We’ve had some isolated days of sun, so magnificent and clear that I pinch myself and wonder why anyone would ever consider leaving such a place.

Then we’ve had a lot of the other kind of days, the rainy days, the overcast, middling-cool, not-very-remarkable days. Like today.  Because I have lost a contact lens, I’m stuck wearing my glasses. And until I manage to reconnect with my feet in this new optical configuration, I figure it’s a good idea to walk instead of run. I don’t really want a closeup of the gravel path as it meets my face…

Maybe it’s because I’m only 2.5 months from leaving Switzerland, maybe it was because I was walking instead of running, but I was struck by the gorgeosity of my surroundings (yes, that’s a new word. I use it in my novel, too), even on a middling-to-boring day. Luckily I had my phone on me, so I could share this moment of beauty with you.

Lausanne on a “paradise” day is all clear skies, magnificent backdrop and a total absence of annoying insects. Two out of three ain’t bad. Here are some photos from this ordinary day in paradise.

Note to copyright trolls: these are my photos, taken on my iPhone. No, I’m not interested in trying to make money off them. Go away. Crawl back into the stinking hole from whence you slithered. (Long story).

Last year’s 20km had people suffering from heat stroke. This year, it was hypothermia. Nothing like a little variety to keep those race organizers on their toes.

Saturday dawned dark and dreary, a steady rain pounding down on the pavement. Ugh. As the day wore on, though, the rain let up, and then finally stopped. I pumped up the bike tires and Luc and I headed over to Vidy to pick up our race packets. Luc had signed up to run the 10km to fill a sports requirement for his IB.

When Luc took off at 17:20 or so, it had just started to drizzle lightly. I still had an hour to wait until my race started. I met up with my running buddy – we had a pact to get through this together – and found Brendan, who was also doing the 20km. I had brought a down vest and an old rain jacket, and decided to keep the rain jacket on for the race.

We took off at 18:22, hopeful that the rain would let up. It didn’t. My physician caught up with us in the first couple of kilometers, and we had a nice chat. He’s my buddy’s physician too. I felt very healthy out there, running in the rain talking to my doctor.

My buddy counted down the kilometers. Only 15 more to go! 10 down! I saw Brendan tearing down a hill at about 16km for him (only about 8 for us) and he looked good. My friend’s husband was somewhere around the halfway point, cheering madly for us. I felt fine. I felt like I could run like this forever! Not fast, just loping along. The rain didn’t bother me that much, aside from the occasional need to hop a puddle. Very nice. We didn’t talk, like we usually do out on our runs, but that was okay. We got up to the cathedral and ran along the orange-strewn cobblestones through the old town, happy to have reached the apex of the race. It was all downhill from there.

Downhill and into the wind. At about 16km, things started to get old. The rain intensified. So did the wind and the cold. My hands and legs were getting numb.

At 17km, we passed a sign indicating there would be a shower ahead. A shower? Sure enough, there was an enormous snowblower sitting alongside the course. Would have been nice last year, but this year? Overkill. The entire race had been one long shower.

Those last three kms really dragged. We barrelled our way to the finish, and slogged through the muddiest field I’ve ever slogged through to get to our bikes. I took my soggy raincoat off and put the down vest on, then somehow managed to get my fingers to work enough to put the raincoat back on over it. Brendan’s fleece had been taken out so I knew he had finished.

But why was his bike still there, locked to mine?  Did he forget the combination? I figured he had decided to jog home. I didn’t stop to try and find him, because I just wanted to get home as fast as I could. I had been fantasizing about a warm bath for the last five kilometers. I needed that bath! My frozen fingers somehow managed to turn the dial on the lock. I locked Brendan’s bike back up (it is a nice bike) and took off. My fingers lost feeling about halfway home, but I didn’t dare stop. The rain was pouring down my face, my legs were pedaling away on autopilot. Home. Home. Home.

