happy spring...

happy again... my new meds (well, new a year ago now) have really turned me into a different person... mostly i'm happy, most days - almost all days - i'm glad to be alive. Pema Chödrön says,

“I’m glad to be alive to agreeable, I’m glad to be alive to disagreeable. And I’m glad to be alive to sour and sweet and tingly and itchy, and refreshing and cold and hot and the whole thing. And it doesn’t matter that there is this voice that says I don’t like this, or I do like this, that’s fine, you know, that’s also fine, but somehow open and at home, with your body, your mind, and your world, and meditation is actually the means or, the tools that we need… It actually is that the present moment is the doorway to liberation, vastness, unobstructed quality of our mind. And we could experience the world that way.”

and just because of the meds i do begin to feel glad to be alive to different experiences, interested in what's around the corner... i know my world is still small and cramped compared to the "liberation, vastness, unobstructed quality of our mind" that i experience when i do meditate regularly (haven't been, due to the falling-asleep issue)............but i open my arms to the wind and the sunlight and i tip my head back to blue sky or rainy.... and laugh or smile and just feel glad. i love the trees blooming right now - i've taken photos - wait let me upload them...




and i love the blossoms falling so sweet and fluttery, flowing and eddying like powdery snow in the wake of cars... i love the tulips so red and the tulips falling apart... this morning i walked out in the park and i loved the birdsong and the sound of wind in the trees, the sweet smell and feel of dewy grass... spring is in full swing and summer's coming... i have so much to cover in my classes and so much joy to be able to have so much to teach.

looking ahead to the summer, i'm gonna quote (with some editing) from an email i sent to Nadine... i'm laughing as i note somewhat more anxiety and somewhat less 'glad to be alive' than what i'm expressing now... that's ok... glad to be alive to anxious and glad to be alive to peace.

"have a trip planned to Montana and Wyoming (wild beautiful country like in Brokeback Mountain) to see a bunch of cousins - but it's me and mom in the car for 10 days - what was i thinking? ? panic setting in. wondering how to fix that - but her whole trip depends on me chauffeuring. well, i'm gonna ask her how i can shorten it - there may be some days at the beginning and end where the cousins can drive her places.

i mean... i know the scenery is beautiful but... TEN DAYS???? damn...

on top of that i just accepted a job from the boss's boss's boss, writing curriculum in the summer... which wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't already accepted another job writing curriculum for my own boss (the principal) and a third (well that was foisted upon me) working with an outside program to design and provide select services to specific students.

I don't know what all these jobs entail and how much of my time they'll take up, but I'm starting to worry that I won't get any summer break, and come fall I'll feel like I was at school all during my break. I'm told curriculum writing involves taking all the materials away and coming back later, not being at school all the time, but i'm suspicious. anyway i took the jobs for the sake of the serious banking of brownie points... so i think i should just focus on that and consider this summer an investment... frontload the brownie points... hopefully the investment will pay off in the long term and not just be a stupid move in a game i was bound to lose.

so i have this wyoming-montana trip lined up at the end of june/beginning of july, and a week-long queer buddhist retreat in august (same one i went to last year) and id like to get something else in, a trip to new york maybe - i'd like to see the cousins in Boston and Colin and Joel in NYC... and just be in NYC for a day or two... i miss it and i love being there when i get the chance... i've also thought about going overseas somewhere but i don't think i really have time for that... and i'd like to go somewhere with R (she is not interested in the NY-Boston trip). She can't really get any time off work for various reasons... so a quick trip to England to see our friends there is out. A quick trip to Minneapolis is more appealing to her... but that's frustrating cuz it's in driving distance but we'd have to fly because R doesn't have any time. So all this adds up in terms of time and money. I'd have to choose between my east-coast trip and our couple trip to MN, and R doesn't seem to care but I don't know if she does or not, or if I do or not ("I can spend time with you at home," she says). So anyway. Lots to think about. Lots of balancing acts... between what i want to do if i could do anything, and what's in the realm of the possible, and commitments i've made that i am reconsidering too late...

