seasonal ineffective disorder

We ran out of ice melter after the storm, and the driveway was a sheet of ice. Ever wonder if birdseed works? You know, just to create some traction. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone -- an unfortunate use of the expression, I see now. I thought I could get rid of some reject birdseed and also make the driveway less treacherous for my clients to walk on. So I scattered birdseed from where they park by the garage all the way to the gate, making a nice little path.

It was mostly millet, the cheap stuff we couldn't get through last year because everyone except juncos and sparrows considers millet an absolute joke of an excuse for food. They spit it out, and if they had lips, they would say ptooey, like a million times over, because that's how many millet seeds come in a bag. And you knew, you knew this would happen, but the sunflower seed costs an arm and part of a leg, and so you just thought maybe you could mix it with the millet and the birds would suck it up and eat the millet because they were on a roll. Like tucking a pill into someone's oatmeal. But no, they just spit it out. By "they" I mean both the birds and the person eating the oatmeal.

FYI, millet does not create traction on ice. Millet is a tiny, round seed that actually makes ice slipperier than ice. I put down some sand once I saw the ineffectiveness of my intervention, but the seed was already down. So as people made their way from their car to the gate it looked like they were walking through a forest in a wintry fairy tale, with a dozen little juncos picking the millet out of the path.

I did not start out this post intending to talk about the birdseed snafu. But I realize it is fitting. Because I have Seasonal Ineffective Disorder. When the days are short and cold like this, I am all over the place, like a bag of frozen peas that's spilled onto the kitchen floor. There are peas everywhere, out in the hallway, under the couch. One is wedged into the tread of my boots, and one went through the dryer. And even though ten times you think you have found them all, the next day there is always another pea, shriveled, just behind the chair leg or in the cat's food.

Or beads. Beads do that, too. You think you've found them all, but you never have. Anyway, I cannot get things done at a certain point in the wintertime. Not in a straight line anyway. This morning I got almost all of my 10,000 steps while shopping at Whole Foods. I'd get a lemon, get some mushrooms, go back and get another lemon, go get milk, come back and get one more mushroom, go find the almond flour, then get a third lemon. I lost my cart every five minutes and was there forever. With SID, if a thought occurs to me, I follow its instructions. It is like obeying the monkey mind. It's exhausting.

I know there are much more efficient ways to move through time --not that efficiency is everything. But honestly, I am a kite and in the wintertime someone lets go of the string. Every year we have to figure out how to tether me down.

Laura, whose middle name actually is Effective, Effie for short, helps me through each winter's relapse. The treatment protocol is paradoxical: she orders me to sit and read for an hour a day. No computer, no phone, no multi-tasking. I am instructed to set a timer and am not allowed to get up before it goes off. I get to have a cup of tea, but I had to lobby for this, as it is distracting to reach for it, then sip.

When my ineffectiveness is truly out of control -- perhaps I have gone upstairs five times in as many minutes, each time completing one small task -- she orders me to sit down and write. Tonight, as she finally came home for winter break and walked into the pea-strewn kitchen, she hugged me hello and then made me sit at the kitchen table and blog. It worked, and now I feel tethered. Tomorrow, however -- more peas, I'm sure.

nostalgia for the cave

I miss the cave days, where we all slept in a lump of warm bodies. Except in my imagination maybe I have a body pillow. But still; it was nice, that lump of family. Back when we were just developing language, we cracked each other up trying to figure out what the heck the other person was trying to say. What are you trying to tell me? Yesterday? Is that what you mean? We need more words, man!

And if only someone would invent writing! I would want to write down what you just looked like when you brought in that pile of berries, with your smile all blue and the kid on your shoulder, her teeth blue, too. Happy. Here. You. 

Gee. Even the people I'm nostalgic for are nostalgic.

I know; I know it wasn't like that. We made up words as we needed them, and maybe things back then were so tough and so primitive that you only needed to communicate a few things: Yes. No. You do it. Run. Ouchy-wawa. Found food. Hug. Something between teeth. But someone in those caves had to have a bit of poet in him, in her. Someone had to be the first person who started to hum, and then one day someone hummed a third above someone else. I miss those moments.

We didn't worry about being awake at night, because we knew we could nap whenever we wanted to. They say that's been the norm for us since way back when -- we'd have a middle of the night awakening, and then we'd go back for the second sleep. Cave dwellers did not think Ugh. I'm awake and "Frosty the Snowman" is stuck in my head. That torment did not exist in those days. Being up in the middle of the night back then gave you time to stoke the fire, time to go outside and pee, look at the stars, time for everyone to share the crazy highlights of the dream they just woke from. Mine was about flying -- crazy, huh? I flew right up to a giant beehive, ate some honey and then woke up when the little one pulled on my body pillow. Hey, look, I found a great dead branch while I was peeing by moonlight. I'll put it on the woodpile. That's what I would have said if I had had a few more words to play with.

I feel a special nostalgia for my neanderthal ancestors, who seem, no matter how you cut it, to have caught a truly bad break. I'm not saying they were perfect, and I do think humans have some lovely qualities. But they've found that we Neanderthals were homebodies, and liked to keep things organized in our homes. Everything had its place: tools in one pile, sticks in another. Sharp things were out of the way, which I feel particularly proud of somehow. And over in the corner, maybe a this-will-come-in-handy-someday pile of vines -- for when we invent straps, as long as we don't go extinct.

When humans came along and were such bullies, Neanderthals were overwhelmed, is all. I can see myself being flummoxed by this aggression, and I am, in this little reverie of mine, more nostalgic for the Neanderthals than for the wily, bully homo sapiens. As I tap out this blogpost under a blanket in the dark of night, I think wistfully of the things passed down to me from my Neanderthal ancestors, and proud of them for getting that little bit of DNA into the human family before their light flickered out forever. In comparison to humans, they weren't as good at social networking (check) and seem not to have been as committed to grabbing the bull by the horns (check). Some scientists think Neanderthals made life more difficult for themselves by doing everything together instead of divvying up the labor between the sexes (check). And apparently they were great at climbing trees (check, and thank you for that, ancient genes).

I miss these ancestors. They were just beginning to learn to hum.

Louisville Slugger

     In all my years of studying counseling and psychotherapy, no one ever taught me to ask clients about their poop.
     On the contrary; we're taught not to give advice, not to fix it. Many a lip has been bitten in the consulting room, believe you me. And mostly, that is the right thing. It's partly the handing someone a fish thing, versus letting them pierce the worm on a hook and let it dangle in the water, then yank. Fish tastes way better that way. Not only that, but when we give advice it's usually given to take us off the hook (different hook, sans worm), relieving us of the squirmy feeling of wanting to fix something.
     Secretly, though, I love to fix the problem. I daresay this is counselors' dirty little secret. We give each other advice on the sly all the time, and it feels fabulous; like you've been holding your breath all week, and finally you can exhale with a paaaaaaaaah.
     My point today is this: graduate school did not teach me to help clients poop -- and it should have. It turns out that lots of depressed and anxious people are constipated. Freud has something worthwhile to say in there, but he doesn't have The Answer. Constipation, you've just gotta fix. Otherwise, you can't hear, you can't think, you can't do anything but desire to poop. When Buddha said desire is the source of all suffering, he may have been making a veiled reference to the matter of constipation.