I staggered in the door and stripped off my coat and shoes and socks, dropping them to the floor in front of the door. Is Brendan home?  No. Luc was home, showered, in front of the computer. He had run a good race. Marc and our two houseguests had taken over the kitchen, fixing a late dinner. It was now about 9:00 pm.

Where was Brendan?

I urged Marc to go and try to find him. He was skeptical. How could he find Brendan in this weather? He could be anywhere! I wasn’t up to dealing with the situation. I was shaking violently, my whole body vibrating with cold.

I got in the shower, eagerly anticipating the warmth. But it wasn’t warm. It hurt. I turned the temperature down, but even at lukewarm, the water hurt my legs so badly all I wanted to do was get out of there. I dried off, still shaking, got dressed in my warmest fleece (two layers) and, still shaking, got a thick wool blanket from the closet. Still shaking (did I mention I was shaking?), I curled up on the couch and gratefully accepted a cup of hot tea from our Danish houseguest-turned-nurse Martin.

While I had been trying to shower, Brendan had called – he’d commandeered someone else’s cellphone when he discovered I had come and gone leaving his bike locked up behind me. (He couldn’t get the combination undone with his fingers frozen.) Marc and the other houseguest, guitar-wonder Doug, had gone to pick him up in the car.

When he arrived, he was shaking just like me, and laughing – “that was crazy!” He headed up for his own version of the shower from hell. Doug and Marc lit a fire in the fireplace, and I went over, still shaking, to sit in front of it. Finally, after the tea and the fire and the blanket and a couple glasses of wine, I warmed up enough to stop shaking, and we all enoyed the delicious dinner they had prepared. Doug played guitar for us late into the evening.

I read in Monday’s papers that the female winner had to be treated for hypothermia – in fact 20-30 people were treated. Oddly enough, I wasn’t sore at all the next day. Maybe extreme cold is a way to prevent post-race soreness? If so, I’ll take soreness any day!

Brendan ran the race in 1:30, and my buddy and I clocked in at just over 2:00. Brendan had been waiting for us for a half an hour… but at least, in the tent, he’d been dry.

I hate to end on a cliché, but sometimes it’s called for. All’s well that ends well.

A while back I wrote a post on stereotypes. Okay, it was a long while back, when Harold Camping was predicting that the world was about to end. In that post I recapped some pretty standard Swiss stereotypes:

The Swiss go on eating Rostis and chocolate and dipping day-old bread into oozing pots of cheese fondue, occasionally heading down into their fallout shelters for another bottle of Chasselas or Pinot noir, which they deftly open with their ever-handy Swiss army knives, accordions playing cheerily in the background.  When they’re not conducting secret bank deals involving covert Carribean cash transfers, that is. Or cleaning their ovens with toothbrushes. Or hiking up an Alp behind a herd of fat cows whose bells ding and dong sweetly into the picture-postcard valley far below.

Today, I came across something that made me laugh. It’s a story of a Swiss person who has taken the Swiss neatnik stereotype to such an incredible extreme that he completely defies another Swiss stereotype: the one that says the Swiss have no sense of humor. It seemed like an appropriate thing to share on April 1st. It’s no joke, though.

This guy, Ursus Wehrli, likes to tidy stuff up. In a big way. I can’t believe I have lived in Switzerland for almost 10 years and the first time I read about him is in the New York Times. Actually, scrap that, I can believe it. See, he’s Swiss-GERMAN and I live across the Rosti-divide. But that’s another stereotype.

He tidies everything – a pine branch is reduced to neatly stacked lines of sticks and branches. A bowl of alphabet soup is alphabetized.  Cars in a parking lot are sorted by color. A Seurat painting is reduced to a bag of dots. The stars in the heavens above are all sorted by size and luminosity, and stacked in neat rows. It’s hilarious. You can go and see a whole gallery of it at Daily Picks and Flicks (I assume they have permission).

I bet he was commissioned to help set up the Nespresso displays. The color coding could have been done by wavelength, though. Just saying.

