subtitled: a necessarily convoluted entry that I wanted to write anyway

This is an imaginary person. She is a composite of many other people made ridiculous so that no one will ever ever ever be able to trace back this imaginary person to any real ones. You probably know someone just like her.

Ok so I have a thing for green steno pads and have since FOREVER. I love them. I love their silky cool green pages. I love their handy size. I love their subtle lines, including the one down the middle just begging you to make a list. I love how easily a pen clips to the spiral top. I love them.

Back to imaginary person. Let’s say I meet her sometime at some random event. We’re at library storytime or standing by the bar at a networking gathering or at a mutual friend’s party. And she notes I have a green steno pad sticking out of my bag (because I often do).

“Oh my god!” she gushes. “I totally love those!”

Instantly a friendship is formed. A friendship based on a mutual love of green stenopads and all that they stand for.

Now I am pretty passionate about green stenopads but I get that not everyone shares my adoration. Maybe you have a thing for legal pads or moleskin notebooks or maybe you’re the kind of person who would rather catch as catch can, scrawling ideas and brainstorms on the back of cocktail napkins or in the margins of old Chinese take-out menus. It’s all good. We can all doodle in our own way, right? And if I meet you and we don’t bond over green stenopads, that’s ok. I like diversity in my friendships and I will accept you whatever your paper choices. But if you start things out by latching onto my passion, well, then things might get weird.

(Again, this is supposed to be ridiculous. I am not really all that hepped up about writing paper although I am indeed personally picky.)

So this imaginary woman? Since we share this intense bond over stenopads? Maybe I allow myself to say things to her that I would never say out in mixed company. Like maybe I’d say, “Man, moleskins? I totally don’t get that. Too expensive! And how can a person ever write a grocery list in one? Me, I like a notepad that will let me plan an essay and a dinner menu!” And she’ll say, “Word!” And we bond further.

Perhaps at a gathering we catch sight of someone with a yellow legapad and we exchange looks. Then we catch up over by the exit.

“I totally figured her for a yellow legal pad type!”

“I know, right?!”

I am pleased to have found a friend who can share this particular interest and I believe that she is, too. Joy abounds.

Then one day I happen on, say, an article in the paper about a fan club for moleskins and in the grainy picture accompanying the piece is my friend! She’s right there! And she’s quoted in the article, too, saying, “I have always loved a moleskin notebook above all other things. They are my grand passion. My raison d’etre, if you will.”

And when I confront her later, she shuts down. She shuts up! She moves across country, changes her cell phone number and deletes her Facebook account. Of course I find her later (master stalker that I am) hiding out on a Flickr pool for moleskin digital snapshots.

Now for the real true part.

I don’t get this desperation for friends that would make anyone deny their true selves for the sake of a friendship doomed to failure. I don’t want to be friends with people who are just like me anyway — I like to have friends who make different choices and have different looking lives. And if you can’t be honest with me from the get-go, how can I really trust you at all? Besides which, you’re setting yourself up for hurt feelings. If we go into this relationship knowing we have different opinions about notebooks, I’ll couch my choices with care in deference to your feelings. And if our differences are really big? Insurmountable big? (Like values that are so fundamentally different that we can’t even meet anywhere in the middle?) Then it was a friendship that was never going to happen anyway so why fake it.

I was thinking about this because 1.3 million years ago I learned that someone in our circle had been kinda playing all of us to be in the circle and when things fell apart, we were just all astounded because it was so bizarre. And the lies? Really about as stupid as notepads, I swear to god.

You know, I used to think grown-ups were ahead of kids (back when I was a kid) and now I think we’re all just wandering around trying not to walk into walls.

And a little from the Nyquil I took last night. I’ve been working in slow motion all week and every time I’d start getting better, I’d do something to screw it up. (So on Tuesday I worked out thinking it would help me sleep that night. Stuff like that.)

The house is a wreck, my to-do list is a mile long and I really need to grocery shop. But we’re all finally on the mend (knock wood) even though my voice isn’t quite right yet and Madison is still pretty snotty.

I am pretty desperate to get some writing done soon but there just hasn’t been time lately. I’ve learned that I don’t have the luxury to be a writer who needs the moon to be in the seventh house while Jupiter’s aligned with Mars or whatever but I do need space to think and there has been no space to think lately! It seems like it’s been that way for months and I’m getting more and more unhappy about it. Since life won’t give, I’m going to have to but I haven’t figured out if by giving I mean that I just won’t be writing for a bit or if by giving I’m going to let things fall apart so I can write after all.

But today, I’m still dizzy from the Nyquil and an unfortunatate encounter with Benadryl yesterday. Yikes. (I haven’t felt that out-of-control woozy since college.)