     Remember the Squatty Potty? I bought one in the thick of my nutritional studies because it sounded like every home should have one, since humans in the developed world have not been pooping correctly since the days of squatting in the veld. I was alarmed to find I had been doing it wrong, and probably had raised three children to poop sub-optimally, too.
     It turns out -- hold your applause -- that no one in our household actually needs any assistance in pooping. Hydraulics: check.
     Not so fortunate are several of my clients. And what freedom I have felt when together we get to the bottom of things! How is your poop? I ask. Well, I am, in fact (here their face contorts exactly as yours is now), constipated.
     Well, screw that. Yesterday I met with a client who hadn't pooped in five days. Maybe one pebble, she moans. We have a long, meaty talk about her poop. I'm telling you, aside from conversations about life and death, this is my favorite kind of intercourse. That may not be the word I'm looking for.
     Wait right here, I say. I go upstairs and come down with the Squatty Potty. This is today's door prize, I tell her. Keep it. I demonstrate the correct positioning while perched on my office chair. I describe how it will position her colon differently.
     We then realize as the session ends that she had walked to my office. Carrying a Squatty Potty down Main Street, Farmington, Connecticut -- that's asking a lot of just about anyone, even someone looking to counseling to help expand their general sense of freedom in the world. Firmly set on getting this person unplugged, I drive her home.
     She wrote this morning: "The Squatty Potty worked. Today I delivered a Louisville Slugger. Literally."
     You will forgive her use of "literally," won't you? In the end, it had to feel that good.

how to perform beyond your capacity

     I noticed with interest readers' interest in the educational testing I had as a child. I don't remember it -- of course not. I'm not that smart. But here's the thing: if I really wanted to get my hands on the testing, I could get as close as anyone could. I would have the persistence and wherewithal to approach someone at Alice Peck Elementary School and persuade them (in writing; I can't think fast enough face-to-face to persuade many of much) to let me take a flashlight down into the school basement, find the box marked 1960-1965, and sift through its contents. Eventually I would find one moldy page, I'm thinking, with the test results and commentary written by hand.
     Paula Barrett Chu; age 8 years/2 months; grade 3:
     Overview: Not that smart, but will persist until the cows come home, provided cows are in a fenced area and have not strayed too far in the first place. 
     Conclusion: performs beyond her natural capacity. 
     Implications: Given time, she is somewhat smarter than she seems. Except when that is not true.
     Recommendations: [smudged].

     How can someone perform beyond their natural abilities? Watch and learn. Here is one of the "games" one plays on Lumosity.com when one wants to stretch their brain and feel it snap back at the same time. Here you want to move the seed to the hole in 21 moves, without bumping into the ladybugs. Those you need to move out of the way.

Here is what typically ends up happening:

 

     I've made 29 moves and still have one more to go. Why not show all 30, little seed safely in its hole? Because it took me a few rounds of the game to figure out that you can't take a screenshot of the completed puzzle -- the picture disappears as soon as the seed reaches the hole. Q.E.D. 

     But here, one step shy of getting the seed to the hole, the timer is already black, and my "route score" is moving in the same direction. And when the little celebratory tune sounds as I finally plant the precious seed in the damned hole, I can tell it is sarcastic.

     As life unfolds and I take 30 steps to do what perhaps could be done in 21, I will remind readers of my commitment to getting 10,000 steps a day -- which, when you add up all the detours and searches for phone, eyeglasses, and the 8-foot ladder, not the 5-foot one -- I am proud to say I do achieve.

     That's how you do it though, buttercups. You just keep going, even if you take a circuitous route. That allows you to attach a little extender to your brain's leash.

     Keep pulling until the collar is a little too tight and you start kind of panting. 

23 and us

     A couple of months ago, Laura and I both sent off tubes of spit so that "23andme" could analyze our respective DNA. It took me two tries, I'm afraid: I had eaten a cherry tomato from the garden right before my first sample*, and the results said that most of my ancestors were from the nightshade family. That didn't seem to represent my whole story. So I had to send off another ptooey of saliva.
     If you haven't seen what 23andme is up to, you are missing quite a party. They have located 988 of my relatives so far, for one thing. They live all over the globe, and clearly have an inherited fondness for travel. I'm anxious about what this could lead to -- what if they want to see Farmington, Connecticut? Our house is pretty big, but the toilets can handle only so much.
     There's a staggering amount of health-related information at 23andme. They can tell you what your risks are for various illnesses, how likely you are to tolerate an assortment of medicines, what kind of earwax you have (so that's what that stuff is!) and whether you have inherited a tendency to gather lint in your navel. Okay, I made that one up, but I'm telling you, I will not be surprised if someone is looking closely at that.
     There are a bunch of illnesses the risks for which they can predict with strong confidence. Two of them --Alzheimer's and Parkinson's -- are under cyber lock and key. You have to keep telling them you're sure you want to know about those two. They don't want to shock you -- if you had a genetic tendency toward atrial fibrillation or high blood pressure, that could be one tragic scene, right? So it's: If you're sure, click here. Are you really sure? Click here. I'm telling you, the suspense builds like crazy.
     Finally you reach a page where they've hidden your Alzheimer's and Parkinson's results (and a winky face saying "made ya look!").
     All in all, there are more lower-than-average than higher-than-average risks for me, despite increased risks of Parkinson's, gout, Type 2 diabetes, and-- hold onto your hats -- breast cancer.
     Two other things in 23andme have grabbed my attention. First is that my genome places me in the 97th percentile for Neanderthal genes. Let's let that sink in for a moment. I have more Neanderthal in me than 97% of the human population. This explains so much, and I anticipate that I will from here forward feel somewhat vindicated when I walk into a room and can't remember what I was going to do. That used to happen to my ancestors all the time.
     The finding helps me make sense of that educational testing I had as a child, which indicated that I am an overachiever, performing beyond my actual, measurable abilities. I do more than I am actually capable of. That idea alone is, of course, a bit over my head. But now we know how true it is. Oog, as my kin used to say, furrowing their gigantic brows in vague understanding.
     23andme can also tell you how short your telomeres have become. You want nice, long telomeres, since they erode with time and age, and shorter ones mean a decreasing ability for your cells to replicate nicely. Hence, we end up wrinkly and saggy (well, we Neanderthals do, anyway -- I can't speak for the rest of you). And eventually old, in the truest sense of the word. My telomeres are unusually shortened, likely from chemo -- the gift that keeps on giving. Mine are as short as someone who is 7.82 years older. This means my birthdate might as well have been January 3, 1948, making me almost a year older than my parents' firstborn, whom I now, given my aged telomeres, think of as my kid brother, Lee.
     A note about Laura: her ancestors are white. White white white, man. They built the original suburbs in Northern Europe and still live either there or in Greenwich, Connecticut. Apparently hardly any of them were attracted to Neanderthals -- which stings a bit, I have to say.

