welcome and goodbye

Hello, dear followers and dear stumblers-upon:

I began taotechu in November of 2009 in the turbulent wake of my diagnosis of breast cancer. Navigating through double mastectomies, the swamp of chemotherapy, the rapids of BRCA2, and the general current of life, this little blog has helped me keep my nose above water. It has offered me a place to reflect, to rest, to play. I've poured my quirky little heart into this blog, and I am grateful to have had your company.

I know through the years a good number of people have been referred to this blog following their own cancer diagnosis. You will always be welcome here. You might want to start here in 2009, where I began with surgery. January 2010 marks the beginning of several months of ACT chemotherapy for triple negative cancer. Some of the toughest times were after treatment, when people expect you to feel great, but you feel exhausted and more vulnerable without chemical weaponry. It is not until March of 2012 that we learned about my genetic glitch of BRCA2, which led to immediate oophorectomies (ooph is a good term for this) and a hysterectomy while we were in the neighborhood.

It was difficult not to talk about it for the months after BRCA2, but we were in the thick of getting the kids and my siblings tested for quite awhile. It did not feel like I could share about that until 6 spiky shoes had dropped, each with their own excruciating bit of suspense. Tests were negative for one, two, three, four, then five of my beloved family members. We felt crazy lucky each time someone's results came in. But the last one bopped us all on the head, hard, when my sister came up positive for BRCA2. I note that with sadness here, but again, it has not been my story to tell.

Throughout the taotechu blog, you can read some pretty intimate stuff. You can see the guts of my mind and the veins of my heart; it's not for the squeamish, unless you kind of like that feeling.

Some of my favorite posts have been about my life with Laura. For those you need to scrounge. I must publicly mention here how much I appreciate Laura's willingness to serve amuse, bemuse, and be muse.

I am going to suspend taotechu for the foreseeable future. I may post something at the 5-year mark of my cancer diagnosis, some 8 months from now, since I imagine at that point I might feel the need to pipe up, much as you would check in with an old friend on an important occasion.

I appreciate your listening. Special thanks to those who have expressed encouragement and support.

sometimes the Universe listens REALLY closely

I've been hesitating to tell you this, but...I think I killed the blog. I didn't mean to! It was just a draft I made -- the same night I posted about the carn-sarn meditating cat. Just writing about the end of taotechu in draft form made it happen.  I'm telling you: be careful where you point your minds, gentlefolk.

Ever since I wrote a closing, I haven't been able to write in the blog. The "dinner conversation" I posted yesterday wasn't writing as much as it was transcribing my thoughts. I wanted to see if the blog could be resuscitated. Apparently not.

"Keyboard mightier than cannon." I dictated that into my phone in the middle of the night not long ago as I pondered the power of my draft to bring this blog to a halt. It was a sleepy, half-baked update (cannons not being tremendously du jour) about the pen being mightier than the sword. In the morning I check my notes, and the phone's autocorrect has written "Keyboard mightier than Canon."

For a moment the English major within me stirs. I muse on the meaning of this auto-misconstrual in the context of the literary Canon. Since the keyboard (pen, typewriter, whatever) created the Canon, isn't there something true in there -- that the individual's written truth is mightier than the collective whole of the Canon?

It takes a moment to realize my phone is not being witty or erudite. It is thinking of its buddy -- Canon. Like the printer or the camera. Its fellow technological device. Comrade in arms. Partner in crime. BFF.

What I meant about the mighty keyboard was this: Even though I didn't post it, when I wrote that I was ending the blog, the Universe heard. That's mighty. It's possibly mightier than the cannon.

I'll revisit the draft and see if it still speaks truth. If it does, I will post it sometime soon.

dinner conversation

     So I says to myself as I massage the kale with the olive oil, "It's so great. I actually like this shit. Yay. Yay for that."
     I continue to massage and tear, massage and tear.

