I keep having dreams where I am massively stressed out by my forthcoming college graduation (which took place 18 years ago) - packing my dorm room and not having enough boxes, not knowing where to send them. Waiting hungover in line to pick up my cap and gown and then not being able to make it to the ceremony in time......my sleeping mind is using the bluntest of instruments to get my attention. Apparently I am working towards making decisions about who I am that are more typically made by those in their early 20s. I’ve always been a late bloomer, what can I say?
I went to Rhinebeck and bought no fiber or yarn, I had a cigarette and found it utterly disgusting and unsmokable, I finished a sweater that fits perfectly and is exactly what I wanted, I keep eating things I think I like and finding them inedibly salty, I take vitamins now, I dyed my hair red, which I have been letting people talk me out of for 22 years. What I am saying is...I hardly recognize myself in some ways. I THINK it’s good, but we’ll see.I’d love to say I’ll write more, but all this building force toward something feels private and banal in this weirdly complicated way, so it might be a lie. It's not depression though - there's a vibrant kind of tension to it is way too energetic for that.
What's up with y'all?
So I am reading twitter this morning. Instead of working, tra la.
And there is a writer I much admire and follow. He puts up links to many things, most of which I have found worth a click through, and this morning he linked to a site full of excellent and erotic photos.
Hey, I like excellent. I like erotic. Let's go see.
Um. Leaving aside ALL discussions of pornography and women's issues - I did after all, freely go look at something labeled erotic - please to explain these. Because I would describe these as being as erotic as an American Apparel ad, and as interesting. They are naked, but not nude. There is no charge to the provocation. They are full of full-lipped, ennui-drenched youth. They drench me with nothing more than bewilderment.
So this idea of how men and women see sensuality interests me and I want so badly to tweet back, can you explain the eroticism here? Because there is a very interesting conversation to be had.
But I don't know this person.
But he published this opinion.
But it seems so intrusive to say - really, dude?
And in the end what I am really saying is "how can you be such an original and wonderful writer and think this is arousing?"
Which is none of my business in the biggest way possible. The heart wants what the heart wants and as long as all relevant laws are respected, that's between you and you and NOBODY else, I beleive that is true right down to the tiniest corner of my soul.
But it's killing me not to ask. Killing me.
What would you do?
(If you were the sort of person to want to engage a stranger in a critical discussion of the nature of eroticism based on a random internet link)
(Oh, look, I AM crazy)
God I'm tired. The last week I have had someone else's trembling, wimpy arms at yoga and I keep falling asleep on the couch. Partly that's Mom in the house. It's been nice to see her (no, I mean it) but takes a lot of fuel also, and partly it's because I had a stupid wrist sprain that kept me from doing full arm intensive poses for a couple of months and I think I've lost some conditioning, and partly I have my period, which gives me a couple of nights of insomnia and - I am like, early pregnancy tired and no, this is not my coy way of telling you something.
But I can't bloody stay awake. Very annoying.
Mom heads home today and after work I am skipping yoga and going for a walk and eating something green for dinner and reading the utterly fascinating book I began last night and then GOING TO BED EARLY.
OK THAT was yesterday and also, a lie
Instead I went to the chiropractor and tried to take a nap, but was foiled by door knocking and phone ringing, and then I went to J's house for pizza & beer and once again I was barely in bed by midnight.
The book is rather good and I am trying to convince myself reading is as restorative as sleep, because my house is littered with good books right now. OK my house is always littered with good books, but in particular I lost all self control last week and will need some new bookshelves as a result. Which is mostly a joke. (20 books and two seasons of Mad Men.) (Cough.)
I've been on this not-buying-stuff kick for the last 6 month or so. Not because I think it a particular virtue or anything, I'm hardly a minimalist, but what started out as a budgetary plan has been interesting for someone who's been a life long accumulator. Perhaps I should not be surprised to find that, for the most part, the things I've been not-accumulating I don't miss, once I got over the habit of shopping all the time. The perfume samples and t-shirts and gadgets and gewgaws are about 80% distraction and static.