(end of email to Nadine)

so that's my news, my life, my state of mind. long post... my 800th, incidentally. yay me, yay blog. blog is 6 years old, born on May 18, 2004. Weird. May 3 is another anniversary, a good one - first contact with a friend. Recently met a new potential friend - translator of classical poetry in Persian, Latin, Chinese, etc etc... speaks every language, it seems... he knows more than i do about a lot of things, which makes it fun to learn from him but also makes me feel stupid, so i can't take too many hours of conversation with him... he also talks a lot... so you know, like any friend, good and bad mixed together. trying to make more friends here in Chicago... settle in and make it home. still doesn't feel like home and when i think about it i'd still rather be in NYC, but Chicago is so much cheaper and really has many charms, so i need to reconcile myself to being here.

babbling now.

love to all.

self-doubt

...comes creeping back in. classes are getting unruly. i'm getting tired - very tired. i start to feel myself being like last year - staring dully at them and going back to teaching without knowing how to handle what's happening. deer in the headlights, is that coming back? damn, it was so traumatic and awful last year. and the year before.

trying not to panic. using my tools from my outpatient program... what is going well? remember my accomplishments... focus on the positive...

maybe i should call someone from the program, help me snap out of this.

good friends from Madison are coming to visit this weekend - they always make me laugh, hard, a lot. so that will be a good chance to recharge.

i've made some friends in Chicago, finally. a colleague from last year, one from the year before (but we've just started hanging out and grading together on a weekly basis over the past couple months), and a guy i met on the meditation retreat last summer. three whole friends! wow! that's a good thing.

dog continues to be a pain in the ass. doesn't give me a lot of joy like owning a dog should. he's mostly annoying, occasionally delightful. right now we're dogsitting another dog, too. it makes decent money for very little trouble, but it makes me stress out like crazy so i don't know that it's worth it.

i was observed on Tuesday by our curriculum director who just loves me, and she had not one single negative thing to say, and a lot positive. tomorrow there's a team coming from somewhere to judge the school in some way, and the school people want them to observe and interview me. somehow i've become the dog in the dog and pony show, and i don't know that i like it. i mean, it's a huge, huge compliment that suddenly i'm almost a star instead of the door that gets rushed past, but it's scary. i guess that might be one reason for my little freakout. so really, it's a good thing. it just feels painful and scary. but some good things do.

or so i try to tell myself.

i'm glad to have this blog to talk to... helps me figure things out. thank you for reading...

intense flurries, no accumulation

for about 24 hours it snowed furiously... flakes whirling out of a leaden sky, stinging cheeks on a strong and bitter wind... it snowed and snowed, and yet a day later, when it slowed and stopped, there was hardly any snow in the streets... just the barest of white limning in the gutters... it was a weirdly dry snow anyway, and in the end one could imagine that somehow it had all blown away, or else evaporated without ever hitting the ground, like rain in the driest months in the desert.

friday they told me i was 'non-re-appointed' for the fall, i.e. fired.

the whole year feels like that snowstorm... flurry of furious activity, and... and nothing.

i love our new neighborhood

I love that it's genuinely diverse. In 30 seconds you can pass two white yuppie-ish gay men negotiating over who has to stand outside the store with the adorable dog ("Pleeeease? I'll buy you something swee-eet!") and a Latino grandmother speaking Spanish with her grandson, who has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figure almost half his diminutive size.

Along the same lines, I love that I can walk a block to one convenience store that features Ding-Dongs and a whole aisle of 40-proof liquor; I can walk a block in the other direction to a convenience store that has Entenmann's and Ben & Jerry's.

I love that I can walk just a couple more blocks to a passageway under Lake Shore Drive and out to the park beyond, where the lake this morning was soooo lovely between the trees, glittering with bright sunlight... and then just a few blocks north I can cross back under the Drive. AND at this northerly crossing, there is a lovely little public garden with flowers and fountains.

I love that there's an independent coffee shop just around the corner - AND that it has coffee and pastries that are both better than Starbucks. Also in walking distance are a diner and a Mexican seafood place, neither of which we've tried but both of which look great.

I love that there are garbage cans all over the place for dog poop. I love that there are so many dogs.

The architecture is wonderful and historic. Mmmmmm.

This morning I pulled our new blinds up and sat in the front bay window with my latte and scones and newspapers and email just felt soooooo happy to be here....