If you have a few minutes, it’s worth watching this TED video about how he’s “tidied up” art. (Brigitte, my friend, this one’s for YOU!!) And it’s all even better rendered by him in his precious Swiss-German accent.

I would venture out on a limb here, and say that even my mom might find that this “let’s get everything sorted out” has just gone a little over the edge here. But then again, maybe this is her idea of heaven…

Oh, and by the way, cleaning the oven with a toothbrush? That’s not a joke around here, either.

See, Gatsby was all about excess – the old idea that the more you have, and the more you can accumulate, the happier you’ll be. You’ll finally reach some point of maximum return, you’ll hit the top of the top. Then people like Tom, who are born rich, will let you into their fold. There’s this idea that everyone has an equal shot at being one of the chosen few. It’s just a matter of hard work. The movie is coming out this summer, in case you didn’t read the book in high school.

Have we really changed all that much? Look at the famous one percent. There is a non-negligible percentage of the American population that isn’t okay with raising taxes on the insane wealth of this group. I believe it’s a very deep-seated part of the American psyche, the belief that anyone has a shot at this. We can’t begrudge these people something that we desperately want for ourselves, can we?

We brought it up at dinner one night, and Marc disagreed with our thesis. For him, the American Dream isn’t about getting rich so much as it is about following your own path to self-fulfillment.

I still think that for many people, the very notion of self-fulfillment involves lots of money and material things.

I’m a bit obsessed with material things at the moment, because I’m in the process of shedding them in preparation for our move. I was fascinated by an article in the New York Times last week about Graham Hill, a man who struck it rich (the Dream come true!), bought all kinds of stuff, and realized it was making him anxious and unhappy.

Somehow this stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up consuming me.

He says it took him “15 years, a great love, and a lot of travel” to get rid of the inessential things that were cluttering up his life. He claims he lives a “Bigger, better, richer life” with less. I don’t doubt it. He’s designed a 420-square foot apartment that has everything he needs.

My experience is that getting stuff, and thinking about stuff you don’t have but want, occupies a good deal of mental energy. It’s also built into our society, particularly American society, in a way that makes this stuff-focused mindset very hard to avoid.

I have often complained about the fact that everything is closed on Sunday in Switzerland, and it drives me nuts that shopping online is all but impossible here. The way I see it, it’s like a government-mandated moral code: Sunday is Family Time, and If In Doubt, Buy Swiss. Everyone eats a Mandatory Big Lunch, often with extended family, and then goes for a Family Walk. In the paper the other day, in an article about the parliament considering a bill that would allow shops to stay open until 11 pm, a politician even argued that workers “need” to be able to go out on the weekends, and spend time with their families.

Maybe it’s the libertarian American in me, but I still think that this kind of thing should be up to the individual. “No you can’t work on weekends, because you ought to be socializing with your friends or spending time with your family,” strikes me as awfully paternalistic. If I want to work my ass off and build up a chunk of savings, that’s my affair. And if I’d rather spend my Sunday shopping than hanging out with my relatives, that’s my business, too. Why should someone be prevented from making or spending a buck, just because it’s Sunday?

But this American Dream idea gave me pause. As I go through all the things we’ve accumulated in ten years in Switzerland, I realize that a lot of it is totally unnecessary. And I never even shopped on Sunday! A strawberry slicer? Five metric tons of lego? Ten different kinds of candle holders? Granted, I hauled a lot of it over from the US in the first place. But, still. I am taking this opportunity to pare things down, to spend time thinking about what is really necessary.

Here’s one of my favorite songs, from the movie “Into the Wild”- it sums the whole thing up perfectly. I’m heading into the Northern Wilderness, too. “Society, you’re a crazy breed.”

I have decided, however, to adopt a new blogging style. Short. Sweet. To the point. No more ramblings from one topic to another. That’s a real challenge for me, because I find so many things interesting, and I want to share them all with everyone. I guess that means I’ll need to post more things, then, if I limit myself to one topic per post.

