Category Archives: Uncategorized

To Burn Out or to Fade Away–I’ll Take Fade.

40s are the new 40s, Election 2016, Goals, Reflections, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

For most of my life, I assumed that everyone else in the world considered suicide in varying frequencies or degrees. I didn’t know why professionals made such a big, stinking deal over the mention of it, I just learned very early NOT to mention it around certain people and to outright lie to others: Have I had any thoughts of suicide? Nope. Not a one. What do I look like? A crazy person? A weak person? Meanwhile, I would wake up in the morning wondering what it would feel like to jump off a tall building or put a bullet in my head. Quick and efficient stuff I’d think about. None of this slow bleeding in the bathtub nonsense, hoping someone might run in and save me. I always knew that if I actually did it, I’d do it right. I’d do it to get it done. For most of my life I drifted in and out of these fantasies. I could come up with a hundred reasons to hate myself in the course of a day.

It wasn’t until I met my friend Fluoxetine, at the age of 42, that I learned otherwise. Fluoxetine, and the man who prescribes it to me, taught me all kinds of things about how other people can see the world. For instance, some people NEVER think of suicide. Not just once a day or once a month, but NEVER once. These are probably the people who freak out when they hear you mention suicide as casually as if you’re talking about flossing your teeth. They probably feel sorry for people like me who see no other way to see the world. Hell, I guess I would feel sorry for me, too. But I didn’t know anything different. My doctor said freedom from that world, the only one I’d ever known, would feel like a weight being lifted. When my surroundings became more than a fluctuating shade of drab, I would wonder how I could have lived for so long the way I did.

I was skeptical, of course. I’m always skeptical of the therapy trade. But this dude was more than a therapist; he was a doctor who could make a precise diagnosis. He was a man who didn’t pity me or fear for me or for my condition because he knew it was treatable. No drama. No endless talk therapy.

I was one of the lucky ones who reacted positively to the antidepressant right from the start. I remember so clearly driving to the grocery store, exuberantly singing along to whatever came on the radio, and giggling at nothing. I remember walking through the aisles of the store, trembling a little because I just wanted to FUCKING DANCE! That first day was like a pure coke high without the bleeding nose. My doctor said it shouldn’t have happened so quickly, that my body needed time to adjust to it. But I tell you, it happened. I actually wanted to dance in a public place, and I don’t dance, anywhere. It was a sign.

So what’s my point? I guess it’s this: in all those forty-two years, during those times when bleakness would interrupt my thoughts at random and make the whole world seem absurd, I never did it, never acted on the dark fantasy. I seem to have a strong survival instinct. I found ways to adapt to whatever it was, just like I need to find ways to adapt to whatever this is that’s happening now in the world. I need to adjust my perspective, to compensate, maybe to up my dose. I’m considering going full-throttle into hippiedom and embracing peace, learning how to play the guitar, maybe go vegan, never step on a bug. I’m tired of conflict. I’m so damned good it, so good at starting fires and stoking them, but I always get burned.

“Will Never Do”s

40s are the new 40s, Eternal Youth, feeling old, Goals, Reflections

I didn’t post much in 2016, something I vaguely attributed to being drunk much of the time, but I wasn’t drunk for the entire year. I spent some time early in the year training for the AVON 39, a 39-mile charity walk that—due to poor planning, I believe—turned into a 43-mile walk. It was gratifying, and I’d do the walk again if I didn’t have to raise the $1800 required of me to participate. I’d experienced extreme physical tests in my life, but never that extreme.

By the end of Day 1, after crossing that 26.2 mile mark, which was arguably a 29 or more mile mark, I was too exhausted to eat or shower or even move. I hunkered in my pink tent, waiting for a tentmate that never showed, and considered calling an Uber to take me home. The only thing that stopped me from walking to an Uber was the thought of the pain of walking to the Uber. So I just lay there on my unopened sleeping bag until I felt energetic enough to walk over to the “relaxation” tent with the inflatable couches and the warm lighting. After some hot tea, I could eat. After that, I could sleep. I got up in the rain the next morning, dismantled my tent, threw on a plastic poncho and trudged the last arguably 13, though more like 14 and some change, miles back to home base, and I was done with that milestone.

After walking arguably 43 miles in two days, I briefly considered training for a marathon until my father told me in so many words that I was nuts for considering it. He was tactful by never admitting that age was an obstacle. Like me, he had started distance running in his thirties; but unlike me, he had run the marathon before he developed issues with his knees, something that appears to emerge on both sides of my family.

“You can do it,” he explained, “but it’ll take a permanent toll on your knees, and then what’s the point?”

