Posts from — June 2010

I once went on a camping trip as a child and right when we got to the site, there was a huge storm.  The counselors set up our tents and then we rushed into them, our sleeping bags and back packs inside soaked trash bags.  We zipped up the door, damp but out of the rain–setting up our sleeping bags in the cramped space, trying to keep our gear away from the nylon side walls.

There were three of us in the tent.  One girl was my best friend (a girl from Pakistan), and the other was an older girl that I didn’t know well who was deaf.  The counselors brought us cups of peanuts and raisins as a snack and the three of us played cards all afternoon.  It was the coziest time; curled up on our sleeping bags, our tent miraculously dry in the storm.  And when you think about it, almost nothing in common beyond the fact that we all ended up at the same camp in the same storm.

I still ask about them when I bump into their mothers back in our old neighbourhood.

*******

The underbelly of the dark side is the cozy tent in the center of the rain storm and the people who end up inside with you.  It seems as if we end up together mostly by accident–we choose a house and end up within walking distance of a new friend.  We swing by our cousin’s workplace and a few years later, end up with her co-worker as your husband.  We click on a link and start reading a new blog and years later laugh about how we found one another.

As I said in the other post, my internal world is certainly being affected by that storm outside–no one can have that much pressure and anger and frustration and sadness around them and not have it seep into the way they feel as they rub up against the world.  But on paper, things are actually quite nice right now.  While I always have simmering anxieties and jealousies on the back burner, overall, I am in a happy and productive space.

And I have wonderful people in my tent.

On Monday night, Lindsay, Paz, Calliope, and N sucked up the meatlessness and took me to a dive-y little vegan restaurant that I love.  They wanted me to be able to order anything off the menu.  Calliope popped my lottery cherry and Lindsay ensured that she’d be receiving baguettes this summer and we all mocked Paz for having never seen the Goonies and we all squeamishly wondered about the two chairs in the bathroom that were set facing the toilet as if one were going to pee for an audience.

During the meal, Paz pulled out your gift.  I’m still not sure how she arranged this, but Paz, Lavender Luz, Leah, Jendeis, Lindsay, Vee, E’s Mama, Smokeandashesbaby, Lucy, JJ, HereWeGoAJen, N, Somewhat Ordinary, Sunny, Michell, Dora, Kym, and Calliope all commissioned a DC poet to construct a poem for me, weaving in their thoughts and snippets from my blog.

I know–your mouth is dropped open right now too?  When I try to tell this story to people, everyone starts crying as I did when Calliope read the poem.

The poem contains two stanzas of 18–double life–for my 36th birthday.  There are 613 characters in each stanza (including punctuation), because there is a belief in Judaism that pomegranates contain 613 seeds which stand for the 613 commandments in Judaism.  And, as the poet explains, “The reference to cross-pollinating alludes both to a way of generating fruit as well as to Mel’s knack for spreading ideas and connecting people; also, the name Melissa means bee, the supreme pollinator.”

The poem:

Pomegranate Lollipop
for Mel at 36

It could be a flavor: whimsical, comforting,
a blossom at the end of intention,
bracing at the start of each day—
a circle of taste, a fresh taste of hope,
kosher, of course, and mothering, life giving;
or it could be a song: lyric of uplift,
lyric of weeping and cheer, chai
for today and tomorrow, chai for the day
and the night, ditty against disappointment,
dirge becoming delight; or a map with a sign
aimed from IF to THEN, a map of the underworld
turned upside-down, spilling Persephone
out into sunlight, Demeter out of mourning,
casting the arils in loam along the path,
ousting the pockets of emptiness,
cross-pollinating ideas, until the tree hangs heavy—
every bough, fruited and flowered alike,
sharing the same root: Melissa.

It could be a flavor, a lyric or a map, but it’s mostly
a gift: for stirring up empathy, honesty, strength,
for being the change, for making the mix tape,
for soothing the wounds with words;
for tying the threads, for rounding the journey:
carrying what can’t be carried, blessing the fruit,
eating the seeds that bleed and are whole again;
the gift of baking bread for the hungry,
the gift of sitting down to the table of friendship,
singing “sitting all alone, not by myself / everybody’s
here with me” and making of the song
a feast, making it mean
what it means to each of us,
we who have wandered
the island, picked up the gifts
you have laid at our feet, we who stand
with you now on our own, calling you friend,
blessing, wellness, Mel, Melissa.