Today it’s poetry. I happened to visit Brainpickings, Maria Popov’s brilliant blog, and read a fascinating article about a woman named Nina Katchadourian, who photographs the spines of books arranged to make sentences and poems. It reminded me of Jane, a woman I met a couple of weeks ago when I was visiting my mom.

Jane is an artist; she paints miniatures, tiny 3×5-inch paintings. My mom has two of them in her breakfast room. Jane had stopped by to bring my mom some cheese grits to help her recover from a shoulder replacement surgery. I mentioned that I loved the miniature hanging just above the jade plant on the kitchen counter. It’s a picture of a sunrise over some mountains, and it has an eerie inner light, like it’s glowing from within. She told me the effect was due to the careful application of at least 15 layers of tempera paint. And then, almost levitating with excitement, she told us about her next project: She’s going to paint miniatures of the spines of books in her parents’ library.

I am a confirmed book lover. Not just the content of a book, mind you, but the whole package. There are particular titles I remember from my childhood bookshelves, titles I remember pulling down over and over again, the covers becoming soft with wear over the years. I thumbed through the entire Time Life Science Library, gobbled the Reader’s Digest Abridged Classics, read over and over again the Little House on the Prairie series, spent a whole summer with the myriad tomes of the Wonderful Land of Oz.

I know it’s the era of the e-book, but I cannot bring myself to hop on board. I would miss too much the unique physical sensation that each book imparts; its weight, the thickness of its pages, the particular way the edges are done. A hardback is a thing apart.  The joy of the flyleaf – a built in bookmark! – the way you can prop it on its side and read it curled up in bed – the stupid iPad thinks it knows what you want, and keeps trying to right itself – the solid, muffled sound it makes when you close it and put it on the table beside your bed. You can slam it shut in frustration when someone calls for you to unbury yourself. Okay, already! I’m coming! You can ease the back cover down gently when the last page has been read, then hold it for a moment in your hand as you say goodbye – it has become a friend, now. Part of who you are.

So you can understand perhaps why this idea of books and the incidental poetry they harbor in their outer wrappings appealed to me. I’m no visual artist, but I went to my own bookshelf and found a poem almost right away. Here it is. Why not visit your bookshelf and see what you can find? I’d be interested to see what you come up with…

I know it officially happened on December 21, when the balance of dark versus light hit bottom and the slow climb back into the sun began once again. But January is usually still too dark and cold and, well, winter for it to register. Today, however, despite the clouds and the rain, I finally feel like I’m climbing out of the hole.

Although I am not a big fan of winter, it does have one unarguably important purpose: to remind you how wonderful spring and summer are. When we lived in California and winter was but a pathetic shadow of the real thing, spring always took me by surprise. Wait! What happened to the pit?  I felt a bit cheated.

But there are limits. Marc was, at one point, seriously looking at a position in Montreal. Are you out of your MIND? I asked him. It’s winter for nine months of the year in Montreal! January in Montreal is -50, and that’s on a good day. From what I hear, Montreal just bypasses spring altogether and overshoots into hot and humid summer, as if making up for lost time. No thank you!

I feel a lightening, almost imperceptible, but still, it’s there. February happens this week. My baby turns 20. How the years revolve, over and over and over again. Happy Birthday Brendan!!

In other news, we haven’t put our house on the market yet, because I am still trying to figure out how real estate works in Switzerland. Let’s just say, Yodaesque, that transparent, it isn’t. I tried to convince Luc to do his Extended Essay project on the real estate bubble in Vancouver, but he’s not biting. He’d rather write about garbage. That’s my boy.

EPFL got its big “Human Brain Project” funded to the tune of something like a billion Euros. In its early days, when it was still just the “Blue Brain Project” and I was still an EPFL employee, I was the firewall between the project and the media. I built a rudimentary website for them using EPFL’s in-house web editor. I spent a lot of time sending computer-generated images of neurons to journalists via e-mail and telling them that Henry Markram wasn’t available for interviews. They’ve gone all bells and whistles since, and I sincerely hope they reach their goals and we get the brain figured out. If they don’t, it’s not for lack of money.

