October

I think I have established pretty well that I don't know how to blog. I can never decide whether I'm here to have a philosophical ramble, a critical exploration, a personal revelation or a music review. I have another blog where I just talk about my knitting, and that one is much easier — if incredibly dull to those of you who aren't obsessed with a needle, and I don't mean one that serves up dope to junkies.

Anyway, so where was I? Standing on the edge and hoping, last time I saw myself. I think it's going all right. I've lost 13 pounds, and I'm taking a walk nearly every day. Most days, I feel much more energetic and I managed to do a few interviews on cell phone use and finish a research paper I was writing with my friend and co-researcher Louise. I took a little action on the find-a-job-I-might-like-better front (though it's likely to be a year or more before anyone around here is hiring), and I took some action on the making-the-best-of-the-job-I-have front, so the daily grind is a little less grindy. I helped clear brush in the yard to protect us from wildfire. I'm reading a bit more. I'm singing a bit more. And I am now hooked on The Wire (checking it out from Netflix; we still don't have cable, so I'm always a few years behind on TV).

But I feel like I'm not kicking my own ass quite enough.  I want to get back to working on the online course I was writing on how to manage IT staff — and the book I was planning on the same subject. I want to be doing more research on things (like Twitter) that interest me.  I want to set up my music studio again, now that I have some of my voice back, and get back to recording.  I want to spend more time on Grasslimb submissions, so they're not always six months late getting a response.  I want to do about a bazillion more things, and wish I could just quit the dratted job and do it.

I just took a psychological self-assessment that told me that one of my unhelpful personal schemas was thinking you had to accomplish a lot of stuff to be a valuable person. I do accept that I have this problem.  Unfortunately, knowing it doesn't make me want to do all these things any less.

Can I stand on the verge?

Last year, two weeks after my surgery, I thought I was going to get well. I was going to get well and then I was going to do the things I had been forced to put on hold: I was going to sing again, and record more of my songs. I was going to exercise, and drop the weight gained from months of idleness. I was going to see my friends more and write more and finish my mediation credential and do research and damn it, get my life back.

It didn't quite happen. I did finish my mediation credential (this past April), I did do a little research, I was able to sing for a little while, I saw my friends more for a little while, and I even exercised a little (just walking) for a little while. And then I got sicker and sicker and sicker and then I was back in that operating room.

I'm two weeks out of surgery again and I still want to feel like I'm standing on the verge of reclaiming my life. That tomorrow, the first day I'm allowed exercise, I will take a walk and do a little careful floor work. That I'll start practicing with the band again in a couple of weeks, that I'll finish the novel left 1/3 completed, that I'll get back to my planned research. That I'll finally get off the antibiotics I've been taking for a year, get my energy back, stop having side effects. All those things.

And I want to believe it. My caution tells me not to expect too much, too fast; not to be too sure I'll be better this time, as this condition is a tough one to manage. But is it a mistake to have that half-light feeling of standing on the verge of a green-meadowed canyon or a sunlit garden once again?

A cup of tea and all who sail in her

When I started this blog, it was at the behest of several other bloggers whose comments trails I had been using as my own personal blog — a bad habit. I had been meditating on my Internet longevity and thought that might give me some kind of interesting perspective on new media (it doesn't). I thought, I've been on board this ship of wonder since it first set sail: what if I looked back on my voyage? Would I have something to say?

But that's not what happened. Instead, I think, this blog became a refuge for me-in-melancholy — the place to admit some of the loss, the emptiness, the disruption in my generally-cheerful soul. I blogged about deaths of people I've known and people I've admired. I blogged about the loss of a job that I loved with a deep passion and about my troubled search to fill the intellectual void it left. I've not had a lot of readers or commenters, probably owing not just to the nature but to the style of my writing here, but I'm okay with that. I set up this blog with a different ID than my knitting blog, thinking that my knitting readers (there are a lot more of those) might not like to see the things I was blogging about here — the darker side of my moods — that is, I think I knew when I set this up that I was not going to be fascinating and intellectual here, but broody and introspective. But I hadn't admitted it to myself.