Not clothes shopping has actually given me a better understanding of what I really wear and like and find useful, and led me to clear out a lot of things that weren't being used, not shoe shopping has made me more critical of the durability and use of each pair I own - both of these things are going to shape any future purchases in a way I could not have conceptualized last fall. Ditto all the other things I haven't bought, from mascara to a mezzaluna. My relationship with things is changing in a way I like and I really love the corners of spreading quiet in my life as I edit my existing stuff down to something a little less crowded, a little more carefully matched to me, and more wisely balanced between need and want.
Except for books. I'm getting greedier for them as I get less greedy for other things. It's really weird, but doesn't feel like a bad idea, except that I better finish breaking up with my TV and get on it because I mostly can't see my coffee table anymore (there's a little spot hollowed out for my water bottle). I guess my essential book dork has been released from under the materialist burden? Or something. Because books are not material goods, they are OXYGEN. Ideas. Juice for the future. Not stuff.
First up: Mountains of the Mind, which I discovered via the supremely talented Kate @ Needled. Imagination, perception, science and how they give shape to our relationship with the physical world, good stuff.
I like that better than Democrat -which, as we have discussed, I am not really - or liberal which I am, but which is primarily, I think, social & intellectual in its application rather than political.
I think government is useful to regulate and support human endeavor and human society and while I am not at all anti-business, I am opposed to unchecked free markets because people are greedy and short-sighted in fairly predictable ways over the long term and free markets are a pretty accurate reflection of this.
I'm not good at arguing though - I haven't enough historical fact at my finger tips and I tend to get mad and froth at the mouth and frown stubbornly over the underlying ethics of policy, without necessarily having an ability to turn my thoughts and feelings into words (I know the difference between single payer and socialized health-care, but I can't always express it under pressure, for example).
I had dinner with friends Saturday, spent the evening arguing - in a friendly way - with M. While he says he is a Republican, I would say he is in fact a free market conservative of the old school, rather than a modern Republican (I keep waiting for him to notice his party has abandoned him). We agree about nothing, but I think in a respectful way. It was fun.
I thought I would share some of the things I have been reading that left me saying - Dammit, THAT'S what I MEANT - since then.
Jon Carroll on Rachel Maddow: My love is not quite so true, but I do appreciate her for saying things with humor and impeccable calm and well informed decency.
Obsidian Wings (a fantastic site) on the role of progressive politics in creating a society we can enjoy living in.
Shakesville on misogyny and the Pennsylvania gym murders: If I read one more thing that paints the shooter as having been victimized by sexual rejection I will spit upon who said it. I expect he had trouble getting dates because he was exactly the kind of psychiatrically ill person who would say, commit murder to make a point, and was creepy as fuck. Blaming the 30 million women (right) who turned him down is just another way of avoiding taking responsibility for his own life and actions; women are not to blame any more than the Easter Bunny was. Feministing on the same.
Shakesville on the media complicity in breeding poorly informed hysteria about health care change: WORD
Lance Mannion on civility and disagreement: follow the links if you have time.
FiveThirtyEight.com on the conservative/liberal political distribution in the US, kind of fascinating.
I am noticing that Paul Krugman is a recurring theme in all of this. Excuse me while I go follow his blog.
Shakesville on the potential for fascism in the US. For the record, I find this extreme, but it's very interesting, and an idea worth incorporating into your mental filter.
Ta-Nahesi Coates - who may just be my favorite blogger of all time - on the intersection of fear/racism/misogyny that drives explosions of violent resistance to change.
We do live in interesting times.
I started a post about my loathing for self-esteem, both conceptually and in terms of social roles & habits (jargon! artificial praise! in-authenticity!) - but I dunno. It was grumpy. Curmudgeonly. It involved, inevitably, my opinion of self help books. Mostly it wasn't what I want to think about today. Grumpy takes a lot of damn energy.
I need some magic, I think. Yesterday was nice: I went to yoga in the morning and was able to touch my forehead to the floor in siddhasana for the second time. It's so simple and yet feels like ...I don't want to say accomplishment, that's wrong, it's not a trophy for my mantle. It feels elementally right, like I've regained an essential thing I did not know was missing when I find flexibility I did not know was there, or balance or straightness.
