well, he cracks ME up, anyway. you’re on your own.
Surprise dinner with my son last night yielded these two very dry bons mots:
- As I was checking in on facebook places, indicating dinner with Will, he said “I’m not as much a mover and a shaker as I’d like to be.”
- I mentioned coconut milk for some weird reason and he said, “Coconut milk is so anticlimactic.” AND IT REALLY IS!
And get this: breakfast with him in the morning! Joy and rapture! (But not the rapture.)
sidebar: two of the thousands of good things about having a gay son: 1) reliable commentary on cute outfits I may be wearing, and 2) intel about the new slang. Did you know fag hag is so 2010? The hip kids now call them “fruit flies” or “ladybugs.” FRUIT FLIES, that cracks me up.
two FOs quick as a flash!
Not “how long as it been” since I was regularly posting here; that’s a dumb thing to write about. Rather, how long has it been since I sewed (Marnie’s wedding last year, but before that….) something for me! I think it was the late 1980s, to be honest. Back then — which seems like just the other day, doesn’t it, until I do the math — I sewed all the time, since I made clothes for my kids and for myself, too.
I had such fun making these two versions of the Schoolhouse Tunic. It’s an extremely simple pattern, and I just loved the fabrics. I made the purple one first, and then decided to make some changes to the aqua one before I started. It turned out that I needed to severely bring in the seam under the bust, so I rigged paired darts on the back bodice and skirt. So I did those correctly on the aqua dress, and added pockets. I love pockets.
summery aqua
It’s meant to be a dress, but it’s a bit short for the current state of my legs. I want to get some leggings to wear under it, but it’s kinda cute this way too. POCKETS.
what is that accessory I'm holding??
So there’s the purple one — the Kaffe Fassett stripe, so lush and extremely lightweight fabric. That’s not a little spherical bag I’m holding, it’s a kettlebell. A 15-pound kettlebell that will be part of my strength training exercises beginning tomorrow. I hope my trainer doesn’t see that photo, it’s not the right way to be lifting. Sorry, trainer. 
Dinner tonight with my son, after a productive sewing weekend. I hope y’all had a great weekend, too!
soft fabric and hard abs — my weekend!
This weekend, my primary making-things plans are focused on sewing a couple summer dresses for myself, both using the Schoolhouse Tunic pattern (unless the first one just looks awful, of course). It’s pretty cute, and can be cut as a shirt or a dress. I’m going for the dress; it’s worn over a little camisole, and I think it’s cute. I’m just not sure whether the cut will be flattering — I looked at the flickr pool for it, and it looks great on all sizes and shapes of women, so we’ll see. Here are the fabrics I got, from fabric.com:
the purple stripe is Kaffe Fassett, and the aqua one just makes me so happy!
It’ll be fun to sew, especially something that’s as simple and quick as this pattern. I’ll have to scrape the dust off my machines, but it’ll be nice to do something that produces such a fast FO.
Marnie is taking me up and up and up in my workout routines, and I’m so happy. I feel accomplished, and active, and great in my body, which is an entirely new feeling for me. I’m telling you, do a plank. You sure don’t have to look like this guy — when I started, I held it for 5 seconds. Just try it once. You’ve only got 5 seconds to lose. Just try it. Just once.
Happy Friday, y’all! I’ll show my FO dress(es) later!
if only I could knit while doing the plank. hmm.
Well, I guess that’s what I am — a monogamous obsessive. I am now obsessed with remaking my physical life to the detriment of my other obsessions. My knitting has taken a backseat (strangely enough, it’s not like I don’t still watch movies at night, so I could knit….but I don’t). Reading? Backseat. Baking? Way way in the back seat. Like, in that car behind me, in its back seat.
It’s fun. I am shocked, because it’s not really fun doing a lot of the stuff (if you know what a burpee is, you’ll give me a yeah yeah), but the aftermath of doing it, of having done it, becomes a whole lot of fun. My body is changing. My state of mind is changing. Hell, even my sleep is changing.
Weird. But the word nerd in me still exists; I’m off to a poetry group meeting tonight, in which we will read and analyze poetry! We’ll see, I hope we really do that. It’s the first meeting. Other groups I’m in — a reading group, and a writing group — they’re only nominally focused on reading and writing. Mostly, they’re about chatting.