*I trust you'll excuse this error in light of my ancestry.

gluten intolerance

     I've sometimes thought that writers who drink -- think Hemingway as a classic example - do so because they kind of like feeling a bit depressed; drinking helps them lean toward their sadness in order to access deeper emotions so they can write. For them, drink is a catalyst between the gluten of depression and the yeast of creativity; it allows them to cook up some tasty writing. I'm not including alcoholics in this line of thinking, by the way -- just people looking to loosen their noggins.*
     I know the creative momentum that comes with feeling sad. When I was in the thick of cancer and all that, I couldn't stop writing. Mild melancholy and moderate struggle are useful for getting a spark of inspiration going; witness much of the great poetry, great music, great road trips, great howls at the moon.
     But it has to be mild melancholy. It doesn't work when you're lost in the darkest cave. Creativity can kick in, though, when the light is dim and there is a bit of cave-y feeling, like a fort around the lower bunk bed.

     Now, as I sit here with an impulse to write and no muse in sight, it's clear to me that writers who drink or get high are just cheating. They're stuck, and they know that if they can get themselves into an altered state of mind, cerebral ice jams will break apart. Hemingway was no different from the kids who share each other's Adderall and then find they've written a darned good history paper, by gum. Or people who indulge in cannabis and finally get traction on that essay when they speak from the perspective of their cat.

     Me, I'll occasionally have we what call a "girl beer" -- example du saison being ginger beer -- but not more than one. That single serving has never inspired anything other than a good burp or two, and I'm not game for going beyond that. I confess that I am both jealous and judging of those who allow themselves to cheat and hot-wire their imaginations with substance.
      You need some catalyst for creative juices to flow, but I want that to come from light, not from darkness. I know you need both elements -- for contrast and depth perception -- but still.
     I will admit to the thought that if I did get sick again, the upside is that I could write. Those of you who write, too, will forgive me for that terrible, fleeting notion. Yes, it seems I can write a bang up eulogy, but who wants grief as their muse? Not I.
     So much better is when I am amused and feeling up. That happens more routinely when Laura is around: she is my muse and, god bless her, my amusement; my own mind-altering catalyst. With her away most of the time, my creative mind gets kind of dense -- no yeast; just gluten.
     We've been talking about this when she is home, and we're trying to figure out how I can find some leavening within, so I can write.
     But this feels ridiculous to me: too quiet a life to be creative? Tell that to Thoreau. You can bet he wasn't walking into town to pick up a six-pack of Bud to get his writing groove on.

     I will say that I am a little hungry and thirsty after this post. Could be a good sign.

*Here I pause for a few minutes to google the relationship between eggnog and noggin -- a mighty close one which you will need to investigate on your own. I'm talking etymology, not ingestion.

self-monitoring scales

    There are several ways to find out if you are a high self-monitor or a low self-monitor. There's drawing a capital E on your forehead, of course. If your frame of reference is inside your head (low self-monitor), you'll draw it backwards from the perspective of the rest of the world. And if your frame of reference is the point of view of others (high self-monitor), you'll draw them a nice, legible E. Or, if you ever find yourself in a room that's built to be tilted and scientists ask you to hang a painting straight (they provide the painting), as a low self-monitor you will hang it according to your sense of what straight feels like, in reference to your own sense of relation to the earth; high self-monitors want the painting to match the off-kilter room.
     Something like that. I am less clear on the details of the painting-hanging test, never having had the opportunity to hang a painting, upon the request of scientists, in a tilted room. I wish.
     Overall, there seem to be a number of social advantages to being a high self-monitor. You tend to be better at getting people to like you, to listen to you, not to yell at you for getting in their way. You tend not to get in their way in the first place. You can shift, say, from the particular approach required for connecting to a 4-year-old, then manage a classroom of adolescents, then goof off with your family. You believe that Biblical thing about how you once spake as a child and now you've put away childish things, but you also know it's more complicated than that.
     But if you're too far into the high self-monitoring end of things, you're a terrible show off, or -- so much worse -- you're slick, and people smell something phony about you. You walk down the busy street wondering if you look good, look right for the occasion. You shape-shift for each conversation and you sort of lose track of who you are outside of the expectations of others.
     If you're too deep into the low self-monitoring end of things, you pick your nose and scratch your crotch as you walk down that street, forgetting that there is an art to hiding such things, the first involving strategic, casual gestures and the second involving strategic, casual use of pockets.
     Most psychiatric patients tend to be very low self-monitors. Sociopaths, though, are too high. You with me?
     Most of the rest of us are high self-monitors in peculiar ways, and way low in others. I, for example, kicked a black walnut for 3 miles today, absorbed in the challenge of keeping track of it among the autumn leaves and paying attention to cars as hazards but not caring about the possible judgment about what I was doing. That said, when the walnut crossed the street and many cars were parked at the light, I mimed, practiced as I am in such artistry, that I was crestfallen with my bad aim. I just kind of let my shoulders drop and my head fall. This communicated, "I may be kicking this walnut every 15 feet for a very long time, but you can see that I am sane. I am just really working on something here."
     (If you have ever been walking in one direction with other people around and then needed to turn and go back to your car, chances are you have mimed "Oops. Oh, my. I have forgotten something! Is it in this pocket? Is it in this one? Oh, dear! [perhaps a small stomp or huff would be good here] I am going to turn around, but you can see I am not a crazy person, because clearly I have (which is so unlike me!) forgotten something." You know what you do when no one is around? You just turn around. Nary a stomp or huff.)
     Still, by and large, in lots of the usual senses of self-monitoring, I tend toward the low end. I am either generally oblivious, rebellious, or too happy to care what you think. Few would accuse me of being slick. I think we can say that.
     That said, I have islands of absurdly heightened self-monitoring. Sometime in the mid-1990s, I got my first car with an automatic transmission. For months as I drove I tried to make it look like I was still shifting gears. Pulling away from stoplights, I'd drop my right hand toward where the gearshift used to be to give people in other cars, all of whom were looking into my car to see whether I was noble or corrupt, the illusion that I was shifting gears. Sometimes I'd even move my hand down, then up and toward the right, then down to the right. Ahhh...I think I'll just stay in 4th gear for awhile.    
     Your judgment of how I look is not much of a priority for me, but apparently your judgment of my goodness is. That I preferred the ease of an automatic transmission to the more ecological stick-shift was a selfish, indulgent choice. It's called "standard" for a reason, and I failed it.
     And when I walk by that piece of litter while you drive by, I assume you are wondering why I don't pick it up. So I often do, and I think, from the summit of high self-monitoring: "Note the Noble Soul Picking up Litter, Ye, Drivers on Main Street." Holding the Slurpee container with two fingers (the other digits extended and spread, so as to make it clear that the Slurpee container is litter I am nobly picking up, not something I would actually drink), I kick the walnut again. It shoots straight down the center of the sidewalk. I know no one is watching me make that perfect shot, but I think they are watching me carry the Slurpee container.
     This self-monitoring thing: it's more complicated than the E on the forehead. I can't say if the painting-hanging exercise nails you one way or another, but I'd love to try, if you know of a tilted room that needs decorating. Can I bring my walnut?
   