"I mean...pretty much."
"Yeah. I guess it's not always the best tasting stuff in the world."
"And it takes a lot of work -- cooking food that's good for you."
"That's true."
     I load up the pan.
"But that's okay. 'Cause it's a good thing that I am willing to go to the extra effort to put good food into my body."
"I know, right?"
"Yup. It's cool that I really do think in terms of what my body wants in order to stay healthy. It really matters to me. It'd be so hard if that weren't the case; so depressing. You'd feel kind of meh all the time. Tired. And you'd be eating shit that's really bad for your body."
"And the earth, for chrissake."
"Yeah, it's cool that I really am guided by what's best for my body."
"Most of the time."
     I scrape out the seeds of an acorn squash.
"But not in a weird way."
"Right! Not in a weird way."
"Pretty much."
"Anyway, it's so good! It's so cool that I really want to do what I can to live. To not die of cancer."
"Essentially."
"Yeah, well, to not die of cancer."
"Or something."
"Not because I'm scared of dying, but because I really want to live this life well and long."
"So cool. So lucky! Lucky to want to."
"Mm. Needs salt."
"Argh, these Himalayan salt crystals are too big for this salt grinder."
"Why don't I just throw out those last few gigantic crystals?"
"That'd be a waste of good, pink salt crystals."
"Shit. They've come all the way from the other side of the world."
     I arm wrestle with the salt grinder and get out a few pink crumbs.
"Ach. What a gigantic carbon footprint I have. Salt from the other side of the world. Jiminy cricket."
     I peek at the kale in the oven and stir.
"It'll be good for my footprint when I'm dead. No more guilt about these kale chips being a ridiculous amount of carbon, just to end up with this." I pull out what had been a huge pile of kale and now is a crisp tuft of dark green on a cookie sheet.
"Mm. It sucks to have to feel bad about these. They're so good and good for you."
"Yay. How happy am I that I want to take good care of my body?"
"Happy. Lucky."
"So lucky."
"But my footprint! Gee."
"I know. Ugh."
"Ugh."

buddha in a fur coat

     The cat and I have become best buds now that it's just the two of us during the week, and especially since she lost that back leg in late summer. Juniper's always been very sweet -- but reserved, like someone who is on the formal side no matter how long you've known them. They would really rather we all shake hands instead of hug. They make a little sound like "ehhhhh" when you squeeze them, even a bit, in an embrace. My ex-mother-in-law, so formal you wondered if it might be a joke (that would be a no) would, in an attempt to keep children at bay, call out as the kids ran up to greet her: "Now, which hand shall I shake first?" Cats can be like that.
     But since Laura, Juni's more attentive (not to actually say the word "co-dependent") owner, is gone most of the time, and since I am the one who gave the okay to remove her leg (the cat's, not Laura's), Juni sees that the stakes are pretty high. People and limbs can actually disappear, and one is left with what? Three legs and one surgery-happy person who occasionally remembers to feed you. It's not much. Best strategy may be solidarity, the cat seems to think. She is at this moment, as is often the case of late, under the laptop -- or cattop, I should say.
     In the mornings, Juni follows me, staring or glaring -- sometimes it's hard to tell with cats -- until I sit to meditate. When I get on my zafu or zamboni, or whatever that meditation cushion is called, she sits in front of me and immediately starts her mantra. She has mastered her monkey mind, and is freaking buddha in fur. On the mornings when I've decided to skip meditating and instead move straight into the day, her cat-stare is decidedly accusatory. The danged cat has the discipline to meditate this morning, I scold myself.
     This morning I "meditated" about my breathing (I won't say how long that lasted), my to-do list, last night's dreams, my connection to the Source (this for a nanosecond), the Oneness of us all (ditto), and then, for a long time, whether I should have a green smoothie or eggs and kale for breakfast. I opened one eye and spoke to the chanting cat.
     "Very impressive, smartypants," I muttered. Juni did not stop chanting; not for a moment.
     I felt even worse after that -- it negates your meditation session if you peek, I think -- not to mention mutter, for god's sake. It can't be good to make a snarky comment and then go back to contemplating the oneness of us all. But I only opened one eye, so...points for that.