I think most writers are envious. Chekov said writers are as envious as pigeons (I know this because I just got done looking up writer quotes about envy). I think envy comes with the territory, at least for any writer who wants to be read. Because to be ambitious is to be hungry and if you’re hungry, you work a little harder to get to where you want to be.

Worrying that there might not be enough at the great big universal buffet for you and every other hungry person is made worse if the only thing you want to eat up there is the fancy-schmancy gourmet seven layer cake that only serves six. Which is why some people will knock you over to get to the front of the line but others will stay steady on course but not insane — after all, there’s always pie.

My take is that if you believe that only the cake is worth eating then you’ll knock people down to get it. I’ve been knocked down before. There ARE people who will steal your words and your ideas or step on your back to step up to an editor or swipe your sources or badmouth your expertise, etc. etc. Yes, there are. And some of them will be successful even though they don’t deserve it. But I do believe that the cake will taste bitter because when someone is that hungry, nothing ever tastes good and nothing is ever enough so I don’t want to be that person even though I like cake.

On the other hand, if you’re so afraid of causing offense or so afraid you’re not deserving and always hang back from the buffet or if you’re so tensely afraid of getting knocked over that you refuse to move up at all, then you’ll always end up eating stale cookies and I don’t want to be that person either. Especially not the one who shrugs affectedly and says, “I could have the cake if I wanted but I am choosing these stale cookie crumbs as a sign of my superiority over the buffet line” all to try to cover up their fear that they can’t compete with the rest of the line. (Because I have been that person — spent most of my teen years being that person — and not only does it do NOTHING to assuage one’s hunger but everyone sees through the pose anyway.)

All of this is why I think a little envy is a good thing. A little envy keeps you just uncomfortable enough to keep trying. A little edge to your hunger means you won’t tolerate it when someone steps on your foot to push to the front of the line. It’ll make you say, “Hey, no ditching! [We called cutting in line ditching, I don't know what y'all called it.]” And as long as envy isn’t your total driving force, you can be happy when you get pie and really, really appreciate it when you do get that fancy-schmancy gourmet seven layer cake.

Where I don’t want to be envious is in my personal life because that doesn’t help me at all unless I understand that jealousy is always about me and never about the person I’m jealous of and then learn something from it, which I am so sick of doing. I am so sick of learning from all my mistakes and weaknesses. (sigh) But I’ve never bought that ignorance was bliss so I’m stuck with always taking my life’s little after-school lessons to heart.

I remember lamenting the case of the person on whom the sun always shines at my therapist’s office way back when. This person has had not just a good life but a great life. This person is attractive, cheerful, smart, funny and has scads of friends. S/he has never had any real challenges despite going on many adventures and trying many new things. S/he has had it easy in love and easy in marriage and easy in the getting of children who have turned out to be great sleepers, extremely obedient and adorable. S/he has a nice house, a great job, a decent income and lives in a great town with lots of opportunity for travel. This — to my unhappy mind — didn’t seem fair. After all, I work hard. I am a nice person and yet! And yet back then infertility was casting a pall over it all. It made my small house smaller, my (at the time) good job less terrific and my darling son was not enough. It wasn’t fair! IT WASN’T FAIR! I was bitter. And so I railed against this lucky person. I railed against his/her good fortune like it was stealing from mine.

“But it’ll even out, right?” I begged my therapist to tell me. “I’ll have my good times and they’ll have their bad times, right? Right?”

“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe s/he will always be better off than you in lots of ways. Maybe his/her life will always be easy.”

I couldn’t believe it.

“But s/he isn’t really happy, right? Because to have real, true, deep happiness means you have to suffer some, right? I mean, I’m getting wisdom and character-building opportunities and will be a better person and the WINNER eventually somehow, right?”

And my therapist shook her head and gave me the sad, sympathetic look she could give that always made me cry and said, gently, “Dawn, life is not fair and some people just have it better than other people.”

This was not good news to my broken little barren heart desperate for some soothing schadenfreude. I didn’t want to hear that some people would get unending joy and privilege while most of us would have a more equal measure of happiness and hardships.

(Because hearing how much better I had it than other people didn’t make me feel any more grateful — it just made me feel worse for being not only unhappy and envious but also greedy, which does not inspire good behavior in myself. It is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy where I admonish myself, “Gosh, Dawn, aren’t you glad you’re at least not homeless, you selfish little pig?” And I answer right back to myself, “Well, as long as you’re calling me a selfish little pig I may as well act like one and seethe uselessly about all the things I want and don’t have!” And back in the day it meant that I would will all those pregnant people to have babies with colic, which is ironic seeing as how when I did eventually get a baby I got one with colic, which proves one of three things: that The Secret works and I was in vibrational harmony with colic or that God has a sense of humor or that life randomly happens in funny and ironic ways.)