I have more sinus surgery coming up in July (fortunately it will be mostly endoscopic — just some incisions in my eyebrows) and I have different feelings about it this time. Last year I was absolutely terrified, desperately afraid of dying as I've always been, afraid of harm to my vocal cords (singing has long been a critical part of my identity), afraid in general of being unconscious, something I've never liked.

But now I've been sick for a very long time. My life has been curtailed, somewhat placed on hold. I'm still doing what I can of what I love and what makes me me, but there is much I can't do. I can't sing right now. I lack the energy to play instruments or do proper gardening or have sex or keep up with my correspondence. And I don't seem to be writing much — a few poems and half a short story since I became ill, back in August of '07. That seems so feeble; I hate that I'm leaning on an excuse. I get so I despise myself. I've experienced brief flashes of suicidal feelings, when I would think that I might not get well and might have to spend the rest of my life with this illness (which I suppose is still possible — there is no guarantee this surgery will work).

And my view has somehow altered. I'm not at peace exactly, maybe a little more so, and also, I think, somewhat number to the idea that I could go in for surgery and not wake up (it's not likely, but surgery always carries some risk). I do think a lot of it is numbness. I have put my desires, my urges, my cravings into iceboxes for now because they only make me sad. I feel like I care just a little bit less whether I make it through all this or not. (Please note: at this point, my illness is not in any way terminal.)


The funny thing is you can't shut the door entirely. Flowers keep on blooming in my garden despite neglect. I scrape out bits of writing, here or in people's comments trails (er, haven't recovered from that addiction), or on scraps of paper at my bedside, despite my inability to get a complete story finished and sent off. I'm still editing my literary magazine. I still water my potted plumeria and repot my little epiphyllum, even if I don't get the roses pruned. And I keep thinking of things I want to do "when I'm well," if and when that ever happens.

Not sure where I'm going with all this, but I'll sit down here with a cup of tea and try to figure it out.

The scentless world

As you know, I've had chronic bacterial sinusitis (basically, an infection that won't go away) for going on two years now, and in the last five months it's gotten quite bad. I lost my sense of smell completely around February, a small thing in the scheme of things, I thought.

But it has turned out to be very strange. I have always had an overly sensitive sense of smell. Lying in bed at night, I would smell cottage cheese that had gone off in the fridge. Or I couldn't sleep, because there were mildewy towels in the bathroom. I doted on scented flowers, had no time for mere tulips or amaryllis — what was the point? — and loved perfume.

My beloved freesia came and went without me getting a single sniff this year. Roses began to bloom and I cut them and brought them in to look at, remembering the particular smell of each variety but unable to experience it. Food tasted dull, flat, so I ate too much in unsatisfied reaction. I quickly learned that, without odor, there were some foods that actually had no taste at all. Remember the old science experiments where you had to distinguish between raw onion, apple, potato with your eyes closed and a clothespin on your nose? Like that. (Really, because the congestion often feels like a clothespin.) I was miserable. I nearly cried when the freesia quit blooming.

Of course, many things are easier when you have no sense of smell. Clean the catboxes? Why certainly! Stinky bathroom? really? Doesn't bother me. Farty husband? Not a problem. I wasn't bothered by Rob burning toast, something he does regularly of a Sunday morning. Nor did I notice the decaying lizard (the cat likes to bring them inside alive and drop them, where they promptly run under immovable objects) that was stenching up the house, apparently, for a week or so.

But there are problems. Sense of smell is also useful. I didn't detect that the house has been smelling like mold for a few weeks, possibly a water leak which we now will have to investigate. I can't tell if food in the fridge has gone off, or if it's safe to eat. If I'm unsure about food, I toss it; about whether clothing has been worn, I wash it; probably I'm much more wasteful than I was.

And then I began to get flashes of smell.

At first, it was just a few seconds. I would suddenly notice a sort of sour odor, and quickly turn to something pleasant to see if I could smell it before the sense went away again. Sometimes it went away so fast I thought I'd imagined it. Just little glimpses.

One day my sense of smell came back for two hours. And it was awful.

