In which there’s travel! And I repeat myself!
Going to see Amma in D.C. this weekend! Jai Ma! It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
I think this is my twentieth year in a row going to see Her, which is astonishing and weird.
Staying in a Marriott. My man decided not to come this year, so I have a hotel room all to myself. I don’t think I’ve ever stayed in a hotel alone before, seems so absurdly decadent! (I posted repeatedly on the Travel Exchange for a roommate but although I got two inquiries, both devotees found other lodgings.) I can afford the room on my own without someone to share with, but it’s a lot of money.
I feel, I think, guilty about the expense, like it’s a needless waste or I don’t deserve it, but I so prefer staying in the program hotel rather than finding something cheaper elsewhere and walking or trying to arrange rides or cabs or shuttles back and forth. I also decided to stay an extra night so that I can stay up all night for Devi Bhava and then sleep all the next day, rather than going home flat exhausted and fuzzy like I always have before. So, a room alone, and an extra, not-technically-necessary night. Wow.
Expect I’ll feel somewhat lonely, as I don’t really know any D.C. devotees, or really many devotees at all any more, so unless I make a new friend I’ll likely just sit alone.
Oh, well, better for meditation, I guess.
I intend to spend every possible moment in the program hall; maybe do some kitchen seva. Have to remember to take closed shoes for that.
Have plans to see VUBOQ on that last, extra evening, for drinks or dinner! So excited!
Then a flight back the next morning, home, and back to work that evening.
I did something absurd and bought a white dress. It’s the same style as a dress I already have, so I know it’s comfortable and I’ll love it, but me in white is ridiculous because I’ll stain it immediately. But it’ll be fun to wear in the darshan hall, as I never wear any of my old white saris or skirts or punjabis anymore, and I got it for free with credit card points. I don’t have a white slip, but I do have a gray one I think will work even if it shows through some as I’ll wear it with a gray dupatta scarf. My flight is discount, so I have to check my bag, so I bought a set of clear zip pouches for toiletries, too.
I’m still technically poor, but I feel terribly extravagant about my upcoming vacation!
Now I need to go throw in a load of laundry and find my suitcase.
Update: I got a roommate after all! Hope she’s not insane!
In which there’s, uh, random stuff.
Kitchen sink’s been filling up with water from the pipes, so I haven’t done dishes in days. Plumber’s coming tomorrow to fix it, but then I’ll have to do the dishes.
Already cleared out the cupboard under the sink, so the visit shouldn’t be too terrible.
Leaving for DC on the 30th, to see Amma July 1-2, so need to do laundry and organize my crap for travel. Probably need to buy lens solution, too. Have to check (and pay for) my bag because I bought a discounted ticket, so at least I can take full-sized products.
Have to wash a wrap or two, too, for flying. I’ve learned over the years that a wrap is the only way to handle the warmth of airports (throw it over one’s shoulder, out of the way) and the chill of flights (use it as a blanket). Jackets are useless: too bulky to carry, and too short to cover legs and feet.
Sleep cycle’s such that I’m generally awake all night, often reading, until dawn, then sleeping ’til 11 or 1 or 3. We have blackout curtains so with the fan and/or air conditioner on it’s easy sleeping even with the sun up.
Work schedule is still part-time, 5 to 10pm, but my employer lost the chat contract to a call center in India, so we’re all going back on phones in the next 4-6 months. I’m annoyed as hell and considering other work. They’ve never given me a raise, they never manage to give me the few days off I need each year, and policy is ever hostile and shitty. Of course, a job change would probably mean equally shitty policy and even shittier hours, so, well, we’ll see. Maybe something will come up in the neighborhood. Maybe I could check groceries, up the street at that co-op or something. Get me out of the damn building.
In which LOL HORMONES.
As you wade deeper into perimenopause, well, there are these looooong lists of exciting symptoms to experience!
I’m at least halfway through the list now, if not more, and it SUCKS and I want to complain:
Thinning hair. Skin elasticity loss. Irregular (in my case, shorter) cycles. Anxiety. Arrhythmia. Tingling extremities. Muscle aches. Fatigue. Sleep changes. Hot flashes. Weight gain.