So, off to walk the 10 blocks to my poetry group meeting, in the wind and rain. Ah, New York City, such a charmer. Happy Tuesday, y’all!
aw, you know the change is gonna do me good (e. john, honky cat)
First of all, Mary Oliver is awesome. The poem below was the inspiration for this post, which focuses on something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
You know, the other day I was talking about the mean things I say about my appearance, kind of non-stop? Of course, as I knew, I’m not the Lone Ranger. It’s something women do, but I didn’t know just how ubiquitous this is; according to a new survey by Glamour (who certainly doesn’t help with body image issues!), 97% of women do this! Here’s a list of some things actual women report saying about themselves. Harsh, man. I’m a lightweight in the mean and cruel inner voice, apparently, not even a bronze medal winner. But after 50+ years of doing this, I’ve had enough. That’s not to say that it has magically stopped; I read their recommendations for how to make it stop, and some are ok and some are dumb. (Note to Glamour: if you’d quit airbrushing every model, and hire some who look more like me, that’d help too. Plenty of real women have cellulite, and sag.)
So my new mission has three steps:
- just pay attention, first, to see how much, how often, and exactly what I tend to think about myself. I think I know the what, but I’m not quite sure of the how much and how often; I may be surprised.
- then, when i notice myself doing it, let it go and instead remark on something positive I can actually say (and mean!), like “oh, my hair is so cute today!” What grows is what you water.
- keep on keeping on with my strength training. There’s nothing – nothing – like strength training to make you feel good about yourself. And when you feel good about yourself like that, even if you do notice and remark on something, there’s a sense of the impermanence of that “flaw.”
My motto is ‘fall down seven times, get up eight.’ In making this change, it may be fall down 700 times, or even 7000 times, but I’ll just keep getting up and doing it differently. So here’s the beautiful Mary Oliver poem I mentioned:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Poem :: Mary Oliver, Dream Work (1986)
all you need is love / all you need is love / all you need is love / love is all you need. that, and a big enough bandwidth for streaming.
Since I was coming home from Turkey on Actual Mother’s Day, my kids and I pre-arranged a deal where we’d celebrate Mother’s Day today. So I thought that meant I’d chat on the phone with the girls, as usual, and this year (unusually) I’d also get to talk to Will. I was overjoyed.
Despite our arrangement to wait, the girls did a variety of things on the actual day: facebook posts, emails, phone messages, etc. Of course that made me so happy, the bonusness of it.
Turns out, my very sneaky kids had something else up their collective sleeves. When I saw Will for his birthday yesterday, he was somewhat strangely insistent about seeing me for breakfast this morning. I had made plans for a day full of errands; still, Will was really wanting to see me, even 5 minutes, he said. So I said OK, let’s meet at 8am, and I went home and rearranged my plans. No big deal.
Yesterday afternoon my doorbell rang, and these were delivered, from my kids:
in addition to all the lovey stuff, the card said they hoped the flowers made my day a little sunshiney. THEY DID!
So, OK. My daughters live a time zone earlier than me, and typically sleep in on the weekend. My son didn’t get to bed until 3:30 am, and sleeps in on his days off. That’s the context.
I got to Starbucks this morning at 8am, where Will and I were meeting to figure out where to go for breakfast, and he was on the phone, and on his laptop. He held up his finger and asked me to hang on. No problem: mahjong. I love mahjong, and any opportunity to wait is an opportunity to play mahjong guilt-free. After a few minutes, I learned what was going on. Since all I really want is for all 4 of us to be together in the same place, they had planned to all be on video chat, so we could at least be together virtually. It didn’t work, I think because Starbucks has bandwidth limitations on their free wifi, but what an amazing gift. Of course it meant my daughters were up before 7am, and my son was up early enough to get to Starbucks 30 minutes early, to get the whole thing set up.
my sleepy sleepy daughters a screenshot from Marnie's computer.
Of course it would’ve been brilliant for us all 4 to be together like that, with me sitting next to Will, but this plan was the huge gift in itself. We’ll do it, we’ll work it out and do a 4-way video chat, and I really look forward to that.
