24 years, 1 Month, 26 Days, 8 Hours and 49 Minutes...

... but, who's counting?  In April I will have been married for 20 years.  (Pause while friends pick themselves up from the floor.)

My husband and I have known each other almost 25 years.

We play a game, probably not uncommon for people who can see the other side of the mountain, i.e., I Know Who Your Next Spouse Will Be.  His guess for me?  Mr. Nobody.  Mine for him -- well without giving too much away I finally figured out his ideal wife after having known the man for a long long time.  And, Dear Reader, she is not like me.

Marriage is many things, not the least of which is that it is a cosmic joke that many of us, no matter how many times we're told the punchline, just don't get.  And yet, every time the joke's set up, we listen expectantly, hoping this time, this time we'll be as delighted as everyone else.

Dance with the Revolution What Brung Ya

This will be (mercifully) brief, because I have lots to do before leaving town on Monday.  A few thoughts:

1.  Trump's election was a revolution.  A set of ever-wobbling cultural and political norms were tossed off the balcony.  The enforced piety and moral probity required of high office-seekers in the USA has been diminished.  It may be forever possible now to have let your freak flag fly and still become President.

2.  Go ahead and grieve, but refrain from engaging in a flurry of activity as if the world will end on January 17, 2017.  Take more time to do the things you love doing, not the things you should do.

3.  Understand that while the person occupying the office (and the attendant departments under their control) can do great harm, the office changes the person.  In ways few of us understand or will imagine.

4.  And lastly, to quote my older brother, "Keep your head down and your pad low."

Ciao, bella.

Remember to Forget

That phrase came to me a few days ago; what it means I'm not sure other than part of the art of living, and living with another specifically is elective forgetting.  Not all enemies and antagonists must last forever.  In other words, a husband is a man you haven't shivved.  Yet.  (It's a joke, calm down, calm down.  If you don't believe me, call him.  He's sitting by the phone waiting to hear from The One who will make America Great Again.)

I feel I owe Someone Something this morning because GodKnows™ this post won't write itself.  And in that way it resembles almost anything else in my life except the certainly of mortal decay.  Anyway, it is spring and the itch I've felt for weeks to throw my crutches away and walk unaided into the light will now be indulged.  I, like much of the natural world, am molting.  Had to drop the latest math class because I was never going to get more than a C- and an aneurysm in the process.  And now don't yet know how to finish what I started.

Cuthbert, in his manly wisdom, being kind says to me, "Well, now you can focus on something you do well."  Translation:  I.  Told.  You.  So.  (Believe when I tell you that remarks like the above are what pass for compassion in our marriage.)  He's got a point -- a wiser woman than I would have pursued the social sciences, or the arts.  And as excited as I am by them, the many subjects that fall under those classifications are not ones I want to teach.  At least not occupationally.  I wants to teach Math (or Maths as our friends across the pond say).  And I'm not entirely convinced that it is impossible for a woman who hasn't always eaten her spinach (and is now paying for it).

And there is the matter of the job.  I work for a world class university and, at least in the stratum I occupy, because of that I have extraordinary employee benefits.  When you've reached the stage of life where you actually study those Social Security statements that come in the mail, benefits such as retirement savings and health insurance matter.  Perhaps too much but they do.  I've had a glimpse of the ardors of old age, the burden it is on your children, and frankly, I wouldn't blame Daughter No. 1 if she puts a pillow over my head and Daughter No. 2 serves as lookout.  (As long as they don't talk while they're doing it.  I hate to miss a good conversation and my hearing's shit anyway.)  The job itself and the goodies it provides will be hard to abandon.  The running joke in my house is that Cuthbert so loves the University's health facilities that he'll be pushing my wheelchair to the office when I'm 99 years old just so we'll still be covered. And right now, that's as good a life plan as any.

For now.

Grandma's in the House!!!

Were I really really rich I would hire a tow truck to follow me everywhere.  And during those times when I've been sitting too long, the driver would insert the meat hook in my belt loop and hoist my ass into a standing position.  I, who have a surfeit of dignity and vanity, would dust myself off and get on with the business of being an ancient college student.  Aah, yes, it's Fall, I'm in school and also on one of my perennial self-improvement missions.

You know how these things start.  You go shopping and find yourself in a dressing room about to be reflected by half a hexagon of mirrors and out of your mouth comes the immortal words:  Is that MY behind?!?!?!?@**@#&#*@!!?!

The only thing to do, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is to get thee to a gym.  So, I have.  When these fits of fitness come over me I'm lucky enough to have a class schedule to have time to work out when most of the student body doesn't want to or can't -- mid-morning.  Not so this semester.  Twice a week around 5 o'clock I share the fitness center with half the football team, and 20 year old girls bench pressing 100 lbs.  My solution is to take my glasses off, put my blinders on and think of England as I limp from machine to machine setting the pins at no more than 30 lbs. of weight to resist.