I have a ton of work to do for Monday and no idea how I'll get it done... but those few hours in the window this morning were precious.

our new place

so on a more positive note... here is our new building:



and here is a closeup of our portion of the building, specifically the lower left - the first floor and basement (er, "garden level" ha ha).

this sucks

sigh. so the whole "hurry up n get certified" thing is dragging on and on. turns out i needed more paperwork. so i FedExed that. six harrowing days later, they confirmed that they had all my paperwork. that was two days ago. no word from anyone at all, other than that.

today i had another job fair (thought i'd better go since i don't seem to have a "bird in the hand" after all). i stood in line to talk to the guy from the Illinois State Board of Ed, who coincidentally was the same guy who had emailed me. he was very reassuring, said that all my paperwork looked to be in order and that they will most likely send my certification in the mail next week.

which is great except that i'm moving next week. *sigh*

then i went to the table of the school that has semi-tentatively-almost-offered to hire me. they seemed happy to see me but said they weren't sure they were going to have funding for my position after all. of course, i am now tortured by the worry that that is just a nice way of saying "we found someone else," or worse, "you have been emailing us constantly since we made the non-offer and now we think you're insane."

the rest of the job fair was ok; i only really got revved up at the end and made a smashingly good impression on the last few people. unfortunately or fortunately, the one who liked me the best works with a program to teach incarcerated minors between their arraignment and trial. so the student population is constantly changing. i don't mind the incarcerated part, it's the constant flux that i think would drive me nuts.

then i came back to our little apartment (which actually seems to be shrinking, the more i contemplate living here with 2 dogs) and everything in the bathroom is wet.

i just sorted my laundry this morning, intending to do it this afternoon, and so it was in two large heaps on the floor. now they are both wet.

so is everything on the shelves over the toilet.

the thing that proves that this isn't some kind of strange condensation event is that the hallway rug is also soaking wet and draped over the side of the bathtub, a state and location decidedly different from this morning when i left.

i call the maintenance man. he explains there was a leak upstairs and he came down to do damage control.

considering that he apparently mopped the floor and wiped off everything on the shelves and otherwise cleaned up all the water, i can't complain. but it does sorta bother me to have someone in here while i'm out...

especially since there was a giant dildo sitting on the sink.

let's just hope he did not have any opportunity to discover that it glows in the dark.

so anyway. then i realize i don't have quarters to do my laundry, so i go get some from my car, and when i get back, a guy is just putting his in. he promises to call me when he's done. great.

i was supposed to go back to WI tonight and i'm dreading the drive. i'm also dreading coming back here alone next week while Loopy stays in Msn for the closing etc. (we came up with this plan rather than boarding the dogs...now it sounds dumb to me... i just want my Loopyyyyyy!

oh, almost forgot another positive thing - i got my test scores back from a certification test I took in June, and I got 291/300 (that's good for those of you who dont' do math). so hey. it's not all bad.

one that got away; chaos

So I drove down to Chicago for a job interview today... this evening they called to say that I didn't get it.

I knew I didn't do too well in the interview... I was nervous and didn't really take command of the classroom (I had to teach a sample lesson, which is a great idea for the school to do for prospective teachers, but omg it was nerve-wracking). They said they had "never seen anyone so nervous for a job interview." Wow. As I remarked to Franklin, "that'll do wonders for the anxiety in the future."

It's normal to be nervous in a job interview, but teaching is a performance job - if you can't perform under difficult conditions, you aren't going to make it as a teacher.

The thing is, of all the people who've ever judged me and my teaching, these people were the closest to me in philosophy, worldview, everything. So I am struggling not to conclude that I really don't have what it takes.

The only thing I can hang onto is (1) they said they bet I would be a great elementary school teacher, which is what I really want to do anyway, and (2) this *is* a really rough time in my life, so maybe that's affecting me.

Rough time... I haven't blogged in a while so you wouldn't know about that... my dad's dementia is getting so bad that Mom wants to institutionalize him immediately. Except when she wants to wait til we get there. Except when she wants to wait til after we leave. Except when she wants to keep him home to the very end. Her high-anxiety rapid-fire back-and-forth insanity is harder to cope with than his disorientation... although it's sad to feel that he is sort of fading away.