This was my best Mother’s Day, ever, and I’ve had some very nice ones. One year, when they were little, I woke up to “All You Need is Love.” Remember how it opens with a fanfare? Well, my kids were walking into my bedroom, Katie holding a pillow with a little tiara on it, and they had breakfast in bed for me. All you need is love. That’s right.
time to listen to the Polyphonic Spree…
The title of this post is yet another AA saying, and it’s one I really love. I like it differently than the Churchill quote there to the left, though they seem to be saying the same thing, generally. Don’t give up before the miracle. And you know, the miracle can be the tiniest thing that just comes from nowhere.
I haven’t been down in the dumps lately, but there have certainly been a number of times in my life when I got awfully close to the bleakest edge you can imagine. I’m so glad that those moments didn’t go the direction they were headed, and that my life force did not give up. I got struck by a tremendous blow of joy this morning. It happened as I was writing my responses to this little list:
- Five things you love about yourself.
- Five things your body can do.
- Five things you’re grateful for.
- Five things that make you happy you’re alive.
- Five people who you love (pets included!).
Well! In a stunning confluence, I became so happy I started crying and just couldn’t stop (the confluence was that the first thing I wrote in response to the first one was that I’m easily moved to tears ). Does this happen to you, you become so embodied with deep, deep happiness — joy, maybe — that you almost feel like you can’t hold it, or maybe it’s kind of like the boundaries of everything disappear and you feel larger than yourself?
See what happens if you make the 5 lists. Just do them in your head, if you like. I wish you joy, too.
if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife….i like that song despite itself
You know, the concept of happy is so much richer than smiling and laughing.
- I’m going to the Paul Winter Summer Solstice performance at St John the Divine. June 18 at 4:30 in the morning. The Winter Solstice concert was so wonderful, and this one is obviously very very different but I imagine it’ll be wonderful too!
- In light of the fact that I’ve been thinking about what constitutes a meaningful life, I loved this poem fragment by Ramond Carver. It’s on his headstone:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- This page offers 28 things she learned about body image and life, and they’re marvelous. My favorites:
8. You’re beautiful. Period.
14. You have to stand for something.
15. Sleep is not over-rated.
16. But perfection is.
17. A diet is not a magic elixir that leads to everything you want.
18. Success looks easy, but it takes a lot of work, sweat, tears, late nights and early mornings. And the road is sometimes paved with nails.
- Today is Will’s 24th birthday — I haven’t been able to celebrate with him since he turned 18, so this is monumental. My kids’ birthdays are the best days of the year for me, anyway, and this one has layers of extra joy. Over the years, he’s been these boys:
One thing that’s not making me happy, though, is the crappy weather. Spring in NYC has been slow and late, cold and rainy. There were unusual breaks that allowed for sunny beautiful days, but on the whole it’s just been kind of pitiful. Beginning tomorrow, the 10-day forecast shows cloudy skies and rain. NO FUN, WEATHER GODS. No fun at all. But as Will says, there’s nothing more boring than talking about the weather.
Happy Friday y’all!
LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
no pictures today, just a LOT of words.
Meaning
I get so irritated with people who just moan about the meaninglessness of life and say they’re “existentialists.” I love those big-picture questions and can think about them until the cows come home, but existentialism doesn’t mean stopping at the claim that there is no meaning. That’s just the foyer. You have to keep going, walk through the next door which is “the meaning is up to you.” I’m very comfortable with the idea that the meaning is up to me.
Joseph Campbell said, “People say that what we are all seeking is meaning for life. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.” I tend to agree with that. I think that’s why I love this Vonnegut passage from Cat’s Cradle, the last rites for a Bokononist:
“God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up! See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”
Those moments when we really get to experience our lives, when we’re not mindlessly passing hours, when we are connected/connecting to someone else, some other mud, that’s the meaning of life. Leo Buscaglia said, “I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” ME TOO, LEO. Me too. We’re here! We get to be here, in this glorious and terrifying and maddening and disheartening and discouraging and beautiful and profound world.
I have a long relationship with Christianity, beginning with my growing up in the Church of Christ (only ones going to heaven, you know), then losing my faith, then finding it again when I had kids, then a few years as a Quaker, and then a profound uncertainty about it all, leaving me agnostic. I sample from the buffet of Big-Picture ideas, like many 21st century Americans — a bit of resonance to aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, Native American beliefs, some aspects of Christianity (though I wish I could be more comfortable with the love part and less focused on the wrath and vengeance part, thanks Church of Christ upbringing). But I don’t understand why believing there is a specific God provides meaning, or why the fact that we die means there is no meaning. None of that makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t understand why believing that when we die, that’s it, means life has no meaning. I just don’t get it.
