Quiet heart, it's a quiet heart; it's a quiet heart; it's a quiet heart like a car alarm...

 Hoo, boy. 

My skull is full to sloshing. I have neither the time nor the energy to unplug my ear and drain everything out. This is simply a reminder that I owe myself relief tomorrow...either that, or this is a teaser-trailer to anyone whom I imagine might be reading...kidding myself that folks still DO...to stay tuned!

Consider yourselves teased. 

I guess that I'm just some kind of malcontent who gets paid for having nothing good to say.

I miss you, Nate. Today, you have been gone ten years...exactly. Now, I know I seem only to write when I am reflecting either about sad moments or about the people in them (or both). I write to my father on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death, and I write to you on those same moments of yours. Today, at least, I have something that is, if not positive, at least amusing in my head, and it makes me wish you were here so we could be catty bitches about it (yes, I am aware of the oxymoronic nature of the phrase "catty bitch", but I won't get into that here). 

I was at work on a Saturday (!!!) to administer the entrance exam for students hoping to go to one of the various private schools in the area. Think: microcosmic college admissions process. They apply, they visit the school and shadow a student, they interview...they take the exam. That's not the point. The point is, I was at work on a Saturday, so it would be fair to say that I was tired. It would be fairer to say that I was feeling grumpily cynical (cynically grumpy?) as I zombie-walked through the faculty lounge to make myself a coffee. Side note: how lucky am I to work in a place that provides not only a space to make coffee, but also the espresso-maker, the various coffee types, and even delectable accoutrements of flavor to zhuzh it up? Answer? VERY. That being said, I reached for my cat-shaped Christmas mug (yes, I have cat mugs in various shapes for various holidays, all of them glib references to my old spinster cat lady status with lingua in maxillam). We have no "assigned" spots for our individual mugs, but there is a collective unconscious about whose mug goes where. This unspoken rule allows me to connect to mugs to people. A-'s is his mug from his alma mater, L-'s sports a collection of movie quotes, J-'s has a goofy quote about "no coffee, no work-y", and so on. 

Waiting for my drink to brew, I thought about what steps, if any, went into the selection of each mug. Did they get the mugs as souvenirs from a trip? Were they presents from friends? Did they just blindly grab the one about which they worried least? I know that, at least in public schools, when parents buy "teacher appreciation" gifts (when, ironically, the best gift would be simply raising their kids to be respectful yet curious learners), they almost unilaterally default to "the coffee mug". It's almost as if they know that this job is exhausting enough to require legally-approved stimulants. Maybe some of these mugs are that. What if the mugs were the tiny ways in which we are allowed to express our interest? Our passions? Our histories? Our humor?

Now, here's my question: When did we as a species decide that our interests, more than simply reflecting our personalities, actually usurped them? This is the point I wish I could discuss with you. I have so few connections in my life who are both intellectual enough to have an academic discussion about this "stuff" and goofy enough to want to. I spoke to a "potential" friend about this recently. How does "Ohio State fan" or "lover of all things Disney" become who people are? And what does it say about them to have their identities be such a horrid combination of reductivism and commercialism? 

So...

You have been gone ten years...to the DAY. To you, I raise my kitty Christmas mug that reads "Meowy Christmas" (no...seriously), and my hope is that someday, we sit across one another at a cafe, you looking flawless in man-capri pants and espadrilles, me in a simple-yet-chic dress, and we sip our coffees and discuss these things. If Heaven exists, that has to be it. 

Talking like a jerk except you are an ACTUAL jerk and living proof that sometimes, friends are mean...

 I always seem to start these posts by describing one of several things: where I am, what I am doing, or what is going on with my body. Am I that much of a narcissist? Perhaps I am; however, since I write because I fear that one day, all of this...stuff will be a memory to which I no longer have access, it's important to record all the minutiae. Side note: I have a weird predilection for loving the semicolon-conjunctive adverb-comma technique to join together multiple independent clauses. I have actually developed an active dislike for moments wherein people begin their sentences with "however".  It has gotten so intense, in fact, that I have begun speaking punctuation aloud with my students in order to get them in the habit of conjunctive adverb-ing more fluidly. It warms both the cockles and the subcockles of my heart when I hear them say, "I thought we had a quiz today, semicolon-however-comma, we do not."

Nerd.

THAT BEING SAID....