As least the boys are nice to me, although a complicated mixture of pity and snot-shooting scorn has to be gotten under control before they ask:  You usin' that?  And I look at them as if to say, You think I come in here to pick up guyz?  Can't you see the pain I'm in?  But, instead I simply say,  Yeah.  But, this'll be over real soon.  And the deal is done.

As you can imagine during every step I walk to get to the fitness center I'm running a thousand excuses not to go.  (Can you tell I'm taking a programming class?)  But, I must, because if there's anything I'm sure of it is that life goes on until it doesn't.

Happy Fall, y'all.

Keeping a Resolution I Swore I Wouldn't Make

Judging from the grades I make in my math classes I'm not particularly good at Logic.  Common sense I think I've got in abundance, but that other stuff (flutter of hands, rueful face...)  You see, we went to visit some friends in Poughkeepsie this weekend past.  It was combination housewarming and observance of the death of a guru, complete with meditation and a shrine and communion.

I have what I'll delicately called a perverse relationship to the spiritual arts -- I avoid them.  In posts past I confessed to years ago in Brooklyn having a yoga teacher who loved me despite the fact that I Hate Yoga.  Hate.  It.  And yeah, don't tell me it's good for me.  I know that.  What with this colossally shortened hamstring I'm sporting these days I can barely get down a flight of stairs, but you'd have to put a gun to my head to do anything about it except a few stretches and making Cuthbert drive me everywhere.  But, as I've often written, I digress.  (Embarrassment will do make you do that.)  Anyway, Dear Reader, you'd be proud of me, I meditated.  Really.  I felt things I ordinarily would not have which while not always pleasant was interesting.  All good.  We drove to the hotel to sleep.  Just before climbing into bed I ate a few apricots.

And that's where my troubles began.  I woke up the following morning with a food processor dicing chicken bones in my gut.  Not enough to deter me from eating breakfast, mind you, but enough to know that I'd better get home.  So we called our friends just to say "so long and thanks for all the hospitality" and got invited over for tea.  About 1/2 hour after arriving at their home I was pleading to lie down.  I slept and slept and slept.  Awoke, drank some herbal medicine, rattled around a bit, slept some more on the couch and then shuffled through the apartment to throw up in the toilet bowl.  Spent an extra night in Poughkeepsie in case of encore.

Here's where the un-logic comes in:  Meditation = puking your guts up.  Oh oh.

Since Sunday I've barely eaten, mostly out of fear of which end and at what velocity will the food come out.  And slept of course.  I'm sticking to bland food and juice until then.  Usually when I'm as stressed out as I am these days I'll eat anything.  Just put a piece of wet sheetrock on a plate in front of me, and it's gone.  No problem at all.  But these days I'm giving food the side eye.  Which is fine since I dropped a couple pounds that I sure don't need.  Whether I'll continue when my stress = binge eating gene reactivates is unlikely, but for now it'll do.

All this to say that I am all kinds of tired.  And the great David Carr has died.  Namaste.

I Shot A Man In Tucson

Well, not really.  But one of these days someone will walk up to me while I'm buying coffee for my milk and confess to me that they did that very thing just to watch him die ....  This has been going on since I was prepubescent:  strangers seek me out and tell me things.  You'd think after 19 years in New York where averting one's gaze is the penultimate survival strategy that it would stop.  But, it didn't and it hasn't.  And to this day people come to me having decided I have or am the answer to their question or I'm the one they want to tell It to and they proceed to tell me.  So, I am in the supermarket the day after Thanksgiving.  It seems crazy to be shopping after having spent 2 days cramming the refrigerator with all manner of great American foods -- turkeys, brussels sprouts, peas, mashed potatoes the size of salt domes, yams, pies and pies and more pies.  And here I am with a-tisket a-tasket and little purple basket picking up milk (which, frankly, I don't like) and half 'n half (which I'd sell my firstborn to have).  And this lady and I cross paths in front of a display of toilet paper and she says to me out of the blue, "I ain't nevah gonna get that stuff again it take a whole roll to wipe your butt."  And then she marched off to find frozen green beans, I guess.

My eyes don't even widen anymore.

And how was your Thanksgiving?  Mine?  I let go a bit.  Didn't polish the silver (hee hee).  Didn't make any noises about cooking.  (I made some stuffing a la hockey puck last year.)  Just cleaned house, set the table, made runs to the train station and politely consumed my usual measure of "My mother wasn't...." "My sister isn't... " My wife doesn't...." that is my gruel for being the starting point of a Hasse diagram called My Family.  I've survived what has been a debilitating 2 weeks as I nearly threw in the towel and quit studying math, met with a dying friend who is finished fighting, medicated myself through a head cold so I could take Exam IV, and waited for the check to clear.  Things are the same but better now.  I go on.

What keeps me going?  Music from Mozart to Gregory Porter to Shostakovich to Drake.  Friends near and far.  They carry my history; they are my memory.  Children being their beautiful delicious selves.  Art and the need to create.  Waking up in each morning to start again.  Being in the presence of those who are deeply religious (not pious, but religious) and spiritual.  And love.  In all things love.
 