Other stuff: Fitness
I’m still involved with my new strength training regimen, and my progress has been surprising to me! It really helps that I have such an amazing trainer (who writes things like this, which every woman should read); she encourages me and is just the kind of trainer you’d dream of. So I’ve been thinking a lot about bodies, and my body, and the woman-specific cultural “problems” with women’s bodies, and developing a personal style, and feeling good about exactly how I am, today. IT IS HARD. Just getting dressed this morning, I had these thoughts [more or less]:
- ugh, my stomach is too big
- my legs are so white, ugh I can’t even look
- saddlebags, gross
- I’d look a lot better if I lost some weight
Instead, I could honestly think these things [but I didn't]:
- I love that white streak in my hair that frames my face — I feel so lucky that it’s all clumped up like that, so striking!
- I’m so glad I have such pretty skin, and I always have. Lucky me!
- Pretty good! 52, pretty happy, pretty smile, getting stronger every day. Pretty good!
- Good job.
I’m thinking and trying.
Other stuff: Knitting
I don’t really know why, but I’m in a big knitting lull. I took knitting with me to Turkey but didn’t knit a single stitch. In fact, except for being forced to pull the needles out at the airport, I didn’t even open the knitting bag. The last time this happened, just as Janna suggested I just needed to finish something to get it kick-started again, so maybe I can finish my giant byzantine Traveling Woman shawl in the next few days. I’m down to fewer than 10 rows (but of course the rows are very long now). But Friday is my son’s birthday; he’ll be 24, and this is the first birthday I’ll get to celebrate with him since he was 18. Saturday we’re doing our one-week-delayed Mother’s Day, and I have some stuff to do. So I may not get to do much knitting for a few days. Unhappily(?) that doesn’t bother me.
Finally, I’m not getting far in recovering from this jetlag. Reliably, I wake up at 2:12a.m., which kind of cracks me up how specific it is. When I woke up this morning and glanced at the clock and saw yep, 2:12, I stifled a laugh. I start dragging hard around 5pm and crash by 9:30. I hope this passes soon!
Don’t know how to end this overly-long, overly-wordy post.
I was wished a happy mother’s day on a flight from Antalya to Istanbul. THAT’S a first, I’m telling you.
Three views of Mother’s Day:
in Istanbul at Figaro's, holding two red carnations given to me by strangers in front of a van with something blaring over a loudspeaker
My kids and I agreed to postpone Mother’s Day a week, since we couldn’t talk yesterday due to my all-day absence and flight. Still, Katie sent this jib-jab card. You don’t have to have spent much time around this blog to know just how much this screams “me:”
Her name is Patsy Ruth, such an old Texan name combo. This must've been late 1957 or early 1958.
I wonder if next year I’ll be wishing my daughter Katie a happy mother’s day?! We’ll see…..
there and back again
Turkey was wonderful — in almost every way, it was a perfect vacation. There were no major problems, at every turn things worked out well (including the weather!), I saw some amazing sites (including the Hagia Sophia, which I was afraid I’d miss), ate some good food, and most important of all, just enjoyed myself. It was so good for me, I needed a trip like that. Life gets hard now and then, and sometimes you’ve just got to get away.
There was one bad thing, I had to take my knitting needles out of my in-progress work, only to be told oops, it’s ok. It was my most unusual Mother’s Day ever, having never spent one in Istanbul. Although I wasn’t bothered by jetlag on that end, it’s kicking me on this end; I woke up at 2am (9am in Turkey) and couldn’t go back to sleep, even though I’d only slept a couple of hours, plus a few fitful not-really-asleep-but-trying hours on the plane. Turkish Air is not my favorite airline, but as always my ticket was free so I don’t complain too much.
I was here just a few days ago! This was shot behind the Greco-Roman amphitheater at Myra, in Kale, Turkey
Thanks for your comments on the Turkey blog, and for following it, and on facebook, and for the well-wishes here, before I left! You know how it is, there’s such a huge tizzy in the getting-ready, I didn’t get to respond so this note of gratitude is for you.
And now, back to my regularly-scheduled life.
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