   
   
   
   

jiminy cricket!

     Hi ho, readers. I'm filing this brief update on the project to incorporate "awesome" into my options for expressing enthusiasm. You'll be disappointed to hear that I've had very limited success, having spoken the word only once since the last blogpost. Rummaging through the refrigerator, half listening to a story of Laura's derring do in some faculty meeting, I stuck it in among the other well-placed grunts, uh huhs, and mm-hmms. "That's...that's awesome, hon," I managed to muster, while wrestling with a giant cauliflower stuck in the lower bin. Later, cooking up the defeated cauliflower, I graded myself on choreography, the overall challenge of my routine, and whether or not I had stuck the landing on "awesome, hon." Meh. 7 point...2.
     I can do this. I know I can. But adding in a new conversational term is not as easy as breaking a verbal habit, with which I have had pronounced success. A few years ago, for example, I made the successful shift away from "Jesus Christ!", which I would tend to emit in a moment of sudden alarm: a near fall, a car veering into my lane, a wasp on my shirt. I'm not offended by "Jesus Christ!" myself, particularly as his might be a useful presence in a moment of need. But my mom always told me that the objectionable aspect of profanity is that it shows a lack of imagination. That was a harsh judgment for her.
     It sucks that I have such a shitty imagination.
     Though it took several months to replace "Jesus Christ!" with "Jiminy Cricket!", that project came with the advantage of an immediate correction, which I willed myself to deliver with as close to equal feeling as possible: "Je--I mean jiminy cricket!" 
     I am both proud and embarrassed to say that "jiminy cricket" is now my default alarum cry.
     You don't get that same practice with "awesome"-- that immediate correction, is what I'm saying. "Fantas-- I mean awesome!" That's just plain awkward.
     I should mention before closing this report that Marilyn's mention of the superb term "wicked pissah" took all the wind out of my sails. I am merely aiming for a term long in the everyday lexicon, something everyone and their uncle can say with ease and pizzazz. If I could master the timing, nail the delivery, and stick the landing of an authentic "wicked pissah," that would be awesome.
     Hm. 8.5.

it'll be awesome, man

As the youngest of four, I always appreciated that there were sibling sentries who would return from the front lines of adolescence and report back. Between birth order, being a Quaker, and being raised on a college campus, the language of the 60s came to me earlier than to most of my peers. I began to say "man" and "cool," for example, from about the age of 6, when Lee, at 13, brought it home from junior high school.
"Let's go climb that tree, man," I'd say.
"Time for my bath? Cool, man."
Even when you're young, you make decisions about which new words to start implementing yourself. At its very grooviest, groovy didn't work for me; I don't know why. And as for dude, which came along in the 1980s, well, I already had man, after all; there was no room for dude, man. Dude has never stopped sounding funny to me.
As time goes by, you judge words pretty harshly, using a template that seems darn close to arbitrary. Sometimes it's just that the word or term offends: I avoid what a douche, par example. But even the offensiveness thing is arbitrary: I've become immune to what an asshole, but still cringe at what a dick. 
Some of it is simple contrariness: 24/7. Nope; that nifty shortcut is not for me.
Sometimes it is this, I suppose: I make a judgment, based on nothing but faulty intuition, that a given word will have its day and then fade away. You don't want to start flinging about a new term only to find it is already passé. Alas, this happened for me with "my bad," a crinkle-your-nose funny term when you first hear it, and then suddenly very handy, more succinct, and friendlier than "I did not see your cart; I apologize for bumping it ever so lightly." But when I said "my bad" to T'ai one time, he stopped short, shook his head, and said, "No. Mom. Do not say that," conveying in no uncertain terms that I had missed when "my bad" had morphed from new-and-fun to decidedly uncool. Or at least something that you don't want your mom saying. And of course it's too late by then, because once you've added something to your vocabulary, there it is for the using, and you end up being that pleasant but awkward person who says a chipper "my bad!" to someone much cooler than you when you bump their shopping cart with yours.
All of this is to get to "awesome." I have resisted using awesome for a long time. Remember when it appeared? It was off-putting. Abrasive. Immature sounding. Overused. Like....like what. Like like. And you make a haughty resolution to yourself that you do not need this new word. There are plenty of ways to say the same thing, you tell yourself. And when everyone else is saying, "That thunderstorm last night was awesome!" you actually feel yourself resisting saying it too. Instead you chime in with, "Wasn't it amazing?" and you feel both righteous and ridiculous at the same time. Not because amazing or fabulous or terrific aren't terrific words, but because you know that in that moment, awesome would really nail the moment in a way that your po' ass righteous word choice doesn't. You know you are just being stubborn and want to keep being right about how long you've gone without joining the masses-of-lesser-will-and-poorer-judgment who say awesome, like, 24/7.
I would like to give myself permission to say awesome now and then. This blogpost is to nudge me toward the freedom to say something is awesome when it is. I am going to practice exercising that freedom, at first quite deliberately, until I really am free. When "that was awesome!" pops out of my mouth without judging myself, when I say it in a moment of unbridled enthusiasm...That moment, my friends -- that will be...so great wonderful really cool, man...what's the term I'm looking for?

it wasn't Mary Oliver

     Several people have written to ask, with distress in their hearts and fear in their font, if the crabby poet of yore was Mary Oliver. Please don't let it be Mary Oliver, some of the emails begged.
     No, no, my buttercups. When we are in search of true Light, the Universe answers with beauty, hope, and Mary Oliver. While we are all deeply worried about the current global showdown -- which, like all violent showdowns, no matter what, can come to no good, because there's something wrong with such showdowns in the first place -- the Universe is not intentionally messing with our heads, which would be the case if Mary Oliver were a jerk. Which she, by all reports, is not. She's just very quiet.
     Praise Be.

our sweet cat

Poor Juniper, sweetest cat ever, blew her knee and just had her leg amputated. Even in her post-surgery grogginess, she asked for a pen, a card, and a stamp. What a cat.