With Friends Like These Who Needs Enemies?

In a fit a sodden pique, I stomped my foot to alarm the skunk who was probably fighting with one of those 15 lb. feral cats who visit my yard.  I made the skunk who lives behind and underneath my office both scared and mad.  S/he has registered her/his displeasure by employing the nuclear option.  I am sitting here listening to Drake's "Hold On We're Going Home" as the stench leaks into my office.  It has been that kind of week.

Cuthbert, who has never had any liking for me going back to school, has seized upon my despair of ever getting abstract algebra into my brain to berate me for doing this instead of travelling the world (with him, I suppose) ordering 3rd world people around while the dollar is strong.  And my oldest, in an attempt not to be burdened with a wheelchair-bound drooling misanthropic and senile mother, lectured me on how I should be making sure our property in New York was profitable and chastising me for going back to school instead of being the next Conrad (not Paris) Hilton, because going back to school at your age is a fool's errand because you know, she said, nobody's going to hire you.

What's a mother to do?  I went to the gym.  On a Friday night it is pretty damn empty, and I lifted weights while bopping to Drake, who has now displaced La Beyoncé as the pop artist whose music I am obsessively fixated on.

And, too.  There will be a time when Xtian or Chinese anthropologists will write about the current obsession with Jackie's pink brain-splattered suit as the English and American scions of the elite wrote about the strange and quaint customs and folkways of the Africans, the South American Indians, the Pacific Islanders, the Japanese, the ancient Egyptians, and so on and so forth.  Maybe even hang it in one of their national museums.  Yeah, I was alive in 1963, and I remember vividly where I was and what I was doing when Kennedy was assassinated, but Americans please, give it a rest.

Over and out.

Obamacare or Nobody Gets Out of This One Alive

Remember this day all you Chicken Littles.

The World As We Know It™ is coming to an end.  At least according to those who think broad-based mandatory health insurance coverage is an awful thing.

Two things I do know:

1.  Nobody, no body stays young and healthy forever.  And I don't care how much echinacea you quaff.

2.  In theory not having insurance seems like an wonderful idea until either you have a major medical calamity or illness.  (cf.  Doctor, Will I Be Able to Play the Thumb Piano Ever Again?)

Like abortion, you can be against it if you want.  And then you find yourself pregnant for all the wrong reasons.

Now back to Give Me Linear Independence or Give me Death!

Crossing the Rubicon of Middle Age

This is one of my la-la-la posts.  It won't be peppered with anger about racism or shitty public education.  Or marriage and taxes.  All that is the background noise of life today.  (My NSA listener must be bored to death.  It's not like 2005 when in the middle of a phone conversation with a friend I'd gratuitously burp Fuck Bush and then continue with my conversation.)  What I wanted to mention is that for the first time in my life since I started to garden I hired someone to do some of the work.  The simple fact that somebody else's arms and shoulders were digging holes and turning soil and pulling bushes out by the roots seemed to inspire me.  I realized then as I watched J. work in the rain that the dread of going down on my knees was keeping me from turning the front yard (my patch) into a grass-free oasis instead of the weed factory farm it has been since the snow melted.

You may think that you are 30 but your knees and hips will tell you otherwise.  Now if I want certain kinds of physical work done I'll have to pay for it; either in cash or aching muscles.  Now that I think about it did Michaelangelo get winched up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling every morning after a mint latté?  Don't think so.

I Have Started School

Which is why I'm using it as an excuse for not posting.  Truth was I was away last weekend, in the City, pretending I was 25 years old.  But, yes, school has begun with an innocuous class called "Foundations of Mathematics".  Sounds simple, right?  How to count?  And multiply (cf. life before effective birth control) and divide (cf. Republican Convention, Tampa, 2012)?  No.  The course is none of the above.

You have to study logic.  And do proofs.  Husband No. 1 is waiting in the wings thinking this will knock some sense into my head.  I am headed to the nearest medical supply store to buy a leather helmet with a chin strap.  I've only had one class and already my head is starting to swell.  Excelsior, my ass ...
 

Marriage Is Not for the Faint-Hearted

This will be brief:  No pretty pictures.  No videos.  No links.  No poetry.

I am in the throes of the derivatives of inverse functions and logarithms.  I liken it to my old brain being shoved through some space-time membrane into the future only to wind up in the 17th century.  Or, Where the Hell Am I Going and Haven't I Been Here Before?  It hurts.  It really hurts.  Brain cells are committing suicide.  Thoughts come to the door and don't ring the bell.

This morning (not for the first time) I realized that I am my mother.  And that I have often treated Husband No. 1 like my mother treated me.  I owe him and this marriage an apology.

And with no further commercial interruption we return to our regularly scheduled farce, "Taking Calculus I at 57 Years of Age:  An Effing Disaster."

Ciao, bella.