After the marathon, there would be no point, I suppose. I’d have issues with both knees, and I’d be years closer to replacement surgery than my father had been. No point to do it, I suppose, except that I hate closing doors on possibilities. I’ll never be able to stick a 26.2 sticker on my rear window. Boohm.

You know what else I’ll never be able to do? Lots. Here is the list of as many as I could remember in the thirty-eight seconds I gave myself to remember and write them down (NOT necessarily in chronological order):

  • I’ll never be a foot model.
  • I’ll never be Miss America.
  • I’ll never be the President.
  • I’ll never work in Turkey.
  • I’ll never be a high-class prostitute.
  • I’ll never be a mother.
  • I’ll never be a lawyer.
  • I’ll never run a marathon.

I’m sure there were more, but those are the ones I remember as clearly as my conversation with my father about not running a marathon. There are just times in your life when you admit to yourself that something isn’t going to happen. I assume we all do this, and by “we all” I mean people over forty. For you I can’t explain why I considered that I’d never be a high-class prostitute, but I will put it on the list.

And, you know what? My list of dead possibilities is SHORT! I haven’t been wasting my time entirely here on this earth, and life’s adventure ISN’T over. There are so many possibilities left to us at our age, and we’re in a position to pursue any one of them.  The position isn’t financial or familial, it’s primal—We see the end. We grasp the moment. We shit, or we get off the pot. We live, or we die.

2017, Meh.

40s are the new 40s, Election 2016, feeling old, Goals, Reflections, Relationships, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

2017, Meh.

That about describes it—“meh.” It’s more than just a word. It’s how I felt ringing in a new year that I didn’t look forward to. Everyone around me was saying, “2016 just needs to be over! 2016 sucked!” I don’t feel that way. So yeah, in 2016, the historical pendulum swung into outer space and a contentious president was elected. Sure, in 2016, a few childhood icons died. Regardless, 2016 was my peak. It was one big party that I didn’t document. I welcomed it at the craziest one I ever attended—the party that made my husband and I say to each other in the wee hours of January 1, 2016, “This will be our year.”

So fast forward to now. What did we say to each other this year?

“I am going to control my road rage,” he mumbled in the wee hour of January 1, 2017. He must’ve dug deep into the pits of avoidance to come up with that one. I didn’t even bother: I couldn’t think of anything except all the ones I broke last year. My husband brought up one of our shared resolutions, and then I wondered, “Maybe I have peaked. Maybe this year that I am tossing out right now was my last good year.”

And that was that. Happy New Year! My mother-in-law gave us blue sparkly top hats and noisemakers that I tried to hide from the kids. Shortly after the ball came down (which, incidentally, only about 1/3 of us actually saw—the ball drop has cheapened since Dick Clark), we all went to bed.

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I Only Feel Old When I Look in the Mirror

Eternal Youth, feeling old, Uncategorized, , , , ,

 

My ex-husband recently asked me if I felt old. I had messaged him about how a family member, someone he would only remember as a little child, had just turned 30. He was setting me up, wanting me to tell him, “Yes, I feel soooooo old! You?” To this, he would respond with something crafted and esoteric about his eternal youth, because he likes to one-up anyone who might have something vaguely cliché to say about life. But I didn’t tell him yes or no. Because I really don’t know if I “feel” old. I have a tight ass and the physical stamina of a woman half my age. I don’t “feel” old, I suppose. You know what I do feel? Desperate.

Let me tell you about my impending forty-fifth birthday if you haven’t been there already in your own desperate world:

Forty-five times two makes ninety. How many of us are going to live to see ninety? For practical and also spiritual reasons I have a hunch I’m not. That means that, on my forty-fifth birthday, I will be well past the halfway point in my life. I got fewer than forty-five more years to make my life count, to feel like I shined that flashlight into every corner. Subtract twenty of those forty-some remaining years for failing health and dementia, and you know what? I have twenty-five more years to live. IF I’m lucky.

For anyone who’s lived to see her fortieth birthday, you know that ten years can fly by in an instant. I can’t believe, for instance, that it’s been ten years since I’ve enjoyed the effects of a good cocaine high. Ten years? Yup. And the kids—the kids spring up and grow into little adults in the course of ten years. They turn from gurgling, human larvae into thinking, feeling, creative beings who will remember how crazy you are for the rest of their lives. Ten years, to them, and to those of us in our thirties and our twenties and our teens, is an epic. After forty, ten years is a chapter in a mediocre novel. Do I “feel” old? Nope. Girl, I am fucking old.