Fuck it all! It’s unpleasant!
I’m fat and dieting no longer works for shit. Over the past decade half my hair’s fallen out and been replaced with fewer, finer strands. My skin’s saggy. I have wrinkles on the bottoms of my feet, AND the fat there has thinned, so they get sore for no reason! Sometimes they tingle like they’re in a sack of ants because of low estrogen! SOMETIMES I CAN’T SLEEP, which never, ever happened to me before, and weirds me the fuck out. Going to pee and producing only a thimbleful is incredibly annoying. Mood swings, aka walking into the kitchen to get some water and suddenly feeling suddenly and inexplicably sad. I spend lots of time just not really wanting to do much of anything, which is foreign to my extroverted personality so I always feel vaguely guilty and lazy. Fucking acne!
Hot flashes, if you’ve never had one, are fucking stupid.
Trying to be grateful I’ve lived long enough to experience all this is not working. I want to be 35 again! Shit, I’d settle for 43, even!
This sucks!
Can’t tell you how excited I am for NIGHT SWEATS.
Fuck.
In unrelated news, social media still sucks but I keep looking at it anyway.
In which there’s a blog post! ABOUT NOTHING.
It’s late May. The air conditioner’s been in for a week. There was a thunderstorm earlier and the power flickered but didn’t go out, so, sadly, I had to keep working ’til the end of my shift. It was fairly slow and I didn’t get skilled for fucking inbound calls. Win!
It’s 1:22 in the morning and I’m sitting at my desk watching a BBC police procedural and scrolling social media like an idiot.
Need to book my Amma retreat, but keep not doing it. Probably will decide on DC (couldn’t get registered for the Toronto retreat with rooms, tried Travel Exchange but no dice) and buy a plane ticket tomorrow.
Dad was here last week and took us to a Twins game. Mariners won, which is fine with me as a native Washingtonian. It rained for most of the game, but was warm enough it wasn’t a bother.
Bob’s Java Hut, a coffee shop a block away, has a fantastic thing called a Carburetor. It’s cold press with half and half and sweetened condensed milk and it’s brilliant. If I bring a jar, they fill it to the top. Magic.
I still need to see a dentist. OMFG do I ever. My mouth is a fucking crime scene.
Still rockin’ out regularly to my ancient iPod, dug up out of a drawer recently and which still holds a moderately decent charge. Backed it up to my computer finally, but haven’t put anything new on it. It’s so old there’s a playlist called “Pop Rocks” that features nothing under ten years old.
There’s no produce in my fridge. We need to go shopping. All I have is onions and wilted celery, maybe some carrots. How did people used to survive without year-round tomatoes?
Bought some clothes online and they arrived today! A new hippie skirt (my old ones both died recently) with a massive 25-yard spin; expensive as skirts go, but worth it. New sports bras, since the elastic always goes. A three-pack of tank tops because it’s FUCKING HOT OUT, plus a tank dress with pockets, because feminist Twitter spent, like, a month bitching about how women’s clothing never has pockets because OMG TEH PATRIARCHY and I just wanted to prove it’s not that you can’t get pockets but more like you don’t fucking bother to buy shit with pockets, ladies.
There are very few people who need to wash their bed linens as much as I do. Maybe I’ll pull that off tomorrow, so we can sleep in on the weekend in fresh, cleeeeeean sheeeeeets.
Here’s a tiny dalek.
In which there’s a blog post! Because I still blog! Occasionally!
Fat:
On a diet now, again, again-again, started weekend before last. Basically a combo of calorie-counting and slow carb. Haven’t had any pasta or baguette, pizza or flour tortillas, but have had a couple of potatoes. Mashed last weekend, and roasted tonight. They do have vitamins and minerals, after all, your potatoes do.
Doing the tiniest little exercise routine, but doing it daily! Have a couple of old wine bottles filled with water for weights for curls and arm lifts. Weird thing is that squats are easier when fat; something about balance, I imagine? It’s the smallest exercise routine ever, but it’s 100% more than the nothing I was doing before!