All the things people say about yoga - the stress release, the peace, the exercise. None of it's wrong exactly, but the words are placeholders for the experience. It's like a giant secret - you friends say, "oh, you're going to love it" but they can't tell you why, the why is non-verbal, inexplicable in the truest sense, un-knowable until it happens to you. When you put your head on the floor, you're a better version of yourself. When you know where your sit bones are, the world has more solid outlines. I think we are supposed to have strong and flexible as our default condition, like cats and the hind brain knows it. Yoga gives it back.
That is so much better than self-esteem exercises (it was a exercise in writing down the things you love about yourself that set me off)
I had another interesting moment as well. A friend of mine is much in my mind recently and I was having trouble stilling my head for meditation. I finally said - I love you, can you leave me alone right now? And they did. That was new.
(I am starting to wonder if when someone is on your mind it's not because you're on theirs?)
On the way home I remembered what I had forgotten the day before - Toilet paper. I refuse to use un-recycled-paper TP, which means the hippy store, which I had already passed, so I went to Whole Foods, which is the next nearest 7th Generation dealer. When I finished with that, the sky was turning some kind of crazy, lowering gray, with that flat, clear, glowing, sideways light that says run for cover. By the time I parked across from my house it was thunder and torrents and overflowing gutters and no wiper powerful enough to keep the window clear of that volume of water is made on earth.
I thought about waiting it out, but it's just damp you know? It was home-ownership that made me regard weather as an enemy, but really I've loved storms since I was a tiny girl, I used to drag my little chair out on the covered milk porch when I was 3 or 4 to watch the lightening, so I gathered my toilet paper and yoga mat and festooned myself for the journey, all of 12 feet to my door, ankle deep in water, and by the time it shut behind me I was literally wet to the skin, left my yoga gear and sandals in a puddle by the door and sprinted for a towel, shut down the air conditioner and opened all the windows to the sound of water and the movement of real air and ducked out on the deck to clear a gutter and laugh again at how wet I got in 30 seconds. I love that contracted chilled feeling of recently drenched skin under dry things, and curling up on the couch with knitting and listening to the rain.
I worked on a sleeve on and off all day - sleeves in the round on a top down sweater make me a bit mental, all that untwisting, but I'm starting to hit a groove. I want to finish soon - I want to wear this sweater this autumn - and then a shawl I think. It's been a while, but I think I crave the meticulous code of lace, the portable complexity of a big thing in fine yarn.
It is possible I had more magic in my weekend than I initially remembered, which is what I get for listening to radio news while I was still in bed this morning.
I started this blog....5 years ago next week I think.
Typepad says 701 posts and 10140 comments, though I think some of those posts are still in draft form.
It hasn't been much of a blog for a while, I know. The situation as it stands right now is that my life doesn't feel open. It started last year when I was struggling with a love thing that felt intensely private and rolled from there into this recession. Not the recession itself so much, but the questions of desire and obligation and survival and values and paralysis that have come seeping out of my foundations as my work life has more or less collapsed and revealed the underlying faults.
I just wrote a couple of thousand words about all that but they are chaotic and unformed. They might turn into a thing, or they might not. We'll see. Somewhere in the middle of them I started thinking about identity though.
I started this blog anonymously because - why? Because I hated being looked at, because I did not want my family to accidentally google their way into this piece of my life, because, perhaps, I did not know who I was and naming myself felt like chains dragging while I looked. Maybe I am a coward. It's a bit silly: I never thought I'd meet anyone in real life because of this and now most of my most important people are here directly because of it. I hid my name because it is distinctive and I wanted the freedom to not be spotted, and now, I will actually answer to Juno.
A few years ago I was at the Vermont Fiber Festival and someone was trying to get my attention - I was on my way out the door with a spinning wheel on my shoulder and my brother and his kids and she called and called and I was oblivious. And then sharply - JUNO! and I whipped around and bounded back across the room - with the spinning wheel - to give her a hug.
