tammytoes

On Sunday nights, we project films in our backyard. Tonight, ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.’ Several weeks ago, we premiered ‘The Descent’ with the original European ending. We have cocktails, beers, popcorn, homemade snacks and movies. For this reason – and many others – this house has become my home.

It was a petite, quiet white space in the library with a door. That’s not remarkable. What is remarkable is that I had tacked a magazine cutout of some dahlias on the wall for color and life. A passerby could see those dahlias if she walked by. A few weeks after I put up the photo, I received a letter in the mail from a secret admirer. The envelope contained another picture of dahlias and a quote from William Carlos Williams.

I hadn’t gotten a secret admirer letter since 3rd grade.

I eventually met the woman who sent it to me, and we spent some time together. And the story ends badly, and I blew her off and she said some justifiable, angry things to me. She was lovely and smart and adored me, but I was caught up in the mess of a fixation with someone who was touchable, but emotionally unattainable. I spent a year in and out of the object of my affection’s favor, denying the whole time that there was anything wrong with the arrangement.

All this to say that I turned my back on dahlias and poetry and the immediacy of right there and available engagement for the one person who stubbornly refused to make me happy. And I broke someone’s heart in the process.

That was a decade ago, but all those choices – and all that charged emotion – seems to resonate for so many people I care about right now.

At times, I believe we are hardwired for clumsy, stupid emotions. But then, I kind of think all this longing and melancholy can also be creative, sublime. Non-attachment begins to take on a really favorable practice. But I doubt that’s for me.

Something about the simplicity and honesty of this Susan Minot poem really pulls at me today:

There’s a man I’ve thought of many hours…

and
3
a.m.
tonight
he
sleeps
somewhere
and
though
I
no
longer
hope
to
keep
him
near
or
to
kiss
his
grave
face
or
drink
his
sigh
I
don’t
mind
thinking
of
his
closed
eyes
or
of
his
mouth
parted
and
how
my
own
once
rested
there
full-hearted

I was just thinking about this fortune cookie fortune I got during my senior year of college at the only Chinese restaurant in Mt. Vernon, OH. The fortune simply read:

“You are the greatest in the world.”

I tacked it up on the wall of my study cube all year. I did some great work that year. When I graduated, I lost that fortune, unfortunately.

A decade later, I’m haunted by that missing fortune. I hope someone else found it and did great things, too.

I’m back again to over-land. Overworking, overscheduled, overcommitted, overresponsible, all the old over-familiar territory. How the hell did I get back here so fast? I started skating again (which is a good thing, but requires 2-3 solid evenings of my life with another 10+ hours of work a week on top if it), I committed myself to helping friends with a weekly GRE study group, I’ve been taking work home like a maniac in an effort to get all my projects done before the beginning of the school year, and I am seemingly unable to say no to any type of social invitation – even if it means that I am driving between Westminster, Boulder and Denver all within a six-hour timeframe just to fit it all in.

In the past three weeks, I have recklessly abandoned my commitment to only scheduling two items on the weekend (this weekend, I scheduled seven), my commitment to substitution (I added things without even considering the possibility that I might need to cut something that requires equitable time and energy) and I willfully sacrificed alone time. And I’m fully back on the caffeine because I’m so exhausted from all of the above.

Over a round of beers on Friday night, a good friend called me out about writing. She pointed across the table and declared me a total lazy chickenshit about writing. As she pointed out, it’s the absolute one thing I should be doing, that I am more than capable of doing, and that I could be doing to earn an living and fulfill a wish for my career that is near and dear to my heart. And she’s right – here I am, sidetracked constantly by my work addiction, unable to articulate – much less focus – on an attainable and important lifelong goal. I am the furthest thing from lazy, except in the thing I love the most – and I’m starting to believe that I deliberately exhaust myself so that I am unable to write. It’s a risk I don’t seem capable of taking. Rooted, perhaps, in a fear of success.

And more important for the emotional universe in which I live and breathe right now, it’s time to be accountable to my work compulsion and stop, simply stop, often and with joy.