oh my, Pollyanna

     I believe it's after you have said it one hundred times yourself and have heard it for the one thousandth* time, that you decide it's time to look up the reference. In this case it began with a quick glance at Wikipedia: Pollyanna is a best-selling 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter that is now considered a classic of children's literature, with the title character's name becoming a popular term for someone with the same optimistic outlook.
     Hmm. Wonder if it's good. What if we put all the people who are reading Pollyanna right now into the same room? It would probably be a pretty small (but cheery) room.
     I download Pollyanna for free, and then I spring for the Audible version for 99 cents. Why not.
     The excruciating timbre of the narrator's voice is why not, but despite that, I listen to all five and a half hours -- while I cook, while I do email, even practicing some ukulele. It's Pollyanna, for god's sake; it's not like it's hard to follow. When the book ends, at the point when most people would have had more than they wanted of Pollyanna and her story, I, naturally, order the DVD from Netflix. When a book is fresh in your mind sometimes you want to see how closely the movie follows it. You want to see how they mess with the plot, how true they stay to the original dialogue. 
     The next night, because that's how ridiculously quickly the Netflix elves deliver Pollyanna, I watch the Masterpiece Theatre version as I cook, do email, and practice ukulele. With quiet delight, I recognize some dialogue, but they insist upon making Nancy and Tim fall in love, fight, then (spoiler alert) reconcile, when Nancy and Tim didn't have to go through all that in the book. They were just friends. And in the book there was no scene of handsome Tim chopping wood, shirtless and in his suspenders. Perhaps I should have put a spoiler alert in front of that, too.
     Today the original version of Pollyanna should arrive, Elves willing, because the British rendition wasn't enough weirdness. No, now I am going to put myself through the 136-minute American movie, produced before they edited dialogue for our collective ADHD. With this molasses-on-film version, I might even be able to read along. 
     At least in the film adaptations they don't ejaculate, thank god. In 1913, people apparently ejaculated in the middle of conversations all the time. It wasn't even embarrassing to them back then; they all seemed quite comfortable with it. "'This is sheer nonsense!' ejaculated the man, decisively." Or "'Your--aunt!' he ejaculated." By the time someone had ejaculated for the tenth** time in the middle of the story I was otherwise enjoying, I couldn't hear "again that spasm crossed his face" or read that someone had stiffened, moaned, or gasped without feeling kind of mortified. 
     I have to hand it to Pollyanna, though. Even with all of that going on around her, she was a really, really good sport. 

*Here I have inserted the word I find the most difficult to pronounce without a running start, with apologies.
**At least it wasn't the thouthanth.

in the interest of research

     I'm still trying to digest the recent discovery that you don't think about piles of things. Everyone who commented on that post raised their hand and said, no. No, they don't think about piles.
      I think about my accumulated piles of things all the time. It's why I panic when the CVS cashier tries to put my tube of toothpaste into a plastic bag, thereby adding to the gigantic, hideous pile of all the plastic bags I've used in my life. No! God, no. Please; no bag.
     Or the fantasy about gathering people who have one particular thing in common, and watching them try to figure out what it is. Anybody with me on that?
     I'm feeling the need for a survey (wait a second -- do you ever feel the need for a survey?). Here is (page 1 of) a survey I conducted at a conference several years ago. I left it on the registration desk for two days and people quietly filled it in when they spotted it. Does this same surveying impulse sometimes overtake you?

Regardless, below is today's survey, part of my ongoing research on how other people think and don't think.

Question 1:  Do you have a question in your head (perhaps every week or so) that goes like this: Is there anyone else in the world who has ever this exact load of groceries? (e.g., an eggplant, goat cheese, five pounds of cashews, toothpicks, rubber gloves, and a sunflower?) An acceptable variation: has anyone else ever carried this exact load of items? (The image below documents the moment when I told Ting: "Let me get the camera. I think this may be the first time ever in the course of human history that someone has carried this very combination of things: a French press, a wilted daikon radish, and some mud from the Dead Sea.")