And if my argument needs more proof, well, look in the mirror. Time leaves its marks on even the most fastidious and young-feeling graduates of four decades on earth. I can tighten my ass, but I can’t tighten those sags in my neck without surgery. Maybe surgery will enable the forties to be the new thirties. Or maybe the forties are just the forties, like I’ve been sayin’ all along.

 

40sarethenew40s’s Most Influential Reads of 2015

Reflections, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , ,

These are the books, articles, and essays that made me think. Some of them, like Fuller’s book, I haven’t stopped discussing with the friend who recommended it; some of them I found myself. To make this list, the piece has to have the following effects:

  1. Some image, line, or idea from the text makes a permanent impression on me and influences how I view the world around me.
  2. I then attempt to discuss this image, line, or idea with my husband, i.e., I take it out of the friend zone and into my most intimate life.
  3. I walk around for days, weeks, and months thinking about pieces of the text.

Book (nonfiction): Leaving Before the Rains Come, by Alexandra Fuller

This book combines several topics that fascinate me: African culture, alcoholism, and the deterioration of marriage. Alexandra Fuller has knocked me out before with her tales of growing up with eccentric parents of colonial ancestry in southern Africa, namely Zimbabwe. This time she’s all grown up, living in Wyoming with an American husband, drinking too much, and suffering from culture shock. A close contender for my nonfiction vote was Wednesday Martin’s Primates of Park Avenue, but the richness and complexity of Fuller’s writing prevailed. Plus, I love an alcoholic protagonist.

Book (anthology):  Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up, edited by Leah Odze Epstein and Caren Osten Gerszberg

I found this little gem myself. Ever since I read Carolyn Knapp’s Drinking, A Love Story, I have craved more tales about drinking by women who drink. This anthology is not an AA weapon, a Go Ask Alice piece of bullshit designed to dissuade even the most rational thinker from ever picking up a drink again. Rather, it’s honest stories by professional writers for whom drinking plays a role in their family, culture, religion, or identity. There are tales of inspiration and moderation in here. In fact, I think they outweigh the horror stories. And that’s what I like the most about this collection: its embrace of multiple perspectives on a topic that is often treated with all-or-nothing reductionism.

 Book (fiction): Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn

I read this before I discovered it was a movie, thank goodness. My husband only watched the movie and had no idea what was going on. This novel is too complex for film. It’s told from three points of view—the protagonist in the present and past, and her brother and mother in the past. All past events cover a 24-hour period of time that that protagonist is trying to figure out in the present in order to solve a mystery. The protagonist is angry and surly, and there’s no role model character in this novel, rather conflicted people who err. Again, there’s no black and white thinking here—just the way I like it!

 Essay: “Take Me at Face Value,” by Tawni O’Dell

This short essay is a light read. I found it in an anthology called 40 Things to Do When You Turn 40, which I bought and read in the Philadelphia hospital where I tended to my post-op parents in July. O’Dell discusses attending a book club meeting with women in their 20s and 30s, and here she realizes that there are some fundamental differences between her way of thinking as a 40-something and theirs.

 Article: “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Yes, I read stuff that isn’t about either women or alcoholism! Ordinarily, I avoid reading stuff about education because it’s just so fucking depressing, but I had had to read this. This article, in fact, is my 2015 first prizewinner for most influential read. Lukianoff and Haidt have received much criticism from the left for raising this issue—Colleges and universities should be the bastions of free speech and freedom of thought, places where students go to learn how to open their minds and to think critically, to use the Socratic method to discuss sensitive issues, and to emerge from the education as grown-ups. But the opposite is happening in our institutions of higher learning—coddled, closed-minded children are dictating what their professors can and can’t say. Before teaching novels like The Great Gatsby, instructors must begin with caveats, or “trigger warnings,” that the material contains such sensitive material as alcohol abuse or sexual abuse. Any ideas not considered PC enough are ousted. Potentially interesting speakers like Condoleza Rice, Bill Maher, and the Muslim feminist Asra Q. Nomani are “uninvited” in protest of soundbites of their views, “We don’t like you… WAH.” The lunatics are running the asylum.

I’ll end on that note… Happy New Year!

Monogamy, for S.

Eternal Youth, Life in the Suburbs, Relationships

Monogamy. Yes, what better topic to bring up around the holidays, to ring in the new year? Monogamy.