Have already lost a full inch of my thigh and breast measurements, and a quarter inch off my ankle. Maybe more, but I’m only measuring on Sundays. Don’t happen to own a scale. Feeling distinctly better, even. My feet look less like dead fish! More energy, even!
Sol:
The light is getting better, of course, as our gorgeous planet tilts the way she does, but it’s still in the 20’s here with absolute piles of snow all over. The weather doesn’t matter much to me, as I go weeks on end without leaving the building, but I love that it’s still light out now when I sit down at my desk to login for work at five o’clock.
Employment:
Work is, well, stupid. I work for a call center who contracts with cable company, very large. Many employee-facing policies are, for the most part, absurd, and the produce of management who apparently have little to no idea what’s really happening on the ground, and their training videos are absolutely cringeworthy corporate bullshittery trapped in a past of long-term employment and employee-employer loyalty. Their flagship software suite is forever being updated to be less useful, constantly rearranged to make it harder and harder to deliver service to their customers.
Most of what I do is secretarial. In the main, my job is comprised of clicking Next and copying and pasting blurbs. Once in a great while I have to think, briefly, about a customer’s issue and actually solve a problem, but mostly? I just follow a flowchart. Any competently produced piece of software could do 90% what I do (they pay me for that extra 10%, I imagine). Fucking Alexa could do what I do, were it tied into the appropriate data.
My direct employer is, as far as I can tell, very broke and very struggling. Stock value is a downhill slalom since 2013. I’ve been there two years and have seen various functions removed or outsourced, and have never had a raise, plus, well, I sense that peculiar kind of urgency failing companies exude.
But they did, at least, move me off phones into a chat pilot! Chat is better, by a lot of markers, than getting screamed at by infuriated customers, but management has the chat platform software set to feed us as many as three chats at a time, so it makes it impossible to deliver excellent, or even good, service when it’s busy.
Not that it would be overtaxing to chat with three customers at once; could do that easily if the goal were just to fix things, solve problems, give the people what they want. No, it’s the required logging/documentation and abysmal tools we’re also using that make it a nightmare.
It’s been busy lately because a lot of the team are out for a variety of reasons: illness, internet outages/weather, time off. Oh, and because management can’t seem to figure out how to stagger breaks and lunches on the schedule. It’s a disaster, when five agents all go to lunch at once, and your team’s down to a dozen.
Received my tax refund so I currently have more in savings than half of America. I’ll use the bulk of it to see Amma this summer, of course, and am contemplating what else I might want. Set of sheets, maybe, or a new office chair, since this one is sprung.
Input:
Bought some old treeware vedanta and have been doing daily readings of the Yoga Vasistha and the Bhagavad Gita. Only takes a few minutes but I’m really enjoying it; does help to keep the head right.
Have also sucked down a few fiction novels this year, after hardly reading at all last year. Spend a shitload of time watching streaming TV at my desk in the evenings after work, which is fine, but after all my years being pro-reading and anti-telly I feel rather full of it.
The Dread:
Still suffering from anxiety, but (knock on wood) haven’t had a full-blown panic attack since Walla Walla last September. Although, hmm, my anxiety is so bad, and has been for so long, that maybe I now consider what I once would have called a full-blown panic attack just “anxiety.” I’d probably be on meds if I had to work outside the home, but I’m just so resistant to the idea of going to get some, for some crazy fucking idiot reason.
Actually, I know the reason: the idea of going to the doctor for anything but the flu gives me anxiety. I’ve been meaning to go in for a checkup since I got insurance, but I keep blowing it off because WHAT IF I’M DYING. It’s batshit, I know, but hey. I’m batshit. I often sit and twitch for hours while I’m at work. Cool with it.
The Boy:
The relationship is solid and wonderful and the best I’ve ever had. I don’t deserve it, but hey, there you are. God is good.
The dead fish:
I made a delicious dinner tonight: parmesan encrusted salmon, oven roasted potatoes, cabbage gratin, cucumber salad, and homemade tartar sauce. I used a lot of parmesan! Here’s an unflattering photo:
In which I’ve rated the day.
Slept a lot. A LOT a lot. There were cuddles. Lovely.