This is when I started to wonder which of us was which - because in some ways she feels more like me than my birth name. It also feels like a lie though. It occurred to me a few months ago that one of the big problems with my work life is that it exists as wholly separate from my life life. I did that before I knew who I was too - or when I was still trying to live up to some false idol of what One Does.
I think I am going to have to start making all my selves into one whole if I want to keep thriving though. I can answer to both as long as long as they're all part of a whole, not compartments where bits of my soul are divvied up according to use and value.
It's silly, a lot of you know this already, it's almost an anticlimax. But hi. I'm Cassandra Mosle. Welcome to the inside of my head.
I'm having a brain problem right now.
I remember when I was a kid there was always some complaining going on about whether reading junk was really reading and people trying to Save The Children From Trash. Me, I loved trash, it improved both my vocabulary and my working knowledge of human sexuality and I am all for both. And I believe that the more you read the more your sense of nuance improves. Which is to say, you grow out of junk the way you outgrow Twinkies.
Tastes like plastic, but EVERY once in a while you just gotta. Maybe even a lot. And then one day, revulsion (I'm trying to find my revulsion for fudge iced yellow cake right now).
Which is fine. I don't approve of calling books bad names because someone somewhere decided they weren't respectable enough. In the end the quality of the writing shapes you and sends you in new directions.
Which brings me to my brain problem. I seem to be going in a new direction. I had a long no reading period after my dad died, and then I was more into - pop non-fiction. Some of which was great. And satisfying, because it grappled with big modern questions of survival and understanding.
But fiction grapples with survival and understanding right?
Not the fiction I'd been reading.
So over the last 2 years maybe I've been reading again, but sputtering over it - 12 books at once, not much focus, trouble tracking complex ideas over the structure of the book. I feel like an old dirty engine, not quite turning over, idling roughly before dying again. Feeling like I used to be smart. No - AGILE, I used to be agile.
Then, last weekend I came to be hanging out with the parents of someone I went to grade school with.
She was the hippy mom when I was a child, who taught yoga and went back to school and worked as a physical therapist and fed the geese where they lived on the lake and worked for the environment all those years ago. She took me for my very first walk in the woods when I was in the first grade. It was magical, with rocks and lichen, like nothing I had ever seen or felt. I told you about her a few months ago actually, which makes it especially weird I should run into her NOW.
We talked about oh - people we knew in common, and how my hometown is bad and good, and how to change the world in small pieces and later her husband came downstairs and we talked about human potential and The Trial and the doors that are ours to walk through if only we know how and Slavic literature and the Good Soldier Svejk - which is one of the 17 books I am 3 chapters into right now - and she mentioned the Master and Margarita, which coincidentally, I had bought a month or too ago, but hadn't felt up to starting.
And there is a fantastic story about THAT that I can't really tell you 'cause it's about their stuff but it ends in a oil painting like a Russian fairy tale and it made me glad to be alive.
It made me remember not feeling rusty, made me remember agility, it made me remember this piece of myself I've been looking for, and I feel like I just backfired through my own carburetor and woke up.
I confessed to a few of my friends Monday this realization, that really, I'm an intellectual. Over the howls of laughter and my defensive explanations - Bookish Wendy said "dude - it's like you're coming out of the closet - but we all already knew..." which is mortifyingly accurate - came awareness: I have sort of gotten into a place where I suppress this bit of myself - at least partly because it has no non-recreational outlet in my life. Suppress it so hard that the skills, the habit of complex though is corroded. I've been neglecting my brain. Maybe I had to. 10 years ago I was all brain and nothing else and I had to learn to be heart and body too.
And I did.
I think its hysterical and inevitable that I discovered yoga NOW. Of course. Because now I need balance and integration (as well as the calm to survive this economy and its et ceteras) not merely the brute strength to change.
Where was I?
Oh, brain problem.