When you haven't smelled the world for months, it STINKS. It came back while I was driving in my car. There is no rotting food in my car, no tipped-over water, nothing awful like that, and yet it stank. I walked into my office and it stank. People smelled, all of them, despite deodorant. And the bathroom, which is kept clean... was indescribable. I felt queasy. I no longer wanted to overeat; I didn't want to look at food at all. I tried burying my nose in a jasmine plant, but, unused to the overpowering smell, I was disgusted. I found it hard to concentrate on work.

As suddenly as it had arrived, the sense departed. I cannot describe how relieved I felt. It was as if I had been listening to a terrifically loud band while jackhammering, without any ability to cover my ears, and was suddenly transported to a quiet soundproofed room.

I'm back on antibiotics now, so I am still getting occasional glimpses of scent. If I'm bending over my roses, that's pleasant. Otherwise, it is somewhat disconcerting.

I still hope to get my sense of smell back someday. At least, I think I do. But I know it'll take adjusting back to our current societal background smell level — and that, at least, I am not looking forward to.

Natasha Richardson and the death of dreams

It was in "A Month in the Country" when I first fell for Natasha Richardson, her sidelong smile, stun-you-speechless beauty and aura of calm. I had her picture attached to the side of my fridge with cellophane tape (alongside a shot of Ellen Barkin, if I remember correctly).

I didn't see her in her other movies. Perhaps I wanted to preserve the character she'd played in my head; but the picture, tape-stained and yellowing, followed me from house to house to apartment to house until it finally crumbled to dust in a final move.

And now she's gone — as ethereal to me in the end as her picture. From a head injury, one of those terribly insidious ones where you don't know there's anything wrong until it's too late.

It takes me back to 1990. The headlines then read "DEAD BOY", someone's macabre sense of humor. Stiv Bators, once lead singer of the Dead Boys and then of Lords of the New Church, had died unexpectedly after being struck by a car in France. He had tried to go to hospital but after waiting for a long time, gave up and went home, where he subsequently went to sleep and never woke up. It was determined that, similarly to Richardson, he'd had an undetected concussion and probably bleeding in the brain.

This kind of death is so scary and so ridiculously tragic. If you'd caught it in time you might have been okay, except there was nothing to really tell you that there was anything to catch.

As Stiv sang, "There ain't no justice out there."

Torch that wood

I promised a post about Torchwood and why I like it. I really thought (and have been saying) that it's just because of the sexy characters. Let's face it, Gwen and Jack in particular are pretty damned hot. (And yes, I realize the actors are respectively straight and gay, not in a way that would be convenient to me. It's the characters I'm talking about here.) It seemed logical. I think that basically it's Spike and Willow that are keeping me working my way through Buffy, which otherwise doesn't do that much for me.

But it began to enter my consciousness that it's really more than that. And I was puzzled. Because honestly, the show isn't very good. The plots are unabashedly ripped off from everyone from Buffy to Star Trek, and some of the lines of dialogue are embarrassing. True, the acting is better than the material, and the sets are inspired. But sets and acting alone are not enough for great television.

So for a while now, I'd decided that it's the pansexuality that does it for me. As a bisexual — maybe more accurately poly- or pansexual — woman, I don't see much representation of my inclinations on the screen. And though it's been 15 years and more since my sleep-with-all-your-friends days, I do get a sense of comfort, of acceptance, out of watching all the various attractions and couplings just taken for granted. Just normal. Because understand: I don't actually feel like a weird person. I have had many of what society considers abnormal relationships, true, but I don't think of myself as a weirdo. And despite the fact that my life fits the "normal" definition now (married relatively monogamously to a man) — and, for that matter, the fact that I've gotten older and fatter — I'm no different on the inside than I've ever been.

So Jack flirting with everything that moves (human, alien, male female), and the characters exploring different connections — that all feels normal to me. And I appreciate seeing it on the screen being presented as normal.

But that's still not it.

I think it would explain why I enjoy the show, but not why I feel connected to it. If you feel connected to a show, you're probably identifying with a character or a situation. So I've been working it through, chewing on it, trying to figure out what it is.