I got a book I wanted very much in the mail. It was volume 1 of two-volume The Yoga Vasistha, a 70’s publication broken into daily readings. (It was supposed to be both volumes, but shit happens when you buy old books off of eBay.)
I also received a nifty plastic cover for my cloth Hobonichi Weeks day planner, along with a stencil and some stickers and booklets. It was a replacement order for the one the USPS lost and never delivered after it cleared customs, so I couldn’t bug the company for a refund and had to re-order it. I like it all very much.
I had a cup of tomato soup and a few Saltines for breakfast.
I made a couple of tacos on my work break, for lunch:
He bought me a nice pizza for supper. I ate some nice pizza. It was thin crust, with white sauce and veggies. Delicious.
Did not do any chores (beyond making the bed, which I nearly always do).
Monday score: 10/10
In which, well, why don’t we just stop having it?
Another angry hot-take about how bad sex is always the man’s fault:
On the Ansari/#metoo front, nobody seems to be willing to say that maybe, just maybe, women don’t typically enjoy meaningless sexual encounters.
It’s the elephant in the room. Because clearly, we don’t. We have millions of testimonials that prove that we just… don’t.
If #metoo tells us anything, it’s not that men are pigs. It’s that sexual encounters are distressing to women more often than not. Because the vast majority of these stories are not about legal harassment or assault or abuse, they’re stories about unfulfilling hookups, catcalls, and bad sex.
There’s an implication that (most straight) women want and enjoy sex on the same terms (most straight) men do, which is to say: sex that is contextless and meaningless. But clearly, we don’t.
I suspect this is what we really need to be talking about.
And yet, all we get are hot-takes about how men are creeps for taking the sex we’re deliberately giving them, because we’re victims of the patriarchy and have no agency.
It’s somehow not our fault when the sex we enter into willingly is bad and we don’t stop it. (And, per the article, this mysteriously has something to do with uncomfortable fashion, which we literally create and perpetuate ourselves, and endometriosis, which, as far as I know, men don’t actually cause.)
Nobody’s saying, ‘Oh, hey, look, women apparently aren’t liking random sexual encounters, maybe let’s talk about how to enable ourselves to stop having them, rather than blaming men.’
And I think someone should.
Maybe we should say, ‘You’re not frigid if you don’t want to have sex under conditions unfavorable to your needs.’ Maybe we should say, ‘Many men are capable of liking mediocre sex with no real emotional context and it’s okay if you don’t.’ Maybe we should say, ‘You can be a fully authentic woman without having context-free sexual encounters you don’t enjoy.’ Maybe we could say, ‘Fucking around isn’t feminism.’
Maybe we could say, ‘While gender may be a spectrum, there are actual verifiable differences between the sexes that inform motivation and behavior and even sexual enjoyment parameters, and acknowledging these facts can be done intelligently and in a celebratory fashion without resorting to blaming men for taking what you’re giving to them.’
(I can’t speak to the pain topic; I don’t find sex painful, beyond a few random experiences that I immediately halted. I do realize it’s a real issue for many, though.)
In which I posted this on Facebook on a friend’s long piece about the Ansari thing and consent and #metoo in which she’d specifically invited thoughtful response, but then somebody immediately (so immediately that I sincerely doubt they’d actually read it) responded with “Jesus.”, as if I were so profoundly wrong they just couldn’t even, and it made me feel anxious because I’m probably not sex-positive and feminist enough for some circles, so I deleted it and am posting it here where no one will read it.
I think we collectively have this weird belief that sex is:
A. GREAT
B. always fun and satisfying
C. super meaningful and important.
Personally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that sex, alone of all human experiences, will always be great and fun and satisfying, or to believe that the quality matters much.
Even pizza can’t stand up to those expectations! Sometimes you get a burnt one or they left off the olives you really wanted or you’re not in the damn mood for pizza. Nothing is *always* great and fun and satisfying.
Sex isn’t even that important. It’s like elimination: it’s a problem when you can’t do it, sure, but there’s no need to obsess about your bowel movements. That’s weird. Stop it. Nobody cares.