I think I already mentioned that we sold the house... only after that did we discover that we can't get financing to buy a new one until I have a job. So there's a lot riding on my getting a job. We have a new temporary apartment (sublet) that we can move into when the house sells on Aug. 3, but it's small and we don't want to have to be here very long.

Poor dear Loopy is packing the entire house on her own (Miri is going over there tomorrow, bless her!!) because I'm constantly in Chicago doing job fairs, job interviews, etc. So Loopy is always in pain, always exhausted, and yet she doesn't blame me at all. She is my angel, my sunshine, my delight, my everything.

All I can say is, this total chaos can't possibly continue indefinitely, and that's a damn good thing.

Incidentally, this is my 600th blog post. :-)

getting used to Chicago

I called a restaurant to ask how far north they deliver.

"To Addison," they say.

"Great!" I say. "We'll call right back."

As I flip through the menu, I contemplate that in New York, they would have said, "to 45th Street," or something, and for the first time, it seems dull to me that the streets in NYC just have numbers instead of names.

(Up to now it has seemed incredibly irritating that Chicago streets have all these names instead of simple, easy-to-understand numbers).

Wow. Maybe I could really get used to this. :-)

busy

We sold the house. After six days on the market. Kinda mind-boggling. Loopy says her stomach is churning and she won't be able to sleep. I am pleased and relieved but not extremely emotional about it right now... just a bit stressed about everything we have to do in the next few days. ("I can't believe you're not having more of a reaction!" Loopy says. "I'm leaving for Iran in a week... it's hard to top that," I noted).

So, yes. Let's review the situation here.

• We're going to Chicago Sunday, hopefully to finalize which apartment we want to make an offer on, so Loopy can pursue that in my absence.
  
• I need to clean the basement and set up the two new de-humidifiers, because prospective buyers say it smells musty (we will keep showing it in case this buyer doesn't get financing or something).
  
• We are playing some kind of offer-counter-offer tennis game with our neighbors over a piece of empty land we're selling them. (Empty of houses anyway... tho full of cross-country ski trails, wildlife, and lovely trees). At this rate we should just give the fucking land to our & our neighbors' lawyers to pay their fees.
  
• I need to find a job.
  
• Did I mention, I'm going to Iran next week? I should pack.

So, yeah. Busy.

big changes...

Just finished putting away all the kitchen stuff we brought home from the apt., as well as the last of the groceries (the larder was pretty much bare, my friends!)--I also bleached all the countertops b/c there was mouse poop scattered about. (Hands need lotion...) Did some organizing too. But organizing is weird now because...

... we decided to strongly & seriously consider moving to Chicago this spring.

The lease on the Chicago apt. is up in May, and Loopy has a lot more work to do, and not much stamina at the moment for a lot of driving back & forth, never mind the pain involved in climbing two flights of stairs to the Chicago apartment--and don't forget the two flights of stairs here at home. The total handicap-inaccessibility of our house is a very strong "push" factor.

Besides, it doesn't look like I'm ever gonna get a job around here... there's just too much of a glut of experienced teachers on the market, plus (perhaps?) not much appetite for non-traditional teachers? Who knows about the latter, can't assume too much. Whereas in Chicago I could prob'ly have a job tomorrow, if I weren't too picky.

So that's just on the agenda to be explored... wanted to tell y'all about it...

The other thing the title is referring to is something Loopy said today... she was looking at old photos and it really struck her how limited her mobility still is, how she may never get it all back and how she "may never be just standing there again," without help. This struck me some months ago at the gym... that she may never again just come bustling around the corner suddenly. Of course, she may make a complete recovery, but she doesn't feel very optimistic at the moment.

I looked at some old photos to illustrate this and the ones from Montreal struck me the most. Jesus, that just feels like a short time ago--it is just a short time ago--just two months before the surgery.

Damn it damn it damn it, I get so angry thinking about how everything would have been different if they had just found the fucking tumor two months earlier!!!

I know, I know--we did our best, the doctors did their best, nobody's to blame, we can never know what all the alternatives might have been. As we discussed the other day, if they'd done the surgery two months earlier who knows--maybe we wouldn't have had the same surgeon or the same anaesthesiologist or something and maybe something bad woulda happened. Buddhism encourages us to realize that we don't know, for certain, if anything is "good" or "bad." To keep an open mind and not be too certain of anything.