I am sitting here in front of my computer (obviously), and my body is beginning to grumble about the soreness that looms ahead. I did unspeakable things to it at the gym last night... all manner of atrocities--squats, thrusts, curls, etc--and let's face it, the needle on my age-o-meter is moving in only one direction. My relationships with both exercise and my body have changed and changed and changed over the years, as one would expect. Anyone who knows me knows that I started running in seventh grade because it was something my father had done as a teenager, and I LONGED to be more like him, or at least to have more things discussion-worthy and in common. I broke the school record in the 1600 meters (which was broken by someone else a year later. Boo.), and I was hooked. I ran in junior high (successfully) and in high school (less so). I stopped in college and essentially ignored my body. 

It was not happy.

When I got back into running towards the end of my senior year, I became unhealthily obsessed (is there even a healthy way to obsess?) and ran every single day...even after I moved to California for grad school. Oh! The stories! Perhaps some other time, I'll write about THAT journey and its scary nuances, but this is not that. When I injured myself (because, of course, I did), I relegated myself to machines at the gym other than the treadmill. It was there that I developed a totally different kind of neurosis. 

Now...

I often like to semi-joke, "I am never the prettiest girl in the room, but I often get to be the smartest, and that's way more important," and though it was usually sincere, I sometimes used it as a suit of armor. What my time at the gym revealed to me was that many people will fit into others' ideas of "attractive", and this knowledge made it terrifying to go there. Suddenly, I was hyperaware of the redness of my face when I was locomotive-huffing on the treadmill or the sweaty tendrils of hair plastered unflatteringly to my face after I wiped my dripping-not-glistening face (and who created the ridiculous idea that "glistening" is a euphemism for "sweating like a mafia informant"?) I could not distract myself from the obvious shaking in my limbs when I was more ambitious when putting the weights on the bar. Ugh. Suddenly, the gym became yet another place where I needed to fix my posture, hold in my stomach, and poke out my chest...where I needed to "GET THOSE CHEEKBONES HAPPENIN'!" Awful.

Mercifully, I have recently discovered that being *of a certain age* has afforded me the freedom to no longer be anyone's desired demographic. I waltz past the "young-uns" and "gym bros" and even the "second-chancer dads getting in shape for their next wives" pert-near invisibly. Seriously. Often, they do not even see me until I *ahem* softly and ask to use a machine (usually the one they are sitting on while text-facebook-intagramming). It's kind of nice, actually. I can blush and sweat and puff and struggle without alerting the testosterone around me! I do not even register on the radar of the men nearby. To a younger me, this sounds like a tragedy. To current me, it is perfect. Insecurity is not the ideal spotting partner. 

A new (potential) friend suggested to me that "everyone is someobody's desired target," and the gym might soon become terrifying once again.

For now, I'm off to be invisible. The gym closes at 7:00 today. 

I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract...

 Dear Dad,

     It's late. I'm tired. I am icing my knees. An increase in mileage on my "brain-clearing runs" means that now, at 3:29 a.m., I am also hungry. None of this upsets me. These tangible, corporeal sensations in my body, even the potentially unpleasant ones, serve to remind me that I am alive (God, what a cliché, begging for cinematic musical score. Ugh). I equate these feelings with the gratitude I feel when my muscles are sore from the uses of stretch, pull, contraction of a good run. As each year passes, some extend the meniscus of "then" to "now" to "later" into an impossible distance, and some contract those moments down into the imperceptible gap between squint, wish, and candle-breath. Explain THAT one, physics! Regardless of the "length" of each year, I emerge on the other side of it with new aches, less stamina, and greater recovery time.

     Of course, these things all make me think of you. Another year without you, and the pain of losing you has shifted yet again. It never goes away, of course. It simply changes its shape. I wonder what it would have been like if I had rediscovered running earlier, with enough time for us to venture out together.  Would my teeny steps, accompanied by the light piano-tickle-sound-effects of a Fred Flintstone cartoon, be enough to keep up with you, or would your strides eclipse my own mini-stomp-stomp-stomps? I know that you would, of course, not leave me behind, and I know that the love I have developed for running would become yet another thing that we could share, once you became a real person instead of the mental caricature most kids have of their parents. Would we listen to music or try to talk while running? I'm sure it would be some of both. I can imagine visible puffs of breath in November as we chugged through the Metroparks, you asking me about my students, and me asking you about growing up in Cleveland (what stories would you choose to tell each time, and how would you decide?) I can also imagine headphones vibrating against ears and jawbones, mosquito snippets of music escaping out with tinny reverberations. When I think about those moments, I know that both of us would be straining nonchalantly to make out the songs. I feel cheated that we never got to share this synesthesia, this sensory symphony of sight, sound, and tactile joy. I would like to think that our tastes would still be somewhat concurrent, and I am carbonated by the mental image of sitting on the floor with you, running shoes eagerly waiting nearby, as we traded recommendations and playlists, looking for the perfect tone and pitch and cadence to catapult us along the running path, our feet not even touching the ground. I know exactly the first songs I would give you, and, even better, I feel certain that I know the ones you would give me. 