the bad vibes stop here

     Once I sat at a poetry reading by someone you have heard of. She's very famous. You probably know and like some of her poetry.
     About 20 minutes into the reading, right in the middle of one of her poems, she stopped short. She took a deep breath, looked down with a knit brow, and then looked back up at the attentive audience.
     "Someone in here is giving off a very negative vibe, and I do not appreciate it," she snapped, sending a puff of impatience out the nose.
     We in the audience were instantly wide-eyed, charged with something we didn't know we were guilty of, and suddenly feeling ashamed. We tried to convey innocence with our facial expressions, to muster up the most positive vibes we could. I tried to feel where these bad vibes were coming from, but all I could get were the overwhelming, angry vibes from the famous poet.
     She scanned the room, glaring at all of us. "I would appreciate it if you would either leave or STOP IT. NOW."
     There was a long pause as the audience sat frozen in our seats. Then she went back to reading her poetry.
     I have to say: it felt impossible not to give off a bit of a negative vibe after that. I tried, but it was really tough. I was afraid bad vibes were leaking out of me, like a foul, you know, odor. I had been having a pleasant time, but once she scolded us, scattershot like that, in such a harsh, peculiar way, it was very difficult to feel safe.
     From where I sat, it felt like the wrong way to handle bad vibes: to stir up more.
     I still admire her poetry, but I don't like it any more. Not in the way you want to rest in a good poem. Now I feel like I kind of have to pinch my nose a bit. Like there's poop next to a hydrangea bush that's in full bloom. It's a bummer. 

 I feel better telling the story, though. It's been about 25 years since that afternoon. Time to let go. The bad vibes stop here, man. Look at the hydrangea -- it's in full bloom!

   

wedding bells are gonna chime

     Remember that song? "I'm hurt! She's mad! Wedding bells are gonna chime!"
     That's what I always heard in the 1960s "Do Wa Diddy" song. It wasn't until I was singing along 20 some years ago, with kids in the backseat, that my error came to light. It's awkward being busted when you're singing at full volume, but that moment was such an eye opener. The correct lyrics made so much more sense. Ohhhhh, I thought. "I'm hers, she's miiiiine." Right. That does sound better.
     But then again, so what if the lyrics didn't make sense. When the Turtles sang, "So happy together! How is the weather?" we all stomached those sorry lyrics.
     And anyway, surely some couples get married when one of them is hurt and the other a little bit mad. I thought maybe the couple in the song was getting married in spite of their moods, which was a positive indicator of the depth of their love. And they were singing happily about it all. It's almost Zen.
     Well. It was great moods all around on the day Ting and Dave got married. We all gathered to celebrate love, hope, forgiveness, gratitude, and joy itself. Why don't we have these celebrations all the time? Those are good things to celebrate.

     Your heart feels full in these moments. Somehow in the process of the wedding of your kid -- your amazing, beautiful kid, whom someone wonderful has chosen as life partner -- even as you are standing  in the very Center of Life, you can also feel yourself take a step aside.

you never have to ask me that again

     Laura and I are gradually developing a list of things we never need to ask each other again. So far she's given me permission never to ask her again: "Do you mind if I put some protein powder in the smoothie?" That's gonna save a lot of time and breath.
     I'm letting her off the hook for the following: "Is it okay that I'm not wearing a bra?"and "Do you care if my hair is like this?" It's always okay, and I never care.
     Now that we've conceived of the notion of such a list of things, I hope it becomes long and varied. Still, you want some questions to remain. I sort of hope we never get to not asking things like: "Do you feel like driving or do you want me to?" When a couple gets into automatic assumptions about who is going to drive, when either could -- I dunno. Something tends to get funky. So maybe it needs to be a short list, comprising things that are really, really okay never to ask again.
     So far, it's just those three questions.

     While I'm sharing (I know it's been awhile, for which I have some excellent alibis, and an apology), I will mention that Laura and I are today breaking in our new shoes for Ting's wedding next weekend. More to the point, we are breaking in our feet. Lots of women's feet are heel-ready; ours are not. But we are aiming to pull off the illusion that this is how we always walk: on tiptoes; legs not bending much, but instead moving past each other like the spikes of a compass. Except held together, and not making a circle.
     You can see we are still trying to get clear on the concept and its execution.

my shadow side

     Laura and I are walking at the reservoir. Swish swish swish swish swish swish swish swish swish swish....
     "Your shorts are so loud!" she says. "Do you hear them?"
     "It's not just my shorts. It's yours, too. They're the same material, La."
     "Stop," she says. I stop. She takes a few steps and stops.
     I take a few steps and stop.
     "Wait a second." She takes a few more steps.
     "I guess you're right."
     Those are among my favorite words.
     We walk on. Our shorts are crazy loud for about a quarter of a mile, until we stop noticing the noise. Then there is just a sweet peace between us.

     At the Counseling Institute where I teach each summer, I run this ice breaker that divides the group into social styles. There's the controller, the promoter, the analyzer, the supporter. You recognize these in one form or another; they're Jungian archetypes and we all have a style that comes most naturally to us, whether we learn other ways of being or not. Push comes to shove, we lean most heavily on one, maybe two, of the styles.
    The controller tends toward formality and likes being in charge. If everyone would just do as they do, life would work so smoothly, they think.
     The supporter can spot other people's feelings a mile away, and responds to them intuitively. Their theme: only connect.
     The promoters are the hitchhikers of the world -- more spontaneous, stream of consciousness. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't, but they trust themselves to improvise. They're inclusive.
     The analyzer can't decide between the sushi, which would be kind of a treat, and the giant salad, which also sounds kind of good. The analyzer can be pretty introverted, and can happily wave goodbye to clients and get back to the friends thoughts in her head. The analyzer can spend a very long time tinkering with a blog post because it doesn't sound quite right.
     Reserved yet somehow expressive, I fluctuate between the analyzer (able to think something to death, then wondering about where that expression came from, all while the waiter is waiting for my decision) and the promoter ("What's your favorite food here, Raj?"). Let's just say that on several occasions I have found it useful to give the waiter three menu options and then say "just surprise me." That kind of captures the blend.
     My shadow side is the controller. I hadn't recognized this until recently. Oh, I know I can be controlling, but whenever I describe Controllers in this workshop, I do not think I am talking about myself, at all.
     But when Sam, a beloved colleague at the Institute, put his breakfast protein powder in a plastic cup, my controller came out. "Sam!" I glared in what I hoped was a friendly way. "Hunh?" He doesn't speak friendly glare. "Protein powder in a plastic cup? You should use a glass!"
     Janet, another beloved colleague, busted me. She tapped me several times on my collarbone. "You," she said. "Your shadow side is a controller!" She beamed with delight.
     "What?? No."
     "Yes. It comes out when you care about somebody. Especially if they step on your principles."
     Like a good analyzer, I thought about it all that day. I guess I'm still thinking about it.
     She's right. If I love you, you have to deal with my shadow side and my need to tell you not to use plastic, to let you know that you're not supposed to pronounce the e in forte, and to prove that both of our shorts are making noise. If I don't feel attached, I give you a by.
     It's a tough trade-off.
     Beloved attached ones, please bear with me, including my shadow side. I'm trying to evolve here, and I can only control so much of that process.
   

vive la difference, vive la compagnie

       When Laura takes a video, she has to narrate. "It's snowing pretty hard," she'll say as she points the camera toward snow that is falling pretty hard. Or "Here we are at the beach" she'll say when we are at the beach. A good example of her narrative style of videotaping follows. This documents the day the fan installer couldn't seem to finish the job. Note the time.