Somehow hearing unequivocally and baldly that “life is not fair” in the desperate context of trying to overcome my infertility gave me the stark kick in the pants I needed. I could either stay unhappy with all I didn’t have or learn to be happy with my fairly nice lot in life and learn to manage my envy for good instead of evil.

I’m still jealous of that person who’s life looks so sunny (and it hasn’t gotten any darker in the seven years since I was seeing my therapist either). Especially now that s/he moved to an even more architecturally interesting house in the retro-modern style I so adore.  (So unfair! I would love that house!) But that goes with the territory that is me. I no longer take it as a personal affront that his/her house has a nicer entryway than mine. I mean, I still want the entryway but am able to see that having a nicer entryway doesn’t mean that God loves him/her more than me. And it no longer keeps me up nights the way it used to when I was so unhappy. Because that’s key — when I am eaten up by jealousy it’s because there is something else in my life that’s demanding my attention. Either I need to do soemthing major like resolve that life crisis (i.e., infertility) or I need to do something minor like clean my crowded entryway and put a basket out for everyone’s shoes. Or (in the case of professional jealousy) I need to ease up on the whining and get busy on my goals. Because no one is going to get that cake for me. That, my friends, is all up to me.

But I’m not sure that today is going to be such a great day. I had insomnia again last night (par for the course before a big holiday) and I’m not sure what time I fell asleep but I turned off my reading light sometime after 12:30. Then I got up with Brett’s alarm at 5:30. 

It’s gone downhill from there.

• The kitchen is trashed because Brett fell asleep before he cleaned it (he fell asleep watching some Santa video thing with Noah) and I was working ’til after 11pm. (I should have gotten up and cleaned it when I realized I couldn’t sleep.)
• It will take three rounds of cleaning to get it done because all the big pots are dirty including the crockpot I need for dinner tonight.
• I’m hosting potluck tonight.
• It’s gym/ballet today so we’ll be leaving in two hours.
• Madison is still sleeping (it’s 8:30am) and I should wake her so I can make sure we have time to feed her/get her hair done/etc. but she needs to sleep since she’ll be up so late tonight.
• There’s some other cleaning that really ought to be done as a matter of kindness to our guests.
• Various clients are having various out-of-their-control technical issues, which has moved tasks to today that I wanted to get off my desk yesterday, which means that after ballet/gym and running to the store for last-minute dinner stuff, I will need to work in the few hours I have between errands and potluck.
• I will also need to get that dinner into the hopefully-by-then-cleaned crockpot.
• I’m whining on this blog post instead of scrubbing out aforementioned crockpot.
• I’m really tired.
• Seriously tired.
• Still can’t breathe through my nose because of this lingering cold.
• Oh and I haven’t finished my holiday shopping because Brett gets paid tomorrow, which means this weekend will be traffic and crowds, neither of which I like. (I NEVER leave shopping to this late but this has been a year of nevers and we can only hope that 2009 will be an improvement.)
• Tomorrow is a client meeting then an early breakdancing event, which is going to screw up dinner so we’ll eat out even though we were going to save eating out for Hanukkah and I’m a little annoyed to have the glamorous shine of eating out for Hanukkah stolen by the less glamorous (to me, Noah would disagree) of breakdancing.
• The laundry. My god. What are people doing to their clothes that the laundry is so out of control?? I’ve been doing laundry for days and it just keeps coming!!
• I’m worried that one of the clients will get the technical glitch fixed and ready for my input just as the first guests stroll through my door. (Although my guests are people who won’t mind if I say, “Make yourself at home. I’ll be in my basement cubby hole.”)
• Christ, I’m tired.
• The client who said they would pay in November still hasn’t paid. Thus the late shopping. I’m thinking I’ll see that check in that hopefully improved 2009.

Ok, vent over. Plus side:

• Madison is still sleeping! She won’t be whiny tonight!
• I have two meals I could make in the crockpot and they both sound really good.
• I have work.
• I have checks coming (eventually) and they are nice sized checks.
• I have the means (or will tomorrow) to buy last minute holiday gifts.
• My son LOVES breakdancing! And he’s learning to spin on his head! (Which gives me visions of chiropractic bills but at least he’s enjoying himself!)
• I love potluck and my friends don’t care if my house is dirty, my laundry undone and that I can’t breathe through my nose. (Or that I’ll be too tired to be witty.)
• And they won’t mind if I end up having to work for part of the evening.
• Noah just helped me by picking up the entire family room without my asking. (I quote him, “Since I’m not going to be here after gym, is there anything I can help you with now?”)

I now need to go drink coffee, scrub the crockpot and find something to wear — in that order.