     Question 2. If you do have these thoughts, does it ever lead to the following: 
     If this is the very first time this has happened, what an amazing moment this is!
     OR
     If it has happened before: What if those people met? Would they ever figure it out? (e.g., "Stop right there! I once carried a French press, a wilted daikon radish, and a container of mud from the Dead Sea!")
     Do you then imagine their delight?

not nervous at all

      The morning of the TV bit I had an 8:00 appointment in my next door neighbor's kitchen. She was going to put some makeup on my face before I drove to the studio. I brought over the red bag of cosmetics they gave me at the Look Good, Feel Better class I took during chemo.
     "I'm not sure what's in here," I told Arlene, as I emptied the bag onto her counter. Out spilled blush, lipstick, mascara, various pencils and brushes. A sponge with tan smear in its pores. Foundation. Concealer. It just kept coming.
     She did her thing and we put it all back in the bag.
     As I left, she said, "When you get there, touch up your lips with the lipliner and the lipstick." She gave my eyebrow a little brushing with her fingertip. "You always have to touch up your lips," she confided.
     "Okay," I promised. I pulled the lipliner and lipstick out of the bag and popped them into my pocket.

     I had my instruction sheet on the passenger seat next to me in the car. I had highlighted the driving directions in bright yellow so that I wouldn't get distracted by the part in bold: "**NOTE** Hosts don't like mayonnaise, duck, canned tuna, beets, relish, Russian dressing, deer, rabbit, lamb." This little note had already captured me completely a dozen times or more. I wasn't going to have that happen as I drove.
     There it was on the left: the gigantic CHANNEL3 sign, just like on TV. So whaaaat, I say to myself. Wazza big deal" (I have a Brooklyn accent in my head). So what -- it's just fun! It's just a normal thing on a normal day with normal people. I park where the show's logo says to park, and I carry the paintings, one by one, over the slushy driveway. Then the easels. Then shoes, so I don't go on TV in my winter boots. 
     Minutes later, I am still feeling kind of pleased with myself for operating so normally, so like a person who lives in the world and kind of gets around in her own quiet way. Someone comes over to take the paintings and set up their display. There's no "I don't know, Jerry. What do you think? Think this one should be over here? Why don't we try...this?" about it. When I turn my head for a second, they have all 4 paintings in place, with three cameras poised (someone does this from an office somewhere) and ready to go. These guys are studio masters, man. They have this thing down to a science. They are counting seconds -- for ten hours a day. 
     A man walks over to me and says "let me show you to the ladies' room." Even this guy knows the secret about having to touch up your lips. The whole operation is so efficient that they don't even wait for you to ask for directions to the bathroom. This way they don't have to deal with guests trying to figure out whom to interrupt to ask for the bathroom; they don't have to hear people ask for the "loo" or "potty" or "little girls' room."
     I touch up my lips in the bathroom. Let me take a quick moment here to say that I discovered after getting home that eyeliner comes in pencils that look exactly like lipliner pencils. 

     I return to the studio with mauve lips, outlined in brown. I'm here. In this moment. Here I am. What a fun moment! This is my more zen chatter of the head. Fifteen minutes before taping: the clocks on the stove and the microwave both say 2:45, so that when the show airs at 3:00, it looks live. I am a little agog even at that small act of cleverness. I'm pleased that my nervousness is staying quiet enough for me to be having fun.

     The producer comes over to greet me. He puts out his hand and smiles. 
     "Hi!" he says. "I'm Bob."
     "Hi!" I say warmly. "I'm Bob."
     Yep. "Hi!" I said - warmly, for god's sake - "I'm Bob."

found spouse's porn

Oh, she is so busted.

(see this post if you are unsure of reference/context)

promoting the exhibit

     We're having an exhibit of some of my dad's paintings. As part of the publicity, I agreed to be interviewed.
      I thought they were asking one of us to be on the radio. Wouldn't you think that? When someone says "WFSB wants to do an interview," doesn't that sound like radio? I think it sounds like radio. So I say sure. Lee had already done the interview with The Courant, and El just plain has her hands full. Plus she'd hate to do a radio interview.
     An email comes from the show: the attachment is called ALL GUESTS SHOULD KNOW. I glance at it on my screen, then print it out.
     "Clothing: wear what you are comfortable in! We suggest bright colors as opposed to white or something with a complex pattern."
     What the..
     Then "We do not have a hair/makeup team -- please arrive camera ready."
     Jiminy cricket! I thought. This must be TV. 
   