But...



Damn, damn, damn.

"Summer afternoon...summer afternoon…

...to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." So said Henry James (or possibly Henry David Thoreau--one of the Henrys)(looked it up—it's James—also discovered that about fifty billion other people have used it as the title of a blog post—oh well).

Chicago, five o’clock on a Saturday: the sun had sunk low enough that, while the east side of the street was still baking in brilliant light, the west side was in shadow. The sunlight slanted between the buildings, glowing warmly in greenery and dazzling me as I passed each opening; in the shade of their houses, people had come out to putter in their front gardens or sit on their stoops with beer and dogs.

An elderly Taiwanese woman pulled irritably at tomato vines thick with ripening fruit; her deeply lined face appeared focused and perplexed as though attempting to solve a problem. A few doors down, a balding man at the top of his front steps was reading the paper, with an enormous, alert German shepherd seated on either side; the dogs looked at me searchingly as I walked past, and the man gave me a mild hello.

Out on the main street the light was almost blinding and my eyes were filled up with what seemed to be women everywhere, their smooth rounded flesh half-undressed in the heat—floaty gauze grazing calves, strappy straps digging into bare backs, hair plastered against curving necks. Saturday afternoon promenade, with big sunglasses and cell phones; the usual purposeful pace of the city is reduced to a lazy saunter in the heavy heat.

As I waited for my iced coffee, I watched a police van pull up in front of the 7-11 across the street; the thick-vested, heavily armed cops took turns going inside. One got a Big Gulp; the other emerged with a Smart Water and something else I couldn’t see, which he mixed in a plastic container, shaking vigorously.

All very ordinary, unremarkable, summer afternoon details, but somehow the brilliant golden light seemed to etch each in my memory. Cloth clinging to skin in the sticky heat, pursed mouths sucking icy drinks, dogs straining at leashes as flip-flopped feet struggled for traction, bare flesh flecked with sweat.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon... James's "beautiful" is too weak an adjective.

The words are redolent with echoes of childhood delights and reverberations of grown-up pleasures. They conjure a tactile voluptuousness, a sleepy sensuality, a familiar and delicious torpor.

Either that or I’ve been getting laid so much I can’t think straight.

ah, summer in the city

We spent the last week in Chicago which was blissful, because I had nothing scheduled every day and spent at least a couple hours every day (sometimes much more than a couple) getting shit done. Took a lot of lovely walks down pretty streets, most with Loopy who is all about exercisin' these days. It was great all around!

Spending time in the easy-care apartment makes me resent, a little, the burden of dealing with a whole damn house. I know, I know, lots of people would kill for a whole damn house, but it's a pain in the ass after a while... my "to do" list is as long as my arm and everywhere I look there's something else to add to it. Ugh.

So anyway, it's finally warm in our part of the world and last week was very warm, so all the windows were open, and I got re-acquainted with the low constant cacophony of city noises that drift in those open windows...dogs barking, cars honking, trains passing, machinery working, a/c rattling, footsteps and snatches of conversation as people walk past below.

So one morning R and I were, uh, getting busy and suddenly a voice said "Hi!"--right in the room it seemed. We both just about jumped out of our skins. But she was downstairs in the alleyway. That was funny.

It also reminded me of when our dear friend Carol lived three floors below us in our apartment building in Manhattan. The windows opened onto a narrow airshaft between our building and the next, and you could hear all the sounds from all the apartments on both sides... every time I hear "Back on the Chain Gang" I think of the anonymous person who blasted that song at top volume every time s/he was cleaning his/her apartment, or needed to get going in the morning, or, well, a lot. There was also the couple I called the cops on several times... my only problem was I could never identify where they were. "They're either in our building or the next one... uh... can you hurry?" Yeah, sure, to some building or other, that's so helpful, we'll be right there.

So anyway, one Saturday afternoon we ran into Carol in the elevator and she smirked at us and said, "Were you guys having sex this morning at about...uh...10:30?" Uh, yes......We all had a good laugh.

Ah yes, summer in the city. No privacy... and you get used to it.