Successful sex is sex that results in conception. The subjective experience of it doesn’t matter, even if our species does have sex for thousands of reasons that are not about conceiving and are specifically focused on the subjective experience. But really, the drives that cause sex are “for” procreation, and there’s really no promise it will be physically or emotionally enjoyable, and especially not every single time.
It’s also true that because there are so many reasons for doing it, it’s likely that your reason and your partner’s reason may not line up.
Also, it’s fine and absolutely okay to not want to have sex, or to not always like it when you do. I’ve had a lot of sex I didn’t care much for because my own “should” [the OP had listed a series of “shoulds” that resulted in her own experiences of not saying no when she wanted to say no, like “you should be helpful, you should be pleasant, you should be enthusiastic”] was “you should be Very Very Afraid of being called frigid, because apparently that’s the worst thing a girl could ever be.”
I feel like half of #metoo is women being disgusted by men’s higher libidos and not even realizing that that’s what’s happening, because they seem to believe that they’re just as horny as men and that they should want and need and have lots of sex in order to be “normal” and “healthy.”
Some women have high libidos, of course, but most don’t. So they’re not that horny, and they’re not driven to take risks to get off, and they srsly don’t understand why anybody would enjoy fucking for its own sake without the context of commitment until they eventually go through a period of super high libido. Lol hormones!
Another quarter of #metoo is women blaming men for not being psychic. When you give 37 “yes, please proceed” signals and one “um, maybe not” and he misses it, it’s not assault. It’s on par with not being able to hear the ticket guy through that little grille in the booth: it’s frustrating and stupid.
The remaining 25% is a heart-breaking gamut of actual rape and assault and abuse, to stuff you’d need a judge and jury and video footage to ever really know for certain either way since sexual encounters, especially for non-dominant partners, is so highly subjective. But most of the hashtag is not proof of rampant sexual abuse: it’s proof of rampant lack of taking responsibility for one’s own choices and actions.
Paglia says it really well in some video I can’t be bothered to look for right now when she’s talking about being in college in the late 60’s in a women’s dorm with a curfew the men didn’t have. She talks about how feminists at that time were saying they wanted to be responsible for their own safety, they wanted the same rights AND RESPONSIBILITIES the men had, to go where they wanted when they wanted, and to accept the outcomes of their own choices. They wanted society to stop forcing protection on them so that they could protect themselves as they saw fit.
I feel that people today, particularly women, have this expectation that they will be safe at all times in all places. That’s just dumb. There likely isn’t a man on earth who thinks like that, because they know there’s a difference, in expectations of safety, that is absolutely dependent on circumstances.
A church is generally safer than a foxhole. A dark alley in a “bad” part of town is generally less safe than a public library during the day. People cannot have an expectation of perfect safety in all situations, and should prepare for different situations appropriately.
Which is to say, if you’re a girl at a frat party dressed like a whore, your expectations of sexual safety are going to be different than they would be if you were at home with your friends. (And clothing does matter. A business suit says something, a cassock says something, a gimp suit says something. Insisting that deliberately dressing in a sexually provocative way doesn’t have intrinsic meaning? Is ridiculous. It signals sexual availability. Period. Full stop.)
So we need to accept responsibility for our decisions and our actions. Yes, there are actual predators, and they’re absolute rat-fucking bastards, but they’re the exception and not the rule. Most of #metoo is people putting themselves in harm’s way and blaming the world for it. Most of the stories are stories about failing to self-protect on a variety of levels, from physical to emotional, being disappointed when there are bad results, and blaming “the patriarchy.”
My unpopular opinion is that having a disappointing or uncomfortable sexual experience is generally not harm, but believing that it is harm causes a great deal of unnecessary emotional suffering.
It’s like getting a burnt pizza. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a big deal. It’s not going to affect your psyche unless you decide to freak out about it. There are gradations of trauma, and a lame fuck is not going to give you PTSD unless you have a bizarre and unrealistic set of beliefs about the world owing you absolute safety and happiness at all times no matter what you do.
Yes, there are definitely problems in the sexual sphere, obviously, that society should be — and is — conversing about, but I feel that we really need women in particular to accept that with freedom comes responsibility.