     It turns out most folks around here know this show. Better Connecticut. Go ahead: let's all laugh together here. Do you see all the funny things about this? There are several, and they're all tied together into a funny little knot.
     Today I set a timer so I would remember to watch Better Connecticut to see what it's all about, and to get a sense of what bright colors people are wearing.
     Oh, my. The hosts are comedians! That's their schtick! I'm sunk. I'll either go flat (no breast jokes here, please) or I'll go goofy and won't be able to stop laughing. Both scenarios seem equally likely, equally mortifying.
     Let me freeze-frame that scene of the damsel in distress and say one thing. I must comment on the strangeness of what I saw during one hour of TV this afternoon. If you nearly never watch TV, it's a real jolt when you do. There's a whole world in there. It's very intense -- that world and the experience. I think I hardly blinked, and it's possible my mouth was agape.
     Anyway, during one of our "What the heck am I supposed to wear for this television thing?" conversations, I say to Laura, "Maybe I should wear the foobs." I've never yet worn them, but being on TV seems like the kind of occasion that might call for the illusion of breasts.
     "Oh, hon," La says, unsure if this is a moment when I might cry, or if I'm being goofy. I'm not sure either, but I decide to chuckle so that she can, too.
     "Nah, I can't do that. I'll just wear a scarf. A brightly colored scarf."
     My hair is so thin these days that I'm worried the studio lights will make my scalp shine through, giving me a little head-glow. That's a thing, I think.
     But the kicker is that bit about arriving camera ready. Since I have never been camera ready in my life, I have given my well-made-up neighbor the task of getting me there.
     Oh, boy!
     Stay tuned, as they say in the biz.
   
   
   
   

a pile of all the food you've ever eaten

Raise your hand if you don't have this thematic fantasy: seeing a pile of all the food you've eaten in your lifetime. It's in a giant room, right? Or maybe there's just a place floating in the space of your mind, and in that place there is a pile of all the butter that you've ever eaten. A pile of all the apples -- from the perfect sliced Cortland to all the dimpled ones you've found in the grass near an apple tree.

A pile of all the noodles. All the berries. For a moment, memories flash by as I add to the pile: our old raspberry patch, wild strawberries in the woods, or blackberries along a trail.

A pile of all the bacon. For a horrible millisecond: a pile of all the pigs.

A pile of all the licorice, maybe a sub-pile for Good & Plenty alone. Remember when some of them didn't have any licorice -- just a blob of pink or white sugar? Those pieces wouldn't count.

All the black beans. I might break that down into a pile for when I was in Guatemala, and a pile for the rest of my life. I think fondly of Guatemala for a second or two.

There's a very tiny pile of eel. One bite of octopus. One oyster.

Certain items don't lend themselves as easily to piling. When I picture a pile of all the eggs I've eaten, it ends up such a mess. Milk requires a giant imaginary container, maybe like the size of the pond we used to have. Or would it be more like the size of our neighbors' pool? I think for a minute about the pond, with that great birch tree. I think about dips in the pool.

I've had a lot of milk.

All the insects! I would love to see a pile of all the insects I've eaten. All the worms that were blithely steamed into broccoli, flies that took a little road trip from farm to store to belly -- stowaways pressed against a piece of kale. I imagine it wouldn't be a gigantic pile, but there'd be enough to stare at for awhile with your eyebrows raised.

All the lettuce: this could even be sorted into piles by decade. There is a pile of iceberg from the 1960's, for example, towering over the pile of 1960s romaine. Then, beginning with maybe the piles for the 90s, the iceberg lettuce starts to fits into a couple of wheelbarrows, then into a small flower pot. It came on sandwiches, or soggy and flattened under some sushi.