It’ll be interesting to watch as they take the reductionist model to its ultimate limit – build the whole thing, neuron by neuron, back from its DNA. At what level of complexity does consciousness kick in? That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Despite Jonah Lehrer’s fall from grace, I still think his article about the Blue Brain project was one of the better ones written back then.

Henry Markram is tall and slim. He wears jeans and tailored shirts. He has an aquiline nose and a lustrous mop of dirty blond hair that he likes to run his hands through when contemplating a difficult problem. He has a talent for speaking in eloquent soundbites, so that the most grandiose conjectures (“In ten years, this computer will be talking to us.”) are tossed off with a casual air. If it weren’t for his bloodshot, blue eyes—“I don’t sleep much,” he admits—Markram could pass for a European playboy.”

Gotta love it. European playboy. Those were prescient words, weren’t they? Europe certainly has become his playground now!

I’m not dead yet! This may very well be my favorite line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail -  it’s a close tie with Silly English kuhniggits! and Run away! Run away! Spoken with the proper accent, each phrase has served me well in response to a variety of situations I’ve encountered across the years.

You might very well have wondered about my status, since my last post was about a month ago. I saw my trusty CTO Dave not long ago on a trip to the US, and the issue came up.

Dave: You haven’t posted much to Gydle lately.

Me: I don’t have anything to say.

He shrugged, and that was that. Yesterday he sent me a comic from the Oatmeal that explains it much better than I did. Make sure you scroll down to the part that says “I’m a firm believer that if you don’t have anything to say, you shouldn’t be talking. And if you don’t have anything to write about, DON’T WRITE.”

See, I didn’t post anything because I didn’t want to crowd your precious cyber-attention with useless drivel. Wasn’t that thoughful of me? You’re welcome.

But in the spirit of closing out the year, I have put down my box of chocolates and my novel (Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver – I really like it, but then I like almost everything I read).  If the Republicans can work on Sunday to avert a fiscal cliff, I can certainly make an effort.

The main cliff we appear to be plunging off at the moment is yet another installment in the saga otherwise known as The Parlange Family Globe-Hopping Adventure.

We’re moving to Vancouver.

Next summer I am going to be once again in the land of Costco and Whole Foods and English language television, although since this is Canada, it’s the high-tax, government-sponsored health care version. (Suits me fine, since it also means we can finally stop giving the IRS a sizable chunk of our income every year even though we don’t live in the US, we don’t earn US income, and we don’t own a single thing there.) We made a visit in December and I was smitten  – friendly people, lots of trail running opportunities, did I mention Whole Foods?

I am, at heart, an adventurer, otherwise I would never have married such a flighty man. Every time we’ve uprooted ourselves I have been a willing participant, even on occasion an instigator. But this one is going to be tough. Granted, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Switzerland at the moment. I have made some very close friends here, more so than anywhere else we have lived. I will miss them with every ounce of my being and it’s only because Skype and airplanes exist that I’m even considering this. On the other hand, I recognize that no matter how long we live in Switzerland, I will never be anything other than a foreigner, and no matter how good my French gets, the everyday language around me will never be my mother tongue. Those things get to me more than I’d like to admit. Then there’s the whole Swiss attitude towards wild animals, which drives me totally bonkers.

Only hitch is that Luc still has one more year of high school left, and he’s finally happy at school here now that we’ve pulled him out of the public system. When I was a senior in high school, my dad took a job in Washington, and I gamely followed them into the jungle of suburban Maryland. It was a complete and utter disaster. In December, shell-shocked and shaken, I retreated to Los Alamos with my mom and finished out the year with my class, forever marked by the “B” on my report card from the horrible goggly-eyed Maryland calculus teacher.

On the other hand, the experience vastly simplified my college search, since it enabled me to eliminate the entire east coast of the US. I certainly didn’t want to run the risk of encountering any of those kids in college. In fact, I even applied to their most coveted choice, Amherst, on purpose just so I could turn them down if I got accepted. Which I did. Take that, snobs!