I seem to know a lot of people in nontraditional relationships. I have friends in open relationships, gay friends, divorced friends, asexual friends, never married friends; friends who chose the kids and not the spouse, the spouse and not the kids, multiple spouses… and these are just the friends. I’m not talking about acquaintances or friends of friends or people I’ve read about or heard on a podcast. Those really run the gamut, from all types of polyamorous couples to swingers to people who just do life differently than your standard nuclear family. Whatever you imagine can be done–believe me–someone’s doing it. I suspect if we’ve made it this far in life then we’ve heard the rumors about this writer’s or that celebrity’s penchant for swing parties or polyamorous marriage, or weirder stuff. Well, it ain’t just celebrities dipping their toes in those weird waters. It’s a threatening world out there in the gray area if you are a black-and-white kind of thinker.

Well, I’m not a black-and-white kind of thinker unless I’m trying to piss someone off. Maybe that’s why I have the friends that I do, and maybe that’s why I have so few friends here in La-La Land. I found most of my friends back in the city, once upon a time before I moved. Cities are adult playgrounds. They’re full of galleries and theaters and ballroom dance clubs and beer-making groups, activities for adults. The suburbs are where we go to leave all that, to forget art or live music in order to take up bee keeping and the community association, to talk about school budgets and to transfer our identities to our children (See, I’m speaking in blacks-and-whites here for you suburban readers. Go on, challenge me!). I miss my city friends. I miss the anything goes kind of attitude that we all had in our thirties. I miss the hunt-and-chase mentality of the dating world. Some people my age tell me this is just a fact of life—that with age comes dullness. Just deal with it. I’m not so sure.

I flirt with other men sometimes. I can’t help it. They’re there. The more different they are from my husband, the more compelling I find them. My husband doesn’t seem to mind, though. He doesn’t know how to flirt, at ALL, or he probably would do it himself. We acknowledged a long time ago that we’re human, that we don’t stop finding the opposite sex attractive just because we’re committed to each other. Of course, we’re each on our second marriage, and second marriages often come with better communication and more realistic expectations. I never lie to my husband about anything significant or relationship-altering (although I have been known to cast a little white lie once in while to boost his ego.). I love him. To me, he’s perfect and worth every minute of the havoc, the financial and emotional distress, and the lost time that divorce and remarriage has cost us.

But even the bright and shiny newness of a second marriage, a better marriage, begins to fade. You reach a stage in your relationship where it’s totally ok to wear the same pair of paint-splattered yoga pants and the holey t-shirt for three days in a row. If you work out of the home or have longer breaks from work like we do, you have to jog your memory sometimes to recall your last shower. And sometimes you realize that you haven’t showered for days, as many days as you’ve been wearing those yoga pants. And you ask yourself, “Would I have done this eight years ago when I met him?” The answer is an absolute “no.” When he and I started dating, I spent a lot of time maintaining: I fixed my hair; I wore makeup, which I’ve rarely worn in my lifetime. I even teetered around in uncomfortable shoes and clothes that fit a little too tightly. And when I began to slip back into the comfortable clothes, the air-dried hair, and the no-makeup routine, I still tried to salvage a little mystery by hiding my feminine products and refusing to allow him near my laundry.

These days I’d be crazy to pass up an opportunity to hand him a basket of my worn undergarments and everything else, for that matter (I mean, hell, if he’s willing to do the laundry…). Now we’ve been married for going on seven years, and sometimes I wear the same yoga pants for three days running—just get out of bed, put them back on, and go make coffee. Isn’t there a myth about a seven-year itch? That time in a marriage when the breadwinners of the fifties and sixties (and seventies… and eighties…) would run off with their secretaries or their fitness instructors or their kids’ teachers? Are we there now, at mid-life crisis time? Second marriage or not, eight years is a long time to have sex with the same person. I get it. It was around the eight-year mark when I left my first husband, for someone else, of course. I’m the dude who ran off with his secretary.

But I have no intentions of running off this time around. I find the concept, in fact, absurd. New sex and the thrill of the chase might be a nice distraction; but it can’t replace a good spouse, a good partnership, and real love. Sex might get routine and boring; but new sex, if it’s forbidden, is only going to wreck the relationship, the one you worked so hard to build, the financial security, the trust, all gone. Who wants that? Who wants that drama?

Maybe these nontraditional people are on to something, especially the ones who swing or keep an extra partner around the house from time-to-time. My nontraditional friends are all confident people, confident in their choices, confident in their relationships. When you are forging your own path and not following one that was made for you, your choices for happiness and personal satisfaction seem unlimited.

So it’s been seven years. Time to evaluate. I’ve started by learning more about makeup and hair and skin products, by working my alcohol-wrecked body back into a size six and living clean and rocking some heels from time-to-time. I’m back where I was eight years ago, but that doesn’t change one key fact—I’m not new sex, and neither is he. Can we live with that? Do we really have a choice?