Transit strike...so last century right?

No, not everyone can work from home.  And the rights of working people are important.

 But the fact that we are so disabled by transit strikes in this century, the century that touts the information highway, shows us how much old paradigms hold on with a vice-like grip.  The machine (a.k.a society) hasn't learned yet.

But we need to get with the program people.

Profoundly Fraught Umami-land

I’m freshly back from one of Phoenix’s livelier bedroom communities…while there I entertained the idea of immigrating to Arizona.

There’s no doubt that the pervasive pleasures of living in Arizona are an attractor.   There is a seductive ease I have difficulty refuting while I’m there.  It’s all at your fingertips…summery, expedient and come-at-able. It’s also cheap, rife with the touchstones of affluence, and all on one level.

However, the manifest glory of the Bay Area in general, and of Oakland in particular is indisputable.  One forgets, one forgets; one narrowly focuses on the crime statistics, the poverty, the tabloid pronouncements.  And then one peers through the window…across the expanse of lapis lazuli water, at the quality of caramel light curling gracefully along the verdant east bay hills and one can’t deny that Oakland with its troubles is also deeply ravishing.  At autumn’s threshold, the temperate air settles on the skin, pleasing in the most unaffected and natural way.  The downtown, though sparsely populated  feels oddly right-sized.  The disconcertingly nonpareil restaurants sport the spot-on patina of cool and outlaw, van der Waal's forces  at work.

  

There is the promise of land and space and certain svelteness  of character borne from a secular, worldly wise geography. There is the wild charm…an acquired one to be sure, but a charm nonetheless.

Of course, this is no Comfort Inn. The population is decidedly renegade and mavricky; brilliance tightly fused with a razor-sharp edge.  In spite of my substantial middle class misgivings though, each time I return I am struck dumb by the raw beauty of the place.

And once one succumb’s to Oakland’s beguilements a quick peek at real estate listing aren’t completely deflating.  Compared to the kings’ ransom  required to live in careworn San Francisco, there is the bracing realization that this actually could be a place you could make your own; you could stake your claim in metropolis: an urbanite’s reverie, surely.   It’s a potent antidote to the lure of Arizona’s more confectionary suburban indulgences.

Unsurprisingly, I and many of my fellow denizens find ourselves saying…yes, I know there are the proverbial Big Bad’s here..but I don’t want to leave…not just yet.

So I (we) stay, in full face of the attendant urban ills ; the intractable wretchednesses.

It’s profoundly fraught Umami-land by turns salty, sour, sweet and bitter.   For better AND worse  it’s my home.

Give it all up

Do something.  I mean it.  You MUST DO.

Good things are waiting for you.
Hard things too.

But You. Must. Do.

An aside...yes this is your seven year and you are in the grotto staring up at the moon and the stars and taking copious notes and realizing what you don't know.  That shit is scary, no doubt about it.

 But it is EXCELLENT that you know you don't know.  Today (and the rest of the year), remedy that problem.

EXCELLENT I tell you!

DO!

I collect writing programs for the day I do write

It seems like every other week I'm early trying out a new writing program as if that will be the magic bullet that will catapult me into the blogosphere as a legitimate writer. Ain't nothing that will do that kid except you doing it. Ya gotta write, write, write. And you need to have a niche, niche, niche. Oh and yeah, you can't be anonymous.

The newest one is called Draft by a very enthusiastic young man who is probably half my age. Still, hearing him talk, I forgot I was old. I heard him and thought...cool contemporary. Such a very sad thing, this oldness before we come to acknowledge it.

An aside...I know I'm old because I keep on thinking of my life in terms of "preserving" things as in if I don't start exercising, I'm going to lose the ability to exercise willingly at all. Everything that defines who I am--my writing, my speaking, my teeth, knees, lungs, eyes, hair, skin, intellect...all of these things I keep trying to preserve. Of course in the end it's pointless, they will all be lost one day. But while I'm still 'young-old', I want to enjoy what I have...that's the plan anyway.

We'll see.

Thank you but I got it.