     

I am less likely to narrate my humble video captures. I have a long one of me walking along the perfect rows deep within a cornfield, the stalks well above my head. The video is punctuated only toward the end when I get kind of lost. "Hmm," I say.

      We each took some video in Switzerland, of course. See if you can tell which video came from which videographer.

Switzerland trip

     Across the ocean, there is a land where there are no mosquitoes. Where the soil is so healthy and clean there are no trash plants like poison ivy -- only wildflowers and grasses. Water melts and rushes off the mountains and along the roads and paths every few hundred yards there is a trough of spring water that you can drink from. The chocolate and cheese there are so good not because of different processes but because of what the cows eat all day -- clover, gentian, buttercups, forget-me-nots, daisies.
     The troughs at the farms have a steel vat of this morning's raw milk sitting in the icy water. You slip a franc into a wooden box and pour yourself a cup. When you drink the fresh milk you can taste both its past (all those flowers) and its future (there is the slightest suggestion of the potential for a cheese unlike cheese from anywhere else).
     Even though you're not eating bread much these days, you find you must eat this land's bread because it is so simple and fresh, with a crust that is somehow crisp but not dry. The bread allows you also to savor the fresh butter that you slather over it, followed by a layer of apricot spread that your friend has just cooked up.

     You sleep at night with windows wide open. No one has screens. Why would you need screens? 

     You walk through this land, breathing in the crisp mountain air, and you imagine the possibility of living there in your old age. You'd be like Grandfather in Heidi -- wizened yet vigorous. You hope with all your might, as you walk down the mountainside after the long hike up, that you have the privilege of living a long life.

Taylor Swift, revealed

 

   There are certain things I'm deliberately doing to try to stay young. You, too?
     Some are those brain exercises you get at sites like Lumosity, where they lead your brain to the edge of its elasticity and then let it snap back with a thwack. You can remember where 7 squares are, but 8? It's like your brain runs out of the room, hair on fire, when you get to 8. The game essentially says, kindly, "Let's go back to 7, shall we?" Then, since you got so stressed out at 8, you can no longer do 7, and it says, "How about...6? No? How about 5. Can you remember where we put 5 measly things?"
     Laura and I had one of those stark experiences of how worn our brain's elastic is when we played "The Transformation Game" with Ting and Dave last weekend. This is a board game I recently purchased, and it has what seem to Laura and me like rules based on quantum physics (that's a thing, right?). We were referring to the instruction manual every step of the way, like it was for kitchen cupboards from IKEA. But Ting and Dave were whizzing through, reciting the convoluted rules that were brand new to all of us. The difference was that the rules remained brand new to Laura and me each time it was our turn. Dave and Ting would say, "Okay, so now you take 2 awareness cards, take away one pain card from the player of your choice, and then flip the intuition coin to see if you can get an angel token or if you take another pain card." The only card I memorized was the "miracle card," where everyone could return all their pain cards to the box. It was a miracle, all right.
     So the brain thing is a real challenge. I'm also trying to keep limber with physical things: I'm determined to put on my shoes and socks while standing, for example, as long as I can. No sitting on the bed for me; no sir. And lately I've been focusing on getting up from any non-standing position -- sitting in a chair, lying on the floor or in bed, cross-legged for meditation -- without using my hands or arms. Sometimes this is mildly comical, certainly to the gods watching from afar. "Watch this. She's been in bed for 6 hours and she's going to get up without hands or elbows. I love this part."
    The socks and shoes are still easy. I'm aiming for 80 years old, still good on one foot. After that, I'll try to be okay with sitting on the bed.
    But contradictory to these habits, I'm also making some deliberate choices to stay out of the fray, to allow myself to be behind the times. It's an exercise both in keeping my brain young and letting my mind age, too. In a good way.            
     Some of this happens organically, right? Do you know the most popular singing groups these days? Heard any hit music lately? Suddenly you can't even figure out how everyone hears about these things, though I know it just...happens somehow, when you're young.
     When I blogged about thinking that a Kardashian was a kind of a rug, people thought I was joking. You overestimate my engagement in the world of current events. Once that bubble burst and I learned that a Kardashian is actually a person, maybe one that is pregnant by someone else whose name I should probably know, I needed another exercise. I tried assiduously, then, not to learn who Taylor Swift is, despite obvious social pressure to know who the heck people are talking about. It's a cognitive exercise for me; I was trying to keep track of 8 hidden things, and Taylor Swift was one of them. I was pretty sure Taylor Swift was a man, and I wanted to see how long I could go without finding out if that was right or wrong. I understood that s/he sings, but I didn't know what kind of music -- country? I pictured a cowboy hat.
     I told the kids about this project to stay out of the fray du jour, to experience that sense of being out of current loops. They promised not to tell me whether Taylor Swift was a man or a woman; they're so supportive of me and my projects.
     Then, on a long drive while listening to a playlist Yani put on my phone, I hear a nice song. I sing along; it's come up on shuffle a few times before. Oooh, I knew you were trouble when you walked innnnnn...I'm singing along, bouncing from head voice to chest voice in that fun way that makes you feel happy and yodelly. I decide to replay it so I can yodel again, driving along the Mass Pike. I look down at the phone for a second to rewind the song, and there is a picture of the singer: WTF? Taylor Swift? He sings in falsetto and in drag?! 
     That I did not see coming.