(Side note: I wonder if, while you were alive, you noticed how music can be the vessel allowing us to bi-locate not only in place, but in time as well? Or if you felt the grief of an unpleasant circumstance absolutely defiling the memory of a song you once loved? More on that next time...)

     Today, you have been gone for 31 years. It is now 4:23, my ice pack has thawed, my belly is full of water, and I am done stretching my legs. I need to get to bed before the mourning doves who have set up house in the tree outside my bedroom window decide to "greet the new day". Playing in my head is the first track on the wistfully imaginary playlist I have for you ("I Believe" by R.E.M.), and I feel...cheated. miss you. 

Goodnight, Dad.

Strobe lights and blowing speakers, fireworks and hurricanes...

      I was never any good at physics. In fact, the only science or math-related subject I ever excelled in was biology, so when laws of physics and time disregard what I've always been taught, it always trembles the ground under my shoes (sometimes in fear, sometimes in wonderment, and sometimes in rage). I just celebrated my 52nd birthday, and it has given me much to consider, both philosophically and in terms of physics. As I grow older, a luxury not afforded to all (if you know, you know), I have noticed that it has become increasingly difficult to navigate both matters of the body and matters of the heart lately. However, I persist! My relationship with my body has become like that of a landlord and recalcitrant tenant--it refuses to pay, I threaten to evict, etc. Both of us know we are bluffing. I have bullied my body into a grudgingly-consistent regimen, adding several "lifting days" to my running schedule (yes, I still run as often as I can. My runs are slower and shorter, but, damn it all if they aren't a satisfying way to clear my head). While at the gym on the 29th of JUNE (!!!!!) with the row of televisions torturing the patrons with Fox News and CNN in direct, audible competition and tantalizing them with the occasional Applebee's or Mr. Hero commercial (we are a sick, sick species, indeed), I had my psyche positively assaulted by the first of many commercials for...dun dun DUNNNNNN..."Back to School".

Seriously? June? 

     Don't get me wrong. I am absolutely loving my current job and school and students and colleagues and even BOSSES. It has been ages since I taught without counting down the days between breaks or dreading February. I look forward to going to work, and thinking about the number of years before I can even afford to think about retiring no longer causes paper bag-inhaling panic attacks...
     ...HOWEVER, advertising for school supplies in June is, as my students last year would say, "a hard pass", and I can understand why. It got me thinking about how time, or at least humanity's relationship with time, has changed, and continues to change ever more every year, it seems. 

• We see school supply commercials in June.
• There is already Halloween candy in the stores now, in July.
• I will start seeing pumpkin spice EVERYTHING (and don't get me started on that totally separate issue) in August, if not before.
• I know that it's only a matter of weeks before people start gearing up for Christmas, practically skipping over Thanksgiving.
• Now, it's perfectly fine to be excited and look forward to things. However, I have always believed, and I believe even more now, that looking TOO forward to things contracts time into smaller chunks and pushes you through the things you enjoy, even as it prevents your ability to enjoy them fully. 

     This is the first birthday in a long time that I spent alone--my mother is back in Canada, I am recovering from strep throat, so it is dangerous to be around my immunocompromised brother, and my ex-husband and I have peacefully and diplomatically decided not to try to force a faux-friendship--so things were quite different this year. My birthday gift to myself this year was a Radiohead LP (Kid A--my "Autumn album" that I hypocritically played in the middle of summer). It provided the soundtrack as I folded laundry, cleaned my bathroom, and cooked myself a filet mignon for my birthday dinner. 

     "In a little while/I'll be gone/The moment's already passed/Yeah, it's gone." Such beautiful words that perfectly encapsulate my frustration with others' urges to speed through their lives. Life is already fast and short enough. The image of my kitties, sleeping at my feet as I blew out the single candle on my single piece of birthday cake, stole my lungs tonight as I contemplated just how little time I have left in my own life, let alone in theirs. I felt so grateful for every stupid little thing, that I thought to myself, "This is not such a bad life, after all." 

...oh...the cat mug is also a present I bought for myself this year.  Happy birthday to me.

And if you saw with my eyes, you'd see what self-deception means.

I'm thinking about healing today--about how healing is not always a linear or even a chronological progression. Even the use of the word "progression" is deceptive, implying only forward motion. For me, more often than not, healing most closely resembles the hinky way that the knight moves on a chessboard: a little sideways, a little diagonally, an odd number of never-symmetrical spaces, and unpredictably, even to the player whose hand moves the piece itself. Side note: It's one of the reasons I love to attack with the knight. For just about every other piece, the king can be rescued from being "in check" simply by putting another piece in the way (that sacrifice is such a good metaphor for...class struggle? Feminism? Something sociological); however, if you put the king "in check" with the knight, the king has to run, exposing him for the weakling he is. 