It hit me this week. We had just watched the episode "Adam," and Jack had just walked around to each of his team members as they sat, hypnotized, around a table, ready to take amnesia pills. He put a hand on each shoulder as he whispered some word of reassurance — reassurance that he chose them, that they are special, that he cherishes them, that he will take care of them. He loves them; you have a sense of that love almost flowing down his arm and into his hand and into their bodies, in the most goopily new agey way. And all the bells went off.

Now Torchwood steps right outside the "acceptable office behavior" box on a regular basis and I don't advocate that. I've supervised people for 23 years and I've always kept a lid on even the possibility of thinking of an employee in a sexual way. Sometimes I don't discover until after they've left the organization that I have some feelings for or attraction to them. And that, I honestly feel, is how it should be. Sexual power mucks up working relationships all the time, but it's unfair and dangerous between employer and employee, and can be a real mess when it happens. I have been able to keep the walls tight and I wouldn't have it any other way.

So I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about love. And this is where I'm going to get all goopy and horrid on you, but it can't be helped.

Because I know that feeling. That sense of protectiveness, of respect, of championship and fierce devotion. I've felt it for many of my many employees, like I would stand in front of them with a sword if it were needed, like I would walk between them and the cliff and try to keep them from jumping or falling. That sense of embrace, not of a physical person embracing another physical person but a soul wrapping itself protectively around another soul.

Jack loves his staff. That's why he leaves the Doctor — the one person who will always remain just out of his reach and the one he wants the most — to come back to Cardiff. That's why he defends them even when they attack him. And it's that love — that strange, hard to define love (is it parental in nature? loverly? brotherly? none of those fits) — that, finally, is what pulls me in. He's my colleague, I think. He knows what my working experience is like.

I'm about to lose one of the very few people at work that I feel that "sense of colleague" about. He's a fellow middle manager, just enough below me on the totem pole for me to have protective feelings towards him, and so smart and competent and, yes, loving towards his staff that I feel a great deal of respect. There's no physical attraction, but I just enjoy his company; we talk about supervision, about the work environment, about zombie movies and end of the world books and music.

Except: not anymore. He's a Navy Reservist. He's been mobilized. He's going to combat training next month, then to Afghanistan for 14 months. His job will be held for him, but we won't see him for about 16 months — and that's if we're lucky and he makes it through. He's leaving a wife and an eight-year-old child, which seems ungodly sad and horrible.

In some sense, he's why I feel this strange draw towards Torchwood. It's going to be a lonely year and then some without him around.

So stick around, Captain Jack. We have a bit of drinking to do.

Winter in San Diego

Just when you get sick of cursing the dark, covering your outdoor tender plants with old sheets before a frost, waking up in a 58°F bedroom and whimpering your way into your clothes, there's a Santa Ana and it's 80°F outside and you are striking sparks off everything you touch: your car, your pets, your armchair. This is a strange town.

It's a new year and it couldn't come a moment too soon. 2008 ended pretty well on the whole, but it was a challenging year and I'm ready for a new chance. Why the heck I put any store by a calendar date I don't know, but 1 January always seems clean and fresh. (Even if it's now the third anniversary of one of my favorite people dying. He would have savored the irony.)

I'm celebrating January by buying myself a couple of interesting albums (The Album Leaf's "Into the Blue Again" and Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet's unusual and wonderful first album), taking up a new hobby (learning banjo — I got one for Hanukkah) and revisiting an old hobby that I don't have time for (stamp collecting). I'm drinking jasmine green tea and petting the cat and enjoying the luxury of working in my study again (we had three sets of house guests in December, and my study is a 2nd guest room for when we have crowds). I'm finishing the last of the December high-calorie junk food and temporarily ignoring my waistline.

Yes, these are tomato blossoms in the northern hemisphere in January. We're still getting a few cherry tomatoes. Told you it was a weird town.

I tell you, I'd be a fascinating person if I didn't have to work.


Among my pleasures this month is rereading all the wonderful Armitage family stories in the recently released Serial Garden, by Joan Aiken. It's published by some of my favorite people, the inimitable Kelly Link and the lovely Gavin Grant, and you should get it for yourself and all your young friends. Every kid deserves to grow up with the Armitages.

I have a cat in my lap now. Purr purr purr.

This is going to be an interesting year. May your path be irresistible and delicious.