Here is an interesting thing.  Over the weekend...my birthday weekend I might add, my lovely sister offered to decorate my home office.  She's offered to do it before and I've said no...though during a stint when I was in Hawaii and she was house sitting, she did do some small transformations.  It was sweet but the design ultimately never felt quite right.  You see she was designing the room the way she perceived me...rather than the way I saw me.

Physically, I'm a mess.  I'm scruffy, non-linear, scattered.   Her designs and rooms are pristine.

So why would anyone in their right mind turn down a nearly free remodel?  Because the purpose of the office...MY home office, is for me to plum my depths...it's for me to find ME. Her designs though beautiful did not reflect my process, my depths, my quirky underdone weirdness which is where the most creative parts of me dwell.

This is also instructive on a level beyond the herculean effort of appropriately styling a room...as architects of our own lives, we must all become more involved in what we want, not sub it out to a contractor however well meaning and talented. It's a do-it-yourself-existence.

Break out

I have been trying to break out of the world of work for as long as I can remember.  It has been an overarching theme of my life.  Elsewhere in the culture, there has been a return to Stay At Home Mothering (Hat tip to Penelope Trunk), a re-upping  of women to the idea of domestic engineering.  That really hasn't been my thing as I mostly did not have the Mom gene.   I just hate going somewhere each day.

It seemed to me if I could just hone in on the right skill set, or enhance the ones I have naturally, I'd have been able to be self-sufficient and happily ensconced in home a long, long time ago.  But no body gets health care if they stay home.  Not without a lot of money.  With my bronchitis and asthma, I needed work...at least until after 50.  Now that I'm there, I have this continuous record (er CD?  Spotify tune?) playing in my head..."Do your own thing.  Be who you were supposed to be."

But was who I was supposed to be ...a poor elderly woman?

Sometimes I believe that if I mastered the things that vex me my new "able-ness" would be tantamount to a lifetime scholarship that would allow me do what I love...write, read, learn stuff I want to learn, etc.

Here's the truth:  If you want that life, make it happen, even in a tired, broke-down 50 + body.

Period.

Thank God nobody but me reads this crap.

Twenty years on and nothing has changed. Yet.

It's been a long dry spell since I've placed anything here.  Most of my writing has been offline or on other platforms.  Still...I have to say, I haven't written anywhere where it was as satisfying as it has been to write in Blogger (wait...geocities was wonderful but is no more).

I think I don't write here anymore because I lost faith in my ability to make a difference---to get people to read what I'd written...as raptly as I digested other writers on line.  But no one came to my party.  I know, that's my fault alone.

***
In the world, no one...almost no one knows who I am.  I have a very few close friends.  I have a small family.  Just a handful of people are aware of my interests and loves, my passions.  It is very painful to be mostly someone else for the better part of the day...but isn't that what happens when we make compromises for security and supposed comfort?

My world hasn't changed much because I haven't changed it much.  I haven't made the full on commitment  to putting myself over and over and over into the slipstream.  To foreground what I take to be important.

It is instructive that my horoscopes says I am both intensely ambitious AND a ruthless perfectionist.  The combination is strangely suffocating...because I can't be the best ( I am an authority on the fact that I am not the best) I don't try.  I don't telegraph enthusiasm, I don't even feign tepid interest.

Instead, I project a blank slate upon which others project their image of me...typically it's an image that works for them and is quite separate from reality.  I'm a sweet and quiet person.  I am good with technology.  I am a political wonk and a bleeding heart liberal.  I'm a loving daughter and probably a wonderful mother, etc.

Take for example my glass frames.  My family bought me some eye glass frames...very expensive ones.  I hate the frames.  But because I felt bad, I spent a ridiculous amount of money filling a prescription for them...and I didn't even like them.  Why do I acquiesce on such things to my own detriment???

Here's the truth world, I'm none of those things I listed above.  But I admit to being the one who lets these myths persist.

I just continue on the road that I'm on, covertly resentful, bitter and resigned.  Ok.  If someone else told me that they were doing that...I'd say they were seriously damaged.

Acknowledged.