...well. 

THAT certainly got way from me there. 

What I am trying to say is that the process of healing a wound, especially a wound on my terribly soft and squishy, yet dangerously full of hubris heart is a nightmare. I clap my hands together with the faux-resolve that I am trying to manifest through a sheer act of will (fooling exactly no one). I say to myself, "Okay, let's get to it," and then I stand there mute and paralyzed by fear when what I need to do is move, breathe, re-regulate what has been dis-regulated, and "learn to love [myself] again". At least these are the things that I'm being told by the totally-random-and-not-the-product-of-terribly-invasive-algorithms of all of my nearby tech devices are telling me. Feh. The reason I have so little faith in this kind of self-help (at least one of the reasons) is that the advice is so...so...so vague. I don't need to be told to re-regulate. I need someone to explain how to re-regulate. Despite the fact that I consider myself somewhat of an abstract thinker (English teachers love that kind of sh*t), when the pain is concrete, measurable, incandescent, I want the solution to be equally as palpable. 

What I am discovering is that each time the aforementioned heart gets thrashed, the emotional antibiotics I find the most effective are a steady course of running (this is not a metaphor. I mean actual cardiovascular exercise); slow, deliberate walks in relatively decent weather in which the soundtrack is populated by melancholy and joy alike; drawing and doodling, and readingreadingreading voraciously and effulgently--fiction, nonfiction, poetry--it doesn't matter. As I duck and weave and mend and rend and mend again, I will also cry loudly and deliberately, squeezing the poison in my brain out through my teeny-tiny tear ducts. If I'm lucky, I'll find a way to connect with friends whose sympathetic voices cradle my heart in the gentle, downy ease of "everything, everything, EVERYTHING is going to be okay" until the gravities of both sky and earth have returned to their respective places. 

Okay *claps hands together with bravado* before it gets too cold tonight, I am going to go for a run. 

Stamp some feeling back into my legs. Guess I'll freeze to death before I'll beg...

Dear Dad,
    Where do I begin? That question, always rhetorical in nature, is, admittedly, a cheap ploy that actually serves as a beginning, but this time, it is a question I actually seek to answer. Another trip around the sun without you, and being a passenger on this rock hurling through space is still the closest I'll ever get to being an astronaut. Those of us who love you are tasked with trudging on without you, and this year has been especially difficult. Mom is the fiercest warrior I think I have ever met, and she is currently both spine and nerves (not to mention heart) for Kevin. We talked about you tonight while I was taking one of "my walks" (I'm not as young as I pretend I am, and last night's run, bolstered by your memory acting as the breath in my lungs, rendered me nearly immobile today). As expected, today was difficult for all of us, but mom's voice rattling the chain of bones in my ear, my breath made visible by cold and moisture in the air, and ache in my quadriceps were all youyouyou. I realized a few things:

1.) Time passing hasn't made anything easier. I never expected it to. It never gets easier, but it does get different. Each year I get closer to your age when your age...stopped. It feels like to worst footrace ever.

2.) As much as I miss you, I often use the word "incandescently", that agony is mitigated by the idea that I miss you this much only because I was allowed to love you so much. I think about the people in the world who have absolute SHIT parents, and I am doubly grateful.

    I wonder if you would even recognize the world as it is today, and I cannot help but feel a little relief knowing that you were spared at least that. What would you think, as a doctor, of all the... everything that surrounds the pandemic we are in right now? COVID-19 is terrifying in an of itself because of just how little we seem to be able to get in front of it...and the conflicting information that emerges, changes, shifts, recedes, only to be replaced by MORE conflicting information. What's worse, though, is how horrible it is making everyone to each other. I truly want to believe it is because of the fear and sadness and isolation we are all going through, but a far more cynical part of me suspects that, deep down, people have always been this way and just looking for an excuse to let it out. Sadly, the fear of repercussions being one of the only remaining principles, people are turning on each other. Civility...no...basic human decency has gone the way of the dodo, and everyone is left internally smoldering and glowering at one another. If it weren't so ugly, it might actually be funny.

...but then there's the good stuff. There's always the good stuff. James' little James has beaten cancer. Kevin hasn't given up. Moo continues to purr. My heart beats its resilience through heartbreak, its strength inherited from you, no doubt. 

    We made it through another year. I miss you incandescently. Happy birthday, Dad.