I mean, you can’t drink a bottle of wine and blame society because you’re drunk, and you can’t blame society when you find out that fucking isn’t love and you feel icky walk-of-shaming home in your little black dress the next morning with your 4″ heels in your purse.
You put yourself in that situation, you made those choices, you ended up with the so-frequently unfulfilling and disappointing results. It’s not society’s fault that you made a string of choices that didn’t produce the results you wanted, it’s not the patriarchy, it’s not sexism: YOU did that because you’re free to do so, nobody stopped you, there’s no chaperone, there’s no taboo, there’s no longer any shame in the walk of shame.
Random casual sex is normalized, and maybe, just maybe you just don’t actually happen to like it, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe he’s not a creep, maybe you’re not a victim, maybe you just don’t happen to like it. And maybe that’s just absolutely fine and okay.
In which there’s a picture of a food I ate!
I read a lot of recipes online, because they’re free and ubiquitous and frequently useful, if not just as written but for ideas, but they drive me nuts more often than not.
Calling a recipe delicious or easy or quick or inexpensive is fine, but there’s an army of chicks out there posting recipes they claim are “healthy” without defining what that means.
I just scanned half a dozen chimichanga recipes, and the two that claim to be “healthy” do so because they’re baked instead of fried… except one’s flash-fried before baking, and the other’s painted with butter then baked.
So, how does this differ—calorically or in fat content—from just, you know, fucking frying the things? I’d be willing to bet it doesn’t!
Now, this beauty here is a flour tortilla wrapped around chili beans, diced onions, and American cheese, fried in vegetable oil, and then smothered in enchilada sauce, grated cheddar, sour cream, and olives.
It’s pretty cheap, since I made the beans and gravy from scratch, but I’m not going to insinuate that it’s healthy simply because I didn’t use canned beans or sauce. Well, it’s got some fiber, sure, it’s vegetarian, and it’s happy-making because it’s delicious, but I’m not going to tell you it’s health food!
In which we ring in the new!
In 2017, I discovered that a lot of people are racists and honestly don’t know it. They’ll say they’re not racist, and in the next breath explain that marginalized non-white communities are that way because, well, you see, that’s how “those people” are; they deserve it, it’s inherent.
And also classist: They’ll say, “the American dream lives and anyone can make it!” But show them a single fucked-up white community and they’ll dismiss them all as ignorant, low-class trash, rather than the victims of poverty and societal abandonment.
I learned that a lot of Americans who enjoy/ed luck and privilege never learned how to think about it. They believe they have what they do because of their own hard work and initiative, and never do they credit the fully-functioning society—schools, vaccines, food, healthcare, roads—that actually launched them.
If we’re lacking anything in spades, it’s compassion and humility — and the fully-functioning society created by these qualities. Nobody makes it alone, ever: everyone who succeeds does so from a platform of outside assistance. Nobody ever made it in America without using public roads, public education, public resources, entitlements paid for by ALL. But when we close libraries and national parks, and refuse to pay K-12 teachers a living wage for so long that every state in the nation is suffering a critical shortage of teachers, well, society is no longer functioning well at all.
Nobody ever makes it without knowing somebody, or knowing someone who knows somebody, who helps them. With an interview, a tip, guidance. We’re all in this together, even “them.” Because “them” are us, and pretending they’re other makes you an asshole.
You may think you’ve made it due to your hard work and initiative, but YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO WORK HARD HANDED TO YOU ON A PLATE. There are millions who work harder than you ever did, but they present at inner city ERs with late stage cancer because they couldn’t stop working and go in when it was Stage 1. Sure, maybe you studied hard, but there are millions of Americans (and billions of human beings) who would love the chance to merely study hard. Oh, to only have to worry about studying hard, and not calories, disease, war, and shelter!
Open your heart. See and acknowledge and feel suffering. Sure, beggars at intersections can be grifters, but maybe, just maybe, that sign is true? Half of America doesn’t have $400 for an emergency. That’s how we end up on the streets. FEEL THAT.
And, oh, happy New Year!