It wasn’t a disaster for my parents, because going back and forth from DC to LA that spring, my dad built up a truly massive frequent flier balance. In fact, I think my mom is still cashing in on it.

But DC to LA is a time change of 2 hours and a 5+-hour flight. Geneva to Vancouver is a 9-hour time change and a 20+-hour flight. It took me a week to recover from jetlag on this last trip. That’s not something one does every few weekends, carbon footprint notwithstanding.

We’re still working out the details, but I am almost 100% sure that the kids in Vancouver will be nicer than they were in Bethesda, and it looks like Luc and I will move with Marc this summer.

I still have an extremely deep-seated aversion to the college search process, though, and both my children are paying the price. Brendan got into college automatically just by graduating from high school. He’ll stay here next year, on his own. He’s almost 20, after all, and we’re slowly driving him insane by insisting that he wake up before noon every day. Good riddance, he thinks.

The upside is that applying to college in Canada is not as insane as it is in the US, and if Luc gets decent grades on his IB exams he will get into a good university. So there’s a good chance we will be able to get both boys launched into college without having to make a single campus visit or going into a lifetime of debt. No, I’m not mother-of-the-year-award material, but I’m okay with that, and have been ever since I plonked Brendan down in front of Firefighter Joe at the tender age of 2 so I could have a half hour of “me time.”

The other consequence of this move is that if you want to come and visit us in Switzerland and take advantage of a free bed in this outrageously expensive country (breakfast is strictly do-it-yourself, i.e. open the fridge and see what falls out), you’d better hustle. Brendan’s flat is likely to be 1) too small and 2) a total disaster.

So there you have it. I’ve been very preoccupied with all this, and my creative juices ran almost totally dry.

The good news is that while writing this post, I had an idea for another post! I’m not going to spill the beans, but here’s a hint: garbage.

PS I took this picture of the Vancouver skyline this December using my iPhone. It really is that beautiful.

First, I have a great gift idea.

I got an e-mail the other day from “American Gut.” Imagine my excitement! The Human Food Project is live on IndieGoGo. For only $99 and a stool sample, you can get a list of the microbes colonizing your gut. Upscaling is a bargain – it’s $180 for two samples, $260 for three and a mere $320 for a family of four!

For $500 you can collect a stool sample every day for a week, send it along with a diet diary (complete that online), and get DNA extraction and 16S rRNA sequencing on all seven samples.

You can even get your dog analyzed! Finally something really productive to do with that bag of poop!

If just knowing which microbes are in your gut isn’t enough for you, you can pay more and get a metagenomic analysis – that will tell you a bit about what the microbes might be doing.

This might be the perfect gift for that difficult-to-shop-for person – your boss, your mother-in-law, your dentist…

In other news, a few things have caught my eye in the local paper in the past few days. I know you’ll find these things as fascinating as I did.

Item #1: Front page news: a bear has been causing trouble in the canton Graubunden.

Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows I take issue with the Swiss attitude towards wildlife. Here it goes again. This individual, M13, has apparently committed the unforgivable crimes of killing a couple of sheep, approaching human habitations and rooting through garbage cans. The article explained that it was “brought up badly by a wild Slovenian mother” and “learned more bad habits living in Italy.” The rest of its siblings are apparently still in Italy, behaving badly, but nobody over there is complaining.”The problem is not bears per se, but M13 in particular,” reads the headline.

This is the only wild bear in Switzerland. It had a radio transponder, but lost that when it was hit by a train last year. That was also featured in the local news. The collar has been replaced so the authorities can keep tabs on the troublemaker. You’d think they would be a little more sympathetic. This guy has had a rough time. PTSD, anyone?

To illustrate the seriousness of the situation, the article recounted the fate of another bear who didn’t follow Swiss rules for wildlife etiquette. That bear, JJ3, was put to death after it stole a pie that was left in an open window and went on a rampage in a couple of barns.