the old way was too lonely

     Every now and then, you actually hear a voice. It's coming from within your head, I guess, but you'd swear it was outside you. I feel like this happens maybe once every few years, for me -- the experience of feeling as though someone standing close by has just spoken. It's alarming. Usually it's just been "hello," or maybe a clear as day "paula."
     Then, nothing. It's like someone has said "Marco" right into your ear, and though you try your best to say "Polo! Polo! Polo!" they're gone. They just felt like spooking you and taking off.
     A couple of months ago, I heard that kind of voice. It woke me from what felt like a solid sleep. I don't even say "deep sleep" anymore. Anyone remember deep sleep? Evolution is still trying to work out that knot; either you wake up for a quiet "Mom?" or you get deep sleep. Let's make it so they wake up to the offspring who is having a bad dream or about to ralph, Evolution says (but not right into your ear). For years I've tried explaining to Evolution that the kids are not sleeping here anymore. They've moved out! I am ready for some deep sleep, I tell it. But Evolution does not give a whit. "You on you own, missy, " it says, with a bit of an urban, kick ass tone. Evolution can be cold, and I tell it so, often. It does not care. Not a bit, after you have somewhat successfully cared for your young.
     Actually, Evolution doesn't speak at all. Evolution is mute and stealth. Still, it manages to get its point across. Give it time; it's making some kind of point. A good time to think about this is while you are lying awake at night.
     But there is something with a voice. Now and then there is a voice. One March morning, the presence standing over me as I slept said, aloud and firmly: "The old way was too lonely."
     I was up. Like a flip book missing some pages, I was up. Hullo? What old way? What was I doing wrong? Too lonely for what? Come back!
     I've done nothing differently since then. I don't know what is being asked of me, given me, what is trying to guide me, or what the objectionable part of the "old way" even was. But I have felt distinctly unlonely of late.
     It's like without knowing it, without even knowing I needed something, I had said, "Mom?" into the night. And Something had said, "Right here. Always right here." Maybe Evolution is just a lackey; it has to answer to something bigger.
   
   

squeeze me

     As long as I can remember, I've had a recurring fantasy that strikes me at odd times. My family is used to hearing me state variations on its premise:
     A group of strangers are gathered in a large room. They have to figure out the one thing they have in common before they are released.
     "What if you put everyone who was terrified as a kid of that movie with the guy with his eyelids held open by toothpicks into the same room?"
     "What if you put everyone who has in the last week bought a plunger, kale, and nectarines into the same room?"
     "What if you put everyone who lost a ring while swimming in a lake into the same room?"
     "What if you put everyone who thinks "irregardless" is correct into the same room?" Gee, that would need to be a really, really big room. Maybe we narrow it down to people who think it's correct and who happen to use it a lot, like habitually. It'd be tough to figure that one out! They'd really have to think hard to see the problem, then find the commonality. You'd need to bring in food.

     Certain ones would probably give just the right amount of challenge.
     "What if you put everyone in a room who, like, think it's hilarious that they always say 'squeeze me' instead of 'excuse me'?" It'd be pretty crowded, but because it was so crowded they'd all start saying 'squeeze me,' just trying to move around the room. Except...it'd be almost entirely guys, probably almost entirely straight guys, who would feel weird about saying 'squeeze me' to each other. Suddenly it's not so funny any more, is it, bud. This is actually a good one; a good challenge.
     The easiest, of course, would be to put all of us who have this fantasy into one big room. Oh, sweet. We'd be set free in no time at all, but we'd never want to leave.

things you can't blog about

     There is so much you are not supposed to blog about. The other night we were reminiscing about Bear, our beloved dog who died in January. Sometimes he was a real pain. He simply was not interested in pleasing others. It was all me, me, me to that dog. He wasn't one of those dogs who felt guilty or needy or desperate for approval. He was interested in laps, a walk, other dogs' food, and barking. Arghhh, the barking sometimes!
     "'Come?' Hold your damn horses. I'm doing something," he'd say.
     "What a jerk," I muttered, mid-reminiscence. Sometimes he really could be.
     "What a jerk!" echoed Laura. Then: "Don't blog about that, p! Diane reads your blog and she and Dan loved their dog. And they loved Bear. She'd be mortified."
     "What?! Diane knows Bear could be a jerk. You can grieve someone's absence and still remember their character flaws."
     "Still. People don't understand things like that. Once a dog is gone, you're supposed to remember him as a good dog, I think."
     "Really? Not Bear. Not yet, anyway. He could be an asshole."
     "It's true. Such an asshole."

     I figured I'd lead you gently into truly off-limits blogging territory -- by first confessing to the no-no of judging the deceased. I'm embarrassed that I have been critical of Bear's personality, if that helps. And to use such a bad word! As someone who tends to say, "Jiminy Cricket!" instead of its many alternatives, I am embarrassed to have it in plain text that I sometimes speak less delicately.
     Anyway, here's what else you can't blog about, and it's ever-so-slightly more taboo than using a bad word to judge your dead dog: your (my) remaining genitalia.
     These days, with the BRCA2 mutation, I have doctor's appointments more often than most women shave their legs. Well, most Chinese women. More often than I shave my legs, anyway. Let's just say I have a lot of appointments.
     Last year I switched to a new gynecologist. I left my previous one because I felt like I was invisible to her -- especially when I got cancer. Cancer makes you choosier in lots of ways.
     This new ob-gyn walks around in stiletto heels -- not a point in her favor when I first met her, but neither is it a meaningful point against. If stilettos help you feel better about peering into vaginas and palpating breasts all day, more power to you, say I.
     "Careful in there," I ask. "I've been downsized. I think some of the stitches didn't dissolve."
     "How can you tell?"
     Here I want you to imagine a brief silence.
     "I can feel them."
     "How?"
     Here I want you to imagine a long silence.
     "I...felt them. You want to check out the basement once it's been renovated, you know."
     She goes in. I hear her stilettos clicking around as she pushes around the light, the speculum, the furniture in the basement. Tock tock tock tock. Tock....tock.
     "Hmm. Those aren't stitches. That's scar tissue." Here she draws me a diagram; a real keeper.

     My favorite part of this diagram is the eyes that are looking into the vagina. See them there on the bottom? No, not on the bottom; haven't you taken human biology? The bottom of the page. Those are eyes, plus eyebrows that are zigzag with keen interest. The eyes are looking in, a little close up for my liking, and they're thinking "Hmm." On the left is a potato, which is what the vagina looks like once you are standing in there, I guess. Those hatch marks are stitches, I think. Pay no attention to the canal in the middle of the page; that goes back to what I called our beloved dead dog.
     "So the scar tissue has just kind of sealed you up a bit. Sometimes that happens," she says with an affable shrug. She seems very proud of her drawing, like this is the part of being a gynecologist that she really likes. Then she says:
     "If you were still using your vagina, we could do something about it. But as it is, we can just let it go."
     Case closed, apparently -- and vagina, too. Weeks later, I still shake my head (see diagram for general location) at her cheeky assumption.
   

