 11, 2001, brought forth so much goodwill from the rest of the world in how it reached out to us and that we've since squandered that goodwill, and that's the truest and most depressing thing I've thought about in quite some time. How dare we? How dare we. How dare this nation re-elect George W. Bush? I mean, WHAT THE HELL? It makes me cry.

Puke.

And I just read that the Weepies will be opening for the Indigo Girls on tour soon. Nowhere anywhere close to here. Which makes me want to cry some more. Maybe it's selfish and wrong to cry over such things. But missing out on music that fills our hearts and makes us think and imagine? That's something worth crying over in this short damn life, isn't it? Maybe not. But it feels like it. At least right now.

Woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
The night is here and the day is gone
And the world spins madly on