“The best thing M13 can do at this point would be to hibernate,” said an official from the Federal Office for the Environment.

Either that or head back to Italy where the rules are significantly more lax.

Contrast that with this article from CNN, in which an elderly couple out for a stroll was attacked by a mama bear defending her cubs in British Columbia. “If a bear is determined to have attacked someone, often it is put down.” No mention of stolen pies. My mom, in Santa Fe, regularly has a bear visitor that knocks down her bird feeders. It’s not scared of her. Someone should tell the Swiss bear that it picked the wrong country.

Item #2: Parrot smugglers stopped at the Italian border 

As if bears weren’t bad enough, border authorities recently discovered seven white-capped pionus parrots crammed into a cat carrier and hidden under a blanket in a Swiss car. The parrot traffickers were presumably trying to smuggle them over the border for an Italian breeder. Apparently it’s illegal to import parrots into Switzerland. The story immediately reminded me of the massive seizure of 143 Mexican Redknee tarantulas at the Zurich airport last year. The post I wrote about this strange occurrence is one of Gydle’s most popular.

The article didn’t say what happened to the parrots. I’m assuming no one put them into MacDonald’s containers.

Item #2: Drive-thru prostitution

This little tidbit appeared at the bottom right-hand corner of the “Suisse” page in the local paper this morning, just under an article about the increasing prevalence of sexually transmitted disease. Without mentioning who is financing the venture, the article says that a bunch of garage-like boxes are being set up on the outskirts of Zurich.  Men (I’m assuming the clients will be male) will be able to drive their cars into the boxes and get “serviced” right there in the privacy of their cars. Gives a whole new meaning to the term “pick-up window.”

This being Switzerland, the prostitutes will need a permit. Pimping is illegal in Switzerland, but I know someone is making money on rent and permits here, and it isn’t the prostitutes.

You want fries with that?

Photo Credit: mag3737 via Compfight cc

Today as I was driving, I caught a snippet of one of my favorite TED talks, the one in which Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray, Love” fame talks about the nature of genius and the dark side of success. I quoted her talk a while ago in a post on Inspiration.

I took it as a sign.

The important thing about the creative process, she says, is showing up day after day. You have to do your part, and trust that whatever inspiration or creative genius or whatever you want to call it will come and visit you at some point. You have to make the choice to put yourself out there and create something.

It’s actually a lot harder than I thought it would be. I have all kinds of irrational fears. What if people reading this think it’s autobiographical – that the neurotic character is actually me, even if it isn’t? Will I have any friends left? What if my family hates it? What if it’s a big fat failure and no one wants to read it?

Fear is a real creativity-killer. If you’re paralyzed by fear, you can’t show up to work. After months of being blocked by my fears, a few weeks ago I led a mutiny. I lined them up and made them walk the plank. I said to myself, say the impossible happens and I actually finish this book . Say one day it’s actually printed. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s not like I’m going to die or anything.

The worst thing that could happen is that I could be misunderstood. Or that people will think it’s really bad. And if you think about it for a microsecond, you realize that’s pretty much a given. So I decided to get over it now and be done with it.

How’s this for an antidote to fear – faith?  Faith that maybe you won’t be misunderstood, that your work will be seen in the larger light of the human story and not the little pinprick of another’s ego. Faith that the people who matter to you will see that this is a story that has to be told, even its not-so-nice bits. Maybe especially the not-so-nice bits. Faith that someone, somewhere, will think it’s worth reading.

What does this have to do with Halloween? Well, fiction is basically an extended version of Halloween. You create a bunch of characters and weave a tale to go with them, something larger than life, something that distills the important bits and makes them stand out, backlit like a good jack’o'lantern. Halloween is all about exaggeration, excess, disguise. It’s about permitting yourself to let go of ego for a minute and step into someone (or something) else’s shoes. Fiction is, too. When I’m writing, I let go of myself and inhabit the characters. I live in their houses, wear their hair, have their children, feel their pain. I leave my everyday life and enter an alternative reality, woven from bits and pieces of my experience that are exaggerated, distilled, redistributed and changed.