A pile of all of it, all you've ever eaten.

This morning I apply my usual pile-of-food fantasy while eating some nut bread I'd just made. "This recipe would be good with dates," I say aloud, because that's what I do now. And then I wonder about the pile of all the dates I've ever eaten. (Sometimes I create a continuum and wonder where my [say, date] ingestion is in comparison to "other people in the US," which is different from "other people in the world" -- if I want to play with sliding up and down the continuum. For dates: well higher than the average person in the US; then still higher than average -- but less so, I think -- worldwide. Because you have to include in your calculations not only everyone in the middle east, but also all the people in other places who have never had the sticky pleasure.)

I think of how my parents always bought that date nut bread around Christmastime. They ordered loaves and loaves from the Koinonia Farm, a little community of people who decided to live together, practice peace, and try to make a simple living out of selling pecans and date nut bread. That was some good bread.

If you piled all the slices of Koinonia date nut bread I've eaten, I wonder what that would look like.

I wonder how big it would be compared to mom's pile of date nut bread.

Hm. Her pile of date nut bread would be bigger. She loved that bread.

I go back to eating my bread that should have dates in it, and I miss my mom for awhile. In fact, I could start with almost any of those imagined piles except maybe the pigs, and that's where I end up: thinking of meals around a table, thinking of my life, my family -- the good, good stuff.

As I take another bite of bread, then wet a finger to pick up a sunflower seed that is left on the plate, I consider my huge life-pile of sunflower seeds. Most are shelled, but there's a smaller pile that's impressive, too -- sunflower seeds we used to shell with our teeth, sitting together around the big, round table. There was jasmine tea, too.

Man, my dad loved those seeds.

the fall of Rome

I think maybe this is how Rome first began to fall. One night someone put their cup in the sink -- and left it to be washed in the morning. Time went by, and soon an entire supper's dishes sat in the sink all night. Still, this took the Roman dish user by surprise. Did I do that? they'd ask themselves in the morning. Huh, they'd say -- originally a Latin term. As Rome fell and everything felt like an effort, Romans got tired of speaking Latin, and only wrote it now and then. Ancient graffiti remains today on some of the walls in Italy: HUH, carved into the stone. These markings, along with the equally ubiquitous  semper ubi sub ubi, are undeniable evidence of the bewilderment -- and regression -- that came with the gradual approach of the Fall.

They used to pride themselves on making the bed every morning, because that's what the previous Roman elders did, and now they were elders themselves. Romans lived in the Golden Age of Making the Bed, and were a proud people. But as the Empire fell, or at least began to lean, they began to think: Why do we do this? I never come in here except to sleep, and no one else ever comes in here. They did not fully understand that making the bed was holding the fabric of society together, holding together the Empire. People began to get out of bed and then simply "close" the bed. No tucking. Just a quick throw of the blankets in the general direction of the pillows. It was a shortcut that would lead to others.

A mass of Romans went through this unraveling at the same time (they were in middle age, though that term was not to be named for another 1000 years) and each Roman thought maybe they were the only one slacking a bit. But the truth is that everyone was, in their own way. Someday, they secretly feared, they might not even floss.

They began to talk to themselves more. Recently not overheard by anyone in a kitchen I know well: "Tear along the dotted line? I'm trying to tear along the dotted line! You're not giving me much to work with here!" It was just like this in ancient Rome, except without the plastic bag of Romaine (ah, the irony!) lettuce to struggle with. No, back then they began to talk to themselves about the things of their day: Ubi est mea sub ubi? they'd ask themselves in the dark of morning.

At the peak of the Empire, Romans were famous for getting in 10,000 steps a day! It is one of the things that made the Empire so great and powerful. One day they settled for 9,524 and did not even run up and down the stairs to reach 10,000. One day, when it was 8 degrees outside, they didn't even try -- and got only 3,560. The writing, as I've said, was on the wall. Eventually, pathetically, they seemed to stop writing altogether.

Rome fell in the wintertime. I understand. I really do.