lucid dreaming

     Last week I got a call from the mother of a 15-year-old boy who was doing a science project and needed to interview a psychologist. As I always do, I hurried to explain* that I'm not a psychologist. Psychologists are very firm on your doing this quickly. They'd prefer if you wore a t-shirt during session that said, "I am not a psychologist and you are getting less than optimal care by seeing me." Bona fide psychologists get their fur up if anyone without a license as a psychologist calls themselves a you-know-what.
     It's all part of the pecking order, and if you are licensed as a measly clinical social worker or professional counselor, you get the beak. From psychologists who have fur. These are pecking creatures with fur, and they are the dominant species in the therapy biz. Except for psychiatrists, who prescribe medicine and whom we all think are Not Relational Enough, and aren't really doing The Work. We all use a lot of capital letters when we talk about each other.
     "Whatever," said the mom, which is usually the response (it's important that this be kept, however, from the psychologists). "Could he interview you? He needs to speak with a scientist."
     Ah. That there is no license for. Psychology, which I taught for quite a few years, is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes. I love the science of it all; it highlights both our determination to figure people out and the limitations of our conclusions. Most studies should actually have longer "limitations" sections than "conclusions" sections. Anyway, I made an appointment for her kid to come in to talk with me because I am a scientist who works in the field of psychology. But not as a p*y*h*l*g*s*.
     The boy was doing a project on lucid dreaming, that fabulous state wherein you realize you are dreaming and then suddenly have the freedom and ability to do anything you want. Anything. Lucid dreaming happens in that place where you can kind of play with your unconscious mind, consciously; two things that don't usually blend suddenly do and you're in a different state altogether. It's like mixing blue and yellow and coming up with green. Remember learning about that as a kid? Whoa.
     "Have you ever had a lucid dream?" he reads from his script of questions.
     "Oh, yes, many times!" I answer with enthusiasm.
     I can tell by his facial expression that he himself has not. "You have?" I am to him someone who has actually seen a ghost, a unicorn, a martian. He is very excited. He scribbles something down, though he is videotaping our conversation.
     "What did you choose to do in your lucid dream?" he reads.
     I pause for a second and then say, "I usually choose to fly."
     This is durn close to the truth. Often when I become aware that I am dreaming, I choose to fly. Seize the moment, man! Up, up, and away! It's fabulous to fly in a dream, and I savor the memory for days.
     In the momentary pause, though, I was busy resisting the impulse to tell him the other truth: sometimes, lucid dreams are the perfect opportunity to have sex with a stranger. I thought better of telling that to this 15-year-old boy, right at the awakening of his own sexuality. Such a confession from a 57-year-old breastless woman might cause the tiniest shift in his mental picture of sex and sexuality, and not in a happy way. I just think it might ruin something, like inserting a glitch into a stem cell, or going flat early while singing an otherwise catchy song. I didn't want to accidentally show up in his first lucid dream, you know?
     Not long ago, I had a lucid dream in which I excitedly approached the first person I came across.
     "You're in my dream!" I nearly shouted at that person.
     "I know!" he or she answered, as tickled as I. I don't even remember if it was a man or a woman.
     ""LET'S HAVE SEX!!"" we both shouted with delight.
     Afterwards I thought, "I have the title to my book: You're in my dream! I know! Let's have sex!" 
     It turns out that I must have still been asleep when I had that thought, because in the light of day it didn't quite sound like something a publisher would go for.
     All that happened in my mind in the moment I took to muster a response to my young interviewer: "I usually choose to fly."
     Still! What fun, all around. I love being a scientist.


* Please ignore all the other asterisks in the word p*y*h*l*g*s*. They do not relate to footnotes. But when I think of "hurrying to explain" I think of the moose joke where the guy is heading to a costume party in a moose suit and is spotted by a hunter. "I'm not a moose! I'm not a moose!" he hurries to explain, waving his arms in alarm. The hunter looks confused and tilts his head to take this in. "I'm not a moose! I'm not a moose!" the guy in the costume shouts again. BANG. The hunter comes over to the guy whom, let's say, he has shot in the leg. "I am not a moooooose," the wounded guy whines. "Oh! Sorry, man," the hunter says. "I thought you were saying that you are a moose."
   

squatty potty, advanced

     Once you've started to study holistic health in earnest, it's only a matter of time before you feel like you are missing out on something by not owning a Squatty Potty. You've been just sitting on a regular toilet? All this time? How...primitive.
     It's kind of like what happens when I think about the position I was in for the births of T'ai, Ting, and Yani. What? I now think. I was lying down? Why didn't they suggest I squat? Why didn't I think of delivering babies under water, in one of those pop-up pools you can set up in your living room? It really did not cross my mind, and now I feel like it all could have been done more sensibly. It's like I was trying to get the swing going without knowing you could pump your legs. Here I am talking about an actual swing.
     I guess none of this applies to Yani's birth -- she came out her own door, one created with impromptu carpentry. It probably made sense to be lying down for that, I'm thinking. Though she was my third perfect little baby, I have always resented that the obstetrician elected to bring Yani into the world by C-section. I wasn't in distress; the baby wasn't in distress. Yani seemed to be perfectly content being bottom first, and now that we know how much she moves around when she sleeps (whomever she selects as life partner will have to sleep like a rock), we should have just waited for her to grab all the covers and roll over.
     But the doctor was in distress; I was to her like a kid who was just learning to tie my shoelaces and taking a very long time getting my Keds on. She had those Velcro sneakers, maybe even with wheels on the back. Which is to say that, though those are extremely cool, and I feel envious whenever I see kids sliding through the grocery store in their wheely sneakers, I felt rushed by my doctor 23 years ago.
     The next morning she came to check on me. "I wish I could give this woman upstairs a C-section and hurry things up like we did with you," she sighed with understandable fatigue. I imagine that if she hadn't been so tired she might not have shown that card, but there it was. The truth sprayed itself out in a sorry mess, scatological analogies to which I have written and deleted several times. I will spare you that much.
     I am ever the trendsetter -- cutting edge, you might say -- and C-sections are unfortunately almost routine these days. Now I know about and so regret all the biological consequences of Yani's not having been exposed to my, ah, vaginal flora, which is just such an unfortunate thing to be blogging about when I started out wanting to talk about pooping.
     Squatty Potty. I was telling you about the squatty potty. Suddenly I had to have one, to honor my ancestors who squatted so that I might one day live and prosper in Farmington, Connecticut, despite having spit into evolution's wind by birthing my progeny while lying down.
     I make my way to the Squatty Potty website. Once you've chosen your Squatty Potty style, you choose the height. They try to guide you a bit: "Order the 7" if you are new to squatting. If you are advanced or limber, get the 9". Our 5" works great for grannies." This gives rise to serious rumination, and I take days to decide: am I new to squatting? I do it all the time in the garden. Am I advanced? Along what scale? Are we talking spiritually, or what. I sure as heck was not going to order the one for grannies. Not yet, baby.
   The Squatty Potty website will make you feel as though you have long been a fool, tempting death and disease, really, not to "elevate your feet in order to eliminate." And it does help. Oh, I don't actually notice much difference in pooping. But when I put my feet on the Squatty Potty I get a little ego boost -- because I got the advanced.
     Then, when I realize that this type of thinking is not in the least bit advanced, I go back to feeling like my same old foolish self. I chuckle at myself -- and as I sit there, I feel like my ancestors are chuckling at me, too.