My goopy old, gunk-clogged engine of an intellect is coming alive and I am glad to see it but boy howdy am I worried about the damage that may have been done. I've been reading more, and struggling with serious, complicated paths through other people's thoughts. I'm 50 pages into a dozen things, digging my mental fingers into the rock, looking for traction and it hurts like weightlifting after a 6 month break to go a bit deeper than the facile.
Its all about fear too, isn't it? What if I can't deliver, what if I'm not so all-fired clever after all, what if I dig and come up short? What if the brain that is the one thing about myself I've never doubted turns out to be a thin shield.
I am always surprised to rediscover how little maturity and experience really shield you from fear and change. Stress, yeah, experience lets you eat stress for breakfast, but self-doubt not so much.
Ah well, I'm only ever happy when I'm evolving.
So I am starting to think about knitting. Not in a oh right, I have a lot of yarn I should Do Something with it kind of way, but in a looking at patterns thinking about pretty yarn sort of way that is strongly discouraged under present economic conditions. With pleasure, not obligation.
I made the strategic error of looking at Old Maiden Aunt's site a few minutes a go and was overcome with an unseemly and base lust for well, everything. If I am very, very good and kind to small animals and my mother, maybe I can have some someday.
Pardon me, I had to go look again. And I appear to have bought 1300 yards of lace weight.
How extraordinary: I haven't had a yarn accident in about a year. Except for that one time, at Colourmart. (The 10/28NM heavy dk 30/70 cashmere/wool is utterly brilliant and I am only telling you 'cause I have 12 cones in 3 colours or something ridiculous like that. In fact, I have just the sleeves left in an ACTUAL SWEATER in this yarn. If the sun ever comes out I will show you.)
If I believed in jinxes I would not mention any of this - for fear of scaring my knitting soul back into the dark corner it's been lurking for so long - but it's nice to think yarnily again - not as an evasion from the rest of my life but just as a part of it. I've watched so many friends and acquaintances shape lives in fiber - writers and designers and teachers - and thrive, and there came a moment when I realized that wasn't for me - not that it wasn't going to happen but that it wasn't what I want or need. I adore fiber, but it is not my FUTURE, it's just a part of me. Just, funny word.
It was painful though, watching them all go and flourish without me, when I felt stagnant and confused about my life. I had to sort out their paths from my own. It's good now.
I think that's perhaps why I'm seeing yarn in the corners again.
Making Light is often a good read - I haven't the stamina to be a commenter there, but I do enjoy the place, and find out there interesting things about the world and all it's parts. The other day Abi Sutherland had an Open Comment thread up there about a second century potter and why we know who he is at all.
Because he left a mark.
It's just so human, shouting into the future on a scrap of pottery discovered against astonishing odds c. 1800 years later.
I made this, I was here.
We're all doing this - we knit and blog and write and have children and paint and sculpt and cook dinner and plant things and build temples to the glory of our gods in all our little ways - I remember looking at embroidery at the Metropolitan - it was 4 or 5 years ago, an exhibit of ...Byzantine art? I don't remember that, but I remember these tiny micro mosaics and the gold embroidery, the work of someone's hands, the work of someone's life.
I worry sometimes that in this digital age, this age of service and finance and disposable goods, we manage to mark our lives with stuff that won't last, that our voices will end with the obsolescence of our technology.
Of course I also think that the act of forgetting is as important as the act of remembering and that much has to be lost for the next generation to rediscover and relearn. What to sacrifice though?
Fate decides - that exploded kiln must surely have felt like work lost the the potter then, a wasted effort.
The idea of leaving no mark is terribly lonely, and I think making things, actual things, is a nice way to spit into the void. I'm glad I make yarn and sometimes, things from yarn. I'm glad most of the people I know make things, meaningful, beautiful things.
Hello to you, Lucius Meticius Ferenius, and hello to those you loved. You existed.
(edited for spelling, slightly abbreviated - 'cause we go on and on and on.....)
Marin: For you, of course. I'm still in the brunch zone.
11:47 me: feidl trip for a bagel? (OK, that IS a typo)
Marin: I did just have a bagel. We get free donuts, bagels and fruit on Fridays at the office.