It’s kind of scary, yes. But this is a good kind of spooky. We’ll just have to wait and see if it’s a trick or a treat.

As it happens, I intervened all by myself and took two consecutive days off. Then I went into a funk. And that has really slowed me down.

Mind you, despite that amazing and transcendent Braveheart-slash-Arwen running experience, the funk has been coming on for a while. These things are cyclical. I’m not talking PMS here, either. Longer cycle. I don’t pretend to understand it, but there comes a time when everything just starts to annoy the hell out of me. I get sick of cooking, sick of eating healthy stuff, sick of translating, sick of the reading material I have lying around. I get fed up with every little thing – the election craziness, the Swiss supermarkets, the way my garden isn’t self-maintaining, the fact that everyone in this household is conspiring to create as much dirty laundry as possible every single damn day of the year. They way they seem to want to eat twice a day, every damn day of the year. Take a day off, guys?

I take one look at myself in the mirror in the morning and feel like going back to bed in the hopes that something better looking will be there when I wake up again.

Then I start having a hard time sleeping at night, and I get sick of not sleeping at night.

There must be a trigger. Is it biochemical? Hormonal? Lunar? Gravitational? Elecromagnetic? Quantum telepathic? Is it something I ate? Something I didn’t eat? I don’t think it happens exactly this time every year, but so far I haven’t tracked it. I’ve just been hoping it will go away.

Last night, my legs were twitching like crazy, and as usual I was unable to sleep. Marc was out of town, and the moon was, if not full, still high and bright in the sky. I looked at the clock: 11:30. Screw this, I said to myself. I put on my running gear, dug a reflective jacket out of the downstairs closet, and went out for a jog. I know you’re thinking fine, sure, you live in Switzerland, you can do that kind of thing.

Exactly. Which is why I did it. I had the world to myself. Except for the guy waiting at the bus stop with his bike. I was mystified at why he would be waiting for a bus when he could be riding his bike instead, but, then, never mind. Maybe he had a flat. I smiled and said Bonsoir! as I ran by, as if it was 6:30 pm instead of midnight.

I only ran a couple of miles, but it felt good. I came back, took a shower, and went back to bed, sure that sleep was about to descend. Then the other leg started bugging me.

I know I eventually got to sleep, because the alarm at 6:30 woke me up. Since I had to take Luc to the train, I stayed up and went for a great run with my running buddy. I absorbed all kinds of vitamin D after the run as we sat in the park and discussed various tried-and-true methods for passing oral examinations (she has one coming up tomorrow).

The only thing that really seems to end a funk is the passage of time. Today I remembered a NYT article that described depression as a sort of intense rumination. The theory is that it serves an evolutionary purpose – it’s sort of the body’s way of shutting you down so you focus on just one essential problem. It forces you to shut out the world and go into hyper-introversion mode, to deal with whatever is preoocupying your occipital. I don’t think my funk qualifies as depression, but still. It was worth considering that there might be an upside to all this misery. I asked myself, what do I need to deal with? Focus on? What is the busyness of my life preventing me from seeing so that I have to get all cranky to clarify things?

The answer was staring me in the face. So today I spent four hours writing. I didn’t translate anything. I didn’t shop or cook or do any laundry. I did eat too much chocolate, but I’m sure that was necessary. Thanks to Matt for suggesting I come into BooksBooksBooks to write in company for an hour or two. It helps.

I have high hopes that the funk is lifting. Even so, I don’t think I’ll do the Morat-Fribourg race on Sunday. I’m not really in the mood for a crowd run. Although I could put that Bravehearty music on and zone out…

Am I the only one who gets slam-dunked by funks every now and then? What do you do to put them behind you? Does anyone have a magic formula that doesn’t involve illegal substances?

Photo: I took this one. I’m that cat, way back in a dark place, looking out.