*******

In the places where it matters–Josh, the twins, my family, my incredible friends–I am inside the tent.  The rest of it–the failed cycles and the jobs I didn’t get and the oil spill and the murmuring societal anger–is just rain on the roof.  And I would like to state for the record how lucky I feel that we all ended up running through the rain together, our possessions in trash bags, to get in this tent.

The Yin and the Yang–a post in two parts.

Perhaps this is a post that simply needs to be written every year or so.

There is a scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Augustus Gloops is stuck in the pipe and the chocolate is sloshing around him with nowhere to go.  “They could see it building up behind him in a solid mass, pushing against the blockage.  The pressure was terrific.  Something had to give.  Something did give, and that something was Augustus.”

I was reading a review of the book for Other People’s Rejection Letters in People magazine (yes, I read it cover to cover.  Don’t judge).  The reviewer pointed out, “A rejection letter can sway or scar a life, causing one person to give up his dreams, another to work harder.”  I haven’t read the book, but the concept of rejection is something that affects people in the same way in non-letter form.  Friendship that isn’t returned, a job that you don’t get, the negative cycle, the blog post that isn’t read or met with comments.  Rejection happens in subtle and obvious ways all day long.

I think it’s a special person–perhaps a more evolved person–who uses rejection to keep refueling them.  I think for the majority of us–myself included–rejection simply has a way of tearing the heart until you want to curl up on a bed and spend the afternoon crying.

And yes, while the sting of rejection usually fades, I haven’t found that it goads me on later.  I usually take rejection to simply be rejection–a declaration that I should set my sights elsewhere.

I cannot be the only one who is feeling this in the air, sensing the frustration all around me.  It is coming on a global level with the news saturated with stories ranging from unrest and disappointment to all out rage and destruction.  It is coming on a local level.  I recently joined a local listserv and my experience in the first few weeks have been marred with continuous bickering.  I get three digest emails a day filled with local news as well as name-calling, allegations, and people declaring how disgusted they are.  Quite an eye-opening welcome.

It is everything from Helen Thomas to entire hate sites set up to mock a single blogger and everything in between.

It is face-to-face and online.  Almost every conversation with a friend these past few weeks have utilized a few minutes discussing a slight or a feeling a sense of disquiet.  A feeling that something is not quite right within their relationships, their workplace, their marriage, their home.  It seems as if people are posting less and commenting less–something I associate with the disquiet I noticed last year.  It soon passed as the mood broke–which is not to say that life became perfect, world peace was achieved, and all relationships became harmonious, but there was definitely a change in mood within the blogosphere over summer and the disquiet returned in August.  It stuck around for a bit, and then passed again in the fall.

I distinguish this from personal moods.  It seems that we are in a period of disgust, frustration, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction and the blog posts (or also the lack-thereof) reflect this.  People seem to be nastier.  Shorter-tempered.  I am too.  And, at the same time, it’s a nice period of time in my life and my general daily mood seems in discordance with this larger mood.  But the emotional soup that exists outside the home changes how I’m processing my day-to-day.  I hope it’s working in the other direction too, but I fear that it’s more that the negativity is seeping into my personal mood.

I think Josh and my discussion on friendship and trusting people and building a relationship from afar all feeds into this general disquiet.  Is there a general lack of trust right now–with our world leaders, our family, our neighbours, our friends, our online connections?  Does that disquiet make us want to pull back, post less, comment less, interact less?

Poor Augustus Gloop shoots out of the pipe and into the Fudge Room and I think most of us are feeling this strange pressure and discontent building up behind us and it has the power to either shoot us forward energetically into the next mood–one where we take our disquiet and turn it around into positive change–or simply scar us (if not forever, than at least for the short-term) changing the way we view other people.

Have you noticed the dark side?  What are your feelings from inside the figurative tube, the chocolate sloshing around you?

My dual parties this weekend raised an interesting conversation with Josh: at what point does someone cross from being a stranger to an acquaintance to a friend?

Would you answer that different for the face-to-face world vs. the online world?

I’ve spoken to Steve the cart returner at the grocery store thousands of times–does that make him an acquaintance?    I can’t tell you a lot of personal information about him; I know he loves stickers, but I’m not sure if he’s originally from Maryland or moved here or has siblings or is married.  But I speak with him almost daily.  Would it be crazy of me to ask him to watch the twins in the store for a second while I run to get something from the car?  At what point does a person become a trustworthy acquaintance, one that has the potential to help if you need a hand?

How does anyone get to the level of friend if you don’t start taking those small steps towards one another?  Do you need to start placing trust in the person or can you reach the level of “friend” without having that trust tested by being used?

Is friendship always a two-way street?  Can someone be a friend in my eyes but I’m an acquaintance in their eyes?  And if that is the case, can I still say that we’re friends and treat them as such?

Why do people qualify their friends beyond the explanation for how you met?  Why do people judge friendships that begin online and consider them lesser (while you and I might not feel that way, the general public does hold a myriad of opinions on online friendships)?  I knew more about Julie before we met for the first time than I do about Steve.  Had a better sense of who she was despite having more face time and extended conversations with Steve.

Why do you need to meet your online friends face-to-face before the general public accepts that friendship for its full worth?

And yet, how do you build trust with someone you’ve never seen before. Real trust–the sort that would allow you to leave your child with them unattended for a duration of time?  Can you have a deep, trust-based friendship with someone you’ve never met face-to-face?

And on that end, why do we believe that people we meet face-to-face are more trustworthy?  Date rape is more common than being attacked by someone unknown to you.  Serial killers live in communities too.  Knowing these facts, why are people more likely to trust someone they know from face-to-face contact vs. someone they’ve met online?

These were the things we discussed this weekend.  Your thoughts?

Even though I haven’t kept up my exercise blog, I still am running around WuHu Island every morning and attempting to get in better shape (I’m up to over 3 miles every day!).

I am blogging about fitness as well as participating in BlogHer’s $100 gift card sweepstakes over here.  All you need to do is click over, read my blatherings, and then answer the question to be entered.

I am going to two parties this weekend.  The first is comprised entirely of people I have known for at least eleven years.  Some for much longer than that.  We all knew each other before we met our partners and got married and had children.  It is a group that is entirely entrenched in history and we have found over the years that our roots often inadvertently entwine in the past with shared people we knew even before meeting each other.

The second is comprised almost entirely of people I know via blogging and one old camp friend who I re-met via blogging (who is different from the high school friend I re-met via Twitter–hi, Thea!).  For some, I know the intimate details of their life, but have never seen them face-to-face.  Others started out as online friends and then stepped through the computer screen.

It’s a strange continuum of old and new, but in so many permutations that old and new blend together on one extended plane.

Oh yes, and expect pictures, at least from the second one.

*******

Speaking of meeting bloggers, last weekend, I got to meet Flicka, Becky, and Niobe, along we other TOOTPUers who were not drenched in vomit and could therefore get together for breakfast.

*******

The Weekly What If (courtesy, this week, of Calliope): What if Hollywood called and wanted to turn your blog into a movie like Julie and Julia. You get final casting approval. Who would play you?

I don’t know who would play me, but I’d totally get the cast of Brothers & Sisters to play my actual family.

*******

And now, the blogs…

Life from Here has a post about adoption on the lead-up to her daughter’s first birthday.  Where her life was last year vs. where her life is this year.  She is thoughtful and eloquent and raises wonderful points and then meets them with possible answers.  She is most profound when she speaks about ethics and how they navigated the pre-placement months together.  I found myself nodding a lot while reading.

Relaxing Doesn’t Make Babies has an absolutely brilliant post about the worries that have been hounding her since Kate’s birth.  I love the way she describes that running anxiety: “it’s like my brain decides to suddenly worry about everything at once.”  The post flits from fear to thought to fear, and you almost enter Natalie’s brain, feeling a bit like that anxiety fluttering by like a pack of butterflies.

Waiting Lisa has a post explaining why holiday weekends are the hardest weekends and relates it to the idea of attending a family reunion.  She explains, “Parties like this are big check-ins where we are all supposed to share what has happened with us since we last got together. I have nothing. The only thing that has changed is that I’m missing organs.”  It’s a beautiful, aching post and you need to read it in full.

Lastly, Infertile Newlywed has a post about her husband’s diagnosis and the conversations that came afterward.  It is a simple post about the physical and financial realities of infertility informing the emotional side of infertility.  It is about those all-too-familiar planning conversations; the ones that go above and beyond what someone trying unassisted needs to consider just to get to the starting gate.  It’s a wonderful post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Partying this weekend.  Apparently partied last weekend too.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.